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  ‘It’s the documentary I asked you about, sir,’ said Tyrell.

  The camera panned across a wrecked bed, paused to examine a discarded condom.

  ‘How much longer has it got to go?’ If Latimer, the Delves housemaster, came in now there would be questions asked.

  ‘About fifteen minutes. Do you agree that this is art, sir?’

  An unshaven man in square-framed glasses was now standing in front of Tracey Emin’s bed. ‘Bad sex, skid-marked sheets – today it’s all up for grabs,’ he was saying.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not my special subject, Tristram,’ Slater replied. It was a weak answer and he knew it. He should watch this business of Christian-naming the boys, too. The other staff-members didn’t like it, and he’d been warned about it more than once. Undercutting discipline, he’d been told.

  Tracey Emin was now on screen, topless.

  ‘What do you think of that, sir? She’s quite fit, isn’t she?’

  ‘I’m sure she’d value your approval,’ said Slater drily. He glanced round the room. All eyes were on Tracey. ‘How did you goons get to be made prefects, anyway?’

  ‘Born to it, sir,’ drawled a general’s son named Springell, looking pointedly at Slater. ‘Natural selection.’ Running his fingers through expensively barbered hair, he turned back to the screen. ‘Oh, you dirty, dirty girl . . . Bloody hell, that’s a used Tampax, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think you should discuss it with Mr Parry in the art room, Springell. And less of the bloodies, please.’

  ‘It’s not my Tampax.’

  ‘Don’t wind me up Springell, OK?’ Suddenly Slater’s voice was raw steel. The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees. The boys stared at the TV screen, where Tracey Emin was dancing and laughing.

  ‘How’re al-Jubrin and Ripley, sir?’ Paul Reinhardt said eventually.

  ‘I don’t think Masoud’s going to be in that three-quarter line on Saturday, if that’s what you mean. Gary Ripley should be OK.’

  Slater was grateful for the change of subject. Even after fifteen years hard soldiering he was still vulnerable to the suggestion that he had been put on Earth for the casual amusement of the likes of Springell. I’ll give him natural fucking selection, he thought.

  Reinhardt’s question also reminded him that he had promised to look in on the flu-stricken team-members. It shouldn’t be too late.

  ‘How much longer does this go on?’ he asked for the second time.

  ‘Fourteen minutes now, sir,’ said Tyrell.

  ‘Right. I’m just going over to the sick bay and when I come back I want you all upstairs in your rooms. Springell, you’re responsible for making sure everything’s turned off. TV plug out of the wall, please.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Springell, injecting the single syllable with all the irony he could muster.

  The sick bay was at the back of the main building on the top floor, well away from the classrooms, kitchens and other centres of activity. Pupils were only ever detained there with minor conditions. Anything that exceeded the expertise of Matron – a corpulent body who regularly contacted her late husband by means of a spiritualist – demanded a visit from the Henley GP or transfer to a hospital in Reading. That, in turn, often meant a second transfer to a private clinic in London; the school had given up trying to explain to foreign parents that for most conditions the local NHS hospital was a better and safer bet than even the most expensive clinic.

  The lift was waiting on the ground floor. Slater thought this strange: it usually remained on the top floor once Matron had retired to her quarters for the night. She slept next to the sick bay. There was also a night nurse, a willowy redhead named Jean Burney. Slater had caught Jean’s eye once or twice and detected a definite twinkle. Since she was always on duty in the evenings, however, he had not had the chance to follow it up.

  He stepped out of the lift, heard the doors slide shut behind him. The sick bay was arranged around a square lobby containing a pair of sofas, a low table and the night nurse’s desk. On two sides of the square were curtained-off enclosures; these were for junior boys, and none appeared to be occupied.

  Nor was the night nurse’s desk. Perhaps Jean Burney had gone to the toilet. Slater decided to go straight through to the sixth form bay. Passing the desk, however, he saw that a table lamp had fallen and smashed, leaving curling fragments of glass on the white linoleum floor. Among the glass were smears of recently shed blood. More splashes led towards the door to Matron’s quarters and the sixth form bay. Had Jean accidentally knocked the lamp to the floor and then cut her hand on the broken glass? She didn’t look the clumsy type.

