Down Cemetery Road

by Mick Herron

  There was a hand on her shoulder, a voice at her ear. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘No. I’m dying.’

  ‘He says we’ll be there soon.’

  ‘You can bury me on the beach.’

  But in truth she was feeling better; was feeling, at least, that she might live. Probably an improvement.

  Probably, but she’d been wrong about the beach. All there was was rock: this great grey chunk sticking out of the sea like it had been dropped from a large height or thrust up from the depths: whichever, it wasn’t anywhere worth visiting. She groaned again – as a form of communication, this was increasingly appealing to Zoë: it made clear her feelings on most subjects, and was a lot simpler than forming coherent sentences.

  ‘You sure you’re dying?’

  ‘Just fuck off, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And get me a cigarette.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Sarah fetched her a cigarette, but didn’t fuck off. Instead she stood next to her at the stern – stern? The flat end – smoking too: that was another wonderful moment for Zoë, knowing she’d dragged a convert kicking and screaming down Nicotine Lane. But she was glad of the company. Funny thing about seasickness: it ironed out the minor things in life, like your future, and made you glad for what comforts there were.

  ‘He says it’s just a chunk of rock.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘Jed. He says, for a chunk of rock, it’s mighty popular.’

  ‘Since when?’

  Sarah shrugged. Then, because Zoë wasn’t looking, added, ‘He’s not sure. He’s only been hiring out this past year. But he says before then, there used to be helicopters going over. He swears he saw one land there once.’

  ‘And the locals don’t ask questions?’

  ‘Hey. Do you think he’s the only one made a bob out of it?’

  They both turned as Jed shouted something from the wheelhouse. He was pointing towards the island, which had got a lot closer very quickly. ‘I think he’s taking us in,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Dry land,’ Zoë said with feeling.

  ‘Wet rock.’

  ‘Just so long as it’s stable.’

  ‘The luck I’ve had lately,’ Sarah told her, ‘it’ll probably turn out an active volcano.’

  Jed dropped them in what looked like a natural harbour, though a flight of steps had been fashioned out of the rock. Zoë felt them buckle beneath her as she stepped off the damned boat, unless it was her knees doing that; it was too early to tell. It was up to Sarah to extract promises from Jed as to when he’d be back; more importantly, she extracted the cheque Zoë had written him . . . He seemed to accept this as a legitimate business tactic, rather than an indication of mistrust.

  ‘Don’t see why he can’t just bloody wait,’ Zoë said sourly.

  ‘If he’s found, it could cause him problems.’

  ‘Heaven forbid he should have problems,’ Zoë muttered. But she was starting to feel better; feel the difference between the fresh air you got on land and the kind on sea. She reached for a cigarette to put this hypothesis to the test.

  ‘Should you be doing that?’

  ‘Most doctors smoke.’

  ‘I meant, won’t it give us away? The smoke? The smell?’

  ‘I was never a boy scout,’ Zoë said. ‘I failed the medical.’ And just so it wouldn’t look like she was surrendering the initiative because she’d had the good sense to feel nauseated on the water, lit up anyway.

  At the top of the steps they surveyed what they could of the island. True, it was greener than it looked from the water, but what life clung to what soil there was must have had a hellish, hard-scrabble existence. Zoë pointed out what was pretty clearly a track.

  ‘Follow the yellow brick road?’

  ‘Might as well,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m pretty sure we’re not in Kansas any more.’

  It was, anyway, the obvious way to go.

  Twelve minutes later they found the first body, face-up a matter of yards from what looked like some kind of farmhouse, an old stone bungalow built into a dip in the rock, so their heads were more or less level with its roof. The body was, or had been, holding an apple. Zoë had little doubt his death had been violent – he was too young to have just keeled over, and anyway, she had the distinct impression people who did that did it face first. Still, she wasn’t about to roll him over to check. Middle of nowhere, she didn’t fancy mucking about with a corpse.

  ‘Another one,’ Sarah said.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Another body.’

