Authors: Neil Cross
He wondered if pornography might function as a cure for sex. Perhaps young men consumed it so eagerly because it disengaged them from the profundity of their own fear: their most primal dread was rendered farcical. Not even bestial. Lobotomized.
Watch enough and you might never want to have sex again.
The idea made him sad, like old photographs did, and he smiled to himself, watching an American-Asian girl pretend to enjoy being anally skewered on a three-foot dildo.
The next morning he bought a ticket to Wellington, New Zealand.
II
Despite spending two nights in Hong Kong en route, he arrived at Auckland bleary and crumpled. His consciousness felt negligently tethered to his body. It bobbed in his zombie wake like a party balloon. His feet were swollen.
Once it had been established that he did not intend to bring any dangerous fruit into the country, Auckland proved to be the most accommodating of airports. The corridors and walkways were ornamented with potted, indigenous plant species. Native birdsong had been piped in. Smoked glass windows overlooked gigantic docked 747s.
He went to the Air New Zealand desk and confirmed his connecting flight to Wellington. It left in two hours, so he found a luggage trolley and walked to the domestic terminal. In a moulded plastic seat, he punched and bundled his hand luggage into a pillow. He fell asleep at once. When he jerked awake and looked at his watch, he couldn’t work out where the time had gone. He went to the lavatory and passed a thick, odorous stream of dark urine. He examined his tongue in the mirror. The sight was alarming. He went to Whitcoulls and bought a litre of Evian and five Cherry Ripes, bars of cherry coconut in plain chocolate. The mixed strangeness and familiarity of the horizontally ranked confectionery reminded him how far he was from home. By the time he had washed down this meal (he could not work out which meal it had been), the time had come to board his flight.
It was a small plane and he was a nervous flier, but nevertheless he fell asleep before take-off.
He awoke as the aircraft tipped into a vertical dive. He bloomed with hysteria. It was a long minute before he convinced himself they were not about to slam into the heavy earth.
The air crew remained nonchalant (Holloway was well-practised at assessing when they were not) and continued to go about their business. The plane swept low over the water. Too rigid with dread to enquire otherwise, he took it on faith that the pilot was not about to ditch in the Pacific. In fact, Wellington’s approach runway jutted into the bay like an uncompleted motorway bridge. When the aircraft’s landing gear first brushed the tarmac and squealed, so nearly did Holloway.
Outside the airport terminal, he rested his weight on a low wall that bordered the short-stay car park. He squinted in the oblique white slant of Wellington light. Everything was altered. The sunlight came from strange angles. Distant lettering on road signs and advertisements was abnormally distinct. He could see tiny bumps and depressions in the tarmac. The details of his own rumpled clothing and soiled skin. Sweat and sebum were a sheen on his forearms. Crystals of salt at the root of tiny hairs.
The sky rang crystal blue above him. White concrete shone like a temple. Parked and passing cars were bursting nodes of primary colour. The white and silver of skyborne aircraft.
He moved to the taxi rank in dreamlike weightlessness. He tried to calculate what time of day it was, then what day. He reached the front of the queue. The taxi driver left his seat and came round the car to collect Holloway’s bags. It felt like being rescued.
The driver was broad, with a low centre of gravity. He’d greased his thin grey hair into a DA and his blue shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbow, revealing heavily tattooed forearms. He sat behind the wheel and swivelled to face Holloway. He rested a forearm along the back of the seat.
‘Where can I take you, mate?’
Holloway tried to think. After a while, he thought of the word he was looking for.
‘A hotel.’
‘Do you know which hotel?’
‘Oh. Anything half-decent. Whatever.’
‘This your first time in Wellington?’
He lacked the strength to lie.
‘Yes.’
‘That’ll be right.’ The driver nodded and pursed his lips. Then he said: ‘Listen, I’ll tell you the truth. This is my second day behind the wheel.’
‘Right,’ said Holloway.
