by Knight, Ali
‘We’ve got a man overboard. Your man.’
She looked like she was going to cry. ‘I want to see the captain.’ She was getting agitated.
‘The captain is looking for a man presumed dead and steering a ship with millions of pounds of cargo on board through a severe storm. He isn’t going to see you. Instead, you’ve got me.’
She didn’t answer.
‘When we dock, Isabella, there will be customs and police.’ He paused to let that sink in. ‘No one wants to be asked a lot of awkward questions, considering what’s in there.’ He stared at her swollen stomach and she shifted uncomfortably under his gaze and pulled her T-shirt down over the bulge. ‘I just need to know why you’re on this ship. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to hurt you. I just need to know.’
‘I’m going to see my family.’
‘What family, exactly?’
She crossed her legs and looked defensive. ‘My family.’
The Wolf took a chair and sat down. He was taking his time, there was no need to rush. ‘You need to tell me who your family is.’
‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’
The Wolf looked at her and the ship emitted a low groan like an animal in labour. ‘I think we both know that you do.’ He leaned back in the chair as a flurry of water hit the porthole. ‘Neither of us is going anywhere. We’ve got hours and hours to go like this. Let’s at least distract ourselves. Tell me your story.’
46
The women had to concentrate on the strictly practical and get the alarm turned off. Medea and Sylvie hurried downstairs to the fuse box and the emergency numbers. They didn’t want the security service to come and see the state of the living room ceiling and what had caused it. Kelly splashed over to the far end of the room and picked up the gun from under a window. It was heavier than she had expected, and colder. She put it in the pocket of her tunic and felt it stretch the material with its weight.
Sylvie took control of phoning the alarm company, finger jammed in one ear so that she could hear.
The system was state-of-the-art, extensive enough to fit Christos’s ballooning paranoia, and hence impossible to understand. Christos was staring at the fuse box next to a set of blinking security lights, flicking switches randomly, turning a key back and forth to no effect, his lips moving but no one able to hear what he was saying.
Medea was hurrying about like a nineteenth-century midwife, back and forth with towers of towels and tea cloths to soak up the water, and when she ran out of those, with sheets and blankets.
The caretaker’s face appeared in the monitor by the lift as he explained that the hotel manager had been round as the alarm was disturbing the guests and water was coming in to some of their rooms – even some at the highest tariff – and then the screen went snowy and then black. Kelly looked up at the bullying green eye in the corner. It had gone out.
The children were standing, mute, watching events unfold with wide eyes. Kelly took them into her studio, where two streams of water were making their course down the walls by a large mouse effigy. She hugged them tight, a smile on her face. They couldn’t talk because the alarm was so loud, so they just held each other, their warm limbs round each other, their hair tickling her face and neck.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, someone down a phone line must have given the right set of instructions to Christos, who pushed and pulled the right buttons, and the alarm went off, the silence rushing in on them all like an avalanche.
She came out into the corridor. Christos was there, his trousers wet to the knee, his cowlick sweaty. ‘Get the kids out of here. Take them out for food or something.’ Medea turned to the children and hurried them along with her hands in a wheeling motion. Kelly wasn’t allowed to take both of them out at once so she leaned back against the wall. Let them sort it out.
Sylvie and Christos were getting ready to go out, too. ‘We’re going to the office to try to find out what the hell’s happening on that ship.’ They used the lift, still working as it ran on a different circuit to the flat, and five minutes later Kelly was left alone. She felt high, a feeling she hadn’t had since she smoked a few joints on the playing fields near her old school. She came down to the lobby and leaned over the caretaker’s desk, a Cheshire cat grin escaping. ‘Whoa, that was some evening!’ She couldn’t keep the giggles in. ‘Everywhere, it went!’
The caretaker expressed his condolences and they talked of repairs and electricity blackouts. ‘When the maintenance guy gets here I’ll send him straight up,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to be in there in the dark. Kids and all.’
She stepped back in the lift and as she got out in the flat her phone rang. Maintenance were fifteen minutes away, stuck in traffic; she listened as all the usual excuses about roadworks and nose-to-tail this and that flowed over her. She didn’t care anyway, she could just be in her own home thrillingly unobserved for a few minutes. She wandered the ruined flat in the deepening dusk, seeing how the brown stain of the water had seeped down the walls of Medea’s bedroom and had pooled on the towels she’d jammed into corners. It was dripping through a light fitting in one of the toilets, the stair carpet was a sodden mess that she squelched up.
The living room furniture had a tide line a foot deep on the corner sofa and armchairs. She could still hear the cooing of the pigeons, louder now with the holes in the ceiling. There was a smell of wet dust, rotting vegetation and soaked fabrics.
She wondered whether to light a fire, try to make the place cosy, begin to dry it out. It would throw out a bit of light too. The fireplace was an aggressive black tube suspended from the ceiling that stopped two feet short of the floor in a bulbous shape in the far corner of the living room, diagonally opposite the piano. It was one of the few bits of the flat that hadn’t been touched by the flood. Kelly walked over but realised that while the fire was fine, the wood and its basket had been washed to the far end of the room. Part of the high tide had beached a flotsam and jetsam of household detritus against the wall.
