The Fish Kisser (38 page)

“Dead,” echoed Lisa, her eyes fixed on the monitor, gaily “beeping” in time to Trudy's heart, oblivious to the pain.

“Yes. Didn't the police tell you what happened?”

“Not really,” replied Peter. “Although we understand she was in someone's cellar.”

“Not exactly,” replied the doctor, unhygienically picking and poking his nose while recounting how she had been found by the electrician called to trace the mysterious use of electricity, and the locksmith who had prised open the door at the bottom of the pit.

“The first policeman,” he referred to his notes, “Detective Jackson, started mouth to mouth resuscitation and heart massage immediately, but the problem is that her brain had been starved of oxygen for a long time.”

“What does that mean?” asked Peter.

“It means we won't know for a little while what is going to happen …”

“She will live—won't she?” Lisa's frantic voice cut in.

The doctor allowed the silence to grow for a few seconds, letting the couple draw their own conclusions from his sad eyes. “It is too early to say,” he eventually conceded, but his expression clearly said, “Don't bank on it.”

“Was she …” Lisa's voice trailed away, then she tried again, “Did he …”

The doctor helped her out. “There was no sexual activity in the last day or so, but before that …” he stopped and shrugged, letting Lisa's imagination loose.

“I just hope they find the bastard,” she spat, with as much spite as she could muster.

“They,” whoever “they” were, had not found LeClarc, although there was now no question “they” were trying hard and had a fairly good idea where he was. For more
than three hours the trawler had been weaving in and out of moored ships, making erratic turns, speeding up, slowing down, and taking every conceivable evasive action. But, like a sleek shark patiently circling its prey, every time they emerged from behind a massive moored oil tanker or a giant freighter, the tenacious hunter would always be waiting. Almost invisible in the pale moonlight, just a blip on the radar screen, no matter how they twisted and turned, it was always there, stealing through the dark, stealthily sneaking up on them, then veering off to keep station a mile or so away. The predators had become the prey; the piranhas the prawns.

For the first couple of hours Motsom had been convinced the captain of the other vessel had some kind of sixth sense—a shark's sense—enabling him always to be in the right place at the right time. Slowly, reality dawned—there was more than one shark. There were in fact three.

How did they know? Motsom wondered, as he stood next to the skipper, ordering this way or that. What had given the game away? Then he shot the skipper a suspicious look and stretched above his head for the logbooks. Seconds later, without a word, Motsom smashed a fist into the old man's face and sent him sprawling across the floor into the chart table.

“Mac,” bawled Motsom.

He came running.

“Look,” He held up one of the books. The missing corner of a blank page told the tale.

“He must've slipped a message to one of those scum,” he said. “That's why they kept quiet about the compass. He'd warned them.”

“What shall I do with him?”

“Take him below and get Sprat. We're going to have to make plans.”

Motsom jabbed at the dots on the screen a few minutes later, a definite note of concern in his voice. “I think it's this one and these two,” he said.

“We could just give ourselves up,” offered Boyd, but the chill of Motsom's glare had him backtracking immediately. “Just kidding.”

“Why don't we bomb it and get away in the lifeboat?” suggested McCrae, anxious to exercise his peculiar skills.

“How far do you think we'll get? The life-boat's a bloody rowing boat,” shot back Motsom. “Plus, they probably know who we are—me anyway.”

Billy Motsom was correct. The crews of the three patrol boats, two Dutch and one English, were well aware of their identities. Their location and activities had been monitored all day, ever since the skippers' failure to respond to the radio that morning and the brief mayday message from the deck hand. The discovery of the stolen Saab, in which they had jumped the canal bridge, added to the weight of evidence when it was found abandoned, not a mile from the home of the trawler.

The fishery officers, two British detectives in borrowed uniforms, had reported directly back to Superintendent Edwards aboard one of the Dutch vessels with the scrap of paper the old trawler skipper had pressed into his hand.

“3 Gunmen. 3 Hostages. Help,” was all it said, nothing else was necessary.

“Look,” cried McCrae with alarm, “They're getting closer.”

