by Tom Bale
of the single passenger in the back. His impression was of a large,
bulky figure, a man in his late fifties or early sixties. Completely bald,
with strong, square features and a brooding gaze.
Their eyes met for only a fraction of a second, but Joe felt a jolt
of recognition. His reaction was mirrored in the other man’s face, and
then the Cadillac swept past.
Joe drove onto the bridge, trying to place where he might have
seen him before. He glanced to his left, intending to ask if Cassie
had got a clear look at him, and saw there was a vehicle tucked in
front of the ferry shed. A plain white Citroen van, no livery. The
driver’s window was open, a man’s arm protruding from it, holding
a cigarette.
Must be here to do maintenance work, Joe thought, although twenty
past four on a Friday seemed an odd time for it.
But it was the identity of the Cadillac’s passenger that was uppermost
in his mind. He waited until they were across the bridge, then
looked at Cassie again.
'I take it that was your husband’s visitor?’
'I suppose so.’
'Do you know who he is?’
'Not a clue.’
Joe smiled. He couldn’t tell if she was resentful of him, or of Valentin,
or just that the line of enquiry bored her.
'What about that enormous boat sitting off the island?’
'Oh, I heard them talking about that. Valentin chartered it. He was
moaning because the minimum term is a week and he only needs it
for today.’
'What’s wrong with his own yacht?’
'Not impressive enough.’
'For this meeting?’
She nodded. 'He’s thinking of replacing his one with something
bigger. I saw him looking at brochures the other day.’
Joe pondered for a moment, then risked another impertinent
question. 'That’s a brave move in the current climate, isn’t it?’
'It’s crazy, if you ask me. But it’s up to Valentin. He knows whether
or not he can afford it.’
The van driver watched the Shogun until it was out of sight. He took
a final drag on his cigarette and tossed the butt towards the water. It
fell short, landing on the wet mud at the foot of the slipway. He turned
to his colleague, who was hunched over, writing on a notepad balanced
on his knee.
'Got that?’ the driver said.
'Incoming, a Cadillac limo, two male occupants. Outgoing,
Mitsubishi Shogun. One male, one female, two kiddies.’
'That was the Russki’s lot.’
'Ukrainian,’ the passenger corrected. 'Nasenko’s from the Ukraine.’
The driver shrugged. You’re confusing me with someone who gives
a fuck.’
Eleven
Priya wanted to leave the estate agent’s body where it was, but Liam
vetoed the suggestion.
'Someone else might turn up. We can’t open the front door while
he’s lying there.’
Reluctantly she agreed, and helped him unload some of the lighter
equipment from the van: the kitbags containing their clothes, masks
and gloves. For wrapping up valuables they’d brought rolls of bubble
wrap, heavy-duty garbage bags and packing tape, plus paper towels
and bleach to erase any trace of their presence.
Not that he’d envisaged a job on this scale, Liam thought.
Donning latex gloves, they placed the body on a bed of garbage
bags, then wrapped it and bound it with tape. Liam scouted the downstairs
rooms and found an office that would suffice for temporary
storage.
Mopping up the congealed blood was a much tougher proposition.
Priya had found a bucket in the garage, which she filled with hot
water and bleach. Taking a stack of paper towels each, they knelt on
opposite sides of the slick and set to work.
Within seconds they were both gagging. The rich metallic odour
of the blood was bad enough. Mixed with the acrid tang of bleach
and the thick stench of bodily waste, it was almost overpowering. Liam
fetched a couple of ski masks and handed one to Priya.
'Try this,’ he said. 'It might help.’
Priya nodded. Her posture was unnaturally straight as she tried to
keep her head as far as possible from the mess on the floor. She worked
with slow, thrifty movements, often with her eyes averted. Not shirking
from the task, as he first assumed; but definitely unhappy about something.
Liam
endured the mask for less than five minutes, then pulled it
off and hurled it over his shoulder. Too hot.
Shortly afterwards Priya did the same. For the first time today there
was a sheen of sweat on her face. A few strands of hair had escaped
her ponytail and glued themselves to her cheek. Glaring at the floor,
she began to scrub harder, grunting angrily, and that was when Liam
understood.
It wasn’t distaste at the idea of cleaning up blood, but at the idea
of cleaning.
'Lousy job, eh?’ he said.
Priya rinsed her paper towels in the bucket. She didn’t speak until
Liam had turned away.
'My mother was always cleaning. She probably still is. On her knees,
scrubbing floors. Demeaning herself in the service of others. I swore
I’d never do that.’
The bitterness in her voice cut short Liam’s intended quip.
Presumably her mother had never had to mop up the blood of a man
she’d just killed?
