Down Cemetery Road (33 page)

Sarah felt the breeze shift direction. From inside the inn came the sounds of crockery, as the staff cleared up.

‘He wasn’t built or anything, this bloke, just average. Tommy was like me to look at, but you could bounce bricks off him all night long. Anyway, it happened. He followed this bloke outside, someone he’d never met, had never done him harm, and beat him half to death. I pulled him off eventually. I could have put an end to it sooner, but only by killing him. The way you have to some kinds of dog.’

He turned and placed the empty can on the arm of the bench. Then looked at Sarah.

‘Well, what did you expect? He was nice to animals, kind to children? You want to hear about him carrying Maddy’s picture, crying himself to sleep over Dinah? He went with whores, Tucker, and he got in fights, and if the other guy was better than him, he’d hit him from behind. Because that’s what he did. He was a soldier, he was a good soldier. But he wasn’t a nice man.’

‘And he’s the reason you’re looking for Dinah?’

‘No. Maddy is.’

It was as if a picture she had been looking at turned out to be upside down, and no revision of her former opinion was going to make her look less foolish. But Michael didn’t hang around to hear about how she’d got things wrong. She looked up at the stars once more, and then looked round for him, but he’d left.

Sarah Tucker, she thought. You complete and utter idiot.

She wasn’t sure how much longer she sat there in the dark. When she went inside at last, and up to their room, Michael was already in bed: she slipped into the bathroom as quietly as she could, and had a tepid shower. Exhausted.
I am exhausted
, she thought – her mind still racing from untamed thoughts. Using a fresh T-shirt as a nightie, and pulling a pair of pants on, she went back into the bedroom, which was small, with thin curtains no match for the moonlight, so a bluish cast settled on all it held: the electric fire, the dusty shelf with its scatter of tourist-objects, the small bedside table on which sat an unused ashtray. The bed itself. Michael lay still as a corpse beneath its covers, though Sarah knew he was awake, and knew, too, that he knew she knew.
I know you know I know you know I know
. All those hours in that hotel room: he’d know her by her breathing in the dark. By the smell of her hair when it needed shampoo.

She sat lightly on the side of the bed. He made no movement, nor any noise, but his eyes shone wet in the blue light, a trick of the moon suggesting him capable of tears.

‘Michael?’

No reply.

‘She’s your daughter. Isn’t she?’

‘She’s Tommy’s kid.’

‘You know that for a fact?’

‘Who knows anything? For a fact.’

‘Don’t run from this.’

Then his hand appeared from darkness and gripped her own by the wrist. ‘What do you want me to say?’ He held her so tight she could take her own pulse. ‘That I loved my friend’s wife? That I wanted
his
life?’ He let go. She’d have a bruise by morning; a bracelet of used pain, to match the necklace Rufus left her with. ‘We both fucked things up, Tommy and me. But I had more excuse. If I’d had Maddy, I’d never have . . .’

‘Never what?’

‘I wouldn’t be here. Maybe none of us would.’

There’s something he’s not told me, she thought.

He sat up, the sheet falling from his bare chest. It was curiously hairless: a boy’s torso. The red weals cast him like a tiger, or its cage. ‘I’ve seen how you look at me when you think I don’t notice.’

(She could hardly deny what was coming.)

‘I’m a killer, right? I shot that guy in front of you, and it doesn’t matter he’d’ve killed you, it puts me down in your eyes. I shot him, and that chokes you off.’

‘I don’t care what you’ve done.’

‘You don’t know half of it.’

‘Michael –’

‘I loved her. Okay? And he treated her like shit. I saw the bruises, you think that didn’t matter? I’ve killed people, so what’s a knock or two? Fuck it, I’d have ripped his heart out. But she’d have spat in my face while she fitted him together again.’

‘Why did you stay with him?’

‘She asked me to.’

He brushed a hand across his forehead: wiping the thought away.

‘Did you ever . . .’

‘Fuck her?’

‘Okay. Fuck her.’

‘What do you think?’

Of course he had. Else he’d know for a fact he wasn’t Dinah’s –

He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.’

‘Tommy had to go and see her,’ she said softly. ‘That’s why . . .’ It was why they’d been killed; what gave Rufus – Axel – his opportunity.

‘It’s not that he had to see her. He had to make sure she wasn’t seeing anybody else.’

