Free For Valour by Andy McNab Page A

crime scene. I needed to make distance.

17
    I legged it back to St Ellyw’s as quickly as possible after picking up what was left of my kit.
    The daysack had been well ventilated, but it would live to fight another day. The Samsung G3 had been terminated with extreme prejudice, along with the chicken casserole MRE pack. The manufacturers insisted these things could survive a 380-metre drop, but a blast of 7.62 was more than it could handle. The hotpot was miraculously unscathed.
    I picked up the Defender of the Faith way after midnight, as another wave of snow began its assault. All sign would have been covered on the hill by now.
    I headed west past Brecon until I found a couple of artics parked up in a layby and joined them. I left the engine on and the heater running while I warmed Trev’s hotpot in its FRH (flameless ration heater) pouch. MREs weren’t everybody’s favourite snack – as squaddies we’d called them Meals Refusing to Exit – but after freezing my arse off in the Black Mountains it ticked all the boxes. It also gave me something to munch as I thought about my next move.
    If Trev was right about the Head Shed killing their own, I had to ID who was loading the rounds. So the first step was to try to find out why. And since none of us knew who we could trust, I had to be more careful than he had been about the questions I needed to ask – and about selecting the people I could look to for answers.
    Harry’s boy was clearly off limits, so I had to go a few different routes. And I didn’t have much time. I hadn’t broadcast my presence back in the UK, but I reckoned it wouldn’t be long before whoever had wanted Trev dead managed to put two and two together and come after me.
    When I’d finished eating, I unfurled my Gore-Tex hood, put on my gloves and got my head down in the driver’s seat. That way I could stay as close as I could to what little warmth was leaking out of the heating vent.
    It wasn’t the Ritz, but it beat the shit out of lying in a snowdrift with my brains dripping off a nearby tree.

PART THREE
    1

St Francis Xavier’s Roman Catholic Church, Powys
    Thursday, 26 January

08.13 hrs
    I’d always steered clear of confession.
    I could see the attraction of wiping the slate clean with a few Hail Marys, but I’d done some things over the years that I wasn’t proud of, and had never felt comfortable with the idea of spilling the details. The secret of keeping things secret was never, ever, to share them with anyone else.
    I didn’t care about people standing in judgement against me, I just preferred not to give them any extra sticks to beat me with. Whoever said, ‘Knowledge is power,’ knew what they were talking about.
    I’d given Anna the edited version of my life, of course, but she hadn’t bought it. She’d seen me in the shit a good few times, and with her journo hat on she was brilliant at uncovering stuff people wanted to hide. From the moment I met her, I’d had the slightly scary feeling that she understood me a whole lot better than I understood myself. Slightly scary because I discovered that it was one of the many things I really, really liked about being with her.
    The only other person I’d allowed anywhere near the truth was Father Mart. I trusted him completely – which was why I was now sitting in a little wooden box in the corner of a church about fifty Ks north of his cottage. I needed to bring him up to speed on the events of the last twenty-four hours, and find out if he could fill any of the gaps.
    The bench groaned as I shifted from one buttock to the other to try to make myself comfortable. Some hope. These places weren’t built for comfort. They were built for penance. But also for anonymity, which suited me fine right now.
    I couldn’t help wondering about the kind of exchanges that must have taken place through the perforated screen that separated the sinner from the priest. And if the magic ever worked.
    I ran a fingertip across a bit of