Blind Spot

by Terence Bailey

  That was also when he’d started making good his never-ending debt to Rootenberg. Eventually Vos had learned to tamp down the bile that was ever rising in his throat. And he’d kept it down, more or less, until now.

  Vos wondered what he would do if the kid bottled it. He had just about concluded that he might have to abort the operation and take Jamie back to the Green Street flat, when Jamie took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just overwhelming, you know?’

  Vos released an inner sigh of relief. ‘Believe me, I understand. But you know how important this is.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jamie said.

  Vos placed a hand on his shoulder and steered him away from the shop front. ‘And you can do it?’

  Jamie steeled himself. ‘I can do it.’

  ‘Good man.’

  His debt to Rootenberg, Vos thought, would end tonight. He and Jamie began to walk. ‘The restaurant’s just over there,’ Vos said, waving his hand. ‘When we get in, we’ll need to check out the security cameras.’

  Jamie nodded. ‘And then?’

  Vos clapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Then just do what we rehearsed. It’ll be over before you know it.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Two hours later, Jamie arrived with Vos at the Thorndike Investors’ Mingle. The event was being held in a basement wine bar in the City, not far from the high-rise eatery they had just left. Jamie and Vos had parted from their dinner companion on the street outside, Rootenberg heading one way, the two of them another. A wash of pathos had passed through Jamie as he watched Vos looking at Rootenberg. Their prey had seemed on edge during the dinner. Even Vos’s elaborate confection of lies, half-truths and promises had done little to ease the man’s tense shoulders, to soften his chary gaze.

  Unlike more heavily regimented investor events, the atmosphere at the Thorndike Mingle was relaxed – a chance for shareholders to drink and chat with the company brass in a low-pressure environment. There were no placard-waving protesters outside the venue, and no strict agenda inside. Jamie and Vos were among the last to arrive. As they climbed down the shabby-chic wooden stairway into the basement, they were met with a rumble of polite conversation and the soft clinking of empty glasses being whisked away by staff.

  ‘You OK?’ Vos asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jamie breathed.

  ‘You did great,’ Vos assured Jamie under his breath. ‘Nobody saw a thing. Your life’s going to be a lot better from now on, trust me.’ He laid a hand on Jamie’s shoulder. ‘Tomorrow morning, I’ll come round to the flat, and we’ll get our story straight.’

  ‘Our story?’ Jamie whispered. ‘You said we wouldn’t be suspects.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it, kiddo, we won’t. But when someone dies, there are always questions. It’s important to have the right answers.’ Vos patted Jamie as they entered the bar. ‘Have a drink. This event’s called a mingle – so go ahead and mingle.’

  Jamie noticed Andy Turner across the room, chatting animatedly to a well-dressed woman in late middle-age. Andy clocked the two men coming in and raised his arm in greeting. Before long, Vos was approached by someone looking every inch a Thorndike executive. Vos introduced him to Jamie, who did not catch his name, and the two execs drifted away. Jamie watched Vos’s back as he folded into the crowd. He wondered how the man could appear so calm.

  Jamie hoisted a glass of champagne from a passing tray and edged towards the bar. On it was arrayed a selection of nibbles: bowls of upmarket crisps, rustic-looking crackers, and a cheese plate from which several guests had already carved chunks of cheddar and brie. Jamie tried to stand unobtrusively; the last thing he wanted was to smile his way through a conversation. He was happy to be left to his own thoughts; he needed to puzzle over his predicament. Jamie could recall each moment in the restaurant. He and Vos had noted the surveillance cameras as they arrived. They found Rootenberg at a back table. He’d already asked for a bottle of beer, but Vos had flagged down the waiter and changed the order to a white Meursault. When the wine arrived, the waiter had uncorked its bottle and tipped a small amount into Vos’s glass.

  ‘Leave it,’ Vos had grunted. ‘My colleague will pour.’

  The waiter deferred. Vos distracted Rootenberg as Jamie stood, reached for the wine, and felt his world slow to a crawl.

  His right hand had slid into his pocket. He pinioned the plastic pouch between his index and middle fingers. As he did, he thought, Vos threatened Sara. No matter how he explained it away, it was a threat. He has those photos. He’ll use them if he doesn’t get his way.

