The Outsider, page 16
‘Seriously. But I’m older than you, and even if I wasn’t, I don’t exactly have a lot to offer. At the moment, I don’t want a relationship with anyone. But if someone wants to be with you, and they’re worth your time, they won’t wait for your dad’s permission.’
‘He wouldn’t like that.’
‘You’d be worth the risk.’
‘Oh.’ She blushed, and pulled her scarf up over her mouth, but I thought she was pleased. She started off again with more energy and I matched her stride.
‘Incidentally, Logan is gay.’
That brought her to a halt again. ‘What?’
‘He’s proposing to his boyfriend at Christmas.’
Her face was red again, but this time with anger and embarrassment. ‘Fuck you, Mark.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ I felt sincerely sorry for her, for a number of reasons, and making fun of her for lying didn’t seem right.
‘Look, it was just …’ she lifted one shoulder, helpless. ‘Everyone sees me the way my dad sees me. His little princess. I’m not that. I’m my own person. There are things that I want and … and need … and they have nothing to do with my dad and what he wants for me.’
‘That’s normal.’
‘Is it? Is it normal to make up a complete fantasy about being screwed by some random bloke?’
‘It’s understandable,’ I said. ‘And not a big deal.’
‘Why are you so nice all the time?’
‘Why do you say that as if it’s a bad thing?’
She made a noise of pure frustration and set off again, and that was the end of that. I followed her from shop to shop, watching her choose presents for people with unerring knowledge of what they would like, adding bags to the collection I was carrying without pausing to calculate what she was spending.
In an old-fashioned men’s outfitters in Turl Street she pulled out a rainbow of cashmere jumpers in different sizes, ten or twelve of them.
‘Extra, extra large. That should fit Harry. His shoulders …’ She was flipping through the stack of folded jumpers, searching for something. ‘Ah.’ She turned to me and held a green one up to my shoulders. ‘I think that’s the right size for you. Not too skimpy.’
‘You don’t have to—’ I began, and she cut me off.
‘I know. Do you like the colour?’
A woman leaned in between us to twitch a scarf off the display, jostling me out of her way. I frowned, irritated by the interruption.
‘I love it, but I don’t deserve it.’
‘Yes, you do.’
Shopping wasn’t enough to improve her mood, I was surprised to see. If anything, she seemed even more distracted, almost on the verge of tears.
‘Meal break?’ I suggested as we came out into the narrow street and she followed me into the Covered Market where there was a greasy spoon tucked between the butchers and florists and gift shops, all doing strong pre-Christmas business. It was a proper old-fashioned caff that smelled of cooking bacon and had steamed-up windows, and we were lucky to get a table.
‘This isn’t the sort of place I usually go,’ Juliet observed, pulling her coat around herself.
‘More fool you, then. It’s great.’ I left her peering at the gingham oilcloth that covered the table as if she’d never seen anything quite like it. I went to the counter to order for both of us. When I put my hand in my pocket for my wallet I encountered something unfamiliar: a hard plastic rectangular object. A small mobile phone. Not mine, though; mine was in the inside pocket of my coat. I didn’t take it out to look at it, not with Juliet watching, but I remembered the shopper jostling me out of the way earlier and I saw the incident in a new light.
I had said to Opal that I needed some way of contacting her, and Opal had provided.
Back at our table, Juliet was still looking miserable. I set a mug in front of her.
‘There you are. Finest builder’s tea. That’ll cheer you up.’
‘Thanks.’
‘What’s up?’ I sat down opposite her, and my knee nudged hers under the small table. She jumped. ‘Not still worrying about the Logan thing, are you?’
‘No. Not that. Although I’m sorry I lied.’ She couldn’t look at me. ‘Mark, you need to be careful.’
It wasn’t what I’d expected her to say. I froze. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know about Neil.’
‘Neil?’ It took me a second. ‘The chauffeur?’
‘He was nice and kind, like you. He was young. Dad liked him. I liked him.’
