Why We Die

by Mick Herron

  He said, without apology, ‘That’s how it works.’

  She was remembering a children’s game, Murder in the Dark, in one of whose variations the designated detective asks everyone the same questions over and over. Whoever gives inconsistent answers was the murderer.

  ‘I understand.’

  He bent and picked a folded newspaper from the floor, then collected what had been lying underneath it. ‘It seems the guardian of the free press forgot something.’ He showed her Helen Coe’s palm-sized dictaphone. ‘Wouldn’t want her to waste her batteries.’

  He turned it off.

  Coe was spitting feathers by the time the policeman left: who did he think he was? (He thought he was the police.) Whose story was this anyway? (It was Katrina’s.) And wasn’t it way past lunchtime?

  Jonno already had his jacket on; was already out of the door.

  ‘How cooperative were you?’ Helen asked.

  ‘You weren’t listening?’

  ‘You heard the man. He wanted to speak to you alone.’

  And to be fair, when the policeman had checked, neither Helen nor Jonno were at the keyhole.

  Katrina said, ‘I answered his questions.’

  ‘The Chronicle’s paying for an exclusive on this.’

  Katrina stared at her.

  ‘Yeah, all right. Can’t blame me for getting irritated.’ Helen Coe ran fingers through her hair, in case it was settling down. ‘It seems we’ve spent a lot of time talking, and nothing much gets said.’

  ‘Maybe you’re asking the wrong questions,’ Katrina told her.

  ‘Maybe you’re not answering them properly.’

  Katrina didn’t have an answer for that, true. She said nothing.

  Helen Coe asked, ‘Why did you marry him?’

  ‘Why does anybody get married?’

  ‘Try not to look on this as a conversation, Katrina. Try to think of it as an opportunity to get your side across.’

  ‘He won’t be putting his side now, will he?’

  ‘There’s people’ll do that for him.’

  A thought occurred to her. ‘Are you on my side, Helen?’

  After a moment, Helen said, ‘This is my job.’

  ‘What about the Chronicle? Is the Chronicle on my side?’

  ‘Of course. Now, always and forever.’

  ‘Your apprentice has gone for pizza. You can tell me the truth.’

  ‘You’re not a stupid woman, dear, so don’t pretend to be. We’re a newspaper. Whose side we’re on depends on how many copies we’re selling.’

  ‘So long as we both know where we stand.’

  ‘Good. So. When did he start hitting you?’

  A question like any other, from a list to be completed.

  ‘Katrina?’

  ‘Not till after we married.’

  ‘That right?’

  ‘You think I’d have married him if I’d known he would hit me?’

  ‘I don’t know. When was the first time?’

  Katrina glazed over. The past was to be looked at darkly. You did not easily start turning stones when you knew that under one of them, something ugly hid.

  She said, ‘It was quite soon after. Soon after we were married. I forgot to do something, something really stupid. I forgot to pay the paper bill. Which meant one of us had to go out again, though we’d both been out already . . .’

  The windowpane rattled at a gust of wind. Fat raindrops pattered on the glass.

  ‘I’d have gone myself,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think it was that big a deal.’

  After a moment, Helen asked, ‘Where did he hit you?’

  Katrina touched her cheek. Purple or blue; black or crimson. What is your favourite colour?

  ‘Jesus,’ said Helen Coe. She stood, and noticed she’d been sitting on her dictaphone. Perhaps it had been an accident she’d left it there, thought Katrina. Either way, she switched it on now. To celebrate the event, the pair fell silent.

  Tick tick tick. Tock tock tock. In a matter of weeks, the trees across the road would have scattered their leaves on the pavements; making an untidy slippery mess; choking and gagging the storm drains. Puddles would flood the kerbs, while the grass behind the railings grew brown, and tried to dig its way back inside the earth. All as a way of underlining that time went on, regardless of what you did with it. But Katrina would be long departed before this came to pass. She hoped.

  ‘Did you tell anyone?’

  ‘Then? No.’

  ‘How about later?’

  ‘Only much later. And it was nobody important.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t remember. And I didn’t really tell him, anyway. It was just . . . We were talking. I think he might have guessed.’

