by Chris Ewan
He was starting to feel sick and dizzy and dehydrated. Was he just chasing the sun out here? Had the gang simply dispatched him to this point while they made off with the bag of cash?
Or was there more down there than he could spy? He couldn’t see the rear of the beach from up above. Trees and overhanging rocks shaded it. There was still a chance. One he was prepared to cling to as desperately as he gripped the abrasive limestone cliff face as he skidded and slid his way down.
But when he finally reached the bottom, when his boots sank deep into the fine sand and coarse pebble drifts, the last of his hope seeped away along with his energy. There was nobody waiting for him. There wasn’t anything to be found. There was just the beach. Just the scorched sand and the glowing pebbles and the towering, scraped rock on either side of him and the twisted pines and the sea and the relentless, blazing sun.
Trent doubled over, the Ruger nibbling at his spine. He sucked in the dry, cooked air. He thought of the punishing walk back up the cliff and the long, hot tramp to the car that lay ahead.
He straightened and placed his hands on his hips and cursed as he scanned the ridge high above him. Perhaps they were watching him? Perhaps there would be a signal of some kind?
But no, the rocky spurs were unmoving. He closed his eyes against the screaming white glare and panted weakly and fumbled at the pocket of his shirt. He removed his mobile and flipped it open to an inane electronic chime. For a moment, he asked himself if it would be dangerous to call Girard? Perhaps he was in pursuit of a member of the gang? But what good would waiting do?
He shielded the display against the sun with his hand. And right then, just as his thumb hovered above the CALL button, he heard the faint insect whine of an outboard motor.
A rubber dinghy swept into view at the mouth of the inlet, prow raised, white water frothing around the rear. There were two figures on board. One guy was ducked low at the back, holding onto the tiller. Another guy was standing at the front, one foot raised and propped on the grey rubber rim. Both men wore green army surplus jackets, black ski masks and black gloves.
The boat skimmed closer, racing in from the darker, deeper waters towards the spearmint green shallows. It swooped around in a curve, the guy at the back cutting the revs until the craft drifted to rest two hundred metres out from the shore, rocking on its own wash. He let go of the tiller and lifted an assault rifle from his lap. He wedged the stock into his shoulder and propped his elbow on his thigh and sighted through the scope, lens winking in the glare.
Trent dropped his phone to the sand. He reached his hand behind his back, fingers seeking the Ruger. He stood sideways on, the revolver clenched tight. He waited. He didn’t want to prompt the man to shoot. He had no cover and his chances of hitting the men on the boat were bad.
The craft tilted and swayed. The guy at the back maintained his steady aim. The guy on the front spread his legs wide, feet planted securely. His back was straight, arms folded across his chest, as if he was carefully and calmly evaluating the situation.
Sunlight flared off the water all around the boat. It glinted off the rifle scope. Trent’s eyes watered and blurred. But still he stared on. Watching. Waiting.
In his head, he rehearsed the moves he’d need to make to whip the Ruger out. How he’d drop to one knee on the sand. Squeeze off as many rounds as he could, as fast as he could.
He was still thinking through the mechanics of it all when the guy at the front uncrossed his arms and bent down into the hull. He lifted something for Trent to see, holding it in both hands above his head.
The holdall. Trent recognised it right away. It was no fake. It bulged with the three million in cash. The guy’s arms shook under its weight.
He set it back down, then straightened and looked at Trent. He shook his head. He did it slowly, like an exaggerated signal. His shoulders slumped and he showed Trent his gloved palms as if he was disappointed by something. Dismayed, possibly.
Then he swivelled to his left and raised an arm and pointed a gloved finger back towards the entrance of the inlet, high towards a sloping ridge some forty feet above the deep blue waters at the mouth of the cove. There was a patch of greenery there. A few trees. And there were two men emerging from behind a boulder. One of them was wearing a green army jacket and a balaclava. He was holding an assault rifle in gloved hands and he was using it to prod the other man in the back. The second guy was stumbling towards the cliff edge. The nylon of his blue windbreaker gleamed in the sun.
