What I Tell You In the Dark (19 page)

And so I am forced to watch her walk away, my only hope
disappearing into what, just a few short days ago, had seemed to me a luminous bastion of truth and integrity.

‘Jesus Christ,' he says to me, ‘get a grip on yourself. You look like you're about to cry.' He sounds positively delighted at the prospect.

‘Stop calling me that,' I whisper, unable to look him in the eyes.

‘Oh I'm sorry, painful memories?'

I have seen this happen so many times, people coming face to face with their torturers and finding themselves suddenly drained of the rage that sustains them. And now it's happening to me – his physical presence is simply too much to bear, too resonant of everything he did to me. I am paralysed by it – the dog that tires of barking and just wants to lick your hand. I hate myself but I cannot stop it.

Still I stare down at the ground.

Having a nose for weakness, he leans forward so his face is only inches from mine. ‘Don't worry, pipsqueak, I'm not going to hurt you this time. Not like that, anyway.' He takes a step back and straightens up before me, his clothes perfectly creased, not a hair out of place. ‘The game's changed – I'm going to shut you down a different way.'

‘You'll have to kill me,' I find the strength to say.

He laughs at this. ‘Aren't you just precious?' I feel his meaty palm pat my head. ‘No, no, I'm afraid I won't be doing anything like that – more's the pity. It's been decades since I so much as set foot on the earth, let alone laid a finger on one of these …' he doesn't deign to put a word on it, he just gestures in the direction of some passing people. ‘Only a halfwit like you would think about jumping in during this day and age.' He chuckles at this thought, shaking his head.

I start to feel some of that fortifying hatred trickle back into me. ‘Don't try to make out that He parachutes you in like you're
some kind of consultant – we both know what you are. You're a two-bit killer, always were, always will be.'

Forgetting himself, he snatches me up by the throat and rams me against the wall. I look wildly about for someone to raise the alarm but the street is momentarily empty. Then he drops me just as suddenly as he grabbed me, and watches me crouching on the pavement, spluttering and coughing.

‘Why would I kill a footnote like you?' He takes a second to light a cigarette and take a long, contemplative drag. ‘Because that's what you are, son,' he blows smoke down into my face, ‘a footnote, an irrelevance. Do you honestly think He gave a second's thought to casting you out?' He makes a kind of
pfff
sound. ‘You are so deluded – it's tragic. No one's been looking at you and your pointless abominations. They've been watching the assets. They're always watching the assets. It just so happened that you managed to bungle your way close enough to something important for me to have to jump in and sort it out.'

Here he breaks off and looks around in disgust. ‘Do you have any idea …' the coast is still clear, so he aims a quick, hard kick into my stomach, grunting the word
idea
as his shoe connects with my gut ‘… how much I hate …' again he swings in his foot, this time on
hate
‘… jumping into this freak show?'

I can taste the rust of blood in my mouth along with the bile. My breathing is hectic and shallow. I can hear myself making a little noise as I struggle to get the air into my lungs. I sound like a rusty hinge.

He flicks his cigarette at me. ‘Get up.'

When I don't respond he leans down and drags me to my feet. He then positions his body in such a way that anyone walking along the pavement behind us wouldn't properly see me. It would look like we're just standing off to one side, deep in conversation.

From inside the expensive folds of his coat a phone starts ringing.

‘Saint-Clair,' he says, all businesslike.

I can hear Natalie's voice on the other end. He keeps his eyes fixed on mine as he instructs her to remain where she is, and tells her that no, there's no need for her to speak to me. He's loving this. He wants me to hear this commanding way he talks to her, he wants me to understand that he has power over her. It's his chance for a bit of payback after what happened last time, when he tried to chase off Maryam as she wailed at the foot of my cross. Even the other Roman soldiers thought he was out of line, in fact they were about to wade in and put a stop to it (because there are always lines that can't be crossed, even on days like that), but as it turned out, they didn't need to. She took care of it on her own. She clocked him a sweet sucker punch right in the throat (a little tradecraft from her bad old days, no doubt), and there was nothing he could do about it. Obviously, though, not something he's forgotten about.

