Hell Is Empty Page 17

  A voice came through the black clouds. Danny: ‘Fear is man-made,’ he said. ‘More specifically, it’s you-made. It’s personal and intimate. It’s not the knife, it’s the fucking knifer. Being scared is overrated. It’s so yesterday. It’s for fucking kids. Anyway, Joel, what’s the worst that could happen? He slashes you up and you die. Big wank. It’s better than pissing into your cushions while a nurse who despises you feeds you custard in a care home. And who’d miss a cunt like you? The mixologist at One Aldwych?’

  The voice helped. His sweary, know-all voice. The voice he’d worked hard on in order to remove any of the Scottishness in it, to mould it into something posh-casual. You might hear it in Notting Hill or Hoxton.

  It helped to dull the anxiety, but even though Eric was easy enough to best, and I was a good boy, refraining from stamping his head into a disappointing brawn, I knew I’d have to find a different way of coping, because I didn’t want to have to think of Danny Sweet’s voice in my ear every time someone pulled an edged weapon on me. At least now I knew I could do it. And maybe, I thought, as I peeled off some notes and gave them to Eric, thanked Danny and bid him goodbye, hoping never to see him again, he was right in one respect.

  I’d developed a Pavlovian response to the unsheathing of a blade. That was all. It was a related absence of control that bothered me. Death held no fear for me. I knew that. How could I fear death, any kind of death, when even my violent murder would most probably come nowhere near the brutal death that Rebecca suffered? It was more that I feared checking out before I’d made everything right. I didn’t want to go without seeing Sarah again. I wanted my life to be put in order before it was snuffed.

  My hands felt dirty where they had touched the bills. And my guts were trying to repel the taste of Danny Sweet’s coffee. It had been an ugly, desperate act. But necessary, I felt. I’d found some way of overcoming a difficulty. That was life, I supposed, in a nutshell.

  I ascended the stone steps while Danny cajoled Eric back to work. Just as I got to the door, I got a text from Jimmy Two, my miracle man, saying the car, though bruised and battered, had been coaxed back to action and – given my current travails – was waiting for me not outside my flat on Homer Street, but in a car park near Willesden Junction. I was tucking the phone away, a skip working its way into my stride, when it rang.

  18

  It was Lorraine Tokuzo. Her voice slapped me into alert mode; after the fights – Henry, and the less demanding, but equally necessary Eric – my body just wanted to shut down and dissolve in its juices of shock and exhaustion.

  ‘Where are you?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re both safe,’ she said. Typical Tokuzo. Ask a sensible question, get the answer to a question she wanted to hear.

  ‘I told you to get out of London.’

  ‘You might have advised us to get out of London.’

  ‘Lorraine, let’s not play around. It’s dangerous. These guys… they don’t care about anything. They’ll come for my weak spots.’

  ‘I’m not weak.’

  ‘I don’t mean it like that,’ I said. ‘And you know it.’

  ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Romy said she thinks she was followed yesterday.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’re jumping at shadows,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty scared. For me, for you. Romy.’

  ‘This is what I wanted to avoid,’ I said.

  I heard a rumble in the background.

  ‘Where are you?’ I asked again.

  ‘We’re in a fauxtel near Heathrow,’ she said. Fauxtel. That was what she called any place that didn’t come with a chocolate on your pillow or complimentary bathrobes.

  ‘What are you doing at Heathrow?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time. Anonymous. Grey. Getting lost among the masses. But there’s only so much coffee you can drink, and after a while, it gets depressing seeing people piss off to the sunshine. Security were getting a bit fidgety too. You stick out if you’ve got no suitcases and you’re just hanging around.’

  ‘I’ll call you when I get there,’ I said. ‘Sit tight.’ I thought of getting Mawker to help out but he’d either point blank refuse – there was no evidence as yet to suggest Tann was going after anybody but me – or he’d ride in there with half a dozen screaming squad cars and cause a stampede. Half the people at airports are already touching cloth without a bunch of sirens and rifles making things worse. I was back at my car and heading off within the hour.

