by Ingrid Black
I hadn’t held one since . . . well.
‘I wish I had one now,’ I said. ‘Sitting here waiting for who the hell knows who to show, it’d make me feel a whole lot better.’ I handed it back. ‘Let’s hope you’re as good as Fitzgerald says you are. There’s three of us to protect and only one gun.’
‘Soon as anything happens, there’ll be a swarm of armed officers here in two seconds,’ he reassured me.
‘It’s those two seconds that do the damage,’ I said.
I went to the bathroom, ignoring the dirty needles I could see in Jackie’s wastebin, and stared at myself in the mirror.
Through the thin glass, I could hear cars, voices, music drifting from open windows down the street.
Tillman was out there somewhere. The killer was out there somewhere. Both statements were true, but however I picked at them I just couldn’t figure where they intersected.
Downstairs again, I went to the kitchen and opened another beer.
Jackie was still sleeping.
‘You want to play some more cards?’ said Haran. ‘Let me win back some of my money?’
I shook my head. The mood had changed as the night grew older. If he was coming, now would be the time. My nerves were aching tight with the strain of anticipation. I shook Jackie awake and told her to go to bed.
‘Promise you’ll stay?’ she said reluctantly.
‘Jackie, trust us. We’re not going anywhere.’
She wasn’t convinced, but made her way to the door anyway. Like I said, she was used to doing what she was told.
‘Wait. We have to hit the lights first.’
Jackie walked from room to room of her small house, switching off lights, then climbed the stairs, catching my eye as she went. She looked terrified and I didn’t blame her.
Upstairs we heard her moving about, heard the pull of the drapes, the creak of floorboards, followed by the squeak of the bed as she climbed into it, a light switched off. The charade of normality for any possible audience.
Haran and I sat in the dark, and I pictured Jackie lying there in the dark too, trying to sleep, hearing noises. He asked me in a whisper about my time in the FBI, but I brushed him off, shifting the talk to him instead. He gave me some of his favourite anecdotes about his time in the ARU. I got the impression he’d told them plenty enough times before.
Truth was, I wasn’t much in the mood for talking.
It was getting cold. Jackie had a gas fire, but we’d let it go down to make things seem as they should be, and also because cold kept you alert, and alert was what we needed to be. All I could see in the dark whilst we waited was the green glow of the digital clock that Jackie had in her sitting room, tracking the hours.
One a.m. . . . two . . . Jackie coughed faintly upstairs.
Outside was all quiet now, barely any traffic; the music of parties had died. Footsteps intermittently alerted my senses, but they had places to go and went to them without disturbing this house; and once they were gone, the night dragged again. Dark took on its own presence and sentience. My eyes became attuned to it, so that I could look round the room and see as well as if I had switched on a light. John Haran’s eyes glinted in the dark.
At some point, I must have nodded off, for I was back in my own apartment and I didn’t know how I’d got there. I knew at once that it was a dream and that I shouldn’t be sleeping, but I stopped myself from stirring because I was curious to know why I was here, what was here.
The door out to the terrace was open, and an icy draught was snaking round my feet. Outside was no city, only trees, a dark wood like the one where Fagan had died. There was someone in here with me. I knew it instinctively, like the particles in the atmosphere had been altered by a stranger’s breath, so that they felt desecrated.
As I stepped through the shapes of my furniture, down the hallway to the bedroom, I could hear a breathing that wasn’t mine. The door was closed. I touched it and it swung open. There on the bed lay Jackie. She was face down on the sheet, naked, a length of green twine twisted round her neck, her wrists and ankles tied with the same, only she had no hands. And there, sketched on to her back in blood, were two letters. Aleph. Lamedh. Tillman stood by the bed, pointing at them.
I started awake, only just managing to prevent myself from crying out, taking short, shallow breaths to compose myself. Then I noticed.
Haran was gone.
I was out of my chair in an instant. Quick look round the room. Into the kitchen. Check the time: shortly after three.
He wasn’t there.
Into the hallway, careful not to make too much noise. Not there either. Then the stairs, climbing them slowly, remembering Haran’s gun and wishing it was mine. Though what did I need a gun for? Haran had probably only gone to the bathroom. Hadn’t he? If he had, he wasn’t there now. Nor in the second bedroom.
That only left – Jackie’s room.
I was alarmed now as I stepped, quicker, quicker, down the hall to the front of the house.
Stop.
Jackie’s door was ajar.
‘Haran?’
I saw him at once, standing close to the window nearest the door, peering out through a narrow crack.
‘Haran, what the—’
He raised a finger to his lips to silence me, though without taking his eyes off the window, and I saw he’d taken his gun out and now had it balanced lightly in his other hand.
‘There’s someone here,’ he whispered.
‘You should have woken me.’
‘You fall asleep, this is what happens. You miss all the fun.’
‘You call this fun?’
I stepped over to his side lightly, sparing a quick glance to the bed where Jackie lay. I couldn’t see her face, but I heard her breathing faintly.
Dead to the world.
No, don’t say that.
‘Why hasn’t he been closed down yet?’
‘Just waiting for the right moment. There. See him?’
