Why We Die

by Mick Herron

‘Once.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It came to an end,’ Zoë said.

  ‘Mine too.’ Katrina raised a hand to her face. ‘He did this to me.’

  ‘So I heard.’

  ‘Have you ever let a man hit you?’

  ‘Let one? No.’

  ‘But it’s happened?’

  ‘I’ve been roughed up,’ said Zoë. ‘But only by strangers.’

  ‘Do you despise me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t have let somebody do this to you.’

  Zoë said, ‘Things have happened to me that I wish hadn’t. I’m not in the business of judging other people’s mistakes.’

  ‘But you judge your own harshly.’

  ‘I try not to make the same one twice.’

  ‘Is that why you said “once” when I asked if you’d been married?’

  ‘I don’t usually think six answers ahead of myself,’ said Zoë. Then added, ‘I’m glad I knew Joe. That part wasn’t a mistake.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He was a private detective.’

  After a while, Katrina said, ‘You are too, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But it wasn’t really me you were looking for.’

  ‘No,’ said Zoë. ‘I was looking for the money.’

  The sitting room’s bay window overlooked the quiet street below. A sofa faced this window, and a standard lamp stood at one end of the sofa; there was an armchair, too, backed into a corner. Other than that, the room’s story mostly spoke of absences – no TV, no bookcase; no art on the walls, though outlines showed where pictures had once hung. A visitor might remark on their removal; might wonder if Zoë’s minimalist mode signalled depression. But depression would have meant leaving everything the way it was. Zoë had simply grown to dislike her pictures, and hadn’t yet found any she liked more. Besides, art was a luxury she couldn’t currently afford.

  A short way down the road was a streetlight, partly obscured by a tree. After dark, orange light threw branch-shadows on Zoë’s walls, and when the wind blew, they thrashed like a make-believe wood. Taken in all, it didn’t seem Zoë’s room lacked for much: it was furnished with weather, and anxious movement.

  None of which was Zoë’s. She sat in the armchair in the corner. Katrina perched on the sofa, at the opposite end to the lamp, legs tucked beneath her. Her face, mottled by bruises, was also splashed by weaving shadows.

  ‘Don’t you ever draw your curtains?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘. . . I’m okay.’

  Tim had left an hour before. He had become mumbly and awkward while Katrina thanked him; had barely remembered to say goodnight to Zoë. Zoë was neither surprised nor distressed by this, but noted it for what it was: a response rooted in Tim’s needs rather than genuine connection. Tim and Katrina had met, by his own account, just once; he had been quite drunk. His reasons for having been in the hotel in the first place remained obscure, though Zoë had her suspicions.

  It was late now – after two – and the closing-time refrain of drunks and sleepless traffic had subsided. Sometimes, the sound of a night train would carry this far; channelled through streets and round houses until it seemed to be coming from an entirely wrong direction, as if trains were running up the Woodstock Road. Given the local transport strategy, that wasn’t impossible. For the moment, though, there were no trains; only the thrumming of rain on glass, and gentle breathing.

  ‘So . . . You went looking for the jewellery money.’

  ‘The man they took it from wanted it back.’

  ‘But you haven’t found it.’

  ‘I found the Dunstans. That was my job.’

  ‘Are you always this controlled?’

  . . . Zoë remembered pounding on the freezer lid, before it turned out to be a freezer. When it had still been a coffin. She said: ‘What will you do now?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘You thought the paper would keep you safe, didn’t you?’

  ‘From Arkle? Yes.’

  ‘Well, there are other hiding places.’

  Katrina took a sip from her glass. ‘What would you do? If you were me?’

  ‘I’m not you.’

  ‘That’s what “if” means.’

  Zoë chewed her lip. This wasn’t what she wanted right now. On the other hand, action involved responsibility. She wouldn’t pretend that saving somebody’s life meant you had to keep on doing so, but she couldn’t turn Katrina out into the rain, either. ‘You haven’t been charged with anything, have you?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Meaning, it’s going to happen.’

  ‘Helen . . . Helen thought it would be a minor charge. Given the circumstances.’

