Why We Die

by Mick Herron

  ‘Maybe he was looking at rings.’

  ‘And maybe you didn’t just try to pull my head off. Back in reality, we both know Price set it up, but the client doesn’t, and I’m not about to tell him. All he wants are the guys who took his stock. You give them to me, I give them to him. That way, he gets what he wants, I get paid, and your boss discovers the thugs doing his dirty work aren’t just whackos, they’re unreliable whackos he’d be safer not using. Everybody’s happy.’

  ‘We haven’t mentioned me.’

  ‘You? You get to stop worrying about your boss mixing it with guys with crossbows.’

  Win thought for a moment; said, ‘Any names I give you, your client’s going to pass right back to my boss, yes?’

  ‘On the assumption he’ll wreak vengeance on them.’

  ‘Whereas all he’ll do is give ’em the boot, because what use are they if they’re found that easily?’

  ‘Like I said,’ Zoë repeated. ‘You get to stop worrying.’

  ‘You think you’ve got me typed, don’t you?’

  ‘I think I could study you for a decade, Win, and still find you an original. But all we’ve got’s the next five minutes.’

  On the wall above their heads, the clock chipped this away.

  Part Two

  The dark outside

  Chapter Four

  i

  It had the air of a prison break: a day Tim Whitby should have been at work, and wasn’t. Okay, he’d given notice, but . . . The roads were quiet at first; more happening overhead than in the lanes – seagulls, presumably lost, flapping about in noisy convocation; kestrels hovering, alert for groundlife on the hard shoulder. There did not have to be much traffic for things to be deadly.

  Enough, though. One day off from grief.

  But it was like trying not to probe a sore tooth with a tongue. There were times when it seemed that Emma’s death occupied his thoughts more than Emma, alive, had done, with the probable exception of the moments he’d spent inside her. Because what else did he have? While they’d been together, the future had been one blank page after another, waiting for their story to be written. Now, instead of blank, Tim’s future was empty; the best he could scribble on it being versions of a life he’d already had, and couldn’t now retrieve.

  Signs punctuated the motorway: service stations; emergency phones. As if it were that simple. As if you could be given directions, and helped to get there, and rescued when it all went wrong.

  ‘Be reasonable,’ he said. Talking to himself was a recent mannerism. ‘She’s dead. You’re not. Get a life.’

  There were parallel universes in which all possible realities expressed themselves. In one, Tim had died on a wet night in a lightweight car, and even now, in that one, Emma was tooling off to Totnes on some harebrained pretext she’d have difficulty articulating even to herself. And if driving very fast into this approaching concrete abutment would lift him from his world into hers . . .

  ‘But I wouldn’t, would I?’

  The abutment was history by the time he’d reasoned this out.

  ‘I wouldn’t. Because I’d know it was just another way of saying I want to die. But I don’t, not really. Suicide didn’t let me down.’ He wasn’t above sarcastic intonation. ‘I let it down. Otherwise I’d be dead now. QED.’

  Another set of signs. Tim pulled into a service stop, drank a cup of coffee; by the time he rejoined the traffic there was more of it, as if folk had now cottoned on that you could just say Hell, I’m not working today, and hit the road. One among them blared vehicular rage at Tim for some imagined infraction. Tim gave her the finger, then noticed his door wasn’t closed properly . . . Slowing, he secured it; wondered for a second what an apology flare would look like, and wished he had one. Then flashed his headlights, hoping she’d catch this in her rearview, and recognize it for what it was.

  ‘And that is what you do,’ he said a little later.

  This was what you did, if you were a functioning member of society. You noticed other people; offered them help; apologized when they trod on your toes. All of which Emma had understood, of course; as – equally of course – had Tim, while they were married. And had to learn again, because otherwise he’d be forever the man he was now: a self-hating failed suicide, whose tongue, memory, kept probing his sore tooth, life.

  ‘All I know is her name,’ he said. ‘And I’m not even sure of that.’

