Palmer gave a half smile and looked at the ceiling. ‘Did he describe him?’
‘Yeah. Big, tall, and a face like the back of a tank.’
Rockface.
**********
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The road to Colebrooke House was relatively quiet, and Riley was happy to sit back and leave it to Palmer to get them to their destination in one piece. He drove efficiently and silently, absorbed in his thoughts. Apart from the occasional glance in the mirror and toying with an unlit cigarette, he had said very little since leaving London.
His reaction to the news of Sir Kenneth’s activities in Colombia had been muted. With the information coming from a source as close to unimpeachable as it was possible to get, he’d moved from surprise to a mood approaching simmering anger.
‘And this Col bloke,’ was all he had said when Mitcheson finished talking, ‘he’s on the level?’
‘I’d stake my life on him.’ Mitcheson had stood up and nodded goodbye before heading home to catch up on some sleep. Riley had accompanied him downstairs, then returned to join Palmer.
‘What do you want to do now?’ she asked, after a few moments of silence.
Palmer pulled on his jacket and dug out his car keys. ‘First, we eat,’ he replied. ‘Then we go walkies in the country. You game?’
Riley nodded cautiously and glanced at her watch. It was nearly four o’clock. She hadn’t been aware of time passing so quickly. She had no idea what Palmer had in mind, but if he was planning on eating now, it had to mean they’d be out late tonight. ‘I’m game. Only if we’re going to get down and dirty, I need to change my clothes.’ She gestured at her skirt and heels. While they may have been suitable for tea in Belgravia, they wouldn’t match jeans and boots for the sort of location she suspected Palmer might have in mind.
‘No problem. We’ve got time. We’ll swing by your place now.’
‘What are you expecting to find?’ she asked before they left London. ‘He’s unlikely to have anything incriminating at his home.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not,’ he replied. But he knew Riley was correct. If they did find anything, it would be a miracle. Crooks — even upper-class crooks with cut-glass accents — rarely leave evidence lying around for others to trip over. On the other hand, every now and then, even clever crooks got careless.
‘Sir Kenneth is getting substantial sums of money from somewhere — he has to be. We know it isn’t gambling because his wife says he’s hopeless at it.’
‘I’d go along with that,’ Palmer confirmed. ‘I’ve known a few high rollers. Sir Kenneth isn’t the type.’
‘Okay. So how is he doing it?’
‘He’s taking money from the cartels.’ It was a notion that had occurred to Riley as well, in spite of all her instincts. It stunned her that a British Ambassador might be in hock to some of the most heinous purveyors of misery in the world.
‘Where does Rockface fit in?’
‘An opportunist,’ Palmer theorised. ‘From squaddie in Belize to bodyguard and butler. But always managing to be in on the action. We should talk to him, too, but I don’t think he’ll play ball.’
By the time they coasted through the village of Colebrooke, everything was quiet, the huddle of houses wrapped in sleep. It had been hard watching the clock tick away earlier, but Palmer had insisted there was no point in coming here before dark. He drove past the entrance to the house. The gates were closed. If Sir Kenneth had arranged for anyone new to watch the place, they were keeping a low profile.
They followed the lanes in a gradual winding gradient behind the estate, every bend bringing a narrowing in the width of road. With no signs of houses or lights, they could have been driving across the far side of the moon. As they neared the top, they could just make out a sweep of fields on one side, falling away into a valley, while on the other was a dense black nothingness which seemed to be composed mainly of trees and clumps of thicket. The headlights occasionally caught flashes of white from a herd of cows, or the smaller shape of sheep nestling against a hedge, and Palmer eventually switched off the main beams and relied on the sidelights.
‘Where are we going?’ Riley queried as they rounded another bend and edged up a bumpy incline.
‘Back entrance,’ said Palmer shortly. ‘I know another way in.’
Riley didn’t bother asking how.
He turned off the lane and took the Saab through a gap and up a pot-holed track burrowing like a tunnel through the trees. They bumped and lurched for about two hundred yards, the sides of the car scraping gently against overhanging foliage, before reaching a small clearing.
Palmer stopped and switched off the lights and engine. ‘From here, we’re on foot.’
They climbed out and stood in the dark, listening to the cooling engine ticking and the soft creaking and groaning of the trees. Overhead, a few stars were visible through the canopy of leaves, and in the distance a fox barked shrilly, a haunting cry in the still of the night. The air was surprisingly pleasant, holding a residue of warmth from the day.
‘Tell me,’ Riley said softly, when Palmer materialised alongside her, ‘there are no creatures in these woods I should be frightened of.’
‘This is England,’ Palmer reminded her, hand-locking the car doors. ‘The most dangerous creature in this wood is you.’ He handed her a small torch. ‘Only use that when you really have to.’
‘Have a heart. I’m a city girl. I don’t normally do forests — they make me nervous.’
‘Then you’ve led a sheltered life. This is a wood. Forests are bigger. Come on.’
His voice faded into the gloom and Riley realised she was suddenly alone in the dark. She scuttled after him, glad of the torch.
The going was tougher than it looked, with uneven surfaces, tree roots snaking across their path and thick undergrowth impeding their way. Even using the torch in brief bursts, the vegetation was so thick it was easy to lose track of where Palmer was.
