Blood Hunt (12 page)

PART THREE

MAIN LINES

EIGHT

LONDON SEEMED EVERY BIT as alien to him as San Diego.

He actually found himself carrying out evasion procedures at Heathrow. After depositing his single bag in Left Luggage, he went down to the Underground terminal and moved along the platform, watching, waiting. There were good reasons for not taking his car into London of course, reasons anyone would understand: he was only going into town for a short while; his destination was close to a Tube stop; he’d have to be crazy to drive through London, especially jet-lagged. But also he wanted to know if he was being followed, and this was more easily accomplished on foot.

When a train pulled in, he walked onto it, then came off again, looking to left and right along the platform. Then he stepped in again as the doors were closing. The other passengers looked at him like he was mad. Maybe he was. He looked out of the window. There was no one on the platform. No one was tailing him.

He’d been the same on the airplane. His fellow fliers must have thought there was something wrong with him, the number of times he got up to walk the aisles, visiting the bathroom, or going back to ask the stewardesses for drinks he didn’t really want. Just so that he could study the passengers.

Now he was on his way into London, with keys in his pocket he had taken from his brother’s motel room. The train ran on the Piccadilly Line and would take him all the way to Finsbury Park. But he came off two stops short on the Holloway Road and took his time finding a taxi, then watched from the back window as the driver talked football at him. He got the driver to take him past Jim’s flat and drop him off at the end of the road.

The street looked quiet. It was nine-thirty in the morning. People had gone to work for the day. There was a line of cars on one side of the street, and he looked into each one as he passed. Farther along, workmen were digging a hole in the pavement. They were laughing and trading Irish-accented obscenities.

He dismissed them, then checked himself. Nobody could ever be dismissed entirely. The one-armed beggar could be hiding an Uzi up his sleeve. The innocent baby carriage could be booby-trapped. Dismiss nothing and no one. He would stay aware of them, though they were a low priority.

He’d been to the flat before. It was carved from a four-story house which sat just off the top of Ferme Park Road and almost had a view of Alexandra Palace. Jim had laughed about that when he bought the flat. “The estate agent told me as part of his pitch—nearly has a view of Ally Pally! Like that was somehow better than being five miles away! Those bastards’ll turn anything into a selling point. If the roof was leaking, they’d say it was a safety feature in the event of a fire.”

Reeve tried the mortise key in its lock, but it was already unlocked. So he tried the Yale, and that opened the door. The garden flat had its own front door at the bottom of half a dozen steps, but the ground floor and first and second floors were reached via the main door. In the vestibule, there were two more solid doors. Jim’s was the ground-floor flat.

“This was probably a nice family house at one time,” he’d told Gordon when showing him around. “Before the cowboys moved in and carved the place up.” He’d shown him how a large drawing room to the rear had been subdivided with plasterboard walls to make the kitchen and bedroom. The bathroom would once have been part of the main hallway, and the flat’s designer had taken an awkward chunk out of what was left of the living room, too.

“It’s ugly now, see?” Jim had said. “The proportions are all wrong. The ceilings are too high. It’s like standing shoe boxes on their ends.”

“So why did you buy it?”

Jim had blinked at him. “It’s an investment, Gordie.” Then they’d opened the back door so that Jim could show him that the so-called garden flat had no garden, just a concrete patio. “Besides,” said Jim, “this area is in. Pop stars and DJs live here. You see them down on the Broadway, eating in the Greek restaurant, waiting for someone to recognize them.”

“So what do you do?” Reeve had asked.

“Me?” his brother had replied with a smirk which took years off him. “I walk right up to them and ask if I can reserve a table for dinner.”

“Jesus, Jim,” Reeve said now, unlocking the flat door.

There were sounds inside. Instinctively, he dropped to a crouch. He couldn’t identify the sounds—voices maybe. Could they be coming from the flat below or above? He didn’t think so. And then he remembered the hall. There’d been no mail sitting there awaiting Jim’s return. Jim had been gone awhile; there should have been mail.

