(2013) Collateral Damage (11 page)
Upstairs, Ruth had started to run the water for a bath in a big
old-fashioned tub about the size of a municipal horse-trough. The house was mostly
mid-Victorian although parts were supposed to date from the early seventeenth century.
There was even a faction within the local historical society who claimed that some
of the terrorists who tried to blow up king and parliament had rested there during
their abortive flight from failed regicide.
It was called, after some long dead owner, Growton's Farm and
stood, white painted, at the bottom of a meadow where a brook ran not many yards
from the front door. The few acres that remained with the property were let out
to local farmers and the horses in the paddock at the back no longer belonged to
Ruth and her younger sister, who had put aside such childish things some time ago.
Four hundred yards of dirt track, just about wide enough for a Land Rover, led from
a twisting, tarred lane to the front door with its Regency brass knocker and footscrapers
set into large grey blocks of stone. About four minutes after her parents had left
Dove drove up the dirt track in his Cortina.
He had been watching the place for almost three days, spending
his nights in a small hotel in a nearby market town. It had taken him a day to locate
the minister's country home because the newspapers had not given the full address
in their accounts of Ruth's case. Sometimes, when he could see people were getting
curious about his own curiosity, he had posed as a reporter. He had told the landlord
at the Bull this, but the man had not appeared to be listening.
Even now, when he had watched the two cars drive away, he could
not be certain she was alone. He patted his jacket until he could feel the little
revolver where it lay tucked into the waistband of his trousers, a position he was
not altogether happy about although he had made sure that the hammer rested on the
chamber with the screw. The schoolteacher took a deep breath, pulled back the heavy
brass knocker, and let it clatter against the wood. He wondered how he was going
to play it. Without any nonsense, he thought.
In and out.
The longer he was around the more chance of getting caught.
The cabinet minister's daughter was out of the bath, her feet
covered in talcum powder, trying to decide what top to wear with her jeans. When
she heard the knocking below she grabbed a blue check shirt, and was buttoning it
up as she went barefoot down the stairs, powdering a faint talcum spoor on the carpet.
'Oh, it's you,' she said when she pulled back the heavy oak door.
She had been half-expecting it to be her father come back to apologize for the row.
He sometimes did things like that.
It wasn't exactly the greeting Dove had been expecting.
'I'd like a few words,' he said. 'It's about Koller. May I come
in?'
'Are you supposed to question people on bail?' She quite liked
the idea of having some dozy fuzz about the place to tease and Shoulders seemed
no brighter close up than he did at three hundred yards. He was a good-looking hulk
though, even if he was a bit overweight in his appalling suit. Strong jaw, white,
even teeth; of course she would let him in. She might even make him a cup of coffee
if he was nice. She was very bored.
Dove thought: some reporter must have telephoned her and asked
for an interview. Any moment now she's going to slam the door in my face.
Standing on the doorstep Ruth was almost as tall as him. She
stared briefly into his blue eyes - 'guileless', she thought - lowered her gaze
slightly and noted the big right fist, blond hair on the back of his hand, playing
with his lapel. She stood there like this, half-smiling, waiting for his reply.
Then she was having great difficulty getting her breath and at the same time appeared
to be falling backwards. She was vaguely aware that these sensations coincided with
a sudden movement of the big fist with the blond hairs on it. Now they were in the
hall and the front door had slammed shut. He was standing over her as she lay on
the rush matting with her knees drawn up, her hands on her belly, trying to hold
the pain in almost as if she was in labour. He bent down and pulled her up by the
shirt. For a moment she thought perhaps there had been a mistake and he was trying
to make amends, but he pulled her up so savagely that most of her shirt buttons
flew off. There was a lot of pain. She wanted to scream but she couldn't catch her
breath. She was on the floor again and her nose seemed to be swelling across her
face and her mouth was full of some warm salty liquid. This process of being picked
up and knocked down with heavy blows to the face was twice repeated and for a few
seconds she lost consciousness.
When she came to she was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs,
her head between her knees,
spitting
bits of tooth on to
the stone floor. Her shirt was torn and bloodstained, her breasts were mostly exposed.
Her nose was bleeding and her upper lip was beginning to swell up. There was a red
mark on her left cheekbone that would emerge as a big black bruise; her right eye
was half-closed. Dove walked over to the sink and ran some cold water into an orange
plastic washing-up bowl which he proceeded to pour over the young woman he had beaten
up more efficiently than he had ever beaten a man.
'That,' he said, 'is just a sample of what you'll get if you
don't give me some very quick and honest answers to a couple of questions. Do you
understand?'
She tried to say something, but the words came out in bubbles.
He grabbed hold of her wet hair and pulled it back over the chair so that she stared
up at him. 'Understand?'
This time she managed to whisper 'yes' before she started to
cough on the blood and he was obliged to let her head drop back to enable her to
clear her mouth. He spun the chair round so she was facing him.
'Where's Koller?'
'Don't know,' she whimpered. He slapped her, quite gently and
held her to prevent her falling out of the chair. When this happened she realised
that if she was going to survive, the truth wasn't good enough.
'Who are you?' She was playing for time while she tried to clear
her throbbing head and think of some plausible answers. It appeared that he really
did want to know where Hans was. For a moment she had been convinced he was a particularly
sadistic rapist with whom there could be no reasoning at all.
'Never mind who I am. Answer my question.'
'Beirut.'
'Where?'
'Beirut.'
'Yes, but where in Beirut?'
Out of her pain Ruth vaguely remembered that Beirut had French
connections.
'Rue....'
'Rue what?' He was standing beside her, pulling her hair again.
She put a hand, as weak as a child's, on his forearm to try and stop him.
'Rue Isa ... Isabelle,' she gasped. Her mind was clearing. A
moment ago it had been impossible to think of a single French name.
