by Medina, KT
But after Jakkleson’s suspected murder, he knew that he didn’t have a choice. He had hardly left his desk since making the call and suspending clearing, speaking to no one, just sitting, thinking.
He took a slug of Glenfiddich, winced as the acid liquid scorched down his throat. As he raised the glass to his lips for another, it slipped from his fingers, and although he made a grab for it, his co-ordination seemed to be off, and instead of catching it he just knocked it sideways. MacSween watched dully as the copper-coloured liquid spread over the desktop, soaking Jakkleson’s note.
It hadn’t been Huan.
Suddenly he swept the computer screen from the desk, sending it crashing to the floor. He had expected it to shatter, but it just bounced a couple of times and then lay there, intact, as if it was laughing at him for believing he could wipe away history, the White Crocodile, with one sweep of his arm.
Slumping forward in the chair, he dropped his head to his hands. For several seconds he remained like that, rocking backwards and forwards, grating his fingers across his scalp. Staggering to his feet, he grabbed the whisky bottle, stumbled over to the window and threw it open. He stood quite still, feeling the cool swell of unsettled air, listening to the thunder rumbling in the distance.
*
A light was on in the clapboard hut. As Tess neared it, the door swung open and a middle-aged man wearing an oil-stained vest and shorts emerged. His mop of blond hair was tied back from a tanned, lined face, and a smoking roll-up hung from the corner of his mouth. He squinted sullenly at her as she approached, with her hand outstretched.
‘Hi, I’m Tess Hardy, from MCT.’
He took a drag from the roll-up, blowing a cloud of smoke over her, and shook her hand briefly. ‘Dick Seymour.’
Tess took a step back. ‘I wanted to ask you about an emergency call we made to you on Monday morning. Monday just gone.’
He nodded slowly, his expression non-committal.
‘Early, around half past eight. You received a radio transmission from MCT asking you to evacuate a casualty from Koh Kroneg minefield.’
‘Yeah, I received the transmission.’
‘But the helicopter never came.’
‘I got another call cancelling the helicopter less than a minute after the first one. I hadn’t even started the rotors.’
‘But we didn’t cancel it. We needed it.’
He squinted past her, out across the runway. ‘You may not have cancelled it, love, but it was cancelled by MCT nonetheless.’
‘But we radioed again about ten minutes later, and there was no answer.’
‘I was in the air by then, answering an emergency call from Médecins Sans Frontières which came in a few minutes after your first one, so I wouldn’t have got the second call.’
‘Can you check?’
‘Check what?’
‘Your paperwork. Just to confirm.’
‘I don’t need to check any paperwork, love. I’ve got it all stored right here.’ He tapped a nicotine-stained finger to his temple. ‘I got a call from MCT House saying that the casualty wasn’t bad and that you’d take him to hospital by road instead.’
‘From MCT House? Not from the field, then? The call cancelling the helicopter wasn’t from the field?’
She saw a look of fraying patience cross his face. ‘From MCT House.’
She stared at him incredulously, her mind accelerating. ‘Who was it, sorry? Who phoned?’
Hawking some phlegm into his mouth, he spat on to the tarmac.
‘Your boss.’
Tess thought she hadn’t heard him right. ‘Who, sorry?’
‘Your boss. MacSween.’
‘Bob MacSween?’
‘That’s right.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Or if it wasn’t him, it was someone who can put on a bloody good Scottish accent.’
*
He could have taken any of the Land Cruisers: they were all his in the end, paid for with his sweat.
But he chose this one. Jakkleson’s. Returned this morning by the police, minus its wing mirrors, a perfect round coffee-coloured stain on the passenger seat where they had tossed Jakkleson’s baseball cap.
Penance.
For letting it get this far. He had put MCT, the clearance operation, above everything. Above Johnny, above Jakkleson, above those women and their babies. Been obsessive in his belief that nothing – nothing – was more important. Would lives have been saved if he had capitulated and called in the police earlier? If he had sat at his desk, like he had for the past twenty-four hours, and just thought – worked step by step through the possibilities – worked out who the White Crocodile could be? He knew what the answer was.
