Robert Goddard: Found Wanting

Eusden felt weak, light-headed and curiously contented. Nothing he saw or felt was entirely real to him. He assumed this was some kind of trick being played on him by his brain, a defence mechanism designed to ease the onset of death. It did not dull the pain he was in, but somehow divorced it from him, as if he was watching himself from a place of warmth and safety and disinterested ease. It made the idea of lying back down and continuing to stare at the sky very appealing.

‘ Don’t lie down, Coningsby ,’ said Marty.

The voice seemed to come from behind him. When he turned his head, there was no one there. Yet he had the sense that someone had been. It was like the quivering of a leaf after a creature has fled into undergrowth: a sign without a sighting.

‘This is all your fault,’ Eusden said aloud. ‘You know that, Marty, don’t you?’ There was no rancour in his tone. It was more in the way of a friendly reproach. ‘Thanks for landing me in it. One last time.’

‘ Don’t lie down, Coningsby .’

‘What do you expect me to do?’

‘Deliver a touching eulogy at my funeral.’

‘And for that I need to be there, of course.’

‘ It’s customary .’

‘Yeah. So it is.’

Eusden tried to sit up. There was a jab of pain in his side. The bullet had probably smashed a rib. What other damage it might have done he did not care to consider. Certainly standing up did not seem to be an option. He could not phone for help. He was closer to the jammer now than when he had failed to get a signal on the veranda. Theoretically, he could drive to where help might be found if he could make it to the Bentley. He had the key in his pocket. But theory was a long way from practice. Moving presented itself to his mind as a task best deferred, while another part of his mind insisted that deferral would be fatal.

He straightened his arms. It was like plunging into an ice-cold bath. He began to shiver and noticed the sheet of paper with the fingerprints on it lying close to his hand, beside the fallen gun. There they were: the unique traces of a human’s existence on this planet. A.N. Anastasia Nikolaievna. Or Alexei Nikolaievich. ‘Or A.N. bloody Other, Clem, eh?’

‘You’ve been checking up on me, boy? Well, we’ll make a detective of you yet.’

‘Seems you’ve succeeded. Much good that it’s done me.’

Eusden remembered asking Clem once how he had survived four years in the trenches without being killed or injured. And now he heard again the answer the old man had given him. ‘You had to think ahead to survive, boy. If you didn’t, you were finished.’ (Pause for puff on pipe.) ‘’Course, if you thought too far ahead, you were finished as well.’ (Another puff.) ‘I used to reckon five minutes was just about right.’

‘Five minutes? OK, Clem. I’ll try it.’ Eusden grabbed the sheet of paper, folded it as best he could and thrust it into his trouser pocket. The gun he left where it was. He rolled on to his hip and began to work his way towards the Bentley, sawing at the snow with his functioning leg. His shivering became a wild juddering, his breathing a panting wheeze. Pain ballooned inside him. But he did not stop. He felt suddenly and preposterously hot. Sweat started out of him. But still he did not stop.

He reached the car and rewarded himself with a few moments’ rest. The pain ebbed. Then he stretched up to open the door. He managed to do so by about an inch. Pulling it fully open seemed impossible. It felt immensely heavy. He pressed himself close to the side of the car, forced his arm inside the door and pushed with all his failing strength. It was just enough.

An unmeasurable segment of time passed while he rested his chin on the soft leather of the driver’s seat and contemplated, as if it were some abstruse problem he had no personal stake in, the difficulty of levering himself into the car. In the end, no easy answer presented itself. He counted down from ten to one and, after two false starts, simply hauled himself in, gripping the steering-wheel like grim death, an expression he felt in a moment of startling clarity he fully understood for the first time.

He lifted his injured leg in after him, and then nearly fell back out of the car as he pulled the door shut. The warmth that had built up during the drive from Helsinki folded itself round him like a duvet. It would have been easy, so very easy, to surrender to it and fall asleep. But he knew, if he did, he would never wake. He pushed the key into the ignition and turned it. The engine responded with well-tuned vigour. He shifted the stick into drive and eased down the accelerator. The car started moving. He steered it in a slow, wide circle past the body of Arto Falenius, out over the meadow and back on to the track they had arrived by. Every ridge of compacted snow, every minor undulation, sent pain stabbing through his body. But the Bentley rolled softly with the bumps. He knew it could be a great deal worse. And he began to think that he really was going to get through this. He drove slowly along the track, away from the mökki and the bodies lying nearby, into the forest, towards the main road – and survival.

The Bentley essentially drove itself. All Eusden had to do was steer it. His concentration began to falter, his vision to blur. He wondered if dusk was setting in. There was a vagueness to the world beyond the windscreen, a fuzzying at the edges of his vision. The track wound ahead through the snow-stacked trees. He kept his foot on the accelerator, his hands on the wheel. He just needed to keep going. He just-

There was a jolt, a violent lurch. Suddenly, the Bentley was heading down a short slope straight into a mass of trees. He must have mistaken the line of the track somehow. He stamped down on the brake. The car skidded and slewed to the left. But there were as many trees waiting there as dead ahead. And the car slammed straight into one.

Eusden had forgotten to fasten his seat belt. It was far from a high-speed impact, but still he was thrown against the wheel, setting the horn blaring. He lay across it, watched with detached curiosity the steam rising from the crumpled radiator and the shower of snow and pine needles pattering down on to the bonnet.

Eventually, he pushed himself back into the seat. The horn fell silent. All the breath seemed to have been knocked out of him. He found it difficult to organize his thoughts into initiating any kind of action at all. He wondered how much blood he had lost. And how much more he could afford to lose. Then he stopped wondering. He would find out soon enough, after all. Until then…

He forced himself to focus. He engaged reverse and pressed down the accelerator. The tyres spun, but did not grip. The Bentley was going nowhere. And neither was Eusden. He turned off the engine.

Tranquillity descended. And a shaft of sunlight, the first he had seen in Finland, turned the surrounding curtain of snow from greyish white to granular pink. He sat back and savoured the beauty of it. The forest felt holy in that instant. And he would be warm inside the car for a while yet. He could always turn the engine back on.

‘I’m offering you the chance to change your life,’ Pernille had said to him on the ferry from Sweden. Eusden smiled gently at what struck him now less as a tragedy than an irony. If only they had known. In truth, neither of them had had any future to shape or alter. They had both been voyaging to their deaths.

‘Pull yourself together, Coningsby. You should’ve let me drive. I was always better than you. Now, for God’s sake phone for help and get us out of the mess you’ve got us into.’

Eusden did not bother to point out that the jammer had travelled with them. There would still be no signal. Even if it had been conveniently knocked off, the closely packed trees would probably do as good a job. He pulled Lund’s phone out of his pocket and pressed the green button. It was as he had expected. No signal. ‘Sorry, Marty,’ he murmured.