Why We Die (7 page)

. . . Katrina Blake, then. What was she doing in his dreams? And where had her bruise come from: oh, right, the cupboard door. Tim tried to retrieve exactly what she’d said about that, but all he could recall was that it had been a long detailed answer to a question he hadn’t asked. A prepared story; one he’d failed to respond to adequately.

I think some of us are just accident prone
, she’d said.

And had gone on to talk about her husband.

No huge leap in logic was required. It needed a leap in emotional understanding, that was all: a jump back in time to a point where this had been a language he’d been versed in; one he’d spoken at home – the ability to understand what was meant when a subject was talked around, not over. The ability to read between lines, and interpret silences. So say it was true, say it was so – say her husband beat her up. Why, then, would she talk to a strange man in a hotel dining room? Tim wished his recall extended beyond that bruise, that dress; the vague recollection of a voice deeper than expected.

Do you come here often?
Had she really said that?

Tim thought he’d remember if she had looked at him with those forgotten-coloured eyes and said, ‘Help me. Please. My husband beats me up.’

And what business was it of his anyway?

But that was a question for another time. Meanwhile, there was the other fragment that had pushed its way to the surface of his mind; the one he’d found there when he’d woken – Had she come far?

Totnes. Do you know it?

He didn’t. He did. He’d never been there. He knew where it was.

Voices from the staff room told him the shift was changing. It must be the lunch hour. For the first time in a while, Tim Whitby felt the stirrings of appetite; something that reached beyond the body’s automatic response to time passing. For the first time in a while, he had a plan which stretched beyond the first drink of the day.

He would go to Totnes. He would find Katrina Blake.

He would do this tomorrow.

Meanwhile, he’d have lunch.

Chapter Three

i

Men are good at watching and waiting. Zoës, less so. With men, it was doubtless something primitive; a lonely instinct programmed for the forest, where the ability to remain motionless and alert meant the difference between feast and fast. With Zoë, it was straightforward biology: she wasn’t designed for taking a leak in a bottle. So she’d done the next best thing, and lied.

‘It’s for the council. They’re actioning antisocial driving.’
Actioning
was a good local government word, like
prioritize
or
backhander
. ‘I’m taking notes of illegal turns, double parking. Horn-blowing.’

‘People emptying ashtrays on the kerbs?’

‘I’m prioritizing that.’

‘Filthy business. Well, if you’re out there all day, you’ll need to use the facilities, won’t you?’

This was in the Cancer Relief shop opposite Sweeney’s, and the woman was so sweet – all pink wool and white hair; a charming stereotype – Zoë might have felt bad if it hadn’t felt so good. She refused a cup of tea for obvious reasons, and returned to the car, reminding herself to jot down numberplates if any of the cited infractions occurred. Pink wool, white hair – the old duck might be Miss Marple, and come checking.

The car in question was from her local garage; lent by Jeff, who’d tended her Sunny through most of its recent illnesses, and who had accepted its demise with equanimity. ‘I’d have given it six months, max.’

‘Thanks for the sympathy.’

‘Yeah, well. You weren’t planning on putting it out to stud, were you?’

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘But I hadn’t organized a Viking funeral either.’

He’d showed her some used cars, and they talked money without finding common ground. Insurance companies were mentioned, and their famous reluctance to pay out on policies. Zoë had been prepared to whistle this theme, but Jeff explained he had work to do.

‘And you’ll only be happy,’ he said, ‘when they give them away with boxes of cornflakes.’

‘It’d have to be the supermarket brand,’ Zoë said. ‘Lend me a car, Jeff?’

‘How long for?’

‘. . . Couple of years?’

So now she had a Beetle until Wednesday – an orange Beetle. ‘Sometimes I have to follow people,’ she’d reminded him. ‘Have you anything in taupe?’

‘I’m straight, Zoë. I’ve never heard of taupe.’

The orange Beetle worked, though, despite being sticky on hills. And it was somewhere to sit while she watched Sweeney’s. Watched and waited . . . She’d brought a bag of apples along. Since giving up smoking she’d been hungry all the time, and rumour had it apples were healthy.

This was Monday morning. In Sweeney’s shop, there’d been no activity since nine thirty, when he’d opened. It was now pushing twelve. Divide the business rates by the pre-noon profit, and you could see why Harold might have been tempted off the straight and narrow . . . A lorry passed, chugging exhaust fumes, while on the pavements parents pushed prams and buggies, stopping to compare children every so often; a demographic varied by the odd group of students flexing their youth – talking too loudly; fondly imagining the interest of others. In the doorway of a boarded-up shop, a woman of indeterminate age huddled in a blanket, swearing at an ancient enemy who wasn’t there.

A creep in a used-car salesman’s coat with a face that belonged on Gollum oozed past.

