The Pact
Page 14
As Eve stretched out on the sofa, a wave of tiredness swept over her. She yawned. Last night’s lack of sleep was catching up. She would just close her eyes for a minute …
It was nudging five o’clock when she was woken by a soft pervasive noise. For a moment, disoriented, she couldn’t think what it was. Shifting on to her side, she carefully opened her eyes; they felt sore and gritty. She squinted into the afternoon light. Perhaps she’d been dreaming.
Then the sound came again, louder this time, a series of impatient knocks on the door.
Eve shot upright, her heart beginning to pump. Who was that?
With both hands gripping the edge of the sofa, she held her breath. She had to keep quiet. Whatever she did, she mustn’t answer it. It could be him again, the man from the alley. Could he get in? Was he strong enough to break it down? Maybe he wasn’t alone. What if …
The knocks came again, one two three, one two three, in fast succession.
Instinctively, she leapt up, forgetting about her foot. As a jarring pain shot the length of her leg she let out a cry. It must have been loud enough to permeate the thickness of the door because there was a sudden pause on the other side.
Then a faint rasp as if a throat was being cleared.
Then an anxious voice: ‘Eve? Eve, are you in there?’
She knew that voice.
Stumbling across the room, she quickly drew back the bolts and pulled the door open. A familiar figure was standing on the other side. She was so relieved she could have thrown her arms around him, but as he had never been one for overt displays of emotion, she hugged him with her eyes instead. ‘Henry! What are you doing here?’
‘Sorry. I did try to ring before I left.’
So that was who it had been.
She stared at him, taking a moment to absorb his presence, his quiet reassuring solidity. He was dressed in his usual pinstriped suit, white shirt and tie.
Perhaps mistaking her open-mouthed silence for disapproval at his unannounced arrival, he gave a sheepish smile. ‘I was worried after yesterday, after we talked. I thought … but look, if it’s a bad time I can always—’
‘No!’ she insisted. ‘No, of course it isn’t.’ She reached out and lightly touched his hand. ‘Come on in. It’s good to see you. It really is.’
As she shut the door and locked it securely behind them, she felt his inquiring eyes on her.
‘Are you worried I might make a run for it?’
‘Yeah,’ she laughed, ‘my guests are always doing that. Must be something to do with the company.’ She ushered him forward. ‘Take a seat. How are you? How are things at the office? I bet you’re in need of a coffee. You can’t always get one on the train. Not that you can call that stuff coffee, in my experience it’s usually more like—’
‘Eve?’
She heard the mild remonstration in his voice and stopped. She knew she was rambling. He hadn’t come all this way to bring her up to date on office gossip or to hear her opinions on the palatability of railway refreshments. ‘I know. I’m sorry. Just give me a minute. I’ll make a drink and then we’ll talk.’
He nodded and sat down.
Eve walked towards the kitchen.
She hadn’t taken more than a few limping steps before Henry leapt up again. His voice was tight and angry. ‘Did he do that to you?’
With the surprise of his arrival, Eve had stopped thinking about her foot. Now, on being reminded, she suddenly felt the pain again. She gazed down at the bruised and swollen toes. ‘No, it wasn’t him, he didn’t
God, there was just so much to explain. Henry knew about the breakin, about the incident in the alley, but not about the other man who had tailed her today, or the threatening calls, or the less than brilliant welcome she’d received on the doorstep of her former stepmother. Where to begin? It was going to be a long story. ‘I’ll tell you. I promise. I’ll tell you everything. But I need a strong coffee first.’
Henry followed her into the kitchen. ‘I’ll make it,’ he said sternly. ‘You sit down.’
She did as she was told. It felt odd watching him glide around the kitchen, filling the kettle, organizing the cups. She watched the tidy efficient movements of his hands. She felt almost as she had as a child, when she’d been sick, when her father had fussed around her making hot tomato soup. Protected. Cared for. Except her father wasn’t here any more and …
‘Are you all right?’