  Something about that had seemed … off. Why had it been necessary for Vos to mention the photos? Surely the fact that their lives were in danger from the Russian government should have been enough to convince Jamie to act. Still, Vos chose to overplay his hand.

  Had he been lying?

  In those few slow-motion seconds, doubt had washed over Jamie. Maybe Vos had other reasons to want Rootenberg dead. Maybe Jamie was being used. Maybe the real threat to Jamie and Sara was Vos himself, with his incriminating photos and wild tales of intrigue whose solution was murder. For one giddy moment, a whole new possibility surged through Jamie’s mind. The thallium, he’d told himself, could just as easily be slipped into Vos’s glass as Rootenberg’s. If its symptoms were as unremarkable as a viral infection, he was just as likely to get away with Vos’s murder as Rootenberg’s. Then, the threat to Sara would go away. As would his increasingly uncomfortable ties to Thorndike Aerospace.

  It all depended on whether – or how much – Jamie believed the story about the Russians …

  Jamie’s memories were interrupted by a commotion on the other side of the room. He could hear Vos’s voice barking, ‘Jesus Christ – are you sure?’

  He peered over. Vos was partly hidden by the crowd of investors, but Jamie could see he was on his mobile. His voice was thick, marbled with distress. ‘When? Oh, Jesus Christ.’

  Vos listened with an expression Jamie had never seen him wear before. His normally hooded eyes were round with shock, his mouth had curled in a gape of grief. With growing awareness, the people clustered around Vos understood something was very wrong. They shushed each other.

  ‘Tell me exactly – where?’ Vos cried.

  He listened intently and snapped his fingers at a low- ranking Thorndike staffer. ‘You – get my car.’ He handed over keys and a ticket. ‘NCP, Thames Exchange. Run!’

  The staffer grabbed Vos’s keys and fled. Vos threw his head back, hyperventilating. The circle of minglers widened to give the executive space. People began to murmur.

  ‘Gerrit – are you alright?’

  ‘Call a doctor!’

  ‘It was the phone call.’

  ‘Something about his partner.’

  Jamie’s thoughts, still ticking over methodically, appraised the situation. He peered at Vos, and Vos’s hollow eyes made contact. He began to move, softly parting the circle of concern that surrounded him. He approached Jamie unsteadily.

  ‘Nicole,’ Vos whispered. ‘Sara.’

  ‘Gerrit,’ Jamie asked, ‘what’s happened?’

  ‘I told her to do it,’ Vos said. ‘It was my fault.’ His face contorted, and his shoulders began to shudder. ‘All my fault,’ he repeated.

  ‘What’s your fault?’ Jamie said. ‘Someone said it’s about Nicole.’

  ‘She’s dead,’ Vos told him.

  Jamie felt himself blanche. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘I sent her there, in that car,’ Vos went on. ‘Told her to do it.’ He shuddered. ‘It’s my fault. I killed her.’

  ‘My God,’ Jamie said. ‘What car, Gerrit? What did you tell Nicole to do?’

  Gerrit Vos blinked, and something in his eyes shifted. A gleam that came from grief hardening into shock. Vos peered over Jamie’s left shoulder, his brows knitting.

  A voice rang from behind Jamie. ‘Vos!’ it cried. ‘You and me, we need to talk.’

  Vos blinked, and allowed his gaze to return to Jamie. ‘Ch
rist almighty,’ he shuddered.

  A member of the bar staff scurried past Jamie, calling, ‘Sir, this is a private function. I’ll have to ask you to leave.’

  Jamie turned away from Vos, swivelling towards the source of the commotion. There, standing on the bottom stair under the glowing-red Exit sign, was Levi Rootenberg.

  Rootenberg shouldered past the barman and weaved between the few well-dressed bodies that separated him from his quarry. ‘I don’t trust you, you fucker,’ he yelled towards Vos as he walked. Someone from Thorndike security made a beeline towards Rootenberg, but Vos stopped him with a small shake of his head. Vos had managed to tamp down his own private grief in the face of a potentially calamitous new problem. ‘I’ll placate him,’ Vos muttered to Jamie. ‘We don’t want a scene. We need to get him out the door before he starts puking.’

