The Distance: A Thriller

by Helen Giltrow

  “What happens?”

  “You get the fuck out of here.”

  “I can’t leave her—”

  “Can’t you see it? You’re next. You stay, and he’ll come back for you, and she’ll step in because she can’t help herself. And it’ll be worse than Vinnie. Worse for you, but I don’t give a fuck about you, you make your own choice. But worse for her. I won’t let that happen. You’re leaving. Tomorrow, when the gates open. If I can only do one thing for her, then I’m doing that. You’re out of here.”

  Johanssen says, “If I leave her here, she’ll die.”

  “Brice won’t kill her. Fuck, he won’t even kill you: he wants you alive, he wants you suffering. Even Vinnie wasn’t supposed to die, Vinnie was a mistake.”

  “I didn’t mean Brice.”

  “Who else is there? Unless you mean all the mad bastards out there—” Riley jerks his head toward the outside world. “I think you’ll find she’ll take her chance.”

  Johanssen says, “Get something to eat. Get some sleep. I’ll sit with her for a bit.”

  “You look as wrecked as I do,” Riley says.

  Johanssen shrugs.

  As Johanssen passes him on the stairs, Riley grips his shoulder. “He was actually fucking getting out, was Vinnie. Done his tariff, one more month to go. I mean it, mate,” he says. “You’re out of here.”

  Johanssen opens the door: a crack, and then an inch, two inches. She’s lying on the mattress. The sedative’s still working: her face is slack, her limbs still. He steps inside the room, closes the door, crosses to her, crouches. Her drugged breathing’s slow.

  He’ll get her out. He will. Karla will find a way—

  But Brice is out there still. Why hasn’t Quillan made a move against him? What’s he waiting for?

  DAY 22: WEDNESDAY–DAY 23: THURSDAY

  KARLA

  It took me time to gather what I needed. The car—a souped-up ten-year-old BMW—from one of the garages we use for storage; supplies from another. Craigie phoned while I was packing rucksacks. He must have tried the safe landline first; he knew I wasn’t at home. “Where are you?”

  “Something I need to check out,” I said.

  He couldn’t ask what, not on a mobile, not Craigie. All he could say was “Karla—”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  And I called Devlin, on his landline, just to be certain. When he picked up, there was music in the background, and he said, “You got my message? We must get together,” in a way that told me he had company. Less than two hours since he rang me; some other woman—Anna?—must have answered her phone. That’s good: if he’s not alone, he’s safe. I laughed, told him I’d call back some time, hung up, and switched Charlotte Alton’s mobile off.

  I was on the road just before 9:00 p.m.

  The M4 and the Second Severn Crossing are quicker by half an hour, but there are front-facing cameras on the bridge, snapping drivers’ faces. So I’ve come across the other way, the M40 through the Chilterns, then the A40. Just past Oxford I stopped for a slug of coffee and switched Charlotte’s phone back on. It chirruped into life: another message from Devlin, timed just after ten. “You’re not free tomorrow, are you?” I switched it off again and drove on.

  West past Ross, Monmouth, Abergavenny, Ebbw Vale—towns fast asleep, just scattered lights in upstairs windows, the blue glow of a late-night TV movie, the pavements empty, and the roads deserted. At Merthyr, by a roundabout, two coppers in a patrol car eyed the Beamer, saw I was a woman, and turned away.

  Then north, into the Beacons: the bulk of the hills black against the night sky. The roads shrank. On bends the headlamps picked out snatches of landscape, conifer forest and moorland, tussocky grassland, the red eyes of sheep and cattle grazing in the dark.

  At last, on my right, the paler glimmer of the reservoir; left, the trees rising beside the road. I slowed down, looking for the turning. There it was: a tight hairpin. I took it slowly, killing the headlights on the turn. Drove up and into the trees, and there were the gateposts, a Gothic dragon squat and sullen on top of each. The wrought-iron gates were propped open, and overgrown. Beyond them was the clearing, and the house, in darkness.

  I parked the car and got out. And here I am.

