Coral Hill

CORAL HILL

Neil Bhati

Published by Neil Bhati at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Neil Bhati

ISBN 978-1-3104-3036-7

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SURVIVE

01 - LVX

02 - Asymmetric

EVADE

03 - Hunt

04 - Winter

05 - U-boat

RESIST

06 - Mordor

07 - Sword

08 - Muse

ESCAPE

09 - Weaponised

10 - The Protocol

By the same author

SURVIVE

1. LVX

REACTIVATED

Dodgson was caught in the rip of a dark dream when his phone began to ring. He ignored it and eventually it stopped. He curled deeper into the mean warmth of his bed, trying to hoard the embers of his sleep, but again and again the phone would chatter and nag, persistent as toothache. The sharp slats of the window turned in increments from black to sullen grey, and the ghosts of the night faded to nothing. The house was very cold. The phone rang again, as tactless as a klaxon. Dodgson snatched it angrily from the floor, expecting only the worst at this ungodly hour.

‘What?’ he snapped.

There was a long pause and then a voice from his unburied past.

‘LVX? Is that you?’

‘How did you get this number?’

‘LVX, you’ve been reactivated.’

‘Who gave you this number?’

‘Moresby.’

‘But he’s dead.’

‘Yes, I know.’

The voice on the phone was Jack Rackham. Once, a long time ago, Rackham had been his commanding officer. Dodgson had not seen nor heard from him in years. The urbane Rackham wasted no time in small-talk.

‘That shabby little office of yours? Let’s say an hour. No hurry, LVX.’

Rackham hung up and Dodgson checked the time on the plastic phone. It was already past six. He had a splitting headache. He didn’t drink much these days but maybe once a month he’d find himself alone in his echoing house, unable to suppress an inarticulate rage. Last night he’d drank almost a bottle of whisky and had stayed up late, talking to Flynn. Flynn was dead but they’d talked anyway, long into the night.

Dodgson kicked off the tangled sheets and turned on the lights as he stumbled to the bathroom. He showered then shaved. He avoided mirrors and had taught himself to shave by touch like a blind man. Now dry and shivering cold he dressed in a crisp white shirt and sombre black suit, one of the three cheap suits he used for work. He kept them hung on the picture rail that ran like a parapet around the high walls of his bedroom. In the pre-dawn grey of the morning he would imagine they were three black ghosts, the grim judgemental dead, perpetual like a fault in his vision.

He strapped his old analogue watch on his wrist then padded downstairs to the spartan kitchen. He made coffee and watched the stray cat in the yard through the black mirror of the window. Glancing at his watch he realised he was late. He took his coat, Moresby’s old trench-coat, and automatically he checked his wallet, phone and keys.

Quite why he’d taken to wearing Moresby’s trench was a mystery. He’d found it in the office the day after the funeral, hung like a shroud on the back of the door. Flynn had been there too, paying his own respects, a hallucination stuck like grit in Dodgson’s eye. Always there, at the worst times and the evil hours.

He drove fast. At a red light he snagged his reflection in the flash of the rear-view mirror. He knocked it aside but not before he’d caught a glimpse of Flynn’s shattered face and bloody grin. He blinked and the stop light was already green. Last night’s whisky had been a bad idea but he’d been thinking about Ciara and the war and ninety-nine other problems and one impulsive drink had turned into half the bottle. Dodgson decided that he would fob Rackham off then go back to sleep, he’d sleep until he was human.

Moresby was dead but his business still remained. Dodgson had kept the name, Moresby Investigations, out of a sense of misplaced loyalty. The database was still a fertile source of trade and blackmail. He’d been sent to Moresby after the debacle in Ireland. Moresby was ex-Police and blatantly corrupt. He’d asked no questions, seeming already to know the necessary answers.

The office was on the first floor, above a minicab outfit. A tarnished brass name-plate screwed on the front door added a modicum of glamour to the desolate street. The boys downstairs were absurdly proud to share their premises with a Private Detective. The front door was stood ajar and the alarm panel had been disarmed. Only Dodgson and Moresby knew the code and Moresby was dead; he’d fallen under a train at James Street station a year last Christmas. Dodgson trudged up the ladder of stairs to the office. Rackham sat nonchalantly behind the desk.

‘Take a seat, LVX. You're looking a bit green.’

