by T. J. Lebbon
‘Clumsy,’ Holt said.
‘What’s clumsy?’
‘Staying there for two nights. People will get used to seeing you. You’ll be remembered. Especially someone like you.’
‘Like me?’
‘Attractive white woman travelling on her own.’
‘Still such a smooth talker,’ she said, smiling, because he so was not.
Holt only sighed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. There were a thousand questions – Where are you? How did you know I was looking? How long have you been watching me? – but none of them were worth asking. He’d tell her if he wanted to. ‘I know you didn’t want me to come back. But … ’
‘I won’t help you,’ he said.
‘How do you know I haven’t already finished?’ she asked. ‘Come here flushed with victory ready to drag you off into the sunset?’
‘And live happily ever after?’
‘Maybe.’
He sighed again. He knows everything, she thought. She’d always believed that. What he didn’t know via whatever contacts or methods he had, he seemed able to pluck from her thoughts. He had wisdom. Maybe it came with years, but more likely it was a product of the life he had always led. He lived on a different plane to most people, his perception insulated against the interference of modern life.
She sat up and took a long swig of water from the bottle beside the bed. Outside, mopeds buzzed along the narrow street, and the city muttered and rumbled as it came to life. She kept the phone pressed to her ear, but Holt did not talk. He was waiting for her to say why she’d come, what she wanted of him, how desperate things might be. Waiting to say no again.
‘I have to tell you,’ she said. ‘But … not like this.’
‘We’ve already said our goodbyes,’ he said.
‘Can’t we meet?’
‘I’m not in Italy any more.’
That shocked her. It was foolish, but for some reason she’d believed that he was calling from somewhere close. Perhaps even the next room; she thought that would be his style. Her heart sank a little, realising she didn’t know him at all, and was not going to see him again.
‘But tell me anyway,’ he said.
So she did.
‘It didn’t take me long to gather together everything I knew about them. There wasn’t much to gather. Seventeen days working my way around the same place I’d seen Grin, and finally I saw her again. Clumsy of her, and I had to hold back from attacking her there and then. The impulse was there. And after everything you’d taught me … I could have murdered her in the street and walked away without anyone knowing.
‘But I followed her instead. She was fucking someone, that was the only reason she’d appeared there again. I was even kind enough to let her have her night there, then I went to the guy’s flat. He wasn’t one of them. If he was, he wouldn’t have talked so easily. He didn’t know her name, said they’d met on an internet chat room for people looking for casual sex. That was only the third time he’d seen her, and he said she hardly ever spoke, only told him what to do to her. He thought it was just her kink, and he got off on it. He was terrified of me. Maybe he thought that was my kink. I had no reason to hate him, but I did. He’d been … inside her. Inside the woman who’d murdered my family, pleasuring her, making her feel good.’
‘Did you kill him?’ Holt asked. The question didn’t shock her as much as it should.
‘No. But I promised that if he spoke of me, I’d hunt down and kill his entire family.’
‘He knew you were serious.’ It was a statement, not a question. Holt knew he didn’t even have to ask.
Rose thought of the kiss of the blade, the parting of skin, and the man’s gurgled cry as he’d pressed the pouting wound on his thigh together.
‘He gave me enough to work on. The last part of Grin’s car number plate, a tattoo on her thigh, her accent. I did some work. It was a hire car rented through a third party, but the third party had a place in Camden, small empty office, stinking of rat piss. Just a registered address, but there was a cupboard filled with junked laptops. They didn’t know how to wipe their data histories very well. I got part of a credit card number from there, traced that to an address in Sheffield. Old couple. They talked soon enough, all it took was a threat. I have no idea if Grin was even a relative of theirs – daughter, niece, granddaughter – but pretty soon I had an address in Edinburgh.’
‘Sounds like a loose trail,’ Holt said. He’d schooled her on tracking people this way, and how some people not wishing to be found would often leave false clues and pointers to throw pursuers off their scent. He called them loose trails because they were baggy, too filled with clues, too obvious.
