The fly had landed again, on the man’s bloodied ear now. It crawled inside. He was offered a university place but couldn’t go because he had to stay behind and run the family business, man the oven, bake the bread, because his father couldn’t, because he’d died, died sitting upright, in a dark brown armchair …
No, no, no.
‘Joe?’ Lancaster was using an annoying snap-out-of-it voice.
‘Yeah?’
The man let out a long sigh. Was he tired? Bored? Did he wish he hadn’t done it, hadn’t joined the army to prove something to his father, who was dead already, and therefore not even able to take offence?
No, no, no.
The fly had done his time inside the ear and was taking a walk up that excellent sideburn and across the man’s forehead.
‘They’re waiting for us,’ said Lancaster. ‘Come on.’
‘Check out his beard.’
‘What?’
‘It’s great, isn’t it.’
‘Fuck his beard. Come on.’
‘Sure,’ Joseph said. ‘Just give me a minute.’
He didn’t really want to do it.
So he didn’t have to.
He could stop himself!
Here’s how: by folding his arms, burying his hands under his armpits, holding himself in place.
It wasn’t that hard.
But then the tip of the man’s tongue sort of poked out between his black lips and everything was obvious. Katja’s children were dead, but this chap here wasn’t, not yet.
‘I never did find out what happened to that bloody seagull,’ Joseph explained.
‘What seagull?’
‘There could have been some sort of miracle. I mean, I don’t actually know.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘If we go inside now and come back out later he may be gone.’
‘Whatever, come on.’
Joseph reached into his webbing. Lancaster saw what he was doing and said something, but Joseph was already pointing the man’s pistol at the fly on his head. Lancaster lunged at him, shouting something Joseph never heard, because he shouted it too late.
52
Listen to the heating pipes, and the wind through the tall trees in Emily’s garden. Feel the thin soft sheets.
There’s the seagull at head height in the bush, with its floppy wing.
And here is a shadow spreading out from under the fully slumped dead man Joseph shot.
There’s a voice, too, tiny, objecting.
It’s Lancaster: he’s a million miles away, and coming to get you!
‘What the fuck did you do that for?’
Joseph shrugs beneath the covers, pulling them up to his chin.
‘Why? Oh Christ! Why!’
‘It’s pretty straightforward.’
‘No. No. No. I can’t believe you just did that. No.’
‘You shot him first.’
‘What?’
‘He was dying anyway, I think,’ Joseph says eventually.
‘You moron! That’s not the point!’
‘What is the point, then?’
‘You killed him on the ground, right in front of me. What are we supposed to do now? You’re expecting me to just … I don’t have a choice now, do I?! What am I supposed to do?’
There’s no answer, not in the treetops, not beneath the covers.
53
What happened next? For at least a minute, nothing at all. Joseph and Lancaster just stood over the dead man taking him in. Joseph had shot him in the head and now he had a big triangular blackness above his right eyebrow, a cross between a hole and a split.
Baker of bread and children.
Wrestler, aspiring student, swimmer, coach, whatever.
All irrelevant now, what with the missing part of his head.
Now that he was no longer breathing, Joseph marvelled at the new stillness. It had less to do with the quiet and more with a sense of calm.
The fly had gone, he noticed.
‘Give me the gun, Joe.’
‘Eh?’
Lancaster’s face was grey. Joseph felt suddenly sorry for him. But then Lancaster shook his head and, woah! Joseph’s pity soured to defiance.
‘Oh come on. A fucking oven.’
‘We don’t know for sure who—’
‘Apples.’
‘We don’t know.’
‘Of course we do.’
Lancaster drew himself an inch taller. ‘We have to radio this in.’
Joseph looked at him carefully and saw Lancaster’s Adam’s apple move in his throat, giving him away.
‘Radio what in exactly?’
‘Don’t be a dick.’
Joseph turned from Lancaster to the dead man to the brick outbuilding, with its door still ajar, and the two sacks in front it, each covering a dead burned child, and he looked at the blank-faced back of the house through which the children’s mother and aunt had obediently retreated, and said, ‘Of course. Let’s call it in.’
Lancaster nodded in relief.
‘It being the patrol, the women by the church, the trail here, the contact, clearing the house and finding the dead kids in the oven.’
Lancaster tipped his helmet back and ran his hand over his face.
Joseph knelt beside the dead man and used a clean bit of his trouser leg to wipe down the pistol’s handle and the trigger. Fiddly work! He persevered.
‘Seriously?’ said Lancaster.
‘I’m just giving him his gun back,’ Joseph said, laying the pistol in the man’s hand. There was a ring on one of his fingers. They wouldn’t stay clenched, but no matter; Joseph managed to wedge a forefinger in behind the trigger guard. ‘Apart from this one, yours is the only gun anyone fired,’ he said. ‘And you unloaded in self-defence, because this fucker ambushed us. Nobody has to know anything other than that, do they? We found three dead bodies when the shooting stopped, one of whom belonged to the guy who’d been firing at us, trying to stop us discovering the other two, who were kids. Go find the radio. Call it in.’
