People Die (3 page)
Authors: Kevin Wignall
4
Her apartment was empty, none of the choked-up early-morning airlessness of places which had been occupied and slept in. It was clean too, no coffee cups, no makeshift ashtrays, no leftover take-out cartons. It looked pale and pure, the way she’d planned it, the climbing sun blurring the edges of her minimalist living room, the fine spray of blood almost lost in the luminous white of the carpet, only the smudged red patch easily visible, where she’d fallen, where her head had temporarily rested. She’d been kneeling.
The bedroom was untidy, the look of morning but without the feel of it, missing the scent markers of a person only briefly absent, in the shower or making coffee in the kitchen. She’d been out of bed maybe thirty minutes when they’d come, probably the previous morning, her routine interrupted and left now like an exhibit, like something from Pompeii.
He checked the bathroom, strolled back out, and caught his first glimpse of the kitchen. It took him a moment to work out what was on the floor. At first it looked like the debris of a scuffle, but then he saw it for what it was—the shelves from the fridge, pulled out and thrown aside.
He walked toward it, and though he’d known she was dead he could feel the contents of his chest sinking at the sight of the shelves, the realization that he was finally about to be confronted by it, all doubt removed. He pulled the door open and stared, nodding gently at the cauterizing truth of it and at the strange completeness of seeing her there.
It was a big fridge and Aurianne was slim and lithe, but she looked uncomfortable even in death the way she’d been bundled fetal position into its white plastic confines. With the door open the light illuminated the side of her face, bruised around the mouth and in a line from her eye to her ear. The eye was swollen shut, the ear filled with congealed blood, and more blood matted her hair, enough for him to see the blows as they’d fallen. The bullet itself had gone in the other side and hadn’t come through.
He looked at her cramped body, not bruised but blood spattered. She was naked, had probably been raped as part of the process and, ironically, wouldn’t have been able to talk because she’d known almost nothing about him. The guy would have known that too, whoever he was, but some people got their kicks that way, under the guise of ruthlessness and efficiency.
He reached out to touch her but drew back reflexively from the cold air. He hadn’t been in love with her. He’d loved who she was, and they’d been happy together but they hadn’t been in love. That made it worse, because he wanted to feel grief but felt guilt instead, and a disjointed sadness, even relief. But no real grief.
He pushed the door closed, the rubber seal kissing shut, and he stared vacantly for a few seconds, searching for feelings that wouldn’t come. Eventually, a different line of thought rose up to fill the emptiness, and he thought ahead and thought of Athens. He had a box there. If he was flying out then Athens was the best place to make for. He could stay there a week or so before it became too risky, maybe longer if he had to. And if he did have to move on, it was a good place to move on from. He’d go to Athens that morning, as soon as he’d finished what he had left to do.
He walked back into the bedroom before he left, for one last look, taking it all in, the crumpled, lived-in quality that had always been missing from the living room, the memory of her sitting there on the bed, reading, drinking coffee. It was easier to conjure up her presence there than anywhere else.
He sat on the edge of the mattress, the duvet thrown back, and smoothed his hand over the sheet she’d slept on. He picked up the pillow then and held it to his face, breathing in the faint smell of her that remained there, his memory almost overwhelmed by it, by everything it brought to mind.
And then he stood and made to walk out but still turned and looked again. It never ceased to cause him wonder, that here had been a living person and now she was gone, fading away again, the city waking up without her as if she’d never been there. It was an incredible thing, beyond comprehension, as incredible as being there in the first place.
He emerged from the building, the air reviving him. With the sun not on it yet the street was cold and fresh. The taxi driver was still there, like he’d had nowhere to go at that time of the morning, driver door open, one foot resting on the pavement. He was drinking coffee, the flask on the passenger seat, steam creeping up off the cup and out of the car.
He was surprised to see JJ again but made a gesture as if to say he’d finish the drink quickly.
