by Mick Herron
‘Hotel,’ he said, without breaking stride.
‘We’ve passed three.’
‘Too near the station.’
Because of the noise was her first, ridiculous thought. Though what he meant was, hotels by the station were the first places they’d come looking.
Whoever they were.
He came to a stop at a corner, just out of the reach of a streetlight, and looked both ways, like a man checking out enemy terrain. Sarah caught up, and stood in the light. ‘Who are you? Really?’
‘Not here.’
‘Where then? I’m not coming without answers.’
‘I’m the guy who shot the guy who tried to kill you. Happy?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’d have killed him anyway.’
‘Your name’s Downey. You’re supposed to be dead.’
He didn’t answer.
‘You were Singleton’s friend.’
‘I told you that.’
‘And you were both killed in a helicopter crash.’
Before he could react to this, he reacted to something else: footsteps over the road, chopping little pieces off the quiet. Downey pulled Sarah into the dark and she tensed at this unexpected contact. The smell of sweat and loose clippings of hair. He hadn’t shaved, just hacked at the beard with a pair of scissors. From a distance, he could have been riding the fashion. Up close he looked like an accident in a garden shed.
The footsteps stopped. ‘Who’s there?’ It was a querulous tremor, an old woman’s voice, attached in this instance to an old man. ‘I heard you over there. I’m not afraid.’
They stood in their doorway, a chemist’s shop doorway, huddled like startled lovers. But he couldn’t see them, and they made no further noise.
‘Winston? Come on, Winston.’
And the dog wheezed after its ancient owner: a boxer with a clumsy punch-drunk waddle, as if four legs were too many, or not enough. The tapping of the footsteps resumed, only to falter a few yards later while their maker hawked noisily into the gutter; possibly a gesture of contempt, or maybe just a symptom of the condition that had him wandering the streets at this godforsaken hour.
‘See?’
‘What?’ she snapped.
‘We can’t hang about. There’s a place up ahead.’
Which was the last one Sarah would have chosen. She’d have thought he’d go for a backstreet boarding house; the kind of refuge where the arrival of a bedraggled couple in the early hours simply meant another marriage had hit the deck. But the hotel ahead bore the same relation to a travelling reps’ dive that a cruiser does a tug; an imposing stone building which looked like it had graced the town since time out of mind, and only begrudgingly hosted untitled members of the public. ‘You’ve made reservations?’
‘Think they’ll turn away cash? Not on your life.’
He fumbled in his canvas bag again, and this time pulled out a folded stack of currency held by a rubber band.
‘Not on your life,’ he repeated.
This time, Sarah believed him.
II
Seven in the morning – three hours’ sleep – and Amos Crane was back at his desk, back at his screen, hacking his way through railway timetables: an obvious place to start. Maybe Michael Downey used a car. Well, if so, Crane would just have to wait until he broke surface, but in the meantime here he was, chasing trains a pair of fugitives might have hopped in the small hours.
They might have split up, too, but he doubted that.
So he made a list of all possible departures, allowing a generous window of ninety minutes, then cut the London trains, because that’s what he’d have done: only amateurs think you can get lost in the big city. And then cut the north train too, because the only point in heading north was putting down distance, and Downey wouldn’t spend three-four hours on a train if he was expecting pursuit. Not if it meant making it as far as Durham to find a squad car waiting . . .
. . . and it occurred to him he was playing the game by trying to think like Downey; maybe he should be zeroing on the woman instead . . .
. . . but no, it was too early for that: the state she’d be in, the best you could hope was she’d follow instructions without too much fuss. But Downey would keep her for the moment, at least until he’d found out what she knew. Which wasn’t anything, which was fuck all, but that was the beauty of the information game: you never knew how ignorant you were without going over everything twice. Downey needed to hear her story. Which meant he’d want to hole up as soon as possible, get the debriefing under way . . .
