Chasing the Dark

by Sam Hepburn

  Jana touched her leg, rubbed her bloody fingers in disbelief and hissed, ‘Get inside. All of you. Now!’

  I twisted away, saw Oz lying on the grass, heard a faint whimper then silence.

  ‘Nooooo!’ I was running towards him stumbling, choking, blinded. Bogdan caught my hair, yanking me back. I lashed out kicking and punching. Suddenly he let go, I fell forward, heard a click and turned. Shrek was holding Nina and he had his gun rammed against her head. She was reaching for Oz, her mouth stretched wide with horror.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Jana snarled. ‘It’s just a dog. Now get inside. All of you.’

  Shrek let Nina go and pushed me towards the house. I moved slowly, on jelly legs, looking back at the heap of white fur on the grass, too numb to cry.

  Norma shrugged off Jana’s gun. ‘Why don’t you just kill us all out here and have done with it?’ she said.

  ‘Too messy,’ Jana said. ‘This way, once I’ve got the information I need, there’ll be a gas explosion, a terrible fire and nothing left of any of you. You know how I’ve always liked things tidy.’

  But she was limping and underneath the sneer she was gritting her teeth.

  They herded us into the sitting room and forced us to the floor with our backs to the wall. I sagged forward with my head down. I’d never felt so helpless in my life. The Vulture had taken everything I’d ever cared about and I’d been an idiot to think there was anything I could do about it. I felt Yuri’s hand take mine. He squeezed it hard. I twisted my head and glanced at him. OK so he looked like a corpse and smelled like a sewer and his whole body was covered in injuries, but his eyes still gleamed defiance and I knew he hadn’t given up, not yet. I pulled myself up a little. Then I squeezed that cracked leather claw right back.

  In the flickering firelight Nina’s pale face looked like a Hallowe’en mask. The cuts on her lip had opened up again and the purple shadows under her eyes had turned black. Jana hobbled over to the fire and helped herself to a gold-tipped cigarette from the box on the mantelpiece. Reaching for Norma’s jade table lighter, she flicked the thumbwheel. It barely sparked. Annoyed, she bent and searched the crackling flames, carefully selected a glowing twig, pressed the cigarette against the ember and flopped down on the nearest couch, inhaling deeply and inspecting the teeth marks in her leg.

  ‘Shame about the dog,’ she snapped. ‘I’d like to have shot it myself.’

  I wanted to kill her. I jerked forward. Yuri pulled me back.

  Janice flicked her hand at Norma. ‘Get a first-aid kit and sort out my leg. About time you did something for me.’ She signalled Bogdan to go with her. ‘And hurry up.’

  Shrek posted himself by the door, passing the time by pointing his gun at each of us in turn and flicking the trigger, making it crystal clear that he was really going to enjoy pulling it.

  CHAPTER 22

  My eyes roved the room looking for an escape route. Windows – locked. Door – guarded by a crazy gunman. Available weapons – none. Chances of survival – zip. Halfway round, my eyes met Nina’s doing the same recce. I raised my wrist and quietly circled the dial of an imaginary watch. She got the message. Somehow we had to keep psycho Jana talking while we figured a way out of there.

  Norma came back and got down on her knees to see to Jana’s leg. Jana leant back on the cushions. ‘Just like old times, eh, Norma? Only now it’s you doing the grovelling.’

  I watched Norma cutting away Jana’s shredded tights and rifling through the first-aid box and wondered how much damage I could do with a pair of nail scissors and a packet of wet wipes.

  ‘Clean it properly,’ Jana snapped. ‘I don’t want that rancid mutt giving me blood poisoning. What’s in that bottle?’

  ‘Surgical spirit.’

  ‘That’ll do.’

  Hunched in misery, Norma took a ball of cotton wool, wet it from the bottle and started dabbing at the wound.

  Jana took a sharp breath, snapped her fingers and sent Nina off to the bar. She came back with a bottle of Vodka and a tumbler. Jana unscrewed the cap and poured herself a stiff drink, raising it in a mocking toast and knocking it back.

  Go on, Joe, get her talking.

  It was worse than chewing barbed wire but I kept my voice even. ‘How come the newspapers said Clairmont mistook you for Norma? You don’t look anything like her.’

  ‘Simple. I fused the lights so it looked like he’d mistaken us in the dark.’

