Down Cemetery Road

by Mick Herron

  They had followed the dark route by the river; across the old railway bridge and over the meadow by the ice rink, through whose windows she could make out the sweeping presences of a few after-hours skaters, still at work on their figure eights. Then into the bright lights: this main road skirted the city centre. Cars whistled by. A garage dribbled neon in oily puddles. Groups of teenagers strutted past, on their way to a desperate-looking nightclub.

  The station was up a gradient that seemed steeper after dark; its fluorescent lighting spilled through automatic doors like a promise of safety. Reality began seeping back into Sarah, together with an ache in her calves that served notice of how fast they’d come. She looked at Downey, and for the first time his hand fell from her elbow, as if he were offering her a choice of destination. His eyes were very dark.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Up there.’

  ‘But I can’t just –’

  ‘Trust me.’

  Trust him? The man was a killer.

  A platoon of taxis streamed past, their beams picking the couple out like searchlights in old prison movies. A London-bound train was pulling out of the station. It moved slowly over the bridge across the road, its innocent passengers gazing down on the traffic below.

  ‘He wasn’t the only one,’ Downey said suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That guy who tried to kill you? There’ll be others.’

  Something very like a wave came close to breaking inside her. ‘What’s going on?’ she whispered. ‘I don’t even know what’s happening here, there’s madmen all around me –’

  Now a police car flashed past, its American barlights leaving a fresh blur hanging in the air like a ghostly straggler. She blinked and the spectre disappeared. I need help, she thought; apparently aloud.

  ‘I am helping you. This is helping you.’

  Another cop car, this one with siren raging, split the traffic on its way west. Downey brushed hair from his eyes. ‘I’m out of here,’ he said. ‘You want to take your chances, that’s up to you.’

  There was, she thought with sudden clarity, nowhere else to go.

  She followed him into the station, where the promise of safety dissolved into a bleak, tiled expanse of shuttered windows and cold lighting. A booth selling coffee and sandwiches was open, but held the distant appeal of life filtered through a TV commer- cial; she was sure that her stomach would never accept food or drink again. First thing Downey did was stop by the departure schedules, arranged on free-standing boards, while he hunted through the canvas bag over his shoulder for what turned out to be a wallet, his quick eyes scanning the lists while he did so. ‘Wait out there,’ he told her. ‘On the platform.’

  Yes boss. Sure boss. But that was a tiny voice far away in her head, and her feet were already taking her to the dark, littered world outside, which existed in a different century than the one she left. At night railway platforms are draughty, no matter how still and airless the weather. There are always takeaway wrappers scrunched into balls and left on benches. For one mad comforting moment, she considered tidying them away; gathering the whole greasy mess in a lump to her chest, as if she were starting a collection. It seemed an action appropriate to both her location and condition. She had reached a point in her life where this platform was as good a place as any. She could spend the rest of forever caught between destinations, in this ill-lit dimension where muttering, half-mad vagrants pursued their furious agendas. She could join the other transients who no longer had a home to go to.

  A train pulled up opposite and began disgorging passengers from the capital; mostly men, mostly with suits, executive cases and phones; everything, in fact, bar badges reading I WORK LATE. A subtle race for the taxi rank began, bringing them over the bridge, towards Sarah. Almost immediately came a whistle, the buzz of electric doors locking, and with a promptness suggesting the driver was late for an appointment the train shunted off, giving a strobed view through its lit carriages of the nearly empty platform behind: one or two shadows leaning close, their movements interrupted and comical. The gang of commuters flowed down the steps, brushing past Sarah. I don’t know what they do to the economy, Mark said once. But by God, they terrify me. It felt like the first thought in hours she’d spared Mark; it was as if he’d been erased from the equation. But something had brought him to mind just then, and as the end of the train trundled out of her line of vision she saw that it was because she’d been looking at him. He was one of the shadows on the platform opposite, one of two stragglers reluctant to head for home.