Crane sat back, and drank coffee from a takeaway cup. He was thinking: if it had been him, he’d have bought two sets of tickets; putting down a false trail was standard. And the second pair, the real pair, wouldn’t have been identical: he’d have bought two tickets on the same line, but for different stations. But Downey was hampered. That time of night, relatively few people about, he couldn’t have risked going to the window twice: the ticket clerk might have recognized him. So he’d have sent the woman. And one person buying tickets for two different stations, that was memorable too. So Crane had to assume Downey was missing a trick. Two sets of tickets, right, but each an identical pair.
In the old days this was the point at which flatfeet wandered from booth to ticket-booth, photograph in hand, hoping to get lucky. For Crane, it was a finger-hop and skip – technically illegal, he reminded himself, but that was what the word ‘technically’ was for. He didn’t come up with many pairs. Late evening, it was mostly businessmen singles. With luck, he’d pinpoint them.
He took another gulp of coffee. Miles away, Sarah woke up.
She had slept fitfully, wakened at three by aeroplanes exploding overhead, a noise which resolved into thunder once conscious- ness set in. But the rain that followed soothed her, its rhythmic drumming against the wide windows washing her mind clean, for a while, of the horrors, and when she woke next the sun pouring through the gaps in the curtains evidenced a morning so perfect, there was probably a patent pending on it.
Michael sat on the end of the bed.
He had spent the night in the armchair, and sometime early had finished the job he’d started on the train, and shaved. Revealed was a thin, dark face; not much older than her own, but more travelled. A harsh crease on his chin suggested a healed scar. His brown eyes, neither friendly nor threatening, were distinctly matter-of-fact. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he said. He didn’t look well himself.
She cleared her throat. ‘Thanks.’
‘Are you a junkie?’
Oh, God. She closed her eyes. ‘What makes you ask?’
‘Because it’ll save a lot of pain if you say so now.’
‘No. I’m not a junkie.’
She opened them again, and looked round the room. A large room, big windows, a king-size double bed. En-suite bathroom. Trouser press. A TV she knew would get cable. Everything you looked for in a hotel room, really, down to the emergency instructions on the back of the door, and the aura of mild depression hanging over it all: the inescapable conclusion that you were here on a temporary basis. As if she needed reminding of that.
Her clothes clung to her uncomfortably. She had slept fully dressed.
She sat up, rubbed her face in her hands. She was in a strange room with a strange man: it scared her. On the other hand, he had saved her life last night, and subsequently slept in the armchair.
Afterwards, Sarah looked back on this day as a series of snapshots, small moments that became shuffled in her mind. But this was always the first of them: waking and finding him sitting on the end of the bed. The hand that pulled the trigger rubbing an unfamiliar chin.
When Howard came in, saw Crane sitting at his desk, he said, ‘God, Amos, should you be here? Shouldn’t you be . . .’
‘I be what?’
‘Well, mourning.’
‘I am mourning, Howard. I’m also looking for the fucker put me in mourning. Which is why I’m at my desk, yes.’
Howar
d wisely didn’t pursue this. ‘And last night? Um, did you sort out the, er, husband?’
‘Mark Trafford. Did you know he was dirty?’
‘Dirty how?’
Crane rubbed his fingers together.
‘So we can expect little fuss from him, then?’
‘Unless he’s keen on seeing how the other half live. What about you?’
‘The woman?’ Howard shrugged. ‘About what you’d expect.’
Crane didn’t let relief show on his face, but that’s what he felt. Three hours’ sleep, and he’d woken thinking about the woman – Axel’s ‘wife’, or, he supposed, ‘Rufus”s wife. Depending on how you looked at it. Either way, he’d woken wondering if he’d been wrong the previous evening, and Axel really had gone into meltdown. In which case Howard wouldn’t have found a wife, he’d have found another body. There were kids too. It might have been messy.
‘But did she buy it?’
Distaste flitted over Howard’s face. He really didn’t like this part. It made Amos wonder how he’d got here in the first place, let alone being nominally in charge. ‘She’s not the type,’ Howard said at last, ‘to disbelieve anything. Not when it’s backed up with a police presence.’
