“How did you know?” Nick asked.
Giles Frederickson didn’t reply at once. He was leaning against one of the police Armed Response Vehicles, arms folded, wearing a borrowed Tyvek suit.
The forensic people had taken his ruined uniform, bagged and labelled, and Frederickson looked uneasy because of it. No doubt the major had stripped enough captured enemy soldiers, Nick considered cynically, to be aware of the psychological effect.
Mind you, Frederickson had fared better than Max Carri. Poor sod. Inside the back of one of the ambulances over to Nick’s right, he could still see the man Frederickson had dragged dripping from the killing ground. They’d taken everything, including his dignity, leaving him wrapped in a yellow hospital blanket and his misery. Nick saw Grace’s tall figure hurrying up the back steps to go to him. Not quite how Nick had imagined her ex, but he admitted he probably wasn’t seeing the successful entrepreneur at his best.
He returned his attention to the major, waiting. Frederickson’s eyes were on the ragged debris scattered around the red showjumping wall in the middle of the arena.
Something had hit the wall after the shot, collapsing the centre. Nick didn’t want to think what that ‘something’ might have been. The wall looked formidable but was constructed of lightweight hollow blocks, larger sections at the bottom, leading to individual bricks at the top to fine-tune the height. A test of horse and rider’s boldness and skill but easy to knock down, for safety and to incur penalty points.
Angela Inglis scored four faults, then.
Eventually, Frederickson peeled his gaze away from the scene of devastation, met Nick’s eyes.
“How did I know what?” His voice held that slightly dazed note common to victims of serious, sudden, violent crime. Once the adrenaline fades and the reality seeps in. But of all the people on that field, Frederickson was possibly the only one who’d been under this kind of fire before, and Nick noted his reaction with interest.
“The type of weapon?” he nudged. “How did you know?”
Frederickson’s face ticced. “My entire military career has not been spent organising dog and pony shows, Mr Weston. Let’s just say I’ve had enough direct experience with large-calibre sniper’s rifles to identify one when it’s used on a target within a few feet of me.”
The streak of blood high across his cheekbone gave the major the look of a warrior, stained from the fight. His eyes shifted back to the arena, to what was left of the wall.
“You’re sure this wasn’t a rocket-propelled grenade perhaps?” Nick persisted, eyeing the damage.
“The effective range of that type of weapon is around five hundred and fifty yards,” Frederickson said, offhand. “They have a relatively slow muzzle velocity—less than a thousand feet per second. Half the speed of an average rifle bullet.” His eyes flicked over Nick again, hooded now. “I would have seen it.”
No idle boast, Nick realised. He nodded, scrawled a note. The body armour they’d issued chafed as he moved and his shirt was already glued to his back and chest underneath it. Nobody was complaining.
Nick had been moping round Morrison’s supermarket on the outskirts of Kendal when the call came through. It had been almost a relief to abandon his trolley in the cereals aisle. And he’d thought Lisa’s visit was going to be the low point of the day.
He’d arrived to chaos, hundreds of people log-jamming the entrance to the field as the uniforms tried to move them to a holding area where at least names and contact details could be taken. The crowd was frightened, panicky. There’d been a couple of punch-ups. Nothing like a crisis to bring out the best and the worst in people. Traffic was still backed up and the Firearms lads were keeping the CSI teams away until they could confirm the area was secure. Personnel had been dragged in from all over the county for this one.
“Like to hazard a guess what they were using, major?”
Frederickson made a fractional movement of his shoulder, hardly enough to qualify as a shrug. “There are plenty of weapons with that kind of capability.” He jerked his head towards the arena. “McMillan, Stoner, Barrett—they all make twelve-point-seven millimetre anti-matériel sniping rifles. One of those would be my best guess. The Gepard M3 is fourteen-point-five.” He gave Nick a small tight smile. “That will punch a hole through an inch of armour plate at six hundred and fifty yards, so you can imagine what it will do to a fragile human body, even much further out.” His eyes drifted, grew colder. “Well, you can see that one for yourself.”
Nick understood his bitterness. “Care to estimate a likely range?”
“We heard the shot a good four or five seconds after A—” Frederickson stopped, swallowed. “After Mrs Inglis went down. About twenty-two hundred yards, maximum.” He cleared his throat, gave another micro-shrug. “We had recorded kills in Afghanistan at that kind of distance.”
