by Jack Benton
In the reception area, another clerk was talking on the phone, a worried expression on his face. Slim made a quick assessment of the situation. He had paid for a week in advance, and that week wasn’t yet up. He owed no money, and had everything of importance to him in the bag at his side.
He didn’t need to be answering police questions right now.
‘I’m checking out,’ he said, waving his bag towards the door. ‘Thank you. I enjoyed my stay.’
Without looking back, he shouldered his bag and headed out into the night. As he walked across the parking area towards the bus stop he glanced back. Several staff members watched him from the entrance.
Had he overreacted? Maybe so, but he couldn’t recall what he might or might not have done. He knew, however, as he reached the bus shelter with the timetable sandwiched between two plates of glass, that it was either too late or too early to get transport anywhere. Instead, he simply carried on walking, wondering, as the darkness closed in around him, which was more likely: he was now homeless, a fugitive, or both.
26
It wasn’t long before his phone started to ring. First was the inevitable: Kim, no doubt annoyed at being pulled from her bed at such an ungodly hour, was unable to hide the frustration behind her concerned message. She demanded that he get in contact, and had the voicemail not cut off, Slim suspected it may have been followed by a threat of resignation.
The next three calls were all from the same number. The first two hung up quickly, but the third went to voicemail. Waiting until it cut off, Slim listened in alarm to the voice of a police officer, urging him to pick up. They were worried about him, concerned for his safety. Slim knew the drills, however. They wanted to reel him in.
It seemed that walking out of a hotel in the middle of the night was now a matter for the police. Slim wished the management could have just let him go, but there might be more than he remembered. His memory after going into the bar was fleeting at best. What else might he have done?
On the other side of an industrial estate still under construction, he paused in a lay-by where three large lorries stood parked, their lights off and curtains pulled across their windows, then did his usual checks. No damage to his hands. Nor to his face. Everything of value was on his person, and there were no calls on his phone for which he couldn’t recall a reason.
Safe … or was he?
What else, in his drunken idiocy, might he have done he could no longer remember?
The computer. The sent message.
He needed to know what it had said, what implications it might have. For now, though, he had to keep his head down.
A siren rose in the distance, increased in volume as it approached, then faded as the car roared away in the direction of Plymouth.
If he was really wanted, soon they would get smart and begin a proper search. He made his way to a bus shelter at the end of the lay-by where a single dim solar light illuminated a timetable. He set down his bag, pulled out a sheet of paper, then copied down all the important numbers from his phone’s contacts list.
A little farther on, he crossed a small bridge over a brook rushing through rocks in the direction of the River Dart. He lifted the phone, gave the old Nokia a wistful smile, then tossed it into the water.
It was like throwing away an old friend. Slim watched the still-lit display jostling through the water until the light went out, then he shouldered his bag and moved on.
He took a lane heading off the main road as soon as he could. He had studied tracking during his military training and knew he needed to leave no trail. The phone was gone now but if the police really wanted to find him they would trace his route. He doubted he was worthy of a helicopter, but he might warrant a couple of cars if the police had felt it necessary to contact Kim. He kept to the centre of the road, avoiding the verges on either side where he could leave prints. Then, at a suitable gateway, where a wide field sloped down towards the river valley, he pulled off his boots, pushed them into his bag, and continued in his socks.
Shoe prints or even those left by bare feet were easily traceable, but no one ever looked for sock prints, because, frankly, it was the last thing a fugitive considered. It felt oddly satisfying to feel the press of damp earth beneath his feet as he skirted the edge of the field, using the hedgerow as a guide. In the distance, he glimpsed the lights of Dartmouth through the trees, the wide, glittering expanse of the River Dart, and the glow of Kingswear on the opposite hill.
He knew where he needed to go. With muddy socks pushed into a coat pocket and boots back on over his bare feet, he pulled a handful of change from his pocket and caught the first morning ferry from Dartmouth across the river, standing among a huddle of reluctant workers with frosty breath, the chill sea breeze and the salty air working together to keep the exhaustion away. In Kingswear he was too early for the first train, so he followed the railway line in a shambling stumble, keeping his head down, his eyes on his feet while the sky lightened above him and shadows crept back beneath trees and stones.
His investigation called for a dramatic change of angle, one he could not achieve by following the rules. He had always had an opinion of a stubborn case that sometimes it needed to be kicked, broken open, often in a way which might leave him on the wrong side of the law. If you could expose the soft underbelly hidden below the armour, you could go for the kill. It had worked for Slim before, and now, as the sun began to flicker through the trees, bringing with it the day’s first warmth, Slim hoped it would work for him again.
The calls of the waking birds provided a pleasant accompaniment as he headed down the forest path near the entrance to Greenway and followed the line of the old railway cutting. Sunlight sparkled off the exposed steel of the collapsed bridge as Slim turned off the path and waded through the undergrowth.
