“I have been listening to Mozart,” the man said.
Billy sat sideways on his chair, one forearm resting on the back. This wasn’t what he had expected.
“Do you listen to classical music?” the man asked.
“Not much.”
“I listen to Mozart,” the man went on, “and I have trouble understanding how someone could have thought of something so beautiful. I try to imagine the world before that music came into being, and then I try to imagine someone creating it from nothing — all those sounds…Impossible.” He shook his head and then allowed himself a brief sad smile. “And yet it’s just as impossible to imagine the world without that music in it.”
Billy watched the man carefully, but said nothing. One of the vending-machines behind him shuddered and then fell silent.
“If something should happen to my wife…” Forearms still lying flat on the table, the man’s hands lifted off the surface and then dropped back again. He had come as close as he dared to saying what he wanted to say.
Billy looked up as an elderly woman in a pink dressing-gown hobbled past. Noticing him, she raised one fragile fist and shook it in the air beside her ear. I’m giving it everything I’ve got, she was telling him. I’m not bloody going quietly.
“There are things we don’t understand,” the man said, staring at his hands again. “This woman that you’re guarding, for instance. The things she did…”
Billy made sure that the wariness he now felt didn’t reach his face.
“What do you think about that?” the man asked.
“I try not to think. I just do my job.”
“But thoughts still occur to you,” the man said seductively, “despite yourself.”
Rather than express an opinion of his own, Billy fell back on the conversation he’d had with Phil a few hours earlier. “I never met the woman,” he said. “A colleague of mine met her, though, on several occasions, and he told me that it was difficult to connect the things she did then with the woman he saw in front of him.”
The man nodded slowly. “Perhaps it was difficult for her too.” He paused. “Even at the time it was difficult, perhaps…”
“Yes, perhaps,” Billy said. “But you or I would never go so far.”
“Wouldn’t we?” The man’s good eye seemed gentle, as though it were contemplating another, far more selfless world, while his damaged eye, by contrast, had a critical, even accusatory gleam to it. “Who really knows how far we would go,” he said, “if the circumstances were right?”
They both fell quiet again. In a nearby ward a man laughed — or it could have been a cough.
“If you were in love, for example,” the man said. “Not ordinary love. A love that takes you over, turns you upside-down. An absolute dependency. A kind of trance.”
Billy thought of Venetia and her father, their two faces overlapping, merging into one. He felt unsteady, giddy. He felt as if the world was accelerating away from him in all directions. At the same time, everything had remained exactly where it was.
“The things she did,” the Asian man went on, “they weren’t natural to her — not at the beginning, anyway. They became natural, though.”
“You don’t know that,” Billy said. “You’re just guessing.”
He had assumed that the man would argue the point, but the man just looked at him and said, “Of course.”
At that moment, Phil appeared with two other men, one of whom was a detective inspector. They were so deep in conversation that they didn’t notice Billy, but the mere fact of their presence prompted him to glance at his watch. Eight minutes to one.
Rising to his feet, he wrapped his last remaining sandwich in silver foil and tucked it into his bag. “I have to get back to work, I’m afraid.”
The man reached into his jacket pocket, brought out a card and handed it to Billy. “My name is Vijay Prabhu. If you’re ever looking for some new equipment…” His smile told Billy that he needn’t take the offer too seriously: he had simply wanted something tangible to pass between them.
Billy pocketed the card, then leaned across and shook the man’s hand. “I’m Billy Tyler.”
“PC Tyler,” Mr. Prabhu said, as if correcting him. “A pleasure to have met you.”
“I hope everything turns out well for your wife.”
The man inclined his head in thanks.
Billy gathered up the crisp bag and the can of Fanta, both empty now, and dropped them in the rubbish bin, then he started back towards the mortuary. The small hours. It was so quiet that he could hear his own footsteps. They had a measured, dependable sound, and contrasted strangely with his thoughts, which kept flitting from one subject to another. It could be fatigue, or it could be the eerie suggestibility of a hospital at night. It could even be the influence of Mr. Prabhu. The good eye, dark and gentle. The other with its lavish swirl of white. A little like being looked at by two people at once. That subdued, intriguing way of talking around a subject, then closing in on it and capturing it with elegant precision. At some fundamental level, Billy felt they had understood each other perfectly. Mr. Prabhu had implied that he was there for his wife, as any caring husband would be, and that was almost certainly true, but Billy knew that Mr. Prabhu was also there for himself. There was a tremendous fear in you at times like that. There was the need to stay close to whatever was going on. You had to try and hold things together, even though it seemed to be their natural tendency to fall apart.
He thought of how he had rushed to A and E the year before, having just been told about Sue’s crash. He found her behind a curtain, on a high, hard bed. She looked so young that he knew she must have been through something violent, but the only mark on her was a small scratch at the base of her thumb: she’d cut herself when she crawled out through the shattered window. On the right side of her head, behind her ear, her hair looked as though someone had furiously backcombed it, and the fine, spun-sugar tangles were studded with bits of broken glass. The fact that she’d escaped without injury staggered everybody. It also made them suspicious. There had to be damage somewhere, surely…The doctor who examined her described how organs could get twisted in certain types of accident. If the car rolled, for instance, as it had in her case, there was always a possibility of internal bleeding. Sue should stay in bed, he said. She had to keep quiet. Rest. During those long, tense days, Billy turned on the TV and saw a plane slide slowly into one of the Twin Towers. He wasn’t able to process the images at all. They had no effect on him except as an illustration of his own private catastrophe. The demolished skyscrapers stood in for the car that Sue had reduced to a pile of scrap. The three thousand casualties symbolised her brush with death. It was his own story, written large, yet it all felt curiously stilted and obscure. It was a time when things seemed hard to believe, and hard to sustain. He dressed Emma in the mornings, and drove her to school. He cooked her meals. “Mummy resting,” she said once, at breakfast — and then, looking him full in the face, “Mummy all right.” She wanted him to reassure her, but she might also have been prompting him, or even coaching him. The future could be talked into existence. He took one of her hands in both of his. “Yes,” he said. “Mummy’s fine.” At night, though, when Sue was sleeping, he would tiptoe into the room and hover uselessly next to the bed, her bitter breath clouding the air below him, or he would leave the house and stand on the grass track, shivering. What did he think as he stared out over the field? Did he pray?