The Straw Men

I had no memory of my father ever owning or using a home movie camera. I certainly had no recollection of watching such films. Why bother filming your family if you're not going to all sit around some evening and watch, laughing at hairstyles and clothes and pointing out how much everyone has grown in height or waist size? If he'd once been someone who filmed such things, why did he stop? Where were the films?

Which left only the first scene, the one shot on video, much more recently. Because of its very brevity and lack of identifiable meaning, this was the segment that seemed to provide the key. When my father had edited together this little bombshell, he must have tacked this non-event on the front for a reason. He'd said something at the end, the short phrase that the wind had obscured. I needed to know what it said. Maybe it would be a way into understanding the tape's purpose. Maybe not. But at least I would then have all of the evidence.

I shut the car door and got out my phone. I needed help, and so I called Bobby.

Five hours later I was back at my hotel. In the meantime I'd been to Billings, one of Montana's few stabs at a decent-sized town. In accordance with advice, and contrary to my expectations, it had proved to have a copy shop where I could do what I required. As a result I had a new DVD-ROM in my pocket.

As I walked through the lobby I remembered that I'd only booked for a couple of days after the funeral, and stopped by the desk to extend. The girl nodded absently, not taking her eyes off a television tuned to a global news channel. The newscaster was rehashing the scant details that had so far emerged in the mass killing in England, which I'd heard about on the radio on the way out to Billings. It didn't seem like they'd found out anything new. They were repeating the same stuff over and over, like a ritual, breathing it into myth. The guy had barricaded himself somewhere for a couple hours, then killed himself. Probably at this very moment his house was being torn apart by the cops, trying to find some explanation, somebody or something to blame.

'Terrible thing,' I said, mainly to check if I had genuinely caught the receptionist's attention. Hospitality boards in the lobby indicated that the hotel would be hosting a comprehensive slate of corporate brainstorms and deep-thinks over the rest of the week, and I didn't want to suddenly find myself without a room.

She didn't respond immediately, and I was about to try again when I noticed that she was crying. Her eyes were full, and one tear had escaped to run nearly invisibly down one cheek.

'Are you okay?' I asked, surprised.

She turned her head toward me as if dreaming, nodded slowly. 'Extra two days. Room 304. That's fine, sir.'

'Great. Are you all right?'

She quickly wiped the back of one hand across her cheek. 'Oh, yes,' she said. 'It's just sad.'

Then she turned back to the television again.

I watched her as I stood in the elevator, waiting for the doors to close. The lobby was deserted. She was still staring at the screen, motionless, as if looking out of a window. She couldn't have been more

caught up in this event — which had taken place thousands of miles away in a country she'd probably never even visited — if she'd lost a relative of her own in it. I wish I could say that it exacted the same degree of unthinking empathy from me, but it didn't. It wasn't that I didn't care, more that I couldn't get the feeling to sink to my heart out of my head. It wasn't like the World Trade Center, something vile and astonishing within our own borders, happening to people who'd saved coins of the same currency in their piggybanks when they were children. I knew intellectually that shouldn't make a difference, but it seemed to. I didn't know these people.

When I was inside my room I got my laptop out of the wardrobe, put it down on the table, and fired her up. While I waited, I got the DVD-ROM out of my pocket. My father's videotape was hidden in the tyre well of the rental car. What I had on the disk was a digitized version of it. When the PowerBook had gone through its wakeup routine — a shower, slurp of coffee, quick read of the newspaper, whatever the hell else it is that takes it so long — I stuck the cartridge in the slot in the side. It appeared as a disk on the desktop. The video had been saved onto it as four very large MPEG files. It had been too long to digitize at full resolution and still fit on one disk: so, while I was at one of the workstations in the Billings copy shop with no one hovering over me, I ripped the first and last sections down at high resolution, together with the portion of the middle section that had taken place at my parents' house. The long section in the bar I'd laid down at a lower frame rate. It still took a while. The whole shebang barely fit on the eighteen-gig disk.

First I tried using CastingAgent, an old piece of editing shareware that is buggy as shit but sometimes lets you do things other software won't. It crashed so conclusively I had to hard boot the computer. So then I reverted to standard stuff, and got the movie playing on the screen.

I spooled forward to the end of the first section, the one taken somewhere up in the mountains, and took a clipping of the last ten seconds. I saved this to the hard disk. Then I used MPEGSplit to axe out the video portion of the file, leaving me with just the audio track. I knew what the picture showed: a group of people wearing black coats, standing in a loose group. What I wanted to know was what had been said by the cameraman.

I saved the file, swapped out of the video software, and launched a professional battery of sound-processing applications — SoundStage, SFXlab, AudioMelt Pro. For the next half-hour I jiggered the track, trying different filters to see what they brought up. Increasing the amplitude just made it sound worse, but louder; scattershot down-sampling and noise reduction made it muddier. The best I could tell was that it was two or three words.

So then I got serious, and took another audio clip from the section of the tape just before the dialogue. I analysed the frequencies of the background wind, then set up a band-pass filter. I ran this on the other section of the tape, and it started to sound clearer. A little more refining and slowly the noises began to coalesce into words. Un craunen? Vren ouwnen? When I'd done all I could, I got some headphones out of the laptop bag and put them on. I set the track to loop and closed my eyes.

After about forty times through I got it. 'The Straw Men.'

I stopped the loop; took the headphones off. I was pretty sure that was it. The Straw Men. Problem was, it was meaningless. Sounded like an indie rock band — though I doubted that the people on the tape had earned a living through under-produced caterwauling. The members of bands don't live together in ski resorts. They build themselves mock-Tudor mansions on opposite sides of the planet, and only meet up when they're being paid. All I'd done was add another layer of inexplicability to what was captured on the tape. I watched the video again, running it off the DVD just in case the different format helped me to notice something new. Nothing struck me.

I sat in the chair for a while, staring into space, feeling the night catching up with me. Every now and then I heard the sound of someone walking past my door in the corridor, and from outside came the occasional swish of cars or floating fragments of distant conversations between people I didn't know and would never meet. None of this meant anything to me either.

At just after six my cell phone rang, jerking me out of half-sleep. I picked it up blearily. 'Yo,' said a voice. In the background there was the sound of other voices, and muffled music. 'Ward,

it's Bobby.'

'My man,' I said, rubbing my eyes. 'Thanks for the tip. Place in Billings worked out just fine.'

'Cool,' he said. 'But that's not why I'm calling. I'm in some place, what the fuck, the Sacagawea I

think it's called. Kind of a bar thing. Kind of. On the big main street. Huge-ass great sign.'

Suddenly I was awake. 'You're in Dyersburg?'

'Sure am. Flew in.'

'Why the hell did you do that?'

'Well, thing is, after you called, I was kind of bored. Picked up on something you said, did a little

poking around.'

'Poking around in what?'

'Some stuff. Ward, get your butt down here. Got a beer sitting waiting for you. I got something to tell,

my friend, and I'm not doing it over the phone.'

'Why?' I was already packing up the computer.

'Because it's going to freak you out.'

10

The Sacagawea is a large motel on the main drag. It has a huge multicoloured neon sign that can be seen from about half a mile in either direction, drawing the unwary like a magnet. I'd stayed there for about ten minutes once, the first time I'd come to visit my parents. The room I was given was a museum-standard tableau of cheap '60s design and had carpets like an unloved dog. At first I thought this was kind of funky, until I looked closer and realized it simply hadn't been redecorated since around the time I was born. On discovering there was no room service I checked the hell out again. I won't stay in a hotel without room service. I just won't stand for it.

The lobby was small and damp and smelt strongly of chlorine, presumably because of the tiny swimming pool in the next room. The wizened old twonk behind the reception desk directed me upstairs, doing so without recourse to speech but with a curious look. When I got to the bar I could see why. It wasn't humming with life. There was a service island in the middle, a lone waitress, and a rank of archaic slot machines over on the side with equally superannuated people placidly feeding coins into them. As a species, we really know how to live. A long bank of large windows at the front of the room gave a view over the parking lot and the drizzle of traffic tootling up and down the street. A few couples were dotted around the room, talking loudly, as if in the hope this would goose the room into having something approaching atmosphere. It wasn't working.

Sitting at a table up against the window was Bobby Nygard.

'What the fuck is this Sacagawea shit?' was the first thing he said.

I sat down opposite. 'Sacagawea was the name of the Amerind maiden who hung with Lewis and

Clark. Helped them work deals with the locals, not get killed, that kind of thing. The expedition passed by not far from here, on the way to the Bitterroot Mountains.'

'Thank you, professor. But are you allowed to say 'maiden' these days? Isn't it kind of sexist or something?'

'Probably,' I said. 'And you know what? I don't give a shit. It's better than 'squaw' anyhow.'

'Is it, though? Maybe not. Maybe it's like 'nigger'. Assumed as a badge of pride. Absorption of the

terms of the oppressor.'

'Be that as it may, Bobby. It's good to see you.'

He winked, and we touched glasses. Bobby looked pretty much the same as he ever had, though I hadn't met him face-to-face in two years. A little shorter than me, a little broader. Cropped hair, a face that always seemed slightly flushed, and the general air of someone you could take a baseball bat to without him being overly bothered. Used to be in the Forces, and sometimes still seems as if he is — though not the kind of army you see in the news.

After we'd taken a drink, Bobby set his glass back on the table and looked around the room. 'Kind of a shithole, I'd say.'

'So why are you here?'

'Fucking great sign outside. Got me in its tractor beam. Why? There a better hotel in town?'

'No, I mean why did you come to Dyersburg?'

'I'll come to that. Meantime, how you doing? Sorry about your loss, man.'

Suddenly, maybe because I was sitting with someone I counted as a friend, the death of my parents hit me again. Hit me hard, and unexpectedly, as I knew it probably would every now and then for the rest of my life, regardless of what they had done. I started to say something, but didn't. I just felt too tired and confused and sad. Bobby clinked his glass against mine once more, and we drank. He let a silence settle for a while, then changed the subject.

'So. What are you doing these days? You never said.'

'Not much,' I said.

He raised an eyebrow. 'Not much as in 'Don't ask'?'

'No. Just nothing worth talking about. There may be a job or two I haven't tried yet, but I doubt

they'll be much different. Seems that I'd always rather be working something on the side, and employers still don't understand what a key role that is in a modern economy.'

'Timidity and commercial short-sightedness,' he nodded, flagging for another couple beers. 'Ain't that always the way.'

After the waitress, who was young and depressed-looking, got us our drinks, we chatted for a while. That former employment I mentioned was with the CIA. I worked for them for nine years, which is how I met Bobby. We got along immediately. Most of the time I was in the field, though by the end I was doing a lot of media surveillance. I left when the Agency introduced annual lie detector tests a few years back. Lot of people left the service then, indignant at the implied distrust after they'd put themselves on the line for their country. Me, I got out because I'd done some things. Not terrible things, I should add. Just the kind of things they put you in prison for. The CIA may not be the world's most straightforward organization, but they prefer their employees to avoid actual felonies most of the time. I'd used a few contacts to make a little money, bled a little cash out from between the cracks. There were some incidents. A guy got killed. That was all.

Though he now lived in Arizona, Bobby still worked for the Company on and off, and was in contact with a few old mutual friends. Two of them were now working to infiltrate militia groups, and hearing this made me glad all over again that I'd left the firm. That's not the kind of work you want to get into. Not if you value your life. One of these guys, a skinny nutcase called Johnny Claire, was actually living in one of the groups, a collection of ineffectively socialized gun fanatics holed up in a forest in Oklahoma. Better him than me, though Johnny was weird enough to hold his own in any company.

'Okay,' Bobby said, when armed with another beer, 'are you now going to explain how come you're out here in the sticks and suddenly conceive of a need to digitize some home-video footage?'

'Maybe,' I said, admiring the way he was pumping me without revealing what was on his own mind. A trick of the trade, now evidently habitual. When we met he was spending a lot of time in interrogation rooms with citizens of Middle Eastern countries. They all talked in the end. From that he'd sidestepped into surveillance. 'Not definitely. And certainly not until you finally reveal why you hopped on a plane

and flew across three states to buy me a beer.'

'Okay,' he said. 'Okay. Let me ask you something first. Where were you born?'

'Bobby

'Just tell me, Ward.'

'You know where I was born. County Hospital, Hunter's Rock, California.' The place name rolled off

my tongue as easily as my name would have done. It's on-e of the first things you learn. 'Indeed. I remember you telling me. You got all upset about the fact that nobody uses the apostrophe

in 'Hunter's' any more.'

'It pisses me off.'

'Right. It's a scandal. Now. When we spoke earlier today you told me about your folks, and you said something about the video having something to do with your childhood. So there I am, when we've done talking. I've got nothing to do. I'm surrounded by computers and I've surfed the Web all I can bear and I've already had my handjob for the day.'

'Nice thought,' I said. 'I'm hoping that wasn't while you were on the phone to me.'

'Keep hoping,' he said, with a sly little smile. 'So I think, what the hey, maybe I'll poke around in Ward's life a little.'

I stared at him, knowing that he was my friend and that this was okay, but still feeling like he'd intruded.

'I know, I know,' he said, holding up a placating hand. 'I was bored, what can I tell you? I'm sorry. So anyway, I get the computers buzzing and hit a few databases. I should say straight away that I didn't find anything I didn't know about already. Held for questioning over a few matters over the years, blah, released through lack of evidence. Plus a witness who recanted. And the one who disappeared. The drug-dealing bust in the Big Apple in 1985, quashed when you agreed to inform on a certain student group at Columbia.'

'They were assholes,' I said, defensively. 'Racist assholes. Plus one of them was sleeping with my girlfriend.'

'Come on, man. You already told me about it and I don't give a shit either way. You hadn't done that, you wouldn't have wound up in the Agency and I wouldn't know you, which I'd regard as a bad thing. Like I say, either there's nothing in the files that I don't already know about, or you've got it hidden well.

Real well. Kind of like to know which, just as a matter of interest.'

'Not telling,' I said. 'A guy's got to have some secrets.'

'Well, Ward, you got them. I'll give you that much.'

'Meaning?'

'After an hour or so I'm kind of annoyed not to have turned anything up, so I come down to checking stuff in Hunter's Rock — and I said that with an apostrophe. Got the street address of your parents' house, plus when they moved in and out. They took up residence there on July 9th 1956, which I believe was a Monday. Paid their taxes, did their thing. Your father earned a wage at Golson Realty, mother worked part-time in a store. Little over a decade later you were born there. Right?'

'Right,' I said, wondering where this was going. He shook his head.

'Wrong. The County Hospital in Hunter's Rock has no record of a Ward Hopkins having been born on that date.'

The world seemed to take a little sidestep. 'Excuse me?'

'There is also no such record at the General in Bonville, or at the James B. Nolan, or at any other hospital within a two-hundred-mile radius.'

'There wouldn't be. I was born in the County. In Hunter's.'

He shook his head again, firmly. 'No, you weren't.'

'Are you sure?'

'Not only am I sure, but I checked five years either side, just in case you'd misled people on your age for some reason, like vanity or not being able to count. No Ward Hopkins. No Hopkins

under any name. I don't know where you were born, my friend, but it sure as hell wasn't Hunter's Rock or its environs.'

I opened my mouth. Shut it again.

'Maybe it's no big deal,' he said, and then looked at me shrewdly. 'But has this got any bearing on your digitizing needs?'

'Play it again,' he said.

'I honestly don't think I can bear to, Bobby.'

He looked up at me. He was sitting in one of the hotel room's two chairs, hunched over my laptop.

I'd just played him the MPEGs, and strongly believed I'd seen them enough times for one day. Perhaps for one lifetime. 'Trust me. What you see the first time is all there is.'

'Okay. So play me the audio file.'

I reached across, navigated to the file and double-clicked it.

He listened to the filtered version a few times, then stopped it himself. He nodded. 'Sounds like 'The Straw Men' all right. And you got no idea what that might mean?'

'Only in the sense of 'surrogate', which doesn't seem to go anywhere. You?'

He reached for his glass. We were in possession of a half-bottle of Jack Daniel's by then. 'Only other thing I can think of is straw purchases.'

I nodded, thought about it. He was referring to the process by which those who shouldn't be able to buy guns — either through youth, previous convictions, or lack of a licence — are able to get hold of them. What you do is go in the gun store with a friend who has the requisite qualities. You negotiate with the dealer, find what you want. When the time comes to pay, then your friend — the straw purchaser — is the one who actually hands over the cash, who makes the buy. Of course the dealer isn't supposed to let this happen, when he knows it's you who's going to wind up having the gun, but a lot of them will. A sale is a sale. Once you're out of his store, what does he care what you're going to do? As long as you don't go around and shoot his mother he isn't likely to give a damn. There are, of course, a great many honest and upstanding people who sell guns. But there are also many who feel in their hearts that every American, every man jack of us and the little ladies, too, should be equipped with a firearm at birth. Who are at ease with the fact that these small, heavy pieces of machinery are a simple means by which to halt someone's life, who trust that guns are morally uninflected and that it's only their users who have the power to make them bad. Users with black skins, mainly, or no-good white trash punks on drugs who we don't serve in this gun store, no way.

'You think that's it?'

'Seems unlikely,' he admitted. 'Though there's been a thing about them in the last couple of years. The Feds and a few cities have been trying to crack down, targeting dealers who are too blatant about letting people get away with it. Huge percentage of inner-city guns get onto the streets that way, via guys who buy in bulk and then sell them to corner boys. Couple of test cases pending, and I think one of them actually went through a year ago. Can't remember how it played. But either way I don't get how it relates to your folks.'

'Nor me,' I agreed. 'Far as I know, my father never owned a weapon. I don't remember him ever coming down hard on the subject either way, but those in favour tend to have a well-stocked gun

cabinet. Plus I just don't see it.'

'You looked it up?'

'Looked it up where? The Big Book of Short Sentences?'

He rolled his eyes. 'On the Net, of course.'

'Christ, no.' I like the Internet. Really, I do. Any time I need a piece of crap shareware or I want to find out the weather in Bogota or to look at a picture of a woman and a mule, I'm the first guy to get the modem humming. But as a source of information, it sucks. You got a billion pieces of data, struggling to be heard and seen and downloaded, and anything I want to know seems to get trampled underfoot in the crowd. Somehow, whenever I'm looking for something in particular, I get 404s right across the board.

'You're a fucking Luddite, Ward.' He was already plugging in the phone cable. I left him to get on with it, wishing I hadn't thrown away the cigarettes earlier in the day.

Five minutes later he shook his head. 'I get nothing with the major search sites, nothing with the minor ones, nothing with a bunch of specialized Netcrawlers I happen to know about including some you need robust security clearance for.'

'That's the Web for you. The deaf and dumb oracle with amnesia.' I made no effort to sound like I hadn't told him so.

'Doesn't mean there's nothing there. It just means that if the term does appear on a site, then it's one that isn't known to the search engines.'

