Dead Air (49 page)

Merrial looked from her to me.

Celia frowned, then glanced back at me. ‘With
him
?’ she said, and laughed. She turned to look at me, and stopped laughing, looked serious. ‘Mr Nott; no offence, but I could do better.’

‘None taken,’ I managed to wheeze round the pain.

Celia whirled round to face her husband again. ‘Show me, then. Show me what this evidence is!’

Merrial just smiled at her, but the smile was strained, and by then even I could see what she’d sensed instantly; he really didn’t have any evidence on her, he’d been hoping to force a confession out of her with the accusation alone, if a confession had been due.

Celia fixed her gaze upon her husband then and took on a frosty look. Actually, frosty didn’t even start to cover it; it was more of a shaving-of-a-degree-above-absolute-zero look. It put the fear of God into me and I was only caught in the backwash of its baleful focus. Merrial withstood it somehow - must have built up some sort of immunity over the years they’d been married, I supposed - but you could see he was affected. Some fuckwit part of me, patently not in any way connected to my horribly bruised and still jangling testes, almost felt sorry for the bastard.

‘I have been a faithful wife to you,’ Celia said in a measured, contained, utterly sure and certain voice. ‘I have always been
faithful
to you!’ she said, her voice breaking.

And sitting there, right then, goddammit, even
I
believed her. I’d have stood up in court or on any field of honour to insist with my last breath that this woman had been an utterly faithful wife and was being sorely, grievously wronged and defamed by being accused of being anything else.

Part of me found the time to wonder how the hell she was
doing
this, and that was when it occurred to me that - just possibly - Ceel’s patently lunatic ideas about entanglement were making a real and crucial difference here. Maybe at this moment she genuinely believed that she had been a faithful wife, because, in that other reality she claimed to be linked to, she actually was. She was speaking not so much for herself but for the Celia on the other side of that divide; the Celia who was a perfectly, unimpeachably good wife who had never cheated; the Celia who could rightly claim, as she just had, that she had always been faithful to her husband.

‘Can you say the same to me, John?’ Her voice was hollow as a vast canyon, and as sad as the sound of earth hitting a tiny coffin.

Merrial met her gaze.

Drip, drip, drip, in the distance. I was breathing hard, swallowing on a dry, parched throat. The smell of death and shit didn’t seem quite so bad in the air around us now, but maybe it was just something you got used to. Eventually Merrial said, ‘Of course I can say it, Celia.’

That last shaving above Zero Kelvin vanished with a whimper into the darkness surrounding us.

‘Do not treat me like a fool, John,’ Celia said, and her voice was like the voice a glacier would have if it could speak, the voice of the oldest, steepest, widest, most powerful mountain-grinding-up glacier in all the fucking world, after it had thought good and hard in glacier terms about precisely what it wanted to articulate.

Merrial cleared his throat. I didn’t realise he must have looked away until he brought his gaze up to meet hers again with what looked like an appalling, abysmally draining amount of effort. ‘You—’

‘I want a divorce, John,’ she said.

Fucking bombshell. Just like that. Merrial blinked. The two of them stayed that way for a few moments, him swinging one foot without realising it, thunking against the trailing edge of the Bentley’s wheel arch, her glaring down at him, perfectly, savagely still.

Merrial glanced at Kaj, me and the other two guys before looking back to her. ‘I don’t think here is really—’

‘We talk about it here, now,’ Celia said quickly. ‘You brought me here to see this, you changed our rules. You put cameras in my
home
.’ Her voice almost broke, and she took a quick, controlling breath. ‘So business and marriage are the same, now,’ she told him. ‘They are in the same arena. I said: I want a divorce.’

Merrial ground his teeth. ‘No,’ he said.

She didn’t react. Dear God, this woman had perfected threatening stillness to a high art indeed. Merrial might be good, but Ceel would have made a brilliant crime boss.

Merrial cleared his throat and lifted his head up to her again. ‘Actually,
I
want a divorce, Celia.’

