Déjà Vu

Chapter Ten

David had been given orange overalls and cuffed to the floor of the hotel’s wine cellar by a short shackle, which forced him to crouch. He wore a hangman’s hood. A faraway speaker blasted static. He remained still and silent. Let his captors think he was done. He daydreamed that he was poised on a starting block. He could maintain the stance. He played squash twice a week. Cycled to and from work. The room here was cold, but he had known colder.

He sterilised his thoughts through the slow recall of his graduate seminar on psychological interrogation. The physical stress of the crouch was designed to weaken him physically. The static filled his hearing; the hood removed his sight. Given time, such sensory deprivation would turn his mind upon itself, trigger an incestuous multiplication of thoughts would lead led to hallucination and breakdown.

There was a crack in his composure that McWhirter could probe. Bruce was dead. David had murdered him. The stain would mark David forever, but his deeper fear spoke to his daughter’s reaction.

Any further thoughts were smothered by the sudden silence. The speaker had been turned off.

David heard flat shoes approaching slowly.

A woman said, ‘I can get you out if you come with me and ask no questions.’

‘Deal.’

The hood was pulled away by a woman whose seriousness reminded him of Jennifer, but whose eyes were bottle green. She was dressed in black, slim, and perhaps in her forties , David thought. Both crouching in this wine cellar, he looked at her and smiled as her power-cutters sighed through his chain. She did not smile back. Instead, she took his hand and touched the sound system. Its speakers roared with static once more. Rapids, thought David. Deep breath. Hold it.

‘Quickly.’

They ran through a corridor into a kitchen—mortuary-clean, prepped for new day—and into a pantry, and through chambers where old washing machines had once laundered great and good clothing, and down spiralled, wobbling stairs into darkness, and then she turned and said, ‘They’ve realised. Faster.’

David still wore his work shoes. They had no laces and he slipped against the dusty brick work. ‘Slow down.’

‘Nearly there,’ she said. The door ahead was haloed. She barged it and they were outside the hotel, in a yard. Recycling bins lined a low wall.

‘It’s daytime,’ said David.

‘Quiet.’

She pulled him into the gap between a bin and the wall. There was a police motorbike on its lay stand. Its white panniers gleamed in the nodding shadows.

‘Get behind me,’ she said, swinging herself across the seat.

‘Don’t we need helmets?’

‘Come on.’

David heard a shout pass through the firs upwind of them. He settled behind her. Oddly intimate. Her long hair smelled of coconut.

She touched the ignition. A windscreen rose from the fascia and fairing grew out around their legs.

‘Are you the woman who burned my house down?’

They erupted from the hotel. The wind recalled the interrogation static as they erupted from the hotel. David put his cheek to her ear, trapping her whip-like hair. His trouser cuffs buzzed. He looked up. They left the grounds and a tunnel of trees closed over them. The woman downshifted.

She turned to David and said, ‘Yes.’

The bike shuddered. She cut left, though an open gate, and rooster-tailed through a slush of mud and leaves. Then the bike found its grip once more. They rode uphill.

‘You’re right,’ he shouted. ‘We are lucky.’

‘Opened the gate myself,’ she called back.

The bike shimmied briefly and David, unbalanced, dropped his grip to her hips. The flush of impropriety warmed his core.

They kept to the incline. Ahead, panicked sheep had clotted in a corner. The woman swerved across them and abandoned the field through another open gate. She downshifted again and shouted, ‘Lean with me.’ They made a deep turn that scraped the fairing. The corner opened to reveal a dozen more sheep. Escaping too, David thought. Go.

‘Hold tight,’ she called, slaloming through the animals.

‘A helicopter,’ David said.

‘Where?’

He pointed.

‘They can join the queue,’ she said.

David waited for a straight section of road before he turned. Behind them, a marked police car canted on its suspension as it emerged from the bend. Blue lights flickered on its roof.

The next few minutes were disposed in a tiring series of accelerations and decelerations. They took the bends hard and roared along the straights. The road steepened. Soon, David could see the valley floor. It was bluish with distance. Above them, the helicopter remained fixed, thudding.

‘Hold on,’ she shouted, and David tucked himself into her shape. The lane lost its hedges. She swerved onto the stony, grass-splattered shelf that overlooked the valley, hundreds of feet below. She wove around the rock piles. David struggled to look back. The police car had parked and its doors were open. Black-vested officers, their arms open for balance, teetered through the uneven rocks in pursuit.

