The Good Men

Chapter 20

A head-sized block of chalk careened down the cliff face, spraying arrow shards with every ricochet. The crack of stone on stone echoed into the night. A fulmar, startled from its roost, shrieked away towards the sea. With one last leap, the block somersaulted through the air and splintered into a dozen pieces a yard ahead of John's boots.

John peeked out from the overhang. The beach was littered with such rockfalls, the soft chalk no match for the corrosive attack of wind and rain and salt. An occupational hazard. Everyone got hit at some point. You just had to hope the pieces weren't too big or too sharp. And pray it wasn't the advance guard of one of the major slides that periodically sliced away entire sections of cliff face.

John cursed, mostly himself, and not for the first time.

What the hell was he doing here?

It was guilt, mainly. The daily, nagging shame every time he saw Tom poking at the fire embers from his chair, or watched Martha kneading out the bread, sweat on her brow, worry in her eyes.

Guilt and desperation. That he could find no legal, respectable way to make the money they needed, and spied no possibilities on the horizon.

Guilt and desperation and loyalty. Feeling Dan's anguish as he wrestled with the same burdens, recognising how much his friend needed this too.

John's stomach gurgled. It had been there for days, a liquid, bilious bubbling in his abdomen, while his mind raced, jumping from one scenario to another, most of them ending with him taking a bullet from Ranstead or dangling at the end of a rope.

Had he always felt like this on those teenage runs? Maybe. He'd been nervous, he remembered that much. Wondering if he'd make it safely back to his mother and their barren cottage. But he'd never seriously doubted. He'd been too young and dumb. Too convinced of his own immortality. Too confident in the wit of the Good Men. Too full of the joy of putting another one over on the Revenue. Too desperate for the treasure at run's end.

He scratched at his palms, nails digging at the crisscrossed lines, trying to ease the incessant itch. This should be nothing. Half a dozen years of war had hardly touched him. He was older, stronger. Wiser, supposedly. Perhaps that was the problem. He'd seen what a musket ball did to flesh and bone. The damage a swinging cavalry sabre could wreak. Had held men in his arms as the blood sluiced out of them. It was a sobering experience. The fight on the seafront, the escape over the rooftops – that had all been instinct. Anger and survival driven. Adrenaline charged. By God, it had felt good, no question. But this. This was premeditated madness.

And it was now time.

John edged out from the cliff shadows, one foot creeping after the other, probing for loose pebbles beneath his rag-wrapped boots. He pulled Tom's old sawn-off pistol from inside his jacket. Slid the long cone over the barrel. With his free hand sheltering the powder from the rain, John eased the hammer back until he heard the click. Ready.

He aimed the pistol towards the horizon, or where the horizon was supposed to be. The night was so dark the sea and sky had almost merged. Only the bucking white horses riding towards shore revealed which was which. Finger on the trigger and squeeze. Without a ball wedged down the muzzle there was no crack. Just a puff and, though he couldn't see it, a momentary flash of powder confined within the cone.

A moment later a large woven basket landed at John's side. He looked up. The rope, tied around the handle in one of Dan's near-Gordian knots, made a thin, dark trail back up the cliff face. The other end, he hoped, was attached to a wooden derrick secured in the ground at the top. Another rope, thinner than the first, hung beside the basket. John grabbed its end and tied it around his waist.