by Ben Sanders
‘You could have called me. Or visited.’
‘Always figured if you wanted to see me, you’d come. Figured with you being a policeman you could find me right quick.’ He smiled. ‘Although I’m in the same house so it wouldn’t have been too hard.’
‘I used to be terrified of you. For a long time I was adamant I never wanted to see you again.’
‘But here you are. Maybe you’ve hardened up.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Are you married?’
‘No.’
‘So no kids?’
‘No kids.’
‘Girlfriend?’
‘Kind of.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means things could be better.’
‘You like her?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Does she like you?’
‘Most of me. But there’s a reasonable portion she doesn’t like.’
No answer.
Devereaux said, ‘So how have you been?’
‘Do you really care?’
Devereaux thought about it. ‘Yes, I really care.’
Derren cleared his throat. He swallowed. ‘I got cancer. I don’t have all that long.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Throat. Oesophagus.’
‘Well. I’m sorry about that.’
‘Look. I know I did some bad things a long time ago. I know I shouldn’t have treated you the way that I did. But it was a long time ago and I hope we’re not going to end up with bad blood between us while we’ve both got sun on our skin.’
Devereaux blew smoke into the yard. ‘How long have you got?’
‘Months. Maybe a year or so. They say throat cancer’s hard to catch. Normally, by the time they pick it up it’s spread, or, what’s the word?’
‘Metastasised.’
‘Yeah. Metastasised. Which is what mine’s done. It’s in my lymph nodes. Doctor could feel it.’
‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’
‘You’ll be next, if you don’t give them things up.’
‘It doesn’t really bother me.’
‘Why?’
‘I have very little to live for.’
‘It’s the things you don’t have that make life worthwhile.’
‘Because you’ve got something to work towards?’
Derren shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It was my father’s saying. But I guess that’s what he meant.’ He sucked a tooth gently. ‘It’s funny. Reminds me of being a kid and starting a new school. You think you’re going to cope with it. But then it’s the day and you turn up at the gates and suddenly it’s a whole different kettle of fish. You wonder how all the time you had leading up to that moment managed to slip past you.’
‘Apparently, we don’t fear death, we fear the transition.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Another cop. He shot himself in the head.’
‘Well, I guess that’s all well and good. With throat cancer there’s supposed to be a good chance of drowning in your own chuck. Whether that’s fearing death or the transition, I don’t really care. But I’m mighty worried about it. It’s strange, though. I get tired, but I don’t feel that off-colour. Healthiest dead man I ever heard of.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Not old enough.’
Devereaux got up and tapped ash on the lawn, sat back down again. He said, ‘You remember the night it happened?’
It. The bathtub and the blood.
‘Like I’d forget or something?’
‘The police interviewed me. There was a guy called O’Dwyer.’
‘I remember.’
‘He asked me what happened, and I lied to him. I said I’d seen you use the mirror to cut her. But I hadn’t. I hadn’t seen any of it.’
Derren thought about that a long time. He sipped some tea. ‘There’s no point carrying guilt around for this long. It gets to the point where you’ve grown into a different person. And I can’t see the wisdom in carting round someone else’s regret. I did my time and got out. Even if I didn’t kill her, I deserved some sort of punishment.’
Devereaux finished his tea. He tapped ash in his mug. ‘I’ve lost sleep over it for a long time. And I didn’t want to die without confessing or apologising for it.’
‘Can’t see you’ve got anything to apologise for. But I guess that’s just a tick in your favour, if you can be that critical of yourself. I don’t know. Any case, I thought you were a good little kid, and I still do. A good person, I mean. I don’t hold anything against you.’
Devereaux looked away, working carefully on his cigarette. Small drag after small drag. The smoke in cyclic eddied plumes.
‘You want to stay for lunch?’
‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’
‘Work?’
Devereaux nodded. They sat there in almost comfortable quiet.
‘Will you come to my funeral?’
He turned to him and thought about it. This man he’d feared. This man he’d hated. The long years of wishing to face him eye to eye and speak his mind. He said, ‘Yes, of course.’
