Blue-Eyed Stranger, page 17
“He wouldn’t miss practice,” she insisted. “It’s one of the things he does to manage his condition—structure his life, you know, so that he doesn’t have to make too many decisions.”
Martin put a hand over his eyes and massaged his temples while his worry shook the earth beneath him. “Shit. Can you go round there?”
“I did,” she said heavily. “Straight after practice last night, and then again first thing this morning. No one’s answering the door, but I’m sure I heard someone moving around in that ground-floor flat. He was watching me as I left, that lodger of Billy’s. Peering through the letter box, the ridiculous man.”
Shit. Shit. The closest member of Bretwalda to Martin’s house lived an hour’s drive away, and probably wouldn’t come anyway. He thumbed the phone off, got his keys, and ran to the car. Thanks to far too many gangster movies, he kept having vivid flashes of imagination—Billy tied up somewhere with cable ties, gagged and helpless, bundled into a cupboard or under the stairs. That wouldn’t be so bad. Martin could get him out, and they could both recover from that.
Billy already dead with a bullet through his brain, shoved in a cocoon of bin bags with bricks to make him sink, thrown into one of the county’s many canals. That one was not such a good thought. He tried to avoid having that one as he accelerated up the road, cursing all the cautious drivers ahead of him who kept maliciously slowing him down.
He tried to avoid that thought. But it kept coming back.
Halfway to Billy’s house, just passing the odd sail-shaped roof of the Castleton Outdoors Centre, the car coughed under him as though something had tried to trip it up. Martin’s heart hit him in the roof of his mouth. What?
The sensation passed. He drove on another mile, hoping, hoping it wouldn’t come again. And then it did. Twice. He slowed, forced to accept that yes, this was happening, there really was something wrong. What the hell? How could this be his life?
The realization came like falling flat on his face from horseback. No, God! Don’t say he’d . . .
With a final jerk and shudder, the engine stalled, and he coasted to the side of the road where he could tuck the useless vehicle into a lay-by. The arrow of the petrol gauge now pointed below the red, as if it had sunk through the floor. He’d been so preoccupied with getting there quickly, he’d forgotten to fill up.
Fuck! Fuck! He got out, slammed his hand against the door arch, hurt his palm, and swore at the machine for a good minute and a half, ending up bent forward, head down, and stymied. Life had brought him to a stop. He didn’t know what to do next. Couldn’t phone for a breakdown recovery—the cover had lapsed—couldn’t help Billy from here. Couldn’t come to the rescue like he had promised himself he would.
Looking back, he couldn’t put his finger on the point where this desperate need to protect Billy had flowered into one of the mainstays of his life, but wasn’t it just like his life that he should recognise it now, when there was nothing at all he could do?
Leaning against the useless car, he put his head in his hands while he thought. Okay, he could still phone Rolf. Rolf lived three hours away, but judging from his shame-faced look yesterday he’d be glad of the opportunity to do Martin a favour.
Martin tried to breathe until his tight throat had loosened enough to speak, but every time he tried to straighten up the ball in his chest pulled him back down. He couldn’t even stand up now. Turning, he put his back to the car and slid down to sit on the tarmac, surprised that the air above him could feel so heavy.
The sound of a distant motorbike reached him as he paged again through his contacts, trying to find Rolf’s number. The day was wet and cool around him, and the tarmac beneath him was cold. Bluish vegetables grew in the fields that lined the road on either side, and he just knew he was going to hate the smell of leeks forever after this. He lowered his gaze back to the foot of tarmac immediately in front of him and hit Call.
The phone had just begun to ring when a wheel and a foot came into his view, the foot clad in a high-tech, white-and-silver motorcycle boot.
“You need any help down there?”
Martin looked up and saw an angel. Or possibly a Hell’s Granny. The woman was clearly over sixty, her eyes white-ringed beneath heavy glasses, her white-and-silver helmet matching her hair. She rode a silver Norton Commando and was decked out in white-and-silver leathers.
