Westwind

by Ian Rankin

‘Paul?’ he called. Then he pushed the door and let it sweep open on its silent hinges. But the bathroom was empty. He felt momentary relief, though he couldn’t say exactly what he had thought he would find. Then his neck prickled again. Paul wouldn’t have left knowing that Hepton was on his way. He would have stayed close to his room. He wouldn’t have let Harry take him away without a struggle. Not unless he’d been drugged …

  The woman from the front desk was standing at the bedroom door, with the attendant peering over her shoulder.

  ‘He’s not here,’ she said.

  ‘So where is he?’ Hepton’s voice was loud, and the woman recoiled a little.

  ‘The stool from beside the bed’s not there either,’ she said. ‘Maybe he’s taken it into the garden …’

  ‘I’ll go and look,’ said the attendant, skipping away, glad perhaps of a little bit of action. Hepton was back in the corridor again. He examined the other doors. Three, like Vincent’s, were unmarked. Other bedrooms, he supposed. And one was marked Stores.

  ‘Where else might they have gone to talk?’ Hepton asked the woman.

  ‘Well, there’s the television room, of course, but it’s not ideal for conversation. Some of our patients are slightly deaf, and they like the volume turned up. Then there’s the morning room and the library.’

  ‘Library?’

  ‘Downstairs. It’s usually empty. But I’m sure I would have seen them go in there. They’d have had to go through reception to get to it.’

  ‘Would you check anyway?’ The woman seemed doubtful. Hepton tried a smile. ‘Please?’ he said. ‘It’s very urgent that I talk to Mr Vincent.’

  She hesitated. ‘Very well then,’ she said, and turned and walked back along the corridor.

  Hepton stared into Vincent’s room. Where the hell could they be? Wait, though: a building like this would need a fire escape, wouldn’t it? He walked back along the corridor and continued past the staircase. Just around the next corner was a door marked EMERGENCY STAIRS. He smiled and pushed it open.

  He was standing at the top of an enclosed stairwell, its steps winding and made of concrete. There was a window looking out onto the hospital’s rear car park. He glanced at the dozen or so cars and saw the black Sierra parked there. He smiled again. Then he heard a sound from below him. Heels scuffing on stairs.

  ‘Harry?’ he called. He started to descend, then stopped. There was no sound now from below. ‘Harry?’ he repeated. He listened and heard the sound again. Footsteps, not descending now but climbing. Coming towards him. He was about to approach them, but something about the sound stopped him, something distinctly ominous. The steps were slow and even, and he could hear only one pair of feet. No Paul, then. Only a woman’s heels. Silently he retreated a few steps until he was back beside the door and staring down the twelve or so steps to where the staircase turned a corner. There was a shadow on the wall below him. Then a figure appeared on the lower landing.

  Harry.

  And she was holding a gun.

  Her face was devoid of emotion as she saw him and angled the gun up towards his head. Hepton dived towards the door and yanked it open. He threw himself through it and into the corridor, looking to left and right. He heard Harry’s feet quickening on the stairs behind him and ran back along the corridor. The receptionist was standing at the top of the main staircase.

  ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘I’ve looked, but there’s no sign—’

  ‘Get back downstairs!’ yelled Hepton, startling her. Then he was past her, running towards Paul Vincent’s room. He realised that he should have pushed past her and down the stairs, well away from Harry and her gun. But there were people downstairs, lots of them. He couldn’t endanger all those lives. Very noble, Martin, he thought. But now what could he do? He stared at the door marked Stores. Beneath this sign was a smaller one indicating that a fire extinguisher was located within. Well, any weapon was better than none.

  He saw as he approached that the door was ever so slightly ajar. Behind him, he could hear the receptionist. She hadn’t gone downstairs; instead, she had followed him along the corridor. Any second now, Harry would round the corner and be upon them. Hepton pulled open the cupboard door.

  His eyes met a pair of legs. They were hanging a couple of feet above the ground, and on the floor lay an overturned stool. Hepton’s eyes started to move upwards, his teeth gritted in growing horror. The body’s arms hung limply; the head lolled at a tight angle. A thin metal tube, almost certainly carrying electrical wires for the building’s lighting, ran the breadth of the large cupboard’s ceiling, and this was what the green garden twine had been tied to.

