It Never Goes Away

by Tom Trott

  With the same brave refusal to think it through that had served me well on my last stunt I ran straight at the doors, turning sideways at the last moment. Rather than shattering and tinkling there was a muffled crack where the glass and lock sheared from each other, leaving two open doors, one with both parts of the lock attached, and one private detective sprawled on a stranger’s living room floor.

  Footsteps thundered above me. Muffled voices barked orders. I pushed myself up for the millionth time that evening and ran to the front door and out. I stopped suddenly, under the harsh light of the corridor I could see for the first time the white shirt I had worn to Chichester, and the blood that now covered it. I had to ram my fingers in the frame to catch the door before it swang shut.

  Inside again, I made sure the door was locked, the chain too, then I turned on the lights to get a look at the place. Too bright. I turned them off again, then I found a lamp. Now I could see.

  This was not someone’s seaside second home. Or not just. The walls were covered in art, and most of the living room was piled with the stuff too; watercolours, oils, acrylics, all unframed, leaning in stacks against worktops. To my untrained eye they looked professional, I even thought I recognised one or two. Also dominating the room were cardboard boxes that clinked when I walked past them. I assumed they were full of booze, but when I glanced in the top of an open one I saw they were full of perfume bottles. High-end stuff. Counterfeit, no doubt. Just like the art, I guessed. Whether anyone ever slept here I didn’t know, but there were enough personal items and what looked like genuine champagne in the fridge to suggest that at least someone used it sometimes.

  I ran to the bathroom to get a good look at myself. My shirt was covered in blood. I hadn’t checked McCready, hadn’t checked his injuries. I hadn’t even checked that he was dead, but he was awfully cold for a living person. I ripped off my clothes and threw them in the bath. Then I jumped in the shower and rinsed myself as quickly as I could thoroughly.

  I had forgotten to find a towel and so I dripped a path as I moved to the bedroom and went through the wardrobe to find something wearable. There was very little and none of it was anywhere near my size. I had to opt for jogging bottoms and trainers that I could tie tightly, an extra-large black shirt, and a maroon dinner jacket to try and stay warm. I looked like a kid playing dress-up.

  I went back to the living room and turned off the lamp. It was still raining and there was little moonlight, the view through the glass doors and beyond the balcony was of dim blue cloud. Footsteps still marched above my head, voices still murmured. The rain drummed against the windows. The wind played a note through the hole in the glass doors. And I imagined I could still hear the sound of my belt slapping against the balustrade of my balcony above. I had no idea how long it had been, how many minutes. I didn’t want to guess how long it would take them. Someone knocked on a door. Not this flat, but nearby. It was time to get out of here.

  I looked through the spyhole. There was no one I could see. I opened it and took half a confident step toward the stairs before I heard a voice.

  ‘Sir!’

  I stopped. A uniformed police officer was standing down the corridor at the door to the only other flat on this floor.

  ‘Sorry, sir, we’re asking everyone to stay in their apartments.’

  I stepped back and leant on the door frame, as much in shadow as I could achieve without looking deliberate.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I couldn’t tell you if I knew.’ He knocked on the other flat door again, louder than before. There was still no answer. ‘Doesn’t anyone live in this building?’ he asked me.

  ‘Sometimes I think it’s only me.’

  He turned to face me.

  ‘I’ll go back to sleep,’ I said, and shut the door before he could get a proper look at me.

  I stared through the spyhole. His footsteps crept quietly down the corridor toward the door, then I saw his face emerge into my field of vision, bent and distorted by the lens. A frown played across his profile. Then I realised he was listening, ear to the door, an inch from my now held breath. Then he yawned, and wandered away toward the stairs.

  I leant with my hands against the door and listened to all the sounds my ears could pick up. Above me footsteps continued to rumble, furniture was moved, I heard drawers being wrenched open and the contents strewn onto the floor. Then I heard the balcony doors open. Then an excited voice, running back into my flat.