Perhaps on another occasion he might have thoughtlessly mocked this attempt to achieve in old age what she had clearly missed out on in her youth. Right now, Martin couldn’t think of a vision of more loveliness.
“I think my friend’s in trouble, and I can’t . . . The car is . . .”
“I could take you.” She interrupted his struggle for words with calm. “Our main problem is the helmet. I don’t carry a spare.”
Martin’s paralysis passed like a storm cloud. He tore to his feet. “I can do that. I can do that!” Thank God for his laziness—he had unpacked the car of those things that needed to be dealt with, the perishable things, the things that didn’t like to sit in their own damp and go mouldy. But he’d left, at the back of the boot, all of his armour and his shields. He opened the boot up, fished inside, and brought out the spangenhelm, which gleamed dull and sinister against the rain-dark sky.
“Oh!” The woman’s helmet already gave her a chipmunk-cheeked look. Her smile only made it worse. “I say! I always used to dream of being stolen away by a handsome Viking. Better late than never, eh?” She held out a hand to shake, as Martin tightened the strap of his helmet beneath his chin. “I’m Laurie. Pleased to meet you. Where are we going?”
“Martin.” He grinned, shaking her hand. “You are a lifesaver. Possibly literally. Can you take me to 12 High Street, Rosebery Wood, as quickly as possible, please?”
She was old, and old people, notoriously, tended to have older opinions. He briefly considered lying again and couldn’t face it. He’d shamed himself enough in front of Bretwalda. It was time to be brave. The words were hard to get out, but they were the only ones that would come. “I think my boyfriend’s in trouble. I need to get there fast.”
The rain had blown away when they drew up in Rosebery Wood, and the sun was making the wet world as silver as Laurie’s rig. Billy’s house looked impossibly picturesque, with its blue front door and the tubs of marigolds and geraniums that lined the stone steps up to it.
“It doesn’t look like the scene of a crime,” said Laurie as Martin climbed stiffly from the pillion of her bike. “But good luck anyway. I hope it goes well.” She waved a parting salute, which he answered halfheartedly, and roared away as he contemplated the shut door and the darkness behind the windows.
Unlacing his helmet, he tore up the steps two at a time and hammered on the door. “Billy? Billy, are you in there? It’s me, Martin.”
As Annette had implied, there was something eerie about the silence that followed. His instincts told him it was not an empty silence but a silence in which some listener was trying hard to be quiet. It stretched unbearably. He waited, impatient and anxious, sure that eventually whoever it was who was hidden behind the door would crack and open it. Sure they would. Sure of it. He was sure . . .
“Billy!” His body seemed to have reached panic earlier than his mind. He was hitting the door hard with his fist tight in the webbing of his helmet. The thunder of steel on wood echoed down the tiled floor inside and reflected back at him. “If you don’t answer me I’m going to get in some other way. I’m going to break a window or knock down the door. Let me in!”
Still nothing. Doves flapped with whistling wings around the bell cote of the church tower. He felt rather than saw a neighbour’s net curtains twitch in the house opposite Billy’s. He gathered he was ten minutes away from being intercepted and escorted away by a posse of concerned locals. “Fine!”
It didn’t look difficult when he saw it on the TV. He turned to one side, took as long a run up as the small paved landing above the steps could provide, and drove his weight through his shoulder directly into the plate of the lock.
The door cracked against its jamb as he rammed it. Agony clawed up his neck and down his arm, lancing through his back and his ribs. Ah, fuck! He recoiled. The door bounced back with a clatter and stood smugly undamaged and unopened. Someone came out from the back garden of the house across the street and shouted “Oi!” as Martin yelled with pain and fury, kicked the door viciously, making it boom like a drum.
“What do you think you’re—?” began the denim-clad neighbourhood watchman from over the road.
Shit, thought Martin and darted looks from right to left, trying to find somewhere to run.
“Very well. I open.” And there was rattling behind Billy’s front door. A moment later, it swung slightly inwards, enough for Martin to push through, slam it shut again, and put his back to it, keeping the elderly vigilante out.
