Decay Inevitable

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: GREETINGS FROM A DEAD MAN

FOUR DAYS INTO the job, Sean’s back screaming at him, things changed. Rapler and Ronnie Salt walked in on everyone during a tea break. The laughter that had been reverberating around the shattered remains of this fourth-floor suite of offices dwindled to a few nervous coughs. Rapler was white. Sean could see in the others’ faces that this meant something other than the offer of a pay rise.

Rapler said, “Mr. Lord’s here.”

Salt pointed at Sean. “Come with us, chum,” he said.

Sean wondered if he had been rumbled already. Maybe one of the “mourners” at the funeral had spotted him after all and identified him. Maybe he had been recognised as a policeman by someone he had arrested. That was all right. He could come clean and tell them he was off the Force; it was easily proved. Not that they would appreciate an ex-cop in their ranks.

“We slipped up,” Salt explained. “All new recruits must be doctored by the boss.”

“You mean vetted, surely?” Sean said, but Salt did not return his smile.

“Mr. Lord wants a word with you,” Rapler said, fidgeting with his notes. “That’s all. Just a routine chat. He likes to do that with all new employees. I think it’s a nice touch. Makes you feel welcome.”

Salt snorted. At the foot of the stairs he hung back and allowed Rapler to take Sean through the foyer to the forecourt. A black Shogun was parked rakishly across a number of bays. The man Sean had seen talking in the pub was standing with his arms folded, leaning against the rear doors of the four-by-four. Light collected in the lenses of his sunglasses. Sean wondered if he rued the fact that he was a white man. It spoiled the look he was after, from his scuffed black boots to his black leather trenchcoat.

“Hi,” Sean said.

Mr. Lord stared at him but said nothing. He turned to Rapler. “Why are you still here?”

“Sorry, Vernon,” Rapler said. “I thought you might want me to—”

“—to fuck off?” Vernon suggested.

“Yeah.” Rapler scurried away, leafing through the pages on his clipboard.

“That man,” Vernon said, his eyes on Rapler’s back, “is a first-class nadge sac.”

Sean laughed sycophantically. “How long have you known him?”

Vernon turned his shining lenses on Sean. “That, my friend, is one question too many from you. Shut up and come with me.”

Sean stood his ground. “A: you do not tell me to shut up. B: I am not some arse-kissing loser. Watch what you tell me to do. Like this job is so fucking valuable to me I couldn’t walk away whenever I fucking want to.”

Vernon regarded him for a moment. Then he nodded. “Fair enough. Come on. Let me buy you a pint.”

SMOKE AND SWEAT embraced Sean as Vernon Lord pushed him through the doors of the Fallen Angel. The clientele were a rag-bag of damp coats and spoiled teeth. Bottled stout or barley wine was the drink of preference. No smoking ban here. No copper would dare poke his head round the door to check. There was a hubbub of conversation underpinned by the thud of darts hitting a board at the dim reaches of the wedge-shaped lounge. Through greasy windows, Sean watched women in head scarves struggle against the wind as they carried their bags of shopping up Buttermarket Street.

“What you having?”

Sean said, “A lager.”

“Two Kronenbourg,” Vernon said to the barman, who stopped serving the women at the counter to get his drinks.

“You got a bit of clout round here, then?” Sean asked.

“All of it deserved, mate. Nothing wrong with a good rep.”

“A good rep,” Sean repeated. “What does a man do around here to garner himself a good rep?”

“Garner?” Vernon raised his eyebrows and saluted Sean with his pint. “I like it. Garner. Very educated, aren’t we?” He swigged half of his beer in one movement. “What are you doing humping bricks? Should be humping graduates.”

“I’m not the first bloke with half a brain to wear a hard-hat.”

Vernon ruminated on this for a while. “Still, it’s a rare thing. Most of the blokes on my sites. Jesus. If they didn’t have construction, they’d be about as much use as piss in a trumpet.”

“Look, I’m sorry for the smarts, okay? I just need some work, that’s all. I’ll dumb down.”

