cars were damaged, or so it was said; did they count and include the two police units that accidentally scraped bumpers on the way to North Cross mall? And more coincidences: someone with the surname Perkins was killed in both places; someone with the given name Francesca was killed in both places; both gunmen had previous convictions for robbery, but not for firearm abuse.
Coincidences make good headlines for newspapers, they feed the suspicious minds of conspiracy theorists, they open up debates for philosophers about time, perception, consciousness and reality. But to most ordinary people they are only remarked upon, thought about or discussed briefly, then forgotten.
There were superficial coincidences between the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. Were they
significant? How could they be, except on some cosmic or metaphysical level of no concern to most people?
In a more general arena, cnminal lawyers are aware of the surprising coincidences that crop up regularly in even the most straightforward of cases: the two men destined to collaborate in a major crime who come together only by chance; the killer and his victim whose lives are almost exact parallels until the day they meet; the innocent bystanders and the guilty perpetrators who happen to look amazingly alike. None of these coincidences, nor hundreds of others like them, is significant in any way.
They signify only that coincidences occur all. the time in ordinary life, but only when one's attention is focused by something like a crime do they become apparent.
How could the series of coincidences between Kingwood City and Bulverton be explained away, or disregarded, once everyone had remarked upon them? To Teresa, they seemed to have been placed for her to find.
As the immediate loss of Andy began to recede, the need to make sense of what had happened became increasingly important.
The trail ultimately led to here, and to now, to this levelled space by the side of a minor road, the wintershorn trees of Ashdown Forest around her, the lightly drifting rain, the traffic rushing by in a flurry of tyre noise and road spray.
Teresa breathed the air, relished the chill. dampness of the woods, and spread her hands on the highly polished paintwork of the car, feeling the standing droplets of rain running out from beneath her fingers.
lt was impossible to accept the metaphysics of coincidence in an ordered universe, because only by believing that the emergence of killers like Aronwitz and Grove were random events could you ever come to terms with what they had done.
You could only accept their murders by believing in the harmony of chance, believing that the tragedies they inflicted were so to speak unique, unlikely to be repeated.
To think they were part of some pattern that could be understood and interpreted, and therefore predicted, made reality less real.
Yet that was what Andy had been trying to show, before Aronwitz ended everything for him.
Andy ultimately believed in predestiny, even if he had not put it that way himself, she had to overturn that belief to be able to get through the rest of her life.
CHAPTER 20
She arrived in San Diego on a blisteringly hot day, a sea wind bending the palm trees, making the dust fly at the street intersections, puffing the canopies of shops and swinging the overhead traffic signals precariously. Shiny, rounded cars moved in a leisurely fashion through the streets. A DC3 of Pan American circled overhead, moving down towards the airfield; the brilliant sunshine glinted off the unpainted wings and engine cowlings.
She had a key in her hand, and she was hurrying towards a row of cars parked diagonally against the sidewalk. She was out of breath, and her back and legs were hurting. She reeled mentally, perhaps physically too, at the impact of the sensory overload from the collectively remembered scenario. She was too hot, the wind took her breath away, something in the air flew into her eye. She wanted to maintain her own individuality, her own reactions, and turned back quickly enough to see one of the buildings beside her flicker into solidity as her vision persisted in that direction.
She was moving towards a silverandblue Chevrolet station wagon, but again she resisted and went instead to the green Ford saloon parked alongside. The driver's door was locked, and the key she was holding would not even slide in. She gave up and went to the Chevrolet instead.
The door of this was unlocked, and after she had slid on to the bench seat, comfortably spreading her large body, she got the key into the ignition at the first try.
A few moments later she was driving north along 30th
Street, and at the intersection with University she took a right. Shortly afterwards she came to the large intersection with Wabash Boulevard, and here she took a left, driving on to the highway and accelerating to keep up with the rest of the traffic. The sun was shafting in through the driver's window, making her arm and face tingle. She wound up the window, and pulled the visor over to help shade herself
She reached into the glove compartment and took out the automatic pistol that was there.
While she drove she checked it was loaded, then laid it on the seat beside her. She switched on the radio: the Duke Ellington Orchestra was playing 'Newport Up'.
She stretched back in the seat, drove with her arms straight and her head lying back on the rest, the radio on, the sun blazing in on her, and the wonderful rumbling slow traffic of 1950
gliding past and around her.
Moments later she saw diversion lights ahead, and a police roadblock. Most of the traffic was peeling off to the left, going around the diversion, but she slowed and signalled to the right, heading straight for the police line. Teresa resisted. She wrenched the steering wheel to the left and swerved across the traffic lanes and away from the roadblock. One of the cops, who had stepped towards her car as soon as she signalled right, raised his arm and shouted something after her.
