Damned If You Do (15 page)

The oil-soaked sleeve slowly, but inevitably, caught fire.

He ran from the kitchen again and repeated his flight to the water-butt. His arm blazed like a torch; the flames lapped at his head, licked his body, caressed him. Death watched him escape, grabbed the matches, opened the cupboard beneath the sink and tossed the box into the bin.

I followed the man outside again. His arm was immersed up to the shoulder in the water-butt, his face contorted with pain and relief. His whole body shivered with fear, with cold. I felt a powerful urge to comfort him, as my mother had once comforted me when I was ill. But my duty dictated otherwise.

*   *   *

When we returned to the kitchen, Death had disappeared. Our client was weary. He sat down on the stool from which he had fallen only a few minutes earlier and rested his feet in the spreading pool of milk, eggs, honey and fat. Disgusted with his bad luck, he stripped off his sweatshirt, threw it aside and began to wash his arms, hands and head in the sink.

Groping for the tea towel to dry his face, he made three fatal mistakes:

He left the tap running.

He accidentally turned the gas on.

He knocked the long string of sausages to the floor.

And the phone rang.

‘Who the fuck is that?' he wailed.

I watched him from the kitchen doorway.

‘Who is it…? Is anyone there…? Look, if this is your idea of a joke you've picked the wrong fucking time. Really … I'm putting the phone down in five seconds … Four, three, two—'

He slammed down the receiver and returned to the kitchen. The smell of gas was already strong. He failed to notice it, his attention diverted by the running tap. He rushed over to turn it off before the water overflowed, slipping slightly in the pool of liquid food, and catching the hooks of his untied right shoe in the string of sausages.

The sausages held fast to his foot and followed him until his death.

The phone rang again.

‘For fuck's
sake
—'

The man and his trailing string of sausages hobbled to the phone together.

‘If it's
you
again … Oh …
Hello
 … No, I just thought you were— No, no problem … Yes … Uh-huh … Fifty quid on the three-thirty? Yes, of course … No, nothing … I've just had an accident, that's all … Yes … Hold on, I think I can smell gas—'

He hobbled back to the kitchen, the sausages thrashing in his wake like an enraged viper. He turned off the gas, left the kitchen door ajar and threw open the front door to assist ventilation.

On the other side of the front door was Cerberus the dog.

Cerberus was hungry. He liked sausages.

Three red tongues dripped slobber.

*   *   *

Death descended the stairs in time to see his pet attacking a string of pork sausages with a small, fat, screaming man attached.

‘Who rang the second time?' he asked.

‘I don't know,' I replied. ‘Who rang the first?'

He allowed himself a melancholy smile.

‘Who the hell are you?' Our client was staring at both of us with a mixture of panic and terror. He shook his leg violently in a vain attempt to free his foot from the dog's three sets of tightly clamped jaws.

‘I am Death,' said Death, offering his hand.

The man fled across the road, wailing. Cerberus followed him, growling ominously, signalling his determination to hold on. The meat, the innocent party in all of this, was trapped between the unlaced shoe and the dog's slavering maws.

*   *   *

‘Looks like rain again,' Death observed. It was more of a summer shower, droplets spattering the gravel car park inside the cemetery gates, spraying our client's battered head and his monstrous assailant alike, sprinkling the freshly mown grass, filling the shimmering air with thousands of glittering lights.

At the cost of a sausage the man had finally freed himself from the dog's death-grip and was streaking up the slope towards the graveyard. Cerberus decided that this was inadequate reward for his efforts and pursued him vigorously; they met again by a tomb at the summit. The leg-shaking and growling dance continued: a whirling, shuddering ritual punctuated by inhuman shrieks. We trailed them slowly in the rain.

‘Does he have to suffer so much?' I asked.

‘I don't make the rules,' said Death. ‘It's the way things are.'

‘But this could have ended much earlier.'

He turned aside. ‘He's just unlucky, that's all.'

