Nobody Walks

by Mick Herron

  “I’m so sorry, I hated to tell you like that, but I didn’t know what else to do—”

  “You did the right thing.”

  “I know you hadn’t been getting on. I mean, Liam said you didn’t—hadn’t—”

  “We hadn’t been in touch,” Bettany said.

  His gaze left hers to focus on something behind her. Without meaning to, she turned. A small group, three men, one woman, still lingered by the chapel door, but even as she registered this they began to move off. Instead of heading for the gate they walked round to the front, as if heading back inside. One of the men was carrying something. It took Flea a moment to recognise it as a thermos flask.

  Liam’s father asked her, “Who was that you were talking to?”

  “When?”

  “He just left.”

  “Oh … That was Vincent. Vincent Driscoll?”

  It was clear he didn’t know who Vincent Driscoll was.

  “We worked for him. Liam and I did. Well, I still do.”

  She bit her lip. Tenses were awkward, in the company of the bereaved. Apologies had to be implied, for the offence of still living.

  “So you were colleagues,” he said. “Doing what?”

  “Vincent’s a game designer. Shades?”

  Bettany nodded, but she could tell the name meant nothing.

  Distantly, music swelled. The next service was starting. Flea Pointer had the sudden understanding that life was a conveyor belt, a slow rolling progress to the dropping-off point, and that once you’d fallen you’d be followed by the next in line. An unhappy thought, which could be shrugged off anywhere but here.

  If Tom Bettany was having similar thoughts you wouldn’t know it from his expression. He seemed just barely involved in what had happened here this morning.

  “Thank you,” he said again, and left. Flea watched as he headed down the path.

  He didn’t look back.

  1.4

  In the car leaving the crematorium Vincent Driscoll felt one of his headaches coming on, a designation his late mother had coined to distinguish Vincent’s headaches from anyone else’s. It seemed to fit. There was no denying whose headache this was. It felt like a bubble was squeezing its way through his brain.

  He found his Ibuprofen, dry-swallowed a pair, and asked Boo to drive more slowly, or thought he did, and sank back. Had he actually spoken? The world through his tinted glasses, edges softened, passed by at the same speed.

  Left to his own devices, he’d have avoided the service. He hated gatherings, and this one had changed nothing. Liam Bettany remained dead. Which was the kind of thing he mostly remembered not to say aloud, but there was no rule he couldn’t think it. Probably everyone had thoughts like that, the whole notion of “polite society” being little more than a hedge against honesty. Normality was rarely what it appeared. This much Vincent knew.

  And this time, he definitely spoke out loud. “Boo? Could you …”

  He mimed a movement, a gesture with no obvious correlation to any of the actions involved in driving a car, but which Boo Berryman, watching in the rearview mirror, interpreted correctly. He slowed down. Vincent closed his eyes.

  A succession of pastel-coloured characters drifted past, walking down perfectly straight streets, lined with traditional shops. Each was armed with a shopping list, and carried a basket under an arm, and each popped into every shop in turn, in a perfectly choreographed retail ballet … A round yellow sun rose and fell in the sky behind them.

  Vincent, who had dreamt up Shades when he was twelve, sometimes wondered how many others there were who could ascribe their entire life story to one moment, one striking thought. Einstein, perhaps. Maybe Douglas Adams. Anyway. He’d been playing Tetris, in that semi-catatonic way it induced, when he’d had the sudden sense of things having flipped—that he was the game, not the player.

  That had been the spark. Everything else had taken years. But years were what he had had, this being an advantage of having your big idea young.

  The car purred to a halt. Traffic lights. Various noises, muffled by thick windows, sprayed past as if fired from a shotgun. Heavy beats and pitched whistling. Sounds of metal and rubber, of the forces that drove everything. If he had ever found a form of music he enjoyed, this was when he would listen to it …

  Shades had started small, in the sense that it was a one-man show. The team he had now, marketing and packaging and all the rest—he’d had nobody then. Design had happened in his bedroom. Production, outsourced piecemeal to half a dozen tiny companies, had swallowed every penny of his mother’s legacy. The result resembled an arcade giveaway, a game fated to be bundled up with others and sold as a lucky dip. Even the small independent he’d hired to mastermind distribution tried to talk him down. The number of titles coming onto the market, if you didn’t get traction in the first quarter, you were history. He’d be better off using it on a CV, blagging his way into a job with one of the big boys. But he’d insisted on going ahead.