Lancaster’s face looked like it was made out of crumpled paper.
Meanwhile, Joseph, well, he was brick-built, certain!
And yet …
Joseph put an arm around Lancaster. He caught the acrid smell of sweaty fear, but couldn’t tell who it was coming from.
‘It’s the bigger picture that counts, Ben. Why did you come out today? We’re not just tourists. No need to make a drama out of this. We’ve sorted something here.’ Why did his throat feel so tight?
A wood pigeon cooed in the distance, the exact same sound the wood pigeons made in the trees outside the dormitory window at school.
‘You watched me do it.’
‘I tried—’
‘Tried what?’
‘I don’t believe this.’
‘You saw the whole thing.’
‘I—’
‘Oversaw it, almost.’
Lancaster shook his head but said, ‘Okay, all right, all right.’
‘What we have to do now is carry on carrying on.’
Lancaster nodded without conviction.
‘Let’s make a start, then.’
54
Joseph wakes late to see a bar of sunlight falling through the gap between the curtains. He swings his legs out of the bed. They look pale and white and old, unfit for purpose. He’s lost weight: he can see his hip bones. Once he has dressed he heads downstairs, following the pleasing smell of stew. Emily insists he eats a bowlful, and even offers him the use of her laptop. She’s probably hoping that he’ll make contact with someone, but once online he taps straight through to Reuters to check for news about the bank.
There’s nothing.
Still nothing!
Damn Lancaster: it’s an incredible cover-up he’s orchestrating. Incredible and … disheartening. The only explanation Joseph can think of is that they’re waiting until they’ve got him in hand to parade as the guilty man, before they reveal the full exte
nt of what he’s done.
But he knows that makes no sense.
It’s just that the only other explanation is too depressing to articulate.
Yes, they’ll be redoubling their efforts to find him before the story breaks itself.
But he’ll frustrate them.
He’ll show them by pulling off Plan B.
Which means, yes, he’ll actually disappear.
To Southampton!
At least that makes scent.
Sense.
Actually, both!
He needs to throw them off the scent, doesn’t he? And the best way of doing that? By laying a false trail. To a dead end. Literal death would be great, but there’s the problem of a corpse, and it’s good that he still thinks it a problem, isn’t it, because it means he doesn’t want to provide one.
So either he has to be presumed dead, or just gone, as in abroad, far away.
In Southampton he can feign both happenings: slip the net or die trying, appearance-wise, at least.
Joseph mops up the last of the stew with a piece of granary bread. Emily is giving him a bit more Geoffrey detail, probably to make him feel he too can pull through, but he’s not really listening, because he’s thinking instead, reaching the conclusion that for his plan to work he needs to lay down a big marker in Southampton, making it very clear that he, Joseph Ashcroft, was there. How best to do that? He comes up with an idea and discounts it because, listen to her, she’s offering him as much time as he needs to recuperate, and damnit, her kindness tastes of Worcester sauce, so wholesome, making super gratitude the right response, not theft.
Theft? No, no, no: he’s only going to borrow it.
She’ll report it missing. It’ll be found. They’ll work out that it was him, Joseph Ashcroft, who took it. Job done.
There’s the key on its hook by the door.
Coffee? He doesn’t mind if he does.
And sooner or later, yes, he hears her apologise for rabbiting on so, and saying she’ll leave him be while she does a few chores.
Chores. Great word: Joseph hasn’t heard it in ages. Bankers don’t really think about chores, other than to outsource them.
Off she goes, wearing her little slippers.
And wow, he feels bad in advance.
But it’s only a car!
A nice red classic and therefore an obvious one.
Plus her dead husband’s pride and joy.
He should leave her a note. But there’s not really time and what would he say other than sorry. In the utility room he puts on his clean coat and laces his boots and shoulders his satchel and there are the keys to the Merc, right there on the hook with the brass chicken’s head, or at least they were, because they’re already in his ungrateful thieving hand now, which is entirely justified given the wider scheme of things.
Ah, the wider scheme. It’s like a park, or a playground, for outfits like Airdeen Clore to do their stuff in.
This is different.
He skulks out of the back door, careful to walk on the flagstones instead of the white gravel. Quickly he reaches the car, crosses to the driver’s door, unlocks it, climbs in, shoots his bag into the footwell and bends forward to feel for the little lever that will let the seat slide back on its runners, and it’s as he’s fumbling for it, head to one side, that he sees Emily in an upstairs window. She’s looking right at him. His fingers find the knob. He eases the seat away from the pedals, eyes still locked on the old lady.
Is she smiling?
Damnit: there’s a hot sensation in his neck and face.
He should just climb out and apologise: I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking.
But he doesn’t. Can’t. He’s done it now. He’s slotted the key into the ignition and turned it to hear the engine purr, and he’s let off the handbrake and looked up again – he couldn’t help it – as the car eases forward.
Framed in the window, Emily waves.
What an ocean-going schmuck he is!
Ha.
