by Des Ekin
‘I understand perfectly, cherrykins. Well, yes, it’s true that I had a visit from her. She told me her story, too. Only I was much too clever to be taken in.’
‘When?’
‘The evening before you hit the streets with your story. That is, two days before the election.’
‘Tell me everything you can remember, Naomi. It’s very, very important.’
‘Okay. Well, I was writing up boring interviews with the party leaders’ families – you know, the usual crud that editors expect just before an election – when this woman came into reception and asked for me by name. Much against my better judgement, I invited her into my inner sanctum, and she gave me more or less the same spiel she gave you. Mind you, there were a few differences of detail, timing, that sort of thing, so she obviously didn’t take enough care when she prepared the scam.’
‘Such as?’
‘What do you mean, honeybun?’ Naomi looked vague. Her gaze drifted elsewhere.
‘Which details were different?’ snapped Hunter. Naomi looked stung. ‘I’m sorry, Naomi,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to sound abrupt. It’s just that this is very important to me.’
‘That’s okay, darling. I know these past few days haven’t been easy. Let me see. I’d really need to consult my notebook, which won’t be easy, as it’s lurking somewhere in the tertiary layer of the debris on my desk.’
‘What name did she use?’
‘She refused to give me a name. She certainly didn’t try to pass herself off as a frowsy librarian named Mags Jackson, if that’s what you’re thinking. But the basic details were exactly the same. Namely, Valentia pulls up late at night in a Toyota, abducts Kate Spain, drives off.’
‘Did you tape the conversation?’
‘Sorry, Hunter. I’m like yourself, an old-school hack who spent two years doing Pitman shorthand in evening class and likes showing it off.’
‘Did you check her story with the cops?’
‘Yes. They rubbished it.’ She signalled to the barman, who replenished her glass. ‘Gracias, Juan Carlos. So, you see, we had absolutely nothing to go on. No name, no corroboration. I typed up a memo to the editor, who sent it straight back with a Fifi.’
‘Fifi?’
‘It’s an instruction, darling. File It, Forget It.’ She shook her head. ‘So, naturally, I obeyed. Then, next morning, your magazine appeared with exactly the same interview and I was dragged out of my comfortable bed at the unearthly hour of eleven o’clock by an enraged editor who insisted it was all my fault that I’d missed the story of the decade. I spent the next twenty-four hours trying to make contact with the bloody woman, with the editor breathing threateningly down my neck. You know what editors are like.’
Hunter smiled.
‘She’d left me a contact address in Dublin, which I hope I can dig out for you,’ Naomi continued. ‘It’s in the same notebook. But it didn’t matter, because, of course, she wasn’t there when we rang the doorbell. Anyway, I cobbled together an “exclusive” for the morning paper based on my interview with her. It was already printing when Valentia made his surprise reappearance on TV. Talk about panic! We stopped the presses, changed the first two pages and burned about twenty thousand copies that had already been printed. We even had to call back two trucks that were halfway along the M1.’
‘So you were much too clever to be taken in?’ teased Hunter, repeating her own words without malice. She lobbed a cocktail stick at him.
‘Touché,’ she smiled. ‘Okay, so I was taken in, too. Which is why I’m so sympathetic to you, darling. There but for fortune, etcetera.’
Hunter was about to reply when a sudden shoulder-blow from behind made him lurch and spill his mineral water. He turned around angrily to see a scarlet face glaring at him.
Quickly Hunter turned away again. The last person he wanted to talk to was Cormac Falcarragh, political correspondent and propagandist for Joseph Valentia.
‘Hey,’ Falcarragh slurred, ‘what’s the matter, Hunter? You don’t want to talk to me?’
‘Later.’ Hunter faced him briefly and turned back to Naomi. ‘I’m having a private conversation.’
‘I’ve always wanted to tell you …’ Falcarragh, obviously very drunk, elbowed his way between them. ‘All my life, I’ve always wanted to tell you, Hunter, what a first-class shit you are. Now I don’t have to. Everybody knows it.’
He shoved his face so close that Hunter could make out the broken, purplish veins.
