Safe House (10 page)

That was when he’d lost his sunglasses. When he must have dropped his phone.

He’d waited for the man to approach. To finish him off. He’d waited with his finger curled tightly around the trigger of his pistol. Hands shaking. Wondering if he had the nerve to shoot. If his aim would be any good.

His thigh had pulsed and the pain had bloomed and that was when he’d glanced down and seen the blood for the first time. It had soaked through his jeans, dyed the denim an oily red. So much blood. Too much. Lukas had panicked. Crawled on his side away from his position. Kept crawling, even when the man didn’t come. Crawled for close to an hour, maybe, until he found a place to hide. A hollow under a fallen tree deep inside the woods, where he’d removed his turtleneck sweater and used his T-shirt like a tourniquet, tightening it around his wound until he almost passed out. Darkness had come and he’d slept in fits, racked with pain and trembling with fear.

Early the next morning, he’d limped back to the cottage using a fallen branch as a crutch, his jeans stiff with dried blood. The place seemed abandoned and their rental car was nowhere to be seen. He’d entered the cottage slowly, pistol drawn, wondering if the men had left someone there for him. Wondering if Pieter was dead. But the place was empty. All their equipment gone. Every trace of them erased.

He hadn’t known what to do. Whether to stay, or to try and get away. To get to a hospital, maybe. But if he sought help, they’d find him. They’d take him, too. And if he sheltered in the cottage, they might come back for him. He’d searched for his phone. Had no luck. And in his heart he knew he lacked the nerve to call Anderson anyway.

He’d stumbled along the path down through the woods. Asking himself what he should do. Where he could go. And that was when he’d seen the van. It was unlocked. The keys in the ignition.

He slid open the side cargo door and inside he’d found enough to sustain him. Water and sandwiches in a plastic cooler. A towel and a first-aid kit that he’d used to clean the wound to his leg. Pills for the pain. The damage wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. The bullet had ripped clean a chunk of flesh, but it hadn’t struck bone and Lukas couldn’t feel anything lodged inside.

He’d secured a dressing pad with a tightly wound strip of electrician’s tape, then found a change of clothes. A blue sweater and work jeans. Lukas remembered the man wearing them when he’d first approached the cottage. He must have shed them before dressing for his bike ride with Lena.

Lukas didn’t understand why the van had been left behind. That was the part of the clean-up that bothered him.
Somebody
would have to come back for it. But maybe not too soon.

He knew that he should get to a phone and contact Anderson. But he also knew it would be bad for him when he did. He’d failed to protect Lena. But Pieter had failed, too. And Pieter was the professional.

What would Pieter do now, he’d wondered?

An idea formed in his mind. The men who’d come for Lena would want to remove her from the island. That much was clear. And there were only two options. Air or sea. Air was possible, he supposed. It was how he and Pieter had arrived. Lena, too. But Lena had had false papers. And she wouldn’t co-operate with the men. Not willingly. So that meant a private plane. And a plane would leave a trail. Computer records, flight plans, everything.

That left the sea. Lukas knew there was a ferry service from Douglas. He’d seen where the ferry docked on the few occasions he’d been allowed to drive to the supermarket for supplies.

He’d clambered out of the rear of the van and circled around to take a look at the driver’s seat. He was lucky. Luckier than he had any right to be. The van was an automatic and he was able to heave himself up and wedge his injured leg inside so that he could drive without too much discomfort.

The journey wasn’t long. It passed in a blur. He parked the van outside the ferry terminal. The building was very dated. Grey, pitted concrete. Small glass windows. There was some kind of circular office space on top, shaped like a crown with a flagpole in the middle.

There was a waiting room inside. Thin carpets, back-to-back seating, a coffee shop in one corner. A colour monitor above a ticket counter listed the day’s sailings to Liverpool and Heysham.

Lukas took a seat close to the public toilets. It was quiet when he arrived but the space soon filled up. Family groups and school parties and pensioners, hauling wheeled suitcases and holdalls behind them towards the check-in desk. That was when he realised his mistake. The men who’d taken Lena wouldn’t come in here. Too public. They needed to be able to hide Lena. She’d be in the trunk of a car or the back of a van or concealed in some other way.

