Dead Line

by Chris Ewan

  Jérôme went in ahead of him. He stood in the middle of the dim, spacious living room, his back to Trent, his hands opening and closing, his head lowered as if in a moment of prayer.

  Trent tossed the bags he was carrying onto a white leather chair, reached a hand into the sticky heat beneath his shirt and plucked his Beretta free from his shoulder holster. He straightened his arm, the Beretta gripped tight.

  ‘Turn around.’

  Jérôme swivelled, his frown of confusion morphing into stark surprise. Eyes wide and blurring as he saw the gun.

  ‘My name is Daniel Trent.’ It galled him that he couldn’t keep the shake out of his voice, no matter how much he tried. ‘My fiancée’s name is Aimée Paget.’

  He stared at Jérôme. Expecting a reaction. But the only reaction he was seeing was shock and fear and bewilderment.

  He gestured to a white leather couch across from him, some distance away from the model of the yacht in the display case.

  ‘Sit down, Jérôme. You’re going to tell me exactly what you did to her. Where I can find her.’ He paused. Composed himself. Fought to control the wobble in his arm. ‘Then you’re going to beg for your life. Like maybe you made Aimée beg. And then I’m going to kill you and burn down your house.’

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Jérôme blinked. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Trent gestured with his pistol towards the white leather couch.

  ‘Sit down, Jérôme. If you want me to make this hard on you, you should get comfortable first. Could be a long night.’ He looked meaningfully at his duffel bag. ‘A painful one, too.’

  ‘Please. I’m confused.’

  ‘Then sit down. Allow me to explain.’

  There was a fresh purple graze near Jérôme’s temple from where Xavier had pressed his gun. There were some minor cuts and contusions across his cheeks and nose and jaw. He’d been roughed up a little, no question, but not as much as the photograph the gang had taken of him had suggested. His injuries had definitely been faked.

  Trent didn’t plan on being nearly so considerate.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said again.

  This time, Jérôme walked shakily across to the couch and lowered himself in stages, eyes fixed on the Beretta. He rested his elbows on his knees and scrubbed his face with his palms, then stared out through splayed fingers, tugging down the skin of his cheeks. His eyes were red and bleary. The skin around them puffy and grey. He looked like he hadn’t slept properly in weeks.

  Trent glanced sideways at his duffel again. It contained all the equipment he’d amassed. The ropes and cuffs. The pliers. The hammer. The blades. But it was all beginning to feel like too much foreplay. He could just squeeze the trigger and be done with it. Could kill the guy and leave. Go without giving him an opportunity to offer up a half-baked excuse.

  He felt his finger curl. Watched his knuckle whiten with a curious, detached amazement, like he was staring at the hand of somebody else. He was tired of this. Tired of the whole sorry saga. Tired of clinging to his last frayed threads of hope. Tired of Jérôme Moreau most of all.

  ‘You killed her, didn’t you?’ he said, through gritted teeth. ‘Tell me why you killed her.’

  But Jérôme was shaking his head before Trent had even finished speaking.

  ‘Aimée is dead?’ he asked, and in his voice was a kind of amazement, a marvelling at the intricate mechanics of a universe he was woefully ill equipped to understand.

  Trent felt the hot rage vibrate within him. Tasted bile in his throat. He supported his wrist with his spare hand. He had the shakes. Badly.

  ‘She died here,’ he said. ‘She must have. In this house. In your bedroom. You killed her two months ago.’

  ‘No, that’s not right.’

  ‘Her car is in your garage.’

  Jérôme’s brow creased in thought. ‘That can’t be.’

  ‘I found her broken necklace and locket upstairs. Under your bed. There was blood on the carpet.’

  Jérôme raised a hand in the air. He pinched the bridge of his nose, like he was wrestling with a complex mathematical theorem.

  ‘I don’t know why you believe this,’ he said, speaking in a measured tone. ‘I know Aimée. Of course I know her. We met several times. I respected her. We even shared a meal. But she’s never been inside this house. She’s never been inside my bedroom. Her car can’t be in my garage.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  Trent’s wrist was jerking and writhing, moving without his say-so, like some alien limb.