He had drunk a lot. Far more than he had on any recent binge, because even though he was sobering up, he still felt that vacancy the booze brought propelling him forward, pushing him into the very grip of his darkest fears as he stepped over the threshold of the abandoned house and set his bag down.
Whether he had seen movement, whether the fishermen had seen lights, and whether or not any of it was connected to the apparent suicides of Max Carson and Irene Long, it didn’t matter. He was here, in the very eye of his fear.
When he woke he would have to face it. For now though, all that mattered was that he was weary beyond words. He pushed through a broken door into a back room, cleared weeds and other debris off what remained of an old metal-framed bed, then spread out his coat and lay down.
27
He awoke sometime in the afternoon. The thumping headache initially overruled the fear of waking in an unknown place or of who might now be on his trail, but once he had waded down through the undergrowth outside and taken a drink from the brook pooling behind the dam made by the collapsed bridge, he took better stock of his predicament.
Returning to the house, he now saw it for what it was, just a tumbledown ruin perhaps fifty years empty. Only the barest minimum of glass remained in any of the windows. In the building’s centre a wooden staircase that rose to a second floor was partially collapsed, although a second stone staircase on the outer side wall still stood. The downstairs consisted of two large rooms on either side of the entrance, with a kitchen, a utility room, and a small bedroom through a doorway behind the central stairs.
It had the look of a smallholding, and may have stood for some centuries before the construction of Greenway’s Victorian elegance on the hillside above it. While the room to the left had a paved stone floor, the one to the right was dirt, perhaps once used to shelter livestock. The kitchen at the back retained nothing of its former glory besides the rusted remains of an old iron stove and a few piles of sawdust with metal frames emerging from them like the bones of old robots. Slim felt like an archaeologist as he poked through the rooms, looking for evidence of recent habitation or traces of long-gone residents.
He found some, but only what most dete
ctives would consider contamination. A few discarded cans, confectionery wrappers, an empty, faded tobacco packet. The embers of a fire in the corner of one downstairs room. From the subsequent decay of the remaining kindling, Slim estimated it was a year old at least, and therefore unlikely the reason for the lights the fishermen had mentioned. For those he found little other evidence. A couple of heavy boot prints that could have been made by policemen during the recent investigation into Carson’s death, but they stopped in the dirt inside the front entrance and went no farther. Otherwise, the only thing that even resembled a print was a couple of muddy splodges on the lower steps of the central staircase, which were fanned out as though made by a large water bird. Slim could imagine a duck, fresh from sifting through the marshland behind the collapsed bridge, taking a couple of steps up before thinking better of it.
Slim used the outside staircase to reach the upper floor. Besides a few loose stones, it had stood the test of time with apparent ease. Here he saw more signs of muck as though animals wading through the marsh had sought out the higher vantage point.
The upstairs floorboards were in surprisingly good condition except in one corner where the roof had partially collapsed and a tree had grown up, branches reaching through holes in the wall as though trying to reclaim it. The rest of the floor was scattered with leaf litter and bird droppings, while through the hole in the roof Slim heard a faint rustle that suggested roosting bats.
Two windows, set low into the wall, offered a view over the inlet and the curve of the River Dart angling off to the south. The collapsed bridge was visible at the end of a tangle of vegetation.
Tree branches overhung the second of the windows, obstructing the view, so Slim knelt down to see better. He lifted a hand and rested it on the stone window ledge, looking down as he found dried mud crusted over the edge.
A small fishing boat was making its way up the river. Slim watched it chug through the water against the tide, the river splashing whitewater against its hull, and wondered if the lights the fishermen had claimed to have seen had come from this very spot.
28
He didn’t wait until dark before getting to work. Using skills he had learned during his time in the army, he began to set traps and alarms around the house to warn him of the approach of any strangers. He set his traps in ways that looked natural, trip wires and subtly placed items photographed with his digital camera, the later movement of which would notify him of trespass.
Then, with his location secured, he set about extending his knowledge of his immediate surroundings, moving in a gradual circle through the undergrowth, working his way down as far as the water’s edge, then up through the woods, so close to the borders of Greenway’s manicured gardens that through the trees he could see tourists moving about. As the shadows lengthened across the lawns and pathways, the evening sun glinting off pale jackets and slacks, they looked like the ghosts he realised he was hunting.
At five p.m. the house closed up for the night, but with a few hours of midsummer daylight to go, Slim set the second stage of his reconnaissance into action.
He had two requirements for his survival in the pseudo wilderness by the shores of the River Dart. One was a way to continue his investigation, and the other was the more pressing need for sustenance.
Greenway, a sprawling National Trust property complete with a visitor centre and a café set up in an old stables area, had the means to provide both.
Patience. The ability to sit still for hours and simply observe was a military-learned skill Slim had spent twenty years forgetting, but now it was needed, it came back easily. Cameras surrounded the property. Slim crept as close as he could without revealing himself from the undergrowth, then made a mental note of their exact locations and their viewing range.
