Dead Air

Eleven. EXTENDED PANIC FUNCTIONALITY

Oh dear holy fucking Christ almighty. Oh my fucking God. Oh fuck upon fuck upon total fuck to the power of fuck.

I hadn’t, had I? Oh dear God, let it be a dream, let it be a nightmare, let it not have happened, let me have called a different number. Let it be anybody else’s phone, anybody; my mum and dad’s, Craig’s, Ed’s, the office, anybody anybody anybody just please please please not that one, not the number that I’d overwritten where Ceel’s mobile number had been.

I fell off the bed, still fully clothed. The phone wasn’t in its little holster on my hip. I looked around. Where the hell was it? Oh my God, oh my God. Where was it? I threw back the duvet, looked under the bed, searched the tops of the bedside cabinets, the dresser, the table in front of the couch. What had I done with it? I had to find the little fucker, had to check, had to make sure that what I was terrified I had done, I hadn’t really done. Oh fucking hell, they could be on their way now, they might be parking, walking down the pontoon, treading on the gangplank, setting foot on the decking. They’d have the two seats set up, the big blond guy would be looking forward to the sound and feel of knees bending the wrong way and snapping. Then they’d castrate me, then they’d torture me to death. Or maybe they’d be quick, merciful, and just put a bullet through my head. Oh but dear God, Ceel. What would Merrial do to her? What would he do to make her talk, then once she had, what would he do to her for what she’d done with me?

Oh no, no, no, this couldn’t be happening. I stumbled through to the living-room. It had to be here. It had to be. Oh, fuck, this just could not be happening. This had to be a dream. This right now; I wasn’t really awake at all. I was having the mother-fucking great-granddaddy of all nightmares. I had to be. I hadn’t done that. I just hadn’t. I could not be that drunk; nobody could. It was not physically possible to drink so much that any human being could forget that he’d overwritten his lover’s mobile number with her home number, not when the home number was that of not just her but her husband, a major league fucking gangster notorious for having his giant bodyguard bounce up and down on the legs of people he disliked until their knees cracked or their ankles snapped or their femurs popped out of their hip sockets or whatever fucking horrible thing or ghastly combination or succession of things happened when they did this to you.

I turned the living-room upside down. I threw cushions, lifted rugs, left drawers hanging open. This had to be a dream, this had to be a nightmare. I couldn’t have done what I thought I had. There was not enough booze on the fucking planet to make a man do something so fucking stupid. There had never been, in the whole history of the species, sufficient drink fermented, distilled or brewed to make anybody, anybody, anybody at all no matter how stupid, how thoughtless, how much of a total fucking complete and utter fuckwit of the first water, do something that suicidally imbecilic. There were physical laws, immutable rules written into the very warp and woof of the fabric of reality itself, which would prevent any supposedly sentient creature doing anything a tenth as cretinously, murderously insane as that.

A dream. A nightmare. The worst one ever; a new low-water mark in the sump of human fright and terror. I must still be asleep and my heart was probably about to stop out of sheer horror. I had to wake up. I really did.

I stumbled into the bathroom, turned on the cold tap and splashed my face, splashing and slapping my cheeks and staring at myself in the mirror, at the white, terror-struck face of a man who was not going to wake up from his nightmare because it was the worst sort of nightmare, the kind that’s real, the kind you can die from but never wake from. The face of a man who’d killed the one woman he really loved in all the world, consigned her to a horrific, slow, painful, pitiful death because he’d got drunk and been stupid, because he just hadn’t thought, because he’d selfishly wanted to talk to her, because he’d thought it would somehow be funny or sexy to leave a totally shite dirty message on her phone, because he couldn’t read a fucking display and see that it was a different number, a land-line number, because he couldn’t hear the difference between a mobile message service and a common-or-garden domestic answering machine.

Why had it been her? Why the fuck couldn’t the fucking man of the house have recorded the fucking answering machine spiel? Why had that cunt Merrial made his wife record the message, the pathetic, useless, disgusting, inadequate piece of shit?

I looked down at the shelf above the sink. The phone was there. I grabbed it. But I must have left it on last night, because it was dead; no power.

I screamed at it. No words, just a scream. Yes, scream, I thought. Get in some practice for later, because you’re probably going to be doing quite a lot of screaming in the very near future. Scream when you see the two chairs drawn up just a leg-length apart, when you see the big blond guy smiling at you and bouncing up and down on his toes, scream when they tie you in, scream when they bring out the knives or the pliers or the blow torch. Yes, screaming now was a very good idea. Might even energise the phone in some spooky way, jar its battery into life. Because I had to check; I needed the fucking useless silvery little piece of shit on and working so I could hit the Last Calls Made list and find that – hey – of course I hadn’t called Ceel (even though I could still hear her voice, still remember standing on the deck in the darkness and listening to her beautiful voice); no, I’d called somebody else. Any-fucking-body else.

Ceel. I had to phone her. I ran out, put the phone into the recharging unit on the living-room desk, and lifted the boat’s own land-line phone.

Nothing. Oh, Jesus! They’d cut the phone line! They were – the dialling tone sounded. I hesitated. Right thing? Was I doing the right thing? Yes, of course. Right to check, just in case this was somehow as stupid as what I’d done last night, but the right thing. Definitely the right thing. I called her mobile number, the number I knew by heart. Oh please be there, please have it switched on. No; please don’t be there at your house, please be somewhere else, anywhere else, somewhere you can run, hide, get away from him.

Oh sweet Jesus Christ, answer, Ceel, answer. Please, please answer.

‘Hello?’

Oh, Christ, yes!

‘Celia. Hi. It’s Ken. Kenneth. Ken Nott.’ Oh God, I was going to have to tell her, going to have to admit I was an imbecile, that I’d put her in the most fucking awful danger, all through my sheer drunken stupidity.

‘Yes?’

‘Listen, I’ve done something really, unbelievably stupid. You need to get away, you need to run.’

‘Yes,’ she said calmly. ‘I’m in Scotland.’ Behind her voice I could hear what sounded like a car engine.

‘ Scotland?’ I yelped. But then that was good. Anywhere away from London was good. Unless she was with him, unless she was with him and he was going to access their answering machine remotely, from wherever they were in Scotland. Oh, shit.

‘Oh, you’re breaking up, I’m afraid,’ she lied. ‘I’ll call you back when I’ve got a clear… oh, no; gone. Well,’ I heard her say to somebody else, ‘that was unusua-’

And she was gone.

I picked up the mobile, hoping it had recharged sufficiently. No.

I sat down, shaking. Ceel was alive. In Scotland. She’d had a warning of sorts and she was going to call back when she wasn’t with whomever she was with.

If I had done what I feared I had – and I had to accept I probably had because I could remember her voice and something of the words she’d used on the answering machine message – then what could I do? I looked at my watch. The massive Breitling said it was – shit – half ten. Had to give it back, I thought; go back to my more elegant Spoon… what was I thinking of? Fuck the watch, fucking thinking about the watch or anything else apart from the fucking suicidal, murderous position I’d put myself and Celia in. Think; maybe Merrial was with her. Maybe – probably – they were away for the whole weekend. That gave me a day and a half to do something.

What could I do? Burn their house down? Break in? Hope there was a maid or a butler or somebody (but then why the answering machine?) and try to impersonate a… I didn’t know. Gas man? Cop? Jehovah’s fucking Witness?

Could I access the tape or the chip from outside somehow? What if I rang again and just left an immensely long message, would it overwrite the one from last night? No. Of course not. No answering machine I’d ever encountered would do that. Nobody would design one like that. Well, nobody with any sense; a fuckwit like me would, obviously.

Set fire to the fucking place. Heave a petrol bomb through a window, pour lighter fluid through the letter box; when the fire brigade came – ring them first, ring them just beforehand, but not the police – let them break down the door and then go in with them, pretend to be a plain-clothes cop, or from special branch, or find a fancy dress shop and hire a police uniform…

Oh, please let it still not have happened. Please let it be a really vivid false memory syndrome thing. I’d imagined her voice on the answering machine message. It hadn’t been her. I’d put the wrong number in from Merrial’s card, misplaced a digit and it had been there all the time and the first time I used it I got some female who happened to live at the house that had the phone with the one-digit difference from the Merrials’ and so I’d left this filthy, sexually abusive message on the answering machine of a total stranger. Oh, God, it had to be that. It had to be.

But if it wasn’t, if I really had done it, what could I do?

I felt sick. I felt really sick. My head was spinning, I was getting the tunnel vision thing. Roaring in ears. I got up and stumbled to the loo.

