Exposure (38 page)

They sped out of the tunnel and roared onto the Lincoln Highway. Squad cars coming towards them flashed their lights, but Charlie wove between them as easily as the chicane at Silverstone.

He swung left and roared along the centre of the road, scattering pedestrians at one crossing like confetti. Whistles blew and police sirens sang in Helene’s ears but Charlie didn’t stop. He swerved right, leaving a tell-tale trail of burning rubber as smoke poured from the overheated tyres.

Canal Street was at a standstill. Charlie jumped the motorcycle onto the pavement, strewing coffee drinkers left and right. He braked hard to avoid a gaggle of children.

“Why aren’t you at school?” screamed Helene as the children toppled like ninepins.

The bike skidded and Helene felt herself falling. She landed rolling, the soft palms of her hands torn by the tarmac. Fifty yards away Charlie wrenched the handlebars hard round and the back tyre span out. Helene heard him grunt with pain as the bike’s full weight landed on his leg.

Charlie abandoned the wounded motorbike and ran back towards Helene. He grabbed her arm, dragging her behind him. Together they staggered across the busy street, dodging the surprised crowds as he towed her down an alleyway. The police sirens sounded nearer now but in the confusion, they seemed to have escaped.

Helene stumbled and Charlie helped her keep her balance by wrenching her arm upwards.

“Got to stop!” she gasped.

“No! Come on!” he urged her in a low voice.

Helene answered by being violently sick. All the soup and salad and crusty bread found its way back onto the alley. She spat futilely while Charlie held her gently.

“S..sorry!” she whispered, trying not to gag.

He didn’t reply, just pulled her up, more gently this time, and half carried her to the end of the alley.

“Can you walk?” he said, looking rapidly about him.

Helene nodded and, trying to look as normal as possible, walked as quickly as she could manage down a narrow street past the incurious eyes of customers at Lombardi’s pizza restaurant.

She felt sick and dizzy, and the sound of her blood pounding was loud in her ears. She stumbled onwards, trusting Charlie to lead her. Trusting him to protect her.

They hurried past the old cathedral, and the red brick and grey blocks of the Mulberry Library rose from the pavement. Frank’s agency was next door.

Helene was at the end of her strength. Her legs were trembling and each breath was gulped down, a drowning woman in a sea of city people.

“We’re here,” he said, huskily. “You’ll be okay now.”

“You… I…” but Helene was too exhausted to speak.

Suddenly Charlie pulled her close to him and the heat of his body seared her. He swept her backwards, her arms clinging to his neck and kissed her hard. She responded with her whole body burning, bolts of electricity making her shiver. Her lips pressed to his, breathing his breath, flesh on flesh.

“Now go!” he whispered, pulling her back to her feet. “Tell the story. Tell
your
story.”

She staggered slightly and when she’d caught her balance, he was gone and she was alone again. As alone as you can be in a city, surrounded by a ring of astonished spectators.

Helene pushed open the street door to the agency offices and half fell into the marble clad atrium of the smart building. Her face was red and sweaty, her hair a matted nest, clothes torn and stained. The horrified receptionist’s expression said it all. But this was New York: the receptionist recovered fast.

“May I help you?”

The woman sounded extremely doubtful and Helene herself thought it was likely that she looked beyond help.

“Frank Milson, please,” she gasped. “Tell him it’s Helene La Borde: he’s expecting me. Sort of.”

Helene’s face felt frozen in shock.

The receptionist hesitated just long enough to show that she thought an appointment with Mr Milson extremely unlikely. But the insolent glance bounced off Helene’s slight shoulders. It was liberating not to care. Especially when she knew she looked like Hell and that her hands were dripping blood onto the polished parquet floor.

She barely listened to the receptionist’s brief conversation and increasingly bemused high-pitched voice.

Eventually, in a tone that suggested God himself was descending in the elevator, she informed Helene that Frank was on his way down.

Helene collapsed into a new-looking Mies van der Rohe chair and kept an eye on the street door in case her followers hadn’t had enough of shooting up lower Manhattan.

