A Death

Kevin Wignall

A Death

First Published in

 Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

(December 2008)

Copyright © 2008 Kevin Wignall

  Hammond stayed in the car, knowing it would cost him his place in the Branch and maybe even his career.  At first he’d tried to defend himself by imagining that if his first job had been anything other than this, he’d have been able to go through with it, but he realized now that they’d chosen him for this job specifically, as a final test.

  And he’d failed.  Perhaps they’d even anticipated it, perhaps his bosses were betting with each other right now on the odds of him being in the car while Baker was inside killing the old lady.  His stomach tightened with the reminder of it, the fact that Baker was inside that neat little bungalow, ending the life of a seventy-nine year old woman.

  Hammond would have been in the car no matter what threat she’d posed, but he couldn’t imagine any justification for killing her.  She’d served her country for the best part of fifty years, he knew that much, yet now, for whatever reason, she’d become a liability in the eyes of her former masters and had to be removed.

  He looked at the garden, the first spring flowers being beaten relentlessly, but somehow holding their own against the overcast bluster of this threatening March day.  He wondered if she looked after the place herself or if she had a gardener.  And he wondered about the view, which was surely uninterrupted down to the sea, even though it wasn’t visible from this side of the house.  Above all, he tried not to think about what was happening inside.

  And then he didn’t have to think about anything, except the imminent downward spiral of his own career, because Baker stepped carefully through the front door and walked back to the car.

  He leaned down before getting in and smiled, saying, ‘You’re looking a little green – you want me to drive?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Hammond and started the engine as Baker got in and buckled up.

  He hated Baker now, not just for the air of superiority, the way he was looking down at him as if he were some kid out of his depth, but because he was everything Hammond had failed to be.  Baker was in his thirties, but he’d probably always looked like that and always would, an easy confidence about him, comfortable with his own life, comfortable with ending the lives of others.

  ‘You realize I have to report this.’

  Hammond nodded and said, ‘I don’t suppose they’ll give me a second chance?’

  ‘Doubt it,’ said Baker.  ‘Shame of it is, Dorothy Jennings wasn’t a tough one. Diabetics overdose on insulin every day. And she didn’t put up much of a struggle, so that was it really. Easy. Peaceful.’

  She didn’t put up much of a struggle – what horrors could be hidden within a phrase like that!  Hammond’s stomach was gnawing at itself, the nausea swelling as he listened to Baker’s glib description of an elderly woman’s murder.

  ‘That could’ve been your grandmother in there.’

  ‘But it wasn’t,’ said Baker. ‘I’m not gonna give you all that, “ours is not to reason why” stuff, but you can’t be personal about this – job needs to be done, you do it. Dorothy Jennings understood that, and she did plenty in her time.’  Hammond knew there was more to come and sure enough, Baker added almost as an afterthought, ‘She wouldn’t have stayed in the car.’

  Hammond guessed it was pointless fighting his corner.  Baker was the senior officer, he’d report back that Hammond had bottled, and that would be it, game over.

  He could argue as much as he liked that there was a difference between occasionally having to kill an enemy of the state and killing one of its former servants – but arguing suggested thinking and they didn’t want him to be a thinker.

  ‘Stop the car,’ said Baker, with such urgency that Hammond wondered if he’d left something at the scene.

  They were in a narrow country lane with no other traffic ahead or behind so Hammond hit the brakes firmly and waited till they were at a standstill before saying, ‘What is it?’

  ‘Back up to that signpost back there.’  Hammond dutifully reversed and waited while Baker studied the black script on the small white sign that pointed down an even narrower lane. ‘Amazing. Take this right.’

  Hammond did as he said but couldn’t resist saying, ‘What do you have in mind, a little sightseeing after a good morning’s murder?’

  Baker snapped back at him, ‘Hey, I don’t enjoy what I just did, but it’s my job! If you can’t cut it, that’s fine, but don’t get smart with me, Hammond!’

