Not Single Spies

ONE

CHAPTER 1

Five tables lined up in a row, like some ghostly convoy of death. No flood of shadowless white light. Just a wan procession of perforated steel surfaces, scrubbed and stainless, faintly gleaming in the blue radiance of a watching sensor on the wall.

Furthest from the door and detached from the rest, a sixth table. Upon it a white plastic body bag, zipped up the middle, unmistakably corpse-shaped.

Somewhere, far away, a voice talking into a telephone.

The room itself: silent.

Silent as the grave.

The Land Rover driving along the coast road had seen better days. Its khaki wings were battered and mud-spattered, its canvas roof patched and discoloured. Temporary red trade plates hung from the front and rear. It was travelling – in the half light of the dawn – without headlights or even sidelights.

Far away on the horizon, the sun was beginning to splinter the surface of the sea. For a few minutes the scene was a Rothko canvas: a slab of burnt orange, imperceptibly brightening, with the inky purple darkness of the English Channel below. The only movement was the inaudible lapping of tiny waves against the shoreline.

The Land Rover turned inland down a minor road. Buildings began to appear on either side. Shortly after it passed a thirty mile per hour speed restriction sign, a traffic camera flashed at it and it slowed sharply. A mile or so further on, as it approached a dark complex of low buildings, it slowed further to barely walking pace, crossed a wide concourse, eased up a side alley and parked in the deepest shadows.

Five people climbed out. They were young-looking and slimly built, dressed as if for a demonstration in balaclavas and anoraks. The driver was the last to pull her woollen mask down and a whisper of blonde hair escaped across her eyes. She scrambled up onto the cab of the vehicle and threw a black bin bag over a CCTV camera bolted to the wall. Then she led the group down the alley to an open space near the rear of the largest building. She stopped at a green Hospital Fire Assembly Point sign with a double metal door beside it which – with no apparent effort at all – she prised open with the tips of her fingers. Three young men followed her through while the fourth stayed on watch in the alley.

As soon as she was inside she pulled an iPad mini from her pocket and a map of the layout of the building instantaneously appeared on it. She nodded towards a corridor to the left. The group broke into a brisk jog. They crossed an empty reception area – dimly lit by the same faint blue universal glow as the rest of the building – and down another corridor to another set of double doors. The woman pushed them open and walked in.

They had arrived at the mortuary.

One member of the group unzipped the cadaver on the table. Another – a small man in glasses – examined the face in the beam of a pen-light and nodded. The zip was pulled back up and the three men started to lift the body – but its rigor mortis took them by surprise and they struggled to get it past the corridor of tables. They re-formed in pairs on either side, falling into step like military pall-bearers, and retraced their course back through the building and out to the alleyway.

The waiting fourth man hurried to close up behind them. The fire doors crashed together with a sudden, shocking clangour. Immediately, an alarm began to whoop and then another further away and a third.

The body bearers had broken into a shuffling run and were halfway up the alley to the waiting Land Rover. The rear flaps of the vehicle were still tied together and, when one of the team let go of the bag to unloosen them, the cadaver tumbled to the ground, and its head rebounded on the tarmac like a leather basketball. In a few moments of panic, they grappled the body bag into the well of the Land Rover and clambered in after it… and accelerated away in a shower of flying gravel just as three uniformed men came dashing across the concourse towards them.

Other people began to arrive. A man in a white coat sprinted up the alley waving his arms and shouting. A woman raced down a flight of steps from the main entrance and began to issue instructions. Someone found a red trade plate lying in the road near the concourse exit. Calls were made on mobiles.

As the Land Rover crashed through the gears towards the east, a second smaller vehicle quietly emerged from the car park behind the complex. It waited a few seconds. Then slipped away unnoticed in the opposite direction.

CHAPTER 2

Bryn’s mind, as he drove up the M1 this misty morning, was on Oliver Cromwell.

He suspected his hero’s career might be a useful demonstration of his proposition that history – for the most part – was little better than an arbitrary series of accidents.

For example, eight years before the English Civil War broke out, Cromwell planned to emigrate to Connecticut but was not allowed to do so. He was still thinking about it in 1640 and would probably have sailed, had Parliament not sided with him against the King. Instead it rebelled and Cromwell rose to become Lord Protector. When he died in 1658 he was the mightiest man in England.

So… what if Cromwell had taken ship to New England?

