The Cutting Crew (25 page)

I leaned on the desk so as to see the screen more clearly. For a second it was totally black, and then a series of bright white lines blinked into view. There was an outline that I realised corresponded with the city's outside walls, and then more lines dividing the interior into rough districts. I wasn't a cartographer, but it looked to be a pretty good likeness. At the bottom of the screen was a series of makeshift buttons that I figured Hedge had designed himself.

'This is obviously quite basic' He sounded apologetic. 'You can see the city, but there's no detail. We were going to work on it more - map some texture and colour to it. But the measurements are all right. I took it off maps, and everything.'

'It looks good,' I said.

'Thanks.'

On the way here, the nervous sensation had faded into the background a little. I hadn't noticed it happening, but it must have done because I noticed it again now: rolling back into me like a wave of nausea.

'And what Alison was doing was getting me to plot points on it,'

Hedge said. 'They represent places where people have died. Bit morbid.'

'Okay.' I was half-listening, but also trying to force the sick feeling to the back of my head.

'And the program does a few things,' Hedge said.

He clicked one of the buttons. A small red circle appeared towards the top right-hand side of the city. I stared at it.

Somewhere in Bull.

'You can cycle through them one by one.' He clicked the same button again and the first red circle disappeared, replaced immediately by a new one further south, somewhere on the edge of Snail.

Another click and the process repeated itself, only the third circle was in the top coil of the Snake district. I wanted to look away but I couldn't.

'And so on.'

Hedge clicked more rapidly and the circles disappeared, reappeared, tracing a path around the city, doubling back and then jerking across to some new place. Each one seemed to set the air ringing a little more intensely. I swallowed and found my mouth was dry.

'She was going to have a few computers going at once as part of her display,' he was saying. 'Don't ask me why. There was going to be one - like this - that people could cycle through themselves. I guess she'd have set up a controller or something. Another like this where it was all cumulative--'

He pressed the button on the bottom right of the screen and all the red circles disappeared. Stop, I thought. Stop it now. But another click and the first marker appeared again in Bull. Then, as Hedge kept pressing the button, more and more dots appeared.

Three, four, five. As though drops of blood were falling onto the city. I closed my eyes for a moment, but that was even worse: it felt like something was watching me.

Hedge cleared all the circles away again to leave a blank map.

The mouse pointer moved, hovering over a third set of buttons.

'This was the animation sequence,' he said. 'This was what the other officer was most interested in.'

Hedge started it by clicking on a single button and then leaned back in the chair as we both watched the screen. The first circle appeared, as before, blinking out two seconds later to be replaced by the second, further south. The third circle arrived five seconds later. I didn't know why it was terrible, but it was. I leaned away to rub my face, and saw that my palm had left a misty print on the desk.

Hedge seemed oblivious.

'The time intervals are correct,' he said. 'Two seconds on the screen represents twenty-four hours of city time. So the ratio's right. But she hadn't decided how quick she wanted it to go.'

Fourth circle.

Fifth.

Get it together.

I was scared of a computer now, and that was just stupid. So I forced myself to stare at the screen for a full minute, counting the circles. There were thirty murders in that time. An average of one a day. More circles appeared. And with each one, whether I thought about it or not, the fear was slowly intensifying. The only sound in the room was the hum of Hedge's computer equipment, but it was menacing and dangerous.

What was so wrong with it?

I couldn't imagine - but it was as though I was staring into a face I'd had nightmares about. We were looking at the city so closely, Jamie had told us, and so we really shouldn't have been surprised when it started looking back. That was what this felt like.

Which was fucking ridiculous.

I blinked and said, 'Make it go faster.'

'Give me a second.'

He tapped a few keys and the map disappeared, replaced by lines of spare, elegant code. Black on white: a story written in strange words that only really meant something to the computer. But even in this - its genetic form - there was something unnerving about the program. It looked wrong. Hedge scrolled down and typed over a few numbers, replacing them with smaller ones.

'Okay. This should be pretty fast,' he said.

And it was. When the map started up again, the points of red were sly: blinking away almost as soon as they became visible. You flicked your gaze to look at them, and they were gone almost as you saw them. It was like trying to concentrate on single spots of light as your vision starred over. I leaned in even closer. My heart felt as though it was throbbing: not beating faster exactly, just trembling under a singing tension that was growing in pitch.

Blink, blink, blink.

So quick that they were barely there at all.

'Too quick,' Hedge said, and I jumped slightly.

Get yourself together, for fuck's sake.

I moved back across the room and looked away - out of the window. It was slightly open. Cool air was drifting lazily in, like steam rising from dry ice, and for a second I thought I could smell fresh cannabis and hear the crunch of boots compacting snow.

Then, there was just the midday sun again, and a warm breeze through the slightly open window. No smell apart from old linen. I shook my head.

'That's very interesting,' I said, turning back as Hedge shut down the program.

'Thanks. The other officer thought so too.'

Whatever it was about the map that had affected me and Sean, Hedge seemed immune. He was looking at me curiously.

'Are you okay, Detective?'

'I'm fine.'

I wasn't, but with the program shut down I felt slightly better.

