Why We Die

by Mick Herron

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was sorry about that. You’d be Zoë, then.’

  ‘That’s right. And you’d be Dennis.’

  ‘Possibly. Any friend of Joe’s . . . owes me money.’

  ‘He always spoke highly of you, Dennis.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No. I found your number in his files. First time I’d come across your name.’

  ‘He kept a file on me? Jesus!’

  ‘Don’t feel paranoid. He had files on his primary school teachers. You were one among many.’

  After a beat or two, he said, ‘So, Zoë. Zoë Boehm, that right?’

  ‘You’ve a good memory for names.’

  ‘Being good at names is my main thing,’ he said. ‘As you’ll know, if you’ve read my file.’

  ‘That’s exactly what we’re going to talk about,’ she said.

  She didn’t have a phonecard. She could have called from home – Bob Poland, after all, hadn’t sliced her landline – but she didn’t want to be an entry on a callback record. She fed coins into a slot instead.

  ‘Chronicle.’

  ‘I’m trying to reach Helen Coe.’

  ‘Putting you through.’

  But she wasn’t put through to Helen Coe; was transferred, instead, to a male voice affecting boredom, but whose undertone had an elastic twang. ‘She’ll get back to you. What was it in connection with?’

  ‘Isn’t she well? I spoke to her yesterday.’

  ‘At home or at the office?’

  Zoë hung up; flipped through numbers she’d found in Joe’s files – journos one and all, though guessing which among them had retired, descended into alcoholism, or quite rightly been put behind bars was anyone’s guess. She scratched lucky third go: ‘Coe? She went to work for the Chronicle.’

  ‘Do you have her home number?’

  ‘I think it’s listed in my mobile. One second.’

  Which multiplied to eighty. Zoe spent them finding a pen in her inside denim pocket, then smoking it . . . If she’d noted Coe’s address last night, she wouldn’t need to do this. Cars passed. A young couple scrutinized the blackboard roped to the railings of a restaurant over the road . . . The voice returned, and gave her Helen Coe’s number.

  Children had invaded the playground when she passed it heading home, and were watched from the periphery by groups of women, and one or two men. By now, Zoë was suffering the exhaustion that comes from seeking information from strangers. She needed coffee. She needed peace and quiet. And she was returning to a flat with somebody else in it, which she wasn’t accustomed to, and which was making her tense. One of the men caught her eye as she passed, and communicated envy: she was walking away, and he couldn’t. The playground squawking sounded louder the further she got, which was either an aural illusion caused by nearby buildings or a horrible truth caused by children.

  When she got home, Katrina was on the sofa: pale, calm, dressed. In daylight, her damaged face looked appalling. Her plum-coloured wound cast shadows. Automatically, Zoë raised a hand to her own bruise; the circular mark on her forehead she’d collected before being bundled into the freezer. It would pass, and she’d forget about it. What had happened to Katrina, though, wasn’t something that would fade – the face would recover, the swelling subside, but the memory was going nowhere; would pop up with every startling noise, every sudden flash of light . . . A man had done this. She had killed the man before he could do it again. Most juries, Zoë imagined, would look at the photos of her injury, then think about themselves, their wives, their sisters, their girlfriends. Few would be thinking about the other photos: the ones showing Baxter Dunstan with a knife in his chest.

  ‘Did you talk to her?’ Katrina asked.

  ‘I talked to her sister,’ Zoë said.

  ‘And?’

  Zoë shut the door behind her. ‘She’s not dead.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘She’s in a coma.’

  ‘. . . Is it bad?’

  ‘I’m not sure how they grade them. I think you find out afterwards. She’ll come out of it or she won’t.’

  ‘What about Jonno?’

  ‘Okay, I think. Doesn’t seem to be hospitalized, anyway.

  ’ ‘And the Dunstans?’

  Zoë sat. ‘Remember what you said last night?’

  ‘Most of it.’

  ‘You could be right. Helen Coe’s not talking. Jonno won’t know what hit him. As far as the cops are concerned, the missing link is you.’

  ‘They can’t think I hurt them.’

  ‘They’ll certainly be interested in hearing your point of view.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘And it’s not like you’ve not hurt anybody else.’

  The phone rang. Zoë, not taking her eyes off Katrina, picked it up.

