Hold Still – Tim Adler #3: A Psychological Thriller

by Tim Adler

  Lying there, she held on to the moment. Then Paul's wretched mobile pinged with an incoming message and he opened his eyes, rolling onto his side to answer it. The text must have been important, because he got up to read it properly. He stood in the middle of the room gazing concernedly down at his mobile. Kate was in a playful mood and she reached for her iPhone on the bedside table. She framed him with her smartphone, admiring his naked torso.

  "Hold still," she said. The iPhone shutter snapped.

  "We're always going to be together, aren't we," said Paul. It was more of a statement than a question.

  "Of course we are. I love you."

  Paul gave her a brave little smile and she turned away, tagging the photo #holdstill and pinging it to him on Snapchat. It would make him laugh.

  She heard the French doors open, and moments later a car horn blared. Sounds of panic and commotion came up from the street. She rose from the bed, already knowing something bad had happened. "Paul…" she said. He wasn't in the room. Kate pushed her way through the net curtains and reached the balustrade.

  Looking down, she saw her naked husband lying half under a truck. His arms and legs were at funny angles, as if a child had thrown down a doll. A woman was screaming uncontrollably, and the driver had got out of his truck clutching his head. People were gathering around Paul's body and somebody looked up at her. Kate's kneecaps dissolved and she fell to the patio, unable to comprehend what had just happened. One part of her was observing the other, watching herself as she sat there shaking. Only then did she realise that the woman screaming was herself.

  Chapter Four

  Boom-sshh. The waves broke on the bitterly cold beach and spume rolled over the sand, edging up over his feet. The wind flapped around his jacket and trousers. Hashim hated Zogaj for sending him here. How typical of the boss to get others to do the dirty work while Zogaj was probably asleep in a comfortable bed two-and-a-half-thousand kilometres away. He compared the godforsaken spot with home, thinking of the avenue lined with palm trees that led up to the mosque, the hot pinks and acid greens of the seafront. He thought about its shrieking electric amusements and how he'd occasionally catch the eye of a Macedonian factory worker who'd come to Durres for a cheap holiday.

  The biting wind brought Hashim back to the here and now. According to the numerals on his army watch, they were late. Goddamn them for making him do this. Did they think he was no better than some whore-beater?

  A light flashed in the darkness, and he was so caught up in his bitterness that he almost forgot to signal. Hashim gave the boat three long flashes. The whores would be climbing into the inflatable now. Any resistance would have been beaten out of them back home. They realised by now that there were no jobs waiting for them here as beauticians and au pairs. They were not going to save their families from their miserable lives.

  His hatred of Zogaj was graven right down to his bone. Hashim hadn't been there when his father had been murdered. Later they told him that his mother had just stood watching while a pillow was placed over his head. His father had struggled half-heartedly under the blankets and then given up. Of course, Papa had been ill for a long time, and the sweetish smell of death had always been in the room, crouched like a gargoyle in a corner. But now his cousin would inherit everything. Why had his mother never wanted him? He remembered her summoning him once to her bedroom and asking what he would do if he found her dead. He had still been only a child. Call a doctor, he had replied. "No, extract my gold teeth and sell them. You always were a weakling," she said dismissively.

  His feeling of not being wanted was partly the reason he spent so much time away from the farm. He had devoted his youth to looking after sheep, on endless rocky tracks strewn with droppings. Hard scrabble up mountains where the weather could change from sun to rain to snow within an hour. When Hashim was a boy, the family kept what it really did for a living from him. But somehow he always knew. Conversations would stop when he entered a room; there were guilty looks and large amounts of cash lying around.

  In those early days, the family knew the war was there but they didn't go to it. Hashim saw smoke rising from the villages across the border, but his family kept to their side of the mountains. The Serbians were looting houses, setting villages alight and digging mass graves, they said. We must do something. Really, the Kosovans and the Albanians are the same people. One day, a grey NATO jet flew overhead and its sound hit him only a second later, as if somebody had torn the sky in two. That was the night Papa told them that the war was getting nearer and that their brothers in Kosovo would need arms. So they started trading their marijuana with the Italians for weapons: Kalashnikovs, grenades, even an anti-aircraft gun.

