Minnet Kable is dead.
Deer don’t eat sweetcorn or swallow fillings.
He tries the electric switch – in case it’s suddenly started working again, but it doesn’t. He goes down a few steps and waits for a moment to see if his eyes will get used to the light. From here the darkened stairwell falls away into the gloom – he can see nothing. He puts his hand on the banister and ducks his head down, squinting. There is light coming through the floorboards in the kitchen which casts a dim segmented light on to what lies below; you can tell the cellar extends a long way. Ian the Geek has missed something. Something bad is down here because the smell is overpowering. The floorboards aren’t caulked, there is light shining in dusty slices from the kitchen above. A smell from down here would just rise through the gaps into the kitchen.
He gets the torch from the table, powers it up, and shines it down into the darkness. The cellar stretches way off under the house, past the kitchen and onwards into the gloom. To his left are ranged wine racks stacked with dusty bottles. To his right is a pile of firewood and a litter of boxes containing the usual family stuff – Christmas decorations, old bicycle pumps. Further on is the avalanche of coal that Ian the Geek must have precipitated, but it’s only halfway into the cellar and it’s clear he can’t have covered the entire floor space of the cellar in the time he was down here. The place goes on further – much further.
Honig continues down the remaining steps and stops next to the boxes of tinsel. He aims the torch at the ceiling and runs it along the beams. He estimates he must be standing under the kitchen table. He can see the darkness where the large rug sits, and, over near the hearth, the smaller rug where the camp beds are. He shines the torch along the rough stone walls, covered in cobwebs and soot – and sees that along the entire back of the cellar rough-hewn logs are stacked, ready for the fire. Pile after pile after pile of them. He’s fairly sure Ian the Geek didn’t check any of those.
The floor is made of cast concrete and his feet don’t make a sound as he crosses to the wall. He walks like a cat, stepping slowly into each new space, and stops, waiting for something to reveal itself. There’s a grille in the ceiling at the far end which must come out under the big bay in the front room. Other things are down here – old milk crates, a tent in a red-and-blue cover, a rotting cardboard box full of plastic laundry-conditioner bottles. Piled against one of the brick columns he sees clothing.
He squats and begins to go through it. A woman’s clothes, crackling with old dried blood. Bra, knickers, tights in a big jumble. There’s a pair of jeans and from them he fishes out a wallet. He flicks it open and what he sees makes him close his eyes.
Ginny Van Der Bolt. The housekeeper.
Honig has to count to twenty before he finds the strength to stand. ‘Hey!’ He reaches up and uses the butt of the torch to knock on the underside of the ceiling. ‘Get your tukas down here,’ he calls to Ian the Geek. ‘Now.’
He goes to the furthest corner and stops next to the heaps of cut wood. This is where the smell is coming from. He bends slightly and rests his hand on the wood, feeling it rough and dusty under his fingers. No movement from upstairs.
‘Geek,’ he bellows. ‘Down here now.’
The torch beam makes the wood seem to swim in and out of the gloom. He moves a log from the top of the pile and casts it to one side. And another, and another. The fifth log is leaning against something soft.
Honig stands quite still for a long time, his heart thumping in his chest. Something large and spreading is under the wood and now he looks down at his feet he can see what’s oozing out. He lifts one foot – feels the tacky adhesion there. Upending one of the other logs he finds a hand. It is swollen and black, the nails raised from their beds. There’s a ring on one finger – a woman’s ring. As he pulls away more logs the body confirms itself as female. Naked. The head is turned away from him, in the direction of the wall, bent at an almost impossible angle as if she is looking at her knees. He’s grateful he doesn’t have to look at her face. The arm he can see has been sliced by something sharp – she’ll have bled from that. The edges of the wound are peeled open and shrivelled like orange skin. He pulls away another piece of wood and sees the gaping wound in the belly.
Honig’s chest heaves. He can’t tell if it’s nausea or because he wants to sob. Kable is dead, Kable is dead, Kable is dead, he repeats to himself. Kable is dead.
