People Die (7 page)
Authors: Kevin Wignall
JJ watched him die, checked his pulse to be certain, then stood and looked around the room, a fresh early-morning quality about it. He pulled the cord hanging from the wooden seagull and watched its wings and body move in an easy rhythmic flight that took it nowhere. He locked the door as he left and took the key with him, mindful that it was a room the kids were probably in and out of all the time.
He moved quickly down the stairs then and out of the house, the same noises still constant in the kitchen behind him. And outside he moved briskly along the street, the sky edging toward darkness, a hollow chill in the air that gave the lie to the summery warmth of the afternoon.
He’d walked twenty yards or so when he noticed a woman coming toward him in a smart business suit, glasses, attractive but severely professional looking. He knew instinctively that it was Pearson’s wife, and as she got closer thought he could even see a resemblance between her and the girl in the photograph.
He studied her face in the moments as they passed. She looked full of fatigue, heavy with it, like she couldn’t wait to get in and relax, take her shoes off, have a drink, mess around with the kids, simple pleasures that were a long way off now.
A little farther along the street he turned and watched as she walked up the steps, opened the door. It felt like if he waited there a few minutes more he’d hear a scream break through the stillness of the September air. It didn’t happen like that in real life though; in real life there was only the depressing silent yelling of the street itself, bleak, desolate.
He kept walking, dragged down inside by the thought of that woman, and by the memory of her husband’s final words to him before being shot. It had all been a waste, a pointless cavalry charge that had gotten him no nearer. And all because he’d wanted to avoid the awkwardness of meeting a victim’s family, the irony of it claustrophobic, and even more so now because he would have to meet them anyway.
Perhaps Pearson had been right to be contemptuous of him for being nothing more than a killer, someone who’d forgotten how to think beyond killing. Holden was the only option, something he’d already acknowledged to himself, and yet he’d refused to act on it, a day’s delay at a cost of three people, one of whom had been a friend, another as unconnected as Aurianne had been.
Pearson JJ normally wouldn’t have regretted; he was the kind of sneering, inflated guy who invited violence. But he’d killed him in his home, which made it harder somehow, the knowledge of that brightly colored study that would never be the same, the businesswoman whose life was going into a tailspin even as he walked away from her.
But then people were bereaved all the time; it happened, part of the fabric. And people’s lives continued, improved sometimes in unspoken ways, became richer. It was unfortunate but it happened, JJ just one more random cause, in there among cancers and car crashes and countless others. And at least too the children had been spared; she didn’t know it but she had that to be thankful for.
A cab pulled up, a guy in a suit stepping out, carrying a briefcase. JJ took the cab on back to his hotel, a long comfortable journey, the streets gradually darkening, lights appearing, the city washing over him as it made its way home.
He was tired, left melancholy by the day’s events. He needed sleep, to lose himself. And he needed to stop thinking, because every now and then he fell into a cycle of it, turning it all over, attempting to draw it all together, like there were answers inside certain moments, answers to where he’d been and where he was going, answers to who he was.
Probably no one had those answers anyway, no matter what they did for a living, and for the time being at least the only answers that mattered were the ones Holden was offering; the rest was a luxury.
8
He stared at the white clapboard walls beneath the clear blue sky, the russet tones of the surrounding trees, the leaf-strewn lawn. It looked like a house where people were happy, like a house from a hundred American stories where dramas served only as a relief against the return to contentment.
And then in that white clapboard house a phone was ringing and after just a couple of rings a woman answered.
“Good afternoon, this is the Copley Inn. How can I help?” It was what people in big hotels said but this sounded authentic, like the original greeting the business world had based its corporate drill upon.
“I’d like to book a room please, for tomorrow if that’s possible.”
“My goodness you’re lucky,” said the woman he already took to be Susan Bostridge though she could have been anybody. “We’re full but somebody unexpectedly has to leave tomorrow. Could I take your name please?”
“Yes. William Hoffman,” he said, hoping that the person leaving unexpectedly wasn’t Holden. Then he realized he’d given his real name, a sudden act of carelessness, perhaps because he was tired. It was a slip that nagged at him as he gave her the rest of his details, finished the niceties, the woman looking forward to seeing him the next evening.
When he put the phone down he folded up the page from the book of New England inns and threw it aside, sliding down the bed, lying there with tiredness bearing down on him like ballast. He drifted in and out of sleep but never for long and never satisfying and by eight he was awake again, a sudden jolt bursting through him like an electric shock, a sense of hollowness, of the blood draining out of his heart and leaving him lifeless.
He reached over and turned off the bedside lamp and lay for a while in the darkness, gauging whether more sleep would come, but his mind was unreeling, chattering away to itself, throwing up the day’s events and jarring echoes of the conversations he’d had, snippets of dead people talking.