The lift doors opened and Frank appeared in a haze of cigar smoke, ignoring the ban that every other office building was obliged to abide by.

“Jesus wept! It
is
you! You look like shit, Helene!” he grunted.

A deep, deep laugh was building inside her.

“Stop the press, Frank,” she said, smiling thinly. “Have I got a story for you!”

Chapter 27

It was strange to be home again. Although this home-coming had been very different from the last time Helene was in Cornwall.

For one thing, the story of her abduction and torture had been on the front page of every broadsheet and tabloid newspaper across the Western world. Her questions about fake gold and the dollar debt had been more quietly recorded, but the White House press office had been in full denial, despite the damning evidence provided by the doctors’ reports and the circumstantial evidence elsewhere.

Smiling Clive Jackson had found himself in the middle of his own scandal, when photographs of him with an underage boy had been published on the internet. His denials had sounded hollow and Helene had the satisfaction of seeing him fall on his sword, nanoseconds before he was pushed. She knew the Gene Genies were exacting revenge – or more specifically, she recognised the light touch of Hank’s work – whether or not the accusation were true.

Every TV channel, radio programme and web media site wanted to interview her. Helene had told her story so many times that it began to feel unreal.

Frank had been delighted with the scoop and made a small fortune handling the story rights. Helene let him manage access to her, as well. It helped to have him bulldoze reporters and organise media bodyguards, and his office also gave her someone to manage her phone and email.

Now she was weary. Tired to the bone.

After a fortnight of the media circus in London, Helene headed back to Cornwall. She was immediately swamped by local reporters who normally only got to report on fun runs, fishing rights and car boot sales. Helene fielded their questions thoughtfully and became a nine-day wonder in her village.

The Jenkins were stalwart in helping her: Mrs Jenkin became a celebrity in her own right, recalling the day she had driven off intruders, probably armed, from Helene’s cottage. Helene was more than glad to hand the limelight over to her neighbours and had the deferred pleasure of seeing Mrs Jenkin bask in the unfamiliar glow of stardom, whilst Mr Jenkin hovered in the background, growling at any reporter who came too close to his own Celtic Boudicca. Even their dog, Alfie, had become a minor celebrity, and had somehow become a canine hero of mythic proportions, nipping at the heels of the CIA or NSA or whoever. No-one seemed to care much about that detail. The small, round dog took fame in his stumpy stride.

As promised, £100,000 plus a small sum in per diems was deposited into Helene’s account by Frank’s agency. It was enough for her to take early retirement if she was careful, despite the fact that Helene was now more in demand as a celebrity reporter and interviewee than she’d ever been in 25 plus years on the job.

She was considering several potentially lucrative contracts as a columnist. Even one of these would give her a steady income before her newly bright star began to wane, as it inevitably would.

But for one thing, Helene would have been content: she’d heard nothing from Charlie.

Each day she’d checked her private email as well as the Helene of Troy website which had remained secret.

Each day she was sure that this would be the day when he would contact her, or, better still, knock on her door as he had almost promised.

The memory of that kiss was burned into her brain. But he didn’t come and even Hank, contacting her in code, reported that he had no word of him, let alone from him.

There was no-one else she could talk to about him. She was tempted to write down what she was feeling, but that would make it seem more dream-like and unreal. And she very much wanted it to be real.

Worse still, her contacts at the MoD had come up with nothing: no trace of a Charles Paget existed in any of the armed services; not even the police could find anything of him.

So who was he? Who was the man she had followed, who had followed her, who had saved her over and over again? Nobody seemed to know, and as each day passed with no news, he became more and more shadowy.

Helene had to force herself to face the fact that she had no idea who the man was – and would probably never know. He had disappeared from her life as completely as if he had never existed. Only the fact that she was still alive proved that she hadn’t imagined him.

As the weeks passed, Helene’s world began to return to something like normal.

But one day in early Autumn, on a mild October evening, she was wandering restlessly through her garden when she saw Mr Jenkin standing at her gate.

“Evenin’, Miss La Borde,” he said.

She smiled.

