by Peter May
‘It would,’ Smith said, though it was clear from his expression he didn’t think it likely. ‘Oh, by the way, our man’s car . . . It’s a long-term rental, paid for by some company down south. Might take a while to find out exactly who’s behind it.’ He turned towards the door. ‘I’ll check out this bloke Maclean.’
‘While you’re at it, Hector, might as well run a wee check on that couple who’re staying up the road from Dune Cottage.’ He ran an eye over his notes again. ‘Jon and Sally Harrison. From Manchester, apparently. She clearly lied to me about her relationship with our man. And her husband says he’s in concrete.’
Smith chuckled. He knew there was a joke in there somewhere, but he couldn’t think what it was and his smile faded. ‘Will do,’ he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was Karen’s first time in London. When she had boarded the train in Edinburgh, her hands had been shaking almost uncontrollably. She felt sick, and a part of her had just wanted to give it all up and go home. To pretend that none of this had happened. That her dad was still dead, and she could retreat to the comfort of self-recrimination and absolve herself from any further responsibility for her life.
But, as the hours wore on, her fear had slowly dissipated, and she saw all the negatives of her life, self-pity, blame, anger, exposed like dead fish washed up on a beach. And she realised that she had simply wasted the last two years.
Fear, gradually, had been replaced by quiet determination, so that by the time she stepped on to the platform at King’s Cross she was focused and clear on exactly what it was she had to do.
Still, her sense of being alone, and in a strange and dangerous place, at first nearly overwhelmed her. London. It had only ever been a name. A place she had seen on TV and in movies. Edinburgh seemed tiny by comparison, and the sheer scale and volume of noise in this conurbation of eight million people was daunting. Her parents, she knew, had lived somewhere just outside of London when she was a baby, but she had no recollection of it, no affinity with it, and beyond an initial sense of awe, found herself disappointed. It was really just another big, dirty, ugly city. Same shops, same people, same cars, same ads on the billboards.
In the Underground, people squeezed into small, noisy, over-lit capsules that rattled through the bowels of the city. There was no Underground in Edinburgh, and Glasgow’s Clockwork Orange simply didn’t compare. Passengers sat or stood in bubbles of isolation, lost in their private worlds, oblivious of the sweaty, over-scented and indifferent hordes of humanity travelling with them in these dark, smelly tunnels. And when finally they reached their stations, they emerged blinking in the daylight on to blackened pavements shiny with discarded chewing gum, and streets choked with traffic belching poison into the air. For the first time in her life, Karen felt invisible. And in a strange way there was a comfort in that.
The offices of OneWorld were tucked away in a crumbling building in an alley off Dean Street in Soho. Karen had taken the Tube to Leicester Square, and used her phone to navigate her way through Chinatown to Shaftesbury Avenue. Rusted railings and bars on the windows characterised the dirty little backstreet where OneWorld had its headquarters. Scaffolding made the street almost impassable, stone cleaners at work, blasting away decades of grime and repairing the decaying stone and brickwork beneath it. Despite its decrepitude, Karen knew that this was a prestigious and expensive address, and she wondered how much of the money raised by OneWorld went on maintaining its image here, however illusory.
She pushed open a black-painted door with shining brass hardware, and found herself in a gloomy hallway with stairs climbing steeply to a first-floor landing mired in darkness. On her right, a sign on a darkwood door revealed this to be the Office. Opposite was the Conference Room. She knocked, and stepped tentatively into the office.
A girl who looked not much older than Karen sat behind a desk in front of a computer terminal. The wall behind her was pasted with OneWorld campaign posters on GMOs, oil pollution, clean water, CO2 emissions, whale hunting. She had dyed-blond hair tied back in a ponytail and wore a black OneWorld T-shirt and skin-tight jeans tucked into calf-high leather boots. The window that looked out on to the alleyway was barred on the outside and opaque with grime. Ed Sheeran leaked almost subliminally from her computer speakers, and she was speaking animatedly on the phone. She glanced at Karen and raised a finger indicating that she should wait. There were three chairs lined up against the back wall, and a coffee table groaning with magazines. Karen sat down and inclined her head to read the cover of the magazine on top of the pile. It was a copy of the New Internationalist, and its headline screamed ‘TTIP – Now It Gets Political’. Karen had no idea what TTIP was, and she suddenly felt very ignorant and insignificant. A country girl arriving in the big city for the first time, foolish and naive.
