Читать книгу Chameleon - Mark Burnell - Страница 14

It took two hours to return to the lodge. Boyd supported Stephanie so that she wouldn’t have to put any weight onto her right ankle. At first, she was oblivious to the wind and rain but when she saw the faint shimmer of the loch and the vague outline of the cabins beyond, the cold cut in and the last of her strength evaporated.

Inside, he led her to the kitchen, sopping and shivering. He pulled a wooden chair from the table and turned it to face the Rayburn, making sure not to place it too close, before collecting dry clothes for her. He removed her wet T-shirt first – replacing it with a thick burgundy sweatshirt – followed by her tracksuit bottoms and trainers. After jeans, he pulled thick Alpine socks over her frozen feet. Finally, he wrapped a scarf around her throat. Then he put the kettle on one of the hotplates before disappearing to change his own sodden clothes.

Outside, the storm continued to rage.

Gradually, Stephanie drifted back. The thaw in her fingers and toes began to burn. They drank two mugs of sweet milky tea, Boyd telling her to sip not slurp. The clatter of wind on glass was curiously comforting now they were warm and dry. She was a child again.

Boyd waited until her body was able to generate its own heat before attending to her. He removed the scarf and pulled her chair a little closer to the Rayburn. He examined her right ankle, turning and pressing it. He strapped it with a bandage, wiped her grazes with antiseptic and rubbed arnica into the worst of her bruises. Neither of them spoke. Later, he fed her Nurofen, led her to her bed and told her to go to sleep.

It was mid-afternoon. She dressed slowly, easing her muscles through the stiffness. She pulled on the same pair of jeans, a thick roll-neck jersey, climbing socks and a pair of boots. Outside, the weather had cleared. The air was sharp, the sky a deep sapphire. She found Boyd servicing the diesel generator in one of the outbuildings, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, his hands and forearms black with oil and dirt. There was a mark on the side of his face. She couldn’t tell whether it was a bruise or just grime.

He laid a wrench on a strip of stained cloth. ‘How’s the foot?’

She shrugged. ‘Okay.’

‘And the rest of you?’

‘Look, about what happened …’

‘Don’t say anything, Stephanie. It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does matter.’

‘Well, it’s in the past now. Better that we leave it there, don’t you think?’ When she didn’t reply, he added: ‘For both of us.’

‘Can I ask you to do something for me?’

‘What?’

‘Cut my hair.’

Boyd frowned. ‘I’m not much of a barber.’

‘You won’t need to be.’

The following morning brought frost, the start of a four-day cold snap. Stephanie awoke late and rose slowly. The wood-framed mirror above the chest of drawers was only large enough to reflect half her face. She had to crouch a little to see her dark hair. Cropped close to the scalp in ragged tufts, she thought it made her look vulnerable. Which was how she felt. And which she didn’t mind.

Outside, the ground was glass beneath her boots. Above, the sky was almost purple in patches with a few wispy cirrus clouds. Boyd had gone on a run without her. She could see him on a ridge on the hill on the far side of the loch, a green-grey spot moving against a backdrop of wet rust.

She was waiting for him in the kitchen when he returned. He wasn’t short of breath but the cold air and his heat had turned his cheeks red. Sweat lent his forehead a sheen.

He looked at the kitchen table. ‘What’s this?’

‘What does it look like?’

‘You don’t have to make breakfast.’

‘I know.’

‘What I mean is, you don’t have to make amends.’

‘I know.’

Valeria Rauchman was a Russian-language teacher sent by Alexander during the last week of September. Snow-skinned with large, dark brown eyes, she had black hair with silver streaks that she wore in a bun at the nape of her neck. She looked as though she was in her mid-forties but Boyd later told Stephanie she was older. Squarely built, she was nevertheless elegant. Usually stern, she could never quite extinguish the sparkle in her eyes. For every obvious feature, Valeria Rauchman possessed a contradictory quality not far beneath the surface.

The first few days of tuition were intense since Stephanie was unable to exercise. ‘Not as good as I’d expected,’ Rauchman declared after the first lesson. ‘But with a lot of time and effort, who knows?’

