After a while the door beside him opens, and Vinnie comes out. “What you doing?” he whispers, and then he looks up, and his soft harmless face creases in concern.
Together they listen to the footsteps.
At last they stop. Vinnie says, “She’s asleep,” and Johanssen says, “Yes.”
Asleep, or just sitting there, holding the glass, thinking of the bright edge it would make if she broke it … Vinnie nods and goes back into the room, but he waits another fifteen minutes, to be sure, before he, too, turns in.
Lying on his bunk, he goes over it in his head. The man she only knew as Daniel, who’d broken his ankle trying to get away, who’d been tied up to stop him trying again. Whose other ankle was then broken. Who had bled.
Four days she spent with him. Treating him? Or torturing him?
And then she killed him, counting the seconds while the fight went out of him.
Because she could.
He has Terry Cunliffe in his dreams. She has Daniel.
DAY 17: FRIDAY
KARLA
Just gone noon on Friday. We meet in an ugly pub on the edge of a council estate in Bow: the tables sticky with spilled drinks, two spotty lads playing pool in a side room. I’m dressed in a plain dark chain-store suit, with little makeup and my hair tied back: I could be a caseworker or a solicitor, or maybe someone from a charity. Robbie is beside me, sipping his pint; his smile is neutral, his habitual jollity turned in on itself. He set this up—they like him, trust him—but right now he’s minding his own business.
I don’t want to be here.
Louis sits opposite me, a glass of lemonade in front of him: he doesn’t touch alcohol. His expression is quiet, unassuming. He looks tired and out of condition: there’s a slow roll of fat at his gut, and the circles under his eyes show purplish black against his dark skin. Louis is rusty. They lose their touch, don’t they? Just two jobs in the four years since we first met. And whose fault is that?
Beside him, Morag’s a startling contrast: bone-white skin that must once have had an ethereal translucence; crinkling red hair scraped behind her ears. There’s not a spare ounce of fat on her. She looks brittle, but it’s an illusion. If Morag were the type that broke easily, she’d have done so long ago.
Louis is a specialist contractor, and his specialty is doors. Doors, and locks, and motion detectors, and alarms. Morag is his partner but also his manager, his agent, playing the same role in his professional life that Fielding plays in Johanssen’s, except where Fielding loves the business, the contacts and the negotiations and the deals, she gives every sign of hating it. She nurses her vodka tonic with a silent malevolence, and when she turns her gaze to me, her eyes say, Bitch.
She, too, looks tired today. A bad night? More than one? A week of them, or a fortnight? Perhaps this isn’t a good time to approach them, but then, these two never have good times: they lurch from one crisis to the next, an unpredictable sequence of scrabbled-together clothes and late-night taxis and dawn watches in hospital rooms.
They don’t want to be here either.
“How’s Kyle?” I ask.
Louis doesn’t look up from his drink, but he smiles a slow, inward smile.
Morag’s gaze spikes the air between us. “Kyle’s fine,” she spits.
“Your mum sitting in with him?”
Her look says, What’s it to you?
Kyle is the reason they’re here, the reason they do this, but Kyle’s also the reason they’re very, very careful.
They first came into my orbit four years ago, when Kyle was two. His particular cocktail of disabilities—it includes cerebral palsy and epilepsy—means he will never speak or walk or feed himself or control his own bowel movements. They were caring for him between them, with what little support was available from the state, living on benefits and also, from time to time, the occasional job for Louis—once, maybe twice a year, eking out the earnings for as long as possible afterward, knowing that if Louis were caught, Morag wouldn’t cope alone, even with her mother’s help.
Kyle is now six. In four years I’ve only ever seen him from a distance, when no one knew I was watching: thirty meters away, hunkered down behind the wheel of a battered Vauxhall, while Louis or Morag or Morag’s mum wheels him out in his specially adapted pushchair. That’s as close as I get.
