Leaves cling to his wet shoulders, making him look like an extension of the hedge, more plant than animal, more animal than human. He doesn’t like the set-up. He prefers long-range targets viewed through the scope of a rifle.
She has read her little boy a story. Put him to bed. Brought him a glass of water.
Peering through a downstairs window, he looks for the security panel on the wall. It’s not armed. The broken window did its job.
Gloves on. The key. Upstairs.
Elizabeth soaks in the bath, her eyes closed, her head resting on a towel. She hears something outside and holds herself, listening. The wind and rain are like watery insects in her ears. A car engine starts then disappears down the street.
When the water begins to cool she pushes herself up, wrapping a robe around her body. She pauses at the fogged mirror, rubbing a hole to examine her face. There are lines she hasn’t noticed before. Delicate cracks like soft pencil marks.
Pulling on a nightdress, she crawls into bed, asleep almost immediately, dreaming she can feel North’s warm body next to her. In the early years of their marriage, before Rowan was born, North would sometimes wake her in the middle of the night, kissing her nipples and stroking her stomach and thighs. She would moan and smile with drowsy expectation, her legs opening almost instinctively.
At some point she wakes. The wind seems to breathe through the upper windows, locked open a few inches to create a cross draught. Rowan is snuffling on the monitor. He snores like his father, only softer.
“Hello, Elizabeth,” rasps a voice.
Her eyes are wide open now. She looks around the room.
“Can you hear me?”
It’s coming from the monitor; from lips pressed against the plastic microphone.
“Such a fine-looking boy, he sleeps so peacefully.”
Out of bed she crosses the floor, running along the corridor. Rowan’s bedroom door is open. The nightlight casts a soft yellow halo. Her eyes search for him. They open to someone else.
A gloved hand covers her mouth and nose, warm and hard against her lips and teeth. He wrenches her head back into his own, drawing her body into his loins, a belt buckle hard-edged against the small of her back, his unshaved jaw scraping like emery paper across her cheek.
He drags her along the corridor into the darkness of her bedroom, throwing her on to the mattress, where he presses the gun to her temple.
Elizabeth pulls the bedclothes around her.
“Please don’t hurt us. Take whatever you want. My purse is over there, but I don’t have any money.”
“You utter another sound and you die here and now.”
She nods. The cold ring of steel is pressed above her left eye. His face is covered in a handkerchief like a cowboy. His sodden black shirt is molded to his chest.
He twists the gun into her temple. “Who else is in the house?”
“Nobody.”
He presses the barrel to her mouth, forcing it between her lips, into her throat, making her gag.
“Who else is in the house?”
Her lips move around the barrel. She shakes her head, pleading with her eyes.
Pulling the gun free, he wipes the barrel on the bedding.
“Are you afraid?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Of what?”
“Of you.”
Elizabeth can see into his eyes. Empty. Bottomless. They remind her of something from her childhood—an old abandoned well in the garden, covered up and sealed with a metal grate. She would lie upon the cover and peer into the blackness, feeling the updraft as if the hole was breathing like the nostrils of a sleeping giant.
“You have some photographs.”
She shakes her head.
“You know the ones I mean.”
“In my handbag… on the dresser. Take them.”
Tucking the gun in the waistband of his jeans, he searches the bag. Finding the photographs, he folds them roughly and stuffs them inside his shirt.
“Where are the rest of them?”
“That’s all.”
“You’re lying to me.”
“No.”
“Do I have to bring your boy in here?”
“No. Please.”
“Your husband had a notebook—where is it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What about the girl he brought home?”
“I don’t know who she is.”
The Courier sits on the bed. The sheets are knotted in Elizabeth’s hands and drawn up beneath her chin. He traces the barrel of the gun down her cheek across her lips, over her chin to her neck. Lower still… between her breasts… brushing against her pregnancy.
He reacts as though scalded, rearing backwards and pointing the gun at her stomach. Elizabeth lowers the bedclothes. Her nightdress is bunched between her closed thighs. He’s staring at her pregnancy as though witnessing a miracle.
“Turn around. Face down. Hands above your head.”
“Do you know where my husband is?”
“Count to a thousand.”
“Please tell me where he is.”
“Louder! I want to hear the numbers. If you call the police, if you tell anyone, I will come back and cut your baby out of your womb. It will be the last thing you see before you die.”
Elizabeth begins counting slowly, her mouth almost too dry to make the words. The room is quiet. She stops. Listens. Rain gurgles in the downpipes. Wind shakes the trees.
Crawling out of bed, she goes to Rowan’s room, placing her hand upon his chest, feeling for his heartbeat. Then she slips into bed next to him, placing her arms around his sleeping form, protecting him from the monsters.
