Down Cemetery Road (32 page)

Michael slept outside, on hard ground. It was a fine night, with a bright moon but cloud cover enough to keep frost at bay. He had bedded down worse, he assured her. And woken operational.

Earlier that day, they had crossed the glass border: that was what it felt like to Sarah. One moment they were driving along the road; the next they were doing exactly the same thing, only in another country. An invisible transference. In Scotland the sky was still blue; the radio, when they could hear it, still squawked war news. Sometimes, clearing gaps in the roadside, sudden winds buffeted the car, and she felt her heart leap sideways, bang against her ribs.

‘Where do we go now?’

‘North. Still north.’

The island, he told her, was offcoast from a village called Barragan. He had found it on a map, and was sure that was right.

They had other maps, but Sarah wondered if each didn’t merely describe the area in which they were lost. Maps were a means to an end, but only took you so far. Wasn’t there a fable about a king who demanded a map of his land so accurate, it would show every ditch, every bush,
everything
? And his map-makers had produced one on a scale of 1:1, and laid it over his land like a shroud . . . You might as well be stranded in the dark as blinded by the light. And besides, if they knew where their journey would take them, they’d end it here and now.

That afternoon, they parked in a lay-by where a van sold mugs of filthy sweet tea, and one of the other customers – a man in a green sleeveless pullover: for some reason, that detail stuck with Sarah – was driving a car with a for-sale sticker pasted to the rear side window. The car was a Citroën 2CV. A blue one. He was asking four hundred and fifty pounds, and his sign gave an abundance of detail about age, road tax, MOT: Sarah didn’t pay attention, being more enthusiastic about the toilets which were the other main feature of this lay-by. But when she emerged, she found that Michael had bought the car.

‘We’ve already got a car.’

‘Now we’ve got a different one.’

‘We just drive it away?’

‘He’ll take the VW.’

So Michael carried the guns from the old car in a jumble of jackets and a thin blanket; carried them so casually, it was as if they’d lost shape in the process. That must be what it’s like, having guns a part of your life. Carry them like kitchen equipment, and nobody looks at them twice. Sarah, though, watched him, even if the man in sleeveless green was too busy double-counting his money; wondering, probably, if he’d not just been ripped off in a manner he hadn’t tumbled to yet. Sarah felt like Faye Dunaway without the blonde; Michael, too, was no Warren Beatty. Besides, they were the good guys. But still: here they were, swapping cars, concealing guns. Unhappy feelings kicked inside her.

In the new car, this tinny thing, the wind’s buffetings struck a lot more drastically. Sarah was driving now; had to learn to cope with that at the same time as picking up the car’s habits. When she felt the gusts she had to lean into them, making the wheel a part of her own motion. This was the other trick of it. You had to bend to what was happening. You had to accommodate, to keep from being blown away.

All this time, a sense of their shifting status had been growing on Sarah. Quick glimpses of her stranger’s face in the rear-view – the sharp dark hair; the face narrower than she was used to – reminded her that they were on the run; that she had adopted this new identity, non-identity, to throw their followers off the scent. But there were no followers. They were not fugitives. The flight from Oxford, the time in the hotel: these might have been the results of a misread script, because nobody was looking for them at all. She was assumed, if Gerard had told the truth, to have fled a crooked husband, and while this put her under the heading of
missing
, it did not mean she was actively sought. If what she had once read was true, thousands of people went missing every year. She was simply one of a huge population, a vast herd on the run from what had been their defining characteristics: passports, driving licences, credit cards – roaming now at will like invisible buffalo through indifferent landscapes. As for Michael, he was not part of the equation. Nobody but Gerard knew they were together.

And Gerard hadn’t reported the theft of his guns.

So there was no need to worry each time a police car hove into view. Whatever crimes she had been involved in, they had an element of perfection about them: there was even a killing so unobtrusive, it left not a body behind. Though still she flinched when the memory caught her unawares, and in her mind’s eye trapped Rufus, or Axel, falling backwards, his blood a fine spray in the air.

It was an image that haunted her dreams that night, as she slept curled up on the car’s back seat, looking for comfort that never came.

