She saw him long ago when he was young and beautiful, smiling at her through the smoke of one of his pretentious little cheroots, saying, “Just remember, sweet thing, I’m the kind of person who would hurt a fly.”
He’d laughed smoke, and his head had disappeared in the fumes like some kind of magic trick.
Liz fired up the joint and sucked at it, emptying her mind of thought as it burned to nothing. As she watched the play of the light on the waves her fingers found a couple of small knots of tension in her shoulders and she kneaded them away, breathing long and slow.
She reached for her phone and dialed Michael Tate’s number.
When he answered she said, “Michael, can you talk?”
“Briefly.”
“I’d really like us to meet. Will you have a drink with me at Blues at five?”
73
Caroline sat on the closed toilet, hands dangling between her legs, clutching her phone. Still reeling from the video she had just seen.
It took her a moment to understand that the doorbell was ringing. At first she feared it was Michael.
She didn’t want to see him.
She never wanted to see him again.
The bell rang once more.
It couldn’t be Michael. He would let himself in.
She stood up from the toilet and the room spun and she had to hold onto the wall to stop herself falling.
She closed her eyes and the doorbell rang and rang and rang.
Loud.
Incessant.
Caroline opened her eyes and the room was still enough for her to cross to the bedroom window and look down into the gloom.
A white van was parked outside the front door. The person ringing the doorbell was invisible to her.
She dropped her phone on the bed and went down the stairs and opened the front door.
She blinked at Charlie Hepworth.
“Charlie?” she said.
He didn’t reply. He just reached out with something in his hand and she felt a searing pain and her legs buckled and she fell to the floor.
***
Charlie, wearing gloves, pocketed the taser and dragged Caroline away from the door and closed it. She was conscious but immobile. Staring up at him, a trickle of drool escaped her lips.
Oh dear. Well at least she hadn’t pissed or shit herself.
He taped her mouth shut with duct tape and rolled her onto her belly and pulled her arms behind her back. He secured her wrists with a zip tie. He did the same with her ankles.
Charlie flipped her onto her back again, so she didn’t suffocate, and went upstairs.
There was a fetching black cocktail frock laid out on the bed for the romantic dinner with hubby. Her phone lay beside it.
Charlie lifted the cell, muted it, and dropped it into his pocket.
Caroline’s bag was on the vanity. He opened it and searched for the bottle of opioids. Bingo. Then he found her wallet with her credit cards, her passport and a couple of thousand baht. He pocketed the cash and put the wallet back into the bag, which he hung from his shoulder.
He went back down to the lobby. Caroline lay watching him, wide-eyed.
Charlie stepped over her and opened the front door. He crossed to the van, slid open the side door and dumped the bag inside.
Returning to the house he knelt, and, with huge effort, slung Caroline over his shoulder. Gaining his feet was almost beyond him.
Dear God, she was heavier than she looked and he wasn’t as young as he once was.
Panting, he staggered out to the van and bundled her inside. Her head hit the doorframe and he saw her wince.
“Sorry darling,” he said, out of habit.
He returned to the house and drank water from the fridge. Then he sat down at the kitchen counter and caught his breath and wiped sweat from his forehead. He took Caroline’s phone from his pocket and found Michael Tate’s number.
He composed a message: I can’t go through this again, Michael. I’m done.
Charlie attached the video he’d sent Caroline from his burner a few minutes before. He hit send and took the phone and left the house, pulling the door shut after him.
He whistled “La Mer” as he drove away, and felt pretty damn jolly, all things considered.
74
Liz Keller, wrapped in a towel, stood at the bathroom sink of a hotel room near Bangkok Hospital Phuket. It was off the tourist path. Guests were mid-level Thai businesspeople and farang who wanted to be near the medical facility.
Nobody had looked at her twice when she’d checked in using the Swedish passport in the name of Ulrike Johansson that Charlie had procured for her. They’d probably assumed she was scheduled for a bout of elective surgery in the morning.
She’d come here after her drink with Michael at Blues. For safety she’d taken a cab from the bar to Central Mall, and then another here.
The bathroom was tiny, so she was able to stretch the shower nozzle to the sink and rinse her hair. Hair that she had just finished tinting a shade lighter than her natural color.
Looking at herself in the mirror, Liz combed her hair straight. She lifted a pair of hairdresser’s scissors and started to trim it into a mid-length bob. She had a steady hand. Turning her head, she inspected what she had done.
Satisfied, she went through to the room and sat at the table by the mirror and used the hairdryer, and then ran a brush through her hair.
It was scarily perfect.
Her phone rang.
Unknown number.
“Yes?” she said.
“Done,” Charlie said. “Expect a package delivery.”
“Groovy.”
Liz felt a sudden rush of nervous energy and had to fight the urge to roll a joint or raid the mini bar. She clicked on the TV. CNN. The usual slew of small wars and smaller celebrities.
Silencing the tube, she walked to the window and looked out through a chink in the drapes. She had a view of an apartment building. Washing hanging on the balconies. A shirtless guy with man breasts drinking a beer. A woman in tights working out.
