Dark Winter ns-6 Read online

  She threw her Hello! on to the carpet with the rest of the magazines and sat down, bringing her legs up on to the cushions then covering them with the robe. I stayed standing to protect the furniture. I nodded towards the shopping bags. ‘Been to Bluewater?’

  ‘Yeah, I couldn’t get to sleep. I was dying to, but what with all the work going on round the back . . .’ She adjusted the robe round her thighs again, then looked up sharply. ‘So tell me, what’s the story on this girl of yours, if she isn’t your daughter?’

  52

  It took me an hour, but I stood there and told her everything. I fumbled my way through that day in Hunting Bear Path and our weeks on the run together afterwards, and how she’d ended up living with Josh and his family in Maryland after her therapy sessions in London.

  Suzy seemed to understand. ‘She’s never fully recovered, then – that’s why you came back to see the same doctor, yeah?’

  ‘That’s where I disappeared to on Saturday. Seeing your whole family head-jobbed takes some getting over. But she’s just like her dad was, a fighter . . .’

  I told her how she had managed to fight her way back from being a curled-up bundle of nothing to being able to function outside the clinic where she’d spent the best part of ten months. ‘And just when I thought she’d got straightened out, she’s developed a habit with painkillers, and she’s bulimic, and fuck knows what else.’

  ‘That little performance in St Chad’s makes sense now.’

  I fished in my pocket and pulled out the Polaroid. ‘This was her this morning.’

  Suzy kept her eyes fixed on Kelly’s face, but they looked slightly glazed, as if she was elsewhere. ‘Beautiful . . .’ She handed back the picture. ‘You’re sure about not going to the boss?’

  ‘That job I told you about, the one I did for him a couple of years ago? It was in Panama. He threatened to have Kelly killed if I didn’t do it. The two guys in the Transit – they’re the ones who’d have done it. If I go to him now, I’ll lose what little control I have. He won’t give a shit about anything but the DW – fair one, but where would that leave Kelly? The only way I’m going to get her back is by going to Berlin and picking up those bottles.’

  ‘You sure he won’t just kill both of you once he’s got them?’

  I shrugged. What could I say? She was right.

  She studied my face. ‘You’re going to do this regardless, aren’t you?’

  ‘Don’t have much option, do I? The thing is, will you help me? I don’t know how yet – all I know is I’ll need backing once I’m in the UK.’

  She shifted about a little on the settee, as if looking for something, then smiled to herself. ‘Force of habit. I was just about to reach for a fag. It’s going to be hard for me, Nick. I’m in a delicate condition.’

  ‘Look, if everything goes well, your permanent cadre won’t be jeopardized. I don’t think—’

  She lifted a hand. ‘You know, for a highly trained observer, you can be amazingly stupid sometimes. I said condition, not fucking position. Look, I was smoking in Penang, right, but next time you saw me I’d stopped – me, the girl who could describe to you every cigarette she ever smoked. Then that being-sick thing. Nerves? And did you ever see me taking any doxycycline? Think about it, Nick. Hurry up . . . yes, well done, that’s right. Two months. Geoffrey’s fond farewell before the Gulf.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? How long have you known?’

  ‘None of your business – but I found out after we got back from Penang.’

  ‘The Yes Man know?’

  ‘Definitely not. I’m hoping I get PC before I show, then it’s thanks for the promotion, and next day – shock horror, so sorry, I just found out I need some maternity leave.’

  ‘He’ll fuck you over, you know.’

  She shrugged. ‘Geoff’s done that already. Anyway, we’ll see, won’t we?’

  I couldn’t make out if the Geoff thing was a joke or not. ‘What does he think about all this?’

  ‘He doesn’t know yet. I’m not too sure whether I’m keeping it.’ She looked away and had a moment to herself. ‘Our marriage is a bit of a nightmare, to be honest. I thought what I needed was stability. But look at this place, this isn’t me – you know what I mean, don’t you?’ She waved her hand at the flower fest around us. ‘I’ve tried. I always thought I’d want all this, but I’m not made for this shit. You understand, don’t you? You’re the same.’ Her eyes were starting to well up.

