by RJ Bailey
I expected objections, but none came. They knew I couldn’t make it to his gun before he could pick it up. Besides, I wasn’t here to put a bullet in him. That was someone else’s job.
I waited until the pair had left. ‘You killed my husband. Or had him killed. Which is the same thing.’
I gave him the brief summary of how Paul, who had worked for the British Nuclear Police, had been shot down in cold blood on the streets of London.
Executed.
‘That had nothing to do with me,’ he insisted.
‘Yet other members of the same army unit have died. At least one is still a hunted man.’ Tom, who was hiding out at a boatyard in Nottinghamshire. ‘Maybe the others are, too.’
He shook his head. ‘You are barking up the wrong tree. And making a lot of noise while you are at it.’
‘So why did you set the retrievers on me in Zurich to bring me in?’
‘To straighten this out.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
He gave a shrug that managed to be insolent. ‘That’s not my problem.’
‘It is if you are lying. And just in case you are, I have insurance. Pick up the phone.’ He did so. ‘It’s unlocked. Hit camera. Play the video.’
As he did so, I watched all sorts of emotions speed across his face, like fast-moving clouds. He was seeing his kids skip into school, filmed by Freddie. The final cloud settled. It was black with rage.
I could tell from the tension in his body he was about to reach for the revolver. A bullet hit the desk before he could even stretch out his hand, sending his gun spinning to the floor. It was only afterwards the room filled with the sound of glass shimmering and shattering.
The pistol was three paces from me. I let it stay there. The door behind me opened. Leka kicked his chair back, so he was no longer visible from outside the room. ‘Across the street, shooter. Go!’
I was impressed he had pieced it together so quickly.
‘If he’d wanted you dead, you’d be dead,’ I said. ‘But call them off if you want them to live.’
He didn’t ask why, so I told him.
‘That’s Oktane over there.’
*
It was a good ten minutes before order was restored. We moved to a room on the other side of the hotel, where he stayed well away from the windows. But Leka knew the threat wasn’t me. I wouldn’t hurt his kids. But I knew a man who would.
Oktane was, I suppose, like the Banksy of the Circuit in some ways. The best hit man – and rumour had it the richest, given his per diem – in the business. Mysterious and elusive, nobody was even certain of his nationality. Except, perhaps, the Colonel, who had once been his manager – yes, some of them do have managers who act as a cut-out between them and law enforcement – some years past, before the old man decided there was more money in stopping people getting whacked than actually whacking them. The dead don’t pay, after all.
I could have put Freddie out there, except I guessed they would lock her down as collateral. And Oktane had one big advantage. The name. It was enough to tell anyone: I’m serious about this. Deadly serious.
Leka sat in a chair, the gun held limply by his side, while I stood. ‘I’m guessing your father-in-law, or indeed your real wife, don’t know about the second family in Saint-Germain-en-Laye,’ I said. ‘Which is one of the reasons you use agency security for the school run. So word doesn’t get back.’
‘Word has clearly got back somehow.’
It had. To Saban, the café owner. But I didn’t say that. Saban was very clear on that point. He had shared his knowledge on the condition of total anonymity.
‘So what are you threatening me with, Sam Wylde? Telling my people that I am a bigamist, or harming my children? Or shooting me?’
‘Or all of it,’ I said. ‘I have a daughter of my own. She is missing. I have to find her. I can’t with you looming over us like a bogeyman. I don’t want to be distracted watching my back the whole time.’
‘This man of yours, he lets women fight his battles?’
‘Yes, if the woman in question is me.’ I said it with a confidence I didn’t quite feel. But a little bombast goes a long way sometimes.
He frowned, still not quite grasping what was on the table here. Or perhaps pretending not to. ‘So the deal is?’
‘The deal is, it was all a long time ago. People got hurt, people died. Not for the first nor the last time. This blood feud belongs in the past. Let it go.’
‘Let it go?’ He ran his free hand through his hair. ‘You didn’t see what they did to my family.’
