Down Cemetery Road

by Mick Herron

  ‘Of course you are, sir.’ He’d found the reservation Crane had entered himself: Archibald. ‘If you’d just sign here . . .’

  It didn’t take more than five minutes and he was given the key, shown the lift; he ordered an early call he had no intention of being around for, and wished the porter goodnight. If the man were observant, he could deliver a thorough description of Crane to whoever asked: he had, after all, just spent five minutes in a one-to-one. But, thought Crane, it didn’t matter. The die was cast. When the opportunity to kill Downey arose, Crane wouldn’t be put off by the presence of a night porter.

  On the third floor, like an animal, Crane explored the dimensions of his new surroundings. Bed, wardrobe, trouser press. A dressing table at which he sat for a few moments, studying with genuine surprise his reflection in its mirror. Some days, he felt a stranger to himself. A grey face, the skin stretched tightly over bone: it didn’t do him justice. He really thought it didn’t do him justice. But it was too late to change face: he stood and checked out the bathroom. Reasonable size. The water pressure wasn’t brilliant. In a little basket by the sink he found shampoo, shower gel, toothpicks; even a little needlework kit, bound in white cardboard marked With Compliments. It awed him, this descent into the ordinary. That there were people who’d ooh and aah over this stuff; over any stuff. A trouser press, for Christ’s sake. It was like wandering into a situation comedy.

  The window gave out on the main street. He could see a man walking a dog; a few shop windows, lit against burglars, cast his shadow as he went.

  Crane could feel the excitement building. As if he were here for illicit sexual purposes, rather than as a matter of professional pride.

  While Michael slept he made small noises in the dark; not words exactly, though expressive enough: speaking in tongues you might call it, like a common or garden hysteric. Translation, in general terms, was not difficult. Whatever he was dreaming he had already lived through, just as Sarah sometimes felt that what she lived through now she had dreamed in her other life: that there would be days like this, locked in a room with a stranger, who mumbled at night when his bad dreams tracked him down.

  She remembered another night, waking to hear a child crying in the street. When she reached the window, there was nobody there. Probably there never had been. Was this what it was like to be a mother? To be attuned to random distress, even imaginary distress, on the offchance you could offer consolation? Sarah looked at Michael now as she might at a child, but there was no deceiving herself: wherever he was, he was untouchable, and nothing she could do could tone down the pitch of his nightmares. He had seen war. She had seen death. It was a small overlap, not one that amounted to much. Michael would say it counted for nothing. It had never been her finger on the trigger.

  She lay very still, very gently, counting breaths. Soon his whimpering quietened, and soon after that he awoke.

  ‘Did you hear anything?’ he whispered, already knowing she was not asleep.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not a thing.’

  After a while his breathing steadied again.

  But Sarah couldn’t rest. She felt hunted; even here, in this prison-cum-haven, she could feel outside events circling like wolves. Her mind buzzed like a TV screen, all of its pictures uninvited: Rufus – Axel – being blown out of the picture, his blood a fine mist in the air of her kitchen; Mark, kissing a stranger on a railway platform . . . She had not spoken to Wigwam. She had not spoken to anyone. And here she was on a bed in a strange town, next to a man who had already slain her a dragon, but wasn’t what Sarah would have imagined if she’d ever imagined herself a knight. His edges were dull; they had nothing in common. Except for Dinah, of course. That was what they shared: the image of a small girl lay between them like a sword.

  Perhaps she dozed after all. When she opened her eyes, she was looking at the outline of the door: lit by the corridor outside, it was edged in light like it led to another world. But even as she blinked the border was broken; a dark shadow stepped on the fine golden thread, as if an outside force were gathering in the corridor, preparing for invasion . . .

  She thought she saw the handle turn.

  ‘Michael –’ she began, but he was already pushing her over the side, and scooping a heavy glass ashtray in his free hand as he vaulted the foot of the bed, and launched himself at the door.