‘The woodentops have their uses.’
‘What are you doing? Exactly.’
‘Exactly, I’m running through timetables. I think they they went for a train. I’m trying to find which.’
‘You said it didn’t make a difference. That they’ll still come after the child.’
‘They will.’
‘So it doesn’t matter where they are now. So long as they –’
‘Look, Howard, I’m fucking tracking them. All right?’
Howard didn’t say anything.
‘We’ll find them. Sooner or later. But sooner’s better. Don’t you think?’
‘Are you making this personal, Amos?’
Jesus Christ. Amos smiled kindly. ‘Howard. Of course I’m making it personal. Now, fuck off, do you mind? I’m busy.’
Howard stood there for the best part of a minute before he turned and walked away. Probably, if he’d thought of something good to say, he’d have said it.
Amos returned to his screen. And if he’d been buying the tickets, he continued, the ones he’d have bought for actual use would have been for a train leaving thirty seconds later.
Bingo.
Downey had hung a DO NOT DISTURB on their door, and when food arrived, made them leave the trolley outside. He told her to keep away from the windows. And every time she wanted to think this ridiculous, she got flashes of yesterday evening like the remnants of a bad trip: Rufus with the damn dental floss – Rufus! – wrapping her throat with a cord so tight it left a mark like a thin ruby necklace. She studied it in the mirror: a memento mori, secular stigmata. A wound that did not bleed.
‘You think they’ll find us here?’
‘Depends.’
‘On what?’
He shrugged.
And Sarah didn’t even know who they were yet.
He tuned to CNN, and they watched a war unfold in colour; men and women in desert fatigues, auditioning for Armageddon. Commentary was live: this was Virtual Reality Combat. You could hold the remote and imagine pressing the buttons; lasers accurate to an inch over fifty miles; smart bombs that punched their targets while transmitting images to a watching world. You could look into the whites of enemy eyes a continent away. Study their customs, learn their language and kill them, all at once.
Michael wolfed sandwiches. Sarah couldn’t eat. For information, she was hungry, but hardly knew where to start. Nor did Michael . . . There were car alarms that activated when you got too close: you didn’t have to be touching. It was one of those eighties things where you not only owned something, you owned the space around it too. Michael was like that, though instead of an alarm going off everything shut down.
She asked him, ‘Are you married?’
‘Used to be.’
She waited, but he wasn’t enlarging on that. ‘Tell me about Singleton.’
‘We did training together.’
Always, she was left to fill in the gaps, for which she leaned on films dimly remembered, and school stories devoured as a child. Parade ground brutality; men fainting in the heat. Vows of undying loyalty. Smuggled feasts after lights out. She knew the truth lay a million miles wide; truth, anyway, was a private luxury.
‘You fought together?’
‘Over there.’ He nodded at the screen. ‘Last time.’
‘Was it . . .’ She didn’t know what to ask.
‘It was war. We were kids.’
‘Like this.’ She gestured at the screen.
‘This isn’t war. It’s a shooting gallery.’
She looked back at the screen. Graphs showing probable enemy-dead were superimposed on a smoking background. A voice recited figures with barely suppressed excitement, as if this were a lottery-rollover week, and its owner had invested heavily in the big numbers.
He was riding pure intuition here, but he thought they’d boarded the Worcester train. Somebody had, certainly: a pair of returns had been bought with just about two minutes to spare – was Worcester somewhere people went in a hurry? It was the kind of thing Howard would probably know.
He made his choice anyway; pulled up a list of stations the Worcester train stopped at, and waited to see if any jumped out. But they were ordinary places: small towns; nowhere that rang bells, and he sat back in his chair again, feeling his mind slip out of focus. Three hours’ sleep was not enough.
