The Last Tour of Archie Forbes

by Victoria Hendry

  Hours later, he surfaced to the first diamonds of frost strewn by dawn across his green carpet, her face a pitiless yellow, smiling on the horizon. His choices would fall with the mercury. He couldn’t live outdoors much longer, and he couldn’t return without knowing Petal was safe. Petal’s disappearance would be laid at his door. He was sure of that. His staring eyes would look great in the Crimewatch mug shot. He was watershed man now.

  34

  Petal lay on her bed in the dark. She had lost track of the days. The light from the street fell in a chess-board pattern on the floor of the basement: black and white dots on the bare concrete, stark and unyielding. She was out of condition, her hip bones were curved blades under her clothes as her hands traced their contours. Her injured ankle felt shrivelled, like a trailing plant cutting itself off from its roots, drying its stem until it narrowed and separated from the parent. She would leave her foot in this bed as it dropped from her withered ankle under the pressure from the sheets. The basement was a plain in a dark land in which she was stranded. She had thought that in tough times she would inhabit her mind, feed her dry life with a nectar of memories from summer holidays – long days on picnics, in rowing boats, lying in the heather on high mountains, laughing with friends at the exertion, the relief of having reached the top on legs that trembled. Now there was nothing. The uncertainty of not knowing how Calum Ben would behave was paralysing. He stood between her and all that had gone before – everything she was, everything she knew. She thought of Queen Mary’s Bothwell going mad in his Danish cell, his bottle dungeon. She was trapped in the bottle dungeon of her mind by fear. This was no light place of inner resources, of mental treasures, and she wished she had paid more attention to all the good things in her life – revisited each one at the end of each day she had survived in health and freedom; catalogued them in memory and stored them away on the shelves of her inner being. On days like these, days of captivity, filled only with long hours of pain, denial and deprivation, those jewels were the only light. How could she have been so rich and so unaware? Now the shapeless figure of Calum peered down into her captivity from the bottleneck above, searched her face through narrowed eyes, and everything she was, or had ever been, was his. He stood between her and her life: anonymous and immovable.

  She got up and walked over to the bathroom, put on the light and splashed her face in the sink. The water escaped down the drain in its perfect helix, swirling clockwise. She put her hand over the hole. The running water filled up the basin, covering her fingers. She took off her socks and stuffed them in the overflow and put in the plug. She pushed her jumper down the toilet and pushed the flush. The bowl filled up. She did it again and then, taking off the lid, jammed her shoe over the ballcock to keep it down and the cistern filling. The basin was overflowing now, the rushing sound a gurgling brook, a free-running stream. She turned the taps on full and paddled across the floor to her room. She leaned against the wall behind the door, so that she would be hidden when it opened. The water spread. It covered the chess-board shadows from the grille, an unearthly checker-board in a new Atlantis. ‘Come on, you bastard,’ she thought. ‘Come and play my game,’ and she laughed. The water was cold as it passed over her feet and under the door. There was silence from the rest of the house. The sound of the cascade from the basin filled her ears. ‘Help,’ she shouted. ‘Calum, help.’ But there was only silence. It was colder than ever. She waded over to her bed and lay on the island of her mattress, watching the water creep up the walls. It must have been seeping away through porous bricks because it never rose above her bed legs, and she lay on her raft in the black ocean and waited, wondering.

  * * *

  Daylight played on the pool of water when she woke. A bus ticket was floating on it and a cigarette butt from under the bed. She watched them lazily circling each other and then there was a shout of exclamation from outside. There was a slap of a tray hitting water and the door shook as it was unlocked. ‘For fuck’s sake, Petal,’ Calum shouted as he ran in and splashed towards the bathroom. The door to the hall was open. Petal sprang from the bed and waded towards it. She tried to pull the door shut behind her, to lock him in his own horrible chamber, but he had already turned. His eyes were blazing. She ran. There was a short flight of stairs ahead with a threadbare carpet that had once been red with gold roses. She ran up them, her legs heavy, lop-sided as her ankle took her weight. Adrenaline roared through her blood as she reached the landing. There was another door and she closed her hand on the handle even as she saw the keyhole shining empty and bright. It was locked. She banged on the door, looking over her shoulder. She shouted ‘Help’, but her throat was dry. Calum wasn’t running up the stairs behind her. He was standing at the foot, his arms folded across his chest. He wasn’t laughing at her. He was silent. She sat down with her back against the wall and rested her head on her knees. She turned her head to look down at him: a Colossus in the dark water, the bus-ticket sailing ship sinking at his feet. The water depth fell, shrinking fibre by fibre against the water mark on his jeans.

