Down Cemetery Road

by Mick Herron

  They had chosen to drive the back roads – Michael had chosen to drive the back roads – because, well, because that’s what he’d chosen to do. She did not argue; if anything, they needed space in which to conduct a reality check. It was not a reality she had ever expected to find herself in – a hire-car with guns in the boot: you read about this happening in the States. It was always described as a spree, and there were always bodies left by the roadside. It ended with somebody strapped to a chair, waiting for the punishment to start.

  She had to jerk herself out of these reveries. Remind herself whose side they were on.

  The first night, they stopped at a farmhouse some miles from anywhere: if it had been possible to drive clear of Britain without noticing, they’d have managed it that day. The B&B sign by the verge also offered eggs, tomatoes, and, peculiarly, reconditioned fridges. The depredations on the farming industry had obviously been farther-reaching than she’d imagined. They took two rooms, the only two rooms, and in response to the landlady’s raised eyebrow Sarah managed something about just being friends. They were not just friends. There was no word available to describe their relationship. That night she fell straight into heavy sleep, to be woken in the small hours by a barking dog, followed by the muttered cursing of, presumably, the farmer. The dog fell silent. So did everything else. Sarah got out of bed and went to look from the window; the surrounding countryside was dark as the far side of the moon. But as she gazed out, a car crested a hill in the distance, its sudden headlit appearance throwing everything into relief. She could make out the hillsides then; the occasional raggedy outbreak of hedge. Three trees in the near distance, their configuration an echo of a Station of the Cross. When the car passed she returned to bed and slept once more, though this time there were dreams: savage, confused things over which hovered, somehow, the horror of crucifixion. The next morning, when they passed those trees, they were innocent in the early light; neither young nor ancient; merely trees. She could as easily have had nightmares about the car she’d seen; a black demon chewing the darkness with its twin electric swords.

  Michael never referred to his coughing fit. When she asked him directly he shrugged, and changed the subject.

  That second day, still early, they parked on the edge of a wood. While Sarah watched for traffic, Michael fetched the guns from the boot and carried them into the trees. There she followed him, picking carefully over roots and fallen branches; skirting mud puddles and suspicious piles of leaves Michael didn’t seem to notice, though he didn’t stumble either. He stopped in a clearing and laid the shotgun on the ground. He had not broken it the way you were supposed to: the code of the countryside. Presumably he followed a different set of rules.

  Out on the road, a car drove past. Its engine noise tugged at her heart; the ease with which it left the area, disappeared into somebody else’s future.

  He found a tin can lying under a tree – there wasn’t an empty space in the country you couldn’t find a rusting can – and lodged it in a branch before pacing the clearing, measuring ten steps. ‘Any further than this,’ he said, ‘you’re definitely going to miss.’

  ‘I’m not going to shoot anybody.’

  ‘Are you going to let them shoot you?’

  ‘I don’t suppose it’ll be a straight choice,’ she said.

  He loaded the handgun. ‘Use both hands. Use your left to steady your right. On the wrist, like this.’ He demonstrated. ‘It’ll kick back. Not a lot, but you need to expect it.’

  ‘I don’t want to fire your gun, Michael.’

  He ignored her. ‘Don’t aim dead centre. Take your bearing and fire a little low. That way, when it pulls up, you’re already compensating. When you’re new to it, it almost always pulls up.’

  ‘Fascinating. But no.’

  ‘You know your problem, Tucker? You haven’t sorted out yet which part’s real and which part isn’t.’

  He turned, apparently casual, and shot the tin can from the tree. It made a lot of noise: not just the gun itself, whose low crack sounded like the splintering of last year’s wood, but a racket all around as birds and unseen beasts took fright and fled. And then there was just a settling down, with, somewhere in the distance, a bass pulse, as if the gunshot were still out there, heading like hell for the hills.

  Michael retrieved the can and showed her its jaggy, bone-dry wound. ‘See? It’s made of tin. You can shoot it all you like, you’ll never hurt it.’

  ‘So what’s the point?’

  ‘We’re not in Oz. Whoever’s got Dinah, it’s not the Tin Man.’ He held the gun out for her. ‘You might never have to use it. But if the time comes you do, you can’t say Stop, I haven’t practised.’

  It was heavier than she’d have imagined. This was appropriate: machines that were made for taking life should have heft to them. You wouldn’t want to take them lightly. This one, he’d already told her, was a German gun. A Luger. Not as old as the gun he’d broken back at Gerard’s, but a wartime piece just the same. ‘A collector’s item.’

  ‘But still illegal.’

  When she looked at the can, it was miles away.

  ‘Just imagine it’s Rufus.’

  This was crude, unnecessary, and did not work. Her first three shots went wide; only with the fourth could they measure how wide, because that time her bullet wound up buried in the tree itself. About a foot from the can.

  ‘You’re pulling to the right. Aim to the left.’

  He showed her how to load, but didn’t make her do it. He did make her try again. This time she emptied the gun, and came within a few inches of the can with her last shot: he said. She wasn’t sure how he could tell.

