I said: ‘But if you can locate me, why can’t you—?’
Over the noise she said: ‘You know too much, my friend. I will try to get to him first, but after that—’
The door thudded down gently into place.
A sudden, showy and unnecessary getaway followed: she accelerated hard, the drive wheels throwing up a cloud of grit and dust as they tried to find purchase on the road surface. I turned away defensively, rounding my shoulders, protecting my head. Gravel flew around me. There was a stink of burning tyre rubber. The sheer speed and acceleration of the roadster clearly took other drivers by surprise – it was being driven so hard that it snaked from side to side, at the outer edge of control. I saw one oncoming car swerve across the road to avoid a collision, lurching off the paved highway and on to the sloping sward that led down to the beach. The car braked on the grass, came to a sliding halt. People who had been strolling on the sward backed away, but no one seemed to have been hurt. Frejah’s car roared on. Within only a few seconds the roadster had turned a corner and disappeared from sight, but I could hear the disagreeable and impatient thrusting and thundering of the engine for some time afterwards.
Normality returned. I heard birds, the sea breeze moving through the trees, the relaxed sounds from the beach. The driver of the car on the sward restarted the engine and drove carefully back to the roadway.
Inevitably, thoughts on being threatened with sudden death followed.
Although just a crime novelist I believe I share thoughts and ambitions no different from other novelists, and work in much the same way. A novelist creates a work of the imagination. Many novels are written in the realist mode, reflecting the world in which both writer and reader live. Even so, no matter how normal or familiar the setting of a novel might seem to a reader – with recognizable place names, for example, or remembered dates, historical events, perhaps even famous public figures – it is none the less a fantasy, a creation of the mind. Everything is made up.
It is made up because a novelist works in a state of mental and imaginative openness, of inventiveness, replacing the world of known facts with fabricated details, many of which might look as if they are the same, or almost the same, as those which are known. An historical personage in a novel – for instance a film star, or an important politician – is not the real figure known to history, but an imagined construct put to use by the writer. A fictional reconstruction of a war, a setting in a great or historical building, a famous love affair, a string of murders, remain fictitious for all their seeming accuracy to what is known.
The absolute familiarity of the world is for many writers too rigid, too well populated with knowledge, and in many cases is uninteresting because mundane.
There are degrees of this, as in all things. No generalization includes every novel. Some authors do treat reality as a literal matter, relying on it as an authentication of their world view. Others take flight on wings of fancy, dreaming of the fantastic, the magical.
For a writer of crime novels, or thrillers, the curse of reality is present in much of the genre, but most awkwardly in the fact of law enforcement.
The classic crime novel reveals the template that is the problem.
Suppose the body of a devious, adulterous and wealthy man is found in the conservatory of his large house. His son, alienated from his father because of an ill-chosen marriage and mounting gambling debts, finds the body. Three of his siblings have been at war with each other for years. A will has been lost or disputed. An ex-wife appears, not the mother of the gambling son. A secretary has just been fired, but still holds keys to certain mysterious rooms. The servants are divided between loyalty and self interest. Why does the son not call the police?
Because he knows, or at least because his author knows, that a scene of crime officer would soon arrive. The SOCO and a horde of uniformed cops would take control. The house would be declared a crime scene, and zoned off. Nothing could be moved or even touched. Photographers would record in minute detail the place where the body was found, and everywhere else of potential interest. A doctor or a pathologist would have to attend. Witnesses and dependents would be separated from each other for individual questioning.
Many readers will have a sceptical view of the efficiency of the police, especially in times of budget cutbacks, but in fact a modern force has a huge range of technical and scientific means of investigation. In recent years the work of identifying a murderer has been transformed by forensic science.
None of this is any good to a crime novelist. The crime must not be solved by experts, working out of sight in some laboratory. He does not want a helicopter with night-vision cameras to search the grounds. Instead, the bereaved family and their servants must gather, partly to reflect on the evil ways of the deceased, partly to accuse each other of complicity. They will each declare their own innocence, settle old scores, establish alibis, reveal the existence of hitherto secret promises or documents. There will be talk of sinister strangers moving silently through the shadows in the grounds.
Meanwhile, the sleuth, amateur or professional, will lurk quietly in the background, taking notes, interrogating suspects, studying railway timetables and the like.
The existence of a police investigation would ruin this.
Although modern writers have mostly dispensed with the template, elaborating and sophisticating it, the essence remains: a professional investigation does not make a compelling plot. The emphasis can shift to the police officer in charge: his or her weaknesses or strengths allowed to dominate the story. Details of police work can themselves make fascinating fiction of a different kind. Or the possibility of police intervention is removed altogether: a remote location for the scene of murder, landslides or snowdrifts preventing access, some social emergency tying up police resources, and so on.
