Time to Die

15

Several hundred miles and an hour’s time difference away from London, Kathy flew into Flughafen Stuttgart, the city’s airport, home of Mercedes and Porsche. She had only hand luggage with her and there was no queue at passport control. She walked into the main concourse and looked around the clean, modern building with genuine pleasure. The Germanic lettering, the umlauts, the capital letters of the nouns, and the signature letter of the ‘esset’ that represented double ‘s’ in German script and looked like the Greek letter for Beta, greeted her like old friends.

Kathy loved Germany. It was a love affair that had started as an exchange student in grimy, flat-as-a-pancake Berlin, been nurtured in a six-month ERASMUS university stint in Hamburg, and had been topped up ever since. She even quite liked the food. She spoke excellent German and the signs around her and the conversations she heard were as easy to understand as if they’d been in English, but they were, to her eyes and ears, pleasingly exotic. She heard a man’s voice call her name; it was her Siemens contact Max Brucker.

‘Max, good to see you. Wie geht’s? What are you doing here?’ she asked.

Max smiled. Kathy was tall, about five ten, one metre seventy, but she only just reached Max’s shoulder. She was surprised by the rediscovery of just how big he was. ‘Bestens, Kathy, und wie geht’s du?’

He took her solitary piece of hand luggage. ‘I thought I’d come and meet you,’ he said in English. Now it was Kathy’s turn to smile. She had forgotten, or maybe hadn’t acknowledged to herself, just how attractive she found Max. She thought to herself, just for a few hours I’m going to behave normally. Just for a few hours I’m not going to brood on the past or worry about the future. Maybe I’ll even flirt with him. Peter’ll be fine round at Sam’s. I worry too much about that boy, it can’t be healthy. Max smiled back. He thought Kathy was very attractive.

Five streets away from where Peter lived, Annette Fielding took a migraine tablet out of its disproportionately sized piece of packaging, the same as a book of stamps, containing just the one blister-packed tiny tablet, and washed it down with some water. She didn’t like taking them. She thought she’d start building up an immunity to them and they were incredibly expensive, but she had no choice. Her head was killing her. The events of the next few hours certainly wouldn’t help.

Sam, her son, had three friends over for the sleepover that was happening later, making four twelve-year-old boys who had to be fed and entertained. Tonight, with the agonizing pain in her head, she was dreading the noise levels. Frederica, her daughter, was out with some girls from her school but had promised to be back at a reasonable time. Like that’s going to happen! she thought. Freddie was sixteen and always vague about time. Declan, her husband, was stuck in Newcastle because of some systems glitch at work and wouldn’t be home until about 2 a.m. Well, she’d cope, she always did, but by God, she thought, I feel awful. If only she could crawl into bed, close the door and spend the next couple of days there. But that wasn’t going to happen.

She made a cup of tea and looked despairingly round the small kitchen that still had a pile of washing up left from breakfast waiting patiently by the sink. The plates with their congealed food were stacked on top of each other; the cutlery sat there accusingly. The dirty tines of the forks pointed at her, why haven’t you cleaned us yet? She opened the dishwasher. That was full — at least it was full of clean plates rather than dirty ones, let’s be thankful for small mercies — and she started to unload it.

To put them on to a work surface she had to move a basket of laundry whites in a crumpled, sulky heap waiting to be ironed — school shirts and Declan’s shirts mainly (why was she the only one in the house who seemed able to iron, for Christ’s sake? Why couldn’t Declan do some, it’s not that hard, is it?), and another basket of coloured laundry waiting to be washed. The dog nudged her hopefully with its damp nose; he needed feeding. And they were running short of milk. There was a bowl of fruit going off on the kitchen table and a big stack of the children’s schoolbooks that needed sorting out. There were unopened letters on top of the fridge, some of them bills and credit card statements, and she had seven messages on her phone, she could see the red digits glowing at her. Even inanimate things were nagging her now, and the whiteboard in the kitchen for messages seemed to be covered in reminders of other things that needed doing.

Sometimes, and tonight was one of those nights, Annette felt completely overwhelmed by life, outraced by the tide of things that needed to be done.

The migraine headache was really kicking in now. Christ, I feel awful, she thought. Annette sat down on the tiled floor of the kitchen and buried her head in Dizzy, their retriever’s, fur for comfort. She felt nauseous and hoped the pill would take effect before she was actually sick. The dog smelt warm and comforting and licked her hand consolingly. Down at this level she could see that the kitchen floor needed cleaning and so did the skirting boards. Why did skirting boards have a groove in them that served no function but to get clogged with dirt? Whose bright idea was that? Why have I even got skirting boards in the sodding kitchen? She felt like crying. No, she thought, I feel like howling and then crying.

There was something she felt she hadn’t done, something important, but couldn’t bring it to mind. She was feeling too ill to concentrate on the thought. Then her stomach spasmed and she thought, ‘Oh God, here we go,’ and quickly made her way to the toilet. She ran the taps in the basin in case any of the boys overheard her, and was sick into the bowl as quietly as she could be, holding her hair up with one hand so it didn’t get dirty.

