Why We Die (32 page)

‘They still tied?’

‘You want to come and find out?’

There was a thud two inches above her head, as a second bolt buried itself in the wall.

He said, ‘I’ve got four of these. Reason I’m still playing is, I only need one.’

Zoë’s numb fingers fumbled the shard.

‘So you’ve no clue where she’s gone?’

Again: nearly funny. She was lying here while he took potshots, and she was supposed to share information . . . ‘She might be anywhere, Arkle. She’s a rich woman.’ Her scrabbling hand found the fragment again.

Trent groaned once more and stirred. Head down, Zoë couldn’t see, but could sense him trying to pull himself up . . .

Arkle said, ‘Trent? You okay?’

Okay or not, he wasn’t answering yet.

Then Arkle said, ‘The way I see it, my money and the woman who killed my brother are getting further fucking away every second. And you’re not helping.’

Sawing again, Zoë felt her numbed fingers pick up a rhythm . . . How long did it take to sever a length of kitchen twine with a broken vase? . . . Or rather, if
X
was the time so required, and
Y
how long it took a man with a crossbow to climb a flight of stairs, what was
Z
going to do about it? Not that algebra had ever been her strong point.

She said, ‘You seem very sure we’re on different sides here. She fooled me too.’ Trying not to let her efforts break her speech into separate gasps.

‘And kept you from getting your hands on my money.’

Well, yes. He had a point.

. . . Zoë felt something give behind her, a sudden loosening, only it wasn’t twine; it was her fingers . . . Slick with blood, they’d dropped the tool again. And her heart slipped with it, because time was getting away here; Arkle was playing, but she doubted his attention span ever cleared cruising speed. And Trent was shifting too, like the bit at the end of the scary film where the villain lurches upright, and the violence begins again.

In a garden once, Zoë had found a dead duck behind a bush: it looked intact – eye, feather, beak – but when she shifted it with glove and shovel, it proved light as a blown egg. The organs that had anchored it to the land of the living had been subtracted. This evisceration was what death’s hungry agents did; and the same harvest death claimed from the body, fear of death stole from its energies: sapping its vitality, pruning its enthusiasms . . . Fear was performing those actions now. Everything was draining out of her along with the blood trickling from her finger-tips, where the shard of vase had bit.

From below, Arkle said, ‘There’s a stain on the wall above your head. Can you see it? About the size of a penny.’

She said, ‘So what?’, her voice not much more than a whisper.

‘So this.’

And another thump, like a nail being driven straight into her mind – down into its dark places, where things she couldn’t put a name to crawled. It was a noise that, if you’d been on the other side of it, would have been the last you heard.

Arkle said, in a bright conversational tone, ‘I’ve only got one left, but we both know I can put it wherever I want. And after last night . . . Putting another hole in another woman isn’t going to make much difference.’

Not to him.

She said, ‘I don’t know where Katrina is.’

‘Then you’re no use to me, are you?’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to stand up.’

‘You’re going to shoot me.’

‘If I want to do that, I’ll do it anyway.’

‘Not from there.’

‘I can see the top of your head through the banister. You want proof?’

She didn’t.

‘So . . .’

Zoë got to her feet.

She almost stumbled, standing; it wasn’t easy, any of this – being in fights; suffering frights. A woman her age shouldn’t be having this kind of fun. She staggered on reaching her feet; banged backwards into the wall, hooking her hands rather neatly round the bolt buried in it, though that was no use to her . . . Too smooth to fray the twine that held her wrists. Her vision swam, then cleared. Trent was trying to get up; pushing against the floor on arms that trembled as they took his weight. She still had a pain in her forehead from butting him. It was true: acts of violence damaged both parties. Though with a little practice, it would have hurt Zoë a lot less.

The newspaper clippings that had slipped from the crashed bookcase lay at her feet. The topmost headline read ABUSED WIFE’S MURDER CONVICTION QUASHED.

Arkle said, ‘Catch,’ and tossed something up the stairs at her.

The apple bounced off her knee, and rolled through the open toilet door.

She watched it wobble to a halt, and said, ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding.’

