Clean Break

16

I WAS OFF THE BED IN SECONDS AND IN THROUGH THE OPEN door of the bathroom, hitting the light switches on the way. Whoever was outside the door would have to pass me on their way into the room itself, with only the flickering light of the television screen to guide them. The scrabbling stopped, and an arc of light from the hallway spilled across the carpet as the door opened. A shadow crossed the light, then the arc narrowed and disappeared as the door closed. I tensed, ready to come out kicking.

A hand groped along the far wall, followed by a shoulder. I leapt through the doorway, pivoted on one foot and put all my weight behind a straight kick at stomach level, yelling as loudly as I could to multiply the fear and surprise. My foot made contact with flesh and the body staggered back against the door with a heavy crash, the air shooting out of it in a groaning rush as it crumpled on the floor. I stepped back, keeping my weight on the balls of my feet, and reached for the lights.

Richard was doubled up on the carpet, arms folded defensively over his guts. For once, I was lost for words. I relaxed my fighting stance and stood staring at him.

“Fucking hell,” he gasped. “Was that some traditional Belgian greeting, or what?”

“It’s a traditional private eye’s greeting for uninvited visitors,” I snarled. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Richard struggled to his feet, still clutching his stomach. “Nice to see you too, Brannigan.” He pushed past me and stumbled on to the bed, where he curled into a ball. “Oh shit, I think you’ve relocated my stomach somewhere round my left shoulder blade.”

“Serves you right,” I said heartlessly. “You scared me shitless.”

“That why you were in the bathroom?” he said innocently.

“What was wrong with the phone? Was it too much for you to handle, a foreign phone system? Besides, how did you get here? How did you find me? Did Shelley tell you where I was?”

Richard stopped rubbing his stomach and eased up into a sitting position. “I thought I’d surprise you. I don’t know, call yourself a detective? I’ve been tailing you ever since you got off the ferry, and you didn’t even notice,” he said proudly.

I moved across the room to the only chair and sat down heavily. “You’ve been tailing met”

“Piece of piss,” he said.

He had me worried now. If I’d been so busy watching Nicholas Turner that I hadn’t spotted a car as obvious as a snazzy U.K.-registered coupe on my own tail, it was time I gave up detective work and settled for something like social work where I could get away with a complete lack of observational skills. “I don’t believe you,” I said. “Shelley told you where I was and you got a flight over here.”

He grinned. For once, it made me want to hit him, not kiss him. “Sorry, Brannigan. I did it all by myself.”

“No way. I couldn’t have missed seeing the coupe on the ferry,” I said, positive now. The Saab had been one of the last cars to board. He simply couldn’t have got the coupe on board without me spotting it.

“That’s what I thought too,” he said complacently. “That’s why I left it at Hull. I traveled as a foot passenger, which meant I got off the ferry before you. I hired a Merc at the ferry terminal and picked you up as you came off. Then I followed you here. I thought I’d lost you when you got on the tram, but I managed to get a taxi and he followed the tram. Just like the movies, really. I waited outside while you were in that museum, and I hung about just inside the station when you came in here first time round.”

I shook my head in bewildered amazement. “So how did you get a key for the room?”

His grin was beginning to infuriate me. “I had a word with the desk clerk. Told him my girlfriend was here on business and I’d come to surprise her. It cost me two thousand francs. Most I’ve ever paid for a good kicking.”

Forty quid. I was impressed. “I suppose you’re potless now, are you?” I said sternly.

He looked sheepish. “Not as such. I forgot to go to the building society with the nine and a half grand, so I brought it with me.”

I didn’t know whether to be furious or impressed. There was no doubt the money would come in handy, the rate I was spending at, but I didn’t want Richard round on the chase. I had enough to worry about keeping tabs on Turner without having to be constantly aware of what Richard was up to. “Thanks,” I said. “I was wondering what to do when I ran out of cash. You can leave it with me when you go home tomorrow.”

He looked crestfallen. “I thought you’d be pleased to see me,” he said.

I got up and sat down beside him on the bed. “Of course I’m pleased to see you. I just don’t need to have to worry about you while I’m trying to do my job.”

“What’s to worry about?” he demanded. “I’m not a kid, Kate. Look, these are heavy people you’re after, there’s no two ways about it. You could use an extra pair of eyes. Not to mention an extra set of wheels. If he’s going on a long haul, you can’t use the same car all the way, and you could lose him while you’re swapping over at some car-hire place. If I stay, we can rent a couple of mobile phones and that way one of us can stay with him while the other one does things like fill up with petrol or stop for a piss.”

