Long Time Lost (2 page)

Miller hiked up the mud-slicked path from the beach until he was within sight of the house, then veered off the track and trampled through bushes and brambles, the air dank and vaporous, wetting his clothes. The sky was jammed with rain clouds, skimming low over a turbulent sea. There was no moonlight to speak of. No trace of any stars.

He emerged at the edge of a sheer cliff, the rock face tumbling away into darkness and the sound of the waves striking the shore far below. The deck was a metre in front of him. Maybe half a metre up. The timber was greasy with damp, set almost flush against waist-high glass panels topped with rounded aluminium rails. And Miller was a big guy: a heavy, clumsy brute of a man. He was no kind of acrobat.

He leapt out and hooked his forearms over the railing, jamming the toes of his boots against the glass. The panel shuddered. The timber flexed. He experienced a fleeting moment of weightlessness, of terror, before his momentum carried him on, pitching him forwards from the waist, his backpack lurching sideways as he rolled over the rail and slammed down on to his hip.

The wall of glass at the back of the house loomed over him like a dark mirror. Scrambling to his feet, he stalked forwards and cupped his hands, peering in.

At blackness. At nothing.

He was just reaching sideways, poised to try the door handle, when someone grabbed for his arm.

Miller reacted very fast, swinging round and sweeping a leg, pushing down.

‘Ow. You’re hurting me.’

Kate.

‘What are you doing?’ She bucked against him. ‘Let me go. Get off.’

Miller released his grip and staggered away, his limbs taut with adrenaline rigor, a sour, metallic taste swamping his tongue.

Kate lay on her side on the deck. She was wearing grey jogging pants and a pale vest top. There were spots of blood on the vest.

Miller said, ‘I told you to wait in the house.’

‘I couldn’t. Not with him in there.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Upstairs.’

‘And the gun?’

‘I dropped it.’

‘OK.’ Miller turned and looked back at the house. ‘OK,’ he said again.

His mind was racing and so was his pulse. He could feel it twitching in his neck.

‘Are you sure he’s dead?’

‘I think so.’

‘Why the doubt?’

‘I’ve never killed anyone before.’

‘Wait here.’ He slid the door open.

‘The lights don’t work. I think he cut the electricity.’

Miller eased his backpack from his shoulders and removed his torch and his gun. The pistol was a SIG that had been acquired by Hanson, in the way of all contraband that Hanson was able to acquire, without alerting the necessary authorities or troubling with the appropriate paperwork. The SIG was box-fresh, hardly fired.

Miller only hoped he could keep it that way.

On the same night, at the same time, a young man called Patrick Leigh was looking out over Manchester. He had a spectacular view. The city was all lit up. He could see office blocks and apartment towers and street lamps and the distant streaked glow of motorway traffic.

But he wasn’t enjoying what he was seeing – he was absolutely petrified – because he was upside down, suspended by his ankles, several hundred metres in the air.

Two men had dragged Patrick out from behind the dumpsters at the back of a department store where he’d bedded down for the night. The men had punched and kicked him, then bundled him into the back of a windowless van where one of them had gagged him with a foul-smelling rag and pinned him down while his companion climbed into the cab and accelerated away.

If Patrick was scared during the journey, his fear spiked when the van came to a halt and he was thrown out on to the ground in a fenced-off construction site on the edge of the city.

In the small hours of the morning, the site was completely deserted. There were shadowy diggers and dump trucks abandoned at all kinds of angles. There were concrete mixers, pneumatic drills and I-shaped metal girders everywhere he looked.

Without saying a word, the two men bound Patrick’s ankles together, wrapping them over and over, first with bandages and then with metal chains. After that, the older of the two men – the fat, balding one in the crumpled suit and tie who’d driven the van – walked to the tower at the base of a giant crane. The man opened a door and stepped inside a caged elevator, punched a button and straightened his tie, and Patrick watched the elevator zip up into the sky towards the distant operator’s cab.

Patrick had begun to moan then. He’d started to thrash and grapple with his ankle bindings until the second man walked over and squatted next to him. He was short and muscular with a thick, square head and mangled boxer’s ears. His lightless grey eyes were wide-set, creeping towards the sides of his skull, reminding Patrick of a hammerhead shark.

