The Mak Collection

by Tara Moss

  If Mak did have good instincts, as Marian claimed, then they had certainly been hard won through many dangers and challenges. But where were those instincts when she was down in the Catacombs?

  Perhaps you were in love, she thought. With Bogey.

  She wondered if she would ever see him again.

  The door.

  Mak halted her pacing at the sound of the door opening at the top of the stairs.

  Footsteps.

  Here he comes.

  Luther was not feeling right.

  He had not eliminated the mark, Makedde Vanderwall. ‘The mark.’ That was what she was. Nothing more. He would have to kill her. The contract demanded it, and he was a professional. Deviating from the job was when people made mistakes, and he was not one to make mistakes. True, Makedde’s strength and beauty had fascinated him once but he had carefully reined in his unprofessional desires.

  Not Makedde, ‘the mark’. She is only a mark.

  He still had not heard from Madame Q. He felt a strange sense of disconnection. Never before had a woman looked at him, really looked at his face, and not looked away quickly, struck with fear or revulsion. He could see in Makedde’s eyes that she was not afraid of him.

  He moved to her, noticing that she did not flinch. She licked her sensuous lips, and continued to gaze at him in a way that puzzled him. It was not a look of fear, or even loathing. But neither could it be called friendly. She watched him, impassive.

  ‘Could I have a cigarette? I’m really desperate for a smoke,’ she said.

  He frowned for a moment. He hadn’t known she was a smoker. Luther shook his head.

  ‘Shame. I could use one.’ Again, her tone lacked fear.

  There was a prolonged moment of silence.

  ‘You’ve killed before, haven’t you?’ she finally asked. ‘I can tell. It’s a look we all have.’ She cocked her head. ‘We’re alike, you and I. I killed a man once. With a shotgun. It was bloody, and violent. A mess. But you know what, I kind of liked it. It bothered me for a while that I found it satisfying to blow another human being’s head off like that, but you know, he deserved it and I’m okay with that now.’

  Luther did not know how to respond. She had certainly seemed skilled when he had attacked her in that hallway in Australia. But he had been wearing a balaclava; she couldn’t know it was him. Why was she telling him this?

  ‘You’re a hitman, right?’ She was guessing, but his expression told her that she was on the right track. ‘You are. Do you like it? Is it…satisfying?’

  Luther did not know how to answer. Yes, sometimes the job gave him satisfaction, but mostly it was work. He did not care about it so much any more. He did not notice the killing the way he once had.

  ‘I want you to teach me. I want to do what you do,’ she said.

  No you don’t.

  ‘Really. I’ve been thinking. You know, I can’t go back to Australia. You know that. If it isn’t you, it will be someone else. They will be sure to get rid of me on the off-chance that I inconvenience them. You work for the Cavanaghs, don’t you? You’re working as a hitman for them?’

  Such information was often kept from him. Everything with Madame Q was separated, boxed off. No one knew who else was involved in a job. No one could tell. And yet, he had known it was them. Few could afford his fees. He had never dealt with any of the Cavanagh family, but he had been summoned to their house previously to deal with Makedde, and he had known it was they who had set this assignment in motion.

  ‘You know they’ve been caught up in an investigation into an international crime syndicate? In Queensland. They were on some database. You might well be on that database too.’

  He flinched.

  ‘I can’t go back there, and I doubt you can either,’ she told him. ‘I’m sure they already think I’m dead, and it wouldn’t be hard for you to convince them that I am. That’s the only way. If they think I’m alive they’ll just send someone else.’

  He started, and backed away from her. What was she suggesting? That she become his apprentice?

  He needed to leave. He had to be out of her presence before he did something he would regret. He turned and disappeared up the staircase.

  ‘I’m lonely down here by myself,’ he heard Makedde say as he shut the cellar door fast.

  He locked the padlock and leaned against the door, feeling a rare panic.

  CHAPTER 56

  On the morning of day five, the killer Luther Hand woke to the sound of the calico cat stretching and flopping its warm, furry body against the glass of the bedroom window. He looked across to the clock. It was past eight.

  Today is a day to kill.

