Why We Die

by Mick Herron

  Or you could carry on being yourself, and try to put what lay ahead behind you. Which was her current plan.

  In time, she’d been allowed to come and speak to Derek Hunter; in time, she’d reached this point in their conversation:

  ‘Did they say anything?’

  ‘I think they might’ve . . .’ His face scrunched into concentration. Fiftyish faces had earned their lines. Zoë tried to read what these might mean, and guessed at puzzlement, spite, confusion . . . Concentration looked like it might be new. ‘I think he might’ve. The one with the crossbow.’

  ‘You remember what it was?’

  He paused. ‘I was too busy being shot to notice.’

  Fair point.

  Over the way, the patient was succumbing to something approaching panic. His words weren’t clear, but the tone was unmistakable: querulous, importunate. The voice of someone who’d been giving it a little thought, and wasn’t keen on the conclusions. Not when these invoked a curtained bed and a loud-voiced nurse.

  ‘Did he have an accent?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The one who spoke. The one who shot you.’

  She gave him a moment to think about it. They’d been through most else: height, weight, clothing. He’d had nothing to tell her she hadn’t gathered from Sweeney. The masks might have been interesting, if the villains had gone for something post-Tarantino – American presidents, Disney characters, Spice Girls – but stockings were useless. Sometimes it was hard to tell traditionalism from lack of imagination.

  ‘De Niro. He sounded like Robert De Niro.’

  ‘De Niro.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘I know of him. Yes.’

  ‘Well, that’s who he sounded like. Bobby De Niro.’

  ‘. . . Thanks, Derek, You’ve been a help.’

  She tossed the notes she’d made into a bin on her way out. The Deer Hunter. Robert De Niro. Life was too short, really.

  A sign by the door reminded her that her mobile should be turned off. She remembered that hers wasn’t just as it started to ring.

  Smoke that had been a thick black smudge blotting out sunlight was now a greasy ribbon spiralling skywards. On her walk from the city centre – she’d taken the route past the multi-storey and through the estate; across the bridge which overlooked the vacant space where the house had exploded a few years previously – it had reminded her of those hot air balloons which took off from the meadow next to the ice rink. Usually with an advertising logo attached, though all this one said was Used Car.

  Zoë was reasonably proud of not smoking any more. It was definitely a retrograde step that her Sunny had taken it up.

  She’d walked down the main residential road this side of the river, then taken a right which led her past the local nursery school, and along a lane bisecting an adventure playground and a playing field which had once been dead ground: the former site of a gas works, whose industry had rendered the land dust-grey and hopeless. But it had been reclaimed in recent years; there was a basketball court now, and a five-a-side pitch whose goalmouths were muddy with use. On it, some kids were kicking a ball about. There was no good reason for the scene not lifting the heart. Except for the greasy black ribbon up there: the one that said her car was dead.

  A gate blocked the lane halfway, but it was swinging open. The chain that should have secured it glinted in the ditch that ran alongside. The lane itself, heavily rutted, ended in a broad fenced area alongside the railway tracks, which were spanned by a concrete bridge with metal railings. A police car was parked dead centre, and a Dorm-obile on bricks, which had been in place long enough for bushes to have grown round it, was rusting quietly in a corner, its panels daubed with psychedelic whirls and swooshes. Short of carbon dating, it was impossible to tell which particular sixties revival this had died during.

  There was a policeman sitting in the cop car, writing in a notebook, or possibly doing a crossword. Another stood by what had been, earlier this morning, Zoë’s car: her red Nissan Sunny, which was now kind of melty grey.

  ‘Ms Boehm?’

  The standing cop had removed his jacket. Various bits of equipment rattled against his frame.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, here it is. I’m sorry.’

  He seemed friendly and sympathetic, which meant he’d never heard of Zoë Boehm.

  ‘You were quick. It only went missing a couple of hours ago.’

  ‘It was phoned in. Parked in town, were you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He shook his head. ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’

  Zoë supposed she’d missed a fire vehicle. Her wreck of a car was streaked with foam. Its flames hadn’t died by themselves.

