by Mick Herron
‘I’ll just piss off, then,’ Sarah said. Neither of them paid attention.
She wandered off and found another drink. In the background, the music changed from a thud to a smooch; as reliable an indication of time’s passage as the dropping of autumn leaves. She checked her watch anyway: it showed a quarter to eleven. The hands waved at her, then clenched into fists.
When your watch starts misbehaving, she realized, it is definitely time to go. More worrying was the floor. For some time it had been melting, and only a few chunks remained solid enough to stand on; it took great care to reach the staircase without mishap. The last crumb of floor hissed and sank behind her as she jumped. Everybody else was doomed. The stairs, however, were wonderful, and she determined to climb them to the top.
It was on the first landing she encountered the sad hippie again. ‘Hey, you shouldn’t be going up there, man. The party’s downstairs.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘That’s cool. Hey, you, er, going to the roof or what? They got a roof up there. They keep it at the top.’ He tagged behind her while she fought her way up Emerald Mountain. On each landing a small sun burned overhead, circled by tiny pterodactyls, who ate each other then shat each other out again. Ice had formed on the walls. A girl could lose herself in a landscape like this. She could just keep going up and up, where no search party would ever find her.
‘You ever make it on acid? It’s like fucking with angels, you know? King pleasure. You gotta do it once just so you don’t die never knowing about it.’
Sarah put recent practice to good use, and ignored him.
There was, it turned out, a roof at the top. You reached it through a door marked FIRE ESCAPE in letters formed by serpents: before her eyes they rearranged themselves into IFOR OSTRAPE, which was a secret message meant only for her. She pushed on the bar and the door opened with a thud. Behind her, the hippie started re-evaluating his position vis-`a-vis property rights.
‘Er, should you be doing that?’
The door led on to a fire escape; an actual ifor ostrape, which ran down the side of the house all the way to the ground and far beyond. Leaning over, Sarah could make out the dim lights of hell winking miles below . . . It seemed sensible to continue onwards and upwards. The ostrape rattled and shook beneath her feet. As she climbed, the city lights grew brighter. It became apparent that this was the nub of the world; an undiscovered pole. The tragic hippie had sloped off, rattled too by her courage and daring. There was a mission awaiting her at the very top. Already it transmitted a sense of urgency, which in the dark glowed like powerful green beams.
At the very top, she found a playpen.
It was shaped like a playpen. In fact, it contained the whole world, each corner stretching far into space: in one of them lurked Jesus. In another, the holy devil. Both called to her, and for a long moment of pure luxury, she knew that she alone had the choice on which the fate of the world depended, but the moment couldn’t last. It ended with her finding that she was not, in fact, alone, for beside her, the Other Sarah Tucker was baring teeth in a smile of pure benevolence. There was no doubt which choice she would make. The world was snatched from Sarah’s hands.
From below came a growing uproar, as assorted humans bewailed her amazing escape.
It was futile to attempt to stop her. This was the thought that embraced Sarah now. Everything has to balance. This was a truth as deep as gravity. As the Other Sarah Tucker ran to her corner, the Real Sarah, the Only Sarah, took the sole choice available, and rushed for the crooning deity. Because she could float, she had to cling to the railing with both hands, to keep from blowing away.
The people from the party arrived at the top just in time not to save her. She had already remembered that here was a dream the Other Sarah Tucker had never had: the dream of wingless flight, and when she let go it was with a sense of being released; of submitting to a truth that was deep, inescapable and kind. The lights of the city cartwheeled for her, as if it were the landscape and not herself that was being sucked out of the picture. One by one they winked out, and as the last died she learned about pain, and the secret of staying alive.
Later, in her nightmares, she would never hit the ground.
They searched the house.
‘You have a record of involvement with drugs,’ Ruskin said flatly. ‘And a connection with a dead man who turns out to be a dealer. Obviously we were given a warrant.’