Calmer, Liz returned to the table and opened her cosmetic case. She applied the muted dabs of makeup that Caroline Tate favored, finishing off with some nearly colorless lipstick.
The illusion was complete.
She dropped the towel and dressed in Caroline’s underwear. Chaste was the word that came to mind. She slipped on the shirt and the pants, and stepped into the sandals.
Liz was practicing the limp when the room phone rang.
It was the desk to tell her that the package had arrived and she asked them to send it up.
In a minute there was a tap at the door. Staying in character she limped across to open it, hearing her one sandal scuff the tiles.
She took a cardboard box from the bellhop, giving him a twenty baht tip. He waid and she shut the door and put the box on the bed.
She tore off tape and lifted the lid, revealing Caroline’s brown Goyard tote bag.
She checked inside the bag. Wallet. Credit cards. Passport. Cartier wristwatch.
And the vial of hillbilly heroin.
Fucking excellent.
Liz strapped on the wristwatch and slung the bag from her left shoulder.
She put on a straw fedora that covered her hair and most of her face.
There was a small gray backpack by the door. Carrying it, she left the room and went down into the street to find a cab.
75
Caroline lay on the corrugated metal floor of the van. It cornered and she slid against the bulkhead. She had lost all sense of time.
The van came to a halt, probably at a traffic light. Very loud Thai rap boomed from an adjacent vehicle, the bass vibrating beneath her.
She had heard bursts of laughter, and the sounds of car and motorcycle engines and honking horns.
They drove on and she heard the scream of a jet during takeoff, and listened to its rumble before it was drowned out by the engine of the van.
Things beca
me quieter after that. Fewer cars. Fewer stops. Just the thrum of the tires on the road. She heard Charlie coughing occasionally, and smelt the cigarettes that he smoked.
The van slowed and she felt the bumps of a rutted road as they left the blacktop. She tasted dust. Her head bounced on the floor and she tried to brace herself against the side of the van.
It came to a halt and the engine cut. She heard the creak of suspension and the crunch of Charlie’s shoes on gravel. There was the scuff of a key in a lock and the sound of a door slamming open. She listened for voices and heard none.
After a minute the side door of the van rolled wide and Charlie was framed by the uncurtained window of a small house.
Where the impulse came from she didn’t know, but Caroline bent her knees and kicked out, catching Charlie in the gut.
He cursed and folded and she tried to worm herself from the van.
She only succeeded in falling to the gravel and grazing her cheek.
Panting, she felt tears in her eyes.
Charlie was over her, his breath ripe with alcohol and tobacco.
“Okay, that was just plain silly, now wasn’t it, darling?” He grabbed her hair and pulled it, hurting her. “Do you want me to use the taser again?”
She shook her head.
He loosened his grip on her hair and her jaw struck the ground. She tasted blood.
Charlie grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her into the house. Her head bumped against the step and the stone chipped one of her incisors.
She was looking up at a naked incandescent bulb hanging from a cracked ceiling, casting a greenish light. He hauled her past a plastic table with a leg wrapped in blue tape, and she glimpsed an old portable TV perched on a bar fridge.
Charlie towed her into a tiny room. It was dim, illuminated only by the spill of light from outside.
There was a bare mattress on the floor. He rolled her onto it, on her stomach. It stank of urine and sweat. She gagged and nearly vomited into the tape covering her mouth.
She heard the snick of a blade and her hands were free. And her ankles.
He rolled her onto her back and pulled the tape off her mouth. It hurt.
Caroline’s arms and legs were cramped and she couldn’t move them.
“We’re miles from anywhere so nobody but me is going to hear you if you scream,” Charlie said, “But you’ll annoy me and I’ll come back and tie your legs and arms and tape your mouth again. Understood?”
She nodded and he rose to his feet.
“There’s a bottle of water next to the bed and a pisspot. There is no window so don’t bother thinking of escaping.”
He was walking to the door.
“Charlie?” she said, her voice little more than a whisper.
“Yes?”
“Why are you doing this?”
He laughed without humor. “Oh come on, darling, let’s not be childish now. What makes the world go round? I’ll give you a little clue: it’s not bloody love.”
He closed the door and bolted and locked it.
The room was dark but for the slit of light that bled in from under the door
Slowly her eyes adjusted enough for her to dimly see the peeling walls. She stood up from the reeking mattress and sat on the dusty cement floor, back to the wall, hugging her knees.
The room was hot and airless, the smell of mold thick in her nostrils.
She could hear night birds and the scratch of insects in the jungle. A gecko chuckled.
Charlie hadn’t tried to hide his identity.
Caroline knew what that meant.
She went around the room on her hands and knees in search of a weapon.
Other than the plastic water bottle and slop bucket there was nothing.
76
Charlie sat at the stained plastic table in the front room of the hovel smoking a Dunhill and drinking a beer, listening to the croon of the night insects.
He’d rented the house for a month from the owners of a rubber plantation north of the airport. Not far, as the crow flew, from the illicit casino where he’d done his little homage to The Deer Hunter.