She stopped.

‘Get off the bike and run.’

He hopped sideways. His legs smouldered with cramp. ‘Where?’

She nodded at the house-sized heap of rocks in the near distance. Then she pulled away towards the cliff edge. David glanced at the policemen. They had slowed to a walk. It was no challenge to understand their complacency. With the helicopter, David could not hide from surveillance, and the foot officers had him trapped against the sheer drop.

He looked for the woman, but the motorbike had disappeared, sight and sound. Gasping, he loped towards the tor. His posh shoes slipped on the stones and the wind cut through the fabric of his orange overalls. Finally, he rounded the granite slabs and settled in their lee. He hugged himself and considered the lip of grass only twenty feet away, and the valley floor so far below that. He was in greater trouble than ever. His house was destroyed; his career was over. Bruce was dead. He would never see his daughter again.

David lowered his face to his knees.

When the woman lifted his head in both hands a few moments later, he was surprised by a tear in her eye. She brought his lips to hers as if he was a cup. There was no desire in the kiss. Only a relief.

‘I am so glad to see you, David.’

He studied her face. ‘Who you are?’

She placed a gloved finger to his mouth. ‘Put this on.’

The rucksack was no larger than an archer’s quiver. It had loops for his shoulders. As he struggled into it, he saw that the woman wore a similar pack.

‘Wow, it’s heavy.’

‘See this, David?’

She was holding a piece of paper in front of him. High, like ID. The pink paper had lost its corners, and the fold lines had almost torn, but David recognised it as the only personal item he had rescued from the burning house in Oxford that morning.

‘Who gave you that?’

‘Never mind. Look at the number.’ She tapped the corner of the drawing. In ball point pen, someone had written TS4415. ‘I need you to remember this code.’

‘Why?’

She glanced at the helicopter. ‘Just do it.’

‘Shit.’ Tom Sawyer with a .44 Magnum shooting a partridge in a pear tree and getting five gold rings as payment. ‘OK, I’ll remember. What is it?’

‘The cipher.’

She took his hand and led him to the corner of the tor. The two policemen were thirty feet away. David glanced at her, ready to panic, but said nothing. Her lips were moving. David looked back. The policemen had split to approach the tor from opposite sides. ‘Whatever the next part of the plan is,’ he said, ‘can we please proceed to it?’

‘Every police vehicle in the UK is fitted with a trip code in case of hijack. When you send the code, the vehicle locks down and returns to its depot. The instruction cannot be countermanded. Check the car.’

David leaned out. He saw the doors of the patrol car close. A moment later, the sound reached the police officers. They stopped and exchanged a glance. The taller policeman touched his throat and radioed to the other.

‘The policemen are wondering why that happened,’ said the woman. ‘The short one has just realised. Now they’re wondering if they can get back in time.’

David watched them dash to the car. Their runs were ungainly on the slippery rocks. ‘What about the helicopter?’

She seemed to consider his question. ‘The pilot took it calmly. He’s having a coffee. His co-pilot is agitated. But the flight computer will return them safely to the heliport.’

The helicopter tipped forward and, as David stared, became a receding dot. ‘How do you know all that?’

‘I can’t answer any more questions.’ Absently, she moved a lock of his hair. ‘There’s no more time. I’m sorry. All will be well.’

‘Why should I trust you?’

‘Take this. I know you want it. I stole it from the evidence locker in McWhirter’s suite a few minutes ago.’

She handed him the pink sheet. It was Jennifer’s drawing. But, as it fluttered in the wind, David noted that its edges were pristine. Its fold marks had not yet scored the paper. And, below the crayon house and the three stick figures, no code had been written.

‘Now I understand even less. But thank you. I didn’t want to lose this.’

‘Let the parachute do the steering.’

‘What?’

‘See ya.’

She sprinted towards the cliff edge, launched like a long jumper, and was gone. David felt his stomach drop in sympathy. He looked around the side of the granite pile. The policemen seemed angrier than before. They were almost at its edge. The patrol car had gone. David looked into the cobalt sky and hoped his shoes would keep their grip on the grass. As a talisman, he rolled the pink paper and held it in his fist.

He ran towards the edge.