The Oktober Projekt

by R. J. Dillon

  • • •

  Nick went missing for almost a week; Hawick driving everyone mad insisting: ‘He must be found, today, if you will, not tomorrow. Urgency and action will be our watchword. I want his movements and I want him delivered to me.’ Interpreting Hawick’s commands in his own way, Paul Rossan had picked up Nick’s wayward course late on the Tuesday afternoon as his friend and colleague wove an erratic trail across London. Each time Rossan had followed up a reliable sighting, Nick had vanished before he arrived. By Wednesday, Rossan wondered quite seriously if he wasn’t chasing anything more substantial than a ghost. Even Nick’s cottage had turned up a blank; Rossan taking an almighty risk, had somehow obtained a pool car along with a green probationer called Denshaw from Aspley, basing him at a village inn not far from Nick’s cottage, instructing him to make regular checks.

  Finally, when Rossan almost believed Nick to have walked straight off the edge of the world, he got a sheepish call from Denshaw to say Nick had been found. ‘Well where, dammit, where?’ Rossan blasted him, quietly fuming as Denshaw explained that the ‘target’ had spilled out of a taxi almost at his feet as he did one of his calls on the cottage. Denshaw went on to complain that the ‘target’ verbally and physically threatened him, before insisting that they share a drink. ‘How long ago?’ Rossan demanded, having to ask twice before the probationer volunteered that he thought it might have been yesterday evening. ‘Do not move, do not pass go,’ Rossan had ordered him, certain that Denshaw sounded hung-over and queasy. Enlisting the help of Danny Redman, a CO8 close-quarter combat trainer, a former SAS sniper and long-standing partner of Nick, they set out for Devon.

  After packing Denshaw back off to Aspley with a severe rollicking, including dark threats if he ever uttered a word, Rossan padded up the cottage’s twisting staircase followed by Danny. ‘Good God,’ Rossan exclaimed, opening the spare bedroom door, genuinely shocked. Lying across a crumpled bed, duvet and sheets hanging down to the floor, his face staring blankly at them, a half-dressed Nick Torr was comatose, a red fire bucket placed strategically on the floor by his head. Stark, bare walled and furnished with a wardrobe, chests of drawers, dressing table and chairs none of which matched, the room was scarred from years of seasonal living. There were scuffs, scratches and missing segments of plaster and in a pile pushed up in a corner, creased navigation charts showed Nick’s life spent sailing. Every free surface had a covering of books all devoted to the sea, most of them second-hand. Rossan had trouble establishing if Nick had caused any damage, deciding eventually that nothing appeared freshly smashed.

  ‘Come on, old fellow,’ Rossan said, taking one of Nick’s arms, Danny the other, both of them reeling from his stale whisky soaked breath. ‘Time to get you cleaned up.’

  Dragging Nick between them, his legs and feet trailing at obscure angles, Rossan and Danny got him along the landing, wedged his pliable body against the wall with Rossan’s knee in his back as Danny opened the bathroom door. After bundling Nick into the bath, Danny stripped off his jacket and shirt, supporting Nick’s head as Rossan turned on the shower. It took a good minute and a half before Nick gasped, jerked, gripped the rim of the bath and began a messy struggle, flailing at anything within his reach.

  ‘Nick, it’s Paul and Danny,’ Rossan shouted above the shower’s lukewarm spray.

  ‘Piss off,’ Nick managed in response, his words slurred, his voice weak and hoarse.

  ‘You’ve no chance,’ Danny said, preventing Nick from sliding down the bath and dozing off. Danny, who had shared enough perilous operations with Nick to know him well. Danny who was small and fluid, a springy walk to his step that could be mistaken for a jauntiness when it is nothing more than being prepared. Wiry, not muscular, all Danny’s strength and endurance lay inside, while his face had a leanness derived from professional hardship; refined through the storms of many campaigns until the bone beneath the sallow skin revealed every single line like a battle scar, which some of the more recent ones were. His dark hair was not neatly cut, but seemed to have been attacked with blunt scissors. One eyebrow, his right, was testimony to bouts in the boxing ring representing the army, where he had also mastered the fine art of close-quarter combat that CO8 determined his primary trade.