  The silence grew. Petal could hear bird-song beyond the door, feel a cool breeze from a window, burnt fresh with early frost. Somewhere in the garden a robin would be turning over an iced brown leaf, looking at the ground with its beady eye for food. She was trapped here with this un-man, her captor. ‘I am not your prisoner,’ she said. ‘I am Arabella Dexter and I want you to let me go.’

  ‘Petal,’ he said.

  ‘And I am not Petal; not to you.’

  ‘But I’m all you’ve got,’ he replied. ‘Come back downstairs.’ He held out his hand in invitation.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Come back downstairs and I’ll see what I can do. I’m not a bad man. I don’t want you to be unhappy.’

  ‘I don’t trust you,’ she said.

  ‘You have no choice,’ he replied.

  She walked down the stairs, trailing a hand on the cold plaster wall. ‘Where am I anyway?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you really expect me to tell you?’ he asked, and held out his hand.

  She took it, her ankle painful, and they paddled to her bed. The water was less now, ankle deep. There was a smell of sewage and old drains. ‘I can’t stay here,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘Stay on the bed and I’ll see what I can do. It’s almost over now, Petal,’ he said.

  ‘What’s almost over?’ Her throat was tight.

  ‘This,’ he replied. ‘This – is almost over.’ He walked over to the door. ‘I find it pays to time-limit my projects. If there isn’t a return in an anticipated time frame then it’s time to pull the plug.’ He laughed, and waved a manicured hand at the chaos. ‘Literally, in this case.’

  ‘I thought you said you couldn’t let me go?’

  He sat down on one of the chairs and put his feet up on the other. ‘We live in a curious world, Petal. Let me tell you how this will play out,’ said Calum. ‘You phone the police and you say a man you went on a blind date with locked you up and refused to let you go. They come round and knock on my door, if they can find it, and say, “Is this true? Did you hold this woman against her will?” And I say, “Why, Officer …” His voice was high, outraged, celluloid, “She’s having you on. We’ve had a fight and she stormed off in a huff. I think I said she was past her sell-by date. I admit that was unkind but, you know. She’s no spring chicken. It’s a risk you take on blind dates. Not everyone tells the truth about their age.’

  ‘You’re sick,’ said Petal.

  He held up a hand. ‘You’re interrupting, Petal. I don’t like that. And anyway, nothing happened, not really. You can’t point a finger at me and say I ravished you like a Victorian villain, or a Greek God. There was no Leda and the swan. I treated you like a child, an honoured guest. You enjoyed my food.’

  ‘They’ll never believe you. I’ll tell them the truth.’

  ‘Well, you can tell them, but you’ll have to pro
ve your lies, your horrid lies, Petal, because really you’re a bit of a hysteric, aren’t you? We were casual lovers who fell out and you have a bit of a grudge against me, or maybe you’re making it up to discredit me for some strange, warped reason of your own. I’d save yourself the trouble.’

  ‘They will believe me. I’m a professional with a good job.’

  ‘You’re a crank in crank-ville. You’re a bit left-of-centre, a bit “arty”.’ He made an inverted comma sign as he spoke the last word, pushing down his middle and index fingers as he held his hands level with his face. They framed his dark eyes. He was his own mythology.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ she said. ‘You are truly fucking nuts.’

