by Brett Adams
I pulled up Hiero’s blog on my phone, and entered the password that fake Matt’s service was still spitting into my inbox every hour.
There was a new entry. This one included details of the connection at Paris. But Collins had made the mistake of thinking the blog was describing my journey.
It read:
I disembarked onto a platform at Gare du Nord.
The first proper whiff of Paris I got was urine. Someone had peed on a newspaper kiosk. I guess it was an editorial. My knee joints felt rusted in place, but I needed a piss myself.
Tugging my suitcase off the platform, I found the restroom, and uncorked my bladder. At the sink I splashed water on my face and ran my wet fingers over my scalp. Its prickliness still surprised me.
The passage to Paris had put blue bags under my eyes—the shock of the chase, then the boredom of the journey. Mountains lose their romance after a while, even European mountains.
So Hiero had also shaved his head. Useful to know, unless now he knew I was reading the blog, he had begun to seed it with misinformation.
Curious to know what account Hiero had made of his flight from the train, I scrolled down to the previous entry. And there my swirling thoughts were tossed over Niagara Falls.
As I’d thought, the blog entry described the first stage of the journey from Vienna. But it was the way it was said that stunned me. This part in particular:
“My phone buzzed. I pulled it out and retrieved the message. It said: Cold. The little shit was taunting me. He’d tracked me down, and boarded my train, and now he was taunting me.”
So that’s where Collins had got the idea Hiero’s blog was describing not his journey but mine.
All along I had assumed Hiero was recording his own exploits. Saving them up to enjoy later. But, no. The blog was just another part of the setup. It was brilliant. I’d even pointed the police at it, just like a real, egomaniacal psycho.
I quickly flicked back through the previous entries I had already read. With growing dread, I found every one—every one—read just fine if you imagined the narrator was me. Read better, in fact. I came to the entry that described the murder of Li Min, and remembered her journal. The very last line, what did it say?
Cometh the hour, cometh MC Griffen.
I had puzzled over what that meant. What did she mean by using my name? I had assumed that MC stood for Master of Ceremonies, and wondered what ceremony I was supposed to be facilitating. But now reading it with my fresh perspective, I remembered there is another term for which MC is a well-worn abbreviation. One that, given my line of work, should have occurred to me first.
It is Main Character.
A sudden fear gripped me. Li Min had put my name in her journal—I guessed at Hiero’s prompting. Had she also spoken to friends? Made other notes I wasn’t aware of?
All at once my train compartment became a cell. A trap that had snapped shut around me. Claustrophobia surged through me. They could park the train in a tunnel, lock the doors, and throw away the key.
Darkness smothered my mind.
And then a chink of light pierced the darkness.
Collins’ voice came back to me—he means to murder again. He believed me, didn’t he? He was a London copper. Worldly wise, hard bitten, intelligent. He would know this was a setup. It would stink a mile away for a guy who must’ve seen his share of fugitive psychos and inter-continental sewage.
There was no reason for Collins to believe my/Hiero’s blog wasn’t pure fiction. So he’d gone fishing, maybe, called me. Told me to come in from the cold. Well, my train would be pulling into the station in minutes. But I’d have to shelve the idea of a cheap hotel and a hot shower. I had minutes to leg it seven hundred meters to the Eurostar terminus.
Because I would go on to London, as Hiero’s blog foretold. But I wasn’t sticking around till tomorrow morning to be arrested. I was going tonight.
24
Kim, you know how much I hate voicemail, so I’ll make it quick. Besides, I’m down to my last virtual dime.
Do you remember when Tracey was sick? The weirdest things stick in my mind from that time. I remember how the freckles stood out on her face, because it was so very pale. They looked like ink speckle on white paper.
When I asked the nurse if Tracey was developing the death rash she replied that they were just freckles, and smiled a smile as if to say what kind of a father couldn’t remember his daughter’s face.
The last photo I have of her is more than a year old. Tell me, does she still have the same freckles?
