by Brett Adams
But then again, what were the chances she would take the elevator if the train were already at the platform? Half of not much. She would choose the stairs.
And Hiero would give her that helping hand.
I swore, and began pacing again.
There was an ache reaching up my calves and into my lower back when I heard a scream.
The scream was abruptly drowned by a metallic screeching that tore the air and made the concrete rumble. My head twisted round in the direction of the noise. It had not come from this platform.
The mechanical screech juddered on until it finally gave out with an absurd squeak. Utter silence filled the station.
I ran, dodging through a crowd that was flowing as if by gravity to the source of the noise.
On reaching the platform I took in the scene at a glance.
A train was pulled up with its gleaming nose two-thirds the way along the platform. Through its windows I could see passengers sprawled over each other, their faces a mixture of embarrassed smiles and wide-eyed shock. In front of me, a wall of commuters obscured the track. A grey-haired woman in a heavy coat had fainted. A man pointed at something in the far gutter. A teenager in bright blue jacket raised a cellphone and its flash burst over the front of the train; a man turned and slapped the phone from his hand, and it clattered on the concrete.
I strained onto my tiptoes to see to the platform’s edge as cries of Hilfe! and Ambulanz! rose. A minute ticked by, and another, and I could neither get to the platform edge, nor see Hiero.
A flicker of motion in the corner of my eye drew my attention, and I noticed a figure climbing the stairs to the concourse. Maybe I noticed him because he was the only person not running or standing. He reached the head of the stairs, and turned away from me. He wore a long coat with the collar pulled up and a shapeless felt hat. He broke into a loping jog with the ease of an athlete or an egotist.
Who walked calmly away from—?
My feet moved before I could complete the thought. And I was after him, my shoes slapping on the concrete. I bounded up the escalator, two and three steps at a time.
It was only as I reached the top and raced after him that I heard angry cries of Polizei! rise from below. A quick glance over my shoulder caught a sea of faces looking back up at me. I saw the same index finger that had been thrust at the dark below the platform’s edge pointed at me.
A thick foreboding crystallized around my heart. The man fleeing the concourse wore the same bland autumn gear as me. The cheap coat and hat I had purchased at the airport that had seemed to offer a veil of anonymity now marked me a potential murderer.
I pounded after the escaping figure, along a walkway, up another escalator, and out onto a mall, but couldn’t close the gap between us. We had gone barely a hundred meters before my Medline began beeping angrily at me.
For a moment I drove myself harder. I would catch him, and if my heart exploded in the process, too bad. I would pin him to the ground with my corpse.
But I turned a corner that led onto the street, and he was gone. I scanned left and right, hunched over, hands on knees, but saw no sign of him. He had escaped.
The street was thick with taxis. I hailed one and slumped onto its back seat, gulping air. It took me a moment to recover my breath enough to speak. I gave the driver the first address that popped into my head—Annika Kreider’s—and only later feigned a change of mind, and asked the driver to take me to an out-of-the-way hotel.
When I had checked into the hotel, I used the internet terminal in the lounge to log into Hiero’s blog. Sure enough, he had already updated the latest entry. It now read:
However, I don’t think she intended to catch the train in the manner she actually did. We had a “surprise” meeting. We chatted. I convinced her to ditch her plans and come with me to the Tiergarten. (I love German!) I walked her to the edge of the platform as “our” train approached, and whispered in her ear that I was going to show her something most people never see.
It was then I noticed my shadow closing in. He’d made up time. Caused me to rush.
I shoved Annika in the small of the back with one arm, and feigned to save her with the other. Didn’t quite get the leverage I’d wanted, but still, her flight through the air was reminiscent of Piggy’s in Lord of the Flies. Even to the shattered spectacles. So too was the way her body crumpled on impact. The look on her face at the end as she corkscrewed right way up was priceless.
I spent the rest of the night mentally drafting my surrender. Time to put down the dice.
Hiero was not just evil. He was insane. Had to be. And I needed to short circuit his game any way I could.
20
I woke the next morning to the smell of whiskey, and a head packed with sawdust.
“You really slipped in the shit this time,” said Tracey from the gloom, seated in the room’s only chair. My favorite hallucination had returned. Except she would never have said ‘shit’. I berated myself for the off-character dialog.
I opened the curtains a crack, rode a wave of nausea, and in the pale light counted the minibar bottles scattered across the floor. Apparently it was all of them. A fumbling search through my wallet revealed barely enough cash to pay for the bar, let alone the room.
A residue of bourbon glimmered in the bottom of a bottle, so I tipped it above my mouth and let the dregs dribble into my throat. I was my own physician, and I had prescribed a dose of hair of the dog.
At last I tried my voice, which came out in a croak: “How was I to know he would switch train lines?” With the back of my hand I wiped away angry tears.
Tracey watched in silence.
She watched me sniff up the last tear, and rake my hands over my prickly scalp. She said, “He’s making up the rules as he goes along, Dad,” and for a moment I felt like the child. “Edit, cut, paste. Whatever fits his fancy.”
In a sudden pique I said, “I’ll kill him.”
Tracey’s smile was mixed with pity. “No you won’t.”
