Thurston pushes himself upright from the table. “Okay, Sofi. I’m done. I don’t know why I’m asking. We won’t see Miller again.”
Sofi shrugs. “Maybe.”
Thurston stops in the doorway. “You good to lock up on your way out? How’re you getting home?”
“I have my motorbike.”
“Okay. Good night, Sofi. And, so you know, I wasn’t being any kind of hero out there. I did what I had to, nothing else.”
Thurston opens the kitchen door.
“Thurston?” says Sofi. He turns back and sees tears welling in the corners of her eyes.
“Yes?”
“Miller…”
“Miller what?”
Sofi Girsdóttir shakes her head. “Nothing. Forget it.”
Chapter 9
Thurston is woken by a monster prowling outside his room.
He hears someone screaming and opens his eyes to see fingers of flame creeping around the edges of his door. Below, a malevolent red line throbs. His room is full of smoke from the ceiling down to about two feet from the floor. An ominous, restless roaring comes from the landing. The fire sucks up every available scrap of oxygen, gathering its strength for an all-out assault on his room at the apex of the house—the worst place possible in this situation.
Coughing out smoke, Thurston rolls out of bed, dropping to his elbows. The floor is hot to the touch.
A woman screams and Thurston hears the door to his room start to buckle. He has seconds, no more.
Another scream. A sound from Hell.
“Barb!” shouts Thurston and chokes on a lungful of smoke. Coughing, his eyes tearing up, he crawls to the bathroom and finds the bath taps. Thurston drags the towels under the water and soaks them. He wraps one around his head and another around his upper body. When he turns back to his bedroom, flames are licking hungrily under the bottom of the door. The pressure from the inferno on the landing bends the flimsy wood. If he opens the door to get down to Barb, the backdraft will blow him straight through the opposite wall. And keeping the door closed won’t be an option much longer.
Thurston can’t hear any more screams from Barb but knows he has to try something. He makes his way to the window and punches out the glass, his hand wrapped in a T-shirt. Smoke is sucked upward, giving him momentary relief, but the ventilation creates a sudden rise in oxygen. The fire on the landing howls in fury and renews its assault on the door.
Thurston steps out onto his tiny balcony and looks down. Barb’s room, one floor below, has an identical balcony some two yards to Thurston’s left. Flames are already rolling upward and over Barb’s window.
Thurston doesn’t hesitate.
He makes the calculation and leaps down, landing square on Barb’s balcony. The old concrete threatens to pull away from the brick wall but it holds. Just. The heat here is intense. Thurston puts his back to the wall, the bricks hot against his skin.
“Barb!” he shouts. “Barb!”
Nothing.
Thurston braces himself. He ducks as low as he can and tries to look inside.
It’s like looking into a blast furnace.
Even with the wet towel wrapped around his face, Thurston’s hair soon starts to smolder.
“Barb!” screams Thurston, but gets nothing back. He knows Barb Connors is dead already and that he won’t be far behind if he doesn’t get off this balcony. The concrete shifts below his feet and Thurston feels the whole structure start to give. The V is disintegrating around him.
Above him, the fire outside his bedroom finally breaks down the door, and a massive backdraft blows a spume of glass and wood and flame into the cold night air. The blast knocks Thurston off balance. He stumbles dangerously, inches from tumbling over the edge of the balcony.
Sixty feet below is nothing but hard pavement.
Thurston registers people running across the street. Someone screams and Thurston feels the skin on his fingers start to burn. In a second or two he won’t be able to hold his grip. Things become simplified at these moments: do something right now, or die.
Adrenaline works differently in different people.
Cody Thurston has always found when his adrenaline spikes, events around him slow to a crawl. So long as that slowness is not accompanied by paralysis, it can be a useful trait. In the sliced seconds of time he has left on the balcony, Thurston scans his surroundings for an out.
There’ll be something. There has to be.
And then he sees it. Not much but it’s all he’s got: a phone line bolted into the crumbling brickwork a yard or so down to his left. It’s too far to reach with his free arm, but, by swinging across and down, using his own body weight as a pendulum, Thurston manages to hook his feet around the wire. He locks his ankles together, takes a deep breath, and lets go of the railing.
