Free Sonata of the Dead by Conrad Williams Page B

incapacitate. Not to kill.’
    ‘Incapacitate? How?’
    ‘It’s what’s called a C2 complete. By which I mean the spinal cord was damaged at the second cervical vertebra.’ He stuck two fingers against the skin on the back of my neck. ‘Right there. Total paralysis.’
    ‘Why not just knock them out? Use a cosh?’
    Clarke drained his glass and stared at it as if wishing it was self-replenishing. ‘My guess is that would have been too risky. You bash someone over the head and you could kill them. And this guy obviously—’
    ‘Wanted to keep him alive.’
    ‘For a while at least, yes. It would seem.’
    He left then, but not before warning me again that this was strictly off the record and that if it should get back to his bosses that he’d been sharing delicate information I’d wake up short of a kidney or two.
    * * *
    Still no word from Craig Taft. I had to be patient. This was no ordinary writing group. This wasn’t ‘What I Did in My Holidays’ or ‘Tonight, boys and girls, we’re going to write a poem about autumn’. Nobody in this group was over thirty-five, which meant it wasn’t a thinly veiled lonely hearts club, or a support network for the romantically crippled. If you belonged to a gang of any sort at that age you were committed. There was a camaraderie, and a sense of competition; I remembered as much from my days playing Sunday League football as a teenager in the north-west. It was a savage kind of loyalty, a dangerous sort of love, even, existing for as long as the match lasted, or the training session. You felt, in moments of extremis – a goal down; the loss of a teammate to a dirty foul; a sending off – a kinship that went deeper than what it meant to be friends. You felt you might die for these people. You felt you might kill for them.
    I felt an old, ill-defined rage come over me. It was too wayward to be part of what I had experienced after the death of my wife. That was tied up in complex emotions connected to frustration and impotence. This was connected – I was sure – to those trench warfare brothers of mine. I had not enjoyed that level of intimacy or involvement any time since; certainly nothing like it had existed at Bruche when I was undergoing police training, or at Walton Lane nick, my first and last posting after I’d passed out. Family engendered it – to some extent – but at a level of reserve. I missed it; pure and simple. I missed having someone in my life who meant something.
    It was getting late; all day, for one reason or another, I’d been a coil of nervous tension. I needed to relax. Too often these days, no matter if I went to bed early, or – miracle of miracles! – without a drink in me, I’d wake up the next day feeling as though I’d been ploughing a field with a bent fork. I ached everywhere. My teeth ached. Once I’d decided it couldn’t be Mengele beating the shit out of me with the cricket bat in the night, I realised it must be stress. I was going to bed with more knots in me than a sailor’s practice rope. Sleep was failing to unpick any of them. Wake, angst, repeat. It didn’t help, I suppose, that I had the posture of a wanking monkey.
    I’d meant to walk home, but it was another beautiful London evening, so I strolled north-east, enjoying the warmth in the air, and the purpling sky. I wondered what Romy Toussaint was doing, and with whom she might be doing it. And a tender thought turned to a sour one and I remembered how it had gone with Melanie Henriksen.
    Don’t do that again
, I thought.
You can’t do that again
.
    I was on the Strand, heading towards Aldgate. The sound of traffic had reduced to a murmur so I was able to hear the call of birds roosting in the buildings above me. Melanie had done nothing to deserve what had happened to her. Her only crime had been to be receptive to my overtures. She had become a target, a fulcrum for a bad person to lean on in order to get to me, because I cared about her. The monsters in this