Down Cemetery Road Part 11

Howard was always asking if you were aware of whatever.

'It's like chess, Howard,' Amos said kindly. 'You can watch it for hours and think nothing's going on. But that's because you're only seeing what's happening on the surface.'

'Thank you. Where's the child?'

Crane looked at his watch. 'Tucked up in bed.'

'She's not to be harmed. You know that.'

'Safe as houses,' Crane a.s.sured him.

There was a pause while both men thought about houses recently brought to their attention.

'And your brother?'

'I doubt he's in bed yet.'

Howard sat on the edge of Crane's desk, then stood up again when the other man looked at him. He sat on a chair instead. 'I've had a lot of complaints about his action.'

'You said.'

'I can't protect him for ever.'

Amos smiled.

'Any word on Downey?'

'He's keeping his head down. As I mentioned he would.'

'But he'll come looking for the child.'

Made as a statement, but he was after rea.s.surance. There was a kind of boss Amos Crane had read about: the seagull manager. Who flaps in, makes a lot of noise, s.h.i.ts over everything and leaves. Howard aspired to that, but he was hampered by his personality. Unless he got a lot more secure quite quickly, he was never going to be able to f.u.c.k things up in anything but a minor way. So Crane said, 'He'll be looking for the child, Howard. I promise you that. And if he finds her and we'll make it easy for him he'll be sticking his head right into our box.' He chopped the edge of his hand down on to his desk. 'And we'll cut his head clean off, Howard. No mess. No waste. No more Downey.'

'Whereabouts?'

Crane told him.

Howard thought about it, then nodded. 'Makes sense. Has a kind of symmetry about it.'

'Thanks.'

'And the child won't be hurt.'

Crane held up his palms: Who, me?

'I'll hold your f.u.c.king brother responsible.'

'I'll make a note of that.' He wrote something on a Post-it. Howard stood, turned to go, then turned back reluctantly. 'Something else?'

'It's probably minor.'

'But I ought to know. Oughtn't I?' asked Amos Crane.

Howard reached into his inside pocket, and drew a letter out. 'This came the other day. To the Ministry. It was intercepted, of course.'

'Of course.'

'I knew there'd be a fuss. Your b.l.o.o.d.y brother . . .'

Amos was already tucking the letter away in his own pocket. He knew what kind of thing it would be. 'I'll see to it,' he said soothingly. 'It'll be like it never came at all.'

'No bombs.'

'Don't worry.' Be happy. Howard was really going this time. Amos said, 'Oh, and Howard?'

'Yes?'

'You couldn't protect my brother if he used you as a condom.'

For a while, it looked as if Howard had something to say about that, but at the last he just turned and walked away. Crane settled back into his comfortable darkness. Howard was harmless his major failing but he offered occasional amus.e.m.e.nts, such as Mongolia where, in the course of germ-warfare experiments in the early forties, the Soviets kept prisoners chained in tents with plague-infested rats. Crane couldn't remember offhand the point at issue. Anyway: a prisoner escaped, and a minor epidemic was halted by an air strike, with the usual collateral damage. Round about four thousand Mongols died. n.o.body was actually counting. The bodies were burned with 'large quant.i.ties of petrol'; a description Crane had read in a book. Large quant.i.ties of petrol. And Howard had said You can't compare us to them, and Crane had laughed and laughed. He hadn't been scoring moral points. He'd just found Howard's a.s.sertion unbelievably funny.

'Course not, Howard,' he muttered now, as he leaned forward and killed the monitor. For a brief moment, a trinity of dots shone in his eyes red, blue, green then they too died. In that moment, Amos Crane was thinking about Axel, and about how Downey wouldn't just be looking for a child, but looking for revenge, too; and this was a man trained to kill. Perhaps he should be worried about his brother. And then he smiled again, at the notion of worrying about Axel, and patted his breast pocket where Howard's letter now nestled. Whoever sent that should be worrying about Axel. And he turned the Anglepoise off also, and sat for a while in the dark.

Chapter Three.

The First Station of the Cross I.

Monday morning she had the panic, and was a.s.saulted by the dead.

