Until Death (26 page)

‘You’re going to let me go.’ They looked at each other, the fox running into the darkness by some bushes. ‘You’re prepared to take such a risk?’ She couldn’t keep the awe hidden. ‘I could have you instantly put back in jail. Dawn would be alone again.’

He didn’t answer for a long time. ‘I would be lying if I said I hadn’t found tonight surprising. I thought you would be harder. Meaner. I spent most of my life surrounded by bullshitters and cheats. I can tell when someone is lying. You really thought you saw me that day.’ He nodded to himself. ‘That’s clever. That’s the only way it would have worked.’ He handed her back the empty gun. ‘Be careful with that. It’s dangerous. Not something to have round kids.’

The tears rolled in two streaks down her cheeks. ‘I changed my name, my career, my home, because of a fear of what you would do … I don’t know what to do now, I can’t—’

‘Go and see your mother.’

She started crying harder then, watching the fox return and dart in between the car headlight beams. ‘And what are you going to do?’

‘Good question. Probably nothing. Revenge doesn’t help. But I want to know. We all want to know. Someone went to a lot of trouble.’ He paused. ‘Your husband Michael and your daughter died three months before the trial.’

She gulped in a lungful of air, staring at him. ‘It was an accident.’ She was pleading with him now, tears in her eyes. ‘Please, I was right there, it was an accident.’ She heard the clanking of the great metal chains of the Poole harbour ferry, ringing out their death knell. ‘Not that. Don’t try to change that.’

He made a clucking sound with his tongue on his teeth but he let it go.

From a place entirely different in her mind came a thought. ‘The phone call you got at the warehouse that day. What was that about?’

‘A guy wanted some stuff shifting.’

‘What stuff?’

‘Firearms. Shotguns, semi-automatics. Going up to Gunchester.’ He rolled his eyes at her blank look. ‘Manchester.’

She felt the cold metal in her lap. ‘Did you see the guns?’

He shook his head. ‘They were hidden, he said.’

‘What were they hidden in?’

‘He didn’t say. He was very proud of the system he had. Said he could smuggle anything with it of almost any size. He mentioned this system a few times.’

‘Who was he?’

‘I don’t know. I’m no fool, I smelled a rat but I was intrigued, so we arranged to meet somewhere quiet. The route there was empty – no CCTV, no one around. That was clever. No one to see me and corroborate my version of events. He never turned up. Docks are teeming with people, but only in small areas. They give the impression of being busy but there are large pockets that are empty for weeks at a time. But of course I hadn’t realised he had wanted me out of the way all along.’

‘So you never saw him?’

He shook his head. ‘But he was probably tall. Like me.’ He turned to her. ‘He needed to look like me, after all.’

They both stared out of the windscreen into the night. Autumn leaves blew across the strobes of the car lights, orange flares in the light.

‘I don’t have the answers you want. I don’t have the answers I need myself.’ She wondered if grief for her lost family had blinded her to things she should have seen, to connections she should have made. She needed air, she couldn’t breathe. She dragged at the car lock on the door and half fell out into the cold night.

He leaned across the seat and called after her. ‘Have you got any money to get home?’ He sounded like a father dropping his student daughter at the station after a visit home. He handed over a twenty from his pocket. ‘If you need anything, Dawn’s in the phone book. You can call me.’

He put the car in gear and did a wide circle of the empty car park before driving away. She stood for a moment then swayed and fell like a dead weight to the tarmac, sobbing her eyes out.

K
elly got home well after midnight and ran to her children. They were curled up asleep in the TV room because of the water damage in their bedroom. Christos wasn’t home. She kept shivering and realised it was delayed shock, her emotions rollercoastering between euphoria at still being able to stoop over her children in the dark, and an overpowering emptiness. Ricky had let her go, had shown that he wasn’t a danger to her, but his threat had been one of the pillars on which her new life had been constructed, and with it removed there was nothing to fill the void. She had snatched up the phone to call the witness protection officers several times on the train home, but had cut the calls before they were connected. They could be in a new place, with new identities, in just twelve hours, but Christos would still be with her. And what if what Ricky had said was true?

