by Lex Lander
‘Hey, Alis, don’t be anti-social.’ This from the beanpole. ‘We’re kinda short of cunt and this one’s a real looker. C’mere, niecey.’ He reached out and yanked Lizzy from my grasp, his hand cupping a breast. ‘Tits kinda small but I guess they’ll grow. We can give ’em …’ At that point I filled his loud mouth with my knuckles. I felt and heard his front incisors snap. Down he went, landing on top of a naked girl, who objected vocally to being used as a safety net.
Lizzy, released, staggered against me. Power bunched his fists and looked pugnacious, while the other male members of the commune, the beanpole excepted, slowly came up off the floor. Five in all, with Power.
‘Which asshole is next?’ I said with a confidence that wasn’t justified by the odds.
Power paused, glancing down at his felled associate, whose jaw was smeared with blood and hung lop-sidedly. Broken. Well, bloody good!
The other weirdoes were bunched up behind Power; they would take their lead from him. Eliminate Power then. It was easy. A crunching left to his ear, the twin of that I had used to flatten Rik de Bruin, then a right to the breadbasket. It was like punching marshmallow and it arrested him in mid-descent. Finally, as he collapsed, retching, a kick to the crotch to neatly round off the demolition job. The crash when he went down to join the beanpole released the roller shade, which wound up in a rush. Daylight surged in, bright as an arc lamp. From the cries and shrieks you’d have thought I’d disturbed a nest of vampires.
‘Who’s next?’ I repeated, over Uncle Alistair’s twitching form.
Lizzy was clutching my arm, but not from fear. She had proved in Tangier that she wasn’t short of spunk. With her tae-kwon-do skills she was probably capable of doing more damage than I.
Nobody offered to be next. There remained four of Alistair’s pals still able-bodied, and though they could easily have bested us had they acted in concert, they backed off, drugged eyes fearful, mumbling unintelligibly.
‘Wait at the door,’ I ordered Lizzy.
‘Who me? No chance, mate. This is all for one and one for all.’
‘Hey, man, chill out,’ one of the girls whined.
Unable to come up with a witty rejoinder, I turned and, hustling Lizzy ahead of me, quit that stinking hole in search of clean air. I slammed the door after me so hard the handle came off, moving Lizzy to a half-hearted giggle. Grinning foolishly, I jettisoned the handle, and we walked back down the corridor into a gathering of tenants, presumably drawn by the disturbances in 3D.
‘Narcoticos,’ I grunted by way of explanation as we forced a passage. ‘Drugs.’
This was met by an awed ‘aah,’ and they went into a huddle, leaving us to make good our descent. With luck some public-spirited soul among them would tip off the police. Alistair Power and his pals would be looking at the world through vertical bars for many a long year if ever they were busted for drugs this side of the Pyrenees.
Our taxi was still outside, double-parked, the driver picking his teeth with a match.
‘Home, James,’ I said, thrusting Lizzy in ahead of me.
‘Home?’ she said, slumping dejectedly in the corner of the seat. ‘Where’s that?’ She cupped her face in her hands. No tears but she was crying inside. As for me, I had no answer to her question, and no comfort to give worth a damn.
‘Lizzy!’
‘Lizzy!’ mocked the echo. ‘Lizzy-Lizzy-izzie-izzie-zie-e-e-e …’ It travelled down the valley, startling a flock of magpies out of the sun-crisped grass.
‘Lizzy! Where are you?’
‘Areyou-areyou-you-you …’
‘Oh, shit!’ I stumbled forward, swerving between the knobbly little rocks that dot the slopes here on the French side of the Pyrenees. Heading nowhere in particular. Just searching, with increasing desperation. Standing in one spot and hoping didn’t seem the thing to do.
We had driven non-stop from Barcelona in a Hertz Audi, to cross into France at the town of Bourg-Madame. This area is celebrated as the sunniest in France and today’s weather had fortified this statistic. A picnic lunch had been the natural choice.
We shopped for materials and accessories at a mini-supermarket, and drove on out of Bourg-Madame as far as the first suitable site. We dined by a gurgling stream, on a rough and ready salad, liberally enhanced with a bottled garlic dressing and accompanied by pâtés, cheeses, and the obligatory baguette. To wash it all down, a modest red wine from the Pays de l’Hérault.
