The dark confides, p.10
The Dark Confides, page 10
Voicemail #3 [14:14]: I told her about us. She said we were right to abort. See? We were right. No more tears.
Computer analysis confirmed the voice was Carney’s. It was speculated that the messages may have been code but the idea was soon dropped. They searched for a woman from Reykjavik, a ‘thanatologist and antinatalist who specialised in eschatology’, and came up with nothing. Far as they could tell, his wife hadn’t known where he’d gone or what he was planning, but still they followed her, still they went through her garbage, still they listened to her sleep. She looked like the walking dead as she trundled through her days with a grim air of stagnation, going about her business of looking after her dying mother and working at the hospital where she was a radiologist. Maybe just a good actor. Maybe not.
They followed her for eight months and not another piece of communication came in from Carney. Not a letter or an email or a phone call. She never met with anyone outside office hours that didn’t have something to do with her mother. Macmillan nurses followed by funeral directors. They even surveilled the funeral. Not a single member of Carney’s family, also under surveillance, showed. Afterward they saw her only leaving for work and arriving home. She shopped once a week, late on a Monday night when the supermarket was sparse. One March morning she went to the park and sat on a bench watching the ducks. Two doctor visits for nothing serious. A man called around once, a work colleague, but her coldness repelled him.
Then she didn’t show for work one day. And the next. Three days passed and she wasn’t answering her phone. One of the officers on the job dressed as a postman and knocked with a decoy parcel. No answer. He looked through the window and the letterbox and climbed the back wall and looked into the kitchen. Nothing. They broke in and searched the house but it appeared empty. Then someone called out that they’d found her. She’d hanged herself in the walk-in closet amid a pile of his clothes. Maybe smelling him for the last time. She’d pulled the door shut and hanged herself in the dark. From dark to dark.
It wasn’t until after his wife’s death that Carney emerged from the shadows. Reports began to come in from UCOs and informants that a man fitting his description was conducting huge coke deals with the Mexicans and the South Americans. Alone. It was estimated that this man, now confirmed to be Carney, was worth three hundred million. Then came reports of criminal ‘units’ being taken over and restructured by a mystery figure. Rumour spread within the underworld that no one believed, not really. He was eight feet tall, he lived on his own island, he was police. Just as it seemed he was about to reveal himself, the mystery man faded once more and his newly appointed lords became his voice, the coke became crude, and the man became myth.
He heard Wren’s alarm call at eight. He’d fallen asleep on the couch listening to Carney’s voice and dreamed he kept entering the same frightening room over and over, men inside sitting on wooden chairs and horribly lit by swinging hurricane lamps, amusedly watching him. He felt he’d no choice but to enter the room, yet wanted to regardless, as if he needed the pain, something to focus on. For hours this continued, the contradiction and repetition maddening. He was drenched in dreams, felt drugged and hungover by their relentlessness, their intensity. He yearned for black and empty sleep, a dreamless unfeeling vacuum. Nihility. The sleep of the idiot. Sleep synonymous with oblivion. A sleep in which to disappear, to lose everything. Memory, reality, ego, identity. A trial run for the long cold rest.
If you like sleep, you’ll love death, whispered his dad’s voice.
He shut the laptop and went to the kitchen, filled the kettle. While the kettle boiled he looked out the window at the strange early light already ringing against the evenly piled snow with an affected intensity. Ferns of frost had grown across the glass. He was thinking of Carney’s wife swinging there in the closet when her face abruptly became the face of another. He breathed in sharply and shut his eyes, clenched his trembling fists before his face. Every muscle in his body straining as he tried purging the memories of her through sheer will. She hung there before him, tongue lolled and eyes rolled white. He punched himself in the head with both fists until the deep concussions razed the towering sepulchre of her memory. He opened his eyes and concentrated on his breathing, pulling and pushing the cold air through his body. When he’d calmed he forced himself to centre on making the coffee, horribly aware that the rebuilding of that awful monument would soon begin again.
He took the coffee to the bedroom.
‘Cup of coffee for my coffee-coloured girl.’
She was sitting up with her hair sprung about her head in a fuzzy black halo. ‘You’re up early.’
‘Couldn’t sleep.’
‘I don’t like waking up and you’re not there.’
He lay down beside her over the covers. She sipped the coffee in the dark. Outside birds chatted about the dawn and the snow. He lay there looking at her.
‘You’re gorgeous,’ he said.
She smiled and squinted at him. ‘What are you after?’
He moved his hand high up between her legs through the covers, pressing against her, gently squeezing, her heat in his hand clearing out his mind of everything, the poison, the fear, until all that was left was her and her alone.
She said, ‘I dreamt me and Anton were pulling Dad and Christopher from their graves on some empty black beach.’
His hand stopped moving.
