Safe House

by Chris Ewan

  And the film was still sticky. Yes, it had peeled away in the top left corner, but nowhere else. In fact, Lena was of the opinion that the film was probably responsible for stopping the hairline crack in the glass from spreading very far.

  The sticky film and the hairline crack were going to help her. They were exactly what she needed.

  Lena was finally ready to act. She’d done all the thinking she would ever need to do. She gathered up the duvet in the pink coverlet and spread it out as best she could and held it up against the window with her good hand. The duvet draped downwards over her wrist in a rough triangle. That was OK. She really only needed it to cover the middle of the glass because she figured that would be the weakest point.

  She took one step backwards from the window and placed all her weight on her back leg. She turned her foot sideways on, so that it would give her a better foundation. Then she lifted her front leg in the air and practised the move. When she was satisfied with her balance and her positioning, she drew a sharp breath and clenched her teeth and lashed out fast. She kicked as high as she could. As hard as she could. She felt the glass crack right away. She felt the flex and the resistance of the film. She tottered backwards and placed a little weight on her front foot and marvelled at how well the duvet had smothered the pain in her heel and muffled the noise of the glass breaking. She was as sure as she could possibly be that the man wouldn’t have heard a thing.

  A starburst of splintered glass was adhering to the film, exactly as she’d planned. Not a fragment had dropped. There was no way it could have gone better. The shards were long and jagged and just waiting to be plucked free. She wrapped the duvet round her hand and set to work.

  *

  Menser was in severe discomfort. Unremitting agony. He’d staggered as far as a shower cubicle. Shut and bolted the door behind him. Fumbled for the cold feed and stuck his head beneath the icy flow, letting it douse his skin. The sudden cold was like a fearsome slap but warm water would be no good – he needed to close his pores, not open them.

  He hugged himself tight and blinked furiously, ignoring for the moment what the brother had done to his wrist. He was blinking because he knew his tears would help to flush the chemicals from his eyes. His skin was burning very badly. It was itching intensely. That was why he was clutching himself so hard. If he let go, the temptation to scratch his face would overcome him again. He’d spread the contaminant around. Force it into his skin. Make the pain a lot worse.

  So he stood there, shivering, with his arms folded across his chest, trying to calm himself despite the difficulty he was having breathing. That was the snag with chemical sprays. They inflamed everything. Your eyes. Your sinuses. Your airways. And unless you had an antacid to hand – a pack of Alka-Seltzer or some Milk of Magnesia, say – your only option was to wait the worst of the effects out. Ten minutes if you were lucky. Thirty if you weren’t.

  Menser guessed he was nearing the eight-minute mark. His symptoms showed no sign of abating. His eyes were stinging very badly. His nostrils were streaming. His lungs felt like someone was sitting on his chest.

  His hair was thoroughly drenched now. The frigid water was streaming down his neck, soaking into his sweater. It was spattering his trousers and swamping his shoes.

  He did his best to distract himself. To take his mind elsewhere. To think.

  The pain made him think very fast. It rushed his thoughts just like it rushed his breathing. He came to three conclusions.

  One: he’d underestimated the brother, and he couldn’t afford to make the same mistake again.

  Two: he needed to call and check on the girl. Enough had gone wrong already. He had to make certain she was secure and being properly monitored.

  Three: he had to obtain whatever the brother had found. He needed to locate the brother. Force him to exchange. Make it very clear that his only option was to comply.

  The only thing left to think about was the best way to make that happen.

  Chapter Forty-three

  My van was moving. It was shifting around beneath me. I could hear engine noise and feel coarse vibrations through the thin plywood floor. My tools were rattling in the shelves and cubby-holes I’d fitted along the sides. The rear cargo doors and sliding side door were juddering. The suspension was bouncing and creaking and banging. My bad shoulder was knocking painfully against the solid metal bulkhead that separated the load area from the passenger cab.

  My head was in a bad way. There was blood in my left eye, trickling down from a wet gash somewhere above my forehead. I tested the area with my fingertip and sickened myself with the squishiness of what I found there. The inside of my head was pounding. It was pulsing hard. I kept replaying the sensation of the impact over and over in my mind. My skull felt eggshell-thin. It felt vulnerable. I remembered what I’d been told by the hospital doctors. To take care to avoid any follow-up blows. To report to A&E immediately if I experienced any symptoms of a concussion.

  I didn’t think I was being driven to A&E.

  I had no idea where they were taking me. I had no idea who they were.

  The back of the van was very dark. There was a shard of white light somewhere towards the top of the right-hand cargo door. The crack was perhaps a foot in length. A couple of millimetres wide. The light wasn’t enough to see by. All it offered me was a chance to orientate myself.

  I braced my good hand against the dusty plywood floor. Winced as gravity shifted things around inside my head. There was an urgent swelling in my ears. A lot of saliva in my mouth. I gritted my teeth. Tried to stay with it.

  Then a voice spoke to me from the darkness.

  The voice said, ‘How badly are you hurt?’

  It was female. I recognised it. But there was something different about it, too. Like it was constricted in some way. Hard to decipher.

