Why We Die

by Mick Herron

  Arkle explained it was one of those things could happen to anyone, not clear even in his own mind whether he meant releasing the bolt or being shot in the leg, but figuring same difference. Except Price said, ‘Not if you left that fucking thing home it couldn’t.’

  (A couple of things about Price. First, he looked frighteningly like a younger Van Morrison. Unfortunately for him, only about ten minutes younger. Also, he had the habit of stressing random words, which made it tricky to work out his meaning. ‘Did I say shooting was required?’ Which could mean it was optional, right? Which wasn’t what he meant.)

  All this had been late last night, well after midnight. Trent was asleep, stale beer wafting off him; Baxter, meanwhile, had gone on to the gantry with his mobile, and was murmuring to Kay in a voice so low it might have been threat or promise. Baxter was always controlled, always focused; listened when Kay spoke. Kay too was tightly wrapped, though Trent had called her ‘accident prone’ lately – Arkle didn’t know what that was about.

  What Price said next was: ‘Can I assume you at least took the right fucking goods?’

  So Arkle showed him: not the lucky-bag assortment scooped from the counter display, but the stones they’d made Sweeney dig out of his safe. Price sorted through them with greedy fingers, while the TV span silent webs in its corner.

  Price went quiet when assessing merchandise. He’d pick up the pieces one after the other and scrutinize them from all angles, in case he came across one that hadn’t occurred to him before. Arkle left him to it; crossed to the window, whose wiremesh reinforcement cut the pane into tiny diamond shapes, and looked at Price’s car. Price always parked over the road from the gate, or rather Win, his peculiar driver, did.

  . . . That time he’d spoken to Win, it had been with genuine friendliness. Arkle had seriously wanted to know why the fuck Win dressed in retro-leather like an extra in a Nazi porn film. But maybe his choice of words had been poor. Win, in reply, had invited him not to lean on the car, like he was about to smudge it or something. The car was a shit-brown Audi: a smudge would have lent it character.

  ‘You actually his . . .?’

  ‘His what?’

  Get that voice.

  ‘His minder?’

  ‘Try causing a problem. That way, you’ll find out.’

  Which had freaked Arkle, all right: try causing a problem. Like there’d be difficulty noticing if he decided that’s what he’d do.

  What with the irritation and all, he hadn’t felt inclined to offer his advice; this being that when you were minding somebody, it was an idea to vary your routine. Instead of, for example, always parking over the road from the gate.

  Always, though. There was a big word.

  Baxter came in, looked at Price, then sat on his stool again, facing the TV.

  Always meant seven: seven times they’d done this now, so must be experts. Not that a lot of skill was involved. Price provided names, times; spelt out the merchandise; took it off their hands. From his point of view, it must have been like shopping online with Tesco’s, except the right stuff got delivered.

  And what Baxter said was, Price was playing both ends against the middle. The targets were guys Price fenced for, which was how he knew what they were holding – small fry, so lacking in comeback. Price, big in his own field, was poaching in others’: the way McDonald’s sold fish nuggets to choke the local chippies. Baxter knew stuff like this, and could have been an economist if being a thief wasn’t quicker. Baxter took charge of the money.

  But Price didn’t totally squeeze the targets – no: he paid sympathy visits; took some legal junk off their hands, to cheer up their cash flow. That was probably good for another forty per cent under market value, Bax reckoned. You couldn’t underestimate the human touch. Once you’d got that faked, you were raking it in. Again: McDonald’s – have-a-nice-day? If they wanted you to have a nice day, they wouldn’t be selling you that shit.

  Price grunted now, as if he’d discovered a flaw. Arkle turned from the window. ‘Something wrong?’

  Price said, ‘You know much about diamonds?’

  Baxter said in a bored voice: ‘I know a bit.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. I know you’re not the only guy in the West Country buys them.’ Still in the same bored voice, making Arkle proud of him.

  ‘We’ve got a deal,’ Price said, after a moment.

  ‘So don’t start chiselling.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, I’m clearing my throat here. Where’s the problem?’

  Baxter just looked at him.