The female officer, who remained with Sarah throughout, kept asking if she was all right. But of course she wasn’t all right: what kind of idiot question was that? From the kitchen and the rooms upstairs, she heard thumps and scuffles as her home, her life, was ransacked by these ridiculous men, who had already gone rummaging through her history, as if that had anything to do with poor dead Joe. It was the absurdity of their reckoning as much as anything else which had produced this numb reaction; this inability to reach for the phone and call Mark, their lawyer, anyone.
‘You’re very pale. Would you like a glass of water?’
But something in the voice persuaded Sarah not to respond. Something technical and efficient, reminding her that this was a cop doing a cop job, which would get a lot more awkward if Sarah were to faint.
Cop two appeared in the doorway. Ruskin came through from the kitchen.
‘Well?’
Sarah saw a gloved hand; an arm sleeved in blue; and a policeman who wore a grim smile, as if his satisfaction were tinged with dirty thoughts. From his fingers dangled a polythene bag, packed with a powder so white Sarah knew it was anything but innocent.
Already, in her head, she felt the lights cartwheeling once more.
II
That day, too, she fell off the edge of the world. They took her to the police station where they questioned her ceaselessly about drugs and Joe and drugs and Joe and drugs, until she was as convinced as they were that whatever she was hiding would come to light eventually, so she might as well make a clean breast of it now. Their words: a clean breast. So she told them about Dinah and the man in the car park and they gave her a cup of tea and asked about Joe again. So she mentioned the bomb in the house up the road, and they wondered what this had to do with the drugs. The name Lizbeth Moss was remembered. Did she know about Lizbeth Moss?
No.
They supposed Ecstasy meant nothing, either.
Foie gras to the sound of trumpets.
But Lizbeth Moss was a girl who had died; a thirteen-year-old girl who had died after taking E. And they were reasonably sure that what she’d taken would match what they’d found in Joe’s office. So would Sarah like to tell them again about Joe and drugs and Joe? She told them instead about the tie she thought he’d been wearing. She’d entered Joe’s office and Joe had been wearing a tie, a bright red tie. She hadn’t been fooled by the fact that his hand still held the razor. But when they asked why, she just stared at the ceiling.
They sighed, and wanted to talk about the money. Why had she given a man she said she’d never met so much money? If she hadn’t been buying drugs?
A few details slipped her way too. The razor, she learned, had been Joe’s own. As for the bag, the bag with the drugs, the bag had been behind a loose tile in the bathroom; Sarah had never noticed a loose tile there. It had, in turn, been inside a small purse, which she did remember: the purse she used for small change destined for the charity envelopes that dropped weekly through the letterbox. How it had ended up full of white powder, she didn’t know. She didn’t even know what the powder was. (Nor did they.)
But if it’s talcum powder, Ruskin said, why hide it away like that?
Eventually the questioning came to a close; a man in a uniform took her downstairs and spoke at her in a rather formal though meaningless manner, and this either meant she’d been charged or not charged: she wasn’t too sure about the details. Then they let her use the phone, and unable to remember Mark’s work number, she called home just to hear his voice on the answering machine. He cut in almost immediately.
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‘Where the hell are you?’
She started to cry.
It was eight in the evening, this was what frightened her. They had kept her for hours, and she no longer knew where she was, or how to respond. It seemed like days since she’d slept. Everything that had happened before finding Joe had happened in another life. She dimly remembered a girl on a towpath, a girl who had not been Dinah: had there ever been a real Dinah? And remembered, too, the man in the car park, Michael Downey, the one with the hair. What was it he’d said? That he was a friend of the Singletons. All of them. Sarah wondered if he’d killed Joe.
This she brooded on through her tears: her tears were a mask so they’d leave her alone. Up to a point, that is. And up to a point, they worked. She was given a glass of cold water and tepid sympathy by an Asian policewoman who kept calling her Sally; kept asking, too, if it was coke she needed; if she was starting to get the shakes. Sarah cried some more to shut her up. And before these tears dried Mark arrived, together with a man she recognized, Simon Smith, who carried a black briefcase and spoke very loudly about lawsuits. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Mark, though, was livid.
