The Turning Tide

  Which meant she would have to tell him about her deal with the Major and the danger they were in. It would be stupid not to. If he didn’t know Billy was on their side now, he might do something rash. If she kept Rab out of the loop it could be a disaster for them all.

  She didn’t know how to say it. ‘Rab, those guys who broke your fingers? They’re our only friends now.’ Or ‘Rab, we’re going to have to pretend for a while longer – or we could end up in a bag in the North Sea.’

  They had been listening to the radio in the car when Morag stormed off Diana Stuebner’s show on LCC. So Kerry had decided to release the photo after all. Erykah hoped the girl was right, and that staying in the public eye was the best way for her to keep from getting into worse trouble. Maybe with the Major dead and Billy and Buster under control, it could even turn out to be true. Erykah hoped so.

  As far as she had heard on the radio no one was looking for a woman in a headscarf. Not yet.

  Morag’s media faux pas might be enough to bring the press attention around to her illicit activities. Surely once that happened, she would have to step back from secretly pulling the strings of the SLU. Erykah could anonymously deliver the Schofield files to a newspaper – who knows, maybe even to Kerry? – and never have to think about any of this again.

  With a little luck Erykah could find herself home free. Free enough to get away, in any case.

  Maybe everything was going to be all right after all.

  From the path she could see the corner of their back garden. Best get the talk with Rab over with, then. She unlatched the gate and crossed the garden to the French doors.

  As she got closer she noticed the curtains were shut. Odd. Rab wouldn’t have done that until it was bedtime, and that was still hours off. On the edge of the back deck, a plant pot of flowers left from the lottery photo shoot was tipped on its side, broken. One of the French doors was partly open. Something was not right here.

  There were voices inside. Rab’s, and another man’s she didn’t recognise. They were arguing. Then the voices stopped.

  That was when she heard a muffled BANG.

  It sounded like it could have been a gunshot from inside the house. Very much so. Erykah froze with her hand on the doorknob. Rab had never held a gun in his life. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe something had dropped, a glass off a table, perhaps. Don’t be so silly. Erykah straightened her shoulders and started to open the door a bit further.

  BANG. A pause. BANG. Then a fourth time, and twice more. A click, the sound of someone releasing a magazine to reload. No, that was definitely a gun.

  So whoever was in there – however many of them there were – had just shot her husband. Most likely shot him dead.

  She doubled over and stepped carefully back to the garden gate, closed and latched it behind her as softly as possible. She got on her hands and knees and crawled around the side of the house. The pulse in her neck thrummed hard.

  She stopped and flattened her entire body on the ground. There was an unfamiliar saloon car parked on the street outside the house. Black, maybe dark blue. The windows were tinted like a limousine’s. She tried to read the number plate but that angle wasn’t right; she would have to go all the way to the street to see it.

  The front door opened. Through the low branches of the hedge, she saw two pairs of shoes walk out into the front garden. Unfamiliar shoes, black lace-up, and suit turn-ups.

  ‘I’m telling you, I heard something,’ a man said. It was a deep voice, London accent, no one she knew.

  ‘Maybe it was a cat.’

  ‘Maybe.’ The first pair of feet took a few steps towards the hedge. The sound of metal on metal.

  ‘Hey, how did you get on with that new silencer?’

  ‘Eh, not the worst. Loads of muzzle flash though. Might go back to the Hush Puppy. Listen, I’m going to do a check of the perimeter just in case.’

  ‘What, and call more attention to the fact that we’re here? Someone will see you for sure prowling around in the garden. Come on, let’s get inside before the wife gets home.’

  A chuckle. ‘Yeah, all right. Wouldn’t want to kill the mood when she gets in. Did you see the photos? I bet she’s a goer.’ He whistled low. ‘Can’t wait for a little romance.’

  ‘Yeah, I saw the photos, mate. One thing at a time. Get her to hand over the files, then you can have your fun.’

  ‘Lotta hassle over a few pieces of paper,’ the second one said. ‘Wonder what it’s about?’

  ‘Mate, if I ain’t being paid to think, then I don’t,’ the first one said. ‘We top the pair of them, make it look like a burglary gone wrong. Anything else is above my pay grade.’

  ‘Guess you’re right,’ the other one said. ‘It’s funny, if I had won the lottery and was all over the papers I would have put in a security system by now.’

  ‘People are stupid, that’s why bad things happen to ’em,’ the first one said. The two men laughed. Their footsteps went back inside and the door slammed shut.

  Erykah held her breath until her lungs were screaming for air, and when she finally opened her mouth, stuffed a fist between her teeth and bit down hard. The hot drops rolling over her knuckles might have been tears or they might have been blood.

  : 28 :

  It was a couple of minutes before she could breathe properly again.

  No one had come back outside that she could see. Erykah edged past the back of the house towards the towpath, keeping her eyes glued to the windows. Once it was out of sight she picked up speed. She ran as fast and hard as she could, past the cricket club and the park, all the way to the boat club.

  The building was quiet. Anyone around at this time of day would be on the water. With most of the women’s and vet’s squads on training camp in Lucerne, there would be a handful of people coming in and out at most.

