by Peter James
He scrambled up the steeply pitched roof, sending tiles slithering down. It was wet from the rain, slippery as hell, his left foot momentarily lost purchase, and he lurched forward, crashing painfully down on his knee, then he was up again, almost at the top, gripping a strip of raised lead flashing, then a satellite dish. A pigeon sitting only yards away continued to clean itself, then suddenly jerked up its head in alarm and took off.
Spider looked up, too. Fuck. He heard the clattering seconds before he saw it, looming over the roof of the grey concrete council low-rise at the end of the terrace, then dropping out of the sky straight on to him. The down-draught from the rotor was whipping his clothes, shot-blasting clay dust off the tiles into his eyes.
Hovering right over him now.
He looked up. Straight into the muzzle of a rifle. Caught the glint of light on the front lens of the sight. And now, from above him, another megaphone.
'you are completely surrounded by armed police, climb slowly down. you will not be harmed if you climb down, repeat, you are surrounded by armed police marksmen. you will not be harmed if you climb down.'
You won't dare fucking harm me anyway and you know it.
Below, sirens wailed. Spider ran along the roof ridge, buffeted in the down-draught, the roar of the rotor-blade deafening him. Glancing down to his right he could see the high street, strangely silent, a huge empty arc in the centre of it, people standing well clear, anxious to get a good view but not anxious enough to die for it. Two Alsatians were being released from the back of a police van.
Gardens to the left, then the chain-link fence, and the railway line. Open ground. The dogs would get him on foot unless he could scale that fence. But even then he'd be down on their level — here he had the advantage of height on them. Ahead of him the terrace ran into the wall of the council low-rise. A vague plan took him up the wall, in through a window, into an office, where he could take a hostage. Below the building there was a car-park he knew well — he'd taken a couple of vehicles from it.
If he could just get there. Into that building. Down into that carpark. Get to Sevroula.
The megaphone boomed above him. 'climb down!'
He glanced up and, in that fraction of a second, didn't spot the cracked ridge tile, which split in half when he put his weight on it, taking his left foot sharply downwards. As he stumbled, he felt the Heckler and Koch eject from his T-shirt.
No.
Lunging desperately after it with both hands, trying to correct his foothold, another tile gave way, beneath his right foot, and he was falling face first, surfing down the steep wet roof, helpless, tiles ripping past his face, tearing skin from his hands.
His jaw hit the guttering, which sheared from the wall, but somehow he seized it with one hand, and hung, suspended. For a moment he really thought he was going to be OK, that it would take his weight, that he could pull himself back up. Then the fixings came away from the crumbling brickwork and, with a shriek, he plunged down, head first into a greenhouse.
He struck a roof pane with his face, then crashed down on his back into a bed of tomatoes. For an instant, through his pain, he was aware of their sharp, humid smell, then caught a flash of what looked like a huge, translucent bird as a massive, jagged pane of glass dropped from the roof. Before the scream had even left his mouth, the pane landed widthways across his neck, instantly severing his jugular vein and his carotid artery.
His mouth filled with the taste of copper. His lips released a faint, frothy gurgle. A series of deep barks came in response, and now standing over him, snarling, was the last thing he would ever see: an Alsatian's face.
The dog didn't understand that he was bleeding to death. It just didn't like him.
77
'Sea room', sailors called it. Having plenty of deepwater ocean around you. Enough to drift in any direction without having to worry about rocks or sandbars or land. Hugh Caven called it 'thinking room'. It was where he always went when he had a problem to solve.
The prow of the Sandy Lady rose and fell with the swell, and behind him now, a long way west of his stern, was the Thames Barrier. The oil storage depots and refineries along the shoreline, the cranes, bunkering stations, warehouses, marinas and power stations faded into a charcoal smudge. In clear waterproof Cellophane in a locker beneath his feet were the admiralty charts for these waters. He knew the names on them by heart: Canvey Island, Foulness, Sheerness, Isle of Grain, the Swale, Isle of Sheppey, Maplin Sands, and dozens more. You could explore these waters all your life and only cover a fraction of the names and places on the charts.
