Blood Hunt (13 page)

“Promise?”

“I promise. Bye, Joan.”

By the time he got through to the hall, the cupboard was half empty.

“You start looking through that lot,” Fliss said, “while I haul the rest out.”

“Sure,” Reeve agreed. Then: “Shouldn’t you be at work or something?”

She smiled. “Maybe I am at work.”

An hour later, they’d been through the contents of the cupboard and had found nothing relevant. Fliss Hornby had burst into tears just the once. Reeve had thought it best to ignore her. Besides, his mind was on his work. They drank herbal tea and then went into the bedroom. At some point, Reeve couldn’t work out when, Fliss had tidied the room. When he’d first glanced into it, the bed had been strewn with clothes, the floor with books and magazines. Now everything had been hidden.

She pulled two suitcases out from beneath the bed and lifted the first one onto the bed. It wasn’t locked. There were clothes inside. Reeve recognized some of them: a gaudy striped shirt, a couple of ties, a Scotland rugby shirt, saggy, the way all rugby shirts seem to go after the very first wash. The second case contained paperwork.

They spent a lot of time flicking through files, bundles of paper-clipped news cuttings, an old-fashioned card index. Then Fliss found half a dozen computer disks, and waved them at Reeve.

“I may be able to read these here.”

Her PC was set up on the desk in the living room. Reeve studied the bookshelves while she booted up.

“These all yours?” he asked.

“No, most of them are Jim’s. I didn’t bring much from my flat, just stuff I didn’t want burgled.”

There were a couple of philosophy books. Reeve smiled, picking one out. David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. He flicked through, and found a couple of lines had been underlined on one page. He knew which lines they’d be, but read them anyway.

A man, brought to the brink of a precipice, cannot look down without trembling.

He’d spouted philosophy at Jim during a couple of their meetings. He’d quoted Hume at him, this very passage, comparing it with Nietzsche: “If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” More melodramatic than Hume, probably less factual—but much more powerful. Jim had been listening. He’d appeared bored, but all the time he’d been listening, and he’d even bought a couple of the books. More than that, he’d read them.

Fliss Hornby was sliding the first disk home. It contained correspondence. They read through some of the letters.

“This feels weird,” she said at one point. “I mean, I’m not sure we should be doing this. It’s almost like desecration.”

The other disks dealt with stories Jim Reeve had been working on at one time or another. Reeve was glad Fliss was there; she saved him time.

“Giles used that one,” she said of one story. “This one I think turned up unattributed in Private Eye or Time Out. This one I haven’t come across before, but it looks like he hit a dead end with it.”

“We’re looking for a chemical company, Co-World Chemicals, headquarters in San Diego.”

“I know, you told me.” She sounded impatient. She tried another disk. It was labeled 1993 and proved to be all old stuff. The other disks were no more helpful.

“Nothing current,” she said. “He probably took the current disks with him along with his laptop.”

Reeve remembered something she’d said, about journalists only having sources and competitors. “He wouldn’t have left any of his notes here anyway,” he stated. “Not with another reporter on the premises.”

“Where else would he have left them?”

“Could be anywhere. A girlfriend’s, a drinking mate’s…”

“With his ex-wife?”

Reeve shook his head. “She disappeared a while back, probably left the country. Jim had that effect on women.” He’d tried contacting her, to tell her the news. Not that she’d have been interested; not that he’d tried very hard.

Reeve remembered something. “We’re also looking for the name Agrippa.”

“Agrippa? That’s classical, isn’t it?” Fliss slid a CD into the computer’s CD-ROM slot. “Encyclopedia,” she explained. She went to Word Search and entered “Agrippa.” The computer came up with ten articles, the word appearing a total of twenty times. They scanned all ten articles, but remained none the wiser about what Agrippa had meant to Jim. Fliss tried a few reference books, but the only additional Agrippa she found was in the Oxford Companion to English Literature.

“Dead end,” she said, slamming shut the last book.

“What about mail?” Reeve asked. “Has he had any letters while he’s been away?”

“Plenty. He told me he’d phone and give me an address I could redirect them to, but he never did. Last I spoke to him was when he handed me the front-door keys.”

“So where’s the mail?”

