The noise, the excitement, the familiar yet unfamiliar smells, the green, black and red flags of pre-Gaddafi Libya everywhere – Tariq never felt more alive. He purposefully didn’t wash the blue ink from his forefinger, the ink that recorded that he had cast his vote. Aged twenty-two, in love and returned to his homeland, those heady months probably marked the zenith of Tariq’s happiness.
It all went to pot, of course. The militias wouldn’t put down their arms and started competing with each other in murderous turf wars. The Islamists and their allies rebelled after being defeated fairly and squarely in the 2014 elections, a plebiscite overseen by the United Nations. Their so-called Libya Dawn coalition seized Tripoli and the new government fled to the eastern city of Tobruk, shielded by their allies in Egypt. And into this power vacuum stepped Islamic State.
There’s a tap on the door. It’s the changing of the guard. The belching sports lover stands up wearily, pats down his crumpled suit, and without a word exchanges place with a younger man dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a white tennis shirt. The replacement has a trim moustache and watchful, intelligent eyes.
“Bon giorno,” he says. “Come stai?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“We shoulda rung the police… we shoulda rung the police… we shoulda rung the police…” Kylie’s voice is as shrill and insistent as a car alarm. Harry sits with his face in his hands, while Aafia stands expressionless by the kitchen doorway. Max feels strangely calm, detached even. Perhaps it’s the lack of sleep.
“Anyone know the Swiss for 999?” he asks.
“Fer fuck’s sake, your mate’s dead. Call the fucking police.”
“Not helpful,” murmurs Aafia as she steps over to the window and pulls the edge of the curtain slightly to one side. It still looks like night out there.
Harry stands up, pushing his chair screeching back on the floor tiles. Without a word he walks out of the room.
“Where are you going, Harry?” shouts Max.
“I’ll follow him,” says Aafia, and slips out after Harry.
“We gotta phone the police… we gotta phone the police… we gotta phone the police…” Kylie is looking at Max through mascara-smeared eyes.
“Kylie, do me a favour,” says Max, trying to keep his voice even. “Shut the fuck up.”
She stares at him for a second or two, picks up her coffee mug and smashes it on to the floor tiles. The door opens, and Aafia’s head pokes round.
“What was that?”
No one answers.
“Harry’s gone outside,” Aafia continues, holding up the pistol by its trigger guard. “And he left this.”
Max nods in acknowledgement and picks up his phone.
“Fuck… why can’t I get a signal? There was a signal last night.”
“Me neither,” says Kylie, who seems to have composed herself now that she’s smashed some crockery.
“I’ll try upstairs,” says Max.
“No use,” says Aafia. “I’ve tried that already. I’ve tried everywhere.”
* * *
Max is no longer afraid. In fact he feels exhilarated. He isn’t sure how long this sensation will last, but that isn’t something he’s asking himself at the moment. Yesterday, less than twenty-four hours ago, he had faced extinction and he found to his surprise that he wasn’t thinking about himself, or the people he would be leaving behind – Rachel or his sister or his parents.
Max’s thoughts were for a person he would be joining on the other side. He found himself thinking about his brother Nicky.
Joining Nicky in death, in the forever – oblivion not an afterlife – suddenly seemed like an attractive option, compelling even. Perhaps this was what he had always wanted since that day during his final year at university when his father had telephoned to tell him to come home at once. Something terrible had happened.
Max had been cruising to a mediocre law degree at the time – a third or a 2.2 if he got lucky. Law bored him but his father said it would be a key to all sorts of more interesting jobs. But for now university was more about the social life, the girlfriends, the drinking buddies and playing five-a-side football and cricket in the summer. Pimms in the sun. Two in the morning listening to the latest sounds, spliff smoking lazily in the ashtray. Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end.
He was in love for the first time, with a girl from Sunderland, who had been raised in a terrace house, whose dad worked in a car factory making Nissan Micras. She seemed incredibly exotic. The Pulp song Common People was still quite popular at the time, and the lyrics struck a chord.
