by Mike Craven
Fluke had been lost for words. He couldn’t remember when so many people had put themselves out for him and he wasn’t sure he deserved it. Leah, Towler and Jiao-long were all risking their jobs. He didn’t know enough about the law to be sure, but Bridie had probably risked being disbarred. Personally, he didn’t think he was worth it.
The arrival of his coffee brought him back to the present. It was served in a huge cup, more of a bowl with a handle, with a tiny Italian biscuit. A group of farmers sitting at the bar with their pints of Jennings and bowls of soup turned to look at the decidedly un-Cumbrian drink. He grinned apologetically, pointed to his keys and mouthed he was driving. As one, they turned back to the bar and continued talking about whatever farmers talked about. Fluke picked his phone up and checked his emails. There was nothing that couldn’t wait.
With nothing to do but wait, Fluke idly picked up a brochure on the table. It had the rates for rooms and some of the special offers they were running.
When he had time to kill, Fluke would sometimes pass the time people-watching, trying to work out their stories from the context clues around him. The three men at the bar talking about Herdwick sheep were clearly fell farmers. No challenge there. The lounge bar allowed dogs and a Border Collie sat at the feet of the farmer on the left. As if the dog sensed it was being watched, it got up, stretched, and wandered over to the open log fire, before slumping back down.
The only other person in the bar was a petite barmaid. She looked about sixteen but Fluke knew she was at least two years older. You had to be eighteen to serve alcohol. She was a pretty-looking girl, and was wearing the required black polo shirt with the pub logo, along with a black skirt and flat black shoes. He watched as one of the farmers ordered a whiskey “for the road”.
She really was small, he thought, as she stood on tiptoes to reach the optic of the whiskey the farmer had chosen from the vast array on offer. She turned and caught him watching. Instead of looking annoyed, she smiled shyly. ‘I don’t why they have these things so high,’ she said.
Fluke said nothing. A memory was rushing back, something that had happened recently. Something to do with the barmaid serving the farmer his whiskey. He subconsciously raised his hand, as if he were reaching for the optic as well. She stared at him and the three farmers turned to see what she was looking at. He quickly lowered it. Eventually, they all turned back round.
The farmer with the whiskey spoke. ‘Pass the jug o’ watter, lass.’ She moved across to the end of the bar and came back with a small jug. The farmer added a splash of water and thanked her.
Another alarm went off in his head. A jug. A jug and a small girl reaching for something only just within reach. He scoured everything that had happened recently, desperately trying to make the connection. He shut his eyes to blank out all external stimuli.
The case had already thrown things at him that had been just out of his reach. The numbers on the notepad he should have recognised, and the odd number of paracetamol tablets were just two. He knew that sometimes things came to him immediately and sometimes they never came at all. Sometimes he had to simply learn to live with a nagging feeling that refused to die.
He knew this was important though. He raised his hand to reach for the imaginary whiskey again. The farmers and the barmaid stared, but he didn’t care.
Why was it evoking such a strong reaction?
The two thoughts collided.
The jug and the whiskey.
The whiskey and the jug.
He hardly dared to think. If he tried to focus on it, it would disappear. He would scare it away.
Clues became questions. The case had been overrun with them. Clues and questions.
But few answers.
The jug and the whiskey
The whiskey and the jug.
The debris of the collision in his mind cleared and there it was.
An answer.
The answer to the case.
Fluke knew where Dalton Cross was.
Chapter 38
Why would a man in a wheelchair keep the cream on the top shelf of the fridge?
Fluke had watched Tait struggle to reach it. It was the right height for someone standing but the wrong height for someone sitting. Why make things harder than they were?
Tait had told Fluke the cream was in a pitcher.
Who said ‘pitcher’? No one in England, that was for certain. It was a jug. Always had been, always would be.
Fluke knew of one country that used the word pitcher instead of jug though. A country divided from the UK by a common language.
Instantly, Fluke knew three things.
The man calling himself Gibson Tait didn’t need to use a wheelchair.
The man calling himself Gibson Tait was an American.
The man calling himself Gibson Tait was Dalton Cross.
By the time Fluke had finished processing it all, he was already in his car, gunning the accelerator and roaring out of the car park. The big BMW tyres spat gravel back at the pub windows. He’d left an upturned table and a smashed coffee cup in his wake. The farmers and barmaid had stared at him in astonishment as he’d ran out but he didn’t care. He had no time. He’d sent Jiao-long out there to interview him.
‘Bastard!’ Fluke shouted. ‘Fucking bastard!’
Tait lived ten miles away and Fluke was pushing one hundred and ten as he raced west along the A66. He braked hard as he approached the Keswick roundabout. He took the third exit and put his foot back to the floor again.
Although the road had more bends than the A66, he took one hand off the steering wheel, reached for his phone and autodialled the office. Jiao-long answered. Fluke breathed out.
‘Longy, thank f—!’ he started to say before he was interrupted.
‘Boss, Gibson Tait’s talking shit. There’s no such thing as a master code or whatever it was he said—’
‘Longy—’
‘And another thing, boss. Why would—’
‘Longy!’ Fluke shouted. ‘Just shut the fuck up and listen!’