Ten minutes later, still getting the occasional dry heave, my throat raw, my mouth vile despite the mouthwash, my teeth with that stripped stickiness that comes from having recently been bathed in stomach acid, I sat back at the living-room desk and tried the mobile again. My face had still been white in the mirror. My hands were shaking uncontrollably. I had to rest the mobile on my lap so that I could hit the right buttons. I started crying with the awkwardness and the hopelessness of it all.

The little phone buzzed awake on my thigh. It only had a single bar of battery capacity showing but that was all I’d need. Just keep going for a minute or two, you little piece of shit; you could have fucking died on me last night before I made the call that might get me tortured and killed and my beloved too, you silvery be-buttoned turd. Yes, I know you’re fucking Searching… Just fucking stop it and get on with it. Menu; Phone Book, OK, Voice Dialling, Personal Numbers, Last Ten Calls. My mouth went dry. OK. Last Calls Made. Select? OK.

Here we go.

I stared at the number. I jumped up and got my wallet, where Merrial’s card still was. I checked one number against the other. I checked again and again, willing one, just one, just one lousy single fucking little digit to be different. For fuck’s sake, it wouldn’t have been difficult to make a mistake; I made mistakes all the time. Even when I’m sober. Constantly. Just this one time let this be a mistake.

Call? said the little bit of script at the bottom of the screen. No. No, I don’t fucking want to call it again, you worthless stupid piece of crap. I want to Undo. I want to press F1 or go to the relevant menu with a mouse arrow and Undo, totally fucking Undo what I did last night, rewind the tape, oh yes, wipe the chip, reformat the disk, rewind that fucking little deadly tape or whatever the hell it was sitting in a house less than a mile away from here, rewind and erase. Better still, take it out and fucking burn it and mash the ashes into a fine paste and flush it all down a waste disposal unit somewhere in Outer fucking Mongolia.

I read the numbers out from the phone’s screen, comparing them to the numbers on Merrial’s card. They were identical. They weren’t going to change now. I closed the phone.

Maybe he wouldn’t guess who it was. I’d said it was Ken, I remembered that – I thought – but maybe he wouldn’t think to link that drunken Ken with the guy he’d met once in the courtyard of Somerset House… Oh, shit, what was I thinking of? I’d said Naughty Ken or something equally pathetic and incriminating, hadn’t I? Or had I?

It didn’t matter; I was a fucking radio DJ; I was proud I had a distinctive voice. Even if Merrial didn’t ever listen to the show and had missed my high TV and radio presence over the last few weeks or never heard an ad with my voiceover, somebody he knew would recognise me. And anyway, I didn’t bar my mobile number; his answering machine would have remembered the number, the way they all did, didn’t they? Or maybe his didn’t; maybe Merrial was one of those Early Adopters and he had a really old machine he’d never got round to replacing and it didn’t keep a note of the incoming numbers.

Yeah, right.

But even if he had the number, how would he know it was mine? I hadn’t given him my number, he couldn’t… Yes, and of course as a big crime lord he’d have absolutely no way of finding who a mobile number belonged to. Of course he would.

I know! I thought. He owed me a favour. Merrial; he’d said to call him if there was ever a favour he could do for me. I’d phone and phone and phone until I got an answer, or go over there and slip a note through the door, ask him to just not listen to his messages, as a favour to me; just trust me. Heavens, yes, that was bound to work. And OJ was innocent and al-Megrahi was guilty.

Phone now! I thought. Of course! Phone now and find out if the fucking answering machine was still switched on. Why hadn’t I thought of that first? Because I was still drunk, hung-over and panicking under the influence of the most catastrophically fuckwittish mistake ever made in the long history of catastrophically fuckwittish mistakes.

I reached for the land-line. Oh fuck, what if he answered? What if he said something like, Ah, Kenneth, you again. I received your earlier message. Very interesting. I’ve just sent some of my colleagues round to your place to invite you for a little chat…

Oh fuck, oh fuck.

I took three attempts to press the number into the phone, my hands were shaking so much.

Ceel’s voice, recorded. Her beautiful, clear, calm, perfect voice. Leave a message after the tone… then a series of beeps signifying the message or messages already left – mine! mine was there, that dirty, drunken, rambling shite being spooled past right now! – then the beep. I didn’t leave another message. I put the phone down. So – probably – nobody had listened to the message. The worst had not yet happened. Unless, of course, Merrial was being clever and only pretending that he hadn’t listened… but that was even more paranoid than reality demanded, and fuck knew that was bad enough.

Maybe I could sort of half own up. I could say I’d become obsessed with Celia after seeing her on the ice that day. I was living out this fantasy where we were lovers, stalking her… No. No, he’d still do something horrible to me, just for that, and more likely he’d want to check that nothing had been going on, so he’d still have me tortured to get at the truth. And I had no illusions about my ability to hold out under severe pain, not for Ceel, not for myself, not for anybody.

My palms were very sweaty. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow. I got up unsteadily and went to the kitchen for some bottled water. The land-line phone rang on the second swallow, and I sprayed water over the carpet.

‘Yes?’

‘Kenneth?’ It was her. Thank fuck. Her; still alive, still not screaming in agony, still able to talk; now able to talk. ‘What’s wrong?’

I told her. In all my life – and there might not be much more of it to come – I had never known anybody stay so calm in the face of a disaster as utter and unmitigated. She had every right to scream and cry and bawl, but she just asked a couple of sensible, measured questions to clear up some of the holes I’d left in my semi-hysterical account of what had happened. Then I heard her sigh. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Well, I’m in Scotland, staying with some friends near Inverness. John is caving in the Peak District. He’s due back tonight or tomorrow.’

‘Tonight? Oh, Jesus Christ.’

‘Depends on the weather; if there’s been too much rain the system will be flooded and they won’t be able to do much. It was touch and go, last I heard.’

I ran a hand over my face. ‘Can you access the messages on your answering machine from outside, from a different phone?’

‘No. John specifically did not want one which could do that, in case somebody else found out how to access it.’

‘Okay, okay, well, that gives us until he gets home, at least.’ I closed my eyes and stood there shaking my head. ‘Oh, Ceel, I am so, so sorry. I can’t, I just can’t begin to tell you-’

‘Kenneth, stop. We have to think. Right. Bien. I can claim an emergency and ask to be run straight back to the airport. I’ll get on the next flight. I can get home before him, wipe the tape.’

‘Oh, please, yes; please, please.’

‘I’d better let my hosts know.’ I heard her exhale. ‘This should be interesting. I’ll call you back as soon as I know what’s happening. ’

‘Ceel?’

‘What?’

‘I love you.’

This time it was an in-taken breath. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well. Talk to you soon.’

And off.

I drank from the bottle of water, hands still shaking. I stared ahead, seeing nothing. Still alive. Both of us still alive. So far so good. So far no torture and painful death. She’d get back. She’d return, in time. Brilliant, calm, resourceful Ceel would clear up the pig’s diarrhoea of a mess her idiot lover had made. She’d make it all well again. Bless that smart, sexy, wonderful, gorgeous, fantastic woman. She might never talk to me again, she might write me out of her life forevermore and curse me ritually every night before she went to sleep for the rest of her hopefully long life for the ignorant scumbag dickhead that I so surely was, but at least she’d be alive to do it, at least we’d both live. We wouldn’t suffer for my stupidity. I drank some more water and told myself that one day I’d see the funny side of all this.

Ceel rang back forty minutes later with the news that Inverness airport was out of action for the day, fog-bound.

‘You have to run,’ I said. My mouth had gone dry again. ‘That’s all we can do. Run. You have to get away. Further away. Oh, God, Ceel-’

‘No-no,’ she said crisply. ‘I’ll find out when there’s a flight next to London from Aberdeen, Edinburgh or Glasgow, then hire a car to whichever one. I’ll charter a plane or helicopter if I can. The timing will be tighter but it ought still to be possible. But there is another possibility.’

‘What?’

‘You could get into the house.’

‘How? Does anybody else have a key? Is there anybody in the house?’

‘No. There shouldn’t be. The staff have the weekend off.’

‘So, how-?’

‘There’s a key in the back garden, inside an artificial stone.’

‘There is?’ This sounded a bit low-rent and risky for such a posh address.

‘Yes. Then once you’re inside you’ll have to switch the alarm off.’

‘Okay, okay, right.’

‘I’ll give you the number for that. However, there is a problem.’

‘Shit. What?’

‘Getting into the back garden from the lane. There’s a high wall.’

‘So what’s the point of-?’

‘There’s a garage off the lane; you’re supposed to be able to get into the garage with the remote control in the car and then use the spare key. Or there’s an ordinary door, but it’s locked too.’

‘Right. Okay.’ I had an idea. ‘How high is the wall exactly? Well, not ex-’

‘Three metres, perhaps three and a half.’

