For Valour

by Andy McNab

  Except for one. ‘Well, there was that contact outside the chippie in Bolton. You definitely wouldnae be here if I hadnae paid the bill. Those Turkish lads were about to have a major sense-of-humour failure.’

  Trev had been there too, and that triggered another round of war stories. Though we’d never really been the Three Amigos, we had a lot of shared history. But, try as hard as we might to lose ourselves in it that night, it became painfully obvious to us both that our exchanges of banter were barely skin deep. The coincidence of Trev’s death with Catriona’s illness had really messed Al up.

  I had no idea what time we finally turned in, but not long after I’d settled beneath a couple of tartan rugs and another pile of sheepskins I heard a muffled roar of pain.

  I slid out of bed and went back downstairs.

  A crumpled figure sat beside the log pile. The light cast by the glowing embers of the fire was enough to show me that he was clutching the frame of the Braveheart photograph to his chest.

  9

  We were both up shortly after first light.

  Al had a vat of porridge bubbling away on the range. There was no sign of the Lagavulin bottle, or of the raw emotions it had helped to bring to the table. He pulled back the curtains to give us a better view of the mist that blanketed the Cuillin and the gunmetal-grey waters of the sea loch. That was when I noticed the neatly wrapped package beside my table mat.

  ‘I thought you might be missing that. You don’t survive long up here without the right weaponry.’ He whipped one of those stupid Jock knives with a polished antler handle and a very shiny blade out of the top of his sock and sliced a banana into two bowls, then drowned it in porridge.

  ‘I’ve always wondered what those things were for.’

  I unwrapped the oil-cloth and replaced the Browning in my waistband.

  His expression was impossible to read. ‘That was the other reason I didn’t want to risk anyone else pulling you out of that river.’

  He handed me my bowl and a pot of honey and fixed us both a brew.

  As we munched our way through it, he told me he’d decided to give team-building a miss today: there were plenty of lads in orange to keep the flag flying while he spent some time with Catriona. I suggested he hitch a lift to Glasgow in the Skoda – if he could still use the company. I promised to give the Campbell gags a rest on the road through the glen.

  The Beatson was a state-of-the-art complex on the Great Western Road, north of Clydebank. I didn’t see Catriona, but Mel came down to say hi, and to shepherd her dad inside. He was clearly in good hands.

  I scribbled my iPhone number on his wrist with a felt-tip and told him to give me a call whenever he had a spare five minutes. Then I gave him some of that awkward waffle you hear yourself reaching for when you’re trying to bridge a gap that you know can’t be bridged. He nodded silently and gripped my hand. He seemed to have shrunk during the journey down.

  Something made me ask the Detective Columbo question as I was getting back into the Skoda. ‘Oh, one more thing. Do you know anything about a bunch of psycho Serbs with odd tattoos on their necks? They used to fuck people over from the hillsides above Sarajevo and Goražde …’

  His brow creased and something like recognition glimmered briefly in his eyes. ‘Maybe.’ Then he pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘No. I heard rumours, but I never came across them personally.’

  I turned Father Gerard’s wagon south again, stopping for fuel and a shot of caffeine when I’d made some distance. I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for Al to come up with the goods on the Barford front. He had a lot of other shit on his mind. And I had no idea whether my old mate at Akrotiri would be able to get me within reach of Jack Grant. Which meant that Ella Mathieson remained my prime target. I texted Father Mart. It was time for a visit to H.

  It’s never a great idea to stick your head in the lion’s mouth, but I’d made a bit of a habit of it over the years, and there were some things that just had to be done.

  10

  St Francis Xavier’s Roman Catholic Church, Powys

  Sunday, 5 February

  19.15 hrs

  The church was even colder after dark than it had been first thing in the morning. A handful of candles flickered in a tiered rack beneath a small metal cross alongside the confessional booth. Apart from the shadowy figure behind the screen, the place was empty. Maybe that was why I lit one for Catriona.

  Father Mart gave a wry chuckle as I closed the curtain and sat down. ‘We’ll make a believer of you yet, Nicholas.’

