Майкл Ридпат - The Predator

Suddenly, a sharp jolt against his back propelled him into a doorway. He lost his balance and crashed into a metal door. As he tried to turn, he felt cold steel on his cheek. The flat of the blade of a knife pressed his face against the door. He tried to move his head to get a look at his attacker but the knife cut into his cheek. He did catch a glimpse of a black scarf, moustache, dark glasses and woollen hat, with long dark hair curling out beneath its rim. The man was a few inches shorter than him, but he was strong and determined.

‘Stay still,’ hissed a hoarse voice. ‘And listen.’

Chris’s cheek stung. He could feel blood trickling down to his jaw. He kept still.

‘I’m gonna tell you this once,’ whispered the voice in a good imitation of Marlon Brando. ‘You’re not gonna ask any more questions. You’re gonna get on the next plane home. You’re gonna forget all about Lenka. Got that?’

‘Yes,’ Chris said, through clenched teeth.

‘You sure, now?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘OK. I’ll be watching you.’ Then the knife lifted from Chris’s skin and he felt a blow to his ribs that doubled him up. He gasped for breath and turned to see a figure running off. He looked around him. He caught the eye of a woman who had watched the whole thing open mouthed from the other side of the street. She ducked and hurried off in the opposite direction. There were no other witnesses.

Chris picked himself up off the pavement and felt his cheek, which was bleeding quite badly. He set off at a jog to the entrance of the hotel.

The concierge was shocked to see him, and swiftly found a first-aid pack. He offered to call the police, but Chris said that since he wasn’t badly hurt and nothing was taken there was no point. So he took the first-aid kit up to his room, breathing heavily and shaking.

He headed straight for the bathroom, holding his handkerchief to his cheek.

He looked into the mirror and froze. There, written on the glass in blood, were the words I killed Lenka .

He staggered back into the bedroom and slammed the bathroom door. He slumped down on the bed and put his face in his hands. He was shaking all over now. Who was this guy? Where was he? Was he still in the room?

He leapt to his feet and checked the room, behind the curtains, in the wardrobe, and in the bathroom behind the shower curtain. There was no one there, of course. He sat down on the bed and tried to get a grip of himself. After five minutes, when the worst of the shaking had stopped, he called the hotel manager.

The manager came, followed swiftly by two uniformed policemen. They were big men, who seemed even bigger with all the hardware they carried around their waists. Their toughness was both intimidating and comforting. They took notes. Their interest perked up considerably when they heard that Lenka was a murder victim and then subsided when they heard that the crime had taken place in the Czech Republic, which Chris had to spell.

They asked him whether the man who had attacked Lenka was the same one who had attacked him that evening.

Chris thought hard before answering. The clothes, although similar, were different. The moustache could have been the same. He couldn’t remember seeing long curly hair in Prague. But the run was familiar. He had seen both men run away and they were the same man.

The policemen were not convinced that this counted as positive identification but they wrote it down anyway. Then their radio crackled, calling them to a shooting somewhere or other, and they were gone.

The manager fussed over Chris. He said he had no idea how anyone could possibly have got past the front desk and into his room. Chris suspected it was easy. The manager gave him a new room, and Chris requested that the hotel be particularly careful not to divulge his new room number to anyone. The manager made lots of assurances and then left him alone.

Chris had a bath and went to bed. He couldn’t sleep. The warning was as clear as could be. Someone wanted Chris to stop asking questions. If he didn’t, he would be killed. And whoever had made the threat seemed perfectly capable of carrying it out. So what should Chris do?

The obvious answer was give up and go home. Chris resolved to cancel his ticket to Vermont and fly back to London the next day.

Having made that decision, he hoped that his brain, relieved, would shut down in sleep. But it didn’t. A voice somewhere, deep down inside, protested. It called him a coward. Spineless. It whispered Lenka’s name. Chris tried not to listen, but the voice wouldn’t leave him alone. It pointed out that if someone wanted to stop Chris that badly, then Chris must be on the verge of discovering something important. Something about Lenka’s murder. If he persisted, he would find out who had killed Lenka and perhaps do something about it.

But why should he? He wasn’t a hero. It wasn’t his job to solve crimes. Lenka was dead; there was nothing he could do to bring her back to life.

He knew what his grandfather would do. He would risk his life to find out what had happened to Lenka, just as he had risked his life so many times fifty years before.

But his grandfather was a bloody-minded bigot. A pain in the arse.

What about his father, the voice asked. That quiet man of steady principles also wouldn’t quit. It had taken courage to defect when he had. And it had taken courage to stick with his ideals amongst his more conservative compatriots in Halifax. And what of his mother? The woman who had battled through so much hardship to give him and his sister every advantage she could. She would never give up and fly home.

He had left these people behind when he had gone to university, and then into investment banking. He had intended to become someone else, someone better, more successful, wealthier, and yes, more English. But it hadn’t quite worked out like that. He had come close: he had proved to himself at least that he was a good trader, he could earn good money, he could turn a blind eye to the everyday deceptions of people like Ian Darwent or Herbie Exler. But then he had been spurned by the system, unjustly ejected on to the scrap heap of burned-out, toxic traders, ignored, left to rot.

He saw that he had a choice. He could remain in the world of Bloomfield Weiss and George Calhoun, or he could do what his parents, his grandfather and Lenka would do in his place.

If he was going to live with himself, however short that life would be, there was only one choice. He made it and swiftly fell asleep.

He awoke afraid. He still knew he had made the right decision, but he was scared of the consequences. Chris prided himself on his ability to assess risk. And he knew he was right to be scared.

But he had some leeway. He was safe until whoever was after him realized that he had decided not to be deterred. The longer whoever it was thought that he might have given up, the more grace he had.

He ate breakfast in the safety of his room, and packed. He caught a cab outside the hotel, and it crawled across town towards the Lincoln Tunnel. Then, as the cab drove through a light changing from green to red, Chris asked the driver to turn north. He looked over his shoulder. The streets were crowded with cars going in every direction. If someone was following, he might have lost him. Or he might not. He directed the cab left and right, along a few cross streets, before barrelling up Tenth Avenue towards the Upper West Side. It was impossible to tell whether he was being followed. The Indian driver thought he was crazy, but didn’t care.

Dr Marcia Horwath’s office was in a five-storey building in a quiet cross street. Chris leapt out of the cab, overpaid the driver and, quickly scanning the empty street, rushed into the building. It was ten minutes to nine and Dr Horwath was waiting for him.