Vernon drained his pint and ordered a couple more without consulting Sean. “Well, fine, but I just need a few references, that’s all. I don’t know who the fuck you are or where the fuck you’ve come from, or what the fuck.”

“You’re talking like someone who’s got something to hide.”

“I have got something to hide, mate. I have. I’m quite up front about it. Question is, have you?”

“I already told Tony. I’m so square, I can’t stop turning corners.”

“I wish I could believe that.”

Sean shrugged. “Fuck the job then. Fuck you. But thanks for the drink.”

Vernon said, “It’s not the demolition I’m worried about. I couldn’t give a toss who works on that.”

“What then?”

“I need a sidekick. None of those mashed arses could take care of themselves. You, a different story.”

“Not interested,” said Sean, while his heartbeat sped up and he thought, Oh yes, oh yes I am. “I don’t stooge for anybody.”

“You said you needed the job.”

“I need a job. A job. Doesn’t matter what it is. But one is enough.”

Vernon thought this over, twisting his glass around and around on the filthy bar. Somebody put some music on the jukebox. Somebody belched loudly.

“You’ll be well paid,” Vernon said.

“Look, Vernon. Look, we don’t know each other—”

“Which is perfect.”

“—and I really don’t know if I can get back into dodgy stuff.”

Vernon paused with his glass raised to his mouth. His fingers were surprisingly delicate on such a big man. Pianist’s fingers. No rings. “Get back into it? This gets better. Listen. I’ll make it worth your while.”

Sean drained his pint and looked at his watch.

“I have to get back to the lads.”

“Bollocks to the lads.”

Sean studied his feet. “Make what worth my while?”

Vernon smiled. “I’ve got a little sideline going,” he said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: SOFTLY, SOFTLY

A CALL TO Sally unearthed no dirt about Vernon. She suggested he might be using an alias. Sean didn’t think so. Something about him convinced Sean that artifice would not stand with this man. The corollary of this, of course, was that Vernon had no convictions. He was clean as the buttons on his coat. Despite this logic, Sean had no problem at all imagining Vernon in Naomi’s bedroom, stabbing her life away with a screwdriver.

Unhappy with the tension growing in his flat, Sean escaped outside. It was late in the evening. The pubs were getting rowdy. Sullen teenagers gathered under railway bridges or outside fish and chip shops, mouths busy with cigarettes or hidden behind zipped-up collars. Realising he was hungry, Sean ducked into one of these fish bars. He ordered his supper and let the vinegary, soporific heat melt through his bones and relax him. A couple of girls with vicious make-up flirted with him while he waited, asking him hairdresser questions: “Been on holiday?”

Back at his flat, he poured a glass of beer and set about his meal. The potatoes inside him, he stretched luxuriously on the sofa and promptly fell asleep. Almost immediately, he heard the telephone ringing. Disorientated by the extreme dark and the silence, he flailed around for the receiver and burbled something approximating a greeting into the mouthpiece. He felt dizzy and sick with the need for sleep.

“Hi,” said a female voice, far too brightly for the hour, whatever hour it was.

“What time is it?”

“It’s, um, hold on a sec… it’s quarter past midnight.”

“And you are?”

“I’m pissed.”

Sean rubbed his face. “Emma, is that you?”

“Yep. Guilty. Sorry, did I wake you up?”

“Just a little. What do you want?”

“To see you.”

Sean flicked on his bedside lamp. The room leapt away from him; shadows lengthened on the walls. “Emma. It’s late. I’m up early for work in the morning.”

“I wanted to apologise.”

“What for?” The taste of yesterday’s beer was thick in the back of his throat, as was the bitterness that had filled him listening to Vernon, pretending to be impressed. Pretending to be drawn to him.

“I remember you from school, okay? I just pretended not to because… well, because of the embarrassment of it all.”

“You don’t have to explain to me, Emma.”

Panicky now. On the verge of tears. “Can I see you? I won’t take up much of your time.”

Thinking of Naomi. How he should have helped. How he could have been there for her. In time.

Sean said, “Where?”

