The Truth

by Peter James

  And they might not even have her income for much longer if the takeover of her publishing house went ahead.

  Shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

  He thought about the house. He loved driving home to it, and almost every time he pulled up outside he had to tell himself he wasn’t dreaming, this really was his house. He thought about all the change-of-address cards they’d sent out, and the friends they’d already had round to show the place off to. Everyone had loved it, told them how lucky they were. They were going to look foolish, having to move straight out. And he thought about his staff. How could he face them? How would he feel, throwing them all out of work? How were they going to feel?

  He sat down on the sofa, beneath the overhang of a huge potted plant, and closed his eyes again. Must be positive. There will be a solution. You always find solutions. Remember what you’ve always told other people: The best form of revenge is success. Stuff Clake by succeeding.

  The intercom on his new telephone warbled; he ignored it; it warbled again; he ignored it again. He got up and walked over to the one-armed bandit, an original, mechanical one he had bought years ago in an antique shop, slotted in a coin, pulled the lever: a cherry, a lemon and an orange clattered to a halt.

  The bluebottle smacked the window again. It was trying to get out and it was trapped. He knew how it felt. He was trapped too. Bluebottles were also called blowflies, he remembered. Blowflies ate corpses. He thought about a CD they had made called How to Mummify a Corpse. It had sold hugely well; they still had it up on the Web.

  The phone warbled again. The horn blasted outside. His brain was spinning but got no traction. He knew what he should have done; he should have played squash with Archie Warren and he might have felt a bit better afterwards, but he wasn’t up to coping with Archie tonight. Archie was his most successful friend, but he was loud, garish, and John always found himself bullshitting about how well DigiTrak was doing just to keep up with him. And he wasn’t in the mood for bullshitting tonight.

  He made a decision. He’d leave early, pick up a couple of steaks from the butcher round the corner from the mews, stop to buy a couple of good bottles from that terrific little wine merchant Susan had discovered near their house, and fire up the barbecue. Then they could sit out on the brick patio, get smashed and talk their way through this.

  The thought of getting smashed cheered him. He stood up, wormed into his jacket, slammed his PowerBook into his briefcase and was out of his office, telling Stella he’d see her in the morning.

  But as he walked out into the corridor, his partner, Gareth Noyce, attached himself to him. Gareth needed to speak to him. Urgently. He needed to speak to Gareth too, but not now. He didn’t intend telling his partner unless it became absolutely necessary, because Gareth was not good at dealing with pressure. Nor was he much good at dealing with people. If you gave him a computer, any computer, didn’t matter how bad shape it was in, didn’t matter how pissed off it was with life or how stressed out, within a few minutes it loved Gareth, treated him as if he was its favourite uncle, and gave Gareth anything he wanted. But Gareth did not have the same charm with people.

  Gareth was tall, beanpole thin and, although only just thirty-one, his hair had been grey for as long as John had known him. He had a complexion like someone in intensive care, and dressed in clothes that looked like he’d partied in them all night.

  ‘Look,’ he said to John, ‘we have to talk.’

  Reluctantly, John went into Gareth’s tip of an office and sat down. As his partner, John knew he had an obligation to tell Gareth what had happened with Clake and the lawyer, but Gareth had only a childlike grasp of money and it would have meant nothing to him, other than to panic him. Gareth lived on a different planet from John, one that had its own subset of reality. This was one of the reasons the partnership had worked so well. John handled the finance and marketing, Gareth the technical side. There was no crossover.

  Gareth started talking so fast that John had difficulty catching more than the basic drift. It concerned a game they had in development. A glitch had surfaced. It was important to Gareth, but there was nothing John could do about it, and besides, this problem was nothing, nothing, compared to the ones John was carrying inside his head.

  ‘It’s a configuration parameter problem, right?’ Gareth said. ‘But it’s not just configuration, right? We’re getting software conflicts – I mean, for Christ’s sake, Microsoft –’ Gareth launched into a screed of technical jargon that lost John in seconds, but carried on, as he usually did, oblivious to the fact that John had no idea what he was saying.

