by Andy McNab
He returned to his own planet as I reversed away to go in search of a DIY shed he’d aimed me at. It didn’t take me long. The place was in a trading estate just off the main, and the size of an aircraft hangar, with a cash-and-carry right next door.
Even without artificial stimulants, it was decorator’s heaven. A smart white overall, a hard hat, safety glasses and a yellow hi-vis waistcoat went into my trolley. Then tins of paint, brushes, white spirit, sandpaper, disposable cloths, a hammer, a set of screwdrivers, a serious-looking padlock, a box of double-barbed fence staples and a staple gun, screws and ring-shanked nails, a bag of heavy-duty cable ties and two rolls of gaffer tape.
I needed the right equipment if I had to lift Lyubova and take her into the woodland at the northern end of the lake for an in-depth conversation. And if I didn’t, all well and good. Everything looked a bit squeaky clean, but it was the sort of shit that belonged in the back of any builder’s van.
I rolled back the side door and loaded everything up, then climbed inside, took off my jacket and Timberlands, shrugged on the overall and rolled back its sleeves. I replaced my boots, tore open the bag of cable ties and took off the lid of the box of staples.
I visualized a diagonal cross – the shape of a prone body with arms and legs outstretched – and banged sixteen ties, two at a time, into eight key positions: wrists, ankles, knees and elbows. Then two more for the neck. The gun gave a satisfying thud as it buried them in the ply.
Maybe she’d just tell me what I needed to know over tea and biscuits. But I wasn’t counting on it. And if I did have to lift her, I needed to keep her secure. The gaffer tape plus one of the cloths would take care of the mouth until I needed her to start talking.
When I’d fired in the final staple, I selected one slotted and one Phillips screwdriver, both medium, slammed the door and stepped up behind the steering-wheel. My next task was to go and find myself some extra licence plates.
I stayed on the wrong side of the tracks and drove past three or four white vans, which had either doors or windows open and looked like their owners would come back to them any minute.
Then I spotted another, streaked with grime and with a nice collection of dents, parked on the street alongside a church. It carried a German country code, so I pulled in twenty metres ahead of it, ducked down in the gap between its radiator grille and the taillights of the next vehicle and spent less than a minute removing its front plate.
Half an hour later I had five of them – two German, one Italian and two Swiss – from a variety of not very shiny vans parked well out of CCTV range. The trick was never to take both plates from the same vehicle. You could drive legally with just the rear one attached, and if the other was missing, most people assumed that it had just fallen off. Nobody in their right mind would have stolen it on its own.
The only thing you had to be careful about was not transposing Swiss plates. The rear one had country and canton badges; the front one didn’t. And they had different colours for different classes of wagon. Utility vehicles’ were blue. They were cunning fuckers, the Swiss.
I pulled on the hard hat, glasses and hi-vis waistcoat. A glance in the rear-view told me they topped off my whole fancy dress costume very nicely. The Sphinx came out of my waistband and slid under my right thigh. It could almost make that part of the journey on its own.
I was within sight of the chateau by 16:30. I’d reckoned that most if not all the contractors would have gone home by then. One of them was parked about a hundred away, smoking himself to death in a layby.
I slowed as I passed the entrance and liked what I saw.
No Dobermanns on patrol, for starters. Part of me thought, Thank fuck for that, but a small warning bell also started to ring. The absence of the normal often indicated the presence of the abnormal. It was known in the trade as a combat indicator.
The Maserati and the Q5 had also left, unless someone had moved them round the back. They might have been the best of mates, but it looked like a cosy dinner with Dijani and Uran wasn’t part of the deal. All good. I’d like to have got my hands on all three of them, but whatever her portrait said, she was the weakest link.
Five minutes later the gates opened automatically as the last of the vans I’d watched coming in that morning stopped to be frisked on its way out. I gave the boys in black a smile and a wave as I accelerated past them and carried straight on to the wing that was getting all the attention.
