People Die (9 page)
Authors: Kevin Wignall
That was the most they’d be able to reclaim, never more than that, never even as much as the friendship they’d had before, all their conversations inevitably trapped in amber. He’d never be there for her, present tense, like other people would, and she’d only ever serve to remind him that all his potential for being someone else was locked into the past.
Later, as if she too sensed that this was a one-time thing, and wanting at least to prolong it for now, she said to him, “Do you want to stay over?”
“I can’t, I’ve got an early flight out in the morning.”
“Where to?” But she responded almost immediately to his expression, answering herself, “Oh. You can’t say”
“Best not to.” He looked at her then, sleep already wrapping itself around her like a blanket, seeing in her eyes though that she still wanted the company. “I can stay for a few hours if you want.”
She even smiled sleepily. “That’d be nice. It’s funny, but it’s when I miss having someone.”
It hadn’t occurred to him that, as content as she seemed, she might still be lonely too, that his being there had perhaps taken the cold edge off her evening as much as it had his.
So they lay together in her bed, JJ helping her to prop pillows, making her comfortable, and he lay on his side with one arm draped over her and they talked to each other sparingly in the darkness, the words becoming fewer and fewer, the pauses longer.
When Jools fell asleep he eased onto his back, staring up at the ghost of the ceiling, thinking of nothing, then sinking unawares into the Bostridge hit, a stepped remembrance, descending into it till it was more real than the dark room around him. There was Bostridge slumped in blood, the girl captivating him, and that package, and that gaze as he stood in the elevator.
He was flicking through the wallet then, looking at the picture of Bostridge’s family, trying to focus on them but seeing only blanked-out faces, and then he snapped out of it and was focused back on the room and Jools sleeping next to him. Thinking he’d slept too, he lifted his head and looked at her clock, reckoning from the time that only a few minutes had passed.
He’d lie there with her for another hour or so, get up and dress then, probably waking her a little. He’d kiss her goodbye in the darkness, not even rousing her completely, and by the next night it would seem dreamlike to her that he’d even been there.
And heading in the other direction, he’d be draping reality over the bones of dreams, filling in those faces in Bostridge’s wallet, finding out if somewhere in the shamanlike memory of that hit was the thing that had become his death warrant.
Perhaps he’d see the reality too, whether he wanted to or not, of the butterfly effect that resulted each time he pulled the trigger, the lives that spiraled away from those simple actions. It was a rare thing for someone in his position to see what death was, not in the instant but in the aftermath, where all its energies were absorbed. He didn’t know whether he wanted to see it, but at the same time, somewhere hidden away inside him, it was there, pulling at him, scrambling his bearings.
9
By eleven he’d dealt with the mechanics of arriving in New York, picked up a few things, and still managed to get to the drab basement of Penn Station with over half an hour to spare. As always though, it had left him feeling like one of the walking wounded, and it wasn’t even as if he could crash for the afternoon at his hotel, half the journey still ahead of him.
Instead he spent the afternoon and early evening on the train, winding in and out of the New England states, quite a few tourists among the other passengers, English accents audible here and there. He fit in with them too, dressed in casual clothes, his gun in a small rucksack.
It wasn’t the private dead space of a hotel room but it wasn’t too bad either, the relaxed rhythm of the train, its gentle murmurs. After lunch he catnapped on and off throughout the afternoon, ignorant of the aspiring autumn beyond the windows, hearing it though in the commentaries of other passengers.
He came around sharp just before six and looked out at the rural landscape, familiar, almost European, drenched in early-dusk light and shadow. It was a comfortable environment to be cocooned in, instantly recognizable but alien enough in the detail to feel like another world.
He’d bought a newspaper at the station and picked it up for the first time now, scanning through it like an Edwardian traveler looking for news from home. He scanned every headline, deciphering the runes, looking for some hidden hint in the news stories of what was going on. But there was nothing, no reports of car bombs, gas explosions, no snippets of unexplained murders.
Then he came across the one story he hadn’t expected to find there, a short Associated Press piece with the barest facts on Dylan McGill, a twenty-year-old from Illinois, shot dead in Paris in a suspected street robbery. He’d been touring Europe before continuing his education. And that was all, AP leaving it to others to eulogize about American youth and turn over the ground for Pulitzers.
But there he was, the kid JJ had taken out, the only abstract indication to the outside world that something serious was happening in the shadows. He’d still have made the papers if JJ had left him there too, as the student from Illinois charged with the brutal sex murder of an antiques dealer, and how differently they’d have painted him then.
It couldn’t have been down to chance that he’d been set up like that; he had to have upset somebody. And maybe he hadn’t even been aware of it, just as somehow JJ had managed to cross Berg without knowing it, stumbling out of bad fortune only in that unplanned visit to Viner’s, the same place where Dylan McGill had stumbled into it.
