The Killing Lessons (14 page)

It was still dark when they stopped and took her out of the box.

‘Go open up,’ Xander said to the other guy.

More manhandling to get her out of the RV. His hands under her arms, her heels whacking the steps down, scoring the dust when he dragged her towards the house.

She saw open dark land, an overgrown field, a sky full of stars. A dirt yard. Three low buildings and two old cars, one with its wheels missing, standing on cinder blocks. Silence. The emptiness said no neighbours. A farm? It didn’t smell like California. The air was cold and dry and mineral. The sweat began to cool on her skin. The outside space was precious and brought the reality of her dying here big and close. She felt the thousands of miles between her and home, the warp of the time difference, her family’s lives going on with no idea of what was happening to her.

Xander dragged her over the open doorway’s threshold. Derelict. But still, apparently, with power. In the low-wattage light from a bare ceiling bulb Claudia saw a big kitchen of dirty tiles and archaic fittings. A cupboard door open: canned goods and bottled water. A big, stained Belfast sink with a chunk cracked out of it and a dripping tap. Damp patches on the walls. Two doors off the kitchen, one open on a dark corridor.

‘Home sweet home,’ the other guy said.

From the corridor, a door, wooden stairs, down.

They were taking her down. Below ground. Panic rushed her again.

‘Paulie, get her feet for Christ’s sake.’

The reflex to struggle was unstoppable.

Xander let go of her and her head whacked the sharp edge of a step. The knife was at her throat.

‘Keep that up,’ he said, ‘if you want this in you. Do you want this in you?’

Claudia felt the skin on her neck open. A fine line of fire. Wetness. Blood. Her blood. She had an image of the laminated poster from biology lessons at school, showing a man reduced to his circulatory system. Capillaries, veins, arteries. They used to call him Skinless Jim. She stopped struggling. The knife was the only reality. The knife was the only thing that meant anything. If it went into her all the blood would come out. Nothing –
nothing
superseded that fact.

‘That’s better,’ Xander said. ‘But that’s your last warning. You make another move and I’ll open you up. Understand?’

They carried her down the stairs. The basement was big and low-ceilinged, lit by three more bare bulbs. Through the warm blur of the wound on her neck Claudia registered broken crates, a furnace, a busted armchair with half its stuffing out like ectoplasm, empty beer bottles. In several places floorboards were missing. No windows. The walls showed patches of baizy mould. Her heart cried out for the open space she’d been given a few cruel seconds of between the RV and the house. Open space she’d never appreciated. Open space her body screamed to be running through right now. Running fast, away from them, into the concealing darkness and the clean night air. But the basement was a neutral intelligence that simply stated:
That was the last clean air you’ll ever breathe. This place, these bare walls, this low ceiling, is the only place you’ll know from now on. For the minutes or hours or days you have left until they kill you.

Between them they carried her to an alcove by the furnace and, to her astonishment, cut the ties on her hands and feet and yanked the gag down out of her mouth. She couldn’t speak. She put her hand up to her throat, felt it wet with blood – but the cut wasn’t deep.

Paulie went to the other side of the room, then came back with a bucket in one hand and a two-litre bottle of water in the other. He set them down next to her. Then both men stepped back, staring at her.

‘Please,’ she gasped. ‘Let me go. If you let me go I won’t say anything. I swear I won’t say anything. Just let me go.’ The sound of her own voice was terrible to her. It confirmed that all this was real. She was really here. It was really her.

Paulie smiled. Lit a cigarette with a copper Zippo. Xander reached up above his head, where the end of a steel cable dangled. He grabbed it and pulled.

A flexible metal security grille – like the ones stores used – descended with a loud rattle. A padlock that went through a corresponding metal hoop bolted to the floor.

She was sealed off from the rest of the room.

In a cage.

I’ll come by and see you later. Don’t say anything. Just don’t answer the door if you don’t want to.

