Ian Hocking - Flashback

Help me , he thought.

He heard a telephone ringing far away.

Then there was a voice his head: Church of St Mary, Father David Hildegaard speaking.

Cory already knew much about Father Hildegaard. He did not how he knew; but this man could heal him.

I am at your door , thought Cory. I need a Samaritan .

My friend , Hildegaard replied, it is late .

Cory knew that Father Hildegaard had run a prison-visiting society in Copenhagen, under whose auspices he had raped young men.

Father, please.

He heard footsteps on the tiled floor beyond the door, the click of a light, and the clatters of locks being undone. The door swung inwards. The young priest wore a dark cassock, which soon gathered sequins of rain. A cordless phone was pressed to his ear.

Cory said, ‘Listen,’ and reached out.

Father Hildegaard’s breath blew white and a line of blood ran from his nose. He stood as though immobilised with pain. Cory sighed. He felt his health return like youth and purpose.

Inspector Duczyński turned from his balcony and thought of the people he knew well—a civil servant, an artist, a singer, the young man in the apartment above who was, for his own reasons, in love with him—and wished them fairer fortunes. He looked at his empty hand and decided that it needed a drink. Perhaps Florian, his would-be amore in the apartment above, would care to join him. Duczyński’s grin was sickly. His sling was tight and his fingers had pins and needles.

He stepped through his balcony door and shut it. The rain sound muted. Instead of a drink, he returned from the kitchen with a probiotic yogurt and a pill box. He sat in the dark. The rain drew his thoughts once more. He raised his yogurt.

‘Cheers.’

Then he took the phone. It felt light and cheap next to his left ear. It was unusual for him to use the landline, but his mobile phone had disappeared during the day. Perhaps someone at the hospital had stolen it. In the morning, he would report it missing.

‘Who is it?’ asked his mother.

‘It’s Karel.’

‘Who?’

He sighed. ‘Mama, I was shot today. In the shoulder. I’ll be fine, but I lost a suspect. I’m suspended and it’s probably the end of my career.’

He told her everything. In the gaps between his words, he pictured an aeroplane carrying Jem, his only lead, back to England. Her face was pressed against a window. Duczyński’s Polish was slow, while his mother’s had flourished with age. When he cut the call, he noticed an unread answerphone message from a withheld number. He hit ‘play’.

‘Inspector, this is Danny Shaw. How’s the shoulder? I think we can help each other. My sister has done this before—run off, I mean—and I need to find her. I know where she’s going. What I really don’t need is to be arrested. If this sounds like something you can work with, call me back. You know the number, don’t you?’

Duczyński smiled. He punched the number of his mobile into the telephone. After one ring, an English man answered.

‘Hello, Inspector. It’s Danny Shaw.’

‘Good evening. I would like to have my phone back.’

‘Of course you would.’

‘I wish to thank you for saving my life.’

‘You’re welcome. I should apologise for giving you the slip.’

After the call, Duczyński went to a cardboard box and took out the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms. He read:

To escape from someone who is with you, following you, or watching you. Example: ‘There was a man following me when I left the office, but I gave him the slip on the crowded main street.’

Duczyński opened the pill box. Inside was the white marble of unknown substance that the emergency doctor had cut from his shoulder. He watched it roll. It looked like no bullet he had ever seen. Then he placed it in the pocket of his long, black coat, laid the coat around his shoulders like a cloak, and left his apartment.

Several hours later, as the red digits of the cooker clock approached midnight, the apartment door opened. Danny struck the light switch and marched Duczyński to the bedroom as he had conducted him from the club: steadily and without pause. Duczyński fell back upon his bed. Danny adjusted the sling to make sure his arm was comfortable.

‘How’s the injury?’

‘I can’t help you with your sister, Mr Shaw.’

‘Yes, you said.’

‘It breaks too may regulations. Technically, I should arrest you.’ A pause. Then, sleepily: ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m opening the bloody window. Your bedroom stinks. It’s the bachelor life for you, isn’t it?’

‘No. It’s too cold.’

‘Really.’

Danny patted Karel’s chest. The man was already snoring.

In the kitchenette, Danny rinsed the dust from an apple and walked into the living room, where he had half a mind to catch up on the investigation into the air-crash in Bavaria. But Duczyński had no television. The apartment was undecorated and almost empty. It looked like the inspector had moved in the previous week.

He moved to the balcony and ate the fruit as he considered the problem of Jem. A few minutes later, he found a pen and paper. He wrote on the reverse of a receipt:

Fine, Karel. I’ll look for her without your help. See you around, Danny.

He put the receipt on the telephone and opened the apartment door. He stopped on the threshold. The hallway was black and empty. Finding a hotel at this time of night would not be fun.

‘Fuck it.’

He closed the door and stole one of the pillows from Karel’s bed. On the rug in the living room, parallel to the coffee table, he stretched out. The pillow was feathered and double the English size, but he made himself comfortable enough. His back ached like it used to in the days when he sculled. The bachelor life alright.

In the Zoologischer Garten underground station, Jem stopped as she noticed two uniformed police officers twenty feet away from her. They were eating curried sausages near an information desk. She hid behind a postcard carousel, thinking, Don’t be so obvious… don’t be so… so fucking Clouseau. She felt the strain of predation, but its pressure could be transferred: it was potential energy, like that of a coiled spring, and when released she would launch and lose them all. Her eyes hurried over the options as they were served on the departure board. Three hours to Hamburg, door to the North Sea. Four hours to Cologne, the Rhineland city she had visited with her school as a teenager. Four hours to Frankfurt—a blank space on her internal map. Munich, six hours. But why limit herself to Germany? There were night trains to Scandinavia. In short hours, she might part the curtains in her sleeper compartment to view the sea beyond the Danish peninsula. What was that called? The Baltic? Scapa Flow?

‘Scarper,’ she said, testing the word.

She gave a euro to the woman who tended the ladies’ toilet. Inside, she found a disabled stall. Jem put her plastic bag on the cistern and dealt her tools across the seat: hair clips, plastic gloves, towels, and a hand mirror. She re-checked the chemical names on the reverse of the hair dye and asked Ego to reassure her that Wasserstoffperoxid was hydrogen peroxide and Ammoniaklösung ammonia. She smiled as she thought back to the girls in that crappy little hairdresser’s in Exeter.

Twenty minutes later—hair witchy black—she passed the cleaner and dropped a second euro on the plate. It would not cover the damage she had done to the sink. She put her prepaid mobile phone into a bin and bought a second, including a Bluetooth earpiece. She loaded the earpiece with a battery and slipped it over her ear, careful not to touch her hair.