The Truth

by Peter James

  From anywhere in the world, Kündz would be able to hear every word spoken in this house, whether it was a phone call or a conversation taking place in any room. He had connected the system to the house’s mains electricity supply, but had added a back-up in the event of any power cut. If necessary he would have to return in three years’ time to replace the nickel-cadmium battery inside this small metal box. He had noted the date.

  Checking his work, he applied the meter he had brought with him to the box, and was satisfied with the reading. Next he made a test transmission, and was pleased to see that the signal was strong.

  Now he had completed the first part of what he had come to do in this loft. The next part would take longer, at least two days, he estimated. But it would give him such pleasure to work up here immersed in Susan Carter’s smells, with her presence all around him. He thought about the wisdom of the Eighteenth Truth: Anything that can be dreamed can be true.

  Every night since Mr Sarotzini had shown him her photograph, Kündz had dreamed of Susan Carter. He wondered at Mr Sarotzini sometimes. Mr Sartozini always knew exactly what he would like. In return, of course, there was always a price he had to pay. But he did not mind. For Susan Carter there could be no price too high.

  He closed the hatch and climbed down the ladder. One quick job to complete now and then he would be off. He knew that on his first visit he must not outstay his welcome. He had the rest of his life to enjoy her.

  Chapter Seven

  When she heard the front door open Susan was in the kitchen. She went out anxiously into the hall. One look at the ghastly white of John’s face told it all.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, alarmed, swinging his briefcase out of his hand and setting it on the floor. She put her arms around him and kissed him. There was no response: it was like embracing a statue. She could smell cigarette smoke and alcohol on his breath – he hadn’t smoked for three years.

  ‘Hon,’ she said even more alarmed, ‘what happened? Tell me?’ She held his face tightly to hers and felt him give, just a little. ‘Want a drink? A whisky?’

  As she worked his tie loose, she sensed a nod. ‘I’ll fix you a drink,’ she said, aware of her own voice shaking now, not sure how to handle this, not sure what to say to him. He was like a stranger.

  In the kitchen, she poured him a large measure of Macallan, twisted out four ice cubes, and added a splash of filtered tap water. She was about to pour herself a glass of rosé wine, then decided she needed something stronger and poured another slug of whisky.

  ‘Telecom – were they here?’ John said distractedly, looking at a duplicate work-sheet on the table.

  ‘An engineer – he just left. He was putting in a ringing converter, I think he said – does that sound right?’ She looked at John.

  He shrugged. On another day he would have mentioned the phone engineer’s visit to his office – Susan was nuts about coincidences – but he let it go.

  Although she had been desperate to hear about the bank, perversely now Susan found herself wanting to delay getting round to it, and she sensed that John did too. ‘He’s coming back tomorrow to install your ISDN line,’ she said, ‘and he’s going to put in new wiring for the rest of the system.’

  ‘Good,’ John said absently. ‘I didn’t think we had a very good connection. Crackly. Did you get him to check the phones?’

  ‘Uh-huh. He seemed pretty thorough.’

  The conversation dried.

  John swirled his drink and an ice cube cracked loudly. He turned and faced away from her, towards the window. ‘It didn’t go too well at the bank. The new manager –’ He grimaced, took a half-hearted sip of his drink, then propped his elbows on the pine worktop, cradling the tumbler in his hands. ‘He’s a prat, he’s just a total prat. I – I can’t believe –’

  Susan slipped her arms round him and gently turned his face towards her, watching him in alarm. His voice was unsteady – he was fighting back tears. She had never seen him cry before. ‘Darling, poor darling,’ she said, taking the glass out of his shaking hand, then holding him more tightly. ‘Hon, it doesn’t matter, nothing matters except you and me.’

  John pulled out his handkerchief, dabbed his eyes and sniffed. He said nothing.

  ‘So what did this new manager say?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s given me a month to pay off the entire overdraft.’ He sniffed again, then was silent. Very quietly, he said, ‘If I don’t, they’re pulling the plug.’

