‘You were saying something earlier about a parachutist,’ Neesham said.
‘I saw one come down on the Forest,’ I replied. ‘Vaughn Matheson said he’d call it in. I told him to ask for you.’
Neesham shook his head. Apparently the message hadn’t got through.
Doc felt inside the man’s jacket, and produced a crumpled wad of paper. He unfolded it. Two twenty-pound notes, blood leaching into the paper, and a map. He unfolded the map and looked at it. When he looked up, he didn’t look at Neesham, but at me.
‘What?’ I asked.
Doc spread the map out on the kitchen table. Uckfield and Ashdown Forest. Standard Ordnance Survey, one to twenty-five thousand. Sheet TQ 42. You’d find a copy in every house in the district, scuffed at the corners, coming apart at the folds.
A cross, crudely made with thick pencil, showed our current position.
‘Someone gave him this and the money,’ Neesham said. ‘Gave him his marching orders.’
‘This is the Leckies,’ I said, pointing at another cross, at the end of Palehouse Lane, stuck out like an island in the middle of the open space of the Forest.
I’d been wrong about Kate. She hadn’t hired this man. Why would you hire a killer and put yourself on his list?
‘Cook,’ Doc said. His earlier flippancy was gone. Doc was my oldest friend. My only friend. He wasn’t a man who wore his emotions on his sleeve, but in that one word, there was fear, and urgency.
Doc pointed to another point on the map. A third cross, crudely drawn with thick pencil. A job to be done. Forty pounds up front. A year’s pay. Probably more to come on completion.
My vision blurred and I couldn’t focus on the map. I didn’t need to. I knew every lane, every hedgerow, every contour.
I knew what was hidden beneath the thick cross. A farmhouse. Outbuildings. Barns. Sitting alone and vulnerable at the end of a half-mile-long country lane, a mile west of
Uckfield.
My farm.
32
Neesham’s car slid to a halt in the farmyard. I had the door open before it stopped. My heart was pounding from the adrenaline, and my mouth was parched. The yard was quiet, baking in the afternoon sun.
I was too late.
The kitchen door was ajar.
I pushed through the door, blind in the darkness after the bright sun, no attempt at stealth. Everything I’d ever learnt cast by the wayside. Training and craft were for the battlefield. This was my home.
The kitchen was still. Dark shapes loomed.
A lifeless shape was slumped in Uncle Nob’s chair.
I looked for rage to comfort me, that old friend that got me through the worst, time after time, but instead I felt a complete emptiness, as if every part of my soul had been scooped out and discarded. I walked slowly to Nob’s chair, tears filling my eyes.
It took me a second to realise what I was seeing.
Nob’s black coat, thrown over the chair. Impossible to mistake. A coat, in the dark.
The shot was distant. A single explosion, echoing back from the woods, followed by a cacophony of crows as they took off, cawing and complaining.
Neesham followed as I sprinted from the house, through the farmyard to the fields beyond. My boots pounded on theconcrete track that led from the yard to the gate. Neesham’s leather shoes slapped the ground, keeping pace with me.
Crows wheeled above the far meadow, the low-lying field we didn’t farm, too water-logged for crops. There was a shout of anger and another shot. A cry. A young woman. Unmistakable. It was Elizabeth. I’d rescued her from a hell no girl should ever know, and promised to keep her safe.
But I’d failed her.
