by Max Thorn
Another customer had paid and was heading out. A broad-chested man in khaki pants, black tee-shirt, blue denim jacket and sneakers. He approached the door folding a receipt carefully into his wallet before putting the wallet away. A truck driver taking care of his expenses claim. He stepped outside.
I stood up and called to him, “Hi. Hello.”
He paused and looked at me with surprise.
“Are you going south? I’ve got sixty pounds for a ride to Scarborough.” I held up three twenty-pound notes. I noticed the notes quivering in the still air. My hand was shaking.
He eyed me up and down quickly with a look of concern. My bramble-scratched face was streaked with blood and mud. My right leg was coated in damp mud up to the knee. The other was muddy past the ankle. The shots through my rucksack had burst the bottle of water inside and my shirt was damp dark on one side. On the other side, a triangle of torn material flapped free, spotted with blood.
He said, “You can get a taxi for a lot less than that fella.”
“I need to get away from here right now.”
He hesitated. I’d found a Good Samaritan with a keen desire for cash; the only combination that would give me a lift without wasting too much time on questions.
“Come on then.”
“Could you back up to this building?”
He looked across the forecourt to see what was troubling me.
The car with the family drove off. Another customer entered the shop doorway.
The truck driver looked around the building corner behind me to see the access road. It was empty.
“If there’s nothing coming up here, I’ll try and back up.” He sauntered back to his cab.
I looked anxiously at the access road. A car came in fast and parked at the pump vacated by the family on vacation.
The truck started with a deep rumble. Its red stop lights flashed, the white backup lights came on. Compressed air hissed as the driver released the brakes. The cab and its high-sided trailer slowly reversed toward me, a loud beeping warning pedestrians of the maneuver.
I looked anxiously down the access road. Still clear.
The truck reversed a short way down the access road until the cab was level with the corner of the service station building. Compressed air hissed as the brakes went on and the cab rocked for a moment, stop lights blazing. The door on the passenger side opened a fraction.
I scrambled up the steps on the cab, pulled the door open and threw myself on the floor of the vehicle, pulling the door closed behind me.
The driver engaged gear immediately and we moved past the pumps, onto the exit road and out to the main highway. While he worked his way through the gears, I reached up and put the three twenties on the seat within his reach.
“So what or who are you running from fella?”
“People on motorcycles. With rifles and dogs. They were shooting at me.”
“What’ve you done?”
“Asked too many questions.”
The driver continued changing through the gears, checking his mirrors. Without comment, he touched the screen on a cell phone mounted on the instrument dashboard, prodding three digits.
A female voice from the hands-free speaker in the cab asked brightly, “Which emergency service do you require?”
He said, “Police.”
There was a short pause before the female voice said to someone else that it had a call for the police from a cell phone. The voice read out the number of the driver’s phone.
A male voice said, “Go ahead caller. You’re through to North Yorkshire Police.”
“Geoff Burnett, haulage driver here. I’ve just picked up a fella from the Tranmire services and we’re Scarborough bound. He’s in a real mess. He says people have been shooting at him and chasing him with dogs on the moor. Tell ’em what happened fella.”
I stayed beneath the dash, moved close to the center of the cab and told the police about the motorcycle riders and the dogs. I left out the part about the professor but I wasn’t sure why. I told them I’d been walking on the moors. I knew it sounded a bit suspicious.
The voice on the phone told me to go to Whitby police station to make a statement.
I said I was too scared and was going straight to London.
The police operator didn’t like that much, but said they’d look into it. I wasn’t sure how hard they’d look since even I felt I was being a little evasive.
The driver dealing with a bullet-punctured, flat tire back at the service station might have made a better complainant.
I hoped we weren’t being followed.
TWELVE
I stayed out of sight on the floor of the cab. On the way to Scarborough we discussed my onward journey. For one hundred pounds, Geoff agreed to take me to Barnet, just inside the northern edge of London’s M25 orbital motorway.
There was no traffic behind us as we pulled into the industrial estate where Geoff was collecting a small consignment. I stayed in the cab unseen while he secured the additional pallet loads in his trailer and collected paperwork. We were back on the main road in fifteen minutes and soon joined the M1 for the two-hour drive south to Barnet.
I went through my rucksack to see if I had any wearable clothes. Several bullets had torn through the bag. One had passed through my jacket and coat, entered the rucksack, split a bottle of water, smashed a hole through my tablet computer, and shattered my phone before exiting in several pieces through the side of the rucksack. My clothes from the previous day were wet through.
Geoff offered me clothes hangers. I got the wire hangers from his sleeping space behind the front seats and ducked out of sight again quickly. I hung a shirt and pants up on the passenger side near an air vent to dry them. My damp clothes and rucksack smelt of the woodland floor. I didn’t think Geoff would mind anything that diluted the odor of diesel fuel, engine oil, meat pies and perspiration in his cab.
