No Place to Hide

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No Place to Hide Page 6

by Dan Latus


  Even their more pressing problems didn’t really engage him. He simply felt enormously relieved and thankful that they had been able to get out of São Brás in one piece and find a place of refuge. The way he felt just then, nothing else really mattered.

  Chapter 16

  They sat down around the well-worn pine table in the kitchen area, in a pool of soft yellow light from the oil lamp, mugs of coffee before them. It should have been quiet, but it wasn’t.

  Jake could hear night creatures outside, all around the house. An owl hunting, the buzz of insects, and something bigger snuffling and snorting. Wild boar or porcupine, perhaps? Even the house itself was making noises, as it recovered from the heat of the day and settled down for the night.

  Not at all quiet, then. More comfortably noisy. Plenty of sounds to let them know they were not alone, but also that they wouldn’t be troubled. Jake began to relax.

  ‘I owe you an explanation,’ he said softly.

  Magda shrugged. ‘We have our own histories, if that’s what you mean. You will tell me what you want me to know when you are ready – if you want to, that is.’

  He smiled with appreciation. He couldn’t have put it better himself. She had a way with words, even in a language not her own.

  ‘I will tell you now. Some of it, at least. It’s time, past time. I had no right to bring all this down on you. I never intended it, either.’

  ‘I am your woman,’ she said, as if that explained and accounted for everything.

  He started talking then, telling her how it had been for the past couple of years, and where and when it had all started.

  He told her about Bob, and the warning he had delivered, and how swiftly the forces arraigned against him had moved and got their pieces in position on the board. It took quite some time. He even told her of things he had almost forgotten himself. In the telling, he found some relief, and a degree of hope for the future. This was his story. The telling of it made it feel as if he was back in charge, in control.

  Magda listened patiently, calmly. She nodded occasionally but didn’t interrupt him. Her questions and comments waited until he had finished, and even then there were not many.

  ‘So you are not alone in this? Others, too, are threatened?’

  He nodded. ‘There are five of us now, that I know about. There used to be more. But the woman, Anna, has been murdered.’

  ‘Five, now?’ Magda said slowly, frowning, as if she had some doubts about the number.

  ‘Unless you know otherwise?’ he said with a smile.

  ‘Me, Jake? How could I…?’

  ‘Joke, Magda. It was a joke.’

  Jesus, he thought. She takes everything so seriously. For a moment there she had seemed ready to launch an attack on him.

  ‘Such a lot of money missing, Jake,’ she said now, wonderingly. ‘Twenty million pounds, in sterling?’

  ‘So Bob told me,’ he said with a shrug.

  ‘Do you have it, Jake? Did you come to Portugal with it?’

  ‘What do you think?’ he said with a smile.

  ‘I think maybe you don’t have it,’ she said with a coy smile of her own.

  ‘And you’re right.’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘I have no idea what happened to it. I didn’t even know it was missing until Bob told me.’

  ‘But you drove the van containing the money?’

  ‘Some of it. Yes, I drove a van, but I didn’t say it was the only one. There were two. That much cash, in banknotes, takes up a hell of a lot of space. Besides, Fogarty wouldn’t have wanted all his eggs in one basket. He’s too canny for

  that.’

  ‘I understand. So one of the others drove another van?’

  ‘Somebody did.’ He frowned. ‘I have no idea who, though. I just did my bit, what I was told to do. There was so much going on that night, and so much chaos, I didn’t know what was happening to anybody else. I didn’t know what everyone else was supposed to do, anyway. I was just a lowly emergency driver brought in at the last minute.’

  ‘But now this man – Fogarty? – has come here to the Algarve, looking for you to kill?’

  ‘Nicely put! Him, or men sent by him.’

  ‘But why you? You say you were not important. It wasn’t your fault it all went wrong.’

  ‘That’s true. But I was one of the people who betrayed him, and who spoke against him from the witness box. We’re all on his hit list.’

