A loud knocking jerked Patrick Bardwell out of a fitful doze. His hand reached automatically for a weapon that wasn’t there and he blinked into full wakefulness with a shuddering gasp like a man revived from drowning.
The noise stopped and the world righted itself, steadied. He was back in the cramped sitting room of the cottage, embraced in a faded wingback chair where he’d settled, waiting for them to come for him.
He’d been certain they would come. How could they not? The girl had seen him out there on the fell. She knew enough of guns to realise something of what he was about. And even if her word was doubted, the finger marks around her throat would shout their own story.
For a moment he strained, listening. Had there really been knocking, or was his imagination playing tricks on him again? He rubbed wearily at his beard and his hands came away damp and cold, like a fish. He could smell the fear in his own sweat, a sharp, bitter tang. A long time since he’d been afraid like this.
He’d taken off his watch, put it away so they wouldn’t strip him of it when they took him, and now he’d lost his grip on time. The sun was too high for the dawn raid he knew they favoured, when they would hope to drag him disorientated from his bed.
Well, not him.
It’d taken a time to shake out of his daze after the girl fled. He’d finally climbed down and gathered up the tools, putting them away like an automaton, some sub-level of his mind monitoring his movements without registering them.
He drove the Land Rover outside and carried the rifle back into the byre. A good soldier takes care of his equipment first and foremost. That had been drilled into him during basic training and proved in combat in the years since. So he drew the curtains and field-stripped the Barrett, his hands moving in a smooth and precise ritual.
The gun stood now on the low table in the living room, bipod legs spread and aligned exactly with the corners like a kit inspection, the hefty ten-round magazine laid alongside. Then he’d leaned back in his chair, hands quietly on the arms, and waited for them to come.
The knock sounded again and Bardwell’s imagination exploded into a vividly coloured snapshot of black-clad thugs from SCO19, gathered round the cottage doorway with machine pistols at the ready. In his mind’s eye, another pair ran in to swing a steel enforcer towards the hinges and—
Another knock and, as his alertness increased, he recognised timidity in the polite tapping.
The picture jump-cut to a solitary country bobby hovering uncertainly on his doorstep, a bit embarrassed perhaps at having to follow up the wild fantasies of a disturbed teenage girl.
Bardwell got to his feet, staggered, his limbs protesting the sudden activity.
“Just a minute,” he called, gruff. “Give me a minute.”
There was no response and, for all his earlier fatalism, now the moment was here his first instinct was to run.
He grabbed the Barrett and the magazine and carried both through to the tiny bedroom. The space was almost entirely taken up by the double bed in the centre, a legacy from the farm’s holiday let days.
Bardwell knelt down and slid the rifle under the bed, draped in a blanket. He ducked back into the living room only to sweep the oil-impregnated cleaning cloth off the table and drop it into the coal bucket.
In the kitchen, he took a moment to calm himself before he finally opened the door. Outside was a visitor he definitely hadn’t expected.
Edith.
He’d caught her just as she was looking back over her shoulder, nervous, like she knew coming here was a bad idea. At the sound of the door opening, she snapped back to face him, mouth rounding into a silent O. Her neck seemed too long and thin to support her head, with its shapeless cap of badly-cut hair. In that startled, ungainly pose, Bardwell was reminded, not of a young fawn but, less flatteringly, a giraffe.
For an endless, disconnected moment, they stared at each other.
The girl recovered first. His presence less of a surprise to her, however much she might have lost her nerve.
“Well then,” she said at last, boldly, with a kind of jerky flick that might have been intended as a cavalier toss of her head but instead made it seem she’d gone into spasm. “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
Wordlessly, Bardwell stood aside. And just before he closed the door behind her, he made one quick survey of the deserted farmyard. If this went the way he feared, the fewer witnesses the better.