by Karen Guyler
“I. . .How did you get my number?”
He’d always had it, memorised it, followed it as it had changed, her address, her work. He hadn’t been able to let her go all the way. But, careful, he mustn’t make her bolt. “I need to speak with you. It’s urgent.”
“You’re speaking right now.”
“Not on the phone. I’ll be at the all-night-café in Armstrong Street.” He pressed down the peeling corner of one of the stickers plastered on the back wall of the phone box. It popped up again. “You still take your coffee black, twist of sugar?”
“No sugar these days.”
“You might be grateful for it. Please, Nancy, it’s red important.”
To him, the silence between them didn’t feel awkward, rather the recoupling of a shared past, two shared pasts. Was it the same for her?
“Red important?” No panic, a simple clarification.
“Yes.”
The café’s florescent lighting was a beacon in the empty street, Charles’ footsteps the soundtrack to this ungodly hour as he walked towards it. The sparse traffic hum from the closest arterial road barely intruded there. No other sound to worry about. He opened the café door and stepped into the warmth, welcomed by the smell of bacon and coffee as though it was already breakfast time. A group of taxi drivers occupied the safest table, backs to the end wall, their cabs parked outside in a factory production line.
Under the guise of using the gents, he checked out the exit, a door past the toilets, no enclosed courtyard. Good. Funny how he thought he’d forgotten all that.
“Just tea?” the lad behind the counter looked like Charles had told him why he was there when he ordered. “Our bacon butties are legend, yeah.”
“Too right, Rajiv, I could go for another one.” The taxi drivers started a chorus of ‘and me’.
Too noticeable not to after that. “Then I’ll have one too, thank you. And a black coffee.” He’d be optimistic.
He took a seat and waited, staring at the TV screen, the silent BBC News 24 with the yellow subtitles turned on. The odd sentence transcription could have been a good distraction, the gobbledygook that appeared on the screen funny even on another day.
And then nothing was funny. The assassination of Hunter Malone has been claimed by a group called The Society. The ticker tape dropped the bombshell on him with as much concern as it had proclaimed that The Met Office forecast this would be the coldest October for a decade.
Charles had never heard of them before Tony instructed them, and now they were everywhere. Why would they assassinate Hunter? He wasn’t anywhere in the picture for failing to pay them. Unless—they guaranteed a remove to their clients, the one thing Jed would insist upon. People didn’t change. Plausible deniability had been the guiding principle of his entire life.
Tony, so sure you’d hit upon the perfect solution by hiring a hit on the President while he’d ordered the same on us. He would have appreciated that irony.
Duncan, because he would have responded to Charles’ red important messages if he had just gone away out of his own choice, Hunter, now Tony, they were getting closer. Hurry, Nancy.
His bacon sandwich was crumbs on the plate, the dregs of his tea long cold, and he’d moved to the safest seat when the bell on the door tinkled.
His insides somersaulted, the last seven years evaporated, and Nancy was there, sitting opposite him.
“You look good.” Glorious, beautiful, the years apart wore well on her.
She shook her head, short, sharp, fast, like she was shaking water out of her hair. He’d forgotten she did that. “You don’t get to say that.” She peered at the cold coffee. “So confident I’d come?”
“I hoped. Rajiv, could I have another tea and coffee?”
“First name terms already?”
“The bacon butties are legend.” Charles whispered.
“You want a bacon butty with that, lady? They’re legend, yeah.”
“Just coffee, thanks.” Her smile creased into more wrinkles now, framing her eyes, at both sides of her mouth, lighting up her blue eyes.
“How ‘bout you, guvnor, annuva?”
“Just the tea, thank you.”
Nancy pulled off her bobble hat, she’d caught her black curls back in a ponytail, slipped her coat off onto the back of the wooden chair. A forest green jumper underneath, her favourite colour. “Why am I here?”
Charles’ new passport in his shirt pocket pressed against his chest. Come with me, let’s run away together. The words she’d wanted him to say seven years ago were right there. He couldn’t hold them in. They whispered into the no-man’s-land between their lives. Dynamite.
