by Ian Rankin
“It’s ugly now, see?” Jim had said. “The proportions are all wrong. The ceilings are too high. It’s like standing shoe boxes on their ends.”
“So why did you buy it?”
Jim had blinked at him. “It’s an investment, Gordie.” Then they’d opened the back door so that Jim could show him that the so-called garden flat had no garden, just a concrete patio. “Besides,” said Jim, “this area is in. Pop stars and DJs live here. You see them down on the Broadway, eating in the Greek restaurant, waiting for someone to recognize them.”
“So what do you do?” Reeve had asked.
“Me?” his brother had replied with a smirk which took years off him. “I walk right up to them and ask if I can reserve a table for dinner.”
“Jesus, Jim,” Reeve said now, unlocking the flat door.
There were sounds inside. Instinctively, he dropped to a crouch. He couldn’t identify the sounds—voices maybe. Could they be coming from the flat below or above? He didn’t think so. And then he remembered the hall. There’d been no mail sitting there awaiting Jim’s return. Jim had been gone awhile; there should have been mail.
He examined the short hall in which he stood: no places of concealment; no weapons to hand. The floor looked solid enough, but might be noisy underfoot. He kept to one side, hugging the wall. Floors were usually strongest there; they didn’t make so much noise. He clenched his hands into fists. Running water, a clatter of dishes—the sounds were coming from the kitchen—and a radio, voices on a radio. These were domestic sounds, but he wasn’t going to be complacent. It was an easy trick, lulling someone with sound. He recalled a line from Nietzsche: shatter their ears, and teach them to hear with their eyes. It was good advice.
The kitchen door was open a fraction, as were the other doors. The living room looked empty, tidier than he remembered it. The bathroom was in darkness. He couldn’t see into the bedroom. He approached the kitchen door and peered through the gap. A woman was at the sink. She had her back to him. She was thin and tall with short fair hair, curling at the nape of her neck. She was alone, washing her breakfast dishes. He decided to check the other rooms, but as he stepped back into the hall he hit a floorboard which sank and creaked beneath him. She looked around, and their eyes met.
Then she started screaming.
He pushed open the kitchen door, his hands held in front of him in a show of surrender.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m sorry I gave you a fright . . .”
She wasn’t listening. She had raised her hands out of the water and was advancing on him. Soap suds fell from her right hand as she lifted it, and he saw she was holding a bread knife. Her face was red with anger, not pale with fear, and her screams would bring people running if they could be heard above the workmen outside.
He waited for her to lunge at him. When she attacked, he would defend. But she seemed to know better. She stopped short, bringing the knife down and turning it from a hacking weapon into something she could stab with.
When she stopped screaming for a second to catch her breath, he spoke as quickly as he could: “I’m Jim’s brother. Gordon Reeve. We look alike. Maybe he’s mentioned me. Gordon Reeve. I live in Scotland. I’m Jim’s brother.” He shook the keys at her. “His keys. I’m his brother.” And all the time his eyes were half on her, half on the knife, and he was walking backwards into the hall as she kept coming forwards. He hoped he was getting through.
“His brother?” she said at last.
Reeve nodded, but said nothing. He wanted it to sink in first. One concept at a time. She was pumped with adrenaline, and her survival instincts had taken hold. There was fear there, too, probably—only she didn’t want him to sense it. And at the back of it all, there would be shock, just waiting for its chance to join the party.
“His brother?” she repeated, like it was a phrase in some new language she’d only just started learning.
He nodded again.
“Why didn’t you ring the bell?”
“I didn’t think anyone would be here.”
“Why didn’t you shout? You sneaked up, you were spying on me.” She was working herself up again.
“I thought the flat would be empty. I thought you were an intruder.”
“Me?” She thought this was funny, but she wasn’t lowering the knife. “Didn’t Jim tell you?”
“No,” he said.
“But you’re telling me he gave you the keys? He gave you the keys and he didn’t say I was living here?”
Reeve shook his head. “The reason I’m here,” he said quietly, weighing up the effect this would have on her, “is that Jim’s dead. He died in San Diego. I’m on my way home from the funeral.”
San Diego seemed to click with her. “What?” she said, ap-palled.
He didn’t repeat any of it. He was dealing with porcelain now—knife-wielding porcelain, but fragile all the same.
“I’m leaving,” he told her. “I’ll sit outside. You can call the police or you can call my wife, verify who I am. You can do whatever you want. I’ll be waiting outside, okay?”
He was at the door now. A dangerous moment: he’d have to half-turn from her to work the lock, providing her with a moment for attack. But she just stood there. She was like some awful statue as he pulled the door closed.
He sat in the vestibule for ten minutes. Then the door opened and she looked out. She wasn’t carrying the knife.
“I’ve made some tea,” she said. “You better come in.”
Her name was Fliss Hornby, and she was an ex-colleague of Jim’s—which was to say, she still worked for the paper from which he had resigned.
“He didn’t really resign,” she told Reeve. “I mean, he did resign, but then he reconsidered—only Giles Gulliver wouldn’t unaccept his resignation.”