  I hated situations like this. What was I supposed to do now? I never knew if it was listen, hug, or go and put the kettle on.

  ‘I get the feeling he blames me – you know, if he hadn’t met me, he’d still be unhappily married just the once.’ She took a deep breath, exhaled noisily, and tears fell down her cheeks. I took one of my own, ready to ask if she wanted a brew, but I was too late. ‘Goodness knows why he married me.’ She gave me a little grin as the tears fell gently on to her robe. ‘Oh, no, hang on, I remember now – I’m such a fantastic fuck.’

  She motioned me to sit down and dirty an armchair. ‘Fuck it. Never liked the pattern anyway.’

  I moved new sweaters and coats off the back and sat down. I’d been nodding ever since her announcement, but I still had no idea where this was leading.

  ‘I was thinking about the abortion when you rang the bell. Shall I tell you where I’d got to?’

  I carried on nodding.

  ‘My marriage will not survive, but I still want this child.’

  ‘That changes everything, Suzy. I can’t ask you—’

  ‘Why the fuck not? I’m pregnant, not disabled. Anyway, don’t worry, I have a secret weapon.’

  She was willing me to ask her as she gripped herself and the tears stopped.

  ‘Don’t tell me – you’re one of the X Men . . .’

  She gave me the same sort of look Kelly always did when I said something embarrassing. ‘My condition, you dickhead.’

  ‘That’s what’s worrying me.’

  ‘Not that – RUC syndrome. Heard of it, Det boy?’

  I hadn’t, and now got to shake my head.

  ‘It was first diagnosed in the police over the water. If they survived a bomb attack or a hit, some of them started believing they could survive anything. That’s me. I’m invincible.’

  ‘What turned you into superwoman, then?’

  ‘Did you ever hear about the female operator that nearly got lifted in Belfast in the nineties? You remember, August ’ninety-three. You were still in the Regiment then, weren’t you?’

  I was, and I did remember a few vague details.

  ‘I was working two-up on a serial around the West Belfast estates. Just part of a normal team. I dropped off my partner, Bob, to do a walk-past of the target’s flat. I parked up the other side of the estate and waited to pick him up. But we’d been compromised and I ended up trapped in my car by a road-digger. The fucker used the bucket to try to crush it, with me still in it, as a few boyos got together to tear apart whatever was left of me.’

  I was going to make a funny, but then saw the look on her face.

  ‘Don’t ask me how, but I got out of the car with a broken femur after the bucket had gone down on the car two or three times. I shot the digger driver and one of the players who was trying to batter my head in with an iron bar. Then I held the rest back by grabbing one and jamming my pistol into his gob and just held on until the rest of the team rammed their cars into the crowd to get me out. I was shitting myself. Bob got dragged away and kicked to death in the estate.’

  I did remember now: it had been a big deal at the time. She even got decorated for it. ‘So you’re the famous digger girl, then?’

  ‘Yep, that’s me. Big-time hero.’

  She sounded a little sardonic, but surviving was something to be proud of, without a doubt. Others in similar situations were now dead, including Bob. The whole Ashford and the MOE school thing made sense now. Her cover had been blown big-time, but the Det would have wanted to keep hold
of someone of her calibre.

  ‘Does the Yes Man know you have this head-banging RUC whatever-it’s-called?’

  ‘Nope, no one. Just you.’ She smiled briefly, checking that the robe still covered her legs. ‘You want to know something else no one knows? You want to hear the real story?’

  I shifted awkwardly in my chair, thinking that it might be time to go and make a brew.

  ‘It was my fault we got compromised.’ Her voice was drained of emotion, her head was down, hair falling forwards and blocking out her face as her hands flattened out the white towelling over her legs. ‘I stopped the car for a casual drop-off, but as Bob got out, his jacket must have got tucked in behind his pancake. His Sig and mag carrier were showing. I didn’t see it until he was half-way over the road.

  ‘I tapped the horn and he came back, ready to lift off. I said it was OK, don’t be stupid, no one’s seen it. Fact is, I was more worried about the serial being cancelled and looking a dickhead than being compromised, know what I mean?’

