Safe House

by Paul Starkey

  Although maybe he was imagining it? Looking at the others he saw nothing but tired admiration for their surroundings, in fact Lucy seemed to be constantly sniffing the air as if the dog smell wasn’t there, and there was only the scent of lavender.

  He didn’t ask if anyone else smelt it. Olfactory hallucinations were something he hadn’t experienced after his recovery, but he knew other sufferers of encephalitis who were prone to them. If he asked and no one else did smell dog, well that was a major worry. The doctors had made it clear that while he wasn’t going to make a full recovery, it was unlikely his various…disabilities… would get especially worse, nor that he would develop new ones. No, best not to ask; cowardice and ignorance winning out over good sense.

  Even though he’d noticed the absence of Brendan Fox, it still came as a surprise as the door in the far left corner of the hall opened and Fox stepped through. Before the door closed behind him, Tyrell heard the tell-tale gurgle of a cistern refilling.

  “Finally,” said Chalice.

  ‘What?’ said Fox as he walked to re-join them. “It would affect my operational efficiency if I didn’t attend to, ahem, personal matters. And boy did I have personal matters to attend to…”

  Lucy waved a hand in front of her nose. “Too much information.”

  There were four tell-tale little beeps as Chalice pressed buttons inside of the tiny cupboard. Once done she pulled her hand back. A fifth beep sounded, although it was a deeper tone. “Right.” She closed the door shut. Tyrell noted it blended in with the oak panelling, although it you looked closely there was an obviously bulge where it sat. She looked at them. “I’ve just reset the alarm to compensate for the fact that the house is occupied. The various motion sensors in every room are deactivated, however the sensors affixed to every door and window in the place are now live. Should anyone attempt to gain entry, or if anyone tries to leave, the alarm will sound, and there’ll be a vocal indicator of where the breech is.” She smiled. “Lucy, sorry about this but would you open the door again?”

  “Sure”

  It was barely open a crack before the beeps started. After a handful of seconds more an alarm wail echoed through the house. A high-pitched monotone that seemed to slice right through Tyrell’s soul, and he had to fight the urge to clasp his hands to his ears. A few seconds after the alarm sounded, followed a disembodied voice, the owner a woman; the accent French. “Entry violation; Front door,” said the voice, which sounded bored to tears. The words repeated every few seconds, while the wail was unyielding. The ghost of a Frenchwoman was only able to sound her warning three times before Chalice deactivated the alarm. Lucy relocked the door and then the alarm was set once more.

  “Quite a useful security measure,” said Ibex, appearing to shake invisible bells from his head. “Although it won’t stop anyone from coming in,” he added with a cold, almost reptilian smile.

  “True, but it does tell us where to aim our guns though,” grinned Fox, and then he slapped Quintus Armstrong on the back.

  Tyrell saw Ibex tense, saw his lip curl with anger, yet knew that behind the tinted glasses, likely his eyes hadn’t altered. The American fought down his anger, the battle won in moments, and the smile returned. Tyrell had wondered if anyone else had noticed.

  “Ok, we’ll set up camp in the drawing room,” said Chalice, already stepping towards the single door built into the right hand wall.

  As the group slowly followed, Tyrell noted Fox hurry to catch up with his leader. “Hey, Chalice,” he asked furtively.

  “Yes?” she’d paused by the drawing room door now, hand resting on the silver door handle.

  “The Carmichaels. They own a dog?”

  She frowned, shook her head. ‘No. Why?’

  “No reason,” Fox replied.

  Chalice shrugged and opened the door into darkness. Lights flared into being a moment later and one by one they stepped inside. Fox seemed intent on waiting outside until everyone else had entered, and Tyrell was happy to linger, until only he and Fox were still in the hall.

  “Brendan, you asked about a dog?”

  “So?”

  Tyrell felt his right hand start to tremble, so he jabbed both hands into his jacket pockets. “Can you smell it too?”

  “Smell it…” Fox frowned. “Oh yeah, I can smell it,” he smiled now, well sneered. “Smells like shit, sure you haven’t crapped yourself, old man?” He chuckled and went inside.

