The British Lion (4 page)

“You okay?” King asked.

Cook nodded, his face pale. He looked at Lotte, who took a half step back, the fight gone along with the pistol.

Anja started to cry. She tried to move toward her mother, who stared watery eyed at King and then at her daughter.

“Don’t do anything stupid and your daughter can come to you, understand?” King said in his leaden German.

Lotte nodded, and King allowed Anja to go to her. She held her mother close, her head buried in the fur coat Lotte had worn against the cold weather that morning.

It took everyone except Lotte by surprise when she slowly sank to the floor, Anja desperately trying to hold her up.

“Mama?” said Anja, confused.

Lotte’s head lolled and Cook dropped to his knees next to her, quickly pulling open her coat. Just below Lotte’s groin, blood was leaching out, staining her white dress.

Anja moaned at the sight of the blood and Lotte looked down, an almost curious expression on her face.

“Oh, no,” Cook said in English as he looked up at King and then quickly lifted the dress to find the wound. “She’s bleeding to death. Fuck, oh fuck, give me a tie.” Cook looked up at the tailor, who meekly stared back.

“Give him a tie!” King shouted at the little man, who suddenly burst to life. He almost ran around the glass display counter and dropped the flap at the back. King watched him grab a handful of brightly colored ties and hankies and toss them over the counter to Cook. The tailor rubbed a dainty pink palm across his forehead and then looked at King.

King stared back, then gave a tiny nod of his head.

The tailor nodded back and swallowed.

King checked on Cook and saw his hand was thick with treacly blood.

“Can you see it?” he leaned forward to get a closer look.

“What?”

“The wound, can you see it?”

Cook didn’t reply.

“I’ll call an ambulance.” The tailor lifted the phone, but King spun around and slammed his hand across the cradle.

“Wait.” King raised a finger and stared deeply into the tailor’s eyes. “Wait,” he repeated quietly.

The tailor took a step back and shot a look at Lotte and Cook. King read the look and sighed inwardly. Things were going from bad to worse.

“How is she?” he asked quietly.

“It’s bad, Frank.” Cook looked up and King thought he saw tears in the younger man’s eyes.

King leaned forward again and looked into Lotte’s face. She looked confused, bewildered by the blood that was sneaking out of her. This really wasn’t what King had planned. He ran his hand through his hair and looked back toward the door before bending down and picking up the gun. He studied the Walther and then lowered it to his side.

“Well?” he asked Cook while looking at the tailor, who stared back silently.

“I’ve found where it went in, but it’s bleeding like a bitch.” Cook looked up and shook his head at King, who sighed and looked away, pondering his options.

“Can you stop it?”

Cook shrugged.

King tapped the Walther against his leg, then looked over his shoulder at the door again.

He squeezed his lips together as he looked down at Cook, the pistol still knocking against his leg as if it were eager to get away from the scene of the crime.

King knew how it felt.

“I’m sorry,” Cook said.

“So am I,” King replied as he looked at the tailor, who slowly started to raise his hands and then gave a slight shake of his head.

“I’ll not say anything. I’m all for the resistance, I swear I’ll not say a word.”

“We’re not the resistance,” King said, just before he shot the tailor dead.

The little man dropped like sand.

King looked down at Cook, Anja, and Lotte, who all stared back, openmouthed.

“Go get the car. Park it on the curb by the door,” King said quietly to Cook.

Cook looked at Anja and then at his bloodstained hand, still gripping the silk necktie tourniquet on Lotte’s leg.

“Go get the car,” King repeated, very quietly.

Cook nodded, looked at Anja again, and then stood up, wiping his hands on his coat.

He stepped over Lotte and hurried past King to get to the car. The bell above the shop door rang brightly after a second or two, causing Anja to lift her head and look at King.

He saw her cheeks were wet, and he licked his lips and felt a thud in his chest.

“Why?” Anja said softly in English, her hand now holding the tie tightly around her mother’s leg.

King could feel his own pulse pounding in his neck, and he looked at the dead tailor on the floor. He opened his mouth, but the first word caught in his throat and he had to cough it free.

“This will be okay. You just need to do as you are told. Believe me, you’ll both be okay.”

“Just go. We don’t know who you are.” Lotte surprised King by speaking, and he had to move slightly so that he could look into her face.

She blinked back at him, paler than before but strangely beautiful with her blond hair spread across her shoulders where it had fallen during the struggle.

“You will be fine. I’ll see to it. We have doctors. Trust me.”

“Let my daughter go.”

King looked toward the front of the shop, suddenly afraid that Eric was going to run away.

“She is only a child. Please, let her go.”

King raised a hand, motioning that she should be quiet.

“I promise I’ll give you no trouble if you let her go,” Lotte tried again.

“That isn’t going to happen. I’m sorry.”

The bell sounded above the door.

Cook jogged back toward them, stopping just short of King.

“Get the woman and put her in the car,” King said in English, now that there was no point in pretending to be German.

