Smoke and Whispers

by Mick Herron

  Darkness dropped like a torch cut off mid-beam.

  ‘She wanted him to live a happy life.’

  Sarah’s heart had skipped a beat when the light disappeared; but she’d caught her tongue in time. Now Gerard wept, almost without sound – as if he’d had practice – but only almost.

  Not reaching out was the hardest thing she’d done today.

  At length, he clipped the torch on again, holding it to one side.

  ‘That’s when she told me.’

  ‘It must have been awful for her.’

  ‘If I ever needed to justify what I’ve done . . .’ Gerard swallowed. Then said, ‘She blamed herself.’

  ‘People abused as children often do,’ Sarah said softly.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll appreciate that I don’t give a fuck what other people do, feel, or think. That creature force-fed her medication when she was eight years old – eight fucking years old – and now my son needs a machine to breathe in. And there’s no machine invented will mend my wife’s heart.’

  The beam in his hand flickered again, but not from anything he’d done. The battery, she supposed. The battery was wearing down, just as her own was. How long had today been going on? And how much longer would it last?

  ‘What did she tell you?’ she asked softly.

  For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to reply, but the circumstances prevailed. Out in the big world, Gerard was his own boss. Here in the dark, among the spiders, where she’d found him, he had to speak.

  ‘Paula never knew his name. She wasn’t a patient. Her role was just to turn up in the orphanage sanatorium once a week for a year and a half and be given an injection. Did I tell you she was eight?’

  Sarah was expected to answer. She said ‘Yes,’ then cleared her throat. ‘Yes.’

  ‘He never spoke to her. What was there to say? He wasn’t interested in her, beyond how she reacted to the treatment he was . . . providing. The children had been told he was a doctor. And because they were children, and were told this by someone they trusted, they did as they were told, and were probably grateful.’

  ‘Did she even have asthma?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘No. She was part of a control group.’

  ‘She told you that?’

  Gerard said, ‘No. I learned that fact today.’

  The torch flickered again, and at that same moment the clanking noise rang. It crawled up the walls, slithered across the out-of-sight ceiling. There might have been words buried inside it, but Sarah couldn’t make them out.

  ‘Wright wasn’t a doctor. He has no medical degree. His deal with Arimathea was private enterprise. He approached the man running the home, a priest called Thomas Walsh, and offered him a cut of any profits resulting from patents Wright registered. In perpetuity. That must have appealed to Walsh. Priests deal in the perpetual. I’m sure he got a kick out of having a stake in it.’

  Sarah said, ‘He wanted money?’

  She wasn’t sure why this shocked her, but it did. Priests and corruption, she had no problem with, but all the usual scenarios involved sex.

  Gerard was ahead of her. ‘Not for himself. The money was to be made over to the home. I’ve got a copy of the deed he drew up, somewhere. It’s even legal, if you can believe it. In fact, it’s probably still binding.’

  ‘How can it be legal?’ she said. ‘No part of it can be legal. It involved giving drugs to children, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Not for God’s sake,’ Gerard said. ‘And nothing he was doing made it on to the contract. It simply said that a percentage of profits arising from patents resulting from Wright’s research – details unspecified – belonged to the trust in charge of Arimathea’s upkeep.’

  ‘He didn’t want a record made of what he was up to.’

  ‘He was too canny for that.’

  ‘But it went wrong.’

  ‘There was no disaster.’ He shook his head. ‘No, the whole fucking thing was a disaster. What I mean was, nothing hit the papers, then or afterwards. But someone higher up the ladder got wind of what was going on. The church ladder, I mean. They hadn’t known about it, you see. Everything that happened was just between Wright and Walsh and the others at the home. Like I said. Private enterprise.’

  ‘Must have made it easier to put a lid on,’ Sarah said.

  ‘The CIA could take lessons from Rome,’ Gerard said. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they do.’

  Again, the torch beam flickered. This time, Gerard noticed. He slapped the torch with his free hand, and the beam died totally for half a second, then returned full strength.

