Dark Winter ns-6 Read online

  We sat together on the bed. ‘A bit like old times, this,’ Suzy said. ‘Like being back in the Det.’

  I stopped what I was doing and watched her for a moment. For me, this was never more than a job: at best, it delivered a regular flow of cash, at worst, it stopped me from having to pay attention to a lot of shit that I’d spent my whole life running away from. Keeping that lid on, as the all-knowing Josh would say. For her, it was something different. I was curious. ‘How come you’re so sure you’re going to get permanent cadre?’

  She didn’t look at me, and kept on feeding in the rounds. There seemed to be a bit of pride at stake here as to who could do it quicker. She shrugged. ‘Because I’m good and I’m committed, and because I’ve been told I’m going to get it.’

  ‘By the Yes Man?’

  ‘Yeah. By the end of the year, he said, but who knows after this job? What’s your story? You get approached while you were in the Det?’

  ‘No, after I’d left the Regiment.’

  She seemed surprised.

  ‘I know, I know. Sad but true. I left in ’ninety-three, then worked for the guy who ran the desk before the Yes Man.’

  ‘Colonel Lynn? I worked for him too. You ever get permanent cadre?’

  My hand went into the bag and grabbed another half-dozen shiny brass rounds. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘That the reason you moved?’

  ‘No, I did just the one job for the Yes Man a couple of years ago, and we didn’t really get on. Like I said, I was made a better offer in the States.’

  ‘So why are you here?’

  ‘Because somewhere along the line I ran out of choices. But enough of my shit. Why are you?’

  ‘Well . . .’ She stopped loading her magazine and looked up. ‘I want to do other things, another life, but deep down I know it just wouldn’t work. You know what I mean, don’t you?’

  ‘What’re you going to be when you grow up?’

  Now she smiled. ‘Yeah, that’s right. Dunno. You?’

  ‘Haven’t really thought about it. They keep telling me I’ll be kept on until I’m killed or they get somebody better.’

  We both fell silent and the gentle click of rounds and the sound of her chewing took over.

  ‘Suzy, I need a favour.’

  She just carried on.

  ‘I’ve got to do some stuff between about ten and twelve thirty. That’s why I gave the source your number, because you’ll be on it all the time.’

  ‘The boss said sort the child business out by three o’clock, Nick – I was only in the kitchen, wasn’t I? I wasn’t listening – you know the difference, don’t you? The child, is it yours?’

  ‘Look, I got the call in the middle of my holiday, and I’ve got to sort just a little more of my shit out – and hers.’

  She stopped loading again. ‘Are you married? Can’t her mother do it?’

  ‘No, she can’t. And the Yes Man doesn’t need to know. Two and a half hours tomorrow morning, and it’s done. I’ll only be twenty minutes away.’

  She looked at me with what I guessed was something close to pity, and went back to loading. ‘Don’t fuck this up, Nick. I’m doing it for her, whoever she is.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  It wasn’t long before we were both finished and she announced she was going to take a shower. I checked traser: it was just after eleven p.m., which would make it sixish in Maryland. I got my own cell from my bumbag in the front room and took it into the kitchen. Cradling it beneath my ear, I filled the kettle.

  The plumbing’s reaction time was lightning fast. ‘Bastard!’

  It made me smile, anyway.

  The phone kept on ringing, then a smily version of Josh came on the answer-machine. ‘Hey there, you know what to do: just let God bless you.’

  I put the phone down. Of course, he was away until Saturday on the happy-clappy thing with his kids. Kelly wouldn’t be able to fly back until Sunday because Josh had to be there to pick her up. Shit.

  The kettle boiled, and a few seconds later Suzy came out of the bathroom wrapped in a big fluffy green towel, followed by a cloud of steam. She pulled her hair back as she walked the few steps down the corridor to the bedroom, giving me the V sign all the way.

  ‘Fancy a brew?’

  ‘Yeah, arsehole.’

  She only part closed the bedroom door behind her, and I didn’t try too hard to look away as she dried herself and walked to and from the wardrobe; she still had her bikini line from Penang.

