by Guy Adams
He moved back towards the front of the house and drew to a halt. Jimenez and another man were opening the front gate – and you could be sure they hadn't used Garcia's key, however quickly and confidently they pushed it open – and stepping inside. The kid's timing was about to drop her in exactly the sort of trouble he had hoped she could avoid.
The two Spaniards vanished from sight and Ashe hurried after them, his hand once more reaching for that revolver in his pocket. What was he planning to do, shoot them? Maybe, he decided, if it came down to them or her then he would do it for sure. He looked through the gate, there was no sign of anyone. The sound of breaking glass came from inside and that was more than enough to send him through the gate and jogging around the house. The double doors the girl had used were open. She's not Sophie, he reminded himself, that kid is not Sophie. However much he told himself that, he remembered the panic in his chest as he had run across the concourse of the ersatz St. Pancras station inside the House. That feeling of time slowing down but also somehow slipping away. The sight of Whitstable – that crazy bastard – a piece of broken glass in his hand aimed for Sophie's throat.
He ran through the open door and wondered which way to turn. He was in an open foyer, stairs leading up to his left, rooms off to his right. A gunshot rang out from upstairs and he charged up them even as another sound, a loud splashing from the pool outside, gave him pause. He turned to look and saw that crazy – that wonderful – girl pulling herself out of the pool and running past the double doors. The box was in her hand.
He spun on the stairs – just as Jimenez ran out of the office above – and ran back outside. The double doors smacked back against the wall as he charged through, a tinkle of glass falling to the concrete behind him. He turned the corner of the house, the image of Whitstable's gleeful face fresh in his mind. The girl was running towards the front gate. Jimenez's accomplice appeared at the front door and began charging towards her, hoping to cut her off. Jimenez cleared the corner of the house behind him, a gun in his hand. Ashe spun around and pulled out his own revolver, happy to shoot both of the bastards right then and there. The conviction must have showed in his face. Certainly Jimenez recognised the man he had sold the shells to only twenty four hours before. He didn't want to sample his own stock, not for any money.
"Don't!" the Spaniard shouted, his accomplice turning in confusion and – seeing Ashe and the .45 he held that glinted in that evening sun like the prettiest thing in the world. Jimenez dropped his own gun, raising his hands in surrender. He was a crook not a gunfighter. There was a look in this old man's eyes – had been the day before too – that told you all you needed to know: shoot first or give up, this guy would kill you without so much as drawing breath.
Ashe nearly proved him right. He felt his finger twitch on the trigger, it would be so easy just to squeeze, drop these two to the ground, no great loss. But Ashe did not want to be that man. He twisted the gun in his hand and lashed out with it, clubbing Jimenez to the head. Might still have killed him, he thought, cracked his skull open. Maybe… but maybe not. The accomplice hadn't enough love for his employer to get shot over him and ran out of the front gate as fast as he could. The man would still be running hours later, Ashe thought, I scared him good.
Ashe had running of his own to do. The girl would be heading for the port, wanting to sell the box to Chester. Now maybe Chester would just pay up but then maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he'd look at the kid that held his treasure and decide that it was easier just to take the damn thing, to slap it out of her hand and drop her overboard. Or give her to Henryk…
So Ashe ran out of the house and into the square. The girl – not Sophie, remember? – was still visible but he knew he would never catch her, not on foot at least. He glanced around the square and his eyes fell on something that might just make the difference: an old black bicycle leaning against the back of a bench. Its owner must have been one of the old men that were gathering here at the end of the day to smoke their cigars and chat. He ran towards it, remembering to drop his gun back in his pocket before he scared anyone else with it.
"Whose bike?" he yelled as he approached them, rooting in his wallet for money. He held up a few notes and asked again. One old guy, a flat cap sent jaunty over his wrinkled walnut of a head stuck his hand up fast. Ashe shoved the money in his hand and grabbed the bike. "I'll try and bring it back," he promised, pedalling after the girl.
She was running down the narrow side streets, their heavy cobbles sure to smash the wheels out from under him if he tried to ride on them at speed. He spun the bike to the left, aiming for the main road. He had walked this route often enough now, if he put some decent speed on he could overtake her on the main strip and then cut back into the narrow streets halfway to the port. He would stop her before she got there. He would.
The bike shook underneath him, his coat skidding on the back wheel, threatening to catch on the mudguard and yank him off if he didn't bunch it up onto his lap. He was far from stable, it being years since he had ridden a bike. They say you never forget and, yes, he had yet to fall off but it felt a close run thing, his stomach lurching as he wobbled from side to side, often only just regaining his balance before toppling sideways.
He reached a junction of streets, aimed right and pedalled hard towards where the narrow street the kid had been running down would bisect the main road. When he reached the intersection he looked left, no sign of her. I must have beat her to it, he thought, must have. There was no way she could have run that fast. He got off the bike and ran to the right, up the cobbled street. Another right, he remembered, then a short left – not far from Jimenez's house – I should see her any minute. He made the right and bumped into her, sending her sprawling to the floor.