‘Any razor wire or anything?’

‘No.’

‘Not even broken bottles?’

‘No.’

‘Okay, I think I can get into the back garden. I suppose it’s over-looked? By other-?’

‘Yes. But it’s usually quiet; it’s a dead-end off the mews further down.’

‘This artificial stone; how do I find it?’

‘Counting from the rear wall of the garage there are two lanterns on the west garden wall, then the third one. The stone with the key inside is directly under the third lantern and two stones out from the wall. Once you see it it looks almost obvious.’

‘West wall, garage rear wall, third lantern, two stones out.’ I rubbed a hand over the back of my neck. All this was just what I needed in the condition I was in. ‘What about the alarm? Is it linked to a security firm HQ or anything?’

‘Yes, and to the local police station.’

‘The local police station? Really?’

‘You might be surprised at the arrangements John has with the Metropolitan Police, Kenneth.’

‘Yeah, I dare say I might,’ I agreed. ‘What about surveillance cameras?’

‘No. Well, none that I know of.’

‘Right.’

‘Here’s the alarm code.’

‘Shoot.’

‘Write it down, will you?’

‘Okay.’ I lifted Merrial’s card. ‘Go.’ I wrote the code down on the back of Merrial’s card, then repeated it. ‘And where is the answering machine?’

‘It’s in John’s study. On the first floor. Oh.’

‘Now what?’

‘The study might be locked.’

‘Locked? But-’

‘It’s a gun room, too; it’s supposed to be locked.’

‘A gun…? Jeez. Right. So if it is, then what?’

‘I have a key in my bedroom. That’s on the second floor. John doesn’t know about it. You’ll have to go there first if the study door is locked.’

You couldn’t just have the damn thing where people usually have answering machines, by the front door, could you? I thought. And, Ceel’s bedroom; I’d fantasised about something like this for months, but not exactly in these circumstances.

‘Okay. Where’s the key?’

‘In my bathroom. There is a cabinet above the sink. Inside the box of tampons.’

Smart thinking, I guessed. ‘Right.’

‘When you get to the answering machine, you wipe the tape by pressing Function and then Clear. Got that?’

‘Function and Clear. I’d rather tear the whole tape out or take a big magnet and wipe it of everything, but that’ll have to do. Maybe I’ll do it twice.’

‘Function and Clear should do it.’

‘Okay.’

‘Keep in touch.’

‘Will do.’

‘Please be careful, Kenneth.’

‘Oh, I will. Best of luck getting a flight.’

‘Thank you. Goodbye.’

‘Bye.’

I put the phone down. I wasn’t shaking so much now. I drank some more water. At least we had a plan of campaign. At least I had something I could do, rather than just wait for Celia to come and fix things. God, what sort of man was I? Of course I should be doing something. I’d got us both into this grisly mess; it should be me that got both of us out of it. Or even only her. If I could just save Ceel I’d have done something good, something to make up for my gross incompetence. My own miserable behind was patently not worth the saving, attached as it so obviously was to a spine with a lump of barely solidified porridge at the other end where a normal person would have a functioning brain, but hers… her glorious ass was entirely and utterly worth saving, even at the expense of my own.

Think. I’d have to park the Landy in the lane. What if people saw me going over the wall? They’d call the cops, or at the very least they might take the Land Rover’s registration number.

How could I get new numbers for it? You could get rear number plates from any Halfords; people did all the time for trailers and there was no check on whether you really had a vehicle with that number, but you couldn’t get white, front number plates that easily. Maybe I could make false ones using the computer. Print out a couple of sheets of A4 with the relevant sized numerals and then wrap them in cling-film or something and tape them over the real ones. Should fool the casual observer. Wouldn’t even need exactly the right font because people had weird fonts on their plates sometimes; I’d seen them.

Better, I could phone the garage that had repaired the Landy and get some old plates off them. They were bound to have some; it would just be a short-term loan anyway. I had about three hundred quid in an emergency stash at the back of my sock drawer and I could pick up another two-fifty from a cash machine. That should hire a set of plates for an hour. Wouldn’t it? How likely was I to find the only small London garage that would shake their heads at my proposed criminality and promptly phone the cops? Surely not.

On the other hand, it would take time, delay things. Supposing Merrial came back early? Detouring via the garage might make all the difference. And it would introduce another variable into the equation, one more source of potential leaking. Supposing the garage people knew people who knew Merrial? If the Landy was spotted and the false numbers were traced to them, who knew what might happen, what they’d do, what they’d be persuaded to say, how they’d jump?

So I couldn’t risk it. But meanwhile I’d sat here slugging water and thinking about it and wasted a few minutes. Well done, Kenneth. Ten past eleven. Get going.

Traffic was relatively light. It was a pleasantly mild winter morning; high cloud and a watery sun. Breezy. Why the fuck couldn’t it be breezy in fucking Inverness? And dry in the Peak fucking District? I could have gone faster, but I stuck to between thirty and thirty-five. This would be no time to be caught speeding, especially with God knew how much alcohol still sloshing about in my system.

Ascot Square was quiet. Bunches of silver balloons tied to railings indicated there’d been a party in one of the grand town-houses on the other side of the square from the Merrials’. Maybe a twenty-fifth anniversary or something. Lots of Mercs, Jags and BMWs, plus Range Rovers and a brace of Rollers or Bentleys; Audi A2s and a couple of Smarts, too. The Merrials lived in number eleven, near the centre of the imposing, four-storeys-plus-basement terrace. No obvious signs of life at number eleven.

Tall limes and beeches in the private gardens in the centre of the square. I drove on through into Eccleston Street then into Chester Square. I parked in a residents only space for a couple of minutes, climbing into the back of the Landy and pulling on my overalls. Brand new, basically; I’d got them when I bought the Landy, thinking I’d do my own repairs. And a size too small; my shirt sleeves and the bottom of my 501s protruded from the green overalls by a good two or three centimetres. Great; so now I looked stupid as well as villainous. I had an old Sony Music Awards baseball cap; I put that on too. Bit of a giveaway industry-wise, but what else was I supposed to do? Sunglasses from the cubby box between the front seats.

Gloves! Of course I needed gloves. I was going to break into a house, or make an illegal entry or whatever the legally nice definition was. I didn’t want to go leaving fingerprints all over the fucking place. Gloves. I had some somewhere. I rummaged behind the bench seats on either side, feeling down between the seat cushions and the back rests. Blimey, you could hide a complete fucking tool kit along here… gloves. Got them. They were thick, padded things for pulling out bramble bushes or hauling on winch wires or some such manly shit as that, not at all the sort of fine, thin things you’d want for the delicate business of letting yourself into somebody else’s house, but, shit, they’d just have to do.

I jumped back into the front and set off again, back past Ascot Square proper and round into the mews behind it on the south side. Lots of close-packed but very expensive mews properties with differing treatments of the old architecture; a jumbled variety of windows large and small, balconies, awnings and outside steps. Lots of plants, too; hanging baskets, big pot plants and trailing vines. Oh shit; and a family loading up their Landy Discovery. Young couple and three kids getting their cool boxes and child seats sorted for a day out. Shit! What sort of time was this to be setting out for the day? It was practically noon! Best bit of the day gone, dammit! Couldn’t the miserable fucking curs have got their shit together a bit closer to breakfast?

The man looked up when he saw my battered Short-Wheelbase approaching down the cobbles. Took a good look at me. Hmm, don’t recognise that beaten-up old wreck, or the shifty looking weirdo with the sunglasses driving it. Not a resident I’ve ever seen before. And that’s not a Power or Gas company van. You could practically see the thought bubbles.

I wound the window down and stopped by the Disco. ‘Scuse me, mite. Zis Ascot Mews Norf?’

‘Ah, na,’ said the man. ‘This is Siythe, actually.’

‘Sarf?’ I said. ‘Ah, roight.’ I looked over at the other seat, as though there was something there I was consulting. ‘Roight. Ta, mite,’ I said, and reversed out again.

I parked up near the corner of Eccleston Street and Eaton Square, pretending to study an A to Z. The Disco swung out into the traffic and headed for the river ten long, long minutes later. I pulled back into Ascot Mews South, drove on past the mews cottages into the last part of the lane where the garages and tall garden walls began. I counted my way along to number eleven, but I needn’t have bothered; there was a number eleven on the gleaming green pedestrian door that gave out onto the lane beside the equally freshly painted garage doors.

I’d rehearsed this in my mind already. Best done quickly given it had to be done at all. Ignore the rear windows of the houses on the other side of the lane and those next door to number eleven. I killed the engine, got out, locked the door, climbed onto the roof via the front bumper and bonnet – the aluminium roof flexed under my feet, which I actually had the reserve brain power to feel slightly disappointed by – then I jumped up onto the rounded top of the tall stone wall.

