Lynch grinned, then just as quickly, frowned. ‘You wouldn’t be trying to massage my ego, Marie, love, would you?’
Marie laughed. ‘Just your neck, Dermott. Just your neck. We take the B4271 after Upper Killay. The A road goes to the airport and then to the south. We keep heading west.’
‘How far?’
‘To Llanrhidian? About eight miles. What’s the plan?’
The question set Lynch thinking. He’d been so busy getting out of London and worrying about the mess he’d left behind that he’d scarcely thought about what he would do when he got to the point on the map where Cramer’s helicopter had landed. For all he knew, Cramer could have been whisked into a car and driven anywhere in Wales or beyond. ‘We’ll take a look around, see if we can work out where he went,’ he said.
‘That’s the plan?’ she said.
‘It’s not really a plan,’ said Lynch.
‘I’ll say.’
Lynch cleared his throat. ‘Do you have any suggestions?’
‘No suggestions. I just want to get him. We’ll find out where he is and we’ll get him.’
Lynch shook his head. ‘No, Marie, love. I’ll do it.’
Marie nodded slowly. ‘Whatever you say.’
‘I mean it. I don’t want you anywhere near him. He’s a trained killer. He’s one of the most dangerous men you’ll ever meet.’
Marie raised an eyebrow innocently. ‘What, more dangerous than you, Dermott?’
Lynch grinned despite himself. The road to Llanrhidian was narrow and winding and he drove carefully, aware of how easily he could lose control of the spirited Golf GTI.
The village was tiny and looked down upon a long stretch of salt marsh which ran into the Loughor estuary to the north. To the west were the gaunt ruins of a castle. ‘What’s that?’ Lynch asked, nodding at the ruins.
‘Weobley Castle,’ Marie answered, looking at the map. ‘The place we’re looking for is to the east, just the other side of the B4295.’
They drove by the village pub. Lynch resisted the urge to stop. While he would have enjoyed a pint and a rest from driving, the pub was in such an isolated spot that the arrival of two strangers would be bound to attract attention. Marie stared at the map, rechecking the coordinates that Lynch had given her. They followed the B4295 past a sprawling caravan park, then Marie pointed to the right. ‘There,’ she said.
Lynch peered through the windscreen at what appeared to be nothing but farmland, most of it freshly ploughed. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. Marie nodded. Lynch braked. The road curved around to the right, and as he guided the Golf into the curve, a high stone wall came into view. ‘Could this be it?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘According to the map, the coordinates are about half a mile inside the wall.’ Lynch slowed the car to little more than a walking pace. Marie twisted around in her seat and tried to look past Lynch. ‘What is this place?’ she asked.
‘I can’t see.’
‘There’s a gate up ahead.’
Lynch accelerated smoothly. They passed a faded wooden sign affixed to the wall. ‘Did you see that?’ Lynch asked, looking over his shoulder.
‘Sorry. I missed it.’
Lynch stopped and reversed the Golf down the road. The lettering on the board had once been dark brown but it was now streaked with greenish mould. LLANRHIDIAN GIRLS’ PREPARATORY SCHOOL, the sign said, but a white strip with red lettering had been plastered across the board announcing that the building had been sold, along with the name and telephone number of a local estate agent. Marie took a pen from her handbag and copied the name and telephone number into the back of her diary. Lynch put the car into first gear and drove down the road towards the entrance to the school. They were about twenty yards away when he saw the two men standing just inside the wrought-iron gates. They were both in their late twenties and wearing leather jackets and jeans, not standing to attention but not lounging aimlessly, either. They were both looking at the Golf.
‘Kiss me,’ said Lynch.
Marie moved quickly. She leaned over and planted a kiss on his cheek and hugged her arms around his neck. Lynch accelerated and they passed the gate. He checked his rear-view mirror but the men didn’t look through the gate after the Golf.
‘What was that about?’ Marie asked, releasing her grip on his neck.
‘Didn’t you see them?’ Lynch asked. ‘Two men, Sass by the look of them.’
‘Are you sure?’
Lynch gave her a withering look and she slid down into her seat. ‘Now what do we do?’ she asked.
‘We wait until it gets dark,’ he said. ‘If they’re guarding the place, he’s probably still there.’ Lynch felt a growing excitement as he drove alongside the stone wall and he fought to control it. ‘Find us somewhere where we can look down on the school so that we can get an overview, okay?’
‘Sure. There’s a hill to the north. We should be able to see it from there.’
Lynch turned to look at her and he saw that she was smiling. ‘What?’ he said.
‘What do you mean, what?’
‘I mean what are you so happy about?’
Marie ran a finger along his leg, scratching the material of his jeans. ‘You said “we” for the first time.’
Lynch snorted softly and looked back at the road. She was right, he realised. He’d started thinking of her as part of the team. Whether or not that was a good thing remained to be seen.
Bernard Jackman looked up at the blonde stewardess and took the small glass of orange juice that she was offering. He gave her a broad smile but she was already moving on to the next passenger. Even in first class the service was perfunctory and the smiles plastic, but Jackman didn’t care. He flew more than fifty thousand miles a year on scheduled airlines and regarded travelling as nothing more than a means to an end. All he cared about was that the plane arrived on time and that it didn’t crash into the sea along the way.
