Part 23 (1/2)

Mark was straightening up now; the woman relinquis.h.i.+ng her grasp. As Sarah watched, they exchanged a few last words (endearments), then the woman left through the exit their side of the station. Mark picked up his briefcase, and headed for the staircase that would bring him over to Sarah.

Who would probably have remained there to meet him, had Michael Downey not appeared at her side. He thrust what looked like a twenty-pound note on her. 'Two returns,' he said. 'Worcester.'

She stared, uncomprehending.

'Quick. It leaves in two minutes.'

Movement reclaimed her; she took the note and hurried inside, where there was no queue for tickets, and the man selling them grasped immediately what two returns to Worcester meant. n.o.body had ever spent so little time at a railway ticket booth. Which was why she walked past Mark on her way back out; though he kept walking as if she were not there, or were somebody else. He was so close as to be touched, and for a moment she wanted to do that, as if by reaching out she could erase everything, and put the clock back to the days when they'd meet each other off trains and stand on station platforms making exhibitions of themselves. Before there were arguments and bodies in the kitchen; before there were lovers. She stopped, turned, and would have called out, but he was through the station doors and off down the steps, heading for the taxi rank.

'Hey!'

Downey took her arm and steered her out.

The slow train was wheezing at the blocks on Platform 3, and was a not very long string of grubby, unscrubbed carriages, as befitted a service not going anywhere important. Its individual compartments were mostly unoccupied. They took one near the rear, and almost immediately the slow grind and crawl from the station began: as a means of escape it lacked dash, perhaps, but there were no last minute attempts to flag them down. The platform slipped behind them. The racket picked up speed. And Sarah stared at her pale sister in the window and thought about bodies: bodies warm and kissed by unfaithful husbands or stone cold dead in the kitchen. She wiped a hand against the gla.s.s. Through the window, ragged stumps of hedgerow choked to death. While evening died black clouds swallowed the land, and the fields and ditches of one county after another dissolved into a single bleak horizon. Everything she cared for was behind her. None of it mattered any more. She raised a hand to her throat and imagined the thin red necklace painted there, her souvenir of that frightening cord that had nearly taken her out of this world, and spoke to Michael Downey. 'I told him it wasn't a matter of life and death.'

He looked at her, not understanding.

'Mark. I told him it wasn't a matter of life and death, whether we had dental floss on the fridge or not.'

Outside the window bright settlements flashed into view, then lost themselves in the dark nowhere that swallowed up the past. This was a well-known effect of travelling at night: you felt nostalgic for snug, safe places you'd never visited, and never would.

Afterwards, she wondered if it had been the drugs. There was the numbing effect of Rufus's attack to take into account, and the shock of seeing his body hurled from one room to the next like an ill.u.s.tration of what was happening to his soul; but afterwards, she preferred to think it had been the drugs that produced this docility, her inability to reach a decision on her own. It remained true that the available options had been limited and unappealing, but to a rational mind the extravagance of the course she had taken, running off into the dark with an armed stranger, was almost supernatural. The irony did not escape her. Mark's purpose had been to keep her tame, domesticated, and the very tools he had used for the task had secured her libera- tion, as if she had s.h.i.+nned down the wall of her tower using the chains he had wrapped her in for a rope. Her senses dulled by medication, the first plan presented, she had acquiesced to without murmur. The first exit offered, she was off.

Which plan, it had to be said, lacked most defining characteristics of a strategy: forethought, preparation, a definite objective in mind; and boiled down, in the end, to running away. But the soldier Michael Downey had at least covered their tracks as they ran, having bought two singles to Birmingham, behaving memorably as he did so. His appearance alone might have been enough. He had pulled the band from his ponytail, allowing dark hair to tumble over his face and on to his shoulders, and looked like somebody hiding behind a curtain. His voice was strained, hoa.r.s.e. Perhaps he did not use it often, though he used it now, studying her intently: 'You were on the bridge,' he said. 'After they killed Tom.'

'Yes.'

'Then up at the hospital, looking for Dinah.'

'You frightened me.'

He shrugged.

'Do you know where she is?'

'I don't even know your name.'

'Tucker,' she said. 'Sarah Tucker. Do you know where she is?'

'No.'

'Then what do you '

'Not here. Malvern.'

'Malvern?'

'That's where we get off. I'll see you outside.' At her puzzled look, he went on: 'They'll be collecting tickets. We shouldn't be seen together.'

'We were seen getting on.'

'So they'll be looking for a couple. So we stop being one.'

He left, taking his canvas bag. With his departure, the carriage grew colder.

Outside, the landscape unrolled both behind and in front of her reflection, or so it seemed: the dark world looked right through her just as Mark had at the station, and the thought that she could be so easily erased gave a horrifying insight into her future. It was another, gentler kind of death.

She knew you could walk past friends encountered in unlikely places; it was the brain refusing to acknowledge the unexpected. But Mark was her husband . . . An affair she might forgive, though she wouldn't put money on it. But something about the way she hadn't existed for him at that moment was an irrefutable proof that the frayed bond between them had snapped. He had failed to keep her safe when she was falling off the world. And even as she fell, he'd been playing brief f.u.c.king encounter with some pick-up on the commuter express.