Japanese garden; raked gravel forming dry round lakelets with big smooth boulders forming islands in the frozen ripples of greyness. Small, tidily clipped bushes and shrubs; a still pool with another big boulder. Decking under green awnings. Something about its calm organisation told me this was Celia’s garden more than her husband’s. I looked down. I was going to have to drop the whole way, into more gravel. It was easily three and a half metres.

I swung one leg over, then the other, and let myself dangle as far to the ground as I could. In Scotland, as kids, we’d called this dreeping. I had no idea what it was called down here. I couldn’t get any real hand-hold on the smooth round top of the wall so just had to keep as much friction as I could on my forearms and gloved hands until gravity took over and I dropped to the gravel bed. It was mercifully deep. I hit and rolled and didn’t break anything. I’d have to do some remedial work on the gravel bed-work with a rake, though. I looked up at the wall. I’d worry about getting out again later. I smoothed the gravel out a bit now, while I thought of it, just in case I forgot later. It didn’t look perfect but it might pass as the result of a cat coming into the garden. I checked the door in the garden wall. The lock was some sort of ruggedised outdoor Chubb; I tried to open it but it looked like you needed a key even from the inside.

My phone went as I was walking up the path towards the stone with the key inside. There was a sort of slit on each side of the overalls so you could get at the pockets of whatever you were wearing underneath. I hauled the Motorola out through one of those. Ceel.

‘I’m in the back garden,’ I said.

‘Good. I’ve just had a thought. John should have the car. Use the keys just to the right of the back door, once you’ve got in, to open the garage and put your car in. It might look less suspicious.’

I hadn’t paid much attention to the garage doors. I had the impression they were pretty tall, but I might have been wrong. ‘It’s a Land Rover,’ I said. ‘Two metres tall at least. Might not fit.’

‘No, it should. It’s an old coach house.’

‘Okay, then. Good idea.’ I stopped opposite the third lantern and looked down at a neat arrangement of smooth, varied stones. ‘Hold on. What if he comes back? Seeing a Land Rover parked outside your back wall might be a little puzzling; finding the thing sitting inside his own garage…’

‘Hmm, you’re right. Also, I phoned the Weather Centre. The Peak District has had more rain than expected overnight. I think it’s very likely he will be back later today.’

‘Oh, shit. What about you? How are the flights looking?’

‘ Aberdeen is out. It’s a three- or four-hour drive to Edinburgh or Glasgow. I’m trying to arrange a charter from a smaller airport closer to here but it’s not proving easy.’

‘Well, I’m in here already anyway. Hold on.’ I stooped to the stones. The thick gloves meant I took a couple of attempts, but after a few seconds and some muttered curses I was able to announce, ‘I’ve got the key.’

‘You have the alarm number?’

‘Memorised and written down. The door in the garden wall, back into the mews, into the lane; where would I find the key for that?’

‘To the left of the back door in the utility room, looking out. It has a green plastic tag.’

‘Can I lock the door without it? I’m trying to get out without having to climb the wall.’

‘Let me think.’ Ceel was silent for a couple of seconds. ‘Yes. Use the key, open the door, put the key back, put the little button down on the lock and then close the door from outside. That will do it. Don’t forget to put the house back-door key back inside the stone first.’

‘Christ,’ I said, putting one hand over my eyes. ‘Do I so not need all this with a serious fucking hangover.’ I took a deep breath, straightened up. ‘Okay. Never mind. Right. I’ve got all that. Thanks.’

‘Good luck, Kenneth.’

‘You too, kid.’

The back door swung closed and re-locked. I walked quickly through the utility room, the kitchen and along the hall; an insistent beeping noise was sounding from the far end, near the front door. I punched the code into the alarm unit but the thick gloves meant I must have pressed the wrong buttons. I felt sweat prick on my brow as I started again. The beeping went on. I was going to run out of time. I whipped my right glove off and entered the code properly. The noise stopped. My heart was thudding, my hands still shaking. I took a few deep breaths. I used a paper handkerchief to polish the keys I’d touched, then I put the glove back on. God, I was hot. I took off the stupid baseball cap and shoved it into a pocket. Something made me think that I should keep doing things while I thought of them, so I went to the back door, left it unlocked on the catch and wedged with a welly boot while I went out to the garden and replaced the key inside the artificial stone.

I closed the back door again. As I walked along to the foot of the stairs near the main door I realised I seriously needed to visit the toilet. This was ridiculous – for all I knew a suspicious neighbour was already on the phone to the local nick telling them she’d just seen a guy in badly fitting overalls jumping into a back garden – but I really was going to have to get to a loo in the next minute or so or basically I was going to soil myself. Partly, I guessed, it was the result of my colossal alcohol intake from the previous night, but partly it was simple fear. I recalled reading something about this, how burglars who left crap in the middle of their victim’s carpets weren’t necessarily just being shits themselves. They just couldn’t help themselves. Breaking into somebody else’s house was a scary thing to do; most people would be scared shitless. And – as a rule – they weren’t invading the privacy of fucking London crime lords.

I ran up the stairs and started looking for a toilet, opening doors into a sitting-room, a library, a small cinema, another sitting-room, and a walk-in cupboard before finding one that wouldn’t open, which must be the study where the answering machine was.

Oh my God, I was going to shit my pants. I could feel my bowels loosening, a muscle down there starting to spasm as I tried to hold things in. No loo here that I could see. Upstairs; I knew there was a toilet up there; that was where Celia’s bedroom was with its en suite bathroom. I did a weird, knee-knocking sort of walk to the stairs leading up to the next storey, then minced up the steps, sucking in my belly as though this would stop the disaster I was expecting any second. Even as I got to the next floor I was thinking, What was I doing? Running up here had been stupid; there must be a loo downstairs, on the ground floor, where the kitchen and dining-room would be.

Too late now. I ran along to a door whose room probably looked to the rear of the house, overlooking the Japanese garden. I was sucking my cheeks in – I mean my cheeks on my face as well as the cheeks of my bum – as though in sympathy. My whole body was trembling now; I nearly fell as I stumbled through the door and into the room. Bedroom. Big. Dark behind dark-grey vertical blinds shielding two tall windows.

There was a door to each side of the wide, black and white bed. I pulled the left one open; a fucking dressing-room. Jesus fucking Christ, what was it with these rich fuckers? Couldn’t they just have fucking wardrobes like fucking normal people, the self-indulgent sons of bitches? I hobbled round the bed, trying to keep my legs together and yet still walk, and actually putting my right hand to my backside, trying to press upwards, help keep things in. Oh Christ, oh Christ; if this door didn’t lead to a loo, I was going to shit my fucking pants.

The door swung open and I was looking straight at a beautiful white china loo with a rich dark wooden seat and lid. I quickly pulled both gloves off.

My whimper of relief turned to a terrible keening of frustrated rage and despair as I had to waste a few seconds I hadn’t been accounting for – and which I might not have to spare – as I had to tear at my stupid fucking under-size overalls before I could even get to my jeans and pants. I only just remembered to lift the lid of the loo before I turned round.

I started shitting even before my backside hit the wooden rim of the toilet. It was a ghastly, splattery and appallingly malodorous experience, but I believed I’d – just – succeeded in keeping within the bounds of social shitting behaviour.

Sitting back, I closed my eyes, breathing through my mouth to escape the putrid smell of what was going on down below, and – for a few, brief, fleeting moments – just let myself surf along the wave of animal relief surging through my body.

‘Fucking hell,’ I breathed.

Cleaning up took a while. I’d nearly finished when I realised that I’d just taken a seriously fucking rancid dump in what looked like John Merrial’s own bathroom, not Ceel’s. The toiletries spread about the shelves were all masculine and there was a shaving mirror and an electric razor on a shelf above one of the two big wash-handbasins. When I thought about it, I realised that the clothes in the dressing-room I’d looked in earlier had indeed been male clothes; in the wide-eyed terror of the moment, I hadn’t even noticed.

Flushing a couple of times extra and using a loo brush to make sure there were no marks left seemed like a good idea.

I left the place as I’d found it, apart from the smell. I used an air-freshener, more in deference to my mother’s early bathroom training than because it would make any difference; Alpine Glade would be every bit as suspicious as Fetid Faeces if Merrial happened to come home in the next hour or so and decided the first thing he needed was a nice shower to freshen up after a hard day’s caving.

The perfectly folded towels in the bathroom intimidated me, so after I’d washed my hands I just wiped them dry on my overalls rather than sully those snowy white expanses. I did some more wiping down of touched surfaces with the paper hanky.

