Boonzie understood why these men were keeping him alive. What they wanted from him was the same thing they’d thought Ewan had. Something that Boonzie simply couldn’t give them, even if he’d wanted to. And that wasn’t good.
Boonzie also understood that things weren’t going well for his enemies. Day on day, he could sense the change in their manner. They were beginning to panic. Their plans were falling apart. Something new was happening that they weren’t telling him about, but it was frightening them. Boonzie knew the smell of fear and he could smell it on these men. Which intrigued him, but also worried him deeply, because it meant that the danger to Mirella was no idle threat.
Something had to be done.
And Boonzie was working on it.
He’d been working on it for the last three days, ever since he’d thought he could hear the sound of water gushing somewhere behind the wall of his prison and had figured out where it was coming from. His fingertips were ragged and bleeding from his efforts, but the soreness in his hands mattered no more to him than the jolts of pain that now and then shot through his chest as he worked. He’d rest a while, then keep at it until the aching tiredness washed over him, then rest again. All around the clock. Day and night were the same down here.
Now Boonzie decided that he had rested long enough. He rocked his body forwards onto his knees and crawled silently across the dungeon floor so that he could go back to work on the loose stone block in the wall.
Chapter 43
On the drive back northwards, Ben plugged his phone into the Mercedes’ hands-free system and called Mirella. The landline call rang a few times before it was redirected to a mobile. A moment later, a confused-sounding Mirella picked up. It was only then that he realised how late it was; even later in Italy.
‘I’m sorry I woke you.’
‘I wasn’t asleep. It’s impossible for me to close my eyes.’ Mirella tearfully explained that she’d gone to stay with her brother’s family in Rome, unable to stand being alone any longer. She was going out of her mind and, to Ben’s relief, was still procrastinating over whether or not to call in the authorities.
‘Hold on just a little longer, Mirella. I might have found out something important.’
‘You found him?’ It was agonising to hear the rawness of emotion in her voice.
‘I didn’t say that, Mirella. I’ll call you back when I know more. Sit tight and take care.’
‘You look exhausted,’ Grace said, looking at him with concern when the tough call was over. ‘When’s the last time you got any shuteye? You ought to be resting.’
She was right, of course. Mad Monty had offered them the use of two spare bedrooms for the night, but Ben had declined the invitation and decided to press on. At two a.m., three hours after meeting their host at the Blue Lagoon quarry, they were hitting the road again. Ben couldn’t deny that he was badly in need of sleep, but he felt fired up by a renewed sense of purpose. Mad Monty had come through for them in fine style; the coming day would tell whether the things Ben had learned had set him on the right track.
‘When this is over, I’ll rest,’ he replied.
‘You want me to drive? It’s a hell of a long way back to Kinlochardaich.’
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Just keep talking to me.’
‘What do you want me to talk about?’
‘Anything. I don’t care. So long as I can hear your voice.’
Grace smiled. ‘That’s sweet.’ She thought for a moment about what to say. ‘I’d never been to Buxton before. Had you?’
‘Can’t say that I had.’
‘It’s a very historic place. Did you know that Mary Queen of Scots spent a lot of time there?’
Ben dimly recalled having read something once. ‘I think she spent time everywhere, locked up in one castle or another while she was Queen Elizabeth’s prisoner.’
‘That’s true. But Elizabeth let her visit Buxton often to take the waters there, on account of her bad health. She wasn’t a well person. And the spa waters were supposed to have amazing healing powers.’
‘Did it work?’ Ben asked.
‘I don’t think it did a lot for her. Then Elizabeth stopped her going anyway, because she was nervous about Mary getting involved in plots against her if she was given too much freedom.’
‘And then she chopped her head off.’
‘Not for a few years afterwards. That was one execution warrant Elizabeth really didn’t want to sign. She delayed it for a long time. But as she saw it, politically she had no other choice.’
‘I never knew all that,’ Ben said. ‘How come you’re so clued up?’
‘Someone had to pay attention during history class at school. I actually liked learning about Scotland’s past. All the famous figures from our history. William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, Rob Roy, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Flora MacDonald—’
‘Who was she?’
‘A real Scottish heroine, who helped Prince Charlie escape after the English hammered his army at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. She managed to smuggle him to the Isle of Skye on a boat, disguised as a woman. You know the Skye Boat Song? I mean, who doesn’t? Anyway, that’s where it came from.’
Ben looked at her. ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie, the great Scottish hero, dressed up as a woman to get away from the English?’
She nodded. ‘Yup. Petticoat, stockings, garters, and all. Posing as an Irish maid called Betty Burke. Actually, the pattern of material his dress was made of became all the rage for fashionable Jacobite ladies in the late 1740s.’
‘Kind of gives a new meaning to the term “Young Pretender”,’ Ben said.
‘Shocked?’
‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘An SAS squad once dressed up as Muslim women, the full head-to-toe garb, so they could infiltrate an ISIS terrorist cell in Raqqa.’
‘Bet that gave them a surprise.’