  John tuned him out. He let him carry on talking, watched him smoke two cigarettes in succession, the smell driving him nuts. He was tempted to cadge one, but managed to restrain himself. He’d quit three years ago, making a promise to Susan, and was staying quit. Finally, at some point, when he wasn’t even sure whether Gareth had finished or was just pausing for breath, John stood up. ‘I have to go. We’ll talk about it in the morning.’

  ‘You realise this could delay the launch?’ Gareth said, darkly.

  ‘Yup, but we can’t go with it until it’s right.’

  ‘I suppose there is a way round it,’ Gareth remarked, as John reached the door.

  John waited for him to continue.

  ‘Yup,’ Gareth said, perking up. ‘Yup, I know what to do! Don’t worry, leave it to me.’

  John left it to him. He took the lift down to the lobby, wishing he could find a solution to Mr Clake as easily as Gareth had found a solution to his software problem.

  Chapter Six

  ‘This is the master bedroom. We have one phone in here.’ Susan pointed to it. She even felt proud guiding this stranger around the house – it was still a novelty to her and she was like a kid with a new toy. In particular, she liked showing off this round room in the turret, with its views in all directions.

  Kündz followed the line of her finger and saw the telephone beside the bed. He noted the panic button just above the skirting board, but mostly he was taking in the scents of this room. He was separating out the smells this woman had left in this room from those of her husband.

  Rich, musky smells from her vaginal juices lingered in the air. They were soured by the metallic tang of her husband’s semen, still quite fresh. Maybe they had made love this morning, but if not, certainly some time during the night.

  ‘Two lines to this phone,’ she was saying.

  Two lines, he heard. The third was for the fax in her study. The fourth was for the burglar alarm. There were four panic buttons. Kündz had seen these, by the front and back doors, by the bed and in the kitchen, right beside the wall-mounted cordless phone; he remembered their positions exactly. The ISDN was for Mr Carter’s e-mail.

  His thoughts veered to the loft. He had seen the hatch in the landing and the thought of it excited him – not as much as the smell from Susan’s vagina or the mental picture he carried of the red pubic hair inside those jeans, but it excited him a lot. His heart was full of gratitude to Mr Sarotzini for the gift of being here. Mr Sarotzini always seemed to understand the things that excited him

  They stopped on the landing. He pointed up to the hatch. ‘The access by that way is the only one?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Is there a ladder that you have?’

  ‘Out back.’ Susan watched this giant of a man with his odd way of speaking and wondered if he enjoyed his work. She wasn’t sure why but he just didn’t seem to be in the right job, it didn’t fit him. Maybe he couldn’t get a job doing what he really wanted to do, she thought, and he was doing this because it was better than nothing. Because he was desperate, like a lot of other people.

  Susan climbed the ladder first. Kündz stood beneath her. It tormented him to watch her: he was drenched in her smells as he stood there, his face brushed by her legs as she climbed past him. She lifted her feet to another rung and Kündz caught a glimpse of the bare flesh of an ankle exposed beneath her jeans. He’d never bee
n aroused by an ankle before: this was a new experience.

  He’d never made love to a woman with red pubic hair before. He thought about her husband’s sperm and wondered if it would be slippery inside her.

  Above him she pushed open the hatch, and switched on a light.

  Kündz looped his metering equipment over his shoulder, then gripping his blue metal tool box in his hand, he began to climb.

  The traffic was moving slowly south of the river. John sat in his black BMW coupé, with the sun-roof open, Brubeck on the CD turned down low.

  He wasn’t enjoying the warm summer air eddying in around him nor the music, which he was playing to try to relax. With a sudden rise of impatience he blipped the accelerator, watched the rev counter spin round to the red line, then did it again, childishly. The man in the car in front glanced at him in his mirror: there was nothing he could do, they were at an intersection and there were four cars ahead of him.

