Текст книги "The Wolf in Winter"

Автор книги: John Connolly

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

On the box was a plastic bag filled with bills and coins.

The lighter was again growing hot in Brightboy’s hand. He lifted his thumb, and the fame disappeared, but the memory of its light danced in front of his eyes. His left hand found the bag of money. He put it carefully in his pocket, then dragged Jude’s pack into the moonlight and rifled it for whatever was worth taking. He found a flashlight, a deck of cards, a couple of pairs of clean socks, two shirts fresh from Goodwill and a handful of candy bars just one month past expiration.

All these things Brightboy transferred to his own pack. He also took Jude’s sleeping bag, rolling it up and tying it to the base of his pack with string. It was better than his own, newer and warmer. He didn’t even think about Jude again until he was about to leave. They had always got along okay, Brightboy and Jude. Most of the other homeless avoided Brightboy. He was untrustworthy and dishonest. Jude was one of the few who tried not to judge him. True, Brightboy had sometimes found Jude’s obsession with his appearance to be an affectation, and he suspected it helped to make Jude feel superior to the rest of his brothers and sisters on the streets, but Jude had been as generous with Brightboy as he had been with everyone else, and rarely had a harsh word passed between them.

Brightboy thumbed the lighter and held it aloft. Jude seemed frozen in place. His skin and clothing were spangled with frost.

‘Why’d you do it?’ said Brightboy. His left hand dipped into his pocket, as though to reassure himself that the money was still there. He’d heard that Jude had been calling in loans. Brightboy himself had owed Jude two dollars. It was one of the reasons he’d come looking for him; that, and a little company, and maybe a swig of something if Jude had it to spare. Someone had said that Jude wanted the money urgently, and it was time to pay up. Jude rarely asked for anything from the rest of his kind, so few resented him calling in his debts, and those that had it paid willingly enough.

So why would a man who had succeeded in putting together what Brightboy guessed to be $100 at least suddenly give up and take his own life? It made no sense, but then a lot of things made no sense to Brightboy. He liked his street name, but he had no conception of the irony that lay behind it. Brightboy wasn’t smart. Cunning, maybe, but his intelligence was of the lowest and most animal kind.

Whatever had led Jude to finish his days at the end of a rope, he had no need for money where he now was, while Brightboy was still among the living. He walked to St John Street, ordered two cheeseburgers, fries and a soda for $5 at the drive-thru window of McDonald’s, and ate them in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. He then bought himself a six-pack of Miller High Life at a gas station, but it was so cold outside that he had nowhere to drink the beers. With no other option available, he headed back to Jude’s basement and consumed them while the dead man hung suspended before him. He unrolled Jude’s sleeping bag, climbed into it and fell asleep until shortly before dawn. He woke while it was still dark, gathered up the bottles for their deposit and slipped from the basement to seek out breakfast. He stopped only to make a 911 call from a public phone on Congress.

It was the least that he could do for Jude.

10

Jude died without enough money to pay for his own funeral, so he was buried by the city at the taxpayers’ expense. It cost $1500, give or take, although there were those who resented spending even that much to give a decent burial to a man who seemed to them to have been nothing but a burden on the city for most of his life. The only consolation they could derive was that Jude was unlikely to trouble them for a handout again.

He was interred in an unmarked grave at Forest City Cemetery in South Portland when the medical examiner had finished with his body. A funeral director recited a psalm as his cheap coffin was lowered into the ground, but unlike most city cases, he did not go to his rest unmourned. Alongside the cemetery workers stood a dozen of Portland’s homeless, men and women both, as well as representatives of the local shelters and help centers who had known and liked Jude. I was there too. The least that I could do was to acknowledge his passing. A single bouquet of flowers was laid on the ground above him once the grave had been filled in. Nobody lingered. Nobody spoke.

