Out of the Night (16 page)

I
didn’t look back. Not once. They had made their decision and I had made mine. There was no time left for reconsidering anything. It did strike me that they had got a bum deal, the pair of them. It was a suicide mission. They had to stop Borovsky and they knew there would be no negotiations on their behalf. Mother Russia still set her people terrible tasks, it seemed. God knew what chance they had of doing anything but sacrifice their own lives.

My own situation wasn’t much better. The movement of the boat indicated that speed was building up. I had to get off it fast, one way or another. I headed towards the stern of the boat, thinking only that it was there that I had seen the platform that wasn’t so far above the sea.

I went straight through a couple of doors and along a passageway.
Meridion
wasn’t really all that big a boat. It only took me half a minute to get there.

Something must have been brewing onshore. They had taken off in a hurry and the rear end of the boat was still open. Crew members were working hard, hurriedly moving things around on the interior deck so they could get her closed up.

I walked quickly across the deck and only broke into a run
when I heard the first shout. Then I ran fast – and jumped. I jumped way out to the side, hoping the boat was moving so fast it would be past me before I hit the water and gave the propellers a chance to chew me up.

Christ! It was cold. The shock hit me like a rocket. It took all the air out of me. I gasped and sank. But the propellers missed me. I knew that because I didn’t feel them slicing into me.

My brain recovered from the shock. I knew what I had to do next. I kicked up to the surface and began stripping off as many of my clothes as I could. Jacket, shoes and trousers went easily. I gave up after that and started swimming towards the shore. I reckoned I had a couple of minutes before the cold dragged me down. I tried to make the best of them.

It was grim. Waves were washing around and over my head. The cold was like icicles driven into me. But I stayed focused and swam like a man possessed. Soon, though, I grew weak. The cold sapped my muscles and my brain alike. Somehow I kept going. I kept the shore in my sights and did my best.

Then I got lucky. The shore didn’t seem so far away after all, and it was coming closer. Not much to do with me, I realized. The tide was running my way. It didn’t really matter whether I swam or not. I would get there, but would I still be alive when I did?

It seemed like hours later when I finally crawled up onto the shingle beach. I lay full length, my face pressed into the gravel. I retched sea water out of my innards and I shook like
a motor inside had gone berserk. There wasn’t much left of me. I knew I was nearly done for. I raised my head and managed to crawl a few more inches up the beach, but that was all. The incoming sea lapped at my face, and I was powerless to stop it.

Then I got lucky again.

I felt myself being lifted out of the water and carried away, probably on a magic carpet. By then, I knew I was hallucinating, but I didn’t care.

The next scene was real enough. There were two of them. Inside one of the fishermen’s huts, they stripped my remaining clothes off me and rubbed me hard with some material that smelt like an oil rag. Then they wrapped a survival blanket round me, a tinfoil thing that seemed unlikely to do much good.

By then, my senses were returning. I noticed no one spoke for a while. I couldn’t, and they didn’t. One of the men lit a gas stove and heated some water, which they gave me in an enamel mug. I sipped it gratefully and felt my strength returning.

‘Thanks,’ I said, mustering all the words at my command.

‘Bollocks! You’re a fucking nuisance. I’d have left you for the crabs.’

That was nice. I looked up at him.

‘Eight weeks’ work wasted because of you!’

And fuck you, I thought but didn’t say. SAS, I had realized by then.

‘Jock!’ said his mate, who was outside the hut now and had just opened the door and stuck his head in.

Jock joined him. They both stepped outside. Something seemed to be happening. I got up and shuffled to the doorway.

Way in the distance, the sky over the sea had come alive.

‘Shit!’ Jock said with disgust. ‘That’s all we need.’

A huge aurora of incredibly bright light filled the eastern sky. Shooting stars and fiery rockets took the message even further afield. Seconds later we heard the explosion. It came rolling in on the tide, for a few moments drowning out the sound of sea on shingle.

Sasha and Misha. God bless them!

‘See what you’ve done?’ Jock said, turning to me. ‘You stupid bastard!’

I looked at him for a moment. Then I hit him. I couldn’t help myself. I hit him hard twice, once in the belly and once on the chin. He fell backwards, sprawling across the shingle. When he sprang back to his feet and I saw the glint of steel I knew I was in for it.

