Quantum of tweed

Chapter Eight

Victor Stasiak was beginning to regret his taste for the dramatic. He suspected he should have taken Nerius somewhere quiet and simply put a bullet in his head. His bodyguards were good with shovels and Cumbria is almost designed for the easy disposal of dead colleagues, with hidden valleys and clefts by the hundred. Yet for his oldest friend, Victor had imagined a grand finale, a few last words, then a silent fall onto the smooth black boulders far below. He had not imagined a child licking an ice cream and watching them both with dull fascination, nor the two mums walking a squalling baby back and forth across the bridge. In his imagination, the bridge over the waterfall had been deserted and windswept. He frowned to himself. Nerius was still waiting for whatever was so important that his boss and friend had to summon him to such an odd place.

Victor looked at him and drummed his fingers on the wooden railing of the bridge.

‘Did the latest shipment come in all right?’ he said at last.

Nerius shrugged and nodded. Britain was that wonderful combination of an island and a trading nation, so that ships came and went twenty-four hours a day. It really wasn’t difficult to get a small, high-value item like cocaine into one of the great ports. With the best will in the world, the customs officers couldn’t search every container. Victor usually left that side of things to Nerius, while he set up the meetings and links in the chain further down.

The girl with the ice cream stepped closer to stare at the two men talking in a strange language. Victor glowered at her, without making the slightest impression. He had been intending to confront Nerius with his knowledge, see the awareness of real danger creep into the man’s face, then pitch him over the railing. He couldn’t really raise the subject with the prospect of having to wait another half an hour for the bridge to clear. Yet Nerius was growing suspicious, he could sense it. He needed a topic to pass the time. Inspiration struck him and Victor Stasiak relaxed.

‘I’m thinking of retiring, Nerius, old friend,’ he said. ‘I’ve made my money and I’m not a young man any more.’

Nerius looked sharply at him, searching his face with his eyes. The two mums had finally rocked the baby to sleep and one of them was calling for the little girl to come with them. Victor nodded to himself. His bodyguards were further down the track, trying hard to look as if they were just out walking two savage Alsatians.

‘We’ve… um… we’ve had some good times,’ Victor went on vaguely.

The little girl wandered off, looking back at them with every step as she followed the two mums. For the first time, the bridge was empty. As he tensed for action Victor saw what looked like a Scout troop rounding the closest bend, led by a bearded man in shorts.

‘Oh, for God’s sake…’ Victor Stasiak said. ‘There’s no privacy here.’

In moments, the bridge filled with boys peering over the edge while their harassed scoutmaster warned them constantly that they would fall if they leant that far out. Victor tried not to listen, but he learned more about that bridge and waterfall in the next minute than he had ever wanted to know.

To his surprise, Nerius suddenly spoke, the words hoarse from a man who weighed them like gold and spent them only rarely.

‘I am… pleased to hear that. I can take over, Victor. We can work something out.’

Victor Stasiak blinked at him in surprise. He opened his mouth to reply, but the scoutmaster was already pointing further down the hill. The group began to move away. Swiftly, Victor checked both directions, seeing only the backs of young Scouts hurrying to catch up with the rest. He failed to see Albert Rossi brace himself against a tree some way off the path. Albert was muddy and exhausted from scrambling over rough ground, but at last he was close enough to bring his gun to bear on the two men.

‘I would have liked that, Nerius,’ Victor Stasiak went on. ‘Yes, I can say it to you now. I would have liked you to take over, after me. I have no sons, Nerius. You would have made me proud.’ He checked the paths again. Finally they were alone.

A hundred yards away, Albert Rossi wiped sweat from his eyes and rested the long silencer on a small branch, squinting along it.

‘There is only one small problem, old friend,’ Victor said.

Nerius raised his eyebrows in silent enquiry.

‘Small dogs should not show their teeth to big dogs, Nerius. When they do, they get hurt.’

‘What do you mean?’ Nerius asked in genuine confusion.

