‘More wine, Shari?’
They were alone in the dining room. The kitchen was a long way away. Henrik, dismissed for the evening, would be in one of the bars in Auchterarder. He’d told Khan about a barmaid with whom he’d become friendly. So it was just Shari and Khan, and, his presence no more than a distant clang of pots and sizzle of fat, Gordon Sinclair. And Gordon’s girlfriend, who had come to help him in the kitchen. She would leave before dessert was served, while Gordon would linger, clearing up a little and loading his excess ingredients back into the boot of his small sports car. Khan hadn’t met the girlfriend before. She was attractive, if a bit red in the cheeks. Very Scottish: shy, elusive even. Plump too, or at least well-rounded. Khan had the idea that Gordon and she might make a go of a restaurant together. Perhaps she was the knot which tied him to the area. Khan was beginning to form an idea about a restaurant, financed by him and run by Gordon and his girlfriend ...
‘Yes, please,’ said Shari. ‘This is delicious.’
Trout in almonds. Local trout, naturally, with the cream sauce flavoured by a little island malt. The sauce succeeded in not overpowering the delicate fish. The julienne of vegetables remained a little overcooked for Khan’s tastes, but he knew Shari liked them soft almost to the point of mush. She retained the annoying American habit of cutting and spooning everything up with the use of just her fork.
‘Delicious,’ she said again.
He looked at her and smiled. Maybe he was becoming paranoid. Maybe there was nothing to worry about. Look at her - beautiful, fragile. Everything about her was surface. She couldn’t possibly be hiding anything from him. No, he was being stupid. He should forget everything and just enjoy this final night with her.
‘Yes, it is delicious, isn’t it?’ he said, pouring a little more Meursault. Meursault was a little rich for trout on its own, but the sauce both deserved and could cope with it. He knew Gordon liked to surprise him, but Khan guessed some prime beef would be next (albeit in a sauce of exotic provenance), followed by an Orkney cheese and freshly made crannachan. And the beauty was that all the mess in the kitchen and the plates and things in the dining-room could be left just as they were. Mrs MacArthur would come in on Monday afternoon and tidy the lot up.
Before he’d employed her, and again twice since, Khan had had Mrs MacArthur checked over by a detective agency in Dundee. The agency reckoned that not only was she clean, she was practically unbribable. So Khan didn’t mind that she held a set of keys to the house and to the alarm system. Besides, she never entered the study, which was kept on a separate alarm circuit anyway (to which Khan and the local police held the only keys).
‘Delicious,’ he said, raising his glass as if in a toast.
It was one of those special pubs where at weekends after closing time the lights are turned off and the regulars drink on in darkness. But not on a Sunday. Some traditions held fast on a Sunday, and the pub closed at ten-thirty sharp. Which suited Henrik really, since he’d offered to drive Nessa home and she had laughingly accepted. ‘Though it’s only a five-minute walk,’ she’d added.
‘Well, we can always drive home the long way.’ She’d said nothing at that. He’d been waiting outside in the rented Ford Scorpio, the stereo playing, engine running. She said goodnight to the barman, who was locking up, then walked smartly to the edge of the kerb. Henrik was already out of the car, so he could hold the passenger door open for her. She gave him a funny look.
‘Thank you, kind sir,’ she said.
He got back into the driver’s seat. ‘Where to?’ he asked her.
‘Home, of course.’
‘Straight home?’
She gave him the look again. ‘Not necessarily.’
They stopped by a field just off the dual carriageway to the south of the town, and stayed there half an hour or so, chatting, kissing. They were as clumsy as teenagers, even with the seats tilted back. Eventually she laughed again and loosed herself from him.
‘I’d better get back. My mum’ll be getting worried.’
He nodded. ‘Okay.’ They drove more or less in silence after that, except for her few directions. Until eventually they arrived at the stone bungalow.
‘This is it. Thanks for the lift.’
‘I’ll be back again next week probably. What about dinner?’
‘Dinner?’
