Lemonade and Lies (11 page)

I don’t remember falling asleep, but must have done, for my next conscious thought took place in the dark. I was rudely awakened by a tall, athletic, blond haired, blazing eyed Viking-look-alike who made no attempt to control his anger. It sounded like he’d been head butting my door. But it was only his fists. For David Ovenden had large fists and they almost broke my bedroom door down, (but then the architect may well have been pragmatic in his choice of wood for internal doors).

“Where the fuck is he?”

His tone was accusing, and for the life of me, I couldn’t imagine what I was being accused of.

“Jamie, where is he?” he hissed urgently.

“How would I know?”

“He’s been gone all day and we’re supposed to meet up at seven o’clock!”

I rubbed my eyes. “So?”

“So! It’s six thirty and there’s still no sign of him.” David fired the words out rapidly, as if speaking at normal speed was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

I stifled a laugh, for he looked ridiculous.

“Okay, come in,” I said in resignation. I didn’t want to be alone in my room with him. (Alice was serious about the man. Alice was my friend. There was no room for ambiguity.) But in his present state he might go off and do something stupid that could put us both in danger.

“So what’s the problem?” I asked, hoping the answer would be short.

He looked surprised at my failure to grasp his dilemma. Lack of communication – it’s a tricky thing.

“At seven thirty Jamie and I are supposed to be following the others.”

He clocked my cynical look and hurried on. “Purely as a backup. We weren’t meant to do anything, just stay in the background at a safe distance. What am I supposed to do now?”

“Have a night in with the TV? I hear they’re showing re-runs of Miami Vice.”

“Don’t be flippant, Jill. You know we need to keep tabs on Viktor.”

“I thought the professionals were already doing that.”

“That’s not the point.”

“And what is?”

“The point is that Jamie seems to be missing,” he said.

“He’s a big boy. He can look after himself. He's probably gone to join the others in his team.”

“We’ve got to do something.”

“Oh I see, it’s
we
now, is it?” I said, thinking that David hadn’t really got the hang of this communication thing. The fact that it was a two-way street. “What happened to me being sent to my room and all that keeping a low profile stuff?”

“If you don’t want to come, I’ll do it on my own,” he said. “The van’s downstairs in the underground car park.” The way his eyes failed to meet mine, looking instead at a small patch of carpet in front of him, made me rethink the reply I’d been going for. I was about to tell him to
man-up
and that re-runs of Miami Vice would suit me just fine. Better than sitting in a cold van for hours when Jamie would have the whole thing sewn up anyway.

I would go. It was probably a stupid decision, but David didn’t want to go alone. I couldn’t think why. Surely, he wasn’t afraid, not someone of his stature and self assurance. Then I remembered Bill, my flamboyant ex, the man who boasted that there wasn’t another soul on earth he feared. And the way he’d run. And I figured that maybe David was right. Where Viktor Kabak was concerned, it was wise not to go alone.

“This is fun.”

David Ovenden used irony a lot. I was learning new stuff about him all the time - like he wasn’t the most patient of men and the confinement was getting to him. Perhaps the reality of surveillance, freezing your unmentionables in a beat-up van for two hours in temperatures below zero, didn’t quite fit with his romantic notion of the job.

“Give it half an hour,” I said, “and we’ll call it quits.” I wasn’t having fun either, but had a gut feeling about this now.

David wasn’t happy at the prospect of another thirty minutes in the cramped space. Long legs like his weren’t built for it. And although this surveillance had been his idea in the first place, he seemed to have lost the appetite for it.

He made an exaggerated, theatrical sound as he dramatically sucked air in through his mouth. It was like a sigh, but in reverse. I was getting the hang of it now. It was a habit he had when he was about to make a critical judgement or underline a comment he considered important.

“I’d never have put the bastard down as gay.”

It was his favourite theme of the night. Each time he returned to it he became angry, as if - in his eyes at least - the ‘crime’ of being gay was worse than anything else Viktor had done.

I found such morality strange. But maybe it was a male thing, that I couldn’t be expected to understand.

“Going into a gay bar doesn’t automatically give you membership of the club,” I said.

“Eh?” He looked surprised. Whether that was because I’d ventured an opinion on the subject, or because someone was challenging his, I couldn’t tell.

The pub on C J Hambros plass looked like a cool place. Not that we’d been inside, but David had Googled it on his mobile and discovered it was the hub of gay activity in Oslo. Still, that didn’t prove a thing.

