Night rose on Hampstead Heath as Sarah and I walked together, sometimes holding hands, sometimes not.
We walked in silence mostly, just listening to the sounds of our feet on the grass, the mud, the stones. Swallows flitted here and there, darting in and out of the trees and bushes like furtive homosexuals, while the furtive homosexuals flitted here and there, pretty much like swallows. There was a lot of activity on the Heath that night. Or perhaps it’s every night. Men seemed to be everywhere, in ones, and twos, and threes and mores, appraising, signalling, negotiating, getting it done: plugging into each other to give, or receive, that microsecond of electric charge that would allow them to go back home and concentrate on the plot of an Inspector Morse without getting restless.
This is what men are like, I thought. This is unfettered male sexuality. Not without love, but separate from love. Short, neat, efficient. The Fiat Panda, in fact.
‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Sarah, staring hard at the ground as she walked.
‘About you,’ I said, with hardly a stumble.
‘Me?’ she said, and we strolled for a while. ‘Good or bad?’
‘Oh good, definitely.’ I looked at her, but she was frowning, still staring downwards. ‘Definitely good,’ I said again.
We came to a pond, and stood by it, and stared at it, and threw stones in it, and generally gave thanks for it according to whatever ancient mechanism it is that draws people to water. I thought back to the last time we had been alone together, on the banks of the river atHenley. BeforePrague, before the Sword, before all kinds of other things.
‘Thomas,’ she said.
I turned and looked at her head on, because I suddenly had the feeling that she’d been rehearsing something in her mind and now wanted to get it out in a hurry.
‘Sarah,’ I said.
She kept looking down.
‘Thomas, what do you say we make a run for it?’
She paused for a while, and then, at last, raised her eyes to me - those beautiful, huge, grey eyes - and I could see desperation in them, deep and on the surface. ‘I mean, together,’ she said. ‘Just get the hell out.’
I looked at her and sighed. In another world, I thought to myself, it might have worked. In another world, in another universe, in another time, as two quite different people, we really might have been able to put all of this behind us, take off to some sun-drenchedCaribbean island, and have sex and pineapple juice, non-stop, for a year.
But now, it wasn’t going to work. Things I’d thought for a long time, I now knew; and things I’d known for a long time, I now hated knowing.
I took a deep breath.
‘How well do you know Russell Barnes?’ I said. She blinked.
‘What?’
‘I asked you how well you knew Russell Barnes.’
She stared at me for a moment, then let out a kind of laugh; the way I do, when I realise I’m in big trouble.
‘Barnes,’ she said, looking away and shaking her head, trying to behave as if I’d just asked her whether she preferred Coke or Pepsi. ‘What the hell has that…’
I took hold of her by the elbow and squeezed, jerking her round to face me again.
‘Will you answer the fucking question, please?’
The desperation in her eyes was changing to panic. I was scaring her. To be honest, I was scaring myself.
‘Thomas, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Well, that was it.
That was the last glimmer of hope gone. When she lied to me, standing there by the water in the rising night, I knew what I knew.
‘It was you who called them, wasn’t it?’
She struggled against my grip for a moment, and then laughed again.
‘Thomas, you’re… what the hell is the matter with you?’
‘Please, Sarah,’ I said, keeping hold of her elbow, ‘don’t act.’
She was getting really frightened now, and started to try and pull away. I hung on.
‘Jesus Christ…’ she began, but I shook my head and she stopped. I shook my head when she frowned at me, and I shook my head when she tried to look scared. I waited until she’d stopped all those things.
‘Sarah,’ I said eventually, ‘listen to me. You know who Meg Ryan is, don’t you?’ She nodded. ‘Well, Meg Ryan gets paid millions of dollars to do what you’re trying to do now. Tens of millions. Do you know why?’ She stared back at me. ‘Because it’s a very difficult thing to do well, and there aren’t more than about a dozen people in the world who can pull it off at this distance. So don’t act, don’t pretend, don’t lie.’
She closed her mouth and seemed suddenly to relax, so I eased my grip on her elbow, and then let go altogether. We stood there like grown-ups.
‘It was you who called them,’ I said again. ‘You called them the first night I came to your house. You called them from the restaurant, the night they took me off the bike.’
I didn’t want to have to say the last bit, but somebody had to.
You called them,’ I said, and they came to kill your father.’
She cried for about an hour, on Hampstead Heath, on a bench, in the moonlight, in my arms. All the tears in the world ran down her face and soaked into the earth.
At one point the crying became so violent, and so loud, that we began to gather a distant, scattered audience, who muttered to each other about calling the police, and then thought better of it. Why did I put my arms around her? Why did I hold a woman who’d betrayed her own father, and who’d used me like a piece of paper-towel?
Beats me.
When at last the crying started to ease, I kept on holding her, and felt her body jerk and shudder with those after-tears hiccups that children get.
‘He wasn’t meant to die,’ she said suddenly, with a clear, strong voice, which made me wonder if it was coming from somewhere else. Maybe it was. ‘That wasn’t meant to happen. In fact,’ she wiped at her nose with her sleeve, ‘they actually promised me he’d be okay. They said as long as he was stopped, then nothing would happen. We’d both be safe, and we’d both be…’
She faltered, and for all the calm in her voice, I could tell that she was dying from the guilt. ‘You’d both be what?’ I said.
She bent her head back, stretching her long neck, offering her throat to someone who wasn’t me.
Then she laughed. ‘Rich,’ she said.
For a moment, I was tempted to laugh too. It sounded like such a ridiculous word. Such a ridiculous thing to be. It sounded like a name, or a country, or a kind of salad. Whatever the word was, it surely couldn’t mean having a lot of money. It was just, simply, too ridiculous.
‘They promised you’d be rich?’ I said.
She took a deep breath and sighed, and her laughter faded away so quickly it might never have happened.
‘Yup,’ she said. ‘Rich. Money. They said we’d have money.’
‘Said it to who? Both of you?’
‘Oh God, no. Dad wouldn’t have…’ She stopped for a moment, and a violent shiver ran over her body. Then she tilted her chin upwards, and closed her eyes. ‘He was way, way past listening to that kind of stuff.’
I saw his face. The eager, determined, born-again look. The look of a man who’d spent his life making money, making his way, paying his bills, and then, just in time, he’d discovered that wasn’t the point of the game after all. He’d seen a chance to put it right.
Are you a good man, Thomas?