(2005) Rat Run (53 page)

When they reached the kitchen, and when they were
taken up the stairs to see three bedrooms and a bathroom
with walk-in shower, he had found the same cleansed perfection of the living room and the garden. A door off the hall
was opened. This was a different room, an untidy space ...

a shrine.

He waffled, 'Ah, a little place where a chap can shut
himself away. I suppose, a bit of a refuge. Sort of room
every man should have. You're getting the details, Mr
Kitchen?'

Why a shrine? There must have been four more pictures
of the son in uniform, but not best dress. Helmeted and in a
flak-jacket; unshaven and in fatigues; with an arm round
a colleague, crouched in front of a small tank; turning to the
camera and grinning and wearing full combat kit with a
mosque dome and minaret tower as background - and in
every picture a rifle was held in obvious readiness for use.

Two of the pictures were held with drawing-pins to the
shelves of books, one was on the window-ledge, another was
adhesive-taped to the side of the screen. Normally, Horace
Wield would not have talked so fully at a first meeting with
a client. He did it for the benefit of young Kitchen, to give
him a feel for the patter.

'Don't tell me-your boy's out in Iraq. That's a hell-hole.'

The boy was in the Military Police. Had done Kosovo,
then been posted to Al-Amara.

T sympathize. It must be a considerable anxiety to you
both having him in that awful country.'

His wife refused to look at pictures of their son in Iraq,
which was why they were in his den.

'Very brave young fellows, and a scandalous lack of
support for them from too many back home. We should be
right behind them. I think every last one of them is a hero -

yes, a hero. We ought all to be grateful for their sense of
duty and courage ... Anyway, this is a very useful space
for any member of a family and of any age - don't you think
so, Mr Kitchen?'

He looked round, and the doorway was empty. When they
went into the hall, Horace Wield assumed that his trainee
assistant was in the kitchen and measuring, or in the con-servatory, noting details. A frown twitched at his forehead:
against the coatstand was the clipboard that young Kitchen
had carried. A chill draught came through the front door,
which had been left ajar.

Gaunt climbed the stairs.

As a precaution, he had emptied his wallet of all credit cards and identification documents, and had left only enough money for the taxi ride to this feral place and a taxi back, assuming the impossible - that he could find one.

The driver who had brought him from the gates of Vauxhall Bridge Cross and had dropped him in the heart of the estate had leered at him as he took the money and said, 'You sure this is where you want to be, sir? Sorry and all that, but we don't do waits here.'

'Quite sure, thank you.' He had seen youths loitering at a corner where the graffiti was thick. They had hoods over their heads and scarves across their faces, and he had seen a man with two German shepherds, studded collars on short leashes standing impatiently while they peed in turn on mud beside a pavement.

He had lifted his tie knot, pulled a little more of his handkerchief from the breast pocket, swung his furled umbrella forward and stepped out for the block's entrance. He had looked at flat roofs and wondered from which three youths had been suspended, and at lamp posts and wondered at which a man had been trussed.

He avoided human excreta on the stairs, and at the second level he used his umbrella tip to ease a syringe into a corner. He came out on to the walkway. The taxi driver had said, 'I wouldn't have any of mine live here. They'd be better off in Bosnia . . . Good luck, sir, and watch your back.' He went by the doorways with the locked barricades, went past a door behind which a child howled and saw the number - where the man, Kitchen, with the cross on his shoulder, had lived. He had spoken half an hour earlier, before leaving the safety of VBX, to Polly and . . . Another door, another barricade. He rang the bell.

'Mrs Johnson? A very good morning to you, Mrs Johnson. Tony sent me.'

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He made tea.

He smelt age and wondered if he, alone in the dotage of his retirement, would smell the same.

He was told in which cupboard he would find the biscuit tin.

He carried in the tray, poured through a strainer and was instructed on how much milk she took. He used old-world charm to relax her, complimented her on the decoration of her home, the choice of pictures and the decent simplicity of her crockery.