"No," he gasped, seeing the panic in her eyes. His breath was so short, his legs wavering beneath him, he could barely stand let alone speak. "No," he insisted, pointing to the box, "not you, you're the wrong one." She looked baffled and he realised he'd been speaking English. Not that she would have understood what he meant anyway. He wracked his brain for the words, he was so tired… "Give me the box," he said, holding out his hand. She shook her head and ran past him.
He turned after her and saw Chester and Henryk, running along the intersecting road behind the girl. Chester had a gun in his hand, he raised it…
TWO
The Bad
1.
Chester clambered onto his boat, utterly unaware that – several yards behind him – both a young Spanish girl and his future self were following his trail. He nodded at Henryk. "All was fine, you see?" he said, sounding again like a petulant child.
He climbed down into his cabin, peeled off his jacket and shirt and sat on the bed to rub away his sweat with a towel. His head was buzzing with noise and confusion and he would do anything to make it shut up. It sometimes seemed he hadn't had a moment's peace since he had first set eyes on that box of his father's. Such a little thing, and yet so all-consuming.
He remembered the first time he had touched it. The wood had bristled beneath his fingertips like the spines of a stinging nettle. He had been bitten by the thing and whatever mental virus it seemed to possess had transferred to him as surely as a poisonous snake bite.
He got up, closed and locked his door and stripped off the rest of his clothes. They gripped him in the heat of Valencia and he just wanted them to let him go. He wanted everything to let him go. The heat, the noises in his head, that box…
But that wasn't altogether true was it Chester? No, it wasn't. Chester was consumed by a need to be strong and powerful. To step beyond the shadow of parents that had loomed ever since the cradle. Chester wanted out, yes, but he wanted out in a way that nobody would ever be able to drag him back in and that required power. To his father power translated as money. But money wasn't the only power in the world. Certainly money wasn't the key to beating his father. Even at his age he knew that the old man would be years in the grave before he could ever hope to equal his earnin
gs. Hell, he would never equal them, Chester just wasn't built that way. His father knew this and it was a constant insult to him, he had sired a boy that was somehow missing a vital ingredient, that steel that would see him rise in business and take over the old man's throne. Sometimes, Chester knew, his father would look at his son and wonder to himself how he could ever have made such a wet and imperfect child. How so much of his own strength could have ended up on the bed sheets. At those moments – and God help him they had become frequent – Chester could never decided whether he wanted to kill his father or prove him wrong. Maybe they were one and the same thing.
Still he had agreed to follow in his father's footsteps, learn the trade and walk the walk. But it was always a shallow impression, a man copying the moves but not understanding them. At sixteen – Terrance Arthur had no time for schools, "you learn in life boy, not in a classroom," – it had always been understood that he would join the company officially, take a seat on the board and learn how things were done. It had been a punishment not a celebration. He sat there, eyes vacant, not understanding a thing his father or the other old men talked about. He had tried to imagine the day when he would look on this world as one to which he belonged. He could never imagine such a thing.
Then he had touched the box.
Chester had always been a rational man. There was nothing in his life that encouraged belief in a higher power. But when he had touched that box, felt it sink its teeth into him, felt it talk in his head when he was trying to go to sleep, well… then Chester began to wonder if there was something greater out there after all, something that might see its way to sharing a slice of wonder with him.
If the voice of the box was God, God was vicious. The things it said flitted between promises and threats. But Chester was used to harsh love. So when it encouraged him to explore its wooden seal – which would not open to him, it promised, like a teasing virgin, not until he had proved his love – he had done so. When it made suggestions as to experiences he might like to try, violence he might like to commit, he did that too and with a glad heart.
2.
He had first felt blood on his hands on the evening of his seventeenth birthday and it had been the box's doing.
His parents had thrown a party. Not out of love for their son but because parties were what wealthy families did, it showed those less rich how truly extravagant they could afford to be.
A string quartet had set up stall in the corner of one of their many function rooms, laying down sweet, inoffensive music to guzzle canapés to. People much older than Chester had danced and ate and laughed and sighed at the opulence of it all. He had sat quietly, utterly alone – he had no friends and even if he had they would not have been invited, this was not a party for him, whatever the banner may have said that hung from the ceiling.
His parents had employed a catering company and various staff mingled amongst the guests, doing their best to be invisible. Chester had set his sights on one woman in particular, a small, unattractive thing with freckles and hair that bobbed around her head as if it were unattached, perhaps controlled separately by wires from above. She had made a bad effort of ignoring the expensive things around her – this was an important distinction, Chester knew, your guests were supposed to coo at your furnishings, the staff were not – and he frequently caught her admiring a painting or a vase or a set of silver candlesticks. She longed to touch them he realised, longed to live the sort of life that could surround her with such things. After realising this, and seeing the lust in her eyes grow steadily deeper as the night went on, Chester had been only too aware of what the girl would do in the end. It was, after all, exactly what he would have done himself.