Girard.
Trent started forwards, then stopped. The ridge was perhaps five hundred metres away. There was no easy way to get there from below. Limestone towered above him. He’d have to scramble back up the path, head around the rear of the inlet and find his way out to the spit of rock. It could take him an hour. Maybe more. And the hostile guy was way beyond the range of the revolver.
Trent watched. He couldn’t look away.
He saw Girard shoved towards the edge. Saw him windmill his arms. Then the guy with the rifle grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him round until he was facing up to him, his back to the sea, his heels on the precipice.
There was a curving curtain of rock beneath him. It concealed the drop from Trent’s view. He guessed there’d be water down there. Deep water maybe. Or possibly it was just rocks. Which was worse? He didn’t know. Didn’t have time to consider it any further.
The guy in the ski mask took a step backwards and then his wrist jerked and a clutch of seabirds took flight from the cliffs. Girard crumpled at the waist, his arms grown slack at his sides, and he tipped slightly forwards before tilting back the other way, his head a loose and fatal pendulum, pulling him down and over the cliff as the report from the shot clanked and rebounded around the canyon of chalky rock, accompanied by the panicked squawk and flap and tumble of the fleeing gulls.
Trent listened for a splash. He listened very hard. But the guy at the back of the dinghy had cranked the outboard motor and its churning roar filled his ears. The boat swooped round and blasted out of the inlet, low at the rear, high at the prow, where the lead guy had grabbed a rifle of his own and was aiming it at Trent.
Trent yanked free the Ruger but he didn’t fire. A strange kind of inertia took hold of him, as if his heart and his brain had simply stopped. He clenched the revolver numbly at his side and watched the boat race away. Watched the white, foaming suds wash out from the craft towards the porous rocks. Watched the third guy scramble back from the ridge against the blinding sun. Watched the curtain of gnarled limestone. Listened to the zealous keening of the boat’s motor fade out into a mournful silence.
Faint waves brushed the shore. The wheeling gulls beat their wings and shrieked and settled on new ledges.
Still Girard didn’t appear.
Drowsily, Trent emptied his pockets and unbuttoned his shirt. He yanked free his boots and his socks. He stepped into the tepid shallows and waded out until his jeans were soaked and clinging to his thighs.
He dived forwards and the water whooshed and whirled in his ears, and when he surfaced he kicked with his legs and pulled with his arms and swam hard until he was spitting salt water and gasping for breath and his limbs were heavy.
It took him a long time to reach the rock curtain. Too long, he knew. He kept expecting Girard’s corpse to appear floating somewhere ahead of him, tangling in his arms like driftwood. But when he reached the spot where Girard had fallen, there was no trace of him at all. The water was an impenetrable greenish blue. It lapped eerily against the sheer rock. He treaded water and scanned the seesaw surface, feeling the tug of hidden tides against his submerged legs, and then he raised himself up and snatched a fast breath and dived as deep as he could go. But there was only blackness down there. No sense of the bottom. Nothing other than chill water passing through his fingers. Nothing besides the cold and the spiralling vacuum hush and the crushing weight of all the water on his lungs.
* * *
The young man felt his head empty of b
lood. The ground tilted and swayed. It fell away from him and surged back up, as if it was sprung like a trampoline. He slumped and jarred his knees on the floor. Snatched his hand away from something glutinous and milky.
The walls were a dizzying swirl, pinwheeling madly, letters and words jumbled and blurred. Photographs and maps slid around in impossible directions, converging and overlapping and rearranging themselves as if they were being manipulated on the screen of a tablet computer.
The far wall pulsed. It throbbed. The bloody streaks. The pinkish gunk.
And slumped against the toppled desk, limbs slackened, torso crumpled, was the body of the man he’d seen enter the apartment alongside Trent. He could tell by the charcoal jacket he had on. The white linen shirt, stained darkly red. His jaw. The heavy stubble. But not his face. No, not that.
The young man felt reality slide away from him. Felt the floor slide with it. He toppled onto his side, and croaked as his lungs filled with the fetid air. He’d forgotten to breathe. Felt, somehow, that he’d forgotten how.
