The Killing Lessons (38 page)

Leon had gone very still. The wind had dropped again. Valerie was aware of Carla, sobbing, softly.

Leon raised the knife.

And screamed.

The sound silenced even Carla.

A long time seemed to pass. The snow-globe was at complete rest.

Leon dropped the knife. Very slowly reached behind himself and pulled out the axe Angelo had buried in the back of his thigh. He looked at it, puzzled, then turned.

The old man was lying on his side in the snow, eyes closed, wheezing.

Valerie got her legs under her. Her shoulder was dead and her hands were numb but her face was alive with seductive heat. Leon’s jacket had ridden up where he’d stuffed Carla’s Beretta in his jeans.

*

Nell saw Angelo collapse onto his side. The man in the windbreaker stood over him, both hands wrapped around the axe. The bandage had unravelled. It hung from his wrist like a sad party streamer. The wind had died completely, as if a switch controlling it had been turned off. The snow brought every sound close to her. She could hear Angelo struggling for breath. One of the women was on her feet, now.

Angelo drifted gently towards a soft-edged darkness, like an ocean at night. His body seemed a very far away thing, negligible, of no more consequence than the clothes he might have left on the beach before swimming out from a shore to which he knew he would never return. He thought of Sylvia saying:
It made leaving bearable, knowing I’d had that kind of love in my life. Knowing I’d had the best thing
. There was no one to see, but he was smiling.

Reaching for the Beretta, Valerie thought:
I need two hands for this.

You don’t have two hands. So you do it with one.

She bent forward. Extended her arm.

Felt the cut-glass rainbow edging her vision.

Not now.

Oh God. Not now.

She jammed her teeth together. Force of will. Force of
will
.

Darkness encroached. The aperture starting to close. No time. No time.

Her hand shook. Her hand had an infinite number of ways to get it wrong.

One chance.

Pickpocket.

Very gently wrapped her fingers around the Beretta’s grip.

The aperture shuddered, narrowed a little more.

She yanked the weapon out of Leon’s jeans. Clicked the safety off.

‘Drop it, Leon,’ she said, holding the barrel to the back of his head. ‘Drop it now or you’re dead.’

The darkness shivered. The circle of light narrowed, expanded, narrowed.
Kill him now. While you still can. Kill him. End it.

That’s not what you do. You arrest him. You take him in. Justice. Not execution. Murdering a murderer is still murder.

The camera eye opened, fractionally. Her jaws ached. The rainbows flickered. Flirted with giving up.

Cuffs. Call. Court. Lawyers. The law. The families. Words. Katrina Mulvaney, smiling by the double-trunked tree. The sprawling hopelessness of Leon’s history. And before that Jean Ghast’s history, the as yet unknown antecedents, an infinite regress, nesting dolls with no end. Causes.

Make this easy for me, Leon.

He did.

He raised the axe. And turned.

He got one word out. ‘Cunt.’

Then Valerie pulled the trigger.

At the Sterling Regional Medical Center, Colorado, Valerie made a new friend. Morphine. The buckshot had gone through her deltoid, clipped the humerus, missed the subclavian artery. But there had still been a lot of damage to repair. She was still, in the surgeon’s words, a godawful mess. And he wouldn’t give her a straight answer about the nerves. Her arm was dressed and in a sling. She had no idea if she’d ever be able to use it again. She tried to imagine that: The Disabled Detective. Couldn’t. Got an image instead of herself at the apartment’s kitchen sink, failing to peel a potato.

She wasn’t supposed to be out of bed but she’d sweet-talked Carla’s colleague, Field Agent Dane Forester (who’d come with them in the ambulance, and who appeared not to be in on Carla’s hatred) into scoring a wheelchair and taking her to see Nell.

The girl was barely awake. Her foot was stirruped in a cast. She was mildly sedated, and would be kept that way until her grandmother arrived from Florida. She was expected imminently.