  Jamie looked at the wine bar’s gnarled floorboards. ‘Gerrit, I need to –’

  Before Jamie could finish, Rootenberg was on them. He glowered at Vos and said, ‘I want to know what’s really going on. I tried that number you gave me. The message said it wasn’t in service.’

  Vos held up his hands. ‘Easy, Lee,’ he said. ‘I must have got it wrong.’

  ‘And you,’ Rootenberg said to Jamie. ‘Why were you so nervous? All the way through dinner. You were jumpy and couldn’t make eye contact.’ His gaze flicked between the two men. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me, and I want to know what it is.’

  ‘Levi,’ Jamie said, ‘This is a bad time. Mr Vos has just received some terrible news.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit, I want to know what’s up,’ Rootenberg insisted.

  ‘Do you know his partner, Nicole?’ Jamie said quietly. ‘She’s been …’

  Vos placed a hand on Jamie’s arm. ‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘This fucker doesn’t deserve an explanation.’

  Vos turned his hooded gaze onto Levi Rootenberg. ‘The number I gave you was false,’ he said. ‘There’s nobody for you to call, because everyone knows what a clown you are. I was your only friend, and you stretched that privilege to snapping point.’

  Rootenberg started trembling angrily. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying that everything I told you at dinner was bullshit. There’s no new contract. There’s not even the prospect of one. You’re finished, Lee.’

  ‘No,’ Rootenberg said.

  ‘Yep,’ Vos replied.

  ‘I’ll tell everybody,’ Rootenberg gasped. ‘You know I will. Everything I know about you. You’ll be finished, you bastard.’

  Vos pondered this, and grimly shook his head. ‘Don’t think you’ll have time,’ he said. ‘Pretty soon, you’re going to start vomiting.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Gerrit!’ Jamie warned.

  ‘Then you’ll get confused. You’ll start having blackouts. Then you know what’s going to happen?’ Vos raised his hand to Rootenberg’s stubbly chin and held it firmly. ‘You’ll die,’ he continued. ‘Pretty fucking soon, too, Lee. You’re going to die, and it’s too late for anyone to stop it.’

  Jamie could hear his own blood pulsing in his neck. Why was Vos doing this? It had to be grief. Maybe some sort of displacement, an angry cry after the terrible news about Nicole. Whatever the reason, he was making a terrible mistake.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Rootenberg said levelly. ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘I shit you not,’ Vos said with a bleak grin. ‘I tried to warn you not to push things, Lee, but you were too thick to see this coming.’

  Jamie was almost swooning. He had to fix this. ‘Levi,’ he said, ‘I’ll explain this. Let’s go outside. Mr Vos isn’t in his right head.’

  He moved towards Rootenberg, trying to take his elbow. Rootenberg leapt backwards towards the bar. ‘You stay away from me!’ he cried.

  Vos grabbed Jamie’s shoulder and wheeled him around. ‘Leave him,’ he snapped. ‘This fucker will be dead soon enough.’

  ‘No,’ Jamie said urgently. ‘No, he won’t.’

  Vos blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ Jamie breathed.

  Vos’s eyes widened. He plunged his hand into the right pocket of Jamie’s suit jacket and fingered the full pouch of thallium sulphate that still nestled within. Vos withdrew his fingers as though they had been burned. ‘You gutless bastard,’ he cried.

  ‘Gerrit –’

  Behind Vos, Rootenberg moved so quickly he was a blur. He snatched up a knife from the cheese board. Throwing himself forwards, Rootenberg plunged it just under Vos’s right ear. When he pulled the weapon out, Vos’s blood spurted, and Rootenberg drove the knife in again, stabbing it swiftly and repeatedly until Vos dropped.

  Two Thorndike security officers piled onto Rootenberg. The three men crashed in a scrum at Jamie’s feet.

  Sara took the morning’s first London-bound train from Cardiff Central. It was scheduled to leave just before five o’clock. Standing in the chill of the outdoor platform, as the sky morphed from purple to crimson, Sara rang the Dyfed-Powys police. She ignored the hours-old flurry of messages and missed calls from Ceri. She knew her friend must be going mad with worry, but she wasn't thinking clearly enough to concoct a convincing story. The mixture of truth and calming fiction required a clearer head than Sara’s right now. Sara worried she would reach someone at Carmarthen who knew her. After all, she was not a stranger at headquarters. Mercifully, she talked to a young woman who didn't recognise her name. The operator simply told her that her car was in a garage in Brecon and supplied the contact number. Sara wrote it down and slipped the note into her bag. It was something for later – nobody would be at the garage now, and the Mini wasn't going anywhere.

