Down Cemetery Road (11 page)

‘When you were in Gerard’s study,’ he said suspiciously, ‘did you mess with his palmtop at all?’

‘Did I what?’

‘His electric notebook. Only it wasn’t closed down properly.’

‘Maybe he forgot to last time he used it,’ Sarah said, fully awake this time.

‘That’s what I said. He said, Hmmm.’

‘I only turned it on. I’d never seen one before.’

‘Jesus, Sarah! That’s like looking at somebody’s diary. It
is
looking at somebody’s diary.’

‘Well, if it had been a diary, I’d not have been interested,’ she lied. ‘I was thinking of getting you one for Christmas. I wanted to see how they work.’

He became thoughtful. ‘It’d come in very useful.’

‘I can’t get you one now, can I? It wouldn’t be a surprise.’

She left him to mull that over and went inside, where Gerard was in the kitchen, preparing lunch: a joint of beef, the usual veg. Traditional, as she’d have expected, though he wasn’t the one she’d have thought would be preparing it. ‘Anything I can do to help?’

‘I think it’s under control, thanks.’

She looked out of the window at Mark, who’d settled down with the papers now; was reading the Middle East news with a worried frown which might have related to world events or just to his hangover, she couldn’t tell. When she turned back Gerard was studying her with an evil look on his face.

‘Is there a problem?’

‘One thing would be useful.’

‘Yes?’

He pointed at the bottles on the table. ‘You could clear up the dead soldiers,’ he said.

IV

Amos Crane – tall, grey, crewcut, a bit of a problem; his face that of a man in the last stage of something wasting – sat in the glow of a VDU, whose green wash made unearthly the crags and hollows of his head. Beneath the surface wreckage, though, everything pumped in order. The body was a tool. An early riser, Amos Crane jogged three miles before breakfast; ran past Chinese supermarkets as they opened, blowsy strip clubs as they closed, and considered the lives grouped round these exits and entrances as being connected to his own by an invisible network of alliances. Crane was not a Londoner, and never imagined himself one. But on the city’s early streets he felt part of a larger community, and regarded the tired dancers and busy grocers as his equals, at least in as much as they led lives outside the jobsworth’s timetable. He was their secret sharer. He understood their passions. Now, though, he was at his desk.

He preferred to work without overhead lighting; with just an Anglepoise bent so low it scorched rings on the desk’s surface, and the light of the computer screen, whose lettering reflected on his spectacles. A computer, too, was a tool only. He had no patience with those who substituted this magic box for the real world, looking to it for answers: it held only clues. All the information in the world didn’t give you the answers. For these, you had to close with flesh and bone.

His brother used to accuse him of attempting philosophy.

‘It doesn’t hurt to think,’ Amos would say. And then amend it, adding, ‘It doesn’t hurt
me
to think. I can see where you’d have problems.’

‘Always the kidder.’

‘You rush into things.’ Serious now; it was Axel’s big fault. Always doing, and working out the total later. Or letting somebody else do that part, which bored him.

Axel would blow him a smoke ring. Change the subject. But it was true: over the years, Amos had tried to steer his brother right over and over. Telling him a hundred different ways, he had to get a grip on the politics of the situation. Probably there was nowhere left in the world you could do the wet work and not worry about the consequences. Well, America. The Far East. Africa too, come to think of it. And most of Eastern Europe. But Oxford, no, you had to be more circumspect. Blowing up a house, even Axel had to assume there’d be raised eyebrows afterwards.

‘It got the job done.’

‘
Half
the job done.’

Axel had blown another smoke ring.

And it had been up to Amos to work out the details: get the kid out of hospital, fashion a lid to pop on the story; plus the tricky bit, which was letting Howard believe he’d been the one doing all the work. Credit had a way of calming him down. Thinking about Howard now, he tapped out a little riff on his keyboard, squirting a meaningless jumble of letters on to the screen.

‘Your brother,’ Howard had said, ‘is certifiably wacko.’

‘Please.’

‘You’re supposed to be his control on this operation. Did you have any idea what he was planning?’

‘The agent in the field has the last word. Or didn’t you know?’

Howard was strictly a desk-man, and didn’t enjoy being reminded of the fact. He’d flushed, said, ‘An innocent woman was killed. Are you aware of that?’