That was the way it was, always too much synchronicity, like someone behind the scenes somewhere was mapping it all out for them, interwoven strands producing a pattern that was always just out of sight. The truth was though that there was no pattern, the connections were randomly generated, meaning nothing, possessed of no more significance than people chose to attach to them.
The connection he was heading into felt ominously significant, like he’d been heading toward it blindly for almost two years, but that too was a trick of his own mind, nothing more. It was only in his own mind that he was more than just a traveler, that they were more than a family that had suffered a loss, that their inn was more than a place for meeting a contact, it mattered only to him, the curse of carrying too much truth, too much knowledge.
But that didn’t make it any easier, the thought that he’d be staying in their guesthouse, within breathing distance of their daily routines and of any hidden sadness. He’d have to meet that woman and speak to her, knowing what he knew, all the while playing the casual tourist. He’d probably see Bostridge’s children too, the baggage of their loss perhaps even more easily visible.
Possibly Holden had chosen the Copley Inn for purely practical reasons, perhaps simply as somewhere Tom would know from his strange little riddle, a place with nowhere to swim. JJ couldn’t help but think though that there must have been some satisfaction, whether Holden was in the business or not, in forcing him to go there, to face the people from whom he’d taken, knowing what they could never know.
If that had been Holden’s intention it had worked well enough; the thought of it played on JJ’s mind as he drove the final leg in darkness, a fine rain falling like a steady mist sprayed onto the windshield, the last half hour on back roads. His thoughts blanked again only when he saw the turning, clearly marked, on the near side of the small town where the inn was situated, the signboard knocking him into automatic.
Numbly, he climbed the couple of hundred yards up to the house, gravel crackling under the tires, trees mossy damp, and then the white clapboard expanse of the building, the porch lit, a few other cars parked around to the side. The rain was still falling, almost invisible but cool in his face as he walked from the car, bracing himself.
The main door was locked, the glass window in it looking onto an entrance hall with a large staircase. When he rang the bell a woman appeared, mousy hair, slim and attractive, casually dressed but stylish, expensive clothes. She looked in her mid-forties perhaps, old enough to be Susan Bostridge. As she saw him through the glass she smiled, opening the door then and saying, “You must be Mr. Hoffman.” It wasn’t the woman he’d spoken to on the phone; this voice was softer, younger.
“William Hoffman, yes.”
“I’m Susan Bostridge.” She reached out her hand and shook his. JJ was suddenly speechless, his mind tailspun by the mention of her name, the eye contact, the physical presence, this attractive pleasant woman whose husband he’d killed. But she distracted him then by looking at his sweater. “Oh, it’s raining,” she said and lightly brushed the fine droplets of water from his shoulders, an immediate comfortable domesticity that brought him around, putting him at ease. It wasn’t what he’d expected, bringing him back to the moment.
“Idiots’ rain,” he answered her, smiling. “It’s what the Turks call it.”
“Idiots’ rain,” she repeated, the words hanging there for a second. “Have you driven up from Boston?”
“No, I came up from New York on the
Vermonter
, hired a car at the station.”
Vermonter
, hired a car at the station.”
“Oh, well that’s a nice journey. But you must be tired! Would you like something to eat?”
He was already forgetting who she was now, the connection almost disappearing. “No, thanks, I am tired. I think I’ll make it an early night.”
“Then I’ll show you to your room,” she said, smiling, as much with her eyes as anything, a smile that looked for an old friend, like the loaded smile Jools had given him the night before.
He almost felt like he knew her too, and not for the obvious reason; her soft patrician voice and easy warmth disarmed him, making it all but impossible to associate her in his thoughts now with the pathetic figure of Bostridge and his child prostitute.
But being in her company even briefly was enough to make him think that memory might be unfair too. This was the man’s wife, his home, a man who had to have had volumes more to him than the few tawdry Technicolor snapshots JJ had stored away. What did he know anyway of a man he’d seen only in a final moment of weakness and exposure? What did he know about any of them?
She talked him through the details of the place as she showed him upstairs in what looked to him like a typical American house, lots of space but willfully harking back to some indistinct past. Within a few minutes she’d left him in the homely clutter of his room, no ceremony, an offer still hanging in the air that he could have his breakfast as late as he liked, and that was it, the imagined significance of their meeting lost in the informal detail.
He sat there then with the world hushed around him, a deep peace that was almost unsettling, like no one else was there in the inn, like the fine mist of idiots’ rain had smothered everything beyond. And it quickly began to work on him too, a calming blanket to set against the meatless sleep of the previous days, a secure comfortable peace in which to recover his senses.
