Long Time Lost (12 page)

Miller was right. There was surveillance in place. Down the street from the laundrette, just beyond the pool of light being cast by a street lamp, a grey Volkswagen Transporter van was parked beneath an overhanging tree.

Two men were slouched in the darkened cab, one of them pouring steaming liquid from a flask into a cup, the other with his head propped against the driver’s window. Miller had no doubt that they were police.

He took Kate’s hand – the signal they’d agreed on – and they hurried along the opposite side of the street.

‘Stumble a little,’ Miller told her. ‘Act tipsy.’

‘Where are they?’

He told her. ‘But don’t look. Focus on your feet. Lean into me, as if I’m holding you up.’

‘Why can’t I be the sober one?’

‘Just do it. Please.’

Kate did as he asked and he wrapped his arm around her, supporting her weight.

‘You’re hurting me,’ she whispered. ‘Ease off a little.’

It was his size. His strength. But also his nerves.

‘Better?’

‘Much.’

They walked beyond the van to the next cross street, then turned a corner and doubled-back along an unlit alley that smelt of rotting litter. Kate’s footfall echoed off the concrete, her pace picking up as she skipped clear of Miller’s embrace.

‘Will they be watching the back, do you think?’

‘I doubt it.’ He was a little thrown by how quickly she’d darted away from him. ‘Clive’s attacker gained access through the front. If he comes back, they’ll be betting he enters the same way.’

Kate was quiet for a few seconds. Perhaps she thought Miller had slipped up by mentioning Clive’s name. But he hadn’t. Kate had seen the pictures of Clive’s medical chart and he credited her with enough intelligence to have sneaked a look at his name.

‘What do we do if they spot us?’

‘You’re the athlete, Kate. I’d say running would be a great idea.’

There was a high garage behind the laundrette with a roll-up metal door. Miller slid his rucksack off his shoulders, unzipped a compartment on the front and removed a pair of latex gloves. He snapped the gloves on over his wrists, then tried the door handle. It didn’t budge.

‘What now?’ Kate asked.

‘How much can you lift?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You weigh what, one hundred and twenty, hundred and twenty-five pounds?’

‘I’m not going to answer that.’

‘Fine. Call it an even one-twenty. I’m a lot heavier than that. Think you can boost me?’

Miller took her hands and formed them into a bowl shape below her knees.

‘Size fifteen,’ he said, resting the sole of his boot in her palms and propping his hands on her shoulders. ‘Sometimes I wish I was a little more spry.’

‘Newsflash,’ she grunted, ‘you’re not any kind of spry.’

He bounced up, stretching his arms above his head, and grasped the tarred lip of the flat roof above the garage. One handhold was good. The other was bad. Something pierced his glove, breaking his skin. He snatched his hand free, then hooked his elbow over the ledge and heaved himself forwards as Kate pushed at his tangled legs from below.

He rolled on to his back, panting up at the starless sky tinted green by the light spill from all the street lamps and neon in the neighbourhood. Pushing on to his elbow, he looked down to where Kate was gazing up at him, her face very pale in the darkness of the alley. The thought of leaving her behind crossed his mind and he guessed she must have sensed it from the way she jumped and flapped her hands.

‘Come on, Miller. We had a deal.’

And before he thought better of it, he found that he was leaning down and grasping her wrist, lifting her, the sudden weight digging his wedding band hard against the bones of his ring finger. She twisted around, kicking a foot off the garage door, scrabbling for something to hold on to.

‘Crap.’ She scraped her knee, banging her shin, before stumbling on to the roof.

‘OK?’

She sucked air through her teeth, clutching her leg.

‘Take your shoes off,’ Miller told her.

‘What? Why?’

‘I only have one pair of gloves. You’ll need to use your socks.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Does this look like a time for practical jokes?’

Miller peeled back his own glove and sucked at the trickle of blood oozing from the heel of his hand as Kate leaned on his shoulder and worked her feet out of her trainers. She removed her socks and slipped her shoes back on to her bare feet.

‘What now?’ she asked, in a squeaky voice, and Miller turned to find that she was using one of her socks like a hand puppet.

