by Mick Herron
Inside, Sarah was storms and hurricanes. Twisters. Summer madness.
They drove in silence until they reached a school a mile or two down the road, whereupon Joe pulled up and advised Sarah to wait. He was angry with her, as she was with herself. Once, as a teenager, she’d thrown up at her parents’ wedding anniversary bash. This felt worse.
‘What did you think you were doing?’ Joe had asked, once they’d got back to the car.
‘I don’t know,’ she said miserably. ‘I wanted to see how he’d react.’
‘You as good as accused him of child-molesting. Under the circumstances, I think he reacted very well.’
‘I did not!’
‘He’s a priest, Sarah. You accused him of having spirited a child away. Read the papers.’
But she hadn’t meant that. She wasn’t sure what she’d meant. Just that once she’d started, she couldn’t stop herself. Like being on top of a tall building, and falling all the way to the ground.
He was back within minutes. ‘Sometimes it’s quicker,’ he said, ‘to tell the truth.’ He pulled his safety belt on before starting up.
‘And?’
‘Mostly the truth. That we’re looking for an abducted child. Who possibly hasn’t been abducted. And may or may not be blonde. And might answer to the name of Dinah.’
Rubbing it in, yes. ‘Would you just tell me, Joe?’
‘I’ll just tell you, then. I’ve just driven all the way from Oxford and I’m just about to drive all the way back, so before I do that, I’ll just tell you what we’ve found. Nothing. No new child at this school, female, male or monkey. No Dinah Singleton. She isn’t here. She never was.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Paid in full, Sarah. No more favours.’
‘I really am sorry.’
‘Yeah, right.’ He sighed. ‘Me too. I’m sorry. But this vast trek across the country, Sarah, that’s it. All done. That was just an orphanage, Sarah. One you happened to see in a picture on the wall of somebody who happened to be at your house the night your neighbours died. That’s all. Not even a string of coincidences. Because coincidences mean something, and this doesn’t.’
‘I know.’
‘This girl, your Dinah, I don’t know what she’s mixed up in. Something to do with having a father who wasn’t really dead. But you’re not going to find her by throwing darts at a map. Are you with me, Mrs Trafford?’
‘Have you been checking up on me, Joe?’
‘Never trust the client. That’s lesson one in Private Eye School.’
‘Because that’s twice you’ve called me Mrs Trafford. And I gave you my maiden name.’
His voice turned clipped: very Basil Rathbone. ‘You thought you were being so clever, didn’t you? But you made one tiny error. And for that you must pay.’ She wasn’t amused. He sighed. ‘You wrote me a cheque.’
He started the car. For quite a long time, she thought she was going to cry.
III
For the rest of the lousy journey back, they hardly spoke: Sarah didn’t like to think about it afterwards. To her, it felt less a rupture in a friendship than the sudden descent of a wall between two worlds: the one she had inhabited until now, and the one she was about to fall into. The fact that when Joe did speak – comments on the traffic, the roads – he was perfectly friendly didn’t help. A blanket of misery fell over her anyhow, an all-enveloping lack of self-confidence undermining all she knew. Nothing she did could be trusted. When she gave a false name, she followed it up by writing a cheque.
And Mark, when he got home, matched her mood: his own day had been sodding awful. A deal had gone up in smoke, gone down the tubes; ‘Gerard’ had become ‘that bloody Inchon’. Without being Mark’s fault, it was his responsibility; a distinction existing solely in the workplace, as Sarah remembered from occasions when troubles had flared closer to home. She could barely piece together the details. The last two months, though, had just come crashing round Mark’s ears; the cultivation of Inchon, of Inchon’s money, had failed to produce the expected crop. This came out over the course of two bottles of wine, of which Sarah drank almost a glass . . . There was a letter too, a letter sent by bloody Inchon to bloody Mayberry, who was Mark’s bloody boss. The letter contained aspersions, downright accusations . . . It was libellous, obviously. Mark had said as much to a tight-lipped Mayberry.
‘And what did he say?’
‘That it remained to be seen.’