As he explained everything to the young computer expert, a car coming the other way had to swerve to miss him. Fluke heard its horn sound. He ignored it.
Driving at nearly seventy miles an hour on a narrow, bending road with only one hand on the steering wheel, he left instructions for Jiao-long to get armed response out to Tait’s house as soon as possible. Within a minute, Jiao-long had got back to him. Armed response were on a joint exercise with the nuclear police and were at least an hour away.
Fuck! He didn’t know what to do. He could, and probably should, wait for them. That would be the sensible thing to do. Fluke knew he was no match for Cross on his own.
Still, there was no harm in just going to have a look? He’d be able to tell just by driving past whether there was anyone in.
He slammed the accelerator to the floor and watched the speedometer creep past seventy again, which on the narrow twisty road was about forty too fast.
His phone rang again. He looked at the caller-ID. It wasn’t Jiao-long this time but Chambers. Fluke ignored it. He didn’t need to speak to him to know what he was going to say. Back off and let armed response handle it.
The real Gibson Tait was dead, Fluke was sure about that. He’d been Samantha’s contact in the police. When Cross had found out it had been him doing Samantha’s checks for her he’d have gone straight to him, hoped Tait could have led him directly to Samantha. But she was far too careful and he’d had to do it the hard way; going to Diamond and forcing him to reveal where the drop was.
Once they’d served their purpose, there was nothing to gain, and everything to lose by allowing Tait and Diamond to live.
Once Samantha’s body had been discovered, he probably decided he needed to stay and monitor the situation. And he knew of just the place to use as a base. A small cottage in the middle of nowhere…
Fluke instinctively slowed as he entered the village and approached the quiet lane where Tait’s cottage was sit
uated. Cross couldn’t have picked a more perfect place. The Royal Marine in Fluke appreciated the location. A long drive. No obvious cover. No chance of approaching unnoticed. Thick gravel that would make a noise whether you were driving or walking. A superb defensive position.
He crawled past and surreptitiously glanced at the cottage. There were no lights on. There was no car in the drive.
Fluke braked and paused. The cottage looked empty but that didn’t mean it was. He was in a good place to wait for armed response and guide them in. He could help them. He’d been inside before. Waiting was the sensible thing to do.
Fluke hadn’t been passed over for promotion so many times for doing the sensible thing every time.
He put the car into reverse and carefully navigated the narrow unlit lane. Turning a hard left, he entered Tait’s drive backwards. If Cross came out now, Fluke wanted to be able to drive straight out.
Cross didn’t come out, however, and Fluke reversed all the way up to the front door. He stopped but didn’t turn off the engine. He put the BMW into drive and stayed there for a full minute. Watching the front door through his rear view mirror. Looking at the fully drawn curtains for a twitch. Anything to suggest there was someone at home.
The house was unlit and looked unoccupied. He picked his phone up off the passenger seat but there was no signal.
There was no point sitting there, exposed. He either had to try to get inside or leave. Neither held much attraction.
He punched the steering wheel, frustrated at his own indecisiveness.
He was scared but that didn’t bother him. A dark creepy cottage in the middle of nowhere and a deadly killer nearby. It was the type of thing you were supposed to be scared of. If it were a slasher film, he’d have been silently screaming at the girls in bikinis, ‘Don’t go in there, you fucking bimbos!’.
Fluke got out of the car. He left the door open and the engine on.
He opened the BMW’s boot and took out a heavy-duty torch. It had been in there since he’d taken delivery of the car and he’d not once used it. When he pressed the on button, nothing happened. For Fluke, torches were simply cases for carrying dead batteries. The weight was reassuring though. No match for an expert with a gun but better than nothing.
He quietly walked round the back. Fluke knew what the back garden looked like as he’d seen it through the kitchen window when he and Cross had drunk coffee together. It flashed into his mind that if he ever wrote his autobiography, that chapter would be called ‘Coffee with a Killer’.
Fluke peered into the kitchen. It was too dark to see properly. He knew that glass had been expensive when the cottages were built and windows were therefore smaller than those on modern houses. He also knew that, as it was lighter outside than inside, he’d be sticking out like an Alfred Hitchcock silhouette. He moved past the kitchen and further into the back garden. He looked around out of habit.
Like the rest of the village’s gardens, it was immaculate. Large borders with a heavy presence of snowdrops. And, as it was Wordsworth’s county, there were the green shoots of the first daffodils of the year. The rest of the spring perennials were not yet ready to risk the Cumbrian frosts. There was a small pond with a tennis ball floating to discourage ice and what looked like a solar-powered fountain. Probably turned off for the dark winter months. Natural paving stones led around the outside of the lawn, providing a natural barrier between plants and grass. A couple of fruit trees, leafless. Three or four evergreen shrubs. A wooden compost heap in the corner, full and ready to be used in early spring. The garden providing its own nourishment, year on year. In other circumstances, Fluke would have liked a proper look. He turned and surveyed the back of the cottage.
There was a small set of garden furniture on the patio. A small round table and three chairs. Cast iron, painted white. Available everywhere. The table had a glass ashtray. It had been there for a while. It was full of water, stained brown by the cigarette butts floating in it.