  Crane slipped from his room into the dull corridor. Sympathetic lighting: while the hotel guests slept, the world around them dimmed to a pleasant murmur. The air hummed too. It was the suppressed energy of a large building, full to bursting with machines and sleeping people. It was electricity dormant; power waiting to spill.

  From a distance Amos Crane heard a faint ting, which was either the bell on the desk in the lobby, or a lift reaching its floor. A place this size wouldn’t ever be wholly asleep. He didn’t need to take risks like this: so he told himself, but took them anyway. It all depended on how you defined need.

  . . . Crane patted his pocket where his skeleton card sat. He’d tried it on his own door and it worked without a squeak. One of the benefits of working for a government agency, along with the pension, the technology, and the wide-ranging sanction for violent misdeeds.

  The Smithsons – the ‘Smithsons’ – were in Room 231. The 2 meant second floor. Crane didn’t take the lift, which tended to be where video surveillance was heaviest; instead, he padded along to the stairwell, behind a heavy firedoor. In the event of a fire, he remembered reading once, shout Fire and try to put it out. All kinds of emergency descended upon the unwary. Downey, of course, wouldn’t be unwary, but that was where the thrill came in. Crane himself was wholly unarmed. That wasn’t the challenge, though. The challenge was keeping it quiet, and stopping once the job was done.

  He let himself into the corridor below. Three doors along he reached 231 and paused for a while on the threshold, allowing the moment to sink in. Then reached for his key.

  Michael hit the door cleanly and in one fluent moment unsnapped the lock, turned the handle, and pulled the lurking figure into the room, tripping it as it came, and dropping on top as it hit the floor. Outside in the corridor, a woman screamed. Sarah jumped back on the bed. Michael’s hand, full of ashtray, rose and started to fall –

  ‘Don’t!’

  The woman screamed again.

  ‘Don’t,’ Sarah said.

  Michael stopped.

  ‘Shit, feller,’ said the man on the floor.

  ‘It’s just people,’ said Sarah. ‘Only people . . .’

  Michael lowered his arm, and put the ashtray down.

  ‘Wrong room,’ said the man on the floor. He was young, American, slightly drunk, or had been. ‘Sorry, man, but Jeezus, what’s your problem?’

  There was activity outside now, as the hotel responded to the woman’s screams. She had quietened down; came a timid two steps into the room and said, ‘Sorry, we thought this was . . .’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Sarah said. ‘You scared us.’

  Michael allowed his captive to get to his feet, then dropped back to his hands and knees as if the effort had all but killed him. He started to cough. The American staggered up and backed away – ‘We scared you?’

  – just as a man in hotel uniform turned up, carrying for some reason a torch. ‘What’s the problem here?’

  Michael was still coughing. Sarah dropped to the floor, and touched him on the arm. ‘Are you okay?’ But he couldn’t stop.

  The hotel man asked what the problem was again, and the two Americans both tried telling him at once. ‘We’re next door. We got the wrong room, that’s all, but –’

  And then they all shut up as Michael spat loudly into the ashtray: a bright red stream of bloody phlegm that, once it started, didn’t look as if it was going to stop . . .

  ‘Jesus,’ said the American.

  Sarah gripped Michael’s arm, and held on tight.

  And Crane let himself silently out of the room, and padded back to the stairwell.

  I
t was as well to be philosophical about such things. Hadn’t Axel once accused him of philosophy? So he would be philosophical this once, and practise one of its rare consolations: just imagine, he told himself as he slipped into the quiet of his own room, what it would be like to be somebody else. A Smithson, for instance. Lying asleep downstairs right now, unaware of Crane’s brief joyless visit. They’d never know how close they came, or that the rest of their lives were a gift from him. Perhaps he should have left a card for them. I think, therefore you are.

  Worcester had been a mistake, though, he told himself as he undressed. He should have gone to Malvern.

