Death is a Welcome Guest

One

London was hotter than Mumbai that summer, hotter than Beirut, hotter than hell, or so people said. Magnus McFall believed them. The train’s windows were open, but the air blasting through the carriage had a nasty, second-hand quality that reminded Magnus of sliding into a recently vacated bath, warm water scummed with soap. It did not help that the passengers were rammed together as if it were the last train out of Saigon. He breathed in through his mouth and tasted burning rubber. Some summers the tracks melted, stranding passengers between stations. It would screw him, but the possibility brought a smile to Magnus’s face. He thought he might talk a wavering suicide bomber into sticking to his plan — paradise is worth dying for, son, pull that string and shame the infidel — if it meant the show would not go on, even though the show was the only thing that really mattered.

Magnus caught a girl glancing at him from across the aisle and grinned again. The girl frowned and looked away and Magnus wondered if he should practise smiling without showing his teeth. His agent, Richie Banks, had advised him not to get them fixed: ‘They’re as crooked as a pyramid sales scheme, but they’re your best feature, chum. Make you look a bit less like your mother left you out in the rain.’ Judging by the photographs lining his office walls, Richie had represented some odd-looking comics in his time. Magnus was not sure his agent knew the difference between a funny man and a funny-looking man.

Magnus glanced at his watch. Ninety minutes to go. He took a tissue from the pocket of his jeans and dabbed the sweat from his forehead, surprised by how calm he felt. It was the dead calm of the soldier about to go over the top, or an armed robber readying to storm a bank, but it was better than the gut-twisting that could cripple him before a show.

He looked down the carriage. Most of the passengers were also bound for O2. The crush of teenage girls in baseball caps stamped Johnny Dongo Done Done Me Wrongo was obvious. So was the group of middle-aged women, co-workers in some office, he guessed, large bosoms quivering with the motion of the train, bags clink-full of bottles that would be confiscated at the stadium entrance. There were couples too, the women better dressed than a night in the dark warranted in deference to the high ticket price; the men smart-casual in best jeans and trainers. They were out for a good time and that meant they would give him a chance. The Johnny Dongo look-alikes, Dongolites, were a different story. There were four of them smart-arsing by the door, dressed like 1930s history dons on their way to enlist for the wrong side, their floppy hair plastered with sweat and styling gel. They would be impatient for Magnus’s set to end and for Johnny to take the stage. Magnus wondered how they could stand the combination of tight collar and tie, the tweed suits heavy with perspiration. One of the Dongolites took out a Meerschaum pipe and stuck it between his teeth.

Magnus’s own stage gear was zipped inside a garment bag slung over his shoulder, a white shirt and gangster-sharp, midnight-blue suit that looked like a safe choice until you caught a glimpse of scarlet lining. His guts were beginning to clench. He looked out of the window, trying to keep his eyes on the horizon, the way you were meant to on a rocky ferry crossing the Pentland Firth. London blurred by, a strip of blue sky above rows of apartments, precipitous graffiti and concreted back yards cast in shade. It was a world away from Orkney, but the tall buildings reminded him of Stromness, the shadows thrown by the houses along the seafront on to the jetties lined before them. The memory made Magnus think of school and all of a sudden he wished Mr Brown, his maths teacher, was going to be in the audience. ‘You see, Mr Brown,’ he would say, ‘folk do find me funny. It turns out that I am a funny guy after all.’ But Mr Brown was as dead as Magnus’s father, both of them buried in the Kirkwall churchyard. The maths teacher felled by a heart attack he had cultivated as carefully as an investment banker might nurture his own pension, Magnus’s father killed in a careless accident. Bad luck, everyone agreed, especially as Big Magnus never even took a Hogmanay dram.

He tried to picture his father swaying beside him, against the rhythm of the train, but imagined instead the old boy saying, ‘You’re the support act, son, not the headliner.’ Though phrases like ‘support act’ and ‘headliner’ had never been a part of Big Magnus’s vocabulary.

Was it a bad sign that the only people he wanted to invite to his gig were dead? Probably just a sign that he was kidding himself. Magnus would not have invited them had they been alive. His wee mammy would have jumped on a plane to London at the hint of a gig; the same went for his sister Rhona, her man Davie and a whole swathe of aunties, uncles and cousins eager for a spattering of stardust.

‘No little lady you want to show off to?’ Richie Banks had asked, looking up for a moment from the contracts splayed across his desk. ‘Seeing a man on stage can do things to a girl, if you know what I mean.’

‘No one at the moment,’ Magnus had said, looking at the view of brick wall through the dim glass of Richie’s office window and wondering how his agent could have stood to spend the best part of thirty years there. ‘Come along if you want.’

‘It don’t have the same effect on me, son.’ Rich had laughed. ‘Anyway, sad to say, I’m already booked,’ and he had mentioned another of his stable who was a regular on television panel shows. ‘Gets the jitters before he goes on TV. Needs me to hold his hand.’ Rich had pushed the contract for six nights’ warm-up at the O2 across the desk to Magnus and pointed to where he should sign. ‘This is a big gig for you, a good opportunity, don’t fuck it up.’

‘Why would I fuck it up?’

Rich slid the signed contract into an envelope. His grin was still in place, but he had raised his eyebrows, punting the question, which was no question at all, back to Magnus.

O2 was the next stop. The man in the seat beside Magnus was reading an Evening Standard he had folded into a pocket-sized square. Magnus glanced over the man’s shoulder at the headline: ‘Mystery Virus Wipes Out Cruise Ship’. A photograph of an impressive-looking liner illustrated the article about the latest outbreak of the sweats. He scanned the text. There had been cases of the virus in London, but nothing on that scale. The article listed instructions on how to act. People should observe hygiene precautions, phone NHS Direct if they felt unwell, avoid close contact with strangers. Magnus looked at the crammed carriage and grinned. London had not closed for the Blitz, the IRA, or al-Qaeda. It would take more than a few germs to shut down the city.

The train slowed. The man beside him coughed and then sneezed. He wiped his nose on a tissue and stuffed his newspaper into his jacket pocket. One of the Dongolites pulled out a spotty handkerchief and mopped his forehead. The boy was red-faced and shiny with perspiration; gleaming like a… like a… Magnus cast around for an image he could use on Dongolite hecklers, but nothing useful… pig, conker, bell-end… came to mind.

Magnus followed the flow of people on to the platform. There was work being done in the station. Some of the barriers that flanked the platform’s edge had been taken down and temporarily replaced by traffic cones strung with fluorescent tape. They narrowed the walkway, pushing people even closer together.

Magnus saw the crowd before and behind him and realised that the rest of the train had been as full as his compartment. There were other trains, one every fifteen minutes, all crammed with people. Most of them were heading to the stadium. Magnus swallowed. It would be all right once he was on stage. For now he was just a part of the crowd, everyone moving at the same slow pace towards the exit, like one body composed of many cells.

The four Dongolites from his carriage paused up ahead. Magnus glanced in their direction as he drew level. The sweat-soaked youth was swaying gently on his heels, with the unfocused stare of someone about to be transported on a wash of acid. He was wearing black-rimmed spectacles, round and ridiculous, that made him look as if he had put his eyes to binoculars some Beano-reading wag had grimed with soot. The glass magnified the youth’s eyeballs and Magnus saw them roll back in his head, pupils spooling upward until all that was left was white, greased and boiled-egg shiny. The Dongolite tottered backward. The heels of his spit-polished brogues knocked a traffic cone from the platform’s edge. He swayed gently, took a step towards his friends, and then teetered backward again.

Magnus gave a shout of warning and moved towards the group. He heard the shrill blast of the guard’s whistle, saw the Dongolite’s knees crumple, his specs falling, smash against the concrete as he tipped off the platform, backward on to the tracks.

Christ! One of the Dongolites tore off his jacket, exposing maroon braces and matching sleeve suspenders. He froze. Christ! Jesus Christ! Christ! Jesus!

The other two Dongolites threw themselves on to the ground, ready to pull their friend up from the tracks below, but too slow, too slow. Magnus was with them now, face flat on the platform as if a bomb had gone off. He caught a quick glimpse of the boy’s body, floppy hair corn-gold against the gravel, unseasonable tweeds rag-doll-rumpled and then the train was flashing past, the shouts of the crowd and the frantic scream of the guard’s whistle not quite drowned out by its sound.

Richie Banks had once told him that ‘Good comics have ice in their soul. I’ve known more than one cold cunt go up on stage and do their full routine, same day that their mother died. Unfeeling bastards, but a joy to represent. They don’t let a crisis get in the way of a gig.’

It was like speaking to God, standing at the edge of the stage, facing the flare of lights that razed all view of the audience. Magnus did not mention the Dongolite’s fall, the corn-gold hair shining bright in the dark, the rush of the train, or the shout of the youth frozen on the platform, Christ! Christ! Oh Jesus Christ! But the sound of the accident was in his head, the scent of blood and burning rubber still in his nostrils. When he took his bow and announced, ‘Here’s the man you’ve all been waiting for, Jooooooooooohnny Dongo!’ the applause of the audience brought back the shouts of the people on the platform and Magnus could have sworn he heard the guard’s whistle screaming on, so high his eardrums felt ready to explode.

Two

Johnny Dongo looked a mess. His hair had lost its comic bounce and hung in a lank cowlick over a forehead sheened with sweat. He spat into his handkerchief, raised a glass of milk cut with rum to his lips and said, ‘What a fuckup.’

Magnus could not think of anything to say and so he kept quiet. He was on his fifth beer, one half of him still high on applause, the other still reeling from the shock of the accident.

‘A fuckup,’ Johnny repeated. ‘A fucking fuckup.’

It had been a great gig, a show to be proud of, but nobody contradicted Johnny. Magnus took a swig from his bottle of Peroni and looked at his feet. There were six of them in Johnny Dongo’s hotel room: Johnny’s manager Kruze, a couple of Dongolites Magnus had not been introduced to and Johnny’s girlfriend Kim, her face stern beneath her blonde beehive, but with a hint of a smirk that put Magnus in mind of Myra Hindley’s mugshot. They were sitting on a trio of couches around a black coffee table that looked like it had been designed for snorting coke. The Dongolites were side by side, legs crossed in opposite directions as if to indicate that, despite appearances, they did not trust each other. Johnny was squeezed between his manager and his girlfriend in a too-tight arrangement that hinted at a power struggle. Magnus had the third couch to himself.

‘A fucking fuckup,’ Johnny muttered.

Kruze’s eyes were red-rimmed and rheumy. He put an arm around Johnny’s shoulder and gave him the kind of anaconda squeeze a wrestler might give a rival. His bald head gleamed. It looked solid, Magnus thought. Strong enough to batter down doors, but heads were fragile things, no match for speed and metal.

Kruze said, ‘Kim’s the only one who’s going to suck your dick tonight, Johnny. It was a good audience and you did a fucking amazing show, same way as you’re going to give another fucking amazing show tomorrow.’ The TV was on, its volume muted. An aerial view of the abandoned cruise ship shone from the screen, followed by a shot of the Houses of Parliament. Kruze picked up the remote and killed the picture. ‘If these bleeding emergency measures don’t shut down the theatres, that is. A big fuss over very little, if you ask me.’ It was not clear whether he meant the recall of Parliament that the sweats had prompted, or Johnny’s tantrum. Kruze stirred the milky contents of Johnny’s glass with a straw. Ice cubes rattled dully within. ‘Drink your medicine. Time for beddy-byes soon.’

Johnny lifted the glass to his lips and drained it. A dribble rolled down his Roger Ramjet chin. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, then stretched for the carton of full fat on the table and poured some into his glass. He topped it up with a generous tot of Admiral Benbow, turning the white liquid a treacle-toffee shade of brown that tugged at Magnus’s bowels.

Kruze sighed and got to his feet. ‘Get him to bed some time before the call to prayers would you please, Kim love.’

Kim put a hand on Johnny’s thigh.

‘I’ll make sure he gets back here in time for tomorrow’s show, that’s all you need to worry about.’

Kim’s engagement finger sparkled with a ring that had caused some tabloid speculation, and her voice was smug with the assurance of possession. Magnus wondered if rumours about Johnny and the rotation of pretty boys who were always in his orbit were true. And if they were, whether Kim knew and thought them a price worth paying.

Johnny shifted into the space vacated by Kruze. He coughed and then sneezed three times, hard and painful, the sound of a small train crushing bone and flesh. ‘Fuck.’ He took his handkerchief from his top pocket and blew into it.

Kruze was halfway out of the room, but he turned at the sound of Johnny’s sneezes and stood framed in the doorway, his pink shirt and pale blue suit Neapolitan-dapper, despite the late hour.

‘Why don’t I arrange cars for your guests and let you and Kim hit the sack, John?’ Johnny Dongo flapped a hand, dismissing Kruze, but the manager persisted. ‘If you come down with something, Magnus here will have to step into the breach, and you don’t want that, do you?’

Magnus had once auditioned for Kruze, way back when he first arrived in London, his accent so thick he had to repeat everything he said. He had been working as a KP in an Italian restaurant, the only white boy in a kitchen devoted to ‘authentic Tuscan cuisine’. Magnus had grown used to being ridiculed by boys with accents as thick as his own, but whose voices lilted to different rhythms and whose journeys to London had been sans passport. Magnus had rolled with their jokes and contributed a few of his own. After all, he too was fresh off the boat and had had the privilege of an easy passage on the Hamnavoe rather than the long hikes, the stowaway goods trains, overcrowded night boats and container lorries his workmates had endured. But when Kruze had stopped Magnus in the middle of his routine about the fear that could hit you on your way home when it was after midnight and you were fu’, and said, ‘I can’t understand a word you say, kid. Save up for some elocution lessons,’ Magnus had bunched his fists. Later he was glad that there had been no set of golf clubs propped in the corner of Kruze’s office, no handy paperknife, or pair of scissors on his desk, because the urge to score the smile from the manager’s face had been strong. Perhaps Kruze had sensed the danger. He had leapt to his feet, like a man who knew life was short and had decided not to waste a second of it, opened the office door and ushered Magnus into the corridor with a ‘Good luck.’

Magnus had put his foot in the door, leaned in close and said, ‘Awa and fuck yoursel, ya big poof.’

But as Hamza, the best pizza maker this side of Islamabad, remarked later over a consoling beer, it didn’t really matter what Magnus had said. Kruze wouldn’t have understood a word of it.

Magnus and Kruze had run into each other a few times over the years since then. The manager had been polite and Magnus had wondered if he had forgotten the incident, but now the apologetic look Kruze threw Magnus told him that the older man remembered.

‘Don’t get me wrong, you did well tonight, Mags,’ Kruze said, and something inside Magnus cringed.

Johnny flapped his hand at his manager again. ‘Don’t get your Y-fronts in a tangle. Your goose will be on stage crapping golden eggs tomorrow night.’

Kruze hesitated for a moment as if he were going to say something else, then shook his head and shut the door behind him. Johnny Dongo spat into his handkerchief again.

‘Thank fuck for that.’ He turned his bloodshot eyes on Magnus, his pupils microdots. ‘I thought you were an island boy. Stop shaming your ancestors with that piss-poor stuff.’

Johnny splashed a goodly measure of Admiral Benbow into a glass and shoved it towards Magnus who took a sip. It was navy rum, dark and bitter, and it reminded him of late afternoons in the Snapper Bar, ship masts swaying at their moorings, giving a hint of what brand of wind would greet you when you went outside. Then, if you stayed longer than was wise, the ferry docking, blocking all view of land or sky, lit gold against the black of a winter’s night.

Gold and black made Magnus think of the boy’s hair shining on the gravel, the rush of the train. Bile rose in his throat. He drowned it with a swig of rum, finished the measure in his glass and helped himself to more.

‘Take it easy, man,’ said one of the Dongolites, but Johnny Dongo laughed. ‘He’ll be all right, he’s Scottish. My old man was Scottish. He used to drink until his fists were full.’

Magnus could have gone home after his set, stood beneath a hot shower and attempted to wash the day from his skin, but he had stayed on to watch Johnny from the wings. Johnny had danced across the stage, skinny legs encased in herringbone trousers of a lavender hue that would have made old Harris weavers fear for their souls. The audience were a storm of sound, out in the dark of the auditorium. So loud that Magnus wondered Johnny Dongo was not lifted from his feet and thrown on to his arse by the weight of laughter surging towards him. It rose from deep in the audience’s bellies, firing out of wide-open mouths, each one with its share of teeth, and though he could not see them, Magnus could imagine the faces of the crowd, heads thrown back, tongues wet and shining, eyes squeezed into slits. The crowd had loved Johnny Dongo and he had steered them upward, ever upward, sending them rocket-fuelled out into the night. But now that Johnny was off stage, it was as if all his energy had turned to venom.

Kim coughed. ‘Christ,’ she said to Johnny. ‘I think I’m getting your cold. I sound like fag-ash Lil.’

Johnny hoicked up a gob of phlegm and spat into his handkerchief. ‘I don’t have a fucking cold.’

Kim produced a small Ziploc bag from her purse and chopped out neat lines of coke, white stripes bright against the black coffee table, like an inverse barcode. Johnny took a note from his pocket, rolled it tight and handed it to her. ‘Ladies first.’ Kim rubbed his thigh as if she were testing it for quality and hoovered up three lines. She passed the note back to Johnny who followed suit.

‘Whoa!’ There was a glimpse of the man he had been on stage. ‘That’ll do the trick.’ Johnny grinned and then sneezed. ‘Fuck.’ He sniffed and shook his head. ‘I think I lost it.’

Johnny’s pisshole-in-the-snow pupils had all but disappeared and Magnus thought the coke had met its mark despite the sneeze, but the comedian fished the note from his pocket again and snorted another three lines.

‘Sorry about that, lads.’ He grinned at the Dongolites. ‘Reduced rations. Share nicely now.’

Johnny’s acolytes took their turn and then there were two lonely lines, thin and shuffled-looking, waiting for Magnus. There was plenty of the white stuff left in Kim’s Ziploc and Magnus wondered if Johnny had orchestrated a shortage for his own amusement, but Dongo looked washed out despite his double dose of marching powder. The thought flitted across Magnus’s mind that he should pass up his share in case Kruze’s fears came true and he had to stand in for Johnny (let’s do the show right here!) but the rum had tipped him beyond such precautions. He reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a fiver. The blue note looked out of place in the upscale hotel room, but Magnus rolled it tight and snorted the good stuff up into his sinuses, tasting the chemical cut of it in the back of his throat. His nerves zingalinged in anticipation of the hit and, for the first time that evening, he smiled.

Time died in the hotel room and everything shrank and expanded into the moment that was now. Kim put on some music and got each of them up to dance, one at a time; all except for Johnny. The girl was broad-beamed and heavy on her feet, but she had a sense of rhythm and moved her hips in time to the music. Magnus wondered again if she was the comedian’s beard and if Johnny would mind if he borrowed her for a while, just long enough for him to lie her down on the bed in the next room and fuck the sound of train wheels from his head. He took Kim by the arm and drew her close, as if they were in some old movie and he was Frank Sinatra. Kim leaned in to him and put an arm around his back. She was shorter than Magnus and he found himself staring at her beehive. It looked hard and brittle and he felt a sudden urge to snap it from her head.

‘I like your hair,’ he said and ran an experimental hand across her rear.

Kim’s face was shiny beneath its coating of make-up. She let Magnus’s hand rove the globe of her bottom and then shoved him in the chest, dealing a blow that sent him reeling against the bathroom door.

‘Rude boy,’ she whispered, in a voice that might have been a come-on.

‘Help yourself,’ Johnny said. He was sitting between the Dongolites now, on the couch Magnus had vacated, all three of them laughing at something on Johnny’s phone. Magnus saw that they were leaning against the stage suit he had carefully zipped inside its garment bag and hung on the back of the couch. ‘That’s sick,’ said one of the Dongolites, pointing at the phone. Magnus still did not know their names.

Johnny had dispensed with his handkerchief. He spat on the floor. ‘She’s a bit of an armful, but islanders like their women big, don’t they? It comes from being such little men. Go on, fill your boots.’

It was an odd image and Magnus laughed. He wanted to tell Johnny that his father, grandfather and no doubt his great-grandfather had indeed been short men, but they could hunt and fish and farm while he, the tallest known McFall in history at five foot nine (taller than Johnny, he seemed to remember) could only jaw for a living. Then he saw Johnny’s face and remembered a Lon Chaney line: Nobody laughs at a clown at midnight.

‘No offence, John.’ Magnus gave Kim a glance he hoped conveyed the right balance of respect, apology and sexual attraction. ‘But I don’t think it’s in your gift.’

‘I’m Santa-fucking-Claws, Mags. Believe me.’ Johnny held his arms wide, and the Dongolites shrank into the couch. ‘It’s all in my gift. What do you think you’re doing here? I gifted you this gig. Three nights in the biggest stadium in the country, that was my present to you.’

‘And it’s much appreciated, Johnny.’

Magnus had flung his jacket on a chair by the door when they had first entered the room (how many hours ago?). He picked it up and shoved his arms into its sleeves.

Johnny Dongo said, ‘It doesn’t fucking look like it. First you feel up my fiancée and then you refuse to fuck her. What’s that all about?’