‘That’s what I thought, but it was all I had. So I went to Edinburgh anyway, expecting to find nothing.’
‘And?’
‘It was an empty house. I watched for a while, and there was a young kid paid to go in twice each day, turn lights on and off, clear mail from behind the front door. I got in on the third night and had a good sniff around. The mail was all junk stuff, nothing with a name. Everything was clean, dusted, pretty much pristine. But in one of the upstairs rooms there was a small case under the bed. It was filled with weapons and other stuff, survival equipment, false documents, few grand in cash. And a letter to Margaret Vey. On the surface it was a chatty one-pager about a holiday the writer had been on, but there was something strange about it. It was familiar, but impersonal. Like … an instruction manual. I didn’t take anything, and left the way I’d come in.
‘Margaret Vey. I had a name. But she didn’t exist. I used some of the contacts you gave me – Isaac, MonoMan, and the woman at GCHQ. While they were doing their work, I did everything I could. HMRC, National Health, insurance and investment filing systems, passport office, criminal databases. Nothing. She was nobody.’
‘False name?’
‘Of course. But people use false names to get things, and hers didn’t lead anywhere.’
‘So what then?’ Holt sounded interested. He wanted to know how Rose had found out what she had about the Trail, how she’d infiltrated so far. Enough to know when they had initiated another hunt. His interest was good, and she needed to nurture that. She didn’t believe for a minute that she knew him any better than he wanted her to, but the excitement he felt at things like this had always been obvious. He lived off the grid, and that quiet zone beneath the radar was his playground.
‘I remembered the tattoo the guy had described, and the accent. Went to Bolton, visited the studios there, showed them a sketch of the design I said I wanted – a snake coiled around a rat. No joy. But then I remembered the numbers I’d got from her phone the first time I’d seen her. Scratched into my arm. One of them was still visible, just, and it had a Bolton area code, so I tried it. And it was a tattoo artist who did home visits. I met him, talked about the design, and when I got the reaction I was looking for, I asked the guy about the woman while he was working on me.’
‘You got the same tattoo?’
‘Sure. Same place.’ Rose touched her inner thigh. She didn’t think about it too often, and when she did she felt only a blankness. It had been necessary, that was all.
‘So what did he tell you?’
‘Only her home address, where he’d been summoned to do the tattoo.’
Holt caught his breath. Rose smiled. It was rare to garner such a reaction from him.
‘And?’ he asked.
‘I used it well. I kept my distance, but over the next few weeks I’d managed to intercept some of her mail, bug her phone line, hack into her broadband. I was as quiet as I could be. Any sign that someone else was riding her broadband, any hint that her mail had been opened and resealed, and that would have been it. The temptation to kill her was huge. But I was getting a good deal of intel, and as each new element fell into place, a bigger picture was building. And it was terrifying. It was … ’ Rose shook her head, wiping a bead of sweat from her temple. Street noises from outside seeme
d so distant, as if they came from another world. Her world was here, in this room, in her mind, balancing across the phone line to wherever Holt now was. A dark world of people who didn’t exist, and whose reason for living was to provide kill sport for others.
‘There are plenty of people who know how to live like that,’ Holt said, and she knew he meant himself. For a moment she didn’t want to shoot him down; he’d done too much for her, given more of himself than perhaps he’d intended. But even Holt didn’t compare.
‘No, Holt,’ she said. ‘It’s more than that. It’s like they were never born. I have a few names that probably aren’t theirs. I have some grainy images, blown up from pictures taken from a distance. But apart from that, these people might as well not exist. They’ve got no past. Their present is nebulous. They move and interact without being seen, communicate through the white noise of a billion voices. They’re less than ghosts. Barely rumours. First thing I’ll do when I kill one is check them for a navel.’
Holt remained silent for a while. She could hear him breathing, thinking. She’d often tried to imagine what it was like inside his head, but even with every dark thing she saw in her future, she didn’t think she’d ever get close.