It didn’t bother me if Kabak was gay, although I didn’t think he was. That wasn’t why I despised him. The fact that he was a heartless bastard who made money off the back of other people’s misery was good enough reason for me. That, and the way he’d threatened my family. The gay thing was his choice. We’re all different. Live and let live. But apparently David didn’t feel the same.

“Maybe we should get off-side and leave the professionals to deal with it,” he said, not a bit embarrassed by his obvious U-turn. He was cold and bored and from what I knew of him, it was well past the time when he would expect to refuel the inner man. For David that appeared to mean regular access to huge quantities of highly fattening foods. His attitude to calories both impressed and unnerved me. And while I marvelled at his ability to ignore portion control, I’ve never felt comfortable around such over indulgence.

“Well, what about it?” he asked.

“What?” I knew very well
what
, but was getting my own back. I was just here to make up numbers, wasn’t I?

“Christ’s sake Jill, will you concentrate!”
Oh yes, David was definitely getting hungry.
“We should head back to the hotel.”

I didn’t answer. It didn’t sound like he was taking an opinion poll anyway. Jamie’s guys had gone into the club and unless there was a back way out (which we hadn’t actually checked) then the detectives were still inside the pub. So was Viktor. There was a piano bar in there and a D.J. Maybe they were all enjoying the atmosphere.

*

We went back to the hotel. I hadn’t argued with David, for there didn’t seem much point in wasting the energy. Besides, I couldn’t translate my uneasy, gut feeling that something was badly wrong into words. Bill would have been surprised to find me lost for words. He’d once declared that I had far too much to say.

I took refuge in the mini bar, setting myself a challenge. To get as drunk as possible in the shortest time. I’d already polished off one Bacardi and coke when, for the second time that night, David almost broke my door down. His face was pale with a fine sheen of sweat on it, and he had difficulty producing sensible, understandable speech. I wasn’t the only one then.

I led him to a chair and headed straight back to the mini bar, pouring one of the tiny bottles into a glass. No ice. No mixer. He didn’t look as if he needed either. He downed it in one, and his hands shook as he drank. Shit! If he was in this state, then something awful must have happened.

“They’ve got Jamie.” The words seemed to generate an allergic reaction between David and the alcohol. He headed for the bathroom and I could hear loud, painful retching. I hoped he’d made it as far as the toilet bowl.

He came back looking ashen, and his body was shaking. The guy didn’t strike me as someone who scared easily. Anyone who could take on Atlantic breakers the way he did could hardly be a coward, so I guessed this was shock and covered him with my duvet. He threw it off impatiently.

“We’ve got to get out. Viktor probably knows where we are by now.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“No time for that. Get packed.”

An order. Plain and simple. No consultation. Not even the pretence of treating me like a fellow human being with equal rights. So I did what any self respecting female would do. I dug my heels in.

“I’m not moving a muscle till I know what’s going on,” I said.

People seemed to think they could move me around like a piece on a chessboard. Of course there was something to be said for instant obedience. Especially if you were in a sticky situation at the battlefront and following orders without debate was necessary, even vital. But I wasn’t in the bloody army and I wanted to have some control over my actions.

“This is no time to be bloody-minded, Jill. We need to move quickly.”

“And what about Jamie? We can’t just abandon him.”

David stopped in his tracks. He’d been heading for my wardrobe. Seemed to think I couldn’t pack by myself.

“I’m sorry about Jamie, but that’s his job. He knew what he was getting into. Besides, he's got the other two guys to look out for him.”

“Bollocks! That’s an excuse and not a good one.”

He was looking for justification for running away. I felt the same, except I needed to know exactly what we were running from and why it was okay to leave Jamie to face it.

If Kabak and his scum were still free to harass me and my kids, then running away wouldn’t be anything but a temporary solution. I needed more than that. I needed my life back.

“I had a phone call from one of Jamie’s guys. It was their idea we should leave.”

“And?”

“Three men helped Jamie into a car and the CID guys shadowed it. He was having troubling walking.”

“Maybe he was drunk,” I said, knowing it was unlikely. But hope goes hand-in-hand with optimism.

“Yeah. Or maybe Viktor’s drumming up business for hospital emergency rooms.”

“Okay, so where’ve they taken him?”

“No idea. The cops lost them in traffic.” He gave me an odd, judgemental look, as if the policemen’s failure was somehow my fault. Or maybe David was still pissed at me for not immediately following his orders and packing up, like I probably should have done.

