Why We Die

by Mick Herron

  On bare feet she padded to the kitchen; with a glass of water padded back, but found herself instead in her study: big word, small room. Small cluttered room, stacked with books she no longer needed and would one day shed, along with a filing cabinet full of Joe-related documents she supposed she’d keep forever. Zoë stood by the window, and looked out on the night-time world. A mist had fallen. No houselights shone. If she believed in ghosts, now would be the time to see them: pale spectres over the rooftops, barely distinguishable from the air they occupied. But all that carried to her was the sound of distant traffic. The dead don’t drive, Zoë. There are no ghosts. There was, though, a fat cat from next door, scrambling over the fence with a noise like a John Bonham drum solo, only rhythmical. She let the curtain drop.

  No ghosts, but haunting remained possible. Bob Poland, a man who by his own reckoning owed her harm, had threatened her life. How frightened should she be about that? It was true that he was not impressive: in the flesh or on the phone. She had cut bigger threats down to size; had once shot a man who could have crippled Poland with an elbow. Bob had the heart and mind of a stalker, and Zoë had encountered a few stalkers – all shared the same drab profile: middle class underachievers with hygiene problems. But Poland, an ex-cop, had a vicious streak, and it would be wise not to forget that. Besides, he didn’t have to be brave or interesting to cost her money. He’d proved that already.

  She went back to bed in the end. She didn’t dream again, but on the other hand, she didn’t sleep either.

  Back on stakeout next morning, she thought through the robbery again. It involved neat moves. The BMW hadn’t been discovered in the station car park until Tuesday evening, once the commuters’ day was over, and their vehicles had dispersed. It was probable that the robbers had had a second car waiting, but always possible they’d simply boarded a train . . . Westbound they might have been noticed, but there was never a shortage of people heading for London. They might have lost themselves in the crowd. Or it could have been double bluff: they could be local. Either way, they knew their ground; had checked things out in advance. Only that pointless use of the crossbow suggested amateur status, and the more she thought about it, the more they sounded like a professional trio incorporating a loose cannon. Perhaps her time would be better spent scanning the papers, waiting to read about some minor thug being hoisted from a river, medicine ball welded to his ankle. Crooks with ambition didn’t carry passengers. Unless something else bound them together, of course, but it was pointless speculating further.

  No: her best bet was getting a line on Sweeney’s ‘trade contacts’, and since he wasn’t likely to tell her who they were, watching his shop in the hope of a personal appearance was the obvious move. It was a long shot but so was everything else, and she stood to win five grand. The most she had to lose right now was a bag of apples.

  She was back in the charity shop before long.

  ‘Are you collecting lots of data?’

  ‘Masses of it.’

  ‘Only you don’t seem to be doing very much, dear.’

  Which just went to show that sooner or later, long observation resulted in a conclusion or two.

  The rest of the morning crawled. Lunchtime was a meaningless punctuation mark consisting of a cheese sandwich. If she still smoked, the car would be a death chamber by now: her skin, her fabrics, even the windows, would be suffused with dead tobacco. It had been something Jeff had checked on before he’d agreed to lend her the car.

  ‘I figured you for giving up around when they made you Pope. How long?’

  ‘Couple of months.’

  ‘What, you’re not going to break it down to the nearest second?’

  ‘Since the first twenty minutes,’ she’d confessed, ‘it’s all been a bit of a blur.’

  A middle-aged woman entered Sweeney’s about an hour into the afternoon, and came out again shortly after. It was all Zoë could do not to chase her down the road, asking what she’d wanted . . . Minutes passed. Hours. The day.

  Late afternoon, something happened.

  ii

  In a house on a hill in Totnes, a man sat looking at nothing in particular.

  Sometimes she would arrive, and it was as if he were frozen the way she’d last seen him – glued to the chair like some patriarchal version of Whistler’s mother; the dull cardigan still missing a button; the shirt still frayed at collar and cuff. The once-sharp beard straggly and ungroomed. Even the point he was staring at never varied, but remained an invisible dot on a blank wall, causing her to wonder what he saw – whether he was looking back on all the lives whose endings he’d tended, or searching for a clue to his own beginnings; a little light shed on how he’d got here from there.