  After that, he picked up the shotgun.

  (Back at Gerard’s, while Michael smuggled the guns out, Gerard told her about the shotgun. ‘Don’t let him fire it without taking the plugs out,’ he’d said.

  ‘Plugs?’

  ‘The barrels are plugged. Keeps dirt out. That’s a bloody expensive gun, Sarah.’

  ‘What would happen if he fired with them in?’

  ‘He’d ruin it.’ After a moment or two he added, ‘Blow his hands off too, mind. Serve the bugger right.’

  And she knew it was her he was thinking about. That he didn’t want Michael handing her the gun; saying, Here. Have a go with this, and Sarah blowing her hands off.)

  She didn’t need to bring it up. He broke the gun open, peered down the barrels, then upended the gun and pulled a cork from each with his little finger. They looked like corks: red ones, each with a loop in the end for easy removal. He dropped them into a pocket of his denim jacket, then scooped a handful of shells from a box liberated from Gerard’s cellar, and shovelled them into another.

  ‘Watch.’

  He loaded it, his eyes watching her rather than his hands; making sure she was following. Then cracked the gun back into a piece, pulled the hammers back, and with an action so smooth he might have been dancing brought the stock to his shoulder, levelled the barrels and fired.

  The can disappeared. A good part of the branch went with it. This time there was no follow-up noise; no local creatures left to go batshit with shock. Anything left in the area was already stone deaf or dead, themselves excepted. And she wasn’t sure about her own hearing, once the roar of the gun had died away.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘You hit it, then.’ Her voice sounded funny in her head. As if it were echoing in a large, empty room.

  ‘Missing it would have been a better trick. If it comes to a straight choice, use this.’ His voice was level, serious. It always was, but holding a gun lent him gravitas. ‘You point a handgun at a soldier, he’ll take it off you. But if you’re carrying one of these, he’ll keep his distance. Here.’

  This, too, was heavy. But in those first moments, she had nothing to compare it to: couldn’t remember picking other things up. It was a tool for a job outside her scope, and only a sudden heavy scent of woodland carried on a draught through the clearing gave her the beari
ng: it was like work for an autumn day, work you did with the house behind you, and woodsmoke drifting on a steady wind. Like shouldering a rake once you’re sure the job’s done; or wielding a yard broom, clearing rubble from the foot of a tumbling wall.

  It was not like housework.

  ‘It’ll kick,’ Michael said. ‘The thing is, don’t drop it.’

  She raised it to her shoulder, the way he had.

  ‘Uh-uh. You’ll end up with a bruise the size of Ireland. Fire from the hip. Just let your eyes point the way. We’re not going for long-distance marksmanship here. All you need do is prove you’re not afraid to fire it. Most situations, that’ll get you the benefit of the doubt.’

  When he was satisfied she was holding it correctly, she fired.

  It kicked, yes: she felt the tug on her arms as if she were about to take off backwards. What she had been aiming at, she wasn’t sure, but the shells tore a hole in a bush she could have put her arm clean through. This was something she did not notice until regaining her balance: but she did not fall, did not drop the gun. For a short moment her vision pixelated, but that was all. The dead bush, the trees around her, were a vast confusion of blurred dots, as if she were standing too close to the screen they projected on to. And then it cleared, and the bush had a hole in it, and Michael was taking the gun away, showing her again how to break it open, feed it, lock it.

  ‘One more time,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t think that’s it. Shooting at people, it’s a lot different.’

  ‘I imagine,’ she said, on her way back to the car.

  ‘Bushes don’t shoot back,’ she thought he said. But by then she was deep among the green, tracking her way out of this narrow world of leaf and mud, and couldn’t be sure of his words, or whether he meant that made it easier or harder.

  That second night she had curled up on the car’s back seat in a search for comfort calling on resources she didn’t know she possessed. When she closed her eyes, her dream landscape rolled by at an unwavering forty miles an hour, with, every so often, the same barn, the same clutch of houses drifting past. Like a pointless ring road, her dream circled nowhere, endlessly, and trying to break free of it, she could only spin into the void. The trick was to keep going. Even a ring road had to lead somewhere.

  Michael slept outside, on hard ground. It was a fine night, with a bright moon but cloud cover enough to keep frost at bay. He had bedded down worse, he assured her. And woken operational.

  Earlier that day, they had crossed the glass border: that was what it felt like to Sarah. One moment they were driving along the road; the next they were doing exactly the same thing, only in another country. An invisible transference. In Scotland the sky was still blue; the radio, when they could hear it, still squawked war news. Sometimes, clearing gaps in the roadside, sudden winds buffeted the car, and she felt her heart leap sideways, bang against her ribs.

  ‘Where do we go now?’

  ‘North. Still north.’

  The island, he told her, was offcoast from a village called Barragan. He had found it on a map, and was sure that was right.

