Detonator

They looked clear.

And if I was wrong about that, so what? Mincing about wasn’t going to change anything.

The nearest door was on the passenger side and I expected it to be locked, but I strode across to it like I was the owner.

It opened with a soft clunk. And, fuck, was it heavy. Armoured, for sure. The window glass was laminated, and as thick as my thumb.

As I slid on to the seat the screen inside my head kicked off again. I’m in the Nissan, shortly before it loses its grip on the mountain. And I know that if I hadn’t swerved left when the artic rammed on its brakes, the stripy steel missile would have gone right through me.

I was now in a world of cream leather and dark-wood veneer. No sign of ignition keys. A small medallion – the patron saint of travellers – swung gently from the rear-view in the air I’d managed to disturb.

Air that smelt faintly but unmistakably of cordite and blood.

5

I raised my eyes to the mirror. The St Christopher hadn’t worked its magic for the body that was sprawled across the bench seat behind me. I swivelled and squinted past the headrest.

A small man, lying on his stomach, frozen in the act of diving sideways, arms outstretched, making for the door.

He was wearing designer jeans with a carefully ironed crease and a cashmere pullover. The pattern on the cashmere matched the one on the upholstery: cream, with two big splashes of crimson. I couldn’t see his chest, but the two exit wounds in his back were the size and consistency of a Starbucks Strawberry Frappuccino.

It would take more than a quick wipe to fix the leather too. The rounds that had killed the passenger had ripped straight through it.

He had a big fuck-off platinum watch on his left wrist. I took a closer look. A Zenith Class Traveller. No jewels, no glitter, but loads of little dials. It had probably cost even more than the wagon.

I didn’t need to go to the trouble of checking his pulse.

I heard an engine.

I glanced up as another car appeared from the direction of the tu

I could see only the side of the victim’s face – chiselled out of stone; precisely trimmed, swept-back hair, greying at the temples – but when I looked down again, something triggered the thought that this wasn’t the first time we’d met.

I reached through the gap between the seats and tried to lift his head. And realized that I wasn’t sharing this wagon with one corpse. I was sharing it with two.

I reversed out of the front passenger seat at warp speed and pulled open the rear door.

I wasn’t wrong. Hidden under Mr Cashmere there was another body.

A small one.

From this angle I could see a child’s head buried beneath the man’s torso. He hadn’t been trying to escape. In the final seconds of his own life, the man had tried to save the boy. Who would do that? He wasn’t a BG. Not with those clothes and that watch. He must have been his father.

The killer had been inside the wagon. Nothing short of an RPG would have given the outside of it more than a scratch. And there was no sign of forced entry, no scarring on the skin of the Evoque.

I tried to roll Dad back far enough to allow me to separate them. The kid was six or seven years old, max. He was wearing trainers and some kind of football strip. His torso was covered with so much blood I couldn’t tell what had killed him. I couldn’t even tell what club he supported.

I was about to turn my attention back to his dad when I saw a small red bubble form at the corner of the boy’s mouth, then burst. I gripped his arms and dragged his limp body from the car. It was still warm.

I carried him across the gravel and laid him down on a strip of turf behind the brew hut. More bubbles. I wiped the gore and snot away from his nose and mouth and cleared his airway. Then I gave him a rapid once-over to make sure he wasn’t doing any leaking of his own. He wasn’t. It wasn’t his blood. It was his dad’s. My palms were slippery with the stuff.

He grimaced and his eyelids fluttered. Then they opened wide.

He smacked my hand away.

‘Nick …?’

It wasn’t the first time today I’d been called that.

‘How do you …?’ I didn’t bother finishing the question. It could wait. ‘Stefan?’ The name crept out of the muddle in my brain before I even knew it was there.

He gave the smallest of nods, but didn’t utter a word. Then his hand shot out and clung to me, like a limpet. I murmured some reassuring waffle and managed to unclamp his fingers.

My top priority now was to stop him going into shock. I knew this kid. There were things he could tell me. And if I lost him, we were both fucked. I had to make sure he didn’t go down.

I pulled off my bomber and wrapped it around his upper half. Then I opened my mouth and listened, sca

All clear.

I wiped my hands clean on the grass and went back to the Range Rover. We needed to make distance from it. But there was some shit I needed to do before we got out of here.

My first instinct had been to bundle the kid back into the wagon, try to start it and drive somewhere safer where I could sort out my options. But hot-wiring those things was virtually impossible now, and most of them had trackers. I also couldn’t go through either tu

My memory was shot to pieces, but I could still do the procedural stuff, if I didn’t think about it too hard. I shut the rear door so the corpse was out of sight and slid back on to the passenger seat. The clock on the dash read 13:27. The same as my Suunto.

I flipped open the glovebox. A bunch of CDs, a French chocolate bar. A pack of cigarettes. Marlboro. A picture of a guy in an oxygen mask. A health warning in Cyrillic lettering. A slim box of matches. Brown. Gold lettering. Five stars. Hotel Le Strato, Courchevel.

Beneath them, two spiral-bound map books. France and Italy. I chucked both into my day sack, along with the chocolate bar and the matches. I pressed the tailgate release. As the hydraulics worked their magic, I stepped out of the passenger door, closed it, and checked out the contents of the boot.

A neatly folded suede jacket was draped across two matching cases. They smelt of money. Gold and brown, with a repeating pattern of Vs and Ls. And a couple of big holes where the rounds had blasted through the back of the seat.

There was also a kid-size rucksack, containing a change of clothes, a washbag and a hand towel. I frisked the jacket and found two passports in crocodile-skin covers and a bunch of crisp euro and rouble notes in a gold clip. This guy obviously didn’t do credit cards any more than I did.

The passports were both dark blue with gold lettering and some kind of shield. The first bearer was from Ukraine. His name was Francis Timis. And he had short-stay visas for France, Italy and Switzerland.

Some more useful stuff clicked into place.

Ukraine.

Francis Timis.

Frank Timis.

Frank.

I did know him.

He had a job for me.

He needed my help.

He didn’t know who he could trust.

That was why I was there.

The second passport belonged to the boy, Stefan Timis.

I replaced the cash and refolded the jacket. I pocketed both passports, and undid the cases. Nothing useful. Just clothes, and in the smaller one, some books that looked more like homework than fun. One of the spent rounds had gone most of the way through a maths instruction manual. I closed them again, grabbed the rucksack and pressed the button to shut the tailgate.