After all, there was nothing inevitable about a rebellion at precisely that time. In a different set of circumstances, Parliament could well have backed down – and postponed the day of reckoning. But would its cause have prevailed without its most effective field general and leader? Might the English have had to sort the whole problem out generations later with a revolution bloodier than the French?

And what about Cromwell himself? Might seventeenth-century America – led by the charismatic and revolutionary Oliver – might it have risen against its distant King a hundred years earlier? And would the capital of the most powerful country in the world now be called Cromwell, DC?

No… that was going too far.

Bryn was a popular historian. By which he meant he’d put conventional academic life behind him and opened up instead a promising vein of newspaper and magazine articles. His speciality was alternative history: what might have happened if chance had played a different hand or other choices had been made. Indeed, in the early days, his approach had been quite lucrative. There’d even been a possibility of a series on television. Most likely tucked away with the great unwatched – the New Discovery Channel, H2, BBC Five – but with who knows what possibilities for spin-offs and syndication?

And then things started going wrong. Old colleagues characterised his method as populist and unprofessional. There had been an unbylined editorial attack in – of all papers – the liberal Guardian branding him a postmodern fantasist and his method a parlour game; calling for the restoration of traditional academic values. The flow of commissions dried to a trickle.

On top of that, since troubles never come singly, there’d been that major setback with his computer. A few weeks before, all his work had been deleted and his online bank account somehow stripped of every last penny. Of course, it could have happened to anybody. Why should anyone have a reason for targeting him personally? Some jealous professor with a sideline in cybercrime, punishing him for his academic sins… ?

At all events it became obvious, beneath the courtesies, that the bank’s fraud department actually suspected him of being complicit – that he had passed on his security details recklessly or else, though they never suggested it in terms, as a deliberate act. They declined at this moment in time to restore the missing income and he was out of funds as well as out of work. His agent, Jean, was signally unhelpful (perhaps we should let the dust settle a little, darling).

In all these circumstances, the offer from America had been a lifesaver.

He’d found it difficult initially to take seriously. He’d even suspected it of being a scam. It came into his computer about a week after the hacking disaster, bypassing Jean, and was from a magazine he’d never heard of and an editor whose name – he thought – was an undergrad joke. Yet when he checked out the website it was impressive enough, with articles in previous editions from writers who’d worked at Princeton, Berkeley and Stanford, all top-ranking history schools. And Mr Peabody’s email – to be fair – was perfectly correct and formal, if a tiny bit unusual:

Dear Mr Williams

We are planning a special edition of History Tomorrow surveying great civil war battles and we are looking for a British contribution. Knowing your interest, we would like to commission from you five thousand words at two dollars a word on a battle of your choice. Please email agreement by return.

Yours faithfully

Dutton Peabody

Editor-in-Chief, History Tomorrow

If the money had not been so extraordinary, he might have passed the whole thing on to Jean immediately, with little expectation of a useful outcome. But he was intrigued by the ambiguous way the email was worded. Was Peabody hoping for a piece on Shiloh or Gettysburg about which Bryn (whose expertise as a serious academic had been the American Civil War) had once published a well-received account? Or would something English suit the case? He decided to play along for another email or two…

Dear Mr Peabody

How about Naseby (1645)?

Yours sincerely

Bryn Williams (MA UCL)

Hi Bryn

No problem.

Dutton

Now it really was getting interesting. He had in fact never been to Naseby. He knew very little about the English Civil War. And here was Peabody offering him a free ride (more than that: an exceptionally well-paid ride) into one of the more commercially attractive periods of English history. If the man was serious, perhaps he should become so too.

Dear Dutton

Naseby’s the English Civil War. You’re OK with that?

Best wishes

Bryn

Sure thing.

No problem.

DP

Okay… one last question then.

Dutton

Would expenses be additional to the fee?

Bryn

Sure. Would a straight grand cover it?

Wow.

Mr Peabody

If you don’t mind I’ll copy this to my agent who’ll be in touch.

Bryn Williams

Even after he’d forwarded the thread to Jean, he still expected her to respond with one of her blunt dismissals (I get stuff like this all the time, darling, it’s bullshit, they don’t have the finance, they never pay, don’t waste your time). But no dismissal came.

