He finally gave up the struggle and collapsed onto the ground. As he did so, he turned his head towards Cate. For a few agonised seconds they made eye contact. Then his eyes closed and the colour drained from his already pale face.
Cate was about to rush to his assistance when suddenly she heard a clatter of footsteps coming up the hill. Two men, wearing black T-shirts and jeans, rushed to either side of the injured man and, to Cate’s horror, turned him over onto his back and began to kick his body and legs.
Once, in Kosovo with her father, she had witnessed a teenage boy being beaten by a gang of villagers who had accused him of theft. It had been horrible to see – the boy whimpering and cowed, trying hopelessly to protect his bloodied face as the blows rained in. Cate had desperately wanted to help, even tried to get to him through the crowd, but her dad had held her back and eventually a group of Danish peacekeepers had waded into the fray and rescued the terrified boy. Later, her father had read her the riot act about interfering in dangerous situations and she knew he was right, but for months afterwards she had felt guilty that she hadn’t helped.
This time there were no friendly peacekeepers around the corner. And by the time Cate got help this man would be dead. In desperation she looked around for a weapon. The wall behind her was topped with a short metal fence held upright with wooden bars. Frantically she groped at the first bar but it wouldn’t budge. The second one, too, was fixed solid. Cate looked around and to her relief spotted some older and less well-maintained railings further down the alley. She crept carefully to the first of the posts, took a deep breath and tugged hard. It came away in her hands immediately. It felt heavy and solid, like a police baton.
She was terrified that the movement she had made would alert the two thugs, but it seemed that they were enjoying their work too much to notice anything else.
It was now or never. Cate took a deep breath and ran towards the nearest man, who had his back to her, his long lank hair falling over his T-shirt. As she had done so many times before in her kickboxing classes, she launched herself into midair and landed with both her feet on his lower back. Mid-kick, he was totally off balance and fell forward, sprawling over his victim. The other man paused, frozen by the shock of her arrival, but he recovered quickly and within a few seconds was putting out a huge hand to grab the bar that Cate was wielding. She whirled around just out of his reach, using the momentum from her turn to strike his still-sprawling comrade on the side of his forehead. Just about to stand up, he fell back down again, clutching his head.
Sensing a blow coming in, Cate turned back to the second man, ducking as she did so. She felt his arm move centimetres above her head, but before he could take another punch at her, she twisted around and kicked backwards, viciously, into his groin. As he doubled over, she whirled back to face him and brought the bar down hard onto his exposed neck. He staggered, groaning in pain and shock, then, seeing Cate bearing down on him again, he turned and fled down the dusty road.
His colleague was now on his feet and reaching into his pocket. Cate saw the glint of metal and, a split second later, she kicked at it with her right leg. She felt contact, and the gun flew through the air, disappearing into bushes twenty metres away. Now he too had had enough and ran, still holding his head, after the other man.
The whole episode had taken less than two minutes. Shocked at herself and the entire turn of events, Cate turned back to the man she had rescued. He was sitting up, staring at Cate in amazement.
‘Who are you?’ He spoke in French, but with a thick accent from somewhere else. ‘Just who the hell are you?’
Cate stayed silent. She knelt down and leant her left shoulder towards him. He slung his right arm around her neck and somehow managed to stand up and put his weight onto his good leg as they staggered out of the alley.
‘They could be back any minute,’ Cate said to him in French. ‘I’m going to hide you and then get help.’
The man nodded towards a side road. ‘Down there is a good place to hide. Then you must get away. I will be OK.’
They made their way slowly and painfully past several houses until the man finally gestured for her to stop outside a black metal gate. Breathing hard and struggling for air, he used his free hand to push against the gate and it opened slowly onto a gravel drive. Together, the two of them managed to half stagger, half crawl a few metres up the overgrown drive before it became clear that the man would get no further. Looking about her for somewhere safe to hide him, Cate gently manoeuvred him as far as she could into the mesh of branches which overhung the edge of a large lawn.
