A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series) (33 page)

A huge full moon illuminated the flat fields over the Oxfordshire farmland. A hunter’s moon, they called it in the country. Hanlon had dropped Danny off at the top of the track that led to the farm from the main road. She’d told him to remain out of sight with his gun drawn and phone on silent, to await further instructions.

Quite frankly, she had no great faith in Danny. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who had initiative. She didn’t doubt he’d be useful in a fight. He wouldn’t be Anderson’s minder otherwise. But, like an attack dog, you’d have to explain who to go for. She also seriously doubted his ability to hit anything with that automatic of his. But what he could do was keep an eye on the road.

Huss walked behind her as she led the way through the wood. As Derek had said, the path was easy to find and it was only about half a mile across one field, then through the trees, before they came to the field behind the farm.

The path was a ghostly silver in the bright moonlight from overhead, the trees that lined it like columns in a church. Hanlon recognized the trees they were walking through, spectral, graceful, very tall with few side branches, as beech. As the ground fell away from the path the trees changed to spruce that had been planted in orderly lines.

It was very tranquil in the wood. The only sound was the faint noise of their footsteps, practically silent on the beech mast covering the path, and the occasional hoot of an owl. Once they heard a high-pitched yelping bark that Huss recognized as a fox.

They reached the end of the wood. The trees stopped abruptly at the edge of the field behind the farm. Huss recognized the plants in the field as oilseed rape. It was in flower and its heavy smell hung in the air. By day it would be a brilliant blaze of yellow. In the monochrome of the moonlight it was an expanse of silvery grey.

They were standing on a slight ridge overlooking the farm and Huss took a quick glance, then passed Hanlon the pair of night-vision binoculars. She focused them on the buildings in front of her.

Parked down below in the cobbled rectangle of the yard was a large white van she assumed was the one that Chantal had mentioned, a BMW estate and a Harley-Davidson chopper she guessed had to be Dimitri’s. It had ape hanger bars and she could easily imagine him in sawn-off denims and mirrored aviator sunglasses cruising around, trying to impress the girls. It was the kind of bike that would almost certainly have red flames painted on to the gas tank. A pimped-up bike for a pumped-up pimp.

There was nobody around. She looked again, more closely this time. She could see an enormous stack of silage, packed into standard-size green plastic bales and stacked up six high like a pile of giant-sized child’s cylindrical building blocks. A newish-looking tractor was parked near the silage heap next to several bewildering, spiky, dangerous-looking tractor attachments. The Massey Ferguson still had the bale-moving attachment for lifting the silage bags connecteded to its front. The bale mover looked like two enormous metal grips on hydraulic arms that would move together like the jaws of a vice until the bag was securely compressed between them so it could be lifted up and manoeuvred. The grab arms meant that the tightly wrapped bags wouldn’t get punctured and the grass inside would ferment, not rot. Not like if you used a forklift on them, which often risked tearing the packaging. Huss had used something similar on her father’s farm.

The Russians appeared to be doing a reasonable job of running a farm. Huss would doubtless know what the other pieces of machinery were, thought Hanlon. Melinda Huss had been driving her dad’s tractor since she’d been old enough to reach the pedals.

There were no lights on in the house. Hanlon scratched her head irresolutely. Part of her wanted to go down there and set something on fire, see who came out of the house to investigate and then shoot them, the targets hopefully illuminated by the flames. But that would risk burning Enver to death or suffocating him. Would it be better to break in?

She texted Danny, nothing happening where he was. Hanlon reached a decision. In a low voice she breathed her plan into Huss’s ear. Huss nodded silently.

The two women walked down through the oilseed rape field down to the farm. The crop came practically up to their shoulders. The plants were densely packed but a tractor had made a track down which they could walk easily.

Soon they had reached the farmyard and were crouched down in the lee of the silage bags. Each bag was like a large, green, plastic-wrapped cylinder, shoulder high. They looked over the top of one of the lower bags at the base of the stack. The stack rose up next to them like a step pyramid. Hanlon unslung her rifle and rested it on top of the bag. She chambered a round, and looked at Huss and nodded.

