Fifth Column E-Book

David Ewens

• Herausgeber: Grosvenor House Publishing
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Frank Sterling Cases
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 409

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Under extreme duress, publican and ex-spy Mike Strange hands over vital coded information about an impending terrorist incident to Frank Sterling. Straight away, the private investigator is impelled into a fast-moving, unorthodox race against time. With diverse, eccentric and often unexpected support, can Sterling stay ahead of his relentless, violent pursuers and complete his latest mission?

Leseprobe

Contents

About the Author

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Copyright

About the author

David R Ewens worked for many years in the further and adult education sector. He lives and writes in Kent.

Also by David R Ewens in the ‘Frank Sterling’ series

The Flanders Case

Under the Radar

Rotten

Prologue

The compactly built man in the checked shirt approached the large, dark man at an inner table for two in the first floor café at Waterloo station, and they shook hands. The time on the departure boards said 9.30am. It had been a very early start.

‘Long time, Mohamed,’ he said.

‘Yes, Mike. Too long. Thanks for coming up. I didn’t really want to involve you, not after Dubai, but I think my section has been compromised. So you’re the only person I can trust. And it’s a national emergency.’

‘OK,’ said the man called Mike. ‘Let me get some coffee. Then you’d better put me in the picture.’

When he’d settled down, the big man began his story. ‘Seven months ago I penetrated a cell, here in London. I’ve been in the game for a long time, as you know, but I’ve not come across anything quite like this before. It’s what would popularly be termed a terrorist group, but it has no religious or ideological affiliations, and it seems to be for hire. Its members are diverse. The overall leader is a Bosnian Serb and the number two is an Iraqi – a marsh Arab. There are two other Ma’dan, a couple from the Balkans, and some British men – mainly from up north. One of them I’m pretty sure got mixed up in it by mistake. I haven’t had time to find out any more about the parent structure or other cells. You know how it works – one bit of the organisation has no knowledge of any other.

‘I do know this: there’s an event planned on the south coast, what the media would call a terrorist attack. From the little I’ve gathered, my cell is meant to be supporting the one actually carrying out the attack. The details are on these memory sticks – I think.’ The man called Mohamed showed the small rectangular blocks as if they were a poker hand and handed one over. ‘I don’t know for sure because I didn’t have time to do more than copy them. I’ve password-protected them but it’s nothing you haven’t the capability to crack. I’ve added a rendezvous to yours – disguised, but not difficult for you to work out. The codebook for the main details is Muhsin Mahdi’s 1984 edition of One Thousand and One Nights. I think at least two of us are needed to thwart the attack, but if I don’t make it to the rendezvous at least you have the chance to take things forward,’ – he paused for a moment, and shifted uncomfortably in his seat – ‘or the other way round,’ he said softly. ‘You can’t let this fall into the wrong hands.’

‘So we rendezvous somewhere on the south coast, but if one of us doesn’t make it, the other can carry on. It’s all a bit muddled, Mohamed.’

‘I know. It’s a mess. I’ve been under pressure. This is the best I can come up with. If you don’t want to carry on, now’s the time to go.’

‘No, I’m in. You wouldn’t have contacted me if it wasn’t really serious, and I wouldn’t have come up in the first place.’

The briefing, including questions and answers, continued. The men’s heads grew closer together to reflect the intensity and urgency of the conversation. Then the man called Mohamed stopped. His neck stiffened as he looked out over the concourse.

‘It’s worse than I thought, Mike. We’re out of time. My cover’s blown.’

Mike followed the big man’s gaze. At the entrance to the station, a group of about twelve men appeared and fanned out.

‘I’ve left this life behind, Mohamed,’ Mike said. ‘I’m out of practice. So nothing’s guaranteed.’ He paused. He’d thought of something. ‘If I don’t meet you, I might arrange a replacement.’

‘Becky?’ said Mohamed.

‘No, not her. Let’s keep my wife out of it. Frank Sterling. Remember the name. Frank Sterling.’

Mohamed nodded. ‘We must go, Mike. See you soon, my friend, inshaa’Allah.’

He left the table and disappeared down the stairs, reappearing a short while later on the concourse. Mike moved to the window and watched. Mohamed seemed to approach two young men in jeans and anoraks, and Mike saw a wad of money being flashed, and a short, intense conversation. The young men exchanged nods and shrugs. Then they grabbed Mohamed’s arms and frogmarched him towards the Waterloo Road exit and out of sight. To an untrained observer it would have looked as though the young men had made all the running in the brief incident.

Mike watched three men, who had been converging on Mohamed from the open doorway of a newsagent’s on the concourse, hold back, in a state of confusion. One listened intently to the mobile at his ear as he looked up to the balcony. He placed a restraining hand on the arm of the man next to him. Then the whole group stopped and withdrew. From above, a tall man with long dark hair looked down like a prophet surveying the multitudes beneath him, one hand on the railing, the other also holding a mobile to his ear.