  She stepped into the room, but he didn’t look round. In profile, by the light that found its way through the ivy strangling the window, the lines age had carved into his face seemed deeper than natural, like wounds from a battle he’d been lucky to walk away from. And he wasn’t that old, she had to remind herself. Early seventies. Life laid waste to some sooner than others.

  ‘Dad,’ she said.

  He didn’t appear to hear.

  ‘Dad? It’s me. Katie.’

  Two ways of saying the same thing. He’d only ever had one daughter.

  He stirred, as if passing weather had ruffled his surface, then blinked and turned to her. ‘Katie?’ Something missing in his eyes swam back under her regard: not quite a spark of life, but an acknowledgement of involvement – that things went on; that he was part of them. That one of these things was his daughter. The eyes were misty blue; the skin pale. The hair gone grey.

  ‘Are you okay, dad?’

  ‘Katie. I’d just been doing a bit of clearing up.’

  This, too, was how it ever was: he’d always ‘just been doing’ something moments before her arrival; had sat down the instant her key hit the lock. There’d been a children’s programme in which a doll came to life and danced when everyone’s back was turned. Her father cleaned up. That was the fable. Except there were always dirty dishes in odd places, and other, more peculiar untidinesses, such as piles of leaves in the bedroom. A neighbourhood girl did odds and ends, but left no evidence she ventured upstairs. The rooms there seemed part of an abandoned museum; one of those life-as-it-was-lived exhibits, whose roped-off bedside tables hold hatpins, boxes of Bryant & May, and folded-open green Penguin paperbacks. A bit like that, except not roped off.

  She was certain he never went into her old room. Those days were long gone.

  Putting down her bag, she crossed the room; bent and kissed his cheek: sandpaper. Talked about ordinary things, like the route she’d taken and the weather she’d encountered, which gave him time to recalibrate his existence to allow for her presence. This was age, but not just age. It was something age was doing to him. But at the same time, it was part of what he’d always been; never entirely present, it seemed to her.

  The clock on the mantel had wound down months ago, but even so, she knew when ten minutes had passed. That was how long it took for his light to go out; for her presence to stop being a surprise, and start being just something else in the room, like a broken clock, or the oddly shaped metal figure on the mantelpiece. When that happened, she said, ‘I’ll go and see if anything needs doing in the kitchen, shall I?’

  ‘It’s mostly tidy.’

  ‘Then I’ll have a quick dust upstairs.’

  So she left him swaddled in unravelling memory, in a chair placed so perfectly, the sun slanted on to him through a break in the curtains he either hadn’t drawn back yet or had pulled across too early – time slipped past so slyly, it might have been a mouse. He often spent whole days here. He couldn’t be sure how long this had been happening, but it was somewhere between not very and forever. Once there’d been work, and work had meant death – death was something he’d been good at; something he could do business with. These days death was a mark on the calendar, the difference being, the calendar was now his own.

&n
bsp; He could hear Katie overhead, though the sound seemed to be coming from the back of the house. It was easy to grow alone, when you were often confused. Katie aside, company for Kenneth Blake mostly took the shape of young Tamsin, or perhaps her name was Rachel, who lived across the road, and would call in to make sure he’d eaten and that mould spores hadn’t evolved to upright status in the kitchen. She’d bustle away through there, occasionally calling out something bright and cheerful, as if they were friends or family, and she were here out of duty and affection. A curly-haired, dark, overweight cherub: very much the saucy minx. Once she had stood in front of his chair and lifted her skirt, leering at him. He can’t decide now whether he’s remembering imagining this, or imagining remembering it. Whichever, he must be careful not to mention it to Katie.

  Some days he has bright passages, and for hours at a stretch can put a name to everything that matters, but at other times he descends into a fog. And more or less in both of these states, he fears that Katie’s husband is beating her, though he cannot for the moment recall her husband’s name . . . However unravelled he’s become, he knows a bruise when he sees it.

