Safe House (34 page)

He released the Beretta the moment our eyes locked. It clattered against the linoleum with just the barest
tap-tap
because of the thick swirl of noise jamming my hearing. He stumbled backwards. Lifted his hands in the air. Then his wide eyes flicked down to where Anderson lay prone on the floor and the colour left his face so completely that he looked like a figure in a waxwork museum.

Rebecca was up and moving through the haze of dry particles suspended in the air. She vaulted Anderson and lunged towards the kitchen floor and scooped up the gun with her hands all in one fluid movement. She crowded Lukas, holding the pistol in a two-handed grip, her arms sloping down from her shoulders.

‘ON YOUR KNEES, ON YOUR KNEES, ON YOUR KNEES,’ she screamed. ‘DOWN, DOWN, DOWN. NOW. MOVE. ON YOUR KNEES.’

Lukas slumped down hard on one knee, with his bad leg stretched out in front of him, and placed his hands on the back of his neck. He lowered his face to the floor, like a penitent, and Rebecca held the muzzle of the pistol just an inch from his scalp.

I was on my feet, too. Moving through the falling debris towards Anderson. Human nature, I suppose. He was someone in trouble. I thought I might be able to help.

I was wrong.

Plaster and dust coated his hair but I could immediately tell that the back of his skull was mush. Blood was draining freely from the wound. And when I placed two fingers against the side of his neck, his pulse was a barely-there flutter. The tempo was irregular and feeble.

Then it stopped altogether.

Chapter Forty-nine

‘Do you have any tape? Rob? Any tape or ropes in your van?’

I gazed up from Anderson’s body. Rebecca was motioning towards Lukas with the gun.

‘Gaffer tape,’ she said. ‘Anything like that. In your van.’

I nodded dumbly.

‘Good.’ She nudged Lukas with the toe of her shoe. ‘Where are the keys?’

‘He has them,’ Lukas muttered.

The ‘he’ was Anderson. Lukas was keeping his head down, his hair shielding his face, his eyes fixed on a mid-point on the linoleum floor. I was pretty sure he’d already seen the state of his partner’s head. I was pretty sure he didn’t want to look at it again.

‘Can you check him, Rob?’

I didn’t want to, but I could, and I was going to have to do it. I remembered how Anderson had held the bat. He was right-handed. I worked my hand down his right side and into his trouser pockets. Found his wallet. Some loose change. No keys.

I moved around his other side. Moving wasn’t hurting me so much just now. I guessed adrenalin must have flooded my system. It was functioning like a cortisone jab right inside the muscle and tissue surrounding my shoulder blade.

My van keys were inside Anderson’s left-hand trouser pocket. I clasped them tight and shuffled past Rebecca and Lukas and along the hall like an injured man hurrying from a fire. The air outside felt sweet and good. I drank it in, brushing the plaster dust out of my hair and off my clothes, scrubbing my palm over my face. Then I unlocked my van and circled around to the sliding door, hauled it back and scrambled inside to where I keep my plumbing tape. I have all kinds. Teflon tape for sealing a leaky tap. Masking tape in case I need to drill holes. Electrical tape for wiring in boilers and thermostats. And several large rolls of gaffer tape for emergencies.

I grabbed the thickest roll and the craft knife Rebecca had dropped. The tape was grey, webbed with cotton fibres that gave it a very high tensile strength. Excellent for a quick fix when a pipe has burst. Even better for restraining a man.

I returned to the kitchen and exchanged the tape and the knife for the Beretta. The pain in my shoulder and chest might have begun to subside, but binding Lukas was a two-handed job and I wasn’t qualified for it. I held the gun on him while Rebecca yanked his arms behind his back and wrapped the tape around his wrists.

I felt strangely relieved that Lukas had fired the pistol. Anderson’s death didn’t sit easily with my conscience, let alone the law, but the gunfire would help us to argue that we’d been acting in self-defence. I believed that to be the case. We’d both been scared, and for good reason, but there was a part of me that wondered if Rebecca had needed to go as far as she had. She’d been right in what she’d said. If our roles had been reversed, I would have looked to overpower Anderson but I wouldn’t have wanted to be responsible for inflicting a serious injury, let alone a terminal one. But Rebecca hadn’t shared my concerns. She’d hit him with everything she had, and everything she had was easily enough to kill a man.

