The Purple Contract (33 page)

He cruised slowly back northwards, watching for the bay he had spotted a few minutes ago. Here. He chopped the throttle and glided the boat alongside what appeared to be the remains of some wartime slipway. Ashore, red brick structures still stood among the weeds, a few seemingly well-preserved while others were little more than rubble. More discarded remnants of Orkney's place in world history. He cut the engine and sat there for several minutes, listening and waiting. Beyond the mournful cry of an unseen seabird, there was total silence.

Good.

Hollis hopped over the side and moored the dory to a badly rusted ring-bolt at the bow and a broken block of stone at the stern. Belatedly, he remembered to leave some slack in the lines to allow for the rise and fall of the tide. It would surely be safe enough here. In any case, it was the best he could do. He hauled the rucksack out of the boat and opened it, stuffing three sandwiches, a can of cola and a small pair of binoculars into his pockets. Then he dropped the sack into a hollow in a nearby embankment, pulling a tattered piece of corrugated iron across to conceal it completely.

Satisfied, he set off to explore the ruins and find somewhere out of the wind where he could wait for evening and keep an eye on things. He whistled to himself as he walked, things were going quite well. Quite well.

 
 
 
 
20

 
Friday 23 August, 2013

The young girl pulled a face then turned her back and glowered, almost a caricature of the sulky child. She said something too, but the wind noise drowned her out. The boy was close now, approaching stealthily from behind the seat and taking great care to give no sign. Freezing whenever she moved but knowing that she wouldn't keep her head turned away for much longer.

The boy knew time was running out.

Two arms appeared around the seat, low down and hidden behind her back. Still she suspected nothing. Stillness for a moment, then his arms jerked forward and inward, jabbing at the girl's sides. She squealed and whirled round...

Sergeant Davis pressed the
pause
button and said: 'Six o'clock.'

'Christ! Are you involved too?' PC Weeks asked.

'No fear! Somebody has to mind the store while you youngsters go on the school trip.'

'Oh my God! Six am! What on earth are we going to do on Hoy at six am?'

'Turn over every flat stone I expect. John Stewart is looking after our lot, but a DCI from Edinburgh came up yesterday, he's the man in overall charge.' Davis swivelled the seat round to face the screen again and restarted the lost video camera’s playback. 'So let's not give him cause for complaints, eh?'

A horn tooted outside. Weeks glanced out the window and looked for his hat. 'Right, that's us off.'

Davis raised a hand in acknowledgment and settled back in his seat to watch the screen. Fifteen minutes later he was getting bored. The amazing quality of modern hand-held video cameras left him singularly unmoved. It never crossed his mind to give any thought to the technological magic they routinely performed at the push of a button. He sighed and pressed
play
again. He felt he knew this family intimately but so far there had been nothing to identify them, or their car, or the place where they were living in Orkney.

The two youngsters cavorted on the shingle. 'Rackwick,' Davis muttered, recognizing the place immediately. He watched the boy drop the floppy section of seaweed and shook his head wryly when the lad wiped his hand on his trousers. 'Kids!'

His experienced eye took in the hunched figure of the man coming along the beach, but without particular interest. Davis looked over his shoulder when he heard the door behind him open. A tallish man in a roll-neck sweater stood at the desk uncertainly. Without turning round Davis felt for the
pause
button, pushed it and got up to deal with the caller.

On the flat LCD monitor screen, Mike Hollis' face gazed unseeingly out into the office, frozen in the act of walking past the children on Rackwick beach. Less than a metre away the image on the wanted poster was an uncanny match, almost as if it had been taken from the same piece of film.

'What I do for you, sir?'

'Well...I don't really know if you can do anything,' began Ken Basker. 'Fact is, I left my video camera on the ferry yesterday. The
Varagen
I think it's called,' he shrugged his shoulders dejectedly. 'I don't suppose anyone handed it in to you?' He stopped when he saw the desk sergeant smiling at him.

'Funnily enough, we've been waiting for you all day! Two boys found it among their luggage and brought it in here first thing this morning.'

