The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (35 page)

Mathews passed over a small device and a pair of headphones and told her to listen, his voice low, but containing excitement.

‘Listen to this,’ he said, ‘we have a development. He’s speaking about himself.’

Anne took the earphones and looked at the investigator as she listened, uncertain about what she was hearing. Ford’s voice sounded as part of the texture of the room, coherent, calm, measured, not quite rambling, the alcohol unlocked stories which came not quite free enough, elliptic, busy with potential.

She took out the ear-buds, uncertain about what she had heard. ‘I don’t know what this means? Did he know he was being recorded? He sounds drunk.’

Mathews shook his head. ‘We have informed the police. My partner is with them now. The name he’s given us doesn’t check out. There is no Tom Michael or Thomas Michaels. He isn’t who he says he is. The numbers, his travelling in Turkey. We gave the police photographs and a copy of the interview earlier this evening—’ He drew a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket. ‘What do you know about this man?’

Anne found herself blinking. Uncomfortable. ‘I don’t understand what this has to do with finding Eric. He said he didn’t know anything.’

Mark Mathews flattened the paper on the table. ‘There are other issues here. He isn’t the man he says he is. We can’t allow this to pass. We have an obligation to confirm what he has told us.’ He asked her to look at the photograph. ‘Do you know who this man is?’

Anne looked at the image, a printout of an ID, a man looking slightly stupid, a little lost.

‘I don’t know who this is. Is it him? I don’t know?’

Mathews sat upright, unable to suppress a smile. ‘We’re not entirely sure, but the scars on his face, his travelling close to the border in eastern Turkey, it’s
suspicious
. At the very least.’

Anne shook her head, caught up in his words. How easy it was to deliver.
We can’t allow this to pass
, as if she also agreed, as if this decision was something she would naturally follow. ‘I don’t know who this is. What does this have to do with my son? Is he responsible for what has happened to Eric? Does he know where my son is?’

Mark Mathews shook his head. ‘Mrs Powell? Anne—’

She pushed the photocopy away and struggled to remain calm. ‘Please. Explain to me what this has to do with my son. What does this change? Will this get us closer to finding my son?’

Mathews’ face began to redden.

‘You told me that he had no news, he knew nothing. You told me that he has nothing to do with Eric. He said this on your recording. Has this changed?’

‘We have to check, these are our procedures. He might not have been forthright. It’s taken three months to get an interview with him. The only reason he’s here is to look at your son’s notebooks. He might be exactly the kind of man we’re concerned about. He might have other information about Eric. He might not have told the truth.’

‘Might? So you doubt what he told you about my son? What are you saying? Are you saying he has or he has not told you the truth?’

Mathews stood up. ‘I have to be honest. I don’t know. This is looking like something separate. As a witness he’s looking unreliable at this moment, but until we have more information it’s impossible to say. If he’s lying about who he is, then he might be lying about the information he has.’

Anne closed her eyes and asked carefully. ‘Does this change anything he told you earlier today?’

‘What he told us sounds about right. It confirms everything we already know.’

‘But you have suspicions?’

‘About his name. I think he was lying about his name, and he has refused to show us any identification.’

‘But in regard to Eric?’

Mathews’ phone began to ring and he stepped back to answer. While he spoke he looked to Anne. ‘Room nine,’ he nodded, ‘I’ll wait.’ When he cancelled the call he said that the police were coming. The matter was completely out of their hands.

Anne asked for the phone in the lobby, and called room nine. She spoke quickly and left no room for interruption. Done, she thanked the clerk, and turned to her purse to find a set of car keys. As she breathed out she felt a contraction of something more than breath, a keening sense that she was culpable for a mistake which she wanted to correct.

7.5

‘
Please listen to me
. My name is Anne Powell. I am Eric Powell’s mother. You spoke today with investigators from Colson Burns, a company I hired to help find my son. I have to warn you that your discussions with them have been recorded, and that they have approached the police. I’m sorry if this is going to cause you trouble. This isn’t what I wanted. I have a car, outside, I will take you wherever you need to go. I think the police are coming now. I think they are on their way.’