His eyes closed and his face drawn, the man sank gratefully onto the grass. ‘Can you hear me?’ said Cate in French. Shaking with shock, she remembered his accent. ‘Ti menia slishish?’
The sound of his native tongue brought the man round from his stupor and he spoke back to her in Russian. ‘You’re one hell of a girl,’ he said, attempting a grin. ‘Now listen. Tell the Roman that Andrei – that’s me – says he has to look for the good times. They’re all there, everything the Roman was looking for. Everything . . .’
‘I don’t know what you mean. Who is the Roman?’ Russian was never Cate’s best language, and she began to wonder if she was worse at it than she had thought, or if the man was delirious. Andrei was clearly in a bad way. He had gone the colour of pale chalk and was pouring sweat. Cate opened his jacket to see if there was any blood loss but couldn’t find any obvious wounds.
She made up her mind. ‘I’m going to get help. Stay here and I’ll be back. Stay here.’ Without waiting for an answer, she got to her feet and ran back down the drive. As she reached the gate she turned to look. The man was completely hidden by the trees. He would be safe there. For now, at least.
CHAPTER 3
After checking that the alleyway was empty, Cate headed back up to the scene of the fight. She stopped to pick up her rucksack and, after a brief hesitation, ran over to where the gun had landed.
She kicked and scuffed at the bushes with her trainer and felt her foot connect with something hard. She bent down and picked up a smallish pistol, a Beretta, the type she had seen carried by bodyguards all over the world. She thought about leaving it there in the hope that someone else would find it and hand it to the police, but the men would probably come back to look for it and she didn’t want them using it against anyone else. Worse still – Cate shuddered at the thought – a kid might find it and hurt themselves or others.
Cate hated guns and what they could do, although she knew very well how to use one. Every time she visited her mother in LA, her mother had insisted that Cate took gun lessons for her own defence, and so she learnt, in spite of herself, how to load and reload a gun in seconds, becoming skilled at shooting moving targets and distinguishing between different pistols and guns.
Cate unloaded the gun and put the safety catch on. She dropped the six bullets into a side pocket of the rucksack and tucked the gun right at the bottom before heading back towards the main road.
The adrenalin from the fight had long since worn off and as she ran she suddenly felt very vulnerable, and terrified that the two thugs would reappear. She felt as if thousands of hostile eyes were watching from the shuttered windows, and it didn’t help that the bright sun was being replaced with the dull light of early evening. As she reached the coast road, it was with utter relief that she spotted a police vehicle parked a few metres ahead of her.
Cate ran over to the car and banged frantically on the window, speaking in English in her panic, before realising her mistake and switching to French.
‘There’s been a fight – a man attacked just up there,’ she panted. ‘He is in a bad way and he needs help . . .’
She trailed off, suddenly conscious that the two gendarmes, who were sitting inside the car sipping coffee, were not looking that impressed.
‘OK, were they French, English, what?’ said the younger man, leaning out of the window to stare at Cate.
‘Russian, I think.
Well, the man who was attacked is definitely Russian.’
The gendarme sat back in his seat and exchanged glances with his partner, an older, fatter man with slicked back hair.
Cate was enraged by their lack of urgency. ‘He is very badly hurt. He needs an ambulance.’
‘OK, OK.’ The older one sounded bored but he put his coffee slowly into the holder. ‘We’ll take a look. Hop in and show us the way.’
Cate scrambled into the rear of the police car. It smelt of stale sweat and strong coffee. Sandwiches and sweet wrappers were scattered liberally on the floor.
‘Just up there.’ She pointed into the maze of small roads.
With a dramatic sigh, the second gendarme gunned the engine, wrenched the steering wheel, U-turned across the path of oncoming traffic and headed up into the hills. After a few seconds he spoke. ‘OK, young lady, what exactly did you see?’
‘I was out running,’ Cate said. ‘I saw a man crawling along, he was injured. And then two other men came and well – attacked him like they wanted to kill him.’
