Closer, page 1
Contents
CLOSER
Afters: about the author, and hot samples from other books
Credits and copyright information
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CLOSER
A Section Eight Thriller
PJ Adams
Prologue
“Tell me, Matt. How well do you really know her?”
I held Stewart Napier’s look. He was my oldest, dearest friend, and right then I hated him for asking that question.
“I love her.”
“That hardly matters. And that’s not what I asked, Matt. How well do you know her?”
Her. Cassie. The center of my world for the past six months. The woman I would have trusted with my life.
Finally I was the one to break the look, to glance down, and then away.
How well can you know anyone? Even those you’re closest to?
Cassie had gone. Vanished. But it wasn’t only the fact of her absence that was so distressing, but what she’d left behind...
§
I hadn’t seen her since the previous night.
Is it odd that it took me so long to notice her absence? Perhaps, but only in retrospect.
Napier had put us in our usual suite in the east wing of Auldbrigg Haw, the Napier family shooting estate on the west coast of Scotland. Cassie had gone to bed about midnight, but she’d insisted I stay downstairs and finish my drink. With Napier’s skill at the magical refill, my scotch glass was never empty, and it was after two when I finally extracted myself from the drinking session with Napier and a couple of pals and found my way through the rambling corridors to our rooms.
Ever the gentleman, rather than disturb Cassie I’d settled down in the suite’s second bedroom, so it was only the following morning when I discovered she was gone.
Head thumping, I’d gone through into the suite’s living room, expecting her to be there, curled up on a sofa with a book, or working at her knitting or crochet – that always made me smile, such a homely craft as a hobby for a woman so worldly and sophisticated.
But no, maybe she was lying in. Sleeping, or perhaps waiting for me to find her.
My smile broadened, and I was more than a little surprised that my pounding headache had transformed so rapidly into something else.
I’d never known anyone like Cassie.
Never desired or needed someone so intensely.
Over the years, there had been times when I’d truly believed I was in love, but it was only with Cassie that I understood how all-consuming real love could be.
I pushed at the bedroom door, making enough noise to let her know I was coming in, but not enough to disturb her if she was still asleep.
I expected her to be lying there, feigning unawareness, a twist of bedding only partly covering her naked body. Normally a shy and private person, when it was just the two of us she loved to display herself like that, just for my eyes. She always seemed strangely touched that I found her so headily attractive.
The bed was empty. I knew immediately that it hadn’t been slept in, for Cassie was never one to make the bed up in the morning. She always laughed at me when I did so. “We’ll only mess it up again later,” she would say, even though I would argue that was part of the fun, wasn’t it?
I looked around the room. I already understood the bare facts of the situation – that Cassie had not slept here and so something unexpected had occurred – but my brain was still processing. Her bag lay where she’d left it on the chaise longue, her make-up things on the Queen Anne dresser, a pair of Converse pumps partly tucked under the end of the bed. I knew without checking that if her things were here, like this, then her clothes, too, would still be hanging in the wardrobe and folded neatly in the drawers.
So where was she?
Where had she been all night?
I breathed deep, fooling myself I could detect her scent on the air, even though I knew that if she had been absent since the previous evening that could only be my imagination.
I went through to the bathroom, but she was not there.
On the marble shelf by the wide basin I saw a tube of Colgate and the toothbrush we shared when we traveled – such an intimate thing to do, and one that had shocked me a little the first time Cassie had told me she hadn’t packed a toothbrush because she intended to use mine.
I had never been so close to another person as I had come to be with Cassie.
I took her hairbrush and ran it through my tousled, mid-brown mane, taking strange comfort in the action.
She must have made the bed – despite her usual reluctance – and gone for an early morning walk around the estate. I tried to convince myself she would be back soon, and indeed that was what I told Napier when I went down for breakfast a short time later.
By mid-morning, I was seriously concerned. When I returned to the suite I tried calling her, but that only deepened my anxiety: her cellphone buzzed from somewhere inside her bag where it lay on the chaise longue. Why would she leave her phone behind? What if she’d lost her footing on one of those treacherous mountain paths, or lost her way in the forest?
About to head down to persuade Napier to rouse a search party from the estate’s staff, I paused.
Perhaps she’d received a message and had to rush off, some obscure emergency that might explain this strange absence?
I reached into the big travel bag, and eased it open so I could check for her phone. It was tucked into an interior pocket, but the screen told me nothing and I couldn’t check further as there had never been any reason for me to know the PIN required to unlock it.
I tossed the phone aside and glanced at the bag again.
Inside was a grey leather handbag, one I’d seen Cassie use on occasions when she wanted something larger than her usual small clutch.
What made me open that bag? I don’t know. But I would always wonder later whether things might have been a lot simpler if I had not done so.
I pulled the smaller bag out, surprised at its weight in my hands. Cassie prided herself on being low maintenance. She would happily come away with me for a weekend at a moment’s notice, with just a couple of changes of underwear and a minimal make-up set, relying on me to pack the essentials like that shared toothbrush.