‘The way she fawns to authority,' he says to me as he flips shut the phone, ‘it's pitiful.'

I feel deeply nauseous.

‘You know,' he continues breezily, ‘I've barely been off this thing all day.' He still has the phone in his hand. ‘First of all there was my call to Ben Zetterling – you do know who that is, don't you?'

I can't think straight. ‘I don't remember. Leave me alone.'

‘Oh come now.'

‘Please. Just leave me alone.'

‘Yes, yes,' he says thoughtfully, ‘I will be leaving you very much alone, but all in good time. First, though, I must tell you about my conversation with Ben: you see, he wasn't sure who you were either. But don't worry, I soon set him straight. I told him
all
about you. And he was frankly astonished at my tale, the way you had emailed all those highly confidential, extremely sensitive documents to us at the newspaper, and how you had
used his email account to do it. That was the part, I think, that he found most extraordinary of all – I had to tell him twice.'

He reaches down and wrenches up my chin, which I had dropped down against my chest in a kind of a daze, just staring at the ground.

‘Criminal, he called it. Unlawful. Unbelievable – yes, that was the word he used the most.
It's just unbelievable
, he kept saying to me. And yet,' he gives me a gentle, almost playful little slap, ‘I felt bound to point out to him that it was all too believable, all too real.
A very grave matter
, I said to him. It would have been remiss of me to have done anything less. I even offered him my advice on what should be done next.
This
, I told him,
is a matter for the police
. And he couldn't have agreed more.' He lights another cigarette and waves it absently in the air between us. ‘I imagine they are looking into it at this very moment.'

He makes the occasional little stabbing motion with his hand, darting the glowing tip of his cigarette towards my face. I can't help but flinch back from him. He seems satisfied with this reaction.

‘Needless to say, Ben was mightily relieved when I told him that there was simply no way that a newspaper like ours would even for a second consider the use of such material. I was at pains to impress that on him. That, and the fact that our reporter had in no way, shape or form solicited it. And what do you think she had to say about that, the lovely Natalie? What do you think she said to me?'

He has allowed me to drop my head again. I'm not even going to try to respond, and nor am I expected to.

He just rolls right into it, ‘Nothing. Not one solitary word. She just nodded her little head and went about her business.' He bends his knees so he's level with my cowering. ‘It's this Leveson, he's got them all worked up about where their information's coming from. Doesn't matter what's true, all that matters is how
you got it. It's the lawyers who are piping the tune now, son – you didn't really reckon on that, did you?'

I have no idea what he's talking about. I mean, yes, I remember the name from the television news, and I vaguely recall the man's bespectacled dome, microphones sprouting up to it like tendrils pulled towards the sun. But as to what he said, I couldn't even begin to tell you. It was the kind of voice that almost wills you not to listen.

‘It's a shame,' he says, almost too quietly to hear. He seems to have forgotten I'm there. ‘It's a shame we had to change everything. It used to be so straightforward …' He grinds out the butt of his cigarette beneath his shoe ‘… just snuffing out the difficult characters.' He looks at me again, ‘But I don't do that anymore. People don't want the blood and thunder anymore,' he tells me ruefully, ‘at least not from us, anyway.' He gives me a strange, almost apologetic smile. ‘It ruins it for everybody – takes the poetry out of it. It robs it of that …' he twiddles his hand in the air ‘… that epic quality.'

He's contemplating me with something almost approaching warmth. ‘You remember how it was – the good old days …' He shakes his packet of cigarettes at me. ‘Smoke?' I just stare at him. He takes one out for himself and pops it in his mouth. ‘Yeah, the good old days,' he mutters as he lights it. ‘When I think of the number I did on you – remember?' He grins at this shared nostalgia. ‘Man, I really worked you over.'