Huss too had loaded the shotgun. She slid the safety off, and walked round the back of the silage pile to the outhouses. Fuel for agricultural vehicles, red diesel, was tax exempt, and somewhere in the outhouses would be a store of it. There were only three outhouses; all were unlocked.

She struck lucky in the second outhouse. There were a dozen ten-litre cans of the stuff. Diesel was hard to set alight, unlike petrol, but given a wick, or enough vapour coming off it or a sufficient accelerant, it would go up. Huss shone her torch along the shelves. Meths, good, then paint thinners, even better. Then, bingo, a five-litre drum of petrol. Hanging on a nail above the diesel was a Massey Ferguson key on a fob, almost certainly a spare for the tractor. Huss unhooked it and put it in her pocket.

Hurriedly, careful not to spill anything on to herself, she made her preparations, including two petrol bombs, simple Molotov cocktails. She’d done this before, aged thirteen, with a boy from a neighbouring farm. It had worked then, the target had been an already burned-out car at the bottom of a field. Her father had gone berserk. It would work now. Good job he never found out about the strip poker too, she thought.

Huss glanced at her watch. Twelve fifteen a.m.

She texted an OK to Hanlon. She glanced down at the phone; no signal here in the dip where the farmhouse was. She waved her arm instead. Seconds later, she watched as Hanlon soundlessly, lightly ran across the yard to the farmhouse. She could see from here that the lights in one of the upstairs windows were on, though nothing showed in the downstairs rooms. Huss guessed that the door leading on to the yard would almost certainly be the one for the kitchen; it was in most farmhouses. The main door for the house would face out to the drive at the front. It would be reserved for visitors and kept for best, like the front room, the old-fashioned parlour.

The kitchen window was in darkness. She watched as Hanlon tried the door handle and slipped inside.

Huss’s heart was thundering in her chest like crazy and her mouth was very dry. As if to compensate, her hands were slick with sweat and her head felt it was encased in an iron band. The band grew tighter and tighter. I’m terrified, she realized.

Then almost immediately came the thought that she was in the middle of nowhere, outside a house containing a group of men, number unknown, who wouldn’t hesitate to kill her and were holding the man that she loved hostage. It wasn’t a game. It wasn’t a training exercise. In a couple of minutes either they would be dead or she would.

She felt a terrible, almost overpowering desire to turn tail and run. And run and run and run.
No one will ever know
, said a voice in her head,
they will never tell. They won’t be able to. They’ll be dead.

You’ve every right to be terrified, thought her brain, but you’re going to carry on anyway. Fuck, I’m scared, thought Huss.

Seconds later, Arkady Belanov’s Mercedes swept into the yard, an expressionless Joad at the wheel. It pulled up outside the house and the passenger door opened. Myasnikov had arrived.

Hanlon had slipped inside the dark kitchen through the unlocked door. She had a small flashlight the size of a pen, but there was enough light from the moon to see. There was an open door into the hall of the house opposite the one that led into the yard. From the inside of the house she could see bare wooden stairs leading up to the top floor and a door off on either side.

She risked a quick glance. One door was in darkness. Through the bottom of the other one she could see a strip of flickering light and hear muffled shouts and explosions. She guessed that someone would be watching an action movie. Hanlon’s sensitive nose caught the sickly smell of weed and the more acrid tang of cigarette smoke in the hall. The house itself smelled musty, of age and disuse, of damp and coal and a hint of blocked drain. She remembered what Huss had said about the house belonging to an old farmer; it certainly had that look and feel about it.

The kitchen was dominated by an ancient, soot-encrusted range that had stood there for probably eighty years. It was coal-fired and the flue obviously leaked. The scent of coal dust was overpowering.

She wished she had some idea of how many people there were in the house. Joad had texted Huss earlier to say that neither Dimitri nor Belanov were at the house on the Woodstock Road. She shone the torch quickly round the table. There on a chopping board was a large ham, half of it hacked away, and the remains of a supermarket Black Forest gateau. Another gateau with a breadknife sticking out of it, like Excalibur in the stone, stood next to it.