He was face-to-face with Kaminski, and the other man’s fist-flattened face was not happy at all. They stood, watching one another warily. And yes, Martin was pretty handy with a sword, and could hold his own in a contest with axes, but something about Kaminski’s posture, the corded strength in that wiry neck, the flatness of his narrowed eyes, suggested here was a man who did for real what Martin only played at.
“You want what, now?”
Well, okay, perhaps running himself into the same trap had not been the best move, but now he was here, he might as well play the role of rescuing hero to the hilt. “I want to know where Billy Wright is. No one’s heard from him for two days. His friends are worried.”
“And you think I have what? Abducted him? Because I am Polish, you think, ‘He is underworld criminal up to no good’?” Kaminski’s eyes narrowed again until they were like little slits of moonstone, cloudy grey and gleaming. “You know better, I think.”
Martin felt a little abashed. Some of the wired aggression bled out from his fingertips. “I’m sorry,” he said, slumping. “But Billy is really missing. Do you know anything about that?”
In response to Martin’s semisurrender, Kaminski’s fists eased open. He stepped back and turned, holding open the door to his flat. “Come. Come in.”
Come into my lair, said the spider to the fly. “Why?”
“No more talking with the door open. You come in, I lock. Then we talk.”
“That doesn’t sound like such a—”
Kaminski grabbed Martin by the elbow and yanked. Taken by surprise, Martin unbalanced and practically ran into the room while trying to regain his footing. Just as he’d said he would, Kaminski shut the door behind him, locked the three locks with a set of keys he kept in his pocket and slipped shut three heavy bolts. Nothing was getting through that door now.
Feeling suddenly sick, Martin looked to the window, in no way surprised to find it covered with a light metal grille that was screwed into the wood of the frame. Oh God. So much for riding to the rescue. Was he about to become the next victim?
The rest of the flat was hardly the den of iniquity he had been fearing. The bare boards of the floor were painted white to match the walls. The minimalist living space was uncluttered, except for a large black leather sofa and a light with a shade made from black-and-white cowhide. A huge black plasma TV was bolted to the wall in front of the sofa. Behind the sofa some reclaimed railway sleepers had been turned into freestanding bookshelves. Behind those, against the supporting wall of the house, stood a locked metal cabinet easily big enough to contain four trussed-up bodies if they were hung on meat hooks, or stiff enough to stand.
Kaminski caught him looking at it, gave a smug, almost gloating smile.
Martin backed towards the door, though he knew there was no getting out of it. Nothing in the room presented itself as a weapon that he could use, but he would need to at least knock the other man out long enough to get the keys out of his pocket. He could feel his heart whining beneath his breastbone like a saw, and when he moved, he could smell the acrid reek of fear on himself, shameful and embarrassing.
“You let me out right now or I—”
Kaminski’s smile dropped away. His mouth twisted with something rueful, bitter. “You are afraid of me. Why?”
Maybe the lamp, Martin thought. Maybe he could duck behind the sofa, grab the lamp, and use it as a spear. He was bloody good with a spear, and once the shade had been dislodged and the bulb broken, a six-foot wrought iron pole topped with shattered glass should deter anyone. He edged towards it. “Normal people don’t get the police round at five o’clock in the morning. Normal people don’t have cases full of ammunition, or lock their guests in before they’ll talk. Billy’s disappeared, and you’re freaking me out, so—”
“Normal people do not have guns, this is true.” Kaminski interrupted him, his voice soft now and reasonable, with a note of implacability behind it—an army commander bracing up the nerves of a panicking new recruit while reassuring them that he was perfectly in charge of the situation.
Oddly enough it did steady Martin, made him pause in his preparations to fight to the death.
“But I am president of rifle club,” Kaminski went on. “I have my guns, and I have spare guns belonging to the club in my house. I must be careful not to let anyone in to steal them, so I lock, always, the door between them and the outside world.”
Cold humiliation began to give way to a sear of hot humiliation in Martin’s stomach. This sounded so reasonable, so responsible. “And the police?” he asked, relaxing in slow, jerky increments while a wave of nausea passed over him as prickly as pins and needles.