The medical examiner’s opinion was that Jude’s injuries were consistent with asphyxiation, with no indication of a suspicious death. The investigation was ongoing, though, and the police and the attorney general were under no obligation to accept the ME’s opinion as gospel. Still, in this case it was unlikely that the Portland PD would reject it. When a homeless man died at the hands of another, it was usually in a brutal manner, and there was little mystery to it. Jude, despite the care that he took with his appearance, was a troubled man. He suffered from depression. He lived from meal to meal, and handout to handout. There were more likely candidates for suicide, but not many.

If there was anything unusual about his case, it was that the medical examiner had found no trace of drugs or alcohol in Jude’s system. He was clean and sober when he died. It was a minor detail, but still worthy of notice. Those who choose to take their own lives often need help with the final step. Either they set out with the intention of killing themselves, and find something to relax them in those last hours and minutes, or the mood induced by alcohol or narcotics is the trigger for the act. Suicide isn’t easy. Neither, whatever the song might say, is it painless. Jude would have learned that as he kicked at the air from the end of a rope. I don’t know how much help booze might have been under the circumstances, but it couldn’t have made his situation any worse.

To be honest, I let Jude slip from my mind after the funeral. I’d like to say that I was better than everybody else, but I wasn’t. He didn’t matter. He was gone.

Lucas Morland pulled up in front of Hayley Conyer’s home on Griffin Road. It wasn’t the biggest house in Prosperous, not by a long shot, but it was one of the oldest, and, being partly stone built, conveyed a certain authority. Most of it dated from the end of the eighteenth century, and by rights it should probably have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but neither generations of Conyers nor the citizens of Prosperous had seen ft to nominate the house. The town didn’t need that kind of attention. The old church presented them with enough problems as it was. Anyway, the Conyer house wasn’t particularly noteworthy in terms of its situation or design, and had no interesting historical associations. It was just old, or at least old by the standards of the state. The leading citizens of Prosperous, cognizant of their heritage, of their links to a far more ancient history back in England, took a more nuanced view of such matters.

Hayley Conyer’s Country Squire station wagon stood in the drive. There seemed to be even more bumper stickers on it than Morland remembered: Obama/Biden; a ‘No Tar Sands in Maine’ protest badge; ‘Maine Supports Gay Rights’ over a rainbow fag; and a reminder that sixty-one percent of the electorate had not voted for the current governor of the state. (Blame the state’s Democrats for that, thought Morland: trust them to split their own vote and then act surprised when it came back to bite them on the ass. Jesus, monkeys could have handled the nomination process better.) The station wagon was so ancient that it was probably held together by those stickers. He’d heard Hayley arguing with Thomas Souleby about the car, Souleby opining that the old gas-guzzler was causing more environmental pollution than a nuclear meltdown, and Hayley responding that it was still more environmentally friendly than investing in a new car and scrapping the Ford.

Morland’s own Crown Vic had been acquired by him from the Prosperous Police Department back in 2010 while it was still in perfect running order. By then Ford had announced that it would cease production of the Police Interceptors in 2011, and Morland decided to secure one of the department’s Crown Vics for himself before his officers drove the feet into the ground. The Crown Vic had two tons of rear wheel drive, and a V-8 engine under the hood. If you crashed in a Crown Vic you had a better chance of walking away alive than in a lighter patrol car like the increasingly popular Chevy Caprice. The car was also spacious, and that meant a lot to a big man like Morland. The sacrifice was getting only thirteen miles to the gallon, but Morland reckoned the town could afford that small gesture on his behalf.

Hayley appeared on her porch as Morland was musing on his car. She was still a striking woman, even as she left seventy behind. The chief could remember her in her prime, when men had circled her like insects, fitting around her as she went about her business. She did her best to ignore them or, if they grew too persistent, swatted them away with a flick of her hand. He had no idea why she had never married. That rainbow bumper sticker on her car might have caused some folk to suggest an explanation, but Hayley Conyer was no lesbian. She was, if anything, entirely asexual. She had committed herself to the town: it was hers to have and to hold, to love and to cherish. She had inherited her duty to it, for more members of the Conyer family than any other in Prosperous had served on the board. Hayley herself had been the chief selectman for more than four decades now. There were those who whispered that she was irreplaceable, but Morland knew better. Nobody was irreplaceable. If that were true, then Prosperous would never have thrived for so long.

