Romford, East London
The Haven Nursing Home was in Romford’s Gidea Park, an area of immaculate large detached houses, manicured gardens and neat drives boasting two or three shiny new cars.
It was a far cry from the council flat, less than a mile away, in which Harry Tapper had grown up with his mother and father, a cramped, damp hole of dark memories. Tapper would dearly have loved to move his mother nearer his place in Notting Hill, but while Mary-Beth Tapper’s dementia made her confused, frustrated and forgetful, she managed to hold on to one certainty. That she’d been born in Romford and she would die in Romford.
So it was that Tapper made weekly pilgrimages to the home to see his increasingly muddled mother. Today, she’d mistaken him for an old neighbour from the 1950s and had reminisced fondly about a street party to celebrate the Coronation. It was obvious that she remembered it more lucidly than yesterday.
They were in her ground floor room, the heating cranked up full so that, even after discarding his overcoat and jacket, Tapper still felt like he was in a sauna. Mary-Beth Tapper sat small and bird-like in a large, high-backed chair. She held on to her son’s hand tightly as she spoke.
‘It was a lovely day, wasn’t it Teddy?’
‘It was,’ said Tapper wearily.
‘All them flags and the lovely sandwiches and cake. And we got a telegram from the Palace.’
‘Did we?’
‘Don’t you remember, Teddy? It was the talk of Romford.’
He felt his mobile vibrate in his trouser pocket and reached for it with his free hand. The name flashing on the screen was Wallace.
‘’Scuse me for a moment, Mum.’
‘I ain’t your mother, Teddy, you silly arse. It’s me, Mary-Beth. From Number 12.’
Tapper exited his mother’s room. The corridor outside led to a conservatory where there was a door into the garden. He opened it and the cold rushed into the room as if trying to devour the air inside. He put the phone to his ear.
‘Pat.’
For the next couple of minutes, Tapper focused on the garden – the evergreen shrubs poking out from a blanket of white – as Wallace reported back. It was all he could do to stop himself screaming.
‘So where are they now?’ he asked.
‘I went back to the flats,’ said Wallace. ‘To see if I could find anyone who knew anything. I was told about a junkie who’d overheard them speaking.’
‘And?’
‘He said they were talking about Rome.’
‘Right.’ Tapper felt the enormity of the disaster on his hands. The two of them now together. Aware of each other’s plights, aware that others wanted them dead. The shrink and his client, with her incendiary secret.
There was nothing to discover, of that he was sure. But she was a witness.
Despite the bitter cold, Tapper felt a bead of sweat escape an armpit and trickle down the side of his torso as he remembered the night.
‘I can’t do this on my own, Harry,’ Wallace said. He was calm, stating a fact. ‘This operation needs another body on the ground.’
‘Know anyone you can trust?’
‘Not with this kind of thing. We need people we can rely on one hundred per cent.’
‘Let me have a think,’ said Tapper. ‘I’ll call you back.’
The firm was a no-no. Systems in place to track every appointment. He wondered about ex-employees. God knows, Tapper Security didn’t always employ angels, especially for low-level stuff. But he didn’t know any of them. He was too far removed from operational matters.
He rubbed his forehead with the heel of a hand. Perhaps he could pay a visit to Tapper Security’s HR department, do the hands-on CEO routine again. He couldn’t think of a reason right now, but there was probably some way he could get his hands on previous employee records, find someone with services experience, and a less-than-perfect past. But it would take time, and with Keddie and Idris escaping across Europe, they had little to spare. Besides, with another team member, the circle widened a little more. Wallace had latterly more than proved himself, rising above their initial setbacks with some exemplary tracking. Tapper could hardly believe he’d ever doubted him. But could a new team member be trusted?
He breathed in through his nostrils then exhaled, his breath condensing in the freezing air.
Wallace needed someone by his side who he could depend on. Tapper closed his eyes, felt a decision rise, with certainty, to the surface, drowning out every other thought.