  ‘Don’t think I can’t see what you’re up to, you sad little man. Get on with the brews.’

  I turned back to the kettle. ‘You been spending some time at the electric beach?’

  Her laughter bounced out into the hallway. ‘In your dreams, mate. In your dreams.’

  By the time she came to join me in the front room, I was munching a very cold sausage roll, watching the pastry crumble on to my jeans and gather in a pile on the carpet. Her hair was combed back and she was in the same jeans and trainers, but now with a blue sweatshirt and fleece. She bent down near me to take one of the mugs. The smell of her shower gel reminded me that I really did need to keep the gun oil off my boxers. I had no other clothes.

  She sat down and I threw her a card of doxycycline. I’d taken two capsules out of my own. ‘How many should we be taking?’ I swallowed them both with small sips of tea.

  She wasn’t too sure. ‘I’ll take mine with some food. They give me a stomach ache on their own.’

  ‘Want some?’ I offered her half of the sausage roll, but she waved her blister pack at me with a look of utter disgust.

  ‘Why did you rev up like that with the drug head? It looked pretty personal . . .’

  ‘I just hate those fuckers.’ I tried to conjure up a smile. ‘I hate it that they’re making more money than me.’

  ‘Hey, Nick, I’m not the enemy. I won’t tell anyone – I’m covering for you tomorrow, remember.’

  I pushed a bit of pastry that was hanging on my lips into my mouth and pressed out another two capsules. ‘Yeah, OK. The child’s got problems, and I thought I was going to be able to sort everything out here, but then I got the call and—’

  ‘It’s OK, Nick, that’s all I want to know. Personal stuff, remember.’ She got up and disappeared into the hallway. Just before she closed the bedroom door she said, ‘Good luck tomorrow, Nick. Just make sure you keep the fucking phone on.’

  Later that night I lay on the settee under a couple of blankets, but I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t shake off thoughts of the nightmare that tomorrow morning was going to bring. She was going to be devastated to be sent home just when she was getting somewhere with Hughes – and just when she and I were establishing some kind of connection again. But, fuck it, at least she’d be alive. If this ASU really got going, the consequences didn’t bear thinking about – for all of us.

  25

  Saturday 10 May, 08:55 hrs

  I’d got as far as the door when she called from the kitchen, ‘Remember what I said – keep the phone on, yeah?’ I had it half open when she appeared in the hall with a bowl of bran, her jaws working overtime. ‘Hope it all goes well – you know . . .’

  I went down the stairs, checking my inside jacket pocket. My hand connected with the carrier-bag last night’s dinner had come in; it now contained ten packs of doxycycline.

  I was going to leave the Mondeo where it was. The UK is the largest user of CCTV in the world. There’s so much coverage in London linked to numberplate-recognition technology that the Yes Man would know immediately where I was going and might even be waiting for me when I arrived. The addition of eight hundred congestion-charge cameras was the final nail in the coffin. Ken Livingstone kept saying that they’d wipe all information at the end of each day, and maybe they would – but not necessarily before they’d passed it on to the Firm, Special Branch and anyone else who wanted to know about our lives. Even on foot around here the fucking things could capture the average person on film at leas
t once every five minutes. Many of the cameras were ‘smart CCTV’, combining video surveillance with facial-recognition technology, searching one million faceprints per second.

  My own cell was turned off, but the moan-phone stayed on as promised. Because it was on secure, I knew it couldn’t be tracked – but I knew that wouldn’t stop them trying.

  I took a taxi to Chelsea and spent the entire journey grappling with how best to break the news to Kelly. At the turn-off for the Moorings I realized I was most of an hour early, so got the driver to take me the few hundred yards back up the road to Sloane Square. I went into WH Smith and bought a Jiffy-bag, a Bic and a book of stamps. Sealing the antibiotics inside, I wandered down Kings Road to the post office. Addressed to myself care of Jimmy and Carmen, and with enough stamps on to get it to the South Pole, the Jiffy finally made its way through the appropriate hole in the wall.