'Bobby, there's no reason to believe anything will be out there. Not every single thing that ever happened is typed up there yet. Plus, it's just a sentence. Three words. You leave a bunch of monkeys for long enough, one of them will type it a lot sooner than they'll get around to Macbeth. But it doesn't mean he's going to whip up some HTML and sling it on a server with some banner ads and a hit counter

— and even if he did, why should it have anything to do with what's on the tape?' 'You got anything better to do?' 'Yes,' I said, firmly. 'The bottle's running low and I'm tired and need a lot more to drink.' 'We'll do that after.' 'After what? You already found out there's nothing there.' Bobby rapped his fingernails on the table for a while, squinting at the curtains. I could almost hear his

brain humming. I was bored and the whiskey was making my brain feel heavy and cold. Too much new information in the last two days was making me want to forget everything I knew.

'There must be something else in the house,' he said eventually. 'Something you missed.'

'Only if it was hidden in a fucking lightbulb. I tossed the place. There's nothing else there.'

'Everything changes when you know what you're looking for,' he said. 'You thought you were looking for another note. So that's what you looked for. That's the grid you had. You only happened to think about video by chance.'

'No,' I said. 'I thought about it because the house had been set up that way. I think my father had gone to some trouble to ... '

I tailed off. Got up, rummaged in the laptop bag.

'What?'

'I backed up his hard disk onto a ffiz! cart. It's the one thing I haven't really checked.'

I sat back down in the chair next to Bobby and slotted the tiny cartridge in the machine. Soon as it was mounted I got a Find Slip onscreen and typed in 'straw men'. Hit return. The machine chirped and whizzed for a while.

NO MATCHING ITEMS FOUND.

I tried it with 'straw' only. Same result.

'Well, that's that,' I said. 'The bar beckons.' I stood, expecting him to join me. Instead he started

doing something with another Find Slip. 'What are you doing now?'

'Getting Find to index the contents of all the text files on the disk,' he said. 'If this straw thing is some big deal, it would make sense that there'd be no file by that name. You'd want to be less obvious about it. But it might appear inside one of the files.'

It was a reasonable point, so I waited. The ffiz! has a fast access time, and the process only took a

couple of minutes.

Then it told us: the text was still nowhere to be found.

Bobby swore. 'Why the hell didn't he just leave a letter or something, just telling you whatever the

fuck he wanted to say?'

'I already asked myself that question a billion times and the answer is that I don't know. Let's go.'

He still didn't get up. 'Look,' I said. 'I know you're doing this for me, and I'm grateful. But in the last twenty-four hours I've discovered either that my parents were insane and that I once had a twin or they were really insane and pretended I had. I've had nothing to eat in days. I stupidly had a cigarette this morning and now I want about a hundred more and it's taking all my mental energy to resist. I'm done here. I'm going to the bar.'

He turned his head toward me, but his eyes were far away. I'd seen that look in him before. It meant he couldn't even really hear what I was saying, and wouldn't until he'd run his course.

'I'll see you there,' I said, and left.

11

I remember feeling proud of something when I was young — the fact that mosquitoes didn't bite me. If we went on holiday to the right kind of area, or I went on a school trip at the wrong time of year, I discovered that most people found themselves covered in little red bumps that itched like hell — no matter how much they futzed around with creams and sprays and nets. I didn't. I'd get maybe one bite, on the ankle. Kind of a strange thing to be proud of, you might think, but you know how it is when you're young. Once you come to realize that you're not the centre of all creation, you're so keen to find some concrete way of differentiating yourself that just about anything will do. I was the boy who didn't get bitten by insects. Take note, ladies and gentlemen, and have a little respect: there goes No-Bite Boy, the Mosquito-Free Kid. Then, one day when I was in my late twenties, I realized I'd got it wrong. Chances were that I got bitten just as much as everybody else. The only difference was that I didn't have as strong an allergic reaction, so I didn't get the bumps. I was still 'special' — though by then I was old enough to realize this wasn't any great distinction to have, and also to be more concerned with hoping that I wasn't actually so different from other people — but not in the way I'd thought. I got bitten like the rest of you, and No-Bite Boy was vanquished there and then.

As I sat there in the bar and waited for Bobby, this memory was hard to dislodge. My family, my life, was something I suddenly didn't understand. It was as if I'd noticed that I saw the same buildings in the background of my life, wherever I was, and had finally begun to wonder if it was a film set. As a matter of fact, I did generally see the same buildings. Since the Agency, I had never really gotten a mainstream existence on track, and seeing Bobby had made me realize this far more acutely than ever before. I did a little bit of this, and a little bit of that; some of this had been illegal, and some of that had been violent. Most of it was hard for me to even remember. It blurred. I lived in motels and restaurants and regional airports, talking to strangers, reading signs written to people in general and never meant just for me. All around me seemed to be people whose lives had content, who looked like the folks you see on television. Contextualized. Part of a story with the usual beats. Mine seemed to have none. The 'this is where you came from' section had just been abruptly scrapped, leaving an undisclosed number of empty pages.

My barman was on duty, and once again proved an able and efficient ally. He got over the whole 'previous incident' aspect of our reunion by bringing it up right away.

'Going to get your gun out later?'

'Not if you give me some peanuts.'

He got me some. He was a good barman, I decided. The place was free of corporate androids, and the only other guests were a very old foursome in the corner. They'd looked up at me grimly when I came in. I didn't blame them. When I get to their age, I'll resent young people, too. I resent them already, in fact, the slim little fresh-faced assholes. I don't find it surprising that super-old people are so odd and grumpy. Half their friends are dead, they feel like shit most of the time, and the next major event in their lives is going to be their last. They don't even have the salve of believing that going to the gym is going to make things better, that they'll meet someone cute in the small hours of a Friday night or that their career is going to suddenly steer into an upturn and they'll wind up married to a movie star. They're out the other side of all that, onto a flat, grey plain of aches and bad eyesight, of feeling the cold in their bones and having little to do except watch their children and grandchildren go right ahead and make all the mistakes they warned them about. I don't blame them being a little out of sorts. I'm just surprised more oldsters don't take to the streets in packs, swearing and raising hell and getting drunk. With demographics going the way they are, maybe that's going to be the next big thing. Gangs of octogenarians, taking drugs and running amok. Though walking amok is more likely, I guess — with maybe an hour of dozing amok in the afternoon.

After a while the group in the corner seemed to accept that I wasn't going to start playing a new-fangled musical instrument or challenging conventional sexual mores. They got on with their business, and I got on with mine: we co-existed, two species warily sharing the same watering hole.

Nearly two hours later, Bobby came striding in. He caught sight of me slumped in my booth, signalled to the barman for two more of whatever I was drinking, and came over to join me.

'How shit-faced are you?' He had an odd look on his face.

'On a scale of one to ten,' I said breezily, 'I'd have to give myself an F.'

'Good,' he said. 'I've found something. Kind of.'

Suddenly feeling tense, I sat up and saw that he was holding a small sheaf of paper.

'Got reception to let me use their printer,' he said. 'Where the hell are the drinks?'

At that moment the barman appeared with them. 'Any more nuts?' he asked.

'Oh no,' I said. 'Just the two of us.' Then I laughed for quite a long time. I'm pretty sure I was laughing. The barman went away. Bobby waited patiently for me to get a grip. It took a while. I think that for just a moment I was on the verge of losing it.

'Okay,' I said eventually. 'Shoot.'

'First thing is I had another look on the Net. Still no record of the Straw Men as an actual thing, but I found encyclopaedia references to other meanings of the term 'straw man', — something about guys who in the last century would stand outside courts with straw in their shoes — didn't really understand that part — indicating they'd give false testimony for money. And another reference regarding lack of conscience — I guess a straw versus flesh thing.'

'In other words, dummy guys in illegalities,' I said. 'As discussed. So what?'

'Then I looked right through the disk,' he said, ignoring me. 'Ran a low-level media scan, checked for hidden files, partitions, the works. Nothing. Then I looked through the software, of which there ain't

much.'

'Dad wasn't a nerd,' I said. 'That's why I didn't bother to look through the computer in the house.'

'Right. But he did use the Net.'

I shrugged. 'Email, occasionally. Plus he had a site for his business, though someone else maintained it. I used to go look at it once in a while.' It had seemed easier, somehow, than calling them on the phone. Since I'd dropped out of college, they'd never really known what I was doing. They certainly didn't know the reason I hadn't finished the course, or who I'd gone on to work for. My parents never gave the impression of being political people, but they'd been there in the 1960s, as the video I'd found made more than clear. You were there in the Summer of Stupid Pants, then you took certain attitudes on board. Finding their son was working for the CIA would not have gone down big. I'd hidden this from them, not realizing this meant I was hiding everything else. Of course that now seemed a little bizarre, given what they'd been withholding from me.

Bobby shook his head. 'He had Explorer and Navigator on his disk, and he obviously used both a great deal. Huge cache, and about a zillion bookmarks in each.'

'For what kind of thing?'

'You name it. Reference. Online stores. Sports.'

'No porn?'

He smiled. 'No.'

'Thank God for that.'

'I went through every single one. Even the ones that seemed like nothing, just in case he'd covered up by re-naming the bookmark to cover what the link actually led to.'

'You're sneaky,' I said. 'I always said so.'

'So was your father. He had renamed one, in fact, hidden in a folder of a hundred and sixty bookmarks for what I can only regard as the dullest facets of the realty business. It was called 'Recently sold Mizner/Intercoastal lots'. Mean anything to you?'

'Addison Mizner was an estate architect in the 1920s and '30s. Built a bunch of prestige property in Miami, Palm Beach. Italian villa-style. Very sought-after and outlandishly expensive.'

'You know some wacky stuff. Okay. But the link didn't lead to a site to do with land or houses. It led to a blank page. So I thought shit, dead end. Took me a few minutes to realize that actually the page was covered with a transparent graphic that had a hidden image map. When I worked that out I got through to another set of pages, with some pretty odd links.'

'Odd how?'

He shook his head. 'Just odd. Looked like the usual home pages, complete with excessive detail, bad punctuation and rancid colour use, but all the material seemed very anodyne. There was just something hinky about them, almost as if they were fakes.'

'Why would someone put up fake home pages?'

'Well,' he said, 'that's what I wondered. I followed most of the links down into dead ends and 404s. But the line kept on going, through pages of links — and on each page only one of the links seemed to lead more than a couple of pages away. Then I started hitting passwords. At first, easy Java stuff that I could hack myself, using a few goodies I found stashed on your disk. Incidentally, you need more RAM. Fucker crashed on me about five times. Then — hope you don't mind, there's a few long-distance calls on your room — I got some help from specialist friends. I had to get down to wedge tracing and UNIX backdoors and shit. Someone who really knew what they were doing had set up a lot of obfuscation.'

'But what's the point?' I said. 'Surely anyone could just bookmark the end site, whatever it is, and go straight there the next time. Why screw around setting up a paper trail when the whole point of the Web is nonlinear access?'

'My guess is that the destination address changes regularly,' Bobby said. 'Anyway, finally I got through to the end.'

'And what was there?'

'Nothing.'

I stared at him. 'Say again?'

'Nothing. There was nothing there.'

'Bobby,' I said, 'that's a shit story. It sucks. What do you mean, 'nothing'?'

He shoved the sheaf of papers toward me. The top sheet was blank apart from a short sentence centred in the middle of the page. It said: WE RISE.

'That's all there was,' he said. 'A couple of hours' worth of subterfuge to hide a page with no links and just two words. The other sheets are just printouts of the route I took to get there, along with some of the hacks required. Plus I got the IP address of the final page and did a trace on it.'

Most Web addresses are known by a format that, while often not exactly something that trips off the tongue, can at least be understood as words. In fact, the Internet's computers regard them as purely numerical addresses — 118.152.1.54, for example. By using this more basic form of address you can track the page down to a rough geographical location. 'So where was it?'

'Alaska,' he said.

'Whereabouts? Anchorage?'

He shook his head. 'That's it. Just Alaska. Then Paris. Then Germany. Then California.'

'What are you talking about?'

'It moved. Kept blipping all over the place, and I don't think it was ever really in any of those places

at all. It was ghosted. I'm not King Nerd, but I know what I'm doing and I've never seen anything quite like it. I've got a couple of friends looking into it, but either way, something weird is going down.'

'No shit.'

'Not just what's happening to you. This kind of thing is my job. I need to know how they're doing it. And who they are.' He took a long pull on his drink, and looked at me seriously. 'What about you? What are you going to do now? Aside from more drinking.'

'There's three sections on the tape. I can't do anything about the last one, about finding … the other child.' I'd been intending to say 'my twin,' but shied away at the last moment. 'I don't know what city it was, and it's over thirty years ago anyhow. He or she could be anywhere in the world. Or dead. The second section doesn't seem to lead anywhere. So I'm going to go looking for the place in the mountains.'

'Sound thinking,' he said. 'And I'm going to help you.'

'Bobby…'

He shook his head. 'Don't be an asshole, Ward. Your parents didn't die in any accident. You know that.'

I guess I did, and had done for a little while, though I hadn't really allowed the thought to settle, to say it to myself in words.

Bobby did it for me. 'They were murdered,' he said.

12

Nina sat in the yard with Zok Becker. The night was cool and she wished she'd accepted the tea she had been absently offered. Zandt had already spoken with the woman, and stood in her daughter's room, and was now inside with her husband. Neither Becker had seemed surprised to find two investigators on their doorstep, even this late in the evening. Their lives were already too far divorced from what they were prepared to accept as reality. The two women talked fitfully for a while, but soon lapsed into silence. Zok was watching her foot as it jogged up and down at the end of her crossed leg. That at least was the direction in which her eyes were directed. Nina doubted she was seeing anything at all, but rather floating in a void in which the movement of her foot was as meaningful an event as any other. She was glad of the silence, because she knew the only thing the woman would want to talk about. Was her daughter still alive? Did Nina think they would ever get her back? Or would there, in this house that Zoë had spent so much time getting just so, now always be a room whose emptiness and silence would darken until it was a black crystal at the centre of their lives? On the wall of this room was a poster for a band that none of the rest of them had ever heard except by accident. So what was the point of it now? Nina had no answer to this question or others like it, and when the woman appeared about to speak she looked up with dread. Instead she found that Zoë had started to cry, exhausted tears that seemed neither the beginning of anything nor its end. Nina didn't reach out for her. Some people would accept comfort from strangers, and some would not. Mrs Becker was one of the latter.

Instead she leaned back in her chair, and looked across through the French doors to the sitting room. Michael Becker was perched on the edge of an armchair. Zandt was standing behind the couch. Nina had spent the entire day with Zandt without hearing more than five sentences that did not relate to the case. They had walked the ground of the disappearance early in the day, before the shopping crowds gathered. They had visited Sarah Becker's school, so that Zandt could see how it fit into its environment. He had observed the sight lines and access points, the places where someone might wait, looking for someone to love. He spent a long while over it, as if believing there was some new view he might chance upon that would enable him to glimpse a man's shadow in the daylight. He had been irritable when they left.

They had not visited any of the families from The Upright Man's previous murders. They had the files of the original interviews, and it was very unlikely there would be anything new to be learned. Nina knew he held their interviews in his head, and could have told the families things they had themselves forgotten. Talking to them could only confuse matters. She also privately believed that if Zandt was able to lead them closer to the killer, it would be little to do with something he had learned, and much more to do with something he felt.

Nina had another reason for keeping Zandt away from the families. She did not want any of the relatives stirred up enough that they might call the police or the Bureau to check how the investigation was going. No one knew she had reinvolved John Zandt in the case again. If anyone found out, all hell would break loose. This time it wouldn't just be disciplinary: it would be the end of her career. Allowing him to talk to the Beckers was a risk she had to take. The parents had seen so many police and Bureau men since the disappearance that it was unlikely they would remember one in particular, or mention him to someone else. Or so she hoped. She also hoped that whatever the men were talking about, it might spark something in Zandt's mind.

And that he would tell her about it if it did.

'I'll go through it again if you want.'

Michael Becker had already recounted his movements twice, responding quickly and concisely to questions. Zandt knew that the man had nothing helpful to tell him. He had also gathered that, in the weeks leading up to the disappearance, Becker had been so involved in his work that he would have noticed very little about the outside world. He shook his head.

Becker abruptly looked down at the floor and put his head in his hands. 'Don't you have anything

else to ask? There must be something else. There has to be something.'

'There's no magic question. Or if there is, I don't know what it might be.'

Becker looked up. This was not the kind of thing the other policemen had said to him. 'Do you think

she's still alive?'

'Yes,' Zandt said.

Becker was surprised by the confidence he saw in the policemen's face. 'Everyone else is acting as if

she's dead,' he said. 'They don't say it. But they think it.'

'They're wrong. For the time being.'

'Why?' The man's voice was dry, the breathing wrong, the sound of a man caught wanting to believe.

'When a killer of this type disposes of a victim, he usually hides the body and does what he can to obfuscate its identity. Partly just to make it harder for the police. But also because many of these people are seeking to hide their activities from themselves. The three previous victims were found in open ground, wearing the remains of their own clothes and still with their personal effects. This man isn't hiding from anybody. He wanted us to know who they were, and that he had finished with them. Finishing implies a period in which he requires them to be alive.'

'Requires them…'

'Only one of the previous victims was sexually abused. Apart from minor head injuries, the others

showed no abuse apart from the shaving of their heads.'

'And their murder, of course.'

Zandt shook his head. 'Murder is not abuse in this kind of situation. Murder is what ends the abuse.

Forensics can only show so much, but it suggests that all of the girls were alive for over a week after their abductions.'

'A week,' the man said, bleakly. 'It's been five days already.'

There was a pause before Zandt answered. During the interview, his eyes had covered most corners of the room, but now he saw something he hadn't noticed before. A small pile of schoolbooks, on a side table. They were too advanced to belong to the younger daughter. He became conscious that the other man was looking at him. 'I'm aware of that.'

'You sounded like you had another reason.'

'I just don't believe he will have killed her yet.'

Becker laughed harshly. 'Don't 'believe'? That's it? Oh right. That's very reassuring.'

'It's not my job to reassure you.'

'No,' Becker said, face blank. 'I suppose not.' There was silence for a few moments. And then he

added: 'These things really happen, don't they?' Zandt knew what he meant. That certain events, of a kind that most people just watch or read about,

can actually happen. Things like sudden death, and divorce, and spinal injuries; like suicide, and drug addiction, and fading grey people standing in a circle looking down at you muttering 'The driver never stopped'. They happen. They're as real as happiness, marriage and the feel of the sun on your back, and they fade far more slowly. You may not get back the life you had before. You may not be one of the lucky ones. It may just go on and on and on.

'Yes they do,' he said. Unseen by the other man, he touched the cover of one of the schoolbooks. Ran his finger over its rough surface.

'What chance do you think we have of getting her back?'

The question was asked simply, with a steady voice, and Zandt admired him for it. He turned away from the table.

'You should assume that you have none at all.'

Becker looked shocked, and tried to say something. Nothing came out.

'A hundred people are killed by men like this every year,' Zandt said. 'Probably more. In this country alone. Almost none of the killers are ever caught. We make a big fuss when we do, as if we've put the tiger back in his cage. But we haven't. A new one is born every month. The few we catch are unlucky, or stupid, or have been driven to the point where they start making mistakes. The majority are never caught. These men are not aberrations. They are part of who we are. It's like anything else. Survival of the most fit. The cleverest.'

