“Well, no. But what are the chances a guy who used to wear a jacket like that never had the chance to marry? And he’s certainly not wearing a ring now.”
“Perhaps he’s gay.”
“Perhaps he is. But in the absence of evidence one way or the other, let’s go with the odds.”
“His marriage went down the pan.”
“About the same time his old job disappeared.”
“And you can tell that from...?”
“That’s the way it so often happens, isn’t it?” For a moment they shared a look brimming with confidence that this wouldn’t happen to them. “One day you’ve got it all nailed down, but when one thing gives, everything else follows.”
“The domino effect.”
“They wouldn’t have given it a name if it didn’t happen.”
“Whoever ‘they’ are.”
“Oh, they’re a smart bunch. Your turn. What do you think his old job was?”
Jennifer watched the man for a moment or two. He didn’t look their way. He glanced at the car park once, just for a second, but other than that he concentrated on his food.
She said, “I think he wore a uniform.”
He said, “Evidence?” and enjoyed saying it.
“He has that air of invisibility. I mean, when you wear a uniform, you get noticed, right? Except you don’t, not really. People see the uniform, but they don’t see the person wearing it. So if you ask somebody to describe, say, a policeman, they’ll say, well, he was a policeman. He was wearing a police uniform.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And the way he’s sitting there now, you can tell, I don’t know... that he doesn’t expect to be noticed. And that he’s used to that. It gives him a kind of freedom.”
“Freedom,” Peter said. “That’s interesting.”
“Not the open-road freedom he gets from his courier job.” She flashed him a smile with this. “A different kind of freedom. The kind that lets you get away with stuff.”
“Stuff.”
“You know. A life spent tootling up and down motorways, there’s lots of temptations out there. The kind of person who’s used to being invisible could get up to mischief.”
“He could pick up hitchhikers, for instance,” Peter said.
“He could pick them up,” Jennifer agreed. “And then... whatever.”
“Jesus,” Peter said. “I think we’ve just caught ourselves a serial killer.”
They both laughed.
Their sandwiches were finished. They still had some way to go, and neither of them had to say it out loud for both to know they should be on their way. But as they stood, Peter said, “You know, I think I’ll go have a word with him.”
“You can’t!”
“’Course I can. It’s no big deal. I’ll just verify one fact.”
“Which fact? How?”
“I’ll tell him we had a bet. That he used to wear a uniform. What harm can it do?”
“He might get angry.”
“I’ve never met an angry man yet,” Peter said, “that I wasn’t able to run away from. You go out to the car. I’ll join you in a second.”
She stood by the car, waiting. Peter came out two minutes later, holding his mobile to his ear, but whatever he was doing with it he finished before he reached her. “Just checking my messages,” he said, putting it in his pocket.
“And?”
“Nothing important.”
“No, silly. The man. What did you find out?”
“Well...” He was drawing this out. Then he smiled. “You were right, clever girl. He used to drive a bus.”
“A uniform. But completely invisible.”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t suppose that actually makes him a serial killer.”
She looked back through the restaurant window. The man was still sitting there, but he was watching them now, the look on his face completely unreadable from this distance. Or maybe it would have been unreadable even close up. He had the air of being one of those people it wasn’t possible to know much about, no matter how good you were at observation. She shivered a little, then got in the car.
“Cold?”
“No, I’m okay.”
“Good.”
“A little excited, to tell you the truth.”
Turning the ignition, Peter smiled at her. “Good,” he said again. Then they drove off.
Their names were Peter Mason and Jennifer Holmes, and in the eight months they’d been together, they’d made one or two surprising discoveries about shared interests and passions. And now they were heading for a cottage Pete had got hold of, up in the Peak District; somewhere pretty isolated, for a private little party. Just the two of them, plus their luggage.
Everything they needed was in the boot.
Copyright © 2006 Mick Herron
“You say it wasn’t stalking, but by your own admission, everywhere that Mary went you were sure to follow!”
Jade Skirt
by Simon Levack
A solicitor, Simon Levack worked for the Bar Council in the U.K. before his first novel, Demon of the Air, won the CWA Debut Dagger Award in 2000. Since then he has pro-duced two more novels in the series. All, including the most recent, City of Spies, are published by Simon & Schuster, and feature the hero of this story.
My mistress was concerned about her water supply.
This may seem an odd preoccupation for an Aztec. After all, our city, Mexico, was built on an island in a freshwater lake and was riddled with canals, one of which ran past my mistress’s house. However, you had only to think of all the rubbish and other things that were tipped into them by the city’s thousands of households to know why the water we drank always came from springs. Some of these were within the city itself, but the city had long since outgrown them, and now the most important source was on the hill of Chapultepec, across the water on the western shore of the lake.
Years ago — before I was born — the rulers of Mexico had built a great aqueduct whose two stone channels linked Chapultepec to the city. Most households got their fresh water from men who filled their jars from the aqueduct near the point where it entered the city and carried them by canoe through the city’s network of canals direct to our doors. They were paid in bags of cocoa beans and most Aztecs scarcely reckoned the cost, being happy to be spared the daily chore of fetching their own water. Merchants, however, took worldly wealth more seriously than most of us. My mistress, Tiger Lily — the lady to whom I was bound technically as a slave, although in reality our relationship was a good deal more complex than that — was a merchant. This all had something to do with why I was standing in one of the aqueduct’s channels — the southern one, currently empty and closed for cleaning — with evil-smelling muck oozing between my toes and a fetid stench filling my nostrils.
“It’s free water for two years, Yaotl,” Lily had explained. “Just for standing around and watching a ceremony, and you can’t claim you haven’t done worse before. Not to mention the fact that you drink the water, too.”
“I know,” I admitted. “It still seems like an odd request, though. What can I tell a water seller that he can’t see for himself?”
Blue Feather, whose canoe brought a full jar to Lily’s house every day, had asked her for my services for a day. The newly cleaned and reopened northern channel of the aqueduct was to be rededicated to the water goddess, Lady Jade Skirt, and I was to watch the ceremony. I was to take careful note of every aspect of the proceedings, even down to precisely where the priest stood while he made his sacrifices — Blue Feather had been most particular about this.