A Few Words for the Dead

by Guy Adams

  In the bathtub, Goss’s body twitched once, then again and then remained still.

  The bathroom door burst open and the woman who was partially April Shining stepped inside.

  ‘Empty,’ she said, ‘just meat and bone.’

  She had an idea, retreating from the bathroom and wandering around the flat. She found what she wanted in a kitchen cupboard and returned to the lifeless body in the bath tub.

  ‘Best to be tidy,’ she said, pouring the contents of the bottle of paraffin over Goss’s body, letting it soak into his clothes and his hair. ‘No point in leaving it hanging around now there’s nobody using it.’ She lit a match and threw it onto the body, stepping back as it burst into flames.

  ‘Lovely,’ she said as she took her photos. ‘Lovely, lovely, lovely…’

  TWENTY-SIX

  Toby and Tamar passed over a narrow bridge and on towards St Mark’s square.

  Venice in winter seemed a haunted place, not the romantic paradise of holiday brochures and paperback novels, but a sinking city of old stone and ghosts. In the light of a streetlamp, a young woman played a sorrowful lament on a violin. Toby put a euro in her violin case but she didn’t seem to notice, lost in the key of D.

  ‘Who is this man?’ Tamar asked as Toby checked the street signs against his map. He passed her the small black notebook Shining had given him, the collection of contacts and friendly faces around the world.

  ‘He’s under “V” for Venice,’ Toby told her.

  She flicked to the page and began to read. ‘Giovanni, carpenter and seer.’ She pronounced the latter as see-er which was accurate enough. ‘I wonder what he sees?’ she asked.

  ‘Fratfield, we hope.’

  ‘It says “Carl” after it.’

  ‘That’s the name August uses with him. He changes his name more often than his socks.’

  Toby and Tamar had left Mexico following the trail of an aeroplane ticket booked in the name of Jim Lufford, an alias, they were sure, of Fratfield’s. After a few days, the trail had grown cold in Padua so Toby had checked the book in the hope of finding someone close by that could help them heat it back up again. Venice being a short drive away, they had booked a night in the cheapest hotel they could find.

  They had needed a rest anyway, as difficult as it was to relax knowing their target still roamed free. Their travels from one country to another had sent their body clocks into meltdown and, after a breakfast that felt like dinner, they had gone to their room – a graveyard of ostentatious furniture and gilt grown tatty by neglect – and slept through the day.

  After making a phone call to arrange a meeting with Giovanni, they were now on the hunt for both his workshop and dinner.

  ‘There it is,’ Toby said, pointing to a small shop at the end of the street. A wooden sign featuring an embossed harlequin’s mask hung above a window filled with doll’s houses, puppet theatres and carnival masks.

  Toby looked at his watch. ‘We’ve got an hour and a half to kill, let’s find some food.’

  Grabbing a table at a nearby pizzeria, they looked at the menu and tried to pretend they were normal tourists.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to see Venice,’ Tamar admitted having made her choice of pizza.

  ‘Horse meat pizza,’ Toby tutted. ‘Who wants to eat a horse? Let alone put it on a pizza?’ He looked up at her. ‘I’m glad we came, then.’

  ‘It is a place you hear about,’ she said, ‘a place you are supposed to go.’

  ‘True enough, to ride the gondolas and eat expensive ice cream. Or, alternatively, stalk an assassin with magical powers. Both are popular.’

  They looked at one another for a moment then, as one:

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You’ve got nothing to be sorry about!’ said Toby. ‘All of this is my fault. Fratfield did this to get at me, not you.’

  Tamar shrugged. ‘It is what it is. I do not blame you. You did nothing wrong. But now I am a burden. I am weak. I do not like to be weak.’

  ‘How can you say you’re weak? You’re the strongest person I know.’

  ‘I am the accident waiting to happen. Where I go, people get hurt. I cannot fight him. I have to let you fight for me. I do not like letting others fight for me.’

