by Mo Hayder
‘Nah – you haven’t changed.’ Caffery gives a small smile. ‘You haven’t changed. I can tell by the way you said her name. NEEENA.’
‘Amen, Father Caffery, thank you for the sermon.’
Caffery says nothing. Secretly he prefers it this way – nothing changing. The bad guys still the bad guys, the chancers still getting away with it. Patel still a skanky old man with the morals of a dingo. It makes him feel he’s less of an animal – more human. And not set apart from the world by the fact he can’t get a relationship to work.
‘She’s going to look into it for you.’
‘Thank you. I’ll pay you for your time.’
‘OK, I was going to get to that. I know I owe you big time, but eventually reality is going to come back and bite me in the arse. I’ve got a tally, OK. I’ve got this giant favours scoreboard, like at Wembley. And you will thank me for keeping you clearly informed when you’re about to go past your credit limit. Won’t you?’
‘So how much credit have I got?’
Patel thinks about it. ‘Twelve hours. That’s nearly five hundred quid’s worth.’
‘Generous.’
‘And the other thing is, you’ll have to be a bit nicer about Nina. She might turn out to be the love of my life. Then how will you feel, eh?’
Think Like Me
OLIVER DOESN’T REMEMBER the last time he cried and now there’s no stopping it. His eyes, still sore from the time they were taped open, seem to have turned into geysers. They just flow and flow and flow.
The men didn’t rape Matilda. They let her climb down and get dressed. It doesn’t matter of course, because, as with the movie Honey told them not to worry about, the threat is now so firmly planted in Oliver’s mind it will never go away. Over and over again he pictures Honey holding the pen against Matilda’s white stomach. Pictures the two men smiling up at Lucia. This is worse than the pain of the operation. He sits propped like a spent puppet against the wall, arms flopped helplessly at his sides, his mouth open, tears running down his face. A helpless shuffling old man, incapable of standing straight, let alone protecting what is precious to him.
After a long long time, and only when darkness has fallen outside, he begins to calm himself. There has been hardly any sound from the rest of the house. The men have left the house – he heard a car starting outside. They haven’t come back yet.
A presence comes to him. It is a man, dark and lean. He is dressed in a modest suit, off the peg, nothing flashy, and he keeps his hands in his pockets. He comes into the room, moving slowly, deliberately, taking everything in.
John Bancroft. It goes against Oliver’s scientific scepticism, but he firmly believes he’s witnessing Bancroft entering the room at some point in the future when it is over. When they are all dead.
Bancroft stops now and peers down at something. Oliver’s own corpse. Bancroft takes note of it, but he doesn’t overreact. Doesn’t panic. He is too professional – he’s seen this before. Instead he is looking round the room for something, some intangible element which will illuminate the incomprehensible. He stands near the window and closes his eyes briefly, as if trying to tune out everything except the message. Unconsciously, Oliver raises a wavering hand to this spectre, wanting to touch him on the forehead. To get the message to him.
‘Think like me,’ he whispers. ‘Think like me.’
John Bancroft doesn’t move.
‘Come on, think like me – look at the rug.’
Bancroft’s eyes open then, in surprise. Slowly he turns to Oliver. He comes and crouches next to him. Looks at the rug.
Convinced he’s in the presence of something spiritual, Oliver flips over the rug, scrabbles the pen out from its hiding place, and begins to write, feverishly:
The fact these men persist in using my connection with Minnet Kable to play psychological games on us only confirms to me that they are working for one of the companies I sold the Wolf system to. I have written a book about my life, it is possible one of the companies I’ve written about may be threatened by this.
However I sold the system to so many corporations worldwide that I can’t list them all here. It would be a jumble of names and histories.
Bancroft puts his finger on the rug and frowns slightly. He has nowhere to start.
Furiously Oliver tries to think of more clues. If he had the name of the company he could fight back. Or, in the event of his death, John Bancroft could. His only chance to find that out is now, right now, while the men are here, giving subtle hints to their identity. But they’re giving nothing away. That will be a vital part of their remit, never to reveal who they are working for.
