by Chris Ewan
“Michael knew,” I began, looking down at the dark, curd-like surface. “I found a photocopy in his apartment.”
My words were met with silence. Either she didn’t know what to say or she was waiting to hear where I was going with it. The truth was I didn’t really know where I was going with it but it seemed I had to say something more.
“It was in the overflow pipe in his bath. I happen to know he had the copy before he got out of prison. So he knew who you were. He knew it was your father he’d killed.”
She pulled her hands out of the pockets of her jacket and wrapped her arms around herself. Then she kicked at the soot-coated brickwork with her foot, nodding her head, as if part of her had already known.
“He didn’t tell you?” I asked, and she shook her head in a cheerless way. “You were sleeping with the man who killed your own father,” I went on, the words sounding harsher than I’d intended.
Finally, she said, “Not me.”
“Well,” I replied, “unless you have a double I don’t know about, I’m pretty sure it had to be.”
“No. Marieke, maybe, but not me.”
“I’m not sure that’s a distinction you can make.”
“You do not know how it is,” she said, giving me a sharp look.
“I guess I don’t. I guess I don’t understand it at all.”
She turned and leaned back against the balustrade beside me, resting her elbows on the stone plinth and looking up at the dark night sky. Her breath fogged in the air, obscuring her face, but I could see that the cold had given her skin a pinched look, somehow making her cheek bones more pronounced. With her blonde hair hanging loose on her shoulders and her eyes seeming to retreat into their sockets, she had a heroine-chic look about her, like a catwalk model from the nineties.
“I didn’t mean to like him,” she said, in a small voice, half to herself. “At first, I hated it. But it was true anyway. If we’d met by accident and I didn’t know who he was, I would have been attracted to him.”
“But you always knew who he was. What he’d done.”
She closed her eyes, as if to block out my words and focus on her own. “When he told me for the first time that he was innocent, it was so shocking. Not because it made me angry.” She turned to me. “Because I wanted to believe it was true.”
“Maybe it was.”
She bit down on her lip, draining the blood from it. “No,” she said, and shook her head wilfully.
“It was something he told a lot of people, I hear.”
“Not so many killers say they are guilty.”
“Some must. Some even plead that way.”
She inhaled deeply, composing herself. “I was nine years old when it happened. I saw his pictures in the papers. I saw his eyes and I knew it was him, even before the trial. But then, all of a sudden, it was over. He was in prison and I knew nothing about him. Did he think about me? Did he even know I existed? Did he know what he’d taken?”
“It’s not something he’d be likely to forget.”
“But it could have been. I did not know him then. I knew only what my mother would say, spitting his name, saying terrible things. She told me he was a monster.”
“I imagine it was easier, thinking of him like that?”
“Of course,” she said. “It was simple. But then, the first time we spoke—I don’t know, he was so…different.”
“And that hurt.”
“Yes.”
“But that changed.”
She tensed, and I wondered for a moment if she’d go on. She had every reason not to. I wasn’t her counsellor, or even the police. I could have said that she owed me a version of the truth, but what did that mean really? Perhaps all she wanted was someone to listen to her, though, because after a pause she beg&i to speak once again.
“It did not change for a long time,” she said, hesitantly. “At first, I almost could not breathe when we talked. But I learned to control myself, to shut part of me off. And then I found that I wanted to hear what he had to say.”
“Freud would have loved this.”
Kim stomped her feet into the ground and hugged herself more closely. She seemed to be shivering.
“We could go inside,” I suggested. “You could tell me the rest in there.”
“No. It is good out here.”
“You like discomfort?”
She shrugged.
“So when did you decide to take the diamonds? Because that was the plan, right?”
She looked at me, horrified.
“Oh, maybe at first you thought about harming him in some way, perhaps even killing him, but the way I see it that changed when you started to like him. I’m guessing you convinced yourself that the best way to spite him was to take the one thing he’d been waiting twelve years to get his hands on. And, of course, it couldn’t hurt that the diamonds were worth a small fortune.”