A few more deep breaths and a drink of water from the cold tap and I was just about steady and calm enough to continue. I found another large bedroom across the hall, also with a view to the rear. This bedroom was all pale greens and blues, from ceiling and walls and carpets to the furniture and fittings. Bursts of tropical colour on the walls were provided by paintings of riotous jungle scenes, all profuse abstractions of flowers, leaves, sky and rocks, shot through with what looked like squadrons of parrots or cockatiels racing across the scenes, caught in blurs of chromatic chaos.

Thick black Venetian blinds covered windows of a similar size to those in the room across the hall. Maybe everybody hereabouts kept their blinds closed all the time, I thought, allowing hope to blossom again. Maybe nobody would have seen me make the leap over the garden wall.

Pale furniture. A large dressing table with combs and bottles and a small ring tree with a few rings on it, all tidy, neatly arranged. It was very warm.

Definitely Ceel’s room, I thought. The bathroom was on the opposite side to the room across the hall. I had to take the damn stupid big gloves off again. Why hadn’t I thought of this? If I’d only taken a minute to look ahead I’d have realised back on the fucking Temple Belle that I’d need a good thin pair of gloves for this. Oh well. The Yale key was secured to the floor of the little box of tampons by a piece of double-sided tape. I confess I held a few of the tampons, looking at them, then, still holding them, looked round the bathroom; at her bath and, alongside it, a big steam-cabinet shower, with a seat. I found myself smiling as I looked at the loo.

Oh, God, what sort of poor pathetic loon was I, caressing the woman’s tampons and staring fondly, love-struck, at her toilet seat, for fuck’s sake? Get fucking real, Kenneth. And get fucking moving, fuckwit. I put the tampons back and replaced the box, then did the wiping-finger-touched-surfaces bit again.

I went down to the locked door on the first floor. I had a little more time to look around. The house was furnished in a slightly dated respectable style that was probably about right for the building. Actually it looked a lot like some of the slightly more modern hotel suites Ceel and I had been in. She must have felt at home. Not as stiflingly hot, though.

The study door opened with the key and I let it close behind me. The study was more old-fashioned than what I’d seen of the rest of the house. The big desk was un-ironic retro, with a gold-tooled burgundy leather top and a brass lamp with a green glass shade. The computer was a Hewlett Packard with a big plasma screen. Ha! I’d just known Merrial wouldn’t be a Mac guy. I couldn’t see any sign of a gun safe, but I guessed it might be hidden.

The answering machine was on its own little table near the door. I looked at it accusingly, as though this was all its fault. You see the trouble you’ve put me to, you nasty little piece of office-beige shite? I moved towards it.

That was when I heard the siren.

It must have been on the fringes of my hearing for a couple of seconds. I’d been feeling a general unease, which seemed at odds with the fact I was now within sight of the thing I’d spent so much effort, angst and sweat getting to. Then I realised: a siren. The Emergency Services. You stop hearing the sound in a big city after a while.

If you’re driving – and providing you’re not the sort of cack-brained bozo who can have a fucking twenty-tonne fire engine right behind him with its lights flaring and its siren screaming and still not realise it’s time to Get The Fuck Out Of The Way – then you do still take notice when you hear a siren; you start looking at side streets, checking the rear-view every few seconds, watching for people pulling out of the way or bumping up onto kerbs or swerving into bus stops to clear a path for the vehicle with the blue lights. Otherwise, you hear it but you pay no attention unless it signifies something you’re waiting for, or it keeps getting louder all the time until it gets very loud and then stops.

I listened to the siren get closer and closer.

Doppler, you fuck, I thought. Fucking Doppler your fucking woop-wooping arse on past. Don’t stop. Don’t pull up here, in the mews or in the square outside. Keep on going. Let it be an emergency somewhere else. Let it be a cop car en route to a robbery on the King’s Road or an ambulance heading for a boating accident on the river or a fire engine attending a false alarm at a shop; let it be anything at all but not a patrol car coming to check on a suspected break-in at the rear of Ascot Square.

I stood there, staring at the answering machine, knowing that I should keep going, knowing that the sensible, per cent-ages-wise course of action was to keep doing what I was doing, get at the tape, wipe the fucker, wipe the fucker twice, make sure it was clean and I and Celia were in the clear… but I couldn’t. I had to hear what was going to happen with that damn siren. There would still be time to wipe the tape even if the sound did stop right outside anyway, but I just couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything until I knew. Closer, closer. Did they use a siren in such a situation? Would that not be like the stupidest thing to do if you were hoping to catch the crims in the act? Give the fuckers plenty of warning. Give them time to scarper with their bags of swag and their stripy jumpers and their eye masks, before the rozzers caught them bang to rights and they went to chokey so fast their feet didn’t touch…

My own phone went, vibrating against my hip. I jumped as though zapped with a cattle prod then pulled my right-hand glove off and held it in my mouth while I withdrew the mobile from its holster. I was whimpering again. I was getting good at whimpering. My hands were shaking so much I almost dropped the phone. I flipped it open. Phil. I clicked, No, don’t answer and put it away again, trembling fingers missing the holster three or four times. The siren was still coming closer. I put my glove back on.

Go past, go past. Oh, just fucking go past… Saint Doppler, I appeal to thee to intercede on my behalf… Oh, fuck off; what a load of fucking shite. Next I’d be appealing to the patron saint of atheists.

The siren’s note started to deepen. I let out a breath I must have been holding for a minute or more. A roaring noise in my ears began to fade and the room took on more colour and stopped looking like the view down a pipe. Jeez, I must have been close to blacking out there.

Never mind. A candle would be lit at the shrine of Saint Doppler after all. Red shifted, of course.

I walked over to the skinny table and the answering machine. It had a little black-on-green LCD display which was in message counter mode at the moment. Five messages. I was still staring at the machine when it rang.

I jumped. ‘Fuck!’ I screamed. Then, ‘You fucking bastarding little cunt!’ At the time, this seemed only reasonable.

The machine clicked after four rings. ‘There’s nobody here right now,’ Ceel’s calm, beautiful voice said.

‘Yes there fucking is!’ I screamed hoarsely, shaking my fists in front of my chest.

‘Please leave a message after the tone.’

‘No!’ I yelled. ‘Don’t fucking bother! Whoever the fuck you are, just fucking fuck off!’

Another click, and a hum as the machine’s tape wound itself forward. Then, ‘Aow hullo yes my name is Sam I’m calling on behalf of BT we would just like to check that you know of our latest offers for domestic customers I’ll call again at a later time and hope to discuss these offers with you thank you goodbye.’

‘Fuck off!’ I screamed as the phone clicked again and the tape started to wind itself back to Ceel’s announcement at the beginning. Fucking typical, I thought. Go ex-directory because you’re fed up getting junk calls from fucking double-glazing salespeople and what happens? You get fucking junk calls from B fucking T. At least I ought to find it reassuring that even metropolitan crime lords weren’t immune from that sort of shit.

When the machine had gone quiet again, I carefully identified the Function and Clear buttons. They were big enough to use with the heavy gloves still on. I pressed one – the black and green display asked Clear All Messages? – followed by the second button. Nothing happened.

I’d been stooping. Now I stood up.

Actually something had happened; the display now read No Messages. But there was no more clicking, no humming, no other sounds at all.

Was that it? It didn’t seem right. Was that all there was to it? Shouldn’t it wind forwards and wipe the tape after Ceel’s introduction?

I guessed not. It would just forget about the messages sitting there already recorded and record over them when there was another incoming call.

Was that good enough? It should be. That was the way the machine worked. As far as it was concerned, there had been no messages. If you tried to play the tape, you’d get nothing, just No Messages.

But the message I’d left was still there. The words were still printed there in patterns of magnetised stripes on the little brown ribbon of oxide-coated plastic. If you took the micro-cassette out of the answering machine and put it in an ordinary dictation machine you’d still hear what I’d said.

I pressed Function again. Re-record Message? No. I pressed Function again a few times until I got to the No Messages screen again. I was sweating now. I couldn’t decide what to do. In theory, it was all fixed now; mission accomplished. Definitely time to Get To Fuck.

But the message was still there. Was it worth the risk of leaving it there, even though it wasn’t likely that anybody would take the necessary steps to access it? What if Merrial had called his own phone for some reason, and knew there was a message or messages there? Or somebody said they’d left a message? What would happen in that case if he came home and saw it said No Messages? Wouldn’t he investigate, take the cassette out, try it in another machine?

Maybe Ceel would still beat him back and be able to say there was nothing on the tape, or only junk calls, but what if he was first back?