‘Sure.’
‘Do you have any whisky?’
‘There’s some brandy in the cupboard.’
He found the bottle and poured a measure into each of the mugs. He gave the contents a stir before passing hers across the table.
She took a sip and shivered. It was a good kind of shiver, the sort you got from a warm flow of relief rather than a bad encounter down a lonely alley. ‘Thanks,’ she murmured. Henry could have been pressing her for answers but he wasn’t. And she was grateful for it. She wanted to talk about what had happened – but not just yet.
They took the drinks into the living room and settled on the sofa. Henry promptly stood up again and disappeared back into the kitchen.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Nothing.’ He stuck his head in the fridge and pulled out the ice tray. Flicking the cubes out, he neatly wrapped them in a corner of a tea towel. ‘Here,’ he said, sitting down beside her, ‘let me put this round your foot. It might help bring the swelling down.’
She felt the cold hit her toes and flinched.
‘Sorry,’ he murmured.
‘It’s okay.’ Then she sat back and asked softly, ‘Henry, where are you supposed to be?’
He looked at her and frowned.
‘You know what I mean. Where does Celia think you are?’ Eve was sure she wouldn’t have given him permission to come and play doctors and nurses.
‘In Cambridge,’ he said. ‘At my brother’s.’
‘I didn’t know you had a brother.’ For some reason she had always thought of him as an only child. She paused but he didn’t elaborate. ‘What if she rings you there?’
‘She won’t. They don’t get on. And anyhow, she’d view it as undignified. It would look like she was checking up on me.’
Eve raised her eyebrows. ‘And how is it at home?’ She couldn’t imagine it had been easy for him after Richard’s spiteful ‘revelations’. At the thought of his son, of what he’d done, a pink angry flush appeared on her cheeks. That no-good louse had a lot to answer for.
He hesitated before answering. ‘Well, a touch on the chilly side. But not too bad, all things considered.’
She instantly felt guilty. It was the sneaking around that had caused all the grief in the first place. And now here they were, doing it all over again. If Celia found out … ‘I shouldn’t have called you.’
‘Of course you should. You don’t need to deal with this on your own.’
On her own. Was that what she was? It had a lonely kind of sound to it. She shifted forward, put her elbows on her knees and shook her head in frustration. ‘But that’s the trouble, Henry. I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to be dealing with.’
He leaned forward too, took off his glasses and wiped them with a spotlessly clean white handkerchief. ‘I think you’d better tell me everything.’
It had taken over half an hour for the full story to be told. Henry had listened carefully, only interrupting when he felt the need to clarify a point. Now, while he wandered around the room, he meticulously went over the facts again before filing them away in an orderly fashion.
Eve was curled up on the sofa. She looked pale and tired.
He stopped by the desk and picked up a family photograph: Eve with her father and brother. There was no glass in the frame; it must have got shattered in the breakin. He stared long and hard at Alexander Weston. So this was the man she had told him so much about. Even from the picture, he could see how he might have the capacity to charm. It was a handsome face, friendly, and most interesting of all,
deceptively honest. It was the kind of face you would instinctively trust. He had the curious impression that even the photographer had been beguiled.
Henry felt a faint pang. He could not admire Weston – he’d been a cheat and a con artist – but there was something about him he envied. He had led an existence free from the suffocating restraints of society. How tame his own life had been in comparison, a single straight line without troughs or peaks – rather, he thought wryly, as if he was the one who was already dead and buried.
He frowned as he continued to stare at the picture. What motivated people like Weston to act as they did? He’d read about it somewhere. Some kind of superiority complex, allegedly, allied with a lack of conscience. The furrows in his brow grew deeper. What did it matter what he’d read? Perhaps that was the crux of the matter, that where her father had acted, albeit immorally, he in turn had consistently stood back, a spectator on the sidelines, a quiet grey man with his head in a book.
