Creece ran a hand over his scalp to wipe away the snowflakes melting into the stubble of his hair, and eyeballed the state of his old Dishonourable buddy. ‘Jesus H. Christ, pal. What the fuck happened to you? You’re all fuckin’ shot to bits.’

‘Me? Never better,’ Hacker replied. Kaleidoscopes of brilliant white light were spangling and blossoming inside his brain. He felt exhilarated and hyper-alert, and his useless arm seemed to belong to someone else. Who needed doctors and hospitals? ‘It’s good to see you, Mikey.’

‘Lucky we got here at all,’ Creece said. ‘Fuckin’ pilot was gettin’ jumpy about landing in this shit weather. Airfield was like an ice rink and these roads ain’t much better. But never mind us. Looks like you’re the one having the problems. Where’s Banks, Carter and Graham?’

‘They’re dead.’

Creece was a calm and ruthless stone killer, and he accepted the news without a flicker of emotion. ‘Plus Kev O’Donnell. You saying one man did for four of our lads?’

The drugs might be having weird effects on Hacker’s brain, but they hadn’t scrambled his logical capacity. To tell Creece that Stuart had murdered one of their brotherhood would amount to a death warrant for his boss. Not that Hacker cared, but he wanted his money first. He wasn’t prepared to tarnish Mitch Graham’s posthumous reputation in his comrades’ eyes by admitting that he’d been bested by a woman, either. He nodded. ‘Yup. Hope took out the lot of them.’

‘If you tell me this bastard ain’t here any more, then we’re gonna be mightily disappointed.’

‘He’s still here. And now that you are, we can nail the fucker.’

‘Then it looks like we came to the right party,’ Creece said. He nodded to his men holding the bags. ‘Open them up, boys. Show him what we brought to play with.’

Aside from mercenary work and related odd jobs, one of Creece’s more lucrative business enterprises was supplying smuggled Romanian full-automatic AK-74 battle rifles to organised crime gangs in London and Manchester. The unzipped holdalls contained ten of them, fitted with folding stocks and tactical lights and lasers, along with spare magazines amounting to over a thousand rounds of ammunition.

‘That ought to do it,’ Hacker said. ‘Okay, fellas. We’ve got work to do. Hope’s somewhere down below. Or was, until everything went tits up. My guess is that he’s loose in the grounds.’

‘If he’s loose in the grounds, then what’s stopping him from legging it the fuck out of here?’ Buckett asked.

‘Because of the woman,’ Hacker replied. ‘You can bet your arse that he’ll come back to find her.’

Creece frowned. ‘What woman?’

‘She’s a cop,’ Hacker said. ‘Got herself mixed up with Hope, and now she’s somewhere in the castle. We’ve got to find her, too.’