Down into Darkness (15 page)

‘Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo…'

‘Five years, wasn't it?'

‘More.

‘Then no more.'

‘That's right.'

‘Why?'

‘There's a point at which death becomes personal.'

‘Isn't it always?'

‘You know what I mean.'

An intercom voice told Turner he was needed: a fiveminute problem. He took a gulp of beer and got up. ‘And now?' he asked, then left before he could get an answer.

Delaney walked to the window and looked out at the silent world. He remembered the smell of smoke and the juices flowing. He remembered nights in some bar or another, journos in combat gear, booze and laughter and the sound of incoming mortars. All of that. He also remembered skeletal men in camps, sitting still, hollow-eyed, dead inside their heads. He remembered women from the rape camps unable to speak of what had been done to them. He remembered the bodies being flung on to trucks like cordwood, some without legs, without arms, without heads. He remembered his fingers stalling over the keyboard, because nothing he could write, nothing, would even come close.

Turner came back, bringing with him two more bottles of beer. He said, ‘And now?' as if he'd never been away.

‘I think,' Delaney said, ‘I'm trying to work out where I really belong.'

Turner laughed. ‘Don't get all fucking philosophical with me, John. Look, there's Palestine, there's Iraq, there's Chechnya, there's Somalia, there's the Congo. Last time I looked, about ninety small wars going on round the globe. Take your pick; I'll have you on a plane tomorrow.'

Delaney said, ‘I'm contracted to do this Rich List thing.'

‘Sure,' Turner said. ‘Sure, of course you are.'

Stella piled up the files and photocopies and reports and carried them up to Mike Sorley's office. The door was partly open, and a little fog of cigarette smoke was seeping into the corridor. When she went in, Sorley was staring thoughtfully at two cigarettes smouldering in the ashtray, one down to the tip, one freshly lit. His desk was six inches deep in files and photocopies and reports.

Stella said nothing. She put her pile on the floor near his chair. She said, ‘Today's load. Sorry, Boss.'

Sorley looked at her. He said, ‘You know what? I think I'm having a heart-attack.'

Stella looked at his desk. She gave a brief laugh. ‘I'm not surprised.'

Sorley said, ‘No, call an ambulance. I think I'm having a heart-attack.'

In a scene from the movie running in Gideon Woolf's head, a man left his office and took the lift to a basement car park. No one was there apart from the man and Woolf. When the man used his key to blip the lock on his car, Woolf stepped out of hiding. He said, ‘You lying bastard.'

He liked it: the gloom of underground, the concrete pillars, neon strips reflecting hard, white rods of light back off the rows of cars. He liked the sudden surprise, the way he appeared from behind a pillar or from between two high-sided vehicles. He liked the startled look in the man's eyes and the way it quickly turned to fear.

There was a problem, though. The car park was a ‘restricted access facility'; only employees went there, and singly unless they were part of the company's share-a-ride scheme. Woolf needed a more public place: where the man would be seen; exposed, like the others; held up to shame. He constructed other scenes that allowed for this. The man at his office, at his club, at his home… yes, that had possibilities.

The expensive suburb, the detached house screened by a line of silver birches, the radio-controlled gate of black iron railings, the long, broad driveway. The man uses his remote control to roll the gate back, but then sees that there's something in the driveway: it might be the green recycling bin that's kept close to the gate but to one side; it might be a child's bike. He sighs, he gets out of the car…

Yes, that one looked promising.

*

Woolf's room contained a desk, an operator's chair, a bed, a low table made from ply and veneer. He sat in the operator's chair with his feet on the desk, watching the television that was never switched off. On screen was either a newscast of police action in some unnamed city or a shoot-'em-shitless TV drama, he couldn't tell which.

That night, he had dreamed of Aimée, the pair of them far out to sea in a small boat and waves breaking across the bow. He had told her everything about his life while the storm raged. It was clear to him that she was afraid of the darkness and the running sea, so he'd put his arm round her, and she had folded against his chest, her body supple and warm. Now, in his recollection of the dream, she told him she loved him, swore she would never leave him, though he wasn't really sure whether the dream had offered that moment or not.

He crossed to the bed and lay down. Woolf lived a life that took no account of when people normally slept or woke. He hoped that the dream might return, and the moment come round again when Aimée talked about love, but, although sleep arrived almost at once, his dreaming was a series of random images that melted as he woke.

Traffic build-up outside the window and lengthening shadows in the room told him it was late afternoon. He checked the clock on his laptop and saw that it was just after five. The sun had moved round, but the room held that warm, sharp odour of charred wood. He drank water straight from the tap, then went out and walked to the Park Clinic. It was a store-front facçade: two pavement-to-lintel plate-glass windows and the name in blue neon script. Venetian blinds guarded the privacy of waiting patients, though some before-and-after blow-ups on each side of the glass door were distressingly intimate. Woolf walked to the top of the street, then back, as if that was what he'd always intended. He went
into a fast-food place almost opposite, ordered beer and moved to one of the stools by the window.

He looked for her, and, sure enough, after a while, she appeared. She wasn't quite as he remembered her from the dream – not as slender, not as pretty, not as dark – but he still liked the look of her. He could see that her hair, now it wasn't wet, had a soft curl to it. He had thought he might follow her, but, when he stepped out into the street, she saw him at once, and he realized that he'd wanted her to. Her face changed when she smiled – softer, warmer – and she crossed the street to him as if they had done this before.

They walked for a while until they found a pub with a garden, then ordered some drinks and sat in a thin rectangle of sunlight and told each other lies.

