The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels. Michael Marshall

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СКАЧАТЬ to kill them.’

      ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘That’s what we all assumed back then. But I wonder.’

      ‘Are you going to tell me what you do think?’

      ‘I’m wondering if it was a punishment.’

      Nina considered this. ‘For what?’

      ‘I don’t know. But I think this man took these girls, a very particular type of girl, on purpose. I think he had something in mind for them, and each of them failed to come up to scratch in some way. And as a punishment for that, he took something he thought would be of paramount importance to them.’

      He took a drink of his coffee, seeming not to care that it was cold. ‘You know what they did to collaborators in France, at the end of the Second World War?’

      ‘Of course. Women who were thought to have accepted their German invaders too wholeheartedly were paraded down the street with their hair shorn off. A proud moment for our species.’ She shrugged. ‘I can maybe see the punishment thing, but I don’t see what global conflict has to do with it. These girls hadn’t fraternized with anyone.’

      ‘Maybe not.’ Zandt seemed to have lost interest in the subject. He was sitting back in his chair and gazing vaguely across the patio. One of the slackers accidentally caught his eye. Zandt didn’t look away. The slacker did, rapidly. He made a signal to his friend, evidently suggesting this might be a good time to go wax their boards. They got up and sloped off into the night.

      Zandt seemed satisfied with this.

      Nina tried to haul his concentration back. ‘So where does that lead?’

      ‘Possibly nowhere,’ he said, grinding out his cigarette. ‘I just didn’t think hard enough about it last time. Then I was hung up on the method he’d used to find them. How the intersection of their lives had come about. Now it strikes me as curious. How they failed. What he really wanted them for.’

      Nina didn’t say anything, hoping there would be some more. But when he did speak, it wasn’t about the case.

      ‘Why did you stop sleeping with me?’

      Caught again, she hesitated. ‘We stopped sleeping with each other.’

      ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s not the way it was.’

      ‘I don’t know, John. It just happened. You didn’t seem especially hurt at the time.’

      ‘Just kind of accepted it, didn’t I.’

      ‘What are you getting at? You don’t accept it now?’

      ‘Of course I do. It was a long time ago. I’m just asking questions that I haven’t before. Once you start doing that, you find they pop up all over the place.’

      She didn’t really know what to say to that. ‘So what do you want to do next?’

      ‘I want you to go,’ he said. ‘I want you to go home and leave me alone.’

      Nina stood. ‘Suit yourself. You got my number. Call me if you decide to get off your butt and do something.’

      He turned his head slowly, and looked her directly in the eyes. ‘Do you want to know what happened? Last time?’

      She stopped, looked at him. His face was cold and distant. ‘Yes,’ she said.

      ‘I found him.’

      Nina felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. ‘Found who?’

      ‘I tracked him for two weeks. In the end I went to his house. I’d seen him watching other girls. I couldn’t leave it any longer.’

      She didn’t know whether to sit or keep standing. ‘What happened?’

      ‘He denied it. But I knew it was him, and now he knew I’d made him. He was the man, but I had no proof, and he would have run. I stayed with him two days. He wouldn’t tell me where she was.’

      ‘John, don’t tell me this.’

      ‘I killed him.’

      Nina stared at him, and knew it was the truth. She opened her mouth, shut it again.

      ‘And then two days later the sweater and the note arrived.’

      He looked suddenly very tired, and turned away. When he spoke again, his voice was flat. ‘I got the wrong guy. It’s up to you what you do with the information.’

      She walked away, across the Promenade. She willed herself not to look back at him, and instead concentrated on the tops of the palm trees nodding in the faint breeze, a couple of blocks away.

      But when she reached the corner she did stop, and turn. He’d vanished. She waited for a moment, chewing her lip, but he didn’t reappear. Slowly she started walking.

      Something had changed. Until tonight Zandt had seemed malleable, but sitting with him in the café had been an uncomfortable experience. She realized it wasn’t a hunter that he had reminded her of, but a boxer, glimpsed on camera in the period an hour before the actual fight. The time when the show business was put to one side, and the fighter seemed to move off into a realm of his own, a place where he stopped meeting people’s eyes and became absorbed into his archetype. Other people might bet on the outcome, put on monkey suits, get high on corporate hospitality. The rest would crap on about how boxing should be banned, cocooned in lives from which nobody wanted an escape route, any escape route. For the guys in the ring, it was different. They did it for the money, but not only for that. They did it because that was what they did. They weren’t looking for a way out. They were looking for a way in, a road back to some place they sensed inside themselves.

      The parents had been a mistake. Zandt had access to little enough real information as it was, and was already questioning what she wanted of him. The only new investigative material could come from the Beckers. She’d had to let him talk to them. But she’d known as soon as she came back from the garden that this had opened doors that would have been better kept shut.

      She didn’t need this. She’d never wanted a hunter, or a killer. She believed the only thing that would draw The Upright Man into the open was a man he wanted to dominate.

      She wanted bait.

Chapter 13

      The man sat in his chair, in the centre of the living room. The room was large and stuck out from the front of the house, with windows on three walls. Two sides were protected by a stand of trees; the other looked down on a sloping, terraced lawn. This afternoon all of the curtains were drawn, heavy drapes that allowed not the slightest suggestion of the outside to penetrate. Sometimes the man had them shut, sometimes he left them open. He was entirely unpredictable in this regard.

      The chair was positioned with its back to the door into the room. He liked the way this made him feel. It generated a mild tension, the sensation of being unprotected. Someone could, in theory, sneak up behind him and bash him over the head. That person would have to overcome the comprehensive security systems, but the point still СКАЧАТЬ