The Distance: A Thriller

by Helen Giltrow

  You thought you’d beaten them all.

  And then—what?

  Catherine Gallagher half smiles back at me. She’s saying nothing.

  I abandon the view. Walk back into my apartment. Switch the TV on: it goes straight to a news channel. An item on Graves’s death stitches together the day’s events. A daylight shot of the straggling village, another of the police tape across the gravel drive leading to the low white house: there’s a blue crime tent erected over the front porch, SOCOs in protective suits emerging with bagged evidence. A photo of Graves flashes up on the screen. A cut to the news conference: the same talking heads, the same appeal for the woman who visited him to come forward. No e-fit, yet. Then a reporter stands in the road in the dark with her back to the house and does her piece to camera. “Tonight, this is a village in shock,” she says.

  My phone rings: the concierge, with news my financial adviser’s come to see me, for the second time today.

  The moment he walks in, I know it’s bad.

  “We’ve had an invitation to do business,” he says, and his face is tight with stress. “It’s Lucas Powell.”

  “We treated it like a game,” Craigie says hollowly. I’ve made him a cup of tea, but it sits on the table in front of him, untouched, cooling. Anxiety has sharpened that narrow clever face of his, given an extra edge to all of his gestures; even his East Kilbride accent is stronger.

  I say, “Laidlaw loved the game. And it made them think Moscow.” And we sanitized everything. But not enough. We screwed up somewhere, didn’t we? We screwed up.

  “What’s happened?” I ask.

  “You used Isidore.” When he says it I can’t tell whether it’s a question or not.

  Isidore’s a minor criminal, a mongrel of North African, French, and Spanish extraction, operating out of a market stall in North London with a nice little sideline in National Insurance numbers: a canny ferret of a man whom we’ve used from time to time as a courier. A crook, but then, I don’t have much use for entirely honest people. He knows the streets, he knows how the system works, and he’s more trustworthy than he looks, if only because he’s been made to understand: open a package, or fail to deliver, and his life won’t be worth living. He doesn’t know me. There’s no reason why he should. He reports to a bookie called Paulie, who himself reports to the brassy manageress of a tanning salon in Kilburn. Once, twice, maybe three out of the twenty-two times I passed information to Laidlaw, Isidore handled the package or directed him to the drop. But Laidlaw wouldn’t have got a sniff of him. Isidore’s always been careful. I have always been careful—

  “On Sunday Isidore was picked up off the street.”

  “Sunday?”

  “I only found out an hour ago. Police scooped him up. Straight into a van, then straight into an interview room. They weren’t saying much, but they were being nice to him, so then he assumed either they were softening him up or they just wanted a chat, a bit of information. Then a man comes into the room. Not a police officer, he says. Tall. Black. Nice suit.”

  Powell. Jesus Christ.

  “He interviews Isidore alone, if you can call it an interview. No witnesses, no tapes.”

  “That he’s aware of.”

  “Quite. Most of the time he’s just sitting around. Cups of tea. No threats, no attempt to turn the screws. Then right at the end: the business with Laidlaw. ‘You work for Knox. I need to get a message to him.’ ”

  “And Isidore said …?”

  “Isidore denied everything. Looked blank.” Of course he did: Isidore’s never heard of Knox. “Powell didn’t push it. Gave him his card, let him walk out of there. Isidore kept his head down. He knew they’d be watching. He didn’t dare contact anyone. This morning he saw Paulie, by chance. Paulie spoke to Deborah, Deborah got a message to me.” He reads the expression on my face. “Believe me, everyone’s being very, very careful.”

  I nod. I trust him on this.

  Craigie says, “My guess is that Laidlaw faithfully recorded and tried to trace every message you sent him. But he didn’t want to frighten you. What he was getting from Knox was good, potentially very good. He scares you, and he loses Knox. But he can’t stop looking. I think once—just once—Isidore was careless.”

  And that was all it took: Laidlaw—old-school Laidlaw, apprentice of the Cold War—quietly hunted him down.

  “So Laidlaw identified Isidore,” I say.

