But where was Gurya Ali?
The only sound as I’d searched the house had been the noise of my heart pounding in my ears. Now, I couldn’t even hear that. It had been the draught that alerted me. Just the tiniest puff of air.
‘Hello, Pete,’ I said.
‘Lay the rucksack down and turn around.’ His voice sounded surprisingly calm for someone who’d just walked in to find his house being burgled. I did as I was told. For a second I wondered if it was worth trying to bluster my way out, but decided not. It turned out that Pete’s weapon of choice for target practice wasn’t a long bow after all. I’d been even luckier than I thought at Hermitage Castle. The arrow pointed straight at my heart sat in the groove of a high-tech modern crossbow, one of those carbon-fibre jobs with enough power to punch through an engine block, so it should probably more properly be called a bolt. It was a hunting arrow, with the wicked barbs that mean you have to cut it out of the flesh.
Why couldn’t the bastard have taken up fuckin’ darts?
‘You’ve made a mess of my carpet. You’ll pay for that,’ he said conversationally. ‘Sit down in that chair facing me, knees together and keep your hands where I can see them.’
I sat, hoping I wasn’t crumpling his cushions, or he’d probably decide to disembowel me. How could everything seem so normal when the only thing between me and my coffin was an ounce of pressure on the trigger? He’d be asking me if I fancied a cup of tea next.
Only he didn’t. He just stood there with that steel-tipped shaft pointed unerringly at my chest, dark eyes gleaming with hatred and a hunger for – what? Blood? Revenge?
The silence became annoying, and I decided a bit more conversation was in order before he got bored and killed me. It didn’t seem politic to bring up the subject of Gurya Ali just yet, but I’d no doubt we’d get round to it later.
‘You must put a lot of work into keeping the place clean. I’d have thought you’d have had enough of that in the Army? OCD, isn’t that what the shrinks call it? You should see somebody about it.’
I saw his nostrils flare. ‘Don’t try to mess with my fucking head, Savage. I know your game. I even read one of your books. It was a load of worthless bullshit.’
I’ve had worse reviews, but it told me something else about Pete. He’d come out of the Army needing help, but not wanting to admit it. In the end he’d become so concerned about his own sanity he’d even turned to me. Poor bastard. Did I have some sympathy for him? Sure I did. We’d walked the same road and dodged the same bombs and bullets. But I was still going to kill him.
I turned the heat up a little. ‘I heard about Basra, Pete. Your mate didn’t have it so bad. One minute he was walking along enjoying the sunshine, the next he wasn’t. So what? There are a lot worse ways to go. It’s the people who have to clean up the mess that get the shitty end of the stick. All the guts and brains and the bits you don’t know where to put. Did they give you the shovel, or were you the one puking behind the wall?’
The skin on the knuckle of his trigger finger went a fraction paler and I tensed for the strike of the arrow. I was playing a dangerous game, but I didn’t think Pete would kill me until he learned how much I knew about Gurya and who I’d told. Not unless I provoked him a bit more. The nose of the crossbow dipped so it was aiming at my lower belly. At the same time his face dissolved in a dreamy smile and I knew he was anticipating the moment when the arrow zipped across the six feet separating us.
‘What do you know about fucking soldiering? Spit and polish and guarding the Queen with half a fucking bear on your head. Real soldiering’s about guts and endurance, putting your body on the line day after day after fucking day. Not running up some fucking hill to collect your medal.’
He was wrong. Real soldiering is about discipline, pure and simple. Always has been and always will be. The same discipline that sent the Pals’ battalions over the top on the first day of the Somme, or the Big Red One to bleed to death on the sands of Omaha beach, or even a bunch of Scots squaddies walking through the streets of some Iraqi dust bowl knowing that what was round the next corner would very likely kill them.
‘I know enough about soldiering to be certain I’d rather be doing it then than now,’ I said. The Taliban had just started using the type of roadside bombs that had been so effective for the insurgents in Iraq. ‘What kind of training is going to keep you alive when somebody blows up a 130mm artillery round ten feet from your tin can of an armoured Land Rover? Poor bastards aren’t soldiers, they’re just targets, and what are we fighting for anyway? Alexander the Great tried to take on the mujahedin and look where it got him. We got our arses kicked at Kabul and Jalalabad way back when, and the Afghans gave the Russkies a taste of Vietnam medicine in the Seventies. Why should we bother?’
‘Somebody has to fight the ragheads.’ The words came out as a snort but there was nothing humorous about them. ‘If we don’t stop them in Afghanistan and Iraq the bastards will be crawling all over us. Every one of the boys fighting over there is a fucking hero and I’d have been there with them if . . .’
He stopped speaking and glared at me. I could see that if I didn’t change the subject he was just as likely to pull the trigger as not.
‘Tell me about Gurya Ali?’
His eyes narrowed and he breathed out noisily. ‘Is this what all this fucking insanity is about? The Paki lassie?’
‘Not just Gurya Ali, Pete. What about Shoaz Ahmad and Bilal Hammouche and the New Zealand girl you left in the dungeon down at Threave Castle. Pakis and ragheads and some poor girl who just happened to have the wrong colour of skin.’