Mike got up, strode swiftly to the back of the café and pressed on through the emergency exit, ignoring the baristas’ startled glances. He scurried down the dirty, narrow stairs, onto the concourse and out of an obscure back entrance of the station. At Waterloo East station, reached by a circuitous route of little-used stairs, tunnels and covered walkways, he timed his arrival on Platform C just as the Sandley train, via Ashtonleigh and Dovethorpe, pulled in. But boarding the train at the first carriage right at the far end of the platform, his rusty field craft let him down. At the other end, a young, wiry man in jeans and bomber jacket slipped on unseen just as the doors were closing.

Chapter 1

‘Hell’s bells, Mike, where did you come from?’ said Sterling.

Mike Strange put a slender forefinger to his thin lips and edged over to the window behind Sterling’s desk. Flattened hard against the wall, he peered sideways down into Sandley’s narrow main square. ‘We’ve got about two minutes,’ he said softly, ‘perhaps less. You’re going to have two principal advantages. You’re resourceful, and you know the terrain. They don’t.’

‘What on earth…?’

Strange put his hand up. ‘You need to be quiet and listen, Frank. There are some people after me – determined people – and they’ve caught up with me. They think I’ve gone in the library downstairs. There’ll be blokes out the back in case I try the fire door. When I don’t come out, never mind the fuss, never mind Angela objecting, they’re going to come in for me. Can you get out other than by your stairs?’

‘Through the window at the back of the landing, across the gap between the roofs and down a hooped ladder thing at the back of the Thai restaurant. You could do that yourself. We could go together.’

Sterling looked at his friend, the landlord at his local, backup in a couple of his cases, the man with a shadowy security service past. Normally, Mike Strange was neatly and precisely turned out in a checked shirt, pressed jeans and desert boots kind of way. Now, the signs of distress were plain – the scuffs on his shoes, the shirt front half-hanging over his trousers, but most starkly of all, the unkempt hair and hunted look in his eyes.

‘Won’t work, Frank. There are about twelve of them after me. I’m your decoy. I can stall them for a short while until you can get away.’ He looked at Sterling – a calculating, appraising look – and Sterling saw something like reassurance flit over his friend’s features.

‘So, I’m your decoy,’ Strange said again. ‘And you’ve got the baton.’ He slipped a small white envelope onto Sterling’s desk. ‘There’s a memory stick in there, password- protected but accessible for someone of your… resource-fulness. Where’s your bag?’ He nodded when Sterling produced his small emergency backpack from under the desk and held it up. ‘I don’t know much about this, Frank. There’s been no time to get in and work out what’s on it. But something bad’s going to happen. And now, you’re the only person who can stop it.’

‘Whoa, Mike, this is mad. I’m not ready…’

‘From what I can gather, you need to head south and maybe west. Definitely south and west. Got it? There’ll be a rendezvous, details on the stick, and then something else, something much bigger. The man you’ll meet is good, but sometimes… untrustworthy, so watch it. If you miss him, the codebook is Mahdi’s One Thousand and One Nights. Right, time for us to go.’

Sterling looked at the proffered hand. ‘Things must be bad,’ he said.

The last Frank Sterling, private investigator, saw of his friend was his head and back, as Strange padded off down the rickety stairs to his fate in and beyond the library. Sterling took a deep breath. Just then, nothing made sense, but he was savvy enough to realise already that this wasn’t a game.

After what Strange had said, there was no point in looking out of the office window into the square, and it was probably too dangerous anyway. Sterling closed and locked the door, hooked his bag onto his back and stepped across the bare landing to the sash window at the rear. The catch squeaked as he eased it around, and the lower panel inched upwards only through firm pressure. He had to keep the panel vertically lined up or it snagged lopsidedly in the grooves on either side. His beating heart had added a tremor to his hands that made him clumsy. Adrenaline was for flight, not fiddly small tasks. He bumped the top of the sash with his head and then the bag as he ducked through and onto the channel between the roofs. Although he closed the window, a sharp-eyed pursuer might notice the opened catch on the inside, but Sterling couldn’t do anything about that. He edged along the channel to the end and then at right angles onto a narrow ledge with guttering that led to the Thai restaurant next to the library. This was his designated fire escape route, but he’d never needed it before. Moss, mould and slime underfoot made him cautious. He wasn’t too bad with heights – enclosed spaces spooked him more – but he didn’t want to let Mike down by falling off and breaking a leg only a few seconds into his commission.

The hooped ladder clanged as Sterling slipped into the small courtyard of the restaurant. It was eleven o’clock – a quiet time before the lunchtime rush, but anyway, Priawh and her family knew him well enough, and what he did, so they’d have been ready to accept an explanation – an emergency, a small fire… The door into a small covered passageway was unlocked and he slipped through unaccosted. He paused in the gloom. The bricks on either side were damp, and a strange aromatic blend of exotic cooking and mouldiness infiltrated his nostrils. Everything had happened so quickly and it felt far-fetched. He needed to think. He leant against the cool wall.