  And if he wasn’t sitting watching a soundless TV in a tin box, Arkle thought, Baxter could have been, not just an economist, but a banker or TV evangelist: someone making serious money . . . If the old man had had his way, they’d be supplying the basics to construction companies, instead of raking in more in three days than he had in six months. But then, if the old man had had his way, he’d still be alive. Death hadn’t been on his wish list. It had just been on his agenda, like everybody else.

  Price said, ‘Let’s try and keep this on a civilized fucking level.’

  Arkle said, ‘You parked in the usual place?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason.’

  Price said, ‘You enjoying this conversation? Or shall we shut up while I get on with it?’

  Arkle shrugged: get on with it.

  ‘Only it looks like the hobbit’s settled in for the night.’ Nodding at Trent, who was snoring rhythmically, sounding like his own respirator.

  Baxter, without taking his eyes from the screen, said, ‘Don’t dis the hobbit,’ and even Arkle couldn’t tell whether he meant Trent or that pixie from the film.

  Price went back to the merchandise.

  Arkle returned to the window. If it was open, and he had the crossbow, he could put a bolt right through Price’s radiator. Or any other part of the car he chose.

  And that had been last night, and Price had gone eventually, having said the merchandise would do, which was the word he’d used: do – as if there was anything else it could have done. Thirty grand . . . And if he’d paid thirty, it was worth more.

  But thirty grand would do.

  And now they were in the pub down the road from the yard – Arkle, Baxter, Trent – having lunch, which for Arkle was tap water and for Trent lager. Baxter was drinking wine. The pub was done up to look like a library which had become a pub by accident: like, how did that happen? Except Baxter made a point of plucking the occasional book from its shelf, sniffing, putting it back. Then explaining they’d been bought by the yard, as if this was news – there were fucking hundreds of them.

  Trent said, ‘Good couple days’ work,’ and it was the first sensible thing he’d said all morning, or at any rate, the first thing he’d said all morning.

  Baxter looked at him. ‘You ever consider detox?’

  Trent took a pull on his pint and set it down, dead centre of his beermat. He looked around the room: at the books on their shelves, at the barman, at the couple of ancient Chinese men drinking Guinness at the far end, then back at Baxter.

  Bax said, ‘It’s something you might want to think about.’

  ‘Know what I’ve been thinking about?’ Arkle asked.

  ‘No,’ said Baxter, turning to him. ‘But I know where you’ve been. Just this side of fuck-up central. Price was right. You were looking for an excuse.’

  ‘He was in the way. He had this uniform –’

  ‘He had a pair of overalls.’

  ‘You weren’t there.’

  ‘We’ve each got our part to play. Mine’s to drive. Yours is to get the stuff with the minimum fuss.’

  ‘We got away, didn’t we?’

  ‘No thanks to you.’

  Arkle stared at him a long moment, then looked away. It was an old building, and the windows were cramped uneven openings through which dusty sunlight fell in slanting beams. Every time you raised a glass you caused turbulence: swirls and eddies multiplied in th
e streams of dancing dust. Consequences. This was what Baxter meant. That actions had reactions. Except there came a point where you had to stop worrying, else you’d never get anything done. So he’d shot a guy on the way out: so? The guy would live. All they had to do now was not get caught, and they’d had to do that anyway.

  Trent mumbled something nobody heard.

  Arkle said, ‘I’m going for a piss.’ He didn’t need one especially, but those Chinese pensioners were weirding him out. Wasn’t there something oriental they should be drinking: gin slings or tiger beer? Instead of Guinness?

  When he’d left, Baxter said, ‘He’s losing it.’

  Trent shifted. ‘He’s always been losing it.’

  ‘This is worse. The crossbow? He’s going mental.’

  ‘It was under his coat. I didn’t even know he had it until –’

  ‘I don’t blame you.’

  They both knew Trent couldn’t have stopped him if he’d been a traffic light.

  ‘So what you saying?’ Which whatever it was he’d better say fast, because Arkle would be back soon. And Trent didn’t think Arkle wanted to hear it, which meant nobody in the immediate area wanted to be near Arkle hearing it either.

  ‘I’m saying’ – and Baxter leaned forward: ‘I’m saying he’s going to blow it, Trent. Soon. And that’s not something we want to be caught in the middle of.’

