by John Harvey
33
‘Croissant?’
‘What?’ Letitia’s voice was harsh, bruised by sleep.
‘Croissant? It’s a sort of curved doughy thing, a bit like-’
‘I know what a fucking croissant is.’
‘Good. Here. Have one.’ Cordon sat on the side of the bed, paper bag in his lap.
Letitia shook her head and, shuffling into a sitting position, pulled the pillows up against the headboard and leaned back. The sheet slipped as she twisted round, leaving one breast exposed. Outside, rain was falling lightly; you could hear it faintly against the shutters.
‘Where’ve you been anyway?’ she asked.
He held up the bag. ‘To get these.’
‘I didn’t hear the car.’
‘I walked.’
‘In this?’
He shrugged. ‘Live in Cornwall, remember? You get used to it.’
His hair had been darkened by the rain; shoes and waterproof jacket he’d taken off and left just inside the door. His idea had been to give himself time to think, think — what was the expression? outside the box? — but all he could see was the same set of imponderables, the same set of walls.
They’d taken the ferry from Portsmouth to St. Malo. Letitia’s father had driven them to the port and then continued on his way towards Bristol, old friends he hadn’t seen in far too long a time. The bookshop was locked up. A sign: Closed Till Further Notice. After what had happened, there would be people coming round, he didn’t doubt; more friends of Anton’s, asking questions, none too fussy about how they got their answers. One more consequence of Cordon’s actions.
‘Who in God’s name d’you think you are?’ Clifford Carlin had asked. ‘Shane? Sorting out the bad guys? Setting things to rights?’ Jack Schaefer. Alan Ladd in buckskins. One of Carlin’s favourites. Cordon’s, too.
‘Something like that,’ Cordon had answered. He was taller than Ladd, he knew that for a fact.
‘Great!’ Letitia had said when he told her what had happened at the caravan site. ‘You’re going to get us all fucking killed, you know that, don’t you?’
It was a risk, a possibility. Simply, he hadn’t seen what else he could do. He’d said as much to Jack Kiley when he called him later, explaining the situation, asking if there were any ways in which Kiley thought he could help.
‘What?’ Kiley had replied. ‘A couple of nights’ bed and board and suddenly I’m your guardian angel? Picking up the pieces?’
‘Sorry, Jack. Bit out of my depth.’
Kiley gave it some thought. ‘Letitia and the kid, they’ve got passports?’
‘I think so.’
Uncertain where they might go after the funeral, what they might do, Letitia had taken that precaution, at least.
‘What you’ve got to do,’ Kiley said. ‘Buy a little time.’
After arriving in France, they’d taken a bus into Dinard, as Kiley had instructed, just a little way west along the coast. A fading old seaside town, mostly closed down for the winter. Grand hotels on the seafront boarded up, shuttered across. Only the one cafe open on the promenade, where Letitia sat and smoked and read whatever paperbacks she’d bought on the ferry, while Cordon and young Dan played desultory games of football on the beach.
‘Be patient,’ Kiley had told them. ‘Sit tight. I’ll get back to you soon as I can.’
For some reason, there was a statue of Alfred Hitchcock peering out across the water, surrounded by stone birds. A casino under redecoration. They found a little place across from the art gallery that sold good pizzas and sat there for hours, sheltering from the wind, listening to the same music playing over and over.
Kiley phoned again on the third day. One of Jane’s friends at the school had a holiday place in Brittany, a village just a couple of hours’ drive from where they were. Not even a village, a hamlet. Four dwellings and only one of them occupied year round, an old man and his dog. They could stay there, till Easter if necessary. Sort out what they were going to do.
‘Might need your help there, too, Jack,’ Cordon said.
‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
Cordon hired a car and drove it as far as Lamballe where he changed it for another. If anyone was going to be on their trail, he wanted to make it as difficult for them as possible. At the Carrefour in Guingamp they loaded up with supplies; the nearest village, some three or four miles from where they would be staying, had a boulangerie and nothing else.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ Letitia exclaimed.
‘What?’
‘That bloody croissant. You’re getting crumbs all over the bed.’
