Hacker paused a beat. He let the knife slip from his hand and splash into the blood pool at his feet. Stuart put the gun away. Hacker said, ‘All right. Two million, cash. For that you get whatever you want. Except one thing. When this is over, Hope is mine, and mine alone. You started this whole mess, but I’m going to finish it. After that, I don’t work for you any more. Because I quit. Understand?’

That was when Hacker’s phone rang. He didn’t take his eyes off Stuart as he answered it.

The call was from Mikey Creece. Telling him that he, Phil Buckett and the other eight Dishonourables who’d flown up from London with them were en route and just thirty minutes out.

Chapter 57

In retrospect, Grace knew that her escape had been down to pure luck. Luck that they’d allocated only one man to guard her. Luck that they’d stuffed her in a faraway corner of the castle, where nobody else could hear the commotion. And luck that the idiot they’d put in charge of looking after her was a filthy would-be rapist with neither brains nor self-control.

Right from the moment they’d overpowered her in Ben’s cottage and dragged her out to the car, she’d been aware of the way he was looking at her. She’d known that, sooner or later, he was going to make a move. They’d been closeted alone in the room together for less than an hour when he’d done exactly that.

The room was where the castle’s owner kept enough booze to cater for a hundred lavish banquets. Sitting quietly on an ale cask next to a tower of wine boxes, her hands tied behind her back with a plastic cable tie, Grace could feel her captor’s eyes on her. He was leaning casually against the opposite wall, smoking a cigarette and thinking thoughts that left a dreamy kind of half-smile on his face. The knife he held loosely in his hand was bigger than a meat cleaver, shiny and curved. After a while he said, ‘You know what’s going to happen to you, don’t you, darling? You’re not getting out of here.’

‘I’m not your darling.’

He shrugged. ‘I hate to think what they’re going to do. I could help you.’

She said nothing. Refusing to play his game.

‘But if I was to help you,’ he added, ‘then you’d have to give me something in return.’

In your dreams, she thought. She kept silent, but her heart stepped up a beat and she tried not to let him see her swallow.