Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

Remote Control by Mick Herron

© 2007 by Mick Herron

Mick Herron’s last book to see print in the U.S., Why We Die, received a starred review from PW, which praised his series P.I., Zoë Boehm, as “smart, dogged, and never down for the count.” Mr. Herron is a master plotter, and manages here to create both a clever twist and an interesting snap-shot of modern London.

It starts on a train. Maurice’s fault. Maurice is about my age, but since his divorce, he’s let himself go: his suits overdue a dry-cleaning; his shirts frayed at the cuff. Some days, he could stand a little closer to the shower. To hear him tell it, though, he’s better off.

“Finally I get a little peace,” he says. “That woman could talk for England. They should record her phone calls for training purposes.”

But for all the spin, it’s not just his cuffs that are frayed lately. Small things rattle Maurice’s cage. Some days we don’t get a seat — it’s a busy line — and once he’d have grinned and deployed those origami skills commuters develop for reading newspapers upright in a crowd. Now he seethes instead, staring grimly out of the window as if, instead of fields and dormitory towns, we’re flashing through a post-nuclear landscape. His hair needs attention. He still has good teeth, though.

“Jesus,” he tells me. “They should make it a crime.”

“Make what a crime, Maurice?”

“Coming into the capital without due purpose,” he says. “Some of these dumbbells, they’re going shopping, can you believe it? They get on a train, eight-ten in the morning, they’re going shopping on Regent Street. So us poor working stiffs have to stand. Hell of a way to prepare for the day ahead.”

“Most of them have jobs, Maurice.”

“The ones that don’t should be stuffed in the luggage racks.”

I have a job. I work in corporate finance, and earn nicely without causing outrage. And Maurice has a job. His company operates CCTV systems. I sometimes wonder if it’s the vaguely Hollywood flavour of this that has tinted his speech with Americanisms. And, too, he sees a lot of bad behaviour. Maurice doesn’t monitor screens himself, but what he calls the show-stopper stuff gets spliced onto tapes and shown at parties. His outfit has a security contract which puts cameras along the South Bank, all the way to the Isle of Dogs. He’s seen people screwing against the wall in broad daylight, and not just professionally, either. Muggings, of course; rapes, fistfights, stabbings. Politicians arm in arm with local gangsters. Last year he seemed happy in his work, but as the days grind by, the wells we draw from sink deeper. Maurice has a new boss, and this is a travesty of justice. Maurice should have been the new boss — not this punk, which is how Maurice refers to him. “This punk,” he says. “This goddamn kid.” This goddamn kid is ten years younger, two stone lighter, and fifteen grand a year richer than Maurice is right now. Maurice feels he’s been gazumped. “That was my job,” he says. “Goddamn punk came out of nowhere.”

Remain detached, I want to tell him. Stay in control. Or you will rupture one day; burst one of those complicated valves that keep the heart pumping. Once you let the rage inside, it’s hard to get it out. Trust me. I know about this.

Maurice hasn’t mentioned the boss in a while. New angers blossom daily.

“Freakin’ personalised numberplates,” he says this morning. “Don’t you hate them?”

“They have their uses,” I say. “Easy to remember.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not forgetting this one in a hurry.”

And he goes into a spiel about being cut off by a red sports car at the weekend. Maurice was entirely in the right. These twits in their flash motors: Decapitation would be too quick.

“She was driving,” he says. “But it’s him I remember. Shaved bald, and when did that get to be cool? I remember in the good old days, your chrome-domes had the grace to be ashamed.”

He wore an earring, too, and Maurice has much to say on this subject.

“I figure he had his hand up her skirt, and that’s how come she was in a rush. Looked old enough to be his big sister.”

The train pulls into platform 8, and the long forever of its gradual halt begins; the release of its doors.

“Whoosh,” he says, and I think he’s imitating the doors, but he isn’t. “W-H-O-O-5-H. The S was a 5.”

On the concourse, we make our usual farewells.

“Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” he warns me.

“Remember,” I tell him. “They can kill you. But they’re not allowed to eat you.”

But I say it distractedly, because my mind is elsewhere.

If you want to know where it gets you — letting the rage inside — keep your eyes open as you slog around the city. You’ll see people behaving like all kinds of weather at once: fizzing and spitting; boiling and baked; grey and grim. Just by walking where somebody else wants to be, you’re making mortal enemies for life. Somebody asked me “What the hell?” last week because I slowed to check a shop window, and I’ve no doubt he thought it a reasonable question. Trench warfare has its critics, but city life is no picnic either. A Daily Mail columnist once spent a morning on the pavement outside Bond Street station, and not a soul stopped to check he wasn’t dead. Though to be fair, they might have recognised him. One less Mail columnist would brighten anyone’s day.

Remain detached. Stay in control. Or you will rupture; burst a complicated valve.

