we stop so she could use the rest room. Classic hostage technique—get your captors to do you small favors. I wasn’t buying.
“It’s not much further,” I told her. “You’ll have to wait.”
“And what if I can’t wait?”
“That’s up to you—only you might want to bear in mind that this isn’t our vehicle, so we don’t really care what happens to it,” I said blandly. “Whereas you might not have a change of underwear for a while.”
She fell silent for the remainder of the journey.
Sean left the motorway at the north Lancaster exit, drove up the Lune Valley and then struck out along the winding back roads towards Wray. Eventually, at my direction, he turned off the main road and the Shogun clambered easily up a potholed farm track. At the top was a scruffy yard with an old stone barn at one side and a couple of dead pickup trucks fighting a losing battle with the weeds in front.
We passed through a set of stone gateposts, one of which was cracked clean in half, and drew to a halt. A moment later, the barn door opened and a big man with shaggy hair and a scarred face stepped out and glared at us, even though he’d known full well we were coming. At his heels was a mammoth rottweiler bitch. The dog appeared to be glaring, too.
I opened the door and climbed out. As soon as he recognized us for certain, the man broke into a grin that revealed several gold teeth.
“Charlie!” he said. “How are ya, girl?”
“Good, thanks, Gleet,” I said, shaking the oil-ingrained hand he offered. “You remember Sean?”
“Course I do, mate,” Gleet said, a certain amount of respect in his voice. He clicked his fingers dismissively to the dog who, with one last, longing look in our direction, turned and disappeared back into the barn. Gleet jerked his head towards the Shogun. “You got these two bodies you want storing, then?”
“Yeah,” Sean said, opening up the rear door. “Don’t take any chances with either of them.”
“No worries. Got a space cleared out at the back of one of the old pig sheds. They’ll be safe as houses back there and they’ll not get out across the field past that lot with their fingers intact, I can tell you.” He gave an almost delicate shudder. “Vicious little buggers, pigs.”
Gleet might live on a farm, but the day-to-day running was handled by his morose sister. He spent his time building beautiful custom motorcycles out in the barn, which was how I’d first come into contact with him.
His sister appeared now, a stocky masculine woman, silent and scowling, in a baggy flower-print dress over Wellington boots, and a knitted hat with a frayed hole in the crown.
Between us, we hauled our cargo out of the Shogun and untied their feet so they could walk. Don thought about making some kind of a play at that point, but his restricted circulation wasn’t up to it. Gleet’s sister manhandled him across the yard and through a galvanized metal field gate with all the careless skill of a woman who’s spent the last forty years dealing with bolshy cattle.
The free-range pigs were a new addition since my last visit to Gleet’s place, and they hadn’t done much for the landscape. Pigs like to dig, and the ground we staggered across was ankle-deep in muddy ruts, like the Somme after particularly heavy bombardment.
The pigs looked happy, though—and big, too. And intelligent in a sly, cunning kind of way, as if they knew full well they had the upper hand out here and they couldn’t wait for you to miss a step so they could prove it. They stopped wallowing and tunneling long enough to watch our halting progress across the field, past their corrugated iron arks to a dilapidated wooden shed.
Close up, the shed was a lot more solid than it had first appeared, with a shiny new padlock on the door. Inside, it stank of its last occupants, to the extent it made your eyes water. Blondie’s face showed her disgust.
“This isn’t over,” she said, her voice flat and buzzing slightly from the busted nose. “This isn’t anywhere
“Any time you feel up to a rematch,” I said, meeting her gaze, “you let me know.”
Her lips twisted into a grimace that might have doubled as a smile. “You have no idea, do you,” she said, “who you’re dealing with?”
“Perhaps you’d care to enlighten us?” Sean said. He gestured to the pigs, who’d edged nearer like they were hoping to pick up gossip. “Might make all the difference to the company you keep.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Blondie said, closing down. “I think they’re probably better than yours.”
Gleet’s sister gave her a shove backwards and bolted the door to their temporary cell behind the pair of them. It was only then I let the bravado fade from my face.
“Don’t worry, they’ll be fine,” Gleet said. “May and me’ll look after them.”
I realized with some surprise that I’d never known his sister’s name before. I turned to her and, aware of the listening ears, asked casually, “Are you still handy with that crossbow of yours?”
“Don’t need to be no more,” May said darkly, with the faintest glimmer of a twinkle in her dull gray eyes. “Them daft buggers at t’local council gave me my shotgun license back.”
We spent the night down in Cheshire. A phone call on the way back had Madeleine arranging seats for the three of us on the first available return flight to New York, but it didn’t leave until the following morning so there was nothing we could do except sit tight overnight. I called ahead to warn my mother of the schedule. The conversation was brief and when I rang off she was fretting about canceling the milk and the newspaper delivery at such short notice.
For the rest of the journey, we speculated about Blondie’s and Don’s purpose, employer, and identity—mostly fruitlessly.
The only thing that was obvious was that they were both Americans. Accents aside, their clothing was all U.S. chainstore brands. No need to cut out the labels, because hundreds of thousands of each item were sold every year.
Sean and I had been through their belongings meticulously, but they were real pros and they’d carried nothing incriminating. No passports, no ID, no personal mementos or convenient books of matches, no credit cards. Just a stack of cash in a plastic envelope from an airport exchange bureau, and a pay-as-you-go mobile phone with the call register purged.
They’d arrived by taxi, my mother had told us, but in Blondie’s handbag we’d found a ticket for parking at Manchester airport, dated the day of their arrival, and a set of car keys. The keys were for a Citroen, so they obviously didn’t belong to Blondie’s own vehicle in the States, where Citroens weren’t imported. That meant they were from a rental, which they’d picked up and almost immediately abandoned in one of the sprawling car parks. They’d carefully removed the key fob identifying which company it was hired from.
“I suppose that’s where they’ll have stashed their personal stuff,” I said. “Hire a car as soon as you land, leave everything you don’t want found on you inside, then dump it in long-term parking and pick it all up again when you leave.”
“It’s good operating procedure,” Sean said. “These days, the authorities are too nervous to let you leave luggage at the airport.”
They’d stuck to protocol over communication, too. My mother had never heard them make any outgoing calls, and they had always been very careful to take incoming ones well outside her earshot. Apart from Don’s increasingly creepy behavior, they hadn’t given any sign that things weren’t going according to whatever plan they’d devised.
“Interesting that they had no weapons on them,” I said, “but I suppose if they flew in they couldn’t exactly bring anything with them.”
“Mm, still, they’re not difficult to pick up over here—particularly so close to Manchester. Perhaps it’s fortunate they didn’t think of that,” he said with a wry smile. “But they must have known they didn’t need them. There were two of them against an untrained woman in her fifties, and they had the additional threat of doing something nasty to her husband if she didn’t play ball. They knew she wasn’t going to try anything.”
“But … she did,” I said, a little blankly as the realization hit. “She warned us.”
“Yes, she did,” Sean agreed. He threw me a little sideways look. “There’s more to your mother than meets the eye.”