He drove up to Duvall’s place. A short trip beneath searing heat. The sad contrast of grim errands in balmy climes. He turned in off the street and rolled through the low-rise apartment complex towards Duvall’s unit. Two kids on bikes cut gentle swerves in his slow wake.
He stopped nose-in to the door and got out. The unit sheer and narrow before him, neighboured wall to wall on either side. He used the key and let himself in. The air all hot and languid as he entered. The barren living room, with its single lamp. No man is an island? Get a load of this.
He checked the spare bedroom. The file work was gone: it had arrived at CIB that Monday. Pages of witness testimony, reams of typed case research. Devereaux had spread it all on the floor in his cubicle. His desk couldn’t accommodate the spread. The collected paperwork exceeded his own case notes by a factor of two. It was extensive. It looked meticulous. It looked like unbridled obsession.
He’d run a background check. Duvall was ex-police. He’d signed up in ’eighty-one, resigned in ’ninety-seven. Unmarried, no dependants. His parents were dead. He had no criminal record. Ministry of Justice had him on file as a licensed private investigator. Devereaux checked out his finances. He’d had no substantial income for the past eighteen months. He’d cashed a few lightweight cheques the previous year. He’d re-mortgaged a property in March. The loan seemed to have kept him above the breadline. But nobody had made any payments to him since October. Meaning he hadn’t been chasing robbery leads at the request of a client. He’d delved on his own volition. For some reason he’d felt he had to.
Devereaux toured the flat. Boxes of clothes still remained, cartons of canned food. The walls were bare. There were no shelves. There was no phone. It wasn’t home. It was man-sized storage at best. He tried to conceive of the focus it would take to live in such a manner. The devotion and the loneliness. It read like self-enforced penance. It had a vibe to it that seemed guilt-driven: maybe he’d wanted to negate shitty karma. He’d probably succeeded: getting killed had to count for something. Murder must have cleared his debt, wholesale.
He walked across the living room and opened the door to the small deck. The main road lay behind a shelter belt of trees. He stood there with his back to the rail and smoked a cigarette. The room looked back at him, expressionless. This strange and empty testament to a strange and failed aim. He hoped his own home would never trigger that same thought to somebody else.
Noise from adjoining units reached him weakly. He looked in at the barren room with its single lamp and thought: How does a man appoint the sole function of his life?
He called her that night.
She was in a good mood. She said she was glad he’d rung. He asked her if she’d like dinner. She declined, politely. She said maybe Saturday.
But he was happy. He still had her. She was not yet lost.
He called Carl Grayson and got no answer. He�
��d had no answer from him for two weeks. He was less confident he could win him over.
He ate by himself in the living room. Plate on his knees, The Doors on the stereo. McCarthy’s funeral had been the previous week. Devereaux attended. He didn’t really have a choice: his absence would have been obvious. Non-attendance would have fuelled conspiracy. But it was a way overblown affair: friends, relatives, colleagues in full blue regalia, all in one overwhelming hit. Lloyd Bowen pulled him aside afterwards. Five words only: ‘You’re off the hook, sergeant.’ He’d gone home and found mail waiting patiently: written confirmation of Bowen’s curt message, beneath an official police letterhead. A second letter from Thomas Rhys, declaring that the Independent Police Conduct Authority would not be bringing charges. He’d returned the letters to their envelopes once he’d read them and put them on the kitchen table. They were still there: tangible evidence he was in the right. Certainly, the thought was worth keeping.
The CD finished, but he didn’t replace it. He sat there in the dark a long time. When he slept he dreamed he walked a moonlit street with a parade of innocent dead.
OTHER BOOKS BY BEN SANDERS
The Fallen
By Any Means
COPYRIGHT
HarperCollinsPublishers
This edition published in 2013
by HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
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Copyright © Ben Sanders 2013
Ben Sanders asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Sanders, Ben, 1989-
Only the dead / Ben Sanders.
ISBN 978-1-77554-005-2
I. Title.
NZ823.3—dc 23
ISBN: 978 1 77554 005 2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978 1 77549 011 1 (epub)
Cover design by Jane Waterhouse, HarperCollins Design Studio
Handcuffs by Yasuhide Fumoto/Getty Images; all other images by shutterstock.com