Kelly tried to put it together. Was it possible she had been duped? Duped into testifying to something that wasn’t true? That the wrong man went to jail for all those years? That she had been a tool used by others for their own ends? But if he was telling the truth, then maybe Christos
was
involved. Maybe Christos had not met her by accident. The thought stunned her. That he had met her to keep her close, had married her for motives other than love showed he was prepared to play for very high stakes indeed. She thought back to the night she had asked for a divorce. To the violence he had inflicted. A clearer message that he would make her stay at all costs could not have been given. A husband who could do that would think nothing of sending an innocent man to jail.

She closed the children’s door and opened Medea’s. Her mother-in-law was snoring gently. She shut Medea’s door and headed upstairs, searching the dark cupboards beyond the kitchen, the place where dried-up superglue and unused cricket bats live out their decades. Christos had come in here before firing at the ceiling. She found the box of bullets on a shelf so high up she needed a chair to reach to the back of it.

‘Kelsey’, Ricky had called her. Kelsey was her name. She had a flashing image of herself as a young girl in those Portakabin classrooms, the seagulls cawing and shrieking their mournful sound, the Bic with the chewed end in her small fingers, writing out her name. They say name is destiny. Christos never shut up about it, the importance of the Malamatos name. Reputation and name were the same to him, as if every action by anyone was to besmirch his family name, his legacy, the motherland, his honour and his reputation. She felt the bubbled skin on her stomach. Name had been an excuse for a lot of unspeakable behaviour. She loaded the gun and walked across the living room. She was leaving, with the children, right now. There was nothing Medea could do to stop her. Ricky had liberated her from the prison she had constructed around herself. Now it was a question of fighting.

She came down the stairs on silent feet to wake the children. She only saw the shadow of the man standing at the bottom when she was halfway down.

He stood looking up at her in the gloom, calm and assured. It was the man who had followed her to the lawyer’s office. ‘Why don’t you get some sleep, Mrs Malamatos? Christos is worried about your state of mind, he’s worried what you might do to yourself, so we’re here to look after you.’

Kelly looked down the corridor and saw one of the drivers who had come to take her away from Lindsey’s standing by the door. She was too late to escape. Christos was tightening the net, counting down the hours till the kids were sent away. She tried to remain calm and think through her options. She was exhausted; nothing could be done tonight so it was best to get some sleep.

‘We need your phone,’ the first man said. ‘And just so you know, Christos has changed the code on the lifts, so it’s better if you just relax and try and get some rest.’

She was trapped. Even Medea wouldn’t know the new code for the lift and the stair door. She handed her phone over and walked into the TV room, lay down by her children and fell instantly asleep.

K
elly woke up at seven squashed awkwardly into the sofa, the gun a painful imprint on her hip where it bulged in her pocket. The kids were asleep on the floor next to her. She got up and went into her bedroom, washed her face, drank some water.

She came out into the corridor to find Medea up. ‘So you’re back,’ began her mother-in-law. ‘You decided to grace us with your presence.’

‘Where’s Christos?’

‘He’s working flat out trying to find out what happened to his employee on that ship, and to minimise the bad publicity.’

‘Bad publicity? He should be here to explain to his children why he did that to our ceiling. He should be here to grovel at their feet and apologise for scaring the living daylights out of them.’

‘The ceiling will be repaired today. No one will ever know what happened here.’

‘You can’t keep it a secret.’ Their argument was interrupted by the sound of the children stirring in the TV room.

Kelly opened the door to see Florence stretching and kicking back her covers. ‘It’s funny waking up in here,’ she said. The change of routine was a novelty, and not for a good reason.

‘Did you sleep OK?’

Florence shrugged her shoulders, looking downcast. Yannis sat up and yawned. Kelly came in the room, bent down and gave them a long hug.

‘Why did Daddy do that to the pigeons?’ Florence’s voice was quiet.

Medea answered for her son. ‘He’s very stressed at the moment, what with the man falling off the
Saracen
. Though it doesn’t excuse what he did. He would never hurt you.’