He feels Bancroft’s attention wavering. ‘Don’t go,’ he pleads. ‘Please don’t go.’
But Bancroft is tired of waiting. He half straightens, his eyes raised to the window, as if his name has been called, and then he begins to dim. Like a candle his image flickers and dies.
All that is left is the empty bedroom.
Pietr Havilland
THE CHRYSLER 300C, with its new-smelling upholstery and its radiator grille like the mouth on a baleen whale, is a kind of joke. A pantomime gangster car – it’s got no real cachet to it, yet people are so easily convinced, and the 300C looks way out of place in the quiet English countryside. It signals power or danger to the casual onlooker. Not that anyone wanders across these vast parklands of the Anchor-Ferrers, but better safe than sorry, so the men don’t put on the headlights as they go slowly down the driveway, out of the gates, and into the lay-by opposite, where the phone signal can be picked up.
Honig feels faintly self-conscious sitting there while in the passenger seat Ian the Geek fiddles with his iPad and his smartphone. Honig’s still got serious reservations about Ian the Geek. He’s sold himself to Pietr as a shoot-to-kill on-the-balls technical shiznit – and OK, he’s had his uses. To give him his due, it was Ian the Geek who learned about the autobiography Oliver is writing. He did that by passing spyware on to Oliver’s phone disguised as a Bluetoothed airport advert in a business lounge in Munich. All Oliver will have noticed is the occasional flash of the Bluetooth icon on his phone; when the phone was synced, the virus jumped to his laptop and began installing a custom-built spyware with a keystroke recorder that fed all the information on Oliver’s computer to Havilland. This is how Havilland learned that Oliver’s autobiography contains information about Gauntlet Systems which could harm the company.
But otherwise Ian the Geek is patchy. Very patchy. And unpredictable. He notched up a fail on getting a landline back into The Turrets, and because Oliver Anchor-Ferrers changed contracts on the alarm installation there’s a grey area about the security system that Ian the Geek still hasn’t adequately explained. And all that stuff in New York with Havilland? Ian the Geek arguing about bringing Minnet Kable into the operation, as if he was on some moral crusade or something? The hyper-inappropriateness of defying the boss is stunning to Honig. And even more stunning is the fact the bastard seems to have got away with it. Evidently knowing shit about spybots gives you carte blanche to argue with the boss because, while Havilland didn’t junk using the Minnet Kable story, he didn’t drop-kick Ian the Geek off the job either. Instead he let him go ahead with it, regardless of his outlandish temerity. It’s obvious Havilland’s completely blinded by Ian the Geek’s sleight of hand in the techy department, his nerdy glasses and smartphones and computers.
Honig watches Ian the Geek closely as he works. Grudgingly, he has to admit, the video he’s edited together, encrypted, zipped and mailed is pretty good. It shows Matilda naked. It shows her husband watching. Everything Havilland wants is right there in Oliver’s face. Confusion, desperation, fear. Havilland is currently in Mozambique – which has the advantage of being in roughly the same time zone as the UK. He is now sitting in his hotel room watching the video. Pietr Havilland hates Oliver Anchor-Ferrers more than anyone on the planet and seeing him helpless like this is exactly what he wants.
When anything thre
atens his company, Gauntlet Systems, Pietr Havilland doesn’t believe in softly softly catchee monkey. He believes in shoot hard, ask questions later – kill them all, let God decide. Like a viper, he paralyses the prey. Or rather, he sends his soldiers to paralyse. And for this he pays very, very well. On this job Honig has negotiated a unique pay structure: 25 per cent of their ‘bonus’ up front, then incremental payments – each time video evidence of the family’s suffering reaches Havilland, another 5 per cent of the payment is sent, which leaves five episodes of torture and humiliation still to come. When their final objective is achieved they will receive a lump sum of 30 per cent – leaving a total of 15 per cent to collect when they get their first-class flights back to New York.
The job is easy to achieve and the financial terms are extremely good. It’s a golden-goose job and has been awarded to Honig because of his loyalty and status in the company. It irritates him that Ian the Geek, by default, is being paid in exactly the same way. The anorak. Every day he should be getting down and licking Honig’s shoes clean, just to show his gratitude.
