Dead Air

by Iain Banks

  I frown. Just lie, I think. Deny the video, the recorded evidence. Pretend it’s Lawson Brierley we’re dealing with here. Trust to the graininess of the image, the awkward angle the camera has of that door and the big gloves I was wearing to obscure the fact I used a key. ‘No it wasn’t,’ I tell him. ‘The study was open.’

  ‘Kenneth,’ Merrial says gently. He nods at the Range Rover where Kaj put the laptop. ‘We can see it was locked.’

  ‘It wasn’t!’ I protest. ‘I stuck my head in, saw it wasn’t a bedroom, caught a glimpse of the answering machine and kept going!’ I look at Kaj. ‘I did! It took about two seconds; I was desperate. I was about to…’ I let my voice fall away and look down at my lap. ‘I was about to do what I’ve just done, for Christ’s sake. I took a very quick look, closed the door and kept on going.’ I’m breathing deep and hard. There are tears in my eyes. I look at Merrial. ‘God, man, what I’m telling you is bad enough; what more could make it worse?’

  Merrial looks slowly from me to Celia. He looks thoughtful. ‘That’s what I’ve been asking myself, Kenneth.’ He switches his gaze to Kaj. ‘That possible? What he just said?’ he asks.

  Kaj shrugs massively. ‘Perhaps,’ he says. His voice is deep but not as Swedish as I’d been expecting. ‘The frame capture rate is about one per three seconds. He might have had time to open and close the door between frames.’

  Merrial looks at me. ‘The study was locked when I got back yesterday,’ he says.

  I shrug again. ‘Well, I don’t know!’ I say, almost wailing. ‘Maybe I put the sneck down.’

  Merrial looks puzzled. ‘The what?’

  ‘Scottish word,’ I say desperately. ‘The, the, the catch thing down, on the lock inside the door. Anyway, I was about to leave when you came back, so I hid in the cupboard in the gym. I heard you on the phone to your wife saying you were calling somebody called Sky or Kyle or something. Then when you were showering I almost made it to the front door when, when -’ I gesture at Kaj ‘- when he came in, so I hid in the cloakroom by the front door. Once he’d gone upstairs I just walked out.’ I let out a deep, juddering breath. ‘That’s it. Whole truth. Nothing but.’

  Mr Merrial purses his lips. He looks at me for a few moments, and I grit my teeth and return his stare. He nods.

  And I realise then that there is – just – the hint of a chance. There’s a hint of a chance because, complicit in the conspiracy Ceel and I are involved in here, attempting to deceive Mr Merrial, there is, surprisingly, a third person, and that third person is Merrial himself.

  The man doesn’t really want to find out he’s been cuckolded. He knows he has to be suspicious – suspicion is sensible, suspicion is safe, suspicion is how he lives his entire professional life – but, ultimately, he’d rather not discover his wife and another man have made a fool of him. He will go so far to make sure it looks like nothing’s happened – as far as is reasonable, as far as he must to establish the truth beyond something like reasonable doubt – but he won’t pursue the matter as doggedly and as determinedly as he might a debt, or an insult from another crook.

  His own pride puts him on the same side as Ceel and me; none of us wants him to know the truth.

  Merrial makes a sort of huffing noise that might be a laugh and gets down from the Bentley, walking slowly over to me, his hands raised in front of his chin as though in prayer. He stops and looks at Celia. ‘Maria was last out, apparently,’ he says. ‘I think we need a new maid.’ Celia’s frown deepens. Merrial comes up to me. He sits down, gently, on my right knee. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Totally fucking wrong about all the above. Oh fuck. Here it comes.

  He smiles at me. ‘This is on account, Kenneth,’ he says easily, in a pleasant voice. ‘Nothing compared to what’ll follow, I should think, but this is personal, from me, for invading my privacy.’

  He takes a good back swing and punches me hard in the balls.

  I’d forgotten how much it hurt. School playground, last time this happened. I’d forgotten the lights, the nausea, the waves and waves of subtly differing types of pain that course through your body when this is done to you. Not being able to double up properly just makes it worse. It was as though your brain had stored up all the orgasms you’d ever had in your whole life to that point, then paid them back, all in one go, with the polarity reversed so that what had been ecstasy became agony and what had been over in seconds each day was lumped together over five or ten consecutive minutes of pure, grisly, pulsating pain.