  In dappled orange light, Zoë saw the late-autumn shades of Katrina’s cheek.

  She said, ‘You might not have to worry. The Dunstan brothers could be under arrest by now.’

  ‘For evading the congestion charge?’

  ‘For assaulting your friend. Helen.’

  ‘They hurt her to find me, didn’t they?’

  ‘I think they must have done. I’m sorry.’

  Katrina said, ‘What if they killed her?’

  ‘Killed her?’

  ‘Yes. If she’s dead, who’s left to tell stories? Jonno?’

  Jonno was the kid who’d been lying in the hallway.

  ‘Because once Jonno opened the door, that was it. A goldfish would make a better witness. At least their memories last a couple of seconds.’ She paused. ‘As far as the police are concerned, I just legged it.’

  Zoë said, ‘You’ve given this some thought.’

  ‘It’s a pressing issue.’

  Maybe that was a train now, off in the distance. Trains at night were a melancholy sound. They rendered every Country song Zoë’d ever heard redundant.

  Katrina said, ‘I know Arkle. He’s an accident waiting to happen to whoever’s nearest.’ She looked up sharply, but it was only the wind, the rain; the same imaginary train Zoë had heard. She relaxed. ‘He’ll happen to me. First chance he gets.’

  ‘So what do you want to do? Run?’

  ‘Is that what you’d do?’

  Full circle. This was the question Zoë hadn’t answered yet. She chose her words carefully: ‘I’d make sure he couldn’t hurt me.’

  ‘Not the same thing, is it?’

  ‘Running’s a serious business. It’s not like the police’ll think, Well, she was probably innocent . . .’

  Katrina said, ‘My husband’s dead. My father’s losing his mind. What’s left of my family are who I’m scared of. I don’t care how serious it is. The alternative’s not a barrel of laughs either.’

  ‘My specialty’s finding people, not helping them disappear.’

  ‘But I bet you’ve got contacts.’

  Zoë didn’t reply. She was thinking about Joe’s filing cabinets, in which he’d kept a record of everyone he’d ever met: bookies, off-duty cops, civil servants with marital problems, and the boys and girls causing them. He’d known ex- and future cons, without ever feeling the need to judge, and maybe because of this, his cabinets had grown fuller and fuller . . . He’d never been much cop as a detective, but if he’d opened a dating agency, he’d have been quids in.

  He’d known a boy who hotwired cars and a man who could finesse locks, and he’d paid for lessons from both, without staggering success.

  He’d known a woman who kidnapped cats, then waited for flyers to appear on local lamp-posts, offering rewards.

  And he’d known a man who recycled passports, suitably adjusted, at scary prices. For the right customer, he’d throw in credit ratings, driving licences, NI numbers; probably old bus tickets and pocket lint too. Zoë had never met him. But Joe had his name, number and address; and had probably been his best friend once, for half an hour.

  So yes: she had contacts.

  She said, ‘Supposing I did. Where would
you go?’

  ‘Out of the country.’

  ‘That takes paperwork.’

  ‘Will you help me?’

  There was a bad feeling nagging at Zoë; one hard to push aside. Over the past few days, she’d been dumped in a freezer and nearly flattened by a van, while harmless Tim Whitby had been bullied by a crossbow-wielding maniac. Something had happened to Helen Coe, and a kid named Jonno had been left in a heap. Not to mention Baxter Dunstan, who wouldn’t be feeling pain again. All of it revolving round this woman in front of her. Maybe it would be an idea not to get involved further.

  She wasn’t sure how to say any of this, but a short answer occurred. She would say No. That covered the bases. Zoë was good at saying no, and it was an answer that rarely got her into trouble. She finished her water, and looked up.

  Katrina said, ‘The money from the robbery? All the robberies?’

  Zoë nodded.

  Katrina said, ‘I know where it is.’

  ‘. . . Right,’ said Zoë.

  iii

  Tim, alone in his sitting room, paced back and forth, back and forth, waiting for the background noise to start again.

  Background noise meant anything – cars grinding to a halt nearby, or grinding to a start; kids laughing their way to a party, or crying their way back. Anything to distract him from the unreal photoplay of the last few days.

