By Blood We Live (13 page)

But I was already out of the car, blood loud, limbs dreaming, sprinting up the steps to the open front door.

D
EATH VIVIFIES DETAIL
despite the blur. The hallway’s white floor and maple hatstand, the convex mirror that suddenly evoked the one in Van Eyck’s
Arnolfini Marriage
, the red and green tricycles I’d bought the twins when we got here.

The twins. The twins. The twins. My sick heart was ahead of me, nosing the rank air beyond their loss/​death/​mutilation while the rest of me flung up like a black wall simply
No … No … No …

There was the stink of blood, giant, unarguable with, mixed with the smell of meat cooked in wine. Onions. Fresh peaches, cut. Cigarette smoke. A human scent I didn’t recognise.

You should’ve taken them with you to the airport. But they were so weary of airports. Now they’re dead. And all the labour for nothing. Nothing.

But the blood was human. Only human. And Jacques Brel’s “Amsterdam” was playing on the CD in the kitchen.

I knew before seeing.

He liked to kick us all out so he could cook and sing along in peace. I felt precisely the little portion of time left between my realisation and what would be Madeline’s. Collective intuition had been part of the reason for her visit. The other part was here, on the floor, butchered, in a pool of blood.

Cloquet.

You don’t speak. You don’t go “Oh God.” Not straight away. In the first pure moment of comprehension you simply dissolve into the reality of what you’re seeing. It’s transcendence, of a kind.

Then the same reality forces you out again, separate, compelled to negotiate, compelled to accept.

I ran to him, aware as I did so of Madeline arriving in the doorway behind me.

He’d been shot in the head then hacked with what must have been a hatchet or a machete. Or hacked first then finished with the bullet. Either way it was over. Either way he was gone. The solid fact—he’s dead—expanded, filled the room, continued expanding. In spite of which, thanks to Hollywood, a part of me was waiting for the rasp, the gasp, the cough and flutter back into life. All the life we’d shared rushed up like a crowd that couldn’t believe it wasn’t going to be let in. The crowd that didn’t realise the thing it had come to see was already over. I was imagining the twins’ faces when I told them.
Cloquet has had to … Cloquet has gone to
 … Old habits. My children didn’t need euphemisms. Not for death, at any rate. They knew what death was. They watched their mother deal it.
Cloquet is dead.
Zoë would cry. She loved him. She
had
loved him. Lorcan wouldn’t cry. Lorcan didn’t cry. He was too curious for tears. My fault. The ordeal of his infancy I’d failed to prevent. He’d been introduced too early to loss, isolation, betrayal. He’d been introduced too early to not being able to count on anyone. Not even his mother.

Madeline put her bag on one of the kitchen chairs, very carefully, as if it contained a bomb. She stood over me, looking down at the body. She didn’t touch him. They’d been occasional lovers for almost two years. Against all expectations something intense and quiet existed between them. Had existed between them. To me it was as if she’d given him a part of her old self, her human self, for safe-keeping. Only a human would be able to keep it safe. Only a human would want it.

I took out my cell and dialled Walker.

“Hey.”

“Are the kids with you?”

“Yeah, we’re at the beach. What’s—”

“You need to get back here. Something’s happened. Someone’s been here.” Pause, to give reality a chance to change its mind. Reality declined. “Cloquet’s dead.”

Irreversible now. I’d said it. I felt Madeline hearing the words. Involuntarily looked down at Cloquet’s face. It was turned to the left, eyes (thank God) closed. His mouth was open. I thought of all the times he’d done small things for me. Lit my cigarette, handed me a cup of coffee, fastened the kids’ shoes or hassled them to brush their teeth. He insisted
on a cooked breakfast, for the two weeks in the month we ate regular food, whipped-up fresh herb omelettes, mackerel paté, soft-boiled eggs and soldiers for the twins. It was good to come downstairs in the mornings and find him, tow-haired, scowling, barefoot, making coffee, smoking. Sometimes with Zoë sitting up on the counter, talking to him, sharing the momentous business of her life.

“Are Lucy and Trish with you?” I asked.

“Lucy’s here,” he said. “Trish is shopping. Christ. Is Madeline there?”

His maker. For a second or two I hated him. For the connection. For how much the kids loved him. For not being, in spite of love, enough for me.

Then I wanted him there with me, the casual strength in his arms, the familiarity.

