by Mick Herron
So Howard made a mental list (Howard made a lot of mental lists). 1: Check on the child. 2: Hang up some alarm bells – it would be nice to have warning if things went wonky. 3: Remind Crane he wasn’t running a private war out there. If he couldn’t keep his brother on a leash, maybe he’d like checking ID at the car pool.
He almost smiled at the thought of passing that last item on.
Amos Crane, though, was a truly creepy motherfucker, and Howard didn’t think he’d be telling him anything of the sort very soon.
Chapter Two
Dead Soldiers
I
It was over a week before Sarah heard from Silvermann again, a week in which the debris was sifted and cleared at the broken house, and scaffolding erected to prevent what was left of it sliding into the river. The police presence became nominal and eventually disappeared, and the absence of obvious developments led to the falling off of newspaper coverage in proportion to increased speculation in the neighbourhood. No husbands were reported missing. Dinah’s disappearance received no coverage. Either it wasn’t newsworthy, it wasn’t known about, or it wasn’t a real disappearance. Maybe Silvermann would let her know which, if he ever got in touch. One night Sarah awoke sure she could hear a child crying in the street, but saw nothing human through the window. Mark slept through it, even when the streetlight’s glow fell on his face as she drew aside the curtain. He looked much younger sleeping, Sarah thought. Probably everyone did. But it kept alive in her a tenderness harder to maintain in the daylight hours.
Harder to maintain, too, was a sense of exactly why she’d hired Joe in the first place. The image of Dinah that had latched on to her mind had grown paler with the passage of time, as if, mission completed, it could fade away into the light. The overalls, the yellow jellies, remained, but they too seemed less substantial, as if their memory had grown confused with that of the dolls’ accessories Sarah played with as a child. She was starting to wonder if her own subconscious weren’t playing treacherous games, luring her into a state of maternal concern that would leave her prey to Mark’s powers of persuasion. And Silvermann’s silence also gave her unease; nor could she recall the details of their contract. He’d said two days, and taken eight so far: would he charge for those? Several times she’d dialled his number but hung up before making the connection, unready, yet, to call him off before knowing what had happened. At this point, of course, she believed it was possible to halt events.
When he called at last, he called mid-morning. Sarah, inevitably, was involved with housework. At least once a week she found a corner – the cupboard in the spare bedroom today – she’d somehow overlooked until that moment; cleaning it thereafter became a weekly fixture, another item tagged on to a list of chores that threatened to last forever. What had been a weekly routine was becoming an eight-day cycle; she was torn between needing it and wanting to walk away. So Silvermann’s call sounded like chimes of freedom, though it contained less information than you’d find on a postcard, or even a postage stamp. ‘Have you found her?’ she asked him.
‘Are you free?’
‘Right now?’
‘Right now, yes.’
Because he never gave out important stuff over the phone. That was what he told her later, along with what he’d found out.
So she was free, yes, or at least released on licence. He suggested Modern Art Oxford: not the gallery, but the café, which met with Sarah’s approval. While she couldn’t always admire what the gallery chose to exhibit as art, she’d endorse its cakes any day of the week. But Silvermann was there first, and his offer to pay for coffee left her unable to ask for cake. Imposed virtue is not the sweetest, but she supposed she’d live. Joe Silvermann, meanwhile, steered them to a table by the wall where he could sit with one eye on the exit. It was hard to gauge whether this was professional paranoia or juvenile posing. For the moment, Sarah wasn’t ruling out a bit of both.
‘I spend half my life in places like this,’ he said.
‘Galleries?’
‘Cafés. But also galleries, yes, and pubs and clubs. Anywhere people meet people, you know? Museums. Railway stations.’
‘You must have a lot of friends.’