  Background noise meant things happening elsewhere, instead of cluttering up his head . . .

  But it was late, and unlikely that real-world distractions would turn up soon. His car had been the last to disturb his street’s silence; his door the last to close. Anything in the wider distance was smothered by rain, which no longer counted as noise. Once inside, the first thing Tim had done had been pour himself a drink. It would also have been the second, if drinking the first hadn’t intervened. Then he removed his shoes and coat, put the light on. It would be wise not to start drinking now. Two didn’t count. His eyes were strained and dry from night-driving; he was wired and tense, and a strange bubble in his chest kept threatening to burst . . . Tim dimly recalled this feeling from long ago, his first year of courting Emma; a bad week during which she had told him she wasn’t sure they should see each other any more. For days, he had harboured an alien life form; one he was desperate not to give birth to, for that would be to admit its reality. In the end, it had withered and died during one tearstained phonecall. And this . . . This was similar. Not the same, but similar. And so, for the first time since her death, he thought about Emma in relation to the way he was feeling, rather than the other way around.

  But that didn’t register. What did was a simple fact: that he had decided to do something – to find a woman he’d met in a hotel, and help her out of the difficulty she was in – and had achieved it. It wasn’t just that he felt a sense of accomplishment. It was that he felt anything at all, other than empty, hungover or angry; the constant soundtrack of his recent months.

  Over his head, the light flickered. Upstairs, a board creaked. In a movie, these would be signs that all was not right; that what had been accomplished was a false ending. Arkle Dunstan was still out there, which was no way to finish a story. But life followed untidier arcs, and left narrative strands ungathered. Lights flickered in response to local conditions. The electric pulse beat weaker at night. And boards creaked; houses rustled; everything was acted on by everything else . . .

  Tim, for instance. Tim sipped his drink. Tim, like everybody, lived life buffeted by pointless information; a ceaseless update on events he had no chance of influencing, along with intimate details about people in whom he had no interest. ‘News’ happened elsewhere, only occasionally scratching reality . . . Once, Tim’s picture had appeared in a trade newspaper. He couldn’t, at this moment, recall why. And Emma’s death had been reported, though he’d been too untogether to register the details. But it would have been a minor paragraph only, inhabiting that border between the human and the statistical – the shading of a woman into a number; the Xth fatality on the roads this year. Otherwise, Tim had never troubled the public eye. It had been strange, then, to open his paper and find a story in which he felt implicated, even if tangentially. Katrina’s photograph had floated from the page. The facts had taken a while to focus, but death, stab and fatal had figured. This was the woman who’d tried to tell him her husband was beating her up. He had done nothing for her, and this had happened . . . In his mind, it was hard not to hear the word therefore sliding into place in that sentence. He had done nothing for her, and therefore this had happened.

  Pacing was not conducive to drinking, he discovered. Pacing while drinking created spillage. He set the glass down; would have set himself down, but was too nervy, too agitated, too alive. So kept pacing: striding forwards, thinking backwards; recreating the grab-bag of reasons he’d had for returning to Totnes, looking for Katrina – guilt, surprise, uselessness, alcohol, worry, excitement. All these, plus the sense of having got something wrong; of having missed a cue or turned away at a crucial moment, as if life were a spectator sport, and a moment’s inattention meant you’d missed the drop kick, the dropped catch. None of which differed from everybody’s feeling about their everyday life, every day. But not everyone got to read about the consequences in the paper.

  Out loud he said, ‘This time, I got it right.’ His voice felt thick in his mouth.

  It was funny to think he’d worried about skiving off work. Not the crippled-by-indecision worry of the previous week – he was going, and that was that – but worry, nevertheless; an apprehension that he was storing up problems he’d have to deal with later. And then it had occurred to him, with the suddenness of a light going on, that they knew, of course – of course they knew. His colleagues, his staff: all of them knew his wife had died; that eight months was not a long time; that grief was not only embedded in Tim’s life, but was still rubbing away at the surface, altering texture, appearance, colour: everything. And all were human, and remained involved in the emotional network her death had loosed him from. So he could say ‘I won’t be coming in for a few days,’ and their only response would be a sympathetic murmur . . . This was how things worked, among the kind and reasonable. It was how life answered death. And besides, it didn’t truly involve dishonesty. If Emma hadn’t died, none of this would be happening. None of it would be happening to Tim Whitby, anyway.