  And then, at the edge of a smear of blood by the door, Slater saw a faint chevron-shaped imprint. It was no more than an inch long, but he recognised it instantly. No member of the teaching or medical staff wore commando-soled boots, and the boys all wore regulation lace-ups.

  He froze, instantly alert, felt the familiar thud of his heartbeat as the adrenaline kicked in. For a moment he paused, ears straining for the slightest sound, and then moved at a crouch to the passage door. It opened, but not easily. Something heavy had been laid against it. Silently he raised himself to the level of the glass panes in the upper half of the door. The lights were off in the corridor but he made out a human shape – two bare legs, the faint scrabbling of fingers. Gently, Slater forced the door open, pushing the figure away from him until there was room to squeeze through.

  It was Jean Burney. Slater recognised her by her hair. She had been blindfolded and gagged and her wrists were taped behind her back. Drying blood ran from both nostrils, her lower lip was split, and her nose looked broken. She was unconscious.

  She was breathing, though, and Slater quickly ripped off the gag and the blindfold and cut the tape from her wrists with the Mauser penknife he carried on a lanyard in his trouser pocket. For the moment this was all he dared attempt. The intruder, or intruders, could still be in the building.

  There was sufficient light for Slater to see that all three sick bay doors were closed. An attempt to enter any of them could invite a bullet. The fourth door bore a nameplate marked MATRON – Mrs T Mackay. Silently, he turned the handle and slipped inside. He had barely closed the door behind him when a bedside light snapped on and a nightie-clad figure struggled to an upright position.

  ‘Yes?’ she began sleepily, assuming Slater to be Jean. Seeing that he wasn’t her tone changed to alarm. ‘Mr Slater, may I ask what on Earth—’

  ‘Keep quiet!’ he hissed. ‘There are—’

  ‘Come any closer and I’ll scream,’ hissed Mrs Mackay. ‘What the hell’s going on? What are you—’

  ‘Intruders. They’ve knocked Jean out. I think they’re after one of the boys – probably already taken him. I want you to ring security, the police and the headmaster in that order. And I need a weapon.’

  ‘You what? Mr Slater, they might be—’

  ‘Armed? I know. They could also be getting away with one of the boys.’ His eyes searched the room, alighted on the reproduction Hepplewhite chair in which Mrs Mackay liked to watch Emmerdale and EastEnders.

  A hard, downward stamp and a violent wrench before the Matron’s horrified eyes, and Slater was hefting one of the chair’s curved mahogany legs. Shreds of yellow damask trailed from the heavy business end.

  ‘Phone,’ he whispered, and slipped from the room.

  In the corridor he stopped and listened again, all his senses racing. Jean Burney still lay unconscious by the doors. From the furthest sick room came a broken, murmuring sound.

  Slater kicked open the three doors, the chair-leg raised to fend off any attacker. In the first, he found only darkness and silence. In the second, gagged as Jean Burney had been but half-conscious, he discovered a boy he recognised as Christopher Boyd-Farquharson – a dreamy fourteen-year-old excused from games on account of his asthma. The boy had received a nasty bang on the head, and judging from the confusion in his eyes was badly concussed, but – thank God – ap
peared to be breathing more or less regularly. Cutting him free, whispering to him that on no account was he to leave the room, Slater hurried on.

  Behind the third door he found Gary Ripley and an empty bed. Ripley, twisted beneath a grey school blanket, had been beaten badly; his face was bruised and lacerated and he was bleeding from one ear. His knuckles, Slater noticed, were also bleeding and there was blood beneath his fingernails. He had not gone down without a struggle.

  ‘How many men?’ Slater asked gently.

  ‘Two.’

  ‘They took Masoud?’

  Ripley nodded, a movement that was clearly agonising. ‘I did my best, sir,’ he whispered. ‘One had a gun.’

  ‘Describe the gun, Gary.’

  ‘Revolver . . . heavy revolver. Other had a knife.’

  ‘And the men?’

  ‘Two Arabs. In black. Beards . . .’ Tears of pain and helplessness began to run down the boy’s cheeks. ‘My stomach, sir. Could you . . .’