  John was angry with himself now for blowing out tonight’s squash game with Archie Warren. It might indeed have relaxed him, but more importantly, Archie, who was making a fortune as a commodity broker in the City, had terrific connections. He was one of those people who knew everyone. John had joked about Archie’s contacts in the past: he had once told Susan that if she ever wanted to meet the Pope, she should start by talking to Archie.

  He looked at the clock on the dash. It was six twenty. He dialled Archie’s mobile on his car phone, but the answering machine kicked in after one ring. He tried Archie’s office number – if John dashed, he could still just about make the Hurlingham in time. But all he got was Archie’s voice-mail. He hung up, disappointed, without bothering to leave a message.

  There was a fleck of dust on his sunglasses; he took them off and blew it away. Across the road people stood on the pavement in front of a pub, glasses in hands. They were winding down for the day, and there was a carefree air about them that John found himself envying.

  A handful of men were clustered around a brand new Porsche convertible, parked ostentatiously with two wheels on the kerb, and he thought gloomily that it would be a long time before he could buy a new car. The ageing BMW had 90,000 miles on the clock, but replacing it was out of the question now.

  The traffic moved on and John dropped down two gears, trod hard on the accelerator and overtook the car in front, ignoring the flashing lights and angry hooting as he cut into a gap that did not exist. He did the same with the next car, and the next.

  He did not slow down until, pulling up outside the house, he realised he had forgotten to pick up any wine.

  He saw the Telecom van. Susan was in her element, supervising the workmen, watching all her decorating schemes take shape. She had a great talent for decorating. She also had a great talent for spending and, right now, they seemed to be haemorrhaging money – money they no longer had.

  For some moments he sat, looking at the house, his heart riding up and down like a ship at anchor, in a swell. How was he going to tell her she had to stop everything? How was he going to tell her they ought to postpone the housewarming party? She had the guest list all worked out and the invitations were being printed. They’d decided to include the close neighbours, although they weren’t too sure about the ones next door, the Merrimans, they were pretty old. The husband, a retired major who looked gaga, sat out in the garden in a sun-hat on fine days, just staring ahead, and once in a while he shouted at the trees. Every so often his wife hobbled out on a zimmer frame, and when the old boy saw her, he would bark a command at her and she would stagger back indoors.

  John had teased Susan that he thought they’d really make the party swing, and Susan told him not to be cruel, that they might be like that themselves one day.

  Her words had touched a nerve. At thirty-four, old age seemed a long way off – although, he thought uncomfortably, not so far as it had once seemed. Nothing stayed the same, and he’d never felt that so acutely as now. In the space of a few seconds your whole life could change.

  One thing that had not changed was Susan. She was still the same strong, beautiful girl she had been when he had first met her. She had accepted so much in marrying him – uprooting, leaving her family behind and coming to a country where she knew no one but him. And the way she had settled down, won the hearts of all his friends, found herself a great job and run their home, had impressed him even more. Everyone who met her liked her – she was lively, warm-hearted and there wasn’t a trace of malice in her.

  The only thing that concerned him was the way she had accepted his determination never to have children – something John had made clear to her right from the early days of their dating, before he had proposed to her. He could see a look in her eyes sometimes when she saw friends’ children, or even when they were out somewhere and they passed a mother nursing a baby. He was certain that those moments made it hard for her. Not that she ever brought it up.

  There had been occasions when he had overheard her at parties responding to a question about when she and John were going to start a family, and invariably she replied cheerily that they had made a decision not to have children. The disarming, end-of-conversation way she put it, as if this had been her idea instead of one to which she had agreed with mixed feelings, always made him feel proud of her.

  Susan deserved better than Mr Clake.

  His eyes were watering. No one was going to take this place away from him and Susan. No balding, four-eyed creep of a bank manager, with a lopsided mouth and a Bible on his desk, was going to wreck the life they’d created for themselves.

  He turned the car round and drove to the wine merchant.

