Through Every Human Heart Read online

  She had to stop herself from laughing out loud. It sounded exactly like something out of a TV series or an airport paperback thriller.

  ‘The man who was stabbed in your house was my colleague, Dan Reid. We’ve worked together for about three years. Try to imagine how I felt when I came to and found him. And your secretary had been taken hostage. The last thing I wanted was police involvement. Don’t you realise how very important you are?’

  It was said with such intensity, she had to look away. The police still assumed there was only one burglar. Now he was telling her . . . what exactly was he telling her? The foreign man had been waiting for her, Dina had arrived instead, and he and another man had intervened?

  ‘How could he have known I was going to come home?’

  ‘He was waiting. You would have come home eventually.’

  She supposed so.

  ‘And the two of you knew he was there, waiting for me.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But who was the burglar? They took valuable stuff . . .’

  ‘There wasn’t a burglary. He wanted it to look like a burglary. You’re the object of value.’

  Irene felt very odd. She had never felt ordinary, not in the way that other people were. She’d always had so many dreams clamouring to be realised, yet she’d held back, afraid she’d not be understood. Even in the middle of the most exciting project, something was always lacking, something inside her. Inside her soul, it was as if she lived in a world with only two dimensions, a landscape of dull colours, half-heard sounds and false power. Now she was on the brink of something real, something wild and frightening and glorious.

  ‘We’re not playing games, Miss Arbanisi. That man with the scarred face is a ruthless killer. Fortunately the other one’s not nearly so dedicated.’

  ‘Which other one?’

  ‘The one travelling with us in the boot.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, he can’t hurt you. But if he wakes up and starts thumping . . .’

  ‘Why is he in the . . .?’

  ‘I put him there. He was at the tower. I believe he’d gone to relieve himself. I’m not altogether sure what to do with him. Use him as bait, I think. If that fails, I’ll have to think of something else. Maybe I’ll just let him go. I’m so sorry. I’ve shocked you with all this, haven’t I?’

  He had taken her hand.

  ‘Why would anyone want to kidnap me?’ she said. How squeaky she sounded, like a hysterical teenager. Being told she was important was one thing. But the thought that someone was intent on hurting her was unnerving.

  ‘I don’t have a lot of money,’ she said, forcing her voice down. This wasn’t exactly true, she reflected. It was just that she’d always considered that other people, including those she worked for, generally had a lot more cash in hand.

  ‘I only know what I’m told. But anyone who wants to get to you is going to have to deal with me first. That much I promise you.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Dina got out of the car and, opening the rear passenger door, took her two plastic bags and began walking towards the main road. Thank God. No more crazy driving. No more imminent death experiences. With a sigh of relief he followed her, but he was in no hurry to catch up. They’d covered quite a distance in their mad escape, and the tower was a long way off, but he thought it was pretty much a straight road back. She couldn’t get lost.

  He’d assumed they were in the middle of nowhere but once he reached the main road he saw that there was a small building on the other side. She’d crossed over and was now going inside. He shook his head. What the hell was she playing at now?

  On the grass outside the building stood a sign. Teas Coffees Light Snacks. The lettering was hand-painted. It looked like an ordinary small house which had been transformed into a place to eat. The door tinkled as he went in. There was a counter with glass shelves, a large glass-fronted fridge with bottles, and half a dozen tables, covered with red cloths. A dark wood long-case clock stood against the end wall. Two women in white bib aprons were busy behind the counter. The air was fragrant with coffee and the sweet smell of warm bread.

  ‘My friend . . .’ he began, his hand gesturing half way up his chest.

  ‘She’s in the ladies’ room,’ one of the woman said, gesturing to a door.

  He sat down near the door, next to an unlit fireplace. Across the room in a window alcove, was a curly-headed child in a high chair. An old woman and a younger one were adoring him. The young one was noticeably pregnant. Grandmother and daughter, he thought. A man in a red checked shirt, sleeves rolled, sat at another table, studying an unfolded map. Heavy walking boots and a large rucksack. Not police.