  The policeman said, ‘You have to wonder, don’t you?’ This was his theme: you had to wonder and it made you think. ‘Adventure playground to one side, football pitches to the other. And they tell you it’s having nothing to do sends kids off the rails.’

  Zoë wasn’t so sure you could draw such straight lines between events.

  ‘Then there’s the fire-starting. Erases the evidence, sure, but it’s a kick in itself.’

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘Who else?’ He took half a step back, as if the heat had grown too much. ‘It’s not an especially grown-up thing to do.’

  ‘It wasn’t an especially joyride kind of car.’

  ‘We IDed it by the plates. Couldn’t tell the make, just by looking.’

  Point. Whatever it was now couldn’t be called a make. An unmade, perhaps.

  ‘It was a Nissan. A Sunny.’

  ‘Red?’

  Zoë nodded.

  ‘That’ll be it. Honey for the bears, red. It’s a go-faster colour.’

  And Zoë had seen them before, of course: under motorway bridges; in the corners of fields. Cars reduced to exoskeletons; scorched the colour of rust, as if time had bullied them into their own future selves: relics from a future which didn’t enjoy machinery, and whose plastics couldn’t stand the heat . . . She’d seen them before, but she hadn’t seen this one. This had been her car, damnit. Her car, which she’d taken care of. Which Jeff from the garage had monitored regularly. Which Zoë herself had cleaned religiously – i.e. once a year, round about Christmas.

  ‘It usually happens at night, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Time was they were all tucked up by eight. Biggest thing happening was the tooth fairy.’

  ‘But I get lucky in broad daylight.’

  ‘There’s always someone at the sharp end of the averages,’ he said, with a philosophy born of observing something happening to somebody else.

  He took her details, explained some stuff about insurance, and confessed he had no idea what would happen to the car. He imagined the council dealt with burnt-out wrecks. He’d put a Police Aware sticker on it; meanwhile, there was nothing to see here. Move along, now. He didn’t actually say that last bit. She nodded and walked away, from both him and her car’s smoky ruins; took, without considering what she was doing, the steps up to the bridge over the railway line. A little to the south, this side of the gravel mounds bordering the tracks, sat disused rolling stock: canvases for local tag-artists. In the opposite direction, across the river, lay the station. The sky above was a blue surprise, embroidered with just the odd scrap of cloud, and on the far side of the bridge, vaguely visible through the trees, were buildings belonging to a college sports ground: squash courts, maybe a cricket pavilion. Immediately below Zoë, four sets of tracks pointed in both directions at once. You could hear them singing moments before a train arrived, but they were quiet as she fished her mobile from her pocket.

  It surprised her that she had his number locked in her memory. Perhaps it was just locked in her thumb, which jabbed it out as if pushing needles through his skin . . .

  ‘Poland.’

  ‘One day, Bob, I’m going to finish the job I started and squash you like the bug you are.’

  ‘Zoë Boehm. Having a good day?’


  ‘Bob Poland. Not at work?’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Needle or not, it wasn’t hard to get under his skin . . . She’d cost Bob Poland his job. However he was earning his keep these days, she doubted it gave him the kick being on the force had.

  Against the odds, this lifted Zoë’s mood. She looked back, and saw a thin comma of smoke curling into the overhead: her car’s last punctuation mark. At least she wouldn’t be spending the next two years trying to coax another month’s life out of it.

  ‘How’re the job skills shaping up, Bob? Hotwired anything more upmarket than a Sunny lately?’

  ‘Taping this?’

  ‘You’re watching too much daytime TV.’

  ‘Gosh, Zoë, you sound like you’re out in the open. Not calling from your car?’

  ‘You know what gave me the clue it was you, Bob? It was something only a real fuckwit would do.’

  ‘This one’s for your dictaphone.’ He cleared his throat, and spoke slowly, his faint Scots burr humming through. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Thanks, but I don’t need to hear you deny it to know you’re lying. Just opening your mouth does that much.