Cook nodded, then nervously approached Anja and Lotte.

Anja tensed, half turning to Cook as she hunched across her mother, causing Cook to look at King, unsure of what to do next.

King lowered the pistol. “Help him to put your mother in the car, and then we’ll get her some help.”

Anja looked unsure as Cook nodded, holding out his hands, palms out. He gestured that they should lift Lotte together. Anja nodded and Cook approached cautiously before crouching down. He tugged on the tourniquet once more and then grabbed an arm; with Anja’s help, he lifted Lotte from the floor.

King stepped back as Anja and Cook supported Lotte between them. They headed for the front door. He looked briefly at the tailor on the floor and then bent down to pick up Lotte’s handbag. He saw a cash register at the back of the shop and quickly moved around the counter to open it.

There was less than three pounds inside, but he took the money and then knocked the register onto the floor. He looked once more at the dead man and gave a slight shake of his head. It was time to go.

CHAPTER 6

Y
OU SAID YOU
were going to take us to the hospital.” Anja’s face was wet with tears.

Her mother’s head lolled in her hands as the car thudded through a rut in the snow.

Lotte moaned softly.

“I didn’t,” King replied as he eased the car to a halt at a red light.

“You did! You said you would!”

King looked over his shoulder at Anja and then at Cook, who was crouching in the footwell of the backseat, pressing against the wound at the top of Lotte’s leg.

Cook’s hands were wet with blood.

“I said I’d see to it that she was okay.” King turned back to looking at the traffic lights, which were still resolutely stuck on red.

“She needs the hospital, please!” Anja shouted, tears tumbling, looking first at the back of King’s head and then at the top of Cook’s.

“Maybe we should call the embassy, Frank?”

Cook sounded panicky. King glanced at Anja in the mirror and then at her mother. He could see that Lotte’s cheek was daubed with some blood off Anja’s hands.

The snow, which was still falling, had cleared the streets of pedestrians and traffic. King lifted his foot from the brake and thought about driving through the red light, before changing his mind again and deciding to wait.

He pressed down again on the brake. He didn’t want some bored cop pulling him over when he had a woman bleeding to death on his backseat. The windscreen wipers juddered on the glass as the snow lessened; he switched them off and looked again at Anja, who was whispering to her mother as she stroked her face.

“Keep an eye on her, Eric; they’re whispering.”

Cook looked up at Lotte and Anja. “She’s out cold.” Cook shifted his position so that his head was inches from the back of King’s. “We really need to get her to the hospital, she’s bleeding out.”

Anja started to cry again.

The lights finally changed and the car started to move.

“Just keep her alive; maintain pressure on the wound. We’ll sort things out when we get to the flat and I get to speak with control.”

COOK LOOKED AT
Anja and Lotte, chewed down on his lip, then returned to pressing on the wound. King had collected a handful of woolen scarves as they had left the shop, and Cook picked up another to wrap around the three blood-soaked ones that were already on Lotte’s leg.

A rainbow of colors that was slowly staining deep bloodred.

Blood pooled around his fingers when he pressed the wound. He looked up to check if Anja had seen how bad things were. She had. She sniffed and wiped her nose, then met Cook’s gaze.

“Please,” she whispered. “My mother is dying, you have to help her.”

The car jolted and Lotte groaned again. Cook looked down at her and then wiped his face, smearing it with blood.

“She needs a hospital, please,” Anja tried again, reaching forward to help Cook tie off the scarf he was wrapping. Her hand brushed against the back of his, he looked up at her, and she took hold of his fingers. “Don’t let her die. She’s my mummy.”

“Stop talking to her, Eric.”

Cook flinched as King spoke to him from the front seat. He shook his hand free before placing it back onto Lotte’s wound, eyes downcast, unwilling to meet Anja’s.

ANJA
STARTED TO
cry again, quietly this time, shifting in her seat so that she could better cradle her mother’s head. She felt the car turn and looked up to see that they were now in a very different part of London than Regent Street.

Dark, brooding, run-down blocks of buildings seemed to crowd in on the narrow road. The shop windows were empty. Anja saw an old man in an apron, watching them through distorted glass that made him seem to ripple as they drove past. Streetlamps were flickering to life in the gathering gloom, struggling to light the inside of their lenses.

Anja caught sight of a name above a shop:
COHEN B
ROS BUTCHERS, WHITECHAPEL
. The shop was boarded up but the sign remained, gold on blue paint, snow covering its edges. A yellow star of David was painted vividly on the boards across the windows.

The paint had run at the tip of the star; Anja thought it looked like it was crying.

Whitechapel? She’d heard of it, but couldn’t remember where. She tried to guess how long they’d been in the car. Twenty minutes? Maybe more?

Anja twisted her head. Each house looked the same: cold, closed, unwilling to help.

She stroked her mother’s hair; they were alone.

Over King’s shoulder, through the windscreen, she saw a public telephone box at the end of the road. It sat on the corner, outside another boarded-up shop, bright red in the white and gray. The car started to slow even more and she dared to imagine that King was stopping to call for help.