  But he knew she’d been asking for help, however she’d chosen to code it.

  ‘A distress signal,’ he said, his mind still designing an apology flare. ‘She was sending up distress signals, only I didn’t realize that’s what they were.’

  And I am not the Lone Ranger, not Batman, not Simon Templar . . . No, but I’ve not even been Tim Whitby lately, have I? And if that was the best I could be, that’s the highest I can aspire to now.

  Whatever happens, he thought, Emma would approve of the impulse that had driven him here today.

  And having driven here today, he thought, entering Totnes, what he needed was a car park.

  Tim was wearing white chinos, or cream chinos that had faded white, and a dark blue top under a black jacket he couldn’t remember when he’d last worn, though he’d found a cinema ticket in the pocket for a film he was pretty sure had been remade since. Not especially smart, but not a hopeless scruff. All of which occurred to him now because he was after all paying a visit on a woman – provided he found her, and, having done that, kept his nerve and knocked on her door, or rang her bell. Whatever.

  He’d arrived just after twelve, and found a car park at the foot of the town. He’d never enjoyed negotiating strange traffic systems, and, like everywhere else, Totnes appeared to have one of these. The car park was by the river, and from the branch of an overhanging tree a tyre swung on a thick grey rope. Tim’s immediate thought was what a charming, Huck-Finn image this cast, but his second was to wonder where the tyre had come from, and what kind of security they had round here anyway. There were swans on the river, and ducks, and some other birds he couldn’t put a name to. He watched for a while, then set off for the town centre.

  In a post office, he found a payphone with a local directory next to it. This was chained to a hook in the wall which came loose as he opened the book; it was a moment’s work, though, to trace Blake, K. At the stationery counter he bought pen and paper, and jotted down the address. He also bought a map of the town, and was careful to fix the hook back into the wall before he left. It was the small touches that counted; that when you put them together, pulled you back into the fold.

  A minute’s study, and he knew which way he was headed. The route was not hard: straight up the High Street; a left-then-right wiggle at the top. The High Street was on the far side of an open square and displayed the hallmarks of a nice, quirky town. There were the usual landmarks – banks, shoeshops, pubs, church – but a number of secondhand bookshops too; a toyshop with working wooden models on display; and a sweetshop piled high with fudge, details of special offers crayoned in primary colours on its windows.

  The road grew narrower near the top. A clock set in an overhead arch rang the half-hour as he passed beneath.

  It was busy for a weekday, and the pavements too narrow to allow unimpeded progress. Tim found himself trapped behind a group of teenagers traipsing so parodically slowly, it would have required less effort to jog. But this at least postponed whatever came next. Katrina Blake. Totnes. He was reasonably sure about Totnes, but was guessing the Blake. The odds, then, of Blake, K. being the woman he was looking for weren’t great, and anyway, what was the protocol for these situations?

  Hi, I don’t know if you remember me but . . .

  Hello. We met in Oxford . . .

  Stop me if I’ve got this wrong, but did your husband give you that bruise? Is that what you were trying to tell me?

  And even if it had, did that mean she’d be happy to see him now?

  Plus: what if her husband were home?

  Tim hadn’t
been in a fight since school, and not really then. He’d been hit once, and it hadn’t hurt, but the shock had forced tears out of him . . . I was twelve, he reminded himself. Like most men, he carried a secret hero within; like too few, he recognized his as fantasy, but still had faith he’d no longer burst into tears at the threat of violence. He was strengthened in this by the folk-wisdom that only cowards hit women, and that cowards shrivelled like wet triffids when a man – any man – took them to task.

  At the top of the hill, the road bore left. Tim passed a scattering of junk shops and healthfood cafés, a hairdresser’s and a record store, before commerce petered out. He checked the map, then turned right to find the houses taller, and painted Mediterranean colours: faded yellows, pinks and blues, with small, disorganized front gardens. Tim counted numbers down. K. Blake’s was on the end, just edging on to, though elevated above, the road skirting the town centre. The garden here surpassed untidy – resembled a wildlife sanctuary – and the front door was tented by a none-too-robust wooden porch.

