Lynch (8 page)

Jesse nodded, took a sip of his wine, and gave Scott his full attention.

‘He was stabbed,’ Scott began, ‘right in front of me, outside a club in
Belfast
.’ He told Jesse about the events leading up to that critical point, the drinks and the dancing, the laughter and the normality of life. And he told him of the events that immediately followed, how Ryan’s weight had felt dead in his arms before he even drew his last breath, how he had watched him being zipped into a black rubber body bag. He spoke of his night in hospital with a policeman outside his room, wasn’t sure if they thought he would kill himself or if they were protecting him from some unknown entity. He told him about the funeral, how he could even remember that it had been raining that afternoon, remembered feeling so empty inside, and he told him about the months of black depression that followed.

But he never mentioned David Bernhard, never spoke of Interpol or drugs or arms dealing. He never told him about having a bomb strapped to his chest or about his real name or that Katherine was in fact Ryan’s mother, not his own. He stuck to the facts that were necessary, giving Jesse enough to acknowledge the reticence with which he now treated relationships but not enough to scare him away.

They were presented with dessert by the time he had finished and Jesse flattened his lips for a moment and said nothing. At length, he said, ‘Thank you. I owe you a story.’

‘Later,’ Scott said. ‘This butterscotch pie is amazing and it wouldn’t be fair to divide my attention between you and it.’

‘Second best to a pie,’ Jesse laughed. ‘At least I know where I stand.’ Their shared laughter was perfectly unperfect together.

After dinner, they took a walk through Chevin Forest Park in the dwindling summer sunlight, casually ambling along the path between rows of trees and megalithic stone boundaries, neither of them in a hurry to be anywhere else. The branches of the maple trees overhung the path in places to create a tunnel effect that succeeded in adding to the beauty of the trail.

Scott put his arm over Jesse’s shoulders and bumped heads. ‘I’ve had a great time,’ he said.

Jesse smiled. ‘Do you want to hear about my stalker now?’

Scott nodded, remained quiet, and they continued to walk.

‘Like I think I said, she moved into the flat above me when I lived in
York
. Her name was Prabha. The day we met she invited me to her baptism so I knew immediately that she was a bit clingy. I don’t think she had any friends, so showing her some friendliness was probably all it took. When her baptism occurred, I almost felt obliged to drive her there and when we arrived, she introduced me to these church elders or whatever they were called. One of them even prayed with me, her hand on my shoulder, saying, “I thank you, Jesus, for bringing Jesse into Prabha’s life,” and things like that. I think she had told them I was her boyfriend.’

Scott let his arm fall down Jesse’s back and he clasped his hand.

Jesse continued, ‘She would come down to visit me every evening, asking if I had ten minutes to discuss this or that. But her ten minutes would become three or four hours. Did you know there’s a limit on how long you can pause live TV? After so long, it drops out and goes back to normal. That’s how long she would stay.

‘She was constantly telling me about how much she prays to Jesus for things, and how she always gets what she asks for if she really means it. And she was quite tactile, touching my leg while she laughed. I guess at first I was a bit naïve—I just didn’t pick up on the signals that she was so obviously sending out. It took me some time to realise that she liked me as more than a friend or neighbour. And at that point, I’d never mentioned my sexuality. I didn’t have a boyfriend at the time and because of her religion, I didn’t want to upset her. But when I realised what she was looking for, I casually dropped it into conversation.’

Scott raised an eyebrow. ‘You mean like, “Jesus loves you, and by the way I’m a big homo. Would you like more tea?”’

Jesse laughed. ‘No, not quite. But I did mention an ex-boyfriend. I dropped it in so carefully, placed it where I figured she’d register it but wouldn’t comment. But her jaw dropped and she said, “You’re gay?” like she was gobsmacked, and when I said yes, she said, “You’re going to hell.”’

‘Jesus,’ Scott said.

‘Jesus wouldn’t have me, according to her.’

They sat on a patch of grass in the lowering sunlight, side by side, shoulder to shoulder.

‘Anyway, she said that I should repent, and that if only I would come to her prayer meetings at the Baptist church, they could help me. Eventually, I asked her to leave, but she continued to knock on my door every evening. In the end, I stopped answering. Every time I heard her footsteps on the stairs I’d mute the TV and stay still until the knocking stopped and I heard her go back upstairs. This was all a few months after we met, so it wasn’t just a sudden infatuation she’d had. It developed over the months. Sometimes at night I’d hear her crying from the flat upstairs.’

He took a deep breath. ‘A while after that, she got into my flat one night. She had her own key—God knows how she got it; she must have copied mine somehow. I was asleep. I knew nothing until I woke up and found her kneeling over me on the bed. It all happened so fast. “You can’t be gay,” she said, “I love you.” And there was a glint in the darkness, something in her hand. I didn’t have a clue what it was. I was so startled to find her in my room, leaning over me, that I didn’t even think about weapons or anything. She brought her arm up and I saw a knife in her hand; one of my own knives, actually.