  I nodded, but not really meaning it.

  ‘Anyway, he took my word for it, covered up and started again. I went the other side of the estate to pick him up. Next thing I knew that fucking JCB started rearranging the bodywork. So I did my stuff and the green army went into the estate in riot gear and brought out Bob’s body an hour or so later.’

  Her face was still covered by hair, but I knew she was fighting the tears again. ‘Look, you can’t blame yourself. He should have checked himself before getting out of the car. It’s no one’s fault, things fuck up.’

  ‘No, you’re wrong. It fucked up because I was more worried about admitting to myself we were compromised. It felt like a failure and I didn’t want to accept that.’ She sat upright, swinging her feet off the settee. Her eyes were wet, her cheeks red, and she didn’t care about the robe now: it fell apart, exposing her legs. ‘I couldn’t tell anyone – maybe guilt – but I saw Bob, I saw them kicking and punching him to death. We could see each other, he was screaming at me for help. I was out of the car by then but couldn’t get to him. I watched them drop a fucking paving slab on his head because of me, but I couldn’t do anything about it . . .’

  The tears just kept falling, but there was no noise from her now. Maybe she had already made enough over the years.

  My heart quickened: I needed to know. ‘Do you have dreams about it – you know, like a film in your head?’

  She went quite still, not even bothering to wipe away the tears. ‘You know, don’t you? You have them. I can’t stop it sometimes – even watching a TV fight will do it. You understand . . . It’s like, I replay it over and over again in my head, and it totally fucks me over. I can’t help it.’

  Shit. This was more than enough. I stood up, cutting away there and then. ‘Want a brew?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, you’re right. Better shut up now before we become normal and talk about shit – you never know, the floodgates might really burst, and then we’d be totally fucked.’

  She followed me into the kitchen and leant against the worktop, wiping her face with a tea-cloth as she watched me fill the kettle and fumble about for the teabags.

  ‘Ever since then, Nick, I’ve been the first to jump in. No task too small, Suzy’s your girl. No cheap psychology required – I survive even when I fuck up, even when I don’t deserve to. That’s why I’ll go to Berlin with you.’

  I found the tea on the worktop behind her and got pouring. ‘I just need you when I get back.’

  ‘Think about it. It’s better for cover and, anyway, you don’t know what you’re going to find. Apart from that, of course –’ she grinned ‘– you’re fucking useless. How many times have I saved that lardy arse of yours?’

  I passed her brew over and saw that scary look on her face again. Good, things were back to normal. No more talk of videos and gates bursting open. I was planning on keeping mine well shut. ‘So you’ve got a real syndrome? I just thought you were a fucking fruitcake.’

  I got a laugh, but then her eyes narrowed. ‘What were you going to do if I’d said no? Kill me?’

  ‘I’d just have lifted you until I got Kelly.’

  ‘Look, I won’t lie to you. If I’m on my own and I have to make a choice between Kelly and DW, you know which I’m going to go for, don’t you?’

  I nodded. ‘I’ve got two important questions.’

  ‘They’d better be.’

  I pulled at the neck of my sweatshirt. ‘Can I use your shower and washing-machine? I’m covered in sand under here. And can you get on the phone to Air Berlin and book yourself on to my flight?’

  53

  The seats on the Air Berlin flight were small and cramped, but we were both so exhausted it didn’t really matter. Suzy had the window-seat and her head rolled against the side of the aircraft. The gallons of coffee we’d thrown down us all night hadn’t been enough to keep us going. It wasn’t long into the ninety-minute journey that we were both doing neck-breakers, mouths wide open, saliva dribbling down chins, much like every other early-morning passenger off for a day’s business in Berlin, except that they reeked of aftershave and sported suits and pressed shirts.

  Suzy had driven us to Stansted in the runabout Geoff used when on leave, a beaten-up old Micra that chugged out of the garage and I replaced with the Vectra. It was better to be disconnected from it as I entered a new phase.

