Restoration (36 page)

  Garcia and the woman disappeared back into the darkness and, after a few moments, the girl stood up from her seat on the steps and began to walk towards the house. Ashe reached into his pocket to drop change for his drink onto the table and run after her. Then he paused: the girl was walking around the back of the house, along the narrow road that he had walked only the day before to get a feel for the place. With that realisation came another: she was casing the joint, just as he had been. Surely Jimenez hadn't tasked her with the job of retrieving the box? No, of course not, she had overheard their conversation, no doubt become starry eyed at the amount of money Chester had been willing to pay to have his property returned. She meant to steal it for herself. The girl reappeared, her eyes scanning the wall all the way around as she circled the building. I don't believe this, Ashe thought, we all want to break in and get the damned thing!

 

 

Ashe watched the girl all afternoon, she in turn studied the house. Building up nerve and waiting for an oppor tunity, Ashe suspected. After a while he ordered some food, to stop the waiter from hovering as much as to fill his belly. It was clear that he was expected to pay his way for the long-term hire of the table.

  As the sun fell lower in the sky afternoon became evening, Garcia appeared at his front gate, his young woman hanging on his arm. The girl had been circling the building once more and almost came face to face with them. Ashe drew in a breath, sharing her panic, then smiled as she dropped down by the side of the road and held out her hands as if to beg. This kid's good, he thought. With that thought came another, a sudden surge of concern for her followed by a determination that he would do his damnedest to ensure she came out of this unscathed.
Don't make promises you can't keep, old man
, said the voice in his head,
you know as well as any that the path to the future is littered with young bodies just like hers.

  The girl watched Garcia and the woman leave then came to a decision and ran around the back of the house. Here we go, Ashe thought, we're on!

 

 

He got up from his table, noting a sense of relief amongst the staff that he was finally vacating the place. Putting his hand in his coat pocket to grasp his gun – like it or not you may have need of it – he moved around the back of the house just in time to see the girl vanish over the wall into Garcia's garden. He had no intention of climbing after her, but found that if he lodged his foot on the thick base of the bougainvillea she had climbed he was tall enough to peer over the wall. He watched as she skirted a Koi pond and the swimming pool, wandering around the garden as if she were no more illicit than someone invited for a social function. He admired her guts but wished she'd move a little faster. A man like Garcia would probably have house staff and the kid wouldn't get far without being a little more careful. Almost as if she heard him, she darted behind one of the pillars of a large roofed terrace, glancing up at the windows for any sign of being watched. That's more like it, he thought, you'll get away with this yet.

  Moving slower now, she aimed for the double doors that led into the house from the terrace, opened one and slipped through. With that she was gone taking Ashe's best wishes with her.

  He jumped down from the wall. Will she find it? he wondered and briefly considered following after her. But there was nothing to be gained from that. If she saw him then she'd run, panicked. If she found it then great, he would take the box from her – offer her money, whatever he could – and he wouldn't have to break into Garcia's place himself. If she didn't find it… well, he would have lost nothing.

  He moved back towards the front of the house and drew to a halt. Jimenez and another man were opening the front gate – and you could be sure they hadn't used Garcia's key, however quickly and confidently they pushed it open – and stepping inside. The kid's timing was about to drop her in exactly the sort of trouble he had hoped she could avoid.

  The two Spaniards vanished from sight and Ashe hurried after them, his hand once more reaching for that revolver in his pocket. What was he planning to do, shoot them? Maybe, he decided, if it came down to them or her then he would do it for sure. He looked through the gate, there was no sign of anyone. The sound of breaking glass came from inside and that was more than enough to send him through the gate and jogging around the house. The double doors the girl had used were open. She's not Sophie, he reminded himself, that kid is not Sophie. However much he told himself that, he remembered the panic in his chest as he had run across the concourse of the ersatz St. Pancras station inside the House. That feeling of time slowing down but also somehow slipping away. The sight of Whitstable – that crazy bastard – a piece of broken glass in his hand aimed for Sophie's throat.

  He ran through the open door and wondered which way to turn. He was in an open foyer, stairs leading up to his left, rooms off to his right. A gunshot rang out from upstairs and he charged up them even as another sound, a loud splashing from the pool outside, gave him pause. He turned to look and saw that crazy – that
wonderful
– girl pulling herself out of the pool and running past the double doors. The box was in her hand.

  He spun on the stairs – just as Jimenez ran out of the office above – and ran back outside. The double doors smacked back against the wall as he charged through, a tinkle of glass falling to the concrete behind him. He turned the corner of the house, the image of Whitstable's gleeful face fresh in his mind. The girl was running towards the front gate. Jimenez's accomplice appeared at the front door and began charging towards her, hoping to cut her off. Jimenez cleared the corner of the house behind him, a gun in his hand. Ashe spun around and pulled out his own revolver, happy to shoot both of the bastards right then and there. The conviction must have showed in his face. Certainly Jimenez recognised the man he had sold the shells to only twenty four hours before. He didn't want to sample his own stock, not for any money.

  "Don't!" the Spaniard shouted, his accomplice turning in confusion and – seeing Ashe and the .45 he held that glinted in that evening sun like the prettiest thing in the world. Jimenez dropped his own gun, raising his hands in surrender. He was a crook not a gunfighter. There was a look in this old man's eyes – had been the day before too – that told you all you needed to know: shoot first or give up, this guy would kill you without so much as drawing breath.

  Ashe nearly proved him right. He felt his finger twitch on the trigger, it would be so easy just to squeeze, drop these two to the ground, no great loss. But Ashe did not want to be that man. He twisted the gun in his hand and lashed out with it, clubbing Jimenez to the head. Might still have killed him, he thought, cracked his skull open. Maybe… but maybe not. The accomplice hadn't enough love for his employer to get shot over him and ran out of the front gate as fast as he could. The man would still be running hours later, Ashe thought, I scared him good.