The tension seemed to have relaxed a little anyway.

Hedge returned to the bed, and I took back the seat by the desk.

'So the last time you spoke to Alison,' I said, 'what did you talk about?'

We went over a few of the facts. He told me that Alison had been going to Snail that evening; that she'd called both her boyfriend and Jamie but they hadn't been able to go with her. He'd been busy too, he said, or else he would have gone; and he said it in such a way that it was obvious how guilty he felt. I understood. It was the last conversation he'd had with a girl he'd never see again: the kind of conversation you rewrite over and over in your head. Death is such a momentous severance that it makes us relive those last few moments of contact and search for meaning or blame where there is none. Hedge didn't know that Alison was dead; but at the same time, he must have known. I wanted to explain and tell him that he wasn't responsible - that if anyone was, it was me - but I couldn't.

And it wouldn't have done any good if I had.

We talked more, but there wasn't a lot else to learn. Reading between the lines, it seemed that Alison had used sex as a means to get Hedge to help her with the project, but I suppose things are never as simple as that, and he certainly had the impression there was more to it. They'd smoke dope and have a laugh, but she'd never struck him as being particularly happy; and he'd felt, at some level, that they were a lot alike. I felt sad for him.

'Thank you for your help,' I told him as I was leaving.

He said, 'I don't think I've helped much. But no problem.'

Downstairs in the entrance hall, I checked my phone, but there were no messages and nobody had tried to call. I wondered how the others were getting on and considered ringing them, but discounted the idea - they'd be in touch as soon as they knew anything.

I walked outside, heading down the path, and I started to think about Hedge and his feelings of guilt. He didn't even know the truth and he felt responsible, when all he'd done was not be there for her. So what did that make me? This was my fault: because I'd wanted to make some sort of difference; and because I'd wanted that money for me and Rachel.

I paused at that thought. It felt dishonest. At the same time as I didn't want to think about it, I was dimly aware that the reality of what I'd done was far worse. And as I stopped for a second, the feeling became thicker and blacker, and everything around me threatened to cloud over.

So I shook my head and carried on walking.

My guilt wasn't in doubt, I thought, but all I could do now was keep moving and try to make it as right as possible. Responsibility doesn't stop with guilt, after all. Even when you've fucked everything up, you can always make it worse for yourself by turning away.

Chapter
Sixteen

It was dead on twelve when I finally left the main campus, and so the Clock Cafe was busy: crammed from one bohemian wall to the other with students and smoke. I don't know why I went there. I was just walking along, my mind elsewhere, and suddenly there it was. Does it count as a coincidence if you bring it about yourself?

Sean told me once that life is full of coincidences, and that when you start looking for them you find more and more, as though the world is racing to show you something. Perhaps right now the world just wanted me to have coffee. I went inside.

It was the same waiter as when I'd met Rachel there two days ago, and he was similarly tardy in preparing my drink. My attention was drifting, though, and I didn't mind so much. I was happy for him to take his time. When it arrived, delivered with a sprinkling of disdain and a sachet of utter indifference, I paid the man and took the cup carefully over to the only free table, at the back of the cafe.

I sipped it slowly, staring out past all the people at the bright light of the front windows. The crawling feeling that the computer program had given me was slowly returning. I decided that constant sips of coffee and not thinking too much would help keep me occupied. But my mind kept returning to it anyway. What had I seen on that screen that had unnerved me so much? It was just a map of the city, but it had felt like I was staring at something awful and alive. Even thinking about it now was uncomfortable.

I glanced around the cafe. There were a lot of people here, with a great deal of conversation going on between them. The intimacy and involvement of it gave an impression of bustle and, even though nobody seemed to be paying me any attention, for some reason I felt like the centre of it. Outside the window, bunches of students were walking past. Groups of people pulsing along. None of them even looked inside.

The coffee was already half finished. I stopped sipping and started nursing it instead, warming my hands around the cup and staring at the cracked formica of the table.

After a moment or two, something caught my attention and I looked up. At the next table, a woman was talking to the man opposite her, and she was crying desperately.

'I just want you to love me,' she said. 'And I don't understand why you don't.'

I glanced away quickly and picked up my coffee again. My hands were shaking a little. When I looked back at the couple, they were both smiling and she was holding his hands in hers. I shook my head.

It seemed that Rachel had been lurking at the back of my mind ever since we'd met here two days ago, because now shy impressions of her came out of the shadows, stepping tentatively into my open thoughts. What on earth had happened to me? All around me, there were couples smiling. I'd had that with Rachel had it in spades - and I'd given up on the relationship because I'd had ideas of something better. Those ideas seemed mysterious now.

I tried to resurrect whatever it was I'd felt.

Over the past few months, whenever I'd thought of Lucy I'd pictured her with Rich, and it had been the worst image in the world. I'd curled up; cried. It had hollowed me out. But I dug around in those thoughts now, trying to make them hurt, and they were only tender, not painful. It seemed impossible to remember a time when they'd been anything more. Surely, it had only been days ago? And yet I pressed hard, and the feelings weren't there. The nerves had gone dead.