  I screamed, loud and high and shrill, then sucked and wheezed and gasped in the slowly, slowly ebbing aftermath.

  Merrial had gone back to the Bentley.

  ‘How fucking dare you,’ Celia said. Her voice sounded more menacing and cold than Merrial’s had at any point so far. I blinked through the tears and looked at her. She was looking levelly, gravely at Merrial.

  Merrial looked back. ‘Yes, dear?’ he said. But it already sounded weak. Something in the way Ceel had spoken had given her the initiative here.

  ‘How fucking dare you do that to him and make me watch it,’ she breathed. She walked across the pallets towards Merrial. Kaj followed a step behind, looking wary. Celia stopped a metre from her husband. ‘You have no right to do that,’ she said. Her voice was shaking with controlled fury. ‘You have no right to make me witness it, no right to make me part of it, no right to make yourself the law and me no better than one of your fucking thugs.’ She spat the last word out like a broken tooth.

  Merrial looked down briefly. ‘You know I don’t like you using that sort of language, Celia,’ he said calmly.

  ‘I am not one of your fucking gang!’ she shouted at him.

  He looked up, blinking. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ he yelled back. ‘What do you think buys your jewellery, your dresses, the holidays?’

  ‘I’m not stupid!’ Celia exploded. ‘I’m not a fool! I know damn well! Mon dieu! I thought, I stupidly thought until tonight that I didn’t get involved in this sort of thing -’ she gestured behind, towards me ‘- in return for me staying with you, even though I know what you do, what you’ve become!’

  Merrial shook his head and pulled down his cuffs, looking awkward but recovering his composure. ‘It was always like this, Ceel.’

  (And, as some further little part of me died along with hope, I thought, Oh, no. Oh, no; he calls her Ceel, he uses the same name for her that I do.)

  She clenched her fists in front of her, shaking her head. ‘I did not marry this!’ she said, a sort of tumultuous control infecting her voice. ‘I married you. I married a man who took me from a bad place and bad people and a bad thing inside myself, a man who made me feel protected as well as desired.’ She stood back and straightened up. She looked down at him. ‘I will not stand for this, John.’

  He looked down again. ‘You’ve been having an affair,’ he told her quietly.

  ‘What?’ she said, and, with that one word, somehow, and for only about the third or fourth time since I’d met her, sounded like a French-speaker speaking English.

  ‘We have photographs, more video,’ he said, looking down again. He glanced to me, then Kaj.

  She stared at him. She shook her head slowly. ‘You have nothing,’ she said quietly. A silence followed. I realised that somewhere in the black, hollow distance, somewhere through the ambient smell of decay, there was a slow drip-drip-drip noise. ‘Nothing,’ she repeated. ‘Except paranoia.’

  He looked up at her. She shook her head again. ‘My girlfriends, ’ she said slowly, ‘have boyfriends, husbands, brothers; sometimes when we meet up one of them will get there just before or just after me, before the others do. Don’t think that a photograph of me sitting in Harvey Nics with a man you don’t know constitutes an affair. Leave those people out of your sordid imaginings.’

  Merrial looked from her to me.

  Celia frowned, then glanced back at me. ‘With him?’ she said, and laughed. She turned to look at me, and stopped laughing, looked serious. ‘Mr Nott; no off
ence, but I could do better.’

  ‘None taken,’ I managed to wheeze round the pain.

  Celia whirled round to face her husband again. ‘Show me, then. Show me what this evidence is!’

  Merrial just smiled at her, but the smile was strained, and by then even I could see what she’d sensed instantly; he really didn’t have any evidence on her, he’d been hoping to force a confession out of her with the accusation alone, if a confession had been due.

  Celia fixed her gaze upon her husband then and took on a frosty look. Actually, frosty didn’t even start to cover it; it was more of a shaving-of-a-degree-above-absolute-zero look. It put the fear of God into me and I was only caught in the backwash of its baleful focus. Merrial withstood it somehow – must have built up some sort of immunity over the years they’d been married, I supposed – but you could see he was affected. Some fuckwit part of me, patently not in any way connected to my horribly bruised and still jangling testes, almost felt sorry for the bastard.

  ‘I have been a faithful wife to you,’ Celia said in a measured, contained, utterly sure and certain voice. ‘I have always been faithful to you!’ she said, her voice breaking.

