Hanlon lay on her stomach at the top of the escarpment, looking down on the scene in the valley below.
She was about a mile and a half away from the Rosemount Hotel, the other side of the woods that abutted on to the lodge where Schneider was due to stay. A main road ran nearby the entrance to the valley and there was a little single-track road that wound its way up the opposite hill to a hamlet. Near this was a farm track that threaded its way along the bottom of the valley and in this was the encampment that she had been watching for the past half-hour.
The slopes of the valley were fields, now brown and grey and stubbly. The tops of the valleys on both sides were covered in trees, dark and mournful in the cold, autumn breeze.
There were three caravans and their attendant vehicles in the small anarchist encampment. They were two old Land Rovers and an ancient Audi A6. There were also two vans, one a former ambulance, that had been converted into mobile homes. They were parked in a circle like a wagon train in a Western.
Hanlon’s friend, Albert Slater, had hacked into the Samsung, a task that had taken maybe three minutes, and blocked the phone’s tracker app. Hanlon had then been free to browse the anarchist’s life as revealed on his phone.
His name was Deke Pirie. From his phone she also learned that he was a keen game player, he was very sexually active but that he had a partner, Lizzie, (the girl with the pierced nose that Hanlon had met in the kitchen at the anarchist meeting); he was a gun enthusiast and he had a dog, a Dobermann called Jet.
She also learned from his messages that he’d sent a text to Georgie Adams on the day that Kettering had died in the stairwell.
Mark’s on his way with JK.
Time and date. Well, it corroborated one part of Hinds’s story. Adams had called in the heavies.
Like Hanlon, he was a keen cyclist, there were photos of his bike, and, like Hanlon, he had an app that recorded his routes, superimposed on an Ordnance Survey map, dates and times. It was this that had led her here. The app gave detailed maps of the area showing where he began and finished his cycle rides (together with their timings, effort levels and other dashboard information), virtually all centred around the valley below. Finding it had been child’s play. Was this the sort of mistake in security that Georgie Adams would make? Hanlon doubted it.
And I wonder why you chose this area to settle in? thought Hanlon. Could it possibly be its prettiness or is it due to the proximity of the Rosemount Hotel?
The slope of the field down to the caravans was covered in a light brown stubble of some harvested cereal crop, probably barley, thought Hanlon. Behind her was a strip, a thin line really, of maize, and behind that there were several blue barrels between the maize and the wood that lay between the valley and the hotel grounds, about a mile and a half distant. The feed barrels were raised above ground level on a tripod arrangement.
Huss would have known immediately what this meant. The local landowner or farmer was raising pheasant for a shoot, that’s what the feed was for, to keep the pheasants in the immediate vicinity, and the strip of maize was where they would shelter.
Hanlon knew none of this.
She was lying just in front of the green strip of maize when, through her binoculars, she saw Mark Spencer appear from one of the caravans together with Lizzie, Deke’s girlfriend. He was obviously part of the anarchist encampment here.
He was wearing a black T-shirt with the arms cut off, showing off his powerful biceps, and the white anarchist logo, a ragged spray-gunned capital letter A in a circle, emblazoned on the front.
He lit a joint and a cloud of smoke briefly haloed his brutally shaved head. His left eye was practically swollen shut and Hanlon could see the vivid blue and purple bruise from where she had hit him the night before. Lizzie was wearing a ragged short skirt and jumper. She had excellent legs. He passed her the joint and then Jet, the Dobermann, joined them from inside the caravan.
Hanlon moved her foot behind her and by sheer ill-luck a pheasant, disturbed by the motion, flew directly upwards, making its distinctive and very loud call of alarm. The metallic clacking noise rose over the valley and the dog barked. Hanlon looked round in irritation and discovered another of the birds practically sitting on her right calf.
The couple below her looked up sharply. Spencer reached an arm into the caravan and through her binoculars Hanlon watched as his arm reappeared holding a .22 rifle. He raised it to his shoulder and she could see the movement of his fingers as he clicked off the safety and pulled the bolt back. The end of the muzzle moved up and down then settled in her direction. There was a telescopic sight on the gun. Hanlon guessed that if she could see him, he could see her.
Her head could well be filling that sight, her face in its crosshairs.
She froze momentarily. Then started cursing herself. Once Deke had dusted himself down after their fight the night before and discovered his phone missing, he would have informed Spencer. Spencer was no fool. Of course he could have guessed that she’d be down here. That’s why there was no one around but him and the girl – they were expecting some kind of raid. Spencer had obviously moved the other anarchists out. That’s why the only signs of life that she had seen had been them. The decks had been cleared for action.
Also that explained why he had a rifle handy, just in case she was stupid enough to come on her own.
The only question there had to be in his mind was did she work for Schneider or the police or security forces? He had obviously recognized her from the demo in Islington. Her unorthodox approach must have meant that he’d plumped for the former. In Spencer’s mind she was obviously some kind of hired right-wing thug, probably ex-army or mixed martial arts, certainly not connected to the Old Bill. So she could expect… She rolled over immediately.
There was a sharp crack as Spencer pulled the trigger, and a fine spray of dirt and rock fragments as the bullet struck a flint embedded in the soil where her head had been a second earlier.
Well, she thought, he’s certainly not messing around.
She took a look down into the valley. Spencer reloaded the rifle and started up the hill towards her at a fast jog, Jet trotting at his side. Hanlon sprang to her feet and disappeared into the strip of maize bordering the field.
If she’d expected to be hidden she was in for a disappointment.
Almost immediately a whole flock of pheasants, maybe twenty or thirty, zoomed up into the air, squawking, their wings beating loudly. Hanlon groaned to herself. If she had tried to communicate where she was going she could hardly do a better job. Spencer could have been half-blind and partially deaf and still tracked her progress. She heard the dog bark joyfully at the exciting new game they were playing.
She took another step, more bloody birds! They whirred around her, making that weird metallic-sounding alarm that echoed around the valley.
She heard the rifle crack again. God knows where the bullet went. Hanlon decided to put her faith in her fitness. She crashed through the maize, higher than her head, leaving a trail an idiot could have followed of trampled plants, and then she was in the woods, head down and running in what she hoped was the direction of the hotel.