Why We Die

by Mick Herron

  Ignoring the front door, they headed straight for the side passage, with its clutching accompaniment of out-of-control hedge. It smelled of damp, and something else too quick for Zoë to register – not unpleasant; a wild herb, or possibly a flower previously associated with friendly occasions. It would be interesting, her inner Zoë remarked, to keep track of whether future associations remained as positive. If she had a future in which to associate, of course. She scribbled a mental note to her inner Zoë: Shut up. Arkle had made her lead the way, and the first thing she saw at the other end was the hearse, though the first thing to make her shiver was the freezer . . . Which sat under the same makeshift carport-cum-shelter it ever had: next to the workbench with its rusting tools; the wardrobe with its doors removed; the two-foot-high stone frog, with the crack in its head like the slot in a money box. She wouldn’t have been surprised, right then, if the freezer had lifted its lid in a welcoming sneer: Hiya, Zoë. Back to stay? The imagination was a useful tool, but there were times she’d have happily sunk hers in concrete boots.

  Arkle said, ‘If all goes according to plan, that key’s in my hand in about twelve seconds, right?’

  ‘If all goes according to plan,’ Zoë agreed.

  Arkle put his hands on her shoulders and moved her aside. Even as he did so, Trent closed in behind her; his short wide body solid as a fire hydrant. Brushing him off wasn’t on the cards. Hitting him with a shovel might help, but even then he’d probably cling to her legs until Arkle reached her.

  Which wouldn’t take long, because Arkle moved fast. She’d barely blinked before he was at the hearse; long coat flapping like a vampire’s cloak. And she could feel a hollow sensation swelling inside her, because she knew what was coming. How could she not? This was, in the realest of senses, the story of her life. As Arkle stretched through the driver’s door for the ignition, which was where she’d told him the key was, she remembered what Katrina had said: I’m going to need time, Zo¨e. I’ll give you as much as I can, she’d replied . . . There was movement to her left, and she turned her head to see Katrina’s father at the window, staring blankly, wondering what they were up to. Then Arkle pulled his arm out of the dead folks’ car, and turned to show her his empty hand.

  ‘Looks like the plan just fucked up,’ he said.

  Chapter Ten

  i

  With Big Red Box in his rearview mirror, and Katrina beside him in the passenger seat – she’d only been in the depot fifteen minutes; the key was all you needed to pass security – the tightness in Tim’s chest loosened at last, though it threatened to bulk up again with every thought of the two holdalls now in the back of the car. Canvas bags with thick zippers, they bulged in odd, irregular ways. He wasn’t clear on how much money they held, but it was more than he’d seen in one place before. Not that he’d actually seen it yet, because it hadn’t come out of the bags.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he said. It was important he knew this, because he was driving.

  ‘Straight ahead for now.’

  Straight ahead would take them on to Dartmoor eventually.

  ‘What about Zoë?’

  ‘She’s meeting us later.’

  ‘If she gets away from the Dunstans.’

  Katrina turned, and he felt her gaze burn his cheek. ‘Do you trust me?’

  ‘I – yes. Yes, of course I do.’

  ‘Zoë will be okay. She’ll tell them I tricked her. They’ll believe that. They’ll believe that all too easily.’

  ‘But won’t Arkle –’

  ‘Trent won’t let him go overboard. I know these people, Tim. Trent’s not as useless as he looks, almost. He’s Arkle’s anchor.’

  ‘Where’s she taken them?’

  ‘To my father’s. That’s where she’s told them the key is.’

  ‘That your father’s hidden it?’

  ‘No, that I hid it at my father’s.’ All this time she was looking at him, though he couldn’t look back. ‘In the hearse. In its ignition, in fact.’ Now she looked away at last, and, like him, fixed her gaze on the road ahead.

  ‘But it’s not, is it? Because you’ve got it.’

  ‘It wouldn’t fit an ignition anyway.’ She held it up, and he registered something credit-card sized with holes punched into it, and a familiar magnetic strip down one edge.

  ‘. . . Okay.’ But how come Katrina had it, he wanted to know. When everybody seemed to think it was somewhere else . . .

  She said, ‘Tim. Tim?’

