And off.
I drank from the bottle of water, hands still shaking. I stared ahead, seeing nothing. Still alive. Both of us still alive. So far so good. So far no torture and painful death. She’d get back. She’d return, in time. Brilliant, calm, resourceful Ceel would clear up the pig’s diarrhoea of a mess her idiot lover had made. She’d make it all well again. Bless that smart, sexy, wonderful, gorgeous, fantastic woman. She might never talk to me again, she might write me out of her life forevermore and curse me ritually every night before she went to sleep for the rest of her hopefully long life for the ignorant scumbag dickhead that I so surely was, but at least she’d be alive to do it, at least we’d both live. We wouldn’t suffer for my stupidity. I drank some more water and told myself that one day I’d see the funny side of all this.
Ceel rang back forty minutes later with the news that Inverness airport was out of action for the day, fog-bound.
‘You have to run,’ I said. My mouth had gone dry again. ‘That’s all we can do. Run. You have to get away. Further away. Oh, God, Ceel-’
‘No-no,’ she said crisply. ‘I’ll find out when there’s a flight next to London from Aberdeen, Edinburgh or Glasgow, then hire a car to whichever one. I’ll charter a plane or helicopter if I can. The timing will be tighter but it ought still to be possible. But there is another possibility.’
‘What?’
‘You could get into the house.’
‘How? Does anybody else have a key? Is there anybody in the house?’
‘No. There shouldn’t be. The staff have the weekend off.’
‘So, how-?’
‘There’s a key in the back garden, inside an artificial stone.’
‘There is?’ This sounded a bit low-rent and risky for such a posh address.
‘Yes. Then once you’re inside you’ll have to switch the alarm off.’
‘Okay, okay, right.’
‘I’ll give you the number for that. However, there is a problem.’
‘Shit. What?’
‘Getting into the back garden from the lane. There’s a high wall.’
‘So what’s the point of-?’
‘There’s a garage off the lane; you’re supposed to be able to get into the garage with the remote control in the car and then use the spare key. Or there’s an ordinary door, but it’s locked too.’
‘Right. Okay.’ I had an idea. ‘How high is the wall exactly? Well, not ex-’
‘Three metres, perhaps three and a half.’
‘Any razor wire or anything?’
‘No.’
‘Not even broken bottles?’
‘No.’
‘Okay, I think I can get into the back garden. I suppose it’s over-looked? By other-?’
‘Yes. But it’s usually quiet; it’s a dead-end off the mews further down.’
‘This artificial stone; how do I find it?’
‘Counting from the rear wall of the garage there are two lanterns on the west garden wall, then the third one. The stone with the key inside is directly under the third lantern and two stones out from the wall. Once you see it it looks almost obvious.’
‘West wall, garage rear wall, third lantern, two stones out.’ I rubbed a hand over the back of my neck. All this was just what I needed in the condition I was in. ‘What about the alarm? Is it linked to a security firm HQ or anything?’
‘Yes, and to the local police station.’
‘The local police station? Really?’
‘You might be surprised at the arrangements John has with the Metropolitan Police, Kenneth.’
‘Yeah, I dare say I might,’ I agreed. ‘What about surveillance cameras?’
‘No. Well, none that I know of.’
‘Right.’
‘Here’s the alarm code.’
‘Shoot.’
‘Write it down, will you?’
‘Okay.’ I lifted Merrial’s card. ‘Go.’ I wrote the code down on the back of Merrial’s card, then repeated it. ‘And where is the answering machine?’
‘It’s in John’s study. On the first floor. Oh.’
‘Now what?’
‘The study might be locked.’
‘Locked? But-’
‘It’s a gun room, too; it’s supposed to be locked.’
‘A gun…? Jeez. Right. So if it is, then what?’
‘I have a key in my bedroom. That’s on the second floor. John doesn’t know about it. You’ll have to go there first if the study door is locked.’
You couldn’t just have the damn thing where people usually have answering machines, by the front door, could you? I thought. And, Ceel’s bedroom; I’d fantasised about something like this for months, but not exactly in these circumstances.
‘Okay. Where’s the key?’
‘In my bathroom. There is a cabinet above the sink. Inside the box of tampons.’
Smart thinking, I guessed. ‘Right.’
‘When you get to the answering machine, you wipe the tape by pressing Function and then Clear. Got that?’
‘Function and Clear. I’d rather tear the whole tape out or take a big magnet and wipe it of everything, but that’ll have to do. Maybe I’ll do it twice.’
‘Function and Clear should do it.’
‘Okay.’
‘Keep in touch.’
‘Will do.’
‘Please be careful, Kenneth.’
‘Oh, I will. Best of luck getting a flight.’
‘Thank you. Goodbye.’
‘Bye.’
I put the phone down. I wasn’t shaking so much now. I drank some more water. At least we had a plan of campaign. At least I had something I could do, rather than just wait for Celia to come and fix things. God, what sort of man was I? Of course I should be doing something. I’d got us both into this grisly mess; it should be me that got both of us out of it. Or even only her. If I could just save Ceel I’d have done something good, something to make up for my gross incompetence. My own miserable behind was patently not worth the saving, attached as it so obviously was to a spine with a lump of barely solidified porridge at the other end where a normal person would have a functioning brain, but hers… her glorious ass was entirely and utterly worth saving, even at the expense of my own.
Think. I’d have to park the Landy in the lane. What if people saw me going over the wall? They’d call the cops, or at the very least they might take the Land Rover’s registration number.
How could I get new numbers for it? You could get rear number plates from any Halfords; people did all the time for trailers and there was no check on whether you really had a vehicle with that number, but you couldn’t get white, front number plates that easily. Maybe I could make false ones using the computer. Print out a couple of sheets of A4 with the relevant sized numerals and then wrap them in cling-film or something and tape them over the real ones. Should fool the casual observer. Wouldn’t even need exactly the right font because people had weird fonts on their plates sometimes; I’d seen them.
Better, I could phone the garage that had repaired the Landy and get some old plates off them. They were bound to have some; it would just be a short-term loan anyway. I had about three hundred quid in an emergency stash at the back of my sock drawer and I could pick up another two-fifty from a cash machine. That should hire a set of plates for an hour. Wouldn’t it? How likely was I to find the only small London garage that would shake their heads at my proposed criminality and promptly phone the cops? Surely not.
On the other hand, it would take time, delay things. Supposing Merrial came back early? Detouring via the garage might make all the difference. And it would introduce another variable into the equation, one more source of potential leaking. Supposing the garage people knew people who knew Merrial? If the Landy was spotted and the false numbers were traced to them, who knew what might happen, what they’d do, what they’d be persuaded to say, how they’d jump?
So I couldn’t risk it. But meanwhile I’d sat here slugging water and thinking about it and wasted a few minutes. Well done, Kenneth. Ten past eleven. Get going.