Siren

by Tara Moss

  For a stretch of time Luther lay with the sun draped over his skin, feeling strange.

  A rabbit bounded past the window, and suddenly Luther had the feeling that he was unravelling. He sat up and tried to shake it off.

  That’s it. You need to finish this. Finish it by sundown and fly out. Madame Q will have new assignments for you.

  He had not heard back from his agent. That was unusual.

  Luther was beginning to feel peculiarly disconnected from the outside world.

  CHAPTER 54

  ‘Drayson, it’s Bogey. Have you heard anything from Mak? Has Loulou heard from her?’

  Through the phone, Humphrey Mortimer could hear loud guitars, and the noise of a crowd. Drayson and Loulou would still be in party mode.

  There was a long pause before a reply. ‘Mak? No, man. What’s up with her?’ He didn’t wait for Bogey to explain. ‘The festival was rockin’. You should have come with us.’

  Bogey passed a sign indicating Musée Minéralogique and Rue Jussieu, neither of which felt helpful. Nothing about his surroundings was familiar or comforting, and the unexplained absence of the woman he had flown so far to see was a continuing shock to his strung-out nerves.

  ‘Drayson, listen to me,’ he pleaded. ‘I’m in Paris, and I’m supposed to be meeting Mak here. I can’t find her.’

  The music took over the line momentarily and then faded back when Drayson spoke. ‘Oh, man, that sucks. You mean Paris, Europe?’

  ‘Yes. Paris, France. This is serious. I think something has happened to Makedde. She didn’t check out of her hotel room. She is just missing.’

  Static.

  Bogey stopped on the street. The air was cold and unwelcoming, his leather jacket, wool sweater and scarf not enough to offset the penetrating winter chill. French men and women passed without making eye contact, busy on their way to familiar places in a familiar routine Bogey was not part of. He did not speak the language. He did not know whom to ask for help, or what to say. My maybe girlfriend hasn’t shown up?

  ‘Dude, I can barely hear you. I’ll pass you to Loulou.’

  There were the sounds of shuffling and more static. Bogey felt so tense he thought he might explode.

  ‘Bogey? Oh, darling, you should have been there! The bands were awesome!’

  As he heard these words, he saw a waiter coming towards him enquiringly. He was so distracted he had blundered into the outdoor area of a café. He turned away from the establishment, and the man, and walked the other way, shivering, cupping the phone to his ear. He had not eaten since he’d arrived, he realised. It would not be helping his mental state.

  ‘Loulou,’ he pleaded. ‘Where’s Mak? Have you heard from her?’

  ‘Isn’t she at my place?’

  God, she doesn’t even know?

  ‘She came to Paris for an assignment,’ he explained.

  There was a pause. ‘Yeah. I think she said something about that. She isn’t back yet?’

  Hopeless. This is hopeless.

  ‘Do you have the number for her friend…Mahoney? The cop?’ he asked.

  ‘Hang on.’ Even the notoriously scatterbrained Loulou seemed to realise from his voice that something must be wrong. ‘I’ll see what I can find.’

  CHAPTER 55

  Distantly, Mak was aware of a stabbing pain in her lower back, like a sword impaling her lumbar region and extending out her abdomen.

  God help me.

  She stood, arranged her coat and a blanket around herself, and began her ritual walk. In a grim semicircle, she shuffled across the cold floor of the cellar in her dirty socks, one leg weighed down by the heavy cuff, its chain sliding across stone with an eerie rattle. The stabbing pains in her back continued, joined by the ache of knee and elbow joints, and the throb of her head. She tried to keep the pain distant. She needed her head to be clear to think of a way out, and giving in to pain would not help. She tried to imagine the streets of Paris just beyond the walls of her cellar prison. Perhaps she was not so far away from her hotel? Perhaps she was just across from the Catacombs, and hundreds of people were passing on the streets only metres above her. If she could convince her strange captor to take off her cuff, she could flee. She would be up that set of creaking stairs in a flash, out into the day, and into the crowds, absorbed into the movement and life and chaos of Paris. She would be carried to safety by well-meaning Parisians. She would be saved.

  You will not be saved.

  Mak had to save herself. Somehow.

  Back and forth she moved, pacing bleakly in her bonds, cold and on the edge of hunger. She passed her chamberpot, her water dish, her plate speckled with breadcrumbs. She was alone with her quiet fury, disconnected from normality, dignity, common decency, and even from fear. Perhaps fear, like breath, was rationed out, and it was only very few who ran out of one before the other. Yet here she was, alive, breathing, and absolved of fear, like a soldier after too many battles.

  It was strange that life would bring her chronic trouble that seemed never to fade, no matter the skills she learned, no matter the introspection she indulged in. She thought of Arslan, she thought of the Cavanaghs, the Stiletto Killer, those who wished her ill. She shared the earth with dangerous people. Mak had received so much unwanted attention over the years that she could in an instant switch from being relaxed to a hyper-alert survival mode. Her father, the retired Detective Inspector Les Vanderwall, had nicknamed her ‘The Hawk’ for her tendency to survey her surroundings with coplike attention to potential danger. She found it uncomfortable to sit anywhere except the ‘Clint Chair’ in a restaurant or any public venue. The Clint Chair was the seating position that let her keep her back to the wall, an eye on entrances and exits, and preferably had a view of the activity at the cash register as well; it was named thus because it was the seat Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry would choose.

  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 knew 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 th
roat 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.