It happened shopping. During the summer months Oxford fell prey to hordes of foreign students hungry for the cultural experiences the city had to offer, chief among these being found in McDonald's on Cornmarket Street. As Dennis Potter once remarked, Pardon me while I spatter you with vomit. Though on the other hand, Sarah conceded, these were kids far from home, and you couldn't blame them for congregating in the one corner of this foreign field that might have been Mainland Europe. But back on the first hand, they got in the way and left litter everywhere. She crossed the road and entered the covered market.

Everywhere else, a covered market was for cheap food, end-of-line clothing, plastic shoes and party junk. Oxford being Oxford, it was where you bought stuffed olives, Greek bread and T-shirts costing thirty pounds. But there were still ordinary shops, mostly butchers', and through one of their windows now she watched a boy in a white coat arrange a tray of offal: heart, tongue and liver neatly displayed according to a set pattern, as if butchery were an ancient religion, and this its sacrament . . . For some reason she was thinking about Gerard Inchon; about her new-found conviction he was responsible for the explosion up her road. Over the phone she had shared this with Joe, who wasn't impressed.

'He was late for your dinner party.'

'And arrived without his briefcase.'

'Sarah. How can I say this to you? They lock people up for less.'

'I'd think we need more evidence,' she said doubtfully.

'I meant you. Paranoid fantasies, you're a danger to yourself.'

'Do you never get moments of inspiration, when you just know you're right about something?'

'And then I wake up. Sarah, this man, he's got money, right? Lots of it.'

'That's the story.'

'Enough so he wouldn't have to do his own dirty work.'

'Maybe that other guy, the one with the hair '

'Stop right there. You establish an accomplice, your evidence goes out the window. He's got an accomplice, why was he late? If he was late, why think there's an accomplice?'

She changed subject. 'Does the word "rimat" mean anything to you?'

'Rimat?'

'Or "rinat", possibly. Part of a longer word.'

'Like a clue?'

'Something like that.'

'Peregrination,' he said. 'Farinated.'

'But probably "rimat".'

'Where is it from, this clue? Written on a cigarette packet? A sc.r.a.p of burnt paper, perhaps?'

She told him about the photograph.

'Ah. With plenty of children standing about.'

'Maybe it was a school of some sort,' she said.

'Would you listen to yourself? Would you care for some advice, Sarah? From my heart to yours?'

'I'm not going to like it.'

'Have a kiddy. One of your own. Stop worrying about this Dinah child you think someone has spirited away. If she was missing, people would be looking for her. They're not. She isn't.'

'I want to know where she is,' she said stubbornly.

'You're not meant to know where she is. It isn't your business. Now you're having fantasies about this friend of your husband's you don't like. Heaven forbid you should not like me, you'll think I did it.'

'Joe '

'Dinah isn't there. Zoe isn't here. That doesn't mean either of them are missing.'

'Have you heard from her?'

'There was a postcard,' he admitted. 'From London. With the last of the Mohicans on it.'

'Dinah isn't sending postcards.'

'This child, she's too young to write. Besides, how do you know? Would you be the one she sent postcards to?'

She didn't answer.

'You hardly know this girl. Let me guess, you're mid-thirties, right?'

Early thirties. 'Careful, Joe.'

'Have a baby. It will change your life, I mean it. All your problems, all these mysteries, pouf, they're gone. Your life will be happiness and nappies. They're not incompatible.'

'How many kids have you got, Joe?'

'As many as I have paranoid fantasies.'

'You're supposed to be a detective, not an agony column.'

'Hey, I solve problems. I don't choose them.'

But talking to Joe, for all that, had helped, if only in demonstrating that it would take more than undiluted scorn to blow away her suspicions. Though maybe he'd come close to the truth, picking up on that rimat business: she'd only retained the fragment because of the picture: all those children, crowded in front of a big old house. Where was Dinah Singleton? A hundred times a day she wondered that. And all her other notions faded as she did, even the chilling memory she had told n.o.body about: that Gerard Inchon had threatened her in the dark, with only a sleeping husband for a witness.

In a notice on a board near the centre of the market, the council congratulated itself on the standard of busking it demanded. Today's entertainment, though, was provided by a strange drunk woman with sharp ferrety features, playing the same four notes over and over on a recorder. She wore a woollen cap of bright, Latin American design, and her puppy they all had puppies was a brown, shivering wreck. These four notes trailed after Sarah as she wandered buying meat, vegetables, olives; not buying sweatshirts embossed with gargoyles. It only slowly dawned on her that the music was not the only thing following. That was the beginning of the panic.

