PAIN HAS A PERMANENT ADDRESS - READ BETWEEN THE LIES

PAIN HAS A PERMANENT ADDRESS - EPISODE SIX

Chapter Fourteen

Cowan Carter emerged from the bank about half an hour later.  I stood across the road from her, leaning on the harbour wall.  Several people followed her out, and they all looked at her.  It wasn’t hard to see why.  As soon as she left the bank, she took her phone from her handbag and checked it, scrolling through her messages.

  While I had been waiting I’d telephoned Grahame and asked him to find out who owned the lease on the Magic Touch Remedial Therapy building.  He told me to give him half an hour.

  Cowan hadn’t seen me, so I continued to follow her heading east along the promenade.  I kept about eighty feet between us, and as the number of people thinned out, I dropped back further.  Once she headed for the town centre, I closed the gap, getting a sense for the rhythm of her movement, the pace she maintained and the way she’d look to her left and right, but rarely behind her.

  Once she got to the town centre, she merged into a crowd of people gathered outside a pub, stopped, and then crossed the street.  I kept to the same pavement, watching her from the other side until she veered onto Lower Station Road when I finally realized where we were heading.

  Oxmarket-By-The Sea railway station.

  I hung back, letting her get ahead.  The station was a mass of bodies.  Its two-tone façade - all glazed terracotta tiles and sandy bricks – harked back to the grand old days of the railway; to a time when the train wasn’t just a form of transport to get people to their destination, but an experience, a day out.  In truth, it was hard to imagine anything else except a perfect place to execute an escape plan.  I had to be vigilant.

 The station had been set up to funnel arrivals from the trains as fast as possible.  In the middle, one of the exits had a sign on the wall that told the passengers:  FOR THE BEACH AND HARBOUR EXIT HERE.  At the far end of the station, I could just about make out another sign above another exit:  FOR THE TOWN CENTRE EXIT HERE.  The attempt to smooth traffic flow hadn’t worked: the platform was jammed with people not moving at all.

  I saw she had found a seat at the far end of the platform.  I kept my distance near the gate and took a seat on one of the grey metal benches and watched the other passengers, whilst making sure Cowan Carter didn’t give me the slip. 

  People had always fascinated me: what made them different, how they lied and covered up how they emoted and broke down.  I hadn’t missed the crush of humanity in London since I’d resigned from MI5, but I missed the opportunity to watch and learn from the crowds.  All the books on body language and the psychology of interviews helped fill in the blanks.  But I’d never learned more than on weekday mornings when I’d been surrounded by a sea of commuters.

  Three minutes later, the train arrived.

   It was the end of the line and when the doors opened it was like a dam breaking. The wave of fast movement scattering in every direction panicked me for a few moments, as it became almost impossible to keep track of Carter.

  I managed to see her board, and then I did the same much further down.  As the doors slid shut, I wondered again where she was headed.  The train was going via St Edmundsbury and terminating at Gippeswick, so the choices were limited.  Oxmarket Mountfitchet, Oxmarket Creeting, Bedericsworth, Oxmarket Magna, Oxmarket Aspal and Oxupland.

  I soon got my answer.

  At Oxmarket Magna, just as I had done at the previous two stations, I edged out of the open doors and looked along the train.  This time, Cowan got off.  I waited until she’d disappeared into the concourse and then exited the carriage.

  Out of the station, she made a beeline for Oxmarket Magna.  As she moved on to Suffolk Road, a breeze suddenly picked up, ripping down towards us.

  Cowan barely broke stride, pressing forward at the same pace, with the same pattern of movement.  At the corner of Blacksmith Meadow, she took a left, leading me through a series of side streets and then into a cul-de-sac surrounded by the low-rise blocks of flats.  Someone had forgotten to take their washing in from a third-floor balcony; on a telephone wire above us, a pair of cheap trainers hung by the laces.  Otherwise, it was quiet, lifeless, and it wasn’t until we were at the end of the road that I saw what else lay ahead, sitting there in the shadow of the flats: a row of six terraced homes, hidden from view unless you were looking for them.  All six were boarded up.

