The Oktober Projekt (15 page)

‘Where will you go?’

‘Who cares.’

‘I do.’

‘I’m better left alone, that’s the best thing you can do.’

Kissing his cheek she walked off as Nick began a choked round
of calls to friends and family, ringing from his mobile in the hospital’s cold
foyer, repeating every word twice, his throat narrow and raw.
 

Most of the morning he spent with CID, getting nowhere. Asinine
questions and repetition; fact and fantasy mixed as they attempted to suggest
it had been a burglary gone wrong. Nick’s statement made no difference to their
theory and it was recorded, witnessed and dutifully signed the 11th November at
twelve thirty-five. Nick, not for the first time in his life was off the rails,
out of control. Someone had gone and irrevocably tipped the scales towards
destruction; Nick’s or those responsible was hard to say right now. A hunger
for finding the bastards who’d carried out the rape and murder starting to
consume him and he’d a sensation of walking on air as he went to the first pub
he could find open.
 

Drinking became Nick’s direct route to grieving. Four days of
drunken hell when Nick disappeared off the radar, his only altercation came
that very same afternoon in a small pub where they knew Nick quite well. On his
way to the bar, Nick brushed the shoulder of a young City trader numbing the
pain of a Monday morning back at work. ‘Prick,’ he snapped at Nick level with
his shoulder. Nick grabbed the trader by the throat, pushed him back against
his leg and slammed him to the floor. He was only prevented from delivering a
fatal punch by two bar staff pinning Nick’s arms around his waist.
 

‘My wife’s been raped and murdered,’ he yelled.
 

A nervous silence absorbed the conversation and laughs. ‘That’s
enough,’ ordered a barman gripping Nick’s arms tightly, brushing him through
bewildered groups of drinkers. Nick laughed in their faces and their relief
swelled to a noisy echo again as the barmen jostled him to the door. Walking in
a daze, Nick’s system buckled under the whisky, his legs soft and weak, his
steps unsure and wooden as he bumped passers-by, muttering apologies or curses.
Staggering until there was no one around, he slumped on a bench in a square on
Victoria Embankment, heaving his coat around his knees, tears running down his
cheeks.

After that, it was downhill all the way. Five feet-eleven tall
and just under twelve stones, Nick would never be big enough to face the
memories of Angie. Another hard shadow he’d have to outrun, exposing his nerves
and inadequacies. His wife was gone. He visualised Angie at the final second
before she was attacked, wondering what she was thinking, what she’d been
planning? For Nick, reality was a thing of the past, a forgotten world.
 
The only tangible facts were the here
and now, the events he created as a distraction, as a diversion, a narrative of
his own to block out the memories.

That first night Nick found a room in a bed and breakfast hovel
for those on a rock-bottom budget. Sitting by the window a cushion under his
head on a straight-backed chair, he watched the street in case it had all been
a dream and Angie would be looking for him out there under the street lamp’s
fine glow. No lights in his room, just a plastic tumbler and a half drunk
bottle of Laphroaig by his side as he was tortured by the injustice of life;
how he’d kissed Angie’s forehead for the last time, her skin already very cold.

Terrified by his dark mood, he made a bolt for the waiting day.
Catching a bus at random, Nick found his way to Kilburn realising he was
shaking so badly he was drawing stares. Punishment? Revenge? Had he gone plain
crazy? His head ached from trying to push missing segments together or was it
from the whisky? Confused, scared, he took the next stop turning down streets
he didn’t know. Nausea hit him with the heat of a plague, doubling up he
vomited bile and watery whisky into the gutter, his eyes wet with the effort.
Across the street a nursing home promising residential care, and from its
shabby state, it appeared nothing but a farm trading on human weakness. In one
of the front windows a wasted eighty-year old, her dressing gown grubby with
egg and tea. She saw Nick straightening up and rapped on the window. It took a
couple of moments before his stinging eyes could translate her lipped words
behind the glass.

‘Where’s my husband? You seen my husband? Where’s your father?’
She mouthed, on and on until Nick turned and ran, another traitor too afraid to
answer her questions.