Then the one who was not Jock stepped between us and snapped, ‘Leave it!’

Jock wasn’t too keen to do that, but the tension drained out of the moment, sapped by the voice of command.

‘Get him some clothes, so he can get out of here,’ the guy in charge said.

Jock went.

The two of us who remained went back inside.

‘What was that about?’ the boss man asked, sitting himself down across from me.

‘There were two young people I liked on that damned boat,’ I told him bitterly. ‘They’d been living dangerously for a long
time, and they deserved better than what has just happened to them.’

He yawned. ‘Get some sleep,’ he suggested. ‘Think yourself lucky you weren’t with them.’

Surprisingly, I did sleep. When I awoke, there was a pile of clothing near me. The two SAS men were gone.

F
irst, I went home. I walked, of course. No option. Anyway, it did me good. Stretched me out and got things into some sort of perspective.

For some reason best known to themselves, the SAS guys blamed me for … what?
Meridion
blowing up? Borovsky disappearing? Or just for two months of undercover work leaving them without anything to show for it?

What would a result for them have been, for that matter? I had no idea how they looked at it.

What concerned me more was that they had stopped me getting out of Meridion House. Stopped us all. Or had they? Somebody had. But now I thought about it, that arm across my face hadn’t been tough-guy bare skin, and it hadn’t been swathed in camouflage or denim either. It had been smooth as silk, the cloth of an expensive suit. Who could that have been? I shrugged. To hell with it!

Personally, I wasn’t unhappy that a boat load of munitions and art forgeries had been spread across the North Sea. A lot of lives had probably been saved somewhere as a result, somewhere in the North Caucasus, presumably. My regrets were all for a slim, tough Russian girl. And her boyfriend, too, if that was what he had been. It seemed so unnecessary, and
a shitty end to a shitty day. The road home had never seemed so long. I felt like saying, Fuck it! and just sitting down.

My house looked the same, untouched by all the violence. I opened the front door with the spare key I kept hidden under an undistinguished stone round the back and tried to re-enter normality. It wasn’t easy. My mind wasn’t up to it yet. And my body ached like hell. If the SAS guy had punched me back, he would have met all the resistance of a wet paper bag.

I slumped in a chair, and sat and stared at the wall for a while. No energy left for anything else. My mind was full of disturbing pictures, mostly of the end of
Meridion
– and of Sasha and Misha. The pictures kept on coming. They were hard to stop.

But soon I started thinking of Jac, as well, and wondering if she had got out all right. I hoped to God she had. Time to start checking. If she had escaped, she would most likely have just gone home, like me.

All I got when I phoned her there was the message receiver. Jac Picknett was not available.

I tried her office next, and got another recorded announcement. I glanced at the clock on the wall and realized that wasn’t surprising. Two in the morning, apparently. Where had the hours gone?

So it was late. But I was awake now, and as recovered as one could expect after a day like mine had been. I was growing more worried by the minute. Maybe Jac hadn’t made it, I thought with a heart-sick judder.

The route out for her had seemed so straightforward at the time, compared with ours, but that seemed like wishful
thinking now. She had had to get out of Meridion House, evade whatever security was left and then find a way of getting home in the middle of the night without money or anything else. Tricky, when you thought about it. Especially for someone who wasn’t used to the life.

I heaved myself out of the chair. The adrenaline had returned. I knew what I had to do. But I wasn’t walking back to Meridion House. I would kick the Land Rover until it started.

I collected a couple of things, shed the borrowed clothes and donned some of my own. I found the keys. A last glance round to check there wasn’t anything else I needed.

That was when I heard a knock on the front door.

I froze. Recent events were vividly etched on my memory. In fact, they hadn’t even reached my memory. They were still the present, and I was still a participant. I looked round for a weapon, and grabbed a steak knife. Then I switched off the interior lights, switched on the one over the entrance and made my way to the door.

I ought to have known better than to open the door just because someone had knocked on it. I really did. My excuse is that I was tired, exhausted even. I wasn’t actually capable of thinking clearly. So I opened the door.

