Part 22 (2/2)

'They've taken him to the local place, Amos.' Morgue, he meant. Not place. Morgue. 'But we'll have him moved. Back to London.' Where he'd be more comfortable, Howard's tone implied. Where Amos would be able to visit; maybe take him flowers. Grapes.

'What time was he found?'

'A little after ten.'

'And was he still warm?'

Howard said nothing. He was thinking: Jesus Christ Almighty.

'Howard?'

'I don't think Mr Trafford checked.'

'Good point.' Amos looked up at the stars again. Civilian finds a body, he doesn't automatically start processing the data. Especially when the body's in his kitchen, and his wife's nowhere to be seen. 'But he can't have been dead long. Not that it counts. An hour, hour and a half, any kind of head start, someone with Downey's experience could be underground by now.'

'It's coming apart, Amos.'

'Things have come apart before. We're all still here.' He looked back through the kitchen, at the husband sitting in forlorn isolation. 'Anyone been round to Axel's place?'

'Hmm?'

'He lived with a woman. Married her, for G.o.d's sake.' Taking professionalism way too far, but that was Axel: it was often hard to tell when he was taking the p.i.s.s. 'She had kids. Well, still has.'

'What do we tell her? That he's dead?'

'I don't think so.' What he did think took a moment or two to emerge. Axel had been on the point of bailing out: If that had happened, he'd have been just another husband coming to his senses. But circ.u.mstances no longer allowed for that. 'No, I think we'd better make him a terrorist.' That was the thing these days: most people could believe anything without hardly trying. Your husband? Your husband of six months? Well, you didn't really know him at all, did you, madam? Fact is, he's on the Most Wanted, and he only married you for the cover. And now he's gone. And you'll never see him again.

'Do we use the locals?'

'I think you'd better do it, Howard. It'll come better from a suit.'

'And what about the husband?'

'Oh, I'll deal with the husband.'

He turned away. After a while, Howard took the hint, and left him to the stars and his deep thoughts.

Which only looked deep. From long habit Amos Crane was able, at times of stress, to empty his mind. He did that now: for twenty minutes, more or less, he was just an upright body in the garden; at one with the dark and the waving trees. He didn't think about his brother, or the mess in the house behind him. He didn't think at all. He just allowed events to catch up with him; when he was ready, he'd be beyond the primary stages of grief: there'd be no struggling past denial, or reaching for acceptance. What was done was done. Something had happened here, and Axel was dead. This didn't mean the game was over. It just meant there was greater reason to win.

He remembered the moments on the island: wrapping the bag round that idiot Muscle's head. And he thought how fine it would be to have Downey here now: just the two of them, unarmed in the dark. We'd see how well he fared without a gun in his hand. We'd know what his flesh felt like when we ripped it open, and delved beneath.

Amos Crane shuddered at the memory, a memory from the future.

Then he went back into the house, to sort out the husband.

Chapter Five.

Buddy Holly's Last Words I.

Through the window dark scenery rolled past, but all Sarah could make out was the gaunt reflection of her face superimposed on the landscape, as if she were one constant against a restless background, and all the things she had no control over, starting with events and ending with her own thoughts, were unfolding beneath her serious, fractured surface. Outside were empty fields and damp trees but she was thinking about a cat; about watching a cat through a door darkly, while it mocked her unfitness for life on the other side of the gla.s.s. Which lay now, she remembered, in splinters across the length of her kitchen floor.

Michael Downey had dropped the gun in three different drains between the house and railway station: the gun itself, its silencer, ammunition; all done with perfect fluidity, a dip and a drop with no hint of a stumble, so that even a close watcher would have had difficulty being sure that he had seen the actual disposal of a murder weapon, rather than a clever mime. Throughout, Sarah succ.u.mbed to circ.u.mstance. Your best friend's husband tries to kill you; your bogeyman blows him away. Her options seemed limited, somehow. All she had taken from the house was her wallet. All it contained was twenty-odd pounds.

They had followed the dark route by the river; across the old railway bridge and over the meadow by the ice rink, through whose windows she could make out the sweeping presences of a few after-hours skaters, still at work on their figure eights. Then into the bright lights: this main road skirted the city centre. Cars whistled by. A garage dribbled neon in oily puddles. Groups of teenagers strutted past, on their way to a desperate-looking nightclub.