  She should have turned away, but couldn’t. The reason she could not turn was that she was watching her husband kiss another woman, a sight so unusual that it would have been a crime to miss it. The kiss bordered on the perfunctory, it was true; a quick bow and a peck on the cheek, but the fact that the woman held Mark’s arm as he kissed her, that Sarah had never laid eyes on her before, that an aura of intimacy hung on them like a purple cloud: these things could not be dismissed. Mark had a lover. After what she’d been through in the last hour she’d lost much of her capacity for shock, but as she felt the knowledge settle upon her, become as much a part of her consciousness as a childhood memory, it surprised her distantly to learn that she had not yet exhausted her potential for weariness.

  Mark was straightening up now; the woman relinquishing her grasp. As Sarah watched, they exchanged a few last words (endearments), then the woman left through the exit their side of the station. Mark picked up his briefcase, and headed for the staircase that would bring him over to Sarah.

  Who would probably have remained there to meet him, had Michael Downey not appeared at her side. He thrust what looked like a twenty-pound note on her. ‘Two returns,’ he said. ‘Worcester.’

  She stared, uncomprehending.

  ‘Quick. It leaves in two minutes.’

  Movement reclaimed her; she took the note and hurried inside, where there was no queue for tickets, and the man selling them grasped immediately what two returns to Worcester meant. Nobody had ever spent so little time at a railway ticket booth. Which was why she walked past Mark on her way back out; though he kept walking as if she were not there, or were somebody else. He was so close as to be touched, and for a moment she wanted to do that, as if by reaching out she could erase everything, and put the clock back to the days when they’d meet each other off trains and stand on station platforms making exhibitions of themselves. Before there were arguments and bodies in the kitchen; before there were lovers. She stopped, turned, and would have called out, but he was through the station doors and off down the steps, heading for the taxi rank.

  ‘Hey!’

  Downey took her arm and steered her out.

  The slow train was wheezing at the blocks on Platform 3, and was a not very long string of grubby, unscrubbed carriages, as befitted a service not going anywhere important. Its individual compartments were mostly unoccupied. They took one near the rear, and almost immediately the slow grind and crawl from the station began: as a means of escape it lacked dash, perhaps, but there were no last minute attempts to flag them down. The platform slipped behind them. The racket picked up speed. And Sarah stared at her pale sister in the window and thought about bodies: bodies warm and kissed by unfaithful husbands or stone cold dead in the kitchen. She wiped a hand against the glass. Through the window, ragged stumps of hedgerow choked to death. While evening died black clouds swallowed the land, and the fields and ditches of one county after another dissolved into a single bleak horizon. Everything she cared for was behind her. None of it mattered any more. She raised a hand to her throat and imagined the thin red necklace painted there, her souvenir of that frightening cord that had nearly taken her out of this world, and spoke to Michael Downey. ‘I told him it wasn’t a matter of life and death.’

  He looked at her, not understanding.

  ‘Mark. I told him it wasn’t a matter of life and death, whether we had dental floss on the fridge or not.’

  Outs
ide the window bright settlements flashed into view, then lost themselves in the dark nowhere that swallowed up the past. This was a well-known effect of travelling at night: you felt nostalgic for snug, safe places you’d never visited, and never would.

  Afterwards, she wondered if it had been the drugs. There was the numbing effect of Rufus’s attack to take into account, and the shock of seeing his body hurled from one room to the next like an illustration of what was happening to his soul; but afterwards, she preferred to think it had been the drugs that produced this docility, her inability to reach a decision on her own. It remained true that the available options had been limited and unappealing, but to a rational mind the extravagance of the course she had taken, running off into the dark with an armed stranger, was almost supernatural. The irony did not escape her. Mark’s purpose had been to keep her tame, domesticated, and the very tools he had used for the task had secured her libera- tion, as if she had shinned down the wall of her tower using the chains he had wrapped her in for a rope. Her senses dulled by medication, the first plan presented, she had acquiesced to without murmur. The first exit offered, she was off.

