(1992) Prophecy (22 page)

‘Do you think there are different types of coincidence?’ she said.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Can you make a distinction between what’s just pure chance, and – I don’t know – something supernatural, I suppose?’

He carried a tray through into the drawing-room, and put on a jazz cassette she did not recognize, then sat down beside her on a comfortable sofa. Behind her, through the window, she could hear the muffled sound of the traffic.

‘Man has an innate need to try to make sense of things he cannot understand. One of the perverse paradoxes of physics is that there is order in chaos. As I said, I was working with road-accident statistics today. In England in 1986, 5,618 people died in road accidents. In 1987, 5,339. In 1988, 5,230. In 1989, 5,554. In 1990, 5,402. You have the same constancy in the United States only the figures are much higher.’ He raised his hands in a despairing gesture. ‘How the hell can they be so consistent, year after year?’

She looked at him in amazement. ‘You can remember those in your head?’

‘Uh huh.’ He poured some wine into the glasses and handed her one. ‘Cheers. Don’t you think it’s strange? If you think of all the combinations of bad luck and chance that make up a car crash, you would expect to get peaks and troughs – some years more, some less. But it’s almost exactly the same number every year. It’s constant for road deaths, for dog bites, for air-travel deaths, for cancer, heart attacks. Everything.’

‘So why is that?’ Frannie asked.

Oliver drank some wine then looked serious. ‘There is a mathematical law of large numbers, but I don’t believe that’s the answer. I think there has to be something behind how the world works that we don’t yet begin to understand.’

‘Something supernatural?’

‘I think coincidences
are
signals that a greater intelligence or consciousness is at work. But I don’t have a firm conviction as to whether it is some supernatural force or entity, some God figure, or something that is simply inside us all – part of our programming.’

The music was soothing her, now. ‘So was our meeting part of the chaos or part of the cosmic order?’

‘Not necessarily either.’ He said the words sharply, almost chidingly.

‘Isn’t there a theory that we read too much into coincidence? That given infinity everything is possible? That if you sat a monkey at a typewriter it would eventually recreate the entire works of Shakespeare?’

‘I don’t believe in infinity. Life is finite; neither humans nor monkeys live for ever. It would be far more interesting if playwrights in three different parts of the world, who had never met, all sat down and wrote exactly the same play.’

‘I’ve heard of things like that happening.’

‘Yes. They do happen. All sorts of strange things happen that are dismissed as chance. People meet on railway stations and dismiss that as chance.’

Frannie smiled.

Oliver took a small sip of his wine and pondered it for some moments. ‘When we met at King’s Cross, Edward and I should have been on an earlier train; we only missed it because I remembered I had to make a phone call.’

‘Hey! I should have caught an earlier train also. I missed it because I had a phone call just as I was leaving the office.’ She watched his face, but could read no reaction.

‘We meet three years ago in your parents’ café. We meet three years later at a railway station. I place an
advertisement in a magazine you don’t read, and you see it.’ He dipped his head and raised his eyes at her.

‘Didn’t Jung believe in meaningful coincidence? What did he call it – Synchronicity?’

‘He never explained it to his satisfaction. I think he accepted that telepathy had something to do with it.’ Oliver traced a finger around the rim of his glass. ‘Who was it who said that man doubts everything that can be doubted and hopes what is left over is the truth?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘That’s rather beautiful.’

‘I think it’s a sad indictment.’

‘Don’t mathematicians tend to be sceptical about coincidences because the odds on things such as meeting someone you know – like at a station or an airport, or someone phoning just as you’re thinking about them – are much smaller than we realize?’

‘I used to think that once.’ His eyes widened and he looked sad, suddenly. ‘I used to really hope that was the case.’ He cupped his glass in both hands beneath his chin and mustered a weak smile.

‘I’m sorry, I’m talking about a sensitive subject.’

‘It’s OK. It’s good to talk about it.’

She reached across and squeezed one of his hands. His skin was like ice. She lifted her hand away with a start and studied him. In his eyes was the same look of fear that she had seen in his car the first time he had taken her out. Then it had been fleeting, so fast she might have imagined it. This time she gripped his hand and squeezed again, alarmed. ‘What is it?’