The trio of client, sausages and hellhound jigged and jerked and growled and cursed along the brow of the hill. A couple of times they retreated together and circled around us like planets caught in the gravity of twin suns; then, as if freed from our attraction, they sped off into space, chaotic bodies in constant motion. Death maintained a pensive silence until he saw that the man was pirouetting close to a fresh grave.

‘It's time,' he said.

The open grave had no headstone, but a spade rested on the lip. Cerberus' growls deepened as he employed one final, canine scheme to seize the sausages: he shook his heads vigorously from side to side. The strength of the movement unbalanced his opponent, who stumbled backwards towards the gaping hole in the earth. The excavated soil was greasy with rain.

He slipped.

He regained his balance by taking a step back.

He tripped over the spade and tumbled earthwards, twisting.

But there was no earth to support him – only a black pit six feet deep. He caught his head on the walls of the grave as he fell. His body landed with a soft squelch, spraying water out of the hole and onto his nemesis, the dog.

Cerberus watched from the graveside, unperturbed. A pink string of pork sausages hung from his grinning mouths.

‘He slips, he trips, he dives, he dips,' Death observed gloomily, patting the middle of the dog's three heads. We perched, vulture-like, on the edge of the hole. Our client lay face down in the mud below, apparently unconscious.

‘Is he dead?' I asked.

‘Soon. He's drowning.'

Cerberus guzzled two sausages in quick succession. Death teased the animal by threatening to remove the rest. Without knowing why, I buried my face in my hands.

The apartment

Amy rang ten days after our second meeting, and arranged for me to visit her the following Wednesday afternoon. This was about three weeks after the first phone call. Her apartment was located in the block directly above the bus station café where our initial discussions had taken place. More significantly, considering what was to happen a month later, it was the penthouse suite.

In the intervening period I hadn't been able to stop thinking about her, with one memory in particular returning again and again:

It's snowing. We are walking by a river at the northern end of a meadow, on the fringes of a dark wood. Black trees burst from the white ground like the spikes inside an iron maiden. The snow is shallow and crisp underfoot, untrodden, untouched. Golden evening light dazzles in the gaps between the trunks, sparkles on the ice in the swollen river.

‘I just can't see how it's going to work,' she says. ‘It doesn't
feel
right. Not any more.'

‘How is it supposed to feel?' I reply.

‘Better than this.'

‘We can change it.'

‘That's not what I want.'

Recently, we have begun to speak in code, avoiding words which might reveal precisely how we feel. At first it was a game, but the game has grown beyond our control and is smothering us.

‘What
do
you want?' I ask her.

‘Anything but this.'

We are on the edge of a dark wood by a swollen river. Her sharp features are frozen there in an expression of despair. Her teeth chatter, briefly, comically. Her black hair falls in front of her eyes and she brushes it aside.

‘Anything.'

Her black hair falls, and she brushes it aside.

She is young. She has medium-length hair the colour of a raven's wing. She has a long, pointed nose that once belonged to a witch in a fairy tale, thin red lips open like a knife-cut, brown eyes piercing me, daring me to answer. But I turn around, and see a hole in the trees ahead where the snow rises in small drifts – and beyond it, a bridge. We need to return home and forget, but the path we are about to take will lead us back to the Jericho Café, where we will have a discussion that leads to our separation.

And I'm still standing there now, frozen in time, watching again as her black hair falls across her face. She was twenty-one; we had lived together for twenty-eight months.

She was beautiful in the snow.

*   *   *

I wondered how she had come from that moment to this; more specifically, what had induced her to marry Ralph. She was an only child from a poor family, but poverty and solitude are as much prerequisites to a lifetime commitment as they are to a career in ballroom dancing. I suppose I wasn't surprised she'd ended up with a criminal: when she lived with me the uniform had a certain appeal, and it's not so hard to make the switch to the other side of the law. But perhaps she never allowed herself to dwell on what he did. Perhaps he had been the wild lover who also sent her roses, the man who wanted children but respected her independence, the caring, sensitive type who knew exactly when to behave like a shit.