BRIDGE FOOT WAS still busy at this hour. The nearby nightclub was a circus of lurid costumes and loud people emboldened by alcohol. Sean drew the collar of his coat more tightly around him as women in scant dresses and men in shirt sleeves wrestled over cabs or queued at a portable burger bar. It was strange to be on the street at this hour without the compulsion to sort out disputes. They sold ties at the burger bar, for hapless individuals who turned up at the club hoping to be let in but had failed to take note of the dress code. Inscrutable bouncers stood like footballers in a wall defending a free kick. They muttered into headsets that left their hands free to beat the shit out of drunken punters.

Traffic weaved around him. Under the bridge, the Mersey was sacrament-black. He watched it coursing thickly away, wondering idly how many bodies had been cast into it over the years.

“Hi.”

Emma was still a little drunk. Her face was bleached by the flares of sodium and neon, her lips slashes of grey. She was wearing a V-neck sweater and a pair of cargo pants. The tip of her nose was moist.

“Let’s go and find us a coffee,” said Sean.

They walked up Bridge Street to the town centre. People were flooding through it in various stages of inebriation. One of the big chain pizza restaurants was still open and the waitress wasn’t bothered that they didn’t want to order any food. By the time their coffees arrived, the town centre was emptying and Emma’s eyes were having trouble focusing.

Sean said, “You been at anything other than the bottle tonight?”

Emma giggled. “A little draw, that’s all.”

“Sounds like you spoilt a perfect evening to be with me.”

“Icing on the cake, Sean.” She reached out a hand to pat one of his. “You remember Gill Chancellor?”

Sean nodded. He had had an awful feeling that this meeting might deteriorate into some maudlin retrospective, but now that it was happening, he didn’t mind all that much. “She used to be good at athletics, didn’t she? High jump.”

Emma started laughing uncontrollably. “Any kind of jump, more like. She turned into a right old bike.”

“Why do you mention her?”

“She used to fancy you. But you never noticed.”

Sean sipped his coffee. It was surprisingly good. “You should have told me.”

“I might have done, but you were traipsing after some other girl all the time. It was funny. You looked like you were being led around on an invisible leash. We’d see this girl, Naomi, and we’d look at each other and say something like, ‘Three seconds,’ and three seconds later, you’d walk by. You were like one of those Bisto kids.” Emma cracked up again, but the laughter was a little less shrill. The coffee was helping.

Sean finished his cup and sat back. He didn’t feel ready to talk to Emma about Naomi, but it felt as though the shape of the evening was being taken out of his hands. Emma was moulding the substance of their night together. She kept flashing him glimpses of it, and though he couldn’t recognise what she was aiming for, gradually form was emerging, to the extent that, by the time they had paid the bill and returned to the street, the reason for her need to see him had become clear.

“Naomi was killed, not that long ago,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you that. I know you were close to her once.”

Sean put his arms around her and started to laugh.

“Cry all you like, poor thing. You poor, poor thing.”

“I’m not crying,” Sean tried to say, but now he could see that she was right. He was crying. He was crying as though his life depended upon it.

They went back to Emma’s flat. She drew him a hot bath that smelled of vanilla. While he was soaking, she entered the bathroom and handed him a Bloody Mary. Then she sat on the toilet, unashamedly gazing at his body in the water while she rolled a joint on the back of a fashion magazine. It felt like the most natural thing in the world. After a short while, she unshowily began to undress, dropping her clothes in a pile. Then she lit the joint and got into the bath with him.

“You don’t mind, do you?” she asked, when the water had settled.

THEY LAY IN bed together, but they did not make love. Sean sensed a bruise in Emma’s life somewhat like his own. Fresh, painful and discolouring everything that made her who she was. Perhaps her impingement on him was a way in which she could begin to help the bruise heal. Her voice was too tiny, too innocent for the words it contained. “I think,” she said. “I think I’ll go back to work tomorrow.”

“What do you mean, work?”

“You know.”