  Helen said, ‘This really isn’t going to work unless you start being a little clearer.’

  ‘It was in a hotel bar in Oxford. His name was Tim. Bax was . . . out on business. We got talking. I had a bruise, not as bad as this, but . . . He couldn’t not notice.’

  ‘And you told him your husband did it?’

  ‘No. But I think he guessed.’

  He might have guessed. He had seemed sympathetic; the kind of man who might have seen a little further than his own ends required . . . On the other hand, he had turned out to be very drunk. Not noisy, stupid, scene-making drunk, but bottom-of-a-deep-dark-hole drunk, and unlikely to clamber out on his own. Perhaps, once his clouds had cleared, he’d remember their conversation. But she wouldn’t bet on it.

  ‘What about friends?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Didn’t you tell anybody else?’

  ‘Everybody I know knows Baxter. Knew him.’ Tenses were dangerous: now and then they came out wrong. ‘I told some people I’d walked into doors.’ Which was what everybody said when they’d picked up extracurricular bruising. It was part of the social code, a notch above We must get together really soon.

  ‘Did his brothers know?’

  Katrina said, ‘Arkle’s just barely aware the world keeps turning when he’s asleep. Trent . . . Trent knew. I think he knew.’

  Trent had seen her once, with a bruise in place. She was reasonably certain, anyway, that he had seen her, while sober enough to know what he was seeing.

  Helen was pacing the room again. Downstairs, the door opened and closed: that would be Jonno, back with the pizzas. The thought of eating – especially of eating pizza – filled Katrina with disgust. Lately, nothing but takeaway food. Her digestive system must be starting to resemble an overstuffed binliner.

  To the window; back again. It was Katrina who was unspilling secrets; Helen Coe who was agitated and unhappy.

  ‘Why did you stay?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘I suppose you’d have left.’

  ‘After I’d nailed his balls to the ironing board.’

  Katrina laughed: a short sharp shock that startled both of them.

  ‘I’m not joking, dear. You stay with them, you give them licence to do it again.’

  ‘Is this a new phenomenon to you?’

  ‘What, he beats me because he loves me? Of course not.’

  ‘Because you seem to have trouble comprehending it.’

  ‘Maybe that’s because you’re an intelligent woman. Too intelligent to fall for that bullshit.’

  ‘You think it’s an IQ issue?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. But I’d put a man’s lights out before I let him hit me twice.’

  Katrina said, ‘Your point being?’

  And up the stairs and into the room came Jonno. ‘Food’s on the table,’ he said. Neither woman replied. ‘Yeah, well,’ he added, and went back the way he came.

  Once his footsteps had disappeared downstairs, the only sound in the room was the humming of the bored dictaphone.

  ‘I suppose,’ Helen said after a while, ‘he didn’t exactly get away with it, did he?’

  Another squall of wind, and the outside world turned to water.

  Chapter Seven

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  The rain, already hard, redoubled its efforts, and for five minutes bounced off pavements, windows, rooftops, like the trailer for an environmental-damage movie. From the shelter of a shop awning Helen Coe waited until it eased, thinking of this as London weather as opposed to any other kind, which made her wonder if she’d been here too long. It was still steadily raining, though less torrentially, when she moved on.

  Her flat was three bus stops from the Chronicle house and boasted a canal view, though you’d have needed a periscope. At the corner shop she picked up milk, bread, teabags and washing-up liquid, wishing she’d sent Jonno out for them earlier. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Jonno; more that she regarded it a duty to make his apprenticeship unpleasant. To do otherwise would be to waste her experience. These thoughts carried her the last hundred yards; where, flimsy white plastic bag in one hand, she pawed free her keys with the other, and let herself into the building. She lived on the first floor, and had small excuse for using the lift. A small excuse, though, was all she needed. Somebody she didn’t recognize stepped out as she stepped in, and for the time it took the machinery to deliver her to her landing, she endured the masculine smell he’d left behind: aftershave and hair gel, on its way to being swamped by pubs and smoke.

