The Distance: A Thriller

by Helen Giltrow

  But right now all I can think is

  He’s out. He’s safe.

  Forty-five minutes pass before the next phone call. Whitman’s voice again, softly—“Here he is”—and then a rustle as the phone is handed over, the clunk of a car door closing.

  “Hello?” Johanssen says.

  I cannot say, Thank God you’re all right.

  “It was Quillan, wasn’t it?”

  He doesn’t reply. But Whitman’s around—maybe he can’t talk freely.

  I say, “We got into the records—we’ve been through all the lists. She’s not in there. This has all been set up but we can handle it—”

  “She’s in there,” he says. “I’ve seen her. I’m going back.”

  I think I sound calm when I phone Fielding ten minutes later; though of course I’m not.

  The line connects. A muttered aside—“Hey, I’ll be right with you”—and, in the background, a cocktail-party murmur. Fielding drumming up business?

  “Yeah? Who is this?” Fielding’s voice again but louder now and guarded, wary. The background noise has dropped away; he must have stepped into another room, closed a door.

  “He’s out. He says he’s seen her.”

  One of Fielding’s three-second silences. There’s gloating triumph in this one. “What did I tell you?”

  “They scooped him out of a compound. He’s been beaten. By Quillan.” And into the silence that follows that: “He wants to go back.”

  Another pause. Then Fielding says, “Client’s been in touch. Small change of plan … The maintenance crews in the Program, who tells ’em what to do?”

  What is this? “Supervisors. Responding to work tickets—Fielding—”

  “What if we needed a crew to do a job for us? Could you fake a work ticket?”

  “Fielding—”

  “There’s a tank, been capped off. We need the bolts on the cap loosened.” As if it’s all still going to happen, even now.

  “Fielding, what’s this about?”

  “Check it out, get a price, get back to me. Oh, and he and I need to meet.”

  “He’s undercover.”

  “A meeting,” Fielding says. “And don’t tell me you can’t fix it, you fucking well got him in there, you can fucking well get me a meeting.”

  And all the time: She cannot be in there. She cannot.

  I want Johanssen somehow to be wrong.

  Already I know he’s not.

  DAY 10: FRIDAY–DAY 11: SATURDAY

  JOHANSSEN

  They hustle him through the induction block. This time there are no formalities. They find him some clothes to wear, and boots; the dough-faced administrator hisses anxiously, “Do you wish to make a complaint?” and Johanssen shakes his head, and everyone looks relieved.

  To the building’s exit—the metal detectors, the guards, the glass doors opening with a faint soft squeak on their runners … Whitman takes hold of his arm, but as if he might fall, not run. With his eyes still on the doorway he says softly, “You’re a mess. You need a doctor?”

  “No.”

  The car’s parked in the same place as before, Whitman’s men beside it.

  Whitman puts him in it, hands him the phone, closes the car door, and walks away, motioning the other two to follow.

  Karla’s voice: “It was Quillan, wasn’t it?” A sort of fierce compression in her tone. Anger? She’s telling him Cate isn’t in the records, but all he can think of is going back.

  They drive across London. He wakes outside the privatized flats to the tick of the cooling engine and the fleeting conviction that the last three days have been a dream. When he tries to get out of the car his injuries have stiffened again.

  Inside, he manages half a frozen meal, microwaved to scalding in the flat’s little kitchen with the TV blaring in the main room. Through the doorway its images dance meaninglessly in front of his eyes.

  He goes to bed in daylight, like a child. He doesn’t dream at all.

  He wakes when Whitman walks into the room. The clock reads 7:13 a.m. He has slept for seventeen hours.

  “Get up,” Whitman says; then, so the others will hear: “That meeting you wanted? You got it. But after this we want to see some cooperation.”

  Johanssen hauls himself upright, snapping down on the pain. He doesn’t ask where. Karla. It has to be Karla.

  He showers, dresses, eats—swallowing with only a little difficulty—and then they pile back into the car, all four of them. The two ex-army guys are watchful, nervy, but they seem to have bought Whitman’s story, that this is all part of getting Ryan Jackson to talk.