'Is The Delivery Boy clever?'

'That's not his name.'

'That's what the papers called him before. And the cops.'

'He's called The Upright Man. By himself. Yes, he's clever. That may be what causes him to fall. He's

very keen for us to admire him. On the other hand…'

'He may just not get caught, and unless you find him we're never going to see Sarah again.'

'If you see her again,' Zandt said, replacing his pad and pen in an inside pocket, 'it will be a gift from

the gods, and you should see it as such. None of you will ever be the same. That need not be a bad thing. But it's true.'

Becker stood. Zandt didn't think he'd ever seen a man who looked both so tired and incapable of sleep. Unknown to him, Michael Becker was thinking the same thing of him.

'But you'll keep trying?'

'I'll do everything I can,' he said. 'If I can find him, then I will.'

'Then why tell me to assume the worst?'

But his wife came in through the French doors, with the FBI agent just behind, and the policeman did not say anything more.

Nina thanked the Beckers for their time, and promised to keep them up to date. She also managed to imply that their visit had been a formality, without direct relevance to the course of the investigation.

Michael Becker watched as they walked away down the path. He did not shut the door when they were out of sight, but stood a moment looking out at the night. Behind him he heard the sound of Zoë going upstairs to check on Melanie. He doubted his second daughter would be asleep. The nightmares of a year ago were returning, and he could not blame her. What little sleep he managed was an enemy to him, too. He knew she still used the spell he had written, and the knowledge filled him with horror. Irony was no protection, whatever he and Sarah and the directors of modern horror films might think. In a land of blood and bones, irony doesn't cut it. He remembered discussing night fears with Sarah, several years before. She had always been a questioning child, and asked why people were afraid of the dark. He told her it was a leftover from when we were more primitive, and slept out in the open or in caves, and wild animals might come and kill us in the night.

Sarah had looked dubious. 'But that's an awfully long time ago,' she'd said. She'd thought for a little while, before adding, with a ten-year-old's perfect certainty: 'No. We must be frightened of something else.'

Michael believed now she was right. It's not monsters we're afraid of. Monsters were only a comforting fantasy. We know what our own kind is capable of. What we're frightened of is ourselves.

He closed the door eventually and walked into the kitchen. Here he made a pot of coffee, something that had become a ritual for this part of the evening. He would carry it into the sitting room on a tray, along with two cups and a jug of warm milk. Perhaps a cookie or two, which was all Zoë seemed willing to eat. They would sit in front of whatever the television had to offer, waiting for time to pass. Old films were best. Something from another time from before Sarah had been born and any of this could be true. Sometimes they would talk a little. Usually not. Zoë would have the phone close by.

As he took two cups from the new dresser — old pine, imported from England after their recent trip

— Michael thought back on the things the policeman had said, holding each sentence up for consideration. He realized that, for the first time since the disappearance, he felt a small thread of something that must be hope. It would be gone by the morning, but he welcomed its temporary respite. He felt it because he believed he knew what had been said between the lines, that what the policeman had said was less important than what he had not.

The female investigator had shown identification, but the man had never been named. With the dedication of someone who believed in the magic of articulation, that naming and containing events in words could subdue them, Michael Becker had read as much as he could concerning the previous crimes of the man who had taken his daughter. He had been on the Internet, and found copies of the news pieces, even sought out a copy of the supermarket hackbook on unsolved crimes. He had done this at the expense of, among other things, his work. He hadn't touched Dark Shift since the night of the disappearance. He privately thought it was unlikely he ever would, though his partner was as yet unaware of this, and kept frantically rescheduling the meeting with the studio. Wang had money, and his contacts appeared inexhaustible. He was plugged into the city in a way Michael could never hope to be. He'd survive.

Through his research Michael had learned, or been reminded, that in addition to the LeBlanc girl and Josie Ferris and Annette Mattison, another young woman had disappeared at around the same time. This girl had been the daughter of a policeman who had been involved in the apprehension of two previous serial killers. There had been speculation, of a quiet kind, that she had been targeted as a taunt, a punishment for her father's successes. He had become involved in the investigation of her disappearance, against the advice of the FBI, and at least one newspaper had implied that he was believed to be making concrete progress where they were manifestly failing. Then he had simply dropped out of sight. The policeman's name had been John Zandt. The Delivery Boy, as Michael Becker had reason to know, had not been apprehended. A retrospective published a year after the disappearances had reported that a Mrs Jennifer Zandt had returned to Florida to be close to her family. The journalist had been unable to discover what had happened to the detective.

Michael thought that tonight, whatever was on television, he and his wife should talk. He would tell her what he believed concerning the man who had come to see them, and he would suggest that when the other policemen and women came to visit, the well-meaning people with whom they now shared a horrible familiarity, they should not mention this evening's visit.

And something else. Though his faith in words had been deeply shaken, he clung to the belief that words and names were to reality what pillars and architecture were to space. They humanized it. Just as DNA took the random chemicals and turned them into something recognizable, language could take inexplicable phenomena and tame them into situations about which something could be said, and thus about which something could be done.

He would no longer think of The Delivery Boy. He would call him The Upright Man. But in the meantime he would assume the worst. The policeman was right. More than that, Michael Becker realized that it was what Sarah would want.

Nokkon Wud be damned. If the fates demanded this level of tribute, then they could go fuck themselves.

They were sitting outside the Smorgas Board, a combination cafe and surfer hangout about eight yards down the street from where the Becker girl had been abducted. They had been for an hour, and the place was near to closing. The only other customers were a young couple hunkered around a table a couple of yards away, listlessly sipping something out of big cups. 'Are you thinking, or just watching?' Zandt didn't respond immediately. He sat beside Nina, observing the street. He had barely moved. His coffee was cold. He had only smoked one cigarette, and most of that had burned away unnoticed. His attention was focused entirely elsewhere. Nina was reminded of a hunter, though not necessarily a human one. An animal that was prepared and able to sit, to wait, for as long as it took, without boredom, rage or pain to distract it.

'They don't all come back,' she said, irritably.

'I know,' he said, immediately. 'I'm not watching.'

'Bullshit.' She laughed. 'It's either that or you've had a seizure.'

He surprised her by smiling. 'I'm thinking.'

She folded her arms. 'Care to share?'

'I'm thinking what a waste of time this is, and wondering why you brought me here.'

Nina realized it hadn't really been a smile. 'Because I thought you might be able to help,' she said. She

shifted uncomfortably in her seat. 'John, what is this? You know why. Because you helped me before. Because I value your advice.'

He smiled again, and this time she actually shivered.

'What did I achieve last time?'

'I don't know,' she admitted. 'Tell me. What happened?'

'You know what happened.'

'No, I don't,' she said, suddenly angry. 'All I know is that you told me that you were getting somewhere. And you started getting secretive and not telling me anything, despite the fact that up until then you'd relied upon me to feed you stuff out of the Bureau. Stuff you wouldn't have gotten otherwise because you'd been specifically barred from taking part in the investigation by your own department. I did you a favour and you cut me out.'

'You did me no favours,' Zandt said. 'You did what you thought would do you the most good.'

'Oh, fuck you, John,' she snapped. The two slackers at the far table jerked upright, like puppets whose master had suddenly woken up. Heavy vibes.

She lowered her voice and spoke fast. 'If that's what you really think of me, then why don't you just walk away, go back to fucking Vermont. It's going to snow hard there real soon. You could just bury yourself in it.'

'You're telling me that you helped me out of consideration for my family?'

'Yes, of course. What the hell else?'

'Despite the fact you'd helped me be unfaithful to my wife.'

'That's pathetic. Don't blame me for what your dick did.'

She glared at him. Zandt stared back. There was silence for a moment, and then she abruptly let her

eyes drop.

He laughed, briefly. 'That supposed to make me think I'm in control?'

'What?' She silently cursed herself.

'Looking away. Kind of an animal kingdom thing. Male ego massaged by a sign of submission. Now

I'm back to being king of the hill, I'll do what you want again?' 'You've gotten really paranoid, John,' she said, though of course he'd been right. She realized she

spent too much of her time with fools. 'I just don't want to argue with you.'

'What do you think the deal with the hair is?' he said.

She frowned, thrown by the sudden switch. 'What hair?'

'The Upright Man. Why cut the hair off?'

'Well, for the sweaters. So he could embroider the names.'

Zandt shook his head, lit a cigarette. 'You don't need a whole head for that. All of the girls had long

hair. But when they're found, it's all been cut off. Why?'

'To dehumanize them. To make it easier to kill them.'

'Could be,' he said. 'That's what we all assumed back then. But I wonder.'

'Are you going to tell me what you do think?'

'I'm wondering if it was a punishment.'

Nina considered this. 'For what?'

'I don't know. But I think this man took these girls, a very particular type of girl, on purpose. I think

he had something in mind for them, and each of them failed to come up to scratch in some way. And as a punishment for that, he took something he thought would be of paramount importance to them.'

He took a drink of his coffee, seeming not to care that it was cold. 'You know what they did to collaborators in France, at the end of the Second World War?'

'Of course. Women who were thought to have accepted their German invaders too wholeheartedly were paraded down the street with their hair shorn off. A proud moment for our species.' She shrugged. 'I can maybe see the punishment thing, but I don't see what global conflict has to do with it. These girls hadn't fraternized with anyone.'

'Maybe not.' Zandt seemed to have lost interest in the subject. He was sitting back in his chair and gazing vaguely across the patio. One of the slackers accidentally caught his eye. Zandt didn't look away. The slacker did, rapidly. He made a signal to his friend, evidently suggesting this might be a good time to go wax their boards. They got up and sloped off into the night.

Zandt seemed satisfied with this.

Nina tried to haul his concentration back. 'So where does that lead?'

'Possibly nowhere,' he said, grinding out his cigarette. 'I just didn't think hard enough about it last time.

Then I was hung up on the method he'd used to find them. How the intersection of their lives had come about. Now it strikes me as curious. How they failed. What he really wanted them for.'

Nina didn't say anything, hoping there would be some more. But when he did speak, it wasn't about the case.

'Why did you stop sleeping with me?' Caught again, she hesitated. 'We stopped sleeping with each other.' 'No.' He shook his head. 'That's not the way it was.' 'I don't know, John. It just happened. You didn't seem especially hurt at the time.' 'Just kind of accepted it, didn't I.' 'What are you getting at? You don't accept it now?' 'Of course I do. It was a long time ago. I'm just asking questions that I haven't before. Once you start

doing that, you find they pop up all over the place.'

She didn't really know what to say to that. 'So what do you want to do next?'

'I want you to go,' he said. 'I want you to go home and leave me alone.'

Nina stood. 'Suit yourself. You got my number. Call me if you decide to get off your butt and do

something.' He turned his head slowly, and looked her directly in the eyes. 'Do you want to know what

happened? Last time?'

She stopped, looked at him. His face was cold and distant. 'Yes,' she said.

'I found him.'

Nina felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. 'Found who?'

'I tracked him for two weeks. In the end I went to his house. I'd seen him watching other girls. I

couldn't leave it any longer.'

She didn't know whether to sit or keep standing. 'What happened?'

'He denied it. But I knew it was him, and now he knew I'd made him. He was the man, but I had no

proof, and he would have run. I stayed with him two days. He wouldn't tell me where she was.'

'John, don't tell me this.'

'I killed him.'

Nina stared at him, and knew it was the truth. She opened her mouth, shut it again.

'And then two days later the sweater and the note arrived.'

He looked suddenly very tired, and turned away. When he spoke again, his voice was flat. 'I got the

wrong guy. It's up to you what you do with the information.'

She walked away, across the Promenade. She willed herself not to look back at him, and instead concentrated on the tops of the palm trees nodding in the faint breeze, a couple of blocks away.

But when she reached the corner she did stop, and turn. He'd vanished. She waited for a moment, chewing her lip, but he didn't reappear. Slowly she started walking.

Something had changed. Until tonight Zandt had seemed malleable, but sitting with him in the cafe had been an uncomfortable experience. She realized it wasn't a hunter that he had reminded her of, but a boxer, glimpsed on camera in the period an hour before the actual fight. The time when the show business was put to one side, and the fighter seemed to move off into a realm of his own, a place where he stopped meeting people's eyes and became absorbed into his archetype. Other people might bet on the outcome, put on monkey suits, get high on corporate hospitality. The rest would crap on about how boxing should be banned, cocooned in lives from which nobody wanted an escape route, any escape route. For the guys in the ring, it was different. They did it for the money, but not only for that. They did it because that was what they did. They weren't looking for a way out. They were looking for a way in, a road back to some place they sensed inside themselves.

The parents had been a mistake. Zandt had access to little enough real information as it was, and was already questioning what she wanted of him. The only new investigative material could come from the Beckers. She'd had to let him talk to them. But she'd known as soon as she came back from the garden that this had opened doors that would have been better kept shut.

She didn't need this. She'd never wanted a hunter, or a killer. She believed the only thing that would draw The Upright Man into the open was a man he wanted to dominate.

She wanted bait.

13

The man sat in his chair, in the centre of the living room. The room was large and stuck out from the front of the house, with windows on three walls. Two sides were protected by a stand of trees; the other looked down on a sloping, terraced lawn. This afternoon all of the curtains were drawn, heavy drapes that allowed not the slightest suggestion of the outside to penetrate. Sometimes the man had them shut, sometimes he left them open. He was entirely unpredictable in this regard.

The chair was positioned with its back to the door into the room. He liked the way this made him feel. It generated a mild tension, the sensation of being unprotected. Someone could, in theory, sneak up behind him and bash him over the head. That person would have to overcome the comprehensive security systems, but the point still held. It showed how in control of his environment he was. He had no fear of the outside world. From an early age he had been forced to make his way in it, to help himself. But he liked his interior spaces to be just so.

His face was smooth and unlined, the result of assiduous use of moisturizer and other skin foods. His eyes were sharp and clear. His hands were lightly tanned, the nails trimmed. He was entirely naked. The chair was at a slight angle to the polished floorboards that traversed the room in orderly rows. A very hot cup of black coffee sat on a small table beside the chair, next to a saucer filled with tiny glass beads. A thin publication lay nearby. The cup was placed so that just less than half of its base protruded past the edge of the surface. The chair was old, covered in battered leather. By rights it should have a copy of The New York Times folded on one of the arms, and a flunky hovering just behind, ready to dispense sandwiches with the crusts cut off. One entire bookcase he had decorated by crosshatching it with green, blue and red pens, each stroke of the pen no longer than three millimetres, until an overall effect of subtly mottled black had been achieved. It had required seventeen pens, and taken several weeks. A fine Arts and Crafts bureau on the other side of the room was entirely covered by very small glued-on photographs of Madonna, all cut from magazines and none later than her Material Girl incarnation, after which the man had lost interest in her. He had covered the result with a number of coats of dark varnish, until it looked as though the piece was covered in nothing more than an unusual walnut veneer. As with the bookcase, only very close inspection would reveal how the effect was obtained.

His current project involved the small occasional table by his chair, which he was covering with the glass beads. The beads were about one millimetre in diameter, and came in four colours: red, blue, yellow, and green. Genetic colours. Gluing them in position took a great deal of care, not least because they were not placed at random but in a long and complex pattern, which was at least partly speculative. When the table was done he was going to cover it with several coats of thick black lacquer, until all but the faintest hint of texture was removed. It would occur to no one to wonder what was beneath the surface, in the same way that no one would realize that one, and only one, of the floorboards in the house had been constructed from a very large number of wooden matchsticks and then sanded and varnished until it exactly resembled the others. The collecting of the matches had taken the man over six months. Each had, so far as he had been able to ensure, been struck by a different person. He believed deeply in individuality, in its crucial importance to humanity. These days everyone watched the same television shows, read the same glossy magazines, and was press-ganged by the media into dutifully lining up to watch the same ludicrous movies. They stopped smoking because they were told to by people who meanwhile crammed themselves with fat. For the comfort and convenience of others. They lived their lives by rules designed by these others, by people they had never even met. They lived on the surface, in an MTV and CNN world of the last five minutes. Now was all. They had no understanding of 'then', but wallowed in a perpetual present.

The publication on the table was a recent academic paper, which had arrived in the mail that morning. He had seen a synopsis of it online and ordered a copy of the full text for closer inspection. Though its subject was quite specialized, he was more than capable of comprehending it fully. He had spent many years reading carefully in the subjects that interested him: genetics, anthropology, prehistoric culture. Although his schooling had finished very early, he was intelligent, and he had learned a lot from life. His life, and other people's. The things they said, in extremis. There was often a lot of truth to be found there, once you got beyond the pleading, and the body spoke without interference from the mind.

Before reading it he stood up, walked a short distance from the chair, and did three sets of push-ups. One set with his palms flat on the floor and hands shoulder-distance apart. One set with palms flat again, but hands wide apart. A final set with hands back close together, but closed like fists, knuckles on the floor. A hundred of each, with a short break in between.

He barely broke a sweat. He was pleased.

Sarah Becker heard the muffled sound of the man's measured exertions below her, but spent no time trying to work out what the noise might mean. She didn't want to know. She didn't know what time it was, and wasn't inclined to know that either. Her internal clock told her it was probably day, maybe afternoon. In some ways that was worse than it being night. Bad things happened at night. It was to be expected. People were scared of the dark because when it was dark it was night, and when it was night things sometimes came to get you. That was the way of the world. Daytime was supposed to be better. Daytime was when you went to school, and had lunch, and the sky was blue and everything was pretty much safe so long as you stayed out of places where people were poor. If daytime wasn't going to be safe, then she didn't want to think about it. She didn't want to know.

If she craned her neck upward, she could just touch her forehead against the top of the space she inhabited. It was utterly dark. She was lying on her back, and able to move her hands and feet about two inches in any direction. She had been in this position for a long time, which she estimated to be at least four days, maybe six. She remembered nothing from the period between being on 3rd Street Promenade and finding herself lying flat on her back, with a narrow window in front of her face. After a few moments she had realized she could see the ceiling of a room, and that the window was a hole in a floor, beneath which she lay in a space only very slightly larger than her own body. The window in the floor was approximately five inches tall by four wide, and reached from just above her eyebrows to just below her mouth.

She had started screaming, and after a while someone had entered the room. He whispered some things to her. She had screamed a little more, and he had placed a small panel in the hole in the floor. She had heard the sound of his footsteps going away, and only one thing had happened since. Sarah had woken from a doze in what had felt like night to find that the panel above her face had been removed again. The room above was nearly dark, but she could make out the head of someone watching her. She tried to talk to the man, to plead, to offer, but he said nothing. After a while she stopped, and started crying instead. The man's hand came into view, holding a beaker. He tipped water out of this onto her face. At first she tried to turn her head away but then, realizing how thirsty she was, she opened her mouth and swallowed as much as she could. Afterwards the man replaced the panel and went away.

Some indeterminate period of time later he had returned, and they had their conversation about Ted Bundy. This time she drank the water.

