Jigsaw by Campbell Armstrong

mood again.’
    â€˜How would you know anything about my moods?’
    â€˜From experience,’ he said. ‘From watching you. From caring.’ He considered how defensive she could be when the whim seized her. ‘You’re capricious. You veer from one extreme to another.’
    She walked round the bed, heading toward the bathroom. ‘You can get inside me, Barron. But you can never get inside me.’
    She stepped into the bathroom. Her image came back to her from the mirrored walls, strange angles, diminishing reflections. She didn’t recognize herself in any of them. The hardened wax shapes on her flesh suggested fresh scars.
    She locked the bathroom door, entered the shower, ran scalding water over her flesh, soaped herself vigorously, cleansed herself of wax, of Barron’s touch. But was it Barron she was trying to clean away: or was it that dark aspect of herself he managed always to explore? She closed her eyes and listened to the drumming of water.

FIVE
    DUBLIN
    J UST AFTER DAWN , F RANK P AGAN BOUGHT A COPY OF T HE T IMES AT Dublin Airport. He found the story on the front page, together with a smoky photograph of what looked like the crushed and blackened remains of an Underground carriage. Without the accompanying caption it would have been difficult to tell. Rails, bent and uprooted by the blast, created pincers round the carriage, which had lost all shape and form. Firemen labored in the wreckage, their faces bleached of features by harsh lamps. The picture had the grainy feel of an old wartime photograph of atrocities.
    Pagan stared at it for a long time; it defied understanding. It was painful and chaotic, brutal and tragic. It vibrated with loss. His eye drifted across the story. He registered key words and phrases. Rush hour. Underground. Piccadilly. The number of casualties has not been estimated. Nobody has claimed responsibility for the outrage, believed to have been caused by a sophisticated explosive device .
    Responsibility, he thought. He tried to imagine a bomb blast in the London Underground system during rush hour. Why would anyone want to claim that as their own work? He’d encountered many acts of terrorism before, too many, but he’d never been able to comprehend to his complete satisfaction the heart of them, not even when they came wrapped in tedious political dogma. Nor was he immune to the anger they induced in him. Did those lunatics believe extreme violence brought sympathy for their cause, whatever it was? Did they think the massacre of innocents won them some kind of bloodstained respectability? He knew he might have had more composure, more professional detachment, but he’d never achieved that state of disinterest.
    He wandered around the terminal impatiently. He had half an hour before his plane boarded. He bought a cup of coffee, spread the newspaper out on his table and looked at the photograph again. So. He was going back to London to deal with this. This was why Nimmo – Mr Nimmo, as Foxworth pointedly called the upstart – had commanded him to return. My line of work, he thought. My speciality. Blood and death. Carnage. Did he have the heart for it? Did he have the protective armour it took to cope with destruction? He was eager to get back into the stream of things, but he wondered if his spell of recent inactivity, and the shabby way he’d been treated during Nimmo’s ‘reconstruction’, might have diminished his appetite.
    He sighed, closed the newspaper, set it aside, and then picked it up once more, drawn irresistibly back to the photograph. He was sucked down into it, as though he were trapped inside the frame and stood alongside the wreckage, a prisoner of violence. He imagined he felt the heat of the lamps against his face and that if he were to reach out a hand his fingers would be scalded by molten metal. Troubled, he folded the newspaper so that the photograph was no longer visible. He pushed it aside