The circling sharks were closing in. The three bright dots were definitely nearer the centre of the screen—and they were the bullseye. Dawn was only an hour or so away, the hunters had been stalking all night and were moving in for the kill.

“A dawn raid,” Motsom mused, knowing the longstanding police practice of catching their quarry half-asleep, and leaped into action. “Mac. Start a fire,” he shouted. “Sprat, launch that bloody rowing boat. We'll take a chance. With any luck they'll be so busy trying to put out the flames we can get away.”

McCrae was halfway out the door when Sprat Boyd stopped him with a word. “Wait!”

Boyd hadn't moved from the radar screen, and he didn't look up for fear of catching a disapproving stare from Motsom. “I've got a better idea,” he said. The others drifted back as he continued talking, sensing their faces over his shoulder. “These big ships,” he pointed to the anchored vessels, “they've all got bloody great long ladders down to the water. I've seen them. Why don't we drive by one real close and jump. Leave this tub going flat out so they'll chase it for bloody miles 'til the fuel runs out.”

“Or hits something and smashes to pieces,” added McCrae, warming to the idea.

“And just how do we get ashore?” bitched Motsom.

Boyd had an answer. “We swim to the ship and pinch a proper speedboat. They must have them.”

Motsom wasn't sure. “I can't swim very well…” he admitted, then pride got the better of him. “O.K. we'll give it a try, I don't fancy rowing all bloody day.”

Five minutes later the trawler disappeared off the patrol vessels' radar screens as its tiny blip blended with the large blob of a slab-sided freighter. But the 'patter' of its engine still reverberated across the water, sending out a homing signal to the watchmen on the decks of the patrol boats. Then the little boat slipped behind the monster and the “patter” deepened to a dull echo. Thirty seconds later it turned into a deep-throated roar as Boyd slammed the throttles wide open,
leaped out of the wheelhouse and dived over the side into the inky water. The trawler picked itself up and, freed of its malignant cargo, danced across the waves, its powerful engines designed to drag tons of fish from the sea-bed, now light-heartedly making a dash for the open sea.

The sharks were quick to respond as the trawler bounded from behind the freighter, attacking it with a salvo of searchlights and the blare of a loudspeaker. “Heave to. Heave to or we'll shoot.” But the driverless vessel turned a deaf ear, raced drunkenly toward another moored ship, then veered easterly—Holland and home.

“Why can you never find a policeman when you want one?” D.I. Bliss muttered angrily, as he drove the stolen black Mercedes through central Turkey.

“It's the same in Holland,” said Yolanda, through a yawn, catching him by surprise as she woke.

“No wonder people steal things,” he grumbled, shuffling through the car owner's cassette collection, seeking something soothing—Brahms or a Bach adagio perhaps. “We've been driving for hours and haven't been stopped.”

“Nearly three hours,” she noted, glancing at her watch. Then she stretched extravagantly and ended by combing the fingers of her left hand through his hair.

“I haven't even seen a police car,” he continued despondently, a soft warm feeling running through him as her fingers played with the hairs on the back of his neck; he slipped a likely looking tape into the player.

“I don't know if we'd be able to get them to believe us anyway,” she added, then clamped her hands over her ears at the raucous blare of a Turkish version of “Jailhouse Rock.”

The road, which earlier had been as peaceful as could be expected anywhere on a early Saturday morning, was now buzzing with carloads of families, busloads of tourists, and truck-loads of everything imaginable, and unimaginable. A ribbon of humanity, and all their worldly possessions, streaming across the Steppes of Anatolia, according to the map they had bought at a gas station, several hours, and a few hundred miles, earlier.