Over time she had found her mind becoming clearer, as whatever drug she had been given slowly worked its way out of her system. The downside of this was that her initial feeling of floating inconsequence was harder to maintain. She had tried to push up the panel with her nose and tongue, straining her neck up as far as it would go, but its position had been carefully judged and it was impossible to move in this manner. Like the space itself, it had been immaculately designed for someone of her size, almost as if it had been made in preparation for her and her alone. Sarah was physically fit, a good rollerblader, and stronger than most girls of her size. She had nevertheless been unable to make any impression on the space that held her, and had stopped trying. Her father often said that the problems in many people's lives were caused by the energy they wasted trying to change that which couldn't be changed. She was not yet old enough to understand exactly what he meant by that, but on a literal level she took the point. She hadn't eaten in what seemed like for ever. Until it became clear that a source of additional energy was going to be provided, it made no sense to waste what she had. Struggling was stupid. So she lay still, and thought about Nokkon Wud.

Mr Wud was something that she and her father had invented. At least, they thought they'd invented him. He had come about, indirectly, through Sarah's mother. Zok Becker believed in many things. Well, maybe not believed in, as such, but wasn't going to take any chances where they were concerned. Astrology? Well, yes, of course it's nonsense, but there's no harm in knowing what it says and it's surprising how often it seems to be very accurate. Feng shui? Just common sense, of course, but windchimes look pretty and make a nice sound so why not have them anyway? And if a certain type of bird happens to fly across your path, which some people might think could be unlucky, then there are rhymes to say and small hand gestures to make which surely can't do any harm.

As often within families, Zok had inherited her superstitions from her grandmother, rather than her mother, a hardheaded ex-publisher who believed primarily in jogging. Michael Becker had no truck with such spells and signs, and neither did his daughter. Mr Wud had come about as a private joke between them, a response to the superstition that most drove Michael Becker up the wall. Whenever anyone in the family said anything that could — to even the very mildest of degrees — be said to be tempting fate, then Zok Becker would immediately follow it by saying 'Knock on wood,' as swiftly and unconsciously as you might say 'Bless you' after someone sneezes. If someone said 'I'll never end up like that,' she'd say 'Knock on wood' and rap the table with her knuckles. If they said 'My father's in good health,' she would say it — increasingly quietly, as she became aware that her husband found the habit wildly irritating — but she would say it. She would even say it, and this was the kind of occasion that made her husband want to gnaw chunks out of the piano, if someone said something like, 'I've never broken my leg.' Michael Becker would point out that this was a factual statement, and not flipping the bird at the fates. It was merely a recital of a true condition of the world, and hedging it off with a superstitious mantra was ridiculous. You wouldn't, he'd patiently observe, say 'Two plus two equals four — knock on wood,' and so why use the expression after any other kind of fact? It was an explicable habit, and borderline bearable, when used after a statement that showed hubris in the face of the world's potential to hurt. But if it was just a goddamned fact…

Zok would listen to this, as she had many times before. She would then point out that it was a well-established tradition in many parts of the world — in England and Australia, for example, where they would say 'Touch wood' in similar circumstances — and that there might be some basis to it because trees had power, and anyway it didn't do any harm. And Michael would nod, walk quietly out of the room, and go gnaw chunks out of the piano.

Sarah sided with her father on the subject, and over the years they'd developed the character of Nokkon Wud, an evil sprite, probably Scandinavian in nature, whose sole job was to listen for people challenging the fates by rashly making factual observations. He would then swoop invisibly into their homes in the dead of night, and give their lives a stir for the worse. You'd better not feel lucky when Nokkon was around, because he'd know, and punish you for it.

Over the years this had evolved into their parting routine, in which they genially wished some ill upon each other so that Nokkon would hear and know he wasn't required in their lives. It had also proved useful when Sarah's sister, Melanie, had started having nightmares a year back. At Sarah's suggestion, Michael had told her this was Nokkon Wud at work, flying past the bed, sniffing out for people to harm. All Melanie had to do was recite a little rhyme — which her father spent a long time writing, with more redrafts than most of the scripts through which he earned his living — and Nokkon Wud would know that he wasn't needed there and go bother someone else. Melanie tried this solution, dubiously at first, but was soon saying it before she went to bed every night — and in time the bad dreams went away and it mattered less whether her cupboard doors were sealed absolutely tight. Her mother didn't really approve of the joke, and never personally invoked him, but would sometimes smile when Nokkon was mentioned. He explained things about the world, and was now enshrined in Dark Shift as one of the recurrent minor demons ganging up on the heroine. Her father's partner had questioned the idea, with much questioning of skill sets and back story, but Michael kept it in anyhow.

As Sarah lay beneath the floorboards in a house inhabited by a madman, she was wondering if her mother hadn't been right after all. Maybe there was such a monster, such a spirit. And maybe he had known they had been mocking him, had been too complacent. And maybe this had made him angry. And maybe it was he who had come for her, and he came in darkness to see her now because he had no face beneath the mask he had shown to capture her.

Sarah lay still, her eyes open wide.

The paper, which was entitled 'The Krüniger Plot and Mittel-Baxter Society', detailed an archaeological investigation that had recently taken place in an area of Germany with which the man was unfamiliar. He had found it in his atlas, and established it was too distant from any of his contacts for them to be able to provide any on-the-spot observations, and so he was restricted to the information in the paper.

A graveyard had been discovered not far from the remains of a Neolithic settlement. Carbon dating of the skeletons, together with corollary evidence from personal items found within some of the graves, had allowed the site to be dated to the latter part of the eighth millennium B.C. Ten thousand years ago. The man sat for a while, savouring the thought, summoning up an image of this cross-section of time. Before any now-recognizable language had been spoken, long before even the Pyramids had been built — unless one believed the claims of the New Age archaeologists with their selective evidence-gathering and flimsy projections — these people had lived and died and been laid in the earth, had made love and eaten and shat their waste on the ground. The man sipped a little of his coffee, being careful to replace the cup on the side table so that it was only just balanced. Then he read on.

There were twenty-five sets of remains. Women of up to young middle age, children, a few men in their late teens or early twenties, and one man of more advanced years. Thorough appendices detailed the condition of each of the skeletons, and outlined the techniques that had been used both to age them and establish the dietary and environmental conditions within which they had lived. The authors of the paper remarked how the skeletons had been laid in a grid, an organized system of burial observed in no other sites in that part of Europe at the time. They provided diagrams demonstrating how the orientation of the grid was in accordance with what was understood of the period's interest in the summer and winter solstices, thankfully avoiding a digression into primitive astronomy. They instead produced a series of arguments to show that this arrangement provided further evidence for a proposition to which they had been committed for some years: that this particular area of Germany had been host to a hybridized form of social organization that they termed Mittel-Baxter Society (for such were the authors' names), a sporadic and localized culture of very minor academic interest and negligible long-term significance.

The man read the paper carefully to the end, and then worked steadily through the appendices. After reading the reports on the skeletons of the other deceased, nodding occasionally at what he regarded as perfectly well-argued conclusions, he came to the section regarding the older man who had been found at the site. The position of his skeleton — at the exact centre of a five-by-five grid — suggested that he had been the first to be buried in this plot, and the authors argued compellingly that this implied that the man had been a person of importance within the nearby village. It was also deduced that he had been born in a different part of the country, as bilateral pitting in the interior of his eye sockets — a condition known as cribra orbitalia — suggested that his diet had been deficient in iron for much of his life. The amount of iron in vegetation is determined by the geological qualities of the soil in which it grows, and its absorption affected by the amount of lead present: people from different areas will therefore show marked variations in the condition. Cross sections taken from the man's teeth, and subsequent analysis of the levels of lead and strontium isotopes, had enabled them to link him to an area over two hundred and fifty miles away. In an aside it was observed that a lesion on his skull bore witness to a blow to the head that had not proved fatal — as the damage it had caused to the bone tissue was long-healed prior to the man's eventual demise. They speculated that this might have been a result of a battle or struggle for power, and that this proved he had lived a long and vibrant life. A man who, the authors provokingly speculated, might even have been personally responsible for bringing Mittel-Baxter culture into a previously uncivilized and backwoods area, and whose local significance had been enshrined in the manner of his burial. The man read this section for a second time, and then closed the paper on his lap. He was very pleased. This was the best yet, much better and far, far older than even the seven ancient burials discovered together high on the Nazca plain at Cahuachi, each with fossilized excrement in their mouths. He felt pity for Mittel and Baxter, though he supposed it unlikely that the full stupidity of their conclusions would ever be brought to light. Perhaps the paper might even help maintain their tenure at the godforsaken midwestern university for which they toiled. He could, he supposed, get in touch with them and put them in the picture. He doubted that he would be believed, however, even though the truth of the matter was there for those who had eyes to see. Archaeologists were worse than most when it came to judging evidence on the basis of their pre-existing suppositions. It didn't matter whether they were flair players like Hancock and Baigent, or journeymen like Klaus Mittel and George Baxter: they all saw what they wanted to see. The traditionalists could only ever see ceremonial walkways, the New Agers their alien landing strips — however absurd each idea was in individual circumstances. Some of the time each was correct, but they'd never know when — because in their minds they were right all the time. Only if you were prepared to examine the evidence dispassionately could you reliably divine the truth.

The skull lesion most certainly denoted a head injury, though one that had been far more significant than Mittel and Baxter realized — a childhood injury profound enough to wake a portion of the brain that in most men remained regrettably dormant. The evidence of cribra orbitalia was likewise not merely of import with regard to geographical positioning. It was indeed often related to iron deficiency, and sometimes anaemia of a congenital or haemolytic type, but it could also have a far more interesting genesis. Excessive exposure to lead could cause the condition. This, the man knew, wasn't 'poisoning' at all, but a gift that could combine with other factors and lead to alterations on a genetic level, changes that woke suppressed parts of the human genome and allowed them to become manifest.

It was not Mittel and Baxter's misinterpretation of the forensic evidence that was most at fault, however, but their inability to judge the true nature of the site. The man in the centre of the cemetery grid had not died first. Of course not. He had died last. In his own time, and by his own hand.

At the centre of his creation.

14

The realtor leaned forward on his elbows, opened his little mouth, and spoke. 'And what kind of bracket would you be looking to purchase into? Please be frank. I appreciate that

these are early days in our relationship, Mr, uh, Lautner, the dawn of our search for a potential home — but I'm going to come right out and say it'll promote our settling into a mutually beneficial mode if I know exactly how much you're hoping to realize into real estate at this time.'

He sat back in his chair and squinted knowingly at me, evidently pleased to have laid his cards on the table. There was to be no pulling the wool over this guy's eyes, I gathered wearily. If I only had eight dollars and change to spend, or was maybe hoping to barter with shiny stones, he intended to know right away. He was middle-aged and skinny with red hair, and his name — scarcely credibly — appeared to be Chip Farling. I'd already talked to several very similar people, and my tolerance was getting lower and lower.

'I'd like to cap it around six,' I said, briskly. 'For the time being. Something special, I may go higher.'

He beamed. 'That would be cash in full?'

'Yes it would.' I smiled back.

Chip's head bobbed, and his neat little hands moved a couple of pieces of paper around on his desk.

'Good,' he said, still nodding. 'Excellent. That gives us something to play with.'

Then he pointed a finger at me. I frowned, but soon realized this was merely a prelude to his next action, which involved putting his hand up to his chin and rubbing it while staring shrewdly into the middle

distance. This I understood to mean he was thinking.

After nearly half a minute of this, he refocused. 'Okay. Let's get to work.'

He bounced up from the desk and walked briskly to the other end of the office, clicking his fingers. I sighed into my coffee, and prepared to wait.

I'd gone to UnRealty first, of course. It was shut. A notice on the door thanked people for their patronage and explained that the business was being wound up on account of the death of its owner. It stopped short of adding that his heir being an asshole had been an additional factor. I leaned close to the window and peered in. It doesn't matter if the desks and filing cabinets remain, if the computers sit in place and a year planner from the local print shop still hangs on the wall, vacation time firmly plotted by the office anal retentive — you can tell at a glance whether the business has air in its lungs. UnRealty didn't. I'd known it would be that way, but the sight still stopped me short. I realized I hadn't tried to work out whether the discoveries of the last forty-eight hours made my father's actions over UnRealty any more explicable. I couldn't make the thought go anywhere.

So I moved my body instead, and took myself around all the realtors I could find on foot. A rough index of a small community's status can be taken from the number of real-estate businesses on its streets. In Cowlick, Kansas, you're going to have to look real hard. Everyone wants to get out, not in, their only proviso being that it not be through the medium of their death. Preferably. Somewhere of moderate wealth you'll find one or maybe two offices, mixed in amongst the other businesses by the process of commercial Brownian motion. In a place like Dyersburg you can't move for realtors. Even more than the scarves and the galleries and little restaurants, what that kind of town is selling is an idea: the notion that you could live this way all year round, that you could be one of the people who carve off a piece of the good stuff and put a sturdy fence round it; that you, too, could sit in a custom-built log home with cathedral ceilings and feel at one with God and his angels. All over America, the rich are carving out their hidey-holes. Ranches that used to support cattle or simply beauty are being bought up and subdivided into twenty-acre home sites where you can rejoice in stunning views and neighbours who are absolutely just like you. I'm not dissing this. I want one of these views, I want one of those lives, held in the palm of the mountains in one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. I just don't want what comes with it. The golf. The part-share in a Lear jet. The cigar humidors. The bland, screamingly serene androids who live in these country clubs and lodges: bluff men with leather tans and firm handshakes, women with their steely eyes and surgery-tight cheeks; conversations that are one part greed, two parts self-satisfaction, and three parts eerie silence. I think it would drive me insane.

After a little while Chip reappeared, clutching a handful of prospectuses and two videotapes. 'Mr Lautner?' he breathed. 'It's time to find the dream.'

I dutifully watched the tapes, taking care to make occasional grunts or moues of interest. Neither had anything that resembled what I was looking for. Then I leafed through the brochures, which featured faux wooden lodges interior-decorated by some cowboy on drugs, or gleaming white boxes of such Modernist sterility they looked like they'd been discovered on the moon. The only thing that varied, and that not by much, was the hilariousness of the prices. It had been this way with each of the previous realtors. I was on the verge of dutifully asking for Chip's card and leaving, maybe calling Bobby to check how he was getting on with his task, when hidden amongst the glossies I found a single piece of paper.

'The Halls,' it said, in an attractive typeface. 'For people who want more than a home.'

It went on, in three paragraphs of curious restraint, to describe a small development up in the Gallatin range. Ski-in, ski-out convenience, naturally. End-of-the-road seclusion, of course. A two-hundred-acre tract of highlands, fashioned into a community of such ineffable perfection that Zeus himself probably bought a town house off plan — and yet the copy wasn't trying very hard to sell. There weren't even any

pictures, or a price, which piqued my interest further.

I picked up one of the other brochures more or less at random, just making sure it was expensive.

'Like to take a look at this one,' I said.

Chip checked, nodded delightedly. 'It's a peach,' he said.

'And while we're in the area,' I added, as if an afterthought, 'let's check this place out too.'

I shoved the single piece of paper across the desk at him. He glanced at it, then folded his hands

together and looked at me.

'With The Halls, Mr Lautner,' he said, judiciously, 'exclusivity is very much the name of the game. We would be looking at very high-end, in monetary terms. Six million would no longer suffice. By quite some

margin.'

I gave him my best and richest smile.

'Like I said. Show me something special.'

An hour later I was listening to Chip talk about golf. Listening again. Still listening. Would, I was beginning to fear, always be listening. Early in the drive, before we were even out of Dyersburg, he'd quizzed me on my own commitment to the game. I'd rashly admitted I didn't play, though luckily stopped short of adding, 'Why on earth would I, for the love of God?' He stared at me for so long, with a look of such stunned incomprehension, that I said I was intending to take the sport up just as soon as I was settled — that this ambition was, in fact, foremost among my reasons for seeking a property of this type. He'd nodded slowly at this, and then taken it upon himself to give me a crash course on everything there was to know about the game. I reckoned I could bear about another fifteen minutes, and then I'd just have to kill him stone dead.

I'd already endured being shown the house in Big Sky, with its Sub-Zero appliances and Honduran maple flooring and fireplace handcrafted by some moron out of big pebbles. In the end I simply shook my head. Chip clapped me encouragingly on the shoulder — we were well on the way to best buddies by now — and we trooped back to the car. We drove back down to the main road and followed it further into the mountains, Chip giving me the lowdown on what he perceived to be two tiny flaws in Tiger Woods's game — both of which he considered to be related to racial temperament. The sky, which had been clear in the early morning, was now the same colour as the road. The Gallatin River, cold and fast, ran along the left. On the other side was a narrow band of valley, filled with trees. The mountains rose steeply on either side, a notch up into the Rockies. You travel far enough down this way you come up out onto a high plain and then swing east into Yellowstone Park, the caldera of a dormant supervolcano that last erupted six hundred thousand years ago. Molten rock has been gathering in the hollows underneath it since then, and my father told me one time that local legend speaks of a faint buzzing noise on the shores of Yellowstone Lake — the sound of pressure slowly building deep in the rock. Apparently the whole lot could go off again any day, plunging us right back into the Stone Age, which would be a bummer. The way I felt after an hour with Chip, I believed I was capable of triggering it just with the crackling coming from my head.

Twenty miles down the road, Chip pulled over to the right, apropos of nothing as far as I could tell. He hopped out of the car and hurried over to the fence, where I realized there was a small and unassuming gate. This surprised me. Big Sky, in common with most such places, had a huge great entrance, fashioned from trees that had already been sizeable when the Farlings were as yet unheard-of in the area. This gate looked like it led to nothing more than a service road. Chip leaned close to the right-hand side, and I saw his lips move. I realized that an intercom had been built into the post. He straightened and waited for a moment, peering into the sky. A few drops of rain had begun to fall. Then he turned back, listened to something, and walked back to the car.

By the time he was strapped back in, the gate had opened. Chip drove through, and it shut again immediately behind us. He steered us along a track beyond, two patchy lines where the grass had been flattened. He drove carefully, but I was still bounced around. I winced. 'Kind of a rustic thing, is it?'

He smiled. 'You'll see.'

The track continued for maybe a quarter of a mile, cutting at an angle away from the main road and toward a dense stand of trees. As we rounded them, the surface abruptly changed. From two worn lines in the scrub it switched to narrow but immaculate blacktop. I turned quickly in my seat, and saw that the

main road was now invisible, obscured behind the trees.

'Cunning,' I said.

'Nothing is left to chance at The Halls,' Chip intoned. 'Those who choose to make their homes there

can count on the very highest standards of privacy.'

The path turned back away from the river, winding behind an outcrop to follow a steep course up a gully, curving further and further around to remain obscured from the main road. Within a few minutes it was hard to believe that the highway had ever existed. Somebody had put genuine thought into The Halls. I was mildly impressed. 'How long has this place been here?'

'Development started seven years ago,' Chip said, peering through the windshield against the rain. 'Just a shame you're not going to see it in better weather. You get a good snowfall up here, you're going

to think you've died and gone to heaven.'

'Have you sold many?'

'Not a one. There's only ten home sites, and they're in no hurry to fill the last few. Be honest with you,

their leaflet does them no favours. I've told them they should have some pictures on it.' We were approaching the top of a rise now, having climbed at least five hundred feet in a long series

of zigzags.

