Blood Of Angels (39 page)

She heard the sound of the cellar door being opened. She raised her head, still trying not to pant. She could see two men standing at the top of the stairs. The Upright Man and the older one. She got a glimpse of the younger kid standing well back.

Could he be a help to her? There had been something in the kid's face which said this was outside the world he understood. Could she try to tap some kind of older sister vein in him? Yeah, dream on, Nina. But how old would his mother be? Could she be his defenceless mom instead, some pie-wielding sweetie? Would it help?

But when the two older men started down the stairs, the boy remained behind, and after a moment disappeared from view into some other part of the house.

Paul didn't come over to her when he reached the basement, but walked off to one side. He squatted down and seemed to inspect a portion of the ground for a while, reaching out and pulling his finger through the dirt.

'Don't think our wannabe is going to be a problem any more,' he said to the older man. 'Again, no thanks to you.' He stood up again and looked down at Nina. 'We might as well keep our agent for the time being. There will come a time when that's no longer the case. I will call you then, and if I tell you to kill her you'll do it immediately. No playing. Understood?'

The man nodded.

'He was supposed to kill us both,' Nina said, quietly. 'Is that it? He mistook Reidel for Ward, and killed him, but then decided he wanted me for himself

Paul came so he was standing directly over Nina. 'You're sharp, Agent Baynam. Sharp and super-smart. But wrong. James was supposed to kill you. But Ward wasn't his other target.'

'Who was?'

'I'll leave that as an exercise for the student.'

'You're a lunatic'

'No. And I'm not the one tied up in a basement and stinking of stale sweat and fear, so right now nine out of ten cat-owners would prefer my reality to yours.'

The men left soon afterwards, and she heard the door to the house being slammed and the sound of a car driving away. Nina made herself wait before she tried for the phone again, to make sure they'd all gone. In the meantime she tried to think calmly, see if there was anything to learn from what Paul had said. A classic 1930s text she'd read once described a psychopath as a 'reflex machine', which could mimic the human personality so effectively that it was impossible to say what about them is not real. You saw something of this in the eyes of the men who end up in fights in bars. If you passed by early in the evening — assuming you were incautious enough to look their way, which is a bad, bad idea — you could see a restlessness in their faces, a blankness washed with slippery good cheer. The silent are usually misanthropes or depressed or serious drinkers getting on with business. There is a cold and hectic charm about the dangerous ones, like the blurred numbers on a computer read-out: forever spinning to the conclusion of some complex calculation, but never settling on a result. A result would be a fixed personality, something you could reason with. There is no such thing inside such men. They are pockets of violence waiting for an excuse, demonic whirlwinds in human wrappers.

The truly mad are something else again. With them, there
is
something inside — it's just not clear what it is. Dr Cleckley's 'reflex machine' model begged a question: what was it that was doing the impersonating? What was this 'machine', and what was it doing when it wasn't impersonating humankind? What were its normal responses? Where did it come from?
What did it want?

Was it actually something different in each of them, or was it possible that it was the same thing, the same demonic substance or insane spirit, staring out of all of their eyes? Everything in Nina's training and belief system said otherwise, that these were damaged humans, manifesting individual psychoses and pathologies.

But when someone like Paul looked down at you… sometimes you had to wonder.

===OO=OOO=OO===

She had just decided she couldn't wait any longer when she heard the sound of the cellar door opening again, and light leaked down. Her heart sank. They hadn't all gone after all.

Heavy footsteps descended. It could only be James, the one who'd taken her blood. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, where he sat in silence for some time, smoking.

'What happens now, James?' she asked, dully. 'We wait until your leader says you can kill me?'

'He's not my leader. And I'm not James.'

'That's what he called you.'

'I'm Jim Westlake. I take photographs.'

'My father was a photographer.' This was not true, of course. 'What kind of pictures?'

The man hesitated, then got up and went over to his bag. He took Nina's jacket out and laid it on the ground, and Nina's heart caught in her throat.

