Fourth Day

by Zoe Sharp

  I didn’t miss the way the surfer dude’s eyes flared.

  ‘Ah, an audience with the boss lady herself,’ he said. ‘In that case, kiddo, you can give her a message from us.’

  ‘What kind of a message?’

  They moved in then, started to jostle, bumping me, not outright rough but aiming to scare. I dropped my rucksack off my shoulder and waited to see which one of them would cross the line first.

  In the end, it was the short squat guy, which came as no great surprise. Maybe he was trying to make up for being slower on the initial attack by being right up there in the second wave. We were almost on eye level with each other, a fact that did not please him.

  He shoved the heel of his hand into my shoulder, trying to rock me back into the fencing. I rolled out from behind it, brought my hands up and reached for him, twisting his wrist round and up into a decent lock. Just enough to hold him immobilised with one hand, and make the others wary about coming to his aid. He went rigid with shock, rising on his toes, teetering as he tried to work around the pain.

  ‘I don’t like that message,’ I said, speaking directly to the surfer dude, not missing the way one of the secondaries started to edge round behind me. ‘You might like to tell your people to stand down, though, because the first one who tries anything, I’ll dislocate every bone in your friend’s right arm.’ I paused, watched the doubt form in their faces. ‘Up to and including his shoulder joint. He’ll be having surgery for months.’

  We stood like that for what seemed like half a day, while the gulls wheeled mocking overhead, until, at last, I heard hurrying footsteps on the other side of the gate, and the jangle of keys.

  A couple of big guys in nightclub bouncer black wrenched the gate open. I waited a moment longer, then released the squat guy and pushed him away. He stumbled back, cradling his hand.

  I grabbed my rucksack and stepped through the gate. The guards slammed it shut again after me.

  ‘Hey, kiddo,’ the surfer dude called as I started to walk away. ‘That was only part of the message. Don’t you want to hear the rest?’

  I stopped, turned back, half-expecting insults and curious to see if they were ones I hadn’t heard before.

  He was smiling broadly at me through the bars of the gate, placard still balanced over his shoulder.

  ‘Tell Mrs Witney she should have left well alone,’ he said, his words more chilling for being delivered so evenly. ‘Ask her what she gains by involving people like you. And what else does she have to lose?’

  With that he turned and walked away, almost a swagger. And as he did so, for the first time I was able to read the top part of the placard he’d been carrying throughout our exchange. I didn’t get much of it – just the first word. A name rather than a statement.

  Debacle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  When I was shown into Lorna Witney’s office a few minutes later, my first impression was a woman of aloof restraint.

  She sat very still behind an imposing mahogany desk, a plinth-like construction with the appearance of a solid block, like some kind of Mayan sacrificial altar. She didn’t rise as I crossed the expanse of oxblood-red carpet towards her, just peered over the top of her reading glasses and waited for my arrival as if granting audience.

  Thomas Witney’s widow had a striking face, dominated by a slightly haughty nose, and dark-red hair cut short and feathered in an attempt to soften the austerity. She wore a severe grey fitted jacket over a cream blouse with an open neck, smart and businesslike. When I halted in front of her she took off the glasses and pushed back a little.

  It was only then I realised she was in a wheelchair.

  The surfer dude’s parting shot outside took on new meaning.

  ‘And what else does she have to lose?’

  It was information that should have been in Parker’s briefing, I considered, but he’d said very little about this woman before sending me over here as a glorified courier. Surprisingly little…

  I kept my face neutral as we traded names and regarded each other, a mutual weighing-up exercise, then she said, ‘So, you’re with Parker.’ Her voice was low and husky, with the dust of rural Texas still running through it despite living over here for the last five years.

  ‘I am.’

  She digested my answer as if there was more to it, nodded shortly, then wheeled back and rolled out from behind the desk. The immaculate cut of her suit did not quite disguise that the upper half of her frame was all angles and muscle, her shoulders bulked out like an athlete by the effort required to work the chair, leaving her lower body narrow and wasted.

