Dying to Tell (22 page)

He certainly wasn't about to declare it to me. Pausing only to show me where I could find the coffee and the bourbon, he shucked himself into his Harley-Davidson leathers and made ready to leave. "If I don't phone at eight tomorrow morning, it'll be because I'm on my way back, in which case I'll be here by nine. Got it?"

"Got it."

"You'll know it's me on the phone because I'll give it three rings and hang up, then call again within a minute. Don't answer it otherwise.

OK?"

"OK."

"Don't meddle with my papers. I know the exact location of every crumpled note."

"There'll be no meddling."

"Good. If you want some bedtime reading, I have about half a dozen copies of For Whom the Bell Tolls. A dip into that could be kind of appropriate."

"I'll think about it."

"Do that. Anything else you need?"

"The phone number of Mayumi and Haruko's hideaway -in case of emergencies."

"Nice try, but no. I don't want you to have any clues to their whereabouts that you could pass on to a third party."

"Am I likely to do that?"

"Not voluntarily, no. But we have to consider the possibility that circumstances could arise where it's forced out of you."

"A consoling thought."

"I'm not into consolation, Lance. It's a pragmatic judgement. Simple as that."

"Risk assessment."

"Exactly right. And now I have to get rolling. While I'm gone ..."

"Yeh?"

"Try to relax."

I watched through the chink in the blinds as he roared away into the night. He headed west, which as clues went was pretty meagre. And that, by his reckoning, was just as well.

I kept watching for several minutes. There was no sign of a car going off in pursuit. But then, as Loudon would have been sure to tell me, the only pursuit we were likely to be dealing with was the invisible kind.

I gave For Whom the Bell Tolls a miss, but I don't think that's why I failed to nod straight off into dreamland. I was bone weary and not far short of brain dead, but sleep just wouldn't seem to come, even with the help of my absent host's Jack Daniel's.

Solitude by night in a stranger's home isn't a restful experience. In this case, it bred the weirdest illusion in my mind: that I was back in Glastonbury, safe and as sound as I'd ever been, and that none of this had happened none of it at all. Win hadn't walked into the Wheatsheaf and persuaded me to look for Rupe. Hashimoto hadn't inveigled me into going to Berlin with him. There'd been no rifleman lurking in a half-rebuilt room at the Hotel Botschafter, no fatal struggle with Erich Townley. The bullet hadn't smashed into Hashimoto's brain. The base of the lamp hadn't thumped into Erich's skull.

Illusion it wasn't, I realized as I came to myself to see daylight seeping between the slats of the blinds. Just a dream -albeit one cruelly inverting the normal rules of dreaming. I didn't wake to the reassuring knowledge that the horrors were imaginary. I woke to bleak reacquaintance with the awareness that they were all real every one of them.

There was more than an hour to go to the time Loudon had said he'd call. I took a shower and forced myself to eat some toast to soak up the black coffee. (Feeling faintly sick, as I'd been doing for most of the previous two days, hadn't done a lot for my appetite.)

I looked again at the article in The Japan Times, which Loudon had left behind. German Police .. . are trying to trace .. . Lancelot Bradley, 37, a British citizen believed to have been with Hashimoto at the time of the shooting. How had they worked that out? How had they known who I was? Lancelot, for God's sake. It had to be airline records, based on my passport. But they'd moved fast, no doubt about it, mangling my age in the process. My thirty-seventh birthday was still a few weeks off. Not that a few weeks were a small matter to me just then. They sounded like a lifetime. Maybe more than the span of the rest of mine.

That thought led to final abandonment of the toast. If they knew who I was, they knew where I came from. The German Police had probably asked their British opposite numbers to check my home address by now. It could only be a matter of time before they ended up at my parents' door. Maybe I ought to warn Mum and Dad before that happened. But that would be difficult without explaining what I was doing and why. It was around half-past ten the previous evening in England. Mum would just be making the cocoa, blithely unaware -since Martin's in the High Street didn't stock The Japan Times of the trouble her son was in. If I didn't phone now, I mightn't get the chance for quite a while.

But that chance slipped through my fingers sooner than I'd expected. Suddenly, the doorbell rang. I rushed to the window and looked out a pointless thing to do, since the entrance to the flats was out of sight two floors below me. But that wasn't necessarily the case from the balcony. I unlatched the sliding door and stepped outside, craning over the railings for a view. But the entrance was till obscured by the porch. I heard the doorbell ring again, lengthily. Who the hell could it be? Loudon had said nothing about visitors.

