‘And maybe your pullover.’
That’s harder for me to remove. Scarier. But I hand it over. Olaf says, ‘Thanks.’
I wonder if there is going to be a sexual attack here. It’s funny, as a woman, you can’t help but wonder. Even when you’re about to die. But this pair seem too professional for that. They want the emergency services to find a hypothermia victim, not a rape victim.
Hamish meantime is patting down the car. He’s found the torch, the sleeping bag. The things that might keep me alive. He does something to the torch in the snow and kills its light. There’s a brief discussion with Olaf about the sleeping bag, which I gaze on with longing. I can’t hear their muttered conversation, but it ends with Hamish taking the sleeping bag to the Land Rover. I imagine they’ll take it back up to the cottage and leave it there. Buzz, the only person who knows that it was in my car, will assume I just forgot it at the house. Typical Fiona, he’ll think. And he would, most of the time, be right to think so.
Poor Buzz. This will be very hard on him. Not supergreat and perfect at all.
‘The last part,’ I say to Olaf. ‘The very last part. I’d like to be left alone, if that’s okay.’
He thinks about that briefly, but nods. ‘Sure.’ He holds eye contact with me. ‘It’s quite fast, you know. And after a while you don’t feel much.’
He’s trying to be nice. The contract-killer version. I say, ‘Thanks.’
Hamish comes back. The two men complete their check of the car. They’re looking for blankets, tools, anything that might help me out of this. They don’t find anything. The car battery is pretty much dead now. There’s a dim spark left in the headlights, but almost nothing.
‘Can I get back in?’
‘Sure.’
We get back in, though mine is the only door that’s closed. The other one is wide open and a convertible isn’t exactly the most heat-proof conveyance at the best of times. A faint breeze – a whisper of air, no more – wanders through the car.
It is profoundly cold.
We’re sitting in the same configuration as before. Me on the driver’s side. Hamish to my left. Olaf behind. He has my coat and jumper folded on his lap. He takes my phone, checks it for signal – which is registering zero, null points, forget-about-it – and hands it to me.
‘You can write texts if you like.’
So I do. Write my last words.
To Buzz. To Mam and Dad, Ant and Kay.
I tell them I love them. That they’ve been my most important people. That I wish every good thing in the world for them.
None of it is original or clever or witty. Not one word of it. But it is real. My eyes are pricking again. If I weren’t so cold, I might even cry.
I love those people. Love them with all my heart. Nothing else matters. Not really. I hope Buzz and the others know that. I wish I had more time to communicate. More time to express those thoughts.
I’m shivering now. Shaking with cold. As I was completing my texts, my fingers were jittering on the keys.
I hand the phone back to Olaf, who wordlessly scrutinises my texts. Checking I haven’t said anything about how I came to die here like this. I haven’t. Maybe there’s some clever code I could have used, but I’m too cold to think of anything like that. In any case, that’s not the most important message for me right now. Olaf says, ‘Okay.’ He gets out of the car – Hamish has to pull the seat back so he can get out – then he walks up the track into the darkness, comes back a few minutes later without the phone.
‘They’ll find it. I’ve made sure they’ll find it.’
‘Thank you.’
We sit in silence.
These are the minutes in which I die.
Temperature isn’t a feeling anymore. It’s not like a spectrum of colour, a range of smells. Cold and pain are the same thing. They’ve merged, become one. Colder means more painful. A pain that expresses itself in every part of my body. My now compulsively shaking body.
‘Hamish?’ I say.
He turns to me. His stupid, gingery, violent face. I shoot my right arm out and strike his nose as ferociously as I know how. Heel of my hand. Shoulder backing up the arm. All of Lev’s good teaching in the blow.
There’s a spray of blood. I think I’ve broken his nose. He thinks so too. He claps one hand to his face. The other hand wants to get right on and murder me now.
Might even do so except that Olaf physically restrains him.
‘To match his jaw,’ I say to Olaf. ‘Even things up.’