‘White socks? Really?’

He moved away from her, shaking his head, and began to pick a route across the roof.

‘That’s our entry point.’ He nodded one floor above them to a pair of glass French doors set back from a concrete balcony ringed by bowed metal railings.

‘And how do you propose we get up there? It’s pretty high, Miller. If I boost you again, I’m not sure you’ll be able to reach down for me. Or is that your big idea?’

‘The big idea is that I’m going to grab hold of the bottom of the railing and hang there. You can climb me like a ladder.’

‘A ladder?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Sure you can handle all a hundred and twenty pounds of me?’

‘I apologise. It felt more like one-fifteen a moment ago.’

Kate punched him on the arm.

‘Supposing this even works, how are you intending to get in? Are you secretly a burglar, Miller? Do you have some lock picks hidden in that backpack of yours?’

‘Better. I chose this place for Clive. We rent it for him. I have spare keys.’

Miller could tell immediately that the living room was where the attack on Clive had taken place. Stepping in through the French doors from the balcony, he didn’t need his torch to see the bloody residue on the laminate flooring. He flicked the torch beam upwards and spotted a patch of bare plaster and four drill holes in the ceiling directly above. It looked like a metal plate had been fixed in place with a bolt gun. Must have been where Clive’s attacker had suspended him from.

He flashed his torch quickly around the rest of the room. The apartment was small – little more than a studio flat – and it was sparsely furnished. The sofabed and television stand had already been here when Miller had signed off on the rental agreement. So had the shelving unit along the opposite wall. Clive hadn’t added to the place with any of his own decorative touches, unless you included the materials the police forensics team had left behind.

There were numerical tabs next to the blood spills on the floor, the holes in the ceiling, a missing door handle and the switch for the main light. Maybe the German forensics team had found fingerprints belonging to Clive’s attacker, though Miller thought it unlikely.

He stepped out into the hallway, ducked his head into the bathroom, then went to assess the locks on the front door. There was no sign of tampering. Carefully now, he rotated the only lock the German police had secured behind them and peeked out. There was no evidence of scarring or scraping. Two lengths of yellow police tape criss-crossed the door frame.

Miller closed the door, turned the lock and walked back through the apartment to the balcony.

‘You can come in now. It’s safe.’

Kate stepped inside, her hands tucked up beneath her armpits in her socks.

Miller could still feel the sensation of her touch from when she’d climbed him to reach the balcony. It had been more intimate than he’d intended. He’d smelt the hotel shampoo she’d used and had felt the contours of her body pressing into his own. An image had flashed through his mind – one he’d fought hard to forget – of her standing before him in the dismal apartment in Weston-super-Mare, wearing only a T-shirt and panties.

‘This is where he lived? It’s tiny.’

‘It had everything he needed. Nothing he didn’t.’

But even Miller had to admit that it was pretty bleak, and it certainly wasn’t as luxurious as the place where Kate had been living on the Isle of Man.

‘What do we do now? What are we looking for?’

‘Anything the police may have missed. Anything that could tell us what the people who did this were after.’

He wasn’t about to tell Kate that he had a pretty reasonable idea already. Miller guessed it was Connor Lane’s way of applying pressure to him. It was his way of signalling that he wanted Miller to give Kate up. Just possibly, it was also something more than that.

‘Where do I start?’

‘You take the bathroom. I’ll begin in here.’

He showed Kate the way with his torch, pulling on the light cord when she entered the room. There was no window and no extractor fan. The walls were damp-stained and furred with mildew.

‘Take your time. Call me if you find anything.’

He returned to the living room and gazed back up at the ceiling. Clive was a big guy, at least two hundred pounds based on the records Becca had taken when he’d first joined the programme. He’d spent close to nineteen months on his own since then, eating takeaway food. Chances were he was heavier now. And even allowing for a pulley system, it would have taken someone strong to hoist him. Maybe more than one man.

Miller let his eyes wander, following the torch beam around, and after a few seconds they settled on an empty charging cradle for a cordless phone. Which was something Clive was not supposed to have.

