Loose Ends Read online

  She ran on, turned a corner and then another – and was abruptly transposed into a different world: an affluent suburbia, big detached houses with mature hedges shielding them from the road. She reached a house with a gateless bush-lined gravel drive and, before she could think about it, had raced inside and pushed into the concealing evergreens of a shrubbery. There was a gate at the side of the house, leading into the back garden; the entrance to the house was fronted by a slate-roofed porch with benches on either side. Panting, she crouched like a hunted animal on the frozen soil, and paused, her breath ragged, sending plumes of smoke into the freezing winter night. There were no lights on in any of the windows, but that didn’t mean the house was empty. The owners might be sitting in a room at the back, or were already in bed, cosy under their feather-filled duvet with empty cocoa mugs on the night-stands and a book lying face down on spread pages.

  Could she risk leaving her hiding place and hammering at the door? If no-one came, she would be a sitting duck. She heard a car engine further up the road, brakes being applied, the soft pad of an idling engine. Then, though she strained to listen, nothing else. Nothing except a dog yapping somewhere inside a nearby house, water gurgling down a drainpipe, a distant train rattling across a bridge.

  Nothing . . . and then light footsteps, rustles, a voice whispering, ‘Katie, Kay-tee, where are you?’ Teasing, sinister, like a Stephen King movie.

  Despite the chill air, sweat broke out under her arms. God, they must be no more than a few feet away from her. She breathed into her cupped hands, hoping to hide the give-away signs of her presence, and heard it again: ‘Kay-tee, we’re coming for you, you can’t get awa-a-ay.’

  A tell-tale waft of aftershave and cigarette smoke, the soft slur of trainers on pavement. Surely they could hear her heart banging inside her chest. Were they passing by? Had they gone? How long must she wait before she dared emerge? Her bruised shoulder ached; her fingers were numb with cold. And then she heard the slam of doors, the idling engine starting up, moving slowly down the road and past the house. She was safe.

  Cautiously she pushed her way between the damp foliage of whichever shrub had sheltered her – euonymus, was it? – her ears feeling as sensitive as a bat’s. No engine creeping back down the road, no light footsteps, no more of the hateful whispering. She reached the edge of the drive and dropping to her knees, peered carefully round the edge of the low wall to check that the road was empty.

  Suddenly, he was in front of her, lashing out with his foot, catching her in the chest so that she overbalanced and went sprawling on the gravel. She opened her mouth to scream but he grabbed her hair with one hand and pulled her up against him while with the other he shoved something – a scarf, a rolled-up tie – viciously into her mouth. She twisted her head and saw the second man, now recognizable in the street lights as Mick, Stefan Michaels’ sidekick, racing towards her from the other direction, his trainers making no sound at all on the pavement. She couldn’t see how they had managed to come upon her so quickly, without her realizing how close they were. She tried to spit out the gag but she was held so tightly, her head pressed so hard against Stefan’s chest that she couldn’t get her mouth free.

  ‘I’ll hang on to the bitch,’ he said. ‘You bring the van.’

  Desperately, Kate struggled, making mewling sounds in her throat. This couldn’t be happening, it just couldn’t. Fight or flight, Dad used to say, so since she couldn’t fly, she fought, kicking out at him, trying to bring her knee up to his groin. But he was far stronger than she was, and had her in such a tight grip that she could barely move.

  ‘No hope at all, Kate,’ he said in her ear. ‘Why did you think you could get away from us?’ They must have been watching her, maybe for weeks, learning her routines. They must have discovered where she worked, followed when she and Janine went out, made their way back to her house and simply waited until she showed up. If she could only get her head free, she could head-butt him or something. ‘And nobody’s going to come and save you. I told you that you were mine – and you are.’

  The van reappeared. Mick stopped at the kerb, jumped out to open the rear doors, helped Stefan to shove Kate into the back of the van again, then climbed once more into the driver’s seat and pulled away, moving slowly along the road while Stefan repeated his actions of last time, tape over her mouth, tape round her wrists, rope at her ankles. Before he was able to subdue her, she raked her fingers down his face, kicked out at him as hard as she could and felt the satisfaction of connecting with his ribs.

