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Authors: Mick Herron

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BOOK: Down Cemetery Road
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In the event, she didn’t.

V

Some hours later, Amos Crane stood where she’d been standing, looking down on the vacant space where his brother had died. A faint misting of blood on the floor described the shape of Axel’s head, as if death had reduced him to little more than a stencil, though it took a brother, probably, to read
Axel
into it rather than any other damaged head. Howard was there, and a number of local cops, and a man in a suit in the corner, his own head safe in his hands, who’d turn out to be the householder, Amos expected. The owner of the house where his brother had died. Looked at dispassionately, it had long been on the cards that Axel was going to die a violent death: no point blaming the bastard in whose house it actually happened. Looked at less dispassionately: Fuck that. Amos would blame who he liked.

Howard came over. ‘I thought this was a loose end Axel had dealt with.’

‘It must have frayed.’

‘It’s the same woman, right? I mean, please tell me this is just a continuation of the same fuck-up, not a whole new one?’

‘To you it’s a fuck-up, Howard. My brother’s dead.’

‘Oh, Christ.’ Howard pulled a tired hand down his tired face. ‘I’m sorry, Amos. I didn’t mean any of that. Axel – he was one of ours. Not just yours.’

‘Sure he was, Howard.’

‘But this – you’re aware there are civilians here, Amos? I thought we’d been through this.’

‘Maybe you can dock his pay.’

And Amos turned away abruptly, to the back door, to a litter of broken glass and shards of doorframe. That was where the soldier Michael Downey came in. Not a difficult assumption to make. If it had been just Axel and the woman, it would have been the woman’s blood on the floor, and he – Amos – would have been home in bed. And Oxford would have had another burglary gone wrong . . .

The fix, this time, would be tricky as sin. More than just the old school tie and the whisper of a gong; it would take serious handshakes and money in envelopes. No wonder Howard was wetting himself.

Oh, Axel
, he thought, almost aloud.
You stupid fucking

But there was no time for that. This was damage limitation. He felt glass crunch as he stepped into the dark to look at the night sky: the heaventree of stars in all its evening glory.
Think!
He thought. Axel had been here, and for reasons best known to himself had decided to terminate the woman. Up until this evening, that hadn’t been necessary – maybe
wasn’t
necessary; maybe Axel had just been slipping the leash – but it was a field decision, and had to be given the benefit of the doubt. And he’d tried, and he’d used dental floss (which was possibly a first), a loop of which was still wrapped round his fist when they’d bagged the body, and he hadn’t managed it because somebody had kicked the back door in and taken him down with two bullets.

Had to be Downey.

Which left them where? Which left the woman who’d been looking for Singleton’s daughter on the lam with Downey, who was also looking for Singleton’s daughter. Put that way, the situation hadn’t changed. Downey had company. That was all.

But there was an alternative scenario: The woman screams blue murder, and takes it to the press. But that, too, could be dealt with. Amos Crane went over in his mind what he knew about Sarah Trafford: unemployed, restless, history with drugs. There wasn’t a great deal you had to add before you were dealing with a paranoid hysteric finding conspiracies round every corner, and on a day when war had broken out, the press would have better things to think about. As for Downey, he had his own reasons for staying dead. He’d not be bothering the media in this lifetime.

Not going to be a very long lifetime, either.

There was a crunch, and Howard appeared behind him. ‘We found this,’ he said. Wordlessly, Amos took it: a crumpled sheet of paper, with a London number scrawled across. ‘The Ministry,’ Howard said.

Amos looked again. It was a copy of the letter Howard had shown him two weeks back. It had been sent by the detective hired by Sarah Trafford, an unwelcome display of persistence forcing Amos to allow Axel to deal with him. Which Axel had done
very commendably
, to the benefit of all around; following it up with an excellent piece of freelancing which, if there’d been any justice, would have shut Sarah Trafford up without further pain. It was a good rule of thumb not to damage civilians, a rule Axel hadn’t always followed, but had produced a textbook example of in this case. And look where it had got him.

