Frantically, Jake brought his bag up, just as the man swung the knife, and felt the knife blade sink into his bag. But his attacker’s fingers on his throat were like an iron claw, closing, strangling . . .
‘Oi!’
The shout came from down below.
Suddenly, the man’s grip was released, and then he was off running up the stairs. Jake looked down and saw a thickset man hurrying up.
‘Are you all right?’ asked the man.
‘Just about,’ said Jake. His voice sounded hoarse from where the man had tried to strangle him.
His rescuer shook his head.
‘Muggers!’ he said disgustedly. ‘More police here, that’s the answer! It’s all very well them being here in the middle of the day, but it’s this time of night those scum operate!’ He looked anxiously at Jake. ‘You sure you’re all right?’
‘Yes, thanks.’ Jake nodded. ‘Though I wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t come along. Did you see the other one?’
The man frowned.
‘The other one?’
‘Yes. There were two of them, but I knocked the other one down the stairs with my bag.’
‘Good for you!’ The man grinned. Then he frowned again. ‘But I didn’t see anyone else. He must have scarpered when he heard my cab pull up.’
‘Well, thanks,’ said Jake.
He felt the side of his bag. The knife wasn’t there. His attacker must have taken it.
Jake found his seat on the train and settled himself down for the long journey. There had been a sleeping berth available, but it would have meant sharing, and Jake didn’t fancy the idea of being trapped in a sleeping compartment with someone he didn’t know, who might be a drunk, or deranged, or snore loudly. He’d decided he’d rather spend the night trying to sleep in one of the comfortable seats.
As he sat down, his phone went. Another text: We warned you. Don’t go to Mull.
A sickening feeling went through him. So those guys hadn’t been muggers; it had been a deliberate attack on him. The man had tried to stab him. If Jake hadn’t used his bag to stop the knife, he’d be dead!
The attack didn’t have the style of an MI5 operation: two hooded youths. But a late-night mugging in London, a stabbing, could be passed off as just another statistic. But why? What was there on Mull that was so important that they were prepared to kill Jake to stop him getting there? And who were they?
Chapter 3
Jake didn’t get any sleep for the first part of the journey. He spent most of the night watching his phone, waiting for further text messages warning him off, but there were none.
He was also too frightened to go to sleep in case his mystery attackers had put someone on the train. If they could arrange the attack on him at Euston station, they could certainly put someone on the train to follow him, and kill him.
Finally, after what seemed an age, he managed to doze off as tiredness came over him. But even then, it was a fitful sleep, half awake, opening his eyes every few moments. By the time the train pulled into Glasgow Central station just after quarter past seven the next morning, Jake felt exhausted.
But soon, I’ll be on Mull, he told himself. Providing there are no more unpleasant surprises waiting for me on the way.
It was half past nine by the time Jake left the car-hire firm in Glasgow at the wheel of a small car. He’d been waiting outside their doors when they opened at eight thirty, but then a whole hour had been taken up with filling in forms.
No one attacked him as he left the forecourt. No one crashed into him. No one seemed to be watching him; but then that was difficult to be sure of in a city as busy as Glasgow.
The motorway through Glasgow was a nightmare for Jake, with intersections every half a mile or so, and traffic criss-crossing lanes. Once he was out of the city and heading along the road winding round Loch Lomond, he felt he could relax. He didn’t spot any particular vehicle in his rear-view mirror as he drove. No one seemed to be following him. He was on his way.
As he drove he thought about Lauren, and how their lives had brought them to this. They’d met the year before, when Jake had been a trainee press officer at the Department of Science in London, and Lauren was a second-year science student at London University. It was love at first sight, and for six months Jake had been the happiest man in London, thinking their love was for ever. And then he’d ruined it.
A friend of Lauren’s was getting married, and he and Lauren had gone to the wedding ceremony and the reception. It had seemed to Jake that Lauren spent an awful lot of time talking to some rugby-playing bloke she knew. Too much time. Smiling at him, laughing, touching his arm, even flicking her fingers through his hair as she pretended to examine his scalp for nits. Robert was his name. Robert the rugby player. And Jake had got fed up with it. And he did the unforgivable. He went off and found one of the bridesmaids, who’d already given him the eye earlier during the ceremony, and he’d got off with her in the bushes behind the drinks tent. Where Lauren had discovered them when she’d come looking for him.