25
I sat in a café on the ground level of St Pancras Station, London, and watched policemen jog back and forth on the first level.
From my vantage point at a window I could see the tall black helmets of uniformed bobbies, as well as men who had to be plain clothes officers. Near the head of the stairs that connected the ground floor to the Eurostar platforms thirty feet above, beneath the station’s famous statue of a reunited couple, was a solid figure in a suit, hands sunk in pockets, conducting a war council. I wondered if I was looking at Superintendent Collins.
I drank coffee and let my gaze wander the length and breadth of the network of girders arching above like the ribs of a colossal beast. The roof span had been the largest in the world in its day. But that day was more than a century ago. I turned my thoughts back to the present.
So: it had been a sting, after all. A sting that would have stung if it hadn’t been for Hiero’s ever-so-subtle deception about which train I’d taken. I would have been the fly in the web. Not the grasshopper sipping ambivalent Arabica.
As it was, part of my mind was screaming for me to get the hell out of there. But for the moment, the right-side of my brain—the poet, the novelist—held sway. I drank more coffee.
To my right an old-timer choked on his coffee and spluttered. I grimaced, annoyed by old age as much as this man’s clumsiness, before a more worthy impulse took me; I leaned over and offered him a napkin.
He nodded thanks, took the napkin, and tried to speak, before another gale of coughing overcame him.
I returned my gaze to the theatre above me. A failed sting (so far, said left-brain). It was fascinating.
The uniformed cops reminded me of ants who had lost their line. One minute fast, strong, determined, the next a milling start-stop. The men in charge appeared to have come unplugged. Maybe this was a career-wrecking sting.
But not Collins—if that’s who it was. He just looked pissed. And was still giving orders.
Maybe it was time to leave.
A quick glance into my cup told me it held three, maybe four gulps. I decided I would finish it, slowly. Then rise, exit the café, and mix with the passengers thronging the stairs, the exits to the tube, King’s Cross. Somewhere.
“Danke.”
I turned to find the old man’s rheumy eyes on me, and his scarecrow arm outstretched toward me. His hand held a brownish lump. My mind made a couple of false starts at recognizing what he held, before realizing it was the (now used) napkin I had given him.
I plucked the mush from his hand and dumped it on my saucer, and then he said the thing that froze me: “They are looking for you, Ja?”
All I could do was stare at him, my face feeling like an amputated limb.
He smiled and patted my arm with his scarecrow’s hand.
“I will not tell,” he said, smiled, and tapped his forehead. And now it was his turn to gaze up at the unraveling sting. My voice would still not engage gears. He went on: “I have seen too many uniformed men begin . . . bad things this way.”
He drew back his sleeve to reveal a forearm thin as a stick. Beneath the wrinkles of its skin lay the faded ink of a tattoo, a number.
(A fleeting memory of my seven-year-old self asserting to Mrs Arnott that concentration camps were places one was made to concentrate.)
His eyes, the palest blue, whites shot with veins, peered into me, and for a moment I fancied I could see his memories playing on
their surface.
Bad things, indeed.
He patted me once more with a hand that now seemed like worked-iron. “And you don’t seem like a bad man.” He paused, looking me over again. “But you should go.”
I left without another word. I hoped he understood that if I’d been able to, I would have thanked him. For his silence, and much more for his words.
Until then, hunkered down in the café, looking out on the failed sting, had felt so cool. So it came as a shock the way my body reacted to stepping out onto the concourse. My back prickled with imagined stares as I turned toward an exit to the tube.
The exit couldn’t have been more than fifty meters away, but it telescoped in my vision and the distance suddenly seemed a kilometer. I became conscious again of the way I was walking. My legs had forgotten forty years of instinctual memory, and had to be told what to do—lift, extend, drop, push, lift . . .
And my arms. What good were these articulated tubes of bone and flesh attached to my shoulders—good for nothing but dangling weirdly and giving me away was all. They added to the mental burden exacted by this dance called ‘walking’ that I was having to spontaneously choreograph.