  She didn’t mean another one apart from this, Zoë realized: she just meant this. ‘I guess your Michael’s been here.’

  ‘I guess.’

  She sounded disconnected. Zoë didn’t want her coming apart: not here, not now. She reached into her shoulder bag and took out the small silver gun she’d shown Sarah earlier. ‘You want to stay out here?’

  ‘Why, where are you going?’

  Zoë pointed to the farmhouse. Bungalow. Whatever. It seemed to be crouching: a little bit of atmosphere went a long way. Although she’d already done so once that morning, she checked the gun again now, checked it was loaded . . . Actually, she’d never fired a bullet, though Joe had insisted she practise squeezing the trigger, so she’d know the proper way if things ever came to the crunch. He’d been an expert, of course. Not that he’d done it himself. Always leave the chamber under the hammer empty, he’d told her. Case of accidents. Thanks, Joe.

  ‘I’m coming with you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Okay because Zoë had no way of knowing whether it was more dangerous inside the building than out.

  With Zoë leading, they approached the door. Before they’d found the body, everything had been quiet; now, it seemed to Zoë, the island was full of noises – the wind shifting loose pebbles, straining through knotty tussocks of grass; the waves beating at the rocky edges all around them . . . She wondered how far Jed was; whether, if she fired her small pistol in the air, he’d hear and come back to fetch them. Even being seasick might be preferable to staying here, and finding whatever there was to be found. But she was already pushing open the heavy wooden door as she had that thought, so she filed the notion away in that part of her mind labelled Instant Regrets.

  There are those who claim they can tell when a house is empty. Zoë felt the air, colder inside, wrap itself around her as she entered, but it offered no clues about occupation. Empty, maybe. Or there were people here being very quiet. Time would tell.

  It told. There was somebody indeed being very quiet in the first room Zoëe entered: a room off the hall – just to the side of the staircase, leading down, that she was ignoring for now. The room was a kitchen: obvious for its fittings, the oven, the sink still stacked with dirty dishes . . . The person being very quiet was dead. Obvious for the stain on his chest, like a map of one of the larger continents; deep black fading to red against the blue cotton background of his T-shirt. Shot, Zoë thought. She could feel a numbness creeping through her body, a paralysis mixed of shock and fear, but her mind was still going about its business coldly enough. This man had been shot. He was now dead. But so far nobody had shot Zoë or Sarah, so things were going pretty well, considering.

  Behind her she heard Sarah’s breathing catch, then give; behind that, a deeper noise, like an angry buzzing insect somewhere way overhead. Then it faded.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘ – I thought . . .’

  ‘You thought it was Michael?’

  Sarah nodded.

  ‘But it isn’t?’

  Sarah shook her head.

  And are you glad or disappointed? Zoë wondered. But didn’t ask.

  She looked back to the body, which seemed to be growing smaller. A trick of perspective. Above it, a stainless steel draining board; above that, a window showing the view out back to be the same as it was out front. Nothing those eyes would see again.

  ‘Shall we check for a pulse?’

>   ‘You see that grey stuff?’

  Sarah nodded.

  ‘It’s brain matter.’

  ‘Oh Jesus . . .’ Sarah said.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘. . . Where?’

  ‘Somewhere else,’ said Zoë.

  But there was nothing more to be found on this level; no bodies, living or dead. Two tidy bedrooms, pretty monastic- looking. A living room, or what passed for one, with an untidy, uncomfortable sofa and an unswept fireplace. No evidence of a child. No evidence of anything much, as if whatever passed here had been strictly temporary, and left clues no deeper than the empty gaze of a dead man in the kitchen . . . But they hadn’t been downstairs yet.

  ‘It doesn’t sound like there’s anyone down there.’

  Anyone alive, Zoë amended silently.

  ‘Can you see the lights?’

  They couldn’t find the lights.