  The route they take could be going anywhere.

  At last, just gone ten thirty, they pull up outside a rundown row of shops in Lavender Hill.

  Whitman says to him, “It’s just you and me from here.” He adds wearily, for form’s sake, “Don’t try anything.”

  The door is wedged anonymously between a barber’s and a bookmaker’s, with 7A in stick-on brass-effect letters and the tiny bulging eye of a peephole. Whitman knocks.

  Karla, it has to be Karla …

  But the bullet-headed man who opens up is one of Fielding’s regulars.

  He’s a professional, and anyway he’s probably seen worse, much worse, in his time: he regards Johanssen’s damaged face with blank indifference. Then he nods, and Johanssen and Whitman edge past him, over a pile of free newspapers and takeaway menus. Already Johanssen can smell Fielding’s cigar.

  He climbs the stairs alone.

  Fielding’s in an uncarpeted room on the second floor, sitting on a folding chair in a band of rancid-yellow sunlight. For a long moment he stares at Johanssen.

  Then he says, “Fuck you”—anger and relief and resentment all in two words—and he laughs, a corrosive laugh. “Three days,” he says. “Three fucking days. Christ. Look at you.” He draws on the cigar and exhales: smoke twists and billows upward in the light.

  Johanssen says, “I found her. I can do it.”

  Fielding shakes his head. “Not this time, son,” he says. “It’s over.”

  Fielding’s walked to the window and stands close to its edge, peering down into the street. He says, “The bloke you came in with, the thin guy.”

  “He knows not to ask.”

  “And the pair across the road?”

  Johanssen says, “They don’t know anything,” and Fielding grunts, satisfied. He turns away from the window. “Client’s made a new request. They want the body delivered. To a location within the Program, chosen by them. You like the sound of that?”

  He pauses—for effect? For Johanssen to respond? When Johanssen doesn’t, Fielding goes on anyway.

  “There’s a place in there, a workshop, a garage, something like that, bunch of immigrants used it for stripping the lead out of batteries—they dumped the acid in a tank in the floor. When the place went over to the Program no one bothered to drain the tank, just sealed it up. According to the client. So this is what they want: when you’re ready to go, we get the tank unsealed, you take the target there, you do the job, put her in the tank, get away. Forty-eight hours after it’s opened up, we get it sealed again.”

  “This is the client’s idea?”

  Fielding nods: “Yeah. And I told them, battery acid won’t dissolve a body, not completely, not unless it’s in there a very long time. They won’t have it: say it’s the only way to keep it quiet, stop her turning up. Which they don’t want. But it’s all a bit too thorough, isn’t it? A bit too precise, and I don’t like it. So: time to think about alternatives. Like subcontracting: use someone else. Someone inside, someone a bit more … disposable. This guy I got in mind, uses a knife—he does women, that’s his specialty—”

  That again. Fielding knows the button’s there, he can’t resist the urge to push it. “Who’s the client?”

  Fielding shakes his head. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “But you said they’re sound?”

  “I know what I said.”<
br />
  “Our side?”

  “Civilian—now, you’ll get something for your trouble, I’ll make sure of that. Call it a research fee. You found her, and we can use that, right? So don’t look at it as a failure.”

  “Where’s this tank?”

  “In a garage—how the fuck should I know, all I got is a grid reference. Now, you’ve seen the setup in there. You tell me where to find her, I pass it on to my guy, he does the business. You had a plan? Right, now that’s his plan—”

  “It won’t work—”

  “What are you, fucking indispensable? It’ll work for you, it’ll work for him.”

  Johanssen says, “She’s Quillan’s tame doctor and no one in that place’ll risk touching her because they know what’ll happen if they do.”

  Fielding says, “Quillan’s doctor?”

  “She works in a clinic. Run by Quillan from a compound. Give me the location.”

  “Quillan,” Fielding says. He eyes Johanssen’s bruises. “It was Quillan who did that?”

  “Guy called Brice. He works for Quillan.”

  Fielding mutters, “Christ—”

  “He wanted to check who I was.”

  Fielding narrows his eyes. “But he doesn’t know, or you’d have come out of there in a bag.”