  She could have had an electrically operated chair and saved herself the heavy lifting. The fact that she hadn’t chosen the easy option was an interesting one, I felt.

  ‘Thank you, for bringing Thomas back to me,’ she said, a little mechanically. ‘I’m…grateful.’ The hand she offered was strong, the palm callused.

  A strobe-lit image hit me, of that damn motel bathroom again, the smell of fear thick in the air like blood.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs Witney,’ I said, stiffly formal. All of it.

  ‘What do you know about loss?’ It was a snap response, but then she glanced across at me, her gaze assessing. ‘No, I take that back. If you work for Parker, you probably know more than most.’ She gave a tragic sigh. ‘Thomas was effectively lost to me years ago. I guess I thought I’d accepted it.’

  Maybe I was just tired, but something in that martyred tone rankled, made me less diplomatic than I probably should have been.

  ‘But you could have had him back, couldn’t you?’ I said bluntly. ‘If you’d wanted him.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ she bit out, icy calm. ‘What, precisely, is that supposed to mean?’

  My turn to sigh. ‘Look, Mrs Witney, I’ve just flown three thousand miles with a corpse because Parker said you wanted answers. Well, so do I. I thought we’d skip the foreplay.’

  Lorna Witney turned bone white, jaw jutting, so for a moment I thought she’d simply have me thrown out.

  ‘What answers?’ she asked eventually, through stiff lips.

  ‘When your husband went into Fourth Day, you must have known how close to the edge he was,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you overrule his decision to stay – allow Parker to get him out, as arranged – unless you’d decided by that time you were better off without him?’

  ‘That’s not true! You don’t know how Parker and I agonised—’ She broke off, swallowed, then said in a low voice, ‘Yes, the balance of Thomas’s mind was disturbed, but it was like that before he ever set foot inside that place. Way before.’

  But my mind had veered sharply at the way she flushed as she spoke. I saw the trace of guilt underlying her words, thought for a fraction of a second that she had indeed engineered her husband’s convenient retreat. Then the truth of it hit me like a slap in the face.

  ‘You don’t know how Parker and I agonised…’ Something about the way she formed my boss’s name. Connection and memories…

  ‘Wait a minute. Surely it was your decision, not Parker’s?’

  I’d half-expected a vehement denial, but the flush deepened. She had the very pale skin unique to natural redheads, a dusting of freckles across her cheekbones. The blush clashed horribly with her hair.

  ‘My God,’ I whispered. ‘You and Parker…?’

  Her chin rose angrily. ‘I wasn’t always in a wheelchair, Charlie.’

  ‘No, but you were always married,’ I shot back. ‘And, not only that, but you were a client. Married to a client, for heaven’s sake!’

  She swung the chair away from me with a fluid shove, the movement strangely graceful, like an astronaut working in zero gravity. She grabbed the corner of the desk to swing round and tuck herself in behind it, back firmly in her seat of power.

  The desk had been chosen with great care, I realised, to minimise any sign of weakness. Anyone sitting across that polished surface from Lorna Witney, here in her personal domain, wou
ld see only the reins of cool command.

  ‘My marriage was on the rocks before then,’ she said quietly. ‘Liam’s death blew it apart, in a way it couldn’t have done if the cracks weren’t there already. Parker probably saved my sanity. Just as I believe Randall Bane saved Thomas.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, stark.

  ‘Why do I believe it, you mean?’ She reached absently for her glasses again, toyed with them. ‘Liam’s death affected us both, of course, but it hit Thomas particularly hard. He blamed me.’

  ‘Blamed you?’

  ‘For taking Liam with me on explorations when he was still a child. Better that than leaving him at home, or so I believed at the time. But Thomas was the one who taught him geology, ecology, when he was barely old enough to pronounce the words. We thought we’d produced a child who would grow up with a responsible attitude to the world around him. Instead, he became an eco-terrorist, and it killed him.’

  She stopped, broke off, refused to show a chink, but I saw her knuckles bulge regardless. As if aware of the telltale action, she put the glasses down abruptly.

