by Tim Weaver
Do something.
Slowly — so slowly it was hardly even a movement — I guided my hand to the ground and felt around again, my palm flat to the floor. Immediately around me there was nothing: just soft mud and hard snow. Zack took a step forward. I reached further out into the undergrowth, and my fingers brushed something. Rocks. There was a pile of them but only a couple felt big enough. One was larger than the other. I picked it up and brought it into me, then did the same with the second. My sleeve brushed against a branch, but the sound didn’t carry and neither of them registered it.
I wrapped my hand around the smaller one.
Steadied myself.
Waited.
Waited.
Then, slowly, I opened up my body and threw the stone as hard and as far as I could to my left. It hit the forest floor with a thud, snow spitting up, brambles crackling.
The two of them spun around. Zack was quicker off the mark, moving forward, and around the thorns, towards the noise, gun primed. Jason seemed more reticent — as if he knew it might be a trick — but followed at a distance, walking rather than running. I gripped the thicker stone, and moved on to my haunches. The hardest, sharpest end poked out the top of my hands. Jason was about six feet away from me now, the gun still at his side. In his face I could see he hadn’t been fooled by the diversion at all.
Do it now.
I squeezed the stone and sprang at him. He half-turned towards me, his eyes widening as I jabbed the stone’s point into the top of his head. It made a hollow, splitting sound, like a punctured watermelon. His blood speckled against my face, his eyes rolled up into his head, and then he fell forward, hitting the ground almost silently.
I dropped to my knees next to him. There was blood all over his jacket. When I leaned in a little closer, I realized he wasn’t breathing.
I’d killed him.
A shot rang out and a puff of bark flew from a tree about a foot to my left. I fell flat to the floor and tried to pick Zack out against the darkness. Next to me, Jason’s gun was lying on a patch of snow. I scooped it up and peered at it. I didn’t recognize the make. Didn’t have time to check it was loaded. I just gripped it and started to run.
I headed right, around the thorns, and down towards the road, parallel to the way we’d climbed. A second shot rang out, shattering the silence. I kept running. A tree loomed out of the dark and I grazed my arm against the bark, my body swerving too late to avoid it. An ache shot up through my muscles, into my shoulder. I pushed it down with the rest of the pain, and carried on running.
A third shot, then a fourth. A fifth narrowly missed me, hitting a tree as I passed it. My lungs felt like they were squeezing shut. I knew I was losing ground. I knew I was slowing down. I couldn’t keep this pace up — my feet were torn to shreds and there was still no sign of the road. I wasn’t even sure I was heading in the right direction.
Then I fell.
My left foot clipped the grasping arm of a tree root. I tumbled head first, hitting the ground hard. Collapsed on to my front and cried out in pain. It felt like I had broken my arm.
Looking up, I could see Zack, about twenty feet away to my left. He hadn’t spotted me yet, but he’d heard me and he was heading in my direction. I looked around. The gun was wedged against the bottom of an oak tree, its gnarled bark closed around the weapon. I scrambled to my feet and reached for the gun, pulling it out. When I turned, Zack was lurching towards me, his own gun out in front of him.
I fired twice.
He jolted sideways. The first bullet went through his shoulder, the second hit him in the chest — then he stumbled, his feet giving way, and hit the ground. His gun tumbled away from him, making a metallic clang as it bounced across the frozen mud.
When my eyes snapped back to him, Zack was looking at me, blood oozing out of his chest. In his eyes I could see an acceptance. That sooner or later, whatever he was involved in was going to catch up with him. He blinked once, twice, and then his eyes started to lose some of their shine. He didn’t blink again.
* * *
Zack had the car keys in his pocket. I took them out and headed back down to the road. The sky was starting to lighten a little, turning from black into grey, and grey into green. By the time I found my way back to their car, the green had finally become blue.
As I got in, I realized it was a week since Mary had first entered my office.
