The Boat House

by Stephen Gallagher

  "He could be calling someone now."

  Pete said, "Come on. This is hardly going by the book. He broke into my place with a shotgun. You know what he said to me last night, one time when you weren't around? He said he'd looked into her eyes and he didn't think she was human."

  Diane looked toward the house. Pete had noted that even though it was daylight, the upper-storey curtains were still drawn. Apart from that, Aldridge's world seemed like a pretty regular one.

  "Just a way of putting it," she said uncertainly.

  "That's what I thought at the time. Now I'm not so certain."

  Aldridge was coming out again with an armload of stuff. He turned and carefully locked the door behind him.

  And then it seemed to Pete that he stopped for a moment, and for no obvious reason; he stood with his free hand gripping the door handle and his head bowed slightly, like a programmed thing that had hit some momentary gap in the instructions that it was receiving.

  For a moment, it was as if the birds didn't sing.

  And then Aldridge straightened, and started back toward them.

  Dizzy's black limousine was on the forecourt when Diane arrived, and she parked alongside it. She glanced around as she got out, remembering Aldridge's warnings. But this was daylight and familiar ground, and she sensed no danger.

  On her way around to the side entrance she came across Bob Ivie, stretched as before out on his sunlounger. This time he wasn't even pretending to be interested in a magazine; he was simply staring off into space and looking about as forlorn as it was possible to get.

  Diane couldn't help feeling sorry for him; and for Tony Marinello, whom she'd overheard in his room singing along with Rainbow one afternoon the previous week. Dizzy's minders were almost useless when lifted out of their city environment; but they'd have to stand it, because both of them knew that they were otherwise unemployable. They were probably yearning for the end of summer and their return to town, for the late nights and the bad debts and the fights quietly defused before they'd started, and for the legwork involved when Dizzy got tied up with some of the bizarre business ventures of his friends and which would sometimes actually make them all a spot of money. Life out here had been standing still too long for them, and like anything else in the same situation it was beginning to go sour.

  "Bob?" she said, and he looked up, startled. "Sorry, Bob. Were you napping?"

  "No," he said, "just thinking. It's getting to be a bad habit."

  "Has Dizzy got anyone with him, do you know?"

  Ivie slowly started to get to his feet, moving as if he'd gone soft from lying too long. "I don't think so," he said. "Was there anyone in particular you had in mind?" But she sensed more of an evasion than an answer, and Ivie shot a dark glance toward the parapet and Dizzy's apartments above. At that moment, loud rock music suddenly fell onto them like an airburst.

  The level dropped straight away, but it stayed fairly loud; it was the effect of someone having switched on a sound system without realising quite how high they'd set the volume, and it was coming from the suite upstairs. For it to be so loud, Dizzy's verandah windows had to be open.

  Diane looked at Bob Ivie, and saw that he was as tense as a wire.

  She said, "Is something wrong?"

  Ivie forced his attention back down to her. "No," he said, and then he seemed to make a conscious effort to relax. As they went in through the old kitchen, he said, "Spoken to Jed, yet?"

  "I'll ring him tonight," she said, glancing around the kitchen for any hint of a visitor. "Thanks again from the transport."

  "Anytime. Although I was relieved when I found out you meant Richmond, Yorkshire and not Richmond, Surrey. We had a good drive, stopped a couple of times."

  "Did the old folks feed you?"

  "Like a pig. I couldn't get away."

  By now they were through into the hall, Ivie stepping aside to let Diane precede him through the doorway. The music wasn't as loud in here, blocked by interior walls and closed doors.

  It certainly wasn't loud enough to cover one shrill, terrified scream.

  "You carry on," Ivie said sharply to Diane as he started to move. "I'll handle this."

  He ran for the stairs, with Diane no more than a couple of paces behind him. His previous unease and his present speed of reaction seemed to suggest that he'd been half expecting something of the kind.

  Diane said, "Is it her? Is it the waitress?" But Ivie didn't answer. He took the stairs in twos and threes, all of his apparent softness gone as he raced to deal with something that he could at last understand.