  ‘I know you don’t,’ Toby admitted. ‘But you’re right, if you get too close, others will get hurt. We have to be careful. You’re our early warning system. Our tracker. That’s not weakness. You’re still taking a hell of a risk.’ He hesitated then decided to carry on. ‘You know I wish you’d just go back to England.’

  She looked at him with unrestrained anger. ‘You do not say that. It is bad enough I cannot fight. I will not run as well.’

  ‘I know,’ Toby sighed. ‘I know you won’t.’

  The waiter appeared and they ordered their food and a bottle of wine. For a while they were silent. Their wine came. Toby poured and then they continued to stare at the street around them. Then, if only to break the mood, Toby spoke.

  ‘We’ll catch him soon.’

  Tamar made a dismissive clicking sound with her tongue. ‘You are so sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Toby, ‘because he can’t hide for ever. He won’t want to. He’s an assassin. He relies on invisibility, on being able to do his work unnoticed. The more pressure we put on him, the harder that will be. Eventually he’ll come for us, he’ll have to.’

  ‘I suppose that is true,’ Tamar agreed, ‘and however that ends, I look forward to it.’ She took his hand. ‘I married you because you are a good man. And because I knew that together we would be better than we had been before. That is what marriage is for. It is to make people better than they were when they were apart. He is not letting us do that, so let him come. I want our future, not this.’

  Toby leaned over and kissed her.

  ‘One day it’ll all be done,’ he said, ‘but tonight we drink wine and eat horse pizza.’

  ‘You order the horse pizza?’

  ‘He took me by surprise. I panicked.’

  They stayed in the restaurant until just before their arranged meeting, ordering another bottle of wine and allowing themselves the indulgence of being drunk. For weeks now they had always had to be on guard, to be ready for the worst. It was a wonderful relief to know that, tonight at least, they were unlikely to die.

  Giovanni’s shop was dark. Toby rang the small bell hung by the door and they waited by the window, Tamar pulling faces at the grotesque masks and Toby giggling in that way that only a drop too much wine allows.

  After a minute, a light switched on at the rear of the shop and they saw a white-haired man weaving his way through the shop towards them.

  ‘It’s Pinocchio’s bloody father,’ Toby whispered and Tamar nudged him in the ribs.

  ‘Do not be rude, he is a friend of August.’

  ‘Everyone’s a friend of August.’

  The door opened and Giovanni greeted them with the sort of exuberance English people only ever found abroad.

  ‘My friends,’ he said, his Italian accent thick enough to spread on ciabatta and garnish with olives. ‘It is good to see you.’

  He led them inside, closing the door behind them. ‘And how is my wonderful friend, Carl? It has been too long since I saw him, much too long. It must have been…’ He stopped, placed his finger on his chin and looked towards the sky, the most perfect mime for ‘Giovanni thinks’ that could be imagined. ‘1998, yes… the problem of the singing fish.’

  ‘Singing fish?’ asked Tamar.

  Giovanni immediately burst into ‘O Sole Mio!’ while weaving between them like a fish, his hands as flippers, his eyes wide, lips pursed.

  ‘Singing fish,’ Toby repeated and laughed.

  Giovanni stopped singing and continued to lead them towards the back of the shop.

  Toby stumbled slightly and nearly poked his eye out on a carnival mask. ‘Hell of a nose on him,’ he muttered, ducking beneath it.

  ‘It is the plague doctor, no?’ explained Giovanni, miming the long
nose. ‘They wear herbs in their beak. They think it will stop the plague. It did not!’ He laughed and, pulling back a black curtain, ushered them through into his workshop.

  Everywhere they looked surfaces were covered in half-finished toys and puppets.

  ‘It is beautiful,’ said Tamar, squatting down to appreciate a highly polished rocking horse.

  ‘It needs a saddle,’ said Giovanni, cantering around as if on horseback, ‘otherwise the little people will not be able to ride him.’

  He pointed towards the far end of the workshop. In the corner was a large puppet theatre. The stage was about a metre square, ornately painted, decorated with pieces of wooden scenery, trees, bushes and a sea broken down into white-crested waves. Golden-painted wings jutted out from it and the whole was surrounded by a cubicle draped in heavy purple cloth. The puppeteer would stand inside the cubicle, invisible to the audience as he enacted the play.

