Lovers and Liars Trilogy (82 page)

The woman’s eagerness was evident: She was clearly aroused and Hawthorne, equally clearly, was not.

He was watching her in a cold, dispassionate way; nothing in his attitude suggested response. His hands were by his sides. He made no attempt to touch the blonde, or to aid her. He lifted his face very slightly. Pascal took one shot, then another, then stopped. His mind was now beginning to work again, he could think in a more normal mode, and he could read the expression on Hawthorne’s features, which was one of dislike and contempt. The woman shuddered, and rubbed her breasts against his thighs. As she reached up, as if to unfasten his pants, Hawthorne hit her. The action was sudden, swift; the arm lifted, swung, and smashed the woman across her face.

The blow was so hard that it knocked her to the ground. She fell back, half rose, collapsed again, and then dragged herself a few feet away from him. She was now out of frame, hidden from Pascal’s view by the edge of the window. At exactly that moment, just as Pascal realized he could not go on with this, Hawthorne looked up. He turned full-face to the window, full-face to the camera, and gave a tight triumphant smile.

Pascal straightened, and stepped back. He saw now what he should have seen at once. This was not—could not be—unintentional. Would any man in Hawthorne’s position do this? Why stand in front of uncurtained, unshuttered windows, in full light? Why do any of those things, unless what was taking place opposite was a performance for Pascal’s benefit, his very own private viewing, carefully arranged and staged, by John Hawthorne himself?

Bewildered, Pascal bent to the viewfinder again. If this was intentional, it made no sense. Why should Hawthorne wish to provide him with evidence, with proof? One second later, as the woman stepped back into frame, Pascal had the answer to that question. Instinctively he had begun to shoot. He stopped.

The woman in front of him now was no longer blond-haired; her hair reached just to her shoulders, and it was black. Perhaps the blow, and the fall, had dislodged the blond hairpiece she had been wearing, perhaps she had simply decided to dispense with it. Either way, something, a departure from normal rules maybe, had made her acutely distressed.

Her face was chalk-white, and she was trembling with emotion. She began to pull off the black gloves. She threw them to the ground. She launched herself at Hawthorne with a sudden ferocity, punching and clawing, as if she were trying to scratch his face. Hawthorne caught hold of her and put her aside with an easy strength. This seemed to please her. She shuddered and swung around so she was once again full-face to Pascal’s camera. She began to speak, a taunting expression on her face. Though Pascal could hear nothing, he could lip-read the words easily enough.
Hit me,
she said once, twice, three times.

Hawthorne gave her a long, cold, and considering look. In a deliberate way, he turned his back on her, crossed to the window, and began to close the shutters. Before he did so, he looked up one last time, directly at the window where Pascal stood. There was no mistaking the small, tight smile he gave, or the derision in his eyes.

That smile said: Your pictures are unusable. Pascal straightened. He watched the shutters opposite close. He felt an instant’s anger, then a flood of self-loathing. Game, set, and match to Hawthorne, he thought. Of course the pictures were unusable. His pictures proved nothing beyond the fact that both the ambassador and his wife shared a taste for sexual games.

I
T WAS A MAN
outside the door, Gini was certain of that. The footsteps, punctuated by long periods of silence, were too heavy to have been a woman’s, but beyond that they told her little. She could not tell, always, where he was: Sometimes he would sound close, so she expected the door to open at any second, then he would seem to be moving around farther off. Then she would think he had left, and then—after another long and terrifying silence—she would hear him move again.

The darkness seemed to magnify sound and distort it. Was that breathing, or the wind moving through a branch? The night was filled with tiny rustling and scuffling sounds; there was an eerie intermittent whistling noise, thin and high above her, which she thought must be the wind seeping through the tiles of the roof.

She had lost all sense of time, and when she finally began to believe that the man had gone, that she might be alone, she had no idea if half an hour passed, or more, or less. Her heart was beating painfully fast. She edged against the wall and felt for the light switch. Whether the man had gone or still remained, she could bear this absence of light no longer. She counted to ten, then pressed the light switch behind her. Nothing happened. She gave a low moan of fear and slid down the wall into a crouching position. She remembered the noise of that outbuilding door being opened and shut—a shed that housed the circuit breaker, or even a generator. The power had been shut off.

