Second Intention (16 page)

Doktor Chuckles had been
here.

What the hell was I supposed to do? Sue had disappeared and the nutter who had been stal
king me for three weeks was right here. There was no way this was a coincidence.
He
had made it happen.

I felt a tight knot in my stomach at the thought of it, and frantically tried to think it through. What could I
do
?

Pointless going back in to the police. They wouldn’t understand, and, if my experiences back in
Britain had been anything to go by, they wouldn’t take it seriously anyway. No,
I
had to find him. Find him, and find her, and put an end to this.

It felt as though the taxi driver, knowing that I was in a hurry, was deliberately dragging his heels on the drive down to Valbyhallen. Every set of traffic lights seemed determined to stop me, every slow moving truck and bus in
Copenhagen was in a conspiracy to stop me reaching the venue in time. It seemed like an agonizing slowness, but was probably no worse than any other cab journey I had ever taken. We reached the sports hall a mere fourteen minutes after I had dived into the taxi, but it had seemed a lifetime.

I threw some money at the driver, asking him to wait, then dashed into the hall.

There were still people there. The junior tournament had obviously not long finished. All around the arena people were packing away the pistes, the flags, the sponsors’ hoardings, and the notice boards. On the far side, loading their computers into boxes, were several members of the organising committee.

They looked up, clearly puzzled, as I strode over to them.

‘Hello,’ began the woman who had checked me in the previous day. ‘This is a pleasant surp—’

‘Look,’ I cut in, not wanting to waste a moment’s time. ‘I’m really sorry to bother you but this is rea
lly urgent. I need to find Toby Rutherford. You know, the other British fencer who was here yesterday?’

‘Is anything wrong?’ she frowned, clearly picking up the seriousness of it.

‘It’s a long story, but I
must
find him, urgently. It’s an emergency.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, shaking her head as two more of the organisers joined
us. ‘He has not been here today.’

‘No, I realise that,’ I said, ‘but do you know where he’s staying? Which hotel he was at?’

‘Sorry,’ she shrugged, looking around at the other two before saying something quickly in Danish. They both shook their heads and said something back which I didn’t recognise.

‘We all live locally, so we weren’t in any of the hotels,’ explained the older of the two men, ‘but Rolf might know. They were all staying at the Roskbro.’

He called over to a wrinkled old man in a brown suit who I recognised as one of the presidents from the previous day. He ambled over and was asked, in a language I recognised as German, about Toby.

‘Ja,’ he nodded. ‘Der rothaarigger Englander? Ja, ja.’

They then had a further exchange which was all too fast for me to follow.

‘He is staying the Roskbro,’ the woman confirmed. ‘He remembers seeing him at breakfast. Apparently he was quite rude to one of the hotel staff, so they could hardly miss him.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, as I turned to head for the door. ‘Dankeschon, Rolf.’

To my relief, the cab driver had waited, just as I’d asked, and he got me to the Hotel Roskbro in a matter of minutes, although the stern faced man at the reception desk was of no help. No, he asserted firmly, they could not give me any information concerning any of the guests. I told him it was an emergency, but he was having none of it.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It is hotel policy. We can not tell you if the person you are asking about is here.’

I was on the verge of smacking him in the face when somebody I recognised appeared at my side. It was Jan Meeuvissen, one of the fencers from the previous day’s competition. He had, I realised, been sitting in one of the easy chairs in the corner of the lobby, quietly reading a paper, and had cl
early heard this last exchange

‘You have just missed him,’ he said, throwing a stern look at the receptionist. ‘He has just checked out, about a minute before you arrived. He took his bags through the service door there down to the car park.’

The car park was a small two-storey affair tacked onto the back of the hotel, all metal girders and grey concrete. By the time I reached the top of the ramp my heart was pounding from the sprint out into the cold of the night. There had been no cars at all on the ground floor, but as I ran up the ramp to the first level I saw, off to my left, a BMW saloon with its boot open.

And there he was, loading his bulky fencing bag into the back. About to make his escape.

‘Toby!’ I shouted, dashing towards him.

His head snapped around, and his face became a snarling mask as he recognised me. I was almost on him as he turned, and something swung up from the boot towards me, something hard and metallic in his right hand.

