Hell Is Empty

by Conrad Williams

  ‘We’re early,’ I said again. ‘Let the fucker sweat. Let him not keep to the clock. It says something about him.’

  ‘What does it say about him?’

  ‘It tells me he’s nervous. That he’s impatient. Maybe he’s under pressure.’

  ‘So what if he is?’

  ‘It might be something we can use. It might mean he makes a mistake.’

  ‘What if his clock is fast? What if it’s just that?’

  I shrugged. ‘He was right on the button at Gerrard Street.’

  Karen sighed noisily and stared at the red blur. I thought I could hear the ticking of my watch over the air con and the endless drone of cars.

  9.26.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  ‘Fuck,’ Karen said.

  ‘It probably wasn’t even him,’ I said. ‘Wrong number. Happens all the time.’

  ‘What if your watch is slow?’ she said.

  ‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘He’ll call back.’ But already I was thinking about what we might do if he didn’t. Maybe he was under pressure and had cracked, thinking we weren’t playing his game any more. Maybe he was using a different timer, one that was inaccurate. I’d played poker and lost.

  At 9.30 the phone rang again and I tried a told-you-so smile but it crumpled on my face under the weight of relief. She caught that. I kept forgetting she knew me. Aeons had passed, but she had buttonholed me as the cocksure gimp I’d always been. I went with her. We squeezed into the box.

  She picked up on the fourth ring.

  ‘Where?’

  [beat]

  ‘When?’

  [beat]

  ‘Let me speak to him.’

  [beat]

  ‘Okay… Okay.’

  She put the phone down in the cradle and turned to me. She was searching my face as if it had been me on the other end of the phone, somehow ventriloquising.

  ‘What now?’ I asked. ‘Ealing.’

  I looked behind us, towards the heart of London. Romy was that way, and Sarah too, somewhere. I knew that he was there too. I knew this was bullshit. Perhaps Karen caught on to that as well because suddenly her hand (dry skin, ragged fingernails) was around mine and she was tugging at me to return to the car.

  ‘Please, Joel,’ she said.

  ‘Ealing,’ I said. ‘By ten, I’m guessing.’

  She nodded.

  ‘What did he say when you asked to speak to Simon?’

  ‘He said: “It’s late. He’s asleep. Little boys need a lot of sleep.”’

  I didn’t like the sound of that. It sounded like a threat. Where was he sending us? Who was at the end of the road? We sat in the car and I stared at the white spots on the bonnet where filler made ugly scars against the, arguably, even uglier pale-blue paint. I didn’t want to get us going just yet but I knew I’d have to or Karen would whinge and my headache wasn’t up to it. And anyway, we were going to struggle to make it to Ealing in thirty minutes, even if it was clear roads all the way. The engine started – I didn’t want to worry Karen by asking what we’d do if it didn’t – and though it sounded like a washing machine full of bricks, it got us on to the Westway and it got us off at Acton where I found Noel Road and though we cut it fine we made it to Mattock Lane and the phone box and more meaningful looks, and more unanswered questions and another order to get us further away from where I believed we really needed to be.

  10

  The darkness seemed too big for the car. It felt, sometimes, as we hugged the hard shoulder on the M4 heading west, that were we to open the windows by even a crack, the enormity of the sky would simply pour in on us like oil and smother us in our seats. The time he was giving us to get to these more and more remote phone boxes stretched out like old barbed wire. Thirty minutes to get to the airport hotel in West Drayton; forty minutes to get to Station Hill in Reading; ninety minutes to get to the Marriott in Bristol; then it was Paignton in Devon.

  That last shift was a killer. It was getting on for three in the morning and by the time we arrived we almost messed up. By ‘we’, I mean ‘I’, obviously. Karen had fallen asleep.

