For a fleeting second I thought about Big Al. I hoped he’d be well out of it by now. He didn’t have getaway accounts for nothing. If he’d transferred 400 grand into mine, for sure he’d have taken 800 for himself. Old Melon Head would be OK. I cut him from my mind.
The motorway services just before Heathrow were being signposted. I had a thought.
I pulled off onto the slip road and drove into the car park. Now all I had to do was get to a phone and make a call.
39
The service station was busy. I’d had to park 100 metres from the main entrance. I got out of the car just as the heavens opened. By the time I reached the bank of four telephones outside the Burger King, I was soaked. The first two I tried only accepted cards. I had about three pounds in change in my pocket – not enough. I ran into the shop, wiping my face to get some of the blood off. I bought a newspaper with a fiver and walked out, the woman looking worried at the state of my face. I then went back in and got a packet of Rolos with a £10 note. The woman looked even more scared. Maybe she thought I had seen her staring. She was just happy for me to take my change and see me leave.
As I dialled the number I felt a knot in my stomach, as if I was a teenager phoning to arrange his very first date. Would she have charged it and left it switched on? Why shouldn’t she? She had never let me down before.
It started to ring.
For a moment I felt like a child in a sweet shop with his dad, hardly able to contain my excitement. Then I had new things to worry about. What if Euan had the phone now? Did I hang up or did I try to bluff it and maybe find out where she was?
It was too late to think. The ringing stopped; there was a pause, then I heard a quiet, hesitant, ‘Hello, who is it?’
‘Hi, Kelly, it’s me, Nick,’ I said, trying for all the world to sound Mr Casual. ‘Are you on your own?’
‘Yes, you woke me up. Are you coming back now?’ She sounded tired and confused. I was trying hard to think of an answer; thankfully she carried on. ‘Euan said that I may be staying with him for a while now because you have to go away. It isn’t true, is it, Nick? You said you wouldn’t leave me.’
It was a bad line. I had to put a finger in my other ear to hear her above the noise of the rain on the glass of the phone box. A lorry driver in the next box was shouting loudly and angrily, arguing with his boss that he couldn’t go any further because of his tachograph, and he wasn’t going to lose his licence just to get a few boxes of bloody anoraks up to Carlisle. On top of that was the steady boom of traffic on the motorway and the noises of people coming in and out of the services. I had to block all that out and concentrate on the phone call, because I couldn’t ask Kelly to speak up.
I said, ‘Yes, of course you’re right, I will never leave you. Euan is lying to you. I have found out some bad things about him, Kelly. Are you still in the house?’
‘Yes. I’m in bed.’
‘Is Euan in his bed?’
‘Yes. Do you want to speak to him?’
‘No, no. Let me think for a minute.’
My mind was racing now, trying to think of the best way to say what I wanted.
‘Of course I’m coming to get you. In fact, I’ll be there very soon. Now, listen. I need you to do something very difficult and very dangerous. You only have to do this one thing for me and everything will be over.’ The moment I said it I felt like a lowlife.
‘I don’t have to run away from the people again, do I?’
‘No, no, no – it’s not like that this time. But it’s the most special job a spy ever does.’ I didn’t want to give her time to think, so I just carried on. ‘But I want to check something first, OK? You’re in bed, aren’t you? Get under the covers and only talk to me in a whisper, OK?’
I could hear all the rustlings as she got underneath the covers. ‘What are we going to do, Nick?’
‘First, I want you to look at the front of the telephone and press a number. It will then light up. Tell me if you can see a picture of a battery. How many blocks are there where the battery sign is? Can you see it?’
I heard some scufflings.
‘I can see that.’
‘How many blocks are there in the picture?’
‘Three. There’s three blocks. One of them is flashing.’
‘That’s good.’
It wasn’t really: two blocks meant she hadn’t recharged it and the battery was down to less than half-power, and I was going to need a lot of air time to talk her through the whole process.
‘What’s that noise?’ she said.
The truck driver was now really pissed off and was hollering down the phone, the roll-up in his hand making the phone box look like a steam room.
‘Nothing to worry about. Kelly, I’m going to tell you what to do, but you need to keep listening to me on the telephone. Can you do that?’
‘Why is Euan bad, Nick? What—’
‘Listen, Kelly, Euan wants to hurt me. If he finds you doing this thing for me, he will hurt you too. Do you understand that?’
I could hear lots of rustlings; she was obviously still under the bedcovers. Then there was a very quiet ‘Yes’.
She wasn’t sounding a happy bunny. I was sure there was a better way I could be going about all this, I just didn’t have time to think what it might be.
‘If Euan wakes up,’ I said, ‘or if the telephone stops working, I want you to leave the house very, very quietly. I want you to go down the track to the road and hide behind the trees, just by the big gate that Euan drove through to get to his house. Know where I mean?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You must hide there until you hear a car come and stop, but don’t get out from your hiding place unless it toots its horn two times. Then come out. Do you understand that? I’ll be in the car. It’s a blue Astra, OK?’
There was a pause. ‘What’s an As . . . Astra, Nick?’
Shit, she was seven years old and American. What was I expecting?
‘OK. I’ll stop in a blue car and come and get you.’
I got her to repeat it and, for good measure, I said, ‘So if Euan wakes up and sees you, I want you to run to the trees as fast as you can and hide. Because if Euan catches you doing what I want you to do, we will never see each other again. Don’t let me down, OK? And remember, don’t you come out from behind those trees, even if Euan calls for you, OK?’