She crouched there, trying to think. Then she remembered: There were other power sources in this house. There was the paraffin stove, and the gas stove in the kitchen. If lit, both would provide some light. She had no matches, but there were matches upstairs, on the floor by the sleeping bag. She started quickly across the kitchen and felt her way into the living room. She banged into the table, gave a cry, and felt for the wall. She found the door to the stairs, and the faint light in the room above gave her hope. Her hands were shaking: When she picked up the matchbox, she almost dropped it. Slowly, slowly, she said to herself. She opened the box: There were four matches left. She tried the gas stove first. There was a hissing, then, at last, as she touched the match to the burner, some light.

It was bluish and wavering, but it steadied her at once. She listened. Still silence. She looked at her watch. She stared at its hands, unable to believe what they told her. It was past five. She’d been here more than an hour: more than an hour since that door had been slammed and locked. The realization made her frantic.

She tried the back door first, then the front. Both were heavy and reinforced with thick paneling, not normal old cottage doors. Why had she not noticed that? She tried pulling and pushing with all her strength: Neither budged by so much as a centimeter.

She edged back to the kitchen. The gas was still burning well. She opened a cupboard door next to the stove, and found the gas canister there. She looked at it fearfully, and tried to move it, but it was too heavy. It had no gauge. She had no way of telling how much gas was left.

She could not bear the thought of the gas expiring, of being without light. She began a frantic search for some other source of power—a flashlight, candles. There was none. Then she steadied herself and forced herself to become calmer. The doors would not open, the skylight was unreachable, the only means of exit were the windows—and the windows were boarded up.

There was a window in the kitchen, above the sink. She levered herself up onto the counter and examined it. As with all the other downstairs windows—two in the living room, the one here—the boarding-up had been carefully done. The windows were completely covered with thick chipboard, nailed into their frames on the inside. The nails were at one-inch intervals all around the frame; the chipboard itself was in one thick sheet.

She climbed back down to the floor and drew her coat tighter around her. It was bitterly cold, and any residual heat that there had been had worn off.

She made her way back through the bluish flickering darkness to the living room, and eyed the paraffin stove. She had never used one, and she tried to remember how McMullen had lit it the evening they came here. There had been a little door on its side, which he opened, and some mechanism for turning up the wick. She worked out how to do it, finally, and lit it.

She adjusted it as she had seen McMullen do, so the smoky yellow flame burned a clean blue. The light in this room was now a little stronger. She searched both it and the kitchen carefully, going through every cupboard and every drawer. She laid out the array of implements on the kitchen table: three dinner knives, three forks, one teaspoon, a can opener—no tools of any kind.

She climbed up on the countertop again, and tried the knives first. She was breathing hard now, trying to keep her hands steady. She found she could insert the thin blade of the knife between board and window frame—but that was all. She slid the knife back and forth to try to loosen the board, but the blade was too weak. Growing more desperate, she pushed the blade right in, then tried to lever with the handle. Nothing happened. She wrenched harder. The blade snapped.

She gave a cry and threw the broken handle down. She tried again, with a fork this time, first inserting the prongs under the board, then, when that proved useless, the thicker handle end. But she could not thrust the fork under the board far enough to get any leverage. She pushed harder, growing frantic, and her hand slipped. The fork juddered, and the prongs impaled her palm. With a cry of pain she dropped it. Blood welled, and dripped down her fingers into the sink. She slid back down to the floor and went to run the water in the sink. She turned the tap, but there was no water: just a trickle, then a dry, gurgling sound.

For some reason, that terrified her. She stared around her and saw these rooms now as a trap. She had no water and no food. The gas and the paraffin would last only so long. This house was remote, unused, closed up. No one knew she was there. She could be there for days, weeks. Panic swept into her mind, swamping any ability to think. Blood dripped from her hand into the white of the sink. The air in the room was now dry and acrid from the gas. She slumped against the sink, fighting down the fear, telling herself to be calm. She found a cloth and wrapped it around her bleeding hand; she lowered the flame of the gas, and of the paraffin stove, so that their fuel would last longer, and she made herself think.

