Damned If You Do (22 page)

‘I love you,' I said.

‘Don't be ridiculous,' she replied.

*   *   *

We were lying on the bed when the buzzer rang.

‘Oh shit. Oh
shit.
' She leapt up, rearranged her clothes quickly. ‘It's him. I know it is.' She was already at the intercom by the time I reached the doorway. ‘Hello?'

‘'S'me. I've lost my key.'

‘Hold on. I'll come down.'

‘Just open the door.' Then fainter: ‘Stupid cow.'

She panicked. ‘No. Let's go out tonight. Anywhere. Let's—'

‘Look, 'ave you got some wanker up there with you? 'Cos if—'

‘No.'

‘Then
open the fucking door.
'

She pressed a small, black button on the intercom panel, and a moment later I heard a door slam far below.

‘Hurry,' she said, pulling back the bolt on the front door. ‘You have to go.' I straightened my tie, and listened for the sound I didn't want to hear. Sure enough, I heard it: footsteps from the stairwell. ‘Take the lift.'

I felt violently sick. ‘I can't.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean
I can't.
Lifts. Not since my—'

‘Well you can't stay
here.
' She looked around frantically. ‘He suspects something. I can tell by his voice. He'll search every room in the house.'

Even if I'd agreed with her, any time I might have had to overcome my phobia was now gone. The lift was on the ground floor, and Ralph was ascending rapidly via the only other exit. He would arrive before the lift reached halfway. I suggested casually strolling down the stairs, meeting him on the way down. Amy shook her head and pulled the biggest surprise so far.

‘I think he knows who you are. He's seen you following him.'

My only option was to remain where I was and talk my way out. I hadn't brought a weapon with me, and I knew from my observations that he always carried one wherever he went, so it was going to be tricky. But I could deal with it. I had done a couple of times before.

She killed the idea as soon as I suggested it.

‘No. Please. You have to go. You don't understand.'

I closed the door and scanned the living room for anything which might help me, barely listening to Amy's desperate apologies. I couldn't leave, and couldn't conceal myself anywhere in the apartment. What
could
I do?

*   *   *

Rain pounded on the roof of the round tower in the far corner, drawing my gaze to a patch of light on the carpet near by – a pale rectangle created by the moon shining through the skylight. Within its borders curiously symmetrical shadows danced – water running over the glass above.

It was a moment of beauty in a time of terror. It was like a Rorschach Test, revealing aspects of your personality by inviting you to find meaningful patterns in abstract arrangements of inkblots.

And the only pattern I could see was the shape of my own doom.

Sex and Death

‘Why do we do the things that we do?'

I sat in the rear of the car, gazing at the back of Death's head as he talked. Tentacles of black hair curled from the crown to the nape of his white neck. War's head was thicker and larger, but his hair had streaks of red like rust, and clumps of curls crowded his bovine skull like bedsprings.

‘I told you. It'd be worse without us.'

Death stroked his beard absent-mindedly, the distraction causing him to veer towards a roadside storm drain. ‘But how can I have avoided this question before now?'

‘It's one of those things.'

‘Yet it won't go away.'

He put an unlabelled tape into the cassette player, perhaps to drown his confusion. It was a pirated compilation by a band I knew well when I was a teenager: Joy Division. War informed us that it belonged to Skirmish, and speculated that he must have been playing it when he cleaned out the car. It took me barely a moment to recognize the unusually upbeat first track – ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart' – but since it had no special emotional significance for me, I tipped my head back, stared at the sky through the rear window, and let my mind float away.

It drifted towards the decision I would be forced to make in two days' time: which method of death should I choose? At the start of the week I would have taken any option just to get back inside the coffin; but the more I experienced of life beyond the grave, the more I knew that my choice had to be right. None of the deaths I had witnessed so far was suitable.

And if I couldn't make a choice?

‘Did you pack the ants?' Death asked War.

His question pulled me back from the future into the present. I was aware of the rough fabric beneath me, two bodies ahead, the light from a high sun, the hum of the engine.

‘They're in the boot.'

‘I didn't see you put them in.'

‘You weren't bloody looking.'

‘I was looking. I just can't remember.'

‘Your Code Four was watching me. Ask him.'

Simultaneously, Death turned around, pressed his foot hard on the accelerator and swerved up a slip-road.

‘Is is true?' he asked.

‘Yes,' I said quickly. He faced forwards again, decelerated, pulled the wheel hard left, and narrowly avoided an ice-cream van in the inside lane.

Actually, I couldn't remember, either.

*   *   *

The needle on the temperature gauge rested in the red zone. Steam clouds swirled from beneath the bonnet, whispering, whistling, hissing. An acrid smell invaded the interior. The engine was still idling.

‘Metros,' said War disparagingly. ‘Bloody crap bollocks of a car.'

Death switched off the motor. ‘It's taken us where we want to be.'

‘It's a piece of shit.'

He climbed out and kicked the front passenger side wheel. Twice. Then he thumped the bonnet repeatedly, causing several minor dents. He calmed down briefly before launching an assault against the rear bumper.

‘You should come back inside. Our clients will be along any minute.'

War capitulated and sat down sulkily.

We had parked by a gate on the edge of a green field. Ahead of us the land sloped downwards into a hollow and a clump of trees. To the right, on the rim of the depression and level with the car, a dark wood stretched as far as we could see. The words
Boar's Hill
appeared from somewhere inside my head. I had once brought Amy here. We had divided the time between talking about nothing and groping until the car windows steamed up.

‘How many are there?' I asked.

‘Two,' Death replied. ‘A man and a woman.'

*   *   *

He explained that the woman was forty-two years old, the man forty-nine. I quickly calculated that, between them, they had experienced sixty-three years more life than I had. I would have gladly exchanged positions with either of them, just to taste another fifteen minutes.

