Nobody Walks (2 page)

His first stop on reaching London had been Hoxton Police Station.

Detective Sergeant Welles, once located, had been sympathetic.

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

Bettany nodded.

“Nobody seemed to know where you were. But there was an idea you were out of the country. I’m glad you got back in time.”

Which was how he discovered the cremation was taking place that morning.

He’d sat in the back row. The chapel of remembrance was quarter-full, most of the congregation Liam’s age, none of them known to him, but an introduction contained a familiar name, Felicity Pointer. Flea, she’d called herself on the phone. She approached the lectern looking twenty-five, twenty-six, brunette and lightly olive-skinned, wearing black of course. Hardly looking at the assembled company, she read a short poem about chimney sweeps, then returned to her seat.

Watching this, Bettany had barely paid attention to the main object of interest, but looking at it now he realised that what he’d been feeling these past three days was not grief but numbness. A pair of curtains provided the backdrop, and behind them the coffin would soon pass, and there the remains of his only son would be reduced to ash and fragments of bone, to the mess of clinker
you’d find in a grate on a winter’s morning. Nothing of substance. And all Bettany could make of it was an all-consuming absence of feeling, as if he was indeed the stranger his son had made of him.

He rose and slipped out of the door.

Waiting by the trellis, it struck him that it was seven years since he’d been in London. He supposed he ought to be noticing differences, things being better or worse, but he couldn’t see much had changed. The skyline had altered, with new towers jutting heavenwards from the City, and more poised to sprout everywhere you looked. But that had always been the case. London had never been finished, and never would be. Or not by dint of new construction.

Seven years since London, three of them in Lyme. Then Hannah had died, and he’d left England. Now Liam had died, and he was back.

Welles had given him a lift here. There might have been a hidden agenda, pump the father for information, but Bettany had none to offer and the flow had gone the other way. How it had happened, for instance. Up through France, across the choppy Channel, Bettany hadn’t known the how. Of the various possibilities some kind of traffic accident had seemed most likely, Liam driving too fast on a fog-bound stretch of motorway, or a bus mounting the pavement, Liam in the wrong place. He could have called and spared himself conjecture, but that would have been to make imagination fact. Now he learned that there had been no cars involved, no buses. Liam had fallen from the window of his flat.

“Were you in close contact with your son, Mr. Bettany?”

“No.”

“So you wouldn’t know much about his lifestyle?”

“I don’t even know where he lived.”

“Not far from here.”

Which would make it N1. Not somewhere Bettany was familiar with. He gathered it was trendy, if that word was used any more, and if it wasn’t, well then. Cool. Hip. Whatever.

Had Liam been hip? he wondered. Had Liam been cool? They hadn’t spoken in four years. He couldn’t swear to any aspect of his late son’s life, down to the most basic details. Had be been gay? Vegetarian? A biker? What did he do at weekends, browse secondhand shops, looking for bargain furniture? Or hang around the clubs, looking to score? Bettany didn’t know. And while he could find out, that wouldn’t erase the indelible truth of this particular moment, the one he spent outside the chapel where Liam’s body was being fed into the flames. Here and now, he knew nothing. And still, somehow, felt less.

Overhead, a stringy scrap of smoke loosed itself from the chimney. Then another. And now here came the rest of it, billowing and scattering, a cloud for only a moment, and then nothing, and nowhere, ever again.

The chapel had both
entrance and exit, and fresh mourners were congregating at the former. Leaving them, Bettany wandered round to the back, where those who’d come for Liam were dispersing. He was the only blood relative here—there were no others. Liam, an only child, had been the son of only children. And his mother was four years dead.

Loitering under a tree, he watched Flea Pointer emerge. She was talking to an older man, himself flanked by another—flanked, as if the second man were a minder or subordinate. The first man was mid-thirties or so, and while dark suits were the order of the day his seemed of a different cut, the cloth darker, the shirt whiter. A matter of money, Bettany supposed. His short hair was fair to the point of translucence, and his wire-framed glasses tinted blue. As Bettany watched Pointer leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, her arm curling round his back for a moment, and the man tensed. He raised his hand as if to pat her on the back, but thought better of it. Releasing him, she brushed a palm across her eyes, sweeping her hair free or dabbing at tears. They exchanged inaudible words and the men moved off, down the path, through
the gate into the street, and disappeared inside a long silver car, which pulled off with barely a noise. Flea Pointer still hadn’t moved.