  Two had been gutted by fire.  On another, the roof had collapsed, its tiles falling away to reveal the support beams underneath. The adjacent one, the rendering had cracked, jagging up the middle of the house in a rift as wide as a hand.  Others were being attacked by weeds, fusing themselves to drainpipes, doors, and windowsills.

  I stopped in a nearby doorway, watching.

  In front of the row of houses she paused, looking back in my direction, and then at the windows and doors around her.  Once she seemed content the coast was clear, she moved, toward the last of the houses and onto a small, dark path that presumably led to the rear gardens.

  The front garden was a mess.  Everything had been paved over and left to decay.  The slabs were uneven, weeds crawling through the gaps between them.  Four big concrete blocks were in a pile at the end of the driveway.  On top was a flowerpot, no flowers in it, just earth.

  I followed, as quickly and silently as I could. I then paused at the entrance to the path.  Briefly, I caught the red flash of her skirt, and then she disappeared again.  Once I got to the back of the house, I saw her coming around in an arc, beyond the fences that still marked the boundaries of the properties, broken and warped.  The lawns were dumping grounds for the shrunken, rotten bones of old prams and chairs, refrigerators, and tyres, sitting among waist-high grass, weeds, and dense brambles.  Each house was identical: a set of patio doors, a kitchen window, a back door.  Every entrance into the properties had been boarded up, every space covered with graffiti.

 She came to a half-collapsed fence panel at the foot of the garden belonging to the third house and stepped through it and started towards the building.  She moved slowly across the garden seemingly knowing exactly where to tread. She stopped at the back door, looked either way along the terrace and then placed her elegant fingers at the edge of the panel.  It swung against the wall, like the blade of a windmill, one of its screws, on the top-left side, still pinning it to the brickwork.  Beyond the panel, the blackness of the interior revealed itself.

  She disappeared inside.

  Once the panel rocked back into place, I followed towards the house, stopping at the garden, when I felt my mobile vibrate in my pocket. 

  “Hello?”  I whispered.

  “It’s Grahame.”

  “Hello mate.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “I am on a surveillance.”

  “Oops, sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it.  Have you got the information?”

  “The phone number Sabrina Muller rang before she died and leaseholder are one and the same.”

  “Have you got a name?” 

 When he said it, I wasn’t the least bit surprised.

  He ended the call and I steeled myself before heading to the house, grabbed the panel and inched it aside.  There was hardly any light.  Somewhere, something fluttered.  I waited, letting my eyes adjust to the depth of the darkness, and then I heard a noise:  the gentle moan of a floorboard.

  Cowan was upstairs.

  I slipped through the gap, set the panel back in place and waited a second time.  As my eyes adjusted further, I realized the light I’d seen from outside was a candle, its flickering glow coming from the next room, painting the edges and right angles of the room where I stood.  This was a kitchen, the worktops long gone, the units stripped down to melted, twisted bones.  On the only flat surface that remained there were canned fruit and tins of processed meat with Eastern European labels.  The room smelled of the fire that had gutted it, but also of decay, dust, and mould.

  I passed through the kitchen, into a narrow hallway.

  A bathroom was on the right, ravaged like the kitchen, and on the left were stairs, the steps broken and misshaped.  Beyond the bathroom was the dining room, nothing in it except a tatty foam mattress and a sleeping bag.  Via a connecting archway was the living room, a table in the centre with a chair pushed under it.  There was a stack of papers on one side, and a set of three candles next to that.  Only one of them was lit, but I could see others dotted around the sides, on the floor, in coves, or on shelves that still remained.

  I picked up the papers.  They were work permits for Eastern European workers and from experience, I knew they were forgeries.

  Then: a noise from above me.

  Another floorboard.

  She’s moving around.

  I double-backed to the kitchen and searched for something to protect myself.  Sitting among the cans were a tin opener, a fork, a spoon, and a serrated bread knife.  Grabbing the knife, I returned to the bottom of the stairs.

  I looked up and listened.

  No more sound, no sign of Cowan Carter.