Eights Week
MATILDA LIES ON the floor, manacled by her ankle to the radiator. Her eyes are closed, she is somewhere between sleep and delirium. All day she has been trying to summon up a better picture of Oliver. Something clean and beautiful and untouched by age and reality.
At last her eyes flicker and a small smile comes to her face – because she can see him. He’s young again and he’s dressed in a nice suit with a college tie all covered in red pelicans. He’s standing in a sunny quad, holding a pair of binoculars. It’s eights week at Oxford and he’s taken her back to the college reunion. The binoculars are so he can be the first on the top of the boathouse to see his old college team come round the bend in the Isis.
He holds a hand out to her. ‘Come on, Matilda my love,’ he says. ‘Let’s go for a walk next to the river.’
She reaches a hand out to him, but as she does tears come into her eyes. ‘Oh, Oliver,’ she murmurs. ‘What are they going to do to us? What are they going to do to Lucia?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admits. ‘I don’t know.’ The light in the daydream fractures in sharp geometric strands around Oliver’s face. A rush of blood to the head and Matilda wakes, her thoughts suddenly crystal clear. Her eyes come open abruptly. She sees above her the ceiling, the flaking paint on the ornate cornicing, the ceiling rose and all Kiran’s aeroplanes hanging there. She pushes herself to a sitting position, careful not to put more strain on her ankle, and blinks around her. It’s about placing herself into the physical world again, because it is in the physical world that she now has to operate.
Her face becomes fixed, her eyes locked on the peeling paintwork of the skirting board. Something … something … something – she gropes after the idea – she’s missed something about this room. She scans the room, her heart beating harder. The years of maintaining a house like this … years of keeping on top of the havoc wreaked by two young children intent on destroying everything about the house. The broken furniture, warped doors, torn curtains and dog hair. Missing hamsters, smashed cups and jam on the skirting boards.
Skirting boards. Her eyes turn slowly to the base of the wall. She lowers herself on to her hands, as if she’s going to do a press-up, and stares at the gap between the board and the floor. The silvery wire she noticed the first afternoon she was shackled here. She hasn’t given it a thought in all this time.
It’s like a wave crashing over her. A memory that should have come to her days ago. Why didn’t she think?
Her daughter-in-law, Emma. Poor embarrassed Emma. Standing shame-faced in the utility room. ‘Matilda, I’m sorry, I think that’s my fault.’ A plumber’s van leaving, and in the sink a collection of debris that had been clogging the washing-machine pump. Fluff and a single wire from an underwired bra. It’s the culprit ninety per cent of the time, the plumber had said. Who’d have thought: the humble underwired bra, the saboteur extraordinaire of washing machines. But what comes back to Matilda now is Emma’s next comment, peering concernedly into the machine. ‘I’ve lost both wires, I hope the other one isn’t still in there.’
It happened at about the time Emma and Kiran were first married. The missing bra wire never did turn up.
Matilda blinks. She’s looking at it, she’s sure of it. Today she is cuffed by her right ankle, which changes the range of her reach. Lying flat on her stomach and stretching hard she finds her hand reaches the skirting board easily.
She raises her chin, licks her lips and focuses on the wire.
This is not over yet. Not yet.
Ian the Geek
HONIG COMES UP the s
teps slowly, his head throbbing. Still Ian the Geek hasn’t answered or appeared. When he gets to the top of the stairs he sees why. Ian the Geek is fast asleep in Oliver’s recliner. The place Honig usually sits. His head is lying back at an angle, perfectly relaxed, his chest rises and falls slowly.
Honig’s hands are smeared with matter, he is holding the wallet of a dead woman, and Ian the Geek has slept through the entire thing, as if it’s Christmas Day at his family home and he’s just polished off a bottle of port.
He takes long, calming breaths. In his head things are sliding together. But they aren’t coming to rest at the places he expects. He looks down again at where the blood drops were on the floor. They’re not here now, but he can recall how they looked. He’s got a perfect snapshot of them in his head.
He draws an imaginary line from the cellar door to the sink. He realizes that he’d pictured Ian the Geek bringing the intestines in from the front door, passing the cellar door where they began to shed blood. Now he wonders why he assumed that, and then he wonders why it was necessary to have brought them through the house at all, when Ian the Geek could have simply taken them round the outside to the trees. And thirdly, with a rush he realizes that intestines which have been tangled in barbed wire for any length of time wouldn’t still be leaking blood. They’d only be leaking if they had just been taken from the body.
