‘Bike,’ said Vosse on comms. ‘Visual?’
‘Negative,’ Tomkins replied.
‘I’m here. I have line of sight to the Fiat.’
Tomkins hadn’t heard the BMW’s approach, hadn’t looked down at the tablet for ages. Sure enough, he could see the small pulsating icon of Vosse’s vehicle parked on the corner of Spindrift Avenue. Surely he was too close to Pavkov and the Iranian? Surely he would spook them?
‘What else?’ the Iranian asked.
Tomkins realised that he could no longer hear the motorbike. Either the rider had parked nearby or driven north towards the City.
‘Nothing else,’ Pavkov replied.
‘They follow you here?’
Tomkins felt his stomach somersault. The Iranians suspected that Zoltan had a tail. Maybe somebody in a first-floor window had seen the BMW pulling up outside. Maybe there was a stakeout position on Barnfield Place.
‘Nobody follow me,’ the Serb replied. ‘Why would they do this? They suspect nothing.’
‘Nothing.’
Tomkins couldn’t tell if the Iranian was making a statement or asking a question. The take quality on the microphones was extraordinarily clear, but trying to picture the faces of the two men in the Fiat, their moods and gestures, was like trying to move stars around in the night sky. Tomkins felt isolated and near-hopeless. If anything happened, he did not know what he was supposed to do. Stay where he was? Follow the Iranian bagman? He was waiting for somebody to tell him how to act. It didn’t make sense that Vosse hadn’t called for backup. Surely arresting the two men in the car was now the surest way of locating Kite?
‘They ask if something happened,’ Pavkov continued. ‘I tell them nothing happened. They don’t know you were there, in car park. They don’t know you pay me. I don’t tell them nothing.’
‘It’s OK, Zoltan. We believe you.’
‘What are you doing?’ Pavkov asked. He sounded unsettled. ‘You making a call?’
Just then, the burst of the motorbike roaring into life, much closer to the Fiat than before. The noise of the engine smothering the sound of movement inside the car, the microphones picking up the breathlessness of a short struggle, a stifled cry and a gulp for air. Tomkins knew that something was badly wrong. He heard the slamming of a car door then the deafening scream of the bike as it accelerated away from the Punto. Vosse was instantly on comms.
‘Jesus Christ …’
‘What happened?’ Tomkins asked.
The next thing he knew he was out of the Mondeo, sprinting. He saw Vosse ahead of him, holding his head in his hands as he stumbled back from the Fiat. Tomkins reached the passenger side and looked down into the car. Zoltan Pavkov was slumped in the driver’s seat, his head tipped back, his throat cut from ear to ear. Blood had sprayed onto the windscreen, black as tar in the darkness.
‘We get out of here,’ Vosse told him. ‘We disappear.’
21
‘Who’s the Yank in Churchill?’ Kite asked his mother in the hotel office five minutes after finishing his chores upstairs.
‘Mr Strawson?’ she replied. ‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’
Kite didn’t know how to respond: he never liked hearing his mother describing other men as ‘handsome’ or ‘good-looking’ – or ‘gorgeous’. When he was fourteen she had brought a boyfriend on holiday. They had stayed in a cheap hotel on Skye, just the three of them. Night after night, Kite had had to listen to them screwing in the next-door room.
‘Is he religious?’ he asked.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Got a Bible beside his bed. Unless you’ve started handing them out to guests?’
Cheryl shook her head. As always, she was doing several things at once: flicking through the reservations book while searching for a pen, grabbing a Consulate cigarette from a packet on the desk, adjusting her hair by tucking it behind her ears.
‘Not doing the Gideon Bible just yet,’ she said. ‘Is Paolo waiting for you in the bar?’
It was her way of saying that Kite should go back to work. He had given up waiting for his mother to ask him how the Easter term had gone or to enquire about his journey from Euston. Perhaps she would get around to it in the morning.
‘I’ll see if he’s there,’ Kite replied.
