The Sacred Sword

Chapter Sixty-Three

In two hours, Cutter’s men had torn meticulously through the rest of the villa’s five bedrooms, its four bathrooms and the lounge and dining room, ripping out drawers, upturning mattresses, rifling through sideboards and bookcases, even tearing up the carpets to check for loose floorboards under which the cash-filled bags might have been hidden. They’d checked the attic space and found only dust and a stack of empty packing cases. Nothing. Now, as the small hours of the morning wore on, they were getting desperate.

‘Kitchen,’ Cutter said, and led the way through the rambling passages. The kitchen area could have served a medium-sized restaurant. There were dozens of possible hiding places. Cutter stormed over to the row of large cupboards on the right, while Grinnall, still clutching the money in the garbage bag, tried the ones on the left and the others crashed about the rest of the room. In moments the tiled floor was rolling with cookware, smashed plates and glasses.

‘I don’t think he put it in there, you twat,’ Mills said to Prosser, who was bending down to gape inside the oven.

‘You never know what that nutter’d do.’

‘There’s bugger all in here,’ Grinnall said, and smashed his foot into the cupboard doors with a crunch of wood. ‘This is bollocks. I’m going back upstairs and making that fucking nutjob talk.’

‘He won’t talk,’ Cutter said.

‘He will when I slice his-’

Grinnall was interrupted by a cry from Mills, who was leaning inside a deep freeze. ‘Hey! I think I found something!’ With a grunt of effort, he wrenched out a frost-covered black cloth holdall and dumped it on the floor. They all ran over and stood around as he unzipped it, revealing the taped stacks of banknotes inside.

‘Nice one,’ Cutter said, and slapped Mills on the shoulder.

‘Good thing paper don’t freeze,’ Grinnall muttered. ‘How much is there?’

Cutter crouched down next to the holdall and poked around inside. It was a big holdall. The stacks were piled four wide, four long and eight deep. The cash was all in purple five-hundred notes, twenty to a bunch. He was quick with that kind of mental arithmetic.

‘One-point-two-eight mil,’ he said.

‘It’s the fucking mother lode,’ Grinnall said.

‘It’s not a bad start.’

‘What’s that come to six ways?’ Suggs asked, virtually rubbing his hands together.

Cutter looked at Grinnall, then looked at Mills. The three of them all turned to look at Suggs, Prosser and Doyle.

Cutter whipped the Glock 19 out of his belt and shot Suggs twice in the chest. Mills pulled his Taurus and put a bullet in Prosser’s head. Before either of the corpses had hit the floor, Grinnall had Doyle in a stranglehold and was twisting his head around. There was a crackling of cartilage, then a crunch. Doyle slipped lifelessly out of Grinnall’s arms.

‘Never liked them much anyway,’ Grinnall muttered.

‘Three ways.’ Mills smiled. ‘That’s more like it.’

Cutter zipped up the bag and hefted its weight over his shoulder. ‘We ain’t done yet, boys. There’s at least one more of these hidden away. He can’t have spent it all.’

‘Where next?’ Mills said.

‘Sauna room,’ Grinnall suggested.

Cutter dismissed the idea. ‘Nobody’d put cash in a sauna room.’

‘Tool shed? Gardener’s hut? Lodge house? Garage?’

‘Not secure enough, any of them.’

‘Swimming pool?’ Mills said. The enclosed all-season pool, with its luxuriant changing rooms, had always been strictly off-limits to the hired help. Penrose was a poor swimmer, but had been seen splashing around in there once or twice.

Cutter nodded. ‘Can’t fucking hurt to check it out. Let’s go.’

They stepped over the spreading blood of the three dead men and left the kitchen. The pool was housed in a metal-framed glass building adjacent to the main villa, most directly accessible from where they were via an outer walkway that spanned the length of the house and overhung the cliff’s edge. The men passed through an arch and out into the cool night. The stars were bright, their reflection glittering like diamonds over the surface of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the rolling surf.

‘I’m dying for a slash,’ Mills announced as they walked.

‘Can’t you hold it in for a few more minutes?’ Cutter said scathingly.

‘Seriously, I’m fucking bursting. Catch up with you in a sec, okay?’ As Cutter and Grinnall headed on towards the pool building, Mills paused to undo his flies and step up to the iron railing at the edge of the walkway. He braced his feet a little apart and sighed with relief as he urinated through the gap in the railing. His arc of piss disappeared over the edge, dissipated in the breeze and splashed on the rocks far below.

He barely had time to react as a pair of hands grabbed him by the ankles and pitched him headlong over the edge of the balcony. By the time Mills opened his mouth to scream, he’d already dropped fifty feet, a dark cartwheeling figure silhouetted against the starlit surf. His brains were dashed out on a jutting piece of rock halfway down the cliff face, and it was a silent corpse that splashed down into the water and was immediately engulfed by the waves.