Why We Die

by Mick Herron

  He yawned suddenly. Hugely, in fact. Stopped pacing long enough to finish his wine and wonder about pouring another, but that would make three, and he’d decided not to drink tonight . . . He’d sit instead, while remembering what happened next: how he’d gone into the back yard, to hear muffled thumping from, he’d thought at first, the hearse . . . Tim didn’t believe in ghosts, but it was instructive how ineffectual lack of belief was in the face of spooky thumping.

  Except it had come from the freezer, not the hearse, and when he opened its lid, he found the woman who’d rescued him from Arkle with an apple. He hadn’t recognized her sneaking in: memory, in fact, was shaky all over. ‘I thought you were a redhead,’ he told her later.

  ‘Yeah, I get that a lot,’ Zoë said.

  . . . And then Tim must have slept, because light was creeping through the curtains, and the rain’s soft hiss had been replaced by proper noises; the hum of life. The toy-town rattle of a milkfloat. His bladder ached and his mouth felt rusty. Misplaced priority had him switch the kettle on before rushing to the bathroom; after which he checked upstairs for – what, exactly? Intruders? A dim recollection of nocturnal rustling nudged him. Now it was safe, he was making sure. How smart was that? But he did it anyway, and of course both rooms were empty . . . There was a loose slate overhead, that was all. Feeling ridiculous, he returned downstairs. How could Arkle Dunstan have traced him anyway? They’d not been followed last night. Zoë had been sure of that.

  He spooned coffee into a mug, opened the fridge, and found no milk. Toast, he thought. This was the way the mind worked: leapfrogging the immediate problem. Lack of milk was the immediate problem, but he’d already heard the float; there’d be a pint on the doorstep. How could Arkle Dunstan have traced him anyway? Out of nowhere, a smell arrived: a damp mouldiness of the sort that lurks on beaches. Wet sand . . . Tim shook his head to clear the image, but it persisted. Wet sand piled up in pens whose wood had rotted, spilling their contents over the concrete ground.

  Passing through on your way where?

  Oh, uh . . . St Ives.

  From?

  Oxford.

  . . . What’s your name?

  And this, too, he had answered. How could Arkle Dunstan have traced him? Because Tim had given him all the information necessary . . .

  He reached out on automatic for his coffee cup, to find it held dry granules: duh. He added water from the kettle, then reached for the milk. Duh. There was milk on the doorstep, though . . . So Arkle Dunstan could have traced him, and it was important to let Katrina – let Zoë – know this, but what was more important was, it hadn’t happened yet. First thing first, which was fetching the milk. As he passed through the hall, he heard the slate rattling on the roof again: next weekend he’d fix that. It was a bright morning. The front path was five foot long, and spiders’ webs decorated the hedge that bordered it. From Tim’s angle of vision sunlight caught the overnight rain that clung to their threads, turning the hedge to lace and latticework; a dream of somebody else’s wedding. A milk bottle seemed to hover in front of him. He blinked. A milk bottle hovered in front of him. Wrapped round it was a hand, attached to an arm, attached to Arkle Dunstan.

  ‘Looking for something?’ Arkle said.

  iv

  It was late when they got to bed. Even so, Zoë didn’t sleep right away. She’d put Katrina in the spare bedroom; had to shepherd her around stacked boxes, unhung pictures, Joe’s filing cabinets; had nearly apologized for the mess. Now she lay staring at the ceiling, sums of money dancing round her head. Katrina knew how to put her hands on the Dunstans’ treasure; the cash Win’s boss had converted their stolen jewellery into. Zoë had flirted with this possibility once already, and it hadn’t seemed realistic. But this edged closer to the plausible, and she couldn’t deny the money would be useful . . . A lifesaver. The only downside was, it was stolen money. Well, not the only downside. Others were that the Dunstans wanted it too, and that Arkle had a crossbow.

  ‘You mean, they don’t know where it is?’

  ‘Baxter was in charge of the money,’ Katrina had told her.

  Because that was how they’d done things: each of the brothers had their role to play.

  ‘No wonder they came looking for you,’ Zoë said.