He kept a copy of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea at home and thought it the most moving book he had ever read. Sometimes, sitting out here, he liked to imagine himself as Santiago, that determined, courageous, stubborn old man, desperately fighting the sharks to save his prize marlin, and salvaging a kind of triumph. Maybe that was all you could ever achieve in life, never a total triumph, always just a kind of triumph.
He was sad that Hemingway, with all his wisdom, had taken his own life: if a man with a mind as fine as his couldn't hack it, could anyone?
He needed to be out here this afternoon, in the Thames estuary in his sturdy little clinker-built boat, putting as much water as he could between himself and the world. 'I'm going to pay a visit to the thinking room,' he had told Sandy.
She understood.
And now, with the taste of salt on his lips, the comforting smells of petrol exhaust, seaweed, tarpaulin and rope in the air, the drone of the Yamaha outboard behind him, mixed with the dull, clattering resonance of its loose metal casing and the steady crunch of water, he was unwinding, his anger with Ross Ransome subsiding.
He sat back in the stern, a light wind on his face, hand steady on the tiller of the outboard, eyes flicking from the compass on the binnacle to the quiet sea beyond the prow, the blue cool-box with his cans of Caffrey's and sandwiches wedged between his ankles and, further up in the boat, his rod, bait-box, landing-net, gaff-hook.
There was something else inside the cool-box, too: the master copy of the videotape of the man in the track-suit shooting Dr Oliver Cabot's brother. The only other copy was the one he had left in Ross Ransome's office, and he was pretty certain that if the surgeon hadn't destroyed it by now, it would have been put in a place where no one was going to find it.
Spray fell away from the bow like crushed ice, and he watched it for some moments. It looked so cool, fresh, hypnotic. Occasionally he turned his head to check on the stern: the wake churned by the propeller into a grubby brown rubble. Tankers and container ships might loom up behind you, without you realising it, and scare the hell out of you. But now there was nothing but a few gulls bobbing around in the water and a half-submerged spar that was fast becoming part of the horizon.
He looked ahead again, keeping an eye on a conical channel buoy about a nautical mile ahead, and on a large ship about five miles off, heading up-river towards him, and a police launch that was going round slowly, in a wide arc, about two miles to starboard. Nothing else to worry about. At least, not out here.
No need to worry about depth, either, but all the same he glanced at the Eagle echo-sounder fixed to the binnacle beneath the compass. Thirty-five fathoms. A continuous map of the seabed slid across the small green VDU screen, and every few moments a virtual fish would appear, in one of three different sizes, swimming from left to right. He'd bought this piece of kit as a birthday present to himself, to show him where the shoals were, and it was still a novelty to him.
He'd been thinking only last week, that, with an extravagant client like Ross Ransome, he might be able to upgrade his boat. Now he was going to have a hard time getting a penny out of the bastard beyond the deposit. But that wasn't what he needed to think through now.
His employee Barry Gatt was dead. Barry had left a widow, Steph, with triplets — the result of treatment for infertility. Her hormone system had gone wonky since giving birth and she was suffering from depression. She w
as able to mother them and just about run a home, but not much beyond that. She was going to need money.
And Barry needed justice.
But…
A big but. It had been a criminal offence to put those cameras in Dr Cabot's flat.
He could get a tidy sum of money from selling that video footage to a television company or a tabloid newspaper. Hot pictures. He could give the money to Steph Gatt, and although it wouldn't bring back Barry, it might make a difference to her life. Except the pictures would open a can of worms. The police would be on to whoever bought them in seconds, demanding their source.
He was caught between a rock and a hard place, and the more he thought, the less clear the solution became.