  Her heart was beating hard. Ring the police? But what if the killers led back to the Major and they were all exposed? Call Billy? She tried his number, but it was switched off.

  The motion detector lights in the corridors flickered to life one by one as she walked past. The blinds were drawn in the inner office. Rowing machines and workout equipment hulked in the shadows in the corners of the gym. She swept past them to the doors in the back.

  Erykah wrinkled her nose as she entered the changing room. The familiar, musty smell of damp wellies lingered in the air. Sports bras and lycra one-pieces left hung from the radiators and dried to a crisp. Erykah spun the combination lock on her old locker and it popped open. She was relieved to find that nothing inside had been moved or touched since she walked out.

  Maybe she could stay here, wait it out a few hours. Or even until the next morning, if she couldn’t find Billy. But no, that was too dangerous. If the men at the house knew about her rowing, this was surely the first place they would think to look for her.

  The envelope and card Nicole gave to her on Valentine’s Day was still stuffed in the corner of the locker door. Erykah felt for the key, the impression it left in the paper. She stuck the envelope into her bag, grabbed a few bits and pieces of clothes she had left behind, and shut the door.

  She sank down on the wooden bench and held her head in her hands. What was going on? She should have taken that key when Nicole gave it to her, packed her bag, left the house before Rab came home and never looked back. Maybe if she had, none of this would have happened. The Major wouldn’t have died. Rab would still be alive. And she wouldn’t be in an empty, horrible, stinking changing room, fearing for her life.

  She heard a few people come in and out of the main doors. Veteran men, from the sound of it. Her backside grew numb and cold from the bench, but she didn’t want to shift and risk anyone hearing her. Eventually, after a few hours, she finally heard the last one leave.

  It was fully dark outside. It was a mile up the towpath, give or take, to Nicole’s cottage. About fifteen
minutes walking, ten at a jog, in the direction of the station.

  At Nicole’s cottage, everything was dark. She fumbled the key out of the envelope and tried it in the lock. The key rattled in the hole and felt like it started to turn, but something wasn’t right – it wasn’t catching. She found a cycling LED in her bag and shone the light on it for a better look.

  The lock wasn’t turning, because the hole was too big. Or the key was too small. She took the key out of the lock and examined it under the light, turning it over in her hands. There was some raised lettering on the side of the key, Erykah licked her thumb and rubbed at it.

  Which is when she realised it wasn’t even a real key.

  Erykah’s wounded cry echoed out over the water, sending a pair of startled geese flapping and honking down the river’s edge.

  She had got it wrong, entirely. It wasn’t a copy of Nicole’s house key. The lettering on the side had revealed the name of a chain of stationers. It wasn’t a key at all, it was a trinket, a piece of junk jewellery, a cheap piece of metal painted to look vintage. The kind of thing teenagers up and down the country would have bought for their valentines and still have change from a five-pound note. She would probably have more luck trying to open the door with the underwire in her bra than with this stupid thing.

  Why not? She had tried and failed to pick the lock at Damian Schofield’s office, but the principle wasn’t so difficult. And there was the book. Yes, there it was, buried under the piles of clothes and the Schofield folders, the dog-eared paperback of puzzles and mind games. Erykah sat on the ground and flipped to the page about locks. The LED lit up a small white circle on the page and she read it twice over to make sure she understood.

  The instructions were basic and the illustrations were only line drawings, but that was no problem. What other choice did she have? Billy was still not answering. Going home was not an option, not with what those two men had been talking about doing to her. Going back to the boat club was too dangerous, and ringing 999 – no. She could break a window, but someone might hear her or spot it and call the police.

  It was picking the lock or nothing. She had been so close to getting it right at Professor Schofield’s office, it might work this time. Erykah looked up and down the towpath. It was as quiet as a country lane. With any luck if the killers came along she would hear them coming long before they got to her.

  According to the book picking a lock required two tools, one to put pressure and start turning the lock, and the other to feel for the moving parts inside. The lock at Schofield’s had been a Yale lock with a tumbler and pins, but the mortice lock at Nicole’s wasn’t all that different in theory. In theory. The reality, as the book hinted, was that mortice locks were harder to pick.

  Instead of the sprung pins of a Yale lock to feel around for, there were lever tumblers inside instead – a set of flat metal plates that, when pushed at the right depth, slid into alignment and allowed the lock to turn.

  Erykah peeled off her coat. A sharp tang of body odour wafted up to her nose, the smell of concentration and anxiety. She unhooked her bra through the fabric of her dress and shrugged and wiggled her arms, sliding the straps over her shoulders as best she could without baring her skin to the cold breeze. The grey silk bra dropped off her body to the ground. She picked it up and felt the damp edges of the cups. Yes, the thin strip of metal would be perfect. She snipped through the fabric with the scissors of the multitool and pushed against the underwire until it slid out.

  She had a pick. Now she needed something for tension.

  The fake key would do. It fitted into the lock a little bit, and was thicker than the underwire, so she could turn it more easily.

