He heard himself say it. “George Gull is dead.”
He had seen masks before, but never one like this. What moved across her face? Of course, she had the sensibilities of an actress, the poise and perfection of someone who has run through a thousand rehearsals of this moment. Playacting: she had to have it down, neat and tidy; she had to have it perfect.
“Who?” she said.
There was a moment here where he wondered if he had made a mistake, a miscalculation, if he had blundered impossibly.
“I wonder when you called him,” he said.
She was shaking her head, laughing, a sound of ice in a glass.
“I figure you must have done it twice,” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, John.”
“Maybe the first time was after I arrived back in the States. Maybe even after I’d called you from Kennedy,” he said. “Maybe you dropped your dime just as soon as I’d hung up.”
She stared at him in a bewildered way. The laugh was gone; she was still shaking her head. How did you know for sure, George? How?
“Then when you knew I was going to Washington, that I was going to the stadium, you called him again—maybe when I fell asleep in the motel or even later, when we had to stop because the kid was sick, at the rest area. Only this time good old George was back here in D.C., waiting.”
She turned away from him a moment. He was taken by her beauty—flawed as it was in the rain, he was taken by it. The incongruity of desire: even now, even now as he stumbled around the frayed edges of what he was convinced was the truth.
“Only one person,” he said. “Only one person could have told Gull.”
She looked at him. The eyes—the eyes were cold. Light, warmth, whatever, had gone out of them. “You’ve fallen out of your tree this time, John. You’ve really fallen.”
He was silent. It was a day for betrayals, the weather for treachery. Fallen out of your tree, he thought. Yeah, a long time ago. You couldn’t defy gravity.
“It makes sense,” he said. “Think about it. Think about how much sense it makes. You’re with me almost constantly. You know what I’m doing, where I’m headed—and it suits George perfectly. For one thing, you can keep him posted on what I’m doing. For another, you’re nicely located to help me out of the clutches of Chip Alexander, because suddenly it doesn’t quite suit George Gull for the Americans to take me in. It doesn’t fit his plans because there’s a chance, a slight chance, they might just believe me. So all along it looks like you’re with me, it looks like you’re on my side—when your only allegiance is to Gull, to protecting George Gull.”
He stopped. Fatigue, a monster, had hooked onto him. He could feel claws, talons, the shuffling of great black wings through the air. Sleeplessness and hallucination: maybe it was all a construct of his own mind now, something reared in delusion, raised in an indeterminate form of craziness. He thought of the little beach cottage, the new life, the whole new world.
“You even string me along with some pointless little sexual promise. ‘Too soon, John.’ Implying, Maybe later. Maybe never is what you meant to say.” He stared at her expressionless face. “You and George. If I had to put cold cash on it, my best bet would be that you were lovers. You and George. It was going to be cozy. Roses all the fucking way. Right down to the little house, the beach, umbrellas on the goddam sand. It was going to be just you and him with the past all squared away behind you.”
The mask moved. Slightly, vaguely, it shifted.
“Your only error was Fiona,” he said. “Even there you tried to cut your losses, didn’t you? You tried and tried to convince me I was off the wall, didn’t you? You never believed I’d pay any attention to the kid, did you? Maybe that was your best card—my own goddam skepticism. It turned out to be your weakest.”
Rayner shrugged. In the long run, what did any of this matter? George Gull was dead. Too many people had died on account of a monstrous plan that had become a failure. Too many people had to die because of that. He had a feeling now of great solitude: he might have been standing on a vast expanse of empty beach, staring at an empty sea, an empty sky. What did any of this matter?
She had been watching him, but now she looked away. Raindrops coursed from her eyelids, making tracks across her face. Like tears, he thought. How could he tell anymore? He wanted to take her and hold her and look into her eyes and see there the reflection of his own mistake, his own lack of judgment. Prove me wrong, that’s all I ask. Prove me wrong. What was that small part of him that still needed to believe in a morality, a sense of rightness? And he wondered how deeply it had been eroded, how far down into the fiber of himself the damage had gone.
But he knew, he knew he wasn’t wrong.
She turned to look at him. “Sometimes you don’t see the whole picture, John. Sometimes you come in from such a narrow perspective that it eludes you.”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “Tell me about the whole picture.”
She seemed not to have heard him. “After five years, betrayal becomes a part of yourself. You tell so many lies you start to believe them. You don’t know what’s true, what’s not.”
He felt uneasy, a curious emptiness. He couldn’t look at her anymore. Betrayal: where does it start?
She said, “I’m sorry about George.”
And Richard too, he thought. Richard too.
She might, he thought, have been reading his mind. “I wasn’t exactly making your brother a happy man. It wasn’t his fault. He had his work. I was expected to be the perfect hostess in a world I didn’t give a shit about. Parties, receptions, boring dinners. You have to be a zombie to get through them.”
Suddenly he didn’t want to hear any more. It didn’t matter to him. The history of a dead marriage.
She looked down at the wet concrete. In a broken way, she was reflected in a pool of rainwater. “Five years ago I met George Gull in Washington. What can I say?”
Cry, he thought. Show me your tears. Let me see how you feel.
“Now and then, whenever we were in the same town at the same time, Washington, London, Paris—it was classic back-street stuff, John.”
Back-street stuff. He couldn’t imagine them together, Isobel and Gull, he couldn’t imagine them coupling, the impossible conjunction. All the treachery, he thought. Five years. He slammed his hands together, anger, a damp firework burning out.