  But I knew I couldn’t go straight out to the airport. I was reluctant to do it for any number of reasons – including a building desire to get right in Mawker’s face about his visits to Cold Quay – but en route to Heathrow I took a slight detour. I sat in the car for ten minutes on a road just north of the cemetery at Roundwood Park, summoning the nerve to get out and get on with it. And that walk to the door was one of the hardest I’ve ever taken. I’d passed on death news before, but I’d never broken it to a pregnant woman, nor told her that I had played an instrumental part in his demise.

  I’d never met Oka before – Henry had quite rightly kept her away from his work, especially at Tuzie’s, which was the only place I’d ever encountered him.

  The doorbell produced a subtle chime – I should have guessed; no strident cliché tones for Henry – and she answered within seconds, as if she had been waiting at the door for a visitor. Perhaps she had; her husband had been dead for hours, and for hours prior to that he’d been galloping around London after me. He didn’t strike me as the kind of person who would keep someone waiting, let alone his wife. Henry was renowned for his punctuality and reliability. She would know something was amiss. One look at her face told me she already knew, and I paused, considering the wisdom of coming here.

  ‘It is all right,’ she said. Her English was perfect, but the sing-song intonation from her native language remained. There was a flash of grey in her short black hair. ‘They have been and gone.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’ I asked.

  ‘Henry’s comrades. They told me what happened. One of them said you might come here but the other said you could not be so stupid. And yet here you are.’

  ‘Here I am,’ I said. ‘And I’m not going to deny any accusations of stupidity. I thought it was the right thing to do.’

  ‘Will you come in?’

  I flashed a look at the darkness behind her. She placed a hand on the bulge of her stomach as if to reassure me. ‘For a short while,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Please remove your shoes.’

  I followed her along the hallway and into a room that contained a low table with a vase holding a single white flower. There was a framed Japanese ideogram on the wall. A stone bowl on the window ledge. That was it.

  ‘Please,’ she said, and indicated that I should sit on the floor by the table. I did so and she left the room. I closed my eyes at the ludicrous situation. Earlier her husband and I had been trying to gouge the life out of each other. And here I was, spoiling the feng shui.

  She returned with a tray bearing a stone teapot and what looked like two eggcups. She placed the tray on the table and, with some difficulty, lowered herself down opposite me.

  ‘When is the baby due?’

  ‘In two weeks,’ she said.

  Sunshine kitchen. Toast-crumb mouth. Fingers laced through mine. Wide eyes. Joel. Pinch me. Slap me upside the noggin. Tickle my tits till Tuesday. We. Are. Going. To. Be. Parents. In. Two. Weeks.

  ‘Joel?’

  I had reached out and taken her hand in mine. I didn’t know what to do. The child would grow up without a father. She would be more than enough – I could see that – but Henry was suddenly a memory, a myth.

  ‘I liked him,’ I said.

  ‘He liked you.’ Her voice remained smooth and steady but the catchlights in her eyes sparkled. ‘You men,’ she said. ‘Violence never strays far.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  Her fa
ce was stone. Maybe she hadn’t thought about that yet. Maybe there was nothing else on her mind. But then: ‘Sell the house. Go back to Japan.’ She didn’t sound convinced. Neither was I.

  She poured some green tea and stared into the steam. She had the kind of face that you could believe had never known a smile. It seemed born to misery, comfortable with it. But that couldn’t be true. I wondered how a smile might transform her. I wouldn’t be finding out soon.

  ‘I knew Henry’s work was… unconventional. But I did not realise he was involved in killing practice.’

  She nodded at my bald display of scepticism. ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I know he was passionate about Tessenjutsu, but I didn’t believe he carried it beyond the dojo walls. Or that he used it offensively. His sensei would turn his back on him, if he knew.’ She hesitated. When she spoke again her voice was very low, barely audible. ‘And so would I.’

  ‘What did they tell you, these comrades?’

  ‘A body was found in the City a short while ago. They said he fell from a great height. I was told I would not be able to identify him. Only from the clothes he wore.’

