Why We Die (22 page)

I didn
’
t see stars. You
’
re supposed to see stars, aren
’
t you? Well,
I didn
’
t. There
’
s no end to the disappointments in life. What
I saw, for what felt like a second or two, was nothing at all, was
a big black nowhere. I could have stepped into it quite easily. If
I had, everything would have been different . . . I’d have woken
up later, and he’d have been . . . Well, I don’t know what he
would have been. It would be nice to think he’d be sorry. But
I think the most he’d have been was still alive.

For whatever it was – a second, two – I stood in the kitchen
waiting for everything to make sense again. I couldn’t see him.
I could sense his presence, though, close but not touching. It was
a sunny morning, did I mention that? The kitchen must have
been full of sunlight. But not right that moment.

I tried to take a step, almost fell, and must have staggered to
the draining board, because next thing, I was leaning against it
. . . I think I threw up into the sink. You’d probably know more
about that than me. That would be forensics, yes? . . . Anyway.
There was a pain that started on the surface and worked its way
to the centre of my head, and however much you know about
violence, sergeant, or whatever your rank is, I hope you’ve never
felt anything like it. Because it felt life-ruining. It felt like a new
permanence.

He came to me. And I wasn’t sure . . . I don’t know what he
intended to do, sergeant. Take that as a confession, if you like.
I have no idea what he intended. Usually, once he’d hit me, he
made himself scarce. When he came back, we’d pretend an
accident had occurred in his absence. Not that we gave names to
it. We simply failed to acknowledge the truth. But once in a
while his better self, or whatever you’d call it, would seize him
before he’d left, and then he’d take me in his arms, and make
promises . . . That didn’t happen often. But like I say, I don’t
know his intent. All I know is, I was very very hurt, very very
frightened. He’d never hit me so hard before. He’d never slammed
a door in my face. He’d crossed a line, and I wasn’t sure he
knew his way back.

Perhaps you could say I’d been pushed across the same line
.

Unfreezing, she got to her feet, crossed the room without a sound, and flung open the door. Jonno was there, on his knees on the landing; looking, for a foolish moment, exactly what he was: a kid, embarrassed to be caught doing what he was doing.

Which was sliding a pizza from a box on to a plate. The plate sat on a tray. The tray also held a glass of red wine.

No doubt, if he’d had access to a single rose, he’d have laid it across the base of the glass.

‘I thought you might be hungry,’ he said after a moment.

‘That’s sweet,’ she said. ‘Did you bake it yourself?’

‘No, I –’ And here it was: the flush. But he had the composure to come up with something. ‘I took it out the box, though. That’s the tricky bit, know what I mean?’

‘Thank you, Jonno.’

‘I figured you’d rather eat up here.’

‘Thank you, Jonno.’

He got to his feet, and handed her the tray. She took it, restraining herself from making a little curtsy as she did so.

‘I hope you enjoy it.’

‘You’re doing a great job, Jonno.’

‘I’ll be downstairs if you need me.’

Helen likes you, Jonno. It’s her job to give you a hard time. This was what Katrina didn’t say as she carried her supper into her room.

Downstairs, the bell rang again.

It was as if it found its own way into my hand. You think I
’
m
trying to avoid responsibility, don
’
t you? And you
’
re right
because . . . because this really was not my fault. Not right then.
Not with lightning
fl
ashing in my head, and my whole body
scared it would happen again any moment . . .

I don
’
t remember reaching for it, that
’
s what I really mean.
There was nothing deliberate about the way it fetched up in my
hand. It was just the
fi
rst thing there when I needed to hold on
to something.

He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. I still have the
bruise.

There was noise in my head, white noise. The kind that
blankets everything, like a migraine, so you can
’
t see or hear and
don
’
t know what
’
s happening.

I had the impression he was talking, but the words weren
’
t
making it through. It was like being in a fog, hearing cannon in
the distance . . . There were big sounds going on, but everything
was muf
fl
ed by the weather inside.