Through the crack, I saw a shadow stir.
I looked over to the derelict house. I knew there was backup there, but right now I felt like the city had emptied itself of possible aid and we were alone. One gun. One killer. Was this him?
‘Come on.’
Haran crept back out to the top of the stairs. The door below was rattling faintly as the shadow tested the lock.
‘Soon as he comes in, you take cover,’ he said.
Haran levelled the gun patiently as the door began to open slowly and the shadow stepped over the threshold. How had he got past the lock?
There was no time left to ask. This was it.
‘Freeze!’ shouted Haran – and at that moment there was a scuffle outside and I saw two more shadows appear.
The figure in the doorway turned in alarm, and a shot rang out.
Not one of Haran’s.
There was a flash like lightning as he was hit, so bright that I could see his face. Not Tillman’s face, but familiar all the same.
Where had I seen it before?
He fell to the ground with a cry of pain, and from upstairs I could hear Jackie shout out too as she woke to the noise.
Haran took the stairs two at a time on the way down as another voice shouted at the injured man: ‘Stay where you are!’
Haran bent down and started to frisk the figure on the ground.
‘Who fired?’ he demanded. ‘Was it you, Baily?’
‘I thought he was going to shoot.’
‘He hasn’t got a fucking gun; what did you think he was going to shoot you with – a mobile phone?’
‘I thought—’
‘Wrong, Baily. To think, you’d need a fucking brain.’
‘Tony!’
The last cry made me turn, and there was Jackie at the top of the stairs, hand over her mouth, shaking.
Tony.
Of course. I remembered now where I’d seen him, hopping from foot to foot in his baggy pants, waiting for Jackie at her usual pitch the night I’d gone out in the
Jeep to find her.
It was the end of another malignant day.
And tomorrow didn’t look like being much better.
Seventh Day
Chapter Thirty-Five
‘But he is going to be all right?’ said Fisher.
‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ I said. ‘He only got hit in the shoulder – though to listen to him whining, you’d have thought he was being tortured by the Vietcong.’
‘What about the officer who shot him?’
‘Baily,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘will be shunted off into official purgatory for a while to await the findings of an enquiry.’
‘A bit harsh,’ I said, ‘considering his only mistake was not finishing the job properly.’
‘You don’t mean that,’ she said, but at that moment I almost did
Probably nothing would have happened at Jackie’s house if Tony hadn’t turned up, the night was running out as it was; but we’d never know now. It could have been over. Instead . . .
‘Look, forget about Tony,’ I said gruffly. ‘What about breakfast? Have you decided what you want yet?’
It was just after eight and we were sitting in the same café where I’d been that first day when Nick Elliott walked in and the world went dark. Same table, same view out the window, same rain. Margaret had welcomed me back like she hadn’t seen me in years instead of days.
It was good to realise some people would miss me if I was gone; I was strangely touched. Or maybe she was just glad I had company for a change. Company meant extra orders.
Apart from us, there were no other customers.
‘I’m not hungry,’ Fisher said, laying down the menu which he’d been peering at without taking in the words for the last ten minutes. He looked beat. ‘I’ll make do with a coffee.’
‘You don’t make do with a coffee here,’ I told him. ‘You have to eat something or they take out a professional hit on you. The owner’s Italian. It’s an honour code thing.’
‘In that case,’ he conceded with a sigh, ‘I’d better have the scrambled eggs.’
‘Fitzgerald?’
‘My usual.’
Margaret, who’d been waiting patiently for our order, stepped over to the table, pad and pencil at the ready.
‘Scrambled eggs with extra toast for Fatty Arbuckle there,’ I told her, ‘and we’ll just have a couple of coffees. Black.’
‘Coming right up.’
‘But you said – oh, never mind,’ said Fisher. ‘I’m too tired to resist. I hardly got a minute’s sleep last night. I was tied up at Trinity till all hours, then when I eventually got back to my hotel my mobile hardly stopped ringing with reporters looking for information on Tillman – where he’d got to, whether it was true that he was a suspect. Your department’s leakier than the Titanic.’
‘You should have switched it off,’ said Fitzgerald.
‘I couldn’t in case either you or my wife was trying to contact me. I don’t even know where the vultures got my number from. They wouldn’t take no for an answer.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘I just fob them off with the usual lie about following a definite line of enquiry.’
Lie was right. The police were as bemused as the press about what had become of Mort Tillman. He certainly hadn’t turned up at the airports or ferry docks trying to flee the country, and there hadn’t been a single sighting of him. From what they could reconstruct of his movements, Boland and I were among the last people to see him when we turned up yesterday lunchtime to ask about his visit to the courier’s office the night before. He’d been seen returning to his rooms half an hour later by two witnesses in the college, and then nothing more.
Now, twenty hours later, here we sat, none the wiser, waiting for some sign, some portent that would make the shattered fragments of the last six days repair themselves into the semblance of a shape – though that was looking even less likely to appear than Fisher’s breakfast.
In the end, he got tired of waiting for it to arrive and said he was going to the men’s room.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said once we were alone.