Instead, after a few days, he received an email informing him it was a done deal (And by the way I’ve renegotiated the price so my fee is on top of it. Don’t you love the Americans?). He badly needed the cash, more so now than ever. He persuaded Jean to give him an expenses advance – reluctantly conceded – choked down any lingering reservations about the magazine’s credibility, and cleared the decks for a fine new programme of research and travel.

So here he was at last, half an hour from Naseby battlefield and driving through a countryside which reminded him of New England, America. Similar names, similar topography. A few miles to his west was Sulgrave Manor, George Washington’s family seat, with – a similar distance to the east – Huntingdon, the birthplace of Oliver Cromwell himself. Soon he would be driving past Althorp where the Spencers – descendants of Charles II – still lived and where the tomb of Princess Diana – wife of yet another royal Charles – sat in medieval state on an island in the middle of a lake. But of course this was Northamptonshire, the dead centre of England where all roads crossed and the great, defining battle of English history was fought three and a half centuries ago.

Cromwell had always been a hero of his – ever since as a schoolboy he had discovered that he had the same ancestral surname as his own. Mere, modest Williams. Because the Great Oliver was descended from the sister of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister. She had married a Welshman called Morgan Williams but subsequent generations had adopted the more illustrious handle – at least until the restoration of Charles II, when the family prudently reverted to Williams again.

What’s in a name indeed…

He was now entering the village of Cold Ashby, a couple of miles short of Naseby. His iPhone buzzed with a text alert and he glanced down at the screen. Brief and to the point: dont email or call leave it to me

He did not recognise the sender details. But the tone and content left little room for doubt. Dearest Agnete.

It was raining, just as it had been in June 1645. The approaching Parliamentary army had followed this identical route but the road then had quickly deteriorated to a sticky porridge of mud and stone. The horse-drawn supplies and heavy artillery wagons fell behind, even the infantry found it hard going, and it was Cromwell’s mounted troopers who reached Cold Ashby first and promptly billeted themselves on the local peasantry – while the general registered with satisfaction the open, cavalry-friendly fields to the north between him and the King’s army.

He had been trying to get hold of Agnete for a week. He’d kept her informed about his movements, including his plan to visit Naseby – but received nothing in return apart from a where’s that text the previous day. Was she even in England? It would be nice to be told.

The light English drizzle had set in for the day. He carried on into Naseby village. It was more like a dormitory suburb now, serving Northampton or Rugby perhaps, with sprawling new-build bungalows and even a CAMRA-approved pub on the main street.

He found a parking space and picked up the iPhone and tapped in a reply: but where are you

Then when he tried to send it, the process aborted and a red and white exclamation mark flashed up on his screen. He thumbed back to retrieve the original text but it had completely disappeared from his phone. He went to his Favorites list and tried to speed dial Agnete’s normal mobile. No response. Just dead silence and a peculiar hollow resonance.

dont email or call

Darling Agnete… he would do as she instructed, leave it to her, think of other things…

He drove on, trying to focus on the article he would have to write. Perhaps he could make something of the proximity of Althorp and Diana – his American readers would like that. The Spencer family’s demotic origins, for instance – the clue (again) was in the name. The first of their line had rendered himself useful to William the Conqueror as his steward – his Dispenser in Norman French – and then built the family fortune through hard work, a slice of the action, and good connections. Very American.

Meantime another hard worker was doing the exact same job for the King of Scotland. His descendant married a princess and created a new dynasty: the Steward became Stewart. The name persisted in this form until Mary Queen of Scots – while she was briefly Queen of France – amended it to Stuart to break the French court’s tedious habit of mispronouncing the w as if it was a v.

And then it all came together with Charles II, two of whose illegitimate children were the ancestors of Diana Spencer. With the consequence that her son would be the first descendant of that prolific monarch to mount the English throne – uniting at last the whole legion of royal stewards in a single individual.

It seemed to Bryn that his article was half-written already.

CHAPTER 3

The modern road out of the village ran straight across the battlefield and he parked in a lay-by as near to the centre of the action as possible. Then he sat for a while hoping that the rain would stop.

The nine o’clock news was on the car radio. The main story was the latest development in a familiar narrative. Internet hackers for weeks had been sniping at big business – banks, oil companies, multinationals – searching for vulnerabilities in their websites and wiping their data or infecting them with destructive viruses. Now they had also managed to hack into the news feeds of press agencies and wire services around the world and filled them with financial disinformation.

