The Wreckage: A Thriller (10 page)

Luca retreats, wiping his hands on his shirt. He questions the young boy in Arabic. There were four men inside the house. They were wearing uniforms. The police took their bodies away.

The nearest dwel ing is across the street. Luca notices a young girl on the rooftop, sitting beneath a tarpaulin slung from three poles. She’s wearing a scarf drawn across her mouth, peering from beneath the edge of the fabric, not quite looking directly at him.

“Did anyone see what happened?” he asks the boy.

“We were sleeping. My house is there,” he points further along the street. There is a woman hanging washing on a clothesline. The wet clothes are piled in an aluminum case just like the one he saw in the bank vault. On the opposite side of the road an old woman is sel ing onions and peppers from another case.

“Where did you get this?” he asks her.

“It was not stolen.”

“Where?”

The boy answers, “We found them.”

“Show me.”

Luca fol ows the boy again, walking between buildings that radiate heat, yet trap the cool behind thick wal s. Goats bleat from the shade of a lone tree. Stopping at the edge of a ravine, Luca’s feet have disturbed loose stones that bounce and slide down the steep slope, rattling against bags of household rubbish, discarded clothing, furniture and broken pottery.

Scattered on top are more than a dozen aluminum cases. Luca counts them. Including those he saw in the vil age it makes sixteen. How much money did they contain?

Walking back to the destroyed dwel ing, he begins taking photographs. Through the lens he notices the girl again, stil watching him from the rooftop. Luca waves. She doesn’t respond.

Crossing the road, he knocks. For a long while nobody comes. An old man opens the door, a yel owed bandage around his head. His eyes disappear in dark holes like burrowing animals afraid of the light.

Luca greets him with respect. He can smel the rotting flesh beneath the bandage. Infection.

“What happened to your head?”

The old man shrugs.

“Do you have antibiotics?”

“I cannot afford them.”

Luca sends Jamal for the first-aid box in the car. The room has rugs on the floor and a few simple pieces of furniture. The old man sits down on a wooden stool.

“Did you see anything last night?”

“No.”

“What about your granddaughter—did she see?”

“I don’t have a granddaughter.”

“The girl on the roof.”

“That is where she sleeps.” The old man blinks at him. “You are not an Arab.”

“No.”

“What is your religion?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Who is your God?”

“I have no God.”

“What sort of man has no God? What does he believe in? Why does he live?”

He lives because he is a man.

“You are American?”

“I was born there. My mother is Iraqi.”

“I like George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger. How come Americans don’t like footbal ? Everybody in the world likes footbal .”

“We have our own sort of footbal .”

The old man grunts, unimpressed. The girl appears on the narrow stairs. Barely sixteen, her face stil covered. She feels her way, pressing her palm against the wal . The old man cal s her closer. She raises her chin. Her eyes are a dul and sightless white.

“She heard them,” he says.

“What did she hear?”

The girl speaks softly in Arabic. “There was a truck and two cars. Men were arguing.”

“How many men?”

“Seven or eight.”

“What were they saying?”

“Some of them were told to go into the house. They were beating at the door, trying to get out. The other men loaded the truck.”

“Did you hear any names?”

She shakes her head. “They were driving Land Cruisers.”

“How do you know?”

The old man answers for her. “She can recognize different engines.”

“Did they say where they were going?”

She hesitates. The old man barks, “Tel him, wife.”

Not her grandfather!

“I heard them say Al Yarubiyah,” she says.

It’s a crossing on the Syrian border, eighty miles to the west.

“The men in the building were yel ing and screaming,” she says, covering her ears. “There was a big noise and then they stopped.” Luca leaves a bottle of antibiotics on the table and tel s the old man how many to take. He steps into the brightness of the afternoon. A dozen men are watching him, their faces wrapped in kaffiyehs. Eyes empty.

Jamal and Abu are waiting at the vehicles. Abu is eating a homemade sandwich of bread and meat. He has a weapon slung across his chest.

“Time to go,” says Jamal, glancing over his shoulder.

They leave the vil age in a cloud of dust but even before it settles Abu spots a vehicle tracking them, a battered pickup about two hundred yards away, travel ing in the same direction, bouncing over ruts.

