Loose Ends

by Susan Moody

  ‘That’s a bit sweeping, Gordon.’

  ‘They’re all the same, these places. Give me white beaches, blue swimming pools, flushing khazi and a floating bar, and I wouldn’t call the king my uncle.’

  ‘You can probably get all that in Ecuador,’ Jefferson said mildly.

  ‘So, when are you off?’

  ‘Haven’t got my ticket yet, but . . .’ Again Jefferson tried not to think of Kate . . . ‘Beginning of the month.’

  ‘Got a hotel fixed up?’

  ‘Not yet. I’m hoping the travel agency will—’

  ‘Give me a bell when you’ve booked your flight, old son. I got a mate runs a place out in Quito . . .’ Gordon looked at Jefferson and frowned. ‘Think it’s there, unless I’m mixing it up with Peru—’

  ‘Bit of a difference, Gordon.’

  ‘No, no, I’m sure I’m thinking of the right place, anyway, let me know; my mate owes me one, I’ll get you a really good price, rock-bottom, better than any agency could come up with, all that lot’s after is their commission.’ Gordon levered himself out of the yielding sofa he had sunk into. ‘Look, don’t want to rush you, Jeff, and I really appreciate you dropping by, but I got a friend coming round, a special friend, know what I mean?’ He winked obscenely, raising in Jefferson’s unwilling mind images of his stepfather on the job. ‘We’re going out for a drink first and then meeting people at a restaurant. Nice girl, you’d like her, might even take her on holiday with me.’ He winked again. ‘Can’t mourn for ever, can you?’

  . . . and besides, the wench is dead, Jefferson thought, hauling himself to his feet, though the last thing anyone would have accused his mother of was being a wench. ‘Garden’s looking good, Gordon.’

  ‘Even better when summer finally comes. Want a quick look round?’

  Not really, Jefferson thought. ‘Love to.’

  To the accompaniment of some kind of constant buzzing noise which Jefferson took to be a distant neighbour giving his grass the first cut of the season, they strolled beside wide flower beds to the end of an immaculate lawn, where a couple of drooping willows, tiny leaves just bursting out of yellow branches, formed a natural fence between the two halves of the garden. Beyond them lay a large pond with lily-pads round the edges, and bulrushes at the far end. The source of the noise was revealed as dozens of tiny frogs hopping and croaking, leaping from leaf to leaf, clinging on to bits of bark and watching Gordon with shiny golden eyes. ‘Noisy little buggers, aren’t they?’ Gordon said admiringly. His mobile phone chirped into life, and as one frog, they plinked into the water.

  Gordon glanced at the number of the caller and turned away. ‘’Scuse me, Jeff, old son, I ought to take this, unfinished business. Back in a tick. You just walk round, nice view at the end of the garden, you’ll like it.’ He turned away and pushed back between the fronds of the willows.

  Jefferson tried not to listen, a task made easier as the frogs climbed back on to the flat lily leaves and began croaking again. ‘Your problem, matey, you solve it,’ he unwillingly heard, ‘. . . I don’t care . . . can’t be doing with . . . look, buster, guy’s a loose cannon . . . deal with it . . . unless you want . . . OK, that’s good . . .’

  Jefferson concentrated on a lilac bush, raised a branch to his nose and sniffed at the blossom, feeling faintly foolish. Jeez, what the hell was he overhearing here? It sounded ominous, it sounded dangerous.

  Gordon came pushing back through the willow curtain. ‘Gawd, no rest for the wicked, can’t trust anyone these days to do what you want, considering the salaries some of my guys get . . .’

  ‘Nothing serious, I hope.’

  ‘No way. But I’ll tell you something, Jeff, you ever find yourself in any kind of business, watch out for the loose cannons of this world, there’re more of them about than you realize and they can bring an organization down, just like that.’ Gordon snapped his fingers and the frogs leaped again for the safety of the water, from which they stared at the two men with their tiny brilliant eyes.

  ‘Hope I didn’t interrupt you.’ Jefferson began to walk back up to the house.