I was still barefoot. I looked in the mirror and saw I had a thin, deep gash right on the hairline where Zack had clocked me with the gun at the house. My face was bruised and battered, streaked purple and blue, and one of my eyes had started to close. My shoulder wasn’t broken, nor was my arm, but they both hurt right down to the bone. And I could see a knuckle imprint, close to one of my ears, where the man in charge — the man with the saccharine breath — had punched me in the side of the face.
I sat still for a moment and composed myself. Studied my reflection.
Who are you?
I wasn’t the same man who had worked that first missing persons case. I wasn’t even the same man who had woken up the day before. I’d killed twice. I knew that changed me; a part of me knew it changed everything. Suddenly, I was capable of ending a life; of looking into another man’s eyes and, for a split second, losing enough control to pull the trigger. Somewhere buried beneath the surface I’d discovered a man I knew nothing of.
A man who knew nothing of order.
I wondered, for a moment, what Derryn would have made of what I’d done. Would she still have trusted me? Would she still have wanted to lie next to me in our bed? Would she have been able to feel a change in me, a sudden barrier between us, as if there were two men now — the one she had always known, and the one she didn’t recognize.
I started up the car and turned on the heaters.
As air pumped into my face, I realized the thing she’d probably have been most scared of was that I felt so little for what I’d done. I’d killed, but I wasn’t a killer. I’d done what I’d needed to do in order to come out of those woods alive. I didn’t want to have to do it again, but I knew, in some part of me, if I had to, I would. They’d come for me, and when they did, I’d pull the trigger again. Maybe that made me less than the man Derryn would have wanted me to be. But this wasn’t about missing people any more.
This was about survival.
I looked at the clock. 7.49. They all thought I was dead now, so I had to use that. We must have been gone a couple of hours, and burying a body would take another couple on top of that. That gave me two, three hours tops before they realized Zack and Jason weren’t coming back.
28
The place where I was supposed to have died wasn’t on the map they had in the car. But when I finally pulled up at the main road, four miles down a winding gravel path, I saw we were about twenty miles from Bristol, in the middle of the Mendips.
In the glove compartment there was a phone, empty like the last one of theirs I’d found. No names in it. No recent calls. I sat there for a moment, deciding what to do next, then used the phone to dial into my answerphone at home. I had one message. It was John Cary. He’d rung the previous day, at five o’clock in the evening.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said. ‘Call me.’ He left a number. There was a pen in one of the side pockets on the door. I took it out and scrawled his number on the back of my hand, then called him. He answered after two rings.
‘John, it’s David Raker.’
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ he said. He sounded annoyed. ‘You ever answer your phone?’
‘I’ve been…’ I paused.
Should I tell him?
The truth was, I could use some help. I could use some protection too. But I’d just left two dead bodies lying in woodland four miles behind me. And if I told him that, I had to tell him everything else, and face whatever consequences came with it. And I wasn’t ready to give this case — or myself — up. Not yet.
‘I’ve been busy,’ I said finally.
&nb
sp; ‘Yeah, well, that makes two of us. Let me transfer you.’ I waited. Two clicks and he was back on, whispering this time. ‘I got your stuff back from the lab. If you get anything out of this, that’s great. You take it as far as you want. But whatever you choose to do with it, I don’t want to be kept informed. Understood?’
I paused. A bizarre start.
‘Understood?’ he said again.
‘Understood.’
‘Okay,’ he continued, ‘so the lab lightened the Polaroid. Alex is in the middle of the shot, in what looks like the front bedroom of a house. The whole background is a little out of focus, but there’s clearly a window behind him, and on the other side of that, some kind of veranda. To me, it looks like the type of thing you’d get on the front of a farmhouse.’
‘Anything else visible through the window?’
‘Just grass and sky.’
‘No recognizable landmarks?’
‘No. It’s taken from a weird angle. Kind of shot from below. Alex is looking down. The window, and the veranda, they’re both on a slant because of the angle. You on email there?’