  Luther was still in control of the situation, but increasingly he felt unsure of exactly what that situation was. It would soon be one week, and he had still not killed Makedde. At first he had just wanted to contain her. He had rationalised that killing her away from Paris would be wise. It would define her case as that of a missing person, a noncrime. Out here, buried under the cellar, her body might not be found for many years—it might never be found. That would be a professional result. Luther had been confident enough about the professionalism of his actions to have not found the urge to have her with him threatening. He’d envisaged keeping her for a day or two, thinking that would get her out of his system. He had believed that would satisfy him.

  But no.

  Something else was happening that he could not explain.

  He sensed that some central part of his identity was dissolving day by day, losing strength and relevance in this isolated place in the countryside. It was as if he could no longer really pinpoint who he was. Luther Hand. Or Luther Davis, the son of Cathy Davis? He was no longer acting professionally, no longer acting like Mr Hand. He was taking an unnecessary risk by keeping his mark alive, and he could not even say why. And with the inexorable progress of that internal change, that questioning of his identity, came something else—a kind of awakening to the new. Or a rediscovery of the old.

  Five days.

  And Madame Q was still not responding. Perhaps what Makedde said was true? Had the Cavanaghs been caught up in an international investigation and somehow led Interpol to Madame Q and her operation? If so, that meant Interpol could have all the information Madame Q had, information about the job. About him.

  Luther had always been careful, though. He had never met Madame Q. As far as he knew, she did not know what he looked like. Their communications, like those with his other agents, had always been electronic. There were go-betweens, contacts, package drops. No one knew where he lived, what his birth name was. He could not be tracked.

  Luther got up, showered and dressed and went about his morning preparations.

  With a cup of coffee in hand, he took out his work phone. There were no messages on it.

  The job is dead. Madame Q is gone.

  Now certain that his professional involvement was complete, Luther disassembled the phone and destroyed the pieces so they could not be traced.

  No one knew where he was. No one, not even Madame Q, had known where he would take Makedde. That was good.

  Perhaps he could stay with Makedde for a while. Perhaps he could even bring her upstairs?

  Laid out before him on the kitchen table were Makedde’s phone and notebook. With a sense of curiosity he switched on Makedde’s mobile phone. He would check the messages to see if anyone was yet concerned about her. If not, that might buy him more time. He felt safe in this farmhouse. There was nothing linking him or Makedde to this place. Still, when news broke that she was missing, he hoped to be back in Mumbai.

  A text message came in to her phone.

  MAK I AM AT HOTEL DES GRANDES ÉCOLES. REALLY WORRIED. I’M HERE ONE MORE NIGHT. NO ONE IN AUSTRALIA KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE. I’M GOING TO CONTACT THE POLICE TOMORROW IF I DON’T HEAR FROM YOU. I HOPE YOU ARE OKAY. BOGEY

  Luther felt a weight fall across him. Time was running out. Could the police trace her here? Or him?

  He k
new what he had to do. Luther delivered fresh water and food to his captive, Makedde, while she slept. He packed up his laptop and briefcase and put them in the Mercedes in the garage, started the car and prepared for the drive to Paris.

  CHAPTER 57

  The cellar had been particularly quiet.

  No creaking. No disturbances. No voices. No visits.

  On the afternoon of day five, Makedde woke on the mattress in the stone prison where she had been living out hours of her life, bound by an ankle chain and a waning sense of faith in the world.

  She wondered what her future held. She had tried talking with her captor, identifying with him, and had got nowhere.

  Will I die in this cellar? Will anyone know of my passing, except this monster who is keeping me?

  Only he wasn’t a monster. He did have a human side, but it was pushed down deep inside him. He was a large man of intimidating size, and his physicality brought to mind the case of Edmund Kemper, a man of unusually high IQ, a height of two metres plus, and a bulk of 136 kilos, who was raised by a strict mother who apparently suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder, and used to chain him up in the basement because she was afraid he would molest his sisters. She made him into a monster. He viewed himself as a monster, and thought natural sex drive was disgusting and evil. He killed ten people—most of them women whom he raped posthumously—including his own mother before giving himself up to the police. Edmund Kemper had been treated like a monster, and that’s certainly what he became. And this man who kept Mak. What was his story? He was a professional killer, she was now certain. What was he doing with her? Why hadn’t he killed her already? She could see that his face was heavily scarred. What were the scars from? The man who was keeping Mak was not inhuman. He was a man. If she could appeal to the man in him, she might save herself.

