Ascension Day

call.

Jac couldn’t face telling him what Larry could already see in everyone’s eyes: he was already a dead man.

Bob Stratton finally got the breakthrough he’d been frantically chasing for half the day at 2.14 p.m.

Roland Cole had ditched his two credit cards shortly after he left his last address; both of them left hanging with big bills and no forwarding address, no possible link-0n. Cole had covered his tracks well.

But Stratton decided to check new credit card applications over the past ten months, when Cole might have applied for a new one; and out of eight R. Coles processed in that period in Louisiana, he hit gold with an exact birth-date match: Roland T. Cole, Verret Street, Algiers.

Stratton leapt into his car; twenty-five minutes drive, he made it in nineteen.

First-floor apartment of a rundown, chipped-paint, three-storey block with its front doors accessed by outside planked walkways.

Stratton rang the bell, then knocked after five seconds. No answer. He rang and knocked again, still nothing, and was about to try a third time when the neighbour’s door opened.

‘I don’ think you’ll find him there.’ A bleary-eyed man in a T-shirt, squinting as if he’d just awoken from an afternoon nap. ‘He left half an hour back carrying a holdall. Lot of banging of drawers an’ that before he went.’ The man scratched his chest absently. ‘That’s why I looked out when his door slammed — thought for a minute he might have been ransacked.’

‘Oh, right. Do you know where he works?’

‘Yeah. Three blocks away.’ He pointed with a hooked finger, a slight shrug as if he didn’t see the importance. ‘Opelousas Packing.’

‘No idea where he might have gone, I suppose?’

‘No, none at all.’

And Cole’s work colleague at Opelousas had no idea either. He’d left work an hour ago complaining of a bad stomach.

‘An’ s’far as I know he was headin’ for home and bed and stayin’ there.’

As Stratton got back in his car, his nerves still racing from the rush, he took out his cell-phone to call Ayliss.

At 2.30 p.m., Roland Cole jumped on a Greyhound bus bound for Miami via Pensacola, Tallahassee and Tampa.

Durrant’s face everywhere, he couldn’t stand it any more: warehouse walls, work colleagues, a man in the local cafe at lunchtime who reminded him of Durrant… the clock there too didn’t help, a film of sweat breaking out on Cole’s forehead. And when the cafe owner flipped channels on the corner TV from a daytime soap to the news, Cole stood up sharply as Durrant’s face loomed out at him.

‘Man, I can’t take any more o’ this,’ he said to his friend. He rubbed at his stomach and looked with disdain at the barely-eaten burger on his plate. ‘I gotta get home before I die. Tell Max for me, would ya?’

The Greyhound bus was ideal. No TV, no newspapers, no clock; and, as the miles rolled by, no New Orleans either. Out of sight, out of mind; the continued thrum of its wheels on the road would hopefully, finally, push the images of Durrant from his mind.

So he tucked himself away at the back of the Greyhound where nobody would notice him and, more importantly, he wouldn’t notice them — more faces that might remind him of Durrant — and waited for that moment to come. Like Rizzo in the last scene of Midnight Cowboy, he thought as he closed his eyes.

And after a while curled up at the back of the bus, as if in support of that image, he found that he was trembling; although, unlike Rizzo, in his case it was from the tension still writhing in his stomach and the shame of what he’d done, rather than pneumonia.

Truelle called a halt after three brandies.

Cuban measures were generous, a third of a balloon, and the road to the villa was new to him; he didn’t want to risk wrapping Brent’s prize Corvette round a lamppost.

He’d phoned Cynthia for the DHL reference number soon after she’d sent the package, then when he’d phoned to track its progress that morning was told that it was scheduled to be delivered to the Sancti Spiritus correos before midday. He didn’t want to leave the package there any length of time, and, while Brent’s casita fridge was generously stocked, there were a few essential favourites he wanted to pick up: Earl Grey tea, anchovy-stuffed olives and salted almonds. He decided to pick them up first, then head to the post office; he didn’t want to risk leaving the package in his car.

The Earl Grey tea proved impossible to get, he gave up after the third store visited, and the place where he bought the salted almonds told him of a shop halfway across town where they might have the olives. When Truelle got there, half of it was a deli with shelves jammed ceiling high with produce from Spain and Latin America, the other half a cafe where he ordered a coffee and brandy while he perused what else they had, ending up also buying some salami and spicy chorizo.

As he knocked back the last of his brandy, he tried his office number again; still no answer. Then Cynthia’s home number; the same. He’d tried both numbers earlier to find out if anyone had called by the office after he’d left, but with the same result. Maybe with little for Cynthia to be there for, she’d decided to take a break at the same time too.

When he’d first arrived at Brent’s after the long journey, Brent had given him an anxious sideways glance as he opened up the casita for him. ‘You okay, buddy? Something troubling you?’

‘No, fine… fine. Just overwork. Burning the midnight oil on too many patient histories.’

He no doubt looked at that moment how he felt, a total wreck, but he hadn’t got half his own mind around what had happened, let alone to explain it to someone else: I did something with a patient twelve years ago that I shouldn’t have, and as I became worried about the people I’d done it for, I took out a couple of insurance policies — but when I phoned the other day, both of those policy holders had been killed, and now…

Truelle ordered another brandy. He couldn’t get Maggie Steiner’s voice out of his head, cracking pitifully as she told him that Alan was dead. Then that Vancouver policewoman telling him about Chris and Brenda, that… Put the phone down. Shut it out of your head. Have another drink. Push it away, push it away… push it away…

He knocked back the brandy in three quick slugs, raised his hand for another. The shop keeper eyed him with concern as he poured.

‘Are you okay, senor?’

Again, ‘Fine… fine. Bueno. Muy bueno.’ Just don’t get too close to me, that’s all. Everyone who gets close to me gets killed.

Half the world asking if he was okay. The stewardess too on his last leg from Nassau to Havana. For the first legs of the flight, he’d kept to soft drinks, his stomach still churning from a volatile acid-bile mix of last night’s drinks and wire-edge tension. But by the time he came to the last leg, his hands were shaking so heavily that he felt he just had to have a drink to get them steady and try to dull the nightmare images burning hour by hour stronger through his head… push them away… push them away…

He knocked back a quick malt whisky at Nassau airport, ordered another as soon as he was airborne, and as he took his third in-flight whisky from the stewardess, his eyes bleary and red-rimmed, hand shaking on the glass, she asked if he was okay.

Fine. Fine. And even if people didn’t ask, it was there in their eyes. That look of concern. On the faces of the people as he now stepped outside the shop, squinting and swaying slightly as the bright sunshine again hit him. On the face of the woman at the post office as he handed across the note from Brent and collected his package. A young couple heading into the correos as he went back down its steps, unsure whether to side-step him or help him down.

Truelle closed his eyes as he got back into Brent’s car, taking slow, deep breaths to try and get his nerves