  In her kitchen, she unpacked her purchases; transferred the milk to the fridge, left the rest on the table. The kitchen wasn’t large, and unput-away groceries made it seem smaller very quickly. Helen coped with this by not minding. She poured a medium-enormous gin and tonic, then moved into her sitting room, draped her raincoat over a chair and sank into the sofa. The day’s newspapers lay stacked beside her. Ignoring them, she turned the radio on, and caught the end of a report about an increase in the congestion charge, followed by a brief uninformative item about the discovery of a woman’s body somewhere in the West Country. Interesting set of priorities, she reflected, turning it off again. The same stories were always happening: only their endings altered. Unknown women were murdered, and their bodies dumped in the West Country. Others fought back . . . Helen liked the idea that Katrina Blake be recognized for what she was: a victim who’d switched roles. She even liked the way Katrina seemed determined not to cooperate, as if she felt soiled by what had happened to her. Baxter Dunstan might have deserved what he’d got, but once you took pleasure in that, you were no better than the bastards of Al Qaeda or Abu Ghraib.

  She took a large swallow of her G&T, then got up and rifled her raincoat pockets. From one, she took out her dictaphone, and ejected a tape. On this, she’d recorded the afternoon session with Katrina. I’d put a man’s lights out before I let him hit me twice, she had said, and wondered now if that were true. Scaring a man: Helen could manage that – look at Jonno. But there was a crucial difference operating here; the difference between men who hit women and men who didn’t. Statistics dictated that Helen had met more than a few of the former, but all had pretended to be the latter in her presence. And what would she have done if any had dropped the pretence? By its nature, it wasn’t an offence that took place in public. It had the dropped shutters of a relationship shielding it; it happened behind the carefully constructed doors of intimacy. Is this a new phenomenon to you? Because you seem to have trouble comprehending it. No; she’d known it happened. But knowing something and experiencing it were galaxies apart, and in hoping she’d react in a certain way, she was echoing the thoughts of a generation of men who’d never know what stripes they’d have shown, had they been called upon to march to war.

  Ultimately, though, you dealt with what happened to you. Anything that didn’t, you filed under Pending, and forgot about.

  This first cassette, she put on the table next to her glass. Then she foraged in another pocket, and found a second.

  She inserted it into the recorder, pressed rewind, finished her drink, and poured another. Then dimmed the light, and crossed to the window. Rain pattered the glass, while traffic splashed about on the road below. Because, like everywhere else, the parking here was criminal, an illegal amount of it was taking place on the pavement opposite. Helen didn’t run a car. When she needed to be somewhere, she used a minicab. When she was in a hurry, she rang ahead and explained she’d be late.

  Yawning, letting the curtain drop, she went back to her seat.

  Another slug of G&T, and she took her glasses off; let her surroundings dim to a cozy fuzz. The room felt warm and private; detached from the world of men. Odd thoughts to be having when she was about to violate the privacy of others, but that was pretty much her job description. She pressed play. After a moment, the recorder broadcast the noise of somebody bending to pick a folded newspaper from the floor, and collecting what had been lying beneath it. It seems the guardian of the free press forgot something. What the voice was referring to was the recorder now broadcasting its words. This felt a little postmodern. Wouldn’t want her to waste her batteries.

  She wondered if he’d really been so naïve as to believe the room wasn’t wired for sound; then found other things to think about as the tape unpacked its meaning.

  Dusk had fallen, and the lights in the houses across the canal made everything look warm, comfortable and well fed. In the van, however, all was a grumbly mess. Trent would have killed for a drink, and Arkle was in that high-pitched state he reached when he went too long without sleep. This involved talking too much and tapping his fingers on available surfaces.

  Earlier, Trent had done as Arkle wanted; had crossed Whatever Street – the road with the park on one side, behind big black railings – and had rung Helen Coe’s bell, then waited, like, eighteen months for someone to answer it. Helen Coe, who arrived on sticks, had turned out to be old, really old: a granny – very nearly a mummy – and definitely not the Coe they were after. But a kneejerk response to old ladiness kept him hovering on her doorstep anyway, mouth flapping as he unwrapped seven plausible reasons for bothering her, none of them remotely intelligible once they’d been scrambled by his damaged mouth, then processed by her malfunctioning ears. In the end, when she’d looked ready to pass from bewildered to downright terrified, he’d turned and walked back to the van; had got in and been driven away.

