Eye for an Eye (29 page)

At last the
light left her, and she was able to breathe again. Next time she
looked back she saw headlights driving away leaving the cottage
dark and still.

She was
alone.

She broke into
a powerful overarm stroke that sent her surging through the water
like a torpedo, aiming for the tip of the headland that she had
seen earlier in the day. It would be a good place to take a rest
before she tackled crossing the lake to the far shore, where Colwyn
had said there was a group of houses nestled in a small bay. The
distance was within her capabilities, but cold and darkness added
to the difficulty. At least, she thought, there was plenty of
adrenaline in her system to keep her going. Being shot at was an
excellent motivator.

Her foot kicked
a rock painfully, and she realised she had reached the headland.
She stumbled ashore and sat down on the beach, shivering as her
clothes dripped onto the pebbles. Eyes closed, she visualised the
view from the cottage for the direction that should lead to the
houses, and peered into the darkness. Yes, there were lights! She
had a beacon to aim for, and possible sanctuary at the end of the
trip.

Just in case,
she noted the stars above the lights as a secondary indicator. If
there happened to be a power cut, she didn’t want to end her days
swimming in circles in a dark cold lake. She did a few jumps to get
her blood moving and her muscles warmed up, then waded back into
the lake. It felt almost warm after being out in the night air, and
she set off with a strong steady stroke towards the lights.

Colwyn, heading
back to Toronto, was far from steady. Things had suddenly got way
out of control, and he didn’t know what to do. He’d thought he’d
got Robyn where he wanted her, but she’d wriggled out of his grasp
like an eel. Just when he’d expected her to give up, she’d made a
break for it and now Harry had shot her right in the middle of the
lake. This wasn’t in the plan. How were they supposed to tie the
bodies together and sink them when one was floating about loose for
all the world to see? Suppose she had left something at the cottage
that might identify her and he’d failed to spot it? He had her
passport and papers, her purse and clothes, but she might have left
something at the beach, or in the shed. Sweat ran down his face,
gleaming in the headlights of oncoming cars.

Harry was
driving calmly, seemingly unaware of the enormity of what he’d
done.

In the back
seat, there was a muffled groan. Mike was regaining
consciousness.

‘Didn’t you
give him another dose?’ hissed Colwyn.

‘No Mr. Symons
- you’d said you wanted to talk to him when I brought him up here.
If I’d given him another dose he’d have been out to it for
hours.’

‘Well didn’t
you think of it when we left the cottage? Obviously the plan has
changed after your piece of target practice.’

‘Sorry. I can
do it now if you want.’

‘Yes of course
do it now! Can’t you get anything right? Give him a half dose or
something, just to keep him quiet.’

Harry shot him
a hurt look and pulled over to the side of the road. He opened the
rear door, pulled out a small black case, and extracted a syringe.
With a chuckle, he jabbed it into Mike’s thigh and administered the
dose, then replaced the case and got back into the driver’s
seat.

‘All taken care
of Mr. Symons. He’ll sleep like a baby till you’re ready.’

‘That’s if you
haven’t overdone it and killed him as well.’

‘Hey, I know
what I’m doing.’

Harry settled
back into driving, his mouth an ugly pout.

Robyn swam,
stroke after stroke, breathing regularly, covering the distance.
Her mind buzzed with ideas. If she didn’t make it and her body was
found, was there a ‘Made in NZ’ tag on any of her clothes that
would help to identify her? Pete would eventually report her as
missing and the authorities might make the connection. Could she
leave any clues herself? She toyed with the idea of scratching
‘Symons’ on her skin with a fingernail, but decided it wouldn’t
work on wet arms. Besides, if it left a scar, she’d be reminded of
him forever.

She swam on,
forcing tired muscles to keep performing.

At last she was
near enough to the shore to make out individual houses.

There seemed to
be a party going on at one of them, so she headed in that
direction. It would give her a better opportunity of finding
somebody who could help her get back to Toronto in a hurry. She
hadn’t really figured out what she was going to do, but she’d need
to talk to the police first and foremost. Once she’d got Colwyn
locked up she could happily go home to New Zealand. All she’d have
to arrange was a replacement passport if he’d destroyed her real
one.

