Talking to the Dead (40 page)

Then the boots and the voices come downstairs.

My heart rate doesn’t change. There is no separation between me and my feelings. For once in my life, I have no difficulty at all in feeling alive, in feeling the way a human is meant to feel. It sounds crazy to say it, but I feel at peace. Integrated.

They are still talking as they come down the steps. Stone steps, with a stone wall on either side, and a cellar all of stone as well. The sound of these voices is tubular, echoey. Hard to gauge how distant they are.

I have my face pressed down into the straw. To these men, one more slave woman is just a counting error. But my rock-chick makeup will give me away, and I want that moment to be as late as possible, so I deliberately deprive myself of a full view.

These are excuses perhaps. Excuses for getting my timing a second or so out. But I don’t blame myself. I’m not Lev. This is my first time with this kind of thing, and the first time is bound to be a learning experience.

I assume that there are two men. The two I saw taking the girl onto Roberts’s boat, now come back to collect the next one.

I wait for both men to enter the cellar. If they’ve noticed that there are the wrong number of women here, they haven’t yet given any sign of it. The man in front has a leather jacket on over a white T-shirt. The one behind is shorter, and I don’t see him properly. They are killers. Russian killers. Sikorsky’s chums here to complete their business.

I move. Still lying prone, I sweep my gun out in front of me. Aim up, at the first man’s chest. Not black-on-white, the way it was at the firing range. Here, the man’s white T-shirt is the target, and at this range I cannot possibly miss.

I fire.

I can’t even hear the shot. My senses are running way ahead of my brain. They’re telling me what I need to know and what I don’t. The concussion of the shot is irrelevant. All that matters is that it’s a perfect bull’s-eye. A chest shot. Lethal.

The man goes down, and I’m leaping up, firing as I move.

The second man is moving too. Jumping back to the cellar steps. My first shot misses altogether. My second shot hits him in the hip. My third in the leg.

If I had wanted to put that third shot into the chest, I could have. But I didn’t. I want there to be nothing swift about the way that justice claims these men. The first man had to die. There was no other practical solution. The second one has his hip smashed and his thigh pulverized. He’s not going anywhere.

And fool that I am, I think I’m done. This is where Lev would be still moving. Reloading. Keeping the initiative. This is where I’m thinking, Thank fuck, I’m finished.

And I almost am.

Mr. Russian the Third comes plunging down the stairs, a gun in his hand, aiming to kill me. He doesn’t only because he’s temporarily confused. He must have come down expecting a man, or at the very least someone with proper clothes on. All he finds are five half-naked women, and it takes him a second too long to work out which of them has been mowing down his buddies.

He shoots. I shoot.

The air is ablaze with sound. So loud that I register the concussion more than the noise itself. As if some natural disaster—a flood, a hurricane, an earthquake—were translated into sound and compressed into this narrow gap of time and space.

I don’t even know what is happening.

Don’t know until the hammer of my gun clicks and clicks and clicks on emptiness.

Don’t know until I notice that the man I was shooting at has a smashed hand, a smashed shoulder, and a pair of bullet wounds that straddle the gap between his lung and his kidney. He’s not shooting. He’s not standing. He’s not even moving much, unless you count his good hand, which keeps touching different parts of his body and coming away crimson and horrified.

All the time I was shooting, I thought he was shooting back at me. I have to check my own body, by eye and by hand, to convince myself I haven’t been hit. I realize that, thanks to my tiny advantage, my having enjoyed a clear target and him being confused by a choice of five, he never even got a shot off. I’m standing over him as I work all this out, watching blood spurt from his belly, pulsing in time with his heart.

But my brain is starting to engage properly now. My moment of triumph is over, and there were steps up above me just now, running hard out of the lighthouse.

I snap handcuffs over the two wounded men, cuffing each man to the other. I try to reload my gun, but my hands are shaking so much I can’t do anything right. Instead, I grab the Russian’s gun, which lies useless on the floor, and then I’m upstairs. Running past Fletcher. Down the steps and out of the lighthouse. Through the gate, which has been unlocked and is swinging open.

It’s the cliff path I’m headed for.