She tilted her head a little. ‘You do, do you?’ Her voice was neutral now, but sounded ready to slip into menace or accusation at any moment.

‘Yes, I need a divorce.’ Merrial gave an unhealthy looking little smile. ‘I don’t like the term “widower”, Celia, so I hope you’ll be as accommodating as I require you to be.’

She laughed a quick, convulsive laugh. ‘And what does
that
mean?’

Merrial looked just plain nasty now. ‘It means don’t expect any money.’

She gasped. Really gasped, genuinely astonished. ‘I don’t want your
money
, John,’ she told him. There was a hint in her tone as though she had just realised she had been dealing with a child all along. ‘I didn’t marry you for money. I didn’t want it then and I don’t now. Keep the money. Have your divorce.’ She was breathing hard now, shoulders rising and falling in the yellow and black jacket. Her voice had quivered over the last few sentences, barely under control. ‘So,’ she said, shaking her head once, regaining command. ‘Has one of them insisted you make an honest woman of her?’

‘You might say that,’ Merrial said. You could see he was having to force himself to keep looking at her, battling against the pressure of that remorselessly self-possessed gaze.

‘The one in Amsterdam?’ she asked evenly.

‘The one in Amsterdam.’ There was a strange sort of defiance in his tone.

‘And is she younger than I am, John?’ Celia asked quietly. ‘Is she more beautiful? Is she as young as I was when you met me? Or younger? Is she as exotic, is she as foreign? Is she better connected? Has she a famous name? Has she money? Is she fertile?’

Merrial’s gaze might have flickered a little.

Ceel relaxed her stance. She stood back, her weight went more on one foot than the other as she nodded. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘She is pregnant, is she?’

Merrial’s eyes went wide just for a moment, then he gave a small laugh. ‘You always were good like that, weren’t you, Celia?’ He looked past his wife to the big blond guy. ‘Isn’t she, Kaj?’

Kaj just looked awkward, and nodded.

‘Well, congratulations,’ Celia said bitterly.

She seemed suddenly to collapse inside then, looking quickly away and putting one hand up to her eyes. Silently, her shoulders - wide inside the thick yellow and black hiking jacket - shook; spasming once, twice, three times. Merrial looked even more awkward and uncertain. He seemed to be about to go to her and hug her, but he didn’t. He tried to find something to do with his hands and then folded his arms and looked at Kaj and did a sort of pathetic, Women, eh? look and gesture at the bigger man. Kaj sort of twitched, which was probably as close as he was going to come to waxing eloquent on the matter.

You beautiful, brave, intelligent, fabulous woman, I thought, staring at her with tears in my eyes. I had to look away, in case Merrial saw the way I was gazing at his wife. I was still having to remind myself that the extraordinary, exquisite, immaculately righteous ire she was displaying here was all in fact a complete fake, that she was lying through her perfect, delicious teeth when she told Merrial she’d been a faithful wife, but she had successfully, so far, anyway, shifted the focus of all that was going on here away from me and onto herself, onto her marriage. She’d gone nuclear with the big D word and duly been nuked in return, but it looked like she was actually getting away with it.

This was a woman fighting for her own life and that of her lover, but she wasn’t settling for just the result, she seemed determined to accomplish the task with audacity, bravura and style. I didn’t think I’d seen a more resourceful and courageous piece of acting in all my life, in person, on stage or on screen. Even if it still all went horribly, painfully, lethally wrong from here on in, at least I could suffer and die knowing I had been in the presence of genius.

Celia dried her eyes with one hand, then fetched a handkerchief from one of the pockets in her jeans and dabbed at her nose and cheeks. She sniffed and put the hanky away again. She drew herself up. ‘I don’t want any money. And I won’t say anything, to the press, the police, to anybody. I never have, I never will. But I want to be left alone, afterwards. I want to live my own life. You live yours. I live mine. And nothing must happen to any of my family, any of my loved ones.’ She raised her chin to him after she said this, as though defying him to object to any of it.

