Blind pursuit, p.13
Blind Pursuit, page 13
Was he alone inside?
Was he home at all or had he ended up someplace else?
Even though she had the key in her hand, she initially knocked on the door, as though to give him a get-out if he really was in bed with someone else, because quite frankly, if he was, she didn’t want to see it.
No answer.
So she put those morose thoughts aside and slipped the key in the lock and opened up and paused again in the doorway. No sounds coming from inside.
But he should be home?
Now more ominous images spiralled in her mind…
She moved along the hall quiet as could be, past the open bedroom door. The bedsheets were ruffled but no one was in there.
‘Babe!’ she shouted, having had enough of the intrusive thoughts. ‘You home?’
No answer, and so her worry only grew as she neared the living room.
But then… sound behind her. Creeping footsteps.
This was always the risk. The risk of the enemies from her job coming to sabotage her life in the cruellest possible way. As she spun around it was an image of her parents – as vulnerable as they were – that haunted her the most.
She caught sight of the looming figure and swung out her arm to bat away the outstretched hand. Still spinning she swiped the front leg of the person – a man – and thrust out her hands to topple him and only at that point focused on his face…
‘Lea!’ Callum shouted in shock as her hands shoved into his chest. Off balance with his foot uprooted, he went tumbling back, thumping into the sideboard.
The object he’d had pushed out towards her flew from his grip and bobbled along the floor.
‘What the hell!’ he shouted.
‘Babe, I’m so sorry!’ She rushed over to him. ‘You surprised me. I didn’t…’ She couldn’t finish the thought and reached out and initially it looked like he was about to swat her away, but then his face went from anger to surprise to… something else.
Her eyes drifted along the floor to the fallen object. Not a gun or a knife or any other kind of weapon as she’d at first feared as she spun around in attack mode.
A little black box.
He shuffled across and scooped it up and even as she rose up, gobsmacked, he stayed down.
‘Not quite… how I’d planned it,’ he said.
She said nothing. Was actually speechless for both good and bad.
‘I’ve been sat looking out the window for hours. I had no idea what time you’d be back. I would have sat there all day like a mug.’ He laughed nervously. She still couldn’t find any words.
‘You have no idea how much I missed you,’ he said, playing with the box in his hand. ‘And Lea… every time you’re not here, it makes me realise just how much I need you to be part of my life.’ He fumbled with the box now, making a meal of opening it up. ‘Shit. I had so much good stuff to say. I think… I think maybe you knocked it all out of my head.’ He scratched his forehead, looking so lost and vulnerable. So bloody sweet.
‘Lea, will you marry me?’
And even though she knew the difficulties, the danger, the pretty much impossibility of what that meant, she didn’t even hesitate before giving her answer. ‘Yes! Yes, I’ll marry you!’
13
GLOUCESTERSHIRE
Present day
Aaron and Callum sat in the car, outside the Simmonds’s home, staring at the picture on Callum’s phone.
‘I don’t get it,’ Aaron said, looking really confused. ‘It’s just a sticker. Just the name and address of an art shop in Bristol.’
‘No,’ Callum said. ‘It’s not. It’s the name. Adele.’
‘For you, Adele,’ Aaron said, reading the pencilled message written across one corner of the white sticker. ‘She’s probably the shop assistant or something?’
‘Then call the number and check.’
Aaron didn’t. Probably too scared of being proven wrong by his dumb brother.
‘What are you suggesting it actually means then?’ he said.
‘It’s a message from Lea. To me.’
‘You’ve lost me. Just… try and explain.’
‘She has a tattoo. It’s these Chinese characters. They mean hope and light. The same characters were on that painting. Her dad said she brought that painting home from an overseas trip years ago.’
‘She left you this message years ago because…?’
‘No. A few weeks ago she took the painting away for it to be reframed. That’s when I think this sticker was put there. The timing, the message…’
‘But how is that a message to you?’
Callum briefly replayed the memories before answering. One from many years ago; one a bit more recent.
‘You know I always struggled at school,’ he started, not really sure how best to explain. Aaron sniffed as some sort of response. ‘I never talked to you much about this kind of stuff. It was just too… belittling. But shit happened to me pretty much every single day. I just had to learn to deal with it. Expect it. There was this one time though… I was only eleven or twelve, first year of secondary school. We’d had this big assignment in English, and our teacher had taken our folders away to mark everything… Bearing in mind I was in the frigging bottom set, with all the other dumb-arses, most of whom weren’t actually stupid but just lazy, or troublemakers, or lazy troublemakers—’
‘OK, OK, I get the picture.’
He didn’t really. Aaron had been in the most advanced classes for everything. He had no idea what anything else was like.
‘Anyway, it was a simple task as we walked in. Grab your folder from the pile on the teacher’s desk and take it back to your seat. I don’t even know why I did it because even if I struggled like mad to read properly, I knew what my name looked like, even if it doesn’t look like it should to me. If that makes sense. But I picked up Adele’s folder instead. The letters… To me they actually looked like how my name sounds. The l is… kinda the same, and the c, backwards, kind of looks like a d, and an a to me, upside down is kind of like an e, and…’ He paused and looked across at his brother who seemed dumbfounded. After all this time he still just didn’t understand, not at all.
