Down Cemetery Road (25 page)

‘The woodentops have their uses.’

‘What are you doing? Exactly.’

‘
Exactly
, I’m running through timetables. I think they they went for a train. I’m trying to find which.’

‘You said it didn’t make a difference. That they’ll still come after the child.’

‘They will.’

‘So it doesn’t matter where they are now. So long as they –’

‘Look, Howard, I’m fucking tracking them. All right?’

Howard didn’t say anything.

‘We’ll find them. Sooner or later. But sooner’s better. Don’t you think?’

‘Are you making this personal, Amos?’

Jesus Christ. Amos smiled kindly. ‘Howard. Of
course
I’m making it personal. Now, fuck off, do you mind? I’m busy.’

Howard stood there for the best part of a minute before he turned and walked away. Probably, if he’d thought of something good to say, he’d have said it.

Amos returned to his screen. And if he’d been buying the tickets, he continued, the ones he’d have bought for actual use would have been for a train leaving thirty seconds later.

Bingo.

Downey had hung a DO NOT DISTURB on their door, and when food arrived, made them leave the trolley outside. He told her to keep away from the windows. And every time she wanted to think this ridiculous, she got flashes of yesterday evening like the remnants of a bad trip: Rufus with the damn dental floss – Rufus! – wrapping her throat with a cord so tight it left a mark like a thin ruby necklace. She studied it in the mirror: a
memento mori
, secular stigmata. A wound that did not bleed.

‘You think they’ll find us here?’

‘Depends.’

‘On what?’

He shrugged.

And Sarah didn’t even know who
they
were yet.

He tuned to CNN, and they watched a war unfold in colour; men and women in desert fatigues, auditioning for Armageddon. Commentary was live: this was Virtual Reality Combat. You could hold the remote and imagine pressing the buttons; lasers accurate to an inch over fifty miles; smart bombs that punched their targets while transmitting images to a watching world. You could look into the whites of enemy eyes a continent away. Study their customs, learn their language and kill them, all at once.

Michael wolfed sandwiches. Sarah couldn’t eat. For information, she was hungry, but hardly knew where to start. Nor did Michael . . . There were car alarms that activated when you got too close: you didn’t have to be touching. It was one of those eighties things where you not only
owned
something, you owned the space around it too. Michael was like that, though instead of an alarm going off everything shut down.

She asked him, ‘Are you married?’

‘Used to be.’

She waited, but he wasn’t enlarging on that. ‘Tell me about Singleton.’

‘We did training together.’

Always, she was left to fill in the gaps, for which she leaned on films dimly remembered, and school stories devoured as a child. Parade ground brutality; men fainting in the heat. Vows of undying loyalty. Smuggled feasts after lights out. She knew the truth lay a million miles wide; truth, anyway, was a private luxury.

‘You fought together?’

‘Over there.’ He nodded at the screen. ‘Last time.’

‘Was it . . .’ She didn’t know what to ask.

‘It was war. We were kids.’

‘Like this.’ She gestured at the screen.

‘This isn’t war. It’s a shooting gallery.’

She looked back at the screen. Graphs showing probable enemy-dead were superimposed on a smoking background. A voice recited figures with barely suppressed excitement, as if this were a lottery-rollover week, and its owner had invested heavily in the big numbers.

He was riding pure intuition here, but he thought they’d boarded the Worcester train.
Somebody
had, certainly: a pair of returns had been bought with just about two minutes to spare – was Worcester somewhere people went in a hurry? It was the kind of thing Howard would probably know.

He made his choice anyway; pulled up a list of stations the Worcester train stopped at, and waited to see if any jumped out. But they were ordinary places: small towns; nowhere that rang bells, and he sat back in his chair again, feeling his mind slip out of focus. Three hours’ sleep was not enough.

Perhaps, too, he should have been with his brother. Axel had been taken to the small, discreet firm of undertakers the Department used: accustomed to physical trauma, to disguising cause of death. There would be no post-mortem. But perhaps there was need for Amos to sit with his brother’s body a while, so he could get used to the idea that Axel wasn’t coming home this time; that Amos was well and truly alone at last.

. . . Moreton-in-Marsh. Honeybourne. These were towns child- ren’s writers lived; the kind of place Winnie the Pooh would go on his day off. Just listening to the names, Crane knew nobody could hide there for long. Ten minutes after you’d found the B&B, the vicar would be popping round, inviting you for evensong.