  The door to Liston's suite was locked, but Ivie fumbled out a passkey. "Diane," he said. "Do me a favour. Just go. I'll take care of everything."

  He managed to get the door unlocked. It gave half an inch, and then stuck solid against something that appeared to have been jammed up under the handles on the other side.

  "Dizzy?" he shouted urgently. "Boss?"

  But there was no reply.

  Diane reached into her jacket as Ivie tried the door again, again without getting anywhere. She saw the expression of surprise on his face as he turned to speak to her again and saw the compact police radio that she was switching on in the way that Ross Aldridge had shown her.

  "Ross?" she said. "Pete? She's here, all right. In the house, upstairs."

  FORTY-TWO

  They swung in through the narrow gateway with only inches to spare. The dirt road dash to the house was short, fast, and over in seconds.

  Pete didn't worry about neatness, but left the car standing at the end of its slewed turn into the forecourt, blocking the end of the driveway and leaving deep, fresh scars in the gravel. As he ran for the house Aldridge was behind him, slowed a little by the shotgun. Their first sight as they charged into the hallway through the open doors was of Tony Marinello, faintly stoned and looking as if he'd walked into a long running play and discovered that he'd learned the wrong script.

  "Up here!" Diane called from the gallery, and they headed for the stairs.

  Bob Ivie was still trying to insist that everything was under control, but nobody was listening and he wasn't trying too hard. He got out of the way when he saw that Pete was aiming to hit the door, whether he moved or not. The first attempt at breaking through bruised Pete's shoulder and had little effect; the second, with the policeman's added weight, sent the door flying inward with a crash of splintering wood. They fell into the suite through the remains of the antique chair that had been keeping them out. Loud music hit them like an incoming wave.

  Aldridge already had the shotgun levelled at the kneeling figure out in the middle of the polished wooden floor.

  But it wasn't her.

  It wasn't Liston, either; she didn't look much more than a child, and by her on-the-road uniform of T shirt, faded jeans and training shoes Pete would have guessed her to be one of the region's hitch-hikers. Her head was bowed, dark braids hanging, and she was holding her throat and trying to be sick. She heaved in silence, because the sound system was drowning her out.

  There was nobody else.

  Pete crossed the room, and switched off the stereo. The pause that followed was like a dead silence for the moment that it took them all to readjust, but then real sound started to return; their hollow footsteps on the boards, the faint breeze that was lifting the net curtains at the windows, the choking of the young girl. Diane crouched by her with a hand on the child's back, looking to find out what was wrong.

  Aldridge said, "Other rooms?"

  "Through there," Ivie said, and he pointed.

  "Show me."

  Pete followed them. Aldridge checked the rooms to the left, giving a quick glance into each and moving on when he saw nobody there, and Pete covered the rest of the wing. He was beginning to wonder if there would be any way of telling whether Alina had been here at all; but then, in the master bedroom, he saw something that confirmed it for him beyond a doubt.

  Diane looked up as the three of them went back into the main ro
om. Tony Marinello was with her now, and the child had stopped retching and was sitting upright. Here eyes were wide, and her skin was an awesomely pale tint of blue.

  Diane said, "Any sign of Dizzy?"

  "He's hiding in the bathroom and he won't come out," Aldridge told her. "We looked over the door, and he's alone. But the exit to the back stairs is still locked from the inside, and there's no other exit."

  "There's the windows and the terrace," Pete said. "She was definitely here." And he showed them his find; her scrapbook of home, which he'd found with her other stuff on the chair by the unmade bed. He'd looked at the rumpled sheets and the king sized mattress, and he'd wondered.

  Pete laid the book on the table before them, and fanned the pages. They all looked as the photographs went by in a blur; the display was totally personal, and pretty well meaningless to anyone other than the book's owner.

  "That's him!" Diane said, reaching out and stopping the book at one of the pages. The paper's cheap binding was so worn that even this light pressure was enough to detach it, and it came away in her hand. "This is the man I met!"

