Free Ghost Flight by Bear Grylls Page A

about it? Any trouble with the team? With Carson? The film company? Anything?’
    ‘You know how he was about the jungle: he loved it. He was so excited.’ A pause. ‘There was maybe one thing. It troubled me more than it did him. We used to joke about it. I met the team. There was this woman. A Russian. Irina. Irina Narov. Blonde. She thinks she is the world’s most beautiful woman. We didn’t hit it off.’
    ‘Go on,’ Jaeger prompted.
    She reflected for a moment. ‘It was almost as if she thought she was the natural-born leader; that she was better than him. Like she wanted to take it – take the expedition – away from him.’
    Jaeger made a mental note to get some deep background checks made on Irina Narov. He’d never heard of someone committing murder for such tenuous a reason. But hell, a lot was arguably at stake here: with global TV exposure, the promise of international fame and the potential fortune to follow.
    Maybe there was a motive after all.
     
    Jaeger pressed north, the Triumph eating up the miles.
    Somehow, oddly, the visit to Dulce had settled him. It had confirmed what he’d known in his heart – that all had been good in Andy Smith’s life. He hadn’t killed himself; he’d been killed. Now to trace the murderers.
    He’d left Dulce promising that if she or the kids needed anything – anything – she only had to call.
    It was a long drive from Tisbury to the Scottish borders.
    Jaeger had never quite understood why his great-uncle Joe had chosen to move there, so far from friends and family. He’d always felt that the man was hiding, but from what exactly he didn’t know. Buccleuch Fell, east of Langholm, lying below Hellmoor Loch – you could hardly find a more remote and tucked-away location and still be on planet earth.
    The Triumph was a hybrid road/off-road bike. By the time Jaeger turned on to the track that led up to Uncle Joe’s Cabin, as they’d always called it, he was very glad of it, too. He hit the first dusting of snow, and as the track climbed higher so the conditions worsened.
    Lying between Mossbrae Height and Law Kneis – each a 1,500-foot peak – the cabin nestled in a rare clearing in a vast expanse of forest, at close to a thousand feet. Jaeger could tell from the thick layer of snow that no one had driven this way for many a day now.
    He had a box of groceries strapped to the bike’s rack – milk, eggs, bacon, sausages, porridge oats, bread. He’d done a pit stop at Westmorland services, one of the last before he’d turned off the M6. By the time he pulled into Great Uncle Joe’s clearing, he was using both his feet to stabilise the bike, as it slewed through humped snowdrifts a foot deep or more.
    In the summer, this place was something close to paradise. Jaeger, Ruth and Luke had found it hard to keep away.
    But in the long months of the winter . . .
    Three decades back, Great Uncle Joe had bought this land off the Forestry Commission. He’d built the cabin pretty much single-handedly – though it was far too sumptuous to warrant the name. He’d diverted a stream on to the land, and excavated a series of small lakes, one cascading into the other. All around had been landscaped into an eco-paradise, complete with shaded corners for growing vegetables.
    With solar panels and a wood-burning stove, plus wind-generated power, it was close to self-sufficient. There was no phone and no mobile signal, so Jaeger hadn’t been able to call through in advance. A thick stream of white smoke billowed from the steel chimney pipe that ran up the side of the cabin; the firewood came free from the forest, and generally the cabin stayed toasty.
    At ninety-five years of age, Great Uncle Joe had need of the warmth, especially when the weather turned as bad as it had now.
    Jaeger parked up, crunched through the snowdrifts and hammered on the door. He had to knock a good few times before a voice could be heard from inside.
    ‘All right, all right!’ There was the