Old Enemies (8 page)

Ruari woke in the bedroom at the back of the farmhouse that had become his cell. He had nothing but an old mattress on a metal-framed bed, which had neither sheets nor cover, not even a pillow. They had taken his bloodstained ski suit from him, but at least the place was well heated. The pain from his nose was still ferocious, but it was as nothing compared to the agonies he felt inside. Fear, anger, self-loathing, nausea, frustration, grief, resentment; they were like demons leaping out from every shadow to pierce him and snatch away any last shred of resistance. Every time he closed his eyes, every time he tried to escape within himself, the images of what had happened came floating back on a floodtide of guilt. There was Mattias, his face staring quizzically at Ruari, his lips twisted in indictment, demanding an explanation for what he had done. Why had he done this? Got him killed? His fault! The face was drained and ghostly, the cheeks sunken, the eyes large and burning with the injustice of it all, then slowly they fell to the hole in his chest, which seemed to be growing like a spider’s web until it had all but eaten the rest of Mattias away. Ruari tried to drag his own gaze away to another corner, but there was no escape. Mattias was everywhere, lurking in every corner, waiting to accuse him.

So Ruari closed his eyes, screwed them firmly shut, looking for comfort, and there was Casey. Beautiful, wonderful Casey, the girl he loved so much and lusted after still more, who had led him to the brink of manhood and whom he had so disastrously let down – no, not let down. Betrayed. That was the word, the only word. He shook his head, trying to free himself from his overwhelming sense of guilt, but still she was there, her face twisted in horror, pleading for him to save her, her soft lips frozen in a silent, endless scream.

He tried to hide still deeper within himself but they pursued him without respite – Casey, Mattias, Cosmin, de Vries, the other guards, all screaming, pounding away at him. They wouldn’t let him go. He curled himself into a foetal ball and in the recesses of his mind he caught distant glimpses of his mother, flitting between the shadows. He shouted at her, calling for her to come closer, but she didn’t seem to hear him so he raised his voice, louder and still louder, until he found himself whimpering upon his rank, stinking mattress, crying out for her. ‘Mummy, Mummy . . .’

Whatever chance Ruari might have, he knew there was none to be had in crawling back to his childhood. He blamed himself for what had happened, but he blamed his captors more. As the furies in his mind drew closer, chasing him down in every hiding place, suddenly he turned on them and gave a roar of inner defiance that caused him to bite deeply into his lacerated lip. The pain jolted him back to the real world as once more blood began smothering his tongue and trickling from the corner of his mouth. And when he looked out once more he saw not Casey or Mattias or his mother, but a guard with stone-dead eyes watching him from the other side of the room, sneering, and for the first time in his life Ruari knew what it was to hate.

The searchers from the mountain rescue service spotted Casey first. She was lying spread-eagled on a rocky outcrop, her pink and sky-blue jacket vivid against the sunlit snow. Access by land was impossible; the rescue helicopter was forced to hover while a crewman was lowered. He found Casey’s head resting on a pillow of snow, her face turned to the heavens, her eyes open, utterly lifeless.

There was no sign of catastrophe in the immediate area, no broken machine, no further bodies, and this caused much confusion at rescue control. How – and why – a sixteen-year-old girl could have fallen from a helicopter didn’t bear thinking about. What sort of calamity was this?

They intensified their search in the surrounding area and a couple of hours later found their answer. Mattias’s body was poking at an unnatural angle from a pile of freshly disturbed snow at the bottom of a ravine. The injuries were pitiful, he had bounced and tumbled down a rock face for many hundreds of feet, but this had clearly been no accident. The small, circular and ferociously angry hole in the centre of his chest told its own story.

In the circumstances, and in the snow, it was a stroke of fair fortune for the Swiss authorities to have found and recovered both bodies. It was the only luck they were going to have as they searched ever wider, and found nothing.

Harry sat in a chair, towel around his neck, facing the mirror. A frown of indecision was beginning to worm its way across his forehead.

‘So what’s it to be, Harry?’ the tall, middle-aged woman enquired, running exploratory fingers through his hair.

‘I dunno, Tessara. What do you think?’

Harry’s hairdresser stepped back and stared at his reflection in the mirror. ‘Let’s find a cuppa something warm first, then we’ll decide.’

Tessara ran a modest but remarkably popular unisex salon on a backstreet of his constituency, from which she dispensed good cheer and endless cups of tea. Like all good listeners she was remarkably well informed about what was going on in the neighbourhood, and Harry would have been happy enough simply to drop by for the local updates, but she also cut his hair more skilfully than any place he’d found in the West End at five times the price. His hairstyle during his army days had inevitably been unadventurous and over-short, and that had become a matter of habit, but the loss of his ear had required a fundamental rethink, and under the guidance of Tessara’s dexterous fingers he had grown it considerably longer in order to cover the scar. But now he had a new ear. A decision needed to be made, and Harry sat staring at himself in the mirror. The first gentle brushstrokes of middle age were beginning to show through. It happened, dammit, one of those turning points. Perhaps it was a sign of what was meant to be, a new hairstyle along with a new life, with Harry once again flying alongside the other geese, being part of the team. The Prime Minister’s offer had been weighing heavily on him, he knew he would very soon have to decide.