Then, as he pictured the scene again, he realised what had been
bothering him. The blood spatter across her jeans was too low. It
meant the estate agent must have been on the floor when Priya slashed
his throat.
That called into question how much resistance the man had put
up. Or even whether he had resisted at all.
Once on the mainland, Joe followed the road north through several
miles of wetlands. To his left he could make out the reed beds and
the glitter of water beyond. To his right was a bumpy landscape of
bracken and gorse and ancient coppice woods. There were several
parking areas with picnic tables, nature trails and bird-watching hides,
but hardly anyone was around today. Too hot, maybe.
Sofia quickly fell asleep, while Jaden occupied himself by playing
on his Nintendo DS. The baby tended to sleep more soundly with
background music, so Cassie had chosen the Mamma Mia! soundtrack.
It was a running joke that the songs had been imprinted in
Sofia’s DNA, given how often her mother watched the movie. Joe had
once found her smiling through tears as she gazed at the giant plasma
screen in the living room.
'Can you imagine being as happy as that?’ she’d said, almost to
herself.
Joe had watched the dancing, joyful women for a moment. Rather
than imagine, he believed he knew exactly how it felt to be that
happy, though increasingly he feared his recollection was becoming
contaminated by nostalgia. Nostalgia and raw longing.
But he hadn’t told Cassie that. He’d said: 'It’s just a movie. A feelgood
movie.’
'Even so, there must be people somewhere who have everything
they could possibly want.�
�
'I guess there are,’ he’d agreed. 'But I bet most of them don’t know
it until it’s too late.’
Cassie had nodded sadly. 'That’s what I thought.’
Now, as she and Jaden quietly sang along to Our Last Summer, Joe
reached the A27 and joined the eastbound dual carriageway. It was
four-thirty. Even with a clear run it would take a minor miracle to
reach the centre of Brighton within an hour.
He considered Cassie’s allegation that Valentin wanted her out of
the way, and he went on puzzling over the identity of the bald American
in the Cadillac. That Valentin would go to the expense of chartering
a yacht suggested it was an important meeting. It was unusual enough
for Valentin to conduct business on the Reach, so he must—
His train of thought juddered to a halt. The bald American. How
did Joe know he was American . . . ?
The obvious explanation was that Joe had been present at some
prior meeting between Valentin and the other man. If so, he couldn’t
recall the occasion. And yet he retained a persuasive image of the
man speaking. He could recreate the dry Southern drawl in his head,
and a particular phrase that had made him smile: Got ourselves another
clusterfuck . . .
He felt certain the memory was genuine, and that it predated his
period of employment with Valentin. That meant the American was
probably someone from his old life. The life he had fled.
It took the best part of twenty minutes to clean up the blood thoroughly
enough to leave no obvious trace. In places the bleach had
lifted the protective coating from the hardwood floor, leaving odd
patches where the wood was noticeably lighter. Liam wasn’t unduly
worried. In the long run it shouldn’t matter too much.
While Priya went upstairs to shower and change, Liam took his
netbook from the kitbag and carried it through to the kitchen. He
powered it up, found himself a glass and drank a pint of water before
sitting down at the island breakfast bar.
The tiny laptop contained the fruits of their extensive research,
including floor plans for all the homes on the island and detailed profiles
of the residents. Studying these documents had become almost a ritual
to Liam, but now the reassurance they offered had been compromised.
If they hadn’t picked up on the estate agent using Dreamscape as a
love nest, was it possible that other important details had been missed?
Liam instantly stamped on that question. There was no room for
doubt at this stage of the operation.
He ran through the targets again. Five homes, hugging the coast
on the south-western corner of the island. The house at the most
southerly point, furthest from the mainland, was a chalet bungalow
belonging to Donald and Angela Weaver.
Donald was a retired civil servant, while Angela had been a university
lecturer and now did some kind of voluntary work. Their only
son, Joe, had died in a car accident in 2007, aged twenty-eight. The
Weavers weren’t particularly high-net-worth individuals: it was their
location that made them important. They were too close to the action
to be left alone.
The house next to the Weavers belonged to Robert Felton, the real
financial heavyweight on Terror’s Reach. After a period in the army
that included a secondment to the Ministry of Defence, Robert had
joined his father’s munitions company in the mid-1990s, bringing to
it the vigour and ruthlessness of youth, not to mention any number
of important connections. Within a few years profits had risen tenfold,
and the Feltons sold their controlling interest to an American conglomerate – just as concerns were being raised about their deals to supply
landmines, grenades and assault rifles to various dubious regimes in
Africa and the Middle East.
