Long Time Lost (17 page)

Renner waited until Adams had made his way to the bottom of the steps – the two women tracking his movements precisely, as if following him through a minefield – then stood up from behind a screen of carnations, brushed the dirt off his shorts and set off in pursuit.

He couldn’t tell for sure why Christine was so distraught because he hadn’t been close enough to hear what was being said. He guessed Adams had told her she could be being watched and he’d probably let her know some of what Wade had done to Clive Benson in Hamburg. Maybe the two of them had been closer than Clive had let on, or maybe she was afraid of the same thing happening to her. But on balance, Renner suspected it was something more – some kind of fight or disagreement with Adams. There was a tension between them. A physical distancing they seemed unable to bridge.

Not that Adams appeared inclined to try. He was busy forging a route across the piazza into a cobbled shopping lane. The street was narrow to begin with but it was made narrower still by the displays of postcards, T-shirts and baseball caps outside a series of souvenir shops; by the pavement seating for a line of restaurants; by the congealed mass of tourists lurching on.

Just ahead of Adams, a white taxi nosed out from a concealed side street, the driver beeping his horn, gesticulating at people to get out of his way. The crowds swelled and parted, separating Adams from the two women. Renner saw Adams signal at them to head down the alley the taxi had emerged from, and when they failed to move right away, he lost patience and clambered over the bonnet of the taxi, the driver blasting his horn, yelling out of his window.

Renner shoved and elbowed his way forwards, but by the time he entered the side street, he’d lost a lot of ground. The alley was empty aside from a line of dusty city cars parked bumper to bumper. There were no shops or restaurants, and by extension, no people. Without the pedestrian congestion, Adams and the two women had raced ahead.

I just need some time.

Renner thought of Wade. He thought of the iPad he’d taken and the information it might contain. It was possible it could give them a lead on Anna Brooks; a surer lead, perhaps, than trying to force the information out of Adams or taking a chance that either of the women knew where he’d hidden her.

The rapid click of a pair of high heels approached from close behind and Renner turned to see a chicly dressed woman skip by, trailing a cloud of perfume. The woman aimed a set of car keys at a red Fiat 500 nestled against a fire hydrant. The Fiat’s indicators blinked and the doors unlocked in a fast shuffle.

By the time the woman was reaching for the driver’s door, Renner was already moving towards her. He didn’t pause or think or analyse the situation. He reacted on instinct.

His instinct was to reach out and yank her backwards by her ponytail.

Miller heard a yelp, like a small dog’s bark, from somewhere far behind. He didn’t look back. He was focussed on the way ahead, preoccupied by his next move and the move after that. He was trying to decide if he should head to Christine’s apartment to grab her things, whether it was worth the risk, and how best to get there. He was asking himself if he should relocate Christine within Italy or introduce her to a new country altogether. He was contemplating the steps that Hanson and Becca would need to put in place to reinvent her once more. And he was trying to block out the yammer of Christine’s constant apologies.

‘I’m sorry,’ she was saying again. ‘I messed up. I’m an idiot. Will you forgive me? You have to forgive me.’

Would he? Miller wasn’t sure that he could. But he did know that it was too soon for her to ask, his anger too raw. Because the truth was that despite everything he’d experienced and seen in the last several years, despite the way his heart had callused and scarred, Christine wasn’t the only one who’d hoped that someday, no matter how improbably, Danny could be reunited with her again.

And yes, part of that was for the boy and for Christine, but the truth was that Miller had wanted it for himself much more than that. He’d wanted to be able to identify one clear and positive sign that the people he’d helped to hide and survive could do more than simply exist, that their lives could be rebuilt, that the fractured relationship between a child and a parent could be salvaged and renewed against all odds.

So Miller was hurting. He was upset. And because he was distracted he didn’t pause and turn back to investigate the source of that yelping noise or engage with the muffled whump of a car door closing, or the muted squeal of tyres, or the high-pitched whine of an engine during a snatched gear change.

But eventually, something did get through to him – a delayed awareness of the sequence of noises overcoming his sensory lag – and he spun around to see a red Fiat 500 bearing down on them, zeroing in, the driver in the straw sun hat hunched forwards over the steering wheel, his eyes locked on Kate to the exclusion of everything else.

