‘Not done much welding, have you?’ shouted Fields from above. ‘It’d stink for a start. Plus, you’d have to be tiny to fit through there.’
She stood on her tiptoes, tracing the outline of the opening. ‘I think I could fit.’
‘Not welding it up again after,’ I said. ‘No way.’
I placed the chair upright, with his body still bound to it, then stood in front of it, mimicking the actions needed to stab him.
‘The killer unzipped the jacket first,’ I muttered.
‘Get a clean thrust at the heart?’ offered Marty.
I nodded. ‘Yeah, I guess. Why zip it up again after?’
‘To hide the knife? Although you found it anyway, so…’
‘Jeez, I guess this is why they have detectives, eh? I’ll never mock them again.’
‘Blood spray?’ asked Marty.
‘You could be onto something. Maybe removing the knife had been a risk, the killer didn’t want a mess everywhere? Didn’t wanna get sprayed with blood themselves I guess.’
‘Exactly. Leave the knife in, zip the bulky jacket up over the handle to hide it from a casual glance, no blood no mess.’ Marty stood and put her hands in her pockets. ‘Most importantly, no mess on the killer.’
‘I think you’re probably right. This detective shit isn’t that hard after all, is it?’
She smiled. ‘Nice to know there’s a career waiting for me when I want to settle down.’
‘Problem we’ve got out here is we don’t have any forensics. I bet there’s DNA all over the body, fingerprints too. I’ve got a cousin in Sheffield who’s a copper, this is his realm, but out here the killer knows there’s fuck-all we can do about it.’
‘There’ll be no autopsy either, I’m guessing?’ Marty said. ‘No time of death, no other clues they throw in on CSI.’
‘Wait, time of death?’
‘I just meant like they do on TV. We already know the time of death, right?’
‘We do,’ I said, patting my wet jeans.
My pockets were empty. I climbed back up into the cabin, waving Fields out of the way to check the desk, nothing there. He watched as I pulled down my bed and shook out the blankets, threw the pillows on the floor, checked the shelves above.
‘What is it?’ Marty shouted.
‘Something that tells us how he was killed?’ asked Fields.
I grabbed the paperback off King’s bed and flipped it open to the first page, my timeline. 03:45, he was locked in, alive. 03:45 to 03:55 – Marty and I were in the saloon. From then on King and I were getting some uncomfortable broken sleep, until I found the body at 6 a.m.
I tore the page from the book and stuffed it into my back pocket. ‘Anyone seen my phone?’
Fields reached up to the shelf above my bed, holding up my satphone.
‘No, no, my iPhone.’ I patted my jeans again.
‘Won’t work out here,’ he said.
I gave him a look, then flipped my bed back up and started to climb back down into the hold. ‘Phones do more than make calls these days.’
I reached the bottom, turning to Marty. She looked sceptical, I held up the dead man’s arm. ‘Poor man’s tracker.’
I pulled up his sleeve to reveal the smartwatch I’d fastened round his wrist, hastily bought from a French electronics shop. No phone signal out here to track it over distance, but it’d still been downloading me his vitals via Bluetooth whenever I was close enough to pick up a connection.
‘I need my phone to access the history. I had it earlier…’ I trailed off as I pictured King’s bloodied hair in the dim light from the tiny LED phone torch. What had I done with it? Everything from that point was a blur, the mist had descended right up until Katanga and Miller had stopped me in Nic’s cabin.
Which is probably why I’d left it there, on the driver’s seat of my car, now inaccessible to me, outside on deck, behind a wall of angry smugglers with AK-47s.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Tiburon
The lights went out, I crept forward to the end of the passageway by the red emergency lighting, pausing outside the huge engine room door, listening to the regular train-like throb through the bulkhead. Voices tumbled down from the superstructure directly above. A single grimy bulb buzzed in the stairwell above, casting a sickly amber puddle across the wall. The voices upstairs were close. I took out my pistol, screwing the suppressor onto the modified barrel. I didn’t want to shoot these people, but many are the passengers who never made it to port on Miller’s ships; his threats were never idle.