“She’s here,” I said. “We just got back from the airport and he was …” It was only now I noticed the Le Creuset casserole dish upturned on the floor, the food spattered, the sauce nudging the edge of his blood. Madeline reached over and turned the range’s burning gas ring off.

“Take the kids straight upstairs when you get here,” I said. “They can’t see him like this.”

“Have you checked the house?”

Idiot. Idiots, both of us. We should be better than this by now.

“Get Lorcan and Zoë in the car,” I said. “You and Lucy stay with them. And call Trish. Don’t move until I’ve called you back.” I hung up, knowing he was going to say something else, issue some warning or advice, the male habit. Madeline was still standing, staring down at the corpse. Blood had gathered around my knees, her booted feet. My head felt hot, suddenly.
Wulf
had livened at the whiff of carnage. The hunger flickered, shrank back at the smell of the
bourguignon.

I got to my feet.

WE HAVE TO CHECK THE—

I KNOW.

It was a relief to her, to have to do something. Her allowance of deferral was nearly spent. I could feel the reality coming to her:
Never hear hold feel his voice laugh life again. Never. Dead. Gone.
Her force field was heavy. The longer she stood still the worse it would be.

There was a Luger on the third shelf of the crockery cupboard and a Colt behind
Uncle Vanya
in the lounge. We moved silently, room by room.

Nothing. Sunlight on the waxed floors. Languid mote-galaxies. The odours of old rugs, crayons, mould, the kids’ clothes, Lucy’s new leather coat and faint whiff of Chanel No.19; the edgy sex Walker and I had had this morning, before the twins were awake. All the smells and colours of the life that no longer had Cloquet in it. The life that was nothing to him now. The house, the daylight, the hills that led eventually to the clamour of the world—all of it would go on without him.
We
would go on without him. That was how we honoured and disgraced the dead. And if there was an afterlife? A place of comeuppance or reward? Neither his love for us nor ours for him would count. Thanks to the arrogance that came with being (until recently) top of the food chain, betrayal of your species didn’t feature in any of the human world’s moral codes. But it wouldn’t be a head-scratcher for heaven. Conspirator and accessory to murder. If there was a hell, he was going there. With which realisation, as usual, the ghost of my childhood faith withdrew. That hell was for people like Cloquet meant there was no such place.

I called Walker and told him the house was clear.

“Look at this,” Madeline said. We were back in the kitchen. She’d put a cushion under Cloquet’s head, closed his mouth. There was a precision to her movements. Death so close and ugly recharged her beauty, her finite perfections. She was in a different phase of shock, balanced between denial and belief. There was a lightness to it. I knew the feeling. “What does this mean?”

She was looking at a mark on one of the kitchen cabinets, drawn by a finger evidently dipped in Cloquet’s blood. A vertical line with a small circle on top. Something that looked like the symbol for pi next to it. Something else that might be a crescent moon. It meant nothing to me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But whoever did this knows we’re not going to the police. There are fingerprints everywhere.”

Your voice coming out is an offence, a blatant demonstration of your continuing life. Thinking, fingerprints, cause, effect, strategy, action. Life. Consciousness. Every time it registered it refreshed the fact of his death. It’s one of the things that drives the impulse to remove the corpse,
burn it, bury it, give it to the sea. The dead body makes the living one obscene. It’s why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn’t have to look on the lewd aliveness of the living.

“It’s a religious thing,” Madeline said.

“Is it? How do you know?”

“It’s the fucking Angels. I’ve seen this sign in the ads.”

“The Catholics?”

“They’re killing familiars. Not just us. Everyone who helps—” Her voice cracked slightly on the word “helps.” The balance between denial and belief was tipping. Belief. He’s dead. Thinking of what losing him meant to her postponed what it meant to me.
Mon ange. Chèrie.
The casual endearments taken for granted. The life taken for granted.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If they knew he was here they’d know we were here. Why give themselves away?”

She shook her head, let the theory go. Let the thinking go. I knew what she was realising.

LOVE.

She closed her eyes. Swallowed. Didn’t cry.

I
T TOOK
W
ALKER
a lot of calls to get a boat at short notice. High season, everything booked. Eventually he told the hire company to call anyone they thought might be willing to return their vessel early for a fee. Which the hire company did, as well as translating it into an opportunity to slap on an extra twenty per cent. Even in our state the little rip-off registered, dismal, reliable, an affirmation of the world’s shrugging, grinning continuance. Blackly funny, in fact, if you let yourself see it that way.