  “Quillan gave me a job.”

  “What?”

  “In that clinic. I work for him now.” Johanssen holds out a hand. “Give me the location,” he says again. “I go back in, I check it out, I say yes or no. If it’s not safe it’s a no. If it’s a yes, that’s it. I do it. There won’t be a problem.”

  Fielding says nothing.

  The sunlight hazes the dust on the windows. Sound filters up from the bookie’s below and in from the road outside: another bus grumbles past, and someone shouts.

  Then, “Fuck you,” Fielding mutters. He dips into his pocket, pulls out a folded slip of paper, and holds it vertically between two fingers, but when Johanssen reaches for it he flicks it back.

  Fielding says, “You check it out, you call me.”

  “They monitor the landlines.”

  “Who knew?” Fielding says. “You call me. And remember: six years we’ve worked together. Six years, and you know what that means? It means every time you open your mouth I can read every fucking thought in your head. So if you say it’s safe you’d better be sure of it. One tiny little doubt”—he raises his free hand: index finger and thumb measure a sliver of space—“and I’ll know. We’ll go with my guy, and you’ll get out of his way, and you’ll stay out. Have I got your agreement on that?”

  Johanssen nods.

  “Say it.”

  “Yes.”

  Still he pauses, holding the paper, and his eyes stay on Johanssen one, two, three seconds too long. Then suddenly he flicks it forward again. Johanssen takes it, glances once at it—a row of scribbled figures—pockets it without a word, and as he does so the sun blinks out, and the room’s cold.

  “She killed someone,” Johanssen says.

  “She tell you that?”

  He nods. “Why isn’t it in the records?”

  Fielding grunts. “Client said it got covered up. Maybe someone’s got friends in high places. Who knows with this stuff?” Then he says, “So she was a doctor, was she? That figures.”

  “What?”

  “You trust someone when they’re a doctor. Hippocratic oath and all that. You think a doctor kills someone, it’s going to be quick, it’s going to be clean. Not …” He shakes his head. “Client talked about it. You should have seen the state they were in.”

  He pauses, reflective. “Our line of work, we can’t afford to stress about the rights and wrongs of it. But this one?” And his eyes have a flat look in them. “This one deserves it.”

  DAY 11: SATURDAY–DAY 12: SUNDAY

  KARLA

  Two p.m. on Saturday, and I’m in an alleyway in the borough of Wandsworth, with a key in my hand. As I slip it into the padlock and turn it, a voice behind me says doubtfully, “You don’t want to go in there.”

  An elderly man with a woven plastic shopping bag is shuffling toward me through the dusk. “There’s bad people use that place,” he says. “You want to be careful.” The alleyway’s narrow, and his shopping bag scrapes harshly against the brick wall. Up on the main road, a market’s selling pirated DVDs, cheap cleaning materials, giant bags of sweets. Maybe that’s where he’s heading, maybe this is his shortcut.

  He says, “They block up the windows, see, but that don’t stop ’em, they just break in again. It’s drugs.” He nods sagely. “Drugs.”

  He’s right beside me now. I step into the doorway to let him pass, but he doesn’t. Instead he stares expectantly at the door. “I remember this place before they closed it down.” He sounds suddenly hopeful. “Years since I’ve been inside.”

  The last thing I need is nostalgia. I slip the last key into the door’s lock, then turn to the old man. “Not safe in there, mate. You’d need one of these.” I tap the hard hat I’m wearing: its harsh yellow plastic is jagged in the overcast alleyway. I’m conspicuous, but sometimes this is the best way to hide: in plain sight.

  “What you doing then?” the old man asks as the door swings open. He squints past me, into the gloom. The stench of urine and decay belches out at us.

  I step inside. “Health and safety, mate,” I say cheerily. “Health and safety.”

  When I pull the door shut the old man’s still peering in after me: his watery gray eye in the diminishing slit is the last thing I see before the dark closes in on me.

  The building is a big Edwardian-era pub, boarded up for the last three years, sliding into patient disrepair as it awaits the attention of the developers. I’ve come in via a side door, a staff entrance opening onto a dingy, windowless corridor: the darkness magnifies the rich clammy damp.

