by Kevin Brooks
‘Hey,’ I said softly, moving towards her.
At the sound of my voice, she looked up suddenly, and just for a second her face was paralysed with fear. She looked as if she’d been caught doing something terrible.
‘It’s all right,’ I said, keeping my distance, ‘it’s only me.’ I smiled at her. ‘I was just making sure you were OK…’
‘Yeah, yeah…’ she muttered, quickly grabbing a tissue and frantically wiping her face. ‘Yeah, I’m all right.’ She sniffed hard and wiped a string of snot from her nose. ‘Shit,’ she said, sniffing again. ‘Jesus Christ…’
I passed her a towel.
She buried her face in it for a moment, and I saw her take a few deep breaths, then she started wiping her face again. After a while, she breathed out hard, then dropped the towel to the floor and looked up at me.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘Did I wake you up?’
‘I was already awake. Are you all right?’
‘Yeah…’ She shook her head. ‘Shit.’
She started to get to her feet. She looked a bit wobbly, so I held out my hand and helped her up. Her hand was as cold as ice.
‘Thanks,’ she said, rubbing her eyes. She grinned sheepishly at me, then looked in the mirror. ‘Christ, what a mess.’ She turned on the taps and started washing her face.
‘I’ll wait for you in the front room,’ I told her, and started to leave.
‘It was Morris,’ she said quietly.
I stopped and turned round.
She looked at me, drying her face with a fresh towel. ‘I just started seeing him… you know, his face and everything. I couldn’t get it out of my head. All that blood… the way he was just lying there, all twisted up… I don’t know. I suppose it just hit me. The reality of it all. And then I just started crying like a baby, and I couldn’t stop.’ She sighed again, a big shaky breath. ‘God… I totally lost it.’
I nodded at her, not sure what to say.
She smiled at me. ‘You weren’t supposed to see me like that.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I won’t tell anyone.’
Still smiling, she reached up and briefly placed her hand on my cheek. It didn’t mean anything, I knew that. It was just a kind gesture, a friendly touch, an unspoken thank you. I knew that.
But it still ripped me apart.
‘You need to get rid of those clothes,’ she said.
‘What?’
She smiled. ‘Not now… I mean after you’ve had a shower.’ She nodded at a laundry bag on the floor. It was filled with her bloodstained clothing. ‘We need to get rid of everything that might have Morris’s blood on it,’ she told me. ‘So when you’ve showered, put all your clothes in the bag with mine. And I mean all of them. I’ll get rid of the bag before we go.’
‘These are the only clothes I’ve got,’ I said.
‘I’ll find you something to wear.’ She turned away from me to hang up the towel. ‘I won’t be a minute. I just need to dry my hair and get dressed.’
I didn’t move. I just stood there like an idiot, remembering the feel of her hand on my face.
‘Robert?’ she said.
‘Oh, right… yeah. Sorry.’
I backed out of the bathroom and left her to it.
While Eddi was in her bedroom, drying her hair and getting dressed, I took a quick shower and changed into the clothes she’d left out for me. Dark shirt, pants, socks, a plain black suit. I wondered where she’d got them from – a boyfriend, Lawrence, Curtis?
I decided not to ask.
When I came out of the bathroom, Eddi was waiting for me in the front room. She’d slicked back her hair and removed most of the studs and rings from her face, and she’d put on a little black jacket and skirt. She looked cool and neat and businesslike. I passed her the laundry bag full of dirty clothes and she put it with the other bags on the floor.
‘Is there anything else you need to get rid of before we go?’ she asked me.
‘Like what?’
‘Knives, weapons… anything that won’t get through airport security.’
‘Airport security?’
‘I’ll explain later.’ She nodded at my rucksack. ‘If you’ve got anything dodgy in there, get rid of it now. Put it in one of these carrier bags.’
I opened my rucksack and started going through it, but there was hardly anything in there any more – I’d left most of it at the Paradise Hotel. All I could find to leave behind was Ryan’s penknife and the videotape of my endoscopy.
