The Boat House (5 page)

The pressure lessened. She looked up into his eyes.

Her own, he saw, were sad and remote.

"Believe me," she said. "You wouldn't want to."

An hour later, he was still with her. She was on the hard sofa and he reckoned that she was asleep, but he couldn't be sure. There was a duvet cover in the bedroom - no linen, just the white cotton shell of the duvet itself - and she didn't stir when he brought this through and laid it over her. He'd already turned off most of the lights.

He knew that he ought to slip out quietly. Leave her, walk away. He'd already done more than most people ever would.

But he kept turning the strange syllables of her name over and over in his mind.

And, for the second time and without any prompting, he found himself wondering what they'd make of her in the valley.

He couldn't even think of taking her back with him, that much was certain. Imagine the complications. Everyone would jump to the wrong conclusion, even Ted Hammond;
especially
Ted Hammond, who worried over Pete like a mother hen. He kept hinting at how Pete, though hormonally sound, wasn't getting any younger, while the supply of eligible women in the valley was meagre at its best. There was the passing-through traffic of summer, but Pete didn't find that he was much tempted by the seductive signals of bored rich women - or rather, bored women with rich husbands - of a certain age. The men came to play with their big boats, their wives cast an eye along the dock and saw Pete. Maybe it was the way that he had to clamber aboard and ram in the pump nozzle when they called by for fuel, started them thinking and gave them all kinds of ideas. He didn't exactly have to beat them off with a stick, but some of them were so upfront it could be embarrassing. They tended to have tight, well kept figures, expensive bleach jobs, and the skin tone of a crocodile handbag after a lifetime's forced tanning. Thanks, but no thanks.

Somebody like Diane Jackson, though… that was a different proposition entirely. She was a Mrs, but as far as he'd been able to ascertain her husband had long ago been booted out into the street with his hat thrown after him. She'd arrived in the valley only a few months before, to work on the Liston Estate at the head of the lake. She lived in the big house, she sometimes came down to the yard on Estate business. They'd kind of eyed each other and although nothing had exactly happened yet, there was something in the air that said that it might. Something like the highlycharged sense of impending lightning.

Or maybe he was kidding himself.

Maybe, for all that he'd been thinking, he really wasn't anything more than a walk-on in the drama of her life. A couple of lines to say, not even a name to be remembered. Whatever the case, he could be sure of one thing; come home with a good-looking stranger in tow, and his chances with said Mrs Jackson or anybody else would nosedive within hours of the gossip mill getting to work.

Ah, well. Then it would be back to his daydreams of Deborah Harry and a baby oil massage, and wait until some other prospect might open up in his life.

Alina's hand was out from under the cover and turned slightly, so that the inside of her arm caught the faint electric light from the almost-closed bathroom door. The edge of her sleeve had fallen back to show a line of tiny, puckered scars down the soft part of her forearm. He frowned. There was always the possibility that she was actually an addict, and that the rest of it had been a lie; but these were white and long-healed, more likely a permanent record of an abuse that had once been inflicted upon her.

So it probably
was
all true. He didn't doubt it now, and hadn't really needed this evidence to persuade him.

"I only wish I could do something more," he whispered, mostly to himself.

And she heard him.

"You don't know what you're saying," she said from the darkness. She spoke softly, but she sounded as if she was fully awake. "But it doesn't matter. After tonight, you won't see me again."

"What do you mean?"

She raised herself onto one elbow, and the duvet slid from her shoulder. "I mean that I'd hurt you. I'm like a
rusalka
."

"A what?"

"You'd say, a heartbreaker. I have it on the best authority."

He moved around the sofa, and crouched down before her. As once before, her face was in shadow with only the slight, bright flicker of her eyes to betray her attentiveness.

He said, "Listen, don't worry about me. I can look after myself."

"That makes no difference. I'm not just an ordinary runaway, it's not that kind of a situation at all. I could be the worst thing that could ever happen to you. I use people, and then I betray them. It's not a choice that I make. But it happens, again and again."