  There were still another forty-five minutes to kill, so I walked into Next and bought a pile of underwear, socks, sweatshirts and jeans. It must have been the quickest three hundred pounds they’d taken in a long time. My disposable life hadn’t changed much. I still didn’t own many things; I just used kit and then binned it, whether it was razor blades, toothbrushes or clothes. The apartment in Crystal City was bare, apart from three sets of sheets, towels and jeans: one clean, one on, and one in the wash. Well, that was the theory: it all depended on whether I’d get the machine repaired. The rest – a second pair of boots and some trainers, a couple of shirts, a few bits of crockery and a job lot of house stuff from a cable TV channel – I didn’t really need. It wasn’t as if I was entertaining every night. That was how I’d landed up buying it in the first place.

  I got to the Moorings on time but the others hadn’t arrived. The receptionist hadn’t received any calls to say they were going to be late so I called the bungalow from her phone, but all I got was the BT messaging service. Carmen was always fucking up answering-machines by pressing the wrong buttons. Letting BT take care of it made much more sense.

  Dr Hughes came into the waiting room with a smile on her face that made me think she’d been expecting Kelly rather than me.

  ‘Her grandparents are bringing her.’ I smiled back. ‘Maybe they’re caught in the traffic.’

  She nodded. ‘No matter, we’ll just sit and wait awhile, shall we? What would you say to a cup of tea? Catherine, could you organize that for us?’

  No wonder Kelly felt safe with her. She might have stern hair, but there was something about her, some kind of soothing aura, that made it impossible not to relax in her company.

  ‘Dr Hughes, I need to have a word with you. I’m afraid things have changed.’

  ‘By all means, Mr Stone. Do sit down.’

  We sat at either side of the coffee-table, her half-moons nearly falling off the end of her nose as she gave me her full attention.

  ‘Kelly will be going back to the US tomorrow, so unfortunately this is going to be the last time she can come.’

  Her expression didn’t change, but I heard the concern in her voice. ‘Are you sure that’s wise? She still has a—’

  I cut in with a shake of the head. ‘I’ll be quite happy to pay for what time we have booked and anything else I owe you. I really do appreciate all you’ve done for us, in the past and, of course, now, and I’d be very grateful if you would still recommend someone to help sort things out for her in the States.’

  She seemed to know it was pointless taking the conversation further. ‘Very well, Mr Stone, I understand. Your work again, I presume?’ The tone was sympathetic, not accusing.

  I nodded. We’d been through a lot together, Dr Hughes and me. Three years and tens of thousands of pounds ago, I’d turned up at her clinic with Kelly in pieces. She was like a big bucket with holes – everything was going in, but then it just dripped out again. At boarding-school, before she went to live with Josh, she started to complain about ‘pains’, but could never be more specific or explain exactly where they were. It slowly got worse, Kelly gradually withdrawing from her friends, her teachers, her grandparents, me. She wouldn’t talk or play any more; she just watched TV, sat in a sulk, or sobbed. My usual response had been to go and get ice cream. I knew that wasn’t the answer, but I didn’t know what was.

  One particular night, in Norfolk, she’d been particularly distant and detached, and nothing I did seemed to engage her. I felt like a schoolkid jumping around a fight in the playground, not really knowing what to do: join in, stop it or just run away. That was when I nailed the tent down in her room and we played camping. She woke much later with terrible nightmares. Her screaming lasted until dawn. I tried to calm her, but she just lashed out at me as if she was having a fit. The next morning, I made a few phone calls, and found out there was a six-month waiting list for an NHS appointment, and even then I’d be lucky if it helped. I made more calls and took her to see Dr Hughes the same afternoon.

  I’d had some understanding of Kelly’s condition, but only some. I knew men who’d suffered with post-traumatic stress disorder, but they were big boys who’d been to war. Hughes told me it was natural for a child to go through a grieving process after a loss – but sometimes, after a sudden traumatic event, the feelings could surface weeks, months or even years later. This delayed reaction was PTSD, and the symptoms were similar to those associated with depression and anxiety: emotional numbness, feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and despair, and reliving the traumatic experience in nightmares – exactly what had happened to me at Hunting Bear Path.

