She broke into a loose, comfortable run as she pursued him. No danger of Kai doing that, she thought.
Then she heard a car coming up the track heading straight towards her. Shit, she thought.
Hanlon glanced around for cover. The ditch by the side of the road was her best bet. The bare hillside where the trees had been cut down was no good – there was no hiding place and she would be immediately visible. The right-hand side had an unclimbable bank about two metres high where the road had been cut into the hillside.
The ditch was surprisingly deep, as Hanlon discovered when she jumped into it and immediately sank into mud, ooze and water. Her shoulder was level with the road and she crouched down low, pressing her body into the side of the trench. She would be invisible to anyone looking out of a car window.
The car was very close now. She heard it change gear as it jolted its way along. She felt, rather than saw, it pass above her and she risked putting her head up to have a quick look. It was a light blue BMW 4 x 4.
She waited a minute or so, then clambered out. Whoever was driving had to be meeting Kai. He wouldn’t be up here unless he had a reason. She had to find out who it was. She started jogging again up the track. Half a mile or so further, the road started to dip down towards a valley with a wide burn running along its floor. There was a cottage or bothy, a small whitewashed stone-built place with a red corrugated-iron roof. The BMW was parked in front of it; there was now no sign of Kai. Whoever was driving the 4 x 4 would be inside with him.
She studied the situation for a few minutes and decided to approach the bothy via the stream bed. Its banks should, with luck, hide her from view. Hanlon turned off the track and cut a diagonal across the fallen branches and timber so she would arrive at the burn a few hundred metres upstream from the cottage.
Closer to the burn there were tall rhododendron bushes, yet more of the ubiquitous alder trees and the occasional silver birch. Hanlon hoped that these would screen her if either of the two people inside looked out of the small window.
Traversing the ground was every bit as unpleasant as it had been before, made worse by the need to keep a low profile. Moving in a kind of half-crouch to reduce her silhouette, scraping her skin on sharp bits of wood, plagued, and bitten several times by horseflies, she eventually made it to the stream and slid down its steep bank, so she was now invisible from the cottage a hundred metres or so downstream.
Hanlon walked carefully and quietly down the stream bed towards the bothy. The peat-brown water came up to her knees and was bitterly cold. The bottom of the burn was covered with stones that were treacherously slippery – she nearly lost her footing several times – and every so often there were large, smooth boulders that she had to skirt.
She was pleased with the route she had chosen. Down here, in the gully, she was below the sight of Kai or the other person even if they looked out of the window. Idly she wondered what they would do if they saw her. Who was it with Kai? Her money would have been on Big Jim, but why would he want to meet Kai away up here? Why not in his office? Ditto Harriet. Maybe it was his dealer, his coke supplier.
If they saw her, it could be dangerous. Kai was a volatile man, she’d both heard and seen it, Big Jim violent by repute. And, if she was right, one of them was a killer. She knew exactly what she would do if that happened: run. Hanlon ran marathons; she had seen Kai struggle to walk up the road. She would set off across the acres of ruined hillside, back to the path that led from the loch to the road. Catch me if you can. But she thought there was little chance of that happening, if she was careful. Ten minutes later she was level with the house. The stream ran within a couple of metres of its walls. She scrambled halfway up the bank and looked over the edge.
As she had guessed, the wall of the cottage was just a few metres away. The window, its surrounding stone lintels picked out in black, was open. Hanlon pulled herself up out of the stream onto the level ground and ran lightly to shelter behind a pile of logs that had been cut for the fire, stacked up by the wall and partially covered by a tarpaulin. She was now only a metre or so from the open window.
The bar manager was smoking another number. Voices from inside carried to her along with Kai’s weed smoke that drifted out, polluting the pristine hillside air. Kai’s guttural, harsh Glaswegian accent and another whose educated, west-coast tones she knew well. You! she thought, a sharp satisfaction welling up inside her, I knew it.
‘When is the next delivery due?’
‘Next Friday. Three kilos of Charlie… So you let the Hart brothers go?’
‘Sure. We had no reason to hold them, more importantly, don’t want to frighten the horses, eh? What about Big Jim?’
‘He’s cool, Murdo.’
In her imagination she could see Murdo’s handsome face facing Kai’s across a table as they talked. ‘I heard that Kai had made a big-time connection with a Scottish coke importer. I heard too that he was paying the police off tae look the other way.’ That was