‘Uh, I’m not at home.’
‘I can email you a copy.’
‘Okay. Email it to my Yahoo.’ I gave him my address.
‘You asked about prints before,’ he said.
‘Right.’
There was a hesitant pause. ‘There’s two sets of prints.’
‘Okay.’
‘You know a Stephen Myzwik?’
‘Is that a Stephen with a ph?’
‘Yeah.’
Something sparked. The name was on the pad I took from Eagle Heights.
Paul. Stephen. Zack.
‘Maybe.’
‘Stephen Myzwik, aka Stephen Milton. Thirty-two years of age, born in Poland, moved to London, served ten years for stabbing a sixty-year-old man with a piece of glass. After that, he violated the terms of his parole, and, under the alias of Stephen Michaels, used a fraudulent credit card to rent a vehicle in Liverpool.’
I could hear him turning pages. He’d obviously printed them out from HOLMES — the police database where all serious cases were logged — like he’d done for me a couple of days before.
‘Wait a minute…’
‘What?’
‘There’s stuff missing here.’
I thought of something.
‘There were pages missing in Alex’s file as well.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was going to ask you about them.’
‘What was missing?’
‘A couple of pages. Some of the forensic stuff. The pathologist’s report.’
More pages being turned.
‘Where the fuck have they gone?’
‘Has someone deleted them?’
‘Deleted information from the computer?’ A long silence came down the line. I could hear him flicking through the file, faster this time. Then he stopped. ‘This file’s fucked.’
Something had got to him. Something more than just pages missing from a file.
‘Do you want me to call you back?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got time for this shit. I’ll look into it later. Let’s just get it over and done with.’ He started on the file again. Pages turned. ‘He’s dead, anyway.’
‘Who, Myzwik?’
‘Yeah.’
Somehow another dead body wasn’t all that surprising. First Alex, then Jade, now Myzwik: all of them dead — or supposed to be.
‘How’d he die?’
‘Looks like his body was dumped in a reservoir near here.’
‘Near Bristol?’
‘Yeah. Divers dredged him up about two months later. He must have made some dangerous friends.’
‘How come?’
‘His head had been stoved in with a baseball bat, and both his hands were found on the other side of the reservoir.’
‘They’d been chopped off?’
‘With a bandsaw.’
Just like Jade.
I heard Cary flicking through more pages.
‘You said there were a second set of fingerprints?’
‘Yeah. They’re Alex’s.’
‘That’s not such a surprise, is it?’
‘Depends,’ he replied. ‘We took Alex’s prints off some of the stuff he left behind when he went missing. I did that — set up the missing persons file myself.’
‘Okay.’
‘Have you got any idea why Alex disappeared?’
‘I haven’t managed to find that out yet, no.’
A long drawn-out pause.
‘The prints we pulled off the photograph match some pulled off the wheel of a silver Mondeo used in a hit-and-run six years ago.’ More paper being leafed through. ‘Witnesses recall seeing a white male about Alex’s age having a big fucking barney in the parking lot of a strip joint called Sinderella’s in Harrow. I quote: “At eleven twenty-two p.m. on 9 November it is alleged the suspect drove the silver Mondeo—”’
‘Wait a minute. Ninth of November?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s the day before Alex disappeared.’
‘Correct. “Suspect struck the victim — Leyton Alan Green, 54, from Fulham — as he was coming out of the bar, causing critical internal injuries. The victim died a short time later. Witnesses recall seeing a silver Mondeo with a Hertz sticker on the bumper depart the scene shortly after.” The silver Mondeo was recovered in a long-term parking lot at Dover, five months later, on 12 April.’
We both stopped to take the information in.
‘Alex killed someone?’
‘Looks that way.’
‘This Green guy — has he got a record?’
‘No. He’s clean.’
‘And the car was a rental?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did Hertz say?’
‘Not a lot. Alex used fake ID. Registered under the name Leyton Alan Green.’