The man wore a shiny blue tracksuit and pristine white training shoes. He raised a finger to his lips and shook his head in a no-nonsense warning, which, coming from this guy, was enough to make Patrick stay almost completely still as the big metal hook was lowered all the way down from the end of the jib, where it was secured to the chains coiled around his ankles before the mechanism was reversed and the hook was winched up and Patrick was dragged into the air until he was suspended the wrong way round with his blood rushing to his head, just beyond reach of the tower and the cab and any remote chance of safety.

Patrick kept willing himself to pass out but he remained stubbornly conscious as the little elevator shuttled downwards then whirred back up again, whereupon the man in the tracksuit hauled back the caged door and climbed nimbly and confidently between some railings until he was clinging to the outside of the tower, reaching for the flapping hood attached to Patrick’s sweater.

Patrick moaned from behind his gag, and kept moaning even as the man yanked him towards him and shook him vigorously, even as the older man in the suit leaned out of a window on the operator’s cab and told him to shut the hell up.

‘Do you know who we are?’ the older man shouted.

Patrick assumed the question was rhetorical. There was no way he could talk around the gag, even supposing his sweater wasn’t crushing his throat.

‘Do you know who sent us?’

Patrick nodded and swallowed hard, which was a strange sensation, being upside down and half throttled.

‘So then you know why we’re here. You’ve probably heard of my colleague. People have probably warned you about him.’

People had warned Patrick about a lot of things. But nothing specific. And certainly not this.

Why hadn’t he listened to those people? Why did he never listen to good advice?

‘They call my colleague the Hypnotist. Know why? I’ll tell you, Patrick. It’s because he has this rare ability to persuade anyone he wants to do anything he likes. But there’s one big difference between my colleague and a stage hypnotist. He doesn’t have a pocket watch to swing before your eyes. But that’s OK. He doesn’t need one.’

The guy in the tracksuit let go of Patrick’s hood and clutched at his face, digging his fingers into the soft flesh of his cheeks. He pulled Patrick close to him – so close that Patrick could see the crazed glimmer in his eyes – then shoved him away fast and hard.

‘You’re the watch,’ the older man shouted, as Patrick swooped through the air.

Miller found the body in the bedroom. The man was dead, no question. But it almost hadn’t turned out that way. He must have gotten very close to fulfilling his contract. He’d fallen on to his back right next to the bed, toppling the lamp on the nearside cabinet.

There was blood on the duvet. Blood on the pillows and the walls. Kate had shot the man through the throat, close quarters, and Miller guessed he must have been leaning over her at the time. Perhaps she’d been keeping the gun under one of her pillows. Maybe she’d faked being asleep and had waited until the very last moment to shoot.

Impressive, if so.

The guy was dressed all in black. Black trousers, a black gilet over a black cable-knit jumper, black gloves and a black balaclava. His automatic pistol was fitted with a suppressor.

Miller shone his torch into the sightless eyes behind the balaclava. Was this the man he’d vowed to kill four years ago?

He squatted and peeled back the ski mask, revealing a male in his early thirties, well-groomed and clean-shaven. He had no scars or signs of a troubled life or distinguishing marks whatsoever.

Aside from the ugly wound that had killed him.

Miller removed a glove and fished his smartphone out of his pocket – his own phone, not the disposable device Kate had contacted him on – and held it low to the man’s face. He took a photograph and attached the image in an email to Hanson.

He didn’t pat the man down. No killer hired by Connor Lane for this particular assignment would be amateurish enough to carry ID. Besides which, Hanson was capable of finding out more about the dead man from the hasty mug shot Miller had sent him than any trawl through his wallet might reveal.

Straightening now, Miller stalked around the bed, probing left and right with his torch until he found the pistol he’d armed Kate with poking out from just beneath the cotton valance. He stowed it in his backpack and cast his torch around the rest of the room, flinching when the beam was jabbed back at him by a mirrored wardrobe.

He leaned his head to one side, pausing for a moment to consider his reflection – this dishevelled, oversized wanderer, almost a stranger to him now, who was capable of walking into a house where someone had been shot with the intention of concealing evidence and spiriting the killer away. The man Miller had used to be wouldn’t have been able to hold his gaze. But the man Miller had used to be hadn’t understood how rules and laws could mean nothing to some men. He hadn’t known that to beat them you had to become them. Or sometimes, something even worse.