He got up from the bed and went over to the window, looking at the nightscape of city light and darkness, a darkness that was concealing people’s lives, a city he felt isolated from, excluded from even. Years before he’d have been only a phone call away from some of those people, regular people. Somewhere along the line though he’d let them all go, replacing them with people who spoke the same coded language, and now that code was no good.
Maybe some of the old friends were still out there, going through the drill of everyday life. And maybe occasionally they thought fleetingly of him too, on the tube, staring from the office window, the mystery of his whereabouts briefly flickering across their conscious concerns.
It would be good, he thought, on a day like that, between life, to be with some of those friends, to tell them that he was still there, perhaps even in some ways the same person they’d known. It would be good as well to know that in the days following, those people would tell other people and that in some disembodied form his life, the person he’d been ten years before, would be spirited back into existence.
Yet as he thought about it in those terms, he wasn’t even certain how he’d changed, or if he’d changed. It was like he’d lost sight of himself, seeing only a shadow moving from place to place, going through the motions, doing just enough to merge with the crowd. Perhaps that was the real change: that he was no longer visible enough to be judged.
He walked back across the room, put the light on, and took a whisky from the minibar. He poured it and knocked it straight back, holding its anesthetic quality in his mouth for a while before letting it trickle down his throat.
He thought idly about how he might contact one of the old friends he’d been thinking of, and about the tattered address book that lay somewhere hidden away at home, beneath photographs and letters and other stored history. It couldn’t be that difficult though to track one of them down, even after seven or eight years.
Thinking of different people, faces, vaguer memories, he was suddenly desperate for the contact, mentally scrabbling around before thinking of Jools and how maybe he could find her even without an address book. He almost remembered her parents’ address, enough to get the number from directory assistance, and beyond that was easy.
It was ridiculous, he knew that, to get in touch out of the blue after all this time and with only a few hours of one evening left in London. And maybe she wouldn’t even want to meet him, her own life moved on as much as his had, a sense of awkwardness that someone like him should want to dig up the past. At the least though he could speak to her, find out.
He got the first number without a problem and dialed, the phone ringing a few times at the other end before her mother answered. The voice sounded familiar but, still unsure that it was her, JJ said, “Hello, is that Mrs. Garland?”
“Yes,” the reply came back cautiously as if suspecting an imminent sales pitch.
“Hi. I’m an old college friend of Julia’s. I was wondering if you had her number. I have one but it’s very old, when she was in North London.”
The woman loosened up, like it was the kind of inquiry she was used to dealing with.
“Yes of course. She is still in North London but probably a different number. Let me see ...” There was a pause and then she reeled it off before saying, “I didn’t catch your name?”
“Yes, I’m sorry. It’s JJ. We did meet once.”
“Yes, I remember. How lovely!” Her tone had shifted again, to one he remembered from his time as a student, as though they were all still precocious children, nothing more. “And what are you doing with yourself now?” Again he liked the sound of the question, the implicit suggestion that he was still too young to have settled into anything like a real career.
“I work for a venture capital company in Zurich.”
“How interesting,” she said, more likely referring to the location than to the catchall job description. “Well it’s lovely to hear from you, JJ. And Julia will be pleased.”
He wound up the conversation and dialed again immediately, encouraged. Her phone rang for a long time, long enough for him to be thrown when she answered, initially mistaking her for an answering machine.
“Hello, Julia Garland.”
“Hello, Jools. It’s JJ.”
Her dumbfounded reply came back one word at a time: “Oh. My. God.”
He laughed and said, “I know, it’s been a while.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said, and then, “Are you in London?”
“Yeah. Yes I am. That’s why I’m calling. I know it’s getting on but I thought, if you have nothing planned, I’d come over for an hour.”
“Of course!” Her response was immediate, insistent, her voice sounding briefly like her mother’s. “Do you want me to come and pick you up?”
“No, don’t be stupid. I’ll get a taxi. I should be there in twenty minutes.”
“Great,” she said, still sounding shocked. “I’ll see you then.”
“Maybe if you give me the address?” She laughed and gave it to him, and though he’d said twenty minutes he took a quick shower and changed before going down and jumping in a taxi.
It was completely dark now, the lit city coming into its own. He felt better than he had earlier, because in going to see Jools he could forget for a while what was going on around him, forget that somewhere out there people were actively trying to find and kill him.
Sitting in the dark in the back of his cab, he didn’t have to think about strategy and what his plans were. He didn’t have to think at all for the next few hours, not about Berg or Holden or the Bostridges or any of the other people whose names would mean nothing to Jools. He didn’t have to think, just reminisce and relax back into easy parts of his past.
