The Wreckage: A Thriller (4 page)

“When you got shot—did you think you were going to die?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you limp when you walk?”

“It is.”

“What would it take for you to kil yourself?”

“What sort of question is that?”

“It’s just a question.”

“I’ve seen too many suicides.”

“What if you were in awful pain, dying of a terrible disease?”

“There are painkil ers.”

“What if your mind was failing? You had dementia and couldn’t remember your own name?”

“If I had dementia it wouldn’t matter.”

“What if you were being tortured for top secret information?”

“I don’t have any top secret information.”

“What if someone had a grenade on a bus and they were going to blow it to the sky? Would you throw your body on the grenade?”

“Where do you get these questions?”

“I think about stuff al the time; how one decision, even a smal one, can change your life. I have real y weird dreams. I once dreamed I had a penis. Does that make me bisexual?”

“I have no idea.”

She tops up Ruiz’s wine and begins looking through his col ection of DVDs stacked on a shelf. Old films.

“Oooh, I love this one.” She holds up
Philadelphia Story
. “Katherine Hepburn.”

“And Cary Grant.”

“I loved him in
To Catch a Thief
.”

“Favorite old-time actor?”

“Alec Guinness.”

“Mine is Peter O’Toole.”

“Typical.”

“What does that mean?”

She shakes her head. “Favorite old-time actress?”

“Ingrid Berman.”

“I thought you’d say Grace Kel y. Men seem to prefer blondes.”

“Not this one.”

The room has warmed up. Hol y unbuttons her jacket, letting it slip off her arms. Her blouse is edged with silver thread and beads. The fabric pushes out over her breasts and she looks more like a woman than a girl.

If Miranda could see him now, what would she say? She’d tel him to go to bed and to stop embarrassing himself.

Hol y has poured him another glass of wine. How much has he had to drink? Four pints. A scotch. Three glasses of wine…

Ruiz is trying to shake the fuzziness out of his head.

“I could make a bed for you,” he says, feeling his thoughts drifting. Sliding. Spil ing down the mountainside, settling in the hol ows. His legs are so heavy he can’t move them.

Hol y sits next to him on the sofa and puts a pil ow beneath his head. He’s watching her lips move. What is she saying? It might be goodbye. It might be sorry.

3

LONDON

Sunshine crashes through the lace curtains. Ruiz opens one eye. The ceiling comes into focus, dead moths in the domed light fitting. His right nostril is grouted closed. His mouth tastes like a smal animal has crawled inside and died.

Rol ing on to his knees, he groans and feels his stomach lurch and gurgle. The rug has a pattern. He hasn’t noticed it before. Perhaps he’s forgotten. Another convulsion and he stumbles to the toilet, holding on to the side of the bowl.

His stomach empty, he sits against the tiled wal . Shaking. Sweating.

The events of last night—the girl, the trip home, the bottle of wine—what’s the last thing he remembers? She put a pil ow beneath his head. She said she was sorry. What did she slip him?

Rinsing his mouth out under the tap, he scoops water on to his face, eyes stinging, the cold working. Looking in the mirror, he blinks through bloodshot eyes. The foul taste is in his mouth, the toxins in his system. The smel of urine in his hair, on his clothes… Someone pissed on him. The boyfriend wanted some payback.

He walks up the stairs. Drawers have been pul ed out, up-ended, searched. The contents lie on the floor.

What’s missing? His camera, a police medal, an iPod Claire gave him (stil in its box), some euros, his passport… He flicks through his checkbook. Two blank checks are torn from the middle. They were clever. Practiced.

He should make a list. Not touch anything. Cal the police. Then what? They’l send a car out sometime in the next two days. He’l have to make a statement. He can hear them laughing already. The jokes. The ribbing. Detective Inspector Vincent Ruiz, taken in by a girl he invited home. They’l suspect she was a hooker or a cal girl. Ruiz is paying for sex now, they’l say, like some sad old pervert.

Another thought occurs to him. He climbs the stairs to the study. The desk has been swept clean. The pages of the manuscript are scattered on the floor. He didn’t number them.

The drawers have been forced open. One of them had been swol en shut for twenty years. Ruiz remembers what it contained—Laura’s jewelry, her engagement ring and an antique hair-comb that had been passed down through her family. When Laura knew she was dying, when disease swam in her veins and grew in her chest, she wrote a series of letters to the twins—to be opened when they turned eighteen, or when they married, or when they had children of their own…

One of the letters was for Claire on her wedding day. It contained the rings and the hair-comb. Now the torn envelope lies discarded on the floor. The letter screwed into a bal . The smal drawstring bag with the jewelry has gone.

Ruiz picks up the crumpled letter and tries to smooth out the creases. Laura’s handwriting had grown spidery as the chemo robbed her of energy, but none of her sentences are crossed out or corrected. Perhaps a person knows exactly what to write when the sand is trickling away.

Ruiz stops himself reading. The letter is meant for Claire. His eyes drift to the bottom of the page where Laura finished with hugs and kisses. A smal circular stain has marked the porous paper—a fal en tear as a punctuation mark.

Anger rises. Burns. Most of the missing items can be replaced—the camera, the iPod and the money—but not the jewelry. He wanted Claire to wear the hair-comb on her wedding day. It was the “something old” to go with something new and borrowed and blue—just like the rhyme says. But it’s more than that. The hair-comb is something that Ruiz has cherished.

Laura was wearing it when they first met at a twilight bal in Hertfordshire in 1968. She looked like a proverbial sixties flower child with her hair braided and pinned high on her head.

Early in the evening she danced with him but then Ruiz lost her in the crowd and spent four hours trying to find her. It was after midnight. People were starting to leave. Buses were waiting to ferry them back to London. Ruiz saw Laura standing near the entrance. She pointed to him and summoned him with her finger. Ruiz looked over his shoulder to make sure she wanted him.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Vincent.”