When the girl finished her call, Karen stood up. ‘I’d like to see Mr Deloit.’
But still the girl held up a finger, and scribbled something on a notepad before looking up. ‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘No.’
‘Then, I’m sorry, you’ll have to make one and come back another time. Mr Deloit is a very busy man.’ She opened up a desk diary. ‘If you want to leave me your name and number, and preferably an email address, I can get back to you. What is it you want to see him about?’
Karen stood her ground. ‘Just tell him Karen Fleming is here. He’ll see me.’
The girl shook her head. ‘He won’t. Now, either you can give me your details or you can leave.’
Karen sat down. ‘I’m not leaving till I see him.’
The girl sighed. ‘He’s not here.’
‘I’ll wait till he comes back, then.’
Karen could see the workings of the girl’s thought processes revolving behind dark brown eyes. ‘He won’t be in today.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I don’t care what you believe. He’s not going to see you without an appointment.’
Karen stood up again and crossed the room to the desk. She leaned over it, aware that with her cropped black hair and face full of holes she was probably quite intimidating. She knew, too, that the Scottish accent sounded aggressive to the English ear. ‘Just tell him I’m here, alright?’
If the girl was intimidated, she wasn’t going to show it. She glared back at Karen and there was a momentary hiatus. Then she lifted the phone and pressed a button. After a moment she said, ‘There’s a very hostile young lady here who refuses to leave without seeing you.’ A pause. Then, ‘Karen Fleming.’ Karen could hear a man’s voice raised on the other end of the line. The girl flinched, and coloured slightly. She hung up as she hoisted herself out of her chair, and said in a voice that could have turned salt water to ice, ‘Come with me.’
Karen followed her up the stairs into darkness, and as they neared the top, a light came on, triggered by a sensor. There were unmarked doors at either end of the landing, and the stairs went up into yet more darkness. The girl knocked on the nearest door, then held it open for Karen, waiting until she had entered, and then closing it behind her.
It was an old-fashioned room with wood-panelled walls and a high ceiling. A thick, dark red carpet soaked up every sound and movement, and there was a sense of hush in the room. Daylight spilled in through layers of filth on a large window that looked down into the lane, and a green glass and brass lamp on Deloit’s desk cast a pool of bright yellow light on the surface of it all around his laptop. It was a large, leather-tooled mahogany desk, and Deloit eased himself out of a matching captain’s chair.
He was heavier, Karen saw, than he looked in his press photographs, a jawline deformed by jowls and a paunch that stretched the lettering on his OneWorld T-shirt. His platinum curls grew almost to his shoulders. Perhaps natural once, but dyed now. He had probably been a good-looking man in his youth, and in some ways still was. But the ravages of time and good living were starting to show, and his face was ugly with anger as he rounded his desk towards her.
&nb
sp; ‘You stupid little bitch! Which part of never call me again did you not understand?’
‘I’m not calling you, I’m calling on you. And don’t you call me a fucking bitch!’ Which took the wind out of his sails, at least for a moment. Karen used that moment to her advantage. ‘My father’s still alive, isn’t he? And you know where he is.’
He regained his composure, and his anger, and took two steps towards her, grabbing her arm and pushing his face into hers. ‘You fool! You’re risking everything. Were you followed here?’
Karen was startled. ‘Followed? Who by? Who would want to follow me?’
He breathed his anger and frustration in her face. ‘You have no idea, do you? What even gives you the notion that your father’s not dead?’
‘He left a letter for me with my godfather. I wasn’t supposed to get it for another year, but he gave it to me yesterday.’
