I KILL

by Lex Lander

  The morning of the day after my visit from the police, I discharged myself from the Centre Hospitaliet de Purpan. To much head-shaking and clucking by Henry.

  ‘You should stay for at least another week,’ he said dolefully.

  Another week in this place and I would be a candidate for the nut foundry.

  The account was presented and payment requested there and then. Foreign patients have a habit of vanishing without trace, I was tartly informed by the accounts clerk. I wrote a cheque for 24,000 Swiss Francs, drawn on the Schweitzerische Kreditanstaltbank, Zurich. Medical care in France comes dear. Funny, too, how readily they accepted my cheque with no more supporting documentation than my Swiss Driving License.

  By taxi to Toulouse Matabiau Station, then by train to Barcelona, a minor red herring for the police to nibble at. I would dismount at the tiny town of L’Hospitaliet-près-l’Andorre and from there proceed by taxi to Pas de la Casa, the Andorran frontier town that welcomes more visitors than the Eiffel Tower, due to the principality’s tax-free shopping. It was growing dark and drizzling steadily when I paid off the taxi at the edge of town. Wisps of mist straggled down the roadside ravine, and the nine thousand foot summit of the Cirque de Font Negre was cloaked in cloud. Dismal. Like my spirits.

  My plan required that I conduct my business incognito. That I enter and exit Andorra before the local law got wind of it. Crossing the Franco-Andorran frontier is simplicity itself when you know the ropes. Anyplace out of sight of the frontier post will do. Total darkness further improves the prospects of making it without being pinched, that is if you don’t mind falling down the odd crevice or plunging over a precipice. The lights of Pas de la Casa enabled me to avoid the most dangerous pitfalls, but I still spent as much time on my knees as on my feet.

  A little before ten I slunk into the Andorran side of town like the Man With No Name in a spaghetti western. Cold, wet, muddy, and exhausted. Forty-five minutes later, now warm, but still wet, muddy, and exhausted, I was climbing from a taxi a mile or so short of my house. The nefarious purpose of my visit necessitated a few precautions, like not giving my address to gabby taxi-drivers.

  A cold shower later (the heating was off), revived and dressed in black cords and black leather coat, I was push-starting the Peugeot runabout. Fortunately it was all downhill from the garage door. Equally fortunately the battery, after months of inaction, had enough life left in it to send a spark to the plugs. The engine spun and caught, rattling like a can full of nails.

  Andorra-la-Vella was quiet, the summer season long gone, the winter not yet arrived. The main thoroughfare, Avenida Princep Benlloch, slick with rain, no longer a bumper-to-bumper train of vehicles. Business as usual though, in the lighted cafés and restaurants, and beat music boomed from an amusement arcade.

  The drizzle was becoming a deluge. A coach hissed past, throwing scythes of water from its fat wheels, late-season tourists jammed behind steamed-up windows. I came to the Café Raco de Valls, among the sleazier of the town’s dives, and peered inside. Miguel was there all right, discoursing to a bored-looking bartender. A squat old man in a beret unstuck himself from the bar and shambled towards the door. I moved into shadow as the door opened to spill yellow light on the sidewalk. Gauloise fumes eddied past me.

  ‘Sale temps!’ Dirty weather. Oblivious of me, the old man tugged his beret down to his ears before stepping out from under the recess and splashing across the road. I shifted my position to avoid a persistent drip that had discovered the delights of my neck. I wondered if this was the same Andorra I had involuntarily left six weeks ago.

  The door opened again to drunken laughter and farewells, and more customers jostled past. Miguel wasn’t among them. They had no sooner dispersed into the murk when two more boozers floated out, belching in chorus. The taller of the duo reeled away across the road. The other stood swaying on the edge of the curtain of rain.

  ‘Salut, Miguel,’ I said, close to his ear.

  The swarthy features of Gravemaker’s sometime acquaintance, slack with drink, registered only puzzlement. I flourished a fifty euro note. His dark moist eyes caressed it.

  ‘For information,’ I said. ‘Let’s go where we can talk in private.’

  Then recognition crowded out money-hunger. He took a pace backwards.

  ‘It is you … the Englishman.’

  My hand made a bracelet around his bicep; he was so skinny my fingertips almost met.