“You got everything?” I ask, still looking from one to the other. By everything I mean: the floor plan of Graves’s building, the model number and spec of the alarm and the motion sensors linked to it, the number and type of the window and door locks, the floor plans of the houses on either side of Graves’s building, photographs of all three buildings, front and rear, and a plan of the area with the CCTV cameras marked in. Finn and I were up all night pulling it together. The information was handed in an unmarked envelope to a pallid teenage girl—Morag’s niece—on a street corner in Whitechapel this morning, as arranged: Morag won’t allow such things in the house. Being careful, again.
Now she gives a neat businesslike nod. “We got it.”
“And?”
“He needs a week.” From the side room the pool balls click, and one of the lads swears.
“That’s not possible. We know it’s tight. That’s reflected in the fee.”
Morag’s mouth tightens, and she gives a tiny, fractional shake of the head.
I pretend I haven’t seen it. “I can’t afford to wait on this.”
But Morag has a poker player’s face. “We need a week,” she says. “Minimum.”
I shake my head. “Tomorrow night. If I thought it was reasonable I’d be asking for tonight. Tomorrow is as good as it gets.”
“Then sorry.”
What do I say now? That I’ll have to go elsewhere?
There are alternatives. But they involve either people I don’t trust, or Joe Ellis and a warrant. Right now Ellis isn’t playing. But even if he were, a warrant would make it official, and I don’t want the Met anywhere near this. In truth, there is no elsewhere. There is only Louis, and this cold red-and-white woman sitting in front of me.
I’m pretty sure she knows it, too.
I lean forward, fix on her. “Morag, it’s straight in and out. Access only. Nothing leaves the building. All we want is a copy of a file—”
“A week. Or nothing.” She shrugs. “Up to you.”
“Look. You have to put yourself out. We appreciate that. We pay more for it. In fact we pay double. You won’t get another offer like this.”
Something stirs behind that poker player’s gaze.
“Five days,” Morag says.
I should go to three here, but I can’t. There isn’t time. “Tomorrow, and the fee still stands. Final offer.”
Morag sits back in her chair. She’s thinking about it. Her fleshless white fingers tap at the glass in front of her, shifting it left a little, and then right, until it sits exactly between the two of us, as if she’s a sniper lining me up in her sights.
Then she shakes her head. “Don’t like it. He’s taking all the risk.”
“I’ll have one man on lookout in the street, another holding the point of entry, someone else watching CCTV feeds.”
“He’s still the one handling the merchandise.”
“Then we put someone else in to make the copy. Louis just opens the doors.”
“He doesn’t work with strangers.”
“Then how about me?”
Robbie’s sitting next to me, and so his shock comes at me sidelong.
“Tomorrow night, Morag.”
Abruptly she gets to her feet. Louis looks up as if he’s just woken from a doze, and then he, too, rises, blinking sleepily. Is that it? Are they leaving? But all she says is, “I need a smoke.”
Together they wander toward the door. The barman—who’s kept out of sight and earshot ever since we started talking—instantly reappears and nods to them. He begins to wipe down the bar, pointlessly, glancing over at us as he does so. I feel as if I’ve been placed under guard.
&
nbsp; Robbie sits back, sips his pint, says nothing. If he’s ever wondered why Morag hates me so much, he’s never asked.
Two jobs in four years, for ludicrously inflated fees, because they won’t take charity. So Louis won’t have to work for other people who aren’t as careful as I am. So he and Morag can cope. And every time, the negotiation’s as bitter as this: because Morag has no illusions about the fees, she knows I’m paying over the odds, and she’s proud. She’d love to turn me down.
Will she? I’ve no idea. All I can do now is wait.
They come back five minutes later, with smoke on their breath and flecks of sleet in their hair, and slip back into their seats.
Morag says, “We’ll get back to you.”
It’s not the answer I want.
“Fine,” I say. “Do that.”
She nods once, then she says, “And if we agree and this goes tits up, we’ll shop you.”
I reach for my bag and rise. “I know you will.”
The barman appears again and eyes us warily as we leave. At the door I glance back. They’re still in their seats, not talking: a weary black man and a brittle white woman, each staring at their glass as if looking into an abyss.
