Ranulph Fiennes - Killer Elite

Lucia had dealt with Mac’s fits for many years but nothing like the violent convulsive attack that she saw her father was now suffering. Sensibly, she rushed straight downstairs to call for assistance from the neighbors.

De Villiers and Davies heard Mac crash to the floor and Lucia leave the house. Every second counted. They climbed down to the lawn and reached the road several gardens away from Mac’s house. Within two minutes of Lucia’s sudden appearance, both men were well separated from the scene.

An ambulance, summoned at once by the neighbors, arrived within minutes, but Mac was dead on arrival at the hospital. The cause of death was later to be confirmed by autopsy as asphyxia due to a fall and subsequent blockage of the air passage by the tongue.

At 8:30 Pauline got off the bus close by Chelsea Girl in Maylord Orchards Shopping Precinct, to be met by two policemen. They had been called by radio as soon as the ambulance crew sent news of Mac’s death.

Hallett’s watchman during the night of December 11 was a reliable man from Portsmouth who worked in a travel agency and had served some years before with D Squadron of the Territorial SAS. He remembered seeing two dinner-jacketed passersby during the small hours but had certainly not noticed them go into Mac’s garden. Nor had there been any other suspicious signs or sounds audible from his car until Lucia had burst from the front door and, soon afterward, the ambulance had arrived.

The watchman, known to all but Spike as “Wally,” telephoned Hallett’s hotel but could not make contact. He kept trying.

Hallett, unaware that the Tadnams watchers had withdrawn some days earlier on Davies’s orders, had grown impatient with his own passive waiting role and decided to put himself into the mind of the Welshman. How would he learn more about Mac? Hallett knew from Spike that Mac received occasional checkups from Professor Hitchcock, a neurosurgeon in Harley Street, but was cared for on a general basis locally. He deduced that Mac’s general practitioner, a Dr. Wylie of the local Sarum House surgery, might well have received a visit from the Welshman, posing in all probability in some suitable role. Hallett arrived early at the surgery to avoid queuing patients, only to find that the place was shut. He drove slowly back to Salisbury Avenue and found Wally’s car by the nearest phone booth.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Mac’s daughter rushed out of the house around 8:10 and, soon after, an ambulance came and they took Mac away. I was trying to call you.”

Hallett took the phone and called the hospital, saying he was a relative. He put the phone down and turned to Wally.

“He’s dead.” He shook his head in consternation. “If you saw no one enter the premises, he may well have died through natural causes connected with epilepsy.”

He called Spike, who thanked him and asked for a full report that he would collect that evening. Hallett and Wally, after calling Mason and one other Local with the sad news, retired to their Ross hotel, Wally to catch up on his sleep, and Hallett to complete the report. That evening, soon after Spike had come and gone, a porter brought Hallett a message with a telephone number to call back.

A woman with a Welsh accent replied. She had just come off duty at the Green Dragon Hotel in Hereford. He might remember contacting her two weeks previously. Hallett did not, but he knew Mason had shown the Sumail photographs at the Green Dragon and left their hotel contact number plus the promise of a healthy tip should anyone resembling the men in the photographs turn up at the Dragon.

The woman, reassured by an eagerly affirmative response from Hallett, passed on the information that a man, very similar to the stockier of the three described, had booked a double room for the night just before she had gone off duty. Hallett took her address and promised her ten pounds for her trouble. Spike was en route and could not be contacted, but Hallett knew what to do. He went to wake Wally at once.

Davies felt unusually elated and relieved. A call from the Tadnams woman had confirmed that Mac was without question dead and there were no signs of undue police activity at his home indicating official suspicion of foul play. De Villiers had gently replaced the receiver, raised a hand to Davies’s shoulder and exclaimed, “You did well, very well indeed.” Unprecedented praise and it went with a rare if fleeting smile that quite unsettled Davies. “I will contact you as usual, when I leave Dubai,” had been de Villiers’s parting words.

Davies had determined to celebrate before returning to Cardiff. He had taken a room at the most expensive-looking hotel in the center of Hereford, smartened himself up in gear that he considered decidedly trendy, and driven to a local jeweler’s. Then he had picked up a bored forty-year-old housewife in a singles bar and taken her to the Crystal Rooms disco, where they pretended they were back in the late sixties.

At 6 p.m. Hallett reserved two single rooms at the Green Dragon under false names. He and Wally booked in at 7:30, had supper, then split up. Hallett remained reading magazines within sight of Reception and Wally retired to his room.

The woman looked pretty good by candlelight. Only dedicated aerobics, Davies decided, could keep her in the shape that so provocatively beckoned from her tight teenage jeans and open-necked, frilly white shirt.

“Getting quite randy, aren’t we,” she cooed as a Johnny Mathis ballad ended. They left the disco and, in his car, he gave her the pearl earrings just to make sure. Her left hand confirmed his expectations and he drove her back to the Green Dragon.

Davies and the woman arrived back at the hotel soon after 10 p.m.

“Thank you very much, sir.” The receptionist handed him his key and pocketed the ten-pound note. She made no comment, then or later, about Davies’s companion. Davies had prepaid for his room, as was his custom.

Hallett recognized Davies immediately and noted the number of his room. The woman was a complication but Hallett’s mind was made up.

Davies watched the woman undress with the mirror behind her. The champagne he had ordered that afternoon was ostentatiously expensive. She giggled as the cork eased silently free and he touched her glass against her nipple. They entwined arms as they toasted the night ahead of them. “To your imagination,” Davies grinned, and let her undress him.

“How will we get in?” Wally asked. “Credit card?”

“Not with a modern hotel door, boyo.”

“But the Green Dragon’s nine hundred years old.”

“So it is, so it is. But the door locks have changed with the times. Trusthouse Forte will have seen to that.”

Hallett took a ring of tools from his travel bag and silently opened the locked door of Wally’s room from the outside.

“So long as the Welshman does not apply the chain, there will be no problem, and I think he will have other matters on his mind just now.”

“Where did you learn how to use those things?” Wally asked.

Hallett replied by placing one finger along the side of his boxer’s nose. From his travel bag he now withdrew a coil of thin wire, a simple poacher’s snare, and placed it in the chest pocket of his windcheater. He again phoned Spike and this time made contact.

When he replaced the phone he told Wally, “We are to go ahead but, I quote, ‘do him no harm.’ If we succeed we are to park your van by the Upleadon crossroads, east of Newent, where a Y-registration Volvo will collect our cargo.”

While Hallett held the attention of the receptionist, Wally took their bags out to his Bedford, an old van that had seen better days. Wally returned and asked Hallett, in front of the receptionist, where his colleague was. “Must be upstairs still, the idle devil. Never mind, we’ll go and get him. Pinch a drink on his room bill, then bring him down.”