‘You’re fucking crazy, Savage.’ Now his face was lit by an incredulous half-grin that puzzled me. ‘I might not kill you after all. It’d be more entertaining watching you being carted off in a straitjacket.’
‘Every one of them was dumped close to some castle or church that was being done up by Historic Scotland. Each place linked to Sir James Douglas. That’s right, Pete, you can’t deny it – the guy who lived not a mile from here. It’s over. They’re going to find you. Let her go. Please.’
He shook his head angrily and for the first time he took his eyes off me. I saw the point of the crossbow bolt waver and I readied myself to rush him.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re trying to fit me up, you bastard. Trying to get me thrown into jail for something I had nothing to do with. He said you’d do that.’
‘And what about the little lead soldiers,’ I persisted. ‘The same little lead soldiers getting ready to chop each other up on top of your chest of drawers? How come every victim came with their very own special edition toy?’
‘What the fuck right have you to come here and accuse me of this?’ He was raving now. It was the first time I’d actually seen someone frothing at the mouth and it would have been quite amusing but for the shiny steel dart pointed at my guts. ‘You think you can come into my house and call me a fucking murderer? I’m calling the cops. I’m calling my fucking lawyer. No. I’m going to shoot you in the fucking leg and then tear off your arm and beat you to fucking death with the wet end.’
It was a bravura performance. I didn’t know whether it was all an act or if Pete Campbell was in denial about the murders. Maybe the psychosis had created multiple personalities and he didn’t even know he’d killed them. Well, I had one more ace in the hole to play and then it was all or nothing. All I could do was pray that the red mist put his aim off long enough for me to get to him.
‘Then how do you explain the Spanish kid who died exactly the same way about forty miles from your holiday apartment and at the exact place where the Black Douglas died?’
I took a deep breath and bunched my muscles, focusing on the glinting eye of the barbed steel point of the crossbow bolt, waiting for the moment when it was pointed somewhere else but my bellybutton. I charged.
‘What?’ The bewilderment was so honest and the fact that Pete had sat down and allowed the crossbow to fall to his side so
surprising that my attack faltered and I almost fell into his lap. He looked up at me and repeated the question. ‘What did you say?’
‘You murdered a sixteen-year-old Spanish boy called José Caracol at a place called Teba de Ardales. Then you killed Shoaz Ahmad and the two others.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not me.’ His face had gone a shade of custard yellow. ‘When did you say the Spanish kid was killed?’
‘I didn’t. José Caracol died on the twenty-fifth of August, 2005.’
‘July.’ It came out as a whisper and I barely heard it.
‘What about July, Pete? I don’t care about July. I want to know about Gurya Ali. Is she still alive?’
‘I go on holiday in July. I rent the place out for most of the rest of the year.’
Now it was my turn to look pale.
‘What?’ I heard myself echo his bewilderment of two minutes earlier.
‘I rent it out. In August 2005 I let it to a person I’d just met. A guy I occasionally went climbing with. Someone who helped me. The same person who gave me the lead soldiers.’
‘Who?’ I asked, knowing all the time and wondering why the room had suddenly started to spin.
‘Sandy Armstrong.’
CHAPTER 35
I don’t know how long we sat there, but I do know that it was Pete who recovered from his shock first. ‘Why aren’t the cops here?’ he demanded.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You came with all this evidence that I was a serial killer. The cops should be here, not just you.’
‘I didn’t have enough. It was all circumstantial.’
‘No,’ he said emphatically. ‘You had it right. Only the wrong person. I always thought Sandy was a wee bit strange. He said you’d try to fit us up. That you’d got it in for me because you knew I was a better soldier than you were. That’s why I went for you at the abbey. You call me obsessive? You should see him. He makes those lead soldiers by the hundred. Showed me them once, the only time he ever invited me into his house. Took me into this big room and then back out to the car again. Never even offered me a cup of tea.’
‘Was it Sandy who encouraged you to take an interest in history?’
‘Yeah. He said you couldn’t understand the present if you didn’t know your past. He hinted it would be good therapy for me, but he never pushed it. Then he told me about the Black Douglas and Lintalee. I was hooked.’
‘He was setting you up.’
He nodded. ‘He was always so . . . nice. Helpful. But he talked to himself and sometimes you’d catch him looking at people, with his eyes kind of glazed over, and you’d wonder to yourself.’
‘He said you were working together on the day Gurya disappeared.’
‘That’s right, but we only worked until two, because it was a Saturday. Then we left.’
‘Together?’
‘No. We had both vans that day.’
‘So he could have gone back?’
He nodded.
‘I think Sandy Armstrong is going to kill Gurya Ali tonight if he hasn’t already.’
‘Christ!’
“Where does he live?’
‘About five minutes away. Out towards the Jedforest Hotel, on the far side of the valley. You turn off to your left down the hill. There’s a sign for Jedwater Cottage. But we need to call the cops.’
He stood and picked up the phone.
The sensible thing would have been to let him make the call and then walk away. Instead, I hit him behind the left ear with a sock full of damp building sand, just hard enough to put his lights out.