I'd just decided to go back in and wait for them to go away when a figure emerged from the overhang of the porch and looked straight up at me. He was a tall, rangy, middle-aged guy, with fair, thinning hair and a darker-hued moustache, dressed in a short leather jacket, black T-shirt and jeans. He smiled, revealing a set of dazzling white teeth, and held up a hand in greeting. "Hi." The accent was American, more drawly than Loudon's. "You must be Lance."

"Who are you?" I responded, trying not to show the shock I felt that he knew who I was.

"Steve Bryce. A colleague of Miller's from Doshisha. He asked me to pick you up."

"He did?"

"Yuh. Trouble with his bike. But what can you expect? More rust in the tank than gas. So, I had my arm twisted. Your taxi awaits."

"Miller hasn't phoned me about this."

"He'll still be wheeling that behemoth of a bike back to the farmhouse."

The farmhouse?"

"Yuh. Where we're going. It's OK. I know where it is. Miller called me from a payphone. Out in the sticks, they only take coins. He did say he wouldn't have enough to call you as well. Since he harbours some antediluvian prejudice against mobiles, we're kind of lucky he made any contact at all."

"I ... suppose so. But '

"Now I don't want to hurry you, Lance, but I have to be back at Doshisha by ten and it must be an hour's drive to the farmhouse, so could we move this along? I mean, hell, I am doing you guys a favour."

So he certainly appeared to be. But appearances could be deceptive. I looked down at his blandly smiling face and asked myself the obvious question: could I trust him? Loudon hadn't mentioned any friends at Doshisha to me and this was the sort of change of plan he'd have been likely to condemn as too risky if I'd proposed it. But, if his motorbike had let him down and time was of the essence (as it was), he might have felt forced to go for it. In which case I wouldn't be helping anyone by sitting tight. The farmhouse was presumably where Mayumi and Haruko were hiding. And I wanted to speak to them badly.

"Is there a problem, Lance?"

"No." I'd made my choice. "I'll be right down."

Bryce's small white saloon didn't have any of the glamour of Loudon's Harley-Davidson. But, as Bryce pointed out, it had just chalked up a points victory for reliability. We drove north-west out of Kyoto, sunlight dappling the wooded mountains ahead as the cloud thinned. Bryce asked a stream of questions about my connection with Loudon and the urgent need for me to be ferried out to the back of beyond. It seemed he was pretty much in the dark and he was understandably curious. But he got no change out of me and had given up probing for information by the time we left the city limits.

From then on he was happy to talk about himself a favourite topic of his, I guessed. The twists and turns of his academic career didn't interest me, of course, but I was content to let him sustain a monologue on the subject while we zigzagged up the ever steeper road between thick stands of conifers. Habitations were few and far between. We'd left the bustling urban world behind with surprising speed and were heading deeper and deeper into the backwoods.

Shortly after we'd passed through the second of two long tunnels, Bryce turned off onto a rough, unmetalled side-road that soon deteriorated into little more than a forest track. He assured me it was a viable short-cut to another main road that would lead us to the farmhouse, but after nearly breaking the axle of the car in a rut that was deep enough to have been left by a rocket transporter, he seemed to lose confidence.

"I guess I'd better check the map," he said, pulling over under the trees. "Hold on while I fetch it from the trunk."

He clambered out, walked round to the back and opened the boot. I heard him shifting things around, then it went quiet, but the boot didn't close and he didn't come back. I wound down the window and leaned out. "You OK?"

"Not exactly," he replied. "You better come and look at this."

"What is it?"

"Just come see."

"All right." I sighed and climbed out, imagining, I think, that our encounter with the giant wheel-rut had done some serious damage to the underside of the car, though what Bryce thought I could do about it was beyond me. "So, what's the '

The words died in my mouth as I rounded the rear wing of the car and glanced into the boot. Miller Loudon was lying there on his back, trussed with ropes, his face fixed and staring, with a dark, blood-clotted bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.

"I thought she wasn't pulling uphill quite right," said Bryce. "Here's the reason: two hundred and seventy pounds of dead weight."

I stared at him, still too horrified to speak or act. That's when I saw the gun in his right hand, trained on me, and the coil of rope looped over his shoulder.