  I wasn’t sure that I could trust my ears. Maybe it was a side effect of my head injury. Maybe I was hallucinating.

  ‘Hey,’ the voice said. ‘Did you hear me?’

  I said nothing. I was busy trying to swallow the fluids in my mouth without choking.

  The van rocked beneath me. It pitched and rolled. We were going around a corner.

  ‘Do you have your phone?’ the voice asked.

  I stared blindly into the darkness. It seemed to contract and expand and swirl around me. There were gaseous reds and wispy purples inside it. Like I was looking towards a far-off galaxy.

  The voice repeated itself. Measuring out its words. ‘Do . . . you . . . have . . . your . . . phone?’

  ‘It’s in the front,’ I panted. My tongue felt swollen and clumsy. Too big for my mouth. ‘In the glove box.’

  I realised now what was different about the voice. It was thick. Nasal. Like she had a terrible cold.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

  ‘They threw me in after you. You don’t remember?’

  I didn’t remember. Not even close.

  I could hear the doctors’ warnings coming back to me. The dangers of secondary swelling. Bleeding of the brain. Nausea. Dizziness. Confused thinking. Cognitive disruption. I had all of them. Maybe more besides.

  I said, ‘I need to get to a hospital.’

  ‘Join the queue.’

  There was a dry click. A blinding flare. Rebecca was holding a torch in her hands. It was the torch I keep handy at the back of my van. Her hands were in her lap. She was sitting with her back against the rear cargo doors, her legs splayed in front of her. Her expensive leather jacket was scuffed and coated in dirt and grime. It was fully unzipped. Her T-shirt was stained with a dark liquid that had pasted the material against her skin.

  The torch was pointed up at her chin. It illuminated her face from below, as if she was planning to tell me a ghost story.

  Her face was terrible. A wet, blood-caked mess. She had two black eyes. The bruises were a deep aubergine colour. The eyes were badly swollen. Closed almost to slits. Like she’d been stung ferociously. Her nose was worse. It w
as flattened. It was mush. I could see a sliver of bone. A lot of blood. She covered it with some kind of rag. The cloth was sodden. It was dripping.

  She said, ‘I’m starting to regret not staying over last night.’

  ‘Who did this to you?’

  Her head rolled loosely on her shoulders. She was perspiring heavily. Her hair was greasy and stuck to her forehead.

  I scuffled along the floor on my backside. Stopped near her feet. I didn’t want her to have to talk so loudly.

  ‘Anderson,’ she muttered. ‘He flagged me down last night, after I’d left your place. He must have been waiting outside. He said he had something he needed to discuss.’

  She laughed faintly. There was a soggy wheezing in her breath.

  ‘Anderson punched you?’ I asked.

  ‘No, he didn’t punch me.’ She paused. Gulped air. ‘He’s American. He used a baseball bat.’

  She lowered the cloth. Her teeth were bloody. One of them was chipped.

  I looked away. Couldn’t help myself.

  She clicked the torch off. ‘Better?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She wheezed some more. Her breaths were shallow. The wet rattle in her throat was becoming worse.

  She said, ‘He has a man with him. Kind of weedy. Long hair. I think he could be one of the two from the cottage.’

  ‘Lukas.’

  ‘I think so. But he’s limping badly. I don’t remember you mentioning that.’

  ‘I didn’t. What about the blond one?’

  ‘No sign of him.’

  ‘What did they want?’

  ‘To know what we’d found out. They knew you were Laura’s brother. They’d worked out that Laura and Melanie Fleming were the same person, and that Laura was dead. They made me tell them about the locker key.’ She sucked down a halting breath. ‘You still had it, didn’t you?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘You lied to me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. And I meant it, too. ‘But I got the feeling you weren’t being completely honest with me. I thought maybe you were holding something back.’

  Silence. I freed the torch from her hand and pointed the beam towards the roof of the van. She nodded in the ambient light. The movement was slight, but it was clear. I got the impression it hurt.

  ‘I have been holding something back,’ she said.

  ‘About Laura?’

  ‘About her death.’

  ‘What is it? Was she killed? Was Anderson involved?’

  Rebecca turned her head slowly to the left. Eased it to the right.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve been asking myself if she might still be alive.’

  Chapter Forty-four

  The van was accelerating. We were moving fast. I could hear it in the droning note of the engine. I could feel it in the inertia when we turned a corner. I guessed that we’d left behind the built-up areas of Douglas and were moving beyond the outskirts of town on to quicker roads. There were a lot of directions we could be heading in. We could be going south, towards the airport. Or we could be following a different course entirely.

  I was balancing on my knees, shining the torch over the rear cargo doors, looking for a safety catch. There was a catch on the sliding door at the side, but it wouldn’t budge. I guessed the central locking had been engaged. I hoped the rear doors might be different, but I wasn’t having much luck. Plastic mouldings covered the door mechanism. The gap was too thin for me to get my fingers inside.

  I had plenty of tools with me inside the van. I went searching for a screwdriver, shining the torch over the wooden shelves and drawers, fighting to keep my balance as the van squirmed around beneath me.

  ‘Do you want to explain what you mean about my sister?’ I asked Rebecca.