He slid aside the wardrobe doors and scanned the garments in front of him. There were items here that reminded him of the type of clothes Sarah might once have worn. His wife had liked to dress simply. Most days it was jeans and a blouse or a T-shirt, but every now and again, for a special occasion, she would dazzle him with a black cocktail dress like the one his gloved fingers had settled on. He clenched the silky material and could almost conjure up the feel of Sarah’s body beneath it. The swell of her hip. The warmth of her skin. He could almost imagine her batting his hand away, smiling over her shoulder, telling him that now really wasn’t the time.

Which it expressly wasn’t.

Miller released the dress and took out his phone, firing off several flash photographs. When he was done, his eyes settled on a navy fleece jacket on a shelf to the right. He slipped his phone away and tucked the fleece under his arm, thinking how it wouldn’t be wise for Kate to be seen with blood on her clothes on the walk down to the beach.

He was just turning to go – the beam from his torch settling over the doorway that connected with the hall, his mind still snagged by those treacherous thoughts of Sarah and the pain and regret that had led him here – when he heard a low insect hum coming from the dead man. A soft blue light pulsed from behind a chest pocket on his gilet: the light fading, then blooming again, like an alien heart.

Miller knelt and dipped his hand inside the man’s pocket, removing a mobile phone between his finger and thumb.

CALLER UNKNOWN
.

He held the phone in his gloved palm, the buzz passing up his arm, jangling his nerves. He had a sudden urge to answer the call. He could picture himself raising the phone to his ear, listening to the expectant breathing on the other end of the line.

There were so many things he wanted to say.

Mike Renner, the balding man in the suit and tie, leaned back from the open window of the crane operator’s cab and stared out at the glinting cityscape with his phone pressed to his ear.

Renner hadn’t wanted to place this call. He
never
wanted to place these calls. But he’d anticipated receiving an important text message more than twenty minutes ago. The message should have been something short and vaguely cryptic.
Job done.
Contract completed.

Renner had received a number of similar confirmations during the thirty-plus years in which he’d worked for the Lane family, though the method of sending them had changed over time.

Except not tonight. Because no text had reached him. Which meant one of two things: either there’d been an unexpected delay, or the man he’d hired had failed in some way.

Delay seemed the most likely explanation. The intel Renner had paid for on their target’s location and security had been comprehensive, and the killer he’d contracted had an excellent track record. But if the alternative scenario was in play and he’d failed, for whatever reason, then Renner needed to know immediately. Because while it was true that Aaron Wade – the borderline psychotic who was at this very moment hanging off the tower of the crane, pawing at his traumatised victim – was highly adept at persuading people not to talk, or to confess absolutely everything to him, depending on Renner’s whim, it was also true that whatever was happening right now on the Isle of Man, or had already happened, would determine the fate of the unfortunate young man currently swinging by his ankles below him, no matter how positively he responded to Wade’s particular brand of torture.

So Renner listened very hard to the ringing of his phone. He clamped his free hand over his ear in order to block out, as much as possible, the noise of Wade’s jeering taunts and the young man’s increasingly desperate whines.

But all he heard was the drone of an unanswered call until eventually he gave up and powered down his phone, stripping out the SIM and pocketing the component parts for safe disposal at a suitable time and place in the future.

He leaned out of the cab, his tie flapping in the breeze, and looked down at Wade, gripping the tower in his fist, a crazed grin on his face.

Renner couldn’t say he liked Wade. He was always on edge in his company – the same way, he imagined, a lion tamer could never entirely relax when he took the stage with one of his animals. But he absolutely trusted Wade to carry out his instructions, no matter how extreme or unpleasant those instructions might be, and no matter how much Renner wished he didn’t have to issue them.

Because despite his experience and his uncompromising reputation, the truth was that Mike Renner didn’t like killing people. Not because he felt guilty – if somebody posed a threat to the Lane family, then they also posed a corresponding threat to Renner’s livelihood and the well-being of his own wife and two precious daughters – but because killing someone always carried with it the risk of being caught.

Which was why, when he called Wade’s name, with a voice that sounded to him oddly strained, and when Wade looked up, eagerly, and Renner shook his head at the young man swinging from the hook, he couldn’t escape a feeling of sickly dread as he cleared his throat and said, ‘It’s over. Kid has to drop.’