  She reached for the vodka and I raided my memory for movies where the cornered good guy survives by knocking up a deadly weapon out of chewing gum and old toenail clippings. Come on, Joe, think! Think! THINK!

  My eyes flicked to the bottles on the coffee table, clocking the vodka and homing in on the words 90% alcohol on the surgical spirit, while my mashed-up brain started throwing up scenes from old war films: tanks in war-torn ghettos, resistance fighters making Molotov cocktails, fearless kids darting through the rubble and lobbing them at the Nazis. Bottle, fuel, rag, matches. Whiz, smash, boom!

  I blinked at Nina, dragged her eyes towards the bottles then across to the fire and put two fingers to my lips like a little kid pretending to smoke. She didn’t get it. I tried again. Her brow wrinkled.

  Jana jabbed her foot into Norma’s shoulder. ‘Of course, it was all down to you that I got away with it.’

  ‘You’re lying!’ Norma sobbed. ‘I wasn’t even there.’

  ‘That’s the point. You were due back any moment and if you’d come home on time you’d have made things very difficult. As it was, Clairmont hadn’t been dead more than five minutes when you called to say you’d met up with friends and wouldn’t be back till late.’ Jana slopped more Vodka into her glass. ‘That gave me the time I needed to fake the evidence and make it look as if he’d murdered me and gone on the run.’

  Norma, who was already a quivering mess, lost it completely and fell forward, crying, ‘No, no, no …’

  ‘What about the forensics?’ I said. ‘How come the cops never worked out that you were the murderer?’ I wasn’t even playing for time. I really wanted to know.

  Jana laughed. ‘Back then, forensic testing wasn’t nearly so advanced. All I had to do was make the murder scene look right.’

  ‘How? How did you do it?’ Nina croaked.

  Jana looked almost gratified that we were so interested. ‘First, I opened a vein in my arm and collected some of my own blood. Then I washed the vase I’d used to kill Clairmont and smeared it with my blood and hair, to make it look as if he’d grabbed the nearest object and smashed me over the head in a moment of fury. Then I splashed some more of my blood around the hall, dropped one of my shoes in the mess, put on Clairmont’s shoes and laid a trail of his bloody footprints out to his Mercedes. Once I’d checked that Yuri had buried the body and briefed him on what he should tell the police, I packed a bag, drove Clairmont’s Mercedes to Dover and left it on the cliff top with a few more of my hairs, some fibres from my housekeeper’s uniform and my other blood-stained shoe in the boot. After that, a rather fetching black wig, a fake passport and the early-morning ferry to France got me out of England undetected. Just before boarding I called the police anonymously, telling them that a man fitting Clairmont’s description had been seen throwing a body over the cliffs at Dover. The tip-off led them to his abandoned Merc, corroborated Yuri’s statement that he’d seen Clairmont put Janice’s body in the car, and allayed any doubts about who was the murderer and who was the victim.’ She pushed her mask of a face close to Norma’s and hissed, ‘Genius, don’t you think, Norma?’

  Then she sat back, sighing. ‘Of course, Yuri didn’t see it that way and at first he kicked up a fuss and refused to help me. But he had no choice.’ Jana sneered at him as if he was a dribble of cat sick. ‘Look at him. He was no match for Jana Morozova. Not then. Not now.’

  ‘Morozov,’ I said, looking straight at Nina and then at the bottles on the table.

  Jana glared at me. ‘Morozova. And it’s Miss Morozova to you.’

 
‘Sorry. It’s just the name, Morozov – isn’t that some kind of cocktail?’

  ‘Cocktail? What are you talking about, you idiot?’

  ‘Maybe I got it wrong,’ I mumbled, keeping my eyes fixed on Nina. ‘Maybe it just sounds like Morozov.’

  Nina’s lip twitched. She’d got it. I checked the coffee table, weighing up my chances of getting to those bottles faster than Shrek or Bogdan could pull a trigger. The odds weren’t encouraging.

  Norma finished tying off the bandage, flinching as Jana caught her by the chin and jerked her face up. ‘And you and Clairmont being such big celebrities really helped to keep the media spotlight off Janice. What self-respecting paper was going to devote space to a mousey little housekeeper when there was a homicidal aristocrat and a crazy supermodel to write about?’

  Norma was kind of living up to that description, rocking on her knees with her eyes half closed, murmuring, ‘He loved me . . . he loved me . . .’ which didn’t exactly fill me with hope that she was secretly plotting some miracle method of getting us out of there.