  He shrugged and added, ‘Then there’s the money. He’ll be looking for that, as well.’

  After a moment, Magda said, ‘They wouldn’t want just to kill you, I think.’

  He shook his head, but he didn’t say anything more. He didn’t need to. It sounded as if Magda had already worked out the rest. Death would be a welcome relief from the questioning Fogarty would initiate, if it came to that. Preventing the questioning ever getting started was the challenge he faced.

  He frowned as he thought about a word he had used earlier. Betrayal. That’s what had happened that night in the Team Valley. Fogarty would want revenge against all those who had betrayed him, in whatever way. Nicci, especially. But all the others, too, himself included.

  Some, he didn’t even know about. But Fogarty would be intent on finding them all, even those that had disappeared back to far-flung places like Glasgow and Moscow. Maybe even Chicago or Los Angeles. Fogarty wouldn’t rest until he had found them all, or was stopped in his tracks.

  He yawned. He was tired now.

  ‘Fogarty will believe that at least one of us knows what happened to the money. So he’ll track us down, one by one, until he finds it. His questions won’t be asked gently, either.’

  ‘And will they always end with a bullet in the head?’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted, surprised by her pragmatic, knowing question. ‘Always. If his victims are lucky, that is. It could be worse.’

  She thought about that for a moment and then said, ‘So we must work out what to do.’

  ‘We?’ He gave a weary smile. ‘This is my problem, Magda, not yours.’

  ‘Now it is mine, too.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right,’ he admitted, on reflection.

  Then he added, ‘Come on! That’s more than enough for one day. Let’s try to get some sleep.’

  ‘One more question, Jake. Before you became a van driver for this … this bank robber, what were you? How did you live?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

  She waited patiently, staring at him

  He shrugged. ‘I was a retired spy. OK?’

  ‘I thought it must have been something like that,’ she said.

  Chapter 17

  The only bed in the cottage was a simple timber base with a thin foam mattress on top, behind a curtain at one end of the room. It looked clean enough. There was bedding in a cupboard, but they left it there. It smelled as if it had been there a long time. They didn’t need it, anyway. The night was very warm.

  They laid down together and Magda was soon asleep. Jake envied her. He couldn’t make it. Too much had been happening. The adrenaline was still pumping. It was as much as he could do just to lie down.

  He spent the hours of darkness on edge, restless, dozing but listening, waiting for the door to crash open and Fogarty to appear. It wasn’t rational; it was survival instinct. The old fight-or-flight state of readiness that most creatures on the hillside around them would also be in that night, and most nights of their lives. Only predators could be relaxed, unless they were very hungry.

  Reflecting, he was surprised that Magda had come with him so unquestioningly. Surprised, but grateful. In advance, he had tried to get rid of her, to clear the decks, in order to be unencumbered. In the old days he had always worked alone, and it was how he had preferred to be. Responsible for no-one but himself. But the old days were long gone, and he was glad to have Magda here with him. Lucky, too, he thought with a wry smile. Without her, where would he have gone when he fled São Brás?

  Brief
ly, he wondered again how she had known about the cottage, and who it was that owned it. Obviously, she had been here before, perhaps a number of times. He shrugged. He didn’t want to think about all that. He didn’t want to start speculating about Magda’s past life, either. He had enough in the here and now to think about, and to worry about.

  When the suggestion of first light began to filter around the edges of the shutters on the windows, he gently eased away from Magda and slipped off the bed. He picked up his shoes and crossed the room to the door. Carefully, he eased the bolt aside and silently lifted the sneck on the door handle. Then he opened the door and slipped outside to take stock.

  Four in the morning, and a beautiful morning at that. Not a hint of wind. The air fresh, and cooler now than it would be at any time in the day ahead. The sun would be up over the horizon in a little while, and would soon disperse the thin, patchy mist that had gathered overnight below in the valley. He glanced up at a clear sky that would turn blue with the coming of the day.