So Amos had told him about the early forties, in Mongolia. The experiments with the rats and the prisoners.

‘You can’t compare us with
them
,’ Howard had said. And then shut up, perplexed, while Amos laughed at him.

He’d just come into the room, now. Howard. Without turning, Amos knew it was him: something about the clumsy way desk- men moved, even (especially?) when they thought they were sliding like grease. On the nights he worked late – which, to be fair, were frequent – Howard always let you know. ‘I was in the office till almost twelve last night’: not complaining, just filling you in. Wanting everybody to appreciate, Amos Crane thought now, that he had it tough too. Till almost twelve.

‘Howard,’ he said, before the other announced his presence.

‘Any . . . developments?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Are you aware of the pressure I’m under?’

Howard was always asking if you were
aware
of whatever.

‘It’s like chess, Howard,’ Amos said kindly. ‘You can watch it for hours and think nothing’s going on. But that’s because you’re only seeing what’s happening on the surface.’

‘Thank you. Where’s the child?’

Crane looked at his watch. ‘Tucked up in bed.’

‘She’s not to be harmed. You know that.’

‘Safe as houses,’ Crane assured him.

There was a pause while both men thought about houses recently brought to their attention.

‘And your brother?’

‘I doubt he’s in bed yet.’

Howard sat on the edge of Crane’s desk, then stood up again when the other man looked at him. He sat on a chair instead. ‘I’ve had a lot of complaints about his action.’

‘You said.’

‘I can’t protect him for ever.’

Amos smiled.

‘Any word on Downey?’

‘He’s keeping his head down. As I mentioned he would.’

‘But he’ll come looking for the child.’

Made as a statement, but he was after reassurance. There was a kind of boss Amos Crane had read about: the seagull manager. Who flaps in, makes a lot of noise, shits over everything and leaves. Howard aspired to that, but he was hampered by his personality. Unless he got a lot more secure quite quickly, he was never going to be able to fuck things up in anything but a minor way. So Crane said, ‘He’ll be looking for the child, Howard. I promise you that. And if he finds her – and we’ll make it easy for him – he’ll be sticking his head right into our box.’ He chopped the edge of his hand down on to his desk. ‘And we’ll cut his head clean off, Howard. No mess. No waste. No more Downey.’

‘Whereabouts?’

Crane told him.

Howard thought about it, then nodded. ‘Makes sense. Has a kind of symmetry about it.’

‘Thanks.’

‘And the child won’t be hurt.’

Crane held up his palms: Who, me?

‘I’ll hold your fucking brother responsible.’

‘I’ll make a note of that.’ He wrote something on a Post-it. Howard stood, turned to go, then turned back reluctantly. ‘Something else?’

‘It’s probably minor.’

‘But I ought to know. Oughtn’t I?’ asked Amos Crane.

Howard reached into his inside pocket, and drew a letter out. ‘This came the other day. To the Ministry. It was intercepted, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘I knew there’d be a fuss. Your bloody brother . . .’

Amos was already tucking the letter away in his own pocket. He knew what kind of thing it would be. ‘I’ll see to it,’ he said soothingly. ‘It’ll be like it never came at all.’

‘No bombs.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Be happy. Howard was really going this time. Amos said, ‘Oh, and Howard?’

‘Yes?’

‘You couldn’t protect my brother if he used you as a condom.’

For a while, it looked as if Howard had something to say about that, but at the last he just turned and walked away. Crane settled back into his comfortable darkness. Howard was harmless – his major failing – but he offered occasional amusements, such as
Mongolia
– where, in the course of germ-warfare experiments in the early forties, the Soviets kept prisoners chained in tents with plague-infested rats. Crane couldn’t remember offhand the point at issue. Anyway: a prisoner escaped, and a minor epidemic was halted by an air strike, with the usual collateral damage. Round about four thousand Mongols died. Nobody was actually counting. The bodies were burned with ‘large quantities of petrol’; a description Crane had read in a book.
Large quantities
of petrol. And Howard had said
You can’t compare us to them
, and Crane had laughed and laughed. He hadn’t been scoring moral points. He’d just found Howard’s assertion unbelievably funny.

