by Crossfire
“Did she throw you out just for saying that?” He spoke with his mouth full, giving me a fine view of his sweet-and-sour pork ball rotating around like the contents of a cement mixer.
“Well, there were a few other things too,” I said. “You know, personal family things.”
He nodded knowingly. “In a good row, one thing just leads to another and then another, don’t it.” He sounded experienced in the matter, and I wondered whether there had once been a Mrs. Norland.
“You are so right.”
“So, do you still want to stay here?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’m not going home to my mother with my tail between my legs, I can tell you. I’d never hear the end of it.”
He laughed again and took another mouthful of his pork. “Fine by me, but I warn you, I get up early.”
“I want to be gone before first light.”
“The sun comes up at seven these days,” he said. “It’s light for a good half an hour or so before then.”
“Then I’ll be well gone by six,” I said.
“To avoid your mother?”
“Perhaps,” I said. “But you can ask her where she thinks I am. I’d love to know what she says, but don’t tell her I’ve been here.”
“OK, I’ll ask her, and I won’t tell her you’re here, or what we talked about,” he said, “but where are you going?”
“Back to where I’ve been for these past few days,” I said. “I’ve some unfinished business there.”
I took my sword, still safely stowed in its tube, when I slipped out of Ian’s flat at just after five-thirty on Thursday morning. I also took the uneaten remains of the Chinese takeaway, and half the milk that Ian had bought the night before.
In addition, I took my freshly charged cell phone and the card from Mr. Hoogland. I might need something to pass the time.
I retraced my path from Kauri House, through the still sleeping village, and down the Wantage Road to Greystone Stables. One of the major successes of the night was that I had managed to stop my leg from clinking every time I put it down. The problem, I discovered, had been where the leg post met the ankle. The joint was tight enough, but the clink was made by two metal parts coming together when I put my weight on it. I’d eventually silenced it using an adjustable wrench and a square of rubber that Ian had cut from an old leaking Wellington boot. Now I relished being able to move silently once more.
The gates at the bottom of the driveway were still locked together with the chain and padlock, and they didn’t appear to have been touched since I’d left them the previous evening. However, I wasn’t going to assume that no one had been up to the stables in the intervening twelve hours; I would check.
I stepped back through the post-and-rail fence and climbed carefully and clink-free up the hill, keeping off the tarmac surface to reduce noise, listening and watching for anything unusual. Halfway up the drive, I checked the spot where the previous evening I had placed a stick leaning on a small stone. A car’s tire would have had to disturb it to pass by, but the stick was still in place. No one had driven up this hill overnight, not unless they had come by motorbike.
I wasn’t sure whether I should be pleased or disappointed.
Even so, I was still watchful as I approached the house, keeping within the line of vegetation to one side of a small overgrown front lawn. The sky was lightening in the east with a lovely display of blues, purples and reds. In spite of being completely at home in the dark, I had always loved the coming of the dawn, the start of a new day.
The arrival of the sun, bringing light and warmth and driving away the cold and darkness of the night, was like a piece of daily magic, revered and worshipped by man and beast alike. How does it happen? And why? Let us just be thankful that it did. If the sun went out, we would all be in the poop, and no mistake.
The rim of the fiery ball popped up over the horizon and flooded the hillside with an orange glow, banishing the gloom from beneath the bushes.
I silently tried the doors of the house. They were still locked.
I went right around the house, across the gravel turning area and back into the familiar stable yard beyond. In the bright morning light it looked very different from the rain-soaked space of the evening before. The stables had been built as a rectangular quadrangle with stalls along three sides, with the fourth open end facing the house.
First I went down to the far end of the left-hand block, knelt down, and carefully picked up all the shards of glass that still lay on the concrete below the window I’d broken. I placed them all carefully back through the window and out of sight. I had no way of replacing the glass pane, but one had to look closely to see that it was missing.
I walked down the row of stalls to my prison cell and opened both leaves of the stable door, hooking them open so that no one could quickly shut me in again before I could react.
I searched around the stall once more, mostly for my watch, but also in case I had missed anything else in the murk of the previous evening. I found nothing other than the small pile of my own excrement nicely drying next to the wall beneath where the ring had been secured. I knew that Special Forces teams such as the British SAS or the American Delta Force, when dropped in behind enemy lines, were trained not to leave any trace of their presence, and that included collecting their own feces in sealable plastic bags and keeping them in their packs.
In the absence of a suitable plastic bag, I decided to leave mine exactly where they were.
I quickly searched the stall next door, the one where I had found my prosthetic leg and my coat. My watch wasn’t there, either. Damn it, I thought. I really liked that watch.
I closed and rebolted the stable doors and spent a moment or two checking that the positions of the bolts were precisely as I had found them. Now all I needed was a place to hide and wait.
