Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘Do you really think she’ll die?’ she asked. ‘Or is she plotting some last-minute escape?’

  ‘I’ve wondered about that,’ he said. And he had. Time and again the possibility of Carlotta’s escape had entered his mind. The idea that she was planning something, that she had a scheme for avoiding her execution, a stunning stroke of magic pulled off at the very end, another mystifying disappearance.

  He said, ‘Maybe she wants to die. Maybe she’s done everything she ever wanted to do and there’s nothing else that interests her.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  ‘I don’t know what I believe,’ he said. ‘She may want to die the way she lived. A piece of theatre. A flash of electricity. Publicity.’

  Marcia fiddled with her pearls again in an anxious way. ‘Was it difficult?’ she asked.

  ‘Difficult?’

  ‘To catch her.’

  He made a vague gesture with his hand, then got up from his chair and walked to the shelf where the glass zoo was located. He picked up a small transparent panda and turned it over in his fingers. ‘It was difficult enough,’ he said.

  Marcia said, ‘I collect those little creatures.’ She stood alongside him. ‘I’ve had some of them ever since I was a child.’

  Pagan’s eye passed over the glassy gathering. The workmanship was exquisite. The animals trapped light, which seemed to instil them with a kind of life. He felt Marcia Burr’s hand close over his own and he turned his face toward her. Something unsaid hung in the narrow space between them.

  ‘Martin was a decent human being, Frank.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He always tried to do the right thing. Always.’

  Why was she saying this? he wondered.

  ‘Sometimes he had conflicts,’ she said.

  ‘You’re trying to tell me something, Marcia.’

  She removed her hand. She twisted her face away from him. Pagan carefully replaced the small glass panda, setting it down between a bear and a giraffe. He heard Marcia pull a handkerchief from the sleeve of her cardigan. She raised it to her lips.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What’s on your mind, Marcia?’

  She made no answer. She reached for the teapot, filled her cup. Then she sat down, her face expressionless. Pagan waited, but still she said nothing. The room seemed intolerably small and cramped to him right then. He looked at the glass animals, let his eye drift along the collection of photographs. Martin was depicted in most of them. In one, he wore naval uniform and looked impossibly youthful. In another he stood with his arm linked through Marcia’s; Marcia must have been in her mid-twenties, Burr at least forty. The shot had been taken on a pebbled beach. A rough sea, stilled for all time by the camera, was visible in the background.

  Pagan raised a hand, touched the frame, and was about to turn his attention back to Marcia when he stopped.

  He was cold suddenly. There was ice in his bones. He took a photograph down from the shelf and stared at it for a long time and then he moved to the table where he laid the picture down in front of Marcia. He didn’t know what to say. His synapses were flawed. He couldn’t make the connections he needed to make. Marcia didn’t even glance at the photograph he’d set down before her.

  He remembered the atrium stuffed with herbs, the scents of marjoram and thyme and basil. He remembered Bob Naderson. And he remembered this same image enclosed in a frame on the wicker table: Naderson with his arm round a girl’s waist. Naderson and the girl smiling.

  Pagan saw it now. The girl was Marcia.

  He felt a serious displacement of himself. He hovered at Marcia’s shoulder. The room was layered with silences. Awkwardness, puzzlement, the mysterious hush of the past, of hidden relationships.

  She covered the picture with the flat of her hand. ‘Martin didn’t have a choice, you see. He did what I wanted him to do. He felt an obligation, Frank.’

  Pagan watched her trace a line with the tip of her finger over the face of Bob Naderson. The glass was slightly dusty and the motion of her nail left a trail resembling a faded scar across Naderson’s forehead. She extended the line, linking her face with Naderson’s; a connection made in a thin layer of dust. Pagan walked to the window, looked across the slope of lawn that ended in hedgerow.

  ‘An obligation,’ he said. Of blood, he thought. Of family. How could Martin have refused to help? How could he have turned down his wife’s request?

  ‘He didn’t like it, Frank. But what would you have done in the same circumstances? What would you have done if it had been your wife’s father that was being held in Moscow and you didn’t know what was going to happen to him? How would you have acted if it had been somebody close to you?’

