Safe from Harm

by RJ Bailey

  ‘Have we won?’ Asma asked, as I led her back to that other lift, removed the bicycle and pressed for the ground floor. I weighed the hammer in my right hand.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But we’re getting there.’

  FORTY-EIGHT

  ‘Holy fuck!’

  I didn’t blame Nina. If she’d turned up on my doorstep looking as I did, with a luridly damaged cheek, a bloodshot eye, broken fingers, a weeping knife wound and wearing a jacket that looked like a crazed Samurai had attacked it, I’d have said the same.

  ‘What the hell happened?’

  All I had managed to say on the phone before it finally died on me was for Nina to make sure Jess was safe. I’d left behind me chaos. I’d managed to get a perfect strike with my bowling Ferrari, breaking bones and causing massive haemorrhaging among four of the five men who were coming to take on a wounded woman and a frightened cross-gender girl. Swincoe had been among the worst injured.

  I had released Tom, called police and ambulance and then helped myself to the Range Rover Evoque which had been left with keys in it. They’d be coming for me soon. The coppers. So many questions to answer. So many questions I would like answered. But I was so drained, I couldn’t even formulate them.

  ‘Can I see her?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  I followed her eyes up the stairs. It looked like a mountain to climb. Nina saw my expression. ‘Go and sit through there. I’ll bring her down.’

  ‘Can I have a drink?’

  ‘There’s one open on the table. Help yourself. It’s the good stuff.’

  It might be the good stuff, but I treated it rough, glugging out a large glass and taking an unladylike gulp. I almost coughed half of it back up as I slumped on the squishy sofa. Nina had never gone for the modern minimalist look and she had taken advantage of the fall in the price of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century furniture to pick up some classic pieces. Not my taste, but it suited the house, which was a Victorian terrace which had avoided attention from the ‘knocker-throughers’ who seemed to prefer one vast impersonal room to the cosier warrens the original builders intended.

  As I took my second hit of the Pomerol, I wondered how poor Tom was getting on. He was certainly furious when I finally freed him.

  Would he stick around after this? I’d like him to, I realised. If he ever got around to forgiving me for slugging him with the paperweight. Perhaps he’d eventually come to the correct conclusion – that I had done it to save his life. We still had to get to the bottom of the torching of the Slim Pickens. If Swincoe didn’t do it, maybe there really were mad-dog Albanians on his tail. My feeling was that Tom would decide that trouble had not only found him, it had pissed down his leg, drunk his booze and shagged his wife. Maybe I was the trouble in question. I certainly felt like it.

  Only much later would I discover that, probably at that precise moment, Tom was staring at the body of Elliott. The butler’s throat had been cut. There was no sign of Bojan, just Bojan’s blood. He had lost enough to fell any other man. God alone knew what extricating the Eickhorn to murder Elliott had done to his insides. As I would later say, I should probably have used a sharpened stake through the heart on him. Next time.

  The room gave a little lurch. I checked my knife wound. The bleeding had, if not stopped, then slowed. But I needed a hospital. Or a decent medic. I looked at the dead phone again. I’d use Nina’s landline to call Freddie. She would come running. Best battlefield medic I ever knew. And Christ I’d been in a battlefield. And she wouldn’t ask awkward questions like A&E about knife wounds. Even so, I still had a lot of explaining to the police to do. I had to get the story straight in my mind. The room did its merry-go-round trick again. I was on the edge of fainting, but I took a large breath. I just had to keep it together until I had held Jess in my arms.

  The door opened and I turned to look at my daughter.

  There was only Nina, her face devoid of colour, her mouth a perfect ‘O’ of horror. The two words she spoke were my very own sharpened stake through the heart.

  ‘She’s gone.’

  EPILOGUE

  I am waiting to hurt a man. I am not sure how, yet, but my RTG bag has everything in it I need to restrain him and inflict pain. Mask, tape, handcuffs, soldering iron, blowtorch, Taser, sedatives, both oral and IV, retaining straps, Sig-Sauer pistol, as supplied by One-Eyed Jack, who feels he owes me one after handing over that hard drive. But they had threatened to hurt Jordan. I understood that.

  Water under the bridge.

  I’ll stop hurting this man when he tells me the truth, but part of me hopes he will hold out for a little while. I want him to sense just a tiny portion of the agony I have been living with for weeks now. It’s not cancer, but it feels like cancer, eating me hollow. I am a husk. There’s no heart, no emotion left. Just a sort of ill-focused low-level hum of anger, as if there is a hate generator somewhere within me, bleeding bile into my system.

  Never mind. Hatred can be useful.

  I am sitting in my car, less than a hundred metres from his home. He’ll be back soon, back from his plush offices. I’ll move forward as he pulls into the drive. I’ll take him as he gets out of the car. I’m not worried if he sees me. I’m beyond that now.

  It is two weeks since the events at the Asparovs’. A version of what happened has appeared in the newspaper. Nina would have written the most accurate one. But she couldn’t bring herself to, not after what she considers her failure to protect Jess.