  I tooled around the streets looking for Torbay Road, but we had plenty of time and once I’d located the kiosk I set a timer on my phone to go off after fifteen minutes. Then I closed my eyes. And almost immediately opened them again to find that it was five minutes past when he should have called and my timer had not worked because my battery had run out of juice. I felt my gut squirm with chains of ice and got out of the car as quietly as I could. My breath churned around my head: chains made real. I closed my eyes and rubbed my face until it was warmer. I couldn’t feel my feet. All of the houses along the road were ink stencils, copies of copies, dark, asleep. Just looking at them made me feel tired to the chambers of my heart. I went to the phone and picked it up thinking, hoping crazily, that I was not too late and that maybe the bell wasn’t working and it was ringing silently but when I put that cold curve of plastic to my ear there was only the purr of the line’s potential. I put it back down and it rang immediately. I picked up, glancing at Karen to check she had not been wakened. Her face was grey behind a caul of frost spreading leisurely across the passenger-side window. She looked dead: deep shadows where her eyes and mouth were situated. Hollows beneath her cheekbones.

  A voice said: ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  I didn’t like the snarl in it; the assumption of control.

  I said: ‘The VD clinic. Your tests came back negative. You’ve got to stop shoving chickens up your arse.’

  ‘Put Karen on.’

  ‘Karen’s off duty,’ I said. ‘It’s me you should be talking to anyway. I’m the one ferrying her all over the country in a death trap. Can I bill you for petrol expenses?’

  ‘You answered late.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. I dozed off. It won’t happen again.’

  ‘Maybe it’s too late for “sorry”. Maybe it’s time, instead, for funeral hymns.’

  ‘There’ll be hymns aplenty,’ I said, ‘for you if you hurt that child.’

  ‘You’re in no position to make threats.’

  ‘It isn’t a threat. It’s a promise.’ I strained hard to hear something in the background that might give away his location, but there was nothing. He was being careful. There was no hint of any stress in his voice either, which put paid to any suspicions I had that he might be malleable. ‘If you’re late one more time, it’s the end.’

  I bit my lip and checked my watch. How much more of this? ‘Let’s call it the end now,’ I said. ‘I’m tired and bored. Karen’s fallen asleep she’s so tired and bored.’

  ‘I don’t advise –’

  ‘Fuck what you advise. I want to hear that child now. I want to talk to Simon. Otherwise I’m ditching this car and booking into a hotel for what’s left of the night.’

  There was such a seamless silence at the other end that I wondered if he’d killed the line while I was mid-rant. But then I heard snuffling and shuffling and soft, murmured words in the background – of encouragement, perhaps – and a boy’s voice, full of sleep, said: ‘Mum?’

  ‘Simon?’

  ‘That’s all you’re getting.’ Snarl was back.

  ‘What about you?’ I said. ‘What are you getting? Why are you doing this? When are we going to get a list of your tedious demands?’

  ‘Here’s a tedious demand,’ he said. ‘Land’s End, by ten a.m. tomorrow. Plenty of time. Going soft on you in my old age. No more mistakes.’

  ‘Which phone box?’

  ‘Use your imagination,’ he said.

  ‘You’re in London,’ I said. ‘I know it. What’s your fucking game?’

  But now he had killed the link and I slapped the phone back half a dozen times before it docked and I didn’t care who I woke up.

  I trudged to the car and got in. Cold was scraping its nails up and down my back. The eyes that gazed at me from the rear-view mirror looked like black scrawls scribbled onto a special effects head. Karen had manag
ed to remain asleep. I heard an electric motor on a milk float somewhere beyond these houses and I remembered breakfasts in our kitchen in Lime Grove, bright winter sunshine lancing the table while Sarah messily consumed her boiled egg or her Ready Brek, nose glued to a copy of Twinkle.

  It wasn’t Twinkle.

  It fucking well was Twinkle. I should know. I paid the subscription on it for God knows how many years.

  It was The Beano. Twinkle died a righteous death some time in the nineties and a good thing too.

  Because The Beano is a bastion of all that is good in the world.

  Nobody became a serial killer because of a few jokes about farts and bogies.

  Define ‘joke’.

  Let’s see… how about you, naked, giving me your ‘come hither’ look?

  I thought I always looked dashing.

  Interesting you should use the word ‘dashing’ because that’s what I was always doing when you got naked – ‘dashing’. In the direction of ‘away’.

