by Mick Herron
‘Baxter says that’s just looking for trouble.’
Arkle rubbed a hand over his hairless head. He’d lost his place in the conversation: then he hadn’t. ‘Baxter says?’
Trent wouldn’t look up. He was laying out another hand of patience, and somehow his glass had refilled – Trent could pour a drink with both hands in his pockets. Arkle watched while he turned over a card. Then said, ‘When did Bax get to be the oldest?’
‘Arkle –’
‘When did Bax get to be the oldest?’
A faint hiss, as if air were escaping Trent. ‘You’re the oldest, Arkle.’
‘Don’t forget it.’
And that had been last night, and Arkle hadn’t slept since – had left his bed in the tiny hours, and walked to the yard; had perched on the gantry outside the crow’s nest, aiming the bow at anything that moved, which wasn’t much. Scraps of paper bothered by the wind. One big black crow, unless it was a rook, that flapped down as dawn was breaking to pick at something wet lodged between broken stones where the sand elevator had once stood. Arkle had sighted on it, had been half an ounce of pressure off releasing the bolt, but in the end hadn’t – not in case he’d miss, but because he wouldn’t. The Oxford man had crumpled when his leg was pierced; had uttered something recognizably human. But the crow would just explode into sticky feathers. It wasn’t the same.
While the bird took off, Arkle was thinking about Kay.
Who had long been on the scene. You could be forgiven for thinking there were four of them, not three; that was okay up to a point, but the point had been reached some while ago. The day she and Bax married was the last time Arkle had drunk alcohol, and everybody pretended it was in celebration. They all had their role: fine. What was Kay’s role, exactly?
‘She’s my girl, man,’ Bax had told him, when Arkle had brought this up.
‘But kind of like a sister, right?’
And Bax had laughed his deep dark laugh which, more and more, seemed to be aimed at Arkle, rather than anything Arkle said.
So things changed. Bax got married and moved out; Dunstan Senior died. First thing Arkle had done was close the yard down. First thing Bax had wanted to know was, what the fuck was he playing at?
‘You want us to be wage slaves all our lives?’
‘Tell me your better idea.’
Said with that thing tone Bax had developed. Superior, something like that. Arkle didn’t have a word for it.
He walked down the metal steps, his heels ringing like bells in the early morning. There was a milk float chugging along the road, and a girl in a short black dress making her unsteady way up the hill. Arkle had left his crossbow behind the lowest step. You could get into trouble for carrying one around.
He’d met Price in London, when Dunstan sent him there on a bullshit errand: delivering a bid on a cement deal. Arkle had spent the morning traipsing round a building site, being shown a lot of empty space that would one day be filled with glass and girders, maybe with the old man’s cement holding it together. Turned out, he was just making up numbers – there were two serious bidders, and everyone else was scenery. All Arkle needed do was go with the flow, which meant by and by finding himself in a club down some stairs off Brewer Street, the only one among them not drunk. The contractor was happy, because the bigtime bidders were looking competitive, and everybody else was happy because they were on exies, and also because there was a girl under their table. Then a friend of the contractor joined them, and this was Price.
‘Been inside?’ was the first thing he asked Arkle.
Couple of overnighters, Arkle explained: some car crime when he was younger; agg battery too, which had withered and died when witnesses changed their minds. All the stuff Dunstan Senior hadn’t been able cure him of. Something about the club, about it being daylight outside but midnight in, loosed his tongue. ‘It’s the hair, isn’t it?’ he’d asked, meaning it wasn’t: he had no hair. Pointless denying it made him look dangerous. He wouldn’t have shaved it otherwise.
‘The eyes, too.’ Price wasn’t large but acted it, like a cut-rate Joe Pesci. ‘You’ve done institutional. Don’t tell me it was boarding school.’
So Arkle had talked, and Price had listened, and then, after a while, they’d done it the other way round. So when, months later, Bax said, ‘Tell me your better idea,’ Arkle had the details pat. He’d met someone who had this project, and the three of them were perfect for it.
Superior or not, Bax had recognized a plan when he heard one.