I held the pistol down low as I stepped up, craning to see the deck above. The voices rose in volume, coming closer.
I dropped back down, looking round. No external doors here deep in Tiburon’s belly, no route to my car but through those armed crew members. I held my pistol up, looked back along the corridor towards the stern. Fields was kneeling at the far end. He nodded me on and disappeared back round the corner as the voices upstairs closed in.
Despite being outnumbered I’m fairly sure we could have taken the ship, but aside from not wanting to risk everyone’s lives, Nic’s insistence kept coming back to me. He’d seemed genuine. Miller wasn’t the enemy here, someone else was. I just had to find a way to prove it to him.
The engine room was forward of the accommodation, better to keep moving in the direction of my car than retreat. I turned the heavy handle in the centre of the engine room door, unlocking the dog latches around the watertight frame. Light spilled out, the noise increased several-fold as I quickly stepped over the thick metal threshold and pulled it shut behind me. I looked down on the mechanical guts of the Tiburon.
Half a level below me the engines occupied most of the open space, great wedges of cast iron and pipes and gauges. Pistol ready, I jumped down the steps from the platform onto the walkway running between them, steadying myself on the hot coolant pipes, looking down into dirty water slopping around beneath the criss-cross tread plates. The noise was overwhelming in stereo, hot and damp. The smell of oil, diesel fuel, and various other chemicals swished back and forth through the air in time with the murk beneath my trainers.
In contrast to the rest of the boat – and indeed to most others I’ve been on, including Miller’s previous tubs – the engine room was comparatively clean, the diesels obviously far newer than the rest of her and no expense spared in their maintenance. Clearly this was where a large percentage of Miller’s considerable profits was reinvested, along with the generous pay for the crew – both necessities for a rapid and efficient smuggling operation. I hoped his new engineers, Seb and Vincent, were up to the vacancy left by poor Étienne’s departure.
My hunch looked to have paid off, at the far end of the walkway was a short ladder up to a matching platform and door leading forward. I climbed up, it was another watertight bulkhead door, this one stiffer as I unlocked it and swung it open, heading in gun first.
No lights in here, I swung the door shut behind me, felt around and found a switch. Again the smell of oil and machinery, but this time mixed with acrid burning. The workshop, grubbier than the engine room, rows of cabinets and workbenches along one wall, huge grimy floor-standing power tools along another – a press, a pillar drill, a huge circular saw, a grinder, everything covered in used oil and a million dirty fingerprints. The strip lights were barely adequate, flickering and emitting a constant buzz like they were about to give up any second. I walked straight through to a door at the opposite end, it opened with a creak into a short, red-lit corridor, and slammed behind me with the help of a wave. Welded to the wall was a ladder up to a hatch. I worked out the distances in my head and decided it must come up on deck just forward of the superstructure. I was aft of the cargo holds so I’d certainly be able to get to my car, but I’d probably come up in full view of the bridge windows and those spotlamps right under Miller’s nose.
I tried the only other way, a short passage to my right which ended with yet another enormous watertight bulkhead door. This on
e was stiffer, the wheel in the centre was tight and tinged with rust rather than the well-greased levers on the other doors. Eventually the dogs round the edges groaned off their stops and creaked open.
A symphony of percussion hit immediately, the echo of waves against steel plates. A cavern yawned away into darkness in front, above, below, the greasy bulbs around the walls were set too far apart to accurately gauge the size. No bulkheads separating the holds, just one open space. I thought back to all the kids’ books that measured everything in double-decker buses, this looked like it could comfortably swallow a few lengthways. This was the area that, back in the good old days of Brezhnev, would have been taken up by enormous fuel tanks and spare parts, refuelling and servicing the Baltic fleet, perhaps out into the North Atlantic for weeks on end to rendezvous with the huge Typhoon-class subs.
The stubby walkway overlooking the hold ended at a ladder down. I crouched, pointing my pistol through the railings, at the steel ribs along the wall on either side, the innards of a gigantic whale. With each wave water cascaded from above, between the slim gaps in the cargo hatch doors, I hoped the hum of the bilge pumps somewhere below was enough to keep up. My car was lashed down to the front cargo doors, towards the bow.