She let go of her coffee mug, reached for her coat. “You’re seven years too late.”
Charles held a hand out, hovering over the table. “I’m sorry, I didn’t come here for that.”
He’d meant to woo her, wean himself from Eva, and still he had things to action, to complete, but his heart galloped ahead of his logical mind. Why shouldn’t the time be now?
“That’s not your red important.” Her eyebrows arched a warning that it had better not be.
“No, no, I mean it, with every fibre of my being, but I understand I have to earn your trust. I will ask you again, but for now I came to warn you. You’ve seen the news?”
She stayed in the chair, reaching for her coffee again. “Hunter.”
He nodded, “Hunter killed, who could have got close enough to do that?”
“It wasn’t the Russians?”
“Duncan hasn’t been seen for almost a month.”
She nodded, digested, waited. What he’d told her so far didn’t add up to red. So he dropped his bombshell. “Tony died from a heart attack.”
The significance of that alarmed her. “Could it be an actual heart attack?”
Charles shook his head. What the news had shown him altered everything. He dropped his voice, “We need to get out, it’s urgent. I’ve been working to a plan, it’s nearly complete. I wouldn’t have told you yet, not until it’s ready, but,” he spread his hands, “I’m not in control of the timetable now. What I can reassure you of is that I have a way for us to be safe and financially secure so we can disappear beyond his reach.”
Nancy sipped her coffee. He felt the weight of her decision making. Decide the right way. Please.
“He has long arms, deep pockets,” she told the pot of sugar sachets, turning it half anti clockwise, back clockwise. “If I’m doing the same old routine, living at my apartment, going to work as always, how can I be a threat?”
“Tony, Hunter, Duncan, wasn’t that what they were doing?”
“We don’t know their deaths are linked.”
“We don’t know they aren’t.”
“You’re not thinking about your wife.” Nancy’s emphasis on the word was no more than he deserved. “What about your daughter?”
Of all the grey areas, this was the one he’d wrestled with the most. And he still had no answer. If he offered Lily the choice, she’d choose her mother. Knowing that didn’t make it easier, make him not wish it were otherwise.
“He’s made us all targets, Nancy. It’s better if we just disappear.”
“If I were to say yes, Charles, how could I trust you wouldn’t leave again?”
He hesitated. Said out loud the justification for what he did to Nancy, what he would do to Eva, and by extension to Lily, it sounded cold, heartless even. In his head, in his heart though, it was all too tangled up with emotion. His motives were pure. Had always had Nancy behind them. Leaving Eva for Nancy had been the choice of his heart, leaving Nancy for Eva had been a duty for his and her future together.
He was repeating his own history by going back to her in a strange symmetry, an ever decreasing circle of their two lives until there was just him and her, joined by the tiniest symbol, the largest illustration of trust, a wedding ring. And he’d thought he was a pure scientist, no poetry in his blood. Nancy brought out the best in him.
He placed
his hand over hers. This time she didn’t draw away.
“I’m a cliché. Everything I’ve achieved has been for you, for us, leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” He nodded at her raised eyebrows. “You know me, all of me, deeds and misdeeds. Bigger than everything else was the pain of walking away from you. To do it again would break me.”
He’d said it, laid his heart out on the table. Would she trample it or lift it up? He could scarcely breathe. His fingers on hers felt the lightest tether to his dreamt of future.
“I want to believe you,” she said, “but I need time.”
Time, it was perhaps more than he deserved, but it was the one thing they didn’t have.
Nancy murmured her truth. “You broke my heart, it never mended right. I don’t know how to trust you again.” He held his silence, needing her to fill it. “Give me twenty-four hours. You have a number where I can reach you?”
Inside, Charles soared. “I’ll call you, if that’s all right?”
She smiled. What that did to him. How he’d missed it. “It’s okay. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.” She put her coat and hat on. “Maybe not the middle of the night again. Try a civilised hour, around nine.”