For a dizzying second he drops before the wire cuts into his ankles but he holds on. Now he’s hanging upside down from the burning building. He swings upward and manages to grab onto the wire. He clings to it like a monkey on a vine.
A slab of masonry topples from above and almost swipes him out of the sky.
“Move!” shouts a voice from the street and Thurston hauls himself hand over hand toward the steel telephone pole across the street. He’s about twenty feet from The V when he’s almost jolted off as a second piece of debris falls from the roof and bounces onto the wire. Thurston redoubles his efforts and, with each passing second, gets closer to safety.
Less than ten feet from the telephone pole, the wire finally pulls free from the crumbling brick and Thurston is free falling. He smashes backward into the steel pole and the wire almost jerks loose from his hand. He falls another ten feet before he’s pulled up with a violent jerk as the wire finds its length.
The wire snaps and now Thurston is falling. He twists in midair and lands heavily on the roof of a car parked below. The sheet metal crumples and every last ounce of Thurston’s breath is knocked from his lungs.
But he’s alive.
As the buzz of unconsciousness closes in, he hears a rumble. He looks across at The V in time to see the roof collapse in an explosion of dancing orange sparks and blackened timber.
And then there is darkness.
Chapter 10
Lights. Voices. The clang of metal equipment and that unmistakable antiseptic tang in the air. A gurney rumbles down a corridor, wheels squeaking on the rubberized flooring.
Hospital.
Thurston opens his eyes to see a young cop sitting next to the bed, his head bent over a phone, mouth slightly open.
“Is she okay?” says Thurston. “Barb?”
The cop looks up, startled. “What?”
“Barb Connors. She was in the pub. Did she get out?”
The cop doesn’t answer.
“She didn’t, did she?” Thurston lets his head sink back and closes his eyes. An image of Barb trapped inside her room comes into his mind. She’s screaming, her clothes on fire. Thurston opens his eyes again and now there’s a doctor leaning over him with a syringe.
“Wait,” says Thurston, but the needle is already in his arm.
“How long will he be out for?” says the cop.
The doctor shrugs. “Six, seven hours maybe,” he says.
“Tell m—” says Thurston but can’t complete the sentence. He feels like he’s underwater with some great beast dragging him down into the depths. He fights to keep his eyes open but it’s no use. Blackness creeps in at the edges of his vision and his last coherent thought as he sinks back into unconsciousness is to wonder why there’s a cop in his room.
Chapter 11
Thurston’s in the hospital for three days. He’d banged himself up pretty bad getting out of The V but it mostly looks worse than it is. He’s got nine stitches in a head wound and five more in his right hand. There’s been some low-level skin damage on one side of his face. No broken bones. He’ll live. The concussion had been what concerned the doctors most. Despite the fall being broken by the car roof, Thurston ha
d hit hard. Internal bleeding had been a distinct possibility but that had not shown up.
As soon as he’s given the all-clear he dresses in the jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers given to him by the cops, and two of them sign him out and take him in handcuffs to a patrol car. No one has answered any of his questions about Barb Connors and he’d been allowed no visitors. The patrol car takes him directly to Paddington Green police station less than a mile from the hospital.
Inside the station, Thurston is shown into an interview room and left to wait. He takes a seat on one side of a plain wooden table. Now he’s away from the hospital, anger about his treatment is growing. They can’t think he had anything to do with the fire, so why all this heavy-handed stuff? Thurston wonders if it could be related to something in his military past—the fire at The V bringing him to the attention of some shadowy black ops outfit. Almost as soon as he’s thought of it he dismisses that as fanciful. Thurston knows too that these kinds of mind games are part of any interrogation process. Whatever’s happening, his conscience is clear.
Eventually the door opens and two plainclothes cops come in. One of them, a beefy-looking guy with thin, reddish hair, and what Thurston guesses will be a permanently flushed face, sits down and places a file on the table in front of him.