‘It was you gave me the idea.’

‘I’ve told you, I’ve no idea where she’s gone. Where the money is. That storage place? She might even have been lying about –’

‘I’ll find her.’

‘So find her. But don’t play stupid games.’

Games whose losers wouldn’t get a second chance.

Fear of death had gripped her again, and was rapidly starting to squeeze. And something clutched her leg too; she almost screamed – but it was Trent, grabbing at whatever was nearest.

She pushed with her knee and he fell back, but reached his feet with the help of the banister. He was shaking his head now; either trying to rattle confusion loose, or just denying any of this was happening. When he focused, he was looking directly at Zoë. ‘Have too,’ he said.

‘. . . What?’

‘Done that before.’

‘Get the apple, Trent,’ Arkle told him from the foot of the stairs.

It was one of those His Master’s Voice moments: with no fucking idea what Arkle was on about, Trent looked for the apple anyway. And Zoë . . . Zoë didn’t move. The knots at her wrist hadn’t budged an inch, and Arkle, down below, was smiling at her; bow in his hands, primed and ready to fire.

The landing wasn’t too deep . . . He couldn’t hit her below the knees, but other than that, she was open country.

And something slowed inside her; her internal clock, she thought – this, too, was what fear did: it made the bones heavy, so they ached to stop; to come to a halt against a flat surface, and put up with whatever was about to go down.

Trent put a hand on her shoulder to steady himself, then placed the apple on her head as carefully as if it were a joke they were both taking part in . . . As if it were as important to her as to him that it didn’t slip and fall.

Arkle said, ‘This is going to be so cool.’

. . . And Zoë didn’t have words . . .

Trent moved aside. Arkle raised the bow.

Old man Blake appeared behind him, and struck the back of his head with the hood ornament from the hearse.

Arkle crumpled from the knees up in a manner that might have been comical if – well, no, Zoë later amended; in a manner entirely comical, in fact. The look on his face was one there isn’t a word for. When his body hit the floor, it was as if all the air his presence had sucked out of the surroundings came rushing back at once.

The old man said, ‘Katie? Are you all right?’

Trent stepped in front of her; looked down at the pair below.

Zoë took a deep breath, and felt the vampire fear lift its teeth from her neck. Bracing herself against the wall, she kicked Trent hard in the small of the back, and sent him flying down the stairs.

Then she said, ‘Yes, I’m fine. Thanks.’

Her mobile was in Arkle’s pocket; she retrieved it, switched it on, but before she could call the police, it rang.

‘Zoë Boehm . . .’

‘Zoë bloody Boehm,’ a voice said.

‘Oh, hi, Jeff. Funny you should call. I was just on my way to pick your car up.’

She hoped like hell it was still there.

iii

When you piled all the money your immediate future held into a single bag, for ease of carriage, it was hard not to pack all it had cost into a second; or not exactly a bag; more like a black box – your internal recorder; the one you might wish broke down occasionally, and transcribe white noise in place of grey deeds. But no, those deeds were all there; from clipping newspaper reports about acquittals of abused wives, to practising with make-up in shades of burnt sunset, the better to paint a convincing bruise. And choosing the right witnesses, so if it came to court, you’d not be alone.

Sometimes you picked strangers in hotel bars, because who was more impartial than a stranger?

Katrina had always laid contingency plans. It was something she’d learned from her father.

Now she placed her coffee cup on the saucer in front of her, the lipstick ring on its rim as bright and obvious as a Country song. No matter how careful you were in its application, make-up always gave you away; leaving temporary scars on cheap china, or drawing attention to the fact that your foundations needed work. By and large, Katrina had no worries about her foundations. She wore make-up today for the exact reason she had pretended to wear it on that evening she’d met Tim: to conceal her bruising. Which then had been fake, of course; cosmetically applied, and intended to be noticed. But there was nothing made up about her damaged cheekbone now. This bruise was real, and needed toning down – it was a detail that would figure largely in descriptions . . . In truth, cosmetics weren’t doing much in the way of concealment. She’d have worn a headscarf and sunglasses, but would have looked like a film star shamming anonymity.