The driver is dressed al in white. He’s not alone.

Jamal puts his foot down, swerving around potholes, his knuckles white on the wheel.

“How far to the dual carriageway?”

“A mile and a half.”

Luca pul s a Kevlar vest from his bag. “Put this on.”

Jamal shakes his head. “I’m fine. You wear it.”

“We both wear one.”

Jamal takes one hand off the steering wheel and puts it through the sleeve, then the other one.

Reaching beneath the seat, Luca pul s out a machine pistol. He cracks the car door, holding it partial y open, keeping his weapon out of sight.

The pickup is stil with them, the distance closing.

“They could be farmers,” says Luca, not believing it. He raises the machine pistol and fires a warning shot. The pickup doesn’t slow down or change course.

Ahead, lying discarded beside the road is a hessian sack. Jamal swerves violently, bouncing through a gutter and sending the Skoda rearing like a rodeo bul . At the same moment the sack explodes, blowing out the side windows and lifting the Skoda on to two wheels where it balances for what seems like the longest time, trying to decide whether to rol over or right itself.

Gravity is kind to them. Four wheels kiss the earth. Luca’s ears are ringing. Jamal is yel ing.

“He’s coming in! He’s coming in!”

The pickup has closed to within thirty yards. The passenger is firing on them, sending bul ets pinging off the side of the Skoda.

Luca leans over the back seat and shoots through the rear window. Ejected cartridges, brass, red-hot, rattle on to the floor. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Abu in the Toyota HiLux, rearing over the dunes and the undulations. He has pointed the vehicle directly at the pickup, closing at speed.

The gunman in the passenger seat recognizes the danger and changes his aim but it’s too late. The force of the col ision sends the pickup spearing into an embankment. Its nearside bumper digs into the earth and the entire vehicle lifts off the ground and rol s once… twice… three times in slow motion before exploding. Black smoke rises and bil ows like a mushroom cloud, perfect in the heat and stil ness of the afternoon.

Jamal and Abu pul up at a safe distance.

The cousins look at each other, breathing hard, wordlessly taking stock. Uninjured. Jamal runs his hand along the side of the Skoda, putting his finger through one of the many bul et holes.

“And you laughed at my armor plating,” he says, with a hint of pride.

Abu glances at the burning wreck.

“They wil have friends. We cannot stay here.”

14

LONDON

Holy Knight stares at a spot on the wal, concentrating on a crack in the paintwork because it stops her thinking of Zac. The police took away her clothes for testing. She fought them at first and it took three female officers to undress her. Then she sat in her underwear, refusing to wear the prison overal s.

There was an argument outside her cel .

A man said, “I can’t interview her if she’s half-naked.”

“She won’t get dressed.”

“Get her some proper clothes.”

The voices went away and came back later. A WPC brought a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt and Converse trainers.

“They’re not going to let you go unless you’ve been interviewed. You don’t have to answer the questions, but you have to listen to them.” Hol y could see her point.

Now in the interview room the questions are washing over her like background music in a shopping mal . Threats. Accusations. Abuse.

“When did you last see Zac Osborne?”

She doesn’t answer.

“What happened in the flat?”

Silence.

“Did you see his attacker? What did he look like? Are you deaf? Your boyfriend is dead. He was murdered. You won’t say a word. You’re not crying. You’re not upset. Maybe you don’t care.”

Hol y doesn’t react. She only turns her head when someone new enters the room, fixing her eyes on them, committing them to memory. Past experience has impressed upon her the need for silence. She has learned to analyze the consequences of co-operating with the police and has come to the conclusion that the best way to get out of her present circumstances is to say nothing at al so her words can’t be twisted and used against her.

The detective quotes from her file. A history lesson. The foster homes, the past arrests, her alcohol and drug abuse. Her mind slips back over some of these events, but most have been forgotten or blocked out.

She has decided that she does not like DS Thompson, who is no longer polite or respectful. He has an undertaker’s face and dandruff on his shoulders.