  Arkle said, ‘Course, that would only really work if we had two vehicles.’

  By the clock on the dash, it was an actual eleven minutes before Trent worked out what he was on about.

  But now here they were; the third of the unknown quantities. There were lights on but the building was divided into flats, so that wasn’t a clue as such; more an unnecessary confusion. Rain drummed on the van’s roof. A man walked past, with slow enough steps that he might have been a policeman, or possibly a drug dealer. Or both: you heard stories. But he walked on by.

  Arkle stopped tapping, and examined his knuckles instead. ‘If you had to eat one of your own fingers, which would you choose?’

  Trent tried to think of something to say – anything. But all that happened was that rain kept falling; while over the road, the same lights stayed on in the same windows.

  Being in the van when it rained was like sitting in a tin can being shot at.

  Arkle said, ‘Where are we, anyway?’

  Trent showed him on the map.

  Arkle said, ‘Where are we, anyway?’

  ‘Back there,’ Trent said, pointing, ‘is the Angel Islington.’

  ‘That one of the blue ones?’

  Now a woman walked past with a small, black, snuffly dog. Arkle mimed aiming his crossbow at it; fired an invisible bolt through the windscreen. He was remembering the apple, and how he’d hit it on the bounce: a reaction shot God would have been proud of. He’d raised the subject with Trent a few times (sixteen). He raised it again now.

  Trent said, ‘Wish I’d been there,’ feeling like he had been.

  Arkle said, ‘What’s that?’

  Another dogwalker, thought Trent. Another office worker arriving home; another cleaner heading out to scrub offices. But he looked anyway, because Arkle expected a response when he voiced a thought, and
Arkle didn’t mean someone else was coming down the road; he meant someone was standing by a window.

  Second floor. She was framed by background light, and had mad grey hair and thick glasses; wore a tatty green cardigan which bunched into tufts around the shoulders. Even as Trent watched he saw her yawn, and remembered not believing it the first time.

  ‘That’s her,’ he said.

  Arkle looked at him, waiting for the follow-up.

  But all Trent said was ‘It’s her’ again, and the pair sat watching Helen Coe drop the curtain, while rain hammered the roof as if what it really wanted to do was pound their heads.

  I remember a cold morning. I remember a hailstorm last April. It was late in the year, but there aren’t any rules, are there? He’d just washed the car when this hailstorm left little powdery marks all over it. He hit me that day. He said it was for something I’d done, but it was because he’d had to wash the car twice.

  This voice, this tape, this recording Helen had made – it barely sounded like dialogue. It was simply a given; a situation trying to make itself understood. It included the odd question, the odd prompt, but the policeman might as well not have been there. This was Katrina, talking to herself. Or talking to an empty room, rather, which just happened to contain a policeman.

  He never used to care where he hit me. When you read about men . . . When you hear about men who hit women, hit their wives, they’re careful to do it so no one’ll know. You see women in supermarkets with smiles and nice haircuts, who can’t reach the top shelf because their ribs are taped up. But he’d slap me in the face. I had black eyes. He loosed a tooth once. I’d tell people I walked into doors. Some of them even believed me. And you know what? Even the ones who didn’t, they never asked. Never said anything. You see, if it happens to you, it’s bad. But if it keeps happening, it’s your fault.

  This woman, downstairs. The journalist. She wouldn’t let it happen to her. You only have to look at her to know that. Or at least . . . You only have to look to know she believes that. And belief is not something you can argue with. What people perceive about themselves, they assume is hard-won knowledge. Who knows them better than they do? It’s hard to accept that things don’t always work like that, that you’re not always the person you think you are. Something happens, and it takes part of you away. And then you’re frightened in case it happens again. And when it does, you’re more frightened, because you’re not sure how much of you is left.