I don’t run hard. I’m not sprinting. I’m not in good enough shape to run at maximum pelt and then be useful for anything afterward. A couple of times, when the view widens, I see a man running ahead of me. Jeans and a T-shirt. He can’t have a gun, I think, or he wouldn’t be running.

The ground underfoot is okay. It’s dry enough, and there’s a proper path. But it’s not even. Rocks protrude. There’s churned ground where puddles once lay. Gorse roots and sudden twists. I need to keep my eyes on the path in front of me, so I’m able to look ahead less than I’d prefer.

Then I round a bend and come face-to-face with the man.

Waiting for me.

He has no gun, but he has an ax. Snatched from the woodpile at the lighthouse, I guess.

I raise my gun and fire.

Nothing happens. There’s no bullet in the chamber. I pull the trigger again, and still nothing happens. Apart from pulling the trigger, I have no idea what I’m supposed to do next.

If I had more time, I’d sit down with the gun on my lap. Figure it out. It can’t be a very complicated device, this gun. I surely can manage it.

But I have no time. I know it and the man knows it. I toss the gun far back into the field behind me, depriving my opponent of a weapon that he presumably does know how to use, but that’s not much of a victory at this stage.

The man grins. He’s not even swift or oblique in his triumph. He’s thinking, I’ve got the bitch and I can take my time. Take my time and enjoy it.

He lifts the ax overhead. It’s a long-handled thing, not a hatchet. Its head and shaft are gray-brown, a tone equidistant between wood and rust. The sun lies behind the man and the ax, so he’s just silhouette, and his shadow etches its double on the grass.

I suddenly realize, This is Sikorsky. He hasn’t escaped. He’s not in Poland or Russia. He’s here in Pembrokeshire, completing his assignment.

I think, I’m stupid, but you’re stupider.

Something Lev taught me. A distrust of long-handled weapons. They feel good in the hand, but they take too long to swing. You expose yourself as you swing them. Too easy to evade, and especially for me. Small fighters lack power, but we move faster. Right now, I’d sooner have speed than power.

I give Sikorsky his moment. The ax head up in the sun. The seminaked woman in front of him. A lovely day for murder.

“
Zdravstvuite,
Karol,” I say, pleasantly.

He swings. His movement is oversignaled. Too big and too slow. I move to one side, deflecting the shaft with an arm. At the same time, I kick hard at his shin. As hard as I can. As hard as I’ve ever kicked.

It’s not the best move in the world. A good kick at a kneecap has more scope to disable. But you can’t really miss a shin, and right now I’m in risk-minimization mode. The boots I’m wearing today were ones adapted for me by Lev himself. Steel-tipped. Nasty.

The Russian discovers the meaning of pain and for a second or two is out of action with it.

All the time in the world.

Another hard kick to his other shin brings him to his knees, then I get a clear shot at his testicles and take it. As he comes down, his chin moves toward me, and that gets a hammering as well. He’s on the ground moaning now, so I kick him once more on the side of his head, hard. Steel toe cap connecting with bone. His skull jerking back and a spray of blood droplets making patterns in the sun.

I can imagine Lev praising that kick.

Sikorsky jerks spasmodically, then lies still. Not dead, because he’s still breathing, but there are blood bubbles at the corner of his mouth.

I’m not sure what to do now. I don’t have my handcuffs with me. My phone is back at the lighthouse. The guy is hurt, but he’ll recover. I can’t afford to let him get to the boat.

I peer over the edge of the cliff. I’m not brilliant with heights, but I’m not awful, and in any case these are special circumstances. The cliff’s not all that high, maybe fifty feet, and it rolls down at seventy degrees or so to the vertical.

Good enough.

I give Sikorsky another good kick in the head. No point in taking chances. Then I bundle him over the edge. All a bit improvised, but improvisation is my strong suit. He rolls down like a sack of potatoes wrapped in a carpet. He bounces lifelessly, like a punctured football. I can’t see the base of the cliff, so I don’t know what happens at the bottom. I can’t even hear anything. Half deaf from the gunfire earlier, I can’t even hear the waves.

I’m tired now. Unbelievably thirsty.

I trudge into the field behind me and find the gun. There’s a slide on the barrel. You pull the slide back to chamber a bullet. See. I knew it wouldn’t take long to figure out.

