Denial (Sam Keddie Thriller Book 2)

by Paddy Magrane

  ‘No, that’s kind but we’re – .’

  ‘Guessing you called the police,’ interrupted Kyle.

  ‘I –’

  ‘No worries, man. We’ll call them now.’ His voice projected into the room. ‘Enzo, would you do the honours?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the man at the door. ‘We best get going, carry on looking.’

  ‘Enzo and I will help.’

  ‘No, really.’ The voice was already getting quieter. The man was moving away from the door, Kyle’s persistence clearly discomforting.

  ‘It’s no problem,’ shouted Kyle into the darkness outside. He then shut the door.

  Sam exhaled, his tense shoulders dropping, and moved away from the wall.

  Kyle crossed the cabin to him. ‘Gotta say, man. I thought you were mad. But that guy was very shifty. I’m thinking you might be telling the truth.’

  Sam slumped back into the seat before the heater. ‘I am.’

  A dark cloud descended over him, as he began considering the terrible possibility that the only thing the police would find was Zahra’s body.

  ‘You’ve gotta talk to the police, man.’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ said Sam.

  He watched as Enzo and Kyle exchanged suspicious glances.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ said Sam. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide. It’s just that I’ve got to get moving. Those guys you just spoke to – one my build, the other big and broad, I’m guessing?’

  Kyle nodded.

  ‘Well they won’t give up until they’ve found me. So if they see the police arrive and I leave with them, they’ll just follow the police and then they’ll know exactly where I’m being questioned – and where I will eventually emerge.’

  ‘This is fucked up,’ said Kyle.

  ‘That’s exactly what it is.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Enzo. ‘Take the clothes. We don’t need them.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sam, who’d resumed rooting through his jacket for his passport and wallet. He pulled them out of a pocket along with a handful of coins. The passport was limp with damp and would be buckled when it dried out, but Sam reckoned it might just pass muster if requested. As for the cash in his wallet, that would dry out.

  ‘Take my coat too,’ said Kyle. He reached for a parka that hung on the wall to his side. It was as if they wanted rid of Sam now. He’d gone from crank to liability.

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Fuck that,’ said Kyle. ‘Just take it. Unless you wanna freeze all over again. And there’s some sneakers that one of the guys left behind.’

  Kyle pulled the shoes from a locker and passed them to Sam. He then opened the door and stepped out. Re-emerging a moment later, he said. ‘All clear. There’s a staircase up to the bridge just to your left. Better get going before the police arrive, or your two buddies come back.’

  ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done,’ said Sam as he moved to the door.

  ‘Hey,’ said Kyle, briefly slapping Sam on the back outside the cabin. Sam winced as the hand narrowly missed his wound. He suspected the gesture was not meant affectionately, but as a nudge. ‘It’s no problem.’

  Sam began walking left towards the bridge then, when he was sure Kyle had closed the cabin door behind him, turned back on himself. Zahra would also have been pulled downstream which meant this was the only direction in which to search.

  The path ahead, dimly lit by the streetlights above, seemed clear, but that didn’t stop Sam’s heart from racing. Aside from the sanctuary of the rowing club cabin, the riverbank was deserted. The steep stone walls to the street above were at least twelve metres high, giving the embankment a sunken, isolated feel. There were shadows everywhere, countless places for two men to hide. Sam edged forward.

  Seconds later he heard a sound ahead, and froze. A familiar voice called out.

  ‘No sign of them, Harry. They could be miles from here by now.’

  Then: ‘Fuck it. Let’s get out of here.’

  It was hard to tell what distance the voices had carried. They could have been far away, or close by. But Sam’s reaction was immediate. He turned, and as fast as his weakened legs would carry him, ran towards the stairs. It was like jogging through thick mud but eventually he reached the open gate.

  Again he heard a man’s voice from somewhere down the embankment. It sounded fainter, further away, but it still acted like an injection of cold, undiluted fear to his system. He tried to climb the steps quickly. But he couldn’t manage haste. His feet felt leaden.