The videotape…
My mind flashed back to a wondrous cavern, rising and swirling with fantastic alien machineries. Filaments, struts, crystals, ties, pillars, pipes, valves, ribbons, sheaths, valleys, tunnels, veins, countless glimmering particles… a subatomic dome, a dark cathedral, a perfect abomination…
Inside me.
In me.
It was me.
Whatever you see, I’d told myself then, whatever’s there… there’s a thousand ways it won’t be you.
I put the videotape back in the rucksack, then went over and dropped the penknife in one of the carrier bags. There were three of them, all jam-packed with papers and disks and files…
‘What is all this stuff?’ I asked Eddi.
‘My life,’ she said simply. ‘My business… everything. Hard drives, client lists, contacts, names, places, numbers. Everything. Once I’ve got rid of it, the flat’s clean. They can take it apart, computers and everything, but they won’t find anything useful.’ She looked down at the bags. ‘Not much of a life, is it? Three carrier bags full of crap.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realize…’
‘It’s all right,’ she muttered. ‘It was probably time for a change anyway.’ She gazed around the flat for a moment, taking one last look at what she was leaving behind, then she turned back to me and smiled. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Are you ready?’
‘I suppose so…’
‘OK, let’s get out of here.’
On the way to the lift, Eddi called Bean and told him to meet us on the ground floor. As we waited for the lift to arrive, she took Ryan’s wallet from her pocket and gave it back to me.
‘I couldn’t find anything on his credit cards,’ she told me. ‘I searched everything, every illegal database there is, but he wasn’t on any of them. I also ran searches on his ID card and his telephone number… but they all came up blank.’ She looked at me. ‘I don’t understand it, Robert. I’ve got access to almost everything here. Ryan’s details should show up somewhere, but I can’t find anything at all.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s as if he doesn’t exist.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe I just imagined him.’ I looked at her. ‘Maybe I’m making the whole thing up.’
‘I’ve already thought of that,’ she said. ‘But then where did you get the credit cards from? And the ID card? The wallet, the business cards, the pistol? And what about Morris? He existed, didn’t he? He was after you. And I know he wasn’t police.’
The lift doors opened. We picked up our bags and stepped inside. Eddi hit the button for the ground floor. The doors closed and the lift started moving.
‘How do you know that Morris wasn’t a policeman?’ I asked her.
‘The police don’t carry pistols in shoulder holsters, for a start. And the police wouldn’t have been waiting for you at the hospital. And, even if they were, they wouldn’t have left a man on his own.’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘Dennet’s a policeman, though.’
‘Who?’
‘Detective Superintendent Mark Dennet, the one they quoted in the newspaper story. I checked him out. He’s CID, based in Stoneham.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But he’s definitely real? I mean, Dennet definitely exists?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And so did Morris.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So you don’t think I’m making it all up, then?’
> ‘No,’ she replied, ‘not all of it.’
Before I had a chance to ask her what she meant, the lift clunked to a halt and the doors slid open.
Bean was standing there waiting for us.
‘Everything all right?’ Eddi asked him.
‘Yeah.’
‘Anyone around?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’ She gave him the laundry bag and the three carrier bags. ‘These are for the incinerator,’ she told him. ‘Do it before you get rid of the Civic. And make sure there’s nothing left.’
He nodded.
Eddi turned to me. ‘Give him the pistol.’
‘What?’
‘The pistol… give it to him.’
I knew I had to get rid of it, but I felt strangely reluctant to part with it now. I’d got used to it. Its reassuring weight in my pocket… its solidity, its power. I’d got used to knowing it was there if I needed it.
I took the pistol out of my pocket and passed it to Bean.
‘Clean it and get rid of it,’ Eddi told him.
He nodded.
Eddi unzipped her holdall and dug around inside. She pulled out a handful of £50 notes and passed them to Bean. He slipped them in his pocket without counting them.