She was collecting empty glasses from one of their sideboards when her fingers brushed the edge of a silver snuff box. It was a tiny thing, part of a larger display, items bought to fill a space. She had extended her fingers, picked the snuff box up and concealed it in the hand that held her tray, giving a quick glance around the room to make sure that nobody had seen her. But Chester had. And having done so knew that he finally had a sliver of the power he most craved right there in front of him.
"She'll do whatever it takes not to get caught with that," said the voice of the box in his head. It was an unusual voice, an English voice, it reminded him of a movie actor… he couldn't remember the damned man's name. "But you need to catch her now, while it's still hot in her hands not hidden away to collect later or even dumped in the bushes outside when fear of getting caught drives her to ditch it. You need to talk to her now."
He had followed the woman out of the main function room and along one of the corridors that led to the kitchens. She dumped the tray there, slipping the snuff box into the pocket of her apron and called over to the man that Chester took to be her boss. "Just taking a couple of minutes, Sal," she said, "watching all those fat cats drink has made my bladder burst."
"Sal" nodded and returned to supervising the construction of small chocolate truffles on silver platters.
Chester followed the woman through to the servant's quarters – they had been given the night off, why have two sets of slaves after all? – towards the bathroom. She didn't look behind her, eager to hide away so she could examine her prize. He crept closer and closer until, as she opened the bathroom door he was right behind her. He pushed her inside, sliding the bolt of the door behind him. She opened her mouth to scream at him but he clapped his hand across it, shoving her back against the wall in the tiny room.
"I saw you," he whispered, fingers reaching for the snuff box and pulling it out, "saw you take this."
Once presented with the evidence her face went from indignation to fear, her eyes fixing on the snuff box as it glinted in the light of the naked bulb that swung above.
"I didn't mean…" she started to say before giving up. There was no excuse she could think of, nothing that would allow for her having pocketed the box. "I'm sorry," she said instead, "please don't call the police, I'll just go, you'll never see me again."
Chester pressed himself against her wanting to sniff the fear on her skin.
"She'll do anything," the box said, "anything at all. She has a child, an apartment she struggles to pay for… she won't lose all that easily, you could make her do anything."
This excited Chester beyond words, clearly the serving girl felt it – pressed so tight against her she could hardly have missed the pulsing nudge against the top of her thigh. Her face fell as she realised what was likely about to happen. He watched the expression change, watched a misery wash over her that she tried to swallow like a rough pill. She replaced that look with a false smile and reached for his groin with her hand.
"Is this what you want?" she asked, a beautiful tremor in her voice. She could barely get the words out without crying. "Would this make it alright?"
She stroked his cock through the fabric of his trousers, not seductively, she couldn't quite manage that, disgust and self-hatred getting the better of her. It was more like trying to remove a set of keys from a suit pocket that was on its hanger. A functional frisk that sought to get the job done. Chester watched her face, that false smile that choked off any more attempt to speak. Eyes that spoke only of utter hatred, leavened with thoughts of her child and the things she stood to loose if he called the police on her.
"Get off me," he said. "I wouldn't dirty myself with you."
Her hand fell away and a glimpse of relief crossed her face.
"I want something else," he said, "or I will drag you out of here and hold you up in front of my father as the thieving bitch you are."
She looked confused, trying to think what else this man could want from her if it wasn't sex.
"She'll do anything," the box said again. "Power… control…"
"Hold out your hand," he said, "show me your thieving little fingers."
She stretched out her left hand, slowly and fearfully, her right still pinned down by her side.
"Spread them," he said, his groin hotter than
ever, the noise of the box so loud in his head that it made him squint.
"She'll do anything, anything, anything, anything…"
He opened the snuff box and clamped it down on her index finger so the decorative silver edge, a serrated line of autumn leaves, pinched against her skin. She winced. He stepped back a little to free up her other arm.
"Now crush your finger," he said and the look of shock on her face was so beautiful he felt near to tears. "Do it, or I'll take away everything you have."
She reached for the box, gripping it in her right hand and squeezing the lid closed on her finger. Then she shook her head, "I can't…"
He put his hand over hers to help, squeezing in close again, his cheek pressed against hers. "If you scream they will come and I will tell them everything… how you stole the box, then tried to touch me, wanting to fuck away your crime. I'll tell them you begged for that and everyone will know it anyway, even your little boy as they put him in care."
He squeezed her hand as hard as he could, feeling her shake against him as the lid bit down on her finger, the metal cutting into the skin so it bled. She bit her lip and made a low, guttural moan, a tremolo of pain that made him think of a lowing cow. He squeezed and squeezed, shoving against her so her hip bashed over and over again against the small sink set in the wall next to them. His own hand was slick with her blood now, squeezed through clenched fingers.