Still, it was good to know he’d had reason. In his shoes, Amos would have done exactly the same: killed the silly bitch. Nobody got two warnings.

Howard shifted uneasily. ‘We need a game plan, Amos.’

‘I’m thinking.’

‘Think faster.’

‘Thank you, Howard. That’s the husband back there, is it?’

‘He’s a banker. Works for –’

‘I know what he
does
, Howard. I’m asking if that’s him.’

‘It’s him.’

He was problem number one, even Howard had worked that out. But Amos knew something Howard didn’t: the husband was dirty. The dirty ones were easiest to deal with.

It was one of Amos’s rules: when you had an agent in cover, you researched
everyone
. Even if the agent wasn’t your brother . . .

‘The body went out clean. Nobody knows there was a death here.’

‘Except the husband.’

‘Well, he found him . . .’

‘And the locals.’

‘It was the locals he called, Amos. Obviously.’

So nobody knew there’d been a death here, apart from absolutely fucking everyone.

‘Where have they taken my brother, Howard?’

‘They’ve taken him to the local place, Amos.’ Morgue, he meant. Not place. Morgue. ‘But we’ll have him moved. Back to London.’ Where he’d be more comfortable, Howard’s tone implied. Where Amos would be able to visit; maybe take him flowers. Grapes.

‘What time was he found?’

‘A little after ten.’

‘And was he still warm?’

Howard said nothing. He was thinking: Jesus Christ Almighty.

‘Howard?’

‘I don’t think Mr Trafford checked.’

‘Good point.’ Amos looked up at the stars again. Civilian finds a body, he doesn’t automatically start processing the data. Especially when the body’s in his kitchen, and his wife’s nowhere to be seen. ‘But he can’t have been dead long. Not that it counts. An hour, hour and a half, any kind of head start, someone with Downey’s experience could be underground by now.’

‘It’s coming apart, Amos.’

‘Things have come apart before. We’re all still here.’ He looked back through the kitchen, at the husband sitting in forlorn isolation. ‘Anyone been round to Axel’s place?’

‘Hmm?’

‘He lived with a woman.
Married
her, for God’s sake.’ Taking professionalism
way
too far, but that was Axel: it was often hard to tell when he was taking the piss. ‘She had kids. Well, still has.’

‘What do we tell her? That he’s dead?’

‘I don’t think so.’ What he did think took a moment or two to emerge. Axel had been on the point of bailing out: If that had happened, he’d have been just another husband coming to his senses. But circumstances no longer allowed for that. ‘No, I think we’d better make him a terrorist.’ That was the thing these days: most people could believe anything without hardly trying. Your husband? Your husband of
six months
? Well, you didn’t really know him at all, did you, madam? Fact is, he’s on the Most Wanted, and he only married
you
for the cover. And now he’s gone. And you’ll never see him again.

‘Do we use the locals?’

‘I think you’d better do it, Howard. It’ll come better from a suit.’

‘And what about the husband?’

‘Oh, I’ll deal with the husband.’

He turned away. After a while, Howard took the hint, and left him to the stars and his deep thoughts.

Which only looked deep. From long habit Amos Crane was able, at times of stress, to empty his mind. He did that now: for twenty minutes, more or less, he was just an upright body in the garden; at one with the dark and the waving trees. He didn’t think about his brother, or the mess in the house behind him. He didn’t think at all. He just allowed events to catch up with him; when he was ready, he’d be beyond the primary stages of grief: there’d be no struggling past denial, or reaching for acceptance. What was done was done. Something had happened here, and Axel was dead. This didn’t mean the game was over. It just meant there was greater reason to win.

He remembered the moments on the island: wrapping the bag round that idiot Muscle’s head. And he thought how fine it would be to have Downey here now: just the two of them, unarmed in the dark. We’d see how well he fared without a gun in his hand. We’d know what his flesh felt like when we ripped it open, and delved beneath.

Amos Crane shuddered at the memory, a memory from the future.

Then he went back into the house, to sort out the husband.

