Revenge

A Novel by

Michael Rolls

1

Dedicated to the memory of my dear wife

Veronica Rolls

15th April 1943 to 23rd January 2018

2

Revenge

Contents

Chapter One. .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... ..2

Chapter Two. .. .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...6

Chapter Three – 16-18th January. .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....9

Chapter Four – 19th January. .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..13

Chapter Five – 20th January. ... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .. . ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...16

Chapter Six – 21st January..... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ......20

Chapter Seven – 22nd to 29th January..... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...23

Chapter Eight – February 1st to 6th. ... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .... .... .27

Chapter Nine – February 8th to 9th.... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... ...38

Chapter Ten – February 10th.... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... ........40

Chapter Eleven –April... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .........42

Chapter Twelve – May/June.... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... ........57

Chapter Thirteen – 10th – 24th June. .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... . .. .... .... ..... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .... .... .... .... 62

Chapter Fourteen – July. .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...68

Chapter Fi een – 25th July and on.. .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... ...........71

3

Chapter One

She didn’t look like an angel of death. Not remotely. What she looked like was Mrs. Fiona Walton, aged about 50, still attractive in a well-cared for sort of way, hair expensively styled with fashionable streaks of auburn in a sort of chestnut background. She was wearing a two piece suit, the skirt slim line, the jacket over a heavy silk blouse, respectively black and deep red; over the ensemble, thrown carelessly open, there was a two-fingered salute to the animal rights lobby in the form of what I felt sure was a genuine mink coat. The lady exuded class and money; she should have exuded menace and danger, but I wasn’t to know that until a good bit later.

She had come, I hoped, to buy my house, a house I needed desperately to sell to rid myself of the crippling mortgage repayments which I could no longer afford after the collapse of my business.

She had gone over the place with a critical eye; no blemish escaped her, my attempts to talk up the place clearly failing to impress. At last we returned to the hall where I had first greeted her after she rang the doorbell. She had arranged to come having seen the ‘For Sale’ notice outside, but she had not come via the estate agent whose sign it was.

“Right,” she said briskly. “first things first. Tell the estate agent you’ve withdrawn the house from the market and that he can take his sign away.”

My surprise must have been clear to see.

“They are sharks,” she explained patiently. “They will take thousands of your money and for what? Putting a board up and a photo in their window and a few printed circulars. By dropping what they have the nerve to call their services, you are saving thousands, so that can come off the price, right?”

I was beginning to feel that I was standing in the way of an irresistible force.

“Now, how much?”

“Well the valuation was seven hundred and fifty.”

“Forget it. You’ll never see seven fifty at the moment – the market is too flat.”

I knew that she was right; it was very much a buyers’ market thanks to the credit crunch which, amongst other disasters, had led to the failure of my business and left me with a house that I could no longer afford.

Nevertheless, I needed that sort of money to pay off my debts and find a new place to live.

She ploughed on.

“I’ll give you six hundred for the house”

My disappointment was palpable; that just wasn’t going to be enough, but she hadn’t finished.

“Six hundred for the house and a commission for which I will pay you another seventy-five, in cash, tax free.”

I hurriedly did the sums in my head. Seventy five thousand tax free was worth a hundred and twenty five before tax at the higher rate, which is what the government was still charging me at the moment. Combined with six hundred for the house, less lawyer’s fees, it would see me back on my feet, although still out of a job.

“What sort of commission?” I enquired cautiously.

“Nothing illegal, if that is worrying you. Something well within your competence.”

That intrigued me. How could she know what was within my competence? She perceived what was going through my mind.

“I’ve done a bit of homework, Mr. Hartley. Your business may have gone bust, but you haven’t got round to cancelling its website.”

She was right, cancelling the website was way down the list of my priorities and had totally slipped my mind. With a failed marriage and a failed business to contend with, what was an out of date website? The website had detailed the qualifications and history of myself and Iain Jamieson, my former business partner, so I supposed that it would have given Mrs. Walton an idea of my ‘competence’. The history had not, however, been a complete one, and I wondered if Mrs. Walton had done any other digging into my 4

background – she didn’t seem to be the sort of person to be offering a seventy five thousand pound commission without having a very good idea of the likelihood of it being satisfactorily discharged.

I realised that we were still standing in the hall.

“Mrs. Walton, why don’t we go into the lounge and you can tell me more about this commission?”

So saying, I ushered her into the lounge which was the room that had determined Morag, my ex-wife, and me that we wanted this house. With the house set with its back to the hillside, the huge picture window of the lounge gave a stupendous view of the Tay valley and the hills beyond, with the house, over three hundred feet above sea level, high enough for the busy A90 far below to be hidden by trees, its traffic only noticeable as a background hum even out on the decking beyond the window.

She settled herself down on the settee facing the window and looked at me.

“Mr. Hartley, I want you to find my husband.”

I looked blankly at her. Iain and I had often been asked to find wandering spouses, runaway children, even, once, a kidnapped dog (to be fair, it had been a very expensive dog),but nothing remotely like seventy five thousand pounds had ever been involved as our reward.

“Mrs. Walton, what makes finding your husband worth so much money?”

She gave me a tight smile.

“Because until I find him I am the poorer by a very considerable amount of money. He has the bank codes for the major part of our resources; without them I am going to run out of money in a year or so, two at the most – and I am not prepared to let that happen.”

This was beginning to intrigue me.

“How long has your husband been missing? Where and when was he last seen?”

“He went on a business trip to Italy a month ago. I had a telephone conversation with him the night he arrived. Since then, nothing.”

“Have you contacted the local authorities?”

“Yes, but they could find no trace of him. I, and they, wondered if he had been kidnapped for ransom, but no ransom demand has ever been made.”

“Why do you think that I can succeed where the police have failed?”

“Because I am offering to buy your house and also pay you seventy five thousand pounds over and above –

they didn’t have that incentive.”

“Tell me about this business trip.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“John has many business interests. I don’t know the precise details of this particular trip, only that he was going to Italy and that it involved bergamot oranges.”

My face must have registered my total ignorance; I hadn’t the remotest idea what a bergamot orange might be, nor what about it caused a British business man to disappear.

“The bergamot orange has a number of uses. Firstly, nobody eats it, nor drinks its juice, although you could if you wanted to. Instead, it is used in the perfume industry and also, in very low levels of concentration, to flavour Earl Grey tea. One of my husband’s businesses is a perfume manufacturer and he went to Italy to secure a deal for exclusive acquisition of the produce from some of the farms in the Calabria area, where the vast majority of the world’s crop of bergamot oranges is grown.”

“Presumably someone spoke to whoever in your husband’s company arranged his trip? He didn’t book his own tickets or the like?”

She frowned.

“The person who made the arrangements has also disappeared. It was one of the secretaries at Hall’s, a Mrs.

Vera Colclough.”

Before I could make the obvious follow up remark when a man and a woman disappear together, she shook her head.

“No, Mr. Hartley, they haven’t ‘run away together’. Vera Colclough is a widow. She worked for John’s perfume manufacturer, but not directly to John. She is near retirement and I doubt that the two of them ever met more than a handful of times. John owns the company – he doesn’t work there, just goes in on a fairly 5

regular basis to see how things are progressing. I didn’t only contact the Italian authorities about John, I involved our own police as well, and it was they who discovered that Vera Colclough had disappeared. As I said, she is a widow; she lives alone and didn’t come into work just over a week after John went to Italy. The company reported her as missing to the police who, when they couldn’t find her, entered her premises – she has a flat in central Dundee – and there was no trace of her. There was a build up of post and the fridge still had stuff in it, some of which was beginning to go off. Her passport was missing, as was her cheque book, her credit cards, driving licence and the like. They spoke to the tenants in the other flats; nobody had seen her since the weekend before she failed to turn up at work on the Monday.”

I considered what she had said, then made a decision – I would accept her commission. I rose and crossed to the small bureau set in one corner of the room and picked up a notebook and pen.

“When exactly did your husband disappear, Mrs. Walton?”

“He flew from Dundee airport on Wednesday, the 11th December. He phoned me from his hotel that evening; he was stopping at the Hotel Excelsior in Reggio Calabria. Nothing more was heard of him after he left the hotel the next morning, leaving his cases behind. As far as can be told he was out stretching his legs before hosting a meeting with the representatives of half a dozen or so farms, but according to the Italian police he never returned to the hotel. He just vanished into thin air.”

“Reggio Calabria – I’ve never heard of it – whereabouts is it?”

“It’s right down in the south, opposite Sicily. It ’s the biggest town of the Calabria region where, as I said, most of the world’s bergamot oranges are grown, so was the logical base for him.”

“You said he flew from Dundee – I didn’t know they did flights from there to Italy?”

“Oh, they don’t. John flew in the business jet the company lease from time to time.”

The more Mrs. Walton told me, the more money there seemed to be behind the missing Mr. Walton.

“And Mrs. Colclough – when did she go missing?”

“Nobody saw her after she left work on the Friday evening – that was Friday the 21st of December. Whether she went home, nobody knows. Certainly none of her neighbours saw her, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Apparently the layout of the flats is such that you can reach your own front door from the entrance hall by lift and there are only two flats per floor, so she could quite easily have got to her flat without being seen.”

“Where does she work?”

“At the perfume factory – it’s in the industrial estate off the Coupar Angus road just before you reach the A90 there.”

I nodded; I knew the area, although I hadn’t realised that there was a perfume factory in the estate.

“If your husband only keeps a sort of watching brief on the company wouldn’t it have been more logical for someone who is full time there to do what he was doing? Oh, and does he speak Italian or would he have needed an interpreter?”

She shook her head.

“John is a workaholic and very much a hands on owner. The perfume factory – it’s called Hall’s Perfumes –

is a company that he took over only in January of last year and it was failing at the time. He has turned it round and this exclusive deal with producers in Italy he expected to very much strengthen it. As for speaking Italian – he has a real flair for languages – he’s fluent in Italian, Spanish and French and pretty good in German and Russian. At a pinch he can even get by in Japanese.”

“Very impressive - does he have other companies, Mrs. Walton?”

“Oh yes, he’s built up quite a little empire over the years. There are actually eight companies in all in a more or less pyramid structure. The main one is Walton Holdings – that is the one that the others feed their profits into and it is based in Switzerland for tax purposes. Below Walton Holdings are the two major subsidiaries, Walton Pharmaceuticals and Walton Engineering. Again they are holding companies, and also have their legal identity based in Switzerland. Hall’s Perfumes and Tayside Pharmacy are the two elements of Walton Pharmaceuticals. Hall’s actually makes its products – it’s a factory. Tayside Pharmacy is an importer and distributor of medicines from abroad, mostly America and Canada. The engineering side is Dundee Specialist Castings – again a factory making things. They specialise in small runs of complex castings that 6

the volume manufacturers would find uneconomic. The other company on the engineering side is in Aberdeen – Aberdeen Vintage Cars. They specialise in buying, selling and restoring vintage and classic cars, and the last company – which doesn’t come under the two ‘divisions’ is Walton Homes which doesn’t build houses as you might think, but buys them for renting out – which is what attracted me to your house, as I more or less run Walton Homes myself.”

I was impressed at the breadth of the Waltons’ interests - and their money.

“It sounds a pretty complex organisation, Mrs. Walton – does it have shareholders, boards of directors and the like?”

“No shareholders, and the only directors are John, myself and M. Benoit, a lawyer in Switzerland who makes sure that we don’t infringe any Swiss tax laws.”

“So, who stands to benefit from your husband’s disappearance?”

“Nobody – quite the reverse, in fact. With John so much involved with the companies, he is the only one who actually holds everything together. My problem is that the companies have multiple bank accounts and whilst, in John’s absence, I can keep things going in the short term, I don’t want to try and do that for long –

I haven’t John’s capacity for work and I certainly don’t have his access to everything.”

As I listened to her, I couldn’t help but feel that, for all his hard work and entrepreneurial skills, John Walton was an idiot. Everything was so much under his immediate control that with him out of the picture for any length of time I could see his whole empire coming crashing down like a house of cards. Unless, I thought, he was one of these megalomaniacs and wanted everything to go pear shaped if he was out of the picture.

Something to bear in mind, perhaps.

“Going back to his visit to Italy – you said that Mrs. Colclough made the arrangements – what would they have comprised?”

“Letting the company we hire from know that the jet would be required, booking his hotel suite and letting those involved at the Italian end know where and when they would all be meeting.”

“Do we have details of who he was expecting to meet?”

She shook her head.

“No, which is a puzzle. She would have done the arranging from her office and normally there would have been a file created so that John had all the details he needed with him. Oh, and when I say a file, John would have had it on his computer, not on paper, but there should also have been copies of everything in Mrs.

Colclough’s office, both on her computer and also a paper version- but when I asked, nobody could find anything, either on paper or on her computer.”

“Did anyone have the computer examined by an expert? There might have been files on it which were deleted, but very often such files can be rescued if you have the relevant skills.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“I honestly don’t know.”

It looked more and more as if the disappearances of the businessman, the secretary and the records were not only intertwined, but sinisterly so. Mrs. Walton looked enquiringly at me.

“So, Mr. Hartley, will you accept my commission.”

“Oh yes, but I must warn you that if the police have been reasonably thorough then I doubt that I will succeed where they have failed – what then?”

“The seventy five is to find John. If we agree, after, shall we say, two weeks that you have failed then I will pay any expenses you have incurred and five thousand in addition. Oh, and I will still buy your house.

Agreed?”

We shook hands on it and I asked her who I would need to talk to at Hall’s Perfumes, as I felt that the first step had to be to try and discover who John Walton was supposed to have met in Italy.

“The CEO there is a man called Grace, Harold Grace. I will tell him to give you anything that you want.”

Without any more ado, she took out her mobile phone and speed-dialled a number. Whilst I could only hear her end of the conversation, there was no doubt that Harold Grace had been given his orders.

“Right,” she said, “that’s arranged. When will you start?”

I looked at my watch. It was just after five, too late to arrange what I wanted that day.

7

“First thing in the morning, and in the meantime I will be doing some preparatory work.”

“Right, now, we mentioned expenses, Easiest way to cope with that is if you have one of our company credit cards.”

She fished in her handbag and produced a Mastercard.

“Here you are. The PIN is 1066 and it has a twenty thousand pound limit on it. If you need more,” she again fished in her bag an produced a business card, “give me a call on that number and I will arrange for the limit to be raised.”

I entered her phone number into my mobile’s memory and secreted the card itself in my wallet.

Chapter Two

Nine o’clock the next morning I was closeted, with a companion, with Harold Grace, who proved to be a middle-aged man, running slightly to fat, in a grey suit which matched his grey hair and grey eyes. I explained that I needed to look at Vera Colclough’s office and her computer and introduced my companion.

Isla Cameron was probably the most intelligent person that I have ever met. Still only twenty seven or eight, Iain and I had been using her computer skills for five years before, just three months back, we had reluctantly agreed that our business, set up with such high hopes and early success just five years earlier, was no longer viable. She had been surprised to receive my call but gladly agreed to accompany me to Hall’s and see what she could wring from the missing Mrs. Colclough’s computer.

The office was nothing unusual; small and crowded, it was the desktop computer that Isla fastened attention on.

“Bloody Hell,” she exclaimed, “they must have raided the Ark to get that – it’s ancient!”

“Can you get into it?” I enquired anxiously. She gave me a withering glare, the green eyes positively flashing.

“With my eyes closed and a hairpin,” she responded.

She was as good as her word, Fifteen minutes later I was holding a printout of information which had been deleted the day Mrs. Colclough was last seen, Friday the 21st of December. Before disappearing, she had clearly deleted those files; Isla assured me that they had been deleted early that same morning, and when I questioned him, Grace confirmed that nobody else would have used that computer whilst Mrs. Colclough was there.

“What about after she disappeared?” I asked. He shook his head.

“No need, we haven’t replaced Vera and in the current state of business I don’t expect that we shall. As far as I know, that computer hasn’t been touched by anybody since Vera left that evening.”

The information that the printout contained was the confirmation that the hired jet would take off from Dundee airport on the 12th, would fly non-stop to the regional airport at Reggio Calabria, stay overnight and return to Dundee on the evening of the 13th. In the event, it had flown back empty, apart from the crew of two, on the 14th after it became obvious that John Walton had disappeared. It had the confirmation of Walton’s reservation of an executive suite for the night of the 12th, booking out on the 13th. There was also a list of six names, all apparently Italian, and confirmation that the Hotel Excelsior would make a small conference room available for a meeting to be held at eleven in the morning. The various travel arrangements had been made in the space of a single day, the 5th of December.

From what Fiona Walton had told me, her husband had checked in at the hotel as expected and had eaten breakfast in the dining room on the morning of the 13th. Then – nothing. The conference room set aside for him had remained unused, nobody had turned up expecting to meet with him. That was another puzzle.

Obviously the people he was intending to meet would have known about the meeting in advance; the idea that a busy man would fly to Italy, book into a luxury hotel for just one night because he intended to fly home the next day, book a room for a meeting, and then forget to tell the others involved was just preposterous. In any case, I had in my hands the list of expected attendees and the file entries confirming that each had intended to come to the meeting. Somebody had told them not to come, perhaps just by saying that Walton had cancelled the meeting, perhaps by other means.

8

I looked at the list of names, each of which was accompanied by an E-mail address. Clearly everything had been arranged electronically, no actual paper letters had gone back and forth. I examined the list of names, but that was all they were to me, just names:

Alfredo Parisse

Guido lo Cicero

Benito Galdini

Paulo Panini

Roberto Bertoli

Mario Mantone

I pondered my next step. The answer to John Walton’s disappearance obviously lay in Italy, so I could see no alternative but to go over there. I got out my mobile and dialled Fiona Walton.

“Fiona Walton.”

“It’s Keith Hartley. I’ve identified the men your husband was due to meet – all Italian bergamot orange farmers. I want to talk to them and to speed things up I wonder if I can use the jet you hire.”

“Yes – tell Grace to get one of his people to lay it on for you.”

And with that she broke the connection. I put my mobile back in pocket, reflecting that the lady wasted neither time nor words.

I left Isla trawling through Vera Colclough’s computer on the off chance that there was anything else of interest and went in search of Harold Grace. I explained what I wanted and he called in his secretary, who turned out to be a young woman who was every bit as colourful as her boss was monochrome.

Georgina McNulty was perhaps twenty-five or so and very much on the ball. Within twenty minutes she had arranged for the jet to pick me up at seven the next morning at Dundee airport and fly me, as it had flown John Walton, to Reggio Calabria. She had also booked me a suite at the Excelsior hotel for a preliminary four night stay, with the option to extend if needs be. The jet would want twenty four hours notice for picking me up; I would trigger that by phoning or texting her, any time and she would do the rest. I left her presence in a bit of a whirl, not used to such VIP treatment.

I went back to Vera Colclough’s office to find that Isla was just powering down the computer.

“Nothing more of interest, Keith,” she reported, “like I said, this is a pretty old machine and the hard disc is small by modern standards. Mrs. Colclough is obviously a careful worker. She used an external hard drive,”

she indicated a flat black box about an inch deep by four by six, plugged into one the computer’s ports,

“every day to back up that day’s work. It’s an up to date disc and the backups on it go back to January of last year. There is a back-up file for every day except one – want to guess?”

“5th of December?” I hazarded.

“Got it in one. When I dug into it, that file had been deleted on the 21st when our lady vanished. It’s just a duplicate of the one we’ve already rescued, nothing different. However, one thing. Now that I know who Walton was due to meet, I went back and searched for the individual names. All six were sent an invitation to meet with Walton; the invitations were all sent on the 29th November. They didn’t all reply by return, but they had all accepted by the 4th of December – and Vera then set things in motion the next day. Vera had deleted those invitations and the replies, but once I knew what to look for, I had those as well. I’ve made hard copies of them,” she waved at a small heap of papers on the desk, “and I’ve also made computer copies for you.”

She handed me a USB memory stick, secured in a small protective plastic bag, and I put it away in my briefcase.

“Thanks, Isla, what’s the damage?”

She looked at her wrist watch; it was still only eleven o’clock.

“Half a day, OK?”

9

It was a pretty short half day, but well worth the fee. She charged £300 a day, so I owed her £150. I had anticipated this, so the previous evening had used my newly acquired Walton company Mastercard to draw out some cash.

“Cash OK?” I asked her. She smiled.

“Cash is always acceptable.”

I handed over the money and escorted her out of the building to where she had parked her car, a bright red Mini-Cooper which snarled away as she waved from the driver’s open window.

I reflected on the fact that somehow, after a couple of hours in the company of her high intelligence and boundless energy, her ability to look exquisitely dressed no matter what she had on, compared to my inability to look smart in anything, the world always seemed a little flat after Miss Cameron departed the scene.

I shrugged and made my way to my own vehicle, a more modestly coloured Mondeo, six years old, which had replaced my much preferred classic Jaguar Mk II when the business failed. I drove home, thinking as I did so that it wouldn’t be my home for much longer, but another asset in the Walton empire.

It was still only lunch time, but there was nothing more I could do to advance my investigation until I got to Italy on the morrow. I could, however, sit down and mull things over, which is what I did.

First; what had happened to Vera Colclough? Why had she deleted those computer files? I had a working hypothesis. Someone connected with the disappearance of John Walton had contacted her and, using either threats or promises, had persuaded her that it was in her own best interests for the computer files, plus any paper records, to disappear. She had complied and then she had vanished. Judging by the fact that she had vanished after work on the Friday, the 21st , but had deleted the relevant files early in the working day, the contact had probably been made the previous day, the 20th . I realised that I didn’t know how she got from home to work, so telephoned Hall’s perfumes. Georgina answered and told me that Vera had always driven to work. She had a Vauxhall Corsa, about five years old. The car had not been at her flat – it had a resident’s car park at basement level – when the police investigated. So where was it? The police would presumably have looked for it – but how hard? Mrs. Colclough was a mature adult who had gone off with no evidence that it might have been a disappearance under duress of any kind. There were thousands of such disappearances every year and in the vast majority of cases the person who disappeared did so because they wanted to.

In the case of Vera Colclough, however, I had an uneasy feeling that this was different. In fact, I thought that she was probably dead, murdered to keep her quiet. I could easily create a scenario where, having been told to delete those files, she did so and assumed that to be the end of the matter. I could then visualise her driving home that Friday evening, parking in her allotted parking space in the darkness of the underground car park, and then being approached, accosted, abducted and eventually killed. If that was the case, where was her body? Where was her car?

There was, of course, the possibility that I was quite wrong; that for some reason she had done a runner, possibly because she was frightened of whoever had made her delete those files. I had no way of knowing what had actually happened to the woman, so moved on in my thinking.

The meeting. Six people, all, as it happened men, had accepted an invitation to a business meeting. None had actually turned up for it. Why not? One, even two, absentees might be capable of an explanation – illness, transport problems, those sort of things, but not all six. The simplest explanation was that the meeting had been cancelled – but if so, by whom? The obvious person would have been Walton himself, but that was ridiculous – why fly all that way, at considerable expense, and then cancel? No, a much more credible scenario was that some other party had either fooled those six men into believing that the meeting had been cancelled or, by one means or another, persuaded them not to attend. The purpose of the meeting was understood by them all. Walton wanted to persuade them to commit to a contract to sell their bergamot oranges to him alone. Was such an arrangement seen as a threat to the business opportunities of others? I wondered how big a slice of the crop those six farmers represented. Did they represent enough of a threat to make what I feared had happened- two murders, one in Scotland, one in Italy, a risk worth taking?

10

The more I thought about it, the more I felt that John Walton had not just disappeared. I felt pretty sure that he was dead, dead at the same hands responsible for my assumed killing of Vera Colclough.

I got up from the settee, the settee facing the big window, upon which Fiona Walton had sat and walked my mind through the affair. Yesterday –was it really only yesterday? I had nothing to occupy me other than the worries of trying to settle my debts, trying to sell my house, trying to find a job. Today I was potentially on the track of murderers and tomorrow that track would take me to Italy, to a town of which I had never heard until the name passed Fiona Walton’s lips so short a time ago.

I looked out of the window; late January this far North, it was already near dark, and as I looked out over the Tay valley I could see lights here and there in the distance. It made me realise how much I would miss this house, the house that Morag and I had chosen when love was strong and divorce unthinkable. We had been married just four months when the house had come onto the market. Dissatisfied with the house in which we were then living, we had constantly scoured the Net and the papers looking for somewhere to fall in love with - and we had found it. I was not long out of the Army, Morag was a successful solicitor in Perth. Most people, I suppose, would have envied us; even after the taxman had done his rapacious worst, I had inherited over a hundred thousand pounds from my late parents and Morag earned a very reasonable income. I had just gone onto partnership with Iain Jamieson, a one-time school friend in what was effectively a private investigation firm and we had started off well.

All these things combined to convince us that not only did we desire this house with all our beings, we could actually afford it- or at least the deposit on it and the mortgage repayments, although steep, could be afforded and would, of course, effectively decline in real terms over time as our incomes increased.

It hadn’t worked. Oh, the first few years were fine; Morag’s income increased, my business flourished. Then came the banking crisis of 2008 and money became harder to come by. It was, we assured ourselves, only a short term blip on an otherwise rosy horizon, but of course, we were wrong. House values plummeted, but not our mortgage repayments. As people began to feel the financial pinch they were less inclined to seek out the services of Iain and myself. Much of Morag’s work was fee based on conveyancing, and the slump in the housing market affected her income. Then she became pregnant and the thought of losing her income was a Sword of Damocles over our heads. Then, instead of the joy of a child to counteract that threat, she miscarried, and miscarried so badly that she was advised never to attempt to have any more children. Under the surface we blamed each other for everything that was suddenly going wrong in our lives. Eventually, Morag told me that she wanted a divorce. It was a measure of how bad things were between us that I didn’t even really mind; I was much more worried over the fact that Iain was making it very clear that our business was effectively on the rocks and he wanted out.

So, four months later, here I was, wifeless, jobless and, unless I could find John Walton and his wife kept to her decision to buy my house, also penniless.

Chapter Three – 16-18th January

Dundee is a small, friendly airport, with its single runway, aligned East-West running parallel to the River Tay and only yards away from it. As arranged, I had arrived at seven in the morning, to be met by a tall, fair-haired man of about my own age. Dressed in dark trousers and a short sleeved, crisply ironed military style shirt, I didn’t need the four lines of rank braid on his epaulettes to know that this was my pilot for the flight to Italy.

“Mr. Hartley?

“That’s me.”

“I’m Gerald Dawes, your pilot. Let me take you through.”

Unlike the cattle pens of Heathrow, Gatwick, Edinburgh, or the like, we were out on the tarmac in a matter of a few minutes and I was ushered to a small twin jet aircraft waiting at the dispersal pan. I say it was small, but only compared to the average passenger jet. Compared to some of the light aviation aircraft I had flown in during Army days, it looked adequately sized. Wings and tailplane reflected the various lights from their 11

polished metal skins; the fuselage was painted a gleaming white with a dark blue flash along the side and the legend ‘MacLean Air Services’ emblazoned in the same colour on the fin.

“Have you flown with us before, Mr. Hartley?”

“No, I’m taking advantage of the Waltons’ contacts to get to Reggio Calabria as easily as possible.”

“Well, we can certainly do that for you. Without us you would need to fly to Gatwick, then to Naples, then an internal flight from Naples – take you most of the day. The straight line from Dundee to Reggio Calabria is 1527 miles – we’ll be cruising at five hundred so we’ve calculated three and half hours to allow for noise abatement diversions, pattern holding and the like, so we should get you there,” he looked at the chunky watch on his wrist, “for ten forty GMT, eleven forty their time.”

I was impressed; the ease and convenience of using the bizjet far outweighed the cost involved – although only because I wasn’t paying.

Dawes escorted me onto the plane, reaching the cabin area via a small set of steps which let down from the access door, and I stepped into the cabin area.

I was impressed. Six seats, modelled on executive armchairs, denoted the maximum number of passengers the jet would accommodate. The whole cabin floor was covered in a deep shag pile carpet and the walls were faced with a sort of heavily embossed flock wall paper effect. It was all a far cry from Easyjet economy.

As I looked around, a man emerged from the door in the forward bulkhead, presumably from the flight deck area. Dawes turned to me.

“This is David Lachlan, Mr. Hartley, the second pilot.”

We shook hands and the two of them ensured that I was safely buckled into my luxurious seat, then Dawes spoke again.

“We don’t run to stewardess service for short flights, Mr. Hartley, unless the client specifically asks for it, but once airborne” he waved in the direction of the rear of the aircraft, where there was another bulkhead, in front of which was a sort of low cupboard unit, “in there you will find a mini-bar and some sandwiches and the like in case you feel the need for refreshment.”

I smiled my thanks and the two of them disappeared through the door in the forward bulkhead, A couple of minutes later Dawes disembodied voice came over a concealed loudspeaker.

“Mr. Hartley, we have been cleared for take-off, so we are about to start taxing.”

A momentary pause and then the aeroplane started to move. I watched with interest out of my window as the little jet rolled away from its dispersal pan and swung right, then right again until it was lined up at the end of the runway.

“Mr. Hartley, we are rolling now,” came Dawes’ voice. The jet positively leapt forward; accustomed to heavily laden passenger flights to holiday destinations over the years, I was surprised at the way we gained speed and in no time were airborne.

I looked out of my window to the pile of Ninewells hospital on my right, then glanced across to the window on the far side to see the lights of Newport on Tay blinking in the darkness of early morning. Then I settled back into my seat.

True to his word, Dawes landed the jet as gently as a feather at eleven forty local time, and from a cold, dank and dark January morning in Scotland, I stepped out into the bright sunshine and far warmer air of southern Italy. I bade goodbye to him and to Lachlan, confirming that I would be wanting them to pick me up to return to Dundee, but that for the moment I had no idea when.

A taxi whisked me the two miles to the Hotel Excelsior, which proved to be a modern, luxurious building only a few hundred yards from the beach. I booked in and was shown to my suite, actually one very large room with en suite facilities. The room could be divided by heavy drape curtains to isolate the sleeping area, which contained a tempting king sized double bed, from a sitting room and office area. I could understand why multi-millionaire John Walton had graced the place with his custom.

The previous day, when Georgina had been making my travel arrangements, I had E-mailed the list of men Walton had been due to meet to the police officer who had led the enquiries into his disappearance, and had arranged to meet him in his office after lunch.