  ‘Don’t imagine they’ve given up yet.’

  Round and round her head it went, like tigers round a tree. At length she must have been sucked into sleep, because she was wandering a corridor which kept turning corners without arriving anywhere. Overhead lights flickered nervously, while drawers were opened and closed, almost – but not quite – noiselessly. Electrics fizzed and plumbing burped. Somebody stepped into her room and Zoë woke with a start. Katrina stood by her bed, a cup of coffee in her hand. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’

  Creeping into her room wasn’t the best way to achieve this.

  Zoë sat up and took the proffered cup. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Just gone eight.’

  Which meant she’d had about four hours’ sleep. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Sorry. I couldn’t sleep. I was worried.’

  ‘About whatsername,’ Zoë said. Katrina’s brow furrowed. ‘Helen Coe,’ Zoë remembered.

  ‘Yes. There must be someone we can call.’

  ‘Must be. Not from here, though.’ To stop another brow-furrowing, she added, ‘I don’t want my number on anybody’s callback. Not while people are looking for you.’

  ‘Oh.’ Katrina sat on the end of Zoë’s bed. Zoë moved her feet to make room. ‘I’m not too good at this.’

  ‘I’m not an expert myself,’ said Zoë. The coffee was too hot. Probably be non-supportive to mention this. ‘Look, go and lie down. I’ll get dressed and find out what I can.’ Which would not be much, and nothing good. Pretending to rub her eyes awake, she squeezed them shut instead; mentally replaying moments on a rainy road in the city last night – she’d known what Arkle Dunstan was looking for; felt certain there’d be no good news of Helen Coe. But what could she have done to stop the bad things happening? Fragments assembled in her mind, and curled into excuses. I climbed a wall. I rescued Katrina. Which was all very well, and might be a comfort to Helen Coe. If she was in any shape to receive it.

  ‘I can do it.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ Her response to having somebody in her flat was to want to leave it. She meant nothing personal by this, she would say if ever asked.

  She banished Katrina, showered and dressed. Afterwards, she spent some time with Joe’s filing cabinets, then went online and collected phone numbers. In between, she made more coffee. Things weren’t always better with coffee, but they were reliably worse without it. Then she warned, or perhaps just asked, Katrina to stay inside, and left for the nearest phone booth, a few streets away.

  Not far, but she wasn’t there before her mobile rang. She leaned on a railing to answer it. Mobile phones had led to an alleged increase in brain cancers and tumours of the head, and a verifiable increase in people not looking where they’re bloody going. Zoë made a practice of coming to a halt before engaging in conversation with an absent other.

  ‘Zoë Boehm.’

  ‘Wonders never cease. Your phone’s switched on.’

  It was true she’d had it turned off lately, because she’d been avoiding Jeff, who might still wonder where his car was. But this morning she’d reactivated it, in case Tim called. As Katrina said, the Dunstans wouldn’t stop looking. Anything might happen yet.

  But it wasn’t Tim, it was Win – the pale babysoft driver with lips like roses and buzz-cut hair; all of it perched on the body of a pro-wrestler. Even bounced off a signal tower, her voice came over like a speech bubble. ‘I thought we had a deal.’

  ‘I know you did,’ Zoë said.

  ‘My boss has been trying to call the Dunstans.’ There was a sameness to the conversation already. This was how it was going to be: Win would carry on saying whatever she had to say, and nothing Zoë added would make the slightest difference. ‘Can’t get an
answer. Like they’ve fallen off the planet.’

  ‘Perhaps they’ve gone on holiday.’

  ‘It’s as if they’re deliberately avoiding him. The way you’ve been avoiding me.’

  ‘Win. Win?’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘There’s always a first time. Win, whatever you thought we agreed the other evening in the café, we didn’t. Can you follow that?’

  Win paused. ‘You know what I think?’

  Zoë shook her head. Behind the railing was a children’s playground, and though there were no children about, there was playful movement all the same: swings swung gently in the wind, and the roundabout creaked as it inched backwards and forwards over the same two degrees. There was a slide too, and a small smudged plastic horse or something, mounted on a thick spring; the only toy in evidence of which there’d been no direct equivalent in Zoë’s childhood playgrounds. The horse, if that’s what it was, was blue, and –

  ‘Zoë?’

