The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels

The man sat. He was wearing a pair of corduroys, not especially new, but a light jacket that looked well-made. He had big, neat hands. His fair hair had been dyed a stronger blond, but expensively, and his face worked pretty well. Like a hip science teacher, or maybe social studies. The kind that probably wouldn’t sleep with a student, but could if he wanted.

‘So are you an actor, or something?’

‘Oh no. Nothing as grand as that. Just a tourist.’

‘How long are you here for?’

‘A couple of weeks.’ He reached in his pocket and pulled out a small object, made of shiny chrome. He flipped the top off and revealed it to be a small portable ashtray.

Sarah watched this with great interest. ‘The English smoke a lot, don’t they.’

‘We do,’ said the man, who wasn’t English. He stubbed out his cigarette and slipped the ashtray back in his pocket. ‘We are not afraid.’

They chatted for a little while. Sarah reminisced about London. The man was able to join in convincingly, as he had returned from the country only two days before. He did not reveal that the Barnes and Noble bag he was carrying was full of books he had owned for some years, nor that he had spent a full hour in the bookstore sitting in the Politics and Economics section, his face averted from the other customers, watching out of the window for Sarah to arrive. He instead asked for suggestions for what else he should see in the city. He listed the parts of Los Angeles he had already visited, a selection of the usual tourist traps.

Sarah, who took her responsibilities seriously, suggested the La Brea tar pit, Rodeo Drive, and the Watts Tower, which she felt would give a good span of where LA had come from, and where it was going. Plus, she thought privately, on Rodeo he could replace his corduroys with something a little more bon marché, as Sian – who’d vacationed in Antibes last year – was fond of saying.

Then the man went quiet for a moment. Sarah was thinking that it was time for her to windowshop her way down to dinner. She was gathering herself to say good night, when he turned and looked at her.

‘You’re very pretty,’ he said.

This might or might not be true – Sarah’s opinion was currently fiercely divided on the subject – but it was without question straight out of the ‘Watch out, a wacko’ box of conversational sallies.

‘Thanks,’ she said, bright-eyed with deflection. For a moment the evening seemed a little cooler, then steadied as she took control. ‘Anyway, nice talking to you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quickly. ‘That’s rather an odd thing to say, I know. It’s just that you remind me of my own daughter. She’s about your age.’

‘Right,’ Sarah said. ‘Cool.’

‘She’s back in Blighty,’ the man went on, as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘With her mother. Looking forward to seeing them again, don’t you know. Top hole. Gor blimey. Princess Di, God rest ’er soul.’

His eyes flicked away from her then, took a quick glance around. Sarah assumed he was embarrassed. In reality he was estimating that in about twenty seconds all paths would converge to convenience him, the lines of sight all elsewhere. He was good at judging this kind of thing, at telling when he would be in vision, of seeing the small steps that would take him back out of sight. It was one of his special skills. He shifted a few inches closer to the girl, who stood up.

‘Anyway,’ Sarah said. ‘I got to go.’

The man laughed, as he felt the lines fall into place. He grabbed Sarah’s hand and tugged it with surprising force. She squawked quietly and fell back onto the bench, too shocked to resist.

‘Let go,’ she said, fighting to stay calm. The ground seemed to be falling away, a vertiginous, fluid feeling. She felt as if she had been caught cheating, or stealing.

‘Pretty girl.’ He gripped her hand more tightly. ‘A keeper.’

‘Please, let go of me.’

‘Oh shut up,’ he muttered, all pretence of an English accent gone. ‘You ludicrous little slut.’ His fist jackhammered up in a compact, short-armed punch, smashing straight into her face.

Sarah’s head jerked back, her eyes wide open and stunned. Oh no, she thought, the interior voice quiet and dismayed. Oh no.

‘Take a look, Sarah,’ the man said, his voice low and urgent. ‘Look at all the lucky people. The people who aren’t you.’

He nodded down the Promenade. Only a block down, the street was crowded. People going in and out of stores, taking exploratory looks at restaurant menus. Around Sarah and the man there was nobody to be seen.

‘Once there was just bush here, do you realize that? Ragged coastline, rocks, shells. A few tracks in the sand. If you’re quiet you can hear the way that it was, before any of this shit was here.’

Blinking against her watering eyes, Sarah tried to work out what he was getting at. Maybe there was something she could do, some unexpected final question in this test, some way of scraping a pass. ‘But people don’t see,’ he continued. ‘They don’t even look. Blind. Wilfully blind. Trapped in the machine.’

He grabbed her hair, turned her face so she could see into the Barnes and Noble. There were plenty of people in there, too. Reading. Standing. Chatting. Why would you look outside, when you’re in a bookstore at night? Even if you did, would you see more than a couple of dark figures on a bench? Why would that seem exceptional?

‘I should do you here and now,’ the man said, in a tone of quiet indignation. ‘Just to show it could be done. That nobody really cares. When you’re surrounded by people you don’t know all the time, how can you tell what’s wrong? In five square miles of disease, who cares what happens to one little virus? Only me.’

Sarah realized there was going to be no get-out-of-this-free question, not now or ever, and gathered herself to scream. The man felt her chest expand, and his hand quickly looped over her face. Two fingers grabbed her upper lip from above, tugging it hard. The scream never made it out of her throat. Sarah tried to struggle, but the hand held her in position, coupled with the weight of his arm, pressing down on her head.