  Jérôme shook his head, as if mystified. He mouthed the word ‘No’.

  ‘Don’t lie to me.’

  ‘Who told you this? It sounds to me as if someone has tricked you.’

  Trent thought back to what Alain had told him. He judges people. He does it very fast. He did it to me. He saw something in me. Was that what was happening now? Had Jérôme made a quick study of Trent? Had he looked at him and seen his weakness – the desperate need burning deep within? The awful longing to know that it had all been necessary, everything justified? The lying, the deception, the five men killed, and Girard, shot because of him?

  Trent looked over at the kitchen and the door to the garage. He could grab Jérôme by the throat. Could drag him across the room and kick open the door and bundle him through onto his knees on the cold concrete.

  But what if Aimée’s car wasn’t there? What then?

  The Beretta was shaking. Two hands weren’t enough. His entire body was trembling, like a palsy he couldn’t control.

  ‘I can show you,’ Trent hissed. ‘I can prove it to you.’

  To us both.

  ‘I wish you would,’ Jérôme told him. ‘But put the gun down first. That’s a reasonable request, isn’t it? That’s fair?’

  Fair.

  Trent was hot and he was sweating. The rabid fever was leaking out of him. It was soaking his scalp and forehead. Trickling down his face. Breaking out across his arms and over his chest and pooling in his groin.

  It was worse in his hands. His palms were damp and greased. Fingers slipping. The trigger oscillated wildly. A fraction more and it would be over. All of it done. Concluded.

  And what was one more dead body? Jérôme Moreau deserved it. The filthy liar. Trent knew he threatened and assaulted women. He beat them. Stephanie had shown him that. Hadn’t she?

  Bam.

  Moreau bucked suddenly on the couch. His head flew back in a spray of fluids. It pitched to the left and kept on rolling, like whatever complex system of muscles and ligaments had been holding it up had abruptly failed. His neck flexed perversely and his body tumbled after his head, collapsing sideways over the back of the couch, his face pivoted up to the ceiling. There was something amiss with his gaze. It took a moment for Trent to comprehend. Then he saw the gory hole where one of Jérôme’s deceitful eyes had been.

  Trent groaned. He gaped dumbly at the pistol in his hand. He hadn’t felt it discharge. Hadn’t experienced the kick.

  But Jérôme was dead. Shot down with his secrets. With the precious truth about Aimée.

  Trent swayed, slump-shouldered, and a strange animal wail escaped his lips. So he’d given in to the dark instincts swirling inside, to the cheap and gaudy allure of a sudden ending without the resolution he’d set out to find.

  He was still moaning when the second shot rang out and tore through the meat of his thigh. He dropped hard and twirled, the Beretta falling from his hand and clattering to the floor. He slammed into the chair with his duffel in it. Knocked the chair over.

  There was a man standing in the doorway behind him. A man with a gun in his fist. A man he knew to be dead.

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Girard paced into the room and kicked Trent’s Beretta far away. He contemplated Trent, his head on an angle, then hitched up his trousers and squatted close to him. He was wearing black leather gloves and he motioned with his Glock towards Trent’s thigh and the bloody wound he was clutc
hing, inky liquid squirming through his fingers.

  ‘I can see that it hurts.’ Girard sniffed. ‘And I’m sorry for your pain.’ His pouched eyes were wet and baleful. ‘But I could have killed you before you turned round. I could have left you without the answers you’ve been seeking.’

  The pain in Trent’s leg was a gnawing, animal thing. If he lay still, it hurt. If he moved, claws and fangs ripped through him.

  Blood leaked between his fingers with every beat of his racing heart.

  ‘Or I could have shot you in your knee,’ Girard said. ‘Or maybe your ankle. This would have been worse, too.’

  He sighed, as if he found the subject tedious, and pushed up to his feet. He crossed towards the couch and clicked on a tall standing lamp. Light slanted down from beneath the conical shade onto Jérôme’s slackened body. Girard pinched Jérôme’s chin between his forefinger and thumb, turning his face to the light. He hummed in appreciation when he saw the wound that had killed him, as if he’d sampled a fine wine.