The rank gush came in fits and starts. Gobbled down, then bubbling up, like he might gag.
But he held on. Held back. Because all around him was the proof of what he’d suspected for so long. The maps. The plans. The ski mask and gloves, the cuffs, the ropes. The shotgun. The dead man. Him most of all.
The young man shook all over. But not with terror. With rage. He knew now. Knew, for a fact.
All that had happened. All that had been done and not done.
It was Trent. It was always him.
Chapter Forty-four
Hours later, Trent stumbled in through his unsecured front door. He was weak. Disoriented. When he’d first got back to the BMW, he’d drunk the remainder of the bottle of water he’d left inside, its contents warmed by the sun. But it hadn’t been enough to douse the hot coal of fear and frustration that had lodged in his gut or to fight off the twitchy burning sensation in his temples, the first inklings of the head-ache that was now thumping behind his eyes.
There wasn’t much of the drive back that he remembered. It had passed in a hallucinatory blur. A world of warped memories and wild imaginings. Of the flicker of light on water. Of the mirror-bright dazzle of the white sandstone rocks. Of the tumbling, plunging silhouette of the rag-doll friend he’d sent to his death. Girard, buckling, then plummeting; crumpling, then falling; the sequence repeated over and over, making less and less sense.
Trent’s hair and skin were crusty with salt and sand. The evaporated seawater had formed a gritty rime around his eyes and nostrils and badly cracked lips. His jeans had dried in the sun during his trek back through the arid landscape, shrink-wrapping his thighs and calves so that he moved with a curious, stiff gait, like his knees were locked in place.
He shed his shirt and dropped it on the floor as he weaved along the hallway towards his living room. There were no new packages left waiting for him but a green light strobed on his answering machine. He hit play. One message. It was from Stephanie, a shrill demand that he call her and tell her what was going on. She must have got his number from Jérôme’s lawyer. There was no communication from Xavier. He wasn’t surprised. He didn’t expect to hear anything more for quite some time. And even if he did, what could he do? His situation seemed hopeless. Alain was dead, his body splayed on the floor inside the boxroom – a problem he couldn’t even begin to think of a solution for – and he had no alternative way of raising the cash sums the gang might seek. Yes, he had money. He was comfortably well off. But he didn’t have millions of euros at his disposal.
Girard was gone, too, his corpse drawn away by the tides or perhaps sucked down to the seabed. He had an elderly mother, Trent knew. And there was a daughter living somewhere close to Strasbourg. One day soon, if the currents were kind, they would receive a telephone call or a knock at the door that Trent didn’t like to imagine.
He yanked the Ruger from the back of his jeans and tossed it onto his coffee table, along with the crushed box of spare rounds. He unbuttoned his fly and showed his back to the closed door of the boxroom as he moved into the bathroom. He tussled with his jeans. Peeled them down over his thighs. He had to sit on the toilet to haul them from his calves and feet like he was removing a wetsuit. The denim had left a faint blue stain on the inside of his knee. He shed his underwear, then turned on the shower and stepped into the bath.
He pulled the shower curtain across and edged under the flow. It was icy cold and for a second he thought he might pass out. He braced his hands against the wall tiles and gritted his teeth and bowed his head, letting the cold liquid sluice through his hair and drench his shoulders and chest.
He tasted salt on his lips. Scrubbed his palms around his face and swallowed some of the spray. His skin was slowly loosening, changing from something tight and parched and withered to something that could stretch and move. And though his scalp tingled with a pleasant numbness, his mind was sparking to life. He felt like a man rousing himself from a bewildering dream. And just maybe, he thought, if he could stand to linger beneath the chilly jet, he’d find that he was capable of figuring out a new way to get at Jérôme. To find Aimée.
Then the shower curtain swished back and Trent’s eyes snapped open and he swivelled to be confronted by a masked figure holding a shotgun.