“For my gun licence they must come and inspect. Make sure I keep everything locked in gun cabinet, make sure house is secure. I am sorry they come so early, but I had meeting later in day in London, so it was convenient for me.”
“Oh God.” Martin dropped his head into his hands and held on tight through the sickness and the dizziness of a great wash of needless adrenaline dissipating through his system. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I should have guessed it would be something like that. Or asked—we should maybe have just asked.”
“Hmm.” Kaminski huffed a laugh through his nose. “Is not the first time. I am in army when I am young. Boxing champion. Now my face is not good advertisement for my peaceful nature.”
“But, like you say, that kind of thing happens to me too. I should have known better.” One final pass to wipe the shame from his face and Martin sighed, straightened up. “Do you know where Billy is?”
“He is upstairs.” Kaminski waved a hand to indicate the flat above, and Martin breathed in deeply for the first time in days. “I am going out, yesterday evening, and I find him there. Outside my door. I think he is asleep, at first, but no, he is lying on the floor, with his eyes open, not moving.”
The brief feeling of relief morphed into horror. “Yesterday evening? What happened to the day before that?”
“I did not ask. I pick him up and look—he is not hurt anywhere. When I make him stand, he stands; he does not fall down again. I tell him to walk upstairs; he walks upstairs. But he is very tired, I think. I find keys, unlock door. I tell him to go to bed, he goes to bed. I put water and chocolate next to bed, then I leave. This morning I hear shower running and TV on, so I think he is better and it is no longer my business. This I leave to you.”
“Okay.” Martin sighed. “Okay, that’s on the better end of the things I feared. I can cope with that. Okay, okay, God. That’s good.”
The relief left him feeling momentarily limp, still leaning on Kaminski’s front door, with his eyes closed and his head bent. He gave himself a minute to allow the day’s terrors to drain away, to brace himself back up again for action.
“You want a beer?”
Martin laughed. “God, yes! Desperately. But I’d better not. If you let me out, I’ll go and make sure he’s all right.” He moved aside so that Kaminski could go through the lengthy process of unbarring the door. “Thank you for looking after him. I’m Martin, by the way, his boyfriend.”
That was considerably easier to say the second time around, and he hoped that Kaminski would understand that he was being told this sensitive information in the trust that he was the kind of man who could treat it properly. He hoped Kaminski would see that this was an apology.
“Jacek.” Kaminski put out a large hand with stars tattooed over the knuckles, and they shook to cement a new alliance. Martin ducked through the narrow gap of the door and smiled to have it slammed closed behind him and immediately locked and bolted again. What had seemed a sinister habit now seemed an excess of responsibility, as knowledge turned danger into reassurance.
He looked at the stairs, braced himself again, and then went up, knocking gently on Billy’s door at the top. He too could hear the TV from here, the reassuring drone of some documentary.
No one answered the knock, but he knew enough now not to take that personally. He checked the handle, pushed it down. The unlocked door opened for him, and he went in.
Billy lay on the sofa. The TV was on, but Billy had turned towards the back of the couch, his forehead against the cushions, his eyes closed.
“Billy?” Martin shut the door behind him and edged into the room. There was a full cup of tea on the floor in front of the settee, but when he touched it he found it was cold. The remote lay beside it. It didn’t seem likely to Martin that Billy had deliberately tuned the TV to Hollyoaks, so he flipped through some channels and found Poirot instead. Billy sighed when he turned the programme over, so he was a) not dead, and b) not asleep.
That was good. This was some kind of crash, then, of a deeper, more insidious cast than the ones he had had before. Martin could deal with that. No questions, no pressure. He leaned down to stroke the chocolate-brown curls away from Billy’s forehead, which creased in a frown under his palm. “I’m so glad you’re okay. I’ve been so worried.”
But no, that was not a conversational tack he could afford to take at this point. He could feel it open up the lids of all the boxes of his own fear and dismay. If he let his own feelings out at this point, they could easily turn to anger, and anger wouldn’t help either of them.
