Fearless ; The Smoke Child

by Lee Stone

  But not anymore.

  He shook his head as meandered through the quiet of the desolate French quarter until he could hear the sea on the air, and until the fireflies in the mangroves came back into view. When he reached the beachside bar, he grabbed a cold beer and slid into a secluded table in the darkest corner. His mouth felt like a desert. Fear and adrenalin had left him dry as a bone, and the cool Angkor beer revived him. He sat for a few minutes doing little more than staring out to the black ocean and rolling the bottle between his fingers. He thumbed the moisture from the picture of the Angkor Wat temple on the label, for although the heat of the day had subsided, the humidity had not.

  He thought of Trista and wished for the millionth time she was with him. It was almost a year since he slipped away from her in the middle of the night, and now he was alone. He had done it to protect her, but only God knew if she realized that. And when he saw the dead girl tonight, he had thought of Tris. Imagined what the Ukrainians would have done to her if he had stayed in England. Then he pushed all thoughts of her away to keep himself on an even keel and tried to make sense of what had happened over the last few hours.

  What the hell had happened to Kate Braganza?

  Lockhart looked out to the ocean and watched the soft glow of a tanker snailing across the black horizon. Kep was a sleepy backwater, and although The Happy was a rough-looking bar, the only trouble it knew was bar brawling and pick-pocketing. Not murder. Lockhart swallowed down the last of his beer and raised his bottle towards the bar. After a moment, the barman brought him another.

  ‘You like?’ he asked, placing the bottle on the wooden table in front of Lockhart and twisting it so that the label faced him. The flame from the tea-light on the table danced in his eyes, giving him a playful appearance. Lockhart worked hard to muster a smile of his own.

  ‘I like,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Angkor Wat Temple,’ the barman said. ‘Very beautiful. You been?’

  Lockhart shook his head wearily.

  ‘No.’

  Lockhart knew where this conversation was leading. Siem Reap, the strip of border territory where the Angkor Temple knitted into the lush forests, was a tourist magnet. Every barman knew a taxi driver who offered a special rate. But tomorrow would bring questions about Kate Braganza’s death. There would be an investigation. He would have to surrender his passport, and somewhere, notes would be made about his presence in the country. Red flags. If the questioning took long enough, the Ukrainians might even catch up with him, and that was a risk Lockhart wasn’t prepared to take. He would find a flight out of Phnom Penh International in the morning. Destination: Anywhere.

  ‘My cousin lives near the temple,’ the barman smiled. ‘Look.’

  Sure enough, he pulled out a picture from his shirt pocket of a guy who looked very much like himself standing in front of a dilapidated tuk-tuk.

  ‘He can drive you, for a good price.’

  Lockhart smiled.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow?’

  He pulled a few banknotes from his short stack and looked up at the barman, waiting for him to name the price. It was money well spent, if it sent the local police looking in the wrong direction in the morning.

  The barman waved his hands, smiling.

  ‘Pay later,’ he said. ‘Pay tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll pay you now,’ Lockhart said, thinking of the guy in the photo. His tuk-tuk was on its last legs, and he deserved better than waiting in the sun for a fare that was never going to come. The barman thanked him, tucking the money into his shirt pocket.

  ‘I’ll meet your cousin at midday in the market square,’ Lockhart told him, and for the first time, the barman frowned.

  ‘Midday is too late for Angkor Wat.’

  Lockhart pushed back in his chair and shrugged.

  ‘Midday’s fine.’

  The barman nodded, pointing at the pictures of Angkor Wat on the two beer bottles and smiling.

  ‘Double trouble,’ he said.

  He slipped a check under the ashtray for the beer, gave a cursory swipe of his cloth over the wooden table, and then made his way back to the bar.

  Lockhart sucked on the new beer and then put the bottle down next to the empty. Double trouble. He remembered the dead men in the alleyway next to the Rabbit. Why had someone been following him the same day Kate was killed? Two men always meant a conspiracy. The world had known that since the Kennedy assassination. Anyone can be killed by a lone gunman. But if there’s a second shooter, then there must have been a plan. And if there is a plan, then there is a reason. And everything becomes more complicated.

  Tonight, there had been two men in the alleyway. One of them had followed him through the town, and the other had wrapped his fingers around Kate’s throat and wrung the life from her body. Lockhart had known her four days during which she had done nothing surprising. Said nothing out of the ordinary. And yet there had been nothing random about what had happened to her. Someone had wanted her dead.

  Lockhart looked around the quiet bar and remembered how they had been drinking here just a few hours earlier. He thought about her smile, and the way she shifted her gaze from one of his eyes to the other when she looked at him, like she was hoping to find a different part of his soul in each of them. In those moments of connection Lockhart had found an honesty in her, a fragility masked by her brash East Coast accent.