Trust me, because I know about this. I killed a man once. It was mostly an accident. It happened years ago, when I was a student, over a girl: a girl I hadn’t even spoken to, but told a friend about, and next thing I knew they were going steady. It seemed to me that he would never have looked her way if I’d not pointed her out. You dream your dreams aloud, and they come true for someone else. I waited for him after the pubs shut one night, on the towpath he used as a shortcut. He was drunk, and might well have ended up in the canal even if I’d not been there — which, as far as the world was concerned, was the case. The following day it seemed like a strange dream. Now, I recall it as a warning: Remain detached; stay in control. There are angry places in each of us, and we visit them at our peril. I can’t even remember that girl’s name.

The things that are precious remain worth fighting for. But I’ve learned to let go of the space around me. I don’t ask strangers “What the hell?” because I already know what the hell.

I’ve only ever told one person about the man I killed.

I don’t see Maurice on the evening train, because he usually goes to the pub. Instead, I stare out of the window as the world goes whooshing by. I have bought flowers for Emma, which is something I do: It’s not a birthday thing, or an anniversary thing, or even a Friday-night thing. It is a recurring statement of intent: I will always bring you flowers. Tonight they are roses, and to my fellow passengers possibly look like an apology. But I have nothing to be sorry for, and intend to keep it that way.

Emma hums as she arranges the roses in a vase.

“How was your day?” she asks.

“It was fine. Yours?”

“Same old, same old,” she says, and this is our private joke. Emma does not work — I earn enough for both of us — and her same old is someone else’s leisure.

I potter around the sitting room as she prepares the supper. I drink a glass of white, and pick things up and put them down — ornaments, books, a candlestick; a pale silk scarf left draped across a chair — and remember where each came from, and which were my gifts to her. It is not only flowers I bring her: I buy gifts. That scarf; this candlestick. I made her a present long ago of my deepest secret: of the man I killed on a lonely stretch of canal, unobserved by God or anyone. She wept — we both did — but she understood what my telling her meant: that I was placing all I was, and ever hoped to be, in her hands. Ever since, I’ve known we’ll never drift apart.

I bought her those books, those CDs, and the pictures on our walls.

And last year, for her birthday, as a special treat, I bought her a smart red sports car.

With a personalised numberplate.

Remain in control. Stay detached.

Maurice says, “Why so interested? I told you all this yesterday, you’re like yeah, yeah, are we nearly there yet?”

We have seats this morning. There’s never any telling which days are going to be crowded; which are going to be like somebody declared a Bank Holiday and never told you. Maurice sits opposite me, and I can see he’s missed a spot shaving; one of those difficult places under the chin that mirrors don’t always notice, but wives do.

“It’s just bad behaviour,” I tell him.

“Well, it wasn’t the only kind of bad behaviour on their mind. I can promise you that.”

He reminds me that it happened in the Cotswolds, then goes off on a tangent, telling me why he was there himself. I spend the interlude recalling that Emma had gone shopping on Saturday afternoon.

“Couple of miles along the road, I see the car parked by a wood. Like they’re nature-lovers, right? Guy with a shaved head, a freakin’ earring, the only wildlife he’s interested in is a bit of outdoors horizontal jogging.”

Maurice can be loud sometimes. His words riffle through the carriage like a cat in long grass.

That day, I call Emma twice from work. She answers both times. I say I just wanted to hear her voice.

“That’s sweet.”

And in the evening, I dig out our most recent phone bill. Emma has a mobile — of course she does — so there’s no earthly reason a landline should betray her. Even so, there are numbers I don’t recognise. But Google tells me they’re innocent. Mail-order firms; the local library. A plumber. For a while I entertain visions of Emma wrapped in highly coordinated intercourse with an overalled handyman, plungers and piping arrayed all around. But then I recall a leaky tap in the upstairs bathroom. Of course she called a plumber. Who else is going to fix a leaky tap?

“You’re very quiet,” she says over supper. “Is everything all right?”

She’s a beautiful woman, Emma; more beautiful to me than anyone else, it’s true. But beautiful. It always surprises me that she doesn’t take a good photo. I buy her gifts; when you get down to it, I feed and clothe her. But none of this makes her my possession. She is my wife, and that places her deeply inside my space, but she’s not my possession. In my absence, who knows where she walks?

“I’m fine,” I tell her. “Everything is fine.”

“We’re strictly audio-visual, our end,” Maurice says. “And v. much aboveboard. Public stuff, like the South Bank getout, plus offices and home security systems and all that. What you’re talking about’s bugging. You can buy phone taps over the counter, or over the Internet, same difference. But it’s legally touchy. You put up signs saying this area’s under remote surveillance, everyone knows where they stand. Nobody puts up a sign saying this phone’s tapped. And if you did, you could put up another one saying out of order, you’d get more traffic on it.”

