Down Cemetery Road

by Mick Herron

‘Stay here. Tonight.’

  So that was another decision taken, she thought bitterly. But knew, too, that the bitterness was token, was reflexive; because she had no other plans, and nothing to do with her life. Other than finding Dinah, of course. Meanwhile, she might as well stay here as anywhere.

  So they booked a room in the inn after eating; a double room, because that was all that was on offer. Not that the village was heavily popular, but one double room was all the inn had. They didn’t have much luggage: a couple of carrier bags. The changes of clothing Sarah had bought en route. The guns, they left in the boot of the car.

  Afterwards Michael slept, while Sarah went for a wander round the village. By her watch, the wander didn’t take more than fourteen minutes: on her second circuit she stopped at the newsagent’s and bought a Reginald Hill paperback, and retreated to the bar where she read it cover to cover over the space of the next four hours. It was the calmest afternoon she could remember. Joe was much on her mind, though. This thought kept intruding every time she raised her eyes from her page: that she’d killed him, as good as; that if not for her he’d be in his office now, waiting for the phone to ring, or rabbiting on to a new client about old clients he’d had . . . Zoë, too. Just a few days ago, though it seemed as many years, Zoë had pumped her full of salt water and emptied her of drugs: not a soft woman, Zoë. And she’d promised to check up on Sarah, though Sarah hadn’t hung around long enough to be checked up on. Perhaps she should call Zoë. At least let her know she was all right.

  That was another thought that wouldn’t go away, once she’d had it. It felt like she’d run from a lot of responsibilities lately, and letting Zoë Boehm know she was alive would at least give her a small piece of credit: that was what she told herself, dialling Directory Enquiries from the telephone near the bar, and scribbling Oxford Investigations’ number on the pad provided. But when she rang it, that was all that happened; it rang. Not even an answerphone. She pictured a vacant office, dust slowly thickening on its shelves; absence accruing minute by minute, as the empty room waited for a Joe who would never return. She had to hang up before her thoughts caused her to cry.

  – Oh God, she thought, dear Joe. Missing out on the rest of his life, because of her. Poor Joe, she wished him peace. Out there with the cosmos now. She had a sudden urge to see the stars.

  The inn had a back garden where she found a bench and sat, suddenly overwhelmed by the luxury of being alone. For all the relatively early hour, it was dark now as a city girl could wish it, and though it was mild, she shivered under the big night sky. There were countless stars, each already dead perhaps, but the world wouldn’t know that until the unborn generations had come and gone: all part of the cosmic joke that ensured that most important truths stayed well and truly out of reach. The time it took to see the light, the world itself had darkened. There was a degree of comfort in this, Sarah decided; that, divinely ordained or accidentally slamdunked into being, the arrangement of the universe was not without humour. Which in itself you could take as a sign that prayer was not without purpose.

  The wind rustled leaves across the way. An unseen dog barked. Something skittered in the darkness and she exhaled slowly.

  . . . There was this to say about the inky background of the cosmos, it covered a multitude of sins. And maybe the stars didn’t know they were dead yet. Maybe that was why they continued to shine. Looking up at them now, Sarah understood for maybe the first time what a very tiny part of everything the world was, in a universe which was anyway expanding. This world itself would hardly be missed. What mattered were the little components that went up to making human life. If Dinah didn’t matter, nobody did. One of the few important truths within Sarah’s reach.

  ‘There’s always a good night sky here,’ Michael said behind her.

  She hadn’t heard him arriving.

  After a while, he added, ‘We used to look at the sky a lot, when we were on the island. One of the others, he knew we were in Scotland. He could tell by the stars.’

  ‘Was that Tommy?’

  ‘No. But it’s how Tommy and I knew where we were when we landed.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘A little way up the coast.’ He gestured. ‘We found a church by the side of a wood. Well, a chapel. Deserted, it was. Funny place for it, really. We sheltered there that first night. Sanctuary, you’d call it.’