  Ten minutes of holding the shower was enough to persuade Rossan that Nick also needed a good dose of hard love. ‘If you want to find those who raped and killed Angela, you’re not going to do it like this.’

  How or where Nick got his energy from, Danny didn’t know, but Nick flew at Rossan and it took Danny’s expert holds to restrain him and sit him gently back down.

  ‘We’re here to help,’ Rossan said, his jacket soaked.

  Holding tight to the bath’s side, Nick stared up at Rossan; a lost child suddenly found as the spray cascaded off his flattened hair, streaming down his face mixing with his tears.

  Preparing Nick for the journey back took another hour. Leaving Nick in Danny’s care, Rossan bought six bottles of mineral water, two litres in each, a plastic bucket, bin liners, air freshener and a packet of powerful aspirin from the village Spar. Unaided, Nick made it down the stairs, locked the cottage and slipped in beside Rossan in the back as Danny drove them away.

  To Nick, the drive felt as though he’d been returned from the dead. Neither Danny nor Rossan forced any conversation on him, which he was extremely grateful for, his mind only just having stopped freewheeling. Only once did they have to stop as Nick brought up nothing more toxic than water and coffee, but Rossan still had to give the car a blast of freshener. On the outskirts of London, Danny having monitored Nick’s condition through his driving mirror, felt able to lighten the mood.

  ‘Fancy going out for a few beers tonight, Nick?’ Danny asked, half-turning, smiling.

  ‘Only if you’re buying,’ he joked back.

  ‘Hawick is baying for your blood,’ Rossan said on a more serious note.

  ‘At the moment it’s a hundred per cent distilled, so he can’t have any.’

  That short conversation marked Nick’s return from a downward spiral taking him to breaking point Rossan observed, when later he was required to review events with a cold analytical eye. It was also the point if he was to be absolutely honest and objective, when Nick detached himself from friends, from old alliances. Not becoming introverted or maudlin, but possessed by a burning determination that he could trust no one; nor could he, or would he be deviated from what had now become a very personal battle.

  ‘Take care, Nick,’ said Danny as he stopped close to Nick’s address.

  ‘If you need anything, call me,’ Rossan urged him as he climbed out.

  Leaning into the car, one hand resting on the roof, Nick looked from Danny to Rossan. ‘Thanks,’ he said, slammed the door and walked off.

  Flagrantly sitting on the single yellow line at the junction of Burston Road and Ulva Road, a cable company van was sited so its rear doors had a good field of vision covering Nick’s house. One of Hawick’s surveillance teams decided Nick, noting the QR prefix on its number plate. As he walked past its empty cab he wondered if there’d be two or three at work in the back, monitoring, reporting in, letting Hawick know the second Nick appeared. For good measure there was a Met section car parked opposite his house, and a uniform presence on his step. Welcome home Nick, he thought, welcome back to a world you’ve helped create. Nick swung open the garden gate, felt the energy in his legs suddenly drain as he established his ID with the uniform on his step. He noticed the locks had been changed and wondered if it was normal, part of police routine after a murder. The door was already open and he gave it a cursory shove.

  He stepped into the dark hall, and the swell of an unwelcome voice met him, the strident tones of Angela’s mother phrasing shrill orders to her husband on what room was next for cleaning.

  ‘It’s you’, she said coming to check the latest arrival, her bitter contempt resurfacing, functioning at a hundred per cent.

  ‘Now, Nick,’ began her husband, his strategi
c speech prepared in advance, another of his polished pitch presentations perfected during his career as a banker. ‘We appreciate how difficult this must be, but,’ and he sought approval from his wife, ‘we thought it best if we made a start on sorting Angela’s things. We’re just boxing them up for now, make the place presentable. You can of course choose things for yourself. I also took the precautionary measure of having the locks changed as you weren’t here.’

  ‘Never was,’ said Angie’s mother as Nick accepted a set of shiny keys, ‘that was always the problem. If he had been…,’ she broke off with an anguished snort and went back to laying claim to her daughter again.