“I’m Detective Sergeant Hall,” he says. “This is DS Morrison. We’ll be conducting this interview.”
Morrison is a tall, bland-looking man in his early thirties. He says nothing and takes a seat next to Hall.
“You ready to tell me what all this is about?” says Thurston. “I need to know if Barb Connors survived.” He keeps his voice level, respectful. No sense in pissing these guys off if all they’re doing is their job. Still, Thurston has to repress the urge to shout.
“Interview commences 12:00, Monday, eleventh of January,” says Hall. He shows no sign of having heard Thurston speak. “DS Hall and DS Morrison present. Subject, Cody Michael Thurston, formerly of 21 Hackney Road, London.”
Thurston looks at Morrison but, seeing nothing there, keeps his mouth shut. There’s a play going on here and Thurston can wait.
“Why did you do it, Thurston?” says Hall. “She knock you back? You try and screw her and she wasn’t having any of it?”
“Excuse me? What are we talking about? Barb Connors? She’s eighty years old.”
“He’s not talking about Barbara Connors,” says Morrison. “At least, not yet.” He looks down at the file. “We want to know why you raped and killed Sofi Girsdóttir.”
“What?” Thurston sits up straight.
Hall makes a show of sighing. He exchanges a weary look with Morrison.
“Is this how you’re playing it, Thurston?”
“Playing what?”
Hall leans forward and props his elbows on the desk. “Sofi Girsdóttir, your co-worker and ex-girlfriend—”
“My what? Sofi’s not my ex.”
“We understand you had a prior sexual relationship with her that ended recently.”
“We went out once or twice. It didn’t work so we stopped. She’s not what I’d call an ex.”
Hall leans farther forward. “Was the fire an afterthought? Something to cover your tracks after you’d raped and killed Sofi?”
“Let me get this straight,” says Thurston. “Sofi’s dead?”
Without warning, Hall slaps Thurston across the cheek. Thurston bites back the instinct to ram Hall’s face into the table. Thurston sees Morrison tense and thinks: he’s not entirely on board here. It’s useful information.
“Okay,” says Thurston. “You can have that one, Hall.” He wipes blood from his cheek. His head wound has reopened. “Let’s do things your way.”
“While you’ve been in hospital pretending to be hurt,” says Hall, “we’ve been busy out here building a nice, shiny, completely airtight case against you. Want to hear how it goes? After the pub shut down for the evening, you tried it on with Sofi Girsdóttir. Maybe you weren’t happy about her breaking up with you. Maybe you are the kind of man who can’t control himself around women. Who the fuck knows? But you tried and when you were rejected you raped and strangled her. Later, to cover your tracks, you set the pub on fire and staged your own escape. Barbara Connors, an elderly lady, your boss, was left to burn alive.”
Hall pauses for emphasis and holds up a hand. He counts off on his fingers as he talks. “We have a petrol can with your prints on it. We have multiple witnesses who saw you arguing with her on the night of the attack. We have sexually threatening e-mails from you on Girsdóttir’s computer. We have you alive and her dead. So, let’s keep things nice and simple, shall we? Tell us why and how and it’ll go easier on you, Thurston. Not much, but easier.”
Thurston says nothing.
“No request for a lawyer?” says Morrison.
“He’s upset, DS Morrison. I think he might cry.”
Thurston stares at a spot on the wall somewhere past Hall’s shoulder trying to put together something coherent from the information he’s receiving. Barb’s dead. Well, he knew that already. He’d heard the screams. Sofi being dead is a shock. And the crap about him raping her is doubly shocking. Thurston thinks about the evidence Hall had recounted. He thinks about that quite a bit.
It’s the reason why he’s not going to ask for a lawyer, because the torrent of shit coming out of Hall’s mouth means one thing and one thing only: this is a grade-A stitch-up. There’s no point in Thurston protesting his innocence, no percentage gained in whining. If someone’s putting this much effort into framing him then he has to come up with something better than asking for a lawyer. No, Thurston keeps quiet because he isn’t planning on sticking around.
Still, there could be advantages to talking.