So why such a heavy handbag?
I pulled at the zipper, and that was when my life changed forever.
§
Napier and I stood on the southern terrace, braving a break in the grey, drizzly weather so typical of this region. Dreich, they called this kind of weather in these parts, a word peculiarly suited to the damp chill of the western Highlands air that morning.
Dreich was how I felt, just then.
“What do they call it in the movies?” I asked my old friend. “A ‘Go’ bag. My girlfriend has a Go bag.”
“Aren’t you being a wee bit melodramatic, Mattie? Maybe you watch the wrong kind of film.”
“Then how do you explain it?” I insisted. “The cash. The phones. The passport.” I swallowed. “The gun.”
It was as if I’d stepped into another reality when I pulled that zipper back and saw the contents of my loved one’s bag. Perhaps I had. Perhaps none of this was real any more. Maybe I’d wake up in a hospital bed, having suffered some kind of trauma and all this was a dream. A nightmare.
The first thing I saw when I had opened that bag was the money. A fat bundle of notes, held together by a paper collar around the middle. I couldn’t bring myself to count it, but it looked enough to buy a small house. Then as my eyes adjusted I spotted three cellphones – cheap models. Disposable. They’d call them burners in those melodramatic movies Napier disparaged.
The handgun was surprisingly compact and clearly designed to be concealed easily. The words ‘Sig Sauer P238’ were written on the snub barrel.
My head was reeling. I didn’t understand. What was all this?
That was when I spotted the passport tucked into an interior pocket of the bag. I extracted it between thumb and fingertip, as if it might bite.
It did worse than that, though. When I opened it I saw Cassie’s familiar features, cast in the flat expression familiar from any passport photograph. The name in the passport, though, was Katherine Rose Parr, and the date of birth some time in February whereas we had only recently celebrated Cassie’s birthday in June. The place of birth was given as Oxford, rather than Leamington Spa. The handwriting of the signature was familiar, even if it signed a different name.
I flipped to the back to check the emergency contact information, but that was unfamiliar, too: two names I didn’t know, with London addresses.
Why would she have a complete fake identity like this?
And then a chilling thought struck me, one I voiced now to Stewart Napier as we stood together on the terrace.
“What if that’s her real identity, and Cassie is the false identity?”
Napier just smiled at me, like a teacher who has seen his slowest student finally catching up. “Like I say, Mattie, how well did you ever know her?”
I looked away from my old friend again, down toward the distant sea loch. Somewhere a curlew cried, such a haunting sound. I hated the way Napier already referred to Cassie in the past tense.
You can never prepare yourself for something like this. Your world stripped away, the rug tugged from beneath your feet. Can you imagine what it would be like to discover that the person closest to you is not that person at all? That was what I was faced with.
“Maybe she’s just had enough of you, eh? Gone off with someo
Napier was trying to make light of the situation, but reminding me of the sheer unlikeliness of my relationship with Cassie hardly helped.
“You don’t need a fake identity and a handgun for that,” I pointed out.
In silence, for a time, we watched a small fishing boat head out along the loch.
“What if she’s in danger?” I asked. My brain was still struggling to catch up. Whoever she was – whatever she was – if she had a Go bag and hadn’t used it, but had still disappeared, then that could not be good.
“You don’t get it, do you, Mattie?” Napier’s hand on my arm was meant to reassure, but it only served to remind me how far out of my depth I was.
“Get what?”
“She was using you. For some unknown reason she’d worked her way into your life, but...”
He shrugged his broad frame. Left me to fill in the gaps.
Napier had never liked Cassie. He’d made no secret of that. I’d always put that down to jealousy on his part. Not a sexual thing: although Napier was quite open about his sexuality, I’d always known I was not his type. But our friendship went back years, to when he’d taken me under his wing when we were in our early teens – he joked that protecting the weedy scholarship boy from the boarding school bullies had been his first venture into public service. We shared a history, and a closeness, that could only change when I became so besotted with the new love of my life.
Maybe I’d been wrong, though. Maybe Napier’s distrust of Cassie had not been jealousy, but rather a rare case of insight from a man who usually – quite naively – saw the best in those around him.
“What was she doing? Why would she... work her way into my life?”
“No ordinary woman carries a handgun and a fake passport in her luggage,” Napier said.
Again, it felt as if my brain was struggling through mud just to keep up.
Was I merely cover? Part of the disguise of a very ordinary life? Or... “You,” I said. “She was using me to get to you.”
Stewart Napier. Public figure. Always wheeling and dealing behind the scenes of national and international politics. Always in and out of the Houses of Parliament and Downing Street. Confidant of government ministers even while he served as a consultant and strategist for the populist Way Forward movement, trying to forge a new kind of politics for the 21st Century.
“Maybe,” he said now. “Maybe not. But it’s a possibility to consider, is it not?”
“Why, though? What was she hoping to achieve?”
“That’s a question for me and my chief security advisor, right after I’ve given him a swift kick up that tight little ass of his.”