  ‘That’s gratitude for you, and I went to some trouble to text your mum and friends at the top of your contacts list so they wouldn’t worry,’ he said. ‘But never mind. It’s your word against mine. If they find me.’ He emphasised the word ‘if’. ‘My work is about to take me out of the country. So this is how it will go. You’ll say I locked you up. I’ll say I didn’t. Corroboration is my get-out-of-jail-free card. They need proof to get me and you can’t give it to them. There is no proof. No witness. If there is no corroboration, there is no crime. Who came up with that, eh? It’s genius. It’s a gift – to me. So why don’t you just suck it up and get over yourself? It was all in your mind, Petal. That door was never locked. That’s what I’ll say.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear this,’ said Petal. ‘You are very, very sick.’

  He stepped forward and breathed in her ear. ‘Why don’t you admit it?’ he said. ‘You fancied me. All that stuff in the bar. “I’d like kids one day”,’ he said, imitating her voice. ‘But it’s getting too late, isn’t it, Petal? Tick-tock. I don’t think you’re thirty-five at all.’

  She turned her face away. ‘You have got it all so wrong.’

  ‘Not so wrong,’ he said, ‘because I’ll come out of this with what I wanted. It’s all part of the game. It’s my massive, multi-player, off-line, role-playing game, and you’ve got a starring role. It’s real-time strategy in real life. I’m a hacker using Heartbleed, except I’m syphoning you into my world, meshing you into a new, multi-dimensional reality. Fun, but the best bit will be when they come after me. You’ll play your role well. You’ll be very convincing, very distressed, but I’ll elude the hunt, because ultimately, where I’m going, they can’t follow.’

  35

  Archie watched the long lines of cars on the by-pass grow like beads on an abacus; the worker bees going to the hive. He wished he was one of them, sitting in his car on the leather seats, his satnav at his fingertips, his wife’s belly swelling with the new life he had planted there, his home built of solid stone minutes away.

  He huddled in his sleeping bag and nibbled his bread ration from Mike’s flat, and sipped water from his bottle filled at the stream nearby. He hadn’t passed any dead animals lying in it, polluting the water. The clouds were pink over the Forth and they melted away until the sky became an icy, cornflower blue. He turned grey with cold and tried to sleep again to forget the chill creeping into his fingers.

  A dog woke him. Noon. It was pulling the bag of bread from his rucksack. ‘Leave it, Nelson,’ shouted a woman’s voice but the dog bounded over to her, trailing slices from the plastic bag. She grabbed the dog by the collar and threw the bag into the dying grass. ‘Hey,’ he shouted from his doorway and hopped into view in his sleeping bag, filling the doorway of the derelict cottage, larval and incongruous.

  ‘Sorry,’ the woman muttered, turning away and snapping the lead onto the dog’s collar. ‘I didn’t know it was yours.’

  ‘You stupid bitch,’ he shouted after her. She walked faster. He pushed down his sleeping bag and untangled it from his boots. The landscape looked huge and there was no cover, but he forced himself outside to look for the bread. His heart was pumping as he stumbled over the grass. It had landed in a boggy patch and was soaking up brackish water like blotting paper. Archie ground it into the earth under his heel and returned to the cottage. As he paused in the doorway, he remembered entering the warehouse full of almonds near Kandahar, wading through them knee high on the floor, crackling and popping – the crepitus of bones. He had been surrounded by food there. Here there was nothing: a dying year; the imprint of his body in the wet grass. He was endlessly revisiting his life in snapshots, but unable to re-enter the picture of the part he treasured. The difficult memories were his most regular guests now. He sat with his back to the wall and watched the plain. He was on stag – the patrol would relieve him soon. He had to keep his eyes open. He had to make a plan. The sound of male voices and the bleep of a radio brought him to his feet – the tango-charlie-foxtrot trash of radio static. Creeping forward on his belly, he risked a look round the door-frame and saw two police officers making their way towards him, their dog straining at the leash. He threw his rucksack out the back window and climbed through it. Keeping low, he ran as fast as he could towards a coppice of trees. The officers would crest the hill in about five minutes. If they were looking for him, they would check the cottage first. Too late he remembered his sleeping bag. The dog would have his scent, the promise of a reward firing it up. It would bay and gambol, slip its leash. He tried to run but he was stumbling, the tussocks of grass catching his feet. The dog gave an excited bark behind him, still not in view but it wouldn’t be long. He reached the trees, forced his way between the springy pine branches and hobbled down towards the stream gurgling at the foot of the slope. Late autumn leaves spun on the surface of the water above rocks speckled brown like trout. Jew’s ear fungus curled on the bark of elder trees, listening for pursuit. He knew not to linger here – knew from his training that the water would concentrate his scent for the dog, its radar nose seeking him out. He was the prey. He pulled himself up the far bank, sliding on the mud, which clung to autumn leaves in this gully, unfingered by frost. The field ahead would be better. If he could make it to the far wall before the dog sighted him, it would have to cast around to pick up his trail, gaining him time. The officers’ voices behind him were encouraging the dog on. ‘Seek. Seek,’ the voice on the wind shouted, ‘Seek. Seek.’