‘She swung and I realised what she was doing, and I grappled with her wrists and we tumbled on the floor and she stabbed me, here, under my arm.’ Jesse lifted his T-shirt to show the white scar to Scott, a gash of over two inches long. Scott reached out, touched it lightly. ‘She actually left the knife in me,’ Jesse said. ‘She stood up and she was crying and I remember thinking,
Why are you crying?
I
should be crying, not you
. And then she left.’

Jesse lowered his T-shirt and Scott’s fingers were still on his skin.

‘Did they lock her up?’

It took a few seconds before Jesse replied. ‘I didn’t report her. I just wanted to get on with things.’ He looked at Scott. ‘But I wish now I had, because I still have some sleepless nights. Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in this nightmare of window locks and moving furniture in front of doors. It makes me feel like an idiot sometimes.’

‘You’re not an idiot,’ Scott said. He hugged him tight. ‘That was in
York
. You’re here now. Forget about her.’

‘I’m trying,’ Jesse said. ‘I’m really trying. I saw her once more when I was moving out. She said she’d find me. And that I’d regret it.’

Chapter 11

Only a fool would walk in through the front door of the Interpol building in
Central London
with a gun and Fernandez was not about to be foolish. But with the description given to him by Jim Dixon—blonde, five foot six, glasses, always a copper bracelet on her left wrist, and a massive rack—and Dixon’s knowledge of her routine habits, as though he’d been spying on her for months, all Fernandez had to do was stand outside on the street and wait for Lucy Devonshaw to come to him.

Lucy had signed the official secrets act and was entrusted with more information than most people saw in a lifetime. If anyone knew where Kane Rider and Margaret Bernhard were hiding, it was her; or she would certainly be able to find out.

As he waited on the street for her, he called the tech guy to check on his progress. He was trying to locate Bernhard and Rider with cellular data as well as performing transactional checks and, in Ling Xu’s own words, ‘tapping into the national CCTV grid and running facial recognition on a forty-seven point protocol at a rate of six per second, running off four computers that are each accessing four other random internet-enabled computers to steal bandwidth and power and route IPs on four-minute bursts. Four’s my lucky number,’ Xu added.

‘Will it work?’ Fernandez asked the teenager.

‘Only if you’re prepared to wait six months,’ Xu said. ‘It’ll take forever to scan every face in the
UK
—and that’s assuming they’re still even in the
UK
. Do you know how many times your face is captured on CCTV in a day?’

‘Can you speed up the process?’

Xu’s sigh on the end of the phone was heavy. ‘I’m not ramping up the access from four, it’ll only increase the chances of getting spotted as we poke around in someone else’s unsecure network. It’ll take as long as it takes. We’re pollinating flowers, here, mister. We have to tread carefully or we’ll get shit all over our shoes.’

‘Just keep trying,’ Fernandez said and he hung up without another word.

At the sound of a nearby church bell pealing out twelve o’clock, Fernandez straightened up and pushed his hands into his jacket pockets. At twelve o’clock,
Dixon
had told him, Lucy Devonshaw would exit the building and walk to The Bagel Factory through the park, usually alone. She would return to the office with her lunch and wouldn’t reappear until six.

He had a six-minute window in which to make an impression on her—one way or another.

How
Dixon
knew all of this was a question Fernandez didn’t want to ask.

Two minutes after the church bell tolled, a young blonde woman with, Fernandez had to admit, the decent rack Dixon had mentioned, came out of the building, waving over her shoulder at someone in the lobby. She strode down the steps and looked both ways before crossing the busy road.

Fernandez ducked back out of sight and slipped into the park. When Lucy Devonshaw came through the entrance, Fernandez took his watch off and twisted the winder. It was an old trick, one that probably wouldn’t work, but he was prepared to try.

‘Excuse me, miss, do you have the correct time?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t,’ Lucy said with barely a glance in his direction.

‘I have a gun,’ Fernandez said. He was already pulling back his jacket and reaching inside.

‘Excuse me?’ she said, turning to face him, still walking away from him.

‘Don’t run, Lucy. Don’t scream.’

She stopped. The confusion on her face—the gun, her name—was evident. One quick step and he took her arm, pushed the barrel of the handgun under her ribs.

‘I’m sure you’re clever enough not to try anything foolish, Lucy, correct?’

She nodded.

‘Sit down,’ he told her, and together they sat on the nearby bench. With other people in the park, he kept the gun hidden from view but made Lucy Devonshaw plainly aware of it.

He smiled at her, waited to see if she’d say anything. She just looked at him, right in the eyes, pretending she wasn’t scared even though he could smell the fear on her like piss on a beggar.

