The Abrupt Physics of Dying

by Paul E. Hardisty

  He remembered the last time he’d seen her, the next day, curled up naked on the hotel room bed. Africa, they’d decided. Together. He’d been down in the lobby booking the tickets to Cape Town when Rex Medved and his men had arrived. He’d warned Rania, made it up to the room just after she’d fled. But before he could follow, Medved’s men had surprised him. Clay could still see the boardroom arrogance in Medved’s eyes as he pointed the gun at Clay’s head – the complete absence of fear, the invulnerability of money – could hear the bastard’s voice, scorn dripping like toxic waste from each word, delivering a sermon to the lowly: know your place, be content with your pathetic jobs and mindless amusements. And, above all, leave the business of running the world to the people who know. People like me. Then Medved had looked him straight in the eyes and told him exactly what he was going to do to Rania once he found her. Moments later, thanks to Koevoet, it was Clay holding the gun, Medved counting out the seconds. He didn’t have long to wait. Half a minute later Clay put a .45-calibre bullet through Rex Medved’s forehead.

  And in that time suspended before his end, watching Clay’s finger squeezing down on the trigger, Clay wondered, had he known fear?

  Clay shivered, pulled up his collar against the squall, walked the ten steps to the little work shed buttressed into the side of the cottage, and opened the oak-plank door. He pulled the tarpaulin away and wheeled the old Norton out onto the wet gravel. He checked the fuel, clicked the transmission into neutral, turned the ignition, flipped out the starting pedal and gave it a crank. The engine roared, spat blue smoke, cleaned up, and settled into a low growl. He gave the throttle a couple of revs, pulled on the old helmet he’d found stuffed inside a dusty box on the bottom shelf of the workbench, and mounted the bike.

  Eight and a half weeks now he’d stayed put, without a word from Koevoet – his only contact with the world the little radio he’d found in the cottage. Fifty-nine days now, 1422 hours not knowing where she was, not knowing if she’d made it safely to Switzerland, if she was alive or dead, burning away the very fibre of him, the sinew. And if she was there, Allah protect her, what would she be thinking now, hearing the same stories Clay had been tracking in the news, the brutal murder of Rex Medved, celebrity mega-millionaire Russian businessman and philanthropist, the appeals from his family for information leading to the arrest of his killer, the million-pound reward announced just this morning by his sister, Regina Medved, at a press conference held in the Byzantium foyer of her Moscow penthouse apartment.

  A million pounds. Enough to change a life: pay debts, buy freedom, solve problems. It changed everything, for both of them, raised risk to the sixth power.

  It was time to go, time to get back to Rania, find her and disappear for good. Keep that promise he’d made to her, to himself. Maybe change the trajectory, find some of those things he’d always wanted, atone for the wrongs. So many wrongs.

  Clay set off down the gravel track, the wind at his back, the rain coming now in gusty sheets that flayed across the open bluff lands, the gorse shivering with each whip of the lash. Riding one-handed was more difficult than he had anticipated, despite hours of practice sitting on the bike in the shed. Managing the throttle and steering with his right hand was fine, but working the clutch was altogether more difficult. He found the best way was to curl his elbow under the handlebar and hook his stump up onto the lever, pulling inwards with his bicep to release the clutch while applying counter pressure with his right hand. Engaging the clutch was then a matter of easing the handle back out, keeping the front wheel straight by releasing pressure on the right. On his first change up to second, his stump slipped on the wet handle, the clutch popped and the bike stalled with a hollow double clunk.

  He cinched the cuff of his jacket down over the stump for better grip, restarted the engine, tried again. He lurched along the pathway, the engine surging and lugging, learning to ride all over again. Again he stalled out, cursed, kicked the engine to life once more. Gradually he found the right balance, leaning in with his left shoulder on each change to get better purchase on the clutch lever. Soon, he was shifting smoothly, the engine repeating the scaled harmonics of engagement to redline, hum to whine, a pause for breath, the next acceleration. The track wound along the draw, the vegetation here thick, green and wet, before emerging onto the uplands between parallel hedgerows tall as a man. Three and half miles on, the track intersected a narrow single-lane road, the tarmac weathered and sunk deep into the ground, a grass-edged rut in the landscape. Clay turned west and opened the throttle, felt the bike accelerate, the dark hedgerows flying past, road spray hissing from the wheels. He passed the first farmhouse, a distant light across the fen, and joined the B road for Launceston.