A week after Rauchman’s arrival, the last commercial group of the season left. Stephanie watched them file onto two minibuses bound for Inverness. Boyd spent the next two days with his assistants, cleaning the cabins and closing them down for winter. On their last night, he spent the evening with them at the staff cabin. Stephanie and Rauchman remained at the lodge. After supper, Stephanie stood by the sitting-room window and looked out. Weak orange light spilled from the cabin’s windows. It was a still night. Intermittently, they could hear faint peals of laughter.

Rauchman said, ‘It’s good that he’s happy tonight.’

Stephanie looked across the room at her. ‘How well do you know him?’

‘I’ve known him for years. I knew Rachel, too.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Lovely. Quiet but strong. Stronger than him.’

Stephanie felt a pang of jealousy. ‘How did you meet him?’

‘That’s not for me to say.’

‘But you knew him before he came here?’

She nodded. ‘We used to run into each other from time to time. Zagreb, Jakarta, Damascus.’

‘What was he doing in those places?’

‘The same thing I was doing. Working.’

‘In a place like Damascus?’

‘When I saw him in Damascus, he was on his way home from Kuwait.’

‘The Gulf War?’

‘After Iraq invaded Kuwait, he was sent in to gather intelligence. For the six months leading up to Desert Storm, he lived in Kuwait City itself. On his own, on the move, living in rubble, living off rodents, transmitting information about the Iraqis when he could. He stayed until the city was liberated.’

‘And then you just happened to bump into him in Damascus?’

Rauchman smiled. ‘Don’t pretend to be so naïve, Stephanie. I know who you are. So you know how it is.’

‘He doesn’t talk about those things to me.’

‘Of course not. He never talks about anything that’s close to him. That’s why he’s never mentioned you.’

It was a week before Stephanie resumed training. A fortnight later, Rauchman was called to London for several days. Stephanie and Boyd embarked on a four-day trek. Boyd selected their clothes and prepared a small pack for each of them. He carried a compass, but when it was clear he made her navigate using a watch and the sun. She remembered the process: in the northern hemisphere, you hold the watch horizontally with the hour hand pointing at the sun. Bisecting the angle between the hour hand and the twelve, you arrive at a north – south line. From there, all directions are taken.

Her ankle healed, her stamina almost as developed as his, they travelled quickly, no matter what the terrain. Stephanie enjoyed the daily distance covered. By daylight, they stuck mostly to high ground. In the late afternoon, they would find a river or burn and descend towards it. Being the harsh landscape that it was, food was scarce. They had nothing to bring down a stag, a hind or a bird, so they fished for trout. In each pack there was a tin containing fishing line, a selection of hooks and some split lead weights. Stephanie proved to be useless at fishing and caught just one trout in four days, Boyd snagging the rest.

They carried groundsheets for night-time shelter. They plundered saplings from forestry plantations and draped the groundsheets over makeshift frames. Boyd had allowed them the luxury of lightweight Gore-Tex sleeping bags. By choosing places that offered some natural cover, the groundsheets proved largely effective against rain.

Each pack contained waterproof matches to light small fires at night, the flames securely contained within stone circles. They cooked gutted fish over glowing embers. Boyd supplemented their diet with bars of rolled-oat biscuits. When it was clear, he taught her how to read the major constellations in the sky: the Plough, Cassiopeia, Orion.

On the final morning, Stephanie awoke before Boyd. It was still dark. She watched the creeping daylight in the east and the rise of a plum-coloured sun. She heard the distant roar of an old stag on the slope above. Later, they spotted it, corralling its hinds along a ridge. They tracked the animals, taking care to remain downwind and out of sight. Boyd brought her close to them. They crawled through a peat hag rank with the stag’s musky scent and then found a flat slab of rock that overlooked the deer. When the animals moved on, Stephanie and Boyd climbed to the peak, from where they saw the lodge, a speck dwarfed by a wall of granite.

They sat on a rocky lip, their legs dangling over a fifty-foot drop, and ate the remains of their rations. Stephanie glanced across at Boyd, who was chewing a rolled-oat biscuit. He was looking down at his filthy boots and at the air beneath them. He was smiling.

‘What are you thinking about?’

He shook his head. ‘I was just wondering what it must have been like for your parents. Having you as a child, that is.’

