Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

Two nights later, on the train, Nathan remembered the last fragments of that conversation. His vain attempt to win Dad’s mood back.

‘It sounds romantic to me.’

Dad shook his head so violently, he might almost have been in pain. ‘I should never have trusted her.’

Like the hospital, Harriet had cut something out of him. He’d been exploited, hoodwinked, lied to. The whole thing had been an elaborate deception. He’d trusted for the last time. There’d be nobody else now. Nobody. He’d gathered his life around him like a cloak in which there was only room enough for one.

On Nathan’s last morning they’d driven down to the supermarket together. When they returned, there was the usual ritual of putting the shopping away. Dad squatted on the pantry floor and Nathan stood behind him, handing him the groceries.

‘You won’t be able to help me again,’ Dad said. ‘Not till the next time you come, anyway, and that might not be for ages.’

Nathan felt the guilt rise into his throat, bitter as some half-digested thing.

‘Hold on,’ came Dad’s voice from inside the pantry, ‘I’ve just got to clear a space.’ The shifting of packets and tins, and then a silence. Then a soft sound, like a gasp or a sigh.

‘What is it, Dad?’

Still squatting, Dad turned round. There was a block of raw jelly lying in the palm of his hand. The packet had been ripped open and a small bite was missing from one corner. You could see the teethmarks.

‘Rona,’ Nathan said, and Dad nodded.

She must’ve sneaked into the pantry one day when nobody was looking and taken a bite out of that jelly. Orange flavour had always been her favourite. Nathan looked from the jelly on Dad’s hand to Dad’s face, and saw the tears in his eyes.

Now, as the train swayed up the coast, there were tears in his own eyes too. He didn’t want anyone to see so he cupped his hand to the window and looked out. The tracks ran alongside the ocean here. He saw a pale strip of sand. The ocean heaving, unlit. No moon tonight. Tight in his hand he held the silver coin that Dad had given him at the front door. It was the same coin that Dad always gave him, every time he went away. It was just a small coin, worth practically nothing.

Worth everything.

It had been a normal day. In the morning Creed had a meeting with a city bank. He lunched with the police commissioner at a fish restaurant in Torch Bay. After lunch he spent half an hour with McGowan in an outdoor café by the river. Then, during the afternoon he put in a personal appearance at three of the funeral parlours that he’d recently acquired for the company as part of his new expansion programme. By late afternoon the sky was grey and the air seemed hard to breathe. As they left the northern suburbs, the car began to tremble in Jed’s hands. He touched his foot to the brake and slowed to about thirty.

Creed slid the window open. ‘Something wrong?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jed said.

Then the streetlights began to sway. Dreamily, like charmed snakes.

‘Earthquake,’ Creed said.

They were on a raised section of the Ring, the road that acted as the circumference of downtown, and all Jed could see was freeway, sky, and rows of swaying grey poles. He wanted to get back down to ground-level.

Then it was over. Less than six on the Richter scale, he found out later, only a tremor, really, but it was enough to change Creed’s mind about returning to the office. He asked to be driven home instead.

Creed stood on the sidewalk outside the Palace Hotel. Jed watched him in the wing mirror, watched him without seeming to. Creed was looking into the sky as if scanning for omens.

Jed shivered. He couldn’t get that earthquake out of his blood. He kept seeing the streetlights again, those streetlights trembling, as if the whole world was scared. ‘Do you need me again today?’ he said. He hoped the answer was no. He wanted to go home and lie down.

Creed’s head turned slowly on his neck. Every movement seemed to be performed in a trance that day. Death had been and gone, but it was still in the air, like static. ‘I want you back here at ten. There’s something we’ve got to discuss.’

McGowan opened the apartment door that night when Jed buzzed. ‘Weird day,’ he said. He was gloating. It was going to get weirder, that was what he meant.

Jed’s eyes flicked round the lounge. He half expected to see some naked tourist in the corner, bound and gagged. McGowan closed the door and slipped a small glass vial into Jed’s hand. ‘It’s going to be a long night,’ he said, and he turned to Creed, who had just walked into the room, and smiled.

Jed glanced round the room again. Zebra walls, curtains drawn across the windows like a second night sky, carpet the colour of fresh blood. None of this was strange to him, and yet he sensed something different. A heightened atmosphere, an air of ceremony. The skin seemed looser on Creed’s face. Some kind of decision had been reached.

He’d known he was going to be tested, and he’d prepared himself. Mitch had given him the number of a guy called Turner. Turner worked in a security systems retail outlet on Rocket Boulevard. Jed had dropped into the store late one Saturday afternoon.

‘I’m doing a bit of surveillance,’ he told Turner. ‘Mitch said you might be able to help.’

Turner listened to Jed’s requirements, then he led Jed to a glass display case. ‘This is what you need.’ He unlocked the case and lifted out what looked like a Walkman with a small black box attached. A ballpoint pen slid into a hole in the box. ‘We call it the pen recorder,’ Turner said. ‘You take the pen out and it automatically activates the recording mechanism.’ He demonstrated. ‘Put it back again, and it deactivates the mechanism. It’s simple.’

‘How much?’ Jed asked.

‘Fifteen hundred,’ Turner said, ‘but since you’re a friend of Mitch’s.’ He scratched the back of his neck. ‘I could do it for thirteen.’

Jed nodded. It was still expensive, but he couldn’t afford not to take it. Turner showed him how to wire himself up. The recorder slotted neatly into his jacket pocket. The mike clipped to the inside of his cuff. When Jed walked into Creed’s apartment that night he was, in Turner’s language, ‘live’.

He wanted to stay straight, but that small glass vial was always being pressed into his hand, it seemed bottomless, the hours passed and they never reached the end. They were everywhere that night. The Bar Necropolis. The Jupiter casino. A private party in some high-rise apartment block; looking down into the city from the forty-second floor, it was like being inside a radio, one of those old valve radios, and Jed almost told Creed what he thought, he almost blurted something Creed wouldn’t even have understood, You must’ve had radios thrown away some time, didn’t you? but the rush blew over and he was still staring down into the forest of lit buildings and he still hadn’t spoken. Another bar, further west, in Omega. It was like that game where you were blindfolded and spun round, and then you had to try and touch someone, Creed and the Skull, they were close one moment, then they were dancing out of reach, and nothing would sound like anything when he played it back, it would sound like interference, nonsense, silence, but he stayed with it, trips to the bathroom to sluice his nose and throat, more trips to replace the tapes, because he sensed they were leading up to something, there was something at the end of this rainbow of places, not gold but something.

At three in the morning everything suddenly moved back. A clearing in his head, a sudden loss of sound. It was a club. They were sitting at a round table. A candle in a red glass. Drinks. The faces of devils, all empty eyes and bright teeth. Creed was drinking water. He always drank the same brand. Drained from a glacier. Sodium-free. McGowan was talking. His words emerged from silence, as if they were the first words of the evening. Jed stared at McGowan’s face as it tilted and leered, all blocks of colour and deep shadows. Jed listened hard.