Jesus, what was I thinking of? I took off my glove again, got out my mobile and started walking to the door. I’d call the fucking answering machine myself and just leave a soundless call that would last long enough to overwrite my incriminating message from last night. Maybe not soundless; maybe the machine would sense that and switch off. I’d rub my hand over the microphone on the mobile so it would pick up some sound and lay that down on the tape.

First, though, I had to set up my mobile to ban its caller ID on the next outgoing call. I pressed Menu as I opened the door to the first-floor hall. I walked towards the stairs to the ground floor. Phone Book. OK. I got to the top of the stairs.

Oh, Jesus, I hadn’t locked the fucking study. I turned back from the stairs. No, wait a minute; the study’s Yale had locked itself; I didn’t need to actively lock the damn thing. I got to the top of the stairs again. Call Related Features. OK.

Oh, fuck, I had to put the key back in Ceel’s bathroom; I was going the wrong way. I turned round to head for the stairs leading up. Show Battery Meter. No; next. Restrict My Phone Number. OK. I walked upstairs.

This was stupid; I was trying to do two things at once when I was barely capable of doing one with any degree of competence. Restrict ID On Next Call.

At last! OK.

Crossing Ceel’s bedroom, I clicked back until I could make a call then rang the number here. I still jumped when the land-line extension in the bedroom rang. The study key went back in the box of tampons and I listened to Ceel’s voice inviting me to leave a message after the tone. There were no beeps in between, just the tone, immediately. I held the mobile clumsily in my gloved left hand and rubbed it with my thumb while I closed the cabinet and wiped it with the paper hanky again.

I was closing Ceel’s bedroom door and still enthusiastically rubbing the phone’s mike with the glove fabric (and thinking, Hey, this must sound a bit like when I got that unmeant call from Jo’s mobile) when, distantly, down the stairwell, two storeys below, I heard the sound of the front door opening.

I froze. No. Not happen. Not to happen. No happening of such like thing. Just fucking, like, no.

Maybe I’d mistaken the sound. It went quiet. Was that a very quiet clicking I could hear from down there? Then a tiny beeping noise. Of course; the alarm that should have been on when somebody came into the house, the alarm they’d be expecting to be on but then discovered was not. Oh fuck.

‘Celia?’ said a voice. My bowels suddenly felt like they were up to their old tricks again, like there was unfinished business needing attention in there. Oh my God, it was him, back even earlier than we’d been expecting. Oh fucking hell, now what was I supposed to do? I looked down at the mobile phone in my gloved hand. My thumb was over the microphone. Shit, it wouldn’t be picking all this up, would it? Re-transmitting it back to the answering machine in the study?

‘Celia?’ again. Louder. ‘Maria?’

I took a couple of steps back, to Celia’s bedroom door. I’d take sanctuary there. It was right. The natural place, the slim straw it was proper to clutch at, that of my love’s inner sanctum… well, that was a load of bollocks. Assuming that was him, and he was looking for her, where would be the first place he’d try? Well, yes, Kenneth.

I stepped further back, to another door. I could hear footsteps down below. The door led to a shallow cupboard. Not enough room to hide in. That was it. There was his room, hers, and to access any others I’d have to walk past the stairwell and be visible from below for a certain amount of time. The footsteps were hard to make out. Was that somebody walking up the stairs to the floor below, the first floor? Or somebody walking along the hall on the ground floor?

I was quaking. I gripped the mobile so hard I was in danger of breaking it. My jaw was grinding like I’d taken twenty E an hour earlier. It felt like I was right slap bang on the verge of a heart attack. Sweat was trickling from my brows; I could taste it on my upper lip. Jesus Christ; I’d been on the piss from mid-afternoon yesterday, slept in my clothes, got up without changing or washing, suffered at least one full-on panic attack per hour since I woke up and now I was sweating like a paedophile in Mothercare; even if I found the perfect hiding place the fucker was going to smell me.

I walked as fast as possible past the stairwell towards the rooms at the front of the house. I did that walk where you step quickly but put each foot down very gently, trying not to cause any creaks or other noises. I stared wide-eyed down the stairwell. No obvious signs of anybody coming up to this floor or the one below. ‘Maria?’ More distantly this time. He must be through in the kitchen or thereabouts.

Three doors ahead. One to the side. That one led to another, narrower staircase heading steeply for what would have been the servants’ or the children’s rooms when the house was designed. I closed it. So far no comedy door-creaking noises from the well-maintained hinges. Thank fuck. Central door. Another cupboard. Not as shallow as the one along the landing, but nowhere to hide if he did look in.

Right-hand door. Jesus; was this his bedroom? Big enough. Grand enough. Masculine-looking enough (I thought). I’d vaguely assumed they both had their bedrooms at the rear because it would be quieter, but maybe the one opposite hers was somebody else’s – the bodyguard, the big blond guy? – and this was Merrial’s. It looked lived-in, somehow. I closed it. Maybe a little too quickly; there was a distinct click.

The third door revealed a gym. A very well-equipped gym with a polished blond-wood floor and lots of machines, some of which I recognised, a couple I didn’t. Two more tall windows and translucent vertical blinds.

There were footsteps coming up the stairs. I was starting to hyperventilate. What did it feel like when you had a heart attack? Heart thrashing? Pains in chest? Headache? Sore arms? That would be (E) All of the above, then.

I slipped into the gym. Heck, the smell of stale sweat might even be less conspicuous in here. I still needed somewhere to hide. Two more doors; the first led to another en suite. The second belonged to a large, deep cupboard.

Oh shit; I could hear somebody on this floor now, out on the landing. The cupboard held old bits of fitness equipment plus various items of sports gear, including some scuba apparatus. This would have to do. I closed the door and made my way through the darkness as rapidly as I could, banging one shin and barking a hand on something hard and metallic. When I hit the rear wall I got into a corner and squatted down. The place smelled musty. I decided that was good.

A door opened. Was it the door to the gym?

Oh fuck. What the hell had I been thinking? If Merrial had just come back from caving, what was he likely to do? Put the gear away. Where was he likely to put it? Where would he come straight to? Right here. This cupboard, this door. Right here where mister fuckwit was hiding, squatting like a frightened schoolboy at the back of a hidey-hole.

Well done, Kenneth. Top fucking marks, son. Take a good feel of your knees while they still fold the same way as everybody else’s.

Steps; a tread coming closer, shoes on polished wood. Oh, fucking hell. I wanted to cry. I was going to cry. I put my head down, bowing to the darkness. Hide your face, don’t let the whites of the eyes show. Maybe the footsteps weren’t coming this way. You couldn’t always tell in unfamiliar houses. Maybe he was walking upstairs. Maybe – the door to the cupboard opened. Light sensed through the eyelids. I stopped breathing.

How long? What would happen? Would he smell me? Would he see me? How long? How long before I knew? Would he say something? Would he just look, squint, then shout, or take out a gun? Or go for a gun from his gun safe in the study? Or call the big blond guy? Light! There had to be a light fixture in a cupboard this size! I hadn’t thought to look or feel for one, but there must be a switch. He’d turn on the light and see me hunched here. Fucking imbecile!

No light clicked on. Maybe he could see me without it. Anyway the smell was sure to do it. Animals could smell fear and we’re all just animals, especially in situations like this. The oldest, basest, most deeply wired sense was going to betray me, and the more I panicked about it the more fear pheromones I’d be giving out and so the more likely it was to happen. Oh fuck, I was going to lose control of my bowels again. Something clattered, making the floor under my backside thump. I came very close to both jumping and yelping.

Then the door closed and the light went.

Steps sounded going away again.

I breathed again. Of course, Merrial might still have seen me but thought the best thing to do was to pretend he hadn’t, so he could go and get a gun, or call the cops, or the blond guy.

‘Yes, Celia?’ I heard him say. ‘I’m home… Yes, there was too much rain. But listen. The alarm wasn’t on when I got in.’ I heard a rhythmic metallic tapping noise as he spoke. Then, as I looked at the thin frame of light around the closed door, one edge of that glowing boundary started slowly to widen and enlarge. The fucking door was opening! ‘The house alarm. It wasn’t switched on.’ The door opened silently and very slowly. Bits of gleaming fitness equipment came gradually into view. Then Merrial himself was revealed, standing by one of the polished chrome machines, looking out through the opened blinds of one tall window. He was dressed in jeans and a dark leather bomber jacket. ‘Of course I’m sure,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask stupid questions.’ He was resting one hand on the fitness machine, tapping one of the wire-hung weights against the chrome metal support; that was the tapping noise I’d heard. He hadn’t noticed the cupboard door still slowly opening. ‘I don’t even have Kaj here with me. I-’ Now he must have noticed the door from the corner of his eye; he started and his head shot round as he jumped and made a small involuntary noise. ‘Fucking door,’ he said quietly. He was staring, it seemed, straight at me.

