Plausible Deniability: The explosive Lex Harper novella

by Stephen Leather

  ‘It all seems a bit extreme,’ she said.

  ‘Does it? Well that’s because I’m trying to deal with an extreme problem.’

  ‘But does it have to be cold turkey like this? Can’t you get some proper medical help?’

  ‘What and get addicted to methadone instead? No thanks, it has to be this way. Cold turkey.’

  ‘Why do they call it that?’ she asked.

  He smiled ruefully. ‘Because one of the symptoms when you stop taking smack abruptly is that you get goose pimples on your skin, so you look just like a plucked, uncooked turkey.’

  She shook her head. ‘Your ability to come up with irrelevant fascinating facts at moments of crisis never ceases to amaze me, Lex, but can we focus on the here and now? I’ve seen you solve a lot of problems, win a lot of fights and take out a lot of bad guys over the years, but this time your adversary is yourself. So can you do it?’

  ‘I reckon so. And I’m not fighting myself, I’m fighting the heroin addiction that’s poisoning me. Obviously it’s uncharted territory for me - nothing in all the fighting and training I’ve done addresses this - but junkies get addicted because they don’t like their lives. I love mine, so I’ll do what it takes to get it back. I’ve also got some unfinished business to take care of, which should be an extra incentive.’ He paused, studying her expression. ‘Right, are you good to go?’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘No time like the present.’

  ‘Yes, if you’re sure.’

  ‘I’m sure, no sense waiting. Any last words?’

  ‘Just be sure and come back out of there. Oh and Lex? I know enough medicine to know that, just like when you’re dealing with a hangover, the liver is the organ that will do the heavy lifting to metabolise and eliminate the toxins - the heroin - in your system. So you need to take care of your liver by keeping your fluid intake high. If you’re vomiting or get diarrhoea, you’ll dehydrate rapidly, so make yourself keep taking fluids.’

  He gave her a wink. ‘Got it.’ He grinned. ‘Maybe you could wear a sexy nurse’s uniform to cheer me up?’

  ‘Or maybe I could just kick you in the nuts.’

  They both laughed, then she stepped forward and impulsively hugged him.

  Before he went into the cellar, he flushed the rest of his stash of heroin down the toilet, snapped the needle of his syringe and dumped it in the trash with his tie-belt, lighter and the rest of his “works”. There was the trace of a tremor in his voice as he said ‘Well, see you on the other side then,’ but he squared his shoulders, walked into the cellar and closed the door behind him.

  He waited until he heard the sound of the key turning in the lock, then lay down on the mattress, closed his eyes and tried to rest. He knew that withdrawal symptoms would begin within a few hours of the last fix so he would soon be gripped by them. He had only the vaguest of ideas about what to expect. He’d read a couple of newspaper articles about addiction and seen Trainspotting at the movies but he doubted it would be much guide to what he would experience and he certainly wasn’t expecting to see a baby crawling across the ceiling and down the walls. He pushed the thought away, closed his eyes and waited.

  The minutes crawled by and despite trying to clear his mind, slow his pulse rate and zone out, every sense was on alert for the least tremor or feeling that might mark the start of the real withdrawal symptoms. He did not have long to wait.

  The first signs could merely have been symptoms of his anxious state, but he was beginning to feel ever more restless, nervous and agitated, and found it almost impossible to lie or sit still. He began pacing up and down his self-imposed cell, but six paces took him the length of the cellar, and it was just four from one side to the other. He tried to delay looking at his watch for as long as possible; when he eventually did so, he found that barely two hours had passed since Maggie May had locked the door on him. He glanced up towards the tiny barred window and saw the already dim light through it was fading still more as night came on.

  If there was one thing he missed about England apart from the changing seasons, it was the soft evening light as the sun sank below the horizon and the dusk slowly darkened the sky. On this night he missed it more than ever. In the tropics there was no gentle transition from day to night; as soon as the sun went down, night came on with a rush and tonight promised to be the longest he had ever spent.