Deloit tipped his head back, eyes directed to the ceiling. ‘Goddamned stupid fucking idiot!’ Then he seemed to collect himself and directed his ire back at Karen. She felt his fingers tightening around her upper arm, bruising her, she was sure. ‘You have to leave. You have to leave now! And you have to forget that any of this ever happened.’
‘Why?’ Karen very nearly shouted in his face.
But he shook his head. ‘What you don’t know, you can’t tell. But what you do need to know is that your father gave up everything for you. Everything! And if you go on like this, you’re going to fuck it all up.’ He pulled her across to the window and peered through the dirt, down into the lane. ‘We’ve got to get you out of here. But not the front way. Come with me.’ And he dragged her towards the door. As he opened it, she pulled her arm free.
‘I’m not going anywhere till you tell me what’s going on.’
His eyes were wide and wild, tiny drops of spittle gathering in the corners of his mouth. ‘If you care remotely about your dad, if you value his life, and his work, then you’ll go, Karen. Just go. And take my word for it. You are putting his life in danger.’
His words struck her like blows from a fist. Each and every one of them. You are putting his life in danger.
He took her arm again and hurried her downstairs. But instead of opening the front door, he led her back along the hall and into a small kitchen where she smelled stewed coffee and stale food from empty carry-out containers on the worktop. He unlocked a reinforced metal door and pulled it open. Outside was the narrowest of lanes lined with bins that overflowed on to the cobbles. She caught the movement of some creature scuttling off into the late afternoon gloom.
He glanced either way along the lane then propelled her out into it. ‘Go home. And if you care at all about your dad you’ll not breathe a word of this to anyone. Do you understand?’
Karen nodded, and stood mute and bereft in the shadow of the brick facades that towered above her, the tiniest sliver of sky dividing them a long way overhead. The slamming of the door echoed in the silence, and she heard him locking it again. Somewhere distantly she became aware of the rumble of traffic, and she rubbed her arm ruefully where fingers of steel had gripped them. She wanted to cry. And perhaps just twenty-four hours ago tears would have been spilled. But however aggressively Richard Deloit might have screamed in her face, ejecting her from the back door of OneWorld and telling her to go home and forget everything, she knew with certainty now that her dad was still alive. Which made her even more determined than ever to find him.
*
Karen sat in a tiny Starbucks in the Trocadero, just off Leicester Square, nursing a grande caramel macchiato. On one side stood a bureau de change, on the other, a homeless man wearing a baseball cap and wrapped in a torn and dirty coat squatted on the pavement, leaning back against the pillars. The two extremes of modern Britain sandwiching an American coffee shop. Her anger, by now, had been given time to ferment and was fizzing inside her. Why had she let Deloit treat her like that? Why had she not stood her ground and demanded the truth? How pathetic was she that she had allowed him simply to push her out of the back door and leave her standing like an idiot in that back alley?
Such was the level of her indignation that she was tempted to go back and hammer on his door, screaming for answers until she got them. But the one thing that stopped her was the recollection of the words he had almost spat in her face. You are putting his life in danger.
She had no idea how that was possible, or why. But it scared her. He had faked his own suicide. And you didn’t do something like that without a pretty damn good reason. Were you followed here? Deloit had demanded of her. Who would have followed her, and how would she have known if someone had? She glanced around all the faces in the coffee shop. They were young people, mostly, heads buried in phones or tablets or laptops, as oblivious as people in the Underground of everyone else around them. No one was paying Karen the least attention.
For a long time she sat in a state of mental paralysis, letting her coffee grow cold. This had been a wasted trip. All those hours on the train from Edinburgh. The cost of it, charged to Derek’s credit card, had seemed excessive, and she had her first and only pang of guilt about it. It didn’t last long. Because words spoken on the beach at Portobello came tumbling back into her consciousness. I knew what he knew.
She had asked her godfather what it was he knew, and he had not really answered her. But if anyone could tell her what was going on, it had to be him. She took her phone out and dialled his mobile. It rang four times before going to messages, but she didn’t leave one. She hung up, and almost immediately her own phone rang. The display told her it was her mother, and she muted the ringer until it stopped vibrating. She sipped on the lukewarm remains of the sweet chemical concoction that passed for coffee, and thirty seconds later the phone vibrated briefly and she knew her mother had left a message.