Not that he had wanted Axel dead. But for too long he’d been forced to play the older brother role: trying to calm everybody else down when Axel went over the top. Axel enjoyed the wet work too much, that had always been his problem. Bureaucrats like Howard didn’t go for that. They needed it done, sure, but they didn’t want anyone enjoying it.

Pershore, Worcester itself. Worcester was biggish, wasn’t it?

He made a note on a pad by his keyboard:
Hotels in Worcester?
Later, he’d find a list, find a map; use the station as its centre, and plot the hotels accordingly. It was a big job and, as Howard had suggested, not entirely necessary: sooner or later, Downey would come to him. But if it brought that moment closer, it was worth doing. Axel wasn’t supposed to be one of the blips. He shouldn’t have been wiped from the screen like that. Maybe Amos should be sitting vigil over his body, but he knew Axel would prefer it this way: Amos preparing to hunt down Axel’s killer. In the end, you mourned by doing what you were best at, and this time Amos was doing it for love. He’d be sure to tell Downey that, when the moment came.

For a while he sat there, contemplating that moment. Then he licked his lips, and bent back to his screen.

There was a Ted Hughes poem Sarah remembered about a confined panther or other large cat; behind bars, it felt horizons rolling beneath its feet. There was something of this in Michael. The hotel room, to her, had become a prison; hourly, the walls closed in, an inch at a time, as if it were some upscale version of a medieval torture device which would squeeze the life from all their bones. But to Michael, the room was just where he happened to be at the moment. It was just another waystation, away from the war.

‘Where did it start?’ she asked him.

She’d already told him everything she knew, which was nothing really; less than nothing, because telling it left her confused and lost.

‘I don’t know.’

‘But please try.’

He shrugged. Talking was an effort with him. ‘In the desert? I think that’s where it really started.’

‘During the war?’

‘No. Long after that. A year ago. Eighteen months?’

‘You’ve been dead four years,’ she said. ‘The helicopter crash? Off Cyprus?’

‘I’ve never been to Cyprus.’ Then what she’d said registered. ‘Four years? Jesus, it is, isn’t it?’

‘What happened in the desert?’

‘There were six of us. And the . . . others.’

‘What others?’

‘We called them the boy soldiers.’

He seemed to be fading before her eyes, and she was unsure whether he was waking from a nightmare, or falling back into one. ‘Boy soldiers?’

‘They were just kids. Scared to fucking death.’ He ran a hand across his eyes, then looked straight at her. ‘It had to be a desert. The conditions wouldn’t be fair otherwise. That’s what they told us. Fair.’

It was like grasping at smoke. ‘
Who
told you?’

He looked back to the screen.

‘Michael? You have to tell me these things!’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m
involved
, dammit. Because I’m
here
.’

He looked at her again, this time with a fresh curiosity, as if he’d registered for the first time that she’d had an existence prior to his awareness of her. He had saved her life, but she knew that he’d done so simply because he’d thought she might have information; because she’d been looking for Dinah, and he’d thought she might know more than him. Returning his gaze now, she wondered if, under different circumstances, he’d be just as prepared to kill her for the same end. It was a thought she pushed away quickly.

He said, ‘What’s that scar on your arm?’

And she knew it was a question to draw her into his world, the one where even the innocent carry wounds. Especially the innocent. But she could not tell him about the fall from the roof; the way the lights spun cartwheels in her head as she hit the ground.

‘I had a crash,’ she told him.

He seemed to relate to that.

‘Why did the army say you were dead, if you’d never even been to Cyprus?’

And he said, ‘That’s when we knew we were really in trouble.’

By mid-morning Crane had settled on two towns, the time mostly spent staring through the wall, thinking himself into Downey’s shoes. Like all such exercises, the longer he’d tried it, the less sense it made. But in the end he’d chosen Malvern and, yes, Worcester; the latter to allow for two possibilities: the double bluff and the stupid error. Given an hour and a half, he’d told Howard, Downey would be underground, but how true was that? Maybe, all these months, it had been Singleton doing Downey’s thinking for him. Singleton was off the screen now. Downey might just be chasing his own tail, hoping to be caught.

