The Radleys (27 page)

Wil is back on the rowboat again, floating on the familiar red lake. This time though, Helen is in the boat with him and she is holding a dark-haired baby boy in her arms whom she is singing to sleep.

Row, row, row your boat,

Gently down the stream.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

Life is but a dream.

Wil has the oars now and is rowing toward the rocky shore, watching the woman he loves carry on softly singing. As she sings, she smiles at him. It is an uncomplicated, loving smile. He has no idea what wil happen once they get to the shore but he knows they wil have each other and that they wil be happy.

Row, row, row your boat,

Gently down the stream.

If you see a crocodile,

Don’t forget to scream.

He has an uneasy feeling, however. Everything is too perfect. He senses someone on the rocks watching him. Someone alongside Alison Glenny. It is the man who tried to attack him last night.

He is holding something up to the sky, for Wil to see.

A head, with blood dripping from its neck down into the lake.

He stops rowing, but the boat carries on moving toward the man, getting close enough to shore for Wil to realize the severed head is his own.

The face glares at him like a horror mask. Its mouth droops down in terror.

In a state of panic, Wil feels his own neck and finds it perfectly intact.

“Who am I?” he says, interrupting Helen’s lul aby.

She looks confused, as if it is the sil iest question she’s ever heard. “You know who you are,”

she says tenderly. “You’re a very good and kind man.”

“But who?”

“You’re who you’ve always been. You’re the man I married. You’re Peter.” Then she screams, seeing the man and the severed head. And baby Rowan is screaming too. A terrible inconsolable baby’s howl.

Wil wakes with a jolt and hears a strange kind of faint shrieking sound. His cassette machine is chewing up one of his sleep tapes.
Psychocandy
by the Jesus and Mary Chain. A lesser bloodsucker would see such a thing as an omen.

He peeks outside, at the hideously sunny day. And at a man, walking away.

It’s
him
.

“The axe man goeth,” Wil mumbles, and decides to fol ow him.

He grabs his sunglasses and heads out into the bright daylight, stalking the man al the way to the pub on the main street with its Sky Sports banner and painted pastoral vision of an outdated England on its sign, under the name of the place, The Plow.

He’d written a sil y little poem once, just jotted it in one of his journals shortly after he stopped seeing Helen. “The Red Meadow,” it had been cal ed, after his surname.

Plough the red meadow,

Until nothing remains.

Plough the earth dry,

And feed off its veins.

The Plow is a pub Wil would normal y never dream of entering. Bright light leaking from the windows. Sports coverage. Customers who are hardly aware they are alive, staring blankly up at screens.

By the time he gets there, the man has his drink, a whisky, and is sitting as tucked away as possible in the far corner. Wil heads over, parks himself on a seat opposite him.

“They say the pub is a dying institution,” Wil says. “It goes against twenty-first-century life.

There’s no sense of community anymore. It’s al atomized. You know, people live inside these invisible boxes. It’s terribly sad . . . yet, there are stil times when two strangers can sit down and have a little tête-à-tête.” He pauses, studies the man’s ravaged, haunted face. “’Course, we’re not strangers.”

“Who am I?” the man says, his voice a tight lid on whatever forces are inside him.

The question is an echo from Wil ’s dream. He glances at the man’s whisky. “Who are any of us? People who can’t let go.”

“Of what?”

Wil sighs. “The past. Face-to-face conversations. The Garden of Eden.”

The man says nothing. Just sits glaring at Wil with a hatred that infects the air between them.

The tension stays even as a waitress arrives at the table.

“Do you want to look at our lunch menu?” she asks.

Wil admires her pretty plumpness.
A movable feast.

“No,” the man says, without even looking up.

Wil makes eye contact with the girl and holds it. “I’m watching what I eat.”

The waitress leaves, reluctantly, and the men linger in tense but binding wordlessness.

“Can I ask you something?” asks Wil , after a while.

The man sips his whisky instead of answering.

Wil asks the question anyway. “Have you ever been in love?”

The man places his glass down and stares at Wil , steel-eyed. The expected reaction. “Once,”

he responds, the word just a croak from the back of his throat.

Wil nods. “It’s always just once, isn’t it? The rest . . . they’re just echoes.”

The man shakes his head. “Echoes.”

“See, I love someone. But I can’t have her. She’s playing the role of Good Wife in
Someone
Else’s Marriage
. It’s a long-running production.” Wil leans in, manic humor in his eyes, then whispers. “My brother’s wife. We used to have quite a thing going on.” He stops, raises a hand in apology. “Sorry, I probably shouldn’t tel you this stuff. It’s just you’re easy to talk to. You should have been a priest. So, you. Who was yours?”

The man leans forward, his face twitching minutely with repressed rage. Somewhere else in the pub, a slot machine is spil ing out coins.

“My wife,” the man says. “The mother of my child. Her name was Tess. Tess Copeland.”

Wil is off-balance suddenly. For a second he is back in that rowboat. The name Tess Copeland is a sharp prod from his past. He remembers that night, having drinks with her in the union bar, playful y discussing the French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose theories on sex and madness were bizarrely colonizing almost every page of her dissertation. (“So, in what way
precisely
was Wordsworth a—let me get this right—genealogical y confused, de-individualized, empirico-transcendental pedagogue?”) She had wanted to go back to her husband and she didn’t know what she was doing out so late with her tutor.

“Oh . . . I . . . ,” says Wil , genuinely struggling for words.

Action.

Consequence.

Everything balances out in the end.