  III

  Light again. Light playing over furniture in patterns she already recognized: Sarah had lived in houses where she’d not been as familiar with the way light swam across the arrangements in its path. She imagined an old age in which she looked back and reconstructed all of this, including the trouser press; an age in which she mulled not at all over a forgotten home in Oxford. These were tricks her brain played on her to pull her out of the present, which comprised Michael lying on the bed once more, his coughing fit passed but his face pale, his eyes watery – not knowing what else to do, she had placed a wet towel over his forehead and made him drink water. He wasn’t asleep. There was a trace of fever, though, or had been: it seemed to have faded with the dawn. Now he had removed his sweatshirt, and she could see the red blotches on his arms that matched the weals on his stomach. It was a piece of corroboration she could have happily done without.

  I don’t have a normal life any more. I won’t ever have one, if we don’t finish this.

  He would try to get rid of her now, she guessed, because she’d told him all she knew, which was nothing. But she couldn’t stay here and she couldn’t go home, because when she thought of all she might find there – Wigwam, Mark – her future dissolved in a watery mist.

  Michael turned his head to one side; laid his forearm across his eyes. When she was sure he was sleeping, she left the room quietly. All she had brought from Oxford was her purse, and as she waited for the lift she fished in it for what change it held: a small handful of silver, some useless coppers. The lift took her down to the lobby. In a cubbyhole by the entrance to the bar, she found the phone, and piled money on the shelf while she ransacked her memory for her own number: a sure sign of guilt that she couldn’t recall it, but knowing that didn’t help much. Let your fingers do the walking, she decided, and shut her eyes and punched in the number by touch – it came automatically, and her hand shook as she heard the connection made, and the ringing begin in her own front room, so many miles away. But nothing. But not even the answer machine. As if she were a ghost, thwarted in the act of haunting; unable even to leave her voice floating in an empty room.

  She should call Wigwam, she thought, hanging up. Wigwam would be home. But her heart gave way at the prospect, and she knew that she couldn’t talk to Wigwam yet.

  But her fingers were dialling again, as if they’d adopted a dangerous habit of their own volition. It was almost with surprise she heard the voice in her ear, reciting the partners of The Bank With No Name as if it were a mantra enjoyed by the holy: so much surprise she didn’t respond at first, not until the woman on the switchboard repeated the magic words. Then she asked for Mark.

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’

  ‘Mark Trafford. It’s his wife.’

  There was a long moment of silence which stretched nearly to breaking point. Then: ‘Putting you through.’

  For a while there was only space noise, as she travelled the loops and whorls of the bank’s system. She would hear Mark’s voice any second, and just the thought of it was like imagining walking on the moon – being somewhere totally familiar and utterly strange all at once. Would he already know it was her when he heard the phone ring? Once, he’d been able to do that; they both had. Or had told each other they had. But even when it had seemed to happen, it was just another trick the mind played: and this time, if Mark knew who it was, it was because a switchboard operator had told him.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  It wasn’t Mark’s voice anyway.

  ‘Hello? Can I –’

  ‘I’m calling for Mark Trafford. Is he there?’

  The woman didn’t respond. And Sarah had the sudden crazy notion that all these events, even this one, were part of some raddled, toxic dream: that she wasn’t who she thought she was; there was no Mark; she had no life. That the woman down the line would disconnect her any moment, and she would wake into a world completely different.

  ‘Is he –’

  ‘Is that his wife?’

  ‘I – yes. I’m his wife. Yes.’

  There was another strangled silence. Jesus Christ, it’s not just me, thought Sarah. Everyone is totally round the twist.

  ‘You . . . don’t know?’

  ‘Don’t know what?’

  . . . There was no sense of panic, eerily enough. Instead a deadly calm, and a shift in her perspective, as if the cubbyhole had suddenly become very distant from the rest of the lobby. And the woman had sounded almost close to tears . . .

  ‘Don’t know what?’ she repeated.

  ‘He doesn’t work here any more.’

  She had been so sure he was dead that she almost laughed.

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘. . . I don’t . . .’

  ‘Who’m I speaking to, anyway?’

  ‘My name’s Treadwell, Emma Tre–’

  Sarah slammed the phone back on its hook.