“Just like you said, John. We were going to have the roses. The beach. The past at our backs. Just as you phrased it. A different kind of life away from a world we were both sick of.”
Was he expected to make a noise of sympathy now? A murmur of consolation?
“You must have known,” he said. “You must have known he was playing footsie with the other side.”
She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “Whatever he did, it was for me. One side, the other side—he didn’t care. I didn’t care. It must be very hard for you to understand that, John. Both sides are the same. There isn’t a difference.”
“How much more did you know?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she said quietly.
“I want to hear it anyhow.” Both sides the same, he thought. No differences. A world of perfectly balanced darknesses. How could he accept that?
She broke down, covering her face with her hands, inclining her head slightly, reaching out to support herself against a low stone wall—and in spite of himself he felt pity. He wanted to touch her, even if such a contact would bring her no comfort. He stuck his hands in his pockets and looked away. The afternoon was darkening now. Maybe it was another piece of playacting, this sorrow; another put-on in what was a long and presumably distinguished career for her. He didn’t want to know. He felt immensely sad, not for her, not for himself, but for some amorphous thing that defeated definition. Humanity? The abuses that linked people together as much as love did? The small daily assassinations of the heart, he thought. He watched her raise her face and loo
k at him. Her eyes were red, her beauty suddenly a wrecked thing.
“I didn’t know anything,” she said. “I don’t expect you to believe that.”
He shrugged. One way or another, it was of no importance.
“So far as I knew, Richard committed suicide,” she said. Her voice had become strange, different, as if it came from a source other than herself. “All I ever knew was what George wanted to tell me. I was to stick with you, I was to help you find a safe place to keep you away from your old friends, I was to try and prevent you going to the stadium. That’s all I ever knew. The rest—your old woman, the Mallory thing—I never knew any more than you did.”
“You didn’t stop to ask? You didn’t stop to ask yourself what the fuck was going on?”
She shook her head. “Five years is a long time to wait for something you want, John.”
“And now you don’t have it,” he said.
She tried to smile, an odd distorted expression. “You’re a pretty determined character. I couldn’t keep you away from that stadium. I tried. I did try. I even thought of using the gun on you at one point.”
“I die laughing,” Rayner said. Love, he thought. That blind unquestioning place beyond conflict: was that love? Was that how Richard had loved this woman? There was a loneliness, a sense of some indefinable loss, working through him now. It was finished: it was all over, a body that would have to be interred in the very near future. He gazed across the rain. Then he was aware of lights in all the windows of the hospital, white lights that were like a series of blank, blinded eyes. He thought of the kid now and began to move away from Isobel, back toward the hospital entrance. She called out to him, a phrase he didn’t catch, something he didn’t want anyhow. She was something to be walked away from, like an unfinished picture that would never be more than hollow and cold and numb.
Inside the hospital he approached a nurse at the reception desk and asked for the kid’s room number. The nurse, with her pallid officious face, told him that the child wasn’t to be disturbed. Sedated, needs rest, no visitors. Rayner reached across the desk and seized the record sheet from the woman’s hand, stared at the room number, threw the sheet down, and walked along a corridor. He could hear the woman harping and whining at his back, but what the hell did that matter? Soon enough she would be on the intercom system, bellowing about an unauthorized visitor. You travel through the shit, he thought; what difference does a little more make?
He found the room and paused a moment outside the door, thinking of Isobel in the rain. Dismiss it, let it slide, let her make what she can of her life. He pushed the door open and stepped inside the room. The kid lay propped up against a pile of pillows, her eyes closed, her face tilted to one side. He drew a chair close to the bed and sat down, holding her hand lightly. It was strange how in sleep the plain face had assumed something akin to beauty; one day, after the chrysalis of adolescence, she might be a real heart-breaker. He laid the palm of his hand against her forehead and she slowly opened her eyes, blank at first as if she were trying to bring him into focus. For a long time there was silence, something awkward, uncomfortable; and Rayner wondered what he could say, whether he could apologize, make amends, some form of restitution for what he had put her through. Watching her, he said nothing.
When she spoke, her voice was dry and hoarse. “She’s dead.”
Rayner moved his head slightly. He thought: Between you and me, kid, we’ve got a story to tell if anybody wants to listen and believe.
The girl turned her face away, gazing at the rainy window. “I knew she was dead,” she said.
“Rest,” Rayner said. “Rest. Take it easy.”
He took his hand from her brow, remembering how cold she had been when he had last touched her. She twisted around to look at him. Her eyes, glazed from whatever medication had been injected into her blood, still seemed capable of penetration.
“Where’s Isobel?” she asked.
Rayner watched her eyelids flicker. She was drifting away again, floating out on some soporific cloud. He waited until he was certain that she had fallen asleep and then he rose from his chair, looking down at her, watching her, thankful that he hadn’t had to answer her last sleepy question.
The door of the room opened and an angry orderly came in.
“I was just leaving,” Rayner said.
He went out into the corridor and walked toward the exit. Outside, a chill wind had begun to blow the rain in a series of whiplike gusts. Isobel had gone. He stared across the parking lot. There would be explanations to be made, reasons to be given, loose ends to be tied together. A whole tidy package to be delivered.
He was tired. It could wait for another day, a better day.
About the Author
Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these, White Rage and Butcher, were nominated for France’s Prix du Polar. Armstrong’s novels Assassins & Victims and The Punctual Rape won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.
Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1979 by Campbell Armstrong
Cover design by Angela Goddard
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0416-9
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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