Authors: Kevin Wignall
Chapter Twenty-two
They took a cab back to the hotel, the streets busy with the buzz of early evening. Inger seemed subdued, but he wasn’t sure what to say and his own energy levels had taken a knock, so they sat in silence.
They went to their adjoining rooms with some vague idea of having dinner downstairs. Dan slipped the piece of paper with the contact details into his bag, then heard a door open and turned to see Inger standing there with a surprised look on her face.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—I thought it was just . . .” There was a connecting door between the two rooms, something Dan hadn’t noticed himself until now. She laughed a little, but she still looked down, and a bit of him wondered if the mistake of opening that door had been intentional, if she just wanted some company.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded but without conviction, and then she said, “I think it’s just, I never lost anybody, you know. Well, a friend at school when I was fourteen who died from some rare kind of cancer, but no family members, nothing like you’ve known, or them. It was just difficult being there. They were lovely people, weren’t they?”
“Yeah, I liked them, but it was tough. Must have been tough looking through the photographs.”
She lowered her head, as if unable to sum up how difficult it had been; pictures of Sabine from across the short span of her life, each with a happy association, but all equally possessed of a terrible sadness, a sepia tint visible only to those who knew.
“It made me think of you too, the way you lost your son.”
Fleetingly, he regretted telling her about Luca, because he was certain he didn’t deserve her sympathy, but at the same time, he couldn’t deny that it felt right in some way that he’d finally shared it with someone, and that the someone was her.
Even so, he said, “What happened to Luca is . . . What I mean to say is, you can’t compare my loss with theirs. Even I can’t begin to imagine what they’ve been through.”
She nodded, and the light in the room was so soft that it took him a moment as she stood there to see that she was crying. He stepped closer, unsure of himself, and reached out to put a hand on her shoulder.
She shook her head, saying, “It’s stupid of me.” But she held onto him all the same. He could feel the heat of her breath against his neck as she said, “She was so full of life. It was unbearable, and her mother so matter of fact and dignified. I knew it would be terrible to go there.”
“I know you didn’t want to go, I should have . . .”
“No, it’s just me. I’ve been spoiled by life.”
Neither of them spoke for a few seconds, but she held him still, and he became increasingly aware of the warmth and softness of her body against his, but more than that, aware of the affection he felt for her and how stealthily it had crept up on him. Without thinking, he kissed her head where it nestled against him and, immediately, he knew he’d made a mistake.
She pulled back, though her arms were still around him, and stared at him with a look he couldn’t quite read—accusing, insulted?
“Sorry, I didn’t mean . . .”
He fell silent, the air charged between them, and he found himself oddly nervous. He still wasn’t sure how to read her or the situation, so he remained motionless and then she kissed him, tentatively at first, but then with more ease and confidence. He felt the first stirrings of adrenaline, his thoughts spinning slightly out of control as she started to pull at his clothes.
Quickly, he worked at her clothes too, and having believed and accepted that she was out of reach, he found himself almost like a teenager again now, a wave of excitement and heightened desire with each revelation; stomach, breasts, thighs. He couldn’t get enough of her, and couldn’t catch up with the fact that it seemed to be mutual.
A couple of times as they made love he wondered at this change in her, if she was bisexual, if she’d ever had a boyfriend before, because she seemed easy and comfortable and self-assured with him. He said nothing, a selfish part of him not wanting to ruin the moment or break the spell.
It was only as they lay afterwards in his bed that he said, “Er, have you . . . always been a lesbian?”
She laughed loud, doubling up, her leg curling around him. He laughed too, not even sure if they were laughing at the same thing.
She fell onto her back again and said, “I’m not a lesbian.”
He felt like punching the air, but he was curious too, and said, “Why did you tell me you were?”
She didn’t reply at first so he turned to look at her and she looked embarrassed as she said, “To avoid this happening.”
“You could’ve just told me you had a boyfriend.”
She turned to face him now, looking into his eyes as she said, “I don’t think you’re the sort of person who would see that as an obstacle.” He was still trying to think of a response to that when she said, “I was wrong though. Despite everything, I think you’re quite honorable, and quite sweet.”