‘At the hotel if you like.’
‘Depends on my shifts really.’
‘Maybe I can phone you at the pub?’
She thought this over. ‘Yes, okay,’ she said. ‘Do that.’
‘Goodnight, Nessa.’ He pulled her to him for a final kiss, but she wriggled free and glanced out of the window.
‘My mother might be watching. Night, Henrik.’ And she relented, pecking him on the cheek. He watched her as she opened and closed her gate, gave him a final wave, and climbed the steps to her front door. He thought he saw a curtain twitch in one of the unlit windows. The hall light was on. She closed the door softly behind her. Henrik slipped the gear lever into the Drive position and started off. At the end of her road, he ejected Barry Manilow from the tape-player and pushed home some heavy metal, turning the volume all the way up. He drove through Auchterarder’s dark deserted streets for some time with the driver’s window down, grinning to himself. Then he headed home. No doubt he would have to lie in bed and put up with all that squealing and squawking from Khan’s room, all the grunting and puffing. He wondered if it was a put-on, maybe a recording or something. Was it supposed to impress him? Or did neither party realise he had ears?
Mind you, she was a particular beauty, this present catch. And the way she looked at Henrik himself ... the way she touched him, as though wanting to assure herself that his build was a fact and not some fantasy. Yes, maybe when Khan had finished with her, maybe there’d be room for Henrik to move in. He knew where she worked in London. He knew where she lived. He might just happen to be passing. He was pretty sure she’d make even more noise with him than she did with Khan. Yes, pretty damned sure. His grin was even wider as he drove through the gates of the walled and detached house.
He locked the high metal gates behind him. The chef would be long gone. There was no sign of another car. A short gravel driveway led to the front of the house. The place looked to be in darkness. It was only ten to twelve. Maybe they’d finished and were asleep. Maybe he wouldn’t have to resort to vodka to send him into oblivion. He left the car at the top of the drive rather than parking it in the small garage. He stood for a moment, leaning against the cooling body of the car, listening to the silence. A rustling of trees, a bird in the distance, maybe even some frogs. But that was all. And it was so dark. So utterly dark, with the stars shining high in the sky. So different from London, so quiet and isolated. Certainly isolated. They’d talked of keeping guard dogs which could prowl the garden around the house, but then who would feed them and look after them? So instead there was the alarm system, linked to the local station and to Perth constabulary (the latter for times when the former was closed or unmanned).
His eyes having adjusted to the dark, Henrik walked to the front door and opened it, then locked it behind him, using the mortice deadlock as well as the Yale. The light was on at the far end of the hall, where the central alarm system was contained in a metal box secured to the wall beside the door to the kitchen. He used one key to open the box, and another to turn on the system. The bedrooms upstairs were en suite, so he set the pressure-pad alarm for the whole house. No need for anyone to leave their rooms before morning. In the morning, the first person up would have a minute to deactivate the alarm system before the bells started ringing both outside the house itself and inside the police station.
Now, having turned on the system, he had a minute to get to his room, a minute before it was fully operational. He headed for the stairs. There was a soft buzzing from the alarm box which told him it was working. When the buzzing stopped, the various window devices and movement-sensitive beams and pressure-pads woke up for the eve
ning. Silence upstairs, and no light from Khan’s bedroom. Henrik switched off the hall lights and closed his door behind him.
She knows the house almost as well as she knows the surrounding area. In the past two days she’s been here half a dozen times, and twice at the dead of night, the witching hour. She’s been in the grounds, and has peered through windows into rooms, through the letterbox into the hall. She has seen that the alarm box sits at the end of the hall, attached to the wall. She knows the kind of alarm it will be. She has checked door and window locks. She has even gone so far as to pass an angled mirror on the end of a stick through the letterbox, the better to see the locks from the inside. All has proven very satisfactory. The nearest house is half a mile away. There are no alarms in the garden, no infra red beams which, when broken, would turn on floodlights. No lights at all to complicate her approach. No cameras. No dogs. She is especially pleased that there are no dogs.