Her name was Sarah and he liked her accent, and despite her constant teasing about Max being ‘posh’, she quite liked it that he was what she called upper class.
“Upper middle really,” he used to tell her. “Daddy’s only a surveyor.”
“Daddy’s only a surveyor,” she would mimic him.
“It’s true,” Max would reply. “He just got lucky. One little office block in the right place at the right time.” But Max and Sarah got it on in the sack, where it really mattered. And Max thought he loved her.
It ended that afternoon in April. Not straight away, there were phone calls and letters and stuff, but Max never went back to university. Sarah came to the funeral, which was incredibly intense, and stayed at the house for a couple of days afterwards, but it was kind of awkward. Max was all over the shop – his mother was completely in pieces, and she viewed Sarah with undisguised hostility. Who, or rather what, had he dragged into the house at this incredibly difficult time?
Sarah was quite sweet about it all really, but he could see that their worlds would never really come together. Not in these circumstances anyway. He drove her to the station and promised to write when his head was in a better place. Neither of them wrote, though, and he heard years later that she had shacked up with a friend of his. He didn’t think anything came of it though.
He jacked in his stupid law degree; he never saw any of his uni friends again – except Harry, of course, but then he didn’t really count Harry as a uni friend. They had never hung out, just silently acknowledged each other’s presence, or exchanged a few memories about school.
Max had gone travelling for a couple of months – to Thailand and India – got sick, came back, and watched a lot of telly. His mother was shot to pieces at this time, drinking like a fish and hardly ever sober. Some of the things she said. But then maybe she always had them in her mind and now, in her grief, it was all coming out.
“I told you to look after Nicky,” she would berate him, which was true. “It’s your fault.”
It was his fucking fault? How so?
She had actually confided in him a year earlier that Nicky was always getting drunk or worse. “Keep an eye on him, won’t you, Max? Be the big brother.”
He had said “Yes, of course,” but then he was away at Uni and anyway, seventeen-year-olds like Nicky get drunk, and worse. That’s what they do.
Anyway, it became clearer than it ever had been before that Nicky was the love of her life, and that Max was not, in any way, shape or form. His sister, Tash, was the apple of his father’s eye, so that just left poor old Max. Fuck them all.
Then he remembered something that his godfather, Mark, who worked in the City, had said to him at Nicky’s funeral. He hadn’t really taken it in at the time, but it suddenly felt very appealing. “Come and work in the City,” Mark had purred over the rim of a glass of funeral wine. He looked the part, sleek and expensively dressed, a belly fattened by a thousand business lunches. “That’s where the real money is to be made. I’ve got the contacts… just come and see me when you’re ready.” And, boy, was Max ready.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Harry steps outside, his breath immediately exploding into tendrils of water vapour illuminated by the light above the doorway. He instinctively sidles into the shadows and waits, listening. Anything is better than waiting in that house, like rats in a trap.
He’s
acting instinctively now. All he knows is that he has to get away from that chalet, and that he has to take the diamond with him. He can hear Aafia calling his name from inside the house, but otherwise there is only the muffled quiet you get with thick snow. He has pulled some of Simon’s skiing salopettes over his trousers – too short they ride above his ankles, exposing his inadequate city shoes, and grab at his crotch, but they are better than nothing. Simon’s skiing jacket is likewise too small, scrunching his shoulders and leaving his wrists open to the cold.
Now his eyes are acclimatising to the darkness, Harry realises that dawn is slowly emerging and the dark outlines of the mountains are beginning to make themselves known. Satisfied that there is no one in the immediate vicinity he slowly and stealthily begins to follow the mess of footprints – Max’s he assumes – around the side of the house and towards the front, halting in the shadow cast by the driveway security light.