  Behind him, towering over the cottage, was the great mass of Rocha da Pena, a mile-long, limestone hill rising to a height of 1,500 feet. In the early light the rugged buttresses and walls, bare of vegetation, were austere and daunting. The jumble of boulders and shattered trees and tough scrub covering the slopes beneath were no doubt home to a myriad species of wildlife, but they looked as inhospitable as anything he had seen in the Algarve. It was hard country.

  Not a bird or animal of any description in sight, not that that was everything. There never were many birds to be seen, for reasons that eluded him, but there would be plenty of animals out looking for breakfast. Too cool for the likes of snakes yet, but there would be lynx and smaller raptors, such as mongoose, as well as all those creatures happy with a vegetarian diet. The land would abound in wildlife, however spartan it looked. Its warmth guaranteed that.

  And now there was Fogarty to add to the list of raptors. No sign of him here yet, thankfully. No sign of anybody. No visible sign, at least, but he caught a whiff of wood smoke from somewhere. So somebody must live not far away. Another small farm, presumably, one that hadn’t been abandoned. The wife up early to light the wood stove by which she cooked and heated water.

  He glanced up at the luxuriant wisteria threatening to bring down the pergola that provided shade for the terrace. Dry country on the surface, but somehow plants like the wisteria found the water they needed down deep. Good growing country, really. It supported wisteria, cistus and all the other flowering plants and shrubs, together with the bushes and trees that produced the nuts and fruit that had made the Algarve a favoured agricultural region even in ancient times.

  This little farm, he reflected, must have been just about self-sufficient. Now it was light, he could see the cork oak and the eucalyptus, and the trees that had produced the olives and almonds, and the lemons and oranges. A little distance from the house were the sheds and coops that had housed the livestock that provided the meat. What more could have been needed?

  When he looked at it, he could see that the house itself had been built from the materials that lay and grew all around here. Earth and rock for the walls, pebbles for the terrace, bamboo canes for the interior ceilings. Local materials would even have given them the materials they needed to make their own whitewash and the blue paint used traditionally for the adornment of doorways and window frames.

  No doubt about it. This little farm would have given a family a good life, up until the time when they had found a way of doing even better for themselves elsewhere. He smiled ruefully. It was hard not to feel sentimental about what had been lost.

  He didn’t hear Magda’s approach, and he started as her arms slipped around him.

  ‘Nervous?’ she asked with a coy smile.

  ‘You shouldn’t do that,’ he told her gruffly.

  ‘Pff!’ she said, hugging him hard.

  He turned and wrapped his arms around her in return, but he was not pleased. He was unhappy, annoyed with himself. He hadn’t heard her coming. That was very worrying, troubling. He needed to do better. He needed to be more alert. There was no such thing any more as safety and security, not unless he earned it.

  Jake felt a need to explore their surroundings. So after a makeshift breakfast of figs from a nearby tree and stale crackers from a tin in a cupboard, accompanied by coffee, they stepped outside to venture further afield. They set off to walk up the track that climbed the hillside.

  ‘I could smell wood smoke when I first came outside,’ he said.

  ‘From a bush fire?’

  He shook his head. ‘From a stove, I think. Someone must live around here.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Magda said, shrugging. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘We need to know,’ he said firmly.

  Just after eight now. And already it was hot, hot and dry. Later, Jake thought, it would probably get really hot. Maybe as much as forty degrees in the shade. They were in the fierce interior of the Algarve, some distance from the cooling influence of the ocean.

  A strange looking figure suddenly came into view, rounding a bend in the track ahead of them just when they had become accustomed to the idea that they were alone. The figure was walking downhill towards them, moving with short strides and oddly precise footsteps. Something about the head, or where the head should be, was odd, too. Magda clutched his arm.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jake said quietly. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  By then, he was. The figure had become a woman, an elderly woman wearing something like a black top hat above a black jacket and a long, dark skirt that reached to her ankles. No wonder her movement had seemed strange, he realized as she drew nearer. She was wearing polished shoes with heels, low heels admittedly, but still shoes that would have been more appropriate on city pavements. The rough track was a struggle for her.