“No,” she said, and glanced at her feet.
“Oh, I think so. I think that’s exactly how it went. Only you started asking too many questions and Michael got suspicious. And then he got a friend to dig around and that friend happened to find something truly shocking—the girl who’d become so attached to him was the girl whose father he’d murdered.”
Kim shook her head slowly, as if trying to deny the logic behind what I was saying.
“The thing I don’t get is why he left himself open to it all. Why carry on with the charade?”
“He loved me,” she said, in a flat voice.
“Oh, I’m sure that’s what he told you. Question is, why did you pretend to believe him?”
She started crying then, though not in a showy way. Tiny convulsions took hold of her and she quivered by my side, face lowered, mucus glistening in her nostrils. She bit down on her lip again, harder this time, but I tried not to let it get to me.
“You didn’t kill him,” I said, suddenly sure of it now.
“No,” she whispered.
“Because you couldn’t. Even if part of you welcomed it when you saw him that way. That’s why you lost it, I think, seeing that something you’d wanted so badly had come to pass. And it’s okay. I really think it is. Although the truth is I don’t altogether care. All I want right now are the three monkeys. And I think you have the third one.”
She looked at me, bewildered. “No.”
“You’re telling me it’s not in your apartment, that if we went up there right now I wouldn’t find it in among your things?”
“I don’t have it. And what does it matter anyway? You told me you do not have the others.”
She looked at me, her jaw set and her teeth clamped together, and I saw some kind of challenge in her eyes. She suspected me, for sure, and I couldn’t really blame her. But then I didn’t have time to think anymore, because I heard a screech of brakes and turned just in time to see a familiar white van lurching in my direction.
“You called them?” I shouted. “Before you came out?”
Something in her eyes told me I was right. I glared at her, then grabbed her by the arm and threw her towards the wide man just as he jumped down from the driver’s cab with the baseball bat in his hands. He stumbled, but pushed her aside and hurried on, raising the bat over his shoulder and swinging hard as he stepped close to me. This time I knew what was coming and I danced back, sucking my stomach right in to avoid the blow, then rushed forwards and slammed him into the bonnet of the van and bear-gripped him before he could bring the bat back for a second swing. I hoisted my knee into his gut, hoisted it again at his groin. He dropped the bat with a groan and slumped down but still had enough fight to reach up and grab for my neck, squeezing my throat in his gloved hands. I tried to prise his fingers away, meanwhile pushing against his face and poking at his eyes, but he arched his head back so that I couldn’t quite reach and before I could get free the thin man had joined in and forced my arm back at a wild angle, threatening to break it near my shoulder. I gargled in pain, flailing uselessly with my legs and stumbling backward
s, in danger of toppling over the edge of the bridge. I was just at the point of submission when I heard a loud bang in the night sky and strained my eyes until I could just glimpse Stuart holding the smoking handgun I’d taken from the wide man’s apartment above his head.
“Let him go,” he yelled, doing a passable impression of a loose cannon. “Let him go right now, God damn it.”
The wide man and the thin man froze, still holding me by the neck and the shoulder.
“Let him go,” Stuart repeated, this time cocking the gun and levelling it on the thin man.
Slowly, the pressure on my neck and my arm began to ease and before long they’d released me enough so that I was able to step away from them. I swallowed cautiously and gingerly rotated my shoulder in its socket.
“Let’s get out of here,” I croaked, waving my healthy arm at Stuart.
But Stuart had other ideas. As I watched, he stepped across the bridge and grabbed Kirn by the hair, yanking her head back and pressing the gun muzzle against her forehead so that her skin puckered around it. She stared at me, wide-eyed in alarm, and I looked back the same way as Stuart hissed, “Where is it? Where’s the third monkey?”
She shook her head, unable to speak.
“She doesn’t have it,” I told him, as calmly as I could.
“Where is it you bitch? Tell me or so help me I’ll pull the fucking trigger.”
