Marcie had never been inside Zodiac – she only knew of it from Ben – so when she climbed the set of steep stairs she was amazed to enter a space as big as a warehouse, stacked with the greatest repository of books about crime, forensic science and investigation in the world. She explained to the ageing owner behind his desk what she was looking for – technical, factual, something to engage a professional.
The owner was six foot seven and looked more like he belonged in the backwoods than in a bookshop. A former FBI profiler, he slowly unfurled himself and led her past shelves coated with dust and into a row of books and periodicals marked ‘New Releases’. Some of them must have been forty years old. From a small carton on the floor, newly arrived from the publisher, he lifted out a buff-coloured doorstop of a book.
‘You told me he’s sick,’ the Sequoia said, opening the highly technical material to show her. ‘Fifty pages of this should finish him off.’
‘Seriously,’ she said, ‘is it any good?’
He smiled, swept his hand around the room. ‘Might as well throw the rest away.’
As a result, the book which I had spent so many months writing ended up sitting on Bradley’s bedside table. He saw it when he woke early the next morning but made no move towards it. It was a Saturday, and when Marcie brought his breakfast in he asked her about it. ‘What’s it for?’
‘I thought you might find it interesting – look at it if you want,’ she said, trying not to put any pressure on him.
He didn’t glance at it, turning instead towards his food. Throughout the day, every time she came in to check on him, her disappointment grew. The book hadn’t been touched.
She didn’t know, but Bradley had been in a turmoil of his own since the moment he woke, coming down off the drugs, a jack-hammer of a headache splitting his skull as his body adjusted, a kaleidoscope of thoughts all let loose, making him remember when he didn’t even want to think.
By the time she was fixing dinner, Marcie had given up hope. With no sign of interest in the book from her husband she found the forms from the Wellness Foundation and started rehearsing how she was going to tell him it would be best if he went back to hospital. She couldn’t come up with any way of spinning it so that it didn’t sound like a defeat, and she knew it might shatter him. But she had run out of mental highway and, close to tears, she opened the door into the bedroom and braced herself for the imminent wreck.
He was sitting up in bed, thirty pages into my book, sweating hard, face etched with pain. God knows what effort it had taken for him to get that far, but he knew it was important to Marcie. Every time she came in, she couldn’t stop her eyes sliding to the book.
Marcie stared, frightened she was going to drop the tray, but decided that by even acknowledging the event she might scare him back into the cell, so she just continued normally.
‘It’s bullshit,’ he said. Oh God. Her soaring spirits nosedived, ready for another one of his episodes of wild anger.
‘I’m sorry, the man in the shop told me—’ she replied.
‘No, not the book – the book’s fantastic,’ he said irritably. ‘I mean the author. Call it intuition, call it what you like, he’s not FBI. I know those guys – they don’t work the frontier. This guy is something special.’
He motioned her closer, indicating where he’d marked things he had found arresting. And she never remembered seeing any of it, stealing glances at her husband, wondering if his spark of engagement would light a fire or whether – as with people she had read about who emerged from comas – it would die quickly and he would sink back into the void.
He took the dinner napkin off the tray and used it to wipe the sweat from his face. It gave Marcie a chance to leaf back to the beginning of the book. She stopped at the few lines of biography, but a picture of the author was conspicuous by its absence. ‘Who is he, then?’ she asked. ‘Who do you think Jude Garrett really is?’
‘No idea. I’m hoping he’ll make a mistake and tell us by accident,’ he said.
All through the weekend, to Marcie’s relief, the fire kept blazing. She sat on the bed as he ploughed through the pages – reading out slabs to her, arguing ideas back and forth. And as he went deeper, continually thinking about the science of investigation, he was forced to consider the one crime he had tried so hard to forget. Fragments of what had happened in the building kept floating to the surface of his mind, dragging the breath and the sweat out of him.
On Sunday night, seemingly out of nowhere, the words overtopped the dam and he told her that at one point he was trapped in what felt like a concrete tomb and that it had been so dark he hadn’t been able to see the face of the dying man he was with. He started to cry as he said that all he had been able to do was to try to catch his last words – a message for his wife and two young kids – and for the first time, as her husband cried in her arms, Marcie thought everything might be okay.