He smiled. ‘I’m fine.’ He squeezed her hand back. ‘I’m fine,’ he repeated, then stood up abruptly and walked towards the kitchen.

Frannie walked down Phoebe Hawkins’ street shortly after seven, tired and in a bad mood. Oliver had been given tickets to a royal movie première and had asked her to go with him.

It was a damp night and a light drizzle was falling. She walked with her head bowed, clutching a bottle of Valpolicella in its tissue wrapping from the off-licence.

She itched to see Oliver again, had been missing him all day. He had rung and left a message at the office in the late morning, but she had been tied up almost the whole day with Declan O’Hare and a group of colleagues and had not seen the message until half past six.

Now, instead of being with him, she was plodding through the rain to spend an uncertain evening with someone she did not like, and her doubts were increasing. Phoebe Hawkins was sly; a manipulator who had become unpopular for that reason. At university you’d had to be careful what you told her because it would come back at you weeks later, distorted. An innocent comment about a friend would be turned into an insult and recycled to the person concerned in a quiet, underhand way, as a chance remark. Or a message would be subtly altered. For Phoebe the truth was no more than a raw material waiting to be fashioned. Frannie wondered if that was all Phoebe was up to now. Her old tricks. Making something out of nothing.

If Meredith’s death and Jonathan Mountjoy’s death and Susie Verbeeten’s blindness were nothing.

With every step she took closer to Phoebe’s street,
she felt a growing feeling of gloom. A taxi drove past, and she was tempted to hail it, to get it to take her to Leicester Square, to join the crowds outside the cinema and watch for Oliver, see who he was with. The more time she spent with him, the more she enjoyed being with him. After he’d relaxed again last night, they had made love all night through, as tenderly and as forcefully as they had on Saturday.

It had not escaped Penrose Spode’s notice that she had arrived for work in the same clothes as the previous day. The shorts were not her usual office togs. He had not commented, of course, not in words; he had conveyed it all with one brief and complex manoeuvre of his facial muscles. Declan O’Hare had also noticed, because he missed nothing, and made a subtle joke connecting the brevity of her attention span to her sartorial consistency, but she had been able to keep him at bay by casually dropping that she had met an old friend of his, James Shenstone, and that he had been reminiscing about their days at Trinity College, Dublin.

She walked slowly past the parked cars that lined both sides of the street. She smelled cooking as she passed an open window, something garlicky, but she was not hungry, did not want to spend the evening drinking Valpolicella and eating nut rissoles, or whatever else Phoebe might cook, in a grotty kitchen.

A strobe flash of blue light skidded down the pavement and she heard the wailing of a siren. Frannie felt something walk over her grave. A gust of wind shook the trees in the street and a solitary leaf shuffled along the pavement.

Two coincidences yesterday: finding the bronze tiger; the number twenty-six. Then Oliver’s car getting clamped. Was that a connection? Any more than
Meredith’s death had been a connection after the upturned car? Getting paranoid. She shivered. It seemed bitterly cold suddenly. Winter, not late summer. An old Buddy Holly song blasted from a window across the street. As she turned the corner, she saw ahead of her a jumble of vehicles and the stark white glare of an arc light.

For a second she wondered if there was someone filming, then a solitary blue cube of strobed light hurtled towards her and was gone. A policeman in a luminous yellow waistcoat was standing in the middle of the road, stopping a car. The next cube of blue light turned green on his chest.

In the brilliant white light behind him the first thing she saw was a bicycle wheel. Then the huge shadow of a lorry halted at an angle across the pavement. Its cab had demolished the brick wall of someone’s front garden. A small crowd of people stood on the street corner, watching.

‘Sorry, sir,’ the policeman was saying to the driver of the car. ‘Could you use another route?’

The bicycle wheel glinted in the glare of the light mounted on a tripod near it. A gear whined. A man shouted. She saw an ambulance. A fire-engine. A tender. A vast truck with a crane on the back from which a large metal hook was being lowered. Two men were trying to find a purchase beneath the front bumper of the lorry. On the panelled sides of the lorry were emblazoned in large letters:
HUNSTONS WHOLESALE FRUITERERS. GARDEN-FRESH PRODUCE
!

Frannie looked at the bicycle wheel again. It was buckled like the rest of the bike, twisted and broken like some weird modern sculpture in the Tate.
Bicycle on Paving Slab
, she thought, her brain trying to occupy itself, to distract her, to draw her away from the body under the front wheel of the lorry.