He eased into the curb at the call box, then switched off the engine.

Silence.

Nobody spoke. There was no wind, no voices out on the street, nothing but silence.

Anja looked at Cook, who seemed to be staring at the back of King’s head. She followed his lead and saw that King was moving slightly, an inch this way and that, checking the street around them in the car’s mirrors.

Their reflected eyes met. He held her gaze a moment and then carried on searching the street. Anja did the same; she looked over her shoulder out of the back window of the car, and then back at King, who finally spoke.

“Stay here.” King got out.

He left the door open as he took a few steps onto the snow-covered curb. He paused by the call box and then fished in his pocket.

“He’s going to call an ambulance,” Anja whispered down at her mother, then gently traced some hair off her forehead with her finger.

King turned from the call box and went to the narrow, peeling black door next to the boarded-up shop. He pulled out a key, which Anja could see glinting in his hand, and opened the door. He had to push against the swollen wood a couple of times to get it to open. When it finally did, he pushed it ajar and returned to the car.

King surveyed the street, then opened the car’s rear door and looked in at Anja.

“How good is your English?” King asked in German.

“Excellent,” replied Anja primly.

King nodded and then spoke, this time in English.

“You will help him carry your mother; she needs to get inside quickly so we can look after her. Do you understand?”

Anja nodded.

“The tailor at the shop, he didn’t do as he was told. Remember what happened to him?”

Anja nodded. King stared at her a moment and then flicked his head, gesturing for Cook to get out of the car.

“Push her toward me,” King instructed Anja as he took hold of Lotte’s legs and dragged her forward. When she was half out of the car King gripped the semiconscious Lotte under the arms, and turning, swiveled her so that Cook was able to grab her upper body, taking her from him.

King turned back toward Anja as her mother slid the last part of the way out of the backseat.

“Take her legs.” King gripped Anja’s arm, pulling her toward her mother.

Anja did as she was told, and she and Cook carried Lotte into the building. Behind her she heard the car doors slam.

King entered the building and kicked the front door shut behind him, then flicked a switch that turned on a bulb at the top of the staircase. The stairs were narrow; Cook had to twist his head to look over his shoulder as they climbed, feet echoing on the wooden boards with each hesitant backward step. Anja, still holding Lotte’s legs, stared up at her mother’s gray face.

She could feel King’s hand occasionally on her back as they silently made their way up to the first floor. The naked bulb above lit a tiny landing. Two doors greeted them, once white but now faded and dirty, one left, one right.

“Back room,” King said.

Cook kicked open the door on the right and shuffled in. The room was dark; it smelled of damp and seemed colder than outside. Anja shivered, lowering her head as if the weight of the gloom was pushing it down. King must have flicked a switch behind her, because another bulb flickered hesitantly into life, even dimmer than the one on the landing. There was a stained mattress on the floor, under a boarded-up window. Anja and Cook shuffled automatically over and laid Lotte down upon it.

Anja looked toward King, who was still standing at the door, hand on the light switch.

“The man at the shop?” Anja said quietly.

“Yes,” King replied.

“He was doing as he was told; you killed him anyway. You are a liar and a murderer.”

King looked at the floor and then looked back at Anja.

“I am. And you would do well to remember it,” he said before leaving the room.

Cook watched King go, then leaned down to check the scarves tied around Lotte’s leg.

He looked up at Anja.

“Did you bring the other scarves?”

“No.”

He got up from the crouch and stared at Lotte a moment, wiping his hands on his coat again.

“I’ll go get them.” He walked to the door and paused at the threshold. “Remember, Frank is out here. Don’t try to leave.”

“I wouldn’t leave my mother.” Anja didn’t look around at Cook as she spoke. He nodded, as much to himself as anything, then closed the door.

Anja heard his boots banging down the stairs and looked up at the boards on the window.

“If you get the chance, run. Run as fast as you can.”

Anja gave a start and looked down at her mother, whose lips were blue, her skin white like paper.

“I won’t leave you,” Anja whispered.

“You must go. These men, they’ll kill you.”

“I won’t leave you.” Anja smoothed her mother’s cheek.

Lotte smiled, but it soon faded, like a ripple on a pond. Her face relaxed to nothing but a slow blink. When her eyes reopened Anja could see only the whites flutter for a moment before the iris reluctantly rolled back into sight.

“I’m dying, my love.”

Anja started to cry and wiped her mother’s forehead, then looked down at the leg wound.

“No.”

“Don’t give up, whatever they do. Don’t stop thinking about how you can get away. You must run.” Lotte closed her eyes again and Anja heard a creaking breath inflate her mother’s lungs.

“Shush, rest.”

“Don’t give up. Go to your father.” This time Lotte’s eyes didn’t open.

“Rest, Mummy.”

The breath rattled in.

“I love you, Anja.”

“I love you, too, Mummy.”

The breath rattled out.

Lotte Koehler was dead.