The Distance: A Thriller

by Helen Giltrow

  It didn’t take me long to find him: the angelic features were unmistakable. His name is Brice, his specialty torture. In his mug shot he’s smiling.

  Johanssen gave me that name, in the derelict pub in Wandsworth. Brice is the man who had him beaten. Brice is Quillan’s deputy.

  The package waiting for me at the tire shop in Harringay is a small padded envelope with no name on it. I break its seal sitting on the top deck of a bus at a red light on the Charing Cross Road: it contains a data stick, nothing more.

  Back at the apartment I check the stick for bugs and trackers before I open its contents. One sound file, titled “Devlin.”

  Mark Devlin, whose card was in Catherine Gallagher’s flat.

  I’ve done a sketchy background check; I know about the idyllic, moneyed childhood (sailing, riding; the family had a country house in Wales), the boarding school education (Harrow), the brief flirtation with a medical career (Edinburgh; he lasted only two years), the move into recruitment. Four years now at the helm of his own company, with some success. An image search pulls up a handful of PR shots from first nights, fund-raisers, and private viewings in the smaller, more fashionable galleries; three times at Royal Opera House events. In every shot, a different beautiful girl is on his arm; not Catherine, though.

  Now Ellis has interviewed him.

  Ellis’s voice first. Surly, with an edge of impatience to it. “It’s late so I’ll keep it brief. Catherine Gallagher: how did you know her?”

  I wish I could see Mark Devlin’s face. Is he frowning? Racking his brains? Blank? Shocked?

  “Well, sir?” The “sir” for form’s sake only, insincere.

  “We met at a conference.” Devlin’s voice is quiet, slightly husky. “Prague, two years ago.” In control, too: he hasn’t risen to Ellis’s baiting. “I run a medical recruitment business; she was a doctor.” And then: “We began a relationship.”

  That wasn’t in the file.

  But Ellis doesn’t even miss a beat. “And how long did this relationship last?”

  “We met occasionally over a month or so—five or six times.”

  “You mind telling me how it ended?”

  “We were both very busy with work … It just tailed off. I wasn’t aware it was public knowledge.” Implicit question: How did you find out?

  Ellis blanks it. “Did you argue?”

  “No.”

  “You knew she was depressed?”

  “No.”

  “She was seeing a psychiatrist at the time.”

  A brief pause. “I didn’t know that.” It sounds genuine.

  “And when she disappeared? You didn’t think to go to the police?”

  “I hadn’t seen her in months.”

  “Sure about that? Not even in passing? Another conference?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “So what was she like?”

  “Intelligent—ambitious—committed to her job—”

  “Were you representing her professionally, Mr. Devlin? As well as—”

  “No.”

  “She ever discuss becoming a client of yours?”

  “No.”

  “Ever express any worries, concerns? Any problems at work?”

  “No. The last time I saw her she was fine. You said she was depressed? You think she—”

  “Any fears for her safety?”

  For the first time Devlin sounds genuinely shocked. “No, absolutely not. What’s this about?”

  I can almost see Ellis’s placid, treacherous blink. Indifferent, as ever. “Just routine, sir. Just routine.”

  “So, Prague. Some doctor’s jolly. He’s glad-handing the talent; she’s all shiny and ambitious. They shag. Then they come back to London and shag some more.” He snorts over the phone. “ ‘Intelligent—ambitious—committed …’ Christ. Sounds more like a reference, doesn’t it? But maybe there was more shagging than chat.” Then he says, “He didn’t do it—yeah, yeah, I know the statistics, always look at the boyfriend.” Again: “He didn’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “What’s the story? They shag, she gives him the push, eleven months later he offs her in a jealous rage?”

  “We’ve only got his word for the timescale. Or the relationship, come to that.”

  “Oh yeah? So why would he lie? The girl’s gone AWOL; he fesses up to a relationship, he’ll know he’s putting himself in the frame for murder. That’s probably why he kept quiet at the time: it’s not good for business, is it? Plus there’s the phone records—I did check. Bunch of calls two years ago between his mobile and hers. Starts immediately after the Prague conference, tails off after a few weeks. Not a dicky bird after that: home, mobile, or office. Yeah, I know: fact they’re not talking doesn’t mean he’s not obsessing over her. But what’s with the lie she told about her sick mother?”

