Something Coming Through

15. Red Weed Country

London — Norfolk | 8 July

Henry Harris, the driver of the Range Rover, was a security consultant who worked for Ada Morange’s people. A wiry man in his late fifties or early sixties, with a bony boyish face, a deep outdoor tan, and a bright gaze that didn’t miss much. Chloe had seen him visiting Daniel a couple of times, knew that he had once been in the army, allegedly in the SAS or some other crack unit.

His presence was a condition of Chloe being allowed ‘off the leash’, as Daniel had put it. To make sure that she was protected from journalists, to keep her out of any trouble that might attract the attention of Chief Inspector Nevers and the Hazard Police, and to represent Ada Morange’s interests.

‘Which are also our interests, of course,’ Daniel had said.

But not necessarily Chloe’s, or Fahad Chauhan’s. But there wasn’t much she could do about it. If she had headed off to Norfolk on her own it would have been as good as writing a resignation letter. And besides, she’d already told Daniel where she needed to go; Henry Harris would have soon caught up with her.

As they drove towards the M25, he asked her to switch off her phone. Chloe told him that she was using a throwaway. ‘I paid for it with cash a couple of days ago. It isn’t traceable.’

‘Have you used it at work or at home? Yes? Then it’s probably compromised. Let me take a look,’ Henry Harris said, and held out his hand.

She took it out and gave it to him; he immediately tossed it out of the open window.

‘Hey—’

‘I’ll buy you another. What else are you carrying? A tablet, spex?’

‘I need them for my work.’

She had her old phone, too. No way she was giving him that, it had all her shit on it.

‘Don’t use them. Not even in airplane mode.’

‘Are you trying to make me paranoid, Mr Harris?’

She said it with a smile. They were stuck with each other, so there was no point in starting an argument.

‘I don’t mind if you use my first name, Chloe. Mr Harris, it makes me think I’m your geography teacher. As for what I’m trying to do, it’s to keep you out of trouble. The Hazard Police’s interest in this thing of yours means that there might be something to it. But it also means we have to make sure we’re flying under their radar at all times.’

Chloe said, ‘Would you still be interested in this if the Hazard Police weren’t interested? I mean, if it was just my opinion that Fahad’s pictures were important.’

‘You’d have to ask the brass about that,’ Henry said. ‘Me, I’m just a foot soldier, doing what I’m told.’

He was dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt and tan chinos and battered trainers. He wasn’t wearing his seat belt, steered with casual expertise through the thickening traffic, the Range Rover looming like a tank in the buzzing swarm of candy-coloured runabouts and flitters. Its clattering motor was louder than the wind at the window that Chloe had rolled down, and there was a strong odour of frying oil. Her seat was patched with duct tape; the carpet was torn and stained; the back seat was a litter of old pizza boxes, crushed soft-drink cans, newspapers, Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes. There was a stack of box files. An old MacBook Air, its silver clamshell patched with stickers. Whenever the Range Rover went over a bump in the road or turned a corner there was a restless shifting, a clink of rolling bottles.

‘Tell me about these missing kids,’ Henry said.

He wore a big gold watch on his wrist, the second watch Chloe had seen in three days. Its dial was decorated with the face of someone she knew but couldn’t quite place. Dark scowling eyes, a bushy moustache. One of those old film stars who always played villains, maybe. The strap was a cheap strip of grey fabric, fastened with Velcro.

She said, ‘Daniel didn’t brief you?’

‘I want to hear your version.’

She gave him a quick account of the cult’s breakout, the flyer she’d picked up, Fahad Chauhan’s drawings and her brief conversation with him. She told him about Eddie Ackroyd and his mysterious client, her discovery that Fahad’s father had gone up and out to Mangala, his mother’s death.

‘About the father,’ Henry said. ‘It seems that Dr Chauhan lost his job soon after his wife died. He was padding inventory expenses, used the money to feed a gambling habit.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘The Prof has a stake in the company — her person on the board reached out to the head of Human Resources. Anyway, after he was fired, the father ends up in this little town in the back end of nowhere, doing we don’t yet know what. And a year later he lands a contract with that property-development company and is sent up and out to Mangala. There’s definitely something that doesn’t add up.’

‘However he got there, I think he sent back something,’ Chloe said.

‘I bet you’ve met a few aliens, in your line of work.’

‘That depends what you mean by met.’

‘You don’t count the Jackaroo avatar?’

‘We didn’t talk.’

Henry was amused by that. He said, ‘What about alien ghosts?’

‘If you mean eidolons, I’ve seen a few.’

‘Daniel told me you’d been to a lot of seances. Alien ghosts are more popular than dead Indians, he said.’

