Down Cemetery Road Part 32

She turned to look at Michael. He had bathed, shaved; wore a clean shirt and a pair of jeans. In the dim light his face was all crags and valleys, and she had to suppress an impulse to reach out and touch the scar on his chin. He'd probably be no less surprised if she made a grab for his crotch.

To shake the thought from her head, she said, 'Tell me about Tommy.'

'Tommy?'

'You're in this for him. He must have been special.'

'He was okay.' For a while it looked like that was all she was going to get: He was okay. Then he said, 'What did you want to know?'

'Anything. Just what he was like.'

'What he was like,' said Michael. He had a can of beer with him he popped now, and offered her a swallow. She shook her head.

'We were in this bar once, Tommy and me. On leave. We'd had a bad day. Tommy liked to bet, and he'd lost heavily that afternoon, and he was really p.i.s.sed off. Looking for a fight.'

He took a long pull from the beer can, then rubbed his lower lip with a thumb.

'There was a man in the bar, Tommy decided he was the one. I don't know why.' He rapped a quick tattoo with his knuckles on the can. Some way off, the dog barked again. 'You ever see one of those arguments where one guy just wants to live quiet, and the other guy wants to break bones? There was nothing he could say Tommy didn't take wrong. He'd be, Let's buy you a drink, and Tommy was, What are you saying, I'm an alcoholic? You calling me a drunk? Guy must've thought he'd wandered into a nuthouse. He'd say, I'm leaving now, Tommy said, No you're not. Everybody knew what was going to happen. n.o.body got in the way.'

Sarah felt the breeze shift direction. From inside the inn came the sounds of crockery, as the staff cleared up.

'He wasn't built or anything, this bloke, just average. Tommy was like me to look at, but you could bounce bricks off him all night long. Anyway, it happened. He followed this bloke outside, someone he'd never met, had never done him harm, and beat him half to death. I pulled him off eventually. I could have put an end to it sooner, but only by killing him. The way you have to some kinds of dog.'

He turned and placed the empty can on the arm of the bench. Then looked at Sarah.

'Well, what did you expect? He was nice to animals, kind to children? You want to hear about him carrying Maddy's picture, crying himself to sleep over Dinah? He went with wh.o.r.es, Tucker, and he got in fights, and if the other guy was better than him, he'd hit him from behind. Because that's what he did. He was a soldier, he was a good soldier. But he wasn't a nice man.'

'And he's the reason you're looking for Dinah?'

'No. Maddy is.'

It was as if a picture she had been looking at turned out to be upside down, and no revision of her former opinion was going to make her look less foolish. But Michael didn't hang around to hear about how she'd got things wrong. She looked up at the stars once more, and then looked round for him, but he'd left.

Sarah Tucker, she thought. You complete and utter idiot.

She wasn't sure how much longer she sat there in the dark. When she went inside at last, and up to their room, Michael was already in bed: she slipped into the bathroom as quietly as she could, and had a tepid shower. Exhausted. I am exhausted, she thought her mind still racing from untamed thoughts. Using a fresh T-shirt as a nightie, and pulling a pair of pants on, she went back into the bedroom, which was small, with thin curtains no match for the moonlight, so a bluish cast settled on all it held: the electric fire, the dusty shelf with its scatter of tourist-objects, the small bedside table on which sat an unused ashtray. The bed itself. Michael lay still as a corpse beneath its covers, though Sarah knew he was awake, and knew, too, that he knew she knew. I know you know I know you know I know. All those hours in that hotel room: he'd know her by her breathing in the dark. By the smell of her hair when it needed shampoo.

She sat lightly on the side of the bed. He made no movement, nor any noise, but his eyes shone wet in the blue light, a trick of the moon suggesting him capable of tears.

'Michael?'

No reply.

'She's your daughter. Isn't she?'

'She's Tommy's kid.'

'You know that for a fact?'

'Who knows anything? For a fact.'

'Don't run from this.'

Then his hand appeared from darkness and gripped her own by the wrist. 'What do you want me to say?' He held her so tight she could take her own pulse. 'That I loved my friend's wife? That I wanted his life?' He let go. She'd have a bruise by morning; a bracelet of used pain, to match the necklace Rufus left her with. 'We both f.u.c.ked things up, Tommy and me. But I had more excuse. If I'd had Maddy, I'd never have . . .'

'Never what?'

'I wouldn't be here. Maybe none of us would.'

There's something he's not told me, she thought.