She gave up, and, flopping back on the corner sofa, watched the lights of the city intensify as the last of the day drained away. Hampstead Heath remained a stubborn irregular black square in the view.
Her husband and his lover didn’t always have it all their own way. She picked up her phone and called the number she had memorised from Georgie’s business card. Georgie answered after four rings, sounding harassed. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s Kelly Malamatos. Someone went overboard on the Saracen a few hours ago.’
‘We just heard. Who is he?’
‘An employee who’s worked for the company for fifteen years. They’re stressed. Really stressed.’
‘OK. Got that. Kelly, does the number 1824 mean anything to you?’
‘I don’t think so. Should it?’
‘Not necessarily. Never mind. Thanks.’
She put the phone down and heard the bell on the service lift. The maintenance men were here to bring order back to the chaos, to flood her world with light she didn’t want. She dragged herself upright on the sofa and ambled through to the kitchen. The bell rang again before she was halfway across the room. ‘All right, all right,’ she muttered to herself, slowing down in protest at the way whoever was at the bottom was bullying to be allowed to do their job. She pressed the intercom. Snow and crackle on the monitor. ‘Can you hear me? It’s broken, I think.’
She heard something that sounded like ‘Just about.’
She pressed the button to allow them up to the kitchen level.
Ten seconds later the lift pinged to announce it had arrived. She pressed the button and the door slid open. ‘Have you got a torch? You’ll need a torch.’
The shadows were deep now, it took those extra few seconds for faces and features to become distinct; it took that little bit more effort to see the details. Somewhere in Kelly’s brain she registered that the man stepping out of the lift towards her had no bag and that he was going to have to go all the way back down to the garage
to get it and she would be kicking her heels up here. The next thing she thought was that the baseball cap was strange, a touch too casual, this company usually had men wearing uniforms with a logo on the shirt pocket. The last thing she thought before panic took hold and adrenalin flooded her body, blocking out everything else, was she was glad her children had gone out – she loved Medea at that moment for saving their lives.
The man stepped into a shaft of light thrown through the kitchen windows from the city where she had made her home. Eight years folded back on themselves. Ricky Welch, the man from Southampton was here, in her flat, right now.
‘Hello, Kelsey.’
It had been so many years since she’d heard that name, it sounded almost quaint, a glimpse so precious of the person she used to be that even when it came from the mouth of her killer, it was briefly enjoyable.
She turned and with a small gasp sprinted round the kitchen table and across the living room to the stairs. She threw herself round the wide curve and half rolled into the dark corridor at the bottom. She was up an instant later, careening into the wall and sprinting down the long corridor to the service stairs. She could feel him behind her, had no time to look back, as with every stride the panic was building, there was no way out. Christos had the key, she knew there was no way out of that door.
Her hands slammed into the hard wood of the door to the stairs. She yanked down on the handle once, then she tried up, forward and back. It didn’t budge, as she knew it wouldn’t. The service lift was on the floor above, she was trapped. She turned, her hands still on the door and watched him slow down in the corridor now, walking towards her.
She pulled Christos’s gun out of her pocket and fumbled to get it the right way round. She felt ridiculous – she’d never fired a gun, never even seen or held one until half an hour ago. She took up a stance she had seen on American cop shows, legs apart, elbows stiff, pointing in the general direction of his chest. ‘Get out.’
He stopped walking. ‘Why did you set me up?’
‘You’re a lying piece of shit who clubbed a man to death.’
‘Why did you lie at my trial?’
She took a step towards him, feeling bolder now. ‘I saw you. You ruined my life with your threats of how you would kill me if I told the court what I saw, and now you’re here to carry out those threats. How did you find me?’
He took a slow step towards her.
‘Get back.’
He didn’t move. She remembered his height, the muscled forearms and tattoos that poked out beneath the close-fitting white T-shirt when she had picked him out in the line-up, the earring, the darting eyes. He was grey now, his bulk and strength wasted away, his jacket making him look more like a university lecturer than the longshoreman he had been. Only the eyes showed he was the same man, careful and watchful, waiting for the right moment to pounce.
‘I like the theatre and so do you, apparently. That was your mistake. To think you could go on to create another life and leave the old one behind, that you wouldn’t have to pay. A photo of you in this very flat was online.’ His voice had the slight south coast burr to it that hers had once had.
The picture Salvatore had taken here in her studio. She was astonished. Salvatore must have ignored her none too polite demands to erase the photo. She cursed inwardly. He had handed it to the PR department and from there it had come to the attention of the man wreaking vengeance in front of her. ‘I did nothing wrong, unlike you.’ She shouted it out, panic making her voice rise into a scream.
‘You’re coming with me.’
She tightened her grip on the gun. ‘I’m going to kill you before that happens—’
He made a sharp step towards her and she gave a little cry and moved back. He took another step, close enough to touch her now. Her momentary power had slipped away. He reached up with a swift motion and grabbed the gun. ‘I want to show you something.’ He punched the button on the service lift.
‘You need to enter the code to get out.’
‘So enter it.’
‘No.’
He paused for a beat. ‘Enter the code.’
