officer with the Gurkha regiment.
But the old man’s will hadn’t specified that his son, the new Laird of the manor, couldn’t just bung the offensive lot in a skip. And Kirby planned to do exactly that. He just hadn’t got around to it in the months since he’d inherited this rambling pile.
He dumped his briefcase in the passage, walked through to the kitchen and made himself a mug of instant decaf. Carrying the thin brown liquid through to the only one of the manor’s many reception rooms that he ever used, he gazed out of the window across the overgrown lawns behind the house. Beyond a stone wall and a row of trees, he could see the derelict agricultural buildings in the background. The place had been a working farm once but, ever since the old man had got frail and sick, everything had fallen into decay. Abandoned stacks of hay bales were mouldering and turning black in the rusty barn. And the slurry pit was sure to be attracting rats. It was becoming a health hazard. He’d have to tear the whole lot down.
That was Kirby’s last thought before he sensed a presence behind him and spun around in surprise to see two men striding fast towards him across the room. Two guns in his face. He dropped his coffee and let out a short scream. Fell to his knees.
Neither man spoke a word as they grabbed his arms, hauled him roughly to his feet and marched him out of the room and down the passage. He struggled and pleaded. ‘What do you want with me?’ As they frogmarched him across the hall, he glanced up and saw with a shock of horror that there was an empty space where one of the Gurkha knives had hung.
Oh Christ, they’re going to cut my head off.
‘What are you going to do to me?’ he screamed.
They ignored him and dragged him out of the front door. There was a white Suzuki mini-van sitting parked on the gravel outside. The back doors were open. The men shoved him towards it.
‘Where are you taking me?’
No reply.
All the strength had left Kirby’s legs and he was shaking with pure terror as they bundled him into the back. He slid across the bare metal floor, tried to scramble to his feet and whacked his head against the low roof. The doors slammed shut. There were no windows. Kirby was suddenly in darkness.
The kidnappers walked around the van’s sides to the cab, pulled open their doors and climbed in. They spent a moment making their pistols safe and securing them inside the tactical concealment holsters they were both wearing under their jackets. They didn’t speak, but shared the quiet satisfaction of a job cleanly and quickly executed. Now it was time to get out of here and deliver the package to the place outside Glasgow that their cell used as a safehouse. Neither man had any clear idea of the purpose of this job-they only knew that a call had come in from overseas the night before, and it was from someone their bosses obeyed instantly. It had also been put in no uncertain terms to them that to mess this up would mean severe punishment.
The driver twisted the key.
Nothing happened. The van was stone dead.
‘Fuck,’ he said in Arabic.
‘What’s wrong with it? It was fine a minute ago,’ said the man in the passenger seat.
The driver muttered another curse, reached down below the dash and yanked on the bonnet release mechanism. There was a dull clunk and the bonnet popped free of its catch and opened half an inch. He kicked open his door, jumped down from the van and walked around to the front.
The passenger watched through the windscreen as his colleague lifted the bonnet and disappeared behind it. He heard some noises, then nothing. He stuck his head out of the window. ‘Hurry the fuck up,’ he yelled in Arabic. ‘We’ve got to get moving.’
The bonnet crashed down with a clang that shook the van. The passenger looked, expecting to see his colleague wiping his hands and giving the thumbs-up-OK, sorted, let’s roll.
But there was nobody there.
He frowned, opened his door, climbed down. His footsteps crunched on the gravel as he walked around the front wing. He looked down and saw the driver’s legs sticking out as though he were lying on his back to work on the underside of the van.
‘Hey, what the fuck are you doing down there?’
But then he saw the legs give a violent, spasmodic twitch.
And he saw the blood that was pooling outwards from under the van and across the gravel.
After that, he saw nothing more.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Ben cut the man’s throat in a swift sawing motion, stepped aside to avoid the blood spray and let the body slump to the ground. He laid the long, curved knife on the gravel between the two dead men and quickly checked them for any kind of ID. As he’d expected, there was nothing-but the moment he’d seen the van arrive and the two Middle Eastern guys get out, he’d known who had sent them. Kamal must have found the phone number in the blazer pocket and followed the same trail he had.
There was a frenzied thumping and yelling coming from the back of the van. Ben walked around to the rear doors and opened them.
Kirby looked crazed and dishevelled. ‘It’s you. What are you doing here?’
‘Just dropped by for a chat,’ Ben said. ‘I was about to talk to you, when I saw you had company. Decided to hang back and see what happened.’
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘Right now, under the circumstances, I’d say I’m the best friend you have in the world,’ Ben said. ‘Ready to trust me yet?’
Kirby lowered himself gingerly out of the back of the van and froze when he saw the two bodies. He put his hands to his face. ‘Oh, my God. You killed them.’
‘You’re right. Maybe I should have just reasoned with them. I’m sure we could have worked something out.’
‘What’s going on here?’ Kirby gasped.
‘You know perfectly well what’s going on,’ Ben said. ‘Your secret’s out, and everybody wants a piece. What did you think was going to happen?’
‘I’m calling the police.’ Kirby started staggering towards the house.
Ben stopped him. ‘Not if you want to stay alive.’
‘What?’
‘You call the police, I’m out of here. Then, when these guys don’t phone in or turn up, more are going to come. Sooner or later, they’ll get you, take you away, interrogate you and probably torture you to death. There’s nothing the police can do to prevent it. If that’s what you want, go and dial 999, and I’ll say goodbye.’
Kirby’s shoulders slumped helplessly. ‘All right. Obviously I don’t want that. So what am I going to do?’
‘First you’re going to tell me where there’s a tool-shed with a wheelbarrow in it. And then you’re going to help me carry these bodies over to the slurry pit over there, where nobody’s ever going to go looking for them.’
It took less than ten minutes to make the two kidnappers vanish. A concrete lane led from the side of the manor to the dilapidated farm buildings two hundred yards away beyond the trees, and Ben used the creaky old barrow that Kirby found for him to roll them one at a time to the edge of the slurry pit.
At twenty yards, the stink of putrescent liquid dung was noxious. At ten it was overwhelming, and very few people would have got closer than five. Ben held his breath as he kicked back the bolts on the hatches and opened them up to reveal the filth underneath. He rolled one corpse in with his foot, then the other. Two brown splashes, a stream of bubbles as the slurry filled their lungs, and they were gone. The next time anyone saw them, there would be nothing but bones left. Nature was efficient that way. Ben tossed the bloody Kukhri knife in after them, slammed the hatches shut, slid the bolts home and moved away quickly towards cleaner air.
Kirby was waiting for him beside the old hay barn, looking deeply perturbed and shaken. ‘Now what?’
‘Now let’s get out of here,’ Ben said. ‘My car, not yours.’