Mike Strange wasn’t the type to mess about, so it certainly wasn’t a hoax. He didn’t really do humour. His wife, Becky, also an ex-member of a never-disclosed branch of the British security services, balanced things out in that department. Mike was more of a literalist. He was an action man too. When Sterling had been in trouble in Flanders, it was Mike who had done the rescue and got him back in good order to England, and likewise provided key help and support both in the Bawdsey radar case and the viper’s nest of Earlsey Tech. He was loyal and straight, and if he said something was so, it was so.

But there was something else – something much less comforting – the fact that Mike, coolness and competence personified, was clearly rattled and dishevelled. It meant that the people after him were skilled, and if they had hunted down the resourceful and expert Mike Strange, what chance did Sterling have? He would have liked to consult his friend Angela Wilson, who ran the library beneath his office. She’d talk sense, but he knew that was out of the question. He tightened the grip on his backpack and edged to the end of the passageway. There was no choice – it was south and west for him, as directed.

Strange had given Sterling a bit of time. He’d slip out of Market Street past his office, down No Name Street and across the road to the Guildhall, where the buses left from, and get one south to Deeping. He’d find out about the ‘baton’ on the way. But before that, some reconnaissance. As he peered left out of the passageway, his heart lurched. Although he expected to see something, it was still a shock to find two men stationed on one of the forks out of Market Street, and two on the other. Glancing right, he made out another at the other end, and, most morale-sapping of all, one at the bottom of Milk Alley, almost opposite his office and next to Freddie Henderson’s greengrocers. Every exit from the little square was covered. Well, perhaps not every exit…

He’d stick to his original plan. With luck, the people after Strange had not yet picked him up from the library, or they’d taken him but knew nothing of his meeting with Sterling. Sterling adjusted the bag on his shoulder and set off past his office. He was just someone finished with a bit of business in Sandley and strolling out of the commercial centre of town – maybe to go back home on the outskirts, maybe to go to the old cattle market car park beyond the Guildhall to get his car, or maybe to catch a bus in front of the Tourist Information office. He tried to adopt a nonchalant manner, but felt wooden and awkward as if he was in front of a camera.

The wiry young man in jeans and bomber jacket at the link between Market Street and No Name Street had a mobile phone glued to his ear. He was pacing back and forth on the pavement in a short two-metre pattern, and getting increasingly agitated. When Sterling was five metres away on the same pavement, the man looked up, straight at him. In his small, sharp eyes something flickered.

The bus stop at the Guildhall was instantly out of the question. So was Milk Alley. So were all the other exits. Sterling stopped, checked the road and plunged over it and off into the churchyard. It wasn’t even a change of plan – just a visceral reaction to what he knew was imminent danger. Who dares wins – he had his first slice of luck when he heard the squeal of brakes and furious beeping of a horn and glanced back as the young man with sharp eyes leapt back from in front of a large white Range Rover. With a few seconds’ start, Sterling scuttled around the path by the side of the church and up to the gap between the ancient flint walls at the St Peter’s Street end. The young man would be close behind, perhaps at the point of the path just around the corner of the church, only marginally held up by phoning his associates to alert them to Sterling’s escape.

There was an odd hissing sound and then a puff. Just by Sterling’s hand, dust rose into the clear, bright, April air and a piece of flint from the wall spun jerkily away. Christ. He was closer than Sterling imagined. And wasn’t that a gun with a silencer? Sweat pricked up all over Sterling’s frame as he ducked to the right of the wall and momentarily out of sight.

You know the terrain. They don’t. Sterling needed to use that now. Almost opposite was Holy Ghost Alley, one of the narrow passages that led through to the High Street near the barbican on the quay. He slipped into that and walked briskly down the narrow twists and turns. His pursuer would surely not be far behind. The young man with sharp eyes would reach St Peter’s Street, find no sign of Sterling in either direction, see the entrance to the alleyway and conclude that it was as likely an escape route as any other.

The young man’s associates would be monitoring all traffic, foot and vehicle, around the centre of the town. Sterling knew he couldn’t just walk out of here. He had to find another way of slipping the net. As he burst out of Holy Ghost Alley just by the Masonic Lodge, it came to him. The river. But first he had to get away. He turned left towards the barbican, the old toll bridge and the river. Escape from here was too obvious. Instead, a few metres along he turned left again up Seven Post Alley, doubling back up to St Peter’s Street. He felt himself getting more assured and confident after the initial shocks, and the fact that the entrance to this second alley was barely visible even from the other side of the road gave him heart.

At the mouth of the alley, a slit in the middle of St Peter’s Street, Sterling again stopped and peered out, and, as he did, listened for footsteps behind him, which would be amplified by the narrow brick walls. Just at that moment, it was all clear. He turned right for a few metres down St Peter’s Street and then turned right again into Three Kings Yard. This was the trickiest bit. He felt a nag of doubt overlaying his fear. Although the end of this alley went into a sharp bend and ended up in the Strand and not the High Street, perhaps he was being too clever. Winding back and forth and doubling back twice might just lead him into the arms of the people after him. But he needed to get to the river further down from the quay and this was the best option.

