by Mick Herron
Part of the energy that had washed through her on Saturday came flooding back, now coloured as hate. Some experiences rendered you ineligible to discuss them, sure. But the practice helped, on the days you felt like murder.
The non-smile was still plastered to his face. He had stalker’s eyes, Bob Poland: how come she’d not registered this before?
He said, ‘You’re one of those people think you’re invulnerable. You always have done. But you want to be careful about screwing with me, Zoë.’
‘Trust me, Bob. Screwing, you and me are things that are never going to occur.’
It was the best she could manage off the cuff.
‘Bitch.’
She left, hatred pulsing through her veins. This was what it was like to be coming back to life: old emotions stirring, catching like barbed wire. The alleys of the covered market throstled with shoppers and would-be looters; a creep with a car salesman’s coat and a face that belonged on Gollum oozed past. Bob Poland had been part of her scenery so long, she’d forgotten he was venomous. Sometimes a good memory was more important than anything else. Remember to hate him.
There’d been something she’d planned to do, but it slipped her mind right now.
On Market Street the wind’s edge cut through leather. She turned towards Cornmarket, zipping her jacket, and felt in her pocket the familiar lump of her phone: talk to Andrew Kite. That’s what she’d been planning to do when Poland interrupted. Standing on the corner, her neck pricking as if she were being watched, she rang first his house, and got no reply, then the ersatz college he studied at. She had to pretend to be his aunt, but ascertained he was there. By now the pricking was worse, but when she turned, she saw only the usual crowds, the usual butchers’ vans; the usual homeless man with his newspapers clutched to his chest. Poland, she decided. That was his speed: to follow, to watch, but to shrink to the fucking shadows when she felt him. She lit a cigarette, and moved on.
And found herself in that alleyway again, waiting for Andrew to appear; smoking, and thinking about Alan Talmadge – where had he met Victoria and Caroline? Wherever he wanted, was the answer. Talmadge didn’t choose at random, he stalked. Talmadge was looking for women of a certain age, of a certain lifestyle, who had room in their lives for a man bringing little baggage – no books, no photographs; maybe soul music. Everything else was theirs. But then, most relationships involve one half providing the detail (the friends, the location) while the other slots in. It was conflict avoidance, as much as anything else. And when the woman has little background, and the man no being, what’s left is vacuum.
How easy would it have been for them to fall so hard? Very easy indeed.
Zoë ground her cigarette underfoot. They had been, she thought, walking invitations to a man with no morality, which would have been bad enough if all he’d wanted was sex. But he’d insisted, she supposed, on love. And what they’d have thought was what everybody thought: that they were the only people this had ever happened to, when they weren’t even the only people it had happened to with him. Love was recyclable, unfortunately.
. . . It didn’t matter, anyway. It didn’t matter how he’d met them. What mattered was what came after: we are in the realm of results, not causes. He preys on women. I know this, but can’t prove it. If she could, she’d take it to the police. But all she could point to was two women dead in accidents, and her reputation was not such that anyone would care.
The doors to the college opened and a pack of students emerged; somehow uniform, despite their individual striping. A clamorous number headed towards her; distracted, she almost missed Kite, who was heading the other way: jeans, blue-black fleece, QUIKSILVER backpack. She caught him before he reached the market square. ‘Andrew.’
His face was that same polite blank of Friday morning.
She said, ‘I’m not having a good day. You wanted to talk the other night. You want to talk more, talk now. Otherwise, next time you ring, I’ll hunt you down and feed you your mobile.’
And here he was: Dig, not Andrew Kite. The sly but frightened boy who could steal and run but was wholly out of his depth.
Less savagely, Zoë said, ‘Okay. I’m told I’m not that likeable. You want a coffee?’
He nodded, then cleared his throat. ‘Yeah.’
They walked to one of the less crowded cafés, and sat at a table in the bright cold sun. Zoë lit a cigarette, and absently offered him one, then caught herself; shrugged an apology. Before their orders came, he was talking about Wensley Deepman.
