‘We’re going to have to go up those stairs. We don’t want any noise. Watch what I do and copy me. Walk on the edges of the steps, not in the centre. Don’t tiptoe. Press your feet down slowly and firmly.’
‘I like it when you whisper in my ear like that. Tell me you love me.’
‘I prefer Qawaya to you.’
‘Bastard.’
We get to the top of the stairs. There’s a small corridor here with what looks like a toilet straight ahead. To my right is the end of the hallway and the entrance to the reception room where Lady O attempted to fracture my skull. It didn’t look like this reception room was occupied from the street, but now I can hear voices from inside. It’s Chudwell and his wife. Lady O sounds relatively calm and coherent. The door is open about a foot.
I walk down the hallway until I’m about three feet from the reception door. I can hear Caroline’s soft breathing behind me.
‘Why did he have to go home?’ asks Lady O.
‘He doesn’t live here, Debs. He has his own life. He’s done a lot for you this evening. Don’t complain, for God’s sake,’ replies Chudwell.
‘But what if she dies?’
‘She’s not going to die, Debs. Don’t be silly. She’d been taking drugs before she came here. She’s just passed out, that’s all. And don’t forget that Gable hit her in self-defence when she attacked him. Barnaby said it was opiates of some sort. Strong painkillers or diamorphine. Something or other. He didn’t have the time or equipment to tell what sort.’
‘She’s taking drugs because she can’t admit how she feels about me.’
‘Very likely. I’m going to have a drink. D’you want one? Barnaby said you can have a small one.’
‘But what are we going to do with her? She’s going to hate me. She’s going to wonder why I took her clothes off.’
‘She was only in pyjamas. It’s not a big thing.’
‘But how are we going to explain things to her, Hugo?’
I can hear the sounds of drinks being prepared. So that’s one down and three to go. I turn to Caroline and whisper, ‘Footitt’s gone home. We’ve just got the lord and lady in there.’
She nods. ‘Where’s the other guy?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You can say – you can tell her – that you took her pyjamas off because she seemed unwell. Just like loosening someone’s clothes when they’ve fainted,’ says Chudwell.
‘A safety precaution,’ says Lady O.
‘Yes. A safety precaution. It’s why Larry’s keeping an eye on her now while you’re down here. In case she becomes sick. Barnaby said to keep her lying on her side. And don’t worry. When she comes round it’s going to be overwhelming for her. She’ll have to confront what she feels about you. If she makes any objections about anything, we can give her a little gift. A few thousand. I don’t know. We’ll tell her to pretend it all never happened. I know her type. Easily paid off.’
‘She’ll be grateful and embarrassed!’ exclaims Lady O.
‘Exactly. You know her so well.’
‘She has such a delightful little body. And her hair feels so soft. I stroked her like she was a tiny pussy cat.’
God Almighty. This conversation brings a whole new dimension to the phrase ‘messed up’.
‘Tansil’s upstairs,’ I whisper to Caroline who nods. ‘Probably the second floor.’
I hear her unclip her ostrich bag. ‘Baby,’ she says, kissing me on the cheek.
Before I realise what’s happening, she’s kicked the reception room door open and is striding straight towards Chudwell.
‘Caroline!’ I hiss. But it’s too late. Chudwell almost drops his glass when he sees her.
‘Who the bloody hell are y…’
I catch a tiny glint of metal in her hand. With a fast, wide sweep of her arm, she slashes his throat wide open, a spray of bright arterial blood splashing over the wall behind him and the floor beneath him. His hands instinctively reach up to cover the gaping wound in his neck, but the blood just squirts out between his fingers.
As he drops to his knees, his wife opens her mouth to scream, her hands in front of her face in a defensive position. Caroline quickly chops both hands down with her forearm and slashes to the right and then to the left, and now it’s all over for Lady O, who, throat comprehensively slit, falls heavily onto her face, an ever-increasing pool of scarlet leaking out onto the pine flooring. She blows a few gory bubbles then expires.