Arkle walked home from the yard brooding; lay down in curtained darkness, but didn’t sleep. Bax and Trent had something going on. This was not the proper order of things. Time was, when Arkle had a plan – like that they rob Price: which was genius – they’d say yes, great, do it. When had this changed?
When Baxter married Kay.
After a while he got up, made toast, drank water. Trent was sleeping off last night’s vodka: that or he had a pig in his bedroom. Arkle sat in the kitchen and thought about Kay, and also about the money.
Baxter handled the money, and that was fine, was common sense. Trent wouldn’t have known what to do with it, and Arkle himself – well, delegation. And here was the score: when they had enough money, a sum which kept adjusting upwards, they’d take off somewhere cheap and friendly; somewhere Arkle could practise his crossbow unharassed. Anywhere that laid back would be bound to serve alcohol, so Trent would be okay too. And Baxter could bring Kay. Happy families.
Except Kay didn’t fit so snugly into this scenario, did she?
The toast was ready. He ate it dry. Kay was an odd one. Accident-prone, Trent had said lately: Arkle hadn’t noticed. ‘Why?’ It was possible Trent was more observant than he was, just like it was possible we’d be visited by intelligent life, or the Tories would win an election. Bound to happen one day, but no time soon.
‘You haven’t seen her black eye?’
Arkle hadn’t. Would have quite liked to.
‘She walked into a cupboard. She said.’
She’d said, and maybe that was a cover-up? Maybe Bax had blacked her eye. Argument? Over money, perhaps? And how much money was there to argue about? Not a lot, if you weren’t counting Arkle’s.
He supposed it was obvious, when you got down to it, that Kay knew where Baxter kept the money. Man/wife stuff; Arkle didn’t pretend to be an expert, but Kay would be. When Arkle thought about women the woman he was thinking about was Kay, and he didn’t understand Kay, which meant she was sneaky. And Arkle was older than Baxter, so if Kay confused him, what was she doing to Bax? She knew nothing, Bax said – but she’d been with him in Oxford, when he’d been scouting the layout. She’d gone as background colour, and stayed in the hotel, but in the long run which did you believe – a woman or your instincts? Whatever secrets the three of them used to share, four were sharing now, and if things were wobbling, it was Kay wobbling them. Baxter knew that really – once you added up the details, it was scary how obvious it was. Bax had blacked Kay’s eye. It was a classic cry for help.
Cherchez la femme. Arkle finished his water, and went out looking for the money.
And he might not know about the man/wife stuff, but he knew this much: if you were looking for something a woman helped hide, you had to think sideways. They were devious animals.
Bax and Kay rented a downstairs flat near a supermarket junction; not far from where Kay had grown up, but a drive round the houses all the same. Where Arkle and Trent lived was off the other side of the High Street; beyond the concrete square where they’d hung out as kids. It had been a handy place to congregate: there were toilets where you could trap the unwary, and a flat arena for skateboarding. Arkle had never been much cop on a skateboard, but he’d been good at punching people who were better on a skateboard than him. It was where they’d met Kay, way back when.
She had dark hair and was kind of skinny, and wasn’t there for the ’boarding. Arkle wouldn’t have paid her a second glance if Baxter hadn’t noticed her. Bax was sevent
een, and all the teenage stuff – spots, smells, greasy hair – had passed him by, though they were happening to Trent twice, to maintain their average. Girls looked at Baxter like they couldn’t work out if he was threat or promise, but wouldn’t mind trying. And Bax mostly ignored them, which seemed to be the trick of it.
. . . That was the first time Arkle had seen her. He couldn’t offhand remember the last: within the fortnight, but before she picked up this black eye Trent had noticed.
He drove past the flat, wondering if she was in. Maybe they were both home, Kay wearing Baxter down – doing the maths. The way things were, she got no share at all and Bax got a third. Her way Bax got everything, and she got half of that.
No wonder Bax had hit her. But how long was he going to put up resistance? Women crawled beneath your defences; used logic when you least expected. The three of them had been solid as cement, but now Bax and Trent were whispering in corners. Arkle needed to re-establish the old order before everything crumbled to bits.
