Читать книгу The Hunt: ‘A great thriller...breathless all the way’ – LEE CHILD - T.J. Lebbon - Страница 16

‘I was a vet,’ she said. ‘We lived near Chelmsford, nice little village, friendly community. We had good friends. Adam was a landscape gardener. The kids loved the countryside. I treated animals, put them down, made them better. It didn’t feel like I was making a difference, not in the scheme of things. But for every sad owner’s face I saw, there were a dozen happy ones. Sometimes it’s the pets that make a person’s life worthwhile. A little old lady with a scratchy cat, a young boy with his dog. You can tell a lot about people by their pets.’ She turned to Holt where he sat by her window, ever-present bottle of water in his hand. ‘You ever had any pets?’

‘No. But I am a vet.’

Rose snorted, then sniffed back a shuddering sob. Jesus fucking Christ on a bike, how she’d kill for a drink.

She’d pleaded with him at first, told him how the way to come down was by reducing her intake day by day. But Holt had shaken his head. He wasn’t the sort of man you argued with, or who did things by half. She’d only known him for three days but she recognised that already. Short, slight, bespectacled, hair greying, dark skin weathered and leathery and so lined she couldn’t tell wrinkles from scars, he projected the look of a bookworm, not a mercenary. But he had such stories.

She’d only heard a few of them so far, but he held the weight of many more. A red history, heavy with death.

That was in the Comoros, on an island called Anjouan. A man called Badak had already killed three families. He shot the men and women to death, then raped the children and hacked them to pieces with a machete. His men feared him as a demon. I tracked them for three days, shot two of his men from a distance. The others fled. A day later I caught Badak in a snare, tied him to a tree, sliced him from throat to cock, and stuck a lizard inside him. I filmed the whole thing and let the people see.

The stories were like a dark star within him, the black hole of his endless, terrible experiences drawing her with a dreadful gravity. They promised experience. He promised help. At last, she perceived a route out of the spiral she had descended into.

She saw a way to hit back.

‘Why are you helping me?’ she asked.

‘Am I helping you?’

Rose nodded. She was sweating in the steamy hotel room, shaking with alcohol withdrawal. Every time she closed her eyes she saw her family as she had found them. With a drink inside her, at least they were sometimes still alive.

But yes, he was helping her. For the first time in almost a year the future, however bleak, seemed further away than the next drink. She had cast aside initial doubts and suspicions, trying not to worry about just how she had bumped into him, how someone like him happened to find her. She’d even asked him. His response had been that, sometimes, people like them washed up on the same shores.

So she had assigned their meeting to coincidence. And he had made such promises.

‘At first I thought you just wanted to fuck me,’ she said.

‘Is that what most men want of you?’

‘Hah!’ She shivered, drew a hand over the sweat beading her brow. ‘Only if they’re desperate. And I’ve never let them. Not once.’

Holt shrugged and stared from the window. Rose couldn’t even remember the name of the little town where they had met, but here in Sorrento it was scorchingly hot, the streets bedlam, and the smells of delicious cooking and rank sewage wafted through the curtains with each breath of sea air. Her mouth watered and her stomach rolled. Four miles east of them people lived in cheap, chaotic housing, while in the harbour’s à la carte restaurants holidaymakers spent a local’s daily earnings on a plate of imported meat. A site of such contradictions seemed a perfect place to hide.

‘It’s been a long time since I had a cause,’ he said, turning to face her. He was very still when he spoke, only his mouth and eyes moving. Every movement was spare and necessary. ‘Sometimes my causes were convenient because they paid well. That’s the definition of soldier of fortune, I suppose. On occasion, just now and then, I believed in something. But what you tell me happened to you … ’ He sighed. ‘It’s the children. Not you. Not your husband. Don’t care what one adult does to another, because it’s the adults who run the world. We can make our own choices, mostly. But when the children are hurt, that’s when I become sad. And angry.’

The children, she thought. Less clouded by alcohol than she had been for a long time, yet shaken by the burning need she still felt for blessed oblivion, her memories were becoming richer by the hour. Molly, stabbed behind the ear and left sitting up as if still waiting for her mummy. Isaac, lying in his own blood. Alex, one little hand still clasped in his father’s and his face a mask of dried blood. There were flies on them. They’d been there for so long by the time she found them that time had moved on, and nature had moved in.

‘You have children?’ she asked.

Holt stared from the window, silent. It was as if she’d never asked the question at all. Maybe he’d had children and they were gone, but she could not ask him that. She knew how that would burn.

‘I’m ready to learn from you,’ she said. ‘Everything you know. All of it. And I’ll pay you, somehow, one day.’

Holt turned to her again and his face creased into a smile. He had a beautiful smile. ‘I have almost three million dollars in a bank account in the Seychelles.’

She raised her eyebrows.

Holt shrugged gently. ‘What’s a man like me to do with beaches and blue seas?’

‘How long will it take?’ Rose asked.

‘What?’

‘To train me?’

He laughed as if the very idea was faintly ridiculous. Then he looked at her, really looked at her for the first time, and she had never been scrutinised like that before. It was so thorough that he must have seen into her, to those imprinted memories that she had never been able to escape. She was naked beneath his glare, stripped of clothing and skin, flesh and bones. He saw to the heart of her, and then he seemed to relax in his chair a little, drinking some more water as he looked from the open window once more. He stared out at the view across the city rooftops to the sea beyond. He seemed hesitant.

‘Holt,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said softly, as if answering a silent question of his own. Then he turned. ‘Yes. I’ll tell you some things that will help. A few tricks. How to fire a gun, how to fight, how to watch. Some knife work, some fist work. It helps that you’re already away from the world. And you have violence in you already, Rose. I see where it simmers. I’d say you’re halfway there.’