Alison leaned on the bar again in the way that stretched her jumper tight. ‘Maybe… ooh, speak of the devil.’ She looked past Flynn’s shoulder through the window. ‘These are the people who asked about Mallowdale House.’
The blood drained from Flynn’s face. Outside, a black Range Rover that Flynn immediately recognized had pulled up in the car park. The one with the impatient driver that had taken off his and another car’s wing mirrors. Two men got out. Flynn slid off the bar stool and walked to the door, zipping up his jacket, then stepped back into an alcove as the two men came in through the pub door with a crash and headed to the bar without apparently noticing him.
Flynn noticed Alison’s eyes had become wary. The men unzipped their top coats and stomped their feet on the floor to dislodge the snow they’d picked up.
Flynn’s mouth went dry as his inner sluice gates opened and adrenalin gushed through his body. In the five years since he’d been a cop, his memory had not dimmed with the passage of time. He recognized that two dangerous men had just entered this out-of-the-way country pub.
Before his departure from the organization he loved, he had spent a good number of years hunting down professional criminals who made their grubby but lucrative living from dealing drugs and causing misery. Not the gofers or the toe-rags on the streets, but those who organized the importation and distribution of the substances had been Flynn’s targets. Flynn, as a detective sergeant on the drugs branch with Lancashire Constabulary’s Serious and Organized Crime Unit, had successfully targeted some of the leading crime lords in this genre.
Sometimes, of course, he’d been unsuccessful. Often cases built up meticulously over months or years came crashing apart for a variety of reasons.
One such case that he’d been involved in was against a very high-ranking villain called Jonny Cain, maybe one of the richest dealers Flynn had ever encountered. His wealth had been estimated to be somewhere in the region of twenty million. But Cain, a sly, devious man, had eluded the clutches of the law by surrounding himself with layers of protection and operating his business on a cell-by-cell basis. Above all, though, his ruthless approach to anyone who might be a threat to him ensured that few people had the courage to testify against him.
Flynn knew that about a year ago, the police had got Cain as far as a crown court trial for murder, but that had collapsed. Flynn also knew that an unlikely potential witness against Cain — another gangster — had ended up with his brains blown out by a professional assassin. As far as he knew, it had been impossible for the police to prove a definite link between Cain and that killing (although everyone knew it to be the case).
Flynn recalled all this in the moments standing in that alcove because the two men who had just walked into the Tawny Owl, and changed the atmosphere completely, were two of Jonny Cain’s most trusted minders.
Flynn had a quick flashback to the Range Rover incident — the slicing off of his door mirror — and bored into his recall of it. Even though the vehicle’s windows had been smoked out, he was sure there had been four shapes within and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that one of those shapes could well have been Jonny Cain.
Had Cain and the other guy been dropped off at Mallowdale House, Flynn wondered. That was the address that Alison said they’d been enquiring about. And if that was the case, what the hell were they doing here, what did they want and who were they calling on at Mallowdale House?
Flynn dug deep within his mind and regurgitated the names of the two minders: Roy Napier and Sim Riddick, two very evil men who were smiling civilly at Alison. She eyed them cautiously, then glanced in Flynn’s direction. The faces of the two men turned the same way and this time they saw Flynn in the alcove, although they gave no sign that they had recognized him.
Quickly he tugged up his collar, gave Alison a quick wave and stepped out into the harsh snowstorm that engulfed the village.
In his right hand was the message about the possible presence of a poacher on Mallowdale House land.
NINE
‘ Karl! Karl!’ Henry bellowed against the heavy snow smashing into his face as he scrambled back up the path. Panic didn’t need to rise in him — it was there instantly. He had walked maybe thirty metres along the path from the point at which he and Donaldson had stopped, then, for no reason really, just the hint of the suggestion of an out-of-place noise, he’d looked back to check on the Yank — and he wasn’t there. Henry could so easily have walked half a mile with his head down before looking over his shoulder, and if he’d done that and Donaldson hadn’t been there… That horrendous thought was just one of the many that tumbled though his mind. ‘Karl,’ he screamed again, reaching the point where they had rested briefly. Henry faced directly into the weather, shouting his friend’s name through hands cupped around his mouth.
The path was narrow and precarious. Stepping off it could have serious consequences under any circumstances as the hillside fell sharply away. It was particularly dangerous underfoot because of the steep angle and the loose shale.
It was obvious to Henry what Donaldson had done: taken a step off the path, or simply lost his balance and pitched over the edge.
Henry blasphemed. He had once had food poisoning himself. He recalled it vividly, the whole experience. The creasing gut pain, the shits, the nausea. It had drained him completely of any will power, sucked all the energy out of him. All he had wanted to do was go to bed and curl up like a foetus and pull the sheets over his head and die. At least until the next desperate urge to race to the toilet came. It had also made him woozy and light-headed, and he guessed that could be what had happened to Donaldson.
Henry stood at the edge of what was virtually a precipice, his head shaking as he dithered about what to do. The wind howled around his head and he cocked his ear to one side, trying to listen. He shouted the American’s name again.
He was sure he heard some sort of response. The wind swirled away and then there was nothing but the buffeting of the snow, drowning out everything.
Henry shuffled sideways, tentatively placing one foot off the track into the shale. It slid down straight away, but he knew he had to go for it. Angling his whole body to counteract the steepness of the slope he moved down, inches at a time, grinding his feet into the ground with each step.
Within seconds he was enveloped by the snow and had lost sight of the track.
Then he fell and slithered down the hill, emitting a roar, grappling with his fingers, trying to stop his descent. And then he stopped suddenly as he crashed into something hard — which screamed.
‘Fuck, Henry,’ Donaldson said, as Henry regained his feet and crouched by the curled-up body of his friend.
‘What the hell happened? Why did you leave the track?’
‘Thought it would be a wheeze,’ he gasped. ‘A quick way down.’
‘You hurt?’
‘Yeah — busted my ankle.’
Henry’s heart could not have sunk any lower at the words. He crouched over Donaldson with his back to the weather, digging his heels into the shale. Donaldson had managed to sit up.
‘Which one?’
‘Left.’
‘Can you move it?’ Henry looked at the left foot as Donaldson tried to rotate it. He grunted as it moved slightly.
‘Yep, it moves — but I can feel it swelling in the boot.’
‘Hopefully not broken, then?’
‘Dunno — feels bad.’ He raised his eyes and looked at Henry. ‘Pisser, eh?’
Henry nodded. ‘Pisser.’
From the directions given, Flynn knew that Mallowdale House was out of the village, beyond the police house, meaning he would have to drive out past Cathy’s place again. But he could not bring himself to drive past without speaking to Tom once more. He wasn’t remotely happy with what Tom had said to him and he was increasingly concerned about Cathy. He knew she was a big girl, an experienced cop and all that, could look after herself… but until he heard from her he wasn’t going to be satisfied. His still very active cop instinct told him he needed to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.