  The air is cold and damp and soft, and smells of leaf mold. There’s a stream running nearby, a constant rush of water; beyond it, the hiss and rattle of the trees—for a second I’m back in Graves’s garden, but this time no one’s watching. I turn 360, scanning, allowing my eyes to get used to the dark. The woodland screens me on all sides: no view of the reservoir or the road. No lights anywhere.

  I turn toward the house.

  Devlin’s right: it’s big but nothing special. I cross to it, peer in through the windows, then turn away, toward the drive, but the trees curve around the clearing: you can’t see the gates from here.

  The other building’s two stories, like the house. Garage doors and what might be a workshop on the ground floor. A glazed door on the end; through it, stairs going up. A handmade sign by the door reads THE ANNEX. It looks like it was painted by a kid.

  I pull on latex gloves.

  The lock’s a simple one, but I’m out of practice. It takes me minutes to pick it. Inside it’s pitch dark. I pull shoe covers out of my pocket and put them on as I step over the threshold, then shield my torch with my hand to kill most of the light, switch it on, and go up.

  First two doors: a kitchen cubbyhole and a little toilet/shower room, clustered around the top of the stairs. Then a corridor. First bedroom on the right, second one straight ahead, both completely empty: no furniture, no carpets, just bare boards and painted plaster walls. The place has been stripped, and is very clean.

  I go to the window of the farthest bedroom. On the edge of the dark clearing, the stone gateposts glimmer.

  I go back down, taking the shoe covers off at the threshold, to fetch what I need from the car.

  It was Thomas Drew who taught me crime-scene processing. He argued it was an essential skill. You need to know what traces you are leaving, and you need to be able to detect others’ traces, either in order to make sure you’ve erased them or because the proof may be useful for blackmail purposes. So I learned it all: how to secure a sterile corridor, pick up fibers, lift latent prints, process semen stains on dirty bedding. And look for blood, of course.

  I need two journeys to bring everything from the car. Before I close it up for the last time, I take another swig of coffee from my flask, and listen; but there’s no sound from the road.

  This time before I go up the stairs I put on a SOCO’s paper suit.

  In the kitchen I pull down the blinds, then get out a little battery-operated night-light, put it on the work surface, and switch it on. Then I go through the flat. There are blinds at all the windows, and I pull them down, too. The night-light emits only a faint glow, but I don’t want it leaking out into the dark empty night.

  Back in the kitchen I prepare the Bluestar fluid, popping the tablets out of their foil packages and mixing the solutions. Two containers: the pump spray for the floors, the paint-gun-type aerosol with the more concentrated mixture for the walls. I may not need both, but it pays to have them ready. I swill them round to let the solutions mix, then take them through to the farthest bedroom. Then I go back and move the night-light partway down the corridor, so its glow just reaches the bedroom door. I leave the camera on its tripod propped up in the kitchen. A SOCO would take photographs, but a SOCO wouldn’t be doing this alone, and I don’t want to waste time setting up the camera if there’s nothing here to find.

  I return and stand just inside the bedroom door. The faint pale glow of the night-light is the only illumination, but my eyes have adjusted, and you have to do this in near dark.

  A little room. Big enough for a small double bed, a chest of drawers, a chair, not much else. Assume there was a bed in here a year ago: in the middle of the floor, with space around its sides …

  I start in the far corn
er of the floor, working my way down under the window, spraying as I’ve been taught, in steady even strokes, from half a meter away. I’m waiting for the telltale glow of a luminol reaction, the thirty-second steady blue fluorescence that tells you it’s blood; but nothing comes.

  I take one pace back and spray again.

  And there it is: the first bright bloom of spatter, an arc of glowing droplets, left to right.

  One more pace back. Spray again. Another glowing arc pulses into life. This one runs up onto the skirting board. I swap the pump for the aerosol and continue spraying, chasing the arc up across the painted plaster. It runs out a meter above the ground. It’s smeared where someone’s wiped it.

  It happened here.