The gates are high and topped with spikes, but the wall is a pathetic affair with broken bottle-glass cemented to its top. Too pathetic for it to have been Khan’s work. It must already have been in place when he bought the house. The glass has been worn smooth over the years. She won’t even bother to cover it with a blanket before she climbs into the garden.
But first, there is the alarm system. She straps on a special climbing-belt - the sort known to every telephone engineer - and attaches spiked soles to her shoes. The spiked soles are for wear by gardeners so they can aerate their lawns. She has modified the spikes only a little. She drove to a garden centre outside Perth for the spike-shoes, and bought a lot of other stuff as well, stuff she didn’t need, bought solely to disguise this singular purchase. She passed two garden centres before reaching Perth. Police might investigate one or two garden centres, but she doubts they would go much further afield.
She is now standing beside a telegraph-pole in a field across the lane from Khan’s house. She knows this is a dangerous period. She will soon be visible from the house. She checks her watch. Two. The bodyguard locked up two hours ago. They will rise early tomorrow to catch their plane back south. Or rather, if things go as intended, they won’t.
She waits another minute. What moon there is disappears behind a hefty bank of cloud. She ties her belt around the pole as well as herself, grips the pole, hugging herself to it, and begins to climb. Eventually, she knows, twenty-odd feet up, there will be foot-holds to help her. But for now she has only her own strength. She knows it will be enough. She does not hesitate.
At the top of the pole, beneath the wires themselves, sits a large junction box containing the thinner wires running back to homes in the area. She thinks Khan’s alarm system works via telephone lines. From what she’s seen of it, it looks just the type. If it doesn’t ... Well, she will fall back on other plans, other options. But for now she has to keep busy, working fast while the moon stays hidden. She slips a pencil-thin torch into her mouth, holding it as she would a cigarette, and, by its light, begins to unscrew the front from the junction box.
Terrorists aren’t just people who terrorise. They are people who hunger for knowledge, the knowledge of how things work. In knowing how things work, you discover how society works, and that knowledge can help cripple society. She knows she can disrupt communications, bring transport systems to a halt, generate mayhem by computer. Given the knowledge, anything can be achieved. The junction box holds no surprises for her, only a certain measure of relief. She stares at the confusion of wires for a moment, and knows that she can stay with plan one.
There is a distinct colour-coding for the wires from Khan’s alarm system. The puzzle is that there seem to be two sets. One for the main house ... The other? A room inside the house, perhaps, or a garage or workshop. She decides to take both sets out with her neat rubber-handled wire-clippers. It was a good alarm system, but not a great one. A great alarm system would send a constant pulse to the outside world. And if that pulse were interrupted, then the alarm bells would ring. Cutting the wires would cause the alarm to sound in the distant police station. But such systems are unreliable and seldom used. They are nuisances, sounding whenever a fluctuation in current occurs, or a phone-line momentarily breaks up. Society demands that alarms not be a nuisance.
There were times when Witch worried about society.
The job done, she slipped slowly back down the pole and untied her harness at the bottom, putting it back in her heavy black holdall along with the spikes and her tools. Now for the wall. She clambered up and sat on the top for a second, studying the windows in the house, then fell into the dark garden. She had climbed the wall precisely twelve feet to the left of the gate, so that she fell onto grass and not into shrubbery. She’d decided to enter the way most burglars would - by the back entrance - not that she was intending to make this look like a burglary. No, this was to be messy. Her employers wanted her to leave a message, a clear statement of their feelings.
The kitchen then, its door bolted top and bottom with a mortice lock beside the handle. The bedrooms are to the front of the house. She can make a certain amount of noise here. Silence, of course, would be best. Silence is the ideal. In her holdall is a carefully measured and cut piece of Fablon, purchased at a department store in Perth. Ghastly pattern and colour, though the assistant had praised it as though it were an Impressionist painting. Witch is surprised people still use it. She measured the kitchen windows yesterday, and chose the smaller for her purpose. Slowly, carefully, she unpeels the Fablon and presses it against the smaller window, covering it exactly. In the department store she also purchased some good-quality yellow dusters, while at a small hardware shop the keen young assistant was only too pleased to sell some garden twine and a hammer to a lady keen to stake out her future vegetable plots.