“I had a policeman friend that happened to,” Reeve said.
“Jim was furious, but Giles said it was for his own good. I really think he meant it. He knew Jim would be better off going freelance. Not financially better off, but his stuff wouldn’t get spiked so often. He’d have more freedom to write what he liked. And to prove it, he commissioned a couple of pieces by Jim, and took a couple of stories from him which ended up on the inside news page.”
They were eating an early lunch in an Indian restaurant on Tottenham Lane. There was a special lunchtime businessmen’s buffet: large silver salvers with domed covers, blue flames licking beneath each. But they were just watching their food, rearranging it with their forks; they weren’t really eating. They simply needed to be out of the flat.
Reeve had told Fliss Hornby about Jim’s death. He’d meant to keep it simple, lying where necessary, but he found the whole story gushing out of him, a taste of bile at the back of his throat, like he’d been puking.
She was a good listener. She had listened through her tears and got up only once—to fetch a box of tissues from the bedroom. Then it had been her turn to talk, and she told Reeve how she’d met up with Jim and a load of other journalists one night in Whitehall. She’d told him that things weren’t going well with her, that her boyfriend had become her ex-boyfriend and had threatened her with violence.
“I mean,” she told Gordon, “I can look after myself —”
“I’ve noticed.”
“But it was more the atmosphere. It was disrupting my work. Jim said he was going to the States for a month, and suggested I look after his flat. Lance might get bored knocking on the door of an empty flat in Camden. And in the meantime, I could get my head together.”
“Lance, that’s the boyfriend?”
“Ex-boyfriend. Christ, boyfriend—he’s in his forties.”
Fliss Hornby on the other hand was in her late twenties. She’d been married some time in her past, but didn’t talk about it. Everyone was allowed one mistake. It was just that she kept making the one mistake time after time.
They’d demolished a bottle of white wine in the restaurant. Or Fliss had; Reeve had had just the one glass, plus
lots of iced water.
She took a deep breath, stretching her neck to one side and then the other, her eyes closed. Then she settled back in her chair and opened her eyes again.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. I was planning to search the flat.”
“Good idea. Jim filled the hall cupboard with all his stuff, plus there are a couple of suitcases under the bed.” She saw the look on his face. “Would you like me to do it?”
Reeve shook his head. “He didn’t tell you why he was going to the States?”
“He was always a bit hush-hush about his stories, especially in their early stages. Didn’t want anyone nicking his ideas. He had a point. Journalists don’t have friends—you’re either a source or a competitor.”
“I’m a source?”
She shrugged. “If there’s a story . . .”
Reeve nodded. “Jim would like that. He’d want the story finished.”
“Always supposing we can start it. No files, no notes . . .”
“Maybe in the flat.”
She poured the last of the wine down her throat. “Then what are we waiting for?”
Reeve tried to imagine anyone threatening Fliss Hornby. He imagined himself hurting the threatener. It wasn’t difficult. He knew pressure points, angles of twist, agonies waiting to be explored. He could fillet a man like a chef with a Dover sole. He could have them repeat the Lord’s Prayer backwards while eating sand and gravel. He could break a man.
These were thoughts the psychiatrist had warned him about. Mostly, they came after he’d been drinking. But he hadn’t been drinking, and yet he was still thinking them.
More than that, he was enjoying them, relishing the possibility of pain—someone else’s; maybe even his own. Sensations made you feel alive. He was probably never more alive than when consumed by fear and flight at the end of Operation Stalwart. Never more alive than when so nearly dead.
He telephoned Joan from the flat to let her know what was happening. Fliss Hornby was pulling stuff out of the hall cupboard, laying it along the floorboards so it could be gone through methodically. Reeve watched her through the open door of the living room. Joan said that Allan was missing his dad. She told him there had been potential clients, two of them on two separate occasions. He’d already had her cancel this weekend’s course.
“Phone calls?” he asked.
“No, these were personal callers.”
“I mean have there been any phone calls?”
“None I couldn’t deal with.”
“Okay.”
“You sound tense.”
He had yet to tell Joan what he’d just sat and told a complete stranger. “Well, you know, I’ve got all his things to sort through . . .”
“I can come down there, you know.”
“No, you stay there with Allan. I’ll be home soon.”
“Promise?”
“I promise. Bye, Joan.”
By the time he got through to the hall, the cupboard was half empty.
“You start looking through that lot,” Fliss said, “while I haul the rest out.”
“Sure,” Reeve agreed. Then: “Shouldn’t you be at work or something?”
She smiled. “Maybe I am at work.”
An hour later, they’d been through the contents of the cupboard and had found nothing relevant. Fliss Hornby had burst into tears just the once. Reeve had thought it best to ignore her. Besides, his mind was on his work. They drank herbal tea and then went into the bedroom. At some point, Reeve couldn’t work out when, Fliss had tidied the room. When he’d first glanced into it, the bed had been strewn with clothes, the floor with books and magazines. Now everything had been hidden.
