Far North - Michael Ridpath [82]
He slid the pack off his back, took out a trowel, and started to dig. The earth came away easily, and within a few minutes he had revealed a polythene bag containing rifle and ammunition.
A Remington 700. He grinned. He eased the rifle out of its bag and checked the mechanism. Everything worked perfectly.
Then he pulled out his binoculars and examined the barn. It was large and had been converted into a holiday home. Behind it was the farmhouse to which the barn must once have been attached. It was a sunny afternoon, and so there were no lights on in the building, but a door out to the garden was open. And in the garden were two chairs, a book resting open on the seat of one of them. There was a car parked on the patch of gravel in the front – only one car, which implied there were no bodyguards. Excellent. The car was an Audi estate: he could just make out the number plate – British, not French.
It was hard to estimate range with any precision, but he guessed a hundred and twenty-five metres was about right. The chair seemed to be about the same distance away from him as the petrol container had been back in the mountain valley the previous morning.
He found a good spot to lie, with the barrel resting on a log, and waited. It was a sunny day, the French September sun was much stronger than its Icelandic counterpart, and he felt uncomfortably warm in his motorcycle leathers. He would wait until nightfall if he had to, although having spotted the open book on the chair he was optimistic that that would be unnecessary.
He ran through the getaway in his mind. He would be sure to drive the bike at a steady speed so as not to attract attention. It was fifteen kilometres to the isolated water-filled quarry where he would chuck the polythene bag containing rifle, trowel, binoculars and bullet casings, and then twenty more kilometres before he hit the autoroute and the long ride back to Amsterdam.
Through the binoculars he could see movement in the house. He tensed. The target emerged.
He put down the binoculars and rested the rifle on his shoulder. The target was wearing a narrow-checked shirt and carrying a mug. Tea, no doubt – so English. The target walked across to the chair and bent to place the mug by its side. Stood up. Surveyed the landscape.
He pressed the trigger. Several things happened at once. The window behind the target exploded. The noise of the rifle shattered the rural quiet. Rooks further along the copse took to the air, yelling angrily.
The target turned towards the window and then back towards the wood, jaw open, reactions dulled by the surprise.
He had missed. Keep calm. He fired again. This time the target took a step back and raised a hand to his upper arm. A short, sharp cry of pain. One more shot. The target crumpled to the ground, just as a woman ran out of the door screaming.
Time to go.
CHAPTER TWENTY
FRIKKI SAT IN the back of the church as the priest droned on. Magda had forced him to come with her to the large concrete Catholic cathedral on the hill on the other side of the centre of town from the Hallgrímskirkja. She was sitting next to him now, struggling to make sense of the sermon the priest was giving. Frikki had given up after the first sentence.
She had wanted him to pray for forgiveness. He wasn’t sure how to do that. He closed his eyes. ‘Forgive me, God,’ he muttered to himself. Was that enough? He wasn’t sure. ‘Forgive me, God,’ he repeated. Why should God forgive him, a loser without a job, who stole, who never went to church? Who had killed someone.
The only good thing about Frikki’s life was Magda. If God had any sense he wouldn’t bother saving Frikki, he would