These and other practicalities (wrapping and tying the body, finding stones and junk to weight it, downloading the shipping lanes and working out where to make the drop) did what it’s their job to do in the face of death: demanded small actions that stopped you giving yourself entirely to the loss. Nonetheless reality kept refreshing its page for me, this new version without Cloquet in it. There’s nothing so mundane it can’t speak the new absence: a teaspoon; a TV ad; the shadow of a bird passing overhead. For a short while a sore formed where murder rubbed against bereavement. Vestigial circuitry said killing and eating people disqualified me from grief. But
wulf
did what it does: Simply insisted. Simply burned through. Simply defied. The same shrugging, grinning continuance. The nature of life. The nature of the beast.

We waited until after midnight then took the
Sirius
(a thirty-five-foot cabin cruiser cop-show education said was normally home to bikini’d escorts tanning between drug lord blow-jobs) out into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Lucy, whose Henley-on-Thames family had had boats, drove, though Walker had been given the basics by the bandit at the rental office. Trish was with me, Madeline and the kids in the stern, a luxurious snug of waxed walnut and cream leather, chrome fittings and trim. Madeline hadn’t officially cancelled her Spanish arrangements but it was known between us she’d stay with us now for the kill. (The kill? Oh, yes. Have no illusions. The hunger treats everything apart from its own gratification with egalitarian indifference. Depressed? Heartbroken? Bereaved? It’s all one to
wulf.
Full moon rises. You change. You need what you need, so you do what you do. The kill—like the show—must go on.)

“D’you think he’d hate being buried at sea?” Madeline asked me. It was much cooler on the water, half an hour out from the harbour. We’d passed the dark little islands: Zannone, Ponza, Palmarola, Ventotene and tiny Santo Stefano. The sky was black and star-crammed and low. It felt artificial, like a planetarium. The sudden nearness to it and the smell of the water had woken us back up to the honourable alive finiteness of our bodies, bare hands and throats and faces and the fresh salt air around them. “I mean I know it’s the safest thing,” Madeline said, “but it seems so fucking lonely.”

I’d had the same thought. I didn’t recall Cloquet ever stating burial preferences, but the sea seemed wrong for him, somehow. You tell yourself not to be stupid—the dead don’t care because the dead can’t care (unless of course they’re the dead you’ve eaten, who find a curious cramped afterlife in you)—but still, some people you can imagine happy enough in a coffin being gradually reclaimed for the earth by bugs, others going into the fire and sighing away in a quick consummation, some—equipped with robust atheism or black humour—content to become the freshman prank-fodder of medical science. What I couldn’t imagine was Cloquet being okay all alone in billions of tons of dark water, the prey of fish, big and small.

Which thinking brought Quinn’s book back. Death. Spirits. Gods. Underworlds. Afterlives. The possibility of someone, somewhere, knowing what it was all about. The hope of seeing Jake again, albeit in hell.

“I don’t like it, either,” I said to Madeline. “But I don’t think we have a choice.” A land burial was too risky. Bodies got found. Inquests got opened. Questions got asked. And we didn’t have time.

“I know it’s not going to make any difference to him,” Madeline said, lighting a Winston for something to do. “I know that. I just … I don’t like the thought of him all alone down there. In the dark.”

Lucy had said it would take us a couple of hours to reach the coordinates Walker had picked, almost equidistant from the Italian mainland, Sardinia to the northwest and Sicily to the southeast, but the whole day since the morning had hung in dream or imaginal time. The twins were quiet again, after the brief excitement of Going On The Boat. It had sidelined
the other fact, temporarily. But the pack mood had dragged them back to it. When I’d told them Cloquet was gone—
dead
, I made myself use the word—they’d both wanted to see him. Maddy and I cleaned and covered him as best we could but there was no disguising the violence of his death. Zoë didn’t cry until she took his hand and found it cold. She knows what death is, of course. She’s watched me kill. She’s eaten the flesh, lapped the blood, gnawed the bones. But that’s
them.
The humans. I doubt she’d ever had Cloquet in the same category, even though that’s what he was. We’re like those racists who exempt their favourite Indian waiter: No, not
you
, Raj.
You’re
all right. Lorcan had startled me by asking: Where will he go?—until I realised it wasn’t a metaphysical question. He meant: Where will you put him? He’s a very practical child—but he’s not altogether cold. Denial kept coming and going in his face like the sun going in and out of cloud.