Fourth Day

by Zoe Sharp

  I kept my expression neutral as I inventoried what was there, then allowed my shoulders to slump fractionally, as if in defeat. As if they’d got everything.

  But, how had they known to look for it at all? I remembered Thomas Witney’s unexpected familiarity with psychoactive drugs, and wondered briefly if Bane had taken that opportunity with me.

  If they had, they would have found both boxes. Why didn’t they find the other?

  ‘This is not the kind of baggage people usually bring when they’re asking for my help,’ Bane said, almost gently, indicating the array with a dismissive flick of his fingers.

  I jerked my head in Yancy’s direction. ‘He told me junkies sometimes try and bring in drugs. To ease their transition, I think he said.’ I paused. ‘You know I was a soldier. Maybe I’m just having trouble letting go.’

  A faint smile crossed his lips. ‘If I suggested it might be better for you to leave us now, are you going to…erupt again?’

  I put my head on one side. ‘Perhaps,’ I said evenly. ‘Why? Are you planning to suggest that?’

  He sighed. ‘We know you were sent to spy on us, Charlie,’ he said at last. ‘Tell me, what did Parker Armstrong hope to achieve by it?’

  I didn’t show surprise at his use of Parker’s name, because it didn’t come as one. Wherever Bane was getting his information, it was good. And the Debacle pair, Tony and Dexter, certainly knew who I worked for. The connections were there to be made.

  ‘The truth,’ I said. ‘What else is there?’

  He murmured, ‘What else, indeed?’

  ‘I’ve never lied to you,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t mean I’ve told you the whole story, either. The truth is, Parker didn’t send me. Nobody sent me. I wanted to come and I talked him into allowing it, and you already know why.’

  Bane was silent for a moment, frowning, regarding me steadily. His eyes had a darker ring around the edge of the iris, I noticed for the first time, merging to gold near the pupil. Mesmeric. I peeled my gaze away with effort, aware of a breathlessness I couldn’t quite explain.

  ‘So, this has nothing to do with the murder of Thomas Witney?’

  There was no way I was going to mention our interest in Maria. ‘If I said no, I would be lying,’ I said calmly. ‘Witney never wanted to leave here. We forced the issue – not entirely by choice – and I’m living with the consequences of my part in that. But it’s nowhere near the whole reason.’

  His head tilted slightly. ‘This is not the place to find those kind of answers.’

  I let out a long, shaky breath. ‘Well, right now, I can’t think of anywhere else to try.’

  ‘I did not kill Thomas,’ Bane said, and his voice was very sure and very steady, like his eyes, bearing down into mine. If he was a liar, he was the best I’d ever come across. It was suddenly very hot in that room, stifling. ‘I had no reason to want him dead. Do you believe me?’

  But out of the corner of my eye I saw Yancy move, just a fraction. Hardly more than the easing of his weight from one foot to the other. Bane’s eyes, on my face, must have seen the flare of reaction.

  He nodded, as if that was my answer, and stretched a hand towards the collection of my belongings. Just for a second, I thought he was reaching for the SIG. I braced almost subconsciously, but he passed over the gun and picked up my cellphone instead, stabbed the power button with his thumb.

  ‘No doubt you have people on the outside,’ he said as the unit booted up, ‘ready to stage an intervention, should you fail to contact them?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was no point in denying it.

  He held the phone out to me. ‘Then you had best call them.’

  ‘And say what?’ I was suddenly wary, like this was some kind of trap.

  ‘That is up to you, Charlie,’ he said gravely. ‘But think of this as a statement of your intent. A second step on your journey.’

  ‘My journey to where?’

  ‘What you seek – absolution.’

  Slowly, I reached for the phone, keyed in Sean’s number. As soon as it connected, I hit the speaker button. Bane raised his eyebrow.

  ‘I’ve nothing to say that you can’t hear,’ I said.

  The phone rang out half a dozen times. Longer than it would normally take Sean to answer. I assumed he was activating a recorder, or hooking it up to a satellite tracker. Epps was in this, and he had all the toys at his disposal.