‘We’re about a hundred yards from the house,’ he whispered, stopping at the edge of the tree line. ‘The back sweep of lawn is directly ahead of us over a wire fence. From there on, it’s open ground apart from a few bushes.’
‘Can’t we walk round the edges? We could move in along that track we saw the other day.’
‘It would take too long. And on an estate this size, there might be poachers about.’
They reached the wire fence at the edge of the trees and huddled down to watch, studying the open slope leading to the garden and house. Everything around them was silent, as if someone had switched off the volume and even the wildlife was safely hunkered in cover holding its breath. And waiting.
As Palmer had warned her, there was a lot of open ground in front of them, with only a few bushes for cover, darker masses set against the uniform backdrop of grass. They could just make out the shape of the house and a gleam of glass from one of the windows, and slightly to one side, the ghostly expanse of white from the marquee, yet to be dismantled after the wedding party. High above all this and standing out against the night sky was the parapet where Riley and Rockface had discovered the man with the shotgun.
Palmer led the way through the wire fence, then sat watching the house for a couple of minutes. Riley watched him, amazed by his ability to concentrate, his outer demeanour calm and controlled when all she wanted to do was walk straight up to the house and hammer on the door.
Satisfied there was nobody about, Palmer set off across the grass with Riley close behind, keeping as much of the bushes as he could manage between themselves and the windows. Their approach forced them at an angle towards the side of the house, and they eventually dropped into a lengthy section of dry ditch bordered by an ancient stone wall. Palmer had earlier described it as a ha-ha. He’d also warned Riley it might be wet in places.
She stopped beside him and cursed fluently under her breath.
‘Water?’ he queried.
‘Sheep shit,’ she replied, and wiped her hand on the gras
s.
A trip along the rear and sides of the house using the cover of the ha-ha revealed everything was locked tight. There were no lights on in the building and the curtains were pulled across the windows. They stayed away from the revealing expanse of the white marquee, keeping a healthy distance from the main building where they knew intruder lamps were scattered along the walls, tripped by motion detectors.
As they came level with the front right corner of the building, Palmer veered away from the tree cover. A few strides later, they were standing close to the door where Rockface and Riley had accessed the stairs to the roof. A faint glow came from lights placed along the front face of the house, but these were low-wattage and more for effect than security.
Palmer fiddled with the lock. Seconds later they were inside. He closed the door behind him and switched on his torch. They were in the lobby, which was bare and cold, with the echoing emptiness of the stairs vanishing up into the dark towards the roof. To their left was a door leading into the house proper, and the kitchen storeroom where Rockface had locked the shotgun.
‘How did you do that?’ Riley queried, referring to the ease with which he’d got through the door. She decided that one of the skills she’d have to ask him to teach her one day was picking locks. It could come in useful if ever she locked herself out one night.
‘I nicked a key,’ he replied shortly. ‘How else? Come on.’
They had already decided on the drive down that if Myburghe kept information about his former activities anywhere, it would most likely be in the office where he’d briefed them on their initial visit. There was a PC and a desk, and both would have to be checked to see what they might yield.
Palmer opened the door and led the way through the darkened kitchen and a utility room, and out into the foyer, which was lit by a small night-light in an alcove. A clock mechanism clacked away noisily nearby, effectively muffling the noise of anyone approaching, and Riley kept close to Palmer, aware of the hostile stare of the portraits looking down from the walls.
Palmer barely hesitated before crossing the foyer to the office door. He tried the handle. The door opened without hindrance. He stepped inside and cursed softly.
The room was a wreck. Papers were scattered everywhere, the PC monitor was humming but tilted crazily to one side, and the drawers to the mahogany desk were lying on the carpet, their contents spread across the floor like confetti.
Riley checked the pictures on the wall for signs of a wall safe. In her experience, even the blindingly obvious sometimes worked. She gave up after the third one when she noticed that it was slightly out of kilter. Whoever had been here before them had already looked.
‘There.’ Palmer pointed with his torch to the side of the desk. There was a dark streak of something down one corner of the polished wood. Riley touched it with her fingertip. It was sticky.
Blood.
Palmer moved towards the door. ‘I’ll check upstairs, you do the ground floor. Don’t go outside.’
Riley nodded without comment and waited for Palmer to disappear. She made a quick search of the ground floor, room by room, using the torch sparingly to avoid tripping over fragile furniture. But there were no further signs of an intruder and none of the disturbance to indicate a search had been made. She went back through the kitchen to the lobby, and stared out into the garden.
Palmer’s warning not to go outside was reverberating in her mind like a challenge. She knew he was the expert in these circumstances, but she felt an automatic resistance at being told what to do, even by him. If she followed the tree line round the house, she figured she would have a better view of the windows and of anyone skulking around where they shouldn’t be, while keeping safely out of sight. She opened the door and slipped outside, then hurried across the grass to the nearest belt of trees.
The smell of pine was powerful out here, with an underlying aroma of rotting vegetation. She trod carefully, wary of dry twigs and rabbit holes, wary, too, of a sudden attack from out of the darkness. She stopped and listened every few yards, trying to distinguish normal night sounds from the not so normal. It wasn’t easy.
