The Ties That Bind (37 page)

‘What about
them
?’ she cried.

‘If you don’t get your fucking claws out of my arm I’ll fucking put you in there with them,’ said Vaughan. ‘Look, you do what you like with them. You’re on your own now. You’re the one with the brain. Use it.’

‘But if I leave them there and they . . . I can’t deal with that on my own, Vaughan. None of this is set up for me to deal with it on my own! You can’t just dump it all on me. If I let them out, they’ll get the law on me. And what about when the other one shows up?’

‘Not my problem,’ said Vaughan, then in the next breath, ‘Get off me, you stupid old bitch! Right, that’s it.’ There followed the sound of a large object being thrown against the wall, then a whimper and a crash as something solid shook; Luke pictured all too vividly Sandy’s small soft body slamming hard against a filing cabinet.

The sound of a man hitting a woman made him wonder how he had ever been such an idiot as to romanticise violence. His adrenal glands made one last stand, flooding his body with an energy he had given up on, dying cells knitting torn muscles back together so that they carried him up the stairs. The only man in Brighton weaker than Luke followed behind him, grunting with every movement. In the hallway outside, the scuffle continued. Luke didn’t actually know what he thought they were going to do when they got to the top. His arms and legs were still rubbery: he had to look as well as feel his way along the steps.

Grand wheezed to a halt beside him and crouched on all fours. Each breath now was a death rattle. The plaque that marked the house as his was lustreless above Grand’s head and the silver disc whirred next to the old man’s ear. He might not have verbalised his pain but his face was etched with it, the lines on his cheeks and forehead double their previous depth.

The key was in its hole, the bar of the lock solid in the jamb. Luke pressed one ear to the cellar door. His whole body slumped against it and he knew that if he tried to stand unsupported again, he would not be able to.

It was hard to believe that she could recover from that but evidently she was coming back for more because he said it again. ‘Jesus, get
off
me, will you?’ Another blow, soft and dull, finally subdued her into a low moaning. ‘Right,’ said Vaughan decisively and Luke heard the unmistakable jingle of car keys. He couldn’t seriously mean to take the Bentley. The head-turning car would mark his escape as clearly as any tracking device.

‘
Right
,’ he said again, and the repetition gave the lie to his previous conviction. He doesn’t know what to do, thought Luke. He doesn’t know what to do about us and he doesn’t know what to do about Sandy. He had seen what Vaughan would do when cornered, and fresh fear for all their lives coiled around his heart.

‘What the fuck?’ Vaughan’s tone had changed from anger to astonishment.

Jem’s voice was faint but unmistakable, calling Luke’s name over and over in a rising keen. Seconds later came a bang that shook the whole house as the front door hit the wall. A chill wind made a blade of itself through the gaps between the cellar door and its jamb. Jem’s voice rose to a screech, Sandy began to scream and Vaughan to swear. The sickening discordant trio was silenced by a fourth voice, deep and commanding, a big gun that fired the cannonball word, ‘Police.’

They were saved. They were all in trouble but they were saved. He would worry about his book and the lens and Jem’s suicide note and the rest of the mess afterwards. With that thought, the flight instinct abandoned him and returned his body to suffering. He shivered as sweat cooled on his skin.

‘Never thought I’d be glad of a police raid,’ murmured Grand.

‘Bang,’ said Luke with what he felt sure was his last breath.

‘What’s that?’ said Grand. ‘Oh, right.’ He hammered weakly at the door with loose fists, wincing every time his hands made contact with the wood.

‘
Luke!
’ Jem’s voice was close now. ‘Are you in there?’

‘For God’s . . . keep
back
, sir, we’re dealing with this,’ someone growled.

The crime-show crackle of a police radio was the sweetest music Luke had ever heard. Someone turned the key and the door began to press inwards.

‘It’s no good, it’s bolted from the inside or something,’ said the same gruff voice. Luke realised that his weight was holding it shut and used his meagre remaining strength to lurch to the right. Unable to stand, he tumbled through the doorway and collapsed onto the hallway floor, his glasses falling off and his cheek smashing against the tiles.

Chapter 55

The night rushed in through the open front door, its freezing slap keeping Luke awake, keeping him alive. Outside, he could just about see the black-and-white planes of a police car and a few shifting shapes that formed the beginnings of a crowd.