Rebecca finished with Lukas’s wrists. She’d looped the tape around tight enough to whiten and swell the surrounding skin. Before long, it would start to throb. In a couple of hours, it could be a problem. I wondered how much of her reaction was revenge for what Anderson and Lukas had done to her face. Quite a lot, I guessed.

She moved on to Lukas’s ankles. She had him sit down on his backside and straighten both legs and then she peeled a new length of tape and got to work.

I was still pointing the gun at Lukas but my attention had been drawn to the kitchen table. My laptop was there, the one that had been taken from my home. The gaudy purple memory stick was poking out the side of it.

‘You stole my laptop?’ I asked him.

He nodded, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

‘Why?’

‘Because of your sister,’ he said.

‘Did she help you to hide Lena?’

Lukas nodded. ‘She came to Mr Zeeger. She wished to protect Lena. But we knew her by a different name.’

‘Melanie Fleming.’

He seemed surprised by how much I knew. ‘She would visit us here. Check on us. Bring us things.’

‘For how long?’

He shrugged, the movement restricted because of the way Rebecca had bound his arms. ‘A month, maybe. Every few days she would come. Then she stopped. We could not find her. We did not know why.’

I was a little surprised by what Lukas had said. It meant Laura had been on the island far longer than we’d realised. She’d stayed with us at the care home for two days before her death at Marine Drive. Mum had mentioned how exhausted she’d been. Perhaps now I knew why. She’d been running errands to the cottage. Maybe dividing her time between London and the plantation. All for Lena’s benefit.

Lukas glanced down at his lap. ‘I am sorry that she is dead.’

I didn’t say anything to that. I didn’t tell him that Rebecca had her doubts. That those doubts had been planted in my brain. That they’d begun to take root and to grow. That I wondered if there was a chance that the data on the memory stick would tell us where we might find my sister. That I hoped I might see her again.

‘Should I tape his mouth?’ Rebecca asked.

‘What are we going to do with him?’

‘I think we should take him with us.’

‘Then tape it. We don’t want him shouting from the back of the van.’

Rebecca used the knife to slice off a swatch of tape. Before applying it, she asked Lukas one final question.

‘Where’s Erik?’

He hesitated.

Rebecca pinched his chin between her finger and thumb and moved his head until he was forced to look at Anderson’s prone body.

‘Where’s Erik?’ she asked again.

‘A hotel,’ he stammered. ‘In Douglas. A big one. Next to a theatre.’

‘The Sefton?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I think so.’

‘Good,’ Rebecca said, and then she reached up and smoothed the strip of tape carefully over his lips, pressing it down hard as he moaned in complaint. His nostrils remained clear and he’d need to keep them that way. Rebecca had done a comprehensive job of restraining him. ‘Get up.’

Lukas grunted and struggled for a moment before Rebecca heaved him to his feet. She motioned me across and I handed her the gun. Then she poked the muzzle into Lukas’s side and he hopped along the corridor between us.

Once we were outside, I had him clamber inside my van on his elbows and knees and then I closed the door behind him. When I turned around, Rebecca’s hands were behind her back, hitching up her jacket and slipping the Beretta into the waistband of her jeans. She tilted her face to the daylight, as if it might help her bruising to heal. She was rotating her jaw and I thought I knew why. I had the same problem. Grit between my teeth and gums from all the dust and debris.

‘What now?’ I asked.

‘Now we go back inside for your laptop. Tidy up.’

Tidying didn’t take long. I watched as Rebecca stepped over Anderson’s body and grabbed him by the ankles. She ducked down and dragged him a few feet, trailing a wavering slick of blood on the floor. I thought at first she was intending to hide the body, but then I realised she was moving it just enough to be able to close the kitchen door. She dropped his legs and gathered the wrench from the floor. Then she locked the door behind us before handing the wrench to me and telling me to go and lose it somewhere in the woods.

I was as quick as I could be. The wrench wasn’t something I wanted to hold on to. The curved end was coated in blood and fluids, congealed strands of hair and fragments of skin. I held it down and away from my body, so that the blood couldn’t drip on to my hand. The thing felt heavier than it had any right to.

