Why We Die

by Mick Herron

  There was alcohol in the fridge: three bottles of Stolichnaya.

  ‘That’ll be for Trent,’ Katrina said. Then added, redundantly, ‘Trent’s a drinker.’

  ‘Is there anything to mix it with?’ Tim asked. He needed a drink, but wasn’t sure he needed neat vodka.

  ‘No,’ said Katrina. Then added, more pointedly, ‘Trent’s a drinker.’

  And Baxter a weight-watcher, given his choice of meals. But Tim held his tongue. There was presumably an etiquette governing questions addressed to a woman concerning the husband she’d killed, but it was likely to be complicated, and didn’t need exploring right now. He explored the freezer again instead, and found ice cubes. These would dilute the vodka; or at any rate, make it colder. Tim’s initial disinclination to get stuck into hard spirits was diminishing, and unlikely to survive the conclusion that there was nothing else available.

  He chiselled ice from its tray into glasses, listening to Katrina moving about in the sitting room. And as he did so, he noticed – how long had this been going on? – that something had changed. At first, he thought it was his hearing; that his reception had broadened somehow, and sounds of a previously unavailable pitch were coming through. But that wasn’t it. It was internal. It was as if he’d laid a weight down, or had it surgically excised. Something he’d carried for months, and had variously labelled grief, terror, self-loathing, whatever, was gone; had melted the way this ice would, and had done so while his attention was elsewhere. He paused, the bottle hovering over a glass. He was trying to measure the difference. It was ease of movement, he decided. Not just that he could hold the bottle without it trembling, but that he could do so without undue consciousness of the event; without some part of him holding back from doing it, out of fear that every action hardwired him deeper into an Emma-less reality; a fear balanced by the equal and opposite anxiety that every action refrained from had precisely the same effect.

  The over-examined life, which had proved not worth living.

  Enough. He willed himself into movement; poured vodka over ice; felt his tastebuds grip at the cracking sound this made. Then carried the drinks next door, where Katrina was gazing at the pile of money she’d created by emptying the bags on the floor.

  ‘I wanted to see how much there was,’ she said.

  ‘Ah.’

  She looked from Tim to the money, then back to Tim. ‘It seems there’s loads,’ she said.

  Zoë had never liked tea, and if there were a single reason she might start believing herself the plaything of a malevolent deity, it was the frequency with which she ended up nursing cups of the stuff she was expected to drink. Well, that or the number of times she’d pissed off armed and dangerous men.

  Arkle said, ‘This is nice. Isn’t this nice? I think it’s nice.’

  His tone of voice, his savage eyes, suggested he’d sooner be pulling teeth.

  ‘Katie’s been away,’ Blake replied. ‘But I expect she’ll drop in soon.’

  A conversation between these two, thought Zoë, could run for hours without touching the sides. It would be like watching two rubber balls bouncing round a locked room. They might collide eventually, but it was down to chance.

  Trent, watchful, leaned against the wall. He was hard, squat and morose, and in a previous life might have been one of those concrete bollards he’d driven his van into the night before.

  Let’s not forget: Trent had tried to run her over.

  . . . How long it was taking to dawn on her: she was in serious trouble here.

  Arkle said, ‘The key.’

  Zoë took a breath. ‘I’ve told you. Katrina – Kay. Kay tricked me. She told me it was in the hearse, in its ignition. That’s all I know.’

  ‘Why don’t I believe you?’

  ‘You think I’m happy about this?’

  ‘We had a deal.’

  Sounding actually affronted, as if Zoë had wantonly cheated him out of harassing and torturing Tim.

  Blake said, ‘She’s never happier than when she’s sorting through my books. Are you, Katie?’

  ‘I’m not your daughter, Mr Blake,’ Zoë said.

  His eyes clouded, then cleared. ‘No. No, of course not.’ He looked at Arkle again. ‘You’re his brother.’

  ‘I was,’ said Arkle.

  ‘She used to turn up here with bruises.’ He looked back to Zoë. ‘Vicious. Somebody should have stopped him.’