‘I’m sure they can bleed,’ he said.
‘I’m going to find out.’ She didn’t want to ask. Had no way of pleading with him, not after everything he’d already done for her. But truth was, she was scared. They could make themselves disappear, and so they could do that to anyone else. She wasn’t afraid of dying; she was already dead inside, the resurrected corpse of the rounded human being she’d once been. What inspired terror in her was the thought of never avenging her family.
The Trail had to pay, and for that she needed—
‘I can’t help you,’ Holt said.
‘Can’t or won’t?’
‘Same thing.’
‘But why?’ She tried to keep the whine from her voice, wasn’t sure she’d succeeded.
‘I have my reasons. And believe me when I say, you need to do it on your own. This is your time, Rose.’ He hung up.
‘Holt!’ She tried to call him back. His number didn’t register, and she spent twenty long minutes contacting the local phone service provider. She was disconnected three times and passed along to another person, and in the end she was given her own number as the source of the call.
Rose threw the phone across the room, pleased when it smashed. She hoped he was trying to call her back, feeling sorry, and getting desperate and frantic when he couldn’t actually reach her.
But she knew that wasn’t the case. Wherever he was now, Holt was sitting back with his feet up, drinking water, and probably not even thinking about her at all. To move, exist, and survive beneath the grid, there could be no ties.
She was on her own, and she had some killing to do.
Chapter Twenty-Two
clean
In pain, confused and excited, Rose had to prioritise, without emotion and with the killing of as many Trail as possible as her one and only aim.
She could hide close to the helicopter and open up on them as they approached. She might get one, maybe even two, before she was killed. Or she could flee, take time to fix her wound, pursue Chris and those hunting him, and draw the three Trail men after her.
Surviving this had never been her priority. But now that she was on the ground, and she accepted that some of the Trail would go on living if she died in these mountains, surviving suddenly seemed more attractive. Her present was a place of pain and killing, but the future was once again a landscape she wished to explore.
So for a while, she ran.
‘Got veins,’ she said as she started cutting away the sleeve of her jacket. It’s what Adam had used to say if he cut himself gardening, or washing up, or clumsily trying to do some household DIY. He didn’t like wasting time doing stuff he didn’t enjoy, always said he’d rather spend time with his family than painting a wall, putting up a shelf, digging a flower bed. And sometimes Rose used to think that his injuries were self-inflicted. But his dislike of blood had been real, and she’d come to accept that her husband was simply clumsy.
Got veins, he’d say, holding up a red-dripping hand for her to look at, turning away because he didn’t want to see. Once, when he’d come off his bike, he’d walked two miles home and let her peel the torn Lycra from his leg instead of checking it out himself. That had been a trip to the hospital and eight butterfly stitches, and he’d still not once looked. Not until it was all covered up.
She saw him with his throat slashed open.
‘Got veins,’ she whispered again. She peeled the cut portion of sleeve down past her elbow and pulled the remaining sleeve up onto her shoulder, revealing the wound. It was worse than she’d expected. She knew that bullet wounds were almost never neat – hundreds of rounds fired into pigs’ carcasses with Holt had shown her that. This one had entered just beneath her elbow, torn diagonally across her tricep, and exited beneath her armpit. An exit wound was good news. There was no telling whether any material from her jacket had been pulled into the wounds by the bullet, but she had to assume it had been. Even though the bullet had passed through, the risk of infection was large, especially considering the angled depth of the wound.
Dizziness threatened. Rose looked away, bit her lip. It’s not me, she thought. It’s someone else, not my arm, not my blood leaking away. She had to be objective and dispassionate about this if she was to fix it and move on.
She looked again. The fleshy underside of her arm was swollen and full, and already turning a dark purple. Blood was pooling in there, forcing up against the skin. At least the swelling was closing the entry hole. She couldn’t see the exit hole, but feeling with her left hand, her fingertips brushed against the tear in her skin.