  ‘I’ll put the flying pigs on red alert, Father.’

  He chuckled again. ‘I’ll let Father Gerard know. We’ll certainly be needing them at Cheltenham.’

  There was a moment’s silence. ‘What happened to your head?’

  ‘Long story, but no real drama. I took a dip in a mountain stream and had a close encounter with a rock.’

  I told him I was planning a visit to Trev’s, and asked if I was going to get any nasty surprises. He thought not. The house was all locked up, waiting for probate. ‘I think he had a sister somewhere, Australia or New Zealand, but I fully expect to hear that he’s left the bulk of his estate to Harold’s boy.’

  ‘What’s happened to the dog?’

  ‘Icarus? He’s my new house guest. Only temporarily, of course, but I must say I’m enjoying his company. And he can smell a rat at fifty paces.’

  ‘That could come in very useful right now.’ I didn’t tell him that Icarus could also smell an MRUD from about the same range.

  ‘Is the key still where Trev used to leave it?’ He’d never liked carrying it around with him, particularly when he was out on the piss, so he hid it by his side door, under a little concrete Buddha.

  ‘No. It’s in the pocket of my cassock. I’m keeping half an eye on the place.’

  ‘Al thinks he died of a heart attack.’

  ‘I suspect the powers that be decided a heart attack might be more palatable than announcing that he’d been assassinated by a sniper in an area of outstanding natural beauty.’

  ‘Have the powers that be made any other announcements I should know about?’

  ‘They’re still devoting all their energies to keeping this thing under the radar. And the trial is definitely going to be held behind closed doors. Mr Blackwood called with the date, by the way: a week this Wednesday.’

  ‘Does that mean Jack Grant is due back from Afghan?’

  ‘The squadron sergeant major of myth and legend? Well, if he is, DSF and his chums certainly aren’t shouting about it.’

  I don’t know why, but I’d been expecting Icarus to be some kind of super-toned Labrador or Collie or something. The bright-eyed creature that yapped at me from the Defender’s passenger seat as we left was a wire-haired Dachshund with legs that were barely long enough to keep his dick off the ground.

  Father Mart knew exactly what was going through my mind. ‘I like to think that Trevor would enjoy the fact that his sense of humour lives on. And, of course, we must all take encouragement from his belief that, if we put our mind to it, even the most vertically challenged among us can fly too close to the sun.’

  11

  I reckoned Trev’s place had to be the starting point of my search for Dr Eleanor Mathieson. I wouldn’t be the first person to have had that idea, and there was no way Trev would have left any obvious clues, but I needed to get back inside his head. His semi on the northern edge of Hereford was my best route there.

  I parked the Skoda three streets away from Holmer Road and tucked the Browning under my bomber jacket. I gripped Trev’s keys in my right hand, pointy bits outwards between my fingers, handles resting against my palm.

  His tidy red-brick stood on a corner plot, behind a hedge that could have done with a short back and sides. I approached from the right, on the opposite pavement, and walked past, keeping it in my peripheral vision. Fifteen minutes later, I completed a circuit that brought me back along the side of the property, parallel to t
he path that flanked the house and led to the garage and back garden.

  I couldn’t see movement beyond the frosted glass in the front door, or the darkened ground and first-floor windows. The house wasn’t just still, it was completely devoid of life.

  I pulled on my last pair of polythene service-station gloves. I wasn’t breaking in, but I still didn’t want to leave my prints. I turned the keys in the mortice and Yale locks and the door swung open on well-oiled hinges. I stepped into the hall and closed it softly behind me, took off my Timberlands and waited for my vision to adjust to the ambient light from the street. Everything seemed to be in its proper place, but every fibre of the interior told the same story: Trev wasn’t here any more, and neither was Icarus, so why should it give a shit?

  I quickly scanned the living room, study/office and downstairs toilet, then the two bedrooms, bathroom and junk room on the floor above, and ended up in the kitchen, which filled the rear extension. The fridge was empty and switched off, but the kettle still sparked up. I found a box of Yorkshire Tea and a can of condensed milk in a nearby cupboard, so the trip was already a success.

