Loose Ends (The Acer Sansom Novels Book 2)

by Oliver Tidy

  ‘I have nowhere I could go.’

  ‘Rubbish. The world is full of places to hide.’

  Sansom smiled at the old man for his well-intentioned speech. ‘But I don’t want to hide. That’s not me. What’s more, I shouldn’t have to hide. I shouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life skulking around, looking over my shoulder, pretending I’m not who I am. I’ve done little wrong. If I run and bury myself, it will look like I’m guilty of all of it. You’re forgetting that I lost my wife and child and that Bishop, according to the testimony of my dead friend, may know something about that, be complicit in some way. He still has answers for me and I want them. And then there’s my friend’s death. He was a good and decent man, who sought only the truth and justice for the dead and who was murdered trying to protect me. No, Mr Ulusoy. I thank you for your advice, your concern and your words, but I will not be able to live with myself until I have exposed these people, got some answers, the truth and some justice.’

  Emre Ulusoy shook his head sadly. ‘Then may your God go with you.’

  ‘No disrespect, sir, but I gave up on Him a long time ago.’

  *

  Sansom spent the next three days convalescing, staying away from people, considering his position and hoping that the thoughts of the British public were soon to be occupied with other more newsworthy events.

  He asked that his host bring him some newspapers. The accounts of the exploits being attributed to him were not something that he particularly wanted to read, but in his more objective frame of mind he reasoned that it could be prudent to be aware of what he was being accused of, how he was being portrayed, what images they were circulating of him. As a soldier, he appreciated that forewarned was forearmed, no matter how potentially painful and frustrating the experience might turn out to be.

  Each edition carried the same dated Army mugshot. Even Sansom found himself difficult to recognise in that. Details of the soldier’s past and the motives behind his actions were turned over without much consistency but one common thread of the reporting was the suggestion that there could be a terrorist link with Sansom’s behaviour and apparent current purpose.

  A few of the papers made something of his Army career, a suggested spell abroad training with the Special Forces and then his involvement in and subsequent disappearance from the incident in the Pacific. There was also idle speculation about the possibility that he had gone AWOL from the Army to pursue an ideology at odds with UK foreign policy and that he may have spent time with terrorist groups with which he sympathised. To Sansom, it all had the feel of being orchestrated and he sensed that the conductor’s baton would have been in Smith’s capable hand.

  Most papers were saving their column inches for the emotive tirades lamenting the deaths of fine professional law enforcement officers at the hands of a callous, sociopathic killer. There were accounts, opinions, exaggeration, outright lies; professional and personal commentaries presented in outpourings varying in degrees of vitriol. Several papers led with details of Detective Inspector Tallis of the Hampshire County Constabulary, unarmed and shot dead at close range while bravely trying to make an arrest. A photograph – the one that Tallis had shown Sansom in Bodrum to prove he was who he claimed to be – of the policeman with his daughter laughing at the camera invariably accompanied the text. Martins remained anonymous in print but details of the discovery of a body in the boot of a car at a motorway services on the M4 were being linked with other appalling events. One of the broadsheets focussed on the connection between Sansom’s alleged recent exploits and the death of one of their own well-known investigative journalists several weeks before.

  The consensus of opinion, however it was expressed, was generally the same from tabloid to broadsheet: they were united in calling for the British public to be vigilant, to offer this cold-blooded murderer no safe haven. There was also much discussion centring on the reintroduction of hanging.

  Reading about himself as a deranged psychopathic killer with possible terrorist links and sympathies was a wholly depressing, demoralising experience. But in an epiphany moment it provided him with an inspiration. He went back to one particular broadsheet article that made detailed links with the murder some weeks previously of one of their reporters in his London home. The author of the article made no secret of the fact that the death of the colleague had been a huge loss to the profession as well as to her personally – they had once been married, after all. Sansom tore the article from the newspaper, folded it carefully and tucked it away for another time.

  Emre Ulusoy made no further attempt to divert him from his self-generated crusade. He remained amiable, if a little withdrawn, and continued to provide for Sansom’s immediate needs without complaint or apparent expectation of reward or reimbursement. Sansom wondered, despite the old man’s speech suggesting that he abandon his quest for truth and justice, whether he hadn’t detected a note of regret in the old man’s words for his own abandonment of his comrades, homeland and fight for what he believed in.

  *

  On the morning of the fourth day, Sansom told the old man that it would be his last with him. He was feeling as fit and rested as he ever would. His facial injuries that would fade had done so; those that wouldn’t looked less recent. He had the beginnings of a decent beard and he was becoming restless with inaction.

  The old man simply nodded his understanding. ‘I do not wish to know anything of what you propose to do now,’ he said. ‘You understand that it is better that I don’t. I can help you with money if you require it?’

  ‘Thank you, but I have enough to get me where I need to go.’

  ‘When will you leave?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘As you seem to have abandoned your God, I will have to wish you good luck. You will need it, I think.’

