The Killing Lessons (7 page)

She was lying on her front on the edge of the porch, where the snow was thinner, one leg bent, arms limp, face turned towards him, eyes closed, the hood of her red jacket loose around her tangle of dark hair. There was a little puddle of blood by her mouth. Beyond her the land was sculpted white. Snow still fell heavily through the darkness. The ravine was twenty yards away. Across it, the forest climbed the western slope, confected evergreens, like an overdose of Christmas. The light from his open door showed her footprints – or rather leg-prints, since every step had taken her at least shin-deep – trailing away north towards the bridge.

Dead
.

The blood by her mouth.

The body’s posture of indifference, as if she’d lain down to take a snooze on a sunny beach.

A dead child. Here. Now.

For perhaps three seconds adrenalin blocked Angelo’s pain when he moved – but he could feel it pushing to get back through to him by the time he’d staggered to where she lay and dropped to his knees beside her. Thoughts smashed and dead-ended:

Check for pulse…

Don’t move her…

This is because…

Too late for…

No phone, nothing to…

This is because…

From Ellinson, one of the houses…

Be breathing, be breathing…

They’ll think I’ve…

Blank of all but instinct Angelo put his ear as close to her open mouth as he could.

And seemed to wait for ever.

Then it came. Faint. But warmer than the air on his skin. She was breathing.

If she had broken bones then moving her would be risky. But if he didn’t get her out of the snow she might be dead in seconds. No contest.

Except he could still barely move himself. If he tried – and succeeded – in picking her up, there was no guarantee he wouldn’t fall, or drop her. Plus he still needed one hand for his stick. It was awful but he was going to have to – very gently –
drag
her inside.

Angelo knew even as he was bracing himself what that was going to cost him. But there was no alternative. Still on his knees, he loosened the girl’s jacket zipper around her neck, then carefully turned her onto her back. The snow helped. He took hold of the back of the hood with his left hand, got his stick ready in his right, then pushed himself, by degrees, to his feet.

And almost collapsed immediately, the pain was so bad. In the first instant of getting his spine unbent by more than ninety degrees he felt his body’s reflex to go back down onto its hands and knees. He cried out involuntarily – and cried out with every step until he had her in front of the stove. Then he collapsed, weeping, and though the cabin’s front door was still open on its perfect winter wonderland, there was nothing he could do for a while.

The girl didn’t stir. Angelo wondered if she was in a coma. Her jacket was waterproof but her jeans were soaked and half frozen. He wasn’t the man for these situations but he knew you weren’t supposed to leave someone in wet clothes. The evaporating water lowered the body temperature. He had a vision of the girl coming to and finding him undressing her. The terror that would overwhelm her, instantly. But there was nothing else for it. For all he knew she was in the last stage of hypothermia. He remembered reading somewhere that in cases of
extreme
hypothermia, the most obvious symptom – shivering – stopped. And this little girl wasn’t shivering.

Do it now
, Sylvia’s ghost said. She was very close to him just now, very engaged. (He would never, since childhood, have said he believed in ghosts. His rational self still didn’t. But since Sylvia’s death his rational self had been left far behind on the beach of his time, along with much of the clutter of who he was. He was a stranger to himself now and his life was a dream he no longer questioned. Vaguely, since he’d begun sensing her presence – in his head if not in the air around him – he was well aware of what his rational self would have had to say about it: that her ghost was nothing more than the generative power of his own obsessed memory. But it made no difference to him. She came when she came. It was what he still lived for. It was the only thing that felt real in the dream.)
Don’t waste time
,
Sylvia said.
Door first. Crawl. Then sleeping bag. Something under her head. How long was she out there?

He did all of it on his hands and knees, wretched with pain. He got the wet things off the child (but knew as soon as he removed her right boot and saw the dark swelling that her ankle was probably broken) and draped them on the stove so she’d see them as soon as she woke up. He opened the sleeping bag out completely on the Karrimor mat, very gently rolled her into it, then zipped it up around her. He eased his pillow under her head and put more wood in the stove. By the time he was finished he was drenched in sweat.

How old? Nine? Ten? There were pine needles in her dark hair. Her face was covered in scratches.

Scratches because she was running through the woods.

Who was she running from?

Where were they now?

And what use was a cripple going to be if they showed up?

Sylvia, very focused, sent clipped, practical bulletins:
Keep her warm. Get fluids into her
.