Aimée reached home an hour later than usual, though Peter barely noticed. Not that he was indifferent or even hostile – far from it – but it would never have occurred to him to be curious about Aimée's activities. Or about Aimée. He was a good husband, and that was a large part of the problem. He wasn't much good at being a lover or a friend, but he was a top-notch husband.

It must have seemed a pretty likeable set-up: likeable Aimée and likeable Peter with their likeable ten-year-old son, Ben. Aimée had grown tired of being told how lucky she was. Just recently she had started to believe that there were different brands of luck, and that the brand she'd been given led to the sort of quiet, uneventful life many people sought.

Aimée wanted a different kind of luck. The kind that had to do with risk, with chance, with a throw of the dice.

A scrum of doctors and Mike Sorley in the thick of it. He'd died twice, and they'd dragged him back. Now someone was using the defibrillator paddles again. Sorley hopped and flopped, and his heartbeat flickered on the monitor.

In the relatives' room Karen sat with her hands on her knees, then got up and went to the door, then took a turn round the room, then went out and walked down the corridor and back, then sat down with her hands on her knees.

When Stella came in with two cartons of coffee, Karen said, ‘No one's saying anything. No one's saying a word.'

‘Then they're not saying he's dead.'

Stella had made a triple-nine call for the first time in her life. While she was on the phone, Sorley had got up and walked out of the office as if he were on his way to meet the paramedics; or maybe he thought he stood a better chance in the open air. He got as far as the squad room, Stella hard on his heels, when he went down, clattering into a white-board pinned with SOC shots of Tree Girl and Leonard Pigeon. His face was the colour of dishwater and he was breathing in stop-start gulps.

Traffic was backed up in Holland Park Avenue and in gridlock round Shepherd's Bush roundabout. They could hear the whoop of the siren, but the ambulance wasn't getting any closer. Stella got on to her knees, laced her fingers and leaned on Sorley's chest. She counted as she pumped.

*

A hospital, in the small hours, echoes and ticks. The corridors are empty, but you'll hear cries or the sound of running feet. There are deaths like sudden silences. In a side room, under white neon, people sit and wait for bad news to walk in the door.

At 2 a.m. a doctor in green scrubs told Karen Sorley that her husband was in ITC playing pitch and toss with death, but looking the likely winner. He said it would be okay for Karen to go and sit with Sorley. To Stella, he said, ‘It was you who found him.'

‘I was with him when it happened.'

‘You gave him CPR.'

‘The ambulance was backed up in traffic.'

‘It was a bad occlusion. You saved his life.' The doctor sighed and pulled off his skullcap; it was the end of his endless shift. He turned to Karen and smiled. ‘He's not a smoker at all, is he?'

Stella waited until dawn, when Karen came back to the relatives' room to say that Sorley had made it through the night.

‘It was you,' she said. ‘You saved him.'

She took Stella's hands and held them tightly, the sort of intimacy that only fear and deliverance can provoke.

‘Anyone would have done it,' Stella told her.

‘Yes, but it was you.'

A London dawn can be bright and fresh for ten minutes or more.

Harriman had driven her to the hospital, ambulance-chasing through the back streets and rat-runs, his blue light clamped to the roof-arch. Now she walked back towards the Kensals, birdsong over the low drum of engines, the morning sky criss-crossed with jet trails.

When she reached the park railings, she realized that she'd been heading there all along. The tree cast a long, morning shadow. Stella stood in its shade and looked at the trunk; it was about shoulder-height, just where Andy Greegan said it would be.

Who are you, you bastard, and why did you do that to her? What were you thinking when you hauled her up into the tree? Dirty Girl. Is that why she died? Do you think she deserved what she got?

Suddenly she was seized by a wild anger.

Who are you to be judge and executioner? I'm going to find you, you piece of shit. You shithead. You bag of shit, you're mine
.

She went home and showered and sat by the window with a coffee. Delaney came out of the bedroom and looked at her. She said, ‘Not dead.' She drank more coffee while he made eggs.

When she got to the squad room, Sue Chapman handed her the day's reports and cocked a thumb towards Sorley's office. Stella walked down the corridor and looked in. DS Brian Collier was sitting at Sorley's desk; it was nearly clear of paper. He grinned winningly.

‘Acting DI,
AMIP
-5, and trying to get a handle on all this crap.' He indicated two files, side by side in front of him. ‘Bryony Dean, know her?'

‘Missing-persons possibility. When did this happen?'

‘Last night. I got a call from the SIO. Oh,' he said, remembering the etiquette, ‘how is he?'

‘Good. Doing well. Be back at his desk pretty soon, I should think. Sorry about that.'

‘Stella… you turned down three promotion boards. And this is
Acting
DI – they're not making me up.'

‘It's fine. It's fine with me, Brian.'

‘Okay. So, I've read the case papers, but I'll need to be brought up to speed.'

‘Sure.'

‘Good. And look… it's Brian in here; in this office; it's Boss in the squad room. You understand.' He pushed the two files forward an inch or two. ‘Bryony Dean, missing persons file, follow-up by yourself and DC Harriman, your conclusion: that the girl had run off with her mother's boyfriend, have I got that right?'

‘We think the mother knew. The boyfriend reported her missing to put himself in the clear.'

‘Okay, well…' Collier paused for effect. ‘Her file's here. And there's another – it was about three deep – on someone called Elizabeth Rose Connor.' He flipped open the file covers to show the photos provided for the MPB. One had been taken at a party, the girl looking into the camera and smiling a wide smile.

Bryony.

The other was less clear: taken in a club, perhaps. The girl had a cigarette in her hand, and her gaze was beyond the camera, as if she had just spotted someone coming in.