He sat up, the sheet falling from his bare chest. It was curiously hairless: a boy's torso. The red weals cast him like a tiger, or its cage. 'I've seen how you look at me when you think I don't notice.'

(She could hardly deny what was coming.) 'I'm a killer, right? I shot that guy in front of you, and it doesn't matter he'd've killed you, it puts me down in your eyes. I shot him, and that chokes you off.'

'I don't care what you've done.'

'You don't know half of it.'

'Michael '

'I loved her. Okay? And he treated her like s.h.i.t. I saw the bruises, you think that didn't matter? I've killed people, so what's a knock or two? f.u.c.k it, I'd have ripped his heart out. But she'd have spat in my face while she fitted him together again.'

'Why did you stay with him?'

'She asked me to.'

He brushed a hand across his forehead: wiping the thought away.

'Did you ever . . .'

'f.u.c.k her?'

'Okay. f.u.c.k her.'

'What do you think?'

Of course he had. Else he'd know for a fact he wasn't Dinah's He said, 'It doesn't matter. None of it matters.'

'Tommy had to go and see her,' she said softly. 'That's why . . .' It was why they'd been killed; what gave Rufus Axel his opportunity.

'It's not that he had to see her. He had to make sure she wasn't seeing anybody else.'

'Did he know '

'Oh, sure he knew.' He lay back, his eyes reflecting the pale insignificant light. 'Sure he knew,' he said again.

Which was what hurt, she thought, lying down now beside him. That he'd only stuck by Tommy for his love for Tommy's wife. And that Tommy knew it.

Neither spoke for a long while, but when Sarah shivered suddenly a goose running over her grave Michael lifted the sheet so she could slide beneath it. And there she put her arms round him, finding this not so very different, after all, from the other night they'd spent in the same bed. Like cold figures on a stone tomb, she recalled. And now, though wrapped together, there was still that sense of epitaph in their embrace, though over whose grave they were joined tonight, she could not imagine.

But in the morning, when she woke, the room was empty: just a blank cool s.p.a.ce in the bed next to her; and, over the back of the chair by the window, Michael's denim jacket almost like a promise that he'd be back: but a promise, she knew, he had no intention of keeping.

IV.

There were lies and double bluffs and twisted reasons justifying crooked ends, but first of all, and mostly, there were secrets.

Sitting on the train, Amos Crane remembered being recruited to the Department; remembered the double talk and the veiled hints of the unorthodox. Recalled some buffer who'd been involved in the a.s.sa.s.sination of Reinhard Heydrich lecturing him on The Dark Heart That Beats In The Chest Of Government; on how what made democracy a fair and just system was that this Dark Heart was kept hidden, rather than used to promote terror and obedience. Death Squads were for fascists. In a democracy, accidents happened.

Crane's secret was, he didn't need the lecture.

But he sat anyway, and nodded, and tried to look like he was learning hard lessons. Agreed that it was better for instance that a very minor royal should fall getting out of the shower than that the entire royal family should tumble into the dust, and that this was not was not a matter of sweeping paedophilia under the carpet, but simply pragmatic problem-solving. The obituaries elevated the minor royal into a glory-that-might-have-been just this side of sainthood, and a nation mourned untroubled by nasty realities, then forgot him. The boat remained unrocked. This was important.

Sure it was, Crane agreed.

And sometimes, guilt and innocence became relative. When people were in unnecessary possession of troublesome facts, it wasn't crucial to ascertain that they meant to do anything with the information. Possession, after all, was nine-tenths of the law: which made it mostly legal to ensure discretion was permanent. Many senior civil servants, the Old Buffer told Crane, antic.i.p.ate a K at the end of their career; but if, hypothetically, a particular senior civil servant opened the wrong file at the wrong time to learn, say, that the American air bases then in Britain held weaponry of a type not formally disclosed to the people's elected representatives, he might look forward, instead, to an accident on an icy stretch of road. It did not necessarily matter that his loyalty was never in question. What mattered was that the secrecy was preserved intact.

This wasn't a problem, Crane a.s.sured him.

And so Amos Crane, at the tender age of twenty-three, entered the twilight world of expedient operations, a world in which the barbarians were not only waiting at the gates but had copies of the keys. Despite the pep talk, it wasn't all wet work. There were milder ways of silencing potential embarra.s.sments, most involving photographs, women, boys, animals, money, surgery or drugs; though once or twice he was allowed to become creative, which was when his talent for the job became wildly obvious. When an East End pimp acquired pictures of the then Foreign Secretary wearing only a pair of pre-teen girls, Crane, working on the ABC principle, took out not only the pimp himself but eight other hustlers within two days, sparking a lot of editorials about gangland war that m.u.f.fled serious investigation. The only shadow cast over this achievement was Crane's doc.u.mented suggestion at the outset that it would be cheaper and simpler to take out the Foreign Secretary, thus rendering his susceptibility to blackmail moot. Howard's predecessor pretended to believe this was a joke. Amos, once he'd noticed which way the wind blew, pretended likewise.