  ‘Zoë?’

  It was Tim Whitby, out of breath, as if he’d been the one who’d had to run to catch the phone.

  ‘What is it, Tim?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Zoë . . .’

  There came the sound, unmistakable in the circumstances, though unidentifiable in any other context, of somebody taking the receiver from him.

  Arkle Dunstan said: ‘You’re the one hit me with the chair, right?’

  ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  ‘You threw the apple, too.’

  ‘There wasn’t a chair handy.’

  Watching, Katrina had got the message; had hardened into something like waxwork. Arkle Dunstan was on the line – his voice was in the room. She sat motionless, as if hoping it wouldn’t notice her presence; as if it were crawling the walls like a spider on surveillance, waiting for a twitch on its web.

  ‘What do you want, Dunstan?’ Zoë asked. She’d already worked through the various ways he might have found her, and it had dawned on her that he hadn’t: he’d found Tim. This couldn’t be undone. What mattered was what happened next, which was going to involve Katrina, who was going to have to pull herself together. At the moment, she looked like she’d shatter if spoken to. Zoë thought: Hell, woman, you killed the last man raised a hand to you. Get a grip . . .

  ‘She’s with you, isn’t she?’

  ‘Who would that be?’

  ‘And I’ve got your friend Tim.’

  ‘Tell me, Arkle, do you think this is a gangster movie? Am I supposed to say, okay, let’s swap? You think that’s what I’ll say? You’re out of your fucking mind.’

  ‘Listen –’

  ‘No, you listen. You’re halfway through a home invasion less than a mile from where you shot someone with a crossbow. How long do you think it’s going to take to arrange an armed response? Ten minutes from now, you’ll be looking back on this as your last free conversation.’

  ‘No, you daft cow. I meant listen.’

  Zoë heard him lay the receiver down. And then heard what happened next.

  Part Four

  The ultimate stalker

  Chapter Nine

  i

  ‘This might hurt.’

  It did, of course, but what most shocked Tim, reconstructing the moment afterwards – no. What most shocked him, afterwards and at the time, was pain. But the second most shocking thing was, the way the brothers acted in total unspoken accord, as if there’d been a hidden meaning in Arkle’s words, decoded only by Trent. Who, without hesitation, pulled Tim to his feet and pushed him against the wall of the living room . . .

  . . . A while, this had been going on. There’d been conversation, mostly consisting of Arkle asking questions to which Tim didn’t know the answer. A lot of them involved money. Tim was starting to put pieces together: it was like a mystery-jigsaw puzzle he’d done once, which involved reading an incomplete murder story, whose villain the accompanying jigsaw revealed. A jigsaw minus a picture was tricky, but at least you approached it without preconceptions. You filled in the edges, and then you were on your own. Bits that looked like a hand could turn out to be a pigeon, or a juggler’s hat. He’d finished it in the end. He
re and now he was starting to get a vague outline, but a lot of the pigeons might still be jugglers’ hats. Katrina knew where the money was hidden – money the Dunstans had stolen. It seemed Katrina hadn’t been involved in the robberies, but Tim knew enough about the shallows of the human mind to recognize that this might be wishful thinking.

  And then Arkle Dunstan, tiring of asking questions Tim didn’t follow, had said, ‘Who’s the woman?’

  He was looking at the photo of Emma on the mantelpiece. It wasn’t the best picture Tim had of her, but it had been there for years, so it was still there now.

  ‘My wife,’ Tim said.

  Arkle had glanced at the ceiling, as if she might be upstairs. ‘Where’s she, then?’

  ‘She doesn’t live here any more.’

  ‘Not been lucky lately, have you?’

  You could find truth anywhere, Tim supposed.

  ‘Where’s Kay?’

  . . . Photographs apart, in the weeks following her death, Tim forgot Emma’s face. It became impossible to conjure it from the black cupboard of his memory, and when he tortured himself trying to imagine her about her normal everyday tasks, the visions that arrived were of a walking corpse washing dishes, or dealing with the kettle. It was as if his most recent sightings of her, wired to various important pieces of medical machinery, had supplanted all trace of his living wife. And while the best way of quantifying the pain this caused him was to compare it to something heavy and sledgehammer-blunt, another part of it was sharp as a stiletto, and went straight to what remained of his heart. Because, of course, the impossibility of retrieving her face was exactly his first memory of Emma, and brought back all the joyful pain of their early days, and his inability, in her absence, to picture the woman who had captured him. It was as if she’d been another jigsaw puzzle – an undoable one – though he’d been the one falling to pieces. And then he found she loved him too, and after that, he carried a constant perfect image of her in his mind . . . She had been younger than him, and now always would be. Would have been in any case. But more so now than ever.