‘Cute.’
‘Yeah. You could say that.’
‘You believe it?’
‘What do you think?’
I paused and tried to take it in. Things were changing fast.
‘Can I get a copy of those files?’
He didn’t reply straight away.
Then, quietly, he said: ‘I sent them to you yesterday.’
29
It took me three hours to get home. I parked at the end of my street and sat and watched the house. A biting wind pressed at the windows. Snowflakes blew across the street. Without the engine on, and the heaters off, the car cooled down almost instantly, and slowly my body started to react: adrenalin passing out of my system, cold crawling back in. I still had no coat, no shoes, no socks. I reached down to the ignition, my hands shaking now, my teeth chattering. Every cut in my face and feet, every bruise on my body, ached. I turned the key. The heaters kicked back in, the noise of the engine with it. And, finally, as I slowly started to warm up, my body began to settle.
Leaning in against one of the heaters, I looked down the street again, towards my house. The road had always been quiet, so I was hoping anything out of place would stick out a mile. But I also knew from the night before that they weren’t just barmen and youth pastors — they were trackers and marksmen. And they were killers. They could fade in and out, and they could disappear. The advantage was still with them.
I looked at the clock. 11.27. They were probably starting to realize Zack and Jason weren’t coming back. The likelihood that they were already here, watching the house, waiting for me to arrive, was remote. However, I wasn’t about to take any chances. I needed basic provisions. I needed a shower. I needed to patch myself up. I needed shoes and extra clothes. But, most of all, I needed to be sure I was alone.
I got out of the car, locked it and crossed the road towards the house. I looked up and down the street. No one sitting in cars. No one watching the house. They’d removed everything from my pockets the previous day, including my keys, so I headed around the back of the house an
d took the spare key out of one of the dead hanging baskets next to the rear door.
Inside, the house was cold. I approached each room carefully, just in case, but there was no one inside and nothing had been touched. The files Cary had sent the day before were on the floor, under the letterbox, handwritten but otherwise anonymous.
I showered and briefly caught sight of myself in the mirror.
There were cuts all over my face, bruises creeping down my throat and across the muscles at the top of my chest. My body was toned, but now it was marked as well. A reminder of how badly they wanted me dead.
I dug out the warmest clothes I could lay my hands on: a pair of dark jeans; a long-sleeve thermal training top I used for jogging; a T-shirt; a black zip-up top; and a black overcoat Derryn had bought me one Christmas. I packed some extra clothes into a holdall, and grabbed an old laptop I never used from the cupboard in the second bedroom. It had been a work computer but no one had ever asked for it back. There was a spare mobile in the bedside table with some credit left on it, and my credit card. I took both, grabbed a knife from the kitchen, along with the files, a photograph of Derryn, and bandages and plasters to make running repairs to myself once I got somewhere safe. Then I locked up and left.
At the bottom of the garden, I looked back up the drive and glimpsed Liz moving around in her front room. In the windows of the house, I could see my reflection.
A man on the run.
A wound crawled out from my hairline. My face was bruised. I looked gaunt and tired. I wondered whether I’d allow myself to sleep again until this was over. It could be days, weeks, months. It could be never. Maybe the next time I closed my eyes would be with one of their bullets in my chest.
I turned and started towards Zack’s car again.
Then stopped.
There was someone leaning in against the passenger window, the hood up on his coat, cupping his hands against the glass. I backed up and crouched down behind one of the garden walls. He glanced along the street towards the house, didn’t see me, and moved around the front of the car to the driver’s side. He tried the door. When he stepped away from the car a second time, I caught a glimpse of his face and recognized him straight away: the man who had broken into my car at the cemetery; the man I’d followed outside Angel’s. He was scruffy and unkempt, and looked thinner in the daylight — and that immediately concerned me. This was the type of trap they liked to lay: making you believe they were one thing, weaker than you, and then turning everything on its head.