Moonlight made a slow swerve across the white walls of her bedroom. The deep, resonant tick of a grandmother clock climbed the stairs to him from the hallway. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder and in sleep she burrowed closer into the warmth of his body. He felt a breast spread languidly across his ribcage. Her heartbeat was rapid and fluttery. He wondered if she was feigning sleep; it didn’t matter.

Into the dark, he talked about what he had found that day in London. Whether Emma was asleep or not, by the time he had finished talking, his shoulder was wet where her face met it. She never asked him about Naomi again and he never offered any more information about her. But over the coming weeks, they would both learn more about Naomi than they could ever have hoped, or feared, to discover.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: DOOM LOOP

IT MUST HAVE been the dust from the explosions causing the riot of colours as the sun fell towards the Derbyshire hills. Mist layered the fields surrounding the shattered motorway, thickening by the minute. For miles, the ribbon of road sported knots of destruction where bombs had detonated. Carrying Elisabeth had protected him against the cold, but now he saw how Sadie was walking with her arms crossed, her jaw set rigidly. It would be night soon and the temperature would plummet.

They had travelled perhaps three or four miles, that was all. Will was exhausted. Twice he had had to stop to make repairs to the stretcher. It would not hold up to much more of a battering. But maybe it wouldn’t have to. Elisabeth was regaining some of her colour and had woken up a few times, the first in order to be violently sick. Hopefully, if she rallied quickly, they would be able to improve their progress.

“Can we stop?” Sadie asked.

“That’s just what I was thinking,” said Will.

A church spire was visible above a clutch of trees, about a third of a mile to the east of the motorway. Will set off for it. As they moved into the canopy’s shade, a thick burring noise reached to them from above. Three stubby aircraft with squared-off wings scooted low over the motorway, picking at its ruined length, and the areas around it, with powerful searchlights.

Sadie said, “Do you think they’re investigating the explosions?”

Will nodded. “I should think so.”

They watched the aircraft until their fuselages were no longer visible, just the fingers of light prodding at the remains of the road. He was sure that the aircraft were searching for him. If that was so, then the villages they came across might also be patrolled. He didn’t share this suspicion with Sadie, mainly because he didn’t want to alarm her, but also because he hoped his paranoia was misplaced. Sadie didn’t argue when he suggested they stay in the church for the evening; maybe she had reasons of her own to keep a low profile.

It was dark by the time they entered the churchyard. The building was not difficult to break into. The mustiness, and the creaking of the pews, as if they were in constant use, was a relaxing sound. A small electric fire in the apse helped them to stave off the cold as it built up around the stone walls. A little after midnight, a keen wind caroming around the stones outside, Will fell into a deep sleep.

SHE WAS JUST like Catriona, in a way, but the muscles in her buttocks and thighs were more defined, her breasts tighter, almost arrogantly proud. She came to him and slid her tongue between his lips before he had a chance to protest. But if he had, he didn’t really believe that it would be himself protesting. Rather a shade, a projection of himself. The man he ought to be. Christ, the way she moved against him. Her prodigious wetness. Her heat. His cock was embedded inside her before he was fully awake. But he couldn’t rise completely from sleep. It was as if the rhythms of her fucking him contained in them some kind of soporific power, an anaesthetic. He wasn’t even sure this was really happening. Some dream… She rode him for a few minutes, her hands in her hair, her breasts gleaming with sweat. She didn’t take her eyes from his once, even when she came, even when, a few seconds later, he came too, stuffing his knuckles into his mouth so that he wouldn’t wake Elisabeth, if she were yet capable of consciousness. Sadie slid from him, and crawled over to her corner to sleep. Or at least, he believed she did, for as soon as the rioting in his loins had ceased, he was out of it.

WHEN HE WOKE, his legs had stiffened and his arms were sore. He tried to move, but the wrenching pain in his back would not allow it. Sadie’s head was in his lap, her thumb in her mouth. Elisabeth no longer looked as though she was out of reach. She simply seemed to be asleep now.