So it was here. That was great news. But lying on the floor, it could be knocked. The phone could fall out and be discovered. But if she could get to it… or have it brought to her…

'I'm cold,' she said. 'This floor is so cold.'

He didn't seem to hear. When he straightened he was holding a small box, something that looked as though it once held a pair of children's shoes. He sat back on the bottom stair and opened it. He looked through the contents for a while, as if he'd forgotten she was there. Then, without even looking at her, he held up a few Polaroid photographs so she could see.

Nina couldn't tell much except they were of women or girls, of various ages, taken somewhere that looked sunny.

'I didn't do anything,' he said. 'None of them. For years. I even lived next to… Look.'

He flipped quickly through the pictures for a moment, then yanked a single one out. 'Look.'

He held a picture so close to her face she could barely focus to make out what it showed. The picture was of two little girls, maybe four, five years old. Smiling.

'Cute.'

'My neighbours.'

'Really? Next door to here?'

'No. I haven't lived here for a long time.'

'So how come you can just walk in?'

'I still own it but… I lived here with my wife.'

'You're married?'

'Not any more.'

Nina opened her mouth to ask another question, but closed it again slowly. She was not in charge here. This was not an interview with a man awaiting trial. She let silence settle.

Eventually he spoke.

'We met when I got out of the army. We moved around for a few years, all over the place. Then we found this area and it felt right. I got myself a teaching certificate. I'd always been good at numbers. I taught math at the school. But…'

He left a long pause before he continued.

'I'd been okay all that time, overseas. In the army I could have… but I didn't. But something… after I'd been here a while I just wasn't right any more. Couldn't get my head to add things up properly. The sums started going wrong again.'

Nina couldn't help herself. 'What? You're saying it's Thornton's fault? The town made you do it? Take my advice, that defence just won't play.'

'I don't care. For a long time I was like everybody else. I knew I could be wrong if I let myself. But I didn't want to have to do it. I… I did my best. But then.' He put his head in his hands. 'A student. At the school. She reminded me of Karla. That's all it took. She looked like Karla. That was all. Bang. Just like that.'

'Who's Karla? Your wife?'

'My wife was Laurie. Aren't you listening?'

'I'm sorry. So who was Karla?'

'A girl I knew a long time ago. At school. She was my first.'

'The first girl you had sex with.'

'Yes.'

'But that's not what you meant.'

'No.'

'You killed her.'

'Yes.'

He told Nina about the girl, this Karla. He could remember her face in bitter detail. He could remember the way she walked. He could recall preparations, too, undertaken under erasure in his head while apparently doing and thinking something else entirely, something normal. He remembered, too, sitting on the edge of the river afterwards, a waterside where he had played as a kid. It was dark and cold that night and spitting with rain. He sat on the hard, pocked mud, her severed hand beside him, and there was no light anywhere apart from a few distant twinkles in the windows of houses right up along the opposite edge of the water. If you turned away from those and looked out and listened to the wind you could believe that the whole world had disappeared, that you had gone back in time to a place when the things you now held dear had yet to be brought into being, when men and boys were free to be themselves. The specifics of what he had done were already fading around the edges, and he was oddly unconcerned with the notion of capture (that too would return, and in spades). For the moment he felt he was sitting to one side of creation, and it was hard to understand how it could impinge upon him any more. When he turned and looked once more at the house lights he knew they could not see him, just as he knew that if he knocked on their doors the inhabitants would neither hear nor see him. Their life was closed to him now. There was nowhere else to go. He just sat there in the rain and listened to the sounds of wild nature until he was too cold and walked the long mile back home, where he ate a piece of cold chicken and then went to bed.

Nothing like it happened again for a very long time. It could possibly have ended there, stayed at one, remained true but unique. It didn't. Karla was his first. She was a long way from being the last.

He tried. He went in the army. He travelled the country when he got out and eventually settled down into a job in a nice town with a wife and a kid.

