White corridor (8 page)

12

LACUNA

‘Where on earth are we?’ asked Arthur Bryant.

‘You’re the map reader, you should know,’ suggested May, switching on the windscreen wipers. ‘It’s starting to snow. That could slow us down a bit.’

Bryant dug into his astrakhan coat and withdrew a crumpled bag. ‘You’re always going on about what a good driver you are. Now’s your chance to prove it. Have a Milk Bottle. Or there are some pink sugar Shrimps.’ He rattled the bag at May.

‘No, thank you, they get stuck in my teeth. What was the last sign you saw?’

‘Windlesham. Or possibly Bagshot. Hang on, there’s one coming up on the left.’ Bryant wrapped his spectacle arms around his ears and squinted. ‘Hawley, Framley, Minley Manor, Hartley Wintney. The names of English towns are more like elocution exercises than real places. Listen to this: Tinkerton, Tapperton, Topley. Sounds like a ping-pong ball falling down a flight of steps. I say, look at that.’ He pointed through the windscreen. ‘Not often you see a green sky. Is that some kind of shepherd’s warning, I wonder?’

‘Not much traffic,’ May noted in puzzlement. ‘Turn on the radio.’

Bryant rolled the dial through a range of staticky channels, each less distinct than the last, but got a refreshing blast of Respighi on Radio Three and, on a local station, several women holding an urgent discussion about butter. ‘This isn’t Alma’s original radio,’ he explained. ‘I had to buy it from an Armenian man in the Caledonian Road who ran away with my change. There was a time when being a police officer used to count for something.’

‘I don’t understand.’ May took his eyes from the road, confused. ‘What happened to the original radio?’

‘Oh, it melted.’ Bryant sucked his sweet pensively. ‘I borrowed it from the van and wired it to a car battery for a party back in 1970. We were celebrating the anniversary of the Messina brothers being sent down, remember them? Five Maltese racketeers who ran an empire of brothels and streetwalkers across the West End after the war. The senior officers at Bow Street were full of stories about them running around armed with razors, hammers and coshes. The Messinas introduced the “short time” rule for London prostitutes, reducing their time with punters to ten minutes, working them from four
P.M
. to six
A.M
. until they were half dead. Eugenio Messina used to drive around Piccadilly in a yellow Rolls-Royce, checking that his girls weren’t leaning against walls, not that the gesture made him a gentleman. He just wanted to make sure they were working hard.’

‘I don’t see what this has to do with your melted radio—’

‘Some of the call girls heard we were holding a bash, and threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of the station house kitchen to remind us that we had ruined their livelihoods.’

‘So that’s how the radio—’

‘No, I’d put the radio on the cooker, not realising the grill was on. We almost choked to death on the fumes. Oh, we had a laugh in those days.’ He peered out at the passing fields. ‘Look at the snow falling in the trees; it’s so postcard-pretty out there. I’d forgotten how much I hate the countryside. All those rustic views and seasonal changes give me the willies.’

‘That’s because you’ve never spent time there,’ May replied.

‘Why would I? My family came from London. None of us had any business out here. Rural folk think they’re so superior, just because they have a village pub and a duck pond.’

May knew that his partner’s antipathy to the countryside stemmed from the lean times his parents had endured following the war, when their only work came from long days spent hop-picking in Kent. Locals had hated rowdy East-Enders piling down to disturb the peace in their charabancs. ‘The engine doesn’t sound quite right to me.’

‘I had it checked over only recently.’

‘A fully qualified mechanic, I hope.’

‘More of an astrologer,’ Bryant admitted.

‘He must have thought you were born under the sign of the mug, charging you to tie string around the distributor. Do me a favor and call Janice, would you?’ asked May. ‘Make sure everything’s all right.’

Bryant thumped away at his mobile and listened. ‘Janice?’ he shouted. ‘Are you there?’

‘You don’t need to keep checking on us,’ said Sergeant Longbright. ‘Everything’s fine. How’s your trip?’

‘Long motorways play havoc with a weak bladder, but we soldier on. I’ll call you at regular intervals.’

‘There’s really no need, I assure you.’

Longbright replaced the receiver and looked back at Giles Kershaw. ‘I didn’t say anything. I know how upset you must be, but what good would it do to mention it now? Mr Bryant can’t do anything from where he is. At least he didn’t ask if I was still at the unit.’

‘He could talk to Raymond about the matter; he could use his authority,’ Kershaw replied, dropping his head into his hands and allowing his thin blond hair to run through his fingers. ‘I can’t believe Oswald would do a thing like this. He told me I was the best assistant he’d had in years. Why would he refuse to recommend me for the position?’