Early morning sunlight became blades of colour as it hit the stained-glass windows: a civilised light for a brief time, playing lilac and green upon the nave. To go outside would be to reacquaint oneself with its wintry brittleness. There was no heat to be had from such light. The sun would be a dead, cold disc in the sky, mobbed by mist. You could stare at it at such times. It looked as though it should belong to a more savage, a more distant planet.

He regarded Sadie’s face in sleep, ironed of its worries. A child’s face. Guilt lanced him. He felt sick. But last night, had it been real? She had been too knowing, too in control, surely, for it to be real.

“How are you doing?” Will asked, pecking at Sadie’s shoulder with a finger. His voice was cracked with the previous day’s effort.

“Cold and wet,” she replied, rising. “And stiff.” She stretched and her spine crackled. Even when she reached the limit of movement, the sound continued, scuttling around the cavernous interior. She made no comment on the previous night, nor did she give him a look or a smile that would have confirmed his suspicions. Forget it, he thought.

“We should get going,” he said. “This place’ll be crawling with dog-collars before long. Eli?”

She responded to his barking of her name. Her eyes swam, trying to focus. There was even the hint of a smile.

But then something failed. Will found himself looking beyond her, as if somehow she had been rendered insubstantial by what was shifting slowly behind her, in one of the grainy corners of the church, seeping out of the shadows like a tide of thick oil.

“Is there an animal in here with us?” Will muttered.

Eli blinked and tried to move. She slumped to one side and the full breadth of what was coming detached itself from his eye and swelled.

It remained with him for a while, like a pattern of light imprinted on his retina. The muscled bulk of it, great liquid swirls that might have been eyes. Then it faded and became part of the shadows. In a moment, it was as though there had never been anything there at all.

“Did you see that?” he asked Sadie, trying to keep his voice calm.

Sadie was attending to Elisabeth, trying to get her to drink water from a cat’s bowl she had found by the door. Elisabeth was making a sound that might have been “Grue…”

“See what?”

“There was something in the corner… Never mind. Forget it.”

Sadie smiled at him. “You’re just tired, Will. I think Elisabeth will be okay. We should give her a little more time here.”

Will shook his head and started gathering their things. “I don’t think so. If Eli’s getting better, then she’ll have to do it on the move. We have to find some food too.”

“Do you have any money? I could go into the village and buy some sandwiches or something?”

Will fished in his pockets and pulled out a twenty-pound note. It was all he had.

“Here,” he said. “Hurry back. We’ll wait for you in the trees, where we watched the planes yesterday.”

Sadie gone, he strapped Elisabeth into the stretcher and criss-crossed the straps around his chest. He checked the corner of the church again but there was nothing there. Too tired. He hoped that was the case.

Outside, he found a vantage point under the trees from which he could see the motorway and a good portion of the sky. There were no engines thrumming through it. Just the sound of the wind in the leaves.

“You fret too much, Will. You always did. If you were a piece of jewellery, you’d be a set of worry beads.”

Will eased himself out of the straps. Elisabeth was cradling her jaw with a hand and trying to unpick the knots that were keeping her in the stretcher.

“I had a feeling that when you came round your first words would be some sort of crack at me.” He beamed at her regardless. When she tried to return it, her face fell apart.

“I think I broke my jaw.”

Will crouched next to her and gently cupped her head in his hands. “I don’t think so. You wouldn’t be able to talk.”

“I might be able to walk, if you could help me try to put some weight on my feet?”

“Are you sure?”

“If we take it easy. What happened, by the way?”

As they hobbled around the trees, Will explained about the bombs, pointing out some of the visible craters on the road. Thin streams of smoke continued to rise from them.

“I wasn’t aware of any great terrorist activity going on,” said Eli. “Were you?”

Will shook his head. This was beyond anything he had read about in the newspapers. Terrorist activity in the country’s history was sporadic; it might run to one or two bombs prior to a long period of inactivity. The peppering of one of Britain’s arterial carriageways pointed to some other organisation with a lot of money and a lot of personnel. Will wondered if the planes he had seen last night were part of it. If they were, and if they had been hunting him, then, by extension, the bombs had been meant for him too.

