KILL ME IF YOU CAN (Dave Cunane Book 8) (42 page)

I crawled through piles of squared timbers, floorboards, building stone, architectural features, mouldings, bumpers, radiators, and hubcaps and after five minutes came out diagonally opposite the entrance of this maze of jumble. There was no sign of life.

I scratched my head and told myself to be cautious.

The place was deserted or was it? There were sounds coming from outside, shouts and revving engines.

The entrance was a gap in the junk heaps wide enough for two trucks to come through abreast. There was a heavy steel and chain link gate which was now open and beyond that a second, much flimsier, wooden gate.

A small watchman’s hut stood to one side of the site office I’d noticed before. A rusty weighbridge occupied a space in front of the office. There were no telephone wires visible anywhere. A lot of these small businesses had abandoned landlines.

I stared at the tiny hut until my eyes ached. Was someone waiting in there to shoot me when I showed myself?

Keeping low and ready to run if necessary I made my way into the wide gap. I saw the two vans disappearing down the rutted lane. I was alone.

I just had time to read the small sign set high up in a tree before I loped off after them. It read:

PATEL WASTE MANAGEMENT

ABDUL K. PATEL PROPRIETOR

WASTE RECYCLING AND DISPOSAL

CAR PARTS AND DEMOLISHING

HOSPITAL WASTE A SPECIALITY

FORMERLY TRADING AS

LOCHHEAD & SONS

There was a mobile number but it had been painted out.

I wondered if Abdul K. Patel had ever existed outside of Hudson-Piggott’s diseased imagination.

42

Saturday: 7 a.m.

The track downhill had been paved at one time but now it was deeply rutted. It was a pleasant country lane leading to moorland but had subsided into rural squalor. Overgrown hedges and trees on either side were clogged with paper and rubbish and it was almost impassable. There were old ruts and fresh ruts. My guess was that the fresh ones were made when the ‘hospital waste’ was trucked in from the warehouse in Manchester.

I’d been puzzled by the absence of a labour force.

They weren’t absent. Hudson-Piggott’s ‘workers’ were in the two vans slowly bumping along the track ahead of me. What could be simpler than importing a group of contractors from a former Yugoslavian republic disguised as labourers?

The vans weren’t gaining on me. The track was so bad that they had to keep stopping and slowing while I ploughed on. The danger was that I’d get too close. I kept in the shade of the encroaching hedge.

I passed a sign saying Private Road – Keep Out. A steel barrier lay at the side.

Eventually the vans reached civilisation in the form of scattered houses and a paved road and they speeded up.

I kept going. I knew that the house with the garden shed couldn’t be far away.

The vans were almost out of sight when they turned down a side street.

I stepped up my pace. I hadn’t eaten for hours and my stomach was rumbling but the prospect of catching up with Hudson-Piggott was food enough. I was a little too eager. When I reached the bend they’d disappeared round both vans suddenly zoomed out past me and accelerated away at a speed I couldn’t hope to match.

I flung myself back into a privet hedge but I needn’t have bothered. They weren’t interested in me. I untangled myself and watched them vanish into traffic at a busy intersection in the distance.

Suddenly I was too tired even to curse. I squatted on the kerb.

I must have stayed where I was for ten minutes until I shook off the lethargy.

The house with the nasty pond and the garden shed must be nearby.

I needed to retrieve my other shoe. I didn’t want to leave it like Cinderella’s slipper for some forensic investigator to trace my DNA.

That is assuming there’d ever be an investigation.

I recalled the way Morgan and Myers’ deaths and the helicopter crash had been sanitised. Hudson-Piggott was free and was probably already spinning some yarn to the Prime Minister about how he’d broken the vicious Moloch Plot by Moslem terrorists. The dead contractors would become jihadis, Appleyard and Lansdale the brave MI5 men who’d given their lives to defeat them.

That’s how I’d do it and I’m not even a practised liar or a PR man.

Yeah, there were some awkward details to explain . . . Claverhouse in particular . . .  but they’d work round them.

I needed to think about myself now. I could get Jan and the kids away to a country where MI5’s arm wouldn’t reach. It couldn’t be any of the English speaking countries; Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and certainly not the United States. Argentina or Brazil would be the best choices. The children were young enough to pick up the language.

I headed off down the short cul-de-sac. The sound of my sandals slapping the flagged pavement was the only noise. Maybe this was a retreat for zombies.

It was certainly very private. The houses all had hedges or towering Leylandii in front but at the end there was one with genuinely massive and well tended yew hedges. They were tall even by ‘Golden Triangle’ privacy standards, ten or twelve feet. Whoever lived there wanted seclusion. Was it one of the Lochheads, perhaps understandably nervous about reaction after his family had despoiled the moorland?

The wrought iron gate was open but as I entered I came to a sudden stop.

A pair of legs was poking out from under the hedge. They were visible from the street.

Scarcely daring to breathe I parted the foliage to see the face. It was one of the contractors. He had a neat round hole between his eyes. I dropped my bag and fumbled in my pocket for the semi-automatic. I chambered a bullet.

Was it possible?

I crept forward. The well screened drive curved towards an open parking area in front of the large stone-built modern house. There was another body lying face down.

It wasn’t Hudson-Piggott.

A black, top of the range, Jaguar was parked by the entrance porch. Its boot was open. I moved closer, hugging the wall, close enough to identify it as the type of vehicle used by the Prime Minister. It was an XJ Sentinel with a five litre V8 engine and enough armour plate to stop a rocket or a bullet. They’re specially made for the Government at over three hundred K a whack. The days when PMs came into work on the Tube are long gone.