  ‘Somebody did,’ said Zoë, before she could help herself.

  Arkle bent low. ‘His brain’s fucked. What’s your excuse?’

  Trent said, ‘Time’s moving on.’

  ‘Shut up.’ Back to Zoë: ‘Where’s the key?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He nodded at Katrina’s father. ‘You want me to pull bits off him? Till you get your memory back?’

  ‘It’s not a question of memory.’ Her words coming out tighter, the more he wound her inner spring. ‘I’ve no idea where her hiding place was.’

  ‘Katie has a hiding place,’ Katrina’s father said.

  They looked at him.

  ‘She says she’s going upstairs. But I hear her slip outside. Watched her once. By the window.’

  He pointed, to clarify window.

  ‘Like dropping a coin in a slot. Except it wasn’t a coin.’ He turned to Zoë, as if expecting a clue. ‘Don’t know what it was.’

  The old man had acquired momentum now; determined to prove that the brain, if rusty in places, remained the tool of choice for piercing secrets. That sharp as his Katie was, he still knew a thing or two.

  Like creatures in a pantomime Arkle and Trent were on the move; gathering round him, guiding him to the window. ‘Okay,’ Arkle said. ‘Show us.’ Zoë got to her feet too – to protect him?

  So at the window, he pointed again. And all four looked out on the cluttered mess of his back yard: a hearse on bricks, an old workbench, a decommissioned freezer, a wardrobe with its doors removed; and to one side – next to what might have been a pond, if its overgrowth were napalmed – a two-foot-high stone frog, with a crack in its head running ear to ear, as if it were an oversized money box.

  ii

  Katrina counted. Tim watched. At some point, he went to refresh his drink – odd term, refresh: his drink was beyond repair. Poured a new one is what Tim did. When he returned, she was still at it; sorting through bundles of money of differing thickness, each wrapped by a rubber band. After a while, the bands fascinated Tim more than the money. They came in various colours, various widths – he wondered whether Baxter had collected them in advance, or just dug them out of drawers and cupboards. Tim couldn’t remember ever buying rubber bands himself, but he’d usually been able to put his hands on one when he needed to.

  ‘One hundred and eighty-three,’ Katrina said.

  Not rubber bands: pounds. Thousands of pounds.

  ‘That’s a lot,’ Tim agreed. His tongue felt thick and unusual. Neat vodka obviously required practice.

  Katrina stacked it all back into a single bag; flinging the bundled bricks in any which way, as if the money weren’t important to her; the counting a necessary administrative task, no more. She had rolled her sleeves up, and tied her hair back with one of the rubber bands. The effect was brisk and efficient, as if she might be about to start vacuuming, or whip a duster round.

  She noticed him watching, and smiled. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Arkle hurt you, didn’t he?’

  ‘He did. But I’m all right now.’

  Katrina zipped the bag up and stood. ‘How’s the food doing?’

  ‘Five minutes?’

  ‘I could do with another drink.’

  ‘You haven’t touched your first.’

  ‘Watch me.’ She retrieved her glass from the table and drained it in a draught, not taking her eyes off Tim. Then rattled the remains of the ice. ‘See?’

  He held his hand out, and as she handed him her glass, their fingers touched.

  ‘I don’t even
know what you do,’ she said.

  He was about to answer, then shook his head. ‘That’s real life,’ he said. ‘Let’s not worry about it now.’

  ‘And this is make-believe?’

  He thought: thugs, crossbows, bags stuffed full of money . . . Yes, this was make-believe. None of it connected with real life: the get up/go to work variety. His finger tingled where hers had touched it. That wasn’t true either: he was conscious of their fingers having touched, that was all; a consciousness which manifested itself in imagined tingling. ‘Time out, maybe,’ he said. ‘A reality break.’

  ‘My ice is melting,’ she said.

  For a moment he wasn’t sure what she meant, then understood. Her ice was melting.

  ‘I can fix that,’ he said, and went to fetch more.

