I got snared. It was nine o’clock at night and the trail was already cold.
I had the spare keys for the car on my key ring. I drove back to the house oblivious to the rest of the traffic. I left it sitting outside instead of garaging it. I ran up the stairs and barged inside calling her name like an idiot. My voice echoed and rolled round the big old house. No one replied. I hadn’t really expected them to.
As darkness settled, I sat quietly in the kitchen doodling on my pad. I seemed unable to break out of my circular thoughts. What I kept writing on the pad was Why?
Did they take her to shut her up? Was she a hostage to shut me up? Would they make demands? Or would they kill her as casually as they slaughtered the others, including a Lord Chief Justice of Scotland? Would they even now be pushing her broken body off the Stranraer ferry to Belfast, her torso weighed down with stones? I clung to the thought that they’d wanted her alive at least for the moment. They could simply have left her strangled body alongside Allardyce. And how had a Lord Chief Justice got mixed up in this escalating slaughter anyway? What unholy alliance existed between a bunch of Glasgow gangsters with IRA affiliations and one of the top men in the Scottish legal system?
I had one large Scotch, drunk too fast and with too little water. I wanted the fire and pain to break me loose from my meanderings. I coughed and wiped my eyes and then I stoppered the bottle. I needed a clear head for the long drive and what I had to do in the morning. I was amazed that the street outside wasn’t yet filled with clanging squad cars. Wouldn’t this house be their first stop? Maybe it had all been too much for the police top brass. Maybe they were all sitting paralysed with empty bottles at their feet, wondering what new catastrophe would be in the papers in the morning. Maybe they were all in jail.
I began with her room, feeling like a burglar. It was neat and clean and surprisingly frilly. Her scent was everywhere. I leaned forward and sniffed her pillow, then I pressed my face into it. My senses thrilled to the memory of the other night when she’d joined me. But this wasn’t what I’d come for. Feeling mildly ashamed of myself I checked her drawers and found what I was looking for. I took the big bunch of keys and left her room. I’d never been to the top floor of the house. The layout was like the second floor where our bedrooms were. A toilet, a bathroom and two larger rooms.
I tried one and found it laid out as a bedroom. It had similar colours and tastes to Sam’s and I assumed it had been her mother’s. Opposite was the room I was looking for. It was dark until I got a fresh bulb for the overhead light. Very much a man’s room. Solid woods and plain curtains. Hairbrushes sitting neat on a dresser. A wardrobe full of men’s suits and perfectly polished shoes. The room felt like a shrine. There was another cupboard on the far wall, locked and padlocked. This looked like it. If Sam’s hunting father had a hand gun it was likely he had other weapons.
I tried several keys before giving up and breaking into it. Inside on hooks was a pair of magnificent 12-bores. The metal gleamed dully and seemed to flow into the hardwood stock as though wood and metal had chemically fused. I lifted one of them out, savouring the weight and balance. Then as my hand smoothed its way down the barrel from the trigger guard I noticed the unique round action and knew instantly I held a Dickson, a product of Scotland’s finest gunsmiths.
My father had never owned a shotgun but we fished, and we’d spent hours in the fishing and shooting shop in Kilmarnock buying fly-making materials and surreptitiously admiring the arrays of guns. Like any young boy I was entranced by these weapons and the shopkeeper was happy to indulge my endless questions. He even let me hold some. Maybe it was why I joined up.
It must have been well over twenty years ago that he called me over to the gun counter and put a long polished wood box in front of me. It was a special order for one of the factory owners at the big metal works. Inside was a pair of Dicksons with their trademark round action so visibly different from the square action of the English Purdeys or Holland amp; Hollands.
He told me that it was more than just cosmetic, delightful though it was to the look and touch. The opening action was smooth as silk and the spent cartridges were automatically ejected when the gun was broken, saving time on reloading.
I hefted this Dickson, feeling it settle snugly into the shoulder and the barrel come up and hold steady as a rock. I checked the levers and the barrel. Still well oiled and smooth action. I broke it open and closed it again, feeling the springs tug and give properly. I pulled the triggers, one after the other. They clicked neatly and loudly.