Chudwell is still on his knees, gurgling and drowning in his own blood, but it won’t be for long. The whole thing took about three seconds.
I can see it now she’s stopped; it looks like a broad-bladed shredding knife with a razor-sharp cutting edge and a fancy ivory design on the handle. And now it needs a bit of a clean. She walks over and kicks Chudwell onto his side. I can hear the air rasping out of his lungs and then it stops.
There’s someone coming down the stairs. It’s Tansil. He’s red-faced, panting and his flies are undone. He runs into the room and takes in the blood-soaked scene before him. He sees Caroline and her knife. His eyes widen. He’s speechless. I can tell he’s thinking of doing something positive, perhaps a citizen’s arrest, but then I can see panic and fear in his expression and he turns to flee.
Caroline, quite naturally, has other ideas. The second he turns his back on us, she takes my claw hammer out of her bag, pulls her arm back in readiness and throws it straight at his head with everything she’s got. I watch as it cartwheels through the air, just like in a film. When it makes contact, he manages a single ‘uh’ before dropping to the floor, senseless.
She walks over to him, grabs the collar of his suit and drags him into the kitchen. I follow her. She places a foot on his back, gets her mobile out and speaks in Cantonese to someone for about five minutes. While she does that, I’m wondering how all of this is going to affect my burlesque date with Cordelia. I take my watch out of Tansil’s jacket pocket and put it back on my wrist.
When that call is over, she makes another one. This is less frantic than the first and I suspect it’s to Mr Sheng. She has a different tone of voice when she’s speaking to him, but it isn’t deferent; just different. I still don’t know who’s in charge.
I’ve almost forgotten about Paige. I run up two flights of stairs and check out four rooms before I find the one I’m looking for. It seems to be the master bedroom. Paige is naked beneath a red silk sheet. I don’t think she’s unconscious, but she’s not really in the room, either. Her eyes are closed and she’s smiling; squirming around and arching her back, like she’s luxuriating in the sensations of the bed and of the sheet against her body. I can see the outline of her hard nipples against the silk. Zoned out and turned on at the same time, I guess. Nasty bruise on her jaw, but I reckon Gable’s had his comeuppance for that.
There’s a Polaroid camera on a bedside table and a stack of Polaroids on the bed. I quickly flick through them. They’re all of Paige, taken with the sheet pulled down, certainly by Tansil. They’re pretty erotic. I put them in my inside pocket and sit down on the bed next to her. I notice there’s semen on the floor a few feet from the bed. We must have caught Tansil on the hop.
‘Hey, sexy.’ I run the back of my hand against her cheek to bring her into the land of the living. After several seconds of this, she opens her eyes.
‘What?’
‘Do you recognise me?’
She stretches and smiles. ‘What happened to your face? I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘This isn’t the other night, princess, and we’re not in your flat. You were kind of abducted, but you’re safe now.’
If being in a house with a woman who’s just slashed the throats of two people can be described as ‘safe’.
She rubs her jaw. ‘My face hurts.’
‘You were punched. Look. I’ll explain it all later.’ I look around for her black satin lounging pyjamas. They’re on the back of a chair. Avoiding stepping on Tansil’s semen, I pick them up and throw them
onto the bed. ‘Get dressed. I’ll be downstairs. Don’t go into the reception room.’
‘Why am I naked?’
Caroline is crouching down and tying Tansil to one of the Cheltenham chairs with a plastic clothes line that she’s busy cutting up into suitable lengths with a big pair of steel kitchen scissors. He’s still unconscious, his face slack and his fat tongue hanging out of his fat mouth. Her expression is serious, her movements quick and determined. She doesn’t look up when I come in. It’s as if we’ve had a row. I look at my watch. I’m amazed to see that it’s only eleven-twenty.
‘Do you want to tell me anything, Caroline?’