  He said no more but stood, like her, drinking in the vast spaces above them. And Sarah was surprised to find that she had grown comfortable with his company. Liking didn’t enter it. Liking was for people you met, then chose to meet again. This was trust, and trust was for those who taught you to use a gun, then stood close while you fired. Years ago, she’d come through a baptism of pain to find a life with Mark, and had thought she could trust him because she’d imagined it was something they’d come through together. But Mark had simply been on the sidelines; picking up the pieces and arranging them how he’d wanted. And when that fell apart, or at least when his hopes did – for the books and the successes; the life of academic achievement he’d come to expect – he rearranged it all again, and settled for the money. In time, even that hadn’t been enough. She wondered how long it had taken him to rationalize his crime; to talk himself through to the other side of the scruples he’d once had. And supposed that when you were denied what you really wanted, you didn’t see why you shouldn’t have everything else. The money. The mistress. The works.

  She turned to look at Michael. He had bathed, shaved; wore a clean shirt and a pair of jeans. In the dim light his face was all crags and valleys, and she had to suppress an impulse to reach out and touch the scar on his chin. He’d probably be no less surprised if she made a grab for his crotch.

  To shake the thought from her head, she said, ‘Tell me about Tommy.’

  ‘Tommy?’

  ‘You’re in this for him. He must have been special.’

  ‘He was okay.’ For a while it looked like that was all she was going to get: He was okay. Then he said, ‘What did you want to know?’

  ‘Anything. Just what he was like.’

  ‘What he was like,’ said Michael. He had a can of beer with him he popped now, and offered her a swallow. She shook her head.

  ‘We were in this bar once, Tommy and me. On leave. We’d had a bad day. Tommy liked to bet, and he’d lost heavily that afternoon, and he was really pissed off. Looking for a fight.’

  He took a long pull from the beer can, then rubbed his lower lip with a thumb.

  ‘There was a man in the bar, Tommy decided he was the one. I don’t know why.’ He rapped a quick tattoo with his knuckles on the can. Some way off, the dog barked again. ‘You ever see one of those arguments where one guy just wants to live quiet, and the other guy wants to break bones? There was nothing he could say Tommy didn’t take wrong. He’d be, Let’s buy you a drink, and Tommy was, What are you saying, I’m an alcoholic? You calling me a drunk? Guy must’ve thought he’d wandered into a nuthouse. He’d say, I’m leaving now, Tommy said, No you’re not. Everybody knew what was going to happen. Nobody got in the way.’

  Sarah felt the breeze shift direction. From inside the inn came the sounds of crockery, as the staff cleared up.

  ‘He wasn’t built or anything, this bloke, just average. Tommy was like me to look at, but you could bounce bricks off him all night long. Anyway, it happened. He followed this bloke outside, someone he’d never met, had never done him harm, and beat him half to death. I pulled him off eventually. I could have put an end to it sooner, but only by killing him. The way you have to some kinds of dog.’

  He turned and placed the empty can on the arm of the bench. Then looked at Sarah.

  ‘Well, what did you expect? He was nice to animals, kind to children? You want to hear about him carrying Maddy’s picture, crying himself to sleep over Dinah? He went with whores, Tucker, and he got in fights, and if the other guy was better than him, he’d hit him from behind. Because that’s what he did. He was a soldier, h
e was a good soldier. But he wasn’t a nice man.’

  ‘And he’s the reason you’re looking for Dinah?’

  ‘No. Maddy is.’

  It was as if a picture she had been looking at turned out to be upside down, and no revision of her former opinion was going to make her look less foolish. But Michael didn’t hang around to hear about how she’d got things wrong. She looked up at the stars once more, and then looked round for him, but he’d left.

  Sarah Tucker, she thought. You complete and utter idiot.

  She wasn’t sure how much longer she sat there in the dark. When she went inside at last, and up to their room, Michael was already in bed: she slipped into the bathroom as quietly as she could, and had a tepid shower. Exhausted. I am exhausted, she thought – her mind still racing from untamed thoughts. Using a fresh T-shirt as a nightie, and pulling a pair of pants on, she went back into the bedroom, which was small, with thin curtains no match for the moonlight, so a bluish cast settled on all it held: the electric fire, the dusty shelf with its scatter of tourist-objects, the small bedside table on which sat an unused ashtray. The bed itself. Michael lay still as a corpse beneath its covers, though Sarah knew he was awake, and knew, too, that he knew she knew. I know you know I know you know I know. All those hours in that hotel room: he’d know her by her breathing in the dark. By the smell of her hair when it needed shampoo.