‘He obviously doesn’t think you’re ready for it,’ said Longbright. ‘You know how demanding he is, you’ve been shadowing him for nearly a year now.’

‘So Finch steps down on Friday, and Land appoints an outsider to come in and take over. Someone who’s never worked with the unit before, and might decide to stay on forever. Oswald led me to believe the job was mine. He can’t do this to me. This is a specialist unit. All my training has been geared towards this work—where else can I go? You know it’s not fair, Janice. My career’s on the line here.’

‘Leave it for forty-eight hours, until the boys are back,’ Longbright suggested. ‘Nothing will happen before then. I’ll go in with them and see Raymond, but I warn you, Mr Bryant thinks you rely too much on technology and not enough on your natural instincts. He’s told you that before. You’ll need to convince him as well.’ She checked her watch. ‘You’d better go down to the Bayham Street Morgue. They brought someone in a few minutes ago. Caucasian female, early twenties, some kind of overdose, but she was found in suspicious circumstances. It’s probably nothing, but Raymond wants us to take care of it.’

Kershaw puffed his cheeks in annoyance. ‘The system’s down now. I thought we weren’t accepting any cases until the upgrade was finished.’

‘It’s not a referral; we’re just lending a hand. Oswald will be down there, Giles. You’re going to have to work alongside him without letting him know about what you’ve heard.’

‘So I have to help the man who just stepped on my promotion. That’s just great.’ Kershaw picked up his folders and stormed out of the office.

Longbright went to the window and looked out at the grey-green evening. Her bosses were right to remain aloof from the everyday problems of the office; it allowed them space to think. Instead, everyone came to her with their problems, and then expected her to take sides. Since he had announced his retirement, Oswald Finch had managed to upset everyone in the unit. Could it be he simply regretted making the decision to leave? If he could no longer make himself useful, what was left for him?

It looked like it was snowing outside. She pressed her hand against the radiator and discovered it was cold.
No heat, no computers, no investigations, and now Raymond has decided not to let us go home after all,
she thought.
What else can go wrong?

‘It’s snowing,’ said Meera, clearing a patch of condensation from the curved window in her office. ‘With any luck it’ll cover the tramps and they’ll freeze to death.’

‘There’s a touch of Margaret Thatcher in you,’ Colin Bimsley pointed out. ‘I love seeing snow; it freshens everything up. It even makes Camden Town look almost attractive. It’s beautiful.’

‘Not when you’re standing out in it.’ Mangeshkar remembered an incident from her childhood, when she spent the evening locked out on the balcony of the flats while her stepfather beat the hell out of her mother. She had been wearing a T-shirt and track suit bottoms, and the snow had fallen steadily enough to whiten her hair. Eventually a neighbour had taken the frozen girl in and warmed her beside the fire. She had not cried or complained, but never spoke to her mother’s husband again, even after he begged her to forgive him. She had no love of snow. Watching Bimsley’s goggle-eyed reaction to the weather merely convinced her that he was part Labrador. The fact that they expected her to work with someone so hopelessly optimistic and soft showed how badly they had misjudged her abilities. With a groan of fury, she stalked out of the office in search of Giles Kershaw, slamming the door hard behind her.

Raymond Land sat in his office and tipped back his chair, balancing his heels on the edge of his desk. This was how he liked it, so quiet you could hear mice scampering in the skirting boards and Crippen straining in his litter tray. He had been right to keep his staff on at the unit. It was time to stop treating them with kid gloves.

Only the angry traffic in the street below could remind him that he was still stranded here, in an ugly district of the city at a miserable time of the year. If only he had taken a post far, far away from the junkies and nutters of North London, somewhere in the southern hemisphere, where the sun remained visible even in the depth of winter, and the locals smiled respectfully instead of waving two fingers at you. Actually, he would have been grateful to find the Agincourt V sign still in use, but few of the street traders in Camden could manage English and only mustered a phlegmy expectoration as his officers passed.

He tipped his chair back further and placed his hands behind his head, savouring the first moments of what he fully expected to be the calmest three days of his career at the PCU. No tabloid-baiting lunatics to track down, no white witches, weepy clairvoyants, or chanting necromancers to chuck out of Bryant’s room, nothing but the gentle drift of a half-empty office running on a skeleton crew. Faraday had failed to close the unit down entirely, but at least both Bryant and May were out of his hair for the first time in many years. For once there was no-one telling him what to do, or what he ought to have done, or completely ignoring him. Land felt in charge once more, and at a time when there was so little work on that even he could not be accused of making a mistake.