  And sitting there, right then, goddammit, even I believed her. I’d have stood up in court or on any field of honour to insist with my last breath that this woman had been an utterly faithful wife and was being sorely, grievously wronged and defamed by being accused of being anything else.

  Part of me found the time to wonder how the hell she was doing this, and that was when it occurred to me that – just possibly – Ceel’s patently lunatic ideas about entanglement were making a real and crucial difference here. Maybe at this moment she genuinely believed that she had been a faithful wife, because, in that other reality she claimed to be linked to, she actually was. She was speaking not so much for herself but for the Celia on the other side of that divide; the Celia who was a perfectly, unimpeachably good wife who had never cheated; the Celia who could rightly claim, as she just had, that she had always been faithful to her husband.

  ‘Can you say the same to me, John?’ Her voice was hollow as a vast canyon, and as sad as the sound of earth hitting a tiny coffin.

  Merrial met her gaze.

  Drip, drip, drip, in the distance. I was breathing hard, swallowing on a dry, parched throat. The smell of death and shit didn’t seem quite so bad in the air around us now, but maybe it was just something you got used to. Eventually Merrial said, ‘Of course I can say it, Celia.’

  That last shaving above Zero Kelvin vanished with a whimper into the darkness surrounding us.

  ‘Do not treat me like a fool, John,’ Celia said, and her voice was like the voice a glacier would have if it could speak, the voice of the oldest, steepest, widest, most powerful mountain-grinding-up glacier in all the fucking world, after it had thought good and hard in glacier terms about precisely what it wanted to articulate.

  Merrial cleared his throat. I didn’t realise he must have looked away until he brought his gaze up to meet hers again with what looked like an appalling, abysmally draining amount of effort. ‘You-’

  ‘I want a divorce, John,’ she said.

  Fucking bombshell. Just like that. Merrial blinked. The two of them stayed that way for a few moments, him swinging one foot without realising it, thunking against the trailing edge of the Bentley’s wheel arch, her glaring down at him, perfectly, savagely still.

  Merrial glanced at Kaj, me and the other two guys before looking back to her. ‘I don’t think here is really-’

  ‘We talk about it here, now,’ Celia said quickly. ‘You brought me here to see this, you changed our rules. You put cameras in my home.’ Her voice almost broke, and she took a quick, controlling breath. ‘So business and marriage are the same, now,’ she told him. ‘They are in the same arena. I said: I want a divorce.’

  Merrial ground his teeth. ‘No,’ he said.

  She didn’t react. Dear God, this woman had perfected threatening stillness to a high art indeed. Merrial might be good, but Ceel would have made a brilliant crime boss.

  Merrial cleared his throat and lifted his head up to her again. ‘Actually, I want a divorce, Celia.’

  She tilted her head a little. ‘You do, do you?’ Her voice was neutral now, but sounded ready to slip into menace or accusation at any moment.

  ‘Yes, I need a divorce.’ Merrial gave an unhealthy looking little smile. ‘I don’t like the term “widower”, Celia, so I hope you’ll be as accommodating as I require you to be.’

  She laughed a quick, convulsive laugh. ‘And what does that mean?’

  Merrial looked just plain nasty now. ‘It means don’t expect any money.’

  She gasped. Really gasped, genuinely astonished. ‘I don’t want your money, John,’ she told him. There was a hint in her tone as though she had just realised she had been dealing with a child all along. ‘I didn’t marry you for money. I didn’t want it then and I don’t now. Keep the money. Have your divorce.’ She was breathing hard now, shoulders rising and falling in the yellow and black jacket. Her voice had quivered over the last few sentences, barely under control. ‘So,’ she said, shaking her head once, regaining command. ‘Has one of them insisted you make an honest woman of her?’

  ‘You might say that,’ Merrial said. You could see he was having to force himself to keep looking at her, battling against the pressure of that remorselessly self-possessed gaze.

  ‘The one in Amsterdam?’ she asked evenly.

  ‘The one in Amsterdam.’ There was a strange sort of defiance in his tone.

  ‘And is she younger than I am, John?’ Celia asked quietly. ‘Is she more beautiful? Is she as young as I was when you met me? Or younger? Is she as exotic, is she as foreign? Is she better connected? Has she a famous name? Has she money? Is she fertile?’

  Merrial’s gaze might have flickered a little.