Vaughan was cuffed to a water pipe, his arm twisted behind him in a half-Nelson. He strained to free himself, the handcuffs clinking in tinny harmony with the smooth bass ring of the pipe. The uniformed policeman who had opened the cellar door stood nervously by him. Another officer was trying to keep Jem under control; he strained like a leashed dog to be allowed near Luke. He was still in his work clothes, his tie slack around his neck. He had put most of the weight back on and looked like his old self again, although Luke had never seen anything like the pure wide-eyed horror on his face right now.

‘Christ, Luke, what have they done to you?’

Luke was incapable of response. Jem surged forward again; the policeman caught his elbow just in time.

‘Last time of asking, sir, or I’ll have to cuff you, too.’ Jem took two steps back and watched Luke through laced fingers. The policeman turned to speak into the radio pinned to his shoulder.

‘Request backup and one ambulance
immediately
to 33 Disraeli Square.’ Luke felt something light press and slither against his back as Grand crawled out from behind him, creaking and wheezing like an old machine. The officer’s eyes widened. ‘Request backup and
two
ambulances immediately to 33 Disraeli Square.’

No one had bothered to restrain Sandy. She sat trembling halfway up the stairs, an armful of the pages Luke had scattered on his way in held against her breast. The livid imprint of Vaughan’s knuckles on her cheekbone was the only colour in her face. Luke recognised the hollow expression of someone whose plans have just come to nothing,
worse
than nothing, someone who has gambled everything and lost it.

‘I’m really behind on this filing,’ she said vaguely, holding up a glossy sheet. ‘I mean, she’s not as young as she was and what if she dies? I’ve got to be ready for the obits. The phones will be ringing off the hook.’ Her voice was calm and easy: it was the first time Luke had ever seen her even remotely dispassionate about her archive, and her lack of stress was more terrifying than the expected panic. He caught the policemen exchanging a sardonic glance that said
nutter
and then their faces blurred before his eyes. Bile shot up his throat and splashed on the floor. Grand, still on his hands and knees, shuffled out of its way.

Vaughan paused in his struggle for a moment; the shaken pipe continued to reverberate, clanging twice more before falling still. The low note echoed twice.

Luke could not fight a theatrically convulsive shiver.

‘He needs covering up,’ said Jem. ‘May I?’ He held his hands up to the police officer to show he meant no harm, and at his nod, took off his coat and covered Luke with it, then hovered his hand over Luke’s cheek. He polished Luke’s glasses with the end of his tie and, gently lifting his head, set them gently back on his nose. His poor vision now was not the smear of myopia but a narrowing tunnel: Jem was a white circle in the blackness. In his suit, he looked like James Bond in the opening credits. A small detached part of him registered the humour in this.

‘Jesus,’ Jem said. ‘Poor baby. When’s this ambulance coming? He needs help
now
.’

‘Any minute, sir,’ said the second officer. ‘I’ll chase it,’ and he repeated his request in the same even tones as before.

‘I had a bad feeling when I got here and that Bentley was parked outside,’ Jem said. I remembered the pictures from your house, and what I’d read. And then I saw the broken door and the shouting and I thought, Luke’s in trouble, I need to call the police.’ He placed a hesitant hand on Luke’s shoulder. ‘Darling, I didn’t know it was going to be
this
bad.’

Grand used the banister to pull himself up to his full height, hands linked loosely around the newel post, almost in parody of the way Vaughan was manacled only a few feet away. Grand’s eyes searched Vaughan’s face, but the other man had already shut down and stared through them all at an unlabelled filing cabinet on the other side of the hallway.

‘The irony is, I’d’ve given it to you if you’d asked,’ said Grand.

He half-sat, half-collapsed into a twisted sitting position at the foot of the stairs. He was close enough to Sandy to touch the hem of her dress. She pressed back into the wall, holding her loose sheaf out like a shield.

‘Why isn’t he wearing handcuffs?’ said Jem, pointing at Grand. ‘You can’t just arrest the flunkey. You need to take
him
down as well.’

‘Right, let’s get some names,’ said the first policeman. He turned to Grand. ‘And you are?’

Grand’s lungs sucked loud and hard at air they could not use.