  And it had started small, too, in the sense that not many people bought it. Turned on its head, though—the way Vincent liked to look at things—what this meant was, it was bought only by those who bought everything, which was fine by him. A steady trickle diminishing to a drip, but fine by him. Because, monitoring the comment boards, Vincent knew nobody had cracked it. If that happened and the trickle remained a trickle, he’d know he’d failed. But until then, everyone else had.

  Besides, Vincent knew gamers. Gamers were essentially kids, and didn’t throw games away. They swapped them and left them gathering dust and stacked them in towers twenty jewelcases high, but they didn’t throw them away because that was an adult trait. And games that didn’t get thrown away eventually got played again, once they were old enough to have regained novelty value.

  The big danger was the format would become extinct, and that had given him a bad night or two, had tempted him to nudge events himself, and post his own message.

  But not long after the game’s first birthday, everything changed.

  Vincent picked it up on a gamers’ board.

  anyone cracked Shades?

  When he’d read this, something shifted inside him.

  Home. Sometimes Vincent waited for Boo to open the door, but today he was out of the car before the electronic gates whumped shut. In the kitchen he ran the tap to make sure the water was cold, then filled a glass. This he drained without turning the tap off. He filled a second, and drank that too. Then a third. His headache decreased to a background grumble. He filled a fourth glass and carried it back into the sitting room, which covered most of the ground floor. Boo was just coming in, and flashed him a concerned look. Vincent shook his head, meaning leave him alone. Boo carried straight on into the kitchen, where Vincent heard him turn the tap off. Vincent loosened his tie and sank into a chair.

  Above another sofa was a picture, seven foot by four, of a cartoon dog. Some cartoon dogs look intelligent, others dim or violent. Some manage sexy. This one pulled off the relatively simple trick of being nondescript, an expressionless brown mongrel, captured in the act of walking against a two-tone background, the lower half grey, the upper yellow. Those who knew the dog recognised these shades for what they were, which was pavement and wall. And nobody who didn’t know the dog had ever seen the picture, so alternative interpretations had never been offered.

  follow the dog

  That had been the clue offered by that first gamer, the one who’d “cracked” Shades. By the time Vincent had revisited the board, it was in meltdown.

  holy shit

  that is awsum!

  way!!!

  Shades had been written off by serious gamers, as Vincent had expected. They demanded high-spec graphics, way beyond his budget at the time, and this was just another kitsch time-passer, whose animated figures echoed BBC kids’ programming from the ’80s, all big heads and fixed smiles, wandering round in a Truman Show–like daze, collecting shopping. It was a speed-trial, in which the player had to gather
the various items on a list faster than the game-generated characters managed. If you changed the order in which you visited the shops, you could shave seconds off your total, but ran the risk that by the time you got to, say, the butcher’s, he’d be out of sausages. There was—so the rules governing such games dictated—a perfect schematic, if the player could only discover it, one which took into account all the other characters’ purchases, and the order in which they did things. These days, it might be one of fifty games stored on a phone, something to while away a journey. Even then it was nothing special, a different league from the Lara Crofts, the FPSs.

  Nothing special unless you followed the dog.

  The dog was a jerky-looking mutt, and if you played the game four times on the trot it appeared briefly on the main street, ambled round a corner and up an alley, and paused halfway to piss on a lamp post. Most players who’d stuck that far had assumed that was it, a little reward for persistence. An animated dog taking a cartoon piss. After which it trotted round another corner and out of sight.

  But if, instead of heading into a shop to collect the next item on the list, you followed the dog round that corner, and kept on following it until it dug its way under a bush on a scrappy piece of wasteland which didn’t appear to have been there until that moment—because it hadn’t, in fact, been there until that moment—and scrabbled down the resulting hole after it, well, once you’d done that, you were in a whole new world.

