‘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 café 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.
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