Sixty-Four
There were some things Neil Battersby missed about being in the army and others which he most definitely did not.
He did not miss the manky food or the absence of available women, and he certainly didn’t miss being told what to do by chinless senior officers.
But he very much missed giving orders when he was given the chance, he missed the freedom he was given to shoot people every now and again, and above all he missed having a mission.
Or he had done, until Barry Cheshire had called.
His mission from that point on had been to make the people who had tried to murder his old comrade pay for it. To stand up for the regiment and for a fellow soldier who’d once saved his life, even if he never talked about it. So he’d simply done what he thought needed doing. Now, though …
This business with the drugs was doing his nut in.
He’d driven deeper into the woods, which he thought was pretty clever, because they’d be expecting him to head for the M6 as fast as possible. Like he’d be that stupid. A few miles past Slaidburn, he’d crept into the trees alongside Croasdale Brook and parked up.
There were no lights visible anywhere, no cars, nothing.
It was ideal.
He got out of the van and opened the back doors.
He switched on his torch, played the powerful beam across the dozens of sacks and boxes stuffed with cannabis and pills or whatever, and swore quietly to himself.
A big part of him wanted to stick two fingers up to that annoying lad and his daft ideas.
He could easily just drive back to town, flog the lot and live like Riley on the proceeds for a few years; maybe swan off to South America or the Isle of Wight or somewhere.
But that wasn’t what he’d been ordered to do.
He definitely had a few issues with ‘Brightside’ Barry, not least the fact that he’d been working with the coppers when Battersby had explicitly asked him not to, but that wasn’t what mattered at the end of the day.
An order from his corporal was an order, simple as that.
So, good sodding riddance.
He opened his rucksack, took out the can of paraffin and splashed it around. He lit a rag and tossed it into the van, then stood back to watch as the roof-high pile of bin-liners stuffed with weed began to burn, the fumes billowing out into the darkness.
Job done.
He couldn’t be sure how long he’d been standing there.
It might have been five minutes or fifty-five, but however long it was, he was suddenly feeling very relaxed.
He sat down by the side of a ditch, wondering how the trees seemed so green …
like bright green, even though it was pitch black … and starting to feel hugely hungry.
He was furious with himself that he’d given that bag of crisps to Dave Racoon, because crisps would have been … perfect. It was a cool name, though. Then he immediately began to panic, because giving away his cheese and onion was far from the stupidest thing he’d done.
He’d just set fire to his only means of transport.
He was in the middle of bloody nowhere with no way to get home.
To get anywhere.
It was enormously funny …
Maybe he’d sleep for a while … because he was extremely sleepy, then he could walk and walk until he found a road, somewhere there were cars, and he could hitch or maybe just flag someone over and nick their car, and why the hell had he given his crisps to a … racoon?
Did racoons even like crisps?
He heard a branch snap and watched a man step out of the trees.
‘Have you got a car?’ Battersby asked, very slowly. ‘Or any crisps?’
The man raised his arm and pointed a gun fitted with a silencer. Battersby pointed back at it and began to giggle.
‘Wayne Cutler says hello.’
‘Oh, that’s very nice of him—’
The man smiled and the gun went pffft, which was more or less the same noise that Neil Battersby made when he toppled sideways into the ditch.