Putting your opponent’s mind somewhere else, for example. Thurston wants something from Hall but needs him off balance to get it.
“How much are you getting, Hall?” says Thurston. “Enough?”
Hall frowns. “Come again?”
“For the frame,” says Thurston. He switches his gaze to Morrison. “You know about this, too? Wait, no, I’m guessing not.” Thurston smiles bleakly and holds Morrison’s gaze. “Your partner’s for sale, Morrison. A cheap whore. There must be a part of you, deep down, that knows the little fucker’s dirty, right?”
Morrison glances at Hall and Thurston sees the barb has hit home. Morrison isn’t in on this—whatever “this” might be—but has enough suspicion about Hall already to figure he could be bent.
“Ah,” says Thurston, “you do.”
“Very funny, Thurston,” says Hall. He leans forward close enough for Thurston to smell the cigarette smoke on his breath. “You’re going down, dickhead,” he whispers. “For a long time. And you know what they do with rapists inside.”
Thurston lunges at Hall, grabbing him by his lapels and pulling him across the table. He moves so quickly, he and Hall are on the floor of the interview room before Morrison can react.
Thurston and Hall grapple for a few seconds before Morrison hauls Thurston off his partner. Hall staggers to his feet and punches Thurston hard in the stomach. Thurston drops.
“Steve!” spits Morrison. “Enough.”
Hall, breathing heavily, controls himself with difficulty. He brushes his thinning hair back into place and adjusts his tie. Thurston is curled on the floor in a fetal position.
“Interview terminated,” says Hall. He knocks on the door and two uniforms step in.
“Overnight,” says Hall, bending over Thurston. “And we’ll get you a lawyer, Thurston. You’re not getting off on some technical bullshit.”
Thurston says nothing. Instead, he concentrates on slipping the mobile phone he’d taken from Hall’s pocket into his sock. He’ll need it later when he gets out of here and comes after every last motherfucker responsible for the killings of Sofi Girsdóttir and Barb Connors.
Chapter 12
Once he’s down in the cells, Thurston’s chances of escape will reduce drastically. At the v
ery least, Hall’s phone will be discovered.
No, if he’s going to get out of here, there’s only going to be one opportunity: on the short journey between the interview room and the lower cells while the two cops taking him there assume the action is over. Thurston slumps between the two uniforms, waits until they pass the fire exit door. The cops aren’t expecting any trouble from the hobbling Thurston so when it comes he meets little resistance. They haven’t even cuffed him.
Big mistake.
Without warning, Thurston drives the point of his elbow full into the gut of the cop to his left and pops the knee of the other with a simultaneous downward heel kick. With both men disabled, Thurston smashes the fire alarm glass and pushes open the exit door. The bare concrete stairwell is empty but won’t be for long. Thurston walks slowly down, pretending to look at Hall’s mobile. Cops begin to stream into the stairwell, barely giving Thurston a second glance—lesson one in the dark arts he’s been trained in. If you look as though you belong somewhere, no one questions it, not even cops.
This strategy does have a fault: it is strictly a short-term solution. The fire alarm Thurston triggered to cause confusion works well. But by the time he gets to the fire exit door at the foot of the stairs he can detect a shift in the information spreading through the cops milling around outside. News of his escape is in the air. He hears voices raised, fingers pointed his way.
Time to go.
Thurston moves to the curb and waits a few seconds for what he wants on Harrow Road. Behind him he sees five or six cops moving toward him.
C’mon, c’mon.
A courier on a big motorbike weaves slowly beside a stationary BMW. Thurston steps out into the road and, in a swift movement, drags the courier backward off his bike.
“Stop!” yells a voice.
Thurston jumps onto the bike and guns it through the crowd of cops on the pavement. Without hesitation he roars straight down the steps of the Joe Strummer Subway, ducks under the Westway, and comes up the other side heading south on Edgware Road. By the time the first pursuit vehicle has been alerted, Thurston is at the northern edge of Hyde Park. He turns in through the gates and dumps the bike in a clump of trees. At a park café he swipes a blue zip-up windbreaker and a baseball cap from the coatrack near the door.