  ‘I’m still here.’ Pitching for a jaunty tone, but falling between nervous and stupid.

  ‘There were two keys, Tim. Baxter had one. I had the other.’

  ‘. . . And that one’s Baxter’s?’

  ‘I took it from his wallet.’ As he lay dead on the kitchen floor, was the gloss she didn’t need to make. ‘It seemed the sensible thing to do.’

  ‘. . . So yours –’

  ‘Mine’s at my father’s,’ she said. ‘Hidden.’

  ‘And they don’t know there’s two keys,’ Tim said. ‘So once they’ve got it, they’ll think the money’s theirs.’

  ‘By which time we’ll be gone.’

  ‘But Zoë –’

  ‘Zoë will tell them where it is. Long before Arkle hurts her.’

  ‘I bloody hope so.’

  ‘But she’ll keep them guessing first,’ Katrina said.

  ‘That’s where she said it was,’ Zoë told Arkle.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘In the ignition. It’s what she said.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘She tricked me.’

  Right . . .

  Arkle, it struck her, looked at home leaning against a hearse, even a clapped-out no-go hearse like this. Maybe he’d had the wrong adoptive father; should have been reared by one whose daily dealings with death might have lent him respect for natural forces, and helped him appreciate the consequences of violence wrought upon once-living bodies. This might have fostered gentleness, or at least tempered brutality. Instead, he’d grown up with sand and gravel and concrete, in a yard where hard things ground against other hard things until some of them became dust. Same general outcome, but a less forgiving process. And either way, he looked at home leaning against the hearse . . .

  ‘Do you think I’m fucking stupid, or what?’

  Trent said, ‘Arkle –’

  ‘Shut up.’ He brushed a hand over where the hood ornament should have been. ‘Do you think I’m fucking stupid, or what?’

  ‘Why would I think that?’ Zoë asked.

  He stood straight, reminding her how tall he was, and the movement emphasized the hang of his overcoat; underlined the crossbow Velcroed in place. ‘I hate it when I don’t get a straight answer,’ he said, and then he was on her.

  She tried to sidestep but he grabbed her anyway; threw her against the freezer, pinning her head by a hank of hair. His body thick against hers, his face inches away, he said, ‘When did you decide I was joking? About wanting that fucking key?’

  ‘I know you’re not –’

  He slammed her head against the freezer lid. ‘Then why this shit about where it fucking is?’

  Lights swam apart, then swam together again . . . She could feel his body hard against her own: tense and taut; a collection of cables knotted together. It’ll take tools to dismantle this one, was the thought she thrust away, struck by the need to answer him before he bashed her head again. ‘I told you –’

  Arkle did it again. ‘You told me shit. I don’t want to hear words, I want to see keys . . . Oh, fuck. Who have we got here, then?’

  He let go, and before she could grope her groggy way upright, a queue of suspects had trooped through her head – someone watching over her? Not Katrina, surely. And please not Tim. But Win wasn’t out of the question; or even Jeff, tracking down his borrowed car . . . Or the man from her past who owned her old leather jacket, which she was going to go looking for one day.

  But it wasn’t any of them.

  ‘Up here,’ Kat
rina said.

  How she could tell beat Tim. This particular lane was indistinguishable from any they’d crossed since leaving the main road an hour ago: little more than a passage between hedges, with a ditch either side to keep things interesting.

  It was growing dark, and he couldn’t tell whether the sky was giving up or his eyes giving out. The morning’s blue had surrendered to troubled purple, lit by pink smudges to the west. It was probably his imagination that the car felt heavier. He was struck by a ludicrous image, of the bags behind him honking like stolen geese in a fairy tale, and shook his head.

  She said, ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing . . . Are we nearly there? Wherever we’re going?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Tim. You must think I’m a madwoman.’

  Again he felt her gazing at him.

  ‘I think you’ve been through a bad time,’ he told her. ‘It’s over now.’

  The car crested the hill, and Tim switched the headlights on as they went into a descent. He knew the moors began not far away. The boundaries between here and there felt blurred, as if he might tip into wilderness without warning, and he was glad of his seatbelt, and wondered when the day would be over.

  ‘Second on the left.’