He had drifted off. When he opened his eyes once more he was shocked to see what he thought at first was the face of his father staring back at him. He’d been not much older than Harry when he died, leaving behind a wagonload of money and a lifetime of colourful and often exquisitely painful memories. And Harry, of course. Thinking about it all left Harry feeling suddenly vulnerable, not at the thought of death but at what he would leave behind, and who the hell he would leave it to. People assumed he had everything – status, wealth, a reputation more formidable than almost any man of his time, and yet . . .

‘So what’s it to be, my love?’ Tessara demanded, returning from the kitchen with his tea.

‘Your choice. In your hands.’

‘Leave a bit of length in it, if you ask me,’ she replied, holding up a strand. ‘Ride the waves, as my son always says.’

He closed his eyes once more, accepting. He had so many other decisions to make. At least for the next twenty minutes he had the chance to switch off, allow someone else to take the strain.

‘Come on, then, let’s get you washed,’ she declared, wheeling him to the sink.

She had finished with the shampoo and was halfway through administering a head massage when his phone rang. He groaned, swore under his breath. Idiot, should’ve switched the bloody thing off, would do now, whoever it was, even Downing Street. Stuff ‘em. He pulled out the phone and was about to send it to sleep when he noticed the number. He didn’t recognize it. He hesitated, and curiosity did the rest. With a muttered apology to Tessara and considerable caution he put the phone to his new ear.

‘Harry Jones,’ he announced.

‘Hello, Harry.’ The voice was soft, throaty, a little breathless, female. Just as it had always been.

He froze, his contentment stripped like flesh from his bones. It was Terri.

Harry derided himself for his weakness as he dodged the winter puddles that gathered on the paving stones of Notting Hill in the western reaches of central London. What the hell was he doing? Despite the weather he’d decided to walk from his home in Mayfair across the rain-kissed acres of Hyde Park to Terri’s. He needed to clear his thoughts, but he hadn’t got very far with the process by the time he found himself walking up the Portobello Road with its jumble of pastel-fronted urban cottages and antiques emporia. He passed a small dwelling that when it was built had been a dairy farmhouse in the middle of open fields; now its powder-blue wall was covered almost to the point of obliteration with fly posters for wannabe rock bands. He hurried on. Soon he was turning into a more elegant crescent of tall, stucco-fronted Victorian houses backing onto a private garden square that had once formed part of the shortlived Hippodrome racecourse, a notorious track of clinging mud where fortunes were lost before the developers took over and, in unfavourable times, lost fortunes new. It had been an area of slump and slum until the idle classes took over; now it required a fortune simply to park your car on the street.

He didn’t love her, of course, not after all these years, but she still aroused feelings in him – of hurt, anger, shame and, he had to admit, curiosity, like discovering a forgotten scar. She had reappeared to shine a light on part of him that he didn’t understand, one that he didn’t very much like. And now he was almost at her doorstep.

She had once talked to him about her dream of a cottage with honeysuckle and roses climbing over the door, but this place wasn’t anything like that. It was talking millions. Much of the front garden had been given over to a driveway that led to an underground garage, while the rest was hidden behind a thick high hedge for privacy. A Mercedes roadster was parked on the paved standing, a clutter of umbrellas and road atlases spread across the back seat and a pair of woman’s sunglasses – Terri’s sunglasses – dangling from the mirror. Harry found it a short but weary climb up to the front door.

He’d expected a cleaner or nanny, but she answered it herself, her eyes raw from crying. Neither said a word as she led the way up the stairs to a reception room on the first floor overlooking the garden at the rear. Harry hadn’t even taken off his raincoat. She crossed to the window, stared for some while; he saw her body shuddering while she struggled for control. As she remained silent, her arms clasped tightly around her, his eyes danced around the room and soaked up the objects that were the markers of her life – the books, the family photographs, a stack of jigsaws and games on a bottom shelf, the scattering of personal ornaments and heirlooms. A Christmas tree was leaning in one corner, waiting to be set and decorated.

She sighed and moved away from the window. ‘It’s my son, Ruari. I think he’s been kidnapped.’

It was his turn to stand silent for a moment. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Ruari went for a heli-skiing trip from his school in Switzerland four days ago. He hasn’t been seen since. Now they’ve discovered the bodies of two of the friends he was with.’

‘I’m so sorry . . .’

‘One of them had been shot.’

He had come here dragging his own feelings of anger behind him, but now her fear swept those aside. He sat down on the sofa but still she stood, rigid, as though afraid that if she tried to move her legs would give way.