by Mo Hayder
As fakes go, Theo Honig thinks he beats the pants off every paper tiger that ever walked the earth.
Oliver Anchor-Ferrers isn’t going to die. Nor is Matilda. Nor is the girl, Lucia. None of them are. The whole job is an exercise in fear – in headfucks. Headfucks are Pietr Havilland’s speciality. He knows how to inspire terror to achieve his goals. Often that takes time, and in this case it is scheduled to take six days. By the end of which none of the Anchor-Ferrers family will be permanently hurt. At least, not physically. But they will be traumatized beyond belief. As a result Oliver will have withdrawn the book he is working on, and it will never occur to him ever to write about the arms industry again. He will feel sick every time he even thinks about it.
Moreover he will never know that Gauntlet Systems was behind the whole thing. That is Havilland’s most important caveat: that Oliver Anchor-Ferrers never, ever learns the identity of his tormentors. If Oliver finds out Havilland is behind this, he will be in a position to involve the authorities and exact revenge. If he doesn’t know then he has no starting point. The family will be too terrified to speak of it again – they will carry it to their graves. The only evidence that any of this happened will be the video clips of the family crying and begging – and those will remain encrypted on Havilland’s hard-drive, for him to retrieve and enjoy at his leisure whenever he chooses.
This will be Honig’s last job. He’s already decided it – the very last. With the money he gets for this he’s going to go legit. He’ll enrol at one of those big universities in DC. Perhaps he’ll go into design. Do the job his wife thinks he is doing. Anything is possible.
He sniffs the lipstick again. His wife’s face comes to him. Then, frowning he lowers the silver tube and sniffs the air. His daydream evaporates. He recaps the lipstick and turns, scanning the kitchen.
That is what kept waking him overnight – the smell. It’s not just a faint odour any more. The place fairly stinks.
The Colonel
THE WEDDING RING doesn’t belong to a Mason, but the marks on it must mean something. Caffery spends time googling various symbols, but if there is a link between an obsession with space junk, the image of Mercury and the odd eye in a triangle, it eludes him. He finds references to something called the Kessler syndrome back in the eighties, when NASA put money into mapping the junk that was already in space, but that’s long ago. There’s a US research programme under the auspices of the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency that might, possibly, be involved in monitoring space junk – its logo, he notices, incorporates the great American Seal and the Eye of Providence. But it’s unlikely they’ll be able to tell him who owns this damn dog. He’s hit a dead end. If he wants the Walking Man to speak, he’s going to have to start from square one again.
‘Come on,’ he tells Bear, who is sitting on the floor watching him. ‘We’re going back where we started.’
It feels stale and it feels old, but at least the Walking Man can’t say he isn’t thorough. Caffery and Bear return to the hamlet they set off from yesterday. They knock on the same doors they did yesterday – the names of the houses blurring together: Rose Cottage, Hollyhock Bank, Daisy Dene. On and on, an endless repetition of yesterday. The only difference is that today he has a picture of the ring and two names.
‘James and Matilda – they’ll be probably in their fifties or sixties. He’s got something to do with space. Possibly an engineer? A scientist?’
But his hopes this new information might jog someone’s memory are soon in the gutter. Nothing about the ring or the names means anything to anyone around here.
‘I know a James,’ says the woman in the yellow house. She’s wearing pink jeans today – and a striped blue shirt. She doesn’t ask him in this time. ‘But his wife’s name is Maureen. They’re in West Bromwich.’
If Caffery’s spirits are low then Bear’s are even lower. Her head droops further with every door they knock on. Caffery buys a sandwich in the Co-op in the high street and shares it with her, sitting on the stone steps with their backs to the memorial, their heads warm in the sun, the names of the village’s war dead behind them. Bear takes tiny morsels from Caffery’s fingers with great delicacy.
‘You’re a well-mannered girl,’ he tells her. ‘Does that mean you come from a nice family? One of the big houses round here? Or is that my class prejudice at work?’