  I said, ‘I thought Thomas blamed himself?’

  ‘He blamed everybody, at one time or another, the way people lash out when they’re hurt. But most of all he blamed Bane for corrupting Liam. He believed that if Fourth Day hadn’t influenced him, Liam never would have joined Debacle, that he would never have died. Before Thomas decided to go into that damned cult and bring down Bane, he’d been slowly driving himself crazy for over a year. I-I was scared for him, if you must know.’

  Scared of him. She didn’t say the words out loud, but I heard them anyway.

  ‘But when Parker went to see him after six months, he was cured?’ I said, sceptical.

  ‘We both went. I wasn’t about to shirk that responsibility.’ She flushed again, less angrily this time. ‘You may not want to believe it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to believe it, but in twenty years I’d never seen Thomas so centred, so… comfortable inside his own skin, his own mind. Bane worked miracles with him, somehow. And if Thomas was living in his own little dreamworld, who was I to drag him kicking and screaming back into mine?’ Her gaze was both defiant and pleading. Wanting desperately for my approval, yet at the same time telling me to go to hell.

  ‘Was that the last time you saw your husband?’ I asked. ‘The last contact you had with him?’

  ‘Yes, and if I’d known what Parker was planning – to get him out – I would have damn well begged him not to. What right did anybody have to take that peace away from Thomas?’

  ‘Tell Mrs Witney she should have left well alone,’ the Debacle member with the surfer dude looks had said to me. Did he think she was, however belatedly, behind the extraction?

  ‘It wasn’t Parker’s call,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Someone held a gun to his head and forced him, did they?’ she shot back, close to jeering. I thought of the kind of pressure Epps could apply – if not a loaded gun then pretty close.

  But I could understand her anger. After all, we had taken Thomas Witney’s peace away, I acknowledged, and it had been the death of him. Who was to say that Parker’s decision to leave him alone, five years ago, hadn’t been the right one?

  Whatever the reasons behind it…

  And where did that leave us now?

  Suddenly I was aware of an overwhelming weariness, of spirit as much as body. I would have trusted my life to Parker, but I’d been shaken by his secrecy over this job. I liked to think that, had it been me, I would have confided in those closest to me, and to hell with Epps’s paranoid directives on Need To Know.

  But I was even more shaken by his secrecy involving his relationship with Thomas Witney’s wife, regardless of the state of their marriage at the time.

  I tried to tighten my grip on what I knew was right, but the more I grasped at it, the more it slipped through my fingers like sand. After all, I was keeping secrets from Sean far more important, and personal.

  I looked up and found Lorna Witney watching my expression intently.

  ‘Can I offer you coffee?’ she asked in a dispassionate voice. ‘Tea? Something stronger?’

  ‘Coffee would be fine.’

  She jerked her head. ‘There’s a pot on the side over there. Help yourself. I’d ask my secretary, but Alice murders coffee like you wouldn’t believe. She can only make tea.’

  I moved to the coffee pot near the window. The pot itself was a masterpiece of style in black and chrome that clashed with its surroundings. The rest of the office was old-fashioned in design and furnishing, all dull gentlemen’s club colours and dark wood panelling to match the desk. The walls were lined with bookcases and box file racks, none of them reaching higher than about five feet from the ground. Above were maps, framed articles from a variety of newspapers and magazines, and photographs going back years – the history of the company in pictorial form.

  Below me, outside, I could see the Debacle crew, huddled together as a gust of wind blew in eastwards from the North Sea, bringing with it the sting of snow from Norway. It seemed a long way from the Pacific Coast Highway at Malibu.

  ‘You made the acquaintance of our uninvited guests, I understand,’ Lorna Witney murmured. I turned to find she had wheeled out from behind her desk again. She moved close enough to the window to be able to lean forwards and look down at the protesters outside. There was no emotion in her face, as if her earlier burst of anger had never happened.

  ‘How long have they been bothering you?’ I asked.

  ‘About a week this time.’

  ‘This time?’