12

At two thirty I presented myself at the reception desk of the police station and moments later was ushered into the office of Commissario Crocetti. He rose to greet me and guided me into a visitor’s chair across from his desk. I studied him; Tall and slim, his long, saturnine face featured dark, almost black, eyes in his olive skin. A pencil thin moustache graced his upper lip, the black moustache echoing the colour of his hair, worn short and neatly combed. He was immaculately dressed in a white linen suit, dark blue shirt and white tie, with pale cream loafers on his feet and an expensive looking slim gold watch with a black face on his left wrist. All in all, he looked more like an actor or a male model than a senior policeman, but I had learned in the Army never to judge a book by its cover.

My Italian is pretty good – my late mother had been born Maria Dipetti in a small town near Rome, and it was in Rome itself where my father had met her when serving as assistant Military Attaché in the British Embassy there, so as a child I had been brought up to be effectively bi-lingual. However, it was a long while since I had needed to use my Italian, so it was a relief to find that Crocetti spoke flawless English.

“Signor Hartley, thank you for this further information regarding Signor Walton” he waved his hand at a sheet of paper lying on his otherwise clear desk; doubtless it was the list of names that I had sent him. “ I have had one of my officers do a quick check on the background of each of these men. They are all, as you already know, farmers of the bergamot orange. They are towards the lower end of importance in regards to the size of their holdings, not the smallest by any means, but nowhere near the largest. I don’t know how much you know about the bergamot orange trade?”

“Only that the Calabria area is the most important source of the fruit in the world.”

He nodded.

“Yes, that is so and that makes it a very important part of the area’s economy. There is a large number of farmers – nearly twenty – and the total fruit crop is around twenty thousand tonnes of fruit a year. However, the fruit is not, of itself, important. Nobody eats it, nobody drinks its juice. The important element is the oil extracted from it, and it takes a lot of fruit to produce a significant amount of oil. Those twenty thousand tons of fruit only result in about a hundred and twenty tons of oil, which is why the oil is expensive – about two hundred Euros a litre. A hundred years or so ago there were a lot of small farms producing the fruit, but over the last forty years or so many of the small farmers found it uneconomic and sold out, so now the trade is really dominated by three large farms. The six names you have given me are the largest of the small farmers still left, if that makes sense. In combination they would be the fourth, perhaps even the third, largest producer.”

I began to get the stirrings of an idea as to what might be going on; Crocetti was ahead of me.

“As I said, the fruit alone is of little use – the oil has to be extracted from it. In the old days that was done on each farm, using crude presses. That was still the way until after the end of the war; the war hit this region very hard. By 1940 a lot of the oil was being sent to the USA. With America and Italy now on opposite sides that trade obviously stopped. Luxury goods such as perfumes and expensive teas were a low priority for a country at war, so the bergamot orange trade dwindled to virtually nothing. When things started to get back to normal and the demand for bergamot orange oil resurfaced, many of the old farms were no longer producing. Their trees were old and giving poor yields, many of their buildings had fallen into disrepair. In 1946 this town was riven with crime and corruption; the leading figure was Guido Martelli. He was a ruthless man of whom much was said but little proven. One of his enterprises was to buy up a number of the derelict farms for a song, combining them into a single enterprise. He also built a modern processing plant, much more efficient that the old individual presses. By the early sixties, his example had been followed by two other families with links, as ever unproven, with crime, the Busconi family and the Parisse family,” he paused, seeing my interest as that was one of the names on Walton’s list. “No, this is a different Parisse, although there may have been a family connection in the dim and distant past. For a long time the three co-existed reasonably happily, but things changed a little while back. In 2010 the Martelli family was run by Luca Martelli, son of Guido and by then himself an old man – in his eighties - and his nephew Salvatore Mancini. Mancini was murdered – run off the road down a steep hillside by a lorry and soon afterwards Luca died, possibly of natural causes. The influence of the family declined rapidly, but their farm continued as before. Then last year there was a disastrous fire in their processing plant – it was totally destroyed. That left 13

just the two plants, those of the Busconis and the Parisses. So far there has been no real trouble between the two families, but it is a situation I am keeping a very careful eye on. It does mean that now the smaller farmers have to rely on either the Busconi plant or the Parisse plant to process their fruit – and the two have an ‘understanding’ to keep the prices they offer for the fruit low – not that it can be proved, of course. Signor Walton’s idea to enter into a contract with the six largest of the ‘small’ producers could have given them greater bargaining power if it was backed up by a realistic plan for having the fruit processed – either by trying to play the Busconi and Parisse families off against each other, or even by setting up their own processing plant.”

“How big a business is all this?” I enquired.

“In the shops, the pure oil sells for around €1,000 a litre – wholesale the oil sells at around €200 per litre.

Overall, the region produces around one hundred and fifty thousand litres, worth around thirty million Euros at wholesale prices. In a poor region like ours that is a significant element of the economy. One possible avenue for boosting income would be to have direct retail outlets, but geography is against us. However, I wonder if Signor Walton was thinking on those lines – even, perhaps, selling on the Internet?”

I could see that Walton might well have had just such ideas – a secure supply for his existing factory and the opportunity to open a retail venture on the Internet to profit by cutting into the margins of the typical producer-wholesaler-retailer chain. I had a nasty felling that in this instance his entrepreneurial instincts might have cost him his life.

Crocetti continued talking.

“At least we now have a possible new avenue to explore, Signor Hartley. I will have my officers interview each of the men who should have been at Signor Walton’s meeting. Perhaps you would like to call on me again the day after tomorrow so that I can update you?”

I was pleasantly surprised at this level of cooperation and we agreed that I would return after lunch on Friday, the 18th.

I spent the remainder of Wednesday, and all of Thursday, wandering around the town on foot and also driving, in a car arranged for me by the efficient Georgina McNulty via the hotel. I had no idea if I would need a car, but I would much rather have one and not need it, than not have one and then need transport. I drove fairly aimlessly around, simply trying to get a feel for the area, and drove down past the gravel quarries, where the white gravel positively glittered in the bright sunshine.

At last it was Friday and time to meet up once more with Commissario Crocetti. The news was not good. He waved me to a chair and, with an apologetic shrug of his shoulders. Brought me up to date.

“Not good news, I fear, Signor Hartley. All six farmers have been interviewed by my officers and they all tell the same story. Independently of the others, and under no pressure from any third party, each and every one of them decided that they had no wish to meet with Signor Walton. I can, of course, come only to one conclusion. They have been told what to say and either through bribery or fear of the consequences – and I incline very much to the latter reason – that is exactly what they have done.”

A dead end – probably literally. I could see my hopes of receiving Fiona Walton’s largesse vanishing as I sat there, unable to think of any way forward. Crocetti looked at me sympathetically.

“So, Signor Hartley, I fear there is nothing else to be done in this matter. We both know that Signor Walton has been abducted and that those six farmers might be able to throw some light on who was responsible, but they won’t talk and I have no means of making them talk.”

“Thank you for your time and your courtesy in this, Commissario. As you say, it is difficult to see what else could be done.”

However, even as I said the words, the nugget of an idea was forming in my mind.

“What will you do now?”

I shrugged.

“My mission has clearly failed – I will return to Scotland to report my failure to Signora Walton, although I can’t arrange my transport for at least two days.”

14

That wasn’t true. Dawes, and MacLean Air Services had promised that they would only need twenty four hours warning to be able to pick me up, but I had an idea of what to do in the forty eight hours I had claimed that it would take.

Once out of the police station, I took a walk down to the beach to make a telephone call that I didn’t want to make via the hotel switchboard. Mobiles can be less than secure, and although I had absolutely no reason to assume that anybody would be interested in my actions, paranoia isn’t always a bad thing, and I didn’t want this call to appear on my mobile’s call log. I wandered along until I found a tobacco kiosk which also sold telephone cards. I bought one for twenty Euros, then made my way to a bar which had a public phone in it.

I phoned Fiona Walton, reported the lack of success to date and put my plan to her. She agreed instantly.

Chapter Four – 19th January

It was early evening the next day. I drove my hired car out of town headed for the farm of Benito Baldini. I had done some background digging in the interim and had discovered that Baldini was, at sixty-three years old, the oldest of the six farmers whom Walton had been due to meet. He was also the poorest, and this fact was self-evident when I drew up outside his house. It was clearly old, and just as clearly in need of some serious maintenance work. Sagging gutters, doors and window frames warped and with paint peeling off them from years of exposure to the cruel southern sun, and a roof that presented a switchback appearance to the world, all told their own story. My digging had been done by assiduous searching of the website of the local newspaper; the bergamot trade was very important to the area and the state of the crop was news of considerable interest, even if not news of an earth-shattering nature.

I got out of the car, crossed the weed-infested yard, and knocked on the decrepit front door. It was opened by a small, grey haired woman dressed in a shapeless dress under a grubby apron. She looked at me suspiciously but did not speak.

I gave her my most winning smile and my best Italian.

“Good evening, Signora, I wish to speak with Signor Baldini. Is he at home?”

It was a rhetorical question; I had spent the previous hour parked on the hill above the farm and had seen what could only have been the man himself return from the fields thirty minutes previously, trudging slowly up the slope to the house as though all the troubles of the world rested on his scrawny shoulders.

Without answering me, she turned away and shouted back into the house.

“Benito, someone to see you!”

There was a pause of a few minutes, whilst the woman continued to eye me suspiciously, and then Baldini shuffled into view. He was small, like his wife, no more than five feet four or five, with a stoop to his back that made him look even smaller. A lifetime of work in the fields had given him a face the colour and texture of a walnut. Dark eyes viewed me with a suspicion matching that of his wife.

“Si?”

“Signor Baldini, I have a matter of business that I wish to discuss with you. May I come in?”

They both stepped back uncertainly, and, regarding their retreat as an invitation, I stepped over the threshold and found myself in a dark hallway with just two rooms opening off it, one to the left, one to the right, and a rickety looking staircase straight ahead.

Baldini indicated the room to the left and, in response to an unspoken communication, his wife disappeared into the room on the right. I followed him into a low ceilinged room, shabbily furnished and, like everything else I had seen so far, in need of money being spent on it. The only items of modernity were a small TV in one corner and, perched incongruously on a low table, a laptop computer which Isla Cameron would have regarded as even more ancient than the computer in Vera Colclough’s office.

Baldini indicated a chair and I seated myself cautiously on it, wondering if its ancient structure would bear my fourteen and a half stone weight – I probably weighed as much as both the Baldinis put together – and was grateful that it coped with no more than a quiet metallic groan as I settled myself down.

15

I had my briefcase with me and, without speaking, I opened it, extracted the content and tossed it onto the low table.

Baldini’s eyes widened in astonishment. It was a wad of banknotes held together by a rubber band.

“Signor Baldini, there are twenty thousand Euros there, They are yours if you tell me who told you not to attend the meeting with Signor Walton in the Excelsior Hotel on the 15th of November last year.”

He looked at the money, then at me, then back to the money. He shook his head slowly.

“I dare not.”

“That is a shame, Signor. I have come to you first as I felt that after a lifetime of hard work you were the most deserving of a little good fortune. However, I am sure that one of the others who should have been at the meeting will tell me what I want to know.”

I started to reach for the money and he put out a hand to stop me.

“No, please, Signor. My life would be in danger if I told you.”

“Signor Baldini, as I am sure that you realise, I am a foreigner. Tomorrow I will leave Reggio Calabria, never to return. Only you and your wife know that I have come here. Why do you fear?”

He looked at me again, his face no mask for the thoughts clearly racing through his mind. I pressed him.

“Nobody will ever know that you have told me anything. Nobody – but I know that the money on this table represents a year’s profit to you – a year for which you haven’t had to toil in the fields, a year in which you haven’t had to accept the low prices that the Busconis and the Parisses offer you for your hard work whilst they grow rich at your expense.”

He passed his tongue nervously over his lips, his gaze riveted on the wad of banknotes.

“Nobody will ever know?”

“Nobody.”

“It was one of the Busconi family’s men. Luigi Sandini. He is related to Emmanuel Busconi, the head of the family, by marriage – he is married to one of Emannuel’s nieces and he does a lot of work for Emmanuel, collecting payments, making sure that what Emmanuel wants, he gets, whether it is money or goods or silence. Four days before the meeting he came here and told me that I was not to go to it. If I did, he said, the Busconi plant would continue to take my fruit, but would only pay half what they pay now, and that they would agree with the Parisses that they would also refuse to accept our crop except at the reduced price. He also said that if I told anyone why I didn’t attend the meeting he would have men ‘visit’ me as he put it.

Signor, at half price we would be ruined – it is hard enough to make a living at what we are paid now, so I had no option but to do as I was told.”

“Thank you, Signor – that is all I wanted to know. I will go now and leave you and the Signora in peace.”

As I drove aware, I reflected on the fact that I had told at least one lie to Baldini. I had no intention of leaving Reggio Calabria the next day, but it seemed unlikely that our paths would cross again. That was the only deliberate lie; when I did leave, whenever that might be, I had no idea whether or not I might have cause to return. On the major point, however, I had spoken nothing but the absolute truth. Nobody would ever learn from me that he had told me who had intimidated him into ignoring the Walton meeting.

Now I knew that fact, however, what was I going to do about it? I could tell Crocetti – whilst keeping Baldini’s name out of the matter – but as evidence it would be useless to him. Anyway, my primary task was to find out what had happened to John Walton, not right the wrongs perpetrated on Italian farmers.

So, what had happened to John Walton? Obviously the Busconi family had got wind of his plans and decided to scupper them. But – to both points – how?

I returned to the hotel and mulled over matters whilst enjoying a light dinner. Walton had left the building after breakfast and simply never been seen again. I had learnt from Crocetti that the hotel staff had no knowledge of him receiving any messages, whether written or via the hotel switchboard, and the assumption had been that he had simply wanted to stretch his legs before cocooning himself in a potentially long meeting. The more I thought about it, the more unlikely that scenario seemed. Obviously, he had been abducted, but could his abductors rely upon such an off chance? He might not have wanted to go for a walk –

he might, instead have wanted to work on what the meeting would cover. I discounted the possibility of 16

somebody ringing him on his mobile – who in Reggio Calabria could know the number? I had seen the E-mails which set up the meeting – they had made no mention of his mobile number.

What would have caused him to leave the hotel and walk into the trap set for him? It must have been a message of some sort. What could it have been? Given the proximity in time to his meeting with the farmers, it must surely have been something to do with that meeting.

I had a forkful of pasta half-way from plate to mouth when I realised that the answer to how Walton received a message was, quite literally, staring me in the face. The Excelsior caters largely for business men and two such were sharing a nearby table. They had presumably been discussing something complicated, for one of them suddenly reached down beside his chair and brought up a small laptop which he fired up to assist the discussion. Oh course! It was stupid of me not to have thought of it before – Walton had his laptop with him; somebody had E-mailed him, almost certainly in the evening after he had booked in, resulting in his leaving the building and walking into the trap set for him. I had discounted the thought of somebody ringing his mobile, because nobody here could know it, but what about his E-mail address? I hurried through the rest of my meal and returned to my room, where I once again went through the correspondence that had set up the meeting – and there it was. Previously, I had missed it because I had no cause to look for it, but each of the confirmations from the farmers had been acknowledged, and copies of the acknowledgements forwarded to Walton’s E-mail address, so the six potential attendees all had that information. But surely nobody else? In which case the information had been passed onto the abductors from one of the farmers. I wondered specifically about Alfredo Parisse. Crocetti had dismissed him as not belonging to the Parisse underworld family, but suppose there was a link, a link tenuous not to be immediately strong enough to be apparent to others, but strong enough for him to advise his namesakes of what was afoot? Baldini had said that the heavy who had visited him, Luigi Sandini, had done so four days before the meeting was due to take place, making it the 8th of December, only four days after the last confirmatory E-mail from the farmers.

As I sat and pondered, I realised that I had overlooked one vital point. What had set John Walton on the course of action he had taken? What had triggered his interest in contracting directly with the Italian farmers?

The answer, I realised, must surely have been in Scotland. He had acquired Hall’s Perfumes in January of 2012. According to Mrs. Walton the company had been struggling at that time, but he had turned it round.

His next step was to have been to strengthen its supply base with his scheme for a direct contract. Before he had come up with that idea, from whom had Hall’s Perfumes bought their bergamot oil? Who had been responsible for purchasing from Italy? I began to wonder if Walton’s scheme might have impinged on some arrangement between the Italian supplier and the Scottish purchaser. I was about to phone Fiona Walton to put the questions, when I remembered how vague she had been about the meeting. Would she even know the answers to my questions? If she didn’t she would have to ask at the factory and if there was anything shady going on, that might well tip off the person or persons involved.

The more I thought about it, the more the possibility of a Scottish end to the problem made sense. Vera Colclough had disappeared. Which was more likely, that someone from Reggio Calabria had travelled to Scotland to arrange that disappearance or that it had been done locally?

I decided that, rather than contact Fiona Walton and risk tipping off any guilty party that there might be in Hall’s Perfumes, I would try a different approach. I phoned Isla Cameron and explained what I needed to know. She listened, then said, “I suppose you know that what you are suggesting is probably illegal?”

“Double fee?” I responded. There was a brief silence at the other end, then “How well you know me! I’ll do it, but a small place like that, they almost certainly shut their system down overnight, and if they have a separate accounting system – a standalone system not linked to a network of any kind, the only way I could get what you want would be by actually sitting down in front of one of their machines, which would rather give the game away.”

“I’ve crossed my fingers.” I replied.

There was nothing else that I could do that evening, so I had an early night, to dream of bergamot oranges the size of elephants chasing me down a succession of tunnels.

17

Chapter Five – 20th January

Because of the time difference, it was nearly midday my time before Isla phoned me.

“Keith, I’ve got what you want. The existing orders and invoices for the supply of the oil are all authorised by Harold Grace. As you suspected the actual placing of the orders was done by Vera Colclough and, yes, they were skimming. Their networked records only go back seven years, but both of them have been with the company for a good bit longer than that. Grace was the company accountant – appointed in 1999 and promoted to CEO in 2003. He took over from Abraham Hall, the original Hall in Hall’s Perfumes. Back then the company had three directors, Hall, his wife and a Hugh Johnson. When Walton bought the firm their interest in it came to an end and Grace is now answerable to the Waltons, man and wife, and M. Benoit, their guy in Switzerland. I don’t know if Walton suspected that skimming was going on – my guess is not, as he doesn’t seem to sort of man to put up with anything like that, but the turnaround he has achieved in the firm’s finances is largely due to the fact that when he appeared the skimming stopped. When Grace became CEO one of his first acts was to appoint Vera Colclough, so she has been in post just on ten years.”

So there was a strong possibility for a motive for all this.

“What sort of money was involved? And how did they actually do it?”

“Well, they effectively took one percent of the company’s payment for material – not just for the oil, but for everything the company bought, from raw materials down to office supplies. They ran a two book system, one for the auditors, one for themselves. A bill comes in for, say, a thousand pounds. They pay it and the supplier is happy, but in the books that get shown to the auditor the price is shown as one thousand and ten pounds and they spit the ten pounds fifty: fifty between them.”

“That doesn’t sound very much for all the risk.”

“Don’t forget that it is on everything that they buy. The company spends around seven million pounds a year. About a million of that is on salaries rent, power and the like– and the rigours of PAYE systems make trying the same trick there on the salary element much too dangerous, but on the five or six million that is spent on supplies, one percent is fifty to sixty thousand pounds. Half of that each is worth having for folk who are not getting a fortune from their straight salary. And don’t forget, they’ve been doing it for possibly as long as twelve years or so.”

“So, that’s a motive for all this,” I paused for thought, “but hang on – Walton disappeared here in Italy.

Grace and Colclough – even if she’s still alive – can’t have had anything to do with that; they were both in Scotland over the relevant period.”

“There I can’t help; there is nothing at this end to indicate whether or not the Italians were also in on it –

actually I think that it is unlikely. Why would they risk anyone else being in the know?”

“Good point – oh, and two other thing. Who were their Italian suppliers? Busconi?”

“That’s right. And the other thing?”

“How do you know that Grace and Colclough spilt the money evenly between them?”

“Don’t ask. Just think how insecure some bank computer systems seem to be nowadays.”

At that we finished our conversation and I thought over what Isla had told me very carefully. The Italian end was the puzzle; why were the Busconi family interested in John Walton? There were two possible reasons that I could come up with. One, his attempt to effectively form a conglomerate of small farmers would eat into the family’s profits. Two, worried that Walton would discover what he had been up to, Grace had paid the family to dispose of him. Or, as I thought it through, a combination of the two things. It would clearly be to the advantage of Grace and of the Busconis for Walton’s scheme to come to naught and for the man himself to vanish. I kept on thinking about it. Why would Grace risk paying for Walton’s disappearance? He surely didn’t need to. He had dealt with the family for years; revealing Walton’s plans to them might well have been enough.

The more that I thought things through, the more it reinforced my belief that Walton was dead, assassinated by elements of the Busconi family to protect their profitable business. Similarly, the more I thought, the more puzzled I became about Vera Colclough. The only person with a motive for disposing of her, either by murder, or by persuading her to disappear of her own account, was Grace. But why? The skimming scheme had seen the two of them working together, thus keeping the scheme secret from any of the other staff. The 18

only reason that I could think of was that Grace was worried that if Walton, or even the police, began to suspect what had been going on that Vera would be a weak link and point the finger at him.

I had reluctantly come to the conclusion that I could take the case no further, that I would have to report back to Fiona Walton that her husband was missing, presumed dead and that she needed to have a thorough investigation mounted into the activities of Harold Grace when my mobile rang; it was the lady herself.

“There’s been a development.” I was getting used to her telephone manner – no salutation, no preliminary, just straight to the meat of the matter. “One of the accounts that John controls has been accessed. Although it is an account I don’t have access to for withdrawals, in view of John’s disappearance, the bank agreed with the police to advise them if there was any movement on the account. In turn, the police told me – they had promised to keep me informed if there were any developments. The account is the one that he uses for paying his personal expenses – his car, house expenses, that sort of thing. It’s only a small account, never more than fifty or sixty thousand in it when he is buying a new car, but often much less, just three or four thousand. There has been a bank transfer from it to an off-shore account in the Cayman Islands. The police are trying to trace the account holder, but the Caymans are notoriously reticent in such matters and so far they have got nowhere.”

My mind was racing. This could be good news; equally it could be bad. It might mean that John Walton was alive and in control of his money. It could mean that a third party had extracted the information needed to use that account from him, in which case he might still be alive, but not in control of things. Worst scenario, he was dead, but before dying had passed on that information, almost certainly under duress. I had no way of knowing which of those three possibilities might be the case, but the fact that a computer generated transfer was presumably involved gave me hope that it could be tracked down.

“How big was the transfer?”

“That’s an oddity – it was only two hundred pounds.”

“It’s a test. Somebody has got the relevant information from him and has had a trial run to make sure that it works properly.”

“You don’t think that it could be John himself?”

“I have to say that it seems unlikely. Why would he transfer money from an account he uses for domestic expenditure to an account in a dodgy tax haven? Especially such a small amount?”

“Y-e-e-s,” she dragged the word out to three times its normal length, disappointment clear in her tone, “I suppose that must be it, but it does mean that he is still alive, surely?”

“It may well do,” I responded, “certainly, let’s hope so. Do the police have any idea where the transfer was made?”

“If they do, they haven’t told me.”

“Look, I sometimes have need for computer expertise, and the person I use is very good indeed. I’d like her to see if she can track anything down. She’ll need the codes and account numbers for your husband’s account, of course.”

“You mean Ms. Cameron?”

Once again I was taken aback at how much Fiona Walton knew about me.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“All right; I know that she has a very high reputation in her field.”

She recited the account details and I jotted then down as she spoke.

Once she had finished giving me the details, I broke the connection and phoned Isla and explained what I was hoping to achieve.

“Cayman Islands, eh?” she mused, “I’ve never tried tracking anything there before – could be a challenge.

Usual rates?”

“Of course.”

“OK, I should be able to get back to you later today.”

Waiting for her to call back meant that the time passed slowly – I’m not very good at being patient when waiting on somebody else’s efforts, but at last my mobile trilled again and Isla’s name showed on the screen.

“How did you get on?”

19

“Not bad. The Cayman Island account is a cut-out. Over the last year it shows one hundred and seventeen deposits made, each one of which then went somewhere else immediately. I tracked a couple of the others out of curiosity as well as the account that you are interested in. Same destinations in each case. However, getting back to the Walton account. The transfer was made from a site in Reggio Calabria and the computer used is hard wired to a telephone line so I know the address; from the pattern of use I’m one hundred per cent sure it a private residence or office, not a publicly accessible site like a library nor an internet cafe.”

“How do you know the address?” I asked in surprise.

“Easy – as I said the computer is using a land-line for its broadband connection and the telephone line is physically plugged into the computer itself – like everybody had to before wireless networks were developed. Hacking into the computer let me find the telephone number of the line, then it was just a case of looking it up in a reverse directory – you know, those directories where you put in the number and out pops the address instead of the other way round.

“The actual account is on a Swiss bank – that’s bad news. Even in their current mood of greater cooperation with authorities, trying to get cooperation from them is far from easy. Also, their security systems are a lot better than most – and certainly far better than that Cayman Island account was.”

“So we’re stuck?”

“Oh, I didn’t say that. The Swiss account was doubtless opened to make it difficult for the Italian authorities to track the Busconi family’s financial affairs, but the security measures at the family end aren’t anything like as good as those at the bank’s end. If I wanted to, I could empty their account tomorrow.”

“That’s a tempting thought! Still, better not. Out of idle curiosity, how much is in it?”

“Just over five million Euros. Aren’t they lucky I’m one of the good girls?”

That took me back a bit. Five million Euros was a tidy nest egg for the family, but given the size of their various operations over and above the bergamot orange business, it wasn’t huge. From my understanding of what Mrs. Walton had said to me, her husband was worth a good bit more than that on a personal level, never mind what he might make if he were to sell his various companies. If the Busconi family had seized him, it would make good sense for them to try and squeeze money out of him – but why wait so long? The answer, or a probable answer, wasn’t long in coming as Isla continued.

“I was interested in why the Busconi people did that trial run – I mean, two hundred pounds, what is that to them? Anyway, I had a good look at John Walton’s various holdings – and it is a bit complex, but very interesting.

“Most of his money, as you would expect, is in stocks and shares. He has a very varied portfolio, with a lot of activity within it – you know, ‘Sell X and buy Y, then sell Y and buy Z or even X again’ sort of thing.

Obviously it varies just about daily, but overall those holdings are worth something like ten million pounds, and he manages the portfolio well enough that, despite all the disasters going on in the financial markets, he has managed to grow his holdings by about six or seven percent over inflation over the last three years, which is a far back as I have gone. He only has two actual bank accounts, the sort of household account from which that two hundred pounds was taken, and a sort of holding account. That’s the interesting one. What he does is that every two months, on the first business day of February, April, June, August, October and December, he has money paid into that account, the money being his share of the profits from his companies.

Then that money is used to buy stocks and shares, so the holding account is virtually emptied. If the Busconis grabbed him for his money, not just to stop his bergamot oil scheme, they couldn’t have chosen a worse time. On the first of December that account contained nearly half a million pounds. By the time John Walton was taken it was down to just over two thousand.”

That, I told myself, was perhaps the reason for the delay. The Busconis would wait until Walton’s holding account was fed again, then swoop, but couldn’t resist the temptation to make sure that their idea would work by taking a bit out of the household account.

“Isla, that’s terrific work. Now, you said you’ve got the address of where that computer is located?”

“It’s in the Viale Romeo, number 187. Looking at Google Maps, that’s only a few hundred yards from your hotel, back towards the town centre.”

“Right, I’ll have a look at the place. Thanks again, Isla, I’ll settle up with you when I get home.”

20

“I’ll see you – take care.”

It was now just after seven in the evening. I left the hotel and strolled in the direction of the Viale Romeo which was indeed just a few hundred yards away. Number 187 proved to be a small restaurant come bar with what seemed to be an apartment above it. I decided that the best way to investigate the place was to dine there, but by Italian standards it was a bit early for the main evening meal, so I kept on walking, taking the opportunity to further familiarise myself with the town. Finally I returned to the restaurant for dinner. It was a mild evening, even though it was still January and the international news channel on the TV in my room had been talking earlier on the day of blizzards in Scotland. The mildness of the evening made my choice of a pavement table unremarkable; several other outdoor tables were occupied. My choice, however, was dictated by the fact that the apartment above the restaurant was reached by a staircase which I was able, by careful choice of table, to observe without appearing to be doing so.

It looked as though it was a fruitless vigil. I spun out the meal as long as possible, but finally was on the verge of leaving just before eleven when my patience was rewarded. A man turned off the pavement and mounted the stairs. I hurriedly paid my bill and waited; about ten minutes later a different man came down the stairs an set off along the Viale Romeo. The road runs roughly northwest-southeast and he headed southeast, away from the shore and reached the Via Treviso a narrow road with cars parked both sides and lined mostly with a mixture of apartments buildings, some old, some relatively new, but none looking particularly expensive as demonstrated by much evidence of poor external maintenance.

I had followed at a discreet distance, a task made easier by the quite large numbers of pedestrians around, but still close enough to get a good look at my quarry and to see which building he entered. Strolling casually past it, I could see the panel of doorbells and entry phone; it was a block containing eight apartments and obviously I had no idea which one was occupied by my man. I had, of course, had a good look at him as we walked along. About five feet six tall and pudgy rather than stocky, he was about fifty years old with once black hair liberally shot with grey. Sallow features in a face dominated by a Roman nose and deep-set eyes, he was dressed in light coloured slacks and shirt, open at the collar, with a light casual jacket worn unzipped.

I returned to my hotel to think things over. I had now seen the location from which the Busconi family ran their computer controlled bank accounts. It made sense for it to be somewhere with no obvious connection to the family – I had already discovered that Emmanuel Busconi, the head of the family, lived in a large house on the outskirts of the town. I had driven past it; with the high wall all round it and the tall, closed iron gates with their sentry box like gatehouse, it could have been a setting for a gangster’s residence in the Godfather films. A browse through Google Maps had given a bird’s eye view of the place. It was big, perhaps eight or ten bedrooms with tennis courts and an outdoor swimming pool. Clearly, for Emmanuel Busconi, crime did pay. Given so ostentatious a presence I had no doubt that Busconi would go out of his way to ensure that no trace of his illegal activities touched his residence.