Back at her apartment, Valerie tried to imagine not answering the door. She tried to imagine hearing the doorbell and ignoring it, the seconds and minutes that would have to pass before she’d know he’d given up and gone away. She tried to imagine the strength required for waiting that out, all the while knowing that if she hit the buzzer, let him into the building, unlocked her apartment door and stood in her living room it would be a matter of moments before he was with her, his arms around her, the warm fit of their bodies, the blur and surrender that would take them from kissing to hurrying each other’s clothes off (the priceless friction of fabric leaving skin, the little ticks of static, the first tender shock of flesh on flesh) to the bedroom, the bed, the giving in, the certainty, the homecoming of fucking and the knowledge that there was nothing, nothing, nothing better than love. She tried to imagine what it would feel like to know all that was there, that life was ready to burn brightly again – and refusing it. She tried to imagine all this and failed. The failure itself was a kind of sweetness.

But in the shower (her body, for so long nothing to her, now reasserting its sexual self through her breasts and midriff and neck and thighs, through the livening between her legs) other truths jabbed at and cut into the fantasy. That she would have to tell him. Everything. Before anything else happened. And if she did tell him it was almost certain that nothing else
would
happen.

I was pregnant, Nick. But I didn’t know if it was yours. And I never told you.

I want not to do anyone any harm.

Too late for that. She’d already done him harm. Was doing him harm now, with these erotic preparations.

It didn’t stop her. There was a momentum at work in her whether she liked it or not. She shaved her legs and underarms, washed and conditioned her hair, brushed her teeth. Put on a skirt for the first time in years. No perfume. He never wanted her to wear perfume. He wanted, he’d said, just the smell of her skin. It had been a shocking introduction to what love could do that she’d believed him. If they were going out he’d watch her getting ready. She’d be half naked at the dressing table putting on her make-up and catch him observing her in the mirror. Haven’t you got anything better to do? she’d said, the first time this had happened. He’d said: Nothing better than this, no. And because she’d known he wasn’t lying her flush of narcissistic pleasure had been innocent. It was the first time in her life she’d known she was desired and loved for exactly who and what she was.

Dressed, she looked at the clock. It was after eleven. She mixed herself a vodka and tonic. Just one. A large one – but just one. Sip, slowly. For courage.

An hour passed.

Two.

Her apartment’s tension started to tell her he wasn’t coming.

The downed vodka added:
Because he’s thought better of it. Because he knows there’s something you’re not telling him. Because he’ll never love you the way he did. And if he does, what do you think you’ll do with the love? What did you do the last time?

She poured herself another.

By one a.m. she wasn’t drunk, but the vodka had grown in candour.

Nothing’s changed. He’s not coming because you were right the first time: You don’t deserve it. Eight dead women (and one dead baby) and here you are with a fucking skirt on waiting for love. By what right? By what right?

She drank another.

You had love and you shat on it. That’s what you did. That’s what you’ll do. He knows that. He’s not stupid.

With bitter satisfaction she went back to her desk.

That’s right. Work, not love. There’s only work for you, now, so do it.

She went through every case file, over and over again, until the uncooperative facts were a snowstorm in her head, with a backdrop that was a mish-mash of human remains and the obstinately unrelated objects. The objects. There had been a phase early in the investigation when she’d gone down the psych route of their symbolic meanings – if they had any. It had got her nowhere. Not least because there was no consensus on what any given object symbolised. The Internet had taken her into a labyrinth of contradictions. The hammer was everything from a destroyer to a defender, from an inverted cross to a cycle of death and rebirth. Apples were sin and death, but also beauty (when he’d stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her and said You’re beautiful, she’d believed him), immortality, the cosmos, breasts, knowledge… It was pointless. Asking the Internet was like asking God; how could the answer not contradict itself and go on for ever? And this was to say nothing of the crackpot stuff. One source apparently obsessed with rescuing the symbol of the goose from its associations with silliness. The goose was bravery, loyalty, navigation, teamwork, protection… She’d given up. Wild fucking goose chase. Like love. (
Hey? What? I love you
.)