The sun moves high above the church tower. He’s getting tired. That sensation is back – that odd, out-of-body feeling he had in London, of someone trying to get into his thoughts. Someone talking to him urgently: Listen, listen. He shakes his head, scrunches up the sandwich wrapper and drops it in the bin. Looks up at the hill rising above the village, to where the gables of Colonel Frink’s house can be seen above the trees.
‘What do you think, Bear? Do you think the colonel would like a visit?’
Bear looks back at him, her head on one side.
‘I agree – he’ll be chuffed to all buggery.’
They walk up the driveway in the midday sun, crisscrossed by the gaunt shadows of crows flying back and forward between the lime trees. On their right are the ghostly humped shapes of the BMX track. Caffery can’t help thinking they look like ancient burial mounds. As if they should have grave markers mounted above them. He recalls the look on the nurse’s face as she turned to look at the BMX track.
As he and Bear reach the front door he fumbles out his warrant card. The colonel is the type to insist on seeing ID – even though he knows exactly who Caffery is, he’ll stick to protocol. Even if only to humiliate Caffery. That is always the way with men who’ve once held rank; they expect the world to go on in exactly the same way, people to bow and scrape, even when the army’s just a dim and distant memory.
Caffery knocks this time, not trusting the bell. The door is opened almost immediately by the colonel, who wears a patched and threadbare sweater in olive green over a checked shirt. His glasses are perched on the end of his nose. He’s got a glass of whisky in one hand and seems unsteady on his legs without his walking stick.
‘What now?’
‘Colonel Frink? Detective Inspector Caffery.’
‘Yes, I remember you. I do have the faint remnants of a memory span, you know. I can go back further than five minutes ago. Remarkable but true.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Caffery glances over the colonel’s shoulder. Inside the house has the look of a fading chateau, a high-ceilinged hallway with a curved stone staircase leading upwards. Dusty oil portraits hang at intervals along the water-stained wallpaper, and further towards the back of the house a glass-eyed deer’s head stares at him from the wall. Evidently the cleaner still hasn’t been; the place looks as if a tornado has come through and there’s a melancholy, damp smell emanating from inside. In the lighted kitchen at the end of the corridor, Caffery can make out the back of the colonel’s wife’s head. Hunched in her wheelchair, a thick mop of hair above a pink waffle blanket.
‘Fair enough. Just wanted to ask you another question.’ He returns the card to his pocket. ‘About this dog again.’
‘What about it? Has it changed appearance?’ The colonel lurches out of the doorway, slopping whisky on the mat. He glowers at the dog. ‘Am I going to recognize it better today than I could yesterday? Is that it?’
‘I’ve got some names.’ He tugs the laminated print out of the plastic envelope. ‘Matilda and James. Possibly known as Tillie and Jim, Tilda and Jimmy?’
‘Never heard of them. Is that all?’
Caffery holds out the photograph. ‘This is the inside of a wedding ring. Does it suggest anything to you?’
The colonel peers at it blearily, swaying slightly as if there was a wind pushing him off balance. ‘I told you, I don’t know anyone by the name of James. We haven’t been here for years, and like I said, we don’t socialize. Now, for pity’s sake will you please stop pestering us?’
He starts to close the door, but Caffery, wit
h the old salesman technique, slides a foot in to prevent him. ‘Please, Colonel Frink. Please, I’ve got one last question. The land at the bottom of your garden – where the kids ride their bikes.’
‘What about it?’
‘Is there something special about it?’
Frink’s face grows even darker. ‘Is that meant to be a joke?’
‘No. I don’t know—’
‘A detective? And you don’t know about that piece of ground?’
‘Seriously, I don’t. This isn’t a game. I’m a long way off my patch. If I’ve said something inappropriate, then I apologize, but—’
‘Inappropriate,’ the colonel says dully. ‘Utterly inappropriate.’
‘Then I’m sorry.’
‘Accepted. Now are you going to leave us alone?’