Heading up the street a Salvation Army band floated towards
him, a good three feet in the air. Out of each instrument came words not music,
voices of people he’d known; colleagues, lovers, parents, the living and dead.
Forming a circle round Nick one female Salvationist pushed through the band;
Angie, her bonnet askew. Swimming up to Nick she touched his cheek.

‘You’re keeping the wrong company, Nick, booze isn’t going to
save you.’

‘I need you Angie.’

‘That was a bad one that came calling with his friends. You
were a good husband, but now Tom is taking care of me.’

‘I need you Angie.’

‘Why not come to mass with the family, have a word with Father
Antley.’

‘Sure, book a bench for us all.’

‘Repent, Nick, that’s all you’ve got to do.’

Squeezing past Angie, Nick rolled and bumped his way down the
street not daring to look back, his mind already denying him the prospect of
repenting. A weird power had control of Nick’s senses, his body drifted its
lever stuck on automatic. Thoughts
were no
longer becoming positive or succeeding concrete
actions, a breakdown in
the trillion of tiny wires in his brain. The tiredness suddenly crept through
him in long heavy waves, his mind infected with grotesque faces, the day
turning into a freak. Another drink would be required to shift him into a
higher gear.

• • •

Nick went missing for almost a week;
Hawick driving everyone mad insisting: ‘He must be found, today, if you will,
not tomorrow. Urgency and action will be our watchword. I want his movements
and I want him delivered to me.’ Interpreting Hawick’s commands in his own way,
Paul Rossan had picked up Nick’s wayward course late on the Tuesday afternoon
as his friend and colleague wove an erratic trail across London. Each time
Rossan had followed up a reliable sighting, Nick had vanished before he
arrived. By Wednesday, Rossan wondered quite seriously if he wasn’t chasing
anything more substantial than a ghost. Even Nick’s cottage had turned up a
blank; Rossan taking an almighty risk, had somehow obtained a pool car along
with a green probationer called Denshaw from Aspley, basing him at a village
inn not far from Nick’s cottage, instructing him to make regular checks.

Finally, when Rossan almost believed Nick to have walked
straight off the edge of the world, he got a sheepish call from Denshaw to say
Nick had been found. ‘Well where, dammit, where?’ Rossan blasted him, quietly
fuming as Denshaw explained that the ‘target’ had spilled out of a taxi almost
at his feet as he did one of his calls on the cottage. Denshaw went on to
complain that the ‘target’ verbally and physically threatened him, before
insisting that they share a drink. ‘How long ago?’ Rossan demanded, having to
ask twice before the probationer volunteered that he thought it might have been
yesterday evening. ‘Do not move, do not pass go,’ Rossan had ordered him,
certain that Denshaw sounded hung-over and queasy. Enlisting the help of Danny
Redman, a CO8 close-quarter combat trainer, a former SAS sniper and
long-standing partner of Nick, they set out for Devon.

After packing Denshaw back off to Aspley with a severe
rollicking, including dark threats if he ever uttered a word, Rossan padded up
the cottage’s twisting staircase followed by Danny. ‘Good God,’ Rossan
exclaimed, opening the spare bedroom door, genuinely shocked. Lying across a
crumpled bed, duvet and sheets hanging down to the floor, his face staring
blankly at them, a half-dressed Nick Torr was comatose, a red fire bucket
placed strategically on the floor by his head. Stark, bare walled and furnished
with a wardrobe, chests of drawers, dressing table and chairs none of which
matched, the room was scarred from years of seasonal living. There were scuffs,
scratches and missing segments of plaster and in a pile pushed up in a corner,
creased navigation charts showed Nick’s life spent sailing. Every free surface
had a covering of books all devoted to the sea, most of them second-hand.
Rossan had trouble establishing if Nick had caused any damage, deciding
eventually that nothing appeared freshly smashed.

‘Come on, old fellow,’ Rossan said, taking one of Nick’s arms,
Danny the other, both of them reeling from his stale whisky soaked breath.
‘Time to get you cleaned up.’

Dragging Nick between them, his legs and feet trailing at
obscure angles, Rossan and Danny got him along the landing, wedged his pliable
body against the wall with Rossan’s knee in his back as Danny opened the
bathroom door. After bundling Nick into the bath, Danny stripped off his jacket
and shirt, supporting Nick’s head as Rossan turned on the shower. It took a
good minute and a half before Nick gasped, jerked, gripped the rim of the bath
and began a messy struggle, flailing at anything within his reach.