While Felton senior retired to play golf and count his money,
Robert concentrated on other areas of the business, most notably
winning a string of lucrative contracts for security and reconstruction
in post-invasion Iraq. He invested some of the proceeds in an
underperforming chain of sports shops and again worked his magic,
selling it on to a private-equity company for three times what he’d
paid.
With a personal fortune rumoured at well over a billion pounds,
Felton had designed and overseen the construction of the house at
Terror’s Reach, a monstrous Gothic pile with eight bedrooms, a squash
court and – crucially – a walk-in safe.
A long-time widower, Felton had acquired the image of an
unabashed thrill-seeker and playboy of the old school. This weekend
he was at his apartment in Monaco, where he could best indulge his
passion for girls and gambling, safe from the disapproving scrutiny of
his two children. Although they were in their early twenties, neither
Rachel nor Oliver Felton had yet shown much desire to make their
own way in the world. Rachel was currently taking a photography
course in New York, while Oliver was spending the weekend with
friends of his father in Oxfordshire.
The third house was Dreamscape, the base for their operation, also
owned and designed by Robert Felton. Built on a scale that dwarfed
every other property on the island, its completion had coincided with
the first signs of a downturn in the property market. For a time it had
been rented by an ageing rock star, seeking refuge while he recovered
from an addiction to prescription painkillers. Since his departure the
house had remained furnished but unoccupied, while Felton sought
a buyer to take it off his hands.
Next to Dreamscape was a more conventional faux-Georgian
mansion, owned by a high-profile Premiership striker whose ex-model
wife, Trina, had boosted their fortunes by putting her name to a range
of swimwear, a fitness regime and three volumes of autobiography.
With the footballer on loan to an Italian club, the whole family had
decamped to Rome, leaving Trina’s father, a retired builder named
Terry Fox, to house-sit in their absence.
The last of the five homes belonged to Valentin Nasenko. Another
modernist design, it had been the most original and imposing construction
on the island until Dreamscape had trumped it. To Liam it looked
like an electric sandwich-toaster, its open jaws facing the sea. While
nowhere near the top tier of oligarchs, Valentin was nonetheless said
to be worth several hundred million.
Officially the robbery was expected to net around three million
pounds. That was what the knuckle draggers had been told. The true
figure was likely to be a lot higher – how much higher, Liam tried
not to speculate, but he reckoned his share alone should see him
through to old age in comfort.
All in all, it marked a spectacular journey for a working-class kid
from Donegal. In his teens Liam had been excluded from school and
was continually in trouble with the police for vandalism and minor
thefts. He’d fled to England at the age of fifteen, stayed for a couple
of years with an aunt and uncle in Southport, then straightened h
imself
out and sweet-talked himself onto a college course.
At nineteen he moved to London and got a lowly administrative job
with the investment arm of a large merchant bank. He soon discovered
he had a gift more precious than any number of letters after his name.
He had charm. He could make people like him. He could take them
where they didn’t really want to go, whether it was a business deal or
a side bet or a fast and brutal fuck at the end of a boozy night.
Some of it was down to good old Irish blarney, of course, but Liam
was careful not to overdo that aspect. Just as vital was his instinct for
assessing merit and good judgement in others. Soon he was moving
up the hierarchy, generating lots of profit but seeing too much of it
go to other people. He decided to alter the equation in his own favour
and – perhaps inevitably – he over-reached, falling into a trap laid for
him by the firm’s compliance officers.
He was offered a choice: hand back what you’ve stolen and leave
quietly, or take your chances with the police. Sensing that his bosses
were keen to avoid bad publicity, let alone the regulatory attention
that would accompany any criminal investigation, Liam managed to
negotiate a partial repayment.
Even so, he was virtually broke when he walked out. And with
recession looming, his chances of further employment in the financial
services industry were non-existent. He had to sell his Audi A5
and his apartment in Canary Wharf, and ditch his high-maintenance
girlfriend.
He was renting a one-bedroom flat in Forest Gate when he received
a mysterious approach on behalf of a trusted former client, sounding
him out about a new and very challenging role. A role, he was promised,
that would utilise all his considerable talents.
Twelve
The traffic slowed to a crawl as they reached the outskirts of
Chichester. The A27 snaked around the southern perimeter, crossing
a series of busy feeder roads running in and out of the city. After clearing
the intersection with the A286, which led to a pair of coastal villages
known as the Witterings, the Shogun came to a complete stop.
There was a footbridge just ahead: a little gang of schoolgirls using
it to cross the road. They were maybe thirteen, fourteen years old, on
the impatient cusp of adulthood. You could see that from the jewellery