I had been none of these things. During our years together I had been little more than a clown. I had often made jokes to disguise my true feelings, laughed when I should have remained silent.

I rang the buzzer, Amy replied with an ambiguous ‘Is that you?', and I struggled with my equipment up fourteen flights of stairs to the seventh floor. I had a phobia about lifts. Amy met me at the door, smartly dressed as usual, and explained quickly that she only had half an hour to spare.

The apartment was divided into seven areas. The short hallway led into a large, square living room, furnished in what the gossip magazines used to describe as
palatial elegance,
but which was equally identifiable as
criminal ostentation.
The remaining areas were satellites of the main living space. In clockwise order from the door: a coral bathroom decorated with a shell design, a narrow stone balcony overlooking the square, a round tower with a skylight and a collection of videos housed on a wide, free-standing bookshelf, a cramped kitchen and dining area, and a double bedroom with a four-poster. A thick black carpet clung to the floor throughout, like a stray oil slick.

Amy spoke rapidly, nervously, pacing the living room like a trapped animal, checking that everything was safe, seeking reassurances that Ralph wouldn't find out, that I was being careful. At length she led me into the bedroom and pointed to the dressing table.

‘He hardly ever goes near it. But I've taken some things out in the last couple of weeks so he won't get suspicious.'

I installed the miniature camera in a drawer from which she had removed the handle. The hole provided just enough space for the lens, and the rest of the drawer was large enough to accommodate the recording equipment. When I'd finished, and checked twice that everything worked, I gave her my usual speech.

‘It won't be perfect, but it should do it. Give me a call when you're ready to hand it back. Or stick the video in the post.'

‘What do I have to do?'

‘Just switch it on.' I showed her the button. ‘When you feel it's necessary.'

Looking around the room, at its gaudy opulence; watching her folding her arms, trying to remain in control; listening to the fear in her voice as she thanked me and hurried me through the front door, two questions still remained.

What did she want from me?

And what did
I
want?

Cactus ex machina

We ate a very late, and very long, lunch at an Indian restaurant opposite the railway station. A vegetarian curry for me, a range of meat dishes for Death – and I passed my first stool since resurrection. It was early evening when we returned to the car, and it had stopped raining. Cerberus was still sleeping peacefully on the back seat where we had left him, and he didn't stir until, back at the Agency, Death dragged him from the boot and escorted him to the kennel.

I excused myself and retired to my room – where I was startled by noises I hadn't heard since I was alive.

I paused, then knocked hesitantly on the door.

‘Who is it?'

‘The apprentice.'

‘Come in.'

The curtains were drawn against the evening sun, but I saw Skirmish slumped on the Barca lounger, watching a television programme I vaguely remembered. This was the source of the strange sounds.

‘Inspector Morse,' he explained, without taking his eyes off the screen. ‘My favourite episode. The one where the driving instructor goes bananas.'

I hopped across his line of sight and sat on the edge of the lower bunk. I couldn't claim to know the particular episode he was referring to, or to be as interested in it as he was, but I maintained a respectful silence for the next two hours until the programme finished. Quite coincidentally, this idle time also revealed the answer to a question I'd been pondering since Monday morning. As I watched, I began to recognize landmarks from the last three days, places I had visited, even the cemetery where I was buried; and long before one of the characters mentioned the name of the city, I remembered, at last, where I was. Oxford.

This was a relief, but there were more pressing questions. In particular, I still wanted to know what had happened to Hades. As the closing credits rolled I wandered over to the table by the rear window to collect my thoughts. Skirmish switched off the television and yawned. I turned around, and was just about to speak when Pestilence's remedy launched its final and most vicious assault.

I convulsed, tripped against the table leg, lurched forward, tried to steady myself, lost my balance completely, and fell against the cactus in the corner.