It was in the cupboard above the sink in the kitchen. There was a teetering tower of it. Fliss carried it to the kitchen table while Reeve cleared a space, moving cups, sugar bowl, and milk bottle. He couldn’t hear the pneumatic drill anymore. He looked at his watch, surprised to find it was nearly five o’clock—the best part of the day had gone, used up on a hunt which had so far failed to turn up anything the least bit useful.

The mail looked similarly uninspired. Much of it was junk. “I could have just binned it,” Fliss said. “But when I come home after a trip, I like there to be a big pile of letters waiting for me. Makes me feel wanted.”

“Jim was wanted all right,” Reeve said. “Wanted by double-glazing firms, clothes catalogs, the football pools, and just about every fund management scheme going.”

There was a postcard from Wales. Reeve deciphered the spidery handwriting, then handed it to Fliss. “Who’s Charlotte?”

“I think he brought her to the pub once.”

“What about his girlfriends? Anyone come to the flat looking for him? Anyone phone?”

She shook her head. “Just Charlotte. She called one night. Seems he hadn’t said he was going to the States. I think they were supposed to be going to Wales together.”

Reeve considered this. “So either he was an unfeeling bastard who was giving her the big hint she was being ditched…”

“Or?”

“Or something suddenly came up in the States. When did he tell you you could move in?”

“The night before he flew out.”

“So he crammed all his stuff into the cupboard in the hall and the suitcases under the bed and off he went.” Reeve gnawed his bottom lip. “Maybe he knew they were going to move the scientist.”

“Scientist?”

“Dr. Killin—he worked at CWC. Jim went to see him once. Next time he tried, Killin had gone on vacation and the house was under surveillance.”

“I got the feeling he’d only had a few days’ notice that he was making the trip. He complained at the price of the airfare. It wasn’t APEX. What’s the matter?”

Reeve was studying an envelope. He turned it over in his hands. “This is Jim’s handwriting.”

“What?” She gazed at the envelope.

“It’s his handwriting. Postmarked London, the day before he flew to the States.” He held the envelope up to the light, shook it, pressed its contents between thumb and forefinger. “Not just paper,” he said. He peeled apart the two glued flaps. He would never use ready-seal envelopes himself; they were too easy to tamper with. He pulled out a sheet of A4 paper, double-folded. A small key fell out of the paper onto the table. While Fliss picked up the key, Reeve unfolded the paper. The writing was a drunken scrawl.

“Pete’s new address—5 Harrington Lane.”

He showed it to Fliss. “What do you reckon?”

She fetched her street guide. There was only one Harring-ton Lane in London—just off the upper Holloway Road, near Archway.

“It’s not that far,” said Fliss. Her car was being fixed at a garage in Crouch End, so they called for a cab.

“Yeah,” said Pete Cavendish, “like Jim said, you can’t be too careful. And I had the garage gutted out, sold my car and my motorbike. I’ve gone ecology, see. I use a bicycle now. I reckon everybody should.” He was in his late twenties, a photographer. Jim Reeve had put work his way in the past, so Pete had been happy to oblige when Jim asked a favor.

Reeve hadn’t considered his brother’s car. He’d imagined it would be sitting in some long-term car lot out near Heathrow—and as far as he was concerned they could keep it.

Cavendish put him right. “Those places cost a fortune. No, he reckoned this was a better bet.”

They were walking from 5 Harrington Lane, a terraced house, to the garage Pete Cavendish owned. They’d come out through his back door, crossed what might have been the garden, been shown through a gate at the back which Cavendish then repadlocked shut, and were in an alley backing onto two rows of houses whose backyards faced each other. The lane had become a dumping ground for everything from potato chip bags to mattresses and sofas. One sofa had been set alight and was charred to a crisp, showing springs and clumps of wadding. It was nearly dark, but the alley was blessed with a single working streetlight. Cavendish had brought a flashlight with him.

“I think the reason he did that,” Cavendish said, meaning Jim’s letter to himself, “was he was drunk, and he hadn’t been to my new place before. He probably reckoned he’d forget the bloody address and never find me again, or his old car. See, Jim had a kind of dinosaur brain—there was a little bit of it working even when he’d had a drink. It was his ancient consciousness.”