He slept and no dreams came to him, his mind sinking into emptiness, the night devoid of shocks, of the heaving fishhook pulls on his heart, like lines tautening sharply against distant catches. He left himself at ease, becalmed, here of all places.
It was something he thought of when he woke the next morning, the strangeness of finding such peace in this house, a restorative sleep, a feeling that he’d slept for as many days as he’d been awake beforehand. It was completely at odds with the unease he’d had about coming here, this air of benignity around everything, from the first meeting with Susan Bostridge to the room he found himself in, filter-lit by the sun through chintzy curtains, as quiet as it had been the night before.
He checked his watch and saw that despite the offer he was in good time for breakfast, the perfect opportunity to break cover with Holden. Despite the restful atmosphere, he needed to know quickly what Holden could do for him, and what he wanted JJ to do in return; he wasn’t intending to hang around on someone else’s territory if there was nothing in it for him.
There were about a dozen guests at the inn, most of them sitting around a long table when he got to the breakfast room, two young couples, the rest middle-aged. They responded to the sight of him with a communal hello as if they were used to him coming in at that time, and an older woman serving them put down the coffeepot in her hand and said, “Ah, Mr. Hoffman, did you sleep well?”
“Yes thanks,” he replied, recognizing her voice as that of the woman he’d spoken to on the phone.
“Good. Now why don’t you sit right here and I’ll introduce you to everyone?” He took the seat she offered him at the head of the table and went along with the strangely chummy ritual of being introduced, each couple responding like he was someone marrying into the family. They were all American but at the end the woman said, “You’ve missed our Scottish guests, the McCowans, already out walking, and of course Mr. Lassiter had to leave yesterday. But I think that’s everyone.”
One of the younger men up the table said, “Except you, Kathryn.” His partner smiled approvingly at him, a couple not long together.
She responded as though to a bout of forgetfulness. “Of course, what am I thinking of? I’m Kathryn and this is William Hoffman. You like to be called William?”
“Actually, friends call me JJ.”
Nods of acknowledgment were given around the table, people discreetly carrying on their conversations then as Kathryn said, “Now what can I get you for breakfast, JJ?”
“I don’t really eat breakfast,” he said apologetically, adding, “Just some tea please, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh but you have to eat something,” she countered like it was an undeniable truth. “How about some blueberry pancakes? Once you’ve tried them there’s no turning back.” He gave in, accepting the offer rather than being cajoled into it like someone spoiling the party, and she went off into the kitchen looking pleased with herself. Another convert.
The couple to either side looked at him and smiled. The man, introduced as Steve, looked like an off-duty mobster: balding, a solid neck that looked as wide as his head, a body that seemed to keep him away from the table.
He flicked his eyebrows in the direction of the disappearing Kathryn and said, “I never eat breakfast, only when I’m here. Any other time I’m in the office at eight-thirty, nothing but coffee.”
His wife smiled benevolently and said, “As you can see, he makes up for it in lunches.” Steve shrugged in response, a New Yorker’s shrug, like there was nothing he could do about it so no point worrying. JJ smiled, unused to this kind of thing but going along with it, not wanting to stand out from the happy crowd.
They kept talking to him then, Steve the mobster turning out to be a lawyer, talking about the Copley Inn, about their grown-up kids, about the state of America, the last subject bringing agreement from people farther up the table. JJ listened for the most part, giving away only that he worked in venture capital, that he lived in Switzerland, that a friend had recommended the Copley.
He ate the breakfast, not finding it as addictive as they’d suggested but washing it down with the tea and feeling satisfied for having eaten it. Conversation continued to drift around the table, always genial, a general surge of goodwill each time a couple finished and left the room.
JJ let it all wash over him, but at the same time he was already turning over why Holden wasn’t there, and why no one had mentioned him in passing. The absent McCowans received another mention, as did the apparently somber Lassiter who’d made room for JJ. Susan Bostridge got a couple of mentions, one woman dropping in that the children were beautiful, an all-encompassing, meaningless use of the word that nevertheless earned general approval around the table.
But there was no mention of Holden. It crossed his mind briefly that Tom Furst had gotten the location wrong, then that someone had already gotten to Holden, then perhaps that he’d given up on JJ coming and moved on. Whatever the explanation, he didn’t seem to be there, and if Holden wasn’t around there was no reason for JJ to be there either, no reason for him even to have made the trip.
On the other hand though, there weren’t many further options that sprang to mind, apart from going to ground which in a sense he’d already done. And of course it was possible that Holden was there but keeping a low profile, staying in the family’s own quarters, too much of a shadow to feature in the breakfast table conversation but there all the same and already aware of JJ’s arrival.
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