‘Course not, Howard,’ he muttered now, as he leaned forward and killed the monitor. For a brief moment, a trinity of dots shone in his eyes – red, blue, green – then they too died. In that moment, Amos Crane was thinking about Axel, and about how Downey wouldn’t just be looking for a child, but looking for revenge, too; and this was a man trained to kill. Perhaps he should be worried about his brother. And then he smiled again, at the notion of worrying about
Axel
, and patted his breast pocket where Howard’s letter now nestled. Whoever sent
that
should be worrying about Axel. And he turned the Anglepoise off also, and sat for a while in the dark.

Chapter Three

The First Station of the Cross

I

Monday morning she had the panic, and was assaulted by the dead.

It happened shopping. During the summer months Oxford fell prey to hordes of foreign students hungry for the cultural experiences the city had to offer, chief among these being found in McDonald’s on Cornmarket Street. As Dennis Potter once remarked, Pardon me while I spatter you with vomit. Though on the other hand, Sarah conceded, these were kids far from home, and you couldn’t blame them for congregating in the one corner of this foreign field that might have been Mainland Europe. But back on the first hand, they got in the way and left litter everywhere. She crossed the road and entered the covered market.

Everywhere else, a covered market was for cheap food, end-of-line clothing, plastic shoes and party junk. Oxford being Oxford, it was where you bought stuffed olives, Greek bread and T-shirts costing thirty pounds. But there were still ordinary shops, mostly butchers’, and through one of their windows now she watched a boy in a white coat arrange a tray of offal: heart, tongue and liver neatly displayed according to a set pattern, as if butchery were an ancient religion, and this its sacrament . . . For some reason she was thinking about Gerard Inchon; about her new-found conviction he was responsible for the explosion up her road. Over the phone she had shared this with Joe, who wasn’t impressed.

‘He was late for your dinner party.’

‘And arrived without his briefcase.’

‘Sarah. How can I say this to you? They lock people up for less.’

‘I’d think we need more evidence,’ she said doubtfully.

‘I meant you. Paranoid fantasies, you’re a danger to yourself.’

‘Do you never get moments of inspiration, when you just know you’re right about something?’

‘And then I wake up. Sarah, this man, he’s got money, right? Lots of it.’

‘That’s the story.’

‘Enough so he wouldn’t have to do his own dirty work.’

‘Maybe that other guy, the one with the hair –’

‘Stop right there. You establish an accomplice, your
evidence
goes out the window. He’s got an accomplice, why was he late? If he was late, why think there’s an accomplice?’

She changed subject. ‘Does the word “rimat” mean anything to you?’

‘Rimat?’

‘Or “rinat”, possibly. Part of a longer word.’

‘Like a clue?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Peregrination,’ he said. ‘Farinated.’

‘But probably “rimat”.’

‘Where is it from, this clue? Written on a cigarette packet? A scrap of burnt paper, perhaps?’

She told him about the photograph.

‘Ah. With plenty of children standing about.’

‘Maybe it was a school of some sort,’ she said.

‘Would you listen to yourself? Would you care for some advice, Sarah? From my heart to yours?’

‘I’m not going to like it.’

‘Have a kiddy. One of your own. Stop worrying about this Dinah child you think someone has spirited away. If she was missing, people would be looking for her. They’re not. She isn’t.’

‘I want to know where she is,’ she said stubbornly.

‘You’re not meant to know where she is. It isn’t your business. Now you’re having fantasies about this friend of your husband’s you don’t like. Heaven forbid you should not like me, you’ll think I did it.’

‘Joe –’

‘Dinah isn’t there. Zoë isn’t here. That doesn’t mean either of them are missing.’

‘Have you heard from her?’

‘There was a postcard,’ he admitted. ‘From London. With the last of the Mohicans on it.’

‘Dinah isn’t sending postcards.’

‘This child, she’s too young to write. Besides, how do you know? Would you be the one she sent postcards to?’

She didn’t answer.

‘You hardly know this girl. Let me guess, you’re mid-thirties, right?’

Early
thirties. ‘Careful, Joe.’

‘Have a baby. It will change your life, I mean it. All your problems, all these mysteries, pouf, they’re gone. Your life will be happiness and nappies. They’re not incompatible.’

‘How many kids have you got, Joe?’

‘As many as I have paranoid fantasies.’

