‘I’m fine here,’ I said.
‘Dry clothes in there,’ he said. ‘You’ll freeze.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘So am I,’ I said, and leaned back, across the tiny wheelhouse from him, my hands in my pockets, my right clutched around the handle of Hayes’ Webley.
Dyer gave me a look that saved him the bother of telling me to suit myself, and he pointed the nose of the Margareta out to sea.
The journey was slow, and Dyer was tense. I think only then did I start to realise that what we were doing was dangerous, not just illegal. We were crossing the busiest shipping lane in the world. It was a dark night, though we could see a few stars, which was how Dyer was navigating, I supposed, along with the compass in front of him.
Where we ended up on the French coast was likely to be as much by chance as by design.
But it was a calm night, the sea was smooth and black and the only sound was the constant drumming of the Margareta’s engine below, and the shush of water on the prow.
An hour had passed, and we could still see the lights of the English coast, and nothing as yet from France.
‘Fog,’ Dyer grunted, a little while later, and we headed into a bank that seemed to roll on to us without warning. The stars went, and we were alone in the sea, with only the hope that we’d hear a big ship in time to steer clear of it. Dyer now watched the compass in the binnacle more than ever, and I wondered how good a sailor he really was.
Another half-hour passed, maybe more, and we heard the sound of foghorns in front of us, and away to one side.
‘Gris Nez,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘We’ve come too far south. Cap Gris Nez.’
He turned the wheel and corrected our course.
Then he began to talk to me.
‘You in trouble then?’
My lips tightened, my fingers reached for the trigger of the revolver in my pocket.
‘Eh? You must be. Crossing the Channel at night. What did you do?’
‘Nothing . . . I’ve lost my passport.’
It was a terrible lie, and he laughed so suddenly then, I nearly pulled the trigger.
‘And you didn’t want to go to the post office and get another,’ he said, with heavy sarcasm.
‘Is it much further?’ I asked.
‘Depends.’
‘So you said.’
‘Kill someone, did you?’
I started to get angry. I was paying him a small fortune for a few hours’ work. Why couldn’t he just mind his own business?
I said nothing.
‘Or maybe there’s something in that suitcase? Something you don’t want seen, eh?’
‘Just shut up and drive the bus,’ I snapped.
Then he turned away from the wheel, and let it go, and stood looking squarely at me.
‘Don’t fucking tell me what to do,’ he growled.
I was terrified. I tried not to show it. I pulled the gun from my pocket and levelled it at him, at waist height.
‘I’ll tell you whatever I want,’ I whispered, my voice stuck in my throat. I think it sounded tough, but I felt the trickle of urine warmly down my wet leg, and I wanted to cry.
As he saw the gun, he stiffened. I thought he was going to jump at me, but he stared at it, and put one hand back on the wheel.
But he didn’t take his eyes off me, and I knew I needed to do something more, so I lifted the gun, and carefully keeping my distance, I pointed it straight at his eyes.
‘Get us to shore,’ I said. ‘And don’t talk to me again.’
He did as he was told, but kept himself half turned towards me the rest of the way.
Another half-hour, and we heard the sound of the waves on a shingle beach somewhere ahead.
‘Where are we?’ I asked.
He said nothing.
‘Where are we?’ I shouted, and he actually flinched.
‘France,’ he muttered under his breath.
The boat skimmed the shallows and he spun the wheel, pointing the nose out to sea again, but as he did so a wave breaking for the shore caught the side of the boat and sent me staggering off my feet. I put one hand down to get myself up but before I could Dyer was on me.
He pounded me backwards into the rear of the boat, and brought his knee up into my chest, wrapping his arms around me.
The breath had gone from me, but I acted instinctively, somehow knowing I had just one moment to make this all right, or I would be dead. He was feeling for my wrist, for the gun, and I held on to it tightly, more tightly than I had ever held anything before. My fingers locked like a vice around the handle, even as he swung a fist twice into the side of my head, and then I managed to twist the gun, just enough, and put the tip of it against his stomach.
It was point-blank range; there was no way for me to miss.
The bang of the gun was muffled by his body, so it was strange the way he flew backwards, almost silent in the roar of the noise from the sea.
I hadn’t killed him. But there was a very large hole from which blood was flowing rapidly. His eyes bulged with fear as he tried to press his hands over the wound, and his feet scrabbled against the deck. I stumbled as the boat tossed free in the waves, and fell to my knees. He watched me, stared at me, and tried to speak but couldn’t. His eyes turned back to the blood pouring out around him, and I knew he didn’t have long.
I looked at the shore.
I looked at the little ship’s wheel turning wildly.
I looked at Dyer.
I put the revolver in my pocket, stepped forward and knelt by him.
He was trying to speak again and as I reached for him his hands pawed me, but gently. I undid his belt buckle, slipped the belt from out of his waistband, and stepped back to the wheelhouse, where I used it to fix the wheel straight, just as the boat was pointing out to sea.
