Watching You(67)

Nothing there. All he could see was some maritime junk on the jetty. On the far side of the building there was no equivalent flight of steps, only a half-metre-high railing and a two-metre drop to the rocks at the water’s edge.

No one had jumped down; he would have heard them. That left the door.

It was closed.

Berger heard his rapidly accelerating pulse like the ticking of a clock. A large clock, with a powerful clapper.

He snuck round the corner, treading cautiously on the planks of the jetty. They felt strong enough, didn’t creak. He took a couple of steps towards the door. Stopped. Listened.

Nothing but the rain.

A diamond-shaped window in the door was considerably darker than the door itself.

Then he heard the rattling sound again. It was coming from inside the boathouse. It was time. No way back now.

The sound wasn’t coming from the door itself, but from the side of it. There was a hole. The first thing he saw were odd pinpricks of light that his accumulated experience tried in vain to associate with known weapons. It didn’t work. A portal opened through time – into absolute chaos.

Then he saw teeth, sharp, bared teeth, and heard a strangely aggressive wheezing sound.

Then he saw the spines.

A hedgehog emerged from the hole. It spines were raised. It wheezed again, then turned and went back inside the boathouse with a rattling sound. Something inside shrieked. It didn’t sound human.

Berger reached his hand towards the door. He tried the handle. Locked. He backed away towards the railing and raised his foot to kick the door in. Then it was thrown open.

At the edge of his field of vision he saw his lowered weapon rise up. He saw it in an absurd series of images, a slightly blacker crooked line through the darkness until all he saw was an unexpectedly solid Glock at chest height. Only afterwards did he see the bare, raised hand.

Molly Blom didn’t lower it, even when she saw that he had lowered his weapon. Instead she gestured with her hand for him to follow her. He went over and stepped inside the boathouse. It stank of tar. He followed the beam of her torch to the corner. There were four small hedgehogs. Nearby an agitated parent hedgehog was moving about, wheezing and rattling.

He laughed, an unplanned laugh of relief.

‘No one here,’ Molly Blom said.

Their torches moved round the rest of the boathouse. Apart from the abandoned boat engines, buoys and a number of beer cans of varying vintage, there were a couple of carpentry benches and two tables, a crumpled tarpaulin, some cables and ropes in various shades of green.

But what made the strongest impression were the two pillars stretching from floor to roof some way from the wall. In the wall closest to the jetty were six mooring rings in two vertical columns, three in each, so that the two columns formed an imaginary cube with the pillars as the two other uprights.

Blom’s torch jerked and the circle of light sank lower.

‘Dear God,’ she said.

Berger stepped between the posts and looked away from the wall. On the opposite wall, some seven metres away, was a window. In the window he could see an ancient greasy mark. A wave of deep shame washed over him, and the shame quickly turned to pain. The gnawing, shooting pain of a wrecked conscience.

She came over to him. She was holding something in her hand. After a while he saw that it was a strand of hair. A long, blond hair.

‘The worst thing,’ Molly Blom said, ‘is that I can’t tell if it’s mine or William’s.’

They sat there together on the floor of the boathouse listening to the rustling of the hedgehogs. Time passed in peculiar phases. The trees rustled non-stop. There was someone trying to get through from another time.

‘The light,’ Berger said. ‘Why did it feel like the building was lit up?’

‘It didn’t matter in the end,’ Blom said.

‘I’m just wondering why.’

‘Probably fluorescent paint. Probably old. Probably painted by William himself twenty-two years ago.’

‘But why?’

‘He captured this abandoned boathouse. He made it his own. He wanted to find it easily at night. There was already decent fluorescent paint back then.’

‘That would last until now?’

There was a sudden burst of rustling from the hedgehogs in the corner. Berger started, breathed out, shrugged off his bulletproof vest and stood up. He went over to a cobweb-covered light switch and pressed it. A lamp lit up over by the jetty door.

‘Bloody hell,’ Berger said. ‘Electricity.’

Blom raised her head with a look from a completely different decade and said: ‘Presumably one of the warring companies is paying without realising.’

Then she tugged off her own bulletproof vest. ‘We need to get going as soon as possible.’

Berger nodded, then kept nodding for a few moments. ‘Do we have to?’

Blom paused and stared at him.

‘We’ve got nowhere to go tonight,’ Berger said. ‘And time’s passing. Maybe we should try to get something done. Do some thinking.’

‘You mean I should stay in the building where I was tortured? And where you betrayed me so cruelly?’

‘That is probably what I mean.’

It took several hours to create some sort of order. They worked through dawn, clearing, tidying, hanging, organising, fixing, until it was actually light enough for them to switch the lights off. At that point they carried in a huge package draped in a stiffened military-green tarpaulin. They leaned the package against the two pillars and, exhausted, folded back the rain-drenched tarpaulin. Slowly a wonderful photograph of a gang of mountaineers climbing a snow-covered mountain was revealed. They hammered a couple of nails in the pillars and hung the picture up. Then they unfolded the sides and doubled the width of the frame. It was covered with Post-it notes and other papers which, against all the odds, had remained dry.