In the car, Robbie blows out his cheeks. He must think I’m mad.
But I have to see that file. I have to know.
Robbie drops me near a suburban overground line. While he threads toward Graves’s office to scope it out, I head back to Docklands the long way, alone.
By the time I get back, it’s 3:55, and Craigie’s already waiting for me in the lobby of my building, for yet another routine Friday meeting.
The usual litany of clients, sources, opportunities, threats. A minor gang boss with a history of violence is seeking help in tracing his daughter. A German client wants the floor plans of a major London hotel. Someone’s asking questions about William Hamilton’s whereabouts, though the rumor doesn’t say who; and Hamilton, tucked up in a safe house, still won’t come clean on exactly what he’s done. And then Lucas Powell again: whatever he took from Ealing in that crate, it hasn’t led him to my door. (Craigie adds, “Yet.”)
At the end of our session Craigie—rising, reaching for his coat—asks casually, “And the Johanssen business?” So I tell him about Ellis’s fruitless interviews with Catherine Gallagher’s colleagues.
I don’t tell him about my evening with Mark Devlin or the meeting with Graves or the proposal I’ve put to Morag and Louis. I don’t need another lecture about risk.
Six o’clock comes and goes. Seven. I reread Catherine Gallagher’s Missing Persons file, replay Ellis’s recorded interviews, and wait for the phone to ring. It doesn’t.
Morag could string this out for days.
These lulls are part of every job. Why should this one be different? But it is. It is, and already it’s started to eat at me.
By 8:00 p.m. I can’t sit here any longer, waiting for something to happen.
I put on my coat and walk out, through the home-going crowds. The sleet’s abated, but the wind’s like a knife. What am I doing out here? Where am I going? To look at the river again? Buy milk? I don’t even know.
By the side entrance to a corporate HQ, a skinny teenage girl in a cleaner’s blue polyester tabard is shivering her way through a cigarette, her back to me. As I pass her, she stubs it out and turns, and something drops from her bag onto the ground.
It’s a cheap bracelet. I stoop to pick it up. “Excuse me—” She half turns back, looks at me without any trace of recognition. “I think you dropped this.”
“Oh—oh, ta,” Morag’s niece says, and then, her thin pale lips barely moving around the word: “Tomorrow.”
DAY 17: FRIDAY–DAY 18: SATURDAY
JOHANSSEN
That night is more of the same: chest pains, a broken wrist, some poor bastard who’s drunk bleach. A frail old guy strapped to a trolley, trying to nick something from the nearest equipment cart—Johanssen leans over, unlocks the wheels of the cart, and shifts it out of the man’s reach (“Sorry, pal”) and the old man glares at him. Drill in his chair, motionless and unblinking, as if someone’s pulled the plug on him, Vinnie eating a banana and talking about what he’s going to do when he gets out, and Cate working through it all, the expression on her face closed and intent, as if she and the patient she’s treating are the only people in the world. Working even through the lulls, when there are no patients: pulling things out of cupboards and counting them and scribbling lists, padding out the empty minutes with admin, locked in a cycle of perpetual motion. He’s seen it before, in others; once, for a time, in himself. You work and you work and you work until you’re too tired to remember, until the trivia of the present has taken up every spare inch of space in your head, leaving no room for the past.
On Saturday morning she goes straight up to her room. He waits on his bunk for the sound of her footsteps on the stairs, but they don’t come. At last he gets up, dresses, and goes out. The two-man tail is waiting by the gate, smoking and stamping their feet in the cold; he nods to them, and one of them nods back. They let him get twenty meters ahead before they throw down their cigarettes and follow.
He makes the usual random circuit.
He’s wheeling back toward the compound and has stopped at a junction to let a patrol pass, when across the street a scene catches his eye.
A man is slumped against a wall, asleep or drunk. Another—a little guy with flattened-down dark hair—is bending over him. It’s Jimmy, from the yard that first afternoon. Jimmy’s first task is to help us with a little demonstration …
Just now he’s trying to extract something from the slumped man’s pocket, though it’s made harder by the fact that he’s having to work one-handed: his left arm’s in a dirty sling.