  The pair contemplated the renewed light for a moment.

  Then Gerard said: ‘So Wright went under the radar. Like I said, he’d lied about his credentials. He wasn’t a doctor. He could have been open to any amount of charges, not least assault. Assault on children. But the Church wasn’t about to put its hands up to complicity in what he’d been up to, so none of that happened. He was allowed to walk away. And had just enough sense to keep his head down.’

  ‘But you found him.’

  ‘There are gaps. I don’t know where he’s been all the time since. But he came out of the shadows before I started looking for him, and what do you know? He’s been treading the same path all these years.’

  ‘Still looking for a cure for asthma.’

  ‘He was ahead of the curve first time round. Nobody’s found a cure in the meantime. He stands to make a fortune, if he cracks it. But he’s not there yet. And he’s still crunching the results his work at Arimathea produced.’

  Sarah remembered Wright whining about needing better computers. If you don’t want the animal rights brigade on your case, you need some fairly sophisticated software.

  You need a licence to use animals in research, he’d told her.

  He hadn’t needed one to use children.

  ‘What have you done with him?’ she asked softly.

  She was remembering something he’d said over lunch that day. The four of them talking about the local art gallery, and Gerard saying: The terrible vengeance of a righteous God. Looking directly at Wright. Explaining it to him. We can all learn something from that.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘I fed him to a shark.’

  ‘Gerard?’

  ‘I sliced bits off him. Small, important bits.’

  ‘Gerard . . .’

  He said, ‘Fuck him. Fuck you too. Fuck everybody.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Gerard.’

  This time, he didn’t switch the torch off. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and his shoulders shook. Then something went skittering into the darkness: a rat-sized spider, or cat-sized rat, and Sarah wanted to howl too, but couldn’t – she bit her tongue instead, and stepped forward, and put her arms round Gerard. For a big man, he felt insubstantial. Perhaps what she’d heard fleeing into the shadows had taken a piece of Gerard with it.

  After a while, he settled.

  Sarah thought it best not to speak yet.

  Gerard released himself and found a handkerchief. He passed her the torch, and she swept it round the darkness while he blew his nose noisily. The grey webbing that draped everything was clotted as ever, but some of the horror had left it . . . Gerard’s story had supplanted it as an image of filth. She remembered her first impressions of John M. Wright: a man so dull, he’d told her his middle initial. Round face; a neatly trimmed beard but no moustache. A style choice so ill-advised, she wondered if it weren’t a medical condition.

  Medical condition: she’d actually had that thought. A less rational woman might wonder if she’d picked up vibrations.

  And next time she had nightmares, they’d not be of abandoned picture houses shrouded in cobweb, or of rats’ nests built of shredded cushions. No, they’d feature a round face with a ridiculous beard, leaning over her with a sharp needle; as bland and humourless and uncaring as . . .

  Which was where her knowledge broke down. She’d
have to wait for the nightmare to provide the comparison.

  Gerard thrust his handkerchief away, and held his hand out for the torch. She sensed this was more than his need to assert control; he needed to re-establish a sense of self. She doubted he’d cried in front of anyone for a while. Not even Paula. Not even after Zachary was born.

  If he had, they’d probably not be here now.

  She released the torch into his grasp. ‘Where is he, Gerard?’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d consider walking away?’

  ‘I’ll probably have nights when I wished we had. But I can’t. Neither can you. If you could, you’d not still be here.’

  And he’d not have flown flags for her to see. She’d not be here at all if he hadn’t brought her here; if he hadn’t told her about Zachary.

  ‘So where is he? You haven’t killed him or anything? Shit, Gerard, tell me you haven’t killed him.’

  ‘I haven’t killed him,’ Gerard said. His voice was dull. A lot of adjectives, Sarah had for Gerard. Dull, though, was a first. ‘Not because I don’t hate him enough. Not even because of the morality of it. He’s beyond morality.’

  Sarah couldn’t dispute it. Not wanting Gerard to have murdered Wright had nothing to do with wanting Wright unmurdered.

