by Jane Adams
There was not a lot left of Charlie Perrin’s head. Half of his face was relatively untouched, but the other half reminded Clarke of the kind of meat a butcher might make into burgers. He watched without comment as Sir Geoffrey made his examination, keeping up a stream of commentary for the recording, occasionally asking Si for an opinion. Clarke, excluded from the discussion, was content to watch. Sir Geoffrey seemed to be enjoying himself, his voice confident and loud. He was one of those expert witnesses who spoke directly to the jury, who had the knack of presenting evidence in an erudite manner but in language that could be understood by the layman. He was the author of several influential papers and had advanced knowledge in his field, and Clarke knew he was also as corrupt as any Kyle Sykes or Gus Perrin — it was just that no one had, as yet, been able to prove a damned thing.
Clarke knew Si well enough to notice that he was looking uncertain about something. He pointed to something on what was left of Charlie’s skull. Sir Geoffrey looked at it dismissively and moved on. Clarke frowned but didn’t like to interrupt. Instead, as they moved away from their examination of the wound and onto the ritual of weighing and measuring internal organs, Clarke took himself off to get a coffee and a bite to eat. By the time he returned, Si was alone and finishing up his notes.
“I hoped you’d come back,” he said.
“Oh? I noticed you seemed concerned about something. Anything important?”
“Not according to Sir Geoffrey Connor. He’s gone, by the way. Left me to close up and do the washing down. No doubt he’s off to collect his fat fee.”
“Not like you to be bitter.” Clarke grinned at his friend. “So, nothing wrong according to him. And according to you?”
Si hesitated. “He knows his stuff,” he said. “He’s far more experienced than I am, but . . .”
“But?”
Si took a notebook from his drawer. “But this,” he said. “To my mind, this doesn’t add up.”
* * *
Evening saw the return of Kyle Sykes’s missing people, those whose absence Clarke had noted earlier in the day. They returned in twos and threes, a half-dozen cars in all, but none had news.
“What the hell have you been doing all fucking day?” Sykes demanded. “You’re looking for a kid and an old man, how hard can that be?”
An awkward silence followed, a shuffling of feet. These were men who didn’t think twice about inflicting violence, who were in the business of causing others to be afraid. But, confronted by the raw rage of Kyle Sykes, well, that was enough to cause a bit more than general unease in their ranks.
“So,” Sykes said. “We know she’s with Harry. We know what car Harry was driving. What about the bloody ANPR?”
“Our people are onto it,” someone said. ”But it takes time, boss. It ain’t like opening an email. No one knows what direction they went in. There’s no cameras out by Harry’s place.”
“‘There’s no cameras out by Harry’s place,’” Sykes mimicked. “He’ll have gone through town, he’ll have taken the bloody motorway. How hard can it fucking be?”
“We’ve got people on it, boss. They’ll come through.”
“Better bloody do,” Sykes said. He cast a scathing look at his troops. “Tomorrow morning, you get out there again and you knock on any doors you have to. You talk to every single person that kid of mine ever had contact with. Every frigging man or woman Harry ever had dealings with. Be in no doubt, you will find them or I’ll want to know why.”
He paused again, this time seeking and holding eye contact. “And not one of you should be in any doubt of what I’ll do to those who let me down.”
Chapter 10
The cottage really was remote. They had left the motorway, stopped in the first small town they had found with a decent-sized shop and had stocked up with food. Harry had spotted a CCTV camera by the door but nothing inside. He had wanted to avoid big supermarkets. They had too many cameras, too much surveillance.
He knew that they’d be remembered, this older man with a limp and this tired, pale, young girl buying what looked like a weekly shop in this little convenience store, but that couldn’t be helped.
They had then driven ten miles off their route and stocked up with kindling and firelighters, Harry having remembered that the cottage had a wood-burning stove. He’d added a bag of logs from a garage and a couple of bags of coal and hoped there were further supplies at their destination. Harry planned on holing up for the duration, facing whatever came on ground he had surveyed and understood. He didn’t give much for their chances, long-term, but figured they may as well be fed and warm in the meantime.
“Won’t somebody see if we light a fire?” Lauren had asked.
“There is no one to see,” he said. “Nearest cottage is a mile away and that’s a holiday let, too. The North Sea’s too chilly for most folk this time of year.”
They had left the main roads soon after and driven along increasingly narrow lanes until finally Harry turned off, up a long, muddy, grassy track. Soon Lauren could see their destination at the end of the track. Beyond that lay the ocean, grey and cold and fierce, crashing high on the shingle.
She got out of the car, shivering in the sudden blast of cold, fastened her coat and helped Harry get their stuff out of the car.
Lord, she thought, this place is bleak. They had passed no houses for a mile or more before reaching this place and in this spot, apart from the tiny, stone cottage, was a not a single item of anything human-made, in whatever direction she looked.
Harry bustled about, finding the key behind a brick in the garden wall, switching the electric on at the mains and checking that the fridge was working. “Get the kettle on,” he said. “And then help me get this shopping stowed away while I light the fire. The sheets might need airing before we make up the beds, but if I remember right, there’s a dryer in the shed next to the back door.”