‘There would be some who would say they deserved it.’
‘Which someone? It was unprovoked. We were unarmed.’
I shook my head. He wasn’t going to wrong-foot me so easily. ‘That’s not how I heard it.’
‘OK, one of us, my Uncle Ramiz, had a shotgun. It is normal. What did the British have? Submachine guns. It was what you call shooting fish in a barrel. Except they weren’t fish. They were my family.’
He sounded as if he genuinely believed he had been wronged. I could feel something hideous squirming in my stomach. ‘Your family were going to rape the girl. That’s why they got involved. That’s why they broke the non-intervention protocol.’
A sneer twisted the lower part of his face. ‘Is that what he told you? Did he tell you what your fine British soldiers were doing when we found them? Why they had to kill my friends and family? Why I had to play dead with my cousin on top of me, his blood running onto my face?’
My mouth was dry and the next sentence came out as a croak. ‘You’re lying.’
His face relaxed. The clouds of hate suddenly cleared. He smiled, as if confident that he was in the right. And that he had me on his hook. ‘Am I? Look into your boyfriend’s eyes and ask him to tell you the truth for once.’
And what he told me next made me want the earth to open up and swallow me whole, bury me deep and never let me go.
I know I am in trouble when I dream of Bojan. He only comes when I am at my lowest ebb. He was a Serbian gangster, a man who had tricked me into fighting him twice in the basement of an oligarch’s house in The Bishops Avenue. I had won both times, although the second was more by luck than skill. I had managed to stab him with his own knife. Although he later disappeared, he had lost so much blood, I was certain he was dead. That didn’t worry me. It was self-defence and his wound was self-inflicted, with just a little help from me.
But whenever Bojan comes into my dreams, the situation changes. It is me who gets stabbed. Me who bleeds out. Sometimes the knife slides up and under my ribs; in other versions he slices the blade across my throat; a third scenario has him inflicting my death by a hundred tiny cuts.
He always wins.
I know whenever Bojan and his knife appear, my world is about to turn upside down. And he came to me with that blade every night until I finally made it to Tom.
ELEVEN
The boatyard smelled of bitumen and two-pack epoxy. It was blacking season. Narrowboats had been craned, trailered and dry-docked out of the water. From one of the sheds came the sound of metal being shot-blasted. It suited Tom. Outdoors, lots of machinery, the chance to collect and deliver the boats across the canal network and be paid for it.
I arrived just as Tom was on his break. He came over and tried to hug me, but I twisted away. Hugging could wait. Hugging might be off the agenda permanently. He looked confused and asked if anything was wrong. I told him we needed to talk.
We found a picnic-style table in the garden of the pub next to the boatyard. He had put on some bulk since I last saw him. He was wind-tanned, and muscles rippled under his T-shirt. His face was streaked with oil and his fingernails would need an excavator to get the dirt out.
He was happy. I was about to ruin that.
Tom had come into my life at a turbulent time. I was still getting over the shock of Paul’s death and back into the world of personal protection. Tom, the itinerant narrowboat man, cruising the
canals like a waterborne nomad, had provided warmth, humour and sex. And, oddly, a living link to Paul, as they had served in the army together.
In return, I nearly got him killed in a house on The Bishops Avenue. And then I knocked him unconscious so I could take on Bojan alone.
Boyfriend and girlfriend? Not quite. It was more complicated than that. I liked him. Did I love him? I loved the sex we had whenever we were together. But I suspected that wasn’t quite the same thing.
When he came back from the bar with the drinks – a pint for him, half for me because I was driving – I had arranged some photos on the table; print-offs from my phone. My heart was racing in anticipation. I had a tremendous desire to pee, but I knew that was just nerves. I used to get that phantom bladder pressure in Iraq, too.
‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘Holiday snaps?’ Then he saw my face. ‘Sam?’
‘These were taken in a small town outside Paris. Her name is Mrs Cosovanu, although it is possible she isn’t really married. Elona Cosovanu is her full name.’