“It’s been a long time since anyone’s called me that.”
“Honorable or sweet?” She was teasing him and didn’t wait for an answer. “You see, you know your way around a woman’s body, but not a woman’s mind. It’s like, in a way, all these years of adventure and always moving on, a part of you has remained . . .”
“Immature?”
“I was going to stay stunted.”
He laughed, but said afterwards, “I don’t want to be that person, and I’m trying to find a way of moving on, but, it’s not easy.”
“Can you ever move on? Isn’t that what some of these other guys did, and it still caught up with them?”
She was right about that.
“I guess I’ll know soon enough. But wanting it’s a start, surely?”
She nodded and leaned in to kiss him, and that amorphous desire for something resembling a normal life seemed even more pressing now, because he realized she wanted it for him too, and that made it feel tangible. She didn’t necessarily see herself as part of his future—why would she?—but she cared about what happened to him, a rare enough occurrence in his life that he wanted to hold onto it.
Chapter Twenty-three
They woke early the next morning but lingered on in bed, and before either of them thought to check the time it had turned nine.
Inger jumped up and said, “We need to be quick if we’re catching that train.”
He smiled, even as she gathered up her clothes and walked through the connecting door into her own room, but then he lay back on the pillow. He still wasn’t quite sure what had happened, or what it signified, whether it was a one-off or whether there might be more to it than that.
But that was where his thoughts ran aground, because for all the talk of moving on, he didn’t know what the coming months held, and as much as she wanted a better life for him, he couldn’t imagine that she’d want to be a part of it.
He could hear that she’d gone into the bathroom, could hear the shower running, and finally he jumped up and went into his own bathroom. He’d been in the shower for a few minutes when he heard a door close, or what sounded like a door closing. He didn’t think much of it, though he was vigilant enough that he remained tuned in for further sounds from the room beyond.
He heard nothing more until he turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, but as he started to dry off he heard Inger say, “Dan?”
Her voice was faint, as if she was calling from her own room.
“Yeah, what is it?”
“Could you come out here, please?”
He thought again now of the closing door and the strange tone in her voice. He put the towel around his waist and looked around quickly—there was nothing he could defend himself with if she wasn’t alone out there. At a loss he picked up another towel, knowing that anything he threw might give him a moment’s edge.
He opened the door and immediately saw her sitting on the end of his bed in her underwear. In spite of knowing something was wrong, for a fleeting moment he was distracted again by her simple beauty, but then his eyes fell to what she was looking at. Between the bathroom door and the door to his room, a guy was lying crumpled on the floor.
Dan dropped to one knee behind him. There was a gun on the floor so he leaned over and slid it out of reach, then looked at the guy. He was average height but stocky, wearing what looked like a ski jacket. His hair was dark and cropped close, and Dan could see a little blood at the base of his skull and a larger area that looked misshapen.
He was unconscious at the very least. Dan pressed his fingers into the warmth of the guy’s neck, held them there for a few seconds, then turned him on his side and checked his pockets, finding nothing.
He stood again and turned, looking at her. He also saw now that one of the heavy metal bedside lamps was on the floor next to the bed.
He pointed and said, “You hit him with that?”
She turned, in shock, and looked at the lamp on the floor as if reminding herself, then nodded. He walked over and crouched in front of her, taking her hands in his.
“Dan, he had a gun. He was going to go into your bathroom, and . . .” She seemed vague, but was hit by a wave of clarity then and said, “Is he dead?”
“Yeah, he’s dead. Must have been a lucky hit.”
“Lucky?”
“Yeah, lucky. You might have hurt him but not killed him. You might have hurt him but just made him angry.”
She nodded, accepting the point, recovering her composure by the second, and she sounded almost her usual self as she said, “I know I had to do it. He might’ve killed you, or both of us. But . . . I never killed anyone before.”
He nodded, still holding onto her hands, and said, “It’s not an easy thing, I won’t pretend it is. But you did do the right thing. And you must have known this day might come when you joined the Security Service.”