‘Didn’t realise you were so fussy.’
‘Yeah, well …’
They heard the toilet flush and then Danny’s voice telling them it was raining. A moment later he appeared in the doorway, tousle haired, sleepy eyed, dinosaur pyjamas.
‘I’ll get the coffee on,’ Cordon said.
‘You do that.’
She lifted the covers and the boy slid in beside her, Letitia turning to slide an arm comfortably around him, kiss him on the forehead — ‘Why don’t you just snuggle down?’
Feeling a stranger, Cordon left the room.
It was a converted farmhouse, low and long, a longere, thick stone walls that had stood for more than a century. Brown shutters, red paint around the window frames starting to blister and fade. A garden front and back, gravel, lawn and shrubs. A few stunted apple trees. Other trees, taller, shielded the house from the road. Scots pine? Cordon wondered. Breton pine, perhaps? Was there such a thing? His father would have … he stopped the thought on hold.
Inside there were three bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, a wide kitchen with a refectory table and a tap that permanently dripped. You could have fitted Cordon’s old Newlyn sail loft in twice with space to spare. No need for them to get under one another’s feet.
Letitia seemed to be in denial: whenever Cordon tried to get her to talk about what they were going to do, consider their options, ‘There are no fucking options,’ was the best he could get.
Letitia stayed in bed late, drank supermarket wine and cooked a few unwilling meals. Listened in a half-hearted fashion to the Madeleine Peyroux CD that had been left in the portable stereo. Without too much of an argument, she let Danny talk her into helping him do one of the several jigsaw puzzles he’d found in one of the cupboards, played hide-and-seek with him until that too palled and she ran her hand through his hair, kissed his cheek and begged for a rest. Time to do a little reading instead.
When she’d finished the Martina Cole she’d bought on board, she tried some of the books the owners had left around-Ian McEwan, Rose Tremain, Julian Barnes — but with limited success. Sometimes she just sat, collar hunched up, on a folding chair close to the front door of the house, smoking cigarette after cigarette and staring at the empty lane beyond the gate.
As far as Danny was concerned the whole thing was just a holiday, a place to run around; the owners clearly had kids of their own and there were toys in boxes, DVDs of Toy Story, Chicken Run, Tintin, Planet Earth. There was even a child’s bike with a slow puncture in the rear tyre forever in need of pumping up, and Cordon taught Danny, after a fashion, to ride. Wobbly circles that ended less and less in tears and bumps and grazed knees.
‘Don’t make him too fond of you,’ Letitia said one afternoon, her voice edged like a rusted blade. ‘He’s already got one father to get over. He doesn’t need a fuckin’ second.’
Cordon drove to the town and bought lamb chops and a bottle of good Scotch, Johnny Walker Black Label. Scoured the bins of cheap CDs and found an old recording from the Paris Jazz Festival in 1949, remastered: the Tadd Dameron Quintet with Miles Davis.
He’d called the headquarters of the Devon and Cornwall Police in Exeter when they’d arrived and spoken in the vaguest terms of the need to take an extended break, leave without pay; let them try turfing him out a few years short of his pension if they cared to, if they dared.
Serve them right for putting him out to grass for having a mind of his own, playing the awkward bugger one too many times.
Even so, they couldn’t stay there for ever.
A fantasy family.
Lives in hiding.
Recipients of someone else’s good nature.
Funny thing, Jack Kiley had told him, but a few days after he got one of his contacts to run a check on Anton Kosach, as Cordon had asked, he’d had a caller himself.
‘SOCA,’ Kiley said, ‘Serious and Organised Crime Agency. Bloke looked like a bloody tax inspector. Wanted to know about my interest in Kosach. Gave the impression I might have crossed some line. I spun him a bunch of lies and half-truths, how the name had come up as part of something I’d been helping out on, steered well clear of mentioning names. Not sure how much he bought of it, if any. Asked him why he was so interested, of course, but he wasn’t giving anything away. Mr Kosach is one of a number of people who are currently under investigation, that was the sum of it. Hands off, in other words. Steer well clear. Thought you should know.’
‘Thanks, Jack,’ Cordon had said.