He sat and sipped his drink. I pushed the photograph closer. ‘Elona. The goatherd you apparently saved in Kosovo.’ I might have accidentally put too much emphasis on ‘apparently’.
‘Good God. Really? In Paris?’
‘Near Paris,’ I corrected. ‘Is it her?’
He shook his head. ‘Nah. Can’t be.’
‘Well, have a good look at her before you say that. Is it her?’
He rubbed his mouth, smearing more dirt onto his face. ‘Christ, Sam, it was such a long time ago.’
‘Try the next picture. It’s a close-up. Is it her?’
A sigh. ‘I thought you were coming up to see me; to catch up.’
‘Is it her?’ I wanted an answer.
Irritation flared in his words. ‘No. No, I don’t think so.’
‘No, or you don’t think so?’
I saw his eyes flick back towards the boatyard. He wanted to be away from that pub. Away from me and these questions. Back in the sanctuary of hard, physical graft. ‘Why are you doing this? What happened while you were away?’
‘Is it her, Tom?’
‘I don’t know. OK?’
‘Could it be her?’
‘It could be anyone, Sam.’
I examined his expression, as detached as I could manage. ‘You don’t look like it could be anyone. You look like you don’t want it to be her.’
He almost growled at me, his face reddening. ‘For crying out loud—’
‘Is it Elona? Is this the girl you saved?’
‘Why are you saying it like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘ “Saved”, as if it has inverted commas around it.’
‘It’s a simple question.’
‘No, it isn’t. Not the way you’re asking it.’
‘Then just answer me.’
‘It could be. All right? It could be her. Are you going to tell me what this is about?’
‘It’s about the truth.’
‘Where did you get the photos anyway? How did you find her?’
‘Never mind that.’
‘You’re scaring me, Sam. What is this all about?’
‘I am just wondering how a man who was part of a group that almost raped a young goatherd called Elona comes to be keeping her and their two children on the outskirts of Paris? They are, to all intents and purposes, married. Except, he couldn’t marry her because she had been raped.’
‘She wasn’t raped. We saved her,’ Tom protested.
I kept my voice as level as I could. ‘I heard differently. And I heard she was blamed for it. Always the woman’s fault, the world over. She should have fought back; better to have died. She was an outcast. Unclean.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I’m beginning to think you know exactly what I am talking about.’
‘I don’t,’ he insisted. ‘But you’ve seen Leka?’
‘Yes. He said it was you who sodomised her.’
‘What? Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody sodomised her. And how would she identify me anyway?’
‘There’s pictures of KFOR units all over the internet. Band of Brothers and all that shit. Wouldn’t be hard to find you and Paul’s squad.’
He banged the table, slopping his drink. ‘Let me tell you what happened—’
I cut him short. ‘I know your version of events, Tom. Lived with them for a couple of years; never doubted them. But let me tell you what Leka remembers of that day.’
TWELVE
‘And do you believe him?’ Nina asked.
‘Tom? I want to believe him.’
We were lying on daybeds in the relaxation room of a spa in central London. The air was filled with ylang-ylang and yuzu, and dolphins and other cetaceans made plaintive noises over the loudspeakers.
Through a plate-glass window I could see a circular Romanesque pool, complete with fluted columns and curvaceous stone gods. A series of tall, elegant women in expensively sculpted swimsuits carefully risked a few head-up strokes, swimming in a don’t-smudge-my-make-up way. I automatically sorted them into two categories: Work Done and No Work Done. WDs outnumbered NWDs by about two to one. There was more filler out there than in a branch of B&Q. This was the idle rich at . . . well, idle. In what seemed increasingly to be my previous life, they might have been my clients.
What I couldn’t quite figure out was why Nina had brought me here. An old university friend of Paul’s, she worked as a journalist on a national newspaper – the same one as Adam from Albania as it happened, although I thought it best not to bring that little escapade up – and would normally rain vitriol down on the slim-limbed, meticulously depilated women exiling themselves in this private club.