‘And what happened? He left, didn’t he?’
‘That’s what they said.’ A fat tear slid down her cheek and she rubbed it away. ‘But I don’t know if that’s true. One day he was there and the next he was gone. I heard something that night. Shouting. Odd noises. I asked Dad about it but he told me not to worry.’ A tear slipped down the other cheek. ‘He said Neil had stepped out of line and I wasn’t to think about him again. And he made me promise not to go near his flat, by the stables, so I didn’t.’
The waitress dumped our plates in front of us with a cheery, ‘There you go!’ and I muttered my thanks automatically. I’d never felt less like eating.
‘I don’t know what he did, Mark, and I don’t know what my father did to him, but I don’t want the same thing to happen to you. He’s watching you … and me … and everyone. He’s paranoid, now. Whatever he’s doing, it must be big … and he won’t allow anyone to get in the way of what he wants.’
22
As warnings went, it was both timely and daunting. The mobile phone in my pocket felt heavier than it should, a physical reminder of the danger I was in. I was sorely tempted to throw it away rather than risk taking it back to Haulton House, but I needed it, I thought; I had to be able to communicate with Opal. It wasn’t safe, but the danger of not being able to warn the authorities about another terror attack was far more terrifying.
Once we’d eaten I slipped into the toilets, where behind a locked door I was able to take out the phone and look at it properly. It was switched on, but asked me for a four-digit password that I didn’t have. After a moment of blind frustration, I tried 8020, the same number I had been given for the locker in Euston Station, and the phone unlocked for me. The notes app was open on the screen.
Open the email app. Any key stroke you type is downloaded automatically and will be read – do not send any emails. Images taken with the camera on this phone will be downloaded automatically also. Do not save them on the device. Check the deleted items folder for messages; they will only be sent in exceptional circumstances. Delete this.
I deleted it, then went to email and typed a thumbs-up emoji, then deleted that. It felt like shouting into the void but I had to assume it worked. It was a lifeline – or a noose that I was placing around my own neck.
Juliet seemed more cheerful after she’d got the warning off her chest, and after the café we visited some more shops before I ground to a halt.
‘My arms are going to give out if you buy anything else.’
‘Wimp,’ she said lightly. ‘Logan wouldn’t notice he was carrying anything.’
‘Logan would have made you eat salad for lunch, and he certainly wouldn’t have let you have that drink.’
She grinned around the straw that she was biting: I’d bought her a strawberry milkshake, as sweet as her nature and bright pink like the tip of her tongue. ‘You could carry twice as much as that. Have you finally had enough of shopping?’
‘I had enough of shopping about ten minutes after we got here.’
‘Men.’ She sighed in mock irritation. ‘All right. But I’m going to need to come back next week. There are a few things I still need to pick up.’
‘I’ll get Logan to show me some arm exercises between this and then.’
‘Anything so you don’t look so weedy.’
‘Oh, I see. Personal insults now.’
We bickered cheerfully all the way back to the car, and if I checked there was no one following us every couple of minutes, Juliet seemed oblivious. I drove back to Haulton House listening to her prattle about Christmas, and the holiday she was planning with her mother for the New Year (‘Have you been to Barbados?’) that was going to be her father’s Christmas present. The headlights behind us changed as vehicles came and went. No one followed us. No one tried to intercept us.
‘You do have a passport, don’t you?’
‘Um …’ I came back to full attention with a jerk. ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ And it was in the right identity, too; Opal had made sure of that.
‘I’m surprised. I wouldn’t have thought you’d need a passport.’ She blushed. ‘I mean – I know you were really poor before Dad took you on.’
Yes, why the hell had I spent some of my limited funds on a passport? It was always the small questions that tripped you up, my trainer had told me. Always the things you took for granted, so you hadn’t prepared a lie because you never expected to need it.
‘I was skint,’ I said smoothly. ‘I’d decided to emigrate if my luck didn’t change.’
‘Emigrate? Where were you going to go?’
‘Australia.’