Then I opened the throttle a little further, grabbed my case, and threw myself overboard. As I went, I took one last look at Dyer, whose eyes were dull now, though fixed on me. There was no anger from him. No rage, nothing. Just the loneliest look on the face of a man that I have ever seen.
Touching the bottom with my toe tips, I half swam, half waded to the beach, where I pulled myself above the tideline, and then crawled for the cover of the dunes.
There were no lights, and though dawn was coming soon, I was freezing, and I shook violently from the cold.
I lay wretched on the French sand.
As the sun came up, the fog was quickly burned away. It was now a clear May morning and the temperature rose. I lay still till I felt alive again, letting the sunshine bring me back. When I shut my eyes, all I could see was Dyer. I was aware at last that he had hurt me before I’d pulled the trigger, and then I was thinking that I had killed someone again. Unlike Hayes, this wasn’t an accident, though as I lay on the beach, I knew I had had no choice. It was an accident in a way, because he had forced it on me. He would have killed me for what he guessed was in my case, that was certain, and I’d had no choice but to pull the trigger. He was stronger than me and in a few seconds more would have finished me, easily. All that was true, and yet it left a bad taste in my mouth.
A long while later, feeling warmer and stronger, I stripped to my vest and trousers and swung my shirt and jacket over my shoulder as I climbed up the beach and headed inland, swinging my suitcase as I went.
There was a short stand of trees just behind the beach, which I pushed through to find some fields, and then a small coastal road. I didn’t know which way to go, but I knew I was heading east in the long run, so that’s the way I went.
Chapter 9
I didn’t know it was him, the philanthropist who was going to help poor Giovanna. I didn’t know, but I felt it was. I was starting to understand the way his mind worked, feeling the way it felt, and the prospect of a girl who bled spontaneously would be too much for him to ignore.
But why come out into the public eye? There were onl
y two reasons, as far as I could see. The first, he had to. I didn’t know what he was planning, but I could guess. He meant to abduct her, presumably once she arrived in Lausanne, though he might try it before. Either way, my only hope was to make it to Switzerland before she did, and hope that I could track him down.
And the second reason was the one that gave me fear, because this was the thought that it was all part of an elaborate trap, to lure me out of hiding, and it had worked.
I didn’t know any of this, but I felt it. I felt that I knew him. I saw inside him and knew what he meant to do, and why.
I saw what he had in mind for Giovanna too, and what excitement it would cause him, in the time that she had before her own blood killed her.
What a prospect.
I had been following the case as closely as possible while struggling to leave England, gleaning what I could from amongst the garbled and extravagant reports in the press.
The girl’s bleedings were under control, I assumed, or she’d be dead already. Where her priest took the bleeds to be the miraculous stigmata of Christ’s sufferings, I read signs of the disease I’d been trying to cure. While some papers loosely spoke about bleeding palms, I noticed that there was no categoric statement that that had been happening to Giovanna. The only thing that was clear was that her wounds would not heal, and while there was nothing to suggest this in what I read, it was also possible that some form of purpura, or bleeding into the skin, was present as well as her rare form of haemophilia. Such bleeding often accompanies various coagulation disorders of the blood, and it would take little to set off a pronounced bleed through the skin.
There was of course the possibility that the girl was now initiating her own bleeds. She was a tiny girl from a tiny Italian village; now she had priests and doctors and the rich of the world interested in her. It would not be the first time an impressionable youth had created a mystery to attract attention. I was reminded of the girls who started the Salem witch trials, and the Fox sisters, those girls who heard mysterious rapping sounds and so founded the Spiritualist Church, despite the fact they later admitted they’d made it all up. In Giovanna’s case, all it would take would be a small scratch, something that could be done secretly in a moment, and she would have the whole world at a buzz around her.
I wondered if anyone had told her what was approaching her, so very soon, when she reached the point of menarche. And if anyone had, could she understand what she was being told? That she would start to bleed, and while this was a normal thing for every other girl in the world, for her it would mean death.
I doubted that anyone had told her; she was from a small, rural, Catholic community, and I knew that it was unlikely that anything had been done to help her understand. But maybe that was a kindness.
I remembered my childhood, and I remembered Susan, how it had happened for her. I don’t know if she knew anything until the day she bled for the first time, and it took me years to work out what had been going on one mysterious summer day when I had found my big sister crying in the garden, and she had run inside and shut herself in her room.
Our mother, not the most sensitive of creatures, had spent the rest of the day with Susan, while I was left sitting at the top of the stairs, wondering what was wrong.
Eventually my father had come home and did a very rare thing. He played cricket with me until it got too dark to see the ball, and still we had not had supper, and still Susan had not emerged.
When I asked if something was wrong with Susan it was even more mystifying to be told she was fine. We ate very late, and a very quiet Susan joined us briefly. I wondered why everyone was telling me she was fine when I could see she was anything but.
She disappeared up to bed, but next morning she seemed well enough. Am I imagining it now, or had something changed in her already? Maybe I’m just projecting a cliché back on to her: she became a woman. But I know that she no longer went camping with me in the woods behind the house, or played with me all day in the valley beyond, as we had for as long as I could remember.