‘We did a survey last year,’ Chloe said. ‘I saw a woman pretend to drag ten metres of wet muslin from her mouth. I saw a man in black robes and a fez levitate a table.’

‘For real?’

‘With his knees. They both claimed to be in contact with spirit guides from Elder Cultures, but I didn’t see anything that would have surprised Houdini. If you want to see an eidolon, go to the British Museum. They have a tessera from a tomb in the City of the Dead on First Foot that generates one if anyone gets close. It looks a little like a squirrel made of smoke.’

‘What about this kid? Is he possessed by one of these eidolons?’

‘That’s what I want to find out.’

‘And that’s why we’re heading into M.R. James territory.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The writer. Ghost stories. There was one that scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. Saw it on TV one Christmas. That was set in Norfolk. By the sea.’

‘I thought I explained that this isn’t about that kind of ghost.’

‘I never looked at bed-sheets the same, after that,’ Henry said.

He was one of those men who like to test the limits of other people’s patience because they are impatient with themselves, easily bored. Chloe’s last boyfriend had been like that. Had liked to get in people’s faces, as he put it, to see what they were really made of. Simon, an ex-soldier she’d met at the gym. They’d had a sort of semi-serious thing for more than a year, and then one day, out of the blue, he’d told her he had taken a security job with BP and was shipping out to Greenland. And after he’d left he’d immediately broken his promise to stay in touch. He’d been gone almost six months now, and she was still a little raw about it.

They drove around the M25 and joined the M11, and just before Cambridge turned onto an A road, passed through a village, and stopped at a small service station on the far side.

‘You never know when you’re going to find one selling biodiesel these days,’ Henry said.

Chloe watched as he pumped fuel into the Range Rover’s tank. He popped the bonnet and carefully poured a litre of pinkish fluid into the coolant overflow tank. Looking sideways at her, saying, ‘I expect you’re wondering why I hang on to an antique like this.’

‘I was wondering why you weren’t driving something a little less conspicuous.’

‘I used to have a BMW. An E39 M5. Nothing to look at, but it was a real road monster. Six-speed manual, 4.9 litre V8. Totalled it in Wales, in a rainstorm near Cader Idris. Banged through a stone wall and flew halfway across a field, walked away without a scratch. This is a classic too,’ Henry said, lowering the bonnet. ‘Thirty years old, more than a hundred thousand on the clock. They make them with LEAF batteries now, and those tiny little motors that sound like sewing machines. But sometimes you get into a situation where you need a bit of welly.’

They bought sandwiches and coffee from the garage shop, leaned against the Range Rover while they ate. On the other side of the road, a work party of prisoners in orange coveralls printed with the logo of a security company were clearing dense mats of red weed from a stand of pine trees. They used billhooks to haul down scarlet ropes that twined through branches and sagged from tree to tree, chopping them into sections and tossing them into a roaring shredder that spat scarlet pulp into the hopper of a truck. Four guards in blue shirts and black shorts watched them work, tasers on their hips, faces shaded by ball caps, eyes masked by sunglasses.

‘Most of East Anglia is red weed country these days,’ Henry said. ‘They say you can hear it growing, at night. It grows on beaches, salt marshes…I saw a housing estate covered in it, out by Ebbsfleet.’

Chloe decided that she wouldn’t ask him what he’d been doing in Ebbsfleet.

He ate quickly and neatly, pausing now and then to dab at his lips with a paper napkin. Asked her if she wanted a bite. ‘Horse. Very tasty. And much healthier than beef.’

Chloe had abandoned her sandwich: a processed-cheese slice, pallid slices of tomato, bread the texture of packing-foam pellets. She said, ‘I don’t eat meat.’

Henry took a big bite of what was left of his sandwich, chewed and swallowed, and said, ‘Sometimes I could murder for a bacon sarnie. Bacon and fried egg and brown sauce. I hear the Chinese are trying to engineer a new flu-resistant strain of pigs. None too soon if you ask me, and I bet you agree. Every vegetarian I’ve ever met has lust in their heart for a nice bit of bacon.’

He unfolded a paper map on the Range Rover’s bonnet. He didn’t use satnav, he told Chloe, for the same reason he didn’t use a mobile phone or a tablet if he could help it.

‘I like to operate off the grid. Keep things simple.’

‘How do you report to your bosses?’

‘On a job? I don’t. I do what needs to be done, and if it goes wrong it’s on me. Not that anything will go wrong.’ He traced a route with a blunt forefinger, read out the names of towns and villages, road numbers, then folded the map up. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to navigate. Let’s get going.’

‘You need to lose a few prejudices, Mr Harris. Henry. I’m a mean map-reader.’

‘And I’ve memorised the route.’

