The Straw Men Read online

  Then the man went quiet for a moment. Sarah was thinking that it was time for her to windowshop her way down to dinner. She was gathering herself to say good night, when he turned and looked at her.

  'You're very pretty,' he said.

  This might or might not be true—Sarah's opinion was currently fiercely divided on the subject—but it was without question straight out of the 'Watch out, a wacko' box of conversational sallies.

  'Thanks,' she said, bright-eyed with deflection. For a moment the evening seemed a little cooler, then steadied as she took control. 'Anyway, nice talking to you.'

  'I'm sorry,' he said, quickly. 'That's rather an odd thing to say, I know. It's just that you remind me of my own daughter. She's about your age.'

  'Right,' Sarah said. 'Cool.'

  'She's back in Blighty,' the man went on, as if he hadn't heard her. 'With her mother. Looking forward to seeing them again, don't you know. Top hole. Gor blimey. Princess Di, God rest 'er soul.'

  His eyes flicked away from her then, took a quick glance around. Sarah assumed he was embarrassed. In reality he was estimating that in about twenty seconds all paths would converge to convenience him, the lines of sight all elsewhere. He was good at judging this kind of thing, at telling when he would be in vision, of seeing the small steps that would take him back out of sight. It was one of his special skills. He shifted a few inches closer to the girl, who stood up.

  'Anyway,' Sarah said. 'I got to go.'

  The man laughed, as he felt the lines fall into place. He grabbed Sarah's hand and tugged it with surprising force. She squawked quietly and fell back onto the bench, too shocked to resist.

  'Let go,' she said, fighting to stay calm. The ground seemed to be falling away, a vertiginous, fluid feeling. She felt as if she had been caught cheating, or stealing.

  'Pretty girl.' He gripped her hand more tightly. 'A keeper.'

  'Please, let go of me.'

  'Oh shut up,' he muttered, all pretence of an English accent gone. 'You ludicrous little slut.' His fist jack-hammered up in a compact, short-armed punch, smashing straight into her face.

  Sarah's head jerked back, her eyes wide open and stunned. Oh no, she thought, the interior voice quiet and dismayed. Oh no.

  'Take a look, Sarah,' the man said, his voice low and urgent. 'Look at all the lucky people. The people who aren't you.'

  He nodded down the Promenade. Only a block down, the street was crowded. People going in and out of stores, taking exploratory looks at restaurant menus. Around Sarah and the man there was nobody to be seen.

  'Once there was just bush here, do you realize that? Ragged coastline, rocks, shells. A few tracks in the sand. If you're quiet you can hear the way that it was, before any of this shit was here.'

  Blinking against her watering eyes, Sarah tried to work out what he was getting at. Maybe there was something she could do, some unexpected final question in this test, some way of scraping a pass. 'But people don't see,' he continued. 'They don't even look. Blind. Wilfully blind. Trapped in the machine.'

  He grabbed her hair, turned her face so she could see into the Barnes and Noble. There were plenty of people in there, too. Reading. Standing. Chatting. Why would you look outside, when you're in a bookstore at night? Even if you did, would you see more than a couple of dark figures on a bench? Why would that seem exceptional?

  'I should do you here and now,' the man said, in a tone of quiet indignation. 'Just to show it could be done. That nobody really cares. When you're surrounded by people you don't know all the time, how can you tell what's wrong? In five square miles of disease, who cares what happens to one little virus? Only me.'

  Sarah realized there was going to be no get-out-of-this-free question, not now or ever, and gathered herself to scream. The man felt her chest expand, and his hand quickly looped over her face. Two fingers grabbed her upper lip from above, tugging it hard. The scream never made it out of her throat. Sarah tried to struggle, but the hand held her in position, coupled with the weight of his arm, pressing down on her head.

  'Nobody watching,' the man assured her, with the same hateful calm. 'I made it this way. I can walk where nobody sees.'

  Indistinct noises came out of the girl's mouth, as she tried to say something. He seemed to understand.