He examined the short hall in which he stood: no places of concealment; no weapons to hand. The floor looked solid enough, but might be noisy underfoot. He kept to one side, hugging the wall. Floors were usually strongest there; they didn’t make so much noise. He clenched his hands into fists. Running water, a clatter of dishes—the sounds were coming from the kitchen—and a radio, voices on a radio. These were domestic sounds, but he wasn’t going to be complacent. It was an easy trick, lulling someone with sound. He recalled a line from Nietzsche: shatter their ears, and teach them to hear with their eyes. It was good advice.

The kitchen door was open a fraction, as were the other doors. The living room looked empty, tidier than he remembered it. The bathroom was in darkness. He couldn’t see into the bedroom. He approached the kitchen door and peered through the gap. A woman was at the sink. She had her back to him. She was thin and tall with short fair hair, curling at the nape of her neck. She was alone, washing her breakfast dishes. He decided to check the other rooms, but as he stepped back into the hall he hit a floorboard which sank and creaked beneath him. She looked around, and their eyes met.

Then she started screaming.

He pushed open the kitchen door, his hands held in front of him in a show of surrender.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m sorry I gave you a fright…”

She wasn’t listening. She had raised her hands out of the water and was advancing on him. Soap suds fell from her right hand as she lifted it, and he saw she was holding a bread knife. Her face was red with anger, not pale with fear, and her screams would bring people running if they could be heard above the workmen outside.

He waited for her to lunge at him. When she attacked, he would defend. But she seemed to know better. She stopped short, bringing the knife down and turning it from a hacking weapon into something she could stab with.

When she stopped screaming for a second to catch her breath, he spoke as quickly as he could: “I’m Jim’s brother. Gordon Reeve. We look alike. Maybe he’s mentioned me. Gordon Reeve. I live in Scotland. I’m Jim’s brother.” He shook the keys at her. “His keys. I’m his brother.” And all the time his eyes were half on her, half on the knife, and he was walking backwards into the hall as she kept coming forwards. He hoped he was getting through.

“His brother?” she said at last.

Reeve nodded, but said nothing. He wanted it to sink in first. One concept at a time. She was pumped with adrenaline, and her survival instincts had taken hold. There was fear there, too, probably—only she didn’t want him to sense it. And at the back of it all, there would be shock, just waiting for its chance to join the party.

“His brother?” she repeated, like it was a phrase in some new language she’d only just started learning.

He nodded again.

“Why didn’t you ring the bell?”

“I didn’t think anyone would be here.”

“Why didn’t you shout? You sneaked up, you were spying on me.” She was working herself up again.

“I thought the flat would be empty. I thought you were an intruder.”

“Me?” She thought this was funny, but she wasn’t lowering the knife. “Didn’t Jim tell you?”

“No,” he said.

“But you’re telling me he gave you the keys? He gave you the keys and he didn’t say I was living here?”

Reeve shook his head. “The reason I’m here,” he said quietly, weighing up the effect this would have on her, “is that Jim’s dead. He died in San Diego. I’m on my way home from the funeral.”

San Diego seemed to click with her. “What?” she said, ap-palled.

He didn’t repeat any of it. He was dealing with porcelain now—knife-wielding porcelain, but fragile all the same.

“I’m leaving,” he told her. “I’ll sit outside. You can call the police or you can call my wife, verify who I am. You can do whatever you want. I’ll be waiting outside, okay?”

He was at the door now. A dangerous moment: he’d have to half-turn from her to work the lock, providing her with a moment for attack. But she just stood there. She was like some awful statue as he pulled the door closed.

He sat in the vestibule for ten minutes. Then the door opened and she looked out. She wasn’t carrying the knife.

“I’ve made some tea,” she said. “You better come in.”

Her name was Fliss Hornby, and she was an ex-colleague of Jim’s—which was to say, she still worked for the paper from which he had resigned.

“He didn’t really resign,” she told Reeve. “I mean, he did resign, but then he reconsidered—only Giles Gulliver wouldn’t unaccept his resignation.”

“I had a policeman friend that happened to,” Reeve said.