I thought of using one of the other stables farther along, but I quickly rejected the idea. For one thing, I would have had no obvious route of retreat if things started going badly. And second, I really did not want my enemy to spot that the bolts were not properly shut and simply to lock me in as they passed, maybe even unaware that I was waiting inside. I’d had my fill of being locked in stables for this week.
In the end I found the perfect location.
Across the concrete stable yard, opposite the block of stalls in which I’d been imprisoned, there was a second row of stables facing them. In the middle of the row, there was a passageway that ran right through the building from front to rear. The passage had a door in it, on the stable-yard end, but the latch was a simple lever, not a bolt. The door was made from slats of wood screwed to a simple frame, with inch-wide gaps between the slats to allow the wind to blow through. The door had a spring near the hinge to keep it closed, but that would have not been there as a security measure, merely to keep the door shut so as to prevent any loose horses from getting through and escaping.
I lifted the latch, pulled open the door and went through the passageway. Behind the stables was a muck heap, the pile of soiled straw and wood-chip bedding where the stable staff would dump the horse dung ready for the manure man to collect periodically and sell to eager gardeners. Except that this muck heap hadn’t been cleared for a long while, and there were clumps of bright green grass growing through the straw on its surface.
The passageway had obviously been placed there to provide the access to the muck heap from the stable yard. And it made an ideal hiding place.
Out the back, I found an empty blue plastic drum that would do well as a seat, and I was soon sitting behind the door in the passageway, watching and waiting for my enemy to arrive.
I longed to have my trusty SA80 assault rifle beside me, with fixed bayonet. Or better still, a gimpy with a full belt of ammunition.
Instead, all I had was my sword, but it was drawn from its scabbard and ready for action.
13
I waited a long time.
I couldn’t see the sun from my hiding
place, but I could tell t from the movement of the shadows that many hours had passed, a fact borne out by the clock readout on the screen of my cell phone when I turned it on briefly to check.
I drank some of the milk, and went on waiting.
No one came.
Every so often I would stand up and walk back and forth a few times along the short passageway to get the blood moving in my legs. But I didn’t want to go out into the stable yard in case my quarry arrived whilst I was there.
I began to wish that I had chosen a spot where I could see the gate at the bottom of the drive. From my hiding place in the passageway, I wouldn’t have any warning of an arrival before they were upon me.
I went over and over the scenario, rehearsing it in my mind.
I fully expected that my would-be murderer would arrive up the driveway by car, drive across the gravel turning area, through the open gateway into the stable yard, and park close to the stall where he would expect me still to be. My plan was to leave my hiding place just as he entered the stable, to move silently and quickly across the yard, and simply to lock him into my erstwhile prison cell almost before he had a chance to realize that I wasn’t still hanging there, dead.
What would happen next remained a little hazy in my mind. Much might depend on who it was. A young fit man would be able to escape over the walls and through the tack room, as I had done. An elderly or overweight adversary would prove less of a problem. I would simply be able to leave them in the stable for a bit of their own medicine. But would I leave them there to die?
And what would I do if my enemy turned out to be more than one person?
It was a question I had pondered all morning. An unconscious man, even a one-legged unconscious man, was heavy and cumbersome to move. Could one person have had enough strength to carry me into the stable and also to hold me up while padlocking me to the ring? If so, he must be a very strong individual, and escape through the tack-room window would be a real possibility.
The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that there must have been at least two of them. And that put a completely different slant on things. Would I consider taking on an enemy that outnumbered me by two to one, or even more?
Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher, the father of battle tactics, stated that “If you are in equal number to your enemy, then fight if you are able to surprise; if you are fewer, then keep away.”
I decided that if two or more turned up, then I would just watch from my hiding place, and I’d keep away.
At three in the afternoon, while still maintaining a close watch of the stable yard, I called Mr. Hoogland. I was careful to withhold my phone number, as I didn’t want him inadvertently passing it on to the wrong person.
“Ah, hello,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you to call.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I got some answers to your questions.”
“And?” I prompted.
“The deceased definitely was Roderick Ward,” he said.
“Oh.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“No, not really,” I said. “Just a bit surprised. I’d convinced myself that Roderick Ward had staged his own apparent death, while he was actually still alive.”
“So who did you think was found in the car?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I was just doubtful that it was Ward. How come you’re so sure it was him?”
“I asked the pathologist.”
“So he had done the DNA test, then?”
“Well, no, he hadn’t. Not until after I asked him.” He laughed. “I think I gave the poor man a bit of a fright. He went pale and rushed off to his lab. But he called me this morning to confirm that he has now tested some of the samples he kept, and the profile matches the one for Ward in the database. There’s absolutely no doubt that the body in the river was who we thought it was.”
Well, at least that ruled out Roderick as the blackmailer.
“Did the pathologist confirm if the water in Ward’s lungs matched that from the river?”