He twisted the key in the ignition and the engine fired with a boom so loud that it made him flinch. He felt like shit: headachy, sweat pooling in the cleft of his neck and ballooning under his arms despite the air conditioning which rattled and spat lukewarm air at him. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do, where he was going to go. To the police first, to tell them what he had worked out. And then? Home? Did he have a home any more?
All he knew was that he needed to escape from here, from the collapsing edifice of his life. But escape to where, to what?
He stared blankly ahead through the windscreen. He didn’t notice the pale figure standing in the middle of the drive until it was too late.
51
Manchester, England
The POLICE – DO NOT CROSS tape was still in place, hanging limply between the trees. Despite the familiar hum of the cars on the M60, the twinkling of office lights from Sharston industrial estate where nine-to-fivers would now be tidying their desks, there was a denseness to Rose Hill woods this evening, a night world, folded into the daylit landscape of south Manchester.
Shivering, DI Wessex ducked under the tape. He didn’t have a clear idea of why he had come back to the crime scene; hadn’t challenged the niggle in his mind that had pulled him back here, with logic.
Forensics had combed every centimetre of the woodland around the girl’s body. They had found nothing. No broken twigs, no footsteps, no tyre tracks. No signs at all, in fact, to indicate that she or anyone else had run through these trees.
He had been happy to sit out the raid on the brothel. Happy to let DS Viles direct the vice boys. If he scaled a tree, he fancied he would see them now, lined up on the pavement outside the brothel on Cheetham Hill Road, kitted up and psyched up, ready with the steel tubular Enforcer to take down the door, an armed unit for back-up – just in case.
It was warmer this evening than it had been for the past couple of days, and he felt clammy in his wool coat and scarf. Pulling off the scarf, he wrapped it around his hand and tapped his padded fist against his forehead a couple of times. How the hell had the girl got here?
He ducked instinctively as an aeroplane roared overhead suddenly, its belly almost grazing the tops of the trees, its landing lights casting the wood around him in cold white light as it passed. Heading towards Manchester City Airport, just a few miles south.
It’s a very similar pathology to that we see in road traffic accident victims. Massive internal injuries.
He looked up through the branches as another aircraft rumbled towards the airport. This one was smaller, not a jetliner but a private turbo-prop plane, perhaps owned by one of the executives who had colonised Manchester for its cheaper labour and office space. Or by one of the drugs gangs who could slip unchallenged through a busy commercial airport like Manchester in their £1,000 designer suits, while the baggage handlers and customs officers they’d paid off expedited their packages’ flight past customs.
The skin is badly scratched all over . . . it’s wood – living trees – that made the scratches.
It was as if her body had been teleported from Cambodia, straight to this urban wood.
That’s your department, Sherlock.
A private plane.
Jesus. How the hell could he have been so stupid?
52
&n
bsp; Alex wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t this. A dark, silent house. He knocked loudly and waited. The hum of voices and traffic from the street behind him was loud, but from inside there was nothing.
Stepping back, he surveyed the facade: a small, detached French colonial villa on a busy residential street near the centre of Battambang. Johnny liked the life, the fact that whatever the hour of the day or night there was always something going on in his neighbourhood. Alex remembered sitting in the garden with Johnny only a few weeks back, drinking whisky shots and discussing what the neighbours got up to at night. The gambling, the fucking, the drinking and the wife beating that Johnny witnessed in this microcosm of Battambang society. Rear Window from Hell, he called it.
But tonight the surrounding buildings were dark and quiet.