  He cried out, clutching at his side with one hand. ‘You fucking bitch!’ he said. ‘You’ll pay for that.’ He slapped her hard across the side of the head; his vulgar gold ring caught the top of her ear and, she was fairly sure, split it. Blood poured down the side of her face and she lay back on the mattress feeling faint and queasy.

  Suddenly there was a stinging sensation in her arm, just above the elbow. She jerked her head up and saw Stefan withdrawing a syringe. Oh God, he wasn’t trying to turn her into a drug addict, was he? Apart from the odd joint, she’d never tried drugs and never wanted to; she’d seen their effect at far too close hand with the disintegration and eventual death of a friend from uni, found some weeks dead in a former crack-house, her face bitten raw by rats, her clothes soiled by bodily fluids of various kinds. With tape over her mouth, it was impossible for Kate to scream, to beg, to offer anything they wanted, but the thought of being forcibly initiated into a drug habit (Heroin? Crack? Oh God . . .) made her insides dissolve with terror. She was helpless. Her limbs relaxed, her body grew drowsy and unconcerned, the place between her legs melted into mellowness as though she’d just had good sex – which for a moment she wondered about . . . Please God, no, surely not, not with Stefan Michaels, and besides, he’d only just stuck the needle in her arm, and until then she had been perfectly compos mentis, at school her English teacher, long-skirted, whiskery, halitotic Mrs Gardiner, had always insisted that if they used foreign phrases in their essays, they must be italicized, a habit she’d never dropped, partly because of an atavistic fear that if she didn’t, Mrs Gardiner would appear once again behind her shoulder and release a toxic cloud of bad breath. For a moment, or perhaps for hours, images drifted across her mind like clouds on a summer’s day: Magnus, Lisa, Janine, a blue silk cushion on a white rug, Mrs Gardiner, flowers of apricot and peach spilling from a green glass vase, the cold unblinking gaze of an iguana, scarlet birds with . . . and then there was nothing.

  Janine

  Eleven

  Her face concealed behind a visor of green gunge, Janine lay back on her bed, wrapped in a thick towel, her pillows covered in another, with slices of lemon laid over her eyes. She had a plastic bowl of warm water laced with Fairy Liquid balanced on her chest with her fingers soaking in it, prior to a home manicure, since she hadn’t had time over the past week to go to Nails ‘R’ Us.

  The phone rang.

  She dried her hand on the towel behind her head and groped for the phone. ‘Hello? Janine here.’ She spoke without moving her lips as far as possible, not wanting to crack the face mask, which still had eleven minutes to go for maximum effect.

  ‘What is the matter? Your voice sounds very strange.’

  ‘Oh, hi,’ she said carefully.

  ‘I’m in town for a couple of days.’

  ‘Oh.’ Removing the bowl of water so that she could sit up, she forgot about facial cracks. ‘That’s wonderful!’

  ‘Dinner this evening, eight o’clock? I’m at the Grand Central, as usual.’

  ‘I’ll be there. Are we eating out, or in the room?’

  ‘Which would you prefer?’

  She wasn’t sure. Eating out was always exciting, being his partner in public, however briefly, staring at each other over the rims of their glasses like an ordinary couple, exchanging looks, the excitement building. Eating in the room was more intimate, the touching and interconnecting more immediately sexy, the promise of bed easier to fulfil. ‘I . . . d
on’t mind.’

  There was a pause which she interpreted, from long practice, as less than impressed. He didn’t like her to be undecided: it was her certainty about things – where she was going, what she wanted out of life – which had attracted him in the first place. She added quickly, ‘Out, I think.’

  ‘Out is good. But so is in.’

  ‘Out.’ She said it firmly. ‘I like playing footsie under the table.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Are we going to sit side by side, or across from each other?’

  ‘Which do you prefer?’

  ‘Side by side. I like you to put your hand under my skirt, inside my knickers, and no-one can see.’

