Bleeding Hearts

  A car had drawn up nearby. It rose perceptibly on its axles when its driver got out. I nearly tipped backwards off the wall.

  It was Hoffer.

  He stretched, showing an expanse of shirt and a belt on its last notch. He also showed me something more: that he didn’t have a holster beneath his jacket. He did some neck stretches, saw me, and came walking over.

  ‘It’s been a long drive,’ he said with a groan.

  ‘Oh, aye?’ If he’d just come north, maybe he wouldn’t know mock-Scots from the real thing.

  He wasn’t looking at me anyway. He was taking in the harbour, and talking more to himself than to anyone else. I thought he’d been taking drugs. ‘This is some beautiful place,’ he said.

  ‘No’ bad.’

  He looked up at the hotel. ‘What about this place, is it no’ bad too?’I shrugged and he smiled. 'A canny Scot, huh?’ Then he turned away and made to enter the hotel. 'See you around, bud.’

  The moment he’d gone, I slid from the wall, grabbed my jacket, and walked away. I didn’t know which shop Bel would be in, and had half a mind to go to the car instead and get the MP5. But she was coming out of a fancy goods emporium, so I took her arm and steered her with me.

  ‘Hey, what’s up?’

  ‘The TV tec is in town.’

  ‘The fat man?’ Her eyes widened.

  ‘Don’t look back, just keep walking. We’re going to the car and we are getting out of here.’

  ‘He can’t be here,’ she hissed. ‘He was in a TV studio only an hour ago.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of videotape? They record these shows, Bel. You think anyone would have the balls to put Hoffer on live?’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  I looked at her. ‘What do you think I should do?’

  ‘Maybe...’ she began. Then she shook her head.

  ‘What were you going to say?’

  ‘I was going to say...’ her cheeks reddened. ‘I was going to say, maybe you should take him out.’

  I looked at her again. We were at the car now. ‘I take it you don’t mean I should date him?’

  She shook her head. ‘Michael, did you hear him on TV this morning? All those questions they asked: was he armed, would he think twice about killing you?’

  I unlocked her door and went round to the driver’s side. ‘I get paid to do jobs. I don’t do it for fun.’

  ‘There are other ways to make a living,’ she said quietly.

  ‘What? Work behind a desk? That’s what they like haemophiliacs to do. That way we’re safe. To hell with that.’

  ‘Don’t you think becoming a hired assassin is a bit extreme, though?’

  ‘Jesus, Bel, you’re the one who just said I should bump off Hoffer!’

  She smiled. ‘I know, but I’ve changed my mind. I think you should stop. I mean, stop altogether. I think you want to.’

  I started the engine. ‘Then you don’t know me.’

  ‘I think I do.’

  I let off the handbrake and started us rolling out of Oban. Maybe it was Hoffer, or Hoffer added to the conversation I’d just had. Whatever, I wasn’t being very careful. All I knew was that Hoffer’s car was still parked when we passed it.

  I spotted them just outside town. To be fair, they weren’t trying very hard. They didn’t mind me knowing about them. There were two cars, one a smart new Rover and the other an Austin Maestro. ‘Don’t do anything,’ I warned Bel. ‘Just keep looking ahead. We’re being followed.’

  She saw them in her wing mirror. ‘One car or two?’

  ‘Both of them, I think.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘I don’t recognise any faces. They’re clean shaven, the one I can see best is smartly dressed, jacket and tie. I don’t think they’re the Disciples.’

  ‘Police maybe? That could be why the fat man’s in town.’

  ‘Why not just arrest us?’

  ‘Do they have any evidence?’

  She had a point. ‘They could do us for impersonating police officers. That would keep us in the cells till they found something. The police’ll always find a way to stitch you up if they need to.’