She was the same age as Liam had been, though unlike Liam was petite—Liam had been a tall boy, gangly, with arms and legs too spindly to know where their centre of balance lay. He’d filled as he’d grown, and had maybe kept doing so. He might have barrelled out since then. Bettany didn’t know.

As he stood thinking such things, the girl looked round and saw him.

Flea Pointer
watched Vincent Driscoll climb into the limo and pull away, Boo Berryman driving. She had felt him flinch when she put her arm round him—Vincent wasn’t much for human contact. She had forgotten that in the emotion of the moment, or else had thought that he might forget it in that same emotion. But he hadn’t, so he’d flinched, and she was left feeling gauche and adolescent, as if there weren’t enough feelings washing around her now. Tears were not far away. The world threatened to blur.

But she blinked, and it shimmied back. When vision cleared, she was looking at a man standing under a tree like a figure in a fable. He was tall, bearded, shaggy-haired, inappropriately dressed, and she wasn’t sure which of these details clinched it, but she knew he was Liam’s father. With that knowledge slotted in place, she approached him.

“Mr. Bettany?”

He nodded.

“I’m Flea—”

“I know.”

He sounded brusque, but why wouldn’t he? His son had just
been cremated. The emotion of the moment, again. She knew this could take different forms.

On the other hand, he’d never responded to her phone call. She’d dug his number out from a form at work, Liam’s next-of-kin contact. Couldn’t recall exactly what she’d said. But he’d never called back.

What he said now, though, was, “You rang me. Thank you.”

“You live abroad.”

This sounded disjointed even to her own ears.

“Liam told me,” she added.

How else would she have known? She was coming adrift from this exchange already.

“I’m so sorry, I hated to tell you like that, but I didn’t know what else to do—”

“You did the right thing.”

“I know you hadn’t been getting on. I mean, Liam said you didn’t—hadn’t—”

“We hadn’t been in touch,” Bettany said.

His gaze left hers to focus on something behind her. Without meaning to, she turned. A small group, three men, one woman, still lingered by the chapel door, but even as she registered this they began to move off. Instead of heading for the gate they walked round to the front, as if heading back inside. One of the men was carrying something. It took Flea a moment to recognise it as a thermos flask.

Liam’s father asked her, “Who was that you were talking to?”

“When?”

“He just left.”

“Oh … That was Vincent. Vincent Driscoll?”

It was clear he didn’t know who Vincent Driscoll was.

“We worked for him. Liam and I did. Well, I still do.”

She bit her lip. Tenses were awkward, in the company of the bereaved. Apologies had to be implied, for the offence of still living.

“So you were colleagues,” he said. “Doing what?”

“Vincent’s a game designer.
Shades
?”

Bettany nodded, but she could tell the name meant nothing.

Distantly, music swelled. The next service was starting. Flea Pointer had the sudden understanding that life was a conveyor belt, a slow rolling progress to the dropping-off point, and that once you’d fallen you’d be followed by the next in line. An unhappy thought, which could be shrugged off anywhere but here.

If Tom Bettany was having similar thoughts you wouldn’t know it from his expression. He seemed just barely involved in what had happened here this morning.

“Thank you,” he said again, and left. Flea watched as he headed down the path.

He didn’t look back.

In the car leaving
the crematorium Vincent Driscoll felt one of his headaches coming on, a designation his late mother had coined to distinguish Vincent’s headaches from anyone else’s. It seemed to fit. There was no denying whose headache this was. It felt like a bubble was squeezing its way through his brain.

He found his Ibuprofen, dry-swallowed a pair, and asked Boo to drive more slowly, or thought he did, and sank back. Had he actually spoken? The world through his tinted glasses, edges softened, passed by at the same speed.

