Authors: John Baker
Sam drove carefully, getting the feel of the right-hand drive and exploring the subtle potency of the five-cylinder engine and power-assisted steering. There was a hands-free GSM telephone, which might come in useful, and a small pop-up menu-driven screen on the dashboard which he could alternate between a map with highlights or as a system of large arrows. Either way it showed him where he was on the map, which route to take and the remaining distance and travel time to his destination. When he stopped to check out the air-conditioning the pop-up screen turned into a television and if he’d had the time and the inclination he could have sat back and watched another showing of
Atlantic City.
Sam had always been something of a Luddite and he was pleased with himself that he could manage the V70’s technology. Took a little time to get to grips with the audio system but he sussed it in the end and listened to a Jacques Brel collection. The only other thing he could bear to play was Villa-Lobos but he decided to keep that for later, when he got out of the city. The remainder of the tapes were all by Neil Diamond - twenty-three of them.
He made his way down the hill, through Slemdal and Vinderen. He got lost briefly in Majorstuen, passed the Bislet Stadium and the Munch Museum and eventually left Oslo behind. He tucked in behind another Volvo and stayed within the speed limit on the E6, heading for the border with Sweden. Saabs and BMWs overtook from time to time, leather-clad bikers in groups of four or five, the occasional classic Cadillac pulsing with rockabilly music. Seemed like there were no old cars in this country that weren’t classics. Jacques Brel was ecstatic on the audio system, Mathilde had come back to him again. Sam shrugged and gritted his teeth; some people had all the luck.
He rang Geordie on the hands-free system. Geordie’s voice was tiny but already sounding better than it had when Sam had found him in the street.
‘I’ve got the mobile on vibrate,’ he explained. ‘I’m not supposed to use it in here. I’ve already spoken to Janet.’
Sam imagined him propped up in bed with the smallest whitest face in Scandinavia.
‘How you doing?’
‘Good. I’m still alive.’ His voice was far off, little more than a whisper. ‘Holly?’
Sam shook his head. ‘She didn’t make it.’
‘Fuck, Sam.’
‘What happened back there?’
‘I was standing on Calmeyers gate, outside that Christian junk shop, a little further down, near the Vietnamesisk Cafe. It was quiet, no one in the street. I’d been there, what? Ten minutes? Not longer. I saw Holly coming down the street on her own. She went into a shop, then she came out with bread, a baguette or a sandwich. She walked to their flat and went inside.
‘I was wide awake, expecting to see the guy. Could be he was following her. So I’m weaving along the street, crossing from side to side, making out like I’m interested in mung beans, sweet potatoes, all that stuff, haricots. But I’m the only one there. There’s a couple of Asian women, and there’s a guy with a van trying to get a table through somebody’s front door.
‘So I turn round and make my way back. I’m maybe fifty metres past the flat when I hear the door slam and there he is, on the street. I have to do a double-take because I can’t believe he’s coming
out
of Holly’s flat. I never saw him go in there. He must’ve gone in before I was on the street. He’s been inside waiting for her.
‘He’s walking fast down the street now, past that Greek taverna, and I’m standing with my mouth open, catching flies. So I leg it after him. I spin him round on the pavement, his back against the wall. He’s got an axe in his hand, a hatchet. It’s one of those with a blade, like an ordinary axe, but opposite the blade it’s a small pick-axe. You know what I mean?’
‘I know.’
‘He swings at me and gets me in the shoulder. The rest you know.’
‘You’re gonna be OK,’ Sam told him, relief in his voice. ‘You’re still alive, which is more than can be said for other people he’s gone for.’
‘I know. I was lucky. They wanted to give me a blood transfusion but I don’t believe in it.’
‘Bit of blood’s not gonna hurt you, Geordie. You looked like you could use some.’
‘I’ve cleared it with the doctor. It means I’ve gotta stay here a bit longer, that’s all.’
‘But don’t you wanna see Janet, get back home to your family?’
‘No need, Sam. They’re coming here. I talked to Janet on the phone.’
Sam didn’t ask who was paying for Janet and Echo’s flight, he assumed it would be him.
He didn’t tell Geordie that he was going to find it hard working this case on his own. He made his face grin, hoped it would transmit down the line like that.
‘I’m on the road,’ he said. ‘The police are after me. I have to get out of the country.’
‘How, Sam? Where’ll you go?’
‘I’ll find a way. See you back in York.’
‘Is that where the next one is?’
Sam nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Alice. Calls herself Alice Richardson now, her maiden name. But for about four months she was called Alice Turner.’
‘Another marriage made in heaven?’
‘Dunno where it was made. She laughed at everything I said. I thought she loved me, but it was because she had good teeth.’
Geordie sighed.
‘She seemed to think two and two’d come to make five, if she cried and bothered about it enough.’
‘But with you it only came to three?’
‘She decided to let me go after a while. I wasn’t ready for a relationship.’
Geordie breathed down the phone.
Sam shrugged his shoulders. ‘These things happen,’ he said.
He rang home and Angeles picked up the phone. ‘Don’t ask me no questions about where I am,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way from where I’ve been, heading for where this lunatic’s gonna strike next.’
‘I’ve been worried.’
‘You and me both. You being hassled?’
‘Some. The day you left the police had me in the station all day.’
‘But you didn’t say nothing.’
‘I didn’t know anything, Sam. I still don’t.’
‘They’ll have a tap on the phone, be listening in to this.’
‘And my other calls?’
‘You can bet on it.’
‘I miss you, Sam.’
He whistled through his teeth. Watched another Saab go past at speed, young Swede at the wheel with blond hair in spikes as though he was plugged into the car’s electrical system. ‘Yeah. I miss you in the mornings.’ She laughed down the line. ‘What about the rest of the time?’