  So he had returned to Totnes, shovelling from his mind as he drove the image of a shaven-headed maniac with a crossbow in a gravel yard . . . Tim had little doubt Arkle Dunstan would have shot him, if not for Zoë Boehm. Not to kill him. (Probably not to kill him.) But to see him squeal and run . . . What Tim had found more frightening than the crossbow was the pleasure in Arkle’s eyes when he’d picked the crossbow up, as if this were the only connection he cared to make: one that rendered whoever was nearest a target. Tim guessed a lot of cats had gone missing round Arkle Dunstan’s childhood home. So Tim’s plan, inasmuch as he had one, boiled down to this: stay out of Arkle’s way. And as he’d formulated it, he’d felt a long unfamiliar tug at his heart, or some other useful organ; that fish-hook jerk that pulls you back from sleep. Not fear, but excitement. There had been a reason he hadn’t died in that hotel room, and even if came with crossbows and blunt, bald-headed threat, it beat the stasis of these past months. Because it also involved apples that bounced out of nowhere; and a hurt woman in a hotel bar, who had looked to him as if he might help. If nothing else, he’d found out this much: he was worth shooting, and he was worth saving from being shot. However you added the two, it came to more than worthless.

  Another noise from overhead interrupted him: a sound both familiar and unwelcome – a rattling, scratching disturbance; it took Tim a moment to pin it down. The roof. There was a loose slate on the roof, and when the wind hit a certain angle it worried it, trying to prise it out with no other tool than its own blustery nothingness. Perhaps the slate would survive the night; perhaps not. Either way – Tim made a mental note – he’d get around
to fixing it soon. Perhaps next weekend.

  . . . When he’d arrived in Totnes, after dark, he had parked near Katrina’s father’s house. He couldn’t think where else she’d fetch up – news reports indicated she’d been released, but Tim didn’t think her likely to return to the marital home, which was, anyway, in need of a new form of address. Circumstances had rendered ‘marital home’ Orwellian in its incongruity. It was now the murder flat, the death location; a starter home for widows. He’d been parked a while before what should have been his first observation struck him – that the Dunstans’ van sat a short way down the road . . .

  Staying put wasn’t an act of courage. Fact was, Tim was afraid that starting his car would attract attention . . . It occurred to him that, last Wednesday, Arkle hadn’t even been pissed off. Firing his crossbow at strangers was Arkle in neutral. Since then, his brother had been killed. This wasn’t someone whose attention Tim hungered to attract.

  Thoughts like this only took you so far, and in the end left you where you started: behind the wheel of a parked car, watching a house whose front windows were dark, but shone with the hint of lights round the back. Tim unpeeled his fingers from the steering wheel. Somebody sneaked down the passage by the side of the house: Katrina. She was out of sight before he’d decided it hadn’t been. Too solid. In his mind, Katrina had assumed an ethereal quality not entirely consistent with the details his memory had processed: Matisse-print dress; healthy hair; autumnal bruise carefully powdered over . . . Jesus, enough. It hadn’t been Katrina because she looked too big; she moved differently. It was another while before things had started happening.

  First, Arkle appeared in the street, looked up, looked down, then returned inside, to re-emerge moments later with somebody shorter, his face bandaged like the invisible man’s. They got in their van and drove off. Tim’s fingers had stuck to the wheel again, and sweat had broken out over his upper body . . . But Arkle hadn’t seen him; Arkle’s tail-lights were turning the corner, and would be down the hill any moment. Tim wondered what had happened to the woman. Soon, when he could trust his legs, he was going to find out . . . When he looked up, another man was heading past. Whether he’d come out of the house, Tim didn’t know, and he’d vanished into shadow before Tim got a good look.