‘And you find the idea of that funny?’

‘I find the idea of it terrifying.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘Were either of them as strong-willed as you?’

‘Both of them.’

‘Christ.’

‘So was my sister. And one of my brothers.’

‘Must’ve been a lot of noise.’

Stephanie laughed out loud. There had been. All the time. ‘But I was the worst.’

‘You reckon?’

‘I was a nightmare for my parents. Especially when I was a teenager. Too bright for my own good, too headstrong for anyone’s good. I never wanted to be anything like them.’

‘What teenager does?’

‘True. I always tried to disappoint them. And I was pretty successful at it. I was the brightest in my school but I underachieved. I got caught smoking and drinking. I listened to the Clash and the Smiths and hung around with the kind of boys I knew they’d dislike.’ Stephanie gazed at the drop, too. ‘Is there anything in the world more self-centred and pointless than a teenager?’

‘Of course not.’

‘The strange thing is, now my parents are gone, I find I’m envious of them. If I ever got married, I’d want a marriage like theirs. With stand-up rows and unruly children.’

‘And I thought the idea of you as a child was frightening.’

Stephanie turned to him. ‘You can’t see me as a wife? Or a mother?’

He opened his mouth, then checked himself. ‘I was going to say “no” but the truth is, I really don’t know.’

‘I’d want a house like the one I grew up in. I’d want a childhood like the one I grew up in.’

‘Don’t tell me. You’re just an old-fashioned girl at heart.’

She giggled, which was something she rarely did. ‘I know. All that rebellion for all those years and then it turns out there’s a part of me that’s just dying to be a conformist.’

It was a wet Wednesday. The previous evening, Valeria Rauchman had returned from London. When Stephanie came downstairs, she and Boyd were talking in the kitchen. There was a large package on the table.

‘Look what Valeria’s brought us from London.’

‘What is it?’

‘George Salibi.’

The man with the disk. ‘Any news on Marshall’s killer? Or Koba?’

‘Not yet.’

‘What’s the story with Salibi?’

‘The disk is – or will be – in a safe in his penthouse in New York. This is the background material we’ll need.’

They opened the parcel and spread its contents across the table. George Salibi, Lebanese billionaire banker, founder of First Intercontinental, aged sixty-four. A man with a penthouse on Central Park West, a house in London on Wilton Crescent, an enormous residence overlooking the sea at Villefranche-sur-Mer, a one-hundred-metre boat moored at the International Yacht Club at Antibes – named Zara, after his daughter – and a Gulfstream V to ferry him from one property to the next.

Salibi’s wife was an Argentine called Sylvia, daughter of an army general who’d fled to Switzerland in 1975 with twenty million embezzled dollars. Ten years younger than Salibi, Sylvia remained a stunning woman: high cheekbones, large emerald eyes, Sophia Loren’s mouth. She’d been twenty-seven when she married Salibi and it was not hard to see what the stout banker had fallen for. Her beauty was reflected in their children, Felix and Zara. Stephanie returned to a photograph of Sylvia at the time of her engagement. She’d been the same age as Stephanie was now. She’d had poise, sophistication, elegance. She looked entirely at ease with the glittering diamond choker that circled her slender throat. No rough edges, she looked everything that Stephanie wasn’t.

‘Salibi’s a renowned paranoid,’ Boyd said. ‘He has security at all his properties whether he’s there or not. Most of them are ex-Israeli Army, including his personal bodyguard, who’s by his side twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.’

‘No holidays?’

‘Not for more than three years.’

Boyd handed Stephanie a head-and-shoulders photograph: a stern expression, olive skin and chocolate eyes, black hair cut to stubble, powerful shoulder muscles.

‘A woman?’

Boyd nodded. ‘Ruth Steifel. Ex-Army, then ex-Mossad. Magenta House believe she may also have been seconded to Shabek on at least one occasion. Since she’s worked for Salibi, she hasn’t had a day off.’

‘I wonder what Sylvia says about that.’

After lunch, they examined the architect’s plans for the Central Park West penthouse. In a folder, there were photographs of the building from close and afar. There were three lists of observations and twelve pages of technical notes. It took Boyd and Stephanie an hour to go through the material for the first time.