  And sitting on the sofa – Arkle prowling round him – trying to remember exactly what Katrina looked like instead, all Tim could summon up was dark hair falling over a pale face; the shifting pattern on a dress that sunlight played with. But when he stopped trying, Emma returned to him: wearing the same dress, crossing the same sun-patched stretch of hotel bar . . . For a moment, this took his breath away in familiar sledgehammer/stiletto fashion. And then the pain passed, as if it had been the ordinary cardiac warning after one drink too many, and he attempted again to summon up Katrina, because she, after all, remained living and vital, while Emma was gone forever. But he couldn’t. Last night had been only their second encounter, but already she was lodged in – in what? In his heart, he should say, though it felt more like his bowel or lower intestine; somewhere not just organic but digestively functioning – wherever it was, anyway, there she clung, or there he clung to her . . . Tim wasn’t so naive as to think there was more to this than a griefswung heart changing its beat. It had everything to do with loss, and nothing with connection. But it was happening, and it was happening to him. What else did he have to measure against?

  Arkle said, ‘Where is she?’ again, and Tim said, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It was you last night, wasn’t it? Driving the car?’

  ‘I don’t know which car you’re talking about.’

  Even to his own ears, that sounded stupid. Which car didn’t matter.

  ‘We tracked her down.’ Arkle sounded proud of this. ‘The whole world, she could have been hiding. We found her.’

  ‘I don’t know who you mean.’

  ‘Kay,’ Arkle said patiently. Kind of patiently, anyway. It was possible he’d explode any second. ‘Katrina.’

  ‘We met once. In a hotel –’

  ‘I know. You told me, remember?’

  ‘You threatened me with your crossbow.’

  Arkle said, ‘I hit an apple. On the bounce. You should’ve seen it.’

  ‘I was otherwise occupied.’

  ‘It was a fucking Olympic shot.’

  ‘I don’t know where Katrina is.’

  Trent said, ‘Who’s Zoë Boehm?’

  Now they both looked at him.

  Trent was standing by the phone, though Tim hadn’t noticed him get up; he was looking at the scrap of paper on which Tim had scrawled Zoë’s name and number. The first such note he’d made in a long while. Trent had pronounced Boehm Bome, which a lot of people did. Without Zoë to check him, Tim would have spelt it Beam.

  ‘Nobody,’ he said; way too late to be even quarter-way convincing.

  ‘She’s the one hit me with the chair, right?’ Arkle said, in a tone of voice that suggested he was remembering what Zoë did for a living.

  Actually, when Zoë had mentioned she’d hit Arkle with a chair, her tone had been much the same.

  Tim said, ‘You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to,’ but even at this relatively early stage of his personal development, he knew that wasn’t so.

  Arkle said, ‘Actually, I think you’ll find I can make you do pretty much whatever I feel like.’

  The important thing was to keep your cool. Arkle had acquitted himself brilliantly so far: despite recent aggravations, he’d yet to lose control, except with Trent a couple of times, and also with Helen Coe. Which memory was still working its way through him, with special reference to his knuckles and the palms of his hands. But maybe he was being harsh on himself. You couldn’t call that losing control. Circumstances had demanded he become physical. What kind of man failed to rise to the occasion?

  Anyway: he wasn’t going to hurt Tim Whitby until necessary. Control meant timing, if it meant anything.

  He asked Trent, ‘Any other numbers?’

  Trent shook his head.

  Arkle said to Whitby, ‘Okay. I’m going to assume this is the woman who’s been helping you and Kay steal my money.’ Our money, he thought. ‘Our money. Which pisses me off, but I’m prepared to let it pass. Call her up.’

  ‘She’s not involved –’

  ‘She is now.’

  Trent dumped the phone in Whitby’s lap, and Whitby looked at it as if it were a strange machine he’d not been taught to use. Christ. It wasn’t as if Arkle couldn’t push the numbers himself. Whitby doing it gave Arkle the edge, that was all; an admission he was on the right track.

