But right now, there were realities to deal with.
Isabel was alive and recovering. Her brother was in the police and had been at the hospital when he had come to eliminate his risk. That was the greatest threat. He knew these people. They would make it their personal goal to find him. But they would not succeed. He would make sure of it.
The nurse he knocked out would remember him. From now on, every time she encountered a stranger with an unfathomable gaze, she would recoil. The shock of the blow he had delivered to her throat would remain deep inside her. Her confidence in others would be shattered. He would be the last person on earth she would be likely to forget. The secretary, too, would remember him. Nevertheless, he was not afraid of these two women.
When it came down to it, they had no idea what he looked like.
He stood in front of the mirror, considering his reflection while he removed his makeup.
He would be all right. More than most, he was familiar with people’s ability to observe. A sufficiently furrowed face and people would notice nothing else. And a stiff gaze behind a pair of glasses was always enough for a person not to be recognized without them.
A conspicuous wart, however, would be seen and noted, though oddly enough its absence after being removed would go unseen.
Some things served to disguise, others did not. Yet one thing was certain: the best disguise was one that made a person look ordinary, ordinary being unremarkable. And the unremarkable was his area of expertise. Putting wrinkles in the right places, applying shadow to the face and around the eyes, arranging the hair in a different way, manipulating the eyebrows, allowing complexion and hair condition to indicate age and state of health. He used all these things to achieve the perfect result.
Today, he had been the average man in the street. They would recall his age, his accent, and the glasses. But they would be in doubt as to whether his lips were narrow or full, his cheekbones vague or distinct. He knew this, and it made him feel safe. Naturally, they would not forget what had happened, and certain of his features would remain salient, but they would not recognize him the way he really looked.
Let them pursue their investigations. They knew nothing. Ferslev and the van were gone, and he would be, too, before long. Exit the average man, from this average residential street in Roskilde. A man in a comfortable detached home, one of a million others in this small country.
In a few days, when Isabel was able to talk, they would know what he had been up to all these years, but would still have no idea of his identity. That was something known only to him, and that was the way he wanted it to remain. But there would be mention in the media. A lot, even. Warnings would go out for potential victims to be aware, and for that reason alone he would have to suspend his activities for some time. He would live modestly on his savings and find himself new bases from which to operate.
He looked around his tidy home. Although his wife had looked after the place and they had spent a fair amount of money on repairs and improvements, the financial crisis meant it was a bad time for selling property. Still, it would have to go.
Experience told him that if a person was compelled to disappear, burning selected bridges would always be insufficient. There could be no half-measures: new car, new bank, new name, new address, new circles. As long as there was a good explanation, so friends and neighbors understood why you were going, things would work out. A new job abroad, good money, pleasant climate. Anyone could understand that. No one would bat an eyelid.
In other words: no sudden, irrational behavior.
He stood by the open door in front of the mountain of packing cases and said his wife’s name out loud a couple of times. When there was no sign of life after a minute or so, he turned and left.
It suited him well. Doing away with a pet of which the family had been fond was something few people cared to do, and that was the way he felt about her.
Now it was yesterday’s news. And all for the best.
Tonight, after bowling, he would put the body in the car and drive up to Vibegården and get it all over and done with. His wife and the two children up there had to go.
And once the bodies had dissolved and the tank had been rinsed and cleaned in a couple of weeks, everything would be ready.
His mother-in-law would be devastated. The farewell note from her daughter would say that their poor relationship had been a significant factor in their decision to emigrate, and that she would be in touch once the wounds had healed.
And when, as was inevitable, her mother eventually began to wonder, perhaps even express suspicion, he would travel home and force her to write her own suicide note. It would not be the first time he had given a person a lethal dose of sedative.
But to begin with, he would have the packing cases destroyed, get the car mended and sold, and put the house up for sale. He would sit down at the computer and find a comfortable place in the Philippines, collect Benjamin, assure his sister that he would still be sending her money, and then he would set off through Europe to Romania in some nondescript vehicle he could abandon in a street somewhere, secure in the knowledge that within hours it would be stripped to the chassis.
The plane tickets made out in their new assumed names would reveal nothing about their true identities. No one would take notice of a little boy and his father traveling from Bucharest to Manila. Only in the opposite direction, perhaps, would the pair be remarked upon.
A fourteen-hour flight to the future.
He went downstairs into the hall and found his Ebonite bowling bag. In it were the accoutrements of his sporting success. He had triumphed so often over the years, and if there was one thing he was going to miss about this life, it was bowling.
Truth be told, he was not overly fond of his teammates. Two of them, at least, were morons he would prefer to see the back of. All were simple men, of simple ideas and simple lives. Average, by name and by nature. Yet to his mind it didn’t matter who they were, so long as their usual score was the right side of two hundred and fifty. The sound of the ten pins scattering was the sound of success. On that count, all six on the team were as one.