A hint of a smile swept across his mournful face: it was like watching somebody remembering a joke at a funeral. ‘Strictly business. This is where a lot of cases start. Strangers meeting. Then wanting to know more before taking it further.’ He picked up his coffee cup, sniffed suspiciously, then put it down. ‘Maybe ten, twelve times a year I get jobs like this. It’s always an older woman, she’s met a younger man. And what she wants to know is, is he all right. You know?’
‘Is he safe.’
‘Is he safe. Times used to be, you met someone, you liked them, you got married. Now you need a credit check and deep background before the second date. Nobody wants to get married to Frederick West.’
‘Or his wife.’
‘But men mostly trust their judgement. I don’t know why. A woman can fool a man. The other way round, it’s not so easy. So I’ve always believed.’
‘But maybe your judgement is suspect.’
‘You’re laughing at me. I don’t mind.’ He picked up his coffee again. ‘I had a case once, a woman, she has this new boyfriend. And she wants to know, can I take a blood test from him without him knowing? I ask her, what am I, a vampire? But that’s what she’s hiring me for. She wants to know if he’s got Aids, if he’s HIV, without him knowing she’s finding out.’
‘How did you manage that?’
‘Something you should understand, when a woman wants a man checked out, ninety-nine times in a hundred, she’s got good cause. Her instincts have already told her what she needs to know, she’s just looking for confirmation. So that’s what I supplied in this particular case.’
‘You told her he had Aids?’
‘I told her he was already married. It was just as effective, and a lot less messy.’ He drank from his coffee cup at last. ‘So. Dinah Singleton.’
‘You’ve been to the hospital.’
‘I’ve been to the pub,’ he corrected her. ‘Just down the road, the White Horse? Very popular with medical staff.’
‘Is that your usual procedure?’
‘It’s the human touch. So I’m at the White Horse, and I see some familiar faces. I’ve done work there before. One time I bribed a nurse to add bandages to a car-crash vic. It upped the settlement twenty, maybe thirty per cent.’
‘Joe, could you stick to the point?’
‘I am making a point here. Everything I’ve said, it’s to the point. The point is, I do people-work. Conspiracies, I leave to the police.’
‘This is people-work, Joe. I’m looking for a child.’
‘A child who was blown up. You can’t separate the two, Ms Tucker. These are very muddy waters.’
‘Did you find her?’
‘No, I didn’t find her. What I found was, she was checked in at 2.37 a.m. on the fourth. They’re very precise with their records. It is, after all, a hospital. It’s not a cocktail party.’
‘And what else?’
‘Nothing else, Ms Tucker. That’s what I mean by muddy waters. This is a place, you ask for a drink of water, it goes on your chart. They make a record, excuse me, when you fart. But a litle girl disappears in the middle of the night, nobody knows where she went.’
Sarah didn’t say anything.
‘That’s not people-work, Ms Tucker. This, it took organization. I work with carrots, you know what I mean? And the nurse who took my money that time, she needed the little extra. I’m not ashamed. But this time, I’m all out of carrots. People don’t want to know about carrots. It makes me wonder if somebody’s been round there with a stick.’
‘You’re jumping to conclusions.’
‘Jumping, it’s allowed. You had to walk to conclusions, how far would you get?’ He was pleased with this. He stopped talking to drink his coffee while Sarah received the full effect.
On the next table along a
man and a woman sat, also with coffee, but too involved in argument to bother drinking. Snatches of their dialogue, intense if not yet disruptive, kept drifting into hearing. Already they were drawing glances; becoming the centre of that embarrassed fascination you get when a scene threatens to erupt in a middle-class setting. Right at the moment, Sarah had too much on her mind to eavesdrop. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said at last. ‘She can’t have just gone. There has to be a record.’
‘I agree.’
‘But you said –’
‘What I said was nobody knows where she’s gone. Nobody I spoke to. You could call it restricted information. But there must be a record, yes. It’s a hospital, it’s –’
‘Not a cocktail party, right. Could you get into restricted records?’
‘It wouldn’t be easy.’
‘But you could do it.’
‘Probably not.’