  My brain fired a caution, warning me that I had no idea what lay at the top, but by then I was already moving, the steps bending beneath my weight.  The further up I got, the worse the damage became. Walls were charred, paint peeling and blistered, plasterboard and cavities exposed.  The fire damage seemed to deaden any noise, and when I was almost at the apex of the stairs, I could see she’d lit another candle, this one burning in the furthest room to my left – what I guessed was a bedroom.  There were three doors: the one with the light, the one in the middle – another bedroom – and one directly in front of me, a bathroom.

  I stopped, listening again, eyes on the room with the light.  Another creak, this time in tune with a sudden gust of wind, the house moaning and shifting before settling again.  Then I became aware of a new sound.

  A muffled conversation.

  Gripping the knife, I checked the bathroom was clear and stopped at the doorway to the first, unlit bedroom.  In the dark, it was hard to get any real sense of the size of the room, and it was only recognizable as a bedroom because a metal bed frame stood against one of the walls, blackened by the fire.

  It was empty.

  Eye on the second bedroom, I started to move again, knife out in front of me, being pulled towards something I wasn’t sure I wanted to see.  Through the door jamb, half lit, I glimpsed a couple of figures, obscured by shadows.

  One of them was Cowan Carter and the other, another woman, tall and slender, who spoke only broken English.  Cowan seemed to be placating her, and it was then I realized what was going on.

  Cowan was hiring her to work at the massage parlour.

Chapter Fifteen

I managed to get out of the house without being heard.  Once clear of the estate I phoned Reverend Frances Ward at the Oxmarket church and asked if I could borrow her dinghy.  She told me where I would find it.

  I took the route along the River Ox, to clear my head. I descend the steps to the lower level and walked along the riverfront with houses on my left and the river wall on the right.

 The roar of the river was loud enough that I had to stop periodically and check to see if I was being followed.  A mile along, I moved back to street level and continued briskly along the pavement. 

A black car rolled quietly past and stopped thirty feet ahead of me. The driver and front seat passenger both got out. I immediately recognized them.

  The passenger sprang at me.  His first arced towards me and I hit it violently aside as one would a wasp.   He pinned me against a building. His friend hustled to help.  

 I managed to kick out at the storming passenger and connect with his knee with enough momentum to bring his head and the upper half of his body forward.  I grabbed hold of his jacket and swung him round, so his head hit the wall. 

  Free of constraint I ran away from the scene and towards the river.  I heard one of the car doors slam, then the sound of the engine coming behind me.  I ran faster, back toward the river. 

 At the river’s edge I jumped in.  Slipping, falling, getting up, staggering on, realizing the current was much stronger than I’d expected.  The rocks were abrasive, the footing more treacherous.  I had fled from one deadly danger to embrace another.

  The shore shelved.  Every forward step led into a stronger current, slinging me about so much like a flotsam.  Hip-deep, I found it difficult to stay on my feet, and every time I didn’t I was in dire trouble, because of the black needle-sharp rocks waiting in ranks above and below the surface to scratch and tear.

  The rock beside my cheek splintered as if exploding.  Slivers of it prickled in my face.  For a flicker of time I couldn’t understand it, and then I struggled round and looked back to the shore with a flood of foreboding.

  The passenger of the car stood there.  I saw his eyes and the concentration in his body.  He stood with his legs straddled and his arms straight ahead, aiming a pistol.

  There would have to be an end to it.

  Have to be.

  I was freezing cold. Struggling against the current.  I went under a couple of times and came up again gasping for breath.  This was not how I wanted to die.  The river was brutal, relentlessly tough.

  It took everything I had.  Every ounce of energy, every atom of willpower, not to be pulled into the razor-sharp rocks on the shore.  Bullets hit the water like pebbles but thankfully he was off targets.  I tried to keep calm, but my heart was a fist against my ribs, striking so hard I could hear it pounding in my ears.

  But then, I saw a sandbank ahead of me.  It arced out from the river wall, directly under an old warehouse that had now been converted to luxury penthouse flats.  There were lights on inside, but I wasn’t near enough to see if anyone was watching.  Instead, I started to steer myself towards the sandbank.