‘You’re a wanker, Johnny.’ Kim went into the adjoining bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

‘See what you’ve done,’ Johnny said. ‘You’ve upset her now.’

The curtains had been closed when they came into the room, but a thin sliver of grey dawn had reached through a chink in the heavy fabric and was stretching across the floor. Magnus took his phone from his pocket. The battery was dead.

‘What time is it, John?’

Johnny leaned back into the couch, draping an arm around each of the Dongolites.

‘Time you fucked off.’

The rumours were true then, Johnny Dongo liked boys.

‘Don’t worry, I’m gone.’ Magnus held up a hand in goodbye and opened the hotel-room door, but instead of walking into the corridor he was confronted by the ensuite.

‘I’m not jesting,’ Johnny said, as the door swung shut.

Magnus emptied his bladder, zipped up and then splashed some water on his face, grimacing at his reflection in the mirror. He had what his mother called a ‘baby face’. Some girls found the combination of shaggy black hair, wide eyes and gap teeth cute, but Magnus guessed they were not features that would age well. He drew his hands down his face, watching his eyes droop, feeling the scrub of bristle on his chin.

‘You look like a discount rent boy,’ he muttered.

The bathroom had a glass ceiling. He sat on the edge of the whirlpool bath and looked up at the view of lightening sky occasionally interrupted by a flash of high-flying gulls. Why did the birds gravitate to cities when there were wide-open seas out there? It was a question he might as well ask himself. Magnus wondered if the trains were running yet. Fuck only knew how much a cab home would cost. The thought of trains made the rum and beer in his belly threaten to slosh to the surface and he realised he would pay anything not to enter the station again.

The sound of banging startled him and he fell backward into the bath, knocking his cheek against the oversized tap jutting out from the wall. The porcelain was cold and hard, but the tub had been designed for couples to bathe comfortably together, toe to toe, or chest to spine if they were especially good friends, and it was wide enough for Magnus to bend his knees and roll on to his side. He closed his eyes. The sound of banging grew louder and he opened them again. Getting out of the bath was not easy and Magnus fell twice, but eventually he managed it and unlocked the bathroom door. Johnny Dongo was on the other side, his face beaded with sweat, his shirt unfastened to reveal a view of bony, white sternum.

A wave of fellow feeling washed through Magnus. They were all human and alive in the dawn of a fresh day. Who cared what Johnny got up to with his Dongolites, as long as everyone loved each other?

‘You’re a good man, John.’ He clasped Johnny’s elbow. ‘A good man. You want a bit of advice?’

‘No, I want you to piss off,’ Johnny said, pulling his arm free.

But Magnus had seen death that day and needed to share how important it was to live, while you still could.

‘No one gives a fuck that you’re a poof, especially not me.’ He put a hand on Johnny’s elbow and squeezed. ‘You go for it, man, fuck all the boys you want while you’re still young enough to get a lumber.’

Johnny Dongo pulled Magnus close. Magnus opened his arms, ready to receive Johnny’s embrace. He had liberated him. Sex was sex and nothing more, whoever you had it with.

The comic whispered, ‘If you call me a poof again, I’ll kill you,’ and smashed his forehead into the bridge of Magnus’s nose. There was a moment of pain and blindness. Magnus’s face was warm with blood and there was a fire klaxon sounding in his head. He grabbed a bath towel and held it to his nose.

‘That is what is known as a Glasgow kiss.’ Johnny turned to look at the Dongolites rumpled together on the couch. ‘Did I tell you my dad was Scottish?’

‘You did, John, yes,’ one of them replied, his voice soft, as if he feared he might be next.

Johnny said, ‘Trust nae cunt, son,’ in an accent that would pass muster on Sauchiehall Street. He squatted next to Magnus who was crouched in the bathroom doorway, the bloody towel still clutched to his face, and ruffled his hair. ‘Can you guess why I gifted the gig to you, Mags? Because you’re an ideal warm-up man, no one has to worry about the crowd peaking too early. As my old dad would say, you’re never going to set the heather on fire. I’m happy to have you on board, but don’t take fucking liberties. Now piss off out of here.’

Three

Magnus turned into a lane by the side of the hotel and leaned against the wall, head tipped back in the hope that gravity would help stem the gush of blood from his nose.

The hint of light he had seen reaching through the curtains was merely a nicotine dawn. It was a while since anyone had punched Magnus, but the pain was part of his body’s memory and it recognised and embraced it. Just as it had the time Murdo McKechnie ‘accidentally’ kicked a football into his face in P3. And on the night Rab Murchison decided Magnus was a ‘bloody nancy boy’ and smashed L O V E then H A T E into his ‘poof nose’. And on the only occasion his father had punched him. That last one he had deserved.

He felt his face swelling and realised that there was a good chance it would be him, and not Johnny Dongo, who would need an understudy tomorrow.

‘Fuck!’

Magnus spat a stream of blood and mucus on to the ground. He took off his jacket and shirt, held the shirt to his face and zipped the jacket over his naked chest. Blood was still running down into his throat from his ruined nose and he spat again.

He felt in his pocket for his wallet to check he had enough money for a cab, but it was empty. Magnus shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and drew out the crumpled fiver dusted with coke. He already knew what had happened. He had followed a routine formed by years of dodgy, shared dressing rooms and taken his valuables on stage with him. His money and debit card were in the pocket of his sharp blue suit, zipped in its garment bag, still slung across the couch in Johnny Dongo’s hotel room.

Magnus slid down the alley wall and squatted on his haunches. He could probably face the humiliation of seeing Johnny again, but the night porter on duty at the reception desk possessed the bulk and Zen of Mike Tyson. The big man had been woken by the ping of the lift and raised his face from the reception desk as Magnus emerged into the lobby. Magnus had held his hands in the air and walked to the exit. But the porter had rubbed rabbit-pink eyes with grazed knuckles and shadowed him to the door, complaining about the bloodstains dripping on to the lobby carpet and detailing in a low voice, hoarse with a summer cold, the kind of things that happened to people who bled without consideration. Magnus could still feel the point, low on his spine, where the big man had shoved him into one of the rotating door’s compartments and spun him from the hotel. There was no prospect of going back there.

He slid his mobile from his pocket and then remembered that its battery was dead.

‘Fuck!’

He hurled the phone across the alley. It hit the brick wall on the other side and smashed open. The battery bounced from its casing, skittered across the ground and disappeared beneath one of the large container bins that serviced the hotel. This time Magnus did not bother to swear. He rose unsteadily to his feet, crossed the alley, lowered himself on to his hands and knees and looked beneath the container. It was dark, but he thought he could see the battery. He stretched a hand towards it, flinching at the touch of grit and detritus, but the battery was out of reach. Magnus stood and put his weight against the bin. Its wheels were padlocked and it refused to move. It was a problem beyond his ability. He gave the container a kick that hurt his foot and then slithered to the ground, rested his back against the bin and closed his eyes.

Magnus woke slumped on his side. His mouth was dry, his face a dull thump of blood and bruise. He had no idea where he was except that it wasn’t bed, it wasn’t home. Something touched his feet. Magnus batted out a hand, and drew up his knees, sharp to his chin. He had been on stage bathed in the audience’s laughter and then… Oh God. It all came back to him in a rush of shame and vomit. He wiped his mouth on the blood-crusted shirt still clutched in his hand, like a baby’s security blanket.

He had no idea of how long he had slept. Magnus struggled upright and looked towards the mouth of the alley. It was brighter, the sun higher in the sky, but there was a lack of traffic noise that made him think it was still early. Something rattled at the dark end of the lane and he found himself drawing deeper into the shadows thrown by the hotel bins. His mother had warned him more than once of the fall that followed pride. And here he was, like an illustration of a cautionary tale for children, skulking in ordure just hours after his big bow.

Someone coughed. It was a harsh animal sound, loud in the early-morning stillness. Magnus looked towards the noise and saw a couple locked together in the gloom. His first confused thought was that they were dancing. The man had his arm around the girl, her head rested against his shoulder and they were swaying together. Then he saw the floppiness of the girl’s limbs, the way the man was bearing all her weight, his legs scissored wide, spine pitched back for balance. The couple’s shadows reeled against the alley wall and Magnus realised that they were drunk. No, the man’s movements were quick and sure. The girl was beyond drunk, but her dancing partner still had his wits.

Magnus had made drunken love to drunken women in shadowy outside places. He spat on his ruined shirt and dabbed at his face, hoping to clean off the evidence of blood and dirt. There was a long walk ahead and whatever was happening at the other end of the lane had nothing to do with him. He was in no fit state to judge anyone. He thought, as he often did, of a woman he had met in a Belfast bar, late one night, after a gig. They had matched each other shot for shot of tequila and then fucked on the bonnet of a car parked in a deserted street, both of them reckless. Not so reckless he had not rubbered-up though. They had produced a condom at the same time, both of them laughing to see the other so prepared. ‘Quick draw, McGraw,’ she had whispered in exotic Ulster tones. And then she had kissed him.

Magnus got unsteadily to his feet. His legs had died at some point during his sleep, and he felt as if he were fresh from a night’s fishing, feet and knees skinkling at the firmness of solid ground. He looked back at the couple. The girl’s head lolled to one side and he caught an impression of blonde hair shining. The cough that had woken him rasped again, harsh and fox-like. The man spat on the ground and then started to busy himself with his fly. He shoved a knee between hers, pinning the girl against the wall, sliding between her legs. There was no ‘both’ or ‘together’. The man was alone with a human doll.

‘Fuck.’

Magnus cursed his conscience and stretched a hand beneath the bin, searching again for the battery of his phone, but it was useless. The battery was dead and lost in ratty darkness. He looked towards the mouth of the alley, but the road beyond was silent. He was on his own. He stepped into the middle of the alley and walked towards the couple.

‘Excuse me, mate.’

The man froze. He looked up and Magnus was reminded of the expression on the face of a cat interrupted in the act of dispatching a kill. He stepped closer and saw that the man’s hand was not on the girl’s arm, as he had supposed, but at the base of her throat. The girl’s eyes were slits, open and unseeing.

‘Like to watch, do you?’ the man asked.

He was older than Magnus had thought, a craggy business-suited fifty, his white shirt unfastened at the neck.

‘Only if both parties know what they’re doing.’

‘How fucking politically correct of you.’ The man coughed again, his throat grating, metal on un-oiled metal, but the girl did not wake up. ‘Don’t worry,’ the man said, ‘she knows what she’s doing, this is the way she likes it.’ His voice was low and so assured that Magnus almost hesitated, but then the man said, ‘You can have next go if you want. She won’t mind.’

‘You’re a fucking rapist.’ Magnus took another step towards him.

‘Piss off, son. You don’t know who you’re dealing with.’

The man’s arm must have been growing tired with the strain of holding the girl up, or perhaps he wanted to use her as a shield, because he let her fall against him, her face on his shoulder, his arms clasped around the small of her back. The girl’s short skirt had ridden up and Magnus saw that her tights were shredded around her thighs, her underwear pushed to one side. She was wearing high-heeled yellow sandals and had painted her nails the same sunny colour.

Magnus said, ‘Put her down and walk away.’

‘So you can finish what I started?’

He had been wrong to think the man was sober, Magnus realised. He was drunk enough to have lost his inhibitions and lucid enough to carry through.

‘So I don’t kick your fucking head in.’

‘Like someone did to you?’ The man had shouldered the girl’s weight again. He walked slowly towards Magnus, keeping as close to the far wall as possible. ‘Don’t worry. We’re out of here.’

‘Where are you taking her?’

‘A nice warm bed.’ The man’s voice took on an apologetic tone. ‘You were right to interrupt us. We’d been drinking. Things got out of hand. You know how it can be when you drink too much. Don’t worry, she’s safe with me.’

The man smiled. He was level with Magnus now, the girl still wrapped in his arms. It was easier to take the stranger at his word and let them go.

‘Okay.’ Magnus let out a deep breath and leaned against the wall of the alley, allowing the man a clear exit. Close to, the man’s suit looked expensive, his shoes well polished beneath their scuffs. The girl’s skirt and top might have been her best, but even Magnus’s untutored eye could tell that they were chain store rather than designer. He said, ‘Will you look after her?’

‘Don’t you worry.’ The man grinned. Teeth shone white in his brick-red face. ‘I’ll see she gets what she needs.’

It was not easy to hit the man while the girl was still in his arms but Magnus managed it. He ducked to the right and slammed his fist into the stranger’s cheek. The man crashed against the alley wall, still holding the girl close. Magnus grabbed her under her arms and they struggled together for a while, the girl between them like a rag doll. Magnus thought he could feel her waking. Perhaps her assailant felt it too because he let go suddenly, sending Magnus sprawling with the girl on top of him. It should have been enough, but Magnus pushed her to one side and stuck out a leg that sent the man sprawling. Then Magnus was on him, driving his fist into the man’s face, one, two, three… he lost count of the punches in the rhythm of violence.

Magnus’s hand had begun to hurt and he would have stopped soon of his own accord, but he was distracted by an unwelcome early-morning noise, harsh and mechanical, punctuated by regular, high-pitched beeping. He looked towards the source of the sound and saw a refuse van reversing into the alley flanked by bin men. Magnus heaved himself to his feet and gave the man a boot in the ribs. It was a good job well done. The girl had dragged herself to the side of the alley and was cowering against the wall, her hands over her face as if she could not bear to look at the world any longer.

‘It’s okay,’ Magnus said. ‘You’re safe.’ He sent his foot into the man’s side again. The body moved with the impact of his kick, but the man did not make a sound and Magnus found that the silence pleased him. The bin men were running towards him, but they halted a foot or two away, as if scared to come any closer. They were big men, made bigger by their overalls and fluorescent jackets, but they looked hollow-eyed; deathly in the early dawn light.

‘Call the police,’ one of them said.

‘Yes.’ Magnus nodded. He was winded and his words came out in gasps. ‘Call the police.’

He would have liked to have kicked the man again, but two of the bin men screwed up their courage and grabbed hold of him. One of them punched Magnus in the belly. ‘Fucking rapist,’ the bin man said. Then he punched Magnus again.

Four

Magnus sat on his bunk, staring at the small screen of the TV in the corner of his cell, watching a chef with a face as soft and smiling as the Pilsbury Doughman put a pastry lid on the fish pie he was making. On the bunk below, Pete moaned in his sleep. Magnus turned up the sound.

‘Ask your fishmonger to dispose of the heads if you’re squeamish,’ the dough-faced chef said. ‘But traditionally these form part of the decoration.’ He started to insert dead-eyed fish heads into the pastry. ‘This is why it’s called Stargazey Pie.’

Magnus switched channel. A petite, blonde woman dressed in pastels was walking through an abandoned room. Whoever had lived there had not been house-proud. They had left in a hurry and remnants of their belongings were scattered around the space in dusty piles.

‘Marcus paid £292,000 at auction for this derelict Victorian townhouse,’ the woman said, stepping over a sleeping bag lying rumpled on the floor like the skin of some giant serpent. ‘But with a bit of TLC the property has the potential to realise much more than that. Marcus, what are your plans?’

A sallow-faced man with large bags under his eyes stared nervously into the camera. He hesitated and then his words tumbled forth.

‘I fix it up nice, nice fixtures and fittings, nice wallpaper, nice carpets, then I rent it out to young working people who want a nice place to stay.’

‘That sounds nice,’ said the blonde woman.

Magnus switched channel again. A good-looking girl with a wide smile and café au lait skin was displaying a set of exchangeable screwdriver heads.

‘… you need never be scrabbling around to find the right size of screwdriver,’ the woman said. ‘Because the perfect tool for all varieties of screw is right here in this little box.’

She laughed in a way Magnus might have found appealing had he not been locked in a cell in Pentonville for the last two days.

He changed the channel again and saw an exterior shot of a hospital somewhere in India. The scene shifted to the hospital’s interior, then to a full ward and then to a small child gleaming with sweat. A doctor with a cotton mask stretched across her mouth and nose placed a hand on the child’s forehead. The doctor’s hands were encased in thin plastic gloves. To avoid infection, Magnus supposed, but it seemed terrible to deny the sick child the consoling touch of flesh.

The child was critically ill, the voiceover said, and although it came from a poor family, poverty was not to blame. This was a virus that affected rich and poor.

Pete turned over in his sleep and started coughing. Magnus felt the force of his coughs reverberate through the bunk. One of the warders had promised that Pete would be heading to the dispensary, but that felt like a long time ago. Pete had been ill but lucid then. He had not said why he was in Pentonville, but then neither had Magnus. They were in the wing reserved for vulnerable prisoners and sex offenders and the fashion was for discretion.

The television screen shifted to Beijing and the portrait of baby-faced Mao smiling out across Tiananmen Square. It flashed to the White House then to Big Ben and back to the newsroom. The World Health Organisation was co-ordinating responses to the virus, the newsreader said, his face stern. In the meantime it had recommended that theatres, sports stadiums and other places of public entertainment be closed. People should go to work as usual — the newsreader gave a reassuring smile — but the advice was to avoid unnecessary crowds. Someone coughed off camera. The newsreader’s eyes shifted from the autocue to the studio beyond. He hesitated, as if unsure whether to comment on the interruption or not and then got on with the final item, a story about a family of chicks who had hatched next to a toy fire truck and decided it was their mother. Magnus watched a film clip of the chicks waddling in a line behind the red plastic truck and thought there was something obscene about it.

The television was getting on his nerves, but there was nothing else to look at except whitewashed walls and a barred window through which he could see a scrap of blue.

Sometimes in Orkney the land seemed like a thin strip between sea and sky. Few trees interrupted the view or the wind. He remembered how he and his cousin Hugh had played at superheroes when they were boys, leaping from rocks and ridges, arms outstretched, their parkas around their shoulders like capes, in the hope that a gust would take hold and carry them across the fields.

Pete coughed again. The grating sound reminded Magnus of the man he had beaten in the alleyway. The police had told him that his ‘victim’ was a Member of Parliament, a man with connections in high and perhaps low places.

Magnus heard a click as the flap covering the Judas-hole on the other side of the door flicked up and someone looked through. He slid from his bunk. He was still bruised from the beating the refuse men had given him and the movement made his body sing with pain. He banged against the door and shouted, ‘There’s a sick man in here.’

A voice from the landing commanded, ‘Step away from the door.’

Magnus did as he was told and was rewarded by the sound of a key turning in the lock.

The screw’s mouth and nose were hidden by a cotton mask like the one the doctor on the news had worn as she tended the sick child. He was an older man, a heavy smoker from the look of his lined eyes and sallow skin. The screw coughed and Magnus hoped it was a reaction to a thirty-a-day habit.

‘No association today.’ He shoved two packets of sandwiches and two bottles of water into Magnus’s hand and began to close the door.

‘My cellmate needs a doctor.’

Magnus nodded towards Pete-the-Pervert curled beneath a blanket on the bottom bunk and saw what he had been avoiding. The man was slick with perspiration. He had thought Pete was deep in sleep, but his eyes were open and Magnus realised that his cellmate was caught in a fever. The screw took a step back. Magnus asked, ‘Is this what they’re talking about on the news?’

‘Do I look like a doctor?’

Across the landing someone battered against their door. The rhythm was taken up by the surrounding cells, a fast tattoo that reminded Magnus of the football terraces. The screw’s hand moved to his keys. Panic tightened Magnus’s chest, but instinct told him it was important to keep his voice reasonable.

‘They say that whatever this is, it’s infectious. He should be in isolation.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’ The screw’s mask moved with his words. It was damp with saliva and Magnus saw the shape of his mouth, wet behind it. A clamour of shouting joined the banging. The racket boomed across the atrium, dissolving words into echoes, the music of fear.

Magnus said, ‘I’m only on remand. All I did was to try and stop a girl from being raped. I’m innocent.’

‘I know.’ The screw glanced towards the noise and then back at Magnus. ‘I can see it in your eyes. You’ve got a rapist’s charm, but you won’t get my knickers off without a fight.’

The cotton mask trembled and Magnus realised that the screw was laughing. He shouted, ‘At least move me to another cell…’ but the door was closing. Magnus heard the key turning in the lock and though he added his fists to the banging that echoed through the wing, the warder did not return.

Five

Magnus thought Pete might be dead. The wing had shaken to the sound of screaming, chanting and banging throughout the night, but the brightening dawn had stilled the noise, as if the prisoners were vampires forced to take cover from the sun. Pete had kept up a muttered conversation with himself for most of the night, but daylight had quietened him too and it was a long time since the bunk had rattled with his coughs, or swayed in response to his twists and turns. Magnus knew that he should rouse himself, get off his mattress and take a look at his cellmate, but the thought of the man curled beneath the blanket on the bed below, like a corpse shrunk in its coffin, gave him the horrors.

Magnus had kept the television on all night, trying to focus on something other than the noise around him, but Pete’s ramblings and laboured breaths had insisted their way into his head. Pete had been talking softly to some girl, asking her to be nice to him, telling her she was beautiful, a sweet thing, a real doll, until Magnus had wanted to slide the pillow from beneath his cellmate’s head and suffocate him with it. Men at sea shared smaller cabins, but this was a voyage he had been press-ganged into.

