“This is death for me, then,” he thought. Nowhere to go, nothing to do but find a chink of light in an eternity of darkness. High on an embankment a rail track slithered away to unknown, unknowable, distances. Shop fronts that might have given him something with which to entertain the eye for a little while were barricaded with corrugated iron, their awnings selfishly hiding their names from him under coats of rot or rust or graffiti.
But he felt somewhere, not too far away, a tiny coal of warmth that pulsed in the cold, perhaps just for him. A speck of relief. The dot of an island in the Pacific.
Like a hungry dog nosing around for the merest shred of scent that promises dinner, Will made long detours into unlikely streets or cut across unkempt lawns booby-trapped with plastic toys in his search for the warmth. Sometimes – he couldn’t explain how – he knew he was on the wrong track and had to double back and find his original spot, where the feeble pulse of heat had been detected. Then he would be off again, trying to plug into the current and let it pull him in.
It took an age, and Will realised that in real terms that was exactly what might have happened. But suddenly, the heat was stronger and he gave himself to it, the decisions to turn into this street or hurry across that square coming more fluidly as the pulse quickened. At one point he laughed out loud: this must be what it was like for animals, the scent of blood hot and heady in their nostrils. He understood the thrill of the hunt as he closed in on his catch. He could almost see it, a red ball throbbing in the midst of so much blue-black emptiness. Its promise of succour was great; his veins sang and sweat broke out on his forehead, despite the wind’s cruelty.
A door. A red door. It might have been a blue or a green door, but it had been overtaken by the red of warmth. What lay behind it understood the secret of need, the science of comfort. He touched the door and suddenly he was inside the house, sitting on the edge of a bed. He was unhappy now because the interior of the house had proved to be chillier than he expected. No warm welcome. No lack of tension to relax the tight band of pain that circled his head. His hands itched. He stared down at them, at the raw welts scoring the pads of flesh on a parallel with his life lines. If he put his hands together, miming an open book, the weals made a V-shape across them. Their pain was fresh and bright. Closer inspection revealed a pattern in the welts, a series of raised obliques, as though a length of hemp had bitten into his flesh.
There was a knock at the door.
Will stood up. He didn’t want to look to his side. Someone lay there, unmoving. A body, losing heat. But that couldn’t be right. This was a house of warmth and promise. He went to the window and peeked through the curtains. There were people outside.
Sally, there’s someone watching us… Would you mind opening the front door, please, sir?
The voice came to him heavy and full of interference, as though he were a child again, listening to a message from a friend through a Ski yoghurt pot at the end of a piece of string. He went to the door and opened it on a tired policeman in a wet uniform. For a moment he didn’t recognise the man for his scrubbed look and the extra few pounds he was carrying on his jowls and his waistline. But in the moment he recognised him, he recognised too how he had been tricked. Death didn’t work to a timetable. He remembered how de Fleche had put that. Death was sinuous and sly. Death was a Moebius strip, or Ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail. This was Sean’s beginning, and Will’s true end.
Sorry to bother you, sir. We’ve had word of a prowler in the area. Have you seen anything? Heard anything?
De Fleche spoke through him as he was about to give the architect to Sean, making a mockery of any belief Will had that he was in control.
I was asleep. Your torches woke me up.
Sean seemed satisfied with that. Will raged against the seal that de Fleche had squeezed between him and the outside. Is there anyone else in the flat that might have heard anything?
Luce, my girlfriend, she’s asleep too. You’d have had to drive your car through the wall to wake her up.
And then the policeman was apologising and backing off, hurrying back through the rain with his partner to a car that was warm.
When they were alone again, de Fleche let the leash out a little and Will struggled against it, battling to be free. The book was just pages and glue but it had more spine than he. It was yesterday’s book. Catriona didn’t exist any more, the book meant nothing.
“I don’t want to be in your pocket,” he said, sounding like a petulant child at a birthday party who had failed at every game.
“Too late,” de Fleche said. “You killed her. How does that make you feel? You and women are a potent combination, aren’t you? Lethal. How many’s that now? You should have some stickers done, slap them on the side of your cockpit. Authorised kills. Will, the Red Baron. The Strangler. Sleep-Stealer. Kids’ll have trouble going to bed knowing you’re on the hoof.”
“You killed her,” Will said.
“Oh go on, don’t be so modest. You passed my test, squadron leader. Ladykiller. You’re in the army now. Go out there and make mayhem. Make lots of what you are. It’s New Year’s Day for you, for all of us. Year Dot. Year Zero. Let’s have a fresh start.”
The door opened and he found himself in another street in a part of the world he didn’t know. There were others there like him, thin men with clothes that hung on their bodies in dire need of a wash. They sweated, these men, and he sweated too, despite the cold. One of them came up to him, scratching the back of his head and looking around him maniacally as if they were in the middle of a column of biting gnats. His hair was a greasy cap stuck to his scalp and his chin had not felt a blade for a week or so. He wouldn’t look at Will, and when he parted his lips to talk, a fist-sized glut of flying beetles buzzed out of his mouth. He didn’t notice them. They might as well have been exhaled smoke; he certainly looked nervous enough to need a cigarette.
“Are you hungry?” the man said. “I’m hungry. Are you hungry? Because, like, I am hungry. Am I hungry? Too right. Too right. How about you? You hungry?”
The other thin men were looking at him with similarly earnest expressions. There was trouble too, in their eyes, as if they couldn’t quite understand how they had come to be in this position. They looked at Will, the newcomer, as if he had brought some instructions with him.
Up ahead, behind a blockade of cars, he could see more people, but these were not like him or the other thin men. They were stouter and wore a better cut of clothes. They were nervous. Some of them held guns or knives. Their children stood behind them, guarded by the legs of their elders. Even at this distance, Will could smell their odious flesh and the alcohol reek of their perfumes and soaps. They smelled of fat and dairy products. They smelled of mouthwash and shoe polish. It made Will’s mouth sour to feel such an alien flavour in his throat. The thin men walked slowly towards the blockade, and all they could think about was how they wanted to make those fat people less glossy, less stench-ridden. Thinner.
GLEAVE WAS DEAD. But it wasn’t his leg injury that had killed him. Appalled, Sean took in the extent of his degeneration. He resembled potatoes that had been left to boil for too long and had collapsed to a watery vichyssoise in the pan. Tufts of hair or nubs of bone emerged – macabre islands – laced with bloody veins, like seams of sauce in raspberry ripple ice cream. His suit had become a poor-quality bag in which to contain him. Sean couldn’t feel satisfied with Gleave’s death. It had not been achieved by his own hand. He felt cheated, ill-organised. Things were passing him by.