  Which plan, it had to be said, lacked most defining characteristics of a strategy: forethought, preparation, a definite objective in mind; and boiled down, in the end, to running away. But the soldier Michael Downey had at least covered their tracks as they ran, having bought two singles to Birmingham, behaving memorably as he did so. His appearance alone might have been enough. He had pulled the band from his ponytail, allowing dark hair to tumble over his face and on to his shoulders, and looked like somebody hiding behind a curtain. His voice was strained, hoarse. Perhaps he did not use it often, though he used it now, studying her intently:

  ‘You were on the bridge,’ he said. ‘After they killed Tom.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then up at the hospital, looking for Dinah.’

  ‘You frightened me.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘I don’t even know your name.’

  ‘Tucker,’ she said. ‘Sarah Tucker. Do you know where she is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what do you –’

  ‘Not here. Malvern.’

  ‘Malvern?’

  ‘That’s where we get off. I’ll see you outside.’ At her puzzled look, he went on: ‘They’ll be collecting tickets. We shouldn’t be seen together.’

  ‘We were seen getting on.’

  ‘So they’ll be looking for a couple. So we stop being one.’

  He left, taking his canvas bag. With his departure, the carriage grew colder.

  Outside, the landscape unrolled both behind and in front of her reflection, or so it seemed: the dark world looked right through her just as Mark had at the station, and the thought that she could be so easily erased gave a horrifying insight into her future. It was another, gentler kind of death.

  She knew you could walk past friends encountered in unlikely places; it was the brain refusing to acknowledge the unexpected. But Mark was her husband . . . An affair she might forgive, though she wouldn’t put money on it. But something about the way she hadn’t existed for him at that moment was an irrefutable proof that the frayed bond between them had snapped. He had failed to keep her safe when she was falling off the world. And even as she fell, he’d been playing brief fucking encounter with some pick-up on the commuter express.

  It was enough to make her wonder if she had ever known anybody. Mark was not a husband; Rufus was not an airhead. But then, nobody had known Rufus. She thought of Wigwam’s months of happiness with him, and tried to remember how he had first appeared on the scene, and couldn’t: he had simply arrived, and for all Sarah knew about his past, he’d dropped out of a Christmas cracker. Another harmless hippie. It was a marriage made in outer space. Except it had been a lie, all of it; all the time he’d been waiting for Tom Singleton to return from the grave, so he could send him back there. It was a lot of cover for a simple act of murder: this impersonation of a family man, in order to trap a real one. Singleton had died because he could not stay away from his wife and daughter, and now Wigwam had died too, or so Rufus had said . . . Sarah did not know if she could believe that. Why had Rufus tried to kill her, if not for the copy of the letter he’d found? . . . She couldn’t think of a reason for him to have murdered Wigwam beforehand. It was evil, then. Pure evil. He’d wanted her to die thinking her friend already dead.

  But here, anyway, was one thing, one person, she could be sure of. If Wigwam were alive, she would grieve for Rufus; this Sarah knew. Whatever he had done. Whoever he proved to be. Because for six months, he had pretended to be Wigwam’s lover, and no man had cared for Wigwam enough in the past to keep up that pretence for so long. And with this single certainty came Sarah’s own reason to cry: as the train rolled on, she grieved too. Not for the dead but the living. Whoever they were.

  She left the train at Malvern. There were no whistles, no alarms; and neither sight nor sound of Michael Downey, though she waited until the train pulled away before leaving the platform. Seeing it depart was watching an escape route close before her eyes. She had barely a fistful of money; she wore jeans, a T-shirt, a thin cotton top. And she had never been to Malvern, though first impressions coloured it neat, well-kept and dark. The platform lighting fell in tight pools lapped by shifting shadows. It was the wind nudging hanging baskets, from which trailed fuschias and ferns.

