by Neil Cross
The next morning, he put on a suit and tie and caught a taxi to the university. The campus was like a small town within the Wellington suburbs. Its faculty buildings were in the various signature styles of the 1970s, the 1950s, the 1940s. The Hunter Building was gothic and ivy-clad. The students differed in no visible way from their British counterparts. They didn’t seem conscious of Holloway’s existence. The suit rendered him invisible. He thought better of testing this theory by sitting with the undergraduates and buying himself a coffee in the refectory, but he did browse the campus bookstore, his sunglasses tucked safely away in a sober breast pocket.
He explored the campus for hours, taking regular breaks for Coke and Cherry Ripes. He satisfied himself of its layout before finding the faculty of English. It was located on the eight or ninth floor of the 1970s Von Zedlitz building, but alongside it were small Victorian cottages in which lecturers kept their ramshackle offices. His heart beat hard and he sat on a low wall until the giddiness passed. He supposed that if anybody were to notice any incongruity, this would be the moment: a man dressed like an accountant but wearing RayBan Aviators, perched on a wall and eating a Cherry Ripe. He smiled at the thought. It was his first sighting of himself for many weeks.
The moment wavered. The idea grew in him that shortly he would blink and look about him. His head would clear with a pop and he would wonder what he was doing here. Why had he travelled across the world to sit outside a university faculty clutching a briefcase that contained a mace spray, a hunting knife with serrated blade, parcel tape and a length of nylon rope?
Then Dan Weatherell walked past.
Holloway’s hand reached down to clasp the edge of the wall, so that in his light-headed shock he did not roll forward, face-first on to the pavement. He felt unprepared and extravagantly prominent, sitting on a wall with broad-leafed, indigenous vegetal matter swaying pleasantly behind him in the New Zealand breeze while the man he had crossed the planet to kill strolled past, deep in conversation with a colleague or perhaps a graduate student.
It did not seem fitting to Holloway that Nemesis should be encountered with a Cherry Ripe in his hand.
But Weatherell didn’t see him, and Holloway forced himself not to turn his head and follow his progress. Finally, Weatherell passed the clouded edge of his peripheral vision. Still Holloway did not care to look: he feared that Weatherell had been a hallucination, a psychotic wish-fulfilment.
But Holloway’s imagination would not have done to Dan Weatherell what time had.
Holloway thought he might pass out. He stuffed the half-eaten chocolate bar into his pocket and strode from the university campus. He jogged on to the street and tried to hail a taxi. Half a dozen had passed before he recalled that in New Zealand people didn’t hail taxis in the European manner. He set off to find a rank, but by then the sense of urgency had evaporated. It wasn’t such a long way back to his hotel, so he turned in its direction and began to walk.
He decided to kill Weatherell at home.
There would be fewer potential witnesses and he would be able to take his time. He could ask Weatherell how he’d met Derek Bliss, and how long they’d been planning to do this to him.
Although it would be given under duress (under torture, if necessary) Holloway considered taping Weatherell’s confession. Perhaps it could be used to mitigate the case against him, should he be caught.
But he would not get caught. He knew that. When Weatherell was dead, he would simply fly to Brazil, or some other country with no extradition treaty. It would be many months before he even became a suspect—if he ever did. Nobody in this country knew him, or could connect him in any way with Dan Weatherell. He would leave New Zealand using the second passport, which he had not yet used. Even if somebody were to witness him leaving the scene, and his description was somehow connected to the man staying in his hotel room, he would have left the country using another name. In order that he become a suspect, it would first require Kate to learn of Weatherell’s death (which did not seem likely, if they had not been in contact since the end of their affair) and then to connect that death with her missing ex-husband (which seemed scarcely more probable), and finally for her to relay her suspicions to the Wellington police. The Wellington police would then be required to display an active interest in what she told them, and devote resources to its investigation.
He would not be caught. If for some reason he was identified and located, it wouldn’t happen until it was too late to do anything about it. He would invest what was left of the money; perhaps in a beachfront bar or a guest house. If he was careful and exercised some imagination, it might be possible to live in some style.
Or he could take his own life.
He could walk along the stark black beach at Piha and into the ocean. When the crashing ocean reached his narrow throat, he could dip his head into the foreign water, the harsh saline burning his mucus membranes, and he could take the water down and go to sleep.
Either way, he didn’t mind. But he would not be caught.
It took him a week to buy a second-hand car. A certain instinct led him to the kind of car-yard he was looking for. It was a battered, silver-grey Subaru hatchback and he paid far too much for it. Had he not suspected as much, the scrupulously blank eyes of the man into whose hands he dealt the money, note by note, would have told him. But Kooznetzoff looked dangerous, and anyway, he didn’t mind. He spent the morning giving the Subaru a trial run, adapting himself to the automatic transmission. Then he waited outside the campus car park to follow Weatherell home.