  'No they're not,' he said. 'They're not on their way. They're at home. Mommy's a Jackson Pollock in the kitchen. Daddy's in the garden, with little sister. Both naked. They make an interesting tableau. Some might even consider it obscene.'

  In fact, Sarah's mom and Melanie were watching a Simpsons rerun at that moment. It was, as Zoë Becker would always remember, the episode where George Bush moves into Springfield. Michael Becker was typing furiously in his den, having found, he fervently hoped, a way of making everything all right. If he could just fix the opening ten minutes, and find a way of selling the idea that some of the characters had to be older than teenagers, then everything would be okay. Failing that, fuck it, he'd just make them all teenagers—and reinstate all the fucking pans down the front of the high school, the way Wang wanted it. A few miles away, Sian Williams had just picked up Sarah's message, and was feeling a little envious of her friend's Out Alone adventure.

  'If you keep wriggling,' the man said, 'I'll pull your teeth out. I will. I promise. Not easy, but it's worth it. It's really a very unusual sound.' Sarah went completely still, and for a moment neither of them moved. The man seemed to take a pleasure in sitting that way, the girl's mouth pulled up to a point of screaming pain, as if they were sharing a private moment in the middle of a busy street.

  Then he sighed, like a man reluctantly putting aside an absorbing magazine. He stood, pulling Sarah up with him. Her minidisc player slipped to the floor with a brittle clatter. The man glanced at it, and let it lie.

  'Goodbye and good night, good people,' he said, in the general direction of the other end of the street. 'You'll all rot in hell, and I'd love to lead you there.' His right arm rotated around Sarah's head until his hand was clamped firmly over her mouth. With his other hand he picked up the bag of books. 'But I have a date, and we must go.'

  Then, with quick, long strides, he dragged Sarah across the street and into an alley where his car was parked. She had no choice but to accompany him. He was tall and very strong.

  He threw open the back door, then grabbed her hair again and peered closely into her face. The close presence of his face scared all useful thought out of her head.

  'Come, my dear,' he said. 'Our carriage awaits.' Then he head-butted her just above the eyes.

  As Sarah's knees buckled, her last thought was matter-of-fact. In her bedside table was a notebook in which she had written down many thoughts. Some of the most recent were about sex: breathless musings on a part of life she had not yet experienced, but knew was coming her way. Most were transcriptions of things Sian had told her, but she'd used her own imagination too, plus what she'd gleaned from TV and movies and a not-too-gross magazine she'd found under the Pier.

  The notebook was hidden, but not very well. When she was dead, her mother and father would find it, and they would know she had brought this evening upon herself.

  •••

  Nina was unaware of much of this, but this was the event she described. When she had told what she knew, she topped her glass up. Zandt's remained untouched.

  'Four witnesses put Sarah Becker on the bench between 7.12 and 7.31. Their descriptions of the man with her range from 'Nondescript, maybe tall', to 'Shit, I don't know', via 'Well, he was, like, a guy'. We don't even have an age or colour that I'd take to the bank, though we got two hits with white and blond. Two say he was wearing a long coat, another said a sport jacket. Nobody saw them leave, despite the fact that the bench is within yards of a zillion people. If the man spent any time in the bookstore before accosting her, then nobody noticed him. Another witness describes seeing a car of undetermined colour and model in the nearest side street. It's possible that a trashcan may have been placed to obscure the numb
er plate—which is pretty slick, though does require more confidence than God. Anybody could have just moved the can, and he was illegally parked. The car was gone by 8.15.

  'The girl's father arrived at the south end of the Promenade at 9.07. He parked up in the usual place, waited. When neither his daughter nor Sian Williams appeared after a few minutes, he went into the restaurant. The staff told him they hadn't served a table who matched his description, though they did have a no-show in the name of Williams. He called the other girl's mother and found that the dinner had been cancelled at the last moment due to a problem with the Williamses' car. The car's been checked, but we can't get a firm opinion on whether it was tampered with.