  He chuckled. ‘I bet the waiters know exactly what we’re up to. And what we’ll be up to when we get back to the hotel.’

  If he had walked into her flat right then, she’d have pulled her clothes off before he’d even closed the front door behind him – having wiped off the green gunge first, of course. ‘Can’t wait.’

  She got up, ran a bath, and poured in a lavish amount of the expensive bath stuff he’d given her not long ago. She had half an hour, plenty of time to get ready.

  ‘Cara . . .’ He rolled away from her across the wide hotel bed and lay on his side, looking at her.

  ‘Yes?’ She’d been anticipating this moment, knowing that sooner or later he would tell her that, for whatever reason, it was over, they wouldn’t be seeing each other again. She raised herself on to an elbow and drew the sheet over herself. If a man was about to eject you from his life because he was no longer sexually interested, it was more dignified to be covered than exposed.

  He pulled the sheet down a little to expose her breasts, and ran a finger over her stomach. ‘I wish you to do something for me.’

  Disappointment spread thinly across her mind as she understood that (this time) he was not giving her the push; she really wouldn’t mind too much if he did, he was a good companion and they’d had fun together but there was no future with him and recently the future was beginning to seem shorter than it used to. ‘What would that be?’

  ‘You are a good business woman. You have done so well with the travel agency, you are a trained accountant, yes?’

  ‘Not an accountant,’ she corrected. ‘A bookkeeper.’

  ‘But you know how to read accounts, add up the columns, check out the figures?’

  ‘I can do all that.’ She seized his hand and pressed it against her breast. ‘And more.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Gently he pulled away his hand. ‘But I wish to be serious. I want you to go through my books, and report back to me. See if you find anything . . . strange.’

  ‘Strange? What do you mean?’

  ‘Someone is cheating me, cheating the organization, my employers, skimming money off the top, and I would like to find out who it might be. And I can trust you to be discreet – for many reasons, I don’t want to go through my usual accountants.’

  The main reason being that his company or companies was or were engaged in some kind of illegal activity, she guessed. ‘I’d be glad to,’ she said warmly.

  ‘It may be that my suspicions are wrong.’ He swung his legs over the side of the bed and walked naked (good tight buttocks) across the room to where his leather briefcase sat on a table. ‘I would be very happy to know this.’

  ‘And if you’re right?’

  ‘If I am right . . .’ For a moment his handsome features went rigid, his mouth tightened, the warmth in his eyes vanished. Oops! she thought. Whoever it is – if somebody is cheating him – I would definitely not like to be that person. ‘If I’m right, it will be very much the worse for him.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you know you can trust me.’

  ‘I know that, Janine.’ His warm gaze rested on her body and he smiled in a way that made her feel more than a little shivery inside. She had no illusions about him. If she was granted access to his private accounts, could she be certain of her own subsequent safety? Easy enough for him to arrange the sudden shove under a bus, the fall from a bridge, the drop overboard from a boat. If he was serious about her checking his accounts, she would have to have some kind of insurance, a letter to her lawyer, with photocopies of his accounts, perhaps. But he might seek her out, torture her until he’d extracted the lawyer’s name, worse still, might eliminate (wasn’t that the word they used in crime movies?) the innocent lawyer. Suddenly, she wondered what she had got herself into with this relationship, and more importantly, how she was going to get herself out.

  ‘I can’t say for certain that I’d be able to pinpoint exactly what’s going wrong, or who’s responsible, but I’ll certainly do my best,’ she said. ‘How long have I got?’

  ‘As long as you need, cara. But sooner is better than later.’ Once again he smiled. ‘I will make it well worth your while. I can promise you a really good . . . reward, if you come up with the goods.’

  ‘I don’t need a reward,’ she said. ‘You’ve already done more than enough for me.’

  ‘So now you will be doing something for me.’

  ‘Just one thing – are you sure that someone is cheating you?’

