CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Tudor and Deborah stood in the doorway of his houseboat surveying the chaos.
When he had received the call from her of reports of a disturbance at his home he had pretty much known what to expect.
Even so, and even with the lack of working lights, it was shocking.
He had experienced many incidences of violence and danger in his professional life, but this violation of his own space, his personal sanctuary, was a new kind of trauma.
The borrowed illumination from the lights strung along the boardwalk outside picked out the extent of the damage.
Everything was trashed. The sofa was upside down, its cushions eviscerated, stuffing everywhere.
Every drawer had been pulled from its place and upturned, the contents strewn over the floor.
Books had been swept of shelves and searched, for what he had no idea.
But it was more than a search, it was a deliberate ruination.
The glass in every picture was smashed. Not a single ornament or plate was left whole.
Even the lightbulbs had been hammered, hence the gloom.
Debs’ voice broke into his thoughts. ‘Well,’ she said slowly, using the light on her phone and stepping carefully into the mess, ‘someone hates you.’
‘Thanks for that,’ he replied, knowing that she was attempting to take the tension out of the moment.
To make a joke without making a joke was a skill, and she’d always had it.
Tudor stooped and picked up a photo of Emily, brushing the shattered glass from it, holding the broken frame with both hands, cradling it as he had cradled his daughter the day she was born.
Emily’s don’t-make-me-smile face gazed back at him.
At least she was safe. But his home wasn’t.
Which meant being around him probably wasn’t safe either.
But then, if he sent her back to her mother’s she would be completely unprotected.
No, the Aurora was the best place for her.
He knew she couldn’t stay there forever, though.
He needed to put a stop to whatever was going on. And it had to be soon.
He walked to the fridge, treading with care.
The cheerful light as he pulled open the door jarred in the darkness.
‘Looks like they didn’t have time to get to the beer.
Want one?’ he asked, holding up a bottle.
When she nodded he took the tops off two and handed one to her.
They drank them where they stood, taking in the devastation some more, letting the beer buzz take the edge off the nastiness. It was Deborah who spoke first.
‘Actually, I was on the point of calling you.’
‘Oh?’
‘After what you told me about your little escapade outside the Jagoda, I checked out the cctv footage.’
‘Wanted to see me in action?’
‘Wanted to see anything that would explain why I didn’t hear a word about it. Gunshots in the middle of the day in the middle of London?’
‘And? What did you find?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Helpful.’
‘No, I mean, I didn’t find anything on the camera footage at all. Not you, not your car, not a skirmish, and most certainly not men with guns firing at you.’
‘That doesn’t add up.’
‘Tell me about it. That’s a Met cctv system. Our cameras. Which means…’
‘Only a Met officer could doctor the footage.’
‘Lovely thought, isn’t it?’
‘So, the Begovich’s have a man on your team. Wow,’ he took another swig of beer. ‘Looks like they are a bit more of a problem than you thought.’
‘Than any of us thought.’
He shook his head. ‘I already knew. I was the one got my skull cracked courtesy of Miss Begovich’s instructions, remember?’
‘Thing is, why would they go to the trouble of trying to shoot you in broad daylight, and then covering up the unsuccessful attempt using a bent copper? That’s serious stuff. More than just trying to warn you off their business.’
‘Especially when they are the ones who started all this. I mean, I didn’t know of their existence before the attack in Manchester.
’ He paused, weighing up exactly how he felt about the details that he needed to share with the DI.
‘This is going to sound crazy,’ he said, ‘but, when I really think about what happened after the Tae Kwan Do tournament, the thing that bothers me the most is that they seemed to be more interested in Emily than me.’
Deborah looked at him then. Even in the low light he could see her expression was serious. No, he decided, more than that, she was scared. For him. Or for Emily. And Debs Chowdhury did not scare easily.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘While we’re doing crazy, I did see something on that cctv footage.
Something I can’t explain, but it made my skin creep.
’ She paused. He waited. She continued. ‘I studied that film over and over. Played it backwards and forwards. Frame by frame. It was only on about the tenth time of studying it that I saw… a face,’ she trailed off and then tried again.