  As much as I wanted to wake Karen up and tell her the situation I left her to slumber. Letting her know I’d fucked up wasn’t a good idea. The quiet was nice, anyway, once you blanked the wasp-playing-a-kazoo-in-a-tin-can noise created by the Mini’s engine.

  I drove as hard as I could though the time restrictions were gone. I wanted to exorcise that snarl from my thoughts and ninety in a death trap seemed a valid way of going about it. But then I saw a sign for Salcombe and my foot came off the accelerator as though raised by some invisible puppeteer. Salcombe was home to Melanie Henriksen now. There was the information but so what? I was twenty miles away from where she stuck her finger up schnauzers’ arses and sold ridiculously expensive kidney tablets for old cats and – quite possibly – went home to a nice guy who looked after her and did not place her in danger.

  You never meant to do that.

  No. But it happened.

  Yes. And I died. Do you blame yourself for that as well? Of course I do. I should have been home. But I was out, wasn’t I? Drinking. It’s what I’m best at.

  Oh, I don’t know. You’ve quite a nice line in self-pity.

  Fuck off, Becs.

  I would leave Melanie alone because she left London. She went away because of what happened. She went away because I remained there.

  I steered hard left on to the slip road that would take me into the town itself. It was late. I didn’t want to stand over her while she slept. I just wanted to see her place, and maybe the house where she lived. I just wanted to close the chapter by crystallising all of that in my mind.

  I found it pretty quickly. It was set away from the centre, on a quiet lane with a view of the sea and the harbour. There was a pale blue awning: Henriksen’s Veterinary Services, since 1958. There was a brass plaque on the door in the shape of an Airedale terrier. I’ve never understood the appeal of such dogs. I thought the point of a cat or a dog was to have something that felt calming and agreeable when you stroked it. I imagined stroking an Airedale would be akin to stroking a tramp’s matted beard.

  The impulse to ring the bell was very strong.

  Everything dark. I got out and peered through the window but could see only vague outlines: plastic chairs, shelves with pale things on them, pet food, I imagined. A counter. Cards and photographs on the wall behind. I stood back and gazed up at the windows above the surgery. Did she live on the premises? I couldn’t remember the setup, or whether she’d gone into such detail. Probably not, since the last time I’d seen her everything about her was full of goodbye.

  I was backing off, getting ready to return to the driver’s seat – marginally less comfortable, I’d imagine, than an electric chair – when a light came on in the vet’s office. And she was there, moving behind the counter, wearing a ridiculously thick woollen jumper. Her hair was longer than it had been in London, but in the way she walked I could see how she was recovered. A strong woman who had managed to draw a line under a bad episode and was not looking back.

  I caught myself reaching out to tap on the glass but even if she looked up, the light from inside meant that she would not see me. But I stayed my hand because me here meant memories and I had no right to just come wandering back into her life. She didn’t deserve that kind of upheaval. I’d had my chance and it had not worked out. Complaining that it was circumstances or bad luck wasn’t going to cut it.

  I moved away from the window; she retreated from the counter. The door closed. The light went off.

  Karen woke up as I was slowing down along the A30, the sea writhing beyond the edge of the land. I was remembering Melanie, a figure in a doorway in Maida Vale, a moment of warmth on a cold, dangerous night.

  ‘I dreamed we stopped,’ Karen said.

  ‘We stopped,’ I said. ‘A toddler would need to stop regularly to stretch his legs in this thing.’

  ‘I slept okay.’

  ‘You are obviously half cat. We’ve been ordered to Land’s End, by the way,’ I said.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s early. Six-ish. Sun’s coming up.’

  ‘Do you think it might stop here? Do you think it will end today?’

  ‘It would be fitting, wouldn’t it? Land’s End? Better than Fiddler’s Ferry. Or Wetwang.’ Something was bothering me but I couldn’t get it to put out; it flirted instead, maddening, beyond the reach of fingertips.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  ‘Tired,’ I said. It wasn’t anything to do with Melanie, although I thought, maybe, somehow, it was. I chased the tail of it for a few seconds until I realised Karen was expecting me to say more. I let it go. ‘Hungry too,’ I said. ‘I could eat a baby through a colander.’

  ‘We should find this phone box,’ she said.