  Raising his glass to his lips, Vincent discovered it empty. He’d drained it without noticing. Still thirsty, though. But perhaps that was unsurprising, given that he’d spent the morning watching a coffin being fed into the flames—which couldn’t actually be seen, but was impossible to ignore. The wooden box, with its unnecessarily plush interior, sliding into an oven, never to come out. The smoke drifting into the sky … Another gateway, he thought. A chimney instead of a hole, but still, another gateway into a new world.

  And Liam Bettany discovering this one now, just as he’d discovered the other.

  anyone cracked Shades?

  Liam had been the first to follow the dog. In a way Vincent owed him everything, which had never occurred to him until this moment. It wasn’t an important thought, but felt similar enough to grief that he savoured it a while—tended it, to see if it would grow—and even when it didn’t, held on to it a little longer, carrying it back into the kitchen, where he poured another glass of water while Boo prepared a late lunch.

  1.5

  The policeman had told him where Liam had lived, a rented third-floor flat, and Bettany had memorised the address but had no idea where it was. He stopped at the first shop he came to and asked the woman behind the counter for help. It wasn’t far. She gave efficient directions.

  He’d have bought something from her but only had euros, and not many, forty or so. Maybe thirty quid, enough to feed himself at least. He hadn’t eaten in how long? Memory suggested a fast-chicken franchise on the ferry, and alongside this image sat another, of oil-flecked water, and big-winged gulls on the watch for spilled food.

  The address was one of a terraced row twelve houses long on a quiet street. The row was brick, and the upper windows boasted wrought-iron railings wrapped around ledges no wider than shelves. Greenery sprouted in pots from some, and he could make out a bird feeder on one, small pouches of nuts hanging from its curling branches.

  It was accidental. He fell from the balcony, kind of balcony, of his flat.

  The windowframes were uniformly white, as if in response to some local mandate, but the doors were vari-coloured, blues, reds, greens and purples. The door of Liam’s building was red.

  Bettany rang the bell.

  The landlord’s name was Greenleaf, and the ground floor was where he lived. He was a thin, needy-looking man in plaid shirt and baggy trousers, his eyes set far back in his head. On learning Bettany’s name he wrinkled with suspicion, as if Bettany were responsible for the aggravation involved in having a fatal accident on the premises.

  “I knew nothing about any of this drug-taking,” he said.

  “I’d like the key.”

  “It’s in the lease. No illegal substances on the premises.”

  “Noted. The key?”

  “What do you want it for?”

  Bettany said, “I’m going to collect my son’s possessions. Do you have a problem with that?”

  He didn’t think he’d leaned on this especially, but Greenleaf stepped back.

  “No need to get aggressive.”

  He left Bettany hanging in the hall while he disappeared behind a door, emerging at length with a key on a string.

  “How long will you be?”

  There was maybe a joke there, relating to the piece of string, but Bettany couldn’t summon up the interest. Without replying, he took the key and carried on up the stairs.

  Was he drunk?

  He’d been drinking.

  Drugs?

  We think that’s why he was out on the balcony. Kind of balcony.

  The top-floor landing was graced with a skylight, through which grey light fell like drizzle. There was a door on either side. Liam’s opened, with his key, onto a small hallway, into which similar light fell from a companion skylight, this one blazoned with a streak of bird shit. The walls were white and the carpet beige, a little scuffed. The air was stale, but Bettany had known worse.

  There were three rooms off the hallway. The first was a cupboard-sized bathroom without a bath, just sink, shower and toilet. The cabinet above the sink was mirrored, and Bettany opened it as much to avoid his reflection as out of curiosity about what it held. Which was the usual. Razor, soap, deodorant, a fresh tube of toothpaste. A bottle of bleach sat next to the toilet, tucked behind the loo brush. The shower was clean, with just the odd speck of mould eating into the grouting. A small print on the wall showed a boat bobbing on an unconvincing sea.

