Eventually, that person left his tray of half-eaten food where it was and Bruno followed him to the toilets. Despite the bathroom area being relatively empty, the man chose to use one of several disabled cubicles in a separate section. Bruno hovered outside, listening. There was a gentle rustling of something being opened followed by two long sniffs. It wasn’t hard to infer what he was up to.
Bruno took a deep breath, removed a cloth from his pocket, wrapped it around his knuckles and just as the door unlocked, he used all his strength to shove it hard, knocking the man backwards and to the floor. Shutting the door behind him, Bruno pushed the disorientated man over while he was struggling to his feet. He slumped over the toilet pan and barely had time to stretch out his arm to protect himself when Bruno yanked it at a ninety-degree angle causing the bone to snap.
His victim opened his mouth to scream but Bruno was too fast for him. He turned him quickly, grabbed a hammer from his waistband and began hitting him in the face and head with it. He heard the man’s teeth snap and slide back into his throat like bar skittles. And as he choked on them, Bruno grabbed him by his head and slammed it against a metal handrail. It took four dull thwacks before his head cracked open like a horse-chestnut case. Now unconscious and bleeding profusely, he gasped his last, bloody breath.
Bruno took a moment to regain his composure, then pulled the dead man up into a sitting position and left him slumped on the toilet seat. Finally, he took two post-circulation £1 coins and thrust them into the man’s eye sockets. He pushed the eyeballs further inside until they popped like grapes and the coins fitted snugly. Then he took a stepback, removed the cloth from his hand and flicked away two of the man’s teeth embedded in it.
‘You got him good!’ came the same West Indian man’s voice. ‘’Tis a pity he’ll never know why.’ Bruno turned quickly to see the dreadlocked man behind him in the cubicle. Bruno reached his arm out to touch him but he felt nothing.
‘He knew,’ Bruno said firmly. ‘And if all these people want is money, I’ll make sure it’s the last thing they see.’
He took a moment for himself to absorb his actions. The first name on the kill list he spent months planning was now crossed off. And it wouldn’t be long before he had set his sights on the second.
Chapter 18
SINÉAD, EDZELL, SCOTLAND
Sinéad awoke with a start. It wasn’t a noise that brought her out of a deep slumber, it was the silence. She propped herself up by her elbows and took a handful of deep breaths. ‘Hello?’ she said, just to hear the sound of her own voice.
She couldn’t remember when she had last slept so soundly. There was something to be said about the purity of the air in the Scottish countryside. It had been her eighth evening in the Angus village of Edzell and each night was a world away from the broken sleeps she had when her husband Daniel was lying by her side. Often, she’d wake up, a tightened fist filling her stomach, worrying about something she’d said or forgotten to do that would bring about his upset later that morning. Now she was no longer hamstrung by him.
Sinéad climbed out of her sleeping bag, stretched her arms high above her head and unzipped the entrance to the tent. Mile after mile of rolling green countryside lay before her under an endless blue-and-white cotton sky. A canopy of treetops sheltered her from last night’s rain, and it was the pitter patter of drops falling from leaves and branches and onto canvas that had soothed her to sleep. She made out the tiled rooftops of houses and shops and the occasional winding road in the distance, weaving inand out of the village. The only reminders that a world existed outside Edzell were white wind turbines planted in diagonal lines across the hillsides and leading to other towns.
Listening carefully, she could just about detect the faint sound of flowing water. The river Esk ran towards its neighbour Brechin, some five miles away. It was under loose rocks beneath the stone Gannochy bridge where, yesterday, she had buried an emergency escape kit.
For someone who had only ever stayed in hotels, camping had been a shock to the system, but a pleasurable one at that. In fact, anything far removed from her former life was bringing her happiness. As advised by her trainers, Sinéad had spent most of her first week becoming familiar with the area. She had not visited Scotland before so it was all new and by settling in a less densely populated village instead of a large city such as Glasgow or Edinburgh, she would not need to focus too much of her attention on counter-surveillance. If she was being followed, it would soon become apparent.
Some nights, Sinéad slept in her camouflage-coloured woodland tent, yet she also maintained a room in a nearby hotel in the centre of town. Later that morning, she returned there to shower, change her clothes and tuck into breakfast.