It had been Friday night when they locked Magnus in Pentonville. ‘Emergency measures,’ the warden who processed him said. ‘You’ll be in court Monday morning.’ There had been no explanation of what had prompted the crisis or why he was being held in prison, rather than a police cell. Magnus had remembered the recall of Parliament Kruze had been dismissive of and selfishly hoped that theatres were under emergency measures too — at least until he got out.

The screws had allowed Magnus a phone call and he had rung his agent, Richie Banks. The phone had switched to Richie’s voicemail and although Magnus had only left a short message, he was not permitted a second call.

Magnus’s voice had grown higher, and more like a liar’s, with every insistence that he had not touched the girl, except to free her from her attacker. Eventually tiredness won and he had surrendered to the indignities of prison admission. He answered questions about his medical history and mental health from a screw who looked like he had spent so long staring into the sun, it had all but burned the retinas from his head. Then Magnus had stripped naked, bent over to show there was nothing taped beneath his balls or secreted between his arse cheeks, and dressed in a prison tracksuit rough from rewashing. He had tried to comfort himself with the thought that the girl would clear him when she recovered, but the memory persisted of her huddled against the alley wall with her hands over her eyes, as the bin men set about him.

His thoughts were in danger of spiralling. Magnus looked at the patch of blue beyond the barred window. It was Monday morning. Someone would come to take him to court soon and, whatever the outcome, they couldn’t leave him locked up with Pete. Magnus turned the television down and held his breath, hoping to hear approaching footsteps or the jangle of keys that would signal his release. His ears seemed to sing with the silence. There was nothing, not even one of Pete’s rattling gasps. He turned the television volume up again.

Someone would come. First there would be the click of the hatch, the individual pack of cereal and portion of milk. Then a trip to court in a prison van and the chance to explain everything. If things went his way, he could be home in his flat by the end of the day. The thought brought warm tears to Magnus’s eyes.

There was a name for the virus now: V596. Naming the disease seemed to make its existence more real, but the television had also shown images of people around the country acting normally. London was not bowed, a jaunty TV presenter had said, standing in Oxford Street among the usual chaos of tourists, shoppers and slow-moving traffic. As far as the city centre was concerned it was ‘business as usual’. A couple of young Asian girls had bumped into the presenter in their haste to get to Topshop. The BBC had replayed the clip at intervals throughout the night and into the morning: the busy street, the reporter’s laugh as the girls knocked him off balance, the girls’ hands fluttering up to cover their mouths. Magnus had watched and re-watched it and thought he could see the reporter tensing in anticipation of the surprise collision.

‘Pete? Pete?’ Magnus’s voice sounded puny in the still brickness of the cell. ‘Are you all right, mate?’

He did not expect an answer and none came. Magnus tried to remember how the wing had sounded on previous days. He recalled slamming doors, the echo of footsteps, the shouts and laughter of men, but he had been caught up in his own misery and perhaps the prison always fell still in the early hours, at the intersection of early risers and the late to bed.

Magnus did an inventory of his body’s hurts. The bin men’s punches had buried the pain of Johnny Dongo’s fist-in-the-face beneath their own ache. His head was groggy from lack of sleep, and his belly felt empty and sick, but he had none of the symptoms Pete had been tormented by, no cough or sweating, no vomiting or diarrhoea. He leaned over the edge of the bunk. Pete was a foul-smelling huddle on the bed below. Magnus remembered an ailing sheepdog his mother had nursed in her kitchen, the strangeness of seeing the dog in the house, his mother saying, ‘It’ll not be long now. He’s turned his face to the wall.’ Thinking about his mother made Magnus feel ashamed. She would never leave Pete to suffer alone, whatever his crime.

The Judas-flap scraped back. A second later Magnus heard a key turning in the lock and swung himself off his bunk. It was a different warder this time, a younger man with a broad, red face, cheeks like boiled ham and the beginnings of a beer belly.

‘Fuck.’ The screw’s hand went to his nose. ‘It stinks in here. Kildoran and McFall. Who’s who?’

The warder looked like he had been up all night, but his skin was healthy beneath the tiredness, his voice free of the rawness that had made Pete’s words sound as if they were being bled from him. The sight of the man, ugly and healthy in the doorway, made Magnus want to sob with relief.

‘I’m McFall.’ He held up a hand in a gesture that was part salute, part supplication.

The screw gave Magnus a sour look. ‘Kildoran?’ He squatted down and stared at Pete, keeping his distance from the bunk. There was no reply and the warder turned to look at Magnus. ‘Turn him over.’

‘What?’

‘Roll him on to his back.’

Magnus took a step backward; his spine touched the wall.

‘He might be infectious.’

‘Just do it.’

Magnus saw a gun in the warder’s hand. His stomach gave a queasy flip. No, he realised, it was chunky and decorated with yellow flashes. Not a gun, but a Taser.

He leaned in and touched Pete on the shoulder. ‘Pete? Pete? Are you awake, mate?’ Are you alive? he thought, but there was heat coming from the reeking body. Magnus looked up. ‘I think he might still be with us.’

‘I asked you to turn him over, not give me your medical opinion.’

Magnus took a tentative hold of the blanket Pete had cocooned himself in and rolled the man towards the edge of the bed. Pete groaned. He had been sick in the night and his face was soiled with vomit. Magnus tried not to gag.

‘How long has he been like that?’ The disgust Magnus felt was in the screw’s voice.

‘He might have been ill already when they put me in here on Friday. It got worse on Saturday and much worse last night.’

‘And you didn’t think to report it?’

‘I reported it.’ It was a struggle to keep his voice calm. ‘I was told he’d be moved, but nothing happened. I’ve been locked in with him all weekend, watching the quarantine alerts on TV. For all I know I’ve got it too.’

The hand that held the Taser twitched. Magnus flinched again, but nothing happened.

The screw said, ‘I wouldn’t worry. You look like the kind of selfish bastard that always survives. Half an hour later and you’d probably have been chowing down on the poor sod. Come on.’

He stepped out of the cell into the landing. Magnus followed him.

‘Am I going to court?’

The screw gave Pete a last glance and then locked the door on him.

‘Courts are suspended.’

The screw touched Magnus’s shoulder with the Taser, steering him to the left, along the landing, past rows of bolted doors. The air outside the cell was cleaner, but Magnus thought he could detect some taint beneath the usual prison odour of men, bleach and cheaply catered food. It was the kind of scent that might waft from a city three weeks into a refuse strike, bitter and sugar-cloying.

Magnus said, ‘It’s illegal to hold me in prison without a trial.’

‘Bring it up at your hearing.’

Netting was stretched across the higher landings, like safety nets in a circus big top, to deter ‘jumpers’. Discarded lunch wrappers and other detritus were cradled in it. Magnus wondered if it would be strong enough to hold a man. You would be taking a chance, unless you truly wanted to kill yourself. Either way, he guessed there would be a beating waiting when you got down.

Other men were being moved from their cells too. A warder accompanied each prisoner, as if the authorities had become nervous about being outnumbered.

‘How many people are ill?’

The screw ignored the question. He took the one-size-fits-all key on his chain and inserted it into a cell door.

Magnus said, ‘At least let me have a shower. I’ve not had a wash since I got here.’

‘You’re fucking lucky we’re shifting you. If it was up to me nonces would be left to rot.’ The screw’s tone was amiable, as if he had grown used to hating and made his peace with it. ‘The Home Office has told us to keep healthy prisoners together and that’s what we’re doing.’

He opened the door. A thin man was sitting on the top bunk staring down at his hands which were folded loosely in his lap. Magnus’s first thought was that the man was praying, but then the prisoner turned his face towards him and Magnus saw the sullen twist of his mouth. His head had been shaved some time ago and his hair was growing back, dark and thick, like suede.

‘I don’t share.’ The man’s body looked spare, but Magnus got an impression of broad shoulders beneath the prison-issue tracksuit. ‘Check with the governor. He’ll tell you why.’

‘I know why,’ the screw said. ‘But the governor’s indisposed, so you’ll just have to put up with it. Say hello to your new cellmeat, Mr McFall.’

Magnus hesitated on the threshold.

‘Come on.’ The screw gave him a grin and a shove in the small of his back. ‘Mr Soames won’t bite, will you, Jeb?’

Magnus would have liked to beg, but he stepped into the cell. The door slammed and he heard the jangle of keys, the sound of the barrels turning in the lock. The cell walls were the same rank yellow as the cell he had just left, the patch of blue beyond the window bars might have been the same scrap of sky he had been staring out at for the last three days. He slid into the bottom bunk. The mattress creaked above as the other man lay down, so close that Magnus could hear the rhythm of his breaths.

Six

It was seven in the evening. The time that Magnus should have been stepping up on stage to begin the warm-up to Johnny Dongo’s show. He wondered if the show had been cancelled and pictured the empty auditorium, the rows of seats and abandoned aisles. Johnny would be furious, if Johnny was still alive.

Magnus was lying on his mattress listening to the racket of bangs and chanting coming from the other cells and looking up at the wooden base of the upper bunk. Names, obscene drawings and mysterious tags were scrawled across its surface. Danny takes it up the arse… RICKY B IS DEAD… there’s nowhere like home… There had been points when the hammering fists and raised voices had been so loud that his bunk had tingled with their vibration, but now it was possible to distinguish individual voices among the clamour.

‘They haven’t fed us.’

It was the first time Jeb had spoken since the screw had put them together. Magnus wondered if his new cellmate found the drop in volume as unnerving as he did. He waited a beat before replying.

‘No.’ There was a television propped on a shelf in the corner of the cell, a small flat-screen, not much bigger than the laptop he had at home. It had been blank-eyed and silent all afternoon. Magnus asked, ‘What about turning the TV on, Big Man?’

The question hung there, ignored.

Jeb said, ‘This your first time?’

Magnus had been held in police cells overnight once, on a drunk and disorderly charge, not long after he arrived in London, twenty-one and full of his own exoticness. The booking sergeant had been Scottish too, a big Aberdonian with more than a passing resemblance to the Reverend Ian Paisley. ‘Cool your jets, wee man,’ he had said as he poured Magnus into the police cell. ‘You’re in danger of getting your teuchter arse kicked.’

A disembodied pair of breasts stared down at Magnus from the base of the upper bunk, their nipples like eyes. He wished he had a pen to blot out their gaze.

‘First time in Pentonville,’ he said, hoping he sounded like a veteran. ‘You?’

‘I’m seasoned.’ Jeb’s voice had an accent to it, somewhere flat and northern Magnus could not place; one of those nowhere towns that used to have a mine or a factory. Jeb said, ‘They shouldn’t have put you in with me.’

Magnus kept his voice as expressionless as the other man’s. ‘Maybe not, but they did.’

Outside on the landings they had launched into a favourite in their repertoire: Why are we waiting? Why are we fucking waiting… Magnus closed his eyes. There were definitely fewer voices than before. He thought about what the penalty for being billeted with Jeb might be: a pair of hands around the throat, a pillow to the face, a boot to the groin, or worse? He was growing tired of being afraid, but the fear persisted. Magnus took a few deep breaths, as if he were about to step on stage, and repeated his question. ‘Any chance of putting the TV on, Big Man? There might be some news.’

‘TV’s fucked.’

‘I have a knack with TVs.’ It was a lie. ‘I can have a go at it if you like.’

The body in the bed above shifted and then Jeb leaned down and stared at Magnus, his face large and too close; no smile, just the grim line of a mouth set in a blank face.

‘I lost my privileges.’ His eyes were brown with large irises and long lashes. Cow’s eyes, Magnus’s mother would call them. ‘They took the digi-box away.’

Magnus wondered if the man was on medication and if so what would happen if it ran out. He was not much of a fighter. A fast jab of wit had always been his most effective weapon.

‘Do you have a radio?’

The bunk creaked faintly as Jeb flopped back on to his mattress.

‘I told you, no privileges. Who gives a fuck what’s happening out there anyway?’

‘How long have you been without privileges?’

‘Haven’t you learned not to ask questions?’

Jeb’s voice was a slamming door, as final as the turn of a screw’s key but Magnus had been alone with his thoughts for too long to keep quiet now that the silence between them had been broken.

‘There’s stuff happening on the outside you want to know about.’

Jeb snorted. ‘You guys straight out of the van still believe outside matters. It doesn’t. Not in here.’

‘Maybe that used to be true, but the outside has found its way inside. What do you think that rammy’s about?’

‘The screws are on strike, or they’ve accidentally-on-purpose done some fucker in, or the government’s cut prison food in exchange for more votes. Whatever it is doesn’t matter, beyond the fact that they’re not feeding us and that racket’s beginning to mash my head.’

‘It’s more than that, it’s—’

‘I don’t give a fuck. Not unless Jesus Christ himself’s declared an amnesty and brought along a few beers to celebrate with the boys.’

Jeb’s voice was bitter, but Magnus had detected a note of curiosity in it.

‘There’s no beer, but things are getting a bit biblical.’

He sat up with his back against the wall of the cell, and began to tell the other man about the virus. Jeb listened in silence. Outside, in the hallways beyond, the shouts and chanting grew and swelled and fell, and still no one came to feed them.

Seven

Magnus had watched scores of jailbreaks on TV. He knew the options. You could dig yourself out, through the wall or floor, depending on the structure of the cell. Or you might squeeze through the gap left by an easily removed ceiling tile and travel the mysterious space between roof and ceiling, unseen above your jailers’ heads. Bars could be filed, windows forced, fences climbed, barbed wire negotiated, open fields traversed, the consoling shelter of a forest found.

Jeb said, ‘We need one of the screws to open the door.’

‘That’d be good.’ The words came out more sarcastically than Magnus had intended. ‘You believe me then?’

‘Something’s up.’ Jeb’s feet were dangling over the edge of the bed, his heels level with Magnus’s eye line. The rubber soles of his trainers were imprinted, Size 11. ‘Prison grub’s crap, but cons live for their food. There should be a fuck of a racket out there.’

The almighty chorus that had shaken the halls had dwindled to occasional calls and shouting. The sounds were too distant for Magnus to make out the substance of their words, but their tone had shifted from anger to desperation. Once or twice he had heard sobbing and felt tears rising in his own eyes. He would have liked to have battered against the door of the cell and added his voice to the protest, but the fear that it might annoy his cellmate had stopped him.

Jeb had kept silent, out of sight on the bunk above, while Magnus related what he knew of the virus. Magnus had wondered if the other man thought he was a fantasist and had paused to say, ‘I know all this sounds mad, but believe me, it’s true.’

Telling the story reminded him of other details: how pale and sweat-soaked the Dongolite had been before he toppled on to the railway track, Johnny Dongo’s oncoming cold, the grating cough of the rapist in the alleyway, the hollow eyes and sallow faces of the bin men who had beaten him up.

Jeb’s legs swung to and fro, to and fro; frustration and pent-up energy. ‘We need to be ready for them.’

Magnus slid along his bunk, out of reach of the large feet. ‘The screws?’

‘Screws, cons, whoever comes through the door.’

‘They’ve got Tasers.’

‘So we get ready for Tasers.’

‘And if no one comes?’

The legs stopped swinging. ‘We draw straws for who eats who.’

Magnus made an almost-but-not-quite-decent living from his wit, but all he could manage was a weak, ‘Very funny.’

‘Laugh a minute, me.’

The north of England accent was more present. Magnus wondered if it signified anything. Jeb letting his guard down, or maybe trying to get Magnus to let his own guard down, so he could take charge and use him as a human Taser-shield. His mind was spiralling towards panic. As long as Jeb had lain silent and calm on his bunk there had been the possibility that this was a prison crisis, unusual but not unprecedented. That the other man was taking it seriously, more than seriously, was spooked by it, made the virus real.

Magnus asked, ‘How do you feel?’

Metal returned to the flat voice and Jeb’s legs resumed their restless rocking. ‘You sound like a woman.’

Magnus said, ‘I don’t mean emotionally. How do you feel physically?’

‘Hungry.’

‘But otherwise all right?’

‘No. Otherwise fucked off, but I’m not sick if that’s what you mean. How about you?’

‘The same.’

‘Good news for both of us then, if this virus is as bad as you say it is.’

There was a grudge of accusation in Jeb’s delivery.

‘Don’t blame the messenger.’

Jeb slid from his bunk and leaned against the cell wall. Magnus saw the height of him, shorter than he remembered, five eleven or thereabouts, but broad-shouldered and barrel-chested. Jeb smiled for the first time. His voice was soft and reasonable.

‘Best not to tell me don’t. Not if we’re going to try and get out of this together.’

The sky beyond the cell window crept to a blush-tinted grey that slid in turn to black and then back to a pink-grey dawn; another night, another day. Magnus had resolved not to think of food, but his mind kept drifting to his mother’s slow-cooked casseroles, more fragrant even than Hamza’s Italian pastas, though Hamza’s penne con salsiccia picante had been a masterpiece of bite and spice that barely left room for zabaglione. Places came uninvited into Magnus’s mind too. The beach at Skara Brae covered in the large flat stones the ancestors had heated in their fires and used to warm water. They would have roasted fish too. Magnus could almost smell grilled sea trout. His cousin Hugh had always been landed with the job of gutting their catch, while Magnus and the other boys gathered driftwood for the fire. Salmon was good, and herring coated in oatmeal or poached in milk, though he had hated it as a boy. Christ! He remembered his primary school classroom, the smell of wet coats drying on the radiators, Mrs Anderson’s stern eye and quick smiles. Hadn’t there been a Scottish prince thrown into a dungeon and so starved that he ate his own hands? Magnus held his hands up in front of his face. They were bony and unappetising, the knuckles red from clenching his fists.

‘Listen.’ Jeb’s voice was a whisper.

Magnus kept his own voice low. ‘What?’

Jeb slid from the bunk and went quietly to the door. Magnus followed him. There were footsteps on the landing. The sound was uneven and limping, but it was coming slowly closer. The terror he had been trying to keep at bay rushed at Magnus. He imagined some dreadful spindly-legged beast, distorted and unnatural, slouching towards them. Jeb gave his shoulder a shove. It was time to put their plan into action.

‘Hello!’ Magnus’s voice was rusty from lack of use. ‘Hello! Are you ill? I’m a doctor. I can help you if you let me out of here.’

The footsteps stopped. Magnus felt Jeb moving quietly in the cell behind him.

‘Hello? My name is Magnus McFall. I’m a qualified doctor.’ There was no response from the corridor, but the footsteps had not resumed. ‘I studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. I specialised in respiratory diseases before I got myself into this spot of bother.’ There was a character Magnus used in his act, a bumptious Scotsman inspired by Mr Brown his maths teacher, whose certainty in the wrongness of the world had sent him into the St Ola Hotel every afternoon before the school bell had finished its final peal. ‘Don’t be scared. I saw a lot of this kind of thing in Africa during the SARS epidemic.’

Jeb whispered, ‘Don’t overdo it.’

But Magnus was sure he could feel the limping presence listening on the other side of the door.

‘There are things I can do right now, as soon as you let me out, which will alleviate your discomfort.’

Somebody coughed. There was a sound of retching and then a faint voice said, ‘Prove you’re a doctor.’

Magnus had feared the challenge, but he put a smile into his voice. ‘I can’t very well do that from behind a closed door. Let me out and I’ll prove it.’

There was a pause while the voice stopped to consider and then it said, ‘Tell me something.’

‘What kind of thing?’

‘The kind of thing a doctor would know.’

‘Fucking hell.’ Jeb’s voice was a low warning.

Magnus realised that if he failed, his cellmate would blame him. He thought of Pete’s sickness, the pains that had racked him.

‘I know your symptoms and what they signify. Your body is trying to expel the virus, hence your vomiting, diarrhoea and severe sweating. Unfortunately this kind of physical panic makes your body rather indiscriminate, and so it’s also expelling a lot of useful and necessary stuff along with the bad. That’s why, instead of feeling cleansed by the purges, you are shivery and disorientated. My first job will be to replace lost nutrients; thereby stabilising your condition; the next will be to—’

There was a sound of metal on metal as the person on the other side of the door tried to insert their key into the keyhole. It clattered to the floor and Jeb swore softly. ‘Jesus Christ.’

Magnus held a hand up in the air, warning him to keep quiet.

‘Just take it slowly,’ he coaxed. ‘Lack of co-ordination is a classic symptom, but you’ll feel better soon.’ At last the key was in the lock. ‘You’re doing well,’ Magnus said. The key turned. Jeb tensed. The door pushed inward. Magnus stepped out of the way, just like they had rehearsed. ‘Don’t be scared,’ he said and his voice wavered.

The screw’s face might once have been a rich copper, now it was grey. He was clutching a Taser, but his eyes were unfocused, his hands trembling.

Magnus said, ‘I don’t think you need to—’

But Jeb sprang into his part of the routine. He raised the small, flat-screen TV in his hands and dashed it against the screw’s face. The man slammed against the cell wall and crumpled to the ground. The Taser flew from his hand, rattled against the corner of the bunk and slid across the floor. Jeb pulled his foot into a kick.

Magnus grabbed hold of his arm. ‘He’s finished.’