“Jim was furious, but Giles said it was for his own good. I really think he meant it. He knew Jim would be better off going freelance. Not financially better off, but his stuff wouldn’t get spiked so often. He’d have more freedom to write what he liked. And to prove it, he commissioned a couple of pieces by Jim, and took a couple of stories from him which ended up on the inside news page.”

They were eating an early lunch in an Indian restaurant on Tottenham Lane. There was a special lunchtime businessmen’s buffet: large silver salvers with domed covers, blue flames licking beneath each. But they were just watching their food, rearranging it with their forks; they weren’t really eating. They simply needed to be out of the flat.

Reeve had told Fliss Hornby about Jim’s death. He’d meant to keep it simple, lying where necessary, but he found the whole story gushing out of him, a taste of bile at the back of his throat, like he’d been puking.

She was a good listener. She had listened through her tears and got up only once—to fetch a box of tissues from the bedroom. Then it had been her turn to talk, and she told Reeve how she’d met up with Jim and a load of other journalists one night in Whitehall. She’d told him that things weren’t going well with her, that her boyfriend had become her ex-boyfriend and had threatened her with violence.

“I mean,” she told Gordon, “I can look after myself—”

“I’ve noticed.”

“But it was more the atmosphere. It was disrupting my work. Jim said he was going to the States for a month, and suggested I look after his flat. Lance might get bored knocking on the door of an empty flat in Camden. And in the meantime, I could get my head together.”

“Lance, that’s the boyfriend?”

“Ex-boyfriend. Christ, boyfriend—he’s in his forties.”

Fliss Hornby on the other hand was in her late twenties. She’d been married some time in her past, but didn’t talk about it. Everyone was allowed one mistake. It was just that she kept making the one mistake time after time.

They’d demolished a bottle of white wine in the restaurant. Or Fliss had; Reeve had had just the one glass, plus lots of iced water.

She took a deep breath, stretching her neck to one side and then the other, her eyes closed. Then she settled back in her chair and opened her eyes again.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. I was planning to search the flat.”

“Good idea. Jim filled the hall cupboard with all his stuff, plus there are a couple of suitcases under the bed.” She saw the look on his face. “Would you like me to do it?”

Reeve shook his head. “He didn’t tell you why he was going to the States?”

“He was always a bit hush-hush about his stories, especially in their early stages. Didn’t want anyone nicking his ideas. He had a point. Journalists don’t have friends—you’re either a source or a competitor.”

“I’m a source?”

She shrugged. “If there’s a story…”

Reeve nodded. “Jim would like that. He’d want the story finished.”

“Always supposing we can start it. No files, no notes…”

“Maybe in the flat.”

She poured the last of the wine down her throat. “Then what are we waiting for?”

Reeve tried to imagine anyone threatening Fliss Hornby. He imagined himself hurting the threatener. It wasn’t difficult. He knew pressure points, angles of twist, agonies waiting to be explored. He could fillet a man like a chef with a Dover sole. He could have them repeat the Lord’s Prayer backwards while eating sand and gravel. He could break a man.

These were thoughts the psychiatrist had warned him about. Mostly, they came after he’d been drinking. But he hadn’t been drinking, and yet he was still thinking them.

More than that, he was enjoying them, relishing the possibility of pain—someone else’s; maybe even his own. Sensations made you feel alive. He was probably never more alive than when consumed by fear and flight at the end of Operation Stalwart. Never more alive than when so nearly dead.

He telephoned Joan from the flat to let her know what was happening. Fliss Hornby was pulling stuff out of the hall cupboard, laying it along the floorboards so it could be gone through methodically. Reeve watched her through the open door of the living room. Joan said that Allan was missing his dad. She told him there had been potential clients, two of them on two separate occasions. He’d already had her cancel this weekend’s course.

“Phone calls?” he asked.

“No, these were personal callers.”

“I mean have there been any phone calls?”

“None I couldn’t deal with.”

“Okay.”

“You sound tense.”

He had yet to tell Joan what he’d just sat and told a complete stranger. “Well, you know, I’ve got all his things to sort through…”

“I can come down there, you know.”

“No, you stay there with Allan. I’ll be home soon.”