  ‘I have a story for you, I think!’ said Giovanni, pointing to a couple of fold-out chairs that were placed in front of the theatre. ‘Since your call, I have been talking to my friends,’ he mimed being a string puppet, ‘and they have something they want to show you.’

  Toby and Tamar looked at one another and began to laugh. ‘Why not?’ Toby said.

  ‘Excellent!’ Giovanni gave them a little round of applause, bowed and then disappeared behind the purple drapes.

  ‘I like him,’ whispered Tamar. ‘He is mad, but a nice mad.’

  All around them, the lights turned off until only the stage was visible in a single narrow spot.

  A puppet trotted on from downstage left. It was a man dressed in a suit. It’s face bore a large smile as it approached centre stage.

  ‘Good evening my friends,’ it appeared to say. ‘I am a spy from fair London town and I am hunting a bad man.’

  ‘It’s you!’ laughed Tamar, tapping Toby on the arm.

  ‘Looks nothing like me,’ said Toby but laughed along.

  ‘If you see the bad man,’ the spy puppet said, ‘you will be sure to tell me, won’t you?’

  Toby and Tamar didn’t reply.

  ‘I said,’ the puppet repeated, a slightly angry edge to its voice, ‘you will be sure to tell me, won’t you?’

  Toby and Tamar looked at one another before both shouting ‘Yes!’

  The spy puppet gave a bow. ‘Thank you. Though I ask you to remember an important thing. Sometimes we do not see what is real. Sometimes, what we think has played out before us is not as we perceive it. Our eyes cheat. Our hearts lie. Sometimes it is necessary to make…’ it stretched out its arms, ‘a little theatre.’

  It bowed once more.

  ‘So, I am looking for a bad man. I must catch him because he wishes to harm the ones I love. I will do whatever it takes to make sure he is stopped.’

  Behind the spy puppet, another appeared. This man was dressed all in black. It stopped, half on, half off the stage, peering around the curtain. Then, from the other side of the stage, another creation appeared. This was not human: it appeared like a dark cloud, streamers billowing from it thanks to some unseen updraft.

  ‘It’s Fratfield and the curse demon,’ said Toby.

  ‘The bad man is there!’ shouted Tamar. ‘Look behind you.’

  ‘I can feel it coming,’ the spy puppet agreed, ‘and I thank you.’ But it did not turn around, even though the other two puppets now began to creep towards it. ‘I will not run. Because sometimes running is not the way.’

  The other puppets continued to draw closer, the spy puppet placed one wooden hand to its temple as if in pain.

  ‘You will have no choice but where to go,’ it said. ‘I do not need to tell you. Everything falls into place. Everything falls.’

  And closer.

  ‘And you must remember, sometimes it is all just theatre.’

  The cloud puppet pounced on the spy puppet and it gave a piercing scream that made Toby flinch in his seat.

  ‘And sometimes,’ the puppet continued, as the cloud began to obscure it from view, ‘it is death.’

  The Fratfield puppet extended its arm and in its hand it held a gun. There was a loud pop and the smell of gunpowder filled that air.

  The cloud suddenly vanished upwards revealing the spy puppet once more, a red streamer dangling from its temple. The Fratfield puppet extended its other hand, and this one held a pair of scissors. It extended the scissors towards the puppet’s strings and, one by one, they appeared to snap until the spy puppet toppled to the stage.

  ‘Was that helpful?’ asked Giovanni from behind them, his voice making them jump. He presented them with a tray. On it were two small glasses of limoncello.

  ‘How did you…?’ Toby stared at him, the question hanging unfinished, then looked back at the stage where the Fratfield puppet was slowly walking offstage.

  Suddenly there was another bang and this time both Toby and Tamar nearly jumped out of their seats. A thin cloud of smoke worked its way across the stage, dissipating into the air.

  ‘I thought I would get us all a drink while my friends told their story,’ said Giovanni, standing up and turning on the lights. ‘I don’t always like to see what they do.’