There was nothing new here. Zoë had seen this before. Life was a series of vanishing circles that sucked you in faster, the smaller they got – life was a whirlpool. Life, in fact, sucked. She couldn’t remember the first time she’d sat in a car, watching the same door never open, waiting for the same face never to appear . . . She could hazard a guess, though, that the job had involved something unpopular: another bill to pay; another court appearance. She’d pretty quickly grown used to being unwelcome. It must have wreaked havoc on her character, though nothing like the damage it did to her opinion of other people’s . . . It was possible there were trustworthy souls out there, but a glass wall had dropped between her life and theirs. When she’d been those students’ age, one million and twenty-five years ago, she’d no doubt had a vision of how life would be – so what happened? It must have had something to do with Joe, her late husband, whom she didn’t miss. She rarely thought about him, and even when she did, he was still dead. There was nothing new there, either.

Puffed-up contrails crosshatched the sky, as if something large and bored were about to play noughts and crosses.

To work. Sweeney, in Zoë’s view, was dirty; or perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, merely grubby – the difference being, how rough you played. Either way, she was ninety per cent sure, he was a trafficker in stolen goods. As for his ‘trade associates’, they’d be his fences, and ugly pals like that weren’t in the game to shore up a failing business. She wasn’t surprised he didn’t want them knowing he’d been ripped off. She wondered, though, that it hadn’t occurred to him they’d been the ones doing it.

She plucked another apple from the bag. She was approaching her limit already – would wind up with stomach cramps if she didn’t watch it – but she was so damn hungry, or at least, so damn needed to be doing something with her hands . . .

Anyway: the ugly pals were playing rough. Two men (there’d have been a third in the car) had paid an early call on Harold Sweeney, relieving him of loot he kept out of sight of the public. How did they know about the loot? Inside job . . . The ugly pals’ version of victimless crime: one that didn’t involve police. Who wouldn’t have heard about it at all, if D.R. Hunter hadn’t copped it as they left . . . Which was where her scenario might collapse if it weren’t for the desperately-fucking-stupid element – in any group of more than two criminals, one would operate best at room temperature. And when you married poor impulse control to a low attention span, then dumped the mix into a lawless enterprise, someone was going to get hurt.

Something else worried her. She was pretty sure there was a fictional private eye who drove a cute VW. Probably in California. Jeff might be taking the piss.

Action happened over the road – a woman paused by Sweeney’s window; spent fifteen seconds clocking its contents, then moved on briskly: either putting all thoughts of jewellery behind her or hurrying to tell someone of her plans, who could tell? That was it for half an hour; thirty minutes during which Zoë tested her logic and found it held. There was no way on earth she was going to find Sweeney’s robbers by looking for them. Sooner or later they’d do it again and be arrested on the job, but that wouldn’t mean Zoë got paid. Meanwhile, she knew something the police didn’t, which was that these guys had known exactly what they were after, and where Sweeney had kept it. Getting a line on who else had known that was her only available starting point.

She browsed. In the glovebox she found a tube of Polos, an A–Z of Santa Teresa – wherever that was – and a nice pair of nail scissors she put to use: she’d been meaning to buy a pair for ages. Meanwhile, on the radio, an internationally megaselling author explained that he’d chosen popular rather than higher fiction because he’d never write anything as good as
Ulysses
. Zoë, who’d read one of his books, doubted he’d ever write anything as good as
Where
’
s Spot?
In the window of the Cancer Relief shop she caught an image of white hair/pink wool, and pretended to be taking notes.

Lunch was an apple, followed by a Polo. At one, Sweeney left, to return ten minutes later with a sandwich. Zoë sank into her seat, donning her favourite disguise of trying to look like somebody else, but he didn’t glance in her direction. He seemed curiously shorter today. Money worries, she guessed. Her own loomed large behind her. She could almost hear them squabbling in the back seat.

Sweeney had more customers in the afternoon, but none of them excited her. The first, a man in a grey suit whose joints shone, looked more salesman than customer. She could imagine the standoff that must have made. The others were a young couple, early twenties; the male half eager, the way Zoë read it; the woman going with the flow – outmanoeuvred, perhaps, by her own disinclination to cause hurt. A ring was a ring; a bracelet, a bracelet. Sometimes promises were handcuffs. When they left twenty minutes later, he seemed to be halfway through a list of points that needed making: reasons to be cheerful, perhaps. The woman listened, nodded, half-smiled . . . Waited for a break in the traffic through which she could hurl herself, screaming.

That was about it. Cars ebbed and flowed with the clock: school run, office exodus. Sweeney closed at six, though his enterprise had had a needy, unfulfilled air since four thirty at least. Walking away, he stooped like a man on whom gravity had done a number. For a while, she wondered about following him home; then for a while longer wondered what would be the point of that? Instead, she went home herself: ate a bowl of pasta, drank a glass of wine . . .