  Three miles from the Carters’ house, Kündz turned the Telecom van off the road, drove several hundred yards along the cutting beside the disused railway siding and pulled up beside the plain blue Ford he had rented for this switch.

  He did not enjoy driving this van, neither was he looking forward to getting back into the Ford. Mr Sarotzini had bought him a beautiful black Mercedes sports SL600, with black leather seats and a Blaupunkt CD ten-way autochanger with twenty-band graphic and separate amp with bass bin, for his thirtieth birthday last October. The car was in the underground garage beneath his apartment in Geneva, and he missed it. He felt cool driving that car; he did not feel cool driving a rented Ford. But if that was one of the sacrifices Mr Sarotzini had forced him to make to have Susan Carter, he could accept it.

  He pulled a thick wad of fifty-pound bank-notes from his pocket and gave it to the Telecom engineer, who was lying out of sight in the rear of the van, peering at him like a cornered rabbit. ‘The interim payment,’ Kündz said. ‘The last amount you are getting when we have finished.’

  The engineer, a diminutive man close to retirement age, took the money, looking scared as hell. ‘I just hope you did it properly,’ he said.

  Kündz assured him that he had, not that it mattered to the man. In a few days’ time the engineer would throw himself out of a tower-block window. Anything odd that was ever found about the telephone system in the Carters’ house would be down to him, working while the balance of his mind was disturbed.

  Back in the Ford, Kündz switched on his satellite receiver, which was built into the shell of a mobile phone, and set the voice-activated digital recorder. Then he lifted the receiver to his ear, punched in a channel-seek command and listened. It required one small tuning adjustment and then, with perfect clarity, he heard Susan Carter’s voice.

  Instantly it aroused him. Her smell had soaked into his clothes and was all around him in the car. He was going to be reluctant to take off this uniform, which the engineer had ‘borrowed’ for him. Maybe he would keep it.

  Susan Carter said, ‘How? How can they do this? John? How can they do this?’

  ‘They can do what they want,’ John said. ‘It’s crazy, I know, but it’s their money and they can do what they want with it.’

  Susan had been expecting the bank to be tough on him, but not this ruthless. ‘They can’t treat people like this,’ she said.

  John drank some more whisky and was regretting having thrown away the cigarettes. ‘They do it all the time, these days.’

  Susan ran some water into her whisky and sipped it. She was trying to think of something positive to say. There would be a solution to this, there were solutions to everything, it was just a matter of keeping a clear head and not panicking. And of staying confident. If you looked confident, people had confidence in you. Failure in your eyes scared people away. ‘Let’s take our drinks out in the garden and relax, and talk this through. We could go to the Thai restaurant if you like,’ she said.

  ‘I – left the steaks in the car.’

  ‘Steaks?’

  John nodded. ‘And the wine. I – thought – I – I’d do a barbecue.’

  Susan smiled at him gently. ‘Sure. Is that what you’d like? I could put some jacket potatoes in the oven.’

  He shrugged. ‘Better start saving money, no more eating out.’ He pulled open a cupboard door, peered in. Then he removed a jar bearing a Fortnum and Mason label and examined it. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Pesto.’

  ‘Uh.’

&
nbsp; ‘It was in the hamper Archie sent us as a moving-in present.’

  John continued to stare at it, as if, printed somewhere on the label, he might find the solution to his problems. ‘We shouldn’t have gone for this house, that’s the bottom line,’ he said.

  Susan took another sip of her whisky and stared out at the garden. It looked so intensely beautiful in the soft evening sunlight, and she thought about how it would feel to move back into a tiny house, like the one they had left, or an apartment. But if they had to, they would, and they’d make the best of it, and hopefully, in a few years’ time, they’d have enough saved to buy somewhere nicer.

  But would they ever find anywhere like this again?

  ‘Have you spoken to Bill Williams?’ she asked. ‘He’d be horrified if he knew what was happening.’

  ‘Bill’s history. He’s out of it. He’s on the golf course.’

  ‘I know, but he was your friend. We had him round for dinner, we took him to the theatre, to Glyndebourne, to Ascot. I had to put up with his two-brain-cell wife. Surely Bill could do something. He owes you.’