Jeb’s biceps were bunched hard, ready for action. He pulled himself free and for a moment Magnus thought he was going to follow through, but then Jeb shook his head, like a man trying to shake himself awake and said, ‘Get his keys.’

Jeb’s blow had stunned the screw and there was a gash on his forehead where the corner of the television had met its mark, but neither of these should have pinned him, gasping for air, on the floor. Magnus knelt down beside him.

‘I’m sorry, pal. We were worried no one was going to come and let us out.’

The keys were on a chain attached to the screw’s belt. Magnus stiffened, trying to keep his face as far from the other man’s as possible, and pressed his hand into the softness of the screw’s belly, trying to find whatever held them there. ‘Sorry,’ he said again. ‘We didn’t know what else to do.’

‘You’re not a doctor?’ Disappointed hope quivered the screw’s voice.

‘No.’ Magnus had found the clip securing the key chain. He unfastened it and shoved the keys into his tracksuit pocket. ‘I’m a comedian.’

‘A comedian?’

The screw was trying to get up. Magnus considered sliding his hands beneath the man’s arms and dragging him on to the bunk, but the thought of coming into contact again with the sweat-soaked body appalled him.

‘Come on.’ Jeb was already out on the landing.

Magnus pulled the blanket from the bed. He draped it over the man and shoved a pillow beneath his head.

‘Sorry.’

‘You said you were a doctor,’ the screw whispered.

Magnus did not bother to tell him what he did for a living again. It wasn’t funny any more. He closed the door gently behind him.

Eight

The landing was lit by emergency lights and hollow with silence. Magnus followed Jeb, the keys a weight in his pocket. The central hall looked as he remembered, a concrete and metal panopticon, designed to keep men on show. The walls were painted the same fatty-tissue yellow as hospital waiting rooms and school assembly halls. Perhaps it was the design that made Magnus feel their every step was being observed.

Jeb whispered, ‘We can’t be the only ones.’

Magnus kept his voice low. ‘No, there’s no way.’

‘We need to get shot of here. Anyone asks, tell them we were moved here from D Wing and hope they don’t twig the colour of our tracksuits. If cons find out we’re VPs, you’ll wish you’d caught the sweats.’

Magnus’s confusion must have shown on his face because Jeb hissed, ‘A vulnerable prisoner. A fucking nonce.’

‘All I did was to try and stop a girl from getting raped—’

‘I’m not interested. Same way you’re not interested in why I’m here. They won’t be interested in talking about it either, except with their fists.’ Jeb paused and held out a hand. ‘Give us the keys.’ Magnus glanced at the Taser. It was chunky and made of plastic, but its shape was hard and menacing. No one would mistake it for a toy. ‘Don’t worry,’ Jeb said. His voice had less of the north in it again. ‘I’m not going to lock you up.’

‘Hey!’ The shout came from one of the cells further down the corridor, followed by frantic banging. ‘Hey! Is somebody there?’

Magnus started towards the noise, but Jeb caught him by the shoulder.

‘Leave it.’

‘You must be joking.’

‘No. He could be category A. They’re the mad bastards murderers and rapists have nightmares about. You don’t want those guys getting loose.’

‘We can’t leave him locked up.’

‘We bloody can.’

BANG, BANG, BANG.

‘Please, for Christ’s sake.’ The voice was raw and desperate. ‘I’m shut in here with a dead man!’

BANG, BANG, BANG.

Other cells were taking up the noise. Magnus tried to work out how many prisoners he could hear. A dozen? Twenty? Maybe less. The solidarity of the first days’ chanting was gone. The voices cut over and through each other, lost and ghostly, the sense of their words drowned in each other’s appeals.

‘They’re not our problem.’ Jeb held out his hand again. ‘Keys.’

‘They could starve to death.’

Jeb shrugged his shoulders. ‘Shouldn’t have got locked up in the first place then, should they?’

It was the shrug that did it, the casual dismissal so soon after their own escape.

Magnus turned his back on Jeb and ran down the landing to the cell that had started the noise, expecting to feel the sudden scorch of a Taser. He slid the key into the lock and turned to cast a quick glance at Jeb. The other man was gone. Magnus hesitated, but the prisoner must have heard him on the other side of the door. The voice within became soft and wheedling.

‘C’mon, man, let me out. He died this morning. It’s fucking horrible. I’m going crazy in here.’

Magnus glanced over the landing, wondering if Jeb could have made it down the stairs to the lower hall so quickly, but there was no sign of him.

‘Come on, please, man. He died with his eyes open. They’re staring at me.’ The voice sounded tearful.

Magnus took a deep breath, turned the key in the lock, gave the door a shove and took a step backwards.

The man who emerged looked nothing to be frightened of. He had the beginnings of a sparse beard and his prison tracksuit was creased and grubby, but he was short and underweight, and the face beneath the beard looked young and tear-stained.

‘You don’t have anything to eat, do you?’

Magnus said, ‘No, sorry.’

‘Fuck, I’m starving.’

The stranger cast a look around the hall, as if he suspected there might be a buffet waiting somewhere. The noises coming from other cells were growing louder and more frantic. Desperation gave power to the banging; clenched fists and strong arms. Magnus hesitated, like a lion-keeper in a war zone, keen for his beasts to survive the bombing, but unsure of the consequences of opening their cages.

‘I’d leave them to rot if I were you, mate.’ The newly released man was walking companionably beside him. ‘I mean, I know you let me out, cheers and all that, but this wing’s full of nonces.’ He realised what he had said and added, ‘No offence meant.’

Magnus gave him the stare he reserved for hecklers. ‘None taken.’

The man was dressed in the same incriminating blue sweats as he and Jeb. Magnus wanted to add something about not being a sex offender or a child molester, but then a cell door opened. There was a rush of movement and Magnus was knocked across the landing and into the guardrail. Strong hands pinned him to the barrier.

‘Keys!’ Jeb’s face was too close, his features tight with anger.

Magnus slid a hand into his pocket and brought out the keys. The noise in the cells was a discordant wave, a choppy sea at ebb tide, but it was not loud enough to drown out the slam of the newly released prisoner’s feet against the stairs to the lower landings. Magnus handed the keys to Jeb. ‘Please, don’t lock me back up.’

Jeb shoved Magnus from him and jogged towards the stairs. Magnus followed, realising that he needed to stick close if he was to get through the series of locked doors that would take them out of the building and into the grounds beyond.

Nine

The main door of the wing led outside into a courtyard surrounded by high buildings. Jeb let it swing behind him and it was only luck that Magnus managed to catch it and slip out before the door slammed shut. ‘Look, I’m sorry. You were right. I should have left the other cells well alone.’

It was hot outside, the sunshine glaring. Jeb moved, keeping close to the wall like a soldier in an urban combat zone. Magnus followed, sticking to the shadows. The buildings that formed the courtyard were punctuated by ranks of barred windows. Each window indicated a cell; a prisoner dead behind a locked door or abandoned alive; pairs of staring eyes following their progress. The sensation of being watched made him think of a recurring nightmare he had of being on stage, the audience getting to their feet and coming slow and zombie-like towards him as he struggled to remember his routine. There were fresh nightmares waiting for him in the thought of those barred windows. He wondered if he should try to get the keys from Jeb after all, go back, release as many as he could and damn the consequences, but he ran on, following his cellmate through the courtyard’s shadows.

Jeb stopped at the corner of a wall, beneath a queerly angled CCTV camera, surveying the last section of open ground they would have to cross before they reached the admissions building. If he wanted to, Jeb could leave him there, Magnus realised. On the outside-inside, surrounded by high walls and locked doors, exposed to the elements, the stares of the windows and the fading men inside.

‘We can split up as soon as we get out of here,’ Magnus whispered, ‘but we stand a better chance of making it out if we stick together.’

Jeb glanced at him. ‘You’re a liability, mate.’

‘We wouldn’t have got out of the cell in the first place if it wasn’t for me.’

‘You think so?’ Jeb’s smile mocked him. ‘It was me that smashed that screw in the face.’

‘And it was me that persuaded him to unlock the door.’

‘Then you turned into Jesus fucking Christ and started releasing random villains.’ The smile was gone. ‘Didn’t you think there might be a reason I stick to my own fucking cell?’ Every word was a bullet. ‘Get yourself fucking killed if you like, but leave me out of it.’

‘I apologised, okay?’ There was no point in being polite, Magnus realised. Jeb was like a belligerent venue manager who needed convincing before he would agree to book a new act. Appeasement would get him nowhere. ‘I told you, I won’t get in the way and I might be some help.’

Jeb cast him a sceptical glance, but something in Magnus’s words must have persuaded him because he whispered, ‘Don’t talk and don’t try any Good Samaritan acts. First sign of trouble you’re on your own. Understand?’ Magnus nodded. Jeb cast a quick look around the courtyard. ‘We need to get through the admissions hall’ — he gestured up ahead with the hand that was holding the Taser — ‘and then out through the front gate. I reckon these keys will let us into admissions, but I don’t know about the gate. If you see anyone, keep your head down. Don’t speak until spoken to and take your lead from me.’

Jeb did not bother to wait for Magnus to agree. He loped towards the door of the admissions block, keeping his body low. Magnus thought he heard voices shouting behind them, but all his strength was focused on keeping up with Jeb and he did not look back.

The key turned first time and they entered a small vestibule at the bottom of a steep metal staircase. Jeb clattered upward, the Taser clutched in his right hand. Magnus followed in silence, matching his pace to the other man’s. The effects of his beatings were still upon him and his legs protested, but he forced them on, to an upper landing and another locked door.

‘I feel like I’m in a fucking computer game.’ Jeb shifted the Taser to his left hand and took the keys from his pocket. He slid them awkwardly into the lock. Magnus wanted to say that he would relieve him of one or the other, but knew the offer would be rejected. Jeb looked cautiously round the door. Something about the practised stealth of the move made Magnus wonder if the other man had been in the armed forces. ‘Okay.’ Jeb nodded to him. ‘Keep up, and remember what I told you, take your lead from me.’

They entered a long corridor. Magnus supposed he must have passed through it on the night he was admitted, bloodied and bruised, still not quite sober, but he could remember little of that journey except a prison officer’s hand steadying him when he stumbled. It had been a small kindness in a night lacking in compassion and Magnus found himself wondering if the man had caught the virus.

The thought made him think of his mother again. He had called her a week after her birthday, alerted by a caustic text from his sister Rhona, but had he spoken to her since? He didn’t think so. She and Rhona would be fine, he reassured himself. London was an overcrowded airport terminal, jammed with travellers and the people who serviced them. The infection was bound to cut a swathe through the capital, but the Orkney Islands were at the butt end of the world and surrounded by sea. However hard the city was hit, the Orkneys would survive.

But what about tourists? an unwelcome voice in his head whispered. What about the cruise ships and twice-daily ferries? The flights direct from Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow that connect with flights from London and beyond?

‘Where will you go when you get out?’ he asked Jeb, to shut the voice up.

He expected the other man to tell him to mind his own business but Jeb said, ‘Fucked if I know. Guess I’ll cross that bridge when the time comes.’ He bared his teeth; half snarl, half grin. ‘If I haven’t burned it already. You?’

‘Up north, home.’

Jeb looked at him, his expression curious. ‘Will they take you in?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lucky you.’

‘Let’s hope so.’

Jeb stopped and raised a hand in the air, silently telling Magnus to freeze. He cocked his head to one side. The pose reminded Magnus of the games of cowboys and Indians he and his cousins had played. Hugh had always been the tracker shaman, able to spot the enemy (for some reason the cowboys had always been the enemy) from miles away. Usually the memory would have raised a smile, but Magnus had heard the footsteps that had stopped Jeb in his tracks.

‘In here.’ Jeb pointed to a half-glass door marked Education. He unlocked the door and Magnus slipped in after him, closing it quietly. The room had been designed to allow tutors to be on their own with inmates, while also allowing screws to keep an eye on what was happening inside. Prisoners’ paintings covered one wall. Perhaps the art teacher encouraged self-portraits, or maybe the inmates used each other as models. Bullet heads and staring eyes sent out blank challenges from the wall, fronts that must not be breached for fear of what might lie behind them. The prison featured too, its high walls and vertical bars looming aggressively towards the viewer. It was how the place made you feel, like it was alive and biding its time before it crushed you.

Jeb crouched beneath the pictures, his back against the wall, the Taser cradled in his hands. Magnus hunkered down beside him, under a large Dolly Mixture coloured painting of the Disney castle, complete with Mickey, Minnie and their weird chums. Some prisoner had painted it as a present for his small child, Magnus supposed. The thought depressed him and he wondered again what waited beyond the gates of the prison. Had the sickness taken hold on the outside, or had Pentonville been abandoned in some crude attempt at quarantine?

Jeb’s breaths were keeping time with the approaching footsteps in the corridor beyond.

Magnus whispered, ‘There might be safety in numbers.’

‘Not for me.’

Fear had drained the blood from Jeb’s face and tightened his features. He looked like a medieval church effigy carved by a mason with one eye on the old gods.

‘What did you do?’ The words slipped out before Magnus could stop them.

Jeb shook his head. ‘Not what you’re thinking.’

‘You don’t know what I’m thinking.’

‘Don’t I?’

He was right. A series of tabloid headlines were riffling through Magnus’s mind, the kind of stuff that made you lay the newspaper face down. He started to get to his feet but Jeb sank a hand into his shoulder, keeping him there.

‘They’ll know you’re a VP from the colour of your tracksuit. We’re branded in here, remember? If they find us, our only chance is to attack first. Don’t wait to see if they’re going to play nice.’ Jeb’s voice was so low Magnus had to strain to hear it. ‘They won’t. If they smile, smile back, then hit them as hard as you can and run.’

The footsteps were close now. Jeb flattened himself against the wall and shut his eyes. Magnus focused on the window into the corridor. He saw the men’s shadows approach followed swiftly by the men themselves, four prisoners, each dressed in green sweats, rather than the blue that he and Jeb were wearing. The men’s complexions had the exhausted, stone-greyness of people denied the sun and they each had the loose-skin look of men who had recently lost weight, but none of them appeared to have the virus. A prisoner at the back of the line raised a hand in sly benediction and winked at them. Magnus recognised him as the man he had set free, now dressed in the colours of a different hall. The man nodded to let him know he wouldn’t give them away and passed by.

They crouched beneath the paintings in the education room until the men’s footsteps faded into silence. Magnus got to his feet first. Something in the intensity of Jeb’s fear made him as keen to escape the other man as he had been to ally with him.

‘Good luck.’ Magnus was at the door before he realised that it was locked. Outside, in some distant corridor, the sound of screaming echoed. He turned and saw Jeb getting to his feet. The keys and weapon in his hands made him look more jailer than prisoner, despite his prison-issue clothes.

‘Like you said, we can split up once we get out of here.’ Jeb’s voice was low and intense, as if he had found his courage and was making a conscious effort to hold on to it. ‘But right now I reckon we stand more chance if we stick together.’

The screaming died abruptly.

Magnus asked, ‘What did you do that makes you so frightened?’

Jeb stepped closer. ‘Until you get these colours off you better be scared too.’

Magnus felt the heat of the other man’s body and smelled the sweet funky smell of stale and fresh sweat mingling on his skin.

‘All you need to know is that I never hurt anyone who didn’t have it coming to them. I never touched up little kiddies and I never put my hands on a woman that didn’t want me to put my hands on her.’

‘Is that what the women would say?’

Jeb flinched. ‘Women say a lot of things.’ He unlocked the door and scanned the corridor left to right, like a sniper. ‘I never met a woman who didn’t say more than her prayers.’ There was a catch in his voice, as if something in his throat’s mechanism was broken.

Ten

The prison officers’ locker room had already been ransacked, but whoever had been there had concentrated on money and valuables. The small space was littered with clothes, rifled wallets and gaping sports bags. Jeb undressed quickly and stowed his tracksuit out of sight on top of one of the lockers. Magnus stripped off his tracksuit. It was like trying to find an outfit in a jumble sale, sifting through a muddle of styles and sizes, looking for something that would fit and would not mark him out as a fraud.

‘Hurry up. It’s not a fashion show.’ Jeb pulled on a Hope for Heroes T-shirt.

Magnus saw the Union Jack tattoo on Jeb’s chest and wondered again if he had been in the forces. He found a bright blue mod T-shirt with a target on the chest and topped it with a brown hoodie. The hoodie was too warm for the weather, but he liked the idea of being able to hide his face.

‘Here, these should fit you.’ Jeb tossed a pair of jeans at him. They were long in the leg. Magnus folded the hems into turn-ups. Jeb was tying the laces on a pair of top-of-the-range Nikes. ‘Try and find something you can run in.’

It was strange, wearing the clothes of someone you had never met. Magnus rooted through the tangle of clothes and shoes until he found a pair of size eights. He wondered if the screws had left in such a rush there was no time to change out of their uniforms, or if they were still somewhere in Pentonville, coughing up their guts in the sickbay or dealing with a riot in the far reaches of the jail. He thrust his hands into the pockets of the jacket and found an Oyster card and a discount voucher for two classic margaritas and a bottle of wine at Pizza Express. He crumpled the voucher into a ball and let it drop to the ground.

Out in the prison corridors beyond someone bayed like a wolf.

‘I’ll be glad to get out of here,’ Jeb muttered. He was rooting through the abandoned gear, pocketing car keys, checking ID cards. He found a Snickers bar, tore its wrapper free and shoved it into his mouth.

Magnus felt he might kill Jeb for a share of the chocolate but he asked, ‘How will we do it?’

‘Same way we came in, through the front door.’

The locker room was windowless and lined with steel cabinets. It was larger than the cell they had shared, but it gave Magnus the same trapped feeling and his skin itched with the urge to escape. A Daily Express lay folded beneath a wooden bench. Its headline screamed, CONTAGION! Magnus picked up the tabloid. It had been published two days ago. The first three pages were devoted to the virus. People were calling it the sweats and it was overloading hospitals in London, Paris, New York and Berlin. There was an editorial alleging that the poor state of the NHS had precipitated the crisis, but the criticisms were well-rehearsed and perfunctory, as if the journalist’s heart had not really been in the story.

China and Russia had issued statements denying rumours of outbreaks in their major cities, but social media contradicted official accounts and the Express carried surreptitiously-taken photographs of a Shanghai hospital ward lined with beds full of failing patients.

A small galaxy of celebrities had been felled by the virus. Magnus searched for Johnny Dongo’s name, but either the comedian was okay or he had been eclipsed by A-listers. There was something distasteful about the celebrity photographs, the rows of hot women in bikinis, all of them dead.

‘Look at this.’ Magnus passed the paper to Jeb.

‘You can’t trust tabloid rags.’ Jeb tossed the paper on to the floor. ‘They don’t care about facts, or whose life they ruin, just as long as they can twist out a good story.’

Magnus lifted the paper from the floor and held it wide, showing Jeb the photograph of the hospital ward, flanked by sidebars of smiling female celebrities.

‘People are dying.’

Jeb was riffling through jackets and trouser pockets. He glanced up. ‘We already knew that.’ He clicked a penknife open, checking its blade. ‘How many of these actresses are holed up in some spa, ready to come back from the dead with a big tada when the time’s right? And who says the people in that hospital have the chills? All that photo shows is exactly what I’d expect to see in a hospital, patients lying in bed.’

‘They’re calling it the sweats.’

Jeb clicked the penknife shut. ‘Sweats, chills, I don’t give a fuck.’ He slid the closed knife into his jeans pocket. ‘Just concentrate on getting out of here. We can worry about killer flu after that.’

Magnus joined Jeb on the floor and rummaged in a sports bag. There was nothing useful in it, just a bottle of shower gel that claimed to double as shampoo and a towel, but touching another man’s possessions felt intimate and wrong. Magnus shoved it out of the way and started on another bag. He wanted to find something to eat. He wanted a knife like the one Jeb had found, or, better still, a Taser. He said, ‘What if the front door’s locked?’

‘I’m hoping someone will have already solved that problem for us, but if it’s locked then we find a way of opening it.’ Getting rid of his incriminating tracksuit had made Jeb more confident. ‘Here.’ He passed Magnus a prison officer’s identity card.

The man in the ID photograph was older than Magnus. His hair was a similar dark brown, but it was cut short in a barber-shop no-style. His face was thin and intelligent-looking; perfect casting for a university professor, or a curator of rare manuscripts.

‘I don’t look anything like him,’ Magnus said.

‘Just flash it and only if you need to.’ Jeb pulled on a beige jacket, shoved the Taser into one of its pockets and ran a comb he had found through his hair. ‘Tidy yourself up.’ He tossed the comb to Magnus.

Magnus glanced in a small mirror hung on the inside of one of the lockers. His hair was greasy, his chin covered in stubble too long to be designer, but too short to be called a beard. The bruises on his face were shifting to yellow, but the graze on his cheek had scabbed and it was obvious that his eye had recently been blacked.

‘Ready?’

Jeb shoved an NYPD baseball cap on his head. His beard was slightly ragged, but the civilian clothes he had chosen fitted well and he might easily be mistaken for an off-duty prison officer.

‘You look like a screw.’

‘Good, that’s what I was aiming for.’ Jeb grinned. ‘I’m not sure what you look like, but it’ll have to do.’