Share values had collapsed and the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped a thousand points in a matter of minutes. Crude oil prices, Treasury Bonds, and gold futures had tumbled, and there was talk of imminent economic chaos. On top of that, the hackers had compromised the databases of two giant American conglomerates, in spite of them being – amongst other things – major government security contractors. What was the word he was looking for (especially after his recent experiences): schadenfreude… ?

He surfed the other channels. The airwaves were awash with punditry. The usual speculation about the hackers… the most popular line was they were a new generation of activists inspired by the pranksters of the Anonymous/LulzSec era when a group of young people five or ten years previously had broken into the websites of (amongst others) the Church of Scientology, Sony Pictures and the CIA. A message on the security companies’ websites hinted at this: This domain has been seized by Synonymous [sic] under section # 15 of the Rules of the Internet. Alternatively, the culprits were professional cyber criminals, possibly affiliated to the Mafia, seeking opportunistically to manipulate stock prices…

From time to time a few quiet voices pointed out that the damage would probably be brief and transient. No cyber attack had ever lasted more than a few days before the status quo reasserted itself, the websites were repaired and businesses and share prices returned to normal.

Bryn turned off the radio with a sigh.

Even though it was so early in the morning, he was not the only visitor to the battlefield. Several ramblers were clustered around a noticeboard and – as he stepped out into the drizzle – a Vauxhall Astra Hatchback drew into the lay-by behind him. The driver made no attempt to leave the vehicle but stayed in his seat talking energetically into a mobile phone. He was dressed like a policeman in a white shirt, black tie and jersey. A fluorescent yellow jacket on the rear seat seemed to confirm the impression.

He left the man to his conversation and climbed over a stile into the scene of conflict. As he gazed out across the dark, loamy farmland, he felt the same grim sadness that welled up whenever he visited a battlefield. He was reminded of one in particular – which he had often read about but never visited. For Naseby, he’d already concluded, was the Cannae of the English Civil War.

Cannae was as terrible and as brilliant as a battle could be. On a plain somewhere in Southern Italy twenty-two centuries past, Hannibal obliterated Rome’s mightiest army and set a template for victory which is studied to this day in military academies around the world. Put your mobile forces on the wings, foot soldiers in the middle. Let the middle take the enemy’s attack and fall back in disciplined retreat until the advancing infantry exposes its flanks. Then release your mobile forces – cavalry, tanks – so that they sweep round and attack the enemy from both sides and the rear. Outcome: total and bloody annihilation.

Generals have always feared and always craved a Cannae. In the American Civil War Robert E Lee once nearly pulled it off. If he had been successful he’d have won the War for the Confederacy, split the young nation into two, and changed the whole course of modern history. At Naseby though, Cromwell achieved it conclusively. It was the victory that sounded the death knell of feudal kingship – after which England would belong, for almost the entire rest of its history, to Parliament.

The countryside before him rose gently to the horizon like a Greek amphitheatre, serenely detached from any other possible world that might exist beyond it. The palm of God’s hand. A consecrated landscape where hordes of tiny men gathered to perform the primitive rituals of war.

In reality, the numbers at Naseby were modest. Compared with 170,000 at Gettysburg or 190,000 at Waterloo or the 2,500,000 at the Battle of the Somme, the 30,000 souls on this bowl-like field were barely a football crowd. It occurred to Bryn that, of all the great encounters of the last few hundred years, only Saratoga – the battle that effectively won the American War of Independence against the British – had significantly fewer combatants. Yet when the conflict was joined, it all came to pretty much the same thing. Brute force and a frantic frontal assault. Attempts to turn the flanks. Hand-to-hand tumult down the centre and a final terrible slaughter.

He crouched over his reporter’s notebook, trying to protect it from the rain while he scribbled a few of these thoughts down.

‘Seen anything interesting, sir?’

The man from the Vauxhall Astra Hatchback had strolled over to join him. He grinned cheerily at Bryn and waved at the scene in front of them.

‘You’d never believe anything could have happened here, could you? Too peaceful.’

He was tall and slim and with an accent that Bryn could not pin down. Not from these parts. And noticeably careful and precise.

‘All the same,’ said Bryn, glancing at the note he had just made, ‘this was the most important day in our history between Hastings and the Battle of Britain. We are looking at a field where thousands of Englishmen died for our future. Yours and mine.’

‘Oh yes. Do I not know it,’ said the man.