  Soon he was trundling along with the evening traffic, a light rain falling, the lights of the cars swimming across the wet pavement. He stopped at a newsagent, picked up a £50 phone card, paid cash. A few miles down the road he pulled into the parking lot of a Tesco supermarket on the edge of town, and levered the bike up onto its stand. The place was busy with after-work shoppers, the lot almost full. Outside the main entrance to the supermarket was a bank of public telephones. He pulled off his helmet, searching the eaves of the building. A single CCTV camera watched the main entrance. Another was perched atop a lamppost at the far end of the lot. Clay placed the helmet on the seat, pulled up his hood, wandered to the opposite end of the car park and circled back towards the phones, avoiding the cameras.

  Clay closed the phone-box door, brushed the rain from his jacket, cradled the receiver between his shoulder and ear, and composed the number. The line clicked, fuzzed, rang. Clay imagined the telephone on the little pinewood table next to the kitchen window, her walking from the lounge, looking out across the valley, the Dents du Midi towering in the distance, in cloud perhaps now, early snow falling at altitude. She was safe there, he told himself, veiled by a new name, a new identity, a place to live free from questions and intrusions. She had managed to convince him that her old employers, French intelligence, the DGSE – surely compromised by Medved through his close connections inside the French government – didn’t know about her Swiss hideaway. He hoped it was so. The ring tone pulsed for the fourth time, fifth. Clay looked down at his boots, the rain falling across the pavement, the shoppers scurrying past with fists clenched over straining plastic.

  ‘Allo?’ A woman’s voice. Not Rania.

  ‘Is Rania there?’

  ‘Who is calling, please?’ A strong French accent, an older voice.

  He decided to take a chance. ‘It’s Clay, madame.’ He doubted that they would be monitoring her calls, that the police had made any sort of connection between them, yet.

  ‘Monsieur Clay?’ she gasped.

  Clay knew the voice now. It was the old lady who’d led him to Rania after the violence in Yemen. The violence that had brought him here. Madame Debret.

  ‘She is not here, I am afraid.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  Silence. Caution. Good.

  ‘Do you remember the Café Grand Quai in Geneva?’ he asked. Where they had met, where she had directed him to Rania, helped him to find her.

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘You held my hand. Told me about her father.’

  A deep breath. “I am worried, Monsieur Clay. I told her that she should not leave, but she insisted.”

  ‘Where has she gone?’

  ‘Chypre.’

  He wasn’t sure he’s heard right. ‘Cyprus?’

  ‘Lefkosia, yes. Her editor has given her this assignment. He contacted her one week ago. At first she did not want to go. But he was insisting very much, calling her many times.’

  ‘LeClerc?’

  ‘She did not say his name. Only that he was with Agence France-Presse.’ It had to be LeClerc, the man Clay had met in London, the one who’d finally published Rania’s story, the one who in doing so had helped to blow the casket lid off Medved’s corrupt and deadly oil-production activities in Yemen. Pretty qui
ckly after, the Medveds lost all financing for their Petro-Tex venture in Yemen and were forced to sell the company at a loss.

  ‘When did she leave?’

  ‘You have just missed her. She left the day before yesterday. You might see the first story she has written in the journaux today.’

  Damn. ‘Did she say when she’d be back?’

  ‘No more than a week.’

  ‘Forwarding address?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Telephone number? Mobile?’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Thank you, madame.’ He was about to hang up when he heard her call out.