He looks back down the stairs, his pulse racing. Ginny Van Der Bolt in the basement? Ian the Geek’s version of events was that he spoke to her then came straight back up here, finding the innards on his way. Which is of course a lie. Like everything else. Like not being able to fix the landline and ‘finding’ the entrails in a clearing. Like the way he ‘checked’ all the messages on the mobile phone in the car this morning. How many messages about Kable’s death did he surreptitiously delete while Honig was driving …?
The car keys are on the worktop. Honig notes them, then looks back at Ian the Geek, who is still sleeping peacefully, a half smile on his face, his arms folded across his chest. Honig estimates the time it will take to get to the keys and get into the hallway – out to the front door. Tongue between his teeth, he bends and silently lowers the torch to the floor. He is halfway across the kitchen when Ian the Geek’s eyes snap open.
He smiles pleasantly when he sees Honig, but doesn’t try to sit up.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ he says with the same slack-mouthed nonchalance that Jagger used in ‘Sympathy For The Devil’. ‘Have you worked out who I am yet?’
Headaches
STORMS MOVE ACROSS Somerset again. Claps of thunder shake the windows of the little cottage in Priddy, making the books on the shelf shudder. The computer on the desk sends a dim glow across the bedroom to where Caffery sits, on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. There is paperwork scattered around him, and he is pressing his fingers hard into his scalp – fighting the headache that has been nibbling at him all evening.
This investigation, this insane challenge to find Bear’s owner, is turning to mud in his hands. He’s crosschecked the first ten companies Cheryl – the head-messing HR girl – has given him. She’s right, they all have some involvement with lasers, and some connection with Columbus which was, just as Cheryl said, restructured in the nineties, the military division sold off. Since the nineties Columbus’s various offshoots and fledgling companies have divided and re-divided into a morass of different corporations. It’s mind-boggling.
He lowers his hands and glances across at Bear, who is fast asleep on the end of the bed. Her ears are moving as if she’s dreaming of a long run. Rabbits and a ball being thrown.
OK, he thinks, hooking the phone out of his back pocket, and scrolling until he finds Johnny Patel’s number. One last chance. One last-ditch effort.
Patel answers after seven rings, just as it seems the call will divert to the answering service. He sounds out of breath. ‘Hi, hi, Jack. Hang on—’ Caffery hears the shuffling noise of him covering the phone and whispering to someone. Hears something creak. Then Johnny. ‘Hi, Jack, sorry. How’s it going?’
‘I take it I didn’t wake you?’
‘No, mate. No sleep on my planet.’
‘Hard work, Johnny. I pity you. You’re not at the office, I guess that’d be too much to ask.’
‘I am, as it happens. Take it while you can, take it while you can. What can I do you for?’
Caffery sighs. ‘I don’t know. I’m in a dead-end street, shit creek, Johnny. Sort of last-chance saloon stuff. I’ve had a tiny bit more info come through.’
‘Oh joy.’
‘Yeah – about fifty companies, with, say – oh, I don’t know – average four hundred employees apiece, past and present. It’s all hard copy, but I can scan it and zip it over to you. If you compare the names of the employees with your wedding registration records, you might get a name pop out at you.’
‘Yeah,’ says Patel. ‘No problem. Hold on a minute, I’ll just press my “compare-all-married-names-with-all-names-in-the-scanned-files” button. It’s right here, it’s got a giant pink light on it, just begging to be pressed. There we go – done it. Should have your answers this time next year.’
‘OK, OK. I know it’s not that simple. Stick with me, though – there has to be a way through this. You’ve got a stack of names you’ve already pulled out, so it shouldn’t be all that hard to take the names and cross-match them?’
‘You’re right, but Jack, old man, it could take ages. I mean day after day after day. Weeks. I haven’t got OCR – at least not one that actually does what it says on the tin. I might end up having to key the names in manually.’
