Then he’d got the key to the killing room and gone outside.
The killing room was a single locked room attached to the outbuildings. It was fitted out as a cramped living room. There were three dummies dressed in castoff clothes-they represented hostages. Reeve’s weekend soldiers, operating in teams of two, would have to storm the room and rescue the hostages by overpowering their captors-played by two more weekend soldiers. The hostages were to come to no harm.
Reeve had unlocked the killing room and switched on the light, then sat down on the sofa. He looked around him at the dummies, two seated, one propped upright. He remembered the living room of his parents’ home, the night he’d left-all too willingly!-to join the army. He’d known he would miss Jim, his older brother by a year and a half. He would not miss his parents.
From early on, Mother and Father had led their own lives and had expected Jim and Gordon to do the same. The brothers had been close in those days. As they grew, it became clear that Gordon was the “physical” one, while Jim lived in a world of his own-writing poetry, scribbling stories. Gordon went to judo classes; Jim was headed to university. Neither brother had ever really understood the other.
Reeve had stood up and faced the standing dummy. Then he punched it across the room and walked outside.
His bag packed, he’d got into the Land Rover. Joan had already called Grigor Mackenzie who, hearing the circumstances, had agreed to put his ferry to the mainland at Gordon’s disposal, though it was hours past the last sailing.
Reeve drove through the night, remembering the telephone call and trying to push past it to the brother he had once known. Jim had left university after a year to join an evening paper in Glasgow. Gordon had never known him as a serious drinker until he became a journalist. By that time, Gordon was busy himself: two tours of duty in Ulster, training in Germany and Scandinavia… and then the SAS.
When he saw Jim again, one Christmas when their father had just died and their mother was failing, they got into a fight about war and the role of the armed forces. It wasn’t a physical fight, just words. Jim had been good with words.
The following year, he’d moved to a London paper, bought a flat in Crouch End. Gordon had visited it only once, two years ago. By then Jim’s wife had walked out, and the flat was a shambles. Nobody had been invited to the wedding. It had been a ten-minute ceremony and a three-month marriage.
After which, in his career as in his life, Jim had gone freelance.
All the way to the final act of putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.
Reeve had pressed the San Diego detective for that detail. He didn’t know why it was important to him. Almost more than the news of Jim’s death, or the fact that he had killed himself, he had been affected by the means. Anti-conflict, anti-army, Jim had used a gun.
Other than stopping for diesel, Gordon Reeve drove straight to Heathrow. He found a long-term parking lot and took the courtesy bus from there to the terminal building. He’d called Joan from a service station, and she’d told him he was booked on a flight to Los Angeles, where he could catch a connecting flight to San Diego.
Sitting in Departures, Gordon Reeve tried to feel something other than numb. He’d sometimes found an article written by Jim in one of the newspapers-but not often. They’d never kept in touch, except for a New Year’s phone call. Jim had been good with Allan, though, sending him the occasional surprise.
He bought a newspaper and a magazine and walked through duty-free without buying anything. It was Monday morning, which meant he’d no business to take care of at home, nothing pressing until Friday and the new intake. He knew he should be thinking of other things, but it was so hard. He was first in line when boarding time came. His seat on the plane was narrow. He discarded the pillow but draped the thin blanket over him, hoping he would sleep. Breakfast was served soon after takeoff; he was still awake. Above the clouds, the sun was a blazing orange. Then people started to pull down the shutters, and the cabin lights were dimmed. Headsets clamped on, the passengers started to watch the movie. Gordon Reeve closed his eyes again, and found that another kind of film was playing behind his eyelids: two young boys playing soldiers in the long grass… smoking cigarettes in the bathroom, blowing the smoke out of the window… passing comments on the girls at the school dance… patting arms as they went their separate ways.
Be the Superman, Gordon Reeve told himself. But then Nietzsche was never very convincing about personal loss and grief. Live dangerously, he said. Hate your friends. There is no God, no ordering principle. You must assume godhead yourself. Be the Superman.
Gordon Reeve, crying at thirty thousand feet over the sea. Then the wait in Los Angeles, and the connecting flight, forty-five minutes by Alaska Airlines. Reeve hadn’t been to the USA before, and didn’t particularly want to be here now. The man from the consulate had said they could ship the body home if he liked. As long as he paid, he wouldn’t have to come to the States. But he had to come, for all sorts of jumbled reasons that probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. They weren’t really making sense to him. It was just a pull, strong as gravity. He had to see where it happened, had to know why. The consulate man had said it might be better not to know, just remember him the way he was. But that was just so much crap, and Reeve had told the man so. “I didn’t know him at all,” he’d said.
The car-rental people tried to give him a vehicle called a GMC Jimmy, but he refused it point-blank, and eventually settled for a Chevy Blazer-a three-door rear-drive gloss-black wagon that looked built for off-roading. “A compact sport utility,” the clone at the desk called it; whatever it was, it had four wheels and a full tank of gas.
He’d booked into the Radisson in Mission Valley. Mr. Car Rental gave him a complimentary map of San Diego and circled the hotel district of Mission Valley.
“It’s about a ten-minute drive if you know where you’re going, twenty if you don’t. You can’t miss the hotel.”
Reeve put his one large holdall into the capacious trunk, then decided it looked stupid there and transferred it to the passenger seat. He spotted a minibus parked in front of the terminal with the hotel’s name on its side, so he locked the car and walked over to it. The driver had just seen a couple of tourists into the terminal and, when Reeve explained, said “sir” could follow him, no problem.
So Reeve tucked the Blazer in behind the courtesy bus and followed it to the hotel. He unloaded his bag and told the valet he didn’t need any help with it, so the valet went to park his car instead. And then, standing at the reception desk, Reeve nearly fell apart. Nerves, shock, lack of sleep. Standing there, on the hotel’s plush carpet, waiting for the receptionist to finish a telephone call, was harder than any thirty-six-hour pursuit. It felt like one of the hardest things he’d ever done. There seemed to be fog at the edges of his vision. He knew it must be exhaustion, that was all. If only the phone call hadn’t come at the end of a weekend, when his defenses were down and he was already suffering from lack of sleep.
He reminded himself why he was here. Maybe it was pride that kept him upright until he’d filled in the registration form and accepted his key. He waited a minute for the elevator, took it to the tenth floor, finding his room, unlocking it, walking in, dumping the bag on the floor. He pulled open the curtains. His view was of a nearby hillside, and below him the hotel’s parking lot. He’d decided on this hotel because it was the right side of San Diego for La Jolla. Jim had been found in La Jolla.
He lay down on the bed, which seemed solid and floating at the same time. He closed his eyes, just for a minute.