* * *

Next day she drove again; too wired to doze in the passenger seat. Michael traced their journey with a finger on the map: the roads afforded glimpses of the lochs. Spots of rain threatened, but never made good. The drive took three hours.

Three hours, and by the time Sarah drove the 2CV into Barra-gan she was beginning to suspect they’d bought a clunker: loose noises were rattling under its bonnet, as if some mechanical emergency were trying to break free. So much for the man in the green sleeveless pullover; you’d have thought, if you could trust anybody, somebody with an anti-culling sticker on his windscreen would be a good bet.

Michael said, ‘You want to get something to eat?’

‘I’m not hungry,’ she said, without thinking about it.

‘Well, I am.’

So was she. It was as if her body were admitting, at last, that she couldn’t get by without it.

There was what amounted to a village square, though it wasn’t square, and this was where she parked, under the low branches of a large tree. This stood in a plot of earth maybe three yards by four, around which, some time ago, concrete paving slabs had been laid. Now they were cracked and jutting at jagged angles, as what had been intended as some sort of framing device had become a testament to the inexorable defiance of trees. A row of shops lined one side of the square; houses two others; a garage and what seemed to be a health centre the fourth. One of the houses was a pub. This was where they went to eat.

The food was okay, nothing special; the service friendly, if distant. Michael ate like he did most things; as if it were an exercise, and you got marks for efficiency. She wondered how long it would take to get to know somebody like this; and if, after all, the effort would be worth it. Perhaps he’d been different once – hell,
everybody
was different once – but perhaps he’d been different before that time in the desert; before the helicopter and the small glass bomb, and the melting boy soldiers. And still she wondered, too, why he had been chosen to be there in the first place. And if there were sins he’d yet to tell her about.

‘We’ll stay here tonight,’ he said suddenly.

‘We’ll what?’

‘Stay here. Tonight.’

So that was another decision taken, she thought bitterly. But knew, too, that the bitterness was token, was reflexive; because she had no other plans, and nothing to do with her life. Other than finding Dinah, of course. Meanwhile, she might as well stay here as anywhere.

So they booked a room in the inn after eating; a double room, because that was all that was on offer. Not that the village was heavily popular, but one double room was all the inn had. They didn’t have much luggage: a couple of carrier bags. The changes of clothing Sarah had bought en route. The guns, they left in the boot of the car.

Afterwards Michael slept, while Sarah went for a wander round the village. By her watch, the wander didn’t take more than fourteen minutes: on her second circuit she stopped at the newsagent’s and bought a Reginald Hill paperback, and retreated to the bar where she read it cover to cover over the space of the next four hours. It was the calmest afternoon she could remember. Joe was much on her mind, though. This thought kept intruding every time she raised her eyes from her page: that she’d killed him, as good as; that if not for her he’d be in his office now, waiting for the phone to ring, or rabbiting on to a new client about old clients he’d had . . . Zoë, too. Just a few days ago, though it seemed as many years, Zoë had pumped her full of salt water and emptied her of drugs: not a soft woman, Zoë. And she’d promised to check up on Sarah, though Sarah hadn’t hung around long enough to be checked up on. Perhaps she should call Zoë. At least let her know she was all right.

That was another thought that wouldn’t go away, once she’d had it. It felt like she’d run from a lot of responsibilities lately, and letting Zoë Boehm know she was alive would at least give her a small piece of credit: that was what she told herself, dialling Directory Enquiries from the telephone near the bar, and scribbling Oxford Investigations’ number on the pad provided. But when she rang it, that was all that happened; it rang. Not even an answerphone. She pictured a vacant office, dust slowly thickening on its shelves; absence accruing minute by minute, as the empty room waited for a Joe who would never return. She had to hang up before her thoughts caused her to cry.

– Oh God, she thought, dear Joe. Missing out on the rest of his life, because of her. Poor Joe, she wished him peace. Out there with the cosmos now. She had a sudden urge to see the stars.