He watched the stewardess walk down the aisle, dispensing drinks and more artificial smiles. Jackman was used to false smiles. During his time as an FBI profiler he’d interviewed hundreds of murderers, and rarely did they seem out of the ordinary. There was little to separate the serial killer from the man in the street, on the surface at least. Jackman had met serial killers who looked like kindly grandfathers, others who were as charming, handsome and charismatic as chat show hosts, and even one who was every bit as voluptuous as the stewardess. Jackman knew that it was only when you began to delve inside their heads that you discovered what separated the killers from their prey, the sheep from the wolves. He’d spent thousands of hours interviewing convicted killers, winning their confidence, peering into their minds, becoming their friend, so that he could discover what made them different. One of his bosses had said that a good profiler was like a chameleon, that when a profiler and a killer were together in a cell it should be impossible to tell them apart. Their mannerisms, their body language, the way they talked, should be virtually identical. The same man had also warned of the dangers of spending too much time in the company of serial killers. They had the same fascination as a flame to a moth: the profilers had to be careful how close they got, lest they got burned.
Jackman opened the file on Mike Cramer. Most of it consisted of reports from Cramer’s time in the army and later in the Special Air Service, the British Special Forces regiment which was revered throughout the world. There was nothing to explain where the man had been over the previous three years. A colour photograph was clipped to the inside of the file cover: three pictures in a strip, left and right profiles and one full on. There was an intensity in Cramer’s eyes that burned out of the photograph. The effect was almost hypnotic and Jackman spent several minutes staring at the picture. He was disturbed by the stewardess asking if she could take his empty glass. He handed it to her, still looking at the photograph.
Cramer’s eyes were deep-set and his nose was slightly hooked, giving him a predatory appearance. According to the file, Cramer was thirty-seven years old but the eyes wouldn’t have been out of place in an octogenarian. There was no sadness in the man’s gaze, no bitterness, just a cold level stare that seemed to look right through Jackman. Jackman wondered what Cramer had seen and done to get such hard eyes. The file provided a few clues. Cramer had served in the Falklands and had worked undercover in Northern Ireland. After three tours of duty in the province he had been captured by the IRA and brutally tortured. He’d been rescued and rushed by helicopter to a hospital in Belfast where surgeons had saved his life, but shortly afterwards he’d left the SAS for medical reasons. There were no details of what Cramer had been doing since leaving the regiment, but Jackman had gained the impression that the Colonel had been holding something back. Jackman was sure that the Colonel had used Cramer on at least one operation, something so sensitive that he couldn’t involve one of his own men.
The Colonel had been cagey about Cramer’s motivation for taking Vander Mayer’s place. On reading the file, Jackman’s first thought was that Cramer felt he had something to prove, because he’d been forced to leave the army early. Unfinished business. On meeting the man face to face, Jackman had realised that there was something else driving him. Jackman would have liked to have spent more time with Mike Cramer, to have sat down with him and talked in detail, to have done what Jackman did best — probing and ferreting out what made a man tick.
Jackman smiled as he recalled how the Colonel’s jaw had tightened when he’d pointed out how closely Cramer fitted the profile of the man they were looking for. Cramer’s family background — losing his mother and the lack of a father-figure during his teenage years — was almost certainly what had led him to join the armed forces. But Jackman knew that it was also the sort of environment that could lead to psychological problems which, coupled with the intensive training Cramer had received, could be the perfect recipe for producing a psychotic killer. Jackman’s own mother had died when he was young, and he knew all too well the void that left behind, a void that could never be filled. In Cramer’s case, no one had even tried and he’d sought sanctuary in the army.
According to Cramer’s service record, he hadn’t shone as a regular soldier, and on several occasions had been up on insubordination charges. It wasn’t until he passed the rigorous SAS selection tests that Cramer finally found his vocation. Trained to a peak of fitness that most men could only imagine and schooled in weapons, explosives and parachuting, Cramer became a government-trained killing machine. But life in the regiment gave him back something that had been missing in the past — a family. His fellow soldiers became his brothers, the regiment supplied all his needs and wants and, Jackman theorised, the Colonel probably became the father-figure that Cramer sought. Jackman knew that being forced to leave the regiment Cramer loved must have been every bit as emotionally damaging as the death of his mother, and the move back into civilian life would have echoed his original loss. The end of his army career could have opened the floodgates and allowed the release of all the emotions Cramer had been holding back over the years.
Jackman wondered what Cramer had been up to in civilian life. Men with Cramer’s background tended to end up as mercenaries, or in prison, or dead. Jackman leaned back in his seat, smiling to himself. He looked forward to meeting Cramer again: there was so much he wanted to ask him. Jackman wanted to know how many lives Cramer had taken, and how he felt about it, whether he enjoyed the killing or regarded it as just another branch of soldiering. He wanted to find out what the first kill had been like, and whether the feelings had changed with the second, third and fourth. And Jackman wanted to know something else — whether Cramer missed it.
Cramer stood at his bedroom window looking down at the car park. White halogen lights illuminated the area and glinted off the cars. A ginger and white cat walked diagonally across the tarmac square with its ears pricked up and its tail erect as if it was on patrol. Cramer smiled at the thought — an SAS cat, trained to kill without emotion, a cat that could out-march, out-fight and out-drink all other cats. The cat stopped in the centre of the square as if it had seen something. A figure stepped into the light and, as it walked towards the cat, Cramer realised it was Allan.
Cramer watched as Allan walked over to the cat and knelt down beside it. The cat arched its back and rubbed itself against Allan’s outstretched hand and Cramer could imagine it purring with pleasure. Allan looked up towards where Cramer was standing. Cramer wasn’t sure if the bright lights reflected on the glass would allow Allan to see in, but any doubts disappeared when Allan straightened up and waved at him. Cramer unlatched the window and opened it. ‘Hang on, I’ll come down!’ he called.
Allan gave him a thumbs up. The building was in darkness but Cramer didn’t switch on any lights. He went quietly downstairs and slipped out of the back door where Allan was waiting with the cat in his arms. ‘Everything all right?’ Cramer asked.