Part 24 (1/2)

When Howard came in, saw Crane sitting at his desk, he said, 'G.o.d, Amos, should you be here? Shouldn't you be . . .'

'I be what?'

'Well, mourning.'

'I am mourning, Howard. I'm also looking for the f.u.c.ker put me in mourning. Which is why I'm at my desk, yes.'

Howard wisely didn't pursue this. 'And last night? Um, did you sort out the, er, husband?'

'Mark Trafford. Did you know he was dirty?'

'Dirty how?'

Crane rubbed his fingers together.

'So we can expect little fuss from him, then?'

'Unless he's keen on seeing how the other half live. What about you?'

'The woman?' Howard shrugged. 'About what you'd expect.'

Crane didn't let relief show on his face, but that's what he felt. Three hours' sleep, and he'd woken thinking about the woman Axel's 'wife', or, he supposed, 'Rufus”s wife. Depending on how you looked at it. Either way, he'd woken wondering if he'd been wrong the previous evening, and Axel really had gone into meltdown. In which case Howard wouldn't have found a wife, he'd have found another body. There were kids too. It might have been messy.

'But did she buy it?'

Distaste flitted over Howard's face. He really didn't like this part. It made Amos wonder how he'd got here in the first place, let alone being nominally in charge. 'She's not the type,' Howard said at last, 'to disbelieve anything. Not when it's backed up with a police presence.'

'The woodentops have their uses.'

'What are you doing? Exactly.'

'Exactly, I'm running through timetables. I think they they went for a train. I'm trying to find which.'

'You said it didn't make a difference. That they'll still come after the child.'

'They will.'

'So it doesn't matter where they are now. So long as they '

'Look, Howard, I'm f.u.c.king tracking them. All right?'

Howard didn't say anything.

'We'll find them. Sooner or later. But sooner's better. Don't you think?'

'Are you making this personal, Amos?'

Jesus Christ. Amos smiled kindly. 'Howard. Of course I'm making it personal. Now, f.u.c.k off, do you mind? I'm busy.'

Howard stood there for the best part of a minute before he turned and walked away. Probably, if he'd thought of something good to say, he'd have said it.

Amos returned to his screen. And if he'd been buying the tickets, he continued, the ones he'd have bought for actual use would have been for a train leaving thirty seconds later.

Bingo.

Downey had hung a DO NOT DISTURB on their door, and when food arrived, made them leave the trolley outside. He told her to keep away from the windows. And every time she wanted to think this ridiculous, she got flashes of yesterday evening like the remnants of a bad trip: Rufus with the d.a.m.n dental floss Rufus! wrapping her throat with a cord so tight it left a mark like a thin ruby necklace. She studied it in the mirror: a memento mori, secular stigmata. A wound that did not bleed.

'You think they'll find us here?'

'Depends.'

'On what?'

He shrugged.

And Sarah didn't even know who they were yet.

He tuned to CNN, and they watched a war unfold in colour; men and women in desert fatigues, auditioning for Armageddon. Commentary was live: this was Virtual Reality Combat. You could hold the remote and imagine pressing the b.u.t.tons; lasers accurate to an inch over fifty miles; smart bombs that punched their targets while transmitting images to a watching world. You could look into the whites of enemy eyes a continent away. Study their customs, learn their language and kill them, all at once.

Michael wolfed sandwiches. Sarah couldn't eat. For information, she was hungry, but hardly knew where to start. Nor did Michael . . . There were car alarms that activated when you got too close: you didn't have to be touching. It was one of those eighties things where you not only owned something, you owned the s.p.a.ce around it too. Michael was like that, though instead of an alarm going off everything shut down.

She asked him, 'Are you married?'

'Used to be.'

She waited, but he wasn't enlarging on that. 'Tell me about Singleton.'

'We did training together.'

Always, she was left to fill in the gaps, for which she leaned on films dimly remembered, and school stories devoured as a child. Parade ground brutality; men fainting in the heat. Vows of undying loyalty. Smuggled feasts after lights out. She knew the truth lay a million miles wide; truth, anyway, was a private luxury.

'You fought together?'

'Over there.' He nodded at the screen. 'Last time.'

'Was it . . .' She didn't know what to ask.

'It was war. We were kids.'

'Like this.' She gestured at the screen.

'This isn't war. It's a shooting gallery.'

She looked back at the screen. Graphs showing probable enemy-dead were superimposed on a smoking background. A voice recited figures with barely suppressed excitement, as if this were a lottery-rollover week, and its owner had invested heavily in the big numbers.

He was riding pure intuition here, but he thought they'd boarded the Worcester train. Somebody had, certainly: a pair of returns had been bought with just about two minutes to spare was Worcester somewhere people went in a hurry? It was the kind of thing Howard would probably know.

He made his choice anyway; pulled up a list of stations the Worcester train stopped at, and waited to see if any jumped out. But they were ordinary places: small towns; nowhere that rang bells, and he sat back in his chair again, feeling his mind slip out of focus. Three hours' sleep was not enough.

Perhaps, too, he should have been with his brother. Axel had been taken to the small, discreet firm of undertakers the Department used: accustomed to physical trauma, to disguising cause of death. There would be no post-mortem. But perhaps there was need for Amos to sit with his brother's body a while, so he could get used to the idea that Axel wasn't coming home this time; that Amos was well and truly alone at last.