  ‘Yeah?’ Sean’s voice, a little gruff. A non-committal opener in case of listeners, of strangers, or anyone who’d heard him speak and might recognise him.

  ‘It’s Charlie,’ I said. I am not alone.

  There was a pause. ‘Are you OK?’ Is there an immediate danger?

  ‘I’m fine.’ I don’t think so.

  ‘You sure?’ What do you mean, you don’t think so? ‘I’ve been worried about you.’ The team’s on standby. Say the word.

  ‘I’m not ready to come home.’ My mission is not yet complete. Then I sighed, abandoned our carefully worked-out covert language of coded signals and shrouded meaning. ‘Sean, they know who I am,’ I said. ‘They know why I’m here.’

  ‘Charlie—’ he began, then stopped. I could picture his face, shut down, bleached of emotion, thinking like a soldier because that’s all he could afford to be right now. ‘What do you need?’

  I swallowed, meeting Bane’s gaze across the desk and trying not to shift, restless, beneath it. His features formed an impassive mask, giving me nothing in return. Not a trap, but a test. Had he arranged for Thomas Witney to be snatched away from Epps and murdered? Personally stood in that squalid little motel room off Sunset Boulevard and watched his men – maybe even these men – beat Witney half to death and then deliver the final coup de grâce?

  ‘I don’t need anything,’ I said, holding eye contact. ‘I’m OK. I’ll contact you when I’m ready. I’m just calling to say…please, don’t come for me.’

  There was a long period of silence at the other end of the phone. ‘All right, but I have some questions.’ Sean said then, cool and flat and so utterly detached it made my heart weep. ‘Do you mind?’ Are you being forced to do this?

  ‘I understand.’ No.

  ‘Where did I first send you in Germany?’

  No hidden messages here. Simple control questions, designed to expose distress, duress, danger. Checks and balances.

  ‘A place called Einsbaden, just outside Stuttgart,’ I said sedately, knowing that Epps’s people would be analysing the recordings afterwards, listening for stress patterns in my voice, off cadences in my speech, and wanting to give them everything and nothing to go on. ‘To a close-protection training school run by an ex-army major called Gilby.’

  Sean barely paused, changing tack. ‘What was the name of my family cat?’

  ‘You didn’t have a cat,’ I said easily. ‘You had a dog.’

  ‘OK, last one,’ he said, and his voice was softer now, more dangerous. ‘The first time we went away – spent our first night together – where did we go?’

  Our first time together had been on a forty-eight hour pass from camp. A glorious weekend during which only hunger had driven us out of bed. And then right back into it again.

  But I understood the message there. He was giving me just one more night before they pulled the plug. More than that, he was reminding me of what we shared. Telling me not to let go of it. Not to throw it away.

  ‘We went to that little chalet on the cliff, just outside Colwyn Bay on the North Wales coast,’ I said. I paused, then added gently, ‘And it was a week, Sean, not a single night.’ Give me more time!

  He was quiet for so long that I almost spoke again, just to check the signal hadn’t dropped out, but then he said, ‘I won’t pretend I understand, but I’ll respect your decision, Charlie. You’ll call me?’

  ‘I—’ Across the other side of the desk, Bane broke his stasis to give a single shake of his head. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I have a lot of things to work through, to get straight, and to do that, I need
to be alone. I need to be here.’ A whole raft of emotions came bubbling up in a disordered jumble, everything distilled down into a couple of meaningless words. ‘I’m…sorry.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said and for the first time he sounded tired. ‘So am I.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  I wasn’t returned to my subterranean cell after my audience with Bane, which was, I suppose, the one bright spot of the day.

  Instead, Nu walked me back through the main building. The people we encountered stepped back to silently watch me pass. Even if they hadn’t been in Bane’s study that first day, this was a small place and they knew what had happened there. Or enough of it to regard me with curious and slightly fearful eyes, at any rate.

  Their covert attention lay between my shoulder blades like an unscratched itch. I felt like what I was – a freak. Maybe that was the whole point of it.