Ford took the notes he had taken during his meeting with the investigators. He checked the numbers on the paper, then thought to write the number elsewhere, on his hand, but realized he didn’t have time. He tucked the paper into his pocket determined not to lose them a second time. Passport. Wallet. Numbers.

Leaving his backpack in the room he came quickly down the stairs and out of the hotel to the street, numbers repeating in his head. His left hand thrust in his pocket on the slip of paper – everything else left behind. The snow had begun to fall in rougher bouts, and he drew a scarf over his mouth, pulled the hat lower, and squinted into the scurry. The storm brought snow and silence to the city. On a side street cut directly up from the hotel he caught a double flash, headlights from a stationary car, and made it across the road only moments before the first police car rounded the corner, soon joined by a second vehicle.

Anne hunched forward, hands braced on the steering wheel. She resisted flashing the headlights a second time as the man came toward the car, as the police were now directly in front of the hotel.

Ford sat quickly in the passenger seat, and she told him to hunch down and stay down. She slowly backed away, the headlights dim. The lights from the two police vehicles wheeled across the front of the hotel in bright loops of red and white. Anne spoke nervously, half-aware of what she was saying: they should leave, she wasn’t sure how, she didn’t know the city. Keep down, she said, keep down. Once they were out of the city she would take him to a railway station, an airport – anywhere he wanted – and then, when she realized that he had nothing with him, she stopped talking, startled that this was all he had, the clothes he was wearing, while the car was over-packed with her son’s belongings.

She drove slowly, an agony. Came to the river and needed to decide a direction. Ford asked if he could sit upright now, and Anne looked up and down the road for police cars, but said no. No. No traffic on the street now. The snow began to fall thicker, obliterated the distance, seeped colour from the night, so they seemed to be enclosed in a bright and intimate world. Simply a car, busy with packages and bundles. A man slumped forward, his hands gripped over the back of his head.

‘I have his clothes,’ she said. ‘Eric’s clothes. I don’t know if they will fit you. It might be worth looking through to see what you can use.’ How vulnerable this man seemed to her, crouched in a car, entirely dependent. ‘I feel that I owe you. I can’t say why exactly.’ And this was not true. She understood exactly what she wanted to express: gratitude that her son had met him, and that it did not matter whether these feelings were reciprocated. She was happy that Eric had felt, what, love? It didn’t have to be love. She suspected it was small, a wayward attachment, one of the intensities of travel, of being loose in the world. She would settle for something lesser, it just needed to be something akin to love. She wanted to explain this, because what matters, what counts, isn’t how well you are loved, but how able you are to give love. Wherever he is, whatever has happened, she can be certain of this.

There was one place she could think of to go. A small village, La Berarde, up in the mountains. A mountain hut above the village, she was not sure how far. La Berarde wasn’t much, just a hostel for climbers and student groups, closed in the winter. She was pretty certain about this.

‘I’ll take you to a place in the mountains.’ She heard herself speaking, and felt surprised at how orderly she sounded. Rational. ‘There is a climbing hut. They should have provisions. Beds. I’m sure. I’m sure there will be something. I can find you there in the morning. I can bring you clothes that will fit. Tomorrow, I can take you somewhere else. I think they will be watching the stations and the airport.’

According to Eric the Glacier du Chardon was a desolate place and one of his favourites. There were some climbs there, good ones, climbs that were complex and testing. She had a box of his climbing gear, and she had wanted to drive to La Berarde, to leave his things there, the CDs, the books, the climbing apparatus. She felt good about this decision. If he came back. If. He would understand the decision. This felt right. She would go there. Leave him. Later they would regroup, figure out what needed to be done. She would help this man out of trouble.

Ford said thank you, and once they were in the suburbs she told him that he could sit upright.

They drove through empty villages. Houses of grey and black flint. The road two simple black tracks in a thread of white. She talked sporadically. Let ideas come to her. It was a shame not to have come here with Eric when it would have been busier. She knew that climbing was important to him, and wished she’d shared that with him a little more. Shown more interest. There isn’t much to La Berarde. One climbing hut. She was insistent about this. The climbing hut.