He shook me, and jolted my back teeth . . . I remember the way
they clacked together, sending a shock through every bone.
I couldn
’
t see him, but I felt him move, and all I could imagine
was, he was about to punch or slap me, continue punishing me
for whatever it was I
’
d done. Which was simply be there . . .
I was there and I was his. Anything I did that he didn
’
t approve
of was automatically an infraction, do you see? He was allowed
to punish. It wasn
’
t his privilege, it was his right. It was almost
his duty.

I put my hand out, and he walked straight into me. It was as
if he couldn
’
t see I was holding a knife.

. . . Do you remember what I said about the sword in the
stone? That if I could slide each knife into its slot
fi
rst go, I
’
d be
a princess? Well, this one found its slot straight away. All those
bones it could have glanced off, but . . .

I didn
’
t feel like a princess, though. Instead, I felt

Arkle turned the tape off.

They were in the van again; rain bouncing off the roof. Arkle pressed eject, and the tape slipped into his hand the way it had back in Helen Coe’s flat, when he’d removed it from her machine; fingers tingling, as they still did now. Adrenalin buzz. She had given him, by then, the address he needed. She had had little choice. It was unsurprising how easy it was to make people do things; it exactly fitted Arkle’s view of how the world worked. People bent and broke without difficulty, and on the whole were pleased to do things that made the breaking stop.

This woman, downstairs. The journalist. She wouldn
’
t let it
happen to her, you only have to look at her to know that . . . To
know she believes that
.

Whatever. She’d stopped believing it now.

Trent said, ‘That one. On the corner.’

He double-parked opposite the house: end of the row, with a lane bending round the back. It was three storeys high, with lights burning on each floor.

‘Just the two of them, right?’ asked Trent. His face was pulled into a Hallowe’en grin, but he probably couldn’t help it.

‘Kay and a boy. He makes the tea.’

‘And Coe won’t have called the cops or anything?’

Arkle said, ‘Trust me. She won’t have called the cops.’

Not without psychic intervention, she wouldn’t.

Staring through the windshield, Trent said, ‘You didn’t kill her, did you?’

Arkle said, ‘All I meant was, I left her trussed up. On her sofa.’

‘. . . Okay.’

‘And I pulled her landline out and took her mobile. See?’

He showed Trent Helen Coe’s mobile.

‘. . . Okay.’

But Arkle, thought Trent, hadn’t actually said he didn’t kill her. Taking the mobile was something he’d have done anyway. Arkle didn’t altogether approve of mobiles, and definitely objected to other people having them.

And then Trent had an even worse thought, which was: What if he
hadn
’
t
killed her? No way in the world was she not going to know it was Arkle. She’d seen him once already. Leaving her alive was like signing a neon confession.

But there was the money to think about. Revenge for Baxter, too. But also the money.

‘. . . Fuckin’ lot of money,’ he mumbled, as his train of thought audibly derailed.

‘Yeah,’ said Arkle. ‘Revenge for Baxter, too.’

He described his plan, which was not complicated, then got out and crossed to the house where Kay was hiding, and rang its doorbell.

Jonno called up the stairs: ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’ She’d come out on to her landing. Jonno hadn’t ordered another pizza. It wouldn’t be the police again: not this time of night . . .

Kids. One of the local drunks or druggies, looking for a handout. Or somebody lost, wanting directions. Collecters for Christian Aid or Shelter; trick-or-treaters; carol singers . . . Anyone, basically. Anyone except who she already knew it was.

‘Maybe you should stay quiet while I answer it.’

‘Why don’t you call the police, Jonno?’

He said, ‘Because it’s only somebody ringing the bell. What are they gunna do, send the flying squad?’

‘It’s not who you think, Jonno. They’re not interested in stealing your story.’

‘You think I’m just a kid, don’t you?’