"Journey's end, Lance. Turn round and start walking into the forest. I'll tell you when to stop."

I didn't move, just looked down at Loudon's body, then back up at Bryce. Still no words came. I felt sick and helpless and shamingly stupid.

"Come on, Lance. One foot in front of the other. You know how it works. Get moving."

"Who are you?"

"Just move." He slammed the boot shut and raised his right arm, pointing the gun at my head. I found myself staring at the barrel, a rock-steady metal extension of his hand. "OK?"

All my choices had been pared away. There was nothing left but to do exactly what I was told. I turned and started walking.

I'd gone about twenty yards when Bryce told me to stop. I was near the foot of a tall, red-leafed maple standing among the pines. A single leaf from one of the branches slowly fluttered down to rest among the pine needles at my feet as I waited. Was he going to kill me here? Was this where it ended? (If so, I reflected, a forest in Japan was going to be the surprise answer to the question Where did Lance Bradley finish up? in a future Wheatsheaf quiz.)

Suddenly, something hard and heavy struck me round the back of neck. I don't remember hitting the ground.

Pain and consciousness met up some time later. Speech and coherent thought were late for the party, though. I was sitting at the foot of the maple tree, my back resting against the trunk, unable to move. Bryce was standing a few yards in front of me, flicking through the contents of a wallet. It looked like .. . my wallet. Then I became aware of the ropes holding me tight against the tree. And Bryce noticed me make a futile effort to struggle free of them.

"Hi, Lance," he said, smiling at me. "Welcome back."

"What .. . what the ..." My words sounded slurred and subdued.

"Now, a few minutes ago you asked who I am. But it turns out you already know." He tossed the wallet aside and held up a small white card. "Gordon A. Ledgister, Caribtex Oil. Pleased to meet you."

"L-Ledgister?"

That's right. Although, if you asked the agency I hired the car from, they'd say, oddly enough, that my name is ... Lance Bradley." His smile widened. "With poor old Miller in the trunk, I guess somebody will be asking them that question sooner or later. But, hey, let's not worry about it. Sufficient unto the day, etcetera, etcetera. Let's get back to the needs of this day."

"You .. . followed me from Berlin?"

"Got it in one. Stifling my grief at the unscheduled demise of my brother-in-law, I tagged along as you Hawkeyed your way here."

"You shot Hashimoto?"

"Never mind him. It's the living I want to talk to you about, not the dead. Where are they, Lance? Where are Mayumi and Haruko?"

Clumsily, my thoughts grasped the point that Bryce -Ledgister, as I now had to think of him was making for me. He'd followed Loudon to the farmhouse. But Mayumi and Haruko hadn't been there. It was the hiding-place. It had to be. But they'd deserted it. Why? There could only be one answer. Loudon had told them to clear out in his phone call the previous evening. He must have reckoned it was odds-on I'd been followed, so he'd decided to flush out whoever was doing the following. He'd put Mayumi and Haruko out of harm's way. But not himself.

"I asked Miller, of course. You bet I did. Very ... forcefully. But he wouldn't tell me, despite all my blandishments. In the end, I lost patience. Well, you can see how I would, can't you? All this way, only to find that the ladies I was so eager to meet .. . weren't at home. It was a real disappointment."

"I don't know where they are."

"Don't say that, Lance. I want you to help me. I want you to want to help me. Then maybe ... I could help you. That's how relationships should be. Quid pro quo. But if you can't help me ... or won't .. . then our relationship isn't likely to last very long. Now, let's try again. Where are Mayumi and Haruko?"

"I don't know. I don't even know where they were."

"Come on. You don't expect me to believe that."

"No. But it's true."

"This isn't auguring well for your future, Lance. You do realize that, don't you?"

"Yeh, I do." But there I'd told him my first lie. Because I'd just seen a figure threading its soft-footed way through the trees behind Ledgister - a slim, lithely built Japanese man dressed in a blue tracksuit. His hair was short and flecked with grey, his face raw-boned and pale. His gaze was fixed on Ledgister. And he was carrying a gun, clasped in both hands in front of him as he picked a silent path through the drifts of pine needles and damp, fallen leaves. I considered the idea for a moment that he was a hallucination: that fear and concussion had conjured him up as an imaginary saviour. But he looked very real. And he kept on coming.