The DHM gave me a five-minute explanation of why he thought what he was suggesting was a good idea for everyone. Dorothy is having a hard time. Needs a break from work, but is refusing to take it. I formed the impression that she’s suffering from depression, but he didn’t go that far. He can’t force her onto a plane, particularly since her job performance isn’t affected, but this way he’s getting her to help out the police – or me, as it really is – and she obviously agreed to it. Perhaps there’s some other problem being solved by this. I immediately assume it’s some sort of romantic entanglement, but quickly dismiss the thought. I haven’t a clue, and I don’t really need to know anyway.
He was aware that Dorothy had a friend in Paris she’d been to stay with a few times, so this would give her the perfect opportunity to visit. The Embassy would arrange a car hire and Dorothy could leave it in Paris, stay for a few days, then fly home. This was all suggested with the usual caveat that, of course, the Embassy didn’t actually have any money, because no government department does these days, so that I’d be paying for the car hire. He didn’t explain who’d be paying for Dorothy’s return flight, but that wasn’t really my concern. I’d have gladly done it if he’d said it was the only way the whole thing was going to happen. By that point I’d already made up my mind that I was hiring a car to drive to Brussels, so it made sense to have someone to share the driving.
So now, here we are, sitting together in a car driving south through Estonia, Dorothy and I. We haven’t got past hello yet. I don’t know what she was thinking, dragooned into this journey at little more than a half hour’s notice.
She’s not trying to sleep. Eyes open, staring straight ahead. No music on, no radio, but hardly the suffocating atmosphere of the car trip to Tartu. Eventually, presumably, one of us will say something. Perhaps then conversation will develop. Perhaps not.
* * *
She took over at a service station south of Riga. Glad to see we’re already a little ahead of the game. Ultimately it doesn’t matter, as I’m getting the sleeper to Inverness, so arriving at King’s Cross two hours early probably won’t help. But it’s good to make up time, in case at some point we lose it.
Just after nine thirty our time, seven thirty back at home, sitting in the passenger seat, I finally crack. Feeling bad about not speaking to Quinn. Time to man up. So much for my bad intentions about not speaking to him until tomorrow.
I doubt he’ll still be in work, but it’s possible. I’ll never get the switchboard through to him, however, so I call his mobile.
‘Where are you?’ he says by way of answering the phone.
‘Just south of Riga, sir.’
‘Latvia?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll be here on Friday morning.’
‘Yes.’
‘Any further fallout from the raid this morning?’
I already spoke to him, sitting in the back of the car, on the way home from Tartu. A mistake, I quickly realised, as I should have called him without the others in earshot.
‘Not so I heard. I didn’t have much more contact with the police on getting back to Tallinn. Spoke to the DHM at the Embassy…’
‘The what?’
‘The Deputy Head of Mission. The Deputy Ambassador.’
‘Right.’
‘They’re going to get someone along to see Baden tomorrow, start talking to him about coming home. See if there’s anyone he wants them to speak to. He hasn’t asked them to contact anyone yet. The DHM said he might go himself.’
Pause.
‘We’ll need to talk when you get back,’ he says, and we both know he doesn’t mean about Baden.
‘Of course, sir. Any luck finding Emily King?’
‘Sort of,’ he says.
I don’t say anything, waiting for the explanation.
‘She’s dead. We tracked her down to Anstruther. She’d been living there more or less since Baden died in Estonia. Natterson went down to see her yesterday. When he got there, the police were at her house. She’d been strangled and badly beaten. Hard to say right off, but the pathologist reckons it was two or three days ago. Waiting for his final results.’ Pause. ‘You can get into it when you bother coming into work.’
There’s another pause, which I don’t immediately fill and he hangs up.
Stare at the dashboard for a while, still holding the phone to my ear, even though it’s dead, then I slowly lower it.
‘Crap.’
So John Baden, or someone claiming to be him, appears after twelve years, and the next day the woman who had perhaps been waiting for him all that time is murdered. And I’m in a car driving across Europe, feeling stupid.
I glance at Dorothy, but she’s staring straight ahead – which I have to say is a positive, given that she’s driving – and I close my eyes and rest my head back against the seat. Not at all tired, but I’m going to be driving in the middle of the night, so I can’t stay awake all that time.
‘They’re not happy with you.’
I open my eyes. I wonder if it was Dorothy who spoke. They’re not happy with you. Was I asleep? Look at the clock. Just after midnight. How did that happen? Just like that, a flick of the switch, a snap of the fingers. Two and a half hours have vanished.
Lick my lips, blink. Aware from both the taste in my mouth and from the feeling in my eyes that I’ve been sleeping for a while.
‘Where are we?’ I ask, as we pass a signpost with names and a language I don’t recognise.
‘We’re not far from Kaunas in Lithuania,’ she says.
‘How are you doing? You all right?’
‘Sure.’
‘OK to keep going for another hour or so?’
‘Sure.’
‘But if I fall asleep again, you’ll stop anyway, and get me to take over. That’s the point of this.’
‘Of course.’
The brief conversation falls into disuse. I think about her tone of voice, what she said. They were at odds with one another. She sounds tired.
