Nicola Griffith - Stay

“I don’t know.” Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?

I looked at the photograph. Only nine, learning that there was no love in the world. By now the agency might have heard about Karp. It’s likely they would hand the girl over to some other pervert, for more money. That or leave her with the foster parents, who would dump her on social services once the regular checks dried up. All about money.

Tammy poured us both more wine. “So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

The wine was warm now from being by the fire, its taste as rounded and familiar as the roof of my mouth. It would be very easy to just finish this bottle, then start another, sleep soundly, and get up in the morning and go about my business, rebuilding this cabin, pretending to turn it into a home. Why had I hurt Karp? Why wouldn’t he just die? I laughed. I couldn’t even make up my mind about that.

“I don’t think it’s funny,” she said.

I didn’t really care what she thought. I drained my glass and filled it with what was left in the bottle, ignoring her glass. I looked around at the cabin: the fire without its stove, the unconnected toilet, the dry kitchen. “We have to speed up the work here. I’ll be taking the truck and trailer. If you want to stay out here, you’ll need this place to be livable.”

“What are you going to do? You don’t have to rush. You can’t. What about your knee?”

“My knee will be fine.” I shoved the poker in the fire, stirred it about. Put the poker down. Picked it up again.

“I don’t want to be here alone. I want you to stay.”

“People don’t stay just because you want them to.” They never stayed.

“And why are you in such a rush anyhow? You could wait until spring. Why do you want to do it now?”

“I don’t want to do it at all.” I stood up, paced restlessly to the sink, the fireplace, back to the sink. “She’s just some nine-year-old. Why should I care?” Back and forth. Back and forth. I stopped, standing over her. “Why the fuck should I care?”

She flinched, then glared at me. “So if you don’t care, why are you shouting? Why don’t you just run off in your trailer someplace and live happily ever after?”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

Because running would mean closing up seamlessly, leaving everything behind, again. It would mean breaking my promise, acting as though Julia had never existed. I sat down hard, scrubbed my forehead with the heel of my hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have shouted.”

“You keep saying you’re sorry and you keep shouting at me.”

I stared into the fire. Stay in the world, she had said, and this was the world I had made.

“Aud?” She touched my hand to make me look up. “I’m sorry I got you into all this.”

“You didn’t,” I said tiredly. “Dornan did. Or Julia did, by dying. Or maybe I did, by loving her. It’s all connected.” Irony is rarely amusing. “Just one big happy human ecosystem, like the woods, with some trees trying to grow too fast and smother the rest.”

“And you’re the axe,” she said.

The fire popped. An axe, cold and unlovely. “Is that really how you see me?”

The old Tammy would have smiled and said, No, of course not! and tried to reassure me, soothe my ruffled feathers, but though a fleeting regret showed in her sigh, she nodded. “You can use an axe to bang in nails, but that doesn’t make it a hammer. It’s still an axe. Cutting is still what it’s made for.”

The rain washed down the windows in an undulating sheet.

“Remember when you asked me why I didn’t hit Geordie? It was because I don’t know how. That little girl in Arkansas doesn’t, either. You do. I know that. But do you have to go yourself? Or if there’s no one else to send, do you have to go now? You could wait until I—”

She wrestled the old Tammy to silence. “I guess you want to leave as soon as you can.”

Tammy had just gone into the bathroom to brush her teeth and I was already in bed when my phone rang.

“Congratulations,” Eddie said. “Your boy’s case has made it to the front page. Give me your number and I’ll fax it.”

“Just read it out.”

“Very well. It’s the usual tabloid banner—”

“Tabloid?”

“Just so. Not at all the sort of thing a respectable paper would lead with. Did I misunderstand your request for follow-up?”

“No. What’s the headline?”

“ ‘Avenger Twins Out For Blood,’ with a crime scene photo filling the remainder of the page.”

They wouldn’t print a picture of Karp in that state. What had I left? “Describe it.”

“Bloody handprints in a nice arc up the wall, body draped in a stained sheet and half covered in videocassettes, some of which are rather artistically unspooled over the victim’s eyes.”

A mock-up.

“The story itself is quite delightful. Another interview with the unbalanced young woman who claims to have been abused by the victim, this time with some interesting detail. Let’s see. They’re now calling Karp a serial abuser. Quotes from anonymous victims. A sick man, says one. An evil psychopath, says another. All very breathless. The real focus of the piece, however, seems to be these twins. At least on first pass. There’s a sidebar—two sidebars. One headed ‘Angels of Vengeance?’ and the other ‘Well-Versed Agents.’ Two rather unattractive artists’ impressions.”

“What do they look like?”

“Sweet but moronic thugs: corn-fed football players who have found god.”

“Even the woman?”

“Especially the woman.”

“Police comment?”

“Just the official statement: ‘We continue to pursue a variety of leads with all due diligence.’ However, reading between the lines I’d say the Daily Post has an unofficially sanctioned source inside the department. They have a lot of hard information disguised as tabloidese. In sidebar one, that’s the angel argument, if one can dignify such sloppy prose with that label, we’re told that all the tapes have been wiped clean, as though by a powerful magnetic source ‘not unlike that which could be produced by the healing auras said to emanate from saints.’ There is said to be no sign of a struggle, and no blood visible to the naked eye except on the victim and his immediate surroundings. It contradicts the crime scene photo, of course, but no doubt they’re assuming their readers have the average IQ of a second grader. But that’s a very specific qualification, ‘visible to the naked eye.’ The kind of phrasing used by a careful police press liaison.”

Or a prosecuting attorney.

“The second sidebar is equally informative. No fingerprints, they say, or, rather, four or five different sets, but none bloodstained.”

I’d worn gloves every time.

“No sign of forced entry. Evidence of information theft: the photocopier was on, and when the police arrived, the laptop—which is supposed to switch to sleep mode after sixty minutes’ nonuse—was fully powered.” I’d missed that. “Evidence, too, of prior surveillance of the victim—a café waitress and a gallery owner apparently remember someone who could fit the description. There is some speculation—”

“When was the suspect seen in the café?”

“The day of the assault, apparently. The morning. Ah, now this is interesting, fuel for the angel argument, perhaps—no earthly sustenance, and so on. According to the witness, she drank only water.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. Not the café where I had left the book, then, the book with the shiny cover that would hold fingerprints so well. “You were saying something about speculation.”

“Indeed. Professionals, they think: the surveillance, the wiped tapes, no fingerprints, and the laptop. ‘Sensitive documents,’ they say darkly. In other words, industrial espionage.”