  Across the hall was the kitchen, which wasn’t much bigger but had room for oven, fridge, sink, washing machine, and overhead cupboards neatly filled with essentials. Tins of pulses, bags of rice, flour, jars of sauces. On a white plastic sink-tidy, a single plate had long since dried itself.

  Among the postcards stuck to the fridge was a photo of Hannah from before she grew sick. Unthinkingly he pulled it free for a closer look. But it was no riddle awaiting solution. It was an old photograph, that was all.

  The fridge obligingly carried on humming, keeping up the good work of chilling Liam’s out-of-date milk and slowly perishing vegetables. An array of bowls, sealed with clingfilm, held leftovers he’d never finish. It was all very clean, Bettany thought. All surfaces wiped. Cutlery in its drawer. Pans in their cupboard, graded by size.

  Liam had always been careful about his possessions. Very neat in his arrangements.

  Detective Sergeant Welles had told him, “There were effects, odds and ends. What he had in his pockets, I mean.”

  What he had in his pockets when he’d hit the ground.

  “You can collect them from the station. Or … Where are you staying, can I ask, sir? You’ve come from abroad, that right?”

  Bettany had said, “I’m not sure yet. Where I’m staying.”

  The other door led into the living room, which would be a nice bright space on a sunny day, with those big windows. A sofa was set against one wall, alongside a nearly full bookcase. On a low table was an electrical contrivance which Bettany guessed was a music system, and a surprisingly small TV set. A rubber plant, scraping the ceiling, lived between the windows, and a small writing desk with a chair occupied a corner. On it was a flat white laptop with the Apple logo.

  Another doorway in the far wall presumably led to the bedroom. Bettany checked. Bed, wardrobe and chest of drawers with a mirror propped on top. The bed was made. A small window looked out on the backs of other, similar houses. Below it was a wooden chair, on which lay a folded pair of jeans.

  He returned to the sitting room, with its big windows, which didn’t quite reach to the floor.

/>   Sort of balcony?

  It’s just a ledge. A ledge with a railing, meant for putting plants on, so people in upstairs flats can enjoy a bit of garden. What it’s not meant for is smoking a joint on. Because there’s not much room for being straight, let alone getting high.

  The nearest window had a small security lock. Bettany unscrewed it, released the latch, and heaved the window up as high as it would go. The air that blustered in was cold. Down below, a car was inching into a parking space only marginally larger than itself.

  Easing himself through, he stepped onto the balcony not meant for getting high on. It was no more than a foot wide, with a terracotta pot on either end, a dead plant in each. Between the two you could stand, if you were careful, leaning on the brickwork for support. It wasn’t somewhere you could grow too comfortable, unless, Bettany supposed, you were young and immortal. When you were young, you could fly, or at least bounce. That was the theory, anyway.

  He checked the pot to his left, then made a similar examination of the one on his right. Neither had been used as an ashtray.

  This was a pretty strong blend. There’s a lot of it around lately. They’re calling it muskrat. Well, they’d already used skunk.

  Muskrat. Bettany closed his eyes, and imagined the seamless sequence, Liam rolling up, stepping through the window, lighting a joint, and then—what? Losing his balance? Closing his eyes, forgetting where he was? It must have been strong stuff all right. First you get high. Then you come crashing down.

  After giving that a little more thought, he climbed back inside.

  1.6

  Pulling the window shut, Bettany noticed he still held Hannah’s photograph. He took it back to the kitchen and reclamped it to the fridge, then had to lean against the wall while a wave of tiredness struck. He needed coffee. Shouldn’t be too difficult to manage.

  A cafetière sat by the kettle and there was coffee in the fridge. Bettany boiled the kettle, and while the coffee drew, went through cupboards again. Tins, bags of rice and jars of spices. A memory was stirring, but it wasn’t until he saw the matching plastic containers marked TEA, BISCUITS, SUGAR that he knew what it was. Reaching for the third container he unscrewed its lid. It held sugar, sure enough, but when he dipped his fingers through its temporary glaze they met a polythene bag, the kind banks use for change, rolled into a tight cylinder. Unwrapping it, Bettany counted out two hundred and forty pounds in twenties.