‘I don’t think anything right now, Jonno, except that you should call the police.’ She could hear her voice rising as panic bit into her. ‘You were there when we were talking about his brothers? That’s who it is, Jonno. His brothers.’

Jonno fell silent; a silence broken immediately by the doorbell ringing again.

‘They couldn’t possibly know where you are.’

‘No. Not possibly. That’s who it is, though.’

‘You’re nervous, that’s all. And it’s late, and –’

‘Jonno. That is fucking Arkle Dunstan at the door, and if you let him in, he’ll kill me.’

‘Then I won’t let him in,’ said Jonno reasonably. ‘And I’ll call the police. But I can’t do that without knowing it’s him, can I? It would be . . .’

It would be embarrassing.

‘Jonno . . .’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Please. Don’t answer the door.’

And knew immediately that that had been the last thing to say; that what a kid like Jonno was dying to hear was what you didn’t want him to do, so he could do it, and prove you wrong.

‘It’ll be okay,’ he said, and the next she heard his feet were on the stairs, dancing down two flights.

She’d have retreated into her room then, but her hands stayed glued to the banister. Strange things happened – life, for instance, had arranged it that she end up in a barely furnished house, waiting for the hammer to fall – and it might be that here was another of them, and the bellringer was indeed a trick-or-treater/bleeding heart/ lost wanderer: anyone. Anyone but Arkle. But she stayed glued to the banister anyway, while the truth emerged a few floors below. Jonno hit the hallway with a whump, as if he’d leaped the last stairs in his eagerness to put her heart to rest. She heard him open the door and say something, though she couldn’t make out what – it was too big a drop; there was too much space between them. Then came a noise which didn’t sound like anything in particular, though it involved bone. And then came another whump as Jonno hit the hallway again, this time with his body.

Her hands pulled free of the banister as the front door clicked back into place. For a moment there was silence, then she heard footsteps making their way across the hall, and up the stairs. She thought she was imagining the rough breathing accompanying the ascent, then understood it was real, and her own. That and the beat of her heart: he had all the time in the world. It wasn’t like hiding would make a difference. He could track her blindfold, drawn by the volume of her panic.

With nowhere to go, she retreated into her room. The most she could do was jam the door closed then scream out of the window: judging by the area’s nocturnal activities, the police might hear of this sometime in the next fortnight. But before she could get this far, the window was opening; was being pushed up from the outside, and through the gap a woman with pale skin and dark wet curly hair was climbing; a woman with a round red mark on her forehead, as if she’d been struck there recently. She hauled herself over the sill and stood up straight.

‘Where is he?’ she asked.

Katrina pointed.

‘Put some shoes on,’ the woman said, then went out on to the landing.

Chapter Eight

i

You do this quickly, else you won’t do it at all. Fear hides in corners, and once it leaps you’re caught forever. So Zoë bounced out of the room, put one hand to the banister, and launched herself down to the next landing in a single movement. Arkle, two steps below, looked up in surprise, astonishment – something, anyway, which was replaced almost immediately by pain as she kicked him in the throat. There followed a second’s gravity-grasping charade before he tumbled down the stairs. Zoë shouted, ‘Bring the chair,’ then rushed up to fetch it herself.

Katrina, shoes on, burst from her room holding the wooden chair by its neck.

Grabbing it, Zoë jumped back down the stairs. On the landing below, Arkle Dunstan was getting up, both hands to his throat. Zoë hit him so hard with the chair its legs broke, then threw what was left at his head. ‘Now,’ she shouted. Katrina came clattering down behind her, to the hallway where Jonno lay in a confused heap. The front door was open. Zoë pushed Katrina through it; slammed it behind them. Down for the count Arkle might be, but she wanted barriers in place regardless.

‘This way.’

