Cold Hands

by John Niven

  The weight fell off and you felt strength and suppleness returning. You were in your fifties and in the best shape of your life.

  The town’s first gym had recently opened and you started lifting weights, crunching your stomach on the rowing machine, building up your abs and pecs and your laterals. The strength in your arms and upper body grew and grew until you could pull yourself quickly up the ropes that dangled from the ceiling of the gym. And you liked that feeling – the couple of seconds where you paused, breathing hard at the very top of the rope, thirty feet above the floor, your head pressing against the roof, your biceps straining. You liked the fact you were alive and climbing that rope, towering above it instead of swinging at the end of it.

  You enrolled in a tae kwon do class at the leisure centre, the Magnum, where you had taken Craig ice-skating a couple of times. (It terrified you, that ice rink – with all the vicious, glowering boys speeding round. The thought of Craig falling out there, his fingers spread on the watery ice as the twin blades came slicing towards him – and you were relieved when he said he didn’t like it and didn’t want to go any more.) You learned the punches and blocks and – especially – the powerful, sweeping kicks. Your instructor Keith told you were a ‘natural’.

  And you couldn’t say yet exactly why you were doing all of this. Just that you wanted to be . . . ready.

  You took an evening class: Basic first aid.

  The treatment of trauma and the preservation of life.

  You joined the gun club, lying on your stomach on a mat on the rifle range at the leisure centre, squeezing off rounds from the old Martini action rifles they had. Learning the basics about more advanced weapons. You weren’t sure what skills you’d need if the day ever came.

  Then it happened, towards the end of 2004. It was late autumn, your ears cold, a dewdrop on the tip of your nose, great rifts of desiccated leaves blowing by, when the silver-haired man from the photographs came down the courthouse steps, talking to two policemen. They came close to your bench (a history of medieval torture on your lap, open at a page on wheeling), close enough for you to hear the man’s voice, working class, Glaswegian, and watch as he took an unfiltered Capstan Full Strength from its pack and expertly lit it with a match held in cupped fingers, the fingertips as yellow as the phone book. He was older, in his sixties now, but it was certainly him. He walked towards the underground station and you followed.

  To Cowcaddens and then the short walk to the police station. You watched him signing in through the glass doors. You waited across the street and it was dark, five thirty, before he left again. You trailed him to Central Station, then the train out to Rutherglen. You watched as he disappeared into a tenement building near the station. Ground floor, right. You got close enough to read the little brass nameplate on the wooden door frame: ‘P. CARDEW’.

  Your heart had filled your whole chest from the moment you saw him.

  For days you thought it over, gradually realising that even greater reserves of patience were going to be called for. You felt sure that this man would have information about the boy who helped to kill your son. All you needed was a name and a city. However, if something untoward happened to P. Cardew, it might have reverberations for the new identity William Anderson had been given. Yet P. Cardew was old. In a few years, surely, he would retire. More time would have elapsed. Less attention would be paid.

  In the end it took another four years. You discovered reserves of patience you did not know you had. You watched and waited and learned. He lived alone, a bachelor. (This was good.) He smoked and drank too much. (This was bad. Your greatest fear in that time was premature death: a stroke or a heart attack. Those Capstan Full Strength and the bottles of Grouse from the off-licence on Rutherglen High Street three or four times a week.) Then, finally, in the summer of 2008, the grim little retirement party in the pub in Cowcaddens. You were several tables away, with your Coke and your book. He even smiled at you once as he wove unsteadily to the toilets.

  And still you waited another six months, noting with sadness the reductive curve of this man’s retirement: his visits to the pub coming earlier in the day, the lunches with colleagues growing more infrequent already. His occasional visits to the Mitchell Library, your old haunt, where he read mainly social histories of Glasgow, often nodding off, his head lolling onto his chest in the great reading room. The smirks and the head-shaking of the nearby students.

  Finally you could wait no more. You rang the doorbell one evening in early May 2009, almost exactly twenty-seven years to the day. He smiled kindly as he looked at you through thick glasses, the smell of cooking behind him in the tired old flat as he said, ‘Can I help you, dear?’

  You Maced him in the mouth.