‘Really?’ said Bryn.

The man shrugged his shoulders and looked away.

‘Have you been here before?’

‘Oh yes, sir. Many times. Many times.’

But he seemed more concerned by the group of ramblers gathered around the Cromwell Monument at the top of the battlefield, particularly two who were pointing cameras in their direction.

‘What do you do?’ Bryn asked.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said the other.

‘Why do you come here so often?’

‘Police work, sir.’

‘You’re a policeman?’

‘Indeed I am.’

That was confirmed then. Bryn looked past him to the car parked in the lay-by. The driver’s door had been left wide open as if to invite some passing youth to try his luck.

‘Watching for diggers,’ said the policeman.

‘Diggers… ?’

‘Well, it’s a change from traffic duty, sir. People – might be walkers like those folk up there – they come here and dig up spent bullets, bits of bone, even the odd skull. You know it’s an offence to remove an archaeological object from a scheduled site?’

‘I did. But why are you telling me, officer?’

‘Well I shouldn’t, should I, sir? Might put you on your guard.’

He gave Bryn another grin, more gum than tooth, an expression unnervingly close to a snarl but which Bryn took – at least for the moment – to be friendly enough.

‘But I don’t need to do that, do I, sir? You’re here for some other purpose. That notebook, for instance.’

‘My notebook?’

‘I would say you’re writing a literary piece about the battle, am I right, sir?’

‘For a history magazine.’

‘Good money, sir?’

‘Very good money.’

The policeman nodded and grinned again. He seemed content.

‘At all events,’ he said, ‘if you see me around, don’t worry. You needn’t suppose it’s you I’m looking out for, sir.’

Bryn left him and squelched down into the ploughed field. He was in the middle of the Parliamentary lines and it was as sticky underfoot as in 1645. Both armies by this hour of the morning would have been drawn up for some time, waiting only for a few preliminaries to be completed before the big show could start. The Naseby village livestock wandering on the battleground needed to be cleared away. Then both sides had to be preached at one last time. Finally, there was the ritual of the Forlorn Hopes – what in the American Civil War were called skirmishers – men sent ahead of the main forces to scout up and down testing the opposition’s mettle.

Then at last: battle on. With drums rolling, trumpets blaring and mighty shoutes – the Royalists advanced. Slow, heavy going through the drizzle and the grey mud, pitted with waterholes where the Naseby villagers had dug out winter peat to warm their dwellings. Rolling musket fire followed by hand-to-hand mayhem. Pennants jerking above the cloud of smoke and sinking back into it. Oaths and frantic shouting and screams of death-agony.

It was all over in two hours. The advancing infantry at the centre struggled up the rise to the Parliamentary line. The cavalry attempted to turn the flanks, Cannae-style, on either side. Cromwell’s wing charged against the Royalist left, routed it, turned in on the engaged enemy infantry. And all this, while an audience of Naseby villagers watched the whole spectacle appreciatively from higher ground. Just as in 216 BC the folk of Cannae had gathered at the edge of their hilltop town to gape at the carnage in the plain below them.

A tractor with a truckful of black plastic-shrouded bales of hay trundled through, passing directly over that part of the field where the greatest numbers fell. Bryn recalled old local records of wandering pigs feeding for generations on the fragments of the dead poking through the Naseby soil; and of farmers ploughing up broken human bones and making a tidy income selling them to souvenir hunters.

A flock of starlings – disturbed by the tractor – rose out of the wheat stubble and curved away over the battlefield like a black veil tossed in the wind.

CHAPTER 4

Two of the ramblers detached themselves from the group by the Cromwell Monument and strolled down the field to Bryn.

‘Hi,’ said the first amiably.

They were as tall as the policeman and well-built and dressed expensively in tweeds, knee socks and leather walking boots – completely unmuddied and unsplashed. One had a top-of-the-range camera hanging from his neck. With their buzz cuts and perfect tans he hardly needed to hear them speak to guess at their nationality.

‘Saw you taking notes, dude,’ said the second.

‘Hi,’ said Bryn. ‘I’m writing a piece about the battle.’

The two nodded.

‘Just you?’

‘Just me. The lone reporter.’

More slow nodding of heads. They gazed around the landscape as if searching for another topic of conversation. A helicopter did a couple of clattering passes above their heads.