Fitzgerald had been frowning ever since we came in and now she lifted her hand to pinch the bridge of her nose.
‘Is it your head? I’ve tablets somewhere if you want one.’
‘My head’s fine,’ she said. ‘Or no worse than it’s been all week, at any rate. I still can’t believe it about Tillman, that’s all. Why? That’s what I don’t get. Why would he get involved in something like this? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘You heard what Fisher had to say. That he’s seeking revenge on me for ruining his life over the White Monk case.’
‘You don’t exactly sound convinced.’
I didn’t answer her directly.
‘It adds up, I can’t deny that,’ I said. ‘Say something was building inside him, some kind of breakdown. For the first time in his life he loses his self-control and he’s suspended with nowhere to turn, no family, no partner, old friends and colleagues all keeping their distance. It’s one stressor after another. Textbook stuff. Next thing is, he gets invited to Dublin and the gears start clicking and slotting together in his head. He knows I’m here, he knows about Fagan.’
Or he thought he did.
‘And where does that leave all our theories about Mullen?’
‘Mullen attacked Jackie that night at the canal, I’m sure of it,’ I said, ‘and he attacked those prostitutes in London. And the more I go over it in my head, the more convinced I am that he was part of what Fagan did as well. I don’t know how, we might never get to the root of it, but they were in it together. But maybe he didn’t have anything to do with this. Maybe it only looks like he did because Tillman was playing games with all the bits and pieces of Mullen’s past too, just like he was with ours, and Fagan’s son being back in town was only a coincidence.’
‘You once told me there was no such thing as coincidence.’
‘You should know better by now than to listen to anything I say,’ I reminded her with a smile, and I would’ve said more, only at that moment my cellphone began to ring from deep inside my jacket and I had to fumble through my pockets to find it.
I didn’t recognise the number but took the call anyway. I could always cut the connection if it wasn’t important.
‘Yeah?’ I said.
‘That’s no way to answer the telephone,’ a voice said back. ‘Didn’t they teach you manners in the FBI?’
I remembered how Elliott had described the call from the killer he’d received at the start of the week. Obviously it was some sort of electronic device attached to the phone. The voice sounded slowed down and robotic, like a tape in a Walkman when the batteries were low.
I mouthed to Fitzgerald: It’s him.
Quickly, she got up and stretched across the table and put her ear as close to the phone as she could.
‘It’s hard to be polite,’ I said once she was in place, ‘when I don’t know who I’m speaking to.’
‘But that’s exactly the way I like it,’ the voice said with a short stab of a laugh. ‘As Scripture says: Without a parable spake he not unto them, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables. The Gospel of St Matthew, Chapter Thirteen, if memory serves me right.’
‘I thought we’d given up all this religious play-acting.’
‘I know, I know, but I’ve sort of gotten attached to it. I find it comforting. And isn’t consolation one of the great benefits of religion? Besides, you know very well who I am.’
‘Is that you, Tillman?’ I said. ‘Because if it is, just tell me what you want. Do you want me to say I’m sorry? Do you want me to admit I was wrong about you? Is that what you want?’
‘It’s way too late for apologies. I simply called for a friendly chat. The seventh day is here. Time we talked freely.’
‘We can talk as freely as you like. How about it? Why don’t we meet somewhere right now?’
&nbs
p; That laugh again.
One step at a time, Saxon,’ the voice said. ‘There’s no hurry. No rush. I’ve looked forward for so long to being able to talk with you without pretence. I think we understand one another. I certainly have a great deal of respect for you.’
‘You don’t say.’
That’s why I’m disappointed in you. The others – well, I expected nothing from them. Draker. Dalton. Obedient little Sergeant Boland. Not forgetting Chief Superintendent Fitzgerald. No doubt Grace has her attractions for you as a playmate, but as an investigator she leaves a lot to be desired, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Seems to me like I’m not saying anything,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s you doing all the talking.’
‘See what I mean? That’s the spirit. That’s why I had such high hopes of you. Now I’m beginning to wonder if I was wrong. What do you say? Shall I give you another chance?’
‘That depends on what you mean by another chance.’
‘I mean Jackie,’ the voice said. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not talking about your trashy friend from the canal. I actually find it insulting that you thought I could be snared so easily. Still, I promised you a Jackie and I always keep my promises. Those are the rules of the game. Are you ready to play your part?’
‘Listen,’ I said, my voice rising, ‘don’t even start that bullshit with me. There is no game, do you hear me?’ There was silence. ‘Are you listening, damn it?’
‘You know, Saxon,’ the voice returned, ‘you should really try and control that temper of yours. It is most unladylike. And how are you going to get anywhere if you fly off the handle at every setback?’
‘According to you, we’re not getting anywhere as it is.’
‘That’s where I come in. Think of it as a helping hand from an old friend. To start, I have directions to something I think you’ll find interesting. Do you have a pen and paper?’
‘I’ll remember them.’
‘Are you sure? They are rather complicated and I know how useless women are at finding their way around. Remember that winter we were travelling in Vermont and you nearly took us over the border into Canada? You didn’t put that in your book, did you?’