  Back on the bridge, he followed his original path across the Tiber, but this time on the far side so that, if the men were walking back towards the bridge along the embankment, they would not spot him. His head was sunk into his chest. He felt cold to his bones.

  At the end of the bridge he glanced behind him. Two women were walking arm-in-arm in his wake, their chatter and laughter carrying towards him. But otherwise there were no other figures.

  Sam crossed a lane of traffic and moved down an alleyway of crumbling ochre-coloured walls and black cobble-stones. He passed a trattoria, its entrance overhung with creepers. Inside, a waiter was lighting candles on the tables as he prepared for the evening. Sam realised where he was. This was Trastevere, where he and Eleanor had stayed. He remembered how she had tripped on the uneven, undulating surface of a cobbled alley and he’d caught her. He felt his eyes well with tears. He had to call Eleanor’s aunt. Find out how she was.

  As the dark of the alley began to close in on him, he couldn’t shake a pair of images from his head. Eleanor lifeless in a hospital bed. And Zahra dropping to the inky and perishing depths of the Tiber. A horrible knowledge surfaced in his head. It was all his fault.

  A single word disturbed his dark thoughts. What was it Zahra had uttered before she jumped?

  ‘Potzarni,’ she’d said. ‘Potzarni.’

  What had she meant? Was it a word in her native tongue, some message from the gut as she faced the terror of the river? He had no idea.

  He would search for its meaning, but he had little hope of finding any. Little hope at all.

  Chapter 41

  Rome

  Tapper and Wallace sat at a table in a bar, a brightly-lit place decorated with framed photographs of football teams. A handful of men were gathered in one corner, eyes glued to a football match on television. Tapper and Wallace had the opposite corner to themselves. They could talk undisturbed.

  Wallace had a pint of lager in front of him, Tapper a brandy. He craved a shower. He was a fit man, but chasing after Keddie and Idris had left him damp with sweat, his shirt clinging to his back.

  Whatever he’d expected from this trip, he never thought he’d be hounding his quarry through the city. He let Wallace take the lead, hung back to keep his face hidden from Keddie and Idris. But when they’d cornered them at the river, he felt both fear and dark pleasure, as if he longed to push them into the river, to watch them gasp for breath. The sensation surprised him yet at the same time felt quite familiar, like he’d bumped into a long-lost relative who shared the same physical features and mannerisms.

  But now those contradictory feelings were eclipsed by doubt, which had crept into the bar to sit by his side like an unwanted guest.

  ‘No one could have survived the river,’ Wallace said, reading his thoughts. ‘It’s not just the cold, but the currents. They’d have been dragged under and either drowned or passed out. The river’s got ’em, I tell you.’

  ‘I want to believe you, Pat. It’s just that, in my experience, the woman has a knack of surviving.’

  ‘She’s dead, Harry. I tell you.’

  Wallace’s solid certainty was comforting. Tapper felt himself relax a fraction.

  The big man took a gulp of his lager, wiping his mouth with the back of a meaty hand. ‘It was weird what she said before she jumped, wasn’t it?’

  Tapper felt a prickle of electricity. ‘I didn’t hear anything. I was further up the stairs.’

  ‘Sh
e turned and grabbed Keddie’s arm before she leapt. Looked a bit possessed. Then said something like ‘Botzarni or Potzarni.’

  The colour drained from Tapper’s face.

  ‘What’s up, Harry? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  For Tapper, the mere mention of the word conjured up nightmares and brought on cold sweats. He thought again of water, of faces in the darkness crying for mercy.

  ‘How did she say the word?’ he gabbled, his mind in overdrive. ‘Like she was repeating it for emphasis, or using it for the first time?’

  ‘I dunno, Harry.’

  Tapper took a sip of brandy. It was like rocket fuel. He felt the alcohol burning in his stomach.

  ‘We need to go to one more place, Pat,’ he said. ‘I know the chances are slim, but if they have survived, it’s where they’ll head. We must be there to greet them.’

