One of Us Is Dead

77 Saturday 15 October 2022

The damned dog was barking. Paul Anthony looked at his watch for the hundredth time. Unusually for him, he’d lain awake for much of the night before finally drifting off well after 4 a.m. Now something had woken him and it wasn’t just Montmorency. It was a beep, an electronic alert, but not a text or WhatsApp or email alert. Shannon stirred too. ‘Gurrurr?’ she murmured.

The police could not be here, he thought. There was nothing at all in Arundel Terrace to link to this address here. And they’d travelled here in a Nissan Leaf that had not been out of the garage in over a year.

All the same, he was concerned. He slipped out of bed, calling to Montmorency to be quiet, and hurried, naked and anxious, through onto the carpeted floor of the room that served now as his and Shannon’s office as well as living room, and looked at the bank of CCTV monitors above his desk. They covered all 360 degrees around the entire complex of garages. He saw, to his relief, the reason the dog was barking. Monitor 3 showed an urban fox rummaging inside a bin it had managed to knock over. It was only Montmorency’s second night here and the dog hadn’t got used to all the different sounds and activities around this row of lock-up garages.

He turned on the lights then hurried over in the cold air, stroked him and calmed him. ‘Good boy, good boy! We’ll go walkies soon, OK?’ But he was still well aware it wasn’t just the barking that had woken him. It was something else. He looked at his phone and saw an app pulsing. And realized.

Montmorency whined at him.

‘OK, boy!’ He pulled a treat out of a drawer in the kitchen area and gave it to him. The dog took it in his soft mouth, then padded over to his beanbag and settled down to crunch it.

Paul Anthony tapped the app. Seconds later, he was looking at a video of the interior of the Arundel Terrace flat. One of the concealed motion-activated cameras, which covered each of the rooms, showed two men, one black and shaven-headed, one white with short fair hair, both wearing padded jackets with POLICE emblazoned across their chests. He stopped and played it from the start.

The time clock read 05.34. Three-quarters of an hour ago. There were a number of police officers breaking into his flat.

He smiled, he’d been expecting this. They wouldn’t find anything in the apartment. And they wouldn’t find the Kingsway Electrical van that was parked in a lock-up garage two streets away, rented in a completely different name. They wouldn’t find it for a good five years, when the lease ran out. And he would be long gone from England.

‘That’s our apartment!’ Shannon said. He’d been so absorbed he hadn’t noticed her coming over and now standing beside him, hair tousled, pink dressing gown pulled tightly around her. Shivering, he put an arm around her and felt the warmth of her body through the dressing gown. ‘Shit, is that today?’

‘You get it now? What I said about the need to keep on the move?’

She looked up at him. Her eyes looking wider than ever in her still sleepy face. ‘Shit. If—?’

‘If?’

‘If we’d been there, we’d be busted.’

‘Which is why when I say leave, we leave.’

She walked over to the coffee machine and switched it on. ‘Is it always going to be like this?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s only like this because of that twat Barnie Wallace. Which is why we can’t take a risk with Taylor. Capiche?’

She pulled two ristretto capsules from the dispenser then eyed him warily, without saying anything.

‘Capiche?’ he said again. ‘Unless you want to take the risk of spending a very long time in prison, which I do not.’

‘I’ve not actually committed any provable offence, Paul,’ she said.

‘Other than accessory to murder and conspiracy to murder?’ he said and cocked his head with a smile.

She placed a small cup beneath the spout, pushed a capsule into the machine and hit one of the two illuminated buttons. It began rumbling. Seconds later, the tantalizing aroma of coffee spread through the room. ‘Don’t play games with me,’ she said icily. ‘And don’t threaten me.’

‘No one’s playing games and no one’s threatening you. You just need to get real.’

‘I have a very long spoon,’ she said darkly, pushing in the second capsule.

‘Long spoon? Meaning?’

‘You must have heard that expression, being who you are?’

He frowned, shaking his head with a bemused smile.

‘He who sups with the Devil should have a long spoon.’

‘The Devil? I’m taking that as a compliment.’

‘Coffee?’

He nodded.

‘So where do we go from here?’ she asked.

‘Marbella’s very nice this time of year. Spanish winter sunshine. I’ve a gorgeous villa with a heated pool, in a gated complex, and a whole new identity there, where no one’s got a cat-in-hell’s chance of finding us.’

‘Except we just have to get there.’

‘That’s all taken care of. But first you need to earn your keep. Taylor flies for a gazillionaire, Sir Tommy Towne, who lives in Jersey, and he keeps one of Towne’s planes, a Pilatus, at Brighton City airport in Shoreham. The larger plane, a Citation jet, is parked at Southampton airport. I need you to find out which plane he’s flying next and when.’

She handed him his espresso. ‘Sure, shall I phone him and say, “Hey, Mr Taylor, my boss wants to know when you are next flying so he can put a bomb in your plane?”’

‘Haha.’ He put the cup down and wiggled his hands in the air. ‘I think we need a little more subtlety. I know where he lives, because two years ago my dearly beloved non-wife, Fiona, mailed him a ton of stuff about me so he could write my eulogy and he recently sent her a change of address card. Sweet. It’s an apartment block in Worthing, just ten miles from here. I can give you the apartment number. I’m sure with all your grasp of espionage technology you can suck all the information out of his phone. We just need his calendar. Or does that offend your morals?’

‘Are you going to kill him?’

‘I’m just going to have a cosy chat with him.’

‘You expect me to believe you?’

He pointed at the door. ‘I’m not forcing you to stay, you’re free. If you don’t like this — us — you can just walk out the door.’

She walked up to him and kissed him on the lips, hard. ‘Consider it done.’

‘He was in Barbados two days ago, so we may need to be patient.’

‘Didn’t Tolstoy say the two most powerful warriors are patience and time?’

He put his arms around her and pulled her towards him. ‘I never give you enough credit for your intellect.’

She looked up at him again with those big wide eyes. ‘Mediocrity recognizes nothing higher than itself. It takes talent to appreciate genius. You clearly have talent.’

He laughed and hugged her tighter than ever.

But then, as he looked into her eyes again, he saw something. Something he could not put his finger on, something that unsettled him.

Deeply.

Can I trust you or should I kill you too?