Why We Die (17 page)

They were heading into London; Arkle driving, because of Trent’s head. Trent had regained maybe sixty per cent vision, but only in the eye he could see out of, so there was room for improvement. Arkle was optimistic he’d be more or less sighted before long. Meanwhile, on Arkle’s knee lay the
News Chronicle
he’d taken from old man Blake’s, folded open to the story flagged above the headline:
Inside! Today!
– a ‘special report’ on ‘wives who kill’. It turned out there was more than one of them. It turned out there was a fucking epidemic: the big surprise was there were any married men still upright. If Blake hadn’t retired he’d be rich on the overtime, shovelling the poor bastards away. It seemed there was a legal defence available – if he left the toilet seat up, you could whack him – and women jailed as murderers these ten years gone were hitting the streets like there was no tomorrow. Kay Dunstan’s name didn’t figure, but more to come was promised . . .

Arkle, creative genius, could put two and two together. The TV had said a newspaper had bought Kay’s story: that would be the
Chronicle
. The ‘special report’ was the first in a promised series: keep reading, and he’d end up with the inside dope on Baxter’s killing, complete with smiling photograph.
Look at me now
, she’d be saying, and she’d be saying it directly to Arkle.
Look at me now. Your brother
’
s
dead, and I
’
m getting paid for the details
. Not to mention the rest of the money, of course: the money Bax had been in charge of, and which the bitch had stolen on top of everything else.

‘You will ask me nicely if you can give it back,’ he said, and it was only when Trent grunted in reply that he knew he’d spoken out loud.

‘How’s your head?’ he asked. This was something he was making an effort at: showing kindness and consideration to Trent. Trent said something in reply, but he didn’t listen. ‘Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I had another idea. You want to hear it?’

‘Are we nearly there yet?’

Trent really was milking that wound. How the fuck should Arkle know? Was he in charge of geography? They’d know when they reached London because of all the London stuff: Marble Arch, Buckingham Palace, the London Eye. Madame Tussaud’s. Still, he let it pass. ‘What I was thinking, we find one of these Internet cafés, cruise the web. Bax reckoned there’s nothing you can’t find out with a computer.’

After a while Trent said, ‘Maybe.’

Count to ten, Arkle advised himself. He reached two, then said, ‘For all the help you are, I should dump you by the side of the road. You want to be dumped by the side of the road?’

‘. . . No.’

‘And don’t think I’m fucking slowing down, neither.’

‘Sorry, Arkle.’

‘Yeah,
sorry Arkle
. You think it’s easy, having to make all the decisions? You think I’m having fun?’ He drove two miles in silence. ‘And another thing. You look like a mad panda in that fucking bandage. Take it off.’

‘Arkle –’

‘Take it off.’

Trent unwound the bandage. Parts of it stuck to his head, and he removed those bits very carefully indeed.

When it was a sticky mess between Trent’s feet, Arkle said, ‘There. You look a lot better.’

He looked like a burns victim, in fact, but changing your mind was weakness.

Arkle said, ‘We got the name of this paper, right, and we got the name of this journo.’ He glanced down at the paper to remember what it was. ‘Helen Coe. She’s the one writing this story. We need to talk to Helen Coe.’

He kept driving, and eventually they reached London – Marble Arch, Buckingham Palace, the London Eye. Madame Tussaud’s.

So they found an Internet café. Arkle didn’t know where they were, exactly, but that was the point of the Internet: it didn’t matter where you were. He paid for half an hour, because how long could it take, then again thirty minutes later, because who knew it would take this long? Kids surfed the web constantly, and Arkle was older than any kid he’d met. But maybe they knew something he didn’t, because when he typed
Where is Helen Coe?
into a search engine all he got was a list of random websites. He’d be better off wandering the streets, shouting her name. And Trent was a help – was he fuck.

Trent – slouched next to him – hadn’t touched a drop in days, but smelled like alcohol. It was a big responsibility being the oldest. Arkle had done all the driving, all the thinking, and the best Trent could manage was this shagged-out zombie act. His head was kind of splotchy, too. From a distance it looked like a birthmark, but Arkle had to deal with it up close, and frankly it was making him feel ill.

