Stark got back to his car. The play park was empty. The place was deserted. He left, made his way to his flat. On the way, he stopped at a shopping centre, on the outskirts of Glasgow, and made a call to the police – dead body in Chatelherault Woods. He kept it brief. A fitting epitaph for a monster.
He arrived back at his flat at 8.30. The first thing he did was flop onto the couch. The events of the day seemed surreal, stretching reality to the point of disbelief. Did they happen? Perhaps he had hallucinated. Perhaps he was insane, and this thought frightened him more than anything. After the massacre at Alfie Willow’s offices, after the coma, insanity was more than an abstract notion. His mind, fragile at best, never strayed far from the abyss.
Beside him, the polythene bag. He took out the pink diary, held it in his hands. This was his anchor. His grounding. The raw, heart-breaking commentary of a little girl. He wasn’t mad. The world around him was mad. He had helped, just a little.
His phone beeped. He expected it to be Maggie. Checking up and checking in. He read the number. It wasn’t one he recognised instantly. He answered.
“Are you still with the other woman?”
He gave a tired laugh.
“Which one? I have so many.”
“I’m still waiting for this offer of cheap beer.”
He decided against caution. “I can do better.”
“Really?”
“I can offer you totally free beer, by way of bottles in the fridge. But it will mean you’ll have to tolerate the most hideously decorated flat in all of Christendom.”
There was a pause, then, “I would love that.”
He gave Jenny his address. He realised he didn’t have much in to eat, but he was past caring. If she was hungry, then toasted cheese would have to do. He adjusted his thoughts. Just toast.
She arrived a half hour later. Stark was still in his suit. He had forgotten to change. He thought briefly he should have showered, but he was past caring about that too.
She sat at his kitchen table. Stark detected the subtle fragrance of amber and musk, which was not unappealing. She wore a simple summer dress of white cotton, a red shawl to keep her shoulders warm. Her hair was loose, to her shoulders, a casual tangle of auburn locks. Like burnished copper, he thought.
“I see what you mean about the décor,” she said, inspecting the room.
“I’ll sack my interior designer.” He reached into the fridge, retrieved two bottles of beer.
“Glass?”
She responded with mock disdain. “Beer gets drunk from the bottle.”
“Of course it does. Where’s my manners.”
He got a bottle opener from the kitchen drawer, popped the bottles open, handed her one. He sat opposite.
She raised it up. “Here’s to the endless joy of working for SJPS.”
They clinked bottles. “Endless joy,” repeated Stark. They drank. The beer tasted good. After the day he’d had, any alcohol would have tasted good. Jenny grimaced. “Jesus. You weren’t kidding.”
“The wonderful thing about cheap beer, is that it’s cheap. Whether it’s disgusting or not becomes an irrelevance.”
She acknowledged the comment with a smile. “I think there’s logic in there somewhere.”
He raised his bottle again, in salute, took another swig.
“You look tired,” she said.
“I thought exhaustion was expected. Otherwise, the partners might want their money back.”
She gave a frosty chuckle. “Slavery was abolished, with the exception of lawyers’ offices.”
“Now she tells me. And you?”
She regarded him curiously.
“If I recall,” he said, “this morning you were almost snoring on your keyboard.”
She sighed, seemed to give the matter some thought. “I have trouble sleeping. Bad dreams. I wake at three in the morning. Most mornings. Then I worry about how I’ll function in the day ahead if I can’t get back to sleep. And before you know it, the whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t sleep, because I worry about it too much, and the next day becomes a waking nightmare.”
“Waking nightmare,” repeated Stark, more to himself than Jenny.
“Don’t you ever get bad dreams, Jonathan?”
He looked at her. Strange to ask such a question, in the circumstances.
“I do, yes. Doesn’t everybody? Maybe it’s your guilty conscience. What are your bad dreams about?”
“Things most people would laugh at. A missed deadline. A court appearance, and I can’t get the damned car started.”
Stark laughed out loud. The first time he had laughed for as long as he could remember. “You weren’t driving my car, perchance? If it’s any consolation, your nightmare is my reality. I suffer the same dread every day. I put the key in the ignition, and I never quite know what’s going to happen.”
“Ignition?”
“Quite.”
Her lips twitched into a small pensive smile. “Last night was the worst. I dreamt I had died.”
Stark sipped his beer, placed the bottle on the table. “Thankfully, it didn’t come true.” Unlike my dreams, he thought.
She placed the cold bottle against her cheek, closed her eyes. “It was so real. I doubt I shall ever forget it.”
“Drink more of the cheap beer. Guaranteed to make you forget everything and anything.”
She took another drink, then removed her shawl, and folded it round the back of the chair.
She looked at him archly. “I hope you don’t mind a strange woman taking her clothes off in your house.”
“I have absolutely no objection.”
“Then again,” she said, “maybe it’s a regular thing.”