That was the beauty of it.
The team went out to win. It was the reason they could count on him being there whenever there was something at stake. That, and his very useful friend: Pope.
“All right?” he said as he approached the bar. “Sitting here, are we?” As if they would sit anywhere else.
High-fives all around.
“What are we drinking?” he asked. The usual entry into team togetherness.
Like the rest of them, he stuck to mineral water prior to a game. Their opponents generally did not, which was their mistake.
They sat for a few minutes, kicking around the pros and cons of the team they were up against, conversation drifting on to how certain they felt about winning the district championships on the coming Ascension Day.
And then he told them.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to find a replacement for me before then.” He spread his arms out apologetically. “Sorry, guys.”
They fell silent, gawping at him with accusations of treachery blazing in their eyes. For a while there was silence. Svend, always with gum in his mouth before a match, upped his chewing rate. He and Birger looked decidedly pissed off. He had expected as much.
Lars broke the silence. “Sorry to hear it, René. What happened? Trouble with the wife? Typical!”
It was an interpretation that won support.
“Nah.” He allowed himself to chuckle. “It’s not the wife. It’s work. I’ve been offered an executive position with a new company spearheading solar technology in Tripoli. But don’t worry, I’ll be back in five years, once the contract runs out. I reckon you’ll be needing me for the Old Boys team by then.”
No one laughed, but then he could hardly blame them. What he had done was sacrilege. The worst thing anyone could do to a team before an important match. A distracted mind could only ever put a wrong spin
on the ball.
He apologized for his poor timing, knowing it was all he could do.
He was already on his way out. Just like he wanted.
He knew exactly how they felt. Bowling was their escape. For them, an international top job would never loom on the horizon. Now that he had driven in the wedge, they would be feeling like mice in a trap. He had felt like that, too, once. But that was a long time ago.
Now he was the cat.
44
She had seen the light of morning percolate down through the packing cases three times and felt certain that she would see it no more.
She had cried a few times, until she was no longer able. Until she hadn’t the strength even for that.
When she tried to open her mouth, her lips would not part. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. A day perhaps had passed since there had been spit enough in her mouth to allow her to swallow.
Now the thought of death seemed liberating. To sleep forever, with no more pain. To end this desolation.
“Let he who stands before death, he who knows that the end is nigh and who sees the moment at which it all must cease, let him speak of life,” she recalled her husband once having sneeringly quoted his father as saying.
Her husband! That man, who had never been alive in the slightest, how dare he heap scorn on such a sentiment? In a moment, she might even be dead herself. Certainly that was how she felt. But at least she could say she had lived.
Hadn’t she?
She tried to recall when, but everything merged into one. Years became weeks; partial recollections ricocheted in time and place, mingling together in all sorts of impossible patterns.
My mind will die first, I know that now, she thought.
She was no longer aware of her own breathing. It was so faint that she could not feel the air passing through her nostrils. The fingers of her free hand tingled. The fingers that yesterday had scratched a hole in the packing case above her and encountered something made of metal. For a while, she had tried to figure out what it was, but couldn’t.
Now her fingers tingled again. It felt like they were being pulled by strings directly attached to God. Tinglings, and the occasional flutter, like butterfly wings.
Do you want me, God? she asked. Is this the first touch, before you take me to heaven?
She smiled inside. She had never been this close to God before, this close to anyone. And she felt neither afraid nor alone. All she felt was exhaustion. The weight of the boxes on top of her no longer existed. Only this exhaustion.
Then suddenly she felt a pain in her chest. A stabbing sensation, so astonishing it made her open her eyes wide in the dark. The day is gone, my last day, flashed through her mind.
She heard herself groan and felt the muscles of her chest contract around her heart. Her fingers opened in spasms of cramp. Her face tightened.
Oh, it hurts. Please, God, let me die now, she prayed, over and over, until these portents of death at once ceased with a stab of pain almost more unbearable than the first.
In the seconds that followed, she was certain her heart had stopped. She waited for the darkness to come and take her away once and for all. And then her lips parted in a desperate attempt to snatch one final breath. A slight gasp that lodged itself in the tiny place inside her where her will to live stubbornly remained.
She felt a vein pulsate at her temple. Another in her lower leg. Her body was still too strong to succumb. God’s ordeal for her was not yet over.
Fear of what might now be in store made her pray. A brief prayer that she might escape the pain and that death would come soon.
She heard her husband open the door and say her name. But she was no longer able to form or utter a response. And what good would it do?
She felt her index and middle fingers twitch reflexively. Felt them strike the box above, her nails against the metal object she had encountered before. Metal, cold and unreal, until a spasm of cramp caused all her fingers to splay, and she sensed that protruding from the smooth surface of this object was something in the shape of a little V.
