The One Safe Place (57 page)

He almost let the gun fall. He felt it slump in his fist. He clung to the knob with as many fingers as he could force to work, and strained his elbow up, up. The knob seemed to move only slightly, but he tugged at it with what little strength remained in his hand. The door swung toward him so readily that he staggered along the hall as if the weight of the gun was pulling him toward Barry. That must have looked like a real threat, because it stopped Barry just short of the end of the staircase. Before the man could close the distance between them Marshall stepped backward, sure of himself again now that both his hands were supporting the revolver, and out of the house.

He drew a breath which tasted fresh as sunlight, and kept retreating. Once he was beyond the gate he might feel truly safe, and then, little as he liked to abandon his friend while he did so, he could run for help. The spectacle of his escape appeared to have paralysed all activity within the house; even the old man had fallen silent. Marshall looked over his shoulder to ascertain that he was several steps away from the gate, then peered down the barrel of the gun. Barry was stalking along the hall, but he no longer seemed nearly so dangerous, however vicious his face was growing. Marshall wasn't prepared to see him grab Darren and pull the boy in front of him, one arm around his throat, the other hand clamping itself between his legs. "Come back here, you, or I'll cripple your boyfriend."

Darren's face crumpled and was all at once much younger. He tore at the arm around his throat with both hands, and Barry grinned more widely. "Do it," Darren snarled at Marshall. "Shoot him. Pull the trigger."

Marshall took one step toward the house, to enlarge the target of the man's face. "Let him go or I will."

"That's it, lad, keep coming." Barry licked his lips, savouring the excitement. "Get a move on or it'll be too late for your lover."

Though his hand at Darren's crotch appeared hardly to stir, Darren's eyes bulged and his mouth stretched wide, the lips quivering around the teeth. His mother ventured tentatively out of the kitchen—Marshall couldn't tell if she was afraid or trying to reach Barry unnoticed—but as the man's head snapped around, she retreated. "Shoot, fucking shoot," Darren screamed.

Marshall stumbled forward one more step, and prodded the muzzle at the sneering target above Darren's agonised face, and pulled the trigger. The impact of the hammer on the empty chamber was barely audible, as though it was ashamed to own up to its uselessness. Barry's eyes blazed gleefully, and Darren's face convulsed as his captor thrust the hand up between his legs. "Better not shoot," Barry jeered, "or you might hit—"

Something slammed into the heels of Marshall's hands. The ache of it rushed up his arms to the shoulders, from which it seemed to leap into his ringing ears. For a moment deafness blotted out all his senses, and then he was able to see beyond the muzzle and its wisp of acrid smoke. The agony had drained from Darren's face, which looked almost comically astonished, as if he hadn't believed Marshall capable. Just above Darren's head, Barry's throat was growing bright crimson.

The man wobbled toward the stairs, letting Darren sag in his grip. As the boy's head slipped down the leather jacket, Marshall saw it was leaving a track. It wasn't just the blood which was pulsing out of Barry's throat, he saw. It was pulsing out of Darren too, out of his shattered scalp.

Barry wavered backward and sat down hard on a stair. Darren's limbs began to flail the air weakly and haphazardly. Marshall seemed to be watching a dummy sitting on a ventriloquist's lap—a dummy of which the ventriloquist was losing control. It kicked a little, then its legs flopped, and it tried to reach with one hand for the top of its head to feel what had happened there. The hand rose as far as the forehead before giving up. As the fingertips trailed down again they appeared to pull off the peevish bewildered expression which the face was making an effort to wear, and then it was a little boy's face, slack as though asleep, the lips slightly parted. A moment later Barry's head lolled forward on a neck which was now entirely reddened. His chin poked into the ruined scalp, and a wash of crimson welled down the boy's face, turning it into a red plastic mask.

A clunk of metal recalled Marshall from wherever his mind had retreated. The revolver had fallen from his hands onto the concrete. He watched Darren's mother run along the hall, slapping her hands against the wall and the staircase, and hunch her shoulders nearly as high as her ears when she saw what Marshall had done, and begin to scream. She swung her head almost blindly toward him and came out of the house at a fast jagged walk, screaming words now, too harsh for him to distinguish. Whatever she was calling him, and whatever she meant to do to him, he thought it was less than he deserved. It wouldn't bring his friend back.