The guy looked like one of Xavier’s gang. He was wearing a balaclava, black leather gloves and a hooded grey sweatshirt. He was holding the shotgun down by his hip. He didn’t shoot right away. He hesitated. Flinched, almost. It was a bad mistake. Trent lashed out with his right arm in a spray of water and snatched the shotgun barrel and wrenched it hard to the side but the guy didn’t let go. He was short and slight and Trent found that he’d lifted him with the shotgun and heaved him half into the tub.
The guy’s shoulder smacked against the white tiles and he rolled onto his back, his lower legs draped over the edge of the bath. He thrashed with his legs and flailed with his hands, trying to swing the shotgun back round and point it towards Trent.
Trent closed the space between them, cold spray hammering off his bare back. He had two hands on the shotgun now and he was forcing it down at the guy like he was trying to crush his throat with a metal bar. He cocked his head. Recognition dawned. The scarred wooden stock, the lengthy barrel, the blued finish. It was his shotgun. The one he’d stashed in the boxroom. And there was something odd about one of the guy’s hands. Something he didn’t have time to process right now.
It had only been a momentary lapse in concentration – mere fractions of a second – but it was enough for the guy to curl a finger around the trigger. Trent lifted his right foot in the air and stamped down hard on his chest. He groaned and slumped backwards. The shotgun had gotten slippery in the spray. It came away from the guy’s hands. Trent tossed it out of the bath just as the guy scrambled up to his feet and drove with his shoulder into Trent’s gut.
Trent was forced back against the pipework of the shower, spine bending the wrong way. Water danced off the guy’s masked head and shoulders as he reached up with a gloved hand and got a grip around Trent’s throat and shunted his chin back hard. He braced his knuckles beneath Trent’s jaw, crushing his trachea.
Frigid currents cascaded over Trent’s face. He blinked up through the spray towards the blurred showerhead and the ceiling beyond. Air wouldn’t come. He couldn’t breathe. He grasped for a handhold to push his attacker back. Tried finding an eye to gouge or his throat to jab. But his hands seemed to grope only the man’s arms or chest or the hood attached to his sweatshirt. He couldn’t see what he was doing. The vertebrae in his neck were forced right back by the man’s frenzied strength. Trent was half suffocating, half drowning. His system screamed for oxygen. His chest was cramping and aching, lungs itching with a hot acid sting.
His neck slipped back another fraction. He was looking behind himself now. And that was when he saw it. The circular metal fixture on the tiled wall above. The little plastic nipple. He withdrew his hand from the guy
and reached up. His fingers were an inch shy.
Dark spots clouded his vision. There was a shrill whistling in his ears.
He strained every muscle. Stretched every ligament. He went up on his toes, water pooling round his feet. If he slipped now it would be over. His neck might break or the guy could bear down on him. But if he didn’t breathe soon it would be over anyway.
He squatted a little, then jumped, and his neck overextended with a jolt of hot pain and his airways pinched shut. His fingers grasped at the plastic bud. He seized it and tugged on it hard.
The retractable washing line spooled out from the plug. Trent grasped a fistful of nylon cord in each hand and looped it round the guy’s neck. He tightened it like a noose and tugged very hard.
The guy gagged and croaked and his hand fell away from Trent’s throat. Trent snapped his face down, feeling his vertebrae snag and pop. The guy was scrabbling and clawing with his gloved fingers at the cord embedded in his skin. His leather gloves were a problem now. He couldn’t get a grip. Couldn’t slide a nail beneath the thread. And already the string was biting very deep. The guy’s mouth was opening and closing, lips smacking hopelessly together. His eyes bulged from behind the ski mask, the whites staining red.
Trent kept the tension high with his right hand and reached up and got a hold of the guy’s ski mask with his left. He ripped it away, taking some of his attacker’s blond hair with it. He wanted to see who’d come for him. He wanted to stare at the guy Xavier had sent as he squeezed the last of the life from his lungs.
But he wasn’t prepared for what he saw. Even with skin flushed and cheeks engorged, even with lips swollen and eyes protruding and a desperate, panicked look of utter terror on his face, Trent recognised the young man buckling to his knees in front of him.