She really did have a nice pair of jugs. He wondered how soon before a CCTV camera picked them up and Ling Xu spotted her and took a screenshot for his wank bank.

Eventually, Lucy said, ‘Who are you? Who put you up to this?’

‘I can be a friend,’ Fernandez said, ‘or an enemy. That depends on you. I need you to do something for me.’ Lucy glanced over his shoulder and Fernandez said, ‘Don’t look at anyone else, look at me.’

She did. ‘This is about work,’ she said.

‘Very clever,’ Fernandez smiled. She still had the use of her brain with a gun in her side; that was a good sign. What she had meant was clear: if he had wanted to rape her, he wouldn’t have been so bold as to attempt it in broad daylight in a busy
Central London
park. ‘There are some people I need to locate,’ he told her. ‘Some very slippery people.’

‘Why me?’

Fernandez shrugged. ‘You have an admirer. Your name came up in conversation. These people, they’re in your Witness Protection. I need to know where they are.’

Lucy Devonshaw shook her head. ‘I don’t have clearance.’

‘I know you have clearance.’

‘I don’t have that level of clearance. WP files are sealed and secured.’

‘I need their location,’ Fernandez reiterated. ‘Or I can pay your mother a visit and offer her a taste of Spanish cock before I gut her in front of her husband.’

‘You leave her alone,’ she said. She stared at him. ‘This isn’t going to end well,’ she said, and he thought she was threatening him until she added, ‘I guess you plan to kill me. I can’t get those names, and even if I could, what makes you think I could just walk back into the building, fire up a computer and access files I shouldn’t be anywhere near, and not tell a single soul that you’re standing outside with a gun in your hand and a hard on to scare innocent women with? The place would be swarming with cops in seconds.’

Fernandez smiled. ‘I like a woman who knows how to dance. But you won’t do that. You know how I know you won’t? Because you know that as soon as you step away from me, I will be long gone. Like the wind,’ he said, fluttering his fingers in the air. ‘And when I come back to find you, it won’t be in a public park full of people; it will be in the dead of night while you sleep and I will wake you and do unimaginable things to you. This I know you believe.’ He fingered the Crucifix around her neck. ‘Your Jesus tells you this is true. So yes, I have a gun and a hard on, but all you have is a miserable death to look forward to. I could fuck your body after I kill you. You’d still be warm.’

‘You’re sick,’ she said, and Fernandez grinned as he watched the colour drain from her face.

‘You will get me their new names,’ he said. ‘And their location.’

‘I can’t access those files.’

‘Yes, you can.’

‘WP files are on password rotation. Only two people know what they are at any one time and as soon as files are accessed it triggers a system of notifications that get passed to
Lyon
for verification. How am I supposed to bypass that?’

Fernandez had not known about this relay notification process and
Dixon
hadn’t mentioned it. As soon as Lucy touched the files, Interpol’s HQ in
France
would know about it, and if access wasn’t verified as coming from appropriate channels, they’d know there had been a breach and Margaret Bernhard and Kane Rider would be picked up and moved before anyone could blink. They’d be back at square one.

‘Someone will know where they are,’ Fernandez said. ‘You won’t need to access the closed files if you can get the information out of someone else.’

‘Detectives don’t go around telling you their case histories,’ Lucy said.

‘They do if you want to live,’ Fernandez said. ‘Their real names were Margaret Bernhard, Kane Rider. I’ll give you two hours to find out what I need to know or you die.’

Lucy surprised him by actually laughing. ‘The Rider-Bernhard case?’ she asked. ‘From over a year ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘In that case, we’re both screwed. The principal lead has retired and the other has been suspended. You’re bang out of luck.’

‘Where do these detectives live?’

‘Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.’

Fernandez tightened his grip on her arm, pushed harder with the barrel of the gun against her side. ‘You’ll tell me,’ he said, teeth gritted.

‘No.’

She turned her face from him and filled her lungs for a scream. Fernandez quickly took her chin, just as the first whisper of a cry for help escaped her, and twisted her head back to him. He pulled her in and kissed her, muffling her scream. He squeezed the trigger on the silenced gun and felt her jerk in his arms. Even with the silencer attached, the weapon still made a sound—it acted more as noise-suppression rather than cancellation—and once he had shot her at such close range, he continued to kiss her so that any passersby would think nothing of two lovers on a lunchtime date.

Discreetly pocketing the gun before breaking the kiss, Fernandez lifted her limp body back against the bench and folded her arms over the bleeding wound in her stomach. He took the copper bracelet from her wrist—maybe he’d give it to Dixon; maybe he’d keep it for himself—and he left her sitting on the bench, looking to all the world like a weary office worker enjoying an afternoon nap in the sunshine.

He licked his lips as he walked away. He could still taste her lipstick. She was right; he did have a hard on.

But he was no closer to finding his targets.