Kindred Intentions (18 page)

“Where to?”

“We’ll go back and take one of the
motorbikes.” He was already going. “We need a vehicle, we can’t walk.”

Amelia preferred to follow him without asking
any more questions. She had a strange feeling, like a presentiment.

8

She rubbed her face to remove the mud that had
dried on her skin, the tiny drops of blood. She would’ve liked to have had a
shower, to have washed it all away. But it seemed too much to ask for there to
be some soap in the toilet of that country pub.

There were so many places they could have gone
to, yet they had gone there. A coincidence is strange, but can happen. Two
coincidences don’t exist.

She arranged her hair in a ponytail with a
hair tie she had bought from a shop not far from where they’d parked the
motorbike, together with some clothes in her size and a pair of shoes. She had
changed without any hurry. At that time in the morning there weren’t many
people in the pub, and nobody in the ladies’ room. She was presentable now. She
added a pair of useless sunglasses and a cap. She took the dirty clothes and
put them in the bag that had contained her clean ones. She was about to throw
it in the bin, then she changed her mind.

She checked out of the toilet door. Nobody in
sight. She detected the rear exit she had noticed earlier and sneaked out
through there. A wheelie bin was there a few steps away, full of rubbish. They
hadn’t collected it yet. She opened it and dropped the bag inside, then she
returned to the pub.

Only a few seats were occupied in the main
room. A man was lazily having breakfast in front of a newspaper. Amelia kept
her head down and reached an empty table. Mike was nowhere to be seen, but he
had to be close.

Hiding her face behind the menu, she cast a
glance at the man standing on the other side of the counter. She had noticed
him immediately after entering the place. He hadn’t paid any particular
attention to her then, nor was he doing so now. Unlike him, a waitress
addressed her with a wide smile and approached. “Are you ready to order?” She
was holding a notepad.

“I’m … I’m waiting for someone.” She forced
herself to offer a relaxed smile.

“Oh, well, I’ll come back later.” As she
walked away, she grabbed the remote control resting on another table, and
turned on the TV set.

Amelia’s gaze was drawn by the moving
pictures, although the sound was so low she couldn’t hear it. The footage was
showing a car partially sunk along the coast. A heavy vehicle was towing it
out. The line on the screen read: ‘The scuba divers are searching for the body
of the missing police officer.’ She gaped as she saw her face appearing in a
small square on the top of the picture.

She checked the counter again. The man wasn’t
there anymore, so she put aside any caution and rose to reach the remote
control. She raised the volume.

A BBC correspondent was speaking. “They’ve
just confirmed that the number plate of the car matches the one of the vehicle
driven by the man allegedly responsible for yesterday morning’s shooting at
Goldberg & Associates. A lifeless body was found inside the compartment.
Speculation is that it’s the same man. It isn’t clear whether he was already
dead before the car entered the water or whether he had drowned. The man had
kidnapped an officer of the City of
London Police
, Amelia Jennings, and was filmed by a traffic control camera, as he
put her in the boot of this car.” She turned slightly to point at the car that
was now out of the water, surrounded by a small crowd of uniformed officers and
criminologists. The yellow tape cordoning off the area was right behind the
reporter. “From a first possible reconstruction, it seems that the vehicle
swerved and ended up off the road, then it fell into the sea. The event appears
to have occurred a few hours after the kidnapping.
Jennings
’s weapon was found inside the vehicle. It is also known that the
suspect was wounded. The windscreen is smashed, suggesting that
Jennings
might have been thrown out. The
scuba divers will continue to search the area.”

“So does this mean that the police are
persuaded that she was still in the car?” a voiceover asked.

“The police are avoiding any comment, but from
what I could grasp, the backrest of the backseat was found lowered. It’s
impossible to establish whether this happened before the impact, but in this
case a possible theory is that the woman had tried to free herself and could
have overwhelmed the criminal, who was already wounded, thus causing the
accident.”

Amelia muted the TV set. She’d heard enough.
She looked around to check whether any other customer had been watching the
news broadcast, but nobody was turned towards the TV.

During all those hours she’d been so deeply
involved in the events that she hadn’t thought for a moment about what could
have happened out there. There was a dark point in all that story, represented
by what had happened in the cottage. When she’d woken up alone, she hadn’t
found any trace of the man who had kidnapped her, or of his car, but she
remembered well the gunshots and when she had been injected with something that
had made her pass out. The presence that she’d felt.

The killer’s death was a setup. He hadn’t been
wounded so much that he would lose control of the car on a coast road. And
anyway, what was he doing there alone? She had heard at least two more voices.
Now she knew that one had been Jeff’s.

But there was another matter. Nobody thought
she was alive. And with the death of the killer, of the one who was considered
the only culprit of the murders in the City, the case was closed. Very
convenient. Convenient for whom?

Making sure that nobody was looking at her,
she leant on the counter to sneak a peek inside the kitchen. She could see the
cook talking to the waitress. Where had the other man ended up?

It was happening now. There was no other
explanation.

Forcing herself to walk slowly, she headed for
the toilet again and stopped beside the door bearing a sign that read
‘Private’. The low light bothered her. She took off her sunglasses and put them
in a pocket, then she placed a hand on the handle, and it opened without a
problem. Beyond the door was a stairway. She took a deep breath to empower
herself, then she started to climb. The first set of stairs led to a landing.
She ventured to the second one. She was almost halfway, when she heard a pop.

“No, please!” a male voice exclaimed.

Amelia sped up and, when she reached the top
of the stairs, she saw him.

At the same time Mike turned, pointing a gun
fitted with a silencer. Surprise dawned on his face. “Why the hell have you come
here?!”

