For Valour (26 page)

‘I don’t know chapter and verse, but the medics reckon he had a massive heart attack.’

This time the disbelief was easy. I’d like to have had a one to one with the doc who’d seen what a polymer-tipped 7.62 round can do to a man’s head, then diagnosed his problem as a dodgy ticker. ‘Heart attack? Trev? He might have abused himself over the years, but he was fit as a butcher’s dog.’

‘Perhaps it was triggered by the whole Sam Callard mess. Sam was like a son to Trev. That must have hit him really hard.’ He put down his knife and fork. ‘Jesus, Nick … I’m sorry you had to hear it from me. I know you lads were close.’

‘It was Sam I wanted to talk to Trev about. And I need your take on the whole gangfuck in the CQB Rooms too.’

I told him I’d heard some quite confusing rumours about the live firing exercise and the bullet in Scott Braxton’s head, and the events that had led to Sam being banged up at Barford on a manslaughter charge. And I wondered why Jack Grant had been hidden away in Afghan at warp speed.

He didn’t know anything about Jack Grant, but he’d heard the rumours too – and that was all they were, as far as he was concerned, rumours. ‘Not much of this kind of shit gets piped north of the border, these days, and to tell you the truth, I don’t go in search of it. Our Whitehall briefs tend to depend on us keeping our heads down and our mouths shut.’

Fair one. Al was a big lad, and I knew he’d have to tread gently through those minefields if he wanted to keep the government contracts coming.

I asked him if he was still having fun breaking into nuclear reactors to test the alarm systems. I’d done one or two freelance jobs for him on sensitive installations in the early days.

‘Not so much. But they like us to keep them on their toes.’

‘I don’t suppose you could lay your hands on the security spec for a Green Army set-up, could you?’

He didn’t answer immediately. The haggis and the Lagavulin suddenly demanded his full attention. After a bit of clinking of cutlery and refuelling of our glasses he gave me eye to eye again. ‘Who’s asking?’

‘Well, it’s not the Russians, is it, mate? It’s me. It’s probably an even worse idea than leaping into that river of yours, but Sam Callard needs somebody’s help, and now Trev isn’t here to give it, I reckon I’m the next in line. And what with the lockdown, I won’t get anywhere fast if I submit an application form for a prison visit.’

It was my turn to reach for the single malt. Pinpricks of light glinted off the Gillespie family crystal as I raised the tumbler to my lips.

‘So that means I might have to lift him.’

8

If Al was surprised, he did a good job of hiding it. He sat there like a bearded sphinx and let me waffle on.

‘I mean, not right now or tomorrow, but if all else fails I’ll need to get into Barford before the trial kicks off. The Ruperts are closing ranks, and you don’t need me to tell you how loaded these things can be. Sam must know what really happened in the CQB Rooms, and what led up to it. I need to hear it from him.’

I’d spent time at Barford as a Green Jacket. Back then it was just like any other bog-standard military camp – barracks, prefabs, a mess or three, rows of red-brick family quarters, squash courts, a fair amount of open space, maybe even a cricket pitch. You could wander in and out whenever you felt like it. But that was years before they’d built the shiny new Military Court Centre – and before Osama bin Laden and his disciples put pretty much every base on amber or red alert. If I was going to pay Harry’s boy a visit now, I’d need all the help I could get.

‘Have you talked to Chastain? Maybe he could shed some light on it. Flex some muscle, even. The great thing about the colonel is that he’s both old school and a maverick. He’s on first-name terms with the Big Dogs, but still happy to throw away the rulebook when he needs to.’

I told him I’d dropped by the Chastain country seat, but he’d not been optimistic about outflanking the process.

Al hauled himself up from his chair and disappeared outside to the woodpile. There were plenty of logs beside the grate, so I guessed he needed some more thinking time. He came back ten minutes later with another armful of tree trunks and tossed a couple onto the fire.

When he sat down again he had his serious face on. ‘I don’t have the blueprints in my bottom drawer, if that’s what you mean, but I’ll see what I can do.’

After we’d won the Battle of the Haggis he reached for the bottle again with all the determination a Jock can muster when there’s a world to put to rights, and a fearsome amount of whisky drinking to be done.

Back in the day he’d have insisted on me matching him dram for dram, then brought out the bagpipes in case I’d forgotten which road we were taking to the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond. Now he didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t pouring Lagavulin down my neck as speedily as he was, and the pipes stayed on the chair in the hall.

I wasn’t about to swing into tree-hugging mode or get dewy-eyed about my true love and the moon coming out in the gloaming, but this seemed like the right moment to let him know that a whole lot of us owed him big-time, and that we wouldn’t forget it in a hurry. I even heard myself thanking him for dredging me out of the boulder garden earlier in the afternoon, and risking his clan tartan in the process.

He didn’t know where to look, so he just got more Scottish. ‘Och … think nothing of it, laddie … I wouldnae be here if
you
hadnae hauled me out of a fair few scrapes …’

He probably wasn’t wrong, but these things had a habit of evening out in the end; we all knew that. We’d fought alongside each other in two or three actions that had hit the headlines, and plenty more that would never see the light of day, and we didn’t need to remind ourselves of them now.

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

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 the 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?