Through the thick wavy glass of the window over the sink, the helicopter’s brilliant spots swept the broken ground as it attempted to find a sure footing. It was almost down. North slammed and barred the shutters. Pushing Honor through a narrow wooden door in the far corner of the room, he grabbed for the rucksack as he shoved the table on to its side to slam it hard up against the front door – the tin crockery bouncing across the stone-paved floor, coffee everywhere. Even a minute’s delay was worth having.
Ahead, Honor was already scrambling helter-skelter down the dunes, slipping and sliding over the slimy rocks. Outside it was still gusting and dark, the moonlight skinny and the trees bending and bucking in the wind. The rain had all but stopped. Even so, no commercial pilot in his right mind would agree to fly.
He caught up with her. Holding her back by her forearm, speaking directly into her ear, blonde hair over his mouth, the wind ripping away his words. “Find a boat for us if you can. If you can’t, hide, and don’t come out whatever happens.”
She started to protest but he didn’t have time to hear her out.
“If I’m not there in three minutes – leave. If there’s no boat, keep to the rocks and work your way round the island till you get to a settlement. Then make as much noise as you can. Bang on doors. Shout blue murder. This lot will want to pull out before it’s light and they won’t want any fuss.”
“Stay with me, North.”
“Three minutes.”
Head down, she turned away and he gave her a push to get her going.
The house itself blocked the view of the helicopter’s crew. The chopper’s engine shifted, amid the whoomph and clatter of the blades – a roar, and then a whine. Down. Two minutes at the most before its passengers leapt from its belly, hit the ground and headed for the cottage. Thirty seconds before they shot their way through the front door. Thirty-one seconds before they worked out their targets had gone out the back and they followed.
Keeping to the shadows cast by the dunes, North strained to hear voices. If he heard voices, he would know where they were. But there was only the wind, the EC-130 motor and the noise of boots against the ground. Rocking, the helicopter was down, the pilot still in his seat, the massive blades slowing. North kept low. The blades stopped turning. Their attackers’ focus was the cottage – a thin spiral of smoke coming out of its chimney, light behind the shutters like something from a fairy tale.
North counted five men including the pilot.
The first assailant was at the front door. He gestured to two of the men to go round the back, one each way.
North felt for the iron bar he’d left propped against the woodshed door. Finding splinters, rusty nails, stretching his fingers, straining for the length of metal. His fingertips grazed it, felt the air shift as the bar started to fall – catching hold just before it hit the ground.
The first assailant was broad-shouldered and enormous in the dark. Something about the set of his slab-like head. Bruno. His boot was raised to kick in the door.
They’d left only the pilot behind with the helicopter. North backed up, circling the helicopter, coming up behind it in a swift, straight line. Praying Bruno’s attention was fixed on the door. Praying that the pilot didn’t decide to turn the engine back on for a swift getaway. As the sole of Bruno’s boot landed against the door with a splintering crash, North thrust the metal bar up through the enclosed tail-fan with his full strength, wrenching it till the bar caught. There was a shout from the glass cockpit as the pilot glimpsed him in the mirror. North came out from behind the tail. The pilot was out, his door swinging open, a gun already in his hand. North slammed his fist into the other man’s jaw, spinning him round to catch his throat with his forearm, one hand over his mouth. The pilot’s legs danced and North braced as he took the full weight of the struggling man in his arms. He felt the gun fall, heard it bounce into the darkness. There was a choking sound. The agonized terror and scramble of dying. The heart’s frantic beat. A gurgling as North squeezed harder, the cartilage of the throat collapsing. Hope gone. The losing fight for air. Knowing. The last pump of blood, as all breath went out of the dying man.
Inside the cottage, the helicopter team were shouting. North couldn’t make out the words. Half would follow out the back and if they were well-trained, the others would go out the front.
North dragged the corpse as far into the shadows as he could. Bruno would know the missing pilot was dead, but North didn’t want him finding the body anywhere near the tail of the helicopter.