  ‘You’re losing a lot of blood,’ he said, offhand, and wiped his gloved fingers on his trousers.

  Trent writhed on the floor, smearing dark liquid onto the cold marble tiles. He craned his neck and glanced towards where his duffel had been. But it was lost to him somewhere behind the toppled chair. The tools and weapons it contained were far beyond his reach.

  ‘I sympathise,’ Girard said. ‘You remember, I think, that I was shot only this morning.’

  Trent was breathing rapidly through his nose. He was fighting hard to separate himself from the pain and the panic. Trying to compartmentalise them in his mind.

  It wasn’t working.

  ‘Of course,’ Girard told him, ‘I was shot with a blank round. I was wearing a padded vest. But still –’ he smoothed a gloved hand over his chest, as if the percussion of the blast still lingered – ‘I might have drowned.’

  Trent braced himself for the hurt that would come from speaking. ‘I swam out to where you fell. I couldn’t find you.’

  Girard stroked his goatee. He smiled. ‘I spent many summer days there as a boy, diving from the cliffs with my friends.’ His eyes sparkled darkly. ‘We learned to swim deep under water, to surface inside the submerged caves.’ He shrugged, as if it was nothing. ‘I waited until I was sure you would be gone. And also, I had to recover.’ He reached down towards the bottom of the polo shirt he had on and lifted the material to reveal a deep aubergine bruise, dappled around his left nipple. ‘It hurt very much.’

  Trent snarled. He rasped air through greasy lips. ‘You let me think you were dead.’

  ‘I needed you to believe it,’ he said, absently tracing his finger over his bruised skin.

  ‘Why?’

  He lowered his shirt. ‘For the money.’ Girard gestured with his gun towards the holdall of cash. ‘You’d paid once already. With more pressure, and without my help, we hoped you would pay again.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Xavier.’ He shrugged. ‘The men you killed.’

  ‘You were working with them?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Throughout the Roux case?’

  ‘And some others that did not involve you.’

  Trent lurched to one side. He braced a blood-smeared hand on the tiled floor and slithered backwards until he was propped against the upturned chair.

  ‘You shouldn’t have let the boy drive this evening.’ Girard tutted and shook his head. ‘I followed you from outside Le Thor. If you’d been driving, I guess maybe you would have seen me.’

  ‘But you were working for Viktor’s parents. You were hunting Xavier.’

  ‘They were fools. I was happy to take their money.’

  ‘What about your revenge? Your dead colleague? Your lover?’

  He rolled out his bottom lip. Contemplated the muzzle of his gun. ‘Yes, it was a good story. Romantic. I think you liked it. But she was asking too many questions. She had to go.’

  Trent growled. He beat his fist on the floor. His vision was blurring, becoming frayed at the edges. Darkness was slamming in at him, like a series of lights being switched off, one after the other, in a deserted room.

  ‘And Aimée?’ he asked, her name a low whisper.

  ‘A coincidence. Convenient to us.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  Girard threw up a hand. ‘Truthfully, I do not know. I wish that I could tell you. But…’ he puffed air through his lips and flicked his fingers out from his palm, ‘poof. It’s a mystery.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘There is not so much to tell.’ He spread one gloved hand. Pushed the leather into the webbing between his fingers with the barrel of the pistol. ‘I went to your home as you asked, back when you called me from Naples. Your door was open. Aimée was not there. But there were signs of a struggle. Her handbag was upside down on the floor. Her house keys and her car keys, too. Her mobile. Her necklace. It was broken. I guess it was ripped from her throat. And a vase in the hallway had been smashed. I had to sweep the pieces up and throw them away. I don’t think you noticed.’

  He smiled flatly. No remorse.

  ‘So you saw some kind of sick opportunity.’ Trent grimaced. He clenched his teeth against the searing pain in his leg. ‘You took her necklace and you planted it here for me to find. Did you drive her car here, too?’

  ‘Not me.’ Girard clicked his tongue. ‘Your money paid the burglar to do it. The flower seller. You followed him, yes? It was a mistake, I think, asking him to break into your home, also. I told Xavier this. I warned him. But he wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘Why, Girard? Why do this to me?’