She recognised the owner of the pub curled up
against the wall, trembling. He was holding his leg at his knee, where his
trousers were soaked with blood. His gaze was attracted to her presence, and
the terror on his face seemed to be increasing.

“So I wasn’t wrong,” Amelia said. “You are the
killer of the lawyers.”

Mike cracked a bitter smile. “You shouldn’t
have come here. I told you. The less you know about this story, the better.”

She watched the current victim of the killer
for a moment. She didn’t feel a shred of pity. Then she resumed facing Mike. “I
thought you dealt with a higher level of contracts. Ah, no, wait.” She raised a
hand to prevent him from replying. “This was a contract of Yasir’s, right.”

He kept scrutinising her, but didn’t speak.
His surprise had turned into caution.

“At this point you could tell me everything.
You can’t be afraid that I will arrest you, can you?” She spread her arms and
smiled at him. “I’m disarmed.”

“Who are you?”

“Oh, I’m nobody. A woman in the wrong place at
the wrong time. It has happened to me more than once.” Another brief glance at
the man on the floor. “If you are the killer, who hired you? What were you
doing at Goldberg’s?”

The lines on Mike’s face relaxed. “Do you
really want to know the whole story now?”

“Why not?” She pointed at the owner. “He won’t
tell anybody, given that he’ll soon be dead.”

“No, please,” the man murmured.

“Shut up!” Amelia shouted in a surge of rage.
And silence was what she got. When she resumed looking at Mike, she could see
his bewilderment. “It seems that it’s Goldberg who set an army on you, but I
still don’t get one thing.”

Mike was still pointing his weapon at her, but
she didn’t care. “Jeff Matthews was a contact of mine in
London
. Thanks to him I settled here after
Afghanistan
. I continued doing
what I was good at: killing people. But instead of being a killer sent by my
country to eliminate some
strategic
targets, I started killing for
hire.”

“And you started the
estate agency
.”

Her comment left him gaping, but just for a
second. “What do you know about the estate agency?”

“I’ve heard you and Yasir talking about it. Go
on.”

He didn’t seem satisfied by her answer, but
followed her invitation anyway. “And thanks to him I got the contract that
would allow me to retire from the business forever. A ten million pound
contract.”

“The one for killing the lawyers.”

He didn’t reply, but there was no need to.

“Who was the instigator?”

“I never know who the instigator is. I know
the intermediary, at most.”

“Goldberg.” It all fitted now.

“Exactly.”

“First he hires you to kill some people on
behalf of a client and then decides to snuff you out.” She frowned. “I don’t
understand. He practically had an army, so why turn to you?”

“Because I’m a ghost, because I don’t leave
trails that can be traced back to him or his client. I think Jeff and his men
worked for his client.”

“And because after your death nobody would
come looking for you,” Amelia added.

“Yeah, I’m afraid you’re right.”

“What were you doing there yesterday morning?”

“Isabel had called me …” He stopped.

“Goldberg’s assistant?” she urged him.

“Yeah, she was the person through whom he
passed the names to me. Well, actually, she belonged to our agency, she was
another old acquaintance from CIA times.” He took a breath, as he stretched out
his fingers on the grip slightly and then tightened them again. “This contract
started more than a year ago; we knew it would take a long time, because our
targets were all well protected and not easy to approach. We imposed a
condition that Isabel, only she, would get in touch with Goldberg, so that we
remained anonymous; to achieve this he gave her the position of assistant. It
was part of the agreement.” He sighed. “When Goldberg proposed an extension of
the contract with the addition of ten million, she warned me, but I wanted to
learn more anyway. Goldberg wanted to meet me in person, because the target was
supposed to be a very high profile person. And I … well … I’ve been greedy, I
wanted to believe it was true.”

“And instead it was a trap.”

“I’m not a hack. I was armed, but when I
understood who you were, I avoided drawing the gun I was carrying in an ankle
holster. Truth be told, I was more worried that they wanted to follow me after
the meeting, to eliminate me and anybody else working with me. I didn’t expect
them to try to kill me in the firm’s building.” He cracked a smile. “On second
thoughts, it made sense. It was their best chance. I was in their territory,
they controlled the security system.”

It was true. The security cameras hadn’t been
able to film what had happened during the escape of the killer. It was obvious
that it was an inside job.

Even Amelia couldn’t avoid appreciating the
astuteness of that act. “They pretended it was an attempt to kill Goldberg. You
and Isabel would’ve been collateral damage. Meanwhile he was holed up in the
panic room and that explained the fact he had survived. The killer would’ve
escaped and …” She gestured with her hand. “All sorted! We wouldn’t have heard
of any more cases and would have never found out the identity of the killer,
least of all the instigator.”

“They hadn’t expected your presence, that is,
that of a police officer. And when they understood that the police were around
there, they cancelled the plan and ordered the man to get back to safety.”

“And I ended up in the middle. Lucky as
usual.”

“If you and your colleagues hadn’t been there,
more men would’ve surely come out and chased me inside the building.”

“Don’t give me any special credit,” Amelia
mocked him. “You would’ve got by somehow.”

“Maybe yes, maybe not. Anyway I was in your
debt. When I understood you had disappeared, I went looking for you.”

Sure, it had been him. The
presence
in
the cottage. “How did you know I was there?”

“The fact I had accepted Jeff’s proposal
didn’t mean I trusted him. I’ve learnt to make a virtue out of distrust. And so
I made sure to know the strategic places he used together with his thugs.
Taking them by surprise wasn’t so difficult, but Jeff succeeded in escaping.”

“You threw the car of the man who had kidnapped
me into the sea, with him inside.”