I stared. For all the casual dismissal of my concerns earlier, Napier was taking this very seriously.
“You really think...?”
“I don’t know,” Napier said. “But what I do know is that an armed professional has insinuated herself into my entourage. Whatever her reasons, that should never have been allowed to happen.”
“God, Napier. I’m so sorry, I–”
“Oh, don’t concern yourself,” Napier said, clapping that hand on my arm again. “I don’t blame you. Hell, laddie, my heart goes out to you. I’ve seen your heart broken far too many times – you always give it away too easily. I hate to see you this way.”
He made me sound like a serial philanderer – and loser.
The latter, perhaps, but this was different. I’d never felt about anyone the way I felt about Cassie.
Whoever, or whatever, she really was.
“You’re well rid of her, Mattie, believe me. Whatever’s become of her – on the run or dead, even – you’ll see it’s a blessing in the long run.”
I knew he was right. I understood that.
But his words cut deep, giving shape to my darkest fears.
And by saying them out loud it felt as if my old friend had made those possibilities very real indeed.
1. Six Months Earlier
When did I fall? Does it really matter?
What matters is how hard I fell, and how far.
Cassie and I met because of Napier. Of course we did. Oh, for the blessings of hindsight!
It was at a charity do in London, in one of those big Victorian buildings that loom over the Thames, somewhere between the Savoy and Piccadilly.
Napier has always liked to wow me. He still takes delight in my working-class struggle between hating the glamour and disposable wealth of the upper classes and the almost genetic predisposition to defer and tug at my forelock in their presence.
I would always be the scholarship boy raised above his station in the eyes of Napier and his pals, even though my time in the City, and my financial interest in what remained of the Tweed mill industry, gave me enough standing to have earned my place by right at these kinds of gatherings.
I liked it though – the way our relationship amused my old friend, and that almost mothering protectiveness he still showed toward me.
In truth, we both played the class system game, almost as an in-joke between us: his patronage, and my affected lack of culture and – for want of a better word – class. Such a British thing! Do these issues of class and breeding matter in any other country but ours?
Napier was on top form that night. Dressed to the nines in kilt, doublet, and wing-collared shirt, even his accent was stronger, as if the traditional dress reinforced his Scottishness.
“Aye, Mattie,” he said, drawing me into a powerful embrace, “it’s always so good to see ye!” As if we hadn’t seen each other for months, and not the day and a half since we’d last shared a boozy lunch in one of the Westminster clubs he frequented. Stepping back, the embrace became an arm across the shoulders as my old friend led me deeper into the grand hall.
“Come along,” he told me. “There’s people to meet.”
One minute it was the Sultan of wherever, the next a chinless Old Etonian who was something in the Foreign Office. Swiftly, we moved on to a group of City types, and then the Way Forward leader, Bernard Bowler, and his – by comparison – rather shabby entourage. Ironically, it was with the Way Forward group that I felt most at home – these upstarts who thought they might take over the established order – although I’ve always felt uncomfortable with their populist drive down to the lowest, crudest common denominator.
And there, somewhere beyond them, an utterly delightful diversion from the full-on rush of it all, was Cassie.
She didn’t seek me out. She didn’t maneuver for a position at Napier’s elbow through me.
It was I who went to her.
And only with the hindsight of several months, did I ever come to wonder if that, in itself, was some sophisticated kind of maneuver. A spider drawing me into her web. A trap laid. Did she give me a smile or a brief meeting of the eyes, to draw me in? Was it all the most subtly crafted of seductions, choreographed to the finest detail?
Was that all it was?
If so, then it was one of the finest pieces of acting our species has ever seen.
I saw her, one among a group standing by the far wall. A long arm trailing out to snatch a champagne flute from a passing tray.
Was that when I started to fall?
That simple glance?
Perhaps.
Perhaps falling is something we can only ever piece together with hindsight. In itself that glance, the brief image of a long, slender arm, the skin flawless, was nothing, but as part of a mosaic of images and impressions it played its role, was part of the web that trapped me.
I threaded my way through the crowded room, not even realizing that was what I was doing, Napier abandoned somewhere behind me.
I found myself on the fringes of an animated group. Loud voices, laughter, tossing of heads and flamboyant gesturing. It was both intimidating and infectious, and I found myself laughing along without knowing why.
A man with a South African accent was telling a convoluted story about a recent family gathering with a cast of eccentrics that would otherwise have been quite engaging, but by then my eyes had found the owner of that long, elegant arm and the rest of the world might as well not have existed.
She was slim, petite even, in a turquoise dress that shimmered when it caught the light and hung from her body in a not-quite-clinging and utterly tantalizing way. Her hair was a deep sandy blonde, shoulder-length, which later I would learn hung down like a curtain around our faces when she was leaning down from above to kiss me. Her jawline and nose had an almost elfin sharpness, her mouth small and full-lipped, her eyes a blue-green that matched the shade of her dress almost perfectly.