  This, too, he’s always known: that the clocks might stop, but calendars never do. That the days tear off and whip away like a fleeting-years montage from a black-and-white movie: the pages autumn leaves blown damp and dying on the wind; their summer green thumped the colour of bruises. And at calendar’s end your blind date waits, who arrives in different costumes, but is always only after one thing. He’s everybody your parents ever warned you about, though they rarely called him by the right name.

  . . . And after a life spent negotiating with it – moulding it; arranging the empty shapes it left behind; superintending the rituals for those devastated by its passage – death should have been a colleague: not liked, necessarily, but certainly respected, understood, bargained for. But life didn’t work like that. Death didn’t work like that. Long cooperation had produced no uneasy truce, but simply the knowledge that it was always there, always waiting, and might turn at any moment to wonder why he was still alive. Had he really ever thought it needed him? Had he really thought, like collaborators down the centuries, that his obeisance would lead it to spare him or those he loved? No, probably not . . . When his daughter was born, when Katie was born, he had thought Here is another one – another one to whistle for, in the long run; another who’d eventually vanish behind glazed eyes, skin turned plastic, and the utter silence of worn-out organs. In the normal run of events, this would not be until long after he was dead, but what did that change? – it was a detail of chronology, no more. She would still be dead. And all the while she was growing, he remained starkly aware of this: the knowledge lived under a trapdoor in his mind, and sometimes strained at the hinges, aching for the light. She would die. How could he successfully pretend this wasn’t going to happen? She would die. Sometimes, long after midnight, he’d stand in her bedroom doorway to watch her sleeping – death’s counterfeit he’d heard that called: some Elizabethan, who ought to have known better. It was nothing like. It was all grunts and shiftings, every last one of them a match lit in the darkness. Death was never like this. She was still alive . . . Children should reconcile you to your own mortality. All parenthood had done for him had been make him aware of his child’s inevitable end.

  So, of course, he’d put up barriers. The less you seem to care for something, the more it seems to flourish.

  The truth was, there was nothing he wouldn’t do to keep her safe.

  Though she lived just half a mile distant, Katrina always felt like Alice down the rabbit hole on revisiting her childhood home; was always faintly stunned by the way everything familiar had grown smaller. Smaller and dustier. In her father’s bedroom, she tested the environment’s resistance to intrusion; moved the scorpion paperweight that lived on the mantelpiece slightly to one side, wondering if it would inch its way back as soon as she turned. But all that happened was, a scorpion-paperweight-shaped patch of dust-free mantelpiece appeared. Perhaps the neighbourhood girl could be persuaded to do a little more . . . But that way guilt lay; an abdication of the role of dutiful daughter.

  Which was only one of many roles she played. Katrina to the world; Katie to her father; Kay to her husband – small wonder a subtly different woman answered, depending on which was addressed. It was a vocal version of Find The Lady: you overturned a name to see what it uncovered. Today she was Katie, who had grown up in this house. There was no corner of it her imagination hadn’t occupied; not a nook she’d not hidden in, playing one-sided hide and seek, waiting for the calls of Katie? Katie! that never came . . . Once, she’d spent an afternoon investigating her father’s bookshelf on the landing, and found – among the mishmash of MacLeans, Wheatleys, Reader’s Digest’s condenseds, and a pamphlet outlining the uses of a pressure cooker, which was probably the large forgotten pan in the cupboard under the sink – a dusty Names for Girls, and had sat thumbing from Abigail to Zandra; waiting for the perfect name to jump out, the one that should have been hers. And there, right in the middle – first column, centre page – was a neatly inked tick next to Katrina, as if a short list of one had been instantly settled upon . . . When you wanted to know how to use the pressure cooker, you bought the booklet. When you needed a name for a baby girl, you did the same. The pressure cooker eventually went to live under the sink. Katrina . . . Katie was still around. Still haunting the same house, though not on a full-time basis.