He hadn’t mentioned it to Letitia.
Then one day when he got back to the farmhouse after taking a stroll around the narrow lanes, the door hung wide open.
There was no one there.
His chest tightened; skin dimpled cold along the backs of his legs and arms. The book Letitia had been reading was on the ground beside her chair; Dan’s borrowed bike lay on the grass. Inside there were no signs of anything amiss.
He walked to the end of the lane where it met the road, then a short way in both directions, seeing no one. The earlier chill had disappeared and the sun was filtering weakly through the clouds. Their names when he called them echoed back to him along the still air.
Going inside, something caught his eye. Something white, a scrap of paper on the floor. A note Letitia had scribbled that had blown from the table, the wind through the open door. Gone for a walk. Thought we might catch you. Cordon broke the seal on the Black Label, poured a small measure into a glass, his hand shaking only slightly as he raised it to his mouth. For God’s sake, he told himself, get a grip.
For some minutes he stood in the doorway, listening for sounds of them returning, looking into the space beyond the trees. They wouldn’t have gone far.
Back inside, he set the newly acquired CD to play: track two, another version of ‘Good Bait’. You could never have too many. He smiled as the trumpet rose above the crackle of sound. Miles not yet cool, only twenty-three, still trying to sound like someone else, like Dizzy, not yet his own man.
That was how it happened, Cordon thought, you started by copying, learned through doing. Experience. Some did. Some never learned.
‘All right,’ Letitia said, the words out of her mouth almost before she was through the door. ‘Sit. Listen. I’ve been thinking.’
Her skin had taken on some vestige of colour, no longer the putty-like grey it had been more or less since they’d arrived. She looked five years younger; there was, if not a sparkle, liveliness in her eyes.
‘We can’t just stick here and bloody fester, right?’
‘Right.’
Dan was tugging at Cordon’s sleeve, anxious to show him the shells he’d collected from the garden earlier, tiny shells that lay mixed with the gravel, each one no bigger than a fingernail.
‘Danny,’ his mother said, ‘just go and play outside, okay?’
Disappointment flooded the boy’s face.
‘Ten minutes,’ she said, ruffling his hair. ‘That’s all. We’re playing catch later, remember? Why don’t you go and get some practice.’
He pouted. ‘I can’t on my own.’
‘Throw it up against the wall. Just mind the windows, that’s all.’
‘You won’t be long?’
‘I promise. Now off you go, go on.’
The boy grudgingly outside, Cordon pulled out one of the chairs from the table and sat down. ‘So, what’s the brilliant idea?’
‘No need to be bloody sarky.’
‘I’m sorry. Go on.’
‘Taras?’
‘Who?’
‘Taras. Anton’s brother.’
‘The one with the hotel …’
‘In the Lakes, exactly.’
‘What about him?’
‘Well, for one thing he liked me …’
Cordon raised an eyebrow.
‘Liked me, not fancied me. Well, maybe … but we always got along, that’s the thing. He liked Danny, too. And he was reasonable. Not like Anton. You could talk to him and he’d listen.’
‘And you think that’s what we should do? Talk to him?’
‘What someone should do, yes. Get him to talk to Anton, make him listen to reason.’
‘You think that’s possible?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s got to be, hasn’t it? For Danny’s sake as much as anyone’s.’
Cordon glanced towards the door. ‘You think he misses his father?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ve never heard him mention him. Not once.’
‘That doesn’t mean he’s not thinking about him.’
Cordon nodded, thought that was probably right. Children did, young children. Seemed to need to. Until they grew up, grew away …
‘Besides, Danny or no Danny, we can’t just stay here for ever. It’s not real. We’ve got to go back to England sooner or later and when we do I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder all the time in case Anton’s crazy twin brothers are going to be there, waving guns in our faces.’
Cordon angled his chair round away from the table and looked at her carefully. ‘What do you want? Longer term, I mean.’
Letitia took a breath. ‘I just want to go back and be getting on with my life. Our lives. Danny and me. I don’t know where. Not yet. But one thing’s certain, Anton, no way am I going back to live with him, that’s over. And he’s got to accept it. If he wants to see Danny on some kind of regular basis, that’s fine. If he wants to take him places, weekends, holidays, that’s fine, too. But Danny’s living with me.’