  Erykah squatted down so her eyes were at lock level and stuck the LED light in her mouth. She slipped the fake key back in and stared to turn until she felt the lock resisting. With one hand on the key keeping the tension she used her other hand to slide the tip of the underwire next to the fake key, but she couldn’t get purchase on anything with only the wire as it was. She slid it out again. Using the pliers on the multitool, she bent the tip at a right angle to the rest of the wire and then a second time, so the end looked like a P. She tensioned the fake key and tried again.

  The light she held in her mouth wobbled unevenly. A trickle of drool ran out of the corner of her mouth. Erykah was aware that she was shaking, and yet, with all her concentration focused on the tiny spot in front of her, it was as if it was happening to another body.

  But the lock would not budge. The book made it look tantalisingly easy, more of an intellectual challenge than a physical one. Her temperature was dropping fast, her fingers going numb in the chilly breeze. Erykah dropped her hands from the tools, blew on her fingers and rubbed her palms together to try to get circulation back up. The cold was seeping in, and experience told her that before long she would lose sensation in her hands altogether. Not a disaster if you happened to be out on the water in a rowing boat. Far worse if you were doing anything that required fine motor control.

  She had no idea how long she had been there. Minutes? Hours? It felt like an eternity, screwing all her concentration into this one tiny space. Erykah drew deep breaths and held them as long as she could, trying to steady her hands and quiet the sobs that threatened to take over her body if she stopped what she was doing for even a second to think about anything else.

  Still the lock would not move. She could feel the pins inside, feel the fake key start to bite, but her hand would slip or a tumbler would refuse to move and then . . . nothing.

  Erykah’s concentration was broken by a sound coming up the path behind her. Her shaking hands clutched at the improvised instruments. Were those footsteps? A light breeze swept the towpath. No, it was only the clattering of dead leaves on the dirt. In the panic her tenuous picking at the pins had slipped, so that she couldn’t even feel the tumblers with the end of the bra wire now. And her fingers were cold and numbly unresponsive.

  She sank down on the welcome mat, body shaking with cold, fear, and exhaustion. This was never going to work. Unless . . . Unless? With a finger she turned up the corner of the mat. Surely not. Nobody left their door key under the mat, not even in twee suburban Molesey. Although, whether true or not, people liked to flatter themselves that the suburb was not the kind of place where crime happened.

  Erykah’s mouth twisted into a bitter smile. She had a feeling that by tomorrow morning that particular strain of smugness was about to be blown wide open. Still, surely Nicole would not be so stu—

  And there, in the dust, was the key.

  She scrambled frantically, pulled the tools out of the lock, and slid in the real key. The lock clicked and gave way, the door swung open. Erykah collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  The tiles of the entryway were cold against her legs. Erykah closed the door, locked it from the inside, and pocketed the key. Outside on the path the noise started again. Not the wind. Footsteps. She was sure of it. The muffled sound grew closer.

  Erykah was hit with a wave of paranoia. What if the killers had followed her here, waiting until they knew she was alone and indoors to strike? Then they would have a better chance of doing whatever they wanted to unobserved, just as they had to Rab back at home. She didn’t want to risk being seen through the windows or stand up to close the curtains.

  Erykah checked her watch – Billy would be expecting a call soon or else he would assume something had happened to her and go past the house himself. She considered whether it might not be better to let him do that, then rejected the idea. No. Letting someone else walk into an ambush would be wrong. Even if it was someone who could probably handle himself better than most people would have a chance of doing.

  The noise started again. It sounded like only one person. Impossible to tell who it was without standing up and making herself known. Could be serious, could be nothing at all. Could be a neighbour. A jogger. Could be someone just ou
t for a late walk with their dog.

  Every one of her breaths seemed to her as loud as the puff of a steam engine. Surely if someone was outside, they could already hear her – or soon would.

  The footsteps passed the door of Nicole’s cottage, then stopped. A shuffle. Then they turned back in the direction they had come.

  She crawled on her hands and knees to the bedroom, dragging her bag on her coat behind her. Her phone started buzzing, startling her. It was Billy. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she whispered.

  ‘Sorry about that, I was in a black spot,’ he said. ‘You sound stressed. I went by but all the lights are off at your house. Everything OK?’

  ‘Yeah. No. I don’t know.’ A sob wrenched its way up to her throat. She choked it back, like a hiccup. ‘Did you see any police?’

  ‘If I did, would I be on the phone?’ It was a question that did not especially need an answer. ‘Why would there be police there? I’ve been listening to the radio, there’s nothing about a woman at the train station. No one’s looking for you.’

  ‘Someone’s at the house – or was. I don’t know who. I didn’t even get inside. I think Rab is d-dead.’

  ‘Shit.’ A pause. ‘That didn’t take long. Where are you now?’

  ‘Not far from there. Where are you?’

  ‘Fuck knows,’ he growled. ‘I went looking for you. Some damn houses by the river, about a mile from where I dropped you off.’

  ‘Hold on.’ Erykah opened the door and took a peek. At first it looked like there was no one there in the dark. Then a light from the moon caught the edge of a pair of silver-tipped boots and she saw him. The black-clad figure of Billy was only metres away from where she had heard the footsteps. ‘Oi, look to your right,’ she said.