by Dan Latus
Up close, there were still no lights to be seen anywhere in the house. Magda tugged at his sleeve and pointed to a car standing in deep shadow towards the rear of the house. They walked down the short drive to take a closer look.
Jake nodded with satisfaction. They’d found it. This was the car, all right.
‘We’re in the right place,’ he murmured.
Magda nodded.
He led the way to the front door and rang the bell. It was definitely working. He could hear it chiming away in the distance. But no-one answered.
It looked like Freddie really wasn’t home. That gave them the chance to get out of the rain and do a bit of poking around. He was curious to know how Freddie was running his new life, and if he was aware of the danger he was in. He hadn’t forgotten about the money, either.
Assuming the front door was heavily defended, he looked for an easier way of getting inside. He found it in a small window at the back of the house. He tapped out the glass and reached inside to open the window. Then he climbed in, to find himself in a back scullery where Freddie kept his boots and the washing machine.
He sniffed and grimaced. Then he turned to warn Magda, but she had followed him inside already, which was a bit of a nuisance. He really would have preferred her to be back in the car and safely out of the way, especially now. Sooner, rather than later, she was going to ask about the smell.
Chapter 40
‘Remember me, Freddie?’ Fogarty asked when the front door opened.
A startled face peered at him for a moment. Then the door slammed shut. Fogarty smiled grimly and turned to study the drizzle-soaked garden.
‘Nasty night,’ he said in a conversational tone.
Hendrik nodded. ‘Just right.’
‘It is. Just what we want. Ah! Here we are.’
Smiling again, Fogarty turned back to face the front door as it re-opened.
‘We got him,’ the man holding the door said, grinning. ‘Just like you said, he was leaving by the back way.’
Fogarty nodded. ‘Anybody else in the house?’
‘Doesn’t seem to be.’
‘Good. Well, let’s get started,’ he said with a sigh.
As Fogarty had half-expected, Freddie knew nothing about the missing money. At least, that was what he said. After an hour of questioning, bits of Freddie and blood all over, Fogarty was inclined to believe him. He gave the nod, and one of the two men working Freddie over finished him off with the knife he had been using to such terrible effect.
Fogarty turned to leave. Hendrik followed him.
‘So where does that leave us?’ Fogarty wondered as they walked back to the car, parked a couple of blocks away.
‘Well,’ Hendrik said, ‘there used to be Penrose in Yorkshire and Gregory in Scotland, but sadly they’re no longer with us. The Tenerife boys said neither of them knew anything anyway.’
Fogarty thought for a moment and then shook his head. ‘No. Neither of them had the brains they would have needed to grab the money.’
Hendrik used the remote to unlock the car.
Pausing a moment before he got in, Fogarty said, ‘And the Czechs will take care of that guy from Portugal now he’s on their patch. Who else is there?’
‘No-one really. Just Nicci in Crete.’
‘It has to be him, doesn’t it?’
‘It looks that way now, but I’m not so sure we should bother.’
Fogarty got in the car. ‘Why not?’
‘Well, Crete is a long way away, and outside our comfort zone. Then I’m conscious of the time we’re spending on all this. We need to get you somewhere safe, and soon.
‘Maybe we should just forget about the money from the heist. It’s long gone, after all. Just send the Tenerife lads after Nicci.’
‘Well, I hear what you say, Mike, but this is personal. Besides, Crete isn’t that far away. I know we can’t fly, but the yacht will get us there in a just a few days. I want to carry on, as we planned.’
Hendrik started the engine. ‘We still need to start planning to get you away to Cuba, or wherever.’
‘Fair enough. I agree. Why don’t you get the ball rolling?’
As they pulled away from their parking spot, Fogarty added, ‘Funny about Fat Freddie, wasn’t it?’
‘What was?’
‘Well, apart from trying to get out the back door at the beginning, he just gave up. I always thought he had more about him than that.’
‘He was scared shitless,’ Hendrik said with a chuckle. ‘Understandable, really.’
‘I misjudged him,’ Fogarty said, shaking his head.
‘Well, that won’t happen again.’
‘No, it won’t.’ Fogarty began to laugh. ‘You’re right there!’
Chapter 41
Jake didn’t open the door into the main part of the house immediately. Instead, he switched on a light and turned to Magda.
‘I don’t think you should go any further,’ he told her. ‘What we’re going to find will not be very nice. You don’t need that experience.’
‘I know what that smell is,’ she said in an even tone. ‘You don’t need to worry about me, Jake.’
He was less surprised than he would have been before all this started, but he was still pretty damned surprised. He just looked at her for a moment. Then he shook his head. He could see she meant it.
‘Let’s get on with it,’ she suggested.
With a sigh, he turned to open the door that led into the kitchen.
What was left of Freddie was in the main living room. It wasn’t a pretty sight. His death had been far from easy. In fact, his last hour or so didn’t bear thinking about.
Blood, and other liquid matter, had spread far and wide across the room. The mountain of bare flesh in the middle of it was where it had all come from. Intent on keeping well clear, Jake stayed in the doorway. Magda, without a sound, stood beside him. They could see what they needed to see without going any closer.
