Down Cemetery Road

by Mick Herron

  Other photos, of more recent vintage, showed Gerard fully emerged from the cocoon of childhood, not that the result resembled a butterfly. A happy slug came to mind. Here was Gerard breaking ground on what an accompanying picture proved an office block (Inchon Enterprises); Gerard spraying champagne over somebody getting out of an expensive car; Gerard becoming married in (of course) top hat and tails, while Paula posed winsomely beside him in a dress even Sarah could see cost well into four figures. She did, it had to be said, look lovely. Even Gerard came out of this one well. Something solemn had crept into his face, forming a solid foundation for what was obviously happiness. The result was to firm up his otherwise slack features; hardly putting him in heart-throb territory, but at least bestowing a visible sense of purpose you could mistake for integrity. Sarah found the same effect in another recent picture which showed him handing a cheque to a tall, priestly man; the pair of them standing in front of a small crowd of children. The background, mostly obscured, seemed to be an institution of some sort; a noiceboard behind them had part of what was probably a name, rimat, visible between young heads. Some religious setup, she hypothesized. Catholic or very high: he’d said mass.

  She turned her attention to the clutter on the desk, hoping to find a bomb-maker’s manual among it. Nothing doing, but she picked up the palmtop to look at. She’d seen such toys but never operated one; was not really what you’d call a card-carrying member of the technological society, though had enough experience to know the average computer could take you from How Hard Can It Be? to What The Hell Happened There? in two seconds flat. That was the downside. The upside was it was very small with an obvious on-button and where was the harm in trying? This button proved remarkably simple to operate and the little screen came to life immediately, flashing a prompt she guessed was its demand for a password. What kind of password would a man like Gerard use? She went for blindingly predictable, and keyed Paula. Invalid Password it countered. Not a single other word came to mind. It was as if her brain had been rinsed of all vocabulary.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  She nearly jumped out of her skin.

  ‘Sarah?’

  ‘I wasn’t looking for anything. I was just looking.’ She put the machine down before turning round, hoping he wouldn’t notice, then switched topics in what she prayed was an undetectable, natural manner. ‘My God, you look awful.’

  ‘I feel awful.’ Mark ran a hand across his forehead. ‘That wine must have been a bit dodgy.’

  ‘That fifth bottle was corked, probably. Come on, I’ll make you some coffee.’

  Mark took a detour via the bathroom and by the time he joined her in the kitchen, dressed, the others were pulling up outside. ‘They may be godly, but at least I’m clean,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose I should be grateful you didn’t go with them. Keep the client sweet.’

  He gave her a hard look.

  ‘It was a joke, Mark.’

  ‘It needs work.’

  ‘And you need this.’ She gave him a cup of coffee.

  ’No, what he needs is a hair of the dog,’ said Gerard, entering. Then, at the look Mark gave him, laughed and said, ‘But it’ll keep. Actually, I wanted a word, Mark, since you’re up. Don’t mind, do you?’ He addressed the question to Sarah.

  Be a good girl, now. Run along and play. But residual guilt from snooping, or from being caught snooping, left her unable to object.

  Gerard handed her a bunch of newspapers and took Mark up to his study, while a still interestingly pale Paula mumbled something about a lie-down, and disappeared. Sarah took her bundle into the garden, and spent the next hour reading what appeared to be the same set of articles in three different papers, before drifting softly to sleep in the sunshine. She was woken by a hand stroking her cheek, though Mark’s words weren’t as affectionate as his gesture.

  ‘When you were in Gerard’s study,’ he said suspiciously, ‘did you mess with his palmtop at all?’

  ‘Did I what?’

  ‘His electric notebook. Only it wasn’t closed down properly.’

  ‘Maybe he forgot to last time he used it,’ Sarah said, fully awake this time.

  ‘That’s what I said. He said, Hmmm.’

  ‘I only turned it on. I’d never seen one before.’

  ‘Jesus, Sarah! That’s like looking at somebody’s diary. It is looking at somebody’s diary.’

  ‘Well, if it had been a diary, I’d not have been interested,’ she lied. ‘I was thinking of getting you one for Christmas. I wanted to see how they work.’

  He became thoughtful. ‘It’d come in very useful.’

  ‘I can’t get you one now, can I? It wouldn’t be a surprise.’

  She left him to mull that over and went inside, where Gerard was in the kitchen, preparing lunch: a joint of beef, the usual veg. Traditional, as she’d have expected, though he wasn’t the one she’d have thought would be preparing it. ‘Anything I can do to help?’

  ‘I think it’s under control, thanks.’

  She looked out of the window at Mark, who’d settled down with the papers now; was reading the Middle East news with a worried frown which might have related to world events or just to his hangover, she couldn’t tell. When she turned back Gerard was studying her with an evil look on his face.

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘One thing would be useful.’

  ‘Yes?’

  He pointed at the bottles on the table. ‘You could clear up the dead soldiers,’ he said.

