blast and flame were far greater than the other gunshots. The crawling man was thrown forward on his face in an explosion of blood, twitched violently and then lay still.
Angela’s husband twirled the revolver theatrically around his trigger finger, like a movie cowboy, and then thrust it back in its holster. ‘All right,’ he said to the others. ‘Stick this piece of garbage in the van. You can chop his ass up and get rid of it later.’
‘Okay, boss.’
‘Ah, shit, I got blood on my goddamn brogues.’
‘Sorry, boss.’
‘What the hell. Gonna take a leak,’ Angela’s husband announced.
Erin watched, quaking, as the body was dragged down the veranda steps and away towards the trees. All three of the men had moved away from the cabin. This was her one and only chance to get out of here. She turned off the phone, stumbled back inside the bedroom and snatched her backpack. She threw the phone into it. Some of her other things were strewn about the room, but there just wasn’t time to retrieve them.
With the pack on her shoulder and the pistol held out in front of her, she scurried barefoot down the stairs. She felt naked and vulnerable under the lights of the main room. One of the men had only to turn and glance back at the cabin, and she’d be spotted right away. If that happened, she knew the exchange of gunfire would be very brief – and that she wouldn’t survive it.
She almost retched as she picked a path around the bloodslick on the veranda and the broad trail of it down the steps. Just a few yards, and she would be in the shadow of the trees. Her legs were shaking so badly, she was terrified she’d fall over.
Angela’s husband had strolled casually over to a tree and was urinating against it with his feet braced apart and his back to her, left hand on his hip, whistling to himself. She passed within twenty feet of him, close enough to hear the patter of his stream on the ground. The other two had carried the body to a white van that was parked across from the cabin, just a pale outline under the shadows of the trees. She could hear their low voices. They were turning. Heading back. They were going to see her.
She ducked into the dark bushes just in time and crouched there, holding her breath, petrified that the slightest rustle would betray her presence. One of the men walked by so close that she could smell the minty odour on his breath, like gum. It was the one with the ponytail. He paused, seemed to stiffen like an animal when it senses something. Through the leaves she could see his face half-lit by the moon and the glow from the cabin. The gleam of his eyes.
‘What is it, Billy Bob?’ the other one said.
The one called Billy Bob stood still, so close that Erin could have reached out of the bushes and touched him.
‘Nuthin’,’ Billy Bob said, and walked on.
Angela’s husband had zipped himself up and was strolling back towards the cabin, complaining in a loud voice about the goddamn mess. The other two exchanged glances. The one called Billy Bob grinned. They followed him back inside.
And Erin clambered out of her hiding place in the bushes and ran like she’d never run before.
The Galway coast
Republic of Ireland
Two days later
It was cold for the time of year, and the steady breeze from the sea made him turn up the collar of his old leather jacket. The pale early evening sun was beginning to drop lower over the Atlantic horizon, casting his shadow long and dark over the empty, pebbly beach as he walked.
Ben Hope was alone out here, and glad to be. He walked slowly, because he had nowhere in particular to go. He didn’t even know why he’d come to this place. Now and then he paused in his step to stare out to sea, as if somehow the iron-grey ocean would give him the answers he was looking for.
He had lived here once. Spent many hours standing in this very spot, watching the waves roll in and crash against the rocks. It seemed a long time ago now. Just as he had in the old days, he bent and scooped up a handful of pebbles from the stony beach to fling into the surf. He watched them disappear one by one in the hissing foam.
‘Fuck it,’ he muttered to himself after the last pebble was gone. He turned his back on the water and started making his way towards the big house.
As he got closer, he paused again and gazed at it. The Victorian building stood perched on rock overlooking the long, curved stretch of its own private beach. He knew the house very well indeed, as it had once belonged to him. But he’d been away long enough to have forgotten just how large and imposing it looked.
It’d always been too big for him, just one guy rattling around with only his elderly, harried, ever-fussing housekeeper for company. In any case, he’d been away so often that it had felt more like a base than a proper home. The roving, spartan existence of a freelance kidnap rescue specialist had often seemed hard to distinguish from the harsh military life he’d known before that.
The house looked different now, and even though he’d expected it to, it gave him a strange pang to see how it had changed.
Funny, he thought: when the place had been his, he hadn’t cared much for it, never thinking about it on his frequent travels around the world; but now he could feel a creeping sense of nostalgia.
Stupid. What am I doing here? he asked himself once again.
Where the pebbly beach ended, stone steps led up towards the back of the house. The iron safety railing was new. Health and safety regulations, he guessed. So was the large conservatory that the new owners had added where the sea-facing terrace used to be. The dropping sun reflected in its glass panes.
Ben walked around the side of the house, along a neat path that hadn’t been there during his time. At the front of the house, he stopped and looked up. Of all the unfamiliar additions to his former home, the most striking was the sign over the front door that said ‘Pebble Beach Guesthouse’. It was a strange feeling, looking at it. Like something telling him definitively ‘this is no longer yours’. You no longer belong here.
Final. Irreversible.
So where did he belong? He didn’t know any more.
He was just about to turn away, feeling defeated and sad, when he heard a voice.
‘Mr Hope?’
He turned to see a hefty woman in her late fifties smiling at him. Dressed in a baggy black dress, her grey-flecked hair wrenched back into a bun, there was a matronly look about her. Unlike the house, she didn’t seem to have changed since he’d last seen her, the day the sale had gone through. Maybe a little thicker about the hips, but it was hard to tell. She’d probably been built like a sideboard since the age of twenty.
‘Mrs Henry,’ he said, forcing a smile. ‘It’s good to see you again.’
‘And you,’ she said, smiling back.
‘How’s business?’