  Tyrell winced at the venom. Embarrassment was something he felt a lot of these days, but he never seemed to get used to it. It always hurt. Always made him feel a tiny bit less of a man. Once upon a time the likes of Brendan Fox wouldn’t have scared him, nowadays he couldn’t even bring himself to bite back with wit, let along violence. What am I doing here? I’m a scared old man who should’ve stayed at home.

  He felt isolated out in the hall, even though the door was open, even though he could see the others, hear the others. It was like he was a ghost and they were all alive, existing in some other reality to him. He felt something then, the sensation of being watched, eyes boring into his back. It was illusion he knew. Everyone who was in the house was in the room in front of him. Still he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was starting intently at him.

  He wanted to turn around. He didn’t want to turn around. The tremble in his hands had spread insidiously to the rest of his body now, and he knew the quickest way to calm himself would be to look around and confirm there was no one there.

  But if there is, a voice in his mind cautioned.

  If there was then it would give Brendan Fox something to shoot at, he thought sternly, arguing with himself.

  Before timidity could return he turned on his heels, his eyes tracking along the invisible line he’d felt boring into him, up towards the middle landing. There was no one there. The carpet was still red, the vases and their flowers still in place. The window had changed through. The sun had gone down and now the twinkling lights had died. The glass was dark, a portal into void.

  Seeing no one up there should have made him feel better, but for some reason he couldn’t fathom, it didn’t. He hurried into the drawing room, eager to be surrounded by people, by life once more.

  Chapter eighteen

  Quintus Armstrong was disappointed when he entered the drawing room. He’d expected better. While he hadn’t lied about his first impressions of White Wolf House—he really had expected a grotty apartment somewhere—he hadn’t unloaded everything that had been on his mind, but then he never did.

  The house was impressive, but the thought gnawed at him that the place would be cluttered and old fashioned inside. When Chalice opened the front door he’d expected the musty old-fashioned smell of Miss Haverham’s house to come wafting out.

  He’d been pleasantly surprised. The hall had an old fashioned feel to it, but he’d at least been impressed by the stark minimalism of the place, and he’d foolishly believed the theme would extend to the rest of the house.

  He was rarely wrong, but on this occasion he was.

  The drawing room was the very antithesis of the hallway, with every square inch cluttered in some way, either by knickknacks and heirlooms or the myriad shadows cast by them. Quintus Armstrong despised mess. Though he gave the impression of being laid back (a little too laid back as more than one evaluation board had remarked) he was in fact a tidy, precise man. This room reminded him too much of the house he’d grown up in, the house he’d strived so very hard to escape from; the lack of space, of privacy; The overbearing miasma of eight people’s bodily excreta that never seemed to leave the air, no matter how often his mother cleaned.

  Just thinking of that house—never home—made him shudder. All it would have needed to make the illusion complete would have been the caterwauling his mom called singing echoing through the place, somehow rising above the screams and shouts of his brothers and sisters.

  Of course in most respects the room was very different from that house. Where his parent’s house had
been very American; modern Formica furniture laden with trinkets dating back only as far as the Civil War, this room was pure Britannia. A heavy wooden table at one end that looked like it’d give a hernia to even an army of movers; towards the other end two green leather wing-backed chairs that looked like they’d been lifted from a Gentleman’s Club sat facing one another, beside a cold fireplace.

  The far wall to his right was completely obscured by bookshelves that rose up to almost though the intricately corniced ceiling. At least he knew now why the outward facing wall of this room had no windows, even if they hadn’t been obscured by bricks they’d have been blocked by vellum and leather. A short set of wheeled wooden steps was fixed to a rail that ran along the ceiling, enabling even the most petite of readers to gain access to any book and return it whence it came. Except like the worst of libraries, it seemed returning books wasn’t nearly as simple as withdrawing them. There were dozens of noticeable gaps on the shelves, and it looked like all those books were scattered around the room. A couple on one of the green chairs, several more piled up on the dining table; a few left as trip hazards on the floor, but most were deposited upon the profusion of tiny tables that littered the room. There were perhaps a dozen of them, a mix of styles and periods but all sharing the same basic design. More pedestal than table really, elegant but possessing enough room to carry little beyond a pair of brandy glasses…or a few books. Someone in the house obviously had a very specific antiques fetish.