Sadie returned with pies from the village bakery and a newspaper. Apparently, there were few people around at this hour. And it helped that it was a Sunday. “Nobody’s going anywhere because they can’t,” she explained. “There were barricades on all the roads in and out of the village. Soldiers with guns. Everyone’s talking about the explosions.”

Elisabeth and Sadie talked while they ate. Will wolfed his pie and then returned to the vantage point in the trees. Not only must they dodge the surveillance aircraft, if that’s what they were, but now they had troops to deal with.

“Will!” Elisabeth, when he returned, looked even paler than she had directly after the accident.

“What is it?”

She was holding the newspaper open. On page three there was a photograph of Will, the one from his passport. He had had a hangover on the day it was taken. He looked startled, and his eyes seemed somehow too juicy for their sockets, as if someone had bathed them before plugging them back into his face. Next to his photograph was a picture of Cat, from the early days of her pregnancy. They had been holidaying in Greece. She was smiling and her forefinger was pointing to her tummy. The headline read:

Will tore the newspaper from Elisabeth’s hands. As he read the story, his eyes kept returning to his wife’s face. She had been so happy on that day. He remembered that shortly after he took the picture they had made love on the balcony of their hotel room while below a boy carrying a basket of fruit called out: “Meloni, meloni… cool meloni for you hot people!” They hadn’t been able to stop laughing.

Filleted. Filleted.

“She’s dead then?” Will said. “What… you can’t survive a filleting, can you? Can you?” He laughed, infected by the blissful memory and the preposterous thought of his wife, sliced and boned like a cut of meat.

“Will, they’re looking for us. You. They’re looking for you. They’re calling it a manhunt.”

“But I—”

Elisabeth reached for him, pain turning her face grey for a second. “I know you didn’t. But they think you did.”

“She’s—”

“She is dead, Will. She is dead.”

He felt the need to run, to take off across the field, screaming until he coughed up blood. He didn’t care who saw him or how quickly he would be caught. He wanted to die. He wanted the people who were responsible for Cat’s death to die. He wanted to kill them. But he wanted to die first.

Elisabeth saw the tension in him and took his hand before he was able to act upon it. Sadie watched them, wide-eyed, her pie half-eaten and growing cold in her fingers.

“What do we do now?” he asked, weakly. Continuing their journey seemed pointless on the heels of this discovery.

“We go on,” Sadie said.

Elisabeth nodded. “How else are you going to clear your name? You have to go to Sloe Heath. Whatever it has in store for you.”

Will slumped by the foot of the tree. He couldn’t understand how he had dragged Elisabeth so far when it felt as if he no longer owned any bones, any muscles.

“We have to get going soon,” Sadie continued. “People are waking up.”

Will stayed where he was. Cat wasn’t waking up. And he doubted that he would ever wake up again. You had to go to sleep first, in order to wake up. He believed his sleeping days were over for good.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: NEW BLOOD

VERNON PICKED HIM up outside the newspaper shop on Lovely Lane. It was a cold morning. Mist saddled the railway bridge. Blocks of ochre light hung in the air where the hospital should have stood. The Shogun was the only traffic he had seen since leaving his room ten minutes earlier; he hadn’t wanted to reveal his address to Vernon.

It was as hot in the four-by-four as it was chilly in the street. A freshener hung from the rear-view mirror, filling the cab with the cloying smell of apricots. On the back seat lay Vernon’s leather coat. Peeking from beneath it was the polished tip of a baseball bat.

Vernon drove expertly through Bewsey and Dallam, flicking through the gears with fluid familiarity, never taking his eyes off the road. In his seat he leapt in and out of view as they passed beneath the orange sodium lights. Dallam recreation park was wadded with ghosts. The railway track that rose behind it was a wet, trembling line scored through the dawn sky.

“You had breakfast?” Vernon grunted.

“Yeah. Muesli.”

“Muesli. Like it. You don’t bow to convention, do you?”

“I wasn’t aware that a conventional breakfast existed.”