After lunch Lizzy, in an uncharacteristic burst of domesticity, had washed our plastic tableware in the stream and afterwards wandered off in search of ‘the ladies’. Hereabouts, such facilities were to be found only in a ditch or behind a rock.
I stretched out shirtless to siesta in the debilitating heat. Sleep didn’t come easily, beset as I was with anxiety over my escalating obligations. Eventually though I must have dozed off, for when I next gazed upon the sun it was dropping behind the 8,000-foot summit of the Font Negre, and my skin was cool, bordering on chilly.
And Lizzy was nowhere around.
At first I searched without alarm. Then, as the cast of my net grew wider and the sun dipped below the mountain’s crest, transforming the valley into a realm of shadows, real worry set in. Before long I had ranged a mile or more from the car, searching fanwise, calling her at intervals. Now and again I looked back on the off-chance she had returned to our picnic spot. Cars, miniaturised by distance, wound past it, engines buzzing in low gear. Otherwise no movement, no flash of the bright yellow shirt she was wearing. Dusk fell all too fast. I raced for higher ground, for a vantage point from which to scan the whole valley.
At the top of a slope of scree I sat down. A moonless night closed in and the stars sprinkled their dust across the vastness of space. The outline of the mountains blurred and fused with the darkness into a black backdrop. And I kept on calling, until my throat was sore with it and my shouts so hoarse they no longer produced an echo.
As far as I was aware no four-footed creature more savage than a fox inhabited these lower levels of the Pyrenees. What harm could have come to her, I asked myself, to the extent that she was incapable even of responding to my calls? The obvious explanation still didn’t occur to me.
Down on the road vehicles still droned uphill, a necklace of lights. Maybe she was back at the car, waiting for me. Though it was an empty hope, it was a step up from no hope at all. A last hoarse ‘Lizzy!’ that provoked a flutter of wings in the darkness, and I set off.
Without a flashlight, it was a nightmare of a descent. I tripped over rocks, plunged into ditches and hollows. I tore my chinos in several places, cracked my crazy bone, and bruised every toe more than once. The wound above my ear throbbed too, in sympathy.
Finally, I was brought down by an unidentifiable obstruction that went ‘Oh!’ and then as I sprawled across what was undoubtedly a living being, ‘Ow!’
‘Lizzy? Is that you?’ Though the voice was hers I couldn’t believe it. That after all these hours of searching I had actually found her by accident.
A moan, a subdued ‘Yeah.’
‘What happened?’ My own hurts retreated into oblivion. My groping fingers contacted flesh. ‘Are you injured?’
‘I wasn’t injured till you trampled on me.’ She moved, sat upright, wincing. Now the pale smear of her face was discernible, half hidden by tousled hair.
‘What the hell happened to you?’ Anger was displacing relief.
‘Nothing happened to me.’
Mystified and not a little put out, I squatted on my haunches. ‘But I’ve been calling you. You must have heard me.’ I shook her roughly. ‘You bloody well ran away, didn’t you?’
‘Piss off,’ she retorted, her tone flat. Then a sigh. ‘Oh, all right … yes.’
‘But why? I’m taking you home to Andorra with me. Isn’t that enough?’
‘You don’t really want me,’ she said sulkily. ‘You’re just being kind. That’s why I ran away – to relieve you of the burden of being so bloody kind to me.’
‘Oh, my God.’ I sank back on my haunches, shaking my head. This just wasn’t my scene at all. Not only that, the wound in my skull was pounding anew, making any rational thought a trial.
The headlights of a U-turning vehicle flicked across the mountainside, momentarily lighting up the strained features opposite me.
‘Now listen to me,’ I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice, ‘the reason I’m looking after you is first and foremost I owe it to Clair … to your mother. Secondly, I actually do care about you and what becomes of you. I’m not going to fob you off on some hippy uncle, or couldn’t-care-less diplomat, just to get you out of my hair. No one’s making me take you with me. My arm hasn’t been twisted, bribes haven’t been offered. It’s all my own idea, and we both hope that it’s only a temporary situation, don’t we?’