I gave more thought to what I had seen at the Viale Romeo. One man arrived, another left, at eleven in the evening. That looked like a changing of the guard, but what was it that was being guarded? Given the presence of the computer in the apartment and the important part it played in the family business, it made sense for there to be someone to watch over it at all times. Given that, I wondered if it might be more than just the computer which was being guarded. Was it possible that it was also where John Walton was being held?

There was only one way to find out – to see inside. That, however, presented problems. Ideally, I would have gone to Commissario Crocetti and laid my suspicions before him – but I couldn’t do that. The only evidence that I had to back up that suspicion was Isla’s investigations, and those investigations, to put no too fine a point on the matter, were highly illegal. She had hacked into banking and private computer systems at my behest; she had committed illegal acts and I had commissioned them, and I could see no way of involving the Italian authorities without those acts becoming known.

I went to bed with no fixed plan of action ahead of me, just the glimmerings of a way forward.

21

Chapter Six – 21st January

I awoke early and put my vague plan into motion. A quick breakfast and by twenty to seven I was sitting in my car, parked across the road from 187, Viale Romeo. The restaurant was not yet open, although I could see the beginnings of activity within but this time I had no intention of dining there – I did not want my face to become known to the people who worked there.

I did not have long to wait. A few minutes before seven the man I had followed the previous night came into view and I watched as he mounted the stairs to the apartment. The staircase itself was external to the building and ended at a single door. I could plainly see him take a key from his pocket, but before inserting it in the door he rang the doorbell, presumably as advance warning to whoever was inside.

A few minutes later, the man I had seen arrive the previous night appeared at the head of the stairs, descended them, and walked away. I debated whether to follow him but quickly decided against it. I could see no advantage in knowing where he went, which was presumably to his home or some place of employment, whether legal or illegal was of no consequence.

Instead, I waited for half an hour to let the occupant of the apartment settle into whatever routine he followed in there, then got out of the car, crossed the road and ascended the staircase. At the top I paused briefly to inspect the door and the fame into which it was set and was relieved to see no evidence of any security camera, not even a peephole in the door itself.

I positioned myself so that my back was to the street, prepared myself with a couple of items that I had acquired the previous day, and rang the bell. For a long moment nothing, then a muffled voice from within, demanding to know who was there.

“Delivery” I shouted.

There was a moment’s hesitation, then the door started to open. The moment it was unlatched I hurled my weight against it, driving it open and driving the man behind it backwards and I followed him, giving him no chance to regain his balance, forcing him up against the wall and ensuring his quiescence but ramming one of yesterday’s acquisitions hard into his belly.

“Don’t move.” I growled. He obeyed; hardly surprising when what was rammed into his stomach was, to all intents and purposes, an ugly looking pistol. In fact, it was a replica, purchased in a toy shop, but sufficiently realistic for my purpose.

I stepped back, kicking behind me to shut the door as I did so. I waved the ‘pistol’ at him.

“Down on your knees, NOW!”

He obeyed and I circled warily behind him. So far there had been no sign of any other occupant in the apartment. It was a risk that I had decided to take – that the contents, whatever they might be – could be adequately guarded by one person. I based my decision on the near enough three hours that I had spent in the restaurant the previous evening, couple with the early hour at which I had arrived today, but it was a risk, nevertheless.

Now I was behind the man; without, warning, I planted my foot between his shoulder blades and thrust him face down onto the carpet, then, knees first, dropped down onto his back, driving the breath from his body. I pulled his arms behind his back and secured his wrist together with a nylon cable tie, effectively rendering him helpless.

I left him there whilst I explored the place. It was small; a kitchen with about as much room in which to swing an under-sized cat, two bedrooms, one totally bare and other containing just a single bed and a couple of bentwood chairs, and a lounge which boasted a fairly old looking desktop computer, a TV, a couple of small tables, a settee and a pair of easy chairs. The desk upon which the computer stood was also home to three box files, two of them empty, the other containing a single sheet of A4 paper, upon which was a column of numbers, presumably something to do with the use of the computer. However, of John Walton there was no sign. It looked as though I had wasted my time.

There was one item lying on the table next to one of the easy chairs which I decided might be useful; it was a real pistol, as opposed to the imitation that I had used to subdue the guardian of the place. I recognised it from my Army days; it was a Beretta Model 92, which I had seen carried by some rear echelon Italian troops in Afghanistan, unlike their front line troops who carried a more modern Glock pistol. I checked the weapon 22

over; it was fully loaded with ten rounds and appeared to be old but well cared for. I slipped it into the waistband of my trousers at the small of my back where it was concealed by my jacket. I returned to my prisoner, who was still lying face down where I had left him. I checked that the cable tie round his wrists was still secure, then used my foot to roll him over onto his back. He glared savagely at me.

“You are a dead man,” he snarled, “don’t you know who my boss is?”

I squatted down beside him so that our faces were only a couple of feet apart.

“I think so,” I said, “but why don’t you confirm it for me?”

“Don Busconi, of course. Now you know why you are a dead man walking. Nobody crosses Don Busconi.”

I smiled at him.

“I think I just did. So, I am a dead man walking am I? What does that make you, my little friend? Who is it who is tied up and helpless? Who is it who has the gun? Should Signor Busconi cause my death, you won’t be here to see it – so why should you care?”

I reached behind my back and brought out the Beretta.

“You see? Your own pistol. So sad that you felt the necessity to take your own life – I am sure that your friends will be puzzled, they will be upset, they will mourn you. They will say why should,”

I broke off my monologue and reached inside his jacket and extracted a wallet, flipped it open and examined the contents.

“Why, they will say, should poor Luigi Sandini have taken his own life like that? Was he frightened of something or someone? Was he ill, about to die anyway from some terrible disease? Not that any of that concern will worry you – you’ll be dead. Let me tell you what is going to happen. I am going to drag you into the lounge, sit you in a chair, hold your pistol against your head and blow your brains, bits of skull, and lots of blood all over the wall. Then I will undo your hands, place the pistol in your hand, and leave.”

He glared at my defiantly; my rhetoric seemed to have failed to convince him, so I took hold of his ankles and, as I had promised, dragged him into the lounge, where I pulled him up into one of the easy chairs. At last he began to believe.

“No, no – what do you want?”

I shrugged.

“Nothing, really. Your death is to be a message to Emmanuel Busconi, a message that times are changing.

His days are numbered; new men are in Reggio Cantabria and it is time for the Busconi family to leave for healthier climes.”

He was sweating now, and his expression became one of terror. I regarded him thoughtfully.

“I suppose you don’t really want to die for your boss, am I right?”

“Of course I don’t want to die – what do you want of me?”

I crossed to the computer desk and picked up the box file containing the sheet of A4, which I extracted.

“What are these numbers?”

“They are bank codes – Don Busconi’s bank codes. His banker uses them to transfer monies – but I don’t know how it is done – I’m only a guard to protect this place.”

I folded the sheet of paper and put it away in my inside breast pocket.

“That’s very interesting – so I could use these numbers to rob Signor Busconi?”

“I don’t know – but I suppose so. There are millions of Euros in those accounts.”

“Interesting – I will see what I can do with them. Perhaps being penniless will convince Signor Busconi to move more easily that using you as a message. Perhaps.”

He looked at me with a vestige of hope beginning to appear in his features. I shook my head slowly, as though trying to make my mind up over something.

“Of course, being robbed and sent a message might be better still. Tell me, where is the Englishman being kept?”

He blinked, taken aback by the sudden change of subject. I had referred to John Walton as an Englishman, although in fact he was a Scot, but whether he came from Motherwell, Merioneth or Manchester, I was sure that he would have been seen as an Englishman by southern Italians.

He eyed me nervously.

23

“What Englishman?”

Without warning I backhanded him across the face, putting a lot of strength behind the blow, rocking his head back from the force of the impact. He shook his head, licking at the trickle of blood coming from a cut lip.

“Don’t play games, Sandini. You know who I mean, so tell me where he is, or you will definitely end up as a message to Busconi.”

The defiance left him.

“He’s being held in a boat in the marina.”

“Which boat?”

“It’s called the Estrella del Sur – it belongs to my cousin, Ettore Sandini.”

“Who is there with the Englishman? There must be somebody, yes?”

He nodded his head.

“But of course; just like here, always someone there.”

I thought things over. I could try and release Walton myself, but the difficulties were many. The moment that I left the apartment, Sandini would obviously try to free himself and warn Walton’s guard. Short of killing him – which I had absolutely no intention of doing – I could see no way of ensuring his silence. I couldn’t take him with me; trying to hustle a restrained prisoner down the stairs, out across the pavement in full view of the restaurant customers and into my car was clearly out of the question. Also, I had no idea whether or not one of Busconi’s people might not arrive at any moment to work on the computer. There was, I decided, only one way forward.

I crossed to the desk and picked up the telephone, which was a hands-free model, and went back to Sandini.

“Here’s what’s going to happen, Sandini. I am going to dial the police and you are going to tell them where they can find the Englishman. Then you and I are going to wait a while to give them time to go to the boat.

In the meantime, you had better pray that none of your friends come here, because if they do, I’ll shoot you and them.”

He ran his tongue over his lips again.

“If anyone is to come here they will phone first so that I know.”

“That’s good – but just remember what I said. Now, that call to the police.”

True to my word, I dialled the police and listened, via the phone’s speakerphone facility, to both sides of the conversation. Sandini believed that he was playing for his life and he quickly convinced the officer on the other end of the line that he was telling the truth.

I waited half an hour, growing more nervous by the minute in case anyone from the Busconi family should decide to visit the apartment, then left. As I did so, and once out of Sandini’s sight, I removed the Ronald Reagan face mask that I had bought in the same toy shop as the imitation gun and which gave me confidence that Sandini could give no useful description of me.

I returned to my hotel and waited. Hopefully, the police would have acted on Sandini’s information and by now John Walton should have been rescued, but I needed to be sure before contacting his wife. In the event, however, she contacted me first.

“I’ve just been phoned by John himself,” she informed me, “the Italian police have just rescued him from his kidnappers. He was being held on a boat,”

“Yes,” I interrupted her, “the Estrella del Sur. I arranged for the police to receive an anonymous tip off.”

“You did? How?”

“Bribery and coercion – your husband is OK, is he?”

“Oh yes, they didn’t ill treat him, thank Heavens, although what would have been the end of it all I shudder to think.”

“They were waiting for money to be paid into his main account on the first of February. They were going to empty the account and I don’t like to think what their next move might have been.”

There was a moment’s silence whilst she digested what I had said.

“No, neither do I.”

Another silence, then she spoke again.

24

“John says that the police are quite happy for him to leave Italy tomorrow. He’ll need to return to give evidence at some stage, but that will probably be ages yet, so I’ve arranged for the plane to pick him up tomorrow – will you come back with him?”

“That would be most helpful – thank you.”

So easy to say, such a bad mistake.

Chapter Seven – 22nd to 29th January

I actually met up with John Walton that evening – he was also staying at the Excelsior – and learned from him what had happened on the fateful day that he disappeared. As I had surmised, the previous evening he had received an E-mail, ostensibly from Alfredo Parisse, who had the largest holding amongst the six growers he was due to meet. In the E-mail ‘Parisse’ said that he needed to talk to Walton before the meeting and asked him to meet in a cafe just a hundred yards or so away at nine thirty. Walton had agreed, but as he crossed the road to the cafe a car drew up alongside him and two men leapt out, grabbed him and bundled him into the car, which then sped off.

The thing that really worried him was that at no time, neither whilst he was actually being abducted, nor in his subsequent incarceration, did anyone try to disguise themselves or conceal their location. He fully expected that he would be killed to prevent him identifying them once they had what they wanted. He had also expected to be tortured, but they were able to obtain his bank details from his laptop once he had given them the necessary passwords; thereafter he had been treated reasonably, although being kept below deck in a boat without any opportunity to exercise had left him very unfit and shaky; that, however, was a temporary state of affairs and he would clearly return to normal health very quickly. More worrying was the thought of what the future might hold. He could give evidence against a powerful criminal family and the thought of them trying to silence him weighed heavily on his mind.

The flight back to Dundee the next morning was uneventful and we parted on good terms, his thanks for finding him and his promise that I could call on him for help should I ever need it, something to treasure. I had told him of the disappearance of Vera Colclough from Hall’s Perfumes and the unsuccessful attempt she had made to hide the details of his meeting, together with my suspicion that the attempt, and her subsequent disappearance, must be linked in some way. I also told him of the skimming exercise that she and Harold Grace had been running and how Isla Cameron had discovered both that and the lost details regarding the meeting. I did not, however, tell of everything that Isla had done, but I did suggest to him that he should commission her to do a review of the security of his various computer systems. He agreed quite readily and I was pleased that I was able to do Isla a good turn.

After the relative warmth and sunshine of southern Italy, to comeback to a Scottish January was a decided shock to the system. In particular, it was a miserable time to be looking for somewhere new to live, for Fiona Walton had been as good as her word and the papers transferring ownership of what had been my house to Walton Homes were well underway. She had generously given me the option of staying in the house at a low rental figure until I found somewhere else at my leisure, but now that the decision had been made I wanted to finalise the break as quickly as possible, so I started house hunting.

At least I now had seen the prospect of total penury removed from over my head; the promised seventy-five thousand pounds had duly been paid, in cash, and I had also managed to persuade the Waltons that my house, even in the current state of the market, was worth more than six hundred thousand. Another fifty thousand had been added to the pot that I now had to settle my various debts, so I was in the financial clear, at least for the time being.

The next week was spent looking at estate agents offerings, mostly on paper but several in bricks and mortar.

None impressed. Anything I liked I couldn’t afford. Anything that I could afford, I didn’t like. Finally, I decided that restricting myself to properties in the towns was out of the question. I had been looking at Perth and Dundee – I had no wish to go further afield from my existing stamping grounds, and I certainly didn’t want to go any further south or nearer to the big cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. There was also the question of finding a job. After twelve years in the Army, followed by five as my own boss, I didn’t really 25

fancy working for somebody else – but in any case, what skills could I offer? I could field strip any current military small arm with my eyes closed and, after reassembling it, use it effectively. I could drive most armoured vehicles, I could even fly a military helicopter – a skill which had, in fact, been my prime function whilst wearing Her Majesty’s uniform. None of those skills, however, were in much demand in civilian life, as I had found out when I left the Army. I had tried to get a job flying helicopters, but the civilian operators weren’t impressed by my military experience. Flying an Apache attack helicopter in Afghanistan apparently didn’t sit with their ideas of what they wanted. My five years in partnership with Iain Jamieson, like myself ex-Army, had seen me work as a discreet private investigator, a profession for which I had discovered an unsuspected degree of reasonable competence, but a job which had palled more and more as time went by. In a way, it was a relief when, due to the credit crunch and the general financial worried it engendered, our market effectively dried up, forcing me to seek pastures new.

I was therefore more than relieved when, a few days later, I received a phone call from John Walton.

“Keith, it’s John Walton. I have a commission which I wonder if you would be willing to undertake for me?”

“If I can – what is it?”

“It’s a bit complicated to discuss over the phone. How about meeting for dinner and we can talk it over?”

“Suits me; where and when?”

“I’m meeting some business people tomorrow afternoon at the Hilton Dundee – would eight o’clock that evening suit you?”

I had no need to consult my diary.

“That would be fine.”

“Oh, good – now, this may involve some computer expertise, so I was wondering about inviting Miss Cameron. I know she has worked for you in the past, so would that be OK by you?”

“Absolutely – if there is a computer element involved I know of nobody more capable than she is.”

“Oh good – I’ll phone her straight away.”

I entered the Hilton bar the next evening, the 29th, just before eight to find John Walton already there.

“Ah, there you are – what will you have to drink?”

I asked for a gin and tonic and eyed my host carefully. The pallor and emaciation caused by his imprisonment in the confines of the Estrella del Sur had already vanished. He looked fit and well, immaculately dressed in a dark grey suit with dazzlingly white shirt and a maroon tie. He looked every inch what he was; a very successful businessman.

We found an unoccupied table near a window giving a view of the quay, and seated ourselves. I had only taken a first sip of my drink when Isla Cameron arrived. Up to that moment I had never seen her dressed in anything other than jeans and, dependent upon the temperature, either a blouse or a sweater, plus, if outdoors in the cold, a Barbour jacket. Tonight was different; she wore a sleeveless black sheath dress, just below knee length, the neckline cut square across the bust to reveal a hint of cleavage. A pearl ‘choker’ necklace adorned her neck, with matching pearl earrings displayed by having her dark, virtually black, hair, normally worn loose to just above shoulder length, piled high on her head. On her left wrist there was a delicate wrist watch, with a balancing silver bracelet on the right. All in all, she resembled an even more beautiful Audrey Hepburn, long my favourite actress, in her Holly Golightly persona from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. As she walked across the floor to us she was the subject of many pairs of eyes, both male and female. As I looked at her I felt the first stirrings of desire since Margot and I had allowed our marriage to decline so disastrously.

Walton and I both rose to our feet as she approached and were rewarded with a dazzling smile.

“Good evening, gentlemen. I hope I haven’t kept you waiting?”

We both assured her that she hadn’t kept us waiting at all, and whilst Walton organised the drink she requested – a Campari and soda – she slipped gracefully into the chair opposite me.

“Well,” she said mischievously, “you didn’t expect me to turn up for dinner with a multi-millionaire in blue jeans, did you?”

I smiled back.

26

“No, but I didn’t expect to see so striking an entrance – I think every man in the room is envious of us having you with us, and every woman is just plain jealous.”

She inclined her head in acknowledgement.

“Thank you, kind sir.”

Walton returned with her drink, accompanied by a waiter bearing menus for our perusal, After the waiter departed, Walton leaned forward in his chair, his gaze switching from one to the other of Isla and myself.

“Before we go in for dinner,” he began, “I want to say that the proposal I have for the two of you – for I think that it will call upon both of your skills – is something that the police have already effectively given up on, but let’s leave discussion until after we have eaten.”

It was an intriguing start to the evening; a waiter came and took our orders and soon afterwards ushered us to a table where we enjoyed an excellent meal.

Once the food was finished we retired to the lounge and a table in a corner with none other within earshot.

We sat down and Isla and I looked at Walton expectantly.

“As you know,” he began, “I will have to return to Italy at some time in the future to give evidence against the men who kidnapped me. What worries me is that I cannot see the Busconi family being happy to see that happen. I have had enquiries made in the region and over the last ten years or more none of the family have ever seen the inside of a courtroom, never mind been convicted, despite the police being quite certain that a number of serious crimes, including at least three suspicious deaths, were brought about by them.

“I have spoken with the police here and whilst they were sympathetic, they were unable to offer any practical help. To be fair to them, it is difficult to see just what they can do. Assuming that the Busconis do decide to silence me it could come at any time – it might be a physical act, it might be a credible threat against my wife, children or grandchildren.”

In my checking up on the Waltons, I had discovered that they had two children, both adults and living their own lives. Robert, twenty-eight years old, was a banker in London and appeared to be doing well for himself. Married to Elena, née Sullivan, two years his junior, they had two children, Julia Fiona, just over two and Richard John, fourteen months. Robert’s sister, Elizabeth Alice, by coincidence exactly the same age as her sister-in-law, ran a dress shop in Perth, where she also lived. She was unmarried, but lived with her boyfriend, David Russell, thirty years old and an estate agent. All in all, plenty of targets for anyone wanting to silence John Walton without necessarily needing to resort to actual violence against him.

Walton leaned forward and fixed his gaze upon me.

“Mr. Hartley, like you, I was once an Army officer, although I was infantry, not Army Air Corps. I served in the Falklands and I saw a fair amount of fighting – I was in 2 Para at Goose Green.”

That caught my attention. The web searches that I had made on Walton had made no mention of his Army service. I wondered why not; Goose Green had been immortalised in the Army by the posthumous award of the Victoria Cross to the commanding officer of 2 Para, Lieutenant Colonel ‘H’ Jones. Anybody who had been there had nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide, so why no mention?

As if he had read my thoughts, Walton continued speaking.

“That finished me for the Army. It was my first experience of seeing men literally blown to pieces and I didn’t want to see it again. I like to think that I did my duty without letting my horror at what was happening affect me – I actually got mentioned in dispatches, so I don’t think I did too badly, but once we were safely home I quit. I really only joined the Army in the first place as a revolt against the beliefs of my parents. They were both teachers, rabidly left wing, totally convinced that the world would be a perfect place if it weren’t for the UK’s memories of Empire and all those nasty Americans. Everything that the USSR did, no matter how vile, they managed to find an excuse for. Everything that the UK or the USA did was, to them, clearly undertaken from the basest of motives. My joining the Army was a total anathema to them. Neither of them spoke to me from that moment until the day they both died in a car crash on the M4 just under three years later. I still wonder if things had worked out just a little differently whether they might both still be alive.

Had they lived they would by now be pushing eighty – by no means impossible.”

He broke off and stared into space for a long moment, then metaphorically shook himself and returned to the matter in hand.

27

“Enough of reminiscing – it’s the present and the future that I need to address. One thing that the Army taught me –nine times out of ten, the best form of defence is attack. Instead of waiting like some sacrificial lamb, I need to find a way of neutralising the Busconi threat. What I need are ideas of actions that will switch their attention from the probable imprisonment of two or more of their lower echelon, and switch that attention somewhere else. What I would like you two to do is come up with plans to achieve that.”

I looked at him in amazement. I had come across some hare-brained schemes in my time, but this took the biscuit.

“Mr. Walton,” I began, but he cut across me.

“Please, please call me John – everyone else does.”

I nodded an acknowledgement and started again.

“John, just what do you mean by ‘attack’?”

He shrugged helplessly.

“I don’t know – that’s why I want to hear ideas from people that I trust – which includes you and Isla.

Obviously, I’m not talking about mounting some sort of commando operation and killing the Busconi family off in their entirety, but some way in diverting their attention.”

Isla had been listening with rapt attention and now she leant forward.

“What about attacking their money?” She asked.

We both looked at her and simultaneously asked “How?”

She took a deep breath and launched into her idea.

“Look, because they raided one of your accounts, John, we know the basic details of their account. All we need is their password to be able to access it and once we can do that, we have a choice of options. We can simply change their password so they can’t access the account without a lot of hassle, and once they’ve sorted it, just change it again for a repeat dose of hassle. We can remove funds from the account. We can do both.”

“How would you go about doing it?” Walton asked.

“Well, there is no such thing as a secure password. Given enough time and a powerful enough computer programme, any password can be cracked. I don’t mean silly, obvious things like the name of your dog, but literally anything.”

Walton and I both looked at her uneasily.

“Anything?” I queried.

“Oh yes. Look at it this way – which is the way the computer looks at it. Each character in a password has to be one of a finite number of letters, numbers or symbols. That means all the letters of the alphabet – twenty-six of them, but they can be upper or lower case, so that means fifty-two chances. Add numbers – nought to nine, another ten chances so we are up to sixty-two. Then add symbols, the pound sign, the dollar sign and the like. Because some symbols can’t be used – the asterisk and the slash, for example because the computer uses those itself – you can add another ten, so we are up to seventy-two chances. Now if you had a one character password, that means you are bound to find it after trying each of those seventy-two options. Of course, nobody uses a single character password. Most sites demand at least six characters for a password –

which means that the number of options is seventy-two to the power of six because each combination you try has to cover all six characters – it isn’t just seventy-two times six, or four hundred and fifty two. Seventy-two to the power of six is roughly fourteen billion different combinations. A computer doing half a million operations a second – which is a pretty high powered computer, although nothing like the power of the super-computers like those NASA use to plan space trips, would therefore take twenty-eight thousand seconds, or nearly eight hours, to try all possible combinations. Make the password much longer and the time taken rises exponentially. For example, suppose you used ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’. Easy to remember and because it is thirty characters long, to try all possible combinations that same computer would take,” she paused, “well, how long do you think?”

“A week?” I hazarded.

“Nope, four years!”

I made a mental note to change my Internet banking password to something longer. Isla shook her head.

28

“Sorry, I’m getting carried away – the thing is, we can crack their password given long enough. Until I try, I don’t know how long it will take, but reckon on at least a day and probably more. Then there is the question of what we do once we are into their account?”

“Empty it.” Walton said without hesitation. Isla nodded.

“OK, and where do we send the money?”

Here Walton was less emphatic.

“I don’t know. Certainly I don’t want it coming anywhere near any of my accounts – my accountant would have a fit, the taxman would think that it was Christmas, and anyway, I don’t want to touch money that came from crime.”

Isla sat back in her chair, clearly thinking hard. Then she gave a wicked smile.

“They’re criminals, right?” we both nodded. “OK, that being the case, I don’t suppose for a moment that they pay all the taxes that they should. So, why not transfer it to the Italian government?”

Walton frowned dubiously.

“Can you do that?”

“Well, it’s not something I’ve ever tried before, but I don’t see why not. Doing that, come to think of it, has another advantage. The Italian authorities will see where the money has come from and are sure to start investigating – which should keep the Busconi family busy for a while.”

I could see the idea clearly appealed to Walton, but I felt obliged to utter a word of caution.

“Isla, if you do that, is there any chance of the Busconi family tracing it back to you? Don’t forget that they include murder amongst their crimes.”

“No,” she said confidently. “I won’t use any of my own computers for the actual tampering with their account, although I will need to use my equipment to break the password. I have access to Abertay University’s computer lab and I’ll use one of their machines for the actual transfer. There is no way that they would be able to trace me – the most they would be able to do is identify that the deed was done from the Uni.”

“Won’t they be able to trace the work you do on your machine to crack the password? After all, you were able to identify where their machine was.”

“No, I can work around that. It would be a small risk if I were to do the work from home, but what I will do is to book into an hotel and do it from there. Then the most that they will be able to achieve is to find out the hotel at which I stayed.”

I was impressed with the thoroughness with which she was approaching the task, after just a few minutes thought. I only wished that I could contribute something equally helpful, but for the life of me I could not think of anything useful.

Walton was clearly as impressed as I was, perhaps even more so, for he had not seen her in action before, whereas I had, quite often. There was no doubt in my mind that Isla could do exactly as she had outlined and that, if Walton agreed to her proposal, the Busconi family were in for a most unpleasant shock in the near future.

Walton furrowed his brow in concentration for just a few seconds, then slowly nodded his head.

“Yes, please – do it as soon as possible.”

It was a fateful decision.

Chapter Eight – February 1st to 6th

Isla was as good as her word. Three days later, on the 1st of February the three of us met again, once more at the Hilton Dundee, although this time in a small conference room that Walton had booked for the occasion.

“Right,” she said, “the Busconi account is now empty. I was able to crack their password, although it took a good bit longer than I had hoped – over forty-eight hours. I stayed in Edinburgh, at the Holiday Inn on Holyrood Road. I didn’t want to leave a money trail of my own, just in case, so I arrived in the evening, claiming that I had flown in and that the airline had lost my luggage and that I had stupidly left my credit cards in my suitcase. I produced a passport and cash and that was OK.”

29

“But wouldn’t your passport enable you to be traced?” I asked. I was impressed by the lengths that she had taken to remain anonymous and untraceable, but using her passport surely invalidated the rest of her precautions. She shook her head.

“No, not this one. It is French. I found it when I was in Paris on holiday a couple of years ago; someone had dropped it in the street and I picked it up, intending to hand it in to the gendarmes, but I was on a tight schedule and didn’t get round to it. Then, when I got home, I looked at it more closely. It belonged to a Marie Clerc, about the same age as myself and the photo could have been me – you know how awful some passport photos look, and this was a prime example. I decided to keep it in case it came it useful at some time – and it has. The desk clerk scarcely glanced at it, and my imitation French accent and cash did the rest.”

“So,” Walton interposed, “we can take it that you are untraceable by the Busconis. I suppose that the next thing to do is to wait on events.”

We didn’t have to wait very long. Walton had been keeping in touch with Commissario Crocetti in Reggae Calabria and four days later we answered his telephone request to meet once more, only this time at his house, rather than at an hotel.

We arrived separately, Isla drawing up in her Mini-Cooper as I was getting out of my Mondeo. The Walton residence was quite modest for a multi-millionaire, although far beyond my own aspirations, especially now that I was actively, but so far unsuccessfully, engaged in downsizing. The Walton house was a couple of miles north of Dundee, tucked away off an offshoot of the busy A90 trunk road. It was a double fronted neo-Georgian building in honey coloured brick, set in perhaps three acres of carefully tended garden. The whole site was enclosed by a high brick wall, pierced with ornate wrought iron gates which had opened automatically as I drove towards them and had presumably done the same for Isla.

The front door, reached by three wide steps, was open and our host stood at the top of them to greet us. I had pondered on what he might have to tell us as I drove, but one look at his face conveyed an unmistakeable message; whatever it was, the news was not good.

He ushered us into a large lounge at the back of the house, a room tastefully furnished and clearly a much used one. As we entered Fiona Walton rose from one of the three large settees which were arranged in a U

shape facing the large picture window looking out onto the garden.

“Do come and sit down,” she said, indicating the settee that she had just vacated. “Can I offer you anything Tea? Coffee?”

Isla and I both declined and all four of us sat down, with Isla and myself looking expectantly at John Walton.

He hesitated for a moment, then began.

“As you know, I have kept in touch with Crocetti in Reggio Calabria, and I had him on the phone yesterday.

The Busconi family are going absolutely crazy over the loss of their money – that’s what we expected and apparently the Italian tax authorities are already on the case, so things are bound to get worse for those criminals. What is worrying is that Crocetti’s informers tell him that two Busconi henchmen have left the area after a concerted trawl by the Busconis of just about every crook, minor and major, in the town. They were showing around a photo and the photo,” he looked directly at me, “was of you, Keith.”

I was stunned. Up until that moment, I had fondly believed that I was totally anonymous to the Busconi family. The old farmer, Benito Baldini, and his wife were the only people remotely involved who had seen me face to face. I was positive that there was no way that they would have volunteered information about me to the family – they would have been risking their own necks had they done so. All the time that I had been extracting information from Luigi Sandini I had been masked, so how did they have a picture of me? The answer, as Walton explained, was all too obvious.

“When you and I boarded our plane to come home someone at the airport must have been busy with a camera. I was already known to them, of course, but you were a mystery. They must have put two and two together and realised that you must have been the person who got the information to the police which enabled them to release me. What really worries me is that the two men who have disappeared are suspected locally of being enforcers for the Busconi family and possibly murderers. Their names are Nico Sandini and his brother Luigi.