  Ceel relaxed her stance. She stood back, her weight went more on one foot than the other as she nodded. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘She is pregnant, is she?’

  Merrial’s eyes went wide just for a moment, then he gave a small laugh. ‘You always were good like that, weren’t you, Celia?’ He looked past his wife to the big blond guy. ‘Isn’t she, Kaj?’

  Kaj just looked awkward, and nodded.

  ‘Well, congratulations,’ Celia said bitterly.

  She seemed suddenly to collapse inside then, looking quickly away and putting one hand up to her eyes. Silently, her shoulders – wide inside the thick yellow and black hiking jacket – shook; spasming once, twice, three times. Merrial looked even more awkward and uncertain. He seemed to be about to go to her and hug her, but he didn’t. He tried to find something to do with his hands and then folded his arms and looked at Kaj and did a sort of pathetic, Women, eh? look and gesture at the bigger man. Kaj sort of twitched, which was probably as close as he was going to come to waxing eloquent on the matter.

  You beautiful, brave, intelligent, fabulous woman, I thought, staring at her with tears in my eyes. I had to look away, in case Merrial saw the way I was gazing at his wife. I was still having to remind myself that the extraordinary, exquisite, immaculately righteous ire she was displaying here was all in fact a complete fake, that she was lying through her perfect, delicious teeth when she told Merrial she’d been a faithful wife, but she had successfully, so far, anyway, shifted the focus of all that was going on here away from me and onto herself, onto her marriage. She’d gone nuclear with the big D word and duly been nuked in return, but it looked like she was actually getting away with it.

  This was a woman fighting for her own life and that of her lover, but she wasn’t settling for just the result, she seemed determined to accomplish the task with audacity, bravura and style. I didn’t think I’d seen a more resourceful and courageous piece of acting in all my life, in person, on stage or on screen. Even if it still all went horribly, painfully, lethally wrong from here on in, at least I could suffer and die knowing I had been in the presence of genius.


  Celia dried her eyes with one hand, then fetched a handkerchief from one of the pockets in her jeans and dabbed at her nose and cheeks. She sniffed and put the hanky away again. She drew herself up. ‘I don’t want any money. And I won’t say anything, to the press, the police, to anybody. I never have, I never will. But I want to be left alone, afterwards. I want to live my own life. You live yours. I live mine. And nothing must happen to any of my family, any of my loved ones.’ She raised her chin to him after she said this, as though defying him to object to any of it.

  Merrial nodded, then said softly, ‘Fair enough.’ He made a small gesture with his hands. ‘I’m sorry it had to end like this, Celia.’

  ‘I’m sorry it had to be so bloody undignified, in front of Kaj and these guys and -’ she gestured vaguely in my direction ‘- this poor clown.’

  Merrial looked at me like he’d forgotten I was there. He sighed. ‘I thought…’ he began. Then he shrugged. He fixed me with a stare I shrank back from. ‘One word on your show about this, Mr Nott, one word to anybody at all; friends or family or police or public, and I’ll make sure you die slowly, do you understand?’

  I swallowed, nodded. I didn’t trust myself to say anything sensible. The fuckwit bit of me with its thumb seemingly super-glued to my personal Self-Destruct button wanted to say something like, Yeah yeah yeah, fucking omertà or I die in drawn-out agony, yada yada yada big man, but your wife’s just worked you over and we both fucking know it and this compensatory macho threat stuff isn’t convincing anybody… Eventually, though, under that gaze, I had to give way and croak, ‘Yeah. Yes, I understand. Nothing. Nobody.’

  Merrial kept looking at me for a moment longer, then nodded to the two guys standing at my shoulders. ‘Give him back his stuff and take him back to where you found him.’

  ‘In the box, Mr M?’ said the guy who’d hit me.

  Merrial looked upset. ‘No, not in the fucking box. In the back of the van; put some tape over his eyes, that’ll do.’

  I thought, Yes!… but just a tad too soon. Kaj stepped past Celia, lowered his mouth to his boss’s ear and muttered something. Merrial smiled that thin, thin smile of his and quietly said, ‘All right. One little one.’ Then, as I thought, No, no, no! We got away with it! This isn’t supposed to happen! Please, no! Merrial looked at Celia and sighed and said, ‘Maybe you’d best look away.’ Celia rolled her eyes and did so.