Safe Read online

  Clarke held his breath. He didn’t recognize either of these man-shaped threats but he knew what they were. A chill ran the length of his spine as he realized that he must have been followed. Then came sudden, self-directed anger. Of course they’d kept tabs on him. Perrin’s lot, or Sykes’s, or maybe both. They’d have known when he went north, known when he turned back towards home, probably been puzzled as hell when he’d taken a detour and come to this city and this hotel.

  “Fuck,” Clarke breathed. Lauren grabbed his sleeve and pulled him into deeper cover.

  For what felt like for ever, they stood in silence in the narrow doorway, Clarke running through scenarios should the men decide to walk on down the street. Did they know about the rear entrance? Did they know what was down this little road? The loading bay, the way into the kitchens?

  Beside him, he realized that Lauren had already made her plans. Her weight shifted slightly as she reached into her pocket and withdrew the gun.

  No, he wanted to tell her, you can’t shoot two people, not even two of your dad’s thugs or whatever they are. Not here, not without consequences. But he found himself wishing that he was also armed. Impatiently, he pushed that idea aside, risked a swift look back at the end of the street. “They seem to have gone,” he whispered, and made to move.

  “Wait!” she hissed at him. “That’s what they’ll want you to think. It’s what they’re trained to do.”

  Reluctantly, he stayed where he was, risking another look a moment or two later and discovered that she’d been right. The men had returned, standing backlit, like easy targets at the end of the street. For a moment, he was tempted to take her gun and shoot them himself. He shifted back into the shadows and tried not to breathe. His breath, his heartbeat, everything felt far too loud. His back was cramped with tension. He felt her lay a hand on his arm, as though she knew just how he was feeling and sympathized.

  The sound of a car engine startled him. The grip on his arm tightened. “Keep really still,” she whispered.

  He heard the car pull up at the end of the road and then two doors open and slam closed. They were driving off. Clarke felt Lauren turn her face away, burying herself as deeply into the doorway as she could. He could sense her willing him to do the same. Clarke needed no persuasion. If the car came down their street . . . He risked a very swift glance. Three men, big vehicle.

  He had never been so grateful for anything in the world as when the sound of the engine faded and the car took the other road, heading away from them.

  Lauren grabbed his hand. “It’s a one-way system — they’ll circle back round,” she said. “We don’t have much time. We need to get to your car and then get out of sight. There’s a multistorey open twenty-four hours. Come on, I’ll give you directions.”

  “We should get right away from here.”

  “Yes, but we’ve got to do it the right way.” She looked him full in the face. “You don’t know them like I do. You don’t know them from the inside, not like I do.”

  She’s probably right, Clarke thought. Though it went against the grain, putting his trust in this kid.

  More than anything, he was ashamed. He should have thought about them tracking him, not with Lauren as motivation but just as a matter of routine.

  They reached his car and threw themselves in. “If they’ve been tracking you, they’ll know your car,” Lauren said, “so we have to be careful.”

  He nodded. “The multistorey you were talking about?”

  “Take a left at the end of the road, then there’s two turns that are one way, you take the third and it brings you round to the multistorey entrance. I wish I knew what they were driving.”

  “Some kind of four-by-four,” Clarke told her. He had seen that much. “Dark green or black. Hard to say, under the street lights.”

  “Predictable,” Lauren said.

  “How come you know so much about the roads? You been here before?”

  She shook her head. “There were tourist maps at the hotel. Harry said I should always know my ground.”

  “Good advice.”

  “Harry cared about me.”

  Not like anyone else was the implication. Clarke glanced sideways at her. She seemed calm, but he could feel the roiling anxiety just below the surface. He knew it was there because it was within him, too.

  He came to the first of the one-way streets and, after a split second of hesitation, turned the wrong way down it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trust me. They’re likely to catch up with us soon. And if you’ve thought about the multistorey, chances are they will have, too.”

