Taking Lives (35 page)

I still had a good fifty miles to go.

She stood naked by the bed, one hand on her sharp hips, body turned like a fighter, with the absolute purpose of one of her mother’s saints.

He stretched himself and threw off the sheets. Desire didn’t happen. Instead, he patted the bed and said: ‘I could tell you about the Bahamas again. About the hurricane.’

‘Don’t you ever run out of stories?’ she said. ‘Don’t you ever stay anywhere?’

‘Is that an invitation?’ He said it without thinking, for once. It was what another Christopher Hart - sexual opportunist, he supposed cynically, not so experienced except with wide-eyed students, given to playing with hearts for the sake of vanity - might have said.

She walked into the living room.

‘Dark of night,’ he said from the bed. ‘Terrible winds, coconuts and tin roofs flying against the house. The rain. The car we’d parked out back so it would be away from the trees, and something shorted: the lights came on suddenly in the middle of the night, so we could watch the trees bend down through the rain. And these three old ladies wearing hats, playing bridge, discussing the possibilities for the next season. They drank. They chatted. They were starched in place. And then I realized every one of them had pissed herself, and gone on talking …’

‘What were you doing in the Bahamas?’ she said.

‘I could tell you. I could tell you about the time I was a New Age minister. Crystals and balls. I was a bodyguard once, in Cannes. I was -‘

There was a clatter of dishes, like sliding rocks.

He raised his voice. ‘I was -‘

She shouted from the kitchen: ‘How did you ever find time to be Christopher Hart, then?’

Trees closed in on the road. At first I thought it was the high moon that somehow made skeletons out of the branches; the moon was the change I noticed. But the trees, too, had changed, become sticks and charcoal, branches broken close to the trunk. Brush had been burnt back and trimmed, and the trees stood about like ruins. I saw the ground smoking, or imagined I did.

I passed through Vila Nova without a problem, and took the main mountain road. The suburbs looked as they always looked: proper, gated, bland. The first stretch of woods was intact. But after another kilometre, the road was blocked with a line of trestles.

I could run the line easily. There were no cops out this late to check the traffic. But if the road was closed here, it must be closed by something more alarming further on: live fire, fallen trees, the volunteer firefighters commandeering the road.

I took the side road that snakes along a contour to the castle at Vila Nova. I was used to seeing only trees at night, trees that came down to the edge of the road and surrounded the small, round hollow castle that was tucked back in a valley. But tonight, the cover had gone. The castle sat in a bright winter of its own: bare trees, white ashy ground.

I pulled off the road for a moment. The woods used to soak up sound, even in the folds of the high serra, but now they might have lost that power. They might hear me in Formentina working the bends and the sharp, stony rises on the back roads. But the back roads were all that I had. I ought to have mapped out a strategy for this, but instead I had only what I could see and smell: the castle in its sea of ash and the cold, brilliant moonlight.

Hart brought tea through to Maria. He’d spent too long in the kitchen, fussed in drawers. She couldn’t tell why he needed a screwdriver and wire.

She hadn’t dressed. The breeze was slight but enough to raise faint prickles on her skin.

She says she didn’t move in her chair when my car stopped below. Doors slammed once, then twice. The quiet returned.

I slipped on the slate outside, in a hurry, and went away and came rushing back. I thought if I waited a moment I’d somehow be unnoticed.

I saw that the reading light caught her across the neck, left her face in darkness, tinged her high, neat breasts with yellow light. Hart looked hard as though he needed to memorize her.

She said, ‘There’s someone at the door.’

Hart looked at her and it didn’t matter. She waited patiently.

I started shouting outside: ‘Maria! Maria!’

She didn’t move. I mean that; she didn’t even tense herself to stay still. She seemed to think that stillness and quiet would make me think she wasn’t there and then I’d go away.

I, of course, muscles bunched up and adrenalin coursing outside the door, was still sure that she must be the victim.

She was smiling.

Hart never had a witness before. He never had someone else who knew what he did and what he could do, who would record him and keep him; love him, even.

I hammered on the door.

Since she wouldn’t speak or move, Hart shouted: ‘She’s here,’ and he threw the door open. A gust of night breeze scattered brown leaves into the room.