She hauled Katrina, who’d been about to head left, off to the right instead, and even as she did, spotted the white van idling over the road with the remaining Dunstan brother at its wheel. He saw them too. Visible questions –
who how what where
– crossed his face, then he snapped to life, and the van’s motor roared. ‘Round the back,’ Zoë shouted, but Katrina was way ahead of her; had turned the corner before the van kangarooed forward, narrowly missing the car parked opposite. Zoë lit up as its headlights found her, and then she too was round the corner, two yards behind Katrina. ‘Down the lane,’ she tried to shout: the words came out an incoherent roar. But Katrina understood and swung left again, down the back lane the nightclub revellers favoured. She pulled further away on the straight, while Zoë’s smokey years dragged her back: her feet like lead; her lungs stone-filled buckets. There was a car waiting at the far end. She picked up speed as the van cornered too, its lights peeling her from the darkness like a moth. And something caught her foot . . . For a moment she was airborne. And next she knew she was sprawled headlong, and the van was almost upon her.

This is not how you
’
re going to die
.

It was a moment for ignoring everything, except the absolute need to be moving. The van at her back; her scraped hands and knees . . . All that mattered was to be moving, so with those same scraped hands, scraped knees, she launched herself. Up ahead, Katrina had stopped: a matter of yards, a hundred miles away. Headlights swallowed Zoë. The van behind her was a light-breathing juggernaut. She could feel it at her spine as she bent double into her sprint, aching for the finish . . . Swore ever after that she felt its kiss one split moment before clearing the concrete bollards that guarded the end of the lane.

There was a tearing sound as the van crunched to a halt: spat glass and furious rubber; a noise like a dustbin hitting a wall. Something bounced away to Zoë’s left. Ahead, the car waited, doors open. She scrambled in behind Katrina. ‘Go.’ As it pulled off she looked back at the van, which was reversing from the concrete soldier. One of its headlights was out, and its front had been radically reshaped. Smoke drifted across the scene like a last-minute special effect.

From the driver’s seat, Tim Whitby said, ‘Are you all right?’

Zoë opened her mouth to reply, and closed it again when she realized he was speaking to Katrina.

They were on the M40 before Katrina Blake started asking questions.

‘What just happened?’ was her first.

Tim, who’d been waiting, said, ‘That guy who came after you? He’s Ar –’

‘I know,’ Katrina said. ‘I was married to his brother.’

‘Oh. Yes. Sorry.’

Zoë said, ‘I don’t think he had friendly intentions.’

‘You climbed up the outside of the house.’

‘It seemed the easiest way of getting past him.’

‘We saw you through the window,’ Tim put in. ‘I’d have climbed up, but Zoë –’

‘You were in the hotel in Oxford.’

‘Tim,’ said Tim. ‘Whitby,’ he added.

‘You, I don’t know.’

‘Boehm,’ said Zoë. ‘Zoë,’ she added.

‘How did you find me?’

Tim said, ‘Zoë did.’

Katrina looked at Zoë.

‘A friend of Zoë’s,’ Tim amended. ‘She must be, what? Twelve?’

‘Fourteen,’ said Zoë, checking the view behind them. Through a rainlit blur of lights in motion, she could identify nothing that was positively following. ‘I think you’re missing a few important details.’

But Tim had latched on to this as the key issue: how they’d found Katrina, with everywhere to choose from. ‘Vicky’s a hacker. A computer whiz?’ Katrina’s expression indicated that she was familiar with basic vocabulary. ‘Sorry. She traced their van. We tracked it because . . . Well, because we didn’t know what they were driving otherwise.’

Katrina said, ‘Leaving aside for the moment why you were trying to find me in the first place, are you seriously telling me some fourteen-year-old plucked one white van out of the ether?’

Zoë, still studying the road, said, ‘It seemed likely that whichever newspaper had hidden you would have picked a city to do it in. They make for better hiding places. London was an obvious choice.’

‘It’s the biggest.’

‘With the most surveillance. My friend hacked the congestion charge system. She found the Dunstans’ van late this morning, entering the zone. We’ve been following them for the past three hours.’ She shrugged. ‘Sometimes the odds pay off.’