Miller didn’t have time to shout out a warning. He didn’t have time to think through his response. He’d stopped so abruptly that Christine had moved ahead of him but Kate was much closer, just to his right, and he dived for her, thrusting his shoulder into her midriff, her upper body folding and collapsing as his hands clasped for the backs of her thighs and he leapt for the cover of a brown Peugeot estate.

Something clipped his left foot – the wing mirror of the Fiat, maybe – and the force of it twisted him sideways. He landed on the bonnet of the Peugeot, striking his hip and knee and elbow. He lost hold of Kate who flew out of his arms, smacking into the dusty wall ahead.

Miller didn’t see the Fiat strike Christine but he heard the awful thud, the crack of glass, the slap and crunch of her limbs hitting the deck.

He whipped his head round as he was sliding across the Peugeot’s bonnet, and he saw the Fiat veer left, throwing up sparks as it scraped the wall of a building. His skull glanced off the Peugeot’s windscreen as the Fiat jinked right, the driver overcompensating, heaving the wheel too hard and slamming into a parked Lancia, the light cluster popping, the wing mirror shearing off. The Fiat slewed left again, then fishtailed and straightened, and finally sped away.

There was a brief moment of silence and then the first of many doors and windows opened along the street, followed by the shrieks and shouts of unknown voices, the wails of shock and dismay.

Miller pushed himself up on to his elbow, clutching at his side, his knee giving way as he dropped down and hobbled towards Christine. She was lying on her front, her face towards him, her legs bent and splayed. There was blood on the cobblestones. More blood trickling out of her mouth and her ear. She blinked at Miller, lips quivering.

‘Ambulance,’ he hollered, looking wildly at the faces that were watching them. ‘Somebody call an ambulance.’

The chant was taken up, repeated in Italian, rebounding off the walls that hemmed them in. Kate staggered out from behind the Peugeot, bent at the hip, bleeding from a cut on her head. And now Miller was down on his knees, squeezing Christine’s hand, brushing her hair from her face, telling her that everything would be OK, that help was coming, that she had to hold on because he would find a way to bring Danny back to her soon.

It turned out the chubby kid in the Apple Store wasn’t able to provide Wade with the contact he needed, at least not directly, but he’d spoken with one of his colleagues who’d given Wade a long, sideways look, then made a call and written down an address on a scrap of paper that he traded with Wade for a crisp hundred-euro note.

Wade had left the mall immediately and climbed into another taxi, where he’d shown the driver the address on the shred of paper and watched as he frowned and shook his head and began to gesture at him to get out of his cab until two hundred euros changed his mind.

The journey took almost an hour through heavy traffic and then they arrived at their destination where Wade understood the real cause of the driver’s concern.

Decrepit high-rise apartment buildings towered over them, marred by dirt and blight, nestled up close to a raised stretch of
autostrada
that teemed with traffic.

A group of boys in dirtied tracksuits, not unlike the outfit Wade was wearing, watched the taxi from the remains of a collapsed bus shelter. Two of them were straddling BMXs. All of them had restless, baleful eyes.

Wade got out and marched over to the group as the taxi turned in a tight circle and roared away.

Thugs know other thugs.

Wade flattened the square of paper in his palm and showed it to the group like he was a cop flashing a badge. No reaction, so he opened his other hand to reveal a one-hundred-euro note. The tallest boy, a lean and stringy black kid with a thick gold chain around his neck, muttered something to a younger white kid on a BMX. The kid sniffed and shrugged, then dropped his bike to the floor and motioned with his head for Wade to follow him.

He led the way through a sunken concrete underpass, scriptured in graffiti, towards a pair of twin apartment towers that looked like the final outpost of some long-ago collapsed communist regime.

The entrance to the tower on the right was ankle-deep in litter and when the dented elevator doors shuffled apart they released a fetid stench. Wade pulled the sleeve of his tracksuit over his hand and covered his nose and mouth as the kid punched a button and they rode the elevator to the twenty-third floor, where the doors parted again and Wade stepped out.

There was a plain plywood door opposite the lift, the frame splintered and scratched from being jimmied multiple times. Wade’s guide barely gestured to it before snatching the cash from his hand as the elevator doors stuttered closed and the carriage began to descend.

Wade checked the address on his paper but there was nothing to indicate he was in the right place. He stepped up and knocked, then listened to silence, followed by footsteps, followed by the slide and clunk of multiple locks and bolts being withdrawn.