“I really wish you’d call me ‘Helene’, especially after everything that’s happened… after everything that you’ve done for me.”

The old man blushed and stammered. He could no sooner call her by her Christian name than fly to the moon. It didn’t matter: first name terms weren’t a prerequisite of intimacy and understanding. Not for a man like Mr Jenkin.

“Be the last day of our Indian Summer,” he said thoughtfully.

“Mmm, it has been unseasonably mild,” she agreed.

“Aagh, the south westerlies will be picking up,” he said. “I’ll come and dead-head those roses for you. Garden could do with a little bit of nurturing.” He looked up at her kindly. “And I think maybe for you, too. Maybe have a bit of a holiday? Have a rest?”

Helene shook her head.

“No time for that,” she said. “Anyway, I’ve been away for long enough. It’s much better to, you know, get on with things.”

As she said the words she realised that she meant them. There was nowhere else she wanted to be except in that small, pretty cottage in the furthest corner of Cornwall. Of course, it would be wonderful to share it… with the right person… the right man…

The old man nodded his head thoughtfully. He looked the picture of wisdom, possibly Methuselah himself.

“This came for you,” he said, interrupting her whimsy. “What with all the helter and skelter, the postie put it in the wrong box.”

He held out a postcard.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

Mr Jenkin touched his cap and disappeared back into his own kitchen, where he stood watching her from the window.

When Helene looked at the frail piece of cardboard she held in her hands, she almost dropped it from shock. The picture showed a photograph of the shrine at Kompira-san. She would have recognised it anywhere.

With trembling hands she turned over the postcard. Apart from her address, there were just four words written on it:

‘Wish you were here.’

Nothing else. Unreasonable joy pulsed through her.

She turned on her heel and by the time she ducked through her kitchen door, her heart rate had trebled and she thought she was going to faint. It was a sign! At last! A message. A message only she would understand. It meant he was safe and that he was back in Japan.

No, she was wrong. Helene looked at the postcard and read the words again – more carefully this time.

‘Wish you were her.’

The sudden joy was swiftly dissolved by a disconcerting chill as if someone had just walked over her grave. A cold feeling seeped through her.

Oh God. Japan. Did that mean he was back with Mayumi? Back with the Yakuza?

‘Wish you were her.’

Helene had a bad, bad feeling.

She turned the card over and over in her hands, looking for some other clue. ‘Wish you were her’. Not ‘wish you were here’. But could she be certain it wasn’t a typo?

Helene turned on her computer, impatient with the twenty seconds it took to fire up. First she checked her email. Nothing. Then she checked the Helene of Troy website: still nothing. Seething with frustration, she paced up and down the kitchen pointlessly.

Then a thought occurred to her. An appalling, distressing, unshakeable thought. She put up the website for her bank account and logged in.

The shock hit her in a wave of nausea. One hundred thousand pounds had been removed from her account.

And she knew who had done it.

The bastard! After everything they’d been through together! He’d been playing her. Waiting for the moment when her money would be paid in.

Fury raged through her and then another thought occurred to her. One hundred thousand pounds had gone, but the per diem money and her meagre savings had been left untouched. He could have taken everything and left her penniless. Maybe there was a reason for his behaviour – and an explanation?

Hadn’t they escaped the clutches of the Yakuza rather too easily? After all, they had knowledge of Bill’s murder and they had simply been allowed to walk away. Maybe he had promised the money to save them – to save her: after all, the turnaround of events in Kotohira had been rapid and unexpected. Had he given the Yakuza that money to pay off a debt? Was he still paying it off by working for them?

Helene longed to know the truth: what had it all meant? To her? To him?

Over the next two days she had numerous and interminable conversations with the bank manager, the police and the Serious Fraud Squad, which seemed cruelly ironic. But the money had undoubtedly vanished and the bank staff were adamant that Helene herself had removed it. How else could anyone have got through all their substantial security?

The police were suspicious: they suggested that Helene was using the event to drum up further publicity for herself. She was furious, but knowing what she knew – or suspected she knew – ill equipped to fight back and prove her innocence. If indeed she was innocent.