  ‘Come on, Miguel, don’t make it difficult.’

  He offered no resistance. As if mesmerised, he let me bundle him up the hill, away from the downtown area. The rain by now was intense. It streamed from my hair, over my face, and dribbled down inside my shirt. Two soakings in the same evening. Miguel was worse off, being dressed only in a coarse-knit jersey plus the much-mended jeans. He began to whine.

  Only when I thrust him down a narrow space between the windowless walls of two old houses did he make a serious effort to escape, twisting free of my grip and dashing towards the street. I caught him by his sodden jersey, pulled him up with a jerk, and swung him hard against the rough stone wall. Head and masonry connected with a crack that wrung a squeal from his lips. For a few horrible moments I thought his skull must be fractured. But, no, he stayed upright, cringing, clutching his bruised temple. The soft radiance of the street lamp opposite reflected the fear in his eyes. I pinned him against the wall, my knee in his groin.

  ‘Where did they take the girl?’ I demanded.

  He whimpered. I ground my knee in his crotch, slammed a fist in his ribs. He screeched and would have doubled up had I not held him hard against the stonework. His feet drummed.

  ‘Where?’ I snarled.

  ‘Holland,’ he groaned. ‘They go to Holland.’

  ‘Where in Holland?’

  A headshake, ignorance or defiance, it was hard to say. I belted him in the ribs, again and again, but he only screeched and pleaded for mercy. Bones bent, fractured, and still I hit him. When he sagged, became a dead weight, I supported him. He scrabbled at me, coughed weakly; a dark bauble dribbled from his lip.

  ‘Where in Holland?’ I raged, shaking him so hard his teeth chattered.

  But he was beyond speech, and as reason disintegrated into unreason I clubbed him about head and body, smashing him to the ground. There he slumped, a sodden, pulped mass, jaw slack, drooling, a black thread linking mouth to jaw. Unrecognizable.

  Spent, panting, frustrated, I stood back and massaged knuckles that were on fire. A guy like Miguel doesn’t soak up that much punishment if he has the means of ending it. He truly hadn’t known.

  ‘You little shit.’ I kicked him, very deliberately, in the head, and watched without emotion as he rolled over into a puddle. Maybe dead, maybe not.

  I couldn’t have cared less.

  Twenty-Six

  Egmond aan Zee. In the north of the Netherlands, just another coastal community, white beaches, grassy dunes, an outlook across the grey North Sea towards England. A flat, bleak, seaside community of straight roads and neat yards, typically Dutch.

  Also, my only lead to Rik de Bruin. A name recalled from the visiting card he handed me on the evening of our chance meeting in the bar at the Rif Hotel.

  An anaemic sun was settling on the watery horizon when I piloted my rented Merc into the town’s main street, Voorstraat, with its awninged stores, bare trees, and paved sidewalks, presided over by a church with an undersized spire and a white finger of a lighthouse. In the summer it was probably picturesque, with the colourful awnings extended, outdoor cafés and street stalls laden with tourist trash. Now, in bleak November, it was short on appeal. It also surprised me that de Bruin would have chosen such a secluded and cutesy location for his business or his home, whichever or both. Unless the address on the card had been a phoney.

  It was too late in the day to start serious enquiries. Hotels were scarce, but I eventually tracked one down in a back street: Hotel De Graaf, a bed-and-breakfast establishment. They gave me a room facin
g seaward. By then it was dark. I crashed down on the firm double bed and slept for an hour.

  At a little after seven, showered and refreshed, I ventured downstairs to the lobby. No meals available, just machine-dispensed coffee and snacks. The old guy behind the desk spoke only Dutch and German. When I ran the name de Bruin past him, he shook his head. ‘Nee,’ Dutch for “No”, was the only part of his answer I understood. He loaned me a local telephone directory. It was unforthcoming on the subject of either de Bruin the individual, or DeB Publications. Maybe he was unlisted.

  Restaurants were no thicker on the ground than hotels. The place I settled on was a diner-type eaterie, with booths and a nice-looking blonde waitress of about thirty, who spoke English better than me. The only other customers were a woman with a small boy, tucking into multi-storey burgers.