On the street, everything looked the way it had done twenty minutes ago: different passers-by, but doing the same city shuffle. The shops lining the pavement opposite were low-end electrical stores, secondhand CD shops, and outfits with whitewashed windows offering a bewildering array of services, from takeaway delivery to unlocking mobile phones; this last so much in demand round here, you had to wonder how forgetful the locals were. Up the road was a market, where once – in this patch of London shading into the east – you might have bought bread, fish, vegetables, but which now mostly boasted the greetings cards and kitchen knick-knacks trade. Electrical goods in battered dusty boxes were stacked in shop doorways. Somewhere, a stall sold burgers in buns. Katrina imagined the smell of hot fat wafting visibly past the window, like cartoon aromas in
Tom & Jerry
. She picked up her coffee again, but it was still too hot to drink.

. . .
I walked into a door
. That was the common lie she’d relied on in fabricating her backstory, and she’d always known it would hit her in the face eventually, like a dramatic truth. A truth which would then seep backwards, granting her lies retrospective validity:
this is real
– so everything else must have been real too. Her black box ticked away as her coffee cooled, bringing back those moments during which Baxter cooled like coffee on the kitchen floor, and she slammed a cupboard door in her own face. One moment of white hot pain, she’d expected, and had not been entirely wrong about this. But what she hadn’t been prepared for was the dull ache afterwards, that never went away. Or how livid her face would look – she’d imagined a rich mish-mash of purples and blues that would flower long enough to look good on the photos, then fade picturesquely to a Chanel smudge. And instead here she sat, still looking like someone had hit her with a shovel.

Over the road, between one of those whitewashed windows and a fast food place – whose logo might be taken, in a hurry, for
KFC
– was an alleyway leading to a back yard. Nobody had entered or left it while Katrina had been here, and nobody passing had shown interest. Of the cars illegally parked nearby, none had occupants. If anyone was watching, they were too good for her. It was more likely that nobody was watching. But still she sat.

The café floor was white lino squares, checked with seemingly random reds. But nothing was random. The placement of each red tile dictated the pattern around it, the options decreasing with every choice made . . . If Baxter hadn’t worried that Arkle was losing it; hadn’t decided to protect him by calling it a day – even though they had nowhere near their target amount – things would have continued as normal. Katrina would have carried on being Baxter’s wife, and carried on convincing him that life could be better without Arkle and Trent – that two could live twice as cheaply as four; or exactly as cheaply, perhaps, but for twice as long. Once they’d arrived at the right magical number (a million had a ring to it) they should cut their losses, the losses being Arkle and Trent. What she hadn’t reckoned on was how deeply Baxter’s bonds to his so-called brothers went . . . So when the maths didn’t work, the bottom line appeared instead. One could live much more expensively than two, because there was no division involved.

Some bonds had to be cut cleanly, the way losses should be.

This time, when she picked up her cup, it was too cold. That familiar Goldilocks feeling. She drank it anyway, and continued staring through the window; something tickling her ear she couldn’t put a name to . . . A mosquito in the room. A bluebottle at the window. A police siren . . .

Katrina put the cup down as quietly as she could. This happened every day in the city; hell, every half-hour. There was always an emergency somewhere; that was practically a definition of London. Handbag snatchers, muggers, pensioners stuck up trees. There was no reason a passing noise should have anything to do with her . . .

And it didn’t. The wailing hit a peak then took the slow slide into distance, cutting off abruptly as it reached a destination, or cornered a building large enough to swallow it. Katrina still had a finger locked around the handle of her cup. As she eased it free, she knew how stupid she’d been: if anyone had the slightest notion she was here, they wouldn’t be sending cars screaming after her; they’d be waiting in corners. Which was why she was watching the street; alert for the studied indifference of the far-too-casual passer-by. Alert, specifically, for Zoë Boehm. But seeing no one who didn’t belong.

Enough. She’d be here all day if she didn’t take a grip, and too much care was as dangerous as too little – sooner or later, the man on the counter would wonder what the lady with the bruise was waiting for. Hoisting her bag, she made her way to the door, noticing how warm the café had been when the chill outside hit her.