‘Joseph Valentia happens to be a friend of mine,’ Falcarragh said, covering Hunter’s face in a fine spray of saliva. ‘A very good and very dear friend. Very dear … very good …’ He broke off, apparently confused.
‘You’re having one of your turns, darling,’ Naomi reassured Falcarragh in a comforting holler. ‘Take one of the red tablets and go to bed for a while, and you’ll be right as rain.’
‘What’s your problem, Falcarragh?’ Hunter was getting annoyed.
‘No point talking to him. He doesn’t recognise you, dear.’ Naomi had switched from an aristocrat to a Sister in a nursing home for the addled and confused. ‘There are good and bad days, you know, and this is one of the bad ones …’
‘Shut up,’ snarled Falcarragh. ‘Stupid cow. Stupid illiterate bitch …’
‘Excuse me, Mr Falcarragh?’ With perfect timing, Dave the barman eased himself tactfully in front of the drunk. ‘Your taxi has arrived.’
‘What?’ Falcarragh looked even more bewildered.
‘The taxi you ordered earlier, sir. It’s arrived.’
‘But I din’ order any taxi.’
‘Yes, you did, Mr Falcarragh. You asked me to call one for you. You must have forgotten. Here we are, now, it’s this way. Now, tell me, did you have a coat? Which address will it be tonight, sir?’
As he talked, he was leading Falcarragh towards the door. Within a few moments, the diversion was over, except for the sound of a plaintive female voice complaining from the far corner: ‘Barman? Barman? I think that was actually my taxi …’
‘Good old Juan Carlos,’ smiled Naomi. ‘He’s so nice, he even makes you feel privileged to be thrown out. Now, how can I help you in your time of need, darling?’
‘Find that address for me.’ Hunter drained his mineral water and lifted the thick envelope of photos. ‘It may be another false trail, but it’s worth a try. In the meantime, I’ve got her photo right here. Perhaps you could take it and show it to as many people as you can. Somebody has to know the real identity of this woman and why she’s taken both of us for a ride.’
He opened the envelope, took out a few of the colour prints, and handed them to Naomi. She squinted at them, then rummaged in her enormous handbag and pulled out a pair of bifocals.
‘Hunter,’ she said slowly, ‘I hate to make your life more complicated than it is already.’
‘You didn’t, Naomi. Completely the opposite, in fact. It’s a great comfort to know that you met the same woman and –’
‘Hunter, shut up!’ Naomi’s voice was as loud as ever, but uncharacteristically sharp. The barroom conversation halted briefly and then resumed.
Hunter stared at her in blank incomprehension.
‘Just listen, will you?’ she said, pointing at the pictures of the woman who’d visited Hunter’s office under the name of Mags Jackson. ‘The hair is different, the shape of the face is different, the eyes and nose are different, and to cap it all, she’s at least ten years younger than the person I interviewed.’ She looked up, and he could read the frank confusion in her eyes.
‘Hunter – this isn’t the same woman. It isn’t the same woman at all.’
‘THIS is getting ridiculous,’ said Emma. ‘First there was one Mags Jackson. Then there were two. Now it looks as though there are three.’
Hunter pushed another coin into the phone box in the lobby of the pub. ‘Yes. I thought Naomi might be able to clear up the mystery, but it’s getting more complicated than ever. I’m even more confused than I was an h
our ago.’
‘And then there’s this 5K2 business,’ Emma said thoughtfully. ‘What could that be? Sounds like a computer virus or something.’
‘No, you’re thinking of Y2K.’
‘You’re right, I am. 5K2. A vitamin supplement? A mini-marathon? A robot from Star Wars?’
The pips sounded again and Hunter pushed in another pile of coins. Even by pub-phone standards, the Bick Iron’s phone seemed particularly hungry for cash.
‘Okay, let’s think about this for a moment,’ Emma said. ‘We’ve agreed we can discount the real Mags Jackson, the librarian who lives in Ardee Terrace. She was obviously just an innocent dupe whose name was used by the woman who approached us. We still have nothing on this second woman, the one you’re calling “the ghost”, except that she may be American. But who’s this third woman? The one who visited Naomi?’
