by Ian Rankin
He locked the high metal gates behind him. The chef would be long gone.
There was no sign of another car. A short gravel driveway led to the front of the house. The place looked to be in darkness. It was only ten to twelve. Maybe they'd finished and were asleep. Maybe he wouldn't have to resort to vodka to send him into oblivion. He left the car at the top of the drive rather than parking it in the small garage. He stood for a moment, leaning against the cooling body of the car, listening to the silence. A rustling of trees, a bird in the distance, maybe even some frogs. But that was all. And it was so dark. So utterly dark, with the stars shining high in the sky. So different from London, so quiet and isolated. Certainly isolated. They'd talked of keeping guard dogs which could prowl the garden around the house, but then who would feed them and look after them? So instead there was the alarm system, linked to the local station and to Perth constabulary (the latter for times when the former was closed or unmanned).
His eyes having adjusted to the dark, Henrik walked to the front door and opened it, then locked it behind him, using the mortice deadlock as well as the Yale. The light was on at the far end of the hall, where the central alarm system was contained in a metal box secured to the wall beside the door to the kitchen. He used one key to open the box, and another to turn on the system. The bedrooms upstairs were en suite, so he set the pressure-pad alarm for the whole house. No need for anyone to leave their rooms before morning. In the morning, the first person up would have a minute to deactivate the alarm system before the bells started ringing both outside the house itself and inside the police station.
Now, having turned on the system, he had a minute to get to his room, a minute before it was fully operational. He headed for the stairs.
There was a soft
buzzing from the alarm box which told him it was working. When the buzzing stopped, the various window devices and movement-sensitive beams and pressure-pads woke up for the evening. Silence upstairs, and no light from Khan's bedroom. Henrik switched off the hall lights and closed his door behind him.
She knows the house almost as well as she knows the surrounding area.
In the past two days she's been here half a dozen times, and twice at the dead of night, the witching hour.
She's been in the grounds, and has peered through windows into rooms, through the letterbox into the hall. She has seen that the alarm box sits at the end of the hall, attached to the wall. She knows the kind of alarm it will be. She has checked door and window locks. She has even gone so far as to pass an angled mirror on the end of a stick through the letterbox, the better to see the locks from the inside. All has proven very satisfactory. The nearest house is half a mile away. There are no alarms in the garden, no infra red beams which, when broken, would turn on floodlights. No lights at all to complicate her approach.
No cameras. No dogs. She is especially pleased that there are no dogs.
The gates are high and topped with spikes, but the wall is a pathetic affair with broken bottle-glass cemented to its top. Too pathetic for it to have been Khan's work. It must already have been in place when he bought the house. The glass has been worn smooth over the years.
She won't even bother to cover it with a blanket before she climbs into the garden.
But first, there is the alarm system. She straps on a special climbing-belt - the sort known to every telephone engineer - and attaches spiked soles to her shoes. The spiked soles are for wear by gardeners so they can aerate
their lawns. She has modified the spikes only a little. She drove to a garden centre outside Perth for the spike-shoes, and bought a lot of other stuff as well, stuff she didn't need, bought solely to disguise this singular purchase. She passed two garden centres before reaching Perth. Police might investigate one or two garden centres, but she doubts they would go much further afield.
She is now standing beside a telegraph-pole in a field across the lane from Khan's house. She knows this is a dangerous period. She will soon be visible from the house. She checks her watch. Two. The bodyguard locked up two hours ago. They will rise early tomorrow to catch their plane back south. Or rather, if things go as intended, they won't.
She waits another minute. What moon there is disappears behind a hefty bank of cloud. She ties her belt around the pole as well as herself, grips the pole, hugging herself to it, and begins to climb. Eventually, she knows, twenty-odd feet up, there will be foot-holds to help her.
But for now she has only her own strength. She knows it will be enough.
She does not hesitate.
