Vagabond (50 page)

The night slipped on.

Chapter 16

A gutter dripped and Danny Curnow woke. He didn’t thrash around, swing his legs and wonder where he was, why and with whom. Clarity came.

He felt the hardness under his shoulder. Answers tripped along in his mind.
Who
was easy: his head was resting on the chest of Gaby Davies, and the hardness under his shoulder was her arm. The next was harder:
why
. It was always difficult to cobble together an answer that was half satisfactory. For a moment he struggled, then gave up. Later there might be an explanation. The next was simpler.
Where
: he was in a doorway opposite the pension. A couple had come out, bent under heavy rucksacks, and lurched away. They might have been looking for a bus to the railway station or the airport. The concrete of the step ate into his buttocks and his sole warmth came from her body. The light was still on in the room high in the building, the only one that had not been switched off during the night.

She gave a sharp kick.

A dog backed away, edging towards the gutter, showing its teeth and snarling. Something for Danny Curnow to savour: her kick at the dog had not been gentle. If the animal had been close enough, and her aim accurate, her foot might have propelled it across the pavement and into the road. He didn’t care to burrow in his mind for an answer as to
why
he was there but he thought she was hardening and had done so on each phase of the trip.

‘Did I wake you?’

‘Probably not. I apologise.’ Danny grimaced.

‘What for?’ She seemed indifferent.

‘Using you as a cushion. I don’t usually crash out.’

There was little light, but he thought a smile might have clipped her mouth. She had brought him dry clothes to increase his effectiveness, not from sympathy. She said, ‘You might not have crashed out years ago when you were working, but now you’re old.’

He disentangled himself and sat up. She rubbed vigorously at her arm and played another trump. Gaby Davies was hunched forward, arms round her knees. Her voice was quiet – as if she believed in her authority over him. She told him that she had been to the back of the hotel, had looked for exits but there were none. Her impression was that the fire-escape door was padlocked and the targets were still inside. She was at a better angle for him to observe her. He could always tell – easier with a woman than a man. He didn’t need to hear footsteps on the landing or the whine of springs when Dusty went in after Christine. There was nothing in Dusty’s manner at breakfast but Christine always jutted her chin and her cheeks were flushed. It was not for Danny Curnow to pass judgement if a handler shagged an agent. She could do worse or better. He was not an expert on relationships.

He said, ‘Not my business who you sleep with.’

She flushed. Her eyes blazed. ‘No.’

‘But in the old days it would have been a hanging offence.’

‘I didn’t ask for your opinion.’

‘And the Joe you slept with had you wrapped round his little finger, told you what he wanted you to know and was economical with the rest.’

‘Wrong. He’s given me every detail of his relationship with Malachy Riordan.’

He said quietly, ‘You’ll get a text this afternoon or this evening, something from Matthew Bentinick. I’m not adding anything except that it was necessary to bully some truths from Exton.’

If she was happy to be bedded by the Joe, good luck to her. Would it last? He didn’t imagine so, but what did he know? Nothing. He felt an ache of loneliness, and couldn’t stifle it. It was good to feel the pistol in his waistband. It was five in the morning and a church clock chimed at the end of the street. It was the start of a day that would begin slowly. The pace would quicken, and he fancied it would end in stampede. He thought her a good kid, but personal happiness was low on the agenda.

He thanked her for his dry clothes. A dustcart came down the street. He thanked her, again, for letting him sleep, and wondered whether his head had shared a place with Ralph Exton.

A traveller’s pocket alarm, one sold in an airport lounge, bleeped thinly. It had woken him in the Armagh hotel when he had needed to drive off into the fog for the meeting with the men on the mountain, beyond the reach of back-up. It had sounded in the kitchen at home and had sent him to the airport for a flight to Prague. Ralph Exton groped across the bed. She wasn’t there.

The other half of the bed was cold. She had not come back with him. Quite brusque. He had been chucked out. He found the alarm, killed it, sagged, and swore.

His first image of the day was not the rose garden at home, the pub in the village where they served him steak or the sight of two hands – one of them his – clasped together in a handshake, deal done. And it was not the sweet mouth of Gaby Davies, poised over his. What he saw in the moment of waking was the face of the man he knew as ‘Danny’. He feared him. The nightmare: he walked streets in darkness, heard footfalls behind him, then the drill. He felt damp concrete on his ankles and shins.

A clock struck. There were churches all around Stepanska. One started, others joined in. A chorus played for him. It was past six.

What could Ralph Exton hope for? Another deal, another shipment of antique furniture from last week’s factory line, or computers in a container from Vietnam that looked good but were short on memory space. Money in small envelopes: no drills, no concrete. He had been threatened and believed the threat. Danny had dead eyes and was to be believed. Danny would kill him.

The horn blasted loudly enough to reach the dormer window.

The three magazines Karol Pilar had loaded for his issue pistol were on the kitchen table and his vest was hooked on a chair. He wolfed the sandwich. She watched from the bedroom door, in her nightdress. His Jana would not have suggested that he might ‘take care’, and hadn’t asked what he’d be doing today. She said she’d make another cake for her mother and was glad it had been appreciated.

As if it were an afterthought, he kissed her cheek.

He ran down the flights of stairs, the camera bouncing on the lanyard around his neck. The cuts on his face had scabbed and now they itched. All would be done as Mr Bentinick had requested.