She unrolled the murder map (a copy of the one from the incident room) looking for something – anything – that would narrow the geography down or reduce it to any kind of logic. She found nothing. The red lines were an impenetrable cat’s cradle. For a little while she revisited the theory that it was a group, a homicidal cabal of killers working together. It wasn’t impossible. It wasn’t impossible – but it only made the situation worse. To make the connections between suspects you needed suspects – and there weren’t any. The half-dozen they’d had in the frame at one time or another were – as far as their confiscated communications technology revealed – utterly unconnected to each other; and the alibis that had eventually ruled them out remained. The investigation had scrutinised correspondence from serial killers already incarcerated, the Hollywoodish conceit of someone locked up directing an acolyte or fan club from behind bars. It had yielded nothing plausible. (A depressing amount of convicted wackos’ letters were to and from women who were infatuated with them, wanted to marry them, get fucked by them, save them, have their children.
If we have a kid, we’ll let it stay up late sometimes for no good reason. Once or twice a year we’ll go into its school and say there’s an emergency and take it out of class and just blow off the day at the park.
)

She spent an hour calling around the enforcement agencies in the states the zoo footage had gone out to. Nothing. Or rather a dozen alleged sightings that had so far come to nothing. She called Reno for progress on ID’ing the alarm clock victim, but of course the process had only just begun. It would mean every Nevada missing person case in the last… what, two? three? four years? Contacting the families. Dental records. And that was assuming the victim had even been reported missing. That was assuming she had people to whom she was missing. Low-rent hooker? Drug addict? A lot of the women in either category (and sometimes both) simply didn’t have anyone who’d give a shit whether they disappeared or not. They didn’t have anyone who’d
notice
. Add to that that if this was the serial duo, chances were the victim wasn’t from Nevada anyway. Valerie looked at the map and felt the entire country like a swirling liquid, particles drifting from one state into another, untrackable, untraceable, defying procedure. (The road trip to Mexico in their first year together, the hours of warm windshield sunlight on her bare legs, his hand there, the shared truancy, the way delighted calm female ownership of him had pierced her when she’d come out of a gas station toilet and seen him talking with the pump attendant. Love ambushed you with these humble revelations, stamped itself on you through the oblique and the mundane.)

Out of sheer desperation she spent another hour dipping into and out of the traffic enforcement footage. RVs. RVs. More RVs. What was she even looking for? A driver wearing a T-shirt that said MURDERER? Time and again she returned to the zoo footage. The dark-haired guy in the Raiders shirt watching Katrina. She was sure it was him. But she couldn’t stand her own intuitive certainty. It meant she was looking at the man who might even now be doing what he did – again, for the ninth or tenth or for all she knew fiftieth time. It made her powerlessness collusive, as if by looking at his image and knowing it was him she were giving him permission – encouragement, even – to carry on doing what he was doing.

It was four thirty a.m. when she laid her head down on her desk and closed her eyes. Her skull was throbbing – from the hours of fruitless concentration, yes, but from the vodka and cigarettes that had kept her company through the night. Her cold, which the excitement had occluded, revved up its symptoms. Her head pounded. Her skin was sore.

Blasko had changed his mind. He’d seen sense. He’d remembered who she was, what she was capable of, what she’d done. Of course he had. He’d done the right thing.

Experimentally, Valerie sat up and raised her hands in front of her face. They were shaking. They shook all the time now. Have to watch that. Make an effort. Keep them busy. Especially in front of Carla Fucking York.

Two hours after she’d crawled into bed (alone, alone, alone; shedding the skirt was like an act of self-ridicule) and fallen into fraught sleep, she was woken by the sound of her cell phone.

And the information that would change everything.

Angelo had known, struggling into extra layers, that he wasn’t going to make the fallen tree. I don’t know how far, Nell had said. A mile, I guess.
A mile
. It had practically killed him just putting on the additional clothes. But what else was there to do? If there was a way, he had to try, if only for her sanity.

He’d managed ten paces with the walking stick – then collapsed. The day was bright blue and glaring white around him. Indifferent beauty. He’d got up again. A mile would take him, what, three hours?

Keep going
, Sylvia, had said.
Come on. It’s like that film,
Touching the Void. They’d watched the movie together. The climber who’d walked all the way down the mountain on a broken leg. The guy had managed it by picking out landmarks – a particular rock or snowy hummock – a few paces ahead, then setting himself the challenge of just getting to that. Then he’d select another spot a few feet away and aim for that, and so on, until, having done this countless times (in agony), he’d made it all the way back to base camp.

Angelo had tried. Just five more steps. Just six more. Just
three
more.

But less than thirty paces from the cabin he’d been reduced to crawling through snow that came up to his elbows.