  How would he have acted? He tried to imagine how he might have felt if Roxanne, say, had been in peril, if she’d been seized and held against her will in a place where he couldn’t reach her. He’d have done the same as Martin, he thought. He’d have done whatever it took to get Roxanne back, even if it meant turning a blind eye to what you knew was an injustice, even if it meant sacrificing another person. Love wasn’t all sweetness and sharing; it had its own ruthlessness.

  He looked at Marcia Burr. Her eyes watered.

  ‘He never truly forgave me,’ she said. ‘That’s what makes it so awful. He never forgave me for influencing him, and he never quite forgot. He always said it was water under the bridge, but I knew how he really felt.’ She stood up, fidgeted with cups and saucers. She stopped, her body rigid. She suddenly swept the cake stand to the floor. Tears ran across her cheeks, gathered at the corners of her mouth.

  Pagan knew he couldn’t comfort her. He felt powerless and clumsy. Bob Naderson’s daughter. How Burr must have struggled with the decision to sacrifice Richard Pasco. How hard he must have warred with himself. Any decision he made was certain to be the wrong one; it had been that kind of situation, a conflict between duty and family, between law and love. And Burr had chosen family. Ten years ago he’d chosen the freedom of his wife’s father.

  The room was too small for Pagan suddenly. It crowded him. He had the beginnings of a headache. Marcia came toward him, touched his arm. ‘I caused Martin pain,’ she said. ‘And in the end I caused his death.’

  ‘You couldn’t have predicted it,’ he said. ‘You can’t blame yourself.’

  ‘I tell myself that,’ she said, and her voice was thin. ‘I tell myself that all the time. If I hadn’t convinced him, if I hadn’t tried to sway him …’

  ‘It’s a waste of time to think that way.’ He placed a hand across his forehead, which was warm, slightly fevered. What he needed was movement, an open road, the blur of speed.

  Marcia lowered her hand to her side. ‘And my father …’

  Pagan thought of rain and floodlights.

  She said, ‘I had a visit from a couple of friendly men from the American Embassy. They never tell you the whole story. Only the bare facts. Never the details. The woman was quote unquote involved in the explosion that took Bob Naderson’s life, very sorry, is there anything we can do to help, and so on. Involved. Don’t you like that word, Frank?’

  Marcia stepped away from him and looked down at the broken cakes on the carpet, the inverted cake stand. She appeared to concentrate on the crumbs as if by force of will she might restore them to shape. Then she pressed a foot into one of the dented cakes and ground it vigorously into the rug. ‘She deserves to die, she deserves to die.’ She said this over and over, as if repetition were a means of exorcizing her sadness.

  Pagan moved toward the door and opened it. He gazed out at his parked car. ‘I’ll leave,’ he said.

  Marcia Burr didn’t look at him. She continued the grinding motion. She was still determinedly pulverizing the crumbs as he stepped outside and drew the door shut behind him. He walked to his car, paused, listened to the hard cawing of rooks in a nearby field. Their shrill cries suggested words in a language he didn’t know.

  He stayed inside the flat in Holland Park for days after the
visit to Lewes. The weather changed. The sky turned cloudy, the green bleached out of the park across from his flat. The area was no longer populated at night by dopers. In daytime it was patrolled by solitary figures walking dogs. Flowers died. He continued to sleep for a dozen hours at a stretch. Consciousness was undesirable.

  He spent time walking from room to room, or fingering Roxanne’s collection of books. He’d developed a deep need to reassure himself that she’d existed, that once upon a time he’d shared his life with somebody else, that he’d loved, that he was more than the creature of dark violent needs that had emerged in Virginia. It was as if remembrance of Roxanne would expunge Carlotta completely from his system. A victory of the dead over the living.

  His loneliness was acute; you could cut yourself on the sharp edge of such solitude. He experienced the odd sensation that he was beginning to fade, that he was yielding to shadow, that the shadow ultimately would give way to nothing, and that anyone who came to the apartment to look for him would find no trace, not a bone, a lock of hair, nothing. No evidence he’d ever existed, he’d ever been married, that a life had been lived in these rooms. He supposed his condition, for want of a better name, was one of despair, but it was a deeper furrow than any he’d ever known before. And he couldn’t find a way out of it, couldn’t scratch his way to the surface, back to life and light.

  On the day Carlotta was scheduled to die, he decided the hollowness of the apartment was finally unbearable. He forced himself to shave and dress and go out. He drove through the streets of Notting Hill. The sun was gone and the sky the colour of a battleship. He understood where he was headed, and although there was an inevitability about his destination he wondered why he felt the desire.