Perhaps, too, he should have been with his brother. Axel had been taken to the small, discreet firm of undertakers the Department used: accustomed to physical trauma, to disguising cause of death. There would be no post-mortem. But perhaps there was need for Amos to sit with his brother’s body a while, so he could get used to the idea that Axel wasn’t coming home this time; that Amos was well and truly alone at last.
. . . Moreton-in-Marsh. Honeybourne. These were towns child- ren’s writers lived; the kind of place Winnie the Pooh would go on his day off. Just listening to the names, Crane knew nobody could hide there for long. Ten minutes after you’d found the B&B, the vicar would be popping round, inviting you for evensong.
Not that he had wanted Axel dead. But for too long he’d been forced to play the older brother role: trying to calm everybody else down when Axel went over the top. Axel enjoyed the wet work too much, that had always been his problem. Bureaucrats like Howard didn’t go for that. They needed it done, sure, but they didn’t want anyone enjoying it.
Pershore, Worcester itself. Worcester was biggish, wasn’t it?
He made a note on a pad by his keyboard: Hotels in Worcester? Later, he’d find a list, find a map; use the station as its centre, and plot the hotels accordingly. It was a big job and, as Howard had suggested, not entirely necessary: sooner or later, Downey would come to him. But if it brought that moment closer, it was worth doing. Axel wasn’t supposed to be one of the blips. He shouldn’t have been wiped from the screen like that. Maybe Amos should be sitting vigil over his body, but he knew Axel would prefer it this way: Amos preparing to hunt down Axel’s killer. In the end, you mourned by doing what you were best at, and this time Amos was doing it for love. He’d be sure to tell Downey that, when the moment came.
For a while he sat there, contemplating that moment. Then he licked his lips, and bent back to his screen.
There was a Ted Hughes poem Sarah remembered about a confined panther or other large cat; behind bars, it felt horizons rolling beneath its feet. There was something of this in Michael. The hotel room, to her, had become a prison; hourly, the walls closed in, an inch at a time, as if it were some upscale version of a medieval torture device which would squeeze the life from all their bones. But to Michael, the room was just where he happened to be at the moment. It was just another waystation, away from the war.
‘Where did it start?’ she asked him.
She’d already to
ld him everything she knew, which was nothing really; less than nothing, because telling it left her confused and lost.
‘I don’t know.’
‘But please try.’
He shrugged. Talking was an effort with him. ‘In the desert? I think that’s where it really started.’
‘During the war?’
‘No. Long after that. A year ago. Eighteen months?’
‘You’ve been dead four years,’ she said. ‘The helicopter crash? Off Cyprus?’
‘I’ve never been to Cyprus.’ Then what she’d said registered. ‘Four years? Jesus, it is, isn’t it?’
‘What happened in the desert?’
‘There were six of us. And the . . . others.’
‘What others?’
‘We called them the boy soldiers.’
He seemed to be fading before her eyes, and she was unsure whether he was waking from a nightmare, or falling back into one. ‘Boy soldiers?’
‘They were just kids. Scared to fucking death.’ He ran a hand across his eyes, then looked straight at her. ‘It had to be a desert. The conditions wouldn’t be fair otherwise. That’s what they told us. Fair.’
It was like grasping at smoke. ‘Who told you?’
He looked back to the screen.
‘Michael? You have to tell me these things!’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m involved, dammit. Because I’m here.’
He looked at her again, this time with a fresh curiosity, as if he’d registered for the first time that she’d had an existence prior to his awareness of her. He had saved her life, but she knew that he’d done so simply because he’d thought she might have information; because she’d been looking for Dinah, and he’d thought she might know more than him. Returning his gaze now, she wondered if, under different circumstances, he’d be just as prepared to kill her for the same end. It was a thought she pushed away quickly.
He said, ‘What’s that scar on your arm?’
And she knew it was a question to draw her into his world, the one where even the innocent carry wounds. Especially the innocent. But she could not tell him about the fall from the roof; the way the lights spun cartwheels in her head as she hit the ground.