‘Especially when the troopers pulled submachine guns out from under their burqas and blasted them,’ Ben said. ‘But they were attacking, not running away. The SAS don’t do running away. And I’d like to see anyone try getting any of the guys I knew into stockings and garters.’
‘Oh, and Prince Charlie wasn’t really Scottish either,’ Grace said.
‘He wasn’t?’
‘His father James II was half French and born in London, and his mother was from Silesia, now Poland. He was born and raised in Italy, spent less than fourteen months of his entire life in this country, and if he spoke English at all it was with a foreign accent. I mean, European royal families were always a mixed bag, inbreeding all over the place. But if Prince Charlie could claim he was Scottish, then with a name like Kirk that goes back to seventh-century Norway, I’m definitely a Viking.’
The journey continued. Ben kept Grace talking, to help him stay awake through the long hours. It wasn’t just the sound of her voice he liked. It was her warmth, her wit, and her company generally. He was starting to like her. Maybe too damn much.
They stopped at the same services they’d used on the way down, and ate pretty much the same meal as before. Then, just as they’d done the previous evening, they returned to the car and kept moving. Hours later they left the motorway north of Glasgow and the night-time traffic, already thin at that hour, dwindled away until the Mercedes became just a solitary bubble of light speeding through the empty darkness. Grace kept offering to take over at the wheel until she dozed off herself, leaving Ben alone again with his troubled thoughts and the endless road snaking hypnotically towards him out of the night. The further north they travelled, the lower the outside temperature reading on the dash dropped. Frozen rain mixed with hail and sleet needled the windscreen and formed a glacial slick over the roads and snowy verges, forcing Ben to relax his pace for fear of hitting a patch of black ice.
Nothing happened for a long while.
And then, on the lonely road pushing into the Highlands, something did happen.
Chapter 44
Just past six in the morning, carving thro
ugh the frigid black heart of the wilderness somewhere between Crianlarich and Glen Orchy, the monotony of their journey came to a sudden halt with the screech of a police siren behind them and flashing blue lights filling the rear-view mirror. Grace had still been half-dozing in the warm comfort of her seat, and woke up with a start. ‘Shit! What’s happening?’
‘Looks like we might have company,’ Ben said. He’d been watching the solitary headlights creeping up on their tail for the last few minutes, and wondering about them. He slackened his pressure on the gas a little but kept moving, in case the patrol car was about to push past them and speed onwards in pursuit of dangerous criminals elsewhere.
Some chance. The patrol vehicle stayed right where it was, blues and twos going full blast. Ben thought fuck it, flicked his indicator like a good citizen and gently pulled in towards the snowy verge. The cops pulled in behind.
Grace said, ‘What’s this about? Were you speeding?’
‘On these icy roads? The sixty limit’s faster than even I’d want to go.’
‘Then what do you think they want?’
‘I reckon we’re about to find out.’ Ben stepped out of the Mercedes into the night-time chill. The patrol car was a Mitsubishi 4x4 with POLICE and the Gaelic POILEAS emblazoned across its bonnet. Both doors swung open and both cops climbed out. Two men, thirties, bulky with black winter coats over their uniforms, batons and cuff holders and Taser holsters dangling from their thick middles, cap peaks pulled down low. Ben supposed that was to make them look mean. It didn’t. They just looked tired and sour, as if they’d been driving around half the night. Ben could empathise with that, though he might have been able to empathise more if he hadn’t just been pulled over in a bullet-holed car containing a bag of illicit guns and ammunition.
The cops walked around the front of their vehicle and came striding over, lit from the rear by their own headlamps and from the front by the red glow of the Mercedes’ tail-lights. Puffing billows of steam on their breath, like bulls. Radios crackling and fizzing. Long metal torches in their gloved hands. Definitely trying to look as intimidating as they could.
Ben closed the driver’s door. He stepped around the rear of his car to see if maybe something wasn’t working properly back there. Tail-lights: check. Number plate light: check. Indicator: ditto. The taped-over bullet holes weren’t visible from the rear, either. And he’d been going steady at about 1 mph below the limit. No obvious reason why he should have been stopped.
He greeted the approaching cops with a pleasant ‘Anything in particular I can help you with, officers?’ He got no answer, only a couple of ugly stares in return. One of the cops was wearing the hint of a smirk on his face. The other one just looked surly.
Ben said, ‘Maybe you’re lost and you need some directions. Bad luck, I’m not from around these parts.’
Still no reply. The smirking one stood a few feet away and aimed his torch in Ben’s face. The surly one stepped around the passenger side of the Mercedes and shone his beam through the window. He glared for a moment at Grace inside the car, then turned and gave his colleague a confirmatory kind of nod. His colleague nodded back, still wearing the smirk. Maybe he had Bell’s palsy or something. Not taking his eyes off Ben he pulled out a phone, jabbed keys to make a call, and a moment later muttered in a low voice, ‘It’s me. We found them. Uh-huh. Copy that, it’s Hope and Kirk, all right.’
Which Ben thought was a little strange. Because in all the countries of the world where he’d ever been pulled over by the cops, he’d never met one yet who used a phone instead of his radio. Nor had Ben ever encountered a police officer with the gift of prophecy. But this guy seemed to know the names of both occupants of the Mercedes, before he’d even asked them a single question.