He shook his head, half smiling. "I don't understand you," he said.

"That's right," she said. "You don't."

At which point, there was a sharp knock at the apartment's door.

Alina shot upright, any hint of drowsiness gone, as tense as a hunted cat getting a scent of the pack. "It's probably nothing," Pete said, rising, but as he turned to go to the door he could sense her wary, watchful presence behind him. The fact of it was, he was a little uneasy himself. When it came down to it, he'd no right to be here other than on Mike's say-so, and that could prove to be an authority of little substance. And then when the shit that he'd handed you hit the fan, Mike was the kind of person who'd shrug and then offer to sell you a washcloth.

A woman stood outside.

She seemed surprised to see Pete. She was around forty, trim and well preserved, anxious-looking and in a dressing gown. She said, "I'm sorry. I saw the light and I thought… I thought Doctor Singer had come back."

"I'm a close friend of his," Pete improvised quickly.

"Oh." she hesitated. "I'm sorry to ask, but…"

"Is something wrong?"

She picked her words carefully, uncertain of being misunderstood by someone she didn't know. "Well… there's a strange character hanging around outside. I'm not sure, but he seems to be looking in all the windows."

Pete felt himself unwind a little. A peeper? Here was something that he could handle, much better than being put on the spot as a squatter. He said, "Just give me a minute," and he stepped back inside. Alina had switched on the table lamp next to the sofa; she looked rumpled but alert, and presumably she'd heard what had been said.

"I have to go out for a few minutes," Pete told her. "Will you be all right?"

"Of course," she said, and she glanced at the woman in the doorway.

"I'm sorry," the woman said. "I won't keep him long."

Alina nodded briefly, as if to show that she didn't mind. Pete told Alina to lock the door behind him, just in case; and as they went out into the stairwell, Pete couldn't help reflecting on the woman's attitude. She'd been deferring to Alina.

Borrowing her man.

They went down to the next floor.

FIVE

Her name was Janis, and she was a nurse; a senior staff nurse, and she'd known the occupant of the upstairs apartment well. Pete decided to say nothing on the subject, or risk betraying some fundamental ignorance. Her flat was larger than the one they'd left, with two bedrooms and a decent length of lounge. It was in the semi-chaos of redecoration with the furniture all sheeted, the walls stripped down to the plaster, and the smell of drying paint in the air.

"Sorry about the mess," Janis said. "I'm doing it all myself."

"No worries," Pete said, stepping over books which had been stacked in the middle of the room and protected by old Sunday colour supplements spread out over the heap. "Does this happen a lot?"

"Two or three times a year," she said. "You get a lot of single women in the flats. It's a bit of a magnet for peculiar types."

He stood at the window. They were on the opposite side of the block now, facing across the street to where the grounds and towers of the hospital complex stood. With the curtains open and the lights behind him, Pete's silhouette would be easily visible to anyone who might be prowling around out there.

He said, "Where did you see him?"

"By the road. He was just… watching. Looking at all the windows. Then he disappeared for a while, then he came back."

"I don't suppose he could have been looking for someone he knows."

"For nearly an hour?"

Pete looked all over the grounds immediately below. These were the same open plan gardens as around the back, dotted here and there with windblown litter. Concrete-set lights illuminated a paved walkway which led up to the street, casting deep shadows from the bushes on either side.

"Well," Pete said, "he doesn't seem to be there now."

"So now you'll think I imagined him."

"Hey, come on. He could be circling the block, looking in some of the other windows. Don't you usually call the police?"

"Only as a last resort. You don't like to cry wolf too often. Hospital security used to send a man over once or twice a night, just to keep all the nurses happy." And then, after a moment in which she realised what she'd just said, she started to colour up red. "I didn't mean that the way it sounds."

"I get the idea," Pete said quickly.

"But they don't do that any more. Money's tight, and this is a private block. It's really nothing to do with the hospital. A lot of us live here, that's all."

Pete said, "Switch the lights off, for a minute."