But in the still, dark corners of his mind, Morland was starting to feel that it might be for the best if Hayley Conyer made way for another. It would take her death to do it, for she would never relinquish control while there was still breath in her body, but it was time that the Conyer reign came to a close. There was a lot to be said for the discipline of married life. It forced one to learn the art of compromise, and to remedy the flaws in one’s nature. Morland himself was still a work in progress after two decades of marriage, but he liked to think that his wife might be as well. Hayley Conyer, on the other hand, simply grew more resolute in her self-belief, more intransigent in her views and more ready to embrace the use of dictats to get her way. She was helped by the rules of the board, which gave the chief selectman the equivalent of two votes. It meant that even if the board was evenly divided on an issue, Hayley’s side would triumph, and she could force a stalemate with only one other selectman on her side. It was also a simple fact that the rest of the board combined had less testosterone than she had. It was increasingly left to Morland to try to deal with Hayley, and to encourage her to moderate her behavior, but he had been having less and less success in recent months. A body left hanging in a Portland basement was testament to that.

‘I was just admiring your car,’ said Morland.

‘You going to tell me that I need to replace it too?’ she said.

‘Not unless pieces of it start coming off on the highway and injuring folk, although that’s starting to seem increasingly likely.’

She folded her arms over her chest, the way she did at meetings when she wanted to let people know that she had given up listening to their arguments, and her decision was made. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere, and her breasts hung low beneath her shirt. With her flowered skirt and her sandaled feet and her long gray hair held back by a scarf, she came across as the typical earth mother, all bean sprouts and wheatgrass and organic milk. It wasn’t entirely inapt, even if it didn’t even hint at the hardness beneath.

‘It’s mine,’ she said, ‘and I like it.’

‘You’re only holding on to it because the Thomas Soulebys of this world keep telling you to get rid of it,’ he said. ‘If they started stroking it and admiring it, you’d sell it for scrap in a heartbeat.’

Her scowl softened. Morland still had a way of disarming her that so many others did not. His father had enjoyed the same gift. Daniel Morland’s relationship with Hayley Conyer had been almost flirtatious, at least when his wife wasn’t around. Whether Hayley chose to embrace sexual activity or not, she was still an attractive woman, and Alina Morland wasn’t about to stand by and let her husband play patty-cake with her just to ensure the smooth running of the town. Neither had Alina been concerned at the power Hayley wielded as chief selectman, because that was all politics, and this was about a wife and her husband. The town could have decided to make Hayley Conyer its official queen, and Alina would still have knocked her crown off for stirring even the slightest of sexual feelings in her husband.

This demonstrated one of the curious truths about Prosperous: in most things it ran pretty much like any other town of similar size. It had its rivalries, its intrigues. Men cheated on their wives, and wives cheated on their husbands. Hugo Reed didn’t talk to Elder Collingwood, and never would, all over an incident with a tractor and a garden gate some forty years earlier. Ramett Huntley and Milisent Rawlin, although superficially polite to each other, were obsessed with their bloodlines, and both had made regular pilgrimages back to the northeast of England over the years in an effort to trace their lineages back to royalty. So far neither had been successful, but the search went on. In Prosperous, business as usual was the order of the day. The town differed only in one crucial way from the rest, and even that had become a version of normal over the centuries. It was surprising what folk could accustom themselves to, as long as they were rewarded for it in the end.

‘You want some tea, Lucas?’ said Hayley.

‘Tea would be good,’ said Morland.

