Read The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit Online
Authors: Richard House
She watches him for a short while. With earphones and a small player he likes to stand over the pool and look out at the sea. There’s a ring of winsome mothers in the shallow end who are less shy about staring at him than their daughters. But he looks bored, and she imagines it can’t be much fun sitting in the sun, with the pool, the interested mothers, the distant daughters, the uppity staff, and the very pissed-off pool boy (who isn’t getting any attention while Sol takes the boards). What he needs is company, other boys, it’s wrong to see a young man so isolated.
She decides to speak to him. The honest truth is that she isn’t entirely sure what to ask him, but has a notion that he can help resolve some of the confusion. Perhaps she means to apologize?
The boy returns to his lounger and lies back. Rike, with her bag over her shoulder, comes tentatively forward and clears her throat.
‘I don’t mean to interrupt.’
She isn’t prepared for his reaction. The boy is alarmed to see her, and he immediately sits up on his elbows.
Rike gestures to the sunbed beside him and she sits side on. The straps on her shoulder bag stroke down her legs as the bag softens at her feet.
‘I need to speak with my brother.’
Sol shuffles up, and searches for a towel, a little too naked perhaps for a conversation about brothers.
‘I can’t speak with you.’
Surprised by his reaction, Rike repeats her question. She just wants to know where her brother is.
‘I can’t help you.’
‘He hasn’t been in touch. I just need to speak with him.’
The boy looks hard at her for a moment. ‘We shouldn’t be talking.’
Rike asks why. ‘He’s my brother. I need to speak with him. You might know where he is?’
‘You seriously haven’t heard?’
‘I told you he hasn’t been in touch.’
Sol shakes his head and she thinks he looks frightened. ‘No one knows where he is. He’s disappeared.’
‘I’m sorry about the manager. Lexi.’
The boy looks away.
‘I really don’t think Mattaus had anything to do with it. I think it was an accident.’
Sol now looks very confused. Rike thinks he has more to say. She looks to the pool, notes the pattern where water has splashed along the stone side. She asks why he isn’t in the Miramar, and Sol automatically looks up at the rising ranks of balconies.
‘The book.’ Rike changes the subject. ‘I looked at the book.’ She holds her hand to her chest, then to her brows. ‘I really need to know where Mattaus is. It would help to know when you last saw him. Nobody knows where he is.’
Kolya’s arrival isn’t best timed. Sol sees him from across the pool. The man strides out from the shadow of the lobby, shorts on, sandals going clap, clap, clap, looking mean and nasty with his newly shaved head (the skin whiter on his head than his face and neck), a monster tattoo of a dragon clambers up his back, she sees this as he twists about to make his way through the tables and chairs, one claw stuck into his belly, another to his thigh, two others dug into his shoulder. The tail coils around his leg – the claws look like they puncture his skin. It’s a crazy tattoo, the thing is scrambling over his body. Compared to the crudity of the blue-black scribbles on his arms, this is fine art.
Kolya clocks onto Rike immediately. His head twists inquisitively as he changes direction and speed as if he’s expecting her to make a dash.
‘Just pretend you’re from the hotel.’
Rike doesn’t hear him.
‘The hotel. Just pretend. You’re a guest.’
As Kolya rounds the near corner of the pool he’s suddenly all smiles, all charm and delight.
‘Hey.’ Sol stands up. ‘I was just heading in.’ He directs this to Kolya, then turning to Rike says he hopes she has a nice stay, perhaps they can talk tomorrow?
‘Sure.’ Rike holds up her hand, like she might wave. ‘Tomorrow.’
Kolya wraps his arm about Sol’s shoulder. ‘You call those shorts? You walk about in public like this?’ He tells the boy to go inside, hands him a key and then speaks to him in Russian. Sol indicates Rike, a small hand gesture, and Kolya asks Rike directly why she is bothering the boy. He knows nothing, and given what has happened, he doesn’t want the boy involved. ‘We cannot talk with you. We can’t help.’
Rike says she’s sorry, but she doesn’t understand what this is about.
And here Sol steps forward. ‘He called me. Before he fell. He asked me to tell your brother that he should run. That he was in trouble. That someone was after him.’
Kolya holds up his hand and tells Sol to be quiet. Rike should go.