Around the houses it was, then. If you wanted to know Kay’s secrets, dig into her past . . . Kenneth Blake’s house was last on the row, just before the drop to the road; he remembered leaning over those railings as a kid, spitting on cars. He didn’t do that now; just parked, got out, looked at the house. A loose gutter rattled as he watched. Through the open side-door, he could see the hedge sprouting like a raggedy monster, planted to stop strangers squeezing past. Except somebody had done that recently; there were bent-back branches, and green leaves littering the passage . . .
He could move quietly when he wanted, Arkle; he could surprise a cat. The man peering through old man Blake’s window wasn’t a cat, but made a peculiar meowing noise anyway when Arkle dropped a hand on his shoulder; pushed a sharp fingernail into his chin’s soft underside. ‘What the fuck’s your game, soldier?’ he asked. And already he could feel it tightening in his belly: that sense of pleasure yet to come; the knowledge that he’d found somebody to play with, without even knowing he’d been looking.
iii
Life was a dangerous business, Zoë reflected, easing past a bottleneck. The accident had happened in the oncoming lane – two cars sat motionless some hundred yards apart; one of them sideways, glassless, its lights punched out; the other concertinaed to what would have been a comedy shape, if it hadn’t involved people. The delay in her lane was caused by drivers slowing down to witness aftermath – police cars, motorbikes; a sense of recently departed ambulances – and like everybody else, Zoë sped up again as soon as she could; partly to put the scene behind her, but mostly to take advantage of the empty road ahead. On motorways, the wisdom went, the dangerous drivers were the ones who drove too slowly. This required shifting definitions of ‘slowly’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘wisdom’, but was too well established to challenge now.
To one side, an angry metal worm of cars sweated out the wait. To the other, shades of green and grey piled into the distance. It was morning, reasonable and fair, though the damage in her wake suggested that for some, the day had come to a shuddering halt. But then, death was always on the case. She remembered a fable about a bird flying through the window of a feasting hall on a winter’s night, then flying out the other side: one bright flash between two eternities of darkness, only one of which was destined to end. It wasn’t a difficult message. Life was the light and the feasting. Death was the dark outside. It didn’t matter how long you lived, the dark was always longer.
So there was little point clinging to the safe side of everything. Survival was a lifetime project, and bound to fail in the long run. Most things had sharp edges, if you used them wrong. Machines were unreliable. People turned nasty, sometimes first chance they got – look at Bob Poland. Even children couldn’t be trusted; were basically walking germ factories, primed for use inside forty-five minutes. And even here, even now, some idiot was leaving a service station with his door not properly closed. Zoë tooted him, then put him out of mind.
She was heading for Totnes, because that was where Price’s thugs hailed from.
‘Tell me about them,’ she’d said last night to Win.
‘It’s not like we’re best mates. I generally wait in the car.’
‘But you met them?’
‘Once or twice. Talked to one of them. If the others are madder than him, I’m happy we’re strangers.’
‘And he’d be . . .?’
‘Arkle.’
‘What’s his first name?’
‘Arkle,’ Win said. ‘What you have to understand is, they’re not your average family.’
She stopped and bought a sandwich in a layby. Of the other customers, the lorry driver was obvious (he had a lorry); salesmen were never difficult to pin down, and the youngish guy, who was tall and acne-splashed, and wore jeans with a blue/white check that had probably looked good in the shop, was definitely a student. That established, she paid them no attention. Zoë was not paranoid, exactly. But she liked to know who was closest at any given moment.
Technically, she reminded herself, she didn’t have to be here. All she had to do was give Sweeney the names, and then all he had to do was give her five grand. Already, she was thinking of it as her money . . .
Win had said: ‘Their old man ran this gravel merchant’s. Been in the family for generations kind of thing. You think there’s money in that?’
‘Probably.’ Unless you were rubbish, of course, though that was pretty much the universal rubric.
‘Except old man Dunstan – that was his name – didn’t have children. So his firm was going down the tubes, as far as the family bit was concerned. Do you have kids?’
