Detonator (21 page)

I was about to move on through when I heard a sound behind me. A creaking board. A misjudged footstep, maybe. I swivelled 180 degrees and brought up the weapon.

Nothing. Nobody. Maybe I’d imagined it.

No, I hadn’t.

The same sound again.

Not a creaking board. A low groan. From somewhere overhead.

I filled my lungs with oxygen, melted back through the doorway, and raised the muzzle of the Sphinx as I raised my eyes, following the staircase.

A muffled cry echoed through the empty space.

A female cry.

Not the kind of cry you make when some fucker has broken into your home and you’re desperate to alert the men you’re paying to keep you safe. The kind you make when you’re trying to fight your way out of the deepest of sleeps, but the nightmare won’t let you go.

There was no sign of the hired help hurrying to the rescue. So, staying close to the wall, I climbed towards the cry one step at a time. I had to move around a marble bust on an ebony plinth halfway up. Fuck knew who it was. Could have been Lenin, for all I cared. Or Dostoevsky. It certainly wasn’t Frank, even though he’d paid for all this.

I slowed almost to a standstill as I approached the second-floor landing, and stopped short of the corridor that ran off it. There had been no more cries, but I thought I could hear breathing. Irregular, husky rasps. Then nothing.

I didn’t wait any longer. Weapon up, I spun through the first door I came to. A bedroom, nearly twice the size of the master suite in the Courchevel chalet.

Two windows ahead of me, overlooking the lake.

A three-sided, gilt-framed mirror between them, on a dressing-table lined with designer make-up containers and sparkly stuff hanging from gold stands.

A bed, built on the same scale. Covers thrown back. Head-shaped dent in the pillow on the far side of it.

So, slept in recently.

Two more windows behind it, above the tarpaulin tent that sheltered the roof I’d cut through. Separated by an enormous wardrobe with a mirror front.

Another fucking great mirror on the wall to my right, beside the half-open door to her bathroom.

Lyubova clearly liked her mirrors.

I took another step forward and caught sight of a bare foot in the one on the dressing-table. A body in a leopard-print skirt lay between the bed and the side window.

It wasn’t moving.

I slapped the pistol back into my waistband and piled in.

When I got closer, I could see that Lyubova wasn’t breathing either.

She was on her side, left arm outstretched, right hand clutching at the bare skin above her breast. Raven hair glued to the sweat on her face. A thin strand of mucus linking the lower corner of her mouth to a pool of vomit on the white sheepskin beneath her head.

I knelt beside her, swept her damp hair aside and felt for her carotid pulse. It fluttered under my fingertip. I glanced at her bedside table. An empty brown bottle, lying on its side. A glass of water, half full, with lipstick on the rim. I wasn’t going to need the ether.

I hooked my index and middle fingers into her oral cavity and scooped out her tongue and another gob of grey gloop, flecked with crimson. I rolled her on to her back, put one hand on top of the other and, allowing my body to rock for maximum force, compressed the centre of her chest. Once. Twice. Three times. Then again. And again. I wanted her groggy, but I didn’t want her to die on me.

I felt one of her ribs crack fairly early in the process, then another, and kept on going.

After thirty compressions I took a deep breath, squeezed her surgically enhanced nose and gripped her perfectly sculpted chin, sealed my lips over hers and tried to fill her lungs.

I caught a hint of no doubt incredibly expensive perfume from near the base of her neck, but it was no match for the acidic taste and stench of her mouth.

Somewhere in the background I could smell alcohol. Not sixteen-year-old single malt or seven-star brandy, more like raw ethanol. And that didn’t strike me as something that Lyubova would go for if she had a choice.

I leant forward and gave her another blast.

She arched her back. It was almost impossible to spot, but she did arch it. Then she retched weakly. Took a breath. Exhaled. But she was still pretty much unconscious.

I shoved both my arms under her like a forklift. Carried her through to the bathroom. Held her head over the toilet and shoved my index finger down her throat as far as I could. The drug and alcohol combo she had taken – or been given – needed to come out again, and fast, before her stomach had fully digested it. She gagged and gave another low moan, but nothing much ended up in the bowl.