  I sat at Trev’s table, watching the steam spiral off the surface of the brew, and started to get in the zone. Part of my training with the Det had been about cutting through other people’s homes like a scalpel, either to identify and uncover their most carefully concealed secrets, or to find the most perfect place to leave something that would compromise them later, and allow us to fuck them over pretty much any way we wanted.

  To begin with I’d thought that after growing up in Bermondsey I had nothing left to learn, but 14th Intelligence Company took me to a whole new level. We honed our covert entry skills until they were so sharp we could cut ourselves on them, and combining speed and precision became second nature. It wasn’t just about infiltrating somebody’s house: it was about burrowing into the fabric of their life.

  Trev had been through the programme as well. It didn’t guarantee that I’d find something here, but it did mean that if I came away empty-handed, it wouldn’t be because I’d messed up.

  Trev didn’t like surprises … But he loved puzzles … The words repeated themselves in my head like a mantra as I went through his place again, from top to bottom, with a fine-tooth comb. He made mistakes, sure. We all did. But he didn’t do anything by accident.

  I kicked off by hoisting myself into the roof space through a hatch above the top landing. There was nothing folded into the insulation strips or nestling in the cold-water tank. I lifted a couple of loose floorboards under Trev’s bed. There was nothing taped underneath them, and there were no false linings to the cupboards. Someone else had already given every mattress a seeing-to, including Icarus’s – clinically, with a razorblade or a Stanley knife, not like a berserker – but I was pretty sure they’d been wasting their time.

  No, not just pretty sure.

  I knew it, beyond any doubt.

  Trev would need me to find my way to Ella if he couldn’t make it, but no one else. Which meant that every known location, from a favourite rented villa to an apartment belonging to a distant cousin – even somewhere you might spot in the background of a holiday snap – was too high risk.

  I went through his desk and his filing cabinet anyway, scanning every document and every random scribble on every scrap of crumpled notepaper, looking for any hint of a signal that was meant only for me.

  There was an amazing amount of shit to sort through. Trev’s enthusiasm for languages – which basically boiled down to an enthusiasm for shagging the girls who spoke them – had taken him all over. Sweden was still high on his list of favourites, but so were France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, even Russia – though he’d kept very quiet about that.

  The shelves in his work area were heaving with dictionaries, phrasebooks, maps, guides, military and cultural histories, language-course CDs. The Dangerous Book for Boys leaned against a copy of Brainteasers for Kids, in case I hadn’t yet got the message. I gathered a selection, fixed myself another brew and flicked through them at the kitchen table.

  Some had the corners of their pages turned over to mark an entry that had triggered his interest. Some didn’t. Some were circled in red. Some weren’t. I couldn’t see any logic to it, any pattern. And I began to understand that that was the whole point of the exercise.

  Speed. Precision. Speed. Precision. And no random surprises.

  It had taken a while, but I was suddenly in Trev’s space. All this stuff added up to one big tease: Looking for Ella? She could be anywhere. I could hear his voice in my ear. And I knew he would have been as amused by the idea of her pursuers rushing around on a series of wild-goose chases as he must have been when he named Icarus.

  I started seeking out the gaps, and that was when my antennae started to go into overtime.

  Why would Trev risk leaving me a message written in plain sight, on the off chance that I might be passing by, when he was going to take the trouble to meet and tell me what he needed me to know?

  There was a crash about ten feet away from me, followed by the splintering of wood. I whipped the Browning out of my waistband and hit the deck. In the silence that followed I heard the creak of rusting hinges, then another crash.

  I moved to the window by Trev’s side entrance and saw his garage door flapping around in the wind. I washed up my mug, put it back in the cupboard and reclaimed my Timberlands. Then I found a padlock in the top drawer of a nearby utility chest and fastened the thing shut on my way out.

  The little concrete Buddha by the step just kept on smiling.

