by Mick Herron
‘We’ve come fucking miles for this,’ he said. We meant himself and the others, but for a moment he might have meant the two of them, and that this were the terminus of some elaborate journey. He pushed the gun’s short barrel against her chin as if he intended to drill through her with his own brute force. ‘But I’d have come a lot fucking further. I owe you, bitch.’
It was strange how the mind would not let go of rescue. She supposed this was always so: as the parachute failed to open; as the jumbo screamed into the sea. There must always be that belief there: that this couldn’t be happening, not to me . . . For some reason, it was Alan Talmadge Zoë was thinking about. The ghost in the machinery of her recent days. He had been following her, she was sure. If these three could manage it, why not him? But as soon as the thought occurred, she forced it away. It was a measure of her desperation that the idea had even visited. It was a glimpse into how much she valued rescue.
She could feel, as if the pressure travelled down the barrel of the gun, his finger tightening on the trigger. She could feel him breaking her life with the movement.
Something crashed behind him.
He moved fast: so fast, she had to piece it together afterwards. He swung the gun, first against her head – and light flared again; supernovas erupted; she hit the dirt – and then round into the darkness, firing twice. He was shouting as he did so, though she never worked out what. And then, it seemed – and this bit wasn’t memory; it was her later recreation of events – that the arm holding the gun dropped to his side, and he stood there on the edge of the light, his one good eye staring into his future. Which came out of the darkness to strike him once, making an inhuman noise as it did so, and then vanished the way it had come, leaving him crumpled in a heap next to Zoë, blood leaking from the wound in his stomach: an almost perfect incision, she was told later. Clean and straight; a good inch deep. Not enough to kill him. Shock did that.
When she got to her feet at last, the second thing she did – after collecting the gun he had no further use for – was bend to pluck the feather she found by his feet. Such a fragile thing, it seemed to have nothing to do with what had just happened.
She found Sarah in the kitchen: two men at her feet; a weapon in her hand. Connor was badly damaged; Maddock simply looked deflated, as if the process Zoë had begun when she’d punctured his leg by the canal had reached its obvious conclusion. Zoë looked at them, then at Sarah. But before she could speak, Sarah said, ‘That one’s got a key in his pocket. Could you ask him for it?’
Zoë said, ‘You heard her.’
Maddock gave her the key.
‘Could you unlock the pantry?’ Sarah said.
‘Where’s the other one?’
‘Burke? Was he not outside?’
‘I’ll go and find him.’
She released Russell, who came close to hitting her with a tin of kidney beans when the door opened – he stalled at the last moment, and carefully placed it on its shelf before stepping into the room. Before he could reach Sarah, Zoë put a hand on his arm.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
He touched her cheek. ‘You’re welcome.’
Zoë was still holding Ross’s gun. On her way out, she said, ‘I loosed your birds, by the way.’
‘They won’t go far,’ Sarah said. ‘They’re spooked right now, but they’re very territorial.’
‘I noticed that,’ said Zoë.
Round the far side of the house she found Burke, beyond the reach of the burglar lights. He lay on his back staring at the starless sky with eyes that were open, but reflected nothing. Instead, they were black pools, which had absorbed everything they were ever going to, and were finished now. She had never known him alive – had never known his name until a minute ago – but he had come here planning to harm her. He might have had second thoughts, but that was his business.
There wasn’t a mark on him, that she could see.
She knelt and examined him briefly. There were no obvious wounds; no blood at all. But his head seemed unmoored, as if he were an overplayed-with doll. The neck was broken. Maybe he had tripped and fallen. But if so, she’d found him in a strange position; as if he’d just lain down, to look at the stars that were not there.
She stood and, realizing at last that the gun was still in her hand, put it on the ground. She’d been too close to too much death today. There was nobody left to shoot, anyway.
From somewhere near the treeline, Zoë caught a whisper of sound, a fragment of song, carried on the wind.
Whenever you need me I’ll be there
And then it was gone.
She began to walk towards the trees, as if she might find him if she reached them. But she knew already that Alan Talmadge wasn’t going to be found, not by her. Not until he wanted to be. She knew who he was, though. There was only one possibility; she should have known him from the start. Should have recognized him, the way you’re supposed to know love when it comes calling. But she hadn’t.
Halfway, Zoë stopped, and sank to her knees. He was long gone and she wouldn’t know what to do with him now anyway; not out here, miles from anywhere. I will find you, she’d promised him, and she would. But not tonight. She was cold and hurt; there’d been too much death. And he had, in his way, helped her.
It was dark, and no one could see her. If she was quiet, no one would hear. Out of reach of any man’s hand, Zoë wept as if her heart would mend.
From the fourteenth floor the world looked sensible, or at least a long way off. Zoë leaned against the railing a moment, flirting with vertigo, and when the wind gusted it was like that moment on a station platform when an express whaps past, and hits the heart sideways. It was a reminder of what could happen if you had no roots. She clutched the railing, and did not light a cigarette.