Olaf’s somewhat amused by that, but mostly pissed off. I’ve broken our lovely little murder-in-the-snow compact. Taken the sweetly amiable edge off it. More to the point, there’s blood all over the car and they have to clean up. Olaf releases Hamish’s arm but growls at him not to touch me. There’s a fierce authority in his voice. He always felt like the boss of these two.
He orders me out of the car and guards me as Hamish wipes down the surfaces. But there’s a limit to what he can do. There will still be blood in the seams of the leather seats. Blood on my trousers. Blood on my T-shirt. And they can’t take those things if they want this murder to look like an idiot-girl-gets-lost-in-snow death.
Truth is, I don’t know if anyone will order forensics on this crime scene. Why would they? There’s little enough that will look suspicious. It would be totally like me to get stuck in the snow. Like me to be underdressed. Like me to set out at night in an unsuitable car. Like me to forget my sleeping bag. That spray of blood is a lovely little clue that could lead straight to the murderer and no one may ever find it.
But maybe not. Watkins will be the grim angel of this investigation and she’s not one to undercook things. She sent me here. She’ll do this right.
I stand in the snow as Hamish does his business. Olaf keeps me standing there long after he’s finished. Partly punishment. Partly just wanting to get on and finish the job.
A T-shirt in this weather.
I am practically naked.
These are long, freezing minutes.
The cold is bewildering now. My feet are burning with the cold. A fire I can’t step out of. My hands are the same. But what’s worse is the shudders from within. I can feel my body retracting into itself. Like the last warm ember in a dying fire. I feel myself get stupider. I try to say something to Olaf and I hear myself slurring the words. Like my tongue is lolling about in my mouth, useless as whale meat. Any movements I make are gross, clumsy. On the edge of failure.
I don’t know how long I stand there. When I’m too cold to stand anymore, I fall over.
More minutes pass.
I’m not even shaking now.
Finally Olaf says, ‘I think it’s time you had your clothes back.’
He hands them to me, but I can’t put them on. That’s not me being tactical or obstinate or anything else. I simply can’t co-ordinate my movements.
I think there might even be tears in my eyes now, but not real ones. Not like when I was thinking of Buzz and my family. Just eyes watering with the cold.
I find myself being lifted by the two men. Bundled into my clothes. Hamish holds my arms behind me, twisting unkindly, while Olaf does up the buttons on my coat. They lift me into the car. I press myself into them as they do so. Wanting to snatch any glimmers of warmth from their bodies.
They’re not returning my clothes to me to keep me warm. The clothes wouldn’t be sufficient to protect me on a night like this, even if I had any body heat left to conserve. They’re just setting the stage for this final act.
I don’t object. I prefer having my clothes back.
And it’s close now. My death is close. Olaf was right. It’s a kind death, in a way. You expect a lot of things from dying. Coldness. Stillness. Silence. Pain. What you don’t expect is this great clumsy stupidity. A blanketing idiocy. Brought about as blood retreats from the inessential organs – like the brain – to the only two things that ultimately matter right now. Heart and lungs. I don’t know which of those two things f
ails first. I only know that I won’t be conscious when it happens. Any pain I’ve felt is receding now. I’m too cold for that.
I’m so cold, I hardly feel the cold anymore.
I say to Olaf, forming my words as carefully as I can, worried that I’ve already lost the power to form coherent syllables, ‘Please. Go. Now.’
He studies me. He’s Swedish or Norwegian, I assume. Knows his snow, anyway. If he has had any military experience – more than likely in a professional killer – he’ll have done plenty of arctic survival training.
He knows hypothermia. Knows the passage to death. He’s looking to make sure that I am on a path from which there is no return.
And I am. In his expert eyes, I am.
He says, ‘Okay.’
He and Hamish walk off back to their car. They are leaving me here to die.