  They had other maps, but Sarah wondered if each didn’t merely describe the area in which they were lost. Maps were a means to an end, but only took you so far. Wasn’t there a fable about a king who demanded a map of his land so accurate, it would show every ditch, every bush, everything? And his map-makers had produced one on a scale of 1:1, and laid it over his land like a shroud . . . You might as well be stranded in the dark as blinded by the light. And besides, if they knew where their journey would take them, they’d end it here and now.

  That afternoon, they parked in a lay-by where a van sold mugs of filthy sweet tea, and one of the other customers – a man in a green sleeveless pullover: for some reason, that detail stuck with Sarah – was driving a car with a for-sale sticker pasted to the rear side window. The car was a Citroën 2CV. A blue one. He was asking four hundred and fifty pounds, and his sign gave an abundance of detail about age, road tax, MOT: Sarah didn’t pay attention, being more enthusiastic about the toilets which were the other main feature of this lay-by. But when she emerged, she found that Michael had bought the car.

  ‘We’ve already got a car.’

  ‘Now we’ve got a different one.’

  ‘We just drive it away?’

  ‘He’ll take the VW.’

  So Michael carried the guns from the old car in a jumble of jackets and a thin blanket; carried them so casually, it was as if they’d lost shape in the process. That must be what it’s like, having guns a part of your life. Carry them like kitchen equipment, and nobody looks at them twice. Sarah, though, watched him, even if the man in sleeveless green was too busy double-counting his money; wondering, probably, if he’d not just been ripped off in a manner he hadn’t tumbled to yet. Sarah felt like Faye Dunaway without the blonde; Michael, too, was no Warren Beatty. Besides, they were the good guys. But still: here they were, swapping cars, concealing guns. Unhappy feelings kicked inside her.

  In the new car, this tinny thing, the wind’s buffetings struck a lot more drastically. Sarah was driving now; had to learn to cope with that at the same time as picking up the car’s habits. When she felt the gusts she had to lean into them, making the wheel a part of her own motion. This was the other trick of it. You had to bend to what was happening. You had to accommodate, to keep from being blown away.

  All this time, a sense of their shifting status had been growing on Sarah. Quick glimpses of her stranger’s face in the rear-view – the sharp dark hair; the face narrower than she was used to – reminded her that they were on the run; that she had adopted this new identity, non-identity, to throw their followers off the scent. But there were no followers. They were not fugitives. The flight from Oxford, the time in the hotel: these might have been the results of a misread script, because nobody was looking for them at all. She was assumed, if Gerard had told the truth, to have fled a crooked husband, and while this put her under the heading of missing, it did not mean she was actively sought. If what she had once read was true, thousands of people went missing every year. She was simply one of a huge population, a vast herd on the run from what had been their defining characteristics: passports, driving licences, credit cards – roaming now at will like invisible buffalo through indifferent landscapes. As for Michael, he was not part of the equation. Nobody but Gerard knew they were together.

  And Gerard hadn’t reported the theft of his guns.

  So there was no need to worry each time a police car hove into view. Whatever crimes she had been involved in, they had an element of perfection about them: there was even a killing so unobtrusive, it left not a body behind. Though still she flinched when the memory caught her unawares, and in her mind’s eye trapped Rufus, or Axel, falling backwards, his blood a fine spray in the air.

  It was an image that haunted her dreams that night, as she slept curled up on the car’s back seat, looking for comfort that never came.

  * * *

  Next day she drove again; too wired to doze in the passenger seat. Michael traced their journey with a finger on the map: the roads afforded glimpses of the lochs. Spots of rain threatened, but never made good. The drive took three hours.

  Three hours, and by the time Sarah drove the 2CV into Barra-gan she was beginning to suspect they’d bought a clunker: loose noises were rattling under its bonnet, as if some mechanical emergency were trying to break free. So much for the man in the green sleeveless pullover; you’d have thought, if you could trust anybody, somebody with an anti-culling sticker on his windscreen would be a good bet.

  Michael said, ‘You want to get something to eat?’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ she said, without thinking about it.

  ‘Well, I am.’

  So was she. It was as if her body were admitting, at last, that she couldn’t get by without it.

  There was what amounted to a village square, though it wasn’t square, and this was where she parked
, under the low branches of a large tree. This stood in a plot of earth maybe three yards by four, around which, some time ago, concrete paving slabs had been laid. Now they were cracked and jutting at jagged angles, as what had been intended as some sort of framing device had become a testament to the inexorable defiance of trees. A row of shops lined one side of the square; houses two others; a garage and what seemed to be a health centre the fourth. One of the houses was a pub. This was where they went to eat.

  The food was okay, nothing special; the service friendly, if distant. Michael ate like he did most things; as if it were an exercise, and you got marks for efficiency. She wondered how long it would take to get to know somebody like this; and if, after all, the effort would be worth it. Perhaps he’d been different once – hell, everybody was different once – but perhaps he’d been different before that time in the desert; before the helicopter and the small glass bomb, and the melting boy soldiers. And still she wondered, too, why he had been chosen to be there in the first place. And if there were sins he’d yet to tell her about.

  ‘We’ll stay here tonight,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘We’ll what?’