‘Then what happened?’
Cate opened her mouth to tell them that she had fought off two grown men and then realised she would sound like a complete fantasist.
She thought fast.
‘Well, I screamed at them and they ran away,’ she said lamely, aware of how unlikely this sounded. ‘And then I helped the man into a garden and hid him . . .’Her voice trailed off. The silence that followed spoke volumes.
Cate spotted a familiar side road. ‘Turn up here,’ she said. The car lurched and bounced up the track, took another turning and suddenly they were back at the scene of the fight. Cate gestured to the gateway of the house where she had left Andrei.
‘He’s in there,’ she said in a pleading voice. ‘He’s in a bad way.’
‘OK. We’ll go and take a look,’ said the younger gendarme. ‘But you’d better not be wasting our time,’ he added sternly.
The three of them got out of the car and stood for a few seconds looking down the gloomy, overgrown driveway. The sun was dropping down over the houses now, the air felt cooler and Cate could hear the first rasping calls of the cicadas. She was very glad of the two men standing beside her, methodically checking their guns.
Cate walked towards the gate and pushed it open, the two men following behind her.
Even before she reached the clump of trees, Cate sensed rather than saw that the injured man was gone. She went through the motions of pushing through the undergrowth, walked around the edges of vast lawn and she even borrowed a torch from one of the policemen to shine into the darkest areas of bushes – but there was nothing and no one there.
‘He must have crawled away,’ said Cate lamely. ‘He was definitely here.’
She pointed at the flattened grass. The younger gendarme crouched down and silently stared at the spot. Then he stood up slowly.
‘Let’s go,’ he said flatly. The three of them walked back to the car, the gendarmes on either side of Cate like a pair of bodyguards.
Cate climbed wearily into the car and waited for the lecture. She was surprised then, when the older policeman began to talk quietly to her.
‘Look – what’s your name?’ He went on without waiting for an answer. ‘You’re new around here, right?’
Cate nodded.
‘Now listen closely, young lady. This place is changing fast. Criminals are coming in from Eastern Europe, Asia, South America faster than we can count them. Our local criminals used to play by some sort of basic rules. But not these new guys.’ He shook his head theatrically. ‘They carry guns, use tear gas, trade women, children, drugs, medicines – whatever makes the most money at the time. They fight their customers, they fight with cops, but most of all they fight each other. They will beat the hell out of their best friend if they have to. You might have seen a fight or you might be lying. I can’t see any real reason why you would make up something like this so I’m inclined to believe you. But either way it doesn’t matter. If we wasted our time on every punch up between guys with funny names from remote countries, well, we would be drowning in paperwork and we wouldn’t do anything else. You get it?’
Cate got it. But she remembered the injured man’s fear, the terror in his eyes and she knew she had to try one more time.
‘But what if they find him again? He needs our help,’ she said.
Without even turning round to look at Cate, the younger man spoke. ‘If we did look for him all night, call out dogs and helicopters and if we did find him – do you know what he’d say? He’d say he’d had an accident and fallen over and that he had never seen you before in his life. So forget what you saw. It’s not your problem. Where do you want us to drop you?’
No doubt he was right. It was the equivalent of her father’s advice that day back in Kosovo. ‘Think before you rush in, Cate. You can’t save the world – no one can.’
Suddenly exhausted, she couldn’t face making her own way back to the boat. ‘Could you take me to the marina, please?’ she asked in a small voice. ‘I’m staying on a boat there.’
‘Not owned by a Russian, I hope.’ The younger gendarme spluttered with laughter. ‘OK, we’ll drop you there.’
The police car pulled to a halt in the large car park by the marina.
‘Er, thanks.’ Cate didn’t know what else to say.
‘OK – take care now,’ said the younger one.
‘Watch out for the bad guys,’ said the older one.
