The Cutting Crew (19 page)

'Are you okay?'

I looked back down at the stretch of ground in front of me. This was the exact spot where it had happened - as a child, I'd watched a man die here. It used to be services, but now it was just a car park, a motel and not much of anything else: dull floodlights at the end of a spread of darkening tarmac; cars rushing past on the road beyond. Exactly the kind of place that three people like us should end up for the night. I hadn't realised - even as Lucy had taken the turning - but now the memory couldn't have been clearer.

'I'm fine,' I said.

'You don't look fine. You're worried about--'

I shook my head, perhaps too quickly.

'No.'

"I'm not worried about Rachel.

I wanted to shout that at her until it echoed - until it pranged back and forth between the handful of parked cars.

You see, there had been a time when Lucy would never have spoken Rachel's name out loud. It's no surprise, I guess - when you're fucking a guy you don't want to talk too much about his wife, even if you're pretending that it's all very casual and easy. But after she started seeing Rich again - when it was officially over between us - Rachel's name began to crop up more frequently, as though she was now suddenly welcome as a guest in our conversations.

'I'm not worried about Rachel,' I said.

'Yes, you are.'

I kicked the ground a little, not wanting to talk about this now and already slightly irritated by it. This was something else that Lucy did. She always seemed to think she had some kind of direct line into my head - that she could see straight through what I was thinking on the surface, all the way down to what was being whispered underneath - and she was always correcting me about stuff she couldn't possibly know. Despite the fact that I'd left my wife for her, she just knew that I didn't love her: that I was being silly, and that I'd go back to Rachel in the end. The force of her appraisals always made me go to extremes. Yes, I do. I love you. I'd insist it and feel even more stupid.

'If you must know,' I said, 'I was just thinking. I've been here before.'

She looked at the motel. 'Stayed here?'

'No. When I was young. It used to be services.'

'Right.'

I said, 'I was just thinking it was weird, that was all.'

It felt more than weird, though, and I kept staring at the ground and feeling shivers of recognition. It was like bumping into an old friend at a random party: just coincidence, but you're compelled to try and work out how the fuck you both ended up there. It's random but meaningful and, for no real reason I could identify, it seemed slightly ominous. Every time I moved my head, I could hear a whining in the air. We were miles out of the city - couldn't even see the swell of it, the pinprick spread of its lights - and yet I felt trapped by the crawling familiarity of being here. It seemed to soak everything that had happened in the last few days with a black inevitability.

Lucy ground out the cigarette under her heel. Obviously, she wasn't feeling anything like that.

'If you're worried, you should ring her,' she said.

I walked away from where I'd been standing and leaned against the car beside her.

'Bad idea,' I said. 'Anyway, she'll be fine.'

'You don't want to keep trying? She's your wife.'

'No,' I said. 'She's not. And she'll be fine. What the fuck would I tell her anyway?'

She inclined her head slightly, conceding the point.

I said, 'Well, maybe you should ring Rich.'

The air between us stiffened, tensed, and suddenly I wished I wasn't standing quite so close to her anymore. That had been unfair and unnecessary, and we both knew it.

'He's at home,' she told me quietly.

She'd told me the same thing earlier on, as well, when the three of us had been debating what to do. The most worrying thing about the damage to Rosh's farmhouse wasn't the loss of the building: it was that someone had known enough about us to find it in the first place. If they knew that then what else did they know, and what else might they be prepared to do? Perhaps we'd killed all of them tonight, but until we spoke to Keleigh or found Harris we couldn't assume anything, and so going home was out of the question. Hence the motel. We'd also discussed whether anyone we cared about might be in danger, and after some deliberation I'd tried to phone Rachel. She hadn't answered. But it was late, and phonecalls from me weren't exactly welcome at the best of times.

'Okay,' Rosh said, the front doors of the motel closing behind him. He was swinging a key. 'We've got one family room between us.'

A family room? I could only imagine what the guy on the desk must have thought, what with Rosh coming in at this hour. On first glance, it was difficult to imagine Rosh having a family at all, or, if he did, what it might look like. And I guess Lucy and I must have looked pretty shit even to Rosh, because he frowned and said: 'You two okay?'

'Fine,' I said. Lucy didn't say anything.

He kept looking at me, concerned, for a couple of seconds, and then he seemed to shrug to himself. I wasn't sure how much Rosh knew about what had happened between me and Lucy, but whatever that might be he obviously figured that now wasn't the best time to bring it up or offer advice. Far smarter than either of us had been.

'Whatever,' he said. 'Come on - it's over this way.'

We followed him, Lucy heading off first and leaving me trailing behind. I glanced back as I went, taking one last look at the patch of tarmac where, as a child, I'd seen a man murdered. I hadn't been back here since and it still seemed odd that I'd ended up here now.

If there really was one single event that had made me want to be a cop then I thought that one was as good a candidate as any.

Strange. I turned around and hurried to catch up.

The motel was constructed around a rectangle, with all the rooms facing inwards on what had once - and presumably quite some time ago - been a swimming pool. Now it was just a dirty hole that would never be used again. I casually watched the closed, white doors as we passed, but there was nobody to see and not much to hear. Just the night-time rush of air, like a faraway river, and the muffled sound of someone's television. Apart from that, the motel felt silent and abandoned. Above us, the rain clouds had relaxed and untensed, and the sky was mostly clear now. Looking up, it was like I was wandering into a child's model - as though someone had taken the roof off a doll's house and was peering down at me.