  I accelerated, knowing the Escort couldn’t outrun the pursuers. We were heading down the coast, since we’d agreed to take a different route back to Glasgow. When we reached a straight stretch with no other traffic in sight, the Maestro signalled to overtake. The way it pulled past, I knew there was a big engine lurking inside it. There was no need for pretence, so I gave the driver and passenger a good look as they cruised past, trying to place them. Both were young and fair-haired and wearing sunglasses. They pulled in sharply in front of us and hit the brakes, so that we’d have to slow down, or else overtake. The Rover was right behind, making us the meat in the sandwich.

  ‘What are they doing, Michael?’

  ‘I think they want us to stop.’ I signalled that I was pulling over, and hit the brakes so fast the Rover’s tyres squealed as the driver stopped from ramming us. I couldn’t see the road ahead, but shifted down into second and pulled out into the oncoming lane. There was nothing coming, so I tore alongside the Maestro, which was already accelerating. There was a bend approaching, and neither car had the beating of the other. Suddenly a lorry emerged from round the bend, and I braked hard, pulling us back into the left lane, still sandwiched.

  ‘I don’t think policemen play these kinds of game,’ I told Bel. She was looking pale, gripping the passenger door and the dashboard.

  ‘Then who are they?’

  ‘I’ll be sure to ask them.’

  The front car was braking again. The driver had put on his emergency flashers. He was obviously coming to a halt on the carriageway. A stream of traffic had been trapped behind the lorry, so there was no chance of us pulling past the Maestro. The Rover behind was keeping its distance, but I knew once we stopped that would be it. One would reverse and the other edge forward until there was nowhere for us to go.

  I stopped the car.

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ Bel said.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  Traffic heading in the other direction was slowing even further to watch. Whoever our pursuers were, they didn’t seem to care about having an audience. A normal person might be relieved, thinking nothing serious was going to happen in front of witnesses. But I saw it another way. If they weren’t worried about having an audience, maybe they weren’t worried about anything.

  I slid my hand back between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. On the floor in the back, wrapped in my old blue raincoat, was the MP5. I don’t know what made me switch it from the boot when we were loading the car, but I said a silent thank you to whichever bad angel was watching over me.

  ‘Oh God,’ Bel said, seeing the gun. I opened my driver’s door and stepped out, leaving raincoat and contents both on the floor beside the pedals. The Maestro had backed up to kiss my front bumper, and the Rover was tucked in nicely behind. Three cars had never been closer on a car transporter or parked on a Paris street. I decided to take the initiative and walked to the car at the back. I reckoned the front car was the workhorse; the person I wanted to speak to would be in the nice car, probably in the back seat. Electric windows whirred downwards at my approach. The windows were tinted, the interior upholstery cream leather. All I could see of the driver was the back of his head, but the man in the back of the car was smiling.

  ‘Hello there,’ he said. He was wearing ordinary glasses rather than sunglasses, and had short blond hair. His lips were thin, his face dotted with freckles. He looked like his head hadn’t quite grown up yet. He was wearing a suit, and a white shirt whose cuffs were slightly too long for the jacket. The shirt was buttoned to the neck, but he didn’t wear a tie.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘Is there a problem?’

  He acted like there wasn’t. ‘We’d appreciate a few minutes of your time.’

  ‘Pollsters aren’t usually so determined,’ I said. I was thinking: he’s American. Was he
working for Hoffer? No, I didn’t get that impression at all.

  ‘If you and your friend will get in the car, I’d appreciate it very much.’

  ‘You mean, get in your car?’

  I didn’t even dent his smile. ‘That’s what I mean.’

  I shrugged. ‘What’s this all about?’

  ‘It can be explained in five minutes.’ He held up a hand, palm spread wide to show fingers and thumb.

  ‘You could have talked to us in town.’

  ‘Please, just get in the car.’

  At last another vehicle appeared coming from Oban. It was a Volkswagen estate pulling a caravan. The car had a German licence plate.

  ‘Oh oh,’ I said, ‘here comes an international incident.’

  The bastard just kept on smiling. He didn’t seem to mind if he held up the traffic for the rest of the day.

  ‘I’ll go fetch my friend,’ I said.

  As I walked back to the car, a van driver idling past asked what was happening. I just shook my head. I stuck my head into the Ford Escort.