  I managed to pull myself up to my first stash of tools. Hammers and wrenches and spanners, mostly. But there were many screwdrivers in there, too. I grabbed one with a thick red handle and a metal shaft about as long as my forearm.

  Rebecca said, ‘You remember what I told you up at the cliffs?’

  ‘I remember that you were bothered by the point where Laura’s car went over.’

  I passed Rebecca the torch. Adjusted her hands so that the beam was throwing light on to the area I was working on and tried not to gawp at her face. I slipped the blade of the screwdriver between the plastic mouldings. Pushed it in as far as it would go. Forced it one way. Then the other. I pulled on it with my good arm. Away from Rebecca. Then the van turned a corner and I lost my balance and thumped into the side.

  There was a moment of silence. Then the bang of a fist against the bulkhead up front.

  ‘Quit fooling around,’ Anderson yelled. ‘Don’t make me come back there.’

  I got back on to my knees. Fooled around some more.

  ‘You were saying,’ I said to Rebecca.

  She gulped air and swallowed hard. ‘If your sister was planning to kill herself, she’d have driven right over the cliff face into the sea.’

  ‘You’re assuming she knew what the cliff was like from inside her car.’

  ‘I think she did know.’ She paused. Gathered her breath. I was getting used to the nasal quality of her voice. It was becoming easier for me to understand what she was saying. ‘I think she drove up there and found that exact spot. I think she mounted the kerb slowly. Drove forwards against the fence until it began to give. I think she got the car ready to drop and then she stepped out and clipped the fence wires and gave it a shove. I think she watched it go.’

  ‘Laura was found dead in that car,’ I said. ‘A lot of people saw her.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘Dad identified her body. There was an autopsy. Everything.’

  Rebecca didn’t say anything to that. She’d taken to tilting her head back in an effort to stop her nose from bleeding. I didn’t think it would work. There wasn’t much left of her nose, so far as I could see.

  My screwdriver scraped against the plastic moulding. Bending it. Warping it. But it wouldn’t splinter. It wouldn’t crack.

  I rested against the shelves of tools and let the screwdriver fall to the floor. I took the torch from Rebecca’s hands. Used the sleeve of my hoodie to wipe the blood from above my eye. It was sticky. Beginning to clot.

  ‘I have a first-aid kit,’ I said.

  ‘Could you find it for me?’

  I shuffled back up the van on my knees in search of the kit. Usually I kept it stashed behind the end of the shelving unit. But it wasn’t there. I turned, shining the light around me. I lifted the dust sheets from the floor. Checked underneath.

  ‘I told you I worked with Laura,’ Rebecca panted. ‘And it’s true. But it was a long time ago.’ She paused for another breath. I heard a wet rattle in her throat. ‘The real reason I knew who she was when your mum called me was because she approached my firm for a job six weeks or so ago. She said she wanted to join us, make a clean break. She gave us her real name, so we could run some checks. I noticed that she’d kept the middle name Hendon. I only stalled when your mum called because I wasn’t sure who she might be. I was being careful.’

  My torch beam caught a glimmer of bright green. The first-aid kit. I was surprised to find that it was open. Dressings and bandages were missing.

  ‘Did you already use this?’ I asked.

  ‘Does it look like I did?’

  No, it didn’t look that way at all. I couldn’t explain what had happened to the kit. There were still a couple of antiseptic wipes inside, along with a small bandage in paper packaging. There were pills, too. Paracetamol. I carried the collection to Rebecca and tore open an antiseptic wipe. I handed it across and watched her grimace and flinch as she touched the wipe to the area around her nose. I popped some pills out of the little foil packet and swallowed them. Popped some more and passed them to Rebecca.

  ‘Did you offer Laura a job?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘On pape
r, she was perfect. We knew she had a good reputation. Several of my colleagues were all set on the idea.’ Rebecca slipped the pills in her mouth. She steeled herself to swallow them. Screwed up her battered face in pain. ‘I was the one who blocked it. When Laura came to meet with us, I got the feeling she wasn’t looking for a new career.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I thought she was sounding us out. It seemed to me she was in trouble and needed help.’

  ‘Wouldn’t she just say so?’

  ‘My feeling was that the trouble she was in was serious. She was scared. It was like I told you. I felt she had a problem inside her organisation. And the only place she could get help was outside.’

  ‘But she didn’t ask for help.’

  ‘Not directly, no.’ She paused for a beat and collected herself. When she started talking again, she took her time over her words, as if pronouncing each one risked a fresh stab of pain. It lent her speech a peculiar, faltering cadence. ‘But she had a lot of questions about the kind of work we were involved in. And she really grilled me on our expertise when it came to missing-persons cases. She wanted to know if we helped to find people who’d disappeared. She asked me about the kind of techniques we might use to track down people who adopted new identities and moved to new countries. In hindsight, I think she was digging for data, for know-how. I think she was working on a solution to her problem. She was good, Rob. She was resourceful. I think she faked her own death.’

  I clasped a hand to the wound on my head. Squeezed very gently. As if maybe I could ease the parted skin back together again. Like perhaps if I fixed my head my brain would be capable of fitting together all the information I was hearing.