  He was furious, but not upset, and Hammond felt it was a little misplaced when he said, ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘That’s right, you shouldn’t!’  Baker took a couple of beats to calm down, then said, ‘There’s a hotel down here, that’s all, overlooking the sea – we stayed here a few times when I was a kid.’

  ‘I see,’ said Hammond, though he didn’t.

  It was hard to imagine Baker ever having being a kid but he certainly didn’t seem like someone who went in for nostalgic visits.  And it wasn’t just that Baker was hard, it was as if all the edges had been worn off him, leaving nothing on which another human being could gain purchase, like an abstract bronze, seamlessly cast.

  Perhaps Baker sensed his confusion because he said, ‘It’s a good place to eat – we can lunch there and then head back.’

  ‘Right, I get it.’

  He didn’t want to eat, of course, or didn’t think he could, but it took them twenty minutes to get there and by that time his stomach had settled a little.

  The unimaginatively named Point Hotel was an attractive white Victorian place that had undoubtedly seen better days and was somehow sullied further by the presence of a dozen or so cars and a small bus outside.

  It was situated on its own promontory, a moss-sprung patch of green with dark cliffs that were ragged and broken enough to allow easy access down to the water’s edge.

  Not that anyone would want to be down there on a day like this, the sea like liquid slate, threatening and muscular.  Even as they walked into the hotel, fifty yards from the nearest cliff edge, Hammond could feel the salt moisture in the wind, and the noise was enough to create a sudden sensation of deafness as they stepped into the lobby.

  The menu wasn’t particularly diverse and they both ordered steaks, but they were good when they came and Hammond felt better for getting something in his stomach.  They both drank mineral water which suggested either that Baker planned on doing some of the driving or that he didn’t believe in drinking on the job.

  For the most part they ate in silence, and the only distraction from their own thoughts was when they’d almost finished and a party of schoolchildren spilled clumsily past the dining room windows and out across the promontory.

  There were about twenty of them, maybe fourteen or fifteen year olds, togged up in waterproof coats, hair flying wildly in the wind.  Three teachers, two women and a man, were trying in a half-hearted way to keep them under control, calling out cheery admonitions.

  All it did was remind Hammond that he couldn’t imagine Baker ever having been like that.  And in turn, that made him think of Dorothy Jennings again, her insulin-poisoned body waiting to be found even as they enjoyed their food and thought about the long drive ahead of them.

  The nausea returned unexpectedly on the back of those thoughts, as if it had merely been lying low, waiting to ambush him.  He didn’t think there’d be any quelling it this time, either.  He pushed quickly away from the table, fearing for a second or two that he wouldn’t even make it out of the dining room.

  Baker had just put down his knife and fork but looked surprised and said, ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘No,’ said Hammond. ‘I’m not sure. You’ll have to excuse me for a minute.’

*

  Baker couldn’t help laughing to himself a little as he watched Hammond make a dash for the toilets.  He’d known from the minute he’d met him that Hammond wouldn’t be able to cut it and this was just about the final proof.  The guy hadn’t even made it inside the bungalow and now he was revisiting his lunch.

  He settled the bill in cash and stepped outside to get a feel for the place while he was on his own.  It wasn’t quite the same, of course, because they’d always come here in the summer but they were still big memories, happy, swelling up almost as dangerously as the sea below him.

  He wished these kids weren’t running around shouting, because even though he’d known this place as a boy himself, he didn’t remember it ever being loud or raucous.  Back then, as recently as twenty or so years earlier, it had been the kind of hotel where children were expected to behave, where a certain genteel calm had ruled.

  He walked a little distance from the hotel, closer to the point where the cliffs broke down in a way that allowed an easy path to the water’s edge.  It had been one of his favourite haunts as a child, a haven of rock pools at low tide, out of sight of the hotel terrace.  The kids were here too, though, volatile, running where they wanted.

  The male teacher was right on the far tip of the promontory with a group of three kids.  The two female teachers were standing close to Baker but were so busy talking that they had no idea what their charges were doing.  He was tempted to go over and tell them to keep their kids under control but his chain of thought was interrupted by something more pressing.