It took him three attempts. The first evening, Weatherell’s fat-wheeled Mitsubishi Pajero pulled away too quickly at the lights and Holloway lost him round an unexpected bend. The next night, Holloway was caught at a red light and lost sight of it. On the third attempt, it was easy. He stuck to the white Pajero like a pilot fish. He followed it up steep, curving roads into Khandalla. The streets were lined with wind-twisted trees. Impressive white houses overlooked the city far below and beyond it the blue, twinkling bay. Distant, coloured flecks were wind-surfers. Tiny jet skis and motorboats buzzed and scudded the surface.
The Pajero turned into a plant-lined, concrete driveway. Holloway drove on for a few metres, then pulled to the kerb on the opposite side of the road. He twisted the rear-view mirror, noting which house Weatherell went to.
He drove back to his hotel. He sat on the bed and dialled room service. He ordered a vodka, ice, no tonic. But when it arrived, he left it undrunk on the bedside table. He called down for a Coke, instead.
The next afternoon, he broke into Weatherell’s house.
It was a large, two-storey structure that backed on to the hillside. At the front it spread on to a broad, flat lawn that overlooked the far-off bay, but the rear garden was dense with plants whose swaying, fleshy leaves overhung the two flights of concrete steps by which one descended to it.
Holloway took the steps briskly but did not run.
Gaining entry to the house was easy. A kitchen window had been left unlatched. He opened it fully and hiked himself on to the windowsill. He used his arms to brace himself in the frame and sprang across a sink full of unwashed plates and mugs. He landed on his feet on the quarry-tiled floor.
He brushed himself down. The house smelled of new carpets and coffee and woodshavings.
The internal kitchen door opened on to the long, narrow sitting room. Large, bright sofas and parquet flooring, with scattered rugs. A second door in the far corner. Maori sculptures with grotesque faces stood in the corners and on the windowsills. Low wooden bookshelves were haphazardly stuffed with hardbacks, paperbacks, framed and unframed photographs, decorative bowls and saucers containing buttons, loose coins, unidentifiable odds and ends of metal and plastic. No TV that he could see, but an impressive stereo. French windows opened on to the garden, which was bordered at the far end with swaying copper beech.
The French wi
ndows were open. In the garden there sat a woman in a wheelchair. She was reading a book.
At first, the sight of her puzzled Holloway. He couldn’t work out who she might be. He had accepted without question that Weatherell, like himself, had never found a partner to replace Kate and lived alone. But, of course, Dan Weatherell had been married when he and Kate met. His contract at Leeds University had been for a single academic year. His wife had professional commitments of her own and did not join him. Holloway knew—had always known—that Weatherell returned to her when the relationship with Kate ended.
He wondered how different all their lives might have been had this woman only accompanied her husband to England all those years ago.
He stood in the French window and watched her. He wondered if she knew about Kate. He decided that she couldn’t. She seemed too content and dozy in the leaf-dappled shadow ever to have been hurt so badly. Her curly hair was cut short like a choirboy. She was pale, with a touch of ruddiness round the cheeks. She wore angular tortoiseshell spectacles.
As he watched, she lay the book in her lap and massaged her neck, rolling her head on her shoulders. She removed the spectacles and rubbed at her eyes. She looked at her watch. Then she turned the wheelchair abruptly about and rolled back to the house.
Her speed and dexterity took Holloway by surprise. He threw himself behind the sofa. He crouched there, believing it impossible that she had not seen him. He couldn’t breathe. He wanted to piss. He bit down on his fist to stifle a nervous giggle.
She wheeled past him and into the kitchen. The door swung closed behind her.
He heard the fridge door open and close. Then something being laid on the table: the rattle of a cutlery drawer. The tinny sound of a local radio station news broadcast.
The kitchen overlooked the steps that led back to the road. While she remained in there, it would not be possible to leave without being seen.
Holloway guessed that the door at the far corner of the sitting room would take him through to the hallway and the possibility of exit: if he waited in the hallway, he could escape through the front door when next she entered the sitting room. He thought he could do it without her hearing. If not, he would be gone before she was in a position to see and describe him to her husband.
In a spidery half-crouch, he scuttled from behind the sofa and pressed his eye to the crack in the door. She displayed no inclination to leave. A dog-eared, floury and sauce-stained cook book lay open on the kitchen table, alongside a half-glass of wine, the last from an empty bottle she’d set down on the edge of the sink. As he watched, she lifted herself in the wheelchair to press her full weight on the flat of a large blade, crushing the breastbone of two poussins.
He looked at his watch.
He wondered if the garden might provide an alternative means of escape. But he knew that, if somebody saw him—and if he went leaping over hedges and through people’s gardens, somebody surely would—then he could never come back. He scratched an eyebrow and tried to think.
A car pulled in to the driveway.
Holloway punched his forehead with the heel of his hand.
The clunk of a car door opening.
The woman called out through the wide-open kitchen window: ‘You’re early.’
A car door slamming.
Distantly: ‘Yeah.’
‘Did you remember to get wine?’
‘What do you think?’
Weatherell entered the kitchen through the unlocked door. On the table he set down a carrier bag containing three bottles of wine. He shrugged a bag made heavy with books and essays from his shoulder and set it on the floor, near the doorway. He took off his jacket and hung it on a kitchen chair, then removed his tie. He dangled it over the jacket. He kissed his wife on the forehead, then the lips.