  I flung open the door and ran to the stairs, adrenaline coursing through me. Into the stairwell, I didn’t even check to see if anyone was below me, I just ran. Down a flight, down another, leaping each in a single bound. Out onto the second floor. Then I ran to the fire alarm and smashed the glass with my elbow.

  A deafening bell rang through the building. I banged on the door of flat 3, then I banged on the door of flat 4, then I ran back into the stairwell, down, and out onto the first floor. I banged on the door of flat 1, then I ran to flat 2, at the sea-end of the corridor.

  I banged on the door. No one answered. I started banging again and didn’t stop. Above me I heard people opening their doors, movement in the corridor. Finally the door of flat 2 was opened by an angry man tying a dressing gown. I pushed past him and ran straight for their balcony doors, unlocked them, and ran outside. I could barely hear his and his family’s shouting over the deafening alarm bell. I leapt from his balcony onto the sloped walkway that runs just half a storey underneath it, then disappeared over the wall.

  I grazed my hands landing on the rough concrete tetrapods that protect the sea wall. My foot went down a gap, twisting to a weird angle. Everything hurt. I pulled my foot out and rested it up on the concrete. The silhouetted mass of interlocking shapes looked like a scrapheap of decaying gravestones, any one of them mine. Or maybe the inside of a giant jaw, seaweed stuck to them like spinach on these giant teeth, and I a morsel ready to be ground.

  I listened to the ringing of the bell and the mayhem of an angry crowd of residents flooding into the mass of police cars. Then a voice crackled over a megaphone, but what it said was distorted as it echoed between the buildings. By standing up and clinging to the tallest knob of concrete I could see up to my balcony, five storeys above, where more than ten police officers were standing, many leaning over the side, looking over to the balcony below where more officers stood. I instinctively slipped back down into the shadows. They were catching up with me, it wouldn’t take long for someone to listen to the family from flat 2 screaming about some madman who had jumped off their balcony.

  The rain beat against me and a wave broke against the concrete, gushing up between my legs, soaking my feet and ankles. I shivered violently, almost losing my grip. I began to scramble across the giant teeth, slowly working my way parallel to the building. Halfway, I reached the point where the road ends (or started from my perspective), and above me, just beyond the wall, I knew there were a dozen police cars and many more officers. Just one of them had to lean out over the marina wall to see me scurrying along like a spider in the shadows. But I made it past the apartment building and round an inside corner until I was past the yacht club and I could climb over the wall onto the one-way road that runs round the back of the casino.

  Once I was on the tarmac I felt hideously exposed. Cars leaving the main marina car park as well as huge double-decker night buses used this road. Then I heard the rumble of a helicopter and ran into the shadows of the casino back entrance. I cursed my stupidity: the casino was open twenty-four hours, I should have hidden by the back entrance of the bowling complex. I was paralysed with fear, and yet I couldn’t stop shivering. The helicopter buzzed about me, but no spotlights lit the road. Then the terrifying thought struck me that they don’t use spotlights anymore, they use thermal imaging cameras, and there was no way I could hide from them, they might be staring at me on their monitors right now.

  There was nothing to do but make a run for it. I ran down the road, past the b
ack of the bowling complex, past the back of the gym and round the corner until I reached the steps that allow you to climb the storey-high road-thick seawall. Up top, I started to run down the wide concrete boulevard that caps the wall but then the roar of the helicopter filled my ears and I saw two sprinting silhouettes leap up the next set of steps, a hundred metres ahead of me. There was shouting. I took a leap of faith, jumping to my left onto the pebble beach below.

  I landed with a crunch, but without injury. I could see the officers on the wall turn back on themselves to try and beat me to the walkway at the top of the beach. I ran as fast as possible, as fast as anyone has ever run on pebbles. And as I made my deafening way across them a blinding spotlight finally shone on me, the helicopter lighting me up to help those pursuing on foot.