. . . She’d drunk so much coffee already she was zigzagging, or that was what it felt like, while Andrew Kite spilled all he’d ever known about Kid B: how they’d met, what Wez had said; all the ins and outs of being rough in the city. Their drinks came, and he kept talking. Kid B knew all the rules: that’s what Dig reckoned. Between the lines, Wez had been another punk wannabe, but to hear Dig they’d been Butch and Sundance, carving a hole in the wall. In his mind he was reliving grainy walls and neon puddles. Only when he’d wound down – when the words gave way to a middle-distance stare that might have been aimed at the gaggle of girls across the way, or possibly three years further – did Zoë say: ‘When did he call?’
‘Late at night, mostly.’
‘To your home?’
‘Once. ’Fore I gave him my moby number.’
(So his parents didn’t need to know.)
‘And he asked you for money.’
Fifty quid a go; the odd hundred, Andrew told her. Told her as if such sums were the usual ones; sums you couldn’t expect to be smaller; sums most teenagers could lay their hands on no problem.
‘Were there threats?’
Andrew said, ‘If I hadn’t sent it, he’d have come for it.’
Zoë wondered what that would have been like; a door opening on one world from another. From this safe present, Andrew looked back on his wild-side walk as if it allowed him a broader perspective than the children he moved among daily, cushioned by their parents’ love and money. He might even have been right. But he knew – it was obvious – that he was back where he belonged, and that when Zoë had brought him home, she’d been rescuing not relocating him.
‘Did he?’
‘No. I never saw him again.’
‘On Saturday,’ she said, ‘you told me he’d come into money.’
‘He said he knew where he could get some.’
‘Did he say where from?’
Andrew shook his head. ‘But it was a scam of some sort. Something dangerous.’
‘How do you know?’
He looked at her as if she were forty-four, and he only seventeen. ‘Because he was Wez.’
Right.
‘Did he ever talk about his grandfather?’
‘He mentioned him.’
‘What did he say?’
But Andrew couldn’t remember. It was too removed from anything that could matter: an old man, somebody else’s grandparent . . . As for Wensley, Wensley was an image, when he’d not been a voice on the phone; an emblem of something exciting Andrew had done once. The fact that he was dead was exciting too, Zoë suspected, though Andrew would never admit it.
‘He ever take you there?’
‘Wez only went when he needed to hide.’
Right, she thought again.
He said, ‘You know something funny? The day he died? It was my birthday.’
Zoë tried, but couldn’t think of what to say.
‘Ain’t life a bitch?’ Andrew asked, as if he’d rehearsed it often.
She watched him make his way across the square. A grown woman, easily in her thirties, looked back at him as they crossed. Then turned to notice Zoë noticing this, and smiled at being caught.
Zoë sat on a bench by the tourist office, watching buses dispense the morning’s travellers. There’d been a reason she’d come into town – groceries – but it was fading fast. Her other concerns divided neatly in two. She needed to know more about Alan Talmadge; enough that she could convince
the world of what he was. But had to find him first. And then there was Wensley Deepman, who wouldn’t take much finding because he wasn’t going anywhere ever again. Who didn’t like heights, but had been on that roof by himself. Who’d found a way of making money, and boasted about it to Andrew Kite. She wondered if he’d boasted to anybody else.
It was about now she’d normally be lighting another cigarette. She’d had a vague resolve on waking, though, and while giving up wasn’t going to happen here and now, cutting back was worth thinking about. So was whatever it was she was doing.
Nobody reached Zoë’s age without formulating rules for life. Some were obvious – never trust a man with a sunlamp tan, or anyone who smiled while delivering bad news. Others were more to do with the way things were: that it was a hard world, with a sentimental streak a mile wide. That traffic slowed for nuns and ducklings. That everyone else took their chances.
That it was best not to get involved.