'Two lads with rucksacks?' Ken was astonished.

'That's right. Know them, do you?'

'They were sitting next to us in the cabin. I thought I'd never see it again!'

'I've just been running through the footage trying to find some means of identifying your car or accommodation.' He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. 'You've only made one appearance on it so far, but I recognise you all right.'

Ken looked past him at the large monitor screen. He remembered the shot on the beach but hadn't before noticed the man walking past. Oh well, not to worry. He shook his head and let out a long breath. 'Whew, I thought it was gone for good. The wife's about ready to kill me!'

'You wouldn't believe the stuff people leave on buses and whatnot. We've had
kids
brought in here before now!' Davis moved across to the shelf and lifted the camera and pressed the
stop
button. From his acute downward angle of vision he could see only a blur on the screen. Ken Basker watched Mike Hollis' face disappear into a white raster.

'There you are, sir. Try and take better care of it––you might be so lucky a second time.'

Ken still couldn't believe it. 'Thanks a lot!' he said with feeling. 'Listen, do you have a charity box or something? I reckon someone's due a donation for this!'

'Happens we do, sir, just on the wall there.' Anthony Davis grinned. It was a long time since he had seen someone so obviously relieved.
Made his day
.

Ken dropped all the pound coins in his pocket into the slot. 'Thanks again,' he said, gripping the door handle.

'Don't worry, sir, it happens to us all. You just have to turn your back on something at the wrong time and it's gone! Enjoy your holiday.'

Darkness wouldn't help him much: there wasn't going to be a lot of it. In mid-summer in these latitudes, fifty nine degrees north, the sun was barely below the northern horizon all night. In Shetland, land of the midnight sun, they called it the
simmer dim
. Further south in Orkney there was only slightly more in the way of darkness. On a clear night it was little more than deep twilight. So Mike Hollis was not at all put out when a light drizzle began to fall from the heavily overcast sky in late afternoon, as suggested by the local weather forecast. It would be a murky night and that was better than he could have hoped for.

Just after seven, with the drizzle becoming very intermittent, he visited the rucksack in its hiding place. Packed right on top was a flattened duffle bag with a lanyard attached top to bottom. Hollis opened it out and carefully put the imitation filter and the radio-controlled trigger unit inside and followed it with a tightly rolled up change of clothing and a battery-operated shaver. Other items he transferred from his waterproof parka to the waxed Barbour jacket which he put on instead. The parka and all other unneeded belongings went into the rucksack.

After thoroughly checking the area for signs of his presence, Hollis stuffed the rucksack into the dory, pushing it inside the small cabin. The moorings were secure, the lashing not too tight, he didn't want to have a struggle with jammed ropes at the very time when seconds would be of vital importance.

One more thing he must not forget. Hollis stepped down to one side of the old slipway and urinated against the cold stone. There wouldn't be opportunity for such things later and the last thing he needed tonight was a bursting bladder! For the same reason he took no food or drink with him. Better a rumbling belly than to be in urgent need of a toilet. Slinging the duffle bag across his back on it's lanyard, to keep his hands free, Hollis started back round the bay to Lyness.

The industrial estate was deserted, as expected at this hour. Hollis rounded the corner nearest to NorthTek, keeping his head down into the turned-up collar of his jacket. Hopefully the security guards at NorthTek's gate would see only a workman heading into an area full of one-man businesses and workshops. The only risk was that they might notice he hadn't come back out. Taking the first lane on the left put a row of buildings between Hollis and NorthTek and he slowed his pace even further, carefully looking for signs of life in any of the workshop units.

All was quiet.

Good.

Reaching the end of the road, Hollis turned and walked back the way he had come. Nothing and nobody moved: as far as he could determine he was quite alone here. The place he wanted belonged to a painter & decorator, the unit almost directly across the road from NorthTek's front gate. All the buildings were alike and all had the same fenced-in yard at the rear for loading and storage. Nobody, it appeared, could be bothered to close the steel and wire mesh gates provided. Hollis shook his head: didn't they have thieves here?