  As the waitress jotted down my order for fillet steak and fries, I tried de Bruin’s name on her.

  ‘There used to be a sex shop of that name,’ she mused. ‘In Voorstraat, by the supermarket. But they went away, oh, years ago.’ She smiled cheekily at me, her very blue eyes crinkling. There was a seen-it-all air about her. ‘Something special you wanted there?’

  An invitation of a certain kind, if ever I heard one.

  ‘What’ve you got?’ I said with a shade less subtlety.

  Her smile broadened and the tip of her tongue slid across her upper lip.

  ‘Are you staying at Le Graaf?’ she asked.

  I nodded. ‘Good guess.’

  ‘Not really. It’s about the only place that’s open out of season.’

  She swayed away with my order. My gaze went with her, appraising the roll of her hips. Inside me, the devil of old was awakening from a long sleep. I slapped him down, knowing he would rise again.

  The information the waitress had provided was depressing. I didn’t see Rik de Bruin dispensing dildos and penis extenders behind the counter of a sex shop. Small-time, he was not. So if the sex shop had been his, it would have to be part of a chain or a franchise set-up, or maybe a front for the real money making operation. The supermarket, or other retail stores on Voorstraat, might be able to point me towards DeB’s current trading address. All I had to do was find a single store under the name DeB-something. From there to the DeB nerve centre should be a fast straight run. Still hope then.

  I stared through the plate glass window at my reflection overlaying the empty street. It was raining now, the asphalt slick and black. The waitress was behind the counter, resting on her elbows. Her reflected features were in shadow but I sensed she was looking at me.

  The meal was nothing to enthuse about. It filled a hollow. Afterwards I skimmed through a Dutch magazine before heading for my room and an early crashdown.

  It was while I was rinsing toothpaste foam from my mouth that a knock came at my door. Too tired to wonder who, I went to answer it topless and in my shorts.

  On my doorstep was the blonde waitress. It didn’t exactly surprise me. The signals had all been there, including the enquiry about my hotel. Her face was made up a shade too heavily. Her smile was the same though.

  ‘Er … hello,’ I said, torn between falling upon her with frothing mouth, and slamming the door in her face.

  She was wearing a blue coat, just above knee-length, held together by a knotted belt, and very high heels with ankle straps. White stockings. So far, so commonplace. Then she unknotted the belt and let the coat fall open. Underneath she had on a bra, bikini briefs, and a garter belt, all in a black lacy material. A black rose tattoo adorned her stomach, its spiny stalk plunging behind the waistband of her briefs and re-emerging on her thigh. Very artistic. Her navel was adorned with a ring that glittered in the light of the corridor. Her figure was good and her timing, if she had but realised, was impeccable. My last sexual adventure was so long ago I couldn’t even recall who it was with, let alone when. Now here was an offer, on my doorstep, on a plate. I retreated a couple of steps. Reasonably enough, she took this as an invitation. When I stopped she bumped into me.

  ‘What is the matter?’ she said, a frown creasing the bridge of her nose.

  ‘Look … I can’t,’ I said lamely. ‘You see, I’m … I’m married.’

  So what? her expression said.

  I spread my hands, half-embarrassment, half-regret. ‘Sorry. I don’t screw around.’

  Her frown became a scowl. Mine wasn’t the standard reaction, I guessed. Chances were she was the town hooker, supplementing her table waiting wages with “presents” from passing businessmen.

  Voices travelled down the corridor. She hesitated. For a moment I thought she was going to force her way past me, but no, she flailed me with a few words of Dutch – abuse presumably – and stomped off. No sway, just frustrated hormones.

  Refusing sex with a desirable woman, hooker or no, was not the sexually predatory André Warner of old. The lust generated by the waitress exposing herself had been fleeting, routed by my commitment to Clair and Lizzy. The twin reasons why I was here, in Egmond aan See. To go tomcatting with a waitress-cum-hooker would somehow degrade that mission and Clair’s and Lizzy’s memories. I went to bed feeling almost proud.

  Next morning the sun was back. It lifted my spirits and sent me about my business with a shade more bounce in my step than yesterday. First the supermarket. Sexworld, as the DeB business was known, was well, even fondly, remembered, chiefly because its closure left Egmond bereft of such outlets. How did they manage? As to where they were now, shaking heads were universal. ‘Amsterdam?’ several suggested, but it was only conjecture.