The shelves were full of boxes; cartridges for the Dicksons and shells for the Webley I’d already tested on one of the Slattery gang. I took down a leather pouch and filled it full of ammunition. I checked the remaining drawer and discovered a fine-edged gutting knife in its leather sheath. I slipped it into my pouch. There was an old army water bottle in webbing. I slung it round my shoulder. I relocked the remaining gun in its cupboard and left the room. I packed a couple of overnight items, locked the house and loaded the car. It was midnight. I could chance getting some sleep here and being wakened by heavy knocks on the door, or I could start out after Sam.
By twelve thirty I was steering the big car back down the coast road through the douce towns of Troon and Ayr. My headlights swept the quiet roads ahead and only once clashed with the beams from another car. Well into the middle of the night the sign to Culzean Castle flashed up in my lamps. This was where General Eisenhower was about to take residence. A grateful British nation had offered Ike a suite in the castle in perpetuity in thanks for his leadership during the war. Or at least from the time the Yanks finally showed up.
By 3 a.m. I was pulling into the tiny village of Maidens far down the coast and rolling on to the sandy grass at the seafront. I eased down the window a bit, got into the back seat and fell asleep to the swish of waves on the beach.
By first light I was awake and walking on the shore in my shirtsleeves swinging my arms to free my stiff limbs. For breakfast I had a cigarette sitting on a sand dune, watching Ailsa Craig define itself in the morning light. I didn’t think much about the messy business ahead or whether I’d come out of it with my skin. The slaughter so far had all been one-sided. It was time to even things up. It was that simple. My boiling anger seemed to have evaporated like sea mist. In its place was a cool certainty about my next steps.
The first time I had this feeling was when the old 51st was surrounded at St Valery en Caux and forced to surrender, stuck as we were, in the middle of a French army who’d already waved the white flag. I slipped away with four of my men and hightailed it along the cliffs until we found a fisherman’s boat and sailed it back to England. It was the same feeling on the morning of our counter-attack against Rommel outside Tobruk. The sun swept aside the cool desert air and brought with it clarity and a tingling readiness. I ushered my platoon to their positions and prepared for the off as if we were on a training romp at Aldershot. I came to see it as a gift that I could draw on when the die had been cast, when the time for planning was done. My mind was working as smoothly and efficiently as the action in the beautiful Dickson lying in the boot. And with equal deadly purpose. The months of vacillation and gloom in London were swept aside. This was what I was trained for. It’s what I’m good at.
By six I was back in the car and pressing south along the coast. On any other day I would have been grinning with the sheer pleasure of the trip, the big car feeling tight and powerful in my hands as we swept round bends and down green hills. The sea on my right lay flat and calm like a pewter dish. As the road swung round to the west the whale shape of Arran swam into view to the north. South again and the symmetrical granite stump of Ailsa Craig appeared and disappeared in the sea mists. These two islands had floated through the days of my youth, markers of long dreamy picnics among the dunes, backdrops to mad games in the shallow pools. Now, I didn’t know if they were omens or endings, signifying the full circle of my life.
On down the rocky coast and through Girvan, until the signs pointed me towards Stranraer and the ferry to Ireland. I was in luck. I made the eight-o’clock boat and was soon tucking into a bracing Ulster Fry of tattie farls, sliced black pudding, streaky bacon and mushrooms. Other than the fry-up it was a three-and-a-half-hour uneventful crossing. No one tried to throw me overboard.
I stood on the top deck leaning over the rail, watching for the first line of Irish coast to come over the horizon. The grey line took on definition and formed itself into green hills and a township with an open harbour. Soon I was flicking my last cigarette into the briny and going down to collect the car as we eased into Larne. My stomach was churning, either in protest at the greasy breakfast or the prospect of facing Slattery and his men on their home turf. The ferrymen saluted me as I powered up the engine and drove the Riley out on to the ramp.
I had a rough idea where I was going but I needed fuel and a proper map. I stopped at the first garage and tore off the last of my blue coupons and very nearly the last of my pound notes to fill the tank. I bought a map and got directions from the attendant, and drove off towards the west.
By my reckoning it was about 120 miles from Larne to my destination, through Antrim on the A6 and then on