  ‘. . . What do you think, Win?’

  ‘I think now would be a good time to check out their place. The Dunstans. While they’re elsewhere.’

  ‘Not answering your phone doesn’t mean you’re somewhere else. I’ve had mine switched off, and I haven’t been anywhere.’

  ‘But yours is a mobile,’ Win reminded her. ‘You can be anywhere whether you’re answering or not.’

  Dream-logic was nothing Zoë wanted to dispute. ‘Win, I’m expecting a call. We’ll continue this some other time.’

  ‘You’re not going after the money yourself, are you?’ Something in that cartoon bubble carried the weight of the body it came from. This would not be a good idea was its undertow. ‘You wouldn’t do that, would you?’

  ‘It’s stolen money, Win.’

  ‘That’s often the best kind.’

  ‘You’ve been driving cars for the wrong man too long. People die over that kind of cash.’

  ‘People die anyway,’ said Win. ‘Money’s as good a reason as any.’

  ‘I’m about to go into a tunnel,’ Zoë said, and broke the connection. She turned her phone off, put it in her pocket; walked on to the post office.

  But when she reached it she kept walking; went as far as the bookshop before turning down a short road ending at a wall. Making this call from her mobile didn’t matter. Harold Sweeney already had her number; besides, his were stored in her Nokia, not in her head. She rang the shop first, and got the same nothing as last time . . . The image it conjured was the same, too: a rotary phone rattling on a dusty counter, while junk mail piled up behind a locked door, and brittle sunlight chiselled through flaws in the metal shutters. There was a certain bleak romanticism here, but it didn’t encourage Harold to answer. After a while Zoë gave up, and tried his home number instead.

  She wasn’t expecting a response. Why was she calling then? Because you tried all the doors; when you were looking for something, you kept opening doors until you found it. That it was always in the last place you looked was one of those irritating universals you had to put up with . . . These past days, when Zoë hadn’t been reflecting on the death she’d lived through, or looking for Katrina Blake, she’d been wondering where Harold Sweeney was, and whether he’d indeed gone hunting Arkle Dunstan. A picture which kept morphing into one of Elmer Fudd: little brown suit and cap, shotgun at the ready . . . Either way, he remained her client until he’d paid her bill, and while Zoë’s occupation probably ranked near politician in any public grading, she liked to think she’d retained certain standards. Knowing where her client was seemed a bare minimum. At the very least, she’d know where to send that bill.

  All this in her head: no wonder she started when the phone was answered: ‘Yes?’

  ‘. . . Harold?’

  (Hard not to call him Harold, given that’s how she thought of him.)

  ‘Is this . . . ?’

  ‘It’s Zoë Boehm.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Deep breath. ‘Where’ve you been, Mr Sweeney?’

  The building she was facing, back up the road – a multi-storey block in the hospital grounds – was currently undergoing renovation, and scaffolding masked its façade. Across this was stretched, like some Christo-inspired event, a huge sheet of canvas, which whapped and smacked in the wind. It was the sound of a body at rest, aching to be in motion. Zoë had plenty of time to notice it while waiting for Harold Sweeney to reply.

  ‘You’re annoyed. You’ve a right to be.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re pissed off.’

  ‘If I need a thesaurus, Mr Sweeney, I’ll ask. Where’ve you been?’

  ‘I went away.’

  ‘I’d got that far.’

  ‘I was on the south coast. Near Brighton.’

  ‘Did you have a nice time?’

  ‘Ms Boehm –’

  ‘Because for all I knew, you’d gone off on some harebrained scheme. I thought you’d gone after –’ She’d been about to say the Dunstans. ‘I thought you’d gone after those thieves on your own.’

  And then there was another pause, during which the canvas sail audibly grieved for open seas.

  ‘Ms Boehm?’

  ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘Why would I have done that?’

  It was a good question. One she didn’t answer.

  ‘I thought this was what I’d paid you to do.’

  ‘You’ve paid me nothing yet. And I thought you’d be around to hear what progress I’ve made.’

