Ashes to Ashes

by Margaret Duffy

  ‘I have. And come up with absolutely nothing.’

  ‘Then let’s hit the missing persons’ records and look for someone with hip replacements who might also have been in a serious accident of some kind.’

  ‘I suppose it’s a start,’ Joanna said sarcastically. Then: ‘Sorry, that came out all wrong.’

  Yes, this highly intelligent woman was miserable now her life revolved around domesticity and being alone with a small baby, Iona Flora, all day long in a semi-isolated rural environment.

  ‘I really can’t give this time until there’s some kind of evidence that points to a crime having been committed,’ her husband said slowly.

  ‘Quoted straight out of a police procedural manual,’ Joanna said, his words not having improved her mood.

  ‘Oh, be fair!’ he protested.

  ‘I’ll look into it,’ she said defiantly.

  ‘You can’t. You don’t have all the security codes for the websites. Nor the passwords.’

  I was thinking that it had been rather kind of him not to tell her she didn’t have the authority either.

  He was presented with a Mona Lisa lookalike.

  ‘You have?’ he gasped. ‘How, for God’s sake?’

  ‘I still have connections. I use someone else’s passwords.’

  ‘Who is it?’ James demanded to know.

  ‘And I have every intention of protecting my sources.’

  ‘Jo …’ he began warningly.

  ‘Children, please,’ Patrick murmured. And then, into the rather strained silence that followed, added: ‘Me.’

  ‘You!’ Carrick exclaimed.

  ‘Your other half is going to apply to rejoin the police. I think you already knew that. It doesn’t hurt for her to be kept in the picture and in this case nothing is yet official. And, should you regard that as unwarranted interference on my part, I can either grovel an apology and leave or you can have your punch-up now. I quite fancy a good shangie too.’

  ‘Isn’t there a third option?’ Carrick enquired with the hint of a smile.

  ‘Yes; pour me another tot.’

  ‘OK,’ said Carrick after pausing only briefly. He then shoved all the metal bits back in the bag and plonked them in his wife’s lap before grabbing the whisky bottle.

  I don’t think any of those present anticipated the thoroughness with which she would tackle her ‘case’.

  The fine weather broke, the two children came home, Fudge lame after having caught a hoof in a rabbit hole and thrown Katie who had landed safely, if scratchily, in a bush. The vet prescribed the pony be turned out to grass to rest, ‘Tough as old boots these Exmoors,’ and we went back to being a family with five children, the four elder ones having to be organized during the remainder of the school holidays.

  Keeping fit can be a problem for Patrick, who lost the lower part of his right leg during covert army operations. It has been replaced by something which – although state of the art with a tiny in-built computer powered by lithium batteries, cost the same as a small family car, and no one who didn’t know him would ever guess just seeing him moving about – does not lend itself to sustained running or jogging. Worried about losing fitness while being away from the gym he uses in London, and between grass-cutting sessions, Patrick started going to one locally and also swimming in Bath, taking Matthew, who was nervous, to the latter with him for lessons. Justin became unhappy about this – threw tantrums, that is, wanting to go as well but, at six years old, I thought him a bit too young, and he has a history of behaving badly in public. Patrick finally caved in and it was discovered that the boy not only behaved but took to the water like a seal, just as his father had.

  The author, now between novels, devoted time to Vicky and baby Mark, Katie having gone off again, this time to a local friend’s house for a few days, where, surprise, surprise, the parents bred show ponies. I’m not a very good mother in that small children soon exhaust my ability to amuse them, the two little ones humbly making it clear to me after a while that they preferred their own company, the baby content to watch Vicky playing at dolls’ tea parties for hours and being allowed to hold, chew, wave around and throw the odd ‘guest’.

  ‘Is this baby downright strange, or what?’ I asked Carrie at some stage.

  ‘Different,’ replied this forthright woman. ‘He’s not backward, mind,’ she added hastily, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking. No, Mark watches and learns all the time. He’ll start trying to talk soon.’

  ‘But he’s so good and quiet and loves all the pretty things.’