  ‘Not at all, Jeff, any time, me old son, any time. Don’t forget to call me before you take off for Ecuador, I’ll see you right, a quick bell to my associates.’ Gordon led him towards the front door. ‘And if you want my advice, which you probably don’t, re your mother’s accident, I’d just leave it lay, as the Yanks say. Never does any good to rake up the past.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  As Jefferson started up his car, another one pulled up and as the occupant got out, he caught a glimpse of a hatchet-faced (what did that mean, exactly?) blonde-haired woman done up to the nines in a high-collared red suit, froth of white blouse at the neck and white stilettos to match, gold chain round her left ankle, the complete antithesis of his mother. One of these days he was absolutely going to take the bull by the horns and ask Gordon what in the world had drawn him to her, since a more unlikely couple it was difficult to imagine, though it was perfectly possible that when Gordon wasn’t running his betting shops and whatever other businesses he owned (or murdering defenceless Antipodean wildlife), he could be seen on the picket lines over the flouting of human rights in China, or manning the barricades to protest against the dumping of nuclear waste. Seemed unlikely, though.

  And perhaps Gordon was right. What could possibly be gained by looking into a long-ago car accident, even supposing Jefferson was competent to do so? Only the thought of his father, plus images of Philip Marlowe in the Big Sleep (the 1946 version set in Los Angeles, rather than the 1978 one) and a more poignant one of Romilly’s sad face kept him geared up to continue scanning the papers which had set his father speculating as to whether justice had been done and the true facts of his former wife’s death had been uncovered.

  Kate

  Sixteen

  Because of the drugs he fed her, not all the time, but often enough, her memory jumped and faltered. The hours passed hazily, a constant hallucinatory loop of dreaming and enduring, threats and degradation.

  She wanted to show him that whatever he did to her, he couldn’t break her spirit, wanted to spit and curse at him, but she feared that if she did, he would grow more violent. At least he did not – could not? – actually rape her. A mercy, though a small one. Often she drifted away, back to the safety of school, to the rented many-verandahed house on Santa Cruz, to moonlit beaches and waving palms, shrieking parrots and the chirp of finches, not sure, sometimes, exactly where she was, whether she had left this ugly room and gone elsewhere or was still lying on the smelly sheet he had spread over the mattress. Over and over again, she lived through the sequence of events which had led to her being here and thought, even if I’d known what would happen, how could I have deflected it, how else would I have responded? If it hadn’t been that night, it would have been another, all because she’d ‘dissed’ that strutting little inadequate.

  She dreamed. The past returned. Places she no longer belonged to, people she no longer knew, memories she did not know she owned. Observing them, spotlighting them, she saw clearly that we are always moving forward and can carry only so much of the past accumulation with us into the present, that in order to survive, it is necessary to forget, to leave behind. But one piece of memory, incomplete but still horrifying, would not be discarded. She had spent nearly ten years trying to push it away, and had succeeded to a certain extent. But here in this dreary room, it replayed itself, not once or twice, but many times, herself sitting in the back of the car with Annie and Luisa, staring out of the window at a parakeet, red and yellow and green, its long tail feathers brushing the leaves as it flitted between the creepers. Cloud hung over the leaves, the forest, dampened the roadway which led straight along towards the village they were coming up to at Dad’s usual steady driving pace, his summer assistant in the passenger seat beside him. One minute she was idly watching a group of men standing at the side of the road watching their approach, not Indians, more like men from the cit
y, the mainland, talking together as the car approached them, some kid peeping at them around the edge of a white wall. The next, she was lying on her back, blinking up at the sky through the car’s roof, which looked as though someone had taken a tin-opener and peeled it back. Beyond the jagged edges, she could see brilliant birds fussing, emerald feathers distinct as jewels among the leaves. Palm fronds pressed against the hot white sky. Shards of glass powdered her arms; her face and hair felt sticky. Only much later would she realize that she was covered in the brains and blood of the two in the front seats. One of her arms was pinned under something, she could see Annie’s leg, her white sock and brown sandal, directly in front of her, unattached to anything else, she could smell fire and scorching flesh, the heat of flame on her skin, burning, her arm, her leg, oh, her leg; Dad’s summer assistant lying against the front window, mouth open, teeth lying like an unstrung necklace on her navy blue shirt, a mix of other smells: gasoline, faeces, blood. Far away, she could hear voices, quick and urgent. She’d wiggled her fingers and felt something soft, silky, and realized after a long while that it was Luisa’s hair. ‘Mummy?’ she whispered, though her mother had died years before. ‘Daddy?’