The house and the street when he got there were similar to Pearson’s, the same overpriced redbrick uniformity, the bleakness tempered though by the darkroom glow of the streetlights. Her house itself looked dark, but when he rang the bell a porch light came on and a hallway light beyond the door.
There was a peephole, and he sensed her checking through it before the door opened. And then she was standing there, unchanged apparently except for the neat bump showing beneath her lambswool pullover.
“You’re pregnant,” he said, the first words from his mouth.
She smiled and said, “You should’ve considered becoming a doctor.” He smiled too, acknowledging the statement of the obvious. “Come in, she added, stepping aside and closing the door behind him.
There was a moment then when neither of them quite knew what to do. They’d been good friends but now that seemed like a long time ago, and as if they’d forgotten the language of familiarity there was an awkwardness, a shyness even. Finally JJ broached it, laughing and saying, “What are we meant to do here? Kiss? Hug?”
“How about a bit of both?” she said, kissing him on the cheek and holding herself against him for a few seconds, stirring the thought of Esther’s Judas greeting earlier that day. When she pulled away she smiled at him and said, “Boy, do you have some explaining to do!”
“Tell me about it.”
“Come on then, let’s have tea.” She led him through to the kitchen, showing him the other downstairs rooms on the way, one of them still undecorated. It looked like her place somehow, no indication that someone else lived there, raising the question of the expected baby’s father, the suggestion that perhaps JJ wasn’t the only one with a recent history worth telling.
He sat at the heavy wooden table in the kitchen, a rustic look to the room like part of her wanted to go back and live in Somerset. As she made the tea he said, “So when’s the baby due?”
“Second of December.” She turned and patted the bump. “So it looks like I’m in for a family Christmas.”
“It’s amazing,” he said, staring at her stomach. “It’s just hard to believe you’re pregnant, you know, grown up, having a child.”
“I don’t know about grown up. But I am twenty-nine, not exactly a schoolgirl mother.” She poured the water into the teapot and brought it over to the table, then the mugs and milk. Sitting down she said, “Do you want to touch it?”
“Do you mind?”
“Why should I mind?” She smiled and lifted the sweater and T-shirt under it to reveal her rounded, marble-smooth stomach.
“I should warm my hands,” he said, rubbing them together. He pulled his chair out and reached over, putting his palm flat on the skin and moving it slowly across the curved world of her body like it was a piece of living sculpture.
There was no kick, no movement, but an overpowering sense all the same of another life enclosed there, another heart beating, another mind already subconsciously recording its mother’s moods, environment, sounds, perhaps even the touch of his hand. Unexpectedly he felt himself moved, ambushed by the emotional power of it, his eyes welling up a little without him knowing why.
He looked at her, bemused by his own response to something so commonplace, an unborn child that wasn’t even his own, in which he had no investment.
“Well?” Jools could see he was moved, and she looked touched in turn by his response.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “I don’t know why but it’s really beautiful.”
She smiled, pleased, and said, “A man who’s not afraid of his emotions—now there’s a rare thing.”
He smiled back. It was a compliment that made him uneasy though. Maybe he wasn’t afraid of his emotions, but it was a lack of fear that also manifested itself in ways she would have found completely alien.
Shifting away from himself he said, “What about the father?”
“Shall I pour?” she answered with awry smile, confirming what he’d thought earlier. She poured the tea but continued dismissively, “To be fair, it was a fling, nothing more, fun for a couple of months but not someone I would have wanted to stay with. It had already fizzled by the time I found out I was pregnant.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Oh I told him and he was fine about it, offered to support me and everything, which I declined. Rather thankfully, he seems quite happy to have nothing further to do with it.”
He wondered if she was putting a brave face on it, but she seemed at ease with things, too relaxed to be covering her true feelings. He could understand it too from the way she looked because there was a completeness about her, like they hadn’t known the whole person back at college but there she was now, all her promise delivered. It made him warm to her even more than he had in his memory.
“Will you be okay financially?”
“Yes I think so,” she said, nodding. “I may not look high-powered but I am, and the City’s been good to me. Frankly, I could retire now and not worry about holidays or school fees or anything else. As it is I’ll work part-time or freelance, employ a good nanny It’s incredible really; my parents are still baffled as to exactly what it is I do and yet I get paid huge amounts of money for it.”
“I know what you mean.”
Her face was transformed suddenly by another thought. “God, how are your parents? And your little sister!”
“Oh they’re all fine,” he said, finding it strange to be with someone again who’d met his family, who had access to the lumber room where he kept all those other parts of himself. “My sister’s not so little anymore. She’s a journalist for Reuters in Hong Kong. My parents are still the same though.”
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