Down Cemetery Road Part 26

Amos was better. Always had been.

Howard poured another gla.s.s of water.

Amos was better than Axel, and the pair of them had been the best field agents the Department had ever had. A happy worker is a good worker, Howard's predecessor had told him. That pair like their work. Some parts in particular, Axel had liked too well: his specialized tastes had got him into trouble more than once. The Department's function was to clear up other people's messes, Howard had frequently had to remind him. Not make our own. Axel, then, would become petulant, and seek to lay the blame on whoever else had been involved a useful choice of scapegoat, as they were rarely alive enough to object. Howard, frankly, had been sick and tired of him, though he'd been careful to pretend amused affection.

Amos, the elder, had been more controlled. Not today, of course. And his record was far from spotless. But of late he'd been prepared to adapt: unlike Axel, he'd realized that the days of guns and roses were numbered, and if he'd wanted his career to last, he'd better be prepared to take up a more executive role. Not that he was suited for it, but experience mattered. He had a calm head. Nothing fl.u.s.tered him. He accepted the outrageous at face value. Axel, though, he'd always indulged, which had been fatal to the current op, and alone gave Howard enough of an edge to give him the chop, even without the a.s.sault. Howard rubbed his poor throat once more, and painfully sipped his water. Amos was making things personal: well, he wasn't the only one.

He studied Downey's file again. The man had been a good soldier, once. His bad luck, really. If he'd been a worse one, he'd never have made it past Crows' Hill. As it was he had Amos Crane on his case, not something you'd wish on your enemy, and had somehow managed to involve the woman, Sarah Traf-ford, too. She definitely came under the heading of Bad Accidents. The mess afterwards was going to take weeks to red-ribbon.

But Downey had killed Axel Crane, remember, and while Amos was better than Axel, that didn't make him invulnerable. Michael Downey, after all, had a cause. What Amos had been banking on from the start: that Downey wouldn't stop until he'd found the child. And a soldier with a cause was a different proposition from a lot of the targets Amos Crane had drawn a line through. Perhaps Crane was stepping in something deeper than he'd realized. The state he was in at the moment, you couldn't accuse him of thinking straight.

Downey surviving this was unthinkable, obviously, but if he despatched Amos Crane in the meantime, it wasn't going to spoil Howard's day. He closed the file, locked it in his cabinet, and after a good hard think about it, crept down the stairs to check on Amos Crane. But Crane was gone, his office in darkness; the dead eye of his computer screen reflecting just the debris of his desk. Among it, Crane's spectacles, neatly folded. He wore them only for screen work, and wouldn't need them now.

Daylight was bleeding out of the sky. Above the rooftops of the houses opposite a few last red smears were fading to black, as if an old wound were going bad, and it took an effort for Sarah to remember the obvious: that this was the way it always was, and the sky would be healed by morning. With the pictures in her head mingling with the onscreen images, it was easy to imagine instead that this was the end. Some wounds never got better. The boy soldiers had melted.

She did not press Michael for details: there were some things it was better never to know. And anyway, the word 'melted' contained enough bitter knowledge to last a lifetime. They had sat in silence after its utterance, the pair of them on the floor somehow; Sarah leaning against the bed, and Michael cross-legged, back to the window, so he couldn't see the sky as Sarah could. She wondered if he too would have thought it mortally wounded. Or perhaps he'd have expected a helicopter, and the sound of breaking gla.s.s: same thing.

'Are you all right?' she prompted gently at last.

'I'm fine.'

'What happened next?'

Michael didn't know what happened next.

He had pa.s.sed out; wished he had pa.s.sed out seconds earlier, and been spared the nightmares since. When he came to he was a red sore: his skin flaking, peeling; his hair scorched. He was tied to a hospital bed. He didn't know where he was. He thought . . .

'I didn't know what I thought.'

'You thought you were a prisoner.'

'It was our helicopter. One of ours. I know that now. But back then, tied to that bed . . . I wondered. I thought maybe I'd got it upside down.'

'But you hadn't.'

'We were guinea pigs. That bomb, it was some kind of chem- ical agent. And the stuff we'd been painted with, that was supposed to protect us.' He paused. 'You used to hear stories, back during the war. About the super-weapon. They called it a Patriot Bomb. You ever hear of that?'

Sarah shook her head.

'It's the Holy Grail. Something that kills the enemy, but not your own troops. I don't think it exists, not yet. But not everybody's stopped trying.'

'But that's illegal, chemical weapons, they're . . .'

They were against the law. She didn't bother finishing.

He pulled his shirt up and showed her his stomach. Ugly red weals coloured it, strange blotchy stripes, like the camouflage of a new beast. He didn't comment, having no need to. He pulled his shirt down again. Sarah couldn't say sorry: mostly she felt sick, but not for the sake of his appearance. She said nothing.

'I don't know how long I was there. We were all there, the six of us, but I didn't know that until later. There were tests. Blood tests. A machine, like they use for a brain scan, but for the whole body. They never spoke to me. It was as if I'd dropped from outer s.p.a.ce, and they wanted to know all about my planet. You know what happened? I became an un-person out there in the desert. I was just a result, the result of an experiment. And they didn't give a f.u.c.k I was also human.'

She would have reached to touch him then, but sensed he didn't want that.

'It was only when I saw through a window I knew I was in England. After that, they moved us anyway. All of us.'

'Where to?'

'An island. Off the west coast of Scotland. I was better by then. Better as I'll ever be. I'm not sure why they didn't just kill us.'

'They pretended you were dead.'