Pulling his collar up against the smattering of rain that had begun to fall, Alex walked down the side of the house, checking to see if any windows had been left unlocked: kitchen, dining room, Keav’s bedroom, a box room overlooking the side alley. He expected to see her sitting on the bed, reading or sewing, but though her light was on, the room was empty, her bed unslept-in. He reached the back garden. The doors and windows at the back of the house were also dark, the huge plate-glass doors which led into the sitting room shut and bolted by the looks of it. No way in, unless he smashed a window, which he didn’t want to do. Johnny’s call had given Alex an idea of the state he was in and the last thing he wanted was a bullet through the brain as a result of breaking and entering.
Stepping on to the patio, he pressed his face to the glass and looked into the sitting room. A woman lay on the floor, her head resting on a cushion. She could have been asleep, but there was something about the arrangement of her limbs that told Alex that he was too late to save Keav.
His gaze rose from the floor. What looked like a single black eye stared straight back at him. It took him a moment of squinting through the dark and rain to see Johnny’s face behind the eye, white and bloated and sick-looking. His eyes, washed-out blue shot with red, stared straight back at him, as if they’d seen a ghost. It took Alex a fraction of a second longer to realise that the black eye was the barrel of a pistol.
An avalanche of glass covered him as the bullet passed through the window. His chilled skin was slow to register the pain. Then the concrete slammed up to meet him.
*
The grounds of MCT House beyond the gate and the building itself looked, as she had expected, deserted. Glancing each way down the rain-drenched street to make sure that she was alone, she hauled herself over the gate and lowered herself silently on to the gravel drive.
The front door was unlocked. She hadn’t expected it to be.
When she stepped into the hall and locked the door behind her, she recognised the sounds and smells that met her. Those of an old, empty house, familiar this time: hot, dusty air; whispered creaks and groans magnified by the silence and by her own tension; the hollow echo of her footsteps on the wooden boards as she crossed to the stairs; the slide of the banister underneath her palm as she started to climb.
She tried MacSween’s office, but the door was locked. She knocked – couldn’t stop herself, though what the hell would she do if he opened it? – rested her ear against the rough wood and listened, but there was no sound from inside.
When she reached Jakkleson’s office, she switched on the desk lamp instead of the bare overhead bulb, so her presence would be less obvious to anyone outside. The weak cone of light illuminated a room as absurdly tidy as the first time she had seen it. The desk clear of documents, the notices on the board perfectly aligned, his family still smiling out from their silver frame, the vase of flowers, frangipani this time, drooping and sick.
Déjà vu.
Lowering herself gently into his chair, she flicked the on switch, waited for what felt like an eternity for the computer to boot up. The miniature egg timer emptied and refilled itself a couple of times before the ‘Danger!! Mines!!’ sign replaced it, casting a red glow in the darkened room.
Déjà vu.
A sudden shiver ran down her spine, a fleeting sense that someone was standing in the doorway behind her. MacSween? The doorway was empty, the dark landing beyond it quiet. Noiselessly, she breathed out, took a long draught of air back into her lungs, willing herself to relax. But she couldn’t shake the feeling. Pushing the chair back, she tiptoed to the door. The landing and stairs were empty, the hallway below also. The only sound was the computer’s operating system purring into the silence.
53
December 1990, England
The little boy’s ribs hurt when he breathed, but he didn’t think that any of them were broken. They had hurt like that before, but the hurt was just bruising and it had gone away after a few days. His head throbbed at the back where the man had held his hair and smashed his head against the floor.
But he couldn’t cry. Was too scared to make a sound.
The hitting and the loneliness felt much worse than before because this time his mother had done nothing. He was used to her lolling on the sofa with her eyes half closed, mouth slack, but she would protest, a bit at least, when the men beat him too viciously. Would stumble over and pull on their arms, tell them to leave the kid alone. He was used to her taking him to the doctor, saying that he had been in a fight at school, or fallen down the stairs – different doctors, different reasons – and he would nod when the doctor questioned him, because he loved his mummy. Was desperate for her to love him back. Now, he knew, there would be no more doctors’ trips.