Cate didn’t wait to watch them drive off. She headed into the marina and reached Catwalk II, bobbing calmly at her moorings. She looked at her watch – ten past eight. She had only been gone for a few hours but so much had happened in that time it felt more like days. As she dragged herself up the walkway, the waft of delicious smells coming from the galley made her realise that she was truly famished.
Marcus must have heard her coming. He poked his head around the corner of the galley and called to her. ‘Twenty minutes to dinner, Cate. Don’t be late.’
Cate took a deep breath and tried to sound casual. ‘Marcus, were you out this afternoon?’ She felt slightly foolish even asking.
Marcus gave her a questioning look. ‘No, man,’ he said. ‘Been on the boat most of the day cooking, getting the galley stocked up and listening to music. Why do you ask?’
Cate shook her head. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I just thought I saw you up by the Cap earlier. I was running there.’
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Must have been my double.’
That’s that then, thought Cate. She headed back to the staff quarters, sinking gratefully down onto the bed in her little cabin. Although she was exhausted, her mind was racing. The boy with the volleyball, the fight, the desperate man, the gun. Suddenly she sat up in horror, her stomach churning with the dreadful realisation.
The gun! She still had the gun! How could she have forgotten? She should have told the police about it when they were doubting her. She could hand it in now of course, but after the dismissive way the gendarmes had treated her, she didn’t much feel like going back to them any time soon. As Cate groaned at her own stupidity, there was a rap on the door and Wendy appeared.
‘Cate, dinner’s served upstairs in the salon in ten minutes.’
Cate heaved herself off the bed, showered quickly and then pulled on her linen trousers and a T-shirt. She would have to think about the gun later.
Upstairs, the solid mahogany table was set with the jadegreen china and crystal glasses. Someone had lit candles and the wall chandeliers glimmered and sparkled reflective light over the highly polished wood and brass.
Wendy grinned when she saw Cate’s stunned face. ‘Don’t get used to it,’ she laughed. ‘It’s kind of a special occasion. Bill just passed his final nautical exams, I got a call from my waster of a boyfriend at last and we all thought it would be a nice way to welcome you onboard.’
‘Sit down,’ said Bill, pointing to a chair opposite Cate and pouring her some sparkling white grape jui
ce that fizzed in the crystal flute. Cleaned up from their earlier meeting he now looked younger and more approachable. No more than thirty, Cate decided.
He and Wendy seemed like such decent people that she was tempted to confide in them. But then she remembered Bill’s words – that he didn’t want any trouble.
They’d never believe her anyway, they’d just think she was a drama queen, or a nutter and that would be her card marked for good. She wasn’t ready to go home yet.
No, in the circumstances it was definitely best to keep quiet and so, as Bill proposed a toast, Cate made a big effort to smile.
‘To Catwalk II and all who sail on her,’ he said. ‘And where is that Marcus when you need him?’
‘I’m here, man, don’t rush me.’ Marcus was carrying a large casserole. He placed it on a mat on the white linen tablecloth and proceeded to ladle out generous portions of steak in a rich red sauce topped with crispy brown miniature dumplings.
He smiled. ‘Tuck in, guys.’
Cate ate heartily, feeling more human with every mouthful. Suddenly the events of the day seemed like a dream, as if they had happened to someone else. She found herself relaxing and telling Wendy about how she knew Charlie (he was an old school friend of her dad’s) and about her mad mum in LA who only rang when she was feeling low and then got upset if Cate ever asked anything remotely mother-like of her.
In return, Wendy confided that her American boyfriend was a loser but far too gorgeous to give up on, no matter how many times he forgot to ring.
Marcus, who was sitting opposite Cate, seemed very quiet compared to his earlier chattiness. ‘I forgot to ask, how was your run?’ he said finally, his words wrenching Cate back to the chaos of the last few hours.
She looked up at him warily, but his face was expressionless. ‘It was, er, well, OK,’ she said lamely. ‘Nice views.’
‘Did you see the Russians?’
This time she stared at him blankly, a feeling of panic rising from her stomach.
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