‘They were alive and covered in sand, their mouths and eyes plugged with it. I think they had different faces though. Like masks or something. It was raining and the sand was heavy and we kept slipping and sinking and I was terrified the sand was going to suck me under. I think my mum was there too. I don’t know. It’s going already. You never tell me your dreams.’
‘I don’t dream.’
‘Everyone dreams.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Everyone.’
‘They must scatter when I open my eyes and light hits my brain.’
‘Like cockroaches.’
‘Maybe they’re just shy.’
She stretched and looked at the time on her phone and he went on gripping her through the covers, kissing the warm, soft skin of her shoulder, her chest, her throat.
‘Sean.’
‘Mm?’
‘I’m pregnant.’
He stopped again.
‘I knew I shouldn’t have said anything.’
He pulled out his hand from between her thighs and sat up, staring at the ceiling bulb from what felt a nauseating distance.
‘No, I’m happy. I am.’
‘Really? Because you look like I just told you that you’re dying.’
‘Of course I am.’ He took her hand and kissed it. ‘I promise.’
The birdsong had stopped. Perhaps having realised how ice-hard the ground was, how deep the worms had tunnelled.
‘I was thinking about when we met,’ she said. ‘I was so scared.’
‘What, of me?’
‘No, of course not of you. Of being broken-down on the motorway in the dark. On my own. No one about. They’re strange places when you stand still on them. They’re like alien runways.’
‘I was about.’
‘Yeah, you were about. But only because she told you to come and find me.’
‘I would have found you anyway. It was meant to be. It was predestined. Inevitable.’
‘You said you don’t believe in fate.’
‘I don’t. But I believe in the present and here we are, together.’
The room filled unevenly with chalky light from around the edges of the curtains. Dust motes tumbling uncountable through the air.
‘No one else knows?’ he said.
‘Just you. Who else would I tell? Her? She’s the last person I’d tell.’
He got off the bed and then leaned back over and kissed her. He stopped at the door with his back to her, just a silhouette in a doorway, featureless, anonymous. Anyone, not someone. A blank screen whereon a projectionist could shine a life.
‘We’ll figure something out, okay?’ the silhouette said.
An empty moment passed before she cleared her throat.
’Okay.’
He left the bedroom. Then, in the hall, he turned back and said, ‘Everything’s false and the world’s broken, but I do love you.’
After Wren had left to open the gallery, Bale went for a drive to clear his head. He drove out east into the Peak District and played music loud, putting down the windows to hear the roar of the wind until he couldn’t take the cold any more. A sea change had taken place in him, a seismic upheaval, her pregnancy the catalyst. But really the change had come earlier, on the night he’d killed. The operation had become untenable. It was over. He’d been deluding himself thinking otherwise. He had killed and there was no way back, no matter how he tried to ignore it or bury it under logic. If Margot had known, he’d already be in escape mode and that was exactly why he hadn’t told her. He hadn’t wanted to escape. This life was better than any life he’d lived and he wanted to coast wearing this other mask, this other identity. In this life he’d found purpose, and now fatherhood, and nothing was going to jeopardise it, not until he was ready to leave, not this time. After his last operation, he’d sworn to himself that if he ever accepted another, it would end on his terms and be planned, not some last minute dash to escape the inescapable. As he passed through wild gritstone hills and around lakes that gave back the misery of the sky, he knew it was time to get out. To jump before he was pushed, or worse: before he was pulled too deep. He had to leave while he still could without eyes watching him. The moment they’d driven him to kill, the operation was over. No going back. He’d spent the last twenty-four hours trying to move forward as if nothing had happened. But something had happened.
Could he risk being recognised again by another spectre from his past? Next time he might not be so lucky. The mishap at the mall, the cop following him, Søren knowing of his affair, and the fact that he’d been driven to kill all should have been enough to drive home the point that he’d outstayed his welcome, but they hadn’t been enough and his delusion had continued, ever witching, ever powerful. The delusion that tomorrow would be better than today. But not now, not with a baby. It was time to run. But would Wren run with him? He was almost certain she would. After the way she’d spoken in the bath on Halloween about vanishing, he was confident. They would run away and start anew, the three of them. A real family with money and opportunities. Leave the unit behind, leave the police behind, leave the past behind. He’d never again squander such a rare and transformative opportunity as rebirth. He would make this situation work for him. He suddenly felt good. Energised. A decision made, a problem overcome. He would go home and eat, have a drink, sleep well, and in the morning he would call Wren and they would get on a plane and fly into another future, never looking back. Somewhere hot, somewhere cold, he couldn’t care less, just as long as it was a million miles from everyone and everywhere he’d ever known, from the lives he had possessed and the lives that had possessed him. It was time to capitalise on her wanderlust while it still ran hot in her veins and while escape was on his terms before anything came of the dead UCO, before he was recognised again, before the world was pulled out from under his feet.