  But for the moment she had no opportunities. Her ankle was raw. She had no tools to relieve herself of its chafing bondage. He had left her water and food, and he had not come back for some time.

  Where is he?

  Mak picked up her plastic water dish and drank from it, feeling the cold liquid slide down her throat and into the base of her hollow stomach. She ate the bread, and scooped up the remains of a cold TV dinner out of its foil tray with a spoon. Her nameless captor clearly did not trust her with other implements—glassware, forks, knives. Spooning a TV dinner and drinking out of a cat bowl; she had been reduced to this. Her life had brought her to this point.

  Mak put the foil tray down, and became aware of a creeping numbness in her limbs, her brain and her heart. She had, for the moment, lost interest in reversing the spread of that natural anaesthetic. The man who was holding her captive had left her to ponder her fate. He had been gone for a stretch of time that she guessed to be equal to a day in the language of her pre-captivity life. In that time she had really begun to believe that she might never make it out of the dark little cellar alive. Her hope was waning with every passing hour, and her inner strength was crumbling in the face of the futility of her attempts to find a way out. She had being trying to reach her captor, and had so far failed. He had walked away from her, and she was still chained up there, no better off than she had been on day one. He could come back at any moment to finish her off. There were no white knights and no guarantees, and if Mak could not save herself from this place then it was over for her, and this whole strange journey of a life she had experienced would have finally reached its end. At thirty, her life would end in a dank, foreign cellar, after being held captive for a number of days she could not accurately document, for reasons she did not understand.

  There are no white knights.

  This reality penetrated to her core. Some primal belief, some childish ideal had not fully been extinguished until now, despite her harsh years of experience. Funny, she thought, how, despite everything she knew, some part of her female psyche had still held the tiniest fraction of hope that a white knight would come charging in, as in the fairytales of childhood. An angelic Jesus figure haloed in white light and song. A Prince Charming. Or the more rational but no less naïve idea of the far-reaching, infallible long arm of the law. The cops rushing in at the last moment to save every hostage and put the bad guys in jail.

  No. Mak had never been one to wait for miracles. But now that she had truly acknowledged their non-existence, the lack of hope saddened her deeply. She recalled a quote that had always stuck with her—attributed to Helen Keller, she was fairly sure: Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature. There was no security here, in this life of Makedde’s, or in the limited world she was bound to in this dark cellar. There was no security. In her life, the few fleeting scraps of security she had clung to had turned out to be sad illusions. Her mother was dead. Her father was far away. Her sister had always been distant. She had no children. No husband. No land. No home. And she would die at thirty in this cellar.

  You’ll die here.

  She was losing her will. Her sense of self-preservation was wavering.

  From some distant place, cocooned in her numbness, Mak observed her internal crumbling dispassionately.

  You’re losing your mind. Really, finally losing your mind.

  CHAPTER 58

  Mak woke with a start.

  She’d dozed off again. She didn’t know how long she’d been resting on her mattress, her eyes closed.

  She was not alone.

  Her captor stood before her, and at the sight of him she felt fear fly through her organs—her heart thumping, her brain jolted. He loomed over her with his incredible physical mass, and the pocket of his pants bulged. For an instant she feared he would sexually attack her. But no. He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the pocket, and she saw something else too. Something metal. A round metal keyring. There was a small key on it. It would be the key for her ankle. The key. And quickly the metal ring slipped back into the fabric of his pocket as he removed a box of matches with his monstrously large hand. If she had blinked, she would have missed it.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. ‘Oh, thank you. You are so kind.’

  He had been away for some stretch of time, and had returned with a packet of cigarettes and a box of household matches. Where had he gone?

  She saw the corner of the door, ajar at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Share one with me?’ she suggested, moving over on the mattress in the hope he would join her.

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ he said flatly.

  Neither do I.

  ‘Well, thank you,’ she said again, and accepted the cigarette, taking it between her fingers and reaching for the box of matches clumsily, knocking it out of his hand, emptying its contents on the stone floor, half a dozen matches scattering across the stone.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, as if embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry.’ She gathered what she could and put them back in the box. She drew one match across the side of the matchbox and it lit. She held the cigarette between her lips and touched the match to the end. The flame was strong and red. Inviting. Makedde had never smoked a cigarette before, only the occasional cigar, and those had always gone out on her and needed relighting. She was not much of a smoker. With a touch of anxiety, she drew the cigarette smoke in a little and blew it out of her mouth without inhaling too much.