The classic crime story was always a kind of artifice, and no reader or writer thought otherwise. But all thrillers, made as fiction, require special conditions for the story to work. Crime writers create self-contained worlds, or at least they carefully contrive a special area of the world that only seems realistic, where what we know about the reality of murder and its detection is set aside, forgotten. When we write crime we think little of real crime.
Frejah Harsent had tested my own understanding of reality. She brought what she claimed was a genuine threat of someone out to kill me. For some reason, she also accused me of knowing too much. That for me was unrealistic, unbelievable. It was she who knew nothing of me. She was a stranger who had power-driven jarringly into my life, created a web of lies, threats, old murders, false names. I still did not know why, and was beginning to realize that perhaps I never would.
In spite of what she said about my being in danger, how could I take any of it seriously?
I went inside the house, made myself some tea. I sipped it while I stood at the window looking out across the garden. I realized only then that for some reason I had closed the garden doors behind me. An instinct to lock myself inside against a possible intruder? I opened them again. Familiar sounds reached me from outside. The thought of some vengeful assassin, out to get me, prowling my island with a tracking device – it was ridiculous even to consider it as a possible threat.
This must be the saving grace of the real world, I thought. In crime novels and movies a murderous threat is taken seriously, at face value. It has an immediate and disruptive impact on the story. The intended victim flees to a place of safety, or rustles up some protection, or sets out on whatever it was that Frejah called pre-emptive self defence – attack being claimed by storytellers everywhere to be the best form of defence.
But fiction is made up. I was not. A feeling of everyday normality spread around me. I lived in a world I had found, not one I had constructed.
If you research the subject of murder and murderers you soon discover that fiction and the real world are entirely at odds. Far from there being some sort of criminal mastermind planning and preparing, fiendishly plotting killing sch
emes, most murders are impulsive, messy, sordid, and not at all mysterious. They occur as a result of fights and arguments, or most likely of all within a dysfunctional relationship.
Discounting acts of terrorism, more than half of all women murdered are killed by their spouse, their partner, their ex-partner or a work colleague. Roughly a quarter of all murdered men are killed by a friend or an acquaintance or at least by someone they recognize or already know superficially. When children are murdered it is most often, tragically, by a parent, a step-parent or a live-in partner.
In any police investigation of a murder, the starting point of enquiry is invariably within the immediate family, then to the circle of closest friends.
Only a minority of victims are murdered by strangers. Should you take comfort from the thought that if you are murdered the killer is likely to be someone you know?
Today I had received an indirect threat of murder, delivered by someone I barely knew, on behalf of someone I did not know at all. It seemed absurd.
The world you live in goes on around you in the same old way. Why should it not?
The threat only gains weight if you start believing in it, or if the people around you believe it. What, for instance, would Jo have to say about it? We could laugh it off together, as we often did about other things, small or large. Jo was my sanity resource. On the other hand, she sometimes took matters more seriously than I did. I take nothing for granted with Jo.
Would I still think it absurd if one day I noticed a disagreeable looking stranger with a gun or a knife or a club, clambering up the flight of steps from the road, striding through the trees and across the garden towards me, his manner single-minded and deadly? Would that be how this revenge was going to be taken? Somehow it still did not seem likely.
Or maybe a surprise attack? Someone who broke into my house earlier and was hiding as I came home late at night. A gunshot in the dark, a sudden clubbing with a baseball bat, a knife in the back?
I realized then that I was adumbrating the scene as if it was part of something I might write. The fallback position of every writer: events are useful, experience can fill in a plot, waste not, want not.
I would in fact write it differently. For me, a properly imagined murder would be prepared by deliberate imprecision. The victim would be in a strange place, feeling extra vulnerable. There would be the unknowable social conventions, possibly the language, the weather, the look of the people and the appearance of the buildings. The victim would already be disoriented by the sense of foreignness, isolation. Then by blurring, darkening or making the surroundings mysterious, by not describing motives, by having the threats less clearly uttered, all to misdirect the reader. False alarms, or real warnings? Techniques of delay or surprise or error to heighten the tension, in this imagined world, the one I would make up.
Instead, Frejah’s scenario was this. A warm, sunny afternoon, with a light breeze from the sea. A ludicrously over-powerful car pulls up outside my home. It stands idling on the narrow coastal road, partly obstructing other traffic, two wheels up on the grassy verge that Jo and I from time to time have to cut back and make tidy. The engine, over-tuned, belches heavy gasoline or oil fumes, blatantly and uncaringly above the emissions limit for my island. Cars and bicyclists go past. Children play on the beach. An elderly woman, a senior cop past the age of retirement, known to me as unreliable at least, recently beaten up by masked men, utters mysterious threats, speaking of an enemy I do not know I have.
It was quirky, it was complicated, it lacked conviction. It did not have the atmosphere or the illusory feeling of reality that fiction should create. It was believable, but only because that was what had happened. It would never work in a novel.
Once again I felt irritated with Frejah. She was determined to drag me into her intrigues, her old police cases, the past murders she might or might not have investigated. For none of these I felt any responsibility.