  “Maybe she was running away from him.”

  “So he’s what? Threatening her? Stalkers leave a trail, that’s the whole point. Texts on her phone, weird stuff through her letter box. Whatever you might think of that first inquiry, they looked. They’d have found him. No. No. He’s all wrong for it.” He pauses. “The way he talked about her. Like she was someone he hardly knew.”

  That’s the phrase that echoes in my head long after Ellis is off the line.

  Ellis isn’t a good cop, but he’s a smart one. I trust his instincts on this, even though he doesn’t know the truth.

  I get up, make coffee, stare out of the window, come back to my desk.

  Replay the recording of Mark Devlin’s interview.

  “Intelligent—ambitious—committed to her job—”

  Ellis is right: it’s much more like a reference. An odd thing to say about someone you once slept with, but maybe it was one of those brief relationships fueled by raw chemical attraction and nothing more—burning hot and fast, then burning up: from spark to ashes in a matter of weeks. It happens; I know that from experience.

  Or maybe he just likes to play the field: insists he likes women but doesn’t get involved. The lovely girls on his arm in all those photos parade before me: never the same one twice. I know that type, too.

  I scroll back. Replay again. “Intelligent—ambitious …” But no, something’s wrong. This man rates intelligence, ambition—they’ve got him where he is today—but his tone is cool, stepped back, as if he’s holding the memory of her at arm’s length, as if he doesn’t want to remember her at all.

  Ellis: “You knew she was depressed?” And Devlin: “No.” Ellis again: “She was seeing a psychiatrist at the time.” And Devlin pauses before he says, “I didn’t know that.” And in that pause I swear I can hear it: in Mark Devlin’s mind a loose piece has just dropped into place. Something he didn’t understand before makes sense now. Something about Catherine Gallagher.

  He won’t tell Ellis, though. Ellis is a nosy copper. Devlin’s type doesn’t talk to them.

  So will he talk to me?

  But he haunts the same places Charlotte Alton does; he could know me by sight already, we could have mutual friends.

  And having Charlotte ask him about Catherine Gallagher, the day after the police have paid a visit?

  Charlotte Alton is my cover story. She can’t risk getting involved in any of this.

  Even so, by the time the office workers start to pile into the bars beneath my windows, Charlotte Alton is spending rather longer than usual deciding what dress to wear. She’s going out.

  The exhibition—in a fashionable East End gallery—is called “Pleasures of the Flesh.” But anyone hoping for a cheap thrill would be disappointed. The sealed display cabinets are full of meat—animal carcasses intricately carved into the shape of luxury consumer items, gadgets and handbags, wristwatches, shoes. Some of the cabinets are refrigerated, but not all; sometimes flies buzz around the rotting flesh, or the exhibits squirm with maggots. The artist, a pale, pudgy young man, stands in a corner silently clutching a beer; an arts journalist and a collector converse across him. Waiters drif
t blank faced between the exhibits bearing canapés at shoulder height, but only a hardy few are eating. I take a glass of wine that I don’t plan to drink: it’s just a prop, something for my hands to do. Some of Charlotte’s opera companions are here—among them the senior City lawyer, this time accompanied by his lipsticked politician wife—and we make polite conversation, but I’m not really listening. I’m watching the door. So I see the couple as soon as they walk in.

  Every straight man in the room, and most of the women, would notice the girl first: the long dark hair, the endless legs, the effortless beauty. But I notice the man, because the man is Mark Devlin.

  Gray eyes, pale Celtic skin. The sort of ranginess that looks good in two thousand pounds’ worth of Italian tailoring. His hair isn’t dark, as it appeared from the online photo, but a deep reddish brown. Already he’s snared a waiter: he secures the girl a drink, then leads her across to the corner where the artist skulks. Devlin seems to know both the journalist and the collector. Introductions are made. I turn my head away.