‘It’s not that I don’t know
Wellington
,’
the driver said. ‘I know
Wellington
like the back of my hand. But I’ve been away.’
Holloway trundled along the conversational rut.
‘Really? How long?’
The driver was pulling from the airport now, on to the main road.
‘Twenty years. Give or take.’
‘Long time,’ said Holloway.
‘Bloody long time.’
‘Right.’
‘Right.’
They drove for a while, in the easy silence of two men who fully understood one another.
‘So the thing is,’ said the driver, ‘I can tell you what hotels were good twenty years ago—’
‘Oh. Right,’ said Holloway.
‘You get me? Wellington’s changed a lot in twenty years. A lot. Now, I don’t want to tell you somewhere’s great, just because it was great in 1982. Do you get what I’m saying?’
‘Look,’ Holloway said. ‘Anywhere. Anywhere will do.’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure.’
‘Right you are. You got any preferences about the route?’
‘No.’
‘You ever seen the bay?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, mate. You have to see the
bay
. You can’t come to Wellington and not see the
bay
.’
‘Great,’ said Holloway. ‘OK.’
‘Right you are,’ said the driver. He threw the cab into a screaming U-turn. A giant hand buried Holloway in the vinyl seat.
‘Don’t worry, mate,’ the driver said. ‘She’ll be right.’
Holloway was too tired not to take his word for it.
They raced along the coastal road, which ascended into steep green hills. The landscape was exotic and familiar. Gorse clung to the upper hillsides, undulating tree ferns to the lower. The roadside was lined with toetoe. It bowed like pampas grass; from its centre emerged feathery, head-hung pom-poms.
They passed an erratic strip of weather-beaten dwellings. Each was completed to a different design. Some were ramshackle and uncertain; their wooden frames worn smooth by salt wind hitting the Cook Straight off the Tasman Sea. Others were smart family homes in jaunty pastels. New 4 x 4s squatted in their driveways.
To their immediate right, the ocean surged and eddied at the rocky, beachless seashore. The driver stopped to show Holloway a blue penguin. The bird sprang happily from the boiling foam of a breaking wave and planted itself on a wet rock. It hunched its shoulders like a gumshoe in a raincoat. Holloway watched the penguin through the window. The penguin looked back at him through little black eyes. Then it waddled in a half-turn and dumped itself back in the tidal surge. He watched its head bob like a ping-pong ball until it was lost from sight.
They drove on.
Round the camber of headland, Wellington unveiled itself. It was a pearly crescent, set tight to the windy bay; the lunette of a God’s nail. Standing on reclaimed land, the city climbed on its outer curve into steep hills. White houses collected in their deep green slopes and gullies.
He had not expected the city to be so abundantly green, nor its once-colonial downtown to be so contemporary and metropolitan. He tipped the taxi-driver and decided to get himself a coffee before looking for a hotel.
He found a café on the edge of Civic Square, which was a pristine fusion of Victorian architecture and late twentieth-century postmodernity. He planted himself on a metal alfresco table and ordered banana cake and cappuccino. He felt misplaced and disconsolate. This was a bright new place. He was old-world, and worn and filthy: a spectral reminder of colonial antiquity.
It had been a long way to come, and to a stranger place than he had imagined, to commit a murder.
18
He was in no rush. For nearly three weeks, while he assimilated and got over the jet lag, he familiarized himself with Wellington. He spent hours strolling downtown. He window-shopped and bought a wardrobe of appropriate clothing. The months spent in Europe and the weeks on a Greek beach had left him tanned and his hair bleached nearly blond. He wore loose khaki trousers and bright short-sleeved shirts. He took day trips to local places of interest. He ate in cafés and browsed the Te Papa museum and the bookshops. He committed to memory the secrets of Wellington’s orientation: the linking alleys and the unexpected culs de sac. The dream-city began to solidify. It sent taproots into his mind. The eagerly courteous young waiting staff in the cafés and diners learned to recognize him.
