The Mak Collection (181 page)

The flying, however, was not the root of his uneasiness.

For reasons he could not justify, Bogey had woken in a strange terror, deeply concerned about Makedde’s wellbeing. His sleep had been intermittent, his armrest already pummelled by a violent restlessness. Distress soaked his every pore and nerve ending, as convincing and real as any legitimate panic.

Mak.

He had every reason to be smiling. He should have been excited by his fast-approaching arrival in London, then Paris. He had every reason to feel elated to soon be seeing Mak, a woman who, should he be honest with himself, he had fallen for when they first met.

Instead, he felt panic.

Bogey rubbed his eyes and replaced his glasses. He put his seat upright, and remained that way for a few minutes, willing his heartbeat to slow to a normal pace. Out of habit, he reached for the packet of cigarettes in his leather jacket before remembering that he did not have any. He had no matches either. Neither would be helpful on a flight. Bogey was trying to quit. It did not seem to be working. In his mysterious rush of panic, the urge to smoke was strong.

It wasn’t guns that killed people, it was the bullets. Not the cigarettes, but the matches.

Makedde did not smoke. She never had. He wanted to quit for her.

By now it would be night-time in Paris, where Mak had said she would be sightseeing for the day—the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower. She had promised to show him these places if he had time out from the Form Art and Design Fair.
Of course I have time.
The truth was that London was an excuse to get to Paris to see her. She was the reason he was heading all the way to the design fair. He was not exhibiting his work there, and would most likely not be able to exhibit for another couple of years. She was the reason. He dared not tell her, but she probably already knew.

Bogey found he could not take his eyes from the inflight phone that was staring him in the face from the seatback in front of him. EASY CALLS IN TWO STEPS, it said.

Just call her and see if everything is okay. Bugger the cost.

In moments he had swiped his credit card into the seatback and the headset was ringing. The receptionist at Mak’s hotel answered.

She put his call through, and it rang a dozen times. With each ring, his distress increased.

‘
Il n’y a pas de réponse
. There is no answer,’ she said.

Bogey took a breath and swiped his credit card again. This time he dialled her mobile.

‘Hi, you’ve reached Mak. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now…’

It went straight to her voicemail.

Strange.

He had expected her to be back at her hotel by now, or at the very least answering her mobile in a restaurant or café somewhere. Why was it turned off? By his calculations it was already ten o’clock Paris time, yet she could not be reached. Was the stab of worry he felt motivated by fear for her, or fear of a misunderstanding? He recalled their last conversation, and tried to think of anything he might have said wrong. Was he pressuring her by suggesting he join her in Paris? Did she know that he had not intended travelling across the globe to London to attend the show this year, that it had always been a dream of his, but that he was not planning to go until he had something special to exhibit? Did she know he was only going as an excuse to see her, removed from all distractions, in the world’s most romantic city? Would that knowledge make her uncomfortable? She had just come out of a significant personal break-up. Perhaps this was all too much, too soon?

No.

Mak is in trouble.

Bogey resolved to continue calling her until she answered. He knew he would not be able to go to sleep again until he heard her voice and knew she was okay. His fingers reached again for the packet of cigarettes he did not have, and he sat back, worried and trapped. He tried to reassure himself that she was at a show, or a cinema, and had therefore turned off her phone. She would soon turn it back on. She was fine.

Mak is in trouble
, he thought again.

It would be another twenty hours before touchdown at Heathrow.

Mak cracked open her heavy eyelids a millimetre, as far as she could manage. She was in a dark, unfamiliar space.

Below her was something like a bare mattress, and around her was wrapped a heavy set of woollen blankets. She could see her breath in the air. Her nose felt cold, though her eyes were warm and puffy. She did not know where she was, or how she had got there, and nearly as urgent as this confusion was the tornado of pain in her head, and her throat, which ached as if she had been punched in the trachea. She pulled a leaden hand from under the blankets and caressed her aching neck.
Thirsty. Unbearably thirsty.
With effort, she struggled to sit up, and immediately felt a deep throbbing in her muscles. Her head felt almost too heavy to keep upright.

My ankle?

