The experience with hang-gliding and Peter Schenk had not prepared him for the sheer excitement of a hunter facing a dangerous enemy. Or at least, looking at him from under a hedge. Albert Rossi’s heart pounded wildly and his hands shook as he took hold of the pistol, more for comfort than anything. It was heady stuff for the owner of a men’s clothing shop.
The thrill lasted just long enough for Victor Stasiak to climb into the back seat of the first car, a huge Mercedes. The car door was shut by his manservant and in just a few seconds both vehicles purred their way past Albert Rossi in the undergrowth, down the long drive and were gone. The gates closed slowly on unseen motors. Albert tutted to himself, but he was not disappointed. At the very least, he had confirmed Stasiak was in Cumbria. He watched as the house became quiet once more.
An experienced assassin would probably not have done what Albert Rossi decided to do next. The more professional members of that deadly craft have learned the hard way to make plans and stick with them. They have also learned not to commit small crimes that could get them caught in possession of the tools of their trade. They do not speed on motorways and they park carefully. Perhaps above all else, they do not steal a postman’s bike when it is left within twenty feet of them by a cheerful Cumbrian.
Albert watched as the gates to the estate opened once more. His gaze flicked to the red and black bicycle leaning against the hedge, then to the grey-haired man whistling as he approached the main house with his letters. Albert Rossi did not remember making an actual decision, but he was out of that hedge in a flurry of leaves, onto the bike and pedalling furiously through the gates before his brain caught up.
As he turned into the road, heading in the same direction as the black cars, Albert wobbled out of control. Most men assume they will be able to ride a bike for ever. There is even a phrase – ‘like riding a bike’ – that indicates it’s a skill you never lose once you have gained it. The truth is that childhood skill does not always equal middle-aged skill and Albert very nearly crashed into a tractor on the first bend. Admittedly, the driver of the tractor was distracted as he considered how to reply to a letter accusing him of doing eighty miles an hour in Piccadilly. That combination of distraction, mild rain and lack of skill very nearly ended the career and the life of Albert Rossi. After a moment of flashing images, he found himself in a second hedge, scratched and red-faced, as the tractor driver shouted something unprintable and went on, feeling much better about his own troubles.
Flushed and sweating, Albert pulled himself out and resumed the chase. He was still working on instinct and he peered ahead at every turn of the road for a glimpse of black cars.
Life is full of small choices that can have large effects. If President Lincoln had chosen to stay at home rather than go to the theatre, much of history would be very different. If Victor Stasiak hadn’t decided to send one of his men running into a corner shop in Buttermere village to buy a cigar, Albert would have been unlikely to catch up with them.
Puffing wearily, with his legs already aching, he stopped at the edge of the village and was rewarded by the sight of the two cars waiting at a kerb with engines running. With a huge effort, he steadied his breathing. The gun was back in his rucksack and his prey was in sight. He could only hope Victor Stasiak wasn’t heading towards the motorway. Albert Rossi had visions of the bikeless postman calling the police and fresh beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. If the local constabulary spotted him, he would surely be searched. The gun would be found.
Realising his danger, Albert stepped off the postman’s bike, but as he leaned it against a fence, Stasiak’s cars moved off with a low growl. Albert made a similar sound in the back of his throat. Visions of twenty thousand pounds and freedom from the bank floated across his imagination. He leapt back on, keeping his head down as he pedalled after them, heading through the village and out into the open countryside.
Victor Stasiak climbed slowly out of the car, without bothering to acknowledge the bodyguard holding the door and an umbrella. He could hear the roar of the waterfall nearby, but, as was often the case in Cumbria, he would have to walk the last part to get up to the bridge that crossed its highest point.
The rain was particularly heavy that day, but even so there were one or two families and hikers trudging up the hill. Victor frowned at the sight of them. It was a few minutes to noon and he needed privacy to carry out the unpleasant business he had planned. As he stood there, another black car crunched to a halt on the broken ground and his best friend for thirty years got out.