Had my reactions been any slower, the heavy object would have smacked right into the side of my head, but I managed to tilt my head just enough that it glanced off, catching me sharply on the ear.

It hurt like crazy all the same, and I pitched forward past him and hit the deck.

He followed in with a savage kick to my ribs, and again tried to bring the dark metal object down onto my skull. For the second time it missed by the narrowest of margins, and this time I managed to grab it and twist it out of his grasp, kicking up into his abdomen at the same time.

He flew backwards against the guardrail, his squeal of pain echoing around the concrete walls of the car park. He was on me again by the time I had got to my feet, his fists pummelling at my head. One of them connected with my cheekbone and a thousand bright white stars filled my vision.

I did the only thing I could, used the only weapon left to me. His blunt instrument, whatever it was, was still in my hand and I swung it with all the force I could muster straight into his temple.

The next bit all seemed to happen in slow motion. I can see it all in my mind’
s eye so clearly even now. Toby, knocked senseless by the blow to his head, pitching sideways against the guardrail, then disappearing completely as he flipped over it and fell to the roadway below.

The next bit all went fuzzy, and I realised I was passing out. I was aware of Meuvissen standing over me, and before my eyes closed I could dimly see, lying on the ground a few feet
away, the dark shape of a ten inch high cast metal replica of the Little Mermaid.

Seventeen

Toby
was still out cold when we flew back to Britain the following day. He would recover, although the fall hadn’t done him any favours, and with a broken jaw, fractured pelvis, dislocated shoulder and concussion he was unlikely to be leaving his hospital bed for a few days yet.

Before that the Copenhagen Police had a lot that they wanted to speak to him about.

Sue, as it happened, had been safe and sound back at our hotel throughout the whole business. The full story of what had happened didn’t come to light until later that night, after I had spent several hours being questioned by Detective Sergeant Torssen.

I was in no mood to spend my evening in an interview room going over the whole business, but didn’t really have any choice in the matter. My head ached, I had caught a nasty gash on my ear, and my ribs hurt from the kicking I’d received. Every time I tried to take in a deep breath I winced, and I just wanted to get back to Sue and sink down into a hot bath with a big glass of whisky, but it wasn’t going to happen just yet. The paramedics had patched me up at the scene and said I’d be okay, then handed me over to the police.

Torssen, a stocky man in his late forties, was very polite and very thorough. He began by reassuring me that my wife was safe and waiting for me out in the reception area of the police station, then went on to explain that I was not being charged with anything at that stage. He just wanted to get to the bottom of what had happened, and hear my side of things, before they decided what to do next.

He was very patient in his questioning, letting me speak as much as I wanted to, only occasionally cutting in with a question when he sought further clarification of something I’d said, and he gave me gentle prompts here and there to encourage me to open up a little more.

I told him everything, and he listened carefully. He made notes, he checked records, and every half hour or so he would disappear to seek confirmation of various details I’d given. He didn’t jump to any conclusions, or try and find quick, easy answers. No, this was an experienced professional at work. He was doing this properly.

The whole process must have taken a good three or four hours, on and off, but he finally came in with the news that they had pieced together the full story and I would be free to go. They fully understood that I had been the victim in all this, and had acted in self-defence in the car park, and they had plenty of evidence to confirm  it.

Meuvissen, it seemed, had realised that something was seriously wrong, and had followed me into the car park where he had seen the whole thing. The police officers at the railway station had confirmed that an Englishmen, in a state of some agitation, had that afternoon sought their help saying he couldn’t find his wife. Torssen had also been onto the British police and run both Toby and myself through criminal records. I had come up clean, but it turned out that Toby had something of a history.

He had actually been arrested on two occasions, once for indecently assaulting a fellow student back in Oxford, and once for ABH when he had flown into a rage with some bloke while playing golf, of all things. Each time the charges had been dropped before the case got anywhere near the courts, probably due to the intervention of daddy and his magic cheque book.

All the same, it told Torssen as much as he needed to know about Toby Rutherford. This was a young man on the edge, capable of acts of violence when provoked, and doubtless believing that he was above the law.