  One afternoon they found a Serbian soldier wandering dazed in the mountains. He'd become separated from his unit. One eye was puffy and black and closed-up, and he was acting confused; later his father said he had shellshock. He kept mumbling and slapping his forehead as if he'd forgotten something. So that evening they led him down to the village, which looked so warm and inviting, in the valley below. Hashim thought the farmers would look after him. The whole village posed for a photograph with the soldier, looking stiffly formal like in one of those Victorian portraits. His father told him that he and his cousin were to turn the soldier over to the KLA.

  He would always remember what happened next.

  Hashim dug his hands into his pockets, cursing the wind while his lungs ached for a cigarette. But he'd left them in the van. The dinghy's outboard engine was getting nearer, the inflatable smacking down like an open hand on the water. Once they were inside the van, their orders were to drive back up the motorway to a service station where cars were waiting to send the girls all over England: Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds. They may be my brothers, he thought, but the Bangladeshis were the worst. They paid a high price, the younger the better. He tried imagining what it would be like to be with a woman, to touch her down there, but that was the problem. He had no imagination.

  Sammy cut the engine and let the waves carry the dinghy the rest of the way. Hashim helped haul the inflatable up onto the sand to stop it sliding back into the water. Sammy shouted at the whores to get out. He was a sick fucker, that one. He once told Hashim that when he was a kid, the dogcatcher who lived upstairs taught him how to masturbate the strays they caught. Hashim would have to keep a close eye on him.

  The handover went smoothly, and eventually there were just three of them sitting in the driver's cab. Sammy sat on the far left wearing his stupid wraparound sunglasses, thinking they made him look like Bono. The girl sat between them. Hashim wanted to tell her that everything was going to be all right, that nothing would happen as long as she did what she was told, but he didn't speak Vietnamese and, he guessed, she didn't speak Albanian.

  Papa had treated his cousin like a son after he came to live with them. His cousin must have been eight years old. At first, they used to tumble over each other like puppies, but the older his cousin got, the more different they became. It was as if he could see further than Hashim, think about things longer and deeper, and had grown embarrassed by his cloddish cousin. Sitting there at the family dining table, Hashim felt dull resentment whenever he looked at him. Why should his cousin usurp what was rightfully his?

  The business had changed, too. The Albanians have always been pirates, his cousin said, but there was a new kind of piracy. Today there were billions of leks to be made from cybercrime. Say, somebody wanted to download music. You sent them back a file – and then he used all these words Hashim didn't understand, like malware and Trojans. What he did understand was that it was like old-fashioned protection. The family held their computers to ransom: either the person paid up or they destroyed what was on it. Plus, they'd stolen everything that was on it anyway. Our friends in Italy would pay good money for credit card details, his cousin said. The old man just sat there nodding; in truth he was only a peasant goatherd. Hashim's uncle had always been the one with the brains.

&nbs
p; The three of them drove mostly in silence into south London. It always surprised Hashim how many people were awake even at five in the morning as he watched a bus pull out in front of him.

  Other gangs caught on to what they were doing. It was like picking low-hanging fruit. Hashim's job was to be the muscle, to make sure that other families didn't get in on the action. A couple of brothers gave them a lot of trouble, though. They shut up after a grenade was tossed through their front window.

  The nail bar was in a side street. Looking for the turn, Hashim noticed with distaste the number of hairdressing salons and nail bars catering to the blacks. The nail bar was sandwiched between a pawnbroker and a vet. A dumpy Vietnamese woman, grey with tiredness, opened the door in her dressing gown. Her son stood behind her, and a flash of recognition passed between them. "People like us always recognise each other," he thought. The walls of the place were painted a hideous magenta, and it reminded him of the pink house. "Upstairs," the woman grunted in a thick, rubbery accent. They followed the tough-looking youth through a beaded curtain and up the steps to a bedroom. The madam switched on the overhead light. A single mattress, stained brown with what could have been blood, lay in one corner. The Vietnamese girl sat down on the mattress, drawing her knees up against her chest. Watching, afraid of what was going to happen next.