  ‘We’re okay so far.’

  ‘Skin of the teeth. Think about it, that’s all.’

  Baxter leaned back and the conversation was over. Trent took a pull on his lager, and felt his body start to relax.

  In the corner, a trivia-quiz machine went through its endless routine: snippets of games, each of which guaranteed a fifty-quid payout, unless the snippets weren’t telling the whole entire truth. Somebody had lit a cigarette, and the sunlight vectoring from window to bar billowed suddenly with blue-grey smoke, the way a river swirls with mud when you drop rocks into it. It took Trent a moment to notice that the cigarette was his.

  ‘Kay coming?’ he asked, without knowing he was going to.

  ‘No.’

  ‘She all right?’

  Baxter said, ‘Why shouldn’t she be?’

  ‘No reason,’ Trent said.

  Arkle appeared through the door from the toilets, and stood surveying the scene for a moment, as if presented with an unexpected vista. It wasn’t clear whether he’d lost track of where he was, or was just momentarily appalled by it. On his way back he paused by the Chinese men, or Trent assumed they were Chinese, and said something, pointing to their pints of Guinness. The Chinese men looked at each other. Arkle said something else, or maybe the same thing again, and this time pointed to the bar’s top shelf and its row of bottles: the usual suspects, plus a couple of fairly exotic interlopers, notably more dusty than the rest. The barman arrived. Arkle kept pointing, and the Chinese men were served with a couple of glasses of one of the exotics. Then Arkle nodded, satisfied, and came to join Trent and Baxter, wiping his shaved head with his big right hand as he approached; letting it rest there a moment as if he were about to test his skull’s strength; see if he could squash it in his own grip. It was the kind of competition, whatever the result, Arkle would figure he’d won. Which was a good reason for not getting involved in serious disagreement with him.

  Sitting down, he said, ‘So what I’ve been thinking is, maybe it’s time we did things a little differently.’

  They looked at him.

  ‘I mean, Price? Seriously? He’s taking half of everything we earn.’

  ‘He sets it all up,’ Baxter said in a neutral tone.

  ‘So? How hard could it be?’

  He began humming, a tune Trent didn’t recognize, though it was a safe bet its composer wouldn’t either. Down the bar, the two Chinese men rose and went.

  ‘You know,’ Arkle said, ‘I’ve got a good feeling about the way things are going.’ Though he wasn’t happy about the unfinished glasses they’d left behind them.

  ii

  ‘They come out of nowhere.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Must’ve been . . . half nine?’

  Derek Hunter – Derek Raymond Hunter: D.R., aka the Deer Hunter (Zoë had had this explained twice already) – had come off shift at 9 a.m.; had got off his bus at 9:27; had been walking past Harold Sweeney’s at 9:29 – he lived just round the corner – and had been shot in the leg roughly then, as ‘two armed men’ burst out of the looted jeweller’s. Zoë had only heard about one weapon so far, and wondered how divisible that was. If there’d been five men with a single weapon, would they still have been ‘armed men’? But being injured with the weapon in question probably altered your perspective.

  And the weapon being a crossbow altered Zoë’s, truth to tell. Most situations, something not being a gun could only be a good thing. But when it was a crossbow instead, you were beyond dealing with the average muppet and looking at someone less clearly focused. Possibly a moral halfwit for whom other people’s pain was a party trick. But possibly somebody worse: who knew the pain was real, and liked it.

  Derek worked as a security guard at a supermarket.

  ‘Seventeen years and never a shot fired in anger,’ he said proudly. Derek wasn’t allowed weaponry, of course. But he was man of the moment, and it wasn’t his fault if the only words he could find were hand-me-downs. Seventeen years, and probably nobody had paid much attention before. ‘And here’s me getting plugged off-duty.’

  ‘What else do you remember? About the men?’

  ‘There were two of them.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And they were armed.’

  ‘Did they say anything?’