“Just another echo for you, I suppose. See, I saw you do it. I saw you fly away with her.”

Wil remembers later that night. Kil ing her on campus. Hearing someone running close by.

The scream.

That was him.

He tries to get a grip of himself. He has ignored his frail, famished conscience for so long, it has the ability to surprise him when it attempts to surface. But he tries to push it back down.

I have killed hundreds. This is just a grain in the sand. This man neglected his wife. This man
failed to keep her safe. He hates me because his own guilt makes him hate me.

And if Wil hadn’t come along, he would hate his wife by now. She would have gotten her master’s and be droning on about Foucault and Leonard Cohen and poems he hadn’t read and tutting at him for watching footbal .

This is the whole stupid thing about al these unblood relationships. They depend on people’s staying the same, standing in the same spot they were in over a decade ago, when they first met.

Surely the reality is that connections between people aren’t permanent but fleeting and random, like a solar eclipse or clouds meeting in the sky. They exist in a constantly moving universe ful of constantly moving objects. And soon enough he would have realized his wife thought what so many of those he’s bitten thought. She would think,
I could do better
.

The man looks terrible. Worn, washed out, ground down. And Wil can tel from the scent of his blood, once fresh, this wasn’t always the case. He was a different man once, but he’s gone off, gone sour.

“Jared? Isn’t it? You were in the police,” remembers Wil .

“Yes.”

“But before that night . . . you didn’t know. About people like me.”

“No.”

“You realize I could have kil ed you last night?” says Wil .

Jared shrugs, as if his life is not such a great thing to lose, before Wil gives a monologue half the pub can hear.

“An axe? To behead me?” he says, as the barmaid walks past him, carrying plowman’s lunches out to the beer garden. “Tradition says you’d be better off with something through the heart. Stake, something like that. You get your pedants who insist on hawthorn wood, but the truth is, anything strong enough and long enough wil do the job. Of course then you’re going to need a damn good run-up. Thing is, it’s never going to happen, is it? Vampires kil vampires. But people, no. It doesn’t happen.” His face gets serious. “Now, if you don’t get out of my sight, I wil lower my standards and binge on your stewed and bitter blood.”

Jared’s mobile phone starts to ring. He ignores it. In fact, he hardly even hears it. He thinks of Eve. How just sitting here and having this conversation could be putting her life at further risk. The fear rushes toward him in a torrent and he stands up with his heart drumming as hard and fast as it did that night two years ago. He walks stiffly away and heads out into the mild afternoon air and at first doesn’t realize his phone is ringing again.

Wil lets him go. After a while, he gets up and goes to browse the selection offered by the dul brown jukebox, hanging on the wal like an old cigarette machine. The Rol ing Stones’ “Under My Thumb” is the best it has to offer, so he puts it on and lies himself down on the seat where he has previously been sitting.

People notice, but no one says anything.

He just lies there, as the music plays, thinking everything is clear now.

And it’s down to me, the way she talks when she’s spoken to . . .

He doesn’t care about Manchester anymore.

He doesn’t care about Isobel or the Black Narcissus or the Sheridan Society or any of those blood cliques.

He wil stay here in Bishopthorpe, with Helen, and hope for a second eclipse of the sun.

Pavement

Jared trembles at the thought he might just have blown everything.

Number withheld.

He picks up.

“Jared, this is Alison Glenny.”

This is a voice he never expected to hear again. He remembers the last time he heard it, in her office, as she made her final warning.
I understand your pain, but if you carry on like this, if you
blow this wide open, you will be putting hundreds of lives at risk.
Said without the slightest acknowledgment of the irony that his wife had died because it
hadn’t
been made public.
I’ll have
no choice, Detective Inspector, but to dismiss you on grounds of mental health and make sure
you are sectioned.

Two months in a mental hospital while his daughter had to live with his terminal y il , fractious mother. And there he was, dosed up on industrial strength mood levelers by doctors who received ridiculous government-endorsed bonuses for making sure they kept in mind the “greater good”

they were doing for society.

“How did you get this number?” he asks, realizing there must be some connection between Wil ’s being here and this phone cal .

“It wasn’t too hard. You haven’t exactly changed your name.”

“I’ve got nothing to hide. I did nothing wrong.”

She sighs. “Jared, there’s no need to be defensive. I am phoning with good news. I want to tel you something. About Wil Radley.”

He says nothing. What can she possibly want to tel him that he doesn’t already know?

After a long moment, she tel s him. “We’re free to hunt him down.”

“What?”

“We’ve been applying pressure in the right places. The Sheridan Society want to be rid of him as much as we do. He’s been too erratic recently.”

The word angers Jared. “More
erratic
than kil ing the wife of a CID officer on a university campus?”

“I just thought you would want to know. We’re going to do everything in our power to catch him.

Which is why I’m cal ing. Is he there? I mean, is this why you moved to Bishopthorpe?” She pauses, sensing his reluctance to give her any information. “Look, if you tel us he’s there, we wil do everything we can. I promise you. You’l be able to move on with your life. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Jared keeps walking quickly. The pub is now far behind him, its sign no more than a little brown square. He remembers what Wil just said to him a few moments ago.
Thing is, it’s never going to
happen, is it?

“Yes,” Jared manages to say into the phone, “he’s here.”

“Good. Right. One more thing. Do you know much about his relationship with the other Radleys?

Is there anything we could use? Anything at al ?”

Jared thinks of what Wil told him in the pub.
It’s my brother’s wife
.“Yes. There is something.”