  ’ ‘I hear you got your nose caught in a VAT-trap. That must sting. Your sort don’t like parting with money, do you?’

  ‘Works every time. Scratch a thug, you’ll find an anti-Semite.’ Vice versa worked too. A train was coming, Oxford-bound, but very very slowly. ‘I’ve a job on at the moment, Bob, but I’ll get back to you soon. See how life’s been treating you since you last tried messing with me. And then I’ll fix your wheels, like you just fixed mine.’

  ‘You’ve had your go, bitch. You think fate’s gunna swing your way again? Your good luck’s used up. It’s downhill all the way.’

  ‘So I could strive real hard in this life and still have a haircut like yours in the next?’

  ‘Hang on to your sense of humour, Zoë. You’re going to need it.’

  The phone died, then the train blotted the silence out as it crawled asthmatically towards the station.

  Bob Poland . . . Describe Bob Poland. He was a six-foot jawless stringbean who used to be a cop; a man whose nearly spherical head topped a narrow frame like a concrete ball tops a gatepost. It would be the most obvious thing about him, if it weren’t for his being a prick . . . For the first few years of their working relationship, he’d been Zoë’s police contact; someone she gave money to in return for information. Then he got involved with people who wanted to kill her, which had ultimately cost him his job. Apparently, he remained pissed off about this.

  She slipped her mobile into her pocket and leaned on the rail to watch the train come to a halt by the cemetery. Last time she’d caught a train from London, the fifty-minute journey had taken a shade under three hours. It was a wonder ties and shoelaces weren’t confiscated on boarding, as a suicide precaution.

  Back on ground level, the cops had gone. On the field, there were kids still playing kickabout, though not with a ball, she realized, but something ball-shaped: a rolled-up wodge of wet newspaper, or a human head. They had better things to do than watch a car expire. Happened every day. She left them to it, and walked into town.

  iii

  It was office procedure to give one week’s notice of time off. Tim Whitby had always set a good example, and hesitated now to say he wouldn’t be in tomorrow. A dozen small but cumulatively significant obstacles suggested themselves as he sat tapping a pencil against his thumbnail. His office was small, windowless, would have passed for a cupboard without effort, but it allowed him a certain amount of privacy despite his open-door policy. And there were usually people outside that door, because the office was off the staff room, which wasn’t much larger but had more chairs.

  The previous Monday, of course, he had called in sick. This had felt legitimate – he had, after all, planned on being dead – but had not gone unnoticed.

  ‘Feeling better?’ Jean had asked, every morning since.

  Jean was the shop mother. Jean fussed over everybody; even – especially – those who didn’t welcome it. Fuss was Jean’s default setting. If Tim announced that he was taking tomorrow off, she’d assume he’d had to make an emergency appointment with a specialist. So he needed a plausible explanation for absence; another sick day, and she’d send an ambulance round his house.

  . . . And this was what his decision to live had returned him to. He favoured an open-door policy, but was locked back in his old life as severely as if it were a cell; worrying about how much notice he should give for a day off. He’d planned on taking the rest of forever off: how much warning had he given of that? Tim had the feeling he’d passed a fork in the road, and there was no turning back – suicide was a one-time-only offer, if you were Tim Whitby. Like those rubrics in job adverts: Previous applicants need not apply. He’d sometimes wondered how he’d feel if he saw one of those and knew it meant him. Well, this was it. Death had rejected him. It would catch up eventually, of course, but at a time of its own choosing. Not his.

  He realized that he was bent forward over his desk, eyes closed, and that anyone could have looked in. In case they had, and were still there now, he tried to adopt an expression of intense concentration, provoking instead a fleeting amalgam of self-disgust, amusement and despair, which convulsed his shoulders in a kind of emotional hiccup. Great. Now his observer would think he was crying. Tim opened his eyes. There was nobody there. On his desk various invoices craved his attention, but not loudly enough to warrant it. He stood and walked through the staff room to the storage area, and let himself out of the side door.