Auguste Nerius was a thin man, wiry and still black-haired despite his age. Victor suspected he dyed it, but he had never asked. Nerius had been with Victor in the shipyards, running a small stolen-car ring and a betting consortium. When the authorities had finally closed in on them, they had taken ship to the United Kingdom, just two more immigrants with a bagful of used notes. The seed money had given them something of a jump start and their shipping contacts meant they could import almost anything. They had got in at the beginning of a massive cocaine market in the seventies and made several fortunes.
Victor greeted his oldest friend with a broad smile and patted him on the back.
‘Let’s walk,’ he said, without explanation.
As always, he was impossible to refuse and Nerius merely shrugged and followed. He had always been the planner, a man of few words, while Victor was the one who met clients and impressed them with his ruthlessness and charisma. It had been a good partnership. As they turned together to walk up the path, Victor shook his head in sadness. Some men are never satisfied, no matter how much they own. Nerius had been like a brother to him, but that made the betrayal all the more painful – and the anger more fierce.
Neither man took any notice of the middle-aged cyclist who leaned his bike against a tree and stood with his hands on his knees, gasping and red-faced. After a time, Albert lay down on his back and wheezed at the grey clouds overhead. Victor Stasiak’s bodyguards stared at him as they brought the dogs out of the second car and let them sniff around on short leashes, but there was nothing about Albert Rossi to arouse suspicion, unless perhaps you worked for the Post Office and recognised the bike. Victor and Nerius led the way and the bodyguards followed. The small group left Albert behind as they strolled along the winding track that would take them across the very top of the waterfall.
Chapter Eight
Victor Stasiak was beginning to regret his taste for the dramatic. He suspected he should have taken Nerius somewhere quiet and simply put a bullet in his head. His bodyguards were good with shovels and Cumbria is almost designed for the easy disposal of dead colleagues, with hidden valleys and clefts by the hundred. Yet for his oldest friend, Victor had imagined a grand finale, a few last words, then a silent fall onto the smooth black boulders far below. He had not imagined a child licking an ice cream and watching them both with dull fascination, nor the two mums walking a squalling baby back and forth across the bridge. In his imagination, the bridge over the waterfall had been deserted and windswept. He frowned to himself. Nerius was still waiting for whatever was so important that his boss and friend had to summon him to such an odd place.
Victor looked at him and drummed his fingers on the wooden railing of the bridge.
‘Did the latest shipment come in all right?’ he said at last.
Nerius shrugged and nodded. Britain was that wonderful combination of an island and a trading nation, so that ships came and went twenty-four hours a day. It really wasn’t difficult to get a small, high-value item like cocaine into one of the great ports. With the best will in the world, the customs officers couldn’t search every container. Victor usually left that side of things to Nerius, while he set up the meetings and links in the chain further down.
The girl with the ice cream stepped closer to stare at the two men talking in a strange language. Victor glowered at her, without making the slightest impression. He had been intending to confront Nerius with his knowledge, see the awareness of r
eal danger creep into the man’s face, then pitch him over the railing. He couldn’t really raise the subject with the prospect of having to wait another half an hour for the bridge to clear. Yet Nerius was growing suspicious, he could sense it. He needed a topic to pass the time. Inspiration struck him and Victor Stasiak relaxed.
‘I’m thinking of retiring, Nerius, old friend,’ he said. ‘I’ve made my money and I’m not a young man any more.’
Nerius looked sharply at him, searching his face with his eyes. The two mums had finally rocked the baby to sleep and one of them was calling for the little girl to come with them. Victor nodded to himself. His bodyguards were further down the track, trying hard to look as if they were just out walking two savage Alsatians.
‘We’ve … um … we’ve had some good times,’ Victor went on vaguely.
The little girl wandered off, looking back at them with every step as she followed the two mums. For the first time, the bridge was empty. As he tensed for action Victor saw what looked like a Scout troop rounding the closest bend, led by a bearded man in shorts.