‘And Arkle? How did he find me?’

Spray thrashed the windscreen as they passed a sixteen-wheeler.

After a while, Zoë said, ‘If it was me, I’d have gone through the paper. The
Chronicle
. Journalist, accountant, something like that.’

‘Helen,’ Katrina said.

Zoë didn’t reply. When Arkle had come out of that last place, before leading them to the safe house, he’d carried himself like a man who’d just enjoyed violent exercise.

‘Arkle will have hurt her,’ Katrina said after a while.

‘We’ll find out in the morning,’ Zoë said.

Her bones ached; her palms were raw and stinging. When Katrina subsided into silence Zoë closed her eyes, and was instantly back in her coffin: that cold hungry space which had swallowed her whole. She didn’t know how long she’d lain inside; only knew that when Tim opened its lid to release her, her throat had felt like torn sandpaper, and she’d expected to be spitting blood. Instead, she had found herself in a decommissioned freezer which sat between an old workbench and a wardrobe with its doors removed; all three beneath a carport-cum-shelter with a corrugated plastic roof. A two-foot-high stone frog with a crack in its head crouched to one side. And beyond it lurked the hearse; its grille gaping wide as a skull’s mortal grin.
Could
have been me
it was saying. That, or
How
you
doin
’
?

She couldn’t believe she was back in the world: on shaky legs, on solid earth. When she’d looked at Tim, who sensibly stood back in case she savaged him, he’d seemed limned in light, like a man in a doorway. It had taken a moment to recognize the faded chinos, the black jacket; the man she’d saved from Arkle Dunstan with an apple . . . And now she opened her eyes again, and was in a car speeding from London: Tim Whitby’s car. Her time in a counterfeit coffin was behind her, and whatever didn’t kill her made her stronger.

Whatever did kill her would fuck her up no end, of course.

Lights splashed all around, blurred or polished by the kaleidoscopic rain. Way off the motorway, a lonely pair of beams explored the wilderness, scratching a route through the dark. On a distant hillside, a garage floated on a tide of nothing, its overhead spotlights pooling on an invisible forecourt. These would be places the dead gathered; empty places, hungry for life. Places which left lights blazing, in the hope of company.

Zoë did not believe in ghosts, on the reasonable ground that they don’t exist, but she was acquainted with the dead, and knew that the space between them and the living was a heartbeat thick. The dead were in the next room, as the comforting lie had it. If so, death was the party wall. And the older you got, the more time you spent leaning against it, wondering if you heard murmuring from the other side; and knowing that it would collapse one day, perhaps when you least expected. Or worse, when you most did. Two nights ago, she’d put a hand through that wall, only to pull it back – frozen, aching, but still attached. Possibly, there had been moments when her life had come closer to ending; episodes she could never know about – the virus shunned by the healthy cells; the multi-car pile-up that didn’t happen. All the accidents that wait round the corners we choose not to take. But she’d never before felt so trenchantly that this was it; the dim and distant become the here and now. When the lid lifted, she thought for a moment her heart had burst. It was something she would never speak of to anybody.

White eyes bore into her own across the central divide; grew the size of comets, then hurled past, leaving a red blur in their wake. If she relaxed, the car’s motion might rock her to sleep, but she doubted it. She didn’t like being a passenger; felt it incumbent upon her to remain alert, in case of emergencies. Though Tim was doing a reasonable job . . . It had been for Tim’s sake that she had looked for Katrina. He had freed her, so she owed him. She recognized, too, a certain quality in his determination to track Katrina down: something – duty or guilt – that wouldn’t subside until satisfied. Zoë had known similar hungers. Trying to convince him they couldn’t be quelled would have been futile. Besides, Tim Whitby had the air of a man coming awake after haunted sleep, and Zoë didn’t have the right to get in his way.