She tried to think rationally. Tried to separate things, so the nerve impulses from her colon that had ceased to function, from cells that screamed for water, and from skin that was no longer sensitive would not disrupt the image she now struggled to comprehend. The image of something metal with a raised V on its surface.
Her thoughts dissolved. Again, this void that threatened to consume her brain. This emptiness that returned to her at increasingly short intervals.
And then the pictures came rushing into her mind. Images of smooth objects, the menu button of her mobile, the face of her watch, the mirror in her dressing table, leaped forth and danced before her. Everything smooth that she had ever registered in her life jostled to find a place in her mind, a place where it would be recognized. And then, there it was. An object she had never used but which men had often produced from their pockets with pride when she had still been a child. A status symbol from an age long gone, to which her husband, too, had yielded. There it lay, the Ronson lighter with its little V, tossed into a packing case, perhaps so that she alone might find use for it. So that it might provoke her thoughts, or make for a final solution in what was left of her meager life.
If I could extract it and light it, everything would quickly find an end, she thought. And everything he owns would disappear with me.
Again, she smiled inside. The thought was so oddly life-giving. In burning everything, she would at least be making her own mark, planting a thorn in his life, which he would never, ever be able to remove. He would lose everything for which his crimes had been committed.
Retribution.
She held her breath and began again to scratch away at the cardboard, realizing at once how tough the material was. How unreasonably resilient. Scratching away tiny pieces at a time. Like a wasp consuming the surface of the table in the garden. She imagined paper dust descending through the air in front of her face. Tiny particles that together might make a hole, if only her fingers were strong enough. A hole through which the Ronson lighter might fall into her hand.
Eventually, when she had labored enough to dislodge the lighter only a few millimeters, her strength ebbed away.
She closed her eyes and pictured Benjamin for a moment. Bigger than he was now, talking, and nimble on his feet. A gorgeous little boy running to greet her. A fine leather ball in his hands and his eyes full of mischief. How she would have loved to have been there. For his first proper sentence. His first day at school. The first time he looked into her eyes and said she was the best mummy in all the world.
The emotion she felt may have been no more apparent than a slight moisture in the corner of her eye, but it was there. Emotion at the thought of Benjamin. Her little boy, who would now have to live without her.
Benjamin, who would have to live with…him.
NO! everything inside her screamed. But what was the use?
And yet the thought kept coming back, more and more insistent. He would be with Benjamin, and this thought would be the last thing on her mind when her heart finally succumbed.
She extended her fingers again. The nail of her middle digit found a shred, and she began to scrape, scratching with this one finger, until its nail broke. Her only tool denied her. And then she drifted into sleep, tormented by her realization.
The cries from outside came at the same time as the mobile again chimed in her back pocket. It sounded weaker now. Soon the battery would be spent. She knew the signs.
The voice belonged to Kenneth. Perhaps her husband was still in the house. Perhaps he would open the door. Perhaps Kenneth would know something was wrong. Perhaps…
Her fingers moved slightly. It was the only response she could muster.
But the front door did not open. The sounds of arguing never came. All she perceived was her mobile ringing, its tone becoming fainter. And then the lighter suddenly dislodged and came to rest against her thumb.
The slightest wron
g movement and it would be lost to the darkness that surrounded her.
She tried to disregard Kenneth’s cries, to ignore the fact that the vibrations of the phone in her pocket were now growing weaker. And then, with the slightest twitch of a finger, the lighter lay in her hand.
Once she felt certain she had a proper hold, she twisted her wrist as far as she could. Perhaps only a centimeter, but enough to give her hope. Her ring finger and little finger were lifeless and numb, and yet she believed in her endeavor.
She pressed as hard as she could and heard the faint escape of gas as the valve opened. So very faint.
How could she ever press hard enough to make a spark?
She tried to channel all that remained of her strength into the extremity of her thumb. Into this last display of will to show the world how she had lived her final hours, and where she had died.
She pressed again. All the life inside her went into this one action. And like a shooting star in the night sky, the spark burst out in front of her in the darkness, igniting the gas and making everything bright.
She twisted her wrist the one free centimeter back toward the cardboard and allowed the flame to lick the sides of the packing case. Then she let go and watched the sliver of blue turn yellow and widen, wandering slowly upward and leaving behind it a blackened fan of soot for each centimeter’s advance. What for a moment had been aflame was then extinguished incrementally, like a trail of gunpowder leading nowhere.
After a moment, the weak flame reached the top of the box and died. Only a deep red glow remained. And then it, too, was gone.
She heard him call and knew it was over.
No more strength.
She closed her eyes and imagined Kenneth outside in front of the house. The brothers and sisters they could have given to Benjamin. A beautiful life.
A Conspiracy of Faith Page 43