  From the moment they had met on the flight from New York, they had become easy friends. Now, as his thoughts began to percolate, he realized he had not really known her at all. No question she had her secrets. He remembered the linea nigra he had first spotted as she reached up for her luggage on the plane. The thin black line that stretched across her stomach was a sure mark that she had given birth, and probably not so long ago. And yet she was traveling without a child. There had been no reason for Lockhart to ask about that. None of his business. But now he wondered what else she had kept from him. In the last year Lockhart had learned to keep secrets. He had learned to keep moving without leaving tracks and to glance over his shoulder from time to time. He had learned to stay cautious and alert. Maybe that was why he and Kate had hit it off so easily. Maybe they were kindred spirits. Maybe she had been running too? Hiding in this coastal village at the ends of the earth?

  Hiding or not, someone had been chasing her. Lockhart knew that much for sure. Follow you, find the girl. That’s what Chhan had told him in the alleyway. But why had they needed to find her? She had only been in town for a couple of days; there had hardly been time for her to get into trouble. She had told him she had no connection with Cambodia. Her sister was traveling, and Kep had been the pin in the map where they had arranged to meet. That had been Kate’s story, and there had been no reason for Lockhart to question it until now.

  But who was she, really? And who were the men in the alleyway? Why had they killed her? And why had one of them had an eye gouged earlier in the evening? Lockhart slumped back into his chair, reaching over his shoulder and pulling at a knotted muscle in his back. He took a breath, waiting for a spark to ignite. Waiting for some extra piece of the picture to fall into place and make sense of it all. But nothing came. And nothing mattered. Because Kate Braganza was already dead. And that was the end. It was time to go home.

  Thousands of black-eyes crabs watched him cross the beach as he headed back to his hut, splitting like the Red Sea as he passed. The glow of the tanker was far off in the East now, and it was impossible to tell where the ocean ended and the starry sky began. It took him less than a minute to find the place he had rented, nestled in the green vegetation a few yards back from the beach. It was a traditional place, its sun bleached wooden frame sitting on bamboo stilts, as per Cambodian tradition. As he headed up from the gentle surf, Lockhart saw soft light spilling from the windows and cutting a golden path through the midnight sand. He slowed his pace. As he watched, he got a sense of movement and shadow inside the hut. He hadn’t left the light on. He was sure of that.


  He moved sideways, keeping out of the light that was spilling from the window. He looped around in the shadow and slipped his shoes off in the sand. Then he moved slowly and deliberately towards the front door. Three wooden steps bridged the gap between the sand and the door, and Lockhart tested each one gently before putting his full weight on it. The top step had taken the brunt of the hot Cambodian sun and was more warped than the others, and it creaked enough for him to stop still in the darkness and listen for a reaction behind the door. Three seconds. Nothing. Five seconds. Nothing. He breathed again and let his fingers reach out for the handle. He thought about the layout of the room and imagined from which direction someone might run at him when he opened the door. Then he took a breath, wrapped his fist around the cold metal handle, thrust the door open and burst decisively into the room, braced for whatever might come at him. But nothing did. The only person in the room stayed stone cold still. Ashen skinned and terrified into silence, with her knees drawn to her chest and her hand over her mouth, a woman was staring wide eyed at him from his bed. An impossible ghost of a woman.

  8

  A cold chill ran across Charlie Lockhart’s skin. For a moment he lost his footing and stumbled backwards against the dry wooden wall of the beach hut. He recognized the woman sitting on his bed. But she was impossible. The last time he had seen her, she had been dead. The last time he had seen her, the life had been crushed from her and her skin had turned pale and grey. Now she looked afraid. Terrified, even. But alive. The autumn tones had returned to her skin and the violent welts and bruises were gone from around her neck. Her lips were no longer blue and cold and as she looked at him her wide eyes registered a flash of recognition that confirmed the impossible: Kate Braganza was back from the dead.

  Lockhart’s mouth dropped and his brow furrowed as his mind tried to make sense of the woman in front of him. She kept her hand to her mouth, as if she didn’t trust herself not to scream. Lockhart said nothing. He knew she had died. There was no question about that. Whoever the girl in the Happy had been, Lockhart had pounded on her chest and tried in vain to revive her. He had felt her pulse ebb away. He had seen her dilated eyes and even more; he had known. He had known straight away that she was gone, because dead bodies are different. You can sense that their soul is missing. And her soul had gone.

  The woman in the hotel room had looked exactly like Kate, and yet that was impossible. Here was Kate, staring wide eyed at him from his bed. She was shivering with fear and shock, and he could see the adrenalin-fuelled pulse banging in her neck. There was no question that she was alive. And one thing is certain: dead people stay dead. So there could only be one explanation.

  ‘Twins?’

  Kate Braganza said nothing, but her eyes, which had been dazed and confused, now focused in on him. And since her eyes had narrowed slightly in recognition when he walked through the doorway, and since she had found her way to his beach hut, it was reasonable to assume that the woman alive on the bed was Kate, and the woman dead in the hotel was her sister.

  ‘Twins,’ she nodded eventually, her voice cracked and broken.

  ‘I found your sister at the Happy,’ Lockhart said. ‘I couldn’t save her.’

  Kate’s eyelids came down like lead shutters, and they took an eternity to pull open again. When they did, a tear spilled across her cheek.

  ‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘I was there. I saw them taking the body away.’