  He scrabbled at his throat as you pushed him backwards into the hall. He was trying to shout but the Mace was already constricting, burning his larynx. It would wear off. You needed him able to talk. Without fear, and in exactly the way you’d rehearsed it countless times, you slammed the door behind you and kicked his legs from under him, following him down, making sure he didn’t bang his head on the floor, the knife already out of your other coat pocket and up at his jaw, tickling his jugular vein as you said, ‘Do what I say and everything will be OK.’

  The great pain, fear and confusion in P. Cardew’s eyes as you slipped your heavy rucksack off your shoulder and set it on the floor. As you took out the car battery.

  Stronger than you’d expected, this 66-year-old man.

  He held out for several hours, whether through loyalty to, or a genuine affection for, William Anderson, or whether because of some personal code of honour you were never quite sure. In the end you had the voltage up as high as you dared. Smoke was coming off his hair, out of his nose, the gag was barely muffling the screams and you had to have the television up loud to cover this. You were grateful for the thick walls of those old Victorian sandstones. Every time his eyeballs flipped upwards, vibrating in their sockets, you feared it might be the last time; that they’d never come back down again. Finally it came out, just four words, the sweetest four words you’d heard in many years. Almost as sweet as ‘I love you, Mummy’.

  ‘Donald’ (gasping), ‘Miller’ (retching), ‘Toronto’, (panting), ‘University’ (sobbing).

  You thanked P. Cardew and then dum-de-dummed a little song to yourself to drown out his pleading and bargaining as you carried him through to the bedroom, no fight left in him. The worn old dark-wood furniture, the green bedspread, an ashtray and a photograph of some nephews and nieces on the nightstand.

  He gratefully drank down the mug of water with a fistful of your Valium and sank down, slackjawed with exhaustion. You tidied the flat, meticulously removing any trace of your presence. You lit one of his Capstan Full Strength and placed it between his fingers. He was deeply asleep as the unfiltered cigarette burned against the bedspread, forming a dark brown line that began smoking, then flaming.

  You sat in the corner of the room and watched for as long as you dared. Long enough to see the bed and half the room engulfed in flames. He never woke up.

  You closed the garden gate gently behind you, a soft marmalade glow just visible through the net curtains of the living room, something that would have looked to a passer-by like a nice fire burning in the grate.

  You read the headline at Glasgow Airport two days later: ‘RUTHERGLEN MAN DIES IN HOUSE FIRE’.

  You scanned the details (‘Paul Cardew, 66, recently retired . . . Strathclyde Police . . . highlighted the dangers of smoking in bed’), finished your coffee and boarded the flight to Toronto.

  It all became much easier after that. Your acting skills. You were charming with the lady in the administration office at the University of Toronto and she riffled through the records and told you that Donald Miller, your nephew from Scotland (‘wee Donnie’ you called him), had indeed graduated from the Masters programme in 1996. If you’d just hold on she’d see if – and wasn’t that a lovely blouse you had on? – she could find the l
ast address they mailed the alumni newsletter to and, oh yes, here we are, an apartment in Regina, Saskatchewan. The address was a few years old, so few of the students kept in touch to update their details, and how were you enjoying Canada?

  In Regina, two days later. No Donald Miller listed in any of the phone books. It wasn’t a big city, but you couldn’t go asking around, you weren’t quite sure how, exactly, you wanted to work it. You walked the streets a lot for the first few weeks, hoping you might see the adult face of that gap-toothed thirteen-year-old walking past you, but knowing that if you did you’d never recognise him. You went to the library and checked the electoral roll. Nothing there either. You moved from the hotel into a short-term rental and the weeks turned into months and you began to lose faith when kindly fate dealt you an unexpectedly wonderful hand. You were sitting in a coffee shop one morning when you picked up the copy of the Regina Advertiser someone had left lying in the booth across from you. Flipping through the real estate and local interest stories your eye snagged on the headline: ‘MILLER’S CHOICE’, then the little postage-stamp-sized photograph next it; a shyly grinning fortyish man. Then the byline at the bottom of the page – Donald Miller’.

  You sat there for several minutes, your breath shallow through your nostrils. You had no way of connecting the man in the photograph with the boy from the front pages of almost thirty years ago. It was possible that this was an entirely different Donald Miller. But you knew, knew in your blood and in your bones, that it was him.