'None of the other realtors I talked to seemed to know about it.'

Chip shook his head. 'It's our exclusive. Leastways, it is now.'

He winked at me, and for just a second I got a glimpse of the man Mr Farling might be when he shut his door behind him at night. I turned away, suddenly sure that it had been a good decision not to introduce myself by my real name. I got the feeling that Chip might have recognized the name Hopkins sooner than he would that of a dead Los Angeles architect, however many movies the latter's buildings had been in.

A gate now became visible, as we turned a final bend. It was made not of wood, but of very large pieces of mountain rock, and sat on the top of a small rise, so that what lay beyond was not visible. As we drew closer, I saw that the words 'The Halls' had been hand-carved into it, in the same typeface

they'd used on their sales sheet.

'This is it,' Chip chirped, superfluously.

On the other side of the rise the road turned sharply left. I got an impression of a range of higher peaks half a mile away, but this was obscured by another bank of trees. Behind them was a fence that stretched off in both directions. The fence was very high, hiding everything that lay beyond. The rain was coming on harder, and the sky looked black fit to burst.

'The course is over the other side,' Chip said, switching seamlessly onto autopilot. 'Nine hole, Nicklaus pere et fils design, bien sur. As they say — who can beat a pair of Jacks? Naturally it's under cover at this time of year, and who needs it — with the Thunder Fall and Lost Creek runs barely minutes away? Imagine the convenience of world-class outdoor facilities, only a short drive from homes to delight the most discerning and sophisticated buyer.'

Indeed, I thought. And imagine me poking a finger up your nose.

'This is the entrance compound right here,' Chip said. A clump of low wooden buildings became

visible, looming out of the murk. 'Club room, non-smoking bar, and a fine restaurant.'

'Have you eaten there?'

'No. But I gather it's, uh, extremely fine.'

He pulled the car over to park in a space to one side of the entrance to the building, alongside a row of very expensive cars. We got out, and he led me to the door. I tried to look around, to get a sense of the rest of the development, but the visibility was shot and we were moving quickly because of the rain now drumming down onto every horizontal surface.

'Fucking rain,' Chip muttered quietly. He noticed my surprise and shrugged apologetically. 'Sorry. Realtor's worst enemy.'

'What — worse than Hispanic neighbours?'

He laughed uproariously, clapped me on the back, and shepherded me through the door.

Inside, all was calm. To the left stretched a kind of club room, leather chairs around dark wood tables. It was empty. Down the end was a window, which on any other day would have afforded a doubtless stunning view. Today it was just a grey rectangle. To the right was a large fireplace, in which a well-behaved fire crackled. Very quietly in the background was the sound of Beethoven, one of the Sonatas for Violin and Piano. The reception desk was a smooth line of good wood, and on the wall behind it hung a piece of 'art'. As we stood, waiting for someone to respond to the buzzer Chip had rung, I reached inside my jacket and pressed a button on my cell phone. Assuming there was service out here, Bobby's phone would ring. We'd arranged that I'd do this if I'd found what I was looking for. I had.

The induction process took half an hour. A slim and attractive woman of early middle age, augmented by many, many dollars' worth of hairstyling, sat us in the lounge and explained the glories The Halls had to offer. She was dressed in an immaculate grey suit and had bright little blue eyes and good skin, so I guess everything she said had to be true. She didn't give her name, which I thought was odd. In American commercial discourse we always give our designation: straight off, right at the top along with the handshake. A token of engagement. You know my name, so I can only want the best for you. There's no way I'm going to rip you off — what, me, your friend? At the heart of The Halls, Ms No-Name explained, was a desire to reproduce the traditional ideals of 'community' — only better. Staff were on hand at all times to assist in any matter, however arcane. The residents apparently thought of them as friends — presumably that special kind of friend who has to do whatever you tell them, no matter what time it is or how boring and arduous the task. The restaurant's chef had previously worked at a glamour trough in Los Angeles even I had heard of, and residents could have meals delivered to their homes between the hours of 9.00 a.m. and midnight. Their wine cellars, she assured me, beggared belief. All houses were automated up to the hilt, with cable Internet access as standard. In addition to the much-vaunted golf club, there was a health club and a dining club and several others I didn't bother to commit to memory. Membership of each of these was mandatory for residents and came in at around a half-million dollars. Per year. Each. Throughout all this I was aware of Chip nodding vigorously beside me, as if unable to believe what a good deal this all was. I sipped my hundredth cup of coffee of the day

— at The Halls, at least it was good — and tried not to blanch. She concluded by observing that there were only three homes still available within the community, priced at between eleven point five and fourteen million dollars — barkingly expensive even by luxury real-estate standards. She rounded off with a heartwarming paean to the joys of residence that I could see Chip mentally taking notes from. 'Cool,' I said, when this eventually drew to a measured close. I put my cup down. 'So let's go have a

look.'

The woman stared politely at me. 'Of course that's not possible.'

'I've been wet before,' I reassured her. 'Many times. I even went swimming once.'

'The weather is immaterial. We don't allow viewing of The Halls until a demonstration of

appropriateness has taken place.' She glanced at Chip, who was looking carefully blank.

'Appropriateness,' I said.

'Financial and otherwise.'

I raised my eyebrows, smiled pleasantly. 'What?'

'What's being said, if I might intrude,' Chip said, 'is that, as we discussed on the way here, The Halls

maintains a very…'

'I heard,' I said. 'So I'm to understand, Ms…?' I left a gap, but she didn't fill in her name. This woman was in no hurry to be my friend. 'I'm to understand that I can't get further than this room until I've jumped through some hoops you've set up to determine whether I'm suitable.'

'Correct.' She smiled brightly at me, as if at a child who had finally understood, after long and painful effort, how the relative positions of the big and little hands could be used to divine how long it was until

bedtime. 'As Mr Farling should have made clear.'

'And what form would these demonstrations take?'

The woman reached into a folder and drew out a piece of paper. Placing it in front of me, she said:

'The placing of the cost in full of your proposed purchase, along with sufficient funds to cover club

memberships for five years, in an escrow account. No mortgage or other part-payment options are entertained. The granting of access to your accountant or other agreed-upon representative for the purpose of establishing a general financial impression. A meeting by yourself with the full board of the community, which consists of the managing agents and a representative from each of the occupied properties, with a subsequent follow-up in subcommittee should this be required. Your nomination of two significant individuals — and by 'significant' we mean that they should be so within our society at large — to whom the board may make reference with regard to your past and present situation. Assuming that all of the above proceeds smoothly, then you will be welcomed onto the property to be introduced to the finer points of the development, and to make your selection.'

'You've got to be kidding.'

'I assure you that I am not.'

I tried for bluster. 'Do you have any idea who I am?'

'No.' She smiled, turning her lips into a thin line resembling a recently healed scar. 'Which is precisely

the point.' I was dimly aware that the receptionist, a young man who had spent a great deal of time in the gym,

was watching us. I held the woman's gaze for a moment, and then smiled back.

'Excellent,' I said.

After a moment's hesitation, she frowned. 'Excuse me?'

'This is exactly what I hoped for. Mr Farling has evidently divined my needs accurately.' My voice

was now a little clipped, presumably to be in keeping with my shifted persona. 'Someone in my position requires certain assurances, and I'm pleased to say that you have afforded them.'

Ms No-Name began to look friendly again. 'We are in understanding?'

'Perfectly so. Might I be permitted to see plans of the available properties?'

'Of course.' She went back to her folder and pulled out two bundles. She unfolded these across the table and I scanned them quickly. They were detailed and well-annotated. What I saw interested me more than I'd expected.

'Intriguing,' I said. 'I'm sorry not to be able to examine them in the flesh on this occasion, but this is certainly enough to maintain my interest.' I started to refold the plans, then realized that a man as rich as I was supposed to be would let someone else handle such a menial task. Instead I stood up. The abruptness of this caught both of them unawares, and they hurried to follow. I thrust my hand out to the woman, and shook hers firmly.

'Thank you for your time,' I said, as if I was already thinking of other matters. 'I assume that any further questions I might have should be directed through Mr Farling?'

'That is the usual way. Might I ask how you heard of The Halls?'

I hesitated for a moment, as it occurred to me that admitting I'd just seen a piece of paper might sound weak.

'Friends,' I said. She nodded, almost imperceptibly. Good answer.

I bowed my head and walked out across the lobby, not waiting for Chip. Outside I stood under the awning for a moment, watching the rain come down. Even if I'd felt like braving it, I could now see that the buildings had been arranged in such a way that no glimpse of the community was possible from the outside. Chip hadn't been kidding about the privacy.

He emerged soon afterward and walked me across to the car. As I climbed in I noticed that another vehicle had just come in the gate and was heading quickly down the drive. It was large and black, some kind of all-terrain monster. It sloshed in an arc around the small lot and pulled up twenty feet away.

I took as long as I could to open the door, climb in, and get into my seat, even leaving one of my feet outside to prolong the operation. As I strapped myself in a man emerged from the building we had just left. He was about my height, with blond hair, and walked purposefully, head down. He didn't look at us at any point, and I got an impression of strong features but no more. As he walked toward the car, a man hopped out of the driver's seat and went round to open the back of the vehicle. With his back to us, the other man hefted a bag into it. The bag was large, and a kind of petrol blue colour. It had a paper customs strap around the handle, but I couldn't see the letters. Both men climbed into the car.

By then Chip had our own vehicle started. He reversed carefully out, headed up the drive, and we left The Halls behind.

Chip was quiet for most of the journey back into town. I got the feeling that he might have been grilled by No-Name after I'd left, and was berating himself for not being able to adequately answer her questions. Like who I was, and where I was from. Even I knew that these were the first things a realtor should find out from a potential customer, the amino acids of the transaction genome. My father used to say, in his rare expansive moments, that the way into a man's pocket is with his own hand: by which he meant ensuring that you know enough about him to approach him in the way to which he's most accustomed.

Chip did ask me what I thought of what I'd seen. I told him the Big Sky property was of no interest, especially after seeing what The Halls had to offer. He didn't seem surprised. I asked how many other people he'd shown up there. The answer was eight, in the past three years. All had gone through the procedures required by the management. None had been offered the opportunity to buy.

I stared at him. 'These people put fifteen, twenty million in an account, opened up their affairs, and still they didn't get in? They actually want to sell these houses, or what?'

'Exclusivity, Mr Lautner. That's the name of the game.' He glanced at me, to check he had my full attention. 'We're living in a strange world, and that's a fact. We've got the most beautiful country on the planet, the most hard-working folks, and yet we live cheek by jowl with people you wouldn't want in the same hemisphere. There's a historical dimension. We opened the doors too wide, and we shut them too late. We said 'Come on, everybody, join us — we need warm bodies. Got us plenty of land to fill' — but we didn't spend enough time making sure we got the right kind of bodies. Didn't think clearly enough about the future. That's the reason why people like yourself come out West. To get away from the cities, from the hordes, to get in amongst their own folk. To get back to real ways of living. I'm not talking about race, though that does play a part. I'm talking about attitude. About quality. About people who are meant to be with each other, and people who aren't. That's why folks come to a place like Dyersburg. It's a kind of filter, and most of the time it works pretty good — but still you wind up with some people who just don't meet the grade. Students. Ski bums. White trash out by the freeway. People who don't understand. What are you going to do? Can't stop folks moving out here — it's a free country. Nothing you can do but look after your own.'

'And how do you do that?'

'You make the mesh of your filter a whole lot finer. You find some like-minded people, and you build

yourself a king-sized wall.'

'That's what The Halls is?'

'One way of looking at it. But mainly, of course, a unique homemaking opportunity.'

'You had the money, would you move in up there?'

He laughed, a short bitter sound. 'Yes, sir, I surely would. Meantime, I'll just work for my

commission.'

We drove down out of the hills and onto the small high plain. By the time we got back to Dyersburg it was full dark, and the rain had begun to slacken a little. Chip parked up outside his office, and turned to me.

'So.' He grinned. 'What's your next move? Want to think about what you've seen, or can I bring you

in to the office, maybe show you a few more options for tomorrow?'

'Wanted to ask you a question,' I said, looking through the windshield. The pavement was deserted.

'Shoot.' He looked tired but game. My mother always used to say that real estate wasn't a business

for people who wanted to keep predictable hours.

'You said you just got the exclusive on The Halls. So there used to be another firm looking after it?'

'That's right.' He looked confused. 'What of it?'

'They ever get any sales that you know of?'

'No, sir. They didn't even have the account very long.'

'So how come they're not still representing it?'

'Guy died, business got wound up. Can't sell homes if you're dead.'

I nodded, feeling very quiet inside. 'How much would your commission be on one of those places? A

fair sum, I'd imagine?'

'Quite a piece,' he allowed, carefully.

I let a pause settle. 'Enough to kill someone for?'

'What?'

'You heard me.' I wasn't smiling any more.

'I don't know what you're talking about. You think… what? What the hell are you saying?'

There was something about his denial I didn't like, and you'd be amazed, and saddened, if you knew how good people are at lying, in even the most difficult circumstances. I'd waited. I'd been good. Now I was fed up with playing games. I grabbed the back of Chip's head and yanked it forward, smacking his forehead hard into the steering wheel. I angled this so that the hard plastic caught him dead on the bridge of the nose. Then I wrenched his head back.

'I'm going to ask you a question,' I said, pulling his head forward to smack it into the steering column again. He made a quiet moaning sound as I held it there. 'This time, I need to believe your answer. I need to know you're telling me the truth, and you have just this one opportunity to convince me. Otherwise I'll kill you. Understand?'

I could feel his fevered nod. I pulled him back up by the hair once more. His nose was bleeding, and there was a livid welt across his forehead. His eyes were very wide.

'Did you kill Don Hopkins?'

He shook his head. Shook it, and kept shaking it, with the frantic and jerky movements of a child. I watched this for a while. I've dealt with many liars in my time, have been one myself for long periods. I have a good eye for it.

Chip hadn't killed my father. At least, not personally.

'Okay,' I said, before he broke his own neck. 'But I think you know something about what happened

to him. Here's the deal. I want you to take a message. You going to do that for me?'

He nodded. Blinked.

'Tell the Nazis up in the mountains that someone is taking an interest in them. Tell them that I don't

believe my parents died by accident, and that I will exact payment for what happened. Got that?'

He nodded again. I let go of his head, opened the door, and climbed out into the rain.

When I was standing outside I leaned down and looked at him. His mouth was downturned with fear

and shock, blood running down his chin. I turned away with my hands shaking, and went to find someone human.

15

Bobby was leaning against the counter in my parents' house, sipping a glass of mineral water. He glanced up when I walked in, watched me stand and drip on the floor. It had rained virtually the entire time I had

been walking.

'What have you done?' he asked mildly.

'Nothing.'

'Right,' he said, eventually. I took the glass and drank the remainder of the water in one swallow.

Only when it was gone did I remember it had come from my parents' last shopping list.

'Is there any more of that?'

'A little,' he said.

'Don't drink it.' I put the glass on the counter and sat down at the table. As an afterthought I took my coat off, almost as if I'd heard a voice warning me that I'd catch my death. Through the window I could see that Mary's sitting-room light was on. I hoped she didn't find out I was still in town. It would have looked rude that I hadn't dropped by. Then I realized that I was sitting in a house with several lights on and a car outside, and so she probably knew already. I wasn't thinking very clearly.

Bobby waited, arms folded.

'So,' I asked. 'How was your day?'

'Come on, Ward,' he said irritably.

I shook my head. He shrugged and let it go. 'I checked out the scene of the accident. Given the position of the car they ran into, it's entirely conceivable your mother could have simply screwed up the turn. It's kind of sharp, it was dark, and it was pretty misty by all accounts.'

'Right,' I said, wearily. 'And she had only been driving for, like, forty years. Probably never come across a sharp turn before, never crossed that junction in all the time they'd been living here. I guess the cranberry juice and the mist was just all too much for her. I see it all now. It's a miracle the car didn't flip clean over the first row of buildings and bounce all the way to the sea.'

Bobby ignored me. 'There was a small gas station kitty-corner to the crash site, and a video rental a little further along the way. It goes without saying that neither of the guys I talked to were there the night of the accident. The video store is an independent run by two brothers. The one I talked to was certain that his brother hadn't known anything about it until he saw a police car arriving.'

'He didn't hear the sound of one heavy metal object running into another, think maybe something might be afoot?'

'You know what these places are like. Big old TV hung from the ceiling, John Woo movie playing ear-bleeding loud, guy behind the counter getting through the evening with beer and a joint the size of a burrito. Chances are you could have cracked him over the head with a hammer and he'd've barely blinked. So I went over to the gas station, and the guy gave me his manager's number. I called him and got the address of the guy on duty at the time.'

'Telling him what?'

'That I was assisting the police with their inquiries.'

'Great,' I said. 'That's going to get the local PD right up my ass.'

'Ward, who fucking cares?'

'I'm not Agency any more, Bobby. Out here in the real world, the cops can do things to you.'

Bobby flipped a hand, indicating this was a negligible concern. 'So I visited him. I confirmed that he saw nothing either. He heard a noise, but thought it was maybe someone dicking around at the back of the station. Dithered about calling the cops, and by the time he realized there'd been an accident outside and the station was safe, the police were already on the scene.'

'Okay,' I said. I hadn't expected anything to come of Bobby looking into the crash, but he'd been insistent. 'So what else?'

'So then, as agreed, I came here and looked around.' 'Find anything?' He shook his head. 'Nope. Absolutely nothing.' 'I told you.' 'You did,' he snapped. 'You're not only handsome, Ward, you're always right. Man, I wish I was gay.

I'd look no further. You're the best. So now you tell me something.'

'The place in the first scene of the video is called The Halls, and it's up a gully off the Gallatin Valley. You have to be really very rich to join, and they won't even let you see the houses until you've proved

you're good enough.'

'The Halls? What kind of a name is that?'

I breathed out heavily. 'I don't know. Maybe they're thinking of Valhalla. Maybe they believe they're

gods. That much money, maybe they are.'

'You're sure it's the one?'

'There's no question. The lobby was exactly the same as the one from the video, right down to the

artwork. It's the place. And they are very, very tight about letting people join.'

'So how come you didn't put a call through?'

'I did. Must be there's no signal out there. I did it with the phone in my pocket, so I couldn't tell.'

'What was it like?'

'Just swell. I didn't see any of the residents, except one guy briefly at the end and I didn't get a good look at him either. Basically if you've got the money and don't want to be bothered by standard-issue earthlings, then this is the place for you. I got a peek at the house plans, though, and these are not your average trophy homes. They got someone pretty good on the case, someone who had something specific in mind.'

'Like what?'

I took a pen from my pocket and sketched. 'Exploded layout. Main living spaces elevated over the terrain. Central fireplaces withdrawn to internal room edges. Stained glass on the windows opposite the fires, and in skylights over corridors. Hanging eaves, horizontal banding of windows, conspicuous

terraces.'

Bobby peered at the drawing. 'So? I tell you, my friend, that just sounds like a regular house to me.'

'Lot of this has been incorporated into standard design now,' I agreed. 'But the way it was put

together in these drawings was textbook Frank Lloyd Wright.'

'So maybe they hired him.'