Carney stepped from the murk of his thoughts. A great presence of impossible dimensions that grew to fill any space it occupied. He too had had vanished mid-op. Some officers did, it happened. But he was a ghost, an urban myth, a flicker in the corner of the eye. He would emerge at will or he would vanish at will, and far as Bale was concerned not a whole lot in the world could stop him. Such is the power of money, the skeleton key unlocking many doors. Bale had spent two years brooding over him, trying to sound the depths of such a man, to fathom his actions and intentions, yet Carney had made a killer of him without lifting a finger and he was afraid. The moment Wren had told him about the pregnancy, he’d realised just how afraid. He no longer had only his own life to lose any more, now he had a family. A real family. In twenty-four hours he’d taken and given life, and though the deal with the Chinese was close and there was maybe a chance of contact with Carney somewhere down the line, he realised that his monomaniacal urge to expose the Devil had flown.
He drove all morning into late afternoon. He filled his car and bought a Guinness from a fieldstone boozer hundreds of years old on the edge of a wild and snowy moor. The crenelated silhouette of a stately castle stood against the darkening skyline like the backdrop to a medieval shadow show. Sun fanning redly as it collapsed behind the world. He finished the Guinness and drove on, comfortably lost. He decided to take the long way home and drove at leisure, playing music. When the man he’d killed formed bloodied and white-eyed in the windscreen, he loudened the music and sped up until the pounding bass and the rush of the world beyond the glass broke apart the apparition.
But then another came to him, a shadow whose residue clogged his memories and curdled his dreams. It lived in his flesh, in his marrow, feeding off him, alive only as long as his pain was alive. He gripped the wheel and drove too fast, trying not to think about exorcisms. Instead he was trying to visualise time as a place, moments to which he could physically travel. He wondered where he’d go first.
The first time he’d seen Dr Elms he asked to shut the blinds.
‘Okay.’ She got up and shut them, sat back down. ‘Can I ask why?’
He shrugged. ‘I feel naked, exposed. Like an insect in a jar.’
‘This is normal in officers living in the chrysalis of deployment.’
‘Don’t feel you need to keep the pupal metaphor going to keep me happy.’
She cleared her throat, plainly uncomfortable.
‘Ignore me,’ he said.
‘Dr Milich assessed you last time, is that right?’
‘Yeah. Milich.’
‘Says here you have an IQ of 160 and psychiatric damage on account of deep-cover deployment.’
‘They’re unrelated.’
‘Why did you stop seeing him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What were the differences of opinion?’
‘Can’t remember.’
‘I’m just trying to get a clear picture of where you are in—’
‘He was a twat, okay? Go on, write it in your little book. Twat.’
She closed the notebook and adjusted her glasses.
He sat there on the edge of the seat, hunched over, hands held between his knees, looking down at the grey carpet. His knees were rattling about. He couldn’t stop them.
‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ she said.
‘I can’t talk about operations.’
‘I don’t mean the beginning of the operation. I mean the beginning of you.’
‘The beginning of me? I began when the operation began.’
‘No. That’s when you ended. The possession began at the beginning of the operation.’
‘What are talking about, the possession? You sound like a priest.’
‘You allowed yourself to be possessed when you agreed to the operation. You allowed a new identity in and it became you and you it. Now it’s talking through you. You need to learn to control it. You need help.’
‘From the sound of it, I need a fucking exorcism. The power of Freud compels you.’
She laughed. She didn’t really mean it though.
‘It’s good you can joke about it.’
‘Yeah.’ He sat back and rubbed his beard. He hadn’t shaved in months. Not since going on the Carrion Run.
‘So?’ she said.
‘So what?’
‘Do you want to talk about the beginning?’
‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘I can’t think of anything to say.’
‘What do you think of when you think of the beginning? What’s the first thing that comes to mind? A picture, a face, a song?’
‘Lies.’
‘Lies? What do you mean?’
‘I remember lying.’
‘Who to?’
‘Everyone.’
‘You were a compulsive liar?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I mean lying to protect people. Lying for people.’
‘You were coerced into lying?’
‘Yeah. I mean, my mum or my sister would do something and then tell me to say something else to him when he came home, then he’d admit something to me and tell me what to say to them. The usual bollocks.’
‘You were like a mediator for everyone else?’
‘That’s what it felt like. I’m sure it wasn’t only that, but that’s what it felt like. I remember being really uncomfortable about it at first. I stopped caring after a while. Anything to keep the peace. I suppose lies aren’t always a bad thing.’
‘No?’
‘I think after a while I started liking it. The power I had.’
‘What do you mean, power?’
‘It just felt like, I don’t know, like I had a power over everyone. Well not a power. I don’t know. At first the lies felt heavy, you know, weighing me down, difficult to keep up with them all.’
‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’
‘Yeah, something like that. Then they became second nature and I walked around in two minds, like I was split down the middle, one half working for my mum and sister, the other half working for him. Maybe a small piece of me still working for me.’
‘By him you mean your dad?’