The corridors up ahead echoed with the rumble of male voices. They passed a splash of blood blooming head-height on a wall, red and vital against the whitewash. Their eyes met, but neither of them said anything. Magnus wished he had the weight of a Taser in his pocket.

‘Anyone who’s got out will come this way,’ Jeb whispered. ‘So sooner or later we’re going to meet someone. If anything kicks off, go in hard.’ Magnus wanted to protest that he did not know how to ‘go in hard’, but he nodded. Jeb must have seen the fear on his face because he added, ‘Fight dirty and don’t hold back.’

Magnus’s father had tried to teach him how to fight, shouting instructions while Magnus threw punches into a grain sack, left, right, left, right, right, right, right, but Magnus did not have the dexterity required of a good featherweight and he lacked the power to be a heavyweight.

‘It’s your mouth that gets you into trouble,’ his dad had finally said. ‘Let’s hope it learns how to get you out of it too.’

They met their first prisoners in the next stretch of corridor. There were two of them, both still dressed in green prison-issue tracksuits and trainers. Magnus detected a glimmer of sweat on the younger of the pair which spoke of the virus. That was who he would go for if it came to a fight, he decided, the under-fed youth whose hands were trembling. The decision prompted a familiar jolt of shame.

‘All right, lads?’ Jeb’s voice was bold and confident.

The men froze and the boy Magnus had marked as his target muttered, ‘Shit.’

‘Don’t worry, we’re not screws.’ Jeb took off his baseball cap and rubbed a hand through his suede head. ‘Just treated ourselves to a couple of going-away outfits. Talking about going away, you’re going the wrong way, aren’t you?’

‘Depends whether you want to get your head kicked in or not,’ the elder of the duo said. He was a man somewhere beyond his mid-forties who looked like he knew what it was to take a kicking. The man’s face was pitted with old scars that suggested a flight through a car windscreen or unexpected congress with a plate-glass window.

‘Trouble up ahead?’

‘You could say that.’ The man’s voice was heavy with resentment. ‘A reception committee checking who’s fit for the outside.’

‘Too scared to go outside themselves, if you ask me.’ The boy hugged his ribs, as if he were cold and trying to stop himself from shivering. ‘They said I was sick. No one sick gets to leave.’ His voice wavered, but he added bravely, ‘I heard on the news that they’re sending the army in anyway. That’ll fix those cunts. The army have the best doctors too. They’ll sort us out.’

‘What about you?’ Jeb asked the older man. ‘You look well enough.’

‘I didn’t want to leave Jack here.’ The boy was taller than him, but the scarred man reached up and put an arm around the youth’s thin shoulders. ‘Him and me’s been mates a long time. He needs looking after, specially if he’s ill.’

Jeb nodded as if he understood. His expression was neutral, but he stood stolid in the middle of the corridor, blocking the men’s progress.

‘Anything else we need to know?’

The man shrugged. ‘They’ve got the prison records up on computer and they’re checking what people are in for. They say they want to stop any nonces from getting out.’

Magnus snapped, ‘Why don’t they just mind their own fucking business?’

The older man gave him a shrewd look, but he said, ‘The lad here’s right. They’re long-termers, big men inside, nothing on the outside. I guess they like being big men.’

Jeb said, ‘We’re both in for intent to supply, you know the sketch. Think they’ll have any objection to that?’

‘I don’t suppose so.’ The older man didn’t sound convinced. ‘Not unless your face doesn’t fit.’

Jeb nodded again. ‘Yes, there’s always that.’

The young boy started to cough. The older man rubbed his back, but the boy’s coughing increased, catching in whoops at the back of his throat. Magnus took a step backward, but Jeb held his ground. It seemed that all the air in the boy’s body was being expelled, but then he bent forward and was sick against the wall. He crouched over his vomit, gasping for breath.

His companion put an arm around him. ‘It’s all right, Jack, you’re going to be fine.’

‘Piss off, you old poof. Can’t you even keep your hands off me when I’m bloody dying?’

The man threw Jeb and Magnus an apologetic look. ‘I’d like to find him somewhere comfy, where he could have a lie-down.’ He gave them a sad half-smile, asking for permission to move on.

Jeb stepped to one side. ‘Good luck.’

‘Yeah, same to you.’

Jeb waited until the men were further down the corridor and then he asked, ‘How many are in this reception committee?’

‘A few.’

Magnus would have liked to have pinned the man down on exactly how many a few were, but the answer seemed to satisfy Jeb. He said, ‘Are they armed?’

‘Tasered up to the eyeballs, mate, wired too. That’s why we’re planning on bunking down and making the best of things. Prisoners make brutal jailers.’

Eleven

‘The boy said the army were coming.’ Magnus was crouched next to Jeb in a corner of an intersection in the long, white corridors that were a feature of the admissions block.

Jeb hissed, ‘Ever been in army nick?’

‘No, have you?’

A stretch of empty hallway loomed before and behind them. They had not seen anyone since encountering the two retreating prisoners, but a rumble of male voices reverberated through the building, echoing from all directions, like cries in an overcrowded swimming pool. There was something high-pitched and excited about the noise that raised the hairs on the back of Magnus’s neck and he guessed it would not be long before they met more escapees.

Jeb said, ‘I’ve heard plenty about them from guys that have. The army have their own rules. This isn’t the cavalry coming over the hill to save us. We’re the bad guys, remember?’

The wolf-man was howling again. It was hard to tell if he was in pain or celebrating his freedom to roam the corridors.

Magnus said, ‘I’ve not even been properly charged. It was different when I thought we were stuck here, but now help is coming…’

The baying noise increased in pitch.

Jeb said, ‘I’ll fucking throttle that guy if I get my hands on him.’ He looked at Magnus. ‘The army will help you into a set of handcuffs, kick you up the arse and into a cell that’ll make your last place look like a fucking palace. If things are as you say they are, then we need to get out of here, pronto.’

Magnus thought of the headlines in the Daily Express. Jeb was right: tabloids were not to be trusted, but the contents of the paper chimed with the television he had watched and the sick prisoners, absent warders and abandoned prison all told their own story. He said, ‘Scarface said there’s a reception committee checking who’s who. If they find our records on the computer they’ll know we’re VPs.’

‘Keep your voice down.’ Jeb glanced around as if he were afraid someone might have overheard.

The howling seemed louder, the yells and catcalls of the surrounding voices closer. Magnus would have liked to have found a cell, climbed into bed and hidden himself beneath the covers, until whatever was about to happen, happened, but the smell of Pete’s illness was still sharp in his memory and he knew that once closed, cell doors were not so easily opened.

Jeb took a swift intake of breath and whispered, ‘They’re coming.’

The howling was upon them. A squad of men, most of them still in prison tracksuits, rounded the corner. The wolf-man gambolled beside them like a mascot. He was smaller than Magnus had imagined; a chubby, middle-aged man who it would be easy to imagine devoting Sunday afternoons to washing his car, were it not for the mad bluster of his dance, the crazy tilt of his head. The prisoners had broken up bunks and benches and armed themselves with chair and bed legs. A couple of them carried fire extinguishers. Magnus wondered why it had not occurred to him to arm himself in the same way. He leapt to his feet, ready to run in the opposite direction, but Jeb grabbed his arm.

‘Stand your ground.’ Jeb pulled his baseball cap low over his eyes, hiding his features in the shadow of its brim. ‘This is our best chance.’ He stepped into the middle of the corridor and raised a hand in greeting, like a man trying to stop a car on a country road. The group faltered to a halt. No one spoke and then Jeb said, ‘Okay to join you lads?’

‘We don’t need any screws,’ a voice from the back said.

There were about fifteen of them, Magnus reckoned. He wondered how they had got out and hoped that no one had seen him and Jeb crossing the courtyard, leaving other prisoners trapped in their cells.

‘Do we look like screws?’ Jeb’s voice was hard and challenging.

The wolf-man waved a chair leg lightly in the air, the way a fool might wave his sceptre. ‘You’re dressed like off-duty screws, or filth…’

Jeb’s head jerked at the mention of police. ‘We look like screws cos we nicked these clothes from their locker room. We thought they might help us get away. We just want out, same as you do.’

One of the prisoners started to cough, a second man joined in and another spat on the ground.

‘Anyone know these boys?’ a tall man near the front asked.

There was no one in charge, Magnus realised, no one to make the decision to let them join the group. He said, ‘I just got put in here on Friday, no trial, no lawyer. Emergency measures, the police told me.’ He let some of the despair he was feeling leak into his voice. ‘It’s been a fucking nightmare. All I’m interested in is getting home. I’ve got family I need to get back to.’

The tall man nodded. He looked at Jeb. ‘Do I know you?’

Jeb lifted his face and stared him straight in the eyes. ‘Ever worked the rigs?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe we met somewhere.’ Jeb shrugged. ‘I work the rigs, three weeks on, three weeks off. It makes you stir-crazy. Occasionally it gets me into a bit of bother. Drunk and disorderly; expected a night in the cells, woke up in here.’

The tall man glanced at the men behind him. No one said anything and he gave Magnus and Jeb a curt nod.

‘Plan is we go out mob-handed. Extra bodies should be a help.’

Magnus said, ‘We met a couple of guys earlier. They told us there’s a squad at the front door checking what people are in for and deciding who gets out.’

‘We heard that.’ The tall man snorted. ‘There’s always plenty want to make themselves fucking guvnor.’

‘Fuck the guvnor!’ the wolf-man shouted. A few of the men took up the cry. The wolf-man leapt into his dance again and the men stepped on, their voices rising once more. Magnus realised they were scared and the realisation tightened fear’s grip on him. Jeb shoved himself into the huddle of bodies. He grasped Magnus by the shoulder, taking him with him.

Magnus pulled the hood of his stolen jacket up over his head. ‘I’m not sure about this.’

Jeb’s voice was low. ‘Have you got a better suggestion?’

Once, on a Christmas visit to Edinburgh organised by the High School, his cousin Hugh had dragged Magnus on to the starflyer in Princes Street Gardens fairground. Joining the squad of escapees reminded Magnus of the sensation of suddenly being borne aloft by the ride. He felt the same swoop of danger in his stomach, the same loss of control.

Magnus had thrown up over the side of the starflyer. His vomit had been snatched away by the wind, travelling it seemed in one solid mass towards the south side of the gardens. Hugh had laughed so hard Magnus had thought his cousin might throw up too. ‘I was just imagining some poor wee man walking his dog and getting hit in the face by your spew,’ Hugh said later as the two of them walked along Rose Street in search of a pub that would not be too fussy about the age of its clientele.

Hugh had filled himself full of vodka and pills and walked into the sea, not long before Magnus had decided to hell with islands and left for London. Magnus had often wondered if Hugh had been scared when he did it, or if the drink and drugs had drowned his cousin’s fears, even as the bitter sea slid over his head and into his lungs.

The wolf-man capered beside them like a fool at a Morris dance. He waved the chair leg he was carrying lightly in the air, like a sceptre. ‘There’ll be a squad of soldiers waiting to mow us down soon as we step out those gates.’ The wolf-man’s voice was high and excited. He pointed the chair leg as if it were a gun and made a rattling noise, aiming it at the prisoners behind him. Somebody knocked it from his hand and someone else kicked it away. The wolf-man scrabbled on the floor, among the feet of the men, searching for it. Magnus thought they had lost him, but it was as if the wolf-man sensed something different about him and Jeb. He soon returned to their side.

‘Piss off,’ Jeb said. ‘Unless you want me to take that stick off you and shove it up your arse.’

‘You would, wouldn’t you?’ the wolf-man said in a camp voice, grinning with delight. He thrust his face close and whispered, ‘I know who you are.’ Jeb made a lunge for him, but the wolf-man was faster. He ducked backward into the small group of men. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not a grass.’

‘Prick.’ Jeb’s jaw bunched, but he let the wolf-man go.

The bodies of two screws lay slumped on the floor of the corridor, each of them marked with signs of the sweats.

Magnus whispered, ‘What the fuck is this thing?’

Someone said, ‘The army will have an antidote.’

Jeb touched the pocket that held the Taser, as if it were a talisman against infection. ‘It was probably those army bastards that caused it in the first place.’

Magnus said, ‘So maybe we should stick around and get vaccinated.’

Jeb laughed. ‘Think they’d share it with scum like us? Who’s to say they didn’t drop a test-tube accidentally-on-purpose? It wouldn’t be the first time inmates have been used as guinea pigs.’

The inmates’ conviction that the authorities knew everything reminded Magnus of the dying youth they had met earlier. They’ll sort us out, he had said.

‘The sweats isn’t just killing prisoners.’ Magnus jerked a thumb backward to where the screws’ bodies lay slouched together in a corner.

The wolf-man was suddenly at their side. He did a twirl and then staggered with the dizziness of it. ‘Collateral damage.’ He giggled. ‘Scratch a screw and you’ll find a bastard, it’s no great loss.’ He waved his chair leg in the air. ‘Me, you, these cunts, the whole stinking world. None of it would be a great loss.’

Twelve

Magnus had thought they would pause to work out a plan before they got to the reception desk, but the small band of inmates gained speed as they got closer to the front entrance. A man with keys ran on ahead to unlock each door and hold it open for the rest, who sailed through without faltering, as if they instinctively knew that to lose momentum would be to lose courage. The key-man waited until the last moment before opening the door leading to the entrance hall. He held it wide and they bombed through, keeping close, because the door was only wide enough for one man at a time.

It would have been better to keep quiet and hold on to the element of surprise, but the escapees were anxious and when the wolf-man raised his voice in a high ululating howl, others joined in. The sound was ghastly. Magnus thought that if he had been on the other side of the door he would have fled, but the self-elected cordon at the security desk were made of steelier stuff. They decked the first wave of trespassers with Tasers. The stun guns had been designed to fell with one quick blast, but the inmates pumped the triggers until the men snared by the wires stopped screaming and lay still on the ground. There were only a few Tasers to go round and no time to disengage the cables from their victims’ bodies, but the cordon had planned ahead. They weighed in with batons and improvised weapons. Jeb had cannily positioned himself and Magnus in the second wave of the assault. He Tasered the largest of the men guarding the hallway and then took the penknife from his pocket and stabbed another in the neck. Blood gushed from the wound in a mesmerising arc. Magnus grabbed the man as he sank to the ground.

‘Jeb, for Christ’s sake…’ He was about to tell his cellmate to get a grip. That he would end up killing someone if he wasn’t careful, but then something hit him, hard and sickening, on the back of his head. He fell forward, landing on top of the other man’s body. Jeb grabbed him by the scruff of his jumper and hauled him to his feet. They were in the middle of the tussle now, backed up against the admissions desk. ‘Computer!’ Jeb shouted in Magnus’s face.

It took Magnus a second to grasp the command, then he realised what Jeb wanted him to do. He tumbled on to the counter, rolled behind the desk and grabbed the desktop computer. The cables snagged, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, but then Magnus managed to topple it to the ground, breaking its screen. He put a foot through the cracked plastic, making certain it was truly beyond use and no one could discover that they were VPs. His heel stuck in the computer’s damaged frame. Magnus swore and pulled it free.

An overweight man was grappling with the electronics under the desk. He must have found the correct switch because he punched a hand into the air and shouted, ‘Ya beauty!’ and the front doors opened automatically. The gate to the outside world waited beyond it. An inmate dressed in jeans and a prison sweatshirt was running into the courtyard, a set of keys swinging in his hands. A prison guard raced after him, but the guard’s movements were slow and weaving. He faltered to a halt and sank on to his knees in the middle of the courtyard, clutching his head.

There were only a few of them left tussling in the entrance hall. Magnus looked for Jeb and saw him in the centre of a small ruck. The men were squeezed together, limbs tangled, like Uppies and Doonies in close combat for the ba’ and it was hard to tell who was fighting who.

‘C’mon, lads. Have yous lot nae hames to go to?’ Magnus shouted in the voice of Johnny Bell, landlord of the Snapper, who could empty a bar full of thirsty trawlermen, swift as the sea could sweep you from your feet. ‘The bloody gate’s open. Get yourselves through it.’

Some inmates took heed and ran for the door, a few continuing to exchange kicks and punches as they fled. A small knot of prisoners was too engaged in the fight to extricate themselves, afraid that if they turned their back their opponents would gain the advantage. Magnus had lost sight of Jeb, but it was every man for himself now. He scanned the foyer, plotting his route to the door. There was no way to avoid passing the cluster of fighters, but perhaps if he ran…

‘He’s a fucking nonce,’ a voice screamed.

For a moment Magnus was unsure who had shouted, then he saw the weasel face of the hungry VP he had released from his cell during their escape. Magnus’s cheeks flushed. He tore the computer keyboard from its shattered monitor, ready to use it as a weapon.

‘I’m not…’

Denial started to his lips in a rush of breath and shame. Then he saw the cut across the small man’s face, the bloody knife in Jeb’s hand, and realised who the VP had accused. The fight faltered and eyes glanced in Jeb’s direction, marking him. It was Magnus’s cue to break for the door, but he shouted, ‘He’s lying to save his own arse. That guy’s the nonce. I saw him earlier, straight out of the VP wing. He was wearing blue sweats.’

Two men had already grabbed Jeb. One of them pressed his hand to Jeb’s throat, pushing his head back, turning his face crimson. The small inmate was on the edge of the tussle. He pointed at Magnus. ‘He’s one t—’

Eyes swivelled in Magnus’s direction and he realised he was about to be lynched.

Jeb nutted one of the men holding him. He kicked the other one’s knees, knocking him flat, and then kneed the weasel-faced VP in the groin before he could finish his accusation. The man crumpled and Jeb kicked him in the head, felling him. The weasel-man crawled towards the exit. Magnus saw the penknife shining in Jeb’s hand and started towards him.

The fight was filtering away, more inmates making for the door. But the two prisoners who had fixed on Jeb seemed content to delay their escape. Blood was streaming from the nose of the man Jeb had nutted, but pain seemed to have given him strength. He sprang to his feet and caught hold of Jeb again. His companion shook the penknife from Jeb’s grip.

‘Just do him,’ the other man said, his smile as wide as his gut. ‘One less nonce, you’ll be doing the world a favour.’

If Magnus ran now he might make it through the front gate and out into the streets beyond. The man raised the penknife in the air. Magnus fired the computer keyboard at the upraised hand. It dealt Jeb a glancing blow on the forehead that freed him from the smiler’s grip and knocked the knife from the other man’s grasp.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Jeb’s attacker lunged towards Magnus who picked up a discarded fire extinguisher, freed its safety catch and pulled down on the trigger, blasting the men with foam. Jeb was back on his feet, grappling with the fat man, but the foam made the tiled floor treacherous and he slid backward, pulling his opponent on top of him.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Jeb shouted. ‘This isn’t fucking Home Alone. Hit him with it.’

Magnus swung the extinguisher; it was heavy and he almost lost his balance, but he managed to right himself and deal the other man a blow on the side of the head. His descent, sure as Wylie Coyote’s after he had been hit with an Acme anvil, would have been comical were it not for the sickening crunch of metal against bone. Magnus retched, but his stomach was empty and all that came up was bile. The man groaned. The fingers of one of his hands fluttered. Magnus drove the fire extinguisher down again, like a crofter marking where he was about to begin digging turf. There was another stomach-turning crunch of bone and then the man lay still.

The fat inmate lost his grip on Jeb. ‘Fuck.’ He took a step backward, his eyes moving from Magnus to his friend lying still and bloodied on the ground, then back to Magnus again. ‘Fuck,’ he repeated. ‘Fuck,’ and made for the exit.

Magnus scanned the entrance hall, preparing for the next attack, but he and Jeb were the only people left standing.

‘Shit.’ Jeb leaned forward panting, his hands on his knees. ‘I didn’t think you had it in you.’

‘I don’t.’ Magnus was gasping for breath. ‘Do you think he’s…?’

Jeb looked up. ‘Christ, that was a close one. I thought he had me there.’

Magnus held out his hands. They were trembling. ‘I think I might have…’

Jeb said, ‘You did what you had to do. You saved my skin and I saved yours.’

Magnus gave a crazy laugh. ‘What does that make us? Blood brothers?’

Jeb folded his penknife and slid it into his pocket. ‘It makes us even.’

There was a rumble of activity beyond the prison. Magnus looked towards the open gates and saw a flash of desert camouflage, a pale alert against the London brick.

Thirteen

‘We could pretend to be screws and show them our ID.’

Magnus kept his voice to a whisper, even though the wall they were crouched against was too far from the gate for the soldiers guarding it to hear them. His heart was still pounding from the fight in the entrance hall, but the fear that had stalked him since his arrest had vanished. The drab courtyard gleamed with colours he had never noticed before and the air made his skin tingle. Magnus’s eyes tracked a seagull flying high above. The sky was bluer than he remembered, the bird a soaring flash of white.

‘If they don’t believe us, it’ll be game over.’ Jeb was sorting through his pockets, examining the tangle of car keys he had lifted from the locker room. ‘I’m not getting banged up again.’

‘Going straight?’

Jeb glanced at Magnus. ‘That kind of comment could get you into trouble inside.’

‘Glad I managed to avoid trouble,’ Magnus whispered. He had a hysterical urge to laugh.