The edge of the rocks, just visible in the moonlight, he leapt for it, his feet hitting the hard sand, his body rolling as he tumbled over the rocks. He must have looked the wrong way because at first he didn’t see her, then she whistled, long and low. She’d found the boat.
His feet pounding the sand, Honor was already untying the sodden, weed-shrouded rope from the mooring hammered into the concrete slip. She held the boat to the dock by the rusty metal stake. North scrambled aboard, his weight taking the boat one way and then the other almost knocking Honor into the water, as he wrenched the cord to start the engine. It caught, then died.
North could barely make out Honor’s voice over the crashing of the waves, but he understood the gesture of warning as she pointed towards the silhouette of a man who’d appeared at the ridge. Bruno’s unmistakable Easter Island head. Then another. A third. All with guns.
He tried the engine again, nothing.
The first bullet hit the water – like a coin making a wish. A sincere wish that they would both die.
He wrenched the cord, the angle different this time. Third time lucky. Fourth time dead. And the engine spluttered and caught. Bullets came thick and fast into the sea around them as he opened it up. The paintwork was cracked and battered but the engine sounded powerful enough.
The boat hit the waves with a thud rising and then falling back into the sea. He prayed he wasn’t about to drive it straight into one of the rocks that littered the coastline hereabouts – rocks on which bigger boats than this foundered and were lost.
He turned his head to watch the men. It was dark but he made out Bruno grinning, thigh-deep in the surf, regardless of the cold and wet as his compatriots abandoned their shooting gallery, running for the dunes and the helicopter. Bruno lifted his hand, took aim and fired a make-believe gun at North. Once. Twice. He was in no hurry. North was his – sooner or later. Meantime Bruno was enjoying the chase – savouring the expectation of murder yet to come. Peachy. Good enough to eat. The boat was fast, but the helicopter was faster. North guessed it could reach 130 knots compared to their 10. In an open sea, the boat had no chance of outrunning their attackers. North knew that, and he also knew he’d kill Honor himself before he let her fall into Bruno’s hands. Quick and clean. She wouldn’t know anything about it.
“Under that bench, there’s something there,” North had to shout to make himself heard. He looked back towards the island. Bruno was in darkness but North sensed he was moving away from the sea.
Honor leaned down, tugging, her grip slipping in the wet, holding on to the side with one hand to give her better purchase on whatever was beneath the bench.
There was the noise of ripping as the bundle came free of an unseen nail under the bench. It had caught in an ancient oilskin, ripping a chunk out of the sleeve. Honor took hold of the oilskin and pulled it away to reveal a black donkey jacket, which in turn lay over a canvas haversack. At no point did she look at him to see what he thought. North was irrelevant, he knew. Instead, she unbuckled the bag and upended the contents into her lap. It wasn’t much. A heavy-duty torch. A map and a compass – the arrow swinging wildly with the motion of the boat. What did she think was going to be in there?
North reached for the map. It was the North Northumberland coastline – the rocks jagged and dangerous circled in red ink, a black cross drawn in the middle of the sea close to one of the islands.
Honor was trembling. Maybe from fear. Maybe from shock. Or maybe from disappointment. “Put it on,” North instructed, pointing at the donkey jacket.
The wool cloth must have been cold because she shivered as she drew it over her shoulders, but it was at least dry. Not that she knew it but the jacket made her look younger, more carefree. North wondered if she was ever carefree. He thought not. There was £50 rolled-up in ten pound notes – two rubber bands around the tube – in the pocket of the oilskin. He was beginning to warm to Peggy – she was a woman who thought ahead. He tucked the notes in his jeans pocket and was pulling the oilskin over the Aran jumper as Honor gasped.
The helicopter was trying to take off – the roar and whine of its straining engine carrying on the wind. North cursed whoever else could fly it. It rose and spun – its anti-torque system wrecked by the iron bar. Dipping then rising then spinning.
The helicopter disappeared from view, and a black plume of smoke rose from the shore, a billowing ball of flames from the aviation fuel; the fuel lighting up the diesel across the yard, the woodshed – then the boom hit them, the noise moving across the water like a wall. Honor watched the plume, the ball of flames, her pale face wet from the sea spray. “What did you do?” The wind whipping her voice off the boat and away to the grey and pink horizon. “Are they dead?”