Hiya, Will. Cake and a Coke?
At the end of the second week, he went to an internet café and found the official website of Victoria University, Wellington. He made notes in a spiral-bound reporters’ pad, then read and reread some pages of secondary interest.
The next morning, he put on a suit and tie and caught a taxi to the university. The campus was like a small town within the Wellington suburbs. Its faculty buildings were in the various signature styles of the 1970s, the 1950s, the 1940s. The Hunter Building was gothic and ivy-clad. The students differed in no visible way from their British counterparts. They didn’t seem conscious of Holloway’s existence. The suit rendered him invisible. He thought better of testing this theory by sitting with the undergraduates and buying himself a coffee in the refectory, but he did browse the campus bookstore, his sunglasses tucked safely away in a sober breast pocket.
He explored the campus for hours, taking regular breaks for Coke and Cherry Ripes. He satisfied himself of its layout before finding the faculty of English. It was located on the eight or ninth floor of the 1970s Von Zedlitz building, but alongside it were small Victorian cottages in which lecturers kept their ramshackle offices. His heart beat hard and he sat on a low wall until the giddiness passed. He supposed that if anybody were to notice any incongruity, this would be the moment: a man dressed like an accountant but wearing RayBan Aviators, perched on a wall and eating a Cherry Ripe. He smiled at the thought. It was his first sighting of himself for many weeks.
The moment wavered. The idea grew in him that shortly he would blink and look about him. His head would clear with a pop and he would wonder what he was doing here. Why had he travelled across the world to sit outside a university faculty clutching a briefcase that contained a mace spray, a hunting knife with serrated blade, parcel tape and a length of nylon rope?
Then Dan Weatherell walked past.
Holloway’s hand reached down to clasp the edge of the wall, so that in his light-headed shock he did not roll forward, face-first on to the pavement. He felt unprepared and extravagantly prominent, sitting on a wall with broad-leafed, indigenous vegetal matter swaying pleasantly behind him in the New Zealand breeze while the man he had crossed the planet to kill strolled past, deep in conversation with a colleague or perhaps a graduate student.
It did not seem fitting to Holloway that Nemesis should be encountered with a Cherry Ripe in his hand.
But Weatherell didn’t see him, and Holloway forced himself not to turn his head and follow his progress. Finally, Weatherell passed the clouded edge of his peripheral vision. Still Holloway did not care to look: he feared that Weatherell had been a hallucination, a psychotic wish-fulfilment.
But Holloway’s imagination would not have done to Dan Weatherell what time had.
Holloway thought he might pass out. He stuffed the half-eaten chocolate bar into his pocket and strode from the university campus. He jogged on to the street and tried to hail a taxi. Half a dozen had passed before he recalled that in New Zealand people didn’t hail taxis in the European manner. He set off to find a rank, but by then the sense of urgency had evaporated. It wasn’t such a long way back to his hotel, so he turned in its direction and began to walk.
He decided to kill Weatherell at home.
There would be fewer potential witnesses and he would be able to take his time. He could ask Weatherell how he’d met Derek Bliss, and how long they’d been planning to do this to him.
Although it would be given under duress (under torture, if necessary) Holloway considered taping Weatherell’s confession. Perhaps it could be used to mitigate the case against him, should he be caught.
But he would not get caught. He knew that. When Weatherell was dead, he would simply fly to Brazil, or some other country with no extradition treaty. It would be many months before he even became a suspect—if he ever did. Nobody in this country knew him, or could connect him in any way with Dan Weatherell. He would leave New Zealand using the second passport, which he had not yet used. Even if somebody were to witness him leaving the scene, and his description was somehow connected to the man staying in his hotel room, he would have left the country using another name. In order that he become a suspect, it would first require Kate to learn of Weatherell’s death (which did not seem likely, if they had not been in contact since the end of their affair) and then to connect that death with her missing ex-husband (which seemed scarcely more probable), and finally for her to relay her suspicions to the Wellington police. The Wellington police would then be required to display an active interest in what she told them, and devote resources to its investigation.