30

“As you know, I have been worried all along that the Busconis might try to silence me in some way, and I have been preparing for that. Robert has been able to arrange with the bank for a transfer to Tokyo – he will take his family with him and I can’t believe that the Busconis will follow him to there. Julia has put a manager in place in her dress shop and is going to stay with a cousin in Vancouver – again, I can’t think that the Busconis will follow her there. Her boyfriend was very unhappy about it all, but I’ve had a word with him to ensure that he understands the seriousness of the situation and I’ve found him a job with an acquaintance of mine in London, which hopefully keep him under the radar, although I doubt they would go after him anyway. That just leaves Fiona and myself; we are leaving here and going to stay in an hotel. I won’t say where, what you don’t know can’t be got out of you should the worst happen. What I hadn’t anticipated, Keith, was that they would be able to tie you to me, so obviously I had to warn you.”

He turned to Isla.

“As far as I can find out, Isla, they have no knowledge of your existence, but again, I felt that I had to warn you.”

He turned to a low table beside the settee; on it were three mobile phones, two of which he picked up, handing one to Isla and one to myself. One stayed on the table.

“These are pay as you go phones and untraceable. I’ve programmed your two numbers into mine, and my number, and each of the other’s, into yours. If you need to contact me, use only those phones. Similarly, if I need to contact either of you, I will only use mine. They have a conference call facility, so that if needs be the three of us can talk to each other no matter where we all are.”

I was taken aback at the speed with which Walton have moved his son and daughter, but I suppose that when you are a multi-millionaire, and you set your mind to it, you can make things move more quickly than can the rest of us.

And that was that. We took our leave of the Waltons, but before going our separate ways, I suggested to Isla that we needed to talk, just the two of us, about things. She agreed and we drove in convoy to the nearest pub, where we settled in a corner to talk things through.

Isla was clearly anxious about the way that the Busconis looked as though they were seriously after the Waltons and presumably me.

“What will you do, Keith? It’s alright for the Waltons to go into hiding, but what about you?”

I shrugged.

“I’ve already sold my house to Walton Homes, and I’m looking hard for a new place. Fiona Walton has kindly let me stay in my old place until I find somewhere new, but now with this, the sooner I find somewhere, the better. One thing – one these two men who are presumably over here by now I know by sight. Luigi Sandini was the man I extracted John Walton’s whereabouts from.”

“But he will also know you by sight now that they have that picture of you.”

“Yes, there is that.”

A thought struck me.

“They’ll know where I live – my name was on the flight plan for the aircraft, the plan showed Dundee as our destination. Hartley isn’t a very common name up here – an hour with the phone book could track me down easily.”

I phoned John Walton and, apologising for using our communication system so soon, asked if he had idea how long the Sandini brothers might have been in Scotland.

“I got a contact to check for me. They didn’t fly in under their own names, but judging by what went on at the Italian end they could have been here for at least fort-eight hours.”

Another example of multi-millions greasing the wheels, I thought as I thanked him and rang off. I conveyed the information to Isla, who frowned in acknowledgement.

“So what will you do?”

“Well, my time in the Army taught me to always plan for the worst that you can imagine, because what actually happens will almost certainly be worse still. Assuming that they have worked out where I live, I am going to be very cautious about returning home. If it is all clear there, I will pick up some essentials and then book into an hotel for a while until I can find somewhere to rent furnished until this blows over.”

31

She continued to look concerned.

“But will it blow over? The Italian authorities may close down the Busconi family over there – although they haven’t had much success in the past – but what about the Sandini brothers over here? Might they not just carry on regardless?”

I had been thinking on much the same lines myself, and nodded in agreement. If the brothers were simply out for revenge on behalf of the family, there was precious little that I could do to thwart them other than keep out of their way by disappearing from my usual haunts.

I was still unable to come up with any alternative plan as Isla and I left the pub and went our separate ways, and I drove home in contemplative mood.

I didn’t drive straight up to the house. Instead, I turned off the M90 down Rhynd Road, a narrow little lane which meandered through farmland, past various houses and finally came to a dead end after a couple of miles or so. Its advantage for my purpose was that at one point it passed about half a mile to the north of my house, separated from it by a small wooded area which reached almost to the rear of my property, enabling me to leave the car amongst the trees and approach the house on foot, safely out of sight of anybody waiting for me to return.

I did not, however, go to the house straight away. It was now just after three o’clock. The day was overcast and dull, with occasional snow flurries. This far north, in early February, sunset would be around ten to five; in less than two hours time it would be dark enough for me to approach in an effective cloak of invisibility right up to the house itself. I settled down to wait, less than a hundred yards from my back door, and waited.

Waiting was something I was, and still am, good at. The house gave no indication of life and at last I deemed it dark enough to approach nearer. Again, I did not follow a straight path, but cautiously circled the building, looking for any evidence that it contained unwelcome visitors. I found none, and even more cautiously entered, but via the back door, not the front.

Anticlimax; the house proved to be as empty as it had looked. Once I had proved that to my satisfaction, I set about collecting together things I needed to take away with me; laptop computer, spare clothes, and my survival kit. This was something that I had put together over a long time and had been prompted by a discussion that I had once had with an Army colleague as we waited in anticipation of possibly being called upon to support an infantry patrol which was tasked with flushing out a suspected Taliban group believed to be sheltering in a supposedly deserted village. In the event the call never came. The village was truly empty, although there was evidence that people, perhaps Taliban, perhaps not, had been there in the recent past. My colleague, George Lewis, had hypothesised on what one would need for survival under a variety of scenarios

- forced down in the desert by engine failure, being hunted by enemies (regardless of whether the enemies were the authorities or criminals) , things like that – we even included discussing our choices if appearing on Desert Island Discs. All idle chatter to pass away the time, but some years later it came back to my mind.

Now out of the Army, and working with Iain Jamieson in our investigative agency, I had been engaged in tracking down an errant husband who, faced with imminent divorce proceedings, had done a bunk, taking with him his wife’s quite valuable jewellery and a substantial amount of cash which he had cleared out of their joint account. The police had not been interested. They saw no criminal actions; the couple were married, there had been no hint of domestic violence, it was, after all, a joint account and the jewellery –

well, who had paid for it in the first instance? The husband. None of that cut any ice with the wife, who wanted the errant male tracked down and we got the job. The couple had lived in Edinburgh, and he had gone to ground in a small hotel on the outskirts. As a first step, I had assumed that he might not have gone far afield and I had found him by the simple expedient of telephoning every hotel in the Edinburgh Yellow Pages and asking if he was there. Booked in under his own name, I found him at just the twelfth attempt.

It had, however, set me to thinking. Suppose, for whatever reason, I had wanted to disappear? How would I go about it? A credible alternative identity would be needed, one which would render me more or less invisible to anybody looking for me under my own name and persona. Feeling slightly foolish and over-dramatic, I had, however, set about doing just that. The result was a small metal box, carefully concealed in the garage behind a couple of loose bricks. In it were just three items; a credit card, one thousand pounds in twenty pound notes, and a souvenir of Afghanistan. The credit card was in a name not quite my own; instead 32

of Keith Graham Hartley, just plain Keith Graham. To keep it current I had used it from time to time in the past, always settling the balance by cheque drawn on my normal account. I was uncertain whether the process was actually illegal or not, but had never had any wish to find out. The souvenir, on the other hand, was very definitely illegal. It was a pistol. As a helicopter pilot I had carried an officially issued sidearm, a 9mm Browning automatic. Carried in a canvas holster on my webbing belt, it was very visible; furthermore any enemy would be fully aware that I carried such a weapon. I had therefore also carried an unofficial –

very unofficial – back-up weapon. I had ‘liberated’ it from a cache of captured Taliban weapons which were being shipped from where they had been found back to base. It was a Walther PPK, made famous by Ian Fleming as the preferred weapon of his fictional James Bond character. Only a tad over six inches in length, it was easy to conceal about ones person compared to the much bigger Browning. Less powerful and less accurate, it was nevertheless powerful enough and accurate enough in any likely scenario where it might be needed.

When I had been posted back to the UK I had fully intended to leave it behind, but somehow in the flurry of activity it had been overlooked and ended up amongst my luggage. By the greatest of good fortune it had not been discovered until I myself had gone through my things some weeks after my return as I was sorting everything out prior to my leaving the Army. It posed a dilemma; if I handed it in I faced the strong possibility of my claim that I knew nothing about it getting to the UK being disbelieved. After all, in the eyes of the Army I should never have had it in the first place; in the eyes of the civilian authorities I was in possession of a forbidden firearm, a crime carrying a five year prison sentence. So I had kept it, carefully hidden away, over the years. Now, with two Italian gangsters looking for me, I was extremely glad that I had. I examined it carefully. Apart from a quick test shot when I had first acquitted it, I had never had occasion to fire the weapon, so the ammunition was a good five or six years old at least, but hopefully still fully functioning. However, I remembered clearly the words of our senior weapons instructor ‘Never rely upon a weapon unless you know that it works as intended’. I therefore took an old cardboard box from the corner of the garage, stuffed it full of old telephone directories and mail order catalogues that I had been intending to get rid of for ages, lined the little pistol up and squeezed the trigger. The noise, inside the concrete floored, brick built garage, was deafening, but at least I now knew that the Walther and its ammunition still worked.

I had originally just intended to try and disappear from any normal hunt that two Italians landing in Scotland might be able to mount – after all, I didn’t even know if they spoke any English between them. Whilst I had been interrogating Luigi Sandini I had, of course, done so in Italian. That, however, meant that I would never know when, if ever, it would be safe to resume my normal life. Somehow I had to neutralise the threat posed by the Sandini brothers. The more I had thought about it as I assembled my escape package, the more unhappy I became at adopting so passive a role.

I left the house, again by the back door , and made my way back to my car. The snow flurries of earlier had evolved into a steady, though quite light, snowfall, backed by a cold easterly wind strong enough to blast individual snowflakes into my face with uncomfortable force. At last I reached the comfort of the Mondeo and sat with the engine idling whilst I warmed up again and whilst I gave further thought to my predicament.

All I knew for certain was that I had upset the Busconi family and that two of them had vanished from their normal haunts. We were assuming that they had flown from Italy – probably via Naples, to Scotland, but must have done so under names other than their own.

It slowly dawned on me that I was missing an obvious trick. Cursing myself for being so slow in so important a matter, I got out my mobile and phoned Isla. She answered at the third ring.

“Hello?”

“Isla, it’s Keith – could you do something for me?”

“If I can. What is it?”

“Tell me, with your computer expertise, could you track what passengers flew on a particular flight?”

“If you know the flight – you know, what airline, where from and to – and if it wasn’t too long ago. Airlines don’t keep that information for very long – there’s just too much of it. I’m not sure but I think a couple of 33

months is the usual limit, although a lot of governments are trying to make them keep the records for much longer so that they trace criminals and terrorists - or so they say.”

“That’s great – what I’m trying to do is to trace the Sandini brothers. Thanks to John Walton we know that if they did come to Scotland they didn’t do so under their own names. Now, the logical route for them would be from the regional airport at Reggio Calabria to Naples then up here somehow. I don’t know if there are direct flights, or if they might have to change, but what we are looking for is two Italian males flying from Reggae Calabria to Scotland. Is that possible?”

“It’ll take a while, but yes, I can do it. I’ll phone you back mobile to mobile.”

“Thanks, Isla, you’re a star.”

I drove away and an hour later had booked myself into the Gilvenbank Hotel in Glenrothes. My first intention had been to find somewhere in Perth or Dundee, but on thinking things through, I decided to head away from my usual area, so drove south on the M90 instead of north, then swung off east onto the A911. As I hadn’t known myself that I would be coming to Glenrothes, there was no chance of anyone finding me quickly, if at all.

I settled into my room, intending nothing more adventurous than dinner and an early night, and was in bed not long after ten. It seemed but moments later that I was woken by the ringing of the Walton mobile.

Blearily, I turned on the bedside lamp and picked up the phone, glancing at my watch as I did so. It was half past two in the morning. A sense of foreboding hit me; what had happened?

“Hello?” I croaked.

“Keith, I’ve found them.” It was Isla; I tried to give an impression of bright awareness.

“That’s great – how?”

“There were only two males with Italian passports in the last week who travelled from Reggio Calabria to Scotland. Three days ago Luigi and Nico Panini flew from Reggio to Naples, then to Gatwick, then to Edinburgh. At Edinburgh they hired a car from Hertz – a Mondeo. This must be the Sandini brothers. They spent the night at the Quality Inn at the airport, then drove to Dundee – they used a credit card to pay for dinner at the Hilton Dundee.”

The very hotel where Isla and I had met up with John Walton; coincidence, or did they know something?

“Did they stay there?”

“Yes, they haven’t booked out yet, so they are presumably still there.”

“That’s great work, Isla, see you tomorrow to settle up?”

There was a pause at the other end of the line.

“Oh shit – I’ve just realised what the time was – did I wake you? Sorry, I get carried away when I’m tracking something like this.”

“Don’t worry about it. You know what they say – I had to get up, the phone was ringing!”

I was rewarded with a chuckle from the other end.

“OK, when and where to meet?”

“Well, not the Hilton Dundee, that’s for sure. Look, I’ve realised that I don’t even know where you live –

where is convenient for you?”

“I stay in Methven – that’s the other side of Perth from you.”

I visualised the geography in my mind.

“Let’s meet well away from Dundee – how about Auchterarder – do you know it?”

“I’ve driven past on the A9 – never into the town itself.”

“Well, if you come off the A9 where it is signposted to Auchterarder that leads you into the High Street –

there’s a good hotel there, the Star. It’ll be on your left as you come in from the north - let’s meet there for a pub lunch at, say, one o’clock, OK?”

“That would be fine. See you there.”

And with that I settled back down to resume my interrupted sleep.

I got to our appointed meeting place a little early, and settled down with a half pint of bitter to await Isla’s arrival. She came through the door about ten minutes later and I rose to greet her, an easy smile forming on 34

my lips, a smile which died half-formed when I saw her face. It was positively ashen and she looked as though she might collapse at any moment.

“Isla, what’s happened?”

“Keith, it’s awful, it’s the Waltons- they’ve been murdered. It was on the car radio just a minute or two ago.”

I sank back into my chair.

“Are you sure?” Stupid question; Isla, of all the people I’ve ever known, was the least likely to get something of such magnitude wrong.

“Yes, it happened yesterday. They were driving away from their house when another car blocked their path and they were shot by two men who jumped out of it – and who then drove away. The Waltons were being driven – the driver of their car was wounded but has survived, but all he could say was that the killers wore masks. It must have happened not long after you spoke to John Walton on the phone. ”

Without a shadow of a doubt, the Sandini brothers had exacted a terrible revenge on behalf of the whole Busconi family. John and Fiona Walton had sorted out safeguarding their children, but had left their own flight to safety too late.

Another thought struck me.

“Isla, the Sandinis must have been waiting for the Waltons to leave – they may well have seen us arrive and leave. There was plenty of lay-bys near the house that they could have used. That means they may well now know about you – the fact that you and I arrived at the same time would link you with the Waltons and me.

You mustn’t go back to your place; I’m confident that they can’t find me for the time being, but they will have had the opportunity to note your licence number and from that it’s easy to get an address.”

Isla was still in a state of shock and gazed vacantly at me.

“Isla, are you listening to me? You mustn’t go home from here.”

She visibly pulled herself together.

“Keith, where can I go – and I need my things from home. I can’t function away from my computers...”

I interrupted her.

“You can’t function at all if you are dead, that’s for sure. Let’s book you in here, at least for tonight. Make a list of what you need from your place that I can get for you and I’ll suss the place out and if it’s safe I’ll bring them to you.”

We spent the next twenty minutes getting her booked in for the night and making a list of things that she really needed from her house. The moment she was settled into her room I left her and drove to the small village of Methven, which straddled the A85 a few miles west of Perth.

Isla’s house proved to be a small detached bungalow just off the main road of the village. I had parked the Mondeo several hundred yards away in another side street and approached the house on foot and very cautiously. I had no reason to expect that the Sandini brothers were already there, but I had no intention of underestimating them. Indeed, I was very impressed with their efficiency to date. They had only been in Scotland for three days, yet in that short time they had tracked down and killed the Waltons and had done so with firearms that they could not possibly have brought with them, not on a passenger aircraft in this day and age. So, it looked as though they might well have a contact or contacts in Scotland, which made the task of defeating them all the harder with an unknown presence to cope with as well as the two brothers themselves.

Isla’s house was deserted. Using the keys she had lent me, I quickly gathered together her essential items –

clothes, shoes and underwear, but above all her state of the art laptop computer. I was in and out of the house in under fifteen minutes, leaving as carefully as I had arrived, and encountering nobody.

I returned to Auchterarder; it was by now getting dark although still only just after four o’clock and I found Isla in a more composed state of mind.

“So,” she said, looking at me enquiringly, “what do we do now?”

I had been thinking of nothing else as I had driven to Methven and back.

“We need to tell the police at least some of what we know, although not everything.”

She nodded her head.

“I agree with that OK – I shudder to think how many laws I broke in getting the information for you and the Waltons, never mind raiding that bank account.”

35

She paused.

“You know, up until know, using my computer to find out things has always seemed harmless. I never hurt anyone, even though I got into systems I had no right to. Even taking the Busconi money – well they’re criminals and transferring their money to the Italian taxman seemed a sort of poetic justice. But that’s what got the Waltons killed, wasn’t it? Because of what I did.”

Basically what she said was correct, although the Busconis would almost certainly have done something unpleasant to stop John Walton from testifying against those who had kidnapped him back in Italy. I had to admit that in going along with John Walton I had helped turn what had been a potential threat, a possibility even if a likely one, into something far worse. I tried to reassure her.

“Isla, you did the transfer because you were the only one amongst us with the skills to do it, but we were all equally involved. None of us thought that it would come to something like this, even though there was every possibility that the Busconis would take some sort of action to shut John Walton’s mouth. Whether that would have meant murder we have no way of knowing. What’s important now is to keep you safe and get justice for the Waltons.”

We were in her hotel room, a small single, with just the one easy chair and an upright chair at the desk come dressing table. I had been sitting in the easy chair, with Isla perched on the edge of the bed. She looked at me, despair written on her face and tears slowly welled up in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks.

“Keith, it’s easy to say that, but I can never forgive myself for what has happened. I’m sure that if I hadn’t raided their bank account the Busconis would never have gone to such lengths.”

In vain I tried to reason with her, but nothing I said would convince her that the deaths of the Waltons would not be on her conscience for evermore. At length, I gave it up as a bad job and suggested that she had an early night – she refused to even contemplate having anything to eat or drink – and left her in the room.

I was worried about her and rather than leave for my own hotel room in Glenrothes – even though it was only about a thirty mile journey – I booked myself in the Star as well. My complete absence of luggage was a nuisance, but not insurmountable and I took my own advice and had an early night. It took an age for me to drift off to sleep as the events of the last few days whirled endlessly through my mind, but at last I dropped off into an uneasy slumber.

The next morning I got to the dining room as early as possible and waited for Isla to appear, which she eventually did nearly an hour later. Hollow-eyed and still ashen faced, she looked as though she hadn’t slept a wink, despite the early night. She saw me and made her way over to my table, seating herself opposite me.

She answered my ‘Good morning,’ listlessly and I wondered how to get her out of her depressed mood.

“What are we going to do, Keith?” she enquired. It was something to which I had been giving a great deal of thought.

“Well, first things first. You need to be somewhere where the Sandinis cannot find you. Do you have family or friends that can take you in, but which the Sandinis won’t be able to trace?”

She shook her head.

“I’ve no family to go to. My parents are both dead, mum died of cancer ten years ago and dad died soon after of a heart attack – although I reckon it was a broken heart that did for him – they were devoted to each other and mum’s death really destroyed him. I’ve a lot of contacts on the net, but nobody who actually lives near enough and knows me well enough to take me in. I do have an aunt – mum’s sister – but she lives in New Zealand and I haven’t seen her since she left the UK when I was a little girl. She married out there and has a family I’ve never met. We exchange Christmas cards and that’s about it.”

I mulled the matter over.

“Look, I have a possible solution for you. As you know, until the recession killed our firm off, I was partners with an ex-Army buddy, Iain Jamieson. He and his wife stay out Stirling way and I’m sure that they would put you up until this is all over.”

She looked helplessly at me.

36

“But when will it all be over, Keith? The Sandinis are over here in Scotland; if they go back to Italy they might find themselves being investigated with the rest of the family. For all we know they might decide to stay here indefinitely – after all they are EU citizens so they can stay as long as they like if they want to.”

What she said was all too true, but in the dark watches of the night I had come to a conclusion about the Sandini brothers, one which I was unwilling to share with anyone, least of all a young woman who was feeling near to the end of her tether, and whom I was worried might even be heading for a nervous breakdown.

My solution failed at the second fence. Isla grudgingly agreed to my suggestion, but when I phoned Iain’s house I could only get his voice mail. Trying his mobile did get me through to him, only to discover that he, his wife Marie, and Kevin and Ailsa, their twelve year old twins, were all in Disneyland in Florida – and the time difference made it a fairly disgruntled ex-partner who answered the phone. They would be away for another two weeks, so I was in need of a Plan B to keep Isla safe. If I had still had the support of the Waltons and their millions, I would have put her up in an hotel far away, Birmingham or London, perhaps, but neither of us had the money for such a course of action for more than a fairly brief period.

“So now what?” Isla asked listlessly.

“The best that I can suggest is that you stay here. It is out of the way, nobody here knows you – nor me for that matter..”

A sudden thought struck me.

“That bag of things I brought from your house for you. Does it include that French passport that you have?”

She nodded.

“That’s it, then. You book out of here and we book you in somewhere else. The Sandinis might know to look for Isla Cameron, but there is no way that they can know about Marie Clerc, is there?”

For the first time that morning she displayed a flicker of animation.

“That’s right,” then she hesitated, “but when I used the passport before I also used cash and a tale of lost luggage. That isn’t going to sound too convincing away from an airport – and I haven’t much cash on me anyway.”

I thought for a moment, then came up with a solution.

“No problem,” I said, “we will both book in, but after that, I will leave you there. I have a credit card account in a different name – Keith Graham, instead of Keith Graham Hartley – and I have two cards on it, so as far as the hotel is concerned, when you come to leave you use that card, which will be the same as the one we used when booking in. The account has a ten thousand pound limit, so there is no need to worry about money. As far as the hotel will be concerned you and your partner booked in, and if they ask, your partner has been called away on business or something for a few days. ”

“We’ll need some luggage to look convincing,” she pointed out. She was right and I was pleased that she was beginning to come out of her lethargy and look at things objectively.

So that was what we did. By late afternoon, after a bit of shopping using my Keith Graham credit card, we had a credible amount of luggage between us for a couple on holiday and we had booked into the Jury’s Inn in central Glasgow, leaving Isla’s Mini parked in a side road where it would hopefully be safe, at least for a few days, because although I had not taken Isla into my confidence, I was determined that within the next few days the threat of the Sandini brothers would have been lifted. As the Sandinis had travelled via Edinburgh, it seemed good sense to avoid the capital, hence the choice of Glasgow. The location was logical for a city holiday and the hotel big enough for us to be reasonably anonymous.

By early evening I was on my way again, this time to spend the night in my Glenrothes hotel. Before turning in for an early night I fired up my laptop and checked my bank account. To my amazement, there was a payment in it of twenty thousand pounds. Bemused, I checked my E-mails for the first time since two days previous. There was one from John Walton; it must have been just about the last thing that he did before he and his wife got into that car to fall at the hands of the Sandini brothers.

I read it with a sense of unreality.

“Keith:

37

It dawned on me that I have made no payment yet to you and Miss Cameron for your latest efforts. I have therefore transferred £20,000 to your account as an interim arrangement. We can discuss final arrangements when we next meet.

John Walton”

I had no idea how he had got my bank account details – another exhibition, I suppose, of the power of money

– but I was intensely glad that he had . Now I had funds to support myself for a good while whilst I settled matters with the Sandinis.

The next question was just what to do about them. I toyed with the idea of an anonymous tip-off to the police implicating them in the Walton murders and revealing their real identities, but I had no way of knowing what evidence the police might be able to obtain to progress from such a tip-off to an actual arrest, nor how good the fake identities might be when scrutinised. If the brothers were questioned and released, it merely stretched out the period of time that Isla and I would have to cope with never knowing when, how or even if they might come after us.

There was also the question of making the punishment fit the crime. The Waltons had been good people, good people snuffed out by a couple of low-life gangsters operating on the orders of more of the same ilk.

Were they to be arrested and convicted, they would be out again in perhaps ten years or so, still young enough to enjoy a reasonable amount of life, a privilege they had callously denied their victims. The murder of the Waltons, and the threat they certainly posed to me and perhaps also to Isla, made the matter personal.

Very personal. Somehow, I felt, I was both entitled and required to act against them on my own behalf. The problem, of course, was how?

I needed to entice them into a trap of my own making, a trap that I could spring without causing danger to myself – or at least with only an acceptable level of danger – nor creating any risk to innocent third parties.

The only thing that I could think of was to set myself up as bait, and the only way that I could think of doing that was by returning to my house – or more properly what was now Walton Home’s house – and lie in wait for them there.

I knew that they had booked into the Hilton Dundee –a choice that seemed surprisingly upmarket for such as them – but I did not know if they were still there. Easy way to find out. I telephoned the hotel and asked –

why try and make things complicated for oneself?

The receptionist assured me that the Panini brothers were still booked in, but that they were not currently in their rooms. Yes, I was further assured, my message would be passed on to them as soon as they returned to the hotel.

It was time to forego yet another night in my Glenrothes hotel. I left at once, driving the Mondeo in the direction of the house that, despite everything, I still thought of as my home. Once again, I parked the car off Rhynd Road, and once again I approached the house from the woods behind, picking my way cautiously by the light of a very small torch, for the night was black as pitch.

I was even more careful in my checking of the house than on my previous visit. The result was different. It was deserted, but a careful check of various tell-tales that I had l left behind – the exact positioning of a sheet of scrap paper on the desk in the office, the precise amount by which the kitchen door into the hall had been left open – that sort of thing – clearly demonstrated that somebody had been in the house and had tried to mask the fact by being very careful – but not careful enough. Now I knew that they had tracked me down; it only remained for me to turn that fact to my advantage.

I settled down to wait, confident that they moment they got back to the hotel and received my message, they would be on the road again, heading my way. The message had been brief and, to anyone other than the Sandinis unintelligible; ‘Tell them that I want to talk about the price of bergamot oranges and that they can reach me on this number’ and I had recited the Walton mobile number. I dare not give the house’s landline number – it might serve to trace back to me at some future date. Hopefully, they would not anticipate that I knew that they had already tracked me down to my address. Hopefully, they would think that by giving out a mobile number I was unaware that they already knew where I lived. Hopefully, they would be overconfident because the odds were two to one in their favour..Hopefully, my planned surprise for them would work as I intended it to. A lot of hope – but at least it was hope born of experience.

38

It took them three and a half hours to make their move. I had covered all the likely approaches – drive straight up to the door and ring the bell (unlikely), creep in from the back through the wood and across the field (more likely), a combination attack – one at the front, one at the back – which I felt was more likely.

What, however, would I have done? What would my Army instructors have done in like circumstance? The answer was brutally simple. Fire.

A firebomb, something as simple as a Molotov cocktail – a bottle filled with petrol with a wick in the neck –

or as sophisticated as a phosphorus grenade. Hurled through a window, such a device would turn the lower floor into an inferno in no time, an inferno from which there would be no escape for any occupant who would either die in the fire or be shot down whilst trying to escape it.

That’s why I wasn’t inside the house at all. Instead, I was in the garden at the side, concealed by the shrubbery, and from where I could keep watch on both front and back of the house. The big picture window overlooking the rear garden and the valley beyond offered the most tempting target for a firebomb, and I had left a low powered lamp on in the corridor outside the bedroom immediately above it as an inducement. I had also left on the low power light above the front door.

In fact, their approach and attempt to break into the house displayed the fact that they had not had the benefit of the sort of training that I had received in the Army. They parked somewhere short of the house, although in the quiet of two o’clock in the morning I clearly heard their vehicle, even the clunk of the doors as they were closed. Too near, too noisy. At least they walked on the grass, not crunching up on the gravel, but even so the sound of their progress was obvious.

They converged on the front door; it had small windows either side of it, one of which they had left unlocked from their previous visit. I had discovered the fact, but had not secured it. The chances were that they would prefer to use it again, and knowing their probable point of entry worked in my favour. I watched patiently as one of them – I later discovered that it was Luigi – fiddled around opening the window by sliding a knife down the gap between frame and window to dislodge the catch, then opening it. He started to haul himself up and as he did so, I rose to my knees, the Walther held out in front of me in both hands. The light above the front door, whilst dim, gave enough illumination for my purpose. I shot Luigi, twice, in the back, and as he tumbled down backwards and Nico turned towards the source of the gunfire, I shot him as well.

I suppose that had I been some comic book hero I would have called on them to surrender and marched them in triumph to the authorities. However, I am not a comic book hero. I was opposed by two armed, vicious killers and performing comic book heroics would most likely have resulted in getting myself killed, which was not part of my plan.

I cautiously approached the two bodies and satisfied myself that they were, indeed, quite dead. My next action was to search them and remove anything of interest, which proved to be their wallets, the false Panini passports, the keys for their rental car, and a couple of pistols, an old Colt 45 automatic from Luigi, a snub nosed Smith and Wesson 38 revolver in the case of Nico. I wondered how they had been able to obtain the weapons so quickly in the UK, where they are prohibited from private ownership. They must have some contacts somewhere, but hopefully the matter was of only academic interest. Far more pressing was the matter of disposing of their corpses.

One of the purchases that I had made that day was several yards of heavy duty polythene sheeting to wrap them in. I would have preferred proper body bags, but I could hardly expect trying to purchase such items to go unremarked nor unremembered. The Forces, the police, etc., buy them in bulk and through official channels. For a private individual to try and buy just two would stink to high heaven, so the plastic sheeting would have to do.

After stripping both of them naked, I carefully rolled them into their makeshift shrouds, sealing the sheeting closed around them with a combination of a heavy duty stapler and a generous amount of duct tape, both of which had also been a recent purchase, then dragged them one after the other into the garage. I stripped them because, should their bodies ever be discovered, I wanted to leave no identifying features on them, and their Italian made clothes and shoes would have been a starting point for any investigation.