  12

  I swung the Skoda in alongside Defender of the Faith and stood on the anchors. A nanosecond later I hammered on Father Mart’s door. When he pulled it open, I piled straight past him. ‘Where’s Icarus?’

  He followed me to the kitchen and gestured towards a newly installed fleece-covered beanbag in front of the range. ‘Where else?’

  Icarus was stretched out on top of it, on his back, like he’d been spatchcocked. He opened one eye, gave me a look of extreme displeasure, and closed it again.

  Father Mart tilted his head.

  ‘Trev said something by the dam. It’s only just clicked. “When your own semi becomes the battle space, what’s the world coming to? You, Father Mart and the dog are the only people I can trust.”’

  I undid Icarus’s collar. A small brass disc hung from its buckle; the kind that carried your phone number or the contact details of the local vet in case your dog did a runner. It had a smiley face embossed on one side and a six-digit sequence scratched on the other. 121492. It sounded like a grid reference but, without the right map, it meant nothing to me.

  Father Mart picked up on my disappointment and held out his hand. ‘Well, you’ve done your bit, and Icarus has too. So I guess that means it’s my turn.’

  He sat by the table and I pulled up the chair opposite him. He gave the surface of the disc a rub with his thumb. ‘One, two, one, four, nine, two … He won’t just have left us with part of a telephone number, so what else could it be? A licence number? A car registration?’

  He turned it over and over.

  ‘A date, perhaps? There aren’t fourteen months in the year, so maybe there’s some American angle. The fourteenth of December 1992?’ He looked up at me. ‘Does that mean anything to you? Were you with Trevor in December ’ninety-two? Somewhere in particular?’

  I shook my head. ‘We were in Sweden that May, then I got sent to try to talk some sense to the FBI during the Mount Carmel siege the following spring, but Trev wasn’t part of the team.’

  ‘Mount Carmel?’

  ‘Waco, Texas. David Koresh. You remember. A bunch of religious nutters bent on self-destruction …’ I gave him my naughty-schoolboy smile.

  He wasn’t listening.

  ‘Perhaps it’s nothing to do with you two. What if he’s trying to draw our attention somewhere else? The second of January 1492. A Columbus connection? Maybe. But Columbus discovered the New World l
ater …’

  He sprang up and went next door, where I could hear him riffling through his desk and bookshelves. He returned with an A5 Jiffy-bag and a battered volume from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. ‘Just been doing what you might call some joined-up thinking …’

  He slid a small and very beautiful book of photographs of the Alhambra from the bag. ‘This arrived for me after you left for London. A gift from Trevor.’ He handed me the card that had been attached to the jacket with a paperclip. I’d recognize Trev’s scrawl anywhere. It was even worse than mine. You’ll like this, Father, it read. Your team won. The caption beneath his message told me that the picture on the other side had been taken from the Comares Tower.

  I scratched my head. ‘Now I’m feeling really stupid …’

  Father Mart was firing on all cylinders. He could barely keep the lid on his excitement as he flicked through the Britannica. ‘Here we are. Abu ’Abd Allah Muhammad XI, last Nasrid Sultan of Granada, Spain … They called him Boabdil. Ferdinand and Isabella captured his stronghold on the second of January …’

  ‘… 1492.’ I was getting the hang of this. ‘A famous victory for the left-footers.’

  ‘I’ve always felt a bit sorry for Boabdil. He had the mother from hell. She turned him against everyone, including his father, and the poor lad lost everything. Even then she wouldn’t let up. As he turned to catch his last glimpse of the Alhambra from the pass through the Sierra Nevada, he got a bit emotional. She just sneered at him and said, “Don’t weep like a woman for that which you failed to defend like a man.”’

  I grinned. ‘Some of my mates on the estate had mums like that.’

  I asked him if he had a good-sized map of southern Spain.

  The thing he brought back had seen some action in its time. Much folded and dog-eared, it looked like a veteran of several Sierra Nevada missions. We spread it out on the table between us, and Father Mart ran his index finger down the route that Boabdil would have taken from the city he lost to the Catholic invader. I pictured his mum giving him regular clips around the ear as they went.