  And Zoë didn’t want to go down the stairs. Movies and books were well past the stage where the heroine went down the stairs (and it was hard not to think herself the heroine at this point); instead they fluttered around at the top, thinking about all the movies and books where the heroine went down the stairs . . . In the really scary films it was safer down the stairs. Here and now, though, she had no choice. Though they were carved into the stone, these stairs, the way they were in the older kind of crypt.

  Dark, too, but that was the point; the stairs were always dark . . . Gripping the silver gun firmly, her free hand on the wall for guidance, Zoë went down into the gloom, taking each step like an invalid, trying not to think about what had happened here early this morning . . . just one man, this Michael man, with a gun, and bodies dropping everywhere. Like an avenging angel – or devil. For there was no apparent justice in this aftermath; no satisfaction in evil vanquished, just the overwhelming sense that nobody deserved to take another person’s life, not when it meant leaving that blank stare in the kitchen . . . She wondered whether Joe had been left like that. He’d been sitting at his desk with an open throat, but nobody had told her about his eyes.

  . . . And there was the noise again, a distant beating hazing in and out of hearing. Helicopter?

  But it was too much to be expected that she should think about helicopters when she was heading down into the dark. Sarah was a step or two behind her, which was a comfort; the staircase turned a corner into total dark, which was not. Her hand traced the angle of the wall. And then, with a lurch, she was on flat ground again, in what seemed to be a corridor, though it was hard to –

  Light exploded all around her and Zoë jumped, had to swallow a scream.

  ‘Sorry. There was a switch,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Christ, woman, have you no –’

  And a sound like a wet hiccup, like a sob, from behind a closed door.

  She supposed, afterwards, that Sarah’s first thought had been Dinah. Her own was a blank, was reflex; it was amazing how her reflex took her towards the sound and not away. There were heavy wooden doors, much like upstairs, lining this corridor like a dungeon, and without knowing which the noise had come from she chose the nearest, pushed it, watched it swing open without a sound only to thump softly against an obstacle in its path . . . Another body, Zoë thought. Something soft, not offering much resistance. And so small a body, it could only belong to a child.

  There was movement to her left and she dropped to a crouch, forgetting the gun in her hand entirely, then almost dropping it in her haste to cover her lapse. And there was another wet hiccup like a bubble bursting, and Zoë was looking at a woman, she realized: not an armed woman, just a woman, frightened and hurting and bundled up against the wall as if it were the only thing stopping her from sliding off the planet. Not dead. But plainly hurting. Zoë stood slowly and dropped the gun back into her bag, which had slipped from her shoulder. Then she approached the woman the way she might a wounded cat, if she’d ever felt the urge to offer one assistance.

  The woman was blonde, though her hair looked streaked and muddy in the shallow light. Curled foetally, she looked up as Zoë approached. Oh Christ thought Zoë, just like everyone else on this damn island . . .

  ‘Is she alive?’ Sarah said, behind her.

  Zoë bit her lip. ‘I think she’s been shot. There’s been a bloody massacre round here . . .’

  ‘Let me see.’

  Zoë crouched instead, put her hand to the woman’s forehead. Felt normal. So? And what do you do? she thought miserably, realizing that the woman’s hands, folded over her stomach, were leaking red; what do you do with someone hurt like this? Do you sit and watch her die?

  ‘Zoë?’

  She moved away. Let Sarah deal with this. And as she stood she saw on the wall above another ghastly pattern, like a mortal Rorschach; a spray of blood about level with her own head.

  Beside her Sarah knelt, began murmuring to the woman. Just a babble of comfort, like a stream washing over its bed . . . She remembered the beating she’d heard, remembered thinking helicopter.

  ‘I’m going back up. I think there’s somebody else here.’

  ‘Be careful,’ Sarah told her, not looking up.

  Yes. She’d be careful. She took the stairs two at a time, ran out, found a man with a briefcase . . .

  Before all that, she stopped to see what it was had obstructed the door. And found, with no conscious sense of surprise at all, that it was a teddy bear; a great big blue teddy bear.