  Same story at all the other adjacent, smaller stores. Only one guy, the young manager of a bookstore, was able to offer any info.

  ‘They change their name,’ he told me, in reasonable English.

  My ears pricked up. This was new.

  ‘What are they called now?’

  His shrug sent my hopes plummeting.

  ‘No idea. I just know they changed because the day they move I am talking to the manager, and he tell me.’

  I slipped him a card bearing my cell phone no. Asked him to call me if the changed name came to him. He promised he would, but I didn’t expect much. Even as he spoke his attention was wandering towards a couple of mini-skirted girls perusing the magazine rack.

  So much for Edmond aan Zee. My goodbye was not regretful.

  Amsterdam was my next port of call. The helpful official at the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce was unable to trace DeB Publications, or DeB anything else. Many privately-owned enterprises are never registered, he informed me apologetically, notably those in the more, ahem, dubious business sectors.

  From there I was reduced to haphazard ferreting in the red light district and other sleazy parts of the city down by the docks. Brown cafés, sex emporiums, night clubs, strip clubs (yes, even in these days of free on-line porn, they still exist), private booth operators, brothels, you name it. Anyplace I might spot or bump into de Bruin or a member of his coterie. It was a tour only the dedicated sex fiend would have found stimulating. For me, it was a reminder of the cesspool Lizzy was by now probably immersed in. As the days passed, then weeks with zero progress, I was coming to accept that she and her mother were beyond my reach. Clair, the unintended victim, was almost sure to be dead; Lizzy too, maybe, but even if alive she could be anyplace in the world. De Bruin was still my only lead.

  With the approach of Christmas I hired a private detective called Frederik Berkhuisen, whose office on Scharbeekstraat was just outside the red light district. He was a lanky individual of about forty, with receding black hair, very unDutch in appearance. His glasses resembled the ones Himmler used to wear. But he had been recommended as an expert in tracing missing people.

  ‘Henrik de Bruin,’ he mused, after I regaled him with a few basic facts.

  ‘You know him?’

  He contemplated me across his black Ikea desk. ‘The name, not the man. Why are you searching for this man?’ Yet another Dutch fluent English-speaker.

&nbs
p; He owed me money, I told him. Berkhuisen jotted a few words on a notepad. The Himmler glasses glinted at me.

  ‘Tell me all you know and I will see what I can do.’

  So I told him all I knew, which took about five seconds, and left him to see what he could do.

  I stuck around for a week or so, mostly hoping from news from Berkhuisen. At a cost to me of eight hundred euros he produced a big zilch. Oh, yes, I received a written report of his enquiries and investigations to justify the outlay. I chucked it in the trash can.

  For now though he was all I had. Admitting failure came hard. Even so I was at that point and, instructing Berkhuisen to continue digging, I went home to Andorra. Not without misgivings, running the gauntlet of a charge for my assault or even homicide of Miguel. Learning with relief that he, though still in hospital, had survived. The police didn’t pay a call, meaning he hadn’t pointed the finger at me.

  On the debit side, Lucien and Madeleine were away, and Simone had gone off to winter in her native Grenoble, which made my splendid isolation even more complete. Would I have bedded her if she were available? After some searching self-analysis, I concluded that I wouldn’t. Until I knew Lizzy’s fate I was committed to her. You can’t cheat on someone you don’t and probably never will have a relationship with. But that’s what it would have felt like.

  Spending Christmas alone would have been unthinkable, not to mention unbearable, so the day before Christmas Eve I took off to a fogbound England, turning up unannounced at Julie’s, bearing a car trunkful of gifts from Harrods. Just like Santa Claus.

  The ball zinged past my ear as if rocket-propelled and I hadn’t a hope of playing it.

  ‘Five – two,’ my opponent sang out smugly. I gritted my teeth and went to retrieve the object of my humiliation from its resting place. It was almost too hot to hold, a testimony to the pace of the game. Until recently I hadn’t played squash for nigh on six months, and had never been more than a keen dabbler. Now, even in my state of relative fitness, I was feeling the strain.