Part 36 (1/2)

There was a bear, too, a big blue teddy bear. It lay by the door, exactly as if it had been Oh, yes, shot.

This had been Michael, she supposed. He was fading in her memory, she was surprised to find; probably because she was having difficulty putting what he had done here next to who he was. Who she thought he'd been. But he had come in the night, or early in the morning, and left this mayhem behind him; taken Dinah . . . She felt sick. For a moment it was a worse wound than this woman lying here had suffered: she had lain with that man, and what was he: a war criminal? Filled with revulsion, she forced her mind further back: would she have let him save her life if she'd known him capable of this? Somewhere between that point and sharing a bed, she drew the line, and somewhere on that line, he'd been balancing for years. Maybe Maddy Singleton had been the only hope he'd had, and even that hope was a dim reflection of betrayal; she was married to his brother soldier . . . Even now, Sarah had barely an inkling of the bond that had held those two together. But knew at least that it had been sealed with blood, and couldn't be broken by less.

She went to fetch the bear. There was nothing else she could do. It wouldn't have surprised her if the woman had died in the moments it took to collect it, but she was still breathing when Sarah knelt by her once more with the ridiculous blue toy in her hands. The light in her eyes was flickering, or that might have been a trick of Sarah's own eyes; watering now, making candlelight out of the gloom.

There was a noise upstairs. Zoe coming back.

'Die,' the woman said again.

'Dinah. Yes.'

'Dine.'

Dying. There was somebody with Zoe; Sarah could clearly hear two pairs of feet on the steps. How had she known they weren't alone? Was that Michael? Or would he just have killed Zoe like he'd killed everybody else?

But it wasn't Michael. It looked, instead, as if Zoe had brought her bank manager along; a neat, medium man with a balding head and a cheap briefcase, who smiled pleasantly when he saw Sarah, as if he'd long been denied the pleasure of an introduction.

'Can you help?' she asked him.

'Oh, I do hope so.'

'She's been shot. We think she's been shot.'

'What a pity. You must be Sarah Trafford, is that right? Sarah Trafford, nee Tucker, late of Oxford?'

'. . . Who are you?'

'And your friend is ?'

'Not important,' said Zoe. 'Look. Can you help her? She's dying.'

'I expect she is. Downey did all this, I presume? He's a better soldier than we thought. Or else the child is just very, very important to him.'

He stepped further into the room, and put the briefcase on the floor.

'The funny thing is, she's not his. Did you know that? The blood work was done. She's definitely Singleton's.'

'I don't know who you are,' Zoe said, 'and I don't know what the f.u.c.k you're on about, but the question is, can you help her? She's dying, for pity's sake.'

'Oh, we're all doing that. Downey's dying too, did you know? Caught something nasty in the desert. Long term, but definitely fatal. Just a little bit,' said Howard, 'like life.'

'Are you mad?' Zoe asked him.

'Mad, no. Maybe a little disoriented.'

But Sarah wondered.

The man came closer, knelt by the dying woman. Something heavy in his pocket dragged at his jacket, ruining the cut. It looked awfully like, Sarah thought 'Die '

'Yes,' said the man sadly.

A gun, Sarah thought. It looked very like a gun.

Amos Crane was using binoculars, binoculars he had found in the boot of the car. Now he sat on the harbour wall, scanning the sea for traffic; not sure yet what he was looking for, but confident he'd know it when he found it . . . Where the sea met the sky was just a thin grey stripe. Ideally there'd be a boat bobbing on that stripe, a boat with a big white sail with a blue and gold target st.i.tched into it.

My, he felt grand. Oh, he felt really fine.

On the train he had slept at last, a sleep punctuated, bizarrely, by dreams of the woman he had seen, the woman in the red top, with the coffee and the railway sandwiches. But he'd woken refreshed. And the morning since had pa.s.sed like clockwork, if about as slowly; he'd found himself delighting in the detail, savouring the moment, as if this were less a routine nutting than a swan song . . . Well, of course it was a swan song. He'd been present at a lot of those. He'd just never been the swan yet. He didn't intend to be one now.

. . . Nutting was an Axel-word. It was one of many. He'd been a magpie with his euphemisms, filching them from other contexts: s.e.x and drugs and sports. He'd spoken of t.w.a.tting and spliffing, and he'd always meant one thing. Rarely used the same word twice. Never had to explain himself. Back in the rarefied air of the office, it was all red-ribbon this and expedite that . . . Like working in a bank. Axel's approach had been more honest, you couldn't deny it. When you did a job on someone, you weren't expediting them. You were splatting them, basically. It was a fact of life.

. . . He wondered if Howard were here yet, and concluded: Chances were. Howard probably came by helicopter. No budgetary restraints for Howard, thank you very much. Amos closed one eye, and imagined the black circle he was looking through a gunsight. Pretty soon, he supposed, he'd be after a new lifestyle new ident.i.ty, new country, all the rest. Howard, though, would be looking for a new plane of existence. Along with Downey, the woman, the child . . .

The child, yes. He'd taken her a teddy bear, but that hadn't been sentiment, it had just been the job.

He s.h.i.+fted a little, to ease the growing cramp in his leg. Doing the child wasn't something he was looking forward to, obviously, but he'd never been one to s.h.i.+rk the painfully inevitable. So as was his habit, he put this detail from his mind. Let the next thing happen in its order. We'll shoot that horse when we come to it.

And way off in the distance a familiar boat hove into view, and Amos Crane thought to himself: Well . . .

The woman died two minutes later.

That was what the man had said, bending low over her, his hand to her pulse.

Hard to know, Sarah thought, whether it was relief or defeat. For the woman, that is. Two minutes of struggle, then she stopped sudden as that; no winding down, just a full stop instead of a comma. Sarah had left the room, walked up the stairs, come out here into the light and air birds wheeling about now, couple of hundred yards away, as if they'd found something on which to feed. She kept expecting to cry, but didn't. Inside her something welled and gathered, but she wouldn't let it burst.

She heard sounds now familiar behind her: a soft footfall, a cardboard rustle, the hiss of a plastic lighter.

Zoe said, 'There's nothing we could have done.'

'I know.'

'Maybe if we'd got here earlier . . .'

'Or been surgeons.'

'Or been surgeons.'

'What the f.u.c.k happened, Zoe?'

'Your friend Michael '

'He's not my friend.'

'No. What I think happened, what it looks like happened, he got here, probably stole a boat, killed the guards, took Dinah and left.'

'And who's '

'I don't know. One of them. Hush.'

Whoever he was, he came out and joined them now: something of an absurd little man, Sarah couldn't help feeling, with his suit and tie, his briefcase, on this grey lump of seabound rock. But he'd known her name. So yes, obviously, one of them.