He was Henry Baxter, nice, steady, reliable Henry. If he had one outstanding skill it was his ability to merge effortlessly into the background. He was sixty-two years old and had never quite found the courage to step outside his tiny world – a world, now he came to consider it, which was as devoid of colour, as bleakly stark, as any prison cell. And like a forgotten prisoner, he had almost lost the capacity to imagine any kind of escape.
At least until he’d met Eve.
Henry glanced over his shoulder.
She raised her head and smiled.
Things happened when he was with her. Not always good things, granted, but things that shook him up and made him think. Wherever she went, she attracted attention. And it wasn’t just because of how she looked. It was something more, something intrinsic to her nature.
Henry wasn’t in love but he was intrigued. He had never met anyone like her before. She fascinated him. Her life, right from its beginning, had been the diametric opposite of his. With nothing laid out, nothing predestined, she had constantly drifted from place to place, never rooted, always open to endless possibilities. Was she like her father? He couldn’t say. She was certainly a rule breaker, and perhaps more than capable of deceit, but he had never doubted that their friendship was genuine.
He laid the photograph back on the desk and turned to look at her again. ‘So you think this is all connected to Martin Cavelli?’
She raised her slim shoulders and shrugged. ‘It has to be. Doesn’t it? In one way or another.’
‘What do you know about him?’
‘Only what I’ve told you, what Paula told me.’
That didn’t add up to much. He was still astounded by what she’d done, amazed that she’d approached a total stranger to take care of her brother. There was one almighty gap between taking a judicious risk and leaping headlong into an abyss. ‘I still don’t understand why you asked him.’
She raised her hands in frustration. ‘What else could I do? At least this way I know that Terry’s safe.’
But at what cost? Henry thought. It seemed she had traded his safety for hers. Yet the facts, when he added them up, didn’t quite make a whole. He couldn’t see why this Cavelli character should put her in such obvious danger. He must have guessed, if he was passing on anything valuable, that it wouldn’t take long for his enemies to catch up with her. On the other hand, he had arranged for the door to be reinforced. Which suggested that he knew she would need protection.
‘Can I see the boxes?’
‘Sure.’
Eve went to stand up but he waved her back down again. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You should keep the weight off that foot. Just tell me where they are.’
She directed him towards a door to the left. ‘They’re in the bottom of the wardrobe. But Henry, you won’t open them, will you? I want to wait until I’ve seen Cavelli again, at least hear what he has to say. Then, maybe …’
He nodded. ‘I won’t. I promise.’
He went into her father’s bedroom and glanced around. It was a man’s room all right, bare, without any of the prettification or comforts that women insist upon. The walls were a dull, rather murky shade of green. There was a lamp and a few books on a table beside his bed. Henry idly picked one up, and flicked through the pages. It was one of his favourites, The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler.
He suddenly remembered Eve’s call to the office, how she had used the name Lennox to get through to him. He smiled. But the smile soon faded. He hadn’t even asked her about how she was coping. Living here, surrounded by all these reminders, couldn’t be easy. He felt a tiny spurt of resentment towards the brother he had never met. If it wasn’t for Terry she’d be safely back in London by now.
‘Have you found them?’ she called out.
Henry quickly put down the book and opened the wardrobe. ‘I’ve got them.’ Kneeling down, he pulled the two cardboard boxes towards him and laid them on the worn carpet. He could see how hard it would be to surreptitiously break them open. They were sealed with yards and yards of dark red tape. It was an unusual colour, a deep shade of magenta. Which would make it hard to replace. And which was probably the reason it had been used in the first place.
Starting with the larger box, he pressed around its edges. It felt solid, like books. But who knew what might be hidden inside. Drugs perhaps? He knew that was Eve’s suspicion. Heroin or cocaine. Something that was important enough, valuable enough, to warrant a breakin, an assault, threats …
He turned his attention to the smaller, lighter box. It was only half full and as he shook it he could hear the contents moving around, a brisk rustle that sounded like papers. He gently shook it again.