But what about me, thought Kelly. She came out into the corridor and looked around. The two men who were in the flat last night were still there.

Kelly turned to Medea. ‘You know you can’t keep me a prisoner forever.’

Medea drew herself up, indignant. ‘Prisoner, what nonsense you spout. These people are here for your protection. We’re worried about you.’

‘I’ve seen what happens in this house in the middle of the night, who creeps about—’

‘You see? You’re getting delusions, and I’m worried.’

‘You defend a man who fires off a loaded gun around his children, simply because he’s your flesh and blood.’ She saw embarrassment flit across Medea’s face. ‘That’s right, I want you to feel your shame.’ Kelly saw one of the men at the end of the corridor begin to walk towards them.

‘Mum? What’s going on? I hate it when you argue, please …’ Florence was standing by the open door to the TV room, eyes brimming with tears.

Medea swung into action. ‘Come on kids, we’re going to do some painting, and help Kelly finish the masks for the Halloween party tomorrow. We’ll have a lovely day here at the flat just relaxing, all of us together. I’ll get all the stuff ready upstairs.’

Kelly wanted to laugh. Medea thought that a bit of playtime with the acrylics could paper over the compromises on show here.

She walked away into her bedroom again, trying to think. Ricky’s revelations had only reinforced to her the danger she was in from her husband. His mother, she knew now, would stand with him through anything, defend him on every point. She came to the window and stared out at the city teeming with life below her, at the millions of lives lived in varying degrees of chaos and danger. But today she didn’t feel separated from the city below her, she felt part of it, energised by it, not terrified. This morning, after the revelations of last night, she was a different person, someone who saw opportunity now.

She walked into the bathroom again, looked at her bottle of pills on the shelf, picked it up and dropped it into the bin. It was time to take responsibility, it was time to end this. First chance she got, she would escape, without the kids. One thing Ricky’s tale had taught her was that tyrants don’t get everything their own way. What she needed to do now was prepare for any chance she got. She felt the gun hard against her hip. And that meant at least getting some breakfast inside her.

T
he Wolf leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, rubbing his palms together. His palms made a dry, scratchy sound audible over the deep rumble of the engines. ‘OK, here’s what we’re going to do. You need to come with me.’

She sat up straighter, ready to disagree. ‘I want to stay here. I was told to stay in here.’

‘That’s not possible any more. You’re a courier—’

‘How dare you accuse me of—’

‘Save it, no one’s interested. Details apart, you want to get paid, more than anything else, yes? This way you’ll get your money and more. Everyone’s happy.’

She looked at him and he looked back. She was churning through her options, beginning to realise she didn’t have many. After a moment she shrugged and struggled to her feet in the listing ship.

The storm was starting to abate, the sky that seemed to be sitting right on their heads began to lift imperceptibly as they powered northwards into the English Channel, the busiest shipping lane in the world, a great motorway of ships ploughing to their destinations. The mood on board was tense and grave; the President would be having many conversations with various agencies – coastguard, customs, police, writing reports, filling in logs, accounting for the unaccountable, trying to explain the unexplainable.

The crew was still searching the ship for the company man, checking he hadn’t got lodged somewhere, that the storm hadn’t shifted something and trapped him underneath it.

The Wolf found Jonas in the ship’s mess, looking nervous and morose. ‘You OK? It can unsettle a man, something like this.’

Jonas shrugged. One of the Poles finished his coffee and left the room.

‘Will we be delayed when we arrive?’

There he was, thought the Wolf, trying to anticipate what law enforcement would be there to greet this cursed ship when it charged into London. ‘Why, got something you’re keen to hide?’

‘No.’ He looked indignant and folded his arms over his chest.

‘Come with me.’ The Wolf walked out of the room, Jonas trailing behind, up the stairs to the accommodation area and stood outside Jonas’s cabin. ‘Open it.’

Jonas stood firm. ‘Why?’

‘Bring that rucksack you’ve got locked away in there.’ He saw Jonas’s eyes widen with fear. ‘Bring it out here, or I’m going to order a search of your cabin.’