  Chapter 42

  Rome

  The receptionist on duty smiled at Sam as he entered the hotel. It was the place where he and Eleanor had stayed and Sam remembered that there were two laptops for guests’ use just off reception. If he could get past the desk without being challenged, he figured that one was bound to be free.

  ‘Can I help?’ asked the man on duty.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Sam, walking purposefully towards the laptops. The receptionist returned to his work.

  Both laptops were in use. A thin, older woman was looking at TripAdvisor on one, while the other was occupied by a boy playing a video game, his father sitting on a nearby sofa tapping at a BlackBerry. When the man looked up and saw Sam waiting, he barked some German at the kid. The boy immediately vacated the machine. Sam thanked them both and sat.

  Opening Google, he tried countless derivations of what he thought Zahra had said – Potzarni, Port Zarne, Potzarny, Potsarni, Pozzarni – and was rewarded with results that included an Italian American congressman, an opera singer from the 19th Century, a town in Bosnia, a hotel in southern Spain, an S&M site, reams of results in Russian and Polish, and one page with zero results. He was despairing, convinced he’d misheard Zahra, when he saw a suggestion just below the search box. ‘Did you mean: Pozzani?’ He clicked on the word.

  The screen filled with results, all referring to the same place.

  Pozzani was a town in Sicily. There was a map to the right of the page, images of a sandy beach, and a square-looking citadel perched on the water’s edge. There were Wikipedia pages in English and Italian and, as subsequent results revealed, dozens of links to pensiones and campsites. A holiday resort. Hardly murky but then, as Sam knew all too well from countless clients, the most innocuous façades could hide the darkest truths.

  Sam clicked on the map. Suddenly Pozzani was seen in context. A town close to the southern-most point of the island. West was Tunisia. South was Malta and then, as Sam tracked down the map, the coast of Libya.

  He revisited the search box and typed in: ‘Pozzani immigrants’. The results told a more immediate story. It was clear that Pozzani was a favoured landing point for naval and coastguard vessels who’d picked up immigrants in trouble. The town had temporary accommodation in dedicated buildings and large tents and had, it appeared, seen thousands of immigrants pass through in the last year alone. There was talk of tension in the town between different groups of immigrants, as well as resistance from certain parts of the community. Sam had seen enough to know that he’d found the right place, and clicked the window shut. A screensaver – a bland landscape of rolling green fields and bright blue sky – filled the screen.

  He paused, thinking of that moment on the staircase, the sudden unlocking of memory – the fragment that had burst to the surface of Zahra’s mind. He knew of cases where patients with retrograde amnesia remembered snatches of lost memory when they were exposed to smells, sights, textures or sounds similar to those experienced during the original trauma. But what was the prompt in Zahra’s case? Water? And if Pozzani was where the injury occurred, how come she started remembering in Catania? Retrograde amnesia was the loss of memory prior to an injury. Sam was confused.

  Stepping out of the hotel, he felt a chill wintry wind whip down the alley from the piazza at the end. He thought of the men on his tail. Now that there were two of them, the larger man was thrown into context. He seemed like a hired grunt, while the slimmer man – of whom Sam had seen little more than a silhouette – was somehow more polished. He tried to remember his voice. A trace of Essex, but less pronounced than the other man. And what had he said on the stairs? ‘Be careful.’ And then a name. Sam racked his brain, but couldn’t remember what it was. But he did recall the tone, the hint of concern for the other man. While it hadn’t suggested a merciful stance when it came to him or Zahra, there was some hint of friendship between the two men.

  And then there was the calling out on the embankment. The sense that a search was being abandoned. And a name that Sam had heard clearly. Harry. But who was Harry?

  Another thought occurred to him. How the hell had they traced them to Rome? Had the bigger man somehow managed to pick up their trail back in Amsterdam, and follow them here? Sam was sure they’d shaken him off in the city. Then, with a sinking feeling, he remembered. That brief conversation in the building in Bijlmer, when he and Zahra were hiding from their pursuers. When Zahra had talked about Rome. They’d clearly not been alone in the dark. There must have been someone listening, someone willing to pass on a scrap of information in exchange for some cash. Thanks to them, the two men had turned up here and, by sniffing around an immigrants’ camp, had picked up their trail again.