My next task was to find their car, which turned out to be parked on the verge only two hundred yards away, and drive it into the garage so that it also was out of sight. Finally, I trekked through the woods and retrieved 39

my own vehicle and drove it into the, by now crowded, garage, thankful that when the house had been built a two car garage of generous dimensions had been thought appropriate for its upmarket status.

My first thought had been to bury them in the woods, as the better solution of dumping the bodies in a deep water loch would involve driving miles with them in the car with the awful prospect of being involved in a traffic accident or the like and having them discovered, but the practicalities of a grave in the woods had defeated me. I could see no way of safely getting the bodies there, digging a grave, and carrying out the interment, so a journey to a loch it would have to be, despite the frightening risks. However, it was now nearly four in the morning, and although there were still several hours of darkness left, I was exhausted, so I went to bed.

Chapter Nine – February 8th to 9th

I slept solidly, not waking until well gone nine. My first action was to phone and check on Isla; to my relief she was perfectly alright, with nothing to report. I didn’t tell her what had happened to the Sandini brothers; it was scarcely the sort of thing to discuss over the phone, even mobile to mobile. Instead I left her with the impression, without actually lying to her, that I was still at the Glenrothes hotel, and got her agreement to stay in Glasgow at least for a couple of days more whilst – another inference – I looked for ways to set the police on the trail of the Sandinis.

In fact, I had a very different, and very busy, day ahead of me. My first task was to reconnoitre a suitable last resting place for the Italians. I already had somewhere in mind, but I wanted to check it out and make sure that my memory of the location was accurate; that things hadn’t changed since I was last there, so I was on the road before eleven.

The Loch of Clunie is a small, isolated loch about three miles west of Pitlochry, reached by a series of minor roads, roads minor enough to be infrequently trafficked, but not so remote that any vehicle would be a cause for comment. I drove the thirty five miles in my own car; for the actual task I intended to use the car the Sandinis had hired, but I didn’t want the same vehicle appearing on anybody’s consciousness twice in quick succession.

The area was as I had remembered; the narrow roads skirted the loch, but it was effectively screened from them by bushes and shrubs, even in their scanty winter guise. Satisfied with my choice, I drove back to the house. Now I had to wait. Timing was important; I needed the cover of darkness for what I intended to do and, by Sod’s Law, the gloom we had experienced over the last few days had been replaced by a cold, crisp and clear day, so darkness would be that much later. On the other hand, if the skies remained clear there would be moonlight to help me.

At last it was time to leave. The car that the brothers had hired was a Mondeo estate with ample room for me to load them into the back and cover them over with an old blanket, Before doing so, however, I checked the plastic cocoons for any sign of escaped blood. It was essential that no forensic evidence of their deaths should remain in the car. Thankfully, the plastic sheeting had done its work well and I was confident that at least this element of my task was going to plan.

There was, of course, blood on the gravel at the front of the house and I carefully raked away at the marks until they were covered up by the realigning of the gravel. Hopefully there was no reason for anyone to go digging around in that gravel, at least not for the foreseeable future. The Walther didn’t have enough power for its bullets to have penetrated the corpses; all four were still buried deep in the Italians’ flesh, so there were no inconvenient bullet holes in the front of the house to explain away.

The journey was a nightmare, not because of traffic conditions or the like, but purely because of my paranoid assumption that every car that passed me might be an unmarked police car about to pull me over for some unspecified and unsuspected reason. Never have I driven more courteously, never have I observed speed limits so scrupulously: the three police cars that I saw on the unavoidable main road element at the beginning of my journey almost caused me to have palpitations, but at last I reached my destination.

By now it was full dark, but the skies had remained clear, so a wintry moon cast an eerie light over everything. I was able to pull the Mondeo off the road into a small lay-by within ten yards of the water’s 40

edge. I had carefully studied the Ordnance Survey map of the area and I knew that even quite close to the water’s edge it was already deep. Ideally, I would have taken my victims out into the middle of the loch, but that would have called for a boat, and a boat I did not have. What I did have, however, were two long lengths of rope, one tied to each of the cocooned corpses. The spot that I had chosen was where the loch made an indent into the bank so that I was at one side of a body of water about thirty yards across. Working as quickly as I could, I hurled the ropes to the further bank, a task made possible by having a weight on the free end of each of them. I placed the two bodies in the water and then jogged the hundred yards or so around the indent, to the indent’s further side. I then simply pulled on the ropes until I judged that the bodies, which were, of course under water and being dragged along the bottom, were half way across and released the ropes which sank out of sight, thanks to the weights I had attached to them. I would have to rely upon the depth of water available to me and the weights that I had secured to the plastic cocoons to ensure that it would be a long time, if ever, before the Sandinis were discovered, but it was a risk that I would have to take; there was no alternative.

I drove back in easier mode, but still carefully. I didn’t want the car to be involved in any sort of incident which would bring it to the attention of the authorities. Like the Sandinis, the car had to disappear, but in a somewhat less spectacular fashion, a task that I would perform on the morrow.

The next day, the 9th, saw me leave the house at half past six in the morning and drive in the hired Mondeo to Edinburgh, where I left it, unlocked and with the keys in the ignition, in a side street in the poorer part of town, confident that it would soon attract the attention of the local car thieves. I then took the train back to Perth and the bus to the Bridge of Earn, followed by the two mile walk to the house. I had neutralised the threat of the Sandini brothers; now it remained to be seen whether the Busconi family would take any further action, or whether the murder of the Waltons would satisfy their desire for revenge.

One last task was to dispose of the three pistols that I now had in my possession. Should the Sandinis ever be found, the bullets in their bodies could be matched to the Walther, and in any case the mere possession of it would put me behind bars for five years. The other two, the Colt and the Smith and Wesson, were similar dangers to me, as I had no idea of their provenance; for all I knew they might be linked to crimes as well.

I unloaded all three and disposed of them, one at a time, by dropping them off various bridges in a circular route that afternoon. The ammunition with which they had been loaded I put in a bag and that also ended up in a river. It was another fraught journey until all my illegal possessions had been disposed of, but at the end of the drive I got back to the house with a clear conscience.

I decided to visit Isla rather than rely just on the phone, so after just telling her that I was on my way, I drove to Glasgow and met up with her in ‘our’ room in Jury’s Hotel. By now it was nearly ten o’clock at night and I was feeling the effects of the last couple of days. My feet felt like lead as I dragged myself from the lift to Isla’s door and knocked on it. She opened it, an anxious look on her face.

“So,” she greeted me, “what’s the latest? You said on the phone that you wanted to bring me up to date and that there was nothing to worry about, but I’ve been on tenterhooks ever since you rang.”

I smiled at her.

“Good news, Isla, the Sandini brothers are no longer a problem – they’re gone.”

She gave a sigh of relief. I had decided that, if at possible, I would refrain from giving her the details of just how the Sandinis had ‘gone’ but I didn’t want to lie to her.

“How have you found that out?” she demanded.

“Like I found John Walton – a bit of bribery and persuasion.”

Not quite true, so strictly speaking a lie, when I had determined not to lie to this young woman – but given the shock that she had, I didn’t want to make things worse for her than they already were. I had, not for the first time, and probably not for the last, underestimated her. She looked straight into my eyes.

“Keith, all this is bad enough as it is, without you holding out on me. What actually happened?”

I returned her gaze. Was she, I wondered, able to cope with the truth? Only one way to find out.

“I don’t want to say any more. If I do, you won’t like it – do you want to hear it?”

She took a deep breath, then shook her head. My relief was only momentary.

“You don’t need to say any more. They’re dead, aren’t they?”

41

I nodded, unable to trust my voice to form the words. She continued to gaze at me and I sensed that she had fractionally relaxed.

“Don’t worry, Keith, I’m not going to faint, nor have a fit of the vapours. I never met the Sandinis, but I did meet John and Fiona. They were good people, nice people, and they did nothing to deserve what happened to them. I’m glad the Sandinis are dead – it means we can both stop looking over our shoulders for ever more.

I’m an Old Testament girl – when it is justified, an eye for an eye doesn’t bother me at all.”

It was my turn to relax, and also to realise that trying to deceive Isla would be stupidity in the extreme. She hadn’t finished, though.

“Keith, you are sure that they can’t be traced back to you, aren’t you? If there is any way that I can help –

you know that you only have to say the word.”

“Thanks, I appreciate your support. I’ve taken every precaution that I can think of to ensure that, if their bodies are ever found, there will be no way of knowing what happened to them nor who did it. Now, I’d better be going-it’s been a long couple of days.”

She looked at me for a long moment, as though making up her mind about something.

“You look whacked – stay here with me.”

I returned her gaze, anxious to make sure that I didn’t misunderstand her.

“There’s only one bed, Isla.”

She came closer and put her arms around my neck; I could smell the delicate perfume she was using.

“One’s all we need. Stay with me, please.”

So I stayed, and the one bed was, indeed, all we needed.

Chapter Ten – February 10th

It should have been a blissful night, and making love to Isla was, indeed, a blissful start to it, but at about two in the morning I awake with a start, conscious of the fact that not only was she also awake, but she was shaking my shoulder vigorously. I realised that I was drenched in sweat, my hair sticking to my forehead, my whole body as wet as though in the grasp of a fever. My nightmare had returned.

I became aware of the fact that as well as shaking me, Isla was speaking to me.

“Keith, what’s wrong, you were yelling out loud in your sleep.”

Every muscle in my body was tense; my hands were balled into fists, my calf muscles felt as if they were about to go into spasm. I took a long, shuddering breath and willed my body to relax.

“I’m sorry – it was a nightmare, one I haven’t had for a long time.”

In my nightmare I was back in Afghanistan, in the heat, dust and danger of Helmand province. The call had been to take out a building from which Taliban fighters had been engaging an infantry foot patrol and I had been on stand-by so was the first responder. In the event, no further responder was necessary. A single Hellfire missile had reduced the building to rubble, killing or maiming those inside. I lifted the Apache helicopter away and turned to go back to base.

That was when things started to go wrong. My radio crackled into life. Thirty miles away a French convoy had been ambushed and were in deep trouble. My helicopter was the nearest friendly asset and I was ordered to go to their assistance.

The convoy had been passing a small village – a village of no more than a dozen or so buildings, when a large roadside bomb had been detonated, destroying the armoured car which had been escorting the convoy and also the leading truck and immobilising two others of the six trucks.

I was in communication via my controller back at base with somebody in the convoy, who asked for suppressing fire on one of the buildings, which he identified as the third from the left. I told Corporal Hughes, my gunner, to give the building a quick burst from our machine gun, after asking my controller to tell the Frenchman to watch for our bullet strikes to confirm that we had the right building. Our machine gun sent a brief burst of rounds into the building, and almost immediately my controller was in my ear.

“No, wrong building. I say again WRONG BUILDING. Your target is two along to your right.”

42

We tried again; another brief burst and this time the man on the ground confirmed we were hitting the correct target. I switched the fire control and sent a Hellfire missile on its way, completely destroying the building and those within it.

We hovered over the stricken convoy for about twenty minutes until we were relieved by three American helicopters– a troop carrying Chinook to ferry out the casualties and two US Army Apaches to provide security. Satisfied that matters were under control, we flew back to base.

All hell let loose the next day. The Taliban claimed that the first building upon which we had fired contained women and children, most of whom had been killed or injured. The Frenchman on the ground claimed that he had identified the correct target for us at the outset and we had fired on the wrong one. Our ground controller claimed that the Frenchman had identified two different targets, initially the first building upon which we had fired, then had changed his mind. The Americans, under cover of their Apache gunships, had sent men into the village who had confirmed that there were indeed dead women and children in the first building, but that they seemed to have been dead for at least some hours, perhaps killed by the Taliban themselves.

All in all, a right old mess and one which sat badly with UK-Afghan and UK-French relations on the ground.

It was this incident which finally decided me to leave the Army; I had had enough of death and destruction, no matter what the rights and wrongs of the affair in Afghanistan. No pressure was brought to bear on me to go; it was entirely my own decision, but one which I felt was probably welcomed, if with some sadness, by my superiors.

All this I explained to Isla in the darkness as she snuggled close to me.

“It’s in the past, Keith, how often do you have the nightmare?”

“At first it was often – two or three times a week, but after a couple of years they faded. This is the first time I have had it in nearly a year. I suppose it was brought on by having to get rid of the Sandinis.”

“I’m sure you’re right – but they’re in the past as well now.”

We both drifted off to sleep again; Isla was right, from that day to this, the nightmare has never reappeared.

We got up that morning and, with nothing pressing to claim our attention, spent the day idly strolling through Glasgow. As if to mark the passing of the cloud that the Sandini brothers had cast over us, the day was bright and sunny, although cold enough to need wrapping up well.

We dined not at the hotel, but in a small French restaurant – we had decided against a rather more upmarket looking Italian restaurant in the same street on the grounds that links with Italy were now something to be severed, not something to be maintained.

How wrong we were to prove.

Over dinner we had, very tentatively, discussed the future. With John Walton dead, the continuing work, after her first investigation, that he had asked Isla to undertake was probably at an end. We had no idea what would happen to his empire now that he was gone; presumably his children, Robert and Elizabeth, would inherit, but whether they would get involved with the running of the companies, or whether M. Benoit the Swiss based lawyer who was the third director of Walton Holdings, would assume command was something we knew not.

As far as I was concerned, the house sale and the associated bits and pieces meant that I was solvent without working for perhaps a year, but certainly no longer. I needed to find some form of employment and I really needed to find it fairly soon. I also needed somewhere to live; I couldn’t expect whoever took over the running of Walton Homes to let me stay in what had been my house indefinitely, unless I became a formal tenant, and the market rent of such a house would be well beyond my means.

It was with some diffidence that Isla suggested that I move in with her. My initial reaction was to refuse as gracefully as I could; the passion we had shared the previous night was very much a new-born thing and who could tell if it would survive for any length of time? Fortunately, I bit my tongue and let her continue with her offer.

“The house is too big for one person, really – it was my parents and I inherited it when they died and I’ve never really given any thought to moving out of it.” She paused. “I did have a boyfriend live with me a few 43

years ago, but it didn’t last. We met at university and originally seemed to hit it off alright, but as time went on we just drifted apart. We split up over four years ago, amicably, I’m glad to say, but we haven’t kept in touch at all.”

She looked earnestly at me.

“If you want to, you could move in with your own room – we could see how things go, couldn’t we?”

I returned her gaze.

“Are you sure about this, Isla? You really know very little about me, you know.”

“I think that I know enough for starters – after that, only time will tell, won’t it?”

It was a far different situation than that in which I had found myself with Morag – a full blown courtship and engagement, big white wedding, and all that sort of thing, but suddenly I realised just how much this young woman actually meant to me. It might be a low key way to start, but hopefully, from a low key start things would evolve, whereas after the big wedding with Morag time had only seen things go downhill.

I smiled at her.

“Well, if you are willing to take a chance with me – OK, let’s do it – and I promise that if I don’t make you happy it won’t be for want of trying.”

I still felt a little uneasy at the thought that I would be free-loading off Isla until I could find some form or other of a job, but I resolutely put the worry behind me for the time being.

The next few days were spent in going through what had been my house, sorting out what I wanted to take with me to my new life. I had agreed with Fiona Walton when she agreed to buy the house for Walton Homes that I would leave most of my furniture – she explained that there was quite a demand for houses such as mine for furnished rentals. I did, however, have things to take with me. Apart from the obvious items

– clothes, CD collection, books and the like – there was one item which took some explaining. It was a large, old and very battered suitcase which had originally belonged to my father and which had been with me for most of my Army career. It contained mementos – photos of my parents, the school XV, my class at Sandhurst, those sort of things. It also contained an ornamental dagger in a richly decorated sheath. Isla looked at it in amazement.

“What on earth is that?”

“It was a gift from a village elder in Afghanistan. His village had been devastated by the Taliban and we drove them off. I flew my helicopter in support of the ground troops and landed next to the village to preserve fuel in case we were called on again. Whilst we were there, he came over to us and made gifts to my gunner, Corporal Hughes, and myself – he gave us one of these daggers each. His gratitude was misplaced; two weeks later, after the ground troops had moved on, a Taliban band returned to the village and slaughtered everyone in it – men, women and children, even the dogs and livestock – everything and everybody. I keep that dagger to remind me of just how inhumane people can be to each other.”

Isla shuddered and returned to dagger to the suitcase.

Chapter Eleven –April

April was a bad month that year; winter seemed never to want to relent. Rain, wind, snow, there was no respite. Hill farmers faced ruin as new born lambs died in the cold, even ewes being lost in snowdrifts. The previous seven weeks had seen some changes affecting Isla and me. Robert Walton had returned briefly from Japan, as had his sister Elizabeth from Canada, to meet up with M. Benoit who had flown in from Zurich. I knew all this because they had asked Isla to continue with the computer security consultancy which John Walton had originally offered her, something that she was glad to accept.

The meeting of the three had also had a direct effect upon myself. Neither Robert nor Elizabeth wanted to take up full time responsibility for the Walton businesses, Robert was anxious to return to Tokyo and his family whilst Elizabeth had discovered a business opportunity in Vancouver and was happy to let her Perth shop remain in the care of the manager she had appointed, whilst M. Benoit was only involved in the Zurich headquarters. They agreed that they needed a general manager, based in Scotland, answerable to the three of them as the board of directors for the running of the subordinate Walton companies, and offered me the post.

44

I accepted with alacrity. The salary was reasonable and the job really entailed little more than keeping an eye on the performance of the managers of the five Walton companies – Hall’s Perfumes, Tayside Pharmacy, Walton Homes, Dundee Specialist Castings, and Aberdeen Vintage Cars. John Walton had set things up so that the first two had been elements of Walton Pharmaceuticals, the last two of Walton Engineering, with Walton Homes a separate entity directly responsible to Walton Holdings. I had flown to Zurich to meet with M. Benoit to go through the reasoning behind such a set-up in detail and agreed with him, and subsequently with Robert and Elizabeth, that it was unnecessarily complex and I was tasked with simplifying matters. It wasn’t too difficult; Walton Pharmaceuticals and Walton Engineering existed in the same office in Dundee, with a total staff of just five, each of whom effectively had a part time post with each of the two companies.

The five comprised two secretaries, a general factotum, an accountant and an assistant accountant. The five were all amenable to a change in organisation, with the two companies formally melding into one, named Walton Holdings (Dundee) to differentiate it from the Zurich headquarters. In practice, virtually nothing was changed; people were still doing virtually the same jobs in the same place and getting the same money.

The first few weeks had been hectic, but by the beginning of April things had settled down and people had got used to the new regime. I am sure that they all missed the live-wire presence of John Walton; although I had replaced him in what had been his ‘oversight’ role, there was no question of me having anything like his business acumen and ability to perceive new opportunities.

One of my first jobs had been to find a replacement for Harold Grace who, after Isla had revealed his skimming of money from Hall’s Pharmaceuticals to John Walton back in January, had vanished without trace, presumably worried that the police would be after him for embezzlement. In fact, John Walton had not had the time to do anything about Grace and Robert, Elizabeth and M. Benoit had decided to let things lie –

they had no wish to show up the firm’s weaknesses, and in any case, it had all happened before John Walton had bought the company. I had found a suitable replacement in Grace’s own deputy; again, he had only joined the firm after the Walton acquisition so was not involved in what had been going on, and he impressed me as a man with knowledge of the perfumery industry, enthusiasm and drive. His name was Willie MacFarlane, born and brought up locally, but with experience in the business in France at the world famous Yves Rocher plant in La Gacilly in Brittany. He had been running things since Grace’s disappearance and I had no hesitation in making his de facto position into a permanent one.

It was evening; Isla and I were enjoying a glass of wine after dinner when she said languidly “I wonder what happened to Harold Grace – and for that matter to Vera Colclough.”

“I don’t suppose that we shall ever know what happened to the Colclough woman, although I suspect that Grace probably killed her or had her killed. If that wasn’t the case, surely she would have been found by now. As for Grace himself, he’s done a runner to parts unknown. I don’t suppose that we will ever hear of him again, either.”

“H’mm, I suppose you are right. Still, it would be nice to know for definite.”

I nodded my agreement, although to be honest, my interest in the two of them was scarcely above zero.

My interest was to be raised to a new peak only three days later, on the 4th of April. I had spent the day at the Dundee office, ploughing through financial returns from the companies. The economic downturn was clearly affecting the classic car market and I was beginning to feel uneasy about the returns from Aberdeen Classic Cars. Isla was working from home on a commission to look into the network security of a Falkirk firm which had had its fingers burned by a dishonest computer clerk.

I was about to leave the office when my mobile phone rang. I fumbled it out of my pocket and answered it.

The number displayed on the screen was one I did not recognise, but had an 0738 prefix, signifying that the call originated in the Perth area.

“Keith Hartley.”

“Mr. Hartley, this is Staff Nurse Gordon from the Accident and Emergency unit at Perth Royal Infirmary.”

My heart seemed to do a double backward somersault in my ribcage.

“What’s happened?”

“Mr. Hartley, we have had Miss Isla Cameron admitted; she has been involved in a traffic accident and is asking for you.”

45

“How is she?”

“I’m afraid that her injuries are quite severe, although we do not believe them to be life threatening.”

“Can I see her?”

“We’ve just moved her to the orthopaedic ward; she had to be anaesthetised but she should have come round by now, although I think that you will probably find her to be still a bit sleepy and confused.”

I drove from Dundee to Perth in a turmoil, raging at every hold-up, at every slow driver who impeded my progress, at every red traffic light, but at last, after what seem a lifetime, I was at the hospital and scurrying through the corridor to the female orthopaedic ward.

I was met at the nursing station by a woman who introduced herself as Staff Nurse McNulty; tall, perhaps forty or forty five years old, with dark brown hair matched by similarly coloured eyes, she explained that Isla was now conscious. They had placed her in a side room as there was a police officer with her, anxious to hear her story as soon as she was able to give it.

I was ushered into the small room and stopped in horror. Isla’s face was half concealed by dressings which covered most of the left side of her head. Her left leg was plaster from toes to thigh and her left arm, like her leg, was plastered and lay across her chest. She was conscious, and smiled weakly at me.

It took me a moment to realise that she was not alone in the room; seated beside her was a young woman in police uniform, who rose gracefully to her feet as I entered.

“Mr. Hartley?” she queried.

“Yes, Keith Hartley – but what has happened?”

“We don’t have the full picture yet, Mr. Hartley, but apparently Miss Cameron was cycling along Methven High Street when a car knocked her from her machine and drove off without stopping. Oh, I’m PC Sheena MacDonald, by the way.”

For the first time I paid her some attention. She was young, surely still in her twenties, and about five feet five in height. Slimly built, with short blonde hair, her gray eyes surveyed me carefully from a calm, attractive face.

“Mr. Hartley, although Miss Cameron hasn’t been able to talk to us yet, we have found several witnesses to the incident. They all agree on three points; firstly, the car was dark in colour, although there is no consensus as to what make it was. Secondly, the driver made no attempt to avoid Miss Cameron, indeed it looked as though the collision was deliberate, and thirdly, that the driver was a woman.”

PC MacDonald’s second point had immediately set me thinking that the Busconis were behind the attack, for an attack it surely was. Her third point, however, stopped that train of thought in its tracks. No way would the Busconis employ a woman for such a task. Italian machismo, in particular criminal Italian machismo, would never have entertained such an action.

We both turned to Isla; it was the policewoman who spoke first.

“Miss Cameron, can you tell me what you remember of what happened to you?”

Isla attempted to shrug; a mistake as the pain that showed in her face clearly demonstrated.

“Ouch, oh, sorry, that hurt.” She collected herself and continued, her voice slightly slurred, presumably from a combination of the painkillers she must have been given, and the dressings on the left side of her face.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t really know what happened. I never saw the car at all. I had been working in the office in our house and when I made a cup of tea I realised that we were running short of milk. It’s only a bit over half a mile to the shops – not worth getting the car out for, but I didn’t want to waste time walking, so I got my bike out. I remember turning into the High Street, but after that I don’t remember anything until I came round in the ambulance for a while, then I must have passed out again, because I don’t remember anything more until I woke up here like this.”

PC MacDonald was clearly disappointed at such a scanty report, but clearly accepted that there was nothing more that Isla could usefully add. She spoke to both of us.

“In view of what the witnesses have said we are treating this as a potentially serious crime. Once you are feeling a bit better, Miss Cameron, one of my more senior colleagues will come to see you, probably tomorrow.”

And with that she left us alone.

46

I took the chair that she had vacated and anxiously took Isla’s undamaged hand.

“Darling, have you any idea what happened?” Stupid question, really, seeing that she had just recounted what little she remembered. Involuntarily she attempted to shake her head, resulting in another wave of pain washing across her face.

“Not a clue, Keith – but I do wonder – could the Busconis be after us as well as the Waltons?”

I shook my own head confidently, and without pain.

“No chance. They might or might not still be after us, but there is no way that they would have used a woman to carry out an attack. To act as a decoy, quite possibly, but not for direct action. No, presuming that the witnesses are right and it really was deliberate and not just some driver not paying attention and then taking off, afraid to face the consequences, this is somebody else.”

“But who?”

I shrugged helplessly.

“The only person, apart from the Busconis, likely to have a grudge against us is Harold Grace – but this was a woman driving.”

We were both silent for a while, pondering on what had happened. It was Isla who broke the silence.

“If it was a deliberate attack, the driver must have been waiting somewhere for me to appear – I mean, it was a spur of the moment thing that I decided to go and get some milk – I wasn’t responding to anyone’s suggestion or anything. Nobody phoned asking me to meet them somewhere, or anything like that. Five minutes before I left the house nobody knew that I was going to – and that includes me.”

I pondered on what she had said.

“Perhaps the witnesses are wrong after all. Perhaps it really was as stupid bloody driver not concentrating and then getting scared. “

She looked at me long and hard. The events of the last few months were clearly ticking themselves off, one after another, through her mind.

Another thought struck me.

“Everyone says that it was a woman driving – but are we sure that she was alone?”

She looked helplessly at me.

“Haven’t a clue. We ought to ask the police when they come back.” She paused. “Something else entirely, though. Could you get in touch with that Falkirk firm I was working for and tell them that I’m laid up – that I probably won’t be able to get back to them now for at least three weeks or so?”

I agreed to contact them with the bad news, and then she suddenly stared at me – a new thought had obviously occurred to her.

“Shit!” she breathed, “I’ve been an idiot.”

“How?”

“Yesterday and today I had one of those irritating cold calls – some Indian sounding woman saying that she was calling on behalf of a market research company.”

“So? Happens all the time.”

“Yes – but she asked if you were available. How could a genuine cold caller know that you lived with me?

The house is in my name. You haven’t been there long enough to appear on the electoral roll. Whoever it was must have known that you had moved in with me – but how? And who?”

It was a seminal moment. Someone was tracking us. Whoever they were, they had discovered that I had moved in with Isla. They had been checking to see if I was at home.

“How soon was the call before you went out for the milk?”

“Not long – fifteen minutes tops. In fact, it was the call that broke into what I was doing and decided me to stop and have a cup of tea – which in turn decided me to get some more milk.”

I pondered on what she had just said. No easier accent to assume that one that sounded like the speaker came from the Indian sub-continent; most who assumed such an accent tended to sound like a cross between Cardiff and Calcutta if you really concentrated, but the unsuspecting could easily be fooled. Isla’s response had clearly confirmed to the caller that I was indeed living in the house. The call yesterday had established 47

that fact. Today’s call had established that she was alone in the house. What might have happened had she not gone out to get some milk?

I returned home in an unsettled state of mind. Isla, I felt sure, was safe enough in hospital, but the house was wide open to attack and apart from a kitchen knife or the Afghan dagger, neither of which would be much use against someone with a gun, I was unarmed. I cooked myself a scratch meal and thought through my predicament. I still felt that the involvement of a woman meant that the attack on Isla was not directly the responsibility of the Busconi family, but I supposed that it was always possible that they had, as it were, sub-contracted the job to local talent with a different outlook on such matters. I harped back to the fact that the Sandini brothers had somehow acquired firearms within forty eight hours of entering the country, a fact which surely smacked of local contacts.

The night passed off without incident; my improvised burglar alarms – saucepans precariously balanced in strategic places, similarly empty tin cans, plus the security element of chairs jammed under door handles –

all remained untested.

I made myself breakfast, then made a quick visit to my office to acquaint folk with the fact that I would probably be in and out over at least the next few days, visiting Isla in hospital. They all expressed horror and sympathy over what had happened and, on an impulse, I asked to see the personnel file for Harold Grace and studied it carefully. I already knew where he had lived whilst employed at Hall’s Perfumes, but that was all I knew about the man.

A careful study of his file revealed nothing of immediate interest. It contained his CV, details of his bank account, and the name and address of his next of kin which was not, as I had expected, a wife. He was unmarried and his next of kin was a sister living in Birmingham. Nothing really to help me in my thinking. I put the file to one side and left to visit Isla.

When I arrived I did so only minutes before a police officer. Detective Inspector Amanda Harrup was a smartly dressed, well groomed young woman in her early thirties. Black hair, cut short, framed an oval face; clear blue eyes regarded the world with the knowing expression of one who has seen many things and too many of them bad.

She introduced herself to us both and then asked Isla to go through exactly what had happened the previous day. The tale had gained nothing over night; Inspector Harrup, in her turn, could tell us nothing new, apart from one nugget of information. Whilst all the witnesses were agreed that the car had been driven by a woman, two of them thought that there had also been a passenger in the back, although they were uncertain as to whether the passenger was male or female. As to the vehicle itself there was agreement that it was an ordinary saloon, dark in colour – either black or very dark blue, and not very small nor very big, but that was about it.

Her obvious question was whether Isla had any enemies, anyone who would target her in such a way. We had already agreed that no mention should be made of the Busconi family; we could not see any good coming of it, and there was always the remote chance that by doing so some thread we could not conceive of might lead the police back to how I had removed the threat of the Sandini brothers. Isla did, however, mention Harold Grace and her part in uncovering his embezzlement of Hall’s Perfumes money. During the previous twenty four hours I had phoned Robert and Julia Walton, warning them of our intention. I told them that their wish to avoid embarrassment for the company by admitting how it had been duped was far outweighed by the possibility that Grace was involved in the attack on Isla. I offered to resign if that made them unhappy, but they both accepted my argument and agreed that the police should be advised of the existence of the disgruntled and possibly vengeance seeking Harold Grace. Additionally, I told DI Harrup of the existence of Grace’s sister and she promised to have the woman interviewed by the local police, and that was about that.