I parked behind the monster skip at the bottom of the yellow chute, alongside a gap in the tarpaulin sheeting where the ties had been left undone for easy access. I undid the front buttons of my overall, adjusted the Sphinx in my belt and transferred my shiny new knife from its sheath to the right-hand pocket. I tucked the ether into the left. Then I shrugged off the hi-vis waistcoat, exited the Expert and slipped through the gap.
The scaffolding wasn’t alarmed. That was what the security team and the dogs were for. There was no obvious way into the house on the ground floor. All the shutters were closed, probably to prevent the lads doing the heavy lifting from smashing the glass. I made for the ladder that had been clamped to the horizontal poles and stepped out on to the boards. No joy there either. No breaches in the wall, no empty window frames. Just more shutters. I had to try the roof.
The platform that ran along the guttering on the top level was stacked with tiles. They weren’t patching the holes: they were replacing the lot. And they still had a long way to go. There was a ten-square-metre area that was covered with battens and a waterproof membrane.
I took off the helmet and glasses and dumped them on the platform. Then I stood absolutely still, opened my mouth and listened. I’d expected the security guys to come sniffing round as soon as they spotted the fact that I wasn’t coming straight back out again, but I couldn’t hear any yells or footsteps on the gravel. The tarp overhead rippled in the breeze and the sun shining through gave the space below it the strange, unearthly quality of a hospital corridor.
I took out the knife, pulled it open, sliced a hole in the membrane and peeled it back far enough to scan the attic beneath. There was enough ambient light to see that it was a bit of a mess. The workforce had looked like they were taking the piss through the binos, and this confirmed it. Electricity cables snaked through randomly laid strips of insulation and heaps of sawdust, broken slates and all sorts of other builder shit that should have gone straight down the telescopic chute and into the skip.
There was no sign of cabin trunks filled with family heirlooms or contractors who’d missed the last wagon home.
I lowered myself through and went in search of a hatch that would take me down into the house. Almost immediately, I realized I could do better than that. The joists that paralleled the gable end of the wing were still open to the rooms below. I was going to be able to make entry without the creaking of a hinge or the clunk of a telescopic ladder.
I picked up a length of frayed blue nylon rope as I crept towards the gap and lowered myself on to my hands and knees half a metre short of it. Five minutes of listening satisfied me that either nobody was in the immediate vicinity or they were being even quieter than I was. I moved forwards and craned my neck far enough to check out where I was going next.
The room with no ceiling was as full of construction crap as the place I was about to leave. More cables, some with bare wires, some leading to halogen arc lamps on yellow tripods. Others that led nowhere in particular. Stacks of wood panelling that had been ripped off the walls. I slung the rope over the nearest joist and eased myself into the middle of it.
As soon as my feet touched the floorboards I stopped and listened again. Then I switched the knife to my left-hand pocket, closed my right around the pistol grip inside my overall and brought it up into the aim.
There was no carpet to deaden the sound of my footsteps, so I trod as lightly as the Timberlands allowed. I stepped to the left of each doorway I came to, did the mouth trick and cocked an ear before carrying on.
The door
s themselves had been removed, so I didn’t have to worry about squeaking hinges. And I wasn’t silhouetted as I stepped across each threshold: I was moving towards the light, not away from it. But it still took a while. There were a lot of doorways.
The fabric of the place looked like it was in the middle of a major identity crisis. Some bits were covered with fresh gilt and moulded plaster, others seemed to be trying to throw off the bling of the past and go minimalist. There were enough pots of paint and glue and twenty-litre containers of white spirit lying around to last my anarchist mate a lifetime of artistic protest.
The builders’ mess didn’t seem to be confined to the wing I’d infiltrated. Four rooms further on, there was still not much sign of habitation. Then I came to the fifth, where a sheet of clear polythene had been fastened to the double door frame, separating the plaster dust and the lads responsible for it from what appeared to be the Gucci end of the house.