  On a bench across from the Advertiser’s downtown offices you ate your sandwiches and read your book and did this day after day, until, after a week, you saw the man from the photograph coming out of the building talking to an attractive, well-dressed woman who looked a little older than he did. They stood talking in the sunshine by a cherry tree. You crossed the square and passed close enough to hear their voices. It was unmistakable; his accent had clearly undergone some work, some revision, but it was still there, clear and distinct, that Ayrshire burr.

  You settled into a routine familiar to you from your Glasgow days with kindly Mr Cardew.

  Watching. Waiting. Thinking.

  Your disbelief when you saw where, and how, he lived. The enormous house of glass and timber, with its pool and outbuildings, its 4x4s in the drive and solar panels on the roof. The trips to what you soon learned was his in-laws mansion. And then the joy, the utter joy, when you saw the boy, the son, skipping along the deck in the summer sun. (You were parked on a ridge half a mile away, with powerful binoculars and a map spread out on the roof in case of questions from passers-by.)

  Because you had been wondering what to do. Had he been single, had there been nothing to take from him, it was very likely you would simply have abducted him, tortured him for as long as you could keep him alive, and then killed him. Now, when you saw all that he had to lose, a different plan suggested itself.

  Take from him everything there was to take.

  Make him watch.

  Let him live.

  Fate had one last favour in store for you. It had been staring you in the face for weeks too, you just hadn’t noticed it until, one day, on one of your frequent drives by the Miller house, you glanced left down the drive that led to the farmhouse perhaps a half-mile from their property, their nearest ‘neighbour’ really, and noticed for the first time the yellow-and-red realtor’s sign.

  ‘TO LET’.

  You drove back into Regina so fast you nearly crashed the car twice. On the drive your backstory formed in your head and you practised your accent. A Southern American – Georgia twang was something you felt very comfortable with. You’d got such compliments on it when you’d done Streetcar all those years ago, back at the Arts Centre, in another life, when you were another person. It was an accent you knew you could maintain without serious slippage for long stretches of conversation. You would practise too.

  You were retired. Your husband had recently died. You wanted to paint landscapes – the view was perfect. No, you didn’t mind that the house was a bit run-down, didn’t mind at all. In fact, would they mind if you took a one-year lease with an option to extend and paid the first year’s rental in advance? The realtor nearly fell over running to get the keys to take you for a look around.

  You were nearly sick with fear that Saturday morning, the first time you went over there. Would your accent give you away? Was it possible he’d recognise you? Even after nearly thirty years and twenty pounds and a different hair colour? In the end it was the wife who was there to receive your home-made jam. She made coffee and you talked in the vast modern kitchen, with you oohing and ahhing over the house while you gave her a more elaborate version of the story you’d given the realtor. He came home just as you were leaving, trailing the kid behind him.

  ‘Eye-reen,’ you said, shyly extending your hand. (You’d decided that shyness would be part of your character.)

  ‘Donnie,’ he lied easily, smiling, taking your hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, Irene. This is Walt.’

  You looked down and smiled at the angelic little boy grinning up at you, half hiding behind his father’s leg.

  You walked home two feet off the ground. You had done it. Now it just required patience and planning.

  Two of your strong suits.

  38

  SHE STOPPED TALKING. She seemed dreamy now, sleepy and faraway. ‘Why did you wait so long?’ I asked. I was sitting down now, in an armchair across from her, the gun still trained on her chest.

  ‘I wanted to watch you for a while, see what you’d become.’

  ‘What have I become?’

  She shrugged. ‘A decent person, I suppose. I don’t really care. It doesn’t change anything.’ She had let her head drop down and was gently massaging her bandaged right temple. ‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘what time is it, William?’

  I looked at my watch, not taking the gun off her. ‘Nearly three.’

  ‘We’d best get on then.’

  She reached down into her boot and pulled out a knife. My eight-inch Global chef’s knife.

  I stood up. ‘If you don’t put that down, I’ll kill you.’

  ‘Yes, why haven’t you killed me? After what I did to your wife and child?’ She sounded genuinely puzzled.

  ‘If you –’

  She was trying to stand up.

  ‘PUT THE FUCKING KNIFE DOWN!’

  She started getting to her feet. I trained the gun on her head, on the turban of bandages, the black sight on the barrel standing out stark against the white cotton, just five feet away, point-blank. I pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  She looked at me – her eyes suddenly very clear – and smiled. ‘You think I didn’t sit there every day with my binoculars watching you in your little office?’

  Click.