  “But he did nothing with the information. Didn’t act on it. Certainly didn’t pass it on. He logged it, and he stored it, and that’s where it stayed.”

  “The Ealing flat.” In my head, Powell lugs his cardboard crate toward the waiting car.

  “Maybe the Ealing flat,” Craigie says, “maybe somewhere else. Knowing won’t help us.” He looks bleak.

  “We break the chain,” I say. “Leave Isidore where he is. Get Paulie out of there. If Powell leans on Isidore again and Isidore cracks, the only person he can give up is Paulie. Put Paulie out of harm’s way for a while. Deborah, too. Get them out tonight.”

  We hold our nerve, and we’ll be all right.

  “And Powell?”

  “We don’t go near him. He’s only got Isidore, and Isidore knows nothing. We’re safe.”

  Craigie glances down at the cup of tea as if noticing it for the first time. His face is strained. He says, “Powell’s made this a quest. He’ll keep trying. He wants Knox for himself.”

  He looks tired: up all last night sorting out Sean’s cover, and this tonight … I probably look worse.

  Then he says, “I got hold of Fielding. Face-to-face. He blanked me when I mentioned Ian Graves. Whoever did that job, it wasn’t him. But there’s something else. Your alter ego Elizabeth Crow? Last night I put an online watch on those references you posted. Three hours later someone took a look. I should have spotted it sooner, but Sean’s alibi—” He breaks off.

  Overnight … I hadn’t laid the false trail to Eastern Europe then. Or uploaded the images that don’t look like me.

  “It’s not police,” I say. “Ellis would have told me—”

  Someone moving within that house after I rang the bell. The snick of a latch on a closing door. A sense of someone watching from the trees …

  Craigie gets it, too. “It was whoever killed Graves. But who’s that? Fielding’s client? Or the people who put Catherine Gallagher in the Program? Assuming they’re not one and the same.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Anything from Finn?”

  “The phone records have been deleted.”

  Craigie gazes at me. “Karla,” he says softly, “we don’t know anything, do we?” He turns his head, pinches his lips together.

  “We’ll get there.”

  “Hasn’t this gone far enough? Since when did you put yourself at a crime scene? Since when did you put a lad of twenty-one who knows you in a police interview room—”

  “Sean will be fine.”

  “It’s not about Sean. You brought me in a year ago to keep you safe. But now you’re taking risk after risk after—”

  “Craigie—”

  “As if there was never going to be any comeback, as if no one was ever going to notice. Now Lucas Powell is looking for you. You should be keeping your head down. And you shouldn’t be handling Simon Johanssen, you shouldn’t be anywhere near him, he’s too—”

  “Too what?”

  For a handful of seconds, nothing: Craigie’s sallow face is still, but somewhere in his eyes there’s a look I never wanted to see from him, and it’s compassion.

  Quietly he says, “He’s too important to you.”

  I retaliate. “Are you saying my judgment’s clouded?”

  “Are you saying it’s not?” He stares at me, but still his voice is gentle. “Hand him over to me. You’re not seeing this clearly. I will do everything in my power to make sure he’s safe—”

  But you won’t. You won’t.

  It’s a stalemate, and he knows it. At last he rises stiffly, reaches for h
is coat. He says, “Then I’m sorry, Karla, but I think we need to isolate you a little.”

  “Isolate me? How?” I’m going nowhere. Not while Johanssen’s still out there.

  He pauses. Blinks. “What I mean is, I think you and I should routinize our contact more.”

  Routinize? For a moment I don’t get it, and then I do.

  Craigie has begun to distance himself from me.

  As soon as he’s gone, I walk into the kitchen and tip my wine down the sink. I ache with tiredness, but I know I won’t sleep and I can’t stop and I don’t want to sit by the phone any longer.

  The lift takes me down to the dank, overlit basement car park. I thrust my hands deep into my pockets and walk past the ranks of my neighbors’ cars—luxury models, every one—to my parking bay, my heels ringing on the poured concrete. A camera swivels to follow me: the concierge must be watching.