He didn’t have the requisite psychology. The
Touching the Void
climber, whilst astonishing, had always struck both him and Sylvia as a psychopath or suffering from a version of autism – or at the very least devoid of human warmth and realism. Sylvia conceded as much, now.

You would be so much better at this than me
, he’d said to her through his pain. Sylvia had always had more strength and courage than him. Sylvia had always had more of all the good stuff than him. Integrity. Honesty. Empathy. Depth.
She
should have been the novelist. Except what she
didn’t
have was the desire for public affirmation, for peer acknowledgement, for glowing endorsements, for fame. Unlike him. Unlike him, what she had was quiet sufficiency and the ability to take pleasure in a life without shallow social back-slaps or professional flattery. What she had was the ability to love, and be loved – and for that to be enough. She conceded that, too, when he’d given up, collapsed on his side in the snow. She conceded it as she conceded all her merits: not with self-satisfaction, just with a smile and a shrug. The truth was the truth, and there was no point denying it.

All right, my love
, she’d said, as he’d begun the return struggle to the cabin.
All right, you tried.

The worst thing had been seeing Nell unsurprised by his return.

I’m sorry, he’d gasped, his face wet with pain. I’m so sorry.

Now, no matter how many ways he looked at it, the situation didn’t change. They were stuck here. Her, courtesy of the broken ankle (fractured hip, too, he suspected; and the pain when she breathed in said a rib had cracked as well); him, at the mercy of L5 and S1. Two cripples, no meds, no phone, no transport.
He hurt my mom
. Every minute that passed testified that no one had found her yet.

‘Yet’ felt irrelevant. The more Angelo gleaned the more certain he was that Nell’s mother was dead. Murdered. He’d had to ask the questions delicately. Detail brought the whole thing up in the kid, huge, unassimilable. Blood. She kept saying her mom was bleeding. Every time the word left her mouth it was as if another bone in her broke. Her face lost its bearings. Shock renewed itself. He’d had to keep easing back. Eventually he’d stopped trying to build the picture of what had happened. And in any case, since no amount of narrative changed their predicament, what was the point in getting it? Whether the woman was dead or not, there was still nothing to do but wait. If Nell’s brother had escaped or survived he would have got help. The house had a landline and cellular reception. There were neighbours a mile away. And given that no help had come, there was only one conclusion to draw.

He’d splinted her ankle as best he could. Two bits of flat wood he’d found amongst the chopped logs and kindling bound with shreds torn from one of the towels. He hadn’t known what he was doing, but he held to the idea that anything that helped keep it still couldn’t make matters worse.

He was perpetually exhausted. The sciatica wouldn’t let up. He kept testing it. Kept getting the same blinding result:
Stop trying to move
. Filling a cup with water was a gruelling ordeal. Replenishing the wood-stove an odyssey that left him drenched in sweat, shaking, sick. The only favour his condition did him was that the grotesque spectacle of it absorbed the girl’s attention for a little while. He could see that a remote part of her registered his suffering, her distant sympathy circuits were still trying to fire. But all the circuits were dimmed, blotted out by the giant thing that had happened to her, that would not go away, that had taken up colossal and tyrannical residency in her changed world.
The grim mathematics were plain. A mother didn’t tell her child to run away from her protection unless she knew she had no protection left to give.

Sylvia came and went. When she was there, it was bearable.

I can’t be here all the time
.

Angelo believed there was a finite allowance granted to the dead. Precious currency, to be spent wisely.

‘I know you don’t want to,’ he said to Nell, ‘but you should really try to eat something. You must be starving.’

It was late evening. She was lying on her right side in the sleeping bag with her back to the stove. She had a choice between pains, he knew. Lying on her side eased the pain of breathing but increased the pain in her ankle. Lying on her back turned down the pain in her ankle, but made every breath a precise, mean stab.

‘Nell?’

She shook her head. He could see what an effort even the most minimal interaction was for her. He could see that what had happened devoured every gram of consciousness. She was condemned to replay what she had seen, over and over. Some part of her, for the rest of her life, would always be replaying it. If she lived to be a hundred the reel would still be running. It was her legacy, now.

‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ she said.

This had occurred to him. He’d been dreading it.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘No problem. I’ll carry you on my back.’