“No, take your time. I’m in no hurry.” JJ got in the back and looked at the building across the street, top half sunlit, the bottom looking like an early taste of winter. It occurred to him that he’d probably never see that street again in winter, that he’d never been to that part of town before he’d met her and would probably never go there again. For some reason it made him sad, sadder even than the thought of never seeing Aurianne again, never seeing her smile, never hearing her speak in English.
The driver seemed nervous with him just sitting in the back like that, silent, eyes on the street, and he finished his coffee quickly anyway, wiping the cup dry with a paper napkin before putting it back on the flask. He closed the door and started the engine and looked in the rearview mirror, eye contact once removed, saying he was ready, but only if his passenger was ready.
JJ responded with a token smile and nodded for him to drive on, giving him general directions at first, then closing in, more specific. When they got there he had him pull up right outside, not down the street like a lot of people would have done. And this time he told him to wait, fifteen minutes or so, told him even that they’d be going to the airport.
He moved quickly through the lobby and up the stairs, opened the lock, let the door slip ajar an inch, and waited, listening. He could hear someone in the kitchen and knew automatically from the time of day what was happening. There were two of them, one sleeping. He couldn’t help but think of Aurianne’s body being eased into her fridge. But this was different; the owner of this apartment was still alive.
He stepped inside and waited against the wall. He could see the door to his bedroom closed and a loaded holster sitting on the low table in the living room, looking like a chic black handbag from that angle. Whoever was in the kitchen deserved a slap for having left it there, but it was the kind of lapse of judgment most people fell into sooner or later.
He came out then, a guy about JJ’s own age or younger, no one he knew, wearing a plain shirt, dark trousers. JJ glanced back at the living room and saw a tie draped over one arm of the chair he’d been sitting on. He was carrying a tray with a pot of coffee and a cup on it, and he was laughing to himself, maybe about how domesticated it all seemed. He shifted the tray into one hand as he got to the bedroom, knocked on the door, got some response, and started to open it.
It had to be now. JJ vaulted off the wall and threw his weight into the square of the other guy’s back, slamming him into the room, a crash of body, tray, coffeepot, cup. Without even getting a look at him, he took out the guy on the bed with one shot, still startled and bleary-eyed and a good few heartbeats away from thinking of going for his gun. It was Ian Wilson, someone he’d met a couple of times and knew something about.
The younger guy was thrashing around like a fish on deck, scalded by the coffee where it had gone through his shirt, his bearings scattered. He instinctively went for his holster, found it missing, seemed to come back to himself, and suddenly became calm, sitting up where he’d fallen on the floor. He stared at Wilson’s body twitching on the bed, then looked up.
“There’s a chair behind you. Why don’t you shuffle backwards and put yourself in it?”
The guy moved slowly, eyes dulled in submission. Once he was sitting JJ said, “Do you know anything about me?”
He tried to speak, found his voice constricted, and cleared his throat before trying again. “Not officially. Stuff he told me.”
“So you know that if I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead by now.” He nodded, noncommittal. “So relax, you’re okay. I just need one piece of information and once I’ve got it I’ll have no reason to kill you. In fact, you can take a message back for me.”
“What piece of information?”
“Who sent you?”
The guy made an attempt at looking puzzled and said, “London. I don’t know who. I don’t think Wilson knew.”
“How old are you?”
“What?”
“Who has the gun here? Just answer the question.”
“Twenty-nine.”
“But you’re new in.” He nodded. “So I’m guessing you were in the services before. British Army?” He didn’t nod this time but the guess was correct, the haircut as much a giveaway as anything else. “And it was you who interrogated my girlfriend.”
“Wilson killed her.”
“But you interrogated her. And now that I know this piece of shit was involved I know for sure you raped her too.” He was shaking his head, his face playing nervous games. “He’d have pushed you if you needed it, cajoled you into it, told you how good it was at breaking them down, but he’d have got you to do it because he always got off on watching it. Or didn’t you know that?”