Those most likely to record his movements were fixed level with the second floor, one with a view of the outer courtyard, one of the approach road, another of the main entrance. However, it would be easy to hide his identity, and it was unlikely there was active security on a historical property. As long as he offered no clear identification and set off no alarms, he could move about without concern.
Slim retreated to his observer’s position, again considering the security aspects as a whole, and what would be the easiest way to enter undetected.
Costs had been cut in subtle ways, he soon discovered, after making a circuit of the property from the cover of the gardens. While the building had an alarm system, it only extended through the ground floor and the main windows of the first. With a way up and the right equipment, Slim could easily gain access through one of the narrow hall windows, but at the moment he had no interest in the main building.
The visitor centre was set up in a converted outhouse. Where solid stone walls hadn’t been available, prefab plastic and glass had been installed. A camera covered the front entrance, but by climbing over a wall farther along, Slim was able to approach from the unmonitored rear.
A single camera attached to a corner of the house covered the visitor centre and rear gardens, but a line of hedge gave enough cover for Slim to get within a stone’s throw of the wall, and a shimmy across a lawn in the dark got him close to the doors.
He had noticed the telltale wires on the front entrance to hint at an alarm, but on the rear there was nothing. Hidden by shadows, Slim pulled what looked like a small plastic spatula from his coat pocket and used it to pick out the rubber lining surrounding a side window about fifty centimetres by thirty. With a piece of cloth he lifted out a single pane of glass, left it propped against the wall then removed his boots and climbed inside.
He had dried out his socks over a window ledge earlier in the day and shaken out the dust. Now they were clean enough to leave no trace of his passing as he climbed inside.
Inside the staff office, the only light came from a sliver of moon across the floor. Slim took out his digital camera and used the display light to collect serial numbers, Wi-Fi codes, and model IDs from the backs of two computers.
Satisfied with his catch, he retreated to his point of entry and replaced the pane of window glass after climbing out. Careful inspection would reveal what he had done, but he hoped that the volunteer staff were not vigilant enough to notice a loose pane of glass.
Feeling happier than he had in a while, he slipped away into the night.
29
‘Don, it’s me.’
‘Slim! Mate, where are you? How did you get on with that information I set you?’
Slim looked through the dirty glass of the phone box window at a car passing the Sevenoaks Inn and heading across a road bridge into Totnes’s eastern suburbs. It was unlikely the phone was being monitored, but discretion was still best. He let Don’s questions ride, then said, ‘I need some computer gear assessed. Specifically, I need to gain entry to a system, and I need it to be secure and non-traceable.’
‘You want to crack their files?’
Slim thought of the National Trust computer, of what hideous secrets it was likely to contain, and smiled.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I just need to use it. I don’t have access to a computer right now and I need to get online.’
‘What can you give me?’
‘I have serial numbers, network identification, that kind of thing.’
Don let out a barely audible sigh. ‘That’s all? All right, fax it through. I can’t promise, but I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Thanks.’
Slim hung up. Glad the incessant rain gave him a reason to cover his face, he walked along the winding Ticklemore Street and turned on to Victoria Street where he found Totnes public library. There, he faxed Don what information he had, then made up a library card using his fake ID for Mike Lewis, BBC researcher. He checked out a couple of books on local history and headed back out into the rain.
Half an hour later, his conscience getting the better of him, he slipped into a different phone box and called Kim.
‘Mr. Hardy! Are you all right? Where have you been?’
‘I’m fine, Kim—’
‘I must say, Mr. Hardy, that you’re really stretching the limits of the people around you with this behaviour—’
‘I’m sorry, but I can’t explain right now. I just want you to know that I’m fine and not to worry.’
‘Well, of course I’m pleased to hear that, but I’ve had the police on the phone. You walked out of a hotel in the middle of the night after trashing the bar.’
Slim winced. ‘I don’t remember that.’
‘You’ll only make things worse if you don’t hand yourself in.’
‘I can’t right now. I have things going on.’
‘What things?’
‘I can’t say. But I’m safe. And I’ll be in touch again soon.’
‘Mr. Hardy, you’re insufferable—’
Slim ended the call. He hung up the receiver with a sigh then wiped the handset clean of prints with a rag. Adjusting his hood, he headed out.
So, he was wanted for questioning. He had no recollection of trashing the hotel bar, but a charge of public disorder and criminal damage was preferable to being linked to a possible murder.
Concerned he was leaving too wide a trail, he caught a local bus which dropped him off in Paignton.
There, he found another phone box outside the railway station and called another old friend, Ben Holland. Formerly Slim’s squad leader during his military days, Ben had left the army and taken up a position in the Metropolitan Police. Calling him was a risk; if there was a warrant out for his arrest, Ben might find himself in a conflict of loyalties. They hadn’t been such great friends that Slim could guarantee Ben’s discretion.
‘Ben, it’s Slim. How are you?’