She leaned forward, head between her knees, trying not to tip sideways even though she was sitting down. She was groaning without realising, so she bit her lip again. Tasted blood. Got big, big veins, Adam.
She had to clean and bind the wound. A hefty dose of painkillers should see her through the rest of the day and night, and she suspected all this would be over by then. After that she could retreat to a doctor she knew, pay him the last of her money and get him to sort her out. Or more likely, there’d be other, more fatal wounds to add to this one.
‘Come on, Rose,’ she whispered. ‘Kick up the arse. No time to fuck around. Do it and move on.’
Come on, Rose, Adam said, agreeing.
Sitting up straight, she looked around to make sure no one was stalking towards her. A cooling breeze lifted her hair. She was maybe a mile across the slopes from the helicopter. Once the Trail men reached the aircraft they’d be there for a while, assessing the damage, trying to see what they could fix and decide what the next course of action would be. Following and killing her, she knew. But she had a good head start, and they couldn’t know for sure which way she’d come.
It would be dark soon. They’d likely have night vision tech, GPS devices, other stuff. Darkness would be their friend and her enemy.
She set to work on her wound. The first aid kit from the helicopter contained two packs of saline. She ripped one open with her teeth, lifted her arm and squeezed the sachet into the entrance wound. As the salt-water sluiced through the hole in her arm she couldn’t help crying out, burying her face against her left shoulder to try to drown out the sound. But she remained conscious. It wasn’t the most effective way of cleaning the injury, but it was the best she could do right then. She considered using the second sachet but decided to retain it for later.
Antiseptic sprays were next, aimed into entrance and exit wounds as best she could. Her damaged arm was shaking now as she held it up, strained and torn muscles quivering, and each movement drove the agony deeper.
She needed stitches. There was a needle and thread in the first aid kit, packed and sterile, but she wasn’t sure she could do it. The entry wound would be easy enough to reach, but the exit was beneath her arm, out of sight
even if she could twist her arm around without passing out from the pain. Stitching only one rip was pointless. Instead, she shook a small pack of clotting powder and, without giving herself a chance to think about it too much, scattered some of it directly into the bullet wound.
She pressed hard on the hole. Surroundings receded. Pain ruled. Her arm and shoulder were the centre of her world, the throbbing sun of pain around which she orbited. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but when she was able she twisted around and poured a good amount of powder into the exit wound.
More agony. She leaned back and lay on the ground, looking up into the dark blue sky at the clouds that drifted there, uncaring of the drama down below. The world went on. That was something she’d found difficult to accept after her family were slaughtered – that even people she’d once been close to still woke in the morning, had breakfast, went to work, watched TV, argued, loved, ate, pissed, slept. Some people still cared, but the deaths of her family really had affected no one more deeply than her. And she’d had no chance to share the grief, having to hide away to avoid repercussions, from the law or the Trail. The idea that her friends, parents, and Adam’s siblings would now think of her as a killer had struck a coldness in her heart that never went away.
The isolation had pushed her away from the world, accelerating her withdrawal into a place darker and deeper than anyone knew. She’d lived there alone; her own new world, drenched in cheap alcohol fumes and awash with nightmares.
‘Now you can watch,’ she whispered to the sky. The clouds, the air, the hillsides and lakes could see what she was doing and bear witness to her revenge. Blood was spilled in the mountains. She was creating a fresh new world for herself.
You’re strong, bunny, Adam said. Come on. Since when did a gunshot kill anyone?
She gasped a strained laugh. Hearing his voice, imagining his dark humour, suddenly brought him so close that she could almost smell his breath.
‘Hurts,’ she whispered. She sat up and went about binding the wound. It was still bleeding, but the clotting powder was slowly doing its work and would hopefully prevent any more drastic blood loss. She wrapped the bandages tight, pinned them closed. After swallowing several painkillers – enough to hopefully calm the white-hot flames, not too much to dull her senses – she stood and kicked around the mess at her feet. She wanted them to find the discarded packets and know the way she’d come. She wanted them to follow.
