The Wolves of London (26 page)

‘Funny way of showing his protective side – by kicking you out to fend for yourself.’

‘It was my decision. Benny’s a proud man. He’d already decided to kick
you
out. There was no way he was going to lose face by going back on that.’

‘Not even if it meant leaving you at the mercy of the Wolves of London?’

‘Like I say, it was my decision. What could he do? Force me at gunpoint back into the car? Shoot me if I refused?’

‘I see your point.’ I hesitated, then said, ‘Do you think he’d have shot
me
if I’d refused to get out of the car?’

Clover was silent for a few seconds. Far off in the darkness I heard the mournful cry of a bird.

‘Who knows?’ she said finally. ‘Maybe. Benny’s unpredictable. I’ve known him for years, but I wouldn’t claim to
know
him, if you get what I mean? With people like Benny, it’s all about self-preservation. They’re loyal and protective up to a point, but they would never lay their life on the line for you. If Benny thought you were a threat he’d kill you as soon as look at you.’

I wondered, not for the first time, what had prompted him to take me under his wing in prison all those years ago. Had it been a whim? Had he thought I might be useful to him in some way? Or was it pointless trying to work out his motives because, as Clover had said, he was unpredictable?

‘Back at the house, and then in the car, was the first time I’ve seen him flustered,’ I said. ‘I’d always thought he was… unruffable. Is that a word?’

Clover made a sound in her throat that was barely a laugh. ‘It is now.’ Again she paused. ‘I might be wrong, but I think the darkness, and then seeing that… thing on your arm, rocked his world – and not in a good way. Although Benny’s unpredictable, his world is very black and white; it has very set parameters. He can cope with threats from other people, but I think what happened tonight took him so far out of his comfort zone that it scared the shit out of him. It made him realise he wasn’t in control, after all, that there were things he couldn’t understand and deal with. So he decided to jettison what he saw as the cause.’

‘Me,’ I said, and she nodded.

We trudged on in silence for another minute or so, the uneven ground crackling wetly underfoot. It was just before 6 a.m., maybe an hour or so before dawn, yet although the sky was only a fraction lighter than the landscape around us, courtesy of a half-moon that transformed the low-hanging clouds into smears of silver, the dawn chorus was beginning its first hesitant twitterings and warblings. Surrounding us was the mulchy odour of wet vegetation and the occasional sharp tang of animal musk.

‘So what about you?’ I said eventually.

She looked at me. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, Benny was right, wasn’t he? You could have cut your losses, put yourself out of danger by staying with him and Lesley. But you chose to come with me instead. Why was that?’

Her features tightened as her eyes narrowed. ‘Is that a serious question?’

‘You tell me.’

She halted abruptly. Her fists were clenched and I could tell she was angry. In a tight voice she said, ‘Has the world really become so… so fucking cynical? So
poisonous
? Does nobody think that loyalty and integrity are good enough reasons any more?’

Aware that I was playing devil’s advocate, I muttered, ‘Like Benny said, you hardly know me.’

She closed her eyes briefly, as if fighting to control her temper. Then, in a scarily calm voice, she said, ‘I feel guilty, if you must know. Regardless of whether I like you or not – which I do – I feel a
duty
to hang around. If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t be in possession of the heart; you wouldn’t have the “Wolves of London”, or whoever they are, after you; your daughter might not have been kidnapped.’

I shook my head. ‘We don’t know if that’s true. If you’re not bullshitting me – which I have to admit I’m still not sure about – then you’re just as much of a pawn in this game as I am.’

‘Game?’ she said.

I flapped a hand. ‘I use the term loosely.’

‘I’ve lost my business,’ she said, ‘my home. Friends of mine, people I know, and in Mary’s case loved, have died…’

Her voice choked off. I stepped towards her instinctively, as if to offer comfort, but she waved me back.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Sorry. I’m just so…’ I shook my head. ‘This is just so fucked up.’

She drew a long, shuddering breath. Swiped at her teary eyes as if angry at herself for getting upset. Eventually, almost challengingly, she said, ‘So what’s the plan now?’

It was a question that had been preying on my mind. Shrugging, I said, ‘We hitch a lift back to London, I suppose.’

‘And then what?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.

She sighed, though I’m sure she can’t have been expecting anything more constructive than that.

‘At least I’ve still got the heart,’ I said. ‘Hopefully that will protect us.’