‘Save the jokes for later.’ Jeb was all business. He nodded towards the gates where a small group of soldiers stood, cradling guns. ‘It’s up to you what you do. I’m going to drive through them.’

Magnus took a deep breath. His bravery had been all adrenalin and it was wearing off. He felt tired and hungry.

Jeb said, ‘I’m not sure why these guys are hanging around instead of barging their way in, but my guess is that they’re not sure what they’re going to find inside and are waiting on reinforcements. We need to make our move now.’

It occurred to Magnus that he could hand himself in, throw himself on the mercy of the soldiers and take his chances. It was the phrase ‘mercy of the soldiers’ that decided him. The memory of news reports from Afghanistan and Iraq, film footage of men in orange jumpsuits being stretchered in chains into cages at Guantánamo Bay. He said, ‘How will we do it?’

‘Find a car, put the pedal to the metal and aim it at the gates. No finesse.’

‘What if they shoot?’

‘Duck.’ Jeb shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe we both end up with an extra bloody eye in the middle of our forehead. Are you up for it or not?’

This was how men landed in prison, Magnus realised, how he had got there himself, acting without imagining the consequences. He shook his head. ‘Probably not.’

‘Fuck you then.’

Jeb rose from their hiding place and ran the length of the wall, keeping his body low. Without thinking about what he was doing, Magnus followed. Jeb halted at a corner and peered round it. ‘I thought you were crapping out.’

‘I am,’ Magnus whispered. ‘But I can’t hide behind this wall for ever. There might be another gate.’

‘An unguarded exit?’

‘You never know.’

Jeb let out a snort. ‘The car park’s over there. Don’t make a show of yourself, if you’re following me.’

The clothes Jeb had chosen were shades of grey that melted into the urban landscape. Magnus glanced down at the mod T-shirt he had stolen from the locker room. The red and white target on his chest seemed like a poor choice now and he pulled up the zip of his hoodie to cover it.

Jeb turned the corner and sprinted across open tarmac to where ranks of cars were parked. Magnus plunged after him, thigh muscles singing with the effort of crouching and running. ‘They’ll probably shoot me in the arse and blow my fucking bollocks off,’ he muttered. But he made the shelter of the cars and hunkered down between a Mondeo and a Shogun. Jeb was flitting between the rows of vehicles, pointing one electronic key after another.

The Mondeo next to Magnus flashed its sidelights and gave an electronic chirrup.

‘Fuck.’ His voice was all breath.

Jeb jogged over, opened the driver’s door and slid inside.

‘Sure you don’t want to come along for the ride?’

‘I can think of pleasanter ways to commit suicide.’

‘Don’t jinx me.’ For the first time since they had sheltered in the art room Jeb looked nervous. He adjusted the rear-view mirror and fitted the key in the ignition. ‘You sit on your arse if you want. I’d rather take a chance than end up back inside.’

Magnus did not bother to contradict him. ‘Look.’ He pointed across the car park. ‘That’s our way out.’

The prison van was skewed across three spaces at the far end of the car park. It was long, with three small, high windows on either side, more like a large horsebox than a vehicle designed for ferrying men. Jeb complained that he didn’t have keys for it, that Magnus was making him lose time and that the van was ‘fucking impregnable’, but Magnus suspected that he was secretly relieved not to be facing a cordon of armed soldiers through the Mondeo’s wide windscreen.

Magnus pulled at the back door to the van, but it was locked tight. He skirted round to the front passenger side and Jeb took the driver’s door. Magnus tried opening his side.

‘Fuck, it’s locked.’

Even as Magnus said the words he heard the door on the other side click open and the horror in Jeb’s voice.

‘Jesus Christ.’

It was impossible to know how long the prison guard had been slumped in the well of the driver’s seat. But these were the hottest days of summer and it had been long enough to bloat the man’s stomach and putrefy his flesh. Jeb held his bloodstained sleeve against his nose and mouth.

‘No way, man, I am not getting in there.’

Magnus thought he saw something moving on the guard’s swollen belly. He turned and retched, holding a hand over his mouth to muffle the sound. Bile stung the back of his throat. He breathed deeply, his hands on his knees bracing himself, and then straightened up, took off the brown hoodie and grabbed the dead man’s arm, using the cloth as a barrier between his flesh and the corpse’s.

The smell was worse than that of the Minke whale that had been beached when he was fourteen. A group of volunteers had tried for hours to get it back into the water but the beast’s radar was faulty, or perhaps it had been ill and wanted to die. Their efforts had failed. The next day he and Hugh had dared each other to climb up on its black mountain of a body. In the end they had done it together, the pair of them slipping and sliding until they reached its peak, standing triumphant until the gases in the whale had suddenly shifted, and they had tumbled off, laughing and swearing, sure that the creature had come back to life.

‘Worse than a whale’s fart,’ he muttered. The dead guard flopped to the ground and Magnus saw the white stuff wriggling in the rotting flesh more clearly. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ Swearing helped. He dragged the man to one side, wiped the seat with the brown hoodie and dropped it on to the man’s face. ‘Rest in Peace.’ The van’s keys were resting in the ignition. Magnus turned to where his cellmate was crouched. ‘Do you want to drive?’

Jeb’s face was pale, but his voice had regained its edge. ‘Think you’ll go fast enough?’

Magnus nodded. ‘If there’s one thing island boys can do, it’s drive fast.’

He would have preferred to have been dressed in a prison guard’s uniform, but going back into the building to find one would take too much time and stripping the screw’s decaying body was out of the question. Magnus steered the van from its parking space. The cab smelled foul, but he kept its windows closed, even though he doubted that its glass was bullet proof. He glanced at Jeb. ‘Do you think the guy I hit with the fire extinguisher is dead?’

Jeb’s knees were folded tight, as if he were bracing himself for impact.‘Concentrate on getting us through the gate.’

‘I think maybe I killed him.’

‘Why would that bother you?’ Jeb took the penknife from his pocket and rolled it between his palms. Magnus remembered how the point of its blade had pierced an inmate’s neck, the arc of blood fountaining from the wound. Jeb said, ‘He was a piece of scum. He would have killed you, killed both of us, without blinking.’

‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ It was a question Magnus would not have dared to broach before, but the closed-in silence of the cab and the waiting troops made it seem imperative.

Jeb pressed the point of the penknife against the palm of his hand, testing the sharpness of the blade or the elasticity of his skin.

‘There’s no point in thinking about it.’

They were crossing the forecourt now and the soldiers had seen the van. Their eyes were on the vehicle, their guns resting in their arms. Magnus drove slowly, hoping the van’s insignia would make them think it was on official business. He felt the pure calm that always washed over him as he stepped on stage and into the spotlight, the fear that clenched his bowels before performances banished in the knowledge that, for good or for bad, it would all be over soon.

Jeb hissed, ‘Speed up.’

One of the soldiers, a young man with fair skin and red hair, stepped forward. He held up his right palm. Magnus slowed the van and held up a hand in greeting. ‘Smile, don’t let them see you’re nervous.’

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Jeb spoke through clenched teeth. His mouth was stretched into an expression that was more grimace than grin. ‘Put your foot down.’

‘Don’t worry.’

Magnus nodded at the soldier, one foot on the accelerator, the other on the clutch, keeping the van slow until they were almost at the main gate. At the last minute he pressed a hand to the horn and floored the accelerator. The van was slower to gain speed than he had expected and for one horrible moment he thought that Jeb was right, he had left it too late. Then he saw the soldiers diving out of the van’s path. He scraped the driver’s door against the gatepost, knocking its wing mirror off. Then they were out of Pentonville and into the streets beyond. Magnus turned the van left and let out a roar. He kept his foot to the floor, going as fast as he dared along the city street. Jeb squinted into the passenger-side wing mirror, looking to see if they were being pursued.

‘Anyone coming?’ Magnus asked.

‘Not so far.’

‘Stupid fucking squaddies, lock the gate if you want to keep folk inside.’

Magnus slammed his hands against the steering wheel, drumming out a victory tattoo, light-headed with the buzz of escape and freedom.

‘They were waiting on someone. That’s the only reason they’d have kept the gate open.’

It was as if Jeb’s words summoned the convoy. Two tanks flanked by soldiers turned out of a side street and drove towards them.

‘Oh shit.’ Magnus hit the brakes and slammed the steering wheel again, this time in frustration.

‘Keep calm.’ Jeb gripped Magnus’s arm. His fingers dug into the flesh, forcing him to pay attention. ‘They’re heading to the prison, not away from it. They might not know about us yet.’ He pointed to a side road. ‘Turn first right.’

Magnus did as he was told. He was still going too fast and the van swerved on to the wrong side of the road as he rounded the corner, but the street was deserted.

‘Okay,’ Jeb said, looking at the road behind them in the wing mirror. ‘Turn left at the end.’

Magnus obeyed him, taking the corner with more care this time.

He asked, ‘Are they behind us?’

‘No, I think we struck lucky. It looks like they weren’t interested in us. The squaddies at the gate mustn’t have radioed ahead.’

Magnus wondered if there were more bodies in the back of the van, prisoners who had never made it to their cells rolling from side to side, like slaves in the hold of a transport ship, each time he swung around a corner. That could have been his fate, locked in with men suffering from the sweats, watching them die one by one, and all the time being cooked alive inside the metal box.

‘Keep going.’ Jeb rolled his window down. Perhaps he was also wondering about the contents of the van, because he said, ‘We’ll ditch this fucking coffin asap.’

Magnus had grown used to the smell of decay inside the cab, but the fresh air blowing in through the passenger window was a relief. He opened the window on his side too and a breeze sprang in, ruffling his hair. They were alive.

Fourteen

It was only when he saw an old woman edging her way along the pavement with the aid of a Zimmer frame that Magnus realised what was wrong with the world beyond the van’s windows. The streets were too quiet for a sunny London afternoon. He said, ‘It’s too quiet.’

‘Not quiet enough.’ Jeb had been monitoring the road behind them in the wing mirror. ‘There’s a truck behind us.’

‘An army truck?’

‘No, a VW camper van full of page-three girls.’

Magnus put his foot to the accelerator. The streets were too small for the cumbersome vehicle and it was an effort to keep it on the road.

‘I thought you said you could drive.’

‘Lewis Hamilton couldn’t steer this thing any faster,’ Magnus said.

You are in a controlled zone, an amplified voice announced. Pull over and exit your vehicle.

Jeb said, ‘Keep going.’

Magnus glanced at the knife in Jeb’s hand and wondered if it would go to his own throat should he slow the prison van.

You are in contravention of martial law. The amplified voice was calm. Pull over and exit your vehicle or we will shoot.

There was a tight turn up ahead, an alleyway that they were never going to make. Magnus dropped down the gears. ‘I can stop and back up or we’ve got a choice between controlled crash and out-of-control crash.’

Jeb said, ‘Don’t fucking crash.’

‘Trust me.’

The knife hand twitched. ‘I don’t trust you.’

We are prepared to fire.

Magnus increased their speed.

This is your final warning. Preparing to fire in five… four…

He heard Jeb fastening his safety belt and wondered that he had not fastened it before.

… three… two…

‘Hold on!’ Magnus skewed the van across the road, hitting the mouth of the alley sideways, blocking it with the cab of the van. The windscreen cracked and stayed miraculously in place, but both side windows shattered, spraying the interior with glitters of flying glass. There was a second dunt and the inertia-reel seatbelt tightened across Magnus’s chest, as the truck pursuing them made contact with the rear of their van. The windscreen of the cab gave way and fell in on them in chunks.

Magnus opened his eyes and saw Jeb already out of his seatbelt, his face potted with stabs of blood, as if he had been attacked by sharp-beaked crows. He touched his own face and felt heat and broken glass.

‘Come on.’ Jeb was almost on top of him, reaching towards the handle of the driver’s door.

‘Lock your side,’ Magnus said. ‘It might slow them down.’

He felt as if his brain had been shaken around his skull like a dice in a cup, but managed to open his own door and jump out into the blocked side of the alley. He staggered as he hit the ground and righted himself against the side of the van. Jeb followed quickly behind him. Magnus looked for the soldiers, but the army truck was out of sight somewhere between the back of the van and the wall of the alley. He had no idea how badly it, or the men inside, were damaged.

‘If this turns out to be a dead-end, then you’ve just given them a wall to shoot us against.’ Jeb shoved Magnus on the shoulder, reminding him of the need to keep moving and they started to jog towards whatever lay at the end of the alley.

Magnus said, ‘This is London, not New York. They won’t shoot us.’

‘I thought you came from Jockland, not another fucking planet.’ Tears of blood were running down Jeb’s face. His eyelashes glistered with shards of glass. He looked like a reluctant glam rocker, a bully boy drummer femmed up for the fans on his manager’s advice. ‘They announced on a loud fucking hailer that they were going to shoot us.’ Jeb spat on the ground. ‘Are you deaf as well as stupid?’

The alleyway was dark and lined with bins. It reminded Magnus of the lane behind Johnny Dongo’s hotel, where he had beaten up the rapist MP. He should never have got drunk, should never have been there. ‘Should never have been bloody born,’ he muttered under his breath. He could hear footsteps but was unsure if it was the sound of soldiers following them or merely the echo of his and Jeb’s feet against the cobbles. Jeb’s movements were sluggish and twice he stumbled. Magnus realised that his own progress was slow and weaving and knew that if they had to face the soldiers they would lose. They turned another dark corner and saw a blaze of sunlight. The alley led out into a main street lined with shops.

‘Thank fuck,’ Jeb said. ‘Come on.’

Almost all the shop windows that lined the road had been smashed. New clothes, some still on their hangers, lay scattered in heaps at the edge of the road, piled like storm-blasted seaweed at low tide. Trainers spilled from cardboard boxes inside a ransacked branch of Foot Locker and mobile phones were scattered like hand grenades outside EE Mobile. The bank sandwiched between the two plundered shops stood strangely intact, as if looters had decided they preferred solid merchandise to cash. Magnus picked up a smartphone. The plastic had been warmed by the sun. The phone’s screen was cracked, its virgin battery uncharged. It would be no use for calling home. He dropped it with the rest.

‘Do you know where we are?’

‘Not a scooby.’ Jeb’s voice was a whisper although the road, like the others they had driven along, was empty of people.

A plastic carrier bag, caught by the breeze, wrapped itself around Magnus’s leg. He peeled it free.

‘Where is everybody? This is like something out of Dr Who.’

Somewhere there was burning. The breeze was tainted with the odour of melting plastic and charred wood. The scent caught at the back of Magnus’s throat, nasty and acrylic, but there was an undertaste to it, a charred, summer barbecue smell that reminded him he was hungry. A Tesco Direct stood a few yards down the road. Someone had started to board up its windows, but they had given up halfway through and the plate glass on the exposed side had been replaced by fresh air and jagged shards.

‘I need to eat something.’

‘We need to get under cover.’

Jeb grabbed his elbow and kept moving, taking Magnus with him. Magnus shook himself free, but they crossed the road together, walking around cars that had been abandoned with no thought to parking fines or regulations. Magnus peered into a baby-blue Mini standing in the middle of the road, its doors wide open.

‘Someone left this car in a hurry,’ Magnus said. ‘The key’s still in the ignition.’

Jeb snapped, ‘Don’t start it.’

But Magnus had already leaned inside and turned the key. The engine growled into life. The sound was loud in the silent street and was almost immediately punctuated by the slap of boots pounding against pavement. There was movement in some of the abandoned shops as people who had hidden unmoving in the shadows fled. Jeb was already running for cover. The road was too jammed with cars for there to be any point in trying to drive anywhere and Magnus ran after him, leaving the car engine idling. He heard a crack of gunfire. He had been beater at enough grouse shoots to be sure that whoever was firing was not sending a warning shot over their heads.

‘Fucking idiot,’ Jeb panted and Magnus knew that it was not the gunman he was cursing.

A grille had been pulled half shut across the entrance to a subway station, as if someone had started to lock up and then given up the task as too much trouble. A man in a business suit lay just outside. He was thin and might once have been rich, but death had made these things irrelevant. Jeb leapt over his body and Magnus followed, catching the toe of his trainer against the man’s shoulder and landing flat on the tiled floor of the station. The fall saved him. Bullets rattled into the ticket hall, ricocheting against the walls and shattering the window of the information booth.

Jeb hurdled the ticket turnstile. Magnus crawled beneath the barrier nearest to him and followed the sound of Jeb’s footsteps along the tiled corridors to the platform below. There were bodies in the hallways, men and women who had lain down and not managed to rouse themselves again, but the soldiers might still be behind him and Magnus did not stop to check if any of the sleepers were alive. He saw the black line edging the walls, and a sign directing him onwards and knew that they were heading towards the Northern line. North, the rhythm of his feet said against the tunnel floor: north, north, north, north, north.

Fifteen

There were other people on the platform, but Jeb was the only one standing.

‘Can you believe it?’

Magnus did not need to ask what he was talking about. The reality of the sweats was stronger below ground than it had been in the looted streets. Up above there was still the chance that they had stumbled on the aftermath of one of London’s riots; down here the evidence lay in the bodies slumped where they had fallen, waiting for trains they would never board. They were bodies, Magnus told himself, to be pitied and mourned. The thing to fear was flesh and blood, the soldiers who might yet appear and take him back to prison at gunpoint. But his skin crawled with the certainty that the lady who had pulled the folds of her orange sari over her face before she died was about to draw the gauzy material back, blink her dead eyes and come towards him. Or that the youth, whose yellow headphones were still coiled around his neck, might straighten his spine and get to his feet. Or that any of the people, so clear and sharp-edged, so there, but no longer present, would twitch awake, turn their heads and look at him with the jealousy the dead must surely feel for the living. It felt wicked to want the so recently deceased to remain dead, but they were gone and every horror movie and zombie flick Magnus had ever seen was crowding in on him.

‘It’s unbelievable,’ Jeb said again, and Magnus saw that the dead stillness of the Underground was working on him too.

The electricity had failed and the platform was dimly lit by emergency lights. Along at the far end something moved, indistinct in the shadows. Magnus took a step backward; his foot touched the softness of another body and he almost toppled. He let out a gasp. The thing moved again, swift and undulating, and he realised that it was not one of the bodies restored to half-life, but the largest rat he had seen, sleek and busy, its whiskers twitching. The rat looked at him, and then it perked its nose in another direction, turning its ears, like radar towards some sound only it could hear. It scuttled down on to the tracks and ran into the waiting blackness of the tunnels beyond. A moment later Magnus heard the footsteps that had disturbed it. Jeb heard them too and held a finger to his lips. He nodded towards the tracks, where the rat had made its escape. Magnus shook his head. It was impossible. He had seen the Dongolite’s face as the train consumed him. Prison was preferable to the rush of noise and steel that had sucked the boy under. Jeb shrugged, exaggerating the gesture to make up for not speaking. He jumped down on to the tracks and jogged towards the north tunnel, his feet crunching against the gravel.

Magnus heard his own breath, loud in his head. The soldiers’ footsteps came closer. The dead woman lay still beneath the folds of her orange sari and the yellow wires of the youth’s headphones remained coiled around his neck. There were rats in the tunnels, rats and inky darkness that might be split without warning by the electric rush of a subway train.

The footsteps were very close now. The soldiers would be with him soon. Magnus wondered how they could be bothered to chase him in the face of so much death. Why they did not simply dump their uniforms and escape while they were still alive. But perhaps he already knew the answer. The only way to avoid going mad was to go on. Following orders was an enviable profession.

Magnus ran along the platform to a maintenance ladder and climbed down on to the tracks. The live rail glinted silver and tempting on his right. He marked the distance between it and him and ran northwards. A voice shouted behind him but Magnus ran on, into the dark.

Sixteen

Pitch-blackness folded around Magnus. The soldiers were still out there, somewhere in the dim-bright. Something scuttled through the dark and he imagined the same fat rat that he had seen on the Underground platform.

Between the ages of ten and seventeen Magnus and his cousin Hugh had spent many idle days shooting barn-rats with air rifles, competing for the highest score. Hugh had usually won, but they were well matched and Magnus was generally a close second. Magnus bent over in the dark and tucked the hems of his jeans into his socks, the way his father had instructed him to, to stop the rats from climbing up the inside of his trouser legs. He felt a sudden suspicious fear that they might somehow know how many of them he had murdered and decide to get their revenge.

Magnus stretched out a hand and walked into the blackness. Every atom of his body resisted, but he pressed on, humming the ghost of a song beneath his breath to give himself courage.

Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled,

Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,

Welcome tae yer gory bed,

Or tae victorie.

Now’s the day and now’s the hour…

Something touched him and he sank on to his haunches gasping for breath.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Jeb hissed.

Magnus would have liked to have punched him, but Jeb was a voice in the darkness and Magnus was finding it hard to breathe. He filled his lungs, trying to calm his hammering heart. ‘You scared the shit out of me.’

He saw a flash of white in the dark and realised that Jeb was smiling.

‘Don’t worry. They won’t come down here.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Would you?’

‘No, but I wouldn’t join the fucking army in the first place. They have lights on their gun sights. They’re wearing stab vests and helmets and I’m willing to bet they’ve eaten recently. They can take us no bother, if they want to.’