Halfway to the exit I stole a glance at the railing above me. The dance faltered—one of the plainclothes cops was staring back at me. No. Not staring. His gaze swept on, across the crowd flowing with me.
Fixing my eyes ahead, I marched for the exit, fearing at any moment a tap on the shoulder. That gentle touch that would undo my world.
But no touch came. I was jostled at the exit, where the bottleneck forced commuters together. A middle-aged woman with a bright pink suitcase, and brighter pink lipstick, forced herself past me. She smelled of sweat and cheap perfume.
And then we were through. Turning to look over my shoulder, I saw the concourse and platforms rise up and out of sight as I descended the stairs.
At the bottom of the stairs I found a cavern filled with the rumble of trains near and far. Hanging from a stretch of tiled wall was a restroom sign, and I made for it. Relief swept over me as I entered, and I cursed myself for having lingered in the café.
The restroom was laid out in an L of off-white tile. Sinks and urinals lined the straight, and round the corner was a row of cubicles. Opposite the cubicles stood a single sink. Ignoring the yellow grime covering it, I rested my forearms on its lip. All the nervous tension left me in a moment, and I collapsed forward like a marionette with cut strings. I remained like that for a full minute, head hanging above the sink’s drain, heavy eyes mapping the mottled stain of black mold around the drain, indulging in sink-related nostalgia—teeth brushing, one of my fondest memories from another life. A normal life.
When I raised my head to look into the mirror, for a moment I didn’t recognize the man staring back at me. My flight—the hunt—was etching lines in my face. Dark smudges ringed my eyes, and my skin looked papery.
Something was going to have to give. That something was probably me.
The roar of a flushing toilet filled the confined space, startling me. I’d thought myself alone.
In the mirror I saw the cubicle door behind me open, and a man emerge. He filled what was left of the mirror’s surface. Our gazes locked, and in the same moment his lit with recognition, and I realized his uniform marked him a cop. His expression twisted with fear and . . . hunger?
A split second later all was motion.
His image tilted from view; I rose from my elbows and spun.
A thunderous roar filled the air, pressing my eardrums. The sheer intensity of sound stunned me.
We froze, staring at each other, while pieces of glass fell like diamonds onto the tiles.
A heartbeat passed. Another. Thought returned. This was no cop, couldn’t be. He was a kid. Barely needed to shave. But—No. He had to be a cop. The uniform, the gun. The gun.
It sat in his grip, its weight dragging his outstretched arm floorward. A tremor shook his arm. His gaze was fixed on the gun. His arm began to shake more wildly.
That’s when I did possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. I reached out and took the gun, simply tugged it from his shaking fingers. It slipped free without resistance.
Then it was my turn to stare at it. A Glock 17, twenty-two ounces, but heavier than I’d imagined. The faint acrid smell of propellant wafted from it. Beside me, the shattered mirror bore mute testimony to the gun’s killing potential. Shards had come away from the tight, black entry hole; beneath the surrounding glass a rough circle had puckered the plaster, a rebounding concussive pressure wave.
As if to convince myself the two were related—gun and impact crater—I touched the still-warm barrel, then fingered the hole. Then with the same finger, I tapped my chest, above my heart.
Yeah. That would have done it. That ‘something’ might have made me give.
I looked into the eyes of the cop, and felt pressure in the pit of my belly, like an uncoiling snake, and knew a moment of potent rage.
It was only then I realized we were still alone. Trains rumbled and shrieked outside. From round the corner came the splattering sound of a leaking urinal, but no footsteps, no voices.
A flicker of movement in a mirror-shard caught my eye. I looked up in time to dodge a punch he threw, but it caught me a glancing blow to the jaw. My teeth squeaked as they ground under the blow.
Instinctively—or else that rage finally broke out—I swung the gun in an arc. Its handle clipped him across the bridge of his nose. A stream of blood erupted from one nostril and dove for the floor faster than gravity demanded.