  ‘So he’s going to be like Laurence Llewelyn Bowen when he grows up. Gorgeous!’

  I hadn’t thought of it like that.

  Some fitness aspects of the job cannot be dealt with locally and, ten days later, Patrick and I headed for London for firearms training. My husband is, and has to be, a fine shot. Due to his service in undercover units the Gillards are still on the hit lists of various terrorist organizations, not to mention those of aggrieved mobsters he has helped put behind bars. Most of them, thankfully, have no idea who he really is. But because of this he carries a Glock 17 in a shoulder harness and, even at home, when it is obviously out of sight, it is not far away, secured in a wall safe together with my Smith and Wesson, or in our car, a Range Rover which has a hidden safe in the cubby box between the front seats, fitted with electronic locks that can only be opened by us. Patrick also usually has in his possession his Italian throwing knife, and he is more dangerous with that than most men armed with a chainsaw. All of these weapons have saved our lives on more than one occasion.

  I am quite a good shot and, having carried it around with me for quite a while, have recently, and at last, received official authorization to retain the short-barrelled Smith and Wesson with which Patrick was issued when he worked for D12, a department of MI5, but never quite got round to handing back. I do not want to be given anything else as I am used to it and that seems to find favour with those in charge, who have to bear in mind that retraining me with, say, a Glock, would take time and, due to drastic cuts in funding, cost too much money. I have used Patrick’s Glock once, when a man was about to finish me off at close range with a rifle. There had been no risk of my missing him.

  After the routine target practice, at which we both proved to be a little rusty, followed the second stage. This takes place at a training set-up run by the military set deep in the bowels of a Ministry of Defence building a short taxi ride away from the first venue. It is run by the army, and although police personnel do sometimes use the facility, Commander Greenway has no actual say in the fact that we do.

  Scenarios of any kind can be put together there along the lines of stage or film sets using various and usually lightweight materials. That is just about the only concession to keeping participants in one piece. The basic arrangement is a series of tunnels, parts of which can collapse without warning, with crevices hiding targets which spring up and have to be dealt with in meaningful fashion otherwise one loses a ‘life’, of which a certain number, usually three, are issued at the start. The tunnels often lead into a large open space of some kind – where there are booby traps and more targets – that has to be crossed in order to reach, in convoluted fashion, a high point near the end; perhaps a tower.

  All this has to be achieved within a time limit with the added distraction of young and very fit service people ordered to ambush participants in the tunnels. The occasional live electrical wire, low voltage but with a kick, waits for the unwary. Oh, and perhaps a soaking in water. And not to mention marksman perched high on a gantry taking careful but unnerving shots, also using live ammunition.

  Patrick helped create this facility and wrote most of the early ‘scripts’, and it is for this reason, I think, that he has some kind of life membership. There is a tradition that they try to overpower him when he nears the end of the course, ‘lives’ lost or not, before he endeavours to demolish the entire set-up. People have been hurt, even ended up in hospital. Men of Patrick�
��s ilk find this kind of thing vastly entertaining, if a challenge. I just somehow get through it and laugh afterwards and it goes without saying that, for most of the time, I rely very heavily on Patrick’s assistance.

  We were kitted out in the usual dark blue tracksuits and non-slip boots, the last another rare nod to staying out of A&E, and headed down the dimly lit approach corridor. As pre-arranged between us, Patrick had not drawn his Glock, but I had my weapon ready in my hand. This soon proved to be a good idea when a couple of men jumped on him from a hidden recess. He has a varied and effective choice of temporary disabling tactics, and these people were, frankly, naive and clumsy. One paid the price by being on the receiving end of a hefty box around the head; the other, breaking probably the only house safety rule by grabbing hold of Patrick around the neck, got an elbow, possibly accidental, smack on the nose, which gushed with blood as though someone had turned a tap on in it.

  We moved on.