  The green garden twine that was cutting into Paul Vincent’s neck.

  His face was purple, eyes and tongue bulging obscenely. Somewhere behind Hepton the receptionist shrieked. He leapt forward and wrapped his arms around Vincent’s legs, lifting them a little higher, then reached up with a finger to pull the twine out from where it had cut into the neck.

  ‘Get me scissors!’ he hissed. ‘Or a knife – anything that’ll cut this.’

  The woman had a small pair of nail scissors in her pocket and handed these to him. After that initial shriek, she had quickly calmed. Hepton supposed she had seen this sort of thing before, working here. He cut the twine and eased Paul Vincent’s body down, bringing it out into the hall and laying it on the carpeted floor.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ the woman was saying. ‘I never realised the poor man might—’

  ‘He wouldn’t!’ Hepton snapped back at her. ‘He wouldn’t do this.’

  He looked past the receptionist, along to the end of the corridor, and saw Harry standing there. Their eyes met, then she turned swiftly and was gone, back towards the emergency stairs.

  ‘Wait!’ he shouted.

  The receptionist saw him staring and glanced back along the corridor too, but saw nothing. No doubt she thought him emotional and in shock.

  Hepton stared at Paul Vincent, then at where Harry had been standing. He made his decision and bent over his friend, pushing Paul’s swollen tongue out of the way and sticking two fingers into the young man’s mouth, searching down towards the throat, checking if there was a clear flow for air. Then he pinched Paul’s nose and gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  ‘Come on, Paul,’ he said. He pushed down with both hands on Vincent’s chest, once, twice, three times. Pause. Once, twice, three times again. He checked for a pulse. There wasn’t one – but then there was! Faint, but there.

  ‘Is he …?’

  Hepton turned to the woman. ‘Go get a doctor,’ he hissed.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She hurried away.

  Hepton kept trying the mishmash of life-saving techniques, remembering bits of each of them from the training sessions he had attended more than a year ago. He pushed down hard again on Vincent’s chest with the heels of his hands. There was a palpable groan from the inert body. He crawled back to Vincent’s head, his mouth close to the deep-red ear.

  ‘Paul? Paul, it’s Martin. Come on, Paul. You’re going to be fine. Paul?’

  The opaque eyes seemed to clear, the mouth trying to form words. But the voice box was shattered, the windpipe raw. Hepton brought his own ear close to Vincent’s mouth. There were white threads of saliva at the edges, hanging from swollen lips. The word was hoarse, barely recognisable as speech. But Hepton heard it, where others might have thought it mere babble.

  ‘Arrus … Arrus … Arrosss …’

  And then the breath seemed to rattle within, the eyes became filmy, and Hepton could only crouch there, staring at his friend. The doctor was rushing along the corridor now, and would do what he could. It was already too late, Hepton knew. His own ministrations had served only to extend the waning life by a moment. But in that precious moment, Paul Vincent had given him something. A word.

  Argos.

  He left the body, rising slowly to his feet. Then he remembered Harry, and turned on his heel. He ran along the corridor, swung round the
corner, pushed open the door to the stairs. He didn’t mind now, didn’t care if he ran straight into her and her gun. All he held in his mind was burning rage. But a glance through the window showed him that the black Sierra had gone. He leaned his forehead against the glass and closed his eyes.

  ‘Paul,’ he whispered. Then he began to cry.

  14

  They sat him on a sagging chesterfield sofa in the musty library, declared the room off-limits to the inquisitive patients and gave him sweet tea to drink. Meanwhile, Paul Vincent’s body was being laid out on the bed in his room, his possessions gathered together, his family informed. A tragic suicide: that was what it would become. But Hepton, sipping his tea, knew this was not the truth. A policeman came to see him, a detective in plain clothes. Hepton told him about Harry.

  ‘Yes,’ the detective said. ‘Mrs Collins on reception said Mr Vincent had had a visitor.’

  ‘She killed him.’

  The detective raised one eyebrow. He had already been informed that Hepton was in shock.