He would not be caught. If for some reason he was identified and located, it wouldn’t happen until it was too late to do anything about it. He would invest what was left of the money; perhaps in a beachfront bar or a guest house. If he was careful and exercised some imagination, it might be possible to live in some style.
Or he could take his own life.
He could walk along the stark black beach at Piha and into the ocean. When the crashing ocean reached his narrow throat, he could dip his head into the foreign water, the harsh saline burning his mucus membranes, and he could take the water down and go to sleep.
Either way, he didn’t mind. But he would not be caught.
It took him a week to buy a second-hand car. A certain instinct led him to the kind of car-yard he was looking for. It was a battered, silver-grey Subaru hatchback and he paid far too much for it. Had he not suspected as much, the scrupulously blank eyes of the man into whose hands he dealt the money, note by note, would have told him. But Kooznetzoff looked dangerous, and anyway, he didn’t mind. He spent the morning giving the Subaru a trial run, adapting himself to the automatic transmission. Then he waited outside the campus car park to follow Weatherell home.
It took him three attempts. The first evening, Weatherell’s fat-wheeled Mitsubishi Pajero pulled away too quickly at the lights and Holloway lost him round an unexpected bend. The next night, Holloway was caught at a red light and lost sight of it. On the third attempt, it was easy. He stuck to the white Pajero like a pilot fish. He followed it up steep, curving roads into Khandalla. The streets were lined with wind-twisted trees. Impressive white houses overlooked the city far below and beyond it the blue, twinkling bay. Distant, coloured flecks were wind-surfers. Tiny jet skis and motorboats buzzed and scudded the surface.
The Pajero turned into a plant-lined, concrete driveway. Holloway drove on for a few metres, then pulled to the kerb on the opposite side of the road. He twisted the rear-view mirror, noting which house Weatherell went to.
He drove back to his hotel. He sat on the bed and dialled room service. He ordered a vodka, ice, no tonic. But when it arrived, he left it undrunk on the bedside table. He called down for a Coke, instead.
The next afternoon, he broke into Weatherell’s house.
It was a large, two-storey structure that backed on to the hillside. At the front it spread on to a broad, flat lawn that overlooked the far-off bay, but the rear garden was dense with plants whose swaying, fleshy leaves overhung the two flights of concrete steps by which one descended to it.
Holloway took the steps briskly but did not run.
Gaining entry to the house was easy. A kitchen window had been left unlatched. He opened it fully and hiked himself on to the windowsill. He used his arms to brace himself in the frame and sprang across a sink full of unwashed plates and mugs. He landed on his feet on the quarry-tiled floor.
He brushed himself down. The house smelled of new carpets and coffee and woodshavings.
The internal kitchen door opened on to the long, narrow sitting room. Large, bright sofas and parquet flooring, with scattered rugs. A second door in the far corner. Maori sculptures with grotesque faces stood in the corners and on the windowsills. Low wooden bookshelves were haphazardly stuffed with hardbacks, paperbacks, framed and unframed photographs, decorative bowls and saucers containing buttons, loose coins, unidentifiable odds and ends of metal and plastic. No TV that he could see, but an impressive stereo. French windows opened on to the garden, which was bordered at the far end with swaying copper beech.
The French windows were open. In the garden there sat a woman in a wheelchair. She was reading a book.
At first, the sight of her puzzled Holloway. He couldn’t work out who she might be. He had accepted without question that Weatherell, like himself, had never found a partner to replace Kate and lived alone. But, of course, Dan Weatherell had been married when he and Kate met. His contract at Leeds University had been for a single academic year. His wife had professional commitments of her own and did not join him. Holloway knew—had always known—that Weatherell returned to her when the relationship with Kate ended.