  Slater pulled back the blanket. A black, inch-long slit gaped just below the boy’s navel. Blood pulsed from the wound. The sheets and the boy’s cotton pyjamas were dark with it. Grabbing a towel from the handrail, Slater pressed it to the stab-wound. Ripley gasped and his eyes rolled backwards.

  ‘Gary, you’ve done well. You’ve done fucking well. Now you’ve got to hang in there, understand?’

  ‘I’ll be OK, sir. You go on.’

  But the voice was barely audible, and as Slater raised himself from the bed the boy began to shake. Slater knew what was coming. He’d held men on the edge of death before, seen them move from this world into the waiting room of the next. Convulsing, Ripley lost consciousness.

  Mrs Mackay, her nightdress smeared with Jean Burney’s blood, stood in the doorway. Taking in the scene at a glance she moved swiftly to the bed and held a finger to Ripley’s neck.

  ‘I’ve rung an ambulance for Jean, but it’s got to come from Reading. This boy’s not going to last that long.’

  Slater pulled a pen from his pocket and scribbled a number on the pillow-case. ‘Get back on the phone. Tell whoever answers there’s been a kidnapping and stabbing, that there are firearms involved, and that we need an emergency services helicopter immediately. Say you’re calling on behalf of Neil Slater from B Squadron.’

  Mrs Mackay looked at him uncertainly. ‘What is this number?’

  Slater picked up the chair-leg. ‘It’s the headquarters of the Special Air Service.’

  ‘And you’re . . .’

  But Slater had already vanished.

  Ignoring the lift, he ran headlong down the stairs to the bottom of the tower, then at full speed along the road fronting the main school buildings. The security team was based in a small ornamental lodge half-way up the drive – previously the domain of the estate’s head gardener. During the day two men manned the main gates in a car, and at 7pm, when the main gates closed, the night team took over in the lodge, keeping watch over a bank of monitors.

  To Slater’s eye the system was all but useless, and he had told the headmaster as much within days of his arrival. Apart from loudly advertising its function, Slater had pointed out, the lodge was at least 200 yards from the main school buildings and highly vulnerable to assault. At the very least the operations centre should be moved indoors. The head had heard him out and then informed him that the system had been set up by a company owned by a school old boy. The old boy in question – and here the head had tapped the side of his nose meaningfully – had spent some time in one of the hush-hush departments, and jolly well knew what was what.

  Slater had shut up. The lodge, with its imposing bank of screens, was clearly a selling-point for nervous parents, and – equally important to the management – meant that the security teams could be kept at a distance; the staff and pupils didn’t have to suffer their chain-smoking and filthy jokes.

  Pushing the lodge door open with the chair-leg, he peered quickly inside. The monitors were blank, and both men were slumped forward against the control system console, which was running with spilt tea and blood. A holed and crumpled parka jacket lay on the floor. One of the men had crapped himself before he died – probably when witnessing his companion’s fate – and the stench in the small overheated room was overwhelming.

  Slater visualised the scene. The terrorists would have burst in. The man with the knife would have held Masoud while the gunman – his weapon muffled in the parka – would have immediately shot one of the security men. The second man, all but paralysed with fear, would then have been ordered to open the electronic gates before suffering the same fate as his partner – a single shot below the ear. With Masoud in tow there wouldn’t have been any question of disabling or gagging; the security men had had to die. This far from the main building, no one would have heard anything.

  Slater leant over the dead men and flicked the monitors back on. Nothing, just the darkness and trees twisting in the wind. The main gate, as he had suspected, had been opened. But Slater knew he wasn’t far behind the kidnappers, and with luck, assuming their vehicle was laid up away from the gate, they hadn’t got Masoud into the vehicle yet. Would a driver be waiting there?

  Still carrying the heavy chair-leg – the security men were not permitted to carry firearms or any other salvageable form of weapon – Slater sprinted down the grass verge at the side of the drive. The frost was hard now, and he was grateful for the treads on his Timberland boots. The high winds had dispersed the cloud cover, and the moonlight glimmered on the hard-frosted landscape. He could see tracks on the drive now – two pairs of cleated soles and one much smaller pair of bare feet – and it was clear from the erratic pattern that Masoud was resisting hard. Good lad, thought Slater. Slow them down. Make it hard for them.