If he wasn’t so hot with guilt, he’d be able to enjoy the ocean-going thought as funny, given that he’s actually going to the ocean, or the sea, at least, Channel, whatever.
Just shut up!
She’ll get the car back.
Just – after he’s gunned it down this lane, out onto the open road – later.
55
They crunched back through the house over so much broken glass it seemed they’d shot up a glaziers, with water from a holed tank or pipe dripping through the hall ceiling, diluting the blood on the floor, each of them carrying a child’s corpse in a sack, Joseph’s stupidly light in his arms, so light in fact that it couldn’t be a real body, could it, except that it was, and they found the women with Reid and the others, and perhaps because of the morphine they’d given him, or perhaps not, when Reid worked out what was in the bags he flipped out in all the wrong directions, accusing everyone – the little crowd that had gathered at a respectful distance, poor Katja and Anis, even Lancaster and Joseph – of it being their fault.
‘Who are you people?’ he shouted. ‘You’re monsters, that’s who!’
Joseph didn’t disagree, just stood marvelling at the scene, leaving it to Lancaster to calm the man down, which he did by digging a roll of wine gums out of his webbing and offering it to him. A wine gum. When Joseph saw the packet, steady in Lancaster’s hand, he knew, as in knew absolutely, that Lancaster would keep the secret, tell no one, come what may.
And he was right: neither man mentioned it ever again.
56
The old car drives like a powerboat on a glassy lake. It takes Joseph a while to get used to the steering. Feels like he has to turn in before each corner, set the course for the bend ahead. Soon he finds himself on a straighter dual carriageway. The hedge alongside it is newly buzz-cut: raw white wood flashes among the dark stems. He heads south.
He turns on the radio for the news, but it’s dominated by a story about another ancient DJ added to the list of 1970s perverts. For years those guys must’ve thought they were home free. Now they’re paying.
Stuff catches up with you in the end.
Except when it doesn’t.
When Joseph reaches Southampton, he follows signs for a multistorey car park and runs the old Mercedes up the concrete ramp to the top floor, the tyres squealing even at this low speed as he uncoils the car round the tight bends. They need a top-up of air. If he’d noticed earlier, he could have sorted that for her. He rolls to a stop in an empty bay. No rush now. He has bags of time before the last ferry, which sets off after dark. He uses the time to write Emily that note, combining an apology with thanks (she waved him off, after all!), and adds a postscript suggesting she has the tyres looked at. He puts the seat back and whiles away the rest of the day in the old army lying-in-wait mode, plus, admit it, a fair bit of napping.
Excellent.
He even dreams.
Of Naomi, plus Lara.
He has to make her a costume for a school event, World Book Day or possibly Comic Relief. She and her little friend Harriet, the one with the glasses, have decided to go as Laurel and Hardy, so he makes a fat suit by putting Lara in one of his old Jermyn Street shirts and stuffing it full of balled-up pages from the Financial Times. He and Naomi aren’t speaking, and the whole hands-on-father costume initiative is supposed to encourage her to break her silence, and it does, but not in the way he expects: she stops en route through the kitchen, laughs at Lara, and congratulates him on dressing her up as a fat cat.
Joseph wakes up.
Naomi.
When she realises what he’s done.
She’ll be so cowed.
No, no, no!
So proud.
It’s dark enough now, so he sets off to case the port. And yes, it’s pretty much as he remembered, because yes, he did his due diligence. Not just for this trip, no. Beforehand, back in the day, when he bought this port, lock, stock and funnels. Not for himself – what would he want with a port? – but
for a port-keen client. Bought two others as well that summer, in fact, but this was the only one they persuaded him to visit in person, suffer the guided tour, dot the portholes and cross the anchors, so to speak. The bloke who showed the team around had a large nose and took his job incredibly seriously. Joseph had to pinch his inner thigh to stay awake through the grindingly slow tour of the loading bays, cargo containers, ships’ berths and so on.
Now he has to find the right ferry. That one, the smaller of the two, parked nearest the eastern end of the horseshoe. He hangs back from the relevant ticket office until there’s no queue, waits a moment longer, then advances. The woman in the booth has taken advantage of the customer gap to open a packet of mini sausage rolls. She bites into one as he arrives and turns away to chew.
Because some people are just good, polite people!
Above her and to the right, a security camera.
Politely now: smile.
Joseph books a one-way ticket and holds his breath as he pays with his credit card, half expecting Lancaster to have cancelled it, but no, of course he hasn’t, sale accepted, because this is exactly what the crafty bastard will have been hoping, that he, Joseph, will run out of cash and slip up. In fact, he only has a few notes left, so the credit card is actually quite necessary. To buy the ticket he has to give the woman his name, address, inside leg measurement, everything.
In for a penny!
Details in the system: electronic breadcrumbs. Meaning he doesn’t have much time. Lancaster will already be pecking them up. Right now there will be people en route to the port, the ship, Joseph, and even if they don’t manage to board before the ship sails, which in all likelihood they will, Lancaster will waste no time in organising a reception party in Dieppe.
Escape and Evasion Page 13