  The Merc gleams in its slot, the bodywork like black glass. I touch the wing mirror lightly—it’s been fixed—then slide into the driver’s seat; shut the door—it closes with a satisfyingly heavy clunk—and rest my hands on the wheel. The interior still has that smell of newness, chemical, faintly toxic.

  When I touch the ignition the engine purrs into life. I slide the car out of its space and turn it toward the ramp, flashing my keycard at the sensor. The security shutter slides up, and I’m away.

  I drive aimlessly through the evening traffic, edging between lanes, dodging the buses, picking lefts and rights at random. First the glass canyons of Canary Wharf. Then Commercial Road: rundown side streets, shuttered shops, late-night grocers doing Monday-evening trade. Then cutting northwest, through the high-water mark of hopeful new money. Beyond it, in the fashionable East End: restaurants and bars, the premises of media start-ups and graphic designers, the gallery with its display cases of rotting meat, the blue neon of a boutique hotel. A building site, cranes slumbering behind hoardings. Then south: the City, emptied out for the night, the pubs quiet, the shops and coffee bars blank and closed, litter racing the cars down the streets. The Merc slides through the grid of traffic cameras. If they want to track my every move, they can. I’ve always counted on slipping beneath their radar. I wonder if I’m on it now?

  Graves knew what this was all about. Now Graves is dead. The person who phoned him knows, too. That record is deleted. At every turn I’m blocked, and they’re good. Good enough to wipe a whole phone record at source. Like me, but stronger; more powerful.

  Now they know Elizabeth Crow’s on to them. Of course. That ID’s thin; it won’t take long to break. They’ll know soon enough she’s just a fiction.

  One consolation: they don’t know she’s me.

  And if they saw you in Graves’s garden?

  It was dark. The disguise will hold—

  And Simon Johanssen? Do they know about him?

  I don’t even know who they are.

  There’s a hidden architecture to this job, an architecture of false doors and secret passages, dead-end corridors, high windows into rooms I can’t locate. Catherine Gallagher stands behind one of the windows, polished, aloof, but she’s not alone. Other people move through that building. They leave traces—shadows, footsteps, a door closing on the far side of a room, a bolt slid home—but however hard I try I can’t get sight of them.

  For the first time it hits me: that maybe I never will.

  Johanssen hasn’t called yet, but he will. He’ll go to that workshop with Catherine Gallagher. Never mind that we don’t have any insurance, never mind the risk. He’s committed himself. He’s going to do it anyway. He’s been going to do it from the moment Fielding first told him about the job.

  Not safe, a voice in my head still whispers. It’s not safe. But that’s the irony of it, he’s known all along, and he’s made his choice. And I can’t stop him. Because he doesn’t care about safe. He only cares about impossible.

  So walk away. Just walk away. Phone Craigie. Hand over the job. Go back to being Charlotte Alton. Charlotte Alton has a good life, doesn’t she?

  And just at that moment—as I’m pulled up at a red light on the Embankment—I look across the road, and there’s Mark Devlin.

  He lives in an elegant painted house with a Notting Hill address that only seven figures can buy. Three buttons on the entryphone, and his name on the middle one. The flat’s main room’s an expensive space, stylishly furnished but with bachelorish touches: the oversize screen of a home cinema system, skis propped against a wall, an e-reader wedged against the arm of an Italian sofa. Through a doorway, in the kitchen, he busies himself with a bottle of red and a corkscrew, pours me half a glass—no more, I’m driving—and hands it to me.

  “Nice place.”

  He smiles. This one’s rueful. “An inheritance. I’m doing well but not that well.” Then: “Take a look around, I know you want to.”

  I wander over to a bookcase by the window. Ignore the battered crime novels and the travel guides. Go straight for the photos.

  Mark Devlin, impossibly young, in an academic gown, surrounded by other students, laughing at the camera against a backdrop of granite-gray architecture; a life-size skeleton completes the lineup. Then older, with a group of male friends, in morning dress: a wedding. A ski trip, a mixed group goofing around outside a chalet—he’s flushed and grinning beside an elfin dark-haired girl.