‘They don’t have our motivation,’ Jeb said. He was standing in a hollow in the tunnel wall, Magnus guessed. A recess where track workers had sheltered from passing trains, sucking in their bellies as carriages rushed past. ‘Soldiers are pack animals. These guys looked like ordinary squaddies to me. They won’t go far from the rest of their crew without orders. It makes them nervous.’

As if on cue, two pinpoints of light appeared in the blackness of the corridor. Jeb pulled Magnus into the recess beside him. It smelled of piss, mortar and loamy earth, a graveyard scent. It was a tight fit and Magnus felt Jeb’s body against his, warm in the dampness. Jeb moved a hand to his pocket. Magnus knew he was taking out his penknife and resisted the urge to grab Jeb’s wrist, for fear of feeling the sharp edge of the blade penetrate his side.

The lights came closer, no longer pinpoints but two fans of brilliance, illuminating the tunnel and revealing its red-brick walls, the high curve of its roof. The lights revealed rats too, larger than any that had graced his father’s barn. Fat enough to make a good meal for a starving man, Magnus thought, disgusted by the eager way his belly responded to the image. He wondered if the army would feed them or if Jeb was right and they would be summarily executed; worse than dying would be to die hungry.

The lights were edging nearer and it would not be long before they exposed their hiding place. Magnus shrank against the wall. He felt Jeb’s body tense, muscles bunching, readying for combat. There was a good chance that they would die here, wearing strangers’ clothes and carrying other men’s IDs. Magnus heard the sound of the soldiers’ boots, crunching against the gravel, and felt sad that his mother would never know what had happened to him. He heard something else too, phlegm hacking in one of the soldiers’ throats. Light ricocheted around the walls, bouncing across the roof of the tunnel in crazy circles and Magnus guessed that the soldier had bent over to be sick. He felt Jeb holding his breath, and realised that he was holding his own too.

‘Mike, are you okay?’ he heard a voice ask. The answer was low and unintelligible and the same voice said, ‘Do you think you’ve got it?’ The answer must have been a negative because the voice said, ‘I think you’re wrong, Mike. I think you’ve caught it. You’re boiling up, man. You should have told me.’ The voice sounded young and full of more regret than a young voice should be able to hold. It had a Liverpool accent, both soft and harsh, like a war ballad. ‘You should have told me, Mike,’ it repeated. Whatever Mike whispered next made the voice sadder. ‘I’m sorry, Mike,’ it said. ‘Sorry, man.’

Jeb must have guessed what was going to happen next because a shudder ran through him. There was the sound of a gun being cocked and someone — Mike — shouted something that was all fear and panic, not a word at all, but unmistakable in its plea. There was a crack of gunfire, a flash in the dark, brighter than the lights on the gun sights that had led the men there. The soft Liverpudlian voice said, ‘Sorry, mate.’

There was a moment of not quite silence, a sound of rustling and Magnus guessed the soldier was stripping his dead companion of useful kit, then the light resumed its stare down the tunnel. It puddled inches from where their feet stood, side by side in the recess.

They were dead men. Jeb’s penknife was a child’s toy, effective against a half-starved convict, but useless against an armed professional. Magnus wished that he could pray. Now was the time to commend themselves to their maker.

‘Don’t worry, lads.’ The voice was stronger, as if the act of killing had fortified it. ‘I’ve had enough. You go your way, and I’ll go mine.’ The soldier paused as if he were waiting for a reply, but speaking would give away their position, and Jeb and Magnus kept their silence. ‘Okay.’ The voice sounded at a loss. ‘I guess there’s nothing much to be said, except that I’ve got a gun for each hand now, so go the other way, if you want to keep on going.’

There was another pause, and then the footsteps resumed their contact with the gravel, fading into the distance. Magnus and Jeb stayed where they were, upright in the open recess, like mannequins in a display case, rooted to the spot until long after the sound of the soldier’s retreat had vanished.

Seventeen

They travelled north through the dark, side by side, in silence. Magnus was glad of Jeb’s presence. It was good to know that there was someone else alive, even if it was a man who knew how to kill quickly and who had been locked up for crimes unknown. Magnus would have liked to talk. Silence allowed too much space for his thoughts, which were all of home: his mother and sister, his cousins, even his brother-in-law. Davie was not a bad guy, just a wee bit too concerned with his own comfort for Magnus’s liking. Rhona ran around after him as if it were the 1950s and Davie a limbless invalid. They might all be dead, a cruel voice whispered in his head, dead and no one there to bury them. He started to sing again, softly under his breath:

Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled,

Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,

Welcome tae yer gory bed…

‘Shut up.’ Jeb sounded weary. ‘We don’t know who’s out here. And you’ve got a crap voice.’

Magnus had always finished his act with a song, like the old comics on the circuit used to. Stanley Baxter, Frankie Howerd, Morecambe and Wise: those boys had known what they were doing and it was all there for the taking if you watched their acts. Not the jokes themselves, time had moved on and they had dated, but their patter, the way they moved, the way they were with the audience. They had honed their techniques over decades of performing live, before they got their big breaks. He would watch them late at night on YouTube, the screen of his computer glowing in a dimly lit hotel room, a miniature of Famous Grouse in a tooth-mug by the bed. He wondered if it was all gone, hotel rooms, the Internet, YouTube, Famous Grouse…

I fought at land, I fought at sea,

At hame I fought my Auntie, O;

But I met the Devil an’ Dundee,

On the Braes o’ Killiekrankie, O.

A hand slammed against his back and Magnus stumbled forward, only just managing to avoid falling flat against the track. ‘What the fuck?’

‘I told you to shut up.’

Magnus had not realised that he was singing. Jeb’s voice brought him back to himself, back to ratty blackness and hunger.

‘Who put you in charge?’

‘You did.’

Magnus tightened his fists, but he was too tired for another fight. ‘Soon as we get out of here we split.’

‘Why wait?’

‘Because this tunnel only has two directions and I’m not going back, not after walking all this way.’

‘Reckon I could make you.’

Reckon you could, the soft voice in Magnus’s head whispered.

‘I won’t sing if it annoys you that much…’ Magnus stopped mid-sentence.

They had been stumbling like prisoners on an enforced march, along a curve in the tunnel, one or other of them occasionally touching the damp wall for guidance. Now they had reached the turn of the bend. A faint light shone ahead.

‘Shit.’ Jeb’s voice was as soft as a bird’s wing flapping into flight.

Fear cramped in Magnus’s belly. ‘What do you think it is?’

‘Something.’ The light was too far away for it to illuminate their features, but Magnus could hear the shrug in Jeb’s voice. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t like it.’

‘Thank fuck for that. At least it means you won’t feel a song coming on.’

Magus ignored the jibe. ‘It could be anything.’

‘Light at the end of the tunnel, that’s meant to be a good thing, isn’t it?’

Jeb’s voice was resolute, but Magnus thought he could hear a shiver of apprehension in it. Magnus said, ‘That soldier’s probably clear by now. There’s nothing to stop us going back.’

‘If you don’t mind being a poof.’

It was strange how the darkness Magnus had feared had become the thing to hold on to, the light something to be afraid of.

Jeb said, ‘I had a girlfriend that was into hippy shit.’ It was the first time he had mentioned anything about his life before prison and Magnus found himself paying attention. ‘She used to say, put the bad stuff behind you and go forward. She was right about that. Always go forward, never back.’

‘Ever gone too far?’

Jeb’s laugh was deep and humourless. ‘Far too far.’

He started to walk on, his feet crunching against the gravel and after a moment Magnus followed him. It was like a near-death experience, walking the long dark tunnel towards a pinprick of light.

‘I keep expecting a voice to tell me to turn back, it’s not my time yet,’ Magnus whispered.

‘Be nice to wake up and find out it was all a dream.’ Something about the light in the darkness seemed to have made Jeb more confiding.

Magnus said, ‘That’d be grand, right enough.’

He imagined himself in his old room on the farm, eleven or twelve years old. Woken by the sound of the kitchen door shutting as his father came in from early-morning milking, the rattle of metal on metal in the kitchen below, as his mother set the pans on the range, ready to make breakfast. His loathed school uniform hanging from the peg on the back of his bedroom door. Hugh still alive; knowing they would meet later at the turn in the bend where the school bus stopped. Nothing special, just an ordinary school day. Tears were running down his cheeks. Magnus let them take their course until the light threatened to touch his face and then he rubbed them away with the back of his hand.

It was a subway train, sitting tight against the walls of the tunnel, its windows illuminated from within. Jeb slid along the side of the train.

‘Check this out.’

Magnus followed. It was what he had wanted to avoid, being constricted between a subway train and a tunnel wall, another rock and a hard place.

‘We can go through it.’ Jeb pointed to a smashed window. He took off his jacket. ‘Give us a leg-up.’

Magnus helped to boost Jeb up. Jeb slung his jacket over the jagged edge of the broken window and slid inside, head first. It was a tight fit and he kicked his legs as he wriggled through. He stuck his head out.

‘You coming?’

‘What’s it like?’

‘More of the same.’

Magnus muttered, ‘More of the same.’

He took a deep breath and climbed on to the side of the carriage. Jeb reached out and dragged Magnus through. The jacket was still draped across the broken glass, but Magnus felt it scrape against his belly as he slid inside the compartment. They would have to be careful. Scrapes and cuts could turn septic and there was no longer the guarantee of a friendly doctor armed with antibiotics, ready to patch them up.

The brightness of the carriage hurt Magnus’s eyes, but it was mercifully empty. Had he ever been in a completely empty London Underground carriage before? Maybe in the dim light of half-dawn after a heavy post-show session, but then his senses would be dulled by drink and tiredness, the taste of sulphate coating the back of his throat.

‘You said it was more of the same.’

Jeb had put his jacket back on and was already starting down the carriage to the connecting doors and the next compartment. He glanced back at Magnus.

‘What would you call it?’

‘I thought you meant more bodies.’

Jeb opened the door and stepped through.

A thin man was slumped in the corner of the compartment, his face hidden by long dreadlocks that had fallen forward, obscuring his features.

Jeb said, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’

The carriage smelled like long-ignored refuse from some downscale grill house. Meaty leavings that had been locked in a tin shed for days in the middle of a heatwave.

Magnus pulled the neck of his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose.

‘It took some people suddenly,’ Jeb said. A phone rested on the seat beside the dead man. He picked it up and tossed it to Magnus. ‘ET phone home.’

‘Don’t you want it?’

The mobile was turned off. Magnus switched it on, wincing at the sound of its wake-up tune: loud and stupidly melodic. The battery was almost full, but as he had expected there was no signal. He glanced at the log. The last call had been two days ago, to Mum. It had gone unanswered. Magnus turned the mobile off again and stowed it in his jeans pocket.

Jeb was at the door to the next carriage. ‘Guess you feel sorry for me. The end of the world and there’s no one I’d like to call.’

Magnus caught the door as it was about to slam shut and followed Jeb through.

‘Who said it was the end of the world?’

‘Looks like it, from where I’m standing.’ Jeb’s voice was belligerent. As if he had just begun to comprehend the magnitude of what was happening and was working his way up to expressing it. The next carriage was empty too. A tatty copy of Metro lay crumpled on the floor. Jeb picked it up and shoved it at Magnus. ‘Here you go. You like reading the news.’

The newspaper felt thin and insubstantial, a half edition. Its headline was to the point: SWEATS KILLS BILLIONS.

‘We’re not the only ones who’ve survived.’ Magnus folded the Metro into a baton and slid it into the back pocket of his jeans. ‘A bunch of lads left the prison with us, and there were plenty of soldiers about the jail. London’s an overcrowded shithole.’ He had loved the city, loved the anonymity it conferred, loved that he could walk for miles without anyone hailing him to ask his business and tell him theirs. ‘It was bound to get hit hard. Things will be different in the countryside. I bet the sweats have hardly touched the islands. People are always behind the times up there.’

No they’re not, the voice Magnus feared whispered in his head. Once maybe, but not any more. Orkney had Internet and drugs, a giant Tesco. There was no more relying on catalogues for clothing. Girls had the latest fashions delivered to their door and when they were dressed for a night out you would be hard pushed to tell them from Londoners.

Surely someone on the council would have got wise and set up a quarantine zone, he consoled himself. As soon as it became clear what was happening they were bound to have halted trains, flights and ferries, switched off the constant stream of tourists.

Money, the cruel voice whispered. All those hotels, B&Bs and restaurants; the cafés, craft shops, excursions and galleries.

The carriages were mostly empty, but occasionally they passed bodies lying where they had died. ‘It’s like going to sleep,’ Magnus’s mother had said to him of death. ‘You close your eyes and don’t wake up.’

His father had been caught in the combine, his flesh hacked, his bones and organs crushed. The doctor said death had been instantaneous, but Magnus had dreamed about the moment his father finished clearing the blockage in the combine’s blades. There must have been a shit-sinking second when he knew, as the machine growled back to life, that he had neglected to take the keys from the ignition.

Windows and doors were shattered or forced open in some of the carriages, where survivors had smashed their way free. The driver must have died, Magnus guessed. They would find him slumped across the wheel, or huddled on the floor of the cab. He remembered the driver of the prison van, the squirming white of his belly.

‘Why do you think we haven’t caught it yet?’ he asked Jeb as they slammed into yet another carriage, another stink of shit and rotting meat. ‘Do you think we’re immune?’

Jeb had pulled his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose and his words were muffled.

‘Maybe, or maybe it’s in the post.’

Jeb sounded as if living and dying were all the same to him, but Magnus had seen how hard he would fight to survive.

‘Did you get ill?’

‘Sicker than a dead dog.’ Jeb looked at him. ‘I caught it early. They were about to take me to hospital when I got better. I tried to string it out, in the hope of meeting a nice nurse. I thought maybe some wild woman would fancy getting it on with a bad man, they say it happens sometimes. But the screws guessed I was faking. How about you?’

‘The guy in the cell I was in got it. It took a long time for him to die. I had three days of close exposure.’

Jeb nodded, as if it made sense. ‘Some people die slow, others die fast. The poor bastards on this train obviously didn’t expect to catch it.’

Magnus made a mental inventory of his own aches and pains. So far there was nothing that tiredness and hunger could not account for. Perhaps the sweats would strike him down suddenly, the way it had hit the people on the train. He thought of the unanswered phone call on the dead man’s mobile: Mum.

‘Maybe they knew they had it and were trying to get to somewhere, someone.’

‘Maybe.’

They made their way to the control cabin in silence. This time it was Jeb who moved the corpse, sliding the train driver out of the cab and into the corridor.

‘Poor sod.’ It was the first time he had expressed pity for any of the dead and Magnus glanced at him. Jeb caught his look. ‘My old man worked on the railways. He wasn’t a driver, you need connections to be a driver, but I know what he’d have thought about dying on the job; a fucking insult and not even any overtime to make it worth your while.’ He was fiddling with the controls. ‘Ever driven one of these things?’

‘No.’

‘Me neither, but how difficult can it be?’

The tunnel stretched ahead, dark and seemingly as endless as outer space, but they had walked a long way. Surely it wouldn’t be far until the next station, the next assembly of bodies. Magnus could see his own reflection in the train’s curved windscreen. He looked thinner, older, like the fishermen he had sometimes seen coming ashore in the early morning, battered by the elements, half-dead to the world.

‘These trains need electricity to work.’

‘I’m not completely fucking ignorant.’ Jeb threw a few switches and pressed some buttons, experimenting with the dashboard. ‘Just cos the station was out doesn’t mean the points will be. If everything rode off one circuit the whole system would overload.’

As if to confirm what he was saying the engine shuddered alive. Magnus imagined the corpses slumped in their seats quivering in response. He saw them staggering down the carriages, heads bowed, hair hanging over their faces like the dreadlocked man in the first compartment, coming to see who had woken them.

Jeb let out a shout of triumph and the engine died. He slammed his hand against the dashboard, hard enough to hurt. ‘Shit! Fucking thing!’ He pressed a combination of levers and switches, but whatever charge the train had stored was gone.

They rested for a while in the shelter of the carriage, but Magnus sensed danger in sleep and though Jeb sank deep and snoring, he did not get beyond a half-doze. Then it was up and out, into the dark again, a long stumble through nothingness until they reached the next station and a weary climb up precipitous, stalled escalators. There was a moment of swearing and panic when they realised that the grilles to the Underground entrance were shut and bolted, but then Jeb found a key hanging from a hook in the ticket office and they were suddenly, miraculously, out into the brightness.

If the tunnel had been outer space, then this was a new planet of whose atmosphere they were uncertain. Magnus was getting better at un-focusing his eyes as he passed dead bodies, but it was hard to block out everything and so he knew that the corpse he was skirting had once been a woman in a summer dress. He glimpsed a tangle of long, russet hair and felt the pity of it all.

Jeb stepped through a smashed window of a Pret A Manger and grabbed a bottle of water. He threw its cap on the floor and chugged down its contents. Magnus followed suit. The water was warm, but the sensation of it going over his throat and down into his belly was delicious. He drank half of his bottle and then forced himself to stop, worried he would be sick.

The shop was a mess, but unless the contents of the till had been taken it was hard to see what whoever had broken in had been after. Tables and chairs had tumbled as if the seating area had been the scene of a fight, but there were no bodies, no spatters of blood. The glass counter was shattered and a display cabinet lay tipped on its side beside it. The wrapped food it had held was scattered across the floor.

He and Jeb squatted on their haunches and pawed through mouldering sandwiches, melted puddings and glistening sushi. They burst open packets of crisps and stale muffins that seemed impervious to decay. It was the kind of food Magnus hated, the sort of crap he resorted to eating on badly planned tours, where he arrived in towns too late for dinner and left too early for lunch. It was the best meal he had ever eaten.

When they were finished they packed a couple of paper bags they found behind the counter with more snacks and bottled water and crossed the road to a hotel. The doors were open and they walked silently through the carpeted lobby, their senses under assault from a surfeit of textures and colours after the grey of the prison and the black of the subway tunnel.

It was a five-star place, old-fashioned and gaudy with wealth. They passed the reception desk, unchallenged. Everything was neatly arranged, as if the staff and guests had simply left, taking their luggage with them. The carpet was decorated with floral medallions, the chairs figured with gold paisley patterns, the satin curtains embossed with thick, crisscrossing lines. Patterns vied with patterns, colours with colours; everything caught, reflected and refracted, over and over again in bronzed mirrors. Magnus said, ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.’

‘I can think of worse fates,’ Jeb said and Magnus wondered how it would be to lie on a soft mattress and feel clean sheets against your skin.

The hotel corridors were a challenge to match the Underground tunnel. The lights were still on, the rows of closed doors a series of possibilities. Neither of them knew how to activate the hotel’s electronic key cards and so they took turns at kicking and shouldering locks until they gave way. There were a couple of false attempts, rooms wrapped in darkness with bodies humped beneath their covers, but then they found two adjoining bedrooms. They made no plans for later, but their eyes met briefly for a moment before they each went into their room and closed the door behind them.

Eighteen

Magnus woke suddenly, aware that there was someone else in the room. Jeb was a shadow at the window. He had opened the curtains a few inches and was staring out at a view of the building’s flat-roofed kitchens. He turned and looked at Magnus.

‘I walked up to the sixteenth floor. You can see a good way across the city from up there.’ His voice was calm, as if he were just back from buying a round at the bar and picking up a conversation they had already started. ‘A lot of it’s on fire.’

Magnus swung his feet out of the bed. He had intended to wash before going to sleep, but the lure of the hotel bed had proved too much for him and he had slipped between its sheets filthy and fully dressed, only pausing to take his trainers off.

‘How close are the fires?’ Magnus stretched. His head hurt. His back hurt. His shoulders, legs and arms hurt.

‘Hard to say.’ Jeb paused and Magnus got the impression that he was seeing the view from the top floor again and assessing the distance between them and the fires. ‘Not so close you can’t take some time to sort yourself out, but close enough for us to need to think about moving on.’

Magnus was unsure of how he felt about the ‘us’. He got to his feet, rubbing his eyes. Jeb, he noticed, was freshly shaved, showered and changed. Magnus said, ‘So there’s still water.’

‘Hot water.’ Jeb nodded towards a chair where a neatly folded bundle of clothes waited. ‘I got you these.’

It felt like a rival on the comedy circuit had just offered to swap the top slot for inferior billing. Some instinct within Magnus twitched, reminding him that kindness was a thing to be mistrusted, but he said, ‘Thanks.’

He had been too weary, too fearful, to look at the television earlier. Now he lifted the remote and pointed it at the blank screen.

Flashing images appeared from a hospital ward somewhere in India. They were quickly replaced by similar scenes from somewhere in Europe and then Africa. The TV’s volume was down and subtitles stabbed across the bottom of its screen.

V596 IS NO RESPECTER OF AGE OR SOCIAL CLASS

The picture shifted to stock film of an anonymous scientist delicately inserting a pipette into a test tube.