He limped outside and paced between the vehicles that had been parked in lines, waiting to be loaded on to the ferry. He realised then that it was hopeless. In his panic to flee the cottage, he hadn’t got a good look at the men who’d come for them. He had no way of recognising them and no way of knowing which vehicle Lena might be in.

He circled anyway, staring in through people’s windscreens, searching for a reaction. The worried looks he received unnerved him. He was drawing too much attention. Hobbling awkwardly between the rows of cars, the heavy pistol bulging in his pocket.

Should he make the phone call? He’d seen a public payphone inside the building.

Maybe not yet. He remembered what he’d told himself up at the plantation. Someone would have to return for the van. Someone would come for it.

So he would buy some food and drink from the coffee shop, drive back to the plantation and wait. Another day, at least.

He did exactly that, driving quickly for fear that he would change his mind. He retraced his route to the cottage, beached the van where he’d found it, opened the rear cargo doors and tidied away his clothes and the bloodied towel he’d used to tend to his injured leg.

Then he waited with his supplies, hidden in the woods. First, he saw the police come. Saw them poke around in the van. Saw them drive up the track to the cottage and summon some kind of lock service. Saw all of them leave.

Darkness fell. He fed himself and sheltered alongside the van through the night. Stumbled up the track with a bottle of water and hunted through the woods by the cottage for his phone during the day.

And now the man was back, accompanied by a woman. She was wearing gloves and plastic covers over her feet. A professional. Lukas guessed they were finishing the clean-up now that the police were gone.

Lukas had watched the woman enter the cottage. He’d watched the man follow his dog into the woods and come back again. That was when the dog began to make sense. It must have been trained. It had found Lukas’s phone. His sunglasses.

But it hadn’t found Lukas.

And it hadn’t found his gun.

Chapter Fourteen

Rebecca looked at me. I looked at Rebecca. The phone kept buzzing.

‘What do we do?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Do we answer it?’

‘I think so.’

‘You
think
so.’

‘What have we got to lose?’

Rocky looked like he wanted to intervene. He leapt up and rested his forepaws on the edge of the kitchen table, watching the phone buzz and jitter against the tabletop.

‘Who does the talking?’

‘You do,’ Rebecca said. ‘But I’ll put it on speaker so we can both hear.’

‘What do I say?’

‘The truth. If you want to find Lena, this could be our best chance.’

She steadied the phone with one hand and pressed a button with the other. The buzzing stopped. She pressed another button and I could hear dead air and a crackle through the speaker.

I waited for our caller to talk. Seemed they were waiting for the same thing from me. I cleared my throat.

‘Hello?’

Silence. A heavy one.

‘Hello?’ I tried again.

‘Who is this?’

The man’s voice was cultured, marked by the same European accent I’d heard from Mr Shades and Lena. It was obvious that English wasn’t his first language. But he spoke it very well.

‘My name’s Rob. And you are?’

‘Why are you using this phone?’

For some reason, I found myself answering his question, even though he’d chosen to ignore mine. ‘I found it.’

‘Found it where?’

‘The woods. Near a cottage in Arrasey plantation.’ I thought of his accent. ‘In the Isle of Man,’ I added.

There was a pause as the caller absorbed the information.

‘And where are you now?’

‘Same place. Inside the cottage.’

‘And why are you there?’

I took a breath. Tried to think where to begin. Beside me, Rebecca was carefully reaching inside her backpack. She removed a notepad and pen. Pulled the lid off the pen soundlessly with her teeth.

‘I’m looking for someone.’

Another pause. The man was being cautious.

I locked eyes with Rebecca. She circled her pen in the air, motioning for me to continue.

‘Her name’s Lena. She’s missing.’

The silence lingered. It was getting to me. I filled it again.

‘I took her for a ride on my motorbike two days ago. We crashed. I haven’t seen her since. I don’t know what’s happened to her.’

Finally, he spoke. His voice was pinched. An octave higher.

‘Who do you work for?’

‘What?’