‘Would it help if we talked?’ I ask. Waking up now, might as well make the effort.
‘Sure,’ she says, unexpectedly. ‘What d’you want to talk about?’
She glances at me this time, then looks forward again. The road is quiet, only three or four other cars in sight along the stretch of motorway in either direction.
I smile, make a small gesture.
‘I guess it might be a little forced if we approach it like that,’ I say.
‘Tell me why we’re sitting in this car,’ she says.
‘I don’t want to fly.’
‘Why not?’
‘Some bad experiences.’
‘Does everyone who’s had a bad experience on a plane refuse to fly again?’ she asks. Hint of disapproval in her tone.
And so I don’t answer, sliding into the familiar self-doubt. She’s right, of course. How many times have I told myself to get over it? Get on the damn plane. Well, not so often, as it happens, because I usually never put myself in a position where I’ll need to get on one. Until now, when someone else put me in it.
The road stretches ahead. A BMW overtakes on the outside, the driver switching to full beam as he eases in front. I move another inch or two down in the seat and close my eyes.
21
We’re nearing the final stretch, still beating Google Maps by a couple of hours. Stopped three times, just had a good few hours’ sleep, eyes closed, in the passenger seat, through the middle of Germany. Now the Rhineland, before cutting through the bottom of the Netherlands, into Belgium.
The fitful conversation of the middle of the night dries to nothing through Germany. The autobahns are insane. Where there are three lanes, things aren’t too bad, but then there are all the two lane sections, with someone driving at fifty-five in the inside lane, and the procession of Mercedes and BMWs on the outside doing a hundred and thirty.
Everything calms down coming into Holland. We’re both awake, the cars and the afternoon flitting b
y. Low cloud, but bright. Melancholy sits on the car. I can feel it from her, as I did when we were introduced last night. But this close, after this much time, it’s painful. A painful sorrow.
I wonder… I wonder, when they sent her off across Europe in a car with me for company, if they realised how consumed she is. Consumed by misery. Did they do it because they think she can be cured by a little distraction, cheered up by having something to do?
Try not to worry about her. I need to process what’s happening with Baden and what the news about Emily King could mean. Realise, every time I start thinking about it, that I have too little information; and as soon as I think about that, I start kicking myself for being in the car, rather than at home getting on with the investigation and filling in the gaps.
I’m hoping I’ll be able to get an earlier Eurostar, by at least a couple of hours, although I doubt even that will give me any better options upon arriving in London. Even if there was a train that got me into Inverness at two in the morning, it doesn’t actually get me into work any earlier. I just need to be at my desk when I said I would be, and take it from there.
‘I went back in time.’
Her voice comes slowly across the car. I went back in time. I don’t immediately turn to look at her, the words seem so strange, then I give a quick glance to my right. She’s awake, eyes wide, slightly glazed expression, her head back against the headrest, staring straight ahead.
‘How do you mean?’
We come to it at last. The root of her sorrow. I thought that we’d get to the end and she’d never say, and all that would be left was an image of this person who I met once, so full of sadness, this strange young woman I’d barely remember.
‘There was this moment in school. High school, just before A Levels. I always remembered it. A warm afternoon. Early May. We’d been somewhere, into a museum in town. Bath. We were on our way back to Chippenham, the sun was warm. I was sitting on my own, didn’t have any friends on the trip. There was a lazy, sleepy feel. Hard to pin down, but something peculiar. It felt… there was something about the moment. It felt liquid. Time itself felt liquid.’
She stops talking for a while. I don’t turn and stare. She’s not waiting, with some conceit, for me to show interest. I can tell. She’s never told this to anyone. She’s working out how to tell the story, having never put it into words before.
The sun flashes for a brief moment, showing that the cloud is not impenetrable, and is gone before I can lower the visor.
A small movement of her hand.
‘I had a normal kind of life. University, work. Got married, had a kid. That was all. Like everybody – maybe not, maybe not everybody – I thought about all the things we’d done wrong, all the opportunities that were missed or that came too late. I didn’t live in regret or the past, I just had these moments. I used to wonder about going back, having it all again. I’d still have married Jonathan, we’d still have had Gabriella, but then there’d be everything else. The chances we could grab.’
Another pause, the story coming in painful chapters, as she assembles the narrative in her head. I glance at her again. Maybe making sure she’s not crying, although there’s nothing I’d be able to do about that. But there are no tears.
‘And then it happened. I can’t think. I can’t think what it was about that moment. Why then? I was dozing on the couch, Gabriella sitting next to me watching Scooby Doo. That ordinary a day. And it just happened. I went back in time. I was asleep on the sofa, and when I came round I was back sitting in that minibus, on the way home from the museum in Bath. Snapped out of it, like I’d fallen asleep, and I was there. Me. Sitting in my own eighteen-year-old body.’
Of course I don’t know what’s coming, but it’s obviously not good. I don’t really want to hear it, but she has her audience captive. And this is her, talking for the first time, choosing me. How can I not listen?
‘And there was the future, all in front of me. I knew what was coming. I knew… I knew everything. Except, what I didn’t know.’