‘I can take most of it,’ he said. ‘Evening’s bad and during the day, that’s bad too. But mornings are the worst. Waking up there’s a surge of optimism because it’s a new day, you know, just before you open your eyes. Then it all comes back. Bang. Another shit day. I’m still chasing a guy I don’t know who he is. I know what he’s done and what he’s doing. I know where he’s heading. But I don’t know
who
he is. And you’re not here, and whatever happens during the day you’re still not gonna be here tonight.’
‘I’m not going anywhere else,’ she told him. ‘I’m waiting for you.’
He let the words hang there, trying to imagine her with the phone cradled against her ear. Dark curls and her skin with its hint of Buenos Aires, a genetic inheritance from her Argentine father. And close by there would be the long white cane, a substitute for her eyes.
‘I’m signing off,’ he said.
‘When will I see you?’
He shook his head. Reached to switch off the phone. |
‘I love you, Sam,’ she managed to say before he broke the connection.
He mouthed the words back to her though she was gone. They wouldn’t convey what he felt anyway. His life i had been littered with small loves but Angeles was different. And yet each of those small loves had seemed possible at the time. Sam had a genius for wrapping potential in glitzy paper and convincing himself it was reality. He’d taken many a girl off the street under the illusion she was a princess.
He should be there with her, not tearing from country to country in pursuit of some madman. All the women in his life were in danger. How long would it be before this guy, whoever he was, was turning his attention to Angeles, or to Marie or Celia, the women who were part of Sam’s life now? According to the pattern, the sequence, the next one would be Alice, but what happened after that?
Sam would have to make sure that he never got to Alice. He didn’t know how, he just knew that he had to do it.
He crossed the Svinesund bridge and felt the hairline prickle at the back of his neck as the Norwegian/Swedish border came in sight. There were a couple of lights on in the custom buildings and someone in a uniform by a large container lorry. But the road wasn’t manned and the stream of traffic continued on into Sweden without interruption.
Sam changed the tape, pushed the play button on the audio system and listened to the opening strains of the first of the Five Preludes by a Brazilian guitarist who had known Villa-Lobos and who had had his brow touched by the hand of God.
He settled back in the well-upholstered seat of the V70 and aimed it towards Gothenburg. He drove into the night thinking about women who had accompanied him on shorter or longer journeys and who had shared his past. He thought about Geordie stuck back in Oslo and he thought about Angeles in York. And as the kilometres passed he began to focus on Alice Richardson, tried to imagine her in her house in Clementhorpe with her husband and her children. He knew that he wasn’t the only one thinking about her, that the man who had already murdered three of Sam’s previous partners also had her on his mind.
‘But I’ll beat you this time,’ Sam said out loud. ‘Whatever it takes, you’re not having Alice as well.’
He parked the V70 on the top deck of a multi-storey car park in the middle of Gothenburg. Bought a ticket for it and stuck it on the windscreen.
He had breakfast in a fast-food joint, baguette with bacon and Brie and two cups of strong black. He pumped the assistant for directions to the docks. He felt good in the new Finnish suit, it took ten years off him, and when he’d handed over the cash it felt like that many years’ earnings.
But if that was how much it cost to keep him on the street then it was worth the money. If he was picked up now they’d lock him away and leave him to rot. And there’d be no hope at all for Alice.
The
Stena Germanica
was at her berth but wasn’t due to leave for Kiel until 7.30 that evening. He bought a single ticket and sat in the waiting room with a coffee machine and a German tourist with a limp for four hours. They both attempted to breach the language barrier and failed almost completely. Sam discovered that the German liked his new suit but was unable to discover which part of Germany he came from. They settled on sign language eventually and were able to express joint disgust over the warm sludge which the machine served up if they fed it enough Swedish Kroner.
When they got on board Sam went to his cabin and locked the door. He showered and lay down on his bunk, pulling the single white duvet around him. He listened to the chugging of the huge engines and felt the rolling of the ship as it left the shelter of Gothenburg behind. With his eyes closed he allowed his mind to gnaw at the bone of facts and suppositions about the killer. The guy was almost there, still emerging from a welter of leads and clues and random inklings. Sam was looking for a miracle, something that would collect the disparate facts together and deliver an exact portrait of the killer. His choice of language on the phone when he was gloating over the death of Nicole.
When your ex-partner was transformed,
he’d said. That single word,
transformed.
It had to be significant. And in Oslo, when he used the word
Katha
like an incantation, before axing Geordie.
Katha
was not an incantation, it was a meditation or a prayer of some kind.
When he thought of the killer in terms of his language Sam imagined a mystic, a holy man or a latter-day hippie. If that was the case the killings would appear to be sacrificial.
But language wasn’t the only thing that was known about the man. The braid on his trousers - that was so odd that it had to be significant. On the other hand he was good at disguising himself. Geordie had recognized him as two, probably three, different characters in Oslo. So the braid could be a blind lead.
And then there was the pubic hair. The distinct possibility that he might have a doll. He could be a ventriloquist, perhaps? Sam shook his head. Ventriloquism brought him back full circle to language again.
It didn’t matter how many times he went over the facts the guy refused to come into focus. He was almost there, as if he was tantalizing Sam, standing in the shadows of consciousness. No matter which way Sam came at him he managed to stay out of the light. He was a silhouette, a ghost. He didn’t seem to be threatening. Unless your name was on his list.
Sam got out of his bunk and dressed. He went to the ship’s buffet restaurant and gorged himself on poached salmon, prawns and tiny squares of herring in mustard sauce. He got himself a clean plate and went back for blue mussels and crayfish, a pile of fresh salad. Ate so much he had no room left for pudding. The profiteroles looked real nice, too good to leave behind, so he put a couple of them in a bag for breakfast.