Waves boomed, echoing around the empty space, no chance even to die away before the next hit. With every crash the dim lamps flickered, casting eerie shadows across the neon graffiti daubed on the walls, German phrases, anti-establishment slogans, acid-house smiley faces, Nineties satire. On one wall an enormous pear representing Helmut Kohl was flaking in brown stains running down the steel plates, I remembered when my brother was stationed in West Germany at the time that this was how Nineties magazines often depicted the ex-Chancellor.
I stood and leaned over the railings to look down at a network of steel girders and mesh-like tread plates with a few empty cardboard boxes slowly rotting on them. Below that, the huge ballast tanks made up the space down to the keel. I was in the naked unadorned belly of the beast. I pushed my pistol into the holster, and climbed down the ladder.
A whisper came from down below, on my right. I paused on the ladder, withdrawing my gun again. The lights flickered and blinked out.
No emergency lighting in here, I gripped the ladder, pointing my pistol down. Something scratched at the tread plates, using the cover of darkness to move towards me. The faint sound of nails on rusty steel. I wrapped my left arm through the ladder, pulled my legs up a rung, swung the pistol down, tracking the sound. My finger twitched on the trigger.
Another whisper came from the other side, answering the first, I looked round, eyes straining into the black. Patches of glow-in-the-dark paint, bright words and drooping faces lent a soft glow to the walls but weren’t enough to touch the shadows. The same scratching came from the tread plates below as it approached.
I swung my arm side to side as the sounds closed in, pointing the pistol straight down as they converged at the foot of the ladder. The hold was in darkness, water poured from the bay doors above, making it impossible to understand what the voices were saying.
The ladder trembled slightly, the lightest vibration, another scratch. They were climbing. I reasoned whoever they were, they weren’t friendly.
The gunshot lit the ladder, a shadow scuttled away. I fired again, it retreated, three times I fired, the flash briefly lighting up another shadow round the back of the ladder.
The lights buzzed, fizzed, pinged back on. A pile of cardboard washed around in the dirty seawater at the foot of the ladder. I dropped, hitting the floor and rolling backwards, swinging the pistol up. Nothing, I came up onto my knees, aiming into the corners of the room. The hold was empty.
I massaged my eyes, yearning for sleep.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Château des Aigles
Three days previously
The sun had already dipped behind the peaks, the sky was darkening as the cable car creaked up the mountain. My gondola was empty; no one else was braving these temperatures, most were heading down the mountain to get changed for tea.
The wind had picked up. I gripped the seat and closed my eyes as I swung upwards, trying not to think of the long drop to the trees below, the soft white duvet concealing hard, sharp rocks.
‘They’re getting off,’ said McCartney’s voice over the comms, waiting for me at the top. I forced my eyes open and looked up, two cars in front, where a gondola was entering the station.
‘Don’t get lazy,’ I said. ‘These guys are dangerous.’
‘We can’t lose them,’ said McCartney. ‘We need to make sure they’re still sticking to the route.’
‘Just don’t get too close.’
‘Okay, they’re heading further up. Bob, Sting, and Bono.’
‘Where’s Midge?’ asked Ringo from the gondola in front of mine.
‘Still in the bar,’ McCartney said. ‘Looks like he’s finishing up now.’
Through the radio came the sound of crunching snow, I could picture McCartney making his way up the slope from the bubble lift station to the plateau, where the chairlifts would take us up to the start of the runs – and the black run through the tight valley to the start of their favoured off-piste.
‘Hold there,’ I said.
‘I’m waiting at the top,’ said Ringo. I opened my eyes, above me his gondola had reached the station.
‘Nearly at the chairlift,’ said McCartney.
‘Hold and wait for us,’ I repeated.
‘I’ll get on behind them.’
‘Hold and wait, for fuck’s sake!’