He said, as she held her cup and saucer, that his business was Malachy Kitchen, and saw defiance settle on her face. He hurried to assure her that he intended no harm to her former neighbour but had come to learn.

Of course, he had an image of a vigilante: a swollen beer belly and shaven head, a vocabulary of

obscenities and a muscular arm chucking broken bricks at the windows of a suspected pervert's home.

With reedy determination in her voice, the sparrow-sized woman contradicted the image.

She said, 'No one else ever did what he done.

Nobody ever stood up to them the way he did. I thought it was because of me. I was attacked for my bag, I was put in hospital - yes, I'm rid of the sling, but the arm's not right, not yet - and what he did was after that. Not that he told me it was because of what had happened to me, one old lady who is forgotten and's lived too long. There was no boast in him, wasn't trophies he went after . . . I know it was him. When you live too long you get that sense - and there wasn't any one else on the Amersham who'd have done it. I told him to his face that I had not given myself such importance, and I asked him to kiss me, and he did. Then he was gone. I'm alone too much, and alone I think. Cheeky of me, really, to believe it was for me. There was what happened here, and then my friend

- that's Dawn - saw something in the paper about the house of a big drug man being burned. The last time Malachy came, when he kissed me, he had scars on him like he'd been beaten. Only after he'd gone did I know it wasn't for me. I had that conceit, but I've ditched i t . . . It was about the past. Something hideous happened to him in his past, and I haven't an idea what.

His past gave him strength, so much of it, and more guts than any other man on the Amersham... Are you going to tell me what he's done now, where he is?'

Gravely, Freddie Gaunt shook his head. He did not think she expected an answer. Her cup was as full as when he had poured it. Pieces had fallen into place; confirmations had been given.

She said, 'Each thing he did was harder than the last. Down at our Pensioners' Association they have gym machines, and there's that gear you walk on and you can make it go faster. You with me? It's like each time he did something he made the machine go quicker... You've come to see me, which tells me he's not given up on it, and so I'm thinking he must be running now . . . '

Running rather fast, Gaunt thought, but did not tell her.

'If you ever see him, you give him my love. Give him Millie Johnson's love, please. Don't let it go too fast, that machine.'

He heard a hiss of passion in her voice, but it subsided.

'I get tired. I'm sorry.'

He took the cups, saucers and plates back into the kitchen, returned the biscuits to the tin and washed up

- as her one-time neighbour would have - leaving the crockery to dry on the draining-board. When he left, her eyes were closed and she might have been asleep.

He closed the front door quietly, pulled the barricade shut and heard the click of its lock.

The boy, his grandson, screamed.

Not letting go of the wheel, Harry Rogers swung his shoulders. The plate arced up and the sandwiches flew towards the ceiling. The kid was pitched sideways and his shoulder cannoned against the rail under the windows. He saw young Paul slide down.

God . . . God . . . Only a bloody sandwich that he'd asked for, and the lashed bucket was already well filled with his vomit and his legs had been weak when he'd gone down to the galley to make them. Couldn't have asked his son, not Billy, to make him sandwiches because Billy was below, nursing the engines.

'You all right?' To be heard, even in the confines of the wheel-house, Harry had to shout. The kid moaned back at him. The noises, deafening, were of the engines' race when the bows went down in a trough and the propeller blades were tilted clear of water, and the thud of waves against the hull. When the big gusts hit and tilted them, the boat groaned as if she were either stretched or crushed. 'You all right, young 'un?'

'I'm sorry . . . sorry . . . '

'You got nothing to be sorry for.'

He saw the pain on the kid's face. The face, so pale.

If Annie ever knew the conditions out on the North Sea into which he had taken their grandson, she might just lift a kitchen knife against him, or she might pack up and quit. No choice. Had to have the third pair of hands, and no one else he could have trusted. Men enough in harbour who yearned for a good pay-day, who didn't care about weather, but they were not family.

The whimper came through the noise belting him.

'I'm sorry for your sandwiches.'

'You broke anything?'

'I don't think so.'

