Mark Mills - House of the Hanged

‘Hector . . . Hector . . . Come on, boy . . .’

The words echoed back at him, hollow, futile.

Hector would often come here to cool off when the mercury was nudging ninety degrees, but he wasn’t here now.

The donkey engine and the water pump were housed in a wooden shed beside the well. Tom cranked the wheel, amazed, as always, when the faithful old Lister phut-phutted into life. The water in the big holding tank up top was running low. It would take a couple of hours to fill – more than enough time to complete his task.

He started in the northeast corner, right up by the railway cutting, where the ground vanished in a sheer drop of some thirty feet to the steel tracks below. From here he made his way back towards the sea, working methodically, taking each patch of land between the latticework of pathways in turn and searching it thoroughly, delving deep into the tangled underbrush.

Chapter Three

He signed for the cocktails and lay back on the sun lounger. As jobs went, he reflected, things didn’t get much better than this.

He cast his mind back over the other ones and concluded that things didn’t get any better than this. Talk about mixing business and pleasure: a summer break at a top hotel right on the beach, just one little chore to perform and then he’d be gone.

‘Why are you smiling?’

She had finished her swim and was towelling herself dry in the sunshine. She was in good condition for her age, although gravity had taken its inevitable toll on her breasts and buttocks.

‘Because I’m contented,’ he replied.

He spoke a formal French, far too formal, but it would have to do. It was the only shared language between them. He barely spoke a word of German, let alone Swiss German, and her Italian was a joke.

‘Is that for me?’ she asked in her guttural French, nodding at the drinks set on the table between their loungers.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re a bad boy.’

He was about to reply that she sounded like his mother, but checked himself just in time. She was, after all, close to his mother’s age; not so close as to repel him, but close enough for him to feel mildly squeamish at the prospect of seducing her.

‘I’m on holiday,’ he said. ‘And so are you.’

For the first time in their brief acquaintance, he used the familiar ‘ tu ’ instead of ‘ vous ’, and he could see that this didn’t go unnoticed by her.

She adjusted her bathing costume, brushed some imaginary sand from her thigh and lowered herself on to the lounger.

‘Well, if you insist . . .’ she purred coquettishly, following his lead and using the familiar pronoun.

He knew from their conversation on the terrace after dinner last night that her husband had been held back in Zurich on business, leaving her to travel on ahead alone. He could picture the husband rolling around with his secretary on some dishevelled bed, and he wondered if she suspected the same.

‘Did you contact your friend?’ she asked.

‘My friend?’

‘The painter in Cannes.’

‘Oh him . . . yes.’

He remembered now. Stuck with the cover story he’d already shared with a couple of the other hotel guests, he’d embellished it slightly for her benefit, adding a touch of glamour to impress. The painter in Cannes was a childhood friend from Rome who had recently found great success abroad, and was eager to show off his new house on the Cap d’Antibes.

‘Have you decided when you’re leaving?’

Not immediately the job was done; that was liable to arouse suspicion. No, he would brave it out for a day or two afterwards, as he usually did.

‘When is your husband arriving?’

‘Saturday.’

He glanced around him, but the only people within earshot were two sun-bronzed children, a brother and sister, playing beach quoits nearby, and they were far too absorbed in their game to be listening.

‘I was thinking Friday,’ he said.

There, it was done. He had made his intentions plain. It wasn’t the end of the world if she didn’t take the bait, but it would be much better if she did. It was always good to have an alibi up your sleeve.

She didn’t react at first; she just took a sip of her cocktail and stretched out on the lounger, closing her eyes.

‘I’ve never done this sort of thing before,’ she said quietly.

‘You haven’t done anything.’

She turned on to her side and looked at him. ‘No, but I want to.’

He saw the way the skin hung loose on her thighs and around her neck, and he wasn’t entirely lying when he said, ‘Knowing that is enough for me.’

‘Well, it’s not enough for me.’

Chapter Four

Tom was familiar with the sound. Lying in bed at night, the creak of the big old vine that coiled its way up the front of the villa would often carry through the open French windows into his room when the wind was up.

But there wasn’t any wind tonight, not a breath of it.

He rarely slept the sleep of the innocent, lost to the world, and he shrugged off his liminal state in an instant, alert now, ears straining.

Maybe he’d been mistaken. All he could hear was the beat of the waves on the rocks below the villa, the ocean’s blind purpose to make all things sea.

No. There it was again. And a faint rustle of leaves.

Someone was climbing the vine, and there was only one reason why they would be doing that: in order to reach the large terrace which served the master bedroom where he slept.

He cursed himself for his complacency. He hadn’t slept with his gun to hand for almost a year. The old Beretta 418 was locked away in a drawer in the study, a symbol of a time when his life had been ruled by fear and suspicion. He prided himself on having finally mastered that debilitating state of mind. As if in affirmation of this, a harmless explanation came to him quite suddenly, taking the edge off his building panic.

Barnaby.

Barnaby wasn’t due until tomorrow evening, but he was quite capable of changing his plans on a whim, especially if he’d landed himself in trouble while motoring down through France, which was quite probable. Trouble and Barnaby had always gone together, and Tom could picture him having to flee some tricky situation entirely of his own making. Turning up un announced in the middle of night and then pouncing on Tom while he slept was exactly the sort of infantile prank that would appeal to Barnaby’s sense of humour.

The moonlight flooding through the French windows and painting the wall beside the bed would allow Tom to see the shadow-play of anyone entering from the terrace. Well, he would turn the tables on Barnaby, waiting until the last moment before scaring the living daylights out of him.

Then again, maybe he was stretching the realms of possibility, even by the preposterous standards of his old friend. Maybe it wasn’t Barnaby, but a burglar. A small band of Spaniards, professional housebreakers from Barcelona, had passed this way two summers back. Some were still serving time in Toulon prison.

Whoever it was, the person had now cleared the stone balustrade and was creeping across the terrace. Their soft footfalls ceased, replaced by another sound. It was hard to make out, but it sounded like someone un screwing the cap of a bottle.

Tom exaggerated his breathing to convey the impression of someone deep in slumber, and moments later the visitor slipped silently into the bedroom.

He knew immediately that it wasn’t Barnaby, not unless he had shrunk by half a head since April. Everything about the shadow on the wall was wrong. Most worryingly, it moved with a professional stealth, confident, unhurried. It was definitely a man, and as he stole towards the bed it became clear that he was carrying something in his hand, not a weapon – not a gun or a knife or even a cudgel – but something else.