their wages were scum. A long-overdue wake-up call. Perhaps word would get out to the store assistants, too, even the ones on Rodeo Drive. Zandt could still, would always, remember an incident that had taken place one anniversary afternoon six or seven years before. An occasion when he had taken his wife to an expensive store to buy a blouse, and they had left soon afterwards; Jennifer awkwardly clutching a bag, Zandt shaking with unexpressed fury. She had seldom worn the shirt. It was stained by how small she had been made to feel while buying it.
The memory made him feel far worse than he had before. He was sliding one of the remaining pieces of stationery closer, intending to make notes on something – anything – when suddenly he paused. He could see the waiter, standing behind the counter in the next section of the bar, pouring out his beer.
It was a Budweiser. Same as he’d had last time. That was to be expected. The previous waiter would have left a chit showing how much he owed, what he had been served so far.
An indication of what he wanted, in other words.
Of what his preferences were.
When the waiter arrived with the beer, he found an empty seat and a ten-dollar bill.
The house was high up in the Malibu hills. It was small, and unusual, arranged as a series of rooms like a tiny motel. To get from one living area to the next you went outside and walked along a covered path, re-entering the building via another outer door. It stood on the edge of a cliff and was approached down a steep and twisting lane that was inadequately lit. It wasn’t somewhere you’d find yourself by accident. It was cheap to rent, despite its position, because it was on unstable ground and one step away from being condemned. The combined living room and kitchen area, which was large and glass-sided and easily the best feature, had a crack across the centre of its concrete floor. You could get most of a fist down into it, and the sides differed in height by over two inches. Outside, on the landward side of the lot, was a small swimming pool. It was empty, the pipes having been melted in a brushfire years before she’d come to live there. It took a certain courage to sleep at night.
Nina had spent the evening on the patio, at the rear of the house, her back against the wall and legs splayed out in front of her. Usually the view was of the ocean, with just a few trees and bushes before the land shaded sharply away. No other houses were visible. Tonight the sea was invisible, too, obscured behind a mist that seemed to start at the ends of her feet. It was sometimes this way, and she wondered if she didn’t prefer it. A place on the edge of being, in which anything could happen. She had meant to bring a glass of wine out with her, but forgot. Once she had sat down she seemed becalmed, unable to summon the will to go back in and confront the refrigerator.
She had spent the day looking for Zandt. He had not been at the hotel, nor on the Promenade, or anywhere else she had tried. Early evening she had driven all the way out to sit and watch the house where he had once lived. Other people owned it now, and he had not appeared. She had driven home again. So all she could do was sit. The living room behind her was lined with bookshelves filled with texts and papers and notes. She did not wish to look at any of them. She didn’t want to talk to anyone in the Bureau. Her position there was not as it had been before. The Upright Man had sidelined her career – not because of their failure to apprehend him, though that had not helped. Rather because she had continued to leak information to a policeman who had been ordered not to interfere after the disappearance of his daughter. Agents had lost their jobs for far less. She had managed to keep hers, but things were different now. Once she’d had Monroe’s ear, had been a comer. Now their relationship felt stretched and tired.
She felt alone, and afraid. Her fear was unconnected with the loneliness. She was used to solitude and did not mind it, despite a nature that yearned for something else. She had ended the affair with Zandt for one reason only. The more she came to care about him, the less she had felt willing to destroy the life he already had. The fact that it had been destroyed anyway had made it impossible to explain this fact to him when he asked. Not impossible, perhaps: sentences could have been framed to convey the information. But somewhere within them might have been something that betrayed her. Betrayed the fact that, two weeks after Karen’s disappearance, she had witnessed a thought that had floated unbidden across the back of her mind. That if this thing had been going to happen, the destruction of this family, she might as well have been the one to do it.
There had been other men in the meantime, though not many, and there would presumably be more. Finding men was no real problem, at least the ones you had little desire to keep. It was more the despair that ground her down, the endless procession of terrible events. If this was what we were like, then perhaps there was nothing to be done. If you looked at what our species did to its own kind and to other animals, you had to ask if we didn’t deserve whatever we had coming to us, whatever autonemesis we brought merrily into being; if the rough beasts that slouched towards Bethlehem were anything more than our own prodigal children, coming home.
At about nine-thirty she stood up and went back inside. As she opened the fridge, which held nothing except a half-drunk bottle of wine, she kept half an eye on the small television on the counter. More coverage of the killings in England, though with the sound turned down she could not tell what was being said, or revealed, or alleged. Some dismal facts or other, some new reason to feel sad.
She shut the door again, the bottle untouched, and leaned for a moment with her face against its cool surface.
She looked up when she heard a sound from outside. After a moment the noise resolved into the sound of tyres on the gravel of the road. She walked quickly across the room, stepping over the crack, and got a gun from her bag.
The car came to a halt outside, and she heard a muffled conversation. Then the sound of a door slamming shut, and the noise of tyres again, reversing back up the drive. Footsteps, and a knock on the door. Hand behind her back, she went to open it.
Zandt stood outside. He looked breathless, and a little drunk.
‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘All over.’ He walked into the room, stopped, and looked around. ‘I love what you’ve done with the place.’
‘I haven’t done anything to it.’
‘That’s what I mean. It looks exactly the same.’
‘Not every chick is obsessed with interior decoration.’
‘Yeah, they are. I think you must be a man in disguise.’
‘Damn. You got me.’ She stood with arms folded. ‘What do you want?’
‘Just to tell you I killed the right man after all.’
By the time she came out onto the patio with the bottle, he had already started talking.
‘The problem was that we couldn’t work it like other cases. It didn’t respond to normal investigative procedure. When people disappear you trace back through the contacts, work it down. You talk to the families, their friends, the people in their environments. You’re looking for an intersection. A bar they went to at different times on different nights. Memberships to the same gym. A friend of a friend of a friend. Some point of confluence that says these people are linked by something other than now being dead. By something before, something that led to their deaths. With The Upright Man we had multiple disappearances but only superficial similarities. Same sex, same age, more or less. All pretty. So what? There’s boys sitting in rooms all over the city praying for girls like this. Women, come to that. It’s a consensual