  He reached the piazza and saw a church. Remembering the spiel Eleanor had given him about the building – how the campanile and mosaics were 12th Century – he wanted to weep again. He needed to call Eleanor’s aunt.

  There was a phone booth directly across from where he stood. He looked around the piazza. There were people about, but no sign of the heavy-set man or his companion. He crossed the piazza and stopped by the booth, pulling a handful of change from his pocket. His hand was shaking when he lifted the receiver. He wanted to put it down to the cold, but knew it was fear.

  He fed coins into the slot, dialled the international code for the UK, and then Eleanor’s aunt’s number. It began to ring, a soft purring noise. Perhaps he’d got the wrong number. But then a familiar voice answered.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Susan, it’s Sam.’

  ‘Sam! Where are you? I’ve been trying to get hold of you.’ Clearly she hadn’t been listening when they’d last spoken.

  ‘I had to get away. A conference.’ The lie sat in his stomach, acid burning away at his insides.

  Susan sighed. ‘It’s not good, Sam.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘She’s had the MRI.’

  Sam felt his mouth go dry. ‘And?’

  ‘It’s complicated, Sam. They think her brain moved during the attack.’

  The phone was hot against his ear, but otherwise Sam was enveloped by the cold. His legs felt weak again, as if he might drop to the ground. He wanted to find a corner to hide, a place to pull himself into a tight ball and forget everything.

  ‘Sam. Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There may be severe damage.’

  Sam had a brief vision of the large man flinging Eleanor aside. A sudden flash of violence. Her head smacking against the radiator. ‘Surely there’s something else that can be done? She’s young, strong. They can’t have exhausted every treatment.’

  There was a persistent beeping sound, the phone demanding more change. Sam fumbled in his pocket but by the time he’d pulled enough coins out, the phone had gone dead.

  He stood like a statue, phone still clamped to his ear, eyes fixed on the stone work of the building behind the booth. He saw Eleanor as clear as day in front of him, ached to be by her side.

  Laughter from a passing couple woke him from his trance. The Eleanor he ached for had been torn from his life. He felt his blood heat,
the anger rise from his stomach to his chest. He burned for justice.

  Had Zahra survived the river? Or had she been pulled, lifeless, from the water by the police? He shook the darkness from his head. She was a survivor. He had to believe that.

  And if Zahra was alive, would she head to Pozzani or disappear for good, convinced that he just brought trouble to her door? All he knew was that he had a clue, one he felt compelled to pursue.

  Chapter 43

  The Strait of Messina

  Sam lay on a hard couchette in the hot compartment. The curtains were drawn but a crack in the material revealed the ferry’s bowels – metal trusses and steam ducts covered in the same grey paint, and the orange of a life buoy.

  The train had boarded the ferry shortly before dawn and was now easing across the water to Messina. From there, according to the map he’d briefly consulted at Rome’s Termini Station, it was less than an hour to Catania and then possibly the same to Pozzani.

  He turned on his bunk. The wound on his back protested and he winced. But at least he was warm.

  The other three Italian passengers in his cabin – a woman and two men in their early twenties – had got off the train and were on the ship somewhere, possibly sobering up with coffee after the two bottles of Chianti that had been consumed on the journey. Sam had taken a few sips to be friendly, lied about his intentions in Sicily – he was, as far as they were concerned, heading for a language school in Palermo – and then feigned sleep while the others continued imbibing. Had they not been so keen to get pissed, he reckoned they would have questioned him a little more. He was, after all, unshaven, travelling without baggage and wearing clothes that were a size too large. There was a lot about him that didn’t add up.

  The boat groaned and Sam felt a drop in his stomach as the vessel pitched downwards. Despite being cocooned in the train, layer upon layer of dense metal between him and the water, he still sensed a storm outside, imagined water lashing against the side as the ferry battled forward through a wintry sea.