It flew back against me, hard. A body followed it, and fell against me, knocking me backwards. Jesus! I dropped the steak knife and clung on to the body to keep my balance.

‘Frank! Thank goodness.’

Relief flooded through me. This body was fully clothed. I hung on to her. She hugged me back, even harder than I was hugging her.

‘Jac!’ I pulled her further inside and slammed the door shut. ‘Where have you come from? I was just going to drive back to Meridion House, looking for you.’

‘Jimmy’s,’ she said. ‘I’ve been at Jimmy Mack’s. He’s lovely, isn’t he?’

I might have known, I thought, shaking my head. That interfering old man!

She had got out of Meridion House without difficulty, it seemed. No one had tried to stop her. She hadn’t even seen anyone.

‘They were there,’ I told her. ‘You were lucky.’

‘Who? Borovsky’s people?’

‘And the SAS. Maybe the SAS. A couple of them, anyway.’

She shook her head and digested that. ‘Well, I never saw them.’

‘Nor me,’ I admitted. ‘So then what?’

She had got outside and kept on walking. She had walked all the way back to Risky Point, keeping to the road. One or two vehicles had passed, but she had hidden from them. Given the time of day, or night, hitching a lift hadn’t seemed a safe or sensible thing to do.

I nodded, and kept quiet.

‘My feet were so sore by the time I reached Risky Point,’ she said. ‘I knew I had to rest. I had to find a phone. Get help, or …’

I steered her to the sofa. She sat down and I wrapped my arms round her. She clung to me. For a moment, I thought she was weeping. Shock had at last given way to tears. But I was wrong. She buried her face in my shoulder – and bit me!

‘Hey!’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you deserve it. I was worried about you. And today wasn’t a lot of fun.’

‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t all your fault – was it?’

‘Well….’

So she had taken refuge with Jimmy when she found she couldn’t get into my house.

‘You should have broken a window and climbed in.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t do a thing like that! What would you have said?’

I laughed. After all we’d been through, she was still capable of teasing me.

‘Hot drink?’ I asked. ‘Or a hot bath and bed?’

She put her head on one side and looked at me archly. ‘Could we do all three – in that order?’

‘Easily.’

I stood up and reached out a hand. She took it. I pulled her to her feet and kissed her. I thought she was never going to let me go.

I
n the morning, the very late morning, Jac said, ‘Jimmy and I saw the explosion.’

I turned over and kissed her breast. I licked her nipple. She briefly wrapped her arm round my head and held me there, but I sensed we were in different territory now. She wanted to talk. I wasn’t sure I did. I wanted the night to go on forever.

‘Those young Russians,’ she said. ‘Was there no chance for them?’

‘No. None at all.’

‘The girl was so young.’

‘Her choice. She knew what she was doing.’

I wasn’t about to get all sentimental again about Sasha. I couldn’t afford it. She shouldn’t have died, but she had. Time to move on.

But it was hard to do.

We ate a long, satisfying breakfast. It wasn’t necessarily what either of us would have chosen had we been in a posh hotel with a full breakfast menu, but it was fun. And it was what was available. Nutritious, too.

‘Dab?’ Jac said. ‘For breakfast – fried dab?’

‘And toast,’ I pointed out. ‘And as much coffee as you can drink – proper coffee.’

‘I usually have fruit. Sometimes with muesli. And a glass of water.’

‘Excellent!’ I said with approval. ‘That’s what we can have every other morning – if you stay. But today we have what we can find. You’ve had dab before, haven’t you, coming from a fishing family?’

‘Yes, but not for breakfast. And not for many years. Not since I was little, and used to go out in the boat with my Uncle Edward.’

‘Reacquaint yourself,’ I advised.

She laughed and grabbed the handle of the skillet, just to show she could cook as well as paint.

‘By the way, I will,’ she said, over her shoulder.

‘What?’

‘Stay – for a while. Then you can come to my place.’

I smiled. Maybe I hadn’t made any money out of my activities in the past week or two, but I seemed to have struck gold.

Bill Peart came to see us the next day. Well, he came to see me, actually, but Jac was there, too. He looked at her suspiciously when I made the introductions.

‘Are you one of Frank’s … clients?’ he inquired gravely.

