Reckoning Point, стр. 20
Alex takes a deep breath, holds it, releases it, and moves away from the pine table and all the thoughts it conjures up. There’s work to be done, and he’s the only one who can do it.
His mind is determined and focussed until something else becomes glaringly obvious to him. The tin. He spots it straight away, nestled between the jar of Italian coffee and a cookery book of Eastern European recipes. He remembers that tin and the secrets it contained and probably still does. He remembers the first time he looked inside it and how she caught him and threw him out.
It hits him then, the hopelessness again, starting as an ache in his chest, spreading heat throughout his body, culminating in a rage which he sees through a red mist and he grabs the tin, hurls it over arm across the kitchen where it bounces off the tiled wall and lands in the sink.
“Dude!” Noah’s voice breaks the fog and Alex passes a hand across his face.
“I’m all right,” he replies, his tone weary.
“No, come here, I found something.”
Putting the tin back in its position on the shelf, Alex walks down the hallway. In the lounge he finds Noah hunched over the small end table. Edging closer, he looks over Noah’s shoulder.
“What are you doing?”
“I found this notebook, look. The pen has been pressed hard, ay?” Noah has placed a blank piece of paper over the top page and is shading across the sheet with a pencil. Faint lines appear. Lines that Alex realises are words.
“Fuck!” he exclaims and claps Noah on the back. “Nice work.”
A lopsided grin lights up Noah’s face and Alex smiles ruefully. Noah isn’t used to praise. Alex sits down as Noah hands another sheet over which contains words he has already deciphered.
“Bella Vista,” he reads. “What is that?”
“I’m guessing a hotel, it says ‘62 a night’,” replies Noah, tapping at the sheet with his pencil. “And she wrote this too, but I don’t know what it means. It’s foreign, right?”
Alex reads the next words, written in block capitals, underlined three times so hard that the third line ends in what can only be the page tearing underneath the pen. “Lev Aliyev.”
It means nothing to Alex and he doesn’t know if it is a name or a place, but it sounds like the kind of words he saw and heard in Chernobyl. He writes it next to the hotel name on the page, already planning to call Sissy or Klim in Pripyat and ask them if it means anything to them.
And as Noah goes back to working on the notebook, Alex sits back, clutching the sheet of paper. The rage of only moments ago has gone, faded away to be replaced by hope and determination.
The Bella Vista and the strange other words are Alex’s first clue to the whereabouts of Elian.
I’ll find you, he promises under his breath. I’ll get you back home.
19
THE DOCTOR
HOLLAND SPOOR
5.7.15 Late afternoon
Bram stands next to the flapping police tape and cranes his head to look down the alleyway. He has bought his cane out this afternoon. Though his joints only usually play him up in damp weather, he has missed an entire night’s sleep and his legs are tired and aching. He could have napped before the start of his evening surgery, but there is too much going on and as an upstanding member of this community, he feels that he should put in an appearance, make it known that his support is available, should either the authorities or his girls need it.
“Mister Braston!”
Bram hears the call and groans inwardly, knowing who it is before he even turns around. He taps his cane on the floor, wondering if he can move on and pretend not to have heard. But it’s too late; the boy is upon him, standing too close with a ridiculous smile on his big round face.
“Oh, hello, Roland.” He forces a smile.
Roland plucks at the police tape, his face serious now. “You heard about Gabi?”
“Yes, I did.” Bram edges around Roland in an attempt to escape. “It’s very sad, very sad indeed.”
“She was a lovely lady. It’s not fair, is it Mister Braston?”
Bram heaves a sigh at the whine in the boy’s voice and doesn’t bother to correct him on the hash up he has made of his name. He stopped correcting him years ago. He stopped speaking to Roland years ago too, but the boy never seemed to notice, and whenever he sees Bram he chats away as though they are old buddies. They are old something, but buddies definitely not.
“See you later, Roland. Enjoy the rest of your day.”
“I saw him, you know.” Roland’s words, shouted into the sunny afternoon, stop Bram in his tracks, though he doesn’t turn around.
“What?”
“He’s a very bad man, and I shall tell the policeman when he gets round to talking to me.”
Bram reluctantly moves back to Roland. “Are you trying to b e funny? And why would the police speak to you, boy?”
Roland looks almost proud as he sticks his chest out. “They always do, when something like this happens. They always speak to me.”
Bram utters a laugh, taps his cane on the ground and this time, as he moves away, still laughing, he doesn’t look back.
He walks on through the streets, nodding a greeting to those who hail him, all the while thinking about what the boy Roland had said. Had he seen something? He wouldn’t dismiss the idea immediately, for the boy is always running around Schev and den Haag, especially the back streets where the girls hang around after finishing their shifts in their windows. And the girls are