‘Oh, for God’s sake …’ Victor Stasiak said. ‘There’s no privacy here.’
In moments, the bridge filled with boys peering over the edge while their harassed scoutmaster warned them constantly that they would fall if they leant that far out. Victor tried not to listen, but he learned more about that bridge and waterfall in the next minute than he had ever wanted to know.
To his surprise, Nerius suddenly spoke, the words hoarse from a man who weighed them like gold and spent them only rarely.
‘I am … pleased to hear that. I can take over, Victor. We can work something out.’
Victor Stasiak blinked at him in surprise. He opened his mouth to reply, but the scoutmaster was already pointing further down the hill. The group began to move away. Swiftly, Victor checked both directions, seeing only the backs of young Scouts hurrying to catch up with the rest. He failed to see Albert Rossi brace himself against a tree some way off the path. Albert was muddy and exhausted from scrambling over rough ground, but at last he was close enough to bring his gun to bear on the two men.
‘I would have liked that, Nerius,’ Victor Stasiak went on. ‘Yes, I can say it to you now. I would have liked you to take over, after me. I have no sons, Nerius. You would have made me proud.’ He checked the paths again. Finally they were alone.
A hundred yards away, Albert Rossi wiped sweat from his eyes and rested the long silencer on a small branch, squinting along it.
‘There is only one small problem, old friend,’ Victor said.
Nerius raised his eyebrows in silent enquiry.
‘Small dogs should not show their teeth to big dogs, Nerius. When they do, they get hurt.’
‘What do you mean?’ Nerius asked in genuine confusion.
‘I mean you should have told me about the shipment from the Ukraine, old friend. It should have turned up on the books and it did not. Did you really think I wouldn’t find out about you stealing from me?’
Nerius understood suddenly that he was very alone. He stepped away from Victor Stasiak and his muscles tensed to run. In doing so, he gave Albert Rossi a perfect, clear shot.
With a grim expression, Albert squeezed the trigger, then squeezed it again, much harder, so that his hand shook with the effort.
‘Safety catch!’ he whispered to himself, flicking it across with his finger and resuming his position, squinting along the barrel.
His mouth fell open in surprise. In that brief moment of inattention, the situation on the bridge had changed dramatically.
Victor Stasiak had Nerius by the throat. The smaller man was struggling violently, hammering at the hands that held him. They staggered left, then right as Albert Rossi looked on in astonishment. It seemed almost rude to interrupt his kill in such a way, as if they were not taking him seriously at all.
The wooden bridge across the waterfall was well built and solid. It was quite capable of preventing Boy Scouts from falling to their deaths, with a little care. It was not, however, capable of withstanding the sixteen stone of Victor Stasiak, combined with the twelve stone of Auguste Nerius, suddenly slamming against the railing. It gave way and both men flailed in horror as they plunged over the edge and tumbled to the rocks far below. For reasons Albert did not understand, Victor Stasiak’s spinning bowler hat landed on the wooden bridge and stuck there, quivering.
For the second time in his brief career as an assassin, Albert Rossi watched men fall to their deaths. He was obscurely disappointed. He’d been looking forward to using the gun and if it hadn’t been for the rotten safety catch, he’d … He caught himself, realising lots of different things at once. He would be paid a small fortune, for a start. Victor Stasiak was definitely dead and that meant he’d succeeded, at least as far as Stephen Hawking was concerned.
More pressing, though, was the sudden shouting of bodyguards nearby, combined with the barking of dogs. Albert Rossi was fairly certain they would see that a terrible accident had occurred. However, he suspected the sight of an armed man wrapped around a nearby tree might make even a simple-minded bodyguard a little suspicious. He could hear Alsatians barking furiously as the bodyguards came sprinting up to the bridge. Instinct alone made him toss the pistol into the river far below before standing up and trying very hard to look like any other hiker who happened to be wandering past.