“Shouldn’t be too hard to find them, Oslo’s a small city,” I said. “And I packed a map.”
I’m not above using the odd bit of irony myself.

“You’re not serious. You wouldn’t go looking for him! Jamie said you were stubborn – but that’d be madness.”

Jamie McDonald thought I was stubborn, did he? I accepted the description gracefully, as a compliment, and smiled. Thought about myself singing in the shower when by all accounts I should have been depressed. “Don’t you know that madness can be very liberating?”

For the first time since I’d known him, the large man in front of me produced a spontaneous belly laugh that echoed noisily around the room. The smile that went with it showed his perfectly-formed, brilliantly-white, tombstone teeth. David would be okay now. We both would. We’d go and look for Jamie. He deserved no less, and he would do the same for us.

I guess I’d always known that Norway would be a cold place, but the reality didn’t hit me until then. Even though winter hadn’t officially arrived, the freezing wind made it hard to suck in a breath.

The Norwegians were no different from the British. The weather was their default topic of conversation. It was going through a mild spell, at least according to the hotel doorman. And he should know, for he spent most of his time out in it. Mild is a relative term, though. The Norwegian idea of mild was wildly different to mine, and I was glad I’d brought my thick padded jacket with me.

People were worried that this coming snow season would be as bad as last year. (You pick things up when you hang around in hotel lobbies). Their idea of bad was having only moderate snowfalls that lightly dusted the place, and would keep serious skiers away. Even in the Høyfjells, where the mountains produced some good downhill runs, in recent years the snowfall had been miserly. The country needed winter tourists. But they expected good skiing and a backdrop of cutesy Christmas card scenes.

I’d never skied. But the thought of that downhill stuff gave me the same feeling that huge roller-coasters did; impressive to look at but I wouldn’t fancy being on one.

Nordic skiing was different. Cross-country, mostly on the flat for a start. Though I imagined it was tough on the ankles, for you only had one set of bindings that fixed your boot to the ski at the toe. I’d fallen in love with the idea of it though. All those miles of lit trails and evening torch parades conjured up a magical fairyland.

“Hey! You listening?”

“What?”

“I said we’ll need to hurry if we want to catch the next ferry,” said David. “Where were you?”

Not thinking about the ferry, obviously. And I suppose that was because the whole idea of what we were about to do made me nervous.
Ideas seem a lot easier and less scary on the drawing board.

David and I were making our way towards the ferry terminal on the Rådhusbrygge Quay in downtown Oslo. It hadn’t been easy persuading the two detectives from the Met to let us go over on the ferry to the Bygdøy Peninsula where Jamie was being held at Kabak’s summer house.

We’d been warned off. ‘Impeding a criminal investigation’ was serious stuff the coppers reminded us, and there were threats of being taken into custody if we got in the way.

We could have stayed in the hotel. It was a
nice
hotel. Luxurious. Welcoming. Expensive. Warm! But the hotel doorman had been promoting the virtues of the Bygdøy Peninsula ever since we arrived. I guess he thought we were tourists and the Viking Ship Museum would be on our list.

That wasn’t the only thing to recommend the peninsula; the guy was a good salesman, maybe he was on commission from the ferry company. The place was a ‘rural idyll, a nature lover’s feast’. Incredible, when you think that it’s part of the city, for it dips its toes into the Oslo fjord and the ferry only takes ten minutes to get there across the harbour.

So we boarded the ferry. For it seemed that today was the day Jamie was to be transported back to some as yet unknown destination. The Met detectives called this information ‘Intel’ which made it sound a whole lot more impressive than saying they’d followed a hunch, or read the tea leaves. But the result might turn out the same.

We’d finally been ‘allowed’ to go after promising that we wouldn’t make contact with the CID guys. They were protective of their anonymity and didn’t want
any
fucking amateur
screwing it up
. Maybe they thought we would provide a good diversion, cover for them, said the cynic lurking in the corner of my brain. But I wanted to go anyway.

“What happens when we get off the ferry?” David hissed. He hadn’t got the idea of trying to blend in. The stage whisper that he must have thought discreet was designed to draw attention, especially if anyone had a particular interest in us. Still, there was only a smattering of passengers on the ferry and they all looked fairly normal.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said. “We play it by ear, I suppose.”

I’d no more idea than David what we were going to do. Our drawing board stuff had been sketchy, at best.
Flexible
had been a word that featured prominently in our planning. That was my word. David’s was suck-it-and-see.