‘Nick, it’s Paul and Danny,’ Rossan shouted above the shower’s
lukewarm spray.

‘Piss off,’ Nick managed in response, his words slurred, his
voice weak and hoarse.

‘You’ve no chance,’ Danny said, preventing Nick from sliding
down the bath and dozing off. Danny, who had shared enough perilous operations
with Nick to know him well. Danny who was small and fluid, a springy walk to
his step that could be mistaken for a jauntiness when it is nothing more than
being prepared. Wiry, not muscular, all Danny’s strength and endurance lay
inside, while his face had a leanness derived from professional hardship;
refined through the storms of many campaigns until the bone beneath the sallow
skin revealed every single line like a battle scar, which some of the more
recent ones were. His dark hair was not neatly cut, but seemed to have been
attacked with blunt scissors. One eyebrow, his right, was testimony to bouts in
the boxing ring representing the army, where he had also mastered the fine art
of close-quarter combat that CO8 determined his primary trade.

Ten minutes of holding the shower was enough to persuade Rossan
that Nick also needed a good dose of hard love. ‘If you want to find those who
raped and killed Angela, you’re not going to do it like this.’

How or where Nick got his energy from, Danny didn’t know, but
Nick flew at Rossan and it took Danny’s expert holds to restrain him and sit
him gently back down.

‘We’re here to help,’ Rossan said, his jacket soaked.

Holding tight to the bath’s side, Nick stared up at Rossan; a
lost child suddenly found as the spray cascaded off his flattened hair, streaming
down his face mixing with his tears.

Preparing Nick for the journey back took another hour. Leaving
Nick in Danny’s care, Rossan bought six bottles of mineral water, two litres in
each, a plastic bucket, bin liners, air freshener and a packet of powerful
aspirin from the village Spar. Unaided, Nick made it down the stairs, locked
the cottage and slipped in beside Rossan in the back as Danny drove them away.

To Nick, the drive felt as though he’d been returned from the
dead. Neither Danny nor Rossan forced any conversation on him, which he was
extremely grateful for, his mind only just having stopped freewheeling. Only
once did they have to stop as Nick brought up nothing more toxic than water and
coffee, but Rossan still had to give the car a blast of freshener. On the
outskirts of London, Danny having monitored Nick’s condition through his
driving mirror, felt able to lighten the mood.

‘Fancy going out for a few beers tonight, Nick?’ Danny asked,
half-turning, smiling.

‘Only if you’re buying,’ he joked back.

‘Hawick is baying for your blood,’ Rossan said on a more
serious note.

‘At the moment it’s a hundred per cent distilled, so he can’t
have any.’

That short conversation marked Nick’s return from a downward
spiral taking him to breaking point Rossan observed, when later he was required
to review events with a cold analytical eye. It was also the point if he was to
be absolutely honest and objective, when Nick detached himself from friends,
from old alliances. Not becoming introverted or maudlin, but possessed by a
burning determination that he could trust no one; nor could he, or would he be
deviated from what had now become a very personal battle.

‘Take care, Nick,’ said Danny as he stopped close to Nick’s
address.

‘If you need anything, call me,’ Rossan urged him as he climbed
out.

Leaning into the car, one hand resting on the roof, Nick looked
from Danny to Rossan. ‘Thanks,’ he said, slammed the door and walked off.

Flagrantly sitting on the single yellow line at the junction of
Burston Road and Ulva Road, a cable company van was sited so its rear doors had
a good field of vision covering Nick’s house. One of Hawick’s surveillance
teams decided Nick, noting the QR prefix on its number plate. As he walked past
its empty cab he wondered if there’d be two or three at work in the back,
monitoring, reporting in, letting Hawick know the second Nick appeared. For
good measure there was a Met section car parked opposite his house, and a
uniform presence on his step. Welcome home Nick, he thought, welcome back to a
world you’ve helped create. Nick swung open the garden gate, felt the energy in
his legs suddenly drain as he established his ID with the uniform on his step.
He noticed the locks had been changed and wondered if it was normal, part of
police routine after a murder. The door was already open and he gave it a
cursory shove.