by Tara Moss
Mak looked around her. There was nothing Utopian about this.
She loaded herself up with her backpack and overflowing panniers and walked towards the concrete steps of the industrial-looking apartment block, fishing the keys out of Loulou’s mailbox and letting herself in. The interior hallways of the building were all polished white concrete and tall ceilings. It was stylishly lit, and struck Mak as slightly eerie in its minimalism. Mak made her way down the echoing concrete corridor on the ground floor, in search of Apartment 101. The scent of curry permeated the hallway. Someone was cooking Indian. She found the door of Loulou’s apartment towards the back of the building, and let herself in. There were more polished concrete floors inside, covered with shaggy pink throw rugs. Exactly Loulou’s kind of décor. There were movie posters adorning the walls: Moulin Rouge, La Femme Nikita.
Mak carefully put down her stuff on the floor with a strained groan, then dialled her friend to let her know she had arrived safely.
‘You made it!’ were Loulou’s first words.
‘Hi, Loulou. Thanks for letting me stay.’ Her words echoed strangely through the apartment.
‘Sorry I’m not there, darling. I can’t wait to see you in a couple of weeks!’
But if you were here, I wouldn’t have a bed.
‘That’s okay. I’m glad I can stay. Have fun in Byron. I’m happy things are going well for you two,’ she said of Loulou’s romance with Drayson.
Drayson had been the latest of Loulou’s greasy-haired musician boyfriends when Mak had moved to Canberra. A week after meeting him, Loulou had packed up for Melbourne to cohabit with him, but her relocation had lasted just one tumultuous month, even worse than Mak’s failure in Canberra. Loulou had lost her previous apartment thanks to that impulsive move, but had found this one after a short stint on a friend’s floor. The break-up had been followed by on-and-off interstate couplings since, and things looked to have well and truly picked up again.
‘I always kinda liked Drayson. He doesn’t say much, but he seems sweet,’ Mak admitted, although she always felt he was a bit more stoned than was helpful. ‘I like the way he looks at you.’
‘Oh, Mak. He is soooooo good in bed,’ Loulou confessed. ‘He does this amazing thing with his tongue—’
‘Hello!’ Mak jumped in. ‘I don’t think I need this information, but thank you. Especially as I am newly single, unless you have forgotten already.’
‘Here he is…Oh, I’m being dragged away…’ There were muffled sounds, and something that sounded like sucking. ‘Darling…make yourself at home. Love you!’
The call ended.
Mak shook her head and smiled.
She set about taking in her temporary surroundings.
The apartment was tight, but with the tall ceiling it was more than liveable. Through large windows she could see an unkempt communal garden out the back, overwhelmed by low-lying branches, overgrown weeds and dry grass. The kitchen-cum-living room was an open space with a TV, coffee table, furry couch and a couple of stools pushed against the kitchen counter. There was more than the recommended amount of pink.
Mak moved down the short hallway that led to two doors, and pushed the right one open to find a small bedroom with a double bed, and a window looking out to the garden. A closet was bursting with Loulou’s colourful outfits. She was a woman for whom neon, fishnets and all manner of synthetic fabrics were forever in fashion. Mak spotted men’s shirts in one corner and a rockabilly-style jacket hanging on the closet doorhandle. There was a pair of men’s pointy black shoes next to the bed. It looked like Drayson had been spending a bit of time at the apartment.
She stepped back into the hall and pushed the opposite door open. It was a bathroom of plain white tile, small enough that Mak guessed it would be possible to shower, use the toilet and brush one’s teeth in the sink simultaneously.
Two weeks. Well, you’d better make yourself at home.
She returned to the bedroom, and looked the room up and down before piling Drayson’s things in one corner and hers in another. There was no hanging space left in the closet, but Mak had brought only two small panniers of clothing, which amounted to little more than some T-shirts, jeans, a suit jacket and skirt, two LBDs—little black dresses—and her briefcase. She hung her nicer things carefully from the window fastener before peeling off her leathers with a sense of relief, and heading for the shower cubicle.
Mak was eager to scrub off the seven months and 288 kilometres.
You did it. You aren’t going back.
An hour later, Mak found herself frowning in Loulou’s living room, a cooling cup of tea in her hand. A few feet away, her bike leathers were depressingly sprawled over a plastic chair, in the form of a deflated man. She could hear echoing footsteps in rooms and hallways on floors above. A dog barked outside. Her mobile phone was ringing on the coffee table.
She ignored it.
How many moves in the past five years? Four? Five? How many more in the next five years?she wondered.
She was getting tired of her life being perpetually uprooted. This time she had packed her things in a flustered rush once she’d made the final decision to leave. She’d tried to get everything done before there was a confrontation with her lover upon his return from overseas. She didn’t want a fight. She didn’t want any more fighting.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Mak listened to her phone’s persistent cricket-like cry with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. It might have been her Sydney friend Karen Mahoney, a cop, checking in on her recent relocation. But it might be her ex-lover, Detective Senior Sergeant Andrew Flynn, who had just touched down in Australia after his latest stint at the Quantico FBI Academy. Andy was the man she had temporarily moved to Canberra to be with and precisely the one person she didn’t want a call from.