He pressed ‘1’ on speed-dial.
‘Sir Harry,’ said Jenny, his PA, her voice bright and cut-glass.
‘Jenny, I’m taking some time off. Mum’s not well. Can you clear the diary? Sure the board can cope. I don’t want any calls, understood?’
He called Wallace back. ‘I’m coming out, Pat.’
‘But you can’t do that, Harry. You’ve got a company to run.’
‘Right now, I’m not sure I have a choice.’
Tapper promised to call back when he’d sorted a flight to Rome. It had been years since he’d had to deal with bookings. Normally Jenny took care of such matters.
The cold was now penetrating his skin, inching its way to his vital organs. How long would someone survive standing still in such temperatures, he wondered?
He thought of the task before him. Of tracking two people, one effectively a ghost, in a large European city, if indeed they were in Rome.
There were plenty of dangers. Logically, it made sense for him to stay as far away from Zahra Idris as possible, for the hunt to have no connection to him at all. What if it all went wrong? What if they were caught as they tried to deal with Keddie and Idris? Arrested. It would all be over.
But then it was all over if he didn’t act.
Tapper thought of the last time he and Wallace had been together for any length of time. He thought of the violence that he might inevitably witness, possibly even be a part of. He shuddered with fear. And also, he realised, with pleasure.
Chapter 31
Belgium
Sam watched in horror as the traffic ahead slowed at the Belgium border crossing. It hadn’t occurred to him that they’d have any problems passing through what were meant to be the open borders of the Schengen Zone. But Europe was a twitchier place these days. Sam cursed. He should have anticipated this.
‘Get in the back now!’ he hissed. ‘And take that blanket with you to pull over your body.’
Without hesitation, Zahra unbuckled her seatbelt and climbed into the rear, taking the blanket she’d had wrapped around her.
The car inched forward, the air thick with condensed exhaust fumes. The border was comprised of a line of booths. He looked at the car at the front of the queue, watched as the driver handed his passport to a border official. The man examined the passport for less than thirty seconds, then handed it back. The barrier rose and the car departed. How hard could it be?
But Sam was harbouring an immigrant who’d escaped from a detention centre in the UK. A woman without a passport.
Sam could hear his pulse thudding in his ear.
There were now just two cars between him and the booth. He glanced behind at the backseat. Zahra’s feet were sticking out from the bottom of the blanket. Sam undid his seatbelt, removed his coat and draped them over the protruding limbs.
A car horn sounded. The driver behind was urging Sam to move forward into the space that had been freed up ahead. Just one car between him and the booth.
Sam re-buckled his belt, accelerating into the gap.
A minute passed. The barrier rose and the car ahead moved off. Sam came to a halt by the booth. The man to his left wore a blue uniform, a colour that almost matched his complexion.
‘Passport,’ he said disinterestedly.
Sam handed it across to him. The man flicked through the pages, pausing on the final one where Sam’s image appeared next to his details. He scrunched up his eyes as he studied it, then glanced at Sam and the vehicle.
‘Moment
,’ the man said.
Sam’s heart was in his mouth. The man had placed the passport down on his desk and seemed to be tapping at a keyboard. He scratched his stubble. This hadn’t happened to the other drivers. What the fuck was going on? Had he spotted the tell-tale lump in the rear? Was there a problem with the car? Had Ruby reported it stolen?
The man looked up. The passport was handed back. The barrier rose. Sam thanked the man, then slowly accelerated away, finally letting go of his breath.
‘You can come out now.’
On the back seat, there was a movement – a blanket rising up – and Zahra emerged, climbing from the rear into the front.
‘God, that was close,’ said Sam, the words escaping on a sigh.
Zahra glanced at him, a look of mild incredulity on her face. Of course, thought Sam. Crossing borders illegally was what she did, and that last one was probably child’s play compared with most.
A sign above the road read Antwerp, Brussels and Maastricht. He hoped the next crossing was open.