‘Oh, yes,’ she assured him. ‘I own a gallery in Middlesbrough, and Frank has been assessing my security requirements.’

‘Ah!’

He obviously recalled hearing about her, and was satisfied.

‘Might we have a word in private, Frank?’ he asked.

‘We might. But you ought to know Jac was with me.’

He looked blank. Nothing was going to make him admit he knew what I was talking about.

‘At Meridion House,’ I added. ‘She was with me when I spoke to Borovsky.’

Now he was really discomfited.

‘She knows everything,’ I assured him. ‘As much as me, at least.’

His face cleared up. ‘Not everything, then? Only some of it.’

‘We are eager to hear anything you can add, Detective Inspector Peart,’ Jac assured him, in a voice and with a smile I knew Bill would be unable to resist.

‘Even I don’t know everything,’ he admitted, ‘but … It’s Bill, by the way.’

‘Bill,’ she obliged.

He knew more than me anyway. The security and intelligence agencies were furious, it seemed. Their careful surveillance over many weeks, and the intelligence gathering before that, had been kicked into touch by unanticipated events.

‘Some of them no doubt involving you, Frank,’ he said sternly. ‘And perhaps Miss Picknett, too.’

He wasn’t all that bothered himself, though, about the spy people being upset. Ordinary cops are more like normal people. They don’t mind sticking a finger in the eye of higher authority from time to time. They are not terribly keen on people with guns either, whichever side they are on, and they worry a lot about The Law. That’s probably a good thing – most of the time.

Borovsky, it seemed, had been spooked. Not by me, in
particular. More by a chain of events of which I had only been a part.

‘The bodies on the beach?’ I inquired.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, for a moment looking pleased with himself. ‘They came back to haunt him. Just when he thought he’d got rid of them.’

‘The currents,’ I explained for Jac’s benefit. ‘The bodies didn’t stay in the deep pools, like they were supposed to. They fetched up on the beach at Port Holland.’

She grimaced.

‘We got a result there,’ Bill said, stretching it a bit. ‘We discovered who was responsible for those murders.’

‘Borovsky got away with it, though,’ I suggested. ‘You never got to charge him, did you?’

Bill shook his head. ‘No, but he didn’t get away with it. Nobody got off that boat. Search and Rescue didn’t even find bits of bodies.’

That pretty well ruled out my last lingering hope that Sasha might somehow have escaped.

‘So what else spooked him?’ I asked. ‘Beside the bodies, I mean.’

‘Moscow, in a word. It seems they knew about some of what he was doing all along. The forgery business, I mean. They stayed their hand because they wanted to know where the forged art went when it left here.

‘What seems to have led them to pull the rug out was that they found he was also shipping arms to funny places in their own country.’

‘The North Caucasus?’

He nodded. ‘Wherever that is.’

‘The Badlands north of Georgia.’

He peered at me and said, ‘You’re a mine of information, Frank. You should be on Mastermind.’

I knew he didn’t mean it. So I just smiled pleasantly and said, ‘So what was our lot’s interest?’

‘Simple. They, too, wanted to know who his contacts were, but in their case it was the guns they were interested in. They didn’t know about the art. They were trying to follow the guns.’

‘Using the SAS?’

He hesitated and then said, ‘Not only.’

Whatever the hell that meant. I raised my eyebrows.

‘It’s complicated.’

‘Oh?’

He was enjoying this, I could tell. His inside information meant he could lord it over me.

‘Go on!’

‘The SAS were responsible for observation and tracking – surveillance, if you like. They were supposed to see who he passed the arms shipments to. Others – and I don’t know who, exactly – had a more interventionist role.’

‘Meaning they were close to Borovsky?’

He nodded.

I thought again about the mysterious figures in the shadows who had stopped our escape from Meridion House. It figured. The suits! I’d even seen them entering the building.

‘So what were they after?’

‘Russian spies – a spy gang. Borovsky was helping to round them up.’

I turned away for a moment, to stop myself from giggling. So there had been three groups supposedly shadowing Borovsky? Wonderful. I couldn’t have made it up.

I looked at Jac. She winked – definitely a wink. Then she used a tissue to wipe her eyes.