‘Spiders.’
‘Sunshine,’ I countered. ‘But then my luck did change, didn’t it? So I’ll stick with the clouds for now.’
Juliet went silent again, but it was a different kind of silence. She waited until I opened the car door for her at the house to speak again, slipping out of her seat and stopping beside me.
‘I’m glad you didn’t go to Australia.’
‘Me too.’
She gazed into my eyes, and she was close enough that I could smell strawberries on her breath.
‘I’m pretty sure your dad is watching,’ I said softly, and she leaned sideways so she could see over my shoulder.
‘Staring out of the study window, right at us. He’s on the phone but I don’t think it’s distracting him.’
‘I thought as much.’ I took a step back, away from her, and gave her a rueful smile that made her laugh as she sashayed away. I might try not to flirt with Juliet, but Juliet was still going to flirt with me. Thank God for defensive fathers, I thought, as I carried handfuls of bags into the house. Thank God for a cover story that made my reticence understandable instead of insulting. If Juliet started minding about me turning her down, I would find myself out of a job.
Harry stood near the doorway of the study, watching me, his hands in his pockets.
‘Do you want to give me a hand?’
‘Nope.’
‘Thanks very much,’ I said, and got a craggy grin in return. Harry knew the score. He’d spent a lifetime around the argumentative, cantankerous Carters. You knew where the invisible boundaries were and you stayed on the right side of them, no matter how hard it was. He didn’t have to warn me to stay away from Juliet, and he knew it.
Nevertheless, I stopped next to him on my way out to move the car. ‘I take it I did the right thing as far as Geraint was concerned.’
A long, slow nod.
‘And I should keep doing that.’
‘If you value your skin.’
I did. Not as much as Harry thought I did, but too much to want to risk it for pretty Juliet.
I drove the car around to the garage where I inspected it for damage and trackers and bugs – all part of the daily routine, as prescribed by Geraint – and made a note to wash it the following day to get rid of the flecks of mud we’d acquired on the road. Then, leaving the garage door open, I walked outside and jogged up the steps that led to the chauffeur’s apartment above the garage building. I moved with confidence, as if I had a perfect right to be there. Anyone but Geraint would assume I was there on his business, and Geraint was on the phone.
At least, I hoped Geraint was on the phone.
The door to the flat was locked, which shouldn’t have surprised me. It was nothing more than a standard Yale lock and I carded the door, resisting the urge to turn around and check for cameras. The cover story, if I needed it, was that Juliet had told me about the chauffeur’s accommodation and I’d wondered about moving in there. Space of my own, privacy, the chance to play music and watch television without disturbing anyone – a literal halfway house between independence and being available whenever Geraint decided he needed me.
I hoped like hell I wouldn’t need to explain myself to anyone, though. I hadn’t forgotten that someone had sent a tail after me when I left Charing Cross police station, or that they’d managed to track me to Maeve’s home. I couldn’t assume they trusted me and I certainly didn’t trust them.
The air inside the flat rushed out with a sigh like a dying breath as the door came open. It was cold and musty; no one had been in there for a long time. I didn’t put on the lights. The curtains were open and the floodlighting around Geraint’s house was effective enough that I could see everything quite clearly. The space consisted of a decent-sized sitting room with a pitched roof that reduced the usable floor space considerably, a kitchen and bathroom in the middle and a bedroom at the end. Ideal for the single man who lives on his employer’s property. Ideal for me, you’d have thought, in my ill-defined position as Geraint’s dogsbody.
The first thing that struck me was the sofa, literally. I walked into the end of it as I moved towards the kitchen area. Looking around, I frowned; why would anyone want to put the sofa in the exact centre of the room when it would have fitted under the areas where the ceiling was lower? It didn’t make any sense to me – or at least, it didn’t until I shoved one end of it out of position and saw the large, wavering stain on the floorboards. The boards themselves were gappy and rough, unfinished, and I assumed there had once been a carpet laid over them. I looked up at the nearest window. The glass was cracked from side to side with a bullseye ring in the centre, as if something had hit it very hard.