The water darkened ahead of him, and a spot of rain struck his cheek. He glanced up at the asphalt sky. Some day he would buy a boat with a wheelhouse. He zipped up his fleecy Henry Lloyd buoyancy jacket, pulled on his green fishing-cap, tugging the peak down low, and peered over the bow, mindful of the buoy, altering his course by a few degrees to give it a wide berth. The container ship was looming larger, but was not a problem, it would pass a good half-mile to his starboard. He held the needle of the compass on his new course, 92. degrees. Steady. The anchor rattled in the sudden chop.
He should take the video to the police. Withholding evidence was an even bigger crime than either breaking and entering or illegal surveillance. Under the circumstances, the police might well let him off with a caution, if that. But he was a jailbird. A convicted criminal with a record.
The police might just love this.
What if they tried implicating him? He'd fallen foul of them during his work on a number of occasions, and if they chose, they could make it very difficult for him. They would insist on him giving them Ross Ransome's name, and someone would make sure that that it hit the papers. And when that happened he could kiss goodbye to the rest of his fee for certain.
But if he did nothing?
The crime-scene boys might find the surveillance cameras but he doubted that: they'd be looking on the ground and the walls and at the furniture. Would they look up? Did they have any reason to? And even if they did, would they find those tiny cameras?
There had been a message on his voice-mail this morning from a Detective Anson, giving an incident-room number and two other numbers, and he hadn't yet returned the call. He couldn't until he'd decided what to say. Another good reason to be out here now.
It had been stupid going to Ross Ransome's office and showing him the tape. What the hell had he hoped to achieve by it? A confession? Certainly the surgeon might be guilty. Caven liked to believe he was. The guy was unstable: he had evidence that his wife was considering being unfaithful and it wouldn't be beyond a man like him to have someone killed.
He was safely beyond the buoy now. The squall had died and the air was calm as the rain fell. His watch told him it was three o'clock. Slack water for the next hour. He cut the motor, closed the air-cap on the petrol can, tore open a beer and drank the creamy froth that rose up through the spout to pool in the lid.
Then he lit a cigarette and drew the sweet smoke deep into his lungs. The boat rocked gently and water slapped softly against the hull. Overhead, a gull cried. He watched the rain spiking the water all around him.
Walk away from this one, Hugh, a voice said inside his head. You can make amends to Steph without landing yourself in a shitload of trouble. Ross Ransome's a smart bastard. You'll be the one who gets screwed, not him.
When he finished the cigarette, he made his decision. Reaching into the cool box, he took out the videotape. Then he hesitated. The Dylan song came back to him, those words again about the roads. How many? How many roads would he have to walk? And he thought, sweet Jesus, I don't know the answer.
78
The Daily Mail lay on the kitchen table. The front-page headline said, 'double-killing suspect dead in fall'.
On the television screen, Bart Simpson was standing on a stage beneath a proscenium arch in the beam of a spotlight, singing. Alec, in a red sweatshirt, elbows on the kitchen table, spoon and fork in the air, spaghetti sliding on to his hand, chortled.
'Alec,' Faith chided, 'darling, elbows off, and put your fork and spoon down.' Her eyes returned to the story in the Daily Mail. She couldn't keep away from it.
Alec ignored her.
She glanced up again. 'Alec!'
He still ignored her.
She switched off the television.
The story was in all the other papers and had been a lead item on the news. Paramedics had been unable to save the man, who had bled to death. Now fresher news was replacing it.
'Mummy!'
'Bed!'
'But, Mummy, you always let me watch The Simpsons.'
She stood up, grabbed his arm, tugged him sharply from the table. 'You're going to grow up with good manners. People with good manners don't watch television at the dinner table.'
'But you were late tonight. Otherwise I could have had my supper and then watched them.'
'Well, I'm not letting you put your elbows on the table and then ignore me.'
'You were late yesterday, too. I couldn't watch —'
'I was late today because I had an important committee meeting. We're trying to stop some of our beautiful countryside being taken away. It's something Mummy has to do.'
He was crying now. 'I didn't hear you telling me about my elbows.'