  A call to this evening’s organizers confirmed he was on the guest list. They thought I was his secretary, just checking.

  Another call, and Charlotte Alton was on the guest list, too.

  Now I immerse myself in conversation again, but my eyes keep hunting out Devlin and his companion. They leave the artist’s corner and start to move round the room. I’m circulating, too, and on three separate occasions I’m close enough to touch Devlin’s arm. Fragments of their conversation drift toward me: he’s trying to entertain the girl, but she’s increasingly fractious. First date, or second? He doesn’t know her well. He thought she’d enjoy this, or be impressed by it, but for once he’s called it wrong: she thinks it’s unpleasant and bizarre, and she’s making it obvious. He’s mortified. They’ll move on soon. I don’t have long.

  I step into the gallery’s lobby, and make a call. “Hello, darling.”

  Robbie recovers fast. “Silver Audi, parked thirty meters from yours, left as you come out of the entrance.”

  “That’s lovely. Thank you.”

  Robbie says, “You sure about this?”

  “We’ve done it before.”

  “Years ago,” he says.

  As I return to the party, the girl is heading for the ladies’, sullen faced. For a moment Devlin’s alone, staring at a decomposing Louis Vuitton trunk overflowing with entrails. I saunter over to stand beside the same exhibit—glance at him, my standard ice-breaking line ready—when he flashes me a quick ironic grimace and says, “Yes, I know, bad choice of date.”

  As if we’ve known each other for years, as if we’re old friends.

  “She’s very beautiful,” I say.

  “Apparently she’s vegetarian.” He looks at me again, curiously. He says, “Somehow I suspect you’re not.”

  I laugh. It doesn’t feel forced, and he takes it as encouragement. He says, “I know you from somewhere,” and just then the door to the ladies’ opens, and the girl emerges, her face set. He sees her and pulls back. “I’d better—”

  “Of course.” I glance at my watch. “Enjoy the rest of your evening.” I turn away.

  A brief flirtatious exchange between two semi-strangers, over in seconds, but it’s all I need for now.

  I find Charlotte’s friends, make my excuses, and deposit my barely touched glass of wine on a tray. I pass Mark Devlin and the girl on the way to the gallery exit. They’re by the door, about to leave, too: he opens it for me—our eyes meet briefly. I smile my thanks. The girl ignores me. She’s frowning; there’s an obvious tension between them. As the door closes behind me, a scrap of her speech—just the word “sick”—escapes into the lobby.

  I collect my coat from the attendant, pull out my phone, dial Robbie’s mobile. The line connects as I step out into the cold night air.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay,” he says. He doesn’t sound okay. I end the call.

  Farther along the street there’s a cluster of fashionable bars and clubs—a bass line pumps out from a doorway, and lights spill from a restaurant window—but here I’m in a patch of silence: the pavement’s bleak and cold, a bitter wind blasting down between the late-nineteenth-century commercial buildings, the darkened design-group shops, the shuttered advertising agencies. My Merc is parked a little way from the gallery. As I turn toward it the door opens again behind me, and I glance back. Devlin and the girl have followed me out. Her face is still sullen. He takes her arm and begins to walk her up the road, away from me—he’s trying to tease her out of her bad mood, though she’s resisting, making him work. What’s her plan for this evening? An expensive restaurant where she’ll sulk over dinner, and then—if she’s forgiven him sufficiently—back to his, where he’ll have to exert himself again to make up for the evening’s bad start.

  I’ve reached the Merc. My palms are sweating, my heart starting to race. You sure about this?

  Devlin and the girl have stopped under a streetlight, beside a silver Audi. Devlin has a key fob in his hand. He’s smiling; the girl isn’t.

  Any second—

  From nearby, a squeal of tires.

  Now.

  I step out from the pavement just as the van corners wildly into the street.

  Thirty meters away, Mark Devlin and the girl turn their heads.

  I don’t know what happens next. The tires squeal again, and someone shouts, but by now I’m on the tarmac, the breath knocked out of me.

  By the time I’ve struggled into a sitting position, he’s reached me.

