hum of traffic on the motorway a short way away. The rattle of a diesel engine firing up. Strains of music, very faint, from a parked lorry somewhere nearby.
He dragged the man the short distance to his car, the lorry driver’s heavy-duty Totectors scraping noisily along the tarmac, but Tooth was confident no one was around to hear them. He hauled him on to the rear seat, closed the doors, then drove a short way across the car park and pulled up in an area of total darkness, away from all the vehicles.
Next he tugged the man’s polo shirt out of his trousers. With his thumbs he felt up the man’s spine before carefully counting down again from the top to C4. Then, using a movement he had been taught in the military for disabling or killing the enemy silently, with bare hands, he swung him out of the car, lifted him up, then dropped him down hard, backwards, across his knees, hearing the snap. This location on the spine he had chosen would not kill the lorry driver. It would just stop him from running away.
He manoeuvred him back into the car and set to work, binding the man’s mouth and arms with duct tape. Then he jammed him down into the gap between the front and rear seats and covered him with a rug he had bought for the purpose, just in case he got stopped later by the police for any reason, then locked up.
He had one more job to do, which involved a screwdriver. It took him only fifteen minutes. Afterwards, he sauntered across to the service station cafeteria, pulling the baseball cap even lower over his face and turning the collar of his jacket up as he spotted the CCTV camera. He walked past, facing away, as he entered the building.
Tooth finally used the restroom, then bought himself a large black coffee and a custard Danish. He chose a table in a quiet section, ate his pastry and sipped some scalding coffee. Then he carried the cup outside, leaned against a wall, lit a cigarette and drank some more. The cigarette tasted particularly good. He felt good. His plan was coming together, the way his plans always came together.
He didn’t do abortive missions.
59
Stuart Ferguson woke feeling confused. For an instant he thought he was home with his ex-wife, Maddie. But the room felt unfamiliar. Jessie? Was he with Jessie? Swirling darkness all around him, like a void. His head was throbbing. He heard a noise, a hum, a faint whine like tyres on tarmac. His head was jigging, vibrating, rocking slightly, as if it was floating in space.
Was he asleep in his cab?
He tried to think clearly. He had pulled into the service station to get something to eat and to have a rest. Had he gone to sleep in his bunk? He tried to reach out for the light switch, but nothing seemed to be happening – it was as if he had forgotten how to move his arm. He tried again. Still nothing. Was he lying on it? But he could not feel any of his limbs at all, he realized.
His head became hot, suddenly, with panic. Beads of sweat trickled down his face. He listened to the hum. The whine. He tried to speak, then realized he could not move his mouth.
He was face down. Was he trussed up? Why couldn’t he feel anything? Had he had an accident? Was he being taken to hospital?
Sweat was in his eyes now. He blinked, the salt stinging them. His left cheek itched. What had happened? Shit. He concentrated on listening for a moment. He was definitely in a moving vehicle. He was conscious of lights. Headlights. But he could see nothing of where he was. Just dark fibres. There was a smell of dusty carpet in his nostrils.
Something was very wrong. Panic and fear swirled through his head. He wanted Jessie. Wanted to be in her arms. Wanted to hear her voice. He grunted, tried to turn his head. He could hear a clicking sound now. Steady, every few seconds,
He thought about Jessie. Sweet Jessie. He so desperately wanted to be with her. He cried out to her, but no sound came through his taped mouth.
60
David Harris, dressed as usual in his heavy fleece, thick jeans, cap and rubber boots, looked up at the sky as he made his morning inspection of the smokery. The solid cloud cover of earlier this morning seemed to be breaking up, with shards of glassy blue sky appearing in the gaps. The air felt a little bit warmer today, too. Spring was late but perhaps it was finally starting.
He glanced at his watch: 7.45. The delivery driver from Aberdeen Ocean Fisheries was usually here at 7.30 a.m. every Wednesday, on the nail. A cheery little Scot called Stuart Ferguson. The man was always quick and businesslike. He would unload, help Harris and his staff into the sheds with the cargo, getting the items checked and ticked on his docket, then have it signed and be on his way. He always seemed in a hurry to get off.
Last week was one of the few times in all the years Harris could remember when there’d been no delivery from Aberdeen. The previous week the lorry had been involved in that bad accident that had been all over the news. Some big New York crime family’s son had been killed. Ferguson had been named as the lorry driver – and Harris had worked out that the accident must have happened only a short while after the driver had made his delivery here.
He wondered if it would be Ferguson again today or whether they would have put a different driver on. He hoped it would be Ferguson, because it would be interesting to find out from him what had actually happened. But perhaps the man had lost his job over this. Or was suspended. He looked at his watch again and listened for a moment, to see if he could hear the sound of an approaching lorry. But all he could hear was the faint, insistent bleating of sheep up on the Downs above him. Must be a new driver, he thought, either with a different schedule or perhaps lost – not hard on the narrow, winding roads to this place.
He walked up the incline between two low buildings, passing a row of his parked delivery vans, then, to his surprise, he noticed the padlock on the first of the smokehouse doors, which one of his staff always locked last thing at night, was hanging loose and open. He felt a sudden twist of unease inside him. Each of the brick and steel smokehouses contained many thousands of pounds’ worth of fish, and so far, in the company’s history, they’d never been burgled. Which was why he’d never thought it necessary to invest in expensive security systems such as alarms or CCTV. Perhaps he might have to now, he thought.
Hurrying over, he pulled the door open and stepped inside. The strong, familar fug that he loved, of smoke and fish, enveloped him. Inside the dim interior, everything looked fine, the fish – all wild Scottish salmon in this kiln – hung in dense, packed rows on hooks from the ceiling. He was about to leave, when he decided to do a quick check, and cranked the handle that moved the fish along the ceiling rail, so they could be rotated for inspection purposes. At the halfway point, he suddenly saw four large fish had fallen from their hooks and lay on the draining tray beneath.
How the hell could they have fallen, he wondered?
Had there been a problem with this kiln during the night? One of the pieces of high-tech they had invested in was a temperature alarm system. If the temperature in one of the kilns dropped too low, or the temperature in one of the cold-storage sheds rose too high his engineer, Tom White, would get a call on his mobile phone and have to come straight over. Had Tom needed to do some work on this kiln? But even if he had, Tom was a careful man; he wouldn’t leave four expensive salmon lying in the draining tray.
He called the engineer’s mobile – the man would probably be in his workshop at the far end of the smokery at this time of day. White answered immediately, but it wasn’t the reply David Harris had hoped for. There hadn’t been any problems overnight. No call-out.
As he hung up, he wondered if there been an attempted burglary. Hurriedly, he hooked the salmon back up, then checked each of the next four kilns, but everything was fine. Then he walked along to the cold-store sheds and stared, in growing bewilderment and unease, at the sight of the padlock on the first shed door, also hanging loose