  ‘Monsieur Clay, please. Wait. She left a message for you, if you called.’ Noise down the line, scraping, a drawer being opened and closed. ‘I have it here. She wrote it for me.’

  Clay waited, said nothing.

  ‘It says: “Ecoutons la confession d’un compagnon d’enfer.”’

  Clay understood only one word: enfer. Hell.

  ‘It is Rimbaud, I believe,’ she said. ‘Listen to the confession of hell’s companion.’

  A tumour of ice materialised in Clay’s chest. He knew this, from the boy poet’s A Season in Hell, the chapter entitled: ‘The Infernal Husband’. He curled his lip, hung up the phone, stared out into the half-light of day. She’d chosen carefully, knowing he’d read this prose-poem over and over while he was in Geneva searching for her, this lament, taken by its power: I am lost. I am impure, a slave of the infernal husband. A widow.

  Why this? Something was wrong. Clay pulled in a half-breath, let it flow back out as vapour, looked long both ways along the store-front pavement, out into the car park, through the big front windows into the fluorescent glow of the supermarket, the patchwork of vivid primary colours, his insides roiling in a Southern Ocean gale. Near one of the checkout counters was an in-store newsagent selling copies of the major British broadsheets and tabloids. There would be CCTV coverage inside the store, and no way to avoid it. He pulled up the collar of his jacket and pulled the grey hood of his jumper over his head, tugged it out to cover his profile, shoved his forearms deep into his pockets and strode into the store.

  Less than five minutes later he was back in the phone box, a copy of the Independent under his left arm. Thirty-first October 1994: British soldiers freed by Bosnian Serb authorities after six days in captivity, a Tory sleaze enquiry, the England football coach accused of financial wrongdoing. He scanned the back pages. On page nine: a short article on the theft of cultural and religious artefacts in Northern Cyprus since 1974 and, more notably, in the last few months. Centuries-old illuminations, mosaics and sculpture, stolen from abandoned Greek Orthodox churches in the occupied North, were making their way to private buyers in Europe and Russia. The article claimed that the ring was highly organised, well-funded, and violent. The thing seemed to straddle both sides of the border, and the recent sharp upturn in thefts coincided with a dramatic surge in unsolved murders on the island. Outraged Greek Cypriots were calling on the UN and Turkey to take action to stop the plunder. The article was syndicated by Agence France-Presse, written by Lise Moulinbeqc, Rania’s new identity, courtesy of her ex-employers the DGSE, Direction Genérale Securité Exterieure, French Intelligence.

  Clay read the piece twice more, savouring Rania’s use of her second language, her ability to meld technical precision with passion. A pang swept through him, spreading from his chest and surging down his legs, lingering in his knees, in the wrist he’d lost. Jesus. He stamped his feet on the concrete pavement, stuffed the paper into his backpack, combed his hand through his wet hair. The island of love. Definitely.

  Clay picked up the phone and dialled his Cayman Islands banker. It was the first time he’d made contact since the killing. Clay gave the password, his account number. There was an urgent message for him, the banker said. It had arrived only three days ago. Clay jotted down the name, the telephone number, the South African prefix, Johannesburg area code. He put down the phone, checked his watch, and dialled. A receptionist directed his call. He was put through to the clinic’s director.

  ‘This is Declan Greene.’ Clay’s new identity, an unintentional gift of the Yemeni secret police, complete with offshore bank accounts, an Australian passport and an apartment in Perth. ‘I had a message to call.’

  The doctor paused, as if searching his memory. “Yes, thank you for calling, Mr Greene. We were expecting to hear from you sooner.’

  ‘I’ve been busy, Doctor.’ Doing nothing. Waiting.

  ‘I am very sorry to disturb you like this, but you see …’ The doctor stopped, cleared his throat. ‘There is no easy way to say this, I am afraid, Mr Greene.’

  The line crackled, empty. ‘Then you’d better just tell me.’

  ‘Yes, of course. We traced you through the payment you made to the clinic earlier this year, Mr Greene, and since there are no living direct relatives, you were the only person we could contact.’