  They usually try to split us up but I was determined that, this time, it would not happen. When someone lobbed a thunderflash at us from somewhere at the rear, however, I was momentarily deafened and blinded, and when the smoke cleared a little I was on my own. Too late, I remembered Patrick’s words, uttered on more than one occasion: ‘When they try to confuse and stop you, move!’

  ‘You have two lives between you as your target practice was so lousy,’ a voice boomed over a hidden speaker. ‘And if we hear you talking to one another you’ve immediately failed.’

  I already knew there were mikes all over the place and yelled, ‘And if we talk to ourselves?’

  There was no response.

  Who made up these bloody rules?

  I moved, ran down the rest of the corridor, through the swing doors at the end and in the ‘lobby’ I found myself in was confronted by a young woman dressed in combats. She didn’t like the look of the gun at all but squared up to me with the brave intention of stopping me from going any further. I simply didn’t want to have to hit her so shoved the gun in a pocket and carried out the manoeuvre Patrick does with those far weaker than himself. She wasn’t weaker than me really but I still stuck out a leg, grabbed her, pulled and pushed in scientific fashion, got her off-balance and watched as she went over backwards. By the time she’d picked herself up I had barged through another pair of doors.

  No tunnels, no Patrick, just a half-light moonscape of large boulders – polystyrene, probably – sand, pebbles, a slate scree and dead trees, actual branches stuck into the sand. And spiders. They were not real but very lifelike, hanging like oversized black grapes with long legs in the centre of lovingly fashioned webs strung between several of the trees and a tumbledown shed. There was an artificial breeze, which somehow made it worse, fanning through this nightmare, the creatures jigging up and down and from side to side in an unbelievably nasty dance.

  If this was one of Patrick’s ideas I would divorce him, again – we have been married twice – as soon as we got outside.

  I am a complete and utter arachnophobe and was too slow to react when a target popped up – one of the usual cardboard replicas used indoors representing a leering gunman. But I got it in the guts, the crack of the shot very loud even though the walls of this extensive area are lined with bulletproof baffles. There was another shot, somewhere close by, off to my left – the Glock by the sound of it. Quickly, using a couple of the phoney rocks as cover, I went in that direction. But carefully – we didn’t want to end up shooting each other.

  Perhaps, I thought, the author of this had been hoping that I, in a panic, would waste my ammunition on the spiders. Congratulating myself that I had not fallen for this, I rounded a rock and came face-to-face with the eight eyes of a huge arachnid, at least three feet in height, that did not have a web but was on the ground and mobile, almost right upon me and moving in a way that can only be described as a metallic frenzy. Really, really wanting to run, shrieking, I picked up a largish rock that was real, tore around to one side of the thing, managed to kill another target on the way that appeared in a dark recess on the far side of the sandy space and smashed it down with all my strength. Reduced to half the height it had been, it tottered into a boulder then disintegrated, crunching into a twitching heap that still managed to look like a real spider in its death throes.

  ‘Sammy’s going to be really sad about that,’ thundered the disembodied voice. ‘It took him a long time to make that. It wouldn’t have hurt you, duckie. We might have to send you the bill.’

  I mentally told Sammy what he could do with his flattened spider.

  Patrick appeared and towed me at speed through the trees. I collected only one of the spiders on my tracksuit top – why the hell hadn’t Patrick? – and ripped it off. It burst, splashing me in some kind of black gunge. I hit freak-out level ten even though I knew they weren’t real. In the next moment one of the smaller of the dead ‘trees’ keeled over as we went by, hitting Patrick on the shoulder, causing him to trip on the uneven ground and fall flat. I heaved it off him and ran on, leaving him to get to his feet.

  The tumbledown shed did its thing – fell apart like a pack of cards shooting red dye everywhere. I had flung myself down and all of it missed me, squirting all over the spot lamps which provided what light there was, and everything became much dimmer.

  We proceeded to systematically slaughter everything cardboard that they then threw at us as we crossed the rest of the open space. I let my partner, who had just one splash of red on his overalls, do most of the work, as he had started off with seventeen shots to my six. It took me a while to realize that he was on auto, bored and angry. When someone took a shot at us from the gantry that came just too close for comfort, he started on the lights serving that area, no doubt showering those up there with glass and other bits and pieces. I heard someone swear.

