The driver pointed to a row of garish store fronts. A nail studio. The Shostakovich Music, Art and Sport School. There was Russian writing everywhere. He saw a pharmacy sign in Cyrillic. Unless you spoke Russian, you wouldn’t know what half these stores were. And he didn’t speak a word.
Rushon. Now Ronnie understood.
‘Little Odessa,’ the driver said. ‘Yuge fuggin’ colony. Didn’t used to be, not when I was a kid. Perestroika, glasnost, right? They let them travel, waddya know? They all come here! Whole world’s changing – know what I’m saying?’
Ronnie was tempted to shut the man up by telling him that the world had changed once for the Native Americans too, but he didn’t want to get thrown out of the truck.
So he just said another, ‘Yep.’
They made a right turn into a residential cul-de-sac. At the far end was a row of black bollards with a boardwalk beyond, and a beach beyond that. And then the ocean.
‘Brighton Beach. Good place. Be safe here. Safe from the planes,’ the driver said, indicating to Ronnie that this was journey’s end.
The driver turned to the ghosts behind. ‘Coney Island. Brighton Beach. I gotta get back to find my ladders, my harnesses, all my stuff. Expensive stuff, you know.’
Ronnie unclipped his seat belt, thanked the man profusely and shook his big, callused hand.
‘Be safe, buddy.’
‘You too.’
‘You bet.’
Ronnie opened the door and jumped down on to the tarmac. There was a tang of sea salt in the air. And just a faint smell of burning and aviation fuel. Faint enough to make him feel safe here. But not so faint that he felt free of what he had just been through.
Without casting a backwards glance at the ghosts, he walked on to the boardwalk, with almost a spring in his step, and pulled his mobile phone from his pocket to check that it was definitely off.
Then he stopped and stared past the sandy beach at the vast flat expanse of rippling, green-blue ocean and the hazy smudge of land miles in the distance. He took in a deep breath. Followed by another. His plan was still only very vague and needed a lot of work.
But he felt excited.
Elated.
Not many people in New York on the morning of 9/11 punched the air in glee. But Ronnie Wilson did.
36
Abby sat cradling a cup of tea in her trembling hands, staring through a gap in the blinds down at the street below. Her eyes were raw from three sleepless nights in a row. Fear swirled inside her.
I know where you are.
Her suitcase was by the front door, packed and zipped shut. She looked at her watch: 8.55. In five minutes she would make the call she had been planning to make all yesterday, just as soon as office hours started. It was ironic, she thought, that for most of her life she had disliked Monday mornings. But all of yesterday she had willed it to come.
She felt more scared than she had ever felt in her life.
Unless she was completely mistaken, and panicking needlessly, he was out there somewhere, waiting and watching. Her card marked. Waiting and watching and angry.
Had he done something to the lift? And its alarm? Would he have known what to do? She repeated the questions to herself, over and over.
Yes, he’d been a mechanic once. He could fix mechanical and electrical things. But why would he have done something to the lift?
She tried to get her head around that. If he really knew where she was, why hadn’t he just lain in wait for her? What did he have to gain by getting her stuck in the lift? If he wanted time to try to break in, why hadn’t he just waited until she went out?
Was she, in her panicked state, simply putting two and two together and getting five?
Maybe. Maybe not. She just didn’t know. So most of the day, yesterday, instead of going out, buying the Sunday papers and lounging in front of the television, as she would ordinarily have done, she sat here, in the same spot where she was now, watching the street below, passing the time by listening to one Spanish lesson after another on her headphones, pronouncing, and repeating, words and sentences out aloud.
It had been a foul Sunday, a south-westerly twisting off the English Channel, continuing to blast the rain on the pavement, the puddles, the parked cars, the passers-by.
And it was the cars and the passers-by that she was watching, like a hawk, through the rain that was still pelting down today. She checked all the parked cars and vans first thing, when she woke up. Only a couple had changed from the night before. It was a neighbourhood where there was insufficient street parking, so once people found a space, they tended to leave their cars until they really needed to go somewhere. Otherwise, the moment they drove off, another vehicle took their place, and when they came back they might have to park several streets away.
She’d had two visitors yesterday, a photographer from the
She got rid of him as quickly as she could, in order to return to her vigil of watching the street.
She called her mother, but she said nothing about receiving any phone calls from anyone. Abby continued the lie that she was still in Australia and having a great time.
Sometimes text messages went astray, got sent to wrong numbers by mistake. Could this have been one?
I know where you are.
Possible.
Coming on top of the lift getting stuck, was she jumping to conclusions in her paranoid state? It was comforting to think that. But complacency was the one luxury she could not afford. She had gone into this knowing the risks involved. Knowing that she would only get away with it by living on her wits, 24/7, for however long it took.
The only thing that had made her smile yesterday was another of his lovely texts. This one said:
You don’t love a woman because she is
She had replied:
It’s beauty that captures your attention -
She saw nothing untoward in the street all Sunday. No strangers watching her. No Ricky. Just the rain. Just people. Life going on.
Normal life.
Something she was – for just a short while longer, she promised herself – no longer a part of. But all that would be changing soon.
37
Rain rattled down on the roof and the van rocked in strong gusts of wind. Although he was well wrapped up, he was still cold in here, only daring to run the engine occasionally, not wanting to attract attention to himself. At least he had a comfortable mattress, books, a Starbucks nearby and music on his iPod. There was a public toilet close by on the promenade with an adequate washing facility and it was conveniently out of sight of any of the city’s CCTV cameras. Very definitely a public convenience.
He had once read a line in a book someone had given him which said, Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.
The book was wrong, he thought. Sometimes revenge could be fun too. Just as much fun as sex.
The van still had the FOR SALE note written in red ink on a strip of brown cardboard stuck in its passenger-door window, although he had actually bought it, for three hundred and fifty pounds cash, over two weeks ago. He knew Abby was sharp, and had observed her checking the vehicles daily. No point in removing the sign and alerting her to any change. So if the previous owner got pissed off with people phoning, wanting to buy it, tough. He hadn’t bought it because he needed transport. He had bought it for the view. He could see every window of her flat from here.
It was the perfect parking spot. The van had a valid tax disc and MOT and residents’ parking sticker. All of them ran out in three months’ time.
By then he would be long gone.
38
It was the same every damn time. Whatever confidence Roy Grace felt when he set off to come to this impressive place deserted him when he actually arrived.
Malling House, the headquarters of Sussex Police, was just a fifteen-minute drive from his office. But in atmosphere, it was on a different planet. Strike that, he thought as drove past the raised barrier of the security gate, it was in a whole different
It sat within a ragbag complex of buildings on the outskirts of Lewes, the county town of East Sussex, housing the administration and key management for the five thousand officers and employees of the Sussex Police Force.