‘Not that I know of,’ Zoë said. ‘Price told you this, did he?’
‘Some nights he likes to talk.’ Zoë must have signalled a false understanding, because Win added: ‘In the car, coming home from wherever. Business trips. Says he doesn’t want me dozing off at the wheel.’
‘I can see how that might spoil his evening,’ Zoë agreed. ‘And he talks about these Dunstans?’
‘He likes to think he’s an expert on human nature,’ said Win. ‘Most men think that, don’t they?’
There were probably a couple of realists out there as confused as everybody else, but it was kind of rare to hear it admitted.
‘So anyway, he adopted three boys. To be the sons in Dunstan & Sons. If you can’t beat ’em, fake it, sort of thing.’
‘And one was called Arkle?’
‘Arkle, Baxter and Trent. What he did was, he kept their actual surnames, only he stuck his own on the end.’
‘That’s cold.’
Win shrugged. ‘What I’ve seen of Arkle, it could be arctic, he’d not notice. My boss breaks the law, okay. But he does it for the money.’
‘Whereas Arkle does it for kicks.’
‘Arkle does it because it’s what he does. And if it’s what he’s doing, why should anybody stop him?’
A law unto himself. They were the hardest kind to break.
Zoë said, ‘Sounds like old man Dunstan made some unwise choices on his one-stop shop for progeny.’
‘They weren’t babies when he took them on. They’d been kicked round various foster homes, and God knows what. You hear stories, don’t you?’ Win finished her tea. The cup looked ridiculously small in her hand. ‘The old man died last year. They folded the business about five minutes later. They still use the place, though. There’s an office, like on a building site? One of those cabins, up on scaffolding.’
Dunstan & Sons. A gravel merchant’s. It didn’t sound hard to find.
It had been late when Zoë got home, and the drive from London had left her cross. She ate a half-hearted sandwich, drank a large glass of wine, and went to bed, to be woken half an hour later by a talentless yoyo in the house opposite, murdering an electric guitar. Broken sleep was irreparable in Zoë’s world, so she left her bed, poured more wine, fired up the Internet. She found no mention of Dunstan &Sons. What she did find was a street map of Totnes, which she printed. I
t was handy when decisions were reached with no conscious effort needing to be made.
After that she shut everything down and sat in the dark for a while, waiting in vain for her brain to stop churning. Random thoughts were their own special torture; circulating endlessly, arriving nowhere. Contents under pressure: we should have that tattooed on our foreheads at puberty. Zoë must have slept at last, curled on the sofa, because that’s where she was when she woke.
She drank coffee, showered and dressed, catching herself in the mirror halfway through: black pants, white bra – zebra underwear: something Joe said twenty years before. It was strange how such fragments kept recurring, like shrapnel working its way to the body’s surface years after the wound had apparently healed.
In the car, it occurred to her that it was her last day for use of the Beetle – another reason, if she needed one, for heading off to Totnes now.
Other people’s accidents and sandwich stops apart, she was there before she knew it.
It was a bright day, not long past morning, and the sun caught glass everywhere she looked. To establish her bearings, Zoë headed up the High Street; found herself having one of those near-bodiless experiences in which every detail is brilliant and every surface shines. The wheels on a passing pushchair. The multi-coloured frames on a teenager’s shades. When she crossed the road to examine a bookshop window, and had to wait for a van to pass first, she could have sworn she saw the driver’s eyes flash – a shaven-headed man with a smile tight as a shark’s.
The books were all hardbacked; their titles embossed and glittering. Even as she read them the sun slipped behind cover, and the words faded to drab, cluttered cliché.
Zoë checked her map, though she was good at holding streets in her head. She knew where she was, and where she needed to go. Heading back down the hill, she passed an alternative grocer’s, whose noticeboard she paused to browse: ‘Bleed beautifully with hand-crafted moon pads.’ A surprisingly tasteful illustration went with that. And, ‘Rediscover the traditional art of ear-coning, under a trained therapist.’ What? When she’d finished, she moved on, replaying in her head the rest of her conversation with Win: ‘Where did Price find them anyway, if they live in the West Country?’