‘Your employer. Tell me.’

Rebecca made a note on her pad. She wrote down the words:
Who do you work for?

‘I don’t work for anyone. I’m a heating engineer. I came out here because the boiler was broken. That was three days ago. There were two men here with Lena. She said they were friends but I had my doubts about it. She asked me to take her out on my motorbike the following morning. I agreed. After that, I don’t remember exactly what happened. I had a concussion. But now this cottage is empty. There’s nobody here.’ I looked around me, as if to confirm that was still the case. ‘This phone belonged to one of the men. I saw him with it. And now you’ve dialled it. I can see that someone, probably you, has dialled it sixty-four times before this. So perhaps you can tell me where Lena is?’ The static buzz seemed to charge the air in the room. ‘Or perhaps I should call the police? Give them this phone, too?’

‘Will you tell me something, Rob?’ He said my name as if it sounded exotic to him. ‘Why are you looking for Lena?’

And the funny thing was, when he asked me that, I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know why exactly this was important to me. I could have told him that I was worried for Lena’s welfare, which was true. I could have said that I wanted to prove to myself that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing, which was also the case, though my need to do that had become less pressing since I’d found the phone and the sunglasses, and since Rebecca had discovered the surveillance equipment. I could even have said that it had something to do with the way I’d been feeling since I’d lost my sister – the aimless, rootless sensation of a grief without explanation or resolution. The endless wondering if there was something more I could have done for Laura. If I might have saved her, even.

But instead all I said was, ‘Because somebody should be.’

And to my surprise, it seemed to be enough. I heard him exhale heavily into the phone, like a man who’d just set down a heavy object he’d been carrying for longer than he could truly bear.

‘Are you alone, Rob?’

I glanced at Rebecca. She nodded cautiously.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Then please listen very carefully to what I am about to tell you. Lena’s life may depend on it.’

Chapter Fifteen

‘There are some things you must know about me,’ said the voice on the end of the phone. ‘The first is that my name is Erik Zeeger and I am Lena’s father. The second is that I am a rich man. A very rich man. This is my privilege. It is also my curse.’

Rebecca scrawled the name
Erik Zeeger
on her pad. She added the word
Rich
and underlined it twice.

‘Perhaps you understand. There are people who wish to hurt me. People who would prefer to take what I have rather than build something of their own. Can you understand this, Rob?’

I thought Rocky was capable of understanding it. ‘I suppose I can,’ I told him.

‘But money. Wealth. It is only so much, yes? There is more to life than this. For me, I think so. I have hobbies. Passions. But more than any of this, I have my Lena. My child.’

I stared at the phone, waiting for him to go on. I was building an image of him now. I was picturing him in a well-appointed study in a remote wing of a large house, overlooking a manicured lawn. In my mind’s eye, he was wearing a business suit. Red braces. His slicked grey hair was parted neatly along the middle of his scalp.

‘These people, these evil, twisted people, will do anything to harm me. To . . . unsettle me.’

‘Are you saying they’d hurt Lena to get to you?’

‘Exactly this.’

I glanced at Rebecca. ‘And these people. Could they be the men I saw with her here?’

‘Describe them to me.’

I did. I ran through everything I could remember about Mr Shades and his musclebound companion. I mentioned the laptop and the book on body art. I also told Erik that their accents sounded similar to his own.

‘These men you describe – they work for me. Lukas and Pieter. They are loyal men. Men I trust. But they have not called me for two days now. And if what you tell me is true – that you are alone and you have found Lukas’s phone – then I think this can only mean one thing.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘They are dead, Rob. The people who took Lena. They killed them.’

I felt the room contract around me. I wasn’t sure if he was being melodramatic or if he was a raving fantasist or if my bruised mind was playing tricks on me.

‘Dead?’ I asked, mainly because I couldn’t think of what else to say. ‘You really think someone would murder them?’

‘Of course. It is simple.’

I raised my good hand to my forehead. Looked down at the surveillance equipment on the table. Then at the woman in latex gloves and forensic overshoes standing alongside me. Perhaps the idea of two men being killed wasn’t so hard to believe, after all.