  ‘Bom dia!’ Good day, he said with a polite smile as they passed.

  ‘Bom dia,’ the woman responded, stony-faced.

  Her eyes swept across him to Magda, where they lingered for a moment, until Magda, too, muttered a greeting.

  Then she was gone. They continued on their way, Jake managing to resist the temptation to look back after her. Not for one moment did he think she would be looking back at them, but she had seen, definitely noticed, them both. That was unfortunate.

  ‘Who is she?’ Magda whispered.

  Jake shook his head. ‘No idea. But it doesn’t matter,’ he insisted, hoping that was true.

  Already, though, he was thinking that perhaps they shouldn’t stay here. They had been noticed, and they didn’t fit. In places like this, unexplained strangers could be a worry, and a subject for gossip.

  Magda’s question was answered a couple of hundred yards further up the track, where they passed a small house hidden amongst low trees and scrub. An elderly man was chopping firewood for the stove. He looked up as they passed. Jake raised a hand in salute, and the man nodded back.

  ‘So she was going to do her marketing,’ Magda said thoughtfully.

  Jake nodded. ‘Catching a bus to town, probably. Properly dressed and shod for the occasion. The highlight of her week.’

  ‘Shod?’

  ‘Her shoes.’

  ‘Ah! Which town, though?’ Magda asked. ‘And who will she see there?’

  They were questions that worried him, too. The woman had seen them. Who would she tell?

  Chapter 18

  While they were walking, Jake recalled puzzling over something during the night, while he dozed and almost, but not quite, went to sleep. Something to do with Bob. Something he had said, or not said. Something about him. Some question. Odd. What the hell was it?

  Bob was back in mind now. He could see him, but the picture was murky, cloudy. Something strange about it. But he was damned if he could put his finger on it.

  ‘That’s far enough for me,’ Magda said, suddenly stopping walking. ‘I want to go back to the house now.’

  ‘Yes, of c
ourse.’ He smiled and came to a halt beside her. ‘We’ve seen enough. Let’s go back, and sort out what we’re going to do next.’

  With surprise, he noted that he was beginning to include Magda in his thinking and planning automatically now. Well, why not? She was aboard, alongside him, regardless of whether or not that had been his original expectation.

  Then his mind jumped to something else: a picture of Bob in uniform. He realized that was what he had been puzzling over in the night – a picture out of focus, but definitely of Bob in uniform. Why? What was the significance of that? Ridiculous! He smiled and shook his head. Whatever next? The pressure, the tension, was getting to him.

  And then, in a eureka moment, it occurred to him that perhaps it wasn’t ridiculous at all. There was a good reason for his preoccupation with Bob. It concerned an outstanding question. He needed to find the answer to that before they went much further.

  Back on the terrace outside the cottage, he checked and found to his surprise that he had mobile coverage. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Countries like Portugal, with poor landline infrastructure, had invested heavily in facilities for mobile services. It had been a cheaper option, and far speedier, than upgrading ancient landline networks.

  Magda looked at him quizzically.

  He made an apologetic gesture. ‘I want to make a phone call.’

  She shrugged and went inside, leaving him on the terrace. He made the call.

  ‘Good morning. I would like to speak to DCI Robson.’

  ‘May I ask your name, sir?’

  ‘Just tell him it’s Jake.’

  After a pause a new voice came on the line. ‘DCI Pendergast here. How can I help?’

  ‘I want to speak to DCI Robson, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘I’m sorry. He’s not available. Perhaps you can tell me what it’s about? I’m sure I can help.’

  Jake grimaced, ended the call and switched off the phone.

  Magda, who had emerged with mugs of coffee, glanced at him curiously but didn’t say anything.

 

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