  'Michael Becker demanded to speak to the girl herself and was eventually told Sarah had left a message saying she didn't want to bother her dad, and that she was going to just kill time and wait for the usual pickup. He searched up and down the street without finding any sign of his daughter. Finally he made it up to the far end and after checking in the Barnes and Noble he spotted a Sony minidisc player lying partially obscured under the bench. His daughter's ownership of this device was certain, both through a label she had affixed and because he had bought it for her. The disc in the machine was some album by her favourite band. She has a poster of them on her bedroom wall. Becker then called the sheriff's department, the LAPD, and also his agent, somewhat bizarrely. He seems to have thought that she would have more pull with the cops than he did. He called his wife, and told her to stay where she was in case their daughter arrived home by cab.

  'The whole area was searched. Nothing. There are no prints on the player apart from the girl's. There are about a hundred cigarette butts around the bench, but we don't even know if the perpetrator smoked. One of the witnesses said he thought he might have done, so some poor fucker in a lab is currently trying for DNA off a whole bag of them.'

  'The father isn't a suspect.'

  'Not in this universe. They were very close, in the right ways. Still, for a couple of days that's what people were wondering. But no. We don't think it's him, and the timings don't work at all. We've also eliminated his partner, a Charles Wang. He was in New York.'

  Zandt slowly raised his glass, emptied it, lowered it again. He knew there was more. 'And then?'

  Nina pulled her feet off the table, reached over to pick the file up off the floor. Inside, in addition to a large number of copied documents, was a thin package wrapped in brown paper. What she pulled out, however, was a photograph.

  'This arrived at the Becker residence late the following afternoon. Some time between half past four and six o'clock. It was discovered lying on the path.' She handed it to Zandt.

  The picture showed a girl's sweater, pale lilac, neatly folded into a square. What looked like ribbed ribbon had been tied around the sweater into a bow.

  'It's been tied up with plaited hair. Sarah's was long enough for it to be hers, and it's the right colour. Forensics has taken samples off her hairbrush, and will have confirmation very soon.'

  Zandt noticed that his glass had been refilled. He drank. The whiskey stung in the dryness of his mouth, and made him nauseous. His head felt as if it were a balloon, blown up slightly too much, floating a couple of inches above his neck.

  'The Upright Man,' he said.

  'Well,' Nina said, judiciously, 'we've checked with the families of the victims two and three years ago, and every officer who was involved in those investigations. We're pretty convinced that the nature of the parcels he left on those occasions has remained secret. It could still be a copycat. I doubt it. But I have an all-media scan in operation, including the Internet, for any use of the phrases 'Delivery Boy' or 'Upright Man'.'

  'The Internet?'

  'Yeah, she said. Kind of a computer thing. It's all the rage.'

  'It's him,' Zandt said. Only he was fully aware of the irony inherent in his confidence.

  She looked at him, and then reached reluctantly back into the file. This time the photograph showed the sweater after it had been carefully unwrapped and laid out flat. Sarah's name was embroidered on the front, not fancily, but in neat block letters.

  'The hair used for the name is of a dark brown. It is much drier than the hair that we believe to be Sarah's, suggesting that it was cut some time ago.'

  She stopped then, and waited while Zandt slowly reached into his pocket. He pulled out a pack of Marlboros and a matchbook. He had not smoked since they had been in the room. There was no ashtray. His hands, as he pulled a cigarette out, were almost steady. He did not look at her, but only at the match as he struck it: regarding it with fixed concentration, as if it were something unfamiliar to him, but whose purpose he had divined through intuition. It took three attempts before it flared, but the match could have been damp.

  'I made sure the dark brown hair was tested first.' She took a deep breath. 'It's a match, John. It's Karen's hair.'

  •••

  She left him alone for a while, went and stood outside in the cold and listened to the darkness. Muted laughter drifted across from the main building, and through the window she could see couples of varying ages, bundled up in sensible sweaters, plotting tomorrow's adventures in hiking. A door was open on the other side of the building and through it she could hear the clatter of plates being cleaned by someone who didn't own them. Something small rustled in the undergrowth on the other side of the road, but nothing came of it.