SCIENTISTS ACROSS THE WORLD ARE TAKING PART IN AN UNPRECEDENTED COLLABORATION

‘It’s showing the same stuff, over and over,’ Jeb said in a low voice. ‘I let it run on for an hour this morning. I reckon someone put it on repeat before they left the studio.’ Before they died, the soft voice in Magnus’s head whispered. He kept his eyes on the screen, where anxious men and women ushered their children towards hastily commandeered primary schools and community centres. It had been a sunny afternoon, but the children were dressed in coats and jackets, as if wrapping them up tight would help protect them from infection.

QUARANTINE CENTRES HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED IN TOWNS AND CITIES ACROSS EUROPE

The camera focused on unhappy-looking soldiers manning a barricade. Magnus thought some of them looked sick, but perhaps worry and lack of sleep had sapped the colour from their skin.

CURFEWS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED. NO-GO ZONES PUT IN PLACE TO AVOID LOOTING AND DAMAGE TO PROPERTY

Magnus said, ‘We should check out the Internet.’

‘It’s down.’ Jeb shrugged his shoulders. ‘In the hotel anyway. I tried the computers behind the reception desk and a few laptops. Could be the server.’

‘Could be.’ Magnus nodded, though he knew that neither of them was convinced.

The scrolling banner at the bottom of the screen announced:

Military law established… Looters and rumour-mongers to face the highest penalties… Schools cancelled… Curfews in place during hours of darkness… Dog owners urged to keep pets indoors… Cabinet reconvened… Prime Minister set to make an announcement later today…

And on the main screen the various images of hospital wards around the world were repeating.

V596 IS NO RESPECTER OF AGE OR SOCIAL CLASS. SCIENTISTS ACROSS THE WORLD ARE TAKING PART IN AN UNPRECEDENTED COLLABORATION

Magnus switched channels, but they were either lost in static, guarded by test cards or running the same footage he had just watched.

‘It’s been like that all morning,’ Jeb said.

Magnus wanted to make a joke about how he would have predicted endless repeats of Frasier or Friends, but he could not trust himself to speak. He lifted the pile of clothes Jeb had brought him and took them into the bathroom, not bothering to ask where they had come from.

Magnus showered with the bathroom door ajar. The water was tepid, but he could feel it restoring him to life. Prison had given him an awareness of walls and corners, he realised, a reluctance to be contained. Perhaps if he survived he would become one of those feral men who lived alone in the outdoors. There had been one of them on Wyre. Their mothers had told them to keep away from him, but one long holiday afternoon Magnus and Hugh had taken the ferry over and ridden their bikes up to the battered caravan where he lived. The man was outside, dressed only in baggy khaki shorts that looked like they had seen good service in the Great War. He looked wild, right enough, a Ben Gunn scarecrow with lunatic grey hair and a beard to match. He had been feeding something to his dogs, but paused to give the boys a gummy smile and then raised a hand and beckoned to them. Magnus had taken a step forward. Hugh grabbed his arm and without saying anything to each other, they had jumped on their bikes and pedalled off, as if the de’il himself was after them.

Hugh had been stupid to kill himself. It was a stupid waste, a stupid, senseless waste. Death would have come around eventually and in the meantime he could have lived.

The mobile phone Jeb had taken from the dead man in the subway carriage was sitting on the bedside table. Magnus wrapped a towel around his waist, sat on the edge of the bed and turned it on. He could hear his mother’s telephone ringing, far away across land and water. For a moment Magnus pictured the old Trimphone that used to sit in the lobby, but it had gone years ago, banished by a cordless phone. His mother might have mislaid the handset. That was the trouble with these cordless numbers: you set them down somewhere and couldn’t put your hands on them when they rang. His mother could be dashing between the kitchen and sitting room right now, looking for it.

The answering service came on. ‘Hello, Mum?’ He hated the question mark in his voice. ‘Hi, it’s me. I hope you and Rhona are okay. There’s been a bit of bother down here, but I’m fine. I’m coming home. I’ll be with you in a couple of —’ The phone beeped, cutting him off. He tried to remember his mother’s mobile number and the number of Rhona’s phones, but they had been programmed into his own device. He had summoned them by typing in their names and had never bothered to commit them to memory.

‘Fuck.’

His mum was probably at Rhona’s right now, the pair of them worrying about him and cursing him in equal measure. Magnus dialled the only other Orkney number he knew by heart, his Aunty Gwen’s, Hugh’s mother. Once again it rang out and he left a brief message. Cordless phones were useless, he consoled himself. If the electricity went down they went with it. His mother would have done better to have stuck with the old Trimphone.

He rang 118 118, thinking he should phone the Snapper Bar, or perhaps even the police or the hospital, but they did not answer either and he switched the mobile off, scared of wasting its battery. Things would be okay, he reassured himself. He would get home to find them all waiting for him.

Jeb was sitting at a low table in the lobby where guests had once enjoyed an aperitif while they waited for cabs to take them to that evening’s destination. There was an unopened bottle of Highland Park and two whisky glasses on the table in front him. Jeb touched the neck of the malt gently with his fingertips as Magnus sat down.

‘I never had a problem with drink, how about you?’

‘I like a drink, if that’s what you mean.’

‘I meant if I open this bottle will you feel obliged to sup it all?’

There had been nights when he had killed a bottle and still been standing straight enough to make an assault on one of its comrades, but Magnus said, ‘I can take a dram and put the cap back on the bottle.’

Jeb broke the seal and poured two measures into the waiting glasses.

‘That’s what we’ll do then.’ He passed one of the charged glasses to Magnus. The malt smelled of snugs and peat fires, of funeral breath and late nights. It smelled unbearably of home and Magnus was forced to look away. He cleared his throat.

‘They made this not far from where I grew up.’ He wondered at his use of the past tense.

Jeb raised his glass. ‘To survival.’

Magnus echoed, ‘Survival.’

They both drank. Jeb nodded, as if reaffirming the toast.

‘When I first saw you, I don’t know why, but I thought you were a soft lad.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe it’s the accent.’

You decided before I opened my mouth, Magnus thought, I saw it in your eyes. He said nothing.

‘We’ve been through a fair bit these last couple of days.’ Jeb swirled the liquid in his glass, molten gold. This was another Jeb, no longer the sullen prison inmate or the crazed escapee armed with a ready chib. The military aspect that Magnus had noticed during their escape had returned. ‘The odds were against us, but here we are.’

‘These last days,’ Magnus said. He took a sip of his dram. The whisky stung his lips but it brightened his perceptions. He could see the five-star hotel for what it was — a folly designed to make those who could afford it feel superior. That kind of swank was in the past; they had entered a new world where the only rank was survival.

Magnus had told Jeb that he could take a measure and put the cap back on the bottle, but he wanted to drink it dry and go into battle. Let whisky be his lieutenant and his linesman. He reached out, topped up his dram and gestured the bottle towards Jeb’s glass. The other man shook his head.

‘I’m not used to it.’

Magnus asked, ‘How long were you inside?’

‘I’d done three years, most of it in solitary.’

‘So you’re either a bad bastard, or an antisocial bastard.’

‘A bit of both.’

The whisky was working on Magnus. He asked, ‘What did you do?’

Jeb’s voice was dangerously even. ‘Like I said before, nothing you need to worry about. I ended up on the wrong side of the law, just like you. That’s all you need to know.’

This was prison morality, Magnus supposed. Torture, robbery, extortion, violence of every stamp was tolerable, as long as the victims were male and over-age.

Jeb continued, ‘What I was trying to say is, I can survive on my own—’

‘Me too.’ Magnus tipped back the last of his drink and reached for a refill, but the bottle was gone. His eyes met Jeb’s.

‘We need to stay straight,’ Jeb said.

‘That’s your opinion.’

Jeb shook his head. ‘It’s like you’re determined to make me change my mind. What I was going to say is, I can survive on my own, we both can, but we stand more chance together. At least until we make it out of London and work out what’s going on in the rest of the country.’

‘Going to organise a census, are you?’ The over-patterned lounge seemed to sneer at them. Magnus wanted to take Jeb’s penknife and shred the complacent cushions, tear the curtains, stain the carpets with red wine and worse.

‘You should listen to your friend,’ an American voice said. ‘Two heads are better than one.’

Magnus turned and saw an old man leaning out of a winged armchair.

Jeb had sprung to his feet at the sound of his voice, but the man’s age must have reassured him, because he sank back down into his seat, slowly. ‘How long have you been there?’ he asked.

‘Long enough to know you were both in jail when this kicked off. You missed a time, boys.’ He raised a drink to his mouth and Magnus realised that he was drunk. Not quite fleeing, but most definitely three sheets to the wind. ‘Yes, boys,’ the man repeated softly. ‘You surely missed a time.’

Nineteen

The old man’s name was Edgar Prentice, ‘Eddie to my friends’. He was a professor in English Literature at Dartmouth College and lived in Norwich, New Hampshire. ‘A nice town, but sleepy. You want an injection of culture then you get yourself to Boston or New York, Europe if you’re lucky. I thought I was lucky.’ Eddie had brought a loaded martini glass and a cocktail shaker over to their table. He raised his drink to his lips. ‘Except the day before we were due to travel to London, my wife came down with a fever. I was all for cancelling, but Miriam wouldn’t hear of it. She changed her ticket to a later flight, our daughter came to visit and I flew over on my own. Worst decision of my life.’

Magnus asked, ‘How are they?’

The old man knocked back the last of his drink and refreshed his glass from the silver shaker. He was taller than any of the pensioners Magnus had grown up around, but his clothes hung loose on his bones and Magnus guessed that he too had recently lost weight. Eddie said, ‘I anticipate a whole new set of taboos in this brave new world of ours. Asking about a man’s family is going to be one of them.’ He looked Magnus in the eye.

Magnus said, ‘I was hoping immunity might run in families.’

Eddie tipped back his drink again. The electricity had died a few minutes ago and his hair gleamed nicotine yellow against the light of the candles Jeb had lit.

‘Sorry to disappoint you.’

Jeb leaned forward in his chair. He had opened a bottle of San Pellegrino and the bubbles fizzed, straight and pure, in his glass. ‘You stayed in London?’

‘I didn’t want to. It probably sounds lame, but as soon as that flight took off, I felt a sense of foreboding. I wanted to ask the stewardess to get the captain to turn the plane around and let me off. I didn’t of course.’ Eddie gave a sad smile. ‘Just ordered a martini extra dry and found an in-flight movie I could tolerate. Soon as I got to London I phoned home. Jaime said that her mom was a lot better. I wished my girls goodnight and went to bed.

‘The next day the TV news mentioned this new virus, V596, the sweats, but I didn’t pay it any mind. I had tickets for Richard III at the Globe. I didn’t know it, but it was one of their final performances. Richard overplayed his disability, but it was a good production.’ Eddie shook his head. ‘Sorry, old habits die hard. Like Jimmy Durante said, everyone’s a critic.

‘I wasn’t worried when I phoned Miriam at home and on her cell the next day and got no response. I’d forgotten the premonition I had on the plane in my excitement of being back in London. As far as I was concerned, my wife was better. Miriam would be joining me in a day or two and in the meantime she was making the most of a visit from our daughter. Sure, there was mention of the virus on TV, but where I was, in the centre of London, everything looked good. There was nothing to be concerned about. I didn’t even bother to phone later, because of the time difference.’

Somewhere in the hotel a door slammed and footsteps rang out against a tiled floor. Jeb and Magnus turned to look across the dim lobby for the source of the sound, but there was no one there. Eddie said, ‘We’re not the only ones hiding out here. So far most people have kept to themselves, but I’ve seen them at a distance. You’re the first folks I’ve talked to.’

Magnus glanced towards the dark part of the lobby, where elevators waited like upright coffins, ready to ferry guests up or down, to heaven or hell, but there was no one there. ‘Why us?’

Eddie shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe I’m just the right level of drunk. I always got sociable after a couple of martinis. It used to irritate Miriam. She thought I spent too much time talking to strangers and not enough talking to her.’ He sighed. ‘Nice as you fellows are, I’d give a lot to be talking to her instead of you right now.’

Jeb asked, ‘When did you realise how bad things were?’

‘That used to irritate Miriam too, the way I drift on to tangents. She’d say, “Get back on track, old man.” She loved me enough to stay married to me for thirty-five years, but sometimes I drove her crazy.’ Eddie gave a sad smile. His teeth were white and regular enough to be dentures. ‘I’m not exactly sure when I realised things were serious. The hotel staff dwindled over the next couple of days. I was staying somewhere cheaper. Not here.’ He affected an English accent. ‘Even a professor’s salary only stretches so far in jolly old London.’ Eddie sighed and resumed his own voice, dry and slightly slurred at the edges. ‘I noticed there were less people around. The bar was closed, the maid service didn’t freshen my room and there were no cooked breakfasts available, just stale croissants and little packs of cereal. I was irritated, but not worried. Brits have a fun-loving reputation. I thought maybe the hotel staff had had some party, gotten drunk and were sleeping it off. What concerned me was that I still couldn’t get hold of Miriam or Jaime. I tried to get in touch with a colleague at the college, in the hope that she would drive round and check on them, but there was no response from her either. So eventually I called the cops. They told me they had no report of any problems, but said they would drop by the house and check on them. I don’t know whether they did or not, they never phoned me back.’ Eddie took a sip from his almost empty martini. ‘The Internet was still operating. The sweats had gone viral, if you’ll excuse the pun, but my own social media was more or less static. Usually I’m swamped by emails, even during vacation, but my inbox barely rattled.’

‘Didn’t you try to book a flight home?’ Magnus asked.

‘Sure I did. I packed my bags and headed for the airport determined to get myself on the first cancelled seat out of town, no dicking around. I started to cough in the taxi. The driver said he was sorry, but he wasn’t taking any chances, and threw me out. I was beginning to feel bad, but I managed to hail another one and get myself to Heathrow. By the time I got to the check-in desk I must have looked bad too. They rounded me up and delivered me to a quarantine centre.’ Eddie shook his head. ‘They called it a quarantine centre, but it was a games hall with blankets on the floor. It was a place where they sent people to die in the hope that they wouldn’t infect anyone else. I was there for four days. Like Charles Dickens said, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” I was too ill to worry about my family, but the sweats is no joke. There were some good Christian souls who tried to look after us, but I guess they mostly came down with it too. We were laid out in rows, as if we were already in a graveyard. There weren’t enough people to clean us sick folks up, and we weren’t capable of doing it ourselves, so we were left to lie in our own shit and vomit.’ Eddie ran a hand across his forehead. ‘I’m sorry. You boys both have people of your own to mourn. I guess it’s a while since I talked with anyone.’

Magnus said, ‘It’s okay.’ Eddie’s words had conjured the gym hall in his primary school in Kirkwall. How it had looked the night high winds had disrupted their Boys’ Brigade camping trip and the captain had arranged for them to bunk in sleeping bags in the hall instead. He tried not to imagine his mother and Rhona laid out on the hall’s wooden floor, beside their neighbours.

Eddie said, ‘I had weird dreams. Kept thinking I was slammed in the wagon of some overcrowded goods train headed for Auschwitz. Just shows how strongly those images are rooted in popular consciousness.’ Magnus caught a glimpse of the professor the old man had so recently been, and then Eddie looked up and showed a face haggard by illness and grief. ‘I thought God might come back to me. I was religious as a boy. Miriam used to joke that I’d relapse back to the Church on my deathbed, but He paid me the same no-mind He has for the last fifty-plus years.’

Jeb sipped his mineral water. His face was impassive. ‘You didn’t die.’

‘No.’ Eddie tipped the last of the martini from the shaker into his glass. His voice was weary. ‘I didn’t die.’

Magnus heard ice rattling inside the cocktail shaker and wondered that the man could take time to chill his drink when everything was falling apart.

Eddie said, ‘I was in a crash on the interstate once, a long time ago. I had a blow-out in the fast lane. My car spun full circle, three hundred and sixty degrees, and crossed the barrier on to the other side of the carriageway. One moment I’m travelling north, the next I’m facing southbound traffic. I felt like I was moving fast as light, but I still had time to think about how much I loved Miriam. Jaime was just a little girl, she must have been around seven years old and I remember thinking what a shame it was that I would never see her grow up.’ Eddie wiped away a tear. ‘Well, at least I got to see her turn into a fine young woman.’ He looked out towards the middle distance at the bar, still decorated with an elaborate flower arrangement as dead as the people in the darkened rooms above them. Magnus thought the old man was about to rise and refill the cocktail shaker, but he sat where he was, his eyes trained on the past. ‘The sweats were in the newspapers and on television, but for a while everything seemed to function as normal. There were deaths in the news, sure, but there were always deaths in the news. I guess it had gotten to seem like death was no big news, just something the media were obliged to report.

‘When I got out of the quarantine centre everything had changed. The city was under martial law. There were curfews at night, looting in the shopping districts, even the occasional dead body in the street.’ He shook his head, as if he still could not believe the events he had witnessed. ‘I don’t know if it was a second wave of the disease or if the sweats just hit some people harder, but the deaths became sudden. I saw a young woman, a girl of about Jaime’s age, drop down dead. One minute she was walking along, short skirt, cute red shoes, the next she was sprawled on the sidewalk. I went to help, but she was beyond help. A man shouted at me to leave her alone if I didn’t want to catch it and so, God help me, I walked away and left her there, face down on the ground, her underwear on display, no dignity, no one to say a few words over her.’

‘What else could you do?’ Magnus thought about the bodies he had left lying on the Underground platform, the girl with long russet hair slumped on the pavement.

‘I could have looked in her purse, checked to see if there was someone I could call. I know my girls are dead, perhaps her father is still waiting somewhere for her.’

Jeb held a hand over the bank of tea lights, watching the way the flames reflected against his skin. He looked up and met the old man’s eyes. ‘No one can bury them all. That’s one of the reasons we’re heading out of London. Other diseases will start to take hold. Cholera, typhoid…’ He shrugged, acknowledging that he had come to the end of his understanding of infections. ‘Other things.’

Magnus thought about the fires Jeb had seen from the top of the hotel; soon it would be too late. ‘We were shot at by soldiers. They told us we were in a controlled zone.’

Eddie nodded. ‘The authorities couldn’t keep up with the number of deaths, but they sure were quick to stamp down on damage to property. Certain zones, shopping districts in the centre of towns, were meant to be no-go. I guess you’ve seen for yourself that it didn’t work.’

Jeb said, ‘It looked like people decided they wanted to die in front of a big flat screen, drinking a bottle of Chivas and wearing nice new trainers.’

Eddie nodded. ‘I always thought of Brits as restrained, but the scenes I saw on television of your city centres reminded me of footage of the LA riots. I didn’t want any part of it, so I maxed out my credit cards, booked myself in here and phoned home every quarter-hour in the hope that someone would pick up. Eventually Ben, my neighbour, answered.’ Eddie’s voice broke. ‘He told me what had happened to my girls.’ The old man covered his face with his hands and took a deep juddering sigh. When he removed them he was calm again. ‘I never bothered to ask Ben what he was doing in my house. Anything there that he wanted, he was welcome to. I just wished him luck and hung up the phone. I’ve been here ever since, screwing up the courage to do what needs to be done.’

Jeb nodded. His face was blank, as if he were back in the prison cell he refused to share.

‘We’re heading north,’ Magnus said. ‘Far north in my case. I’m from Orkney.’ It seemed crass to mention family after Eddie’s tale, but he asked, ‘I don’t suppose you heard anything about how things are up there, in the islands?’

‘No, son.’ Eddie raised his glass to his lips. Magnus got the impression that this time it was an attempt to avoid meeting his eyes rather than an urge for alcohol that prompted the move. ‘I never heard anything about how things are up there.’

‘Why don’t you join us?’ Magnus looked at Jeb, inviting his support, but Jeb stared unspeaking at the candles in front of him.

‘I appreciate the invitation.’ Eddie gave a polite smile and once more Magnus caught a glimpse of the person he had been before the crisis: a man with enough self-regard to stand by his convictions and enough empathy to do so graciously. ‘But I don’t have the energy left for that kind of trip. I thought I might hang around here, see if I can’t find a way into the British Library and take a last look around for old times’ sake. This disaster may have its compensations. I may never see another of Shakespeare’s plays performed, but perhaps I can revisit his First Folio before I die.’

‘There are fires in the city, diseases.’ Magnus looked at Jeb again, but Jeb’s face had regained its shuttered look.

‘This isn’t a time to be sentimental about strangers, not if you want to survive.’ Eddie nodded towards Jeb. ‘He knows that.’ His eyes met Magnus’s. ‘You’re a young man. You still have things you need to do, find a girl, start a family. I did all that. It was fun and I highly recommend it, but there’s nothing left for me. I’ve lost my taste for life.’

His cousin Hugh had been a younger man than Magnus was now, but he had lost his taste for life too. Magnus wanted to say something about the misery of suicide, but the words were beyond his grasp. Somewhere another door slammed. All three of them turned towards the noise, but there was nothing in the lobby except a clash of colours and patterns it had once been thought worth a lot of money to sit among.

Eddie got up and walked slowly towards the bar as if his joints were hurting, though it might have been the shaker full of martini inside him that slowed his pace. ‘There are more survivors than you might think.’ It should have been a cause for celebration, but Eddie’s expression was serious. ‘Keep your eyes open, and be careful how you go. Like the bard said, “The world is grown so bad, that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.”’