But this was even worse than a bad French film… there were so many lies involved, so much deceit… driven by the prime motives for inflicting pain and suffering that he had thought about that day at the mill museum… profit and fear… and maybe worse. And he had been a part of it… He could conceive of how he had been responsible for certain things. And perhaps for what would happen next, if it hadn’t already happened. Because it might be too late…
He stared at the moon, now brighter and clearer than it had ever seemed to him before, and he let the horrible question ring through his head…
Why had Sarah Hartley tried to kill him?
Phone intercept 3
Friday 26/4 08.27
- Are we good?
- I think so.
- You think so?
- More than likely.
- Ok. It’s been a week.
- I’m on it. Tonight.
Chapter 27
Saturday, April 27th 2013
“So you’re a Barca man, are you?”
Paul looked at the doctor and didn’t understand a word he’d said.
“Pardon?”
The doctor pointed to the computer screen on the desk, showing an article about Lionel Messi. Paul couldn’t remember reading it.
“Not really. Huddersfield Town. Or Brighton and Hove Albion.”
Now the doctor didn’t know what Paul was talking about.
He was a young man, serious-looking, with a short goatee and a gold stud in his left ear. He smelt of disinfectant and toothpaste. He looked liked he’d dressed in a hurry, probably dragged out of bed on short notice.
“Not much chance against the boys from Bayern, I’m afraid. But I see Real taking it against Dortmund, myself. Maybe not after 90 minutes, but in the end… definitely. And then the final too.”
He took off his stethoscope and massaged and squeezed and pinched Paul’s legs. Paul was lying on his hotel bed. It was 2.30 in the morning.
“I think you’ve been very fortunate. There’s nothing broken. Some ugly bruising, some cuts you’ll need to be careful with… so there’s just your head. What did you say you hit?”
“I fell off a canal bank and hit the side of a barge.”
“Of course… nasty wound. I imagine it hurts, I’ll give you something for that. And I’ll be back tomorrow to see if we need to get a scan done. But the only thing for you to do now is rest, and don’t move around too much. You don’t mess with head injuries, they can cause permanent damage.”
Paul’s eyes looked at Leo Messi again but he was thinking about his father.
When he looked back at the doctor he wasn’t there any more. The room was empty.
He closed his eyes for a minute and then opened them again and he looked at the clock on the bedside table. It was 6.45 a.m.
Chapter 28
Saturday April 27th 2013
He got up and hobbled into the bathroom and stuck his mouth under the tap and drank. His whole body was stiff and sore and his head was throbbing. He looked for the pills the doctor had left and found them on the bedside table and took two and opened the curtains and looked out of the window. The early morning sun was picking out the rooftops on the other side of the canal but the canal itself was still in shadow. He looked down at the railings where he had stood two nights ago, and again the previous evening.
She had come back.
She had come back and this time he had followed her.
He didn’t know what time it had been. In the afternoon he had worked and slept for a while and then he remembered eating and going for a beer or two a few blocks away and coming back to the hotel. It had been dark by then. So maybe 9 o’clock. Maybe later.
She had been in the same place and she had just stared at him.
He had set off towards the bridge, glancing across at her from time to time, and she hadn’t moved. It was only when he was on the opposite bank and walking towards Rozenstraat that she had turned round and mounted a bicycle and started cycling away along the canal. He had started running…
Then she turned left and Paul looked around and saw a bicycle leaning against the wall outside a small guest house and he took it. The saddle was too low and it was uncomfortable but he pedalled on and turned left and she was only a hundred yards or so ahead of him. She was wearing a light green jacket and she was easy to see.
There were blanks then… he couldn’t remember the route they had taken… He recalled a tram clanging furiously as he sped in front of it, his eyes glued to the green shape in front of him. He saw a crowd of people, spread out across the road, blocking his view, and he had to dismount and almost carry the bike as he squeezed through them, and he had smelt onions and sausages and beer. Then he lost her. He was looking at a main road right in front of him, a 4-lane highway, but there was no access to it and she was gone. But then she reappeared on the other side of the road and he had seen a tunnel passing beneath the road and he had hurried along it and he saw her up ahead turning off the new road onto a cycle path and accelerating. Then there were more blanks… it was dark and he couldn’t see very much. But the green jacket seemed almost fluorescent as it passed under the odd streetlight and he kept going. There were no people around now, and very few cars. They had ridden parallel to a railway line for a while then passed under a bridge, right and left and right again… At one point he had almost caught up with her but she turned again and when he turned too he couldn’t see her any more. Then it was black again and he didn’t remember anything else until he was standing on the dock or whatever it was, looking down the shaft, and he heard something swinging through the air towards his head.
He heard a voice and it was saying “Sir? Sir?”
He looked at his watch. But his watch wasn’t there, on his left wrist, as it always was. He felt it on his right wrist and looked at it. It was 10.15. But what day was it?
“Sir?” the voice said again.
He looked up and saw a woman in uniform.
“We’re about to take off, sir. Please fasten your safety belt.”
He looked around and he saw that he was on a plane. He looked up at the woman. She was trying to smile but was obviously losing patience. He nodded at her and tried to smile back. The man in the aisle seat next to him was looking at him in a strange way.
“What the fuck are you looking at?”, Paul said.
The man turned away.
Paul had a sudden urge to apologise to the man but he said nothing.
He didn’t know what he was doing on the plane or how he had got there or why his watch was on his right wrist.
He fastened his seat-belt and felt a stabbing twinge above his temple. He reached up to his head and touched the bandage, feeling it tight around his skull, all round his head and he realised he must look very odd. He felt very odd. And then he remembered a couple of things. A sequence played on a screen in his mind and he was in it and he was watching himself, a spectator and a player at the same time.
He saw himself get dressed in his hotel bedroom, in blue trousers and a grey polo-neck sweater, and then he packed and retrieved all the papers and money that he’d laid out near the radiator in the bathroom to dry and he gathered up his bags and went downstairs and he paid his bill. He ordered a taxi to the airport and when the taxi came he went outside. He was just getting into it when a man came running out of the hotel and handed him his computer.
“You forget this, sir… you left it at the reception desk when you were checking out.”
“Thanks”, he said.
The taxi took him to the airport and he paid the driver and the driver looked at him very strangely.
“These are English pounds”, he said. “They’re no use to me.”
So he took back the pounds and found some euros and the man had looked at him very strangely again.
He watched himself trundling his bag towards the terminal building and realised he didn’t know where he was going. And then he remembered being in the airport, and seeing a group of American tour
ists with Culture-Vulture stickers on their bags and he sat down for a moment and looked at the departures board and saw flights to Innsbruck, Vienna, Verona, Istanbul, London, Hong Kong and Dubai and he wondered if Sarah might be there, waiting for him, and where he might get the best cup of coffee. Because he wanted a cup of coffee.
So he got a cup of coffee from Starbucks and went to buy a ticket to Leeds-Bradford because he remembered that was where he had to go.
And then he was sitting on the plane again and the sequence stopped and his head was hurting so he took two more pills and he looked at the man in the aisle seat next to him reading the in-flight magazine and he thought he should say something but he closed his eyes.
When he opened them again he was sitting in Leeds-Bradford airport, watching the luggage carrousel go round and round and he played a game with himself, trying to guess which bags were for which passengers. He thought the golf clubs in the tartan bag would be for the athletic looking, suntanned bloke wearing a baseball cap, but a small dark-haired woman of about 45 came to grab them and he was disappointed. Then a large Louis Vuitton suitcase appeared and he knew it belonged to the lady in the pink and mauve suit standing with a trolley in one hand and a phone in the other. But then a burly-looking priest stepped forward and grabbed it and heaved it up and he knew it wasn’t the right day to play that sort of game.
When there was only one bag left on the carrousel it dawned on him that he didn’t have any baggage checked in, just his carry-on, so he got up and walked out of the baggage area and went outside and thought about what he was going to do next.
It was colder in Yorkshire than in Amsterdam and he felt a jolt of energy and something like vitality shudder through him and when he lit a cigarette and sucked in the smoke he was feeling a little better. He knew what day it was.
He looked down at his feet and saw that he was wearing sneakers, but he couldn’t remember putting them on. He’d been wearing shoes last night, his favourite brown brogues… but they were gone now, down river, along with his Bic. Along with a lot of other things, perhaps.
He remembered walking back to the hotel in his socks, and how heavy his clothes had felt. He wondered why he hadn’t taken the bike from where he had left it near the Portakabin, but then he remembered the pedals on the bike had been the type with rough, serrated metal edges, to give a better grip… if you had shoes on… and he didn’t know if he could have cycled very far in just his socks.
He could see the dismay on the night manager’s face when he had walked into the hotel and then someone helping him into the lift. He smelt disinfectant and toothpaste and wondered if Real Madrid could actually win the Champions League.
He crushed his cigarette into an ashtray by the door and pulled out his wallet and leafed through it and found the car-park ticket. He was glad he’d got into the habit of writing down the number of the space on the ticket.
Chapter 29
Saturday, April 27th 2013
Forty minutes later he was on the M62 heading for home.
Home. He let the word resound in his head for a minute and then forgot it.
He listened to the news on the radio.
The Prime Minister talked about sending troops to Syria and about Luis Suarez’s ban for biting an opponent. A fire at a mental hospital in Moscow had killed 38 people and a couple of American tourists had survived by swimming in the Caribbean for 13 hours after their boat capsized.
There was nothing about Sarah.