  It came as no great surprise to find herself abandoned. Compared to recent events, it was a small betrayal: Downey was a stranger; he had saved her life and owed her nothing. That he had left her stranded hours from home was a detail. She could easily picture him, miles from here: hurrying across a field, the lights of labourers’ cottages winking in the distance. A little bit of pastoral, there. But probably he had just changed trains, and was now heading into the city. Any city.

  From somewhere the other side of the shadows came thumping, heaving and laughter; sounds Sarah took for porters, larking with the mails. A dim sense of self-preservation reasserted itself. Whatever happened next had best happen elsewhere: somewhere better lit, more crowded; also warmer. A sudden shiver shook her head to toe. It was the thought of that noose tightening on her throat. It was the cold and the dark and the fear, and the being alone.

  Her shoes clattered on the station concourse. Everything sounds louder in the dark. Outside there was a car park and a hill to climb, and a bigger hill in the distance, and Sarah couldn’t have felt further from home if she’d been E.T. Her cheeks stung where her tears for Wigwam had dried. Soon, she knew, she’d be crying again, but before that happened she needed shelter. Because once she started crying, she’d likely never stop.

  A lout stepped from an alcove. ‘Tucker.’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Where were you?’

  He had cut his hair on the train, and this oddness distracted her from fright for a second. And then it poured through her again, riding her blood like a surfer on a wave, and it didn’t at first occur to her that it was relief as much as anger that made her coarse. ‘You shit you frightened me half to death.’

  ‘Who else round here knows your name?’

  ‘That’s hardly the –’

  ‘We can’t stay here. Come on.’

  Like I’m a bloody dog, she thought. But followed anyway, like a bloody dog, up the road towards the town centre.

  Downey moved naturally among the shadows, as if they were his element after years spent pretending to be dead. Sarah was forced to trot to match his pace; to stretch her legs after weeks without exercise. The blood pounded through her and her skin began to tingle. Sensations indicating that she too was coming back to life.

  Coming back to it and giving it some thought. That she was here, now, was a given. That she was blindly following a man she’d seen kill without hesitation would perhaps bear examination. What it suggested was not attractive, not to the Sarah emerging from tranquillized stupor; the same inner co
re of selfhood that had responded to Zoë Boehm rebelled against relying on a man for instruction. Mark’s betrayal was only just sinking in. Not the kiss on the railway platform, but the whole of the last few weeks: the tame doctor wheeled out to pop pills; the sex visited on her as if it were a form of therapy. Even Simon Smith had acknowledged she had some degree of autonomy, though he’d tempered it with the unstated view that she’d be better off not exercising it. Mark thought rape and drugs would see her through. Yet here she was, having run from them all, tagging after a proven killer like a confirmed victim, lost without a source of punishment.

  But that wasn’t it. She knew that wasn’t it. The reason she was following Michael Downey was that he’d faked death four years ago, and that lay at the heart of recent events. Joe would not be coming back to life. Her own would never be the same. And somewhere underneath all this was the shadow of Dinah Singleton, surely as unknowing a player in the game as Sarah herself . . . She could admit now that the child had been little more than an excuse. She would have traced a treasure map with as much concern. It was what Gerard Inchon had called BHS; the urge to do something – anything – to relieve the terrible boredom.

  The boredom had been relieved.

  And now that the damage was done, the long days when the worst she had to worry about was what to fix for supper had a prelapsarian glow; it was like those first few seconds after breaking a tooth, when you’re immediately cross with yourself for not having taken advantage of all the lovely moments without a broken tooth. But there was no cosmic dentist available, and no advantage in looking back. The best she could do was arrange her own agenda. Soon they would come looking for her: the police for sure; whoever sent Rufus, possibly. The choice was to go to earth or to start back at the beginning, and not give up. To find Dinah. It had nothing to do with revenge, or even reconciliation. It was simply a matter of finishing what she had started. And that meant knowing what Downey knew.

  Their location, for a start. ‘What are we looking for?’