First, she saw the man with the placard: a tall man in a dull grey suit, his trouser legs bunched around his ankles, a bowler hat perched on his head like an egg on a tray. Where his face should have been was a rubber mask. Looking tearfully at the world from between bow tie and bowler, Stan Laurel bowed low for her and walked on by, the large wooden sign he carried swaying ominously as he pa.s.sed. Party Favours, it read. Fancy Dress, Balloons, Novelties. There was a whole industry based on such ephemera. Today, though, Sarah felt a slight shiver a goose on her grave as the living image of the dead comedian pa.s.sed, large as life and twice as monochrome: it felt more than an advert; it felt a warning.

On the street outside the crowds were desperate as ever. On any given day, you could easily believe rationing had been introduced that morning. Manoeuvring though shoppers, the feeling grew upon her, as intangible yet certain as hearing her name whispered in a crowded room, that she was being followed. When she stopped and looked round, she couldn't pick anyone out. But the feeling remained, went hand in hand with the music in her mind, the four erratic notes the small battered woman had played on her recorder. As if the tune had drifted from the market in her wake and dogged her now like one of those sick puppies.

The feeling grew gradually, but when the panic arrived it arrived full fledged, forcing her to stop dead, drop her shopping, take her left hand in her right and squeeze. It was years since she'd had one of these: a doom-attack; a paranoia fit; after her accident they'd arrived regularly, once every few weeks, but had faded with time. She'd never learned to control them. But knew, nevertheless, what to do now: find somewhere quiet to sit until the world ceased to be a hostile ma.s.s, became the usual whirl of busy people who had nothing to do with her. All she had to do was move. She released her hand, saw the purple indentation marks her nails had left, and could think of nowhere to go. Muttering people b.u.mped into her. At the top of the street was a church, a grubby square, a couple of benches. Winos hung out there, like everywhere else, but it was close. Her bruised hands collected her shopping while she faked normality: breathe in, count down, breathe out. One step became another. There was a booth where you could buy coffee, but she gave it a miss and sat in the shade, where, in the s.p.a.ce of ten minutes she noticed, repeatedly: a female jogger in a purple tracksuit, her hair tied back so it bounced off her collar; a dirty man in need of a shave, with an indestructible dog-end cupped in a scarred right hand; a man in a used-car salesman's coat, and a face that belonged on Gollum; a teenage girl hugging a filthy child, waving a polystyrene cup in the face of everyone who pa.s.sed; and, this one only in her mind, a woman herself skydiving from the roof of a high terraced house, the lights of the city cartwheeling in her head as she turned over and over, and never hit the ground.

She was breathing hard now. It was a vision that recurred at moments of crisis; her own private ghost no rite of exorcism ever managed to lay. It happened, she said not aloud to the Other Sarah Tucker. But the only answer her mind gave was the same frightening picture from the same impossible angle: a woman herself skydiving from the roof of a high terraced house, the lights of the city cartwheeling in her head as she turned over and over, and never hit the ground.

'Spare s'm change, miss? F'food like?'

It was just a voice from the never-ending street parade but it startled her anyway; she must have made some noise or other because he backed off, startled himself.

'Wz only askin'.'

He had black teeth and a bruised head; his features were puffy with drink or a.s.sault.

'f.u.c.k off,' she snarled.

'Wz only askin',' he muttered again. But he backed off further, f.u.c.ked off in fact, leaving her alone again and the skydiving picture shattered. In its place hard knowledge.

Which was this. In all the films, all the books, it was the little things gave you away: the typewriter with the raised T; the spare key still on its ledge above the door. With her, it was that d.a.m.n palmtop. One switch flicked at no gain to herself, and Gerard knew she was digging, knew she knew what he had done. So now she sat on a crowded street, people milling every which way, and she was alone and frightened because Gerard knew, and had already killed two people and disappeared a third. Maybe more, because nothing about planting a bomb suggested you were an amateur: amateurs used kitchen knives. Gerard had blown people away for motives she hadn't even thought about yet, and now she'd provided him with a reason for doing it to her. And this was a man who collected guns. Batten down the hatches, girl. You've got big trouble coming.