Probably not.

The painter & decorator's back door was securely locked but next to it was a rectangular single-glazed window. Hollis peered in through the glass, checking for alarm sensors on the inside of the window and in the upper corners of the room. Nothing. There was no burglar-alarm box mounted on the wall outside either, but that didn't necessarily mean there wasn't some sort of security system installed. However, he could see no signs of any such equipment, and he couldn't believe that any of the more expensive, sophisticated stuff would be installed in a place like this.

Hollis pulled a medium-sized screwdriver from his pocket and set about removing the putty from around the glass in the window.

He nearly dropped the pane when it came loose. That brought the sweat out and he roundly cursed himself under his breath. He stowed the large sheet of glass out of the way between two empty crates. That was fine. From the lane it would take an observant person to note that there was no glass in the window. The putty scrapings were lost in the packed gravel surface of the yard. Hollis pulled himself inside and crouched unmoving for over a minute.

Silence.

He was in a small office, secretarial by the look of it. Outside there was a small hallway and Hollis explored it on his hands and knees, careful to keep his head below window height. Several identical doors led to toilets, a tiny kitchen with a butane gas stove, two stock rooms and another office. Both the larger of the stock rooms and the office had windows to the front.

Hollis chose the store room because it offered much better cover among the miscellaneous boxes, wallpaper and tins of paint. It took five minutes to open the door far enough to crawl through. The human eye is attracted by movement, the ancient reflex of the hunter: movement means prey, and prey means food, survival for another day. Hollis opened the door imperceptibly millimetre by millimetre. The door was in sight of the security guards across the road and they must not notice any movement. The window, through which Hollis intended to observe them, would also allow the two guards to see Mike Hollis. If he let them.

Another three minutes to insinuate himself behind some cardboard boxes supporting stacked rolls of wallpaper, where he could sight through a variety of gaps between loose rolls. Hollis rested his back gingerly against the plywood packing case behind him. It didn't move. He released a long silent breath. It was ten minutes after eight pm.

Stage one.

At nine o'clock there was activity from the portacabin alongside NorthTek's front door. The steel and wire mesh gate itself was closed with a simple padlock. All that was needed with two security guards less than ten metres away. At nine on the dot one of the pair left the portacabin and walked across to the factory's entrance door, opened it and walked through into the dimly-lit foyer.

Mike Hollis sat up straighter and muttered, 'Fuckin' hell!', staring intently through one of his view-holes. It was inevitable that the guards would check round the place at intervals, but he hadn't expected them to leave the factory door unlocked!

That act alone answered his question about whether the guards were well-trained professionals or part-time amateurs. On reflection he supposed it was understandable. Their cabin was right alongside the door, and the compound was well lit. There was no possibility of someone getting to that doorway unseen. And of course the big steel entrance gate in the fence was padlocked.

Eight minutes and the guard appeared again, closing the door behind him and disappearing up one side of the double factory unit. Two minutes until he appeared back down the far side, having circumnavigated the premises.

Ten o'clock and there was no movement. Eight minutes past ten and the Portacabin door opened and the other guard took a walk down the short path and into the building. This one put the main lights on in the foyer, and other lights showed at intervals from windows as he did the rounds of the offices and workshops. The first man must have relied on his torch, if indeed he patrolled the building at all. The guard was inside for twelve minutes and when he emerged also went for a two-minute stroll around the site before retiring back into the cabin.

Three minutes before eleven pm and the pattern was clearly established. Guard number one took his turn and no lights showed anywhere, except the permanent dim light in the foyer. Hollis carefully watched the other windows and once thought he saw a dim glow. Presume torchlight then. Every hour on the hour, more or less, the guards would check the building and the external environs. In between they apparently ignored everything, staying in the cabin from where they could clearly see the main gate.

Hollis leaned back against the packing-case and closed his eyes. Deliberately relaxing his muscles in sequence from the neck down. Finally he sighed quietly and settled down to think up some plan of action.