  It happened so quickly. The iron curtain crashing down between Before and the Rest of her Life, changing everything, irreversible and immutable.

  There were few thoughts, mostly images flashing past, and behind them, the question which had never been answered: why? Why then? Why them? Dad had lived and worked in Ecuador on and off for years, so what had changed?

  She had times of lucidity, and in these she walked around the room where they kept her, clutched at the bars which covered the shuttered windows, rattled the handle of the locked door. By now she must have been missed. Even if Magnus wasn’t back from California, there was her job at the travel agency. Janine: she had to have gone to the police. But although she was fairly sure she had spoken of Stefan, Kate feared that she had never told Janine his name, so even if she had alerted the authorities, they would have little to go on.

  She had no idea where she was. No real sense of time passing, though through the edges of the shutters she could faintly see the change of light from night to day. But there were days she might have missed, and sometimes she felt herself fragmenting, receding like a mirror hit by a bullet, pieces of herself spinning away into the distance until they disappeared.

  Hatred, and the thought of revenge sustained her, kept her strong. That and the certainty that sooner or later, she would find a way to get out of here. Meanwhile, it was important that she maintained her self-respect, kept up her strength. She tried to exercise by pacing up and down, lifting the metal chair and then the table in alternate hands many times a day, did sit-ups and press-ups, ate whatever he brought her even though she knew that sometimes it must be drugged. And she waited. Escape and revenge. The two occupied her thoughts, got her through the wavering days. Revenge was easier. It would be long and slow, the death she would inflict on Stefan, the man who believed he had only to ask and she would fall into his arms, the one whose humiliation and pride was the cause of all this. There’d be blood and tears and more blood. He would beg until he saw that there was no hope, and then he would fall silent, sensing death somewhere close by – but not close enough. Occasionally this thought would cause her such pleasure that she would smile, sometimes even laugh aloud. In her more lucid moments, she knew this was nothing more than a fantasy, that she would be incapable of such actions, but it was one she clung to because it gave her something to keep focused on.

  She could discover very little about her location. The house was obviously empty; no-one was living there, at least for the moment. Was Stefan an estate agent? A property developer? Did the house belong to a friend? At night, the darkness was total: no indication of street lamps or lights from passing cars, so probably somewhere isolated. She lived on the takeaway food he brought her: pizzas, Chinese dishes of vegetables and rice, Indian curries, bags of apples and oranges, water from the filthy tap.

  She could hear his footsteps echoing on uncarpeted wooden steps as he came upstairs to where she waited. Stefan worked out at the gym: muscles like bowling-balls congregated at the top of his arms; when he held her down on the bed, the veins popped and crawled under his tanned skin. She looked at his taut jaw line, and knew that he was far too strong for it to be worth struggling. Would he let her live? Almost certainly not: after this, he couldn’t simply let her go – not only could she could identify him, but she would. She did not want to die, not yet, not here. The Stockholm Syndrome was where victims gradually felt sympathy, perhaps even love, for their captors. No way was that going to happen here. If – when – she got out, she would feel nothing but hatred and contempt. But she’d read somewhere that the more some kind of relationship was built up, the harder it was in the end for the captor to kill his prey, so at first she tried to personalize things, use his name, thank him for the food he brought, but her hatred wouldn’t lie down, and it seemed a pointless charade. She was here so he could hurt her, not because he saw her as a bargaining chip, except that so far, despite his tedious sadistic fantasies about what he was going to do to her, the different disgusting ways he was going to abuse her, he had done nothing except punch her around, and throw himself on top of her, force his fingers inside her, until slowly it had dawned on her that he was unable to get it up, or at least, unable in circumstances like these.