  He heard the rattle of the hatch and Maggie May’s voice. ‘All right Lex?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll find it easier if you leave me alone. Just stick to what we agreed.’

  ‘If you’re sure?’

  He didn’t reply and after a few seconds the hatch was closed and locked. He felt bad for the abrupt way he’d spoken to her, but a sympathetic voice was not what he wanted to hear and he was afraid that every time she opened the hatch, it would just increase the temptation to find reasons for her to release him straight away.

  As the evening wore on, his restlessness increased and he was also now suffering symptoms that in other circumstances he would have put down to flu. His eyes and nose were streaming, his joints and muscles were aching, a headache was pounding in his temples and every few minutes a violent bout of shivering shook him. He lay down on the mattress and tried to rest but within minutes he was back on his feet and pacing the cellar.

  The night was interminable. When he lay down and tried to rest, muscle spasms set him twitching and cursing, and waves of nausea were sweeping over him. On the one occasion he did manage to drift off to sleep for a few minutes, he woke from a nightmare, eyes wild and staring, to find the mattress drenched in his sweat and his heart beating so fast that his pulse was beating in his ears like a snare drum banging in six-eight time.

  The cravings for the drug were now so intense that he found himself wanting a fix more than anything he had wanted in his whole life. In his more lucid moments he kept reminding himself that the obsession dominating his every thought wasn’t really what he wanted, it was just the drug refusing to give up its hold without a fight. Well, he’d fought often enough in other circumstances, surely he could win a fight with himself as well. He tried to summon happy memories to counter the sick depression that was threatening to overwhelm him, but all he could dredge up were dark thoughts that grew bleaker and bleaker as the night progressed. At one point he even found himself pounding on the door and yelling to Maggie May. ‘I’ve changed my mind, get me out of here. You hear me? Get me out!’ But either she wasn’t there or she had heeded his instructions to ignore any noises from the other side of the cellar door.

  As the dawn light at last began to show, his cravings for the drug were augmented by a feeling of blind, furious rage. The faintest noise filtering to him from the street outside as the city came to life drove him mad with irritation. He was grinding his teeth so hard that his gums were bleeding, but he could not stop himself and the noise was so loud in his head that he began to punch the wall, using the pain to try and drown the sound.

  Just as he felt he was beginning to get control of his fury, those symptoms began to subside and a fresh wave hit him: this time such powerful feelings of dizziness and nausea that he could no longer stand up and had to slump onto his mattress. He lay there, his head spinning, gagging and dry heaving, and then he began to vomit. For hour after hour, long after his stomach had been purged of everything it had contained, he continued to puke and dry heave.

  As the urge to vomit finally began to abate, he slumped back on his stained, filthy mattress, closed his eyes and for a few minutes may even have fallen asleep, but the next phase was now creeping up on him. He woke feeling as if ants were crawling over his skin. The sensation was so real that he tried to brush them off him, but then the ants began to bite, he felt stinging sensations all over his body and when he lifted his arm he could see - or imagined that he could - the red bodies of fire ants, their mandibles biting into his skin. He shouted and yelled, scratching furiously at his arms as he tried to dislodge them, but that only made the feeling worse. He stumbled
to his feet, blundering into the wall, and when he looked down he saw that he was scratching the track marks on his arms so hard that he had drawn blood. He pushed his hands into his pockets to stop him scratching himself and kept them there, even though the itching, stinging and biting sensations on his skin were almost unendurable.

  As that began to fade, he drank a few mouthfuls of water, the first he had managed to keep down since the vomiting phase began. He lay down on the mattress and closed his eyes but at once, nightmares or hallucinations - he could no longer say whether he was awake or asleep - began to assail him. Whenever he closed his eyes a fresh horrific image filled his mind, so vivid it seemed absolutely real, jolting him upright with terror etched on his face.