  ‘She killed him,’ Hepton repeated. ‘She had a gun. I saw her.’

  ‘But Mr Vincent wasn’t killed with a gun,’ the detective said slowly, as though explaining something difficult to a child. ‘He hanged himself.’

  ‘No, she did it. She hung him up there.’

  The detective decided to ignore all this. He referred to his notebook. ‘The name we have for the visitor is a Miss Victoria Simmons.’

  Hepton shook his head. ‘Her name’s Harry.’

  ‘Harry?’ The detective sounded doubtful.

  ‘Short for Harriet.’

  ‘And her second name?’

  Hepton shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She’s something to do with the military. That’s what she told me, anyway. You can ask my boss, Mr Henry Fagin. I’ll give you his number …’

  ‘Yes, well, meantime just you rest, Mr Hepton. You’ve had a bit of a shock.’

  ‘I’m fine. But I’m telling you …’ He looked up at the policeman. A simple-looking face, disguising a simple-working mind. He shook his head. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Never mind.’

  The duty doctor gave him a couple of tablets, but Hepton refused them. He didn’t need calming down, or cheering up. He didn’t require the proffered lift home. He was quite capable of driving himself.

  Paul had given him a name: Argos. Perhaps the truth had been too obvious, too glaring, too outrageous. But now that he thought it over, it was quite true that the United States space shuttle Argos had been in space at the time Zephyr had malfunctioned. But Argos wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near Zephyr’s orbit. It had been a thousand or more miles away, launching another satellite. With Dreyfuss on board, now its only survivor. A coincidence? Paul had given him that one word because he had suspected Argos of interfering with Zephyr in some way. One person would know for sure.

  Dreyfuss.

  But how the hell could Hepton get to him? There had to be some way. The Foreign Office, perhaps. Their people in the United States would have access to him, surely? That might mean a trip to London …

  London.

  Of course! Jilly would have been keeping in touch with him. Hepton just knew she would. Partly from friendship – mostly from friendship, even – but partly because she had a nose for a story, and Dreyfuss was news. That was that then: he’d pack a bag and head for London. But first there were more questions to be asked of him, more tea to be served up and drunk. Why garden twine? Why suicide? Why by hanging? Why in a cupboard? He kept his answers to himself. Garden twine was strong. It wasn’t suicide, but murder. Hanging to make it look like suicide. A cupboard to prevent the body being found too quickly.

  Because Harry had known Hepton was on his way, and there hadn’t been much time. Not enough time for an overdose, and not enough time for an abduction. No one, of course, had seen anything. No one had heard anything No chair falling. No choking or kicking. It was a neat operation. Neat and tidy. Hepton couldn’t get Harry’s face out of his mind.

  Eventually they had to let him go. He gave his address in Louth, got into his car and drove off at a steady pace, picking up speed only when he was out of the nursing home’s gates, picking up more and more speed until he caught himself doing seventy. Too fast on these roads. Braking, slowing. He didn’t want there to be any other accidents.

  Parking outside the flat, though, locking the car door, he felt a fresh wave of foreboding wash over him. Harry had killed Paul to stop him saying anything about Zephyr and, more especially, about Argos. Hepton thought of Harry again: I like things neat and tidy. With Paul gone, he knew he himself had become a target. Perhaps the only target left.

  He stood at the bottom of the stairwell for a long time, listening. Then he climbed quietly to the first floor. He slowly pushed open his letter box and listened for sounds in the flat. There were none. Then he unlocked the mortise and the Yale lock and opened the door. There was a piece of paper lying on the floor of the hallway. He unfolded it and read: Need to speak with you. Please come to the Coach and Four, 7.30. Nick.

  Hepton looked at his watch. It was 7.25. He’d have to hurry; the Coach and Four was a good seven or eight minutes’ walk away. He’d never been to it before, there being two other pubs nearer the flat. He wondered why Nick wanted to meet him. Perhaps he had discovered something. Well, Hepton had things to tell him too, didn’t he? Things about Zephyr and Argos. Things about Paul Vincent. Things about his death.