Even when we got to the terminal at Dronningen, there was no real plan. Did we just hang around? Should we walk to the ship museum or one of the other tourist haunts? Or go off half-cocked looking for a summer house that might be Viktor’s? Maybe we should just stay onboard the ferry until it got to its next stop at Bygdøynes.

But if two coppers got off the boat in the next couple of minutes when it docked at Dronningen, then obviously we’d follow them. At a safe distance, of course. For we’d given our word that we wouldn’t interfere.

*

I don’t know how David felt. He didn’t say. But I felt bloody stupid. We’d waited for over an hour, just hanging around the quayside. Ferries came and went, and nobody gave us more than a glance. It crossed my mind that somebody, somewhere, was pulling our chain. Either Viktor, or the men from the Met. Either way it didn’t matter. There was no sign of Jamie or anyone who looked faintly suspicious, unless you counted us.

I cursed myself for being such a simple minded prat. I was about to yell over to David that I was going back on the next ferry, when he came running towards me like a man with an army on his heels. All I’d needed was a bit more patience – and faith in the officers of the Metropolitan Police Service. They should do the lottery this week.

David had spotted the small knot of people when they were still some distance away and now pulled me urgently around the side of the wooden building on the quayside.

“Didn’t you see them?  It’s our Jamie all right and he’s got two of Viktor’s little helpers with him.”

“How can you tell?”

He pulled the binoculars from his jacket pocket with a flourish. “Give me some credit, Jill. Some of us come prepared.”

Okay, so he was a boy scout
. We waited. And my stomach churned. And one glance at David confirmed that, boy scout or not, he was just as scared as I was. His body was stiff, and the pupils of his eyes were dilated.

I had my own problems. Now that the time was finally here, my heart was pounding frantically fast, and the bit of my body meant to produce saliva wasn’t up to the job. I couldn’t rake up enough to help my parched mouth. And I wondered how I’d ever prise my legs from the spot they were glued to. Despite all that, I was determined to get back on the ferry somehow, in case there was a chance to help Jamie.

Circumstance made it easy for us. The posse of Jamie and the two men with him headed onboard the ferry, and in their wake came a noisy group of American tourists. They were gloriously true to their stereotypes and wore brash sports clothes so loudly coloured that the noise pollution could have been picked up in the centre of Oslo. Their presence was a gift. The men escorting Jamie seemed to experience some form of culture shock and after firing angry scowls at the Americans, immediately left the boat deck to take refuge below. It was the perfect chance for the two of us to walk aboard without being spotted.

We stayed on deck. It seemed safer. But the biting cold wind sought out every vulnerable part of your body, made your eyes stream with tears.

“Where the hell are those policemen of yours?” (
Mine
?) “You think they’d be here by now,” complained David, practising his stage whisper again.

“How do I know? Maybe they lost their way - or they’re on the next ferry. Or already on this one. Or lying out there in the woods somewhere.”
What was I? A bloody psychic now?

“We need to think of something fast.” He spat the words at me. “While we’re still on the ferry there’s a chance.”

“What chance?” I said.

“Our
only
chance. Once they get back they’ll have a car waiting. We’ll lose them.”

He was probably right. But what could we do on our own? Where were the police when you needed them?

David was facing me. He’d been moving from foot-to-foot, trying to keep warm on the freezing deck when suddenly he halted dramatically. His eyes locked onto a spot somewhere over my left shoulder. His jaw unhinged itself like he was about to say something, but no words came out. It was a strange, surreal pantomime and he might well have shouted ‘look behind you’. He didn’t. But I looked anyway.

A bizarre assortment of men, nostrils flaring, testosterone gushing, were doing what seemed to come naturally to the alpha male. Either four random ferry passengers were knocking hell out of each other (unlikely) or Viktor Kabak’s muscle men were being given a run for their money by two of England’s finest. Even the copper who looked pensionable had turned into a Rotweiller.

And while a savage fight took place along the companionway, a sorry-looking man dressed only in a pair of scruffy track suit bottoms and a thin tee-shirt went scurrying across the deck. He mounted the rail, and with one enormous leap jumped overboard.

Someone up in the wheelhouse blew the fog horn. A deckhand threw a lifebelt over the side. A woman screamed. David Ovenden said ‘fuck me!’ And I jumped in after Jamie. I knew he couldn’t swim.