Pity from my own daughter. I wasn’t going to take that. I gripped the hallucination in my mind and extinguished it.
In the closet-sized bathroom I dashed water on my face and rubbed my cheeks. They were rough with stubble, but shaving was the second last thing I wanted to do right then.
The last thing I wanted to do was get on the telephone, but I might as well charge the call to the room. In for a dime, in for a dollar.
I checked the hotel booklet for the international extension, put the phone on speaker, and dialed. My head lay heavy in my hands as I listened to the faint hiss and the ping-pong of my call racing around the globe.
A call tone, finally. Four pulses before it picked up.
“Hello?” said a voice.
“Matt.” At last. “You need to give the police the passwords—”
“Mr Griffen?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Did you hear me? You need—”
“I got your message,” he said.
“Well, never mind that. You got there ahead of me. The passwords are working, but I need you to give them to the police so they can access the blog, too.”
Silence.
“Mr Griffen . . .”
There it was again. Mr Griffen? What the hell was wrong with the kid.
“I got your message,” he repeated, “but I have no idea what you’re talking about. And—”
“What do you mean—”
“—the police have been here.”
“Wait. Wait. Back up.” My head snapped up. “What do you mean you have no idea what I’m talking about? The passwords for Hiero’s blog. Remember? They cycle. You cracked his server.”
“Mr Griffen”—Arg!—“those things you said I did, I didn’t do. I haven’t spoken to you since . . . it must be last holidays.”
Heat flushed my cheeks, but my gut was growing cold.
“I know we haven’t spoken,” I said, voice rising. “I tried to call you. We Skyped, text chat, last week.”
�
�No, we didn’t. I was away last week, at beach camp. Digital detox. I haven’t Skyped anyone in weeks.”
“Shit . . .” I sighed.
I must’ve been silent a long time, because Matt said, “Mr Griffen? Are you there? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I thought I’d just stepped in shit, but it seems I’ve been flushed down the toilet.” I lowered the receiver, then raised it once more. “Whatever they say about me, Matt. It’s not true. Don’t believe it.”
And with those sage words I hung up.
I sat there in silence and tried to make the world stop spinning. The hard-arse in my head reeled off the score: I was (mostly) alone in a hotel room on the other side of the world, in an unfamiliar city filled with people speaking an unfamiliar language. I was broke, and suspected of at least one, possibly two, murders. I was doomed with the foreknowledge of another murder about to happen, and my one ace in the hole, my one window into the mind of the killer, which had seemed too good to be true, was in fact too good to be true.
The blog was a honeypot and I was Winnie-the-Pooh.
Hiero had somehow intercepted my attempt to communicate with Matt. Had impersonated him and set me up to read his blog.
But why?
I suddenly understood those guys you see on street corners and parking lots, the guys who stand staring at nothing, slapping their own heads.
Quickly I packed my meager belongings and descended to the lobby. I stashed Li Min’s journal next to Hiero’s notes in my coat pocket in an attempt to not look like I was skipping out on my bill.
Before I left I checked the blog again. The latest entry held me with that same car-crash-can’t-look-away feeling:
On to the next adventure. By train, this time, I think. The 08:52 from the Hauptbahnhof on through a cavalcade of German cities, the names of which put me in mind of B-Grade World War II movies. Destination: Gare de L’Est, Gay Paree!
Not the Orient Express, but the same romantic sense of the European journey. Wintering trees and cigarettes and cocktails in the dining cart.
And there it was. Hiero’s rampage rolled on again like a locomotive. And now it was almost certain he knew I was reading this account of his exploits.
Well, I was getting on that train.
From a boutique telecom store I bought a prepaid phone, and loaded every last cent onto it. I called the Murdoch police station from memory and asked for Thomas. My call was dispatched and seconds later a very alert Thomas spoke. “Tell me you’re on your way home, Griffen.”
“No, I’m on my way to do your job. He’s killed again, you know. Vienna. Hauptbahnhof station. Yesterday, right in front of me. I’m not going to let him do it again.”
“What you nee—”
I hung up.
Barely thirty seconds later the phone buzzed. No caller id, but it had to be Thomas. I turned the phone off. Let him stew.
21
I swung the new suitcase onto the luggage shelf above my seat, even as the train filled with the hiss of automatic doors closing. I’d bought the suitcase at Aldi, together with socks, jocks, a pair of jeans, a couple of shirts, and a windcheater. I was learning. A suitcase made me look less like a witless desperado. A little less.
I’d been the last to board, as I’d hung back, looking to catch a glimpse of Hiero. His latest blog entry, accessed on my phone, hadn’t been edited. It still stated his intention to go to London by train—this train.
He was on here somewhere, and I meant to find him.
The fact that I knew he knew I was on the train probably should have disturbed me more than it did. That it didn’t, I put down to the idea he imagined we were somehow chummy. I, the master, watching him, the apprentice, with a paternal eye as we travelled this adventure of discovery.
Well, if that was his idea, he was only about as wrong as any human can be. He’d find out how wrong when I caught him on the train and buckled his face with my supremely un-paternal fist.