She sighs impatiently. ‘I’ve made a few calls. There’s a lot to do; here and in the mausoleum. It all has to be done tonight, before dawn. Speed is very important. Jiang Weisheng is on his way here. He will bring a girl who has special skills. He will also bring three assistants. I will keep the basement door open. Too conspicuous to have strangers using the front door here. They will come in separately so as not to attract attention. I will close all the curtains. Someone will do something on the other side of the square to take attention away. Maybe start a fire in one of the offices. Call the fire brigade. Make a big scene.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Different people will go to the mausoleum. A man called Lok Hsing and his apprentice will deal with the contents of the basement and the transit van. I will need you to give me the relevant keys.’
‘OK. I guess you’re not going to tell me what was going on tonight. With you, I mean. You’ve been preoccupied ever since we left the mausoleum.’
She stands up. Something’s wrong. She’s wound up tight. ‘Of course I’ll tell you. None of this could have been done without your help. We would never have known what had been going on. Not in a million years. Your work on this was invaluable.’
‘But this isn’t a straight retribution job for you, is it? What’s it all about, Caroline?’
She swallows. She purses her lips. Her eyes suddenly flood with tears. She opens her mouth to say something, then closes it again, as if the effort was too much. Then she tries again.
‘My real name is Fan Mei Tuan. Rikki was my brother. Rikki was my baby brother.’
She starts sobbing, shaking. I hold her tightly. I can feel her tears against my face. She pulls away for a moment to look me in the eyes and then we’re kissing. She grinds her body against mine. I can tell she’s on fire, but we both know this has to stop.
‘Oh Jesus. That was hot,’ she says, sniffing and wiping the tears from her face.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I had to block it out. It would have been too distracting for me to think about it. When Rikki vanished, someone had to be sent here to deal with whatever it was. If it was discovered there had been foul play, someone had to track down and eliminate the perpetrators. I volunteered. I insisted. I told them I would be more motivated and therefore more successful. It would bring a lot of good luck for me to be the one. Listen. There’s gonna be a lot of activity here soon. You’ve got to go. Take the girl with you. And get yourself to a hospital.’
I point to Tansil, still out for the count. ‘What about him? Why didn’t he get his throat cut? After all, he was the one that killed Rikki.’
‘I’ve got something special lined up for him.’
She rummages around in her bag and produces a thirteen-inch combat hunting knife. She lightly touches the tip of one of her fingers with the blade. A cut appears immediately. Razor sharp.
‘This is Rikki’s knife,’ she says. ‘Call it poetic justice, if you like. Or a tribute to Rikki’s techniques. You better go now. I’ve got work to do.’
I place a hand on her cheek, turn on my heel and go and fetch Paige.
I think Larry Tansil is about to lose face.
42
SOMETHING TO REMEMBER ME BY
At the hospital, they insisted that I stay in for three days. It was the head injury they were most concerned about. I had a CT scan to check for brain damage and the wound required nine stitches. When they put those stitches in it hurt like a bastard. I also had a couple of X-rays that revealed two cracked ribs. I told them I’d been mugged. I know they didn’t believe me. The rest of the superficial stuff didn’t concern them that much. The best bit was when a pretty Romanian nurse called Viorica cleaned me up.
I also had four stitches where Chudwell had kicked me in the face when I was unconscious and the doctor reckoned that the scar will have disappeared completely in four or five months, the resultant black eye and miscellaneous bruising in a couple of weeks. They also took a few blood samples, but I don’t know what for. After I’d taken Paige home, I got a cab to St Mary’s to avoid bumping into Annalise or, God forbid, Footitt.
I also had to visit the hospital dentist. One of my lower molars on the left was cracked and the gum around it was badly inflamed. From what I can remember, that was also the result of Chudwell’s kicking.
While I was floating on painkillers for the first two days, I had a lot of time to think about Footitt. I kept on thinking about the girl in Rikki’s flat. If I closed my eyes I could still see her face, and allowed my imagination to remove the maggots, slit throat and skin discolouration. Quite pretty, really; I remember thinking that at the time.
As I now know she was one of Footitt’s pickups I wonder about the timeline that had taken her into Footitt’s sphere. What went wrong? Was it drugs or desperation? I still can’t work out her age. She could have been late teens or early twenties; maybe older, and quite possibly younger. Whoever she was, she’s gone now.