  A boy in a dark blue apron emerged through a curtain of bright plastic strips. He stopped at the table.

  Feliks said, ‘We will have coffee, please. And water. And something to eat. What do you have? Something smells very good.’

  He sounded just like his first English primer. How odd to be using those phrases at last.

  The boy said he thought it might be the cheese scones. Though he wasn’t sure what these were, Feliks asked him to bring some. The police might come at any time, but he was hungry and thirsty, and the smells had settled it.

  ‘Would you be wanting cups or mugs?’

  ‘What is the difference?’

  ‘Mugs are bigger.’

  ‘Mugs, then. Thank you.’

  A few more years, he thought. When you’ve been around for a few more years, boy, you won’t stare at faces like mine. You’ll master the quick sideways look – the controlled, polite glance that comes with maturity. That sweet, white-haired grandmother over there, she did it perfectly.

  When Dina emerged he caught her lightly by the arm. ‘I’ve ordered coffee,’ he said.

  She didn’t struggle. She looked exhausted, but her face was clean, her hair tidied, and her hands and nails had been washed.

  She said nothing. Her eyes were fixed on the trio at the window, as if she wished she could change places with the young mother.

  Bottled water was brought, and glasses with ice, and coffee in tall white mugs. A jug of hot milk, butter in small silver foil packets just like the ones on the plane, and with them a plate bearing four large round fragrant cake-like objects, flecked with orange.

  Behind them an old clock on the mantelpiece began to chime. Four times for the half hour.

  ‘This is very fine coffee,’ Feliks told her. No response. She wouldn’t even look at him. Would she feel differently about him if by some magic he could turn back time, go back to who he’d once been, or swop faces with the endearing Lazslo, or the even more lovely smoothly-suited burglar? His grandmother would have had an incantation to do such a thing, she’d had them for every other ailment. Lighted match after lighted match, dropped into a bowl of water till some subtle alteration in the hissing satisfied her that evil had been dealt with. He could not imagine the old lady at the window, so clean-looking in her flowered dress and white cardigan, doing any such thing.

  He poured milk into her mug, stirred in sugar, pushed it closer to her. After a few seconds she lifted it to her mouth.

  ‘You should eat too.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You will feel better with some food inside you.’

  Warily he tasted some of the cheese bread. It was delicious. He broke one of the rounds in half and put them on her plate. How surreal all this was. Any moment the door would open and this illusion of normality would end. Possibly this was why the bread and the coffee tasted so good.

  Each passing car seemed faster and more furious than the last. Hard, gleaming shells, with soft bodies inside, they boomed past, like so many crustaceans hurtling across the surface of an alien world.

  ‘How did you get the car keys?’ he asked. He wanted to ask why she had run, but it seemed better to begin elsewhere.

  ‘I left them. They’re in the ignition.’

  ‘No, how did you first get
them?’

  It took her a moment to recall. ‘They were lying on the grass.’

  ‘When you and Miss Arbanisi first left the building, did you see Lazslo?’

  She shook her head. The coffee seemed to please her, now that she’d tasted it.

  ‘But the keys were on the ground? Was this before or after the police arrived?’

  ‘Before. I saw them when Irene went back to speak to you.’

  It made no sense. Why would Lazslo leave on foot? If the keys were so easy to spot, why hadn’t Lazslo seen them?

  ‘Something has happened to him. I was thinking he saw the police and hid somewhere or ran away, but whatever happened, it was before that.’

  ‘When Irene came with that man?’

  He nodded.

  ‘But he could easily have run away before that,’ she suggested. ‘He wasn’t . . . He didn’t seem . . .’

  Happy? No, Lazslo hadn’t seemed happy. And from the look on her face, it seemed possible that Lazslo might have mentioned his unhappiness, as if he’d had a great deal to say for himself in the times when they’d been alone together.