  Because it was, if he stopped to think about it, a moment of decision, he decided not to stop to think about it, but simply rang the bell and stepped back, looking out across the road below while waiting for an answer. In the distance, over the moors, clouds gathered. He wondered if it were raining, and if the rain were heading this way.

  After a while he rang the bell again.

  This time he leaned forward as he pressed the button, but heard no answering buzz within. Which meant that the bell didn’t work, or that it did work, but was inaudible on the front step. Either the house was empty, then, or it wasn’t; and if it wasn’t, whoever was inside either wanted him to go away, or didn’t know he was there. An analytical mind was a useful thing. At a pinch, it always knew where the exits were.

  From the railing a few yards distant, he looked down on the road below. This was why he’d driven this far: to lean on a railing and breathe in fumes. Nice going, he thought, then said it aloud. ‘Nice going.’ He turned, and studied the house in more detail. Like its neighbours, it was three storeys high; unlike them it had once been painted milk chocolate, though was peeling badly now. Slates were missing from the roof, and the guttering to the left of the ramshackle wooden porch had rusted and appeared barely functional. The porch itself was painted darker chocolate than the brickwork, as was the length of guttering, though this turned a fresh bright blue where it reached next door, as if someone were making a point. Even with anyone inside, Tim thought, it would still be an empty house. One whose lights had gone out.

  By the side abutting the main road, a path ran through to the back. This had a wooden door at the near end, which wasn’t locked but would barely open – the hedge behind it had grown so wild it was touching the brickwork. Tim discovered this a few minutes later – there’d come a moment when he was no longer leaning against the railing, but was instead making his way along this passage, with no clear memory of having decided to do so. Squeezing past, he had the impression of a hundred green fingers clutching at him, most of them wet, and when he reached the back garden he felt like he’d walked through a carwash. The ground was thick and spongy, as if coated with sea-moss. The first thing he saw, parked under a makeshift carport – a transparent sheet of corrugated plastic held up by wooden struts – was a hearse.

  Quite literally, Tim stopped breathing.

  Before long, he began again. It was a car, no more; a car used for the transportation of the dead. This, in and of itself, did not make the vehicle more to be feared than any other car not actively bearing down on him. Besides, it was on blocks. Despite, judging by the paintwork, being in better nick than the house – though lacking its hood ornament – the hearse wasn’t actually usable. Why this should be a comfort, he didn’t immediately analyse.

  There was other stuff under this carport-cum-shelter: what looked like an old workbench, on which a few ancient tools quietly rusted; a freezer, presumably decommissioned; a wardrobe with its doors removed. To one side, next to what might have been a pond if its overgrowth were napalmed, sat a two-foot-high stone frog. A crack had formed in its head, running ear to ear, as if it were an oversized money box. None of this was terribly important, but it distracted him from the immediate problem of what, exactly, he thought he was doing.

  A door into the house, probably the kitchen, lay immediately to his left. He put a hand to its handle. There was a word for this, wasn’t there? – three words: breaking and entering. For half a second he wondered what his colleagues would have made of it: Tim on his day off, miles from home, looking to break into a house in search of a woman he’d met once. They probably thought he was having a lie-in. He took his hand away; made to knock on the glass, then didn’t do that either. Instead he walked further round the house until he reached quite a large window, partly obscured by ivy, but not so much he couldn’t see through.

  In a chair in the centre of a room sat an oldish man in a threadbare cardigan, his attention focused on some out-of-view spot on the wall.

  A hand dropped on Tim’s shoulder. Something sharp tickled his chin. ‘What the fuck’s your game, soldier?’ Tim felt the morning’s dreaminess slip away, and nasty cold reality take its place.

  ii

  Cherchez la femme. This was French for find the lady, which was one of three cards, but not usually the one you thought it was. Hunting the lady was a good way of losing your money.