  The last of the day’s sun strayed through a long window, dull stalks falling across the detritus of his life. In every room Nick smelt dust and Angie’s feint lingering scent, but what troubled him was the loss of Angie’s voice, its disappearance too loud in itself. In the kitchen even though its walls were scrubbed clean, as he rummaged through a cupboard for his case of Laphroaig, he found blood smattered along the top of a cabinet door. All the cupboards had been emptied, the contents stored in sturdy packing boxes. Finding the remains of his Laphroaig, Nick took out two bottles, and grabbing a large mineral water prepared to control his withdrawal.

  Armed with his liquid solace Nick made straight for Angela’s studio; a terrible silence unbroken from the bottom step to the landing and her door when the stairs used to be her territory, Angie’s pulpit for lecturing him. Everything around him wasn’t as he wanted to remember it, the familiar things he now dreaded to touch. Beside the window Angela’s easel and stool kicked over, her plan chest ransacked, her last sketch screwed in a ball lying with pencils and a smashed glass in the fireplace. Hanging out of the plan chest a plain hardback book Angie used as a diary; illustrated outpourings, her intimate feelings that Nick began to read and immediately wanted to put down, forget he’d ever seen it. Angie had lied to Nick when he’d asked months ago if there’d been someone else. There always had been a string of lovers.

  A world underground she’d made her own, formed from secret conventions and moments to savour. Reading between the lines on several entries, he found that Angie believed the actual sex was secondary to the excitement she gained from cheating on him. Having Tom was a mistake; a tortuous period she wanted erased and never repeated, she’d written in an assertive hand. Turning one page, Nick came across a pressed flower and a small black and white photograph with crimped edges showing a pretty girl aged six or seven who he guessed was Angie, posing in a forest. This before you became a victim in love and marriage? he wondered, a couple of petals coming away on his fingers. Well at least I know he thought, ripping out pages, screwing them up and burning them one by one in the fireplace. For a good while afterwards the air smelt of sooty smoke and specks of ash smeared the tiled hearth.

  Dialling through the stations on a radio Angie used for background noise when painting, he caught a snatch of Roxy Music and thought he should perhaps adopt their In Every Dream Home A Heartache as his personal anthem. With the lyrics buzzing through his head, Nick turned the radio off, knowing that Mr. Ferry may not have been writing about this sort of heartache, but he was correct in assuming that each step he took would also take him further from heaven. Sitting back on a leather armchair, closing his eyes he began to doze, coming around when the doorbell went. Listening hard he heard Hawick’s clipped introduction followed by one other voice as they were admitted. They ascended in single file, Nick measuring the progress by each loose stair tread they hit. Then Hawick strutted straight in followed by a thin woman in her thirties. Introducing herself as an officer from the Service’s Internal Security Directorate, she advised Nick he could call her Denise. Nick promised he would.

  ‘I bear the Service’s condolences,’ Hawick declared, ‘from the Chief himself, all the way down.’

  ‘Everybody,’ Denise added needlessly, looking Nick up and down.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Yes, well, good to see you’ve decided to return,’ Hawick began after a rude interlude, struggling to find an approach. ‘This is jolly awkward for us all you know. We have procedures to follow unfortunately,’ he said, casting a glance to Denise halted midway across the room as she stared out of the window.

  Denise had chosen her best investigative outfit for the visit; a charcoal grey business suit, dark tights and patent shoes with minimum heels though none of it seemed to be cut to deal with personal tragedy. Her hair, not a natural colour, was a mix of highlights that a senior stylist had shaped in homage to Cleopatra.

  ‘I have been appointed to handle your case,’ Denise said, taking up residence in a far corner half hidden in shadow.

  Without effort or resistance Nick submitted, reaching a lazy arm over the side of the chair he dragged up the bottle of Laphroaig, poured a small measure and drowned it with water. Hawick mawkish as ever, watched without a word as still the sorting and packing continued below. It took Nick two attempts to clear his throat before he spoke.

  ‘I didn’t know I was a case?’

  With no intention of surrendering his authority, Hawick took responsibility for providing an answer. ‘The police have still not ruled out that Angela and her… um… friend died as the result of a break-in that went tragically wrong.’

  ‘Break-in?’ The severity in Nick’s voice took them by surprise. ‘How could it be a break-in when Angie’s boyfriend was shot in the head on the front step?’