  When I made it to the concrete walkway the two uniforms were bolting towards me in full Tom Cruise-mode, just metres away. I kept running as fast as I could, running on concrete suddenly joyous after the pebbles. My throat burnt, my muscles screamed. I ran the length of the walkway until I reached Black Rock car park, then across Madeira Drive and across the grass below the coast road, heading west, away from the marina, toward town. As I ran I shot my eyes around and caught snapshots of uniforms converging on me from every path, coming up from Madeira drive and down from Marine Parade, left and right. Blue lights flashed above me on the road and more appeared from both directions on the beach. All the officers converging, sprinting, all wanting to be the one to tackle me to the ground. I stopped for just a second by the brief cream patch of wall that interrupts the otherwise monotonous brick edifice atop which the road runs.

  The spotlight was on me, my shadow projected on the cream wall. I took it all in; the manic manhunt, the dozens of officers, the helicopters, the sirens, the screams, all for me. I could even see the grins on their sprinting, huffing, puffing faces. The grins said I had done well to get this far, but now I was trapped. Cornered. Nowhere to run. It was over.

  But this is where it pays to know your history, folks, because there was something about historic Brighton that I knew, and they didn’t. As the helicopter banked, the spotlight drifted from me momentarily, plunging us into comparable darkness. A second later it returned to the cream wall, and inside I laughed at what they were thinking when to their eyes I had simply vanished into thin air.

  18

  Hot Pursuit

  The cream wall that interrupts the brick wall below Marine Parade is not featureless. It has four arched windows and in the middle of them a narrow arched tunnel that runs beneath the road and into the Kemp Town Enclosures. Private gardens, the enclosures are for the exclusive use of the owners of the icing-white townhouses (now mostly flats), and the tunnel was built to allow the rich bastards to promenade down to the beach without dirtying themselves by crossing the road. There are actually two “cottages” either side of the tunnel, that’s what the windows are for, built for a gardener and a constable, now occupied by people who have to live under an A road (if they’re not just holiday lets). They say the garden and tunnel inspired Lewis Carroll to write Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but people say a lot of things. Especially when they’re trying to sell houses.

  A sea mist was creeping in, forming balls of light around street lamps and headlights, reducing the Regency neighbourhood to a cliché. I ran as fast as I could up through the damp, tranquil gardens. The officers on foot were close behind, crunching on the pebble path, their shouts echoing in the slick brick tunnel, but the cars parked on Marine Parade hadn’t yet been told what had happened and the helicopter was still lighting the beach. I ran the length of the gardens and vaulted the hedge and iron fence onto Eastern Road, clipping a bus stop and almost being smushed by a bus.

  I couldn’t hear footsteps any more, not over the busy traffic, but the sound of the helicopter had changed and sirens filled the air again. They were on the move. I ran a block, then another, before I saw flashing blue lights zipping in and out of traffic ahead, John Street Police Station being just over the hill at the far end of Eastern Road. I scrabbled over a high brick wall and into the gardens of St Mary’s Hall, the former private girls’ school now hospital overflow. That gave me an idea.

  I was no longer on Eastern Road but running parallel to it now, still heading west through Kemptown toward the city centre. I crossed a side road and slowed to a jog as I ran behind a building. The sirens were still in the air but they seemed not to have noticed my manoeuvre over the wall. After five seconds I heard the growl of a police car on the prowl and I sprinted again, across another side road, and this time onto the playing fields of Brighton College Nursery & Pre-Prep School. I ran across their two hundred metre running track and had to climb the wall into the Macmillan Horizon Centre car park, after which I finally reached the Royal Sussex County Hospital.

  I had already run a mile from my flat, including sprinting and scrabbling uphill and my body was screaming at me to stop. The Royal Sussex complex is big, and I hoped the corridors of a busy hospital would be hectic and labyrinthine enough for me to at least walk this part of my escape. At the end of the first corridor was a lift, I jumped in and punched the fifth floor button. It opened on a quiet ward with only two nurses, staring at computer screens, and two cleaners, staring at the floor. I squeaked across the rubber floors, through the darkest corridors I could find. From the pitch black of an empty room I could see the night streets of Kemptown and the blue lights that pulsed and zipped back and forth like electricity through a circuit board.