Zahra opened the vanity mirror above her, brushing a few stray hairs from her face. She then reached for a bag in the footwell, pulled a packet of wipes from it and began cleaning her face, closing her eyes as if the cool tissue afforded her a rare moment of pleasure.
She threw the used wipe back into the bag, then turned to Sam. ‘Do you mind if I sleep?’ she asked.
‘Be my guest.’
*
Sam was driving around the outskirts of Brussels when he noticed that Zahra was sweating. She’d also begun twitching, her face screwed up in a grimace. The tics became more pronounced and soon she was tossing her head from side to side, moaning to herself in a language Sam couldn’t understand.
He needed to pull over, convinced that her movements would become more dramatic, endangering them both. But then they came to an abrupt and blood-curdling stop.
Zahra woke, eyes wide, and screamed, the car filling with an ear-piercing, primal noise. Sam flinched as the sound was repeated again and again, like an alarm of pure terror. As he tried to pull the car across two busy lanes of traffic and bring it to a standstill on the hard shoulder, Zahra finally stilled. Sam found a way to enter the far right lane then pulled over, skidding as he came to a halt on the untreated road surface.
He turned to Zahra. Her face was glistening with sweat.
‘It was a snake,’ she said, her voice trembling.
‘What?’
Zahra was staring ahead, as if in a trance.
‘The belt.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I dreamt that I was on a beach on an island. It was a perfect place. The kind you see in magazines. White, powdery sand, palm trees. I got up and began to walk towards the trees. The air smelt sweet. But then my foot brushed against an object and I looked down to see something buried in the sand.’ She shuddered. ‘I began digging with my hands. When I’d pulled the sand away, I could see it was a leather belt, with a metal buckle. I held it in my hands and that was when it turned into a snake. A snake that reared up and opened a mouth full of fangs.’
Zahra shook violently, as if desperate to eject the repellent image from her mind.
Was this connected to her lost memories, Sam wondered? Was it some way in? He glanced at Zahra as she sat upright in her seat.
‘Does that remind you of anything?’ he asked gently. ‘Any feelings you’ve had?’
She turned to him. ‘It reminds me of every time I have felt frightened.’
‘In it, you’re somewhere perfect.’
‘I haven’t been anywhere perfect for a long time.’
Zahra had turned away, her face pressed to the glass as the traffic sped by. Sam decided to let it drop. It was a possible angle to explore, nothing more. The dream might have been a link to a lost memory, or simply a reminder that the woman by his side carried a headful of darkness.
Chapter 32
Ragusa, Sicily – the previous summer
Ispettore Guido Reni parked his car in the courtyard of the police headquarters. Opening the door, he felt a wall of oppressive heat and knew he’d be sweating before he reached the air-conditioned interior of the building ahead.
He unlocked the boot, lifted out a case of Santa Cecilia, an over-priced red with an almost blood-like consistency, and placed it gently on the ground while he slammed the boot shut. His chest felt tight, and he knew he’d need a hit on the inhaler as soon as he could put the box down.
Reni had been told that it was his asthma that had held him back for well over a decade. He had the right qualifications for promotion – a degree, in his case forensic investigation, from the University of Naples – but was constantly passed over. He’d tried to question this reasoning – after all, higher ranks spent more time behind desks and less time running around – but was always palmed off. At first he thought it was because the Mafia still had influence in the town and, as a result, honest, incorruptible men could not thrive. But then it slowly dawned on him that the real reason he languished at Ispettore was even less palatable.
Although his father’s forebears had lived in Siracusa for centuries – his father a fisherman, like his grandfather and great-grandfather before him – his mother was Tunisian. He’d come to realise that the Arab blood that flowed through his veins counted against him. He knew about his nickname, ‘Arabo’, though it was never used to his face.
And so, over the years, confident that he’d remain an Ispettore forever, he became the outsider they all thought he was. He stopped going for drinks after work, was less collaborative and more intransigent, happy to plough his own furrow.
Lugging the case of wine, he walked to a glass door, turning the handle with an awkward sideways stance, then stepped into blissful air-conditioned chill. He nodded to the officer behind the desk, and moved down the corridor, passing under a suspended sign that read ‘Obitorio’.
The first room was a waiting area. A slim, dark-haired woman in a fitted white shirt – a welcome sight for grieving men, Reni thought – looked over the lip of spectacles and tipped her head in the direction of the next room.
Reni pushed through a set of swing doors into a larger area. Down the far end a rotund man in a white coat was standing over a body on an examination table. Observation benches climbed the wall behind him. Opposite were steel-fronted cabinets, the temporary homes of those bodies that required a closer examination following death.
‘Ciao Guido!’ called out the rotund man. He had a scrubbed appearance, his face pink and shiny.
‘Ciao Simone.’
‘What have you brought me?’
‘Don’t play the innocent, Simone,’ said Reni, lowering the box to the floor. ‘You wouldn’t have looked at the corpse if I hadn’t bribed you.’
The pathologist pretended to look affronted. ‘Come on, Guido. You know how busy it gets in here. Besides, no one’s interested in your man. He should be signed off and released for burial.’
Reni shook his inhaler then pumped it into his mouth, drawing in deeply. He felt his lungs relax. ‘It’s a sad world when we stop caring about people like him.’
The pathologist opened the lid of the box and carefully lifted a bottle out. He held it with all the love of a father for their new-born child. Bending to kiss the bottle’s breast, he then placed it back in the box.
‘So, what have you found?’ asked Reni.
The pathologist peeled back a white sheet to reveal the head and torso of a man. Once again, Reni, who’d seen plenty of murder victims, was struck by the marks on the corpse’s chest.
‘The wounds are no great mystery, as we’ve already discussed. But I’ve jotted down my findings so you have it on paper.’
Reni was beginning to wonder whether the wine hadn’t been an expensive mistake.
‘However,’ said the pathologist, his voice rising in enthusiasm, ‘the contents of the stomach are interesting. Here,’ he said, handing Reni a sheaf of stapled papers. His report. ‘Read.’
Reni c
ast his eye over the report. As he turned to the second page and found what the pathologist was referring to, he felt a small charge of electricity run up his arms, as if the report itself held a live current. The pathologist’s findings cast the body in a whole new light. Not that it would make any difference to his commanding officers.
But Reni knew that, unless he could solve this mystery, it would haunt him to his dying day.
Chapter 33
Heathrow Airport, London
Instead of his usual airport haunt – the bar of the nearest executive lounge – Tapper opted for the anonymity of a faux Irish pub in the terminal building. The people he normally encountered in airports would never bump into him here, or indeed in Alitalia’s economy section (ordinarily he flew with BA or Virgin). He couldn’t wholly disguise the fact he was heading to Rome – flights had been booked, passport details taken – but there was little point advertising it loudly, or inviting awkward conversations about where he was heading.
Tapper bought himself a large gin & tonic and sat in a quiet and shadowy corner of the room. He took two large gulps. He soon felt the alcohol go to work, flooding his veins, settling the uneasy mix of fear and anticipation that swam in his gut.
He opened the BBC news web page on his phone, scanning distractedly through the headlines.
The big story was that the Foreign Secretary had made a surprise announcement, that he was resigning due to ill health. Tapper opened the accompanying footage. It showed the Cabinet Minister briefing reporters at the Foreign Office. ‘I will shortly be undergoing an operation for prostate cancer,’ the man said, his face grey. ‘This will be followed by several weeks of radiotherapy, which I’m told will be debilitating. As a result I have no choice but to resign the job I have been so proud to carry out on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government.’
Tapper noticed a red banner across the top of the page with the words: ‘Latest: Prime Minister pays tribute to Foreign Secretary and announces successor.’ Tapper clicked on it.
Denial (Sam Keddie Thriller Book 2) Page 11