Mark was white with anger throughout, or mostly anger. But there was fear too. You didn’t fuck about with your career, he’d explained to her once; not half-way up the ladder, with everybody above you kicking out. It was so different from Sarah’s experience that she’d taken issue, arguing that if that was how the game was played he’d be better off leaving the board altogether. He’d told her she didn’t understand; it became a familiar row. But she didn’t have the heart now to get involved in a postmortem: just kept filling his glass and nodding, agreeing that he had indeed mentioned that he’d always seen the danger signs, had never trusted Inchon, had known it would come to this. After a while the words slipped over and into each other, and what had never been fully comprehensible to her became totally incoherent. Mark went to lie in the bath and reconstruct the case for the defence. Sarah went through to the kitchen to examine the possibilities of comfort food.
Every kitchen, she was reminded on entering, needs a place you can put things that don’t live anywhere else. The top of the fridge was where buttons, screws, pill bottles and biros went when they died, all haphazardly interred in a recycled ice-cream tub; it was where Mark’s downstairs dental floss lived. It was where she put the rape alarm Joe had given her, because he’d forgotten to ask for it back. She had one of her own somewhere, very likely down the back of the fridge by now. Even in her most aggressive bouts of spring-cleaning, she’d avoided that kind of heavy lifting. It was a problem she felt immediately nostalgic for, now that larger ones had loomed into view.
It was unthinkable that Mark should lose his job, unthinkable to her, because there was no doubt in her mind what had happened. If Inchon had pulled out, leaving Mark twisting in the wind, it was Sarah’s fault; it was the kind of indirect revenge a sneaky bastard like Gerard thought clever. Too late now to complain that revenge was undeserved, or that her ‘investigating’ had got her nowhere. She had had the temerity to stick her neck out; if Mark’s head got chopped off in her place, that was what Gerard would call fair. All she could do now was play the traditional dormouse role and settle back into everyday life. Maybe things would work out, by which she meant return to the way they’d been this morning. There was nothing she could do for Dinah. It was time she admitted that. And whatever Gerard was up to, he had too many weapons at his disposal for her to assail: this was a man, she reminded herself, who collected guns.
Time to give up, then. Time to be a good girl. She began unpacking the fridge to make sandwiches for Mark, and found a packet of biscuits to eat while she did so. Come the weekend, come next week, she’d start over. First thing needed, a damn good cleaning job.
By the weekend, her life was to have altered course. Two things happened first, though.
In the days that followed, immediacy seemed to drain from the situation. Nothing serious developed. Mark became reticent, unwilling to discuss work in detail, though he gave her to understand things weren’t as bad as he’d feared. Bloody May-berry, the boss from hell, might still be breathing smoke, but the word ‘fire’ had yet to be uttered. Jobs like Mark’s, they didn’t give you notice; the least competent moneyman could bring a bank to its knees in a week. He still had a desk, then, which was as good as an anchor; he was keeping his head down, his nose clean, his tie straight, and every other cliché he could think of ironed and buttoned. Gerard Inchon, maybe, didn’t have the clout he thought he had. One word from him, and nothing much occurred . . .
But the first thing that happened was, Sarah found Dinah Singleton. Or rather, discovered that she’d never a
ctually missed her.
For the child was not Dinah, this was the sad and awful truth of it. The child was somebody else entirely: the overalls, the jellies, the fondness for feeding the swans. Sarah chanced upon her one afternoon coming back across the bridge; her eyes drawn to the devastated house, she did not see the child at first. By the time she did, it was too late to undo anything.
The blown house was a familiar landmark by now: one local children were proud of and adults tutted over as something which should have been seen to already. What had been done was not enough. Though boarding had been erected, indicating to the civic-minded that this was a no-go area, it was not so effectively constructed that it actually prevented ingress to anyone with even a mild curiosity as to what lay behind. From the bridge, what this was was clear enough: a slew of rubble, of bricks and mortar, of broken pipes and shards of porcelain, all of it liberally studded with jewels of broken glass, adding a touch of glitter to the sad remains of a suburban life. And there were rags and ends of household bric-`a-brac poking like weeds through the rubbish; stuff that might have emerged of its own accord, seeking the light, for most things portable of even minimal value had been carted off long since. It was strange what refused to remain buried, Sarah thought. Even a battered fish-slice, a frayed lampshade, could be exceedingly tenacious of whatever life it thought it possessed. Unwilling to surrender what had never knowingly been bestowed.