She thought about that.

‘Can I use your stick?’ she said.

If she fell… If she fell… Oh, God.

‘Sure you can,’ he said. ‘Just be very, very careful.’

She had to think it through. It would require getting her one good leg under her and pulling herself up with her arms via the sink. In other words—

Her scream told both of them everything they needed to know. It was impossible. She could get upright, but even with the stick taking the weight of the bad leg, moving forward under her own power was unbearable. The ribs made every jolting step agony. She’d never make it.

She lay back down, sweating, in tears, sobbing.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Hey, come on now, don’t cry. We’ll work something out. Hold on. Just give me a minute to think. They used to say I was a smart guy. I’m sure I can figure something.’

After a few moments, he said: ‘If I get you to the bathroom, will you be able to sit on the toilet?’

But for a little while she was inconsolable. The shame and the weakness on top of everything else. He was worried she would wet herself. (At
least
wet herself. He didn’t have it in him to ask her if peeing was all she needed to do.)

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Here’s what I think we should try. We unzip the sleeping bag and get that out of the way. Then I’ll pull you on the mat. We’ll deal with the rest when we get there. How’s that sound?’

It took a long time, but eventually they made it to the bathroom. It cost him a lot. He was in tears himself, silently, by the time they got there. He lay on his side for a moment, gasping, the nerve in his leg jangling.

‘I can do it,’ she said, through her misery. ‘I can do it myself.’

‘You sure?’

‘I can do it. You have to go away.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be right outside the door. You shout if you need me, OK?’

He did not look, though he was terrified she’d fall. She sobbed, continuously, a misery like that thin rain that could last all day. He could picture her small shut face suppressing the pain, the contortions pulling her pants down and getting onto the toilet seat would require. It was a great relief to him to hear the flush. He wondered how long she’d been lying there by the stove plucking up courage to tell him she needed to go. The colossal courage children needed for these things.

By the time they made it back to the stove both of them were spent. They lay a few feet apart. Her embarrassment was still coming off her, an aura of distressed energy.

‘Well, it’s probably going to make me faint,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to try to heat something up. Let’s see what we’ve got in here.’

Before his abrupt incapacitation he’d lugged a few boxes of supplies over the bridge on foot, in defiance of the sheriff. (The sheriff. What he wouldn’t give to see that guy right now.) The cabin’s two tiny cupboards had enough in them, he guessed, for maybe ten days, if they ate sparingly. Apart from a dozen eggs and a stale white loaf nothing fresh, but there was canned stuff that would stop them starving for a while. It was a mercy that the faucets still yielded apparently drinkable water, although he supposed they could melt snow in a pan on the stove if they had to. How many days could you go without food? He stopped himself wondering.

‘OK,’ he said, shuddering from what crawling to the cupboard had taken out of him. ‘We’ve got soup. We’ve got dried pasta. We’ve got canned tomatoes, canned peaches, canned ham, canned beans, canned sweetcorn. We’ve got Fig Newtons. No idea why we have those. I don’t even like them. We’ve got olive oil. We’ve got rice. Dried chillies. Two bulbs of garlic… I have to say, none of this is exactly making my mouth water.’ He reached further back into the cupboard. ‘Although wait a second. What’s this?
Coq au vin
. In a
can
? OK, I’m going to heat this up. I’ll make some pasta too. Do you know what
coq au vin
is?’

When she didn’t answer he looked over at her. Tears were streaming. She hadn’t made a sound.

He remembered her pale legs and narrow sternum when he’d undressed her. It had made him picture her mother drying her after a bath, with a huge towel that would have felt good, that would have smelled to the child of home and safety and love. He knew, by contrast, how he must seem to her: a crazy old cripple living in a hut. He’d spent half his life finding what he believed were the right words. Getting it right at the level of the sentence, he’d said, countless times, in interviews. There was no getting it right here. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say that wouldn’t make it worse.

He stood, bent over his stick, watching her, the can a dead joke in his hand.

What do I do? What the fuck do I do?

There’s nothing you can do
, Sylvia said.
Except keep her alive. There’s nothing you can do except take care of her
.

Saying nothing, he turned to the stove. He had no idea where the can opener was.