  The pink house. His father told them to drive the Serbian soldier to a pink house near Tirana airport. During Hoxha's time, the only flights that came in to Tirana were from Communist China. So the teenager didn't understand why they were taking the Serb to the airport – were they flying him to China? His cousin said he didn't know, best not ask. The soldier lay across both footwells with his hands tied and a sack over his head. Hashim's boots rested on top of him. The pink house, when they got there, was a nothing sort of place with a scrubby garden and a few chickens pecking about. The walls were a wedding-cake pink that changed to grey halfway up, as if they'd run out of paint and had just decided to carry on painting. It was dusk by now. You could hear planes in the distance coming in to land at the nearby airport. Hashim hauled the soldier out of the car and pulled him towards the house, but the closer they got, the worse he felt about it. A strong chemical smell clogged his nostrils. His cousin was to take the Serbian inside while Hashim waited in the car. To his surprise, a man in blue hospital scrubs opened the door, all dressed up like a surgeon.

  Hashim sat in the driver's seat smoking cigarettes and waiting for his cousin to come out. All the while an ominous feeling kept building, like something bad was about to happen. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. After three quarters of an hour, Hashim was about to get out and see what was going on when his cousin appeared holding a plastic picnic cooler. When he got back in the car, Hashim could tell something was wrong.

  "You were a fucking long time. What took you so long?"

  "Just shut up and drive. I don't want to talk about it."

  "Hey, I was just asking–"

  "You don't want to talk about it either."

  They'd been told to go to a gate away from the main building. All the way there, Hashim knew there was something bad in the picnic box on the back seat. A guard waved them through. A private jet was parked beside the hanger, and there were men waiting to do the handover. "You do it," his cousin said. "I need to get some air." Hauling the picnic box out, Hashim set off towards the aircraft steps, noticing the Turkish flag on the plane tail. His cousin walked around the car breathing in deeply. He looked as if he was going to be sick.

  The present knifed into the past. Dumping his rucksack on the bedroom floor, Hashim rummaged through a front pocket for his carefully wrapped needles. Then he set his ink bottle down. He had always enjoyed drawing: flowers, birds, hands clasped in prayer. In prison they'd called him Picasso. Which was why that stupid kuff had asked him to draw a tattoo of a cross on his neck. Instead, he'd drawn a great black ugly penis with hair sticking out of its balls like an old-fashioned sea mine. The brothers all had a good laugh over that. Except that he'd found a chunky turd in his bed that night when he threw back the cover. Hashim remembered looking in the shower-room mirror and calmly knowing that he would kill the fucker down the hall that night. That was the first time he had murdered. He remembered the slight resistance as the shiv went in, and the pop-eyed "Wait, this can't be happening" look on the infidel's face. Later, Hashim felt bad. The kuff came to him as a ghost, sitting on the end of his bed and not saying a word, just looking at him reproachfully. That's why Hashim decided to tattoo a black teardrop above his left eye – as a way of showing his remorse. It also told the others to keep away. He was a murderer now.

  "Give me your hand," Hashim said in English. When the whore looked confused, he grabbed her hand and held on. He kept the wrist tight as he dipped the needle into the ink, jabbing it into her forearm. He could feel her panicking, like a bird battering its wings against the side of a cage.

  Slowly he tattooed the letter Z into her skin. Papa compared it to marking sheep up the hillside. After Hashim had finished and rewrapped his bloody needle, the whore just stared at her reddened forearm. Even if she tried running away, anybody who picked her up would know who she belonged to. Zogaj.