No, he understood that there was problem, but he didn’t understand how the problem could create such an issue over such a seemingly simple task. But that was Callum’s life. Those simple tasks – recognising his own name, reading a simple phrase – were things that other people just did, without any thought at all. For Callum it was a constant battle.
And in the moment he didn’t properly think things through… That’s when shit went wrong. Like picking up a girl’s folder rather than his own. Or getting a construction crew to bolt steels on to a brick frame in the incorrect configuration with the wrong screws. Very different mistakes with different consequences but it all came from the same place.
‘So you picked up someone else’s folder?’ Aaron said, quite blasé. ‘That’s it?’
‘Well, yeah… but… you can’t imagine the shit I had to deal with, the heckling, the name-calling, the bullying, all of the time. Not just because of this but every other thing too. This was before I was big enough to fend off a pack of rabid dogs.’
And once he was big, bulky, not only did the bullies back off, but – for that and perhaps other reasons too – he found a kind of acceptance within Aaron’s circle of friends. But by that point he was sixteen and the mental damage of those earlier years was done.
‘I’m sorry,’ Aaron said. ‘I’m sorry that I never… knew about stuff like that. That I never helped you with any of that. You should have told me.’
Callum had often thought the same thing. Perhaps he should have told his brother. But would it have really made a difference? Or would it only have added extra ammo into Aaron’s arsenal, putting him even further ahead of his struggling sibling?
‘Anyway. I told Lea about this stuff. I told her everything. And…’ He closed his eyes, pictured her face. Found himself smiling about the memory. ‘She took the piss out of me. Like, rolling on the floor laughing at me. She called me Adele non-stop for about two months. But she did it in a way that… made me feel better about it all. I don’t even know how to explain that.’
‘I still don’t understand what you think this means, though. Why would she write that for you?’
‘Let’s go and find out.’
The shop was one of several in a row of terraces on an early 1900s high street on the outskirts of the city proper. Probably once a thriving area, the buildings looked down at heel now, with the establishments in the still-open units ranging from two barbers to a charity clothes shop to a grotty-looking e-vaping shop.
A small car park sat in front of a slightly larger Spar convenience store and Aaron pulled up there, both of them staring out of the window to the Bristol Art and Supply Co.
‘So what now?’
‘This isn’t it,’ Callum said.
‘What isn’t?’
‘This isn’t what she meant.’
He took out his phone and scanned the picture again.
‘Wait a second…’ He pulled the phone right up to his face, then pushed it over to his brother.
‘What’s the street number?’ he asked.
Aaron looked at him curiously. ‘You can’t even read the numbers?’
Callum ground his teeth, although he was sure Aaron hadn’t meant to insult him.
‘Sorry,’ Aaron said. ‘I meant… like, I didn’t even know if you had the same issue with numbers as with letters and words.’
His brother of over thirty years? He really should have known.
‘It depends,’ Callum said. ‘Often numbers are easier than letters. There are only ten digits, and they’re mostly unique except maybe six and nine and eight and zero. But my biggest issue is correctly identifying the order. The bigger the number, the harder it gets.’
Probably more explanation than was needed in this case, but Aaron had asked.
‘When I plugged it into the satnav, I read out the name of the shop to the voice prompt. Not the address,’ Callum added.
‘It says 480,’ Aaron said, staring at the picture on the phone screen.
‘Yeah. I thought so too,’ Callum responded and they both looked out to the art shop again and the plaque on the wall by the door with the three digits.
‘400,’ Aaron said. ‘The shop is at 400, not 480.’
‘On the sticker it’s written over. She turned the zero into an eight.’
‘So what’s at 480?’
Both of them turned the other way, following the same thought process at the same time. A rare brotherly connection?
‘Must be the other side of the crossroads,’ Callum said.
Aaron was already releasing the handbrake as he’d said it. They headed across the lights and he pulled into the car park of the bank.
‘480,’ he said, nodding to the sign. ‘You really think she planned this for you?’
‘I’ll soon find out. Wait here. Call me if you see anything suspicious.’
Callum went to get out but then paused. Thought. Opened the picture again. ‘Just read out those numbers for me one more time?’
By which he meant the pencilled numbers right underneath the sticker. They looked like maybe they were the order number from the art store or something. Callum hoped it was something else altogether. Fourteen digits.
‘Got it,’ he said after Aaron had finished.
He couldn’t read for shit, but his memory was damn good.
He headed out and into the bank. Not a national chain – in fact, he’d never heard of South-West First Bank. The stone building had an old-world appearance to it, with a lofty although cool-feeling interior, marble – or at least marble-effect – floor and gold embellishments here and there. A smartly dressed attendant smiled at Callum as he entered.
‘Good morning, sir,’ he said. ‘Anything I can help you with?’