  The house felt calmer without Arkle in it. Most houses would; he seemed to trail a cloud like that kid in the Charlie Brown strip, except instead of dust and dirt, Arkle’s exhaust blew violence and threat. He might as easily have put that bolt into Bob Poland’s head as through his leg. And Zoë’s complicity in that imagined act frightened her, now it was too late to retract: it was as if a door had closed just before she’d stepped through it. The view on the other side had been familiar – she had once killed a man herself – but it wasn’t anywhere she wanted to visit again.

  Her face must have clouded, because Trent said, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I was thinking.’

  He nodded, as if that would do it every time.

  They were in old man Blake’s sitting room, because there seemed no point in putting him anywhere else. He was sitting now, largely focused on something happening on the other side of the wall his chair faced, but every so often he’d look at Zoë, who was leaning against the same wall, balanced on a stool. On the mantelpiece sat an oddly shaped metal figure she guessed was the hearse’s missing hood ornament. Trent, meanwhile, stood with his back to the door, reminding Zoë of one of those dogs which, once it’s clamped its teeth round part of you, you have to saw its head off to get free.

  Arkle had left them twice; the first time to fish the key from the crack in the stone frog’s head. From the window, Zoë had watched him pull on a length of thread looped round the creature’s ear. What emerged on the other end resembled a credit card that had been run through a hole-punch: a swipe key, of course; nothing you’d fit into an ignition. Wrapping his long, surprisingly clean fingers round it, Arkle had stared directly at her; for a while it was as if their lines of vision had knotted, and neither could break away. You knew, his gaze said. And beneath that, something not entirely susceptible to language; an inchoate mess of suggestion, bloody with the split infinitives of all he yet intended: to seriously hurt, to definitely maim. She did not look away, on the principle that once you’d shown fear, you were lost. In the end it was Arkle who had broken the connection, as if the intensity were too much to maintain.

  She’d thought he was going to hit her once he was back in the house. Her body felt both hard and soft at the same time; either way, she was a target. Yield or not yield, the result wouldn’t differ . . . He didn’t, though; barely looked her way, in fact, as if the gaze they’d exchanged through the window had set the seal on a promise he could redeem at leisure.

  Instead, he said to Trent: ‘Where’s that place again?’

  ‘Big Red Box?’

  There was a slight pause.

  Trent continued, in a hurry, ‘You go out towards the roundabout . . .’

  He lost her in a blether of instruction.

  When Trent finished, Arkle said, ‘Tie her up. I’m going for the money.’

  ‘By yourself?’

  ‘You stay with them. Tie her up. Something’s going on, and I don’t know what.’

  Then, in case Trent hadn’t followed, he went and found some garden twine, and tied her up himself.

  So here she was, wrists bound behind her, propped against the wall the old man faced; the only available good news the fact that Arkle had left the building, and even this tempered by Trent’s repeated use of it’s not far when explaining where the storage facility was . . . Arkle, from what Win had said, had lived here as long as Trent, so should have had a similar grasp on local geography. But it was likely that trivia didn’t cling to Arkle’s consciousness that tightly; trivia in his case being anything that didn’t immediately affect his well-being.

  For now he was gone, though. Him and his weapon both.

  She said, ‘I need to use the bathroom.’

  ‘Piss yourself.’

  ‘You sure? We might be here a while.’

  Trent touched his damaged nose. ‘My sense of smell’s fucked. I couldn’t give a toss.’

  If she’d been kidding, this would have rankled; the fact that it was soon going to be a live issue made it worse. But she put that out of mind, as far as she was able. ‘You think Arkle’s coming back?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he?’

  She laughed. God knew what it sounded like outside her head; to her own ears, a rattlesnake had just entered the room. ‘We’re talking about a couple of hundred grand, right? What’s that divided by one?’

  ‘He’s coming back.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I just did.’

  Playground stuff . . .

  She said, ‘Besides.’

  ‘Besides what?’

  ‘. . . What if the money’s not there?’