All the doors, hinges attached, had been leant against the wall to my right, opposite the shuttered window. Someone had obviously been busy with a blowtorch here. There was a stack of propane cylinders alongside them.
Keeping the pistol in my right hand, out came the knife again in my left. It made short work of the polythene. I waited again. No hint of movement. I seemed to be the only body fucking about with the air molecules around here. I eased through the slit I’d made, muzzle first.
Lyubova obviously didn’t share Frank’s enthusiasm for grey marble, but she hadn’t stinted on the Afghan rugs. The one that was now beneath my feet was the blood red of a Himalayan sunset, and must have been worth a fortune. I’d seen dozens of women in Kabul sweatshops at work on pieces like this, and only drug barons and dot.com zillionaires could afford to buy them. It stretched at least ten metres from the front of the house to the huge central staircase that dominated the back, and another ten from side to side.
I moved to the nearest window. It was the first I could see through beyond the scaffolding. The shutters were open. So were the curtains. Standing far enough back to avoid being spotted from the garden, I looked towards the main entrance. I needn’t have bothered. There was no one there.
The now perfectly mown lawn was as deserted as the house seemed to be. The gates were shut, but unmanned. Unless the boys in black were tiptoeing around below me, with weapons at the ready, they’d taken an early bath. Even though the water was a couple of Ks away, the boats scudding across it seemed to be within touching distance.
I turned back to the staircase. It rose from the entrance hall to a gleaming glass dome four storeys above. If the security boys were down there, they were as still as statues. Nothing moved beyond the banisters at every level.
The doors into the first Gucci room had both been thrown back. This was no building site. It was flooded with sunlight, some of which seemed to be bouncing straight off the surface of the lake. Every piece of furniture had probably been made for Napoleon personally. The mahogany gleamed and the velvet looked like it had never been touched. I couldn’t see Stefan having much fun here, beatings or no beatings. It felt like a museum.
I was about to move on through when I heard a sound behind me. A creaking board. A misjudged footstep, maybe. I swivelled 180 degrees and brought up the weapon.
Nothing. Nobody. Maybe I’d imagined it.
No, I hadn’t.
The same sound again.
Not a creaking board. A low groan. From somewhere overhead.
I filled my lungs with oxygen, melted back through the doorway, and raised the muzzle of the Sphinx as I raised my eyes, following the staircase.
A muffled cry echoed through the empty space.
A female cry.
Not the kind of cry you make when some fucker has broken into your home and you’re desperate to alert the men you’re paying to keep you safe. The kind you make when you’re trying to fight your way out of the deepest of sleeps, but the nightmare won’t let you go.
There was no sign of the hired help hurrying to the rescue. So, staying close to the wall, I climbed towards the cry one step at a time. I had to move around a marble bust on an ebony plinth halfway up. Fuck knew who it was. Could have been Lenin, for all I cared. Or Dostoevsky. It certainly wasn’t Frank, even though he’d paid for all this.
I slowed almost to a standstill as I approached the second-floor landing, and stopped short of the corridor that ran off it. There had been no more cries, but I thought I could hear breathing. Irregular, husky rasps. Then nothing.
I didn’t wait any longer. Weapon up, I spun through the first door I came to. A bedroom, nearly twice the size of the master suite in the Courchevel chalet.
Two windows ahead of me, overlooking the lake.
A three-sided, gilt-framed mirror between them, on a dressing-table lined with designer make-up containers and sparkly stuff hanging from gold stands.
A bed, built on the same scale. Covers thrown back. Head-shaped dent in the pillow on the far side of it.
So, slept in recently.
Two more windows behind it, above the tarpaulin tent that sheltered the roof I’d cut through. Separated by an enormous wardrobe with a mirror front.
Another fucking great mirror on the wall to my right, beside the half-open door to her bathroom.
Lyubova clearly liked her mirrors.
I took another step forward and caught sight of a bare foot in the one on the dressing-table. A body in a leopard-print skirt lay between the bed and the side window.
It wasn’t moving.