At least Bill had given us an explanation for some funny goings on. All those people wanting to know where
Meridion
went next? No wonder they were all pissed when the damned thing blew up.

‘Do your people – our people – know how Moscow dealt with it?’ I asked.

He looked at me, all the usual suspicion back on his face. ‘The explosion, you mean?’

I nodded.

‘Not really. Or if they do, they’re not telling anyone wearing a uniform – including my chief constable.’

He paused there and studied me for a moment, head on one side, which always indicated deep-running thought processes had been activated. ‘But you do?’

‘I might.’

‘Oh?’

‘It was the Russian girl and her partner.’

‘What Russian girl?’

‘Sasha,’ Jac said quietly.

It clicked. ‘The girl we were so worried about?’

I nodded.

‘She was Russian?’

Again I nodded.

After a moment a smile of pure delight lit up his face. ‘Then she must have been a…?’

‘She was. Both of them were.’

‘But…?’

‘They were monitoring Borovsky’s activities on the art front. Moscow wanted to know who his contacts were, and where the networks ran, like you said.

‘But the mission changed when guns came into it. There was no way Moscow was going to allow them to reach their destination. Sasha and her partner were ordered to stop them, any way they could – and they did.’

‘So it was a suicide mission,’ Bill said slowly. He seemed lost for words for a moment. Then he said, ‘Well…. Unofficially, speaking personally, I’m sorry for the two agents – but glad they were successful.’

‘My thoughts, too,’ I assured him.

‘And mine,’ Jac added.

At times, Bill can reveal his human side.

That about wrapped it all up, at least to the satisfaction of the three of us. We were still there, having yet more coffee, when I heard heavy feet climbing the steps. The front door opened. Jimmy Mack stuck his head inside.

‘Everything all right?’ he asked.

‘Just about,’ I said.

‘Come in, Jimmy,’ Jac suggested. ‘We have plenty of coffee left.’

‘It’s a little early for me,’ he said wistfully.

‘It’s in the cupboard under the sink,’ I told him. ‘Help yourself.’

‘Ah!’ Jac said with understanding when Jimmy pulled out the Famous Grouse.

He poured himself a decent glass and accepted a small cup of coffee as a chaser. Then he looked at Bill Peart and said, ‘Is this an official visit?’

Bill studied the bottle longingly and said with a sigh, ‘No, but I’m still on duty.’

‘That’s a pity. But this might cheer you all up,’ Jimmy said. He looked straight at me and added, ‘Two lads from Staithes were out last night, late on, catching the tide.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘They were about ten mile out,’ he said complacently.

I guessed where he was going, and I held my breath.

‘They were shocked by a terrible explosion. It lit up the sky and created some big waves that set their coble rocking like a wild thing. Came out of nowhere, they said.’

I stared hard, willing him to get on with it.

‘Afterwards, they came across a life raft.’

‘Anybody on it?’ Bill asked.

‘Just two people – alive. One was a girl.’

My heart was beating faster. I looked at Jac and beamed. Her hand went up to her face with surprise and delight.

‘Go on, Jimmy!’ I urged.

‘The lads brought them ashore, a little the worse for wear but otherwise OK, they thought. Then they went for help. When they came back they were both gone, disappeared.’

I felt like clapping and hooting with joy. Jac did do some of that.

‘It was her, wasn’t it?’ Jimmy said, looking straight at me again.

I nodded and grinned.

‘We’ll find them,’ Bill Peart said, leaping to his feet.

‘No, you won’t,’ Jimmy said decisively.

‘No, you won’t,’ I agreed.

Bill paused. ‘No,’ he said, sitting back down. ‘We probably won’t.’

He looked at me and added, ‘How did they do it?’

I shrugged. ‘I’d only be guessing.’

‘Then guess.’

‘Perhaps they had explosives already planted? So all they had to do was set the timer to give them five minutes to get clear, and then abandon ship.’

‘Yes,’ Bill said, nodding with approval. ‘That would work.’

‘Brilliant!’ Jac said.

‘Foreigners, eh?’ Jimmy Mack said, shaking his head. ‘What are they like?’

‘Good luck to them,’ I said, reaching for the bottle to pour Jac and myself a celebratory glass apiece. I glanced at Bill. He pushed a glass forward, too.