“I’ll walk you home.” Charles’ feet tangled themselves up in his chair, the one next to him, the table leg, while he watched her, not willing to let her out of his sight.
She held a hand out to him and he grasped it, a drowning man hanging on to a lifebuoy. He was grinning as though he had won the Nobel. Hell, no, this was better than that. This was all his dreams coming true. And when his royalties started flowing, any day now, he could buy the security that would have come with the high media profile of the prize-winner.
“It’s okay, you’re a bit of a liability. Besides, you need to sort out Rajiv.”
Their fingertips lingered together a long moment before breaking apart as Nancy left.
“My man, respect.” Rajiv’s reaction was so surprising, Charles fist bumped the hand he held out. “Made me totes emosh, worth doing the night shift for that right there, yeah.”
So much for being inconspicuous, under the radar. But right then Charles didn’t care.
28
The second mug deposited on Charles’ table by the young guy manning the all-night café stopped Eva dead. She’d been so careful, but Charles had noticed her anyway? Was he calling her bluff? She traced the handlebar grip on Lily’s bike with her gloved fingertip. He didn’t play games.
Eva moved further into the freezing shadows behind a parked car on the opposite side of the road, jabbing her calf with the pedal. Lily was safe at Hugo’s. His scribbled note through the door that he’d put her to bed, so they’d see Eva in the morning, a lifesaver.
She recited the reassurance over and over, trying to ignore the concrete cold leaching from the pavement up through her boots, a way to justify watching her husband.
It had to be for her, the drink, because it had to be cold by now. Clearly no one else was coming. Should she show herself, let him know he’d—As the woman entered the spotlight of the cafe’s lighting, Eva knew she was who Charles waited for. She propped Lily’s bike against the shop front behind her and stepped out from the camouflage of the parked car to see his face better.
Oh, Charles.
His expression, his hand hovering between him and the woman. How could he? Weren’t they everything to each other?
The weight in her chest, the crushing of her heart, not felt since he walked out of her life twelve years ago, told her otherwise. The frigid air gnawed at Eva’s hand, telling her to put it back in her pocket, that her heart wasn’t going to shatter, didn’t need her to hold it in place.
Charles, what are you doing? You can’t. . .Eva could scarcely bear to watch his apparent truth in the way the woman and he held fingertips, drew apart.
The tinkle of the café bell rang loud in the silent night as the door opened on the woman leaving, the night moving on while Eva tried to hold her heart together.
The truth in heeled boots was walking away. Eva’s numb feet step-limped, step-limped behind her into the next street, past a row of closed restaurants and nail salons. The woman turned the corner, the distance between them growing. Did she know about Eva, Charles’ wife, about Lily?
“Hey!” Eva’s yell surprised the night, made the woman jump. A glance behind her at Eva’s all-in-black figure made her hurry away faster. “I just want to talk.”
The woman didn’t.
Eva sped up, gritting her teeth, trying to weight bear on her right leg. But rushing round the corner, a spectacular agony tore through her. Her knee gave way as if it wasn’t there and she keeled over onto the stack of rubbish bags at the kerb. Her short, sharp cry sounded like a scream in the quietness. Clasping her knee, she screwed her eyes shut, seeing flashes. Hard edges dug at her back, into her side, as she rolled on the unsolid surface.
The woman was at the door of a small block of flats, the white ball of fur on the top of her hat bobbing up and down as she wrestled with a difficult lock. Eva wasn’t that terrifying. She yanked off her beanie that her stitches had forced her to wear instead of Lily’s cycle helmet. The bright beacon of her hair should reassure.
The chink of dropped metal and a cry—surprise, fear?—then the woman was running towards her. Eva elbowed her way up out of the grip of the rubbish bags. The smell of rotten food greased into her nose, whipping the churning in her stomach into a frenzy. Pushing, shoving, her hands disappearing into hard-edged crevices between slithering masses of food waste, Eva wrestled to be free.