  Well, you asked for that, too.

  In the small entrance lobby, Nu ignored the door to the outside and headed off down another corridor, turning back when my footsteps paused behind him.

  ‘Come on then, love,’ he said, almost a challenge. ‘Taking you to new quarters, aren’t I?’

  The last time I’d ventured into this part of the building, it had been dark, and my only concern had been getting the team in to retrieve Thomas Witney from his apparent captivity.

  Sagar had told me Bane liked to play mind games, but even he wouldn’t…

  ‘Here you go,’ Nu said, halting outside a doorway. ‘Home, sweet home.’

  Oh yes, he would.

  They’d put me in Thomas Witney’s old room.

  I threw a searching gaze at Nu as I moved past him, but he stared back blandly. Inside, the room was unchanged, with the single bed, the desk and the simple chair. The glass of water and the book were even still on the table by the bed, as if in deliberate provocation.

  The only difference was a girl who was just in the process of throwing a new sheet over the bed. She straightened with a gasp at the sound of Nu’s voice. When she jerked towards us, I recognised the thin, nervous figure of Maria Gonzalez.

  As soon as I saw her, I realised that finding out if Liam Witney was the father of her child was going to take a lot more than asking probing questions, or putting pressure on her to reveal the truth. The girl had the wild eyes and jittery stance of someone half a step from the edge. It was hard to credit she was the same girl who appeared, smiling and carefree, alongside Liam in the photograph on his mother’s office wall.

  What kind of breakdown had she suffered, and – more to the point – what had caused it?

  If we’d obeyed Sean’s instinct to take Maria out with us that night, I wondered, what would have become of her? Even if she hadn’t been snatched away, like Witney, a stint with Epps would have done nothing for her clearly fragile state of mind.

  Maria, meanwhile, gaped at us, immobile.

  ‘Here, let me give you a hand with that,’ I said, offering to take one end of the sheet, smiling.

  Just for a moment, she clutched the ironed cotton closer to her chest, as if I’d caught her naked coming out of the shower and was now suggesting removing her towel. Her gaze flitted to Nu, as if seeking his approval, then she nodded to me, a little shyly, and released her grip.

  I smiled again and we quickly tucked the sheet under the mattress, added a blanket, and folded the corners with military precision.

  When we were done, Maria gave me a mumbled, ‘Thank you,’ but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  ‘Come along, love,’ Nu said from the doorway, an underlying tension to his voice. ‘Let’s give Charlie here a chance to settle in, eh?’

  Maria flushed and nodded, scooping up the old linen she’d dropped onto the floor, and grabbing the book and the glass from the night table. I wanted to find some excuse to prolong her visit, build up some kind of relationship, but she was stretched taut as a bowstring with the urge to flee.

  Nu’s arm across the doorway blocked her exit, spiking her unease. I shifted my stance, knew he registered the movement by the way he let his arm drop.

  ‘What’s the book?’ he asked, lifting it out of her grasp and staring, nonplussed at the old-fashioned jacket. As he turned it over in his hands, I saw the title. JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

  He pursed his lips. ‘Ever read it?’ he asked me.

  ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘Might as well hang onto this one then,’ he said, and put the book down onto the corner of the desk.

  Maria took advantage of his distraction to make a bolt for it. We heard the slap of her shoes along the corridor as she hurried away. Not quite running, but not far off it.

  Nu grinned and I turned towards him very slowly.

  Bait her, and you’ll answer to me.

  I didn’t have to say the words out loud. His grin faded.

  ‘What’s her story?’ I asked. I didn’t expect to get the truth, but even the official lie might be instructive.

  ‘Mad as a box of frogs, that one,’ Nu said, dismissive, turning away. ‘You don’t want to pay much attention to anything little Maria says.’

  I raised an eyebrow and the grin was back, full force, just before he closed the door behind him. I wasn’t at all surprised to hear the key turn pointedly in the lock on the outside.

  So, I’d exchanged one locked room for another. At least this one had natural light and a few more creature comforts.

