embraced her. ‘Leave this to me. Go to bed.’
She turned reluctantly and Paul Rashid went into the shadows and squatted beside the second assassin, now pegged out on the ground. The man’s face was lined and drawn. The pupils of his eyes were like pinpricks and there was foam around his mouth.
‘A hired assassin drugged with quat,’ George said.
Paul Rashid lit a cigarette and nodded. Quat was a narcotic found in the leaves of shrubs in Hazar. Many of his people were addicted to it. For some, it lent false courage.
For this man, it would lend only death.
‘Do what you have to do,’ he said to George.
He went back and sat by the fire, drank more coffee, and Kate appeared and sat at his side. A cry of pain came from the shadows, a sudden scream, then silence. George and Michael appeared.
‘So?’ Paul asked.
‘The Sultan arranged it for the Americans and Russians. They couldn’t afford us staying alive.’
‘What a pity for them,’ Paul Rashid said, ‘that they failed.’
There was a pause. Michael and George sat down. ‘What happens now?’ George asked.
‘First, I think it’s time for a new sultan. Your speciality is working with our people in Hazar,’ Paul told him. ‘See to it. But there’s a larger issue at stake. Do we let these mighty powers do this to our people? Do we let them destroy our land? Do we let them strike at us? No, I think we must strike at them.’
At that moment, his mobile phone rang. He took it from his robe. ‘Rashid.’
He sat there in the firelight and his face changed before them, his eyes turning to bleak holes.
He said, ‘We’ll be there as soon as possible.’
He switched off the phone and handed it to Kate. ‘Call Haman. Tell them to have the Gulfstream ready for immediate departure. We’re leaving in the helicopter now.’
‘But Paul, why? What happened?’ Kate demanded.
‘That was Betty Moody. Something terrible has happened to Mother.’
Something terrible indeed. Driving home to Dauncey Place, Lady Kate had been involved in a head-on collision with a car driving on the wrong side of the road. The Rashids made it to the hospital ten minutes before she died, time enough only to stand, the four of them, and hold her hands.
‘My lovely boys,’ Lady Kate said in her bad Arabic, always the family joke. ‘My gorgeous girl. Always love each other.’ And she was gone.
Michael and George broke into a storm of weeping, but not Kate. She clutched Paul’s hand as he leaned down to kiss his mother’s forehead and her eyes burned, but there were no tears. Those would come later – after she discovered the man responsible for this.
But when the name came, there was only more bad news. A chief inspector of the Hampshire Police told them that, yes, the other driver, one Igor Gatov, had been driving on the wrong side of the road on his way to London from Knotsley Hall, which was owned by the Russian Embassy. And, yes, he had most certainly been drunk, and miraculously had been able to walk away from the crash with only minor injuries. But unfortunately, he was also a commercial attaché at the Russian Embassy in London, which meant that he had diplomatic immunity. Their mother’s killer could not be tried in an English court.
In deference to their mother’s Christianity, they buried her in the mausoleum at Dauncey village church on a March afternoon. One of the most important imams in London graced the proceedings with his presence and, standing there, the three Rashid brothers and young Kate had never felt closer.
Later, at the reception in the Great Hall at Dauncey Place, Paul Rashid was approached by Charles Ferguson. The Brigadier said, ‘This is a rotten business, Paul. I’m so sorry. She was a great lady.’
Kate said, ‘Do you know something you’re not telling us, Brigadier?’
Ferguson looked at her. ‘Give me a call sometime.’
He walked away. Kate said, ‘Paul?’
‘As soon as we’re done here,’ her brother said, ‘we’ll go and see him.’
Two days later, Paul and Kate Rashid arrived at Charles Ferguson’s Georgian flat in Cavendish Place, London. They were admitted by Ferguson’s Gurkha manservant, Kim, and found that Ferguson was not alone. Two other people were there, one of them a small man, his hair so fair that it was almost white.
‘Lady Kate, this is Sean Dillon, who works for my department,’ Ferguson said, then introduced the other, a red-haired woman. ‘Detective Superintendent Hannah Bernstein from Special Branch. Lord Loch Dhu, how can I help? May we offer you a glass of champagne?’
‘No, thank you. My sister perhaps, but I would prefer a Bushmills Irish whiskey like the one Mr Dillon is pouring.’
‘Good man yourself,’ Dillon told him, ‘but first, the ladies,’ and he poured champagne.
Hannah Bernstein said to Kate, ‘You went to Oxford, I believe? I was at Cambridge myself.’
‘Well, that’s not your fault,’ Kate said and gave a small smile.
Her brother said, ‘I did Irish time, with the Grenadier Guards and the SAS. I heard many things about Sean Dillon there.’
‘Probably all true,’ Hannah Bernstein told him, with an undertone Rashid could not decipher.
‘Don’t listen to her,’ Dillon said. ‘I’ll always be the man in the black hat to her, but to you and me, Major, to soldiers everywhere, we’re the men who handle the crap the general public can’t. That’s a showstopper,’ Dillon added and turned to Kate. ‘Wouldn’t you agree that’s a showstopper?’
She wasn’t in the least offended. ‘Absolutely.’
‘So,’ Paul Rashid said, ‘Igor Gatov, a commercial attaché at the Russian Embassy, kills my mother while driving on the wrong side of the road, drunk. The police say he has diplomatic immunity.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘And he’s gone back to Moscow?’
‘No, he’s needed here,’ Ferguson told him.
‘Needed?’ Rashid asked.
‘The Secret Security Services would not thank me for telling you this, but they’re not my best friends. Tell him, Superintendent.’
‘But how far do I go?’ she asked.
‘As far as it takes,’ Dillon said. ‘This Russian shite takes out a great lady and walks away.’ He poured another Bushmills, toasted young Kate, turned to Paul