  In the lift again, heading back up to the room, she remembered a moment from ancient history, and a morning spent complaining to Wigwam about her boring life. No job. Housework. ‘You know what he said to me the other day? . . . I was handing him a cup of coffee, and he said Thanks, em, Sarah.’ No he hadn’t. He’d said ‘Thanks, Em – Sarah.’ Bastard. She reached the room in a mood to kill. And then that vanished too, and there was very nearly real panic this time as she pushed the door open on an empty bed in an empty –

  ‘Michael? Michael!’

  ‘What?’

  He came out of the bathroom, a towel hanging limply over his shoulders.

  Sarah pushed the door shut behind her, and leaned on it for support.

  ‘I thought you’d gone,’ he said.

  Redundantly, she shook her head.

  ‘Anyway, we’ve been here too long. We should both be going.’ He went back into the bathroom, but left the door open. She could hear water running down the sink. She sat on the bed, and waited.

  IV

  The room was still on the same floor and had the same old calendar on the wall; the same window provided the same view of, probably, the same traffic snaking through the same lights. C had the same mane of silver grey hair, the same look of repressed fury, and the same tension headache was creeping up on Howard as he stood in the same place he had last time: just in front of the desk. That mark on the wall hadn’t been there before, though. Looked like a spider had been squashed about half-way up.

  ‘Let’s recap,’ said C.

  Yes. Let’s.

  ‘You let Axel Crane, who was barking mad, go ballistic on an operation that called for finesse. He blew up a nice suburban house, scoring exactly fifty per cent in his attempt to eliminate the targets, Downey and Singleton. He also killed Singleton’s wife, and came this close to killing his young daughter, whom Amos Crane has since spirited away for use as bait to draw Downey out. Who meanwhile has killed Axel Crane, apparently to prevent him from murdering a local woman who got too nosy about Singleton’s daughter’s whereabouts. Said nosiness consisting in part of hiring a private detective, whom Axel successfully murdered. Did I miss anything important?’

  Howard shook his head.

  ‘Good. Now, here’s the really interesting question. If only one part of that was to appear in the papers, which part would you like it to be?’

  ‘The bit about Downey killing Axel,’ Howard said.

  C closed his eyes briefy. ‘Have you any ide
a how fucking rhetorical that was?’

  This time, Howard didn’t reply.

  From an office somewhere down the corridor a phone rang, which nobody answered. It was late afternoon, which in the Ministry for Urban Development counted as the wee small hours of the morning. Its name is MUD, Howard thought, inconsequentially. That gave them something in common, at any rate.

  ‘You’re supposed to be running a secret department, Howard. You don’t officially exist.’

  Howard thought: Sure. Fine. But the problem with running a place that doesn’t exist is, you have to staff it with people who do. Which means creatures like the Crane brothers. Not much point in trying to get that across. ‘I’m aware of that.’

  ‘So why is Downey still on the loose? He’s been out of our hands since almost last Christmas. He’s been back in the country three weeks at least. Have you any idea how much damage he could do if he started talking? If anyone listened?’

  ‘Nobody would.’

  ‘You’d like to guarantee that, would you, Howard? You’d like to sign your fucking name to the promise?’

  ‘He’s a war criminal. We can prove it.’

  ‘Oh, brilliant. He’s also technically dead, Howard. We can prove that too.’ He shook his head. ‘We are at war, Howard. Along with our good allies across the water. Protecting the proud name of democracy, and all the rest of the bollocks. Do we really want the world to know that it’s our fault this time? Because some mad bugger with more ribbons on his uniform than brain cells in his head wanted live targets for the latest chemical toy? We won’t look quite so fucking noble all of a sudden, will we? You ever wonder what it’s like on the receiving end of sanctions, Howard? Or Scud fucking missiles, come to that? Because that’ll be the least of our bloody worries if Downey lives long enough to talk.’

  ‘If he was going to talk, he already would have. He’s been on the loose long enough.’

  ‘Didn’t have a woman with him, though, did he? Just him and Singleton, right? Combat conditions. It’s not like that now. And where’s Amos Crane, anyway?’