  A voice inside—it might be Drew’s—is telling me: Be systematic. You need evidence. Get the camera now. Set it up. Respray. Get shots. But I can’t break away: I can’t stop spraying. The bright trails surge and glow before my eyes, surge and glow, hypnotically—the violence of one death recorded in spatters and spurts of blue light. One loops right up the wall to the ceiling. Another goes along toward the door, breaks off—there’s a clear gap—then a fat bright splodge, a smear—

  And then, as clear as day, a handprint. The size of mine, maybe a little smaller. A woman’s hand. Catherine.

  I stare at it as it slowly fades to nothing.

  Respray. Get shots.

  Because this is all the evidence I may get. All that’s left of the man called Daniel.

  And in that moment, I know. I’m going to get that woman out of the Program, but I’m not going to ignore what she’s done. Not until I know everything.

  I turn toward the door. In the corridor beyond, the night-light falters.

  A footstep, and a man’s outline blocks the door. He’s holding a shotgun.

  He says, “Charlotte, what are you doing?”

  I swear I never heard a car. He must have parked it somewhere along the road and run from there. Not with the gun: the gun comes from the house—he let himself in, got the gun, loaded it, and came up here, all so quietly—a late gift from all those childhood holidays, the games of hide-and-seek, knowing exactly which stair will creak.

  I say, “This is where she killed him, isn’t it? I’m spraying with luminol—it discloses bloodstains.” And then, ridiculously, “Do you want to see?”

  Of course he doesn’t. He’s seen it all already.

  I say, “I know you didn’t do this—” and he says, “If I’d had any idea that she—” and we both stop, and together we look back along the wall, but the smears and arcs and spatters have all faded. We’re standing in the near dark of an empty room again.

  He says, “It was such a mess. He was—” He stops, swallows. He saw Daniel.

  “And she left you to clean up.” The walls, the body, everything … I wonder where Daniel is now. In a shallow pit among the trees?

  “I didn’t have a choice. She’d gone. I couldn’t go to the police—” He breaks off again. What did she have on you? But later, I can leave that one for later. There are other more important things to deal with now.

  What did I do to bring him here tonight? Somewhere along the line I showed my hand. Too obvious an interest in Catherine? In the photo? Or was it the phone call? Did I let something slip?

  But he followed me; and someone may have followed him. And he’s standing there with a gun, and he doesn’t know who I am anymore or whether he can trust me.

  He turns and looks at me. He says, “You’re collecting evidence. Why, Charlotte?”

  “Because I had to be sure.” I sound calm, though my heart is hammering. “And because I needed you to talk to me about what happened. Unless I had evidence you’d just deny it.”

  “Why should I talk to you?” His back is to the door, the corridor, the night-light; I can’t see his face. All I’ve got to go on is his voice. And in it, something’s shifted.

  “Everyone involved in this is in danger—everyone who’s helped her get away. Two are dead already.” I don’t want to say, You could be next. “What brought you here tonight?”

  He says, “You were seen,” and I hear it again, the change in his voice, but this time it’s like a shutter going down, a part of Mark Devlin closing itself off, and for the first time I’m afraid.

  Seen? At Graves’s house? Was it Mark Devlin watching? But in that case—

  Devlin is the one who murdered Graves.

  I’ve got this backward. Mark Devlin isn’t Catherine’s protector. Mark Devlin is the client.

  You need to be in control of this right now.

  “All right,” I say, making it firm, businesslike. “Do you know who I am?”

  “Probably not Charlotte Alton,” he says; there’s a bitter little twist there. I ignore it.

  “I’m not police, and I don’t make moral judgments. Catherine killed a man. It was horrific. You got here too late; you couldn’t have stopped it. All you could do was clean up afterward. But then you went after her. To put right what she’d done. And eventually you found her. You’ve hired someone to do the job, haven’t you? Because you can’t get at her where she is.”

  A silence from Devlin. Then he says, “I liked you. I really, really liked you.”

  Another kick of panic. I smother it. “We can still sort this out.”

  He says, “I was warned you’d say that.” He lifts the shotgun, just fractionally. “I have to make a call.”

  My heart lurches.

  “We’re going to the house now,” he says, and he points the gun at me.

  If he killed Graves, he’ll use it.