I stood, holding the guardrail, and made the mistake of looking down at my boots. Far below, black rocks stuck out like islands in the snow. Lego-sized pines bent and swayed with the gusts whipping through the valley. My heart pounded, I screwed my eyes shut.
The gondola swung and slowed, the doors slid open. I stepped onto the metal ribbed walkway and propped my board against the railings to pull up my scarf over my nose. Ringo was leaning on the wooden railings of the outdoor restaurant area, next to a crowd preparing to travel back down. I grabbed my board and walked over the hard-packed snow as the group trudged past me.
He nodded and picked up his skis as I approached. I glanced sideways to see the third bodyguard pushing outside through the restaurant doors.
‘Midge is on his way down to you,’ I said.
‘Copy,’ said Lennon from where I’d left her in the cafe at the bottom.
I patted Ringo on the shoulder and headed for the chairlift.
‘Two minutes, McCartney,’ said Ringo beside me.
‘They’re two seats in front of me,’ said McCartney. ‘They’ve just got off.’
‘Jesus Christ, McCartney, what don’t you understand. Wait at the top of the chairlift, we’re coming up.’
‘We can’t lose them,’ said McCartney.
‘Don’t worry, we know where they’re headed,’ said Ringo.
I put my board down and clicked in, skimming down the short incline to the chairlift with Ringo alongside. The seats came round and plucked us into the air, I pulled the bar down quickly and held it tight.
‘Christ, I thought you were supposed to be a hard man,’ Ringo said. ‘Show a little backbone, will ya?’ He pulled on the bar, swinging the chair side to side.
I gripped tighter. ‘Cut that shit out. Where are they now?’
The chair swung again as Ringo leaned out to see past the cable support tower. ‘McCartney’s getting off.’
A minute later it was our turn. Ringo tapped me and pulled up the bar, I opened my eyes and braced, jumped up, riding the short slope off the chairlift. No sign of McCartney. Ringo overtook me on his skis, hooked a tight turn, headed straight over the berm to the right and dropped over the edge. I leaned and cut across, following in his wake.
‘McCartney’s gone ahead,’ shouted Ringo, pointing at the four sets of tracks.
The bashed snow of the run changed as we cut over the drifts and off the piste, dropping steeply on the
far side. Ahead of me Ringo was already slowing, ready for the thick pines. No one else was around, the temperature was plummeting quickly, the snow had already obliterated anyone else’s tracks that might have been through here. Everyone except the three targets, and their three hunters.
Snow hissed under my board as I weaved across the steep slope. Ringo had disappeared into the trees but I could hear his skis slicing the deep snow in my radio earpiece. There was a sharp crack, a muffled banging sound like a mic in a tumble dryer.
‘McCartney, check in,’ came Ringo’s voice.
I could see Ringo now, he’d waited for me, crouching just inside the treeline.
More banging on the radio, McCartney mumbled something then a grunt, more rustling.
This side of the mountain was almost dark, the lights of the cars below twinkled between gusts as flakes were whipped down from the sky and up from the ground like mini tornados sweeping the mountainside.
I leaned sharply, sliding to a stop next to Ringo, lifting up my goggles and squinting into the trees.
‘…Don’t ski…’ came a voice. Bono, the big Serbian, over McCartney’s radio.
‘Any sign of them?’ I asked.
Ringo held a finger to his lips and tapped his ear.
Faint laughter, muffled, as if McCartney’s radio earpiece had been wrapped in cotton wool. Or fallen into the snow.
I nodded, reached down and unclipped my board, stepping off into the deep snow. The laughter continued, a few choice insults about McCartney’s ethnicity half-caught between snatched breaths. I unzipped my jacket and pulled out my pistol, set off jogging through the trees with Ringo right behind me.
‘…skiing is for whites…’
The pit of my stomach dropped, I picked up the pace, deeper into the trees. More muffled words came through my earpiece, shouts that I could only hear over the radio but not above the wind, they couldn’t be close. I pushed harder.
‘…can’t ski, maybe you can fly…’
‘Guys, what’s happening up there?’ asked Lennon, panic creeping into her voice.
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