Spook Street полностью

River rarely forgot anything. David Cartwright had taught him well.

“You see a stoat, you pretend you haven’t,” River said.

“Except you never see a stoat.”

“You never see them,” River agreed. “But you know they’re there.”

Because the signs they left were legion. The bent grasses where they’d knelt; the lopped-off branch that had obscured their view. Cigarette ends in a tidy heap. Don’t have the boy picking up old fag ends, Rose had scolded. But it was best the boy was taught to be on his guard, because once the stoats had you in their sights it was the devil’s own job shaking them off.

A good morning for training, then. Besides, all boys like splashing in puddles so—one welly on; the other angled for entry—he bellowed for River to come join him for a walk. But even as his words went crashing through the empty house, he noticed their falsity: that was not the voice he’d had when River had been a boy. And River’s boyhood was over; the days of teaching him about stoats and bogeymen, the myths and legends of Spook Street, had been gone longer than Rose . . .

David Cartwright shook his head. An old man’s fancy—a memory rising to the surface, like a bubble from a frog. He lowered his foot into the second welly, chuckling. The boy ever learned he had these moments of inattention, he’d never hear the end of it. Besides, stoats weren’t what they used to be. These days they used drones and satellite imagery; they planted tiny cameras in your house. Your every movement charted.

Wellington on, he stood up straight. Little bit of exercise, that was the ticket. It was true, there’d been times lately when he’d worried he’d come adrift. He’d doze off of an afternoon, forgivable lapse in an old codger, and come to in a panic: the fire seething in the grate, lamplight softly glowing; everything as it ought to be, but still that knocking in his chest: what had happened while he’d slept? Walls had been known to fall. Things had emerged from under bridges. It was a relief when the world he woke to was the same as the one he’d left.

But that wasn’t always the case, was it? Sometimes the world did shift on its axis. Just two days ago, there’d been a suicide bomber in a British shopping centre—what did they call it? A flash mob . . . The blackest of black jokes; a flash mob ignited, and all those young lives destroyed. For a moment, standing by his own front door, David Cartwright felt it as a personal loss, something he could have prevented. And then that loss shifted shape, and Rose was telling him to be sure to wear his Barbour, not that dreadful old raincoat. And to carry his umbrella, just in case.

Keys in pocket. Wellingtons on feet. What was it he’d been thinking about, some dreadful thing or other? It slid past him like smoke, nothing he could get a grip on. Tucking himself into his raincoat—the Barbour made him feel he was pretending to be country folk—and leaving his umbrella hanging like a bat on its hook, he let himself out the door.

In the office above Marcus and Shirley’s heads, other fingers tapped away: their movements fluid, the keyboard imaginary, the notes they followed apparently random but always searching for the melody beneath; a tune that would echo, build and repeat itself for thirty minutes or so, its themes at first withheld, sometimes stumbling, but ultimately laid bare. And while this happened, nothing else did. That was its lure for Jason Kevin Coe; the clean white page it opened in his mind, temporarily erasing the nightmares scribbled there.

We feel that you’re not . . . happy in your work.

He could not remember how he had answered this question, which, anyway, was not a question. He had the feeling he’d simply sat, fingers twitching in his lap. Reaching for a tune that swirled around his head.

Coe wasn’t sure when this had begun. It hadn’t been a conscious decision, to mime his way through a series of improvised piano recitals; it was simply something he’d discovered himself doing, or rather, had discovered somebody else discovering him doing—he’d been on a bus, moving in fits and starts along a crowded Regent Street, when he noticed that the young woman next to him was edging away, casting worried glances at him, at his fingers, which were thrumming a non-existent keyboard. He hadn’t until that moment connected the music in his head with the movement of his hands. At the time, he hadn’t even been wearing his iPod. The music was simply inside him, something he relied on in moments of anxiety, which now included, he was barely surprised to learn, travelling in fits and starts in a crowded bus on Regent Street.

We were wondering if a transfer might not be in your best interests.

Always that we, underlining the plurality of the forces lined against him. Not that it was the Service’s HR department that gave him sleepless nights.