It wasn’t true that no one knew where she was. Pascal knew. He might not know precisely, because she had not mentioned the cottage to him, but he knew that she had been going to the rail line below. He was expecting her in London at six. When she did not return, eventually, he would take action. He would work out where she might have gone. It was foolish to think of being trapped here for days or weeks—that was not going to happen. She would be found, and released. But she had no intention of waiting that long: She was going to get out of this place by herself.

She thought of Pascal. She saw his face and heard his voice. He felt suddenly very close, and this sense of his closeness gave her courage. She climbed back up onto the counter and felt the edge of the board carefully. Halfway down on the right-hand side, one of the nails was driven in at a poor angle. It was looser than the others. Slowly and carefully this time, she inserted the blade of the second knife. She began to lever it gently, back and forth, back and forth.

It took hours. For hours she worked away at the one loose nail, that tiny section of board. She levered it just a fraction, first with the knife blade, then, when the gap between board and window frame was a fraction wider, with the fork. As she worked, concentrating on that tiny section of wood, she thought carefully back over the events of that day. One by one they clicked into place. McMullen was
not
dead, she was now certain of that. He had been here. It was he who had bought that newspaper, lit the paraffin stove, and opened that envelope of photographs. It was McMullen, she thought, who had been here when she herself arrived, and McMullen who had locked her in. Now he had left—which suggested the place was of no further use to him. He had left, but where would he have gone?

She stopped her levering for a second and stared straight ahead. Her skin went cold. He had received the photographs, and they must have been a devastating blow to him. He had left them behind, but he had taken with him both that heavy army rucksack, and the container of gun oil.

She looked down at her watch. It was past eight o’clock. Only four hours of Saturday remained. Why would McMullen stage his own death—and she was now certain that he had done just that—unless he wanted to buy himself a little time, lull John Hawthorne into a false sense of security? Suppose, as Pascal had suggested, McMullen had decided to kill Hawthorne? When would he have the best opportunity? When everyone believed him dead. Of course, she thought, on the Sunday, on the third Sunday of the month—that date might well appeal to McMullen, and that Sunday was now just four hours away.

She levered frantically at the board again, then steadied herself. She suddenly remembered something Hawthorne had said to her the previous evening. It was after she had mentioned Venice.
Don’t believe all the lies,
Hawthorne had said.
Just give me a few more days.

She stared at the board in front of her. When he said that, Hawthorne must already have known about that body on the rail line, and must have assumed McMullen was dead. He must have believed that with McMullen dead the rest of the lies and allegations could be quickly cleared up—that was why he had felt able to speak to her as openly as he did. But if McMullen were
not
dead, then Hawthorne could be in danger He might have not a few days, but only a few hours, left.

As she thought that, she pushed hard on the board, and at last, at last the loose nail was dislodged; she could get more purchase on the board. She began to work at it, first with the fork, then with the can opener, the handles of which were stronger, then—when the space widened—with her fingers. The board creaked, resisted, cut into her hands. Gini cried out, almost fell, tugged harder, and the board split.

Even then it was still a slow, hard task. She had to break the board away from the window bit by bit. Sometimes a large chunk could be ripped away, then only a tiny sliver. But gradually she could see moonlight outside, then an angle of wall through the glass, then the flagstones. Her hands were bleeding now, and stiff with cold and exertion, but she fought with the board, hating herself for being a woman with weak muscles, bitterly aware that a man, Pascal, could have ripped this board away in minutes. She tugged and ripped and pulled and pushed: Freedom felt so close. She could see the moonlit yard clearly now, and beyond it the darkness of the woods. Her car was there, just sixty yards down that slope. In another half hour she could be in that car and away from this place. She could find a phone, call Pascal, call Hawthorne too, yes, she must do that. Hawthorne had to be warned that McMullen was not dead.