‘That was some fancy-arsed driving you did back there.’
Harvey gave me a short, derisive laugh. ‘Fancy-assed? I was crapping my pants, man!’
‘Well, you did OK. Did you study defensive driving when you were with the Rangers?’
He shook his head. ‘I was just winging it. Sheer adrenalin got me through.’
His comments had shut down my line of conversation, and I sat there ruminating for a moment. It got me thinking on how earlier I’d have preferred if Rink had been the one covering my back, and now I felt a little ashamed of myself. ‘Harve.’
He glanced over at me, inclined his chin.
‘I’m sorry I got you into this.’
‘Anything for a friend.’
That made me feel worse. ‘You do realise that we’re probably going to go to prison for a long time.’
Harvey bit down on his bottom lip. ‘There’s always the possibility we’ll get away with it. I’ve taken precautions. The rifle can’t be traced to me. I had my gloves on when driving the car we dumped.’
These days the science of forensic investigation was more sophisticated than looking for fingerprints. And even if that’s all they went by, the police wouldn’t go with the obvious. Harvey hadn’t been wearing gloves when we were in the hotel room, so they could find plenty of evidence there. Identifying Harvey would be a piece of cake for any investigator. Christ, all they had to do was look at my known associates and the first black man to jump out at them would be Harvey. Not only that, but if Walter had been responsible for betraying us, the police had arrived at the scene with prior knowledge of who was assisting me. Of course, if I was to be captured, they wouldn’t get his name from me.
‘I think it’s time I finished this alone.’
Shaking his head adamantly, Harvey said, ‘I started this with you, I’m gonna finish it with you.’
‘Not a good idea, Harve.’
‘Has anything we’ve done been a good idea?’ He considered his words, then added, ‘With the exception of saving Rink and killing the bad guys, that is?’
‘There are still two bad guys out there. Baron I’m not worried about, but this won’t end until Tubal Cain’s finally in his grave. No, scratch that. A grave couldn’t hold him last time. This time I’m going to have to make sure there isn’t enough of him left to put in a coffin.’
‘That’s the big problem. How do we find him?’
‘We set a trap.’ I dropped the subject of going it alone. Jesus, if I suggested as much, Rink would likely hand me my arse on a platter. ‘That’s why I wanted to speak to John. To see if he was prepared to help us.’
‘You’d use your brother as bait?’
‘I’d have made sure that he was never in any physical danger. But that’s moot now. I don’t know how to contact him.’
‘I thought Walter was setting that up for you?’
I hadn’t yet shared my suspicions with Harvey, but it looked like it was time. ‘Who do you think sent the cops after us, Harve?’
‘I don’t know Walter the way you guys do, but I find it hard to believe that he’d turn you in.’
‘Walter plays a constant game; one where he’s only interested in being the winner.’
‘Could have been someone else,’ Harvey pointed out. ‘Baron escaped. Could have been him who directed the police to us.’
It was plausible, I supposed. When I thought about the slimy bastard, Baron had made his escape in a vehicle. It was possible that he’d followed us as we got away from Hendrickson’s estate, and had tried to have us captured by the police. I thought that Walter had been stalling in order to triangulate my mobile phone, and had then sent a car to keep an eye on us. But, the omnipotent eye of the CIA wasn’t as all-powerful as made out in movies: what were the chances that he could have located us and dispatched a car to our location in such a short time? Pretty slim.
I tried to picture the scene outside the Tudor hall. I have trained myself to take snapshot images that I compartmentalise for future use. But it’s one thing when consciously deciding to save an image for later, quite another when concentrating on something else. I couldn’t bring to mind the makes and models of the vehicles in the small fleet arranged on the gravel parking space. One of them could have been a dark sedan with tinted windows. Perhaps the blame had been wrongly targeted at my old friend. I felt a trickle of relief, but then it was pushed aside by a different concern. If Walter hadn’t set us up, then why had he stalled over John’s unavailability?
I used the satellite phone to call Walter.
‘Walt, it’s me, Joe.’
‘Hunter, I’m glad you called.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. I told you to leave phoning me for a few hours. Big mistake! I’ve been frantic to get a hold of you since.’
‘You didn’t hear about Richmond yet?’
‘Richmond? No, I’ve been too busy dealing with what else has happened.’
‘What has happened? Is it John? Does Cain have him?’
‘It’s worse than that, son.’
‘What could be worse than Cain capturing my brother?’
When he told me, he was right. It was much worse.
Chapter 32
Over in Manchester, my old home town, three boys had innocently enquired of the time from a stranger. Mistaking them for thugs, he’d threatened them with a collection of knives and a gun. Upset by the incident they’d debated whether to telephone the police, but it seemed that the one mobile phone between them had a flat battery, and public telephone kiosks — those that hadn’t been vandalised — were as rare as chicken’s teeth in their neighbourhood. Instead they’d decided to spy on the stranger and see what he was up to. He’d allegedly gone into a block of flats, where shortly afterwards a Ford Transit van had arrived. The youths then swore that the stranger and driver had carried the body of a woman to the van and placed it inside. The van drove away and they’d come out of hiding and immediately ran to a friend’s house where they’d alerted the local police. The police officer dispatched to investigate their claim soon discovered my niece and nephew, Beatrice and Jack, unharmed and safely locked inside their bedroom. But of Jenny there was no sign. My parents had gone to the kids’ rescue, taking them home out of the hands of the social workers. The street on which the Telfer family had lived was now a major crime scene while the police tried to determine what had happened.
That Jenny’s abductor was Tubal Cain was obvious. I didn’t need the boys’ description of the fair-haired Yank with a scar on his throat for confirmation. The knives did it for me.
If it wouldn’t have sent Harvey and me plummeting to our deaths, I’d have turned the cockpit of the Jetranger inside out. That was the level of my rage. No, it was worse than that: it was the measure of my sense of futility. I was thousands of miles away, and Jenny was in danger.
I lost track of things after that, and rode the chopper with intense dread gnawing at my insides. I tried not to conjure the nightmare scenario of Jenny eviscerated, her skeletal remains displayed as an insane trophy, but it was there. Closing my eyes made it worse, so I stared straight ahead, trying to bury the horrific image behind the clouds.
Things were totally out of control.
For years now, I realised, I’d been very lucky in that the events I’d chosen — or been manipulated — to involve myself in had been resolved with the back-up and resources of a certain friend. But this time, trying to fix things without the benefit of Walter’s sanction made me understand how ineffective it was for one man to try to combat the evil of the world. It was always a demanding mission I’d set myself, but it was one thing punishing a low-life criminal, quite another to take on an entire network of world-class villains. Petoskey was dead, and so was Hendrickson. So what? What exactly had I achieved if it meant that Jennifer might also be slaughtered? There was no balance in that. I could kill a hundred, a thousand gangsters, and their lives would be nothing compared to that