The most irritating thing was that he was right. I’d been worrying about that very thing myself. “I don’t know,” I said. I wanted to say, this is my territory, my skill area, my speciality and you’re just an amateur. But I didn’t want to throw that down on the bed for both of us to look at. The thing that worried me most was that after the debacle when he’d last tried to help me out, Richard felt he had something to prove. And there’s nothing more dangerous on a job that needs patience than someone with something to prove.

At quarter past six the following morning, I was sitting in the dark in my rented Mercedes on Pelikaanstraat. Richard was on the Keyserlei, a couple of hundred yards up from the hotel. Whichever way Turner went, one of us would pick him up. I checked the equipment on the passenger seat one more time. Richard hadn’t been strictly honest with me the previous evening. Once I’d reluctantly agreed to let him tag along, he confessed that he’d already hired a pair of mobile phones, so convinced was he that I’d see what he called sense.

We’d already agreed on a modus operandi. I would use the bugging equipment to keep tabs on Turner. Richard would sit tucked in behind me. If I wanted to stop to change cars, fill up with petrol or go to the loo, I’d phone him and he’d overtake me. Then, when he had Turner in sight, he’d call me and I’d go and do whatever I needed to. Once I was back on track, Richard would fall back behind me again. That was the theory. I’d put money on it working like a windup toy with a broken spring.

I sipped the cup of coffee I’d bought from the vending machine in the station and watched the screen. The buckle wasn’t moving yet. I ate one of the waffles I’d bought the evening before. I could feel my blood sugar rising with every mouthful. The combination of sugar and caffeine had me feeling almost human by the time the phone rang at five to seven. “Yes?” I said.

“Z-Victor one to BD,” Richard said. “Target on move. I’ve just pulled out in front of him. Heading for the traffic lights. He’s staying in the left-hand lane. Roger and out.”

If he carried on like this all day, I might just kill him by dinnertime, I decided. I stepped on the accelerator and swung round the corner. I was just in time to see the two cars turn left at the traffic lights. No way was I going to catch them, so I settled for watching the screen. I caught up with them about a mile from the motorway. It looked like we were heading southeast, toward Germany

Once we hit the motorway, I called Richard and told him to fall back behind me. I kept a steady two kilometers behind Turner, which was far enough at 140 kph, and five minutes later, Richard appeared in front of me, showing down enough to slide into my slipstream with a cheery wave. By nine, we’d sailed past Maastricht and Aachen, the bug had seen us safely through the maze of autobahns round Koln and Bonn was fast approaching on the port bow as we rolled on to the west of the Rhine. The boring flat land of Belgium was a distant memory now as the motorway swept us inexorably through rolling hills and woodland. Somehow, the motorways in Europe seem to be much more attractively landscaped than ours do. Maybe it’s just the indefinably foreign quality of the scenery, but I suspect it’s more to do with the fact that the Germans in particular have had to take Green politics seriously for a few years longer than we have.

Just before eleven, we crossed the Rhine north of Karlsruhe, with no sign of slowing up. I rang Richard and told him to overtake me and get on Turner’s back bumper again. The motorway split just south of the city, the A5 carrying on south and the A8 cutting off east. Unlike Koln, there was no quick way to double back if we made the wrong decision. A few minutes later, he called telling me to stay on the A5. We carried on down the river valley, the wooded hills on the left starting to become mountains, the occasional rocky peak flashing in and out of sight for seconds at a time.

A few kilometers before the Swiss border, the blip on the screen started moving toward me. It looked like Turner had stopped. Judging by the state of my fuel gauge, he was probably buying petrol. I rang Richard and told him to pull off at the approaching services while I carried on across the border. I stopped as soon as I could after waving my passport at Swiss customs and poured petrol into my tank till I couldn’t squeeze another drop in. I bought a couple of sandwiches, bars of yummy Swiss chocolate and cans of mineral water, then rushed back to the car. The buckle was still behind me, but closing fast. I rang Richard.

“We both filled up with petrol,” he reported. “I waited till he’d cleared the shop before I went in to pay, then I followed him through the border. Where are you?”

“In the service area you’re about to pass,” I told him. “You can let Turner get away from you now. If you drive into the services, you can fall in behind me again.” I couldn’t believe it was all going so well. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

We carried on past Basel and on to Zurich. By now, we were properly into the Alps, mountains towering above us on all sides. If I hadn’t been concentrating so hard on staying in touch with Turner and the buckle, I’d have been enjoying the drive. As it was, I felt as stressed as if I’d been sitting in city rush-hour traffic for the five and a half hours it had taken us to get this far.