She whimpered, words failing her. By now, onlookers had spilled out onto the street from the cafe and it wouldn’t be long before one of them called the police or thought about playing the hero. I couldn’t imagine trying to explain this one to Burggrave.
“She doesn’t have it,” I repeated, louder this time. “Let her go. I know where it is. Believe me, there’s only one place it can be.”
He looked around, beginning to register what I was saying to him, and at last his grip started to loosen on her hair.
“Come with me,” I said. “We have to go now.”
He lowered the gun from Kirn’s temple and un-cocked it in an almost trance-like way, as if the mechanics of what he was doing could distract him from the mess he’d just made of the girl slumped on the ground in front of him. He watched over her, unmoving, and I stepped forwards to free the gun from his limp hand. I gave his wrist a squeeze, motioned for him to come with me. When he still didn’t budge, I tugged on his arm and dragged him away in the direction of the nearest busy street.
TWENTY-EIGHT
At mid-morning the following day, I followed two teenage girls in through the front security door of a modern apartment building in the south of the city. I paused by the mail boxes just long enough for them to step into the elevator and for the elevator doors to close behind them, and then I climbed a communal staircase up to the second floor of the building where I walked through a fire safety door with a reinforced glass portal in it and passed three identical-looking wooden doors before I found the one I was after.
There was a peep-hole at eye-level in the centre of the door and a brass mortise lock beside my hip. I rapped on the door twice and when nobody came to answer it I checked both ways along the corridor, making sure it was clear, and then I put on a pair of my disposable gloves, removed my picks from my coat pocket and set to work on the lock. It seemed a fair while since I’d tackled a really up-to-date lock but it was no more difficult to coax open than any of the others I’d dealt with recently. And aside from the low-level hum of an air-conditioning unit housed somewhere above my head, the corridor was very quiet, so I didn’t even need to lower my head to hear the pins engage. When the final pin clicked into place, I twisted the cam and the bolt snuck back obligingly. Then I eased down on the handle, stepped inside the threshold and locked the door behind me.
The apartment I’d entered was in near-darkness and I could barely see a thing. I fumbled around on the wall for the main light switch and when the overhead light came on I found myself at the beginning of a magnolia painted hallway. There were several pairs of shoes by my feet and a hooded top hanging from one of the wallmounted coat hooks by my side. Just ahead and on the left was a doorway that led into a compact, windowless kitchen. I turned on the lights inside the kitchen and scanned the fitted ash units and the chrome oven and hob. The kitchen surfaces were covered in dirty plates and coffee mugs and there was a blender that still had the residue from a breakfast smoothie congealed on its insides.
I moved back into the hallway and passed a bathroom, then turned left and entered a relatively large, L-shaped living room with a plush beige carpet, a state of the art flat-screen television, a glass coffee table and a black leather couch. The floor to ceiling curtains were drawn, which explained why it was so dark. I left the curtains like that to avoid attracting any unwanted attention and then I retraced my steps to investigate the final two doors in the apartment. The first door contained a closet that was filled with all manner of household junk: a vacuum cleaner, an ironing board, more shoes, some coats, hats and scarves, and a step ladder. The second door led into a bedroom that was just large enough to contain a double bed and a flat-pack wardrobe and chest of drawers. The bed was unmade and there was a pile of dirty clothes on the floor. By the side of the bed was an alarm clock and a paperback novel.
The bedroom struck me as being as good a place as any other to begin and so it was there that I started my search. Dropping to my knees, I pushed the duvet out of the way and shone my pocket torch beneath the bed. There was a stray white sports sock and a world of dust and carpet fluff but that was all. I felt all along the side of the bed box, checking for storage spaces, but I didn’t find any. After that, I felt inside the pillowcases and then inside the duvet, and from the odour of stale sweat that hit me like a blow to the nose, I was glad to be wearing my gloves. When I didn’t find anything there either, I turned my attentions to the wardrobe and after that the chest of drawers, removing each drawer and checking behind and underneath them in the usual way. Then I pulled the wardrobe and the drawer unit away from the wall and shone my torch behind and after that I went and fetched the stepladder from the hallway closet and scanned the top of the wardrobe. Finally, I sorted through the dirty laundry on the floor, pockets and all, until I was satisfied that the bedroom was a dead-end, and then I went and put the step ladder back just where I’d found it.