‘The … number …?' But I only manage to hiccup the words. To my immense irritation, I have begun to cry, and the more I try to stop, the more the tears keep coming, burbling up from a well-stocked source.

His grin broadens until he is positively beaming. ‘It really suits you, this new life you've chosen,' he says.

I'm trying desperately to regain my composure but all I can think about is Abaddon, the way he was on that day – the day
he did his ‘number' on me. I hadn't even known it was him at first. At Gethsemane, at the Praetorium, he just hung back in the rank and file with the other soldiers. I remember noticing him, though, those eyes watching my every moment, and the murderous hunch of his shoulders, but it was only as the morning wore on and the journey to my crucifixion began that he started to reveal himself to me.

I am putting you back
. Those were his first words to me, as he pushed that thorny tangle into my scalp.
You know who I am
, he said into my ear. Not a question, a statement. And the moment he said it, I understood what was happening to me. I understood that he would use every second of these final hours on earth to visit unspeakable pain on me. And if there is one thing that Abaddon knows, it is pain. The atrocities he committed at His behest were infamous among us. We all knew that he'd waded knee-deep in gore at the Assyrian camp. In that baptism he discovered the esoteric pleasures of violence. And from there he refined that understanding to an addiction. It became a passion. A holy passion for pain. And so by the time my day came around, he was a past master at it. He manipulated those soldiers with clinical precision, worming into the crawl-space of their minds, urging them towards greater cruelties. Under Abaddon's approving gaze, they tore my back to ribbons with their whips, they battered fractures into my arms and legs with wooden rods. I wasn't even carrying the beam of my cross when I finally collapsed, it wasn't about that – I just couldn't go on, I was hysterical, very near to death already at that point. And yet still he yapped and goaded like a hyena, and still they beat me.

Everyone was afraid of how he looked
. That's what was written, how they remember it now, in all the churches and the pictures, making a festival of my beasting.
He did not even look human
.
Nobody would recognise him as a man
.

So by the time they were driving the nails through my feet, I was just babbling. Anything, anything to make them stop. But they wouldn't stop. Even as my heart surrendered its final beats to my flooded chest, he was still there, conducting the mocking and the jeering and the spitting. God's most decorated soldier, bullying me towards an unthinkable death.

‘You're psychotic,' I croak, shuffling backwards in an attempt to get away from him but bumping into the wall.

He nods slowly, like he takes my point. ‘And you? What is your part in all this? Tell me – I'm genuinely interested to know what you think you're achieving here, among the people.'

‘I'm telling them the truth.'

‘Oh, are you really? And why do you think they need to hear this truth?' He mimics my voice when he says
truth
, making me sound high-pitched and womanish.

‘I promised them something they can never have, and I –'

‘And you
what
?' He snaps, right back up close again, in the space where he likes to be, just inches away from me. ‘There
is
no you,' he exhales the sourness of these words right into my face. This time, though, I force myself not to look away. ‘None of this, none of anything, is about you.'

He desperately wants to hit me – he is almost quivering with the effort of restraint. I'm just hoping that passers-by might notice it too, the way he is standing over me like a wolf.

‘The truth, you spectacularly misguided little renegade, is that it doesn't
matter
what you promised them. No one cares. No one cares what happens to them now, no one cares what happens to them when they die – it affects nothing. They're just weeds. They sprout up, they rot back down. And so
you
,' he grabs me by my shoulders and shakes me hard so my head whips back against the wall ‘do not get to start meddling in it. It is not
your
story,' again he snaps my head back, ‘to tell.' My ears begin to buzz, still he looms.

He's about to say more but finally someone, a man, has come to help me. He is standing behind Abaddon. He clears his throat.

‘Is everything alright here?' the man asks.

I look with plaintive gratitude at him as he dances around through the shimmer of fresh tears.

‘Go away,' Abaddon says to him without turning around.

‘I'm sorry but I –'

‘I
said
,' and this time he does turn around, ‘Go. Away.'