The Mortality Principle. Alex Archer
to gather, blocking the way.
One man stepped away from the group.
He pulled out his cell phone.
She was too far away to hear what the man said as he spoke into his phone, but his body language spoke volumes. He was calling the police.
At the sound of the approaching siren a few people peeled away from the crowd. They disappeared into the side streets and wider spaces beyond, happy not to be involved once the police arrived.
Annja stepped into a gap that had been created as a middle-aged woman stepped away. The woman’s rigid expression gave plenty warning of what she was about to see. A shiver raced up Annja’s spine as she peered through the cluster of bodies: a man in a blue suit crouched over someone lying on the ground in an alleyway that ran between two buildings. Annja saw the dark, damp patch staining the cobbles at his feet as she worked her way closer. The man was fighting for a life that wasn’t there to be saved. He stood and shook his head to no one in particular. There was nothing he could do. Nothing anyone could do. As he moved away to the fresher air of the street, Annja saw the body properly.
The victim had been dead for some time.
Four and a half hours, Annja thought, looking at the ragged clothes the body wore, and at the stains that had turned them the same dark color as the ground around the corpse.
Judging by the state of his clothes, there was every chance this usually quiet alleyway was where the dead man made his bed for the night. Could his death be the consequence of a fight over something as tragic as the meager shelter that the alleyway offered? If it was, then it was a poor way to end a life that had surely seen more than its fair share of troubles. Annja rubbed a hand through her damp hair. The body that lay in the narrow space was no longer a man; now it was evidence to be picked over in the mortuary.
It didn’t need a pathologist to read the crime scene. This wasn’t death by natural causes. There was nothing accidental about it. She’d been right the previous night; there had been violence in the air. She couldn’t have stopped it. She couldn’t even let herself think that way. The world wasn’t her responsibility. She couldn’t police every street and save every victim.
When the police car came to a halt only a few feet away from the crowd, the press of bodies miraculously thinned, gawkers suddenly remembering they had somewhere else to be. The man in the suit spoke to a policeman, no doubt explaining that he had found the dead man. Annja couldn’t understand the few words she caught. One policeman made a note in his small black book, presumably of the man’s name and address while the other worked his way through the remaining gawkers to the corpse. A few seconds later, after the briefest of glances at the dead vagrant, he began to usher everyone back.
The forlorn siren song of an approaching ambulance was wholly out of place and much too late, unless it was bringing a priest. By the look of the dead man, every last ounce of hope had been torn from him, shredded, before he had finally slumped to the ground and spilled what little was left of his bodily fluids out across the cobbles.
Annja was still wrapped up in her thoughts when she realized that the policeman was talking to her. She shook her head.
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t speak Czech.”
“Ah, did you see anything?” he asked, switching to English easily, though his voice carried a heavy accent. There was no way anyone would mistake him for a native speaker. Annja shook her head, so he moved on to the next person, no doubt sure this was a crime that didn’t warrant investigating given who the victim was.
“I might have heard something, though,” Annja said to his back. “Last night.”
He made no effort to disguise his world-weary sigh as he turned back to her. His pen was still poised over his pad. “What did you hear?”
Annja chose her words carefully. She didn’t want to risk any misunderstanding. “I heard a fight,” she began.
“A fight?”
She nodded. “Two men,” she said, though even as the words left her lips she couldn’t actually be sure that it was the truth. She’d heard so little, even with the window open. In truth, she had no reason to believe the dead man had anything to do with the struggle she had heard in the night.
“Can you describe them?” the policeman asked. “Anything at all?”
Annja held out her hands, shaking her head slightly. “I’m sorry, no. I only heard them. I can’t even be sure what I heard. It just sounded like fighting, but it was over very quickly, then I heard footsteps running away. It could have been anything, really. I just thought you should know.”
“When was this?”
“A little before three.”
“And where were you when you heard this altercation?”
She pointed in the direction of her hotel room, and her window, which didn’t really overlook the street by more than a few degrees, the laws of physics explaining why she hadn’t been able to see anything. The expression on his face changed. She couldn’t read him. He looked tired, and the stubble on his chin suggested a long night on duty was about to turn into an even longer day on duty. He made a note of her name and the room number, and offered cursory thanks as he moved on to the next face in the crowd, repeating his questions.
A man tried to enter the alleyway, but the policeman stopped him. The newcomer wouldn’t be deterred. He was determined to cut through the narrow passageway, and no dead body was going to stop him. The officer prodded him in the chest with a stubby finger. He might as well have hit the man with a Taser gun; the effect was just about the same. Annja turned toward the hotel and walked away as the disgruntled man started threatening to have the policeman’s badge. At least, that was what she chose to imagine his rant entailed. He could have been asking for alternative directions or if the good officer fancied a nice game of global thermonuclear war, for all she knew.
Annja still had no appetite.
She made her way into the dining room for breakfast, though she wasn’t sure she could face much more than a cup of strong black coffee. The stronger, the better, given it was going to have to mask the taste of death that had been cloying at the back of her throat since she stood in the alleyway.
“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress asked as she topped up her cup with a third refill in half an hour.
“I’m good, thanks,” Annja replied, picking up the cup without even thinking about it. She was no stranger to death, which wasn’t something she would have ever thought she’d find herself thinking a few years ago, but things had changed since Roux and Garin had walked into her life. What should have been the most horrific thing imaginable had almost become a fact of life, and of course there were those harrowing times when it had been her doing, a matter of kill or be killed.
But this was different.
She couldn’t shift the guilt. She could have done something. She’d heard it happening, had known instinctively something was wrong, but hadn’t gone down to check it out. She’d simply lain there telling herself there was nothing she could do. And even now, knowing that she was right—at least academically—emotionally she couldn’t banish the self-loathing that came with not even trying.
Someone had torn that vagrant open.
“Is something wrong?” the waitress whispered, her voice so quiet that none of the other diners would be able to hear what she said.
“Nothing that another cup of coffee won’t put right if I know you,” a familiar voice said, the man joining her at the table.
Annja didn’t need to look up to know who her visitor was.
“Garin,” she said. “I’m not even going to ask how you found me.”