In the Strand there were thirty risky metres before he could get into the bend that hid the pavement from people looking down it from the town. He scurried past the Beach Hut Café, a favourite lunchtime destination, waving distractedly as Cherry Smith, the owner, looked out and recognised him. Twenty metres, ten metres… at every moment he expected a shout, a flurry of running feet, perhaps even another silenced gunshot. He felt his sphincter relaxing. ‘Not now,’ he muttered as he strove to get a grip, and succeeded… for the moment. Then he was around the bend and out of sight. He passed a few Georgian town houses, and on the opposite side of the road St Mary’s Church, adapted now for concerts and other community events. He contemplated ducking in there to draw breath and look at the envelope Mike Strange had passed onto him. There’d be a bit of peace and quiet, but on the other hand he’d lose time and was scared he might be cornered. He plunged on and then stumbled right into the car park at Bazen Salts, abutting the river half a mile upstream from Sandley’s main quay.

The warren of Sandley’s central medieval grid would have left the pursuing strangers completely confused. Although for the moment he was out in the open, Sterling felt safer than he had since the adventure started.

Some of the riverbank on the Sandley side was partitioned off by temporary metal fencing panels with stabilisers. Behind it, workmen in hi-vis jackets and safety helmets moved around on the nearly completed flood defences. A JCB mini-digger with tracks jerked busily about, as if in an old 16mm film, shifting soil towards the new barriers. In the distance upriver, Sterling could see the pharma company complex on which Sandley depended for its economic good health. Next to the car park a man in white overalls on a ladder was painting the eaves of the cricket pavilion, and beyond that Sterling could hear the chirrup of an unidentified bird in the nature reserve. A seagull rested stock-still and hunched up, its beak in its wing feathers, on one leg like a flamingo, in the roped-off cricket square that glinted emerald-green in the sunshine.

Workaday Sandley – but of course it wasn’t, not for Mike Strange and not for Sterling. He couldn’t waste time on ridiculous contrasts – the ordinariness here and the silent menace behind him. Moving beyond the fencing, he cast his eyes over the river. That’s where his salvation lay.

Chapter 2

Sterling would have recognised the irony. Four hundred metres downriver, the Bell and Tower Hotel looked over the Sandley’s quayside, and in the balcony suite a man sat on a sofa peeling an apple. His dark-blue suit looked freshly pressed and immaculately cut, and his black shoes shone in the soft hotel light. His manicured hands managed the knife and apple deftly. A napkin rested next to the plate onto which the peel unfurled in one unbroken roll. Although he was elegant, his jowls and neck were thick and his frame stocky.

Another man, tall, thin and fierce, with a long Middle Eastern face and bright, dark eyes, stood with his hands behind his back, his back to the window. His black hair fell over his collar, and his dark beard covered his neck. A suit hung loosely from his narrow body and his shoes were worn and scuffed.

‘Go on, Irfan,’ said the seated man.

‘We’ve picked up the man Strange,’ said Irfan Zahra. ‘We had to… subdue him on the way to the van until we could get him to the secure base. We’ve found nothing on him so far. But…’.

The senior man, Kurjak, paused from peeling his apple and looked up.

‘… We thought he went into the town library. Now we think he went upstairs – there’s a small office up there – to a private detective. Strange may have known this man.’ Zahra blinked and coughed. Behind his back his hands twisted. ‘Strange could have passed the package on.’

The senior man tossed the apple and knife onto the plate. The peel broke. ‘But you don’t know,’ he said.

‘The detective was not there when we went up,’ said Zahra. ‘Rashad thinks he went out by a window at the back. By the time he phoned the others in the street, the man was getting away. Nevin spotted him.’ Zahra found something on the ceiling that required his attention. ‘You know that Nevin can be a bit of a hothead. He fired his gun in the churchyard.’

‘Spotted him. Fired his gun,’ sighed the senior man. ‘Speak to Nevin. We can’t afford an incident.’

‘This town is like a souk. All the alleys and small streets.’ Now there was something interesting in the carpet.

‘So he got away. What’s his name, this man?’

‘Frank Sterling. We don’t know anything about him.’

‘Have Asif find out. Put a cordon around the town. Find a picture and circulate his details to all the followers. When Strange is ready, begin the interrogation.’

‘All these things are in hand, Excellency.’

‘Good. We don’t have long, Irfan. There can be no mistakes.’ Kurjak picked up the apple and knife and resumed his peeling. Zahra withdrew from the suite, went down the corridor and then unlocked and entered a more modest room towards the back of the building.

