37

Rhees was killing time fishing detritus from the pool – dead butterflies, limp insects, leaves – when the telephone rang inside the house. He laid the net on the ground and walked into the kitchen. He half-expected to hear Amanda again, but it was Morgan Scholes on the line.

‘Is she around?’

‘Not at the moment,’ Rhees said. He looked across the backyard at the cedar fence. Water reflected by sunlight rippled against the wood, a dappled effect. A few yards down the alley beyond the fence a telephone lineman in a white hard hat was climbing down from a ladder propped against a pole. He vanished out of sight and Rhees heard doors slam and the sound of a van start up.

‘You there, John?’ Scholes asked.

‘I’m here.’

‘I call her, she says she’ll get back to me, I don’t hear a goddam thing.’

Rhees said, ‘She’s running an errand, Morgan.’

‘Don’t tell me. It’s this stiff in the river business she’s got herself into, right?’

‘You know what she’s like,’ Rhees said.

‘The back of my hand,’ Morgan Scholes said. ‘You’re too soft on her, John. Who’s in charge there anyway? You or her?’

Rhees said, ‘We’re equal partners,’ and wondered how true that was. Sometimes he thought of Amanda in terms of a storm, a river suddenly flooding. His role was to stack sandbags along the banks and wait for the waters to recede.

‘Equal, I don’t think. She has you by the short and curlies.’

‘That’s not true, Morgan.’

‘I blame myself. I gave her too much freedom when she was a kid and what good has that done? I should have laid down the law more.’

Rhees glanced at the kitchen clock. Half an hour had passed since he’d hung up on her. Maybe she was sulking somewhere, taking her time coming home, trying his patience.

‘I don’t think this has to do with you giving her too much freedom, Morgan,’ he said.

‘No?’

‘One minute she wants the cabin and peace,’ Rhees said, ‘the next she’s not sure it’s inactivity she’s really after. She’s always had goals in the past. Now … I guess it’s a question of redefining herself, which isn’t easy for her.’

Morgan Scholes said, ‘She’s old enough to make up her mind, John, and you ought to tell her that.’

Rhees said, ‘I’m trying.’

‘Get her to phone me when she comes in.’

Rhees said he’d pass along the message.

He hung up, wandered through the house, room to room, restless. In the bathroom he looked inside the medicine cabinet. He had an urge to gather together Amanda’s vitamin supplements and immune-system boosters and just dump all that quackery in the trash. He studied the labels: dried seaweed, powder derived from a green-lipped mussel, whatever the hell that was. He imagined plants and creatures fished out of the deep sea, ground down and then stuffed into capsules.

There were a couple of prescription medications: Diazepam, Dalmane. Downers she’d used during the Sanchez trial when she’d needed to sleep, when she was fraught and wound too tight, and it was three a.m. and she was collating material or studying Isabel Sanchez’s testimony, or poring over transcripts of her interviews with Galindez. When she was fraying at the edges.

And now, now she’d said Dansk was following her. Her gut feeling, she’d said. She usually had good instincts, but this time he had to wonder if she was interpreting the signals accurately, or if she was creating her own little melodrama because of Isabel.

A touch of paranoia? Possibly.

He shut the cabinet. He listened to the silences of the house. He wished she’d come through the front door and he could hold her and say something like, I’m sorry I hung up on you, let’s talk. Let’s clear the air about everything.

He walked into the kitchen. The door to the backyard was open. He thought he’d closed it. No, he remembered closing it to keep the cold air from the air-conditioning escaping –

He saw the tyre-iron but couldn’t move out the way before it smashed into his ribs with an impact that forced all air out of his lungs, and he staggered, clutching the area of pain, aware of light being sucked out of the room, and he had the sensation of plummeting down a greased cylinder. The second blow struck the side of his head and the sense of slipping inside a darkening tube was even stronger now, and he gave up trying to keep his balance and went down on his hands and knees.

He raised his face. He made an effort to get up by clutching the edge of the table, and that was when the third blow was launched, sharp and dreadful, metal coming down so hard on his left hand that he could hear the sound of his finger-bones breaking. He slumped and the room was like one of those deranged rides at a carnival when you went spinning round and round in the air and the spectators far below you were just a sea of faces in white light. He rolled over on his back and dimly saw two guys wearing ski masks. He launched a foot, the best effort he could make, and struck one of the guys in the groin.

‘You motherfucker,’ the guy said.

The tyre-iron cracked against the back of his knee and he was dragged across the kitchen floor and out into the yard towards the swimming-pool where his head was forced underwater and held there, and all he could see were pale red bubbles rising from his mouth. Drowned, he was being drowned. He wanted to scream, but then his head was yanked up from the water and the sunlight was blistering against his eyes and he was whacked again, this time across the shoulders. And then his face was forced underwater a second time, or maybe a third, he couldn’t count, he was beyond making elementary measurements. Now the pain came roaring through him, gathering strength, but that was only the first stage, because after that he found himself entering a place of pain beyond pain, where a deep burgundy tide hurried into his brain.