Confessional - Jack Higgins [80]
Brodie sat on a stool, leaning back in the corner watching Cussane and smoking a cigarette. The guard was checking a list on his desk. He totalled it and put his pen away. 'I'll make my rounds. See you later.'
He went out and Brodie pulled his stool across the baggage car and sat very close to Cussane. 'I've never understood it. Men in skirts. It'll never catch on.' He leaned forward. 'Tell me, you priests - what do you do for it?'
'For what?' Cussane said.
'You know. Is it choirboys? Is that the truth of it?' There were beads of perspiration on the big man's forehead.
'That's a hell of a big moustache you're wearing,' Cussane said. 'Have you got a weak mouth or something?'
Brodie was angry now. 'Cocky bastard. I'll show you.'
He reached forward and touched the end of the lighted cigarette to the back of Cussane's hand. Cussane cried out and fell back against the mailbags.
Brodie laughed and leaned over him. 'I thought you'd like that,' he said and reached to touch the back of the hand again. Cussane kicked him in the crutch. Brodie staggered back clutching at himself and Cussane sprang to his feet. He kicked out expertly, catching the right kneecap, and as Brodie keeled forward, raised his knee into the face.
The police sergeant lay on his back moaning and Cussane searched his pockets, found the key and unlocked his handcuffs. He got his bag, checked that the contents were intact and slipped the Stechkin into his pocket. He pulled back the sliding door and rain flooded in.
The guard, entering the baggage car a moment later, caught a brief glimpse of him landing in heather at the side of the track and rolling over and over down the slope. And then there was only mist and rain.
*
When the train coasted into Glasgow Central, Trent and half-a-dozen uniformed constables were waiting on platform one. The door of the baggage car slid open and the guard appeared.
'In here.'
Trent paused at the entrance. There was only Lachlan Brodie nursing a bloody and swollen face, sitting on the guard's stool. Trent's heart sank. 'Tell me,' he said wearily. Brodie did the best he could. When he was finished, Trent said, 'He was handcuffed, you say, and you let him take you?'
'It wasn't as simple as it sounds, sir,' Brodie said lamely.
'You stupid, stupid man,' Trent said. 'By the time I'm finished with you, you'll be lucky if they put you in charge of a public lavatory.'
He turned away in disgust and went back along the platform to phone Ferguson.
Cussane at that precise moment was halted in the shelter of some rocks on top of a hill north of Dunhill. He had the ordnance survey map open that he'd purchased from Moira McGregor. He found Larwick with no trouble and the Mungos' farm was just outside. Perhaps fifteen miles and most of that over hill country, and yet he felt cheerful enough as he pressed on.
The mist curling in on either hand, the heavy rain, gave him a safe, enclosed feeling, remote from the world outside, a kind of freedom. He moved on through birch trees and wet bracken that soaked his trouser legs. Occasionally grouse or plover lifted from the heather, disturbed by his passing. He kept on the move, for by now his raincoat was soaked through and he was experienced enough to know the dangers of being in hill country like this in the wrong clothing.
He came over the edge of an escarpment perhaps an hour after leaving the train and looked down into a valley glen below. Darkness was falling, but there was a clearly defined man-made track a few yards away ending at a cairn of rough stones. It was enough; he hurried on with renewed energy and plunged down the hillside.
Ferguson was looking at a large ordnance survey map of the Scottish Lowlands. 'Apparently he got the coach in Morecambe,' he said. 'We've established that.'
'A neat way of getting to Glasgow, sir,' Fox said.
'No,' Ferguson said. 'He took a ticket to a place called Dunhill. What in