He sighs and stares out of the window at the woods that run along the side of the lane. Impenetrable purple and grey shadows.
Honig’s a brilliant performer, but that’s his only skill. He’s not the badass he pretends, not at all. And although he is good at acting, lately he’s been getting tired of it. The way he and Ian the Geek were talking to each other yesterday: Yes, Mr Honey, OK, Mr Molina – no first names, as if they were in a Tarantino movie and were about to put on loud music and cut someone’s ear off – he wishes he believed in it. He wishes he was a proper villain, a hard bastard, someone who could have done every bit of that Sudoku puzzle while Mrs Anchor-Ferrers was hanging from the ceiling.
He’s not. The Sudoku book got filled in with nonsense. Honig was concentrating on his act. The act which is making him tired, cold and slightly disgusted with himself.
Honig is British, but at the moment he lives in a modest house on the outskirts of Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. What no one in the company would guess is that his life is changing. He has a brand-new wife, a beautiful half-Puerto Rican girl from New Jersey who works in a beautician’s in the local shopping mall. The beauty clinic is called Strawberries and Cream and she is obliged to wear a pale pink tunic and slacks to work. She hates the uniform, thinks it’s cheesy. Honig loves it. Her black hair against the pale pink is the happiest, prettiest sight he can imagine.
He would go to the ends of the world for her – do anything just for five minutes of watching her wake and shower and dress, tie her hair back and lean into the mirror to examine her make-up. Usually she kisses him, then puts on her lipstick carefully, outlining the lips before filling in the rest with expert ease. Sometimes, just to wind her up, he grabs her on the way out of the house and kisses her again before she can get out of the door. Then she yells and play-slaps him and complains that she’s got to do her lipstick all over again and does he know how much good lipstick costs these days?
Bubblegum Mania. That’s the name of her lipstick. He knows because he’s got a stick of it in his pocket to remind him of her. He pushes his hand in there and rubs his fingers along the casing. He misses his house, his home. He doesn’t like this part of England. It is damp and the valleys mean you can never see very far. He wonders exactly how far away from here the bodies of those teenagers were found. He thinks about those deer intestines, stinking the place up, covered in flies. He doesn’t know why they’re bothering him so much – it’s as if they’ve left a brief, transient stain in his mind.
Weird bastard, Kable, to have done what he did. Weird-looking too. Long face and strange teeth. What would he be doing at this very moment? He must still be inside – no way he could have been released yet. Is he rocking back and forward on his bed, watching monkeys climbing the walls of his cell? Alien radio beams and TV news presenters whispering secret messages? Or maybe he’s actually much more sane than anyone thinks. Maybe he’d be honoured to know someone has mimicked his crime.
Ian the Geek’s iPad pings.
‘Bingo,’ he says, holding it out to show Honig the screen. Four thousand dollars for the video of Matilda has just hit his bank account. That means Havilland approves. It feels good.
‘See?’ Ian the Geek says. ‘Told you we didn’t need the landline.’
‘There’s still no signal up at the house. Which isn’t perfect.’
‘Why? We can always come down here to stay in contact.’
‘Yeah,’ Honig says, wryly. ‘I mean what’s the worst that can happen if we haven’t got a phone up there? A couple of tossers posing as cops walk in and tie us up?’ He turns the engine on. ‘Come on. It’s time we ate something.’
The Eye of Providence
BACK IN HIS home in the Mendips, Caffery sleeps well for the first time since Tracey Lamb died. When he wakes his head is clear. He sees where he is going and it feels good and right. His old determination and drive are back.
Cross-matching weddings registered in 1981 in the London boroughs is going to take days. Even if Johnny Patel finds a James and Matilda, they won’t necessarily be the right ones. And if he finds the right ones, what are the chances they are still together? The way divorce rates have climbed sky-high, surnames will have changed, people will have moved, dispersed, left the country, died. It’s an almost impossible challenge. The Freemasonry lead sounds more promising. He makes coffee and calls Patel, finding him in a good mood. Things must have gone well with Nina last night.