She took in the fixtures as she ate. She liked the characterful, exposed brickwork, uneven plastered walls and oak beams of this hotel built at the turn of the last century. It was the polar opposite to her modern apartment that Daniel insisted on filling with branded furniture and fittings, each surface sparse and devoid of quirk or personality. He didn’t appreciate the one-off items she bought from flea markets to restore. So eventually, she stopped.
A middle-aged couple wearing matching rose-gold wedding rings entered the restaurant. Yesterday, Sinéad accepted their invitation to join them for breakfast and learned they were visiting Scotland to celebrate theirthirtieth wedding anniversary. A pang of envy touched her until she reminded herself that a relationship wasn’t the only route to fulfilment.
However today, Sinéad had no time for conversation. She and the woman wished each other a good morning before she made her way back to her room to log on to the ReadWell message board. She was expected to visit weekly, but caution always got the better of her and she visited daily.
She speculated as to how many other Minders there were. Had they started off as broken as her? Had they required as much rebuilding as she had? Sinéad assumed they too were able to store and process vast amounts of data thanks to anomalies in the formation of their brains. And she wondered if they all had synaesthesia and which variation of it. As a child, schoolmates teased her when she told them music made her see colours. Now, it was something she was proud of. She was using it to protect her country.
But preventing its secrets from being revealed sometimes left her conflicted. There were dreadful, horrendous things the country had done over the centuries involving slavery, mass murder, incitement of civil war and plundering less civilised nations to line its own pockets. And when she had learned the truth of the Mumbai tsunami that killed her parents and thousands of others, it was the hardest secret of all to keep. The data she protected revealed it was one of the biggest man-made disasters in history, an underwater earthquake being the result of seabed fracking by a British-owned company. A subsequent sizeable investment in the Indian economy kept the truth under wraps. The world deserved to know what Britain had done to prevent it from happening again, but she had been sworn to secrecy. It was the price she must pay for her brand-new start.
A part of her still questioned why she had been chosen, despite Karczewski’s reassurances. ‘I’ve made so many baddecisions and put my faith in the wrong people,’ she’d admitted soon into training. ‘How do you know history won’t repeat itself and I won’t mess this up?’
‘Because you have incredible determination and inner strength,’ he’d replied. ‘Probably more so than any of our other candidates – and our training will help you to harness it. This isn’t about what poor decisions you’ve made in the past, it’s about your courage and your focus and your ability to start from scratch. There is more to you than others have led you to believe.’
She opened a rucksack lying by her feet and checked it contained all she needed for the day. Inside was a compass, ordnance survey map, torch, energy bars and waterproofs to slip over her clothing. She kept exactly the same objects in the boot of her car, inside the tent and under Gannochy bridge. And each contained a hunting knife with a four-inch, double-edged, stainless-steel serrated blade. She had never hurt another person in her life but this version of herself wouldn’t hesitate to kill to protect what she knew. No one would take her knowledge, her new life or her confidence away from her.
Chapter 19
EMILIA
Emilia’s fists were clenched, both hands raised high ready to defend herself. She scanned the hospital room, but if there was an enemy present, they were invisible. It must have been another daydream.
Moments earlier, she had been imagining a faceless woman approaching her, armed with a knife. The blade slashed through the air, effortlessly slicing anyone who encroached on her path. Emilia had sensed the coolness of the blade against the warmth of her skin, then the heat of her blood as it seeped from a horizontal wound across her abdomen.
Such streams of consciousness detached from reality were becoming increasingly common. And without fail, they were so vivid, it was hard to believe they weren’t real. Now, she took deep breaths as she tried to rid herself of either a memory clawing its way to the surface or her interpretation of what Ted had told her – that her colleague’s psychotic state was down to Emilia piling pressure upon her. The woman had fatally attacked four of their workmates and injured Emilia. Or perhaps this build-up of anxiety was related to her forthcoming discharge that afternoon.
A week had passed since she’d collided with a car and the physical bruises were fading. But the bruises from whatshe had learned about the trigger for her mental breakdown were in full bloom. Meanwhile Ted had tried to prepare Emilia for her return home by FaceTiming her from their house. He had guided her through every room, partly hoping to extinguish any nerves and partly to jolt her memory. She couldn’t fault his understanding.
She had not encouraged him to visit the hospital that morning, telling him she’d be engaged with a final round of brain-imaging scans and a psychological evaluation before she was released into his care. What Emilia actually wanted was a little extra time to learn about the incident that instigated her decline.