Simon’s body is still sitting propped up by the driver’s door of his 4x4, a dusting of fresh snow along the tops of his legs, on his shoulders and on the top of his head. Harry emerges silently into the light and moves closer. The face seems grey, the mouth partly open and a distant – a very distant – look in the glassy eyes. The front of his torso is just one enormous stain of what looks like, in this light, chocolate brown, almost black, and his hands lie uselessly, palms upwards, by his sides. It’s the first dead person he has ever seen.
Harry hadn’t liked Simon – feared him really – but that seems irrelevant now. The man’s life has gone, and his stiffened shell is all that remains. Harry feels something he had never expected to feel towards Simon. Pity.
Why had he come outside? For a spliff before bedtime? That didn’t make sense; Simon was never one for smoking outside. Had the cocaine made him restless? Harry’s eyes rest on some dark drops on the snow near the bush, where they had been shielded from any fresh falls. Near them he can just make out a melted, yellowed circle where Simon must have taken his last piss.
Harry stands up from where he is crouching and gingerly makes his way over to the little pedestrian gate next to the electronically activated driveway barrier. Poking his head out so that he can see further down the road, he freezes at the sight of the rear end of a car, the hairs rising on his scalp. It’s an Audi. The Audi A6 he had seen in the garage in Rome? It could be.
“Fuck,” he exclaims involuntarily, pulling himself back into the camouflage of the hedge. He waits, suddenly aware that his bladder is bursting. There is no way that Harry is going to have a pee though, not after Simon’s example. He isn’t going to die with his cock out. He thinks about letting it run down his leg, but decides against pissing himself. He’ll wait.
Silence. Once again he pushes his head out around the hedge so that he can get a better view of the car. It is definitely an Audi A6 and it has Italian number plates, and a man is sitting in the kerbside passenger seat – some sort of thick antennae poking out of the driver’s window. Or is it a rifle barrel?
Just then the man’s head turns suddenly, so that he is in profile. It’s as if he has sensed Harry’s presence, or perhaps heard him. Harry doesn’t wait, but he turns and runs back past Simon’s body, round the side of the house, and into the shadow by the back door. He stops, waits and tries to hear anything above his rapid breathing.
Dawn is taking a firmer grip now, and Harry can see that the garden runs up a slope, abutting onto the garden of the neighbouring chalet. There’s only a low meshed fence dividing the two, even more scalable after snow has drifted up against it.
There’s a sort of evergreen shrub near the top of the slope and Harry makes his way towards that, his legs sinking in the soft virgin snow up to his knees. He’s leaving a trail that even a novice hunter could follow with the utmost ease – he just hopes that the man in the car has more important things on his mind.
It’s surprisingly hard going and Harry rests behind the shrub to survey the scene. There appears to be no movement from around the house, which is now revealing itself in the strengthening dawn light. Harry feels safe enough to lower his salopettes, unbutton his flies and let out a steaming stream of piss.
The last splash is just cutting into the snow when he spots the figure walking purposefully around the back of the house. Harry’s not sure but the figure seems to have some sort of rifle strung across his shoulder.
The figure appears to be making an inspection of the doors and windows, and Harry hopes that he doesn’t turn and spot the churned snow leading to his hiding place. With a rifle he’d be able to pick off Harry with ease. Fuck! Why hadn’t he taken the gun?
Fuck Max and his stupid fucking plans to sell diamonds to the super-rich. “We’ll be proper rich… proper rich, Harry, do you know what that means?” he used to say of their concierge operation. Proper dead, more like.
But Harry knows what proper poor means – proper poor like his mum stuck in that god-awful village in Norfolk where nobody but a few local inbred landowners had any money. And the odd businessman like Nick Mooreland. The odd paedophile businessman like Nick Mooreland. There. He could say it now. He felt strangely liberated after his talk with Aafia last night, and he didn’t want to die now that he had tasted freedom.