  This was both pleasing and empowering.

  ‘I have to brush my teeth, it’s been days,’ she said firmly. It wasn’t a question, or a plea, but a statement. Her mouth tasted foul, her breath must smell, though sometimes he left chewing-gum along with the takeaways.

  ‘You can’t have a toothbrush.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Mick says you’d stick it in my eye if you had one.’

  How right Mick was. ‘Then at least bring me toothpaste. I can use my finger as a brush.’ She watched him consider, wonder if she could use the tube to harm him in some way.

  He was wavering. ‘All right,’ he said. She guessed that he was beginning to feel anxious about what he and Mick had done, were doing, whether he would really get away with it. She guessed that the plan had been Mick’s, feeding Stefan’s macho fantasies of dominance, of getting even, and she guessed, too, that if and when Mick showed up, things would be horribly different. She had to get out of here, and she saw the toothpaste as a victory of sorts.

  She spent hours wondering how she could fashion a weapon. Although they had obviously planned and prepared for her abduction and imprisonment in detail, she knew that they could not have thought of everything. She was cleverer than either of them, and she could outwit them, especially Stefan on his own, if she only focused on the problem. She examined the table, chair and bed many times, testing the strength of joints and legs, tearing at the fabric which covered the bed’s base to see if she could wrest a spring free, but she didn’t waste energy on it, knowing she wasn’t strong enough to pull the furniture apart. The walls were thick and solid; there was no chimney breast. He’d provided her with a sliver of soap and a towel, plus sheets and a blanket, but taken away all her clothes.

  By now she knew the room as intimately as a lover: every crack in the walls, every stain on the ceiling, the scuff marks on the floor, the paint peeling from the woodwork, the dry-rot in the window-sill and skirting boards.

  After much consideration, she had reached the conclusion that her only weapon was Stefan himself.

  Stefan would be easier to manipulate than Mick, the thug, the bottom-feeder, if and when he finally appeared. Her mind groped its way through the sludge they had filled it with, offered her blue-footed boobies, Annie dancing in the garden sprinkler, thirteen finches chirping. She worked on a plan, though it was difficult with such meagre resources at her disposal, and a brain which wheeled and drifted inside her skull.

  Each day, head swimming, she forced her body off the bed and marched round the room ten, twenty, a hundred times. She swung her
arms up and down and in front of her. She brought her knees up to her chin, one after the other, ten times, twenty times, fifty times, determined not to let the drugs control her. And she worked on her plan. There was no mirror in the room, but if the light was right, she could sometimes make herself out in the glass of the windows, behind the screen. She draped the sheet seductively over herself, pulling and folding until it resembled a dress, she preened this way and that, forced her mouth into a smile, dragged her fingers through her hair since she had no comb.

  ‘I need shampoo,’ she said coldly, next time he arrived, and saw his eyes shift from side to side. Shampoo, shampoo, did he dare allow her to have some? She was winning, she could tell. ‘Look at my hair.’ She grabbed a handful. ‘Feel it. You used to like my hair. I can’t go on washing it with soap. Besides, there’s only a sliver left. Bring me shampoo. It doesn’t have to be a big bottle. You needn’t let Mick know.’

  The next day, he brought her a small bottle of shampoo. She tried not to show her triumph.

  He was in a suit today, with a tie and colour-coordinated shirt. Good, she thought, good, excellent. He undid his belt, lowered the zip, let his trousers fall to the ground and stepped out of them. He walked over to her, semi-erect, his penis poking out from under his shirt, waving like the branch of a tree, a drop of moisture at its tip; something had finally turned him on. Maybe he’d been in touch with Mick again, Mick the Mentor, Mick the Monster, been fired up in some way. For the first time in days she felt real fear.

  ‘Let me go,’ she said softly.

  He ignored her, pulled off his tie, undid his shirt, dropped his jacket over the chair, watching her all the time in case she launched herself at him, attacked him.

  ‘You don’t really want to do this,’ she said.