The woman’s heels rat-a-tat-tatted as she ran down the middle of the road. Then a new sound, London intruding. A car. An everyday, expected thing, until the crump. The terrible deadened sound of metal smashing into human, a half-strangled scream, the falling, falling, breaking of bones, ripping of skin, the almost unremarkableness of the car accelerating away.
Oh God, oh God. A whisper of a moan urged Eva, hurry. Her elbow jarred through the bags’ contents, smacking onto the pavement.
Footsteps coming from where the woman had tried to get into the building. A long stride, rushing, not rushed. Someone else to help, thank God.
Eva’s useless knee dared her to trust it.
Her mirror image dressed all in black knelt beside the woman. The man cupped her face; he knew her? Did she need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?
“Is she okay?” Eva’s question jolted him.
She rolled onto her side, levered herself up onto her hands, an awkward press-up.
He moved both gloved hands, one over the woman’s nose, one over her mouth and her heels made a different sound then, a desperate drumroll.
“What’re you doing?” Eva asked, struggling to get upright, awkwardly on her good leg, not trusting her damaged knee. “Hey!”
She took a step towards him. Her body screamed at her to run, get away, but she closed the distance between them with another awkward step, another.
“Leave her alone.”
She sounded as authoritative as you’d expect an injured 5’3” woman to be when facing off against a man who looked like he’d just stepped off the cover of MMA Monthly.
He rolled up to standing, interlaced his gloved hands, pressed the palms towards Eva. Any hope she had vanished as she recognised him.
29
How was he there now?
Eva fled out of the street where the woman lay still in the road. The next was just as deserted. But by the first pile of rubbish, a gift. Eva snatched up a bottle from the box of glass recycling, rapped it on the pavement.
“You can’t get away from me.” He toyed with her. “Even without a bad leg, even if you hadn’t killed my buddy.”
Eva ran faster, harder in a clumsy limping that jarred her spine, screaming, screaming, screaming. She lunged for the end of the street. The man who’d taunted her from outside the fire exit door at Charles’ lab sauntered behind her. His slowness, his assurance he’d catch her and make her pay, made her fra
ntic efforts feel pointless.
“I might have made it quick, like for the other woman. But for what you did to him, I’m gonna make it real slow.”
Her jacket hood cut into her throat, jerking her to a clumsy stop. Her throat was already raw. Someone must be able to hear her.
“I’m gonna make you scream like he did, you’ll beg me to die.”
Pretending both knees had given way, making her a surprising dead weight, she dropped to the pavement. She heard the air moving past her as his punch skimmed just above her head. He kneed the air out of her lungs, knocking her onto her side.
“Go on then, you’re so hard. You think you can suffocate me too?” she wheezed.
He grabbed her by her throat and squeezed.
“Coward.” she could barely force the word out.
He leant closer over her, closer. Close enough.
She snapped her arm up and stabbed his face with the broken-ended bottle. Again, again, until his grip loosened. He roared with fury at her. Eva jabbed with everything she had, catching his open mouth. She dragged her weapon through his skin. Warm drips splattered her face. Her grip on the glass was slipping.
She dragged in a raggedy breath and twisted away from him as a punch rocketed towards her, connected with the pavement. He yelled louder, rocked upwards, holding his ribboned face. Eva rammed the bottle at the side of his neck, scrabbled to her feet. Fled away from him.
Ahead, a beacon of safety. She burst through the café door.
“Call the police!”
“What’s occurring?” The lad behind the counter looked up from his phone. “Holy crap.”
“It’s not me, it’s not my blood. There’s a woman out in the road, she was knocked over, I don’t know if she’s okay.”
The guy got busy on his phone. “I know what time it is, listen, yeah, I’ve got a lady in here covered in blood, says there’s another one knocked over in the street. You’ll call it in and all that cop stuff?. . .Innit. . .Yeah, I can do that.” He hung up and gestured at the phone. “My cousin, he’s a copper, he’ll sort it out.”