Merrial nodded, then said softly, ‘Fair enough.’ He made a small gesture with his hands. ‘I’m sorry it had to end like this, Celia.’

‘I’m sorry it had to be so bloody undignified, in front of Kaj and these guys and -’ she gestured vaguely in my direction ‘- this poor clown.’

Merrial looked at me like he’d forgotten I was there. He sighed. ‘I thought …’ he began. Then he shrugged. He fixed me with a stare I shrank back from. ‘One word on your show about this, Mr Nott, one word to anybody at all; friends or family or police or public, and I’ll make sure you die slowly, do you understand?’

I swallowed, nodded. I didn’t trust myself to say anything sensible. The fuckwit bit of me with its thumb seemingly super-glued to my personal Self-Destruct button wanted to say something like, Yeah yeah yeah, fucking
omertà
or I die in drawn-out agony, yada yada yada big man, but your wife’s just worked you over and we both fucking know it and this compensatory macho threat stuff isn’t convincing anybody … Eventually, though, under that gaze, I had to give way and croak, ‘Yeah. Yes, I understand. Nothing. Nobody.’

Merrial kept looking at me for a moment longer, then nodded to the two guys standing at my shoulders. ‘Give him back his stuff and take him back to where you found him.’

‘In the box, Mr M?’ said the guy who’d hit me.

Merrial looked upset. ‘No, not in the fucking box. In the back of the van; put some tape over his eyes, that’ll do.’

I thought, Yes! … but just a tad too soon. Kaj stepped past Celia, lowered his mouth to his boss’s ear and muttered something. Merrial smiled that thin, thin smile of his and quietly said, ‘All right. One little one.’ Then, as I thought, No, no, no! We got
away
with it! This isn’t supposed to happen! Please, no! Merrial looked at Celia and sighed and said, ‘Maybe you’d best look away.’ Celia rolled her eyes and did so.

Kaj stood in front of me.

‘This is for crapping in my loo,’ he said.

I had just enough time to think,
Now
the cunt sounds vaguely Swedish, then he punched me so hard across the face I didn’t wake up until I was in the back of the Astramax again, eyes taped over and hands tied together but otherwise unrestricted. My head and my balls hurt like fuck, blood was bubbling from my nose, my pants were full of chilled shit and I was very cold indeed; a bitter winter breeze was whipping through the van from the open front windows.

I didn’t blame the guys; it was reeking in here.

Thirteen

THE SCOTTISH VERDICT

‘What the fucking hell happened to you?’

‘I walked into a door.’

‘… Right. Would some stairs be involved at any point?’

‘That’s right; then I fell down some stairs.’

‘And after that?’

‘Then somebody beat the shit out of me, Craig.’

‘That must have taken a while. Were they working shifts?’

‘… Now that has got to smart.’

‘Philip, if I live for a thousand years, “smart” is not a word I will ever choose to associate with how I came to acquire this little lot.’

‘Good, your brain and tongue are still working. Debbie wants to see us after the show and the first record up is Addicta’s new one with Jo on joint lead vocals … Na, looking for sympathy doesn’t get any more efficient with a black eye. Good try, though.’

‘Oh, my good Lord almighty, get yourself in here, Kennit, you need tendin to.’

‘Fackin ell, man, you white guys go
brilliant
colours!’

Anonymous. ‘Yes?’

‘Don’t forget to wipe your phone’s Last Calls Made and Received memories, just in case. I’ve tidied everything at this end.’

‘Already done.’ I’d destroyed the calling card with the incriminating code number on it, too. ‘Though now I’ll have to do this one, of course. Celia?’

‘What, Kenneth?’

‘Thank you. You were brilliant. You saved my miserable life.’

‘It was my pleasure.’

‘I love you.’

‘Still? Are you sure?’

‘I do. I mean it.’

‘Well. Thank you, Kenneth.’

‘… What happens now?’

‘I have to pay the woman who was our maid some money to compensate her for her dismissal.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’