Reluctantly, Caffery returns the photos to the wallet. Fishes his car keys out. This is getting sour. ‘I’m sorry – a waste of your time.’
He walks back down the path, Bear tripping along behind him. He’s almost across the weed-cracked courtyard when the colonel calls him from behind.
‘You walked all this way.’
Caffery stops in his tracks. He waits a moment, then turns. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said you came all this way for a second time.’ The colonel looks something monstrous, filling the doorway. ‘Asked the same questions twice.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘Persistence. It’s something I like. You could count a hundred men in your regiment and you’d only find one who had true persistence. It’s a rarity. Like gold dust.’
‘And?’
‘You might want to think about speaking to someone in the Royal Signals.’
‘Beg pardon?’
‘Royal Signals.’
Caffery comes back to the doorway and pulls the photo out. Studies it. ‘What? What makes you say that?’
‘Mercury – on a globe. It’s the cap badge for the Royal Corps of Signals.’
‘Mercury on a globe is a symbol for a lot of companies.’
‘But that’s a particular one. Ever heard of Giambologna?’
Caffery has. It’s something his time with the artist girlfriend gave him. It’s not usual cop knowledge.
‘I have. Italian – medieval, sculptor.’
The colonel raises an eyebrow. ‘And they say our tax pennies are wasted. Extraordinary.’ He leans unsteadily over the photo, pointing a reddened finger, swollen at the joints. ‘Look at it. See the way he’s standing – the way he’s holding the staff? That’s based on a bronze by Giambologna. I know because I did some time in army intelligence. Did a lot of liaising with the various corps.’
‘Seems a bit of a leap to me.’
‘That’s because you don’t know. The name Giambologna – can you see your average squaddie being able to pronounce it? Of course not. They shortened it to something the great unwashed could handle.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes.’ The colonel holds Caffery’s eyes. ‘They shortened it to Jimmy. Show a signaller that picture of Mercury – the first word out of his mouth would be “Jimmy”.’
Legacy
THE SUN BEATS through the skull curtains, making the floor a blood red. Ollie sits hunched over the rug, funnelling all his concentration into what he writes.
It is my opinion that we are going to die in the next 48–72 hours. Probably we will be tortured first.
He touches the pen to his tongue and continues in the painfully cramped script:
I hereby bequeath my entire estate …
He pauses. A few years ago, this would have been clear-cut, straightforward. Kiran had done so well for himself, riding the white horses of the nineties and noughties, back in the day when ‘investment banker’ was still a job title to aspire to. It seemed certain that he would never have a financial worry in his life – unlike Lucia. In the aftermath of Hugo’s murder and everything that led up to it, she stumbled and stuttered through life, pursuing one thing after another, but never finishing anything. She’s earned next to nothing in her various dead-end design jobs. It had therefore been decided that the lion’s share of the estate would pass to Lucia. But what with the upheavals in the banking system, Kiran’s star isn’t shining so brightly of late. When they got the news from Hong Kong – a second baby on the way, another grandchild to provide for – Matilda urged Oliver to reconsider. They’ve made an appointment with their solicitors, set for next month, to change the will so the children get equal shares. The solicitor already knows what the terms of the new will are to be, and Oliver’s scientific brain struggles to decide if this fact should be addressed in this note. In the end it is the military man, not the scientist in him, that comes to the fore and he makes a decision:
… to my wife, Matilda Emma Anchor-Ferrers. In the event that she doesn’t survive me, I wish it to be divided equally between my two children, Lucia and Kiran. In the event either child does not survive me I wish the entire estate to go to my surviving child.
Kiran, he thinks, it’s going to be Kiran. Because every family member currently in the house is going to die.
Today they tortured my wife, using me and my daughter as witnesses.
I am going to witness further attacks on my wife, and almost inevitably on my daughter too.
There is nothing I can do to stop it happening.
I want to
He breaks off. Stares at the letters, his eyes watering. He was about to write I want to die, but he has already written that several times in other places.
John Bancroft will have got the message by now.