  Everywhere was quiet, there was no crowd to hide in, but it didn’t matter; in a hospital a strangely-dressed man shuffling along was not something to give a second look to; just one more distressed human, one more sad story. I took a circuitous route through the building, moving between floors, then through the Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital, then out the back onto the leg-ruiningly steep Whitehawk Hill Road. Sirens still filled the air, but they were down on Eastern Road and I was now moving away from them. I trekked up past St. John’s College, realising quite how many schools and hospitals there were in this part of Brighton, and to the Walpole Road allotments behind.

  I climbed the fence and laid down in someone’s crops. My body was lead, I couldn’t move. After five minutes’ stargazing I pushed myself up, resting on my arms behind my back. I was quite high on Whitehawk Hill here, and looking south-west I could see down over Brighton College, and beyond it the tower blocks south of Eastern Road. The mist was creeping in, a tide that hid all but the tops of the towers. The city hummed and twinkled through the haze. At my toes the buds of drooping crops quivered in the breeze. An unseen animal rustled in the grass. The sirens were distant but constant on the night air. The helicopter circled endlessly and I started to imagine the white silhouette of a warm human lying in an otherwise empty allotment, sticking out on the thermal cameras like an invitation. My rest was over.

  I got up and trekked through the allotments into woods, a patch of cold, wet, dark, distant-feeling wilderness in the middle of the city. I knelt down in a damp bush and felt that no one could ever find me here, but knew I had to keep moving. I found the path that runs north-south and eventually goes all the way up to The Causeway, but I turned off it before then and fought my way through the trees and into the valley by Craven Vale. From there I headed west into Queens Park, then out the other side at the top of Albion Hill, toward town. I wanted to hide in a crowd, but as I made it down the hill toward St Peter’s the towers loomed out of the mist like cliffs in a storm, and at the back of them was Thornsdale. I stared at it and made up my mind.

  I avoided the twenty-four hour shops as they would have CCTV and instead popped into Planet India and managed to talk myself into being given a pen and a paperclip. I returned to Thornsdale, up the stairs, and to number 37. I bent the pen clip to a right angle, making a passable tension wrench, and used the paperclip as a pick. It took longer than normal, of course, but I was inside in about ten minutes. I shut the door and slumped against it. The fl
at was pitch black. No one would find me here.

  I sat there for what seemed like an hour. I was too exhausted to get up, I had destroyed my body. I was too exhausted even to consider what had happened to me. I forgot about it blissfully and drifted in a mist of unformed thoughts. Eventually I crawled my way to the flat’s decaying bedroom, with its windows and balcony. There were no sounds from the other flats this night. I stared into the mist. It was grey, and complete, like a blanket that would keep me safe.

  I used the toilet. Then I filled the kettle and used one of the immaculately clean mugs and the jar of instant coffee. I settled in the same brown chair as I had the night before and had a good old-fashioned think.

  Someone had followed me from Tessafrak’s offices, maybe Hillerman had given them a call. They must have drugged me, but I had no memory of it. They could have been waiting in the shadows of the car park and put a cloth over my face before I had a chance. They hadn’t sapped me, I had no unexplained bruises. Then they had staged one hell of a party. It would be easier for them if they killed McCready somewhere else and moved his body to my flat, but the evidence would be better if they did it there. The blood spatter, etc. And now I was in a different league of trouble: a murder charge, possibly two, the drugs, breaking and entering, and theft of the clothes I was wearing. There would be a reckoning.

  I tried to think about something else, but what else was there? This time I didn’t have my notebook to work through Clarence’s code. I tried to picture it. Images flashed across my mind of the last combinations I had written. G T X. Q X. The only earlier combination I remembered was MANET, like the painter. Then from nowhere, the pieces fell into place. I knew what it said. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it earlier, maybe I didn’t want to. I’m sure you figured it out. I tapped it out on the arm of the chair: