by Max China
He flashed back to the shock he felt at the blow that little bitch had dealt him. His knees had buckled to the ground. The will that carried him through many a hard fight had been in him as he’d fought to stay conscious. The pain! And she’d wanted to do him with the bat again and again – and if he hadn’t moved, she would have done. Bitch! Instinct had taken over; he found his feet and made his escape.
Scrutinizing himself in the mirror, he then put it down and removed a passport secreted in the kitbag’s lining. Opening it, he set about recreating the look he’d given himself when the photograph had been taken. The first eyebrow hair he plucked made his eyes water. Shit! He debated whether to shave them off and pencil them in. Deciding the effect wouldn’t be the same, he endured the prolonged process of plucking, thinning and reshaping them into higher arches formed within the former lines of each brow. Half an hour later, after shaving his moustache, he applied the finishing make-up touches before placing a long black wig on his head. Turning left and right, he admired his handiwork in the mirror.
Finally, he stripped and dressed in the dark floral sarong he’d just purchased, along with flip-flops. He stared at his toes. Forgot nail varnish! Then he grinned. Let’s not get too carried away, Willy-Boy!
‘What do you do when all else fails, James?’ he said, mimicking an Englishwoman’s cut-glass accent.
‘Why, Miss Moneypenny,’ he said, in his best Sean Connery voice. ‘When all else fails, by drawing attention to myself in the right way, I hide in plain sight.’
Once he’d packed all he needed into the large, rainbow-striped beach bag he’d bought earlier, he dumped everything else into a refuse bin. After finding his way back to the main road, he fixed a look of disdain on his face and ignored the curious glances he drew from passers-by as he flip-flopped along, heading in the direction of the ferry port.
Chapter 26
Kennedy and I were friends, rivals, and colleagues: not necessarily in that order. Boyle had manipulated things so that it looked like poor Kennedy was behind a lot of the crime he was trying to solve himself. I was fooled, and I know Theresa was too. He created tensions between us and then exploited them. Meanwhile, Kennedy didn’t feel able to confide in anyone. It was really sad. And do I feel guilty?
Every day I sit in his office.
DCI John Tanner
‘The passport belongs to the man I’m looking for, but this is not him.’ What was it the German woman told him when she translated the book? Trained in espionage and counter- insurgency ... He has another passport!
‘But that means—’ Sayeed didn’t get the chance to finish.
‘I need to get to the terminal,’ Mohand barked, ‘and quickly!’
Sayeed flicked his shoulder. ‘What are you waiting for? My car is round the corner. Let’s go!’ He then gave orders to the fresh police arrivals. ‘Get those people back. This is a crime scene!’
Pushing through the crowd, Mohand and Sayeed passed another two gendarmes and the ambulance crew coming the other way. ‘Don’t disturb the body,’ Sayeed said, glancing at his watch. ‘There’s nothing you can do, believe me. Call forensics. I’ll be back in a few minutes.’
Although it wasn’t a technique he’d employed often, he’d learned years before how to stand out by attracting attention, and yet remain invisible because of it.
Apart from a few cursory glances, people in the queue shunned him, turning to look the other way, purposefully avoiding his brazen gaze. Shit or bust.
He handed his passport to the officer in the booth, who looked up and checked the photograph matched the individual. Maintaining a calm and professional air, he double-checked and stared with lingering scrutiny at the parody of a woman before him; he broke contact immediately as the grotesque lips puckered up and blew him a kiss. Stamping the document and handing it back, he jerked his head, indicating he should go through.
Boyle made his way into the heart of the ferry, unsure whether or not his quarry would have taken this particular boat, or tried to shake him off by catching a later one. It didn’t matter. All thoughts of kidnapping had disappeared. He despised her with a vengeance and he’d kill her at the first opportunity. You can run, bitch, but I’ll getcha in the end.
The police had set up a wandering contingent the other side of customs and x-ray to minimize disruption to the queuing. Here people would be stuck for hours anyway.
Miller could see at least two officers making their way between the waiting vehicles. They ordered a woman out of the car. She had a similar hairstyle to Carla.
‘Get in the boot,’ he urged.
‘What’s happening?’ she said, reacting to his urgent tones.
‘Just do it. They’ve pulled a woman out of a Mercedes up ahead. Now do it quickly!’
‘Someone will see me getting in, won’t they?’ she said, a note of concern in her voice.
‘Not if you fold the back seat down, and get into it from there.’
‘Jesus, Miller,’ she said ruefully, looking down at her new clothes, ‘I hope it’s clean in there.’
She clambered between the front seats into the back, and lifted the button to let the seat next to her down.
‘Go in feet first. That way you can pull it shut after you.’
After a few minutes of close questioning and examination of her passport, the woman was allowed back into her seat.
The officers conversed briefly and then split up.
Miller pushed his sunglasses higher onto the bridge of his nose, cursing himself the instant he did it.
The gendarme’s eye was drawn to him and he made a tight circling gesture with his right hand, indicating Miller should open his window.
‘Passport, Monsieur?’
Miller handed it over.
‘Your sunglasses, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘Take them off.’
Miller obliged.
‘You have been here for only two days, you no like our country?’ Although the officer was smiling, there was a slant of suspicion in his voice. His eyes scanned the inside of the car.
‘I’m meeting friends in Spain, and then we’re all coming back. In the car.’
‘Quicker to fly ...’ the gendarme ventured.
‘Me, I hate the flying. If I can drive, always I drive.’ Miller grinned easily, amused at how his style of speech mirrored that of the other man.
The officer stooped lower, scrutinizing Miller’s face. ‘The trunk. Open it.’
He thinks I’m a drugs mule! For an instant, he saw how the policeman was viewing him and he knew he’d not given anything away. He smiled again, feeling around under the seat. ‘Of course. Do you know where the control is for opening it?’
‘Get out of the car, Monsieur.’
In his mind, Miller played out the scenario to follow. The officer would crouch down for the release button. All the other policemen were distracted by their own tasks. He would chop him just behind the ear ... And then what? Are you crazy? Just tell him what happened.
A voice cried out, ‘Arrêter cet homme! Stop that man!’
The gendarme swivelled around in the direction of the voice. Almost as one, the officers abandoned their previous duties and immediately took up the pursuit.
The running man was built like a rugby prop forward, and was just as evasive.
Miller sighed with relief as whistles blew and all hell broke loose as more people joined the chase.
He relaxed back into his seat. Carla did not say a word, but he imagined her in the boot, seething at hearing the commotion and not knowing what was going on.
A crew member beckoned him forward. He restarted the engine and drove into the bowels of the ship.
Up on the top deck, unnoticed, a tall, dark-skinned ladyboy casually watched the proceedings. The wind played havoc with his long hair and buffeted his loose-fitting traditional clothes. Impassive, he shifted against the railing to face the other way and, hoisting his beach bag over a shoulder, made his way back inside.
Chapter 27
&nbs
p; Sayeed stopped the car in the terminal car park.
‘Mustafa, you understand you are on your own from here?’
‘Sayeed, I’m grateful for your help.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I will wait here and observe,’ he said, pressing his thumb into his navel. ‘I have this feeling, here. He will come.’
Catching a glimpse of the commotion ahead, Mohand leaped from the car, thinking it was Boule running and then, realizing it wasn’t, called out to the nearest officer, ‘You, why are you all chasing that man?’
‘He is a suspect in the murder of a German tourist and wanted—’
‘It is not him.’
‘Then why does he run?’
‘Catch him and you will find out, but he is not the man you are supposed to be looking out for. How long has this debacle been going on for?’
The gendarme shrugged. ‘Five minutes ...’ he said, almost embarrassed.
In one hand, Mohand held his identification aloft and with the other, drew his pistol and fired into the air. The man stopped in his tracks.
A dozen pistols pointed at Mohand. Sayeed stood up, halfway out of the car, leaning on his open door, urging them all to put their guns away. ‘He is one of us! Now arrest that man, before someone gets hurt. Merde!’ Turning to Mohand, he said, ‘You had better keep a low profile after that. If the boss hears, he will—’
‘Leave him to me. I’m only doing what any off-duty policeman would do. Go, Sayeed. Leave me.’
Miller was one of the last to park. Before leaving the vehicle deck, he opened the back door of the car, and pretended he was looking for something, and then unlatched the back seat, pulling it forward just enough so that he could see Carla’s face in the V-shaped aperture. ‘It’s only for an hour,’ he told her; ‘you’ll just have to endure it.’
‘Only an hour! Jeez, what if I need to pee?’ she said.
He laughed. ‘Put some of that muscle control you’ve got down there to good use! You’ve got food and water from that last garage in there with you. Just go easy on the water ...’
‘I hate you!’ she hissed, as he pushed the back of the seat up, not quite closing it.
‘I’ve left it so you can get out if you absolutely have to, but if you do, be careful. OK?’
As Miller stepped out onto the top deck, a crisp breeze snatched at his clothes. He took a deep breath, and walked into the wind towards the front of the boat.
A saltwater tang in the air, tainted by diesel fumes, gave way to a heady cocktail of memories that washed unexpectedly over him as he leaned, elbows resting on the railings, to look down over the side at the turbulent trail of foam the vessel left in its wake.
He hadn’t been on a ferry since Josie died. The churning of the boat as it chugged through the choppy water, and the deep hum of the engines, set off vibrations that combined with his thoughts and started a nausea in his belly. Soon, the sickness would be clawing at the back of his throat.
He looked at his watch. An hour to go. He wasn’t sure he’d make it. Got to stop thinking about it. Got to stop thinking about everything. But it was too late. Overhead a seabird cried. He saw himself on deck, telescoping out until he was but a speck. He felt his knees give way as if disconnected from his senses, and fought to remain upright. Mushin no shin. Mind of no mind. He drifted, and thought once more of Josie; the scene he’d witnessed through the Sister played out in a loop in his head and then stopped. Stella?
Although they hadn’t spoken, Stella knew Miller was OK. She felt it in the air, in the atmosphere. She’d learned to surrender her thoughts to the void, and have faith in what came back. Nothing ... If something was wrong, wouldn’t I feel it? She hesitated; something had come back. This is the last time.
She knew she had to do what she had to do. There’d be no end to it otherwise.
Wandering through the house to Miller’s study, she sat down in his chair and opened his notepad. Picking up a pen, she began to write, pausing often, eventually ripping the sheet from the pad and crumpling it into a ball. It was a process she repeated several times as she sought the right words.
She finished writing, folded the note, and placed it in front of her on his desk, on top of the accumulation of letters that also awaited his return.
She pushed herself away to gather the rejected balls of paper. About to throw them in the wastepaper bin, she noticed a similarly crumpled ball resting at the bottom.
She frowned, wondering if she’d thrown one in separately from the others without thinking. She took it out and studied it. The compression was far tighter than those she had in her other hand. She unwrapped it and smoothed the creases from the page, and Miller’s handwriting was revealed.
Dear Stella,
I wanted to explain something before I left because you were in no mood to listen to me. When I get back, I’ll go through it all then – why I had to finish this thing once and for all.
This will be the last time. I promise.
Bruce x
She sat down again, thinking about what he’d said. Why didn’t he give her the message? Why did he throw it away? Slowly shaking her head, she remembered that he’d said it would be the last time when he’d gone off with Carla to Amsterdam. No, she was right. It would never be over. It suddenly occurred to her that she hadn’t said goodbye. She analysed her thoughts. It isn’t really goodbye, is it? You’re going to see him again. It’s just a warning shot, to give him a scare. You wouldn’t leave him. How could you?