We skirted the outskirts of the city and drove on down the side of Lake Zurich. About halfway down the lake, the blip on the screen suddenly swung off to the right. “Oh shit,” I muttered. I stepped on the accelerator, checking in my mirror that Richard was still with me. The motorway exit was only seconds away, and I swung off on a road that led into the mountains. I grabbed the phone, punched the memory redial that linked me to Richard and said, “Wait here. Turn round to face the motorway so you can pick him up if he heads back.”

“Roger wilco,” Richard said. “Call me if you need backup.”

I carried on, checking the blip on the screen against the road map. Cursing that I didn’t have a more detailed map of Switzerland, I swung the car through the bends of what was rapidly becoming a mountain road. A couple of miles farther on, I realized that staying on the main road had been the wrong decision, as the buckle was moving farther away from me at an angle. Swearing so fluently my mother would have disowned me, I nearly caused a small pileup with a U-turn that took a thousand miles off the tires and hammered back down the road and on to a narrow, twisting side road. About a kilometer away from the main drag, the screen suddenly went blank.

I panicked. My first thought was that Turner had met someone or picked someone up who had taken one look at the buckle, spotted the bug and disabled it. Then logic kicked in and told me that was impossible in so short a time. As I swung round yet another bend with a sheer rock wall on one side and a vertiginous drop on the other, I twigged. The mountains were so high and so dense that the radio signal was blocked.

I raced the car round the bends as fast as I could, tires screaming on every one, wrists starting to feel it in spite of the power steering. I was concentrating so hard on not ending up as a sheet of scrap metal on the valley floor that I nearly missed Turner. With the suddenness of daylight at the end of a tunnel, the road emerged onto a wide plateau about halfway up the mountain. In the middle of an Alpine meadow complete with cows that tinkled like bass wind chimes stood an inn, as pretty as a picture postcard, as Swiss as a Chalet School novel. On the edge of the crowded car park, Turner’s pale green Mercedes was parked. And the screen flashed back into life.

Heaving a huge sigh of relief, I drove to the far end of the car park and tried to ring Richard and let him know everything was okay. No joy. I supposed the mountain was in the way again. I got out of the car, took a black beret and a pair of granny glasses with clear lenses out of my stakeout disguises holdall and walked into the inn. Inside, it was the traditional Swiss chalet, wood everywhere, walls decorated with huge posters of Alpine scenery, a blazing fire in a central stone fireplace. The room was crammed with tables, most of them occupied. A quick scan showed me Turner sitting alone at a table for two, studying the menu. A waitress dressed in traditional costume bustled up to me and said something in German. I shrugged and tried out my school French, saying I wanted to eat, one alone, and did they have a telephone?

She smiled and showed me to a table near the fire and pointed out the phone. I got change from the cashier and gave Richard a quick call. For some reason, he was less than thrilled that I was sitting down to some Tyrolean speciality while he was stuck on the verge of the road with nothing in sight but the motorway and a field of the inevitable cows. “Go and get some sandwiches or something,” I instructed him. “I’ll let you know when we set off.”

I went back to my table. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Turner tucking into a steaming bowl of soup, a stein of beer beside him, so I figured I’d have time to eat something. I ordered Tyroler grostl, a mixture of potatoes, onions and ham with a fried egg on top. It looked like the nearest thing to fast food on the menu. I was right. My meal was in front of me in under five minutes. I was halfway through it before Turner’s main course arrived. Judging by the pile of chips that was all I could identify, he was eating for two. Frankly, I could see why he’d made the detour. The food was more than worth it, if my plateful was anything to go by. Definitely one to cut out and keep for next time we were passing Zurich.

By the time I’d finished and lingered over a cup of coffee, Turner had also demolished a huge wedge of lemon meringue pie. If I’d scoffed that much in the middle of the day, I’d have been asleep at the wheel ten miles down the road. I hoped he had a more lively metabolism. When he called for the bill, I took mine to the cashier, rang Richard to warn him we were on the move and headed back to the car. Minutes later, Turner was heading back down the road, with me a couple of bends behind him.

As we hit the motorway, I had another panic. Where I’d expected to see Richard in his Mercedes, there was a black BMW. As I sailed past, I glanced across and saw the familiar grin behind the thumbs-up sign. Moments later, as he swung in behind me, the phone rang. “Sierra Forty-nine to Sierra Oscar,” he said. “Surprise, surprise. I nipped back to Zurich and swapped the cars. I thought it was about time for a change.”