At the top of the pole, beneath the wires themselves, sits a large junction box containing the thinner wires running back to homes in the area. She thinks Khan's alarm system works via telephone lines. From what she's seen of it, it looks just the type. If it doesn't. .. Well, she will fall back on other plans, other options. But for now she has to keep busy, working fast while the moon stays hidden. She slips a pencil-thin torch into her mouth, holding it as she would a cigarette, and, by its light, begins to unscrew the front from the junction box.
Terrorists aren't just people who terrorise. They are people who hunger for knowledge, the knowledge of how things work. In knowing how things work, you discover
how society works, and that knowledge can help cripple society. She knows she can disrupt communications, bring transport systems to a halt, generate mayhem by computer. Given the knowledge, anything can be achieved. The junction box holds no surprises for her, only a certain measure of relief. She stares at the confusion of wires for a moment, and knows that she can stay with plan one.
There is a distinct colour-coding for the wires from Khan's alarm system.
The puzzle is that there seem to be two sets. One for the main house .. .
The other? A room inside the house, perhaps, or a garage or workshop.
She decides to take both sets out with her neat rubber-handled wire-clippers. It was a good alarm system, but not a great one. A great alarm system would send a constant pulse to the outside world. And if that pulse were interrupted, then the alarm bells would ring. Cutting the wires would cause the alarm to sound in the distant police station.
But such systems are unreliable and seldom used. They are nuisances, sounding whenever a fluctuation in current occurs, or a phone-line momentarily breaks up. Society demands that alarms not be a nuisance.
There were times when Witch worried about society.
The job done, she slipped slowly back down the pole and untied her harness at the bottom, putting it back in her heavy black holdall along with the spikes and her tools. Now for the wall. She clambered up and sat on the top for a second, studying the windows in the house, then fell into the dark garden. She had climbed the wall precisely twelve feet to the left of the gate, so that she fell onto grass and not into shrubbery.
She'd decided to enter the way most burglars would - by the back entrance
- not that she was intending to make this look like a burglary. No, this was to be messy. Her employers
wanted her to leave a message, a clear statement of their feelings.
The kitchen then, its door bolted top and bottom with a mortice lock beside the handle. The bedrooms are to the front of the house. She can make a certain amount of noise here. Silence, of course, would be best.
Silence is the ideal. In her holdall is a carefully measured and cut piece of Fablon, purchased at a department store in Perth. Ghastly pattern and colour, though the assistant had praised it as though it were an Impressionist painting. Witch is surprised people still use it. She measured the kitchen windows yesterday, and chose the smaller for her purpose. Slowly, carefully, she unpeels the Fablon and presses it against the smaller window, covering it exactly. In the department store she also purchased some good-quality yellow dusters, while at a small hardware shop the keen young assistant was only too pleased to sell some garden twine and a hammer to a lady keen to stake out her future vegetable plots.
She takes the hammer from her holdall. S
he has used some twine to tie a duster around the head. Out of the spare cuts of Fablon she has made some makeshift handles, which she attaches to the sheet of Fablon stuck to the window. She grips one of these handles as, softly, near soundlessly, she begins to tap away at the glass, which falls away from the window-frame but stays attached to the Fablon. Within three minutes she is lifting the whole window out from its frame, laying it on the ground. The alarm is just outside the kitchen door. If she'd set it off, it would probably be buzzing by now. But she can't hear it. She can't hear anything, not even her heart.
Upstairs, Henrik is asleep and dreaming in Danish. He's dreaming of barmaids with pumps attached to their
breasts, and of flying champagne bottles, and of winning a bodybuilding contest against Khan and the pre-movie star Schwarzenegger. He drank one glass of neat vodka before retiring, and watched ten minutes of the satellite movie on his eighteen-inch television before falling asleep, waking half an hour later just long enough to switch off the television.
He sleeps and he dreams with one hand tight between his legs, something he's done since childhood. Girlfriends have commented on it, laughed at it even. If he catches himself doing it, he shoves the hand under a pillow, but it always seems to creep south again of its own volition.