He found himself looking at a screen telling him that the page he wanted couldn’t be found, and swore loudly. Then noticed he was being scrutinized by a black kid who looked about eleven or six or something. ‘You got a problem?’

‘You ever used a computer before?’

It was lucky Arkle was a creative genius, because anyone else would have smacked the kid. Maybe four foot high: it wouldn’t have needed a big smack. Baggy T-shirt; pair of jeans he might grow into if he lived another six years. Which depended on him not bothering Arkle any more.

‘You’re doing it wrong,’ the kid said.

This was constructive?

‘You’re supposed to use commas,’ the kid said.

Now he fucking tells him. Arkle typed
Where, is, Helen,
Coe?
, and got the same mad list he’d got before.

‘Not them kind of commas,’ the kid said.

Arkle looked at him. ‘You work here?’ he asked.

The kid stared. ‘I’m nine,’ he said.

Arkle had been bigger than that when he was nine, definite. ‘And?’

Turned out there was an electoral register site. Arkle fed the kid Baxter’s credit card number, and the kid did the rest.

Ten minutes later, forty quid and a credit card lighter, Arkle and Trent were back in the van. Trent looked more alert now. Maybe the nap had done him good.

Arkle said, ‘You gunna whinge the rest of your life, or give me a hand here?’

‘I’m feeling better,’ Trent said.

He still sounded like he was chewing mothballs, but it was supportive not to mention this.

‘Cause we got a list of Helen Coes twenty names long. It’ll take a while to work round them.’ He pulled out, and someone behind him tooted angrily. This happened: people saw a white van, they hit the horn. Plain bad manners. ‘And every hour wasted . . .’ He paused at a junction and lost his thread. ‘Is an hour wasted,’ he finished.

Trent asked, ‘We got an A–Z?’ and it was the first time in a while Arkle had heard him say
we
.

‘Somewhere.’

‘And we got Baxter’s phone,’ said Trent. ‘We can work something out.’

iii

It was part of the deal: the whole of the deal, in fact. As long as she was here, she had to answer questions. All the
Chronicle
wanted was her story. What Katrina wanted was somewhere to hide.

A chair, a stool and a man by the door . . . She felt like Goldilocks, in a dwelling short one bear.

And here was Mummy Bear, her chief interrogator:

‘How long were you married?’

‘A year. A bit more than.’

‘Had you known him long?’

‘Since we were teenagers.’

‘How did you meet?’

Once upon a time there were three boys, and their names
were . . .

‘Katrina?’

Katrina, eyes fixed on the window – through which she could see only the raggy tops of exhausted trees in the square opposite – said, ‘There was a place the kids used to hang out. Not a club. Just a public space, the top of the High Street.’

‘He was a skateboarder, was he?’

Katrina said, ‘Well, he followed it.’

What he did was follow
them
. It wasn’t hard to work out who had money. Baxter, Arkle and Trent had it down to an art: they could shake a ’boarder down in a lot less time than it took to learn a double flip-back. And were good at ensuring nobody complained afterwards.

Complaint meant official intervention. First time that happened, the boy in question broke both legs the following week, and told anyone who asked, and a few who didn’t, he’d fallen off his skateboard.

Kay had heard about the brothers before she laid eyes on them.

‘I’d have given them the money twice over,’ somebody said. ‘Just to make him stop looking at me.’

Him
was Arkle, of course.

‘The brown one, though. Funny thing is, he’s kind of nice.’

Which should have been news, but wasn’t, somehow – the brown one was a thug, who robbed other kids and damaged them if they squealed. This should have shown on the surface; he should have had stupefied eyes and a fixed lip-curl; a face waiting for a tattoo to happen. Instead he had white teeth, open features, and a smile that suggested, if it was up to him, you’d be friends, and happy to share your wealth. All this, Kay put together from secondhand details, as if she were colouring by numbers without having been told what colours the numbers meant. So why wasn’t this news? Because it was there in countless films and numberless books. The good-looking bad boy. The one who stole your heart along with everything else he could get his hands on.

Of course, now she thought about it, none of those stories ended happily.

‘And did you think you could change him?’

‘Change him?’

‘That’s the usual pattern, dear. Women choose men hoping they’ll change. Men choose women hoping they won’t.’