  ‘But I couldn’t face telling Paula what I’d done. She’d know I’d done it for my own sake, you see. Doesn’t matter that everyone else would think I’d done it for her, or for our son. No, she’d know I’d done it for myself. And I don’t think I could bear her knowing that.’

  ‘Where is he, Gerard?’

  ‘There’s a room. Behind the stage.’

  ‘You’d better lead the way.’

  16

  Something soggy had collapsed at the end of the corridor: Sarah didn’t want to know what. The air grew colder, ranker. She wondered how many broken things had crawled in here to die over the past decade, and if any of them had been human. But the building was a valuable property, or at any rate, taking up valuable space. Brian Harper must have the place inspected regularly.

  She was careful to step round the soggy something all the same.

  They’d reached a door; one secure on its hinges, and with a large rusty key fitted into its lock. Gerard shone the torch on it.

  ‘Did you know this was here?’ Sarah asked him.

  ‘Not until this morning.’ He blinked, and shook his head. ‘Yesterday morning.’ He looked at her. ‘When Harper showed us round, I made sure I could get back in.’

  ‘You propped open an exit with a glove,’ Sarah said. ‘I found it.’

  He’d wanted her to find it. He’d wanted not to have to kill Wright.

  ‘How did you get him here?’

  ‘I waved a cheque book under his nose.’

  That would work, thought Sarah.

  She reached past Gerard and turned the key.

  It made exactly the screechy noise she’d expected, as if this were a cruel, unusual punishment for a key: being made to revolve in its lock. The door, too, protested when she pushed it.

  Sarah fumbled for a light switch, and gave a yelp when it worked. The light that dropped was a filmy yellow that soiled everything it touched. After so long in the dark, Sarah felt it like a physical shock. And when she saw what it illuminated she felt another, duller thump. If she hadn’t already witnessed Barry Malone sitting naked on a chair tonight, that thump might have been less dull.

  Jack Gannon hadn’t laid a finger on Barry. Barry had sat down compelled by nothing more than fear, which had proved powerful enough to hold him in place. Gerard had gone a different road, that was clear. Gerard had used his fists.

  Wright was handcuffed to a radiator pipe – he’d been the source of those clanking noises; the spooky echoes that had crawled around the moribund cinema. Earlier, she supposed, he’d have made more noise. Right now, he looked near the end of his tether. He’d been gagged with a handkerchief, and beaten around the face. His jacket lay in a scruffy heap. What had happened to his glasses, Sarah couldn’t tell.

  He whimpered at her entrance. Whether that meant he hadn’t recognized her, or that he had, Sarah didn’t want to think about.

  Without a word, she thrust her hand out at Gerard, who was behind her. He dropped the handcuff key into it.

  ‘Wait outside,’ she told him.

  At her approach Wright curled into a ball, and Sarah found herself making soothing noises; the same calming buzz she used on the ostriches when they were fussed by a low-flying plane or high-pitched car. She knelt, still crooning, and unlocked the cuffs. As soon as one wrist was free, he snatched both hands away; the metal bracelets dangling from his left.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  He didn’t reply.

  Sarah supposed she ought to put a hand on him; offer him comfort the way she would a frightened child, but couldn’t bring herself to. Wright wasn’t a frightened child. The nearest he’d come was frightening a few himself. Besides, he looked damp.

  ‘Nobody’s going to hurt you,’ she said.

  While he absorbed this, she looked around the room, which wasn’t large. Paint flaked from the walls, and a stack of wooden chairs seemed to be folding in on itself, as if the chairs aspired to the condition of matchsticks. She wondered briefly why they were here, and then forgot about them. There was a sink in the opposite corner. There didn’t seem any great purpose to this either.

  There was less cobweb, she noticed. Perhaps spiders saw no reason to confine themselves to a crabbed little room like this when there were wide dark spaces to explore a mere – Never fails. Before the thought had fully formed, the biggest spider Sarah ever laid eyes on scuttled across the floor in front of her. Except scuttled wasn’t the word. Strolled, rather. Nonchalantly. As if it owned the place. She was too terrified to speak, let alone scream, so did neither, and two seconds later it had vanished inside that collapsing palace of wooden chairs as if it owned them, which maybe it did.