‘I’m not going to be around for a while,’ Eddi told him. ‘You don’t need to watch the flat any more, but let me know if anyone comes round. Use email, not the phone. I’ll make sure you’re all right.’
‘You coming back?’ he asked her.
She smiled at him. ‘Yeah… I’m coming back.’
He nodded again, then turned round and walked off with the carrier bags. Eddi watched him until he’d left the tower block, then she picked up her holdall and slung her rucksack over her shoulder.
‘Come on,’ she said to me, heading for the doors.
I followed her out of the tower block and around the back to the lock-up garages. The Civic had gone. There was no one around. Just a row of garages, a couple of wheelie bins and a skip full of bricks and plasterboard. Eddi went over to one of the garages, unlocked the door and opened it up. There was a car inside, a white BMW 525.
‘Is that yours?’ I asked her.
She nodded. ‘Unregistered, untraceable, almost unused.’
‘Have you got any more cars hidden away?’
‘Nope,’ she said. ‘This is my last one.’
We threw our bags in the back, got in the front, and Eddi started the car. She put it into reverse, adjusted the mirror, then paused for a moment and looked at me. I thought she was going to say something… something meaningful, or something wise, or maybe something I didn’t want to hear… but she didn’t. She just stared at me in silence for a while, then she looked over her shoulder and started reversing the BMW out of the garage.
It was late afternoon now and the rush-hour traffic was beginning to build up. It took us almost two hours to get out of London, and then we got stuck in more roadworks again, and by the time we got through them and were finally moving again it was just gone six o’clock. I hadn’t really been paying much attention to where we were going, but as Eddi put her foot down and we joined a stream of motorway traffic, I looked out of the window and saw a sign that said: MI THE NORTH.
‘We’re not going to Stansted, then?’ I said to Eddi.
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Well, we’re going the wrong way for a start. And you said your flight left at seven, so you had to be at Stansted by six at the latest. It’s gone six now. But you don’t seem too worried.’
‘I cancelled the flight,’ she said. ‘I’ve booked us on another one. Seven o’clock tomorrow morning from Leeds Bradford International.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Where do you think?’
‘Spain?’
‘Correct. And do you know why we’re going from Leeds and not Stansted?’
‘Because if Ryan’s people are watching the airports, they’ll probably be concentrating on Stansted, Gatwick and Heathrow. They won’t be expecting us to go from Leeds.’
She looked at me, slightly surprised that I’d worked it all out.
‘What happens when we get to Spain?’ I asked her.
‘I’ve got a flat there. It’s in a little village called Tejeda, on the south coast of Andalusia. I bought it a few years ago.’
‘In a false name?’
‘False everything,’ she said. ‘It’s completely safe. No one knows anything about it. It’s where I go when I want to disappear for a while. My secret hideaway.’
‘So this holiday you were talking about,’ I said, ‘the one you could have paid for twice over with the money you didn’t get for my false ID…’
‘I lied,’ she said. ‘The only thing that cost me anything was the flight.’ She glanced at me. ‘The rest of it was true, though. I was flying out today. I did have a flight.’
I smiled at her, hoping she couldn’t see the truth behind my smile. Because the truth was – I was sick to death of lies. My lies, her lies, big lies, small lies… I didn’t care what kind they were, I’d had enough of them. They made me think about things, and I didn’t want to think about things.
‘Are you all right?’ Eddi asked me.
‘Yeah… I’m fine.’
She gazed at me for a moment, then she nodded her head and turned her attention back to the road again. ‘It’ll just be for a while,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘When we get to Tejeda… I mean, we don’t have to stay there forever. It’s just a safe place to stay until we’ve worked out what’s happening, and what we’re going to do.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘I don’t know yet… I need to think about it.’ She flashed a quick grin at me. ‘That’s why we’re going to Tejeda.’