“I’m Laura. This is my phone number. If you don’t cal me within two days, Vincent, you lose your chance. I’m a good girl. I don’t sleep with men on the first date or the second or the third. You have to woo me, but I’m worth the effort.”

Then she kissed him on the cheek and was gone. He cal ed her within two hours. The rest is, as they say…

Picking up a notebook, Ruiz makes a list. First he contacts his bank and reports his cards stolen. The recorded messages give him six options and then another six. Eventual y, a girl with an Indian accent takes the details. Checks his account. There was a cash withdrawal just before midnight and another one just after; a thousand pounds in total. There were two other online purchases. She won’t give him the details.

“Someone from our fraud department wil cal you, sir.”

Sunlight makes his head throb. He considers his options. How can he find the girl? The actress. The boyfriend either fol owed them home or Hol y must have cal ed him. Maybe both.

Ruiz picks up his phone and hits redial. The last number she dialed was a mobile—the boyfriend perhaps.

A man answers with a grunt.

“Listen, I don’t know who you are. I don’t care. But you took something of mine last night, something of great sentimental value. You can have the rest of my stuff. I don’t care about that. But I need the jewelry—the rings and the hair-comb—they belonged to my wife. Give them back to me and I won’t come looking for you. You have my word on that. If you don’t give them back, I wil find you and I wil punish you. You have my word on that too.”

He pauses. Listens to the breathing. The boyfriend clears his throat.

“Fuck off!”

Ruiz listens to the dead air.

“Who was that, babe?”

“Nobody.”

Hol y Knight is awake now. She won’t go back to sleep.

“He sounded angry.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Zac rol s over and squashes a pil ow beneath his head. Within half a minute he’s asleep again, his nostrils barely moving as he breathes.

Hol y examines his sleeping face, the angular jaw line, darkened with growth, his heavy lids hiding blue-green eyes. There were no nightmares last night. No silent screams or sobs.

Running her fingers across his exposed back, the scars look like ripples on a dried-up lake bed, pink and grey and dead looking. When she touches them in the dark it feels as though his skin has been eaten away by acid or dissolved by some sort of flesh-eating bug.

Slipping out of bed, she goes to the bathroom and sits on the toilet, staring at the discolored tiles and the rust stains in the bath. Finishing, she pul s her jeans over her panties, buttoning them on the flatness of her stomach.

Looking in the mirror, she touches the bruise on her face. Zac hit her too hard last night. Sometimes he forgets his own strength. She wil say something to him when he wakes and is in a good mood.

The flat has peeling wal s, mismatched furniture and different floor coverings in every room. Poverty in progress. An old armchair sits in the middle of the kitchen floor, because Zac likes to watch Hol y cooking and doesn’t like to be alone.

Smearing butter on the inside of a frying pan, she cracks two eggs. The smel of breakfast wakes Zac, who comes out of the bedroom in his boxers, scratching the line of dark hair below his navel.

Self-conscious about his scars, he pul s on a T-shirt, and brushes a finger across Hol y’s cheek.

“You hit me too hard last night.”

“Didn’t mean to.”

“You might break me if you’re not careful.”

“I’m sorry, babe.”

Hol y sets his plate on the table.

“Do we have any… any… you know?”

“We didn’t have any bacon.”

“No, do we have any, ah, any…?” He begins shaking his hand up and down. “Brown stuff.”

“Sauce?”

“Yeah.”

Hol y finds the bottle in the fridge. Zac eats with his head low and one arm curled around his plate. Yesterday he forgot the word for petrol. He kept saying he needed to get “stuff” for the bike, “to make it go.” And before that he drove himself into a rage because he couldn’t remember who played left back for Spurs in the League Cup final in 2008. That’s one of the reasons he gets so angry—he can’t remember things.

According to the doctors there was no sign of brain damage, but something got rewired in Zac’s head when he was in Afghanistan. Now he forgets things. Not the big stuff, but smal details—names and words.

There was a fire. Seven men were trapped inside a troop carrier, according to the commendation they gave Zac with his gal antry medal. He pul ed three men from inside the carrier while it was under attack. That’s when he got burned. That’s when he started forgetting things.

Zac turns on the tel y. A girl in a raincoat is giving the weather report, pointing to a map with cartoon clouds.

“How pointless is that,” says Zac. “Look out the window and you can see the sun is shining.”

Next comes a report on the stock market, the Dow Jones. Is that a person, wonders Hol y; is there someone cal ed Mr. Jones?

Zac picks up the near-empty bottle of Scotch.

“It’s too early,” she says.

“Hair of the dog.”

He pours two fingers into a glass.

Hol y leaves him to get changed.

“I’ve got to go and see Bernie,” she yel s from the bedroom.

“Why?”

“We owe the rent.”

“Again?”

“Comes round every month. We don’t have enough to pay Floyd.”

Floyd is their landlord on the estate and also a local crack dealer.

“I’m going to sel that stuff we got last night.”

“Don’t let Bernie rip you off.”

“I won’t.”

“And don’t let him touch you. He’s always trying to touch you.”

“Bernie is pretty harmless.”

“You want me to come?”

“No it’s OK. I want you to fil out the form from the DSS. You need to get your pension sorted.”

Hol y has changed into her nicest clothes. She rinses Zac’s plate in the sink.

“I’m going to sel Bernie the laptop and other stuff. Then I thought I might take the jewelry to Hatton Garden.”

“Don’t let them rip you off.”

“I won’t. I have my audition today.”

“Can I come?”

“You know I get nervous when you’re there.”

He nods and goes back to watching an infomercial for a hair-straightening wand that features women with perfect teeth and lottery-winning smiles.

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