But Penrose was far from finished. ‘Now, remind me: who exactly in this business relationship are you?’
Cutter shifted from foot to foot, starting to get restless. He needed to remind himself of the perks of this job. More cash than he and his team had ever pulled in before. The poshest quarters they’d ever been put up in, by far. All the whisky and beer and wine they could guzzle, and all the whores from the mainland they could sate themselves with. If it hadn’t been for those minor benefits, he’d have smashed this little upstart’s teeth down his throat right where he stood. ‘The guy you hired,’ he said tersely.
‘And why did I do that, and pay you all this money?’
‘Because my team are the best,’ Cutter said, looking him in the eye.
‘The best in the business,’ Penrose yelled. ‘Your very words. So what am I to think when my cherry-picked elite team fail not once, but twice in a row to get me what I want? First you tell me that your cretin Grinnall let Holland get away—’
‘Terry Grinnall will find him,’ Cutter said.
‘And now, when all you had to do was walk into an unoccupied house in some sleepy village and pick up a few simple items, you come back empty-handed and all beaten up, telling me you screwed up because of—’ he searched for the right words ‘—because of some vicarage guest? What did he do, throw a prayer book at you?’
Cutter shook his head. ‘He wasn’t an ordinary vicarage guest. Somebody skilled. Somebody trained.’
‘But you just told me you were the best!’ Penrose screeched. ‘What the hell was stopping you going back there after him and finishing him?’
‘My orders were to carry out a quick, clean job, not create a war zone,’ Cutter said.
‘What I want,’ Penrose exploded, ‘is every last one of my enemies stamped out and crushed. Do you understand?’
Rex O’Neill felt like saying something, but he held back and kept his mouth shut.
Cutter gave a shrug. ‘Sure.’
Penrose stormed across to his desk, ripped open a drawer and took out a large pistol. Cutter, Mills and Rex O’Neill all stared at the gun. Penrose walked back over to Cutter, gnashing his teeth, and pointed the weapon at his chest. He loved the cool steel of the pistol in his hand. So many years he’d longed for a real gun. Now he could have all the real guns he wanted. This one was a Coonan .357 Magnum automatic. Rare and beautiful, smooth stainless steel with gleaming walnut grips and an eight-shot capacity. He played with it constantly. ‘No. I mean, do you really, really understand?’ he screamed. ‘Because if not I’ll put a bullet in you right now and hire someone who can do a better job of this for me. In fact,’ he added, ‘perhaps I ought to just shoot you anyway, as a punishment. Shall I? Shall I?’ He raised the pistol to Cutter’s face.
Cutter gazed calmly into the man’s eyes. He could easily rip the gun out of Penrose’s hand, and the arm out of the socket with it. You are crazy, he thought. ‘I understand,’ he said quietly.
Penrose glowered at him, breathing hard. A vein was popping in his forehead. His carefully coiffured hair was sprawling in all directions. After twenty long, silent seconds, he lowered the gun. ‘Pleased to hear it. I want this man dead, whoever he is. I don’t care if you have to raze half of England to the ground to get him. I just want you to get him. Nobody is going to stop me. Nobody!’
O’Neill had kept his mouth shut until now, but couldn’t hold back any longer. ‘If I could remind you, Mr Lucas, my employers have been quite clear that they want this kept as quiet as possible. I thought that was understood.’
Penrose balked in horror at his words, then turned on him. ‘Your employers also recruited me to run this operation, yes? Me, not you. That was also understood.’
A number of possible replies occurred to O’Neill. Most of them centred on the theme of ‘Yes, but the Trimble Group never realised they were taking on a raving bloody maniac’. But considering the circumstances and the Coonan .357 that was still clutched tightly in Penrose’s fist, he wisely chose not to voice them. Shortly afterwards, he left the room and returned to his own office within the villa complex while Cutter and Mills were dismissed back to their quarters to lick their wounds and await further instructions.
Penrose Lucas spent quite a few minutes pacing and seething alone. He pulled out a large holdall from under the desk, unzipped it and lifted out the stacks of banknotes he kept in there. Counting the money sometimes soothed him – but not this time, and as the migraine just kept worsening he was compelled to retreat to the bedroom to lie down.
After an hour in the blacked-out room with a mask over his face and five codeine tablets washing through his bloodstream, he emerged and turned on his computer, intent on finding out all he could about Simeon Arundel’s mysterious and peculiarly talented guest.
Thanks to Rex O’Neill and the team behind the scenes whose names and faces Penrose neither knew nor wanted to know, he had unlimited access to police reports and a host of other data, some of it official, some of it not, concerning his victims before and after their deaths. He’d scanned through them already, but as he perused the files again now he paid much more attention to detail.
‘Ben Hope,’ he said out loud. The name came up twice. Once as the witness at the scene of the fatal car crash, and again as a speaker at the musical event, a concert at the Leigh Llewellyn Foundation, which Simeon Arundel and his wife had attended – shadowed, unknown to them, by Dave Mills.
What was a man like this doing hanging around a supposedly empty vicarage in the middle of the night, and getting in the way of his carefully laid plans? Penrose had always been a keen researcher, and nothing motivated him like utter hatred. Digging a little deeper, he quickly unearthed the connection between this Ben Hope and the deceased opera star Leigh Llewellyn. The old news item announcing their marriage was still viewable online and provided Penrose with his new enemy’s full name and title: Major Benedict Hope, British Army, retired.
From there it was just a short skip to Hope’s business website. He ran something called a tactical training facility in northern France. Penrose had little idea of what a tactical training facility was, but he understood enough to know what it suggested about the kind of skills this Hope possessed. He opened the page titled ‘About the Team’ and read, then re-read, the two short paragraphs describing Hope’s background. The man’s military experience was extensive, that much was patently obvious, but the information seemed carefully pruned, as though much of his past history couldn’t be revealed. Even to someone with Penrose’s limited understanding of military matters, that in itself was revealing enough. As for the connection between Hope and Arundel, that remained a mystery.
Wasn’t bloody O’Neill meant to take care of this kind of stuff?
Penrose summoned Cutter back to his office. Minutes later the mercenary was standing at the desk, looking no less battered and sour than he had earlier, and every bit as wary. He soon understood that his boss’s psychopathic rage had settled down to a mere simmering fury, and the gun would remain in the desk this time. Cutter relaxed a little.
His eyes flicked across to the holdall and the bundles of cash that were visible through the open zipper. That looked like one hell of a lot of money in there. Cutter noticed two more holdalls just like it on an armchair at the back of the room. He remembered what the boss had said that night back in London. Money’s the easy part.
‘Is this the man you encountered in Arundel’s home?’ Penrose demanded, showing him the picture on the website.
‘That’s him,’ Cutter said instantly, with a flash of pain and humiliation.
‘You were a soldier. Can you tell more about who he is?’
Cutter studied the webpage. ‘Not your regular ex-squaddie. This guy’s been in deep.’
‘The question is, can we deal with him?’