Struggling to stay calm and objective, Jake said, ‘We were too late to help Freddie, sadly, but I think we can be sure of one thing.’
‘I agree,’ Magda said quietly. ‘Freddie did not know where the missing money is.’
Jake’s thought exactly. Much of the poor man’s suffering would have been unnecessary if he had been able to tell Fogarty what he wanted to know.
‘Come on,’ he said, turning away. ‘We found Freddie, but we’re not going to find anything else here. Let’s get out.’
He headed for the front door, too uncertain of his stomach to risk clambering back out through the window. Magda followed him.
‘You all right?’ he asked as he shut the door after them.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re sure?’ he insisted, expecting her to collapse into a vomiting heap any moment.
‘You don’t need to worry about me, Jake.’
‘No? You’re going to tell me you’ve seen that sort of thing – or worse – before?’
‘Stop it, Jake!’ she said sharply. ‘You should know by now that I am not an innocent.’
Indeed he should, he thought wearily as they headed back to their car. Indeed he should. Long before now, he had realized that Magda was not your average young woman.
They sat in the car and took stock. Taking stock was something they seemed to need to do a lot of. Either they were hitting their faces against a blank wall or something unsettling had happened. Often it was both.
‘Well, we found Freddie,’ he said with a sigh.
Magda nodded. ‘What is left of him, now the torturers have finished.’
‘Yeah.’ He thought for a moment before adding, ‘Fat Freddie was a career criminal – another one – and probably did a lot of bad things in his life, but...’
‘He didn’t deserve to die like that,’ Magda finished for him.
Jake nodded. Exactly.
‘What now, Jake?’
Now? Well, now there was only one person left of the group Bob had asked him to warn about Foga
rty’s release. And there was still the money, of course. Not forgetting that.
‘First, I need to meet Bob and bring him up to date. Then we’ll go to Crete.’
‘Crete, yes,’ Magda said, nodding. ‘Somewhere warm and dry will be pleasant.’
Pleasant? Only if we can avert more bloodshed, he thought. And if we can’t, let’s hope the blood isn’t ours.
‘But before that, Jake, I think we need to rest for a day or two.’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘You can see Bob. Then I would like to see a little more of England. Particularly, I would like to see your old home. Is that possible?’
‘I suppose so,’ he said with surprise. ‘Yes, it’s possible.’
This woman, he thought wearily. She just continues to astonish me.
Chapter 42
Jake had wondered what it would be like to see his old place again, his isolated cottage in the Northumberland hills. Well, it had been a cottage once, when he lived there. By the time he left, though, it had been a burned-out ruin. For several years he had tried not to think about it. Now? Well, nothing had changed. It was still a burned-out ruin, a charred and blackened heap of stones. The only difference he could see was that now there were healthy clumps of nettles and a few thistles growing amongst the rubble.
At one time, Bob had been going to help him with rebuilding the cottage, but that had never happened. Bob had been too busy, as a serving police inspector, and Jake had lost heart, given the immensity of the job. He hadn’t had the money to pay a builder to do the work for him, either. So nothing much had happened at first, and then for several years afterwards nothing at all had happened.
He stopped the car on the track, and turned it round. Then they got out and stood and stared, taking in the dereliction and the sheer loneliness of their surroundings.
After a few moments, Magda said, ‘So this is where you lived, Jake?’
‘For a while, yes. A couple of years.’
She turned and gazed around at the surrounding moorland, the mix of grass and heather, that stretched for miles. Not a tree in sight. Nor another building. Fern Cottage – what was left of it – was four miles from the nearest village, and from anything else man-built. But in its snug little valley, it had defied the isolation and the elements very well for a long, long time. Many generations of hill shepherds and their families had lived here before it had been abandoned by them and Jake had taken up residence.
They walked up to the sandstone scarp overlooking the cottage. From there, on a clear day, you could see the North Sea, as well as a lot more moorland. A pair of circling crows overhead inspected them, uncertain perhaps if they were foe or food. You had to be opportunistic to live up here. The handful of sheep grazing quietly nearby scarcely noticed their presence. Jake heard a curlew call, and then he glanced up at the skylarks chattering overhead.
Once again, Magda surprised him when she spoke. ‘Your enemies attacked from up here?’ she asked.
‘Enemies?’
‘The cottage did not burn down all by itself.’
He gave a grim smile and nodded. ‘Yes, that’s what happened, all right. A long time ago.’
It was uncanny how Magda could still take him unawares with her questions and observations. Right now, she seemed to be thinking like a soldier on the battlefield, eyeing and evaluating the landscape like a military tactician.
‘What a life you must have led, Magda!’
She shrugged but made no comment. They stayed a few more minutes. Then they turned to head back down to the car.
‘It is beautiful here,’ Magda said, with a last wistful look around at the view.
Jake nodded. He had always thought so. Desolate, lonely, but quietly beautiful. In recent years he had almost forgotten that.
‘Could you live here again, Jake?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
That had always been his intention. Until Bob had involved him in his quest to bring Fogarty down, rebuilding the cottage had been top of his to-do list. Only lack of resources and insufficient energy had stood in his way.