But this was a rule she’d broken before. Once, she’d done a brave thing, putting herself in danger to help a woman she barely knew. And afterwards, wondering why she’d taken that decision – to stand with Sarah Tucker rather than walk to safety – she’d known that beneath whatever rationalization she’d cite, whether of valour or morality, lay her sense of self. Whichever course she’d chosen, that was who she’d be for the rest of her life. The woman who’d stayed or the one who’d walked away. What she hadn’t realized was that being the one who’d stayed wouldn’t necessarily make her feel better afterwards. But either way, that Zoë had at least cared: cared about what people thought of her, and cared too about Sarah Tucker. She wouldn’t be pondering her choices on a bench outside the tourist office. She’d have felt no more for Wensley Deepman than this Zoë, but she’d have known what was right. In the long run, she was already involved – this Zoë/that Zoë. Both of them.
The bright sun caught the windscreen of a London coach pulling in, and its reflection smashed into supernova, dazzling her the way tears might. For a moment she could see nothing for the bright ghosts seared on to each retina: sunbursts and lavaspray. But slowly vision returned, and with it a little clarity of thought; a little insight. She was frightened of having cancer. That wasn’t outrageous: a lot of people were. But she was nearer than many, at this point in her life, to the reality. So much of the woman she’d continue to be, or grow into being, depended on the envelope that hadn’t arrived; the appointment she’d yet to keep. And what was she doing to hold that at bay? – she was dazzling herself with her own private sunburst; a distraction from the cold possibility of her near future. What, after all, did she know about Alan Talmadge? One CD on a dead woman’s player; one vinyl 45 among another’s lost possessions. All she knew was nothing. She was kidding herself. She had cancer.
And maybe it’s this that brings back the pricking at her neck. Maybe it’s nothing external at all, but a fear of what lies within. And as she stands, acting on a decision she hardly knows she’s made yet, the old words come back to her, cast in a different form: that she has nothing to fear but fear itself; that she has nothing to fear but herself.
ii
She doesn’t see me, he decides, because she’s not ready to see me yet.
This is a satisfying explanation, as it covers many ponder-ables. He has been watching her for days, and if what he’s read is true – and he has no reason to disbelieve it; her appearance, somehow, verifies her reputation – she should have noticed him: this is her domain, her duty; she sees things others don’t, finds things they have lost. That’s the story in those internetted abstracts he’s uncovered; the mini-histories culled from tabloids and the occasional official report, pasted on to the ether by men with an interest in women who’ve taken life. So if she hasn’t seen him, it’s because she’s not ready to. That explains her lack of observation. Though it’s also a testament to the subtlety of his approaches.
And he’s not immune to alternative possibilities. Perhaps she’s distracted by an as-yet unrevealed heartbreak. That can take the edge off a woman (he knows this), and there are men who’d regard it as weakness, but he recognizes it for what it is: a courage most men aren’t aware exists. Men hurt themselves because they blunder into havoc unaware, but women walk wide-eyed into the danger. That’s the difference. If she has a heartbreak, he’ll find out what it is. He’s just getting started.
As for her, she’s moving; rising from her bench as if released by a starting gun. And watching her, he’s aware of her body; not just that she’s in good shape – note that he doesn’t add the poisonous for her age – but that she houses various tensions that exercise, always supposing she takes any, can’t reconcile. She has set herself at an angle to the world, and this is part of her allure; her willingness to go to battle to defend her right to suffer. He finds this incredibly moving. And all the while she too is moving, of course, and she moves right on to that London coach.
He watches while she produces money, buys a ticket, chooses a seat; becomes semi-anonymous behind metalwork and glass, and for a moment, he imagines boarding, sitting next to her, enjoying her reaction. What are you doing here? she’d ask. Shouldn’t you be at work? And he’d laugh it off, discover a plausible reason, and they’d smile and joke all the way to the city –
The bus is away, out of the station; a foul exhaust storm in its wake, despite its company’s claims to the contrary. And then only the cloud shows it was ever there; that and (he’d like to pretend) a similar ghostly energy on the bench where she’d been sitting; in the air she passed through, heading for the bus. This was a spur of the moment decision. When she left her flat, she had no plans beyond shopping. Don’t ask him why he’s sure of this. It’s to do with the connection between them; the perfect understanding she’s not yet aware of.
