The Distance: A Thriller

by Helen Giltrow

  Before I arrived, Sean had already established his credentials as a property rental agent with the caretaker. I did the groundwork myself on this one: a rush job, and the paperwork’s a little flaky. But no one seems particularly interested in Catherine Gallagher after a year: Sean looks, sounds, and smells right, and no awkward questions have been asked.

  I open a door: the light from the hall spills into a small sitting room. The blinds are closed. I won’t open them. Instead I grope for the light switch, flick it on.

  A sofa, a table and chairs, TV, iPod dock. A bookcase of medical textbooks and neatly filed journals. But no family photos, scribbled shopping lists, dirty mugs, dead houseplants—none of the usual, poignant reminders of a life abandoned. It’s like a room setting in a furniture store, with space left for the customer’s imagination to dress in their own possessions: See, you too could live in a place like this. But she didn’t really live here, did she? She lived at the hospital, in the ICU. No wonder this place is like an empty shell.

  I spent last night reviewing Catherine Gallagher’s professional history. There’s a sheeny gloss on it all: the pristine exam results, the extra year in med school to acquire a further degree in medical sciences, the house jobs in top teaching hospitals, the list of published papers dating back to her student years—dense studies into the management of neurological problems within intensive care that descend into jargon within a paragraph. What lies behind that history? The emotional immaturity of the hothoused overbright, the brittle calculation of the very ambitious, the steady loneliness of the workaholic? The HR files don’t give a clue, but they back up colleagues’ accounts: she lived for her work, chose a life that revolved around it.

  Somewhere in that life there’s the reason she has to die.

  I’ve looked at the figures: there’s no statistical irregularity, no mortality spike in any of the ICUs where she worked. But one kill would be invisible in the stats, amid all those routine deaths, the broken bodies simply giving up on life, too damaged to be saved … So I’m going through those fatalities, one by one, searching for the ugly death, the one that demanded secrecy. I haven’t found it yet.

  The kitchen is off the sitting room. I open drawers, cupboards: the cans and jars are regimented in rows. The wineglasses all match. The plates and bowls are stacked tidily: probably Dr. Gallagher only ever used one of each.

  Then the bedroom. The bed’s made. I go to the wardrobe, open it; open the drawers, too. Suits, trousers, skirts, shirts, sweaters, a few pairs of jeans, underwear. All good-quality labels and all in colors that must have suited her. There’s nothing for evenings out. Nothing silkily indulgent, nothing sparkly. No mistakes either—nothing extravagant or frivolous or ill judged, nothing bought on a whim.

  The SOCOs were here a year ago, their quiet latexed hands moving over the shelves, through the drawers, checking the pockets. They found nothing. Now it’s my turn.

  I go through every garment in the wardrobe. I go right through the drawers. I shift furniture, peer under the bed with a torch. In the en suite bathroom the toiletries are neatly ranged in the cabinet. There is a little makeup—good brands, natural colors—but no perfume. Band-Aids and a few over-the-counter remedies, painkillers, antiseptic; nothing stronger.

  Back to the living room. The door into the hallway’s still open: Sean stands motionless by the front door, awaiting his cue like an actor in the wings.

  I empty the bookcase, item by item. I all but strip the sofa and the armchairs. I lift the iPod dock and the TV, exposing their blank shiny footprints in the dust.

  I retrieve a flyer for a domestic cleaning outfit and a twenty-euro note, both pressed into service as bookmarks; a dark blue button; a pen that looks like a drug-company handout; a few coins; a paper clip; and wedged between a shelf and the wall a creased business card. It’s not much.

  Around me the dust I’ve stirred is already settling. What have I learned? That she was tidy and focused and isolated? But I knew that from the file.

  Every moment of your life, from when you were a little girl, all you ever wanted to do, all you’d ever prepared for, was to practice medicine. You’d been working sixteen-hour days for years. You had no personal life. When you went to the gym you were never one of those chatting over a cappuccino with girlfriends in the café afterward. You went alone, you worked the machines, you plowed your lengths up and down the pool, you showered, you left. You came back to your flat, you heated up supper, you read the medical journals and worked on your papers, you slept, and you worked again.