The return journey to the lighthouse seems like a hundred miles, and I feel every inch of it. Despite my T-shirt, I feel completely naked.

I don’t like violence. I know I’ve learned it. Studied its dark and unpredictable arts. But I don’t like it. What I’ve just done revolts me. What has happened here is revolting.

When I get back to the lighthouse, I can’t go in straightaway. To the house of horror. To Fletcher’s mute, repulsive eyes.

For a minute, maybe two, I sit on the stone steps and just let myself be. I’m not consciously practicing my breathing, but these things have become part of me now, and I do it without noticing sometimes.
In
-two-three-four-five.
Out
-two-three-four-five. My pulse rate slows. I feel calmer. I notice what an extraordinarily beautiful day it is. What an extraordinarily beautiful place. Cropped grass, lichened limestone, and the endless cerulean sea.

Since I parked my car on the shoulder above the lighthouse, there has been no barrier between me and my feelings. None at all. I’ve never been myself as much as this for as long as this.

In
-two-three-four-five.
Out
-two-three-four-five.

Then I drag myself inside. That dark interior, home to so much cruelty.

Fletcher is alive, but unconscious. The bleeding seems to have stopped, so I decide not to move him. I don’t trust myself to make good decisions now. Let the professionals look after things.

I go downstairs, picking my way over the two semiconscious men and avoiding the one very dead one.

The women stare at me. They don’t know they’ve been saved. Maybe they don’t know they were about to be killed. In any case, given what they’ve been through, their salvation lies a long way off. They may never find it. Janet Mancini never did. Stacey Edwards never did. It’s no good living in a world at peace if your own head is at war with itself.

I can’t find the keys to unlock the women, and in any case that’s not a priority. I check the two handcuffed men. They’re not in good shape, but they’re alive and I don’t feel like giving them first aid. I find my clothes and my phone. There’s no signal in the cellar, so I walk back outside to the steps. I call Jackson.

He starts to give me a bollocking for going AWOL, and I interrupt. I tell him where I am and what I’ve found.

I tell him that there’s one man dead, and four others, who might or might not be dead by the time help arrives.

I tell him about the boat.

“There’s at least one woman on it. I’d guess more. Maybe as many as six. I’m pretty certain they were going to be taken out into the Irish Sea and then thrown overboard. You need coast guard vessels to approach from the sea. Ideally a helicopter from above, and divers ready for an instantaneous rescue job if whoever is onboard tries to dump the evidence. And if you can find some snipers from anywhere, you might want to get them.”

Jackson, bless the man, takes me at face value. He tells me to stay on the line—I called his mobile—then I can hear him yelling orders, using his landline, getting the cleanup operation mobilized. Every now and then he checks in with me. Precise location of the vessel. Identifying marks. Number of men guessed to be onboard—not that I have an answer to that one, but it can’t be many. Probably just Martyn Roberts.

It’s easy for me now. Someone else is making the decisions, getting the job done. I unzip my boots and take them off. These little stone steps make something of a sun trap. A nice place to lie around. But I get dressed properly. Trousers. Top. Boots. I remember about the ammo in my jacket pocket and take it out. I pop back inside and leave it on the table in the upstairs room. I give it a quick polish in the lining of my jacket to remove some of my prints from it, but if there are some left, then so be it.

I leave the Russian’s gun next to the ammo.

I’m gunless now. Fully clothed, I feel naked.

Too naked. Bracing myself one last time against the horror, I go back inside and retrieve the gun. I smell it. It hasn’t been fired today. Chances are it hasn’t been fired in any place that would give our ballistics people the opportunity to get the measure of it. These days, guns are one-use-only affairs. Used once, then ditched. We’re a throwaway society.

The Russian gun is bigger than mine, but not too big. Not unusably big. I quite like the heft of it, the greater weight, the absence of compromise. A gun for grown-ups.

I wonder what to do with it.

Hand it over to the good folk who are about to arrive. That’s the answer that every good copper would come to without much need for thought.

Keep it for myself. The answer my instinct prefers. I liked having a gun. I slept better for it. I felt more complete owning a weapon and knowing how to shoot it.