‘Just come for my, erm… safe-deposit box?’ Callum answered, trying his best to sound assured and calm. There was only a narrow choice of options for why Lea would send him here. A secret account with money in it? Possibly, but what would be the point and why the little clues from Lea leading to it? Money wasn’t going to help him. Much more likely that she was taking him to information of some sort. Information would much more likely be in physical form, one way or another. So safe-deposit box was his guess.
‘Certainly, sir,’ the man said. ‘If you go to my colleague over there, she’ll assist you.’
He pointed towards a suited woman behind a desk in the far corner. Callum headed over there, looking over his shoulder as he went, making sure the guy hadn’t alerted anyone or anything like that.
The woman looked up at him and smiled just before he reached her desk.
‘Good morning. Can I help you?’ she asked.
‘Just come to access my box.’
‘Certainly. What’s the account number?’
He’d never had a safe-deposit box before, but he’d seen in films where, for privacy reasons he guessed, people only needed a number to access them, no name on the account or a need to show ID or anything like that. He wasn’t sure if every bank everywhere dealt with their boxes in that manner, but he hoped that this one did. For obvious reasons.
He repeated the first eight numbers from the sequence that Aaron had told him. The woman typed into her computer but then frowned.
‘Just give me that number once again, please?’
He repeated the sequence. She typed again. ‘Sorry, sir, I don’t have a record with that account number.’
‘Oh, I… er,’ he looked over his shoulder again, felt the beads of sweat forming on his neck and brow. Damn, he couldn’t even pull off this simple task without flaking. He took out his phone. Opened the picture once more. He was certain the last six digits were a passcode because it was the same six digits he and Lea used for so many other things. The date he proposed to her. Except with the day as sixteen rather than nineteen because that was the dumb mistake he’d made the first time he’d set that as the number on his phone lock screen. So the first eight digits, he’d assumed, would be the account number.
He replayed the sequence Aaron had told him in his head. No, that wasn’t what he saw at all.
And that was the point.
Lea had written this for him, not for Aaron or anyone else. She knew exactly the mistakes he’d make.
He read out the numbers again.
This time the woman smiled before getting up from her seat. ‘This way, sir.’
He followed her into a room behind where two walls were taken up with row upon row of metallic boxes built into the walls.
‘If you’d like to input your code,’ she said, indicating one of boxes that was listed as 846D. At least, that’s what he saw.
He typed the six digits into the panel on the box and a green light blinked. The woman smiled again and pulled a key up from the retractable chain on her side. She pushed a round-ended key into the lock on the door, twisted, and the green light blinked again and this time Callum heard a lock release too.
‘The door’ll be locked to outsiders,’ she said, ‘so you’ll get privacy while you go through your things.’ She turned and headed out.
He waited a moment, listening. For what, he didn’t really know.
Then he grasped the box’s door and pulled it open…
Empty.
Nothing at all.
‘What the hell?’ he said.
Didn’t get the chance to decide on an answer before his phone buzzed in his pocket.
Aaron.
‘Shit.’
He pushed the door closed and double checked it was locked, though he wasn’t really sure why, before he rushed to the door. He flung it open. The woman pretty much jumped up from her seat.
‘You’re done? Everything’s OK?’
He looked out across the foyer. All quiet… Normal.
‘Done, thank you,’ he said, trying to appear calm. He strode across the tiles, pushed open the doors to the outside, his phone buzzing in his pocket the whole way. He scanned the car park. Still didn’t see anything untoward. No sirens, flashing lights, anything like that.
He caught sight of Aaron through the car window, phone pressed to his ear.
The brothers locked eyes. Callum started towards him, but Aaron ever so slightly shook his head.
Callum pulled the phone from his pocket. Answered the call.
Neither brother spoke. Callum could hear Aaron’s deep breaths.
‘Run,’ he said. Almost a whisper.
Except before Callum could, he jolted when a gun barrel came into view from an unseen person in the back seat, shielded from view by the privacy glass. The barrel was pushed into Aaron’s neck.
‘Do anything stupid and your brother’s dead,’ came a voice from behind him. A female voice. One he recognised.
Jenn Hinch.
Before he’d moved a muscle, the barrel of a gun – at least that’s what he imagined the object to be – was pressed into the small of his back. ‘Now get in the car.’
14
Callum walked slowly, steadily, towards his brother’s car. Aaron stared at him through the glass the whole way, his eyes wide in panic. The shaded glass in the back meant Callum couldn’t see who held the gun, but he assumed Warren Brandt was back there – Hinch’s chum who’d been in his house the day before. The police had said both of them had got away.
But how had they tracked Callum here?
They reached the passenger side of the car.
‘Get in,’ Hinch said before the pressure on Callum’s back released.
Could he make a move?
The fact his hand trembled as he reached forward for the handle told him no. A fist fight was one thing, but fighting empty-handed against an armed and likely damn well-trained assailant? He was so far out of his depth.
But then the alternative of sitting inside the car, with both brothers at the mercy of Hinch and Brandt, didn’t seem so great either. He really didn’t see how that was going to end well.