  He’s talking. Asking if I’m all right? My ears are still ringing. “I’m fine,” I say, but my voice is shaky. I’m out of practice. That was too close.

  “Did he hit you?”

  “No. Let me get up.”

  “You sure? You’re very pale.”

  I hold out a hand. Dirt from the road is crusted into my palms. “Please—”

  He takes it and helps me up. He doesn’t let go.

  “He almost ran you over,” he says.

  This is what I planned, isn’t it? But suddenly he’s too close, and the world is moving too fast: I’m hanging on to it by my fingernails. Adrenaline has kicked in, redundantly: my pulse is racing, and the streetlights seem brighter than they should be, the shadows darker, too, squirming and alive. Perhaps he sees it. “Do you need to sit down? Or some water, maybe? Shall I—”

  “Really, I’m okay—”

  It’s the girl who rescues me, arriving at his side. She doesn’t even glance at me. The attention-grabbing, electric beauty she had when she walked into the gallery has lost its charge completely: now she looks cold, and furious.

  “You could have been killed,” she says, but not to me. To him.

  That’s when I notice the Merc. The wing mirror hangs limp from a wire, like a broken hand. I pull myself away from Devlin and shuffle round the car, leaving him and the girl to their muttered conversation—“stupid” is the only word that reaches me. I touch the damage, gingerly. Close. Very close.

  “Your car?” he asks. He’s beside me again.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “I’m not sure you should drive.”

  “I’m fine,” I say, but now I’ve started shivering. What’s this? Shock?

  “Let me drive you home,” he says.

  “I can get a cab.”

  But he says, “You know I can’t just leave you like this,” as if there’s an intimacy between us. As if he’d stay all night.

  Heels on the pavement make us both turn. The girl is stalking toward the Audi. He must have given her the key: the indicators wink as the locks disengage. “I told her to go and get warm,” he says.

  But she gets in on the driver’s side. A second later the headlights come on, and the engine fires; the gears grind sickeningly, then the car lurches away from the curb and accelerates past us. Behind the wheel, the girl’s face is tight and closed. She doesn’t look at us.

  Mark Devlin watches the taillights disappear. He breathes out a
nd shakes his head and smiles to himself: a complex, layered smile full of irony and self-mockery. Then he turns to me, and the smile becomes conspiratorial: as if we’ve just shared a joke. No—as if we’re kids, doing it for a dare, and we just got away with it.

  “I need a drink,” I say.

  “I don’t even know your name,” he says.

  “Charlotte.” I offer my hand across the table. “It’s Charlotte Alton.”

  His grip’s firm and warm, but the fingertips are cold from the ice in his glass. “Mark Devlin.” Then he says, “That wasn’t just a line, you know? I recognize you from somewhere.”

  The opera house, probably. Will he work it out? Charlotte Alton’s undemanding on the eye, elegant but never glamorous, shunning attention, largely unmemorable. No reason why he’d notice. I shrug. “I go to a few of these things.” A beat. “I’ve wrecked your evening.”

  He smiles: that lopsided, ironic smile that lifts only one side of his face. “And it was going so well.”

  “Surely she’ll have just gone home?”

  “I don’t think I ever got her address.”

  “Her phone number?”

  “I was working up to that.”

  “At least the car’s fitted with a tracker,” I say.

  He glances at me; a tweak of his mouth concedes the point. “As long as she doesn’t wrap it round a lamppost first.”

  “What happened?” I ask. “Back there in the street.”

  “You nearly got run over by a van.”

  “She said you could have been killed.”

  “Really? I thought she was talking to you,” he says. For a second his smile’s disingenuous, and then it morphs into something almost serious. “I’d like to take you out to dinner. Would that be all right?”

  I hold up my scraped palms. “Maybe not tonight.”

  “Another night.” That other smile, now: the smile that makes us coconspirators. He has a whole repertoire of smiles, each with a different meaning. I’m starting to collect them. Then he leans forward in his seat. “Can I have your number?”

  I write Charlotte’s number on a paper napkin—the digits come out ill formed and blotchy—and present him with it, and he smiles as if I’ve just made his day.