A slight young man wearing an outsized pair of black-framed spectacles and headphones was hunched over a laptop open on the small desk at the window. Instead of the river, the view was of the brick wall of the house next to the hotel. Electrical equipment lay in various states of assembly and use around the room, which, together with the figure at the laptop, gave an impression of a teenager’s set-up without the pop-star wall posters.

‘Anything?’ said Zahra.

The young man took a headphone from one of his ears and propped it on the scalp above. ‘He’s disappeared. No one has seen him. He might have ducked into one of the houses near the square, but Nevin didn’t think he’d have time to knock and get in.’

‘Who is he, Asif?’

‘Well it’s weird,’ said the young man. ‘He’s a private investigator, but he hasn’t got a website. You’d think, in this day and age…’.

‘What else, Asif?’

The young man refocused on the screen. ‘We know where his office is. I’ve found out where he lives, which is close by, but he couldn’t get to that because we’d blocked the roads off – unless there’s a back way, which I don’t think there is.’ Pictures flashed up, as if to demonstrate the hermetic nature of Market Street. ‘He’s had one or two high-profile cases.’ Pictures of Sandley were replaced by newspaper reports, some local, one or two national. ‘He helped a girl in a wheelchair to find her grandmother’s killer and ruined a small electronic communications company in the process. He smashed a kind of criminal gang operating in a college about twelve miles from here. It looks like someone has ghosted a story of his cases.’

‘Credit cards? Facebook? Mobile number? Car? Car especially. We can’t let him get out of here.’

‘It doesn’t look like he’s got a car.’ Asif looked at the tall, fierce, scruffy man. ‘This is one odd bloke, brother. Lives and works locally, no web presence to speak of. No car. How can he run a detective business?’

The tall man Zahra frowned. ‘Maybe that’s how. Keep looking, and update me regularly.’

The young man readjusted his headphones and turned back to the laptop.

Zahra eased softly from the room, padded along the corridor and slipped down the stairs to the car park at the back of the hotel. He got in his car and headed out to the bridge over the river to Earlsey, nodding to his men stationed on the quay, who formed part of the cordon around the town.

Beyond former RAF married quarters, a sign on the right indicated half a mile to Stonham quay and Stonham café further down on the river. Zahra kept going, driving sedately past Averton Generator Hire, and then Stonham Garage, with its eclectic collection of aging cars in front of the servicing shop, optimistically priced even to Zahra, who took no interest in such things. Pride of place was taken by a top-of-the-range yellow Saab coupé whose dilapidation even a wax and clean could not disguise. Just after a printworks and a shed construction business, Eagle Sheds, and before the pharma plant and offices began, he turned right into a compound once designed for making fireworks. He pulled the silver Mercedes around the front administration block, where the ‘Cosmo Pyrotechnics Limited’ sign was still faintly legible above the warped, decaying fascia, and parked in a space hidden from the road, next to a large black Ford van with tinted windows at the front and no windows at all at the back.

It hadn’t been difficult to ‘hire’ one of the brick blockhouses in the compound for the few days it was required. There had been no talk of contracts in the telephone conversation with the letting agent. Zahra had sent a British subordinate with the cash, and the young man had come back with the key to the gates and the blockhouse. If he’d given it any thought, Zahra would have concluded that the hefty roll of money, an eyebrow-raising amount for such a short time, would stay in the agent’s pocket and go nowhere near the site owner. Cash, a lot but not too much, eroded curiosity. No paper trail meant that if anything went wrong, the agent could deny all knowledge and responsibility. It was the same the world over, in the developed world or in any failed state. There were rules, and the rules were circumvented by money and negotiation.

As he reclosed the galvanised steel gate, Zahra looked calmly over to the road. Three hikers in sturdy boots, one with a hiking stick, marched resolutely past in broken step towards Sandley, hunched over under the weight of their rucksacks. At the generator hire outfit, a forklift truck darted busily back and forth in front of the plant entrance, shifting materials in a pattern that was hard to fathom.

Zahra walked around the corner to one of the blockhouses at the back. That each was separate, so accidental explosions during firework making would be isolated and contained, was useful to him. He rapped softly on the solid wooden door, waiting and watching as the sun glinted on Stonham lake, an expanse of water between the industrial-pharma complex and the river, and a ruffled-looking black bird with a wide wing span and a long neck drifted down and splash-landed. It was good that it was a weekday, and therefore there was no activity at the sailing club over the fence and on the far shore.

A burly, pale-skinned man with a long beard like Zahra’s and a slight cast to his small eyes opened up and peered out through the sliver between door and jamb, recognising Zahra and stepping aside so he could enter.

When Cosmo Pyrotechnics moved their manufacturing to the Philippines, they stripped their premises of everything. The blockhouse, about the size of an average sitting room but with a higher ceiling, was completely windowless. The concrete floor, a dull grey-white, was empty apart from a solid wooden chair with arms like a primitive throne against a wall, a structure in the shape of an operating table in the middle of the room, and various pieces of equipment clustered in one of the far corners – plastic jerrycans of water; some groceries; cushions and mattresses; a couple of folding chairs. Light in the dark, musty, damp room came from a mixture of cargo and trawler lamps dotted around the room in each corner, the electric power supply having long gone. There was an atmosphere of hurry and improvisation.