  A long time ago someone had done a loft-insulation job here. The spongy yellow material was packed into every crevice, and Kündz was pleased about this as he picked his way carefully along the joists. He rounded a corner, stepped over the desiccated skeleton of a mouse crushed in a trap that someone must have set then forgotten about; small patches of fur were still attached to the carcass, but any smell of decomposition had long gone.

  There were other smells up here, of a dead bird somewhere close and the dankness of a cistern full of water, and rotting timber where the flashing, probably on the join between the chimney and the roof, had lifted. But there was only one smell up here that mattered to Kündz, and with every step he took, he breathed it in deeply. It was the smell of Susan Carter, and it was making it hard for him to concentrate.

  It was only the ever-present thought of Mr Sarotzini that helped him to stay focused. The thought of what Mr Sarotzini might do to him if he failed. He wondered, sometimes, if Mr Sarotzini became really angry with him, how long the pain he inflicted would last. No pain that Mr Sarotzini had given him so far had ever lasted longer than a few days. But he had seen other people suffer pain inflicted by Mr Sarotzini. Pain that had lasted days, weeks, months after they had screamed to be allowed to die.

  People had often spoken of hell on earth – it was an expression with which Kündz had become familiar from books and films, and he knew it was just a metaphor. Even among the survivors of the Holocaust, there were few people who had experienced a hell of the kind suffered by those who had angered Mr Sarotzini.

  Susan Carter was right behind him. She followed him into the total darkness around the corner, and she was excreting no smells of fear. She trusted him and that was good.

  John sat in his car outside the wine merchant, digging at the cellophane around the packet of Silk Cut with his thumbnail. He removed the wrapping, opened the flip-top lid, tore away the gold foil and pulled out a cigarette. The dry, cedary smell reminded him fleetingly of his childhood. Furtive cigarettes hidden under his socks in a drawer at school and smoked in a loft or in a derelict bomb shelter beyond the bounds of the school grounds.

  He lit it with the car’s lighter and inhaled deeply. There was an unpleasant rush of blood to his head and he felt slightly giddy. With the second drag, he felt even more giddy and broke out in a cold sweat.

  In disgust he opened t
he door, tossed the cigarette into the gutter, then guiltily stared at the opened packet on the seat beside him. He got out, dumped it, the cellophane and the gold foil into a litter bin, then pushed a stick of Doublemint gum into his mouth. He leant back in his seat, feeling terrible. He couldn’t go home yet – he needed a drink before he faced Susan. There was a pub in the next street along. He started the car and headed there.

  Anticipation. Kündz had learned that anticipation could often be greater than the pleasure that followed. The Twenty-first Truth stated that pleasure was merely the release from anticipation. But he didn’t think this would be the case here, not with this woman. With Susan Carter he was certain that the pleasure would be even greater than the anticipation.

  ‘Do you need me any more?’ she asked, suddenly.

  He said nothing. He liked her being in this darkness with him, it gave him a feeling of intimacy between them. Then she called out again, ‘Hallo? Do you still need me?’

  He liked the change of pitch in her voice, this tease of silence was fun, he was enjoying himself. He waited a little longer before calling back, ‘No, everything I have need of is up here, thank you.’

  Kündz followed her back round the corner, directing the torch beam to guide her, then stood still, watching as she climbed through the hatch, savouring her smells, which lingered on, greedily lapping them up.

  Then he moved back down the loft, and turned his attention to the first part of the work that had brought him here. He set down his tool box, knelt, and from the top tray removed a small metal box, two inches long and an inch wide. He also took out a copy of the plans of the house he had obtained from the Planning Department. A spider’s web rocked just above his face.

  Moving carefully around the loft spaces, he located the optimum position, then screwed the box to the side of a joist where it would be safe, concealed by the insulation and not in danger of being trodden on. It would pick up the signals from the microphone transmitters he was about to place inside each telephone in the house, and relay them to a low-orbit satellite.