Chapter Five

Buddy Holly’s Last Words

I

Through the window dark scenery rolled past, but all Sarah could make out was the gaunt reflection of her face superimposed on the landscape, as if she were one constant against a restless background, and all the things she had no control over, starting with events and ending with her own thoughts, were unfolding beneath her serious, fractured surface. Outside were empty fields and damp trees but she was thinking about a cat; about watching a cat through a door darkly, while it mocked her unfitness for life on the other side of the glass. Which lay now, she remembered, in splinters across the length of her kitchen floor.

Michael Downey had dropped the gun in three different drains between the house and railway station: the gun itself, its silencer, ammunition; all done with perfect fluidity, a dip and a drop with no hint of a stumble, so that even a close watcher would have had difficulty being sure that he had seen the actual disposal of a murder weapon, rather than a clever mime. Throughout, Sarah succumbed to circumstance.
Your best friend’s husband tries to kill you; your bogeyman blows him away
. Her options seemed limited, somehow. All she had taken from the house was her wallet. All it contained was twenty-odd pounds.

They had followed the dark route by the river; across the old railway bridge and over the meadow by the ice rink, through whose windows she could make out the sweeping presences of a few after-hours skaters, still at work on their figure eights. Then into the bright lights: this main road skirted the city centre. Cars whistled by. A garage dribbled neon in oily puddles. Groups of teenagers strutted past, on their way to a desperate-looking nightclub.

The station was up a gradient that seemed steeper after dark; its fluorescent lighting spilled through automatic doors like a promise of safety. Reality began seeping back into Sarah, together with an ache in her calves that served notice of how fast they’d come. She looked at Downey, and for the first time his hand fell from her elbow, as if he were offering her a choice of destination. His eyes were very dark.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Up there.’

‘But I can’t just –’

‘Trust me.’

Trust him? The man was a killer.

A platoon of taxis streamed past, their beams picking the couple out like searchlights in old prison movies. A London-bound train was pulling out of the station. It moved slowly over the bridge across the road, its innocent passengers gazing down on the traffic below.

‘He wasn’t the only one,’ Downey said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘That guy who tried to kill you? There’ll be others.’

Something very like a wave came close to breaking inside her. ‘What’s going
on
?’ she whispered. ‘I don’t even know what’s happening here, there’s madmen all around me –’

Now a police car flashed past, its American barlights leaving a fresh blur hanging in the air like a ghostly straggler. She blinked and the spectre disappeared. I need help, she thought; apparently aloud.

‘I am helping you. This is helping you.’

Another cop car, this one with siren raging, split the traffic on its way west. Downey brushed hair from his eyes. ‘I’m out of here,’ he said. ‘You want to take your chances, that’s up to you.’

There was, she thought with sudden clarity, nowhere else to go.

She followed him into the station, where the promise of safety dissolved into a bleak, tiled expanse of shuttered windows and cold lighting. A booth selling coffee and sandwiches was open, but held the distant appeal of life filtered through a TV commer- cial; she was sure that her stomach would never accept food or drink again. First thing Downey did was stop by the departure schedules, arranged on free-standing boards, while he hunted through the canvas bag over his shoulder for what turned out to be a wallet, his quick eyes scanning the lists while he did so. ‘Wait out there,’ he told her. ‘On the platform.’

Yes boss. Sure boss
. But that was a tiny voice far away in her head, and her feet were already taking her to the dark, littered world outside, which existed in a different century than the one she left. At night railway platforms are draughty, no matter how still and airless the weather. There are always takeaway wrappers scrunched into balls and left on benches. For one mad comforting moment, she considered tidying them away; gathering the whole greasy mess in a lump to her chest, as if she were starting a collection. It seemed an action appropriate to both her location and condition. She had reached a point in her life where this platform was as good a place as any. She could spend the rest of forever caught between destinations, in this ill-lit dimension where muttering, half-mad vagrants pursued their furious agendas. She could join the other transients who no longer had a home to go to.