‘Who the fuck is in charge here?’
The Asian woman gave Sarah a look of shared citizenship. As if they had this in common: loud male voices which knew they were right.
What she remembered afterwards were harsh details: the lighting, the shabby paintwork; a voice in the corridor complaining about a database being down. But of the human contact, of Mark’s intercession, almost nothing remained. At one point he hugged her, it was true, but it was the smell of trains and smoky rooms on his jacket that stayed with her. It was the irritation in his voice as he spoke of how worried he’d been, as if everything that had happened to her had been just another way of something happening to him.
Later, he’d say, ‘It’s all that Jewish detective’s fault, isn’t it?’
‘Why say that?’
‘Well, if it hadn’t been for him –’
‘Why say Jewish?’
‘Oh, Christ, don’t start playing PC games. I just meant he was Jewish, that’s all. He was, wasn’t he?’
He had been. That much was true.
But that was later, when they were home. Though in fact not much later, for Simon Smith’s talk of lawsuits, along with his lethally efficient briefcase, had them out on the pavement by nine. He could, he said, have got them a lift home in a cop car, but it didn’t always pay to be too pushy. He was of an age with Mark, but a savagely receding hairline gave him an authority Mark was still aiming at. He also had the smallest teeth Sarah had ever seen.
‘But you should have called me yesterday,’ he said. ‘We could have nipped this in the bud.’
‘I didn’t know about it yesterday,’ Mark said, exasperated. He ran a hand through his own thick hair. He often did this in Simon’s company. ‘I mean, nobody tells me anything.’
They both looked at Sarah. But she was transfixed by the passing traffic; the bright headlights slicing up the evening.
Simon hailed a taxi. The way he climbed into it left no doubt that getting into taxis was a way of life with him; something he had aspired to, earned, and enjoyed demonstrating in public. ‘Call me later,’ he said to Mark. It was about half-way between advice and instruction.
They walked the rest of the way in silence, though the electricity generated by what Mark wasn’t saying buzzed in Sarah’s ears. She felt disoriented, out of it; the time she had spent in the police station already receding to the status of a bad dream, but one she had yet to wake from. She wanted Joe, that was the worst of it. She wanted Joe to tell her what was happening; more importantly, to tell her it would stop. But Joe was dead, and when alive his advice had never been top-notch. Already she was mythologizing. Pretty soon, Joe would be everything her father had never been. He’d be the husband her mother had wished for her.
Her own real husband had been that once, though he was falling down on the job badly now. ‘I have my keys,’ he said redundantly as they walked up the garden path, as if affirming a disputed claim to home-ownership; he opened the door and allowed her in first, the kind of gesture he insisted on when pissed off. So she was waiting for the lecture; prolonged silence always led to the lecture. It was the last thing Sarah needed, and a list of the first things would have filled a book: a hug, a bath, an ear, some sympathy. But once inside Mark went straight to the phone: not the one in the living room, but the extension in what he claimed was his study, though had never been more than a den. It was where he read Q magazine and listened to Oasis on headphones. He had never really lost his youth; he just kept it in a small room off the landing.
In the kitchen, Sarah spent a short while picking things up and putting them down again. This was the room Ruskin had searched, and the effect now was of having endured an untidy guest. Small objects – a sugar bowl, a mug holding pencils – had been shifted from their accustomed positions, reminding Sarah of one of those magazine puzzles: what is wrong with this picture? But you had to have lived in it first. Upstairs, Mark hung up the phone, then dialled again. The phones, at his insistence, were the old-fashioned, alarm-bell kind. It had been a fad at the time; part of a trend that had done its best to suggest that adherence to tradition was a form of integrity.