“‘We’?” Nick queried and received a flinty look.
“Don’t ask, Mr Weston. You don’t begin to have the clearance. Just take my word for it that you need to set up roadblocks at least two miles away, if you haven’t done so already.”
“I’m sure my superiors have come to the same conclusion, sir.” He looked round at the blankly distant hills. “Although I suspect our man was long gone before we got here, if he’s any sense.”
The major snorted. “You think sense had any part to play?”
“Does this feel like a random shooting to you?” Nick asked quietly. “Even Derrick Bird, before he started taking potshots at passers-by, took out specific targets first. And I think our man here had a specific target in mind. Question is, did he hit it?”
Frederickson took an instinctive breath to snap at him, let it go, and something of his resolve went along with it. “It might help if you told me exactly what it is you want to know, Mr Weston,” he said, more tired than angry. “Spit it out, man, for God’s sake.”
Nick pointedly shut his notebook. “Was he aiming for you?”
Frederickson’s mouth flattened into a thin line. “Hard to tell. At that kind of range, a fraction of error in the calibration of the sight, calculating the windage, any number of factors, and you’d miss an elephant.” He made a brief, dismissive gesture. “Who knows how much time he’s spent zeroing? Or even how much experience he’s had?”
Something about this last comment jarred on Nick’s cop senses. He’d listened to any number of lies over the years, told with everything from absolute conviction to utter desperation. False, he knew instantly. Not even a conscious thought process, just a reflex response.
“Anyone who goes to the trouble of obtaining a gun like that has to be pretty sure of their ability to use it.” He waited a beat, then said softly, “Who is he, major?”
Frederickson’s gaze wouldn’t lock. “How would I know?”
“First your dog, now your mistress.” Nick saw the jerk of surprise. He stepped in closer, certainty burning brightly now. “He must really have it in for you. Someone you served with, maybe? Or against?”
The question lay where it had fallen. For a long time, the major didn’t speak. Nick knew if he’d been way off the mark, the man’s first response would have been denial, ridicule. But it wasn’t.
“Neither.” Frederickson straightened. He spoke without looking at Nick, staring off into the distance. “I suspect he may be someone who served under me.”
“Who?”
Frederickson glanced at him then. “You were entirely correct when you asked what I’d done to end up here,” he said with a grim smile. “I’m here as a penance. A man of my experience would not be shunted away into some little rural backwater at this point in his career otherwise.”
Quietly, Nick said, “What happened?”
“I made a mistake,” Frederickson said flatly. “A bad one. My last tour in Afghanistan. Kandahar region. I was in charge of coordinating a small group, snipers. The best we had. Too good, as it turned out.”
“Too good?”
“We were given bad intel, which resulted in what’s euphemistically termed a friendly fire incident.” His shoulders squared a little, gaunt face rigid. “It was my operation, I was in charge, so I carried the can.”
Nick heard the pain in his voice. More than that; a deep abiding sorrow.
“Who is it you think is after you?” he asked. “Some friend of the men who were killed?”
“No,” Frederickson said. “Pete Tawney. The man who killed them.”
Nick frowned. “But surely—?”
Frederickson gave a twisted smile. “Tawney questioned the order to fire. His spotter radioed repeated requests for target confirmation. At the time I had no reason to doubt, so I gave it. Somewhat forcefully, I’m afraid.” He reached up to swat at a fly that was hovering around his face, drawn by the dried blood. “Afterwards, when the whole damn mess came out, he…punched me out, swore vengeance. Landed himself in the glasshouse at Colchester for his trouble. Military prison.”
“I’m aware of the facility,” Nick said drily. “When did Tawney get out?”
“Six months ago. The shrinks were claiming post-traumatic stress, of course, and he was supposed to report in regularly, but a week after his release he disappeared, dropped off the radar.” He saw the question forming on Nick’s face. “I had an email from an old friend down there, telling me I should watch my back.”
“And this Tawney was capable of using one of the rifles you mentioned?”
“He had a liking for the Barrett Light Fifty, and he was one of the best we had. I’ve come across a lot of snipers in my time, Mr Weston, but Tawney differed from many of them in one important regard.” Frederickson glanced back out across the arena again where the carrion birds had begun to gather. “He had no problem killing women.”