  Aldridge took a look, half interested. "Keep it somewhere safe," he said.

  "For evidence?" Diane said.

  "Something like that," Aldridge said, moving off toward the french windows as if the legal niceties couldn't be further from his mind right now.

  They went out to take a look at the terrace. There was no way down other than to drop from the parapet, but the ground beneath was soft. There might have been some mark of where she'd landed, but it was impossible to be certain from here.

  Aldridge said nothing for a moment. But he seemed to be running through his options, rather than hesitating.

  "Right," he said when he'd reached a decision. "We have to move." He turned to the girl, who was standing in the window behind them. "Are you all right?"

  "I just want to go," the girl said in a small voice.

  "You know you're a witness."

  "I didn't even want to come here. My dad'll kill me if he ever finds out. Can't I just leave?"

  Aldridge glanced out across the overgrown gardens. Pete could see no movement out there.

  "I'll tell you what to do," Aldridge said to the girl. "Get your stuff and walk out of the gates and don't look back. Don't tell anybody what you saw here today, and no one'll come looking for you. That's the deal."

  "You're on," she said, and hurried to get her pack.

  They went down to check the ground under the terrace, leaving Ivie and Marinello in a hurried whispered conference. The empty sun lounger stood out on the lawn, a faint breeze riffling the pages of Ivie's abandoned magazine. On the ground by the wall there was no convincing sign, but after a minute Ivie appeared at the parapet above them and called down, "The limo's gone."

  "Gone where?" Aldridge said.

  "How should I know? It was there ten minutes ago, it ain't there now."

  The five of them met up again in Diane's office, where Diane unlocked her grey metal gun cupboard. Laid out on the desk, the four shotguns — Aldridge's own included — made a formidable looking arsenal. Ivie and Marinello were both contemplating it with the same dazed look; but Pete's dismay was mainly felt when he looked at Ross Aldridge.

  He was beginning to feel railroaded, hustled along the young policeman's path before he'd had time to consider the game that he was entering. This entire affair was beginning to take on an ugly aspect, almost like the organisation of a lynch mob. Aldridge wasn't pursuing his professional duty; this seemed to be turning more into some kind of a vendetta, with Aldridge merely using his profession to legitimise it.

  The four guns, and the schoolteacher's scrapbook. There was the situation, in one simple picture. Aldridge was asking each of them about their firearms experience.

  "Don't look at me," Pete said. "Most I ever handled was a bent air rifle in a fairground."

  Tony Marinello said more or less the same. Ivie had hit a few birds in his time. Diane had hit very little in hers, but she was still included as one of the experienced shots.

  "Now," Aldridge said. "This is the situation. We know she's taken the limo. Pete's car's still blocking the way out, so she could only have gone into the estate. How many tracks are there?"

  Ivie and Marinello looked blank. Diane rubbed her forehead as she thought for a moment.

  "Three main ones," she said. "Lakeside, woodland, and across the top. There are little dirt roads as well, but that car's too wide."

  "So that's three possibilities, but we've only got two cars — Diane's pickup, and Pete's wreck."

  "Thanks," Pete said drily, but Aldridge didn't seem to hear; and besides, Bob Ivie was chipping in with a suggestion.

  "Three," he said. "There's the Land Rover in the stables."

  "Okay. Three possibilities, three cars. We want a gun and a radio in each. Those with no weapons experience handle the driving. If you find her, raise the alarm and don't let her get near. Use the gun if you have to. I mean, a warning shot first if it'll do any good, but then I'm saying use it. I've seen her in action and I'm telling you, don't even hesitate. Any questions?"

  "Yeah," Tony Marinello said. "What the fuck's going on?"

  "Later," Aldridge told him. "Just hope you don't find out the hard way."

  Pete was watching Aldridge as he handed out the weapons and counted shells.

  Forget it, buster, he was thinking. Let's just forget the whole thing.