The wind in the trees didn’t help. Even a slight breeze sounded like rushing water, effectively cutting off any potential man-made noises such as snapping branches, the scrape of clothing or an involuntary cough. In contrast, it also threw up imagined sounds, such as the ticking of branches translating into a weapon loading, and the falling of a dried leaf like the scrape of a shoe. It wasn’t a venue for the faint-hearted or the over-imaginative.
Riley reached the corner of the stable block, and was about to turn and check the house, when she froze.
The stable block lights were on.
She flattened herself against the wall, her mouth as dry as sand. Walking into a trap couldn’t have been simpler; she would have to enter the open square formed by the buildings, with no sure escape if anyone was waiting for her. If they were and made themselves known before she entered the central block, turning and heading back into the woods would only be an option if she could run faster than her pursuer. Entering the building made even that a non-starter.
She glanced back at the house and saw several lights burning along the top floor. She knew instinctively what Palmer was doing: he was drawing attention to himself, trying to lure anyone in the grounds back to the house. It was all the opportunity she was going to get, so she stepped round the corner of the first stall and through the open door.
The air was as she recalled previously: musty and smelling of straw. She put her fingers over the lens of her torch and flicked it on. In the restricted glow, she saw the same pile of discarded tackle covered in dust. But no horses. And no baddies with big guns or knives.
Someone had left a pitchfork against one wall, the tines spotted with rust and the handle worn smooth with use and broken off halfway down. Riley picked it up and held it like a lance. It might not be much, but if the person who had ransacked Myburghe’s office was here, it was better than going in empty-handed.
She sneaked a look around the door towards the central building where she’d seen the anteroom and sleeping quarters. Bright light spilled out from the door and a couple of small windows, but she couldn’t hear a sound. She ghosted past the other stalls, a faint swish of weeds and grass sprouting from the cobblestones brushing her ankles. She checked each stall, her relief growing as each one proved empty. Then she was outside the anteroom.
She sniffed. There was a strange smell in the air; one that hadn’t been here before. It was almost sweet, slightly heavy, and the explanation for it lurked in the back of her mind, just out of reach.
She shook her head, refusing to be spooked by the unknown. After all, what could there be here that she hadn’t seen the other day? Bracing herself, she stepped through the doorway into the light.
What she saw was like a slap in the face, and her every instinct was to scream and not stop.
Rockface was staring down at her from the far wall, a giant, grotesque gargoyle, his bloodless face frozen in agony.
***********
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Riley felt a surge of something bitter rise up and threaten to spill out across the floor. She swallowed hard. Not that it would have made things any worse; what she was looking at was beyond anything she could think of. Against every fibre of her being, she forced herself to look again.
Rockface was hanging on the wall like a side of beef.
He had been stripped naked, his wrists tied by orange baling string to the two heavy brackets Riley had noticed the first time she came in here. Even with his height, they were positioned a good two feet above his head, and the weight of his body bearing down had made the string bite deeply into the flesh of his arms. A couple of lengths of the same string had been looped beneath his chin to keep his head up, so that at first glance he seemed to be watching the doorway, his face distorted into a lop-sided grimace. If he had been standing at any time while tied up, his strength had long given out and he had
slumped downwards, his knees now bent and giving his trunk a curiously elongated appearance, like a reflection in a fairground hall of mirrors. He had lost some of his impressive build, making him seem thinner and less awesome; shrunken, even, as if starved over a long period of time.
Riley was torn between the instinct to check for life signs and the scalp-tingling desire to run from this awful place and get help. But even as she overcame her fear and stepped closer, she realised that the former bodyguard was beyond any assistance she or anyone else could give him.
His blood had splashed on the wall behind him, vivid and glossy, like dark lipstick. More had run in sticky streams down his torso and legs. The hair on his chest was matted with it, as was the area around his groin, and more was puddled thickly on the floor beneath his feet. A heavy globular trail led to the sink, beneath which lay a wide pool of water. On it, a collection of soap bubbles floated silent and still, like little boats on a lake.
The analytical part of Riley’s brain kicked in. She was no expert, but the blood was coagulating, which meant this must have happened within the past few hours. Long enough for whoever had done this to have slipped away. She realised that the killers — surely it would have taken more than one man to do this — would have had to wash themselves afterwards. She forced herself to cross the room and look into the basin. Just visible beneath the surface of the reddened water was a large kitchen knife, the blade heavy with streaks of red clinging to the shiny metal.
She concentrated on maintaining her breathing and backed away, then turned and walked out of the anteroom and down the corridor. Gone was any idea of stealth; instead she used speed and intent to overcome the fear brought on by the horror of what she’d just seen. She kicked open each door with a crash, the pitchfork held out in front of her, half expecting at any moment for someone to come rushing out. But nobody did.
The rooms were the same as before: cold, unoccupied and soul-less. Just rooms. She went back to the anteroom and stared at the body. She was tempted to do something, to cut it down. But she couldn’t bring herself to go near, telling herself that it was evidence, like the knife, and that she shouldn’t touch.
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