No landline. No cell reception. He had to get to the car. He couldn’t get to the car. It had nearly done for him just getting to the front porch and back. He had an image of himself crawling on all fours through the snow to the bridge. Impossible. It didn’t matter how many times he approached the problem, the facts remained: he was stuck here with her until L5 decided it had had enough of torturing him and released the pressure on S1, or until whoever she belonged to showed up to claim her. Someone
would
show up, obviously, sooner or later. She couldn’t be anything other than missing. But what had happened to her? And what if she died in the meantime?

Who was she running from? He consulted Sylvia. Could feel her shaking her head, see her dark eyes bright with the mystery.

When he’d had to undress the girl he’d wanted to do it briskly, out of a panicky care for her dignity. But the swollen ankle meant he’d had to be careful and slow (who knew what else was broken?) and he’d been ambushed by an awkward piercing sadness at the sight of her pale legs and hairless vulva. The forlornness of her bare legs. As soon as her panties were dry he’d slipped them back on for her.

The world was full of awful things happening to kids. He and Sylvia had been childless. Sylvia had had scarring from a miscarriage when she was eighteen and he had sperm with such low motility they might as well have been dead. They’d tried in the early years of their marriage, five attempts at IVF without success. They’d felt it start to consume them, the cycle of hope and disappointment. They’d had the wisdom to know when to stop. It had made a little sadness between them. But it had also asked the necessary question: in the absence of a child to love, will this be enough? Will the two of you, for each other, be enough? And the answer, they’d both known, was yes. It had brought them closer, gently. It had confirmed them.

Looking at this child now, Angelo was appalled by her vulnerability, the small wrists and tender throat, the eyes like shut buds. When her jeans were dry, he decided, he’d put those back on for her too.

He felt her forehead. The chill had gone, but she didn’t stir. Her stillness was awful. If she was shivering or raving it would be something, a sign that she was still here. As it was, he imagined her spirit wandering somewhere between here and the afterlife, lost, confused, alone.
No, I can’t help with that
, Sylvia said.
She’s still with you
.

There were more difficulties. Even with the wood-stove he was going to be pretty cold without his sleeping bag. There was one moth-eaten blanket in the chest in the bedroom (no bed) and two bath towels he’d dried yesterday, but that would be the limit of his insulation. He’d been sleeping on the Karrimor on the floor by the stove, but she needed that, so he’d have to take his chances on the busted couch, which would almost certainly make his back worse, if it
could
get worse. He’d have to put on extra clothes. Which meant moving again. Which meant ringing the L5 to S1 doorbell.

Who was she running from?

In a minute, he decided, when he’d gathered his strength, he’d go through every drawer in the place for anything he might – however pointlessly – use as a weapon.

Shock had addled his brain. He spent an agonising, indeterminate time crawling around the cabin – he found a rusted file, a broken saw, a broom with half its bristles gone – before being forced to conclude that all he really had at his disposal was the wood-stove’s brass-handled poker, which was barely a foot long.

Then, astonished at his own dimness, he remembered the axe.

Which was, of course, in the woodshed that adjoined the cabin.

Forget it. The search indoors had exhausted him. He had nothing left.

But the image of the girl running in terror through the woods wouldn’t go away. Nor the poignancy of her bare legs and the state of utter helplessness she’d been reduced to.

I can’t do this.

Try
.

He tried to argue Sylvia out of it. Even if he got the axe, what, exactly, was he going to do with it? In his state, did she seriously think he was going to be any kind of match for an attacker? He might as well hurl insults. And why were they getting so obsessed with the idea of an attacker? The kid could have been… The kid could have been what? Playing hide and seek? Fallen out of a tree she’d climbed? Escaped from an asylum?

It was terrible, the clarity with which he felt the need to protect her. It was a new measure of his own weakness, as if he needed one.

Sylvia’s energy bristled near him:
It’s fifteen paces to the shed. Or a short crawl in the snow. Come on. Put the gloves on
.

Shock had also, apparently, erased his hangover. The last of the Scotch winked its promise.

No. Don’t dull yourself
.

OK.

Come on. Do it
.

By the time he got back – he’d managed five paces bent double with the cane, then been forced down onto his hands and knees in the snow by grinning L5 – he was certain of one thing: that if an attacker kicked in the door right now there would be no resistance he could offer.

He shoved the axe under the stove, out of sight. Not the sort of thing he wanted to have on him when she opened her eyes.