'What number?'
'48.' Year of her birth.
That was easy.
Dove let her head go and she slumped down. He walked round until
he stood in front of her and then pulled the Webley out of the waistband of his
trousers. 'Look at me,' he said.
Slowly, she raised her eyes to find herself looking down the
hexagon-shaped muzzle of the pistol. On each side of the barrel she could also see
the business ends of two copper-jacket .38 bullets waiting in their chambers. Dove
held her head in his left hand as gently as a lover and kept the barrel just far
enough away from her mouth for her eyes to focus on it.
'If I find out you're lying I'll come back and kill you ... Are
you lying? This is your last chance.'
'No, no. It's the truth. Really, it's the truth. I swear it.
I'm not lying. He's a shit. He ran out on me.' She squeezed her eyes shut. She was
a child again, daring God to strike her down dead. She felt the cold metal against
her forehead and gave another little gasp. It stayed there for a long moment and
then went away. Her jeans went damp at the crutch, but she was too relieved to realise
what it was.
'Have you told the police this?'
'No.' Her mind was clear now. If she'd told the police and the
address was correct Koller might have been caught.
'Where's the cellar?'
She told him the entrance was under the stairs.
'Open your mouth.' He was behind her again, gagging her with
a tea-towel. Then he tied her hands behind her back with some nylon plastic washing-line
he found on a hook, led her down the cellar steps and seated her on the earth floor
with her back to the wall while he tied her ankles with more of the line. Her breasts
were now completely exposed because her buttonless shirt had been pulled even further
apart when her arms were bound. For the first time since he started hitting her
he felt a twinge of something close to compassion. He pulled the shirt together
and did up two surviving buttons. In doing so his knuckles skimmed her nipples and
he caught the fresh alarm in her eyes, felt her body tense. 'Don't worry,' said
Dove. 'Not with a bloody bargepole.'
For good measure he went back up to the kitchen, found another
tea-towel and blindfolded her. He also moved away from her various gardening tools
that might have been put to use cutting the washing-line. Before he left the house
he used a bread-knife on the telephone lead, and wiped up the bits of tooth, the
blood and the pool of urine under the kitchen chair with a dish-cloth. Apart from
the sabotaged telephone there was no sign that anything untoward had occurred. If
one of her parents came back in the afternoon they might think she had gone out
for a walk and that would give him more time.
Twenty minutes after he had entered Growton farmhouse he was
back in his Cortina and driving towards London airport fifty miles to the east.
Somewhere along the M4 it occurred to him that if she was expecting a reporter he'd
have quite a little scoop. He wondered how long it would take the police to find
out
who
had beaten her up and how much they would care.
He didn't regret what he'd done in the least. It was, he said to himself, necessary.
He didn't have time for the luxury of prolonged interrogation and at least he had
left her alive which is more than her bloody boyfriend had done for Emma. Fancy
the bitch thinking he wanted to rape her. Then, to his shame, he began to enjoy
the notion. Concentrate on killing Koller, he thought. After a while this did the
trick. He noticed he was sweating, and his arms and shoulders ached.
Dove had been gone almost an hour when Ruth managed to partially
remove the blindfold by making downward strokes with her face against the rough
brick wall. In doing so she developed another graze on her forehead, but uncovered
her left eye. By arching her back she managed to get her fingers to the line around
her ankles and pulled at the knots until they were sufficiently loose to allow her
to crawl about on her knees.
In this fashion, and in the half-gloom, she painfully climbed
the six cellar steps on her knees. Twice she almost fell backwards and just kept
her balance by hunching her shoulders so far forward that she was practically crawling
up the flight on her belly. When she got to the top she tried to raise the latch
on the cellar door with what was left of her front teeth. It was very tender work
for a bruised mouth and she took her time about it. As she was half-blind and could
make out only the most definite objects this operation also needed considerable
concentration. She bent her head and felt for the latch, first with her tongue,
and then with her teeth. Her head was still ringing from Dove's punches. She began
to feel dizzy. The latch was stiff. Three times she almost lifted it only to have
it fall back into position. Her head ached. She felt sick. Then she was spinning
off the edge, dissolving into a nauseous limbo. For a second or two she fought against
it, but it was so much easier to let go. She fell backwards and with some violence,
her legs bent under her, hands tied behind her back, banging her head hard against
the last two steps. When she had finished her fall she lay very still and her breathing
was barely audible.
'Shloms?'
The young Detective-Sergeant
who had been so nervous when they raided Ruth's flat often had difficulty in understanding
Fitchett. The older man mixed his generation's slang with words of his own device.
'Yeah.
That's what the governor thinks.
Shloms.'
'Who?'
'Shloms ... Solomons ... Israelis, you know,' said Fitchett,
impatiently revealing the word's curious derivation. He'd picked it up years ago
from a mate in the old Palestine Police.
'What do you think?'
'I'm not so sure. A couple of years back when they had those
teams over here and in Europe' - Britain would never be in Europe as far as Fitchett
was concerned - 'I'd have been more sure. But then they overstepped the mark and
clobbered the wrong bloke in Norway. And the French were getting pissed off with
scraping the right blokes off the pavement even before that. One of the Funnies
told me they'd promised to stop it, er, which he seemed to think meant, er, be more
discreet about it. You could hardly call what happened to the girl discreet, could
you?'
'Looks like she's fallen off a cliff.'
'Is she conscious yet?'
'Shouldn't think so.
Hargraves is at
the clinic and I asked him to call the moment she came round. Last time he was on,
he said the doctors were saying that even if she did she might not walk again. Her
back's definitely broken as well as the fractured skull.'
'Marvellous,' said Fitchett gloomily. He lit one of his fat cigarettes
with his oily little flame-thrower. 'What about the bloke her dad thought was one
of ours?'