‘Why?’ she asks the boy directly.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where was he?’
‘He was staying here. He’s gone now. He left as soon as I spoke with him. I don’t know where he’s gone.’
Kolya again instructs the boy to be quiet.
‘He needs to tell this to the police.’
Kolya says no. The boy is not involved. Whatever trouble her brother is in, Sol has nothing to do with. ‘He can’t help you.’
11.9
Udo comes to the apartment on his own. Henning, he says, is with the manager and the boy from the nightclub but they aren’t getting any information. The boy won’t even confirm what he told Rike earlier. He wants to speak about the other matter, Tomas Berens. He’d like to go through everything Berens has told her, everything she might have said to him. Anything that might seem particularly odd to her now. Udo tells her:
You are the stories you tell, whatever their basis in fact or experience.
It’s who you are. This sounds like Isa, truthful and banal. Once she can understand Tomas Berens, she can let him go.
What did she tell him? ‘Are there any discussions which stand out? Things which at the time were peculiar?’
Rike honestly can’t remember. In hindsight she just feels stupid about everything. The story about the assault is perhaps the most ridiculous element.
‘What did he tell you?’ Udo insists on detail.
It’s hard to remember specific conversations, all of that stuff about his neighbours.
Udo is definite. ‘What did you talk about? Try to remember.’
He needs to explain, she asks, how this matters. ‘What difference will it make?’
Udo holds his breath, as if he needs to say something, but wants to spare her. ‘We have nothing except for the stories. His apartment is close to the hospital. Henning thinks this is relevant. It could be a coincidence, but I doubt it.’
This isn’t so bad, she thinks. Surely? This can be explained. And what about the medication?
‘He won’t explain what he’s doing here.’ The medication the man was supposed to be taking is unbelievable. She should have seen it. The quantity. The bathroom had every anti-psychotic you could imagine. All suppressants of one form or another. The man isn’t well.
‘It’s all attributable.’ Udo is insistent. It will all come from somewhere. He won’t be completely making it up because that takes time and creativity he just doesn’t have.’ The books are his source. Perhaps, on some level, he wants you to know how clever he is. He wants the shape of this deception to be discovered. He wants to be acknowledged.
Udo lays out the possibilities. ‘This is what we think we know. The man is suffering some kind of breakdown. It’s possible he’s here because he’s fixated on the man they discovered in the desert.’ He asks again, ‘Is there anything he’s said which makes either or both of these seem likely? Is there anything you might have said which could have encouraged him?’
Rike stands at the window and looks for a while to the patio. She should shower, freshen up, put this aside and take a break. He wasn’t well. Didn’t he admit to that?
‘There’s no record of a family, the Berens, in Bergen.’
‘So where is he? Is he dangerous?’
‘I doubt it.’ Udo doesn’t think the man is dangerous, just delusional.
Rike lets the water fall hard on her scalp, turns under it, twists the head so that the stream becomes sharper and more focused. The pressure penetrates, at least preoccupies her so she can focus only on the water, the heat. She doesn’t want to think of Tomas, and cannot believe that he is disturbed in any way.
When Rike and Henning visit they find Isa sat up in bed, flowers on the table, flowers beside the bedside. Isa asks Rike if it’s too funereal. ‘I mean, seriously, look.’
Rike holds back at the door, and Isa asks why she’s looking at her like that. She can’t bear how kind they’ve become. Everyone is being overly nice.
‘Hen.’ Isa purses her hands, as if in prayer. ‘Would you give us a moment?’
Isa is seldom this serious. Henning holds up his hands in surrender. ‘Let me know when you’re done.’
‘I’ll let you know.’
Rike asks what’s wrong. Isa gathers papers from the side unit. ‘The boy who came to fix the washing machine—’
‘Shit-the-bed?’
‘Right. Little Mr Shit-the-bed. They think he’s the one shooting the cats.’
‘They know? Or they think?’
Isa closes her eyes and softly rubs her eyelids. ‘That’s not what I wanted to talk about.’
Here it comes.