Dodgson sagged gratefully into the spare chair. Rackham, elegant in a finely tailored suit, was seated on Dodgson’s usual side of the desk. Two desks had been pushed together to form a square. The walls were buttressed with old steel filing cabinets. Huge street-maps like banners were pinned to the walls. A slatted venetian blind covered the windows. The office was a grim and dusty place. There was a battered laptop on the desk, dormant and quietly charging.

‘I handed in my tools,’ growled Dodgson. ‘I quit.’

‘Nonsense,’ laughed Rackham. ‘I have a little job for you. Well within your capabilities.’

‘What job?’

Rackham tossed him a sheet of paper, folded into quarters. A briefing document.

‘I want you to keep an eye on someone. Chap’s gone a bit erratic of late. Lost his head over a girl.’

‘What do you want me to do about it?’

‘Have a quiet word. The man’s name is Everard Rush. He was briefly attached to an Intelligence operation, before he quit the Army. Nowadays he’s reinvented himself as some sort of artist. I told him to expect you.’

‘Why me?’

‘To be brutally honest, I don’t have anyone else to ask. You’re my only asset north of the Watford Gap. And I’d prefer to keep this unofficial.’

‘Will I get paid for this?’

Rackham looked hurt.

‘LVX, must you always adopt that mercenary tone? Of course you’ll be paid! Now go and talk to Rush. Find out about this girl of his, this Coral Hill.’

He stood up slowly as if to leave.

‘Do you have a weapon?’ he asked casually.

‘Will I need one?’

‘Better safe than sorry. Moresby liked to be ready for all sorts of eventualities. Perhaps you should take a look, before you visit Rush?’

Rackham dropped a key-ring on the desk and scribbled an address on the reverse of the briefing paper.

‘I’ll let myself out, shall I?’

Dodgson remained sat at Moresby’s side of the desk, studying the précis. He noticed on the ancient blotter the long lines of faded mirror-writing. Moresby’s dead hand was almost Arabic in its meandering scrawl. After a while, with his stomach grumbling like old plumbing, he got up and stretched. He took Rackham’s keys and folded the briefing paper inside his notebook.

He took a short walk to a nearby café. The windows were opaque with condensation. Dodgson sat with his back to the wall, religiously checking the door. He was alone, just the cook in the kitchen and the tired girl at the counter under a blackboard menu. There was no one else this early on a Sunday. He tried to smile when he ordered his breakfast. He came here most days, if only for endless cups of tea. It was one of Moresby’s old haunts. He waited patiently for his breakfast, avoiding his reflection in the scratched steel cutlery. Automatically testing the knife’s blunt edge with his thumb.

He ate mechanically then returned to the office for the laptop. He would be on the move over the next few days and might not have the luxury to return to the office. He had no computer at his house, no electronics at all, but having ready access to the old laptop available might prove useful. It went in his day-sack along with the long white noose of the power-cable.

Rackham’s address was a compound of lock-up garages in the grim depths of a Liverpool council estate. Dodgson parked behind a rank of dilapidated tenements. Their smashed windows were visored with stark metal plates as thick as armour. There was no-one around but Dodgson didn’t hesitate. He found the right garage and unlocked the brass padlock that secured the metal door. He raised it and quickly ducked inside. The garage was heavy with shadows and it stank of engine oil. Rainwater had pooled along the concrete floor. The narrow space was filled with the rusted carcass of a Ford Capri. The Ford was balanced on bricks and draped with a ragged tarpaulin as big as a parachute. Dodgson dragged it aside. The car was powder-blue beneath a scum of dirt. The second key opened the car. Under the driver’s seat was a small metal tool-box. It was very clean, without dust or the tarnishing grease of fingerprints. It contained a roll of oil-soaked cloth, furled around a steel gun. A gun and a carton of bullets, carefully sealed against the damp. The gun slotted neatly into his hand and Dodgson weighed it approvingly. He hadn’t pulled a trigger in years.

Rackham’s briefing document was short and to the point. Late Friday night a man called Everard Rush was found at his studio apartment by paramedics. He was unconscious, with superficial head injuries. The following evening Rush had gone to an apartment owned by a girl called Coral Hill. Coral was described as an art student, in her twenties. Rush had shot a pistol at her, though somehow the girl had escaped unscathed. Later that night Rush made contact with Rackham’s department, demanding their help to catch a terrorist. That was yesterday. Today was Sunday.