‘I mean you should have told me about the shipment from the Ukraine, old friend. It should have turned up on the books and it did not. Did you really think I wouldn’t find out about you stealing from me?’

Nerius understood suddenly that he was very alone. He stepped away from Victor Stasiak and his muscles tensed to run. In doing so, he gave Albert Rossi a perfect, clear shot.

With a grim expression, Albert squeezed the trigger, then squeezed it again, much harder, so that his hand shook with the effort.

‘Safety catch!’ he whispered to himself, flicking it across with his finger and resuming his position, squinting along the barrel.

His mouth fell open in surprise. In that brief moment of inattention, the situation on the bridge had changed dramatically.

Victor Stasiak had Nerius by the throat. The smaller man was struggling violently, hammering at the hands that held him. They staggered left, then right as Albert Rossi looked on in astonishment. It seemed almost rude to interrupt his kill in such a way, as if they were not taking him seriously at all.

The wooden bridge across the waterfall was well built and solid. It was quite capable of preventing Boy Scouts from falling to their deaths, with a little care. It was not, however, capable of withstanding the sixteen stone of Victor Stasiak, combined with the twelve stone of Auguste Nerius, suddenly slamming against the railing. It gave way and both men flailed in horror as they plunged over the edge and tumbled to the rocks far below. For reasons Albert did not understand, Victor Stasiak’s spinning bowler hat landed on the wooden bridge and stuck there, quivering.

For the second time in his brief career as an assassin, Albert Rossi watched men fall to their deaths. He was obscurely disappointed. He’d been looking forward to using the gun and if it hadn’t been for the rotten safety catch, he’d… He caught himself, realising lots of different things at once. He would be paid a small fortune, for a start. Victor Stasiak was definitely dead and that meant he’d succeeded, at least as far as Stephen Hawking was concerned.

More pressing, though, was the sudden shouting of bodyguards nearby, combined with the barking of dogs. Albert Rossi was fairly certain they would see that a terrible accident had occurred. However, he suspected the sight of an armed man wrapped around a nearby tree might make even a simple-minded bodyguard a little suspicious. He could hear Alsatians barking furiously as the bodyguards came sprinting up to the bridge. Instinct alone made him toss the pistol into the river far below before standing up and trying very hard to look like any other hiker who happened to be wandering past.

Albert Rossi reached the bridge at the same time as the bodyguards. The Alsatian dogs growled and lunged on their short leashes, their black eyes frightening. One of the men was already gesturing wildly, speaking into a mobile phone in a language Albert couldn’t understand.

Albert felt it would be suspicious to ignore the scene, so he sidled close to the broken rail like any other interested passer-by. He was looking at the sprawled bodies far below when one of the guards grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.

‘You… go! Go away now!’ the man said, gesturing down the path.

With a frown at the man’s bad manners, Albert did as he was told, trying not to let them see how his legs were shaking. That was it, he told himself. That was the last job he’d take. He could still recall the moment of puzzled terror as Victor Stasiak caught sight of him in mid-fall. The look in the man’s eyes had been an awful thing to witness and Albert shuddered as he reached the bottom of the track.

To his surprise, there was a policeman standing by the postman’s bicycle, but Albert had been dealing with worse things than that and he strolled on, passing the police car parked nearby. He was close enough to hear the radio splutter as the message came in about a Boy Scout troop who had been splashing around in the pools below only to have two men bounce off the rocks around them. That was a trip they wouldn’t forget, Albert Rossi thought with a smile. He wondered if there was a badge for that.

As he made it back to the road, he realised he didn’t regret the decision he had made. Albert Rossi was cut out for a lot of things, but the life of an assassin was too noisy, too fraught with danger and, frankly, too stressful. He almost looked forward to quiet days back in the shop, or he could even retire.

A thought struck him. He owed himself a visit to a casino first. He began to whistle, walking along a leafy lane towards Buttermere.