Makedde’s ankle felt strange. With dread, she pulled the blankets away and looked at it. The room spun.
No!
There was a heavy cuff locked around her flesh. A metal cuff and a chain…

Scream.

Scream!

Makedde’s mouth opened to shriek, but she caught herself before she uttered a sound. It was only a well-honed survival instinct that kept her quiet. For the moment she was alone. But she might not remain alone if she made a noise. She had to use caution. Anyone she would meet in this situation was not likely to be on her side. She had to figure a way out before her captor—or captors—came back.

Nothing to be gained from screaming right now. Nothing at all. Look. Listen. Remain calm. Figure this out. You can figure this out…

Waves of dizziness bombarded her. She was being beckoned back into unconsciousness. She struggled to remain alert and take in some of the detail around her. She was in a cold, dank space that smelled of mould and fermentation. She could see that the ceiling was low, perhaps not much more than two metres high. The floor was made of stone. The walls were stone. She saw wooden shelves of bottles on both sides of her.
A cellar?
She was not in the Denfert-Rochereau Ossuary any more. Could she be somewhere nearby? She hoped so. But probably not. Mak sensed that a lot of time had elapsed. Perhaps hours, perhaps even a day or two. Yes, it was at least a day. Her mouth was dry, her stomach felt hollow.
My God, where is this place?
There were no windows. She could not tell the time of day. A bit of light crept in from the top of a narrow, steep staircase of the type you found leading to attics, she thought. Was it artificial light, or sun seeping through? She could not tell.

Her eyelids felt heavy. They threatened to shut. Mak had been drugged. She was imprisoned, and she had been drugged.

Arslan.

Could he have been following her? Could he have tracked her down and drugged her? He was dangerous and he was on the loose. She was in danger.

As it is at the moment, you can’t get far. No windows. One door. You are chained. And you don’t know why.

The world within and without her dissolved into a terrifying, ill-defined fog. Her body didn’t feel right. Her brain stopped co-operating, stopped being lucid. And now her eyelids were too heavy to stay open any longer. She forced them open with her fingertips.

It isn’t safe to sleep.

Stay awake…

Stay awake!

A black void crept in around her, suffocating, stifling, more powerful than her determination to remain wakeful. The corners of her vision blackened like the edges of an old photograph. Gradually her fingers dropped, and her warm, bloodshot eyes shut of their own volition.

Mak felt her neck go limp as she slipped again into unconsciousness, the fingers of one hand wrapped around the heavy iron ankle cuff that kept her prisoner.

Luther Hand inserted his key and silently unlocked the heavy padlock on the cellar door.

He paused.

The padlock was new, and looked out of place in the rustic surroundings of the dilapidated farmhouse, where everything seemed to have been in place decades before his arrival. He let it swing on the hook with a rattle. He pushed the door open with his boot, and listened.

Silence.

Had there been any witness to this moment, they would have seen that Luther’s ravaged face did not betray any emotion. Beneath the surface of his cold countenance, however, conflict raged. With the door ajar, Luther peered inside at the short, steep set of steps that descended to the wine cellar. The stairs disappeared into relative darkness. His eyes took a moment to adjust, and once he could make out ghostly shapes of stone and wood, he stepped inside and listened again. Luther felt a strange tightness in his stomach, a kind of queer adrenaline. He took pleasure in standing in the
cool dark, listening for stirring below. He felt satisfaction. Strangeness. Even something like fear.

He could hear nothing.

Is she asleep?

There was no need to sneak up on her now, not as he had in the Catacombs.

Luther pulled a cord that dangled just inside the doorway next to him, and a bare light bulb flickered to life, casting a pale white glow into the space, illuminating the wooden steps and old stone walls. Now he could hear movement below, a weak shifting. The light had startled her out of a doze. She was there just below him. She was awake
.
Wasting no more time, Luther walked solidly down the staircase. It was not until he reached the bottom that he looked at his captive.

Makedde Vanderwall.