Two hours later we joined the M25 briefly, before turning off for Barnet town center. I changed into my crumpled, almost dry shirt and spare pants. Then I cleaned the blood and mud from my face using my torn shirt and the water in the bottom of the split bottle. I put on my jacket. The hole through the left side pocket was not immediately noticeable.
Geoff stopped on the main street, wished me good luck and we shook hands. He set off a hundred pounds richer, to make the turn back to the M25.
At the end of the main street I found a four-star hotel. Inside I asked a real-life receptionist if I could use the hotel’s business center. She was less friendly than HomEvo’s receptionist but I put it down to my scratched face, crumpled clothes and anxious demeanor. When I offered to pay upfront, she showed me to a glass-partitioned room with three computer screens, a printer and a phone.
Since people were trying to kill me, I decided to stay away from my apartment for a while and lie low in my home town of eight million people. I needed a large amount of cash so I could avoid using traceable credit cards but take care of expenses like hotel accommodation, a new wardrobe of clothes or a plane ticket to Australia.
On the hotel’s computer I logged into my checking accounts. Altogether, I had ten thousand pounds in available cash in two accounts. The banks might be uncooperative if I made a large withdrawal near to closing time, so I called ahead to let them know I was coming to withdraw a large sum. It was just past four o’clock; I had twenty-five minutes to get to both banks and collect the cash. Both had branches on the main street a short walk away.
I printed a map of Christmas Pendle’s part of town, cleared the browsing history from the computer, called the car rental company to tell them that I’d left their car near Whitby at the professor’s flying saucer, and set off to the banks to collect enough money to live on and handle the unexpected for a few weeks.
* * *
The cash bulged conspicuously in my pockets. A minute’s walk away in Barnet’s shopping mall, I found a shop selling travel luggage, where I bought a money belt with eight pouches.
In
the mall toilets I locked myself in an empty cubicle to sort the money unseen. A foul fog of disinfectant and excrement filled the confined space. The counting of cash notes has a distinctive sound so I stopped when I heard other people come into the room. Eventually I’d divided the money into eight wads, filled the belt and put it on under my shirt.
Next I stopped at a men’s clothing shop where I bought shirts, pants and underwear. In the changing room I swapped my crumpled, still damp clothing for new items.
Finally, I sat down at the mall’s main restaurant and forced down a meal of pasta, salad and plenty of water. Fear had dulled my appetite but I knew I needed fuel. Now fed, reclothed and financed, I was ready to find Raymond Pendle’s daughter.
I walked back down the main street to High Barnet underground station. It’s the last stop on the Northern line at the edge of the sprawling metropolis. A train was waiting on the platform. I got into the empty fourth car. A minute later I was on my way to central London.
The professor had said that his daughter would help me survive. But I hadn’t asked him how. The question hadn’t seemed important at the time. Now I wanted all the help I could get. I hoped Raymond Pendle’s daughter had an underground bunker or a private plane and full-time bodyguards. A bullet-proof vest would be useful too.
I wondered why anyone would send someone in danger to their own daughter for protection. It seemed odd that her father would deliberately send trouble her way.
I wondered who she was. I realized I should’ve looked her up on the hotel’s computer. The professor’s idea might have made sense if she was the police commissioner or an armed forces general. But I’d never heard of her and she had the kind of name that was easy to remember.
Since her father was ninety-two, I guessed that she’d be somewhere between her early fifties and mid-sixties. I wasn’t sure how a retired lady was going to help me survive, but I assumed she must be well connected. A mixture of fear, hope and curiosity made me keen to find her as quickly as possible.
THIRTEEN
I rode on the clattering Northern line tube into central London, getting out at Tottenham Court Road where I worked my way to the surface against the flow of crowds rushing homeward, through the station’s rabbit warren. While I threaded my way along the busy street, I wondered what Christmas Pendle looked like and whether she was one of the thousands of faces that I’d already passed.
The crowds thinned quickly as I turned north off Oxford Street. A couple more turns and I reached her road, a mainly residential avenue with a coffee shop on the corner, next to a florist and a small convenience store.
Halfway along the road I found Christmas’s block, Chrysalis House, a Victorian red-brick four-story building of eight apartments with large windows. The front entrance double-doors were flanked by white limestone columns on each side. Each of the doors was tall, half-glazed with nine panes of heavy beveled glass above a gloss-black lower panel of wood. The bottom cross-piece of each door was protected with a full-width kick-plate of brightly polished brass. An eight-button panel beside the doors showed the names of some of the residents. Several were blank, including Christmas’s apartment, number eight. Above the buttons, a perforated metal grill and camera lens enabled visitors to announce their arrival.
Before I could press a button, one of the main doors opened and a white-haired old man struggled partway out of the doorway, onto the broad stone step of the entrance, encumbered by a shopping bag and a walking stick. I held the door open for him while he eyed me suspiciously.
“Visiting Ms Pendle,” I said.
He muttered something unintelligible and gestured upward with one finger of his stick carrying hand, while shuffling unsteadily onto the sidewalk. He composed himself in a moment and set off toward the convenience store, more confident with the rubber-ended stick against the paving.