  *

  When the time came for Sansom to leave, he was reminded of having to leave another old man, his dead wife’s father. Gerald was someone else who had helped him when he was in trouble and counselled him not to pursue a path of retribution. But when Gerald had realised the futility of his argument, he had sent him on his way with money and the offer that he could return to him for anything whenever he needed it.

  Sansom left with only the clothes he was wearing and with one of the pistols he had taken from the dead men concealed in the shoulder bag. The ammunition from the second pistol was carefully wrapped next to it. In his pockets he had the last of his cash and the scrap of paper with Eda’s phone numbers. His host for the past few days had allowed him to leave his suitcase, telling him that it would be waiting for him anytime he cared to collect it. Also, despite his earlier request that Sansom forget about him when he left, he offered the soldier further refuge should he need it.

  *

  Approximately four miles separated Emre Ulusoy’s home from Sansom’s destination: Gerald’s old town house. He had only fleetingly considered speeding his journey using the tube, bus or taxi. But for the walk and time it would cost him, it wasn’t worth the risk of being exposed to the city’s CCTV cameras, law enforcement and observant members of the public. The thought of finding himself cornered in the Underground like a trapped rodent sent a chill through him. No, he thought, better to keep himself above ground, use the darkness of the streets at night, give himself options and cover if the need for flight arose.

  The night was typical of the end of summer. Once the sun had dipped below the horizon the temperature dropped too, enough to make anyone wearing a hat and scarf appear simply prudently dressed. Although finding his way across the capital using the city’s more famous streets’ names with the aid of his A-Z, Sansom avoided using them, preferring to tread the roads less travelled, less famous and less populated that ran parallel to them. This put time on his journey, but time was not his enemy, discovery was.

  *

  He arrived in Gerald’s quiet street a little before midnight. As soon as he entered the narrow congested place, he realised that he had made a mistake. At that hour
it was too quiet. Apart from him, there was no discernible activity. His presence, his movements and attaining his objective, should circumstances permit it, would invite the interest of anyone who happened to be walking a dog, arriving home late or just looking out of a window.

  From the shadows Sansom located Gerald’s property. It wasn’t difficult to do. It was the only one in the street with a ‘For Sale’ sign hammered into the small front lawn.

  A couple of cats fought or fornicated in a nearby garden, their calls and wails puncturing the quiet.

  He was about to start making his way along the darker side of the street when something of his sixth-sense caused him to delay and shrink back into the patch of darkness that he occupied.

  Sansom couldn’t understand what disturbed him, whether it was simply an irrational fear, his healthy paranoia or an over-developed sense of self-preservation. Something bothered him about the scene in front of him. He took time to study it carefully, every detail, every home, every parked vehicle. And then he saw what it was that had stirred his subconscious – and the realisation gripped his guts in its icy grasp. It was a large nondescript family saloon exactly like the one he had been collected in from RAF Lyneham; just like the one the police had been so interested in at the services; just like the one he had driven away from the New Forest.

  He focussed on suppressing his reptilian-brain’s messages and encouraging his analytical thinking to take over. He rationalised that there must be thousands of that type of vehicle in the country. It didn’t have to mean trouble. It didn’t have to mean that they were watching the house. It didn’t have to mean that there was a surveillance team inside or nearby waiting to shoot him dead. But it wasn’t worth the chance of simply dismissing these possibilities either and blundering into a bullet.

  From the moment he had been informed of Gerald’s death something had bothered him about that, too. It wasn’t simply the fact of his death, if indeed he was dead. The initial shock of that news had receded to allow other suspicions to creep into his thinking. Tallis would have been proud of him the way he was reasoning more, questioning more, refusing to accept everything at face value, as the policeman had encouraged him to start doing in Bodrum. There had been something about the voice of the woman who had informed him of his father-in-law’s death. It wasn’t something he found easy to explain or understand. Something in the woman’s language or tone didn’t ring true. She had come across as rehearsed and detached. He had struggled to recollect exactly what she had said to him, but there was something about the whole conversation that made him think she hadn’t been some new occupier of the property, some innocent party who just happened to be near the phone when it rang, but someone who had been waiting to intercept the call that they must have known would come. In the end, Sansom put it down to his sixth sense, the same one that was keeping him immobile in the shadows of an empty street staring fixedly at an ordinary family saloon.

  Sansom’s reasons for risking a visit to the one place the opposition would know he might were twofold and he justified to himself that both were worth it, even if he were once again breaking one of his golden rules – never go back. He’d done that in Bodrum and it had proved a catastrophic decision that nearly cost both him and Eda their lives.

  Firstly, he wanted to be sure of the information he had been given regarding the old man’s death. Secondly, he figured that if the information was accurate then with Gerald’s death being recent there would be a good chance that the legal wheels of inheritance and probate would not have ground around to seeing the property emptied, picked-clean and sold off by those legally entitled to do so. There was something there that Sansom wanted and he might never have another chance to recover it.