As if on cue, her son’s voice came from the garden, ‘Mum!’
‘A normal life,’ Letitia said. ‘Is that too much to ask?’
Cordon shook his head. It shouldn’t be, but maybe, in this instance, it was. And for Letitia, what was normal anyway?
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Your friend Kiley,’ she said, ‘you think he’d do that? Talk to Taras? Some kind of go-between?’
‘I don’t know. We’ve asked a lot of him already.’
‘But he might.’
Cordon nodded. ‘He might.’
Letitia’s face broke into a rare smile, a grin almost, carried away on her own idea. ‘Good-looking, is he? Fit?’ She winked. ‘I’d make it worth his while.’
‘Mum!’
‘Coming!’
She reached out towards Cordon’s shoulder as she passed, her fingers brushing the bare skin of his neck; just a touch, but it sent a shock through him as if he’d been grazed by electric wire.
34
Not so long ago, it would have been a smoke-filled room. Silk Cut, Benson’s King Size, the occasional small cigar. The air acrid and blue. Not a black face, not a woman in sight. Now it was pristine, anonymous, the lingering scent of air freshener and cheap polish. The faint hum of central heating. A table, centrally placed, and seven chairs, three occupied. Burcher stood by the window, looking out through the double glazing.
They were on the eleventh floor, a view south and west across London, far beyond the Imperial War Museum and the Elephant, out towards the old Battersea Power Station and the television mast at Crystal Palace, topping out at over two hundred metres.
Karen they kept waiting outside, a small room across the corridor, coffee, bland and undrinkable, in a plastic cup. A week-old copy of the Standard to read. She had chosen black, a black trouser suit neatly cut, straight
-legged, angled lapels; a cream shirt, buttoned to the neck. Boots with a low heel. Little make-up, save around the eyes; no ornamentation, no rings. Hair pushed up and back and held in place.
‘Want me to come and hold your hand?’ Ramsden had asked.
‘As if.’
So far, only one of the three men whose bodies had been found at Stansted had been positively identified. Valentyn Horak, a Ukrainian last arrested eighteen months previously, accused of involvement in drug smuggling and prostitution; several weeks before the trial, all charges had been dropped when the CPS judged there was insufficient evidence to secure a conviction.
Though neither of the other two victims yet had names, all the evidence — tattoos, dental work, physical appearance — suggested that they too were from the Ukraine or somewhere similar, in the country illegally.
Karen had been unable, as yet, to erase the memory; scrub the lingering smell from her skin.
A civilian with a slight stammer invited her to join the Detective Chief Superintendent and the others, held the door open, then disappeared whence she had come — all of this without once looking Karen in the eye.
Three heads turned towards her as she entered; Burcher’s did not.
Warren Cormack, of course, she knew. Same suit, different tie. A suggestion of a smile as she entered, he stood and offered his hand.
Seated directly across from him was a man she didn’t recognise. Mid-forties? A little older? Hair neatly trimmed, almost an old-fashioned straight back and sides. His suit jacket, a thin pinstripe, he’d removed and hung carefully from the back of the chair alongside, shirtsleeves rolled neatly back at the cuff. There was a small cut above his top lip as if he’d been uncautious shaving. Cardboard cut-out eyes.
Then there was Alex Williams. Alexandria. Tailored jacket. Square hands. A face that was handsome rather than pretty. Hair cut short, like a boy’s. Had she not known her to be happily married and living with a husband — who was something in the media — and their three children in a large terraced house in Herne Hill, Karen might have mistaken her as gay.
When they’d first met, Alex had been seconded to Homicide and Serious Crime; no bullshit, no backing down, a fast learner — Karen had liked her. Admired her, even. Now, two promotions, four years later, she was back in the Specialist Intelligence Service, SIS, and the darling of the Met’s PR department — equal opportunity works, motherhood and a career both attainable, here was the living proof. It helped that her husband worked, most of the time, from home; that they could afford a succession of nannies and au pairs.