‘I saw Dragana Begovich staring out of the front window of the restaurant.’
‘So? The camera caught her standing there.’
‘Except that she wasn’t there the first nine times. Only the tenth. And she wasn’t just looking out, she was looking at me. It felt like she was seeing me. Like she was there in real time, watching me watching her.’
‘On a piece of video?’
‘I told you we were in crazy territory. And it gets freakier. I took a screen grab. Wanted you to see the scary lady.’ She set her beer down on the counter, slipped her bag off her shoulder and rummaged in it.
Even off duty in jeans and a tee-shirt, she kept her serious bag with her.
She pulled out a file, opened it and selected a printed screenshot from the footage.
‘Look,’ she said, handing it to him and using her phone to light it. ‘Look at the window.’
He looked, squinting at the fuzzy image, searching for Dragana’s unmistakeable features. ‘I can’t see her,’ he said, shaking his head slowly. ‘I can’t see anybody.’
‘Exactly!’ Deborah tapped at the page with a finger to underline her point.
‘Nothing. Nada. Zip. She was there and now she isn’t.
First nothing, then she appears, then she’s gone again.
And no, I hadn’t overindulged in Merlot.
And no, I wasn’t dreaming, imagining things, hormonal or anything else you can come up with to explain it away.
That crazy woman appeared on my screen while I was reviewing the film, but the screenshot didn’t pick her up.
I’m not trying to be dramatic, Tudor, but you’ve got yourself mixed up in something seriously weird.
’ She picked up her beer and drank deeply.
But Tudor hadn’t heard half of what she had said.
He was staring at the print out, his attention completely taken by the door of the restaurant.
Or, more specifically, the door frame. Taking hold of Debs’ hand he angled the phone light to see better, but he already knew what he was looking at.
All around the entrance, there were deep carvings, intricate and arcane, painstakingly chiselled into the wooden frame on all sides and over the top.
Whether they had been there when he went to the place and he had blindly walked past them, or they had somehow only become visible since, he had no idea.
What he did know, without an iota of doubt, was that those carvings, those shapes, those symbols, were identical to the ones above the Richards’ shrine, and in the grand foyer of the apartment building.
However unlikely it seemed, that small, scruffy restaurant and the impossibly glamorous Aurora building were sisters under the skin.
When they had tired of trying to get their heads around what any of this new information meant, Tudor and Deborah set to the task of putting the houseboat back together.
It was slow work, not least because there was broken glass everywhere.
Everything had to be picked up, turned over, brushed off, and set down in a carefully cleared space.
Tedious as the task was, Tudor was glad of it.
It gave his mind time to freewheel while he worked, letting the confusion he felt at not being able to make sense of the puzzle gradually lessen.
Ordinarily, in his professional capacity, such unanswered questions would gnaw away at him.
In this case, with his own family at the centre of what was going on, he experienced a sense of being unmoored, and a queasiness to go with it.
This was no time to come up short. The connection between the buildings was the key to understanding what was going on.
It was the piece of the puzzle that should explain why he, and more strangely Emily, were being targeted.
It should make everything fall into place.
And yet it did not. He was still as much in the dark as he had been before.
And now he had Debs’ experience to scramble his head further.
From anyone else such a story would not have cut much ice.
DI Chowdhury was not anyone. She was feet-on-the-ground, show-me-evidence, born-with-extra-common-sense reasonable.
If she was seeing ghosts, they were all in real trouble.
It took them the better part of two hours, working steadily, to restore something approaching order to the boat.
Anything beyond repair they stacked in a sorry heap in one corner.
Anything salvageable they put more or less in place.
The bedrooms had not escaped ransacking, but there was less to break in either of them.
It was gone eleven when he and Debs finished remaking the bed. They stood either side of it.
‘Let’s call it a day. Time to turn in,’ Tudor said without thinking about where they were when he said it.
An awkwardness joined them in the little room. The freshly made bed sat between them, cool, soft and inviting, suddenly a big, fat possibility.
‘I didn’t mean…’ he began.
‘No?’ she asked.