I rushed the house and stood very still, breathing hard. I’d expected obstacles, and found none. I’d expected Maria in danger, but she was only undressed.

Maria said, ‘Go away. It’s just a game. Go away.’

I couldn’t read the story in the room. There was Hart, with tea: domestic, half-naked, curiously busy for the middle of the night. I wasn’t interested in Hart. There was Maria, not moving but quite free, sitting so I could not quite see her face but only her body. I’d had so much time to think about her body.

‘You have to go away,’ Maria said.

I’d burst into some private moment, a cosy moment after making love. Perhaps.

Hart said: ‘You want some tea?’ He said it with real kindness.

I didn’t know what a man like me would do or say. I had nothing but TechniScope and De Luxe Color thoughts. I thought of The Searchers, and the girl who doesn’t want to be saved.

Maria got up and went into the bedroom. Hart went into the kitchen to fetch another cup.

I could have invented all this. I could have made up the story about my father, the informer in that bright white room. Hart might be who he said, might not have done what he denied doing, might not be dangerous at all. Maria and Hart might simply be having a quick summer affair, or perhaps not even that. Perhaps she had stayed the night just because the roads were closed.

Everything in my own past had dissolved, so why should all the fixed points of a collective past, the books, records, papers, reports mean anything more?

Hart and Maria hardly made any noise in the house; they slipped about on agile, quiet feet. From the window I could see the village going down the valley like a fall of tiles and slate. Beyond that, the woods began again. There were no dogs barking, no talk, none of the reassuring city noises that meant life continued even when it was deep night.

Below the road, three men - young men - were throwing a barrel of liquid on a field in the moonlight: shadow figures, furiously active. They stepped back. One of them struck a match, and the gold of the flame was brilliant for a moment before he lit the field. It went up in billows of orange smoke.

‘They’re making a firebreak,’ Maria said, as though she could see what was going on. By the time she was beside me watching, the fire was raining sparks upwards. The men were dancing.

Maria came out dressed, talking urgently, almost whispering. ‘You’ve got to go,’ she was saying. ‘You don’t know about Hart.’

‘Mello told me,’ I was saying.

‘Did he tell you the whole story?’

‘I know he’s wanted for murder.’

‘Do you know how many murders?’

I stared at her. I shrugged.

‘And you still came back here?’ she said.

‘I thought you were in trouble.’

‘I’m not in trouble. You are. I told you not to come.’

I wouldn’t believe it, of course. I have chivalry in the genes, and I know how proper stories go: woman at risk.

Hart walked into the living room.

Maria said: ‘We have to talk.’

So he sat, and he tucked something down at the side of the chair, something springy that resisted being hidden. I was still standing, and Maria pacing like an advocate. Dogs took to barking.

She said to Hart, ‘Who are you?’

Hart said, ‘You mean me?’

‘Listen to this, John,’ she said. ‘If you won’t go, then listen.’

‘What do you want to know?’ Hart asked.

She said, ‘Mello told me. You have a real name. You’re Martin Arkenhout. You killed some kid in Florida, took his name, and a year later that kid’s name disappeared; so you must have killed again. Now you’re Christopher Hart, so knowing how you operate, you must have killed Hart.’

‘You say so,’ Hart said. What else was he meant to say? It was obvious this version of his lives was lying in a police file somewhere, an open active file. They’d got it right, at last.

I said: ‘That’s all you’ve got to say?’

‘Exactly. What do you expect?’ Hart tried to sound morally superior. ‘You want to know how to kill someone? You want the details? You get off on this kind of thing?’

I didn’t lunge at him. I wanted to, though. My whole body was a policeman.

‘Why don’t you call the police?’ Hart said. ‘You have a phone. I have a phone. I’m not stopping you.’

‘You know the roads are closed,’ Maria said.

‘I expect the cops could risk it. Costa got here, after all.’

Maria said, ‘I’m not leaving without Costa.’

I sat down as if to make a point.

We were a stalemate nicely expressed in social terms - two men wedged in chairs, a woman pacing between them - but at a grossly early hour.