  I was beginning to apologise; why did I think a joke about a baby would be a good idea while with someone whose only child had been kidnapped? But she either hadn’t heard or was paying me no notice. I pulled up in the car park next to a couple of tennis courts. There was a phone box outside a pub nearby, its door hanging askew in the frame.

  ‘Shit,’ Karen said.

  ‘Yep.’ The phone’s guts were hanging out and the receiver was gone. Spray paint and beer cans and condoms inside.

  I got out for a closer look just for something to do. There was a piece of paper, nice paper, neatly folded and pinned to what remained of the kiosk. And I thought of Melanie again. How I was hidden from her, but in plain sight. And of course he knew where we were and what we were doing. Of course he wasn’t in London. I looked behind me at the other cars in the car park.

  ‘What is it?’ Karen asked.

  I plucked the note from the booth and handed it to her.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she read.

  ‘He asked me who I was,’ I said. ‘Before I’d said a word.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You were asleep. I should have realised immediately. He’s been watching us every step of the way.’

  She walked away from me towards the tennis courts. She let the paper fall from her fingers. ‘So what now?’ she asked. The skyline beyond her was thickening with ash-grey cloud. My stomach rumbled again, but this time the noise came from somewhere inside that weather.

  ‘We go back,’ I said. ‘We’ve been led a merry dance for some reason. Hopefully it was all just a cruel prank and when we get you back to Leonard Mansion Simon will be waiting for you. And lesson learned.’

  ‘We should eat first,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you fainting on the motorway.’

  I nodded and we got back in the Mini. I couldn’t remember passing any shops since we’d come off the main road, certainly nothing that would be open at this hour. We could always drive off road and try to hit a sheep and then fry it on the Mini’s overheating bonnet.

  I was weary and in dire need of a shower. I got my wish, sooner than expected, as the rain came spearing down within minutes and the road vanished, turning to a vague blur from the torrent and the resultant spray rising beneath it. That and the
perpetual mist of the glass made it impossible to see anything more than about one millimetre in front of the windscreen wipers, which were flailing about ineffectually like the world’s worst semaphorist signalling for help while drowning.

  ‘Christ,’ I said, unhelpfully, as I righted the car after veering on to the other side of a road filled with headlights. ‘We can’t drive in this.’

  We got off on to a track and followed it for a mile or so. Rain was dripping into the car now. My seat was filling with its own puddle of rusted water. ‘Did you actually buy this car or was it bequeathed to you by your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandbastard?’

  ‘Over there,’ Karen said.

  She was pointing at something to our left, a series of farm buildings emerging from the maelstrom. No lights. The windows looked like holes in a street fighter’s mouth. I pulled up outside and we ran to the door.

  ‘It’s open,’ she said.

  ‘That’s because nobody lives here. The place is a wreck.’

  ‘Should we move on?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s either this place or sitting in the Mini till it blows over and I’d rather sit in a hammock of sick than spend another minute in your so-called car.’

  We got inside but there was only so much of it still benefiting from a roof so we were still outside, technically. Old dead rooms, anonymous, all of them larded with muck and bird shit and drifts of litter. We found a tent in a back room full of rusted pieces of machinery: a lathe, a circular saw, all of it beyond function, corroded to brown flaking lumps. The roof was on in here but water drizzled down the walls anyway. Someone had barbecued something in the grass collector of a lawn mower. The cold, sour smell of ancient charcoal hung in the air like a threat. I checked inside the tent. A couple of gossip magazines from months back. An empty packet of Walker’s cheese and onion crisps. Nothing else.

  ‘It’s mostly dry,’ I said. ‘We can sit in here. Keep it warm for the serial killers until they get back from doing some serial killing.’

  ‘Don’t—’ Karen said. One of her eyes was bloodshot. Fatigue was bowing her mouth, her shoulders. She looked at the very edge of tolerance, sanity, understanding. But then she smiled and lifted up two bottles, one of vodka, one of Coca-Cola. ‘Rescued from the car,’ she said. ‘My “in case of emergency” stash. And I think you’ll agree we’ve reached that point and gone beyond it.’