She pulled two suitcases out from beneath the bed and lifted the first one onto the bed. It wasn’t locked. There were clothes inside. Reeve recognized some of them: a gaudy striped shirt, a couple of ties, a Scotland rugby shirt, saggy, the way all rugby shirts seem to go after the very first wash. The second case contained paperwork.
They spent a lot of time flicking through files, bundles of paper-clipped news cuttings, an old-fashioned card index. Then Fliss found half a dozen computer disks, and waved them at Reeve.
“I may be able to read these here.”
Her PC was set up on the desk in the living room. Reeve studied the bookshelves while she booted up.
“These all yours?” he asked.
“No, most of them are Jim’s. I didn’t bring much from my flat, just stuff I didn’t want burgled.”
There were a couple of philosophy books. Reeve smiled, picking one out. David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. He flicked through, and found a couple of lines had been underlined on one page. He knew which lines they’d be, but read them anyway.
A man, brought to the brink of a precipice, cannot look down without trembling.
He’d spouted philosophy at Jim during a couple of their meetings. He’d quoted Hume at him, this very passage, comparing it with Nietzsche: “If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” More melodramatic than Hume, probably less factual—but much more powerful. Jim had been listening. He’d appeared bored, but all the time he’d been listening, and he’d even bought a couple of the books. More than that, he’d read them.
Fliss Hornby was sliding the first disk home. It contained correspondence. They read through some of the letters.
“This feels weird,” she said at one point. “I mean, I’m not sure we should be doing this. It’s almost like desecration.”
The other disks dealt with stories Jim Reeve had been working on at one time or another. Reeve was glad Fliss was there; she saved him time.
“Giles used that one,” she said of one story. “This one I think turned up unattributed in Private Eye or Time Out. This one I haven’t come across before, but it looks like he hit a dead end with it.”
“We’re looking for a chemical company, Co-World Chemicals, headquarters in San Diego.”
“I know, you told me.” She sounded impatient. She tried another disk. It was labeled 1993 and proved to be all old stuff. The other disks were no more helpful.
“Nothing current,” she said. “He probably took the current disks with him along with his laptop.”
Reeve remembered something she’d said, about journalists only having sources and competitors. “He wouldn’t have left any of his notes here anyway,” he stated. “Not with another reporter on the premises.”
“Where else would he have left them?”
“Could be anywhere. A girlfriend’s, a drinking mate’s . . .”
“With his ex-wife?”
Reeve shook his head. “She disappeared a while back, probably left the country. Jim had that effect on women.” He’d tried contacting her, to tell her the news. Not that she’d have been interested; not that he’d tried very hard.
Reeve remembered something. “We’re also looking for the name Agrippa.”
“Agrippa? That’s classical, isn’t it?” Fliss slid a CD into the computer’s CD-ROM slot. “Encyclopedia,” she explained. She went to Word Search and entered “Agrippa.” The computer came up with ten articles, the word appearing a total of twenty times. They scanned all ten articles, but remained none the wiser about what Agrippa had meant to Jim. Fliss tried a few reference books, but the only additional Agrippa she found was in the Oxford Companion to English Literature.
“Dead end,” she said, slamming shut the last book.
“What about mail?” Reeve asked. “Has he had any letters while he’s been away?”
“Plenty. He told me he’d phone and give me an address I could redirect them to, but he never did. Last I spoke to him was when he handed me the front-door keys.”
“So where’s the mail?”
It was in the cupboard above the sink in the kitchen. There was a teetering tower of it. Fliss carried it to the kitchen table while Reeve cleared a space, moving cups, sugar bowl, and milk bottle. He couldn�
��t hear the pneumatic drill anymore. He looked at his watch, surprised to find it was nearly five o’clock—the best part of the day had gone, used up on a hunt which had so far failed to turn up anything the least bit useful.
The mail looked similarly uninspired. Much of it was junk. “I could have just binned it,” Fliss said. “But when I come home after a trip, I like there to be a big pile of letters waiting for me. Makes me feel wanted.”
“Jim was wanted all right,” Reeve said. “Wanted by double-glazing firms, clothes catalogs, the football pools, and just about every fund management scheme going.”
There was a postcard from Wales. Reeve deciphered the spidery handwriting, then handed it to Fliss. “Who’s Charlotte?”
“I think he brought her to the pub once.”
“What about his girlfriends? Anyone come to the flat looking for him? Anyone phone?”
She shook her head. “Just Charlotte. She called one night. Seems he hadn’t said he was going to the States. I think they were supposed to be going to Wales together.”
Reeve considered this. “So either he was an unfeeling bastard who was giving her the big hint she was being ditched . . .”
“Or?”
“Or something suddenly came up in the States. When did he tell you you could move in?”
“The night before he flew out.”
“So he crammed all his stuff into the cupboard in the hall and the suitcases under the bed and off he went.” Reeve gnawed his bottom lip. “Maybe he knew they were going to move the scientist.”
“Scientist?”
“Dr. Killin—he worked at CWC. Jim went to see him once. Next time he tried, Killin had gone on vacation and the house was under surveillance.”
“I got the feeling he’d only had a few days’ notice that he was making the trip. He complained at the price of the airfare. It wasn’t APEX. What’s the matter?”