  She looked doubtful but didn’t argue. He could see her checking the wing mirrors for anything four-by-four-shaped on the road they’d just left.

  Clarke spotted a gate part way down the one-way street. It was closed, but there was just enough of a space in front of it to allow him to turn around so that their car faced the right way. He manoeuvred quickly, then tucked the car between two others and switched off the lights. They slid down in their seats, looking towards the main road through the windscreen of the car in front.

  They waited. Time is doing its extending thing again, Clarke thought.

  “There!” he hissed. A dark four-by-four drove past, three men inside. They could be entirely innocent, of course, but Clarke was convinced it was the same car he had glimpsed before. Silently, he counted to fifty, then to one hundred, before he started the engine. He edged to the end of the street and turned right. Traffic was light, but they scanned it urgently.

  “We need to get out of town,” Clarke said.

  Lauren pointed. “There’s a sign for the motorway.”

  “Good as anything,” Clarke agreed. His hands were shaking on the wheel. He gripped it tightly, trying to ease the tension from his shoulders. He’d nearly blown it. “Lauren, I . . .”

  She waved a dismissive hand. “You don’t know my dad,” she said. “You don’t know Gus Perrin. Oh yes, you might think you do, but you’ve been looking at them from the outside. Like they’re some . . . I don’t know . . . experiment you’re doing, just to see what happens next. But you’re looking at it all wrong. Men like my dad and Gus Perrin — they’re not people you can understand just by looking at them from the outside, you’ve got to remember that. No one who really deals with men like that can stay on the outside. They get sucked in, so it’s their whole life. It’s like being in a cult or something. People on the inside, they forget what it’s like on the outside. It’s like it burrows into them. It’s their whole life.”

  “I do get that, Lauren. I’ve been investigating people like your dad for years.”

  “No!” She slapped the dashboard in her impatience. “No, you don’t. If you get fed up with your job, your house, your girlfriend, have a falling out with your boss, then you can just leave. You’ve got choices, choices that don’t mean you end up dead. Those men who followed you. They gave up their choices a lifetime ago. You stand on the outside looking in and you think you get it. How can you get it?”

  Clarke frowned, not too sure where the rage had come from. She didn’t seem to be blaming him for almost bringing trouble down on their heads, so what point was she making? He could have understood her anger if it had been directed at his carelessness, but he felt this was about something else. “You feel sorry for them?”

  “Not exactly.” She looked uncomfortable. “I just know how easy it would be to give in. To be what my dad or Gus Perrin or whoever wants you to be, because being on the inside of something can make you feel safe. And it’s not. Nowhere ever is.”

  Chapter 39

  For a while Marty had driven, not knowing what to do or where to go. He had been waved through the gates as though nothing was wrong, even though he’d been driving Carole’s car. Only one man had been on duty, which was in itself unusual. And he had been distracted by a car coming at speed the other way. Marty had had to swerve to get out of its path.

  He decided to go home t
o the cottage at the edge of the farm, a house close enough to the village to be almost part of it, but still under Gus Perrin’s gaze. The house was empty, though the lights were on. They’d left the front door open when they’d dragged him into their car. He summoned the courage to go inside, to pack some of his things, intending to head for a hotel for the night. He phoned Sam but it went straight to voicemail. Switched off. He tried hard to summon the nerve to go back for her, but he knew there was nothing he could do and that he must trust to Carole to work this out. A noise at the kitchen door made him jump and he turned to see the cat coming in through the cat flap and go to its food bowl. The cat was totally unconcerned.

  Sighing, Marty filled the bowl and gave it fresh water, then left the house for the last time. Anything that was important to him was now in his suitcase and he suddenly realized that, with or without Sam, there was no way that he could go back to stay there ever again. He locked the door, got into the borrowed car and drove away.

