The Dying Light (2 page)
The dozen or so reporters leaned forward with fascination. ‘Any moment now,’ said the clerk, ‘you will see the white Honda van approach from the right. This vehicle was carrying the device. It parks in the alley, which is bordered by the party headquarters -’ he consulted his pad - ‘of the People’s Party for Unity, which was the target of the attack.’
The van appeared from the right but was held up first by a group of youths crossing the street, then by two men pushing a cart loaded down with bags of nuts and fruit and some kind of cooker. An arm appeared out of the driver’s side and waved languidly; a glint of light on the windscreen meant no face was visible as it turned. The van entered the alley and parked but the driver found he couldn’t open the door far enough to get out and had to reverse out then park again. Presently a stocky man wearing sunglasses and a cap appeared from the shadows. He paused in a splash of evening sunlight, rubbed his forearms, glanced down the street then sauntered off without the least hurry.
On the near side of the street, the policeman had shifted his chair round to face Eyam, who was gesturing towards the book and nodding. She saw now that he meant the book as a gift. The detective seemed overwhelmed and rose and shook his hand then returned to his seat and began to thumb through what she could see was a slim paperback. Nothing happened for a few seconds, then Eyam slipped a hand inside his jacket, removed a phone and made a call seemingly without dialling. At that moment a wedding party came into view on the other side of the street: the newlyweds - a beautiful mulatto couple - were followed by some children and about twenty guests. A band of five musicians brought up the rear of the procession. They soon moved out of shot. She looked back to Eyam, who had finished his call and was returning the phone to his jacket. He had spoken for no more than thirty seconds. With a start she remembered the call she’d received from him out of the blue one Saturday in January, the first contact since they had fallen out and drifted irrevocably apart. It was at the weekend, and she’d gone to stay with old man Calvert in Connecticut. She returned the call to the unfamiliar number but had got no answer. After trying a dozen or so times over the next week she gave up, assuming he would eventually respond. His message was short - he said he felt like speaking to her - and it was still there. She was sure of that because she was in the habit of methodically erasing all those to do with her work as she dealt with them. But she’d kept this one, out of sentiment and guilt and a hope that the chill between them had ended; also because she meant to copy this new number to her list of contacts.
She watched the film, aware of her short, shallow breaths. The detective’s attention was drawn to someone out of shot, and he began to wave. From the right of the screen came a woman dressed in a dark red flared skirt and a white shirt that was knotted at the waist like a fifties pin-up. The detective was saying something about her to Eyam. She paused before reaching the tables, put her index finger to her chin, then raised her hand theatrically and clicked her fingers to suggest she had just remembered something. With a swirl of skirts, she almost pirouetted and walked across the road where she pretended to window shop, bending over and then stretching upwards to examine something at the top of the display, and showing off her figure to maximum effect. She moved out of shot. The detective slapped his thighs with mock exasperation and threw himself back in his chair as though to say he could play it cool too. Eyam nodded sympathetically, then drained his drink and got up.
He took a couple of paces, said something over his shoulder - probably his last words - paused at the kerb for a truck carrying a gang of workers to pass, then crossed over and entered the alley, squeezing past the white van into the dark of the tunnel.
The clerk pressed a button on the remote and the picture froze again, causing kate’s eyes to settle on the clerk’s head and neck, which rose from his shoulders like a cork in a bottle. ‘At this moment,’ said the clerk, turning with sudden movement to the court, ‘the detective heard the first detonator and realised what was going to happen, which explains his quick reaction. The delay between the first and second detonators, usual in this kind of bomb, was probably intended, but it may have been simply an indication of the amateurishness of the bomb maker.’
‘However,’ said the coroner, ‘the Colombian authorities believe that the delay was designed to allow maximum dispersal of the gas before detonation.’ The clerk nodded agreement.
The film was started again. The field of the shot seemed to have changed, as though the camera had been loosened on its stand and the lens had drifted upwards a few degrees. There was an odd moment of stillness when nothing much happened. In the foreground the tourists stared about them without speaking. No vehicles passed. Then the detective sprang out of his chair and sprinted across the street waving frantically for the girl to get down. His shouts were picked up by the camera’s microphone. The girl stepped back from the shop window with an appalled and strangely embarrassed expression and began to walk towards him, her arms held outwards interrogatively. The detective reached her, hooked his arm around her waist, lifting her off the ground in one clean movement, then ran three or four paces until they were out of shot. At this moment the cameraman bobbed up to see what was going on and blocked most of the view. A beat later he was surrounded by a halo of flame that expanded fifty yards away from him. Then a shock wave propelled his body to the left and rippled outwards. Even though the clerk had aimed the remote to turn down the volume, the roar that followed filled the courtroom. Astonishingly, the camera remained upright, possibly because its owner had shielded it from the main blast, and the film ran on for a few seconds until the camera was toppled by something falling from above. By this time there was very little to be seen except a ball of fire billowing outwards to touch everything in shot. The street vendors vanished. The people, the buildings, the parked cars, the sunlight and shadows - all were obliterated by the sudden cosmic flare of destruction.
The screens around the court went blank. One or two people murmured their shock but for the most part they were silent. Kate found herself staring vacantly at the courtroom’s awful new royal-blue carpeting. There had been no time for Eyam to pass through that tunnel. He would have been killed instantly. It was as if she had just watched his death in real time and had been unable to shout a warning to him. She looked up through the windows. Outside in the March morning some scaffolding was being erected. A man warmed his hand round a cup that steamed in the wind. Eyam had gone. People were oblivious. Life went on.
The coroner glanced down at the lawyer appointed by David Eyam’s stepmother. ‘Would it suit you, Mr Richards, if we rose now and resumed at - say - two o’clock?’