  When she returned, Zandt was sitting exactly as she'd left him, though he had a new cigarette. He didn't look up at her.

  She put a few more pieces of wood on the fire, inexpertly, unable to remember whether you piled them on top or placed them round the sides. She sat in the chair and poured herself another drink. Then sat up with him through the night.

  Chapter 5

  By late afternoon I'd had conversations with the police and the hospital, and before that with my parents' neighbours on either side. Each of these had been carefully judged.

  I called the cops from the house, and was put through to an Officer Spurling—thankfully not one of the men who'd interviewed me after the incident in the hotel bar. Spurling and his partner had been first on the scene of my parents' accident, alerted through a call from a passing motorist. Officers Spurling and McGregor remained on the scene until the ambulance and fire service arrived, and assisted in the removal of the bodies from the car. They followed the ambulance to the hospital, and Spurling had been present when Donald and Elizabeth Hopkins had been pronounced dead on arrival. The deceased had been identified by their driver's licenses, with subsequent confirmation from Harold Davids (attorney) and Mary Richards (neighbour) within two hours.

  Officer Spurling was sympathetic to my desire to establish the circumstances of my parents' death. He provided me with the name of the relevant doctor at the hospital, and suggested I look into counselling. I took him to mean receiving some, rather than as a career. I thanked him for his time, and he wished me the very best. I ended the call hoping I didn't run into him when I went to the station to retrieve my gun, though chances were he already knew all about it. The counselling suggestion hadn't sounded entirely uninflected.

  Tracking down the doctor was a good deal more difficult. She wasn't on duty when I called the hospital, and the length of time it took to elicit this information, via a succession of conversations with harried nurses and other disembodied and bad-tempered voices, suggested that I'd be lucky to get her on the phone when she arrived. The ER was there for the living. Once you were dead you were merely an unwelcome reminder, and out of their hands.

  I drove over and spent a very quiet hour waiting there. Dr Michaels eventually deigned to come out of her bunker and talk to me. She was in her late twenties, studiously harassed, and awfully pleased with herself. After ruthlessly patronizing me for a few moments she confirmed what I'd already been told. Major head and upper body trauma. Dead as dead could be. If that was all, could I excuse her. She was very grown up now, and had patients to see. I was more
than happy to relinquish her company, and tempted to help her along her way with a brisk shove.

  I walked back out of the hospital. The light was gone, a fall evening come early. A few cars were parked randomly around the lot, made monochromatic and anonymous by high overhead lamps. A young woman stood smoking and crying quietly, some distance away.

  I considered what to do next. After finding the note, I'd sat on the coffee table for quite some time. Neither the light-headedness nor the crawling sensation in my stomach went away. A search through the rest of the book showed that it was empty. There was no question that the note was in my father's handwriting.

  'Ward,' it said, in writing that was in no way different from what I would expect, neither too large nor too small, not forced or noticeably faint: 'We're not dead.' My father had written this on a piece of paper, slipped it into a book, and then stashed it inside his old chair, taking care to replace the braid that covered the join. A note denying their death had been placed in a position where it would come to light only if they were dead. Why else would I be in the house alone? What would I be doing in his chair? The positioning of the note suggested that whoever had placed it believed that, in the circumstances that next led me to be in the house, I would sit in the old chair—despite knowing it was the least comfortable in the room. As it happened, they'd been right. I had sat there, and for some time. It made sense that I would do so if they were dead, or that I would at least look at it, maybe run my hand over the fabric for a moment. It was exactly the kind of thing a grieving son might be expected to do.

  But, and this was the point that kept jabbing away at me, this implied that some time before their deaths one or both of them had spent time thinking about what would be likely to happen after they died. They had considered the situation in detail, and made judgments on my likely behaviour. Why? Why would they be thinking of death? It was bizarre. It made no sense.