Lost in this ontological speculation, she nearly fell over Dinah. Not-Dinah. The child was standing beneath the bridge, fishing lumps of bread from a Marks and Sparks carrier bag and tossing them into the water, while her superintending adult, a woman, stood smoking a cigarette. Ducks quacked and, oddly, barked in the water. The adult studied Sarah suspiciously. It was not ordinary, it was not normal, for a woman to respond this way to another woman’s child . . .
For Sarah had come to a dead halt, all the motion knocked out of her body.
‘. . . Dinah?’
The child laughed; bread flew. In the water, the word had spread. A pair of swans arrived late for the feast, running across the water; their large feet rattling the surface as if it were a snare drum. The woman dropped her cigarette and ground it underfoot. ‘Come on, Kylie.’
‘I haven’t finished.’
‘Dinah?’
‘What do you want, then?’
The woman’s overt hostility masked fear. There was nothing in modern urban mythology to suggest that lone women acting strangely were not as dangerous as men, and nothing in Sarah’s behaviour to suggest she wasn’t hovering on the edge of some calamity. Women squawking Dinah without reason were best avoided. She held her Kylie’s hand and began to pull her from the riverside.
As for Sarah, in that first moment of mistaken recognition, several things seemed to come together at once to make an awesome truth: here was Dinah, back from the unknown, just as her father had come back from the dead. But, as in his case, this was but a temporary reawakening: he had emerged from an apparent state of death only to be catapulted into a real one, just as Dinah now had reappeared only to reveal that she was not Dinah, had never been Dinah, and all of Sarah’s confused actions of the past few weeks had been based on a misunderstanding. The picture she’d formed of Dinah when first told about the child had been true enough. It was simply that it hadn’t been Dinah she’d been remembering, but this stranger, this Kylie, who was regarding her now with part pity, part amusement, while whatever tiny amount of confidence Sarah retained disappeared like the bread on the waters. She began to weep. While Kylie’s mother watched, revising her opinions and drawing her own incorrect conclusions: that here was a woman who had lost something; that here was a mother who had ceased to be.
By the following morning this, too, Sarah had accommodated. It was beginning to look like there was no end to her incompetence; that the whole world was involved in some complicated conspiracy aimed at destroying her self-respect. But when you started thinking that way, you ended up gibbering on the streets. She vacuumed most of the house in the two hours following Mark’s departure for work; then took a break which rapidly degenerated into a biscuit festival. Something had to give. She had not yet paid Joe for the petrol he had wasted; that seemed a fitting way of starting the bothersome business of forgetting. Mid-morning, she took the bus up to the north end of town.
The last time she’d been to Joe’s office, the only time, there’d been roadworks to navigate: today the street, never what you’d call a thoroughfare, was empty. Though even as she realized this, its condition changed. A man in a white jacket appeared in the doorway of the Italian restaurant opposite; he looked one way then the other, cast a hopeful glance at Sarah, and finally admitted defeat and lit a cigarette. Meanwhile, a tour bus trundled past the end of the road: what on earth did they find to look at up here? She tried the outer door and, finding it unlocked, climbed the stairs to Reception, the door to which was swinging ajar. She called Joe’s name, but he didn’t answer. For a moment she wondered if Zoë were back, and hoped for Joe’s sake that she was, but there was only silence from Joe’s office. If Zoë had come back, Sarah was pretty sure silence would not be on her agenda.
She knocked, waited, and knocked again. The first had been pretty feeble; a very English am-I-supposed-to-be-here? knock. Something about empty premises made her feel in the wrong. The second was a firm businesslike rap, but she already knew Joe was out; had probably nipped to paper shop or pub; somewhere, anyway, near, to account for the doors being left unlocked. If she went to check these places, she knew she’d end up back at the office anyway, in case he’d returned in her absence. Simplest to wait. Simplest of all just to leave a cheque. He’d find it on his desk and know she’d been; as soon as she wrote the damn thing, she’d feel forgiven. It was the quickest way over the hurdle. She tried the inner door, the one leading into his office, and it was open too.