She adjusted the calendar, which was hanging out of true. The rest of the month was a chequerboard of appointments and deadlines: visits to the dentist, bills to be paid; black scrawls noted weeks in advance, when there had still been a chance that they might be important. For Joe, there’d be no more of this. For Joe, the weeks and months ahead would remain blank; the calendars unbought. This was what death was. It was the point at which calendars were wiped clean, and all the pre-Raph ladies and Warhol etchings decorating them blurred into nonsense.
On the stairs, the thump of Mark’s feet. He entered the kitchen guns blazing. ‘You realize this couldn’t have happened at a worse time for me?’
‘I didn’t have a great day either. Thanks.’
‘Oh, that’s right. Turn it into my fault. What got into you, Sarah? Coke in the bathroom? For Christ’s sake!’
She did not need this argument now. On the other hand, it was all that was on offer. ‘I didn’t put it there.’
‘Are you saying I did?’
‘No, of course not!’
‘So what happened, the police planted it? Is this one of those seventies things? The pigs framed me, man. It was a bum deal. That it?’
‘You’re being ridiculous.’
‘I’m being ridiculous? Well, thank God for that. I knew one of us was off the wall. Sarah, when I went out this morning, you were a housewife. I come home, you’re public enemy number one. What the fuck is going on?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, who does, then? Yesterday, you find this man dead in his office. You told me you’d never met him before, that you wanted to hire him to find this girl you’d never mentioned either. Am I on the right track so far?’
‘I didn’t tell you because I knew you wouldn’t understand. And I was right.’
‘Today it turns out he’s running a Colombian franchise in North Oxford, and half my income’s in his bank account. Not to mention his product under my bathroom sink. Which part haven’t I understood yet, Sarah?’
‘None of this is true. This isn’t what’s happening.’
‘What planet are you on, woman? Of course it’s fucking happening! It’s half-past nine, I haven’t eaten, I’ve just dragged you out of a police cell. How real do you want it to get?’
‘I. Don’t. Take. Drugs. Joe. Doesn’t. Sell them.’
‘Not any more he doesn’t. And whose word do we take for your being clean? Have you forgotten what –’
‘Of course I haven’t!’
There was a ring at the doorbell and Sarah burst into tears; events so perfectly synchronized, they might have been a Pavlovian illustration. Mark looked at her for a long while. He started to say something, changed his mind, then
went to get the door.
The sugar bowl was still out of place; the time still out of joint.
When next she was aware of company, it took the form of a man she had never met. He was gently guiding her to sit, as if this were his kitchen and Sarah some waif wandered through the back door; he was speaking, but the words rushed past in a warm, musical flow. This was a trick everybody used when speaking to a strange dog or a grizzling baby, and a sudden flash of anger riled her entire body. But it left as quickly, leaving only tremendous tiredness, and the relief of having somebody not barking at her. So Sarah cried herself out; it did not make her feel noticeably better, but at least released tears that had been building since she found Joe’s body.
The man – Sarah already suspected he was a doctor – made her a cup of tea.
She could never remember what he looked like. Small and shiny was the best she could manage in retrospect, and even that was a mental quirk: he could have been a hairy giant, and still seemed small and shiny afterwards. The same general size and shape as a little blue tablet. But at the time, what mattered was his voice. Though when she could make it out, what he actually said was: ‘Why don’t you drink that, and tell me all about it?’
So she drank the tea and told him all about it, or as much as she could recall. About her day being ripped from her, replaced with a nightmare of custody and harsh questioning; about a drab room with overhead lighting, and nothing to mark the passage of the hours but the constant ringing of phones. And when she ran out of words, a new need sprang to the top of her list: it was to wallow in silence; to have everything about her wind down and come to a halt. Instead, there was the drumming of fresh rain on the kitchen window, and the raggy breathing of this small shiny man as he waited to be sure she was finished. Even the sound of her tears, drying on her cheeks.
‘You’ll be all right,’ he said at last. ‘Here. Take this.’
He handed Sarah a small blue tablet, then poured her a glass of water, which he placed in front of her, removing her teacup first like a fussy monitor.