  Clay’s throat tightened.

  ‘I’m very sorry to inform you that Eben Barstow died four days ago.’

  Clay’s legs quivered, weak. Eben, the best friend he’d ever had, wounded in action in Angola all those years ago, a bullet to the head. Clay had carried him to the helicopter and he had survived, if you could call it that, physically functioning but otherwise dead. How many times had he tried to ask Eben’s parents to let him die? Now it was done. Relief surged through him, a decade of regret. It took him a moment to catch his breath, to fully process this information. ‘Did you say no living relatives?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What about his parents?’

  ‘They died the same day.’

  Jesus. ‘The same day?’

  ‘Yes. Tragic. But there is something you should know, Mr Greene. The circumstances of Mr Barstow’s death, were, how can I put this, unusual.’

  Just say it, for Christ’s sake. So many times he had anticipated this moment, such had been the inevitability of it, but now that it was here he couldn’t quite believe that Eben was gone, that the tiny shard of hope he had carried with him all those years, wrapped up in a teardrop, a pearl, hidden away somewhere so secure that he’d forgotten it was ever there, had turned out to be the folly he always knew it was.

  ‘Mr Greene, are you there?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He was shot, Mr Greene.’

  Clay thought he had misheard. He was hot. Died of fever.

  ‘Someone broke into the hospital at night, went to his room, and shot him three times. Twice in the chest, and once in the head.’

  Clay’s blood stopped pumping. Jesus Christ.

  ‘And whoever it was, they also broke into our records department. It seems they were after information about Eben, about our accounts.’

  ‘What did they get?’

  ‘Everything, I’m afraid, Mr Greene. The police said it was a very professional job. The perpetrators were in and out without being seen by any of our staff, or waking any of the other patients.’

  Jesus. ‘And Eben’s parents?’

  ‘They died in a car accident. As I said, a tragedy.’

  Clay’s mind blanked, raced. All three of them, on the same day?

  ‘Mr Greene, are you there?’

  ‘Yes.’ No, not really.

  Outside, the rain was coming down again, hammering against the thin steel of the supermarket’s cantilevered roof. He pushed the receiver onto his ear.

  ‘There is a sizeable credit on Mr Barstow’s account,’ came the voice, faint against the din, ‘which you paid in advance, if you recall. What would you have us do with it, Mr Greene?’

  ‘Are there any others?’

  ‘Pardon me, Mr Greene? Others?’

  ‘Any others like Eben.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t follow.’

  ‘Vets.’ Fucked-up unfortunates. The half-digested shit of a forgotten war, a failed system. Him.

  ‘Yes, of course. There are three others.’

  ‘Give it to whoever
needs it most.’

  Silence there, so far away, in a place he used to call home. And then, ‘That is very generous, Mister Greene.’

  Clay said nothing, waited a moment, was about to hang up.

  The doctor’s voice again, urgent. ‘Mr Greene, before you go. There is something else.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘You must understand. We are all very shocked, here.’

  Clay waited for the doctor to continue.

  ‘When we found him …’ The doctor paused, cleared his throat. ‘You can imagine. It was a horrible sight.’

  Yes, he could imagine. All too well. Did so on a nightly basis.

  ‘The killer, or killers, left a message. We have no idea who it was intended for, or what it means.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  The doctor paused, then continued, his voice wavering. ‘It was written on the wall, in Mr Barstow’s blood. It said: “She’s next”.’

  Clay stood staring down at the wet concrete, the implications of this moving through him now like a slow dose of poison. ‘Are you sure, Doctor? Absolutely sure that’s what it said?’

  ‘No question at all, Mr Greene. The words were very clear, well spelled out, as if they had taken their time. They used a brush.’

  ‘Did you say brush?’

  ‘A paintbrush, yes. They left it in the room.’

  Copyright

  Orenda Books

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  First published in ebook by Orenda Books 2014

  Copyright © Paul E. Hardisty 2014

  Paul E. Hardisty has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.