In Prosperous, you were more likely to be offered tea than coffee. It was a hangover from the old country. Ben Pearson was probably the only storeowner for fifty miles who regularly ran out of loose leaf Earl Grey and English Breakfast, and Yorkshire Tea teabags. And, damn, was there trouble when he did.

Inside, Hayley’s home resembled a Victorian house museum: dark wood antique furniture, Persian rugs, lace tablecloths, overstuffed chairs and wall upon wall of books. The chandeliers were late nineteenth-century reproductions by Osler & Faraday of Birmingham, based on a classic eighteenth-century Georgian design. Morland thought them excessively ornate, and ill suited to the house, but he kept that opinion to himself. Still, sitting at Hayley’s dining table always made him feel like he was preparing for a séance.

Hayley boiled some water and set the tea to brew. The teapot was sterling silver, but the tea would be served in mismatched mugs. China would have been an affectation too far. She poured milk into each of the mugs, not bothering to ask Morland how much he wanted, or whether he might prefer to do it himself. By now she knew his habits and preferences almost as well as his own wife. She added the tea, then found some shortbread biscuits and emptied four on a plate. Biscuits, not cookies: it said so on the packaging, which was also decorated with Highland cattle, tartans and ancient ruins.

They sipped their tea, nibbled the shortbread, and spoke of the weather and the repairs that would have to be made to the town office once winter was gone, before moving on to the real business of the afternoon.

‘I hear they buried that hobo,’ said Hayley.

Morland wasn’t sure that the man named Jude had been a hobo, strictly speaking. As far as he knew, hobos were migratory workers. Technically, Jude had been a bum.

‘Apparently so,’ said Morland.

‘Has there been any fuss?’

‘Not that I’ve heard.’

‘I told you there wouldn’t be. I had to listen to all of that bitching and moaning for nothing.’

Morland didn’t dispute the point. He had done all his arguing when the decision of the board had been communicated to him, but by then it was too late. He’d tried to talk Hayley around, but on that occasion she had proved immune to his charms.

‘It would have been preferable if he’d just disappeared,’ said Morland.

‘That would have cost more – a lot more. Books have to be balanced.’

‘It might have been worth it. I don’t think anyone would have come looking for a missing homeless man, and it’s hard to prove the commission of a crime without a body.’

‘Nobody’s trying to prove that a crime was committed. A hobo hanged himself, and that’s the end of it.’

Not quite, thought Morland. Hayley was thinking like a selectman, Morland like a lawman.

‘The problem, as I see it, is that we now have two dead bodies to no good end,’ said Morland.

‘Ben told me that he had no choice but to shoot the girl. You agreed.’

Yet I didn’t agree to the killing of her father, Morland was about to say, but he killed the words before they reached his tongue.

‘This town has survived, and flourished, by being careful,’ he said.

‘You don’t have to tell me that!’ said Hayley. A little blood found its way into her pale cheeks. ‘What do you think I’ve been doing all these years? Every decision I’ve made has been with the best interests of the town at heart.’

I’ve made, he noticed, not we’ve made. He wondered if this was how all despots began. At some point, someone had to speak truth to power. Then again, those who did frequently ended up with their heads on stakes.

‘I’m not questioning your commitment to the town, Hayley. Nobody is. But two dead from the same family could attract attention.’

‘One dead,’ she corrected him. ‘There’s one body, not two. Has the girl even been reported missing yet?’

‘No,’ he conceded.

‘And she won’t be either, because the only one who might have been concerned about her is now in the ground. By acting as we did, we solved the problem, or we would have if that damn fool Dixon hadn’t let the girl go.’

‘That’s an interesting choice of words,’ said Morland.

He hadn’t raised his suspicions with Hayley before now. He wanted to let them percolate some before he started pouring them out. Hayley nibbled on her shortcake, her tiny white teeth chipping away at it with the action of a hungry rodent.

‘You think he’s telling lies about what happened?’ she said.