  In her corner Denise gave an involuntary sigh, sensing her moment at last. ‘Perhaps it is better to make Mr. Torr fully aware of his position,’ she said to Hawick, her velveteen voice correct and exact, a response to the hopelessness, to the chaos inflicted on the living by the dead.

  Without the benefit of shadow, Hawick stranded in full view of Nick, shook his wizened little head in disbelief. ‘Yes, well, I was on course to do just that,’ objected Hawick. ‘The police, aware of your personal and professional circumstances, have approached us to put a few further questions to you.’

  ‘How long have you known your wife had a lover?’ Denise said, from her shadowy corner, earning Hawick’s reproach with a sharp stare. ‘That could be taken as a motive,’ she blithely added.

  ‘What?’ said Nick and Hawick in wonderful stereo, though for completely different reasons.

  Pouring himself another whisky Nick hardly bothered with the water, taking a long pull, his outrage growing. For too many years he’d struggled under the bureaucratic hammer attempting to tame his individual way of working; blow after blow forging him on the Service’s mighty anvil – praise and punishment, praise and punishment, praise and punishment – conform.

  ‘Very well,’ Hawick said with a diplomatic sigh. ‘From what I can gather, the Murder Squad are reluctant to dismiss any angle at this stage. I am aware, and sympathetic to the reasons why you may not feel inclined to discuss this right now, but that doesn’t mean the issues will go away.’

  ‘Your mental health must be taken into consideration after Moscow,’ Denise said, sailing merrily along. ‘Was your wife’s affair the last straw?’ Her voice offered no hope.

  They were conspiring against him. Nick sensed and felt it, saw their ritual deceit brightening their eyes, the unspoken agreement and their chosen pattern of closing him in, smothering him with bureaucracy.

  ‘You know what all this is related to,’ Nick told Hawick, ‘You’d better put a stop to this bullshit.’

  ‘Are we expected to believe that Moscow was involved?’ Denise said, the main assault under way.

  Over Hawick’s shoulder Nick stared at low shreds of cloud sweeping by the window, bringing rain or dusk he couldn’t tell.

  ‘And the ballistics?’ Nick asked, refilling his tumbler. ‘Normal round was it that killed my wife’s lover?’

  ‘The round was something that common burglars would not have access to,’ stated Denise.

  ‘But I would, that it?’ demanded Nick.

  Clearly unsure on how to proceed, Denise emerge
d from her corner, glanced at Hawick for approval, received it and shook the weight from one foot to another.

  ‘Yes.’

  In the street children played through the last of the day. Nick closed his mind to their voices, their laughs and shouts. Down the hall, someone ran water in the kitchen. He remembered the buckets and detergents at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Blood everywhere,’ he’d heard Angie’s mother complaining. Hawick circled the room, light and free on his feet, a moth choosing its spot.

  ‘You’d better leave,’ Nick snapped. ‘I’ll discuss your issues when I get a lawyer.’

  Hawick reddened, his entire flimsy body arching.

  ‘Do you not think you’ve not had enough of that?’ He jabbed a finger towards the whisky. ‘You’re strained Torr, we understand. But let’s not forget that the police have to work on the facts and that is all they have.’

  Too tired to argue, too weary to move from the chair, Nick’s energy was reserved for lifting, pouring and drinking. He stared at Hawick. Why do I hate you? Why do you pretend to care?

  ‘Try to see some sense,’ Hawick insisted, looming over him; concerned, twisting his watch chain with long slim fingers.

  Nick wanted to hit him hard, one punch, a blow he had developed and perfected himself. Then the hate passed, leaving him weak.

  ‘You are doing yourself no credit,’ he added, bent over Nick, his sickly breath warm and close. ‘This is all for your own good. I know how you feel, but I strongly advise you to let the Service handle it.’

  ‘Handle a cover-up?’ Nick was on his feet, fired up, angry. ‘Pretend it didn’t happen to protect our reputation with the Americans, to stop Downing Street and the FCO losing influence and allies?’

  Already Denise recognised the futility of her mission, crossed to the door, pulled on her gloves, putting each finger determinedly in; a woman much used to paying great attention to small details.