  Who did you kill, and why?

  In my head the woman in the picture stares back at me. She’s saying nothing.

  I’ve been here too long. It’s time to go. One last look around: everything is as I found it. In the hallway I strip off the gloves and push them into my bag and promise to call Sean with my decision tomorrow. I smile, and he smiles back. Fake smiles. Heaven knows why, no one’s watching. But I’ve been careful for so long that it’s become much more than a routine; now it’s a biological necessity, like breathing.

  Back at my apartment I take out my meager haul from Catherine Gallagher’s flat. The business card first: Mark Devlin, Recruitment Consultant, it says, and the company name, MDR. The pen has what I guess is the brand name of a drug stamped on its plastic casing.

  A brief Internet search reveals that the drug is a sedative, and that Mark Devlin’s a headhunter specializing in the medical sector. He’s in his midthirties with a lean smooth face: he half smiles from his page on his company’s website, above a ghosted paragraph that boasts of his track record in connecting high-caliber medical professionals with projects at the cutting edge of treatment and research. It’s an intelligent smile with a hint of self-mockery, as if he doesn’t take his own profile entirely seriously. His name isn’t in Dr. Catherine Gallagher’s Missing Persons file.

  Did she keep the card deliberately or by chance? Was he a friend? But if he was, he’d have been questioned by police. Maybe he was just a useful contact. Maybe they once shook hands at a conference. I phone Ellis and give him Mark Devlin’s name.

  “His card was in Catherine Gallagher’s flat.”

  Immediately he bridles. “You saying we didn’t do our job?”

  “I’m saying it was in her flat. Find out what the relationship was. Especially if she was a client. If he was looking to place her in a position, he’ll have checked her out. Maybe he heard something.”

  “So why didn’t he say so when she vanished?”

  “The guy’s a Big Pharma headhunter, he lives and dies by his own discretion. No one asked, so he didn’t say. Start by finding out if she was on his books.”

  I put the phone down. Seconds later it rings again. Robbie’s gravelly voice, pure Old East End, says, “Karla? Check your in-box.”

  While his son was escorting me to Catherine Gallagher’s flat, Robbie was monitoring Program surveillance feeds.

  The link he’s sent me takes me to a view of a wire-fenced compound and a knot of figures at a gate. Three seconds in, Simon Johanssen walks into shot. The gate opens, and out he goes. A jump cut, and there he is a street farther on; and again, a little farther still—he’s scouting the terrain.

  The cameras track him toward Houghton Street. But he’s being careful or maybe he’s being followed; two streets from the workshop he turns away and loops back toward the compound. The gate is opened for him, and he disappears from view.

  The screen goes blank.

  But tomorrow he’ll go out again, and the day after, and the day after that. Let them get used to him coming and going, let them believe there’s nothing to worry about. One day he’ll have to walk out of there with Catherine Gallagher beside him, and no one must think anything of it.

  DAY 13: MONDAY

  POWELL

  Eight days on the case.

  If you’re going to throw your weight around, the first week of an investigation is the time to do it: before the shine’s worn off you, before they’ve got
your measure. But everything’s been done before he’s even had the chance to ask. Peter Laidlaw’s house in Shepherd’s Bush secured. The body—what was left of it—ready for viewing. (He declined.) Pathologists on hand to explain their findings. (Laidlaw had been drinking—blood alcohol at 190 milligrams; nothing in his stomach. No needle marks, a clean tox report, no signs of foul play.) Laidlaw’s personnel files retrieved and laid out for inspection: the details of every operation behind the old Iron Curtain. (His ID came under Soviet scrutiny in the seventies, but he returned twice after that, at some personal risk, under assumed names, to handle meetings with frightened men who wouldn’t talk to anyone else.) His Moscow contacts, and their contacts, listed—the list given to him in person by Laidlaw’s own handler, with a look that said, Do you think we didn’t check?