North sincerely hoped their attackers were dead. He would light a candle to every saint whose name he could remember if Bruno died screaming in a blaze of fire.
But they were as far from safe as they could be.
According to the map, they were around 25 minutes from the nearest fishing village along the coast. In this weather it would take twice as long to get back to the mainland. He checked the compass, the co-ordinates, and headed for a bobbing orange floating buoy.
They needed a cover and if he was right, Peggy just provided the perfect one.
He cut the engine and the boat floated sideways on over to the buoy, the waves and wind pushing it hither and thither. “Keep an eye on the rocks – make sure we don’t go too close,” he told Honor as he leaned over the side of the boat into the freezing water, grabbing at the buoy and hauling up the saturated rope attached to it. With a sudden pop, the lobster pot broke from the water, black claws waving from one side and festooned with dark brown seaweed. Foaming water poured back into the sea as North steadied it on the side before heaving it into the boat. Plunging his hand into the roped and bound pot, he eased out a large lobster, its claws snapping closed as North wrapped them around with the rubber bands from the tenners. He threw the lobster in the large plastic box at the back of the boat and pushed his hands back in the other side of the pot for two large crabs.
He was about to throw the pot back in when Honor stopped him. “There’s something in it,” she said, her hand on his forearm.
North pushed his arm though the small gap where the lobsters crawled in, the nylon rope sleeve scratching against his skin. His fingertips touched something hard, wrapped in shredded green plastic as if the lobster had tried to pick a fight with whatever was in there first.
They had got to it just in time he thought. Another day or two and the lobster would have won. His fingers found purchase. It was firm to the touch. Hard-edged. Perhaps some kind of box wrapped in heavy-duty plastic and tarp? More shreds fell away as he drew the package out of the pot. The refuse bags around it had been punctured and torn, but Honor took it from him before he could judge the damage. He waited. The natural thing was to open it, instead she sat with it on her lap, staring straight ahead. Her face was set. They were in Peggy’s boat, using Peggy’s map to find Peggy’s treasure. A treasure Peggy had kept from Honor – a secret she didn’t share. Honor needed time. He let her be.
He set the boat in motion again and gunned the engine.
Honor was right. Three. Two. One. Coming ready or not. The children’s game of hide the thimble played for adult stakes.
Peggy didn’t hide herself, but she saw fit to hide something. In the sea, off an island, miles from home. It was dangerous or she wouldn’t have hidden it. It was valuable or she wouldn’t have kept it. She was supposed to recover it at some point, but she didn’t. Did she keep it for insurance purposes? Or was it the reason she was in trouble? He glanced again at Honor but her face was turned to the sea. Her hair. The curve of her cheek. He couldn’t read her.
He swept the boat around, its tail spinning out behind them, seething water slapping against its wooden frame, then dropped down, taking her between the islands to anchor. His instinct was to gun the boat, but it wasn’t the right instinct. They had to slip back on to land like any fishing crew. Not hit land at full tilt and draw the wrong kind of attention.
They had to wait it out. And they weren’t alone.
Regardless of the cutting winds and crashing waves all around, a colony of Atlantic grey seals lay fat and comfortable against the foaming water’s edge. Small dark pups nuzzling their parents while braver souls flopped into the shifting, churning water. A sleek mottled seal emerged close-up and sudden against the boat, its liquid brown eyes curious and trustful as it watched the strangers.
North looked at Honor, wanting to share the moment, but her gaze was already fixed on him.
“You don’t care about anyone, do you, North? Not those men you killed. Not me.” Honor’s hands gripped the parcel as if she wanted to throw it back over the side and herself after it. She didn’t look happy despite the fact the find proved her right. What did it tell her? That her friend kept secrets. Everyone kept secrets.
He stayed quiet. She did, after all, have a point. He didn’t care about the men he just killed. He did however care what happened to Honor Jones.
The seal’s head disappeared under the water, its shape a shadow, and then gone.