  John replaced the jar in the cupboard and picked up his glass again. ‘I don’t think Bill can do anything – I was the reason he got stuffed. One of them, anyhow. That’s how I read it from Clake.’ He drained his whisky and began to pour himself some more.

  Susan made no comment about it: maybe it was the best thing tonight for him – at least he usually became docile when he was drunk, and not aggressive, like her father. Maybe they should both drink themselves into oblivion tonight. ‘What’s this Mr Clake got against you? You’re a good customer. I don’t understand why the bank’s being so hard suddenly.’

  ‘Officially? Clake says the bank is over-exposed in the technology sector. They’ve had their fingers burned by a few high-tech companies going down on them – a couple of which were Bill Williams’s babies. Our balance sheet isn’t great, and they don’t believe our projections. They don’t think we’re going to be able to meet our borrowing repayments and they’re cutting their losses.’

  ‘And unofficially?’

  ‘Clake’s a born-again Bible-basher. Technophobe. Reckons technology is the work of Satan – you know the kind of guy.’ John always trod carefully around the subject of religion with Susan because she was a believer. In the early days of their marriage she had gone to church quite frequently. He had joined her a few times, reluctantly, while they were engaged, to pacify the vicar before their wedding, but had steadfastly refused to go since. And she went only rarely now.

  Susan had a mental image of Clake as an immaculately coiffed, cadaverous man, with grey hair and a grey suit. Although she had never met him she was suddenly frightened of him, of his power, of the hold he had over them. She remembered now, with chilling clarity, the evening when Bill Williams had come apologetically to their house in Fulham with a briefcase full of forms. He’d told her that she would not have to be a guarantor for long, he’d see to that personally, just a few months until DigiTrak’s figures improved.

  Their figures did start to improve, but then they’d bought this house and John had told her the bank needed her to stay as guarantor just a while longer so that Bill’s superiors at the bank had the comfort factor of the security of the house.

  Susan knew enough about the law to be aware that if she hadn’t co-signed the papers, the bank would not have been able to touch the house.

  Bill Williams was out on the golf course, with a stack of severance money, a handsome pension and not a care in the world. She found herself hating him with a vengeance for landing them in this.

  And now Kündz, who was driving the Ford and listening in on the satellite cellphone, knew they had a problem. And he thought to himself that this was good. Mr Sarotzini was going to be so pleased with him.

  Years ago, Mr Sarotzini had taught him how to fish for salmon, on a great estate in Scotland. Mr Sarotzini had placed in his hands a huge, whippy, hand-made rod, with a beautifully engineered reel, and stood patiently with Kündz for hours, on a river bank, teaching him how to lay the line far out across the water.

  Finally, when Mr Sarotzini had been satisfied, he had attached the fly that Kündz had tied under his guidance, to the end of the line, and allowed Kündz to make his first real cast.

  Kündz had never forgotten that moment. The line snaking out over the foaming black water of the Dee, the fly touching the surface and then, seconds later, the explosion of water around it, the flash of silver, and that incredible jigging sensation through the rod.

  That thrill, that same deep thrill he had experienced then, was the same thrill he was experiencing now.

  He could scarcely believe his luck.

  ‘What’s the total amount you have to find?’ Susan asked. ‘Your overdraft is around five hundred thousand, isn’t it?’

  John cradled the crystal tumbler in his hands. ‘Bill increased it a few months back to seven fifty. And we have a quarter of a million term loan, which is due – Bill would have extended it. Plus the mortgage on this place.’

  Susan swallowed nervously. Christ, it was even worse than she’d thought. A loud crack startled her.

  The tumbler had splintered in John’s hand.

  Susan recoiled in shock as ice, whisky and sparkling shards of glass fell to the floor. Blood streamed from John’s palm where a sliver had embedded itself. He pulled it out, then stood still, like a child who has not fully understood what he has done.

  Susan checked that there was no more glass in the wound, then pressed a wet towel against it, steered John away from the mess and into a chair. ‘Hon, try to relax. You just sit down and I’ll do everything.’