Doing nothing exhausted her. Her body felt like she’d put it through an uphill, dangerous struggle. It craved exercise, she supposed. Weariness was a con her mind was hoping to pull. In another life she’d have gym membership, or a robust callisthenics routine. In this one she had another glass of wine and went to bed.

Where she slept the fitful, punished sleep such shirking deserved. She dreamed she was cuffed to the steering wheel of an embarrassing German car, while Bob Poland watched through its windscreen . . . Poland was a man best left under his rock. She woke with that thought in mind, and couldn’t sleep again.

On bare feet she padded to the kitchen; with a glass of water padded back, but found herself instead in her study: big word, small room. Small cluttered room, stacked with books she no longer needed and would one day shed, along with a filing cabinet full of Joe-related documents she supposed she’d keep forever. Zoë stood by the window, and looked out on the night-time world. A mist had fallen. No houselights shone. If she believed in ghosts, now would be the time to see them: pale spectres over the rooftops, barely distinguishable from the air they occupied. But all that carried to her was the sound of distant traffic. The dead don’t drive, Zoë. There are no ghosts. There was, though, a fat cat from next door, scrambling over the fence with a noise like a John Bonham drum solo, only rhythmical. She let the curtain drop.

No ghosts, but haunting remained possible. Bob Poland, a man who by his own reckoning owed her harm, had threatened her life. How frightened should she be about that? It was true that he was not impressive: in the flesh or on the phone. She had cut bigger threats down to size; had once shot a man who could have crippled Poland with an elbow. Bob had the heart and mind of a stalker, and Zoë had encountered a few stalkers – all shared the same drab profile: middle class underachievers with hygiene problems. But Poland, an ex-cop, had a vicious streak, and it would be wise not to forget that. Besides, he didn’t have to be brave or interesting to cost her money. He’d proved that already.

She went back to bed in the end. She didn’t dream again, but on the other hand, she didn’t sleep either.

Back on stakeout next morning, she thought through the robbery again. It involved neat moves. The BMW hadn’t been discovered in the station car park until Tuesday evening, once the commuters’ day was over, and their vehicles had dispersed. It was probable that the robbers had had a second car waiting, but always possible they’d simply boarded a train . . . Westbound they might have been noticed, but there was never a shortage of people heading for London. They might have lost themselves in the crowd. Or it could have been double bluff: they could be local. Either way, they knew their ground; had checked things out in advance. Only that pointless use of the crossbow suggested amateur status, and the more she thought about it, the more they sounded like a professional trio incorporating a loose cannon. Perhaps her time would be better spent scanning the papers, waiting to read about some minor thug being hoisted from a river, medicine ball welded to his ankle. Crooks with ambition didn’t carry passengers. Unless something else bound them together, of course, but it was pointless speculating further.

No: her best bet was getting a line on Sweeney’s ‘trade contacts’, and since he wasn’t likely to tell her who they were, watching his shop in the hope of a personal appearance was the obvious move. It was a long shot but so was everything else, and she stood to win five grand. The most she had to lose right now was a bag of apples.

She was back in the charity shop before long.

‘Are you collecting lots of data?’

‘Masses of it.’

‘Only you don’t seem to be
doing
very much, dear.’

Which just went to show that sooner or later, long observation resulted in a conclusion or two.

The rest of the morning crawled. Lunchtime was a meaningless punctuation mark consisting of a cheese sandwich. If she still smoked, the car would be a death chamber by now: her skin, her fabrics, even the windows, would be suffused with dead tobacco. It had been something Jeff had checked on before he’d agreed to lend her the car.

‘I figured you for giving up around when they made you Pope. How long?’

‘Couple of months.’

‘What, you’re not going to break it down to the nearest second?’

‘Since the first twenty minutes,’ she’d confessed, ‘it’s all been a bit of a blur.’

A middle-aged woman entered Sweeney’s about an hour into the afternoon, and came out again shortly after. It was all Zoë could do not to chase her down the road, asking what she’d wanted . . . Minutes passed. Hours. The day.

Late afternoon, something happened.

ii

In a house on a hill in Totnes, a man sat looking at nothing in particular.

Sometimes she would arrive, and it was as if he were frozen the way she’d last seen him – glued to the chair like some patriarchal version of Whistler’s mother; the dull cardigan still missing a button; the shirt still frayed at collar and cuff. The once-sharp beard straggly and ungroomed. Even the point he was staring at never varied, but remained an invisible dot on a blank wall, causing her to wonder what he saw – whether he was looking back on all the lives whose endings he’d tended, or searching for a clue to his own beginnings; a little light shed on how he’d got here from there.