  ‘So. What progress have you made?’

  Zoë tried not to sigh. She was obviously no wabbit, or Fudd wouldn’t be tying her in knots.

  ‘Ms Boehm?’

  ‘Not too much,’ she said.

  ‘You haven’t found them?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I haven’t found them.’

  Another pause. She leaned against the wall. A group of students crossed her line of vision, heading townwards. The moment during which she could have given Harold Sweeney the names of the men who’d robbed him, and arranged to collect her five thousand pounds, slipped out of sight about the same time the students did.

  ‘I’m glad.’

  It wasn’t the response she’d expected.

  ‘Ms Boehm?’

  ‘I heard. I’m wondering why.’

  ‘Because I did the wrong thing, sending you after them. It was dangerous and it was wrong. They shot a man, you’ll remember.’

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’

  ‘With a crossbow. Even if you’d found them, Ms Boehm – and I know now it was an impossible task – but if you had, then what? You might have been hurt too.’

  That would have been another nice moment to tell him: the one in which he’d just said what she’d done was impossible. But she held her tongue.

  ‘I was greedy. What they stole, I shouldn’t have had in the first place. I told myself I didn’t know for sure the . . . items were already stolen property. But I knew.’

  ‘We all cut corners,’ Zoë said, just to be saying something.

  ‘We don’t all drive a bulldozer, to be sure of making the short cut,’ Harold Sweeney said. ‘Something else occurred to me, down at the seaside. You go to the seaside much, Ms Boehm?’

  ‘Once in a while.’

  ‘It’s a good thinking place. The other thing that occurred to me was, maybe it was my own fault. You get involved with a bad crowd, you can’t complain when things get nasty. You follow me?’

  ‘Loud and clear.’

  ‘The man I used to sell the items to, the under-the-counter items, his name’s Oswald Price.’

  ‘You didn’t have to tell me that, Mr Sweeney.’

  ‘No, but in your line of work, maybe it’ll be useful sometime. I’m glad you came up short, Ms Boehm. I bet you don’t hear that often.’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  There was another pause. The open connection swelled like an ocean, and the canvas sail flapped again. This should have been conducive to thought, given the seaside theor
y, but all Zoë was thinking was, maybe you did get to hear the ends of some parts of the story . . . It seemed she didn’t have a client any more. And she tried to tell herself that his change of heart made it okay to lie to him; that anyway, she’d been lying for his own protection. That all this was getting a bit nasty for the likes of Harold Sweeney. But the fact remained: back in Zoë’s flat was the only woman who knew where the stolen money was, and there was no chance poor Harold was seeing any of it . . . She’d given him, effectively, his five grand back. Didn’t that give her the right to play her own game from here on in?

  She wasn’t sure. But thankfully he didn’t know any of this, and broke the silence of his own accord.

  ‘I was frightened,’ he said simply. ‘I was frightened they’d come back. The bald one? The one with the crossbow?’

  ‘Yes,’ Zoë said. Then added, ‘You mentioned him.’

  ‘He didn’t have to shoot that man. He shot him because he wanted to.’

  Zoë said, ‘He’s no reason to come back. He got what he was after.’

  ‘Yes. So long as we don’t stir things up.’

  She said, ‘Okay, Mr Sweeney. I think you’re doing the right thing. I won’t be sending a bill.’

  ‘You don’t need to do that.’ Not do that, he meant. ‘I’ll pay you for your time.’

  ‘I hadn’t spent much time on it. Good luck, Mr Sweeney.’ She disconnected before he could say more.

  Then she walked back to the post office, where the coin box waited. Behind her, the wrapped building flapped and rustled, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

  Another place, another phone call.

  ‘I was looking for Dennis.’

  ‘Is that right? And what made you think you’d find him here?’

  ‘A friend gave me the number.’

  ‘A friend of yours or a friend of his?’

  ‘Both. He was my husband.’

  ‘Did he have a name?’

  ‘Joe. Joe Silvermann.’

  There was a pause. She heard a rasp, or maybe imagined one: a match being struck. A dull intake of smoke. ‘I heard he died.’