  When the train doors unlocked, Sara settled into a seat and wriggled with discomfort. Her body had taken an awful battering over the last couple of days, and the lack of ergonomic seating did not help her now. Had the designers of train seats ever actually seen a human body? Sara forced herself to breathe deeply. For the first time since the kerfuffle of discharging herself from the hospital, she had time to reflect. Sara knew from experience she was now in danger of latent panic swelling up and overtaking her. She fought to quell the rising overwhelm. Now more than ever, Sara needed to think rationally. She tried to focus. What had she seen in her vision at the Heath Hospital?

  She had seen Jamie trying to poison Levi Rootenberg.

  It was that simple – Sara had witnessed her partner attempting murder.

  How many hours ago had she foreseen this? Seven or more? At the time, Sara’s sense had been that the act was imminent. If that were true, then Jamie would have tried it by now. Which meant he would be …

  What?

  Arrested? In hiding?

  No, Sara thought, the whole notion was ridiculous. She stared out at the crimson-streaked sky on the border between Wales and England. Jamie may be under Vos’s sway, but he wasn't brainwashed enough to try to kill a man. Once again, she asked herself the question that had dogged her this entire spring – how did she know if what she had seen was true?

  Sara followed that trail of thought. And what if it were? Why would Jamie have done such a thing? Would he be caught? Good heavens, shouldn’t he be?

  Sara squeezed her eyes together so tightly her face flushed; she could feel her features sting as they scrunched. She tried to wish away the tide of questions. Sara felt traitorous even to think of Jamie deserving prison. Hypocritical. Her own morality had taken so many twists in the past few years, Sara had no right to judge Jamie for whatever had happened.

  If it had happened.

  Because she could be wrong.

  Stop it, Sara.

  The train had left Newport and was approaching Bristol Parkway. Sara would be in this carriage for the next hour and a half, regardless of what unsettling twists her life had just taken. There was nothing she could do except wait.

  Well, she thought, there was one thing she could do. Sara kept her eyes closed and focused on relaxing her face. She took a
further deep breath.

  OK, Miss Sara, here are your coordinates …

  Look for Jamie, she told herself. Tune in. Find him.

  Immediately, Sara felt a thrust of pressure, like a reservoir bursting its barrier. A sudden breaking-through of emotion, once held in check, but now escaping in one great torrent. It was Jamie, and he was quivering with emotional exhaustion. But safe! Jamie was safe.

  Sara could feel her eyeballs moving under her closed lids as she surveyed her vision. Was Jamie at home? She reached out in one particular direction and felt around. Yes, he was. But he was agitated. Jamie’s mind swirled like the foam-flecked eddy of a teeming river. Blasts of overwhelm knocked Sara. She needed to pull away or be consumed by them.

  Sara forced open her eyes. The train had stopped at Bristol. Boarding passengers knocked past her, jolting her shoulder and arm. However, nobody asked her to remove her things – the overnight case and medical bag the police had returned – from the seat next to her. Sara was breathing heavily. She sweated in a way not justified by the weak train radiator pressing against her ankle.

  She would have answers soon, Sara told herself. For now, it was enough to know that Jamie was safe and at home.

  And with that, she shut her eyes again. Quickly, she succumbed to the overwhelming fatigue that had threatened to engulf her since she’d regained consciousness in Cardiff. Before the train had left Parkway, Sara was asleep.

  Sara took a black cab from Paddington. It was just before 9:30 when she charged into the Brixton flat. She found Jamie sprawled on the leather sofa, one leg dangling onto the floor. He still wore the suit she’d first seen on FaceTime fifteen hours earlier. As Ego tried to wrap himself around her ankles, Sara set down her bags and perched on the chair next to the sofa. She reached out a hand and brushed Jamie’s sweat-soaked copper fringe from his forehead. He stirred and opened his eyes.