For a while Valerie just sat by her bed, enjoying the sight of her wrapped in the arms of high-tech care. The monitors, the IV, the crisp white linen. The little plastic ID bracelet around her wrist said
Nell Louise Cooper
. Her fingernails were filthy. Snow-reflected sunlight came in slats through the venetian blinds. The world was a wonderful place. Full of nightmares.

She was about to call Forester back in to wheel her away when Nell stirred and opened her eyes. It took a moment for her to focus. Valerie didn’t know how much they’d told her, but her face said she already knew. Your mother and brother are dead. Maybe she’d known ever since she ran.

‘Hey,’ Valerie said. ‘Remember me? How’s your ankle?’

They were practically the first words she’d spoken to her. Back at the cabin, she’d managed to call in their location and tell Nell that she was a police officer before passing out. By the time the cavalry arrived Nell was the only person on the scene still actually conscious.

‘I can’t feel it,’ Nell said.

She was visibly exhausted. Childhood force-fed adult horror, adult loss. The look of absorbed suffering you saw in the eyes of starving children, as if they were compelled to stare at all the universe’s cruelty and meaninglessness while you spent your entire life distracting yourself from it with pleasures you took for granted and more than enough to eat. The eyes of starving children were an accusation – and the eyes of this little girl would always have something of that in them. In whatever new place she ended up (with her grandmother in Florida, for now), at whatever new school she joined, people would sense it, the something different in her, the something unnatural, the something wrong. Her life ahead would be a terrible accommodation. She would grow, she would live (assuming she didn’t break down or kill herself), but everything she did and everything she became would have its roots in what had happened to her.

‘I can’t feel my shoulder, either,’ Valerie said. The discrepancy between what life needed and what words could do. This girl would have been reared on stories with happy endings and miraculous justice. And denied the chance to grow out of the fantasy naturally. Valerie felt the moribund reflex, that there ought to be something you could do to stop it. But there wasn’t, not for her. All she could do was try to stop the ruiners before they did it again. It wasn’t enough. If she did it for the rest of her life it would never be enough.

The door opened. Forester entered with a woman in her early sixties. Meredith Trent, Valerie understood, Nell’s grandmother. She was a tall, handsome woman with well-cut dyed auburn hair that fell in two thick waves down to her shoulders. A long green woollen overcoat and black corduroys. She was clutching a soft, dark leather shoulder bag and her eyes were raw. At a glance Valerie could see the effort she’d put in to lock her shock and grief down. She’d lost her daughter and her grandson, but she was forcing herself to be strong for her granddaughter. Forcing herself. She would have spent the whole flight in tears, had
been
crying, Valerie knew, right until she got outside the door to Nell’s room a moment ago. All the trauma was there in her face, barely held back from unravelling her features. It was as if the air immediately around her trembled with what the composure was costing her. And the second she saw Nell lying in the hospital bed the tears came again, though she didn’t make a sound.

Nell said: ‘Grandma.’

In a moment, she was on her knees by Nell’s bed, her arms around the little girl. ‘Nellie, Nellie, sweetheart I’m here. I’m here,’ though she could hardly get the words past the tears.

Valerie nodded to Forester, who quickly wheeled her out.

‘I’ll come back in a little while,’ Forester said, depositing Valerie at the side of Carla’s bed.

‘Thanks,’ Valerie said. ‘Can you make sure there’s someone there for Mrs Trent?’

‘Done,’ Forester said.

Carla’s leg was in an incomprehensible contraption.

For a while the two women didn’t speak.

Then Carla said, ‘You still don’t know, do you?’

‘What?’

Carla blinked, slowly. ‘Carter,’ she said.

Valerie waited. Let the pieces come together.
Agent
Mike Carter. Three years ago. The other candidate for fatherhood of the lost child. Along with Nick Blaskovitch.

Carla smiled, without amusement.

‘He was nothing to you,’ she said. ‘He was a lot more than nothing to me.’