  Despite all the shouting and excited screams, he immediately picked out a girl shouting, ‘Oh my God!’  She’d shouted no louder than any of the others but he’d picked it out immediately because her tone was strikingly different, the tone of urgency and fear.

  He spotted her, followed her gaze to sea and saw it instantly, a pulsing swell coming in, deceptively flat at the moment, but only because it was broad and high, a big enough wall of water to overwhelm the lower reaches of those cliffs.

  The girl was screaming now, directing her shouts to someone on the rocks below.  He’d seen a few of the kids run down the path and seen some emerge, and he wondered how many were still down there, how many had lingered too long.  She seemed to be calling a single name so maybe it was just one.

  A couple of the girl’s friends joined in with her, a hopeless siren chorus, desperately trying to tell one of their classmates what the teachers should already have told them, that it was dangerous to be down there, that soon it would be fatal.

  The two female teachers glanced in the direction of the girls but still didn’t seem unduly concerned.  Baker looked at the swell and knew already that it was too late, that this would be in the papers tomorrow, because someone was about to die.

  He looked back to the hotel, willing Hammond to get a move on.  They had to get away from here now, or soon, before there were emergency services on the scene and a need for witness statements.

  It wasn’t so much that he didn’t care, just that it was his job and his duty not to become part of it.  Besides, one look at that incoming wall of water had told him all he needed to know, that there was nothing they could do.

  The chorus screamed.  He turned back to the cliffs and saw the spray explode into the air, causing more excited screams from those who didn’t yet know what had happened below.  The two female teachers stopped talking and looked with astonishment as the spray fell away again like the dying bursts of fireworks.

  One of the screaming girls appeared to faint and was left on the floor.  The first to scream turned and shouted at her teachers, her voice full of terror but clear and strong.

  ‘Tom’s in the water!’

  He heard the teachers swear in hushed panic, then one of the two took control, saying to her colleague, ‘Call the coastguard, then go and get Dave!’

  Baker guessed Dave was the male teacher who still didn’t appear to know that anything was wrong.  The woman who was left standing near Baker started fumbling for her phone.  The other ran toward the cliffs and started calling the children away, telling them to get back near the hotel, all too late.

  And as if proof were needed, Baker spotted the kid in the sea, his head alone visible out on the swell, looking almost like a seal from up above, not a boy who had the screaming shock of the cold coursing through him, a boy who would drown or die of hypothermia long before any helicopter arrived.

  The scene descended into panic within seconds, as first some of the kids, then all of them became aware of what had happened.  The male teacher was running back, bringing the three kids in a trail behind him.  Others were running back to the hotel on their own.  Two more were attending to the girl who’d fainted.

  Some just stood, not knowing what to do.  There were always some like that, thought Baker, and in a terrorist attack or natural disaster, those were the people who inevitably died.

  The female teacher who’d laughably attempted to take control was shouting instructions at people, unaware that the kids were following their own instincts as much now as they had been ten minutes before.  The other teacher was cursing shakily to herself as she tried and failed to get a signal on her phone.

  Then Baker saw him, a boy with a mess of brown hair, and he was instantly mesmerized.  In the middle of all this chaos, unnoticed by any of his friends or teachers, the boy was calmly taking off his coat, then his shoes, then his socks.

  Baker knew what the boy was planning – how could he not know? – and a part of him wanted to tell him that it was the wrong decision, that he wouldn’t be saving anyone, only killing himself.  But the boy’s movements were so graceful, they seemed to produce an air of transcendent peace around him upon which it would have been impossible to intrude.

  The boy left his things on the ground and walked the few yards to the top of the path.  Even now, barefoot on the cold rocky slope, he didn’t walk gingerly but with a strangely assured step.  It was like watching an Indian mystic walk effortlessly across burning coals.

  Baker found himself walking forward, not with the aim of stopping the boy, just in eagerness to keep him in sight as he descended toward the water’s edge.  At the same time, the male teacher, still some way off, saw the kid and started shouting, not at the boy but at the female teacher who looked around frantically, unable to see what it was that she was meant to be doing.