‘But it could be done – in theory? Even if it takes time?’
‘Uh, yes. In theory. But it is time to look hard at what we’re trying to do. The sheer needle-in-a-haystack element to this. Are you sure this is worth it?’
Caffery is silent for a moment. Since yesterday morning he’s slept just four hours. He feels no closer to his goal than he was four days ago.
‘Just do it,’ he says.
He finishes the call and rubs his eyes. He stays like this on the edge of the bed for almost five minutes, fighting the rising depression in him. It’s not working – he can kid himself that between them he and Johnny are going to dive into this mess and come up holding the magic shining clue, but that’s not going to happen. In a week’s time he’ll find himself with an invoice from Johnny amounting to thousands and nothing to show for it. It’s like being told in the coldest possible terms that you’re going to be drowned. And saying in reply, OK, bring it on.
He shakes his head and raises his chin, wondering how to shed this mood. He’d like to speak to the woman he knows, the one with the specialist search unit. She would have an opinion. She would bounce him back to enthusiasm in the blink of an eye. He stares moodily at the phone, picturing what she would say. She’d tell him to stand up and fight. She’d tell him to stop being so defeatist. And he’d probably end up angry with her and it would all go to shit. Instead of making a phone call he finds two paracetamol in the bedstand drawer, fills a glass with the whisky and swallows them with a slug. He refills his glass and leans back on the pillows, eyes closed, the tumbler resting on his chest.
He’s got to deal with this. He can’t just let the mystery disappear into the ether. He can’t let the sickness, the headaches and the dreams, back into his life. Some people can do that thing with boxes – they can strap any unwanted thought down in a box and never open it. Caffery’s never been able to do that. Never.
The last cogent thought he has is that this is all the Walking Man’s fault. The fucking Walking Man who could answer his question in a second if he just had a mind to. Put all of this to bed and release him. Caffery thinks it. Forces himself to think it again, so it’s ingrained and he doesn’t forget it. And in the process of the second thinking he falls into a deep sleep, poleaxed at last by alcohol and exhaustion.
The Killing of Ginny Van Der Bolt
GINNY VAN DER BOLT died f
our days ago. It was sunny – a fresh breeze – nothing to complicate things for Ian, and as he climbed the giant stone steps of The Turrets he wasn’t anticipating anything. It was only when he saw the front door standing slightly ajar he realized it wasn’t going to be straightforward.
He pushed the door open and came silently into the hallway to hear a radio playing in the kitchen, to smell polish and bleach, to see a basket of fresh-cut flowers in the hallway. To glimpse, across the threadbare kilim and flagstones, Ginny Van Der Bolt in the downstairs shower room – on her knees, back to him, scrubbing the toilet. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt, blond hair in a ponytail, round backside sticking up in the air.
She heard the door latch. She raised her head. A strand of hair dangled across her forehead, and there were clogged specks of mascara around her shocked open eyes. Hurriedly she pulled off her rubber gloves and fumbled in her pocket for her phone. Maybe she recognized him from years ago when he lived in the area, maybe it was just the uncertainty of an intruder, but she was terrified.
‘Don’t come near me.’ She jabbed a number into her phone. ‘Whoever you are, respect what it’s like to be a woman on her own.’
He took another step towards her and that was enough. She began to scream. She scrambled out of the cloakroom and bolted into the kitchen. He followed her through and found her at the back door, battling to negotiate the locks and keep her phone in her hand. In that second he knew what he had to do.
The Wolf is still inside him. All these years later. He may have been around the world since then, but his killing instinct hasn’t left him.
When he joined Gauntlet he didn’t know he’d be back here, recreating all this. He’s been pulled back here by circumstances and a little help. When Pietr Havilland ordered him to use the murders of Hugo and Sophie to scare the family Ian baulked at first. Then he saw arguing was only drawing more attention to himself, and now he’s accepted it the irony is delicious. That Havilland should unwittingly be hiring Ian to re-stage his own killings? It is his private joke, one of life’s quirky twists. The death of Ginny Van Der Bolt, that too tumbled on to him from nowhere. Thrown in by fate. He had to make of it what he could. Let instinct take over.