Part 24 (2/2)

. . . Moreton-in-Marsh. Honeybourne. These were towns child- ren's writers lived; the kind of place Winnie the Pooh would go on his day off. Just listening to the names, Crane knew n.o.body could hide there for long. Ten minutes after you'd found the B&B, the vicar would be popping round, inviting you for evensong.

Not that he had wanted Axel dead. But for too long he'd been forced to play the older brother role: trying to calm everybody else down when Axel went over the top. Axel enjoyed the wet work too much, that had always been his problem. Bureaucrats like Howard didn't go for that. They needed it done, sure, but they didn't want anyone enjoying it.

Persh.o.r.e, Worcester itself. Worcester was biggish, wasn't it?

He made a note on a pad by his keyboard: Hotels in Worcester? Later, he'd find a list, find a map; use the station as its centre, and plot the hotels accordingly. It was a big job and, as Howard had suggested, not entirely necessary: sooner or later, Downey would come to him. But if it brought that moment closer, it was worth doing. Axel wasn't supposed to be one of the blips. He shouldn't have been wiped from the screen like that. Maybe Amos should be sitting vigil over his body, but he knew Axel would prefer it this way: Amos preparing to hunt down Axel's killer. In the end, you mourned by doing what you were best at, and this time Amos was doing it for love. He'd be sure to tell Downey that, when the moment came.

For a while he sat there, contemplating that moment. Then he licked his lips, and bent back to his screen.

There was a Ted Hughes poem Sarah remembered about a confined panther or other large cat; behind bars, it felt horizons rolling beneath its feet. There was something of this in Michael. The hotel room, to her, had become a prison; hourly, the walls closed in, an inch at a time, as if it were some upscale version of a medieval torture device which would squeeze the life from all their bones. But to Michael, the room was just where he happened to be at the moment. It was just another waystation, away from the war.

'Where did it start?' she asked him.

She'd already told him everything she knew, which was nothing really; less than nothing, because telling it left her confused and lost.

'I don't know.'

'But please try.'

He shrugged. Talking was an effort with him. 'In the desert? I think that's where it really started.'

'During the war?'

'No. Long after that. A year ago. Eighteen months?'

'You've been dead four years,' she said. 'The helicopter crash? Off Cyprus?'

'I've never been to Cyprus.' Then what she'd said registered. 'Four years? Jesus, it is, isn't it?'

'What happened in the desert?'

'There were six of us. And the . . . others.'

'What others?'

'We called them the boy soldiers.'

He seemed to be fading before her eyes, and she was unsure whether he was waking from a nightmare, or falling back into one. 'Boy soldiers?'

'They were just kids. Scared to f.u.c.king death.' He ran a hand across his eyes, then looked straight at her. 'It had to be a desert. The conditions wouldn't be fair otherwise. That's what they told us. Fair.'

It was like grasping at smoke. 'Who told you?'

He looked back to the screen.

'Michael? You have to tell me these things!'

'Why?'

'Because I'm involved, dammit. Because I'm here.'

He looked at her again, this time with a fresh curiosity, as if he'd registered for the first time that she'd had an existence prior to his awareness of her. He had saved her life, but she knew that he'd done so simply because he'd thought she might have information; because she'd been looking for Dinah, and he'd thought she might know more than him. Returning his gaze now, she wondered if, under different circ.u.mstances, he'd be just as prepared to kill her for the same end. It was a thought she pushed away quickly.

He said, 'What's that scar on your arm?'

And she knew it was a question to draw her into his world, the one where even the innocent carry wounds. Especially the innocent. But she could not tell him about the fall from the roof; the way the lights spun cartwheels in her head as she hit the ground.

'I had a crash,' she told him.

He seemed to relate to that.

'Why did the army say you were dead, if you'd never even been to Cyprus?'

And he said, 'That's when we knew we were really in trouble.'

By mid-morning Crane had settled on two towns, the time mostly spent staring through the wall, thinking himself into Downey's shoes. Like all such exercises, the longer he'd tried it, the less sense it made. But in the end he'd chosen Malvern and, yes, Worcester; the latter to allow for two possibilities: the double bluff and the stupid error. Given an hour and a half, he'd told Howard, Downey would be underground, but how true was that? Maybe, all these months, it had been Singleton doing Downey's thinking for him. Singleton was off the screen now. Downey might just be chasing his own tail, hoping to be caught.

. . . Crane held a pencil by its tip between right thumb and index finger, and as he sat, tapped the end of it against the arm of his spectacles, in time to the rhythm of his heart.

He didn't believe it. But the idea wouldn't go away, so there it was on his list.

He was waiting now for a printout of hotels, B&Bs, pubs that offered rooms, and while he did he was thinking about the woman. He didn't know much about the woman yet. If she proved as weak as her husband, who'd crumpled at his touch, she'd not be around long enough to be a problem. But Axel's ruse to take her out of the picture drawing on her background; fitting her up with a bag of cocaine hadn't worked, so she was either really dumb or something of a fighter, and Crane didn't think she was dumb. And by now she'd have more of an idea of what she'd fallen into.

But she wouldn't know everything. For instance, Downey wouldn't tell her the truth about himself.

Not if he wanted her on his side.

'Why you?'

He looked away. There were things he wouldn't tell her: not now, not ever. She knew that as precisely as if he'd actually said it, instead of what he did say, which was, 'You wouldn't understand. We were soldiers.'

'Great.'

They'd trained in a desert: somewhere in North Africa, he said; he didn't know where. They weren't told. There were no uniforms, just a vast expanse of sand and sky; a canvas-and-tin construction they slept in, ate in, returned exhausted to every evening.

'Training?'

'Up and down the sandhills. With weights. Serious weights.'

She got the picture. She even imagined the pain: the sand dragging at their limbs, trying to pull them back into the earth.

'But that wasn't the point. They were painting us. Twice a day.'

'Painting?'

She was starting to sound like an echo.

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