The inn had a back garden where she found a bench and sat, suddenly overwhelmed by the luxury of being alone. For all the relatively early hour, it was dark now as a city girl could wish it, and though it was mild, she shivered under the big night sky. There were countless stars, each already dead perhaps, but the world wouldn’t know that until the unborn generations had come and gone: all part of the cosmic joke that ensured that most important truths stayed well and truly out of reach. The time it took to see the light, the world itself had darkened. There was a degree of comfort in this, Sarah decided; that, divinely ordained or accidentally slamdunked into being, the arrangement of the universe was not without humour. Which in itself you could take as a sign that prayer was not without purpose.

The wind rustled leaves across the way. An unseen dog barked. Something skittered in the darkness and she exhaled slowly.

. . . There was this to say about the inky background of the cosmos, it covered a multitude of sins. And maybe the stars didn’t know they were dead yet. Maybe that was why they continued to shine. Looking up at them now, Sarah understood for maybe the first time what a very tiny part of everything the world was, in a universe which was anyway expanding. This world itself would hardly be missed. What mattered were the little components that went up to making human life. If Dinah didn’t matter, nobody did. One of the few important truths within Sarah’s reach.

‘There’s always a good night sky here,’ Michael said behind her.

She hadn’t heard him arriving.

After a while, he added, ‘We used to look at the sky a lot, when we were on the island. One of the others, he knew we were in Scotland. He could tell by the stars.’

‘Was that Tommy?’

‘No. But it’s how Tommy and I knew where we were when we landed.’

‘Where was that?’

‘A little way up the coast.’ He gestured. ‘We found a church by the side of a wood. Well, a chapel. Deserted, it was. Funny place for it, really. We sheltered there that first night. Sanctuary, you’d call it.’

He said no more but stood, like her, drinking in the vast spaces above them. And Sarah was surprised to find that she had grown comfortable with his company. Liking didn’t enter it. Liking was for people you met, then chose to meet again. This was trust, and trust was for those who taught you to use a gun, then stood close while you fired. Years ago, she’d come through a baptism of pain to find a life with Mark, and had thought she could trust him because she’d imagined it was something they’d come through together. But Mark had simply been on the sidelines; picking up the pieces and arranging them how he’d wanted. And when that fell apart, or at least when his hopes did – for the books and the successes; the life of academic achievement he’d come to expect – he rearranged it all again, and settled for the money. In time, even that hadn’t been enough. She wondered how long it had taken him to rationalize his crime; to talk himself through to the other side of the scruples he’d once had. And supposed that when you were denied what you really wanted, you didn’t see why you shouldn’t have everything else. The money. The mistress. The works.

She turned to look at Michael. He had bathed, shaved; wore a clean shirt and a pair of jeans. In the dim light his face was all crags and valleys, and she had to suppress an impulse to reach out and touch the scar on his chin. He’d probably be no less surprised if she made a grab for his crotch.

To shake the thought from her head, she said, ‘Tell me about Tommy.’

‘Tommy?’

‘You’re in this for him. He must have been special.’

‘He was okay.’ For a while it looked like that was all she was going to get:
He was okay
. Then he said, ‘What did you want to know?’

‘Anything. Just what he was like.’

‘What he was like,’ said Michael. He had a can of beer with him he popped now, and offered her a swallow. She shook her head.

‘We were in this bar once, Tommy and me. On leave. We’d had a bad day. Tommy liked to bet, and he’d lost heavily that afternoon, and he was really pissed off. Looking for a fight.’

He took a long pull from the beer can, then rubbed his lower lip with a thumb.

‘There was a man in the bar, Tommy decided he was the one. I don’t know why.’ He rapped a quick tattoo with his knuckles on the can. Some way off, the dog barked again. ‘You ever see one of those arguments where one guy just wants to live quiet, and the other guy wants to break bones? There was nothing he could say Tommy didn’t take wrong. He’d be, Let’s buy you a drink, and Tommy was, What are you saying, I’m an alcoholic? You calling me a drunk? Guy must’ve thought he’d wandered into a nuthouse. He’d say, I’m leaving now, Tommy said, No you’re not. Everybody knew what was going to happen. Nobody got in the way.’