He wondered how different all their lives might have been had this woman only accompanied her husband to England all those years ago.
He stood in the French window and watched her. He wondered if she knew about Kate. He decided that she couldn’t. She seemed too content and dozy in the leaf-dappled shadow ever to have been hurt so badly. Her curly hair was cut short like a choirboy. She was pale, with a touch of ruddiness round the cheeks. She wore angular tortoiseshell spectacles.
As he watched, she lay the book in her lap and massaged her neck, rolling her head on her shoulders. She removed the spectacles and rubbed at her eyes. She looked at her watch. Then she turned the wheelchair abruptly about and rolled back to the house.
Her speed and dexterity took Holloway by surprise. He threw himself behind the sofa. He crouched there, believing it impossible that she had not seen him. He couldn’t breathe. He wanted to piss. He bit down on his fist to stifle a nervous giggle.
She wheeled past him and into the kitchen. The door swung closed behind her.
He heard the fridge door open and close. Then something being laid on the table: the rattle of a cutlery drawer. The tinny sound of a local radio station news broadcast.
The kitchen overlooked the steps that led back to the road. While she remained in there, it would not be possible to leave without being seen.
Holloway guessed that the door at the far corner of the sitting room would take him through to the hallway and the possibility of exit: if he waited in the hallway, he could escape through the front door when next she entered the sitting room. He thought he could do it without her hearing. If not, he would be gone before she was in a position to see and describe him to her husband.
In a spidery half-crouch, he scuttled from behind the sofa and pressed his eye to the crack in the door. She displayed no inclination to leave. A dog-eared, floury and sauce-stained cook book lay open on the kitchen table, alongside a half-glass of wine, the last from an empty bottle she’d set down on the edge of the sink. As he watched, she lifted herself in the wheelchair to press her full weight on the flat of a large blade, crushing the breastbone of two poussins.
He looked at his watch.
He wondered if the garden might provide an alternative means of escape. But he knew that, if somebody saw him—and if he went leaping over hedges and through people’s gardens, somebody surely would—then he could never come back. He scratched an eyebrow and tried to think.
A car pulled in to the driveway.
Holloway punched his forehead with the heel of his hand.
The clunk of a car door opening.
The woman called out through the wide-open kitchen window: ‘You’re early.’
A car door slamming.
Distantly: ‘Yeah.’
‘Did you remember to get wine?’
‘What do
you
think?’
Weatherell entered the kitchen through the unlocked door. On the table he set down a carrier bag containing three bottles of wine. He shrugged a bag made heavy with books and essays from his shoulder and set it on the floor, near the doorway. He took off his jacket and hung it on a kitchen chair, then removed his tie. He dangled it over the jacket. He kissed his wife on the forehead, then the lips.
‘I thought you’d forget.’
‘Yeah, right.’ He jiggled on the spot. ‘I’m bustin’,’ he said. He made an exaggerated waddle towards the door.
Holloway threw himself behind the sofa again. He heard the swish of Weatherell’s trousers and the slight exertion of his breath as he hurried past. There was a toilet in the hallway. Weatherell’s grunt of relief was followed by a powerful, extended surge of urine on water. Then there was silence as he shook and zipped. The roar of the flush. Weatherell kicked off his shoes in the hallway and returned to the kitchen in stockinged feet. He left a trail of sweaty footprints on the parquet floor. Holloway watched them evaporate. His skin crawled with shame and disgust.
In the kitchen, Weatherell said: ‘How’s it been?’
‘Bad today. I read.’
‘That’s good, love. That’s really good.’
‘Are you even listening to me?’
‘Course I am. I mean it’s good you got to read.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘Course. Yeah.’
‘Why are you so early?’
He took a corkscrew from the cutlery drawer and opened the wine.
‘What’s the point of being there at all,’ he said, ‘if you don’t get to leave early, every now and again?’