‘Did he know –’

‘Oh, sure he knew.’ He lay back, his eyes reflecting the pale insignificant light. ‘Sure he knew,’ he said again.

Which was what hurt, she thought, lying down now beside him. That he’d only stuck by Tommy for his love for Tommy’s wife. And that Tommy knew it.

Neither spoke for a long while, but when Sarah shivered suddenly – a goose running over her grave – Michael lifted the sheet so she could slide beneath it. And there she put her arms round him, finding this not so very different, after all, from the other night they’d spent in the same bed. Like cold figures on a stone tomb, she recalled. And now, though wrapped together, there was still that sense of epitaph in their embrace, though over whose grave they were joined tonight, she could not imagine.

But in the morning, when she woke, the room was empty: just a blank cool space in the bed next to her; and, over the back of the chair by the window, Michael’s denim jacket – almost like a promise that he’d be back: but a promise, she knew, he had no intention of keeping.

IV

There were lies and double bluffs and twisted reasons justifying crooked ends, but first of all, and mostly, there were secrets.

Sitting on the train, Amos Crane remembered being recruited to the Department; remembered the double talk and the veiled hints of the unorthodox. Recalled some buffer who’d been involved in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich lecturing him on The Dark Heart That Beats In The Chest Of Government; on how what made democracy a fair and just system was that this Dark Heart was kept hidden, rather than used to promote terror and obedience. Death Squads were for fascists. In a democracy, accidents happened.

Crane’s secret was, he didn’t need the lecture.

But he sat anyway, and nodded, and tried to look like he was learning hard lessons. Agreed that it was better – for instance – that a very minor royal should fall getting out of the shower than that the entire royal family should tumble into the dust, and that this was not – was
not
– a matter of sweeping paedophilia under the carpet, but simply pragmatic problem-solving. The obituaries elevated the minor royal into a glory-that-might-have-been just this side of sainthood, and a nation mourned untroubled by nasty realities, then forgot him. The boat remained unrocked. This was important.

Sure it was, Crane agreed.

And sometimes, guilt and innocence became relative. When people were in unnecessary possession of troublesome facts, it wasn’t crucial to ascertain that they meant to
do
anything with the information. Possession, after all, was nine-tenths of the law: which made it mostly legal to ensure discretion was permanent. Many senior civil servants, the Old Buffer told Crane, anticipate a K at the end of their career; but if, hypothetically, a particular senior civil servant opened the wrong file at the wrong time to learn, say, that the American air bases then in Britain held weaponry of a type not formally disclosed to the people’s elected representatives, he might look forward, instead, to an accident on an icy stretch of road. It did not necessarily matter that his loyalty was never in question. What mattered was that the secrecy was preserved intact.

This wasn’t a problem, Crane assured him.

And so Amos Crane, at the tender age of twenty-three, entered the twilight world of expedient operations, a world in which the barbarians were not only waiting at the gates but had copies of the keys. Despite the pep talk, it wasn’t all wet work. There were milder ways of silencing potential embarrassments, most involving photographs, women, boys, animals, money, surgery or drugs; though once or twice he was allowed to become creative, which was when his talent for the job became wildly obvious. When an East End pimp acquired pictures of the then Foreign Secretary wearing only a pair of pre-teen girls, Crane, working on the ABC principle, took out not only the pimp himself but eight other hustlers within two days, sparking a lot of editorials about gangland war that muffled serious investigation. The only shadow cast over this achievement was Crane’s documented suggestion at the outset that it would be cheaper and simpler to take out the Foreign Secretary, thus rendering his susceptibility to blackmail moot. Howard’s predecessor pretended to believe this was a joke. Amos, once he’d noticed which way the wind blew, pretended likewise.

And two years into the job, he’d put his young brother up for recruitment.

‘It’s not a bloody club,’ he’d been told.

‘No need to blackball him, then.’

‘Amos, the fact that he’s your brother doesn’t mean he’s our kind of material. My own brother works for ICI, for God’s sake.’

Didn’t surprise Amos one bit. ‘The point is,’ he said, ‘he’s not exactly a novice. That thing with the pimps . . . ‘

‘Don’t say it.’

‘Nine in two days? I’m good, but I’m not
that
good. Axel did two of them. The one in the car and the one with the scissors.’

‘Oh Jesus Christ . . .’

‘He’s versatile. You have to give him that.’