*
There was no easy way to get back to the car and I didn’t think it would be a good idea to turn up at Sandy Armstrong’s home in Pete Campbell’s van. Instead, I fought my way through a wood in the dark and then waded the river. Fortunately the Jed was low, only up to about mid-calf, but every time I braked water squirted out of my boots.
I missed the sign for the cottage on the first pass and had to drive a couple of miles further south before I found a place to turn. On the return journey I thought I saw a car’s brake lights ahead that probably shouldn’t have been there, but I couldn’t be certain.
A passing place at the entrance to a field looked like a good place to park the car, so I walked the last few hundred yards towards the house in pitch black. Darkness holds no fears for me. I seem to have spent half my life sitting in damp holes lit only by the stars waiting for someone to kill me or vice versa. In South Armagh we’d be out for days at a time, alternately patrolling and lying up; one night an observation post in the trees overlooking a known PIRA player’s home, the next an ambush set up around an arms cache in someone’s potato patch. In Ulster the night was my friend. As I walked silently towards the cottage I tried to analyse the motivation that made me do what I did. It’s always dangerous to wallop somebody over the head; you’ve got as good a chance of killing them as not. I didn’t particularly like Pete Campbell but I didn’t want him to die. Hitting him with a home-made sap full of sand should mean he’d only be stunned and there’d be no fractures. I’d tied him up, but left the knots fairly loose, so he could work them free in a while. That should be all the time I needed.
Why did I do it?
For Aelish.
A light shone over the front porch of Jedwater Cottage and I studied it for a couple of minutes before making my decision. No sign of a car or van, but that didn’t mean anything. He was there or he wasn’t. If he was, I wasn’t feeling so charitable to him as I had been to Pete. I left the sand-filled sock where it was and hefted the crowbar in my right hand. It felt good.
There was no time for finesse. I marched up to the front door and knocked ready to batter whoever answered’s face in. After a minute or so when no one did, I jemmied the lock and let myself inside.
The smell hit me first – a smell like nothing I’d ever experienced before, apart from in my dreams of hell. The rotten-egg scent of sulphur and ashes, the acrid reek you get when metal strikes metal in a certain way, a pungent, throat-filling mix of chemicals that made my eyes water, and over it all the faint, but unmistakeable, stench of death. My hand shook as I fumbled for a light switch and flicked it to find myself in a narrow hallway lit by a single naked bulb. At the far end, bare wooden stairs led upwards to the first floor, while a pair of doors faced each other halfway along. The awful smell seemed to be coming from the one on the right.
I opened it as if I was defusing a landmine, a millimetre at a time and ready for it to go up in my face at the first false movement. The light switch for this room was just inside the doorway, but, ominously, when I flicked it nothing happened. I drew the torch from my jacket pocket and switched it on, casting the beam over the furniture and around the walls. The white light cast eerie shadows that moved like living things and grew and shrank as the pale eye of the torch swayed in my hand. It was only when I steadied it that I realised they weren’t shadows at all. I focused the beam on a single shrieking horror and backed away in such a hurry I almost fell over a chair. The cat’s pelt had been nailed to the wall by its four paws. The head hung towards me, the facial mask a picture of terror and torment, eyes wide and lips drawn back in agony. A few feet away a large Alsatian dog’s jaws dripped strings of blood while its glazed eyes stared accusingly. A lamb, rabbits, foxes and other carcasses too mutilated to identify, they were all represented in the Crusader’s macabre gallery. On the table, what I’d imagined were glass ornaments turned out to be bell jars filled with nameless obscenities, pickled in some kind of viscous yellow liquid. Feathers littered the floor like a carpet, lifting now and then in the draught from the doorway to float gently in the air, suspended in their natural environment for one final time. Sandy Armstrong had kept the lid on the bloodthirsty demon inside: now it was well and truly off.
Very slowly, I moved across the feathered carpet towards a door that must lead to the kitchen. Kitchens are full of knives and whoever had done this was a very handy man with a knife. Now I wished
I’d brought the Ballester-Molina.
But the kitchen was just a kitchen. Pots and pans and a mess in the sink that I hoped was old tea leaves. Beyond it lay another door. I lifted the crowbar in my right hand and grasped the door handle with my left hand, easing it gently open.
Now I knew where the metallic smell came from. Lead. Lots of lead. Silvery splashes of it all over the walls and the floor. The source was an old-fashioned, gas-powered furnace and melting pot in the centre of the room. This was where he’d spent countless hours melting down his old medieval lead to make his toys. Was this where fascination had turned to obsession? Had he become Douglas, a new incarnation of Douglas, or just Douglas’s servant? Well, a shrink would have to work that one out. And when had hero worship evolved into hatred? Had it been when the bombs went off on the London Tube, or had the seed been planted earlier? The two planes that had curved through a clear blue sky into the Twin Towers in 2001 had changed the world, why shouldn’t it have changed a deluded loner with obsession in his DNA? In that single moment anyone with a brown face had become a potential enemy; the enemy of God and the enemy of Christendom.
War Games Page 24