The train bucked and swayed over a junction then picked up speed. Vienna began to sweep by outside and soon we were rising and falling gently past mist-shrouded fields.
From my pocket I retrieved my wallet. The tip of my train ticket poked from its fold. I slipped it out and checked my name again: Dieter Schleicher.
Herr Dieter. Nice to meet you. Pity my German didn’t get beyond, Wo ist mein Hundefutter? Im Kuhlschrank. (Where is my dogfood? In the refrigerator.)
Don’t ask.
I hoped the real Dieter had a nice time of his extended stay in Vienna. He’d seemed like a nice enough chap, to judge from the back of his head as it faced a urinal.
The train clattered over switches at St Polten, the point on the map at which I had decided I would tour the second class carriages. Hiero hadn’t mentioned if he was riding first or second (or freight). I took a deep breath and flicked my wrist out to check my Medline. Pulse at 63 bpm. Plenty of margin to work in.
I exited the compartment into the thin corridor running the length of the carriage. Dieter Schleicher’s seat was two-thirds the way toward the first class carriages. I decided to head towards the rear of the train as far as the freight carriages.
I’m not an actor, but I can emote “needs to pee” and I did so now. Through the squat glass portal of the next compartment I saw a family of three. The father was plunged in a newspaper, the mother picking through an open suitcase. The kid was standing at an angle, and was either hungry or also needed to pee.
The ticket inspector caught me then. He was a rotund man, singularly unsuited to the thin corridor. There was no way I could squeeze past without retreating to my compartment. Or maybe that was the point. Maybe advertisements for ticket inspectors specified fat guys.
“Ticket please,” he said. Clearly he thought I looked English.
Without a word I handed him my ticket, while behind him rain began to speckle the window.
He scanned the ticket briefly, clamped it in a metal punch, and handed it back.
“Vergessen Sie nicht, in Munchen umzusteigen,” he said and dipped his head. “Gute Reise.”
“Danke,” I said. It was either that or the dog food line.
I about faced and ducked into my compartment, and waited until he passed. He left a smell like Old Spice wafting in the corridor.
As I padded back along the corridor I paused at each compartment just long enough to see its occupants. Every glance came with a little burn in my guts, and a quickening of my breath. My breathing slowed again each time I didn’t find Hiero, but never quite to what it had been before I looked. By the time I got to the last second class compartment, I was sucking air like a marathon runner on the home straight.
I glanced into the compartment and found only a man and a woman, seated with their faces locked together in mortal combat. The man had long hair and the woman short. On the opposite seat sat a battered guitar case covered in stickers.
Unless Hiero was stowing away in the guitar case, he wasn’t traveling second class.
I returned to my compartment and sat, waiting for my pulse to drop back to its normal 56 bpm. Outside an unbroken drizzle rendered everything an endless grey, broken by the occasional burst of orange and yellow autumn color. On a far-off road, silent toy cars matched our speed.
My stomach growled. I hadn’t eaten since—when? Last evening, if you count a packet of hotel crisps. My stomach didn’t seem to want to count them.
My hand was reaching for the door that led to first class when my phone buzzed. Hesitating, I retrieved it. On its screen was printed: 1 new message(s). See message. I thumbed the invitation.
It was an email from [email protected]. No subject. The message body was a single word:
Cold.
I glanced out the window at the spray churning away in the train’s slipstream. Yeah, it was cold. So?
I passed through the door and into the gangway between carriages, to be assaulted by a rush of wind and the train’s clatter. The noise was leaking though a tear in the accordioned wall.
At the opposite side of the gangway, a mere five feet, I opened the door into a first class carriage. As I did so, the phone in my hand vibrated. Another message notification. I called it up. Same sender. Still no subject. Again one word payload:
Colder.
Understanding broke through in an instant.
Whoever [email protected] was, they were playing a game with me, the children’s game of hot and cold. They were telling me my hunt was taking me away from my prey. I was getting colder.
I swung around, re-entered the gangway, and hurried out the other side, back into the second class carriage.
Again the phone buzzed. A message. One word: Warm.
I didn’t need to check my Medline to know my pulse suddenly beat harder. I stalked down the corridor, glancing again into the compartments. I had passed three when another message arrived: Warmer.
A voice blared in my ear. Wincing I looked up to see I was standing right beneath a speaker. I covered my ears, but still heard it speaking German. Then a pause, and it spoke a much slower English. I uncovered my ears in time to hear: “—wishing you a good morning. This train will be stopping in two minutes at Linz and then travelling express to Salzburg. Those passengers making connections for Prague should disembark at Linz, and I wish you a pleasant onward journey.”
I hurried to the next compartment, and put my face up to the window, no longer caring if the occupants noticed me. The couple inside were bent over books, one on each seat. They didn’t move a muscle.
I stepped toward the next compartment. My phone buzzed. Same message: Warmer.
My breathed steamed onto the cool glass of the next compartment. Inside were four chattering, grey-haired ladies. One paused to shoot me the hairy eyeball. I moved on.
Buzz: Hot!
The next compartment was a young man in a Yankees cap absorbed by a laptop’s screen.