‘Nobody watching,’ the man assured her, with the same hateful calm. ‘I made it this way. I can walk where nobody sees.’

Indistinct noises came out of the girl’s mouth, as she tried to say something. He seemed to understand.

‘No they’re not,’ he said. ‘They’re not on their way. They’re at home. Mommy’s a Jackson Pollock in the kitchen. Daddy’s in the garden, with little sister. Both naked. They make an interesting tableau. Some might even consider it obscene.’

In fact, Sarah’s mom and Melanie were watching a Simpsons rerun at that moment. It was, as Zoë Becker would always remember, the episode where George Bush moves into Springfield. Michael Becker was typing furiously in his den, having found, he fervently hoped, a way of making everything all right. If he could just fix the opening ten minutes, and find a way of selling the idea that some of the characters had to be older than teenagers, then everything would be okay. Failing that, fuck it, he’d just make them all teenagers – and reinstate all the fucking pans down the front of the high school, the way Wang wanted it. A few miles away, Sian Williams had just picked up Sarah’s message, and was feeling a little envious of her friend’s Out Alone adventure.

‘If you keep wriggling,’ the man said, ‘I’ll pull your teeth out. I will. I promise. Not easy, but it’s worth it. It’s really a very unusual sound.’

Sarah went completely still, and for a moment neither of them moved. The man seemed to take a pleasure in sitting that way, the girl’s mouth pulled up to a point of screaming pain, as if they were sharing a private moment in the middle of a busy street.

Then he sighed, like a man reluctantly putting aside an absorbing magazine. He stood, pulling Sarah up with him. Her minidisc player slipped to the floor with a brittle clatter. The man glanced at it, and let it lie.

‘Goodbye and good night, good people,’ he said, in the general direction of the other end of the street. ‘You’ll all rot in hell, and I’d love to lead you there.’ His right arm rotated around Sarah’s head until his hand was clamped firmly over her mouth. With his other hand he picked up the bag of books. ‘But I have a date, and we must go.’

Then, with quick, long strides, he dragged Sarah across the street and into an alley where his car was parked. She had no choice but to accompany him. He was tall and very strong.

He threw open the back door, then grabbed her hair again and peered closely into her face. The close presence of his face scared all useful thought out of her head.

‘Come, my dear,’ he said. ‘Our carriage awaits.’ Then he head-butted her just above the eyes.

As Sarah’s knees buckled, her last thought was matter-of-fact. In her bedside table was a notebook in which she had written down many thoughts. Some of the most recent were about sex: breathless musings on a part of life she had not yet experienced, but knew was coming her way. Most were transcriptions of things Sian had told her, but she’d used her own imagination too, plus what she’d gleaned from TV and movies and a not-too-gross magazine she’d found under the Pier.

The notebook was hidden, but not very well. When she was dead, her mother and father would find it, and they would know she had brought this evening upon herself.

Nina was unaware of much of this, but this was the event she described. When she had told what she knew, she topped her glass up. Zandt’s remained untouched.

‘Four witnesses put Sarah Becker on the bench between 7.12 and 7.31. Their descriptions of the man with her range from “Nondescript, maybe tall”, to “Shit, I don’t know”, via “Well, he was, like, a guy”. We don’t even have an age or colour that I’d take to the bank, though we got two hits with white and blond. Two say he was wearing a long coat, another said a sport jacket. Nobody saw them leave, despite the fact that the bench is within yards of a zillion people. If the man spent any time in the bookstore before accosting her, then nobody noticed him. Another witness describes seeing a car of undetermined colour and model in the nearest side street. It’s possible that a trashcan may have been placed to obscure the number plate – which is pretty slick, though does require more confidence than God. Anybody could have just moved the can, and he was illegally parked. The car was gone by 8.15.

‘The girl’s father arrived at the south end of the Promenade at 9.07. He parked up in the usual place, waited. When neither his daughter nor Sian Williams appeared after a few minutes, he went into the restaurant. The staff told him they hadn’t served a table who matched his description, though they did have a no-show in the name of Williams. He called the other girl’s mother and found that the dinner had been cancelled at the last moment due to a problem with the Williamses’ car. The car’s been checked, but we can’t get a firm opinion on whether it was tampered with.

‘Michael Becker demanded to speak to the girl herself and was eventually told Sarah had left a message saying she didn’t want to bother her dad, and that she was going to just kill time and wait for the usual pickup. He searched up and down the street without finding any sign of his daughter. Finally he made it up to the far end and after checking in the Barnes and Noble he spotted a Sony minidisc player lying partially obscured under the bench. His daughter’s ownership of this device was certain, both through a label she had affixed and because he had bought it for her. The disc in the machine was some album by her favourite band. She has a poster of them on her bedroom wall. Becker then called the sheriff’s department, the LAPD, and also his agent, somewhat bizarrely. He seems to have thought that she would have more pull with the cops than he did. He called his wife, and told her to stay where she was in case their daughter arrived home by cab.

‘The whole area was searched. Nothing. There are no prints on the player apart from the girl’s. There are about a hundred cigarette butts around the bench, but we don’t even know if the perpetrator smoked. One of the witnesses said he thought he might have done, so some poor fucker in a lab is currently trying for DNA off a whole bag of them.’

‘The father isn’t a suspect.’