Dodgson drove into the city-centre where he found a dank multi-storey car-park. It was a dismal place but its upper levels offered a degree of privacy. Back in the days of the Protocol they always met in places like this, Rackham and Flynn and himself, on windswept roof-tops and in old courtyards, by abandoned warehouses and along the tow-paths of derelict canals. Never in bars or train-stations, never on the zenith of the hour. Never with functioning comms; they made it a habit to leave their mobile phones locked in their cars safely out of earshot. Work phones and play phones, and when Dodgson had still had a life he’d juggled them with the same diligence as when he’d showered and dressed before replacing his wedding ring.

Moresby’s gun was an automatic pistol of a curiously unfinished appearance. The safety was marked on the receiver with a red dot. There was a serial number, KA 000301 but no other manufacturer’s marks. Dodgson knew immediately what it was though he’d never seen one outside of a reference book. It was a Soviet-era silenced pistol called a PSS. It used a special type of ammunition instead of a suppressor to make it silent. The gun was very cold as if it had lain buried for years. Dodgson wondered how Moresby had got hold of it and, more to the point, how he’d acquired the ammunition. There were twelve blunt-nosed bullets in the carton. Two magazines, six shots each. He loaded the weapon and slipped it in his right pocket. He took a deep breath. His hands were shaking.

He got out of his car, shrugged inside his coat, and looked around the gloomy precinct to get his bearings. He walked up the ramp to the roof of the car-park. He drank in the salt air, the grey sky and diesel sea and the city spread out all around him. He spat into a wide oily puddle that reflected the torn sky. His reflection was a shadow, warped beneath the clouds.

WORK MAKES YOU FREE

He sent Rackham a text-message, the letters A M F. It was an abbreviation of the German arbeit macht frei. Back in the days of the Protocol it was his signal that he was about to begin an operation. Dodgson still kept to the old traditions. He still wore his army watch, a black-faced analogue on a NATO strap. Not strictly regulation but the entire unit had been issued with them. It was old and battered but kept the right time. Even broken it was right twice a day. That had been one of Flynn’s favourite sayings.

Dodgson returned to his car and drove to Rush’s studio apartment. It was on a narrow back-street between converted warehouses. The cobbled road had been swept spotlessly clean. Huge reproductions of vibrant French graffiti were carefully collaged on the repointed orange-brick walls. Bright cargo-doors in the sheer warehouse functioned as garage access for the residents. Dodgson could see tyre marks burned into the road, the tracks of a vehicle accelerating as it left the warehouse. There was a smaller door with a brushed-steel intercom. A hooded surveillance camera glared at him. Dodgson sniffed the rancid air and carefully locked his old Ford. It was quite out of place in this affluent street. The surrounding buildings had been expensively converted into apartments for the urban elite. Negative equity, thought Dodgson and he felt a momentary contentment with his own domestic arrangements. A blank terrace house as spartan as could be imagined, three black suits hung on the wall and a stray cat he suffered to trespass.

It was starting to rain. Dodgson knew he was prevaricating. His hangover was back, a nagging grinding headache. He leaned on the intercom and kept it pressed until finally a voice yelled down, shouting abuse. It was so distorted with static it could be in another language. Dodgson kept the bell pressed until finally the door was wrenched open. Rush hadn’t bothered with the security chain. He seemed too angry to care.

Everard Rush was a tall hulk of a man, heavily muscled beneath a recent accretion of fat. His stubbled head was webbed with a lattice of scars. A jagged line of white surgical strips sutured a recent laceration. A brandy bottle swung like a pendulum in his fist. Rush wore a short silk gown printed with a florid Chinese dragon. The gown left his powerful legs bare. The left leg ended in a stump, just below the knee-cap, knuckled with fat worms of scar-tissue. It was strapped into a black prosthetic, an abstract sculpture of a leg.

‘Rackham sent me,’ explained Dodgson, when Rush had stopped swearing.

Rush went quiet. He advanced on Dodgson, a lazy mannerism to intimidate and threaten. Dodgson didn’t move an inch. Rush stank of oil-paint and brandy and sweat. He was overweight, belligerent and as malicious as a bear. His hands were curled into fists and Dodgson could see that their natural state was a weapon.

‘What?’ growled Rush.

He took another step forward, grinding his metal leg against the step.

‘I said, Rackham sent me. Perhaps we might talk in private?’

Rush led the way, through a wide blank atrium dominated by a sleek Lotus Elise. Its bodywork was canary-yellow and it looked very fast. Dodgson was honest enough to admit he coveted it though he’d have preferred a more restrained shade of black. A mid-life crisis car, he thought. Another cliché. This legend, this cover-story of an artist, it was all wrong.