  He’s gone through that list, searching for links to active Russian intelligence personnel—the men and women within the SVR who might be able to get their hands on the sort of information that Knox passed on to Laidlaw. Somewhere there’s a point of intersection, a space where the lines all cross, a center to the web … He draws a blank.

  He’s viewed the footage of Laidlaw’s own debrief: Laidlaw saying patiently, for the record, time and time again, I have no idea who Knox might be. A lie, it has to be; but one they never caught him out on.

  Resources: ask for whatever you need, the Section Chief had said, so he hand-picked a young woman called Bethany to act as his assistant—he finds her tidy, unreadable, disconcerting—and a tech guy, Mitch, who is friendly but not quite genuine. They’ve been given the office beside his in the janitors’ blank narrow-fronted building in Victoria, and they’re trying to impress him: whenever he walks into their room they have lists for him of things they’ve done or things they’re about to do, and they look up into his face—it might be guilelessly—for approval.

  Beyond them, the other janitors circle, watching. Carter, himself ex-MI5, bluff, affable, eaten up with curiosity. Busy, eh? But let’s have a drink some time. A quiet young woman he can just remember as a junior when he left, now a janitor in her own right: must be Leeson, the one who tracked down the tech ops guy after Knox’s tip-off. Morris in her end office overlooking the street, seven months from retirement herself, peering over her reading glasses at him, wrinkling her nose. Kingman, the one he didn’t know, imported from Special Branch after his own departure for Washington: Kingman came in to shake his hand, I’ve heard a lot about you—but he didn’t say what. All of them eyeing him. The janitors are people readers to a man and woman, and now they’re trying to read him. To bring him back from the States means something serious, something bad … Maybe they’ve heard the Section Chief’s rumor, maybe they really do believe something’s begun to stink and he’s been called in to track the stench to its source. He doesn’t confide in them; that’s not how it works. Janitors operate in isolation, not only from the rest of the intelligence community but even from one another. After all, anyone could be guilty.

  Except he doesn’t work in isolation, does he? He’s the exception to the rule. Three reports so far sent up to the Section Chief, detailing each careful step he’s taken, keeping conclusions to a minimum—refusing to grasp at empty supposition, create theories just to fill the void, but after each report the Chief’s come down “to talk it through.” The man’s looking over his shoulder constantly. He’s trying not to twitch.

  He works late most days, returning to the flat after ten o’clock—long hours in the office are inevitable when you can’t take paperwork home—eating supper alone, Skyping to catch Thea before bed. She has drawn him pictures, which she holds up for inspection: herself in her pink fairy outfit, at the party; him in a suit, with Tori’s clear, no-nonsense handwriting below: Daddy helping people. So that’s what he does, is it?

  He tries not to let himself think about the progress he’s not making. Falls back on handy clichés: It’s early days … Sooner or later, the breakthrough will come.

  Today he went back to Laidlaw’s house in Shepherd’s Bush.

  Last Monday, when he visited for the first time, the dead man’s presence was still all over it: the washing-up on the drainer, the socks drying on the rack above the bath, a tattered scrap of a shopping list in the kitchen (tea bags, bleach). A letter from the hospital pinned to the fridge, a Post-it on the front door: bins Tuesday. Upstairs, a recent and very beautiful edition of the Iliad by the bed; and a smell of books and damp that took him back to his tutors’ rooms in Cambridge.

  It’s all changed now. Holes knocked in the walls to admit cameras. Insulation ripped out of the loft. The chimney, drains, and sewers examined. The carpets and floorboards lifted.

  “And you’ve found?”

  Mitch—in a T-shirt and overalls, dust caking his hair—said, “Only what MI5 put there.”