  The attention of the whole party finally fell on the boy just as it became too late to intervene.  He stood on the rocks above the water, as oblivious to their shouts as the boy who was already out there riding the swell.  He studied the waves as a surfer would and then, as if in slow motion, he sprang away from the rocks in an easy and confident dive.

  He’d been like a boy outside of time, superhuman, but the illusion exploded the moment he hit the bitter truth of the water.  When he emerged through the swell, he swam furiously, perhaps in that first adrenaline rush of dread realization, that the sea was colder than he’d expected, fiercer, that his undoubted bravery had been fatally misplaced.

  Even as the boy reached his friend, Baker felt a terrible sorrow for him, because he was strong and decent and selfless and he would die for it.  His friend would die for being stupid, but in a sense, the second boy would die for being noble but stupider still.

  ‘I need the coastguard! The Point Hotel, a boy went in the water, two boys.’  It was the female teacher, some way behind him, close to hysteria.

  A girl walked past Baker, drifting towards the hotel in shock.  She looked at him and said, as if he were a reporter or a policeman, ‘His name was Jake.’

  Baker nodded, though he doubted the girl was even aware of him, and certainly didn’t know that she’d been right to use the past tense.  He looked out to sea, one of many sets of eyes fixed on the same spot of the ocean’s darkening pulse.

  The boy whose name had been Jake was holding the other, holding his head as if trying to give him instructions, but he was constantly glancing further out to sea, too.  Maybe he was looking for a rescue boat, or maybe he was just overawed by the scale of the waves now that he was almost underneath them.

  But the kid was stronger than Baker could have imagined.  The swell looked uniform from up on the cliff, but the boy appeared to see something, whatever it was he’d been waiting for, the right wave, and suddenly he grabbed his friend more firmly around the body and with what looked like practised ease, the two of them rode it right back onto the rocks, travelling fast.

  The rescuer hit the lower rocks fiercely but was moving immediately, scrambling away from the waterline, dragging the first boy who’d washed up like a dead seabird.  There was still no complacency about him as he cajoled his friend into movement, hauling him onto his feet, starting him up the path.

  It took Baker a moment to realize that this had not ended as it should have done.  Instead, the impossible had happened and both boys had somehow been delivered from the waves.

  Some of the kids above cheered and whooped spontaneously.  Some were crying.  The male teacher ran down the path to help them and, after some awkward manoeuvring, picked up the first boy and carried him the rest of the way.

  The second boy, whose name was Jake, walked slowly behind them, shivering, the first signs of exhaustion pulling at him.  Even in that state, his brown hair plastered to his head and face, his clothes hanging cold against his frame, there was a startling air of peace about him.  He didn’t look like someone who’d just performed a miracle and saved a life in the process.

  Baker stared at the boy, still in his island of calm amidst the maelstrom that had swept up the rest of them, and he felt himself lurch, as if something had been ripped open deep inside him, as if he might drop down dead right there on that promontory.  That was exactly how it felt to Baker, as if he could feel the life draining out of himself.

  What had wounded him to the core was a devastating realization.  At first he’d thought it was a sense of loss, seeing that boy act the way he had, his selflessness, and realizing that he’d long shed the quality of behaving like that, of behaving in a way that was recklessly, beautifully human.

  But it was worse than that.  It was the realization that he had never been that boy.  He wouldn’t have dived in at fifteen and he wouldn’t have dived in now, not because he was afraid but because within himself he possessed no reason to dive.

  Baker didn’t fear death and he’d thought that was enough, but it wasn’t an absence of fear that had made that boy act the way he had, it was greater than that, it was a love of life, an urge to protect it against all the odds, heroism in its purest form.  And Baker had never lost those attributes because he’d never had them.

  He turned, trying to get himself away from the scene, but as he started walking back to the hotel he couldn’t help but think of Dorothy Jennings.  She’d saved six people in the Yemen once, at enormous risk to her own safety.  If he’d told her this morning that her death would save one other person she’d have probably administered the overdose herself.  That was the life he had ended today.