  ‘Because we had selected this man,’ he said, waving his arm at Jérôme’s corpse as if it were explanation enough. ‘Xavier and myself. We knew you were his negotiator. And with Aimée gone, with this man appearing to be responsible, we knew you would be desperate. We thought that you would let his family pay more.’

  ‘And I did,’ Trent muttered.

  Girard nodded, his face carved into a winning grin, like the two of them were sharing a great fortune together. ‘We had hoped for more still. Only,’ he frowned, ‘you were lucky. More resourceful than we anticipated.’

  ‘Aimée was pregnant,’ Trent said. ‘She was carrying my child.’

  Girard sucked air through his lips. He bowed his head. ‘Then this is unfortunate, of course. I’m sorry for you both.’

  ‘I’ll kill you.’ Trent clutched at his thigh. ‘Just like I killed Xavier.’

  ‘No,’ he said simply. ‘Your strength is almost gone. But I can also shoot you again. It’s easy for me. No problem. I have a gun. You don’t.’

  Trent gazed down at his thigh. Blood had soaked through his trouser leg, pasting his jeans to his skin. It had puddled in his groin. It had trickled down his shin, into his sock, wetting the cotton.

  ‘All this time,’ he said, and the words rattled inside his lungs. ‘Two months, Girard. My fiancée. Our unborn child.’

  ‘Do not think that I’m proud of it.’ He opened his mouth to say more, then stopped himself, as if acknowledging that no explanation would ever be good enough. He hummed and smoothed back his hair and hunched his shoulders, smiling sheepishly, as if he’d been powerless to behave otherwise. ‘But then, you never did like to involve the police. Always so willing to co-operate with the gangs. To pay them. You colluded, too. Just like me.’

  ‘Not like you. Never that.’

  Girard motioned towards Jérôme. ‘I had to kill him because of you. Your persistence. He would have convinced you he knew nothing and then what would you have done?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have believed him. You made sure of that. I’d have killed him first.’

  Girard swayed his head on his shoulders, like a set of weighing scales. ‘Then I think maybe you deserve this. Maybe it’s right that you die here, also.’

  He clicked the lamp off and blackness crowded in. It was dark outside now. Trent’s vision flickered and dimmed. He dug his fingers
into the flesh of his wound. Roused himself.

  He heard Girard make his way to the door. Glimpsed him ducking in a wash of faint moonlight for the holdall. Heard him release a gust of air when he straightened and bore its weight.

  He stood in the doorway. Adjusted his grip on the holdall. Looked down at his gun and relaxed his shoulders.

  ‘You know, I think I will leave you to bleed. So much blood.’ He shook his head. ‘See how it clings to you?’

  * * *

  Viktor supposed that Trent’s advice had been wise. He should abandon his car. Leave it somewhere to be stolen. A suitable area in Marseilles wouldn’t be hard to find. Then he could return home to his parents. Try to rebuild his life.

  But there was one thing Trent had overlooked. He’d forgotten about the apartment Viktor had been renting.

  Standing in it now, with his clothes and his few belongings stuffed in his suitcase, Viktor was amazed by how dismal it looked. Hard to believe he’d been living here. Harder still to know that the man he’d been monitoring so closely, the one he’d been determined to bring down, was the person who’d finally set him free.

  He lingered by the window and looked out at the view across the square. It was a scene he’d come to know so intimately. One that he’d watched in the blazing noontime sun, the foggy maritime dawns, the haunted hours of the night.

  The streetlamps burned an anaemic yellow. Lights shone in the windows of the houses and apartments. Trent’s home was in darkness but the front door was wide open. Must have been caught by a breeze. Viktor felt troubled about leaving it that way. The broken lock was the problem, but perhaps the door could be wedged closed somehow.

  He didn’t want a stranger becoming curious and wandering inside to find the dead man in the boxroom. If there was any way that Trent could clear up after himself and erase the trail that linked him to Xavier and the mess in Le Thor, then Viktor didn’t want him to fail.

  Lifting his suitcase from the floor, he walked out of the cramped, mildewed room for the final time, and headed across the deserted square. He paused. Checked all around. Then stepped inside the unlit hallway.