  Powell nodded. We bugged it. But Knox knew that, or guessed, and steered clear. Just as Knox knew, or guessed, about the intercept on the post. No meetings here, no phone calls, and no secondary bugging either: Knox never succumbed to the temptation to watch those who were watching him. Perhaps he didn’t find it necessary.

  “What about paperwork? Records?”

  Mitch gestured at the wrecked walls. “If Laidlaw kept anything, he didn’t keep it here.”

  Bethany was standing to one side, hands folded in front of her, quiet, fastidious: keeping the dust off her coat. “Thoughts?” Powell asked her.

  Her pale unreadable gaze went around the room. She shrugged. “He wanted to keep Knox to himself.”

  “Because?”

  “Because he didn’t trust anyone. He expected betrayal.” She paused. Her eyes are a yellowish green; her pale brown hair, in its ponytail, has the sheen of satin. “And because Knox gave him status. Without Knox, he’s just another old man.” She turned her head toward him. Her look seemed to say, Are we done here?

  Now, back at his desk, he goes through the surveillance reports on Laidlaw again. Twenty-two tip-offs in five years and eight months. Peter Laidlaw, out of retirement and following the chalk marks on the trees … Bethany is right. You kept Knox to yourself. You clung on tight to him, and when you stepped in front of that train you took him down with you.

  Bethany works on until seven, then puts her head around the door. A small, surveying pause before she says good night. She’ll be good in interrogations; you can’t tell what she’s thinking.

  In the logs: Laidlaw doing his shopping. Laidlaw going to the post office, the library. Laidlaw stopping for a quiet pint somewhere. Old man’s errands. Did Laidlaw know about the watchers? The MI5 surveillance came in waves, intensifying when a tip-off was expected or had just taken place, falling into abeyance as the months passed and Knox remained silent, until another tip-off fired up the machine again.

  Knox had been quiet lately. So there was no surveillance on the last day, when Laidlaw carried out his plan.

  Finally he puts the surveillance logs back in the strongbox in the corner of the room and locks it.

  Tori has taken Thea swimming today, with friends. He thinks of Thea in her swimsuit, doggy-paddling, her small sturdy brown body slick with water … The thought of her tightens into a fist and wedges itself beneath his breastbone.

  He assumed he was the only one in the building, but as he leaves, via the basement car park, the woman Leeson is walking out ahead of him. At the sound of his footsteps she turns. She nods to him, but her look is wary. Perhaps she can smell the loneliness on him.

  She gets into her car, a small red Citroën, starts the engine and drives out, through the barriers.

  The tech guy who tried to sell those ops files on the open market got away from her, didn’t he? That must have counted against her. Does she still think of that? In her mind is it still pinned to her, a badge of her own failure?

  And what if you don’t find Knox?

  But Knox won’t simply vanish, not after five years and eight months. Knox wants something. Knox just hasn’t got around to asking yet.

 
; So Knox will resurface, somewhere, at a time and place of his own choosing, when he has something to communicate.

  It’s not supposed to work like that.

  Run the source. Win trust. Reward compliance. Control the relationship. Don’t just wait for them to come to you. That’s what the rule book says, but Knox doesn’t care.

  They’ve hired him a car. He pats his pockets for his keys and then remembers his coat, hanging on the back of his office door.

  Sees another door, in a damp house, with a Post-it on it: bins Tuesday.

  Laidlaw’s memory was failing.

  He made notes for his own reference, because he needed to remember, and without the notes he was helpless.

  He made notes.

  Mitch said, If Laidlaw kept anything, he didn’t keep it here.

  Somewhere else, though?

  Somewhere he could visit, later, once it was all quiet again, the surveillance wound down, everyone gone home?

  There’s no other property in his name.

  What about the other names?

  There are no other names—

  And then he stops.

  The meetings with frightened men, in the seventies, in Moscow. Laidlaw had other passports then.

  DAY 13: MONDAY–DAY 14: TUESDAY

  JOHANSSEN

  All residents have access to medical treatment, including twenty-four-hour emergency care and evacuation facilities.