I needed something more heavy duty. I grabbed the toilet brush handle, reversed it, and repeated the process. This way I got in deep, and wasn’t going to have her chew my finger off.

That didn’t work either.

I laid her down on the tiled floor, in the recovery position. Turned on the hot tap and found a plastic beaker. Ran through her medicine cabinet for anything I could mix into a warm saline solution. It contained every upper and downer the Swiss pharmaceutical industry could provide, and a few that it probably couldn’t.

The bad news was that there wasn’t a grain of salt to be seen.

Or anything else that I could use to make her puke her guts out. The medics didn’t like doing that sort of shit, these days. If the patient inhaled, you could fuck them up big-time. But it was a risk I was going to have to take. And Lyubova hadn’t earned any special treatment.

I checked her pulse again and decided to look downstairs.

The set-up on the ground floor was pretty much the same as on the first. One side of the house was gleaming and fully functional, the other still under wraps. I glanced through another polythene screen on my way past. All I could see close up were two or three more propane cylinders. They lay at odd angles on the floor, like torpedoes.

The kitchen was on the opposite side of the entrance hall.

This was where Frank’s taste and Lyubova’s did gel. Acres of polished granite and state-of-the-art stainless-steel cooking equipment and an island with a sink unit. There was only one gadget missing. She had settled for a little George Clooney coffee machine instead of one the size of a nuclear reactor.

Boiling water would dissolve the salt quicker than the stuff that came out of the tap. I’d dilute the mixture with cold when I got back to the bathroom. I filled the electric kettle and pressed the on button, flooding the surrounding area with blue light.

Leaving it to bubble, I scanned the shelves above the work surface by the cooker. They were stuffed with herbs and spices and tins of smoked mussels and five kinds of pepper, but not what I was looking for. They didn’t seem to go for Colman’s mustard around here, and the Gucci packet of pink Himalayan rock salt was almost empty. I dived into the cupboard under the sink. Dishwasher salt would do just fine.

I reached for the bag and got another whiff of white spirit vapour. I’d been aware of the smell upstairs in the wing that was still under reconstruction, only fleetingly, though, and in an environment where I’d expect it. Maybe this smelt stronger because it didn’t belong here.

As I straightened, the socket powering the kettle buzzed and flashed and popped and the blue light snapped off. I flicked the nearest wall switch and half a dozen LED bulbs in the ceiling sparked up, so only the ring circuit feeding the sockets had blown.

I emptied the dishwasher salt into a glass jug, poured the not-quite-boiling water over it and gave the concoction a stir.

Upstairs in the bedroom, Lyubova was pretty much where I’d left her, still out of it, but breathing more easily. I fixed her a saline cocktail in the plastic beaker and gave it an experimental sip. If this stuff didn’t work, nothing would.

I went down on one knee and, keeping her arse on the floor, hauled her up far enough to lodge the back of her neck in the crook of my left arm. Her ribs must have been on fire, but she didn’t even blink. I reached round and gripped her jaw with my left thumb and forefinger, locking her chin in the web of skin between them. Keeping her face horizontal, I pushed open her mouth and poured as much of the emetic down her throat as I could.

A fair amount of it spilt down her cheeks and some went into her nose, but most of it was on target. The result was almost immediate. Her sneezing then her gagging reflex went into overdrive. Her chest heaved and I managed to tilt her sideways before she propelled whatever she’d had for lunch across the tiles and, with any luck, a critical amount of whatever had been forced into her before I arrived. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but house beautiful had been put on hold.

I poured her another slug of saline and she gave a repeat performance. Then she opened her perfectly shaped eyes. But this wasn’t a Snow White moment. Her surgeon wouldn’t have been pleased. She still looked like shit. And felt like a dead weight. I didn’t expect her to crack into a kettlebell workout anytime soon.

She didn’t seem at all surprised to see me.

She took a deep, rasping breath, swallowed painfully and tried to lick her lips. Then she spoke.

‘Those … fucking … bastards …’ Her words were slurred, but her voice was deep and husky.

‘Who?’

She turned on her own this time and sprayed the porcelain once more. It took her another couple of minutes to gather her marbles. I knew exactly how she felt.