‘Just so you know, she’s not only beautiful but a very nice person too. With the morals of an angel and the brains of an Einstein. She spent a long time last night looking into this.’
‘Generous with her time too, by all accounts.’
‘Ahem – remember the deal, Jack?’
‘I remember. Go on.’
‘OK. So, according to her, all the Masonic lodges have got different symbols. Like the agriculture lodge has an ear of corn, for example. There’s pretty much every symbol you can imagine.’
‘What about the one on the ring?’
‘Mercury? She thinks it’s something to do with an engineers’ guild down in Farnborough. But the Mercury in their symbol is pictured differently – their Mercury isn’t on top of a globe like this one is. She’s adamant about that. Now, Jack, have a proper butcher’s at the circle in the triangle? The one with rays coming out of it. That’s the bit she’s not sure about. She says it looks like the Eye of Providence.’
Caffery studies the photographs splayed out on his kitchen table. ‘Is that what it’s called? I thought it was the all-seeing eye – it’s Masonic, isn’t it?’
‘They do use it – but it’s not exclusive to the Masons. Nina says it’s one of those images that has been picked up and used all over the world down the ages. Probably came from Egypt originally. It’s on the American dollar bill, at the top of a pyramid, which is why the conspiracy theorists say the American government is a Masonic clique – a load of BS, of course. Though when you look around and see the number of US government agencies who’ve used it as a symbol, you start wondering. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you, right? But … there’s a problem.’
‘Oh joy.’
‘Open your emails.’
Caffery sighs. He pushes his coffee cup out of the way and drags his iPad over. There’s a message from Patel with an attachment, which he opens.
It shows a Masonic ‘lodge certificate’. Some of the names have been blocked out to preserve anonymity, but it’s not identities Patel wants Caffery to see – it’s the symbols at the head of the paper. A set square and a pair of compasses arranged in a diamond shape, next to them an eye.
‘See what I’m seeing?’
‘The same radiating lines, but it’s just the eye on its own.’ Caffery traces his finger across the screen. From the corner of the room, Bear watches him steadily. ‘It’s not a triangle. And the eye on the ring is rounder.’ He compares the two; t
he shape of the eye in the triangle on the ring is a circle, whereas the Masonic eye is almond. And though he thought he’d once seen a triangle on a Masonic lodge, it must actually have been this – the set square and compasses diamond.
‘Not Masonic then?’
‘I’m sorry, Jack. It’s a dead end.’
He shakes his head, deflated. His good mood has gone. Maybe he should just open the malt whisky that sits on the counter and get stuck in drinking now, at nine a.m. The road, which a few minutes ago seemed a little more navigable, has suddenly stretched out again – into infinity.
Paper Tigers
MORNING AT THE Turrets. Theo Honig lies on his bed, his hand behind his head, and stares at the ceiling. Ian the Geek is snoring on the other camp bed, oblivious – he’d sleep through an earthquake – but something keeps waking Honig, and he can’t put his finger on what. In the night three times he woke and went to the windows to check they were closed, but even when he’d checked and checked again he still slept uneasily, his dreams flitting across mashed faces, long scrawls of intestinal matter decorating trees.
He hates this damp rambling old pile of a mansion with its draughts and echoey halls and dark oak panelling. It is supposed to be early summer, but at night the place is freezing. And it smells too. All night long he’s been conscious of that smell. He stares at the ceiling; it is damp and peeling in places and seems a million miles away. It must be at least ten feet tall. His ceiling at home is one of those low, functional things, covered in a freckled render so common in American houses. It is painted a pale yellow.
He misses it like crazy. And his wife.
He throws back the covers and pads across the kitchen, feels around in his jacket for the lipstick. He takes it out and winds it so the frosty tip comes up. He smells it, closing his eyes, remembering her soft black hair, the fragrant waxy slide of her lips against his. His wife doesn’t know where he is at the moment – she knows he is in England, but she believes he is at a high-level meeting. She knows he works in the arms industry, but he’s allowed her to think he works in design. He hasn’t the courage to tell her the truth.