The station was up a gradient that seemed steeper after dark; its fluorescent lighting spilled through automatic doors like a promise of safety. Reality began seeping back into Sarah, together with an ache in her calves that served notice of how fast they'd come. She looked at Downey, and for the first time his hand fell from her elbow, as if he were offering her a choice of destination. His eyes were very dark.

'Where are we going?'

'Up there.'

'But I can't just '

'Trust me.'

Trust him? The man was a killer.

A platoon of taxis streamed past, their beams picking the couple out like searchlights in old prison movies. A London-bound train was pulling out of the station. It moved slowly over the bridge across the road, its innocent pa.s.sengers gazing down on the traffic below.

'He wasn't the only one,' Downey said suddenly.

'What?'

'That guy who tried to kill you? There'll be others.'

Something very like a wave came close to breaking inside her. 'What's going on?' she whispered. 'I don't even know what's happening here, there's madmen all around me '

Now a police car flashed past, its American barlights leaving a fresh blur hanging in the air like a ghostly straggler. She blinked and the spectre disappeared. I need help, she thought; apparently aloud.

'I am helping you. This is helping you.'

Another cop car, this one with siren raging, split the traffic on its way west. Downey brushed hair from his eyes. 'I'm out of here,' he said. 'You want to take your chances, that's up to you.'

There was, she thought with sudden clarity, nowhere else to go.

She followed him into the station, where the promise of safety dissolved into a bleak, tiled expanse of shuttered windows and cold lighting. A booth selling coffee and sandwiches was open, but held the distant appeal of life filtered through a TV commer- cial; she was sure that her stomach would never accept food or drink again. First thing Downey did was stop by the departure schedules, arranged on free-standing boards, while he hunted through the canvas bag over his shoulder for what turned out to be a wallet, his quick eyes scanning the lists while he did so. 'Wait out there,' he told her. 'On the platform.'

Yes boss. Sure boss. But that was a tiny voice far away in her head, and her feet were already taking her to the dark, littered world outside, which existed in a different century than the one she left. At night railway platforms are draughty, no matter how still and airless the weather. There are always takeaway wrappers scrunched into b.a.l.l.s and left on benches. For one mad comforting moment, she considered tidying them away; gathering the whole greasy mess in a lump to her chest, as if she were starting a collection. It seemed an action appropriate to both her location and condition. She had reached a point in her life where this platform was as good a place as any. She could spend the rest of forever caught between destinations, in this ill-lit dimension where muttering, half-mad vagrants pursued their furious agendas. She could join the other transients who no longer had a home to go to.

A train pulled up opposite and began disgorging pa.s.sengers from the capital; mostly men, mostly with suits, executive cases and phones; everything, in fact, bar badges reading I WORK LATE. A subtle race for the taxi rank began, bringing them over the bridge, towards Sarah. Almost immediately came a whistle, the buzz of electric doors locking, and with a promptness suggesting the driver was late for an appointment the train shunted off, giving a strobed view through its lit carriages of the nearly empty platform behind: one or two shadows leaning close, their movements interrupted and comical. The gang of commuters flowed down the steps, brus.h.i.+ng past Sarah. I don't know what they do to the economy, Mark said once. But by G.o.d, they terrify me. It felt like the first thought in hours she'd spared Mark; it was as if he'd been erased from the equation. But something had brought him to mind just then, and as the end of the train trundled out of her line of vision she saw that it was because she'd been looking at him. He was one of the shadows on the platform opposite, one of two stragglers reluctant to head for home.

She should have turned away, but couldn't. The reason she could not turn was that she was watching her husband kiss another woman, a sight so unusual that it would have been a crime to miss it. The kiss bordered on the perfunctory, it was true; a quick bow and a peck on the cheek, but the fact that the woman held Mark's arm as he kissed her, that Sarah had never laid eyes on her before, that an aura of intimacy hung on them like a purple cloud: these things could not be dismissed. Mark had a lover. After what she'd been through in the last hour she'd lost much of her capacity for shock, but as she felt the knowledge settle upon her, become as much a part of her consciousness as a childhood memory, it surprised her distantly to learn that she had not yet exhausted her potential for weariness.

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