‘You’re supposed to be a detective, not an agony column.’

‘Hey, I solve problems. I don’t choose them.’

But talking to Joe, for all that, had helped, if only in demonstrating that it would take more than undiluted scorn to blow away her suspicions. Though maybe he’d come close to the truth, picking up on that
rimat
business: she’d only retained the fragment because of the picture: all those children, crowded in front of a big old house.
Where was Dinah Singleton?
A hundred times a day she wondered that. And all her other notions faded as she did, even the chilling memory she had told nobody about: that Gerard Inchon had threatened her in the dark, with only a sleeping husband for a witness.

In a notice on a board near the centre of the market, the council congratulated itself on the standard of busking it demanded. Today’s entertainment, though, was provided by a strange drunk woman with sharp ferrety features, playing the same four notes over and over on a recorder. She wore a woollen cap of bright, Latin American design, and her puppy – they all had puppies – was a brown, shivering wreck. These four notes trailed after Sarah as she wandered buying meat, vegetables, olives; not buying sweatshirts embossed with gargoyles. It only slowly dawned on her that the music was not the only thing following. That was the beginning of the panic.

First, she saw the man with the placard: a tall man in a dull grey suit, his trouser legs bunched around his ankles, a bowler hat perched on his head like an egg on a tray. Where his face should have been was a rubber mask. Looking tearfully at the world from between bow tie and bowler, Stan Laurel bowed low for her and walked on by, the large wooden sign he carried swaying ominously as he passed.
Party Favours
, it read.
Fancy Dress, Balloons, Novelties
. There was a whole industry based on such ephemera. Today, though, Sarah felt a slight shiver – a goose on her grave – as the living image of the dead comedian passed, large as life and twice as monochrome: it felt more than an advert; it felt a warning.

On the street outside the crowds were desperate as ever. On any given day, you could easily believe rationing had been introduced that morning. Manoeuvring though shoppers, the feeling grew upon her, as intangible yet certain as hearing her name whispered in a crowded room, that she was being followed. When she stopped and looked round, she couldn’t pick anyone out. But the feeling remained, went hand in hand with the music in her mind, the four erratic notes the small battered woman had played on her recorder. As if the tune had drifted from the market in her wake and dogged her now like one of those sick puppies.

The feeling grew gradually, but when the panic arrived it arrived full fledged, forcing her to stop dead, drop her shopping, take her left hand in her right and squeeze. It was years since she’d had one of these: a doom-attack; a paranoia fit; after her accident they’d arrived regularly, once every few weeks, but had faded with time. She’d never learned to control them. But knew, nevertheless, what to do now: find somewhere quiet to sit until the world ceased to be a hostile mass, became the usual whirl of busy people who had nothing to do with her. All she had to do was move. She released her hand, saw the purple indentation marks her nails had left, and could think of nowhere to go. Muttering people bumped into her. At the top of the street was a church, a grubby square, a couple of benches. Winos hung out there, like everywhere else, but it was close. Her bruised hands collected her shopping while she faked normality: breathe in, count down, breathe out. One step became another. There was a booth where you could buy coffee, but she gave it a miss and sat in the shade, where, in the space of ten minutes she noticed, repeatedly:

a female jogger in a purple tracksuit, her hair tied back so it bounced off her collar;

a dirty man in need of a shave, with an indestructible dog-end cupped in a scarred right hand;

a man in a used-car salesman’s coat, and a face that belonged on Gollum;

a teenage girl hugging a filthy child, waving a polystyrene cup in the face of everyone who passed;

and, this one only in her mind, a woman – herself – skydiving from the roof of a high terraced house, the lights of the city cartwheeling in her head as she turned over and over, and never hit the ground.

She was breathing hard now. It was a vision that recurred at moments of crisis; her own private ghost no rite of exorcism ever managed to lay. It happened, she said – not aloud – to the Other Sarah Tucker. But the only answer her mind gave was the same frightening picture from the same impossible angle: a woman – herself – skydiving from the roof of a high terraced house, the lights of the city cartwheeling in her head as she turned over and over, and never hit the ground.

‘Spare s’m change, miss? F’food like?’

It was just a voice from the never-ending street parade but it startled her anyway; she must have made some noise or other because he backed off, startled himself.

‘Wz only askin’.’