Smiling to himself, he stretched and tipped his chair just a little bit too far.

13

HUNTING

Madeline ran down the steep slope of the road, her trainers sliding on loose gravel. She knew that her head start would not last long.

In the time it took Johann to dry and clothe himself, or even understand what she had realised about him, she could be back at the hotel. Steep staircases and flood gutters traversed the winding roads, allowing her to cut a path down the hillside to the palm-lined
Basse Corniche
. She reached sea level without a car passing her, and ran around the granite wall that lined the cliff in the direction of her hotel. Even though it was early, the village was dormant and lifeless. Only the occasional motorbike tore past her, waiters heading home from Monte Carlo to Nice.

She was shocked to discover that she still had the envelope with the passport and photographs gripped tightly in her hand, the proof of his guilt that would protect her from harm. What could she do now? He knew where she was staying, and there was nowhere else to go in a place as small as this.

She checked her watch and thought about the time it would take to rouse Ryan, pack, and check out. She could not remember how the winter train schedule operated, and did not want to wait on the exposed station platform, which could be seen from virtually everywhere in the village. The only alternative was to find a gendarme and convince him that this man was dangerous, but she could imagine how that conversation would go: ‘What were you doing with him in a house he’d broken into?’ ‘You made love to him while the owner lay dying in the upstairs room?’

She had already been warned about the local police treating outsiders with suspicion. He had not just stolen passports; he had stolen whole identities. Perhaps if she threw the photographic evidence away, into the bushes beside the railway track, he would leave her alone—but they were her only weapon against him.

Or he might ignore her, simply move on to another town and start again. How long had he been travelling about like this, burglarizing and killing? How many others had discovered his secret, and what had he done to them? He had shown gentility and thoughtfulness in her company. Or perhaps he had just been careful. Her husband had always demonstrated a capacity for violence, but Johann—or whatever his real name might be—had hidden his other self so completely that he had disarmed her natural inclination to suspicion.

She thought back to the day that Kate Summerton had shown her how to kill the moth, using only the power of her unconscious mind. When she had first visited the refuge, Kate had healed her and cared for her like any hospital nurse. It was what she had done for so many other women who had been bullied and beaten by their men. But later, the art of her healing had moved beyond salves and sticking plasters to something more spiritual, a personal training program that had allowed her to understand why men had always troubled and deceived her. Yet it seemed that even Kate had not been able to prevent it from happening again…

Heavy clouds far blacker than the night were rolling over the edge of the Savaric cliffs, and the first fat droplets of rain had started to fall, drawing up the scent of pine and earth. She reached L’Auberge des Anges and walked through the bright, empty bar. Mme Funes and her husband usually stayed in the back watching television when there were no diners or drinkers to serve.

She unlatched the door of her room quietly and found Ryan folded up in the corner of her bed. She packed around the sleeping boy, shoving everything into two small bags, placing the envelope with the passport and photographs into her shoulder purse. It was 9:12
P.M
. She thought there was a train at twenty-two minutes past, but could not be sure. There would probably not be another for an hour.

Ryan remained heavy and unmanageable, drifting in a fugue state from pyjamas to sweater and jeans without fully awakening. She needed to leave without disturbing Mme Funes, who would keep her talking, and tell others that she had left. The room bill could be mailed at a later date. Getting out of the front door, on the other side of the bar, would be the tricky part.

‘Ryan, I want you to be very quiet, okay? We don’t want anyone to know we’re going out.’

‘Where’s Johann?’ the boy asked sleepily. ‘Can he come with us?’

‘No, he has to work tonight. We’ll call him later.’ She hoisted Ryan’s bag onto her spare shoulder and led him down the stairs. The floorboards were covered in threadbare carpet, and creaked horribly.

‘Where are we going?’ he whispered.

‘We have to catch a train. We can’t stay here.’ He was about to speak again, but she cut him off. He was at the age when he demanded explanations for everything. ‘I’ll tell you all about it once we’re on our way, I promise.’ She would provide him with some invented excuse; there was no point in scaring him further.

At the foot of the stairs, she stopped and peered back through the hatch to the Funeses’ claustrophobically wallpapered lounge. She could hear the television playing, some announcer shouting ‘
Qui gagnera le grand prix de ce soir?
’—Mme Funes was addicted to game shows. When she opened the front door, a blast of rainy wind blew in, and she heard the old lady rising from her place before the TV. Pulling Ryan through the door, she closed it firmly and headed out across the forecourt in the direction of the yellow radiance marking the railway station. Streetlights obscured by branches caused patches of shadow to waver across the road like flittering bats.