  There were nightmare visions of torture and deaths in which the faces of men he had killed - and there had been many of those - unseen for years and long forgotten, now again swam before him. Hands reached out for him, knives jabbed at him and the sound of gunfire, screams and cries jerked him back to consciousness whenever he managed to close his eyes. The things he saw seemed more real to him than the stone cellar where he lay, trapped with his nightmares. He began to question his own sanity and even briefly harboured thoughts of suicide to escape the torment he was enduring, but at once he pulled back from the brink as his iron will reasserted itself.

  He knew that there would be no cavalry riding to his rescue, and though he had not put himself in this situation, only he could extricate himself from it. He reminded himself for the thousandth time that what he was seeing and feeling was not real, just the drug that had poisoned him and which was now fighting him for control of his mind and body. ‘I’m going to get through this!’ he shouted aloud, though his parched throat, swollen tongue and cracked lips made the voice almost unrecognisable as his.

  When his symptoms permitted, he exercised furiously, knocking out press-ups and sit-ups by the hundred on the cold stone floor until he collapsed exhausted. At other times, he could only lie flat, grinding his teeth or pacing his cell, while either sweat poured from him in torrents, or chills and ferocious bouts of shivering set his teeth rattling in his head. He shouted, swore and at times begged and pleaded with Maggie May to ‘open the door and get me a fix - just one more.’

  Furious at his weakness in that moment, he abandoned every other thought to focus on one simple purpose: to survive, if only because he had too much burning hate for those who had done this to him to allow them to escape unscathed. That hate was a far more powerful motivation than any happy-clappy thoughts or memories he might have been able to conjure. He sat with his back against the wall, focussed his gaze on the opposite wall and sat there staring balefully at it. He refused to allow himself to rest and let every twitch, every spasm, fill him with ever more hatred.

  He lost all track of time and was no longer sure if this was the second, third, fourth or fifth day he had been confined. Food and water came and went, the stinking buckets in the corner were still there, and the only thing that suggested time passing was that his symptoms were now beginning to ease a little. It was not a steady process; there were flashbacks and periods when he shook like a leaf in a gale, or tore at his skin with his nails, and again howled obscenities at the stone walls of his self-imposed prison. There were other times, however, when he was able to lie relatively still and close his eyes without summoning fresh horrors from his subconscious, and even snatch some precious sleep.

  Badly shaken, Maggie May had tried to close her ears to the sounds from the other side of the cellar door and, as instructed, only opened the hatch to change his water and food, which was often left uneaten. On the third morning, deep in the depths of withdrawal, he had rushed to the hatch and tried to grab her wrist as she reached through to place a jug of fresh water on the floor. She cursed and snatched her hand away just in time. From then on, she kept well back from the hatch until she was sure that Harper was at the far side of the cellar or lying on his mattress, oblivious of her.

  As the days went by, his hallucinations, chills, spasms and tremors eased still more and on the eighth day, when Maggie May opened the hatch to change his food and water, she saw him lying fast asleep and looking more relaxed than at any time since his withdrawal had begun. The next morning his food had all been eaten for the first time since he went in there. When she called to him, waking him from a sleep, he was pale, hollow-eyed and almost unrecognisable behind his nine-day growth of beard, but his voice was steadier and his hands no longer shook like leaves in a gale.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she said.

  ‘Better.’ His voice was a harsh rasp.

  ‘Well enough to be sprung from jail?’

  He hesitated. ‘Let’s leave it one more day, just to be sure.’

  When he emerged the next morning, he was so unsteady on his legs that Maggie May had to take his arm and help him up the cellar steps. She flagged down a tuk-tuk, took Harper back to his apartment and set up a plastic chair in the shower. Wrinkling her nose at the smell and ignoring his protests, she stripped him of his sweat-stained clothes and stuffed them into a bin-bag. ‘Bloody hell, Lex,’ she said. ‘In my idle moments I have sometimes wondered what it would be like to rip the clothes off you, but none of my fantasies included this scenario.’