Zahra approached the hooded man slumped in the chair, bound to it by his arms and legs. ‘When will he come round?’ he said, turning his head. A fourth man approached from the other corner of the room, his shadows from each of the lamps long and short, sharp and blurred, and all overlapping.

‘Soon,’ said the man. He was as tall as Zahra and had the same build. His face had a hangdog air, and his eyes were expressionless.

‘We don’t have much time. Speed it up. I don’t care how.’

The man went over to the chair, removed the hood, pulled Strange’s hair back and slapped him hard on each cheek. Strange’s head lolled and his eyes fluttered as he came to.

‘He’s ready,’ said the hangdog man twenty minutes later.

Zahra took the dusty folding chair he’d been sitting on and carried it over in front of the tied-up man.

‘You know what we want, Mr Strange.’

Strange turned towards him with a faraway look in his still-glazed eyes. A snail’s trail of spittle, tinged pink with blood, crawled down the side of his mouth.

‘Don’t make us go onto the next stage, Mr Strange. We know all about CIA methods – from personal experience – and how effective they are. Two simple questions to begin: Where are the instructions that were stolen from us? And of course, closely linked to that, where is the renegade Mohamed Husain?’

‘I… I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. I just run a pub.’

‘Don’t insult us, Mr Strange. We know your background in British Intelligence. We know about your service here in Europe and in the Middle East. We even know about your previous… encounter… with interrogation. They say you can only go through it once, twice at most. Any more, and, well, things fall apart. The trembling, the nightmares, the bouts of sweating, the fear of enclosed spaces. Every kind of fear that never goes away.’

‘I’m just a publican.’

‘Enough,’ said Zahra. ‘We suspected Mohamed Husain. We watched him meet you at Waterloo station. We even know what you ordered in the coffee shop. It was clever of Husain to lose his brothers, but we did not lose you – all the way back to this insignificant little town. I could show you the footage. Be sensible, Mr Strange.’ Zahra got up from the folding chair, leaned against the wall next to the tied-up man and clasped his hands. ‘I could go over the river and fetch your wife,’ he said softly. ‘OK, the pub is shut up right at this moment, but we could just wait. You’d not be the only one who would suffer.’

Strange tipped his head forward. A very astute observer might have seen the downturn of lips and flicker of eyes – the very briefest of tells, immediately hidden.

Zahra sighed. ‘We have no more time, Mr Strange.’ He nodded to the jailer-torturers. Roughly, the two of them undid the bindings and dragged Strange, writhing and struggling, to the table-board in the middle of the room, onto which they re-strapped him on his back. Zahra’s lip curled as he found himself compelled to assist in subduing the prisoner.

Hangdog man tilted the table-board about twenty degrees using a ratchet device under the board at Strange’s feet so that his face dropped down. Strange emitted a loud, low moan – memory-laden and full of dread – which was immediately absorbed by the thick brick walls.

Squint-eyed man took a cloth like a tea towel, thoroughly steeped it in water and laid it over Strange’s face. The moan turned into a kind of whimper. Strange’s body convulsed as he wrestled with the binding on his arms and legs.

Hangdog man acknowledged Zahra’s nod and started pouring water from a jerrycan over the cloth on Strange’s face. The water saturated the cloth and almost immediately, Strange gagged and jerked on the board. The torturer’s lips moved as he counted the seconds. After twenty, he stopped pouring and removed the cloth. The other torturer checked Strange’s mouth for signs of vomit from stomach into lungs, whilst Strange continued to jerk and convulse, his eyes staring wildly.

Zahra loomed over him and spoke softly. ‘No more “I just run a pub”, Mr Strange. Answer the questions and it all stops. Where is the memory stick? Did you give it to the private detective Frank Sterling?’

Strange nodded vigorously.

‘Did you open it?’

‘I tried to – on the train back to Sandley,’ said Strange hoarsely. ‘But it was password-protected. I didn’t have time or tools to get in… I swear.’

‘What did you tell the man Sterling?’

‘Get out of Sandley and sort it out.’

‘Where did you tell him to go?’

‘North. London. That’s where Mohamed Husain still is.’

‘Ah. Mohamed Husain. Yes, I was coming back to him. London is a big place, Mr Strange.’

‘I don’t know any more than that. I knew him from… before. He found out where I was and contacted me. I agreed to meet him in Waterloo. I didn’t want to know where he was staying. It was safe that way… safer for me.’ Strange was speaking quickly now. His voice had acquired a quaver and its pitch was higher.

In the background, hangdog man let drips from the jerrycan splash on the hard, cold floor.