The station platform was deserted, a sign that the next train was not due for some time yet. The timetable was almost impossible to decipher, but it appeared that they had missed a train heading all the way to Marseilles. There was a connection to Nice due in fifteen minutes. Ryan’s hand had grown cold in hers, and she knew he would soon start protesting. She was still deciding what to do when a crackle of gravel heralded the arrival of the stolen Mercedes in the station forecourt. Lifting her surprised son into her arms, she abandoned her bags and ran through the underpass beneath the track, climbing the staircase back to the main road.

Above them stood the village, its barred, unlit houses offering little refuge.

He saw her moving and reversed the car, but the parking area was too narrow to offer a turning circle. Not daring to look back, she carried on up the slope to the grand white houses cut in against the base of the cliff. All the villas had barred gates, automatic floodlights and entry-phones. Setting Ryan down, she tried the first buzzer she reached, but there was no answer.
Someone must be in,
she thought.
They can’t all be summer homes; somebody must live here
. She ran from bell to bell, slapping them with her palm, but they rang in darkened dead hallways, and no lights came on.

Somewhere a dog began barking, the sound echoing around the hills, but every villa was shuttered and dead, ghost buildings in a village that could only be brought to life by the warmth of summer.

Behind them, the sleek Mercedes coasted a curve and began its unhurried approach. There was nowhere for them to hide; the cliff rose on one side of the road, and bare walls lined the other. On their left, an alleyway overhung with pomegranate trees led to a pair of small houses built onto the steps, the remnants of the original village. Ryan resisted as she pulled him up towards the first front door. There was no doorbell or buzzer for the property, so she rapped with her knuckles.

At the base of the alley, the Mercedes halted as Johann ducked his head and watched them through the passenger window.

Madeline was sure she had seen a curtain twitch from the corner of her eye, but no-one came to answer her call. The sound of the car door opening propelled her to the second building, a lopsided two-floor house with peeling green shutters. She slapped at the door with her hand, calling ‘
S’il vous plaît! Au secours!
’ but there was silence within. He was striding up the alley stairs towards them now, calling to her, ‘Madeline, I have to talk with you.’

The door before her suddenly opened, and a miniscule old lady peered up at her from the gap. ‘Please, do you speak English?’ Madeline asked. ‘There is a man following us.’

‘
Alors, vous devez entrer
.’ She slipped the chain and widened the door as Madeline pushed Ryan forward. The old woman remembered the village as it had been before the arrival of the foreigners, when residents still took care of each other. For centuries these hills had offered refuge to smugglers, and old habits were slow to die.

‘We don’t want to get you into trouble,’ she insisted. ‘Is there another way out of the house?’

‘Madeline!’ She heard the call from the street. ‘I know where you are. I just want to talk.’

‘Est-ce votre mari?’
asked the old lady, squinting suspiciously from the window.

‘No, he is a burglar,’ she said, searching for her schoolgirl French.
‘Un cambrioleur.’

‘Je comprends. Venez avec moi, il y a une porte arrière.’
She led the way through a small Provence-style lounge crowded with dark turned wood and overstuffed floral chairs. They reached the kitchen as Johann started hammering at the door.
‘Allez, allez avec votre beau fils. Je me débarrasserai de lui. Toute vite.’

Madeline found herself in the dark rear garden of the house as the old woman closed the door on her. Gripping Ryan’s hand tightly, she pushed into the wet hibiscus bushes, searching for the back gate. As they slipped along the side of the house she could hear Johann arguing with the old woman at the front door, and prayed he would not hurt her. He was swearing loudly at her now, and she was shrieking back. Ryan yelled at her, complaining that she was hurting his arm as they hurtled back down the steps to the road.

The train had left Cap-d’Ail and was already coasting the headland as they ran towards the station. The underpass to the correct platform was too far away. ‘We’ll have to go over the line,’ she told Ryan. ‘Can you run?’

‘Mum, the barrier’s down. I can see the train coming.’

She swung him up into her arms before he could think further, and ran across the track as the light from the double-decked train illuminated the pine trees around them. Their bags were still lying on the platform. The sight of Johann appearing on the other side was cut off as the carriages flashed past and the train came to a stop. She prayed he would not have enough time to reach the underpass.

They boarded the train without tickets and found their way to an upstairs seat. She watched anxiously from the window as the train stayed at the platform, its door wide open.
Please,
she prayed,
let the doors close before he reaches us
.

As they finally pulled out of Eze-sur-Mer in the direction of Nice, she had no idea whether he had managed to board the train or not.