“Nice one,” I conceded. Maybe he wasn’t the liability I’d feared he’d be after all. And there was me thinking that he was as subtle as Jean-Paul Gaultier. This wasn’t the time to reassess the capabilities of the man in my life, but I filed the thought away for future scrutiny.

I figured we must be heading for Liechtenstein, haven for tax dodgers, fraudsters and stamp-collecting anoraks. No such luck. We carried on south, deep into the Alps. Richard was in front of me again, keeping tabs on Turner. The bug kept cutting out because of the mountains, and I was determined that we weren’t going to lose him after coming this far. Now Richard was in another car, I felt happy about him staying in fairly close touch.

A few miles down the road, my bottle started twitching. There was no getting away from it. We were heading for the San Bernadino tunnel. Ten kilometers in that dark tube, aware of the millions of tons of rock just sitting above my head, waiting to crush me thin as a postage stamp. Just the thought of it forced a groan from my lips. I’m terrified of tunnels. Not a lot of people know that. It doesn’t sit well with the fearless, feisty image. I’ve even been known to drive thirty miles out of my way to avoid going through the tunnels under the Mersey.

“With every minute that passed, that gaping hole in the hillside was getting closer and my heart was pounding faster. Desperately, I rattled through the handful of cassettes I’d grabbed when I’d picked up Bill’s car. Not a soothing one among them. No Enya, no Mary Coughlan, not even Everything But The Girl. Plenty of Pet Shop Boys, Eurythmics and REM. I settled for Crowded House turned up loud to keep the eerie boom of the tunnel traffic at bay and tried to concentrate on their harmonies.

Two minutes into the tunnel and the sweat was clammy on my back. Three minutes in and my upper lip was damp. Four minutes in and my forehead was slimy as a sewer wall. Six minutes in and my knuckles were white on the steering wheel. The walls looked as if they were closing in. I tried telling myself it was only imagination, and Crowded House promised they could ease my pain. They were lying. Ten minutes and I could feel a scream bubbling in my throat. I was on the point of tears when a doughnut of light appeared around the cars in front of me.

As soon as I burst out again into daylight, my phone started ringing. “Yeah?” I gasped.

“You okay?” Richard asked. He knows all about me and tunnels.

“I’ll live.” I swallowed hard. “Thanks for asking.”

“You’re a hero, Brannigan,” he said.

“Never mind that,” I said gruffly. “You still with Turner?”

“Tight as Jagger’s jeans. He’s got his foot down. Looks like we’re heading for la bella Italia.”

At least I’d be somewhere I could speak the language, I thought with relief. I’d been worried all the way down Germany and Switzerland that Turner was going to end up in a close encounter that I couldn’t understand a word of. But my Italian was fluent, a hangover from the summer before university, when I’d worked in the kitchens of Oxford’s most select trattoria. It was learn the language or take a vow of silence. I’d prevented it from getting too rusty by holidaying in Italy whenever I could.

I drove cheerfully down the mountain, glad to be out in the open air again, relieved that we were gradually leaving the peaks behind us. We worked our way round Milan just after five, Richard back behind me, and by seven we were skirting Genoa. This was turning into one hell of a drive. My shoulders were locked, my backside numb, my hips stiff in spite of regular squirming. If they ever start making private eyes work with tachographs, I’m going to be as much use to my clients as a cardboard chip pan. I shuddered to think what this overtime was going to look like on Henry’s bill. He’d run out of buckshee hours awhile back.

At Genoa, we turned east again on the A12, another one of those autostradas carved out of the side of a mountain. I kept telling myself the little tunnels were just like driving under big bridges, but it didn’t help a lot, especially since the receiver kept cutting out, giving me panic attacks every time.

Three quarters of an hour past Genoa, the screen told me Turner was moving off to one side. First, he went right, then crossed back left. I nearly missed the exit, I was concentrating so hard on the screen, but I managed to get off with Richard on my tail. We were on the outskirts of some town called Sestri Levante, but according to my screen, Turner was heading away from it. Praying I was going the right way, I swung left and found myself driving along a river valley, the road lined with shops and houses. Sestri Levante shaded into Casarza Ligure, then we were out into open country, wooded hills on either side of the valley. We hit a small village called Bargonasco just as the direction changed on the receiver. A couple of kilometers farther up, there was a turning on the left. It was a narrow asphalt road, with a sign saying Villa San Pietro. The blip on the screen stayed steady. A kilometer away, straight up the Villa San Pietro’s drive.

Journey’s end.