Afterwards, she tried to reduce it to the barest essential. Sarah thought he was wearing a tie. That was how this fiction began; she entered Joe’s office and Joe was wearing a tie, a bright red tie. It didn’t last more than a second or so, that impression, but it was a lot more comforting than the truth. Nor was she fooled by the fact that it was Joe’s own hand that held the razor.
IV
The boat looked about the size of a matchbox if you squinted; it bobbed on the waves like a damn matchbox. Eight miles from the nearest town, and every last inch under water. There were maybe worse ways to die than drowning, but Amos Crane hadn’t tried them yet. Just the thought set his teeth on edge. Probably some evolutionary memory. This was where we came from: well, he wasn’t ready to go back just yet.
He had drowned somebody once, in a hotel bathroom. It had been enough to get the basic picture: the subject had thrashed about as much as he’d been allowed, eyes wide open, and must have spent every second (the process had taken a good few minutes) knowing it was all over; that he wasn’t going to breathe again, and was wasting what was left of life trying. Or not wasting, exactly, because there wasn’t much else he could have been doing. Saying a prayer, perhaps. With his eyes wide open and his mouth tight shut.
One way or the other, Amos Crane was glad to be back on dry land.
The harbour, what there was of it, was barely big enough for one boat: just an inlet above which twenty foot or so of rock face sheered steeply. A flight of steps had been carved in the rock, and he stopped half-way up to look back at the grey blanket of sea. Forget about the boat: the island itself was the size of a handkerchief. One decent wave, and everything local was going to get wet.
He looked down at the boat, and at Jed, who’d driven the boat here. Did you drive boats? Sailed, perhaps, though it had involved an engine. Jed was maybe twenty, had grown up by the edge of this sea, and probably thought he had a lot in common with the local rocks. He nodded at Crane curtly, now. Crane offered his sunniest smile in return. It was like watching a grave open, though Crane was unaware of this. He climbed the rest of the steps, clutching all the luggage he’d
brought: a sealed polythene bag holding a teddy bear.
‘An hour,’ Jed called.
Crane nodded.
With his teddy bear under one arm, he turned and set off down the path to the Farm. From this point, there was a fairly good view of the east side of the island, which was not a handkerchief, not really; maybe a mile-and-a-half in length, and shaped amusingly like a banana when seen on an aerial photograph. It was hard-scrabble land, where you still found the odd sheep skull, picked clean by the salt wind and noisy birds, though it had been years since the last shepherd packed his bags. Crane wondered why they’d bothered in the first place. Was there that much money in wool you’d spend your days on a rock that God forgot, watching a pack of dumb animals tear their lunch from the gorse and tough shrubbery? There still stood the remains of a bothy in the dip on the south side: not much more than a pile of stones arranged with a little forethought. No electric, no plumbing. Jesus Christ.
But it could have been worse. Not so far away was another island. In 1942 a small bomb was detonated there. In 1981, a bunch of scientists went back. They took a seven-and-a-half-month course of injections first, and any birds picking at the sheep skulls there were found dead by the bodies of their dinner.
To the west, the opposite side of the island, was a stretch of pebbly beach which rattled constantly. He’d jogged it, his last time here. There’d been no streetgirls or Asian porters to watch him, and stones had crept into his Reeboks.
Previous visits, Crane had arrived by helicopter, which would put down on a relatively flat, turfed expanse just behind the Farm. He had enjoyed those trips, for all they felt like being carried in a bucket. Felt himself a prince, with all the powers of the air. By the second or third trip, the pilot was showing Crane which controls did what. Now, though, there were ‘budgetary restrictions’, which loosely translated as ‘no more helicopters’. Howard’s business. Crane wondered sometimes precisely how much fun it would be to bring Howard out here: boat or helicopter, it didn’t matter which. And drop him half-way like a penny in the ocean, where he would never be found, nor ever washed up. It wouldn’t actually be a just return for him having spouted on about budgetary restrictions, but it would certainly make Crane feel better about having had to listen.