  It was hard, but I got there, hitting the dry land at the very end of the bank. I dragged myself out of the water, and paused there, doubled over, trying to catch my breath.  Every muscle in my body ached.  My lungs burned.  My head was thumping so hard it made it difficult to see straight.  I turned and looked at where I had come from, about half a mile back up the river.  The men had gone.

  A set of concrete steps led me off the sandbank, up to a narrow pathway that ran between two old wharves.  I stopped and looked out between the buildings.  I was right at the end of Oxmarket High Street, the Waggoner’s Rest, about a fifth of a mile along, concealed beyond a bend in the road.

  I was cold, chilled to the bone by the water, by the coolness of the oncoming evening.  I scanned the street again.  There was no getting around the fact that I looked wet that my shirt was sticking to me, my trousers too, but I sorted my hair out, made it look respectable, and moved as quickly and as casually as I could.

  At the railway station, I crossed the street, avoiding a couple milling around the entrance, but then had to stop at the junction for Bedericsworth Lane as a police car, travelling in my direction roared past, lights flashing and sirens blazing.  Stepping slowly back from the pavement’s edge, I kept on going until I was out of their line of sight, and then waited for them to take the roundabout and head east and down towards where I had jumped into the river.  Once they were far enough away from me, I set off again.

  There was slight bend in Oxmarket High Street, left to right, and it wasn’t until I got to the Waggoner’s Rest, that I realized two marked cars had already cordoned off the area, parked diagonally to prevent any access.

  I double-backed and crossed Oxmarket Rose Garden heading out the other side into the countryside.  A few people passed me in the park, eyes lingering on me, on my soaked clothes, but I kept my head down and my pace up.  As I reached the sign for the access to the public footpath, an old lady on the opposite pavement actually stopped and watched me.  Twenty feet further on, I glanced back over my shoulder, and she was in the same spot, eyes tracking my movement, all the way down to the footpath.  I tried not to let the idea of being ID’d distract me, and headed left, onto the footpath.

Chapter Sixteen

  Shaking with cold, I proceeded along the footpath to a house looming out of the dusk.  There were no lights, and on looking closer I found the downstairs windows were all shuttered.  An unwelcome but not unexpected discovery.

  I walked on past the house, past an estate agent’s board announcing that this desirable country residence was for sale, together with some excellent modern stabling, forty acres of arable land and an apple orchard.

  I came to a country lane that gave no indication as to which way lay civilization.  I fumbled in my pocket for my mobile, and it was no longer there.  Washed away down to the estuary, no doubt.  I glanced automatically at my left wrist, only to find that the glass was damaged.  Since it had to be one thing or the other, I turned right.  It was a deserted road with open fields on the far sides of its low hedges.  No cars passed, and nowhere could I see a light.  Cursing the wind and aching all over, I stumbled on, hanging on to the fact that if I went far enough I was bound to come to a house in the end.

  What I came to first wasn’t a house but something much better.  A red telephone box. It stood alone, square and beckoning. Positioned on the corner where the lane turned into a main road, it solved the embarrassing problem of presenting me at some stranger’s door looking the way that I did a having to explain how I had got into such a state.

  I stood for a moment and studied my reflection in the glass of the telephone box.

  Who are you?

  I wasn’t the same man who had become a private detective.  I wasn’t even the same man who had woken up the day before.  Somewhere buried beneath the surface I’d discovered a man I knew nothing of.

  A man who knew nothing of order.

  I wondered for a moment what Zoë would have made of what I’d become.  Would she still have loved me?  Would she still have wanted to lie down next to me in our bed?  Would she have been able to feel a change in me, a sudden barrier between us, as if there were two men now - the one she had always known, and the one she didn’t recognize?

  Maybe that made me less than the man Zoë would have wanted me to be.  But this wasn’t about being a private detective any more.

  This was about solving a case and stopping a deranged killer.

  I stepped into the telephone box and stared for a few moments at the receiver.