From the bedroom, I moved onto the living room. On the surface, at least, there wasn’t so much to search in the living room, and my mind soon began to wander. Not unusually for me, I found myself thinking about my-book again. It felt like a long time since I’d thought about it properly and as I went calmly about my business, I began to retread the plot twists that had led to my problems in the first place. Before very long, I found myself wondering if there wasn’t a simple way out of it after all. It would take some work, but maybe I could rewrite the beginning of the story to make things easier on myself. The problem with that, though, was that I didn’t want to make it all too easy for Faulks or my readers to work out who the killer was. But there had to be a balance to be struck, a way to accommodate logic without killing the book altogether. Perhaps I could dispense with the briefcase, I thought. It could be replaced with a carrier bag from a well-known store and that way Faulks could pick up a duplicate without any trouble. Or maybe the butler’s hand was left at the scene in the first place. That wasn’t as interesting, I guessed, because part of the mystery was how the murderer had got into a safe guarded by a fingerprint scanner that Faulks himself had been unable to access. Would Victoria go for it? More to the point, would I be satisfied?
The honest answer was no. Really, I should have been looking for ways to push myself and make things more difficult rather than jumping at easy solutions. But I was so fed up with having an almost-finished manuscript on my hands that it was a tempting option. My publishers might not agree, though, and where would that leave me? Back at square one with four months work written off and not a bean to show for it.
A change of scene could help, mind. Italy still appealed to me and if I
went there maybe there was a chance I’d find the inspiration I was looking for. And even if I didn’t, the weather would be brighter and the winter nights less severe. Plus there were Italian women to think about. Dark-haired, olive-skinned. Wonderful legs, as a general rule. And I’d always wanted to pick up a little of the language, ever since I’d seen Roman Holiday for the first time. I could have my own Roman Holiday. I could maybe do Gregory Peck, give or take a few degrees of smooth. And so far as I was aware, there were no meaty Italians looking to swing a baseball bat in my direction at any time soon.
I wondered how many times Gregory Peck had appeared on the television that dominated the living room. Not enough probably, which was a shame, because it was a fine machine, with something like a 42-inch screen, and I supposed it could give Gregory a pretty fair hearing. As great as it was, though, it didn’t help me find what I was looking for and neither did the couch or the glass coffee table or the pile of newspapers and magazines hidden behind the door.
I bypassed the bathroom, figuring a bathroom couldn’t come good two times in a row, and I passed over the storage closet too, because tackling all the junk inside of it looked like way too much work and I was content for it to be an absolute last resort. That only left the kitchen, where the smell of dried food on all the dirty crockery was potent enough to make me turn up my nose. There might not have been much evidence of home cooking going on but that didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of places to search.
The bin was filled to overflow with ready-meal containers, I noticed, and when I checked inside the microwave I saw that it was peppered with fatty residues. The wall-mounted cupboards contained an extensive selection of cereal brands, as well as bread loaves of varying degrees of decay, and several packets of the chocolate sprinkles that Dutch people spread onto slices of bread as a breakfast treat. The base cupboards held a small collection of cleaning products, a few baking trays and saucepans and the odd can of tinned food. I checked inside the oven and behind the housing of the extractor fan and then I gave the lengths of wooden plinth above and below the kitchen units a solid prod to make sure that none of them had been loosened. After that, I opened the fridge door and almost gagged on the eggy smell that wafted out at me. There was a carton of milk and some processed cheese and a half a chocolate bar inside. At the top of the fridge was an ice box. I pulled down the plastic flap on the icebox and pushed a bag of frozen mixed vegetables to one side. Nothing. Then I straightened and happened to look down into one of the slots in the electric toaster and, stone me, there he was, hands covering his eyes as if he was just waiting for me to shout peek-a-boo.