A goods elevator had been repurposed to carry passengers and they rode it in silence to the first floor. Rush’s prosthetic kept scratching against the floor of the lift cage, though whether from restrained fury or an excess of nerves Dodgson couldn’t tell.

‘I’m forgetting my manners,’ said Rush, as the lift jerked to a stop. ‘Everard Rush.’

‘Dodgson,’ said Dodgson, reluctantly shaking Rush’s moist hand.

Rush ushered him into a huge open plan area, his studio.

‘You’ve caught me at a bad time,’ admitted Rush. ‘Rackham told me he’d send up his best man. I hope we can work together. Please, this way. Let me get you a drink.’

The opposite wall was painted with a huge hyper-detailed mural, almost photographic in its resolution. The sun against the vast interstellar void. Dodgson looked closer. Set against the equator of the star was a perfect black circle, small but perfectly distinct, like a flaw in the iris of an eye.

‘The Transit of Venus,’ said Rush cryptically.

‘It’s very red,’ agreed Dodgson.

‘It’s the eclipse of Venus against the sun. I based it upon images taken by NASA and the Japanese space agency.’

‘Oh, coffee, thanks.’

Rush handed him a delicate cup, filled with a rich and viscous brew drawn from an expensive machine. There was an awkward silence as Dodgson waited for Rush to speak. He was curious to hear the lies Rush would spin. Whatever Rush had done for Rackham’s mob in the war, he’d invested his gains well. The film-set studio and the sports-car were not the trappings of an artist but of a dilettante playing an idle game.

‘I’ve discovered a terrorist sleeper-cell,’ announced Rush blandly.

Dodgson choked on his thimble of coffee.

‘One of them tried to kill me. She calls herself Coral Hill. I tried to apprehend her but she escaped. That was when I contacted Rackham.’

‘He said you tried to shoot her?’

‘Oh yes.’ Rush plucked a hand-gun from the clutter of a nearby work-bench.

‘Is that thing loaded?’ asked Dodgson stupidly.

Rush aimed at the opposite wall. He pulled the trigger, again and again and again, blasting away until the magazine was empty. He ejected the clip and made the pistol safe. His actions were practiced and efficient. Dodgson, shocked at the racket of gun-fire, crossed the paint-stained floor of the studio. He passed by a pair of huge cubical space-heaters. High above long indecipherable rolls of paper writhed in their convection cell. On the wall he found the antique metal hazard sign Rush had used as a target. It was perforated by a tight group of bullet-holes. Dodgson was conscious of the Russian gun in his trench-coat and how he hadn’t fired a weapon in years. Even back in the days of the Protocol he’d have been hard-pressed to have matched Rush’s aim.

‘You’re a good shot,’ said Dodgson.

Rush shrugged modestly.

‘I’m surprised you managed to miss the girl. What happened?’

Dodgson watched Rush turn aside as if distracted.

‘I suppose deep-down I didn’t really want to hurt her.’

There was embarrassed silence. Rush lied like a bad actor.

‘Do you have her picture?’ asked Dodgson.

Rush led him to a screened-off area by a helical metal staircase. The stairs led up to the actual apartment, the bathroom and bedrooms. The private space remained open, divided by the planes of an exploded cube. Floating walls hung by wires from the high roof, like the grid-lines in an architectural sketch. The screens were fabric and wood, an expensive and muted shade of white. Within the cube there was a chaise-longue and an easel, and pinned to the walls was a haphazard collage of Polaroid photographs. They were all pictures of the same girl.

She was beautiful. Not even the chemical trap of the Polaroid could still her raw power. Her lips were a sullen pout, a secret smile. Her hair was as straight as a razor. Her eyes raked him, measuring him and finding him wanting. They burned with a blue fire.

Rush plucked a photograph at random and thrust it into Dodgson’s hands.

‘This is Coral Hill.’

POLAROID

‘I’ll get you her number, and Hennessy’s as well. He was her tutor back when she still bothered with classes. She was on the Fine Arts course. She should be in her third year now but she took a break. I think she had an illness but she never talked about it, not to me or the girls.’

‘She’s your model?’ asked Dodgson, completely entranced by Coral’s picture.

‘My muse,’ corrected Rush.