  My torch flares, the beam nosing through the rubbish on the floor. Used needles glint among the refuse. To my left a narrow staircase rises to the first floor. Upstairs there’ll be peeling bedrooms, rust-spotted baths, frayed death-trap electrics … or maybe it’s all gone, torn out, and the floorboards are failing. I don’t go up. We agreed: the ground floor.

  Beyond the staircase there’s a fire door. I open it, and immediately I’m dazzled.

  On instinct I put a hand up, and the beam glances away. Behind its bright afterglow Whitman, invisible, says, “Laura, where do you find these places?”

  I didn’t see his men outside. “You alone?” I think he nods. “What have you told them?”

  He sighs. “He wants to meet some old contacts, and we need to keep him sweet.”

  “They okay with that?”

  “They’re paid to be okay.” But there’s something noncommittal about the way he says it. He thought it was going to be simpler than this.

  I’ve finally blinked the dazzle out of my eyes. Whitman angles his head toward the bar. By torchlight his face is more cadaverous than ever. “In there,” he says. “He’s not pretty.” And he steps past me, closing the fire door behind him. Whatever comes next, he doesn’t want to hear it.

  The bar’s boarded windows face the main street. Through the boards filter noises—traffic, voices, the thump of bhangra music from a passing car—and a little light. In the corner the outer double doors that once opened onto the street are nailed shut. The glazed inner doors are empty frames, the glass glittering in tiny fragments on the dirty tiles. I play my torch beam around: there’s rubbish everywhere, empty bottles, more drug paraphernalia, graffiti on the walls.

  Johanssen’s down on his haunches with his back to the far wall, so still he might be petrified.

  The gloom has smoothed his features into a mask, but as I approach he rises and nods a greeting—“Karla”—and a strand of light crosses his face, and something thumps in my chest.

  The swelling’s gone down but the bruising’s still bad, purple-black and red fading out to yellow and brown.

  I’ve seen enough. I switch off the torch, pocket
it, and fold my arms, and for a moment we both stand there, in silence.

  At last I say, “It’s definitely her?”

  “It’s her.”

  “She’s not listed, anywhere. Not as an inmate, a volunteer, a member of staff.” A hidden inmate in the Program and someone wants her dead. I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all.

  He just repeats, “It’s her.”

  I bite back my anxiety. For now.

  “So what happened in there?” I ask. “We looked for you. The surveillance feeds.”

  “You can access them?”

  “We can now. It took a while—we only got in on Wednesday. Whitman said they found you in Quillan’s compound.”

  “Quillan doesn’t know who I am,” he says. His face shifts in the light. There are cuts, too, to his lip, his ears, around his eyes.

  He tells me the story then—but quietly and as if he weren’t part of it, and not all of it either. The interview with Quillan and the night in the cell, but not the beating. The little man Jimmy but not exactly what was done to him, or what Johanssen was expected to do. Or what punishment his refusal had earned him, before the woman called Cate stepped in to save him, with a knife.

  I wonder if this intervention will bother him, but all he says is, “Turf war. Cate and Quillan’s deputy, a guy called Brice. A day later she was threatening to hand me back.”

  “And she’s an inmate? You’re sure? Not a volunteer medic?”

  “Killed someone. She told me herself.”

  “She killed someone?” All those hours scouring the reports … “Then it’s been covered up.”

  He nods. “Fielding said.”

  But doctors who kill get put on trial, locked up. Not hidden away. What makes this one special? I’m watching Johanssen, but his gaze comes straight back at me. He has nothing to add.

  At last I ask, “So what did Fielding want?” though I’ve a suspicion I already know.

  He digs in his pocket, hands me a scrap of paper. A string of numbers has been scrawled across it.

  Coordinates: same as the ones Fielding gave me a few hours ago. I hand them back. “Medium-sized structure, in the southwest sector of the Program. Houghton Street. One camera, inside. I checked the feed: not a lot to see. Brick built, semiderelict.” A wall smeared with graffiti and one enormous window with every pane broken.