‘Mr Tran. I am concerned for our friend over there. Is she OK?’
The Asian man practised his inscrutable arts, maintaining a completely expressionless expression. ‘I know of no problems. I have heard and seen no problems. Missy is away, I think. For some days. You have the keys, Mr Stoner. You can check up on her.’ Still no expression. ‘I shall tell her of your enquiry.’
‘OK. Thank you.’
Mr Tran appeared to be transfixed by the sight of the Hard Man, despite the latter’s studied air of nonchalance. ‘Hello,’ he said. The Hard Man declined a response. He and Mr Tran ran a brief, silent inscrutability competition. There was no obvious victor. Then The Hard Man levered himself away from the wall, removed his gaze from Mr Tran and spoke softly to Stoner.
‘I’ll be off then. Leave you two to . . . to whatever it is that you two do. Good to see you’re in one piece. Survived Harding. A rare talent. Leave a phone on, JJ. Just in case, huh? Domesticity calls.’ He sketched an approximate smile, glanced once at the silent Mr Tran, and left. Quietly.
Mr Tran was an interesting man. All of Stoner’s tenants were interesting in one way or another. Mr Tran was particularly interesting in that he appeared to have no identity at all. Stoner knew him only as a most reliable friend, and a sometimes mysteriously invisible ally. He had already been a resident tenant when Stoner inherited the house, the only tenant there, in fact, despite the building containing another three spacious apartments.
Mr Tran had a large and fluid family. Maybe it was less of a family and more an active, shifting circle of friends. Stoner never invited an explanation. Had he done so, both men knew that the reply would have been a lie. A kind, considerate and unverifiable lie, but a lie nonetheless, and some twitch of trust would have been lost, both in the asking and the telling. They came and they went, this family and friends. They were implacably polite and spoke English excellently, although with a consistent and notable southern American drawl. Which sounded odd from the mouths of a collection of diminutive Asiatics, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen. Mr Tran was also an excellent cook; he sometimes invited Stoner and the dirty blonde to eat with him and whoever was sharing his apartment at the time. And now, with a typically subtle shift in demeanour which Stoner always found vaguely disquieting, a suddenly beaming Mr Tran accosted him with an invitation to eat. Right now. Immediately. A family celebration, he said.
Stoner attempted polite refusal, explaining that he and the dirty blonde had been aiming for a night out together, maybe some music, maybe a meal for two, had she been . . . well . . . where she should have been. Mr Tran frowned, an expression as theatrically insincere as his sudden enthusiastic welcome.
‘Missy has been compelled to be out.’ Mr Tran’s use of English, while always most comprehensible, could at times be mysterious. ‘She has been extracted by an insistent client, perhaps. A gentleman greatly affluential who wished to celebrate a family matter with her.’
Stoner worked hard to keep his surprise from his features; inscrutability was a much-prized art among Mr Tran’s kind. Among Stoner’s kind, too.
‘Influential, Mr Tran. A man of great influence.’
Mr Tran beamed wider still.
‘Mr Stoner. I am attempting to share with you that he is a gentleman of considerable wealth.’ He looked closely at Stoner. ‘A really rich geezer, OK? It is unkind that you are unable to pass your evening with Missy, as was your plan, and so I would like you to share a family celebration. You are a kind landlord and I wish to repay that kindness.’
The smile left Mr Tran’s face, replaced by a suddenly stony gaze which would have been alarming under other circumstances. Stoner was unalarmed, but recognised that beating on the dirty blonde’s door to check the veracity of Mr Tran’s statement would have been as insensitive as it was unnecessary. And in any case, he did enjoy Mr Tran’s exquisite cuisine. And he would at least be in the building when the dirty blonde returned from her evening’s entertainment. He accepted, with good grace and bowing.
Mr Tran offered him a low bow, and a wide smile.