  I thought of him standing on the edge, the wind flapping at his jacket, flashing its iridescent lining at me.

  ‘He fell,’ I said. ‘He was not pushed. We fought. It didn’t go well for him. But I suppose you could say he retained his dignity, at the end.’

  ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘I am not blaming you.’

  ‘Did Henry talk about the person he was working for?’

  ‘He never spoke about any aspect of his work. And I never asked.’

  ‘Is there anything you can tell me? Anything at all that you heard or saw? Anybody who came to the house you didn’t recognise?’

  A shake of the head. ‘Henry was protective of his privacy. And protective of me. Our paths rarely crossed during the mornings and nights. He was always out, working. I saw him in the afternoons he wasn’t catching up on his sleep. Sometimes we would go out for brunch.’

  ‘And where did he go, other than Tuzie’s?’

  Her eyes flicked to the stone bowl on the window ledge. ‘Nowhere, really,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know his paymasters.’

  I was restless. It was time to go. I finished my tea and stood up. I went over to the stone bowl. There was a key on a leather fob. A laminated piece of paper with the number 7 on it.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘You have no right.’

  ‘My wife was murdered by your husband’s paymaster,’ I said. ‘Henry visited me once, when I was in hospital. His betrayal gives me every right.’

  The hand on the belly again. To calm her, to calm the baby. Who knew? Who cared? ‘It’s a key to a garage,’ she said.

  ‘Where is it? What’s in it? Your car?’

  She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t belong to us. Henry was looking after it while the owner was… away.’

  ‘Away? This is Tann’s garage.’

  She nodded. Stroked her child.

  ‘Where is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Wallingford.’ She gave me the address and accompanied me to the door.

  ‘In Japan,’ she said, ‘ritual suicide was performed by the wives of those samurai who had brought dishonour on their homes. It was called jigai. You take a sharp knife and draw it across the throat, cutting the arteries clean through. A fast death. It was taught to very young girls so that they might be prepared in later life.’

  ‘But times have changed,’ I said, carefully.

  ‘In some ways,’ she said. ‘For some people.’

  ‘Your child will be happy and strong,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to pass on the sorrow. You mustn’t act rashly. There are positives to be gained from all of this.’

  ‘I am struggling to see what they might be,’ she said. A hand on the belly. Her other hand swept her hair away from her throat and in that moment I saw how her suicide might go. I felt the skin on my arms pucker.

  ‘I can put you in touch with people who can help you,’ I said. ‘They will give you good advice.’

  ‘It’s time to say goodbye,’ she said.

  I pulled my boots on and Henry’s voice leapt up in my head.

  ‘Can you tell me what… To… something… um… day? die?… moto crashy means?’

  ‘Tōdai moto kurashi? It means, more or less, that “The base of the lighthouse is dark”.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  In the street a rag-and-bone man went by. We stared at him. I felt lost in time, unfastened, as if I wasn’t moving along at the same speed it was. Everything was playing itself out a few frames ahead of me.

  ‘There is another Japanese proverb,’ she said. Her voice had turned dry and bitter. The hand had not left her distended belly. ‘Katte kabuto no o wo shimeyo.’

  I waited. I wondered about Oka, and what she had told me. I felt she was reining in much of what she had wanted to say, or do. I wondered whether it was true, her assurance that she did not blame me. And what might have happened to me were she not carrying the child.

  ‘Having conquered,’ she said, ‘tighten the thongs of your helmet.’

  19

  The key was burning a hole in my pocket. I wondered what I might find there. I wondered if this garage, in the south-east of Oxfordshire, might not be where Graeme Tann was hiding out. But I had to help Lorraine and Romy first.

  Heathrow, then. I still get excited whenever I get near an airfield. One of my favourite memories of Dad was when he took me to the viewing park at Manchester airport and we spent a couple of hours watching jets take off and land. As I approached Bath Road from the M4, a 747 sank before me, flaps extended as it came in to land. Now all I could think of was suicide bombers and hijackings and engine failures, and two women I cared about sitting in a grey room while someone mooched about outside, looking for them.