‘Henning and I. Actually, it doesn’t have anything to do with Henning. I think. Not right now. But after the baby comes. I think you should start thinking about leaving Cyprus. This isn’t what it sounds like. I just don’t think you should stay here. I don’t think it’s healthy. I think you should make a new start. We can still keep looking for Mattaus. We aren’t giving up. You can still be involved.’ She reaches for Rike’s hand. ‘Rike. I’m worried about you. I don’t think it’s healthy to stay here.’
Rike sits back and folds her arms.
‘Do you hate me?’
‘I don’t hate you.’
‘But you don’t like me much right now?’ Isa shifts her weight awkwardly in the bed. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that nobody wants you to be happy. That everything is working against you. I just want you to have a fresh start.’ Isa pauses and purses her lips. ‘He’s sick. I don’t think you can blame him either. He’s a clever man who is also very sick. He’s a fantasist who thinks he’s more powerful than he is. This is all about power. He finds stuff in the real world and insinuates himself into it. Telling stories to make himself into something that he isn’t. We all do it. We all tell stories to make ourselves look better.’
Rike looks at the books and papers spread out across the bed.
‘Let it go.’
She finds her brother, or thinks this is her brother, online, in a video posted by
MFP
, a short piece, ‘Hotel, Hotel’, in which different couples repeatedly check in under the same name. The quality is poor, the pixels vibrate so that the image shudders, drops colour. Light fuzzes unevenly across the faces, stretches them into blades, and behind there’s one man at a table – right beside the reception. It’s the hunch, the way he leans on a table, the whole forearm flat to the table top so he’s leaning in, that makes her think
Mattaus
even before she properly reads the image: a reception, a receptionist, a couple, a table behind. First – a man whose face, whose body language, might or might not be her brother’s. The scene changes, flickers to another foyer, and again, the same scene replaying, the same four couples, with a title in the right-hand corner which names the hotel and place. Hotel Mons, Troodos. The Ziggurat, Limassol. Hotel 5, Ayia Napa. Hotel Montparnasse, Nicosia. Four couples check in, one after another, under the same name.
Henning and Isa haven’t spoken to her about Mattaus. While they talk about Lexi’s accident and the associated dangers of ‘a certain kind of lifestyle’, Mattaus, as a subject of discussion, is studiously avoided. Officially, Mattaus Falsen remains a
person of interest
. His flight, they assume, is one of panic. Rike senses that she has always misread her brother. Always looked for trouble, and regarded him with mistrust.
How could it happen? One minute someone is right there, the next, they’ve tipped over a low balcony. No one heard it. To Rike the suddenness, in how she imagines this, is profoundly saddening. Poor Mattaus. Poor, poor Mattaus. This will haunt him. This will eat him alive.
Rike replays the clip from the beginning. It seems more degraded the second time, holds just enough information to show a hunched figure at a table. Those shoulders, the outline of the head. He would wear a jacket, it’s exactly what he would do, even though the brightness of the images shows how hot it must be. He’s in Troodos, she thinks. She hopes. He’s up in the mountains, and when he’s ready, he’ll do what he always does. He’ll show up and face whatever is coming to him.
Henning brings Rike a glass of wine to her bedroom. She closes the computer. Isn’t ready to talk about this.
‘Stay as long as you like.’ Henning bows down as he sets the glass beside her. There’s no hurry. Once Henning is gone Rike returns to the computer, looks again at the clip and finds herself frustrated at how long it takes to reboot. She watches again, then again, this man who might be her brother. The figure is no clearer, and she is sometimes certain, at other times she cringes away from certainty.
The fact is she sees him frequently. Elements of him. Out in the street these small sightings, familiar as a scent.
Rike calls her sister on her mobile. Isa has news. It was an accident, she says, a slip where the nurse said
she
. ‘We have to be careful,’ it started, ‘if
she
is in distress . . .’
‘It’s a girl,’ she says, ‘I knew it. I’m going to have a daughter.’
While the issue doesn’t matter to Rike she’s moved to hear the news, because the event is now inevitable, impending.
Isa asks if she’s still there.
‘I’m here.’
‘It’s happening.’ She’s at that point where they need to make a decision. Her blood pressure hasn’t levelled, the child is in distress. They want to induce, and if this fails to draw on labour there will be a caesarean. The doctors have carefully explained the risks. ‘It’s because of last time,’ she says. Everything otherwise is in good shape. Ordinarily they wouldn’t worry. Except for last time.