She just stopped doing those things, and I was an adult before I pieced together enough hints and implications to work out that she had been told to stop doing those things, she had not wanted to stop doing them.
If that was the experience of an upper-middle-class girl of educated and wealthy parents in Britain, I couldn’t imagine that Giovanna had had more consideration, albeit a few years had passed in between.
So Verovkin had played a card, and now it was my turn to play one back. He had put the girl down before me as bait and, that being the case, I knew he would want me to get to Lausanne before making his move, or I would have no trail to follow, and there would be no trap to close around me.
I knew of the Swiss Haemophilia Clinic. It was a genuine establishment, and though I had never corresponded with the doctors there, it was a respected institution, founded on the groundbreaking work that Feissly had done in the twenties. Obviously, Verovkin was using them unwittingly, but how and when he intended to take the girl I was left to guess. For now, there were more pressing problems to solve. I was hungry. I needed to travel fast. I had money but it was English.
It took me most of the morning to walk into the nearest town, a fishing village called Wissant. I was dry by then, but must still have looked a little out of place. I hitched a lift from there into Calais, and as in Dover, I found that ports are a good place to engage in activities that border on illegality. I managed to change a good deal of money in a little office near the quay. The lady asked for my passport. It didn’t take much to convince her that I had left it in my hotel and was in a hurry: a couple of pounds extra for her were enough.
I found a down-at-heel café along the street and ate a big meal, and then waited to feel my hunger drain from me. As it did, I prayed that the night’s fog had allowed Dyer and his boat to travel far before being found. Maybe I would be lucky and the thing would have been dragged out to the Atlantic. Even if it was found, there was nothing to connect it to me, and that thought gave me some satisfaction.
Leaving the café, I stretched my arms out in the strong morning sun, and started to feel better. I walked to the outskirts of the town and found the shabbiest garage I could, where the owner was happy to allow me to rent a battered old Peugeot 403 without adhering to the formalities of paperwork. It was important to me to avoid the trains, for there was always the possibility that the ticket inspector would want to see my passport too. Being unable to produce one would lead to an unravelling of events that I could not afford.
I left the garage owner clutching a large sum in francs and set out to drive as far as I could before the light went. He must have known there was a chance I’d not be coming back, but I’d given him more than the car was worth, and I knew he’d be perfectly happy with that arrangement.
I made my way across France. The first night I stopped on the outskirts of Amiens, the next Dijon. Both nights I was forced, despite the sums at my disposal, to choose the cheapest guest houses I could find, places where they would not demand the production of a passport at a polished walnut reception desk.
I didn’t mind; it suited me well enough. There was a greater problem on my mind, and that was crossing the border into Switzerland. I knew I would have to make the trip cross-country, in the dark, to avoid border formalities.
In Amiens I had bought a few road maps, which I now pored over every time I made a stop for food or to rest, or to buy petrol. Finally, by driving the roads near the frontier, I made my choice. I fixed on an insignificant village called Chappelle-en-Bois, in the Jura. The woods after which the village was named gave out at the top of the hill, and from there on, I would be in Switzerland. The only problem was the Peugeot, and I knew I would have to abandon it and get hold of another. But that was a matter of inconvenience to me, no more, and I understood again how money makes all the difference. It was how he, Verovkin, had made his life so free, and how he had been able to get away with the terrible things he’d done,
and it was how I was going to track him down. And when I had, I would put a stop to him, for good.
Chapter 10
God bless the Swiss, I thought.
It had taken quite a lot of work in Glasgow to set up the bank accounts in Geneva, as they had been reluctant to do so without my physical presence there. Once again, I’d learned that money opens every door. When they’d heard the sums I was speaking of investing with them, things had changed, and to make matters even better for me, the beauty of a numbered account was that all I needed to access my money was that number, and a password.
The Peugeot had taken a big chunk of the money I had left England with, and I needed a new car and money to live on. I armed myself with Swiss francs on top of the dwindling French ones I had left, and also lire and marks, because I wanted to be prepared.
I assumed they were used to eccentric foreigners in the bank in Geneva, because they didn’t even blink at the long-haired, bearded and battered man wearing a suit that might once have been expensive but was now clearly showing the miles it had travelled. Nevertheless I felt very conspicuous, and decided I needed to clean myself up a little. I found a barber and had my hair cut a little shorter, and my beard trimmed, enough to smarten myself up, but still enough, I hoped, to make me appear very different from my old persona.
If money was easy to arrange in Switzerland, it took me a while longer to find a car. Geneva was not Calais. It was a mild, sedate kind of place, a place that stuck to the rules, and the one car dealer I spoke to on the outskirts of town was so horrified at my suggestion of a ‘simple’ purchase, in cash, that I could see him practically calling the police on the spot.
I wanted a car, but time was running out. According to the last news I’d seen, Giovanna was due to arrive in Lausanne at the end of the month. I could find nothing more specific than that but it didn’t matter; May was almost over and so I took a risk and caught the train the short distance to Lausanne.
A Love Like Blood Page 19