  ‘Bel,’ I said, ‘I want you to be calin, okay? Here, take the keys. I want you to grab the map book, then get out of the car, unlock the boot, and get our stuff. We’re changing cars.’

  Then I picked up the raincoat and walked forward towards the Maestro. The driver and passenger were watching in their mirrors. When I started towards them, they opened their doors. I came to the passenger side, away from the oncoming traffic, and showed the passenger my raincoat. He could see the gun barrel.

  ‘You’ve seen one of these before,’ I told him. ‘Now tell your partner.’

  ‘He’s packing heat,’ the passenger said. He was American too.

  ‘We’re going to see your boss,’ I told him, and motioned with the gun for him to move. They walked in front of me. When we reached the boot of the Escort, I told them to keep walking. The German motorist was out of his car and was talking in broken but heated English with the Rover driver, who didn’t look to be answering.

  Bel had lifted out our two bags. I took one and she the other, and we walked to the Maestro again and got in. I started the ignition and we roared away, leaving the mess behind. Bel screamed with relief and kissed me on the cheek.

  ‘I nearly wet myself back there!’

  ‘Have you got the Escort keys?’ I asked, grinning. She shook them at me.

  ‘Then they’ll be stuck there till they either push it off the road or learn the German for “back your caravan up”.’ I tried to relax my shoulders. I was hunched over the steering-wheel like a racing driver. ‘It was a close one though,’ I said. ‘Twice in one day is too close.’

  ‘You think they were something to do with Hoffer?’

  I shook my head. ‘Too smooth. They had a sort of government smell about them. There’s a kind of smugness you get when you know you’ve got everything on your side.’

  ‘Then they’re to do with Prendergast?’

  She’d misunderstood me. ‘No, they had American accents.’

  ‘The American government?’

  I shook my head slowly, trying to clear it. ‘Maybe I’m wrong. But they were definitely Americans.’

  ‘More men hired by that girl’s father?’

  ‘I really don’t know. I think it all ties in with the Disciples of Love.’

  She looked startled. ‘You’re not going back there?’

  ‘No, don’t worry.’

  ‘I thought you’d ruled out Rick and his gang.’

  Now I nodded. ‘Maybe it goes higher, Bel.’ I didn’t bother explaining what I meant.

  We’d no hire car to return, so I decided to hang on to the Maestro. I could drop Bel off in Yorkshire then dump the car somewhere. We kept moving, stopping only to fill up with petrol, buy sandwiches and drinks from the filling-station shops, and try getting through to Max. ‘Maybe he’s had to go somewhere?’ I suggested.

  ‘Maybe. He’d have said, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Short notice. I know I’ve been in a tight spot once or twice and dragged him away with no notice at all.’

  She nodded, but stared at the windscreen. To take her mind off Max, I got her round to talking about the men from that morning, what they could have wanted from us, how they’d known where we were.

  ‘What would you have done,’ she asked, ‘if one of them had drawn a gun?’

  ‘Taken the drawing from him and torn it up.’

  ‘But seriously.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I considered. ‘I’d probably have gone along peacefully.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s hard to know, but I think so.’

  I assumed it was the answer she wanted to hear.

  We reached the farm before dark. I got a bad feeling about the place straight away, and was glad I had the MP5 with me. As soon as I stopped the car, Bel was out and running. She’d felt something too. I called out for her to wait, but she was already opening the kitchen door.

  I left the car idling and followed her, holding the sub-machine gun one-handed. With its stock fully retracted, the thing was just like an oversized pistol. I pushed the safety catch past single-shot and on to three-round burst.

  Then I went in.

  Bel’s scream froze my blood. I wanted to run to her, but knew better than that. There could be many reasons for her screams. I peered into the hall but saw no one. Holding the gun in front of me, I walked forward, brushing the wall all the way. I passed the open door of the dining room and noticed that one of the chairs was missing from around the table. Then I saw the living room, things scattered over the floor, and Bel kneeling in the middle of it all, her hands over her face. Finally I saw Max.