Albert Rossi reached the bridge at the same time as the bodyguards. The Alsatian dogs growled and lunged on their short leashes, their black eyes frightening. One of the men was already gesturing wildly, speaking into a mobile phone in a language Albert couldn’t understand.
Albert felt it would be suspicious to ignore the scene, so he sidled close to the broken rail like any other interested passer-by. He was looking at the sprawled bodies far below when one of the guards grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.
‘You … go! Go away now!’ the man said, gesturing down the path.
With a frown at the man’s bad manners, Albert did as he was told, trying not to let them see how his legs were shaking. That was it, he told himself. That was the last job he’d take. He could still recall the moment of puzzled terror as Victor Stasiak caught sight of him in mid-fall. The look in the man’s eyes had been an awful thing to witness and Albert shuddered as he reached the bottom of the track.
To his surprise, there was a policeman standing by the postman’s bicycle, but Albert had been dealing with worse things than that and he strolled on, passing the police car parked nearby. He was close enough to hear the radio splutter as the message came in about a Boy Scout troop who had been splashing around in the pools below only to have two men bounce off the rocks around them. That was a trip they wouldn’t forget, Albert Rossi thought with a smile. He wondered if there was a badge for that.
As he made it back to the road, he realised he didn’t regret the decision he had made. Albert Rossi was cut out for a lot of things, but the life of an assassin was too noisy, too fraught with danger and, frankly, too stressful. He almost looked forward to quiet days back in the shop, or he could even retire.
A thought struck him. He owed himself a visit to a casino first. He began to whistle, walking along a leafy lane towards Buttermere.
Chapter Nine
PC George Thompson almost choked on his lemonade when he saw Albert Rossi again. For a moment, he thought there would be a nasty repeat of their first meeting, but this time with Rossi thumping him on the back. He had been sitting at a table under a café awning, coincidentally close to the Nissan Micra he had followed north, when the man himself strolled by, whistling to himself as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
As a general rule, policemen don’t enjoy the sight of cheerful, carefree people and PC Thompson was no exception. He finished coughing out the last gulp of lemonade he’d inhaled and stood up suddenly to bar Albert Rossi’s path. They faced each other in mutual suspicion and surprise.
For the first few moments, Albert could not reconcile the fac
e of the policeman with his recent experiences. In Albert’s mind, the policeman had a definite context and a café in Cumbria was not it. For his part, PC George Thompson could hardly believe how bedraggled and muddy Albert Rossi was. He looked as if he’d leapt through a hedge, hiked over a mountain and slid down a hill until a tree arrested his descent.
All of that was in fact true. It had been a busy morning for Albert Rossi. Mud-spattered and weary though he was, he was also feeling very pleased with himself. He recognised the moustache and smiled.
‘Afternoon, George,’ Albert said cheerily. ‘Or I suppose it’s evening by now. I didn’t expect to see the long arm of the law so far out of London.’
PC Thompson narrowed his eyes at this casual use of his first name.
‘I’m on leave for a couple of days,’ he said grimly. ‘Might I ask your reason for suddenly visiting the Lake District?’ He remembered Rossi as a nervous little man, not this breezy fellow in hiking gear with a mischievous expression.
Albert Rossi was in the pleasant situation of knowing he had committed no crime barring the theft of a bicycle. Oh, he had intended terrible dark deeds, no doubt about it, but as it happens, none of them had actually come off. He didn’t even have the gun any longer. All in all, it had been a lovely holiday and he couldn’t resist tweaking the nose of a policeman who had lost his power to intimidate.
‘Just getting away from the smog, George, don’t you know? Bit of fresh air, hiking in the rain, seeing God’s creatures up close – that sort of thing.’
‘I see. So it wouldn’t have anything to do with a large amount of money in used notes then?’
It was, admittedly, a stab in the dark to see what reaction he would get. Albert Rossi only chuckled and tutted in gentle reproof.
‘No casinos around here, George. Just hills and … waterfalls and things. Beautiful. You should try it a bit, before you go back. Now, lovely to see you, but I’ve a long drive ahead.’