  ‘I don’t want to be poor again,’ he said. ‘No way. I’m not going back down that alley.’

  ‘We’re not going to be poor,’ she replied quickly, fetching some rags and a dustpan and brush. ‘We’re going to find a way out of this. I’ll go and speak to your Mr Clake.’

  John managed a faint smile. He could imagine Susan bursting into his office, and letting rip with her fireball temper.

  ‘Maybe you should try going higher – above Mr Clake’s head. Do the directors of the bank know about this? Are they happy about losing one of their best customers?’

  ‘If they fired Bill for loaning me too much, they probably are,’ John said.

  Susan knelt and began to clear up the mess. ‘You’ve had a big shock today and you’re too tense to think straight right now. Why don’t you go change, and we’ll sit outside, light up the barbecue and try to relax a little? OK?’

  Twenty minutes later, comfortably dressed in old jeans and a sweatshirt, John had flames licking up evenly through the charcoal in the barbecue. He sat down on the bench and drank some of his fresh whisky. Susan brought out a bowl of salad and a clutch of cutlery dropped them on the table, then joined him.

  On the other side of the fence, they heard the voice of the old man next door. ‘Go away, woman!’ he shouted.

  Then a dog barked excitedly in the park. There was a deep rumble like thunder. John looked up and saw a jumbo jet on its landing approach to Heathrow, it seemed scarily close and low.

  In spite of the warmth of the air he shivered. If you were poor you didn’t get to fly off in aeroplanes. If you were poor you were trapped, you lived your whole life like a fly crawling around inside an empty jam-jar, scavenging traces that hadn’t been licked away, and beyond caring whether you got out or not.

  His mother had been trapped by his father, and then by giving birth to him. She’d struggled all through his childhood, trying to find ways to supplement the dole money in between taking him to school and fetching him, and she’d found some pretty unsavoury ways. When you were poor the world could despise you, could dump on you, and you had nothing to hit back with. His mother had had nothing with which to hit back at the social services people when they’d tried to take him away. She had had nothing with which to hit back at his father.

  And now he had nothing with which to hit b
ack at Clake. It felt as though Clake was standing at the top of the long, greasy pole John had spent his life climbing, and just when he had almost reached the top, had given him a hard shove sending him hurtling back down towards the cesspool at the bottom.

  ‘Honey,’ Susan said, softly, ‘DigiTrak itself is doing well, right? I mean in terms of orders and reputation.’

  John hesitated. ‘Sure.’

  ‘There must be other banks that would love to have your business?’

  John said nothing. The sound of the jet was fading. The sky was turning deep cobalt; the colour was so intense it seemed unreal. It reminded him of a painted backdrop in a theatre.

  ‘If it wasn’t for the lawsuit, yes,’ he said.

  ‘With the composer? Zak Danziger? I thought that was sorted out, that he was dropping it.’

  ‘So did I,’ John replied. ‘Tony Bamford thought so too. We’d agreed a royalty payment, based on sales.’

  Tony Bamford was John’s lawyer. DigiTrak had used a piece of music for the Home Doctor series from a young composer they’d hired, whom Gareth had discovered, part of which turned out to be a possible copyright infringement of an old work of one of Britain’s highest paid composers, Zak Danziger.

  DigiTrak’s composer had denied vigorously that he’d ripped off Danziger’s work, but when the two pieces were played side by side, the similarities were evident. The onus of defending the accusation fell on DigiTrak, and they had little chance of recovering any of the costs from their youngster.

  ‘What’s happened now?’ she asked, alarmed.

  ‘Someone sent Danziger to a hot-shot brief. He’s been advised that he could probably get three to five million out of us. We have an errors and omissions insurance limit of one million, and the court costs alone could easily run to half of that. Not too many people are going to want to jump into bed with a five-million-pound lawsuit.’

  John stood up and gloomily rearranged some of the barbecue coals. Even the smell, which he normally loved, failed to lift his despondency. He prodded the steaks, which were lying in his own special hot ‘n’ spicy marinade, and scooped a few spoonfuls of it over them.