A slim girl of East Asian origin stood before him, aged about fifteen. She was wearing a grey school dress over a navy blue blouse and knee-high blue socks.

‘Show it to me,’ she said, in perfect English.

Wade unzipped his tracksuit top and removed the stolen iPad. He watched as the girl flipped back the magnetic cover and hummed in surprise and delight as the security screen flashed up.

‘Can you crack it?’

‘Of course,’ the girl replied. ‘How much money do you have?’

Another city, another hospital, but this time Miller found himself sitting in the waiting area of the casualty department of Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, one hand clamped to the bruising on his hip, a sterile patch covering a graze on his thigh. Kate was next to him with her head resting on his shoulder. A line of four stitches curved across her forehead. There were adhesive patches on her elbow and wrist.

Three hours had rushed by in a blur of sirens and police officers and paramedics, of hospital paperwork and triage questions and medical treatment. Miller knew they’d been lucky. Their injuries were minor. It was much worse for Christine. She’d been loaded on to a spinal board and driven away in the first ambulance. Right now, surgeons were working on her in an operating theatre somewhere. Miller hadn’t been able to obtain an update on her condition from the nurses rushing by. He took that as a bad sign.

Just an hour ago, a female police officer had sat across from Miller and written down his preliminary statement in a pocket notebook, then gone through the same process with Kate. The officer had confiscated their passports and told them to report to a central police station within the next twenty-four hours to sign off on full witness accounts and reclaim their IDs. Not that that would happen. Miller couldn’t contemplate the risk. And besides, it was largely irrelevant, because he was confident the police would never catch the driver of the red Fiat 500.

He’d been able to provide an accurate description of the man, largely because he’d recognised him, but he hadn’t provided a name. What was the point? Mike Renner was experienced enough to get out of Italy without being caught. And if he identified Renner, Miller would have to explain how he knew him and why they’d been targeted.

But that didn’t mean he could forget what had happened. It didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to make amends. First, though, he had to wonder what Renner’s intentions had been. Had he been aiming to kill Kate? Was Christine just collateral damage? Or was something else going on?

‘How much longer until we get some news, do you think?’

Miller stirred and looked down at Kate, nestled against his arm. All around them was speed and bluster and noise, the banging of doors, the shuttling to and fro of trolleys and patients and staff.

‘Could be a while.’

Kate hadn’t said anything before snuggling up to him and she hadn’t said much since. She’d treated it as a perfectly normal thing to do. And perhaps it was. For her.

But it was different for Miller. He’d tensed at first, then relaxed in degrees, and now he was leaning into her just a little.

What would Becca say if she saw them? Something that didn’t need to be said any more.

‘What is it?’ She rested the flat of her hand on his chest. ‘Your heart is racing.’

‘It’s the stress.’

He straightened until she had to lift her head away from him, then feigned a stretch and a yawn, trying to make it seem like a natural response. Which obviously didn’t work, because Kate frowned at him, one eye closed in a squint.

‘You want coffee?’ he asked her. ‘I know a great little vending machine.’

But she tugged at his shirtsleeve, not willing to let him escape just yet.

‘Promise me something, Miller. I don’t want to be like Clive or Christine. I don’t want to end up alone in a foreign hospital. I don’t want to die without anyone knowing who I really am.’

‘Christine’s not by herself. We’re right here for her.’

‘I couldn’t bear it, Miller. Truly. If something happens to me, I want you to find my brother. Find Richard. I want you to tell him about me. Tell him I was looking for him.’

She bit down on her lip and he knew right away what it was that she expected him to say. She wanted him to tell her that it wouldn’t be necessary because he wouldn’t allow anything bad to happen to her. That he was strong and smart and could protect her from every kind of danger.

But he couldn’t bring himself to tell her that because he wasn’t sure he believed it any more. Look at how he’d failed Sarah and Melanie. Look at Clive. Look at Christine.

‘
Signor
Miller?’

A doctor was standing before them. He had on crumpled blue scrubs, white plimsolls and a day’s worth of stubble and eye-strain. He reached up and scratched at his head, then took a deep breath and gave them the news.

Miller didn’t listen to the details. The doctor’s sombre expression and regretful tone had told him everything he needed to know.