'Unlikely. Unless they hired a medium, too.'

'So they got someone who designs like him. There must be hundreds. Big deal.'

'Probably. But this kind of stuff isn't fashionable these days, never has been for this kind of

development. Usually it's oil baron staircases, master bedroom suites, and look-at-me aren't-I-rich.'

'Sounds great.'

'But artificial. In the beginning, the places where we lived were sculpted from natural environments, not constructed from scratch. That's why so much modern architecture feels barren: it makes no organic use of the site. Wright's houses were different. The entrance route is made complicated to symbolize a retreat to a known safe haven, and the fireplace is withdrawn into the centre of the structure to take the place of a fire in a deep cave. Spaces within the house flow to allow internal prospect as an ultimate defence, additionally suggesting the adaptation of a naturally created space. External windows are banded so the sight lines reveal the outside without compromising the inside. Stained glass evokes a wall of vegetation that the inhabitants can see through, but which presents a wall from without. Humans feel most comfortable when they've got both prospect and refuge — when they've got a good view of the terrain they inhabit, but also feel protected and hidden. That's what his patterns provide.'

Bobby stared at me. 'You're an unusual man.'

I shrugged, embarrassed. 'I listened in class. My point is, you find me another development in the

world looks like this, I'll kiss your ass.'

'Tempting, but I'm just going to take your word for it.'

'It's probably one of the reasons they don't let people see the houses beforehand. It's not what they'd

usually lay out their millions for. Which means they have to have some other reason for making them that way.'

'So the developer's a Wright nut. Or they hired an architect who listened in class, too. I don't see how this leads anywhere, and I'd really like you to tell me what happened at the end.'

'I lost it with the realtor.'

'On site?'

I shook my head. 'Give me some credit. Back in town. There was no one around.'

'Is he dead?' The question was businesslike.

'Christ, no.'

'Why did you do this?'

'I didn't like him. Plus there used to be two firms looking after The Halls. Now there's only one.'

Bobby nodded, slowly. 'Your dad's firm being the one no longer on the case.'

'You're a bright guy.'

'I also take it, from the fact we're not discussing a homicide, that you don't think this realtor killed your folks. Despite the financial incentive.'

I shook my head. 'Not personally. But he's in bed with people who did. Why else is there footage of this place on the tape?'

Suddenly I was on my feet, walking quickly out of the kitchen. As I passed through the hall something tugged at me, but I couldn't work out what, so kept on going. Bobby followed me into the sitting room, where I went over to the coffee table.

I picked up the book lying there, and waved it at him.

'A book about the aforementioned great architect,' he said. 'So what? Your dad was a realtor. They're into houses. And an old guy. Old dudes really dig biographies. It's that and the Discovery

Channel that keeps them going.'

'Bobby…'

'Okay,' he conceded. 'It's an interesting coincidence. Sort of.'

I wandered back out into the hallway and then came to a halt again. I felt like I had an engine of

activity inside me, turning over, ready to run — but having no idea what direction to go in. 'You tossed this place hard?'

'I took carpet up, I went under floorboards, I went in the roof and shone a flashlight in the tank. I looked inside the phones. There's nothing else here. Of course — I can't tell what might be missing.'

'Me neither,' I said. 'I didn't come here enough. The only thing I noticed was the videos.' I frowned. 'Wait a second. When I was here the other day I put the mail here. Now it's gone.' I looked up at him, suddenly sure I was onto something.

'Relax, detective. A couple hours ago an old guy picked it up. Beaky, said he used to be your folks' lawyer. I let him in, explained I was a friend of yours. He was cool about it, though he did look like he wanted to check how many spoons I'd stolen.'

'Harold Davids,' I said. 'He said he'd keep coming by.'

Bobby smiled. 'Ward, you got enough weirdness going on without looking for it. Stop being so paranoid.'

We heard a loud shattering sound from the sitting room. We started moving, but not quickly enough.

It's not so much a sound as a feeling of immense pressure, and as shocking as being a child smashed across the face by someone who's never hit you before. If you're close enough to an explosion, what you're mainly aware of is the thud of your head and chest, an impact that turns any noise into a deep sensation, a feeling that the world itself has been knocked out of its path. The sound itself seems secondary, as if you're hearing it days afterward.

It seemed like I hit the wall immediately, hard, and smacked face-first into a row of pictures. As I hit the ground, my head full of white light and surrounded by falling glass, there was another, quieter explosion, and then I was hauling Bobby off the floor and toward the remains of the front door.

We careered down the path together, slipping and falling on the wet flagstones. There was another detonation behind us, much louder than the first. This time I heard the whistle and fizz of things flying around me, the whupp-a of air compressed and released. Bobby kept scrabbling forward, using his hands to keep us moving. I screwed up his efforts by turning to look back at the house, and we tangled and ended up skidding flat on our backs on the wet grass. The whole of the outer wall of the sitting room was gone, and the interior was already beginning to burn. I couldn't take my eyes off it. When you see a house on fire it's like watching the burning effigy of someone's soul, like seeing the grave work of worms writ sixty feet tall.

By the time I'd pushed myself up Bobby already had his phone out and was walking away, looking over the fence. I took a few paces back toward the house. Maybe I thought I could go back in and put the fire out. Or that I should save some things. I don't know. I just felt there ought to be something that I could do.

There was another small detonation, and I heard things break deep inside the house. The heat was building rapidly. The rain had slackened into a faint drizzle, and I remember feeling that this was about typical. It had rained hard all afternoon. Why not now?

Bobby ran back over to me, snapping his phone shut. He had a small cut on his forehead, which was dripping blood.

'They're on their way,' he said. I couldn't imagine who he would be talking about. 'Who are?'

'The fire brigade. Let's go.'

'I can't go,' I said. 'That's their house.'

'No,' he said firmly, 'it's a crime scene.'

When we reached my car he walked quickly all around the vehicle, looking carefully at the ground. Then he went down on hands and knees in the mud and peered up underneath. He got back up, rubbed his hands, then unlocked the door. He squatted down and looked under the driver's seat, then popped the hood, walked round the front, and looked at the engine.

'Okay,' he said. 'We'll take the chance.'

He closed the hood and walked back to the driver's side. He stuck the keys in the ignition, winced at me, and turned his hand. The engine started, and nothing exploded. Bobby breathed out heavily, patted the top of the car.

'But we didn't hear anything,' I said. 'No car.'

'Not surprised,' he said, and his voice was a little shaky with relief. 'Area like this it's easier to lose yourself in backyards than on the road. I'd stash a car downhill and come the last quarter mile on foot. Though if it had been me, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You hear the way it kept futzing after

the first explosion? Someone put it together in a hurry and screwed up.'

'What difference? Surely the first blast takes the whole lot up?'

'The sections got blown apart by the ignition charge. Someone tried to put together a real mother, and

it blew itself apart before it could go off properly.' 'If we'd been in the sitting room, it would have been enough.' I abruptly rubbed my face with my

hands. 'I guess Chip delivered the message.'

'Sure looks like it.'

'In which case…' I looked at my watch. 'They put this whole thing together in just over an hour,

including someone getting down here.' I noticed I was bleeding briskly from a gash on the back of my hand, and wiped my jacket over it.

'Like I said. They rushed it.'

'They may screw up on the details, but they're definitely on the case, wouldn't you say?' In the distance I could now hear the sound of approaching sirens, and across the road I saw front doors opening.

'They bombed my parents' house,' I said, incredulously, turning to look at it once more. 'Like, with a bomb.'

The burning house looked bizarre, a point of utter wrongness amongst a street of perfect little dwellings. I turned to look at Mary's house across the hedge. A few lights were on, and the front door was open.

'You're dealing with Grade-A cocksuckers,' Bobby agreed, slapping the top of the car again. 'And now let's leave.'

But by then I was running, slipping and careering down toward the gate. I heard Bobby swear and start after me. Near the end of the path I thrashed my way straight through the hedge and into Mary's front yard. I'd barely made it into her property before Bobby grabbed my shoulder and spun me round.

I shrugged him off, tried to keep walking up the yard. He reached for me again, but faltered when he saw what I'd seen, and then he was moving faster than me.

She was lying half on the porch, her head and shoulders tipped downward onto the steps, one arm thrown out by her side. At first I thought maybe a heart attack, until I saw the blood all over her, the pool already turning sluggish on the weathered wood. Bobby dropped to one knee beside her, supporting her head.

'Mary,' I said. 'Oh, Jesus Christ.'

Between us we pulled her gently round so that she was lying level. Her breathing was ragged. Enough light was thrown by the fire next door to make the lines in her face look like canyons. Bobby was searching through the folds of her clothing, finding hole after hole, trying to stanch blood that didn't seem to be flowing as fast as it should. She coughed, and a slug of something dark glotted up into her mouth.

Before this I had only ever seen an old woman, one of those people who clutter up the lanes of supermarkets and stand waiting for buses, who know or care about what gift people are supposed to give on which anniversary, who look papery and cold and as if they can never have been any other way.

People who can never have been drunk, or clambered over forbidden fences, or moved, giggling, so that someone else gets stuck with the wet patch in the bed. Dry old sticks who you cannot credit with having loved someone, not someone alive anyhow, not someone who wasn't just a memory, whose resting place was now decorated with fading flowers that only she remembered to bring. Now I saw someone else. Someone she'd once been and presumably remained, beneath the patina of failing cells and dry skin and wrinkle canyons and grey hair curled and cut short. Behind the disguise the years had conferred, behind the mistaken assumption that because of her age she had never been, and wasn't still, somebody real.

And then her throat clicked, and a full bladder voided, the smell warm and acrid. Her eyes seemed to go from moist to dry in an instant, as if fast-forwarded. Perhaps it was the coldness of the air, but it looked as if she'd been pulled away in front of our eyes, and pulled away fast.

Bobby looked slowly up at me. I stared back. I didn't have anything to say.

'What happened?' I asked. It was the first thing I had been able to say in ten minutes. 'What the hell happened back there?'

Bobby was peering hard through the windshield, whipping his head back and forth to look up side roads as we sped past them. All were early-evening quiet. Mary's body was two miles behind us now, still lying on her porch. It would receive medical attention there faster than we could have got it to a hospital, and anyway it was dead without hope of reprieve. Both Bobby and I knew that.

He shrugged. 'She got in the way. Like I said,

someone came in over the yards. She heard something, came out. So they emptied half a gun into her. I'm sorry, man.'

'Someone comes down here to blow me up, bringing a gun with a silencer just in case. A harmless old

lady gets in the way and they whack her. Just like that.'

'These people are serious, Ward, and they really don't like you at all.'

He yanked the car round a sharp left and then we were back down in the main part of town. A fire

truck flashed past us along the main drag, heading in very much the wrong direction to get to the house.

'Where the fuck is he going?'

A car behind us honked. Bobby and I turned as one and a guy in a pickup indicated that the lights

had changed and maybe we'd like to move. Bobby pulled out, and headed down the road after the fire truck.

'The truck's going the wrong way, Bobby.'

'I told them the address just as you told me. It was good enough to get me there.'

'But why the…' I stopped. We could both now see the orange light up ahead.

Bobby abruptly pulled over, without signalling. We got another stern honk from the oldster in the pickup, who turned to stare heavily at us as he passed. Neither of us really paid him much mind. We could see now that the Best Western, or at least a small part of it, was on fire. I stared at it in frank disbelief, wondering how Dyersburg had suddenly come to reside within one of the circles of Hell.

'Get closer,' I said, faintly.

He drove slowly, and after a block left the main drag to come around at the hotel along a side street. We stopped at the top, putting us about a hundred yards from the hotel. From here we could see that the fire was relatively small, only affecting a forty-yard stretch of one wing. The hotel would survive to host another convention. Four fire trucks were already in attendance, and a fifth joined them as we watched.

The other end of the street was already thronged with people, and more were walking quickly past the car, hurrying to get a better view of the excitement. Half of the town's police force appeared to be in attendance.

'That start round about where your room was?'

I didn't even answer. I felt sick. For some reason attacking the hotel felt like more of a personal wound than the house had done. I wondered if my neighbours had been in, the people in the rooms

around me.

'Ward, this message you sent them,' Bobby said, 'what exactly did you say?'

'This is ridiculous,' I said. 'This is completely out of hand.' Then: 'What about the house? What are

they…' 'They've probably got someone up there already. Other neighbours will have called it in. And before

you even get around to wondering, your stuff is safe.'

'What stuff?'

'Well, not your clothes. Look in the back.' I turned and saw my laptop bag in the backseat of the car.

'Never assume you've got refuge,' he said, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, and watching the fire. 'I'm a prospect man myself. Keep what you need within reach. I think now would be a good time to blow Dodge.'

I wanted to go up into the hills and kill someone. Bobby read my mind, and shook his head firmly. 'Once this fire is under control they're going to find which room went up first. Chances are they'll have taken more time and made it look halfway credible. But add it to the house and you're going to leap straight to Dyersburg's Most Wanted.'

'In what fucking sense? I didn't do anything.'

'There an insurance policy on your folks' house?'

'Yes.'

'Big one?'

I sighed. 'Probably. I didn't listen. And then they'll find Mary and some bright cop will decide to dust

her down just in case. That much blood, they may get some latents. Your prints on file, Bobby?'

'You know they are.'

'Mine, too. You're right. It's time to leave.'

Twenty minutes later we were at Dyersburg airport.

16

Zandt reached Beverly Boulevard at nine in the evening. He was exhausted, and his feet hurt a good deal. He was also drunk.

At 3.00 a.m. he'd stood outside the cinema where Elyse LeBlanc had last been seen. Cinemas look strange at that time, as do stores and restaurants. In the small hours they seem odd and arbitrary and edificial — as if we are explorers who have missed, by a bare decade or two, whatever civilization brought them into being. A few hours later he watched the house where Annette Mattison spent her last evening with a friend. He recognized the woman who came out at seven o'clock, dressed in a business suit, on her way to the television mines. Zandt had interviewed Gloria Neiden on more than one occasion. She had aged a great deal in the past two years. He wondered if she was still in touch with Frances Mattison. Their daughters had visited with each other many times, and always walked the three short blocks home. It was the usual arrangement. They lived, after all, in a very nice neighbourhood, up in Dale Lawns, 90210 — and surely one of the reasons why you paid seven figures for a house was so that you could walk under the stars after dark. Zandt suspected that the relationship between the two mothers would have become strained, if not altogether dead. When Zoë Becker had mentioned Monica Williams, her voice acquired a colourless tone — though the latter could hardly be held responsible for Sarah's electing to wait out the time until her father came to pick her up. Their small community had failed. When this happens, you ask what it's for, and look for someone to blame. The people within the walls are closest.

Zandt turned away as Mrs Neiden's car swished past. It was possible she would recognize him, and to have watched for longer would have made him feel unwelcomely like another man, the one who had stood outside her house, perhaps in the same spot, two years before.

He walked on. By late morning he had been in Griffith Park, at the place where Elyse's body had been found. There was nothing to mark the space, though for a while there had been flowers and he found the remains of a broken glass jar. He stood there for a long time, looking out over the hazy city, at the places where a million people worked and slept and lied, turning rank in the urban field.

It was soon after this that he first went into a bar. And, a little later, into another. He kept walking in between and afterward, but more slowly, feeling his sense of purpose bag around the seams. He had walked these routes many times. All they had brought him was blood and breakage. He could still hear the voices that had propelled him to his feet when Nina left, the cries of the missing — but obscured by daylight and rationality they were too faint to lead him anywhere. His shirt became untucked, and when he passed other pedestrians he was aware of their scrutiny. It's claimed that you can tell the police, especially a policeman, by his eyes, a gaze that measures and assays, that judges from a position of suspicion and strength. Zandt wondered if you could also tell someone who was not a cop any more, by the look of emasculation, of having turned away. He had known this city once, known it from inside. He had walked the streets as one to whom the residents turned in times of chaos. A part of the immune system. Now he lived without this sanction. He was no longer identified, was without fame or its equivalent in function. He was just a man on the street in a city where very few people walk — and where those who did regarded him with caution. It was a habitat as real as any steppe or shaded valley, no more different to the countryside than Death Valley was to Vermont, or Kansas to the bottom of the sea. The only distinction was in the people, the smog-stained and battle-weary. All the people.

By late afternoon he had stood, weaving slightly now, by the side of a side road in Laurel Canyon. The bushes that had once grown there had been uprooted and replaced with a stretch of pavement perhaps a couple of feet longer than Annette's body. By now he was quite drunk, but not so that he didn't spot the person watching him from the safety of the nice house across the road.

Within a few minutes a man emerged from the house. He was wearing jogging pants, a pale grey vest. He looked very healthy.

'Can I help you?'

'No,' Zandt said. He tried a smile, but the man wasn't having any of it. Had Zandt seen the result of his attempt, he probably wouldn't have blamed him.

The man sniffed. 'Are you drunk?'

'I'm just standing here a moment. Go back inside. I'll be gone soon.'

'What is it, anyway?' The man turned slightly, revealing that he was holding a phone in the hand behind his back.

Zandt looked at him. 'What?'

'That pavement thing. Why's it there? It's useless.'

'Somebody died there. Or was found there, dead.'

The man's face became more open. 'You knew them?'

'Not until she was dead.'

'So what do you care? What was she — a working girl?'

Zandt's throat constricted. Death's sliding scale, as if whores and addicts and young black men were little more than unwanted pets, as if they had never run laughing to the return of a parent, or said a first

word, or spent long nights wondering what their stocking would hold.

The man took a hurried step back. 'I'll call the cops,' he warned.

'They'd be too late. Maybe you'd rate one more slab of pavement, but I wouldn't bet on it.'

Zandt turned and walked away, leaving the man no different and no wiser.

When he finally reached Beverly Boulevard he went past the Hard Rock Cafe, tucking in his shirt and straightening his jacket, pulling his shoulders back. He walked into the Ma Maison hotel without incident, steered right and straight to the gents in the bar. A splash of water and no one but a barman could tell he didn't belong. He went back out into the bar and sat at a low table where he could see the street. After the miles of walking, the softness of the couch made him feel like he was sitting on a cloud. A pleasant young man promised to bring him a drink.

While he waited, Zandt looked out at the road where Josie Ferris had disappeared. It was not quite the last scene that related to the crimes, but he was unwilling to go and stand by the school Karen had attended, or outside the house where his family had once lived. And there was no point going back to that other, final place. It was a place he had created. Though it had a bearing, it couldn't help him now. It had not helped him then. Standing above the dead body of the man he had killed had done nothing but prove the fineness of the distinctions we turn into laws.

Jennifer had known what he had done. He told her, two days later, when the sweater had arrived. It had not been the death of them, not at first. She'd understood his actions, condoned everything except the mistake. They tried to hold it together. They failed. His position had been untenable. Either he bore the horror of Karen's disappearance and remained strong for his wife, while feeling like he was going to break apart into small sharp pieces: or he could reveal the pain he was in. When he did so he lost the male claim to strength without gaining any foothold on the high ground of revealed trauma that was the preserve of women. It was her job to express the outrage; it was his to withstand it.

He decided he could no longer pretend to be a policeman at around the same time that she decided to go back to her parents. Someone had stolen their golden egg, and the goose that laid it had died.