There was tea on the table: cups, milk, an old pot with the glaze cracked. It wouldn’t do. There was no wasted furniture in the room, in the corners where the pale yellow light did not reach, and no big ornamental things. There was nothing I could use to take Hart down.

I thought animals would have done this better. Cats would arch backs, spike their fur, pose to say who was attacking, who was being attacked, then yowl and spit and jump. We had manners. Hart was the child of good middle-class Dutch parents who know how to sit at table and kneel in church. Maria wanted quiet most of all. As for me, I had this quaint residual notion that a man’s guilt ought to be proved, and it was enough to hold me back from saving my own life.

Whatever Hart hid down by his chair, it sprang up for a moment: a circle of wire. He’d always been so efficient when it came to killing. Now he hesitated, in a nervous state of being ready for a crime he had not yet committed.

He tried to hide the wire.

Maria smelt petrol. The smell was faint, and it caught in her mind like a memory, but she knew it was close.

‘You’re crazy, both of you,’ she said. ‘You could run, Christopher. Or Martin. Or whoever you are. Get moving now, and they won’t have alerted the frontier police. You could get into Spain without a check, and then you can go where you want. What’s stopping you?’

Hart said nothing.

‘And you, Mr Costa. Why don’t you go home now? There’s nothing for you here. Nothing.’

‘I come from here,’ I said.

We were pacing behind a fence of words.

‘You don’t belong here.’

‘I know some Portuguese already. I know about Portugal from my father.’

‘You’re from London. You have to go back.’

I said: ‘But I don’t have any reason -‘

I stumbled up to my feet, not looking at Maria, fixed on Hart: on Hart who’d fucked Maria, who’d doubted that she told the truth, who’d brought me here and wrecked things, who refused to be properly guilty even of theft, let alone murder. I know only genteel business on the whole - things purloined, the confederacy of dealers, some fakers, not the kind of street attitude that grins and teases and boasts - but I knew then the cold useful rage that can come down on you when you want to punish as well as persuade with your fists.

Hart didn’t back away. He stood in the yellow light and he let me fall towards him, right fist out, as though I were punching through a door. He was making me into a caricature: like a drunk professor. He dodged sideways and out of the light. I was shocked that the punch did not connect and twisted round.

Maria saw Hart fetch the wire from the side of his chair.

The wire was a ring twisted round wood at the side, round a screwdriver. She couldn’t shout for fear of distracting me.

Hart dodged in and out of light. I waited, blocking the doorway. The man was only making shadows, huge, gangling shadows, on the wall and the ceiling. He had nowhere to run. He was casting about for an open window, but they were all closed: glass, and then bolted shutters beyond. If he tried to get out that way, he’d be caught before he could get the shutters opened wide.

Then Hart stopped dodging quite suddenly. His arms hung at his sides. I ran at him like a rugby player, got him about the ankles and threw him down on the floor. Hart’s head connected with the red-brown marble of the window sill and his neck cracked.

Maria tugged her skirt into place, and she walked out, down the shining slate steps, through the white of daisies and the sharp agapanthus leaves that both caught the fading moon.

She sat by the chapel and she waited.

Hart’s eyes opened. It was as though he didn’t have the force or will to keep them closed.

I thought he might have broken his spine. The only movement was those eyes, and they stared ahead. I felt pity for a moment, but only a moment. Then his arm jerked across his chest as though he were looking for something in an imaginary pocket.

He began to inhabit his body again, as a photograph slowly inhabits the paper as it develops, detail by detail: becoming Hart again.

So he wasn’t crippled. He was only numb and dazed. I watched his eyes begin to seek out objects, to see me.

I knew that he wanted to kill me. He had this chicken wire fixed round a screwdriver in a loop the size of a neck. You couldn’t fix anything with it, but you could kill.

So there were no pretty rules any more. This was the unimaginable moment: an actual matter of life or death. We’re always nervous of people who have known a choice like this: veterans, grandfathers with medals, cops on a street.

He tried to pull himself to his knees.

‘What do you want?’ he said.

He wasn’t able to stand properly. There was blood on his head. When I went towards him, he scooted back awkwardly on his buttocks. I never felt such power. He was the one who had always made choices but now I could choose if he lived or died.