  IV

  Amos Crane – tall, grey, crewcut, a bit of a problem; his face that of a man in the last stage of something wasting – sat in the glow of a VDU, whose green wash made unearthly the crags and hollows of his head. Beneath the surface wreckage, though, everything pumped in order. The body was a tool. An early riser, Amos Crane jogged three miles before breakfast; ran past Chinese supermarkets as they opened, blowsy strip clubs as they closed, and considered the lives grouped round these exits and entrances as being connected to his own by an invisible network of alliances. Crane was not a Londoner, and never imagined himself one. But on the city’s early streets he felt part of a larger community, and regarded the tired dancers and busy grocers as his equals, at least in as much as they led lives outside the jobsworth’s timetable. He was their secret sharer. He understood their passions. Now, though, he was at his desk.

  He preferred to work without overhead lighting; with just an Anglepoise bent so low it scorched rings on the desk’s surface, and the light of the computer screen, whose lettering reflected on his spectacles. A computer, too, was a tool only. He had no patience with those who substituted this magic box for the real world, looking to it for answers: it held only clues. All the information in the world didn’t give you the answers. For these, you had to close with flesh and bone.

  His brother used to accuse him of attempting philosophy.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt to think,’ Amos would say. And then amend it, adding, ‘It doesn’t hurt me to think. I can see where you’d have problems.’

  ‘Always the kidder.’

  ‘You rush into things.’ Serious now; it was Axel’s big fault. Always doing, and working out the total later. Or letting somebody else do that part, which bored him.

  Axel would blow him a smoke ring. Change the subject. But it was true: over the years, Amos had tried to steer his brother right over and over. Telling him a hundred different ways, he had to get a grip on the politics of the situation. Probably there was nowhere left in the world you could do the wet work and not worry about the consequences. Well, America. The Far East. Africa too, come to think of it. And most of Eastern Europe. But Oxford, no, you had to be more circumspect. Blowing up a house, even Axel had to assume there’d be raised eyebrows afterwards.

  ‘It got the job done.’

  ‘Half the job done.’

  Axel had blown another smoke ring.

  And it had been up to Amos to work out the details: get the kid out of hospital, f
ashion a lid to pop on the story; plus the tricky bit, which was letting Howard believe he’d been the one doing all the work. Credit had a way of calming him down. Thinking about Howard now, he tapped out a little riff on his keyboard, squirting a meaningless jumble of letters on to the screen.

  ‘Your brother,’ Howard had said, ‘is certifiably wacko.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be his control on this operation. Did you have any idea what he was planning?’

  ‘The agent in the field has the last word. Or didn’t you know?’

  Howard was strictly a desk-man, and didn’t enjoy being reminded of the fact. He’d flushed, said, ‘An innocent woman was killed. Are you aware of that?’

  So Amos had told him about the early forties, in Mongolia. The experiments with the rats and the prisoners.

  ‘You can’t compare us with them,’ Howard had said. And then shut up, perplexed, while Amos laughed at him.

  He’d just come into the room, now. Howard. Without turning, Amos knew it was him: something about the clumsy way desk- men moved, even (especially?) when they thought they were sliding like grease. On the nights he worked late – which, to be fair, were frequent – Howard always let you know. ‘I was in the office till almost twelve last night’: not complaining, just filling you in. Wanting everybody to appreciate, Amos Crane thought now, that he had it tough too. Till almost twelve.

  ‘Howard,’ he said, before the other announced his presence.

  ‘Any . . . developments?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Are you aware of the pressure I’m under?’

  Howard was always asking if you were aware of whatever.

  ‘It’s like chess, Howard,’ Amos said kindly. ‘You can watch it for hours and think nothing’s going on. But that’s because you’re only seeing what’s happening on the surface.’

  ‘Thank you. Where’s the child?’

  Crane looked at his watch. ‘Tucked up in bed.’

  ‘She’s not to be harmed. You know that.’

  ‘Safe as houses,’ Crane assured him.

  There was a pause while both men thought about houses recently brought to their attention.

  ‘And your brother?’

  ‘I doubt he’s in bed yet.’

  Howard sat on the edge of Crane’s desk, then stood up again when the other man looked at him. He sat on a chair instead. ‘I’ve had a lot of complaints about his action.’

  ‘You said.’

  ‘I can’t protect him for ever.’

  Amos smiled.

  ‘Any word on Downey?’

  ‘He’s keeping his head down. As I mentioned he would.’

  ‘But he’ll come looking for the child.’

  Made as a statement, but he was after reassurance. There was a kind of boss Amos Crane had read about: the seagull manager. Who flaps in, makes a lot of noise, shits over everything and leaves. Howard aspired to that, but he was hampered by his personality. Unless he got a lot more secure quite quickly, he was never going to be able to fuck things up in anything but a minor way. So Crane said, ‘He’ll be looking for the child, Howard. I promise you that. And if he finds her – and we’ll make it easy for him – he’ll be sticking his head right into our box.’ He chopped the edge of his hand down on to his desk. ‘And we’ll cut his head clean off, Howard. No mess. No waste. No more Downey.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  Crane told him.

  Howard thought about it, then nodded. ‘Makes sense. Has a kind of symmetry about it.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And the child won’t be hurt.’

  Crane held up his palms: Who, me?

  ‘I’ll hold your fucking brother responsible.’