  On Sansom’s last visit to his father-in-law’s he had been faced with the largely-sentimental remnants of his past life piled up in boxes, things he had been grateful that the old man just hadn’t been able to bring himself to dispose of. When he and Alison had erroneously been declared missing at sea and legally dead, it had been down to his father-in-law to deal with what they had left behind. In the days he had spent with the old man, hiding out from the authorities while he prepared himself for confronting a man he believed had knowledge of the atrocity that had robbed him of his wife and child, he had gone through what Gerald had brought back to his London home from their Sussex house.

  It had been a miserable and soul-searching experience. The old man had left him to it, not wanting to intrude on such grief. Sansom had been brutal in his decisions of what to keep and what to let go. By the time he had finished, he had one small box that contained mostly photographs, legal documents, and the most sentimental of keepsakes along with the journal that he had kept of daily life on the island in the Pacific that had been his open prison for a year.

  Sansom had substituted the cardboard box for a strong plastic one with a tight-fitting lid. In a perverse way, he acknowledged to Gerald that the whole horrible experience had been ultimately therapeutic. He had created a treasure box, something that he would have to reclaim. It was as important to him as anything left in his life. He had not known when he would ever be back to collect it, assuming he survived his need for retribution, but it had remained a constant focus for him to recover when the opportunity arose. It was all that remained of his past and his family.

  At the time he had no idea, as now, what his immediate future might hold. Then, as now, he was on a path of vengeance, searching for answers and men to hold accountable for unspeakable wrongs. Then, as now, he had been hiding from the authorities. Then, unlike now, however, he didn’t have every police force in the country diligently searching for him. His face hadn’t been a feature of every medium’s news reporting. He hadn’t been on the wrong end of a probable shoot-to-kill order. He had been more than anonymous. He had been a dead man walking. Now he was famous – infamous – sought after and wanted, dead, not alive.

  ***

  9

  Sansom retraced his steps out of the street. He found a darkened recess in a high boundary wall and gave himself time to think. Despite the threat that they might be waiting for him, he was still not deterred from his course of action. He could abandon the idea, get away. What he had come for, while important to him in more ways than one, was not absolutely essential to his existence. It wasn’t air. It wasn’t worth endangering his life for. But as well as not wanting to miss the potentially-limited opportunity to recover his treasure box for burning personal reasons, he now had another use for what it contained that could help him preserve his life and immediate future.

  He manoeuvred himself back to a position where he could see the car. Whoever had parked it had chosen, deliberately or by chance, one of the darkest spots in the street. A car rounded the end of the road and went slowly past him. He tucked himself away in the shadows as the headlights bathed all before it in artificial glare. He worked his way closer. And he waited. Maybe ten minutes passed before another vehicle approached from the opposite end of the street. Its headlights, like the car before it, lit up everything in its path. As it got close to the family saloon that was the focus of Sansom’s attention and had his insides playing up, it illuminated it for a split second. It was long enough for Samsom to see the outlines of two figures occupying the front seats. Having confirmed his grim fears, he slunk well back out of sight.

  The thought that he might be able to get into the house without the noise that went with breaking and entering was the reason he was still there, despite the presence of men there to kill him. Gerald had always kept a spare key to the back door hidden under an old urn in the back garden. He had reminded Sansom of this on his last visit in case the soldier ever needed it. Sansom had no reason to believe it would not still be there. Knowledge of the watchers’ presence and position gave him the advantage, providing that there were only two of them. He had all night to find that out.

  There was no street running directly behind Gerald’s home. The properties had long back gardens that were mostly bordered
by high brick walls. These backed on to a row of similar properties’ rear gardens. Sansom navigated his way to the street that fronted these homes. A cursory inspection showed no signs of a vehicle occupied by men, armed or not. Sansom got himself in front of the property whose rear garden butted up to Gerald’s and explored the possibility of making an undetected entry through the garden and over the dividing wall.

  Sansom remembered Gerald’s rear garden as being overgrown. He would have no problem finding cover there. In contrast, in the brief pass that he allowed himself, what he could see of the garden that he would have to cross to gain access to Gerald’s was mostly lawn.

  He retreated to the shadows once more to consider his position. He was so close, but the risk was high and ultimately not essential to his plans. One phone call from an observant neighbour and he could find himself trapped in the house. Despite his feeling towards the members of the service that he was up against, he had no desire to live up to his public image and engage them in a gun battle, possibly with innocent unarmed police officers becoming embroiled. He was also aware that the longer he loitered in the shadows the greater the risk that he would be noticed.

  He walked along the road once more, crossed it and returned. He slipped into the darkness offered at the side of the property, made his way quietly to a low gate into the back garden then waited, trying to hear over the blood pumping in his ears. As certain as he could be that he had not been seen, he vaulted the gate and looked around the garden. At least there didn’t appear to be any dogs to make a fuss over his intrusion.