  Ashe had running of his own to do. The girl would be heading for the port, wanting to sell the box to Chester. Now maybe Chester would just pay up but then maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he'd look at the kid that held his treasure and decide that it was easier just to take the damn thing, to slap it out of her hand and drop her overboard. Or give her to Henryk…

  So Ashe ran out of the house and into the square. The girl –
not
Sophie, remember? – was still visible but he knew he would never catch her, not on foot at least. He glanced around the square and his eyes fell on something that might just make the difference: an old black bicycle leaning against the back of a bench. Its owner must have been one of the old men that were gathering here at the end of the day to smoke their cigars and chat. He ran towards it, remembering to drop his gun back in his pocket before he scared anyone else with it.

  "Whose bike?" he yelled as he approached them, rooting in his wallet for money. He held up a few notes and asked again. One old guy, a flat cap sent jaunty over his wrinkled walnut of a head stuck his hand up fast. Ashe shoved the money in his hand and grabbed the bike. "I'll try and bring it back," he promised, pedalling after the girl.

  She was running down the narrow side streets, their heavy cobbles sure to smash the wheels out from under him if he tried to ride on them at speed. He spun the bike to the left, aiming for the main road. He had walked this route often enough now, if he put some decent speed on he could overtake her on the main strip and then cut back into the narrow streets halfway to the port. He would stop her before she got there. He
would
.

  The bike shook underneath him, his coat skidding on the back wheel, threatening to catch on the mudguard and yank him off if he didn't bunch it up onto his lap. He was far from stable, it being years since he had ridden a bike. They say you never forget and, yes, he had yet to fall off but it felt a close run thing, his stomach lurching as he wobbled from side to side, often only just regaining his balance before toppling sideways.

  He reached a junction of streets, aimed right and pedalled hard towards where the narrow street the kid had been running down would bisect the main road. When he reached the intersection he looked left, no sign of her. I must have beat her to it, he thought,
must
have. There was no way she could have run that fast. He got off the bike and ran to the right, up the cobbled street. Another right, he remembered, then a short left – not far from Jimenez's house – I should see her any minute. He made the right and bumped into her, sending her sprawling to the floor.

  "No," he gasped, seeing the panic in her eyes. His breath was so short, his legs wavering beneath him, he could barely stand let alone speak. "No," he insisted, pointing to the box, "not you, you're the wrong one." She looked baffled and he realised he'd been speaking English. Not that she would have understood what he meant anyway. He wracked his brain for the words, he was so tired… "Give me the box," he said, holding out his hand. She shook her head and ran past him.

  He turned after her and saw Chester and Henryk, running along the intersecting road behind the girl. Chester had a gun in his hand, he raised it…

 
 

 

Chester clambered onto his boat, utterly unaware that – several yards behind him – both a young Spanish girl and his future self were following his trail. He nodded at Henryk. "All was fine, you see?" he said, sounding again like a petulant child.

  He climbed down into his cabin, peeled off his jacket and shirt and sat on the bed to rub away his sweat with a towel. His head was buzzing with noise and confusion and he would do anything to make it shut up. It sometimes seemed he hadn't had a moment's peace since he had first set eyes on that box of his father's. Such a little thing, and yet so all-consuming.

  He remembered the first time he had touched it. The wood had bristled beneath his fingertips like the spines of a stinging nettle. He had been bitten by the thing and whatever mental virus it seemed to possess had transferred to him as surely as a poisonous snake bite.

  He got up, closed and locked his door and stripped off the rest of his clothes. They gripped him in the heat of Valencia and he just wanted them to let him go. He wanted everything to let him go. The heat, the noises in his head, that box…

  But that wasn't altogether true was it Chester? No, it wasn't. Chester was consumed by a need to be strong and powerful. To step beyond the shadow of parents that had loomed ever since the cradle. Chester wanted out, yes, but he wanted out in a way that nobody would ever be able to drag him back in and that required power. To his father power translated as money. But money wasn't the only power in the world. Certainly money wasn't the key to beating his father. Even at his age he knew that the old man would be years in the grave before he could ever hope to equal his earnings. Hell, he would never equal them, Chester just wasn't built that way. His father knew this and it was a constant insult to him, he had sired a boy that was somehow missing a vital ingredient, that steel that would see him rise in business and take over the old man's throne. Sometimes, Chester knew, his father would look at his son and wonder to himself how he could ever have made such a wet and imperfect child. How so much of his own strength could have ended up on the bed sheets. At those moments – and God help him they had become frequent – Chester could never decided whether he wanted to kill his father or prove him wrong. Maybe they were one and the same thing.

  Still he had agreed to follow in his father's footsteps, learn the trade and walk the walk. But it was always a shallow impression, a man copying the moves but not understanding them. At sixteen – Terrance Arthur had no time for schools, "you learn in life boy, not in a classroom," – it had always been understood that he would join the company officially, take a seat on the board and learn how things were done. It had been a punishment not a celebration. He sat there, eyes vacant, not understanding a thing his father or the other old men talked about. He had tried to imagine the day when he would look on this world as one to which he belonged. He could never imagine such a thing.

  Then he had touched the box.

  Chester had always been a rational man. There was nothing in his life that encouraged belief in a higher power. But when he had touched that box, felt it sink its teeth into him, felt it talk in his head when he was trying to go to sleep, well… then Chester began to wonder if there was something greater out there after all, something that might see its way to sharing a slice of wonder with him.