She takes the hammer from her holdall. She has used some twine to tie a duster around the head. Out of the spare cuts of Fablon she has made some makeshift handles, which she attaches to the sheet of Fablon stuck to the window. She grips one of these handles as, softly, near soundlessly, she begins to tap away at the glass, which falls away from the window-frame but stays attached to the Fablon. Within three minutes she is lifting the whole window out from its frame, laying it on the ground. The alarm is just outside the kitchen door. If she’d set it off, it would probably be buzzing by now. But she can’t hear it. She can’t hear anything, not even her heart.
Upstairs, Henrik is asleep and dreaming in Danish. He’s dreaming of barmaids with pumps attached to their breasts, and of flying champagne bottles, and of winning a bodybuilding contest against Khan and the pre-movie star Schwarzenegger. He drank one glass of neat vodka before retiring, and watched ten minutes of the satellite movie on his eighteen-inch television before falling asleep, waking half an hour later just long enough to switch off the television. He sleeps and he dreams with one hand tight between his legs, something he’s done since childhood. Girlfriends have commented on it, laughed at it even. If he catches himself doing it, he shoves the hand under a pillow, but it always seems to creep south again of its own volition.
The barmaids are singing. Topless for some reason, and singing in a language he doesn’t understand. His name? His name? Can they possibly be singing ... his name?
‘Wake up!’ A whisper. A woman’s urgent hiss. His eyes open to blackness and he tries to sit up, but a feminine hand pushes at his chest, and he sinks back down again. The hand remains against his chest, rubbing it. A silky-smooth hand.
Shari’s hand.
‘What is it?’ he hisses back. ‘What’s the matter, Shari?’
Her face seems very close to him. ‘It’s Khan. He’s sound asleep ... as usual. He just doesn’t ... I don’t want to put him down or anything, but he just doesn’t satisfy me.’
Topless barmaids ... breasts. Henrik gives a groggy half-smile in the dark. He reaches a hand to where he imagines her chest is. He’s not sure whether he finds it or not. She’s wearing her clothes ... maybe some sort of nightdress, a baby-doll or something.
&
nbsp; ‘I knew you’d come,’ he whispers. ‘I was going to call on you when we got back to London. Khan’s a shit, he’ll dump you the minute the plane lands.’
‘I know.’ Her hand rubbing him, rubbing in wider circles, taking in shoulders and down over his stomach. Feels good. ‘He doesn’t understand how I like it.’
‘Like it?’
‘Sex.’ A low guttural sound, more moan than whisper. ‘I love it.’ Still rubbing, smooth hand. ‘I like it tied up. Khan doesn’t like that, but it’s such a turn on. What about you, huh? Is it a turn on for you?’
‘Sure.’ He’s waking up now. Tied up?
‘Want to try? I’ve got some of Khan’s ties. Want to try it with his ties?’
‘Why not?’ Her hand is insistent on him now. She moves one of his arms, then the other, until his hands are behind him, grasping at the bedposts. He realises now that she wants to tie him up ... not what he had in mind, but all the same ... And in fact she’s already busy. It’s easy for her to slip the ties around his wrists.
‘Not too tight are they?’
‘No.’ Lying. His wrists feel like the circulation’s been cut.
And around his feet too, so he is splayed and naked on the bed. He knows he’s in good shape, but sucks his gut in a little anyway. He’s stiff as a beer-pump himself now. Damn, he’ll make her bells ring, little Shari’s bells ring. Oh Christ, but if she calls out ... what if Khan hears? He’s a pretty light sleeper, what if he bursts in while he’s lying here all trussed ...
Bells ... make her bells ring ...