Oh fuck. If I shifted now he’d see the movement but if he kept looking at me he’d surely see my pasty white face in the darkness. I kept still but closed my eyes. Then opened them a touch because I could hear him walking towards me across the wooden floor of the gym.

‘No, just the door to the cupboard in the gym. Swung open there. Gave me a… moment,’ he said, putting one hand to the edge of the door and closing it. The light faded again. I took another breath. ‘So were you last out, or what?’ he said, voice muffled again by the closed door. ‘Well, somebody forgot to set the fucking alarm, Celia.’

Oh, just fucking leave her alone, you fuck. It wasn’t her. She’s Ceel; she would never make a mistake like that. She’s the calm, infallible one. Her only fault is a certain weakness for villains and idiots.

Maybe if I rushed the bastard and smacked him over the head with something heavy. Kill the fucker; murder the man. He was a fucking people-smuggling, life-ruining, knee-snapping crime lord, for fuck’s sake; I’d be doing society a favour. Then Ceel and I could run away together.

Or, better still, say, just hide here in the darkness and hope.

‘Well, I’m calling Kaj, get him to have a look at the alarm… Well, he helped install it. I’m going to take a look round, make sure there’s nobody in here… It’s not being paranoid, Celia. I’m not taking a shower thinking there could be some smack-head on the loose in here looking for your jewels or something. These types are unbalanced, capable of anything… Yes, that sort of remark is amusing around the dinner table, Celia. Standing here right now thinking there could be some junkie hiding behind a door with a knife, irony is the last thing on my mind… I’m not suggesting a junkie could defeat the alarm, I’m suggesting that somebody forgot to turn the alarm on and that therefore there could possibly be somebody in the house who got in without the alarm going off as it would have otherwise… I’m not discussing this with you. You seem in a very strange mood… No, I don’t want to know how your weekend is going… Do what you want.’ There was a soft snapping noise, like a phone being closed, perhaps. Then steps, a pause, more steps, a door opening off the room, then closing, then another door, and then silence.

My hand was getting sore. I was still gripping my mobile; it was still, I guessed, connected to the answering machine in the study on the floor below. I closed the phone then opened it again so that the back light would come on. Duration of call: 6:51, 6:52, 6:53… End Call?

That had to cover the message I’d left last night. It must have been recorded over by now. I clicked OK to end the call. The phone vibrated almost immediately, making me panic again. I dropped the phone, grabbed at it while it was still in mid-air and succeeded only in batting it across the dark cupboard, off a wall with a loud thud and against some unidentified piece of metallic equipment with a resounding clang. Then it fell to the floor with another thump.

Fuck! Would he have heard that? And where was the phone? Lying on the floor somewhere. If I was lucky the fucker would have been smashed by the series of impacts, but if I wasn’t then it was about to exhaust the three or four vibrations it went through in the mode I had it in and start ringing normally. I had to get to it before it did. Merrial was probably standing stopped in the hall outside, listening intently and thinking, Did I hear a couple of thuds with a clang in-between there? If he heard the piercing warble of an unfamiliar mobile phone coming from the room he’d just left, he’d be right back in here. Or more likely he’d dash down to his study, grab a gun and then come storming back.

I levered myself forward, feeling along the unseen floor for the little phone. Why did they have to make the damn things so fucking small nowadays? Old mobiles were the size of a brick; I’d have found the thing by now instead of whimpering as my hands fanned out across the wooden floor, banging into bits of gear and failing totally to find the phone, which I couldn’t even hear now. The ringing would start any second. Not that that would matter, because thanks to my panic and subsequent whacking of the phone about the place like it was a fucking squash ball, Merrial had almost certainly realised there was somebody hiding in his gym store and probably already had his shotgun or whatever and was walking calmly upstairs, chambers full and hammers cocked.

Green glow to one side, quietly flicking off. The phone’s screen. I found it, bashing my forehead off something metal as I did so. I closed then opened the phone again. The display looked normal; nothing wrong with the little fucker. So how come it hadn’t gone from vibration to ring? Then I saw the little envelope symbol. Of course; it had registered an incoming text message and so had vibrated once only. I needn’t have panicked; I certainly needn’t have started bouncing it off the walls like a bluebottle in a fucking jam jar.

Still no sounds from outside. Maybe I’d got away with it. I squatted there in the darkness and accessed the message: OK 2 CALL? C.

I looked to the door of the cupboard. There was an old-fashioned keyhole there, halfway up one edge. I swivelled over to it to put my eye to the bright slit. My forehead banged off the door handle. I sat back, blinking through the tears. A door-knob just above a keyhole; who’d have thought that? Fucking, fucking idiot. It had hurt so much I hadn’t really registered how loud the sound had been. Jesus H. For all the stealthiness I was showing here I might just as well march out singing a medley of Slipknot numbers and slide down the fucking banister rail yodelling.

I looked carefully through the keyhole. Most of the gym was visible, including the door to the hall outside. The door was closed. Nobody in the room. I wedged myself against the wall and dialled Celia’s mobile number.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m in the cupboard in the gym,’ I whispered. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Yes. I just had a call from John.’

‘I know. I heard. Who’s this Kaj?’

‘John’s bodyguard. Swedish. You’ve met him, at Somerset House.’

The big blond guy. ‘Oh, fuck.’

‘Have you cleared the tape on the answering machine?’

‘Thoroughly.’

‘Get out. Quick as you can.’

‘That was my intention.’

‘He said he’d have a look round, and call Kaj to get him over. Also, he might have a shower. If he does shower you should hear it; it’s a power shower and the pump is in a cupboard off the second-floor hall; it makes a fair amount of noise, on that floor at least.’

‘Where will this Kaj person be coming from?’

‘I don’t know. I’m surprised he wasn’t with him. Unless they were together and he gave him the rest of the day off. Wait; Kaj has a girlfriend who lives… somewhere off Regent’s Park. He may be there. John could have dropped him on the way down from Yorkshire. He didn’t say anything about seeing your Land Rover in the mews so he’s probably parked out the front. But you must get out as soon as possible.’

‘I know!’ I hissed, glancing through the keyhole again. Regent’s Park to Belgravia. How long would that take by car? Potentially several hours if you made the journey during a rainy weekday rush hour while there was a tube strike, but this was a sunny Saturday lunchtime. Ten minutes? No; maybe on a Sunday. Twenty minutes? Longer? Always assuming that was where this Kaj guy was in the first place. Maybe the fucker was only five minutes’ walk away, shoulders taking up half the pavement as he searched the King’s Road for a trendy Outsize shop. ‘I’ll give it a couple of minutes more,’ I told Ceel. ‘If he’s searching the place he probably reckons he needn’t look in here because he’s already taken care of it.’

‘Why don’t I phone him again?’ Celia suggested. ‘I can try to find out what he’s going to do and how far away Kaj might be. I might even try to convince him he should go out until Kaj gets there, visit some friends or go to a café.’

I thought. ‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘Call me back.’

‘All right. Be ready to move.’

‘Oh, I am,’ I said. Ceel rang off. I was about to close the phone when the display faded of its own accord. Oh. No. I closed the phone and opened it, but the phone had turned itself off. I tried turning it back on again and it got as far as vibrating once and beginning its start-up procedure, showing zero bars out of three of available battery power before confirming this by going dark again. Out of power. I supposed I’d been lucky to get what I had out of it after such a short charge-up time on the Temple Belle this morning.

I sat there, breathing almost normally, with the little phone a dead lump in my hand, then I holstered it and sighed. So I was on my own now. Poor Ceel; she would worry, not being able to contact me. She’d guess the phone was out of juice, I hoped. The keyhole again. Still nothing happening in the gym. I supposed I ought to put on my other glove.

Ah; the other glove. Now then, where would that be?

I shook my head at the darkness. Swivelling and sliding back to where I’d been squatting earlier, in the rear corner of the store, I banged another shin on something very hard. At this rate it wouldn’t need Kaj to jump up and down on my knees to wreck my fucking legs. I felt around on the floor. I felt the glove. And some relief. One more tiny hurdle accidentally set up but then cleared. Oh, Christ, I was getting very tired. I was going to spend the rest of my life in this fucking posh house, just trying to get the hell out of it.

Maybe I could just lie here and go to sleep and nobody would ever find me. I could squat here; stow away. Live secretly here in the house like a sort of soft hermit. Celia would discover me and bring me something to eat each evening, like a child sent to their room by a strict father brought food by a forgiving mother or younger sister.