I made supper, and afterwards had a long online chat with Jo. I said nothing to her of Frejah’s visit. I watched the news on television, then downloaded a movie and viewed it with Barmi curled up on my lap. I went to bed late. (I did make sure all the windows and doors were locked.)
21
A Parity of Arms
Spoder came to see me. I invited him because I wanted at last to catch up with what he was doing. Because he lived in Raba City itself, I was also interested in finding out from him how the financial debacle looked from his perspective. He was eager to visit. He said he had news, things had developed. He roared up to the house on his motorbike within an hour of my call.
I was still following the daily news reports about the financial crash, which was growing worse and better in roughly equal proportions.
More banks and financial institutions had either had to close their doors, or were being administered by liquidation accountants appointed by the seignioral commissariat in Salay Ewwel, the first. On the plus side, a large number of new ATM cash machines had suddenly appeared in shopping malls, supermarkets, commercial centres and so on. People of course flocked to these, which fulfilled a real need, but their operation as actively reliable automats was strictly limited. Most of them became erratically unusable within about a day and a half of their appearance. Some were taken away and replaced. Naturally, there was always a huge rush to use a new ATM whenever it appeared.
A temporary compensation scheme had been hastily arranged by a group of the less badly affected banks. Although seeming huge by individual standards the fund was hopelessly inadequate as a way of bailing out the banks and other companies, but it was a much needed resource for many citizen serfs. Thousands had found their lives and homes seriously in jeopardy because of the crash. Emergency survival payments acted as a lifeline for most of these people.
Some of the more articulate victims of the crash went on television to say that the whole thing was illusory. There was no evidence of financial weakness, they claimed, and added that the so-called crisis had been devised as a way of amalgamating certain of the banks and other finance houses to strengthen their position. The cost of this was being borne by the citizen serfs whose savings were at stake.
It suddenly struck me that there was a similarity with the landslides and avalanches that killed people on Dearth but were in fact illusory, a psychological delusion of some kind. How long before we found out that the financial crash had never really happened?
Meanwhile, the authorities continued to insist they were closing their net on the mysterious group of hackers responsible for everything.
Every day I went online to check my own bank account. Every day I read the reassuring notes that the bank was riding out the storm of uncertainty sinking all others around. I doubted that was true, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was able to pay bills from the account, draw small amounts of cash from a handful of nominated sites, and I could of course pay into the account as much as I wished.
That gave me a thought. I hurriedly exchanged emails with the accounts department of the literary agents who paid me my royalties and other income. They were off-island and therefore likely to be unaffected by the crash. I instructed them not to send me any more payments for the time being.
Far away on the metropolitan island of Muriseay, north of the equator, not far from the forbidden and to me unimaginable countries of the northern continent, Jo made the same simple precautionary arrangement. We were both freelance workers. We could request the credit transfers to be resumed when the financial situation had stabilized.
Spoder arrived full of news and gossip about what he had seen around the town, as well as in the suburb where he had his apartment. It was all interesting, but nothing I had not heard about, or had not assumed was happening. I was happy to let it flow around me. He and I drank coffee together on the decking outside my office, relishing the shade and the steady draught from the electric fan, while an entirely normal and unthreatening summer’s afternoon unfolded around us. I took him down to the roadside and showed hi
m the tyre scorch marks, still visible, left by the roadster as Frejah Harsent accelerated away.
‘Who is this woman?’ he said. ‘Is she the ex-cop from Dearth?’
‘Frejah Harsent, a commissioner of police on Dearth. She claims to be still operative, and carries a warrant card or at least something that looks just like one.’
‘Harsent – that rings a bell.’ Then he shook his head, as if trying to erase the remark.
‘Do you know her?’
‘Let me think.’ He leaned over to the coffee pot and poured himself a second mug. ‘I think I heard the name recently.’
A silence followed. Spoder was not good at silences, because he made facial expressions and sometimes emitted grunting noises, but I knew to wait. After I had stared at him for a few seconds he began to look evasive.
‘Tell me what you heard?’ I said. ‘It’s not a Salay name, I know. Frejah Harsent said she was born on Hames, the fifth, but when she was six years old her parents moved to Dearth. She grew up there, and married a man called Harsent.’
‘It was a man I heard about.’
‘What was his first name? Was it Hari?’
‘It was a case I was briefly involved in. I don’t remember his name. It might have been Hari.’
‘Was it a murder case? Where did it happen?’
‘It was on Salay Ewwel, the first. Not so long ago – more recently than the murder of Dever Antterland, at least. I never had to investigate it directly, but these big cases generate a lot of paperwork. Some of the records came to the station house in Raba, and I was working on those for a while. There was something about the ballistic identity of the murder weapon. I remember scouring the files of registered guns, but we found nothing. The victim had his own similar weapon, but that wasn’t the one used on him.’
The Evidence Page 20