‘I thought you’d forget.’
‘Yeah, right.’ He jiggled on the spot. ‘I’m bustin’,’ he said. He made an exaggerated waddle towards the door.
Holloway threw himself behind the sofa again. He heard the swish of Weatherell’s trousers and the slight exertion of his breath as he hurried past. There was a toilet in the hallway. Weatherell’s grunt of relief was followed by a powerful, extended surge of urine on water. Then there was silence as he shook and zipped. The roar of the flush. Weatherell kicked off his shoes in the hallway and returned to the kitchen in stockinged feet. He left a trail of sweaty footprints on the parquet floor. Holloway watched them evaporate. His skin crawled with shame and disgust.
In the kitchen, Weatherell said: ‘How’s it been?’
‘Bad today. I read.’
‘That’s good, love. That’s really good.’
‘Are you even listening to me?’
‘Course I am. I mean it’s good you got to read.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘Course. Yeah.’
‘Why are you so early?’
He took a corkscrew from the cutlery drawer and opened the wine.
‘What’s the point of being there at all,’ he said, ‘if you don’t get to leave early, every now and again?’
Weatherell was not the man of Holloway’s memory. He remembered Kate’s lover, the man for the love of whom she had left him, as a gloomy, Byronic figure, with a dark, heavy fringe and intense, unblinking eyes. This man was shorter, stouter. He shambled as he walked and wore clothes that needed pressing: a pastel-pink shirt with short sleeves and biros in the breast pocket. Grubby khaki chinos. He had sweaty feet and a belly. His socks were worn transparent at the heel. His greasy hair was combed carelessly back from his brow. He wore a goatee beard in need of a trim.
‘I got no work done,’ she said. ‘Not a jot.’
Weatherell opened a low cupboard.
‘Take a day out, for God’s sake. Any luck with the real estate agents?’
‘Not even a call.’
‘You leave messages?’
‘About a hundred.’
‘Jeez. Those guys.’
He took some sweet potatoes from the cupboard and dumped them on a double spread of newspaper. He sat alongside her at the table and began to peel.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Never mind.’ He dumped a potato in an empty pan and pulled a curl of peel from the blade. He picked up another and said: ‘I had another phone call today.’
‘What sort of phone call?’
‘The English guy, asking to come and see me at home.’
‘About what, this time?’
‘He wouldn’t say. Not over the phone. That’s why he wants me to see him.’
‘Are you going to?’
He took a sip from her glass.
‘What? See him? Fuck no. I’m worried that he’s—you know. A pickle short of the full burger.’
She smiled, set the poussins with some crushed garlic on a baking tray. Drizzled over some olive oil. She went to the fruit bowl and put three lemons in her lap, returned to the table and cut them in half. One by one, she squeezed the halves over the tiny, hollow chickens. Then she arranged the squeezed halves in the baking tray.
They talked some more about selling the house, independent access to which was becoming more difficult for her. But the house-hunting was not going well.
The discussion disheartened them and for a while they sat in silence at the table, sharing and refilling the same glass of wine. A couple of flies buzzed the crushed poussins, and Weatherell brushed them away with a flick of his wrist.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to the beach this weekend.’
A brief silence.
‘I don’t know, Dan.’
‘Christ, Liz. You’re talking a couple hundred bucks, max. I’m not talking Fiji here. I’m just saying, let’s go up the coast. I’m talking maybe the Road to Ruin.’
At first Holloway was not sure he’d understood Weatherell correctly. But he repeated it thre
e or four times in the next few minutes. Let’s just go relax at the Road to Ruin.
‘Honey,’ said Liz. ‘Are you OK? You seem a little freaked out.’
Weatherell was slicing some mushrooms. He shrugged.
‘It’s this house thing,’ he said. ‘It’s getting me down, I guess.’
‘Don’t worry about the house. We’ll be right. There’s plenty of time.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know. I know that.’
She said: ‘There’s something else.’
‘No, there’s not. I’m fine. I’m tired.’
‘It’s that phone call, isn’t it?’
He lay the vegetable knife down and ran a hand through his hair. He left little shreds of mushroom there.
‘Dan, what did he actually say?’
‘Nothing. It’s just—stupid.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ He started chopping again. He gathered himself and said: ‘Are we going away or what?’
A lock of hair fell across his brow and he brushed it away.
Liz agreed that they would set out on Friday for the Road to Ruin. Weatherell took the tray of poussins to the oven and slammed it in. A brief burst of heat.
Holloway hid out behind the sofa for perhaps half an hour while they stayed in the kitchen. Then, still in his socks, Weatherell carried two folding tables to the patio. He returned for the bottle and a basket of bread. Liz followed him to the garden.
Holloway peeked over the back of the sofa. He watched and listened for any sign that they might be headed back to the kitchen. But they were talking in a low, summer murmur. Liz reached out and tickled the back of Weatherell’s head. He nuzzled closer to her. Holloway wondered how long the small birds would take to roast.
He lurched through to the kitchen and out of the door. His legs were cramped and numb for the crouching. He wondered if he could make it up the two flights of concrete steps. Leaves tickled his face. Burrs caught in his hair.