Authors: Ali Knight
‘And Mummy,’ said Yannis.
Christos turned to Kelly. ‘Yes, you’ll always have Mummy.’ But the way he said it sent a shiver down her spine. He turned back to his son. ‘You know what happened today? Someone gave me a polo mallet. Ever heard of polo? You play it on horses, just like you’re doing at Hyde Park in the mornings with Sylvie. Come on, I’ll show you.’
Yannis could sense something much more exciting than Lego was at hand and jumped up and ran out of the room and Florence followed. Kelly felt a part of her heart going with them.
She thought about her conversation yesterday with Georgie in the sauna. She needed to try and find something to use against Christos, but it felt like an impossible task she wasn’t capable of executing. Yannis’s shouts filtered through from the living room.
There was one thing she could do. She went down to the bedroom and put on a jacket, pulled at the armchair in the corner of the bedroom and dragged it under the lightshade. She was too short to reach the ceiling light, so she grabbed the stool by the dressing table and, balancing precariously on that, could just reach to unscrew the Sleepchecker. She didn’t care that she was being filmed by the green eye in the corner, she wanted to know what Christos had been doing while she had been sleeping. She threw the Sleepchecker in her bag and left the flat, heading through Bloomsbury to the Internet café. The man following her kept a discreet distance behind and waited in the street outside.
She settled down at the computer and watched the grainy images. There were five nights to look through. Thursday night she was recovering from being drugged, and she moved a lot, twisting and turning and thrashing in her sleep, the video a stop-start journey through the dark hours. Christos in contrast slept easily, jabbing a hypodermic into his wife’s thigh not seemingly troubling him. On Friday’s video she saw Sylvie walk into shot and lie a dry-cleaning bag on the bed. It was soon after this that she had discovered Sylvie in the flat after her collapse at the station. She was taken aback, Sylvie had put Christos’s dry-cleaning on the bed just like she did. That evening she was comatose in the bed while Christos worked for at least two hours on his laptop. He got up in the night to go to the toilet.
Saturday night there was little video; she and Christos must have been sleeping soundly. At one point the camera recorded them both turned away from each other, still. Something struck her. The camera was motion sensitive, so why was it recording now? She rewound and watched the video again. Nothing, bar a fleeting shadow to the right of the screen. She watched it again, couldn’t make out what it was, but it must have been big to trip the motion sensor.
Sunday night Christos was in bed alone. She was in the kids’ bedroom, processing the revelation that their father wanted them to go to boarding school. In the grey light of early dawn she saw herself come back into the room and crawl under the covers, defeat lying over her more fully than the duvet.
The video reached last night. Her husband seemed to have an untroubled conscience by the little tossing and turning he did, most of the night he was unmoving in the bed. She watched herself sleeping on her back, mouth open, saw that Christos was also asleep. The timer running across the bottom of the screen showed 3.55 a.m., the deepest time of night. The moment when an enemy attacks. Michael had told her that. They were both still, why was the video recording? She rewound and played the film again. And glimpsed a pair of legs walking through the edge of the shot. She flinched. The legs weren’t Medea’s, they were too thin. This body was lither and younger, tight trousers clinging to the calves. What the hell was happening? The legs stopped moving and walked to her shoes, lined up under the window. It was then that Kelly realised the woman was barefoot. The woman slipped on a pair of her favourite stilettos and walked out of shot towards the dressing room. She was sure now, the swaying walk in high heels had made it so: Sylvie.
Kelly got to her feet. This invasion could not stand. Did Christos know? Medea? The questions were coming too fast to process. Then something happened that made Kelly sit back down with a gasp. Sylvie reappeared at the other side of the bed, her side. She was still in the stilettos. Sylvie came up to the bed and leaned over, staring at Kelly, looming over her in the dark. Sylvie moved her head as if examining her from different angles. She was unhurried, her movements lazy and sure.
After a few minutes of scrutiny, Sylvie turned and put the shoes back, exactly where she had found them, and walked in the direction of the door. Kelly stood again, grabbed the memory card, and ran.