  I was scrabbling for something, anything, to keep Jana talking when Nina piped up.

  ‘Why did you not take those files out of KGB archives as soon as they were opened to public?’

  Jana looked up. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I sanitised the main Moscow archive years ago.’ She tipped her glass towards Yuri. ‘But because he’s Ukrainian, the KGB in Kiev had copies of everything relating to the Elysium operation. Stupid of me. If I’d realised sooner I wouldn’t be here now, clearing up this mess. Still it won’t take long. I just need the names of everyone who knew about Lincoln’s investigation, then I’ll be on my way. Well, Joe? Apart from Nina and Professor Lincoln, who I’m assured won’t ever regain consciousness, who did you tell?’

  I looked her square in the eye. ‘No one.’

  She sighed and muttered to Shrek who slipped his gun down the back of his trousers and came towards me, eyes dead, hands twitchy.

  I backed up. ‘No one. I swear.’

  She barked something in Russian. He yanked me to my feet and wrenched my arm back, locking my elbow on the point of breaking. Pain worse than anything you can imagine sawed nerves I never even knew I had. I couldn’t move forward or back. I couldn’t bend, breathe or even yell without ratcheting up the torment. Out of the corner of my eye I caught the glint of steel in Shrek’s hand and heard a scream, only it wasn’t me. It was Norma rushing towards me. Bogdan whacked her with his gun. She tottered backwards saying over and over, ‘The boy has nobody. Who was he going to tell?’

  Jana stood up, flexing her bandaged ankle. ‘That’s what we’re here to find out.’

  ‘Don’t do this, Janice,’ Norma pleaded. ‘Let him go. I swear to God we’ll keep your secret.’

  ‘Sorry, Norma. I have to finish this tonight.’

  ‘Why now?’ Norma sobbed. ‘After all these years.’

  ‘Because of this summit I’m off to tomorrow. I’m all set to sign a huge Arctic oil contract with the British government that’ll net my companies millions.’

  ‘So sign your damn contract and leave us alone.’

  ‘Do be sensible, Norma. I have to plug every possible leak before I get there. Can you imagine the Brits signing a deal with the woman who murdered Greville Clairmont?’

  Norma crumpled into a heap of misery. Nina flashed me a look, crawled over to her, threw her arms round her neck and started blubbing into her hair. Startled at first, Norma began to rock her gently, murmuring and patting her like a little kid. Slowly, as Nina’s whispers sank in, Norma’s swollen eyes lifted and met mine.

  Jana took a couple of careful steps to the mantelpiece and got herself another cigarette. ‘Come on, Joe. Who did you tell?’

  ‘Just the Professor,’ I whimpered, petrified I’d crack and let on about Bailey. I knew I was weeping but the pain was so bad I couldn’t stop.

  A twitch of Shrek’s fingers fired agony up my arm and jolted a scream from my lungs. The room tilted as the tip of his knife slit the flesh of my ear.

  ‘No one else. I swear.’

  His knife slid deeper. I could feel something warm and sticky dripping down my neck. My body was a twitching mess but my brain was working overtime, warning me that my plan, what there was of it, could go either way. I could deal with that. But I wasn’t going to die without getting the truth about Mum.

  ‘Why did you kill my mother?’ I gasped. ‘What did she have to do with any of this?’

  Jana’s lips peeled back. ‘What do you think, Norma? You’re all about to die. Maybe it’s only fair he should know.’

  My heart stuttered to a stop. Jana was getting a real kick out of dragging this out but if she gave me an answer I didn’t care how much she sneered. I held my breath, waiting, hoping . . . horrified. She was bending down to the fire, searching for a twig to light her cigarette. Nina tensed. This was it. Our only chance. I had to act now. But if I did I’d never find out the truth about Mum. I looked at Nina and Norma and I knew I didn’t have a choice. Ignoring the burning hunger for answers and the sickening stab of pain, I opened my mouth, yelled, ‘Bogdan!’ and brought my knee up hard into Shrek’s groin.

  Startled, Bogdan swung round just as Shrek let go of me, dropped the knife and folded forward with a breathy grunt.

  Nina and Norma sprang apart. Faster than a spitting snake, Nina grabbed the surgical spirit and squirted it over Jana’s shoulder into the flames while Norma smashed open the vodka bottle and threw the contents down Jana’s clothes.