Behind her was Joseph Deepman’s flat, though Deep-man didn’t live there any more. The old man had died the day after Zoë had last seen him, and had lain undisturbed for three days until an angry neighbour crashed his way in to turn the TV off. What Zoë felt about this, if anything, she didn’t yet know. She wasn’t sure she’d had much more to say to him; was pretty sure she knew the answers to any questions she might have asked. It was another appointment missed, though, of which there had been a number lately.
For instance: she had not found the man whose coat she had stolen, and, while she couldn’t yet know this, never would. She had looked for him in the usual places – along the canal, in the public squares – and had found plenty of other invisibles, but no sign of those battered laundry bags. The previous afternoon, though, she’d divided ninety pounds among a group of what she’d heard called junks and drunkies, who had sensibly scattered as soon she was done. Zoë hadn’t thought of this as paying a debt. It was more an acknowledgement that a debt existed that was waiting to be paid.
The wind blew again, and she hugged herself. Her jacket was denim, resurrected from the back of a wardrobe. Her missing leather jacket was another debt, one she intended to collect some day.
Because Alan Talmadge was out in the world: wearing her leather jacket.
She shivered at the thought, or maybe it was the lack of leather that made her shiver. Alan Talmadge had followed her all right; had been there, she supposed, in her hour of need. He had quietly, calmly, broken a man’s neck, and had done this for ‘love’ of Zoë. This was what love meant in some vocabularies. That there was no harm you would not inflict to keep the loved one safe.
(Zoë had asked Sarah, ‘Would you have done it? Killed him?’ And by him she’d meant Connor, or Maddock, or Ross . . . Whoever had been closest.
And Sarah had said, ‘To stop them hurting Russell? Yes . . .’)
But love took different forms, some more recognizable than others. Zoë, for instance, had not recognized Alan Talmadge when she met him, but then, he had adopted a different character for her – had cut his hair; shifted his manner – as if he’d already known that the shape he’d assumed for Caroline and Victoria wouldn’t have do
ne for Zoë. The fact was, no shape would have done that. Apart from anything else, she’d had their examples to look back on. Caroline Daniels and Victoria Ingalls had opened their hearts where they shouldn’t, and, when push had met shove, that had cost them everything. Talmadge had ghostwritten his way into their lives and ghosted his way out again, and the ghosts left in his wake were theirs.
But then, maybe they’d always known danger lay ahead, but found the alternative too bleak to countenance: that they were unloved; or worse, unlovable. Maybe this late arrival in their lives felt like a prize they’d won, and the man delivering it the thing itself: their golden ticket out of loneliness.
Zoë could live with being unlovable. There were worse fates.
And meanwhile, unlovable or not, she was everywhere again. Out in the ether, the stories were writing themselves; flying higher the less there was to tie them to the ground. Where she’d spent days answering questions, or trying to; though the list of things she had no answer for spooled endlessly in front of her, while the answers she did have might have been cobbled out of a sick fantasy:
You’re saying an ostrich did that . . .?
But they weren’t stupid, her questioners. At least part of the story that had threatened to swallow her had travelled the Blue World already: a whisper in the canteens; a rumour in off-duty hours. Everybody knew those cops had known Danny Boyd; had been the mainstay of the anniversary do. That Ross, who’d jumped the force seven years ago, a shade before he’d been pushed, had been the unlikely point of intersection between the upward-looking Connor, the lifer Burke and the workhorse Maddock. And it was known that they’d huddled in corners a time or two; and it was known, of course, that Charles Parsley Sturrock was dead. The shortest distance between two points was occasionally just a line, waiting to be crossed.
You’ve killed before, haven’t you?
She had, and it had scarred her life, but scars heal – the mark remains, but the pain disappears. Zoë was learning that. A few hard hours in police custody weren’t going to unlearn it for her.
‘You already know I have,’ she said, ‘so it’s not a real question. Now I’ll ask you one. Who do you think threw that kid off a roof?’
What they thought and what they knew were two different areas. Though it was increasingly apparent that the truth, whatever form it took, wasn’t going to look nice on the front pages.
So they had let her go for now, though they’d collect her again before long. It was nice to have some routine to your days. And it was always possible that sooner or later, she’d give them Bob Poland. Unless she decided that his was a debt best paid personally: personally, and over and over again . . .
For the second time in as many minutes, Zoë didn’t light a cigarette.
She had another appointment this afternoon; this with Amory Grayling. Who was perhaps wondering if she were still among the living. For some while Zoë had wondered whether he really needed to know how Caroline’s life had ended; that long before she had found herself in the path of that oncoming train, Caroline had wandered into the way of somebody at least as directed, at least as dangerous. Grayling might have been happier with his illusions intact, especially if these included – as Zoë suspected – that Caroline’s balance had been upset, in the end, by his own perfect unattainability; his own happy marriage. His own being there, every day. So yes, of course he had to know. The fact that a diagnosis might turn out to be unpleasant bestowed no right to hide from it. Even ostriches didn’t, in fact, hide their heads in sand; this was one of those myths that came out of nowhere, and gained currency because they were just strange enough to sound true.