34
I’ve spent more of my life with death than almost anyone. Not the shoot-bang sort of death. I haven’t had Lev’s kind of life, not even Buzz’s. I don’t know exactly what my father got up to in the dark days of his past, but I haven’t had his kind of life either.
All the same, for two years as a teenager I lived with death. It wasn’t something external for me. Not something encountered on the point of a gun, the tip of a blade. It was internal. I didn’t confront death, I was dead. I lived it. That doesn’t make sense to people who haven’t been where I’ve been. To the tiny handful of those that have – well, there’s no other way to describe it. We have been dead: lived it and breathed it. Some very few of us even survived it.
You don’t encounter something like that and emerge again normal. For long years after I was no longer officially sick, I still saw death’s yellow teeth grinning at me from every corner, every shadow. Those years, in some weird way, were even worse than the ones that came before. I found the struggle for life harder than being dead.
That struggle does, now, abate. This year, in the arms of my beloved Buzz, I have sometimes known what it is like to live without struggle. Sometimes almost without fear. But I’ve never thought I would plant my flag permanently on Planet Normal. That planet is not my own. I might perhaps acquire papers permitting residence, even naturalisation, but its gravity – its soil and atmosphere – will always be alien. They will never be mine.
Until maybe now.
I’d never thought about it before, but there is no more powerful statement of being alive than the business of dying. Plenty of lifeless things have the power of motion. Crystals grow and viruses replicate. But to die – actually to die – that’s an honour only granted to the living. The cost of admission.
And I’m about to be so honoured. The stupid thing is, I feel honoured. Insofar as I retain any sensation at all, I have two things in my head. The love I have for Buzz and my family. And the stunning assurance that I am truly alive. I couldn’t be dying if I weren’t. I don’t want to die, but a strange way this is the best moment of my life. Something precious. Something longed for. There are worse ways to die than this. Many worse.
I’m too fuddled to think anything quite so clear, but these thoughts hang there in the middle distance like the golden background on a Chinese painting. Gently illuminating. Not interfering.
Which is just as well, because I’m not planning to die.
I roll over onto my back in the driver’s seat and lash my booted feet at the window. Not once, repeatedly. I can’t coordinate my movements at all well, but there’s something in the abruptness of the action which seems to work for me. The first few times, I achieve nothing. Then I do. I don’t even realise that I’ve broken the window until I lash out a couple more times and can’t even find the window. It’s gone.
While I’m in the position I’m in, I grope for the levers that release the bonnet and the petrol cap. I pull them both.
Then I roll over and forward to find a splinter of glass – only to find nothing usable at all. The stupid, stupid window is made of safety glass. It’s crumbled into a million tiny granules. None of them are usable as a cutting tool.
I stagger back to the rear of the car. I’m not thinking any of this through. I’m just acting out the plan I made as I was standing, dying, in the snow.
Open the back. It takes me several goes but I do it. Buzz’s spare petrol can sits in the way of the little hatch that protects the tyre irons. I heave the petrol can out onto the ground behind, fumble the hatch open, and grope for the tyre iron. I have to do all this by moonlight because there is no other source of light. But I know where the tyre irons are: they’re where I keep my cannabis.
Leaning against the car all the way, I stumble back to the broken window. Feel for the wing mirror. Find it. Smash it.
The mirror, the little darling, shatters beautifully. Long, dangerous shards, reflecting starlight. I take the most daggerlike of those shards and start ripping up the seats. Foam rubber bursts forth.
It’s hard getting it out. I keep failing. My shard breaks and I have to find another. There is blood on my hands. Blood everywhere. The stitching on the seat resists my cutting. And everything I do is done through this dull soup of stupidity.
Somehow, though, it happens. Beautiful sheets of foam rubber. I get the first out, stuff it up the inside of my coat. Then, because my technique has improved, get more foam from the other seats. Enough to stuff down my back, down my trousers. Anywhere I can, I stuff it in. I wrap foam over my head. Tie it with the belt from my coat.