Instinctively Harry pats the inside pocket where the diamond is nestled. He has his wallet with his credit cards, he has his passport. The gun was his parting gift to the others, a better chance of defending themselves against whoever killed Simon – that Omar character presumably. But if they are rats in a trap, then Harry will be the rat that survives.
His plan, such as it is, is to make his way into the centre of Verbier. He must catch the first train to Geneva, but when to contact the police? He can’t be caught up in any investigation – he has to get to Geneva and to get the diamond safely stored somewhere. He doesn’t want to lose the diamond again. Anyway, the others have phones so they can contact the police. Surely they’ve done it already. He pulls out his phone, the last of the ones that they were given by that man at the airport in Rome. God, that was only yesterday – only twenty-four hours ago. It has a healthy signal. The others will be all right.
The man has disappeared from sight. Shit! Where did he go? Harry looks over at the fence and reckons it’s about ten or fifteen metres, and there’s another, similar shrub to this one about another ten metres on the other side. He could laugh. This is the sort of situation he had painted for his school friends of his imaginary father, scrambling across Mount Tumbledown in the Falklands under Argentinian sniper fire.
Concentrate.
He’s running now. Or rather he’s crashing through the thick snow, stumbling, crawling and almost swimming at one point. The fence is easy enough to get over and he is almost at the shrub-hiding place when he hears a sharp crack in the snow about a metre or so behind him. Then another. The figure down below is firing at him. He can see the flash.
The shrub won’t afford much protection from bullets, and he passes it and he throws himself down beside a low structure half submerged in the snow. It’s a log store. Another bullet thumps into the earth beside him, and Harry squeezes himself against the wooden structure, trying to make himself as small as possible. Another round, this one smacking into a wooden upright less than a metre from Harry’s head.
And then it goes quiet. Harry can’t bring himself to stand up and take a look – Omar, or whoever it is down there, is probably waiting for him to do just that. It’s properly light now, but Harry’s view is restricted to the path he has forged along the slope. He can’t see the house.
His shoes offer no protection against the cold and wet, and his socks are soaked, his feet freezing. But the adrenaline is pumping and he can’t think about that now.
The neighbour’s house looks impossibly far off. A better bet would be to make for the next garden along, which is protected by a low stone wall. Without thinking too hard about it, he sets off at a furious ungainly waddle, expecting bullets to rain down on him at any second.
He makes the wall
in no time, throwing himself over and landing in the top of a rose bush, which snags his salopettes and the arm of his jacket. There must be a flower bed underneath all this snow. He pulls himself free, ripping both top and trousers in the process.
There are no shots this time as far as he can tell, but Harry’s presence has set a dog barking. He can see it now, chained up at the back of another identikit wooden ski chalet. The back door opens and the figure of an old woman appears, swiftly joined by a man. They stand there staring at Harry as he crouches behind their garden wall. Call the police, he finds himself muttering – don’t just stand there.
He waves idiotically and they go back inside, closing the door behind them. Thank God they didn’t let the dog off its chain, it’s an ugly great brute. Hopefully now they’ll call the police.
To the left of the house is a driveway that opens on the main road into the centre of Verbier. Keeping close to the wall, Harry makes his way down towards the house, towards the cage where the dog is going crazy now, yanking on its chain and slavering. Crouching low he runs across the back of the house towards the drive and then on to the main road.
An old-style VW camper van, pale orange and white, is making its way slowly – weirdly slowly, thinks Harry – in the direction of the town centre, and Harry sticks up a thumb, hitchhiker style. He used to hitch a lot as a teenager – it wasn’t something people seemed to do any more. If you don’t own a car then you’re a loser, and if you’re a loser why the hell would I give you a lift?
Sometimes he would even hitch back to Norfolk for the school holidays, as his classmates’ parents arrived in their Range Rovers and Mercedes. He’d save the train fare money that his mother had sent (God, how many hours of drudgery had that cost her?) and use it in the pub later.
The Concierge Page 17