No more fighting.
It rang and rang, and when finally she capitulated, it had rung out. With strained breath, Mak flipped the phone open to check, and at the sight of the name on the display, a little knot formed in her stomach.
Andy.
There would be no comfort there. Not now and never again. Mak closed her mobile phone, put it back gently on the coffee table and tried not to look at it. She tried not to imagine what she would say if she called him back. She tried not to imagine him—tall, dark-haired and masculine—arriving at the door and kissing her deeply.
Fuck.
He was back after a three-week trip, and part of her missed him. She had known it wouldn’t be easy. Not at first. This was something she had to do, and anything worth doing was hard, wasn’t it?
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Oh, for godsake, Andy! Leave me be!
Exasperated, Mak picked up her mobile phone and again checked the caller ID. To her surprise, it was an unlisted number. She sat cross-legged on the furry couch and gathered herself before answering, suspicious that her former lover might be calling from another number so she would answer him, and have to listen to his limp explanations.
‘Yes?’ Her voice was tentative.
‘Mak Vanderwall?’ came a familiar drawl. Only her friends knew her as ‘Mak’. It was not Loulou. It didn’t sound like Karen.
Mak paused, unable to exactly place the voice. Her eyes went to the windowsill, where a wind-up toy hula girl stood at rest, arms raised above her head in wait for the next opportunity to dance. ‘Yes, this is Mak.’
‘It didn’t quite sound like you,’ the familiar woman’s voice purred.
Marian Wendell!
‘Oh, God, you scared me. How are you? I got in not even…’ she looked at her watch ‘…not even two hours ago.’
Marian Wendell ran a private investigation agency. Mak had done some PI work for her the previous year, and by the time she’d left there had been a little too much focus in the local papers on one particular investigation of Mak’s. She now wondered if perhaps she had followed Andy Flynn to another city as much to tr
y to save the relationship as to distance herself from the investigation and the controversy it caused.
‘I was going to call you tomorrow…’ Mak continued guiltily.
Marian had a new assignment for her, and right on time, too. Apparently, the client had asked for her specifically.
Makedde had previously plied her height and natural good looks in the modelling industry, catwalking around the world to pay her way through her PhD in forensic psychology. Now that she finally had her doctorate, she found it ironic that she wasn’t even working in the field, which wasn’t to say that psychology couldn’t be useful in this new trade. Her involvement in private detective work had begun innocuously enough, with a bit of banal administrative stuff for Marian’s agency, but the next thing Mak knew she was getting her Certificate III in Investigative Services and becoming one of Marian’s part-time investigators. Every step she took towards starting her psychology practice seemed impeded in some way, yet investigations pulled her in like a magnet. It was not the occupation she had chosen, but it sure seemed to keep choosing her. Certainly the casual psych tutoring she had picked up at the Australian National University in Canberra had not encouraged her to find similar academic work in Sydney. Teaching a semester of ‘Introduction to Methodological Design and Statistics’ to first-year students was excruciatingly tedious, and not very helpful for her pocketbook.
‘Nine-thirty in my office.’
‘Nine-thirty? Okay,’ she heard herself saying. ‘Uh, Marian, who is this client who asked for me?’
‘I’ll see you in the morning. It’s good to have you back.’
Mak hung up the phone and ran a hand through her mane of long dark-blonde hair, her fingers catching in a tangle at the ends.
Back to investigations.
CHAPTER 2
With considerable haste, Mr Nicholas Santer departed from his palatial London home at the hour of five a.m. while his wife of seventeen years slept soundly in her own bedroom, on her own floor, in a separate wing of the house. He had packed several valuable items from his private safe including £20 000 in hundred-pound notes, his father’s medals and watch, and a small Rembrandt ink sketch no larger than his fist, which he hoped to sell on the black market.
He had not bothered to say goodbye.
Nearly twenty-four hours and over 1000 kilometres later he was snoring in a rustic farmhouse south of the town of Vézelay, France, his dreams assisted by a now empty bottle of fine cognac. As the bottle from his impressive cellar had been steadily drained, so also his worries and strain had dissipated, along with the feeling in his limbs, his lips, his face. He was tingling and warm by the time he nodded off, stretched out on a couch he barely remembered buying years before, surrounded by white dust covers, a half-unpacked case and an overflowing ashtray of cigarette butts that he could no longer see through the blur across his eyes. His 52-year-old body slumped in inebriated rest, but even in his dreams his mind was active with worry. He imagined himself in a huge wine barrel, running like a mouse on a wheel, a heavy briefcase of money in his hand. In his nightmare everything depended on him running and never stopping.
Running…running…
A bead of acrid sweat rolled down his temple.
With distaste, the man watched the bead of sweat move down Santer’s face. Santer did not realise it, but he was not alone.
The sweat was puzzling to the man who stood silently over the snoring, sweating, murmuring Santer. The room was not particularly warm; in fact, it was winter in Burgundy, and the old farmhouse felt like an icebox, not a sweatbox. It had been no colder in Russia, his last stop.
Santer let out a grating snore, and at this Mr Hand squinted.