‘OK. You will come and get me, won’t you?’
There was a bit of doubt in her mind.
‘Of course I will. Now, first of all, what I want you to do is get out of bed, then put the phone on the bed and get dressed, very slowly and quietly. Put on a nice thick coat. And you know those trainers that you’ve got? Make sure you take those as well, but don’t put them on yet.’
I heard her put the phone down and start rummaging around the room.
For fuck’s sake, hurry up!
I forced myself to calm down.
It was almost two minutes before I heard ‘I’m ready, Nick.’
‘Now, listen to me very carefully. Euan is not a friend; he has tried to kill me. Do you understand, Kelly? He has tried to kill me.’
There was a pause.
‘Why? I . . . I don’t understand, Nick . . . you said he was your friend.’
‘I know, I know, but things change. Do you want to help me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good, then you must do exactly what I tell you.’ I want you to put your trainers in your coat pockets. OK, now it’s time to go downstairs. I want you to keep the telephone with you. All right?’
‘Yeah.’
Time was running short and so was my money.
‘Just remember, you must be very, very quiet, because otherwise you will wake Euan. If that happens, you run out of the house towards the hidey-hole – promise?’
‘Cross my heart.’
‘OK, I want you to creep very, very gently down the stairs. Don’t talk to me again until you’re in the kitchen; from now on what we must do is whisper all the time. OK?’
‘OK.’
I heard the door open. As she came out of the room I imagined her passing the bathroom on her left. Ahead of her, up a half-landing and about twelve feet away, would be the door to Euan’s room. Was it open or closed? Too late to ask her. A few steps now and she’d be at the top of the main stairs and next to the old grandfather clock. On cue, I heard its slow, ponderous tick-tock; it reminded me of something out of a Hitchcock movie.
The sound receded very slowly: good girl, she must be going down the stairs very carefully. Only once did I hear the creak of a board and I wondered again about Euan’s door. Did he usually sleep with it open? I couldn’t remember.
At the bottom of the stairs she’d be turning back on herself to the right, heading towards the kitchen.
I tried to imagine where she was, but lost her in the silence. At last I heard the barely perceptible sound of a protesting hinge; that was the kitchen door. I felt a stab of guilt for using the girl like this; but she knew the score – well, sort of. Fuck it, the decision was made; I just had to do it. If it worked, fine; if it didn’t, she was dead. But if I didn’t try it she was dead anyway, so let’s get on with it.
She whispered, ‘I’m in the kitchen, but I can’t see very much. Am I allowed to turn the light on?’
It was the loudest whisper I’d ever heard.
‘No, no, no, Kelly, you’ve got to speak very slowly and very quietly – like this.’ I demonstrated. ‘And don’t put the light on, that would wake Euan up. Just go more slowly, and listen to me all the time. If you don’t understand anything, just ask, and remember, if anything goes wrong or you hear a noise, stop and we will both listen. OK?’
‘OK.’
The problem with her being quieter on the phone was that it was harder to hear her. The lorry driver had now finished, slamming the phone down and storming into the Burger King. A woman took his place and was gobbing off to a girlfriend.
The kitchen was two areas knocked into one: the old back room of the house and what had used to be an alleyway between the house and the old sheep-pen wall. The alleyway had been covered by a conservatory, with all the kitchen units arranged galley-style in one long range beneath it. There were plants on pedestals and a large circular wooden table in the middle of the area; I hoped she wouldn’t knock anything over onto the squash-court floor. Thinking of the night we’d spent ‘rescuing’ the wood made me shudder at all those years of friendship, trust and even love. I felt let down, used, fucked over.
There couldn’t be much battery time left.
‘Everything OK?’ I said. I tried hard not to convey any sense of panic, but I knew we would be in trouble soon. If the phone went dead, would she remember what I’d told her to do?
‘I can’t see anything, Nick.’
I thought for a few seconds, trying to remember more of the layout. ‘OK, Kelly, go very slowly to where the sink is. Go and stand by the hob.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s the bit you cook on with saucepans. You see it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘OK, there’s a switch on the right-hand side. Can you see that?’
‘I’ll look.’
A moment or two later she said, ‘Nick, I can see now.’
She must have switched on the small fluorescent light that illuminated the worktop of the kitchen; she sounded relieved.
‘Good girl. Now I want you to go back and very gently close the kitchen door. Will you do that for me?’
‘OK. You are coming for me, Nick?’
I wasn’t feeling confident about this at all. Should I stop it now and just get her to open the door for me and wait? No, fuck it. He might be getting a phone call any minute about Simmonds’s death.
‘Of course I am, but I can’t come unless you do what I say, OK? Keep the telephone to your ear and, very gently, close that door.’
I heard the tell-tale creak.
‘What I want you to do now is go and have a look under the sink, and put all the bottles and things on the table. Will you do that for me?’
‘OK.’
There was silence, then a soft clatter as she moved bottles and cans around.
‘That’s everything out now.’
‘Well done! Now, very quietly, read out the labels to me. Can you do that?’
‘No, I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘There’s too many things and it’s too dark, I can’t do it.’
She was sounding under pressure now; there was that wobble in her voice.
Fuck, this is taking too long
.
‘It’s OK, Kelly, just walk over to the light switch by the door and turn the light on. Don’t rush. Will you do that?’
‘OK.’ It sounded as if her nose was blocking up. I knew the sound so well by now. The next stage, if I wasn’t careful, would be tears – and failure.
I heard her shuffling towards the light switch.