She dragged
herself up the beach, feeling the full force of gravity weighing
her down after so long in the water. Noisy music from the party
reached towards her, and she squinted up at the crowd on the
balcony to make sure they weren’t low-lives or gang members that
she’d be better off avoiding. They looked like normal people, so
she squelched up to the front door and rang the bell.

‘Whoa, did you
swim over to complain about the noise?’

A tall, dark
man was laughing at her, until he realised she was near exhaustion
and wasn’t laughing back.

‘Come on in.
You want to tell me what’s wrong?’

He sat her on a
chair, despite her feeble protests that her wet clothes would ruin
it. A stunning dark-haired woman he introduced as Jessie came to
see who had arrived, and hurried off to make Robyn a hot
coffee.

As she sipped
it, she outlined what had happened to her. They reacted with
outrage on her behalf.

‘You have to
tell the police - Jessie, call the O.P.P.’

‘Shouldn’t it
be the Mounties for a Federal case? Attempted murder of an alien
would be Federal, wouldn’t it?’

‘Hell, I don’t
know. The O.P.P would be quicker, that’s for sure.’

‘What’s the
O.P.P.?’ asked Robyn, bewildered by the conversation.

‘Ontario
Provincial Police. They handle the local stuff.’

‘I’m not sure
this counts as local - the guy that shot at me comes from Toronto.
Does that make a difference?’

‘Oh, honey,
that might make it Metro’s problem - maybe we should call them
instead.’ Jessie hovered uncertainly over the phone.

‘It happened
here, that makes it O.P.P.,’ her husband said firmly. ‘Go on, call
them. This young lady needs to get some sleep sometime tonight
after all this malarkey.’

Robyn smiled at
him gratefully, close to the end of her endurance.

She held it
together, nursing a second hot cup of coffee until a couple of
local policemen arrived to interview her, but they asked endless
questions with what seemed to her to be increasing scepticism.
After they drove her all the way round the lake to where she
thought Colwyn’s cottage was and she wasn’t able to find it in the
dark, they lost all interest and didn’t appear to take her claim of
being shot at seriously. With no physical evidence to back up her
story, she finally gave up trying to persuade them and simply
pleaded for a ride back to Toronto. They agreed to take her, but
told her that investigating Colwyn’s apartment and boat would be a
matter for the Toronto Metro Police and advised her to call them if
she wished to pursue the case any further.

After a silent
journey they dropped her outside Mike’s place and drove off without
even bothering to see if he was home. Robyn was too tired to argue.
She was left standing in front of Mike’s apartment, knocking
quietly so as not to disturb the neighbours. Her door key was in
her abandoned purse along with a bunch of other stuff that would
have been really useful about now, like credit cards. There was no
answer, so she knocked again, harder this time. Finally, when
insistent pounding had achieved nothing except a shout of “Go
away!” from a window above, she gave up.

It was 1am and
he clearly wasn’t there.

She was alone
in the city once more with no money, and just a bagful of wet
clothes. She wished she had accepted Jessie’s offer of a bed for
the night as well as the loaned dry clothes, but it was too late
now. Wherever Mike was, he wasn’t going to let her in to his
apartment so she might as well find somewhere else to bed down for
the night.

She started
walking in the general direction of the studio. If she was really
in luck, Tony would be still there working late on the Christmas
scene and would let her in. If not, she could probably find a way
to break in somehow. It was a long trek, but better than sitting on
a cold concrete doorstep, so she set out as briskly as she could
manage.

She plodded her
way through the quiet streets where sleeping houses presented dark
faces to the night. To save her feet she tried walking on the grass
strip that ran between the trees, but she stumbled over too many
tree roots and stepped back onto the smooth sidewalk.

The miles
passed.

As she
approached the studio, her heart sank. Tony’s big gold Chevy wasn’t
in the parking lot. She walked round the outside of the building
looking for an open window, and checked all the doors, but came to
the conclusion that she was firmly locked out.