It was too late. It had always been too late.

'She was a stupid girl anyway. The one who looked like Karla. Really, really dumb. People were happy to believe she'd run off somewhere, gone to California like all the other lazy whores.'

'How long ago was this?'

'Fifteen years,' he said. 'It didn't happen often. I didn't let it. Never women from Thornton or Dryford, either. A waitress from Owensville, once. They're in the woods now. No one's ever going to find them. But once I'd started… I thought I was handling it. Of course it wasn't good, but it was under control.'

'Your wife didn't know? Didn't guess?'

He was quiet for a moment. 'She left.'

'Did she?'

He looked away. 'No,' he said.

Then suddenly he frowned, turned his head upwards. 'Did you hear that?'

'I didn't hear anything,' Nina said. 'What did you think you heard?'

He shook his head. 'Sometimes when there was a storm in the night she would get so upset.'

'Your wife?'

'She would hear the thunder and think it was the sky shouting. She thought the night was angry, and looking for someone to hurt. I said it wasn't that, it was just a sound like children make when they play. I said thunder was just the sound of the sky playing, far away.'

He was quiet for a while, and Nina realized he was crying.

'Jim,' she said, gently. 'I'm really cold. I don't feel well. You couldn't… would it be possible for me to have my coat? You could just lie it over me. Keep me warm. I'm sure he wouldn't mind.'

But he still didn't hear her, and Nina had a sudden vision of her smashing a metal bar over his head. None of them ever heard anything above the jabbering inside their own minds. They talked and talked, but no words ever made it in the other direction. Nothing ever went inside.

'I lost… It all just got to a point,' he said, his voice thick. 'You understand, don't you?'

'No,' she said, coldly. 'And I never will.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

A while later Paul returned. Nina heard a car door slam outside and two sets of footsteps enter the house. She heard someone walk over to the door and open it. She thought that now maybe time had run out.

But when he got down to the cellar Paul bent down and helped her to her knees, and then her feet.

'What now?' she said, hating the confidence in his gentleness.

'Going to bring you along.' He tied the gag around her mouth again. 'I don't have time to savour any of your deep thoughts. Sorry if that's disempowering in any way.'

'She's cold,' Jim/James said, suddenly.

He was not looking at either of them, or at anything that Nina could see. He had another cigarette in his mouth and seemed focused on that. She wasn't even sure he was talking to Paul, or about her.

Nonetheless Paul reached down and picked up her coat, the coat Ward had given her a lifetime ago. He hung it over her shoulders. 'Better?'

Nina nodded quickly, warmly, gratefully, the most well-behaved she had ever been in her life.

When the coat was on, she could actually feel the slight heaviness on the left side. Her phone was only inches away. All she had to do was find a way of pressing the ON switch through the fabric, and then a speed dial button. It wouldn't be easy but it wasn't impossible. Ward wouldn't even need to hear her voice. He'd know from the number that flashed up on his phone…

'Oh,' Paul murmured. 'Mustn't forget this.'

He reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out her phone. He watched her face as he did so, and though she tried, she could not hide the crushing disappointment.

'Give me some credit, Nina.'

As he carried her up the stairs, towards an uncertain light, Nina dismally accepted that he had always been a step ahead of her, of all of them.

Maybe always would be.

When John and I pulled into the Mayflower parking lot Unger was already waiting right in the middle. He was dressed more smartly than when I'd seen him last, an expensive-looking charcoal suit and a sober dark tie. He looked different. I led John over.

'Good timing,' Unger said. Even his voice sounded more clipped.

'How did you get here?'

'Cab. I don't like to drive.'

'Really?'

'It's dangerous.'

'Worse than flying?'

'Pilots are trained. I'm not.' He turned to John. 'I'm Carl Unger.'

'John Zandt.'

'I know who you are.'

John frowned. 'What do you mean by that?'

'Several things.' Unger looked at the Mayflower. 'We going to take this inside? It's cold as hell out here.'