  FORTY-THREE

  Ivie had been having bad feelings about the situation ever since Dizzy had called him up to the doorway of his suite to explain that he'd been joined by 'a lady friend' during the night, and that her presence at the Hall was going to have to be the best kept secret since Winston Churchill's sex change. It hadn't taken much for Ivie to guess that the lady friend in question would be the little waitress from the village that Dizzy had been pining over for so long.

  It had felt like trouble to Ivie even then, and when he'd seen them going out together in the limo and then returning after half an hour with an obviously underaged kid that they'd taken up to the suite with them, the mental alarm bells had really started to ring. He'd watched them unseen from a doorway as they'd ascended, and he'd felt his skin creep into gooseflesh as he'd heard the waitress whispering to the child in a way that was somehow empty of words but filled with promises. When the door had closed behind them and the lock had clicked shut, Ivie had begun to feel sick. It was then that he'd gone to the key board in the housekeeper's closet and helped himself to her passkey; but, until the loud music and the scream, he hadn't been able to raise the nerve to use it.

  Now he and Marinello were in the estate's Land Rover, the one with the wire-protected windows that was like a mobile jail, bumping along the middle track through the centre of the estate. McCarthy and Diane had taken the lower road along the very edge of the lake while Ross Aldridge, alone and in Diane's pickup truck, was way up on the high ground where the woodland ended and the shooting moor began.

  Ivie was at the wheel. Marinello rode shotgun. In spite of Aldridge's insistence that there was a possibility of real danger, he might have felt happier if it could have been the other way around.

  "What do you think?" Marinello asked suddenly, as if his thoughts had been slowly heating up and now had to boil over.

  "I don't know," Ivie said, scanning the woodland out of the meshed window as they rolled forward at no more than ten miles an hour. "Doesn't make any sense to me. You'd think the copper would know what he was talking about."

  "Unless there's more to it, and nobody's saying."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I was in the village, first thing. The news is all over. They're saying the copper's wife walked out on him last night. What if this ties in?"

  Ivie thought it over.

  It made a certain kind of sense, even though he couldn't see all of the connections; and Tony's information in such matters was usually good, thanks to the network of local contacts that he'd kept up since his a
ll comers dance marathon on the night of the party. If the girl was supposed to be so dangerous — and there was nothing about the way that she looked to suggest that she was — then, why was Aldridge throwing together a rag-tag vigilante force instead of calling on his own people? Perhaps his own people were on their way, but Ivie had seen nothing to suggest it.

  He was about to say as much, when the small police radio crackled into life and gave them both a start. It was Aldridge, calling on both of his parties to check in.

  Ivie reached for the radio, which he'd hung by its carrying strap from the Rover's rearview mirror. Pressing the transmission button, he said, "Bob Ivie. Nothing so far."

  "Where are you?"

  "About a mile out, still moving."

  A couple of seconds later, they heard Diane reporting on the same channel. She said that she and McCarthy hadn't seen anything yet, either.

  Marinello said, "I don't like it. I don't know what's going on, but I haven't seen anything to warrant any of this." The whole car dropped with a jolt as they hit a bad pothole, and the engine complained as Ivie changed down a gear to get them out of it. The Rover was an ex army model, unbelievably old and not fit for much more than carrying small parties up to the shooting butts. Marinello added, as Ivie was changing back up again, "I think we're being set up, here."

  "For what?"

  "I don't know. But say they've got a situation, the four of them, and now everything's gone wrong and nobody's thinking straight. Can't you just see it?"

  "I suppose it's possible."

  "What do they think we are? Stupid?"

  Ivie couldn't say that he was as fully convinced as Marinello seemed to be, but he didn't have any evidence that he could offer for his doubts.

  But he'd heard that whispering, on the stairs. And he'd seen the way that the waitress had been looking at the child.

  Aldridge said that he'd seen her in action, and perhaps this was the same kind of thing. If you hadn't been there, it was impossible to explain.

  Ivie suddenly hit the brakes, and then started to reverse.