Free Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron Page B

board. It was up to them to use her with care.
    But Howard, without being sentimental about it, wasn’t sure this was a good idea. The trouble with infants was, you couldn’t be sure people would forget about them. Everyone could lose an adult or two, and assume their life just took a different direction: they’d moved or got in with a new crowd – people were always prepared to write their own backstory to explain away a casual friend’s disappearance. But with an infant, you didn’t assume they’d made their own choices, changed their own lifestyle. With infants, the most unlikely types might get it in their heads to come looking.
    The fix seemed solid: the police, the local press. The inquest should ring down the curtain. Nobody liked it much, but in the name of national security, a lot of shit got swallowed. Still, things needed checking. That was the trouble with cowboys like Axel, thought Howard: they pulled off whatever wacky stunt felt good at the time, and muggins here was left to make sure nobody got curious after the event. It could be a problem if anyone other than Michael Downey took the bait. Especially with Axel Crane running wild, morally certain the fastest solution to most problems was a shallow grave.
    So Howard made a mental list (Howard made a lot of mental lists). 1: Check on the child. 2: Hang up some alarm bells – it would be nice to have warning if things went wonky. 3: Remind Crane he wasn’t running a private war out there. If he couldn’t keep his brother on a leash, maybe he’d like checking ID at the car pool.
    He almost smiled at the thought of passing that last item on.
    Amos Crane, though, was a truly creepy motherfucker, and Howard didn’t think he’d be telling him anything of the sort very soon.

Chapter Two
    Dead Soldiers
    I
    It was over a week before Sarah heard from Silvermann again, a week in which the debris was sifted and cleared at the broken house, and scaffolding erected to prevent what was left of it sliding into the river. The police presence became nominal and eventually disappeared, and the absence of obvious developments led to the falling off of newspaper coverage in proportion to increased speculation in the neighbourhood. No husbands were reported missing. Dinah’s disappearance received no coverage. Either it wasn’t newsworthy, it wasn’t known about, or it wasn’t a real disappearance. Maybe Silvermann would let her know which, if he ever got in touch. One night Sarah awoke sure she could hear a child crying in the street, but saw nothing human through the window. Mark slept through it, even when the streetlight’s glow fell on his face as she drew aside the curtain. He looked much younger sleeping, Sarah thought. Probably everyone did. But it kept alive in her a tenderness harder to maintain in the daylight hours.
    Harder to maintain, too, was a sense of exactly why she’d hired Joe in the first place. The image of Dinah that had latched on to her mind had grown paler with the passage of time, as if, mission completed, it could fade away into the light. The overalls, the yellow jellies, remained, but they too seemed less substantial, as if their memory had grown confused with that of the dolls’ accessories Sarah played with as a child. She was starting to wonder if her own subconscious weren’t playing treacherous games, luring her into a state of maternal concern that would leave her prey to Mark’s powers of persuasion. And Silvermann’s silence also gave her unease; nor could she recall the details of their contract. He’d said two days, and taken eight so far: would he charge for those? Several times she’d dialled his number but hung up before making the connection, unready, yet, to call him off before knowing what had happened. At this point, of course, she believed it was possible to halt events.
    When he called at last, he called mid-morning. Sarah, inevitably, was involved with housework. At least once a week she found a corner – the