Luther Hand had found him easily. One of the things he specialised in was finding people. And what he did to the people he found paid very handsomely. For five or six figures, Mr Hand—Luther, or ‘The hands of Lucifer’ as he was sometimes called—would remove from the food chain any politician, policeman, dignitary or despot, witness, waitress or lover, troublesome competition or troublesome colleague his client nominated. He was what the industry called a ‘cleaner’. He cleaned up problems for anyone with pockets deep enough to pay for his services. His job was simply to follow instructions, and to remain invisible. As a cleaner—a hitman—he was adept at delivering death using knives, axes, blunt instruments, rope, poison and chemicals. He had fine firearm skills at close and middle range. His sniper skills were excellent. He had successfully staged fatal drownings, robberies, suicides and accidents, and had also arranged terminations where the hit appeared precisely what it was—to make a point. He was a flexible and near flawless operator, unfussed by codes that restricted others to eliminating only male targets, or members of particular ‘organisations’. He did not belong to any crime family. He had no loyalties. He did business, and that was all it was. He was professional, unattached and virtually untraceable, and anyone on his list, whether man, woman or child, would be dispatched efficiently, and according to any special instructions. With these attributes, Luther Hand had gained a reputation over six years as a valuable and successful component of the international crime community.
Generally, Hand was one or two closely guarded steps removed from the client he served. They never met him, and it was not his job to ask why the names ended up on his list. More often than not, he received background on the individual mark, but he did not require reasons for the call upon his services. This mark was different, however. Santer had pissed off an impressive number of ruthless people, and had come to the attention of more than a few members of Luther’s trade. If it had not been Luther, it would have been someone else cutting his throat that night.
Luther adjusted his latex gloves, gripped Santer’s floppy chin in one steady hand, and drew the sharpened blade of a hunting knife across his neck from his right ear to his left. The mark was so drunk that his body barely flinched at the intrusion of the blade. There was a gurgling sound as the trachea opened up and air rushed out. In seconds, torrents of blood flowed from the wound and down his chest. The cut was deep, and the skin sagged as it hung open, giving the dead man the look of a fleshy jack-o’-lantern, head thrown back against the couch cushions, a giant, oversized red smile slick across his neck. Luther briefly thought of pulling the tongue through the wound to create a ‘Colombian Neck-Tie’, as it was called. But he didn’t see any reason to bother with such flashy creations. It was not in his instructions, and if he did everything properly, there should never be anyone to witness his handiwork with this mark. Instead, he set to work transferring the body to the garage for the next vital stage. Mr Santer needed to disappear, something he had not so successfully achieved in his living moments, and so Luther’s work was not over yet. He spent the next hour focused on the task of dismembering the mark over thick sheets of plastic in the garage next to his new car, a maroon BMW, with bright yellow British plates. It, too, would need to disappear. When the body was dissected into enough pieces—eighteen in all—it fitted into a chest. Luther locked it and by torchlight buried it in the back garden amongst the dead flowers.
It was early morning when Luther stripped the BMW of its books, plates and valuables, and drove it to nearby Vézelay. The black-market dealer was waiting for him at the edge of town at six. He was Italian and Luther had dealt with him before. He counted the notes carefully. The transaction was quick, and in minutes Luther had ten thousand euros in cash. The serial numbers would be filed off Santer’s car, the paint changed, perhaps even the interior. Untraceable, the new car would be resold to an Italian businessman for four times what Luther was paid for it, still somewhat less than its retail value. He returned to the farmhouse and gathered up the valuables Santer had fled with. They were best hidden on the property for now. It would not do to travel with such easily traceable items. He replaced the dust covers in their original positions, cleaned up the blood and superficial evidence of recent activity, and closed the place up.
It was a beautiful area, he reflected.
<
br /> Remote.
Luther might like to return to such a place, if ever he found someone to share time with. Perhaps he could send his mother to a place like this. There would be many cottages and farmhouses in the area, all of them affordable to a man of Luther’s means. But he couldn’t be sure his mother would even recognise him. Or accept him. She lived in Australia, where he had grown up. She had not seen him in years. But she would like a place like this, wouldn’t she? She had been on his mind a lot lately.
Luther stepped out into the fresh air, showered, cleaned and satisfied with his work. Without a tip-off, Santer would not likely be found for some time. There was no one alive who’d be the least bit interested in getting in touch with the authorities regarding his absence. Scotland Yard would be left to their own devices, having to search every one of Santer’s nine properties that stretched from the Bahamas to the English countryside. He doubted they would care that much. And if they did, and if he was found, no one would be very surprised that he had met a grisly end. He’d certainly seemed to be asking for it.
The client would be pleased to know that Santer had taken a permanent vacation. He would let his agent, Madame Q, know the job was done. With something like the contentedness of job satisfaction, Luther turned on his phone and sent the agreed message to signal the success of another job.
COMPLETE.
He had a message waiting on his phone, and it was not from Madame Q, but from a hired contact in Australia.
At the sight of the name, his countenance changed. His throat tightened.
URGENT NEWS ABOUT CATHY DAVIS, the message said. CALL ME.
CHAPTER 3
Running…she was running as fast as she physically could. Running…muscles burning…I must save her!