Conn Iggulden - Quantum of tweed

A very old tool roll was helpful in putting his little kit together and at last the Micra was loaded and ready to go. According to his AA Road Atlas, Cumbria was just shy of three hundred miles away. As he drove through Ickenham towards the motorways that would take him north, he worked out his journey times in calm anticipation. Victor Stasiak did not know it, but death was heading up the M1 towards him.

When it isn’t raining, Cumbria is ranked among the most beautiful parts of England. It is difficult to confirm this because it’s always, always raining. The inhabitants delight and frolic in it, telling themselves that at least gardeners will be pleased. Gardeners are sometimes washed away in Cumbria. It has mountains as well, however, so those gentlemen are rarely washed far. They usually end up in a gully of some kind.

Albert had an umbrella, of course. It was a beautiful thing, bought from James Smith and Sons on New Oxford Street. It had struts and spars and it hummed in the wind as he heaved it open into a wet Cumbrian gale. He had also chosen a tweed jacket, expecting it to help him blend in up north. It is a little-known fact that one stage of making tweed cloth involves leaving it to soak in urine. Sheep urine is much prized but for obvious reasons is extremely difficult to collect. They won’t stand still. Human urine is the only remaining choice, and as a result there was a faint odour of wee around Albert as his jacket grew damp.

He had parked his car in a town his map told him was called Keswick and was walking down a rainy street where every second shop sold waterproof clothing and hiking boots. Or heavy jumpers. Or old-fashioned sweets, for some reason. Perhaps hikers take comfort in barley twists or lemon drops as they wait for the rain to stop. It never does, though, so some of them never come down.

Albert had a huge choice of places offering bed and breakfast, down every side street. He picked one at random and lugged his heavy bag and umbrella through the door. He told himself wearily that tomorrow would do well enough to despatch Victor Stasiak from this world to the next.

Halliday stood outside the main entrance to Harefield Hospital, shivering slightly in a grey drizzle. He was out. More importantly, the catheter was out. He was free. He had made a call at last from inside the hospital and a long, black car was now sliding through the rain towards him, parking itself on a set of red lines usually reserved for ambulances. He opened the door, wincing slightly as the stitches in his groin pulled with the motion. It was a mystery to him why the doctors had decided to approach his heart from as far away as a vein in his leg. Perhaps they enjoyed the challenge.

From his chart he had learned that a tiny cage had been inserted in his heart, a ‘stent’, as they called it. It held the vein open and allowed the blood clot to disperse. He frowned at the thought of the strange thing keeping him alive. Presumably they knew their business. He was walking again, after all. He set his jaw as he slid into the back seat of the car and nodded to the driver. He knew his business as well. In ten years of successful work, he had not suffered a single injury or come close to talking to a policeman — until a complete stranger had run him over in a side street with a Nissan Micra. It was frankly humiliating, but he knew how to handle problems like that.

‘I need another gun,’ he growled.

The driver nodded and opened the glove compartment, handing back an oiled Colt Government and two clips of ammunition. Halliday tested the mechanism with swift, much-practised moves before showing his teeth in a savage smile. The driver blinked into the mirror at the white glare, but wisely decided not to notice.

‘Where to?’ the driver said.

Halliday didn’t have to think. He’d had time to plan in the endless days in the ward.

‘Eastcote. The Tudor Lodge Hotel.’

It would do as a base for a few days while he found out everything he needed to know. He didn’t like to admit it, but he also needed more time to recover. His heart had been damaged while part of it was blocked shut. The slightest exertion set off sharp pains across his chest and made him gasp as if he’d been running a fast mile. Although he hated the idea, Halliday was forced to admit it might be time to collect his savings and retire. There was just one last job to do first.

As the limousine pulled away from the hospital, they passed a lone police car coming the other way. Both of the uniformed occupants looked over at the black car, but they couldn’t see through the darkened windows. John Halliday smiled to himself. He had nothing to fear from their questions now. He hadn’t given them his real name and they could search for ‘Nigel Farnsley’ all they wanted. He gripped the pistol tightly, taking comfort from the familiar weight. Someone was definitely going to pay for what had been done to him.

Albert’s first problem after breakfast was confirming that Victor Stasiak was in residence. A man with at least three houses — the ones Albert knew about — could not be pinned down easily in one spot. Albert had brought enough money for a week at the bed and breakfast. If that failed, he knew he would have to try his luck in London. That was not a pleasant prospect. London was full of potential witnesses and there was something about the empty ruggedness of Cumbria that appealed to the assassin in him.

As a boy, he had read The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, which involved gentlemen wearing tweed chasing other, more unsavoury, gentlemen across the moors of Scotland. He could not recall all the details, but in his hiking gear, with the wind, and of course the rain, he felt glorious. In waterproof Gore-Tex trousers, with a rucksack and a large map flapping in the wind, he might as well have been invisible as he trudged up hill and down dale — and sometimes up dale and down hill. There were a few others like him, hardy-looking men for the most part, out enjoying the rain and the cold. For Cumbria, it was a fine morning.

Keswick town lies on the edge of a huge lake named Derwentwater. Albert hadn’t wanted to park too close to his quarry, but as the morning wore on, he found he’d underestimated the distances involved. At first, he took long, deep breaths and strode along the edge of the lake. By the time he’d worked his way through the valley of Borrowdale, he was weary. He slogged through Honister Pass and began the long ascent of the fell known as Rannerdale Knotts. It looked over the lakes of Buttermere and Crummock Water, and as he read each name on the map, Albert Rossi began to wonder if he’d somehow wandered into the set of The Hobbit.

He reached the summit by the early afternoon, fairly close to exhaustion. Only the sight of Buttermere village below raised his spirits. Victor Stasiak had his holiday home there and it was high summer, when the rain warms a bit. Albert stood panting, chewing on something called Kendal Mint Cake, which seemed to be a kind of brittle glass made of sugar. He worked a piece out from where it had impaled the roof of his mouth and stood looking down on the houses below. It was a little depressing to see a nice road running close by. Clearly he could have spared himself the hike, but his aim of scouting the area from a safe distance had certainly been fulfilled. Albert could feel the weight of the pistol in his rucksack. It could also have been his flask, or the paperback book he had brought with him, or the binoculars, or even the bulky file with all the vital details of Victor Stasiak’s life, but in his imagination, it was definitely the gun.

Victor Stasiak was excited. An observer would have seen no betraying sparkle in his eyes as he flipped and tugged his tie into a Windsor knot, gazing into a long mirror as he did so. The face that looked back was heavy-jowled and serious, with a solid jaw almost submerged in the layers of good living. Freshly shaved and gleaming rolls of pink fat disappeared into his collar. If the same observer was feeling unkind, he might have described it as the face of an elderly carp, with thicker lips than are usual on a man. When Victor Stasiak tensed his jaw, the lower lip overrode the top one. A determined carp then, a carp who has met most of life’s little irritations and triumphed over them. A carp, in fact, who tended to leave life’s little irritations in graves around the Cumbrian countryside.