Pete Cavendish spoke with a hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth. He had a ponytail and gray wizened cheeks. The holes in his jeans weren’t there by design, and the heel was loose on one of his sneakers. Reeve had noticed some cans of Super Lager on the kitchen counter. He’d seen Cavendish swig from one before they set off. Ecology and dinosaurs. If Cavendish kept drinking, he’d be seeing green dinosaurs in his dreams.

They passed seven garages before coming to a stop. Caven-dish kicked away some empty cans and a bag of bottles from the front of his own private garage, then took the key from Reeve that Jim had mailed to his own home. He turned it in the lock, pulled the handle, and the garage door groaned open. It stuck halfway up, but halfway was enough. The streetlight barely penetrated the interior gloom.

Cavendish switched on the flashlight. “Doesn’t look as though any of the kids have been in here,” he said, checking the floor and walls. Reeve didn’t ask what he’d thought he might find—glue, spray paint, used vials of crack?

There was only the car.

It was a battered Saab 900 of indeterminate color—charcoal came closest—with a chip out of the windshield, the fixings for side mirrors but no actual mirrors, and one door (replaced after a collision) a different color from the rest of the body. Reeve had never let his brother drive him anywhere in the Saab, and had never seen Jim drive it. It used to sit outside the flat with a tarpaulin over it.

“He spent a grand getting it done up,” Cavendish said.

“Money well spent,” Reeve muttered.

“Not on the outside, on the inside: new engine, transmission, clutch. He could’ve bought another car cheaper, but he loved this old tank.” Cavendish patted it fondly.

“Keys?” Reeve asked. Cavendish handed them over. Reeve unlocked the car and looked inside, checking under the seats and in the glove compartment. He came up with chewing gum, parking tickets, and a book of matches from the same Indian restaurant where he’d eaten lunch.

“The boot?” Fliss suggested. Reeve was unwilling; this would be it, the very last option, their last chance to move any further forward. He turned the key and felt the trunk spring open. Cavendish shone the flashlight in. There was something nestling there, covered with a tartan traveling rug. Reeve pulled off the rug, revealing a large cardboard box advertising its contents to be twelve one-liter bottles of dishwashing liquid. It was the kind of box you picked up from supermarkets and corner shops. He opened its flaps. There were papers inside, maybe half a boxful. He pulled out the top sheet and angled it into the failing flashlight.

“Bingo,” he said.

He lifted the box out, and Fliss locked the trunk. The box was awkward rather than heavy.

“Can we call for a cab from your phone?” Reeve asked Cavendish.

“Yeah, sure.” They left the garage, and Cavendish locked it tight. “Just one thing,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“What’s going to happen to the car?”

Reeve thought about it for all of two seconds. “It’s yours,” he told Cavendish. “Jim would have wanted it that way.”

NINE

January 13

I suppose if this turns into a story, I’ll have to credit Marco with the genesis—though he’d probably stress he’s more of a Pink Floyd fan. He wears a T-shirt which must date back to Dark Side of the Moon. It’s black with the prism logo on it—only he says it’s a pyramid. Sure, but light doesn’t enter a pyramid white and come out the seven colors of the rainbow. It only does that with prisms, so it must be a prism. He says I’m missing the point, maaann. The point is, the album’s a concept album and the concept is everyday madness. Pure white light into a myriad of colors. The everyday gone mad.

But then why is it a damned pyramid? Why not a teacup or a toaster or even a typewriter? Marco laughs, remembering that party of his and how I looked at a poster on his wall and thought it was sailing boats on a rippling blue sea, pictured near sunset with some heavy filtering.

And it wasn’t. It was pyramids. It was the poster that came with Dark Side of the Moon and I was sober when I mistook it. Sober as a judge. Later, I was drunk as a lord and trying to get my hand up Marco’s girlfriend’s kilt until she reminded me, her mouth shiveringly close to my ear, that Marco had done a bit of judo in his time and part of his left ear was missing. So, fair enough, I retracted my hand. You do, don’t you?

Where the fuck was I? The story. The story.

It’s about madness, too: that’s why I used the Pink Floyd reference. I could use it as a lead into the story proper. “Tales of Everyday Madness.” Was that a book or a film? Did someone give me that at charades one time? Absolutely impossible. Yes, charades, at Marco’s party. And Marco’s team was making half its titles up. The bastard even dumped in some that were in Italian.