  It hit him then, standing in the hall with the note in his hand. A huge tremor ran through him, and the strength left his body. He leaned against the wall for support and thought he was going to be sick. Was this what delayed shock felt like? He stumbled into the bathroom and ran cold water into the basin, splashing his face and neck. He wasn’t going to be sick; the feeling was passing. He had to be strong, for his own sake. And he wouldn’t be late for his appointment.

  There was only one real route to the Coach and Four. It took him up a narrow, cottage-lined street, a street he’d always admired. But the people who lived there these days weren’t farmhands or labourers or even small merchants. They were estate agents and accountants, most of them working in London during the week, coming here only at weekends. And as this wasn’t yet the weekend, the street was deserted. At the end of what might seem to some a cul-de-sac, he turned right into a narrower lane yet, which would bring him out across from the pub. It too was quiet; one side being workshops and garaging, the other the backs of some houses, high fencing protecting the privacy of the gardens. A few brave motorists used this lane as a shortcut, though its surface was rutted and booby-trapped with potholes. He could hear a car now, slowing in the street behind him, turning into the lane. But there was plenty of room for it to pass him.

  He turned to look at the car and saw the nose of the black Sierra as it started to speed towards him. Harry, clearly visible behind the windscreen, seemed to be enjoying the look of terror on his face. She gunned the vehicle forwards just as Hepton turned and ran.

  He was no judge of distance but reckoned that he couldn’t make the end of the lane before the car caught him. He quickly sought an open door to one of the workshops, some garage that hadn’t been locked up. But it was useless. The Sierra was only a few yards from him when he made up his mind. He braced himself against the metal door of one of the garages, then pushed off from it and sprinted across the line of the oncoming vehicle. Harry accelerated harder yet, but Hepton had judged it right, and he leapt at the high wall of one of the gardens, his fingers seeking the top edge of the brickwork. They found it, and he pulled himself upwards as the Sierra curved towards him, its front wing searing against the wall. He swung his legs upwards so that the roof of the car just missed them, and hung there, teeth gritted, thinking suddenly and absurdly of the multigym’s chinning bar.

  The Sierra screeched to a stop at the end of the lane, just as Hepton was about to drop back to the ground. Then its wheels spun and it started to reverse hard towards him. Christ, he couldn’t hang o
n much longer, and he hadn’t the strength to pull himself over the wall. But then the car stopped, idled for a moment.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Hepton turned his head and saw that a man had appeared from a gate in one of the garden fences. He was in his shirtsleeves and carried a folded newspaper, obviously having just been disturbed from an evening’s reading in his garden. Hepton dropped to the ground and watched the Sierra start forwards slowly, turning out of the lane and speeding away.

  Of course: there couldn’t be any witnesses, could there? It had to look like an accident. Hepton saw it all clearly. The note from Nick was a fake. She had chosen the pub because she’d known he had to walk along this lane to get to it. And in the lane there would be no escape, and no one to see the car hit him. But it wouldn’t have been hit-and-run. That might have looked too suspicious. No, she would have stopped and played the innocent. She would say he had jumped in front of the car, perhaps, and everyone would come to believe her, because it would be shown that Hepton was distraught, unstable after watching his friend die earlier in the day.

  Just another suicide.

  ‘I said, what’s going on?’

  Hepton snapped out of his reverie, went to the man and shook his hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, then began to jog back the way he had come, leaving the man standing there uncomprehending.

  He arrived at his car without further incident. They wouldn’t want his death to look suspicious, so he didn’t bother to check for bombs under the chassis or snipers on the rooftops. He just got in and drove, trembling throughout his body, heading south towards Boston and further on to Peterborough, and beyond that London.

  He stopped once for petrol and asked the attendant where he might find a telephone. There was a payphone on the wall outside the gents’. A man was coming out of the toilets, his face wet. Hepton had noticed a car parked beside the pumps. The man smiled.

  ‘Never any bloody paper in these places,’ he said, explaining the wet face. Hepton nodded. ‘Needed a bit of a splash, though,’ the man went on. ‘Driving to Leeds tonight. Bloody long way, but the roads are quieter at night than through the day. I’m a rep, you see. You get to know these tricks.’