  The tunnels, constructed of some kind of wooden panels that locked together, were on the far side and like a maze with several dead ends and false entrances. These had to be negotiated to reach the end but we worked as a team, not needing to speak, relying on hand signals and, seemingly, telepathy. We have done this many times before and I knew that the reason for Patrick’s anger was that although they had given us less lives than normal, the entire set-up consisted of stale ideas padded out with gizmos. They were wasting our time.

  Our tunnel world suddenly went almost completely dark so I guessed that someone else was angry too, and there was one bad moment when a man grabbed me, coming from nowhere. I yelled when he got me by the hair, somehow spun round and clouted him with my free hand. Then reinforcements took over and I’m not quite sure what happened next in the gloom. It sounded very much like someone being thrown several feet into an open wardrobe.

  We were already in what seemed to be a promising route through the tunnels and continued at speed and little caution, although I was looking over my shoulder all the time. Very shortly afterwards we emerged into pitch darkness which seemed, if the deadened, muffled sound of our footsteps was to be believed, to be a small, enclosed space. I kept as close to Patrick as possible and, groping in the darkness, our hands encountered the rungs of a ladder. Looking up what appeared to be a tall shaft, I saw a faint circle of light overhead and, as I did so, a target-like shape was silhouetted against it. Patrick fired. There was a pause and then the light was blocked out as something heavy thundered down the ladder towards us. I flung myself to one side but was still clouted on the head by something hard and everything went fuzzy, odd ringing noises vibrating in my ears. But there was one clear thought in my mind: this thing down here with us was a body and we had killed someone.

  ‘Are you all right?’ breathed a voice in my ear.

  ‘No,’ I whispered.

  ‘Good.’

  I was hauled to my feet.

  ‘It’s a shop window dummy,’ Patrick continued, stamping his feet to cover our conversation.

  ‘A mannequin.’

  ‘Is that what they’re called? Yes.’

  ‘You’re getting t
ime faults!’ blared the loudspeaker.

  ‘He lies because he knows he’s a loser,’ Patrick muttered under his breath, this a heavily censored version of what he actually said. Circumnavigating the dummy, he started up the ladder. This was not easy for someone with no sensation in his right foot, so I gave him plenty of room and then slowly followed, feeling dizzy and a bit sick.

  I knew that war would be declared up there somewhere, this obvious to Patrick as he reholstered the Glock just before he reached the top. He went from my sight and I hurried as fast as I could, in my haste not putting my feet on the rungs properly and slipping off. I had to stop for a rest, hoping my world would stop revolving, and put the gun in my pocket to enable me to hold on with both hands.

  Above me there were thumps, bangs and heavy breathing.

  Taking an embarrassingly long time, I finally reached the top and emerged into the light only to make a complete mess of getting off the ladder, catching the toe of my boot on something and pitching full length. I rolled into what turned out to be the backs of someone’s legs, causing him to overbalance and fall over. This someone not being Patrick, I wriggled around and quickly rolled him, protesting, off the edge of the large and slightly shaky platform we were on. There was a heart-stopping pause before a loud thud from somewhere below. I had no time to worry about this – another man came hurtling in my direction and I just had time to flatten myself before he followed his comrade over the edge.

  Another two, one a woman, had pitched into Patrick, she, the bitch, punching him in the stomach while the other held him, my husband playing the gentleman, so far, by not kicking her away. She didn’t see me coming, mostly because I was behind her, so I went with the trend, got her by her ginger ponytail and hauled her away. She rounded on me, thus lining herself up for me to clip her on the jaw. She staggered and I guided her into thin air with a kick to the backside.

  Almost lovingly, Patrick carried the last man to the edge, planted a smacking kiss on his forehead and then dropped him over.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he panted. ‘There’s a load of gym mats down there. No one’s hurt. Are you?’ he finished by bellowing below.