Now, when he looked back, he believed he had been most in the wrong. It was his rigidity that had enabled the fault lines to form. She would have let him be weak for a spell. Women are often wiser when it comes to understanding which rules can be allowed to bend. Relationships require flexibility, particularly in times of high stress, those periods when they feel like a desperate pact against a world of unbearable darkness. Strong pairings will fight to retain an equilibrium, regardless of short-term changes in balance. Though it was a double-edged consolation, this realization had enabled him to stay alive. Sometimes the key to regaining one's life is looking back at a terrible situation and realizing that you were partly to blame. Before you see this, you feel wronged, hurt — and cannot find any peace. But 'It's unfair' is the cry of a child, of someone who does not realize that causal relationships act in two directions. When you come to understand that you were also at fault, the pain slowly fades away. Once you realize that you made your own bed, it becomes easier to lie in it, however hard and soiled it may be.

When his Budweiser arrived he nursed it a while, ostensibly looking out of the window. In reality he was, as he had been all day, trying to see a set of facts differently. In a crime where there was no evidence to speak of, the best you could do was try new ways of fitting the information together. Most crimes, in their essence, boiled down to a single sentence. Fingerprints and an affair and a hastily concealed knife and debts and an exploded alibi; these were the business of the courts, requisites for tidying away. The true crime, in all its glory, boiled down to this: people killed each other. Husbands killed their wives. Women killed their menfolk, too, and parents their children, and children their parents, and strangers other strangers. People took things they didn't own. People set fire to places, for money, or because there were people inside. When each manifestation had been tucked away into its judicial drawer, the truth still remained at large. You could take any two people and put the word 'killed' between them.

Zandt had been able to make no headway in trying to work out what The Upright Man might want from his victims. Why they were being punished. Had they failed him by not loving him, not responding to his advances? Had they been too frightened, or not frightened enough? Had they failed by breaking, by not showing some of the strength he looked for and wished to steal?

He noticed that he'd finished his beer, and twisted in his seat, looking for the young waiter. There was no sign of him, though the other people dotted around the lounge seemed to have recently been served. He watched them for a while. Strangers, drinking alcohol to feel more comfortable. To sand off the edges of anxiety. Everybody did. Americans — except for a brief experiment that led to an explosion of crime never seen before or since. The Germans and French, heartily. The Russians, with melancholy seriousness. The English, too, beery maniacs. They spent their hours in bars and pubs and at home, making everything blurred. They needed the fizzing mask, the glue.

Eventually a man appeared. He was dressed in black with a white shirt, exactly as the previous barman had been — but ten years older and considerably less sunny in demeanour. Whereas the younger man's hopes of selling a screenplay or shouting 'Cut!' were probably still fresh, this man appeared on the edge of a curdled acceptance that Hollywood's actresses would continue to survive without his good loving. He regarded Zandt suspiciously, waiter radar telling him that this was a man who was neither resident in the hotel nor waiting to meet anyone in particular.

'Same again, sir?' Said with an inclined head, a gesture of cordial irony: we both understand that Sir is not of the type one prefers, is moreover somewhat drunk, and not clad to an adequate standard.

'Where's the other guy?'

'Other 'guy', sir?'

'The waiter who served me before.'

'Shift change. Don't worry. It'll be the same beer.'

As the waiter walked off, languidly, bouncing his tray on his knee, Zandt briefly considered shooting him. As a lesson to all the other waiters who somehow managed to suggest that the people paying their wages were scum. A long-overdue wake-up call. Perhaps word would get out to the store assistants, too, even the ones on Rodeo Drive. Zandt could still, would always, remember an incident that had taken place one anniversary afternoon six or seven years before. An occasion when he had taken his wife to an expensive store to buy a blouse, and they had left soon afterwards; Jennifer awkwardly clutching a bag, Zandt shaking with unexpressed fury. She had seldom worn the shirt. It was stained by how small she had been made to feel while buying it.

The memory made him feel far worse than he had before. He was sliding one of the remaining pieces of stationery closer, intending to make notes on something — anything — when suddenly he paused. He could see the waiter, standing behind the counter in the next section of the bar, pouring out his beer.

It was a Budweiser. Same as he'd had last time. That was to be expected. The previous waiter would have left a chit showing how much he owed, what he had been served so far.

An indication of what he wanted, in other words.

Of what his preferences were.

When the waiter arrived with the beer, he found an empty seat and a ten-dollar bill.

17

The house was high up in the Malibu hills. It was small, and unusual, arranged as a series of rooms like a tiny motel. To get from one living area to the next you went outside and walked along a covered path, re-entering the building via another outer door. It stood on the edge of a cliff and was approached down a steep and twisting lane that was inadequately lit. It wasn't somewhere you'd find yourself by accident. It was cheap to rent, despite its position, because it was on unstable ground and one step away from being condemned. The combined living room and kitchen area, which was large and glass-sided and easily the best feature, had a crack across the centre of its concrete floor. You could get most of a fist down into it, and the sides differed in height by over two inches. Outside, on the landward side of the lot, was a small swimming pool. It was empty, the pipes having been melted in a brushfire years before she'd come to live there. It took a certain courage to sleep at night.

Nina had spent the evening on the patio, at the rear of the house, her back against the wall and legs splayed out in front of her. Usually the view was of the ocean, with just a few trees and bushes before the land shaded sharply away. No other houses were visible. Tonight the sea was invisible, too, obscured behind a mist that seemed to start at the ends of her feet. It was sometimes this way, and she wondered if she didn't prefer it. A place on the edge of being, in which anything could happen. She had meant to bring a glass of wine out with her, but forgot. Once she had sat down she seemed becalmed, unable to summon the will to go back in and confront the refrigerator.

She had spent the day looking for Zandt. He had not been at the hotel, nor on the Promenade, or anywhere else she had tried. Early evening she had driven all the way out to sit and watch the house where he had once lived. Other people owned it now, and he had not appeared. She had driven home again. So all she could do was sit. The living room behind her was lined with bookshelves filled with texts and papers and notes. She did not wish to look at any of them. She didn't want to talk to anyone in the Bureau. Her position there was not as it had been before. The Upright Man had sidelined her career — not because of their failure to apprehend him, though that had not helped. Rather because she had continued to leak information to a policeman who had been ordered not to interfere after the disappearance of his daughter. Agents had lost their jobs for far less. She had managed to keep hers, but things were different now. Once she'd had Monroe's ear, had been a comer. Now their relationship felt stretched and tired.

She felt alone, and afraid. Her fear was unconnected with the loneliness. She was used to solitude and did not mind it, despite a nature that yearned for something else. She had ended the affair with Zandt for one reason only. The more she came to care about him, the less she had felt willing to destroy the life he already had. The fact that it had been destroyed anyway had made it impossible to explain this fact to him when he asked. Not impossible, perhaps: sentences could have been framed to convey the information. But somewhere within them might have been something that betrayed her. Betrayed the fact that, two weeks after Karen's disappearance, she had witnessed a thought that had floated unbidden across the back of her mind. That if this thing had been going to happen, the destruction of this family, she might as well have been the one to do it.

There had been other men in the meantime, though not many, and there would presumably be more. Finding men was no real problem, at least the ones you had little desire to keep. It was more the despair that ground her down, the endless procession of terrible events. If this was what we were like, then perhaps there was nothing to be done. If you looked at what our species did to its own kind and to other animals, you had to ask if we didn't deserve whatever we had coming to us, whatever autonemesis we brought merrily into being; if the rough beasts that slouched towards Bethlehem were anything more than our own prodigal children, coming home.

At about nine-thirty she stood up and went back inside. As she opened the fridge, which held nothing except a half-drunk bottle of wine, she kept half an eye on the small television on the counter. More

coverage of the killings in England, though with the sound turned down she could not tell what was being said, or revealed, or alleged. Some dismal facts or other, some new reason to feel sad.

She shut the door again, the bottle untouched, and leaned for a moment with her face against its cool surface.

She looked up when she heard a sound from outside. After a moment the noise resolved into the sound of tyres on the gravel of the road. She walked quickly across the room, stepping over the crack, and got a gun from her bag.

The car came to a halt outside, and she heard a muffled conversation. Then the sound of a door slamming shut, and the noise of tyres again, reversing back up the drive. Footsteps, and a knock on the door. Hand behind her back, she went to open it.

Zandt stood outside. He looked breathless, and a little drunk.

'Where the hell have you been?'

'All over.' He walked into the room, stopped, and looked around. 'I love what you've done with the

place.'

'I haven't done anything to it.'

'That's what I mean. It looks exactly the same.'

'Not every chick is obsessed with interior decoration.'

'Yeah, they are. I think you must be a man in disguise.'

'Damn. You got me.' She stood with arms folded. 'What do you want?'

'Just to tell you I killed the right man after all.'

By the time she came out onto the patio with the bottle, he had already started talking.

'The problem was that we couldn't work it like other cases. It didn't respond to normal investigative procedure. When people disappear you trace back through the contacts, work it down. You talk to the families, their friends, the people in their environments. You're looking for an intersection. A bar they went to at different times on different nights. Memberships to the same gym. A friend of a friend of a friend. Some point of confluence that says these people are linked by something other than now being dead. By something before, something that led to their deaths. With The Upright Man we had multiple disappearances but only superficial similarities. Same sex, same age, more or less. All pretty. So what? There's boys sitting in rooms all over the city praying for girls like this. Women, come to that. It's a consensual desire, not psychopathology. Apart from the long hair. That's the only thing that can be pointed at, the only preference — along with the fact the girls came from families where money isn't a big issue. They're not runaways, they're not junkies. Which just means that what he did was more difficult, because girls like this are harder to steal. It's not a lead.'

He paused. Nina waited. He wasn't looking at her. He didn't even seem aware of her presence. He stood on the very edge of the patio. From the doorway his outline looked indistinct. When he started again, he spoke more slowly.

'A man is looking for something. He has an anxiety, something that can only be resolved through a certain course of action, which he has become aware of through accident or trial and error. He hasn't allowed it to happen for a while. He's been good. He hasn't done the bad thing. He's kept himself to himself, and not done anyone any harm. He's never going to do it again. He's not weak — he doesn't need it. Not now, maybe not ever. Maybe he's never going to do it again. Maybe he can leave it behind.

Maybe it's over.

'But gradually… it stops being okay. It starts getting harder. His concentration goes. He finds he can't function. He can't focus on his job, his family, his life. He's getting tense. Ideas start recurring, patterns of fantasy. He's becoming anxious, and what makes it worse is that he knows what is causing it. He knows the only thing that is going to resolve it. He begins to revisit old campaigns in his head, but they don't help. He may find it difficult to remember them in any detail. They don't diminish the way he's feeling now. It's yesterday's news. You can't resolve a current anxiety through something that has already happened: last year's good times do not combat this week's misery. He needs something in front of him, something he hasn't done yet. Not even the talismans help, the things he kept, the proof that he's done it before. All they do is remind him that it's possible. He needs to do it so much and knows that he can't live without it

— and in any event, no matter how hard he tries, he's already done it and there can never be any real peace or any hope of forgiveness. His life is tainted and he can't go back.

'And so, accidentally, almost, he starts looking again. He may tell himself that this is all he is doing. Looking. That he is more in control now. That this time he will only look, not take. But he will start looking again, and once he has taken this step there can be only one outcome. He will forget how bad he felt last time, as the memory of a hangover will not stop you drinking next Friday night. He may have done it so many times that he no longer feels bad about it even in prospect. It may be the only thing that has meaning to him. He will go to a place he's been before, or somewhere like it. He will have a plan by now. This is a dangerous business, and he will have developed ways of reducing the risk. This is where the intersections come into play, because the intersections are the man, and lie at the heart of his paths. They come from the places where he feels safe, where he wanders as himself. Some will think of it as a hunting ground. Others will just think of it as somewhere they blend in, or where nobody watches, where they're invisible. Where he is not weak, but has power; where he is not part of the crowd, but above it. His hidden places, the ones where people come to find him, where the thing he is looking for walks in out of the evening and into a night he has planned for them. He will watch for a while, and then finally one night, when the girl turns as she walks down the street, she will see someone behind her and then it will all be over until it's time to clean up and feel sick and promise God or whoever you think listens that he will never, ever do it again.'

'And that's how you found him,' Nina prompted.

'No. We found nothing that tied all the girls together. We never came close to finding the man because we could never work out where he'd first seen the girls. That's why, when Karen disappeared, I ended up falling back on the places the girls had been taken from. They were the only sites we knew were linked to the killer. It was all I had left. There's no link. No way of finding one. Except… last time he did come back. He came back to visit a site, and I thought it was to relive what had happened there. And once I'd seen him at two of them, I believed he was the man. And so I tracked him, and I found

him.'

'But then,' Nina said, choosing her words carefully, 'you discovered that he wasn't the man after all.'

'Wrong. The man I killed was the man who abducted some of the girls.'

'Are you saying the one now is a copycat?'

'No. I'm saying I killed the waiter, not the man who ordered the beer.'

'I don't understand.'

'The man who sent the parcels was different from the one who abducted the girls.'

Nina stared at him. 'The Upright Man decides he needs a girl, and he just puts in an order? And then

this guy just goes out and snatches them to order? Like a fucking pizza delivery?' 'That's why no more girls disappeared after Karen, even though someone delivered the package. The man who abducted them was gone. The killer was still alive.'

'But serial killers don't work that way. Okay, there's been a few who worked in pairs. Leonard Lake and Charles Ng. John and Richard Darrow. The Wests, depending how you look at it. But nothing like this.'

'Not until now,' he agreed. 'But we live in a changing world, where everything is bigger, brighter and better. Convenient. On-demand.'

'Then how come there were no links between all of the girls? The abductor must have had a standard MO, like you said. We should have been able to find it.'

'If it was the same man each time.'

Nina just looked at him, and blinked. 'There were two abductors?'

'Maybe more. Why not?'

'Because, John, because The Upright Man has only taken one potential victim in the last two years. Sarah Becker.'

'Who says it's just him?' He picked up the wine bottle, found it was empty. 'You must have some more wine somewhere.'

Nina followed him as he walked back into the house. He opened the fridge, stared with disbelief at its emptiness.

'John, I don't have anything more to drink. What do you mean, who says it's just him?'

'How many serial killers you got working in California at this time?'

'At least seven, maybe as many as eleven. Depends how you define…'

'Exactly. And those are the ones you know about. In one state, and a state that comes way down the rankings. Call it a hundred and fifty nationwide, and say ten to fifteen of them can afford twenty thousand a pop. Maybe more. Maybe a lot more. That's a client base. A big one. You could get a fucking bank loan on the back of that business plan.'

'Even if you're right, which frankly remains to be proved, how does this help us find Sarah Becker?'

'It doesn't,' he admitted, and his nervous energy abruptly disappeared. He rubbed his forehead with

his fingers, hard. 'I assume the Feds are still running down any lines leading from the family?'

Nina nodded.

'Well,' he said, sounding tired and defeated. 'Then I guess we just wait.' He was watching the mute television. They were still doing a wrap-up of recent mass murders, background to the high street massacre in England. 'Have you been following this?'

'I've tried not to,' she said. They stood in the kitchen and watched it together awhile. There was no real news. They still didn't know why the man might have done it. A search of his house had turned up some generic hate literature, another gun, a computer full of porn, and a very bad painting of a number of dark figures against a white background, like wraiths in front of snow.

None of it was judged to be important.

18

'You have to give me something more than water,' Sarah had said. Her voice sounded weak, even to herself. She had repeated this sentence many times. It had become

the first thing she said every time the lid was removed.

'Don't you like the water?'

'I like the water. Thank you for the water. But I need something more. You have to give me

something more than water.'

'What do you want?'

'I need food. Something to eat.' She coughed. She seemed to be coughing a lot now, and when she did it made her feel nauseous.

'We eat too much these days,' the man said. 'Far too much. It's killed for us and grown by the ton and then delivered to our door and we sit like pigs at the trough. We're not even hunters any more. Just scavengers. Hyenas with coupons who pick through the shrink-wrapped leavings of people we've never

even met.'

'If you say so. But I have to eat.'

'I have to eat I have to eat I have to eat,' the man chanted. He seemed to like the sound the words

made, and continued repeating the sentences for some minutes. Then he was silent for a while, before observing: 'Once we would go for days without food. We were

lean.'

'Right, the Great Depression. Dust Bowl years, blah.'

The man laughed. 'That was yesterday and of no interest to us. I meant before the invasion.'

'The invasion?' Sarah asked — thinking: Okay, here we get to it. Little green men. The Russians. The Jews. Whatever. She coughed violently again, and for a moment everything went white in front of her eyes, and when he answered his voice sounded as if it was coming from a long way off or as if he was using one of those things like Cher did when she sang 'Believe'.

'Yes, invasion. What else would you call it?' he asked.

She swallowed, screwed her eyes shut and then opened them again. 'I wouldn't call it anything. I'm

too hungry.'

'You can't have any food.'

Something in the man's voice made her suddenly very afraid. He didn't sound like he meant she just couldn't have any today. He sounded like he meant she couldn't have any, period. In a surprisingly short time she had adapted to her current circumstances, aided by an increasing sense of dislocation. But the threat of nothing to eat, ever, was enough to momentarily jog her completely back to reality.

'Look,' she said, voice unsteady now, 'you must want something from me. There must be some reason you are doing this. Please just get on with what you want and either kill me or give me some food. I have to have something to eat.'

'Open your mouth.'

She did so eagerly, saliva immediately flooding into her mouth. For a moment nothing happened, and then a hand appeared. It wasn't holding anything that looked like food, but only a small piece of white paper. The hand pressed it to her tongue briefly, and then withdrew. Sarah started to cry.

The man said nothing for a while, and then tutted. 'No change,' he said. 'Stubborn little genome.' The piece of white paper fluttered down into the hole to lie beside her. 'You haven't really learned anything,

have you?'

She sniffed. 'You haven't told me anything.'

'I'm beginning to wonder about you,' he said. 'I thought you were different. That you might change. I

came for you personally. I had plans for us. But now I'm Wondering if you'll do after all.'

'Oh yes? Why's that?'

'You're lazy and spoiled and not coming on very well.'

'Yeah? Well you're a wacko.'

'And you're a silly little bitch.'

'Fuck you,' she said. 'You're a fucking nutcase and I'm going to escape and smash your head in.

She kept her mouth shut as he poured the water.

He hadn't come back for a long time.

19

We got to Hunter's Rock at three o'clock in the morning, after a short flight and a long drive. When we landed in Oregon I drove down the highway over the state line, and then along roads that I recalled from long ago — feeling as if I were retracing the steps of an explorer I'd only read about, rather than revisiting old ground of my own. Gradually we began to pass places I had known better, and it got harder. I chose routes that I would not have taken for directness. I think Bobby realized. He didn't say anything.

Eventually we stopped at an old motel I didn't recognize, twenty miles out of town. I had been all for sleeping in the car, but Bobby, ever practical, pointed out we'd do a better day's work if we got a few hours in a bed. We walked over and banged on the door to the office. After a pretty long time a man in a T-shirt and pyjamas emerged, and was frank in expressing his dissatisfaction at our presence. We allowed that the hour was late, but suggested that now he was awake he might as well turn a buck by giving us a twin room.