He had black teeth and a bruised head; his features were puffy with drink or assault.

‘Fuck off,’ she snarled.

‘Wz only askin’,’ he muttered again. But he backed off further, fucked off in fact, leaving her alone again and the skydiving picture shattered. In its place hard knowledge.

Which was this. In all the films, all the books, it was the little things gave you away: the typewriter with the raised T; the spare key still on its ledge above the door. With her, it was that damn palmtop. One switch flicked at no gain to herself, and Gerard knew she was digging, knew she knew what he had done. So now she sat on a crowded street, people milling every which way, and she was alone and frightened because Gerard
knew
, and had already killed two people and disappeared a third. Maybe more, because nothing about planting a bomb suggested you were an amateur: amateurs used kitchen knives. Gerard had blown people away for motives she hadn’t even thought about yet, and now she’d provided him with a reason for doing it to her. And this was a man who collected guns.
Batten down the hatches, girl. You’ve got big trouble coming
.

Just two days ago she’d been thinking there was entertainment value in this.

Her blouse clung to her now: she wore jeans, a blouse, a summer jacket; all light enough until fear had set in. Her shoes were no help: flat but narrow, running to a point at the tip, which ruled out breaking into a jog. And where would she run? Who was she running from?
He’s got lots of money, this Gerard?
Joe had asked.
Enough so he doesn’t have to do his own dirty work?
He could have hired anyone. They could all be in his pay.

Tall, mournful Stan Laurel bobbed past once more, and it seemed to Sarah that he picked her out for special scrutiny; that the living eyes behind the rubber mask found her out in her junkies’ corner, and recorded a secret amusement at the sight. She clutched her own hand again. A silly exercise, but it used to help, and could do no harm now. And nor could Stan Laurel. If anyone was watching her, it was somebody from the colourful now, not out of the black-and-white past.

There was an odd sort of comfort in this, though; knowing there was a real enemy, a specific danger. Whatever had happened in the past, whatever scars left on her imagination, it was not her own mind she had to fear now: this was happening, and was therefore not without solution. There were rules for these situations, and number one was that you didn’t panic. She released her hand again, and studied the nail marks in the flesh: once, when she was younger, they’d have disappeared as she watched. But the self-inflicted pain had done the trick, and she felt ready to leave now. Gathering her shopping, she stood. With the dimming of the panic, knowledge of her essential safety gathered about her like an overcoat. Nothing could happen. This was important to remember. Here among the Monday morning shoppers, nothing would happen.

Home, then. She crossed the road and headed down St Michael’s Street. Not much more than a lane, this carried little in the way of traffic, and few pedestrians compared to the main shopping grid. Her bags were growing heavier by the step, and she stopped twice before the corner, rearranging them to achieve the perfect balance. Which would be the day, she thought rue- fully. Already her panic was strange to her, like a familiar object viewed from an unusual angle: a worm’s eye view of a cheese-grater. What had got into her? How likely could it be that Gerard was having her watched? On the one hand you could add up all that had happened: the bomb, the missing child, Gerard’s threat, all the rest. And on the other you took an ordinary day in the centre of Oxford, and a young (thank you) woman fetching the first of the week’s groceries. Nothing ever happened. There was a kind of middle-class privilege about lives like hers: for all the drama she hovered on the edge of, there would always be the home to go to, the food on the table, the bath before bedtime. Sinister strangers had their place, but only in guest appearances. Life was
slow
dying. Her bubble would burst like all bubbles, but not without the usual drawn-out ending: the doctor’s charts, the nurse’s warnings, the soft words spoken around a bed with fresh linen. Death didn’t happen on a side lane in the city. Cemetery Road was very long.

A car pulled up behind her and she jumped.

A man leaped out and disappeared into a printers’ shop. Sarah’s heart changed gear again; climbed right back down into first.
Idiot
she thought. Meaning herself, mostly, but also whoever that had been, who had no right to exist while she felt so fragile. All that equilibrium shot to pieces. She reached the corner, turned it, and bumped into Stan Laurel.

‘Sarah,’ he said.

She screamed, or tried to, or thought she did, but no sound came out: not much more than a hiccup. He’d already put one white-gloved hand out and taken her by the arm, while with the other he carefully leaned his placard against the wall.