A place to sit and relax in the evening. Much like his own.
Fluke walked further in until he came to some patio doors. He tried looking in again but still couldn’t see anything in the gloom. He tried the handle gently. It was open.
This was it. If he was going to go back and wait for armed response, it had to be now. Once he was in the cottage, he was committed. If Cross was still in there, there’d be no avoiding him. He thought about Kenneth Diamond’s mutilated body. He thought about the way a beautiful young woman, criminal or not, had been discarded like a fly-tipped fridge. And he thought about Gibson Tait. A man in a wheelchair who’d been killed just for checking a name on a computer.
He opened the door and walked in.
Past the point of no return.
The lounge was empty so he walked straight through, his torch raised as if it was a police baton. He stopped at the door and listened. The cottage remained silent.
He opened the lounge door into the hall and tried to get his bearings. He could see the kitchen but already knew it was empty. There were three doors leading from the hall. All closed.
It wasn’t a big building, judging by the time it had taken to walk round it. Fluke guessed there would be two bedrooms and a bathroom. He walked towards the first door and put his hand on the handle. He paused.
He imagined people who risked their lives playing Russian roulette went through something similar to what he was feeling now. Being an instrument in their own death, never knowing if their next action would be their last.
Fluke raised his torch and opened the door.
It was the master bedroom. A double bed, roughly made. A wardrobe, open but empty, and a chest of drawers with a flat-screen TV on top. The remote was on a bedside cabinet, along with a couple of books and a half-drunk glass of water. It didn’t smell musty and he guessed that it was where Cross had been sleeping. The room was otherwise empty. It was similar to his own bedroom at home. Functional rather than elaborate.
A small canvas bag was lying on the bed. Fluke opened it. It had clothes in and three passports. He didn’t have time to look properly. It was a job for a full forensic team. One thing was obvious though. Cross hadn’t left the country yet.
So where was he?
Fluke backed out into the hall.
He opened the second door.
He’d been half right. It was a spare bedroom but Tait had been using it as a study. An Apple desktop computer, heavy-duty laserjet printer, Bose speakers and a wifi router with a flashing blue light. All expensive stuff. There were bookshelves full of IT manuals, books and DVDs. An executive chair was in front of the computer. The desk was tidy. A few pens in a cracked Steve Jobs mug and a glass paperweight with a corporate logo that Fluke didn’t recognise. A souvenir from some event, no doubt. The room was otherwise empty.
One to go. The bathroom. He reached for the door handle.
He froze.
There was a noise. A very faint noise. The sound of material rustling. Very faint but he was sure he hadn’t imagined it.
Cross was on the other side of the door.
Waiting.
Fluke gently gripped the door handle and held it shut. He didn’t want to be surprised by Cross rushing him. He’d been quiet searching the house but there was no way Cross wouldn’t know he was there.
He’d been quiet but not silent.
Going back wasn’t an option. He couldn’t turn his back on Cross. Going forward meant coming face-to-face with a contract killer, armed with nothing more than a heavy torch.
In films where Russian roulette had been portrayed, one thing had always bothered Fluke. There had been occasions when they’d been firing a revolver and the rules of the game had not permitted re-spinning the chamber after someone’s turn. Fluke had seen one film where it had dry-fired five times. The person whose turn it had been next had known with absolute certainty that there was a bullet in the chamber. Not one-in-six odds, but one-in-one. A one hundred per cent chance of death. Yet they still pulled the trigger. He�
��d never understood why they did it. Until now.
He had to do something. The longer he stood there, the greater the chance that Cross would just start shooting through the flimsy wood.
He didn’t want to die wondering. Fluke had been trained in room breaches and knew that going in fast and noisy was better than timidly sticking your head in. Speed, aggression, surprise. SAS.
Disorientating Cross for long enough to grab the weapon was his only hope.
He flung the door open and burst into the room screaming obscenities.
A shower curtain flapped lazily in the breeze coming from the open window.
It was a small bathroom and was tiled in white from floor to ceiling. There was a mirror above a small vanity sink. Toiletries were lined up neatly on the little shelf below. The toilet was beside the sink. Fluke peered round the door to check the bath.
The room was empty.
Fluke collapsed to the floor in relief.
After a few seconds, he reached for his phone. Still no signal.
He picked himself up and waited for his heart to stop racing. He was drenched in cold sweat.
He weakly made his way out of the cottage, using the front door which was also unlocked.
He blinked in the bright evening sun.
He walked towards his car. And stopped.
At the end of the drive, staring at him, was Dalton Cross.
Chapter 39
Cross was on foot. He’d clearly seen Fluke’s car and had parked his own out of sight. He had a small handgun drawn. He was pointing it at Fluke. A two-handed grip. Steady.
He was about sixty yards away.
He walked towards Fluke.
Fluke stood still, frozen to the cold ground.
Death was on its way, he had no doubt about that. He was out of options. He was still out of range of Cross’s small handgun but the distance was closing fast. He looked at what he was carrying and laughed, the sound tinged with hysteria. Never bring a torch to a gunfight.