Jesus, now she really did feel terrible. All she wanted to do was curl up on the loo floor but that simply wasn’t an option. Dimly, she heard the phone start to ring in the kitchen.

‘Oh, go away!’ she groaned.

In Stuttgart, in her comfortable room at the five-star, quietly luxurious Althoff Hotel, Kathy let the phone ring five times and then hung up. She enjoyed staying in hotels. She liked the solitude and anonymity. Annette must be busy, she thought. She had promised Peter she wouldn’t phone him anyway — ‘It’s like you’re checking up on me, Mum.’ He’d be fine. She undressed and got into the shower. It was roomy, spacious and had a large, powerful jet, much better than the one at home. She turned the heat up to the maximum her body could bear, revelling in the sensation. A shower after a journey, she thought, what could be more fun than that. The bathroom gleamed and shone through the transparent shower screen. She felt intensely happy.

The only thing she didn’t like about business travel was eating alone. It was particularly unenjoyable in hotel dining rooms where many of her fellow diners tended to be single businessmen who would surreptitiously stare at her speculatively as she ate, a book or a Kindle propped up on a cruet set in front of her.

Tonight would be different, though. Max was taking her out to dinner and she was determined to enjoy herself.

Peter Reynolds had regained consciousness and was lying on his back, taking stock of his surroundings. He felt remarkably calm, considering. He was feeling very weak and he could feel the hypo coming. This meant his blood sugar was very low and he knew he was not far off fainting. Despite the panic and fear he was feeling at his abduction, he knew he had to get some sugars into his body before he collapsed. He felt in his pockets for his blood-testing kit to check how low he was, then remembered it was in his schoolbag. His blood sugar had to be below four, he thought, the danger level. Four’s the floor. He patted his pockets again, hoping to find a sweet, but it was no good. There was nothing there.

He had no way of knowing what time it was but he guessed, judging by the way he was feeling, it was probably late on Friday night. He breathed deeply and looked around him again.

It did not take long to complete an inventory. He was in a small, bare windowless room. The walls were smooth brick, painted a battleship grey. It was lit dimly by a recessed light covered with a grille. The metal door of the room was painted a dull green, with two square hatches, one at shoulder level, the other at floor level, and an eyehole. The room was about the size of his bedroom at home, he guessed. It wasn’t very big but the lack of furnishings made it seem larger than it was. A metal toilet was bolted to the wall, no seat, with some toilet paper next to it. There was a small washbasin, also metal, with a mixer tap, some soap and a plastic cup. In one corner of the room was a fixed shower head and mixer tap, with a drain below it set into the floor. He was lying by the far wall opposite the door on a thick, blue padded plastic mat, rather like they had at school in the gym, with a thin pillow that his head was resting on and a neatly folded blanket by his feet. In the ceiling corner above the door was a CCTV camera so he could be observed. That completed the inspection of the room, apart from one thing that made his misery more bearable. By the door was the dog in its cage.

Peter carefully got to his feet, rubbing his head, and opened the cage door. The dog flinched in fear. Its brown eyes were troubled and it trembled slightly. The boy put his arm slowly into the cage, allowing the dog to smell his hand to reassure it, and spoke soothingly to it. The animal let him stroke its head and when Peter withdrew his hand the dog crept nervously out of its cage and came to him. It lay down in front of Peter as he stroked its warm fur. It was still trembling. Peter could sympathize. The dog licked his hand and Peter kissed its head. As he did so, he heard footsteps that stopped outside his cell and felt he was being observed through the spyhole. He lifted his head.

‘I’m diabetic and I’m about to go into a coma unless you give me the emergency glucose that you’ll find in my schoolbag. And get me some orange juice.’ He spoke loudly at the blank, metal door. He paused, his head ached so. The coma was no idle threat. ‘I’ll need my blood-testing kit too. I’d hurry if I were you.’

The footsteps on the other side of the door started to move away, much more quickly than they’d arrived. A couple of minutes later he stood up as he heard the bottom hatch in his cell door being opened, and he moved forward to take the two cases that contained what he needed. Then the hands of the unseen person — a man’s hands, he noticed, so not the woman who had kidnapped him — passed him four individual cartons of orange juice. He noticed that the hands of the unseen man were furred with coarse, dark hair and heavily and intricately tattooed with Gothic lettering; the words weren’t English.

Quickly he sat down and tested his blood. He raised his eyebrows. God, he was low. He drank the juice and crunched three of the dextrose tablets between his teeth. He could almost feel the palpable relief in his body as his sugar levels rose. He felt a bit happier now. ‘At least I’m not dead,’ he whispered to the dog.

He sat back on his mat and the dog climbed into his arms, and Peter buried his nose in the animal’s fur for reassurance. Above him the light shone remorselessly and the camera watched over him like a malignant, vigilant eye.