Killantringan was an eighteenth-century shooting lodge which had been converted into a hotel shortly after the end of the Second World War. The bar was located in one of two former drawing rooms and decorated in a style his grandmother had described as ‘shortbread tin chic’: the sofas and armchairs were upholstered in red and green tartans, the walls covered in reproduction oil paintings of stags and men in kilts, the shelves stocked with antique hardback books and dog-eared, long-ago copies of Country Life. The carpet was an occasionally stained Royal blue with frayed edges and black spots indicating where guests had accidentally dropped lit matches and cigarettes. With a log fire burning nine months out of twelve, the intended effect was of a cosy, wood-panelled country house that had been in the same family since the Highland Clearances.
The bar itself had two taps serving draught SKOL and Bass Special, a collection box for the RNLI and a till that regularly became stuck and had to be prised open with a screwdriver. Kite had served behind it for at least two years, retreating into the back office on the rare occasions that a police officer or employee of Customs and Excise visited the hotel. Otherwise his mother confidently told any guests who enquired about Lachlan’s age that he was twenty years old and looking forward to a career in hospitality.
‘How are you doing there, young man?’ said Michael Strawson. He had managed to get to the bar and order another tumbler of Laphroaig in the time it had taken Kite to walk down the back stairs, throw out the rubbish, talk to his mother in the office and switch shifts with Paolo.
‘Mr Strawson,’ he said. ‘Everything OK upstairs?’
‘Everything is A-OK.’
There were seven other guests in the bar: an elderly couple sitting silently together looking out over the moonlit lawn and the silvery sea; two laughing pals in their fifties who looked and sounded as though they were probably Irishmen over on the ferry from Larne; a Frenchman and his elegantly coiffured wife, both in their late thirties and wearing tweed; and Strawson himself, looking for all the world like a famous American country and western singer whose name Kite could not for the life of him remember.
‘Are you staying here for the Easter weekend?’ he asked.
Kenny Rogers. That was it. Strawson looked like a slightly larger, more dishevelled version of Kenny Rogers. Kite immediately starting hearing ‘Islands in the Stream’ in his head and turned up the volume on the Richard Clayderman album playing in the bar to clear the earworm.
‘That’s right. Leaving Monday. You’re here for the spring break, am I correct? Your mother told me you go to Alford College. That’s quite a school. How do you enjoy it?’
Kite picked the second of the two questions and told Strawson that he was coming to the end of his time at Alford, revising for A levels over the Easter holidays, and hoping to go to Edinburgh University in September to study Russian and French.
‘A ty govorish’ po Russki?’
Kite’s knowledge of Russian extended to ‘yes’ and ‘no’, to ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’, but he knew that Strawson had asked him if he spoke the language and replied: ‘Nyet. But they start from scratch, and students get a year studying in the Soviet Union, so hopefully I’ll pick it up quite quickly.’
‘Mais votre français est courant?’
Kite was knackered from the long journey and had been hoping for a quiet shift in the bar. He assumed that Strawson was trying to show off his knowledge of both languages, so he humoured the American by saying that his French was not fluent, but good enough to understand most conversations:
‘Mon français n’est pas couramment, mais je peux comprendre la plupart des conversations.’
‘Very good, very impressive,’ the American replied. ‘So
you get a good education down there at Alford? I heard it was all strange customs and ancient traditions. Secret handshakes, that kind of thing.’
‘There’s a bit of that.’ One of the Irishmen came to the bar and ordered two pints of SKOL. Kite poured them as he continued his conversation with Strawson. ‘There are definitely some strange customs.’
‘Such as?’
He put the first of the two pints on the bar. He was thirsty and would have given a lung for a cold, hair-of-the-dog pint of lager, a Marlboro Red and a night in front of the television. When backs were turned at the hotel, Kite sometimes poured himself a heart-starting shot of vodka or knocked back a quick glass of wine. Strawson was standing in the way of that. It felt as though he was going to sit on his bar stool until two in the morning firing questions at him.
‘So there’s a thing called “capping”,’ he replied, on the assumption that Strawson would get a kick out of the story.
‘And what’s that?’
‘If you’re walking down the street and a beak – that what’s we call a teacher – is coming towards you, you’re meant to raise your right hand and kind of salute him by touching the rim of a non-existent hat on your head.’