The reason she’d climbed the wall to Katrina’s room, though, had more to do with her life-sized fears the other night . . .

Tim said, ‘You still awake?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nearly there.’

She knew. But knew, too, that his reason for speaking was just to hear a voice reply, so said, ‘Thanks, Tim.’

. . . The reason she’d climbed that wall had been that Arkle Dunstan had almost scared her to death. It must have been Arkle Dunstan. Zoë had a small round bruise on her forehead where he’d hit her with, she guessed, the heel of a torch, before dumping her in the freezer and taking off. She could have died. Worse, she could have died knowing it was happening: locked inside her fear as securely as she was boxed in a no-longer functioning device. It was the fear that reverberated. The chances of her winding up in a freezer twice were reasonably remote; the memory of the fear, she’d carry forever. And Zoë hated that notion; belonged to the school that would have forced her back on the horse, though she’d never belonged to a school where there’d been horses. She’d climbed the wall to show she wasn’t scared, and it didn’t have to be true to make the point. She’d been scared, but had done it anyway. She might live with fear, but she damn well wasn’t tidying up after it.

When Tim had released her, he’d been full of garbled stories: that Arkle Dunstan had burst out of the front door, and looked up and down the street as if expecting someone. That he’d gone back in and re-emerged moments later with a bandaged man who must have been Trent: they’d got in their van and driven away. That somebody else had passed by, but Tim wasn’t too coherent on the subject, because what he wasn’t saying was what seeing Arkle had felt like – the man who’d terrorized him with the crossbow: a nightmare given flesh. Tim must have shrunk behind his windscreen; hoped he was invisible, the way a child hopes, if he keeps his foot clear of the floor, that the monster won’t grab him. When you were a child, that often worked. In the grown-up world it wasn’t a sure thing. Zoë was thankful Tim had held out long enough to be there when she needed him.

He had heard her thumping the sides of the freezer . . . At first, he’d thought it had been coming from the hearse. This with a laugh that lasted longer than it needed to. As he’d opened the lid to release her, he’d wondered if he was making a grave mistake.

And then had turned and seen, through the window into the back room, old man Blake watching them, a totally unreadable expression on his face.

Zoë blinked. They were coming off the motorway, a few miles from Oxford. She wondered whether the old man had actually been watching, or just staring out blankly, fazed by the disturbance . . . Tim had helped her to his car and brought her home. As for her own car, Jeff’s car: that was still in the car park in Totnes, unless it had been stripped and redistributed since. Something else she was trying not to think about.

The rain had eased. The road narrowed. Big empty buildings appeared, lit only in the stairwells. Road signs promised twenty-four-hour shopping at the next junction, or perhaps the one after. When Zoë glanced at Katrina, she seemed to be sleeping, though it was hard to be sure. The shadows that played across her as they drove into the city simulated movement, or perhaps disguised it. It depended on how you looked at things.

ii

‘Why did you come looking for me?’

Zoë said, ‘Tim came looking. I helped, that’s all.’

‘Are you lovers?’

‘No.’

Katrina said, ‘You were lucky, you know. With Arkle, I mean.’

‘I know.’

‘You took him by surprise.’

‘Perhaps I should have given him a warning.’

‘All I meant was, it won’t be so easy next time.’

‘There’ll be a next time?’

‘He won’t stop looking for me just because you knocked him over.’

‘But maybe I won’t be there next time he finds you.’

‘No. But maybe Tim will.’

Zoë said, ‘Tim’s got some stuff he’s getting over, I don’t know the details. But he seems pretty decent. I’m sure he’ll do his best not to let you down.’

‘That’s good.’

‘On the other hand, Arkle Dunstan’ll make mincemeat of him.’

‘Yes.’ Katrina put down her glass, and looked around. Took in the minimal furnishings; the shady lighting. They were in Zoë’s sitting room. Both were drinking water. Katrina had turned down the offer of food. ‘You live here alone.’