‘Hopefully,’ she said, and sighed deeply, then began to look around as if searching for something.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

‘I really need to pee,’ she said.

I laughed. After the tension of the last couple of minutes her words struck me as funnier than they ought to have done.

‘I’ll just go behind those bushes over there,’ she said. ‘Wait for me, won’t you?’

‘Course I will.’

I watched her move to the side of the track and then blend into the blackness of the trees and undergrowth. The crackle and snap of small branches as she pushed her way through the dark tangle gradually faded to silence.

‘You all right?’ I called.

Her voice was fainter than I expected it to be. ‘Fine.’

‘You sound quite far away.’

‘I didn’t want you to hear me peeing. It’s embarrassing.’

‘I’ll cover my ears.’

In fact, I didn’t need to cover my ears. Any sound that Clover might have been making was masked by the still-muted tuning up of the dawn chorus and the occasional rustle of wind in the bushes. I stood and relished these gentle sounds, tilting my head back and drawing the fresh morning air deep into my lungs. I doubted there would be many more moments like this in my immediate future, moments when I could just stand in contemplation, secure in the knowledge that I was alone and undetected. Then I thought of how I couldn’t hear Clover even though she was only thirty or forty metres away, which made me realise how oblivious the two of us would be if there
was
actually someone close by, monitoring our movements. Would we hear them if they began to stalk us? Would the heart alert me to danger?

Once again I slipped my hand into my pocket and stroked the surface of the heart, tracing its contours with my fingertips. I was aware that my desire to keep touching it was almost fetishistic, and yet I was not sure how much of that was based on my anxiety about Kate and my belief that the heart was a bargaining tool for her safe return, and how much was due to the influence – whether insidious or benign – of the thing itself. An hour or so before, I had felt at one with the heart, in harmony with it; I had felt not only that we were working together towards a common cause, but that I was on the verge of grasping its secrets and mysteries, of being granted understanding of its true nature.

But had that really been the case? Or had the heart simply been using me as a puppet, buttering me up for its own purpose? Was it merely a parasite that needed a human host to function effectively?

I liked to think that the heart and I were protecting each other, but perhaps we weren’t; perhaps the heart had its own agenda and would discard me when it decided I was no longer useful. In which case, until then, was I invincible with the heart in my possession? Was I like some kind of superhero, impervious to attack? And how far did the heart’s influence extend? What kind of powers did it yield? Could it – as I had wondered in Benny’s car – stop a bullet? What if I wasn’t directly linked to it – if I was shot or stabbed whilst asleep, say? Would it come to my rescue then? And what of the people in physical proximity to me, like Clover – would it save them too? I squeezed the heart in my fist, and immediately the questions crowding my mind dissipated, as if the black stone was absorbing my anxiety and confusion.

As my mind cleared, I became aware that, standing in the darkness, I had slipped into what amounted to a waking trance. I blinked and looked around me. Far off on what I presumed to be the horizon I could see the thinnest sliver of pale blue light. How long had I phased out for? One minute? Five? Longer? Clover had still not reappeared, so it couldn’t have been
that
long. Unless, of course, something had happened to her, or her claim that she needed to pee had merely been a pretext for… for what? Perhaps she had slipped away. Or called someone on her mobile. Again I wondered how much I could really trust her. Perhaps she had her own agenda, after all. Perhaps she was playing me for a fool. Turning to where she had slipped into the trees, I saw a glimmer of white in the blackness.

It wasn’t until I had stepped forward, and had opened my mouth to speak her name, that it occurred to me that Clover had not been wearing white. Apprehension bristled through me, raising goosebumps on my arms, as the pale shapeless thing drew closer, flickering among the trees. I wanted to speak, to challenge it, but I was loath to draw attention to myself. The pale thing drifted closer still, pushing between the last of the trees, and was suddenly on the road ten metres from me.

In the darkness it was little more than a grey-white smear that seemed to hover above the ground. It was motionless for a moment, and then it began to waver towards me. I stepped back, drawing the heart from my pocket. I was about to shout out whatever warning my dry throat could dredge up when a soft voice said, ‘Alex?’

I drew in a breath so violently it sounded like a cry of pain. I recognised that voice. I had last heard it in what I thought had been a dream not more than twenty-four hours previously.

‘Lyn?’ I whispered. ‘Is that you?’