I stepped onto the cool, white, marble floor of the downstairs lobby at the bottom of the block’s central stairwell. At the back of the lobby I found the front doors for the two first-floor apartments. Since I was looking at doors one and two, I guessed the professor’s daughter lived on the top floor.
Broad marble stairs with teak paneling on the walls and a wide brass handrail with twisted spindle supports on the open side of the stair, led to the upper floors. I made my way up six flights, two for each floor, to the top landing.
Number eight had a scarlet front door with a spy hole, a brass-faced door lock, a recessed security lock and a brass knocker in the center. I knocked politely. There was no sound from inside. I waited.
After a full minute the door was opened wide by a young woman. She looked to be in her mid-twenties, oval-faced with a clear complexion and insouciant expression. Either she had just arrived or was about to leave. She wore a dark-red weatherproof jacket, close fitting dark-gray jeans and laced-up black suede boots with a short heel, making her height about two inches shorter than mine. One hand stayed on the door. The other pushed a strand of chestnut brown hair behind her ear. I guessed she was either Christmas’s daughter or a visitor.
“I’m looking for Ms Pendle.”
“And who are you?”
“Zav Fox. I’ve got a letter for her.” From my inside jacket pocket I pulled the envelope with the jaggedly written address.
She held out her hand.
“It’s for Christmas Pendle.” I held onto the letter.
“That’s me.”
“I was expecting someone older.”
“And I was expecting two books and a nice hat, but doors are often like that; gateways to disappointment.” Her gray-green eyes watched me confidently.
I gave her the envelope reluctantly.
She opened it with an impatient flick and read the short message inside quickly before handing it back to me. It read, This should be passed to you by Xavier Fox. Protect him and help him, and he will help you. Love Dad.
Christmas eyed the damage to my jacket. “Is that a bullet hole?”
I nodded.
“You’d better come in.”
She stepped back into her hallway. As I passed by, she poked her fingers into the bullet holes in the rucksack.
“Someone been using you for target practice?”
“They weren’t practicing.”
“Tell me all about it.”
I turned to face her again. “Are you really Raymond Pendle’s daughter?”
“I’m thirty-one. I have one old, genius-level parent,” she said, pulling a wallet from her jeans, “and here’s my driving license,” she slid a pink plastic card from the wallet. “See? Face and name. Don’t sound the tee and don’t shorten it.”
“Do people ever tell you that you’re bossy?”
“I like to save everyone the embarrassment of getting it wrong. And you’re a doubting Thomas.”
“Yeah, I suppose so. I’m sorry. I started the day mildly paranoid. Then people started shooting.”
“Well it’s not all bad. You’re still in one piece.” She shook off her jacket while she guided me from the apartment’s entrance hall into the living room, a large room with a dark teakwood floor.
Between wide bookcases, framed photographs of spectacular landscapes hung on the walls. The furniture included two sofas, a plain writing desk with a keyboard and large monitor screen, a glass dining table with chairs, a pair of leather armchairs, and a low wide coffee table. In the corner of the room a large television screen was turned away from the sofas at an angle which suggested it was rarely switched on.
Next to the television a low table held a large chess set. Moving closer, I recognized the game as the same one I’d seen that morning. The white move remained unanswered by Christmas but a comment had been added by her father on the small electronic screen next to the board. Ticks all boxes. I didn’t see how rook to A8 ticked any boxes.
At the back, the living room was separated from the kitchen by a wall with a wide servery opening. A corridor next to the servery led to the other rooms. The apartment felt expensive and w
ell appointed.
She brought me coffee and a glass of water with ice. “So what’s the story?”
I sat on a sofa and told Christmas about Aleksy’s death, Laura and HomEvo, my conversation with her father, and the chase across the moors. I left out the part about the private detective and the police file. I wanted to know her a little better before I started getting other people into trouble.
Her attitude softened as I talked and by the end she was listening with rapt attention, sitting on the edge of her chair, opposite the sofa. “Tell me again about the part where they shoot at you, just before the trees.”
“Why?”
“I like the way you describe it,” she smiled gleefully.
“Okay. I don’t mind entertaining you with traumatic tales of attempted murder.”
“It’s not traumatic for me.”
“You’re not helping. Have you not heard of empathy?”
“I need to know what we’re dealing with,” she said momentarily serious. “Please continue.”
“Well, I think I might’ve stumbled before the shot.”
“You said the shot made you stumble, before.”
“I know, but you’re making me think about it. I think I fell and that’s why they missed.”
“If I’d been on the trigger-end of that rifle, I’d have shot you in the head from that range.”
“Thank you, that’s really reassuring. Empathy!”
“Well, I wouldn’t now that I’ve met you. Obviously.”
“Thanks.”
“I’d probably just shoot you in the leg.”
“You’re definitely not helping me feel any better about this.”
“Let’s get some dinner then.”
“I’m trying to stay out of sight.”
“Don’t worry, I know a great place. Give me a minute to change my jacket.”