I powered up the binos and moved towards the road at the base of the triangle. Their cars had approached from either side of the house. They were probably parked up behind it.
We moved as fast as we could over the frozen mud. Lynn was finding it hard in his bare feet. I had to keep pulling him forward, then stopping to scan through the binos for the shape of a car on the road or beyond the trees and bushes that lined the fields.
We were about twenty from the base of the triangle. The house was immediately to my right. Still no sign of a vehicle.
A figure appeared from the rear of the house. Lights sprang on a few seconds later, reversed a short way along the base road, swung back up the drive, then turned back towards us.
'Keep the fuck down!'
I had another squint through the binos. Two guys were carrying the body and a third was helping the other casualty to the road.
I ripped off my day sack and fumbled inside the flap as the car drew level with the first cooling shed.
It stopped when I was still about seven or eight metres from the road.
I sprinted for it, not bothering to check if Lynn was behind. I got to the driver's door. The window was down. He'd been shouting to the others with the engine still running.
I pulled open the door and swung the screwdriver down hard into the top of his shoulder.
He roared like a wounded bull and made a wild grab for it. He looked up at me. I could see his face in the lights of the dash. It would have looked perfectly at home on the front seat of Little Miss Camcorder's BMW.
I grabbed a handful of hair, yanked him out onto the road and kicked him down.
'Come on, get in there!' I yelled at Lynn. 'You drive.'
The lads were streaming towards us from the cooling sheds. I threw the day sack over the roof at them, not that it was going to slow them down much, then pulled the bino strap off my neck and threw them too. As the closest one dodged to avoid them I dived into the back seat. 'Go! Go! Go!'
Lynn put his foot to the floor and mounted the verge. We bounced back down onto the tarmac and nearly stalled.
'Calm down! Put it in first – let's go! Let's go!'
As we fishtailed up the road, Mr Norfolk Country Pursuits' binos bounced off the rear window.
We drove up to the fork and then on towards the coast.
The Merc was going to have to find its way back to Mayfair on its own.
39
Our next objective wasn't complicated: to get the fuck out of the immediate area before they cordoned it off, or night was turned into day by searchlight-toting helicopters.
I wiped the blood from my face as the car weaved with the road.
I sat up as it began to narrow. Lynn made few concessions. I caught sight of his expression in the glow of the dashboard: eyes narrowed, jaw clenched, concentrating with every fibre of his being on the tunnel of light thrown by the headlamp beams and framed by the high hedges either side of the road.
The rev counter gradually fell from the red. Without as much as a sideways glance, he smiled for the first time. Fuck me, I was sharing a getaway car with Stirling Moss in stripy pyjamas.
'Where's the nearest ATM?'
'Holt. About fifteen minutes away.'
Life had to change now. I could no longer leave a trail behind me. With every new direction I took, I needed to shed my skin. First job was to draw the max from my two accounts, then bin the cards. No more money trail. Then we had to get some clothes and get the fuck out of the land of Country Pursuits.
The lane became a blur as Lynn forgot to relax his right foot again. I checked behind and saw no lights.
'Bit slower . . .'
I didn't want to end up in a ditch now we'd got this far.
Despite the gash I'd left on his pate and the streaks of mud on his dressing gown, he was completely unruffled, and so typically English it was as if we were slightly late for dinner.
'Who are they, Nick? Anyone we know?'
I shrugged. 'The Firm's still top of my list, though that doesn't totally explain the leatherwear. I was in Ireland yesterday. A device was shoved under my car. By them, I reckon; that's why they had no weapons. We've all come straight off the ferry.'
Another corner was coming up fast. He dipped the lights to check if anything was coming the other way, then switched back to full beam.
My feet kicked against some shit in the foot well. I looked down and saw a sliver of light. I reached down and recovered a laptop with a mobile phone connected to it by a cable. Sellotaped to the lid was a sheet of A4, a printout of a video grab. It was a close-up of my face from Pete's Basra footage. Would the Firm need to rely on that? They'd have far better mug shots of me on file – but maybe none that were quite so up-to-date.
I opened the top and tapped the keys to take it out of screensaver. A Google Earth map came up. The cursor