Now? Now it was quite a while since he had last thought of it.
‘Let’s go to Crete,’ Magda said, sensing his unsettled mood and taking his hand.
Chapter 43
They left that evening, sharing a flight from Newcastle Airport with lots of Geordie holidaymakers. The accents and excited chatter all around them gave Jake something to smile about, and made him feel quite nostalgic.
Magda didn’t understand. ‘Are they English?’ she whispered, puzzled by what she was hearing.
‘Certainly they’re English,’ he assured her. ‘Technically, at least.’
‘Technically?’
‘It’s God’s own country, here, up in the north.’
‘I understand.’
He doubted that.
They landed in Heraklion at a god-awful hour. Jake’s watch said it was 2.30 in the morning, but the captain told them all it was a couple of hours later than that. Dawn would soon be breaking.
Magda had managed to doze a little during the flight, but Jake hadn’t. His mind was forging ahead to the task of finding Nicci, and hoping they could do it while he was still alive. That would be no mean achievement, considering their success rate so far. Himself and Nicci were now the only ones left on Fogarty’s hit list.
He really hoped they would do better with Nicci, not least because he had quite liked the guy. During their ill-fated, short association, Nicci had behaved decently towards him. Just another career criminal he might be, but Jake was prepared to make all sorts of allowances and excuses for Nicci that he wouldn’t have made for the likes of Fat Freddie and the others.
Something that gave him hope was that, in Crete, Nicci was on home ground. This was where he belonged, and where he would be known. As Jake understood it, family and clan still stood for a lot in Crete. They could provide Nicci with the protection he wouldn’t have had elsewhere.
Fogarty, on the other hand, was a dangerous, malevolent foreigner. He wouldn’t find the odds in his favour here, however much power and influence he could wield in London and leafy Essex.
Jake also believed that when they found Nicci, they would learn what had happened to the missing twenty-million quid. It had to be Nicci who had found a way of spiriting it away. There was no-one else left who could have done it. Fogarty would know that as well, of course. The pressure was building on them all.
That thought brought him back to Magda, sleeping beside him. He still didn’t know about Magda. Was she really with him, and on his side, or was she still dancing to Kunda’s tune?
He hadn’t forgotten the moment of indecision when he interrupted their discussion at the restaurant in Vysoká Lípa. He hadn’t been sure then that she would leave with him, and he wasn’t sure now that she would stay with him. He might just be serving her purpose, as she was his. A mutual-help pact, he thought with a wry smile. That might be all it was.
There were lots of families with young children on their flight. People looking for sun and sea late in the year, as well as cheap booze and fags. Other stuff, as well, probably. By now, some of the kids were manic after their four-hour incarceration and their sleep deprivation. Let loose in the baggage hall, they took full advantage. The noise was excruciating.
Jake led Magda quickly through it all, heading for the exit, congratulating himself that they carried only hand luggage and didn’t have to wait for the carousel to deliver up suitcases.
The day was beginning to dawn when they left the terminal. They took a taxi into the town centre and checked into a hotel for what remained of the night. The new day was going to have to wait until they had caught up on some sleep.
By the time they surfaced, the new day was more than half over. They got up, showered and checked out of the hotel. Then they found a small, quiet café in a side street and ordered a meal that might technically still have been lunch.
‘Where does Nicci come fr
om?’ Magda asked as they nursed cups of vile coffee. ‘You never did say.’
‘Not here, or any other town. He grew up on a farm, somewhere in the middle of the island.’
‘You think he will have gone back there?’
‘Not if he has twenty million pounds, he won’t!’ Jake smiled and added, ‘He told me about the family farm. One of his jobs, when he was young, was to fetch water from the well. They didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing, or much else, either. Plenty to eat, though – in good years.’
‘What happened in bad years?’
‘I doubt if they ever really went hungry, not here, but…’ He broke off with a shrug. ‘Who knows?’
Magda pulled a face. ‘A primitive life, I think.’
Jake nodded. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll have wanted to take up farming again.’
‘So?’
‘I still think he might have gone back to the area where he grew up. There was a small town nearby that he talked about once. Town? Not much more than a village, probably. He’ll have relatives and friends there. People who know him, and who he trusts. Hell, he might even have rebuilt the town for them!’
‘If he has the money,’ Magda said with a smile. ‘Where is this town?’
‘It’s somewhere called the Lasithi Plateau. Have you heard of it?’
She shook her head.
‘Me neither, apart from the time Nicci mentioned it. We’ll hire a car, and make our way there.’
Chapter 44
‘The Lasithi Plateau?’ Magda said thoughtfully. ‘It is what?’
‘Well, the name suggests it’s a high place, so presumably it’s in the mountains.’ Jake glanced at her and smiled. ‘Other than that, I know nothing.’
They were on their way there, and about to head inland in the Honda CR-V he’d hired in Heraklion. The car was well-worn, both visually and mechanically, but it was like the one he had acquired in the Algarve and left behind in Vysoká Lípa. So the model was familiar, and he knew it to be reliable.