Vernon chuckled. He took the Shogun around the traffic island on the Winwick Road at fifty. Long Lane sucked them towards the dark streets of Orford. “Last guy helped me out was an egg and bacon man. All the time, not just for breakfast. Kev, his name was. He only ever ate egg and bacon and your usual trimmings. Thought cabbage was something you pushed around in a wheelchair.”

“Where are we going?”

“Sad case out in Grasmere Avenue. One of those little rabbit hutches with front doors filled with empty egg cartons. Tasteful, you know. Do you like Level 42?”

It was seven o’clock. Lights were going on in kitchens. Vernon swerved the Jeep around an electric milk float that bumbled into the road.

He continued: “Lynne and Gareth Morgan. They’ve got a son, Greg, who is blind. Severe learning disability, apparently. No shit, wouldn’t you?” He looked at Sean and Sean duly laughed. “Got another son, Billy. Billy the breadwinner. Dealer. Small-time. Bit of blow. Pills.

“Eighteen months ago, Lynne and Gareth had jobs. He was a taxi driver and she cleaned. They bought a car, a dishwasher, and a plasma TV on the never-never. Then they both lost their jobs. They owe fifteen grand. Hence me.”

He steered the jeep into Blackwood Crescent, killed the lights, and decelerated to a crawl.

“And the killer. The law centre they depended on for advice lost its funding and closed down. Lynne got another job but she was fired a couple days later. Fell asleep with her mop in her hand. That’s sloppy. That’s just not trying hard enough.”

“What are you going to do to them?” Sean asked, casually.

“I’m going to fuck them over with that bat and scream at them until the skin roasts off their fucking faces. That’s what I’m going to do. Whether they’ve got some money for me or not.”

“What am I here for? Moral support?”

Vernon laughed out loud. “You’re here to look out for the filth. And keep me covered. Not the man I used to be. People run, I can’t always catch them. You can though. You be my legs.”

Vernon braked sharply across the road from a series of flats with tiny windows. His eyes were fast upon them. To Sean, it seemed that Vernon was almost meditating, drinking in the shabby detail of the brickwork, the peeling paint on the window-frames, the gaps in the slates.

“Pass me my jacket please, Sean,” he said. His voice was level and business-like. “And wrap your mitts around that fucking bat.”

They walked across the road. Vernon pulled on a pair of black leather gloves and relieved Sean of the weapon.

Vernon said, “Round the back, son. Give us two whistles when you’re in position, then when you hear me bash the door in, close on the back door. Slippery as shitty eels, these bastards. Don’t let anyone out.”

Sean gave his signal when he had found the corresponding rear gate. The alleyway was filled with sagging sofas and bin bags. He gritted his teeth against the unpleasantness that must be about to ensue. As much as his instinct told him to back off, he knew he must not fail in this task, if he was to get close to Vernon and understand what lay behind the door of the house in the country and what, if any, link to Naomi these men had.

The sound of the door impacting was swiftly followed by the bark of a dog that ended almost as quickly with a shout and a series of pathetic whines. Vernon was quick. But evidently not quick enough. Sean watched a rear window swing open and a leg clamber out. The yelling inside the house diminished until it was Vernon’s voice that was dominant. Sean couldn’t tell what he was saying. The hooded figure hopped down off the kitchen extension and Sean said: “Hey.”

The kid took off without checking to see who had hailed him. Sean kept pace easily, even though this area was more familiar to his quarry. He thought he heard Vernon’s Shogun roar into life, but then they had rounded a corner and there was wind in his ears, and the grey, hooded figure was sprinting across a small square.

At a row of pebble-dashed garages, the kid jinked right and pounded over a narrow field. Progress for the both of them was hampered by hard furrows of soil. Ahead lay a thin wood. Around the wood sprawled building sites in various stages of development: new, cheap housing estates. The houses looked as though they had just been bombed.

Sean knew he must catch the kid before he reached the leading edge of trees or he would be lost, either to the undergrowth or the many hiding places available in the infant estate. He pushed himself to go faster over the awkward terrain, trying to measure his pace so that he could use the ridges to propel himself. He tried to imagine that the fleeing figure was responsible for something more than a missed payment. Maybe he was. He might be guilty of kicking cats or bullying kids on his estate. He might steal money from his grandmother’s purse. It helped.