'Yes, you bloody well did.'
'No, I bloody well didn't.'
'Don't swear.'
'You did.'
On the landing she gripped him by the shoulders, struggling to contain the rage inside her. Taking out my anger on my child, she thought. Taking out my resentment at having to leave Oliver yesterday afternoon to come home. And at not being able to see him all day today.
Taking it out on my child. God. Calm down. Pull yourself together.
She was seeing Oliver in the morning. But that was too long to wait. She wanted to get Alec into bed and asleep, then she could ring him as she had promised.
She had felt better today. No nausea, none of that freaky dissociation from her body, her brain had been sharp and focused in the committee meeting, even though it had run on hours late.
Yesterday, after they had made love, Oliver had insisted on doing a little work on her, some hypnosis and visualisation. Afterwards she had felt rested and energised, but whether that was from their lovemaking, the hypnosis, simply being with him, or the herbal capsules he had given her, which she had to take every three hours, she didn't know — or care. All she knew was that for twenty-four hours she had felt good for the first time in weeks. Normal.
I'm going to beat this, she thought. I'm going to crush every last bastard kidney bean shaped amoeba to pulp.
'You swore, Mummy. You did. I want to see The Simpsons.'
Downstairs, Rasputin ran into the hall, barking excitedly.
Alec was sobbing, stamping his foot now. 'I want to see The Simpsons.'
'Next time Mummy tells you to take your elbows off the table, you take them off the table, understand?'
'Not my fault you were late.'
The front door was opening. Ross's voice. Oh, God.
'Hey, boy! Hey, hey, hey! Yes, good boy!'
Her heart sank. What the hell was he doing at home?
Go away. Go to London. Leave me alone. Ross was never at home on a Tuesday night. All this attention he had started paying her. Ironic. All the years when she had wanted him home he hadn't been around; he'd always been in London, or abroad, working or talking at conferences. And now, suddenly, he had become new Ross, caring Ross. And inside, silently, she screamed, Get out of my hair.
'Faith? Darling?'
He stood at the foot of the stairs, holding about as a big a bouquet as it was possible for a man to carry.
Alec trotted down the stairs, forlornly. 'Daddy, Mummy won't let me watch The Simpsons. Bart was doing an audition and now I don't know if they're going to choose him.'
>
From the upstairs landing, Faith watched Ross put down the flowers, pick Alec up and kiss him. 'And why won't she let the big guy watch The Simpsons?' Turning his face up towards her, he smiled.
'Cos…' Alec wiped his eyes with his sweatshirt sleeve. 'Cos… I didn't hear her —'
Ross lowered him so his feet were back on the floor.
'Alec,' Faith said, 'kiss Daddy goodnight and come up and run your bath.'
Ignoring her, Alec said, 'I really didn't hear her, Daddy, honestly.'
'Go up and run your bath,' Ross said. 'Then I'll come up and read to you. Deal?'
Faith watched the lips pout, then the hesitation. Debating the toss. Sometimes his father had a strangely calming influence on him, and could get him to do things she couldn't. Alec nodded, solemnly. Then, infuriatingly slowly, as if this was the one way he could get back at her, he began to climb the stairs, gripping every upright in turn, doing a little swing around it, then taking his time to ponder each tread before he placed his trainer on it.
When he was half-way up, she called down to him, 'Alec, have you fed Spike today?'
His jaw dropped, guiltily, and he scampered up the rest of the steps and along to his room to feed his hamster. She stood where she was, staring down at her husband.
He picked up the flowers and held them towards her. 'I brought you these.'
'Thanks,' she said flatly, and reluctantly walked down the stairs. The paper and the Cellophane rustled in his arms. She leaned forward and smelt the scent. She recognised some as orchids but there were other exotic ones she didn't think she'd seen before. 'What are these, the long ones?'
'I can't remember their name, but they cost a fucking fortune.'
'I'll put them in water right away.'
'Amount they cost you'd better put them in champagne.'