The evening presented a pair of immediate surprises. Firstly there was no sign whatsoever of Mr Tran’s transient family. It was dinner for two, and it was ready to serve. Stoner’s presence at the Tran table plainly was no surprise at all to his host. The second surprise was that the food was entirely southern American states; gumbo, dirty rice, Cajun spices, po’boy sandwiches and onion threads, chowder and beignets, hot dogs and hamburger. It was all perfect and it was all delicious. The coffee too. After a long conversation-free time in shared appreciation of Mr Tran’s mastery of Mississippi cuisine, Stoner expressed both his delight and indeed his surprise. All the food he had previously shared with Mr Tran had, as he remarked, been Chinese.
Mr Tran swilled noisily from a bottle of Coors and contemplated his guest. ‘Not Chinese, Mr Stoner. Never Chinese. Vietnamese. I am a man from Vietnam; Tran the man from Vietnam.’ He seemed pleased with his own joke. Constructing a joke in an alien language is never easy. An intentional joke, at any rate. ‘And now, Mr Stoner, you have a call waiting.’
Stoner looked up, alarmed. Mr Tran rose easily and smoothly to his feet and lifted some of the evening’s debris from the table. Stoner’s cell phone immediately shook itself in his pocket; he looked at Mr Tran’s departing shoulders with some surprise.
‘I would answer that, Mr Stoner. It may be important.’
He flicked the phone open, raised it to an ear, still watching Mr Tran’s retreating shoulders. The Hard Man, again.
‘Sorry to disturb your evening, again, so soon. But you should know that my own intended time of conjugal delight has been interrupted, postponed, spoiled even, by the loathed pressure from above. Those magnificent men in the ministerial machine appear unable to understand why it is that I am still unable to offer them answers about these damned bodies. My usual entreaties and laments concerning the dire quality of the troops at my disposal had no effect. Well. No positive effect. Their view, vigorously expressed, is that if I cannot provide answers they will employ another agency. Maybe a foreign agency in case there is a cover-up going on. No comment? Then I shall continue.
‘I neither want nor need the giant, flat and sweaty feet of some continental cousins stamping across my turf. That would be too unpleasant for words. I need some answers, JJ. I need those answers fast. The time for genial conversation is over. Get out and break some heads. Get out and get me some answers. Do it now. I’ll put it another way: please do it now. Or. . .’ his voice fell away.
‘Or what?’ Stoner asked, carefully. ‘Or you’ll threaten me?’
‘The opposite. Or tell me that you can’t do the job. Do that before we hang up and I’ll root among the sewers to dig out another operator. They won’t be as good as you, JJ, but maybe I’d feel easier about threatening terrible things to them when they fail to live up to even my painfully low expectations. Say now if you want out. Now. This instant. Or shift a gear and step up and sort this thing out.’
No hesitation: ‘I’m on it. I’ll start pushing.’
The Hard Man hung up. Stoner closed his own phone.
Which immediately rewarded him with an irritated tone announcing that two messages were waiting. He listened to them both. The dirty blonde, at last. She wondered, twice and with audibly escalating disappointment, whether he was ever going to answer her calls? Whether he was going to accept her sudden and exciting invitation?
Mr Tran stood smiling at him from the doorway. Stoner’s phone rang again. He decided that after answering this last time he would break it into its component parts and flush it down the toilet.
But he answered the incoming call . . .
16
GOLDEN BROWN
‘I’m a wife for a week!’ The dirty blonde screamed into Stoner’s ear. He held the cell phone at bay, bemused more than amused.
‘Well, a little more, but a week as a wife sounds better than a bit more than a week as a wife.’
Stoner was
silent, unable to think of a reply which was better than unpleasant. Why hadn’t she mentioned her revised status? Her holiday? Whatever it actually was.
The dirty blonde, however, was plainly having a better time than he was. ‘A bit less than a week to go and I can maybe get back to being single. Being human. Maybe. How’re you, lover boy? How’s big bad life in the big bad city? You caught loadsa crims, done loadsa fighting? Bloody strange here, baby.’
Stoner wondered at her lung capacity. There was no pause in the flow; she breathed only out, and all the time she was breathing out, she was speaking. Loudly. Maybe too loudly. Stoner felt the hackles of suspicion rising. He pretended to ignore them. To concentrate only on her words.
‘But I need you. I want you. Can you drag yourself away from your passionate performance of that twat’s every bidding and provide an honest girl with a good day’s fucking? Living like a nun, I am. All I need’s the black dress and insane hat and I’d be bloody Mother bloody Superior.’