  II

  . . . David Keller was approaching fifty, still on the road, desperate for a cup of coffee – the very next place, he promised himself: Little Chef or roadside spoon, he was stopping. A shot of hot caffeine. He was supposed to bring it down to three a day, and this would be his fourth (and it wasn’t yet lunchtime) but listen, he said to himself – if doctors knew everything, they’d live forever. The rest of us, we’d get old, sick and die, but doctors, none of that would happen to them. If they were so clever. But they’re not.

  It wasn’t a spoon he reached next, but one of those squeaky-clean franchised places where they wore uniforms and hoped you had a good day. He didn’t mind that. And say what you like, they served good coffee. They could dress up as frogs and sing ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’, provided they served good coffee.

  He parked out front. Used the toilet on his way past. Paid for his cup of coffee – okay, his pot – and sat, like he always did, where he could watch the road . . .

  For almost thirty years he had been driving this stretch of the country, a big stretch – right up the west coast, and as far south as Carlisle, so two countries, you wanted to get technical – plying his trade as a rep for a pharmaceutical company . . . Pharmaceuticals. It had got so you couldn’t use the word in company without encountering the knowing wink, the finger tapping the nose, the bark of surprised laughter . . . Sad, really. Nobody worked the roads these days not knowing it was no joke, that ‘recreational’ drugs were no joke. Kids he stopped to give lifts, you could see it in their eyes, in the loose, jangled rhythm of their movements; you could tell by the fragments of conversation they thought were normal that they were strung out so far you couldn’t haul them back with rod and line. This was what was happening. Children – he knew they grew up faster now, but they were still children – being used up and tipped on the scrapheap before they were legal to buy a drink, and some people still thought they could raise a laugh saying ‘Ah, pharmaceuticals’ when they met a rep in a public bar. More than sad, it was sick. But don’t get me on my hobbyhorse he said now: said it to himself. One of the drawbacks of this line of work. Not just that you talked to yourself, but that you’d said it all before.

  Which was one reason he gave lifts, but not the only one. Get to hear somebody else’s voice for a change. But also, if you reached fifty without ever needing a lift yourself, well, you must have been born rich or lucky. So David Keller was in the habit of stopping when he saw somebody looked like they needed help, and it was another sad reflection on the state of the world – so many sad reflections this
world has, it’s like living in a hall of crazy mirrors – that even that was open to misinterpretation. Pick up many hitchers? men asked him in bars, when they heard he worked the roads. Pick up many girls? Aye, David Keller had picked up girls: he’d picked them up, taken them where they wanted to go – miles out his way, sometimes – and left them with a wave, some advice if he had it, a couple of quid if they needed it. Other stuff, taking advantage – you’d have to be a monster. He really meant that. Teenage girls, these men wanted to know about. Men old enough to have teenage daughters themselves. When he heard that question, he’d switch off. He’d get up and walk away. It wasn’t like he was a saint or anything. He just thought there were standards, or ought to be; that it should be possible to live, even this day and age, doing more good than harm, and not end up in your closing days looking back on the damage you’d done.

  Which was another thing about getting older: you did far too much philosophizing over a single pot of coffee.

  After a while he finished his drink, left a tip and went back to his car. The skies were still grey, he had miles to go, but he didn’t feel unhappy about it. Say what you like about the state of the world, each day came minted new. That wasn’t just the caffeine talking, either. You put your head down, you got on with things, and mostly life took care of itself. It was true.

  It was true, but later that morning David Keller would give a lift where he saw it was needed, and that was the last mistake his good heart would ever make.

  Sarah knelt beside the dying woman. There seemed little doubt about this fact, that the woman was dying, or no doubt in Sarah’s mind . . . For the first time in what felt like hours she was in full control of her own thoughts, her own actions. She’d been sidelined, perhaps, by Zoë’s presence. But now she was back, though helpless in the face of this woman’s pain.

  ‘Die,’ the woman said.

  ‘Shh. Rest quiet now.’