  ‘Something you might want to think about,’ he said.

  Whitby looked up.

  Arkle backhanded him, not too hard; it probably looked worse than it felt – probably hurt Arkle more than it hurt Tim Whitby. Well, not literally, but it jarred his knuckles. ‘That didn’t hurt much,’ he said. Whitby, tears in his eyes, looked like he disagreed. ‘Trust me, that was nothing. Make the fucking call.’

  A couple of minutes later, when his hands had stopped shaking, that’s what Tim Whitby did.

  ‘Listen –’

  A calm buzz on the other end of the line was all Tim could hear. Zoë taking charge of the situation.

  ‘No, you daft cow. I meant listen.’

  And then Arkle was saying, ‘This might hurt,’ which it did, of course, but what shocked Tim almost as much was the way the brothers acted in total unspoken accord: Trent pulling Tim to his feet and pushing him against the wall of the living room; kicking his feet apart the way cops did in movies, though it wasn’t Tim who was the bad guy . . . Then Arkle dropped the receiver and stepped across to him, and then Tim wasn’t thinking anything, because lightning had struck. The world fizzed into black noise and static. Breath sucked out of him, immediately replaced by blind cold pain, focused on his stomach. Later he would think of penalty shots he’d seen in internationals; of tries converted, and know that Arkle hadn’t kicked him much less softly than that. It was a wonder his balls were still attached.

  Meanwhile, black noise and static:

  ‘. . . already know you’ve got her . . .’

  �
��. . . keep this up all day . . .’

  ‘. . . how much of him do you think there’ll be left, by the time the cops get here?’

  He wondered if Emma were looking down on the mess he was making. Nothing remotely like this had happened when she’d been around. Or if it had, it had happened elsewhere, to other people, so didn’t count . . . That’s what he thought he was thinking anyway. It might have been something he added later. At the time, things were mostly pain: brightly coloured pain in fantastic blotchy shapes that swallowed each other then spat each other out, like an animated Rorschach test. What did they all remind him of? They all reminded him of pain.

  ‘. . . hundred grand, two hundred. What’s it to you, bitch? It’s ours . . .’

  Something was being hung up. Probably the phone. Now something was being picked up. Probably Tim. Hands hooked under his arms and threw him back on the sofa, where he curled into as small a Tim as possible, in case this hurt less. It didn’t. He squeezed his eyes so tightly shut the darkness shone. The ache in his stomach was a balloon, into which air was steadily pumped.

  There was more conversation. Tim, head buried in cushions, heard: worra worra worra worra worra.

  Time must have passed. Light span and buckled. Bells rang.

  The next English phrase that made any sense was, ‘Okay. Let’s go.’

  ii

  On a road heading away from the city centre, past the University Press and the arts cinema, a walled drive ran off to the left just before shops and restaurants yielded to houses and flats; a drive lined by trees big and old enough to cast heavy cover, even now, in their largely leafless state. It had been June last time Zoë was here, and the trees had shed deep green light on the rough ground. The cemetery gates kept daylight hours, according to a board hung in the big stone porch, and were imposing, serious gates; might have been planted to guard some moneyed, exclusive community, though money and exclusivity were not entry requirements here, or not the primary one. On that June day Zoë had wandered through the open gates to find a path, also tree-lined, which wound into a circular area made up of brick-built flowerbeds, a bench and a litter bin, so visitors could rest among plantlife without making a mess. A breeze, as it happened, had done this anyway, and papers and wrappers were scattered about; some coming to rest against gravestones, as if taking rubbings. The graves were nominally arranged in rows, but the years had tilted the majority from the perpendicular; now, like English teeth, they leaned this way and that, though rooted in straight lines. The cemetery had a bedded-down air; told a tale of grief surrendering to neglect, and was hemmed on several sides by the ironworks, whose green-tinged windows overlooked the mostly forgotten. Zoë found few recent dates, and no recent offerings. Somehow, this was irrelevant. It is not why we die but when that matters. And such places paid testimony to the fact that even the forgotten have their memorials; and that though we’ll all end up history, history always stakes a claim on the present. Or something like that. A hard-edged comfort, but at least it was honest.