Left to his own devices, he’d have avoided the service. He hated gatherings, and this one had changed nothing. Liam Bettany remained dead. Which was the kind of thing he mostly remembered not to say aloud, but there was no rule he couldn’t think it. Probably everyone had thoughts like that, the whole notion of “polite society” being little more than a hedge against honesty. Normality was rarely what it appeared. This much Vincent knew.

And this time, he definitely spoke out loud. “Boo? Could you …”

He mimed a movement, a gesture with no obvious correlation to any of the actions involved in driving a car, but which Boo Berryman, watching in the rearview mirror, interpreted correctly. He slowed down. Vincent closed his eyes.

A succession of pastel-coloured characters drifted past, walking down perfectly straight streets, lined with traditional shops. Each was armed with a shopping list, and carried a basket under an arm, and each popped into every shop in turn, in a perfectly choreographed retail ballet … A round yellow sun rose and fell in the sky behind them.

Vincent, who had dreamt up
Shades
when he was twelve, sometimes wondered how many others there were who could ascribe their entire life story to one moment, one striking thought. Einstein, perhaps. Maybe Douglas Adams. Anyway. He’d been playing Tetris, in that semi-catatonic way it induced, when he’d had the sudden sense of things having flipped—that he was the game, not the player.

That had been the spark. Everything else had taken years. But years were what he had had, this being an advantage of having your big idea young.

The car purred to a halt. Traffic lights. Various noises, muffled by thick windows, sprayed past as if fired from a shotgun. Heavy beats and pitched whistling. Sounds of metal and rubber, of the forces that drove everything. If he had ever found a form of music he enjoyed, this was when he would listen to it …

Shades
had started small, in the sense that it was a one-man show. The team he had now, marketing and packaging and all the rest—he’d had nobody then. Design had happened in his bedroom. Production, outsourced piecemeal to half a dozen tiny companies, had swallowed every penny of his mother’s legacy. The result resembled an arcade giveaway, a game fated to be bundled
up with others and sold as a lucky dip. Even the small independent he’d hired to mastermind distribution tried to talk him down. The number of titles coming onto the market, if you didn’t get traction in the first quarter, you were history. He’d be better off using it on a CV, blagging his way into a job with one of the big boys. But he’d insisted on going ahead.

And it had started small, too, in the sense that not many people bought it. Turned on its head, though—the way Vincent liked to look at things—what this meant was, it was bought only by those who bought everything, which was fine by him. A steady trickle diminishing to a drip, but fine by him. Because, monitoring the comment boards, Vincent knew nobody had cracked it. If that happened and the trickle remained a trickle, he’d know he’d failed. But until then, everyone else had.

Besides, Vincent knew gamers. Gamers were essentially kids, and didn’t throw games away. They swapped them and left them gathering dust and stacked them in towers twenty jewelcases high, but they didn’t throw them away because that was an adult trait. And games that didn’t get thrown away eventually got played again, once they were old enough to have regained novelty value.

The big danger was the format would become extinct, and that had given him a bad night or two, had tempted him to nudge events himself, and post his own message.

But not long after the game’s first birthday, everything changed.

Vincent picked it up on a gamers’ board.

anyone cracked Shades?

When he’d read this, something shifted inside him.

Home. Sometimes
Vincent waited for Boo to open the door, but today he was out of the car before the electronic gates whumped
shut. In the kitchen he ran the tap to make sure the water was cold, then filled a glass. This he drained without turning the tap off. He filled a second, and drank that too. Then a third. His headache decreased to a background grumble. He filled a fourth glass and carried it back into the sitting room, which covered most of the ground floor. Boo was just coming in, and flashed him a concerned look. Vincent shook his head, meaning leave him alone. Boo carried straight on into the kitchen, where Vincent heard him turn the tap off. Vincent loosened his tie and sank into a chair.

Above another sofa was a picture, seven foot by four, of a cartoon dog. Some cartoon dogs look intelligent, others dim or violent. Some manage sexy. This one pulled off the relatively simple trick of being nondescript, an expressionless brown mongrel, captured in the act of walking against a two-tone background, the lower half grey, the upper yellow. Those who knew the dog recognised these shades for what they were, which was pavement and wall. And nobody who didn’t know the dog had ever seen the picture, so alternative interpretations had never been offered.