'Forget the goddamn sandwiches.'

'How long is it? Is it long?'

There was pleading in the kid's eyes. He was seventeen. Back in the old days, sail days, the trawlers like the one he coveted took kids to sea, fourteen and younger, in the same storms and paid them less in a month than they needed to buy a pair of sea boots.

Harry Rogers could not tell his grandson that from this sea journey, and from two more years and from the ones already done, a chest of cash was accumu-lating. The alternative to the chest was gaol - for the kid, for Billy, for him. Harry thought the truth cruel.

He shouted back, and tried to put a smile on his face:

'I reckon we're through the worst of i t . . . How long?

The rest of today and a bit of tonight.'

Then, and he didn't tell the kid, there would be the coming back and maybe more of the same.

The reference to Harry Rogers, brother of Sharon (nee Rogers) Capel, had been a note buried in a long-neglected file. He was described, in a report on the extended family of Mikey Capel, as a freelance skipper with a master's ticket for taking out deep-sea trawlers.

Going deeper, digging with the computer bank available to him, Tony Johnson had tapped into back numbers of
Fishing Monthly
and had failed to find a match for Harry Rogers, but had hit gold with the weekly
Fishing News.
There, two paragraphs described the purchase in the Channel Islands of a beam trawler by Rogers, and its renaming as
Anneliese
Royal,
and its registration in the Devon port of Dartmouth.

From a phone call to the harbourmaster at

Dartmouth, the detective sergeant had learned that the
Anneliese Royal
was never seen in West Country waters. 'Harry lives here, and I can give you his address and number, but he works the North Sea out of the east coast . . . Not in bother, is he? He's a very good guy.' Oh, no, not in any bother - only has the bloody spooks sniffing at his backside.

He had checked with harbourmasters from

Immingham to Harwich. Back on his familiar workload, human-trafficking (Vice), he had revelled in the extreme secrecy, imposed by Frederick Gaunt, and had done his checks late in the evening and early that morning before the pace of the National Criminal Intelligence Service had resurfaced. A laconic answer from Lowestoft had lifted him, the last call he made before the open-plan office area filled around him.

'The
Anneliese Royal
was here and now is not. Hold on a second, friend, and I'll give you timings from our log . . . Pretty rotten weather when she sailed, and not much sign of it changing. God knows why they went because there's no way they'll have the nets down.

Rather them than me . . . Here we are. I can be quite exact. It's thirty-six hours, and about fifteen minutes, since she went. Don't get me wrong, beam trawlers rarely sink, but it won't be any sort of comfort cruise.'

He had waited for the coffee trolley to come round, because that was when people went out on to the front pavement for a smoke.

He left the building and walked fast, didn't use the nearest public telephones. They'd break his legs if they knew that, without sanction and authorization, he was moonlighting for the spooks. Why did he do it, risk himself? Because he had entrapped Malachy Kitchen
and
because Ricky Capel walked top of the shit-heap and believed himself untouchable. Two reasons, each good enough.

With a handkerchief over his mouth, giving muffled disguise, he spoke to a recording machine on the number given him and told what he knew, didn't give his name and rang off. He hoped he had done something to help one man and skewer another.

When he came to the platform in the faint first light, he had seen the mass of scattered feathers.

Anger churned in Oskar Netzer. He stood beside the upright poles, straightened and nailed, of the platform and in the growing brightness he saw the devastation of the killing site. The feathers were spread about an area of mud beside the pond. At the moment of the attack the ducks would have fled but now they had returned and stayed on the far side of the water. The bird had flown off, low and hugging the dunes' shallow contours, the moment he had reached the platform, and it would have carried a last scrap of the duck's breast in its talons.

The killing bird circled high and at a distance.

It would have been aware, with its keen eyesight, of him standing beside the posts. It wanted to feed, to take more of the flesh of its victim . . . Oskar saw the remaining eiders, innocent and without protection, and seemed to hear the voice of his mother as she read the letter that had been left with a lawyer by his uncle, who had driven the lorry from the camp at