She pressed her
nose against the office window, and in the dim light from the
street, saw the coffee machine sitting there. It was all the
incentive she needed. She pried up a brick from the paving below
the window, took her wet sweatshirt out of the plastic bag, and
held it against the glass while she hit it hard. Shards and
splinters fell about her feet as she scraped a clear edge to climb
in over, but she was past caring. All she wanted was a hot drink
and a place to lie down. In the morning she’d deal with finding
Mike and getting a new passport and making a travel insurance claim
on lost belongings and all the other drama.

She hauled
herself painfully over the sill, dusted off the bits of glass, and
made herself a coffee. There was no fresh milk so she had to make
do with non-dairy creamer, but the mixture tasted like nectar of
the gods. She pirated a packet of biscuits that was supposed to be
used as a prop, and ate the lot. Finally, with the last of her
energy, she found a fur coat in the props room to pull over her,
lay down on the couch, and fell into an exhausted sleep.

CHAPTER
12

Colwyn stirred
as Harry made a sharp turn off the expressway and drove down into
the city. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked sharply.

‘Your
apartment, Mr Symons. Isn’t that where you want to go?’

‘With him?’
Colwyn jerked a thumb towards the back seat. ‘That would look good,
wouldn’t it, carrying an unconscious body around in my building?
Not suspicious at all. Try to be smart, Harry. Take us to the boat,
we’ll deal with him there.’

They drove to
the marina, and quietly unloaded their cargo onto the dock. Harry
took Mike’s weight and stood him up, then they half dragged, half
carried him to the Angel Lady.

‘Hey, Mr.
Symons - did you ever see that movie Weekend at Bernie’s?’

‘Yes. Shut
up.’

‘This is just
like when they took the corpse to the party, eh?’

‘Yes. Shut
UP.’

They wrestled
Mike’s unconscious body into the cabin and dumped him onto a bunk.
Harry tied his hands.

‘Won’t give you
no trouble now, Mr. Symons.’

‘When’s he due
to come round?’

‘What is it now
- two o’clock? He’ll be out another coupla hours. We’ll be able to
get a bit of shut-eye ourselves.’

‘Not just yet,
Harry. There’s another job to do first.’

‘Huh?’

‘Because you
went and shot the girl, Harry, there will be an investigation.
Missing women will be talked about. She won’t turn up for work, and
they may report that to the police. Suppose she has things in her
locker there that connect her to me? It wouldn’t take the
authorities long to come sniffing round here and interviewing the
pair of us, Harry. We have to go to the studio and make sure
there’s no evidence. Obviously I can’t trust you to do it
alone.’

‘Couldn’t we do
it tomorrow? I’m real tired now after all that driving. I could go
there in the morning and say she’s had an accident and won’t be
coming back, and ask to pick up her things.’

‘Oh yes,
Einstein strikes again. Wrong! Why would you show your face to a
whole bunch of witnesses and link us to the missing girl when we
could just go in there tonight, see no-one, and get what we need?
Think, Harry, think.’

‘I guess you’re
better at that than me, Mr. Symons.’

‘Just get on
with it Harry. The sooner we get it done, the sooner we can get to
sleep, all right?’

Harry and
Colwyn trudged back along the dock and started up the car.

Robyn heard the
car stop.

Deeply asleep
as she was, her subconscious was alert enough to nudge her on
hearing a car pull up outside the studio in the middle of the
night. She struggled back to the surface of wakefulness, and lay
there listening. Nothing sounded wrong. She closed her eyes and let
herself drift off again.

Harry walked
round the building checking for a way in, and found the broken
window. He heaved his substantial bulk over the windowsill and
eased down to the floor inside. Using a thin beam of light from his
pencil torch, he checked the room, frowning when he found the warm
coffee machine. He moved on into the studio itself, looking for
some kind of staff room or locker area, moving quietly but missing
nothing. The narrow beam of his torch flickered over cables, light
stands, tripods. It shone into each area, then moved on. He opened
doors soundlessly, checking each room he found.

Sudden light on
her eyelids roused Robyn, who sat up with a startled cry.