The bare bulb cast a circle of light on the floor where she sat. He’d taken her boots off to fit her ankle with the heavy iron cuff. The right leg of her jeans half obscured the cuff, from which a slack trail of chain ran to one dusty corner of the cellar, and an iron ring on the wall. The chain was solid, and quite sufficient to keep anyone in one place, even the likes of Mak Vanderwall who had proved resourceful in the past. She wore her black top and winter coat, which he had emptied of its few contents—a mobile phone, some cash, an old-fashioned hotel key and a small notepad and pen. He’d covered her with blankets, and she now wore them around her shoulders and over her toes. She was huddled on the bare mattress, knees bent to her chest and back against the wall. It was cold down here, cold and dark.

There was much about this moment which was odd for Luther. For starters, he had rarely been interested in keeping
people alive. On the handful of occasions in his career when he’d been required to do so, he’d arranged a similar setup, finding a cellar or storehouse, usually equipped with basic medical supplies and the most common tools of persuasion. Waterboarding. Electric shock. Those targets would always be eliminated once the required information was elicited. This was not Luther’s area of expertise, and such jobs had been rare. He was an expert killer, not a torturer. That sort of work was generally left to those with military training or a particular interest in the field. It was not Luther’s interest.

And this was different. Luther was not being paid to keep Mak alive. He was being paid to kill her.

He stood near the edge of the mattress, and observed the vision of her at his feet with an odd cocktail of feeling.
Exhilaration. Strangeness.
He had killed a handful of women in the course of his professional duties, but he had never before had a living woman captive in his care. Since he was a small boy, his contact with women had been limited, and once it was clear that his mother would be safer believing him dead, he had lost touch with the one woman in his life who had cared about him. Women hired for their company were his only option, and if it were not for those women that Ms Rosalay introduced him to, he would not have had any intimate encounters at all. It was not that he didn’t like women. Luther loved women, and he was attracted to them. The problem had always been that they did not like him. He repelled them. It was only the girls at Ms Rosalay’s establishment who were nice to him. But frustratingly, most of them were not very good at masking their distress at his appearance. When they saw him—his size, his face, his scars, his crooked nose, his half-torn ear—their eyes filled with an
alarm and disgust they could not hide. Some of the younger girls even cried when he got close. That was not what he wanted. Luther didn’t want to make women cry. He had no violence for them. That was not why he was there. He wished to avoid violence outside his work, and inflicting unwanted fear caused him a deep personal sadness.

So, Luther’s experiences with women were few. Yet here he was with a woman at his feet.
This
woman…

Will she recognise me now? Will she realise we have met before?

Makedde was still weakly shifting, seemingly disoriented. Possibly the drugs had not worn off, he thought. She was moving though, and eventually, from under the dishevelled mane of her blonde hair, a pair of bloodshot blue-green eyes found him. He did not register any expression in them except exhaustion. He did not register any recognition. Her beautiful eyes were puffy and red, mascara making dark smudges across her lashes. She was contained. This woman would no longer be swinging a motorcycle helmet at his face, breaking his nose. She would not be kicking him, scratching him, fighting and fleeing. He had her. Six years after she first crossed his path, Makedde Vanderwall was finally helpless before him, and this fact delivered mixed emotions. For Luther this issue had become significant. The desire to contain her had crept up on him. Even in the Catacombs, he had not been sure what he would ultimately do with her, or how much his chosen method of elimination was motivated by professionalism.

We have a history, you and I. We have a history.

When Luther had first laid eyes on this woman, he had been in the early stages of his career. He had been roughing people up for cash, and not very good cash at that, certainly
nothing like the five- and six-figure contracts he could now demand. Back in those days, his clients were lowlifes. The work was unsophisticated. Mak had been a Canadian visiting Sydney to work as a fashion model, and Luther had at first been hired to merely spook her: move things around in her apartment when she wasn’t there, confuse her, leave threatening messages, with the ultimate aim of scaring her back onto a plane to her homeland. It happened that one day he was concealed behind her couch and saw her in a state of undress. She’d had no inkling he was there, and she had moved through her apartment disrobed and radiantly naked.
You are beautiful
, he had wanted to tell her, but waited instead for a safe way to exit before being discovered. That week Luther lost the top of his ear to some unseen protector in her yard at night, in an incident he still did not understand. The man had come out of nowhere. He had used an extremely sharp blade. Luther had not been fast enough to respond. Even with all his many scars and the injuries he had received over the years, losing part of an ear was not something one soon forgot.