it’s the right colour. Forensics has taken samples off her hairbrush, and will have confirmation very soon.’
Zandt noticed that his glass had been refilled. He drank. The whiskey stung in the dryness of his mouth, and made him nauseous. His head felt as if it were a balloon, blown up slightly too much, floating a couple of inches above his neck.
‘The Upright Man,’ he said.
‘Well,’ Nina said, judiciously, ‘we’ve checked with the families of the victims two and three years ago, and every officer who was involved in those investigations. We’re pretty convinced that the nature of the parcels he left on those occasions has remained secret. It could still be a copycat. I doubt it. But I have an all-media scan in operation, including the Internet, for any use of the phrases “Delivery Boy” or “Upright Man”.’
‘The Internet?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Kind of a computer thing. It’s all the rage.’
‘It’s him,’ Zandt said. Only he was fully aware of the irony inherent in his confidence.
She looked at him, and then reached reluctantly back into the file. This time the photograph showed the sweater after it had been carefully unwrapped and laid out flat. Sarah’s name was embroidered on the front, not fancily, but in neat block letters.
‘The hair used for the name is of a dark brown. It is much drier than the hair that we believe to be Sarah’s, suggesting that it was cut some time ago.’
She stopped then, and waited while Zandt slowly reached into his pocket. He pulled out a pack of Marlboros and a matchbook. He had not smoked since they had been in the room. There was no ashtray. His hands, as he pulled a cigarette out, were almost steady. He did not look at her, but only at the match as he struck it: regarding it with fixed concentration, as if it were something unfamiliar to him, but whose purpose he had divined through intuition. It took three attempts before it flared, but the match could have been damp.
‘I made sure the dark brown hair was tested first.’ She took a deep breath. ‘It’s a match, John. It’s Karen’s hair.’
She left him alone for a while, went and stood outside in the cold and listened to the darkness. Muted laughter drifted across from the main building, and through the window she could see couples of varying ages, bundled up in sensible sweaters, plotting tomorrow’s adventures in hiking. A door was open on the other side of the building and through it she could hear the clatter of plates being cleaned by someone who didn’t own them. Something small rustled in the undergrowth on the other side of the road, but nothing came of it.
When she returned, Zandt was sitting exactly as she’d left him, though he had a new cigarette. He didn’t look up at her.
She put a few more pieces of wood on the fire, inexpertly, unable to remember whether you piled them on top or placed them round the sides. She sat in the chair and poured herself another drink. Then sat up with him through the night.
By late afternoon I’d had conversations with the police and the hospital, and before that with my parents’ neighbours on either side. Each of these had been carefully judged.
I called the cops from the house, and was put through to an Officer Spurling – thankfully not one of the men who’d interviewed me after the incident in the hotel bar. Spurling and his partner had been first on the scene of my parents’ accident, alerted through a call from a passing motorist. Officers Spurling and McGregor remained on the scene until the ambulance and fire service arrived, and assisted in the removal of the bodies from the car. They followed the ambulance to the hospital, and Spurling had been present when Donald and Elizabeth Hopkins had been pronounced dead on arrival. The deceased had been identified by their driver’s licenses, with subsequent confirmation from Harold Davids (attorney) and Mary Richards (neighbour) within two hours.
Officer Spurling was sympathetic to my desire to establish the circumstances of my parents’ death. He provided me with the name of the relevant doctor at the hospital, and suggested I look into counselling. I took him to mean receiving some, rather than as a career. I thanked him for his time, and he wished me the very best. I ended the call hoping I didn’t run into him when I went to the station to retrieve my gun, though chances were he already knew all about it. The counselling suggestion hadn’t sounded entirely uninflected.
Tracking down the doctor was a good deal more difficult. She wasn’t on duty when I called the hospital, and the length of time it took to elicit this information, via a succession of conversations with harried nurses and other disembodied and bad-tempered voices, suggested that I’d be lucky to get her on the phone when she arrived. The ER was there for the living. Once you were dead you were merely an unwelcome reminder, and out of their hands.
I drove over and spent a very quiet hour waiting there. Dr Michaels eventually deigned to come out of her bunker and talk to me. She was in her late twenties, studiously harassed, and awfully pleased with herself. After ruthlessly patronizing me for a few moments she confirmed what I’d already been told. Major head and upper body trauma. Dead as dead could be. If that was all, could I excuse her. She was very grown up now, and had patients to see. I was more than happy to relinquish her company, and tempted to help her along her way with a brisk shove.
I walked back out of the hospital. The light was gone, a fall evening come early. A few cars were parked randomly around the lot, made monochromatic and anonymous by high overhead lamps. A young woman stood smoking and crying quietly, some distance away.
I considered what to do next. After finding the note, I’d sat on the coffee table for quite some time. Neither the light-headedness nor the crawling sensation in my stomach went away. A search through the rest of the book showed that it was empty. There was no question that the note was in my father’s handwriting.
‘Ward,’ it said, in writing that was in no way different from what I would expect, neither too large nor too small, not forced or noticeably faint: ‘We’re not dead.’ My father had written this on a piece of paper, slipped it into a book, and then stashed it inside his old chair, taking care to replace the braid that covered the join. A note denying their death had been placed in a position where it would come to light only if they were dead. Why else would I be in the house alone? What would I be doing in his chair? The positioning of the note suggested that whoever had placed it believed that, in the circumstances that next led me to be in the house, I would sit in the old chair – despite knowing it was the least comfortable in the room. As it happened, they’d been right. I had sat there, and for some time. It made sense that I would do so if they were dead, or that I would at least look at it, maybe run my hand over the fabric for a moment. It was exactly the kind of thing a grieving son might be expected to do.
But, and this was the point that kept jabbing away at me, this implied that some time before their deaths one or both of them had spent time thinking about what would be likely to happen after they died. They had considered the situation in detail, and made judgments on my likely behaviour. Why? Why would they be thinking of death? It was bizarre. It made no sense.
Assuming they were actually dead.
The idea that the last few days had been a farce, that my parents weren’t dead after all, was a difficult one to face head-on. Part of my heart leapt at the idea, the part that had awakened me at some stage in every night since the phone call from Mary. Even if I hadn’t cared for them, and had only wished for a chance to bawl them out about UnRealty, I wanted my parents back. But when your flesh is damaged the body