  A white hot jet of flame whooshed out of the fireplace straight into Jana’s face, catching her lacquered hair and sweeping a line of blue flickers down her front. She leapt back, screaming and batting wildly at the flames. Within seconds her whole suit was alight, filling the room with the stench of burning hair and clothes. Rolling and kicking, she fell to the ground.

  Bogdan panicked and rushed forward, waving his gun around but even he couldn’t see how shooting anyone was going to help Jana. He dropped the weapon, leapt across the sofa, kicked aside the coffee table, and tried to roll her up in the rug. As Shrek scrambled forward to help him, Yuri grabbed his leg, tipping him over. Shrek crashed down, smashing his head against the table, adding the punch of breaking glass to the gruesome sound of Jana’s shrieks. Bogdan turned, saw me grab the gun from the back of Shrek’s trousers and made a dash for his own. As I fumbled with the weapon, trying to pull back the hammer, Nina hurled herself over the sofa and slithered towards Bogdan’s gun, shouting to Norma who jumped on his back, clawing at his throat. He bucked and twisted, elbowing her so hard she hit the wall with a dull slap. He skirted the sofa and seized Nina’s hair, ripping her head back as she grabbed the gun. She doubled over, clasping the weapon as he wrestled her down and tore at her arms till the gun tumbled free and slid across the floor. He threw himself after it, grabbed it and swerved round on his knees to take aim.

  My muscles seized up, halted by the ugly, unnatural weight of the weapon in my hand, the ordinariness of the sweat on Bogdan’s lip and the lock of oily hair falling across his eyes. You have to do this, Joe, you have to. Sick and scared I raised Shrek’s gun and held it with both hands, mirroring Bogdan’s grasp on his. A shot cracked through Jana’s screams. I saw Nina, Yuri and Norma reach out to me in silent slo-mo, mouths opening, faces warping, and the room turned so wobbly that my body had to sway to stay upright. It was only when I looked down that I saw a crimson spurt of blood spreading across my chest. And when I looked up I saw Bogdan taking aim to fire a second shot.

  CHAPTER 23

  Like a sleepwalker, I watched the floor floating gently towards me. I knew I’d entered some kind of weird zone where anything could happen but I was still amazed when the door flew open and Jackson Duval burst in wielding a garden spade and cracked it across the back of Bogdan’s head. The ringing crunch of metal on skull was the last thing I heard before the floor turned black and soft and sucked me into silence for what seemed like forever. Then a voice broke through, li
ke someone speaking under water.

  ‘Hey, Joe.’

  I forced my eyes open. A face swam into focus. I could tell I was still in weird zone because it was Bailey, staring down at me through his grubby glasses. Behind him there was movement and shouting; two cops handcuffing Viktor Kozek, a load more cops coming through the French windows, and Norma and Nina crawling towards me across the broken glass. I tried to speak. The darkness swept me away.

  I was gazing into a pair of square, unblinking eyes and it took me a while to work out that they weren’t eyes at all but metal lights in a plain white ceiling and all around me soft beeps, whooshing doors, faint voices and the sharp tang of disinfectant were triggering thoughts of the night Mum died and the search for answers that had been the only thing keeping me going ever since. Then it all flooded back, the night at Elysium, the world-stopping moment when Jana Morozova had been about to tell me why she’d had Mum killed and the choice I’d made. It had been the right one, I was sure of that. Only now I’d be spending the rest of my life with a big black question mark scrawled across every memory of Mum I had. That didn’t seem much like a life worth living, ’specially without Oz in it, or a home to go to.

  I tried to sit up, the room spun, and a woman bent over me, sploshing fat tears on to my face and whispering, ‘Joe, thank God, thank God.’

  Seeing as one of my hands was wired to a drip and she was holding the other one really tight, I couldn’t push her away. I stared up at her, a bit bewildered, mostly embarrassed. You see, the woman doing the crying was Norma Craig.

  My throat felt like sandpaper but I gave my voice a try. ‘Miss . . . Craig.’ I didn’t sound like me, but then I didn’t feel much like me either.

  She poured me a cup of water and helped me take a drink.

  ‘Is Yuri . . . all right?’ I croaked. ‘And . . . Nina?’

  ‘Yuri’s doing fine and they’re letting Nina out tomorrow.’

  The relief cut through some of the fug in my head. ‘What … happened? It was like I was … hallucinating. I thought I saw these … people I know from … London.’