He took a long look at us. 'You a couple of perverts?'

We looked back at him, and he evidently decided that worse than renting to two potential homosexuals was the prospect of having those same homosexuals beat the living crap out of him in the middle of the night. He handed me a key.

Bobby lay down on one of the beds and went straight to sleep. I tried to do the same, but couldn't get it to stick. Eventually I got back up and left the room. I bought a pack of cigarettes from the machine and went out to the centre of the old court, where a rusty fence surrounded the remains of a swimming pool. I pulled a battered chair up to one end and sat there in the darkness. There was no light apart from the dusty pink of the VACANCY sign over the office, a smudge of moon, some glints off peeling hard surfaces. I got out the gun Bobby had given me and looked at it for a while. It didn't have much of interest to say, so I put it back in my jacket.

Instead I stared at the shadows of the empty pool, wondering how long it had been empty. Quite a time, by its appearance: the sides were cracked and the six inches of sludge at the bottom looked as if it could have provided the forum for the first emergence of life. Once it had been full of cool water, and families would have gratefully dispatched their children to it, glad of the relief after a long drive. The sign for the motel, faded and unloved though it was, dated it to the late fifties. I could picture the way life had been then, but only as still images: snapshots of the glory years, the colours slightly off and everything frozen in an advertisement for the kind of life we've always been promised is inevitable. A backyard of sweetness and light, cookouts and firm handshakes, of hard work and true love and fair play. The way life is supposed to be. Instead we wander about, short on charisma and direction and script — and in the end the whole business just stops and we realize no one was watching anyway. We're so used to events being portrayed in particular ways that when they actually happen to us, and our life bears no resemblance to expectation, we don't really know how we're supposed to respond. Our lives are unrecognizable to us. Should we still try to be happy, when everything seems so flawed and out of kilter and grey? How are we supposed to be content, when everything on television is so much better?

I believed that Bobby had already found the truth, and that my birth was not recorded in Hunter's Rock, but I had to check for myself. All of the time I'd been driven around by Chip Farling, my childhood had been pulling at me with cold fingers. If my parents had gone somewhere else for my birth, maybe it wasn't that important. Could be they'd gone away for the weekend, a last chance before their family expanded, and had been caught short somewhere far from home. But surely that was the kind of story you tell your child, the kind of anecdote that makes each life unique? I could only assume that it had

not been revealed because of the fact that wherever this birth had taken place, it had been of twins. Why this should have made a difference, and why they had done what they had gone on to do, I still had no idea. Perhaps this was the gap that I had unconsciously sculpted my life around. Everyone feels that way some of the time. But I felt it a lot. And maybe I'd finally found out why.

I don't know how long the noise had been going on. Not long, I think. But gradually I realized that I could hear a quiet lapping sound. It seemed very close by, so close that I turned in my seat. There was nothing behind me. When I turned round again I realized I had misjudged the direction, and that it was coming from the far end of the pool. It was a little too dark to see, but it sounded as if water was sloshing quietly into the far end. I sat forward in my chair, surprised. The water in the pool was getting a little deeper: slowly, but noticeably. It was no longer only a few inches deep, but about a foot. It was only then that I realized that there were two people in the pool. Right down at the far end. One was a little taller than the other, and both were at first no more than bulky shadows. They were holding hands as they struggled forward, pushing against the viscous water as it rose. The watery sounds got louder as the pool began to fill more quickly, and the movement of the figures became more vigorous as they tried to come up toward the shallow end, up towards me.

By now the moonlight had caught their features and I knew it was my mother and father. They could have made better progress if they had let go of each other, but they didn't. Even after the water was over their waists, their hands were linked under the surface. I think they saw me. They were looking in my direction, at least. My father's mouth opened and closed, but if he made any sound it never reached me. Their free arms cut down into the heavy water, but made no splashes, and still it got deeper. It made no difference how close they got. The pool did not become more shallow. The water did not stop rising. It did not stop even after it had gone up to their chins, even after it had begun to slop over the edges of the pool and spill like dark mercury around my feet. My mother's eyes were calm until the end: it was my father in whom I saw panic, for the first time in my life, and it was his hand that was the last thing visible, as they almost reached the end, still sinking, but reaching up for me.

When my eyes flew open it was dawn, and Bobby was standing over me, shaking his head.

I sat up, eyes wide, and saw that my pack of cigarettes was no longer in my lap but lying in the six inches of crap at the bottom of the pool. I looked at Bobby, and he winked.

'Must have twitched in your sleep,' he said.

By late morning it had been confirmed. No Ward Hopkins, no Hopkins of any flavour, had ever been born in Hunter's Rock. I talked to a nice young lady behind a desk, who said she'd see if she could find any other information. I couldn't see what else would be helpful, and it soon became apparent that she couldn't either but was trying to help out of a combination of compassion and boredom. I gave her my number and left.

Bobby was standing on the pavement outside, talking on his phone. I looked dumbly up and down the street until he was finished. Even though I'd known it was coming, I felt dispossessed. It was like being sat down and told that you hadn't come out of your mother's tummy after all, but really had been deposited under a bush by a stork. I'd had my tonsils removed in that little hospital, visited it to get two separate sets of stitches in youthful knees. On each occasion I'd believed that I had been revisiting the place where I'd been born.

'Well, my friend,' Bobby said eventually. 'The upstanding men and women of the Dyersburg police department would surely like to know where you are. You'll be gratified to hear that this appears to be out of a concern for your well-being. At the moment.'

'And the house?'

'Extensive damage to living room and hallway, chunk of lower stairway destroyed. But not burned to the ground.'

'So what now?'

'Show me your old house,' he said.

I looked at him. 'Why?'

'Well, honey, because you're big and blond and gorgeous and I want to know everything about you.'

'Fuck off,' I suggested, supporting the notion with a weary hand gesture. 'It's a dumb and pointless idea.'

'You got any better suggestions? This doesn't look like a town with limitless entertainment options.'

I took us out along the main street. I couldn't work out whether it was the new or the old stuff that looked most unfamiliar. The most noticeable thing was that the old Jane's Market had been knocked down, replaced by a small Holiday Inn with one of the new-style boxy little signs. I miss the big old googie ones. I really do. I don't understand why rectangles are supposed to be better.

When we were nearly there I drove more slowly, and finally pulled over on the opposite side. It had been ten years since I'd last looked at the house, maybe more. It looked pretty much the same — though it had been repainted in the intervening time and the trees and shrubs around it had changed. A family vehicle of Far Eastern provenance was parked in the drive, and three bikes were stowed neatly around the side.

After a minute I saw a shape passing behind the front window and then disappearing from sight. Just a nondescript suburban dwelling, but it looked like a gingerbread house in a fairy tale. Its reality was too strong, too compelling, as if overloaded with MSG. I tried to remember exactly when I'd last been inside. It seemed inconceivable that I hadn't wanted to visit again before it passed into someone else's hands. Had I really been so bad at seeing how things might one day be different?

'Are you ready for this?'

I realized that my hands were shaking a little. I turned to him. 'Ready for what?'

'Going inside.'

'I'm not going inside.'

'Yes you are,' he said, patiently.

'Bobby — have you lost your mind? Somebody else lives there now. There's no way I'm going in that

house.'

'Listen to me. Couple of years ago my old man died. Didn't matter much to me — we got on like shit. But my mother called, asked me home for the burial. I was busy. Didn't make it. Six months later I realized I was acting kind of weird. Nothing you'd put your finger on. Things were just stressing me out. All the time. Getting anxious when there was nothing specific to make me that way. A panic attack kind

of thing, I guess. Holes kept opening in front of me.'

I didn't know what to say. He wasn't looking in my direction, but staring straight out of the windshield.

'In the end some work brought me close to home, so I went to see my mother in Rochford. It's not like she and I were best pals either. But it was good to see her. Maybe 'good' isn't the right word. Useful. She looked different. Smaller. And on the way out of town I stopped by the graveyard, stood by the old man's plot for a while. It was a sunny afternoon and there was no one else around. And his ghost, his ghost came right up out of the soil in front of me and said, 'Listen, Bobby, chill.''

I stared at him. He laughed quietly. 'Of course not. I didn't feel his presence, or become any more reconciled to the way he'd been. But since then I don't feel so anxious. I think about death sometimes, and I'm more careful in what I do and I'm more open to the idea of settling down one of these years. But the weird thing went away. I found the ground again.' He looked at me. 'Loose ends are the death of people, Ward. You think you're protecting yourself but all you're doing is opening little cracks. You let too many open up at once, the whole thing is going to fall to dust and you'll find yourself like a starving dog wandering the streets in the night. And you, my friend, have got a whole lot of cracks appearing at this time.'

I opened the door and got out of the car.

'If they'll let me.'

'They'll let you,' he said. 'I'll wait for you here.'

I stopped. I guess I thought he'd be coming with me. 'It's your house,' he said. 'And we knock on that

door together, whoever opens it is going to think they're going to be starring in the mortuary end of an episode of Forensic Detectives.'

I walked up the driveway, and knocked on the door. The porch was tidy and well-swept.

A woman appeared, smiled. 'Mr Hopkins?' she said.

After a beat I got it, and simultaneously cursed and glorified Bobby's name. He'd called ahead, pretended to be me, and laid the groundwork. I wondered what he'd've done if I'd refused.

'That's right,' I said, coming up to speed. 'You're sure you don't mind?'

'Not at all.' She stood aside to usher me in. 'You were lucky to catch me earlier. I'm afraid I have to go out again soon though.'

'Of course,' I said. 'Just a few minutes would be great.'

The woman, who was in middle age and pretty and nice enough to be someone's mother on television, asked if I wanted coffee. I said no but there was some already made and in the end it was easier to accept. While she fetched it I stood in the hallway and looked around. Everything had changed. The woman, whatever her name was (I couldn't ask, as in theory I'd spoken to her earlier), was not unfamiliar with the stenciller's art. In a Pottery Barn kind of way it looked rather better than when we'd lived there.

Then we walked around. The woman didn't need to explain why she accompanied me. I thought it pretty unusual that she would let a man into her house just on the basis of a phone call: a desire to keep half an eye on her belongings was entirely natural. I was soon able to make sufficient comment on the way things had been when she moved in that even this mild guardedness disappeared, and she busied herself with stuff in the background. I wandered through each of the rooms, and then up the stairs. I took a brief look in what had been my parents' room and the spare room, both of which had been largely alien territory to me. Then I girded myself for the final area.

When the door to my old room was open, I swallowed involuntarily. I took a couple of paces in, then stopped. Green walls, brown carpet. A few boxes and some old chairs, a broken fan and most of a child's bike.

I discovered that the woman was standing behind me.

'Haven't changed a thing,' she admitted. 'View's better from the other room, so my daughter sleeps in there even though it's a little smaller. We just store a few things here. I'll see you downstairs.'

With that she disappeared. I stood a few minutes in the room, just turning around, seeing it from different angles. It was maybe twelve feet square, and seemed both very small and bigger than Africa. The space you grew up in is not like normal space. You know it so intimately, have sat and stood and lain down in its every corner. It's where you think many things for the first time, and as a result it stretches like the time before Christmas, as you live there and wait to grow up. It holds you.

'This is my room,' I said, quietly and to myself. Seeing it on the video had been strange. But this was not. The place I'd come from hadn't changed. Not everything in my life had been erased. I shut the door again on the way out, as if to keep something in.

Downstairs the woman was perched against the table in the kitchen. 'Thank you,' I said. 'You've been very kind.'

She shushed this away, and I looked around the kitchen for a moment. The appliances had been updated, but the cabinets were still the same: strong and made of good wood, they'd presumably found no reason to replace them. My father's handiwork lived on.

It was then that I remembered the evening from long ago, eating lasagne with him. A cloth hung on an oven handle, a game of pool that didn't work out. I opened my mouth and then shut it again.

Stepping out of the house was one of the strangest things, the act of leaving that particular inside to return to the outside where I lived now. I was almost surprised to see the big white car on the other side of the street, Bobby still sitting inside, and I noticed how much cars look like huge bugs these days.

I waved to the woman and walked down the path, not quickly, just as you normally would. By the time I was opening the car door the house was shut again behind me, shut and left behind.

Bobby was sitting reading the rental agreement for the car. 'Jesus, these things are boring,' he said. 'I mean, really. They should hire some writer. Get him to spice

it up a little.'

'You're a bad man,' I said. 'But thank you.'

He shoved the sheaf of papers back in the glove compartment. 'So I guess we've done with Hunter's

Rock.'

'No, I don't think so.'

'What's on your mind?'

'How about they already knew, when we were born, that they were going to do what they did.

Maybe, I don't know — maybe they thought they could only support one child or something.'

Bobby looked dubious. 'I know,' I admitted. 'But either way, say they knew they were going to get rid of one of us. But they also knew that one day they were going to die, and that I might do what I'm doing now. I might come home, look around. And I might find out from the hospital that I'd been one of two.'

'So they have you born somewhere else, and in that case all you find out is there's a minor mystery

about which particular hospital you arrived in, not that you had a twin they abandoned.'

'That's what I'm thinking.'

'But how come the Agency didn't find a problem when you joined?'

'I was very useful to them at the time. My guess is they skimped on the background checks for

expedience, and by then I'm one of the team and who cares?' Bobby considered it. 'Best we've got. But this is still weird. Your parents went to all that trouble to

hide this, why then leave documentary evidence of what they did?'

'Maybe something happened recently that meant they changed their minds about letting me know.'

I realized that the woman might be watching out of the window, so I started the car up and pulled

away.

'I'm thinking that maybe we've been looking in the wrong directions. There are three chunks on that video. First one shows a place I could go find. The Halls. Last one tells me something I didn't know.

Middle section shows two places. First the house, where I've just been, thanks to you. Nothing there. The other was a bar. I don't recognize it. It's nowhere I've ever been.'

'So?' We were at a junction.

'Bear with me,' I said, and took a left. A turn that would eventually lead us, assuming it was still there, to a bar I used to go to.

20

It was never a place you'd go on purpose, unless chance had made it your habitual haunt. I was expecting it to have gone one of two ways: spruced up with an eating room addition and lots of perky waitresses in red-and-white, or bulldozed and under cheap housing where people shouted a lot after dark. In fact, progress seemed to have simply ignored Lazy Ed's altogether: unlike genteel decay, which had settled into it like damp.

The interior was empty and silent. The wood of the bar and the stools looked about as scuffed up as they always had. The pool table was still in place, along with most of the dust, some of it maybe even mine. There were a few additions here and there, high-water marks of progress. The neon MILLER sign had been replaced with one for Bud Lite, and the calendar on the wall showed young ladies closer to their natural state than it had in my day. Natural, at least, in their state of undress, if not in the shape or constitution of their breasts. Somewhere, probably hidden very well, would be a plaque warning pregnant women against drinking — though had such a person been coming here for her kicks the warning would likely be lost on her on account of her being blind or deranged. Women have higher standards. That's why they're a civilizing influence on young men. You have to find somewhere nice to get them drunk.

Bobby leaned back against the pool table, gazing around. 'Same as it ever was?'

'Like I never went away.'

I went up to the bar, feeling nervous. I used to just call out Ed's name. That was twenty years ago, and doing it now would be like going back to school and expecting the teachers to recognize you. The last thing anyone needs is to learn that in the grand scheme of things they were always just 'some kid'.

A man emerged from out the back, wiping his hands on a cloth that could only be making them dirtier. He raised his chin in a greeting that was cordial but of limited enthusiasm. He was about my age, maybe a little older, fat, and already going bald. I love it when I see contemporaries losing their hair. It perks me right up.

'Hi,' I said. 'Was looking for Ed.'

'Found him,' he replied.

'The one I had in mind would be about thirty years older.'

'You mean Lazy. He ain't here.'

'You can't be an Ed junior.' Ed didn't have any kids. He wasn't even married.

'Shit no,' the man said, as if disquieted by the idea. 'Just a coincidence. I'm the new owner. Have

been since Ed retired.'

I tried to hide my disappointment. 'Retired.' I didn't want to seem too pushy.

'Couple years. Still,' the guy said. 'Saved me having to make a new sign.'

'Whole place looks the same, actually,' I ventured.

The man shook his head wearily. 'Don't I know it. When Lazy sold up he made a condition. Said he

was selling a business, not his second home. Had to be left this way until he died.'

'And you went for it?'

'I got it very cheap. And Lazy is pretty old.'

'How's he going to know whether you kept the agreement?'

'Still comes in. Most every day. You wait around, chances are you'll see him.' He must have seen me smile, and added: 'One thing though. He may not be quite the way you remember him.'

I started a tab, and went over to where Bobby was sitting. We drank beer and played pool for a while. Bobby won.

We kept the beers coming, and after I'd lost interest in losing any more games Bobby spent an hour practising shots. My dad would have approved of his dedication. We had the bar to ourselves for a long while, and then a few people started to drift in. By the end of the afternoon Bobby and I still constituted about a third of the clientele. I'd lightly quizzed Ed on what time Lazy usually came by, but apparently it was completely unpredictable. I thought about asking for his address, but something told me the guy wouldn't give it up and that the question would make him suspicious. Early evening there was a rush. A whole four people came in at once. None of them was Ed.

Then at seven, something happened.

Bobby and I were playing pool again by then. He wasn't beating me so easily by this point. Somebody had put classic Springsteen on the jukebox and it felt weirdly as if I could have been playing twenty years ago, in the days of hair gel and pushed-up sleeves. I was getting drunk enough to be verging on nostalgic for the 1980s, which is never a good sign.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the door to the bar open. Still leaning over the table, I watched to see who'd come in. I got just a glimpse. A face, pretty old. Looking right at me. And then whoever it was turned tail and went.

I shouted to Bobby, but he'd already seen. He ran straight across the floor and had crashed out the door before I'd even dropped my cue.

Outside it was dark and a car was on the move and fast. A battered old Ford, spraying gravel as it fishtailed out of the lot. Bobby was swearing fit for competition standard and I quickly saw why: some

asshole had blocked us in with a big red truck. He turned, saw me. 'Why'd he run?'

'No idea. You see which way he went?'

'No.' He turned and kicked the nearest truck.

'Get the car started.'

I ran back inside and straight up to the bar. 'Whose is the truck?'

A guy dressed in denim raised his hand.

'Get it the fuck out of the way or we're going to shove it clean off the lot.'

He stared at me a moment, and then got up and went outside.

I turned to Ed. 'That was him, right? Guy who ran?'

'Guess he didn't want to talk to you after all.'

'Well that's a shame,' I said. 'Because it's going to happen regardless. I need to talk with him about

old times. I'm feeling so nostalgic I could just shit. So where does he live?'

'I ain't telling you that.'

'Don't fuck with me, Ed.'

The man started to reach under the counter. I pulled my gun out and pointed it at him. 'Don't do that

either. It isn't worth it.'

Young Ed put his hands back in view. I was aware of the bar's other patrons watching, and hoped none of them was in the mood for trouble. Folks can get very protective of the people who serve their beer. It's an important bond.