Shooting in the Dark

end up walking with a pimp-limp, but they don’t get headaches. The watcher, before we got involved, he was in a closed system. There was just him and Angeles, right?’
    ‘What about Isabel?’
    ‘Keep it simple. There was him and the object of his obsession.’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘But now we’ve arrived on the scene. We’re disrupting the system. We’re becoming part of it. We know we’ve changed it, and he knows we’ve changed it. What we have to work out is how we can change it so that he shows himself to us without knowing that he’s doing it.’
    ‘I knew you were gonna end up here. You want us to use her as bait.’
    ‘I want bait, yeah, but it doesn’t have to be Angeles.’
    ‘You suggesting we use somebody else? Janet, for instance? I can really see Geordie going for that. Or Marie?’
    ‘They’d have a great advantage, Sam. They can see.’
     

30
     
    Russell Harvey was in a box about two metres long. The undertaker had done a good job on him, so he appeared cleaner in death, altogether more healthy than when he had been drawing breath. A close shave and a touch of rouge to the cheek bones had removed the illusion of sleaze, transformed it into mere roguish charm. The bluish tinge high on the neck had not been obliterated by the black art of cosmetics and still bore faint witness to a death administered by his own hands.
    Not entirely self-inflicted, though, Marie reflected. Russell Harvey had not been independent of the world. While it was true that he was a victim of his own personality, life had equipped him with a pack containing a fairly hefty wedge of bad cards.
    It was late evening. She had let the day grow old and the shadows lengthen before making her way here. Putting off the inevitable.
    ‘No one else has been. You’re the first.’ The undertaker’s apprentice had confirmed what she already knew. She’d had to come and sit with Russell’s corpse, because if she didn’t do it, who else would?
    She inspected the box; not for the quality of the work, the dovetailing of the joints, the depth of surface sheen, but for some obvious flaw that would mark it out as a factory reject. She didn’t find anything and was surprised that Russell should be given something that would hold its own, not fail him at the last moment. Perhaps it was true, then, that death was a great equalizer? She shrugged, decided to ignore the quality of the boards and the fittings. Not teak or oak or African mahogany, but some altogether softer, unrecognizable timber, perhaps a composition of sawdust and glue; and for its handles, only gilded pig iron, no silver or brass.
    There’s always more than one casualty of a murder, Marie reasoned. At the trial they spend a lot of words proving that the perpetrator has wasted a life. But there are other lives, in the wings so to speak, equally broken. The lives of the loved ones.
    Russell Harvey was Isabel Reeves’ loved one and when she was snatched away the rest of his life stretched out before him like a bed of cinders.
    Marie Dickens, as an ex-nurse, had seen many lifeless bodies, the first well before she was out of her teens. It was part of the initiation into the profession to be able to deal with a patient whose essential systems had closed down. Most student nurses, by the end of their first year, have first-hand experience of the tasks involved. But for Marie that lingering sense of a soul departed, the shell-like emptiness of the still, carnal body, never failed in the poignancy of its moment. It had been there with every patient lost in the night, it had been there with her mother and her father, and it was here again with Russell Harvey. What had been human, with all its flaws, its spiritual or physical lesions, had come to an end. Packed up and skipped town.
    You could choose to ignore it. Like one of those extremely efficient people who reach for a roll of string and a cork. But that was running away. A death, any death, is a full stop; it is a mark of punctuation that demands that you take a breath. And it is in the space of that breath, when the old sentence is buried and before the new one is begun, that a different language is spoken. You can call it grief if you like, grief or mourning or, simply, shock. In truth it doesn’t have a name.
    It is the space in which the only possible response is prayer. In the old world, when the line between humanity and the gods was clearly defined, our ancestors knew instinctively what to do. They didn’t have to