Then she managed to wrench her head back in my direction. ‘Whatever that little … shit … is paying you …’

She closed her eyes and I felt her body slump.

I shook her like a ragdoll until she resurfaced.

‘… I will … pay you …
double
… to kill them …’

Her eyes flashed.

‘What little shit? Frank?’

‘
Frank?
’ She snorted. ‘He’s dead.’

‘What little shit?’

Her mouth opened and closed. ‘Frank’s …
creature
…’

I waited. I didn’t have a fuck of a lot of choice.

‘Laff … ont …’

‘Who did this to you?’

I knew the answer, but I needed it to come from her.

‘The Albanian … bastard.’

‘Uran?’

She summoned the energy to curl her upper lip. ‘Ur-
anus …
’ She must have been quite pleased with that one, because the sneer almost turned into a smile. ‘And … the other …
asshole
…’

‘Dijani?’

I couldn’t help admiring her anger. But I didn’t want her confusing me with her new best friend. I tightened my elbow and felt my left fist clench. ‘You helped them to kill Frank.’

‘Frank … deserved … to die.’ Her dark eyes blazed. ‘But they … are …
peasants
…’

I couldn’t argue with that. And Lyubova should know: she’d made the journey from air stewardess to aristocracy in double-quick time.

She went limp on me again. I bundled a big fluffy bath towel under her head, then stood and filled the jug with cold water and emptied the whole thing over her face.

Her eyelashes fluttered and she fought to get some more oxygen into her lungs.

I knelt down and gave her a slap, leaving a livid red mark on her cheek. So her circulation wasn’t completely shot.

‘Where are they? Where are your peasants?’

She mumbled something I couldn’t hear.

I felt for her pulse again. Her heart was now beating like a snare drum.

‘Where?’ I leant in closer and turned the volume up. ‘
Where?
’

Her eyes widened, but they were glassy now. Unfocused. Her breathing quickened.

‘
WHERE?
’

Blood-flecked spittle leaked out of the corner of her mouth.

‘Ad … ler …’

In the silence that followed, I knew that the interior of the chateau was no longer still. The quality of the air had changed. My eardrums registered it first. Something or someone had fucked with the molecules in our immediate environment.

I drew down the Sphinx as I got to my feet.

I reached the archway that led through to the bedroom and heard a crack from below us. The entrance hall, maybe. A door banging shut? No. I had a bad feeling about this.

Then a noise behind me.

The empty glass jug smashing against the tiles.

I turned to see Lyubova struggling to raise herself off the floor. Gasping. Her skirt riding up her bare thighs. One hand clutching her ribs, apparently unaware that blood was flowing freely from the other, where shards of glass were embedded in her palm.

‘Mis-ter …’

She shook her head, trying to clear it.

‘Stefan …’

I smelt a hint of smoke now. I glanced in the direction of the stairwell. I couldn’t see any sign of it in the corridor, but it was definitely in the atmosphere.

‘They … have … him …’

As I went back to her, Lyubova’s supporting hand slipped away, leaving a streak of crimson on the tiles. She collapsed, shoulder first, on to the towel I’d shoved underneath her head, and gave a pain-racked groan.

I gripped her outstretched arm and rolled her on to her back. She was in all sorts of shit, but her eyes were open. She was relishing this.

Steering clear of the broken jug, I pushed my head right up close to hers. ‘What did you say?’

It was a fucking stupid question. We both knew what she’d said. And I’d just given her the pleasure of saying it again.

‘Those … assholes. They have … taken … the … boy …’

‘You’re talking shit.’

Her tongue slid out, moistened her lips, then slid back in again.

‘So … go back … to … the beach … and check …’

I replayed my movements over the last few hours at top speed inside my head. I hadn’t been followed. I was ninety-nine point nine per cent sure of that.

‘Where have they taken him?’

She said nothing. Didn’t even blink. Her expression told me everything she wanted me to know.
You may have saved Frank’s son on the mountain. But now you’re both well and truly fucked
…

I let her have a good look at the muzzle of the Sphinx, then pressed it against her forehead, right between her eyes.