  ‘You felt sorry for him? And you believe everything he told you, of course. What did he say about me, I wonder.’

  ‘Nothing, really.’

  She was a poor liar.

  ‘Let me explain something, Miss MacLeod. In my country, when I was conceived, it was still legal to have an abortion. But it was not legal by the time Lazslo was born.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Lazslo was unplanned, and unwanted. His family was poor, and there were too many children already. He has always known this. He was given to his grandparents when he was three or four, and they were only a little less poor, so they begrudged every meal they gave to him. This was not uncommon,’ he added, watching the small distressed changes in her listening face. ‘There are many in my generation bitter in their hearts, because their parents told them the truth.’

  ‘Why are you telling me all this?’

  Why was he telling her? Lazslo’s childhood miseries had nothing to do with the present situation. What did it matter if Lazslo had portrayed himself as the victim and Feliks as the villain? He cut the second cake in half and added butter, but the little rectangle was too cold to spread properly.

  Unable to leave the silence alone, he went on, ‘Lazslo and I used to be school mates. He was a little younger, but we played a lot of football together. They made me Captain, in fact, but I wasn’t very good. I ran about a lot, but I never knew where the ball was. And I fell over a lot. Mostly over my own feet.’

  ‘My sixth year report said, ‘Donaldina still has to find her sport.’’

  ‘Donaldina?’

  ‘My name. It’s a Highland thing. Traditional among the Gaels. I was supposed to be a boy.’

  ‘It’s a pretty name.’

  ‘God, you must be the only person in the world who thinks so.’

  She wiped crumbs away from her mouth, then said abruptly, ‘Now I need to go to the toilet. I’m not going to do anything stupid, I just didn’t go before. Ok?’

  Just as the door swung shut behind her, he heard a car draw in to the small space at the front of the building. It might be the police. It might be Miss Arbanisi and the suited man. It might be no one at all. He took out his wallet, extracted notes enough to cover the bill and laid them in the middle of the table. Then he wiped his own mouth clean of crumbs with a paper napkin, got back into his jacket and zipped it up.

  The man who entered was the man who had stood talking with the guard at the castle. In his mid to late thirties, clean-shaven and fit-looking, with close-cropped dark hair. He wore blue jeans. Sunglasses with gold rims dangled by one leg from the neck of his navy sweatshirt. He met Feliks’s eye, nodded, and came over to the table.

  ‘Can we have a word?’ he asked.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The toilet was clean, but small. No manufacturer’s name. She’d collected toilets as a child, calling out to her mother, ‘It’s a Twyfords, Mummy,’ or whatever it was. Paul was terribly enthusiastic about bathrooms and toilets. There were around two hundred and forty different manufacturers of toilets in the UK, apparently. ‘Memorise that, Dina. It’s bound to come up in a pub quiz sometime,’ he said. So she had, but it hadn’t yet.

  There was room in this one to sit down, stand up and turn around, but anyone over a size sixteen would have had serious problems. The urgent business done, she let her sore hands soak in hot water again for several minutes. What had possessed her to mention her failure at sport? How unreal it had been, talking to him like that, eating cheese scones as if nothing was wrong, as if they were just two ordinary people, passing the time.

  He’d almost sounded sorry himself for Lazslo, the one who had nothing good to say about him. And he’d said her name was pretty. No one in the world had ever said that. Maybe she’d been a bit harsh, calling him a headless chicken. God help me, the only man who’s ever told me my name was pretty, and he has to be a priest.

  Not great, she thought, studying her reflection, but it would do. Whatever happened would happen, she told herself, but at least she looked less like a fool. She’d never reach the heights of Irene’s elegance, but at least she looked clean.

  Irene. How could she have lost sight of Irene? Where was she? Why had she left them? On the other hand, she was probably all right. Irene was a take-charge person. Irene didn’t panic, she let other people do the panicking. She would be all right. It was not knowing, that was the problem.