Anne drove in silence. The road followed the river, veered from one bank to the other across small iron and stone bridges poised above vast gullies. The sides of the gorge rose steeply beside them, banked with fir trees, thinning out to rock and snow, below them it fell to steep shorn rock, black chasms, and white rapids. She switched off the radio and said that she knew that her son was not coming back. Was it bad to say so? She was certain. Everything was against him being alive.

The next moment she was equally certain that he was alive. You hear these stories about people, who for no reason start a new life. Define an entirely new path. There’s no logic to it, but everything old has to be discarded. Some people can’t settle, it just isn’t in them. They just aren’t attached to the world. They can’t see the damage they cause. Some people. It isn’t deliberate. They just can’t see it.

‘I don’t mean you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I really don’t. I mean Eric. I think he can do that sometimes. Just drop everything and start from nothing. School. University. The move to New York. Each time it was a reinvention.’ She turned to Ford, who looked ahead, the dim light from the dashboard soft on his face, a scar under his eye. ‘I’m just not ready. You know. It’s too soon.’ She whispered to herself. ‘I think you understand?’

She wiped her face, her sweater curled over the heel of her hand. ‘I’ll go back,’ she decided. ‘I’ll find out what’s happening. I’ll come back in the morning. I’ll bring food and coffee. I’ll come back tomorrow.’

He found the climbing hut further up the road, beyond where the ploughs had stopped, so the path became deep and uncertain, hard to follow, and difficult to stride through. He saw the car idle, red lights blooming on the snow, the exhaust funnelling thin and low, before it slipped quietly out of view.

He pushed through the door, looked back down the path but could not see the road, and could not see any suggestion of the car. The night now entirely silent.
Some people
, she’d said,
I think you understand.
Despite her explanation, he knew that she was talking about him.

The building, a strong black stone house, similar to the houses in the village, stood as a block on a steep ridge below the stark walls of the gorge; the valley extending before it in a soft white swoop.

Some people.

The door wasn’t locked, but the building was cold, entirely without heat. There were five rooms upstairs, in the first three the beds were stripped down to the wire springs. In the last two he found mattresses and thin blankets. There was nothing to burn in the kitchen, and in the communal rooms the windows, jammed open, tipped snow over the slate lintel and onto the floors. A smaller drift had settled in the fireplace. He found no food, no water, only an old travelling alarm clock and a torch with one battery that clattered about inside when it was lifted up. There were blankets, thick, army grey, and rubber wellingtons stuck upside down on pegs on the walls.

He prepared to sleep. Took off his socks and laid them out beside him. He lay on the mattress, curled into himself. His feet, his hands, quickly lost sensation, and his thoughts began to run scattershot over the same ideas:

She isn’t coming back.

She’s changed her mind about helping.

She’s bringing the police.

She’s bringing the investigators.

She knows who I am.

She believes I am responsible for the disappearance of her son.

She has abandoned me.

This is a punishment.

She wants me to disappear.

The snow continued through the night, so that it did not become dark, and the room held a faint luminescence. He considered what he should do. The road would be lost now, buried. If he had climbing boots he would have better hopes of making his way forward. She wasn’t coming back. His only hope now would be to walk out of the mountains.

In the morning the storm had worsened, and the flakes thickened, so that the house appeared to crouch under the weight of the snow. His hands and feet remained numb and his thinking seemed disjointed, inarticulate.

Grey rock rose close and steep on either side of the path, and although it was cold Ford began to sweat. The path ascended through a narrow pass, over small bridges, packs of ice which spanned a rivulet so blue it appeared thick with dye. Ahead of him, perhaps four or five hundred feet from the house, the valley opened to a bowl, snow-covered and rutted in broken folds, and stained with dirt: a mammoth’s skin. Far below the skyline brightened along the horizon, and he imagined the streets of a vast city laid out in the plain, the dark curve of a river cutting through. In this city he would not be Sutler, he would not be Ford, but someone entirely new.