The most damning evidence came when they went through his hire car in the car park and searched through his luggage. There, in the bottom of his fencing bag, buried beneath a pile of sweaty fencing kit, they had found a brown envelope.

It contained a scrap of paper with a doodle on it in red ink. It was the face of a clown, but with its features twisted into a menacing grimace. There had also been two photographs showing the exterior of a house, which Sue had confirmed was our place back in Ely.

We h
ad definitely got our man. Toby Rutherford
was
Doktor Chuckles.

Sue’s disappearance, I later found out, had a simple, if rather sinister, explanation. Whilst she had been in the toilets a young woman had approached her and handed her a note, saying that an Englishman outside had asked her to give it to the dark haired lady in the purple coat. Sue, of course, had assumed it was from me, and this was confirmed when she read it. ‘
Can’t explain
,’ it said,
‘you
must
go back to the hotel now! See you there. Love, R. xx’

I hadn’t told her about my suspicions that our mysterious stalker was there in Copenhagen with us. Hell, we’d been having such a great time that even
I
had forgotten about Doktor Chuckles. She was completely clueless. Although she couldn’t imagine what the emergency was that had made me send in the message, she had no reason to doubt that it had come from me. On emerging from the toilets she had looked around, but not seen me anywhere, and then done as the note said, catching a cab back to the hotel in Valby.

Of the woman who had handed her the note, there had been no sign.

*                  *                  *                  *

Neither of us talked about the business with Doktor Chuckles on that Monday evening. We would, soon enough, but right then we both knew he didn’t deserve any more air time. No, having got home we just wanted to have as normal an evening as possible.

Sue cooked a wonderful dinner, and we settled down with a bottle of wine to watch a DVD. I’ve always liked action films and Sue is a big fan of Sean Connery, and we nearly opted for
Entrapment
,  but something, I don’t know what it was, made us choose an early Bond instead. Perhaps it was that we took comfort in seeing the world when it was a much more innocent place, or maybe it was just that we didn’t want a film with modern computers in.

Anyway, we chose
From Russia With Love
and thoroughly enjoyed it. By half past ten, with a few glasses of claret inside me and the threat of Doktor Chuckles now gone, I was feeling very mellow. I would sleep soundly that night.

Just as I was about to drift off into sleep it hit me. Hit me like a thunderbolt.

I had got it all completely wrong.

*                  *                  *                  *

The sun was just setting behind the cathedral as I reached the bench where we had agreed to meet. I had been to St. Albans once before, and knew that this long sweep of grass leading down to the cobbled streets of the oldest part of the city suited my needs perfectly. There was nobody about, and no buildings nearby, with the exception of the imposing bulk of the cathedral behind me. I figured that he would have been happiest to meet out in the open.

All around there were piles
of leaves, the last traces of autumn scooped up to await collection. They had caught my eye the moment I had got there earlier that afternoon, the first time, long before I made the phone call asking him if we could meet up.

It had occurred to me earlier
that once you have figured out “why?” then “who?” becomes a much simpler matter. The trouble with this whole thing was that the “why?” just had no sense to it. The only thing to do, having figured it out, was to ask.

When he arrived, with the shadows of the bare trees lengthening before me, we were polite enough, but then the encounter took a different course to the one I had envisaged. I had imagined that I would challenge him, he would deny it, I would present him with incontrovertible proof (not that I really had any), and he would deny it again, before finally breaking down and admitting to the whole thing.

But that wasn’t how it went.

‘Well,’ he said, plonking himself down onto the bench next to me, ‘it took you long enough, didn’t it? Still, it wasn’t
too
soon, was it? Got the job done, all the same.’

‘Why, Sean?’ It was all I could think of to say.

‘Oh, come on now,’ he said, trying to sound as charming as usual, ‘you can’t pretend that this doesn’t count as a good result. You hated him just as much as me, and this way we get what we both wanted after all. And you walk away from it entirely blameless.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This guy was a total lunatic.

‘Sean …’ I shook my head. I really was lost for words.

‘Let’s face it. Toby
is not a nice person,’ he went on. ‘In fact, he’s a worthless little shit who got what was coming to him. Somebody should have thrown him off a car park years ago. You just needed the incentive to do it, that was all.’