  Feliks wasn’t at the table. Wasn’t anywhere.

  One of the women behind the counter smiled at her and pointed to the door. She went outside. There he was. Another man with him. They both turned at the sound of the door. Feliks held out something, a small laminated card.

  ‘He says his name is Frank Gibson. He says he works for a newspaper.’

  She looked at the card without seeing it.

  ‘I want your story,’ the dark-haired man said. ‘I want the exclusive. The scoop. That’s how I make . . .’

  ‘I told you. There is no story here,’ Feliks interrupted him.

  ‘Trust me, I’m naughty. I listen in to the police frequencies. I’m willing to help you, if you promise to fill me in on the parts . . .’

  ‘Leave us alone. We don’t need help.’’

  ‘Look, why don’t you and the lady talk it over?’ the man said, and he moved a few yards away.

  Feliks ran his hand over his face and forehead, disordering his hair. ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Me? Am I making the decisions now?’

  ‘I did not say that. I ask what do you want. Do you believe him?’

  ‘Do you?’

  He shook his head. ‘However I am asking myself, all this time, why are the police not here. And how has this man found us when they have not?’

  She had no answer either.

  ‘If I ask this fellow to let us use his phone, to telephone the police to come here for us, will you stay this time, until they come? We only do harm if we run anymore.’

  The café’s got a phone, we could have asked to use it, she thought, but perhaps he didn’t want to involve other people, or upset them. Or possibly he wanted to save his battery.

  ‘Could we try to phone Irene as well? Or first. I mean, if we can tell the police where she is, show them we’re being helpful . . .’

  ‘Yes, that is a good idea.’

  Hopefully Irene would be all right, and everything would be cleared up. She said, ‘I’m going to tell them none of it was your fault.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, reaching towards her hair. She stiffened, then relaxed as he held it out. A tiny green fly. He blew it off into the breeze.

  ‘Such a pity,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That we cannot grow wings.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  ‘Do you have a phone? We would like to make a call before we talk to you further,’ he
told the dark-haired man.

  ‘No problem.’

  To get a signal they had to clamber quite far up the high slope behind the building, right up to a barbed wire fence. The reporter waited beside his car, not even watching them.

  ‘Better you should talk to them. Sometimes I am slow with the accents,’ he said.

  ‘Could I just try Irene first?’

  Why not? There was a breeze up here, bending the grass, blowing her hair into her eyes. She turned to face into it. He found a smooth place on a nearby boulder, and watched her. He liked it that she had thought of Irene. She was irrational, vain and most irritating, but there was some good in her. The sun moved behind a cloud. He zipped his jacket higher. This country was cold at its heart.

  ‘It’s just the answering message,’ she said.

  ‘Try again. Ask where she is, and say that we need her. Say we have a car.’

  ‘Do we?’

  ‘In a fashion,’ he pointed to the reporter below.

  At last. ‘This is Dina,’ the girl said, repeating it more loudly. But her face crumpled.

  ‘What is wrong?’ He got up from his rock.

  ‘It’s him,’ she mouthed. She meant the suited blond fellow. It was the possibility he’d been refusing to consider.

  ‘No, they’re not,’ the girl answered. Then, reluctantly, ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘He wants you,’ she held out the phone.

  ‘How clever of you to find this number.’ His enemy’s voice was so close, as if he was right there. ‘Dina tells me that you haven’t been stopped by the police. Is that true?’

  ‘Let me speak to Miss Arbanisi,’ Feliks said, putting a hand on the fence post to steady himself.

  ‘I don’t think so. She’s right beside me, and she’s safe now. You’ll never get the chance to hurt a hair of her head.’

  ‘I don’t mean to hurt anyone. You are the one who does. Let me speak to her, right now.’

  ‘Over my dead body, pal. And you can swear at me all you like, you’ll never get her.’

  Swear? When had he sworn?

  ‘Who are you? Who are you working for? For my father?’