Nina had spent the evening on the patio, at the rear of the house, her back against the wall and legs splayed out in front of her. Usually the view was of the ocean, with just a few trees and bushes before the land shaded sharply away. No other houses were visible. Tonight the sea was invisible, too, obscured behind a mist that seemed to start at the ends of her feet. It was sometimes this way, and she wondered if she didn’t prefer it. A place on the edge of being, in which anything could happen. She had meant to bring a glass of wine out with her, but forgot. Once she had sat down she seemed becalmed, unable to summon the will to go back in and confront the refrigerator.
She had spent the day looking for Zandt. He had not been at the hotel, nor on the Promenade, or anywhere else she had tried. Early evening she had driven all the way out to sit and watch the house where he had once lived. Other people owned it now, and he had not appeared. She had driven home again. So all she could do was sit. The living room behind her was lined with bookshelves filled with texts and papers and notes. She did not wish to look at any of them. She didn’t want to talk to anyone in the Bureau. Her position there was not as it had been before. The Upright Man had sidelined her career – not because of their failure to apprehend him, though that had not helped. Rather because she had continued to leak information to a policeman who had been ordered not to interfere after the disappearance of his daughter. Agents had lost their jobs for far less. She had managed to keep hers, but things were different now. Once she’d had Monroe’s ear, had been a comer. Now their relationship felt stretched and tired.
She felt alone, and afraid. Her fear was unconnected with the loneliness. She was used to solitude and did not mind it, despite a nature that yearned for something else. She had ended the affair with Zandt for one reason only. The more she came to care about him, the less she had felt willing to destroy the life he already had. The fact that it had been destroyed anyway had made it impossible to explain this fact to him when he asked. Not impossible, perhaps: sentences could have been framed to convey the information. But somewhere within them might have been something that betrayed her. Betrayed the fact that, two weeks after Karen’s disappearance, she had witnessed a thought that had floated unbidden across the back of her mind. That if this thing had been going to happen, the destruction of this family, she might as well have been the one to do it.
There had been other men in the meantime, though not many, and there would presumably be more. Finding men was no real problem, at least the ones you had little desire to keep. It was more the despair that ground her down, the endless procession of terrible events. If this was what we were like, then perhaps there was nothing to be done. If you looked at what our species did to its own kind and to other animals, you had to ask if we didn’t deserve whatever we had coming to us, whatever autonemesis we brought merrily into being; if the rough beasts that slouched towards Bethlehem were anything more than our own prodigal children, coming home.
At about nine-thirty she stood up and went back inside. As she opened the fridge, which held nothing except a half-drunk bottle of wine, she kept half an eye on the small television on the counter. More coverage of the killings in England, though with the sound turned down she could not tell what was being said, or revealed, or alleged. Some dismal facts or other, some new reason to feel sad.
She shut the door again, the bottle untouched, and leaned for a moment with her face against its cool surface.
She looked up when she heard a sound from outside. After a moment the noise resolved into the sound of tyres on the gravel of the road. She walked quickly across the room, stepping over the crack, and got a gun from her bag.
The car came to a halt outside, and she heard a muffled conversation. Then the sound of a door slamming shut, and the noise of tyres again, reversing back up the drive. Footsteps, and a knock on the door. Hand behind her back, she went to open it.
Zandt stood outside. He looked breathless, and a little drunk.
‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘All over.’ He walked into the room, stopped, and looked around. ‘I love what you’ve done with the place.’
‘I haven’t done anything to it.’
‘That’s what I mean. It looks exactly the same.’
‘Not every chick is obsessed with interior decoration.’
‘Yeah, they are. I think you must be a man in disguise.’
‘Damn. You got me.’ She stood with arms folded. ‘What do you want?’
‘Just to tell you I killed the right man after all.’
By the time she came out onto the patio with the bottle, he had already started talking.
‘The problem was that we couldn’t work it like other cases. It didn’t respond to normal investigative procedure. When people disappear you trace back through the contacts, work it down. You talk to the families, their friends, the people in their environments. You’re looking for an intersection. A bar they went to at different times on different nights. Memberships to the same gym. A friend of a friend of a friend. Some point of confluence that says these people are linked by something other than now being dead. By something before, something that led to their deaths. With The Upright Man we had multiple disappearances but only superficial similarities. Same sex, same age, more or less. All pretty. So what? There’s boys sitting in rooms all over the city praying for girls like this. Women, come to that. It’s a consensual desire, not psychopathology. Apart from the long hair. That’s the only thing that can be pointed at, the only preference – along with the fact the girls came from families where money isn’t a big issue. They’re not runaways, they’re not junkies. Which just means that what he did was more difficult, because girls like this are harder to steal. It’s not a lead.’
He paused. Nina waited. He wasn’t looking at her. He didn’t even seem aware of her presence. He stood on the very edge of the patio. From the doorway his outline looked indistinct. When he started again, he spoke more slowly.
‘A man is looking for something. He has an anxiety, something that can only be resolved through a certain course of action, which he has become aware of through accident or trial and error. He hasn’t allowed it to happen for a while. He’s been good. He hasn’t done the bad thing. He’s kept himself to himself, and not done anyone any harm. He’s never going to do it again. He’s not weak – he doesn’t need it. Not now, maybe not ever. Maybe he’s never going to do it again. Maybe he can leave it behind. Maybe it’s over.
‘But gradually … it stops being okay. It starts getting harder. His concentration goes. He finds he can’t function. He can’t focus on his job, his family, his life. He’s getting tense. Ideas start recurring, patterns of fantasy. He’s becoming anxious, and what makes it worse is that he knows what is causing it. He knows the only thing that is going to resolve it. He begins to revisit old campaigns in his head, but they don’t help. He may find it difficult to remember them in any detail. They don’t diminish the way he’s feeling now. It’s yesterday’s news. You can’t resolve a current anxiety through something that has already happened: last year’s good times do not combat this week’s misery. He needs something in front of him, something he hasn’t done yet. Not even the talismans help, the things he kept, the proof that he’s done it before. All they do is remind him that it’s possible. He needs to do it so much and knows that he can’t live without it – and in any event, no matter how hard he tries, he’s already done it and there can never be any real peace or any hope of forgiveness. His life is tainted and he can’t go back.
‘And