He seemed relieved to be here, but Lauren was worried. Harry clearly knew this place well. “Harry, who owns this cottage? How come you’ve been here before? Harry, if you know about this place . . .”
“You think your dad will, too.”
Lauren nodded. “He keeps tabs on everything anyone ever does, you know that.”
Harry hoisted two carrier bags onto the kitchen table and set them down. He was clearly working out how to respond.
“Harry? Look, I know nowhere’s safe, but to come somewhere he knows about, that’s just asking for trouble. He’ll search everywhere you’ve ever been. Threaten anyone I’ve ever even been in the same room with.” She sat down on one of the kitchen chairs and placed her elbows on the table, face in her hands, trying hard not to cry.
“He’ll find us, no matter how far we run,” Harry said. “He’ll put out the word to every Tom, Dick and Harry, the length and breadth of the country. I don’t suppose he’ll value my old head very high, but there’ll be a price on yours, pet, so the best thing we can do is get as far away as possible from anyone and anything that might recognize you and — you’re right — any place your old man might be able to think of where I might have been. He doesn’t know about this place. Granted, that don’t make it safe, but I came here only once before. Found it by chance. It was just after my Jeanie passed away and I needed to just go off for a while. You remember?”
Lauren nodded. As it happened, her dad had been out of the country and had missed the funeral. Harry had caused something of a flap, going off like he did. She’d heard about it, heard the gossip. Some of her dad’s lieutenants had even started a book on whether or not old Harry had topped himself — and how. Her dad had been informed but had been remarkably sanguine, reckoning Harry knew which side his bread was buttered on and that he’d be back.
“Dad said you and Jean had been married a long time. That you were bound to be cut up about her dying.” He’d also started to get impatient when Harry had not returned by the time he had come home. Grieving for a dead wife was allowed: Sykes had even taken a few days for himself after h
is own wife had gone, though he’d gone on a bender, not on a road trip like Harry. But there were limits, according to Sykes. A few days was expected. A few weeks was ‘Just fucking self-indulgent’. She could remember her father saying that the day before Harry returned. She recalled being so scared in case Harry’s absence might cause her dad to go off on one, as her mother used to say. Kyle Sykes, generally cool and calculating, could be dangerously unpredictable when the mood took him.
“You came here?”
“Eventually. I just drove. Stopped . . . I don’t really remember where. Then this particular day, I pulled into a car park about three, four miles down the road. There’s a little cut-through onto the beach, a pub, fish and chip van in the summer and a few caravans, though it was all closed up, bar the pub, when I came here that time too. It was winter, you remember.”
“Of course I do.” Lauren had been utterly devastated when Jean had died.
“I walked on the beach and after a while, I came on this place. It was empty but I liked the look of it and it didn’t take much to get inside.”
“You didn’t know where the spare key was then.”
Harry laughed. “No, not then. Anyway, I walked back along the beach, asked about it at the pub. The landlord said it was rarely rented out this late in the year so, well, let’s just say I camped out for a couple of days. Never saw a living soul apart from the birds.”
Lauren considered. Harry was evidently spinning this whole story to make this place seem safer and even more cut-off than it was. Trying to convince himself as much as her. He wasn’t fooling himself and he wasn’t fooling her, but that was OK. For the moment, both of them wanted, needed, to believe that things might just somehow be all right.
“Best get this food put away,” she said. They could take refuge in ordinary, safe activity.
He nodded. “You do that. I’ll light the fire and find the sheets, get them in the dryer. Anyone comes asking questions, we tell them I’ve come up here on a birdwatching holiday and dragged you along with me.”
“Yes, Harry,” Lauren said. “Like you’d know a buzzard from a seagull.”
* * *
A couple of hours later, as darkness closed in and they sat down to their evening meal, Lauren raised the issue again of what they were going to do next. Harry had brought the four-by-four round to the side of the house and covered it with a tarpaulin he’d found in the storeroom at the back, so that the large green vehicle did not stand out quite so incongruously. He’d made sure that all the curtains were tightly closed, so that light did not show through the windows, particularly those facing out towards the sea. The cottage was not really in view of the little road, but he worried about local fishing boats perhaps noticing the cottage was in use. As he had told Lauren earlier, if anybody did happen upon them and enquired, then the excuse of a late holiday would be the one they would use and they would just hope that whoever they were talking to did not have the owner’s phone number on speed dial. That, Harry thought, was really the least of their problems, anyway.
“Did you tell anybody about this place? I mean, people must have asked where you’d been. It was the longest you’d been away for, well, like . . . years. I missed you, Harry.”
“I know you did, pet. I kept telling myself that I should stay around for you, that Jean would want me to stay and look after you, but I just couldn’t. I needed to be on my own for a bit.”
She nodded and cut another slice of pizza. He was glad that she was eating. There were a few chips left in the bowl and he shared these between their plates. “Cheesecake for dessert,” he said.
“God, how many calories have I eaten today!”
“Who cares?” Harry grinned at her. Kyle Sykes liked his women thin. Harry knew that he kept a tight rein on what his daughter ate. Famously, he kept a tight rein on what she wore, where she went, what friends she had. As a result, she really didn’t have any friends, not that Harry would have considered worthy of the name. There were just a few girls who she occasionally did things with, but that was about the size of it.