Is that lady dead, Daddy?

Edward’s words as they had driven up to London on Sunday night came into her mind. Shards of blue light skidded across the wet pavement, across the woman lying in the road. Sparks of orange light followed intermittently from the roof light of the truck with the crane. Puffs of dark diesel smoke drifted across. The woman was in her twenties; Phoebe’s build, she thought. About Phoebe’s height. She was dressed in a kaftan and Roman sandals.

Frannie’s knees collided together. Her stomach was pitching. She did not want to look any more. The woman wasn’t moving but she might not be dead, she was not underneath the lorry herself; just had one arm pinned beneath its massive front wheel, as though she were stretching underneath it to reach something.

A shopping bag lay in the gutter beside her. A carton of yoghurt was on its side a short distance from it, its contents spilled on the tarmac; apples, a bunch of bananas; a polythene pack of fresh tagliatelle; a tube of tomato purée. A large shoulder-bag lay in the gutter also, a comb and a notebook beside it.

An ambulanceman walked towards the woman, shining a powerful lamp and taking slow, wary steps on the slick black tarmac as if he were walking on ice. The wheel of the lorry was turned at an angle and in the beam of the light she could see the woman’s hand splayed out on the far side, flat, like a dead starfish.

Blood oozed from under the tyre. Her eye caught the word ‘Pirelli’ embossed close to the rim, and she read it and reread it until it became meaningless. It gave her something to concentrate on, saved her from having to look back at the woman.

Then the beam of the ambulanceman’s lamp struck the woman’s face. It was turned forwards, eyes closed, trails of blood already congealing.

Frannie’s scream got caught in her throat and came out at first as a yammering wail of disbelief as she mouthed Phoebe’s name, then ran towards her.

‘Stand back, please! Stand well back, please!’ a policeman shouted.

Frannie ignored him, knelt and took Phoebe’s free hand, her good hand, squeezed it. ‘It’s OK, Phoebe, it’s me,’ she said, but the words came out silently, high-pitched, inaudible, like a dog whistle. Something metallic clanged above her. Someone was easing her away. A doom-laden bell clanged deep inside her. She had heard its warning knell before.

‘Have to move, please,’ a voice said. ‘We’re lifting now.’

The shadow of the lorry’s bumper quivered. Frannie shook helplessly with shock. A voice called out; an engine roared; she heard the rattle of a chain. The wheel lifted a fraction of an inch and then some more, lifted clear, and a shadow swung beneath it.

Frannie could see underneath now; could see that what had once been an arm was now a flattened pulp of flesh indistinguishable from crushed bone, obscenely printed with the zigzag tread pattern of the tyre.

The plastic cup dropped into place: hot black coffee jetted from the nozzle; then frothing milk; there was a sharp clunk and the machine fell silent.

Frannie removed the cup carefully, trying not to slop any over the side, and carried it back to the waiting-room, which had a depressing, lifeless feel, enhanced by the dreary green paint of the walls and the smell of vinyl from the slashed and torn leatherette seat covers.

A trolley clattered past the door. Then silence. After about five minutes a flurry of footsteps came down the corridor and Frannie looked round as the door opened. A nurse whom she recognized from earlier walked in, followed by a tall bear of a man with a tired and rather belligerent expression beneath shaggy eyebrows. He was wearing a grey suit which fitted him sloppily, the top button of his shirt was undone and his tie was loose.

‘This is Miss Monsanto,’ the nurse said. ‘Mr Gower has been operating on your friend.’

When Frannie stood up, the surgeon gestured for her to sit and perched himself on the edge of a chair. ‘We haven’t been able to contact Phoebe’s parents,’ he said tersely. ‘They’ll keep on trying.’ He fixed a lengthy stare on Frannie, sizing her up. ‘We couldn’t save her arm, I’m afraid; the bones were too badly crushed.’

Frannie heard the words one at a time, in slow motion. She felt as if something had been injected into her stomach, numbing it, and the numbness was
spreading through her, up her chest, her neck, into her brain. She shook her head in dismay as the words kept on coming, each resonating, made noisier by the buzz of the faulty fluorescent above her.