Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(26)

There were some awkward moments while they all stared at each other. The newcomer was in his early sixties, dressed in a leather jacket over a hoodie over a massively-thick knitted sweater, what seemed to be several metres of scarf wound round his neck. He had tiny, annoyed eyes under bristling badgery eyebrows, and an old-fashioned lumberjack-style hipster beard.

“Fritz,” he said. “We spoke.”

“Indeed we did,” Rudi said. “Are you hungry? Can we get you anything? A pastry, perhaps?”

“You mentioned money,” Fritz said. His English was heavily-accented.

“I did,” Rudi agreed again. “If you’d care to check, you’ll find a small addition to your bank balance.”

Fritz took his phone out, thumbed a sequence of numbers, swept through a couple of menus, read the screen. He looked at Rudi and raised his eyebrows.

“For your time,” Rudi told him. “I’ll transfer the rest, if your story’s interesting enough.”

Fritz put his phone away. “Three weeks ago,” he said. “Everything’s puttering along nicely, then all of a sudden we get this order.”

“Out of the blue,” Rudi said. “Urgent.”

Fritz nodded. He looked at Gwen.

“My friend can be trusted,” Rudi assured him. “Although the money isn’t hers.”

Fritz pouted. “A kilometre of fencing,” he said. “In ten-metre sections. Five metres tall.”

“That’s a lot of fencing,” Rudi noted. “Did your employers have that much in stock?”

“Business has been slow lately,” Fritz said. “We had a big contract, an office renovation, but they ran out of money and left us with the fencing we’d manufactured. My boss was sick of it; he wanted to sell it for scrap and start again, stupid bastard.”

“There must have been a contract, though? Were you never paid?”

“The firm doing the renovations went bust; it’s still in the courts.”

“But you wouldn’t need a kilometre of fencing for a building site,” Rudi said, and Gwen got the sudden impression that the firm Fritz worked for must be teetering on the brink of disaster, mainly because his boss had made some very poor business decisions.

“Do you want to hear the story?” Fritz asked. “Or shall I call up a spreadsheet of our accounts?”

Rudi smiled and made an after you gesture.

“So we get the word,” Fritz went on grumpily. “A kilometre of close-woven mesh, so-and-so tall, buyer to collect. Boss went wild, never seen him smile so much.”

“But the buyer never collected?”

Fritz shook his head. “Got the word a couple of days later, there’d been some kind of f*ckup and could we deliver for them.”

“That’s interesting. Did they say why?”

“No, but it was obvious later; they were just so f*cking poorly organised, they didn’t have enough transport of their own.”

“And where were you to deliver it to?” Rudi asked nonchalantly.

Fritz sat and looked at him.

“You make me sad, Fritz,” said Rudi. He took out his phone and thumb-typed quickly. “Here’s another third.”

Fritz checked his own phone and then stared at Rudi again.

“The rest when I’ve checked out your story,” said Rudi. “I would hate to believe you think I’m an idiot.”

Fritz sighed and took a slip of paper from his pocket. He put it on the table in front of him and pushed it across towards Rudi. “GPS coordinates,” he said.

Rudi left the slip where it was. He leaned his elbows on the table and smiled. “So,” he said. “To recap, this mysterious – and apparently quite wealthy – client failed to budget for sufficient transport and asked your firm to make the delivery. And you were one of the drivers?”

Fritz nodded. “The whole transport staff. We’d been sitting around drinking coffee for weeks, and then all of a sudden all six of us loaded up the trucks and took the fencing out there.” He nodded at the slip of paper.

“And what did you find when you got to the coordinates?” Rudi asked.

“Soldiers,” said Fritz. “The entire f*cking Army, looked like. In the middle of a forest. Trucks, helicopters, those modular office things they use as barracks. Fucking arseholes.”

“Trucks,” Rudi noted.

Fritz leaned forward and said quietly, “Sir, I have never seen so much fencing in one place. They must have run out of their own supply and had to get the rest wherever they could. It was piled everywhere.”

Rudi smiled again. “You must have developed quite an expert eye for fencing, during your career,” he said.

Fritz glared at him. “Listen, son,” he said, “I drive a f*cking truck. It’s what I do so I don’t have to live in a hedge. It’s not a f*cking career.”

Rudi tipped his head to one side.

“I don’t know if I saw all of it,” Fritz said. “What I did see, with the inventory we delivered, I reckon there was more than four kilometres of fencing.”

Rudi thought about it. “Did you see any sign of building work? Clearance work?”

Fritz shook his head.

Rudi reached out and took the slip of paper, read the figures written on it, put it in his pocket. “How did the soldiers seem?” he asked.