  Attachment is a dangerous thing, and over the last few months of traveling, Lockhart had disciplined himself to move on from the people he cared about the most. Parting was never easy, but tonight had been the worst. Kate had been killed, or so he had thought. Gone forever. Now here she was, back from the dead, and a part of him felt relieved. Elated. It was miraculous.

  And yet. And yet. He swallowed his feelings down and headed over to her on the bed. She flinched when he touched her, bewildered and unsure who to trust. But after a moment, Lockhart felt her yield to his touch and nestle into his arms. Whatever she had been coiling up inside her began to unwind. Her shoulders fell and her breathing became heavier until the breathing became sobbing. She sobbed for a long time until she was worn out and her eyes closed completely. Lockhart pulled a blanket over her legs and let her sleep. He had a hundred questions, but his instinct was to let her rest. He sat with his back against the wall, his eyes on the door and his ears focused on the smallest sounds.

  She twisted closer to him as she fell deeper into sleep, wrapping herself around him like a question mark. Lockhart reached above the bed and switched off the light and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark. Faces came to him in the gloom. The guy with the ponytail was dead in the alley with Chhan, but how many more of them were there? Lockhart needed to move on, but until he knew that, how could he leave Kate mourning her sister on her own? He couldn’t. Simple as that. He sat awake listening to the sounds of insects and waves, questions coming and going as the moon slowly moved across the sky. The corresponding shadows slowly orbited around the sparse room, and Lockhart kept returning to one question more than any other. What if they came for her again?

  9

  Lockhart was packed long before sunrise, his few possessions bundled into his rucksack. The easiest way to the airport would be by bike, assuming that Kate could ride. When the sun came up, they would get on the road and head for Phnom Penh. He would watch her onto the first flight back to New York, and then he would take then next flight to anywhere for himself. She woke when the warm sun rose high enough to shaft through the window slats and onto her pale skin. Sleep hadn’t washed the haunted look from her face, and Lockhart watched the fear return as she remembered where she was and what had happened. He turned his back on her and busied himself at a Calor stove in the corner of the hut, giving her the space to pull herself together.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asked over his shoulder.

  She hummed a little and shifted under the cotton sheets, which Lockhart took as a yes. He added a little more water to the Bialetti, one of his few luxuries, and set it on the flame.

  ‘We need to talk,’ he said.

  Kate breathed out and pulled the sheets a little closer around her.

  ‘I don’t want to talk.’

  ‘Even so.’

  Her eyes begged him not to re-open last night’s wounds, but she knew that Lockhart was right. She rubbed at her forehead as if she was hoping to erase the memories of the previous day.

  ‘She was your sister, right?’ Lockhart asked.

  Kate nodded.

  ‘Yeah,’ she breathed.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not your fault,’ she said, but her voice was distant.

  ‘Were they looking for her, or you?’

  No answer.

  ‘You have to tell me,’ Lockhart pushed.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The smell of fresh coffee began to percolate through the air, bitter and European, the way it would have done during Kep’s colonial past.

  ‘Well then, it must have been her,’ Lockhart told her. ‘That guy turned up at The Happy looking for something. If you don’t know what they wanted, then it must have had something to do with Matilda.’

  Kate paused before shrugging and trying unsuccessfully to meet Lockhart’s gaze. He had clear cornflower eyes, and when she looked into them she had the unnerving feeling that he could see straight into her soul. Still, he didn’t challenge her. Instead, he returned to the coffee.

  ‘We have to leave,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘This morning.’

  The noise of the Moka pot on the Calor flame had changed. The heat had forced the boiling water through the coffee and into the top chamber, ready to drink. Lockhart turned back to the stove and turned down the gas.

  ‘I have to bury her,’ Kate whispered.

  Lockhart thought about it as he poured the coffee and turned back to her, handing her a beaten old teacup.

  ‘Thank you, Charlie.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he said, and he t
ook a sip of the hot black espresso.

  Kate watched him, waiting for his response.

  ‘Listen,’ he said after a moment. ‘You’ve got to think about the living, not the dead. You’ve got to think about yourself.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Someone killed your sister for a reason,’ Lockhart said. ‘I don’t want them coming for you next, okay? The sooner we get on the road, the less chance they’ll come looking for you.’

  He watched her face as she sipped the coffee. She should have looked afraid, but she didn’t. She looked glum. She looked resigned to it all, whatever it was.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Lockhart asked.

  An answer played across her lips for a moment, but then she thought better of it and swallowed it back down.

  ‘We have to bury my sister,’ she said again.

  ‘Listen,’ Lockhart told her. ‘There is nothing you can do for her.’

  She looked away.

  ‘The police won’t release the body until they finish investigating, and that could be weeks. When they’ve finished, it won’t be in any state to repatriate.’

  Something inside Kate finally snapped. She let out a long moan and put her head in her hands.

  ‘It should be me,’ she said hoarsely. ‘She came out here for me, and now she’s… I don’t even know where they’ve taken her body.’

  She looked lost.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lockhart said. ‘But we can’t help her. There’s nothing we can do for her. But I can help you. I can get you back on a plane to New York tonight. You’ll be safe once you get back home.’

  Kate laughed a hollow, desperate laugh that halted when they heard voices outside the hut. And the voices were getting louder.