  At first he looked for another turning, then realized she meant the cottages lining the dip ahead – shepherds’ cottages, he thought, but what did he know? They might be local sewage workers’, or computer programmers’. Old, anyway, and small, and built of stone, and unlit. The second on the left was also the last on the left, and Tim didn’t wait to be told it was okay to park on the gravelled area beyond. Killing the engine, he turned to Katrina, who flinched, or he thought she did. And at once Tim felt guilty; implicated in that vast engine of male aggression that had damaged her face, and left it the same brooding purple as the sky overhead.

  ‘This is it,’ she said.

  It took him a second to shift from his viewpoint to hers. ‘The cottage?’

  ‘Baxter rented it. A six-month let. In case they needed a hideaway, he said.’

  ‘But his brothers didn’t know?’

  ‘The emergency never came up. So no, he never told them.’

  He could watch her now, for the first time since getting into the car, and he thought: yes, she’s beautiful. Even with that bruise plastering her face, like the birthmarks you sometimes see on people on the street – though never on people you know – she was beautiful. Admitting it, Tim felt a missing part of his heart slot back into place. ‘And we can get in okay?’ he said. It surprised and comforted him that his brain was keeping pace with the conversation.

  ‘There’s a key by the back door.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit . . .’

  She said, ‘Somebody wants to break in, it’d be easy enough. It’s not like there’s anything to steal.’

  Tim unsnapped his seatbelt, which whipped back into its socket. He felt absurdly conscious of the mole under his jawline, of the fact that he’d not showered today, and supposed this was writ large on his face, though Katrina evidently read something else there, because her next words were sharp: ‘Yes, he told me about it. Okay?’

  ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘We were married. Have you been married, Tim?’

  ‘Yes. She died.’

  ‘Oh . . . I’m sorry.’

  He said, ‘Me too. I didn’t mean to throw it at you.’

  ‘No. No, you didn’t – I’m so sorry. I just meant, when you’re married . . . There aren’t secrets. Not for long.’ A car rolled down the road, and kept rolling. She said, ‘I knew about the robberies, too. It doesn’t mean I liked it.’ She touched her cheek. ‘Bad things happen,’ she said. ‘You’ll understand that.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I understand that.’

  She reached and squeezed his hand. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s find the key.’

  Zoë’s head was ringing, or possibly only her ears. Trying to draw a distinction was in itself not a good sign . . . She was upright, resting against the hearse’s bonnet; Arkle in front of her, Trent to her left. And newly on the scene was Katrina’s father, surprisingly tall; almost imposing with his iron-grey hair and shaggy beard, if not for his misbuttoned cardigan, and the fact that he wore slippers, and had them on the wrong feet.

  ‘Katie?’

  ‘Go back inside, old man.’

  ‘Are you all right, Katie?’

  Arkle turned to Zoë, raising eyebrows as if they shared an in-law problem. ‘This is Kay’s dad. He’s kind of senile.’

  There was nothing senile about the look Blake flashed Arkle. ‘You’re Baxter’s brother. What are you doing?’

  Trent said, ‘You’d better go inside, Mr Blake.’

  But Blake turned to Zoë instead. ‘Katie? You’re not Katie.’

  This with an air of disappointment, as if she’d let him down.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But I’m a friend.’

  ‘Oh . . . Would you like a cup of tea?’ The word ‘friend’ pushing a button, perhaps; or just the universal fall-back asserting itself. When mayhem erupts in your back yard, offer it tea. Normal service will be resumed.

  ‘Old man,’ Arkle said, ‘we’re sort of busy.’

  ‘You’re on my property,’ Blake said. ‘I want you to leave. This lady can stay. I shall make her a cup of tea.’

  ‘Nobody’s going anywhere,’ Arkle said, ‘until I’ve got what we came for.’

  ‘Then I shall call the police,’ Blake said. And he turned and strode towards the house.

  Arkle watched for a moment, then looked back at Zoë, a sly grin opening his face. He twitched at his overcoat, reminding her what hung beneath. As if she’d forgotten. Then he turned his back again, and she could tell by the way his shoulder dropped that he was reaching for the bow.

  Zoë shouted, ‘Wait!’ and everybody stopped.