He went out through the building’s front door. In the park, high above the side-street, he was observed by the stern-featured statue of Svatopluk
C
^ˇ
ech – dead more than a century. The writer and poet might not have considered Karol Pilar a suitable neighbour. He ran as the horn sounded again from an unmarked black Transit-style van. He had twice been beaten and his injuries, old and new, were important to him. They steeled his determination. That morning he would cross a line. There would be little future, he thought, in the Prague detective offices for a young officer determined to stand against the flow. He would risk his job. He would not be congratulated. Karol Pilar, among many talents, could play the devious bastard in the face of his office colleagues.

The back door opened for him. They were all in black. Their weapons were on racks. They drove away. It was past seven. They went west, as they had to.

A fly crawled on his face. He struggled not to open his eyes. Malachy Riordan had long tracked the fly. It had started on his arm, where the scratches and bite marks were, trekked up and over the bulges of his muscles. It had been round his neck and gone past his mouth. It had crossed his cheeks and been near to his ear. It was the tickling at his nose that broke him. The fuckin’ thing was going into his nostril. He snorted and slapped himself.

The fly had gone. His fingertips were on his right cheek. The scratches were dry because the blood had been staunched.

He had been awake long enough, sharing the bed with her. He had stared at the ceiling and had noted each crack in the plaster around the light fitting. Then he had slept. The boys had been killed and it might as well have been at his hand. He opened his eyes and tilted his head. He saw her.

His fingers lay against the scratches on his cheek that her nails had made. It had been done in the last spasms, with her final strength. The tips of her fingers were bloodied, her nails stuffed with his flesh. He was on the bed beside her. He wore his vest, and his underpants were at his knees. She had lowered them before his hands had flailed at her face. She had undressed for both of them. He had not known how to stop her. Her voice had been a murmur in his ear, supposed to soothe him, and her hands gone where only Bridie’s went. He had felt himself growing, had known the shame and struck her.

‘What’s the matter with you? Can’t you do it? I won’t hurt you. Doesn’t your wife do this with you? Are you frightened of me, Malachy?’ One blow, hard enough to loosen teeth. He’d seen the scream well in her and had grabbed her throat. The scratch on his cheek was deep and hurt. He squeezed tighter, her writhing on the bed, attempting to dislodge him and biting his forearms. He had gone on squeezing, long after the chance of her screaming had been eliminated. He had not stopped until she was still. He had lain there. He had not touched her, looked at her or covered her with the sheet.

A long time afterwards, tears wetting his face, he had drifted into sleep.

Now he saw the death pallor of her cheeks and the blue of her lips. Her tongue was out and twisted clear of her teeth, which had his blood on them. The bruises shocked him. Her throat was mottled with blue, yellow and purple welts. She had her pants on, nothing else. She had not removed them when he had tried to push her away. The fly moved on her: it flew from her chin to her chest, then circled a nipple and went on down.

He choked.

Malachy Riordan would be pushed into a cell and the door would slam. It had happened in the Antrim crime suite, and in the barracks at Dungannon, but then his head had been high and he had been confident that they couldn’t hold him. He had been, then, a great man, Brennie Murphy’s disciple. There would have been police in Dungannon and Armagh who dreaded the thought of a late-night call-out and the risks of a ‘come-on’ bomb – probably terrified by the thought of him, what he could do. His name was strong on the mountain and his wife had the respect of the community. He had not betrayed what others had died for. There would be no respect from the villagers on either side of the Dungannon to Pomeroy road for the killer of a girl, whose red hair was tangled across her face, whose green eyes were staring, and whose mouth, which had been pretty . . . She lay beside him.

He swung himself off the bed. At the window he parted the curtains and looked down. A vagrant occupied a doorway, a woman with him. He wondered if this was the day when the boys would be buried, or if the police would continue to hold the bodies. He dressed in what warm clothes he had left and bundled the wet garments into a torn laundry bag from the bottom of the wardrobe. He added her clothing to the bundle. Then he saw the small pink package on the floor that held a condom. It went into the bag too. Her handbag was on the chair. He went through it. Makeup, a purse, a passport and the notebook. He read the pages: where they should go and where they would be picked up, dictated to her by the arsehole Russian from the bank. He tore out those pages and looked again at the rest – flight times, bank numbers and expenses incurred. Her handbag went with the laundry.

At the door, he lifted the Do Not Disturb sign off the handle, opened it, hung it on the outside, closed the door and locked it.

It was past eight, from the chimes of the clock on the church tower at the top of the street. Far below him, the vagrant and the woman still occupied the doorway of a derelict building. Behind him, muffled, he heard footsteps on the stairs and voices. He sat in a chair and faced the window. The curtain stayed drawn. He couldn’t see her.

It was a habit, and it amused Timofey Simonov to indulge it. He enjoyed playing the great man, employer and master, when the brigadier’s wife came from Prague. When she arrived by taxi – the amount charged always queried – Simonov would nag and belittle his man. The brigadier would not walk out on him – he could have bet his life on it.

Nikolai Denisov and his wife, Elena, had looked over the edge of a cliff and felt the vertigo of standing above an abyss. They had known terror when they thought of their prospects and the future.

He had been on the phone and on his laptop. He had been speaking with bankers and investment managers in Zürich, Nassau and São Paolo, punctuating the calls with shouted questions down the stairs. Dutiful answers had returned to him.