Dorset
RECENTLY DS PALUZZI, who has always dressed like a sex bomb anyway, has got even more extreme. Her sweaters are tighter, her skirts and her pink Capri pants more figure-hugging. Her heels have got higher too. This reinforces for Caffery that since her divorce she’s developed an interest in him. It’s little things, like the way he sometimes catches her watching him across the office. A stray comment here and there about the tie he’s wearing, or did she see him when she was out at a Bristol bar last Saturday night? She could have sworn it was him. Did he have a good time?
It’s not the first time this has happened to Caffery at work. He likes Paluzzi, respects her, but he’s not above using the situation to his advantage. While he’s driving down to the Royal Signals regimental base in Blandford, Dorset, he pairs his phone to the Bluetooth speaker and calls her, asking her to do some digging on what happened at the BMX course behind the colonel’s house. Paluzzi tells him the mood in the office has been like a war council, but that the superintendent has gone from red alert to amber, and it probably won’t be long before he starts begging Jack to come back to work. Offering him incentives. Then she promises to send him the information as soon as she can get it.
Yup, he thinks as he finishes the call. He was right about her.
He puts in a call to Johnny Patel, who answers sleepily, as if this is two o’clock on a Sunday morning and not a weekday afternoon.
‘Hey, Jack. How’re the rednecks, my old china?’
‘Have I got you at a bad time?’
‘No no no – I’m just doing a little, uh, research.’
‘With Nina the classicist?’
‘Like I said – a suspicious mind …’
‘How’s my project coming along?’
‘Not good. The clock’s ticked out on your credit, Jack, I’ve got to charge you from now on. I’m sorry, but Nina really needs a Samsung tablet for the course she’s on. And there’s a pair of Kurt Geigers too. You can’t guess what a pair of Kurt Geigers buys between the sheets.’ He coughs. ‘Not that Nina cares about these things, you understand. Like I said, lovely girl, morals of a nun.’
‘It’s fine – it’s fine. Just start me a tab. Now, here’s the twist. We may have got the wrong names.’
‘We? Who’s the “we”, kemosabe?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Lone Ranger joke.’
Caffery si
ghs. He’s tiring of Patel’s relentless perkiness. ‘It might not be James and Matilda. It might be something else and Matilda.’
‘Ohhhkay, so that takes us back a few steps.’
‘I know it. And the groom might have a military title in the marriage certificate. The mercury symbol is the badge of the Royal Corps of Signals. And those quotation marks around the “Jimmy” – well, it turns out that’s a nickname for the signallers. I’m on the way to regimental HQ now.’
‘On your way? What’re you going to do there? If everyone in the regiment is nicknamed Jimmy, how the hell are they going to help?’
Caffery surveys the countryside that zips past the car. Hot and still in the late afternoon sun. It’s the sort of place the Americans and the Japanese would fly thousands of miles to gawp at: honeysuckle-covered cottages and quaint pubs and churches. To him, in his current frame of mind, there couldn’t be a greyer, more desolate sight.
‘Well, Johnny,’ he says eventually. ‘You got any better ideas?’
The Smell
ALL DAY LONG the smell hangs around the kitchen, refusing to budge. In between ferrying food up and down the stairs, and trying to get the phone line working, the men try to work out how the hell it’s creeping into the house from the scullery where the bucket of intestines still sits.
‘Because that’s all it can be,’ says Honig.
‘Right,’ says Ian the Geek. ‘Unless the dog crept back into the house and died on us.’
But they comb the house, the cupboards and the rooms, and find nothing. They search for vents in the scullery and shove newspaper up into the chimney that the dog fell down, but it makes no difference. What neither of them is in the mood to do, Honig thinks that afternoon, standing in the doorway of the scullery, coffee cup in hand, is move the fucking bucket. Hardly surprising, considering. As the day has gone on the flies have been swarming around the entrails. The noise they’re making is like the sound of an electricity pylon on a damp day. They move like a single black entity, undulating as if the offal itself is moving.