  The key to the back door was in the second place they looked – behind a loose brick – which might have delayed a burglar half a minute, supposing he hadn’t used the time to pick the lock instead. But once inside, it wasn’t clear what he would have stolen, unless he was in the business of outfitting holiday cottages. The kitchen was a drab affair – bare essentials arranged in the usual manner on peeling tiles – and the sitting room the same: an ancient dusty sofa, a ditto portable TV; last year’s calendar on a wall that needed painting. The lampshade, thick with dust, gave a yellow, elderly quality to the light. Tim knew without looking that in the wooden chest by the sofa there’d be a pile of last year’s magazines – OK, Hello; the odd Railway Enthusiast’s World – and somewhere on a windowsill would sit a row of forgotten bestsellers: MacLeans, Wheatleys, Reader’s Digest’s condenseds. For a moment, he was reminded so explicitly of childhood holidays that he felt actual pain. Then he turned to Katrina and said, ‘So this is where Baxter planned to retire with the stolen millions.’

  She laughed. Then said, ‘It’s not millions. This was just in case they needed somewhere to hide in a hurry.’

  ‘Playing board games until the heat died down.’ He was getting into the swing of this. ‘There’ll be jigsaws too, no doubt.’

  ‘And food in the freezer, and alcohol somewhere. Baxter was big on contingency planning.’

  ‘How will Zoë find us? I mean, even I’m not sure how we got here. And I was driving.’

  ‘She’s got my number. We’ll work something out.’

  Tim was carrying the two bags of money, which wasn’t a sentence he’d featured in before. New experiences cluttered his life. Putting them in a corner, he drew the curtains; then, in afterthought, moved them under the table instead. Katrina watched with an amused expression. This, too, was new; he’d not seen Katrina amused. Except, perhaps, in the hotel, but he hadn’t been paying full attention then.

  ‘You must be starving,’ she said.

  He supposed he must. He hadn’t thought about it. ‘We need to decide what to do,’ he said. ‘I mean, shouldn’t we call the police?’

  ‘Not until we’ve h
eard from Zoë,’ Katrina said.

  ‘But –’

  ‘I know Arkle. If he’s threatened, he’ll hurt people. Whoever’s nearest. Right now, that’s Zoë. Maybe my father.’

  Tim had spent the past few days in women’s hands: obeying their directions, seeking their advice. After months of only his own counsel, and most of that despairing, this was a relief. And he was very hungry. . . ‘We’ll give her an hour,’ he said. ‘But no longer. I’m worried about her, Katrina.’

  ‘Me too. But she’s a tough lady. And this was her idea, Tim. Buying time so we could get clear.’

  In this faded, papery light she looked younger, for some reason. Maybe because she was starting to feel safe . . . The idea pleased him. Of course it did.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘An hour, then. So. Where’s this food?’

  ‘A cup of tea sounds a good idea, Mr Blake,’ Zoë said.

  ‘This man was rude to me.’

  ‘He wasn’t terribly nice to me,’ Zoë agreed. ‘He’s annoyed because he’s looking for something, and he thinks I know where it is. Maybe tea will calm him down.’

  Arkle said: ‘If you seriously fucking think –’

  ‘Or you could do both of us,’ Zoë told him, trusting do was outside the old man’s vocabulary. ‘Then spend the rest of your natural life tearing this place apart.’

  ‘You know where it is.’

  ‘I guarantee this much,’ Zoë said. ‘Harm him, and you’ll never know the answer to that.’

  Trent said, ‘Arkle –’

  ‘Shut up.’ Arkle, coat back in place, jammed his hands in its pockets. His mouth worked furiously: he was possibly chewing his tongue. ‘You think you’re protecting him, right? But keep pissing me off, and I’ll use him for target practice.’

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ she said. Old man Blake was hovering uncertainly a few yards away. Zoë took his arm. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Show me how your kettle works.’

  Together Tim and Katrina raided the kitchen, and found a collection of ready-meals in the freezer – mostly Indian and Italian, from a low-fat ‘be-good-to-yourself’ range. Both would have preferred a high-carb fuck-yourself-up selection they’d remember eating half an hour later, but warmed the oven anyway, loaded it with foil containers, and waited for the smell of lasagna to overpower the damp.