‘I’ve absolutely no idea.’ Hunter’s voice was weary. ‘All I’ve got is a quick drawing that Naomi sketched for me.’ He reached into his portfolio and fished out a champagne-stained beermat with a line-drawing in blue ballpoint. ‘Well, it’s a cartoon caricature more than anything else. Naomi used to do that sort of thing as a sideline when she was at college.’
‘What’s she look like? The woman in the drawing, I mean.’
‘Early forties, I suppose, with tightly permed brown hair. Small, bright eyes. Sharp chin. Long pointy nose.’
‘Great. We’ll get the cops to put out an APB for somebody who looks like a goblin out of Tolkien.’
The pips sounded again. ‘I’ve run out of cash,’ Hunter shouted. ‘I’ll have to go.’
‘Send me a copy of the drawing along with the photos. And don’t worry, Hunter. We’ll crack this eventually.’
‘Of course we will.’ He tried to keep his tone optimistic, although he was far from confident.
‘Talk to you later.’
‘Yes. Talk to you later. How’s Robbie?’ he asked, just as the line went dead.
He shrugged and replaced the phone. Then he turned his back on the bright lights of the pub and walked slowly out into the icy darkness of the car park.
Chapter Twenty
AT first he thought it was a dog, the low black shape that squatted awkwardly in front of his Vespa. It was so dark at that end of the car park that he couldn’t really see anything; he could just distinguish the vague outline of an object that blocked the reflection from the feebly gleaming chromework.
Hunter quickened his pace across the soft muddy ground when he realised that the shape was human. Someone was kneeling in front of the Vespa, fiddling with the engine. Or maybe pilfering one of the bolt-on attachments. He glanced back towards the faraway wooden hut where the car-park supervisor had been on duty. The place was locked up and obviously empty. So much for security.
He broke into a run, but the soft mud absorbed his footsteps and the figure beside the Vespa didn’t even hear him until the last minute. He spun around to face Hunter, rising up to his full height in the same swift motion. Even in the dull half-light, Hunter recognised him – the purple birthmark, the shock of coarse hair, the killer eyes.
In the same fleeting moment, Hunter caught a glimpse of the ruins of his Vespa GT. It was a mess of tangled wires and molten metal. Beside it lay a tyre-lever, empty plastic jars containing what looked like chemical powders, and the burned remains of a magnesium strip. Chato Cook had done a thorough job. Years of work had been destroyed within a few minutes. Hunter’s treasured Gran Turismo was now an unsalvageable heap of junk.
For an instant the two men stared at each other, equally surprised.
It was Chato Cook who moved first, lunging his powerful frame towards Hunter, knocking him off balance, then grabbing him by the lapels of his jacket and halting his fall towards the ground.
Chato’s face was up close to his, so close that he could smell the stale stout and cigarettes on his breath. Hunter scrambled to regain balance, desperately trying to raise his arms to break the man’s hold on him.
But it was too late. The bullet head jerked backwards, away from Hunter’s face, then plunged forward like some predatory bird pecking at its prey. And as the forehead struck Hunter’s unprotected face, Chato Cook’s hands gripped harder on Hunter’s lapels and yanked him viciously forwards into the blow.
Hunter’s head exploded in pain, his eyes blinded, his nose filling with blood. It was hard to breathe. Looking downwards through a dizzy red haze, he was just in time to see Chato’s knee jerking upwards towards his groin. He corkscrewed aside, managing to deflect the blow towards his inner thigh. But the force behind the knee was so powerful that it still hurt like hell, and Hunter felt as though his thigh-bone had been shattered.
Then for a split second it was Chato who was off balance, knee raised, weight resting on one foot. Hunter, knowing he was fighting for his life, lashed out as hard as he could with his fist, feeling it crunch on hard bone. Wiping the blood from his eyes, he saw Chato toppling backwards across the Vespa, knocking it over, falling down with it. Chato grasping at the metal bodywork for support, but suddenly withdrawing his hand as though it were red-hot. Whatever corrosive substance he’d used to destroy the Vespa had burned and seared his flesh. Chato clutched at his maimed hand, bellowing in pain, temporarily disabled.