BOOK THREE
We are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.
EDWARD R. MURROW
1
LONDON
Holly opens the curtains, dividing the room with angled light. The overnight storm has passed and the sky is the color of tarnished silverware. The bruise on her cheek has faded but if she presses it hard enough she can still feel it beneath her skin. Zac’s bruise: the last one he inflicted upon her. A souvenir. No, that’s not the word she wants. A reminder.
She should call his parents. Help make arrangements for the funeral. She only met them once. Zac told them that she was a legal secretary and was helping him sue the army for compensation. Can you sue the army for war injuries, she wondered. Maybe the government doesn’t allow it.
There is a knock on the door. Her heart leaps. She checks the window. The fire escape is her escape route.
“Who is it?”
“I’m looking for Florence.”
“Just a minute.”
Holly pulls on a pair of jeans and picks up a lamp from a table between the beds. Unlocking the door, she steps behind it, holding the lamp above her head.
The door opens. Nobody enters.
“You don’t need that,” says the voice.
Holly looks across the room and sees her reflection in the mirror. The man in the hallway can see her.
“I’m a friend of Vincent’s. You can call me Joe.”
She studies him for a moment, looking for the lie, then lowers the lamp on to the table. Joe steps into the room.
“I brought you something to eat,” he says, handing her a paper bag with handles. “I didn’t know if you were a vegetarian so I brought you both.”
Holly rips open the wrapping and bends into a sandwich greedily, forcing the corner of the bread into her mouth.
“How do you know Vincent?” she asks between mouthfuls.
“We’ve worked together.”
“Are you a copper?”
“A psychologist.”
Holly searches his face. He’s telling the truth. She starts on the second sandwich.
“Can I sit down?” he asks.
“Do what you like.”
The hotel room is just big enough for two single beds, a wardrobe and an armchair worn smooth by many buttocks. It smells of ancient lacquer and cheap perfume and, somehow faintly, of wet tobacco trodden into the carpets.
“So?”
“So what?”
“How did you sleep?”
She laughs. “This conversation sounds like a real winner.”
Joe is studying her. “Do I make you nervous?”
“No.”
She opens the soft drink and gulps it noisily, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She’s sitting cross-legged on the bed, barefoot, shoulders hunched. Pausing for a moment, she looks at Joe again, examining him like a strange animal that has crossed her path. Mid-forties, slightly stooped, he has a tangle of hair and baggy clothes. He has kind eyes and a bumbling sort of air, like a man who’s forgotten something.
“Where are you from, Holly?”
“Why?”
“I’m interested.”
“Why are you interested?”
“I’ve read your Social Services file.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“I called in a favor.”
“What about my privacy?”
“Have you talked to someone like me before?”
“Yes.”
“When was that?”
“You want dates?”
Joe gives her a pained smile. “Vincent thinks you can tell when someone is lying.”
“He’s wrong. I tricked him.”
“How did you do that?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Holly tilts the soft-drink can, draining the remainder. She toys with the can, running her finger around the rim.
“What’s the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist?”
“Psychiatrists can medicate.”
“Just my luck.”
“Why wouldn’t you talk to the police?”
“Same reason I don’t want to talk to you.”
“But you are talking to me. You don’t trust them, do you? You’ve spent time in custody. Did something happen to you?”
She’s not looking at him now. Her lips are thin lines.
“Can you really tell when someone is lying?” he asks.
“You don’t believe it.”
“I keep an open mind.”
“Things get polluted if you leave them open. They collect rainwater. Litter. Leaves.”
Joe has had people like Holly in his consulting room. Patients unwilling to trust or frightened of what their thoughts and words might reveal about them. Sometimes Holly acts as though she has all the self-awareness of a hairdryer, but she’s picking up on every detail of their conversation, his unspoken signals, mannerisms and micro-expressions.
Holly asks him what time it is.
“Does it matter?” he asks.
“Is everything with you a question?” She bounces off the bed and walks to the window, her bare feet making the floor creak. “I need to get out of here.”
“Vincent said you should stay put.”
“Nobody knows I’m here. Just for half an hour. A walk.”
He agrees. They stop at a café on Edgware Road with metal tables and chairs on the pavement. Holly is hungry again. She orders a muffin and a cappuccino. Joe pays. He’s still trying to fathom this girl, whose piercings seem to multiply in her ears, three in her left ear, four in her right; another in her navel, which he glimpses when she yawns and stretches her arms above her head.
“Get a good look?” she says. She flips up her T-shirt, showing her bra. Her breasts. He looks away. Wrongly accused. Within moments, Holly acts as though the entire incident never happened. She flicks through magazines on a wooden rack. A newspaper lies open on a table. The headline: ROGUE BANKER FLIGHT RISK. Holly turns to the full story and reads about Richard North, her lips forming the words.