They had known each other for nine months. They worked for a company which made polyextruded plastics. He was an accountant, she a project manager. In his twenties he had wanted to be a painter, but had been encouraged by his parents to pursue a financially rewarding career instead. In
her
twenties she had wanted to become a project manager, but had not expected to wait so long. They were both married, but not to each other.

They had been interested in each other since the first time they met. He was attracted to her impatience. She was attracted to his creative spirit. His creativity expressed itself most frequently in the sketches he drew for her, the notes he wrote and the jokes he made. Her impatience was familiar enough to tease him but not enough to annoy him.

Overt, uninhibited, mutual sexual attraction came later.

The office they shared was the same office in which Monday's client, the suicidal woman, had worked. They did not know her particularly well, but had attended her funeral on Thursday as a mark of respect.

The hearse was driven to the funeral service by the business partner of the accident-prone man who had been savaged by Cerberus on Wednesday. Apart from one of the pall-bearers stumbling and almost dropping the coffin, there were no unusual incidents during the ceremony.

The woman's seventh-closest friend was the bearded man who had been mangled in the fairground, and who now rested in storage back at the Agency. The woman ranked her friends using a complex scoring system based on general personality, sense of humour, intelligence, charisma, social skills, co-ordination, physical appearance, and bodily hygiene.

Neither of the lovers had any knowledge of the couple who may, or may not, have contracted a disease on Tuesday.

*   *   *

‘How old are you?' I asked Death.

We were still sitting inside the car. It was thirty minutes since we had parked and I was trying to pass the time with casual chat. War was scraping his teeth with a Swiss Army knife.

‘The question has no meaning for me,' he replied.

*   *   *

Two people approached hand-in-hand, the man grinning broadly, the woman laughing. Their conversation was too distant to catch anything other than its rhythm and tone. The man carried a Blackwatch tartan picnic rug. They glanced briefly, innocently, at the pale Metro as they headed for the dark wood, and only released their hands when they negotiated a stile. He climbed over first, then assisted her. She didn't seem to mind: as far as she was concerned, a bright sun shone between the twin moons of his buttocks.

Death coughed. ‘We should follow them.'

They were fifty yards ahead. The man had medium-length grey hair, coarse like an old whippet. The woman's hair was blond, and curly like a West Highland terrier's. He had kept himself in reasonable shape for someone who was almost fifty, had led a sedentary life, ate, drank and smoked too much, took no regular exercise and had an underachieving destructive metabolism. She, too, was overweight.

War removed the sack from the boot and held it to his ear. ‘I can hear their mandibles clicking. They must smell food.'

‘Ants
can't
smell,' I told him. ‘They use chemical trails to find—' I stopped, realizing I had missed the point.

We climbed over the stile and trailed the couple through the forest. The trees, mostly firs, were densely packed, forcing us to march in single file. We caught glimpses of our clients as they picked and skipped their way up a long slope, heard them laughing against the silence of the forest floor. It was cool and dark beneath the whispering branches.

‘They'll be stopping somewhere ahead,' Death explained, his white worm finger resting on a map. ‘There's a clearing near by.' He pointed vaguely to a patch of green between two grid-lines, where a big red ‘X' had been scrawled with a crayon. ‘When they reach the clearing they'll stop, kiss for a few minutes, spread out the rug, remove their clothes and have sex. At some point in this process we will release our friends here.' He indicated the sack. ‘And when the ants have finished we need to collect every last one of them.'

We advanced deeper into the forest, Death at the head, War bringing up the rear. The laughter had stopped, and the only sound we heard was the rustle of our own footfalls. The light grew dimmer, the tree trunks more tightly packed. The cathedral of branches blocked out the sky.

‘Damn blast sodding
hell.
'

I turned around. War had his hand over his left eye and was flapping aimlessly at a swinging twig.

‘Bugger blasted lashing
thing,
' he continued.

‘Are you all right?' I asked him.

‘Just watch where you're going.'

He walked on with a hand covering the afflicted eye, leading the party at Death's invitation, dodging exaggeratedly the overhanging branches.

I avoided thinking about what we were doing. As we advanced further up the slope and deeper into the woods, my brain resorted to nonsense, as it had in the Stock Room. I tried to remember everything about sex I'd learned from my trivia encyclopedia, convincing myself that it would help with what we were about to do. All I could recall was a sequence of disjointed facts:

The female whale has nipples on her back.

Whalebone corsets were replaced by the brassière in 1914.

The fourth Mogul Emperor, Jahangir, had three hundred wives and five thousand mistresses.

Or was it the other way around?

The hyena, like man, does not have a penis bone.

Syphilis is transmitted from the genitals via the skin and mucous membrane to the bones, muscles and brain.

Cardinal Wolsey was accused of spreading syphilis to Henry VIII by whispering in his ear.

And in case you're wondering, there's only one kind of sex available to cadavers: necrophilia. But the dead, as everyone knows, do not copulate.

What would be the point?

*   *   *

I had just remembered that Donatien Alphonse Francois Sade was sentenced to death in 1772 for ‘immoral behaviour' (which included describing six hundred different sexual techniques in his book,
100 Days of Sodom
), when we burst into a glade. Light from darkness, space from confinement, warm air from cool shade. It was a flat patch of land no larger than a small house, sparsely carpeted with grass and speckled with dry, brown needles from the trees. The overhead sun cast no shadows but enriched every colour, the intensity of the light drawing us in to the centre of the clearing.

The couple were already intertwined. Her hands clasped his neck, his hands clamped her waist. Their faces were connected, too. When they pulled away from each other their mouths closed like small, pink clams; when they came together their lips ripped apart at the seams. They spluttered through stuttering pneumatic kisses: glistening gums, flashing white teeth, spit-bright tongues dripping with the moment's release.