“The
Swedish
Security Service,” she said, and managed a weak smile.
“Point taken.”
She looked over at the body and said, “Do you know him? I hope to God he’s not CIA.”
Dan looked behind too, though he couldn’t see his face clearly from here. “I don’t recognize him. I’m pretty certain he isn’t CIA. He looks wrong.”
He didn’t say it, but he also guessed Bill Brabham was reluctant to use his own people now that Dan and Charlie had hit back and he’d taken casualties. So he was using freelancers where he could but, of course, thanks to Bill Brabham himself, a lot of the better freelancers were now dead.
“But how did he know you were here?”
“Beats me. Either there’s a leak in your office or in Patrick White’s. I don’t have an office.”
“It must be Patrick’s, so we have to tell him. He was expecting you to be on your own, I think, so that suggests he was following you, not me.”
She was right, and she was thinking straight which was good.
“You’re probably right, but we won’t tell Patrick. We just keep moving for now. Chances are, Brabham will have someone in Paris anyway, so we need to be vigilant.”
“And the body?”
The body.
“Okay, there’s a stairwell at the end of the corridor, a fire escape, looks like it’s never used. I’ll dump the body there. You need to get dressed.”
For a second she looked confused and he feared she was going to object, suggest they had to wait for the police or call it in to her head office.
But she snapped out of it again and said, “Do you need help moving it?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe only as a lookout.”
She nodded, and they both stood and she walked back into her room. Dan took the lamp into the bathroom, wiped it, making sure there was no obvious damage. He checked the floor around the body then, but they’d once more touched lucky—the wound hadn’t bled as much as it might have done, as if the surface of the skin hadn’t fully broken. There was no blood on the carpet.
He finished getting dressed, got everything together, then waited for Inger. She came through a couple of minutes later, fully dressed. She offered a strained smile—she was dealing with it pretty well, though he knew from his own experience that she would never quite shake this off, that it was part of her now.
He tested the guy’s weight, but he was too big to do anything other than drag him.
“Okay, take a walk in the corridor, check that there’s no noise from any of the other rooms, no one about, no cleaners. Once you’re confident it’s clear, tap on this door as you walk past and then keep an eye on the main stairwell.”
She nodded and left.
Dan turned the guy onto his front and waited. Inger tapped on the door as she walked past, so he opened it, held it with his foot and hoisted the guy up by his arms, dragging him out into the corridor and in one swift movement to the end and the fire exit.
He was moving through the door even before Inger had reached the main stairs. He hesitated then, making sure there was no one about, that the lower floors of this stairwell weren’t being used for service. It was silent though, and noticeably colder than the rest of the hotel, which he guessed was a promising sign in itself.
It was an open stairwell, with a gap in the middle over which he could see all the way to a dark concrete floor at the bottom. He turned the body and lifted it up now, so the middle of his back was resting on the metal rail, a position that would have been painful if he’d still been alive.
And then he tipped him and looked over himself to watch the descent. The body didn’t fall straight and the head hit the rail on a lower floor with a glancing but visceral blow, before finally landing in an oddly shaped heap at the bottom. That would do, enough to sow confusion for a while, and perhaps indefinitely.
Dan walked back along the corridor, past his room until he was able to catch Inger’s eye. She came back with him and once inside they both got their bags together in silence.
Only as they were about to leave the room did he stop her and say, “I’m sorry, I should have said earlier, but thank you.” She looked confused, and he said, “You probably saved my life, and you definitely covered my back.”
“I didn’t see it quite like that.”
“Well, you should, because this’ll stay with you, but you can at least be certain that you did the right thing, for the right reason. That’s a luxury most of us don’t have.”
She smiled a little, grateful, for his intentions if nothing else. He wanted to kiss her, but thought she’d consider it inappropriate in some way, so he held back. Maybe it was for the best anyway. She had just killed a man and Dan wanted to kiss her, and in those two facts, ironically, lay the difference that would probably always remain between them.