The device, which arrives at my office from friendlyear.com, is no bigger than a watch battery, and transmits to a recorder the size of a memory stick. Feel more secure, the packaging invites, though its actual purpose is to confirm one’s insecurities. The instructions read like they’ve been translated from the Portuguese by someone who speaks only French, but owns two dictionaries.

It weighs my pocket down as I leave, and I wonder if the dogs at the station will bark me out — the police dogs that wait on the concourse, trained to sniff for bombs, guns, and fear.

On the train, Maurice says, “You’re looking pressured. Markets heading for a fall?”

It is such a surprise that Maurice notices anything beyond his own concerns that I’m not sure how to answer. “Same old, same old,” I say at last.

He looks out on a darkening view of warehouse yards and traffic jams. “Tell me about it. We’ve got a citywide systems check on — every camera, every lens, every angle. Guess which muggins gets to coordinate that little lot?”

“Don’t the cameras get checked all the time?”

“Individually, yes. This is a systems audit.” He leans forward. “Means we have to close whole chunks of it down. You want to pull some riverside mischief and not get caught, this week’s good.”

“I presume you’re not advertising that.”

“Jesus, don’t joke.” He brushes imaginary crumbs from his lapel. The real ketchup stain on his tie is unimpressed. “Big Brother never sleeps. That’s our story, anyway.”

At home, I place the bug on the standard lamp. The recorder goes in a drawer. It’s noise-activated, which means that when nothing’s happening, it goes to sleep. Along with hours of sound, it can capture aeons of unremembered silence.

“What are your plans for the rest of the week?” I ask Emma over supper; a strangely formal construction.

“I thought I might go up to London one morning. Do some shopping. But don’t worry, I’ll avoid the commuter crush.”

“That’s good,” I say. “Maurice doesn’t like noncombatants stealing our seats.”

She smiles at this. She knows Maurice.

All night it rains, and I lie awake wondering if the pattering on the windows will trigger the bug. Already I can picture myself listening to it: hours of secondhand rain; a memory of overnight weather.

Emma hums as she moves from room to room; she hums as she changes the roses’ water. And talks to herself, too, snatches of dialogue — single words, mostly — meant to act as memos-to-self: milk, she will say, for obvious reasons, or oven, less obviously. She takes a call on her mobile, and walks out of range while gossiping with a book-club friend. I hear all this hours later, in the bathroom, the recorder’s earpiece clamped to my head.

She interrupts my surveillance by calling upstairs.

I go down to eat, and admire her food. I applaud the industry with which she passes her days. I notice that the oven sparkles; its ceramic buffed and polished. My attentions amuse her.

“Sometimes you act like a brand-new husband,” she tells me.

“Would you like a brand-new husband?” I ask.

“I’m quite content with the old one,” she says. “But it’s nice to be appreciated.”

Later, I return to the bathroom, and continue listening to the day’s messages.

More humming.

Light bulbs.

The friendly clatter of a woman preparing to go out, followed an unknowable amount of time later by the sound of the same woman returning home.

She takes a call on her mobile.

Yes... Tomorrow, that’s right. Well, thank you for confirming. What time’s check-in? Any time after eleven? That’s fine.

Damn, she tells herself sometime later. I forgot to buy the bread.

I hear myself arriving back from work, and removing the recorder from its drawer.

And then all I hear is silence, taking place in real time.

In the morning, before she’s up, I take her mobile from her coat pocket, and jot a number down from Call Register. When I ring it from my own phone, a hotel receptionist answers. I find I can’t speak.

Emma emerges, in her dressing gown. “I’m going to London today, too,” she says. “But I’ll go in on the ten o’clock.”

“Shall we come back together?” My voice is rusty, as if it belongs to somebody older.

“Oh, I’ll be home before rush hour.” She kisses me on the cheek. “I’ll leave the rough stuff to you men.”

On the train, Maurice complains about the continuing rain. He also complains about fare increases, the government’s pensions policy, and the number of reality shows on TV.

“Don’t those guys know their T.S. Eliot?” Those guys are the guys we all hate: the ones responsible for whatever disgusts us at that moment. “ ‘Humankind cannot bear too much reality.’ Did they think he was kidding, or what?”

“I don’t think modernist poetry factors in much in TV scheduling, Maurice.”

“Well, I don’t think basic intelligence factors in much in TV scheduling. They got freaking cheerleaders doing the weather, for God’s sake.” He pauses. “Actually, that bit’s not all bad.”

On the concourse he says, “Let’s be careful out there.”

“Do it to them before they do it to you,” I tell him.

But I don’t head for the Tube. Instead I make for the daylight, or what little there is of it — it’s wet and grey as I walk to Hyde Park Corner, where I buy a cup of coffee in a franchise opposite Victoria’s Hotel, and use my mobile to call in sick. There’s a newspaper on my table, and I pretend to read while I watch the comings and goings.