None of this will stop me dying, I know that. The slow leaking of heat from my body is still happening, but not as fast. When Olaf and Hamish left, they drove up to the top of the hill, to get back onto the road proper. But they’re pros. They won’t have left immediately. They’ll be parked there, looking down.
They’ll want to be sure I don’t magic fire from somewhere, don’t summon the airborne cavalry using a microtransmitter hidden in the sole of my boot. But then, once they’re confident that I’m done for, they’ll leave. Exit the crime scene as swiftly and noiselessly as they can. Start to build an alibi in some other part of the country altogether. I don’t know how long they’ll watch me, but I need to outlast their watching.
When I’ve done all I can to insulate myself, I force the car bonnet open. There is still some residual heat in the engine block. Not much, and I lie over it pulling my arms and legs in for whatever warmth I can find. In the old days, drovers caught out in the snow would sometimes get through the night by sheltering in the opened guts of newly dead animals. Forget the smell, feel the warmth. I’m the same. Sheltering in the guts of my Peugeot. For the first time in what seems like an eternity, I can feel my midriff. It’s cramping with cold, but that’s better than no feeling at all.
I find myself daring to think the unthinkable. Go on, Griffiths. You’ll get through this.
I need to keep alert. It would be all too easy to drift into unconsciousness.
I try chanting to stay awake. Counting up to twenty, then back down again. Listing all the people I know, all the people I love. Some of my words are out loud. Most, I think, aren’t. My tongue is made of wood. My cheeks are walls of bone.
I try to notice whether the engine is still warm, whether it’s still giving me any kind of sustenance.
Weirdly, I think I have an advantage over ordinary people in all this. They’re so used to having their sensations arrive in the regular way, they wouldn’t know what to do under these unordinary circumstances. But these cloaked and unreliable feelings are what I’m used to. The world I’ve lived in. Figuring out how to manage them, how to make decisions despite the fog, is my own particular expertise. My sphere of excellence.
I last as long on the engine block as I can. When I can’t any longer count up to ten, not even in my head, I realise it’s time for the next phase.
If Olaf and Hamish are still on the hill waiting for me, I’m dead.
If they’ve gone, I’ve got a chance.
I go back to the boot of the car. I’m shocked to find that I can’t walk. Not at all. I have
to hit my legs to find out if they’re there or not. I have some stupid idea in my head that they’ve fallen off. I can’t feel myself hitting myself, but somehow my brain catches up with reality and I stop worrying. In any case, I don’t need to walk. Crawling is fine.
I get to the boot. The little tyre iron hatch. Find the little tin that contains my joints and a cigarette lighter. Somehow, on the third or fifth or tenth try get a joint in my mouth.
That’s the easy bit.
Cigarette lighters – cheap, disposable ones like mine – are hard to use. You need strong fingers and a clear action to get a light. My fingers are weaker than milk and I live in a world where I think my legs have fallen off.
I try I don’t know how many times to force a light.
Can’t do it.
Summon all the concentration I have. All the will. All the effort.
Nada. Nothing. Sweet fuck all.
Mostly it’s that my movements are just too uncontrolled, but I think my hands are still bleeding from the glass. They are slippery with blood. My fingers aren’t strong or adept enough to turn the serrated double wheel of the lighter. I am dying because I can’t turn that wheel.
Think, Griffiths. Think, bitch.
And I do. I change my grip, press the wheel into the fake-wool interior of the boot and roll it along.
Flame.
Instantly flame.
Because I’m so excited, I drop the lighter and it goes out immediately, but I know what I’m doing now. Three or four more goes and I get it.
Flame. Blue-yellow. Steady. Life-saving.
I light my joint.
I want to do more than that. Want to press my face up against that beautiful steady light. But I’m in control now.
This time I don’t even try to walk. Just edge round on my knees, leaning up against the side of the car to the petrol cap. It’s hard work getting the petrol cap off, but I just lit a lighter. A petrol cap is child’s play.
Love Story, With Murders Page 22