  On impulse, she visited her old room. Downstairs was quiet. Her father had probably re-entered that near-catatonia in which she suspected he spent most of his waking hours. She wondered if it was his past he visited; wondered if somewhere in his remembered corridors a little girl hid, waiting for a cry of Katie? that never came . . . Her room smelled of dust, and possibly mould. She ought to rectify this; to make sure the house wasn’t about to collapse about her father’s ears, but that might draw attention, which wasn’t sensible. Other than the smell, everything remained the same as ever: bed, dressing table, bookshelf, wardrobe. The window looked townwards, and had always reminded her of a storybook illustration: the rooftops it viewed so pointy; the streetlamps old-fashioned. Smudges on the walls indicated where posters had been Blutacked: popstars (Numan, Spandau, Duran) giving way to art (the Impressionists, and then the medieval masters) giving way to nothing at all – was that a fair summary of her changing taste? Tucked into the dressing table mirror were two photographs, each capturing an attempt at a smile. The first was of her mother, who had died when Katie was eleven. And while the mother Katie recalled had been always distracted, or angry, or perhaps just unhappy, she had been aware that when a camera was pointed at you, you smiled. So what the camera had seen was a pretty woman, who had known how to smile. Her hair was fairer than Katie remembered; her eyes brighter.

  The other showed her father as a young man, and his smile might have illustrated a relevant page in a physiology textbook. It reminded Katrina, obscurely, of the Mona Lisa . . . Hadn’t da Vinci studied the skull beneath the skin, and everything else it hid? – all those bloody strings and lengths of gristle which worked to make things move? Then clothed it in flesh, and painted it in action? And this was her father facing the camera, as if the photographer, coaxing the required reaction, had asked What makes you smile? and he had replied The muscles at the corner of your mouth. They make you smile.

  When she returned downstairs, he was standing. ‘I thought I might go for a walk later,’ he said.

  It was the kind of statement he primed himself to make in her presence: one that transmitted loud clear messages of health and independence.

  ‘How are you for groceries?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, Rachel does that.’

  ‘Tamsin.’

  Whoever. As if he didn’t have better things to do than remember the names of the neighbourhood girls.

  They stood for a while looking out of the window. After some moments he shifted, and she thought he was about to lay an arm across her
shoulder, but he didn’t.

  iii

  Price’s driver was called Win, and like everybody else, he had trouble remembering it wasn’t short for Winston. Roughly the size and shape of a phone booth, Win had been with him four or five years, so folk assumed she had something on him, video or DNA, because why else would he let a uniformed walrus chauffeur him round? A lot of women, the uniform wouldn’t be a problem, but on Win black leather suggested a seventies dining room suite more than sex on wheels. But while it was true he’d rather Win had a body he could happily imagine in or out of a bikini, there were other factors at play. He’d seen her bounce a man off the side of a building once – ‘bounce’ was usually an expression, but this guy had been airborne. This had been the first time Price had seen Win, not long after he’d had to fire his regular driver for being stabbed. The airborne joker, in pre-flight mode, had been a door supervisor at a club. And what made it funny, when you thought about it, was that the proper name for a door supervisor was –

  ‘Someone’s following.’

  For all her big-boned frame, her voice was pitched higher than likely. It could take a moment to focus on what she was saying, rather than how she was saying it.

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘You sure?’

  She glanced reproachfully into the rearview.

  For some reason the first thing into his head was Arkle – he didn’t trust Arkle. Baxter, he could do business with: Arkle, you’d be better off chaining to a kennel and forgetting to feed.

  ‘Recognize the car?’ he asked.

  But Win was shaking her head: ‘Orange VW.’

  ‘A Beetle?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘What, they couldn’t have found a, a, a pink Rolls Royce? Something less noticeable?’

  But it wasn’t Win’s job to have ideas about cars for other people, and he couldn’t really blame her for not replying.

  Besides: what mattered was she’d picked up the tail, and he didn’t doubt her ability to lose it. Of course, then he’d have no idea who it was, which would be a complication, and the best thing to do with a complication was stamp on it before it grew up, sprouted little complications of its own . . .