. . . Crane held a pencil by its tip between right thumb and index finger, and as he sat, tapped the end of it against the arm of his spectacles, in time to the rhythm of his heart.

He didn’t believe it. But the idea wouldn’t go away, so there it was on his list.

He was waiting now for a printout of hotels, B&Bs, pubs that offered rooms, and while he did he was thinking about the woman. He didn’t know much about the woman yet. If she proved as weak as her husband, who’d crumpled at his touch, she’d not be around long enough to be a problem. But Axel’s ruse to take her out of the picture – drawing on her background; fitting her up with a bag of cocaine – hadn’t worked, so she was either really dumb or something of a fighter, and Crane didn’t think she was dumb. And by now she’d have more of an idea of what she’d fallen into.

But she wouldn’t know everything. For instance, Downey wouldn’t tell her the truth about himself.

Not if he wanted her on his side.

‘Why you?’

He looked away. There were things he wouldn’t tell her: not now, not ever. She knew that as precisely as if he’d actually said it, instead of what he did say, which was, ‘You wouldn’t understand. We were soldiers.’

‘Great.’

They’d trained in a desert: somewhere in North Africa, he said; he didn’t know where. They weren’t told. There were no uniforms, just a vast expanse of sand and sky; a canvas-and-tin construction they slept in, ate in, returned exhausted to every evening.

‘Training?’

‘Up and down the sandhills. With weights. Serious weights.’

She got the picture. She even imagined the pain: the sand dragging at their limbs, trying to pull them back into the earth.

‘But that wasn’t the point. They were painting us. Twice a day.’

‘Painting?’

She was starting to sound like an echo.

‘Like they sprayed us in the war. This was different, though. They told us about it. Had to. We had to strip naked, and let the stuff dry.’

‘What was it?’

‘God knows.’ He was far away, maybe back in North Africa. ‘Could have been water. That’s what we thought for a while, in fact. There were stories, you know, about the guys coming back from the war with problems. Dying. We thought it might be some kind of psych-ops thing. See if we could take it. Already knowing the stories.’

‘But it wasn’t.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t.’

‘How long? How long did they do that for?’

He shrugged. ‘You lose track of time, you know? A few weeks. It stretched into months, I guess. That was when they said we were dead.’

‘In a helicopter crash off Cyprus.’

‘Tommy hated that. When we found out about it. That’s when he knew we were really in the shit.’ He looked directly at Sarah. ‘Helicopter crashes, that’s the kind of thing the army likes to pretend never happens. If they were using one of those as
cover
, well, Tommy said we were never coming back to life. We were on the island by then.’

‘Which island?’

‘That comes later.’

‘Tell me what happened in the desert.’

He looked back to the TV screen, where a reporter leaned against an all-terrain vehicle, talking urgently at the camera. ‘They took us into the sands one day. Drove us there. Miles from anywhere. They said, this time it’s not an exercise. There’s bad guys out there. We want you to take them.’

‘The boy soldiers.’

‘That’s who they were. But we were told they were the real thing.’ He shook his head. ‘We were told to bring them home alive.’

She hardly dared ask. ‘And did you?’

‘Christ, yes.’ He was still shaking his head, as if it were all some big story. ‘They were kids. Six of them, too. But they didn’t know a thing, they were kids. They weren’t soldiers.’

Something was stirring in her memory: fragments of bulletins, and loud denials in the press. ‘They were Iraqi, weren’t they?’

The look he gave her was pure scorn. ‘Well, of course they bloody were.’

Six Iraqi conscripts who had perished in a storm on the Syrian border twenty months ago. Who Iraqi ministers claimed had been captured – murdered – by Western troops.

It was Sarah’s turn to shake her head. She didn’t want to look at the TV screen, and know there was a war happening. She didn’t want to know any of this at all.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

The circles he’d drawn on the maps rendered the towns targets. Ground Zero was a railway station. Red dots were hotels. (It was far from foolproof – nobody had to tell Crane that – but rapidly becoming a compulsion.) Blue dots were B&Bs; there were probably unlicensed places in both towns. Which put them off the map. And there were green dots for hostels, homeless shelters; places they’d have had to bluff their way into, but which he couldn’t completely ignore. Of course, it would take weeks to check, by which time Downey and his woman could be anywhere. But long shots were always worth playing. Every week, some fool won the lottery. When that happened, they stopped being fools.