‘I tried using a scrap of material to open the bolt from the inside, like he and Erin claimed the girl did.’

‘And?’

‘It worked.’

‘So?’

‘It took a while, and I had to use a piece of wood to pull the cloth in and form a loop, just as Erin Dixon did when I put her in the basement and asked her to demonstrate how the girl might have escaped. She told me she’d found the wood on the floor, and that the girl must have broken it off the bed. She showed me the bed, and there was a long splinter of wood missing that matched the piece in Erin’s hand.’

‘I’m waiting for a “but”.’

‘But there was blood on the floor by the bed when I let Erin out, and it was fresh.’

‘Could it have been the girl’s? She couldn’t have been gone for but an hour by then.’

‘If it was, the blood would have congealed.’

‘If it was Erin’s blood, maybe she cut herself when she was examining the wood.’

‘Maybe.’

Hayley set her shortbread down by her mug. She seemed to have lost her taste for sweetness.

‘Why would they have let her go?’

‘I don’t know. There are rumors about Harry’s business.’

‘I’ve heard. I’ve been concerned since they took that loan.’

‘The paint on his house needs a new coat, and that old truck of his might just be the only vehicle in Prosperous that’s in worse shape than yours. I didn’t have time to take a good look around his kitchen when I visited, but I saw that some groceries had been unpacked and hadn’t yet been put away. They’re buying cheap bread, generic pasta, a couple of packs of chicken joints that were about to expire but would be okay if you froze them, that kind of thing.’

‘They could have been for the girl. They weren’t going to be feeding her filet mignon.’

‘It just doesn’t sit right with me.’ He regarded her closely. ‘It sounds to me like you’re trying to defend them.’

‘I’m not defending anyone,’ said Hayley. ‘I’m trying to understand. If what you’re suggesting is true, we have a major problem on our hands. We’ll have to act, and that could cause unrest in the town. We don’t turn on our own.’

‘Not unless our own start turning on us.’

‘I still can’t figure out why they’d want to release her.’

‘Pity? Guilt?’

‘It’s not like we were asking them to kill her,’ said Hayley. ‘They just had to take care of her until we were ready. She was too thin. All this might have been avoided if Walter and Beatrix hadn’t brought us a junkie.’

‘It’s been a long time since we’ve had to find someone,’ said Morland. ‘It’s harder now. The safest way is to take the vulnerable, the lost, the ones that nobody will miss. If that means junkies and whores, then so be it.’

‘Junkies and whores may not be good enough.’

‘It’s been many years, Hayley. Some people are wondering if it might not be necessary at all.’

She fared up.

‘Who? Tell me!’ Her eyes grew sly. ‘The same ones who are whispering about my “commitment” to the town?’

He should have stepped more carefully. She heard everything, turning the details over in her mind and examining them the way a jeweler might consider gemstones before deciding which to keep and which to discard.

‘I know there are some who are starting to doubt me,’ she said.

Hayley stared at Morland, as though willing him to confess that he himself had been guilty of such thoughts, but he did not. She leaned over the table and grasped his hand. Her skin was cold, and its look and feel reminded him of the cheap chicken cuts at the Dixon house.

‘That’s why this is so important,’ she said. ‘If I’m to go, I want to leave knowing the town is secure. I want to be sure that I’ve done all that I can for it.’

She released her grip on him. She had left marks on the back on his hand, as if to remind him that she was still strong and should not be underestimated.

‘What do you suggest?’ he said.

‘We talk to the Dixons. We tell them to find us another girl, fast. And no junkie either: we want someone clean and healthy. If they come through for us, we’ll see what more the town can do to help them out if they’re in trouble.’

‘And if they don’t?’

Hayley stood and started clearing the table. She was tired of talking with him. The discussion was over.

‘Then they’re a threat to the security of the town. There’s still money in the discretionary fund, thanks to the decision not to disappear the hobo.

‘And,’ she added, ‘our friends will be grateful for the work.’