Zahra asked a few more questions, and Strange replied in the same half-panicky way, and then the interrogator motioned to squint-eyed man to join him at the door. ‘For the moment, keep him tied up and conscious,’ Zahra said under his breath. ‘Take no chances. We’ll need to ask him more questions. What happens after that… well, we’ll see. I’m going to check on progress in the town.’

Squint-eyed man nodded and unbolted the heavy door, and Zahra stepped out into the spring air, narrowing his eyes to the brightness after the gloom within. Over on Stonham Lake, the black-feathered bird had gone. So had the man Sterling and the renegade Mohamed Husain – for the moment. Zahra scowled and walked to his car.

Chapter 3

Along the riverbank there seemed few possibilities. Perhaps a river-borne escape was not such a good idea after all. Sterling cast his eye over the motley collection of yachts, cruisers, barges and tubs moored on his side. It wasn’t those that piqued his interest so much as any tenders that might be attached to them. What he was looking for had to be something sturdy, and not in bad nick, preferably a rubber dinghy with an outboard. He spotted something, attached to a fifteen-metre-long boat apparently designed to look like a miniature steamship, or even a small ironclad. He stole a glance right and left. It was lunchtime on Friday, and there was no one in the car park behind him or on the boats in the river below. The workmen on the flood barriers were busy on their duties. Sterling hopped over the new red-brick flood defence wall and approached the ironclad. The tender wasn’t a rubber dinghy, but otherwise met his criteria, and there was a bonus – as well as an outboard, rowlocks were fitted and oars lined the gunwales. He stepped from bank to boat and wobbled as it bobbed underneath him.

He’d noticed before that the tide was going out, and that would suit him very well. Sandley quay and the town behind it were situated at the base of a watery horseshoe. The river came down from Cantcester in the northwest and then looped back on itself and into the North Sea at Pegsill Bay four miles up to the northeast. It was better for him to go with the current four miles north and east to the sea rather than north and west up to the old power station and Roman fort the same distance the other way. Then, if he chose, he could hug the coast and go south to Deeping and beyond. He freed the painter and used an oar to poke the boat away from the bank. It was best – quieter and less conspicuous – to start the outboard when he was out of sight of Sandley around the bend, using the oars first. Clumsily, he fumbled them into the rowlocks and paddled the left one to turn the boat in the right direction. He felt a surge of optimism. He knew the terrain and was thinking creatively. If he kept calm, this could go well – this bit anyway. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d rowed, but the knack came back easily. The danger point was coming up as he approached the bridge that joined Sandley and the barbican at the end to the Isle of Earlsey. If the men hunting him decided to look outward from their cordon, and not into the town…

The combination of oars and current made progress downriver satisfyingly quick. As he hunched over, facing in the opposite direction and glancing occasionally to the bow to avoid collisions, he caught sight of a silver Mercedes coming over the bridge from Earlsey. In the damp, dark arch he heard the car above him. On the other side, by the barbican, two men loitered casually, looking along the quay to the east and down the High Street to the south. If they turned to the river and spotted him, there wasn’t much they could do – except shoot him of course – but even then it was broad daylight, there was a tidy bustle of people about and he had something they probably needed. He looked down into the bottom of the boat where a small puddle vibrated above the current. The ostrich act – avoidance of eye contact as the boat made its way into the strangers’ line of vision below the quayside – was strangely comforting.

Just before the bend took him out of sight, he couldn’t resist looking up to Sandley. There was no one running along the path extending from the quayside before it veered off inland. No one was frantically jabbering into a mobile and looking downriver. There were no shouts and gesticulations – only the gentle slapping of the water on the hull, the dull methodical splash of the oars, and the tinkling Greensleeves tune of an ice cream van, getting fainter by the minute as the van came onto the quay from Knightrider Street and parked by the jetty.

Then Sterling could no longer see the town at all. On his left, the land stretched off towards the sea coast beyond the northernmost jut of the golf course. On his right, in the river’s horseshoe, a series of ramshackle boatyards, jetties and ramps, complete with another gallimaufry of vessels, clung untidily to the river between the mudflats emerging as the tide continued to edge out. Sterling had to work hard to keep the boat on course through the kinks and bends that would finally end at the North Sea three and a half miles ahead.

Now it was time to take stock and get the outboard working. He aimed for the jetty that he was next approaching, and the boat bumped awkwardly against the old tyres suspended over the side. He only just managed to stow the right oar in time before impact, which bounced him out of his seat and almost caused him to lose the other oar. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, but then, realising what he’d managed, a wave of euphoria swept over him. Mike Strange had made the right choice for handing over the baton. Sterling had been resourceful, and self-congratulation blended with exhilaration. But as the boat bumped and chafed against the jetty, other thoughts and questions began to jostle, principally, ‘What next?’

Through a gap between a dilapidated boatshed and a rusting hulk supported on a crisscross of boat stands he could see the old Cosmo Pyrotechnics sign high at the back of the compound, and beyond it the pharma company. He knew that Stonham Lake was between the boatyard and the industrial park beyond.