‘Initial thoughts?’

Stephanie was studying the vertical plans. ‘Initial thoughts … if the disk is up for sale, perhaps it would be easier if Magenta House bought it.’

‘I think it’s going to be out of Alexander’s price range. People like you are very expensive to run.’

‘I had no idea I was such a luxury.’

‘You’re not. You’re an unfortunate necessity.’

Stephanie returned her attention to the plans. ‘I don’t think I can get into the place from below so it’s going to have to be from above.’

‘I agree. But how?’

‘Well, I can’t go up the outside. I’d be seen.’

‘And you can’t go up the inside because it’s secure.’

‘And I can’t drop onto the roof. Not realistically.’ Stephanie looked at the plans again. ‘The lifts …’

‘No. The main lift and the service lift both stop automatically on the floor beneath the penthouse. Every time the doors open, they’re checked by the guards. You wouldn’t even get to the right floor.’

‘Not the actual lifts. The lift-shafts.’

It takes forty-five minutes to reach it. A large ledge of soaking black granite, sodden grass beneath it, grassy tufts and dead trees above it, and above them, a one-hundred-foot granite wall.

I look at Boyd. He grins mischievously. ‘Not that. The ledge.’

Icy water falls from the ledge, a veil made of dozens of streams, some as heavy as a running tap, others needle-thin. The sound of the trickle, gurgle and rush is all we can hear.

‘Look at it. Doesn’t it remind you of something?’

I shrug. ‘Not immediately.’

‘Central Park West. The cornice around the top of the building.’

In my mind, I see the photographs again. Gothic, heavy, monstrous.

‘The cornice above the penthouse is about the same size and angle as this piece of rock. You’re going to have to come down over it.’

‘I’ll be suspended, though …’

‘Yes. But you need to climb down over it, not drop.’

‘Okay.’

‘But before you make a descent here, I want you to try to climb up it.’

I look at the reverse angle. I’ve tackled far worse and Boyd knows it. My mother, who was Swiss, was a climber of some fame when she was young. She made it to the top of Everest at the second attempt and conquered most of Europe’s greatest peaks, with the notable exception of the Eiger, which denied her twice. I’ve inherited her love of climbing and her lack of fear on rock.

I walk up to the face and place my palms against it. Hard, wet and freezing cold. Before I start, I make a map in my head of the route I’ll take. Crevices for toes, slender finger-holds, chunks small enough to grab but large enough to take the whole weight of my body. It’s join-the-dots. When I’ve seen exactly how I’ll make it to the lip of the ledge, I start.

I’m ten feet off the ground when I fall. I’m reaching to my right, spread-eagled across the rock, leaning back at an angle of almost forty-five degrees. I grab a sharp but thick ledge and I’m beginning to transfer my weight when, without warning, the rock shears, coming away in my hand. There’s no time to react. I’m already falling. I land on thick grass with a squelch.

As I struggle for breath, Boyd says, ‘You okay?’

I try to say something but can’t form a word. He leaves me to recover for a moment.

‘I thought that might happen.’

To prove the point, he steps through the gossamer waterfall, grabs a secure-looking wedge of rock and yanks it. It snaps free of the face, leaving a light scar beneath.

‘Bastard,’ I gasp.

‘It could happen again.’

I sit up. I’m soaked to the skin. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The plasterwork on the cornice. It’s old and rotten. It’s liable to come away in your hand.’

‘You must be pretty pleased with yourself.’

‘Very. Now let’s try it from the top.’

Stephanie pulled the curtains. It was a breezy morning, the wind sending washboard ripples across the loch. There was frost on the grass. She dressed quickly. The T-shirt she’d left to dry overnight was stiff and smelt of peat. She pulled a sweatshirt over the top. She collected her boots from the small drying room by the back door. They were warm.

Boyd was in the kitchen, drinking coffee, leaning against the sink. He wore an old pair of combat trousers and a chunky black V-neck over a white T-shirt.

‘Aren’t we going for a run?’

‘Valeria’s gone. She didn’t want to wake you. She asked me to say goodbye to you.’

‘When did she go?’