  They had eaten and were on the sofa now, and if Tim closed his eyes and threw his mind back to when he and Emma were starting out – to when a whole minefield of nuance and between-the-lines silences had to be negotiated before he braved an arm round her shoulder – he could drum up a soundtrack to match the moment. REM released Automatic for the People the same month he first kissed her, and everywhere you went, everybody hurt. He could hear it now: a quiet song, best played loud. When the chorus loomed, he was surprised Katrina couldn’t hear it too.

  ‘. . . Are you asleep?’

  ‘Sorry. It’s the vodka.’

  ‘You’ve done a lot of driving. It’s okay if you sleep.’

  ‘Has it been an hour?’

  ‘I’ll call her now.’

  She did, and the pair sat listening to the curiously chirpy response: The number you requested is not available . . . Not a lot of clues in a verbal cul-de-sac like that. Zoë might be anything – upright, sideways, downright dead – and all they knew was, she wasn’t available. Whether this was temporary or permanent, the future would tell; meanwhile, Katrina switched her mobile off.

  Then they sat quietly, while ‘Everybody Hurts’ looped through Tim’s head, and the melting ice in his glass fizzed in time.

  . . . Katrina said, ‘How do you see the rest of your life?’

  ‘How do I what?’

  ‘You think this will change things? What’s happened these past few days?’

  He said, ‘I live an ordinary life. I mean . . . When Emma died, it nearly killed me. Went on nearly killing me. But it didn’t, in the end. I’m still here. My life’s pretty boring, you want the truth. Electrical goods aren’t as exciting as they sound.’

  That was a joke, but Katrina didn’t laugh.

  ‘But it’s not a bad life. Until Emma died, it was enough. And would be again, if missing her stopped. And what they say, the things people tell you, they talk about two years or whatever, a specific passage of time, that you get better, that it stops hurting. And maybe that’s true. It’s not, I don’t mean, she wasn’t replaceable . . . Isn’t. Isn’t replaceable. But the gap she left in my life, if that was filled, everything else would work too. It would be enough again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It would need to be something special. Somebody special. Emma . . . I loved Emma so much. I’ve never stopped. I thought I had . . . You hate people when they’re dead. At first. But really you’re hating yourself, for not being there when it mattered. You think you’re the reason why they died. But you’re not. And you always love the ones you love. Tha
t’s what love means. It means nothing if you stop.’

  ‘You’re a nice man, Tim.’

  ‘No, I’m just me. Everybody’s just themselves, it doesn’t matter how nice they want people to think they are. I’m not making sense. All I mean is . . . All it is, things are what they are, that’s all. Emma’s dead. I’m still here. Life goes on. Will go on, I mean. You’re nice too, Katrina. I’m not just saying that because I’m drunk.’

  She kissed him: a light feathery kiss that barely brushed his cheek. But it would have hurt her to kiss him any other way; her cheekbone hadn’t knit together yet. Her face was still the colour of pain. But her lips touched him, and for a moment he forgot the song in his head, because not everybody hurt after all.

  ‘I think I need another drink,’ she said.

  Tim was pretty sure he didn’t, but went and poured two all the same. When he returned, she’d drawn her knees beneath her, and taken the band from her hair. He remembered the first time he’d seen her, with a bruise just a ghost of this present damage, and knew there’d come a time when this hurt too would fade, and he’d have to study her face for signs of its having existed. That was what the future looked like in that moment; a long drawn-out passage of time in which Tim studied Katrina’s face. He was still holding both their glasses, so handed her one, and sat down.

  The bag under the table stared up at them.

  Katrina said, ‘Do you really think they need the money?’

  ‘. . . Who?’

  ‘The insurance companies?’

  ‘Probably not need, no.’

  ‘It seems . . . idiotic to give it to them. So much good could be done with it.’

  ‘What sort of good?’

  ‘Any sort. You could start a whole new life with that much money.’

  He laughed. ‘I thought you were going to say you could feed the starving, or fund a cure for something.’