Helen had taking to pacing the room, smoking imaginary cigarettes – tucking her biro between her lips; breathing out clouds of invisible ink.

‘Well,’ Katrina said. ‘I didn’t suppose he’d be pinching skateboarders’ lunch money all his life. But I expect he’d have reached a similar conclusion on his own.’

‘You thought he’d graduate to mugging grown-ups?’

‘I thought he’d grow out of it. It wasn’t like he’d had the best start in life. Shuffled from one foster home to the next. When Roy Dunstan adopted him, it was more for the sake of the firm than anything else.’

‘Seems odd he chose a mixed-race kid, then. If he was after surrogate sons.’

‘That was his wife’s idea. I never knew her. Baxter said she was a good lady.’

‘That doesn’t seem to have affected them much, does it? What did she think of their thieving?’

‘She’d died by then,’ Katrina said. ‘Like I say, Bax didn’t have the easiest of childhoods. None of them did.’

And maybe that was a connection Helen would want to know about; maybe she should talk about dead mothers. She could say a bond developed because both were motherless. Baxter, in fact, had lost mothers several times over: first the real one, an anonymous teenager he never hungered to know more about; then various foster mums, among them some real demons. And lastly Mary Dunstan, who had been kind to him and his new brothers, but who had died within two years of the adoptions. Her heart, a rock for others, had proved unreliable in the end.

But she didn’t say any of that, because it would have been a lie. Or rather, would have been such a small part of the truth, but sounding so big and meaningful, that it would have allowed Helen to think she’d found the key to her whole story.

And what was the rest of the truth? That she had been attracted to Baxter because he was beautiful – the word itself: he wasn’t good-looking, but beautiful, and it didn’t matter how many muggings he participated in, how many threats and menaces he casually dispensed, he’d had looks that could stop a teenager’s heart. Her own was no more reliable, in its way, than Mary Dunstan’s.

The deal was, she’d give the
Chronicle
their story. But stories were, by their nature, untrue.

Once upon a time . . .

‘Tell me about his brothers.’

Katrina said, ‘What do they have to do with anything?’

‘At the risk of sounding unsympathetic, dear, can I remind you of one detail?’

(Helen Coe might look like Denholm Elliot in drag, but she had a core of pure steel running through her.)

‘We own you. The
News Chronicle
owns you. Which, for current purposes, means I own you. And if you do not give me a full and detailed answer to every question I ask, I will rip you up and flush you down the nearest drain. Are we agreed on that?’

‘I can walk out of here any time I like.’

‘And what happens when you’re arrested again? Because the police aren’t finished with you yet. And next time, you won’t have a friendly newspaper batting for you. You ever seen footage of lions on a gazelle, dear?’

Katrina didn’t answer.

‘Start a feeding frenzy among the press, you’d change places with the gazelle. Believe me. I’ve seen people chewed up so bad, what was spat out afterwards didn’t look organic, let alone human. And these were folk who’d merely put their genitals where they shouldn’t, dear. They didn’t murder anyone.’

‘Neither. Did. I.’

‘Really, dear? That’s interesting.’ Helen pulled back the lace curtain, and looked down on the street below. Then let it drop. ‘Why don’t you tell me all about it? Start with his brothers.’

‘Trent,’ she said, ‘would have been the runt of the litter. Whatever litter he came from.’

Trent, she didn’t say, spent his teenage years waiting for the next hammer to fall. At the time of life when how you looked determined your worth, he was designed to be a cast-off: sniggered at in the school corridor, laughed-out-loud at in the gym. Except he hadn’t bothered a lot with school, and nobody was going to so much as chuckle with Arkle nearby, which was always.

‘Arkle, though – he’s the oldest – Arkle kind of imagines himself the alpha-male in any gathering.’

Arkle, she didn’t say, would have been left on a hillside in some societies; those that would sooner make the odd small sacrifice than nurture their own destruction.

‘Imagines?’

‘I’ve always thought your true alpha-male had rather more going on up top.’

Jonno, from his doorway watchtower, allowed himself a quiet smile.

‘He’s not a clever man, then,’ Helen said.

‘He’s cunning. And he may not be a man of ideas, but the ideas he does have, he grips pretty tight. He’s not somebody you want to get in the way of.’