  Their hotel was a cheap, nondescript little place with a farty little token gesture car park and neglected hedges. A woman at the desk with a face like a gravestone looked at me as if I had just offered to eat her children in a granary bap. There was nobody else in the so-called lobby. A birdcage luggage cart bore a misery-grey suitcase with a broken handle wrapped in parcel tape. There was the faint smell of fear sweat. People holed up waiting to get on pressurised metal tubes travelling eight miles high at 500 miles per hour with 150 tons of highly flammable fuel under their arses.

  I texted Tokuzo to say I’d arrived. I got one back: 37.

  I walked along a gloomy corridor punctuated with muffled sounds of TV and argument. I tapped softly at the door and she opened it. A sharp smell of vinegar. Romy was sitting on the bed behind her, knees drawn up to her chin. They both looked tired and edgy. Tension was thick in the room. I wondered if they’d been squabbling.

  ‘So what’s going on?’ I asked.

  ‘Can we just get out of here?’ Tokuzo said.

  ‘Let’s just relax, okay? Let’s not get up a head of steam over something that might be nothing. I’m in the car, we can all head back together. But not while we’re in headless chicken mode.’

  ‘I went out earlier,’ Romy said. ‘To get something to eat. We were both starving.’

  ‘Why not order room service?’

  ‘I’m not eating anything from this skank hole,’ said Tokuzo.

  ‘There’s a fish and chip shop just five minutes away,’ Romy said. ‘I saw someone on the other side of the road. He had a phone with him. And he was talking into it. He watched me walk by.’

  ‘As would any red-blooded male,’ I said.

  ‘He wasn’t there when I was coming back. But there was a car, and it was just idling. I think there were two people in the car.’

  ‘What kind of car?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not good with models,’ she said. ‘It was black, I think. Black wheels too.’

  ‘And what? It followed you?’

  ‘Well no, it wasn’t kerb-crawling me. But when I got to the hotel entrance I heard a car very fast in the
street. I turned to look and it was the black car.’

  I sat down on the bed. I felt Romy’s foot move away, and then move back. Her toe dimpled my thigh. I gave her calf a squeeze.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Tokuzo. She was biting the nail of her thumb. Those cat-sly hazel eyes looked muddy in the sickly gleam from the hotel room lights.

  ‘I’m wondering if I saw a black car on the way here. And you know, I think I did. One of those thousands of cars might well be what we’re looking for.’ But black wheels, I thought. A bit of a stand out. Something to keep an eye out for.

  ‘What about just now?’ she said, her voice getting firmer. I knew that voice. It meant: no more dicking about. ‘Anybody in the car park? Anyone shifty at Reception?’

  ‘Other than the receptionist, no. There was a service vehicle in the car park, and a taxi. I saw a man walking a dog along Bath Road. Nobody sitting on a bench with slits cut into his newspaper.’

  What to make of it? Maybe nothing. Maybe something. I had to consider it a threat.

  ‘I think we’ve all spooked each other enough,’ I said. ‘Come on, let me take you somewhere safe.’

  ‘Nowhere’s safe, with you knocking about,’ Tokuzo said.

  ‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘There’s this safe house I know about.’

  ‘Stick your safe house,’ she said. ‘If it’s so safe, why aren’t you in it?’

  ‘Good question,’ I said.

  ‘I want to go home,’ she said.

  ‘And how about you?’ I asked Romy.

  ‘I’ll go with her,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay with Dad. I won’t stay with you.’

  Get that ‘won’t’.

  ‘King’s Cross might be all right,’ I said, because I felt I had to offer some crumb. There was no reason it would be all right. There was every reason it was being staked out like every other place in London that Tann knew I had a connection to. ‘But first we have to drive out Oxford way.’

  ‘Oxford?’

  ‘Wallingford, to be precise.’

  ‘Wallingford? What’s in Wallingford?’

  ‘Tut-tut,’ I said. ‘There’s a glass-half-empty attitude if ever I heard one. What isn’t in Wallingford? That’s the question you should be asking yourself.’