  While the suits had been catching up on their beauty sleep, we’d been working out the plan for the pickup. We kicked round and round the possibility of replacing the bottles with others containing inert powder. In theory, it would be no problem to work the switch: we’d both done it enough times with weapons and equipment against other players in the past. But to do the job properly takes time, something we didn’t have. Any player worth their salt would have placed tell-tales on the bottles; maybe a small pin-hole in the foil that the replacement wouldn’t have, or maybe a taste. Rubbing ginger or a wet boiled sweet around the foil, or the cork before it was resealed, would leave a trace that could be picked up with a wet finger. But even if there were no tell-tales, what if he had the capability to test the contents? Could I afford to take that risk? The source would need to know that he had DW before he’d even think of handing over Kelly – not that I reckoned he planned to – and delivering it intact was the only way I had even the remotest chance of getting to her. Fuck the inert business. Dark Winter had to be delivered.

  We had to travel on our own passports because there was no time to do otherwise. Her real name was Susan Gilligan or, at least, that was her maiden name. She’d never got round to changing her passport, even though she’d been married nearly four years now.

  My head rolled with another neck-breaker that woke me up as abruptly as if I was having the falling-off-a-building-and-just-about-to-hit-the-ground nightmare. The day’s papers had slipped off my lap long ago and got ripped to pieces on the floor as we’d twisted and turned in the confined space to try to get even more uncomfortable. They were full of post-war Baghdad, America’s amber alert, which was being blamed on the Iraqi situation, and pictures of Canadians walking about in face masks to avoid contracting SARS. Nothing in the national pages about King’s Cross or King’s Lynn.

  I wiped some saliva from the side of my mouth. The pre-landing announcements started in efficient German, followed by accented but perfect English. The aircraft began to lose height and we tried to find where our seat-belt buckles had hidden themselves.

  I copied Suzy as she adjusted her watch to Central European time, then craned my neck to look out of her window. The sky was sunny and cloud free, and I could clearly see the Brandenburg Gate, surrounded by burgeoning high-rises. The whole of the centre of the city looked like a field ready for harvest, except that the yellow stuff wasn’t wheat, it was tower cranes.

  ‘Looks like a nice day for it.’ We hadn’t talked about the job itself since we entered Stansted, and wouldn’t again until we got out of the cab at the other end. We didn’t want to be overheard, a
nd talking in whispers attracts too much attention.

  Suzy had bought a guidebook at the airport, so we knew Bergmannstrasse was in the old Western part of the city, in an area called Kreuzberg, which I thought I knew from my time as a squaddie in the early eighties. The book said it had a large Turkish population, and Germans went there to escape National Service and become artists, punks or anarchists instead. That sounded about right. I wasn’t too sure about having seen any artists, but I’d spent a good few nights in West Berlin getting ripped off by Turkish bar owners and trading punches with German punks.

  We landed and everybody stood up and clogged the aisle as soon as the seat-belt sign flickered off. The suits revved up their mobiles to start the day’s work. When we eventually disembarked, we were channelled towards two control booths immediately at the top of the ramp. They were manned by German Immigration police in dark-green jackets and washed-out yellow shirts, their spiky hair and stern faces making them look as if they’d be more at home sticking out the top of a tank than checking passports and watching for illegals.

  Suzy made sure she had the guidebook in view as the two of us stepped forward. A guy in his late twenties, with a blond crewcut, flushed cheeks and rectangular frameless glasses, took our passports, looked at us, then snapped them shut before passing them back with a nod. We muttered thanks and entered Germany, following signs for taxis. Checkpoint Charlie was just a couple of Ks to the north of Bergmannstrasse, and a major tourist trap. It was as good a destination as any to give to a cabbie, before walking into the target area.

  We stepped out into bright sunshine as I took a couple more antibiotics, not bothering to offer any to Suzy. The temperature was still a little cold as we lined up at the rank with about thirty others, mostly suits with their phones stuck to their ears. White Mercedes cabs filtered forwards to run the fares the dozen or so kilometres into town. We didn’t talk: there were still too many spare ears around.

  When our turn eventually came, we climbed into a six- or seven-year-old Merc with plastic seats. The driver, an old Turk, didn’t need to speak English to understand Suzy’s ‘Checkpoint Charlie, mate.’