T
he storm was in full force, hurling everything it had at the
Saracen
. The waves were crashing over the prow of the ship, throwing spray far into the air. The crew was in a state of suspended animation, waiting, waiting for the weather to break. The temperature was dropping fast; the Wolf had already added layers of clothing, felt the cold fingers of the seas around Europe, the chill of an English autumn, reaching out to grab him.
He was scrubbing rust off a door lining with a coarse wire brush and a chisel, his hands chapped and red with cold – he preferred work to idleness in a storm – when he heard the President talking in hurried tones to some of the crew nearby. ‘Up to the bridge, now.’
The President rounded the corner. The look on his face told the Wolf something was serious. ‘You too, now.’
The Wolf dropped the brush on the floor, put the chisel in his pocket and they walked up the stairs. The entire crew was there on the bridge, including Jonas and some other travellers.
‘The company employee is missing,’ said the President. ‘He’s not in his cabin, he’s not been seen for eight hours. Unless we can locate him imminently, we’re looking at a man overboard.’
The Wolf heard someone swear in Polish. They all knew what man overboard meant. In a storm this severe, if you went in you survived less than two minutes.
The President outlined who was to look where on the vast ship, to see if the missing man could be located. The meeting didn’t last long and the group broke up, keen to bring this unsavoury situation to a conclusion one way or the other. The Wolf walked away, rounded a corner and jumped down the flights of stairs to the accommodation deck, running to cabin number 18. He didn’t have much time. The door was locked. He knocked. No answer. He knocked again, then inserted the chisel’s thin end into the lock mechanism of the door, and turned.
T
he numbers ‘one eight two four’ had set up shop in Georgie’s brain and weren’t going anywhere soon. She tried fiddling round with the numbers, checking them against consignment numbers on shipping bills of lading, the unique BIC code that every container had, but drew a blank. She felt bad that she couldn’t brainstorm with Mo, but she was far beyond legal here and no one else could know what she was doing. She discovered 1824 was a UN number for sodium hydroxide, a substance that the United Nations had classed as dangerous for international transport purposes. Sodium hydroxide, more commonly known as caustic soda, she noted, was used in the production of wood and paper pulp. But why would Christos be pulping prized rosewood? She checked the paperwork for the
Saracen
and there was no record of any sodium hydroxide being aboard.
She repeated the message to herself:
1824
is no.
The voice was emphasising the no, the negative, but that still didn’t help her.
She put her ear next to the table and tapped the top. She was listening to her fingers, trying to test Ryan’s suggestion that the sound on Christos’s voicemail might be something to do with fingernails. She could approximate the tappy sound, but not the scrapy bit that preceded it. She began to stroke the table.
‘If you’re looking for something hard to caress, I can oblige.’ Preston was grinning down at her, a cup of tea in his hand.
‘Ha ha.’ She scowled as she sat up.
‘Anguish wants us in there now.’ He nodded towards the boss’s office.
Georgie followed Preston and Mo into Anguish’s office for a post-lunch update on the case. Mo began. ‘The cans are logged as coming in, going out with the delivery companies and arriving. We’re seeing if anything’s slipped through the system. We’re about halfway through the paperwork and computer records for the dates we’re looking at.’
‘OK, keep going with that,’ Angus said.
‘I spoke to the wife again,’ Georgie added. ‘I think she’s keen to help us if she can, but she doesn’t know very much. The truth is she’s terrified of Christos, he has her followed everywhere—’
‘That’s way outside our job description,’ Angus said dismissively. ‘She needs Women’s Aid or something.’
Preston smiled in a self-satisfied way. ‘If you play with fire, you’re gonna get burned.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ snapped Georgie. After what she’d seen on Kelly’s stomach yesterday, it was the most inappropriate comment she’d heard in a long time. She didn’t feel she could tell them about the burn, it felt private, not something Kelly would relish her revealing to a room of men.
‘You know exactly what it means,’ retorted Preston. ‘Christos is as dodgy as hell, we just haven’t found the evidence yet. We know it, so does she.’
Georgie was getting angry and decided it was better to stay quiet.
‘We could check the lorries that park up at the play centre? They’re coming tomorrow to set up for the Halloween charity party,’ suggested Mo.
Preston frowned. ‘Why? We thought originally that the wood was being shipped every six months, but we’ve found no evidence for that. It could just be a one-off after all.’