  It was another bright blue day, too windy to be warm. There was something he ought to be doing now, for a moment he couldn’t imagine what, and then decided it was smoking – he should be smoking. This was your alibi when you’d walked out of your office and were standing doing nothing much while work piled up behind you. But his occasional nicotine binges left him sick and hungover, and he wasn’t in the habit of carrying cigarettes. So he stood doing nothing, while the wind rearranged his hair. He yawned suddenly and largely. He hadn’t slept much last night.

  His bedroom was at the front of the house, and though it was a quiet neighbourhood, noises from the street carried to him nonetheless, offering a commentary on lives unconnected to his. Last night, he’d heard footsteps – a woman, in heels; their regular click/click providing a rhythm for his insomnia. And as they reached their loudest, directly beneath his window, they stopped, and for half a beat he imagined the next sound he’d hear would be her key in the lock, and that this was Emma come back to him. But Emma wasn’t coming back to him. This is what your life is like now. But he allowed himself to dwell for a second on what would happen if she did; the readjustments that would ensue; the endless explanations to friends and neighbours. The rot that would result from this attempt to repair the irreparably sundered. It wasn’t going to happen. She wasn’t coming back. Something rasped on the street below – a match or an inefficient lighter – and the footsteps started again; grew quieter, more distant, disappeared.

  He’d somehow dozed off after that, and had the second dream.

  The store was part of a complex of large retail outlets – the others sold sporting goods and DIY materials – arranged as an open-ended square around a car park; a probably accidental parody of the quadrangle effect older buildings in the city were famous for. The car park’s level expanse was relieved here and there by strips of greenery intended as chicanes, but which also served as fast-food packaging depositories. Red-and-white-striped cardboard cartons nestled under exhaust-stripped shrubberies like a terrible taste of Christmas-yet-to-come. And the whole complex was just one of a series of such lining this busy road leading west out of the city: a consumer paradise, or possibly hell on earth.

  He walked a little, to avoid capture. By the DIY store he paused. Its window-stickers offered unbeatable bargains with a gusto bordering on the desperate. He peered past them to pyramids of paint
cans; to racks of tools designed for home improvements. Everything here came with the promise of a future attached. He left, kept walking; found himself tracing the car park perimeter with no real sense of purpose, but at least it was a ready-made route. At the main road he stopped, and thought about the dreams.

  Emma had often described her dreams to him, and they had always been – or had seemed in the telling – coherent narratives, with defined beginnings, middles and endings, even if the endings turned out to be that hoary old staple And then I woke up – it was all a dream. But Tim had rarely recounted his, and she’d never, of course, pressed. Dreams are more interesting related than listened to. And Tim’s were pointless, shambolic episodes: fragments too scattered to shore up any ruin. But last night, and the night before, he’d dreamed about the woman.

  The first time had felt like an act of infidelity. Something very like guilt clouded him that morning; dogged him all day until he burned it off with alcohol, the way Emma used to sear their Christmas pudding – infidelity? It was Emma who’d betrayed him. He was still here. At which the usual bout of hatred and self-pity enveloped him: the usual old snake, swallowing its own tail. It took the second dream to make him think about the dream itself.

  Which had been almost eventless. They had not been in the hotel bar where they’d met, but in a cottage somewhere. She had her back to him, and he had been asking a question which had seemed, at the point of asking, to carry the weight of his entire life, but whose import he’d immediately forgotten. And when she turned, any answer she might have made became irrelevant, because all that mattered was the bruise, which was no longer a slight discoloration under one eye but a whole continent of purples, blacks and oranges; a bruise which blazoned not only the blow which had made it, but all the other blows suffered by the same body. That there had been others, he had no doubt. Perhaps it was that sense of certainty that woke him: it was an unfamiliar feeling these days. And dreaming the same dream twice was strange, too – but perhaps, in fact, he hadn’t. Perhaps the dream had arrived with familiarity hardwired into it: trailer and movie at once. Just another retail con trick; one with the promise of a history attached.