Sarah took a deep breath. ‘That’s it, then.’
‘Not entirely.’
‘How so?’
Joe scanned the café. It was filling up nicely; the lunch crowd drifting in to form a queue at the salad bar. Also, the rowing couple had adjusted their volume upwards. Leaving little chance, Sarah reckoned, of anybody overhearing what he was about to say; which didn’t stop him approaching it from somewhere over the horizon. ‘You get a feeling for this kind of work. You learn to trust your instincts.’
‘What are they telling you, Joe?’
‘When you came in the other day I thought, this isn’t as simple as it sounds. Finding a missing child.’
‘Not what you said at the time.’
‘I didn’t want to alarm you. But look at the facts, her mother’s killed in an explosion, then she disappears. What does that tell you?’
‘It doesn’t tell me anything, Joe. Nor have you.’
‘Somebody’s got an enemy.’
‘She’s too young to have enemies. She’s only a kid.’
‘Nobody’s too young to have enemies. This is news to you? Some of us, we’ve got enemies because of the race we were born into.’
‘We should discuss this some day. But not right now.’
‘That’s a good idea. We should meet, talk about this and that. No reason we can’t be friends just because we met professionally.’
‘Joe –’
‘It happens. Sometimes,’ he said hopefully, ‘the client develops romantic yearnings towards the detective.’
‘Have you heard from Zoë?’
He sighed. ‘I withdraw the comment.’
‘Joe, what did you find out?’
‘I talked to the cops.’
Sarah picked up her coffee. It was pretty cold. The couple at the next table were still bickering steadily, though the parameters of their discontent had widened. Something about him caring more for his damn golf clubs than about her talent; something else about her only talent being for shopping. The word bitch was tagged invisibly on to this last complaint, or possibly Sarah imagined that.
‘And?’
‘And they’ve identified the other body. The man.’
‘That’s not been reported.’
‘No. They’re keeping it quiet for the time being.’
‘So who was he?’
‘They got him through his prints, and double-checked them against his dental records. Normally they’d be lucky to get one or the other, but in his case they had both.’
‘Joe –’
‘He’d been in the services, you see. The army.’
At the next table, the woman stood and reached into her handbag.
‘Who –’
‘It was her husband, Sarah.’
‘Her husband?’
‘Lawful,’ Joe said. ‘Wedded.’
‘But he’s dead!’
Two feet from where Sarah sat, the standing woman pulled a gun and fired it six times at her companion.
As the noise died away Joe said, ‘Well, if he wasn’t then, he certainly is now.’
II
For days she could not get it from her head: the way the man had bled at the mouth before falling backwards, spilling his chair as he fell. All chatter died the way the man died: not suddenly, but with a great deal of painful surprise. Even once he’d hit the ground he continued to twitch convulsively, as if life leaked away in little spurts, while the woman glared down at him with a contempt suggesting she didn’t think he was handling even this automatic process with much finesse. In the silence following, somebody dropped a saucer. Everybody waited until its ringing died too before shocked outrage found a voice.
‘Guerilla theatre,’ Mark said. ‘So-called. A bit passé, I’d have thought.’
‘I know what they call it. It was still upsetting.’
‘It’s easy to shock. It doesn’t take talent.’
Neither did being critical.
When the man sprang up, blood dripping from his jaw, to take a bow, Sarah hadn’t joined the applause. Nor, to tell the truth, had anybody much. Even in Modern Art Oxford, disturbing people unnecessarily was on a par with rifling through their handbags. It might be Theatre, but it wasn’t nice. But Sarah’s reluctance was less a disinclination to bestow undue praise than shock at the uncanny conjunction of this man dying and coming back to life just as Joe was telling her that Maddy Singleton’s husband had also risen from the grave. Though returned there, in short order.
‘I suppose they took up a collection after.’
‘No. Just smirked a little, then left.’
‘I didn’t realize,’ Mark went on, ‘that was where you spent your mornings. In the gallery.’