  Even the lighting contrived to make the room seem smaller; three chandeliers hung in a line bisecting the room, but draped so low that they wiped out any sense of space created by the high ceiling. There were a couple of standing lamps in the corners, but with neither turned on the light from the chandeliers didn’t reach every nook and cranny, so the far corners seemed to exist in a localised, nebulous gloom.

  “What a gorgeous room,” said Lucy Parrish as the group fanned out to explore.

  You could tell a lot about people by the way they reacted to a place for the first time. Take Lucy. He’d had her pegged as the chintzy type, so very messy and so much of a klutz. Of course she would love a place like this.

  Brendan Fox looked bored, like he barely even noticed the decor of the room. This fit with Quintus’s impressions of him so far. He imagined the only things that would cause the young man’s pulse to quicken would be of a more vicarious nature. If he couldn’t eat it, drink it, smoke it, hit it, or fuck it, likely didn’t much care for it. He didn’t explore the room, merely plonked himself down on the uncluttered of the green leather armchairs facing the dead fireplace that was set off centre two thirds of the way down the opposing wall.

  Cheung on the other hand, he made a very precise survey of the place. Sticking to the edge of the room he walked around the heavy table and the six chairs arranged around it, then hesitated by the thick purple curtains that obscured the rear windows. He didn’t look behind them, and after a few seconds he continued along the far wall until he reached the armchairs and the fireplace. There was a large gilt framed mirror hung above the mantle. Even this failed to make the room seem bigger, instead by reflecting, and seeming to magnify, the clutter it only added to the sense of claustrophobia. Cheung ignored the mirror and instead picked up a photo frame from the mantle. There were about half a dozen there but he chose the largest.

  “The Carmichaels?” he asked.

  Of course it was the Carmichaels, thought Quintus. It was a professionally shot image of a man and a woman with a child, perhaps thirteen years old. Who else was it likely to be?

  He’d evaluated the young man as precise yet unimaginative, and so far he was living down to expectations. Even the dice shaped cufflinks did little to alleviate his dull, stoic image. Obviously they were supposed to make him seem unpredictable, but like a businessman who wears socks with reindeers on them, or a Homer Simpson tie, the cufflinks served only to appear a forced and desperate attempt to seem interesting.

  “Yes the Carmichaels,” said Chalice. “That’s a few years old,” she added.

  He had known Chalice Knight a few scant hours, spent little of that time in her presence, but already she vexed him with her need to explain things, her obvious belief that people were too stupid to work things out for themselves. Quintus walked over to stand beside Cheung. When he reached to take the photo frame, the younger man paused, seemingly reluctant to let it go as if it were his own property, and Quintus was some kind of thief.

  Eventually he relinquished it and continued his explorations, following the wall to stand before the bookcase. Quintus ignored him and examined the family photo. Of course it was several years old. The boy was slightly older than he’d thought, but no more than fifteen at most. Since Chalice had told them the Carmichaels’ son was at university he would have to be at least eighteen now. He looked a sad child, less unhappy than weighed down by expectation, even at such a young age. Quintus recognised the look in the child’s big brown eyes, the slight slump of the shoulders. Even in the way his mother subtlety held a lock of brown hair back from his eyes, as if it wouldn’t stay back on its own.

  Even without Chalice’s helpful biographies, he would have been able to hazard a guess at the parents’ occupations. Burgess was a short, portly man; chubby rather than fat, though Quintus imagined he would only expand with age as he let himself go. His hair had been slicked down, but still several mad tufts of blonde stuck up haphazardly. He wore a shirt and tie but looked uncomfortable in them, and though he was smiling, his blue eyes were not, he seemed to be somewhere else; the vacant gaze of an artist.