Jimmy straightens, with something in his hand. A photograph. He looks pleased. He’s pocketing the photo when his gaze crosses the street to Johanssen, and for a second or two he smiles—a sudden, hopeful smile, a child’s smile. But then he seems to remember, and his free hand comes up protectively by his shoulder, and the smile drops away.
They let him in at the compound gate without a word. He crosses the yard, pushes his way through the clinic doors into the waiting room. And there it is, the familiar prickle of tension.
He stops, measuring the silence. Cate will be waiting for him in the clinic.
In that moment tiredness hits him, deep-in-the-bone tiredness, and he wants it to be over.
He steps through the clinic door and lets it swing behind him. A chair is in the center of the room, empty.
The blow comes out of nowhere.
Pain in his skull. Blood in his mouth. A ripping sound—loud—right next to him: duct tape pulled from a roll. Brice says, “Block the doors,” and someone laughs, a breathy laugh: the thin dark one. The one with the knife.
He opens his eyes. Tape binds his forearms and his ankles to the frame of the chair, tight. He can’t move.
He must have made a sound. Brice crouches before him. He presses a finger to his lips: “Hussshh …” One of the others, out of sight, says, “Gag him?” but Brice smiles. He says to Johanssen, “That’s not going to be necessary, is it? Is it?”
Cooperation. Brice demands cooperation. Johanssen shakes his head. Bloody drool spills from his mouth where his teeth have cut into the lining of his cheek. Brice tuts. “Messy.”
Johanssen swallows, hard. This isn’t it, he’ll want an audience. Quillan. Cate. But fear’s expanding in his guts like a fist uncurling. There are too many blades in this room.
Brice is still crouched before him, looking up into his face. His eyes are bright and clear. “You’re looking tired, Ryan—that is your name, isn’t it? And you’re making mistakes—but you know that.” He pauses. “Can I tell you what I think? Can I, Ryan?”
Johanssen nods. Brice smiles encouragingly. Good boy.
“You didn’t take this place fully into account. You didn’t, did you? You’ve been around, seen some stuff. This place? It was g
oing to be easy, coming here, wasn’t it? Walk in, get on the right side of Quillan, make yourself at home …” Brice brings his face a few inches closer. “You haven’t given this place enough consideration,” he says.
He moves suddenly—Johanssen jerks back from the blow, but it doesn’t come. Brice’s on his feet now: an easy, casual stroll that takes him the length of the clinic. He runs his hand along the counters, opens cupboards and peers in and closes them again, lifts pieces of equipment and puts them down. Johanssen cranes around to follow him, but he’s strapped to the chair, and the muscles in his neck burn.
After a minute Brice says, “I watch you taking out the body bags, and you know what I think?” He picks up a bottle of fluid, reads the label, returns it to its place. “It’s a waste. A waste, to go out like that. Not that you will. You’ll leave this place alive. Just … changed.” He nods to himself, as if he’s been giving it some thought. “Yeah, this place will change you. Change you for life.
“People are frightened of change, don’t you find that?” He rests a hand against the sterilization unit, taps it once, moves on. “I mean”—he glances up at Johanssen, a look that mimics genuine curiosity—“what scares you most? The idea of death? You believe in hell? I don’t.”
He’s found a box of gloves. He pulls one out, idly, and then eases it over his right hand, wiggling his fingers as if testing the fit.
“Death’s just like sleeping. But living on, and being changed”—he’s wandering back across the room, behind Johanssen, out of sight—“say, living without something you take for granted, living without your eyes or your tongue or your hands—your hands.” He’s right behind the chair now. One gloved fingertip brushes Johanssen’s cheek, lightly, coldly, and he flinches.
Brice murmurs, “Just think: all that life stretching out in front of you, and you can’t even wank. Eh? Eh, Ryan?”
Johanssen nods. What comes next?
Brice leans forward: Johanssen can feel his breath. He says, “This place is changing you. It’s got you marked.”
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