  Hammond emerged from the building looking drained and pale.  He smiled apologetically and Baker faltered and stopped walking for a moment.  He’d despised Hammond until now, but he knew as soon as he looked at him, he knew exactly what Hammond would have done if he’d been out there just five minutes earlier.  He probably didn’t know it himself, but Hammond would have dived.

*

  Hammond was ready for the gloating, for the ridicule.  He wasn’t ready for the scene he met with as he stepped out of the hotel.  It took him just a moment to realize some emergency had taken place.  There were groups of kids huddled near the hotel, upset and shocked, more out on the promontory with the teachers, formed together in a larger huddle as if attending to someone who was hurt.

  Most disturbing of all was Baker.  He was walking directly towards him but he looked terrible, as if someone had turned off his power supply.  It wasn’t that he looked upset, more that he looked… grief-stricken.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  Baker appeared to regain some of his composure and said, ‘Nothing, a kid went in the water, but he’s okay.’

  Hammond looked over Baker’s shoulder and tried to see what was going on in the larger huddle.  He knew instinctively that they’d be better placed to help with casualties than the teachers would.

  ‘Shouldn’t we help? He could go into shock.’

  ‘No, we can’t be here – we have to get away as quickly as possible.’  His eyes had been darting around, unstable, but he fixed Hammond now and said, ‘They’ve called the coastguard, and the kids are both okay. Trust me, they’ll be fine without us.’

  It was so strange to hear Baker using reassuring language that Hammond started walking with him back to the car, glancing once more at the scene behind them as he said, ‘Both? I thought you said one kid went in the water?’

  ‘One got swept in by a wave, another dived in to pull him out.’

  ‘That’s amazing, at this time of year, as well.’

  Baker nodded and said, ‘It was amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.’  As if remembering himself, he added, ‘Stupid, too. Any other time, they’d both be dead.’

  Hammond ignored the criticism and tried to think what he would have done in the same situation, whether now or as a kid of that age.  He didn’t think he’d have dived in after anyone, not at this time of year anyway, but he liked to think he would have done.  At least, he was certain he couldn’t have stood by and done nothing.

  As they reached the car, Baker said, ‘Do you mind driving?’

  He still didn’t sound like himself, but Hammond said, ‘Of course not – it’s the least I can do after messing up this morning.’

  They got in the car and drove away.  Baker took some mints from his pocket and offered him one which he accepted gratefully, anything to shake off the bilious aftertaste in his mouth.

  ‘About this morning,’ said Baker. ‘I’ll tell them you came into the house, that it went off smoothly. If you want me to, that is.’

  Hammond couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and turned briefly to check that Baker wasn’t messing with him.

  ‘Of course, yeah, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘If I tell them what happened your career’s finished, and that wouldn’t be right. You’ve got a good career ahead of you, Hammond, but…’  Baker hesitated, then said, ‘It isn’t with this Branch. Do yourself a favour and ask for a transfer. You could do better than this.’

  He didn’t see that he had a choice anyway, not in the long term, because there’d be another Dorothy Jennings sooner or later and he’d make the same decision every time.

  ‘I will,’ said Hammond. ‘And thanks.’

  He still wasn’t convinced Baker was being straight with him, unless whatever he’d witnessed back there at the hotel had made him want to do a good deed for someone.  Maybe he’d misread Baker, too, but something had certainly changed in him since finishing lunch.

  With the thought of lunch, he said, ‘And I’m sorry I lost it this morning – I don’t know what happened there.’

  Baker took a few seconds to respond, his voice subdued as he said finally, ‘It’s easy for people like me to take it for granted, what we do, but there’s no shame in you losing it. You witnessed a death today, and that’s no small thing.’

  Hammond nodded.  He was about to correct him, to tell him he hadn’t actually witnessed the death firsthand, but he kept driving and remained silent, and Baker remained silent next to him.  There had been a death – that was all that mattered.