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

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СКАЧАТЬ pals either. But it was good to see her. Maybe “good” isn’t the right word. Useful. She looked different. Smaller. And on the way out of town I stopped by the graveyard, stood by the old man’s plot for a while. It was a sunny afternoon and there was no one else around. And his ghost, his ghost came right up out of the soil in front of me and said, “Listen, Bobby, chill.”’

      I stared at him. He laughed quietly. ‘Of course not. I didn’t feel his presence, or become any more reconciled to the way he’d been. But since then I don’t feel so anxious. I think about death sometimes, and I’m more careful in what I do and I’m more open to the idea of settling down one of these years. But the weird thing went away. I found the ground again.’ He looked at me. ‘Loose ends are the death of people, Ward. You think you’re protecting yourself but all you’re doing is opening little cracks. You let too many open up at once, the whole thing is going to fall to dust and you’ll find yourself like a starving dog wandering the streets in the night. And you, my friend, have got a whole lot of cracks appearing at this time.’

      I opened the door and got out of the car.

      ‘If they’ll let me.’

      ‘They’ll let you,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait for you here.’

      I stopped. I guess I thought he’d be coming with me. ‘It’s your house,’ he said. ‘And we knock on that door together, whoever opens it is going to think they’re going to be starring in the mortuary end of an episode of Forensic Detectives.’

      I walked up the driveway, and knocked on the door. The porch was tidy and well-swept.

      A woman appeared, smiled. ‘Mr Hopkins?’ she said.

      After a beat I got it, and simultaneously cursed and glorified Bobby’s name. He’d called ahead, pretended to be me, and laid the groundwork. I wondered what he’d’ve done if I’d refused.

      ‘That’s right,’ I said, coming up to speed. ‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’

      ‘Not at all.’ She stood aside to usher me in. ‘You were lucky to catch me earlier. I’m afraid I have to go out again soon though.’

      ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Just a few minutes would be great.’

      The woman, who was in middle age and pretty and nice enough to be someone’s mother on television, asked if I wanted coffee. I said no but there was some already made and in the end it was easier to accept. While she fetched it I stood in the hallway and looked around. Everything had changed. The woman, whatever her name was (I couldn’t ask, as in theory I’d spoken to her earlier), was not unfamiliar with the stenciller’s art. In a Pottery Barn kind of way it looked rather better than when we’d lived there.

      Then we walked around. The woman didn’t need to explain why she accompanied me. I thought it pretty unusual that she would let a man into her house just on the basis of a phone call: a desire to keep half an eye on her belongings was entirely natural. I was soon able to make sufficient comment on the way things had been when she moved in that even this mild guardedness disappeared, and she busied herself with stuff in the background. I wandered through each of the rooms, and then up the stairs. I took a brief look in what had been my parents’ room and the spare room, both of which had been largely alien territory to me. Then I girded myself for the final area.

      When the door to my old room was open, I swallowed involuntarily. I took a couple of paces in, then stopped. Green walls, brown carpet. A few boxes and some old chairs, a broken fan and most of a child’s bike.

      I discovered that the woman was standing behind me.

      ‘Haven’t changed a thing,’ she admitted. ‘View’s better from the other room, so my daughter sleeps in there even though it’s a little smaller. We just store a few things here. I’ll see you downstairs.’

      With that she disappeared. I stood a few minutes in the room, just turning around, seeing it from different angles. It was maybe twelve feet square, and seemed both very small and bigger than Africa. The space you grew up in is not like normal space. You know it so intimately, have sat and stood and lain down in its every corner. It’s where you think many things for the first time, and as a result it stretches like the time before Christmas, as you live there and wait to grow up. It holds you.

      ‘This is my room,’ I said, quietly and to myself. Seeing it on the video had been strange. But this was not. The place I’d come from hadn’t changed. Not everything in my life had been erased. I shut the door again on the way out, as if to keep something in.

      Downstairs the woman was perched against the table in the kitchen. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very kind.’

      She shushed this away, and I looked around the kitchen for a moment. The appliances had been updated, but the cabinets were still the same: strong and made of good wood, they’d presumably found no reason to replace them. My father’s handiwork lived on.

      It was then that I remembered the evening from long ago, eating lasagne with him. A cloth hung on an oven handle, a game of pool that didn’t work out. I opened my mouth and then shut it again.

      Stepping out of the house was one of the strangest things, the act of leaving that particular inside to return to the outside where I lived now. I was almost surprised to see the big white car on the other side of the street, Bobby still sitting inside, and I noticed how much cars look like huge bugs these days.

      I waved to the woman and walked down the path, not quickly, just as you normally would. By the time I was opening the car door the house was shut again behind me, shut and left behind.

      Bobby was sitting reading the rental agreement for the car.

      ‘Jesus, these things are boring,’ he said. ‘I mean, really. They should hire some writer. Get him to spice it up a little.’

      ‘You’re a bad man,’ I said. ‘But thank you.’

      He shoved the sheaf of papers back in the glove compartment. ‘So I guess we’ve done with Hunter’s Rock.’

      ‘No, I don’t think so.’

      ‘What’s on your mind?’

      ‘How about they already knew, when we were born, that they were going to do what they did. Maybe, I don’t know – maybe they thought they could only support one child or something.’

      Bobby looked dubious. ‘I know,’ I admitted. ‘But either way, say they knew they were going to get rid of one of us. But they also knew that one day they were going to die, and that I might do what I’m doing now. I might come home, look around. And I might find out from the hospital that I’d been one of two.’

      ‘So they have you born somewhere else, and in that case all you find out is there’s a minor mystery about which particular hospital you arrived in, not that you had a twin they abandoned.’

      ‘That’s what I’m thinking.’

      ‘But how come the Agency didn’t find a problem when you joined?’

      ‘I was very useful to them at the time. My guess is they skimped on the background checks for expedience, and by then I’m one of the team and who cares?’

      Bobby considered it. ‘Best we’ve got. But this is still weird. Your parents went СКАЧАТЬ