A head?
I left the sofa at an angle and gave the kitchen and bathroom a cursory look. The cupboards were empty, the bathroom clean but with bare towel rails and no toothbrush in the holder. I wasn’t expecting to find much in the bedroom, but one corner showed signs of a savage struggle: dents and gouges in the plaster up to about three feet above the floor. I could imagine it all too well: a man crouching, trying to protect himself from an attack with some kind of weapon, maybe breaking free, heading for the door, only to lose the fight in the living room.
They had done what they needed to tidy up, as far as they could without bringing in outside workmen. When enough time had passed from the chauffeur’s disappearance, the glass in the window would be replaced. The floorboards would be removed and burned. The plaster would be smoothed over. There would be no trace of Neil ever having lived there, and no sign whatsoever that he’d died there.
I’d been in the flat for a couple of minutes and it felt too long. Moving quickly, I hurried into the bedroom and snapped a couple of pictures of the corner where the plaster was damaged, then the window in the living room, and then, cursing myself for the tremor in my hand, a few pictures of the bloodstains on the floor. I moved the sofa back to exactly where it had been, deleted everything from the phone, closed the door again and ran down the steps to the garage. I started checking the car again, trying to get my breathing under control so my hands would stop shaking. My heart was thudding.
Take it easy.
One more thing to do. I went to the back of the garage, behind the car, where I had scoped out a surveillance blind spot. I tapped out a quick message to say where I was and my very urgent questions, namely: who was Neil? Had he been an undercover officer? Or did he belong to a competitor, like the men Geraint had burned to death for their approach to his daughter? Neither thought was especially comforting.
‘Mark?’
I cleared the screen, locked the phone and slid it into my pocket in record time, stepping out from behind the car. Den’s face cleared.
‘Are you coming to the house?’
‘Yeah. I was just checking on the car.’
‘I know.’ He looked at me oddly. ‘That’s your job, isn’t it?’
Drawing attention to myself wasn’t good. I laughed. ‘Don’t tell the boss but I thought I’d dented it. I was a bit too enthusiastic with my reversing in the car park today.’
‘I thought it had rear cameras.’
‘It does.’ I looked sheepish. ‘I was distracted.’
‘Juliet?’ He chuckled. ‘You’re a goner, you know that, don’t you? Once she’s set her sights on you, you might as well give up.’
I closed the garage door and walked across the yard with him. I was barely listening to the jokes he was making at my expense. I was thinking about the man who had lived and died in the building behind me.
23
The cars came back a couple of days later, and I hadn’t been expecting them. Three vehicles, black and shiny in the winter sunlight, reassuringly expensive but anonymous. Three drivers, a single passenger in the back of each car, all arriving on time, for a meeting I’d known nothing about. I stood on the front steps beside Geraint, part of a welcoming committee that otherwise consisted of his son, his son-in-law and Harry, and I wished someone had trusted me enough to tip me off about the meeting in advance. A sidelong glance told me little: Geraint was smiling faintly, his expression hard to read. Harry was glowering but that was the default for him. Bruno looked bored and Den was rocking back and forth on his heels, a giveaway that he was feeling tense. None of them looked as if they felt completely unprepared for a confrontation with Max Burniford, Phil Boxton and Ivan Manners. I assumed my face wasn’t betraying my own feelings of uncertainty, frustration and fear. If I wasn’t to be included in this meeting I’d have to find some way of listening in, and it was high risk.
‘Gentlemen.’ Geraint moved forward and shook hands with each of them in turn. ‘It’s a fine day. I thought we’d talk in the summerhouse.’
It seemed Geraint – or someone else – didn’t want this meeting in the house, which was a worry. I didn’t want Geraint to be suspicious, of me or anyone else.
Burniford grunted, obviously displeased. He was leaning heavily on his stick and his face was already red from exertion after covering the short distance from his car. ‘How far is it?’