‘What are you here for anyway, revenge? You going to kill me to get back at me? You’re not man enough to admit you killed an old man for money, that you intimidated me so I had to leave my life and start a new one. You’ve already lost.’
‘I want an answer to my question, why—’
‘I saw you.’
‘It wasn’t me. You saw what they wanted you to see.’
‘You’re a liar.’ Kelly felt her anger quelling her fear. She was in the right. The air conditioning was off, no appliances were humming, it was so quiet she could hear just the white noise in her head and the sound of the service lift arriving at their floor, waiting for them to step in, once she’d entered the code. Then she heard a new noise – the louder clanking of the lift at the other end of the corridor as it began to rise from the plush front lobby. It sounded hideously loud in the hermetically sealed apartment and she involuntarily turned her head towards it. The children were returning to the safety of their home.
She saw him register the panic on her face. He grabbed her wrist, understanding that the power was swinging back into his hands with every metre travelled by that lift. ‘I suggest you type in the code.’
She didn’t hesitate and typed in the numbers with shaking fingers. The service lift doors began to open. Kelly stepped in, desperate to be gone now, but he pulled her back out, still holding her wrist. ‘I spent years inside because of you. I want you to beg for forgiveness.’
In the darkness Kelly could see the red light above the lift doors, far down at the end of the corridor, blink on. She had seconds to spare before they opened. To keep her children safe, she caved in. ‘I’ll do anything you want.’ She stepped into the lift again and he came after her.
Tears misted her eyes. At the far end of the corridor, she saw an expanding rectangle of light as the doors opened and Yannis ran out, just as the door in front of her shut completely and they began to plummet to the garage.
47
Georgie was at Broadcasting House just north of Oxford Street, being collected from reception by Joel Flannigan, a sound recordist at the BBC. The BBC press office had found someone for her to talk to within hours of her calling. Joel had wanted her to email over the recording she wanted help with, but she was cautious and made excuses and insisted on coming in person once her shift was finished. Since it had been illegally obtained she didn’t want a record of what she was doing.
Joel was young, had a beard and wore a T-shirt bearing a Banksy image of a kneeling young girl holding a bomb. He took the stairs three at a time, hands thrust deep in his trouser pockets. He led her along corridors and into a small windowless room that looked like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.
‘Wow. This is technical.’
‘It’s a piece of cake really. Take a seat.’ He sat down in a swivel chair and put his ankle on his other knee, tapping out a tune on his raised leg with his fingers. ‘How can I help?’
‘I want to know if you can tell me anything about this recording I’ve got, where it might have been taken, what the noise at the end is.’
He nodded and leaned forward, took her iPhone and plugged it into his system and hit the play function. They listened to ‘1824 is no’. He paused. ‘Short.’ He raised his eyebrows invitingly at her. ‘All very cloak and dagger.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. You hear that weird noise at the end though, right?’
Joel adjusted some knobs and played the message again, much louder. Georgie heard the hiss of static and the strange pattering noise and the louder clunk of the phone at the end. Joel was now tapping his top lip with a finger. ‘OK, let’s start with what I do know. The sound we can’t identify yet is about three to five feet away from the phone, I’d say. It doesn’t resonate like a large sound that is far away, it has a tone like a small one close by.’
Georgie nodded. ‘What kind of phone is that anyway?
Can you tell?’
Joel smiled. ‘You betcha. We’ve got a file just of different phone sounds.’
‘You have?’
He reached across to a bank of CDs in a rack behind him and pulled one out and inserted it into a machine. ‘Try this.’ He pressed play and Georgie listened intently. ‘Pretty similar, yeah? Your phone’s got a receiver, probably connected with a wire, you can hear the old-school clunk-clunk as it’s put back in the cradle. We use these sounds a lot in radio shows like The Archers. They’re good ways to end scenes with the over-fifties.’ He grinned.
‘Yes, you’re right.’
‘With a mobile the recording just stops, and a hands-free is a different tone again, so is a cordless. So I’m thinking it could be an office extension phone, or something reconditioned from the seventies, maybe?’
‘Yeah, interesting.’
Joel played Georgie’s recording again, nodding and adjusting volumes. ‘It’s inside, I’d guess. There’s little background interference. No traffic noise or drilling, no birdsong.’
‘Is it a car phone?’
He considered that for a moment, but shook his head. ‘That sounds a little different again. And you’d hear a low-level background noise, but only if he was driving, I guess. So a stationary car is a possibility. There’re also no squeaking chairs, no rings on his hands knocking together. No computer noise either. He’s somewhere quiet.’
Georgie nodded. ‘And then we have this noise at the end.’
‘Yup.’ They both leaned in, as if being closer to the equipment might produce an answer quicker. ‘I can’t identify it off the top of my head.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I can try to replicate the sound at the end, then we might get some idea of what is making it,’ he suggested.
Georgie watched him, fascinated, as he ran his fingers along the library of CDs, pulling out several. ‘A lot of our stuff is digital now, but we’re still using these guys too. Let’s do something fun, since you came all the way from east London to here. I’ll play a sound, we’ll see if it matches the one we’re trying to replicate and you see if you can tell what the sound is. OK?’