“Irregular, I can assure you.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not quite sure I believe you. Tell me about yourself, Jonathan.”
Jonathan sat back. He was tired, he was perhaps still in shock after the dramatic events earlier, and he was profoundly confused by those events. And yet, he felt he could talk to Jenny for a lifetime. His troubles seemed to drift away.
“There’s not much to tell. I’m probably the most boring human being on the planet. I have a sister. She’s a doctor, and doing extremely well. My parents are dead, so I suppose that makes me an orphan. I was brought up in Eaglesham, which is like one massive retirement home, where the highlight of the year is a missing cat. I like to go for early morning runs. And I’m an expert in packing crates of lemonade.” He blew through his lips. “My God. I really am a boring human being.”
Jenny leaned forward. She gazed at him. Her eyes shone. “Hardly that. You forgot to mention Archie Willow. What you went through. And to survive. That really is something. But I get you don’t want to talk about it.”
He finished his bottle. “Would you like something stronger?” he said. “I’m in the mood.”
“Absolutely.”
He opened a kitchen cupboard, and got out an unopened bottle of ten-year-old Glenmorangie – a birthday gift from his sister, which had remained dormant in his kitchen for months. He had one mug – Iron Man – and one tall lemonade glass. He thought it polite to give Jenny the glass. He poured out healthy measures.
“Straight?” he asked. “And before you answer, there’s only water.”
“Straight’s good.”
He handed her the glass, resumed his seat.
“You don’t do much entertaining,” she said.
“I’m the reclusive type.” He put the mug to his lips, allowed his nose to hover over the whisky. Perhaps not as glamorous as drinking from crystal, but the effect was the same. He had never enjoyed its taste. But right now, at this moment, it smelled good. He sipped. It tasted good, too.
“I was lucky,” he said. “That morning, he killed fifteen of his staff. Lawyers, paralegals, secretaries, receptionists. He even shot a delivery guy, who’d come in to drop a parcel off. He wasn’t choosy. Everyone he shot, he killed. Except me. I used to agonise over it. I wondered why. Why would Willow do such a thing? Why did I survive?”
He fell silent. The details would always remain. The terror, the blood, the madness.
“Did you find an answer?”
Another sip.
“I did, in a way. The answer is that there is no answer. Life is random. There is no pattern. There is no reason. We exist. We die. As soon as I came to understand that, I began to heal.”
She spoke softly. “You don’t believe in God?”
Stark wasn’t sure what he believed in. In the last few days, his views on such matters had been blown to hell.
“Do you?”
She gave a sardonic grin. “How can there be? A real God would never allow people like Paul Hutchison to roam the earth.”
Stark nodded, said nothing, topped up the whisky, swallowed it back. It tasted thick in his mouth. An image formed in his mind. Hutchison, wide-eyed and staring, neck broken, skull bashed. He moved on quickly.
“What about you, Jenny?”
“Very dull. Left school, and tried art college, much to my parents’ vast disapproval. I think I went, just to spite them. It didn’t work out. Put simply, I was rubbish. I woke up, and realised if you want to make any sort of decent money, you have to fit in and go with the flow. Rebels are destined to be poor. And when poverty enters through the door, glamour flies out the window. So I chucked it, went to law school, and got my degree. Got a few jobs, until ending up at SJPS. I’ve been there five years. I think, at least once a week, I feel tempted to tell them to shove it up their arse. But I never quite find the courage. I suppose stress and worry is better than unemployment and worry.”
Stark felt light-headed. The whisky hit the spot.
“No boyfriend?” he asked suddenly, not quite knowing why.
“Not yet.”
He smiled. She didn’t smile. She gave him a level intense gaze, and said, “It’s getting late. If I’m staying the night, I’m not sleeping on the couch.”
“The couch is uncomfortable.”
“In which case, it looks like we’re both sleeping in your bed.”
He held her gaze. “That sounds like a plan.”
“A good plan.”
He got up, went over, bent his face to hers; they kissed again and again. He held her hand. They went to his bedroom, silently, then sinking to the bed, lay locked in each other’s arms, and lost themselves in ardour.
Stark woke at 6.45am. The sun slanted through the bedroom window. His mouth felt dry, then he remembered the whisky. Then he remembered something else. He turned his head. She lay next to him, her arm draped across his chest, breathing softly. He stroked her hair, her cheek, her neck. She moaned, brought her body closer, stretched her leg over.
“Don’t stop,” she mumbled.
He said nothing. Another thing he remembered – he had slept the night without dreaming. Or, if he had dreamt, he was blissfully unaware. Maybe now the dead are at peace, he thought.
But Stark was unsettled. The spectre of Hutchison’s stricken expression floated in his mind. Make him pay – words whispered in his ear. Hutchison had paid, for sure. He had made the ultimate payment. It seemed the victims in his dream had high demands.
He wondered, not without a little dread, if the dead expected more.