He weighed the options. He could abandon the tender here, and with it the idea of a sea trip south, but then he could only make his way back to Sandley by road through Stonham, coming out at the junction just before the bridge back into the town. What was the point of that? It was just back towards the lion’s den. On the east side of the river, opposite the jetty, there was no mooring and no easy climb up the bank. From memory, the country that side was difficult, full of ditches, dykes and scree until up to the golf course – and it was still pretty close to the town.

It looked as if his original plan was still the best – into the sea at Pegsill Bay and then south, hugging the coastline. The outboard looked old but in pristine condition. He hadn’t used one before, but helpfully the starting instructions were on a plate on the casing. ‘Shift lever to neutral,’ he muttered as he searched. ‘Engine probably cold, so choke out a bit… Turn hand grip on throttle to start setting…’. He was flummoxed for a moment and then found it. ‘Find resistance on start rope… and then PULL.’ The motor turned over and did not catch, but on the third jerk, it whined into life. ‘Houston, we’re go.’ Sterling experimented with the hand throttle and then eased the boat back into the river. As he slipped the shift lever to ‘Forward’ the dinghy picked up speed and his euphoria returned.

The boat glided serenely along while Sterling experimented with the throttle and the steering. He calculated that it was about three miles into the bay. The fumes from the pharma plant came down on the wind – sulphurous and irritating on the back of his throat. Then the plant itself hove into view on the north bank, a vast proliferation of silvery pipes and scaffold and tanks and chimneys glinting and glittering in the sunshine, emitting an enormous belch of chemicals from behind the dark-green metal fencing that was topped with barbed wire and encroached right up to the waterside. On the other side, nature held full sway as an egret flew languidly from a reed bed and Sterling saw other birds amongst the mudflats – cormorants and waders – that he had not seen for years.

Up ahead and around a bend, he could hear the regular ticking-over of an approaching boat engine and then the boat itself appeared. He recognised it straight away – the Orca – run by Captain Barry Cavendish, the Sandley harbour-master, who ran tourists from the quay to see the grey seal colony up at Pegsill. Captain Cavendish, usually known as CC or Cap, was an occasional drinking companion in Mike Strange’s pub, the Cinque Port Arms – a cheerful, witty, profane man with a fund of stories about Sandley quay, the river and the startling things tourists got up to. It didn’t seem to matter if some of them were apocryphal, and were changed or exaggerated in the telling and retelling.

Sterling hadn’t realised how large the Orca was when it was moored at Sandley quay. Now he did, as it bore down on him. He swung the outboard handle violently to the left and the dinghy sheered dutifully to the right.

‘What the f…’ shouted Captain Cavendish as he saw the obstacle in the middle of the river as he rounded the bend. ‘Strewth.’ His head, and the yachting cap with Sandley’s coat of arms above the peak, ducked out of sight below the Orca’s garish blue and white striped canopy and a moment afterwards the engine went into a reverse whine, churning up turbid, grey, muddy water underneath it. The bump of the collision, the bow of the Orca against the middle of the dinghy, was enough to send Sterling sprawling, but enough momentum had been lost by both boats that there was little obvious damage.

‘You bloody idiot,’ bellowed Cavendish, ‘why weren’t you on the starboard side? Don’t you know the rules of the sea? Jesus.’ He shook his head. ‘Unbelievable.’

Sterling picked himself up from the bottom of the dinghy. ‘Oops,’ he said. He smiled slyly. ‘Sorry, Cap.’

‘Frank,’ said Cavendish. ‘Frank bloody Sterling. I might have guessed.’ But the smile hadn’t mollified him yet. ‘What the fucking hell are you doing on the wrong side of the fucking river in Jimmy Heselthwaite’s dinghy, heading out to sea?’

Sterling weighed his choices. He could be vague and come up with a cock and bull story about a short expedition to practise his boat craft, with Jimmy’s blessing of course. Or something. Or he could tell the truth, or an abridgement of it, and hope that he could rely on Cavendish’s discretion. There was no choice really. The man wasn’t stupid.

‘I’m kind of on the lam, Cap. I had to get out of Sandley, and this was the only way available at the time.’

‘Does Jimmy know you’ve got his boat?’

Sterling made a face. ‘No. I’m looking after it though. It’s not nicking, it’s borrowing.’

‘Without him knowing,’ stated Cavendish.

‘Emergency,’ countered Sterling.

‘Well, I suppose I know all about your emergencies, Frank. Your various cases have put Sandley on the map.’

‘And this is another one, Cap. Look, if you could tell Jimmy Heselthwaite I’ve got his boat and it’s OK, that would be great. If there’s any damage, I’ll pay for it. I’m not going far, just away from Sandley by unexpected means, as it were.’ Talk of the boat and damage triggered a thought. Who was going to pay for his time and effort on this little jaunt – and danger money for that matter? He remembered the puff of flint in St Peter’s churchyard. A gunshot and a chase in sleepy Sandley.