Had he told anyone else about this cottage? The truth was, he couldn’t remember. He’d still been knocked sideways by grief even after he had turned the car around and headed for home, knowing that sooner or later he’d have to get on with life. Not that the house had ever been home after Jean had gone, it had just been the place where they had lived. He was surprised how little regret he felt now that he’d left it for good. People had asked of course, “Harry, where did you get to?” and he had managed to remember odd places on his route, enough to satisfy them, but the fact was, he had, as he told Lauren, just driven. What he hadn’t told her was that the day he’d walked along the beach and found this little cottage, he had considered walking straight out into the sea, pockets full of stones. He had considered putting a gun to his temple. After all, he was never without the means, but that day it seemed like he decided that he did actually want to live. Or maybe it was simply that — despite having no hesitation about taking other lives — he didn’t have the courage to take his own.
Lauren took their plates over to the sink, filled the kettle yet again, and then faced him with her arms folded across her body and that look in her eye that Harry knew so well.
“So, what next?” she said. “What are we going to do? We need to get ready, Harry. We need to decide. Do I go to the police? Like I said, I know things, we both know things. Maybe they could put us in witness protection or something.”
“Maybe they could. Maybe your dad has fingers in that pie, too.”
Laura nodded. That was a very real possibility. Her dad’s organization was like a big spider sitting at the centre of an even bigger web. Looking at it, you might think the spider was the most important thing. But Lauren knew it was the web that really mattered and she had no idea how big that web was.
“I should have brought my passport,” she said. “We have money, we could have gone somewhere else.” She saw Harry’s sceptical look and sighed. “Yeah, OK, I know that we’d have just bought us a bit more time. I don’t wanna die, Harry, and I don’t believe you do either. So how are we going to get out of this mess?”
Harry looked at her admiringly. Only seventeen, and yet she had the cool and determination of someone much older. She was very much like her mother had been.
“Look under the sink, I think I spotted some old newspapers there earlier. Spread them out on the table, I don’t want to get grease on the wood.” He left the kitchen to go and get a bag he had brought in earlier, and also to retrieve the gun that Lauren had kept in her pocket all day. He figured she’d all but forgotten about it. When he came back in, she’d spread the newspapers on the table. Next, while she washed the pots and made more tea, Harry stripped the gun that Lauren had taken from her father’s desk.
Lauren brought mugs of tea and sat at the table watching him. “You need to teach me to shoot, Harry. I mean aim and that sort of thing. I didn’t need to aim with him. He was so close, I could feel his breath on my face.”
He was so close that after the breath had come the blood. She’d been covered in it. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to block out the memory. She took a deep breath and opened them again, looking steadily at Harry. “So you need to teach me to shoot properly.”
“I’ll teach you,” Harry said. “But more important than that, girl, you need to learn how to hide, because when they do come, your job is to get out of here and stay out of sight, no matter what happens. Your job is to stay alive, you got that?”
He saw her eyes widen as she took in the full impact of what he meant. Harry would die to keep her safe.
“No. I’ll fight. I won’t leave you, Harry. They might get us both, but I won’t leave you.”
He reached across the table and grabbed her hand, looking intently at her. He was angry now, and he wasn’t sure where the anger had come from — only that it was there. “You get killed, and this is all for nothing. You might as well have stayed there, in your room, wai
ting for your dad to come home. But you didn’t, you ran, you came to me and you asked for help. And I’ve helped you, and it will all be for nothing if you die. Got that?”
She nodded slowly and he could see that he had almost frightened her. Almost. Lauren had only ever known one side of Harry. He’d been careful not to let her see the other, but she needed to know. From this moment, she needed know all of Harry and what he was capable of. And the truth was, he would rather put a bullet in her head himself than let her father get to her. Harry’s way at least would be quick. Kyle Sykes liked to get every ounce of satisfaction from his killing, prolonging the moment until the body could take no more — and it was shocking how much a body could take and still keep breathing. Harry and Lauren both had cause to know that.
“Now,” he said. “If you have a weapon, you need to clean it, to maintain it. To treat it like a friend. So, lesson one.” He took the rest of his armoury from the bag and laid it out on the table. “While you strip one gun, another is kept on hand and loaded. You go nowhere unarmed. Even in the house, you keep something always within reach, you understand?”
She nodded, eyeing the stack of weaponry that Harry laid out on the table. It was enough to start a small war.
“Now, this will fit your hand better. Your dad’s gun is really too heavy for you. This is a Walther, a PPK, small enough to put in your pocket and not too much of a kick. This doesn’t have the stopping power of your dad’s gun, but it’s good enough to put a man down. You aim for the centre of mass, not the head, nothing fancy. Keep cash with you at all times and go nowhere without this gun. And go nowhere without this, either.”
From his bag he took a mobile phone, still boxed. They’d bought a couple of them and some spare SIM cards at one of the garages they’d stopped at. “It goes without saying you make no calls, you do nothing that can be traced.” He paused until she nodded affirmation and then she watched as he unpacked the phone and inserted the SIM.