  I sighed, kicked off my boots and lay on the bed with the pillows bunched up behind my head, thinking back over the stilted conversation I’d just had with Sean. Difficult to say a fraction of what I’d wanted to, over an open line with numerous eavesdroppers at both ends. The words were almost immaterial, but I replayed his defeated tone over and over.

  There was a part of me, I knew, that almost wished he’d argued harder about the extra time I’d asked for, even though I would have fought him for it, if he’d insisted. I supposed there was still a chance he was out there, at this very moment, watching the compound, and had identified where I’d been brought.

  And, suddenly, I was achingly aware of the gulf that had opened up between us, and just how much I missed him.

  I massaged my temples vigorously, as if that would help refocus me on the job. I’d come to find out about Maria’s son, I reminded myself. Why Thomas Witney had decided to stay, or what had made him afraid to leave, was a side issue.

  I got up, restless, pulled open the single desk drawer, as if expecting it to be anything other than empty. The room was totally devoid of personality. Witney had lived there for five years, and yet had failed to leave a mark on the place beyond a half-drunk glass of water and a fifty-year-old book.

  I picked up the Salinger, wondering how far he’d got with it, flipped through the yellow-edged pages. They riffled softly beneath my thumb, then jumped a section. I stopped, went back, opened the book up more fully and found, slipped between the pages down close to the spine, a flat key.

  I picked the key out slowly, remembered Witney’s claim that it had been on his night table all the time. I’d thought he was deluding himself, but that wasn’t so. And if he was not a prisoner here, then he’d chosen to lock himself in at night.

  So, who had he really been afraid of?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Bane said, ‘Tell me about your first kill.’

  It was afternoon. I’d spent a couple of hours lying in my room, staring up at the ceiling, before the door had been unlocked by a motherly woman whose face was vaguely familiar from our surveillance. Her name was Ann, she told me, and she’d been with Fourth Day for a year and a half.

  She took me to a small workshop at the rear of the main building, indicated that I should take a seat, as if keeping each other company was the most natural thing in the world.

  On the workbench in front of her was a cheap dismantled radio, the type people throw away rather than repair, but she was soon absorbed in tracing the cause of its demise. I sat alongside her and listened as, withou
t guile, she recounted her life story.

  Abusive parents leading to an abusive husband, a downward spiral into alcohol and drugs, a brush with prostitution. All recounted in a matter-of-fact tone, punctuated by prosaic requests to pass the soldering iron and to reposition the lit magnifier she was using to aid her painstaking task.

  With her wiry greying hair tied back in a loose ponytail, she looked like someone my mother might have served with on a Women’s Institute committee. But for the rolled-back sleeves, which revealed the evidence of her past addiction comprehensively tattooed in the crook of both arms.

  I’d asked her why she bothered to mend something costing maybe a few dollars when it was new. She explained it was part of what Fourth Day did, a kind of recycling and therapy, all rolled into one. ‘I have no artistic talent to create from scratch,’ she said simply, ‘so I bring things back to life instead.’ She smiled. ‘Both satisfying and productive.’

  Afterwards, she peacefully delivered me into Bane’s study, leaving me there with a quiet smile and a quieter hand on my shoulder, as if commanding me to stay.

  Now, I sat back in my chair. ‘Who says I’ve killed anyone?’

  ‘I know something of your history, Charlie, which I’m sure was your intention. Why else would you use your real name, if you did not want or hope for me to uncover your past?’

  Yes, but how? And so fast…

  Bane sat motionless as I struggled to find a way into the story, then said, ‘Was it the man who cut your throat?’ and there was nothing to react to in that dark-brown voice.

  I forced myself not to reach towards the faded scar that encircled the base of my throat. It took physical effort.

  ‘Yes, I killed him,’ I said, flat and even. ‘He had a knife. He broke my ribs, my cheekbone, and my arm in two places.’ I still had the calcified lumps on the radius and ulna of my left arm, reminders of a pair of neat fracture lines that had saved me a shattered skull – his intention. Dazed, bleeding, scared, I’d thought I was finished. He had thought so, too.