  ‘They turn up every year,’ Lorna Witney said in a slightly detached voice, ‘around the anniversary of Liam’s death. Stay a few weeks, make a nuisance of themselves, and then they’re gone.’

  I watched the ginger-haired guy I’d tackled make what I imagined was some raucous joke, laughing, clapping an aggressive hand on another’s shoulder, trying to reassert his bruised masculinity. ‘Always the same group?’

  She shook her head, her gaze still focused out of the window. ‘No, only the tall blond kid. The others call him Dexter – I don’t know if that’s a first name or a last. The rest come and go. I don’t recognise any of the others.’

  ‘Why do they keep coming back?’

  ‘Presumably, lest I forget,’ she said with a twisted smile. ‘But I don’t know for sure. We’re not exactly on speaking terms.’

  I poured coffee into two plain cups. It was hot enough to steam and I registered the expensive smooth aroma of Jamaican Blue Mountain, which was a favourite of Parker’s. Coincidence?

  ‘They asked me to pass on a message,’ I said, and repeated what the surfer dude, Dexter, had said to me through the gate.

  Lorna Witney absorbed the information in frozen silence for a moment. ‘Yes, well, I figured it was something like that,’ she said at last. ‘We stand on the opposite sides of an ideological abyss. There can be no common ground between us.’ She made it sound like a decision.

  ‘Is that why Liam joined Debacle in the first place – as an act of rebellion?’

  Her gaze narrowed. ‘He always was a headstrong child,’ she said, without particular affection. ‘Bright, but a butterfly, flitting from one enthusiasm to the next, never settling. “Unfocused” his teachers said and I suppose they thought him maybe a little spoiled.’ She glanced over at me then, as if checking for signs of censure. I showed her none. ‘He tried a lot of things and never put enough of himself into any of them to succeed.’ She sounded vaguely disappointed rather than saddened.

  He was your child, a product of your genes, your nurturing. Is that the best you can say about him?

  ‘So, when he joined Fourth Day, you thought it was just another of his enthusiasms?’ I asked.

  She looked momentarily surprised, then nodded. ‘Until it was too late.’ She swung the chair round away from the window and added over her shoulder, almost dismissively, ‘That’s him, in the photo just above you. Right before he drop
ped out of college.’

  I glanced up, found the picture she meant and peered closer. It was a framed snapshot of a young couple, side by side on what looked like the seating of a sports stadium, their heads tilted together. The boy was Liam. Now I’d met them, I could see the unmistakable elements of both parents’ bone structure morphed together.

  The girl next to him was pushing her hair back out of her eyes where the breeze had caught it. They were both grinning for the camera, like they’d genuinely been having a good time.

  I unhooked the framed picture off the wall, turned it to face Lorna Witney and tapped a fingernail on the glass over the girl. ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘Oh, one of his girlfriends, I think,’ Lorna said, barely glancing across, her voice flat. ‘We never met.’

  ‘Her name’s Maria,’ I murmured.

  The girl from Fourth Day.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘A child?’ Lorna Witney said blankly.

  I picked up my coffee cup from the edge of her desk. The liquid had cooled to tepid in the time it had taken me to explain about Maria’s presence in Fourth Day, and about the existence of her infant son. I sipped it anyway. It gave me something to do with my hands while I watched her take it in.

  She sat in complete silence for a long time with only her eyes moving, as if scanning a page of hidden text in front of her.

  Eventually she gave a brief nod, like she’d reached the end of her mental report and agreed with its conclusions. She looked up and swallowed, face tightening.

  ‘So, is he Liam’s son?’

  I shrugged. ‘I have no idea.’

  She gave an impatient little twitch, as if I was being deliberately obstructive rather than uninformed. ‘Well…how old was he?’

  I suppressed a sigh. ‘I don’t know – a child. Older than a baby, certainly not in double figures. I only saw him in Maria’s arms, so it was hard to judge his size. And I’m no expert,’ I added. ‘He seemed quite big for a toddler, I suppose, but she’s very slight.’