  He smiled. ‘Better wait until I’m in better condition before trying me out. If you’ve been dreaming about me all the time we’ve known each other, I’d hate it to be a disappointment when it finally happens.’

  She laughed. ‘Probably about the same time as hell freezes over, but meanwhile …’

  She sat him on the chair, handed him soap and shampoo and then switched on the shower. He sat there for twenty minutes, letting the water cascade over him, and then she towelled him dry and helped him into bed. He was asleep before she reached the door. While he slept, she went back to the empty shop and paid a couple of Thais she found squatting in the dust at the side of the street 1000 baht each to clean out the cellar and burn the mattress and all the other contents.

  Harper slept for twenty-four hours straight and when he eventually woke he already looked more like his old self. He got up at once and went for a run along the beach, then ate enough breakfast for three men before beginning a gruelling routine to rebuild his strength and fitness, rotating between weights, running, huge meals and heavy sleep. At Maggie May’s suggestion he also went for tests for HIV and hepatitis. ‘Those dirty syringes may have been used by other addicts before you, Lex. You need to be sure.’

  He went for the tests and though he affected to be unworried about them, Maggie May read the look in his eye and was not fooled. However when he returned, he was grinning broadly. ‘I dropped lucky: all clear.’

  They went out for dinner and drinks that night at a seafood restaurant off Walking Street, Harper treating her to what he described as ‘the best meal in Pattaya accompanied by a bottle of ruinously expensive imported champagne, as a thank you for what you’ve done for me.’

  She smiled. ‘No thanks needed Lex, after all, you were paying me to be here, but I would have done it for nothing too. You’ve been good to me over the years and I owe you big time. I’ve been able to provide for my family and give my son the education I never had and that’s all down to you.’ She paused. ‘You never talk about your own family, do you?’

  There was a long silence which she broke in the end. ‘See what I mean,’ she said with a laugh.

  Harper shrugged. ‘There’s nothing to talk about really. My mum died when I was a kid, my father didn’t. If there was any justice in the world, it would have been the other way round. I ran away from home a few times.’ He gave a bleak smile. ‘That’s probably where I learned my survival skills. Unarmed combat I learned from my father, and not in a good way. I was always in trouble and would probably have ended up in prison if I hadn’t joined the army. So there you have it: all my family history that’s fit to be told.’

  She leaned forward and took his hand. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have pried.’

  ‘I d
on’t mind, but now it’s your turn. Tell me about your parents. I know your mother looks after your boy when you’re away, but I’ve never heard you talk about your father.’

  ‘My father was in the forces too,’ she said. ‘He was an RAF helicopter pilot. He was shot down in Oman - one of those endless secret wars that the SAS was fighting in the Middle East and Far East back then. He survived but was taken prisoner by the insurgents they were fighting. I don’t know what they did to him - he never, ever talked about it - but it marked him for life.’

  She twisted a strand of hair at her temple around her finger as she spoke, her voice a monotone. ‘When he was released, he was medically discharged from the Air Force. I used to watch, powerless to help or comfort him, as he sat for hour after hour in his chair at home, with tears rolling down his cheeks.’

  She fell silent. She was still looking at Harper but he knew that it was not his face that she was seeing. ‘One day - it was a Saturday in late autumn with the last leaves clinging to the trees - he was sitting staring out of the window while I did my homework at the table. We were alone in the house; my mother had gone shopping. He got up and walked over to where I was sitting and stood looking over my shoulder for a moment. Then he leaned forward, touched my hair and whispered, “Work hard. Make me proud of you.” Then he went out through the kitchen into the garage and closed the door.’

  Her voice cracked and tears again welled up in her eyes. ‘He had a workbench out there. I thought he’d gone to fix something. My mother found him when she came back half an hour later. He’d hanged himself from a beam in the roof.’