  The idea that he should go to the police formed very slowly. He’d been too shaken before and had never exactly judged the police as allies. Growing up in the city, a mixed-heritage kid in a diverse neighbourhood, he’d had several run-ins with the authorities. Nothing serious, but enough to reinforce his general suspicion of them. Now, however, it seemed like a good idea. He glanced in the rear-view mirror. The face that stared back was bruised, his eye blackened and his jaw turning an interesting shade of green. The local station wouldn’t be open at night — it closed at six and didn’t open till seven the following day — and so he drove into town to the divisional headquarters. With some trepidation, he approached the desk sergeant and told him that he needed to report a crime.

  * * *

  Carole glanced at her watch. It was almost three a.m. She’d heard the house phone ring two or three times, and had seen Kyle Sykes arrive and her father’s solicitor shortly thereafter. She also knew that Billy and his cohort had been recalled and were now heading home. There was no sign of Pat and for that, at least, Carole was grateful.

  The doctor had attended the two women and they now sat on the bed holding hands with a blanket wrapped around their shoulders and doing their best to ignore the daughter of the house. Carole knew that despite the fact she had tried to help them, she was still the enemy. She left them to it.

  She’d put Sam in her own room. Sam Barker was scared. She had of course known what Gus Perrin was, but she’d hidden behind the notion that she was simply Carole’s assistant and that none of it mattered. Ignorance, Carole thought, even manufactured ignorance, was certainly not bliss in this house. She found that she was annoyed, as much as anything else. Sam had been a fantastic assistant and was in her own right a gifted artist. Carole had allowed herself to feel that she had friends, that Pat and Sam really cared about her. Perhaps they did, but that didn’t mean that either of them was going to be part of her life any longer. Not after this.

  Carole’s main concern now was to get Sam out of this in one piece. Pat, she decided, could take care of herself. If she really was an undercover police officer then no doubt she had her own prearranged escape routes and had had her own agenda all along. Carole was really hurt by that knowledge. That made her angry, too. She had long ago decided that she was beyond being hurt by anything like that.

  She sat next to Sam on the bed and took the younger woman’s hand. “It’s going to be all right. He knows by now you’ve got nothing to do with any of this. By morning you’ll be free to go, I guarantee it.”

  “It is morning.” Sam’s response was sullen and cold. She withdrew her hand from Carole’s and hunched in on herself. “I really enjoyed my job, you know that. I really liked you, but you can’t expect me to just forget about all of this.”

  Carole grabbed Sam by the shoulders and turned her so that she was looking directly into her eyes. “That’s exactly what you’re going to do. Look, I’ll deposit money into your account, three months’ pay, and if you need anything more, you just have to ask. I’ll give you the most excellent references I can. You are going to walk away from this and you are never going to look back. But you are not going to talk about any of it, have you got that? Because if you do, my father will not forgive and he will not forget, and believe me, you do not want him remembering you.”

  Sam stared at her and then shook her off. Carole could see that she was pale and scared and that this was all beyond her comprehension. She had never played this kind of scenario through in her mind.

  “Where do you think Marty will have gone?” Carole asked.

  “Why should I care?”

  “Don’t blame him. I told him to go. There was nothing he could do here except get hurt. This is not his world, Sam, not yours either. Don’t blame him for being scared.”

  “If he’s got any sense, he’ll have gone to the police,” Sam was doing her best to sound defiant.

  “You should hope to God he hasn’t,” Carole said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My father has associates everywhere, including in the police. If he’s gone to the police, Dad will know about it sooner rather than later.”

  * * *

  Toby Clarke pulled off the motorway and into the services. Lauren was already looking round for a sign of Petra. Clarke had told her that Petra’s cover had been blown, that her handler was dead and that she was now potentially in a lot of trouble.

  It was decided that Lauren should stay in the car, in shadow. Her picture was now out there, on social media, news channels, newspapers. It would only take one person to spot her, only one report to give Kyle Sykes a clue to her whereabouts, and the danger would increase twentyfold. It was possible that whoever those men were, they would have shown Lauren’s picture at the hotel. Someone was bound to recognize her.