Our room was on the second floor. We climbed slatted, wooden steps up onto the walkway there and then found our door, which was about halfway along one of the longer sides. Rosh opened up and we went in.

'This is a family room?' Lucy said.

'Apparently so.'

Rosh locked the door behind us.

About the only time you'd bring a family here, I thought, was if you'd kidnapped them. The wallpaper was piss-yellow, peeling in a few choice spots and speckled with damp in others. You could smell it in the air, like someone had left a rack of wet clothes to dry. There was one double bed and two singles, all of them sporting white bedsheets that looked more like cheap paper than anything else. There were no pillow-cases: just pillows the colour of old teabags. In an otherwise unprecedented nod towards convenience and comfort, there was a sink unit in the far corner, but the silver of it was tarnished by those brown stains that metal acquires steadily over time, and it looked as unhygienic as the rest of the room.

There was a single door leading off, which opened into a small bathroom. Lucy flicked the light switch, slapping everything with stunningly harsh white: the kind of light that would probably appear behind God if you received a visitation. There wasn't much to light up, though - surprisingly clean tiles and toilet, another sink and a thin metal radiator mounted high up by the tiny window.

The radiator was humming to itself, sounding potentially dangerous.

'Not great,' Rosh said. 'But it'll do. I suggest we all get some sleep and talk in the morning.'

Part of me wanted to talk about everything now, but I was so tired that my mind probably wouldn't have been able to hold it all together anyway. Better perhaps to rest and then come at it vaguely refreshed in a few hours. We'd had a long night.

'Fine by me,' Lucy said.

Rosh and I took the single beds, allowing Lucy to spread out a little. They settled down first, and I went through to the bathroom to clean my face. The cut wasn't deep and it had already stopped bleeding, so there wasn't much to do but wash away the blood and clean whatever parts of the wound were still open to water.

Despite myself, I found I was thinking. We'd been forced to kill five men and at least one of them had been a cop. All because of Alison Sheldon. But who had she been? Just a student. Except that a number of men with automatic weaponry had a lot invested in making sure her murder went unsolved.

I ticked off the light and went back through into the pitch-black bedroom.

Lucy was already snoring gently. I recognised the sound. It stirred an uncertain pain inside me and I forced myself to ignore it.

It was easier than it should have been, perhaps because I was still hurt and angry from the conversation we'd had outside. Rosh was making no noise at all, and I considered trying to talk to him but then discounted the idea. I just took off a few of my clothes and slipped into bed, leaving my gun within easy reach at the side. I was asleep before I could feel angry or sad or frightened, and I dreamed of nothing.

Later on, I remember sitting up in my bed. The room was growing lighter as dawn broke outside, but Lucy and Rosh were still asleep, both facing away from me. The covers over them were calmly rising and falling, and I felt very much alone, as though despite the slight movement I was trapped in a pocket of paused time. I picked up my mobile, knowing even as I did so that it was a bad idea.

Rachel's number was programmed into the "I' key; I pressed it now, holding the phone up to my ear.

Straight to voicemail. She hadn't answered my last call, and sometime since she had switched off her phone.

Chapter
Thirteen

Eight-thirty the next morning and the main crossroads at the centre of Elephant was saturated with commerce. You could breathe it in - a kind of sparkly damp in the air - and the black tiles on the walkways were soaked with the dew of it. Everyone walking around seemed full of purpose and direction, whereas I felt as though I'd got up very early after not enough sleep and was simply too slow to exist here for very long. Which was true.

There was all manner of shops here, lining the four pedestrian walkways that met in the centre. The traditional colours of Elephant were gold and white, but you couldn't see many lanterns or banners among the shopfronts, which all had awnings and blocky signs stretching out above multicoloured windows and doors. Cameras were recording everything from inside glass bulbs on top of tall, black poles. The crossroads itself was cornered by a chemist, a mobile phone shop, a coffee bar and a clothes store, and variations on these themes extended away as far as the eye could see. They were interspersed with expensive sandwich shops that had the pre-work masses queueing out of the doors, and there was a baked-potato shack outside the chemist, complete with rising steam and the sound of ovens being scraped and trays rattled into place. Everybody apart from Rosh, Lucy and me appeared to be wearing suits and marching in neat lines, with the occasional businessman weaving through at high speed. A fair few men and women were having intense conversations on very small phones. It was actually quite astonishing to see the dexterity with which the city handled its people: even in this place - this hub of activity there were no collisions, no jostling, no shouting. It appeared to be a well-rehearsed performance where everybody knew their spots.

'How many people live in this city?' Rosh asked.

'Close to ten million,' I told him. 'Last time I counted.'

Lucy nodded. 'And they're all here.'

She ground out her cigarette on the pavement. Her mood didn't seem to have improved much since last night, which was strange.

She usually didn't stay pissed off with me for this long, but she'd hardly said a word to me all morning, despite my casual attempts at bridging the gap.

'You want to watch that,' I said, trying again. 'Littering.'

'There'll be a dirt trolley along any second.' She sniffed and looked bored. 'I'm sure all these pricks will survive in the meantime. God, I hate this fucking district.'

We were standing on the corner outside the clothes store. In the window behind us beige dummies modelling expensive garments were staring out into the distance, imperious and stern. From here, if we headed west we'd end up among the shining, glass-fronted office blocks, while east would take us towards the markets and the university. That was where we'd parked this morning. North took us upmarket to the edge of Rabbit, while down the hill behind us the shops got gradually cheaper and more beaten down. That way led to Owl, where you'd find the police department and law courts.