‘You do, anyway.’
‘Because …,’ I said, declining to rise to that barb. ‘Be-cause we both hope your mother will be set free or found or whatever. And if she is, then maybe my home will be yours anyway. You did know I asked your mother to come and spend some time here?’
A snuffle.
‘Sort of.’
‘So look at it this way: you’re the bait that will entice your mother into my lair.’
The snuffle became a giggle.
‘Am I going to be like Rapunzel in the tower, waiting to be rescued by a handsome prince?’
‘You’ll be free as a bird,’ I promised her. ‘For as long as you want to stay.’
A murmur of wind funnelled down through the valley, and I sensed rather than saw Lizzy shiver.
‘That might be a bloody long time, Sir Galahad.’ Her hand came into contact with mine, clutched it. ‘I don’t think Mummy is …’ She caught herself and shivered again, transmitting the convulsion to me through our handclasp. She was still unable to voice the possibility that Clair was gone forever. Maybe she never would, short of confrontation with her dead body.
‘Keep hoping, like me. Pray a little.’
‘I do. A lot. Every night.’
Pins and needles had attacked my legs. I straightened up, hauling Lizzy with me. The sweet-talking was over. It was decision time.
‘I’m going home,’ I said firmly, and would have looked her in the eyes if I could have seen them. ‘You coming?’
‘Just one thing,’ she said as she brushed herself down.
‘Go on.’
‘Why did Alfredo call you André?’
‘It’s Spanish for Alan,’ I improvised.
Funny, I know, but more than anything this one simple question warned of the tiger traps lying in wait on the road ahead.
Eighteen
In the pre-dawn of the morning after Lizzy’s birthday – a lacklustre affair, long on gifts, but short on guests, games, and party spirit – I came awake while the rest of Andorra still slumbered.
Came awake and stayed awake. Before I killed the Pavan girl I had gone about my high-risk business these twelve years and loss of sleep was an uncommon event. Currently I had even less cause than usual to gnaw my nails: no professional demands to satisfy, no contracts pending, none needed (in the financial sense). The omnipresent fear that I had slipped up over some detail and that at any moment might come the legendary small-hours knock on my door so beloved of novelists, had faded to the insignificance of a microdot.
‘No worries, mate,’ as my guest might have put it in Down Under parlance.
No, at the core of my insomnia was that very guest. Sixteen years old yesterday. Fatherless, almost certainly motherless. Effectively relative-less. Stuck with me as I was with her, pending the advent of a someone with a legitimate claim on her, or a move by me to evict her. The second option was a non-starter. Ruthless I could be, callous I was not.
Two weeks had passed since our homecoming. Every morning of every day of those weeks, I had religiously telephoned the Tangier police department. Every morning the reply was the same. Progress zero. For them and for me Clair was already long dead. Possibly for Lizzy too, though the ultimate acceptance was still withheld. Less painful, perhaps, that she should come to a creeping acceptance of the fact.
Most days I left her much to her own devices, and she would spend hours in what was now “her” room, which was the larger of the two guest rooms, complete with ensuite. Once a day, at no particular hour, she would emerge to swim a few lengths of the pool or make a pretence of eating, while in reality doing little more than rearrange the food on her plate. Now and again she had accompanied me into Andorra-la-Vella, but for all the impact the principality’s lively little capital made on her she might as well have stayed at home and moped.
From the farm above the Bos’s house came a triumphal cock crow. Dawn was imminent. The oblong of the balcony doors behind the heavy drapes was paling, the furnishings materializing all around me. As yet they lacked form, as if viewed through a soft filter: the wall-length mirrored vanity, the two bureaux, all in yellow pine; the doors leading to the dressing room and the en-suite bathroom where I had recently had installed a Jacuzzi whirlpool bathtub. It was a bright, sunny room, even when the real sun wasn’t out, if on the Spartan side. The only embellishment I had allowed it was a painting of a sunlit glade in a forest in the Dordogne, hung above one of the bureaux. Somehow, having a female about the place on a regular basis, was making me notice the austerity of my environment.