  I glance up. The real Mark Devlin’s leaning against the doorframe: jacket off, tie loosened, cuffs pushed back. Nursing his wineglass, smiling slightly. He looks clean and fit.

  I turn back to the photos. Devlin, in his twenties, with a girl, his arm hooked round her waist. Not Catherine Gallagher. But then, why would it be? Gaunt, tired Catherine, hugging herself for warmth or comfort with the life drained out of her face … but she would have been different when they met, she would have been the polished woman in Johanssen’s photo, with the smile you couldn’t get past—

  Don’t think about her. Don’t.

  I look again at the photo. Devlin and the girl are outdoors: dark trees in the background, monumental stonework, and wrought iron. And the girl—

  “She was outside the restaurant.” I grope for the name. Hannah. Anna. Same delicate loveliness. The look she gave me now makes perfect sense. “You look very young.”

  An adjustment in his smile. “Anna and I go way back.” The same line as before. Same sense, too, of prickling awkwardness.

  Should I change the subject? The idyllic childhood, the house in Wales … “This your country pile?”

  I’m half joking but he says, “Don’t be fooled, the house is very ordinary.”

  “Still in the family?”

  “I should sell. I don’t go much these days. Time.”

  I look again at their faces. They were together once, and happy. And then what? It ended. Probably he strayed. But he kept the photo—

  “She wants to be with you.”

  It comes out too soon, too fast—straightaway I’m ready to apologize, but he smiles, a different smile—“And not the other way around?”—a smile with a thin rind of sadness. He looks at the photo. “She dumped me four months after that was taken.” Then he twists that smile into something rueful. “It broke my heart.”

  “But you’re still in touch, you’re still close …” Just thinking of her conjures it up, the look she gave me, that brief, dissecting glance—the look a woman gives a rival. “You’re sure she doesn’t want—? The way she looked at me … as if she thought—”

  He shakes his head. “You’re wrong. We’re just friends. We’re close—she needs me, she has problems, she wouldn’t cope alone—but we’re just friends. Don’t ask me to explain, I can’t.” Then he says, “And you, what about you? I’m not supposed to say you look tired, am I?”

  “You’re not.”

  He glances down at his wineglass for a moment, and then he says, softly, “At Götterdämmerung you wore green. You’re excellent company, and you’re patient with bores. You’re wealthy, but you’re not complacent: there was a
time when you didn’t have much money. You’re extremely smart. You don’t like people who ask personal questions. So I’ll try not to. But you look like you haven’t slept for days. It’s all right,” he says suddenly, “I know you’re—careful about how close people get to you. I don’t want to pry. But … do you want to be with him?”

  Is it the wine? The tiredness? I don’t know. I don’t say, Who? I say, “It’s not like that.”

  “Sure?”

  I’m not sure of anything right now. Still I say, “It’s something else.” Back in the apartment with Craigie, the moment he asked me to step aside—“I can’t let him down. He needs me.”

  “You’re afraid if you walk away from him it’ll all come crashing down?”

  I nod. Suddenly I can’t speak.

  He says, “We’re more alike than we know.”

  I bite my lip, stare out of the window. He pretends to be interested in his wine.

  “So what do we do?” I ask.

  He says, “What we have to.”

  All the way back to Docklands those words are chiming in my head.

  I park the car in its slot, take the lift up to my floor, let myself in, close the front door, and stand there, in the dark, listening to the sound of empty rooms, the faint electronic hum of the building … I reach for the light switch, and my mobile chimes.

  A text from Finn. One word.

  Two days have passed since Graves phoned someone on that unknown number, shortly before he died; and they phoned back. Two days, since every detail of the account attached to that number—every trace of its existence—was deleted from the service provider’s system.

  But I’m looking at the record of a pay-as-you-go phone, no owner ID available, no call history until two days ago. A dedicated phone, kept charged up, sterile and blank: they knew it might happen one day, that Graves’s story might come into question, and they gave Graves a number to ring if it did.

  And on Saturday night he called.

  There’s the record of that call: the one that told them I was on my way, I knew the notes were fake, the game was up. And after that, the call they made to Graves’s mobile number at 19:34. To check up on him? Or on me.