  ‘I can’t say I enjoyed it much either,’ Toby admitted. ‘But how did you operate them if you were…?’

  Giovanni put his finger to his lips. ‘Hush my friend. Sometimes you do not ask questions, no? I am sure Carl has told you that. Now, drink…’

  He handed each of them their limoncello, pouring a third for himself.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘the meaning is not always clear. Sometimes it only becomes so later once it has time to make sense in your head.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Toby.

  ‘It was clear,’ said Tamar, ‘and I do not like it. You died!’

  Toby sipped his drink. ‘It’s just a puppet show.’

  Giovanni laughed. ‘So is life, my friend, so is life!’

  They left Giovanni’s as quickly as politeness allowed, their earlier good humour thoroughly trashed by the old man’s bizarre little play.

  ‘It’s just like I said earlier,’ Toby insisted, ‘in order to catch him we’ll have to let him come to us.’

  ‘I do not want him coming so close you are dead.’

  ‘Well, no, neither do I.’ He put his arm around her shoulders as they worked their way back through the narrow streets to their hotel. ‘But we’ll worry about that when it happens. I won’t die easily, I know that for a fact.’

  ‘How can you know?’

  He squeezed her tightly. ‘Because I have you to look after me, don’t I?’

  They stopped and kissed. Somewhere in the distance a catfight erupted followed by the sound of shattered glass. A voice cried out in anger. Somewhere else a violin played, its high, beautiful note cutting through the venetian night. Beyond that a crowd of people laughed and burst into song, a raucous, brutal thing filled with notes that no musician had ever written.

  Toby’s phone rang. They broke their kiss so he could answer it. He was on the phone for no more than a few seconds.

  ‘It was April,’ he told Tamar. ‘August is in trouble. We have to go back.’

  Two hours later they were on a plane back to London.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  April was sat behind the wheel of her old Mini. She hadn’t the first idea of how she’d got there. The last thing she could remember was the jogger in the park. He had offered her the gun… had she taken it? She just couldn’t remember. Her head was aching and she made to press her hands to her temples but discovered that they were fixed to the steering wheel with plastic cable ties.

  ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t risk you running off,’ said a voice from the backseat.

  She looked up and saw Oman’s face looking back at her from the rear-view mirror. She tried to turn around, but her fixed arms held her in place. She looked through the car windows. She was parked just around the corner from the Section 37 office.

  ‘Oman?’ she asked. ‘What the
bloody hell are you playing at?’

  ‘Oman… Oh man!’ He laughed. ‘I’m just giving you a little rest. You can only bear to have me inside you for so long.’

  ‘You’re not getting inside me for one second, you filthy git!’ she replied and then gave a pained sigh – shouting made her head hurt all the more.

  ‘The connection gets… painful,’ he continued. ‘For both of us actually. I don’t mind so much. I quite like pain. It’s better than nothing.’

  ‘Cut me free and I’ll give you all the pain you could want.’

  ‘No, no. You have to rest a little more yet. Just a few hours. Just until you’re better. You need to eat and drink too. I can force you if you make me but you’re not stupid, I think you’ll just do it. After all, I just bet your little mind is ticking over with ways you might be able to overpower me, isn’t it?’

  ‘It might be,’ she admitted.

  He nodded. ‘And of course, your best bet is to bide your time, wait until I do cut you free so you can drive. Yes. That will be your best chance. You’ll have to be quick, though. Alert. So a little sustenance won’t go amiss. I bet you’re hungry.’

  She was. Starving, in fact, though she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why. It wasn’t usually her first concern when she found she’d been made a captive – dear Lord, she thought, you just know you’ve lived a full old life when you can talk from jaded experience about being someone’s prisoner.

  ‘Thirsty too,’ said Oman. ‘You’ve had a busy night and having me on board can really drain some people. I wonder why that is? Because it’s forced perhaps? Like a virus? Is the body constantly fighting me off? Who knows?’

  April certainly didn’t. ‘I haven’t the first idea what you’re talking about,’ she admitted. ‘Or why you’re doing this. You’re our friend, Oman.’