‘His name is Joss Grand,’ said Jem. The second policeman’s eyebrows jumped in instant recognition and Luke wondered which of Grand’s incarnations, past or present, had leaped so easily to his mind.

‘Grand as in the estate agent? I rent my flat off you. Cromwell Road in Hove.’

‘Never mind your bloody flat!’ shouted Jem. ‘This is Joss Grand as in
the gangster
. He’s got a history of violence as long as your arm.’ Even if Jem had been on the right track, his increasingly manic tone would have undermined his argument.

‘OK, sir,
we’ll
get to the bottom of this.’

The second policeman continued talking to Grand. ‘This one of your places, is it?’

‘It’s
not his!
’ shrilled Sandy. ‘It’s
mine!
It’s my
home
! I’ve got nowhere else to put everything.’ She gathered her papers close again. Corners crumpled and folded.

‘Not after tonight,’ spluttered Grand. He was close enough to touch her. ‘It’s all over, Cassandra. Game’s up. I don’t care no more, d’you understand? You can tell who you like. I’ve had enough.’

‘No,’ said Sandy. ‘It
can’t
be over. It
can’t
have all been for nothing.’ She threw up her arms and loose magazine cuttings swirled in the wind tunnel hallway. If newsprint was a blizzard then these pages were an autumn storm, coloured leaves half-hiding her figure as she got to her feet and scrambled to the top of the stairs. At the landing, she took the key out of the heavy steel door and turned it from the other side. The light fitting above their heads shook as she ran through the decades and centuries of her archive, up to the second floor.

‘What’s she doing?’ said the first policeman. He climbed the first flight of stairs and tested the door with his boot. He shouldered it but one man wasn’t enough. ‘Jesus, what’s this made of?’

‘She can’t go far,’ said the second.

Another door slammed. Sandy must now be in the attic, in that dusty old office with its hoard of dead technology. Luke knew she would be fumbling in the desk drawer for the key that she said hadn’t been used in years, the one that opened the door set in the middle of the wall. It was a pathetic attempt at escape that went straight to his heart despite everything she had done. She could lock as many doors behind her as she liked, but the moment she set foot on the fire escape it would rattle and clank. The police could simply exit the front door, walk around to the side of the building and arrest her on the bottom step. He waited for the sound of footsteps on iron but all he could hear was the hum of a noisy gadget being operated several floors above. Nothing Luke could imagine made sense. A vacuum cleaner? Too shrill. A food blender? The voices of the spectators in the square swelled.

From far overhead, there was a rumbling drag. Luke closed his eyes, the better to sharpen his hearing. It was so different from the expected noise of feet on the fire escape that it took him a few seconds to recognise it as the sound of a particularly difficult sash window being forced open.

The chorus outside fell quiet, as if at the twitch of a conductor’s baton.

With great effort, Luke turned his head towards the open front door. A flurry of tiny white flakes blew past it, a few making it into the house. A little square danced before his eyes and he identified it as a fragment of a page that had been put through a shredder. Before he could guess what it might be, someone outside screamed. The rubberneckers on the pavement scattered to form a horseshoe. Sandy was a swift dark shadow in his eyeline for less than a second, then she hit the unseen pavement with a loud wet crack.

The second policeman rushed at the crowd, managing somehow to marshal them into the garden. Someone was still screaming and someone else kept telling her, or him, to shut up. Luke’s eyes flickered closed as he went under.

He surfaced again to a blue flashing blur. The backup squad car had arrived along with the ambulances. Officers swooped to surround Vaughan and paramedics were all over Luke and Grand, elbowing Jem out of the way. Luke was stretchered into the waiting ambulance, the tilt of his body on the way down the front steps allowing a glimpse of the gawping crowd. The shredded document had been scattered by the wind but a handful of tiny flakes still floated around the square. One landed on Luke’s shoulder. Up close, the paper was not white but very pale green.

The paramedics told him to keep absolutely still but he could not resist turning his head to look. Sandy’s curves had been grotesquely twisted into angles; her right leg was up and behind her, the shoe flung off, the left elbow bent ninety degrees in the wrong direction. She looked like a shop mannequin that had been wrongly assembled. Seagulls that had parted to accommodate her terrible flight plunged to investigate, cawing over her twisted form. One swooped like a vulture to peck tentatively at her flesh. The girl in the red coat was reduced to carrion.