A train pulled up opposite and began disgorging passengers from the capital; mostly men, mostly with suits, executive cases and phones; everything, in fact, bar badges reading
I WORK LATE
. A subtle race for the taxi rank began, bringing them over the bridge, towards Sarah. Almost immediately came a whistle, the buzz of electric doors locking, and with a promptness suggesting the driver was late for an appointment the train shunted off, giving a strobed view through its lit carriages of the nearly empty platform behind: one or two shadows leaning close, their movements interrupted and comical. The gang of commuters flowed down the steps, brushing past Sarah.
I don’t know what they do to the economy
, Mark said once.
But by God, they terrify me
. It felt like the first thought in hours she’d spared Mark; it was as if he’d been erased from the equation. But something had brought him to mind just then, and as the end of the train trundled out of her line of vision she saw that it was because she’d been looking at him. He was one of the shadows on the platform opposite, one of two stragglers reluctant to head for home.

She should have turned away, but couldn’t. The reason she could not turn was that she was watching her husband kiss another woman, a sight so unusual that it would have been a crime to miss it. The kiss bordered on the perfunctory, it was true; a quick bow and a peck on the cheek, but the fact that the woman held Mark’s arm as he kissed her, that Sarah had never laid eyes on her before, that an aura of intimacy hung on them like a purple cloud: these things could not be dismissed. Mark had a lover. After what she’d been through in the last hour she’d lost much of her capacity for shock, but as she felt the knowledge settle upon her, become as much a part of her consciousness as a childhood memory, it surprised her distantly to learn that she had not yet exhausted her potential for weariness.

Mark was straightening up now; the woman relinquishing her grasp. As Sarah watched, they exchanged a few last words (endearments), then the woman left through the exit their side of the station. Mark picked up his briefcase, and headed for the staircase that would bring him over to Sarah.

Who would probably have remained there to meet him, had Michael Downey not appeared at her side. He thrust what looked like a twenty-pound note on her. ‘Two returns,’ he said. ‘Worcester.’

She stared, uncomprehending.

‘Quick. It leaves in two minutes.’

Movement reclaimed her; she took the note and hurried inside, where there was no queue for tickets, and the man selling them grasped immediately what two returns to Worcester meant. Nobody had ever spent so little time at a railway ticket booth. Which was why she walked past Mark on her way back out; though he kept walking as if she were not there, or were somebody else. He was so close as to be touched, and for a moment she wanted to do that, as if by reaching out she could erase everything, and put the clock back to the days when they’d meet each other off trains and stand on station platforms making exhibitions of themselves. Before there were arguments and bodies in the kitchen; before there were lovers. She stopped, turned, and would have called out, but he was through the station doors and off down the steps, heading for the taxi rank.

‘Hey!’

Downey took her arm and steered her out.

The slow train was wheezing at the blocks on Platform 3, and was a not very long string of grubby, unscrubbed carriages, as befitted a service not going anywhere important. Its individual compartments were mostly unoccupied. They took one near the rear, and almost immediately the slow grind and crawl from the station began: as a means of escape it lacked dash, perhaps, but there were no last minute attempts to flag them down. The platform slipped behind them. The racket picked up speed. And Sarah stared at her pale sister in the window and thought about bodies: bodies warm and kissed by unfaithful husbands or stone cold dead in the kitchen. She wiped a hand against the glass. Through the window, ragged stumps of hedgerow choked to death. While evening died black clouds swallowed the land, and the fields and ditches of one county after another dissolved into a single bleak horizon. Everything she cared for was behind her. None of it mattered any more. She raised a hand to her throat and imagined the thin red necklace painted there, her souvenir of that frightening cord that had nearly taken her out of this world, and spoke to Michael Downey. ‘I told him it wasn’t a matter of life and death.’

He looked at her, not understanding.

‘Mark. I told him it wasn’t a matter of life and death, whether we had dental floss on the fridge or not.’

Outside the window bright settlements flashed into view, then lost themselves in the dark nowhere that swallowed up the past. This was a well-known effect of travelling at night: you felt nostalgic for snug, safe places you’d never visited, and never would.