  As he ran, Slater cursed himself for not having followed through on his suspicions about the Cherokee. How could he have been so stupid as to think those security guards would take the threat seriously? He’d known so-called hard men like them all his life – over-the-hill ex-regulars who pitched up with their thickening bodies and their Aldershot tattoos, sitting around on their arses, telling war-stories and hoping that nothing would happen.

  At the open gates the tracks swerved to the left. The lay-by, thought Slater, his mind racing – that’s where they’ve got the vehicle. If I follow them down the quarter-mile along the road they’re going to see me – they could easily risk firing at me, and there’s no bloody cover of any kind. If I go through the school grounds, on the other hand, I’ll be covered by the wall.

  He broke back into a fast run, jumping brambles, hedgerows, dead bracken and frozen ditches. Four hundred yards to go. Despite the extreme cold, he could feel the sweat coursing down his back. At one moment he stepped calf-deep into an ice-crusted stream — but barely registered it. The pounding of his feet echoed that of his heart. His breath sawed in his chest. His hands and face burnt with the cold. Two hundred yards to go. So fucking go, he told himself. Push it harder. Lengthen your stride. Forget the potholes and the rabbit-holes and the broken ankles. Push it. Push it!

  And then a faint cry reached him on the wind.

  He froze, and heard it again.

  ‘Itrukni li-hali! Itrukni li-hali!’

  Slater was no linguist but he had picked up enough on missions in Saudi Arabia and Oman to understand Masoud’s words. ‘Leave me alone!’ he was shouting. ‘Let me go!’

  Masoud was behind Slater. He’d overtaken them.

  Fight, he willed Masoud. Slow them down.

  He pounded through the darkness, brambles flailing at his hands and ankles. The voices on the other side of the wall were still a hundred metres away or more. If he crossed the wall now, fifty yards or so beyond the Cherokee he reckoned, they might not see him.

  Over we go. Lobbing the chair-leg over the seven-foot wall, he ran at it – gave it his best shot. His hands found slick ice. His fingers scrabbled desperately, found no purchase, and he fell back to the bracken.

  Squinting, he search
ed the darkness for an alternative run-up. Was there a bush or something against the wall – something he could climb?

  Nothing.

  The cries again. Nearer now.

  Desperately he repeated his first attempt. Again the frosted bricks resisted his hands and again he fell defeated to the brambles. It was just too high.

  Breathe. Use the desperation.

  Focus.

  Do it.

  In his mind’s eye he was back on selection at Hereford. His twelve-strong cadre had been beasted senseless for forty-eight hours – the previous night’s exercise had included a frozen river-crossing in full kit – and they were almost hallucinating with fatigue. Promised a brew and a ration-break, they’d suddenly been ordered off on another thirty-click tab over the hills — any waverers to be immediately RTUed.

  ‘You’ll do it,’ came the staff sergeant’s voice, ‘or ye’ll fuck off back to whatever crap-hat outfit was misguided enough to waste this regiment’s time with ye!’

  And Slater had done it. He’d got round. Somewhere, he’d found the reserve.

  Ah, came a tiny voice, but you were twenty-three then. You’re thirty-six now, and . . .

  Banishing the voice, Slater emptied his mind.

  There was only the wall.

  The wind roared at his ears as he ran, felt the brickwork kick at his chest, the icy flailing of his hands, the desperate swing of his legs.

  And was over.

  He’d judged it spot-on. The Cherokee was immediately in front of him. Picking up the chair-leg from the grass verge, he ducked behind the vehicle’s radiator.

  He could see as well as hear the kidnappers now: they were fifty yards up the road towards the school, thirty yards short of the Cherokee, and Masoud was kicking and struggling violently. ‘Ib’id yadak!’ he screamed to the night air. ‘Let me go!’

  Pulling the Mauser knife from his pocket, Slater stabbed the inside wall of each front tyre. Gently, the four-wheel drive sank forwards. Could he get to the back tyres?

  Without warning, a car came hurtling from behind him, lights at full beam. The driver must have thought Masoud was a drunk being assisted by friends; the horn wailed conspiratorially and the darkness returned.