“You’re mistaken. I ... look, I ...”
“Don’t lie to me. I know she was raped and I know it was you who did it.”
His face was pleading, on the verge of breaking down, his head moving nervously from side to side. It didn’t seem so much that he was scared, more that he knew it had been wrong and was regretting it now, regretting that he’d allowed himself to be swept into it, that he’d allowed his professionalism to be teased away from him by someone like Wilson. “It was just ... I didn’t know.”
JJ cut him short, his voice still calm though. “You didn’t know? Do you know what city you’re in? You raped her. That’s what you did, you raped her, so what I’m gonna do now is graze one of these bullets off your balls and when you come round I’m gonna do it again and keep doing it until you tell me who sent you.” JJ aimed the gun between his legs.
“Berg sent us.”
“Berg’s dead.” He fired, putting a hole in the seat of the chair. The guy let out a hollow wail, like all the air being sucked out of his lungs, and slumped, his head lolling to the side, the crotch of his trousers suddenly torn and bloody where the bullet had gone through.
Either Berg was dead or even Danny didn’t know what was going on. JJ got a bag from the bottom of the closet and started choosing clothes to go in it. And all the while he was thinking through the time scale, when it must have started, whether Berg could have ordered his hit before being hit himself. He couldn’t even think why Berg would have had any reason to hit him, so maybe it had been someone higher or not Berg at all but someone lower, someone like Wilson playing loose.
He’d almost finished packing when the guy in the chair moaned as he began to come around. JJ looked over, watched the guy’s head slowly lifting, then took his gun again and shot him from across the room, a clean finish. He looked at the two of them, one on the bed, one in the chair. The room would have to be redecorated, but maybe they’d deal with that when they came to remove the bodies. He didn’t know what the procedure was, but there was bound to be some department that dealt with it.
He was idly thinking about it when the phone rang, loud and shrill against the silence of the apartment and the early morning. He weighed for a second whether or not he should answer it, then walked into the living room and picked it up, reckoning it was his phone and he was there so what difference did it make?
“Hello?”
There was a pause at the other end, like the caller hadn’t expected an answer. Then an American accent came back at him, middle-aged, gravelly around the edges. “Could I speak to David Bostridge please?”
JJ took a second to place the name, Bostridge, the guy he’d hit a couple of years ago in Moscow, an intriguing choice in itself. “Only if you know a good medium,” he said, and the American seemed to sigh with relief before replying, “Thank God. You don’t know me, Mr. Hoffman. My name’s Ed Holden. I have some important information for you.”
“Go on.”
“Whatever you think is going on at the moment, you’re wrong. Someone wants you dead.” As an information source he seemed a little after the fact.
“So I gather,” said JJ flippantly.
The American came back at him, hesitant but determined to make a distinction. “No, you don’t. This isn’t panic, this isn’t the fallout of something else. Someone wants
you
dead, you specifically, just like they want me dead. There’s no sitting this one out. You and I, we’re both marked.”
you
dead, you specifically, just like they want me dead. There’s no sitting this one out. You and I, we’re both marked.”
JJ didn’t know who he was, but he sounded like someone who knew his time was up, clutching at anything that might save him, hoping to convince someone like JJ to come in on his own protection. It was definitely intriguing though, how he knew about him in the first place, how he knew about the Bostridge hit, why he’d chosen it as an identifying device.
“Okay, Holden,” said JJ, businesslike but relaxed, “how about some meat on these bones? Who are you, who do you work for, why the concern for my welfare?”
The reply was determined again. “It doesn’t matter who I am. I called you because you can help me stay alive and I have the information you need to do the same.” His tone shifted, becoming instructional. “Now, I’m on the move and I’ll be secure by tomorrow morning our time. You have an American friend in London. Tell him I’ve gone to ground and there’s nowhere to swim. He’ll know where I am.”
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