The plantation lay fallow, the owners involved in protracted negotiations to sell the land to resort developers. He’d paid them enough of Liz Keller’s money to ensure complete privacy, and the assurance that any knowledge of him would fade from their memories like steam on a mirror.
It was perfect for their purpose, but, Christ, it was sordid.
However, the woman in the next room was his ticket out of all this poverty and ugliness.
She would guarantee him a serious chunk of money that would set him up for life.
The plan, worthy of Hitchcock in its audaciousness, had been all his own.
The elements had fallen in his lap, true, but only a man of his rare abilities would have recognized its potential, let alone been able to create the elegant vehicle that had now been set in motion.
It had all begun when, after a gap of well over a decade, he’d reconnected with Liz Keller.
Through the years, since her metamorphosis into a wealthy Swiss hausfrau, he’d kept his eye on her. Wasn’t social media lovely?
She’d been discreet at first, not wanting her unseemly past to come and nip her in the backside. But as time passed, as she became ever more a fixture in Zurich’s haut monde, she’d shamelessly flaunted her wealth and privilege on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The skiing. The boating. The parties with people who wore such forced expressions of gemütlichkeit that they looked like life-size marionettes with the hands of invisible puppeteers up their asses.
And then, over the last year, she’d gone a little quieter. Charlie, who had a nose for these things, did a little long distance ferreting, and discovered that her little would-be pharaoh Jürgen had built a pyramid scheme that was busy imploding.
Culminating in his cinematic end in a somersaulting powerboat.
How could Charlie deny the little whiff of schadenfreude he felt when he saw images of the penniless widow, dry-eyed at Sihlfeld Cemetery?
Nudging a few connections in Zürich he’d conjured Liz’s cell number.
Amazingly, she’d answered the first time he’d called from his miserable room in Phuket.
“Yes?” she’d said, in the tone that she must have used each day to scare the wolves from the door.
“Do you know who this is?” he said.
A pleasing little gasp. “You?”
“Yes. Me.”
“And who are you these days?”
He laughed. “Charlie. Charlie Hepworth.”
“That’s very... peppy.”
“I think so too.”
“So, have you called to gloat?”
“Good Lord, no. What do you take me for?”
Her turn to laugh. “So the fact that you’re calling as I’m about to be dragged off to debtors prison is all a coincidence?”
“Well, I did read about the series unfortunate of events.”
“Help me out,” she said, “is that Lemony Snicket or Dr. Seuss?”
He chuckled, genuinely pleased to be talking to her.
“Where are you anyway,” she asked.
“Thailand.”
“Where about in Thailand?”
“Phuket. Do you know it?”
“I do. It was one of Jürgen’s happiest hunting grounds. We bought a couple of houses there, oddly enough.”
“Such a small world.”
“Practically a village.” She lit a cigarette. “I’ve been doing some business with a rental agency in Phuket, actually. One house is being taken by an American couple for an indefinite period. I may be able to pocket a few baht before the bank forecloses.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
She sighed, and he could hear the effort it took to get herself sounding cheerful again. He almost felt sorry for her.
“She’s an author, the wifey. He’s some kind of businessman. Quite hunky, judging from her Faceboo
k page.”
“Oh let me see. Maybe I can show him the sights.”
She told him the woman’s name and he used one of his other phones to call up Facebook.
“Caroline Tate,” he said. “The author of Confections. Is that a cook book?”
“Nope. Short stories.”
“Jesus, I hate short stories. I always find them so bloody... short.”
They both laughed as he opened Caroline Tate’s Facebook gallery and saw the picture of the woman with the blonde bob.
“My God, she looks like you,” he said.
“Oh come on, she’s a house mouse.”
“Seriously, just airbrush away that prim bobby thing and the resemblance is quite uncanny.”
“Mnnn.”
He looked at the husband. “Ooh, he’s hot. One of those brutally sexy American faces. Kind of a Jim Morrisonish mouth.”
“If you say so.”
“Wait...” he said.
“What?”
“Michael Tate. A bell is ringing. Hold on.”
He googled for a minute and then he said, “Jumping Jesus Christ. Do you know who he is?”
“An architect, I think.”
“No, darling, no. Much more than that.”
He filled her in on Michael Tate. The scion of one of America’s East Coast dynasties, with enough money to settle most of the Third World debt.
“Wow, I had no idea,” she said.
“No, he flies under the radar.”
“Clearly. The rental house is no shack, but it’s practically slumming it for a guy like that.” She sounded distracted. “Charlie, it was great to catch up, but I’ve got to go.”
“Okay. Can we talk again?”
“Sure, soon.” She made a smooching sound and was gone.
As Charlie lay smoking on the mattress in his sweltering room he drifted into a kind of alpha state, and the most dazzling plan came to him, fully formed and gorgeous.
But Charlie was old and wise enough to let it sit for a day.
So he rode around on his Vespa.
Drank beer.
Lost money at cards.
Good Friends Page 15