‘We’re on a walking holiday,’ said the first. ‘Wayne here has family in Northamptonshire… always wanted to visit the battlefield.’

‘It’s changed a bit,’ said Bryn.

‘How’s that?’

The others in the rambling group were already moving on but the Americans seemed reluctant to leave.

‘How’s it changed?’

Bryn closed his notebook and slipped his pencil back into the spiral binding. He checked his watch – for their benefit but (he hoped) discreetly enough to avoid offence.

‘Well,’ he said briskly, ‘there were no trees then and only one hedgerow. This was all open ground to the horizon. No fields of corn or farm buildings. No electrified fences.’

‘You’d never guess it,’ said the second American.

He wasn’t wrong. Compared with an American battlefield, the shortage of information was embarrassing. A few information boards of the kind you might expect on a nature trail to help you identify the butterflies and wild flowers. This was a site that had competed with the farmers and landowners; and lost.

They were not taking the hint. He relented. It was not his habit to discourage an audience and visiting Americans were always so polite and attentive. And these were an engaging and good-looking pair, with their smart outfits and easy smiles. Why should he not enlighten them?

Then two things interrupted him. The opening notes of "America the Beautiful" chimed out on a mobile and the older American turned away to take a call. Simultaneously at the top of the field, the leader of the rambling group leaned over a stile and started waving and shouting at them.

‘I’d say you’re wanted,’ said Bryn.

The men retreated towards the monument. The second seemed to be getting a running commentary on the other’s mobile conversation, but then he took the phone himself and they huddled over it, both talking vigorously. Bryn watched until they turned and strode back towards the road, breaking into a canter as they reached the end of the field and disappearing beyond the hedgerow. A car came down from the village. There was a big cat purr of something large and expensive and a few minutes later he caught a brief, flashing glimpse of an expensive black Lexus accelerating away towards the A14.

The policeman had also disappeared, the ramblers were away in the distance trudging along a track towards the west, even the helicopter was a dot on the horizon. He was – at long last – alone.

Only one hedgerow…

That’s what he had said to the Americans.

He pulled out a map he’d scanned from an old book, of the landscape as it had been in the mid seventeenth century. Half a mile or so directly in front of him was the single feature of the battlefield that had survived unchanged into the modern era: the Sulby Hedges – the sturdy parish boundary that set a western limit to the battlefield. The Hedges were also the occasion for a typically opportunistic manoeuvre by the Great Oliver. Even as the sun rose, he was secreting 600 dragoons behind them ready to pour enfilading fire into the enemy as soon as it advanced against the Parliamentary army.

But if the Hedges were still there they were invisible now beyond the farm buildings and the treelines and field borders, and in any case inaccessible from where he stood. It would need a detour of three miles to get to them.

He returned to his car and drove around the perimeter of the battlefield to the village of Sibbertoft and parked up by a diffident little sign pointing towards his objective. After that it was a long, sodden trudge with no other guidance than the occasional minatory Farm Property – Keep Out. In the misty distance he could just about make out the red and white cross of St George flapping on a flagpole by the Cromwell Monument and, since his map placed the Sulby Hedges on a straight line between Sibbertoft and the site of the monument, he aimed for that. For a long time the only signs of humanity were some broken down farm machinery and several stacks of round black polythene hay bales. But eventually he stumbled upon a stone-surfaced track running in from the west and followed that. It took him towards a small spinney and then petered out.

The rain had begun to pour down with a vengeance. A black cloud was moving across the battlefield from the east, and would probably pass within a few minutes – but for the time being he needed shelter. He spotted a vehicle parked just beyond the end of the track among the trees and easy to miss. A superannuated and battered American Ford, possibly an abandoned wreck – if it wasn’t too decayed he might climb inside till the rain eased. He pulled his overcoat collar up around his ears and scurried over.

It wasn’t until he reached the Ford that he realised there was someone still in it. A man in the driver’s seat, head lolling to one side, hands flopped languidly against the steering wheel. Asleep. Presumably.

Then he saw the pipe: a length of garden hose, one end crammed into the exhaust outlet at the back of the car, the other squeezed through a gap at the top of the rolled-up rear passenger window.

He wrenched at the driver’s door but it was locked; the same with all the others. He rooted around in the underbrush for a good-sized stone and managed to smash a way through the rear window, carefully insert his hand – though he nicked himself on the broken glass – and open the rear door from the inside. He reached through and