(This is one of his truths: that love is clairvoyance. Love means knowing what happens next. Or at the very least, love is the ability to improvise, so that when the unexpected happens next, love is quick to catch up, and make as if it never faltered. Like love knows what it’s doing all the time.)
The night he followed her from Caroline’s, he immersed himself in researches into the small hours – her address gave him her name gave him her job, her car, her history. Her whole life unfolded in a pixel stream. And as knowledge gathered in his head like bees, he kept recalling the way she’d looked, walking home in the dark: a woman carrying a burden she had no intention of dropping; no intention of anyone knowing about. Nothing catches the heart like vulnerability unwittingly revealed. This was the chorus of his thoughts, later, as he attached the tracking device to her car’s undercarriage.
And now he is moving too, before his vigil attracts notice, though he appreciates that that’s not likely, on this crowded corner. And if it does, what of it? – he’s in love with a departing passenger: that’s all the explanation necessary. Which is why the songs last for ever, the ones that tell you that love satisfies everybody; that love is the answer.
He checks his pocket for his mobile. There it is. He checks around for unwarranted attention. There isn’t any. And he knows that if he were a woman there wouldn’t have been this same indifference; if he were a woman there’d have been sizings up and markings down; there’d have been that almost-but-not-quite inaudible muttering that follows a woman everywhere, until she’s of an age to lay male interest to rest. But not for him; for him, only the white noise of human traffic and motorized locomotion. It’s not difficult, being invisible. It’s only exactly as difficult as being charming, but in reverse. He leaves the bus station. In the air all around him, in the sky above, in the expressions of passing strangers, nothing happens.
iii
‘It’s now.’
‘What is?’
‘The inquest.’
‘Aren’t you going?’
He regarded her with a mournful face that put Zoë in mind of wet newspaper. Since Friday Joseph Deepman had lost an inch of height, as if he were one of those complicated buildings in the City that adju
st their dimensions to fit the burdens they accommodate. And what he was accommodating was death. This hit her like a blow to the breast. Why had she just now noticed this? He was sheltering death, and not only his grandson’s; he was carrying his own as if it were a load of shopping that needed fetching up to the fourteenth floor, on a day the lifts were down. One word of permission, and he’d let that shopping fall. And she pictured the contents of a long life spilling from torn carrier bags down flight after flight of stairs: youth work marriage daughter grandson food drink lies. All tumbling into chaos at the bottom, while many landings above an empty husk relaxed at last.
He was waiting for a response, but the last question she’d heard was her own.
To cover her lapse she said, ‘Have you been eating?’
The words, in the hallway of his dismal flat, sounded like accusation. What are you chewing? Spit it out.
He shuffled into his kitchen. After a moment, Zoë followed.
More debris had accumulated since Chris’s attempt at clean-up on Friday, which at least answered her query. Two empty tins sat by the sink; one had held sausage and beans, the other beans. Sauce trimmed their rims like savoury lipstick. Her stomach threatened revolt, whether in hunger or disgust she wasn’t sure.
He said, ‘Why would anybody want me there?’
‘You’re his grandfather.’
He sighed, wetly. She’d have liked to grip his shoulders and shake life into him.
For something to do, she set the kettle boiling. It shook and rattled, like old-time rock and roll. ‘When did you last see him?’ This earned a blank look. ‘Wensley, Mr Deep-man. When was the last time you saw him?’
‘The day before.’
‘The day before he died?’
He nodded.
Zoë found cups, and rinsed them. ‘What was he doing for money?’
It was an unfamiliar sound, his next. She had to check to make sure. But it was true: he was laughing, if mirthlessly.
‘Same as always,’ he said, when the tremors ceased. ‘On the rob. Is that tea you’re making?’