It was enough to make her wonder if she had ever known anybody. Mark was not a husband; Rufus was not an airhead. But then, n.o.body had known Rufus. She thought of Wigwam's months of happiness with him, and tried to remember how he had first appeared on the scene, and couldn't: he had simply arrived, and for all Sarah knew about his past, he'd dropped out of a Christmas cracker. Another harmless hippie. It was a marriage made in outer s.p.a.ce. Except it had been a lie, all of it; all the time he'd been waiting for Tom Singleton to return from the grave, so he could send him back there. It was a lot of cover for a simple act of murder: this impersonation of a family man, in order to trap a real one. Singleton had died because he could not stay away from his wife and daughter, and now Wigwam had died too, or so Rufus had said . . . Sarah did not know if she could believe that. Why had Rufus tried to kill her, if not for the copy of the letter he'd found? . . . She couldn't think of a reason for him to have murdered Wigwam beforehand. It was evil, then. Pure evil. He'd wanted her to die thinking her friend already dead.

But here, anyway, was one thing, one person, she could be sure of. If Wigwam were alive, she would grieve for Rufus; this Sarah knew. Whatever he had done. Whoever he proved to be. Because for six months, he had pretended to be Wigwam's lover, and no man had cared for Wigwam enough in the past to keep up that pretence for so long. And with this single certainty came Sarah's own reason to cry: as the train rolled on, she grieved too. Not for the dead but the living. Whoever they were.

She left the train at Malvern. There were no whistles, no alarms; and neither sight nor sound of Michael Downey, though she waited until the train pulled away before leaving the platform. Seeing it depart was watching an escape route close before her eyes. She had barely a fistful of money; she wore jeans, a T-s.h.i.+rt, a thin cotton top. And she had never been to Malvern, though first impressions coloured it neat, well-kept and dark. The platform lighting fell in tight pools lapped by s.h.i.+fting shadows. It was the wind nudging hanging baskets, from which trailed fuschias and ferns.

It came as no great surprise to find herself abandoned. Compared to recent events, it was a small betrayal: Downey was a stranger; he had saved her life and owed her nothing. That he had left her stranded hours from home was a detail. She could easily picture him, miles from here: hurrying across a field, the lights of labourers' cottages winking in the distance. A little bit of pastoral, there. But probably he had just changed trains, and was now heading into the city. Any city.

From somewhere the other side of the shadows came thumping, heaving and laughter; sounds Sarah took for porters, larking with the mails. A dim sense of self-preservation rea.s.serted itself. Whatever happened next had best happen elsewhere: somewhere better lit, more crowded; also warmer. A sudden s.h.i.+ver shook her head to toe. It was the thought of that noose tightening on her throat. It was the cold and the dark and the fear, and the being alone.

Her shoes clattered on the station concourse. Everything sounds louder in the dark. Outside there was a car park and a hill to climb, and a bigger hill in the distance, and Sarah couldn't have felt further from home if she'd been E.T. Her cheeks stung where her tears for Wigwam had dried. Soon, she knew, she'd be crying again, but before that happened she needed shelter. Because once she started crying, she'd likely never stop.

A lout stepped from an alcove. 'Tucker.'

'Jesus!'

'Where were you?'

He had cut his hair on the train, and this oddness distracted her from fright for a second. And then it poured through her again, riding her blood like a surfer on a wave, and it didn't at first occur to her that it was relief as much as anger that made her coa.r.s.e. 'You s.h.i.+t you frightened me half to death.'

'Who else round here knows your name?'

'That's hardly the '

'We can't stay here. Come on.'

Like I'm a b.l.o.o.d.y dog, she thought. But followed anyway, like a b.l.o.o.d.y dog, up the road towards the town centre.

Downey moved naturally among the shadows, as if they were his element after years spent pretending to be dead. Sarah was forced to trot to match his pace; to stretch her legs after weeks without exercise. The blood pounded through her and her skin began to tingle. Sensations indicating that she too was coming back to life.

Coming back to it and giving it some thought. That she was here, now, was a given. That she was blindly following a man she'd seen kill without hesitation would perhaps bear examination. What it suggested was not attractive, not to the Sarah emerging from tranquillized stupor; the same inner core of selfhood that had responded to Zoe Boehm rebelled against relying on a man for instruction. Mark's betrayal was only just sinking in. Not the kiss on the railway platform, but the whole of the last few weeks: the tame doctor wheeled out to pop pills; the s.e.x visited on her as if it were a form of therapy. Even Simon Smith had acknowledged she had some degree of autonomy, though he'd tempered it with the unstated view that she'd be better off not exercising it. Mark thought rape and drugs would see her through. Yet here she was, having run from them all, tagging after a proven killer like a confirmed victim, lost without a source of punishment.

But that wasn't it. She knew that wasn't it. The reason she was following Michael Downey was that he'd faked death four years ago, and that lay at the heart of recent events. Joe would not be coming back to life. Her own would never be the same. And somewhere underneath all this was the shadow of Dinah Singleton, surely as unknowing a player in the game as Sarah herself . . . She could admit now that the child had been little more than an excuse. She would have traced a treasure map with as much concern. It was what Gerard Inchon had called BHS; the urge to do something anything to relieve the terrible boredom.

The boredom had been relieved.

And now that the damage was done, the long days when the worst she had to worry about was what to fix for supper had a prelapsarian glow; it was like those first few seconds after breaking a tooth, when you're immediately cross with yourself for not having taken advantage of all the lovely moments without a broken tooth. But there was no cosmic dentist available, and no advantage in looking back. The best she could do was arrange her own agenda. Soon they would come looking for her: the police for sure; whoever sent Rufus, possibly. The choice was to go to earth or to start back at the beginning, and not give up. To find Dinah. It had nothing to do with revenge, or even reconciliation. It was simply a matter of finis.h.i.+ng what she had started. And that meant knowing what Downey knew.

Their location, for a start. 'What are we looking for?'

'Hotel,' he said, without breaking stride.