Craig Russell - The Deep Dark Sleep

I had no idea about the social life of gamekeepers, but I decided to get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible, in case someone else from the estate decided to drop in for a drink or to exchange beauty tips with Mrs Dunbar.

Backing out to the door again, I took my handkerchief and swabbed the handle, the only thing I had touched, clean. I checked up and down the path. No one. Just to be on the safe side, I gave the window I had peered through a good wipe down too.

I put the gun back in my waistband and ran down the path, back the way I had come. After a couple of hundred yards I eased the pace to a trot. It was getting really dark now and I could easily lose my footing. I remembered where I was now: the path took a sudden bend to the right and I would have another half mile to the ‘cat’ stone.

I was fully around the corner before I saw them: a group of three men. The man in the middle turned and saw me and said something to the other two. Instantly I knew I was in trouble. Instead of coming up the path at me, the other two moved quickly off the path and into the fringe of woods, one on either side. The man in the middle stood still and watched me, his hand reaching inside his short, dark coat. I made a run for the cover of the woods to my left, trying to penetrate them as deeply as I could before the guy who had taken that side could outflank me. I was making a hell of a racket, but at this stage, distance and cover were the most important advantages to gain. I had elected for this side of the path because this was the direction the car lay in. If I had gone the other way I would have been at their mercy for longer.

I was running blind now and my chances of getting a foot caught on a root or tripping over a rock in the dark were too high. I stopped dead and stood stock still, straining the night for any sound. Nothing. But I knew that all three were now in these woods. Again the name of the game would be to outflank me. They would guess that my car was somewhere out on the road and I would be heading back to the perimeter wall. I listened some more. Still nothing.

I don’t know what it was about the three men on the path, but I had known instantly that they were Dunbar’s killers. Again it was something that I had picked up in the war, something I couldn’t analyse or explain: you just learned to tell whether the figures you had spotted in a landscape were combatants or civilians, even if they were vague figures, sighted from a distance. It was a predator’s instinct to recognize another predator.

And these guys had been predators.

More than that, there had been something about the man in the middle. He had been older than the other two. About my height. And there had been something about his bearing that, again from a distance, made me think of some kind of foreign aristocrat.

I was pretty sure I had his photograph in my pocket.

I took the revolver from my waistband, crouched down and waited. They were good all right, but not too good. I heard one of them far off to my left and a little ahead of me. He was moving quietly, but the sound of anything more than a crawl was difficult to hide in a forest at night. I guessed that he was about fifty yards off. My guess was that his compadre would have taken the same measure on the other side. Their boss, I reckoned, would wait until they were fifty yards into the woods and then come in to take the middle way. A triangulated search. I moved as low and silently as I could and advanced several yards to my right. There was a depression in the ground, not much of one, but it had been formed between root balls and it allowed me to crawl along beneath the profile of the forest floor.

Somewhere to my right, something made a noise and suddenly the dark was split by three beams of light. Their torchlight converged on the same spot and a small deer that darted off deeper into the forest. The torches went off, but they had been on for long enough for me to get a rough fix on their positions. I had been right about the search pattern. These guys were good. Professional. My main problem was that the point from which the light behind me came suggested that their boss was going to walk right into me.

The meagre light made me nostalgic for scuffles in the Glasgow smog and I inched back into the woods, trying to find an even better place to conceal myself. I picked up a rock and threw it as hard as I could into the dark. It didn’t travel as far away from me as I wanted before striking a tree. The torches came on again and focused on a point ten yards off. Not finding a Scottish Red Deer or a Greater Canadian Dumbass where they expected, they began to scan the forest and the beam of one torch passed directly over me. If I hadn’t been in the depression I would have been spotted for sure. The two flankers kept their torches on, constantly scanning and keeping me pinned down, but the guy behind me switched his off. My guess was he was on the move. In my direction.

I inched even further back. Eventually I found what I was looking for. A sprung tree had pulled itself up by the roots and a tangle of thick root, fibrous tendrils and clots of earth gave me a curtain to hide behind. In the other side was a thick fallen branch, the diameter of a small tree trunk. All thoughts of preserving suede or houndstooth forgotten, I slipped in behind the exposed root ball and hunkered down. I eased back the hammer on the Webley. Again I was back somewhere I didn’t want to be, but when it came to my life or someone else’s, I would make sure it was someone else’s. One of the searchers’ torch beams swept close over my head again and I sunk deeper. Shaking some of the soil from a root, I used it to darken my face, just in case I was caught in torchlight.

I didn’t hear him until he was almost on top of me. He had been moving almost silently and much more quietly than the other two. He stopped in his tracks, standing on top of the ridge, no more than three feet from my head. So close I couldn’t even ease round to take aim at him. If I moved, I’d have to shoot him. If he turned on his torch, he’d see me through the tangle of roots. I held my breath. This was insane: I’d already killed one man and now I was probably going to have to kill three more if I wanted to survive.

He moved on. But he did so so quietly that there was no way of me knowing how far. I stayed motionless. What this meant was that they were now all behind me, and between me and the perimeter wall and my car beyond. But by the same token, the way back to the path was clear. I turned slowly around in my hiding place and eased myself up to look behind me. I ducked back down when I found myself staring at the silhouette of the older guy’s back, only a few yards further on. Peering over the ridge I could see as he turned sideways. It was so dark that it was impossible to see him clearly, but again I got the impression that I was looking at the man whose picture was still in my pocket.

I was looking at Gentleman Joe Strachan. I was sure of it.

I waited a full five minutes after the older man had been swallowed up in the dark before I made my way back towards the path. It was only a matter of time before they started to sweep back in my direction again.

As soon as I had the path under my feet I sprinted along it in the dark, again having to ignore the risk of stumbling over something. I slowed down when I thought I was close to where I had left the ‘cat stone’, but everything was so different in the dark. I slowed to a walk and realized that I must have come too far and turned back, cursing the lost time. If my pursuers had worked out that I’d gone for the path, they’d catch up with me any moment.

I found it. Again, it looked totally different in the dark and no longer reminded me of anything feline, but I recognized it from the position I’d left it in. I set off back into the woods, heading in a straight line at right-angles to the path, just as I had planned. This time I really did have something more than squirrels and rabbits to worry about and I kept my pace steady but slow and quiet, crouching low with my knees slightly bent and my gun held ready.