The sight of that blood, glistening red, stark against the tiles chilled my rage. Numbness washed through me. I became a spectator of my self.
I reversed my grip on the gun, so the barrel now pointed at his chest.
“In there,” I hissed, prodding him back into the cubicle. His regulation black leather shoes slipped in his own blood and he fell-sat onto the toilet.
I jabbed the gun at him, made him look at me. At it.
“You stay there.”
I looked him over.
“Give me your radio.”
He took an eternity to unbuckle the radio unit and hand it to me. I dropped it between his legs. It made a plop in the bowl.
“Do you have a watch?”
He nodded, and there were tears budding in his eyes.
“You move before half an hour is up, and I’ll—” I jabbed the gun at him. “Okay?”
He nodded still more vigorously.
Stepping back, I took a last look at my handiwork: a terrified kid in well-pressed trousers, cupping blood in his hands, with tears in his eyes.
“Thirty minutes,” I said, and pulled the door shut.
I paused in front of the broken mirror long enough to pull my handkerchief from a pocket and wipe the drops of blood from my face. I didn’t hear my pack of cards fall.
The numbing sensation was sloughing away as I strode from the restroom. In its wake came the aftereffects of shock and an urge to vomit. When I emerged onto the platform, fearing the telltale bulge of the gun now stashed in my pocket, it was still thronged with passengers.
A tremor shook the platform, and the whistling of churned air filled my ears, heralding the arrival of a train. It emerged from the black tunnel mouth like a god of the underworld.
It screeched to a halt and opened its doors. Without hesitation I joined the current of bodies flowing into the nearest doorway, fearing with every bump and jostle to hear a cry—“He’s got a gun!”
But no cry came.
The doors hissed shut, and acceleration tugged me sideways. The view of St Pancras station was swallowed by the tunnel wall.
Pancras. Funny name. Lacking only a vowel to be Pancreas.
I was exiting the pancreas. What did that make me? Jack, the digestive enzyme; Insulin Griffen.
26
“The name is Marten. M-A-R-T-E-N. Inspector Marten Lacroix.”
On any normal day Detective Chief Inspector M
arten Lacroix would have waited patiently for the party on the other end of the line to understand.
But today was not a normal day. Today she was hunting a psycho called Jack Griffen.
“Marten. As in the weasel. As in Dr Martens boots. As in—” She gritted her teeth. “—the man’s name ‘Marten’.”
A man’s name. Yet another gift from her dysfunctional parents.
They had never agreed about anything, so why start with their daughter’s name? Her father had insisted on French-république-stock Marianne. Her mother was fixed on pride-of-the-Bronx Tenisha. So rather than someone play the grown-up and concede, say, Marianne Tenisha, they coined ‘Marten’.
Pity it had been coined centuries prior and taken since by countless baby boys. Would it have killed them to buy a vowel? Just another ‘e’?
Static crackled from the handset pressed to her ear. Finally—a cough. Progress. Then, “Ah, yes. Marten Lacroix. I have you now. What can I do for you Mrs—”
“I need information about Jack Griffen.”
“What kind of information.” Business-like, now.
“Whatever the Australians gave you. The Chinese. Vienna. Everything.”
Marten heard rustling on the other end of the line.
“Yes, here it is. Fresh off the press, the profile—“
“No, I don’t want your profile,” she said. “I want the information.”
She was tempted to add, “Because I’ll do the profiling, and it’ll be right.”
Right? No, too much. But it would be better . . . That was the profiler’s promise. A nudge that made the stranger-rape bogeyman human.
With a start, Marten realized the voice had spoken. She said, “I beg your pardon?”
“I said, I’ll need authorization.”
“Faxing it now,” and she hung up.
It had taken years of hard work to be able to say that, but it had been worth it. Woman of color, five years a young cadet, selected for one of the few international placements in the FBI program, top of her class, and an extended collaboration in the US. Then, The Fall, and back to the UK, and a grind to lose the stigma of a quasi dishonorable discharge.