She yawned again as the parched mountainscape slid by, as it had for hour upon hour. The grandly named Steppes of Anatolia, turned out to be nothing more than a barren rocky desert. Occasionally, they would pass a green tree, cannily growing spindly and sickly in the hope of avoiding the woodchopper's axe or a voracious goat. Some even more enterprising trees lodged themselves precariously into fissures up on the side of escarpments but, otherwise, the scorched landscape appeared almost devoid of life. “I think the Valley of Death is somewhere around here,” muttered Bliss, his geography slightly askew as he scoured the dusty landscape, disappointed at the absence of Cossacks and a regiment of plumed Hussars. “Nothing but bloody goats,” he moaned, with a venom speaking of previous injurious experience. It's a bit like life, he thought, bored by the never-ending undulating landscape, though the odd rocky outcrop and a small craggy mountain added occasional interest. A few romantic precipices and a failed marriage went through his mind, then he caught himself: his marriage hadn't failed—failure suggested catastrophic collapse—his union with
Sarah had gradually dissolved until it became two tenants with shared facilities and memories, and a grown up daughter, who, like her mother, had flown the coop. “I should call Samantha; she might be worried,” he told himself, remembering that he'd half promised to meet her for Sunday brunch. Then he had an unsettling thought. “Yolanda?” he said nervously.

“Ah, ah,” she hummed sleepily.

“You remember what we did in the airplane yesterday?”

“Yeah,” she replied, her eyes closing, the start of a dreamy smile sprouting around her mouth, and she left her lips parted a fraction, in preparation for a wider smile, which she knew, was coming. He blushed and stuttered, “We didn't, um, we didn't, um, take any precautions.”

The smile bloomed. “I know,” she said. “Isn't it wonderful.” Then the blossom faded. “What do you want? Boy or girl?” Without giving him an opportunity to speak, she prattled on. “I would prefer a boy myself, we could call him Peter or Caas … although I've often thought Dave was a nice name.” Her resolve started to crack, seeing the mounting look of concern on his face. “We could have a girl next …” was all she managed before the smile burst back into bloom and turned to laughter. “Don't worry Dave, I take a pill.”

Relieved, he laughed with her. Then he glanced into her deep blue laughing eyes and, looking ahead, saw that the sky had picked up the colour and spread it to the horizon.

“Where's the truck, Dave?” she asked, forcing herself awake.

“There,” he replied, aiming a finger at a point about two miles ahead. On cue, the truck rose from a slight depression into full view, crested a hill and disappeared
again. “According to the map there are no more intersections until we get to Ankara, and we should be there in about an hour.”

“We must get to a telephone in Ankara,” she said. “If I can call the captain he will know how to get the Turkish cops to help.”

“I could always call Edwards …” he began, then changed his mind. Samantha, his daughter, would be first—he needed sympathy not screaming.

“I hope he stops somewhere soon,” she said, the truck cresting another hill. “I need a bathroom and some food.”

“I need a shower,” mused Bliss, recalling his sweatsoaked minutes frantically digging into the warehouse compound during the night.

Yolanda, sniffed. “We both need showers—and new clothes.”

“We're not going to steal them,” he jumped in firmly, thinking she might have that in mind.

The lunar-like landscape dragged by unendingly. The only evidence of human habitation was an occasional cluster of peasants' houses, providing shelter from the sun for a skinny donkey or a flea-ridden goat. Sometimes the remnants of a dry stone wall would rise in the middle of a scrubby dry pasture, meander across the landscape for half a mile or more, then sink slowly back into the dusty soil; marking out some long-forgotten boundary, when the land still had a semblance of fertility—before the Angora goats, a zillion mohair suits still on hoof, had scoured every last blade of vegetation.

Two hours later Ankara was a distant red smear of rooftops in Bliss' rear view mirror. The truck had not even slowed and Yolanda crossed her legs, fearing it might never stop. Spreading the map that was, for the most part, as barren as the landscape, she stuck her finger
on the next town: Kirpehir, at least an hour away. “Can we stop somewhere Dave? I really have to go. We'll have plenty of time to catch up.”

“We'll never catch up if we don't find another gas station,” he muttered as he scanned the deserted roadsides ahead, and a desultory idea took hold and shocked him with its simple logic: I don't have to go back. I could set up a truck stop and stay right here—forever.

“What is it Dave?” said Yolanda, seeing him smile.

“Just a silly thought,” he replied, but was buoyed by the feeling of liberty. Realizing that, if he chose, he could be free—free from Edwards; and past relationships. That's not freedom—that's escape. You're just running away—running from difficult situations. Anyway, look at the place—who'd want to live here? One glance at Yolanda with her expensively unruly hair, Cartier watch, and bank of credit cards told him to forget it.