I think of the tattoo on her forearm. A rose surrounded by musical notes. Hard to say what it indicated, but it must have been something that meant a lot to her at one point in her life. A musician boyfriend? Her own ambitions? Who knows.
But what’s most upsetting about her fate is the fact that it was so unnecessary. A belt and braces ploy so Tansil could avoid a murder investigation while enabling Footitt to have a good time. So Footitt could strike ‘fucking and killing a teenage girl’ off his twisted bucket list.
And that fact that her death was just a logistical part of a cynical cover-up by people who had got so used to getting away with stuff that they saw nothing at all wrong with the whole thing. She was nothing. They didn’t know her, they’d never met her, but she had their total contempt. She was just one of those people. And what were they? A sad bunch of flaccid middle-aged omega males scratching each other’s balls at pathetic secret society meetings. Like Chudwell said: they can get away with it so they do it.
Now, on my third and final day here, I’m psyching myself up to go out into the real world again. I’ve rescheduled all the various dates I’d arranged over the last week and Anouk has agreed to take a quick break with me in the Caribbean.
There’s a knock on the door of my room and a nurse pops her head around the door. She’s a New Zealander. Her name’s Hayley. I’ve already asked her out. ‘Mr Beckett? You have a visitor. Shall I show them in?’ She gives me a big grin. ‘It’s a woman. Are you feeling up to it?’
‘I think I can cope.’
Caroline’s hair is tied back in a ponytail and she’s wearing no makeup. Her look is fashionable, kooky and touristy; a black silk bomber jacket over an outsize Donald Duck t-shirt, a nuclear-neon lime leather miniskirt, black tights, Converse Harley Quinn trainers and a green iguana print Dolce & Gabbana tote bag slung over her shoulder.
‘I thought you’d be back in HK by now.’
‘You want to get rid of me? I’m going back tonight. Eight o’ clock flight. Non-stop from Heathrow. Airbus A380. Eleven and a half hours, baby. It’s a bastard! I’m going to stock up on magazines.’
I smile at her. ‘Will you be using the same passport that you came in on?’
‘Ha. You think I’m stupid?’
She laughs and sits down next to my bed. She looks over her shoulder at the door. ‘Is it OK to talk in here?’
‘I think s
o.’
‘OK. I just wanted to put your mind at rest. The house in Berkeley Square, the mausoleum, the transit van: absolutely clear of any fingerprints, cleaned from top to bottom and Jiang says hello. He also says you’ve got to look after me and care for me and he will be pleased to attend our wedding day. Here’s these.’
She hands me a small freezer bag containing my wallet, keys, tactical pen and the remains of Anouk’s mobile.
‘Have you looked at the papers?’ I ask.
‘Yeah. Big mystery, huh? All these bigtime people disappearing without trace, police baffled. We cleaned out both their bank accounts and made it look as if it happened two days before our visit. Clever, huh? We took their passports and planted fifty thousand pounds’ worth of cocaine and heroin around the house and in their safe. Jiang put some pretty evil shit on the hard drive of their computer. Gives the cops something to chew on. Nothing about Mr Tansil and Mr Gable yet.’
‘It’ll happen. And someone’ll make the link eventually. The whole thing may even get blamed on them if someone’s smart and digs around enough.’
‘You worried about the girl? Chudwell’s girl?’
‘I called her to postpone our date. She told me about her parents’ disappearance. She sounded subdued, concerned and strangely nonplussed. In shock, I suspect. I sounded stunned, sensitive and sympathetic. Of course, what I asked her about when I visited her didn’t impact on any of this and she wouldn’t know who Tansil and Gable were or what they’d been up to. Or my – our – connection with them. Maybe she thought her parents had fallen foul of bad people and done a runner.’
‘You gonna sleep with her?’
‘Probably.’
‘She needs a bit of stress relief, her parents vanishing like that. Tell me what it was like. I’m not kidding. I’m into stuff like that. I’ll text you one of my fake email addresses.’
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