  There were many people I could have called.  Police, Ambulance, or the Fire Brigade for a start; but by the time I had forced my frozen hands to pull the door open far enough for me to get my foot, I’d had time to think.  Once I called in authority in any form there would be unending questions to answer and statements to make, and like as not, I’d end up for the night in the local hospital before the Detective Inspector locked me in a cell for interfering with an ongoing police investigation.

  I dialled the operator with an effort, gave the operator the number of the one person in the world who would give me the help I needed, and keep quiet about it afterwards, and not try to argue me out of what I intended to do.

  She agreed to accept the reverse charges and said, “Hello?”

  “Kira?  Are you busy?”  I asked.

  “Is that you, John?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I need your help.”

  There was a little silence, and she said, “Are you alright?”

  “Not really.  Can you come and pick me up?”

   “Where to?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said, full of despair.  “I’m in a telephone box on a country road near the estuary.”

  “Telephone box?”  She sounded surprised.  “How retro.  Where’s your mobile?”

  “Somewhere in the River Ox.”

   “I won’t ask any more.”  A pause.  “I’ll google telephone box locations in Suffolk and find out where you are and come and pick you up.  Anything else.”

  “Can you bring one my jumpers, a pair of jeans and some socks?”  I asked.  “I’m cold and wet.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Stay by the telephone box.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll hurry, don’t worry.”

  I fumbled the receiver back on to its rest.  However quick she was, she wouldn’t arrive for an hour.  Well, what was one more hour after so many?  When I had been in the river, it had seemed like an eternity, but I had lost sense of actual time.

  I sat down on the floor of the telephone box and leant gingerly against the wall beside the telephone with my head resting on the coin box.  Exercise and the wind outside, inactivity and shelter inside; one looked as cold a prospect as the other.  But I was too tired to walk any more if I didn’t have to, so the choice was easy.

  I put my hands up to my face and one by one bit my fingers.  They were icy cold and yellowish white, and none of them had any feeling.  They would curl and uncurl, but slowly and weakly, and that was all.  I got to work on them seriously then, rubbing them up and down against my legs, bumping them on my knees, forcing them open and shut, but it seemed to make little difference.  I preserved from fear that they should get worse if I didn’t and paid for it in various creaks from my sore and sorely misused shoulders. 

  Looking at my bloodless hands and knowing that on top of everything else I still had to face the pain of their return to life, I was aware that all the civilized brakes were off in my conscience.

  Before I’d had time to engineer a plan to avenge myself, and the victims thoroughly and do it without compunction, I heard a car draw up, a door slam and the sound of Kira’s quick tread on the road.  The door of the telephone box opened, letting in a blast of cold air, and there she stood.

  I can’t tell you how glad I felt to see her.  I looked up and did my best with a big smile of welcome, but it didn’t come off very well.  I was shivering too much.

  Kira knelt down and took a closer look at me.  Her face went stiff with shock.

  “Been swimming?” she said flippantly.  Her voice cracked.

  I stood up clumsily and lurched against Kira and put my arms round her neck to save myself from falling, and as I was there it seemed a shame to miss the opportunity, so I kissed her.

  “I’d better take you to the doctor,” she told me.

  “No,” I said.  “No doctor.”

  “You need one.”

  “No.”

  My teeth were chattering, and I could only speak in short sentences.

  “Your back is in a hell of a state,” Kira said, peering around me and sounding worried.

  “You can wash it when we get home.”

  “John, you need a doctor.”

  I shook my head.  “I need antiseptic, paracetamol and sleep.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “Did you bring those clothes?” 

  “They’re in the car.  You can change as we go along.  The sooner you get into a hot bath the better.”

  We walked from the telephone box to her car.

  “Get in, out of the cold,” she said, opening the rear passenger side door.

  I did as I was told.  She had brought a small suitcase, from which she produced a pale blue jumper, a pair of jeans, some underwear and socks and a padded navy-coloured jacket which zipped up the front.  She looked at me judiciously, opened her handbag and took out a sensible-sized pair of scissors.  Some quick snips and the ruins of my shirt lay on the seat beside me.

  “This is a job for the police,” she suggested.

  I shook my head. “Private fight,” I said.