  ‘I’ll make a note of that.’ He wrote something on a Post-it. Howard stood, turned to go, then turned back reluctantly. ‘Something else?’

  ‘It’s probably minor.’

  ‘But I ought to know. Oughtn’t I?’ asked Amos Crane.

  Howard reached into his inside pocket, and drew a letter out. ‘This came the other day. To the Ministry. It was intercepted, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I knew there’d be a fuss. Your bloody brother . . .’

  Amos was already tucking the letter away in his own pocket. He knew what kind of thing it would be. ‘I’ll see to it,’ he said soothingly. ‘It’ll be like it never came at all.’

  ‘No bombs.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Be happy. Howard was really going this time. Amos said, ‘Oh, and Howard?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You couldn’t protect my brother if he used you as a condom.’

  For a while, it looked as if Howard had something to say about that, but at the last he just turned and walked away. Crane settled back into his comfortable darkness. Howard was harmless – his major failing – but he offered occasional amusements, such as Mongolia – where, in the course of germ-warfare experiments in the early forties, the Soviets kept prisoners chained in tents with plague-infested rats. Crane couldn’t remember offhand the point at issue. Anyway: a prisoner escaped, and a minor epidemic was halted by an air strike, with the usual collateral damage. Round about four thousand Mongols died. Nobody was actually counting. The bodies were burned with ‘large quantities of petrol’; a description Crane had read in a book. Large quantities of petrol. And Howard had said You can’t compare us to them, and Crane had laughed and laughed. He hadn’t been scoring moral points. He’d just found Howard’s assertion unbelievably funny.

  ‘Course not, Howard,’ he muttered now, as he leaned forward and killed the monitor. For a brief moment, a trinity of dots shone in his eyes – red, blue, green – then they too died. In that moment, Amos Crane was thinking about Axel, and about how Downey wouldn’t just be looking for a child, but looking for revenge, too; and this was a man trained to kill. Perhaps he should be worried about his brother. And then he smiled again, at the notion of worrying about Axel, and patted his breast pocket where Howard’s letter now nestled. Whoever sent that should be worrying about Axel. And he turned the Anglepoise off also, and sat for a while in the dark.

  Chapter Three

  The First Station of the Cross

  I

  Monday morning she had the panic, and was assaulted by the dead.

  It happened shopping. During the summer months Oxford fell prey to hordes of foreign students hungry for the cultural experiences the city had to offer, chief among these being found in McDonald’s on Cornmarket Street. As Dennis Potter once remarked, Pardon me while I spatter you with vomit. Though on the other hand, Sarah conceded, these were kids far from home, and you couldn’t blame them for congregating in the one corner of this foreign field that might have been Mainland Europe. But back on the first hand, they got in the way and left litter everywhere. She crossed the road and entered the covered market.

  Everywhere else, a covered market was for cheap food, end-of-line clothing, plastic shoes and party junk. Oxford being Oxford, it was where you bought stuffed olives, Greek bread and T-shirts costing thirty pounds. But there were still ordinary shops, mostly butchers’, and through one of their windows now she watched a boy in a white coat arrange a tray of offal: heart, tongue and liver neatly displayed according to a set pattern, as if butchery were an ancient religion, and this its sacrament . . . For some reason she was thinking about Gerard Inchon; about her new-found conviction he was responsible for the explosion up her road. Over the phone she had shared this with Joe, who wasn’t impressed.

  ‘He was late for your dinner party.’

  ‘And arrived without his briefcase.’

  ‘Sarah. How can I say this to you? They lock people up for less.’

  ‘I’d think we need more evidence,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘I meant you. Paranoid fantasies, you’re a danger to yourself.’

  ‘Do you never get moments of inspiration, when you just know you’re right about something?’

  ‘And the
n I wake up. Sarah, this man, he’s got money, right? Lots of it.’

  ‘That’s the story.’

  ‘Enough so he wouldn’t have to do his own dirty work.’

  ‘Maybe that other guy, the one with the hair –’

  ‘Stop right there. You establish an accomplice, your evidence goes out the window. He’s got an accomplice, why was he late? If he was late, why think there’s an accomplice?’

  She changed subject. ‘Does the word “rimat” mean anything to you?’

  ‘Rimat?’

  ‘Or “rinat”, possibly. Part of a longer word.’

  ‘Like a clue?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Peregrination,’ he said. ‘Farinated.’

  ‘But probably “rimat”.’

  ‘Where is it from, this clue? Written on a cigarette packet? A scrap of burnt paper, perhaps?’

  She told him about the photograph.

  ‘Ah. With plenty of children standing about.’

  ‘Maybe it was a school of some sort,’ she said.

  ‘Would you listen to yourself? Would you care for some advice, Sarah? From my heart to yours?’

  ‘I’m not going to like it.’

  ‘Have a kiddy. One of your own. Stop worrying about this Dinah child you think someone has spirited away. If she was missing, people would be looking for her. They’re not. She isn’t.’

  ‘I want to know where she is,’ she said stubbornly.

  ‘You’re not meant to know where she is. It isn’t your business. Now you’re having fantasies about this friend of your husband’s you don’t like. Heaven forbid you should not like me, you’ll think I did it.’