Another pause. I could think ahead and try to work out the story, but I’ll leave her to tell it. You never know where people and stories are going to go.
‘The first part of the story was that Jonathan and I met at Cambridge. A couple of semesters in, just as he was getting in with the wrong crowd. The money crowd. The coke crowd. He always said I saved him from them. Except, this time, I was thrown back just ahead of my A Levels. I had a week to study and remember everything that I hadn’t studied for fifteen years.’
A pause, but no deep breath, no tears forced back.
‘I never got into Cambridge. I had all those exams to do, and I could barely study. Just spent that week confused, trying to concentrate, barely able to think. When it came to it, I did all right, but not good enough. I… I had options to think about, and in the end I chose to go to Nottingham. Studied there two years, got back in the groove, went down to Cambridge to do my third year.’ Slight shake of the head. ‘It was too late, but of course I tried to tell myself it wasn’t. I’d worried he’d have found someone else, but he hadn’t. At least not the one person. He was the centre of them, all these rich pricks with their money and their drugs. Money, drugs, and sex. I got to know him. I tried, I really did, but I couldn’t compete.
‘I thought, it’s not about Jonathan. Or me. It’s about Gabriella. What if Gabriella never gets born? So I slept with him. I mean, that was easy enough, he was sleeping with everyone. But in the end… it was only a couple of times, and the others didn’t want me there. I tried sticking with him, but they all painted me as some kind of obsessive crazy, following him around. So he stopped seeing me.’
Full stop. Pause. Then the moment of harsh violence.
‘He died. Heroin overdose. I took a pregnancy test the next day, just in case. But what was the point in that? Even if I had been pregnant, it wouldn’t have been Gabriella, would it? Gabriella wasn’t going to be born for another three years. This kid wouldn’t have been her. It would just have been another child born to a single mother without a job, whose dad died of a drug addiction…
‘I wasn’t pregnant anyway. And that was that. I was stuck at Cambridge doing my final year, and my husband and daughter were gone…
‘I was never optimistic. I mean, when this thing, this thing that happened, and I don’t know why, this thing that sent me back, I was nervous right from the off. By the end of that bus trip back home, I’d already thought it all through. Had it figured out. The trouble I’d have with my exams, how it would go with Jonathan again, because there’d been bumps along the way before. And then, how could we ever possibly replicate Gabriella? Even if we had sex on the same evening at exactly the same time… there are sixty million sperm to choose from. It could be any one of them…
‘So, I’d had this dread, right from the start, and everything I thought happened. All my worst fears. And looking back, if I was sitting on that bus again, there was nothing I could do differently. I had to be at Cambridge from the start, more or less. Maybe I could have gone there as a cleaner…
‘I had a husband, and I had a daughter, and now they’re gone. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t touch anything. No one did anything. It just happened.’
I notice the small movement of her hand to her face, but I don’t turn and look at her. I don’t look to see if she’s wiping away a tear. Her voice is steady though. This is it, she’s told her story, it’s out there. Will it being out there make any difference?
A long pause. I don’t think she’s quite finished, but eventually I say, ‘Maybe there’ll be another moment.’
‘Maybe.’
Her voice is small suddenly. How am I supposed to leave this woman in Brussels? How can I leave her to drive the further three hours onto Paris? Except, this isn’t new for her. She’s not any more miserable now than she was this morning, yesterday morning, at any time in the last fifteen years.
Her sadness soaks through my skin. Infects me.
‘Maybe
there’ll be another moment,’ I say. ‘If the last one just happened out of nowhere, maybe it’ll happen again. Maybe you need to wait…’
I suddenly know what it is, I suddenly know why she is so afflicted even before I make the suggestion and she answers. Her story, however far-fetched to some, sounds utterly credible. And I know why it’s worse now than it ever was before.
‘You already passed it, didn’t you? In the past month. You were holding out, holding out hope for the day that you were sent back, the day your life changed. You thought, when that day comes again, maybe I’ll revert. I’ll doze off and suddenly I’ll be sitting on the sofa next to Gabriella…’
‘I even sat and watched Scooby Doo. The exact same episode on Boomerang. Not that I was ever going to fall asleep.’
I look over at her. A single tear has run down her left cheek, the drop at the bottom not heavy enough to fall from her face.
‘When was it?’
‘Three weeks ago last Friday.’
Cars speed by on the outside. I realise I’ve slowed to just over fifty, so I start to build speed again. The atmosphere in the car feels heavy and thick. Peculiar.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
She doesn’t reply at first. Her eyes are staring straight ahead, seeing nothing. I move into the outside lane for the first time since we started talking.
The mood has become one with the car. More tragic, more terrifying than that first awful drive south to Tartu. I will leave the car in Brussels, she will drive on to Paris and leave the car with the people at Hertz. Later on today, or tomorrow perhaps, someone else will get in the car, and they will notice it as soon as they get in, they will feel it, as much as if the inside of the car was covered in cobwebs. Except they won’t be able to see it and they won’t know what it is, and they won’t quite be able to bring themselves to ask for a different vehicle because they don’t think they’d be able to understand why. And they’ll drive away, and they’ll feel like their world has fallen apart.
Song of the Dead Page 10