‘Say what?’
Kite handed the Irishman the second of the two pints and gave him change from a five-pound note.
‘It dates back to the old days when Alfordians wore top hats. Some teachers don’t care, but others are a little power-crazed and insist on it.’ Kite wiped spilled lager from the counter and threw the wet cloth into the sink beneath the bar. ‘It’s funny, when I first went there five years ago and came back here to the hotel, I started capping the guests. My mum kept asking me if I was pretending to be a soldier.’
Strawson reacted delightedly to the story and asked Kite to pour him another inch of Laphroaig. Kite did so, added the whisky to Strawson’s bill, then walked around the bar, returning shortly afterwards with a tray of empty glasses and dirty ashtrays which he set down in the passage leading to the back office. It occurred to him that exactly twenty-four hours earlier he had been doing shots of vodka in Borscht & Tears with Des and Xavier, who were doubtless spending the night at home watching videos and eating pizzas cooked for them by their mothers or private maids. Xavier was due to fly to Geneva the next day for a fortnight’s skiing in Verbier; Des’s parents had booked a family safari in Kenya through Abercrombie and Kent. Meanwhile Kite would be stuck at the hotel for three weeks working ten-hour days and fielding questions from the likes of Michael Strawson about the idiosyncrasies of life at Alford. He wished he could drive to Prestwick, catch a flight to Heathrow and spend the rest of the holidays in bed with Alison Hackford.
‘Say, Lachlan, I gotta a question for you.’
It was Strawson again, calling to him from the bar. Kite heard a seagull clack in the sky above Killantringan. He called out: ‘Just a moment, sir,’ tipped the ash and butts from an evening of cigarettes into the bin, put the dirty glasses in the dishwasher and returned to the bar.
‘Yes, Mr Strawson. What can I do for you?’
‘You like a riddle, young man?’
‘A what, sir?’
‘A puzzle. A brain-teaser.’
About as much as I like eating cigarette butts or talking to strange Americans about school, Kite thought, but he put a professional smile on his face and said: ‘Sure.’
‘I was looking at your light switches there.’ Strawson indicated a panel of four switches beneath a reproduction oil painting of The Monarch of the Glen. ‘Reminded me of a riddle I was taught in the army back in the sixties.’
On Peele’s recommendation, Kite had seen The Deer Hunter and Full Metal Jacket and wondered with a buzz if he was talking to a real-life Vietnam vet.
‘What was the riddle, sir?’
Strawson twisted on the bar stool so that he was facing out into the room. The elderly couple had gone upstairs to bed. The Irishmen were laughing and drinking their pints. The wife of the French guest had momentarily left the room, leaving her husband alone with a copy of The Scotsman. Strawson had no other audience but Kite.
‘OK. There’s a room with nothing inside it except a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. There’s a door into the room. You are on the outside and you can’t see in. Next to the door are three light switches: call them A, B and C. One of them turns the light on and off. The other two are dummies. You have to work out which switch operates the light, but here’s the catch: you’re only allowed to go into the room one time.’
Kite barely understood what Strawson had told him and asked him to repeat what he had said. He was tired and not in the mood to think deeply about anything very much; he sensed that Strawson was trying to make a point about the limits of an Alford education. This irritated Kite, who was possessed of a strong streak of stubborn, competitive pride. He wanted to solve the riddle and prove the American wrong.
‘So the switches are all set to “off”?’ he asked.
Strawson smiled and nodded. ‘There are no tricks. It’s a regular room and it’s a regular lightbulb. A chair won’t help you. You don’t need a desk. You can’t see inside and you can’t open the door, look at the bulb and try the switches one by one. Somehow you have to work out which switch is connected to the lightbulb. A, B or C?’
Kite was not aware of the process by which he arrived at the answer, but it came to him within less than a minute. All it took was a quick walk down the passage, a few moments to clear his head in the hotel office, a glance up at the lightbulb blazing in the ceiling and he had it.
‘Heat,’ he said, walking back into the bar.