She was shivering now. Not in a good way. She was covered in sweat. Her forehead, when he put his hand on it, was burning. Fever. He should get water into her. Somehow.

Shaking, and in a sweat of his own, Angelo wrestled himself to the sink and filled a tin mug with water. Repeated the wrestle in reverse to get back down on the floor next to her.

‘Come on,’ he said, lifting her head and cradling it in his left arm. ‘Drink. It’s good for you. Please. Come on. Take a sip. You can do it.’

But she couldn’t do it. He’d been hoping for some rehydration reflex deep within her to kick in. He’d been hoping that wherever her soul was wandering her body would know it needed water, would feel the cup at its lips, would open her mouth, sip, swallow.

That didn’t happen. The water just ran down her chin.

You’ve done what you can for now. Rest for a while
.

Gently, he laid her head back down on the pillow.

‘Actually I’ve been back a few weeks,’ Nick Blaskovitch said. ‘My dad died. My mom’s in no shape to be out here on her own. Serena can’t move home. She’s got a life.’

Whereas I haven’t. Not since you broke my heart
.

Valerie’s hands were shaking. She’d forced them flat on the desk for disguise.

Three years.

Three years that disappeared into nothing the minute the two of you were in the same room again. In this case a room humming with the cramped energy of police, working. Love didn’t care which room it was. Love wasn’t criminal. Love was breezily amoral.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
Sorry
. The air went dense with the history of that word between them. Quickly, she added: ‘I’m so sorry about your dad. What happened?’

‘Cancer. Ugly, but quick.’

‘Oh God, Blasko, I’m so sorry.’

Three
sorry
s in five seconds. There would never be enough.

‘I know.’

They looked at each other. What was there to do except look at each other? What was there to see except that it was all still there? Everything they’d had. Everything she’d wrecked.

He was seeing it too. They’d always been mutually transparent, fundamentally in cahoots. When they’d been together the world had revealed itself as a beautiful-ugly horror-joke they were both in on. Sometimes you laughed your ass off and sometimes you despaired, but once you’d discovered each other you never had to do either alone.

Except there’s something I never told you, Nick
.
You thought you hated me before? Just wait.

‘You’re back at work here?’ she said.

‘’Fraid so.’

Seeing him every day. The calm, dark-featured face with its look of tired but restless intelligence. The familiar smell of him. His voice. She had a quick, compressed vision of herself moving away to a hot poor country where no one knew anything about her. An adobe hut. Red dust. Bare feet in the sun. Liquor. Loneliness.

‘Still Vice?’

‘Computer Forensics. A lot of desk. I retrained. High-tech. Do you know what a hardware write blocker is? You don’t, do you.
I
do.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously. So if your TiVo crashes, call me.’

Call me
.

No wedding ring, but that proved nothing. She was looking for the presence of another woman in his eyes. She couldn’t help it. It shocked her, the reflex. He knew. His look said there wasn’t anyone. It also said take nothing for granted. You nearly killed me. You could nearly kill me again.

‘You’re on the serial duo,’ he said, glancing down at the shoebox. ‘You getting there?’

She shook her head, looked away. Let’s not talk about that. Too close to history. Too close to home, to the Suzie Fallon case, to love, and her protracted murdering of it.

You’ve done this because you don’t feel entitled to happiness
, he’d said, three years ago, weeks before the bathroom, the test, the language of impersonal biology.
You think shitting on love is going to bring Suzie Fallon back? It won’t bring any of them back.
And he’d been right.

‘Holy Christ on a cracker,’ Laura Flynn said. ‘You?’

She’d been walking past, Starbucks in one hand, half-eaten Sub in the other, three bulging files under her arm.

Blasko smiled at her. Two of the files slipped from under her arm, spat their contents out in a slew on the floor. She nearly lost the coffee, too.

‘Easy,’ Blasko said, laughing. ‘Easy there, tiger.’

‘Fucking great,’ Laura Flynn said. ‘This is your fault.’ But she set the rest of her burdens down and put her arms around him. She was a small, fiery woman with very dark hair and very blue eyes, and could beat at least half the guys in the station in an arm wrestle. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said, looking over his shoulder at Valerie while he hugged her. A look that said: Holy shit. You OK? What does this mean? Is it all going to start again?

Valerie’s look back at her said: No. I don’t know. I can’t. I don’t know. He won’t.
I don’t know
.

And now I’m going to have to tell him. Everything.