Sarah looked away. ‘I just stopped in for a cup of coffee.’
He didn’t reply, but bent, instead, to his newspaper and continued slogging his way through the Middle East coverage.
Telling him about the shooting again – she’d already told him once – had been an attempt at re-establishing friendly relations, but Mark was obviously determined to continue being pissy, a determination Sarah knew from experience could see him through the day. Mighty oaks from little acorns: a lot of marital disharmony starts with the ludicrous before working up to true crime. This had begun with dental floss, or the lack of it in the kitchen.
‘There’s some upstairs,’ Sarah had told him.
‘Yes, but I’m downstairs. I don’t want –’
‘I’ll get it.’
‘That’s not the point. There should be a tub on the fridge. I hate my teeth being gunged up after eating, you know that.’
‘I’ll get some tomorrow.’
‘You said that on Friday, Sarah, but you forgot then too.’
‘Well, for God’s sake, it’s hardly a matter of life and death. Having to walk up a flight of stairs to floss your blasted teeth.’
‘I’m not talking about having to walk upstairs. I’m talking about things not being in their proper place, about running out of stuff we need. I’m at work all day, Sarah. I can’t do all the shopping too.’
‘I spend half my life –’
‘And there’s no binliners either. How am I supposed to get the rubbish out when there’s nothing to put it in?’
She’d called a halt there, though rejoinders sprang to mind. Days like this, it would be best if she could just disappear for a while: meld with the background until he’d forgotten he was pissed off, or at least what he was pissed off about. Not that she didn’t give as good as she got. But soon, she knew, Mark would be on about children again, his sense of timing on the matter being flawlessly inept, and she could live without the recriminations, spoken and otherwise. Unnatural woman, that’s what he was building up to. Unnatural woman, for having her own agenda. She thought of the bonsai trees gardeners slaved over. She didn’t know much about it, but what she thought was this: that there were trees, left to themselves, that might grow sixty feet tall, but instead had their roots punished to produce something small, cosseted, and ornamental. Something making up in charm what it had lost in dignity. Marriage was a psychologica
l bonsai; maybe society was. Still encouraging women, after all these years, to be small, cosseted, and ornamental. Still hacking away at their roots to keep them from growing taller than anybody else. You couldn’t even call it deliberate. It had grown instinctive, a natural form of pruning. To a man like Gerard Inchon, it was a duty: barefoot and pregnant kept them quiet. You didn’t talk about The Enemy, but that was what you meant. With Mark, it was a creeping form of moral paralysis. He wanted a baby; he wanted one now. What did she mean, couldn’t they discuss this? They were discussing this: he wanted a baby. Of course her career was important. But she didn’t actually have one, did she? So what better time to have a baby?
For the moment, she let him simmer. Out in the back garden, she found ivy attacking the shed, and spent thirty minutes ripping it to shreds. Mentally reliving while she did so what Joe had told her, back in Modern Art Oxford.
* * *
Once the emotional terrorists had gone, Sarah settled into a state of mild shock. Joe hadn’t batted an eyelid. ‘An obviously fake gun,’ he had reckoned.
‘You’re an expert?’
‘Was I wrong?’
‘If he’d been bleeding to death,’ she asked him, ‘how long would you have sat watching before admitting you’d made a mistake?’
He didn’t think it worth considering.
The chatter around them had swollen to the level of a medium-tempo uproar; a free-for-all post-mortem on the cunning, smug artistes. ‘So tell me,’ she said. ‘Singleton. What was his name?’
‘Thomas. Tom.’
‘How did he die? The first time, I mean?’
‘At the risk of seeming pedantic,’ he said, ‘the evidence suggests that reports of his first death were grossly exaggerated.’
‘Thank you, Mr Twain.’
‘Apart from anything else, they never recovered his body.’
‘It would have been a bit embarrassing for them if they had,’ Sarah said. ‘In retrospect.’