  Hughes’s diagnosis rang so true, but then, as I was to discover, just about everything she ever said rang true. Kelly hadn’t fully recovered from the events of 1997, and I didn’t know whether she ever would. Seeing your whole family head-jobbed took some recovering from. But she was a fighter, just like her dad had been, and had made dramatic strides. Under Hughes’s care, she’d moved from being a curled-up bundle of nothing to being able to function in the big bad world. It was just a fucker that that world was full of sex, exams, boys and drugs, all conspiring to send her back down the black hole it had taken her so long to escape from.

  26

  There was a gentle knock on the door before it opened and the receptionist popped her head round. ‘Kelly’s here.’ We stood up as Dr Hughes put her special smily face back on.

  ‘Dr Hughes, I haven’t told her yet, and I want to myself later today.’

  Kelly came in, apologizing. ‘The taxi driver didn’t know the way. He had to get his book out.’

  Carmen and Jimmy were still in the reception area, and I could hear Jimmy getting a hard time. Carmen was somehow managing to make the driver’s incompetence his fault. I sneaked a look at the new plaster on Kelly’s right hand.

  ‘Shall we go up, then, Kelly?’ Hughes had an arm out to usher her away. ‘There’s still quite a bit of time left.’

  Kelly looked pleased, then gave me a raised eyebrow. ‘Are you going to be here?’

  I nodded. ‘See you in a bit.’

  I got a slight smile from her as they left the room. I didn’t know whether she was pleased to see me or just glad to escape from those two for the best part of an hour.

  Jimmy looked relieved as I walked into Reception. He always made the mistake of assuming there was safety in numbers. I opened the door for them. ‘Shall we go for a cup of tea round the corner? It’s pointless waiting here, isn’t it?’

  Jimmy was up for it but we had to wait for Carmen to agree. Eventually we walked along to the main and found a table in a pretend French café staffed entirely by Croatians.

  ‘Have any letters come for me yet?’

  She shook her head while studying the menu. ‘No, but we left before the post. It’s such a long way, you know. That stupid man didn’t know where he was. Don’t they have to sit a test? Look at these prices – one fifty for a cup of tea.’

  Jimmy nodded his thanks to the waitress as she wrote down our order and took it to the counter. We all went back to studying our menus, alr
eady stumped for conversation.

  The girl rescued us a few minutes later by returning and plonking down two teas and a coffee for me. I pushed two antibiotic tablets through the foil of the card, which didn’t escape Carmen’s eye. ‘I’ve got a cold coming on,’ I said. ‘Just trying to knock it on the head.’

  ‘As long as you don’t knock it in my direction. I’ve only just got over one. Well, it was more flu, wasn’t it, Jimmy?’

  Jimmy sparked up. ‘I think it’s just black-cab drivers, dear. Our one was a minicab.’

  ‘Well, they should have to do the test too.’ She turned and gave me a theatrical aside. ‘He’s going deaf, but he won’t admit it. I told him to see the doctor, but, oh, no . . .’

  I swallowed the first pill with a sip of frothy coffee. I bet he was deaf. I would have been in his position. ‘There might be another letter coming to you,’ I said. ‘It’s not important, I can always come and pick it up after I’ve finished this work.’ I scooped a bit more of the froth from the top of the brew to help the pill down. There was no point putting this off any longer. It was time to cut to the chase. ‘Carmen and Jimmy, I’ve got some disappointing news. Kelly’s got to go back to the States tomorrow.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I know, I know, but I’m going to be working for longer than I thought. Dr Hughes is already finding somebody in the States for Kelly, so that’s a good thing.’

  ‘Surely it’s not a good idea to chop and change—’

  ‘What I need,’ I cut across whatever she was going to say, ‘is for you to change her flight. Can you do that for her?’

  ‘Oh, but we haven’t got that sort of money.’ No problem was too small to escape Carmen’s radar.

  ‘If you just change it, I’ll pay any extras with my card, I’ll phone them with my details. It’s just I haven’t got time to do the organizing, and she has her ticket. I have to start work at twelve.’