And two years into the job, he'd put his young brother up for recruitment.

'It's not a b.l.o.o.d.y club,' he'd been told.

'No need to blackball him, then.'

'Amos, the fact that he's your brother doesn't mean he's our kind of material. My own brother works for ICI, for G.o.d's sake.'

Didn't surprise Amos one bit. 'The point is,' he said, 'he's not exactly a novice. That thing with the pimps . . . '

'Don't say it.'

'Nine in two days? I'm good, but I'm not that good. Axel did two of them. The one in the car and the one with the scissors.'

'Oh Jesus Christ . . .'

'He's versatile. You have to give him that.'

There'd been an emergency session that afternoon Amos was only supposed to find out about afterwards. He also guessed the outcome correctly: that there'd be strong support for red-ribboning him and his brother both, but sweet reason would prevail. As the original Old Buffer said, A pair of talents like that, you never knew when they'd come in handy. And he'd quoted LBJ or Edgar Hoover or whoever, on it being better having the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds inside p.i.s.sing out.

'We fought a war against people like that,' the Buffer was told.

'd.a.m.n nearly lost, too.'

'It was their kind ran the concentration camps.'

'Do you really think,' he'd said, 'that over in Moscow they're turning talent down because it's too nasty?'

'It's not Moscow I'm worried about. It's Washington.'

'f.u.c.k Washington.'

It was generally agreed afterwards that it was this remark that won the day.

That had been the real beginning, Amos reflected now; the day Axel was recruited alongside him, at an age when most boys his age were awaiting their O-level results. And for a shade over twenty years, life had gone on the same: successes outweighing failures for the most part, which was a pretty acceptable margin of error for government work. And there had been room for sentiment too. Taking the Old Buffer out had been an act of pure heart. The old man had taken to wetting the bed, and telling his life story to his nurse: that wasn't the way he'd have wanted to be remembered, even if he'd been allowed. Amos had seen to him quickly and quietly, and was very proud of the resulting death certificate, which cited heart failure. As for the nurse, she'd been sideswiped on the M1 the following week, on her way to a newly offered job: Amos wasn't sure what the death certificate had read in her case, but was pretty sure they could have slipped it into the same envelope her remains fitted in. Room for sentiment, sure, but there was no sense getting carried away.

And now it was over, and Amos Crane couldn't help thinking they'd been victims of their own success: too good at what they did to be allowed to try anything else, they'd been obvious candidates for downsizing once the winds of fortune changed. Axel's downsizing had happened in the field, of course. But Amos had been targeted, no doubt about it, and all because his first desk operation his first had chalked up a few minor casualties: it was getting so you weren't allowed any mistakes, which hadn't been office policy in the good old days. He blamed political correctness. And what was worse, Howard had sent freelancers, amateurs, to do the job, which was cheeky as well as being a f.u.c.king liberty. Howard would pay for that too. In his mind's eye, in fact, Amos was starting to make out a queue: a lot of people demanding his attention. Michael Downey was still at the head of it, blood being thicker than water Amos Crane could vouch for that. These cliches didn't get where they were by not being true.

And that was a lesson Michael Downey knew too, Crane reminded himself: the lesson about blood. Downey had also served an apprenticeship. Not quite the same league, but he'd been to the edge, which in his case was a place called Crows' Hill, a camp for Iraqi prisoners where he'd served three months as a guard towards the end of the Gulf War, along with his friend Tommy Singleton, always the better soldier. Among those at Crows' Hill were a small group captured at an Iraqi military compound, where a torture chamber had been discovered electric batons, ceiling chains; a bathtub streaked with blood, though no bodies were found. A school of thought held this irrelevant. No bodies were found because the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds buried them. One dark night Singleton, Downey and a handful of others probably drunk or high: Crane neither knew nor cared took the group of three out to the wire and shot them dead.