At ten to eleven a shaven-headed man with an earring pauses at its steps, checks his watch, then goes in.

At ten past, my wife arrives in a taxi. She smiles as she tips the driver.

Stay detached. Remain in control. Let go of the space around you.

But everything inside that space is yours.

I spend so long in that cafe, it starts to feel like my kitchen. I drink so much coffee, I start to feel like hell.

In the newspaper I’m not reading is a grainy picture from CCTV footage. It shows two kids in hoodies stomping a homeless man to death.

Three hours later, Emma leaves the Victoria. Through a circle I’ve rubbed in the steamed-up window I watch as she sets off for the station, and she looks the same to me as she always does. There’s no scarlet letter branded on her forehead. She might have been taking a business meeting in the hotel’s conference room. Out of view she walks, her good grey coat and umbrella keeping her dry. Once she’s gone, I return my attention to the hotel entrance. It swims a little, but I blink away newfound knowledge. When the shaven-headed man emerges five minutes later, my vision is clear again, my purpose undimmed. I pay the bill and follow him round the corner. I’m half an escalator behind him as he dips into the underground.

The Tube map has been played with many times; its stations replaced with constellations, philosophers, authors, famous drunks. It is an attempt, I think, to find poetry in the ordinary. He changes trains, then, at the Great Bear, and I loiter yards from him as he waits on the platform. Every so often he checks his watch. Perhaps he’s heading back to work — playtime over; alibi used up. I wonder what excuse he phoned in before heading for the Victoria: a dental appointment? A checkup? He is wearing a suit beneath his raincoat, and his earring flashes when it catches the light. I imagine him in the passenger seat of my wife’s red car, his hand up her skirt; or in a hotel bedroom, that suit folded onto a hanger before their fun begins. Then the Tube arrives in a silvery whoosh, and we board the same carriage, and sit ten seats apart.

Dylan Thomas; W.B. Yeats; Ezra Pound... The carriage fills, but no one sits next to me. Perhaps I’m giving off the wrong signals. Perhaps no one wants to check if I’m dead. I feel dead, it’s almost true, as we reach our destination and emerge into the same grey, grubby weather of twenty minutes ago. He walks across Hungerford Bridge, collar pulled up to protect his shaven skull. I follow some way behind. My hair is plastered to my head, and rainwater pours down my neck. Everyone I pass has the same expression stamped onto their features: a look that says stay out of my space. On the South Bank he veers left, and heads towards Tate Modern. Before reaching it he turns from the river, and without ever looking behind him — as if he enjoys a clear conscience — leads me to an office block, into which he disappears.

Forever, I wait in an alley opposite. Ages of unrecorded time, whose silence spools into nothingness.

When he emerges, it’s long past office hours. Perhaps he’s compensating for his morning’s absence, or perhaps his office role is important enough to spill into the evening shift. He seems tired when he appears at last, talking into his mobile phone; shaking his head and waving his free hand around in a pointless underlining of his words. This conversation lasts way up the South Bank, where he stops at last at a pub beyond the Globe.

From a corner table I watch as he drinks his way through three large scotches.

Outside, it is full-on dark. The rain is back with a vengeance, and has cleared the evening streets. I nurse a single pint until he rises to leave, then follow him along the unwatched river, heedless of the switched-off cameras we pass. He is somewhat drunk, I expect. I’m mildly wobbly myself, after beer on an empty stomach.

What happens next — the sudden acceleration, the blow to the head, the heave into the water — seems both familiar and surprisingly straightforward. For a minute afterwards I stand there, hardly able to believe that such a large problem can vanish so instantly. In the morning, I expect, it will feel like another strange dream.

And then I catch the last train home, to find Emma waiting, anxious.

“You’re so late!”

“I went for a drink. Sorry.”

“You could have called.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” I say. “How was your day?”

“Same old, same old,” she tells me.

The papers make great play of the irony: The murder of the London head of a global security outfit captured on his firm’s CCTV. There are shots of me trailing him halfway up the river. Even I recognise myself in the blown-up footage. But at the trial I don’t mention Maurice’s subterfuge about the system being shut down because — as both he and Emma point out — last thing I need is another drowned body surfacing. Even a twenty-year-old murder would muddy the waters. One life sentence is enough.

They send me a photo from the wedding. This takes place the week after our divorce comes through. Maurice looks fit and spruce, but then he has no further need to play down-at-heel, and the extra £15K for stepping into the boss’s shoes can’t hurt. He’s maintained his predecessor’s habit of holding brunch meetings at the Victoria, I gather. Its conference room is ideal. I sometimes think about Emma killing three hours in the cafe there, and wonder if she drank as much coffee as I did while waiting for suspicion to harden.

In the photo, she looks beautiful.