The barmaids are singing. Topless for some reason, and singing in a language he doesn't understand. His name? His name? Can they possibly be singing .. . his name?
'Wake up!' A whisper. A woman's urgent hiss. His eyes open to blackness and he tries to sit up, but a feminine hand pushes at his chest, and he sinks back down again. The hand remains against his chest, rubbing it. A silky-smooth hand.
Shari's hand.
'What is it?' he hisses back. 'What's the matter, Shari?'
Her face seems very close to him. 'It's Khan. He's sound asleep ...
as usual. He just doesn't ... I don't want to put him down or anything, but he just doesn't satisfy me.'
Topless barmaids . .. breasts. Henrik gives a groggy half-smile in the dark. He reaches a hand to where he imagines her chest is. He's not sure whether he finds it or not. She's wearing her clothes .. . maybe some sort of nightdress, a baby-doll or something.
'I knew you'd come,' he whispers. 'I was going to call on you when we got back to London. Khan's a shit, he'll dump you the minute the plane lands.'
'I know.' Her hand rubbing him, rubbing in wider circles, taking in shoulders and down over his stomach. Feels good. 'He doesn't understand how I like it.'
'Like it?'
'Sex.' A low guttural sound, more moan than whisper. 'I love it.' Still rubbing, smooth hand. 'I like it tied up. Khan doesn't like that, but it's such a turn on. What about you, huh? Is it a turn on for you?'
'Sure.' He's waking up now. Tied up?
'Want to try? I've got some of Khan's ties. Want to try it with his ties?'
'Why not?' Her hand is insistent on him now. She moves one of his arms, then the other, until his hands are behind him, grasping at the bedposts.
He realises now that she wants to tie him up ... not what he had in mind, but all the same ... And in fact she's already busy. It's easy for her to slip the ties around his wrists.
'Not too tight are they?'
'No.' Lying. His wrists feel like the circulation's been cut.
And around his feet too, so he is splayed and naked on the bed. He knows he's in good shape, but sucks his gut in a little anyway. He's stiff as a beer-pump himself now. Damn, he'll make her bells ring, little Shari's bells ring. Oh Christ, but if she calls out . . . what if Khan hears? He's a pretty light sleeper, what if he bursts in while he's lying here all trussed ...
Bells . . . make her bells ring . . .
How come she hasn't set off the alarm system?
He's forming the question when he hears tape being torn, and next thing her hand is over his face, wrapping tape around his mouth, around the back of his head, mouth again, and again, and again. Jesus fucking Christ!
He grunts, struggles. But then he hears a cli-chick, and another, and another, and another. Four. And he's not
being held by ties any more. Something cold instead. And then the light goes on.
It takes his eyes a second or two to deal with the difference. He sees himself naked, and the handcuffs around his ankles. They're around his wrists too, pinning him to the bedposts top and bottom. No problem.
He can contract himself and snap the goddamned bedposts off if he has to. Idiot that he was in the first place. Khan'll kill him for this.
But who is the woman? The woman dressed in black, who's standing there at the foot of the bed. He hasn't been able to focus on her yet, but now she's stepping forwards and
Thwock!
One blow to the right temple with her hammer, and it's back to the barmaids for Henrik. Witch looks down on him and smiles. Well, what's the point of working if you can't have a little fun?
Across the corridor and down the hall, two people are asleep in a large rumpled bed. The whole room smells of perfume and bath-soap and sex.
Their clothes are distributed across the floor without any discernible pattern or progress. The man is naked and lies on his side without any covering. The woman lies on her front, hair tangled across the pillow.
She is covered by a white sheet, and her left arm hangs limply down from the edge of the bed, fingernails grazing the carpet. No fun and games here. Now the work begins in earnest. The arm is actually a bonus, lying bulging-veined like that. She uses the pencil-thin torch to help her prepare and test the syringe, which she then jabs home into one of Shari Capri's veins, just where the forearm meets the elbow. Not merely asleep now but unconscious. An explosion wouldn't wake her.