I stood up. I really couldn’t just sit there next to him while he was calmly telling me about this as though he was describ
ing his tactics for a DE fight. ‘And so you decided to put me
and
Sue through all this just to take Toby down a peg or two?’ I tried to speak as calmly as possible. If he picked up the rage I was feeling inside he might stop, and I needed him to give me the full story.

‘Well, you did it all extremely well. Much better than
I
could have done.’ At this he actually gave a little laugh. ‘You were the ice to his fire. Perfect man for the job, if we’re honest. I knew if I pressed the right buttons we’d end up with something like what happened.’

‘So how did you do it all?’ I said, flatly, hoping that some twisted sense of pride in what he had achieved would make him admit to all that he had done.

‘Oh, a lot of it was fairly easy, really.’ He gazed out at the old, half-timbered houses of lower St. Albans. ‘The car, the body wires, the phones, the e-mails, they were all quite simple. Your end of it wasn’t too hard.’

‘
My
end?’

‘Sure. You don’t think you were the only one who needed a little prompting, do you? When you’re d
ealing with a nutcase like Toby it’s a lot harder to predict how he’s going to react, so that called for a little more subtlety.’

‘It was you who told him about the tournament in Copenhagen?’

‘Oh yeah. Once he realised there was a chance to show you up by doing better in a B-Grade he jumped at it.’

Yes, I could see it now. Lots of little things, which on their own would seem perfectly harmless, but would buil
d up into a lot more given Toby Rutherford’s precarious grip on his self-control. Like the wager on our DE fight, for example.

‘And you put the stuff in his fencing bag that the police found?’

‘Sure,’ he nodded. ‘It actually takes a lot less time to do that than piss around with his body wires, after all. And there was a bit more, besides.’

Yes, I thought. There would be. Sue and I would not have been the only ones to suffer with the micro-terrorism. Sean had been playing us off against each other. It was the perfect second intention strategy.

I stared at him for a moment. I know I should have been choosing my words carefully at that point, but this was all getting too much. The enormity of what I had been tricked into was getting to me.

‘Y
ou’re crazy,’ I said, quietly. ‘You haven’t even got the balls to do your own dirty work.’

‘Hey,’ he shrugged, and laughed again. ‘I might be crazy, but I’m not fuckin’ stupid.’

‘Why me?’ I said, my anger beginning to show through. ‘I thought we were friends? Why do this to me and Sue?’

‘Oh, don’t get all high and mighty!’ His voice was loaded with a scorn I had never seen in him before. All of a sudden, the true Sean was coming through. There was nothing charming about him now. ‘You got off lightly, boy. I could have made it much harder for you. Could have sent that  lovely wife of yours off to hang around the red light district for a while. Could have sent those photos at a time when you were at your desk, and had them showing some kid having sex with a goat. I could have made this a whole lot worse for you, but I didn’t because it didn’t suit my purpose. You were working for me, after all.’

He was up on his feet by this time and he took a couple of strides away before turning back to face me.

‘The fact is,’ he continued, with a sneer, the anger in his voice rising by the second, ‘that I don’t need your friendship that much. You’ve got your beautiful wife and your lovely house and your perfect existence, and you have absolutely no fuckin’ right to be higher in the rankings than me just because I was late for a tournament!’

I just stood there with my mouth open. He had done this because of
fencing?

I had heard enough. It was time to end this, once and for all.

I turned and looked down the slope to where a line of cars was parked at the edge of the street about a hundred yards away.

‘Did you get all that, Derek?’ I said, w
ithout raising my voice at all.

The headlights on the first of the cars flashed twice. He had got the whole thing.

‘Rifle microphone,’ I said, turning back to Sean. ‘Picks everything up, clear as a bell, right out to two hundred metres. Anything you want to add to what you’ve just said?’

A look crossed his face as it dawned on him what I had done. It was the second time I had seen that expression in three days, and I didn’t like it any more this time than the first. As he launched himself forward, his murderous intent quite plain, I dived sideways and over the bench. I had made a point of wearing a tracksuit, whilst Sean, dressed in his work clothes of pinstripe suit and heavy overcoat, couldn’t
move anything like as fast as I could.