My knees were getting sore from all this squatting. Sore knees. Think about that. Think of that pain, hold that image; Kaj’s big face and short blond hair as he smiles at you and goes boingy-boingy on your fucking leg bones, man.

A surprisingly large part of my brain really did seem to want to do nothing. A significant and very vocal minority of my brain cells seemed to think that just resting here in the darkness was actually quite a good idea. It had proved all right so far; I hadn’t been discovered, it was quiet and unthreatening; maybe if I stayed here everything would somehow be okay. I knew this was nonsense, obviously, but that was the temptation. Stay put. Leaving my dark, musty-smelling sanctuary meant going out into the light, braving the landings and stairs and floors and halls and doors of a house whose owner was present and suspicious and potentially – and very possibly by now – armed. And who was anyway a crime boss. And who had just ordered his personal Dolph Lundgren-on-steroids bodyguard here to investigate what was going on. Oh yes, staying here in the darkness and hiding quietly seemed like a seductively good idea. Or maybe I could go back to Ceel’s bedroom and hide there, and our intense sexual karma would spookily protect me even from a determined and thorough search, until she got back and could smuggle me out when the coast was clear…

No. Out. Get the fuck out. Now. Get back to the door. Look through the keyhole. Confirm nothing happening and nobody there. Take hold of the door handle. Twist handle and slowly open door. Rise. Feel knees complain, as though they’re anticipating what might happen to them later if this all goes horribly wrong. Take deep breath. Close door again. Walk quietly to door of gym. No keyhole so can’t look out to hall.

Stop and listen. Can you hear a power shower pump operating? No. So, what to do? Go back to the cupboard and wait there? Keep an ear to the keyhole so you could hear when the pump did start up? But then what if the pump couldn’t be heard from inside the cupboard? Wait here, at the door leading to the hall? But then what if Merrial took another look inside the gym before taking his shower? He’d already been in here, but he might want to check again.

A house this size was probably well in excess of some mathematically provable topographical limit that defined when a space became too big for one person ever to search perfectly. You could confirm that there was nobody on a certain floor, but then while you were in the depths of one of these large rooms, checking in an en suite loo or whatever, the person doing the hiding could slip out of a not-yet-searched room and creep up to one of the already-searched rooms without the searcher being able to spot them. So checking a room twice would make some sort of sense.

Oh fuck, I didn’t fucking know. I looked behind me. Opened blinds. The window Merrial had been standing at while he’d been talking to Ceel on his mobile. I could see the house on the far side of the square, visible through the leafless trees of winter. Probably too far away for it to be a problem. I wondered if there was any way to get out of the window and down to the ground without causing a fuss. Or making it to the upper storey, to the loft and then out onto the roof and then finding a way down. If I still had a working phone I could call 999 and ask for the fire brigade because there was a major fire in the place, and hope to get away in the confusion. No; all of these just led to more complications and more opportunities for things to go appallingly wrong.

Footsteps outside in the hall, coming closer. Oh shit. Did I have time to get back to the cupboard? Probably not, and certainly not quietly. I shrank back behind the door. If Merrial did open the door, and he was daft enough not to look behind it as soon as he’d opened it, then I might still escape.

The footsteps went past. A door closed. Closed and locked, I thought. I waited for the sound of a shower. I looked around the gym. If there was a phone extension in here, did I dare phone Ceel in case there was something vital she now knew that I needed to? But then what if Merrial was already on the land-line? Bit of a giveaway, hearing that old other-extension click.

I waited. But how long did I have? Where was Kaj coming from? King’s Road? Regent’s Park? Somewhere else? And how fucking long did it take Merrial to get ready for a fucking shower, for fuck’s sake? Come on, man; stop fucking about and get your fucking clothes off and jump into the fucking thing. Twist that dial and lather up.

Maybe Ceel had been exaggerating about how loud the pump was. Maybe she had more acute hearing than I did. Maybe some eccentricity of the way sound was transmitted through the house meant that right here where I was standing in the gym was the one place you couldn’t hear the goddamn pump. I tried to listen really carefully. Was that the sound of a pump? Jesus, if my phone still had power I could phone Ceel and hold the phone up and ask her, Is that the sound of the pump, that barely audible hum way in the distance? Or is that the central heating, or the fucking drinks fridge in the study or something? Maybe Merrial was using a mains-pressure shower over his bath instead for some reason I could only guess at. Ha! Maybe he was showering as quietly as he could specifically because he didn’t want to let his supposed junkie with a knife know where he was, even if he had locked the bedroom and presumably the bathroom door.

When the pump did start up I jumped again; it sounded like it was just through the wall from where I was standing. I thought about that phrase about somebody being as nervous as a kitten and thought what a load of crap it really was; I’d never seen a kitten as nervous as I’d been over the last couple of hours.

Okay. Signal to go. I put my hand on the door handle. But what if Merrial had started the shower going as a ruse, and was – no, no, no, fuck it; just fucking well fucking go for fuck’s sake, you over-cautious fuck.

I went quickly but quietly out into the hall, gently closed the door and went along to the stairwell, treading on the sides of the steps as I descended to keep down any creaking noises. I did the same on the next set of stairs. I was right at the bottom stair, facing the front door and about to make the turn to head back along the long hall to the kitchen and the rear door, when I heard the sound of a key in the front door’s lock.

I didn’t freeze. I didn’t even start to think that, Hey, maybe I can brazen it out, dressed in my incredibly convincing overalls. There was no time to dash back upstairs or get to the kitchen. There was maybe just enough time to get to the door to the right of the main door. I lunged for it, leaping from the bottom stair, grabbing the handle and pulling the door open to fall into a cloakroom as I hauled the door closed behind me, managing to damp its closing just enough to stop it slamming an instant before I heard the front door open.

Oh no, I was going to sneeze. I was panting, close to wheezing, worried that I was going to make so much noise that whoever it was – Kaj, probably – would hear me anyway, but now I felt the tingle in my nose that meant I was going to sneeze. I shoved my tongue up into the top of my mouth and forced the edge of a finger up into the base of my septum, under my nose. The urge to sneeze faded. I tried to work my way back into the coats and jackets – the smell of waxed material always did make me want to sneeze for some reason – and hoped that Kaj didn’t need to put a coat in here. The front door closed.

‘Boss?’ a deep, male voice boomed. ‘John?’

Then silence. I crouched down, behind and underneath the thickest clump of coats. It was winter; not exactly freezing but not exactly warm either, so there was every chance Kaj would have a coat he wanted to deposit in here. Oh no, don’t. Oh no, please don’t. Please be a really hard Swedish guy who just totally scorns the very idea of coats and jackets until the temperature is a good ten below and the wind chill doubles that.

The door opened.

Oh God, this is it. This must be. I didn’t think I could be seen but my luck just had to run out sometime and I suspected it was long overdue for departure. All I could see, as I was buried under and behind the coats, were two very large Timberland boots and the broad shins of a pair of jeans. Could he see anything of me? There was a swishing noise, the sound of fabric on fabric, then the door closed.

I stayed where I was. Give the big blond bastard time to do a double-take; Yoost a meenoot, whose were those shoes that I saw yust there?

Then I heard heavy footsteps going rapidly upstairs.

My mouth had gone all dry once more. When I tried to stand up my legs collapsed under me and I had to sit down, breathing heavily. I levered myself up. I put my ear to the door. I was a metre from escape. I’d use the front door and the hell with getting out the way I came in. Thank fuck I’d replaced the key inside the stone earlier.

Silence. No keyhole here either. I risked cracking the door and looked out. Nobody about. The door opened and closed almost silently. Upstairs, I could still just hear the sound of the shower pump. A door closed up there, sounding faint. I turned to the wide front door. Please don’t let there be a returning maid or an investigating copper standing outside. The front door was heavy but it too swung open without a sound and I went out. The fresh, cool air of a bright winter’s afternoon hit my face as I skipped down the steps to the square, breathing deeply. It tasted like freedom.

Two left turns and I was in the mews. There was nobody at the Land Rover. I got in and reversed out. I whooped and hollered most of the way back to the Temple Belle. I parked on a double yellow by a phone box on Buckingham Palace Road to phone Ceel’s mobile. Message service. I licked my lips, trying to think what to say.

‘It’s all okay,’ I said.

I blew a kiss at a parking warden already starting to take the Landy’s details.

Then when I got back to Chelsea Creek I could hardly move once I reached the car park. It felt like the front wheels were ploughing through half-melted tarmac, and my legs almost buckled underneath me as I got out. I had to support myself with both hands as I went down the narrow gangway to the boat. I got the door closed, half fell down the steps and – for the second time in twelve hours, and, in the overalls, even more fully clothed – collapsed onto the bed like a dead weight. I was asleep before the second bounce.