'We learned that on the island. One of the guards told Tommy. Funny, we didn't really think they were guards until then. They were just guys, a bunch of guys, there to make sure we were all right. That's what they told us. And every time we asked, which was every day, they'd say we were going home soon, and it was just a few things needed sorting, that was all. Tomorrow. Maybe the next day. I can't remember how many tomorrows I lived through, waiting for the boat. Must have been hundreds. Then one of the guys, one Tommy got really friendly with, told him we were all supposed to be dead anyway. In that helicopter.' He laughed, but didn't sound amused. 'I've never been to Cyprus. Never been dead, either.'

'What did you do?'

'That was the end. The end of pretending. They weren't armed just because the regulations demanded, and we weren't kept in cells for protection. We were already dead, it was just n.o.body had pulled the trigger yet. I don't know. Maybe there were more tests they wanted to do. Maybe they wondered if we'd all die anyway, through long-term side effects. Or maybe and this is what I think really happened they couldn't kill us without heavy back-up. Like a signed letter from the Prime Minister, for instance. We were members of Her Majesty's forces, for Christ's sake. They weren't going to execute us without covering their backs. But they weren't going to let us go, either. Not now they'd told the world we were dead.'

Sarah said, 'Jesus wept . . .'

'Yeah. Right.'

He stood abruptly, and went to look out of the window after all. It occurred to her, the way she might cotton on to the plot half-way through a TV drama, that the reason people wanted to kill him was because of everything he knew. And now she knew it too.

'What happened?' she asked.

'We left.'

'Just like that.'

'No. Not just like that.' He turned back to look at her. 'Tommy and I left. That was all.'

'What about the others?'

'Dead.'

'And the guards?'

'Dead.'

'Did you . . .'

'We were still at war, don't you get it? It's just that n.o.body had explained whose side we were on. There were four guards, six of us. Only Tommy and me walked.'

'I don't blame you.'

'I wasn't asking your forgiveness.'

'I wasn't saying that. I meant '

'Or your understanding. I'm telling you what happened, that's all. Okay?'

'Okay,' she said softly. She could hardly make him out, now. The room so full of shadows, she couldn't tell where they stopped and he started.

He shook his head, then turned and drew the curtains. There was a small lamp on the bedside table he turned on, then offered her water. She wasn't thirsty. He poured a gla.s.s to the brim, and drained it in one long swallow.

'What was it called?' she asked. 'The island?'

'I could find it on a map.'

'And where've you been since?'

'When?'

'All the time you've been playing dead. Where did you hide?'

He didn't answer, but picked up the remote control, and buzzed the TV back to life: artillery traces swept across a black sky like screaming angels. And Sarah thought of snipers cloistered high over city streets; of mortar sh.e.l.ls wrecking schools and marketplaces. She thought of dark nights and roadblocks, and civilians poured into ma.s.s graves. There were only so many livings a soldier might earn.

'Did she know?'

'Who?'

'Maddy. Tommy's wife. Did she know you were '

'No. She thought we were dead.'

He snapped the TV off again, as if underlining a point.

She felt she needed breathing s.p.a.ce, a time to absorb the information he'd given her. In a former life, she'd have headed for open air: walked her limbs ragged and cleaned her lungs out, given her mind a chance to catch up. Tonight, she didn't want to leave this room. The story he'd told her: it was as if the reality of it was waiting outside, and it was only in here she'd be safe. As for what had happened to her, her own sad tale, she'd hardly begun to believe it. Though already a full day had pa.s.sed since Rufus attacked her, making ancient history of everything that had gone before. And she wondered what poor Maddy had thought, finding her husband delivered from the grave. She must have believed her life was starting over; all the time Rufus was waiting to take it away.

It was as if he'd read her thoughts. 'Tell me about him.'

'Rufus?'

'If that was his name.'

'He called himself Axel,' she remembered.

'Tell me anyway.'

So she told him about Wigwam instead; not about the wacky clothes and the sixties mind-set, but about the woman who was her friend, who had struggled to bring up four children despite an abusive partner who had popped out one day for the legendary can of lager, and never come back.

'Literally,' Sarah said. 'A can of lager.'

Michael looked away.

And then Rufus showed up. To call it a whirlwind romance underestimated the weather. Sarah had dropped in one morning and found Wigwam had a husband.

'Cover,' Michael said.

'I know that now.'

'He was waiting for Tommy. An agent in place.'

'They knew he'd turn up?'

'They knew where Maddy and Dinah lived.'

Some men b.u.g.g.e.red off in search of the Eternal Off-Licence; others just b.u.g.g.e.red off, period. Some went into hiding to save their lives, but had to come back for their children.

'So what about you? Why didn't you just disappear again?'

He didn't answer.

'A man's gotta do?' she asked, surprised at her own venom. 'n.o.body blows up your best buddy while you're around?'

'Oh, macho, sure.' He looked at her. 'There was something Tommy used to say. "Remember Buddy Holly's last words? f.u.c.k it. We're all going to die."'

'And that's how soldiers talk.'

'He was a soldier, yes. It's how he talked, that's all. What's Dinah to you, anyway?'

'She was a child,' Sarah said after a long pause. 'I just thought somebody should make sure she was all right.'

Michael said, 'That guy. Rufus. Axel? The day after the bomb, he was hanging round the house, or what was left of it. And every day after.'

'But there were loads of people like that. Sightseers.'

'He wasn't watching the fire crews. He was watching the people watching the fire crews. He was waiting for me. Besides, I recognized him.'

'You knew him?'

'Knew the type. He was a killer.'

'Rufus?'

'Was I wrong?'

He hadn't been wrong.

'I knew he killed Maddy and Tommy. If anyone knew where Dinah went, he did.'

She had Dinah to thank for her life, then. If Michael hadn't been following Rufus, he'd never have heard her alarm.

'I'd have killed him anyway,' he said.

She knew that too. It troubled her that it didn't upset her more.

'Why haven't they found him?' she asked.

'They have.'