He stood waiting, close to welcoming her onslaught. Her nails raked at his eyes, but he felt nothing. At first he didn't understand why, even when he saw her staggering back across the doorstep to sprawl on the floor. It wasn't until his mother stepped in front of him and took his hands that he realised her fist had met the other woman's jaw, knocking her unconscious.

As the last bulging suitcase wobbled away along the conveyor belt, Marshall saw a man in the crowd beneath the flight arrival and departure monitors identify him and his mother. She was saying "None" to the woman behind the check-in desk, except that the word changed in his mind as he realised it had only three letters. A gong tolled overhead before a female voice warned yet again that unattended baggage would be removed and might be destroyed. Through the faint hollow echo of the tolling in his ears he heard his mother thank the airline clerk. She turned away from the desk with the boarding cards in her hand, and the man beneath the screens that were shuffling words moved toward her through the crowd.

Marshall swung the baggage trolley in his direction. There was a policeman by the restless automatic doors into the long high booking hall, two more were chatting to a clerk at the Lufthansa desk, and all of them wore guns. He pinched the double bars of the handle together to release the brake, and steered the trolley toward the two policemen and the interior of the airport. His mother was trotting to keep up with him when the man called, "Mrs. Travis?"

The trolley stalled, almost throwing the hand luggage onto the floor, because Marshall's mother had taken hold of his shoulder. One of the policemen glanced incuriously at the incident, which no doubt looked as though a father had just located his wife and son among the mass of passengers. Except that his father was too young, and wore glasses whose narrow lenses were tinted the same dark blue as his suit and cheeks and chin. "Yes, what is it?" Marshall's mother said.

"I wonder if I can ask you a few questions for—" Another gong tolled, and the female voice summoned a member of staff. Marshall stared at the policemen in case they were wanted, but neither moved off. "For what, did you say?" his mother said.

The man repeated the phrase, and Marshall realised that the single syllable was the name of a newspaper. "If you've just a few minutes," the man said.

"I don't know, Marshall. Have we?"

The policemen were taking their leave of the clerk, turning away so that Marshall couldn't see their guns, but he no longer felt the need. "I don't mind."

"If he doesn't mind I suppose I don't either, Mr....?"

"James. Shall we find somewhere to sit? Can I get you both a drink?"

"I could use one. How about you, honey?"

Marshall was trying to decide if James was the reporter's first name or his last; being less than sure of anything about a person made him uneasy now. "Thanks," he said.

"Let me take your bags." Before Marshall could argue, the reporter grabbed both from the trolley and lifted a strap over each shoulder. "You didn't want to keep on pushing, did you, son?"

Whenever anyone called Marshall that, he felt as though they were presuming to be compared with his father. He didn't reply, only looked for armed police as the reporter ushered him and his mother into the next hall, where shops and a bar hemmed in a great many seats fitted back to back. There was a gun, and there another, quite close to the bar where the reporter found three empty stools like puffed-up miniatures of the table they surrounded. "Gin and it it is, and for you, son?"

"Orange in a bottle, please."

"In a bottle," the reporter said as though sharing Marshall's finicality with several Africans in robes and multicoloured caps outside the bar, and swung the cabin baggage off his shoulders before strutting to the counter. As Marshall gazed after him, his mother touched his hand. "We really don't have to do this if you don't want to."

"I don't know what it is yet."

"Our farewell to England."

"Sure," Marshall said, and turned the stool and himself to stop the fluttering of destinations on a monitor from plucking at the edge of his vision. His mother eyed him as if she couldn't judge what answer he had given her, and at once he didn't know. He watched while the reporter delivered himself of an ostentatious amount of change into a saucer on the bar and carried over their drinks dwarfed by his own pint of bitter. He set the bottle and glasses on the table, and pulled the creases over his knees, and shot back his cuffs as he produced a notebook from inside his jacket. He hadn't opened the notebook when he said, "So will you be taking any pleasant memories home with you?"