  She sat lightly on the side of the bed. He made no movement, nor any noise, but his eyes shone wet in the blue light, a trick of the moon suggesting him capable of tears.

  ‘Michael?’

  No reply.

  ‘She’s your daughter. Isn’t she?’

  ‘She’s Tommy’s kid.’

  ‘You know that for a fact?’

  ‘Who knows anything? For a fact.’

  ‘Don’t run from this.’

  Then his hand appeared from darkness and gripped her own by the wrist. ‘What do you want me to say?’ He held her so tight she could take her own pulse. ‘That I loved my friend’s wife? That I wanted his life?’ He let go. She’d have a bruise by morning; a bracelet of used pain, to match the necklace Rufus left her with. ‘We both fucked things up, Tommy and me. But I had more excuse. If I’d had Maddy, I’d never have . . .’

  ‘Never what?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be here. Maybe none of us would.’

  There’s something he’s not told me, she thought.

  He sat up, the sheet falling from his bare chest. It was curiously hairless: a boy’s torso. The red weals cast him like a tiger, or its cage. ‘I’ve seen how you look at me when you think I don’t notice.’

  (She could hardly deny what was coming.)

  ‘I’m a killer, right? I shot that guy in front of you, and it doesn’t matter he’d’ve killed you, it puts me down in your eyes. I shot him, and that chokes you off.’

  ‘I don’t care what you’ve done.’

  ‘You don’t know half of it.’

  ‘Michael –’

  ‘I loved her. Okay? And he treated her like shit. I saw the bruises, you think that didn’t matter? I’ve killed people, so what’s a knock or two? Fuck it, I’d have ripped his heart out. But she’d have spat in my face while she fitted him together again.’

  ‘Why did you stay with him?’

  ‘She asked me to.’

  He brushed a hand across his forehead: wiping the thought away.

  ‘Did you ever . . .’

  ‘Fuck her?’

  ‘Okay. Fuck her.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Of course he had. Else he’d know for a fact he wasn’t Dinah’s –

  He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.’

  ‘Tommy had to go and see her,’ she said softly. ‘That’s why . . .’ It was why they’d been killed; what gave Rufus – Axel – his opportunity.

  ‘It’s not that he had to see her. He had to make sure she wasn’t seeing anybody else.’

  ‘Did he know –’

  ‘Oh, sure he knew.’ He lay back, his eyes reflecting the pale insignificant light. ‘Sure he knew,’ he said again.

  Which was what hurt, she thought, lying down now beside him. That he’d only stuck by Tommy for his love for Tommy’s wife. And that Tommy knew it.

  Neither spoke for a long while, but when Sarah shivered suddenly – a goose running over her grave – Michael lifted the sheet so she could slide beneath it. And there she put her arms round him, finding this not so very different, after all, from the other night they’d spent in the same bed. Like cold figures on a stone tomb, she recalled. And now, though wrapped together, there was still that sense of epitaph in their embrace, though over whose grave they were joined tonight, she could not imagine.

  But in the morning, when she woke, the room was empty: just a blank cool space in the bed next to her; and, over the back of the chair by the window, Michael’s denim jacket – almost like a promise that he’d be back: but a promise, she knew, he had no intention of keeping.

  IV

  There were lies and double bluffs and twisted reasons justifying crooked ends, but first of all, and mostly, there were secrets.

  Sitting on the train, Amos Crane remembered being recruited to the Department; remembered the double talk and the veiled hints of the unorthodox. Recalled some buffer who’d been involved in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich lecturing him on The Dark Heart That Beats In The Chest Of Government; on how what made democracy a fair and just system was that this Dark Heart was kept hidden, rather than used to promote terror and obedience. Death Squads were for fascists. In a democracy, accidents happened.

  Crane’s secret was, he didn’t need the lecture.

  But he sat anyway, and nodded, and tried to look like he was learning hard lessons. Agreed that it was better – for instance – that a very minor royal should fall getting out of the shower than that the entire royal family should tumble into the dust, and that this was not – was not – a matter of sweeping paedophilia under the carpet, but simply pragmatic problem-solving. The obituaries elevated the minor royal into a glory-that-might-have-been just this side of sainthood, and a nation mourned untroubled by nasty realities, then forgot him. The boat remained unrocked. This was important.