Suddenly he was very hungry. He hadn’t eaten anything since the Indonesian food about 18 hours previously. Or had there been a snack on the plane? He couldn’t remember. There was a Mars bar in the glove compartment and he gobbled it down and was sure he could feel the sugar hit his bloodstream.
He turned off the motorway at exit 24 and turned down the hill and into the valley that was beginning to feel very familiar again.
He drove back to the gastro-pub. The woman at reception took one look at him and asked if he was all right. He said he was fine and she said she was surprised to see him but they’d kept his room, even though he hadn’t showed up for two nights. He thanked her and said he’d forgotten to tell them he was going away but that it was all right because he needed somewhere to stay and he was just going to get something to eat and wasn’t it cold today?
The woman smiled at him and he knew she thought he was an idiot.
His memory was fucked, he thought. And he was feeling restless and irritated. He hadn’t wanted to stay in Amsterdam but he wasn’t sure what he was doing back in Halifax. Maybe he was losing it. Maybe he was concussed. Maybe he was just very hungry.
He ordered Cumberland sausage and mash in the bar and felt better as he ate it and was glad his sense of humour was still intact, because the two-page presentation of the various ingredients’ heritage and lineage was highly amusing… at least to his ungreenwashable and cynical frame of mind…
He took his bags from the car and went up to his room and ran a bath, adding all the bath salts and foam and gel he could find.
He undressed and climbed into the bath and soaked up the warmth and felt his muscles relax and he watched the suds sink into the water and was reminded of Susan Kenworthy… and then he thought of Sarah and he felt the horrible question circling round the hole in his head again.
He got dried and dressed and took two more pills and he went to see Dave Middleton.
It was almost two thirty when he pulled up outside the police station. He’d tried calling Dave at home, but his wife Cath had said he was at work. Paul had introduced himself and she had said hello and they chatted briefly.
As he climbed the steps to the second floor, Paul reminded himself to say something to Dave about her being pregnant, and to be thrilled for them. He couldn’t remember how he and Dave had left it the last time they spoke, or the last time they’d met. Or even when that had been…
He knocked on the door and heard a mumbled voice and walked in.
“Jesus, what the fuck happened to you?”
Dave was in his shirt sleeves, standing at a filing cabinet, putting some papers in a folder.
Paul looked at Dave’s uniform jacket hanging over the back of a chair. He ran his fingers over the insignia.
“What are you now, a DIC?”
“Right… a DCI… and you’re the one who looks like a dick, what happened to your head? And your face looks like someone’s taken a cheese grater to it…”
“I saw Sarah.”
“What?”
“I saw Sarah?”
“Where?”
“Amsterdam.”
Dave stared at him.
“When?”
“Erm… yesterday, I think.”
“You saw Sarah… in Amsterdam… yesterday… and you’re only telling me now!”
“It would appear so.”
“Have you told anyone else?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“That’s a good question.”
Dave sat down and indicated the chair opposite him. Paul took it.
“Fucking hell, Paul, shape up… are you sure it was her?”
Paul heard the doubt in his voice and hated it.
He shrugged.
“What does the shrug mean? That you’re not sure or you’re just telling me to fuck off because maybe I’m doubting your observational skills?”
Paul almost smiled. He shrugged again.
“Jesus…”
Dave took in Paul’s scars and bruises.
“What happened to you anyway?”
“She tried to kill me.”
Dave sat back in his chair and clasped his hands together in his lap.
“I see.”
“She hit me with something, on the head, maybe a baseball bat, it seems to be the thing most people want to use on me, and then she pushed me down a shaft into a sort of drainage tunnel, where I nearly drowned.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, mate, but have you seen a doctor?”
<
br /> Paul looked at him.
“Actually, I have, yes.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he thinks Madrid’ll sneak it in extra-time.”
Dave took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Ok. Just as a matter of interest, when was the last time you saw Sarah Hartley. I mean…”
“You mean in a real-life situation, where there were other people present who could corroborate my testimony?”
“Something like that.”
“That would have been at Mum and Dad’s funeral in 2001. For about 50 seconds.”
“12 years ago. 50 seconds.”
“About that, yeah.”
“And she would have been… what? 19 at the time?”
“19 and a half.”
“And she’s 31 now.”
“32 next month.”
“Do you think she’ll have changed at all?”
Paul thought about it for a moment and then shrugged again.
Dave was watching him closely. His eyes fell to his desk and he picked up a pen and twirled it between his fingers.
“People do change.”
“I dare say.”
“But you’re convinced it was her?”
“I saw a slim blonde woman, whose age I would put at around 31 or 32. I saw Sarah Hartley’s nose and mouth and cheekbones and chin, and Sarah Hartley’s eyebrows and nostrils and lips and even her ears, I think… and she saw me. She waved at me. I waved back. We communicated. She recognised me and I recognised her. I’m not fucking with you, Dave.”
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