The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller by Peter May (learn to read books .TXT) 📕

mind’s eye, the image of the dead and bloodied Tuk. A frail figure, crumpled in his leather desk chair, his abject terror at the point of death somehow erasing long years of corruption – like a mortal sin forgiven at the confessional. Death had come as a release, for both of them, from the power of his evil. She turned and looked at the red, perspiring face of the Scotsman. ‘My driver will find the place.’ And for the first time she was curious. ‘You were a friend of her father?’

Blair would not accept the past tense. ‘I am a friend of her father – unless you know something I don’t. I heard Tuk tried to have him killed on the border.’

‘And failed. Jacques crossed safely into Cambodia. If anyone can be safe in Cambodia.’

‘You knew him, too, then?’

A faint smile crossed her lips. ‘Once. In another life, it seems.’

‘And Lisa?’

The smile faded. ‘I have done her great harm. I came tonight to plead for her life, though I knew I would fail.’

Blair regarded her with bewilderment and distaste. He guessed this was the woman Sarit had named as La Mère Grace, responsible – if Sarit was to be believed – for what amounted to Lisa’s sexual enslavement. Why should she care whether the girl lived or died? And yet clearly she did.

‘What is this place we’re going to? If Tuk wanted her dead, why not simply kill her?’

‘Tuk never did anything simply. It is his way of avenging himself on Mr Elliot, for having failed to kill him.’ She looked away at the endless dark buildings. ‘You have heard of snuff movies?’

Blair felt a chill run through him. ‘Yes.’

‘In Bangkok there is a live version. If you are rich enough, and sick enough, you can pay to see a girl beaten nearly to death, like a long, lingering foreplay, and then shot dead – like an orgasm.’

Blair found it difficult to speak. ‘And this is what he planned for Lisa?’

‘I told you. We may already be too late.’

He was trembling now. ‘If we are, I’ll kill you.’

‘If we are, I would not want to live.’

His anger was overlaid by confusion, like oil on water. ‘I don’t understand.’

She shook her head. ‘Neither do I.’

‘Madame, we are there.’ The chauffeur’s voice refocused their attention. The car drew to a stop and the engine idled gently in the darkness. They had drawn up in front of a large brick warehouse, devoid of any sign of light or life. It looked to Blair like all the others they had passed, with nothing to mark it out.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Follow me.’ Grace slipped from the car and her heels echoed back off the cobbles. Blair strode after her, down a narrow lane between rising walls that disappeared into the night sky. At the far end they could see lights twinkling on the black waters of the Chao Phraya. The place smelled damp and rotten.

Halfway along, a figure stepped out from the shadows of a small doorway to block their path. His white shirt caught the reflected light from the water beyond. The butt of a revolver glinted in his belt, but his face was still masked by shadow. There was surprise in his voice.

‘La Mère Grace.’

Her voice seemed remarkably calm. ‘Is it over?’

‘Not yet. Soon.’

‘Tuk said we could watch.’

‘I don’t think so.’ He stepped forward so that they saw his face for the first time, a squat, brutish face, a man of about forty. He cast a wary eye over Blair, then grinned dismissively back at Grace. ‘From what I hear you’re next. Who’s the old man?’

Blair listened impatiently to the exchange. ‘What’s he saying?’

‘He’s not going to let us in.’

The Thai did not expect such speed from the silver-haired foreigner. His hand never reached the revolver in his belt, and he barely had time to be surprised when his face smashed hard against the wall. A sharp inhalation drew blood into his throat, and he choked briefly before an arm encircled his head and a swift jerk snapped his spinal cord. His body went limp and Blair slid him gently to the ground.

Grace’s shock caught in her throat as she gasped, paralysed by the sight of the figure sprawled at her feet. Blair grabbed her arm, fingers biting into soft flesh. ‘Go, lady! Fucking move!’ She caught a glimpse of the pistol in his hand as he pushed her ahead of him, through the door and into the vast, damp interior. A tiny lamp, somewhere far overhead among unseen rafters, cast a feeble light in the emptiness of the warehouse. Grace kicked off her shoes and ran across the huge expanse of concrete floor, kicking up tiny clouds of dust, dodging the massive iron hooks that hung on great chains from the darkness above. The patter of her feet, the clatter of his shoes, the rasp of their breath, echoed around them like ghosts mocking them from the shadows, telling them they were too late.

On the far wall, a small lamp glowed beside a large, rectangular hole in the brick. As they reached it, Blair saw that it the opening to a lift shaft. The iron gates were drawn back, but there was no lift, only rusted metal cables reaching up and down into the void above and below. Grace pressed the lower of two buttons set in the wall below the lamp, and the cables went taut, as power coughed life into the pulley, and the whine of the summoned lift ascending surged up the shaft. They waited in tense, breathless silence as the seconds crawled agonisingly by. Somewhere, far away, Blair imagined he heard the voice of a girl screaming, but he couldn’t be sure it was not just one, among many, of the sounds issued by the rising lift. As it drew near ground level, light spilled out from the shaft, casting their shadows long across the dusty concrete.

Blair grabbed Grace’s arm and pulled her into the bright box of yellow