  Chapter Five

  Kate didn't remember how long she had sat there. Eventually she got up to answer the hesitant knock on the door, taking in the flashing blue lights below. The police must already be here. She knotted her dressing gown, feeling strangely detached, as if this was all happening to somebody else. A dapper man with a Van Dyck beard stood outside in the corridor. The hotel manager, she supposed. Was she all right? A dreadful accident. Her husband must have lost his balance and fallen over the edge. The police were on their way upstairs now and wanted to speak to her.

  She didn't remember getting dressed or how she got into a police car to drive to the hospital. What she did remember was the ambulance's blue light splintering and reflecting back in shop windows. She kept seeing Paul's body, his arms and legs at funny angles, and the way the man in the crowd had looked up when he heard her screams. The occasional yip of the ambulance siren cut through her thoughts. The ambulance men weren't in a hurry to get anywhere; to them this was just another dead body in the back, not the person they were going to spend the rest of their life with.

  A memory. It must have been the first time they went on a date. Paul had taken her to see a revival of an old Marx Brothers film at the National Film Theatre; it was one of the few American films they were allowed to see growing up in Albania, he had said. At first she hadn't liked the film. It seemed stagey and old-fashioned, yet there was a scene where the Marx Brothers were all clambering over each other in a ship's cabin that made her cry with laughter.

  Afterward, they had walked over the bridge to Embankment, and Paul had stopped to admire the city at night: St Paul's and the science-fiction skyscrapers behind it.

  "It's so different from where I grew up," he said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You have no idea. There was no colour, everything was grey. I remember the first time I saw an orange, I couldn't believe how colourful it was, the orangey-ness of it. My Dad brought one home. A lorry had appeared in the street selling them off the back. I think they were from Cuba. We were so cut off from the rest of the world."

  There was a sadness about him as he looked out over the bridge, and she wanted to tell him it was going to be okay. He turned to look at her. Kiss me now, she thought.

  "I could fall into you," he said. At the time she hadn't understood what he meant, but now she knew.

  One moment he was there. The next he was gone.

  A policeman escorted her along the hospital corridor to a waiting area. Nurses chatted behind the reception desk. A man was shouting behind a curtained-off bed. Kate tried to take it all in, feeling far away from herself. This was the kind of thing that happened to other people, not to you. The policeman showed her to a line of bucket seats in the corridor and jerked his chin for her to sit down. Kate sat there in a daze, unable to comp
rehend what had just happened. What was the message Paul had received on his phone just before he jumped? What had been so terrible that he'd taken his own life? His mobile was still lying on the dressing table next to her make-up purse. Thinking about Paul's mobile, she rummaged in her bag for her iPhone. She needed to see that final photograph. She swiped through images she'd taken that day in Tirana, gazing at the last photo of her husband, the one of him standing naked with a hopeless look on his face. She put her finger on the screen, wanting to touch him one more time. My darling, come back to me. I love you so much. Wait, there was something else. Through her tears, she spread her fingers over the screen, enlarging the picture.

  Somebody was standing behind him.

  A bearded man loomed though the curtains behind her husband. The wind had blown the net curtains out, imprinting them on the man's face. Had he been waiting to push Paul off? Who was he? A burglar caught in the act? She rose from her seat, wanting to show the policeman standing guard, but he shook his head and put his hand on her shoulder. The way he pressed down made Kate realise for the first time that the police thought she had something to do with Paul's death. How ridiculous. Surely they didn't think she had pushed her husband off the balcony? A kaleidoscope of thoughts went through her head, each one turning into another.

  A young doctor in hospital scrubs came towards them. "Mrs Julia?" he asked in English. She nodded. "Please would you come with me? The police need you to identify your husband's body. I'm sorry."

  Patients shuffled past them as they turned this way and that down hospital corridors. A porter pushed a stunned-looking old woman in a wheelchair with a drip up her nose. Somewhere a mournful alarm sounded. Finally they came to what Kate guessed was the morgue viewing area. Her body walked through the door, but her mind didn't. Not my husband, she thought, not my husband. The walls were painted coral pink. A box of tissues lay on the table, and through the louvered windows she could see two men in blue scrubs standing over a gurney.