Gunshots would cause no flickering
of her eyelids. She'll wake up in the morning, gluey-mouthed, thirsty, with a sore head most probably.
These will be the least of her problems.
Now only Khan remains. He seems to be sleeping peacefully. She wonders what he's dreaming of. What do you dream of when you have everything?
You dream of more. Or else the terror of losing everything you've got.
Either would be appropriate, considering what is about to happen, and why it's about to happen. Witch squats on the floor, her face in line with Khan's. She's not six feet from him - not quite close enough for him to take a waking, desperate lunge at her, but close enough so that she can study him. And studying him, he becomes less human to her, and less human still. He becomes a motive, a deal, a set of crooked figures on an accounting sheet. He becomes her pay-off.
'Mr Khan,' she says softly. 'Mr Khan.' An eye opens to a slit. Her voice is as casual as any nurse's would be to the patient who's come out of the operating theatre. 'Time to wake up now, Mr Khan.'
The difference being, of course, that now Khan is awake, the operating theatre waits for him. Witch, smiling, already has the good sharp knife in her hand. It flashes through her mind that she has been in Britain exactly a week.
Happy anniversary.
The Protean Self
Monday 8 June
'So how was France then?' Greenleaf was smiling. Some might have called it a grimace.
Doyle smiled too: with pleasure. 'Mag-ni-fique, John. Just mag-ni-fique.
Here .. .' He reached into a carrier bag. 'Have a bottle of beer. I've another 199 of them in the garage at home.'
Greenleaf accepted the small green bottle. 'Thanks,' he said. 'I'll savour it.'
'You do that, John. That's one franc's worth of best Alsace lager in there. Four-point-nine alcohol, so take it slow, eh?' And Doyle gave Greenleaf a big wink.
I don't really hate him, Greenleaf thought suddenly. He's smarmy all right, but I wonder how seriously he takes himself. Maybe the whole thing is just him sending himself up. I don't really hate him. It's just gentle loathing.
'So,' Doyle was saying, looking around him at the office. 'The place didn't crumble in my absence? I'm hurt. I used to think I was the only thing holding this place together.'
'We do our best, Doyle. It's not easy, but we do our best.'
'Good man. So, what did you get in Folkestone?'
'Some cod and a couple of bloaters.'
Doyle laughed for a full fifteen seconds. 'Christ, John, I think a bit of me's rubbing off on you. Don't ask me which bit, mind.'
'As long as I don't catch anything.'
'There you go again! Catch anything. You're pinching all my best lines.'
'Lines, eh?' Even Greenleaf was smiling now: also with pleasure. 'Can I take it I'm part of a running gag about fish?'
'Bear in mind one of the poor sods who got blown up was called Perch.'
'Yes, I met his mother.'
The smile vanished from Doyle's face. 'Yes, doesn't do to joke, does it? So, what did you really find in Folkestone?'
'Haven't you read the report?'
Doyle wrinkled his nose. 'Give me the details. I'll read it later.'
'Well, I found pretty much what you said I would. Looks like it was an explosion all right. Guy's business was in trouble, he was open to any kind of offer. They found two grand on him. I managed to trace the notes.'
Doyle's eyes opened wide. 'Yeah?' Greenleaf nodded. 'Well, good for you, John. Good for you. And?'
'Old notes. Part of a ransom paid to some kidnappers in Italy five years ago.'
'What?'
'It's all in my report.'
'Maybe I'd better read it after all.'
'So what about Calais?'
'Not a lot to tell really.'
'I saw the stuff you sent through by modem on Friday.'
Doyle shrugged. 'Something to impress the old man. A bit of technology.
There wasn't much substance to what I sent.'
Greenleaf nodded. This was true. What's more, it was a shrewd observation of Trilling, who had slavered over
the print-out more for what it was, the manner of its transmission, than for what it contained.
'Still,' said Doyle, 'sending it as it happened meant I had the weekend clear. I found this great restaurant, five courses for a tenner. You should nip over for—'