  Across the ward a nurse pulled a curtain around a bed, and proceeded to act as if she’d thereby constructed a soundproof chamber: Let’s see to the doings then, shall we? Zoë faded her out; tried to concentrate on the Deer Hunter, who was fiftyish, with teeth like a broken fence. Who wore no ring. Who might harbour crucial information – there was a first time for everything – but who most likely was going to enjoy his fifteen minutes then melt into the background, while his front-page appearance yellowed on his sitting-room wall: the one that informed him that, contrary to initial reports, he wasn’t, after all, dead. And one day even that wouldn’t be true any more.

  . . . She had to snap out of this. Morbidity was starting to stain her outlook; starting to taste like the air she breathed. Which this morning had mostly been other people’s exhaust fumes.

  The hospital was barely ten minutes’ walk from Sweeney’s, and a bus had arrived after a mere fifteen, so it hadn’t taken more than half an hour to get here. Finding Mr Hunter hadn’t been difficult, either: he was the only crossbow wound admitted lately. But it hadn’t been visiting time, and the staff on duty hadn’t been impressed with either of her business cards: not the one which said what she actually was, nor the one claiming she was a journalist.

  ‘It’s your lot were saying he was dead the other day.

  ’ ‘I think you’ll find that was TV,’ Zoë said. ‘Or radio. I’m strictly ink and paper.’

  ‘Nice for you. You can wait along there.’

  Waiting was never her strong point, and especially not in a cheerful room; one of those places whose very paintwork screamed Could Be Worse. Paintings by children she had to assume had been patients; whose fortitude should have been a lesson, yes, Zoë knew. But she’d had her car stolen, as accompaniment to a bill she couldn’t afford, and this was not her day regardless. Through the window she looked down on distant undramatic roofs. Sounds carried of doors shutting, of everyday shoes on institutional floors. Half a dozen chairs had been stacked against one wall, beneath a notice reading Awaiting Removal.

  So she’d flicked through a magazine, and encountered an article about Positive Thought, the cure for everything. The Secret To Health, apparently, was A Happy State Of Mind. Happy? Totalitarian state of mind, more like: no sulks, no anger, no kvetching about the weather. No wonderi
ng why things went wrong, even when they obviously fucking did. No swearing. And, of course, no cigarettes, no alcohol, no fatty foods . . . One of those Total Health Diets where you lived to be a hundred, but every last minute felt like death. Capital Punishment – punishment by capitals – had sneaked in through the back door.

  And death was the ultimate removal, of course: death was change of address, no forwarding. Your number disconnected for all time. Right that moment, at the end of this corridor, sitting in a plastic bucket seat, it was hard not to figure this an ante-room to death – maybe the entire building was. Like the joke says: you don’t want to end up in hospital, they’re full of sick people. And sick people died. As, in the end, did healthy people . . . Just one more change of identity, in a lifetime spent being one thing then another. Young/old, happy/sad, alive/dead. The ultimate deed poll alteration. You could change your name, change your habits, but eventually, you got what was coming.

  And here was why death had been on her mind: she had had her own scare lately, Zoë Boehm. It had come to nothing, her brush with death, but the best you could say of that was that it was rehearsal only. It had been an act of subtraction: a good doctor had taken away the thing that had frightened her, which had turned out not cancer, but a cyst. So what still frightened her? How come she still had nights where sleep ended before it began, and dawn found her upright in an armchair, sipping tap water in a room with open curtains? Because she wanted to retain her identity was why. She was not yet ready for removal. And she’d come close, if only in imagination, to what that removal would be like. It would not simply be the end of Zoë Boehm. It would be the end of everything – of armchairs, tap water, curtains: everything. The fact that they would continue for other people didn’t count. She’d discovered she wasn’t going to be around forever any more.

  In her good moments, Zoë worried she’d allow a few bad months to turn her into a health zombie. And the rest of the time, she took her pulse and checked the calendar and carried on giving up smoking . . . And besides, and besides, and besides. There were many possible futures, and one of them was hers. The slow decline into senescence, or the rapid burnout of a mattress fire. Positive thinking only took you so far. You could look on the bright side – that it was the knowledge of inevitable closure that made the remainder sweet. That the trite was also the true: all good things come to an end. That this was the natural state of things, and nature must have its way. And that two positives don’t make a negative. Yeah, right.