She smiled, recalling how she’d caught him with his beloved seashell at his ear; after such a long separation from it, he was again listening to the whispers it breathed from its mysterious and labyrinthine interior.
‘It’s a return to childhood memories and comforts ...,’ he’d said.
‘I don’t know how you can so fondly stroke that thing, when the last person who held it died in such tragic circumstances.’
He’d looked at her at length. ‘You don’t get it, do you? For a long time I thought when I threw it to Brooks, as he was drowning, that its magic had failed ... I did tell you how I acquired it in the first place, didn’t I?’
‘You did.’
‘Well, when I got it back, at the hospital, it started me thinking that it hadn’t failed at all. My strong association with it kept Brooks and the other boys alive in my memory, frozen in time, just as they were that day ...’ He’d trailed off, allowing his thoughts to catch up.
She’d seen it in the deepening lines of his face as his eyes narrowed, focusing on a point beyond where she was sitting, somewhere distant in his mind.
‘I learned a lot from that experience, but you know what came to me in a flash?’
She shook her head. He clearly hadn’t told her everything.
‘No one ever really dies. We carry a tiny part of them around in here.’ He tapped his temple. ‘In our memories. The more important the person is to us ... the more loved they were, then the stronger this little thing is.’ He glanced at her. ‘You’re not following me, are you?’ He pushed his hands together so that the tips of his fingers and thumbs touched, prayer-like. ‘This is what I think. This little thing, a memory pocket if you like, is always at some point in our minds, depending on where we want it to be, but it’s always there. And someone doesn’t have to be dead for it to work. I’ve said this so often. How many times have you thought about a friend you haven’t seen for years, and then the telephone rings – and it’s them. Or, walking down the high street, you think of a particular person and then turn a corner and bump into them. It happens more often than for mere chance to be at play. The memory pocket is, I believe, both a transmitter and a receiver. Most people have forgotten how to use it. It’s a throwback to our ancestors, to before we communicated with the spoken word. Now we only see it at work rarely, in the quiet moments, when our thinking is abstract, or something. We tap into a sort of cosmic consciousness and through those memories we send a signal and, sometimes, it’s received.’
‘You started out by saying no one ever really dies as long as we remember them ...’
‘That’s right. I also came round to thinking it helps explain why some people say they smelled their mother’s perfume years after she’d died, and felt her presence. The memory pocket came alive and brought her back, just for a few moments, and it works when we most need comfort from despair, or something like that.’
She remembered how it made perfect sense. For her, when Boyle had her in his clutches, it was her father she’d recalled, and she’d gained solace from his memory.
‘And the seashell?’ she’d asked.
‘It had something ... I don’t know how, but it gave Brooks enough tangibility to give it back when I really needed it.’ He’d turned the shell over, wrapped it in a soft black cloth and put it in the top drawer next to where she now sat. ‘I don’t need it for my memories. I never did. I hope I never need it for anything else.’
Her fingers found the handle of the drawer, and she opened it. The shell had gone.
Chapter 28
Lieutenant Mohand knew he couldn’t delay the sailing; he had no jurisdiction. If he wanted to test his hunch, he had no choice other than to go aboard and make the crossing. If Boule wasn’t on the boat, it meant one of two things: he’d either gone and Mohand wouldn’t have to concern himself any further, or he was still in Morocco.
His instincts told him that in the light of the most recent developments, he would be on the ship.
He flashed his ID card and boarded the ferry.
Passengers swarmed in all directions, heading up the stairways that led to the upper decks. He stood to one side. Where would they most likely be? To cover the whole thing on his own was like sweeping for fish with a tiny net on the end of a bamboo cane. If he started at the top and worked his way down, he reasoned, he might have a better chance. The futility of the exercise dawned on him and, at almost the same time, a possible solution to the immediate problem came to mind.