‘Oh, so you’re prepared to assume Kelly is guilty with no evidence, but you don’t want to pursue a good lead because of a lack of it.’
‘Guys, please.’ Angus held up his hand. ‘Preston might be right.’ Angus combed the back of his hair with a rolled-up piece of A4 before banging himself lightly on the head with it, thinking. ‘To search the lorries by the play centre we’d need a warrant and I’m not sure we have cause to get one.’
Georgie persisted with the Kelly angle. ‘Christos is clearing the decks at home, sending the children away as if he’s planning for something big. His wife’s suspicious of his every move.’
‘Suspicious?’ Angus leaned forward, pointing the roll of paper at her. ‘The wife’s a dead-end. Keep on task, Georgie, don’t let other agendas distract you from the case.’
She sat back as if he had slapped her.
‘We still don’t know why there’s so much wood.’ This was Mo. ‘We need to find a use for this wood. And why is it being sent in its raw state? It’s cheaper to cut it at source and then send it without the bark – machine-planed it fits in the can better anyway.’
‘I agree it doesn’t make much sense at present,’ conceded Angus.
‘We’ve interviewed Christos’s PA,’ Mo added. ‘She’s also his mistress and on the board of the charity he supports, the charity that’s opposite the yard where the wood goes. But we’ve checked out her story and, well, we’ve got nothing.’
‘Maybe we’ve got this the wrong way round,’ Preston said. ‘Why are we trying to second-guess what they’re using the wood for? All that matters is that someone wants it and someone is prepared to pay for it. It’s that simple. End of.’
Angus gave her a look as if to say, ‘Why didn’t you come up with that?’ To Georgie’s immense irritation, she had no answer.
K
elly ran back to the flat. She would show Christos what she had found on the Sleepchecker. As the lift doors slid open she could hear raised voices upstairs, could sense stress in the air.
She took the stairs two at a time and came in to the living room to find Sylvie there with her family, following Christos as he paced around on his phone. ‘I want a word with you,’ she spat. She wanted this woman out of her home,
now
.
‘It’ll have to wait,’ Sylvie replied, without even looking at her.
‘I’m not waiting,’ Kelly shouted.
‘Mum’ – this was Florence talking now – ‘someone’s gone overboard on the
Saracen
.’
‘The seas are huge, there’s no hope of finding him,’ added Medea.
Kelly was brought up short by this news. ‘My God, that’s terrible. Who is it?’ she asked.
Christos thanked someone on the phone and rang off. He looked livid, panting with shock and adrenalin. ‘One of my employees. He’s been with me for fifteen years. I can’t bloody believe it!’
‘How did it happen, when did it happen?’
Sylvie was wringing her hands together. ‘That’s what
we
want to know.’ She was looking at Christos. ‘Is this some kind of hit? You can’t just fall overboard, even in a storm.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Kelly added.
‘What the hell is going on aboard that ship?’ Christos was shouting at no one in particular.
‘We’ll just have to wait for news, there’s nothing more we can do till the ship arrives tomorrow,’ Medea said, trying to placate her son and his lover. ‘The captain’s still doing a full search. The coastguard’s been informed, a search helicopter has been sent—’
‘It makes no sense!’ wailed Sylvie.
The news was indeed bad, but she couldn’t help feeling that Christos and Sylvie’s reaction was extreme. They didn’t seem to be showing much pity for the man himself or his family. She wondered what Georgie would make of the news.
‘Daddy, you said you’d show me how to use the mallet.’ Yannis was tapping his father on his leg.
‘Not now, Yannis.’
The boy started whining.
‘I need to talk to you, Sylvie,’ Kelly said.
‘What?’ Sylvie was frustrated and her mind was on other things.
‘I want to swing the polo mallet—’
‘Shut up, Yannis,’ Sylvie said.
‘Don’t you dare talk to my child like that,’ Kelly retorted.
Sylvie realised she’d been too harsh and relented. ‘OK, look,
I’ll
show you.’ She had aggression in every movement, the look of a woman with a plan gone awry. She took a chair from the kitchen and placed it on the living room floor near the fish tank, then took a stool and balanced it on top of the chair.