‘By all means, sir,’ said the man moving to his feet with his fingers tucked into the back of his waistband. ‘May I ask if you think it likely that the remains will be released for burial? My client would like to set the funeral arrangements in train as soon as possible. A provisional date of next Tuesday - the twelfth - has been suggested. There is much to organise.’>
‘Yes, I think that can be taken as read. Please inform Lady Eyam that she may go ahead.’ He paused. ‘We will leave evidence of identification and the interview with Detective Bautista until this afternoon.’ He turned to reporters who were occupying the benches that would have been used by the jury had the coroner exercised his option to call one. ‘A copy of this film will be released after I deliver a verdict, which I expect to be at the end of the afternoon.’ With this he rose and left through a door behind the chair.
Outside the court, Kate switched on her phone and worked her way back through the messages from colleagues all expressing disbelief at her sudden departure from the head office of Calvert-Mayne in Manhattan. There was a score of callers wondering why she had left one of the most important jobs in the law firm for an unspecified role in the backwater of the London office. At length she came to Eyam’s call on the Saturday of his death. ‘Hello there, Sister - it’s me. Eyam,’ he started. He sounded relaxed. ‘I felt like having a chat, but it seems you’re busy and I now realise it’s not ideal this end either, because I’m sitting outside in a street bar and a bloody wedding party has just appeared so you wouldn’t be able to hear much anyway. But, look, I miss you and I’d really love to see you when I get back. Perhaps we should meet in New York. We will see each other.’ He paused. ‘You are in my thoughts, as always, and there’s much I want to discuss with you, but now I’ll just have to make do with the charming policeman whom I am sitting here with. Speak to you soon - all my love.’
She held the phone to her ear for a few seconds, thinking that if she had answered the call she might have delayed him leaving his table in the bar. The tourists and the policeman escaped with their lives; only the people in the confined space of the alley were killed. She snapped the phone shut, lit a cigarette - one of a ration of five - and then opened it again to search the phone’s memory for the time of the call. Five forty-five in the afternoon. She could probably work out exactly what she was doing at that precise moment, but what was the point? Eyam was dead. She just had to get used to the idea.
Part of her wanted to return to the Bailey Hotel rather than go back into the inquest, but then it occurred to her that Eyam needed a friendly face at his inquest. There was no family to speak of. His disabled brother had died while they were at Oxford, his mother succumbed to cancer soon afterwards and she had read that Eyam’s father, Sir Colin, a holder of numerous engineering patents, a wily financier and discreet philanthropist, had died the previous year. So it was as an act of friendship as well as a witness that at one forty-five p.m. she worked her way along the bench to sit behind a flustered middle-aged woman and wait for the coroner to reappear. She wondered about the other people in the public benches, particularly a tall man with large glasses, stiff, wavy, dark hair and an expression of courteous disengagement. She had stood by him when filling in the register required of those attending the court - a new procedure presented as a survey - and read the name Kilmartin but not his address, which was illegible. From his clothes came the particular smell of a bonfire; the pockets of his coat were stuffed with rolled-up catalogues; and he held the
Financial Times
and a journal to his chest.
Financial Times
and a journal to his chest.
While they sat waiting in the benches, the woman in front of her turned round and, with her hand rising to pat the flushed skin at the top of her bosom, introduced herself as Diana Kidd. ‘Did you know David?’ she asked.
Kate nodded, aware of a blousy old-fashioned scent reaching her nostrils.
‘Were you an
old
friend?’
old
friend?’
‘I suppose you could say that. We met at college.’ She could see that the woman was trying to work her out: the traces of the East in her appearance - the looks of her father, Sonny Koh - the straight-backed Englishness of her mother, and the American accent which overlaid the voice of a public schoolgirl.
‘I began to know David really quite well, considering,’ continued the woman.
‘Considering what?’ said Kate.
The woman ignored the question. ‘He threw himself into the local arts scene here. He had one of the most formidable minds I’ve ever had the privilege to encounter, but you know he was never pushy or domineering.’ With each statement her eyes darted about the court. ‘He never made people feel ill at ease with that great mind of his. And impeccable manners, of course. Unimpeachable! Kept himself to himself though: an invisible barrier around him, if you know what I mean.’
Kate did, though she wouldn’t have put it like that. Eyam was capable of warmth and loyalty but he had no interest in explaining himself and was impatient when others expected him to. The woman asked if she was family, then if she had visited David since he had moved to High Castle. Kate shook her head to both questions and murmured that she hadn’t seen him for some time. She did not mention the email from Russell, Spring & Co, a firm of local solicitors, which had been forwarded to her by her old assistant in New York and was how she had learned of his death nearly six weeks after it had occurred.
Once Diana Kidd had decided that Kate had not been a lover and possessed no greater claim on the memory of David Eyam than she did, her interest seemed to wane. However, she told Kate a bit more about Eyam’s circumstances. He had bought and restored a black and white A-frame cottage on the edge of the woods overlooking the Dove Valley; he did not seem to have a job; he attended recitals and concerts, and joined the local film society and a reading group, the novelty of which was that books were discussed on rambles through the Marches of Wales.
What utter bloody hell, thought Kate, and not for the first time wondered what had driven Eyam to this provincial limbo on the English-Welsh border. The Eyam she knew was compelled by the centre of things; it was unthinkable that he’d opt for life in the back of beyond nourished only by cultural chats with Diana Kidd.
‘Why was he in Colombia?’ Kate asked. ‘Did he tell you he was going?’
Mrs Kidd shook her head as though this was an extremely stupid question. ‘No, he just vanished two or three weeks before Christmas. No one knew where he had gone or for how long. The next thing we heard was about this bomb, but that took several weeks to filter through because no one suspected that he was involved. I mean, how could they?’ She hissed this last observation as the coroner entered and the clerk asked them to rise.
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