I tramped unsteadily into the woods, the uneven ground jolting my back and shoulder, making me wince and grimace, until I could no longer see the cottage behind me. I thought about just abandoning the wrench where I stood, then I changed my mind and scanned the area around my feet. Leaves and branches and ferns and pine needles. But there was also a hollow beneath the exposed roots of a nearby tree. A warren of some kind. It was deep enough and dark enough to swallow the wrench, and I dropped it and used my foot to nudge it in as far as I could, leaving it there.

I was still wiping my palm clean against my hoodie when I got back to the cottage. The front door was closed and Rebecca was sitting in the driver’s seat of my van. She had my laptop with her, propped against the steering wheel. I opened the passenger door and struggled up into the cab and studied the screen.

There was a dialogue box right in the middle. A cursor was flashing inside the box. Beside it were the words:
Enter password
.

‘So,’ Rebecca said, ‘what’s the code?’

I opened the glove box beside my knees and pulled out my mobile. I flipped up the screen and found that I had six missed calls, all from Dad. I ignored them and punched a few buttons. Then I raised the phone to my ear and listened to it ring.

Chapter Fifty

My parents’ care home is wired up with six telephone lines with separate numbers, and Grandpa has one of them. He keeps his phone on the windowsill in his room, beside his armchair. It’s a luxury that none of the other residents are permitted, and truth be told, it’s an unnecessary one. I could count the outgoing calls Grandpa makes in the average month on the fingers of one hand, and I suspect his incoming calls are even fewer. But it’s a privilege he likes to crow about, and so whenever he
does
receive a call, he makes something of a ceremony out of answering.

For starters, he never answers right away. If he did, none of the neighbouring residents would know about the phone in his room. Then, when he does answer, he likes to recite his telephone number in a strangely formal way, like an old-fashioned radio presenter.

I was treated to the same routine today. First, the delay while his phone rang on and on, then the carefully remembered and even more carefully pronounced sequence of numbers.

‘Grandpa, it’s Rob,’ I said, when he was finally finished.

‘Who?’

‘Rob. Your grandson.’

‘Oh. Hello my boy. Are you looking for Rocky? I could hear him barking for company, so I went and fetched him.’

I seriously doubted that. Rocky doesn’t tend to bark at home, least of all when he’s bored. He simply sleeps. And the only way Grandpa would have heard him was if he’d left his room and crossed the garden to my front door. It was much more likely that Grandpa had been the one wanting company. And that he’d let himself into my place to get it.

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘That’s not why I’m calling.’

‘Are you with that pretty detective?’

‘Yes, Grandpa. Rebecca’s here. That’s why I’m on the phone. I need you to check something for me.’

‘Go ahead, my boy.’

‘Your crossword-puzzle book. Can you fetch it for me?’

Silence.

‘Can you just take a look, Grandpa?’

He knew the book I meant. He’d been working on it since the beginning of the year, one puzzle a day. It was an annual compendium of 365 puzzles published in large print, on cheap paper. It had become a family tradition for me and Laura to buy him a new edition as a joint present every Christmas. We’d done it since we were kids.

‘Have you got it?’ I asked.

I heard the clatter of the telephone receiver being placed on the windowsill. Then some mumbling and grunting. When he eventually came back on the line, he was wheezing.

‘Got it,’ he said.

‘Great. Can you turn to the puzzle on the back page?’

I heard the flutter of pages. Then a pause.

‘Have you been filling in my puzzles again?’

I closed my eyes. ‘Is there writing there?’

‘It’s all filled in already. Did you do this? I asked you not to do this any more.’

‘It wasn’t me, Grandpa. I think you’re looking at Laura’s handwriting.’

There was an audible intake of breath on the end of the line. A long silence. I could picture Grandpa tracing his fingers over the letters in the little puzzle squares, peering down at them through his magnifying glass. I didn’t want to imagine what his face looked like as he did it. He’d seen Laura’s handwriting on birthday cards and Christmas cards enough times to recognise it. This time would be different. This time would sting.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

More silence. I’d spoken about Laura’s death with Grandpa more than with my parents. But Grandpa hadn’t said a lot back. He’d listened and he’d nodded. He’d smiled and he’d cried. But it had been too much for him to share his own memories. And now I didn’t doubt that some of the most powerful were flooding right back. Perhaps he was seeing Laura and me, lying on the floor of his room, crayons and pencils in our hands, giggling as we defaced his puzzle books. I was seeing those memories myself. Laura had known that I would. That was why she’d left the code for me.