And Zoë, too, had been picked out by the headlights that had dazzled Caroline, and poor Victoria. Talmadge had followed her. Had been following her since the night she’d stood outside Caroline Daniels’ home, wondering why a car door had opened and closed, and no light had come on. Had followed her all the way to London more than once; even making it look, the first time, as if he’d been there before her . . . She remembered talking to Deepman about him; trying to find out how often he visited, and Deepman had told her He said he’d come back.
And he did.
Since Friday?
On Friday . . .
She’d thought the old man confused, but it was Zoë who’d muddled the facts. She’d been expecting confirmation that Chris Langley had been a regular visitor. So that’s what she’d heard when Deepman told her otherwise: that Chris had been there, left and come back, all in that same morning. He’d arrived after she’d departed on her quest for light bulbs; he’d brought whisky to distract and confuse the old man. And he’d stuck his mobile number on the fridge for Zoë to find, just as he’d attached a tracking device to her car the night he’d followed her home from Caroline’s. Which was how he’d traced her to Deepman’s in the first place.
He said he’d come back. And he did. He’d said he’d popped next door, but he hadn’t. He’d left and waited for her to come back, that was all. And he’d been at the inquest, expecting to see her there, so had heard Ross give evidence; had maybe seen Burke there too, whom he’d later killed. She wondered at which point in all of this Chris Langley – Alan Talmadge – had decided he loved her; wondered, too, if there was any point in wondering about this. Of the heart and its contents, there were no easy answers; instead, there were too many stories. There were too many songs, each with their own definition of love. There were too many endings, and even the happy ones were precisely that: they were endings.
She should have known him – should have picked him out by his shape from a crowd – but Talmadge had been a stranger after all; had shaved his head and become somebody new for her: nervy, diffident, socially concerned. Had he thought that was what would impress her? Or just assumed this was somebody she would never recognize? And what did it say about her that she hadn’t? What would it have said if she had?
It was a pity she wasn’t smoking today, because now would have been a great moment.
Something happened then in the clouds way above; one of those overarching rearrangements that shift the light a little, allowing shafts of it, in this instance, to break on the City a mile or so to the east. Illumination was always happening elsewhere, it would be easy to decide. Hindsight was the perfect view; it was where the mind said Take your pictures here.
. . . She’d seen Jay Harper the previous evening, in Oxford city centre; his arm round a blonde woman Zoë figured for twenty-three, twenty-four. He’d seen her too, and given her that same rueful smile she’d received when he’d occupied what might have been the last seat on the train. As if, under other circumstances, he’d give things up for her; but not, obviously, if it was going to cost him anything. She’d given him the look she’d give a pane of glass, and walked on by. There were songs for every occasion, perhaps, and that was one right there: ‘Walk On By’.
Leaving her where?
She let go of the railing suddenly, disgusted by her self-interrogation. Zoë Boehm knew where she stood. She stood fourteen storeys up, gazing down on a city where she didn’t belong. She ought to be heading home: there were things to do, there were things to do. And every time one of these things arose, the next step appeared, just waiting to be taken. When that envelope had arrived, for example, with the date of her appointment – two days from today – the next step had proved to be the telephone, and it had been Sarah Tucker she’d rung . . . Because love was unavoidable, really. How long had she spent ignoring that vital truth? Love was unavoidable. It was what the heart did while it was doing everything else. Maybe this, in the end, was what Caroline and Victoria had known. Which did not mean that the price to be paid need always be so great.
There were fourteen floors to climb down, because the lifts were out of order, and Zoë took them briskly, two stairs at a time.
She felt okay – not brilliant, but okay – and she supposed that was a start.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Juliet Burton, for her long patience
and unwavering faith; to Krystyna Green and her colleagues at Constable & Robinson; to my own colleagues at IDS, especially on the fourth floor; and to Erica Neustadt, Imogen Olsen, George Roberts, Nick Smith and Emelia Thorold.
‘This Old Heart Of Mine (Is Weak For You)’. Words and Music by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Eddie Holland and Sylvia Moy © 1966, Stone Agate Music, USA. Reproduced by permission of Jobete Music Co Inc/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H 0QY.
‘I’ll Be There’. Words and Music by Hal Davis, Bob West, Willie Hutch and Berry Gordy © 1970, Jobete Music Co Inc/Stone Diamond Music Corp, USA. Reproduced by permission of Jobete Music Co Inc/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H 0QY.
‘What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted’. Words and Music by Paul Riser, James Dean and William Weather-spoon © 1966, Stone Agate Music, USA. Reproduced by permission of Jobete Music Co Inc/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H 0QY.
‘Tracks Of My Tears’. Words and Music by William Robinson, Warren Moore and Marvin Tarplin © 1965, Jobete Music Co Inc, USA. Reproduced by permission of Jobete Music Co Inc/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H 0QY.