She finally drew breath . . . paused, at least.
Stoner plunged in: ‘Steady. Steady. Where are you? I’ve been calling, I was worried . . .’
‘I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. You’re not my mother. You’re not even my father. You can still qualify as my lover if you get your tricky dicky up here sharpish.’ There was a certain directness of approach here.
‘Here is where, say? Just a clue?’
‘Oh. Yeah. It’s the old vicarage, somewhere . . . hang on . . . near Woodstock.’ A pause. ‘Can’t you locate me from my phone? You FBI chaps can do that. I saw it on the telly. Can’t you just zoom in on my signal and zoomily zoom here with Percy the pink pointer and give a girl something substantial to think about apart from housewifely duties? Which are, really, really, really, dull-oh.’ She was re-warming to her theme.
Stoner plunged in once more; ‘I’m not an FBI man. I’m nowhere near the kit I would need to find your phone. You must know where you are. Bloody hell, woman! Talk sense, huh?’
‘Calm, calm, JJ. Mustn’t get your blood pressure elevated. Not just yet anyway. There’s a pile of letters in the hallway. I’ll read you an address.’ The sound of running feet echoing in a large space, and then the address. ‘Told you it was an old vicarage. It’s a parsonage. What’s the difference between a vicar and a parson? Do they get transmissions from the same god, or do they all have different ones? Thought a parson was part of a chicken? Who knows? Who bloody cares?’
‘You’re staying with a parson?’ Stoner struggled to keep incredulity from his voice.
‘Don’t be a tit, JJ. Just get up here now, give me what I really and truly do need, and I shall reveal all. Then I’ll tell you everything. Look! I made a joke! Tell you what, though, this be-gloomy old pile is not a place for jokes. There’s no bugger here most of the time. Bloody bizarre. Like a railway station at midnight after the last bloody train.
‘Then, just as you’re getting used to the notion that you have a bit of peace and quiet, and a moment of aloneness to enjoy, it’s like a railway station at midday, packed solid with transients you don’t know, don’t want to know, all of them getting in the way. Only it’s worse. It’s like they’re the biggest rugby club in the world. They all know each other and they couldn’t give a shit about you. They just do their stuff, talking, walking about, eating like the pigs they are, swilling booze – not beer though; these inhumans don’t drink proper drink – and it’s like I’m not there at all? Even though I’m taller than most of them? And I do kinda stand out, yeah?’ Her every phrase was now a question. Her voice raised at the end of every thought. She was in fact distressed. Remarkable, that.
‘Why are you there, babe?’ Stoner tried to be kind. ‘It doesn’t sound like fun, to be honest.’
‘Fun? Oh. It will be fun. Fun the minute you arrive. Promise. Fun from the minute you get here till the minute you fall asleep. Then you’ll wake up – come to – and there will be more fun and then you will go away and I’ll stay here and then it will be desperate shit again until I get back to town and we can all have a very good laugh about it. Tell you all when you get here. Do that fast. No waiting for glass slippers at midnight, Cinders.’
She was gone. Sudden silence from the earpiece.
Stoner walked to his heavy Transporter. Walked past it and on down the dark street. The dirty blonde sounded ropey but he doubted that her life was threatened by anything more than the traditional hazards of her occupation. He blipped the van’s alarm from a hundred feet away. The Transporter grunted as its passenger’s door unlocked, the diesel’s glow plugs lit; the engine was ready to fire by the time he was sitting before the wheel, sliding the keycard into its slot, tapping in the code to override the alarms and the no-go status. Lights lit, engine running: Woodstock. Maybe an hour. No need for any speed. Plenty of time for precaution. She’d been there for more than a week, he doubted that an extra hour would damage her more than she was already damaged.
He couldn’t pretend that he enjoyed being used, but she was only being herself. She was who she was and that was what he wanted her to be. At times like these Stoner needed to remind himself that this was the case. Had been the case for a long time now, although he still failed to understand the why of it.