Staring at the charging cradle, trying to quell his anger, Miller was reminded of how he’d hidden Kate’s phone in a kitchen drawer when he’d first broken into her place. Maybe Clive’s attacker or attackers had done the same thing. Maybe they’d been lying in wait for him when he got home.

But ten minutes later, Miller decided that scenario didn’t fit. Clive’s locks had shown no sign of having been forced, which suggested he’d invited his attacker inside his home, or had been obliged to. Miller also couldn’t find the missing handset, no matter how hard he looked, and he reasoned that was because it had probably been taken by the German police for forensics analysis.

But the most compelling reason of all was that Miller had found a second handset in a second charging cradle in Clive’s bedroom, half concealed by a pile of dirty laundry. The phone had a digital screen and Miller was able to scroll through the information it contained until he discovered that the last call placed from the phone had been to a UK number the day before yesterday.

‘Miller, I think I’ve found something.’

He spun to find Kate standing behind him, wrinkling her nose as she took in the funky grey sheets twisted on the bed and the discarded Y-fronts and socks down on the floor.

She was holding a small piece of white card in the mouth of the sock puppet on her right hand.

‘Where did you find this?’

‘He had a paperback next to the toilet. This was keeping his place.’

The card was a ticket stub in Clive’s assumed name for an AlItalia flight to Rome Ciampino, date stamped just over three weeks ago. He’d occupied seat 14A.

‘Is it important?’

Miller’s chest contracted painfully. His mouth had gone dry.

‘I didn’t think you allowed people to travel. I thought it was one of your rules.’

‘I don’t,’ he muttered. ‘And it is.’

‘But this Clive – he went anyway?’

‘Seems that way.’

‘Why do you look so freaked out? Miller? I know you like your rules, but maybe he just needed a holiday.’

‘I don’t think so.’

He pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut, as if he had a sudden pain in his sinuses.

‘Oh, you have a client in Rome, don’t you?’

Miller knew he should be contacting Hanson and instigating some kind of emergency response. But he felt leaden. This couldn’t be real. There was no way this was real.

Clive had travelled
three weeks ago
and he was only learning of this
now
.

‘Who’s in Rome?’ Kate asked him.

‘Client number two.’

‘Are they in danger?’

‘I think we all are.’

Outside on the street, a few hundred metres back from the plainclothes officers in the grey VW Transporter, Aaron Wade lay across the darkened rear bench of a black Renault Clio, his knees bent, legs folded, his neck crushed and contorted. Wade’s hand was cupped to the side of his face, shielding a radio earpiece. He was listening to the feedback from the transmitter he’d stashed behind the light switch in Clive Benson’s living room as Nick Adams ended the phone call he’d just placed.

Once Wade had heard enough, he raised his mobile and made a call of his own.

‘They’re in the apartment,’ Wade said, when Renner picked up. ‘Both of them. They know Benson was in Rome.’

Silence.

‘Adams is talking about flying there. She doesn’t use his real name, by the way. She keeps calling him Miller.’

‘I’ll have someone look into it. What else?’

‘He’s figured out that Benson telephoned someone in the UK before he was attacked. I missed a second phone. He’s getting his crew to put a trace on the call. He knows the number is unlisted and he’s guessing Benson contacted Mr Lane. It won’t take them long to know it for sure.’

‘No names. Jesus.’

Wade supposed he should apologise for the slip, but he didn’t much feel like it. He’d been cramped up in the car for hours now. He was hungry and dehydrated. He wanted to stand on the street and stretch, find some place where he could get a late meal and some good German beer. Maybe even a girl.

There was no way he was going to mention the part before the phone call, where Adams had told Kate that they could link the style of his assault on Clive Benson with the murder of that Patrick kid back in Manchester. Renner was already pissed off with him. He wasn’t going to make it worse.

‘What do you want me to do? They went in around the back. They’ll come out the same way.’

‘Follow them. But keep your distance.’

‘And then?’

‘Call me when you know more.’

It was Wade’s turn not to saying anything. He hated this softly-softly stuff.

‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘Anything new?’

‘Not much,’ Renner told him. ‘It’s raining in Rome.’