‘Early this morning. I drove her into Lairg.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Your preparation is over. At least, this part of it is.’

Stephanie wanted to say something, to protest. But she couldn’t.

Boyd seemed to sense it. ‘I got a call last night, after you’d gone to bed. Tomorrow morning, you’re going home.’

‘It’s not home.’

Boyd poured coffee from the pot into an enamel mug and offered it to her. ‘You can go for a run if you like, but I thought we might give it a miss this morning. You’re in good enough shape.’

‘But not so much fun to look at?’

He smiled. ‘No, I’m afraid not. I miss the bouncy bits you arrived with.’

‘You’ll get over it.’

‘Don’t be too sure.’ He refilled his own mug. ‘I need to go to Durness. Do you want to come?’

She could taste the sea before she saw it. They drove slowly on roads where sheep were the major source of traffic. They entered Durness at midday, sweeping past the primary school before halting outside the Mace store, a small supermarket with a post office counter, where green fees could be paid for Durness Golf Club, mainland Britain’s most northerly and windswept course. There was a BP filling station opposite the store, a small wooden hut beside the old pumps.

They bought groceries at Mace. There were half a dozen people inside the store. Boyd appeared to know them all. He fell into conversation with a couple at the till. A wiry man with copper hair shot a glance at Stephanie and then cracked a sly joke she couldn’t hear. Laughter all round. A fat woman in a grubby black fleece asked Boyd how his season had been.

He caught Stephanie’s eye. ‘More challenging than usual, Mary. But more rewarding, too.’

There was more conversation, more laughter, Boyd at the centre of it, relaxed, social. To Stephanie, who was silent and watching, it was a minor revelation. Outside, he suggested a walk. They headed out towards Balnakeil, a mile away, past the Balnakeil Crafts Centre, where small shops were located in corroding concrete huts erected in the Forties to house German prisoners-of-war. Boyd parked the Land-Rover by the old house at Balnakeil, on the opposite side of the road to the walled churchyard. Stephanie said she wanted to look inside. He shrugged and said he’d wait for her by the gate onto the beach.

The tiny stone church had no roof. Its walls were coated in ivy. The graveyard was crowded. Most of the headstones were old, their engraving partly erased by decades of ferocious weather. Many commemorated men and women who were not buried in the cemetery: those who’d been lost at sea, or in colonial wars fighting for the expansion of the British Empire, or those who’d emigrated to Australia, India and South Africa, in search of a life less gruelling. Scattered among the old graves, there were a few more recent.

Including Rachel’s.

It was in the far corner, by the stone wall. A small, unremarkable square headstone laid down the basic facts of her life. Dead at thirty-five. It made no mention of the cause but Stephanie knew that it had been breast-cancer. Beloved wife of Iain. The bottom half of the headstone was blank, leaving enough space for another entry.

She looked across the cemetery. He was facing the sea.

She joined him at the gate and they walked onto the beach in the direction of Faraid Head, the farthest tip of the headland. The tide was coming in, but still low. The sand was hard, wind blowing a thin film of it across the rippled surface. They stepped over squelching beds of seaweed and scattered rubbish: a single shoe, part of a seat-belt, strips of slime-coated plastic. At the far end of the beach, a concrete track rose between dunes. In some places sand obscured it, but the direction was clear and they followed it. Between the dunes the wind died, in the open it was fierce.

As they crossed a cattle-grid, Stephanie said, ‘There was a man in London before Malta. Frank White. I was in love with him. He was in love with me, I think. But it was a strange kind of love. I couldn’t tell him anything truly personal. It was a love built on lies, except at the end. Then, I told him everything, and he accepted it. He’d known there was something about me right from the start.’ She shook her head at the memory. ‘After Malta, I disappeared. But I sent messages to him. I gave him the opportunity to follow me, to meet me. To vanish with me.’

‘But he didn’t?’

‘No.’

‘Any idea why not?’

‘I guess he didn’t love me as much as I thought he did. Or as much as I loved him.’

‘Maybe he had too much to lose by following you.’

‘Believe me, he didn’t.’

‘Have you tried to contact him again since you’ve been back in London?’

‘No. It’s been four years. He belongs to another part of my life. A part that … well, the idea of it’s just too complicated.’