Gravel crunched. The Transporter ground its heavy unsubtle way around a circular drive to the door of the parsonage. Passed the door and reversed across the drive. Parked facing the exit. Habit. Stoner climbed from the passenger door and slipped it shut behind him. The building was well lit; it looked like a Church of England parsonage should look, like it was a set on an American movie, a set dressed by someone who had watched too many English domestic detective programmes. It looked like a caricature of respectability; one seriously desirable residence.
The front door looked older than Henry VIII would have looked had he still been capable of looking like anything alive. Or which once had been alive. There was without a doubt a doorbell somewhere, but Stoner couldn’t see it in the carefully posed Sherlock Holmes gloom under the misted Victorian overhead light. He was illuminated; none of the door furniture was. He could have designed that himself. Any CCTV would have him framed like the performer he felt like.
He hammered hard on the door. It was unmoved, and his hammering produced no response at all. He tried the handle before hammering again. He respected his hands. He could do better things with them than beat them against planks so heavy that they made hardly a sound. He wondered fleetingly whether beating his head against the door would have the same effect.
The handle turned, the door opened. Of course it did. This was rural England; no need at all for security. For visible security. The house’s electronic brain would have good images of him. He would need to find that brain and . . . no point. If it was as sophisticated as it would be had he specified it himself, his image would already have been transmitted to his own equivalent in a security company and even now his identity would be whistling through the ethers. Within a few minutes – were he interested, which he might be – the Hard Man could know where he was. Which might or might not be important. But which was certainly a concern for another moment.
He walked inside. Into another film set. Another set-dresser’s dream of the rooms English landed gentry liked to inhabit. It all looked genuine, so was most likely either genuine or very expensive fake. Stoner cared neither way. He cared about the dirty blonde, who called him through the doorway of the second room on his left as he penetrated the silent oaky hallway.
‘Fuck first or story first?’ As ever, subtlety was her strong suit.
Stoner faced her without smiling. ‘Where am I? Who owns this place, and why are you all alone in it? Tell me that on the way to somewhere comfortable and a coffee. A hot coffee. Strong coffee. It’s been a long day, and it’s not getting easier.’
The dirty blonde sprang to her feet. She was less than Stoner’s six feet three inches, but not a lot less. And she was a very different shape. She was wrapped in a robe which fell open as she stood. S
toner stared with resolve directly into her eyes. His peripheral vision advised that she was wearing only the robe. He thanked his peripheral vision for this excellent news and instructed it to go away.
‘Don’t be cross, JJ.’ She ran the fingernails of both hands upward from the base of his crotch until those hands found the zipper and pulled it down, unhitching his belt with a sophistication of technique and an utter familiarity with male clothing which would have impressed a first-timer, anyone who didn’t already know her well, into a state of wonder. Her left hand slid inside the open zip and squeezed the base of his cock through the cotton underwear.
‘Please don’t be cross. It’s no problem for you. Just me doing what I do and trying to be something I’d like to be. Trouble is, I always do the same things. I always see the same way onward, and I always stay the same. This will be different. I hope.’ She had freed him from his pants by now and was cruising the nails of her forefingers along the length of him. He still stared into her eyes.
‘Make some sense, please?’
The dirty blonde began to sink before him. She looked him in the eye and parted her lips a little; rolled her tongue into view. He gripped her shoulders, gently but with resolve, and lifted her to her full height again. This was in fact the one hundred per cent opposite of what he most wanted at that point, but times, places; things that go bang in the night, persuaded him otherwise. The dirty blonde lifted her fingers from him, dropped her arms to her sides and gazed hard right back. He returned her hands to their task. ‘Carry on. That’s as good as ever. Just talk. I can listen and lust at the same time. Not all men can do this.’
She smiled.
‘I have a client,’ she began. ‘Well. I have lots of clients, but this is a special one. You sure you don’t need a little something? You do feel a bit urgent. Have you been missing me?’
‘Talk. Just for the love of fucking, talk to me.’
Stoner sounded emotional. He was emotional. Vanishingly few folk could produce emotions in him. The blonde had always been able to do this. She had trouble not doing it. Which did have its moments. She held him in both of her long-fingered hands and massaged the underside of his glans with both thumbs. A lesser man might have died on the spot.
A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1) Page 18