Then an idea suddenly came to him.
Bundling the boxes back into the wardrobe, he rushed into the living room. ‘What did he say – the man in the alley? What did he say exactly?’
Eve glanced up at him in surprise. She took a moment to consider before repeating carefully: ‘Joe wants it back. You understand? He wants it … fucking back.’
He noticed the way she paused before murmuring the expletive, as if considering whether to spare his sensitive ears. That, however, wasn’t the word he was interested in. ‘You’re sure,’ he asked. ‘You’re sure he said “it” and not “them”?’
She nodded. She wasn’t about to forget that demand in a hurry. ‘It. He definitely said “it”.’
Henry leaned against the desk and folded his arms across his chest. ‘So, singular rather than plural. Surely if it was drugs he would have said “them”, he wants them back. Wouldn’t that be natural?’
It hadn’t occurred to Eve before. ‘I suppose so.’ Her eyes brightened a fraction. The thought of a haul of narcotics stashed in the flat hadn’t been appealing. Although that still didn’t solve the problem of what she was supposedly hiding.
‘Also,’ Henry continued, ‘it must be relatively small. Why else would your burglar have had to turn the place upside down?’
‘Unless it was a blind, a cover. Just to make it seem like a casual breakin.’
‘But why bother? If it’s something illegal – and judging from recent events, we can probably presume that it is – you wouldn’t be calling the police. You wouldn’t want the attention.’
‘Except I didn’t call them,’ Eve replied. ‘Sonia did. They might have guessed that someone else would notice the broken door and report it. Perhaps they were covering their tracks. If it looked routine, maybe even the work of kids, the cops wouldn’t delve too deeply.’
Henry, who had thought he was making progress, felt momentarily deflated. She had a point. But he swiftly rallied. There was something nagging at the back of his mind. In his usual methodical way, he ran through the options, stopping to speak only as another idea grew in clarity. ‘Actually, there’s nothing to directly link the breakin with the subsequent attack – or the phone threats.’
Eve tried, not that successfully, to keep the incredulity out of her voice. ‘What? You’re suggesting it’s just a coincidence?’
As if he were slightly mad, she lifted her brows, but had the good grace to humour him. ‘Well, Cavelli rang. I was supposed to go to London and pick up the boxes but I told him I couldn’t, that the flat had been broken into, that I had to clear up the mess. He wasn’t best pleased – I mean about the boxes rather than the flat. And then, about an hour or so later Barry arrived, he’s the guy who fixed the door, and then later, around midday, Paula turned up. After that—’
Henry raised a hand to stop her. ‘Right. So in fact the breakin gave Cavelli the perfect excuse to provide you with a spot of first-class security. At least for the flat.’
‘And for his precious boxes.’ She sank her chin thoughtfully into her hands and stared at the carpet. ‘And I wouldn’t be likely to object, would I? God, you could be right. You know, at the time it did cross my mind that he could be responsible but not for that reason. I thought he might be sending me a message, a warning, one of those “you stick to your side of the bargain and I’ll stick to mine” kind of deals. You know what men like him are like.’
Henry, whose experience of ‘men like him’ was confined to the pages of novels, uttered a vague grunt of agreement. Unlike Eve, he had never had the pleasure of meeting any hardened criminals or studying their habits. Another example, had he needed it, of the vast gulf between the two of them.
She looked up. ‘And then, after everything that happened, I just presumed it couldn’t be him, that it had to be to do with the others, the goon in the alley, this Joe person.’
‘It still might,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure.’ Frustrated, he rapped his knuckles against the surface of the desk. ‘But unless they’re a complete bunch of amateurs, why would they make such a mistake? All they had to do was to wait another twenty-four hours and they could have taken the boxes off you in the street. Or even stolen them from the car when Paula was first up here.’