  ‘Christ Almighty.’

  His headless torso sat on the missing dining-chair, like some ventriloquist’s dummy gone badly wrong. Flies had found the body, and were wandering around the gaping hole which had once been a neck. A false glimmer struck me: maybe it wasn’t him. But the build was right, and the clothes seemed right, though everything had been stained dark red. The blood on the skin had dried to a pale crust, so he’d been here a little while. There was a sour smell in the room, which I traced to a pool of vomit on the carpet. A tea-towel from the kitchen was lying next to this pool, covering something the size of a football.

  I didn’t need to look.

  I squeezed Bel’s shoulder. ‘We can’t do any good here. Let’s go to the kitchen.’

  Somehow I managed to pull her to her feet. I was still holding on to the gun. I didn’t want to let go of it, but I pushed the safety back on.

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ Bel was saying. ‘No, no, no.’ Then she started wailing, her face purple and streaked with tears. I sat her on a chair in the kitchen and went outside.

  I’m no tracker. There were tyre marks on the ground, but they could have belonged to Max’s car. I took a look around, finding nothing. In the long barn, I flicked the lights on and stood staring at one of the distant human-shaped targets on the range. I switched the MP5 to full auto and started blasting away. It took about fifteen seconds to empty the magazine. Only the legs of the target remained.

  Bel was standing at the kitchen door, yelling my name.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, coming out of the barn. ‘It’s okay.’ She put her arms around me and wept again. I held her, kissed her, whispered things to her. And then found myself crying too. Max had been... I can’t say he’d been like a father; I’ve only ever had the one father, and he was quite enough. But he’d been a friend, maybe the closest I’d ever had. After the tears I didn’t feel anger any more. I felt something worse, a cold creeping knowledge of what had to be done.

  Bel blew her nose and said she wanted to walk about a bit, so I went back into the house. They hadn’t left many clues. The vomit and the dishtowel were curious, but that was about it. Why cover the head? I couldn’t understand it. I went upstairs and looked around. The bedrooms hadn’t been touched. They hadn’t been burglars.

  Of course they hadn’t. I knew who they’d been.
The Americans. And either Max had talked, or they’d worked it out for themselves anyway, or someone from the Oban Disciples of Love had contacted them. I considered the first of these the least probable: Max wouldn’t have talked, not when talking would mean putting Bel in danger. As for working it out for themselves, well, if Hoffer could do it so could they.

  Bel still hadn’t come back by the time I went downstairs. I walked out into the yard but couldn’t hear her.

  ‘Bel?’

  There was a noise from the long barn, something being moved around.

  ‘Bel?’

  I had to go to the car for a fresh cartridge-box. When I pushed it home, I had thirty-two rounds ready for action. I moved quietly towards the barn.

  When I looked in, someone had cleared an area of straw from the concrete floor, revealing a large double trap-door, which now sat open. The trap-door led to a bunker. There were wooden steps down into it, and a bare lightbulb inside. Bel was coming back up the steps. She had a rifle slung over each shoulder, a couple of pistols stuck into the waistband of her denims, and she was carrying an MP5 just like my own.

  ‘Going to do some practice?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes, on live targets.’ She had a mad look in her puffy eyes. Her nose was running, and she had to keep wiping it with the back of her hand.

  ‘Fury is the enemy, Bel.’

  ‘Who taught you that?’ she sneered. ‘Some Zen monk?’

  ‘No,’ I said quietly, ‘my father... and yours.’

  She stood facing me, then I saw her shoulders sag.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I went on, ‘you’ll get your revenge. But let’s plan it first, okay?’ I waited till she’d nodded. ‘Besides,’ I added, ‘you’ve forgotten something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bullets.’

  She saw that this was true, and managed a weak smile. I nodded to let her know she was doing okay.

  ‘You don’t need guns just now,’ I went on. ‘You need your brain. Your brain ... and your passport.’

  ‘My passport?’

  ‘Just in case,’ I said. ‘Now go pack yourself some clothes. Are there any more sub-machine guns down there?’