9
I slapped the pistol back into my waistband and piled in.
When I got closer, I could see that Lyubova wasn’t breathing either.
She was on her side, left arm outstretched, right hand clutching at the bare skin above her breast. Raven hair glued to the sweat on her face. A thin strand of mucus linking the lower corner of her mouth to a pool of vomit on the white sheepskin beneath her head.
I knelt beside her, swept her damp hair aside and felt for her carotid pulse. It fluttered under my fingertip. I glanced at her bedside table. An empty brown bottle, lying on its side. A glass of water, half full, with lipstick on the rim. I wasn’t going to need the ether.
I hooked my index and middle fingers into her oral cavity and scooped out her tongue and another gob of grey gloop, flecked with crimson. I rolled her on to her back, put one hand on top of the other and, allowing my body to rock for maximum force, compressed the centre of her chest. Once. Twice. Three times. Then again. And again. I wanted her groggy, but I didn’t want her to die on me.
I felt one of her ribs crack fairly early in the process, then another, and kept on going.
After thirty compressions I took a deep breath, squeezed her surgically enhanced nose and gripped her perfectly sculpted chin, sealed my lips over hers and tried to fill her lungs.
I caught a hint of no doubt incredibly expensive perfume from near the base of her neck, but it was no match for the acidic taste and stench of her mouth.
Somewhere in the background I could smell alcohol. Not sixteen-year-old single malt or seven-star brandy, more like raw ethanol. And that didn’t strike me as something that Lyubova would go for if she had a choice.
I leant forward and gave her another blast.
She arched her back. It was almost impossible to spot, but she did arch it. Then she retched weakly. Took a breath. Exhaled. But she was still pretty much unconscious.
I shoved both my arms under her like a forklift. Carried her through to the bathroom. Held her head over the toilet and shoved my index finger down her throat as far as I could. The drug and alcohol combo she had taken – or been given – needed to come out again, and fast, before her stomach had fully digested it. She gagged and gave another low moan, but nothing much ended up in the bowl.
I needed something more heavy duty. I grabbed the toilet brush handle, reversed it, and repeated the process. This way I got in deep, and wasn’t going to have her chew my finger off.
That didn’t work
either.
I laid her down on the tiled floor, in the recovery position. Turned on the hot tap and found a plastic beaker. Ran through her medicine cabinet for anything I could mix into a warm saline solution. It contained every upper and downer the Swiss pharmaceutical industry could provide, and a few that it probably couldn’t.
The bad news was that there wasn’t a grain of salt to be seen.
Or anything else that I could use to make her puke her guts out. The medics didn’t like doing that sort of shit, these days. If the patient inhaled, you could fuck them up big-time. But it was a risk I was going to have to take. And Lyubova hadn’t earned any special treatment.
I checked her pulse again and decided to look downstairs.
The set-up on the ground floor was pretty much the same as on the first. One side of the house was gleaming and fully functional, the other still under wraps. I glanced through another polythene screen on my way past. All I could see close up were two or three more propane cylinders. They lay at odd angles on the floor, like torpedoes.
The kitchen was on the opposite side of the entrance hall.
This was where Frank’s taste and Lyubova’s did gel. Acres of polished granite and state-of-the-art stainless-steel cooking equipment and an island with a sink unit. There was only one gadget missing. She had settled for a little George Clooney coffee machine instead of one the size of a nuclear reactor.
Boiling water would dissolve the salt quicker than the stuff that came out of the tap. I’d dilute the mixture with cold when I got back to the bathroom. I filled the electric kettle and pressed the on button, flooding the surrounding area with blue light.
Leaving it to bubble, I scanned the shelves above the work surface by the cooker. They were stuffed with herbs and spices and tins of smoked mussels and five kinds of pepper, but not what I was looking for. They didn’t seem to go for Colman’s mustard around here, and the Gucci packet of pink Himalayan rock salt was almost empty. I dived into the cupboard under the sink. Dishwasher salt would do just fine.