  More water under more bridges.

  I don’t blame Nina. Laura and Matt would have got to Jess somehow, sometime. They had prepared the ground well and clearly decided to strike while I was otherwise engaged. Willingly or not, Jess had gone with them. That’s one of many things we don’t know. Did Jess jump or was she pushed? The police asked me that over and over again. No matter what happened, I always contended, it was kidnapping. Close the ports, the airports, the roads, SHUT THE FUCKING TUBE.

  We didn’t see eye to eye, me and the police. Not after all the other stuff I had landed on their doorsteps.

  The Sharifs were grateful, though. Asma was kept out of it all, the images on the hard drive were pronounced fake. Back in Pakistan, rogue family members were purged. I was offered money, cars, my old job back at an increased salary.

  There’s only one thing I want in this life and it isn’t in their gift.

  And Tom? He’s talking about buying a new boat when the insurance money on the Slim Pickens comes through. He hasn’t said as much, but maybe he agrees that I am too much like the trouble he has been trying to avoid. I’m certainly going to be trouble for someone this evening.

  Dusk has turned to a deep azure twilight, but the night is still warm. Summer is here, at last. I roll my window down and flick my cigarette butt far away from the car. Force of habit. I don’t really care if anyone knows someone has been sitting in the same spot for three cigarettes’-worth. I look in the mirror at headlamps approaching from my rear, but I can tell by their height it is an SUV. The car I am waiting for is a Maserati. It belongs to Ben Harris.

  I don’t know yet where the bastard fits into all this. For the past week or so, from the moment the tumblers clicked into place about his initial involvement, my brain has been spitting out ideas, theories, connections, as well as random snatches of conversation I half remembered. Like, they were told I was a technical klutz. That I wouldn’t ask questions.

  As Lawrence had said: ‘Jesus, why didn’t you just do what you were meant to? Not up to speed on tech, we were told. Didn’t know a hard drive from a hard-on. Just wind her up and off she’ll go, for Queen and Country.’

  My suspicion – no, more than that, it is a whisker away from a certainty – is that they approached Ben Harris asking for someone they could manipulate. Fragile, bereaved maybe, who was also a couple of pulses behind the beat on the latest technology. And there I am, vulnerable, wrong-footed, finding my way back again.

  Just how much of it was pre-planned, I
couldn’t be sure. Probably some kind of sham MI5 intervention to convince me there was an Islamist element to the Sharifs, to appeal to my sense of revenge for Paul, was at the core of the plan. Did Harris have anything to do with Matt? Or was that coincidence? My money was on the latter, that my ex-husband appearing was just a random event. But I had to be sure.

  And where was Bojan? Did he survive or did he bleed to death, slowly and painfully like he deserved?

  I’ll find out the truth soon enough. But not too soon, I hope. Dark thoughts live with me now. All my skies are cloudy, oppressive. I am not the same person I was five, six weeks ago. Good. That person couldn’t do what I am about to do.

  At last the Quattroporte growls by. He has it in sport mode, which gives the exhaust a more gravelly note, but does little for the performance. I’ve been brushing up on my supercars since the garage fiasco. I’ll never confuse a California with a Testarossa ever again. I start the engine of my Golf and pull out after him. He won’t notice. There’ll be Verdi or Rossini in the CD player. If he looks in the rear-view mirror, it’ll be to check his hair. But it’s time to fess up, Mr Harris.

  Tonight won’t give me all the answers to my questions. Only some. Real life is too confused, too untidy to deliver me neat, bow-tied solutions, like the whereabouts of my daughter. It’ll be a start, the first step on the trail. But in the long run, I know there is only one person can bring Jess back home where she belongs.

  Samantha Rae Wylde.

  Me.

  THE HURTING KIND

  a SAM WYLDE thriller coming in 2018

  We are looking for a PPO to accompany our client on an extended business trip abroad.

  • The successful applicant will be fully qualified in defensive driving and escape and evasion techniques (with a refresher course completed within the past two years).

  • SIA accreditation and Firearms Authorised for Continental Europe essential. A licence will be issued once in France.

  • The final destination will also be revealed once there, due to security considerations.

  • Passport should not include any recent visits to Middle Eastern countries.

  • Applicant must be available for one to two weeks of continuous travel.

  • Client stipulation is for transport by land only (due to a fear of flying).

  • Hours flexible, pay competitive.

  • Must be ready to begin at short notice.

  • Female preferred, for operational reasons.

  One year on, the hate still burns in Sam Wylde. But a woman has to make a living. Even if it involves killing.

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2017

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © RJ Bailey 2017

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of RJ Bailey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  PB ISBN: 978-1-4711-5716-5

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-5718-9

  TPB ISBN: 978-1-4711-5717-2

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset in Sabon by M Rules

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd are committed to sourcing paper that is made from wood grown in sustainable forests and support the Forest Stewardship Council, the leading international forest certification organisation. Our books displaying the FSC logo are printed on FSC certified paper.