My thoughts shifted from the retrospective to the prospective. To consider, for instance, what was to be done about Lizzy’s future. If I was to be her temporary unofficial refuge, a plan was required. Maybe attendance at a finishing school for a year. An establishment of repute, with residential facilities. Far from Andorra. No involvement by me other than paying the bills, a cheap premium for seeing Lizzy settled and out of my hair. The overall priority was to ensure that she lacked none of life’s fruits, and then I wanted out. O–U–T out.
And yet … and yet …
By coincidence, as if privy to my indecision, Lizzy came back to the land of the living that same morning, a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. Off-blonde hair brushed to gleaming, a smear of eye make-up, the little blue dress that was of such simplicity that it drew attention to her freckled, porcelain beauty, as well as displaying lots of long golden leg. She had her mother’s build. Tall and lean, with the shoulders of an athlete.
‘Can we go shopping today?’ she asked, shredding a croissant. That was progress too. Usually she picked at them.
We were breakfasting on the terrace, served by Señora Sist, my new housekeeper (her predecessor had flounced out of my employ after a row about cleaning up certain of Simone’s unwholesome discards). Señora Sist was an Andorran-born, gentle soul of fifty-odd, who had taken Lizzy’s installation in her stride and accepted her status as the daughter of a close friend who had “just disappeared”, as if such happenings were commonplace. She spoke French rather than Spanish, which was a major factor in her selection.
‘I don’t see why not,’ I said to Lizzy. I viewed her revival with circumspection. It might be no more than a blip on the graph. On the other hand I could always give it some encouragement. So I asked her how she was fixed for money.
‘Er … that might be a problem. All I’ve got are some Australian dollars and about three hundred dirhams.’
I spread butter on a roll. ‘Like me to change it to euros for you?’
‘You’re a real sport, sport. I’ll go and fetch it.’
‘No rush,’ I said, increasingly impressed by this new-found energy. ‘Finish your breakfast.’
Just then Señora Sist appeared with the coffee. Lizzy flashed her such a brilliant smile that she reared back in surprise.
‘The mademoiselle is feeling much better this morning,’ she observed to me, in French.
‘Yes, I am.’ Lizzy had made some modest progress in the language in the last week or two, mostly via the medium of the TV I had contributed to her growing inventory of personal effects. ‘Je suis mieux.’
Señora S
ist was delighted. ‘Je me sens mieux,’ she corrected. ‘Mais bravo!’
‘Vous êtes gentille,’ Lizzy ventured, and garnered more gushing plaudits.
‘Your French is really coming along,’ I said, as Señora Sist retired to the kitchen.
Lizzy peered at me round the stalk of the parasol. ‘Did you think I spent all those hours in my room staring at the ceiling?’
‘Certainly not,’ I said glibly. ‘I assumed you spent it watching the box.’
‘Ho, ho. I detect disapproval.’ She spooned a dollop of chocolate spread from the jar. ‘I do like this Nutella. We used to have it back home but Mummy rationed it.’
‘Good thing too. The way you’re scoffing it, you’d be the size of an elephant. Do you know how many calories there are in that jar?’
She stuck out a chocolate-striped tongue. ‘Who’s counting?’
Señora Sist placed my mail by my plate, and replenished my coffee cup while I flicked through the half-dozen envelopes, a mixture of circulars and bills. Plus my coveted Sunday Times, which was airmailed to me direct from the UK. It was two days old when it was delivered. I tore off the wrapper and sorted through the various sections. In the house was a plethora of unopened packages containing earlier issues of the paper, delivered during my absences. Every six months, Senora Sist arranged for them to be collected for recycling.
‘Alan …’
‘Mmm?’ Scanning the business pages, I was only half paying attention.
‘I know you only telephone the police every evening because you promised you would.’
I stopped reading, peered at her over the top of the newspaper. The lightheartedness was gone. Her eyes were bright but free of tears. A tic at the edge of her mouth was the only symptom of agitation.
‘Well … you don’t need to go on doing it. Not every day, anyway.’ She shrugged unhappily. ‘That’s all.’ The tic became a wavering smile, then she got up and walked with bent head into the house, leaving me staring sightlessly at my own reflection in the glass of the patio doors.