  ‘Watching you play cowboys with your stupid little gun? Keeping the bullets in one drawer, just in case little Walt stumbled upon it?’

  Click.

  My legs caving in.

  ‘Silly boy, William.’

  I brought the gun up to smash her in the head as she lunged with terrible speed, smashing into me, knocking me down onto the chair, driving the knife hard into my left thigh twisting it. I howled and tried to hit her with the pistol again but she caught my wrist with surprising strength and kept twisting the knife. I could feel it scraping the bone and I struggled to keep from fainting. I pushed her back and punched her in the face, driving my fist into the sodden latticework of bandages. She screamed now and stumbled backwards, falling onto the floor, letting go of the knife, leaving it sticking in my thigh, twanging, buried four inches deep, halfway up the blade. I could hear Walt yelling from down the hall as I threw myself forward at her but she kicked out, taking my legs from beneath me and I slammed straight down onto the floor, my left leg coming down first, the handle of the –

  My scream deafening.

  White light as I felt the impact push the blade all the way through my thigh, through bone and muscle, and out the
other side. I felt myself losing consciousness. I sensed her above me, picking something up, something heavy from the table, and then I felt air above my skull moving, humming, and then I felt nothing.

  39

  I CAME ROUND on my side on the floor of the games room. I’d been gagged and hog-tied; my hands behind my back, bound tightly to my feet which were folded up into the small of my back. The knife was gone from my thigh and she’d tied a crude tourniquet just above the wound. The leg of my jeans was soaked in blood and the pain was excruciating. The smell of wet leather as her boots stomped past me, carrying her Gladstone bag towards the pool table. I looked up and saw Walt.

  He was lashed to the table, spreadeagled and crying. His head was turned towards me and I saw that he’d been gagged too, but his eyes were begging, imploring me to help him.

  ‘Tell me, William.’ Her tone was calm and conversational, ‘How much do you know about torture? I’d say I’m fairly widely read on the subject. It kept me going, all those years ago, when it looked hopeless. Fantasising, you could say. When I was keeping an eye on your Mr Cardew I’d sit in the Mitchell Library and read for hours. About the Chinese, the Russians, medieval methods versus modern ones . . .’

  I heard a noise from the Gladstone bag, like something thunking against glass. ‘Sometimes I think it was the only thing keeping me sane. You should count yourself lucky we have so little time. If only it could have been otherwise.’ She was moving around the table as she talked. Pulling on Walt’s ropes, binding him tighter. ‘It would have provided some great opportunities. Scaphism for instance. Do you know about scaphism?’

  She perched on the edge of the pool table, the big knife in her hand, and turned to me, talking on, oblivious to Walt crying and struggling uselessly behind her. ‘It comes from the Greek “skaphe”, meaning “scooped out”, but was mainly practised in ancient Persia. What they did, those clever Persians, was they took you to a riverbank in summertime and they lashed you inside a hollowed-out tree trunk, with your head sticking out one end and your feet out the other and they let you float in the shallow water, among the reeds, while they force-fed you for a couple of days. Lord did they feed you. They made you drink so much milk and honey that you developed diarrhoea. You’d be just . . . filling that tree trunk up with rivers of nasty filth. They’d rub honey on your face and feet too if they really didn’t like you. And then they’d leave you. Well, not completely. They’d stay to watch and feed you. Great crowds of people sometimes, clapping and cheering as you floated on the stagnant water, under the hot sun. You’d have been fairly roughly beaten up prior to all this of course, your own faeces flowing into your cuts, your mouth, your eyes. Then the insects would come. Flies and mosquitoes. Ants, wasps and beetles and whatnot. Great dragonflies. Horseflies as big as swallows, with huge, stinging tails. They’d sting you and bite you and gorge on your flesh and lay their eggs inside you. They’d keep giving you food and water, the Persians, pouring on that honey. They didn’t want you dying of dehydration or starvation. They wanted to watch that cloud of insects grow and grow around you: bigger than a car, big as a bus, a whale. Engulfing you as you screamed all day and all night. Screaming as maggots and larvae burst out of your flesh in great clumps, your face a huge, swollen mass of boils, bites and sores. Do you know there are recorded cases of people enduring this for seventeen days before they died of sceptic shock? Seventeen days.’ She sighed. ‘Sadly, we don’t have that amount of time. So I’ve come up with a kind of condensed version for young Walt here.’