The BMW was a powerful car and it wasn’t long before we’d left London behind and were speeding along the motorway through the heart of the country – Leicester, Derby, Nottingham. I’d never been up this way before, and although I couldn’t see much in the passing darkness outside, everything seemed cold and ancient. The landscape was darker, the night sky blacker. Even the lights of the passing towns seemed dimmer than the brightly lit towns of the south. The cities themselves were barely visible in the clouded night, they just glowed in the distance, like shallow nests of lights in the darkness. They looked as if they’d been there forever.
Another world, another time.
And as we purred along through the unfamiliar landscape, I wondered if that’s what I wanted – another world. Somewhere new. Somewhere different. Somewhere else.
Somewhere I could forget about things.
‘How much do you know about mobile phones?’ I asked Eddi.
‘Why?’ she said. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Are they safe?’
‘It depends… hold on.’ She looked in the mirror and pulled out to overtake a slow-moving car. Once she’d got past it and moved back into the middle lane again, she turned her attention back to me. ‘What do you mean by safe?’
‘If I called someone on a mobile phone and their phone was bugged, could the people who were listening in get a trace on my phone?’
Eddi looked at me, intrigued but slightly concerned. ‘Would this be a landline you were calling?’
‘Yeah…’
‘From a prepaid mobile?’
‘I think so.’
‘And who’d be listening in?’ She raised her eyebrows at me. ‘I don’t suppose it’d be Ryan, would it?’
I looked at her. ‘I just want to call Bridget and Pete to let them know I’m all right. I haven’t spoken to them since all this happened. I just want to tell them I’m OK. It’ll only take a minute.’
Eddi looked away and stared through the windscreen, thinking about it.
I said, ‘I don’t even know if Ryan is tapping their phone –’
‘He’s bound to be.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘How long did you say you’ve been with Bridget and Pete?
’
‘Just over a year.’
‘Do you trust them?’
‘I don’t know… I suppose so. They’ve always been really good to me.’
‘How did they end up fostering you? Did it all go through the usual channels?’
‘Yeah, as far as I know. They’ve been fostering for years. The kid they had before me was with them for ages.’
‘So there was nothing unusual about it?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know, Robert. At the moment, all I know about any of this is what you’ve told me – you woke up in hospital and you had something inside you, or Ryan was putting something inside you, and now he’s got everyone looking for you, and people are dying all over the place…’ She paused, taking a drag on her cigarette, then she leaned down, stabbed it out in the ashtray and blew out a long stream of smoke. ‘All I’m trying to do,’ she said, ‘is work out what the hell it all means – what was inside you, who put it there, why they put it there.’ She looked at me. ‘We need to know if anyone else was involved.’
I stared through the windscreen for a moment, remembering my own doubts about Bridget and Pete. I still didn’t want to believe they had anything to do with all this, and from the way Ryan had spoken about them at the hospital – as if he’d never heard of them before – I was fairly sure they didn’t have anything to do with it.
But it still wasn’t impossible.
‘I don’t know if Bridget and Pete are involved,’ I said to Eddi. ‘I don’t think they are… I mean, I can’t think of anything unusual or suspicious about them. They just seemed quite nice, you know? They were good to me and I liked them. That’s why I want to call them. And anyway, if you think about, it doesn’t really matter whether they’re involved or not.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because if they are, they’ll act as if they’re not when I call them. And if they’re not… well, it won’t make any difference, will it? As long as I don’t tell them where we are or anything, and my call can’t be traced, it doesn’t matter if anyone’s listening in or not.’
Eddi didn’t speak for a moment, she just sat there in silence – chewing on her lip, thinking things through. After a while she said, ‘It depends what kind of tracking equipment Ryan’s people have got. If they’ve got the very best stuff, which I think they probably have, and they’re expecting a call to a particular number, and the call comes in from a landline, they should be able to get a trace on it almost immediately. If the call comes in from a prepaid mobile, though… well, they’ll still get a trace on it, but it’ll take them a while to get a location, especially if the mobile isn’t registered. And even when they do get a location, it won’t be very accurate.’