He began to cry, but then he stopped himself. He took a breath and held on to it, looking out through the cracked window pane to the darkness outside fading into flinty winter daylight, snow falling hard now, imagining that he could fly out through the window like a bird, go anywhere he wanted, disappear into the grey sky for ever. But his gaze was caught by the bloodstain on the windowsill, where the man had cracked his head too hard and it had bled. Now that he’d seen it, his mind just gave up and refused to imagine, refused to take him anywhere. It left him in his room with his pain and fear and loneliness.
And it was much worse this time because he had seen the look on his mother’s face and in her eyes, and he knew that she had gone. Gone somewhere she wasn’t coming back from.
54
‘Jesus fucking Christ, Johnny, it’s Alex.’
His face was pressed to the concrete and he was breathing in blood and rainwater. He dared not move a muscle, had no idea if Johnny could hear him. He knew he had been hit in the left side, had felt the searing heat of the bullet as it passed through his flesh. But the adrenalin had dampened his feeling and the pain was bearable.
Reaching down gingerly, he felt around his middle for the wound, yelped when his fingers found the hole. It was a flesh wound, bloody and painful, but he had been lucky. A centimetre to the right and he would be living with one less kidney.
‘It’s me – Alex,’ he yelled again. ‘Put the fucking gun down.’
Warily, he raised himself on to his elbows – no second bullet, no sound at all over the whoosh of rain – and scrambled backwards fast until he was shielded by the wall of the house. He climbed slowly to his feet, clenching his teeth against the pain, crossed himself – God knows why, because he didn’t believe in any fucking God any more – and tilted sideways, so he could scan the room out of one eye. He couldn’t see anything for a moment, only bulky outlines in the darkness, but gradually his vision adjusted and his gaze found Johnny. He was sitting, leaning back against the sofa, but tipped to one side, as if he had been propped into position by someone else, then, like a rag doll, had slid off centre.
‘Johnny.’
Alex slapped his hand up and down the wall inside the door, groping for the light switch. He found it, and harsh electric light flooded the room. Johnny remained motionless, head sunk into his chest. He was still holding the pistol, but it was sagging against the floor, the fingers gripping it loose, almost as if he
had forgotten it was there. His other hand was lying in his lap, the towel bandaging it mottled with dried blood and pus.
Alex stepped inside the room. He passed by Keav’s body, and this close it was clear how she had died. A neat bullet hole in the centre of her forehead had turned her into a beautiful, alabaster Cyclops. He cursed himself for his stupidity. Could he have saved her if he had listened to Johnny’s plea for help earlier? Taken him back to the hospital and asked Dr Ung to give him drugs to calm his paranoia? He knew that the answer was probably yes, that he was almost as culpable for Keav’s death as Johnny was.
Dragging his gaze from her gelid features, he knelt in front of Johnny, wincing at the pain in his side, feeling a fresh gush of blood released by the movement.
‘Johnny.’
‘Alex. Mate.’
Johnny smiled and lifted his hand in a limp salute, let it fall. Alex glanced down. The muzzle of Johnny’s pistol was pointed straight at his groin. Slipping his hand to Johnny’s wrist, he twisted the pistol away from him. With his other hand he tried to uncurl Johnny’s fingers from the butt. Johnny flinched and jerked it savagely away.
‘NO! Need it!’ He raised his eyes to Alex’s. The whites were shot with red. ‘Need it . . . need to defend myself.’
‘You don’t need it. No one is going to hurt you.’
‘Hurt me? Kill me.’
‘No one is trying to kill you.’ Reaching out, he laid his hand over Johnny’s, on the pistol. Johnny’s eyes sparked with fury and he wrenched his arm away, but Alex held on.
‘Kill me,’ Johnny wailed.
Shaking his head, Alex uncurled Johnny’s fingers from the pistol: the index finger first, taking the tension in it against his own finger, releasing the pressure from the trigger.
‘Coming to kill me.’
