“They did look a bit buggered,” admitted Gunter, reaching into his pocket for his lighter and his cigarettes. He usually went home to bed at this stage of the game, but this morning he was taking a ride off Mitchell as far as King’s Lynn, where his sister Kayleigh had a council flat. He’d rather have driven there in his own car, but that silly-bugger Munday woman had ploughed into the back of it with her four-wheel drive. The Toyota was in Brancaster, getting a new tailgate, lights and exhaust system. The old exhaust was just knackered, nothing to do with the shunt, but the garage had been more than happy to quote for a new system and charge it to the insurance. Least said, soonest mended.
Twenty minutes later the artic pulled into the lorry park of a transport café on the A148 outside Fakenham. This was where, according to instructions, the “special” was to be let out.
As the lorry’s hydraulics gassily exhaled, Gunter took a heavy fourteen-inch Maglite torch from the passenger-side locker and jumped down from the cab. Unlocking the rear doors he clambered inside, switched on the torch and opened the forward compartment a crack.
The man with the rucksack presented himself. He was of medium height, lightly built, with unruly black hair and a studious half-smile. The rucksack, expensive-looking but unbranded, hung heavily from his narrow shoulders. Victim written all over him, thought Gunter. No wonder these Pakis get pushed around. And yet somewhere he’d found twenty grand for his transit. His dad’s life savings, that’d be, and probably half a dozen aunties chipping in too. And all so that the poor sod could spend his life shovelling curry or flogging newspapers in some dingy city like Bradford. Unbelievable. As he relocked the false wall, Gunter glanced at the young Asian-at the worn jeans, the cheap windcheater, and the narrow, fatigued features. Not for the first time in his life he gave sincere thanks that he’d been born white, and beneath the flag of St. George.
He watched as the special lowered himself to the ground, searched the unprepossessing nightscape, and hitched the heavy rucksack higher up his back. What did he have in there that had to be so carefully guarded? Gunter wondered. Something valuable, that was for sure. Maybe even gold-he wouldn’t be the first illegal to carry in a slab of the shiny stuff.
Following Mansoor to the ground, Gunter locked up the truck. From the open cab window, up the front, came the drift of Mitchell’s cigarette smoke.
Mansoor held out his hand. “Thank you,” he said.
“Pleasure,” said Gunter brusquely. His large callused hand dwarfed Mansoor’s.
The Afghan nodded, his half-smile still in place. Rucksack on back, he began to walk the fifty-odd yards to the white-painted toilet block.
Gunter came to a snap decision, and when the door of the block had opened and closed, he followed in Mansoor’s footsteps. Extinguishing the Maglite, he reversed it in his hand so that he was holding it by the knurled grip. Stepping into the toilet block he saw that one of the stalls was occupied, but that otherwise the place was empty. Genuflecting, he saw the base of Mansoor’s rucksack through the gap beneath the door. It was shaking slightly, as if its contents were being repacked. I was right, Gunter thought, the sneaky bastard has got something in there. Shaking his head at the perfidy of Asians in general, he crossed to the urinal to wait.
When Mansoor stepped out of the stall a couple of minutes later with the rucksack hoisted over one shoulder, Gunter rushed him, swinging the big Maglite like a steel-jacketed nightstick. The improvised weapon smashed into Mansoor’s upper arm, sending him staggering, and the rucksack sliding to the floor.
Gasping with pain, and furious with himself for having allowed fatigue to override caution, Mansoor made a desperate grab for the rucksack with his good arm, but the fisherman got there first, clubbing at Mansoor’s head with the Maglite so that the Afghan had to throw himself backwards to avoid having his jaw or skull shattered.
Skidding the rucksack out of reach, Gunter kicked Mansoor hard in the guts and crotch. As his victim writhed and clawed for breath, he grabbed for his spoils. The rucksack’s weight, however, slowed him down. The couple of seconds’ hesitation as he swung it over his shoulder was long enough for Mansoor to reach agonisedly inside his windcheater. He would have shouted if he could have-attracted Gunter’s attention to the silenced weapon, made the stupid English lout drop the rucksack before it was too late-but there wasn’t the breath in his body. And he couldn’t lose sight of the rucksack; that would be the end of everything.
Faraj Mansoor’s choices raced to the vanishing point.
The detonation was no louder than the snapping of a stick. It was the impact of the heavy calibre round that made the noise, such as it was.
13
Pruning shears in her gloved hand, Anne Lakeby moved purposefully along the bank of ornamental sedges and grasses at the foot of the front lawn, cutting back the dead stems. It was a fine morning, cold and clear, and her Wellington boots left crisp imprints in the frosted turf. The shoulder-high grasses prevented any sight of the beach below, but the brownish glitter of the sea showed beyond them.
In her youth, Anne had been described as “handsome.” With age, however, her long features had contracted to a benign gauntness. Robust and unfussy-a pillar of local charities and good works-she was a popular figure in the community, and there were few events in and around Marsh Creake at which her loud neighing laugh was not to be heard. Like the Hall itself, she had become something of a landmark.
In thirty-five years of marriage Anne had never developed much of a fondness for the grey late-Victorian sprawl which her husband had inherited. The house had been built by Perry’s great-grandfather, to replace a much finer building which had burnt down, and she had always found it severe and uninviting. The gardens, however, were her pride and joy. The weathered brickwork, the sweep of the lawn to the shore, the subtle interplay of textures and colours in the mature borders-all of these brought her deep and lasting pleasure. She worked hard to maintain them, and opened the grounds to the public several times a year. In the early spring, people came from far and wide to enjoy the display of snowdrops and aconites.
Perry had brought the house to their marriage, but it was all that he had brought. Born to a local landowning family, Anne had inherited on the grand scale when her parents had died, and had made it her business to keep her personal accounts separate from her husband’s. Many couples would have found such a relationship unsustainable, but Anne and Perry managed to rub along together without too much friction. She was fond of him, she enjoyed his company, and within limits was prepared to indulge him in the little things which made him happy. But she liked to know what was going on in his life, and right now she didn’t. Something was up.
A cold sea breeze rustled the sedges and agitated the feathery heads of the grasses. Pocketing the secateurs, Anne proceeded towards the path which led to the beach. This, like the lawn, was still frosted hard, but Anne noticed that it had recently been considerably churned up. That bloody man Gunter, she supposed. She didn’t see him in person all that often, but she saw signs of his presence all the time-cigarette ends, heavy footprints-and it was beginning to annoy her profoundly. Given an inch, Ray Gunter was the type to take a mile. He knew that she had never liked him, and he didn’t give a damn. Why Perry put up with him tramping backwards and forwards through their property, night and day, she would never know.
She turned back to the house. The bank of grasses and sedges marked the end of the garden proper. The lawn was bordered by frozen beds of closely pruned old roses. The whole was enclosed by a pair of brick walls, above which maples and other deciduous trees stood starkly against the winter sky. The sight gave Anne a moment’s profound satisfaction before reminding her of the second reason for her irritation, which was that Diane Munday had decided to open her own garden to the public on precisely the same day that Anne herself had.