  ‘Absolutely one hundred per cent certain. I even have a suspicion of who it is; maybe you can confirm the name for me.’ He pulled on his clothes then watched appreciatively as she put on her own. ‘Now, let us go downstairs and eat a little supper, maybe dance a little, then come back and . . .’ He ran his hand up and down her arm. ‘It has always been a pleasure to spend time with you, Janine.’

  As they ate thick steaks, matchstick potatoes, a green salad, cheese, danced for an hour or so (he was a lovely mover, like one of the professionals off Strictly Come Dancing) and finally ended up in his room again, she pondered the meaning of that last sentence – it has always been a pleasure – and thought that maybe, once she had gone over his books for him, their relationship would come to a natural end. If not, she might start not always being available when he called. If that was still going to be an option.

  If there was one thing Janine prided herself on – though in fact there were several; plain Jane she might be (or more correctly, might have been once) but she had a reasonable confidence in her own good points – it was her ability to read a person’s character. Kate Fullerton’s failure to turn up on the Sunday she was due to move finally into Janine’s flat, without so much as a phone call, was strictly unlike her. Janine tried to forget the dinner she’d organized for the two of them, a nice cloth on the round table in the bay window, flowers, silver candlesticks (only plate, but they looked like the real thing), linen napkins. She’d done avocado with prawns as a starter, followed by pasta – spaghetti carbonara – with a good green salad on the side, some cheese. And then no Kate, no phone call, nothing. Something was definitely odd about it, she’d felt, as she dug into the Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice-cream (God, that was good!) she’d planned for pudding from its cardboard pint container which, she’d read somewhere, was eco-friendly in some way she couldn’t quite recall.

  Could Kate have changed her mind, decided Janine wasn’t someone she wanted to share with after all, but was too embarrassed to say so? Had she sussed out the fact that beneath the good clothes and the nice flat, Janine was a phony? Had she dismissed her as a social-climbing impostor and decided to stay on with her brother, just not turn up again at the travel agency out of pure embarrassment at her change of heart? Janine shook her head. No way, not Kate, she wasn’t the sort, Janine just knew she wasn’t. Besides, only the other day, she’d said how she wished her brother could meet someone exactly like Janine, someone pretty and smart, with her head screwed on right. ‘He’s so impractical,’ she’d said, ‘so vague, I love him to bits, of course, but he would drive most people absolutely mad; he seems to spend half his time in an alternative universe. What he needs is someone practical, someone to love him for the way he is, not the way he ought to be, but he just can’t seem to find the right person. It’s not as if he didn’t like women, and they seem to
go for him big time, but somehow nothing ever seems to come of it . . .’ She wouldn’t have said that if she hadn’t thought Janine was good enough for him, would she? It stood to reason.

  A pity she’d been down in London when the brother was helping Kate move in. The way Kate told it, he sounded like a bit of an old fogey, quite frankly, not that there was anything wrong with that but still, when you thought of Mr Right, you kind of wanted him to be a bit further up the scale as far as looks, not to mention personality, went. She thought a trifle wistfully of her estate agent days, two or three of her clients back then had been distinctly promising husband material, if she’d felt like following it up.

  When Kate hadn’t shown up by Monday evening, not at the flat, not at work, Janine really became alarmed. The fact that it was an exceptionally slow day, though Mondays were usually very busy (people read the Sunday travel sections and came up with all sorts of ideas for their holidays), simply added to her fears, though she told herself she was being really paranoid. There was probably a perfectly rational explanation, though she couldn’t think what that might be except something bad which prevented Kate from using her mobile phone – or even a callbox if, say, she’d dropped her mobile into the canal or down a drain or something. But where had she spent the Sunday night? Surely she could have found a phone and called.

  She racked her brains to remember what Kate had said about the ‘stalker’ and remembered her own dismissive remarks, intended to be comforting, about her friend, Michelle Watson-as-was, the one who’d had the stalker who eventually was sent to prison. He’d been much more in-your-face than Kate’s person, which is why Janine hadn’t felt that the situation was particularly worrying, though now, of course, she thought differently.