  . . . Last night, he’d been playing cards with Trent, or watching Trent play cards: same thing. Clock patience. Trent always so nearly got this out without cheating, it was painful. Trent was drinking vodka, but Arkle was just prowling: table to window, window to table. This was in Dunstan Senior’s house – he could come back to life and die all over again: it would still be his house. Arkle and Trent lived there, was all. They moved in the spaces between furniture he’d bought; lived under the gaze of pictures he’d hung.

  ‘Do you,’ Arkle said at last, ‘ever get tired of this place?’

  Trent looked up, looked round, looked down. ‘No.’

  ‘Do you get tired of anything?’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘What were you and Bax talking about?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  After a moment Arkle explained, ‘You didn’t ask when.’

  ‘. . . When?’

  ‘In the bar,’ he said. ‘The other lunchtime.’

  This was Tuesday again. In the seven days since the robbery, Price had paid them for the diamonds and Baxter had stashed it, minus walking-around money. Arkle didn’t require much, mostly drinking tap water and mostly eating toast. In a wardrobe upstairs hung a tropical suit, but otherwise he spent little. Like he was going Buddhist, Bax once said, except Buddhists frowned on armed robbery.

  ‘When I was taking a piss,’ he added.

  And it hadn’t mattered until now because everything had been fine: they all had their roles, like Baxter said, and Arkle was happy with that – if asked, he’d have said this was because there was a mountain of money growing in the background, which, when it was big enough, they’d all go and live on. But actually Arkle was happy doing this because he was happy doing it. Only everything didn’t seem fine any more, for some reason.

  ‘What were you talking about?’

  ‘This, that. Jesus, I don’t know. What we always talk about. Usual stuff.’

  But what was the usual stuff they always talked about? Arkle had no clue: the only conversation he could recall right now had happened when he was out of earshot. He reached out with a sigh and began collecting the cards in front of Trent. He did this one-handed, tapping the edge of the pack on the table to square it off. Then he squeezed the top and bottom edges, and squirted the cards into Trent’s face.

  Who batted them away without speaking. Which was an admission of guilt, you asked Arkle.

  When the cards lay in a mess on the floor, on the table, in Trent’s lap, Arkle said, as if nothing had happened, ‘Did you think about my idea at all?’

 
‘Which idea?’

  ‘The one about Price.’ The one where they robbed him. He’d not actually said this out loud, but they’d known what he meant.

  Trent said, ‘These jewellers’ shops, it’s in/out. Mess with Price, we’re going to war.’

  ‘He’s supposed to be some kind of face,’ Arkle said, dreamily. ‘But he’s driven around by a walrus in drag. How difficult would it be?’

  ‘Bax is right. You’re just looking for the edge.’

  ‘That’s what Bax said, is it? In the pub?’

  ‘He didn’t mean anything,’ said Trent, and began collecting the cards, as if that would make things tidy again.

  But coming back from the Gents, Arkle had sensed everything was different. They’d been talking about him. More: they’d come to a decision, something that had been brewing ever since he’d accidentally shot that guy in Oxford.

  Accidentally was the word. It wasn’t like Arkle had arranged him being there.

  ‘He’s pissed off that guy tried to stop us, isn’t he?’

  ‘He wasn’t,’ Trent began, and then quite sensibly stopped.

  ‘He was a security guard. It said so in the paper.’

  ‘At a supermarket. He was on his way home.’

  ‘Those guys are always on duty.’

  (When he’d said as much to Baxter, Bax had said: ‘What, he thought you were a lost trolley?’)

  ‘Price,’ Arkle said now. ‘One big score. Then we can . . .’

  Then they could what, he didn’t know, but it was important to have a plan – a plan involving the three of them. When he shut his eyes and imagined their future, it was always the three of them. That was as far as he’d got until recently, when it had become more specific. They’d be somewhere far away and hot, and there’d be animals: sleek things with teeth and tusks. In the evenings he’d stride out with his crossbow, in his tropical suit. It would be more of a challenge than the fucking yard-rats.