Page 35 of Four of Hearts

‘He told me who he was. Told me everything.’

Harry’s legs lost all feeling and he felt as if he might just drop like a sack of spuds.

‘I don’t know what to say. He... I...’

Harry’s voice broke. He saw out of the corner of his eye that Ben and Liz were hugging each other, both of them crying.

‘Well, I do,’ said Grace.

Harry looked into the eyes of his wife, and saw the only life he ever wanted, then braced himself for the thwack to the head he knew he deserved.

‘You do? What?’ he asked.

Grace leaned in.

‘He’s absolutely not invited to the wedding,’ she whispered.

Harry threw his arms around the woman he loved.

FOURTEEN

Harry was sitting in his favourite chair in the corner of the bar at the Fountain Inn, in Hawes, and sipping on a truly wonderful pint of Gamekeeper. The eventful evenings of the stag and hen dos were now almost two weeks behind them. He was as relieved as he was unnerved by the fact that, in less than twenty-four hours, the celebration of his and Grace’s, and Ben and Liz’s, marriages would be well underway.

It was too late now to make any changes to the plans, so they’d just have to go with it and hope for the best. The only thing that really worried him was Dave’s goats, because if they escaped, and he fully expected them to, then he wasn’t going to be rushing off after them to bring them back.

Grace was back at home, and Harry, still rather baffled by why he’d agreed to it, was staying over at the Fountain itself, on the orders of Mandy, who owned and ran the place with her husband, Angus.

‘You can’t be staying at home with Grace the night before!’ she’d said, and it had been very clear to Harry that she wasn’t going to listen to anyone but herself on the matter. ‘You’ll be staying here, and I’ll not hear any more about it. Honestly, what were you thinking? You’d be seeing her in her wedding dressbefore she’d even left the house, never mind walked down the aisle! And what about you, Harry? You’ll be wanting to save that suit of yours as a surprise as well, won’t you? Of course you will! So, that’s decided then. I’ll book you in!’

And she had, and here Harry was, three pints in and on with pint four, belly full of lasagne, garlic bread and chips.

He wasn’t alone. Sitting with him, and making very slow progress with a half pint of Falconer, was Dave, along with Dave’s Catterick mate, Smithy, who, much to Harry’s surprise, was drinking pints of water. He was the only one of the three of them who’d eaten, Dave and Smithy joining him after he’d polished the very generous portions away.

After the night when Liz and Grace had been kidnapped, Harry had heard little about what Smithy had got up to, mainly because Dave had insisted that he needed to hear it all from the man himself. Now that he was, he was having a hard time believing it.

Smithy was a wiry man, with a face almost as craggy as Harry’s. He had a good story in him, and was just cagey enough about his past to make Harry suspect that the man’s military life didn’t sit with the usual regiments.

‘So, you saw that Grace and Liz weren’t with them, and still went ahead anyway?’

Harry needed to hear it all again, just to make sure he’d not missed any of the details.

‘Well, it’s a bit of a laugh, isn’t it?’ said Smithy. ‘Reckon they all fair shat themselves when they saw us standing across the road, the way ahead blocked by a couple of knackered old Land Rovers. No point taking anything decent to something like that, so just grabbed what we could.’

‘A bit of a laugh?’ Harry wasn’t so sure.

‘The best bit though was when we cut off their exit with the Pinzgauer. That was brilliant!’

‘They didn’t resist?’

‘Didn’t give them chance. It’s amazing how convincing you can be in the middle of the night, especially if you’re kitted out right and your face is all camo’d up. Plus, there’s always the advantage of numbers, isn’t there? Only three of them, against six of us.’

Harry was trying to get his head around how his cousin must’ve felt when he’d been asked to get out of his car by Smithy and his pal.

‘And after that you...’

‘Blindfolded them, zip-tied their wrists behind their backs, bundled them into the back of the truck, and drove them round and round for a few hours, just to make sure they were knackered and properly travel sick. Then we dragged them into this old barn, and gave them a bit of a scare.’

The glint Harry saw in Smithy’s eye gave him just enough indication as to what the man meant bybit of a scare.