Protein for the muscle-building Dimitri, and no prizes for guessing who had wolfed down a cake and a half with what looked like 500 ml of extra-thick double cream. Belanov’s distinctive spoor.

So, at least two of them; almost certainly more.

Encouragingly, there were two empty bottles of vodka on the table too. The more drunk the Russians were, the better.

Hanlon moved to where the pantry should be, through a low opening to the side of the kitchen. She shone her torch at a door that barred her way.

This looked promising. Nothing high-tech like the door of the warehouse in Slough. Nothing formidable like Albert Slater’s metal-plated, hinge-bolted portal that it would take a battering ram to knock down. Just two big bolts, brand new by the look of things, top and bottom, and the old-fashioned keyhole by the handle. Enough to keep a man locked in, but not enough to keep a woman like her out. No sign of a key, though. She quickly ran the torchlight over the walls just in case there was a key hanging on a hook. Nothing. She did notice, though, that the walls of the farmhouse were heavy stone. In here there was no sound whatsoever from the deafening TV.

Quickly she drew the bolts back, top and bottom. She tried the door. It was locked and there was no give on it. Sod it, she thought. She put the muzzle of the rifle against the keyhole, angling the gun so the bullet would strike where the metal of the lock connected with the frame. She slid the safety off. Before she pulled the trigger, she thought with grim amusement of the time she had spent with Mawson practising shooting at tiny targets half a kilometre away. No need to be gentle with the pressure on the trigger now. No need to check her stance or regulate her breathing. Missing was not a possibility. Being blinded by shards of wood or splinters was, though. She screwed her eyes shut and turned her head away as she pulled the trigger.

The bang was like a clap of thunder to her ears. Thank God for the shooting on the TV down the hall. She broke open the rifle and put another round in. This was going to be a serious problem. How quickly could she reload a rifle? Ten seconds? Five? But she wouldn’t be facing a stationary target, and Dimitri, Belanov and anyone they had with them would be armed. She was guessing handguns, automatics. She was pinning her faith on their drunken marksmanship and her ability to hit what she was shooting at. Plus she had Huss, and while she didn’t like her, she trusted Huss’s ability with a gun. Huss was capable of bringing down fifty to a hundred odd clays fired at different speeds and heights, Huss had shot rabbits, pigeons and foxes. She’d certainly be capable of hitting two lumbering Russians at spitting distance. Danny she discounted. She had seen his heart wasn’t in it and anyone who felt like that was not going to arrive early at the party.

She wished she’d taken his gun.

She pushed the door. The old keyhole had looked worryingly intact but the bullet had wrecked the lock, shattering the century-old mechanism. The door swung open easily enough and she shone the torch in.

‘Hello, ma’am,’ said Enver. He was sitting on the floor, propped against the far wall. Relief flooded through her. Not dead. She shone the torch on him. Christ, he looked terrible.

‘Can you get up, Enver?’

He was sitting down, propped against the wall. She leaned over and took his arm. He gasped with pain. His hands were handcuffed together.

‘Pull me up,’ he said with gritted teeth. He hissed with the effort as he straightened up, and then he was on his feet. She looked down at the shackles binding his ankles.

‘Can you move?’ she whispered.

He nodded. ‘Yeah.’ He shuffled forward slowly. That would have to do for now. He was in no fit state to move faster anyway.

‘Come on, we have to get out of here. For God’s sake be quiet.’

She turned and moved to go into the kitchen. As she did so, the headlights of a car illuminated the outbuildings as the Mercedes turned into the farmyard.

Hanlon froze. The car stopped and its horn sounded. She and Enver crouched out of sight below the top of the massive kitchen table as hoarse shouts came from the front room, followed a couple of seconds later by three men running through the kitchen into the yard. None of them had looked left in her direction, though they’d passed a scant metre away from where she and Enver were hiding.

Hanlon rose from her crouch and stood up in the kitchen, just as a fourth man switched on the light.

‘Well, well,’ said Arkady Belanov, a huge grin spreading on his face. ‘Look who it is.’ He raised the CZ 85 automatic in his hand, her face clearly triangulated by the sights on the gun, and pulled the trigger.