They could have been shot themselves. (Probably ended up wishing they had been.) But it was a popular war, and n.o.body wanted to spoil the party, so the fix was put in instead: that couldn't have been particularly difficult, Crane reflected. Removed from Crows' Hill, Singleton's crew was kept in close confinement for the duration; even after the war, the army didn't much know what to do with them. For years, they were a scandal waiting to happen. When they were co-opted en ma.s.se for 'special services', you could hear the sigh of relief in An Najaf. And it was only once these special services were over that they were delivered into the hands of the Department: officially dead a cover story lacking subtlety, but avoiding loose ends they'd become embarra.s.sments, and the Department Crane worked for dealt with embarra.s.sments. But there was still curiosity about how long it would take them to die from the effects of the nerve-bomb: the experiment had been a failure, immunization having worked at only seventy per cent, but that didn't mean the statistics weren't worth keeping. So they'd been sent to the Farm, itself a hangover from the days of germ warfare, the idea being that they'd remain there until their various cancers took hold. After that, they'd be chucked. Before that, though, they'd escaped.

. . . Crane tutted like a disappointed teacher: they'd escaped. Actually, when you thought about it, that was what had put him here, on this train . . .

Because after dealing with Howard's bob-a-job b.o.o.bies, he'd headed straight for King's Cross: morally certain that Downey would have worked it out by now, he wanted to be near the island when the soldier came looking for Dinah. It wasn't that difficult. Dinah was bait, Downey had to know that; and who put bait somewhere their prey would never find it? . . . Besides, he had the woman with him, and Axel had said the woman was smart. Axel was no great fan of women, so if he'd said it, it was probably so. Sarah Trafford, nee Tucker. Dumb enough to get involved, but smart enough for Axel.

Perhaps he scowled at the thought, because the short man sitting opposite asked, 'You all right then, mate?' He had a harsh northern accent, so irritating to the civilized ear, and wore a scarf no sane man would admit to.

'I'm fine. Thank you.'

'Only ye look like death warmed up, like.'

'I doubt that.'

'Y'what?'

Crane sighed, and leaned forward. 'Have you ever seen death, warmed up? Have you?' The man pulled back, but Crane continued: 'The skin pops and blisters like an overcooked rice pudding. The eyeb.a.l.l.s burst. And the lips peel back so the teeth look big as tombstones. Believe me, if I looked like that, you wouldn't be making polite conversation.'

'Ye're a fockin' lunatic.'

'It's been said.'

He closed his unburst eyes and leaned back in his seat, while his fellow pa.s.senger went to find somewhere else to sit. The train rattled away beneath him, carrying him off to Edinburgh. From there he'd pick up another train, or hire a car. Something. It was a d.a.m.n shame he didn't have all his equipment with him especially after carting the bear all that way but h.e.l.l: into each life, a little rain must fall. Round about wherever Downey was now, it was coming on cloudy, that was true.

The train jerked, and he opened his eyes involuntarily to see a woman walking past carrying packets of sandwiches and a plastic cup of coffee: a woman in her forties, with dark curly hair and a deeply hara.s.sed expression. She was none of his business. He hoped she wouldn't sit down. He didn't want company and he didn't want chat. But he needn't have worried because she was on her way down the carriage, and barely glanced at him on her way past.

Turning to look out of the window once more, the first thing he saw was his own reflection. Death warmed up indeed, he thought: no, not that, never that. What he in fact was was cold all of a sudden, as if he'd just had a glimpse into his own future. Everybody's future is the same in the long run. What worried Amos Crane for a moment was how very short the long run suddenly seemed.

V.

Sarah walked down to the sea that morning, and sat on a bench to watch the waves beat on the noisy shingle. Somewhere out of vision, lost in the grey haze of the day, was the island where they were holding Dinah, whoever they were that was what she told herself, and she'd come too far to accept that she might be wrong. Or to give up just because Michael had abandoned her. She was wearing his denim jacket, in a pocket of which she'd found a bundle of notes: tens and twenties, more than enough to pay the bill, though she felt mostly detached from such mundane obligations. It is very important, she remembered thinking at some point during the madness of the last few days, when your life is falling apart, to focus on one thing and one thing only. For better or worse, that had become Dinah. The invisible girl. To get this close and no further was more than flesh and blood could stand.

The wind shivered the shingle, shifting specks of sand. For a moment, it looked like ghosts were chasing each other down the beach.

When she looked round, because she thought she was being watched, Sarah saw a woman approaching down the path. Could be any woman. Wearing a red jumper, as if she liked to be noticed.

She looked back to the sea. One of the things about which was, there was so b.l.o.o.d.y much of it . . . Like a great grey blanket, covering most of the world. When they drag us down Cemetery Road, she thought, that's what'll be left: the sea.