Hunter ran, not towards the faraway buildings, because he knew he’d never make it, but further into the darkness, towards the trees and bushes that lay beyond the boundary of the car park. Running blind, the blood pumping over his face, he dived across a wooden fence and rolled into the tangle of nettles and brambles. He felt thorns rip at his flesh and tear at his clothes as he plunged through the dense undergrowth in the darkness. Gasping for breath, he paused for a split second in his stride and heard Cook crashing through the undergrowth, only a few seconds behind him.
And then Chato was within reach, closing in on him, backing him against a tree, the black tyre-lever raised above his head. The heavy bar flashed downwards towards his skull. Hunter dived sideways to the ground at the last second, rolling out of reach as the metal lever smashed into a branch, savagely splitting the tender bark and splintering the wood.
Chato Cook cursed, kicking out as Hunter rolled over and over on the ground to escape. And suddenly there was no ground underneath him any more; Hunter was plunging downwards on an almost vertical grass slope, rolling faster and faster, unable to stop his fall. And it wasn’t dark any more, either; the blackness of the undergrowth had been replaced by a chaos of orange sodium lamps and halogen spotlights that seared his eyes, disappeared, returned again. Sliding down backwards, rolling around and around in a dizzy spin, Hunter grasped at tussocks and bushes in a vain attempt to slow himself down. And then, without warning, he landed shoulders-first on a hard surface of concrete and gravel, the impact knocking the breath from his lungs.
Dizzy, disorientated, he staggered to his feet. The ground beneath his feet was vibrating; the very air shook and shuddered around him. A car-horn screamed at him, yelled into his ear and disappeared in the distance. Hunter wiped the blood from his eyes, realising with a start that he had plummeted down the sheer slope of a highway embankment and was staggering blindly around in the near-side lane of a motorway.
All three lanes were packed with fast-moving traffic, travelling bumper to bumper at high speed. Cars zoomed past him in a blur, some swerving into the hard shoulder to avoid hitting him. Lorries appeared out of the red haze, filled his field of vision and roared past, missing him by inches.
And there on the slope was Chato Cook, half-running, half-sliding down the embankment, the tyre-lever still grasped in his hand, a look of obsessive determination in his eyes.
No going back. Hunter plunged outward across the three-lane highway, into the middle lane. The traffic was passing him on all sides. A giant articulated truck bore down on him, its horn howling a warning. Hunter hurled himself to the side as it thundered past, and found himself directly in the path of a red sports car. He could see the shock and fear on the fa
ce of the blond woman at the wheel as he appeared without warning just in front of her. Her brakes screamed, her horn blared, she hauled desperately at the steering-wheel. With a superhuman effort, she managed to scrape past him; but she was so close, he could almost smell her perfume.
He was nearly across. Just one lane to go. The lights were blinding him, angular shadows galloped across his field of vision, horns shrieked and faded away into the distance like dive-bombing Stukas. Another container truck came at him at eighty miles an hour in the fast lane, the driver open-mouthed and disbelieving. Hunter dived frantically across in front of it and felt the shock-wave of air hurl him into the central reservation.
Hunter scrambling across the gravel, diving over the steel crash-barrier, landing on his back in the long grass, gasping for air.
After a long time he rose to his feet again. The traffic still thundered past without a break, and through this torrent of steel he could see Chato Cook standing on the hard shoulder, staring across at him. Even Chato wasn’t crazy enough to try to cross a three-lane stream of 70mph traffic.
The passing vehicles made his face appear and disappear, flickering like a character caught in a strobe-light. Slowly, deliberately, Cook raised his maimed hand towards his neck and dragged his finger across his throat in an unmistakeable gesture. Even across three lanes of traffic, Hunter could lip-read his words.
You’re dead.
But I’m not, thought Hunter, as he greedily swallowed the cold November air and exhaled it into the frosty night in defiant plumes of silver. Against all the odds, I’m still alive. And despite your best efforts, despite all the efforts of your spook friends who camp outside my house in their Hiace vans, I’m going to stay that way. And you know what, Chato? You know what? I’m going to beat you all. I’m going to bloody win.
He held the man’s eyes, staring back without flinching, until Chato Cook turned abruptly and stalked away.
‘THERMITE,’ said Bernard Sauvage.