Strawson’s eyes glowed with admiration. ‘Go on,’ he said. Kite could tell from his expression that he had solved it.
‘You turn on switch A. You leave it on for five or ten seconds. You turn it off. Then you flick B, open the door and walk into the room. If the bulb is on, you know it’s operated by B. If it’s off but the bulb is hot when you touch it, you know that it’s operated by A.’ Strawson nodded appreciatively. Kite didn’t even need to finish but wanted to do so for his own satisfaction. ‘If it’s off and the bulb is cold, you’ll know the switch is C.’
Strawson slid off the stool, turned to face Kite and applauded quietly.
‘Very impressive, young man,’ he said. ‘Very impressive.’
All weekend the tests continued.
Just before six o’clock the following evening, Cheryl Kite was driving back from the Cash & Carry in Stranraer with a boot full of supplies for the hotel when she was flagged down by a middle-aged man whose car appeared to have a puncture. She was not far along the narrow, single-track road which ran downhill towards Killantringan past fields of heather and grazing sheep. Service was due to begin in the restaurant at half-past six (Mr Strawson, in common with many of his compatriots, preferred to eat early) and the last thing she needed was to be delayed by a motorist with a flat tyre.
Cheryl pulled up in front of the stranded Ford Cortina and immediately recognised the driver as one of two Irishmen who had been drinking in the bar the night before.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked, walking towards him. ‘Flat tyre?’
‘Oh thank goodness you’re here,’ the man replied. He was in his early fifties and looked very distressed. ‘We were down at Killantringan last night, d’you remember? We’re staying over at the Portpatrick Hotel. I’m Seamus. My friend here is in a bad way. He needs the hospital. Can you help us?’
Cheryl peered inside the car. Sure enough, the second of the two Irishmen was curled up on the back seat nursing what appeared to be an appalling stomach cramp. He was moaning and gasping. Cheryl wondered why the hell his friend hadn’t driven him straight to Stranraer.
‘You should take him to a doctor,’ she said. ‘Is there a puncture? Have you run out of petrol?’
‘I can’t drive,’ Seamus replied, looking utterly shamefaced. ‘Billy has a licence. Only he started feeling terrible twenty minutes ago and can’t get himself behind t
he wheel. You’re the first person to come past, God bless you.’
And so it was that Cheryl Kite had no choice other than to abandon her own vehicle at the side of the road and to drive the two men and their Ford Cortina all the way back to Stranraer, with Billy in the back seat calling out to God and chastising Him for a ‘terrible appendicitis’ and Seamus saying over and over again that Mrs Kite was ‘the kindest woman in all the world’ and apologising repeatedly ‘for inconveniencing you in this way’. As soon as she reached the medical centre, Cheryl took Billy inside then rang the hotel from a callbox in the waiting room. It was already half-past six. Paolo had taken off for Easter celebrations with his family in Glasgow and Lockie was the only person left at Killantringan with the wherewithal to run the hotel.
‘Lachlan?’ she said, when Kite picked up in the office.
‘Mum? Where are you?’
‘I’m in bloody Stranraer with a bloody Irishman who probably drank too much of our whisky last night and developed cirrhosis of the liver.’
Given what had happened to her husband, Cheryl had a predictably short fuse when it came to men overindulging an appetite for alcohol.
‘What?’ Kite replied. ‘How did you end up with—’
‘Never mind.’ He could tell that she was annoyed and just wanted Kite to listen to what she had to say. ‘I’m not going to be able to get back for at least another hour. You’ll have to take orders for dinner, make sure people in the bar get served, ask Wilma to turn down the beds upstairs if she’s not needed in the restaurant. And tell John he’ll have to take pasta off tonight’s menu. It’s sitting in the boot of my fucking car two miles up the road.’
‘I could drive up with someone and fetch it.’
Cheryl cursed. ‘It’s locked and I’ve got the only key.’
There was no night manager at Killantringan. Shortly before dawn on Good Friday morning, Michael Strawson had sneaked downstairs and placed microphones in both of the office telephones. Listening to the call in Churchill, he was impressed by Kite’s apparent sangfroid.
Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 17