How poor Clint would have loved to see it. He’d have rattled off all the specs for me.

Then I shivered as if cold fingers were stroking my spine.

So Hudson-Piggott was high enough in the Government pecking order to rate a high security vehicle. How long would it take him to squash an annoying little bug like me now that he wasn’t also organising a coup d’état?

There was the sound of someone running downstairs.

I pressed myself into the corner formed by the porch and the wall.

Hudson-Piggott emerged. He was wearing the same brown Huntsman suit he’d been wearing when I first met him. There was a small suitcase in his left hand and a semi-automatic in his right. I guessed he had it in case his contractors came back. There must have been a rift; perhaps they didn’t like leaving so many bodies behind.

He slung the case into the boot and moved to the driver’s door still retaining the pistol in his right hand, cautious bastard that he was.

I was on him in a flash, pressing the muzzle of my gun into his head.

‘Cunane,’ he said, ‘how very unsurprising. My mistake all along has been to underestimate you. I should have moved heaven and earth to eliminate you on the very first day.’

‘Move away from the car,’ I ordered.

He stepped back two paces.

‘Shut the door with your foot.’

He complied. I knew he was calculating how to deal with an amateur like me who was breaking rule number one in taking a prisoner at gunpoint by standing too close. I had the drop on him but only just.

‘We can still work something out you know. After all, with your inheritance you’re virtually one of us now. I can get your son down for Eton with a click of my finger. Name it, a title, whatever you want and it’s yours.’

‘Keep moving,’ I ordered.

I shifted position from his left side to his right but I could tell he was tensing to whirl and shoot me. He must have thought I was crazy not to have disarmed him.

He moved at my direction but now only needed to flick his hand up and I’d be dead.

I leaned forward and shot him in the right temple at close range.

He went down face first and sprawled on the macadam drive, quite dead. His rimless specs slipped off his nose. There was powder stippling round the hole in his right temple. A gaping exit wound on the other side marked where the slug had passed through his evil brain. His own gun was still clutched tightly in his right hand and no suicide could ever look more convincing.

I stood and drew several deep breaths.

This is where some killers get caught. They forget a tiny unconsidered detail and the whole thing unravels. No unconsidered detail was ever going to unravel for me.

The fatal bullet: that could be it, my own fatal error.

If it was found they’d quickly discover that Hudson-Piggott wasn’t killed with his own gun.

I stood close to the position I’d killed him from. My eyes scanned the wall. The bullet hadn’t struck the car. I wondered by how much the bullet would be slowed by the journey through a human skull. Very little, I decided. I was patient. I kept looking; the possibility of years in prison riveted my attention to that wall.

Finally I spotted it.

It had struck the brickwork on the porch and ricocheted into the thick mortar between the stone courses on the main wall. It must have lost energy after the first strike because I was able to pull it out from the dense lime mortar with my fingers. I rubbed the spot until it didn’t stand out.

I wasn’t satisfied.

There had to be more.

What was so important to Hudson-Piggott that he had to come back here and change into his suit? There was the car but he could have sent someone for it. It had to be something else. It was Plan B. There must be information he didn’t want to leave lying about; a laptop, a tablet, files. It had to be in the case.

The boot wasn’t locked. I took the case out. There was a laptop inside. I propped it by the Jag and dashed to the garden shed. Satisfyingly, my shoe was there in plain view just where I’d kicked it off.

I wasted time putting my own shoes on. I left the shed and then paused. Something had caught my eye. I went back. The jacket I’d been wearing when they picked me up was hanging from a nail behind the door. How could I have missed it? It had my wallet and my ID in it. I put it on.

I picked up the case and set off down the road. I still had no idea where I was. The ‘zombie’ cul-de-sac, which was actually called Acheron Close, Tameside, was appropriately silent. It was still early and observation cuts both ways. If you surround your property with privets and Leylandii so people can’t see in, it follows that you can’t see out. All the bedroom curtains were still drawn.

I reached the main road and caught a bus into Manchester. I was home free.

Home free except that Clint and Bren and his oppos were dead. That was far, far worse than the prospect of telling Jan that we were homeless.

When I reached Piccadilly Gardens I was still unsure what to do. I bought a prepaid mobile at an all night shop in the station and phoned Jan.

She picked up immediately.

I barely had time to croak ‘hello’ before she spoke.

‘Dave! You’re alive, oh thank God, thank God!’

‘A devout atheist thanking God,’ I commented, ‘that’s a turn-up.’

‘Oh, don’t you go on. I’ve had your mother on continually threatening to start a novena, whatever that is, for your survival and Bren’s got half the police force out scouring the whole of Greater Manchester for you. I honestly think they’re expecting to find your body but I never lost faith in you. How did you get away?’

‘That’s a long story. Tell me about Bren.’

‘No you first.’

‘I can’t. A phone’s a radio, remember?’

‘You are so infuriating at times Dave.’

‘Sorry.’

There was a brief pause.

‘When you were kidnapped one of Bren’s men was grazed in the arm, nothing serious.’

‘But they fired hundreds of bullets, I heard them.’

‘Mainly into the air or at Bren’s vehicle, apparently.’

‘But they killed Clint.’

‘Wrong again, Dave. His back and chest are badly bruised but he’s fine. He’s with those two new assistants you recruited.’

‘Tony and Lee.’

‘Yes, listen Dave, is it all sorted now? Can we come home?’

‘It’s all sorted Jan but . . .’

‘Dave, I know about Topfield. By ‘come home’ I mean come back to you. I don’t care about the house. I’ll live in a squat in Miles Platting as long as it’s with you.’