above it, disappearing at intervals but soon reprising its dry erratic track. Hanks of wool hung from a barbed-wire fence.
They slid down the nettled bank to the water and for twenty minutes Alex set a fast pace up the stream bed. The day was a warm one, despite the fact that afternoon was swiftly becoming evening, and soon they were both sweating.
Alex's thigh swiftly began to throb where the stitches pulled at the wound, but he consigned the discomfort to a distant part of his mind.
They covered the ground fast. The banks of the stream were eight or nine feet high and the foliage had clearly not been cut back for years, allowing them to stay well-concealed from any watching eyes. Despite the absence of any vehicle, Alex was not convinced that the Black Down estate was unoccupied and a careful study of a large-scale map had convinced him that this was the safest approach. Meehan could not watch the entire half-mile perimeter, he could only patrol it, and Alex suspected that he slept through the day.
The estate, they soon discovered, was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. This was not new long streaks of rust discoloured the galvanised metal but at ten feet high it was still effective enough. The banks flattened at the point the stream met the perimeter, so that the lowest chain-linked strands went to within inches of the stream bed. The fence continued in both directions and there was every reason to suppose that it surrounded the estate entirely. It was clearly not proof against determined assault, but it would undoubtedly have deterred the curious over the years.
Alex and Dawn crouched in the shadows beneath the bank.
'What d'you reckon?' asked Dawn.
'I reckon I'm going to have to go in underneath it,' Alex answered.
Removing his rucksack, he took out a lightweight folding shovel and began digging in the stream. After ten hard minutes, and having hauled out several large rocks by hand, he had cleared a twelve-inch space beneath the lowest strands of the fence and the stream bed.
'OK, all clear?'
They looked around them and Alex quickly undressed. Naked, he burrowed up the stream bed and under the fence.
The water was surprisingly cold. When he was through Dawn wrapped his clothes in a bin liner and threw them to him over the fence. The other kit followed.
'Remind me to take those stitches out,' she hissed as Alex re-dressed.
Quickly, they ran through their contingency plans. She would wait where she was and call him on his mobile if there was anything to report, and he would attempt a search of the Black Down estate. Switching his mobile to vibrate, he melted into the woods. His progress was slow. He moved in total silence, continuously scanning the ground in front of him for trip wires and booby traps, and the landscape as a whole for any sign of surveillance.
Soon he was at the edge of the woods and from a well-concealed position among a patch of overgrown thorn bushes was able to rake the area with his binoculars. There was no sign of life and as far as he could see the area of tall grass, nettles and cow-parsley in front of him was untrodden.
Slowly, and with infinite care, he moved from the cover of the woods into the shadowed stream-bed. The water was deeper here and he was soon soaked to the waist. It wasn't the approach route he would have chosen, given a choice, but unlike the nettle-choked field, the exposed rocks would leave no trace of his passing. The day was still warm. The sugar in the tea that he had drunk had made him thirsty and with a flash of irritation Alex realised that he had not filled his canteen. Drinking the stream water, as they had discovered from the forensic samples, was probably inadvisable.
Rounding a corner he saw the church. It had a square tower and a blankly ruined look. Where there had once been windows there were now gaps around which, at some long-ago point, mortar had been roughly tro welled. At one time a road had led past the main house and down alongside the river. The church and its small graveyard lay at the end of this road, or what remained of it. Trees and bushes had forced their way through the dried-out surface and long-unchecked vegetation pressed from both sides. Beyond the church was a line of dilapidated single-storey dwellings.
Having noted the layout of the place, Alex drew himself back into invisibility beneath an overhanging alder bush. With his binoculars he used the slowly failing light to scour the area around the church and then rang Dawn.
'I'm in position,' he murmured.
'Since I've got no idea where our man sleeps or even if he's here, I'm just going to hang back and sit tight. How are you?'
'OK. Nothing to report here.'
Where would Meehan stay, Alex wondered. In the house? In the church? In the crypt, underground? Did the house have cellars? Wherever it was, it would be somewhere where he would have plenty of warning of any arrivals.
By the property's new owners, for example. Angela Fenwick had discovered that Liskeard Holdings were having trouble securing planning permission for the hotel and conference complex that they hoped to build on the site, and that was why the property remained in its ruined state. But presumably there had been a fair amount of coming and going by architects and others.
Alex reasoned that Meehan probably slept and concealed himself somewhere beneath the church. The chances were that if the house had a cellar it would be damp and uncomfortable, and subject to occasional visits the church was much older and much more securely built. Church crypts were stone-walled. They were usually dry.
At 8 p.m. Dawn rang.
'Still waiting for Godot?' she asked.
'Yup, you?'
'The light's almost gone, as you can see. I was thinking I should get back to the Range Rover. Twitchers don't twitch in the dark.'
'OK. Be in touch.'
Two hours later his thigh was itching unbearably and his back aching from immobility. How many hours have I spent lying up like this, he wondered. A hundred? More? And how many times has the whole thing ended in failure, in merely getting up and going back to base?
He was going to have to make a decision, sooner or later, about whether to risk taking a closer look at things. Was Meehan due back tonight? Was he already there? Was he, at this minute, watching Alex the hunted turned hunter?
Alex shuddered, both at the thought of being scoped out by Meehan and at the memory of the former agent's terrifying strength.
No, he thought. I'll go in now.
Slowly he eased himself from cover and continued the silent passage upstream that he had started hours earlier. In his pocket, fully loaded, was the Glock.
Soon, the house was in view above him. The ruins of a flight of steps led down from the road fronting the house to the stream at the bottom of the slope. If he started to climb, he would greatly increase the chance of being spotted if Meehan was in residence. If he stayed where he was, however, he would never learn anything.
A step at a time, he moved up the slope. With the passage of years and neglect, the brickwork steps had cracked and he could feel their uneasy shift beneath his feet. Finally he reached the top and the front door. Was it locked? No, the lock had been kicked in and the flaking door swung open easily. Glock in one hand, Maglite torch in the other, Alex went in. He was in a front hall, a place of rotting floorboards, fallen masonry and the smell of dead animals. Fag ends and empty bottles greyed with plaster dust lay about and there was an old coat in the fireplace. Anything of any conceivable value had been stripped away -there was nothing there except walls and floor.
Taking a pair of thick socks from his rucksack, Alex pulled them over his boots. They would muffle the crunching sound of his movements and help conceal the tracks of his Danner boots on the floor. Quickly he moved from room to room on the ground floor, but found nothing. A few empty tins and a gutted mattress lay around, but there was no sign that the place had been occupied by anyone other than tramps and vagrants -and that a long time ago. There was no cellar.