  It had been a long time since he’d come this way. Once or twice in the past year he’d considered visiting the place, but he’d always rejected the prospect. What was there to see?

  He parked his car in a quiet street of austere Victorian houses and stepped out and made his way in the direction of the wrought-iron gates, noticing that they’d recently been painted. They were black and waxy. He passed through, listening to his feet crunch on the gravel pathway. He paused a second because he’d forgotten the way. He stood under an elm, hesitant. In the distance grey-white smoke rose from a tall dark chimney, as if it were pollution from a foundry. The place he wanted was close to that chimney, he remembered.

  He began to walk, quickly at first, but he slowed the closer he got to his destination. He plucked a handful of wild flowers, held them delicately in his hand because they shed their petals easily. A bouquet of wild flowers: a token. He kept going, seeing here and there stalks of uncut grass grow in tangled clumps, a proliferation of weed and nettle in disarray. The whole area had an illusory stillness about it, an uneasy serenity that affected him: I shouldn’t have come here, he thought. But you had to because – because you need to anchor yourself in your past, you need a memory of how you used to be.

  The wild flower petals drifted from his fingers and fell across his coat. He didn’t feel the echo of grief he’d expected. He experienced an odd calm as he approached the stone, which was plain and unassuming. A patch of lichen grew against the surface. Tall grass obscured the name. He kneeled, pushed the stalks aside, laid the disintegrating wild flowers against the stone. He looked at Roxanne’s name. The dates of her living and her dying. The brevity of her time. He read the epitaph, one word: Missed. He imagined Roxanne taking shape in front of him, delicate and strong, her expression sympathetic: a heartbreaking phantom. He reached out and touched the indented letters. He thought: I love you.

  It was only then he noticed the writing at the base of the stone, the letters painted carefully below Roxanne’s name. He closed his eyes. Even here, he thought. He felt a hammer rise and fall inside his skull. He looked at the words and he imagined her coming here and sitting in the long grass with a paintbrush in her hand, her lips pressed together in concentration; he imagined her fingers, perhaps stained with streaks of red paint, working the brush against the stone.

  I’ll always be around, Frank, she’d written. Look for me.

  I’ll always be around, Frank. He wondered how many months had passed since she’d written these words. She’d known he’d come to this spot sooner or later, that he’d find these words, that this desecration would devastate him. From her place of incarceration more than three thousand miles away, she was still trying to manipulate him.

  No, he thought. God-damn you. No more. This is where you draw the line. In this place of the dead. This is where it ends. Here. Now. Buried and forgotten. A memory extinguished, an anguish annihilated. No more. And he pictured her being strapped in an electric chair, guards watching her closely, a priest mumbling useless platitudes. He imagined her head and hands and ankles tethered to the lethal chair, the impassive faces of observers looking at her through a window as she was bound. He imagined a switch pulled and the voltage coursing through her body, the stiffening of her muscles, the eventual slump of her head. There would be no last-minute escape. No astounding stunt. She was going out in fire. The electricity was all around him. The air was suddenly charged with it. He could hear it crackle nearby. He could almost feel it rush through his own body as if, at the very last, the simple act of an executioner throwing a switch three thousand miles away had liberated him finally from his own imprisonment.

  He got to his feet and the stalks he’d parted with his hands regrouped with all the forceful elasticity of nature and he stepped away from the stone, and in a rich outbreak of liberating anger he said aloud, ‘No, you won’t, you won’t ever be around again, you’re going to burn, you fucking bitch.’ And, his heart beating hard, he gazed in the direction of the smoke that rose in wisps of cloud from the chimney of the crematorium, up and up into the sky like final messages left by departing souls.

  He clenched his hands and walked away, his stride that of a man sensing the possibilities of reinvigoration, a man freed from a time of wreckage and mourning. He’d come back and he’d scrub the paint from the stone and he’d begin to live again in ways he couldn’t yet predict.

  Look for me, he thought. No, never, never again.

  THE END

  About the Author

  Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these, White Rage and Butcher, were nominated for France’s Prix du Polar. Armstrong’s novels Assassins & Victims and The Punctual Rape won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.

  Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1996 by Campbell Armstrong

  Cover design by Angela Goddard

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-0710-8

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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