  How many chances on the way out of here? The staircase and the corridor are narrow. We’ll walk in single file: me in front, him behind. Top of the stairs: I’ll turn before he does, with the kitchen on my left, the camera tripod propped within reach, but I won’t have space to swing it cleanly, and before I’m down the stairs and out the door he will have fired—

  “All right,” I say, and move to step past him. For a second he has to step back, lowering the gun. I’m still holding the Bluestar aerosol.

  I spray it in his eyes.

  He howls. Behind me something clatters, but I’m in the corridor now. I kick the night-light: the plastic casing shatters against the wall, and it goes out. Turn at the end of the corridor and throw myself down the stairs. How long before he realizes he’s not blinded? I’m out the door now, running for the car. Keys, keys. They’re in my pocket, under the SOCO suit. I have to rip it off. For a second it fouls my ankles. Then I’m out of it, keys in hand, hurling myself into the car.

  Car key in ignition. The engine fires. One glance toward the building—the door bursts open, and there’s Devlin running, with the shotgun. I crunch into reverse, pull back, and spin the wheel—where is he?—aim the car toward the gates and floor it, feel the pull of the acceleration as the Beamer’s rear-wheel drive digs in—

  Bang. The windshield crazes over in front of me, dozens of tiny cracks and splits—I can’t see ahead, but my foot’s still to the floor. Bang again, another starburst—then an impact—the car shudders violently, bounces, throws me to one side—then I’m clear and still accelerating—and then—

  I see them in the undamaged edges of the windshield, the second before I hit them. Trees.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here. The engine’s stalled, but the headlamps are still on. Their light reflects up into the crazed patterns of the windshield. It’s oddly beautiful.

  I can’t move: everything has locked. Then something scratches at my side window, and I turn my head, but it’s just a twig. I turn my head back. Shift my shoulders, experimentally. Pry my hands off the steering wheel: the fingers are like hooks.

  The driver’s air bag hasn’t deployed. Interesting, that.

  Devlin Devlin Devlin

  —had a gun—

  In the rearview mirror the wreckage of undergrowth and saplings is lit red by my taillights.

  Beyond them there’s the clearing, and a lo
w dark shape.

  I sit there for another minute, not taking my eyes off the mirror, watching. The shape doesn’t move.

  Get out. Get out. You have to.

  Undergrowth is packed against the door; I have to force it open, then push myself along the bodywork. Twigs claw at me until I’m past the car. Its track has scarred the woodland: broken saplings gleam palely. The air smells green, and damaged.

  I reach the edge of the trees.

  He’s like a rag doll wrapped up in torn clothing, limbs with joints where they shouldn’t be. His head and chest are crushed, deformed, his scalp half torn away, his features mangled and out of shape.

  I know he’s dead, but still I have to touch him.

  I torch the Beamer. There are old newspapers in the house, firelighters, even a disposable barbecue. I add the SOCO suit. The car’s cigarette lighter makes a spark. I crack the driver’s window, wait until it’s caught, then back away.

  The shotgun lies twelve feet from Mark Devlin, both barrels discharged. I leave it there. Leave everything in the Annex too: the Bluestar sprays, the camera, the broken night-light, everything.

  As I walk down the drive, past the sullen dragons, the Beamer’s already billowing acrid smoke.

  I reach the road, turn right, keep walking. A few hundred meters, and there’s a small car park overlooking the reservoir. Mark Devlin’s silver Audi’s parked under the trees. I turn away from it, get out my mobile. One bar of signal. I call Craigie. Give him a code I thought I’d never use. Then switch off the phone and stand among the trees, and wait.

  Mark Devlin leans against the doorway in his flat, wineglass in hand, clean and fit and alive, and smiling. Breathe in too deeply and you feel dizzy.

  DAY 23: THURSDAY

  JOHANSSEN

  At 1:00 a.m. the pattern of her breathing changes. By two she’s starting to stir, and then her eyes open. Ten seconds of blankness. Her forehead creases as if she’s trying to remember something. Then her mouth distorts, and she sucks in air, and her body convulses under the blanket. “No—”