At that moment Grace pushed open her passenger door and got out of the car. The surly cop moved back a few steps, but kept his torch shining on her. The cold wind streamed her hair across her face. She brushed it away, flashed her police warrant card at the two cops and said breezily, ‘PC Kirk, based in Fort William. How are we doing this morning, gents?’
No replies, no smiles of greeting to a fellow officer. Ben looked at Grace and saw the slight bemusement in her eyes that these two weren’t acting quite normal. Then he looked back at the surly cop who was standing a few steps away from her. The cop was holding his torch in his left hand. Ben saw his right hand slip inside his police overcoat and come out with something he definitely shouldn’t have had in there. It was a high-voltage cattle prod.
At the same moment, the smirking cop suddenly came towards Ben with an identical device clenched in his hand. A nasty glint of something in his eyes reflected in the red glow of the Mercedes’ tail-lights.
Ben had no idea what was going on. But he knew what was about to happen in the next instant, unless he took the appropriate action, and fast. He jumped back along the driver’s side of the car until he was level with the windscreen. Planted the flat of his hand on the cold metal of the wing and in an explosive burst of energy vaulted feet-first across the Mercedes’ wide bonnet. Sliding across it at a sharp angle. Crunching down into the snow and ice of the verge on the opposite side, shoving Grace bodily out of the way and throwing his weight hard against the open passenger door as the surly cop came at her with the shock prod in his hand. The edge of the door slammed into the cop’s chest and side and the violent impact knocked him off balance. He staggered backwards with a grunt of pain and fell heavily into the snow.
Then Ben was all over him, trampling him hard and brutally so that he had no chance of getting up, and ripping the shock prod from his hand. The cop tried to flail at Ben with the torch in his other hand, but Ben blocked the blow with his foot and kicked the torch away. Then he drove his knees downwards into the cop’s chest, punching all the air out of his lungs, and jammed the high-voltage device against the guy’s throat.
No hesitation, no mercy. This bastard didn’t get a second chance. A harsh electrical crackle and a high-pitched choking scream of pain filled the air, together with Grace’s confused yell of ‘Ben! No!’
Ben ignored her and held the powerful voltage against the cop’s throat for just an instant longer, until he was confident that the guy was well out of the fight before he ever got into it. Then Ben looked up and saw the second cop backing away, his smirk replaced with a look of startled fear. Turning. Feet slipping and sliding on the compacted roadside snow. Tripping over himself in his jittery haste to sprint back to the relative safety of the patrol vehicle.
Not moving anything like quickly enough.
Ben launched into the chase and caught up with the fleeing cop like a lean, hungry panther running down a fat, lumbering wild hog. The guy let out a gasp of shock and fright as he was slammed to the ground and his face crunched into the snow. His torch went tumbling out of his hand and clattered onto the road. He tried to twist and roll onto his back, lashing out in self-defence with the identical shock prod he’d produced moments earlier. His weapon of attack was now his only chance of protecting himself against his would-be victim who’d so suddenly and violently turned the tables against him.
But that chance was short-lived and futile. The sole of Ben’s left boot came stamping down hard and pinned the cop’s wrist to the icy road. Then Ben dropped his right knee to pin the cop’s other arm. He saw the terror flash in the guy’s eyes. Then came the fizz, crackle and scream as the metal contacts of the shock prod pressed into the soft flesh under the cop’s chin and let loose with several thousand volts of electricity. A small taste of his own medicine before Ben decided to be merciful and knocked him senseless with a hard crack to the side of the face.
Grace was standing on the verge, staring at Ben as though he’d lost his mind. She yelled again, more loudly, ‘Ben! What the fuck?’
Ben ignored her a second time, though he knew he’d have to explain things to her before long. He quickly rifled through the cop’s coat pockets and found his police ID in its leather holder and a thick wallet. When he op
ened up the wallet he wasn’t surprised by its contents. He gave them a sniff, then checked the ID. The cop’s name was PC Murray Brown.
‘Nice meeting you, Murray.’ Ben stood up, stepped away from the unconscious heap in the snow, and turned to look at Grace. Explanation time. Her hair was all awry in the cold wind and the look of wide-eyed bewilderment on her face was lit blue and red by the patrol car’s swirling roof light.
Ben pointed at the two inert shapes on the ground and said, ‘I thought you people were trained in unarmed combat. These two could barely wrestle their way out of bed in the morning.’
Grace could hardly speak. Her mouth opened and closed twice before she managed to say, ‘Ben, what the hell are you thinking? Those are police officers you just assaulted!’
Ben shook his head and replied, ‘No, they’re not.’
Chapter 45
Ben said to Grace, ‘They’re not police officers. They’re bent police officers. That’s a whole other matter. When they chose not to play by the rules, they gave away all privileges of their office and opened themselves up to the consequences.’
Grace just shook her head in bemusement. Ben opened up PC Brown’s wallet to show her what was inside. ‘How many cops you know are running around with two months’ salary in crisp new fifty-pound notes stuffed in their pockets?’
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