In Hol y’s experience, people tend to talk
at
her and not
to
her. They preach or they browbeat and they hear what they want to hear. But that’s not the reason she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t trust the truth. The truth can be a lethal thing.

Her mother used to work nights as a nurse. Her father, Reece, would go to the pub every evening, dressed in his best jacket, smel ing of aftershave, whistling as he walked up the street. He left Hol y in charge. Aged seven. Her brother Albie was five, epileptic, smal for his age. One night Albie left the taps running when he fil ed the bath. It overflowed and flooded downstairs, coming through the ceiling in a torrent of plaster and dust.

When their father came home, Hol y had tried to clean up but the wet plaster dust was like glue and she couldn’t hide the hole in the ceiling. Albie lay mute and fearful in his bed. His cat was under the covers with him.

“It was my fault,” she said. “I should have been paying attention.”

She watched her father’s large cal used hand go up in the air and come down hard on the side of her face: harder than Zac had ever hit her. It knocked her across the room.

Albie lay transfixed, holding the cat against his chest.

The skin of Reece’s face was tight against the bone. He dragged Albie out of bed by the neck and took him to the bathroom.

“You want to be clean? I’l show you clean.”

He pushed Albie’s head into the toilet bowl. Flushed. Did it again. Albie’s socked feet scrabbled on the tiles. He couldn’t breathe. Reece pul ed his head from the bowl and bounced it off the cistern before flushing it again. He left Albie lying on the floor, toilet water dripping from his face.

That’s when it happened. Albie’s eyes began to flicker and rol back in his head. He was stuttering and his limbs were jerking like a fish pul ed from the water. After a while he stopped moving. He had a blue ring around his mouth.

Hol y thought time had stopped. It was like watching a DVD and someone had pressed pause, freezing the frame in a blurred snapshot. Reece tried to shake Albie awake. Gave him mouth to mouth. CPR. Cal ed 999.

The ambulance took Albie to hospital but he was DOA. “What does that mean?” Hol y asked, but nobody answered her.

Her mother came running down the corridor. Reece caught her. Held her. “He just col apsed, babe. He had one of his turns.” He was stroking her hair, whispering, muffling her sobs. Then he looked at Hol y and there was a moment of chil ing certainty that registered in her mind.

“Ask Hol y, she’l tel you.”

Hol y remained motionless. Reece rol ed his jaw like he was chewing on something hard.

“He kil ed Albie,” she whispered. “He put his head down the toilet.”

Her father’s eyes narrowed like he was looking at her down the barrel of a gun.

“The little bitch is lying. It was an accident, babe, I promise you. I tried to save him. Gave him CPR, just like you taught me…”

“No, Mama, Albie overflowed the bath. Daddy got angry.”

“You shut your mouth!” he warned.

“It’s the truth.”

Her mother had pushed Reece away.

“She’s lying, babe, I’d never do anything to hurt Albie. He had one of his turns. Ask the doctors.”

“Why would she lie?”

“I don’t know. Maybe
she
flooded the bathroom. You know what she’s like—always blaming Albie for things.” Hol y’s eyes grew hot and bright. She rocked from foot to foot.

This time her mother knelt in front of her, holding on to her shoulders. “This is real y important, sweetie, you have to tel me the truth.”

“I
am
tel ing the truth.”

There was no fight. No more harsh words. That night Hol y and her mother stayed at a women’s refuge in Battersea. They shared a bed and Hol y fel asleep listening to her mother’s sobs.

It took Reece three weeks to find them. He came to the door of the refuge in his blue suit. Sober. Freshly shaven. He carried a bunch of carnations for her mother that he’d bought at the train station. He also had a present for Hol y—a cheap pink Barbie rip-off with straw-colored hair. Her mother and father drove off together—just to talk things over, Reece said. Hol y knew he was lying.

Later that night, Reece parked in a quiet street and put his hands around her mother’s throat. They found her body next morning lying in the passenger seat with a blanket over her knees. Reece left a suicide note in his flat. He hung himself from a beam in his lockup garage.

A brother, a mother, a father, her entire family broken by the truth—she wouldn’t make that mistake again. Hol y dreamed that night of Albie waving to her from Heaven, signaling her to come.