"Of course," Marshall's mother said, and looked the question at Marshall.

"Sure." That sounded as vague as the last time he'd used it, and he backed it up as best he could. "There was the lady who bought my dad's shop."

"Really. She was..."

"She paid a lot more for it than we were expecting, didn't she, mom? The last books my dad ever bought were the rarest, but she needn't have said."

"Honest of her," the reporter said approvingly, then set the notebook down so as to take a drink. "And will there be much you'll miss?"

"My videos."

"Really," the reporter said, squinting at him over the tilting glass.

"The police took them because they weren't British. We thought they might give them back for us to send home, but they wouldn't. It's all right, mom," he added as he saw her regretting having signed the videos away when they'd seemed not to matter. "Some of them I don't like much anymore."

Marshall's mother stood her glass on the table with a rap like a gavel. "Excuse me, but what kind of story are you planning to write?"

"As much of the truth as you and the nipper will tell me."

The reporter was presenting an earnest expression to her, but just for an instant Marshall saw another one stir beneath it. Every face shifted like that if he looked too long and hard. "I want to talk about what happened, mom."

"It's up to you, Marshall. If you're sure."

He hoped she would understand when she heard him. He wanted to leave behind an image of himself closer to the truth than the wimp who'd been seen weeping in nearly every newspaper and on maybe every television channel in Britain. Only now that he was being given the chance, he didn't know how to begin. The inside of his skull was growing slippery and brittle when the reporter said, "Whenever you're ready, Marshall."

"I'm thinking, James."

"Actually, it's Mr. James."

"Then maybe you should say Mr. Travis."

"Whoa," the reporter said, or a word that sounded like it, and threw up his palms as though Marshall had pointed a gun at him. The gesture brought Marshall unexpectedly close to remembering, though even as it was taking place the shooting had seemed like a nightmare he'd already had, and the memory found words for itself. "He tricked me."

"You can say that again, son. Drugged you without your knowledge. You weren't responsible in the eyes of the law. Over the worst by now, is he, Mrs. Travis?"

"The doctors say so."

"And what do you say, son?"

"Sure." The question, and the hot noisy kaleidoscope surrounding him, were distracting Marshall from the issues he wanted to clarify, except mightn't they be best kept to himself while his mother could hear? "I was trying to save him," he made himself say instead.

"The other boy, that is. You didn't know then what he'd done to you, obviously. Is it right he was being abused?"

For a moment Marshall thought he was being asked whether Darren had deserved it. "Yes," he said. "I was aiming for the guy who had him."

"To stop it, you mean, of course. Yes." Having answered for Marshall, the reporter raised his pint of beer to him. "I hope you aren't blaming yourself. You always hear them say it in films, don't shoot or you might hit the other person. You'd never handled a gun before, had you? No wonder you missed. I would have."

"I didn't miss."

The reporter lowered his glass slowly as he reached for his notebook. "You didn't?"

"Mr. James—"

Marshall interrupted his mother. "He lifted Darren up just as the gun went off."

"Darren being the boy. Darren Fancy, wasn't it? Some surname. Exactly what nobody would." The reporter had found nothing further to write after all. "Looking back now, how do you—"

"Drink up, Marshall, or bring it with you. They've announced our gate."

"Just another couple of questions while he does that if I may, Mrs. Travis. Is it true you're leaving because of the possibility that someone related to the people who were shot might seek revenge?"

This time the rap of the glass on the table was so sharp that a policeman looked hard at Marshall's mother as she stood up, hefting her bag.

"Tell me, do you make a living asking questions like that? Do you consider yourself to be a professional?"

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Travis, if I—"

"Too late. Get your bag, honey. Leave the drink. I'll buy you another when we're through the gate."

The policeman was still looking, but Marshall couldn't tell whether his hand was flickering toward the gun at his hip. Presumably not, since he turned away as Marshall's mother thrust the strap of the flight bag into Marshall's hand. As Marshall felt his fingers close around it, and his legs begin to walk in the direction his mother was urging, the reporter said, "I'm sorry if I gave you the impression I wasn't on your side. I'll tell you now, son, I think you did us all a favour."