“How does somebody spend that much money?” she asks. “He could buy an island or his own plane. If I had fifty-four million quid I’d go to Jamaica and spend the rest of my life on a beach.”
“Do you remember him?”
“I guess.”
“What do you remember?”
“He was married. His wife was away for the weekend. They had a small boy.” Holly breaks her muffin into pieces, picking at the crumbs with her fingertips. “He asked me if I had ever done something wrong. He meant illegal. I thought maybe he knew we were going to rob him.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“He picked me up.”
“Just like that?”
Holly fixes him with a pitying look. “That’s what married men do—they look at someone like me and they want to know what I’m like in bed, what I look like naked, what I’ll do with my pretty little mouth. You’re doing it now.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are. All men are the same. They either hit me or hit on me or do both.”
“That’s a very sad view of life.”
“It’s the truth.”
Joe doesn’t want to argue with her. He sticks to his questions, asking what she stole.
“The usual stuff—phones, laptops, cameras, jewelry—things we could carry in the saddle bags of Zac’s bike.”
“What did you do then?”
“We fenced it.”
“Where?”
Holly rolls her eyes. “There’s a guy I know in the East End. Bernie Levinson. He owns a pawnshop. Bernie bought the stuff from me. He’s tighter than a duck’s arse but sometimes he lends me money when I’m short of the rent.”
Holly brushes the crumbs from her lap and looks around for something else to do. She’s sick of answering questions. “Now it’s my turn,” she says. “Are you married?”
“Technically.”
What does that mean?”
“I’m not divorced.”
“Separated?”
“Presently.”
“Why is your hand shaking?”
“I have Parkinson’s.”
She remains silent.
“Is that it?”
Holly shrugs. “It’s no fun unless you lie to me.”
2
ISTANBUL
The hotel in Istanbul is in a filthy side street between a Chinese wholesalers and a factory where African workers make knock-offs of European labels for Russian tourists. Globalization in a microcosm; profit as god.
Inside the arched gateway, along a narrow passage, there is a courtyard filled with apricot and orange trees around a rectangular pool with water the color of green moss.
Daniela emerges from the bathroom, dressed in a robe, her hair dripping and the ragged curls falling around her neck. Luca is still toweling off.
“I’m probably going to regret this,” she says.
“What happened to the post-coital glow?”
“I’m not talking about the sex.”
Luca holds out his arms and she comes to him, tucking her head beneath his chin, her breasts against his ribs. He can feel the warmth of her breath against his neck.
“Are you really going to London?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to ask Yahya Maluk why one of his companies is smuggling stolen money from Iraq. I’m also going to ask him if he knows Mohammed Ibrahim—a man who helped Saddam steal billions of dollars from his own people.”
“Just like that?”
“Yep.”
“And I suppose he’s going to throw up his hands and confess everything.”
“That would be nice.”
“You have the word of a one-armed former truck driver and a series of coincidences.”
“They’re more than just coincidences.”
“Yahya Maluk has unlimited funds and an army of lawyers. He’ll get injunctions to stop any story. He’ll sue you for defamation.”
“I know that.”
“Why then?”
“Sometimes the only way to rattle someone like Maluk is to shake his
gilded cage.”
“That’s a dangerous game.”
“I’m just following the money.”
“You could stop.”
“What if it’s funding the insurgency?”
“Nobody is going to be surprised.”
Luca feels like a mediocre gambler trying to bluff an expert. Daniela has slipped away and gone to the latticed window. It has grown dark outside. The courtyard is strung with fairy lights that follow the contours of tree trunks and branches. Over the rooftops, the dome of Santa Sophia is bathed in gold.
“Come to London with me,” he says.
“Why?”
“I don’t want you lose you.”
“We’re different people, Luca. I deal in numbers and balance sheets. You deal in hunches and hearsay.”
“I search for the facts.”
“But you never have them all. You gather just enough, write a story and move on.”
“You make me sound like a gigolo.”
“No, you’re not that good.”
Luca can see what she’s like—her father’s daughter, practical to the point of impracticality. He leans forward, brushing his lips against hers, holding the kiss.
Later, lying naked in the air-conditioned room, his heartbeat returning to normal, Luca wonders what it’s like for a woman, that moment when pleasure overcomes self-control and the wave breaks inside her.
“Do you still want me to come to London?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll come to London.”
3
LONDON
Rowan has to shake Elizabeth awake. She is twisted in the sheets, lying on a bed shaped like a racing car with a Green Goblin toy wedged under her hip.
“Why did you sleep here, Mummy?”
“I had a nightmare.”
“What about?”
The Wreckage: A Thriller Page 28