  Clarke had arranged to meet Petra in the main entrance of the service station restaurant and soon they came back together, carrying takeaway coffee and burgers. Petra got into the back of the car. Lauren found that she was overwhelmingly happy to see her.

  Briefly, she filled them in on what had happened and what she had found when she had gone to Frankland’s house. “My guess is they spent most of the day with him. That it probably started out as a straight interrogation, and then it got nasty. Which means that he wasn’t prepared to tell them anything much and it also means they didn’t know much to start with. So somebody must have tipped them off that there was a UC in the organization. I mean, they would have killed him anyway, but probably a bit quicker if he had told them something sooner.”

  “And by running, you’ve now confirmed what was told,” Clarke observed.

  “My cover was blown. I have no intention of ending up dead as well.”

  “You didn’t know that. Most likely, they suspected a man.” Clarke was not quite sure why he was playing devil’s advocate — tiredness and irritation, probably. The truth was, he didn’t blame her. It took a special kind of person to be an undercover officer and Clarke had long ago realized that he was not it.

  Lauren was riled by his attitude. “Don’t be so bloody stupid,” she told him. “Of course she had to get out. There was no other sensible thing to do. You should know that — you lot lost two of your own when they were trying to infiltrate my dad’s organization.”

  It was a fair point. Clarke apologized.

  “So what now?” Petra wanted to know. “You’ve got a safe house organized, for Lauren I mean. I can take care of myself.”

  “No. You’re coming with us,” Lauren said.

  Clarke began to argue. Lauren cut him off. “I owe Petra. You pay debts.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Petra told her. “I’ll lie low till the fuss dies down, I have friends.”

  “Friends who lend you their dogs and their car.” Lauren laughed.

  Clarke looked puzzled, but it was pretty obvious that the two women were not going to explain.

  “This safe house,” Petra said. “Are you sure you can trust whoever set it up?”

  “
I believe so, yes. As you advised, I went outside of the division. I talked to my old boss. He’s straight as a die and speaking of which, I really should report in. I went dark an hour before I collected Lauren, and I’ve not been in contact since.” He reached for his phone.

  Petra put a hand on his arm. “Use this one. It’s clean, it’s a new SIM. And tracking is switched off.”

  Clarke frowned but took the phone. “I’ve still got to switch mine on, I need to look up the number.”

  Lauren could see that Petra was annoyed by this. “Make it quick, phone on phone off. And then we move.”

  Clarke raised an eyebrow, but her anxiety was already infecting him and he didn’t argue with her. The moment he turned on his phone, missed calls and text notifications buzzed and chimed.

  Petra saw him hesitate, wanting to pick up the messages. “Find the number and get off the phone. Say the number out loud, that way we’ll know it too.”

  A little reluctantly, Clarke did as instructed. He dialled the number into the new phone, noting that Lauren had scribbled it down in a small notebook. Petra did not seem to need such an aide-mémoire.

  The voice on the other end of the call was impatient and angry. “Where the hell have you been? No one knows where you are. You call me and you asked me to set up a place of safety, and then you don’t turn up. What the hell is going on, Clarke? I’ve spoken to your boss — no one knows where you are. I spoke to the gold commander of your division and he doesn’t know where you are and has no idea why you would be wanting a safe house. Clarke, what have you got into?”

  “I told you, I need a place of safety for a teenager. I told you the background, so you’ll forgive me for not telling you more. There were complications, I got delayed.”

  “And would this teenager be Lauren Sykes? Half the country’s looking for her. You’re aware that her father reported her as a missing person?”

  “I’m aware of that. I’m also aware that he’s after her, and so is Gus Perrin. And I’m aware that both mean her harm. I’m also aware that she is an intelligence asset.” He looked apologetically at Lauren when he said that. She shrugged. Of course she was.