  When it didn’t re-emerge to waggle hairy eyebrows at her, she tried to pretend she hadn’t seen it, and turned back to Wright.

  ‘Okay. You want to stay in here, that’s your funeral. But I’m off.’

  This got through.

  ‘Don’t leave me.’

  ‘Then get up.’

  He said, ‘That man – that bastard –’

  ‘Be quiet,’ she said. ‘There’s no time for that.’

  ‘He’s an animal –’

  ‘I said be quiet!’

  She shocked herself with her own shrill tone. And then unshocked herself by remembering who was who: Gerard had beaten him up, true, but what had Wright done? He’d committed the kind of crime you read about in history books; the kind performed behind barbed wire, in the service of brutal ideology. The kind that made you ask yourself what you’d have done if you’d been there. What you’d have sacrificed to stop it. Up to and including yourself.

  She said, ‘Have you any idea what you did to him?’

  ‘I’d never seen him before this week. He tricked me.’

  ‘Maybe so. But have you any idea what you did to him?’

  ‘I don’t know who he is. But he beat me. He beat me!’

  . . . Afterwards, she wondered how she’d have approached this in a debate. Whether she’d have attempted to get Wright to admit being the cause of greater suffering than Gerard had caused him. But nothing about Wright suggested him capable of taking on board other points of view. It was one of the ways you recognized a sociopath. Put a bleeding body in front of them, they’d complain it was in their way.

  Wright had never spoken to Paula. He’d simply administered whatever dose he’d prepared for her, then forgot about her until next time. He’d deserved everything Gerard had done, and worse. It shocked Sarah, realizing she thought this. Perhaps it was to do with getting older; seeing more shades of grey.

  The spiders scuttling around in the grime were nothing compared to what crawled around some minds.

  She
said, ‘You know what happens now, don’t you?’

  ‘I’ll see him strung up.’

  Okay, she thought – here we go.

  ‘I’ll see him nailed to a wall.’

  He’d grown stronger in the last few moments. That was what anger did. It rushed in to fill up the spaces fear left in its wake.

  ‘You might want to reconsider that.’

  A voice behind her said, ‘I might want to, actually. Reconsider letting him walk away.’

  ‘Gerard. Shut up.’

  ‘You’re sounding braver now, Wright. You want to start again?’

  ‘Gerard!’

  Wright said, ‘Oh, he’s brave enough when I’m handcuffed to a pipe.’

  ‘You had both hands free when I hit you, you little prick –’

  ‘Gerard! Back off. Now.’

  She could feel his weight behind her. There was a heaviness to his presence above and beyond his bulk: the gravity of a man who’d recently committed violence, and was in the presence of his prey. Events hung on a spider’s thread. Gerard had wanted her here, to stop him from doing his worst. But now she’d arrived, perhaps he wanted a witness to his righteous anger instead. That thread might snap.

  But didn’t.

  He said, for her ears only: ‘He wasn’t cuffed when I hit him.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘He cowered like – I don’t know what he was like. Didn’t even raise a fist. Just whimpered.’

  ‘Gerard, leave, okay? Wait outside.’

  She could sense him hovering, his rage looking for new vocabulary – as if there were words which would sum up precisely what had happened here, in the hours before she’d arrived; raw-knuckled words which remained beyond his reach. But at last he backed off, and she and Wright were alone again. Wright said, ‘He’s lying.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I know so. I was here. You weren’t.’

  She began again. ‘Did he mention his son at all? While he was hitting you?’

  ‘I don’t know him. Don’t know his family. I’ve nothing to do with his son.’

  ‘Oh, believe me, you’ve got everything to do with his son.’ An image flashed through her mind: Gerard’s description of his helpless infant. ‘His son needs a machine to keep him breathing. Do you know why that is? Do you know why that is?’