Afterwards, she wondered if it had been the drugs. There was the numbing effect of Rufus’s attack to take into account, and the shock of seeing his body hurled from one room to the next like an illustration of what was happening to his soul; but afterwards, she preferred to think it had been the drugs that produced this docility, her inability to reach a decision on her own. It remained true that the available options had been limited and unappealing, but to a rational mind the extravagance of the course she had taken, running off into the dark with an armed stranger, was almost supernatural. The irony did not escape her. Mark’s purpose had been to keep her tame, domesticated, and the very tools he had used for the task had secured her libera- tion, as if she had shinned down the wall of her tower using the chains he had wrapped her in for a rope. Her senses dulled by medication, the first plan presented, she had acquiesced to without murmur. The first exit offered, she was off.

Which plan, it had to be said, lacked most defining characteristics of a strategy: forethought, preparation, a definite objective in mind; and boiled down, in the end, to running away. But the soldier Michael Downey had at least covered their tracks as they ran, having bought two singles to Birmingham, behaving memorably as he did so. His appearance alone might have been enough. He had pulled the band from his ponytail, allowing dark hair to tumble over his face and on to his shoulders, and looked like somebody hiding behind a curtain. His voice was strained, hoarse. Perhaps he did not use it often, though he used it now, studying her intently:

‘You were on the bridge,’ he said. ‘After they killed Tom.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then up at the hospital, looking for Dinah.’

‘You frightened me.’

He shrugged.

‘Do you know where she is?’

‘I don’t even know your name.’

‘Tucker,’ she said. ‘Sarah Tucker. Do you know where she is?’

‘No.’

‘Then what
do
you –’

‘Not here. Malvern.’

‘Malvern?’

‘That’s where we get off. I’ll see you outside.’ At her puzzled look, he went on: ‘They’ll be collecting tickets. We shouldn’t be seen together.’

‘We were seen getting on.’

‘So they’ll be looking for a couple. So we stop being one.’

He left, taking his canvas bag. With his departure, the carriage grew colder.

Outside, the landscape unrolled both behind and in front of her reflection, or so it seemed: the dark world looked right through her just as Mark had at the station, and the thought that she could be so easily erased gave a horrifying insight into her future. It was another, gentler kind of death.

She knew you could walk past friends encountered in unlikely places; it was the brain refusing to acknowledge the unexpected. But Mark was her husband . . . An affair she might forgive, though she wouldn’t put money on it. But something about the way she hadn’t existed for him at that moment was an irrefutable proof that the frayed bond between them had snapped. He had failed to keep her safe when she was falling off the world. And even as she fell, he’d been playing brief fucking encounter with some pick-up on the commuter express.

It was enough to make her wonder if she had ever known anybody. Mark was not a husband; Rufus was not an airhead. But then,
nobody
had known Rufus. She thought of Wigwam’s months of happiness with him, and tried to remember how he had first appeared on the scene, and couldn’t: he had simply arrived, and for all Sarah knew about his past, he’d dropped out of a Christmas cracker. Another harmless hippie. It was a marriage made in outer space. Except it had been a lie, all of it; all the time he’d been waiting for Tom Singleton to return from the grave, so he could send him back there. It was a lot of cover for a simple act of murder: this impersonation of a family man, in order to trap a real one. Singleton had died because he could not stay away from his wife and daughter, and now Wigwam had died too, or so Rufus had said . . . Sarah did not know if she could believe that. Why had Rufus tried to kill her, if not for the copy of the letter he’d found? . . . She couldn’t think of a reason for him to have murdered Wigwam beforehand. It was evil, then. Pure evil. He’d wanted her to die thinking her friend already dead.

But here, anyway, was one thing, one person, she could be sure of. If Wigwam were alive, she would grieve for Rufus; this Sarah knew. Whatever he had done. Whoever he proved to be. Because for six months, he had pretended to be Wigwam’s lover, and no man had cared for Wigwam enough in the past to keep up that pretence for so long. And with this single certainty came Sarah’s own reason to cry: as the train rolled on, she grieved too. Not for the dead but the living. Whoever they were.

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