There wasn’t anything to say.

‘He was never the same,’ Carla said, studying Valerie now with a sort of empty fascination. ‘I don’t know what you did to him, but, you know, congratulations.’

After several moments, Valerie said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t know there was anyone.’

‘Would it have made any difference if you had?’

She thought about it. The way she’d been then. The will to indiscriminate wreckage. She didn’t have it in herself to lie.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I guess it wouldn’t.’

Carla reached for the glass of water on the bedside table. Took a few sips through the straw.

‘And now you’ve saved my life,’ she said. Then after a pause: ‘Which obviously doesn’t help.’

There was still nothing to say. Valerie didn’t know if Carla hated her or felt grateful to her. Then she realised that Carla didn’t know either. They were both stalled by the simple incompatibility of the facts.

‘What are you doing here?’ Valerie’s nurse said, appearing in the doorway. ‘You’re supposed to be in bed. Back. Now. Immediately.’

Ten minutes after Valerie was returned to her bed, her room phone rang.

‘Skirt, do me a favour,’ Nick Blaskovitch said. ‘Don’t get shot any more, will you?’

‘OK.’

‘Because there’s a limit to how much of this I can take. It’s bad enough you’ve shaved your head.’

‘Everyone else likes it.’

‘Everyone else is irrelevant. Have you given any thought to where we’re having dinner?’

It was terrible how badly she wanted to see him right then. For a few seconds, she couldn’t speak.

‘Well,’ she said, swallowing. ‘At the moment, anywhere I can get away with only using a fork.’

‘One-armed and half bald. Terrific. I suppose you’re going to need help getting undressed, too?’

‘It looks that way. I’m sorry. If you want to bail, I’ll understand.’

If you want to bail.
Please don’t. Please don’t.

Pause.

‘Are you all right?’ he said. Not banter any more. His voice. The familiarity. The quiet allegiance. The love. Everything she didn’t deserve. She was very close to letting herself feel… Not happy, but ready to try to have what they could have. Very close and very afraid. There was nothing more dangerous than love.

‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’

‘OK, well do me another favour.’

‘Yes?’

‘Look in your doorway.’

Three seconds. Four. Five.

Then he walked in, smiling, still holding the cell phone.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I got impatient.’

A
very
big thank you to my superhumanly brilliant agents, Jonny Geller in London and Jane Gelfman in New York, for doing all that they do with a combination of tact, humour, infallible intuition and precision-strike professionalism. For a novelist, representation simply doesn’t get any better.

It has been a great pleasure to work with my astute and patient editors, Bill Massey at Orion in the UK and Charles Spicer at St Martin’s Press in the US. They both understood immediately where
The Killing Lessons
was going, and put a lot of time, effort – and diplomacy – into getting it there. I am much in their debt.

Two books proved invaluable to my research:
Police Procedure & Investigation
, by Lee Lofland (© 2007) and
Forensics: A Guide for Writers
, by D.P. Lyle, M.D. (© 2008) both published by Writers Digest Books, an imprint of F+W Publications Inc., Cincinnati, Ohio. Any deviation from the expertise contained in these works is entirely my own, for the purposes of fiction.

In addition, for reasons too numerous and varied to list, I’m grateful to: Kate Cooper, Eva Papastratis, Kirsten Foster, Laura Gerrard, Liz Hatherell, Stephen Coates, Nicola Stewart, Jonathan Field, Vicky Hutchinson, Peter Sollett, Eva Vives, Mike Loteryman, Alice Naylor, Lydia Hardiman, Emma Jane Unsworth, Ben Ball and Susanna Moore.

An Orion Books ebook

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Orion Books

This ebook first published in 2015 by Orion Books

Copyright © Glen Duncan 2015

The right of Glen Duncan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 4091 5297 2

Lines from ‘The Novelist’ by W.H. Auden.

Copyright © 1940 by W.H. Auden, renewed.

Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

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