  He skirted the newly ploughed field, white gulls drifting ahead of him, the sticky, black earth clogging his boots. He clambered over the gate at the far end and ran across the country road, dodging a car. Rounding a cottage on the far side, he reached the road to Easter Bush. The university’s bio-science research centres stretched out in a new estate near the Roslin Institute. A double-decker bus wobbled along between the hedges, tourists and students sitting upstairs. He threw himself flat in a ditch and wormed his way under a fence into a field planted with experimental crops, small green shoots in beds with white labels on sticks at the end. A student was hoeing nearby, his head nodding to music on his headphones, the occasional word escaping from his lips, a staccato chain of nonsense fragmenting in the air. Archie ran along the hedge-line, keeping low, willing the man not to turn round. There was a spade resting at the gate and Archie put it over his shoulder. It was perfect camouflage, changed him from a fugitive to a worker, and gave his presence in the landscape a rationale that would be acceptable to the casual observer. It meant he would go unnoticed. He walked along the edge of the road. To his left, the steel frame of a new building sketched its skeleton in the air – a blueprint for a lab.

  The bus moved off ahead of him, a couple of tourists stranded on the back seat. The students had reached the buildings among the trees. He came to a beech wood, dried leaves crackling under his feet and green, plastic tubes popping up from the ground like shell casings, protecting new saplings from deer and rabbits. He sat down with his back to a tree to catch his breath. He was hungry. He could see students in the cafeteria thirty metres away, filling coffee cups at a coffee machine and carrying trays to tables. Their lives were lit by strip lighting; blue and silver lives at plastic tables; laughter and friendship as they cut and paste
d living plants together to make new species – pest and drought-resistant; sought to guarantee the human race food in an inhospitable world; aimed to conquer the inhospitable places, the bad lands, to green the desert. ‘What if the bad lands were inside?’ he thought. What if the fighting never stopped? What if the real problem was other human beings and not the planet? He saw Adam biting into the apple with strong, white teeth. Which had come first? Apple or desire? The long fall from grace.

  There was the wail of a siren, and he saw the student with the headphones walk over to a police car and point in the direction in which he had gone. Blue lights flashed across the field – a disco pursuit of an escaped lunatic. He crawled towards the ditch at the edge of the adjacent field, pushing his rucksack ahead of him, and rolled into the crack in the earth. Sheep looked down at him, chewing, their razor teeth no longer shaving the grass short in small, even strokes. The officers would guess he was here if they read the animals, but as he peered out, the car moved on. The chase was ahead of him. He rolled onto his back and looked at the sky. It was clouding over. The sun was low on its autumnal arc, handing itself from branch to branch among the trees. There was a portacabin nearby and a luminous, orange jacket had been left hanging on a post. The men were at the building site digging a hole with a yellow digger that roared. He put the jacket on, shouldered his spade and walked back onto the road. He was Orange James going to work. The YouTube fanfare sounded in his head. It was blowing a last post for him. He reached the main road and sat in a bus shelter on the edge of a settlement of oatmeal-harled houses. When the light began to fade, he wandered over to the huge metal expanse of an out-of-town supermarket. As he thought, the jumbo bins at the back were being filled with out-of-date stock. He could eat tonight.