  Sure it was, Crane agreed.

  And sometimes, guilt and innocence became relative. When people were in unnecessary possession of troublesome facts, it wasn’t crucial to ascertain that they meant to do anything with the information. Possession, after all, was nine-tenths of the law: which made it mostly legal to ensure discretion was permanent. Many senior civil servants, the Old Buffer told Crane, anticipate a K at the end of their career; but if, hypothetically, a particular senior civil servant opened the wrong file at the wrong time to learn, say, that the American air bases then in Britain held weaponry of a type not formally disclosed to the people’s elected representatives, he might look forward, instead, to an accident on an icy stretch of road. It did not necessarily matter that his loyalty was never in question. What mattered was that the secrecy was preserved intact.

  This wasn’t a problem, Crane assured him.

  And so Amos Crane, at the tender age of twenty-three, entered the twilight world of expedient operations, a world in which the barbarians were not only waiting at the gates but had copies of the keys. Despite the pep talk, it wasn’t all wet work. There were milder ways of silencing potential embarrassments, most involving photographs, women, boys, animals, money, surgery or drugs; though once or twice he was allowed to become creative, which was when his talent for the job became wildly obvious. When an East End pimp acquired pictures of the then Foreign Secretary wearing only a pair of pre-teen girls, Crane, working on the ABC principle, took out not only the pimp himself but eight other hustlers within two days, sparking a lot of editorials about gangland war that muffled serious investigation. The only shadow cast over this achievement was Crane’s documented suggestion at the outset that it would be cheaper and simpler to take out the Foreign Secretary, thus render
ing his susceptibility to blackmail moot. Howard’s predecessor pretended to believe this was a joke. Amos, once he’d noticed which way the wind blew, pretended likewise.

  And two years into the job, he’d put his young brother up for recruitment.

  ‘It’s not a bloody club,’ he’d been told.

  ‘No need to blackball him, then.’

  ‘Amos, the fact that he’s your brother doesn’t mean he’s our kind of material. My own brother works for ICI, for God’s sake.’

  Didn’t surprise Amos one bit. ‘The point is,’ he said, ‘he’s not exactly a novice. That thing with the pimps . . . ‘

  ‘Don’t say it.’

  ‘Nine in two days? I’m good, but I’m not that good. Axel did two of them. The one in the car and the one with the scissors.’

  ‘Oh Jesus Christ . . .’

  ‘He’s versatile. You have to give him that.’

  There’d been an emergency session that afternoon Amos was only supposed to find out about afterwards. He also guessed the outcome correctly: that there’d be strong support for red-ribboning him and his brother both, but sweet reason would prevail. As the original Old Buffer said, A pair of talents like that, you never knew when they’d come in handy. And he’d quoted LBJ or Edgar Hoover or whoever, on it being better having the bastards inside pissing out.

  ‘We fought a war against people like that,’ the Buffer was told.

  ‘Damn nearly lost, too.’

  ‘It was their kind ran the concentration camps.’

  ‘Do you really think,’ he’d said, ‘that over in Moscow they’re turning talent down because it’s too nasty?’

  ‘It’s not Moscow I’m worried about. It’s Washington.’

  ‘Fuck Washington.’

  It was generally agreed afterwards that it was this remark that won the day.

  That had been the real beginning, Amos reflected now; the day Axel was recruited alongside him, at an age when most boys his age were awaiting their O-level results. And for a shade over twenty years, life had gone on the same: successes outweighing failures for the most part, which was a pretty acceptable margin of error for government work. And there had been room for sentiment too. Taking the Old Buffer out had been an act of pure heart. The old man had taken to wetting the bed, and telling his life story to his nurse: that wasn’t the way he’d have wanted to be remembered, even if he’d been allowed. Amos had seen to him quickly and quietly, and was very proud of the resulting death certificate, which cited heart failure. As for the nurse, she’d been sideswiped on the M1 the following week, on her way to a newly offered job: Amos wasn’t sure what the death certificate had read in her case, but was pretty sure they could have slipped it into the same envelope her remains fitted in. Room for sentiment, sure, but there was no sense getting carried away.