‘I know what you mean.’

Stephanie doubted that. She took a deep breath. ‘Anyway, when I realized there wasn’t going to be a future with him, I didn’t feel there was any future at all. I didn’t disappear to escape from Magenta House. Not really. I disappeared to be with him.’ Boyd had stopped walking so she stopped too. She smiled sadly. ‘My first broken heart. I was twenty-three but I took it like a fifteen-year-old.’

‘And became Petra because of it?’

‘I didn’t become anybody. I was already Petra.’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘I didn’t choose to live Petra’s life because my heart got broken. But I was confused and angry. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s self-pity, but when I look at the way I was then I don’t see that I had much of a chance. Trained to perfection – to breaking point – I was bound to fracture sooner or later.’

‘Probably,’ Boyd conceded.

‘In the end, all I did was not change. There was no real decision. Instead of Alexander, there was money, although it wasn’t about the money. It was about the work. The day-to-day existence; rejecting contracts, accepting contracts, planning them, executing them, getting away with it. Attention to detail in all things.’

‘What were you looking for?’

‘Mechanical perfection. I wanted to be a machine. To feel nothing at all.’

‘And did you succeed?’

‘I think so. For a while …’

Beyond the cattle-grid, the road was tarmac with grass on either side, sheep roaming freely. In the distance, at the tip of the headland, Stephanie saw a small building, a look-out tower with black and yellow squares painted on the walls. An old Ministry of Defence facility, Boyd told her, with a concrete helicopter pad. Useful for air-sea rescue.

As they approached it, the incline grew steeper. Dozens of rabbits ran wild. Stephanie walked to the cliff’s edge and peered at the two-hundred-foot vertical drop. She watched raucous waves hurling themselves onto the rocks below, cracking, foaming, receding. She felt the vertiginous pull, as familiar to her as the desire to succumb to momentary madness and to make the leap herself. She leaned further over and sensed Boyd tensing beside her.

‘Why did you stop?’ he asked.

She described Bilbao. ‘I don’t know why it happened. It just did. In the first few weeks after it, I thought it was some kind of nervous breakdown. But now, when I look back at it, I think it was some kind of breakthrough. I think the nervous breakdown came before Bilbao. And after Malta.’

‘And lasted for two and a half years?’

‘Yes. I think my whole independent career as Petra was one long nervous breakdown. And that Bilbao – well, Arkan, to be specific – was the snapping point.’

Boyd was placing squares of peat onto the dying embers of the fire. He stood up and collected his glass from the mantelpiece. When he turned round, he found Stephanie at his side. She took the glass from his hand and returned it to the mantelpiece.

‘Are you going to tell Alexander what I’ve told you today?’

‘Not if you don’t want me to.’

‘He’ll want to know.’

‘He wants to know whether you’re up to scratch.’

‘And am I?’

‘You’re more vulnerable than you used to be.’

‘That’s not an answer. Am I up to scratch?’

‘Yes. I’m afraid you are.’

She kissed him and tasted Pomerol. Boyd had produced a dusty bottle of Clos René at dinner. Stephanie had looked surprised and he’d said that he’d been saving it for a special occasion.

‘You mean like finally getting rid of me?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’

‘What, then?’

‘You work it out.’

She’d blushed instead.

Now, Boyd broke the kiss. But not by much. The only sound was the crackle of flame on peat.

Stephanie whispered, ‘I want to make love with you.’

‘No.’

‘This isn’t like before …’

‘I know.’

He was still holding her. Stephanie looked him straight in the eye when she asked, ‘Is it because of Rachel?’

‘In a way, yes.’

Slowly, reluctantly, she began to move clear of him. ‘Then I’m sorry. I don’t want things to be awkward between us.’

‘There’s nothing to feel awkward about, Stephanie. I just don’t want to get into that position.’

‘What position?’

He turned away from her and collected his glass again. ‘I was in love with Rachel. We both thought we had a long future ahead of us. But we didn’t.’ Stephanie watched him drain the last of his claret. ‘The world you’re about to go back to … we both know what the score is. I’ve already lost somebody I loved. I don’t want to allow myself to get into the position where I might have to go through that a second time.’