There’d been an emergency session that afternoon Amos was only supposed to find out about afterwards. He also guessed the outcome correctly: that there’d be strong support for red-ribboning him and his brother both, but sweet reason would prevail. As the original Old Buffer said, A pair of talents like that, you never knew when they’d come in handy. And he’d quoted LBJ or Edgar Hoover or whoever, on it being better having the bastards inside pissing out.

‘We fought a war against people like that,’ the Buffer was told.

‘Damn nearly lost, too.’

‘It was their kind ran the concentration camps.’

‘Do you really think,’ he’d said, ‘that over in Moscow they’re turning talent down because it’s too
nasty
?’

‘It’s not Moscow I’m worried about. It’s Washington.’

‘Fuck Washington.’

It was generally agreed afterwards that it was this remark that won the day.

That had been the real beginning, Amos reflected now; the day Axel was recruited alongside him, at an age when most boys his age were awaiting their O-level results. And for a shade over twenty years, life had gone on the same: successes outweighing failures for the most part, which was a pretty acceptable margin of error for government work. And there had been room for sentiment too. Taking the Old Buffer out had been an act of pure heart. The old man had taken to wetting the bed, and telling his life story to his nurse: that wasn’t the way he’d have wanted to be remembered, even if he’d been allowed. Amos had seen to him quickly and quietly, and was very proud of the resulting death certificate, which cited heart failure. As for the nurse, she’d been sideswiped on the M1 the following week, on her way to a newly offered job: Amos wasn’t sure what the death certificate had read in her case, but was pretty sure they could have slipped it into the same envelope her remains fitted in. Room for sentiment, sure, but there was no sense getting carried away.

And now it was over, and Amos Crane couldn’t help thinking they’d been victims of their own success: too good at what they did to be allowed to try anything else, they’d been obvious candidates for downsizing once the winds of fortune changed. Axel’s downsizing had happened in the field, of course. But Amos had been targeted, no doubt about it, and all because his first desk operation – his
first
– had chalked up a few minor casualties: it was getting so you weren’t allowed any mistakes, which hadn’t been office policy in the good old days. He blamed political correctness. And what was worse, Howard had sent freelancers,
amateurs
, to do the job, which was cheeky as well as being a fucking liberty. Howard would pay for that too. In his mind’s eye, in fact, Amos was starting to make out a queue: a lot of people demanding his attention. Michael Downey was still at the head of it, blood being thicker than water – Amos Crane could vouch for that. These clichés didn’t get where they were by not being true.

And that was a lesson Michael Downey knew too, Crane reminded himself: the lesson about blood. Downey had also served an apprenticeship. Not quite the same league, but he’d been to the edge, which in his case was a place called Crows’ Hill, a camp for Iraqi prisoners where he’d served three months as a guard towards the end of the Gulf War, along with his friend Tommy Singleton, always the better soldier. Among those at Crows’ Hill were a small group captured at an Iraqi military compound, where a torture chamber had been discovered – electric batons, ceiling chains; a bathtub streaked with blood, though no bodies were found. A school of thought held this irrelevant. No bodies were found because the bastards buried them. One dark night Singleton, Downey and a handful of others – probably drunk or high: Crane neither knew nor cared – took the group of three out to the wire and shot them dead.

They could have been shot themselves. (Probably ended up wishing they had been.) But it was a popular war, and nobody wanted to spoil the party, so the fix was put in instead: that couldn’t have been particularly difficult, Crane reflected. Removed from Crows’ Hill, Singleton’s crew was kept in close confinement for the duration; even after the war, the army didn’t much know what to do with them. For years, they were a scandal waiting to happen. When they were co-opted en masse for ‘special services’, you could hear the sigh of relief in An Najaf. And it was only once these special services were over that they were delivered into the hands of the Department: officially dead – a cover story lacking subtlety, but avoiding loose ends – they’d become embarrassments, and the Department Crane worked for dealt with embarrassments. But there was still curiosity about how long it would take them to die from the effects of the nerve-bomb: the experiment had been a failure, immunization having worked at only seventy per cent, but that didn’t mean the statistics weren’t worth keeping. So they’d been sent to the Farm, itself a hangover from the days of germ warfare, the idea being that they’d remain there until their various cancers took hold. After that, they’d be chucked. Before that, though, they’d escaped.