"Can you see something?"

"I'm not sure."

The glare of the unshaded light in the room wasn't doing much to help Pete's night vision; most of what he could see was his own reflection. The room went dark, and Janis came to join him as he scanned the bushes where he thought he'd seen a movement.

There was an almost immediate response. One of the shadows moved, stepping out into the low-level light of the path.

A young man, fit-looking, with short, fairish hair; pale skinned and unfashionably dressed, he was staring straight up at their window.

"Is that him?" Pete said.

"He's the one." Janis's voice had the kind of tome that she'd probably use to point out a particularly unappealing patch of slime.

"Well, he's seen me."

The prowler was still staring. There was no doubt about it, their window was the one that interested him above all the others; and far from being scared off by Pete's appearance, he'd actually moved out to become visible himself.

Janis said, "It doesn't seem to have discouraged him much, does it?"

"No." Pete took a step back, and drew her with him. "Have you got a big flashlight, something really bright?"

"There's one I use with the car. But I don't want you doing anything stupid."

"Me? No chance of it. I'm just going to ask him what he thinks he's at. It's the only way to deal with these people."
Either that,
he was thinking,
or slug 'em with the flashlight
. The bigger and heavier, the better.

Janis was dubious. She didn't like what she'd started, but she was a single woman living alone and she'd been around enough to know that she'd be fooling herself if she didn't get nervous at something like this.

She brought the flashlight from her kitchen. It was of a square, freestanding type with a carrying handle on the top. Pete did his best to meet her concern with confidence.

"Don't worry," he said. "I'll bring it right back."

Pete didn't switch on the stairwell light for his descent. He slipped out into the grounds unseen.

Once in the cool night air, he stopped for a moment and told himself that he was going to have to slow down; otherwise, he might be heading for a nasty surprise. He didn't have to impress anybody - and even if, for understandable reasons, he felt that he did, he wasn't going to do it by taking on more than he could handle.

He doubted that the prowler was going to be much of a problem.

Adequate people didn't get their kicks from watching bedroom windows - or at least, that was the theory.

He moved out into the shadows beside the path, and at first he didn't switch on the flashlight. He saw no one. So then he cautiously checked the dark spaces in the undergrowth with the beam, but again with no result. The peeper had guessed that someone was coming and had run, that was the only explanation that Pete could see.

He was about to go back, when he heard voices from the direction of the street.

So, moving quietly, he went to take a look.

It was a big and anonymous-looking saloon, pulled in close to the kerbside and just far enough along to be screened from the apartments. Two men sat inside. A third stood on the pavement with the nearside door open, talking to them.

The third man was the prowler, as seen from the second floor window.

A sense of wrongness, hard to explain and impossible to ignore, began to take root somewhere deep inside Pete McCarthy. Since when did perverts hunt in threes? The two in the car, shown up by the interior light, seemed to be taking more interest in their trays of carry-out food than in what was being said to them. The one on the pavement, in contrast, seemed to be taking the whole thing more seriously. The man in the passenger seat - leather jacket, bearded, a face you could see and then forget - was nodding over his fried rice in a way that said
Yeah, sure, you carry on and let us know when it's all over
. The man on the pavement straightened, and Pete took a step back into deeper shadow.

The young man turned. Under the yellow streetlights his face was a deathmask, a short-lived effect that faded as he walked back to the pathway. Pete, still in the bushes and now feeling like a prowler himself, held his breath as the man passed him no more than a few feet away. A dozen yards further on the man stopped, raised his head, and laseredin on the same second-floor window as before. Janis had kept her lounge in darkness, but there was enough spill from one of the inner rooms to make out her moving shadow with surprising clarity.

Pete moved onto the concrete path in silence, out of the sight of the car again. The blatancy of this really pissed him off. His outdoor job kept him reasonably fit and even gave him a certain physical grace developed on narrow ladders and slippery decks, and he knew that he could look mean as long as he didn't smile. He didn't think there was much danger of him smiling now.