‘Karen, for God’s sake, where are you? We’re worried sick. I should have called as soon as I woke up this morning and saw that you were gone. You’ve been acting so weird lately, but I never thought for a minute that you’d run off like this. Now the school have phoned to say you’ve been absent for days.’ A sigh of exasperation. ‘Oh, babygirl, don’t do this to me. Call me, please.’ There was a long pause before she hung up, as if she believed that Karen was there, listening, and might respond.
Karen deleted the message and wondered why she didn’t feel at least some tiny sense of remorse or regret. All she could think was that Derek hadn’t discovered yet that one of his credit cards was missing, or her mother would have said something. But it surely wouldn’t be long before he did, and the likelihood was that he would have it cancelled.
She left Starbucks and searched for a cash dispenser. She needed money as a back-up in case the card stopped working. And she had to make a decision quickly about what to do next. The light was fading faster here than it did back home, and she didn’t relish a night spent on her own in London. There was no reason for her to stay. She had already decided that returning to hammer on the door of OneWorld would be a waste of time. A triumph of head over heart. She needed to talk to Chris Connor again. The night train to Edinburgh would get her there first thing tomorrow morning. But she would need to buy her ticket fast, while Derek’s card was still active.
*
The sleeper left Euston at ten to midnight, the guard’s shrill whistle echoing among the dark rafters of the long, gloomy platform as the train creaked and eased its way out of the station at the start of its seven-and-a-half-hour journey north. Karen found herself sharing a cabin with an over-coiffed middle-aged business woman. She was wearing a grey suit and black high-heeled shoes, and regarded Karen warily. Neither of them was comfortable undressing, and as the lights went out, each lay self-consciously on her back on the narrow bunks, listening to the rhythm of the wheels on the rails, frightened to go to sleep. The rolling stock groaned and complained as the train jerked and shuddered its way through suburban stations, gathering pace with the darkening of the night, and leaving the wealthy veneer of a decadent and
decaying south behind them.
Karen was too tense to sleep, and certain that her travelling companion was equally awake. She lay for a long time staring at a ceiling that only occasionally took form as light leaked around the window blind from some street-lit conurbation. Finally, the relentless tempo of the train carried her off into a restless slumber.
She woke with a start in darkness sometime later. Her fellow traveller was on her feet, and for a moment Karen panicked. Were you followed? She sat bolt upright, heart pounding, before realising that the woman was simply returning from a visit to the toilet. After several long moments, she lay back down again, forcing herself to be calm. This was crazy. She was starting to become paranoid, without the least idea why. She tried to make herself breathe normally, but they were long, deep breaths with the hint of a tremor in them, and she knew that she would not sleep again tonight.
But when the train eased its way gently into the grey, early-morning Edinburgh light that fell through the glass of Waverley Station, Karen woke to the realisation that she had in fact succumbed. The lady with the suit was up and dressed, teeth brushed, hair immaculate, and was closing the clasps on her small suitcase. Karen swung her legs out of her bunk and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. She felt grubby and gritty and had a filthy taste in her mouth. She glimpsed her reflection in the window and saw how pale she was.
The business woman forced a smile. ‘Goodbye,’ she said, although they had never said hello, nor exchanged any other words between them during the entire night.
Karen paid to go into the station’s public toilets, where she washed in the sink and changed her underwear in a cubicle. In the buffet, she bought a coffee and a custard-filled croissant, and began to feel vaguely human again. Self-confidence had been restored by her return to Edinburgh. She was on home ground again. She took out her phone and saw that there had been another five calls from her mother. There were three messages, but she didn’t listen to them. Instead she redialled Chris Connor. Again her call went to messages, but this time she left one. ‘Chris, it’s Karen. We need to talk. I know you didn’t like me coming to the Geddes, but that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll see you there in about an hour.’