After the policewoman had gone Isla asked me to get in touch with the Falkirk company whose computer security she had been examining, and tell them that she would be out of action for some time. If they wanted she would continue the work once she was out of hospital, or alternatively they could employ somebody else, but that the somebody would have to start from scratch as she was in no position to effect a handover.

48

The next two weeks saw Isla discharged from hospital. Her left leg was still in plaster, although a far smaller piece of work than the massive original, and her left arm, although still in a sling, was healing rapidly, whilst the grazes and cuts to her head and face had just about healed completely. I brought her home, which was a welcome relief to us both. She was able to work on her computer again, using voice recognition software, and was able to take up where she had left off with the Falkirk company, who had been impressed enough with her early progress to await her recovery rather than seek somebody new. As she said, another few days in hospital and she would have gone out of her mind with boredom; this way she could occupy herself and do so gainfully.

There had been no further evidence of anyone wishing either of us harm. For two weeks I had been very careful to check that no suspicious characters were hanging around the house, that nobody followed my car on my way to and from work or when visiting Isla in the hospital. Each evening on my return to the house I had been very watchful indeed, but every evening there was no evidence of any attempted, nor actual, illegal entry. DI Harrup had been in touch to say that Harold Grace was nowhere to be found and that, following an interview by the Birmingham police, his sister seemed totally innocent of any involvement with anything that Grace himself might, or might not, have done. I was almost ready to believe that Isla’s injuries were caused by nothing more sinister than a careless, frightened motorist unable to face up to what she had done.

Almost, but not quite.

I was in a quandary. I had taken a few days off work when Isla first came home, so she had not been left alone in the house, other than for my brief excursions to the shops, at any time. However, when I returned to work she would be alone in the house – and with a leg in plaster and an arm in a sling, totally helpless.

It was something that I was not prepared to risk. Mowing her down with a car had resulted in serious injury; it could equally have resulted in her death. Discounting the careless motorist possibility, the only alternative explanation was a deliberate attempt to maim or kill, with the perpetrator unable to control which result occurred. Therefore she – for it had been a woman driving – was prepared to kill. The possibility that there had been two people in the car strengthened my fears for Isla’s safety. I was convinced that, if there had indeed been two people in the car then the second one was almost certainly Harold Grace. Who else would wish Isla harm? It was a mystery as to why, if indeed it was Grace, he was not the driver, but doubtless there was some explanation, even if I could not fathom out what it might be.

How to ensure Isla’s safety? I couldn’t stay off work permanently, but equally I could not justify to myself leaving her in the house alone and vulnerable. One possible course of action, at least for the short term, would be for me to take her to work with me; she could work just as well from there as from home – but for how long would such a course be practical? We were, indeed, in the situation we had feared, never knowing when danger might strike.

There was also the question of security in the house at night. I had to assume that Grace, if indeed he was behind all this, knew were we lived; given the attack on Isla, no other assumption was acceptable. The house was a detached bungalow, with a small garden in front and a slightly larger one behind. Beyond the rear garden was an open field, at this time of year newly planted with wheat, the first shoots of which were just beginning to show. On either side of the house, and across the road, were similar bungalows. The road was a turning off the high street and left the village to join another minor road a mile or so away at a crossroads. It offered an easy route for someone in a vehicle, and the short distance from the road to the generously proportioned front window made our house very vulnerable to a firebomb attack. These were risks I had been willing to run when in the house alone, but with Isla hampered by her leg in plaster things had changed.

I decided that to remain in the house was too risky. An hotel would be a possible alternative, but for a long term solution would be expensive and, again, for how long would we have to continue with such a course of action?

I realised that the solution was staring me in the face. I was the CEO of Walton Holdings (Dundee), which included Walton Homes. A check of the various properties on the company books came up with an ideal solution, a two bedroom flat in the prestigious West End area of Dundee which was currently empty. One of a block of twelve, all owned by Walton Homes, it looked ideal. The flats were in a three storey block forming a hollow square around a communal lawn and kiddies’ play area. Access by car was only possible 49

with an entry card to the underground car park, whilst access on foot was by keying in a numeric code on an entry gate or, for non-residents, by voice box to the flat you wanted . All in all it would be difficult to imagine a more secure location.

Before she was murdered Fiona Walton had run Walton Homes almost as a hobby. She inspected possible properties for acquisition and relied just on one of the secretaries to do any donkey work needed. The secretary she had used was based at what was now Walton Holdings (Dundee); she also had duties with the pharmaceutical side of the business, so I called her into my office.

Freda MacKay was a bright, smartly turned out woman, dressed this morning in a smart black skirt and jacket, the jacket open to show a snowy white blouse. The starkness of the black and white ensemble was relieved by a luxuriant head of shoulder length red-brown hair and a large brooch in the form of a dragon, worked in green, red and gold. I knew from her personnel file that she was forty years old, married and had worked for the Waltons for ten years. She took the proffered seat and looked at me expectantly.

“Freda, I need your help. When Fiona and John were murdered the police felt sure that it was do with when John was kidnapped – that the people who kidnapped him wanted to make sure that he couldn’t give evidence against them.”

She nodded; all this was common knowledge throughout the firm.

“Now, as you know, Miss Cameron did some work for John, work which involved the Italian end of things, and two weeks ago she was nearly killed. The police have got nowhere in tracing whoever attacked her, just as they have got nowhere on catching John and Fiona’s killers. I am worried that the two things are linked and that whoever was responsible may try again. I need a secure base for Miss Cameron and as we live together, that means for me too. Walton Court in West End has an empty flat at the moment and I am going to move the two of us into it. Now, it is essential that nobody knows of our new location – except you, of course.”

She nodded her understanding.

“Right,” she said. “not a word to anyone, I promise. What will you do about the rent?”

“Initially, nothing. If I pay rent in the normal way it will show up on the books somewhere and I can’t afford that risk, no matter how slight – I’ve known people in the forces lose their lives over less likely happenings.

Eventually I will pay whatever has accumulated by the time all this is hopefully over. I’ll declare it for tax purposes as a benefit in kind if we are there long enough.”

I changed the subject.

“Tell me, Freda, has anyone here been asked by the police about Harold Grace – you presumably know about him?”

“Oh yes, although I only ever met him the once. John was a very hands-on person so if he wanted to talk to any of the managers in his companies he tended to go to them rather than have them come here to see him.

On one occasion, however, he had Harold Grace up here. It was just after he had bought Hall’s Perfumes and he had Harold up here to go through a number of things, mostly about areas of responsibility and that sort of thing, and he had me sit in to make any necessary notes for them both. As for the police – no, nobody has been here asking about him.”

“You know that the police want to talk to him about the attack on Miss Cameron?”

She shook her head.

“No, I didn’t know that – why?”

“Well, it was her work that showed up his embezzlement of funds from Hall’s. OK, it’s unlikely, but they did wonder if he harboured enough of a grudge to be involved in the attack on her.”

She looked horrified.

“Surely not? On that one occasion he struck me as a rather timid sort of character, not the sort you would associate with such a thing.” She paused. “Still, I suppose almost anything is possible if someone feels that they are under enough pressure of some sort. But I didn’t realise that the police were looking for him. I presume that he has left his home.”

I nodded, and she looked thoughtful.

“Have they looked for his boat?”

50

“His boat? What boat?”

“Well, that meeting between him and John – they’d finished their business and we were all having a cup of tea. It was Thursday afternoon and John asked – just casually – if Harold had anything planned for the weekend as the weather looked good. John said that he and Fiona were intending to go down to London for the weekend and take in a show. Harold said that he was hoping to take the boat over to Stavanger. He was intending to take the Friday, Monday and Tuesday off and make a long weekend of it. I must say that I was a bit surprised, as he somehow didn’t seem to be the sailing type.”

This was something totally new. So far as I knew, the police were totally unaware that Grace owned a boat and if it was a boat capable of getting him across the North Sea to Norway it must be something fairly substantial. Did this explain how he had been able to disappear?

As soon as Freda had left me, I phoned DI Harrup and passed on my new information, which she promised to follow up. In doing so, she said that there was nothing in Grace’s house that gave any indication of his ownership of any sort of vessel, but that on the other hand, the house had clearly been subjected to a pretty thorough clean out of anything that might give any indication of where he might have gone or what contacts he might have had – no address book, no old bills or letters, nothing like that. She had, as she had already told me, arranged for the police in Birmingham to interview his sister, but that had been a fruitless exercise.

The woman professed total ignorance of where Grace might have gone; whether she was telling the truth, who could say? Certainly not the police.

Several days passed. Isla and I moved into the flat at Walton Court; we had thought of us offering to put Isla’s own house on the company’s books for rental, but on second thoughts decided against it. Grace – if indeed it was Grace behind all this - might not realise what had happened and assume that we were still there. The thought of an innocent third party being the subject of an attack simply didn’t bear thinking about.

True to her word, DI Harrup had followed up on the information that I had given her. It transpired that Grace owned a pretty substantial vessel. Old, but sound, it was a fifty foot twin masted ketch with a powerful auxiliary engine. It had normally been kept at the local sailing club’s moorings at Broughty Ferry, but hadn’t been seen since just before the previous Christmas. That intrigued me. Vera Colclough had disappeared after Friday the 21st of December. Could the two events be connected?

“Could Grace have handled such a vessel on his own?” I had asked the detective.

“I spoke with the club secretary. He said that to handle her under sail an absolute minimum of two highly experienced people would be needed and that three or four would be much better and safer. On the other hand, with no sails set, relying just on the motor, she could be handled by one experienced person quite easily, although again, it would be more convenient with two or more.”

More and more interesting. I began to wonder about Vera Colclough’s disappearance again, and began to see it possibly in a new light.

The next day in the office I asked for, and studied most carefully, Vera Colclough’s personnel file. No immediate family lived locally; her next of kin was quoted as a sister who, like Harold Grace’s sister, lived in Birmingham. When I checked on Google maps, the two sisters lived only a few hundred yards from each other. I don’t like coincidences – never have – and this one began to smell. Grace’s sister was a Mrs. Ethel Hughes. Colclough’s sister was a Mrs. Doreen Clarke.

When I got home I told Isla of my growing belief that there was something more to the next of kin entries of Grace and Colclough than met the eye. At my suggestion she did a quick bit of genealogical research and we both sat looking at the computer screen in amazement. Grace and Colclough were cousins. Their mother had been sisters.

This put an entirely new slant on things. From the start I had assumed that Vera Colclough’s disappearance was at the hands, or at the behest, of Harold Grace and that she was dead. Now I was convinced that she wasn’t. The police had been unable to find any trace of her back in December and January; they had also been unable to find any trace of Grace when we named him as a possible enemy of Isla. He had effectively disappeared back in January when Isla advised John Walton of the embezzlement that had been going on, but at that time there had been no search made for him.

51

Now the boat assumed centre stage in my thinking. It was apparently called the Lucinda named after Grace’s mother – but a paint brush and a pot of paint could easily change that at a moment’s notice. It – she, I corrected myself, boats and ships are always called ‘she’ – had disappeared from her Broughty Ferry moorings ‘just before Christmas’. Vera Colclough had disappeared after work on Friday, the 21st of December. I was certain that all she had done was board the Lucinda, cast off, and motor away. We already knew that under power alone the vessel could be handled by one person. Then, four weeks or so later when Harold Grace needed to also perform the vanishing act, what was more likely than that he had merely joined his cousin on board? Since then they had presumably established a modus vivendi of living on board and could have gone anywhere. The Lucinda was deep sea capable – I remembered Freda MacKay telling me of Grace’s expressed intention to sail across to Stavanger in her when talking to John Walton at that early meeting between them.

They could have sailed the boat to any coastal area of the UK or, for that matter, to somewhere on the Continent.

The thing that really puzzled me, however, was, when they had performed so accomplished a vanishing trick, that they should take such a risk in attacking Isla. Why do it and why on earth wait so long? It seemed illogical. Anything could have gone wrong with so reckless an attack – another vehicle might have given chase, they might have been caught up in traffic whilst pedestrians with mobile phones were busy dialling 999 – anything. I mulled over the matter in my mind, trying to identify any recent occurrence which might have sparked off the attack, but could come up with absolutely nothing at all.

More to the point, however, was the question as to whether or not there would be a repeat attempt to attack Isla or a first attempt to attack me. I felt that our new location was just about as safe for us as it was possible to be, but I resented the thought that we were, if not prisoners, then at least potential victims to any course of action Grace and, presumably, Colclough, might decide upon.

Really, I told myself, we wouldn’t be able to feel at ease until Grace had been tracked down and, hopefully, put away. The police were looking for him; if they found him – and Colclough if she was indeed with him –

they could charge both of them with embezzlement and hopefully put them away for a while – but for how long? I had no wish to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder or worrying every time Isla left home on her own, but an easy answer eluded me.

We could, I supposed, leave the country – but to do what? Isla’s work could, in part, be performed anywhere there was a power socket for a computer and an Internet connection, but it also demanded that she meet clients face to face. My fluent Italian meant that, if I could find some sort of job, I could work in Italy, but Isla’s only language skills were very basic schoolgirl French. In any case, why should we run away? Also, if we were to do so and took advantage of my Italian, how far might the tentacles of the Busconi family reach?

It might be a case of blindly jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

A thought, an unpleasant, but entirely logical thought, began to take shape in my mind. Instead of being the prey, why not become the hunter? Instead of waiting on Grace’s convenience, why not go after him? And then what? Could I scare him off permanently? In view of his willingness to inflict violence, would it not be apposite to inflict violence upon him? There was, of course, one way of ensuring his permanent removal as a source of danger – to kill him. Could I justify such a course of action to myself? If I could, could I get away with it? I still worried about the possibility of being brought to book over my killing of the Sandini brothers; they, however, were out and out killers over whom I had felt absolutely no compunction – no more than crushing a cockroach beneath my heel.

If I could justify killing Grace to myself, what about Vera Colclough? It was my assumption that she had actually driven the car which had mown Isla down, but I had to admit to myself that I was working on assumptions. I could not be sure that Grace and Colclough were behind the attack, even though it seemed by far and away the most likely scenario.

All this, however, was pointless fantasising on my part unless I could actually find Grace and Colclough. I doubted very much that the boat was still called the Lucinda; surely the first thing that would have been done when Colclough needed to disappear was to wield a paint brush over the name and simply change it – but to what?

52

Had anyone acted as soon as Isla had been attacked, the boat might have been found – it would surely have had to be somewhere within reasonable striking distance. Now, however, the attack was two weeks in the past – once again, the boat could be anywhere.

I talked over possible ways of tracing the Lucinda with Isla. We soon discovered that a boat of her size would only have to be registered if it was intended to sail her in international waters. As Grace had mentioned sailing to Norway, presumably she would be registered in the UK small ships registered – and so she was, as we discovered by a simple internet search; there she was, recorded as owned by Harold Grace, home port Dundee. That, however, was the easy bit. It seemed extremely unlikely that her new name, whatever it might be, would have been registered, even if she was intended to be sailed outside UK waters –

I couldn’t imagine Grace being so stupid, not for a moment.

Using the personnel file information on both Grace and Colclough, from the start of our involvement, Isla had been able to trace their use of bank cards up to the time that first the one, then the other, had disappeared.

Since then, there had been no card usage – they must be relying on cash. How much cash did they have, I wondered? Given their history of embezzlement, I would not have been surprised if they had salted a fair amount away as a precaution of having to leave their earlier way of life behind, as had indeed now happened, but how big a hoard, and what would they do when, inevitably, it became exhausted?

I suddenly had an idea.

“Isla, do we know if there is CCTV coverage around the Dundee port areas?”

“Bound to be, but if you are thinking about trying to access it to see if Grace and Colclough are starring, I wouldn’t get your hopes up. For a start, we are talking about two weeks ago – most CCTV cameras don’t keep accessible images that long. Secondly, and much more importantly, we don’t know who controls those cameras.”

I smiled smugly.

“Oh yes we do – if you look at the council website you will see that the dock area was once their responsibility in toto, but that over the years they have contracted out things like parking and – significantly

– security!”

Quarter of an hour later, Isla sat back in triumph.

“Got the buggers!”

True to her word, she had hacked into the security company’s system. Luck was with us – they retained their CCTV images for a month, and there, large as life, were Grace and a woman I assumed to be Colclough – for I had never seen her - walking away from the mooring area for small vessels. Isla checked the time and date of the image, then switched to the harbour system. All visiting vessels had to pay mooring fees and there, on the day in question, were logged the arrivals of eleven vessels. Of the eleven, only three had stayed less than forty-eight hours. Checking those three left only one which was not registered under the small ships legislation. She was recorded as the White Lady. As she was not registered, there was no home port recorded.

Grace and Colclough had clearly arrived in the White Lady on the day before Isla had been attacked and had departed late in the evening of the very day of the attack. It also explained why Colclough had been the assumed driver - Grace had his left wrist heavily bandaged, presumably from some on-board accident, and would have been unable to drive a car with manual transmission. What it still didn’t explain, of course, was why they had decided to mount the attack when they did.

We were making progress. We did briefly discuss passing on what we had learned to DI Harrup, but decided against it – after all, what we, or rather Isla, had done was quite clearly illegal, and we had no justification in expecting DI Harrup to being willing to turn a blind eye to our activities.

Could we track the White Lady? She could be anywhere, and it made sense for Grace and Colclough to live aboard her as much as possible, touching land just for fuel and supplies – but would they be willing to maintain such a lifestyle indefinitely? Surely they would want to resume a more normal type of life at some stage. It was already nearly four months since Vera Colclough had disappeared, three or so for Grace; I for one would not wish to be cooped up within the confines of a fifty foot boat for even that long, let alone longer. I remembered how being kept on a boat for a far lesser period had affected John Walton’s state of 53

health. Admittedly, Grace and Colclough would have a freedom of movement which had been denied to John Walton, but even so it would be a pretty claustrophobic existence for the two of them.

Had they, I wondered, established a base on land well away from Scotland? With that boat to take them wherever they wished, if they had done so it could literally be anywhere. I gave more thought to the attack on Isla. It had been carried out using a car – so where had the car come from? It certainly wasn’t on board their boat – the White Lady was far too small, and in any case they had left the port area on foot. It must have been hired, borrowed or stolen. If it had been borrowed or stolen we had no chance of tracing it. On the other hand, if it had been hired, perhaps we could. We checked the car hire company addresses for the area. The nearest to the port area was the Avis site, a little under a mile’s walk from the port entrance area. If they had hired, it was a likely prospect. There were problems; to hire a car you need to produce your driving licence.

Most folk nowadays have the photo card licence with their picture on it – and their address. Surely neither Grace nor Colclough would take such a risk?

On the other hand – why not? Whilst they were fearful of the police being after them for embezzlement, what chance was there of their having hired a car in Dundee weeks after their original disappearances coming to the attention of the police? Presumably the car would have had some slight damage from where it had hit Isla’s bicycle – how would the hire company handle that?

Isla got cracking with her computer once again. The Avis site proved to offer little resistance to her skills and soon we were looking at the record of cars that had been hired on the day that Grace and Colclough had arrived at Dundee. There was no trace of them, but there was something else. A car had been hired out and never returned. It had been hired by a Mrs. Doreen Clarke, with an address in Birmingham. We looked at each other in astonishment. Doreen Clarke was Vera Colclough’s sister!

Further digging into the Avis system came up with the information that they had reported the vehicle’s non-return to the police, but there was no indication of any successful recovery, nor, for that matter, of any other action having been taken.

I looked at Isla.

“It seems our Vera must have nicked her sister’s licence – that’ll go down well.”

She furrowed her brow in thought.

“But in that case, her sister must surely have been approached by the police – and Avis themselves.”

“Perhaps the English police couldn’t be bothered to chase up a car theft in Scotland? Or the Scots police tried, got nowhere and didn’t follow it up?”

Isla continued to furrow her brow for a moment, then started typing on the computer again.

“Hang on, I’ve had a thought.”

Several minutes went by, then she pushed her chair back from the desk.

“Thought that might be it!” she exclaimed.

“What?”

“The police – and Avis for that matter – wouldn’t have got any joy out of Doreen Clarke – she died over two years ago! And her husband died before she did. No children, so Vera was next of kin – and it was Vera who registered the death.”

It all became clear.

“Ah – so Vera acquired her sister’s belongings – and obviously failed to hand in the driving licence – and perhaps her passport as well?”

“Looks very much like it. So, now what?”

“Well, I doubt that they would try to use the driving licence to hire a car again – I don’t know, but I would imagine that Avis must have issued some sort of warning to its branches, and perhaps to other car hire firms as well to be on the lookout for Doreen Clarke.”

Isla smiled. “I can check that out.”

A couple of minutes more and she once again pushed back from the computer.

“Yes, the Dundee branch sent an E-mail to all the other UK branches warning them of what had happened.

No indication that they warned any other companies, though.”

I mulled things over in my mind.

54

“Another thought – for her to have used that licence the picture on it must look at least reasonably like her, so chances are that the photo on Doreen’s passport could pass for Vera as well.”

“So – she might have used it in the past – anywhere in the world, really.”

I had another thought.

“Everybody has been looking for Vera Colclough and not finding her. Suppose we try looking for Doreen Clarke?”

“H’mm – that could be more difficult. We were able to get onto Vera’s trail, such as it was, because you had her bank details in her personnel file. With Doreen actually being dead, and not knowing anything about her, I’m not sure where we could start.”

“Well we have her driving licence details – can’t you start from there?”

Isla continued to look dubious.

“We know that Vera never surrendered her sister’s driving licence – but if Doreen had any money in the bank, or a building society or whatever, she would have to give them evidence of Doreen’s death before they would release the funds.”

I thought on what she had said. I remembered only too well all the proofs that I had to produce when my parents died before their wills could be processed; undoubtedly, Vera Colclough would have been faced with the same hurdles to surmount. It looked as though we had probably reached a dead end – literally.

Isla was clearly deep in thought; absentmindedly, she picked up a pencil from the desk and chewed gently on the end of it. At last she spoke.

“I suppose there is one possibility. The fact that she hung onto he sister’s driving licence proves that she was up to no good. I suppose it just might have been a fortuitous oversight which chanced to come in useful later on – like that French passport that I found that time – but it’s surely more likely that even if it was an oversight originally, it became more than that over time. She obviously knew that she had it – or she couldn’t have used it, could she?”

I nodded in agreement.

“Now, Doreen only applied for a photo card licence to replace her old fashioned paper one about a year before she died. Passports last for ten years – and her driving licence application was after the DVLA started linking to the passport office for the applicant’s photo. If – but mind you, it is a bloody big if – she had already renewed her passport with one of the new type ones which the DVLA can access, there is just a chance that I can find out her passport details. No promises and it is going to take a while, so how about fixing us both a drink whilst I try and do magic?”

She grinned at me and I got up, kissed the back of her neck and went into the kitchen to obey her command.

I opened the fridge and found a half full bottle of Blue Nun, a favourite of both of us, so I poured two generous glasses and returned to the office to find her staring fixedly at the computer screen.

“You know,” she said vaguely, “ there really ought to be a law against government departments setting up IT

systems. They must employ idiots to do it. This is supposed to be a secure, ever so secure, government site. It has taken me,” she glanced at her wrist watch, “ three minutes and forty seven seconds to get into where I shouldn’t be. OK, it’s going to take a bit longer to track down an individual entry, but even so – jeez, this system’s security protocol really is criminally sloppy.”

She reached out and picked up her glass of wine, took a deep gulp, and settled it back on the desk.

True to her word, about ten minutes later she sat back in her chair with a sigh of satisfaction.

“Got her. We are in luck – her driving licence used the passport photo so we now have the details of her passport.”

She jotted the details down on a scrap of paper and came out of the supposedly secure government computer site.

“Right – I hate to say this, but that was the easy part.”

She sat still for a moment, still gazing at the computer screen as though expecting it to tell her something.

She shrugged her shoulders and turned to look at me.

55

“I’ve just thought of something. When her sister died, Vera had already been on the fiddle, in cahoots with Grace, for some years. You remember what I said about them skimming one percent of nearly everything that Hall’s Perfumes spent?”

“Yes.”

“Well, when I found out that I didn’t tell you all the details – I didn’t feel that I knew you well enough then, and it wasn’t necessary to tell you everything that I had found out.”

I nodded, remembering her cryptic remark about bank systems not being as secure as they claimed.

“Well, what they actually did with the money was not to divert it into their normal current accounts where it would have stuck out like a sore thumb in the most rudimentary check, but to send the money to a pair of separate accounts with a different bank from the ones they used for their current accounts. What I didn’t do at the time – wasn’t any need – was to look at what happened to the money after that. So, I’m now going to do just that because we have been assuming that to avoid leaving a paper trail they must have been using cash. Seeing how Vera has kept her sister’s passport and driving licence, I am beginning to wonder.”

She turned back to the computer and worked at it for perhaps fifteen minutes, then sat back with a sigh of satisfaction.

“Right,” she said, “Grace kept his money in an account in his own name and it was from that account that he obviously financed buying his boat – he paid just over fifty thousand pounds for it in 2003. That account was in regular use until just over a year ago – coinciding with when John Walton took over the company. Until then there were regular deposits, usually monthly, quite small withdrawals in cash and a few payments by cheque. However, as the balance built up month by month it would be just about emptied once a year, the money being taken out in cash, so no idea what then happened to it, but he probably used it to open another account somewhere where he felt that it wouldn’t be traced – and he was probably right in his assumption.

“Now Vera did much the same. Every month she paid money in, then once a year took out the money in cash, leaving just a small balance. Again, no way, in theory, of knowing what happened to the cash in the early days – but I have a good idea what she did after her sister died. Remember she had the passport and driving licence that had been Doreen’s. When you open a new account nowadays the bank will ask for proof of identity and proof of residence. For proof of residence they ask for a recent utility bill – council tax, telephone, whatever. She could have used a bill from Doreen’s house plus the passport and the licence.”

“But Doreen’s been dead for over two years – wouldn’t whoever lives in the house now be puzzled at bank statements keeping coming?”

Isla smiled.

“There’s a way round that – if she opened an on-line account she could opt to go ‘paperless’ – the banks positively encourage you to do that to save paper, save the planet, all that bloody rubbish. Really it’s just because it saves them the effort and money in producing hard copy and posting it.”

“So there’s no way of knowing where those new accounts are?”

She shook her head ruefully.

“Not really, not without any clue at all as to even which bank or banks they are using – I mean, they might even have opened accounts abroad.”

Did it matter, I wondered. We knew what the two of them had been up to, we knew that Colclough, at least, had a false passport, we knew that their boat was now called the White Lady – all well and good. What we didn’t knew were the important things - where they were now, nor what they intended to do and I couldn’t see how finding out about their banking arrangements, even if we could, would really be of any help to us in solving those important questions.

My mind harked back to what Freda MacKay had said about Grace intending to sail to Stavanger for a long weekend when talking to John Walton. When DI Harrup had told us about Grace’s boat she had said that it had apparently been capable of about ten knots – ten nautical miles per hour – under sail in reasonable conditions and about the same just using the motor. I knew from the map that from Dundee to Stavanger was very nearly four hundred miles as the crow flies and, again from studying the map, that the actual course Grace would have had to sail was well over that figure. It would have represented a two day sail there and a two day sail back, with twenty four hours on harbour for rest and relaxation. Seemed hard work just for a day 56

in the town. I supposed that it was possible that Grace simply enjoyed the sailing itself and that the destination was secondary, but there was another thought. Forty eight hours without sleep for each of the two voyages, out and back, seemed risky; I was aware that folk had sailed boats, even boats smaller that the Lucinda – now White Lady – solo across the Atlantic, but they had been able to snatch sleep on the wide wastes of the ocean. Sleeping in the crowded waterways between the UK and Norway would surely have been suicidal. He must have had somebody else with him and Colclough was the logical person.

In the office the next day, I checked the personnel leave records. Sure enough, Colclough had also been off when Grace sailed to Stavanger – assuming that he actually did so, of course.

The leave records went back seven years and flicking backwards in time, I found that the two of them had been away for five days at a time of coinciding dates on each of those seven years. I thought about it for a while, then phoned Isla at our flat.

Isla answered cautiously – the fake call centre experience had made her careful about answering the telephone and all she said after picking it up was ‘Hello?’.

“Isla, love, it’s me.”

“Oh, Keith – nice to hear you voice. I’ve been looking through the response from that Falkirk firm I did the work for, and whilst it is complimentary, it raises some questions that they really ought to have thought about before commissioning me. Still, it’s all fee work, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain, even if it is seven year old level stuff.”

“You be careful what you say about seven year olds – I reckon that they are about to take over the world.”

She chuckled down the line and I had a mental picture of her and wished that I was there with her instead of in my anonymous little office.

“I’ll watch it – anyway, to what do I owe this call?”

“Isla, remember Freda Mackay’s tale of Grace intending to sail to Norway?”

“Of course – rather him than me in something that small.”

“Well, DI Harrup told us that t would need two people at the very least to handle that boat under sail – and given the distance involved, it would need at least two so that each could get some sleep – even under good conditions I don’t see how Grace could have made Stavanger from Dundee in much under forty eight hours.

On the dates involved Vera Colclough also took leave – and that’s not all. The two of them have had similar coinciding leave periods for at least the last seven years. I wonder if it was for the same reason – to sail to Stavanger – and if so, why? I mean, given their ages and their family relationship, it wasn’t for dirty weekends – and in any case even if it had been – why spend eighty percent of the time just travelling pretty slowly? Is it possible to check if they did actually go to Stavanger, not only when Freda said, but the previous years as well?”

There was a short pause as Isla clearly thought things over.

“Depends on what sort of records the Stavanger harbour people keep. Guess it’s a case of maybe yes, maybe no. I’ll get right onto it and phone you back – OK?”

“Absolutely.”

To my surprise it was only a matter of twenty minutes or so before she phoned me back. After an exchange of courtesies she launched into what she had found.

“Our luck is in. The Stavanger harbour records are computerised – and the system would be hackable by a six year old, never mind a seven year old. Grace took the Lucinda into the harbour on every one of those dates you suggested.”

“I wonder what the attraction of Stavanger was for them?”

“No idea – but I’m going to have a look at the area on Google maps to see if anything strikes me. I won’t ring back – could be a long job, could be a waste of time – talk to you when you get home.”

When I got home that evening Isla was waiting for me with barely suppressed excitement.

“Keith, I think that I have worked out the reason for those trips to Stavanger!”

“What was it?”

57

“I’m sure that it was to bank money. You remember that they were putting the money that they skimmed off from Hall’s into separate accounts, but that they didn’t leave it there for long? That once a year they virtually emptied those accounts?”

I nodded.

“Well, each year they took out their money only a week or so before their trip to Norway. I even think that I know which bank they are using in Stavanger. Just a couple of hundred yards away from the port entrance there is a branch of the Nordske bank – it’s a fairly small Norwegian bank with branches throughout the country.”

I thought about she had said – and saw an obvious problem,

“Wait a minute, though – on each occasion they would have arrived on a Sunday. Banks don’t open on Sundays.”

“No, but some branches, including this one, have night deposit facilities – you know, a sort of letterbox in which you simply ‘post’ a packet containing what you want banked. You don’t see them so often nowadays, with so many people using credit or debit cards when they buy something, but they used to be very common in shopping areas so that shopkeepers didn’t have to hold onto their cash and cheque takings overnight.”

I nodded again; now that she mentioned it, I had often seen the ‘letter boxes’ in the walls of banks.

“Oh,” she continued, “and it looks as though I am probably wrong in my assumption that Vera opened an account in her sister’s name somewhere – she and Grace already have their system up and working – or at least, I reckon that is what has been going on – so why change it?”

“Can you find out if they really do have accounts at that bank?”

“That’s what I am about to start on. How about you pour us both a drink whilst I do my thing with the computer?”

I did her bidding and sat nursing my own glass of wine whilst I watched her at work. A look of fierce concentration dominated her features as she subjected the computer keyboard to flurries of activity, interspersed with periods of glaring at the screen as, presumably, something in the depths of the bank’s system delayed her.

At last she sat back with a sigh of satisfaction.

“Got it! Yes, they both opened accounts at the Nordske bank at the same time back in 2003 – when Grace became CEO at Hall’s and when Colclough joined the company. Every year since then they have made cash deposits, on dates that correspond with their sailing trips.”

“I wonder why they chose to open accounts in Norway?”

“I reckon your surprise at the location is the very reason why – who would look for accounts over there if they were investigation our two villains? And Norway isn’t the ends of the earth, you know. For somebody with a UK centred outlook on things it probably doesn’t impinge, but as the crow flies Stavanger is actually slightly closer to Dundee than, say, Portsmouth – and by the sea route it is a good bit closer.”

I pondered on what Isla had said; her logic was irreproachable, but I couldn’t help wondering if there was more to it than that.

“I see what you mean,” I told her, “but I wonder if there is anything else involved in their choice of destination?”

“How do you mean?”

“To be honest, I haven’t a bloody clue, but somehow, there seems as though that there should be more to it than just an anonymous location for a bank account.”

A thought struck me.

“We know that Grace and Colclough are cousins, but is it possible to find out if they have any other relatives, no matter how distant, with Norwegian connections?”

She grinned at me.

“Like being related to Peer Gynt, you mean?”

I returned the grin.

“Who knows?”

Less than twenty minutes later she sat back from the computer with a stunned expression on her face.

58

“Keith, you are not going to believe this. I promise you that you are not going to bloody believe this!”

I looked at her expectantly.

“What have you found out?”

She sat there, still shaking her head in disbelief before launching into speech.

“To understand all this, you need to go back to the grandparents of Harold Grace and Vera Colclough. They were George Walker, born 1903, died 1988, and his wife Jane, maiden name Lewis, born 1905, died 1990.

They had four daughters, no sons. In order they were Geraldine, born 1927, died 2006, Kathleen, born 1929, died 2002, Rita, born 1933, died 2005, and Helen, born 1935, who is still living.

“Now, Geraldine had two daughters – Vera Colclough and Doreen Clarke. We know about them. Rita had one son – Harold Grace, and we know all about him. It’s the offspring of the other two that are the surprise.

Helen married a Norwegian, Olaf Knudsen and they had one son, Henrik, born in 1958, still living, and I wouldn’t mind betting he either lives or has lived, in Stavanger, explaining the Norwegian connection of Grace and Colclough. It’s Kathleen, however, who supplies the real surprise package. She married, wait for it, an Italian national, one Fausto Busconi, who died in 1990 and they had two sons, both still living, Vittorio born in 1950 and Mario born in 1953.”

I sat there, my mind reeling with the information we now had. No wonder that John Walton’s trip to Italy had been such a disaster, with Grace and Colclough doubtless feeding their Italian cousins every scrap of information that might be helpful to them. No wonder that it had been the Busconi family with whom Hall’s had exclusively dealt with before John Walton came on the scene.

However, there was more to come; Isla continued.

“I was so taken aback at the Busconi connection that I did a bit more digging into them. Fausto was the uncle of Emmanuel Busconi, the current head of the family, who succeeded his own father, Luciano, when the latter retired from active work in 1995. Emmanuel is now sixty-five years old, a bit older than his two cousins, but he is childless – so perhaps one of those two might succeed him in due course. I got all this from, would you believe it, the family website, which only deals, of course, with their ostensibly legitimate enterprises, plus digging into the Italian equivalent of our register of births, deaths and marriages.”

I shook my head slowly in incredulity.

“It means that the Busconis must have known about both of us right from the start, the moment Fiona Walton sent us to see Harold Grace. The Sandini brothers must have had both of us on their hit list as well as the Waltons.”

Isla shivered as she realised the implications of what I had said.

“Keith, thank heavens you got them first – but surely it means that they must still be after us?”

I nodded grimly.

“It seems likely – that attack on you – Grace and Colclough must have carried it out to please the Busconis.

It explains why they did it, I am sure, and perhaps explains why they waited so long over it.”

Isla nodded her head thoughtfully.

“OK, so now what do we do?”

“I really don’t know. If the Busconis are still after us, and after Grace and Colclough seem, in their eyes, to have botched things, will they try again? Either through Grace and Colclough, or using their own people as they did using the Sandinis to murder the Waltons?”

“Can’t we go to the police?”

“We can try, but we’ll have to be careful what we tell them – we broke a few laws ourselves, don’t forget.”

“Perhaps, no, certainly, we did, but surely we can tell them enough to get them to protect us?”

Chapter Twelve – May/June

As April ticked over into May, we spent the next couple of days polishing a story that we hoped would get the interest of the police without laying ourselves open to any charges. In essence we said that we were sure that the deaths of the Waltons, and the attack on Isla were connected and that the proof was the family ties between Grace, Colclough, and the Busconis. Once we were happy with our story I phoned DI Harrup, the 59

officer who handled the investigation into the attack on Isla, and she agreed to meet us in her office the next day.

Ten o’clock the next morning saw us seated across from her in her small, cramped office, badly in need of redecoration, as she listened attentively to what we had to say. At length, she leaned back in her chair and regarded us openly.

“Ms. Cameron, Mr. Hartley, I think that on the balance of probability your conclusion that Grace and Colclough are criminally linked with the Busconi family is correct. From my point of view, however, there is a big snag. Nothing that you have found gives us a shred of demonstrable evidence that I can run with. Like you – and incidentally, like Commissario Crocetti in Reggio Calabria – I am sure that Mr. and Mrs. Walton were murdered on the orders of the Busconi family. Being sure, however, is not proof. We know that two of the family’s employees disappeared at the relevant time, and the Commissario believes, but again with no proof, that these two men not only came to the UK to murder the Waltons, but were also responsible for several unsolved murders in his own area, but they have never returned to Reggio Calabria, so he can’t even pick them up and question them.”

I was less than encouraged by what the detective was saying.

“I do understand your position, Inspector, but what about our position? I think that we are agreed that the Waltons were murdered so that John Walton couldn’t give evidence at any trial resulting from his kidnapping, but as you know, I was there and could also be seen as a potential target as a result.”

Harrup looked keenly at me.

“But as I understand it, Mr. Hartley, it was the Italian police who found and released John Walton.”

I took a deep breath; in for a penny, in for a pound.

“Yes, but they were acting on information from an informer whom I had persuaded to contact the police.”

This was clearly news to her.

“Oh – and how did you do that?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“I found one of the family and threatened to kill him.”

She gave me a sceptical look.

“And would you have carried out that threat?”

“No, but he didn’t know that.”

She was looking less sympathetic by the minute.

“So, to put it bluntly, you went outside the law?”

With difficulty I contained my temper.

“What bloody law? John Walton was in danger of losing his life – I was instrumental in saving him. Are you saying that it would be preferable if he had been murdered on that boat where the Busconis had him imprisoned?”

“I can’t be expected to approve of members of the public taking the law into their own hands.”

I was almost speechless; almost, but not quite.

“Are you bloody serious, woman? I saved that man’s life - a life that he lost anyway at the hands of thugs the police haven’t managed to lay a finger on.”

She rose from behind her desk.

“I think that you had better leave now, Mr, Hartley. If you continue in this vein you are laying yourself open to charges of abusing a police officer, which is a serious matter.”

I looked at her in total amazement.

“Is that all you can come up with? To threaten me, when we came to you with relevant information and asked for your help?”

She didn’t even look in the slightest bit embarrassed.

“I’m not threatening you, Mr. Hartley. I am advising you of the possible consequences of your actions.”

“So we can look to the police for no help whatsoever?”

60

“I can’t arrange protection for the two of you, if that is what you mean. We simply don’t have the resources to do that. After all, it is now some time since Ms. Cameron was attacked and there has been no further attempt against either of you, has there?”

I shook my head.

“No, there hasn’t. I suppose the idea of me asking for permission to carry a weapon for our protection would be a waste of breath?”

“If you mean a firearm, you know as well as I do that it is not possible. We can’t have private citizens running around armed.”

“No, of course, not – just criminals who run rings round you.”

And with that I rose from my chair; Isla followed my example and we marched out of the office and off the premises, both seething with anger at the policewoman’s attitude.

Once we got home we mulled over our situation and glumly agreed that we were clearly on our own, and that if the Busconis, or Grace and Colclough, were to come after us the police would do nothing until after the event, by which time we might well both be dead.

I began to regret having disposed of the three pistols I had briefly possessed after my run in with the Sandini brothers, but had to accept in my mind that it would have been far too dangerous to hang onto any of them.

My own Walther would have linked me to two dead bodies; I had no idea what the two pistols the Italians had been carrying might have linked back to. In any case, just being found in possession of a pistol, no matter how justified my need for self defence, would put me inside prison for five years.

For the next two weeks or so we took every precaution that I could think of to ward off the possibility of a second, and perhaps more determined, attack. Isla never went anywhere without me, and when I went out alone I took especial care to avoid placing myself in any sort of vulnerable position. Nothing untoward happened, but we both found it very wearing to live as virtual prisoners in this way.

It was worst for Isla; at least I got out of the flat to go to work, but except when I was at home she was confined to being within the four walls. At least her injuries were now fully healed, but that did little to offset the sense of incarceration forced upon her.

Matters came to a head one evening. I had arrived home a little early – it was Thursday – and had decided to take the Friday and Monday off to give us a long weekend. I found Isla in frustrated mood.

“Keith, I’m going mad stuck here all the time. I’ve been asked by that Falkirk firm to spend a couple of days actually in their offices to train a couple of their new staff in the IT system. If I stop in an hotel there, I’m surely going to be safe. It’s weeks now since I was attacked and there has been absolutely no sign of a follow-up. Surely it’s OK for me to go?”

I thought long and hard, but finally agreed.

We spent the long weekend in the Lake District and managed to put our problems to the backs of our minds.

The weather, for once that year with its long winter and miserable spring, was quite good, if not perfect, and we walked in the hills to our hearts’ content, and on the Monday evening we returned home feeling refreshed and more relaxed than of recent weeks.

Isla went over to Falkirk on the Wednesday, booking herself into the Premier Inn, and spent the Thursday and Friday working with the firm’s new IT staff, ensuring that they were up to speed with the security improvements she had designed for their system. She returned on the Friday evening in a happier mood than at any other time since she had been attacked, and we celebrated with a slap-up meal in a local restaurant, with the Busconis, Grace and Colclough pushed firmly into the far background of our minds.

May ticked over into June; it was Tuesday the fourth of that month when I received the phone call that was to change things yet again.

It was from DI Harrup; I was in my office in Dundee and had just decided – it was nearly half past four –

that I had done enough for the day and that it was time to go home, when the phone on my desk rang. It was Freda MacKay, whom I had promoted to be my PA in addition to her general secretarial duties.

“Keith, it’s Inspector Harrup on the line.”

“OK, thanks, Freda – put her on.”

A short pause and I heard the click as we were connected.

61

“Inspector, what can I do for you”

“Mr. Hartley, I have received some news from Italy which may affect yourself and Ms. Cameron, so I thought it best to let you know straight away.”

“Oh, thank you – what is it?”

“I’ve had a call from Commissario Crocetti at Reggio Calabria. The Italian coastguards found a drifting vessel, at first sight crewless, some ten miles or so off the Reggio Calabria coast, but on boarding it they found two bodies in the cabin. A man and a woman, both had been shot dead. In addition to the bodies, they also found an incendiary device attached to a timer – a timer which had failed to work properly. Clearly the killers had intended for the boat to sink with its occupants to hide the fact of their murder.”

I had a premonition of what was coming next.

“The bodies had identification on them, but when the police searched the vessel thoroughly they found that the IDs were fakes. They found passports, hidden away, in the names of Harold Grace and Vera Colclough.

As I think that you know, when it was realised that the two of them had disappeared, and that Grace’s boat gave them the opportunity to go just about anywhere, we applied for, and were granted, a European arrest warrant, so the Reggio Calabria police had the fact of the warrant on their data base. As a result, the Commissario contacted me.”

In fact, I had not known about the European warrant; presumably it had been applied for after we had told DI Harrup about Grace’s boat, but that was of minor consequence.

“Do the Italians have any idea who was responsible for the murders?”

“Nothing that they can prove – but I think that it is reasonable to assume that the Busconi family may well be involved – certainly, that is the Commissario’s thinking, and I for one certainly wouldn’t disagree with him.”

“Thank you for letting me know of this, Inspector. At least Ms. Cameron and I don’t have to worry about those two any longer – but I wonder if we are out of the wood yet.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, this all goes back to the kidnapping, and then the murder, of John Walton – and the killing of his wife as well, I suppose, although I think that she was just terribly unlucky – wrong place, wrong time sort of thing. I’m sure he was killed to prevent him testifying against the Busconis – and the Busconis know that I could also testify against them. By murdering Grace and Colclough, it looks as though they are removing any proof of a link between themselves and anything that was going on in the UK, doesn’t it? And Ms. Cameron and I are surely still part of that link.”

“I understand what you are saying, Mr. Hartley, but I am sure that you are worrying unnecessarily. With Mr.

Walton dead, there will be no trial for kidnapping, so need to worry about silencing witnesses. The killings of Grace and Colclough were, I am sure, related to the illegal business dealings, not the kidnap and murder.”

And that was her final word on the matter.

When I told her the news, Isla was initially relieved – and then the same thought that I had had occurred to her.

“It’s tying up loose ends, isn’t it? Do you think that the Busconis see us as loose ends?”

“I don’t honestly know. I suppose Harrup could be right – that it is just about the UK-Italian link on the illegal business and the way that the Busconis are now in trouble with the Italian tax people – but, after all, we were the ones who set the tax people onto them. Do they realise that? If they do, I can’t see them as being very happy about it.”

The more we thought about it, the more concerned we became. The Busconis knew that I had been responsible for John Walton’s rescue. The Sandini brothers must have linked Isla to me when they staked out the Walton household before murdering them and must have seen the two of us arrive. Had they passed on their knowledge? For that matter, Grace had known about Isla from the beginning; had he passed on that knowledge?

About all that I could see that we could hope for was that the failure of the Sandini brothers to return to Italy might make the Busconi family feel that it wasn’t worth the effort to come after us. But would that happen?

Could we afford to take the risk – and, on the other hand, if we felt that the risk was too great, what could we do about it?

62

I got my answer a few days later in the form of another unexpected telephone call when I was at the office.

This one was from Italy; from Commissario Crocetti himself. He was aware of my part in the release of John Walton all those weeks ago; once safely – or so we thought – back in the UK, John had been in touch with the Commissario to check if there was any indication of when he might be wanted as a witness at a trial.

There had not been, but during the course of the conversation John had mentioned my part in his rescue which, until then, had been unknown to the Italian authorities. It was because of this chance conversation that I was to receive news that, in the long run, was to prove literally life-saving.

The word on the streets of Reggio Calabria, the Commissario informed me, was that Grace and Colclough had been silenced because Emmanuel Busconi, the head of the crime family, was convinced that the problems that they were now having with the Italian tax authorities were the result of something that had happened at the UK end. Therefore, so the story went, Grace and Colclough had been offered sanctuary by the Busconis – and once they had misguidedly accepted the offer, they had been killed. But for the faulty timer mechanism which resulted in their boat not sinking, they, and the boat, would have disappeared without trace. As it was, the two deaths had resulted in yet another investigation, and whilst, as ever, there was no evidence against the family, the news was that Emmanuel was furious at the error and that he had dispatched yet another family member to the UK to take care of the last remaining UK loose ends – Isla and myself. No name was attached to the latest would-be assassin, nor was it known when he had left for the UK, but, the Commissario assured me, it could not have been more than a matter of a few days.

“Have you told all this to Detective Inspector Harrup?” I asked him. He hesitated for a moment before replying.

“Yes, I have, but I must say that she didn’t seem too impressed – she said that it was difficult for her to act on what was no more than a street rumour. That annoyed me; I know my town, I know what the Busconis are like and I feel that the threat is a real one.”

That brought my spirits to a new low. After what Crocetti had told me I had intended to go back to Harrup and ask for help from the police, but from what the Commissario had now added, I very much doubted that any useful help would be forthcoming.

When I got home I told Isla of my telephone conversation with Crocetti; she shared my pessimism at the likelihood of getting any help from the police and, also like me, had no idea what we could do now to protect ourselves. There was one point possibly in our favour; did the latest assassin actually know where we lived?

Our move into Walton Court wasn’t officially recorded anywhere yet, although to be realistic, all he had to do was follow me back from work. Given the amount of traffic in and around Dundee, both on foot and in vehicles, it was highly unlikely that I would identify any competent tail – indeed, that tailing might already have happened. The man from the Busconi family might already know where we lived and I had no way of finding out if that was the case and precious little opportunity to defend either Isla nor myself against a pre-emptive, premeditated attack.

I explained all this to Isla who, like myself, could come up with nothing useful as a counter-measure to the threat we were sure was facing us. An attack could come at any time and could be of many types. The most difficult to guard against would be a simple drive by shooting, should we be foolish enough to offer ourselves up as targets in a suitable location, so we would make no such mistake – the underground car park beneath our block of flats meant that we had no need to be seen on foot anywhere near our home. A break-in would be difficult, but by no means impossible. Although entry to the site was controlled by an answer phone with CCTV, there would nothing to stop our enemy gaining entry by, for instance, pretending to be a delivery man or a meter reader or something along those lines and finding someone gullible enough to open the door for him. Overall, however, I felt that such an approach would probably be too risky for any would-be assassin; too many imponderables outside his control.

I tried to put myself into the mind of our opponent; if I was tasked with what he was, how would I go about it? Isla now never left the flat except with me, something she found stultifying in the extreme, but which she accepted as sensible. I only ever left by car, either by myself or with Isla as a passenger. She still had her own car, the Mini, but we both felt that driving by herself was too big a chance to take. So, if I were the assassin, what would I do?

63

I came to the conclusion that it would have to be an attack on us when we were in the car. Mentally, I reviewed the routes we took most often. All had one element in common; Walton Court was at the end of a fairly long cul-de-sac off the A991 which was dual carriageway, meaning that one had to turn left onto the major road. Several hundred yards along the major road was a roundabout, enabling you to turn back on yourself if you needed to, but for the best part of half a mile any journey we made had to follow that one route. If I were the assassin I would position myself somewhere along that half mile, knowing that my quarry was bound to come to me. Then what? Surely it would have to be a gun attack, either whilst the target vehicle was waiting to exit the cul-de-sac, or when slowing at the roundabout.

Then how to escape? That was the sticking point. Our cul-de-sac was a couple of hundred yards long with Walton Court at the very end of it. As you approached us, on the left there were houses, fair size, detached dwellings built in the 1970s. Each had a generous garden front and back, each had a double garage. On the other side of the road was a green area much used by local dog walkers, so much used that walking in it was an exercise in circumnavigating the evidence that not all dog owners are as responsible as they should be in cleaning up after their pets..

The A991, into which our road opened, was a busy dual carriageway. You couldn’t park on it, so simply waiting in a parked car for us to emerge wasn’t a possibility for our enemy. However, one possibility was to use a motor-cycle; being disguised as a motor-cycle courier would give the hitman an excuse for being stopped at the road side whilst ostensibly studying a map or something, but surely not for very long before somebody in the houses lining the A991 noticed and remembered him.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed unlikely that the hitman could attack us at home with a reasonable chance of success and, more importantly to him, a good chance of escape afterwards.

We were forewarned and, I hoped, forearmed.

I was wrong.

Chapter Thirteen – 10th – 24th June

It was Monday morning. Over the weekend we had once again escaped from Dundee and spent Friday and Saturday nights, and most of Sunday, in the North Berwick area, enjoying the freedom of walking on the beaches. I was still as vigilant as I could be, although to be honest, I could see no way in which we could have been tracked; I had kept a very careful look out for any following vehicles and had used a circuitous route before leaving the city and trusting ourselves to the less busy roads heading south.

In the weeks since we had moved to Walton Court, and more especially after we had learned of the deaths of Grace and Colclough, and the assumed presence of a Busconi hitman, we had followed as normal a life as possible, whilst also being as careful as possible. The normal life included Isla working from home on a variety of computer projects for a wide range of companies, work which mostly involved attacking their IT

systems, identifying weaknesses, and advising on what to do to correct those weaknesses.

On a couple of occasions she had needed to physically visit company offices; on each of those occasions I had chauffeured her to and from the firm’s premises, on tenterhooks the whole time, but all had gone well.

Quite often companies had sent her packages of computer discs for analysis; in view of the confidential nature of the information on those discs they had always been delivered by courier and had needed to be signed for.

It was therefore no surprise when the intercom to the external door to the block rang just as I was preparing to go to work. I checked the CCTV image and there was a man in the uniform of one of the courier firms that had been used. He stood holding his crash helmet in one hand, a small package in the other.

“Package for Miss Cameron to be signed for,” he announced.

I pressed the button which opened the downstairs door and waited for him to arrive. I hear the lift ascending and a moment later the knock on the door.

“I’ll get it,” I called to Isla as she started to emerge from the kitchen, and opened the door.

The man’s left hand still held the small package, but the right hand which had been holding the crash helmet, now held a small automatic pistol. Of the helmet itself there was no sign.

64

“Back inside,” he ordered, and I stepped back in obedience to the command. As I did so, Isla emerged fully from the kitchen, saw what was happening, and screamed. The gunman was momentarily distracted, his eyes and head turning towards her, the pistol following their movement and he fired. As he did so I launched myself at him. He was a small man, no more than five feet six or so and perhaps ten stone at the most; I outweighed him by at least four stone and my greater weight bore him backwards to crash heavily into the door frame. With my left hand I grasped his right wrist, forcing the pistol away from my body, smashing the back of his hand against the wall with sufficient force to send the weapon spinning from his grasp. With my right hand I clutched at his throat, banging his head repeatedly against the door frame until he went limp. I let him slide to the floor, kicked his pistol under the small cabinet that stood beside the door, and turned anxiously to Isla.

She was on the floor, blood puddled beside her head and I scrambled across to her. She had a head wound, a horrid looking gash along the side of her skull, just above her right ear. She was breathing, but she looked awful; with trembling hands I pulled my mobile phone from my pocket and dialled 999, desperately imploring the impersonal voice at the other end to send an ambulance to cope with a serious head wound. I also asked for the police and as I did so I was aware of the gunman, clearly less damaged that I had thought, running from the flat, slamming the door behind him.

I let him go; staying with Isla was infinitely more important than pursuing him.

It took eleven minutes for the ambulance to arrive, the longest eleven minutes of my life. The police took a little longer; for them I had simply said that Isla had been seriously injured by an intruder. I made no mention of the pistol; to have done so would doubtless have resulted in an armed response unit surrounding the place and refusing the ambulance crew entry whilst Isla bled to death – it has been known to happen.

I went in the ambulance with her as it hurtled along, blue lights flashing, siren screeching, to the accident and emergency unit at Ninewells hospital, whilst I gave thanks that we lived so near to a major teaching hospital.

The eleven minutes it had taken for the ambulance to reach us had been awful; the three hours that I spent in A&E were even worse. On our arrival, Isla had been rushed away to disappear behind closed doors whilst an improbably young looking doctor briefly spoke to me. Yes, I told him, it was a gunshot wound and the perpetrator had got away. It was an explanation I repeated at greater length to a uniformed police sergeant half an hour later, an explanation which caused him to disappear with a worried look on his face, but not before he had called a constable from their vehicle to come and stay with me.

A further half hour on and we were joined by a tired looking, middle-aged man who introduced himself as Detective Inspector McIlvray. He looked somehow crumpled and defeated, as though all the troubles of the world weighed upon his narrow shoulders. Dressed in a mid-grey suit, with shirt to match, his tie slightly askew, his tired grey eyes, lack lustre thinning grey hair and lined face made him look as though he had been up all night; I later learnt that he had, indeed, been on his feet all through the previous night dealing with a case of rape and assault in the city centre.

He listened intently to what I had to say, nodding his head from time to time in what I took to be understanding, but which might equally well have been simple weariness.

It was only when I said that Isla had been shot and that the pistol was still in the flat that he showed any real animation as he used a police radio to instruct somebody – presumably at our flat – to secure the weapon and bring it to him.

“I’d like you to come to the station and make a statement about all this, please, Mr. Hartley.”

I shook my head vehemently.

“I’m not leaving here until I know how Isla is.”

He thought for a moment, then nodded once more.

“Very well, Mr. Hartley, but in view of the seriousness of the incident I am going to have to leave PC

Graham,” he waved his hand in the direction of the uniformed officer who had been staying with me, “with you for the moment.”

I made no comment – so long as McIlroy didn’t insist on me leaving the hospital he could leave the entire Black Watch regiment with me for all I cared.

65

The time dragged by on leaden feet, but at last I had some news. A tall, white coated man, who subsequently introduced himself as the A&E consultant, Mr. Gillespie, approached me, his features clearly set in neutral.

“Mr. Hartley?”

“Yes, how is she?”

“Mr. Hartley, the wound she has suffered in very serious. The bullet didn’t penetrate her skull, but ploughed a furrow along the bone, sending bone splinters into Ms. Cameron’s brain. I have removed those splinters and she is at the moment in an anaesthetic induced coma, which I am going to have to maintain for at least twenty-four hours. I must be frank with you, Mr. Hartley, I am worried that the splinters may have caused brain damage, but we won’t know until she is conscious again.”

This was terrible news; I had known soldiers suffer similar wounds. Some had survived, some had not. Of the survivors some had made complete recoveries, but a worryingly high proportion had not, but had suffered brain damage, and resultant loss of faculties, to a varying degree. One of my own unit, Corporal Bennett the gunner on one of our helicopters, aged just twenty –three at the time, was, I knew only too well, still in a vegetative state six years after being shot by a Taliban sniper, with his young wife still a daily visitor to his bedside, still hoping for a miracle recovery. Was this to be Isla’s fate?

I asked if I could see her, and Gillespie, after warning me that I would probably not find the sight of her at all reassuring, reluctantly agreed. He was right; lying still and waxen faced, with a plethora of lines and cables attached to her, surrounded by mysterious screens and machines, she looked far worse than she had lying on the floor of the flat.

Once I had returned to the waiting room I passed on the state of play to my police companion, who in turn radioed the news back, presumably to McIlroy. At the request of whoever was at the other end of the conversation, I agreed to go to the police station after I had called back at the flat to change into clothes that weren’t stained with Isla’s blood.

I had a surprise when I returned to the flat. It was festooned with blue and white ‘Police: do not cross’ tape and the door was guarded by a uniformed constable who barred my approach.

“I’m sorry, sir, but nobody is allowed in here.”

“But this is my flat – look at me, I need a change of clothing before I can go to your police station to give a statement.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but my orders are very clear. Nobody is allowed in here until DI Harrup gets here.”

Harrup! That wretched woman who had pooh-poohed the danger to Isla and myself.

“So how long will that be?”

“I don’t know, sir, but it shouldn’t be very long. I understand that she is already on her way.”

I waited with as much patience as I could muster; there was no chair in the corridor in front of our door so I simply slumped down on the floor with my back against the wall.

In fact, I only had to wait fifteen minutes or so, but on that dreadful day every minute seemed ten times its normal length. At last, however, she arrived.

“Inspector,” I began, but she stopped me with a raised hand.

“Mr. Hartley, I am sorry to hear about Ms. Cameron, but I need to talk to you urgently.”

“Yes, but at least let me change my clothes.” I indicated the blood-stained state of my apparel.

“Of course, In any case, we need your clothes – they are evidence.”

“Evidence? Evidence of what?”

“Evidence of the alleged presence of an intruder.”

I nearly lost it. Isla was in hospital fighting for her life, I was covered in her blood, the intruder’s pistol had, presumably, been recovered by the police, and this stupid woman was taking about an alleged intruder? I took a long, slow, deep breath. And then another one, before trusting myself to speak.

“Inspector, my partner has been shot and is fighting for her life. She may well not survive and if she does she may have suffered brain damage. She was shot by the very person Commissario Crocetti warned you about and you say an alleged intruder?”

She looked back at me and I realised that, lurking behind her aggressive approach there was fear. Any independent person looking at what had happened was sure to believe that she had cocked-up big time. She 66

had ignored a plain warning from a very senior Italian policeman and as a result she had a case of attempted

– please, dear God, not actual – murder on her hands, a case that she should have been much more on top of.

“Nevertheless, Mr. Hartley, we do need your clothes.”

“OK – are you going to watch me change?

She flushed angrily.

“ Of course not – PC Grieg here will accompany you – oh, and I want all your clothes, underwear, shoes, socks, the lot.”

Seething, I entered my flat, the policeman at my heels, and once in the bedroom stripped naked and donned a complete change of clothes, with PC Grieg bundling the discards into a large plastic bag; then the two of us returned to DI Harrup.

“Right, Inspector – now what?”

“Now Mr. Hartley, we go to the station for you to give a statement.”

And so we did. I sat in the back of the marked police car with DI Harrup and the driver in the front, PC

Grieg, still clutching the bag containing my blood stained clothes, beside me.

We made our way to an interview room, where, to my surprise, DI McIlroy was already waiting. Harrup sat down beside him and indicated for me to take the chair across the table from them.

It was McIlroy who spoke first.

“Mr. Hartley, thank for coming in – before we start, is there any more news on Ms. Cameron?”

I shook my head.

“No, I’m afraid not; things are still very serious for her.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, really I am. We’ll try not to keep you too long, as I’m sure you will want to get away.”

I began to wider if I was in for a ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine, his approach was so different from that of his female colleague. He had in front of him a large padded envelope; he reached inside and withdrew a plastic evidence bag, which he placed on the table between us.

“Have you seen this weapon before, Mr. Hartley?”

I looked closely at the pistol, recognising it as I did so. It was a Ruger Mk.I, an American made pistol noted for its accuracy and, with its low powered .22 cartridge, its low noise and lack of recoil. It was the type of weapon favoured by many for close range assassination, although its primary function was as a sporting weapon.

“I think that it is the gun used to shoot my partner – I was too busy trying to disable the would-be killer to take a close look at the weapon, but I do believe that it what he used.”

“Do you recognise it?”

“Yes, it’s American, a Ruger Mk. I, .22 cartridge.”

“You know about guns, Mr. Hartley?” This was Harrup’s first contribution to the interview.

“Of course, I was a soldier for thirteen years.”

“But that isn’t an Army weapon, surely?”

“No, strictly civilian.”

She looked at me; I could sense hostility not far below the surface.

“Is it your gun, Mr. Hartley?”

I looked blankly at her.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The question is simple enough, surely? Is it your gun?”

“No, of course not – I don’t own any firearms, and certainly not an illegal weapon like that. Why do you ask?”

“Well, you see, nobody saw this man you claim came into your flat and shot Ms. Cameron. Are you sure that you didn’t shoot her – perhaps by accident?”

I glared at her, then turned to McIlroy.

“Inspector, do I have to put up with this nonsense?”

McIlroy smiled sadly at me.

“Mr. Hartley, I think that DI Harrup has asked a very pertinent question. You must understand that we have to consider all aspects of this situation.”

I drew a deep breath.

67

“Very well, for the record, no, I did not shoot Isla Cameron. If that is indeed the gun that shot her, I do not own it, I have not touched it other than to kick it to a safe location when fighting for my life, and before this morning I had never seen it before. Does that satisfy you both?”

“Thank you, Mr. Cameron, I think you have answered DI Harrup’s question very fully. Now, may we move on to the gunman himself. Can you describe him for me?”

I thought for a moment, trying to recall everything I could about the man.

“He wasn’t very big. A good bit shorter than me, about five feet six, perhaps five seven, no more. Slim build; I should think a bit under ten stone. Sallow complexion, very dark eyes, hair virtually black.

I remembered something.

“He wore gloves, black leather gloves.”

“How was he dressed?”

“He had the same uniform as one of the regular courier firms that deliver work to Isla – that is black motorcycle leathers with the name of the company on a patch over the left breast and a black crash helmet with a full face visor. He had the helmet in his hand when he buzzed for admission, but he didn’t have it when I opened the door to him – he must have left it in or near to the lift.”

McIlroy nodded.

“Yes, we found a helmet near to the lift. It’s being tested by the forensic people.”

I relaxed a bit – surely even the antagonistic DI Harrup must accept the helmet as proof that the hitman existed? Fat chance – she wasn’t finished yet.

“Of course, the presence of the helmet doesn’t necessarily mean that it belonged to the intruder you are saying shot Ms. Cameron. One other thing – you say this man came to kill the two of you, yet you overpowered him and he ran away. How was that?”

I stared at her without blinking, forcing her to hold my gaze. I had been sitting with my arms down by my sides; now I slowly raised them and placed my hands, palms down, on the table, then slowly turned them over and closed my fingers to form fists.

“Look at me,” I said, still holding her gaze. “I’ve told you how small he is. Without a gun, do you really think that he would try and take me on, man to man?”

I turned my fists back down onto the table again.

“If he had come at me after losing his gun, and after shooting Isla, I would have killed him. I would have squashed him like a bug.”

As I had been speaking I had raised my fists a few inches off the table’s surface; now I brought them crashing down, hard enough to make the table, and both police officers, jump. By modern standards I am not all that big, six feet one tall and fourteen and a half stone, but I have always had exceptionally large hands in proportion to the rest of me and I think that the impact of those large hands onto the table convinced both of them that I meant every word that I had said and that I was fully capable of doing just what I had said.

There was silence for a moment, then it was McIlroy who took up the questioning.

“Mr. Hartley, how was the gunman able to escape?”

“The door was still open from when I had let him in. I thought that I had rendered him unconscious, but I must only have stunned him temporarily. I left him to go to Isla’s assistance and he took the opportunity to escape. I made no attempt to follow him; it was much more important to do what I could for her than to go running after her assailant.”

That effectively ended the interview. DI Harrup was clearly shaken by my performance; I was sure that she was now more antagonistic than ever towards me, but I had no interest in winning her approval. I was much more interested in McIlroy’s reaction; I was sure that I had convinced him that I was telling the truth. I was about to take my leave of them when something so blindingly obvious that could not understand how I had overlooked it struck me.

“Tell me,” I said, “haven’t you looked at the CCTV of the block of flats.”

For the first time since I had met her, DI Harrup looked embarrassed.

“Yes, we have,” she said defensively, “and it does show a courier, but that didn’t mean that he necessarily came to your flat – it could have been one of the others.”

“Well now you know it wasn’t.”

And with that parting shot I left them.

I returned to the hospital, feeling utterly drained, and tried to get more news of Isla’s condition. I met Mr.

Gillespie’s registrar, Doctor Samantha Kelly, a striking attractive young woman who exuded competence and confidence.

“There’s no new news, I am afraid, Mr. Hartley. Isla’s condition is unchanged; no better, but thankfully no worse. I’m sure that Mr. Gillespie told you that she would be in her induced coma for at least twenty-four hours?”

68

I nodded, too tired to make more of a response.

“Well, I would suggest that you go home and try and get some rest and come back tomorrow morning.

Hopefully we will have more news for you then.”

I took her advice, but I had forgotten that the police were still regarding the flat as a crime scene, Rather than argue the toss, I booked into the nearest hotel and tried to get the rest that my mind, more than my body, craved so deeply, but I was unable to sleep for more than a few brief snatches, snatches interrupted by unpleasant, but formless, dreams.

The next morning I presented myself at the hospital just after nine to be met by Mr. Gillespie and Doctor Kelly in the former’s small office off the main A&E department.

They both looked grave and my heart sank; I am good at reading people’s expressions and these did not bode well. It was Gillespie who took the lead.

“Mr. Hartley, we have been monitoring Ms. Cameron’s condition very closely all night and I am afraid that things are not going as well as we had hoped. By now she should be coming out of the induced coma, but there is no sign of her doing so. Instead, she has slipped into a natural coma and at this stage there is no telling how long that natural coma will last.”

“Will she come out of it?” I asked, dreading to hear the answer.

“I honestly do not know. At the moment I would rate her chances of recovering consciousness as rather less than fifty-fifty, but I could be wrong, and I hope very much that I am. I have discussed her condition with our neurosurgeons and our neurologists and we are all agreed that there is no indication of any further surgery being required. There are no signs of any bleeding into her brain, other than that caused by the bullet and which we are confident we have successfully repaired, Other than that, however, I am afraid that it is now simply a case of wait and see.”

And that was as much as they could tell me. I looked in on her again; she looked no better but I tried to convince myself that at least she looked no worse.

I returned to the flat; the police had relented and I could now call it my own again, although they had kept my blood-stained clothing – not that I ever wanted to see any of it again.

The next two weeks dragged by. I visited the hospital every day and sat with Isla for an hour or so at a time, talking to her in the hope that even though she could not respond, at least she might in some way be able to hear me. The hunt for the gunman had been taken over by DI McIlroy – it was a relief not to have to continue to have dealings with the irritating DI Harrup. The police pieced together information from the Walton Court CCTV system and statements by occupants of nearby houses; the ‘courier’ had been seen on a motorcycle – which proved to have been stolen the previous day – at the end of our cul-de-sac where it met the A991 and also on the main road itself, both before the attack and as he made his escape, now without his helmet. The last sighting of him had been less than a mile away and the motorcycle was found abandoned in a side street. Thereafter, nothing. He had vanished as though he had never existed; the assumption was that he had switched to a car in that street, either one previously placed there or one stolen opportunistically.

I wondered if he would make an attempt to attack me again. I hoped that he would; given half a chance, this time I really would kill him. However, no such attempt was made and on the 24th of the month I had a call from DI McIlroy which made it unlikely that any such attempt would be made, at least not by the same man.

He had been contacted by Commissario Crocetti in Reggio Calabria; the Commissario’s force had been keeping a very close eye on the Busconi family and had probably identified the hitman. Ernesto Brazi, one of the seemingly unending stream of cousins and in-laws, had returned to the town two days after the attack on Isla and myself and checking back it was demonstrated that nobody had seen him locally since the 6th of June. Yet again, only circumstantial but pretty convincing. I asked McIlroy if there was any chance of Brazi being arrested, but had to agree with him that there simply wasn’t the evidence at the Italian end to justify an arrest. However, Crocetti had sent over a file on the man and McIlroy invited me to come to the police station to see if I recognised his picture.

Accordingly, late that afternoon, after work was over for the day, I was sitting with McIlroy in his cubbyhole of an office, staring at the picture of Ernesto Brazi. It was a surveillance picture – Brazi had never been arrested, never mind convicted, so there was no high quality full face ‘mug shot’ to examine. I stared long and hard, trying to convince myself one way or the other, but in the end had to admit that I simply could not be sure. The file said that he was approximately one metre sixty-five tall and about sixty-five kilos in weight, which I translated as about five feet six and ten stone, so the size was right, but that was scarcely enough to go on.

In my heart I felt that I was looking at the gunman, but to be fair to the police, both British and Italian, I could not give them anything definite enough to warrant them taking action, so on that unsatisfactory note I 69

returned home. Once there I fell to wondering what, if anything, my next step could be. On the face of it the Busconis’ attempt to murder us both would go unpunished and that rankled very badly indeed.

I toyed with a number of ideas, and one of them kept recurring. Isla might well die, or if she didn’t actually die she might be in so vegetative a state that she might as well be dead, simply being kept alive by medical machinery with no true existence of her own. To my mind that was every bit as bad as murder. I have never agreed with the abolition of the death penalty for murder – provided one can be absolutely sure that the accused is guilty why should he or she go on living when his – or her – victim or victims have had that luxury denied them? Claims that executing killers is barbaric, unworthy of a civilised society, etc., cut absolutely no ice whatsoever with me.

But regardless of all that, what could I actually do?

Chapter Fourteen – July

The answer came to me slowly over the next couple of weeks, during which time, despite my daily visits, Isla showed no signs of any improvement, although at least she didn’t get any worse. The answer required me to go to Italy, to take action against my enemies before they attacked me again. I had initially thought of flying directly to Reggio Calabria, using MacLean Air Services as I had, now seemingly so long ago, when I went in search of John Walton. Thinking it over, however, I realised that that would be a mistake on several fronts. Firstly, it was at Reggio Calabria airport that I had been identified by one of the Busconis’ people; to return there was to invite them knowing of my arrival as soon as it occurred. Secondly there was the cost involved; it scarcely seemed fair to expect Walton Holdings to finance the trip and I couldn’t afford to do so myself. Thirdly, finally, and most importantly, it would leave a damning trail of evidence for the police to follow.

The result of all that was that on Saturday, the 6th of July, having told my staff that I was taking a couple of weeks off, and leaving Willie MacFarlane, the CEO of Hall’s Perfumes, in overall charge during my absence, I drove to a neat detached house in the small town of Radcliffe, about ten miles or so out of Manchester. The house was the home of George Hughes, now the successful owner of a small car hire and vehicle repair company, but in Afghanistan George had been Corporal Hughes, the gunner in my Apache attack helicopter. He had left the Army shortly before I did, invalided out after our helicopter had been hit by ground fire, wounding him quite badly. I had flown us away from the danger area, landed and seen to his wounds as best I could, then flown him to the nearest military first aid facility. He had made a complete recovery from his wounds, but had decided not to extend his service but to become a civilian. Rightly or wrongly, he credited me with saving his life with my emergency treatment of his injuries, and we had kept in touch thereafter.

A couple of days earlier George and I had had a long telephone conversation and my visit to his house was the result. It had taken me an age to think up a way of getting to Reggio Calabria without leaving a paper trail a mile wide for anyone who had a wish to, to follow with ease.

Then I had hit on a solution. One of the rising elements of crime nowadays is identity theft, where a criminal uses computer hacking techniques to latch onto the bank details of an innocent third party and before that third party knows what has happened, his, or her, bank account has been raided. Although the innocent party is normally refunded by the banks, the inconvenience is very considerable, and the criminal is very rarely caught.

I was going to ‘steal’ George’s identity, but with his complete cooperation, and to a far greater degree. In our telephone conversation I had told him what was going on and the threat I was facing from the Busconi family, and George had readily agreed to help me.

The result was that whilst the real George Hughes went about his business in Lancashire, seen by one and all and demonstrably nowhere near continental Europe, his alter ego, me, flew from Edinburgh to Rome.

George and I were of similar age and build and enough alike in appearance for me to use his passport and pass myself off as him.

In Rome I had arranged to meet another of my contacts from Afghanistan. In 2004 I had flown as one of a pair of Apaches to support an Italian Chinook troop transport helicopter which had been forced down by 70

ground fire with several casualties. The pilot had managed to fly his damaged machine far enough away from the site of the ambush to escape being immediately overrun, but unless the Italians received rapid support it would only be a matter of time before Taliban ground forces reached them.

We, the other Apache and mine, provided visible airborne deterrence and protection until another Chinook, American this time, arrived on the scene to rescue the Italians and lift them to safety, whilst I used a Hellfire missile to destroy the wrecked Chinook to deny to the Taliban anything in it that they might have found useful.

The nearest base with medical facilities to where the engagement had occurred happened to be our own, so that evening we got together in the mess with the uninjured Italians, who included the Chinook pilot. He spoke reasonable English – necessary as it was the primary communication language for aircraft in theatre, but after a few drinks I lapsed into Italian and we spent the rest of the evening conversing in my mother’s native tongue.

To our mutual surprise, we discovered that both our mothers had come from the same small town of Valle Martella, a few miles east of Rome itself. Given the small size of the town (although it has rapidly expanded in the last thirty years or so) it was even quite possible that we were distantly related on our mothers’ sides –

something like nineteenth cousins twenty times removed or the like!

Ercole Bonetti was still in the Italian Air force, although no longer a front line helicopter pilot. Instead, he was a lieutenant-colonel based at the Italian armed force’s general headquarters in Rome. As with George Hughes, I had had a long telephone conversation with him before setting out on my journey and had been promised practical support without which what I had in mind could not be achieved.

Ercole and I had a convivial evening together, and the next morning I set off in my hired Fiat Bravo, taking a while to accustomise myself to Roman driving habits whilst also coping with a left hand drive set-up, but at last I managed to get out of the city without incident, although not without behind the subject of a few blasts from other drivers’ horns. Once out of the city I picked up the SS148 to the south,. At first the road was a fast dual carriageway, but fairly soon became single carriageway, wending its way through a succession of towns, both small and quite large. I would have made better time on the autostrada but I had no wish to leave a trail through the various toll booths, so the slower, but anonymous, road it had to be. Soon I left the SS148 for a succession of similar roads, always avoiding the autostrada. From Rome to Reggio Calabria is about 450 miles, more than I fancied driving in a single day on mostly quite slow roads, so I broke my journey in the small town of Meta, about half way along my journey, with the town itself roughly half way between Naples and Sorrento, staying in the Panorama Palace hotel, a good quality hotel popular with tourists, so George Hughes’ passport and my accent raised no eyebrows.

I was off early again the next morning, with Reggio Calabria my ultimate destination. However, I had no intention of staying in the town itself; the danger of being seen and recognised was too great.

About a mile to the east of the town the terrain becomes very rugged and the road leading to the nearby villages is a nightmare of hairpin bends as it snakes up, down and around rocky outcrops. It is a deserted area, too rocky, and the soil too thin for any cultivation and the only vegetation scrubby bushes and stunted trees. By assiduous use of Google Earth, I had located a rough track leading off the road and appearing to end at a tumbledown building. I approached cautiously; there was always the chance that it had been resurrected since the Google Earth images had been taken, but fortune was on my side. It was even more dilapidated than it had appeared in the computer image; the roof had fallen in, the windows and doors were long gone. For my purpose it was ideal.

Very cautiously I drove the Fiat round behind the building, then spent the next twenty minutes using branches from nearby shrubs to eradicate my tyre marks right back to the road. Satisfied at last that nobody would realise that a car had been driven along the track, I unloaded the contents of the two large rucksacks that Ercole had prepared for me.

The contents of the first one comprised a small, one man army tent, a sleeping bag and camouflage clothing.

I pitched my tent, again on the far side of the old building from the road, made myself a meal from the iron rations in the second rucksack and settled down for the night.

71

The next morning I was up early and after my second cold meal, this time breakfast, set about my reconnaissance mission. From my temporary hiding place to the mansion inhabited by Emmanuel Busconi was perhaps a mile and a half hike; I undertook it with the greatest of caution. From now on it was essential that nobody suspected my presence in the area.

I had used the ubiquitous Google Earth and Google Maps to get an idea of the terrain around the Busconi house, but in the final analysis there is no substitute for actually examining the area on foot, and that was what I now had to do.

The house stood at the end of a long drive, surrounded by a ten feet high wall with just the one entrance gate, a heavy wrought iron affair which was electrically controlled and driven, sliding along a track to open rather than swinging open. It was controlled from a small gatehouse with, presumably, a single guard on duty –

certainly I only saw one man there, a man who was relieved at eight o’clock in the morning.

The wall and the controlled gate made any direct approach to the house unobserved out of the question – but I had no intention of making a direct approach. My reconnaissance had a very different purpose.

The house was overshadowed by a rocky outcrop which I was able to use to ensure that my approach was unseen; once at its summit I had, as I had hoped, a bird’s eye view of the house and its grounds at a distance of some four hundred and fifty yards. The high wall was no hindrance from where I lay; I was side on to the building and able to see both the front and the back of the house from my elevated vantage point, the sweeping drive up to the front door, flanked by an immaculate lawn, a large swimming pool set in a flagged patio at the back, with two tennis courts beyond it, with nowhere any signs of life showing when I first arrived, but which saw three people emerge from the back of the house in mid-morning.

I examined the trio through my binoculars; in relation to the them I had the sun behind me at this hour of the morning, so there was no danger of reflections from the lenses betraying my position to anyone who might be watching from the house.

They were all men; one, quite short but heavily built, dressed in an immaculate white linen suit, and looking to be in his sixties, was Emmanuel Busconi – I had studied his photograph intently on the ‘legitimate’

company website. The other two, much younger and casually dressed, looked like bodyguards – big, fit looking men who walked a respectful pace or two behind their boss. The three slowly paced round the periphery of the swimming pool and I realised that Busconi was talking on a mobile phone. The conversation lasted no more than a minute or two, then he slipped the phone into his jacket pocket and, still followed by his companions, made his way back into the house. Presumably he had not wanted what he was saying to be heard by someone inside, but it was indicative that even the in the security of his own home his bodyguards –

for such, I was convinced, the younger men were – had accompanied him.

It was getting hot; the hillside was almost bare rock and the sun’s heat bounced back off its surface. I had endured worse in Afghanistan, but even so I had a deep respect for what heat can do and had come properly prepared. I had plenty of water with me and a camouflaged groundsheet which, with the aid of some loose rocks, I used to turn a natural cleft in the hillside into a shaded area in which I could wait, if not in comfort, at least in safety from the elements.

An hour passed with no further sign of anyone outside the house, but then from the further side of the building – the side hidden from my view - a large black Mercedes emerged and rolled to a stop outside the front door. After a moment the two bodyguards emerged. One went straight to the car and got in the front passenger seat. The second man hung back, clearly waiting, and after a few moments Busconi himself appeared and hurried down the three steps leading from the front door down the drive and got into the rear of the car. I expected the second bodyguard to join him, but no, A second Mercedes appeared, drew past Busconi’s car and the second bodyguard got into that; a few more seconds passed and yet a third Mercedes appeared and rolled to a stop as third in line. Then all three vehicles set off in convoy. The gatekeeper timed the opening of the big gate so that the three big cars swept through at perhaps twenty miles an hour without having to check their progress and they were soon lost to view. Clearly Emmanuel Busconi took his personal security very seriously indeed.

It wouldn’t do him any good.

72

I watched the house until dusk; Busconi’s convoy returned in the middle of the afternoon, disgorging him and the two bodyguards before the three cars disappeared from my view. After that half an hour passed and Busconi, still accompanied by his bodyguards, appeared at the back of the house. This time the white linen suit had given way to black swimming trunks and I watched enviously as he lowered himself into the pool and swam a few unhurried lengths before leaving the water’s embrace for a lounger by the pool side. All this time the bodyguards had stood watching, their gaze not on their principal but ranging over the house and the immediate surroundings. Impressive but, as a reaction force, pretty pointless. The high wall prevented them from seeing any approach to the house, although such an approach, if from the front, would of course be seen by the gatekeeper. No, I felt that their constant presence was a show of strength, a deterrent, and I wondered whom Busconi felt had to be deterred.

As dusk fell I crept away, even more carefully than I had arrived, and returned to my temporary home in the decrepit building.

The next day I was, once again, up early. This time, however, I hiked away from the Busconi house, deeper into the hills. I trekked for over three miles before I was satisfied that I was far enough away from any likely chance encounter with anybody and set down to organise the next stage of my revenge against Emmanuel Busconi.

The previous day I had carried two rucksacks. Today I carried only one, but I also carried another of the items that Ercole had prepared for me. It was a rifle; to be precise a Beretta M501, the standard weapon for snipers in the Italian military.

It is only in books and films that somebody picks up a rifle he has never used before and promptly indulges in fancy long distance shooting. In real life it doesn’t happen that way. Everyone will hold any given weapon slightly differently, affecting where the bullet actually lands as opposed to what it is being aimed at – that is one of the reasons why rifles have adjustable sights, so that you can adjust the weapon to suit your own particular way of holding it.

The Beretta comes with an adjustable Zeiss telescopic sight and I set it to maximum magnification. Then I carefully paced out one hundred yards and set up my target, a white cardboard box with a black disc, an inch in diameter, painted on it to act as an aiming mark.

I returned to the rifle and, dropping down flat on my stomach, snuggled the butt into my shoulder and took careful aim at my target. Controlling my breathing to steady the sights as much as possible, I squeezed off three shots in slow succession and examined the result. I was pleased with my effort; the three bullet holes formed a group about an inch across and three quarters of an inch top to bottom. The group was also about two inches to the left of my aiming mark but level with it. I carefully adjusted the sights and fired two more shots. Both struck the aiming mark.

From the moment that it leaves the muzzle of the gun from which it is fired, a bullet starts to decelerate and drop. I knew that for this weapon and cartridge, a bullet which hit its aiming point at one hundred yards would strike thirty inches low at four hundred and fifty yards, so I adjusted the sights accordingly. I would have liked to fire some further test shots at the greater distance just to check, but even in so remote an area as this, sound carries and I had no wish to be discovered, so I packed up my equipment and returned to my camp to wait out the rest of the day.

The third morning came; it was the morning of the day on which I would strike back at Busconi.

Chapter Fifteen – 25th July and on

Once again I settled myself into my hiding place on the rocky outcrop overlooking casa Busconi and waited.

As before the cavalcade of cars swept away from the house at about ten o’clock. I made no move; again something that only happens in books and films is that a rifleman shoots somebody at long range despite that somebody moving around. It takes around half a second for a rifle bullet to travel four hundred and fifty yards. Not a long time, but easily long enough for the intended victim to suddenly stop to tie a shoelace, stumble over uneven ground, suddenly change direction whilst walking. To be sure of my shot I needed Busconi stationary, so I was waiting for him to return from wherever he was going.

73

Sure enough, the convoy returned at three in the afternoon. It was another hot day and I was hoping that Busconi would once again decide that it was hot enough to enjoy a dip in his pool.

I was in luck. Half an hour after his return he again emerged from the house clad in swimming trunks. Again he was accompanied by his bodyguards, but they would be no protection for him.

I waited patiently as he completed his swim, then once more settled onto the lounger at the poolside. And then I shot him.

The noise of the impact of the bullet on flesh made the bodyguards spin round, wondering what was happening; the bullet, travelling at well over twice the speed of sound, arrived in half a second from my squeezing the trigger. The sound of the shot reached them just over a second later. That, and the gaping wound in Busconi’s chest, made them realise what was happening. They were brave men; they ignored any possible threat to themselves, but instead grabbed their boss by his arms and dragged him out of sight close to the surrounding wall – they were quick-witted enough to realise that only place from which the shot could have come was my rocky outcrop and they had now removed Busconi from the risk of any further shots.

It didn’t matter. I knew that my shot had been well placed and that Emmanuel Busconi’s days as head of a crime family were over.

Whilst they were crouching behind the wall for protection for themselves and Busconi, I gathered up my equipment and made good my escape.

An hour and a half later I was about fifteen miles away as the crow flies (although a good bit more by the route that I had taken), booking into the hotel Tito Serrano in the small coastal town of Melito de Porto Salvo. En route I had disposed of the rifle and the camouflaged clothing, tent and groundsheet, all of which had gone to the bottom of a small ravine just before I had reached the SS183, the road which approaches Melito de Porto Salvo from the north and which I had reached by striking due east on the minor roads from the area of the Busconi house, so that there was no direct evidence that I had come from Reggio Calabria, something that I had reinforced by stopping for petrol, and paying by credit card, in the small town of Bagaladi on the way. The ravine I had chosen on the road before joining the SS183, was beside a road which was little better than a farm track, running between sheer rocky outcrops and the ravine itself was narrow and precipitous. An experienced rock climber might have been able to get to the bottom, but why should one bother? I had promised Ercole that the items he had, totally unofficially, obtained for me, would never be recovered nor linked back to him in any way and I felt confident that I had kept my promise.

Now I was, to all outward appearances, just another tourist, a role I intended to play for at least a couple of days.

The next morning I availed myself of the hotel’s computer facility to log into the local news service (I had left my own computer safely at home in Dundee – it could be used to reveal my true identity rather than my assumed one). The death of Busconi was headline news; there was open speculation that a ‘business rival’

was the most likely culprit. There were no reports of suspicious strangers in the area, no appeals to the public for information other than of the most general nature. A police spokeswoman had issued a bland statement, reading between the lines of which conveyed the distinct impression that the police didn’t regard Busconi’s murder as the worst thing that had ever happened. I switched to an Italian national news service; Busconi didn’t even get a mention.

I spent two days at the hotel, doing ‘touristy’ things before driving north again, going nowhere near Reggio Calabria, before swinging west and returning to the Panorama Palace hotel in Meta, where I had stayed to break my journey south from Rome. Whilst there I used the hotel’s computer facilities to check the local news for Reggio Calabria; no progress had been made in apprehending Busconi’s killer and the police case was showing every sign of having reached a dead end. From my point of view things could not be better.

There was, however, one definite loose I would dearly like to tie up, plus two possible ones. The definite loose end was Ernesto Brazi, the man I was sure had shot Isla. The possible loose ends were Emmanuel Busconi’s two cousins, Vittorio and Mario. Would they be interested in continuing Emmanuel’s vendetta against Isla and myself?

Brazi had, I knew from Commissario Crocetti, returned to Reggio Calabria; the cousins had certainly never left it. If I wanted to take any action against any, or all, of the three men I would have to return to the town, a 74

town where a number of people, including members of the police force, knew me by sight and knew my real name. If I once allowed my impersonation of George Hughes to be penetrated, I would be lost. Back in Scotland I had decided to limit my revenge to Emmanuel Busconi; once it Italy I had been tempted to go after the others as well, but careful reflection decided me that my original policy had been the right one.

I was staying at the hotel for a couple of days to reinforce my image as a tourist, and to pass the time I was reading on-line back issues of the local news when a name caught my eye. Several weeks earlier, just a couple of days after he had returned to Reggio Calabria, the body of one Ernesto Brazi had been discovered in a car which had plunged off a road in the hills. It was being treated as a simple traffic accident, but I was sure that Brazi, were he still alive to tell his story, would have disputed the fact. Clearly the Busconi organisation had little sympathy with failure. One of my loose ends had been tied up for me without any need for action on my part.

The next day I drove back to Rome and, still impersonating George, flew back to Edinburgh. Once home, my first port of call was the hospital. Isla was still in a coma, but there were some slight signs of improvement –

brain activity had increased and there had been several instances of her stirring her limbs. It was, the medical staff assured me, a hopeful sign that she would eventually come out of the coma, although they still had no idea when that might happen.

Another week went by; I continued to visit Isla every day and sat at her bedside talking to her. There was never any response, but I continued regardless, convinced that one day she would recover.

The morning of the 8th of August started as any other; over breakfast I checked the news on-line, including the Italian news, both national and local for the Reggio Calabria area and my spirits were lifted by an item reporting that Vittorio and Mario Busconi had both been arrested on charges of fraud and tax evasion and the inference of the report was that they would be facing lengthy prison sentences. It was good news; I found it hard to believe that having lost their leader, and now his heirs apparent, that the Busconi family was likely to show any further interest in Isla and myself.

That evening I visited Isla as usual and seated myself at her side and started to recount the day’s happenings when to my amazement and joy, her eyes slowly opened and she turned her head slightly to look straight at me.

“Hello, Keith,” she said, “am I in hospital again?”

The End

75

Table of Contents

Chapter Two