“Oh, sorry. I forgot to ask him.”
“And how about Ward’s sister?” I asked. “Did you find out anything about her?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. It seems her car broke down on the morning of the inquest, and she couldn’t get to the court in time. The Coroner’s Office told her they would have to proceed without her, and she agreed.”
“But she only lives in Oxford,” I said. “Couldn’t she had taken a bus? Or walked?”
“Apparently, she’s moved,” he said. “They did give me her address, but I can’t remember it exactly. But it was in Andover.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, thanks for asking. Seems I may have been barking up the wrong tree.”
“Yeah,” he said wistfully. “Shame. It would have made for a good story.”
“Yeah,” I echoed.
“Who are you anyway?” he said.
“Never you mind,” I replied.
“A journalist, maybe?” he said, fishing.
“I’m just a born skeptic,” I said with a laugh. “’Bye, now.”
I hung up, smiling, and turned off my phone.
And still no one came.
I ate the cold remains of the previous evening’s Chinese food, and drank some more of the milk.
Why would anyone want me dead? And there was now no doubt that my death was what they had intended. I couldn’t imagine what state I would have been in if I’d had to stand on one leg for four whole days and three nights. I would surely have been close to death by then, if not already gone.
So who wanted me dead? And why?
It seemed a massive overreaction to being told on the telephone that Mrs. Kauri’s horses would, henceforth, be running on their merits and not to the order of a blackmailer.
Deliberate cold-blooded murder was a pretty drastic course of action, and there was no doubt that my abduction and imprisonment had been premeditated as well as cold-blooded. No one carries an ether-soaked towel around on the off chance that it might be useful to render someone unconscious, or have some plastic ties, a handy length of galvanized chain and a padlock lying about just in case someone needs to be hung on a wall. My kidnap had been well planned and executed, and I didn’t expect there would be much forensic evidence available that would point to the perpetrators, if any.
So would they even bother to come back and check on their handiwork? Returning here would greatly increase their chances of leaving something incriminating, or of being seen. Wouldn’t they just assume that I was dead?
But didn’t they know? Never assume anything; always check.
The sun went down soon after five o’clock, and the temperature went down with it.
Still I waited, and still no one came.
Was I wasting my time?
Probably, I thought, but what else did I have to do with it? At least being out in the fresh air was better for me than lying on my bed, staring at the molded ceiling of my room.
I stamped around a bit to get some warmth into my left toes. Meanwhile, my phantom right toes were baking hot. It was all very boring.
When my telephone told me it was nine o’clock in the evening, I decided that enough was enough, and it was time to go back to Ian’s flat before he went to bed and locked me out. I had never intended to stay at Greystone Stables all night. Twenty-four-hour stag duty was too much for one person. I had already found myself nodding off during the evening, and a sleeping sentry was worse than no sentry at all.
I put my sword back in its scabbard, and then I put that back in the cardboard tube, which I swung over my shoulder.
Halfway down the driveway I checked that the stick was still resting on the stone. It was. I set up another on the other side of the drive a few yards farther down, just in case the strengthening breeze blew one of them over.
Apart from the slight chill of the wind, it was a beautiful evening with a full canopy of bright stars in the jet-black sky. But it w
as going to be a cold night. The warm blanket of cloud of the previous few days had been blown away, and there was already a frost in the air that caused my breath to form a white mist in front of my face as I walked down towards the gates.
I was climbing through the post-and-rail fence when I saw the headlights of a car coming along the Wantage Road from the direction of Lambourn village. I thought nothing of it. The road could hardly be described as busy, but three or four cars had passed by the gates in the time it had taken for me to walk down the driveway.
I decided, however, that it would not be such a clever idea to be spotted actually climbing through the fence, so I lay down in the long grass and waited for the car to pass by.
But it didn’t pass by.
It pulled off the road and stopped close to the gates. The headlights went out, and I heard rather than saw the driver get out of the car and close the door.
I lay silently, facedown in the grass, about ten yards away. I had the tube with my sword in it close to my side, but there would be no chance of extracting it here without giving away my position.
I lifted my head just a fraction, but I couldn’t see anything. The glare of the headlights had destroyed my night vision, and in any case, the person would have been out of my sight behind the stone gatepost.
I closed my eyes tight shut and listened.
I could hear the chain jingling as it was pulled through the metal posts of the gates. Whoever had just arrived in the car had brought with them the key to the padlock. This was indeed my enemy.
I heard the gates squeak a little as they were opened wide.
I again lifted my head a fraction and stole a look as the driver returned to the car, but my view was obstructed by the open car door. I was lying in a shallow ditch beneath the post-and-rail fence, and my eye line was consequently below the level of the driveway. From that angle it had been impossible to see who it was.
I heard the engine start, and the headlights came back on.