  Antonia Carmichael was the exact opposite of her husband. Tall, with a slightly masculine countenance not helped by her short brown hair and the grey suit she wore. The boy seemed to have gained most of his looks from his mother, especially the deep brown eyes—although his lacked her steely focus. Her thin lips were pulled tight in a rigor like smile.

  He put the photo back on the mantle, back amongst the collection of smaller snaps that all featured one or more members of the immediate Carmichael family. Nobody else though. Obviously nobody else mattered beyond the three of them.

  Quintus had little time for photographs. They were for people with poor memories, or for those who insisted on remembering things they might have been better off forgetting. He looked round as the door closed to find that John Tyrell had finally stepped inside.

  He imagined that, for him, photographs were both a comfort and a curse. They would be the only memory he had left of the last seventeen years, but without context Quintus imagined that even the most innocuous of them would elicit distress. It was a tremor of pity that would have barely registered on the Richter scale, but for Quintus it was out of character that it was there at all.

  “Brendan,” said Chalice. “If I can ask you to get off your arse and turn the TV on please?” and she gestured towards a slim wooden cupboard set against the wall, midway between the fireplace and the dining table. Fox groaned and dragged himself out of the chair like an old miner who’d only just sat down after twelve hours down the pit, before shuffling to the cupboard like an arthritic pensioner. Quintus resisted the urge to sneer. These are my protectors, he mused. A bored thug, a boy barely out of school, a broken shell of a man and, of course, Chalice Knight.

  Maybe it was because he was an American, because he’d had to work for everything he’d ever achieved, but he reserved most of his distain for her. The way she held herself as though they should all show her deference—what was it the Brits called it, tugging the forelock? —Not to mention the way she talked, like there was a blasted plum in her mouth. And being a young woman didn’t help. He had little time for those he judged to be less experienced than he, and he’d yet to encounter a woman in this business who wasn’t out of her depth. He wasn’t a sexist, it was simply that the maternal instinct jarred with the killer variety required for the espionage game.

  Fox had knelt before the cupboard now and opened the doors. They rolled back into the sides revealing
a largish flat screen television. “You know,” he said over his shoulder as he turned it on. “This isn’t so bad, there’s footy on the telly tonight.” He stood up as the picture flickered into life. From somewhere he’d acquired a remote control and he pointed it at the screen now as if it were a gun. “We don’t want this shite,” he muttered as a pub full of forlorn drinkers appeared on screen, accompanied by the sounds of conversation between two who appeared to be communicating by screeching at one another. Fox thankfully muted it. “Wonder if they’ve got Sky…”

  “Brendan. Channel seven if you will”

  “Eh?”

  “Channel seven,” repeated Chalice. She and Lucy were unpacking items onto the dining table.

  “Ok, ok, keep your hair on.” Fox thumbed the requisite control. The glum pub was replaced by a green tinged silent movie, well four green tinged movies in fact, the screen divided into quarters. “Oh,” said Fox glumly as he understood. There’d be no football tonight.

  Everyone except Chalice gathered around the TV, like cavemen gathering around a fire. The TV showed live feed from four CCTV cameras that Quintus presumed were secreted in the grounds, each of the views was a ghostly green in colour because the cameras were fitted with night vision. The first quadrant displayed a long shot of the main gates as seen from an elevated position inside the perimeter, up a tree most likely. The second showed a view of the front of the house. The building looked more sinister through the green miasma, and the two cars parked out front looked less like luxury automobiles and more like long abandoned wrecks. The third quarter showed the house from another angle, one that they hadn’t seen yet. It was another view from distance, showing a corner of the building, two walls meeting to form an L shape. He saw two doors, one in each side, and multiple windows, all of them dark. The final image was another L shape, though this time the view was of the inside of the L, not the outside. The camera was pointing across a neat lawn towards large glass doors, a conservatory of some kind. To the left he could just see a hint of light, which he had determined emanated from the windows at the back of the drawing room before Chalice verbalised this fact.