He started the motor, shoved an actual CD into the antique deck, a compilation of Geezer Rock tracks. Thrashing drums, chugging guitars, male vocals. He told Chloe the name of the band as each track started. Primal Scream. The Wedding Present. New Order. She said that she thought she’d heard of New Order.

‘I saw them when I was fifteen,’ Henry said. ‘In Finsbury Park. What are you into, Chloe? A-pop? Interstellar electronica? Or are you more of a classic-music buff?’

Her mother had liked to play opera very loudly on Sunday morning. It still reminded Chloe of her, instantly, whenever she heard it.

‘That’s Paul Weller,’ Henry said, when another track started up. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard of him, either.’

They drove past an airbase with a jet fighter angled on a fat pedestal at the front gate, followed a badly maintained dual carriageway for a while, then turned off into a maze of little roads that followed old field boundaries as they wound across a flat agricultural landscape. The sky was enormous. Heat shimmering across yellow hectares of oilseed rape. Froths of cow parsley along verdant verges. Pretty little villages of houses of brick and knapped flint, bungalows with fanatically neat front gardens. Pebble-dashed council houses. Thatched pubs. Once a red telephone kiosk, the first Chloe had seen in the wild for several years. Larger houses beyond high walls and shelter belts of poplars. Immemorial England.

Henry Harris seemed relaxed out here, driving with his elbow cocked at the open window. As they followed the ring road around Acle towards the harbour, he glanced over for the first time in more than an hour and asked Chloe to check the glove compartment.

‘It’s all the way in the back. You’ll see.’

It was a small snub-nosed pistol nestled in a litter of chocolate-bar wrappers and spent biros, its chequered plastic grip protruding from a snug holster of soft black neoprene. Chloe felt an electric shock, as if she’d found a coiled snake.

She said, ‘If that’s supposed to make me feel safer, it doesn’t.’

‘It’s supposed to make me feel safer,’ Henry said. ‘Especially in a confined space like a ferry. Not to mention funny little towns full of web-footed locals. Hand it over.’

She tried to use only her fingertips. He wriggled in his seat, clipping the holster to his belt, under the tail of his white shirt.

She said, ‘Is that legal?’

‘I was trained to use bigger guns than this.’

Which didn’t exactly answer her question.

‘It was a long time ago. The Iraq War, the second one. But I still know which end the bullet comes out of,’ Henry said.

Chloe realised who the face on his watch was. The old dead dictator. The ultimate pantomime villain.

Henry told her that he’d once had a spot of trouble with bootleggers out on the Flood. ‘They let you lead them to something good, and then they come in and take it. Happened to me once. When I got out of hospital, I swore it wouldn’t happen to me again.’

His gaze was neutral, daring her to challenge his story.

She said, ‘I shouldn’t think bootleggers would be interested in Fahad’s paintings.’

‘They might be interested in what makes him paint them, mightn’t they?’

It was a good point.

They left the Range Rover in a long-term car park and walked along the edge of the new harbour, a raw excavation faced with steel plating. Windrows of trash rose and fell amongst rainbow oil stains on sluggish waves. Gulls wheeled overhead like revenants of a prehistoric age.

The little ferry, its hold just big enough for half a dozen vehicles, churned out of the harbour more than an hour late. It chugged through channels between islands, hugging the shore, calling in at several villages and small towns. At one stop, there was a delay because a pickup truck had trouble backing down the narrow ramp. Men shouted instructions to the driver, who kept sounding his horn, as if for punctuation.

‘Left a bit, just a bit more. Now straighten up.’

Beep!

‘Straight on, straight on, stop!’

Beep!

‘You’re over to the right. Ease forward, come on back.’

Beep!

Henry sat on his army-surplus kitbag, watching this. Eating cheese-and-onion crisps, turning the empty packet inside out and carefully blotting crumbs from the corners with a wetted fingertip, somehow reminding Chloe of a squirrel. The ferry chugged on, ploughing through floating reefs of bubbleweed that glinted like frothy spills of blood in the late afternoon sunlight, past a line of pylons standing knee-high in the Flood, past a stretch of railway line on an embankment now colonised by the neat multicoloured shacks, vegetable gardens and wind turbines of fishermen. Most of them Dutch refugees, according to Henry. He’d been out this way a few times, he said, chasing down rumours that hadn’t panned out.

‘Like I said, there are plenty of ghosts out here. They outnumber the living.’

Past a shoal of small islands. One was completely covered in red weed, like a boil in the blue water. The sun was setting over the long treeline of the shore as the ferry turned due east, running through a channel cut in a wide beds of reeds, coming at last to the little town beyond a long reach of sand dunes, its lights twinkling in the soft summer evening.