Nina sat up on one elbow, pulling the neck of her robe together. Perhaps she thought natural breasts were against club rules.
‘That’s not really an answer.’
‘Well, it’s he says/he says, isn’t it?’
‘So, do you believe your friend and lover, or some gangster who traffics in human misery?’
I was stumped for an answer. I knew it should be an easy choice. Except, even traffickers in human misery have to switch off some time. It could be that Leka was telling the truth and that Tom – and Paul – had played a part in the cover-up of a rape. Possibly a gang rape. If Leka’s version of events was true.
Leka had claimed that it was the British soldiers who assaulted the girl, and when they, the locals, tried to stop them, the Brits opened fire. Leka had survived, not because of anybody’s mercy, but by playing dead. The thought of Tom and Paul being mixed up in that sent acid into my throat. I couldn’t look that scenario in the eye just yet.
‘What are we doing here, Nina?’ I asked.
‘Didn’t you enjoy that massage?’
‘Not knowing it cost three hundred quid, no.’
‘Ach, I told you, it’s on the house.’
‘Which makes me feel even more uncomfortable.’
Nina used to specialise in making me feel uncomfortable, pointing out my lack of knowledge about art, politics and literature whenever she could. Being able to field-strip a Sig was, in her book, a poor substitute for being able to say Edvard Munch properly. How was I to know his surname wasn’t pronounced like the eating sound?
This had improved somewhat since Matt and Laura had enticed Jess away while she was at Nina’s house. Guilt – even misplaced guilt – had a way of softening her hard edges. But I had that toxic guilt as well. In spades.
Matt was a fuck-up. I’d met him while I was in the army as a medic and I went to Afghanistan while, unbeknown to me, pregnant with his child.
Our child. Jess.
I left the service and decided to settle down. Then Matt decided he hadn’t quite used up his lifetime club-bing/drug allowance and set about touring the party islands of Europe. Somewhere along the way, he realised he couldn’t face coming back to domesticity.
Matt returned to my life some
time after my second husband Paul was murdered, looking for a way into the same family he had rejected years earlier. If I hadn’t batted him away, somewhat forcefully, he might not have taken Jess. I never quite understood why he wanted custody of her. Where did his late burst of paternalism come from? Wherever it was, he probably shouldn’t have had a vasectomy until he was certain he never wanted any more children. But he did and, given he would have no future chance at fatherhood, had been prepared to steal Jess. An eventuality I hadn’t even considered.
Nina might have fallen for Matt and Laura’s ploy to lure Jess away from her care, but the guilt I felt for not second-guessing it was far more acute.
Nina sipped some water. ‘You should rehydrate.’
I took some just to keep any lectures at bay. Her skin did look better than mine, that much was certain. Then again, the skin on the stone gods around the pool looked better than mine.
I had an excuse. It’s difficult to get your fifty litres a day, or whatever it is, when you’re being chased down a mountain by men who want to kill you, or when you are trying to bully an Albanian people-smuggler into getting the fuck out of your life. And gunfights play havoc with any moisturising regime.
Nina put on her serious face. It didn’t wrinkle much and I thought: Botox? No, not Nina, scourge of artifice.
‘Last year, ten thousand journalism jobs disappeared in the UK,’ said Nina. ‘Did you know that?’
‘Have you been fired? Is this your redundancy we’re spending on being stroked by Amazonians?’
‘No. Let me finish. Last year, there were forty thousand PR jobs created. Forty thousand. Most in social media.’
‘Your favourite.’
She looked like I had just punched her dog on the nose. ‘You can’t play favourites with the future.’
It sounded like something Elon Musk or James Dyson might say. ‘Where did you get that line from?’
The door opened and a WD put her head in, tried to sneer, failed and retreated. I recalled there was a ‘Please keep your conversation to a minimum’ sign outside. Fuck them, that’s easy when you have nothing worthwhile to say.