The apparition neither replied nor came closer. It had halted six or seven metres away, a pearly smudge in the darkness. I wanted to walk up to it, but I was scared. Scared of getting too close; scared that if I
did
get too close it would disappear. I stood for a moment in an agony of indecision – and then I had an idea. Still clutching the heart in one hand, I slipped my other into my jeans pocket, took out my phone and switched it on.

This time the sound that came out of me was like a sob, though I was barely aware that I’d made it. Revealed in the icy glow of the mobile screen was Lyn as I had seen her in the hotel room, barefoot and pregnant and beautiful, dressed in the white nightshirt with the cherry design, which billowed gently around her body in the cool breeze. She was smiling and her hair shone like gold in the light.

‘Are you real?’ I asked.

Instead of replying to my question, she raised her arms as though to draw me into an embrace. ‘Come to me, Alex,’ she said.

I took a step towards her, but she shook her head, as though I had misunderstood. ‘No. Come to
me
. I need you. Only you can bring me back.’

‘Where are you?’ I asked.

She smiled sweetly. ‘Long ago and far away.’

I felt my throat thickening with emotion, the heat of tears at the back of my eyes. ‘I miss you, Lyn,’ I whispered.

The screen of my phone went dark.

After the glow of illumination, the blackness seemed so complete that I could no longer see even the glimmer of Lyn’s nightshirt. I jabbed at the screen to light it up again and pointed it at where she had been standing.

She was gone.

I moaned, despair washing through me. But even as I slumped, like a man coming to a halt after pushing himself to his limits, I was surprised at how bereft I felt. It was as though I was suddenly standing outside myself, analysing my emotions from afar and finding them curious and alien. Then the moment passed and I stared at the spot where Lyn had stood, feeling tired and strung out. Although the real Lyn wasn’t dead, I still felt as though I had found a way to make contact with her spirit – albeit haphazardly and so fleetingly that it was agonising. Just before my mobile screen went black again, I noticed that although the ground where she had stood was muddy, she had left no footprints.

Come to me
, she had said, which could mean only one thing.

I heard a rustle in the darkness and turned my phone on again. Clover was struggling through the last of the undergrowth, pushing brambles and small branches aside. She staggered on to the dirt road with a gasp of effort and squinted at what to her must have been a small rectangle of blue-white light.

‘Alex?’ she said. ‘That
is
you, isn’t it?’

I turned the light on to my own face, plunging my surroundings into darkness. ‘’Fraid so.’

I sensed rather than saw her moving towards me. ‘Are you all right? You look a bit… strained.’

‘I’ve seen Lyn again,’ I said. ‘She was standing right there. She looked as real as you are.’

Clover hunched her shoulders and half-turned with a shiver, as if she expected my ex-wife to be standing beside her. ‘Where did she come from?’

I gestured towards the trees, which I now realised were beginning to gain a little definition as the sky grew lighter. ‘Out of the woods, right where you did.’

‘Creepy,’ she said, but I shook my head.

‘No, it was… sad. I have to go and see her.’

‘She’s not real, Alex. She’s an apparition, or a vision, or a trick.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s real and she’s lost. She needs me.’

Clover half-raised a hand, as if to stop me in my tracks. ‘Hang on. This is the actual Lyn we’re talking about, right?’

I nodded. Though I had no idea where it would lead, all at once I had a plan, a purpose. ‘I have to see her, Clover. I don’t care whether it’s a good idea or not, but I have to go to Brighton.’

‘
O
h my God,’ Clover said.

It was two hours since Lyn had appeared. Clover and I were sitting hunched at a corner table of the Copthorne motorway services branch of Costa, trying to appear as unobtrusive as possible as we devoured breakfast paninis and drank seriously big mugs of hot, strong, milky coffee. Although it was only twelve hours since Lesley had cooked us a belt-bursting dinner of lamb casserole, mashed potatoes and honey-roast parsnips, and less than four hours since Clover and I had been in Benny’s conservatory chatting over a pre-dawn cuppa, I felt as though I hadn’t eaten for days. Of course, puking my guts out next to Benny’s car and walking several miles in the autumnal chill of an early morning probably had a great deal to do with that. Finishing my panini in double-quick time I contemplated whether to order another or simply stock up on peanuts and chocolate bars from WH Smith and snack en route.