  ‘Thank you so much. I was dying for it.’ She coughed, and tried to recover herself. ‘I thought I’d quit, but…I was really missing it,’ she tried to explain.

  He looked at her, watchful.

  Behind his cold gaze she thought she sensed him weighing up the situation. He was a man much larger than her. She was unarmed, and still bound at the ankle. What could she possibly do if she got closer—give him a cigarette burn? Surely his pride would allow physical contact with her, if he at all desired it. He was difficult to reach, she could see that, but was it so impossible? He was still a man. There was another angle she could try.

  ‘I still don’t know your name, but I feel I know you.’

 
He continued to watch her, not moving.

  ‘I’m lonely down here by myself. I hope you don’t mind if I talk a bit.’ She was lonely, and she did want to talk. If she was going to die in this place, she wanted to be heard. There were things she wanted to say to this man, or say for herself, she didn’t know which. Mak shifted to one side of the mattress, indicating that she had made room for him. ‘You can sit down, if you like. My name is Makedde.’ She had told him her name before, but she repeated it so that this man might know her, perhaps even understand her. She needed to understand him, and understand what was happening between them. ‘I’d like to know your name, but if you don’t want to tell me, that’s okay.’

  He hadn’t killed her yet. He hadn’t harmed her. What was in store for her? What was the plan? Was he waiting for something?

  He did not answer.

  She tried again. ‘Have you ever lost someone?’ she asked.

  He appeared surprised by her question. Mak knew that he was older than her. Chances were that his parents were in their later years, or had already passed on. Perhaps she could reveal some part of herself to him, and he would reciprocate.

  ‘I lost my mother,’ she told him. ‘She died when I was a teenager. Cancer. It was a rare form of cancer called multiple myeloma. Have you heard of it?’

  He shook his head, signalling that finally he had engaged with her. A cigarette and a shake of the head. Connection. It was a small miracle. Inside, she rejoiced. She felt part of herself break loose, find hope. She felt emotions begin to surface again.

  ‘I want to tell you this because…because I don’t know why I’m here and why you’re keeping me, and if I am to die, I want to talk about my mother first. Jane was her name. Jane Vanderwall. She was my inspiration, my everything.’ He did not stop her, so she continued in a queer ramble. ‘I hadn’t heard of multiple myeloma, either. But then I was barely sixteen, and there were many horrors I hadn’t yet heard of. Multiple myeloma is more common in older male patients, but she was only forty-three. The doctors didn’t see it coming, and neither did we.’ Her throat began to tighten as she spoke. She felt the precursor to tears—tears for her mother, tears for Andy, tears for her crazy ruined life that seemed always to deal her the greatest horrors and injustice. She didn’t care that she would cry. Why should she hold back? Who could care? Days or weeks down in that cellar, and she could not possibly care any more whether this man saw her cry. ‘They gave her a bone marrow transplant. That was her only hope, you know, although, at the time, the risk was extremely high, much higher than it is with the procedures they use now. Her brother gave his marrow. He was her best match. The transplant was so hard. They kept her in the leukaemia ward with the other bone marrow patients, and many of them were children. Everyone there was bald. Some of the visitors were even bald; they’d shaved their heads for their siblings or friends, to show support. She was in there for months, fighting. There was a chart on the wall that I didn’t understand. White blood-cell count. Graphs. Numbers. And the whole time, for months, my father refused to leave her side. Even though he has a bad back, he slept in this crappy little fold-out cot next to her, holding her hand. They talked, and she suffered, and they talked some more, and eventually she couldn’t speak any more, and he was alone, holding the hand of the woman who’d been his wife—my mother. And, I remember…’ Now a single hot tear cascaded down her cheek. ‘…I remember how we held hands and formed a vigil around her in her last days. My father, my sister, Theresa, and I formed a circle around her. I held her right hand in mine, and it was swollen and warm, like a balloon filled with hot water. It didn’t feel like her. The room smelled strange, the air filled with chemicals I couldn’t place. Her face was puffy and slack, nearly unrecognisable. Her eyes were closed and her mouth hung open, with tubes going down…’