In the Polaroid the girl was caught thinking deep-thoughts but Dodgson was too cynical to believe in the verity of looks. Coral was lounging, mostly clothed though in some of the pictures she was quite merrily naked. Rush seemed ambivalent about her condition but Dodgson felt embarrassed for her. He imagined Flynn, cackling and leering at his advantage.

Coral’s azure eyes posed an unspoken question, something she seemed loathe to put into anything as crude as words. Perhaps the timing was all wrong, the mood broken by the unsubtle camera, and the glare that radiated from her eyes had been enough to disrupt Rush’s artistic instinct.

‘That’s a new one,’ said Rush. ‘You can keep it.’

He went to the kitchen and returned with his phone. He tapped its screen with a stylus as big as a chopstick. Dodgson reached into his coat for his notebook and biro. They sat down to exchange numbers, not in the meditative white cube but at the big workbench. Rush made more coffee and waited patiently for Dodgson to finish writing.

‘What happened to your neck?’ asked Dodgson, looking up from his notebook.

Rush couldn’t stop himself pawing the faint red striations that circled his throat.

‘Coral.’

‘This was on Friday night? She was here with you? What exactly happened?’

‘We talked, about art and the war and so on. I tried to get her to open up to me. She must have suspected something. She smashed a bottle of Hines across my skull and ran off.’

‘And your neck?’

‘My identity discs. I wear them sometimes. Nostalgia. They get me back in the Army mindset. I was trying something new with Coral,’ explained Rush, ‘Exploring an image of innocence I remembered from the Desert.’

‘And?’

‘She caught them when she grabbed my shirt. Broke the chain. It ruined my shirt as well.’

Dodgson put his notebook away. He tried to remember the lessons Moresby had taught him, the short cuts and cruel tricks and the tells that bragged a liar. Moresby had been a proper detective, just as Flynn had been a real soldier.

‘I won’t keep you any longer,’ smiled Dodgson. ‘You’ve been very patient. I’ll talk to Rackham and he’ll decide the best way to proceed.’

Rush nodded impatiently. Dodgson stood up as if to leave.

‘I understand you have an exhibition opening soon?’

‘Yes. Carlyle Street. If you have no further questions…’

Rush palmed him a business card and was gone, climbing the spiral stairwell to his bedroom. Dodgson took a final look at the Transit of Venus before making his own way out.

When he got outside it was spitting with rain. Dodgson checked his watch. Night was drawing in but it was barely five o’clock. Returning to his car he made a phone-call to Rackham.

‘The man’s a complete lunatic,’ complained Dodgson.

Rackham listened evenly.

‘Perhaps it would be best if we talked about this face-to-face. I’m up north all this week, but perhaps if I drop by your place at ten?’

‘The house?’

‘Yes LVX, you can show me your new curtains.’

Dodgson went into a random pub, where he used the lavatory and scrubbed his face clean of fatigue. He sat with an untouched whisky, brooding over his notes. A list of names and phone numbers and the web of lies that connected them. Coral’s friends and acquaintances, the people she and Rush had in common. Rackham’s précis listed Coral’s address but now he had her mobile number as well as her photograph. The Polaroid trapped his eyes. It was like when he received a new picture of Ciara - he would spend days staring at it, committing it to memory. A child who stared him right in the eye, as stubborn as he was, refusing to be fobbed-off with any lie or misdirection.

He abandoned his stagnant drink and, back in his car, he drove along the rain-slick roads home to his empty house. He glanced at the dial of his watch, the hands and numbers glowing faintly in the night. He had plenty of time to return for Rackham’s unprecedented visit but right now he needed the space to think. Driving helped to settle his mind, to ground him in the here and now. The traffic was sparse and Dodgson took great satisfaction in racing past the clots of casual drivers. He had taken an advanced driving test and various pursuit courses back in the days of the Protocol. They’d had access to proper cars, angry machines with unbelievable power. Now he was relegated to his old Ford, a knackered old donkey with its perpetual engine warning light that nagged him like a shrewish wife.

The Russian gun worried him. He had no qualms about carrying it, indeed its weight felt natural in his pocket. But the sight of Rush showing-off gave him cause to reflect. Rackham knew how dangerous Rush was beneath the strata of his cover. Dodgson didn’t believe for a second that Rush was an artist. He was something else, an old intelligence asset pensioned off and struggling with the baggage of his career. Dodgson drove on, thinking about Rush and Coral Hill, and the nuclear backdrop of the sun intersected by Venus.

Dodgson parked opposite his house. The front yard was a sterile grid of grey flagstone. The porch light was always switched off,