Sean caught up with him as he attempted to climb through the windowless frame of a partially finished wall, grabbing hold of the loose cloth of his top. The kid was trying to shrug his way out of the garment. Sean hooked his hand underneath his quarry’s arm and drove the limb up his back. In this way the kid was forced to the floor, swearing and screaming that he should be let loose.

Now Sean did hear the Shogun’s engine. He lifted his head and saw the four-by-four jouncing across the rutted field towards them.

“What does he want from you?” Sean asked quickly.

“You fucking what? You fucking know exactly—”

“How much?” Sean cut in, plying the arm with a little pressure. The kid’s face, now free of his hood, turned pale. He sucked in breath. Sean smelled weed on him, and chocolate. He sported a feeble moustache that seemed to be glued above lips that were too wet and pink to belong to a human being, especially as the rest of his skin was so white. His eye sockets were almost round and the lids made no appearance unless he was blinking, which he was doing now. A lot. He screwed his face up with incomprehension.

“You what? It’s not money… Who are you anyway?”

Sean said, “Talk to me. I might be able to help.”

“Seany. Seany-Sean. What have we here then?” Vernon slouched into the unformed room.

Sean straightened.

“Good running, mate.” Vernon swung the bat as though it were a golf club before holding it out and squinting along its length, checking the true. “It’s nice to have a bit of hard around. But not for you though, eh, Billy?”

“Fuck off, you wanker,” Billy said. “What did you do to my old girl?”

“If you mean your mother,” Vernon said, “I told her to put her teeth in if she was going to scream at me like that. Ugly specimen. I can see where you get it from.”

Billy laced his fingers behind his head and crouched low. “Look, just get it over with then, why don’t you? I’ll take my beating and then you can get lost.”

“It’s not quite as easy as that, Billy,” said Vernon. “We are going to do you over, make no mistake—”

Sean loved that we.

“—but where will that leave us? No progress, you see. No improvement in our relationship. The cold, brutal facts are that you owe me and I expect payment.”

Sean said, “I don’t think he’s got any money on him.”

Vernon gave him an indulgent smile. “Sean. Rule A: keep your mouth shut. I talk in these situations. You just stand around looking pretty. Now. It’s cold. I am starving. Let’s get this sorted. Sean. Hurt him. Then you can go. I’ll take things forward from there.”

“You’ve got the bat. You hurt him.”

“Sean…”

Sean pressed his teeth against his tongue. Vernon’s habit of prefacing every sentence with his name was getting up his nose.

“Sean… let’s say that I need you to do this. To prove something to me. It’s a test. Pass it, or fail it. If you fail, you will fail badly. And in more ways than one. So.”

Billy crouched on the ground between them, his face slack with bewilderment, watching them at it.

Is he on to me? Sean thought. And following that: If he is, he won’t be expecting this.

It helped to think of Naomi. It fuelled him. But not so much that he couldn’t rein it in when Billy coughed up a little blood. Vernon was making admiring noises but Sean wasn’t listening. He pushed by Vernon quickly before he became Sean’s target, and strode to the Shogun. He sat in the passenger seat, trying to calm himself, hissing over his raw knuckles. He watched Vernon as he spoke to Billy. It darkened a little, out there, as if a cloud had blocked the sun, but the sky was cloudy anyway.

Getting a headache, Sean thought, and rubbed his temples while punching at the radio buttons for something that might soothe him.

He wanted so much to return and mete out a little to Vernon, just a little, of what Billy had suffered. He wondered if Naomi had been alive when her killer had cut off her lips. Sean rubbed his bruised knuckles and tethered his rage. He thought: not yet… not yet.

He saw Vernon fiddle with his collar and lift something silver to his lips. If it was a whistle, it made no sound that Sean could hear. But when he blinked, there was another man in white standing next to Vernon. He wore a white skull-cap. His eyes were covered with dark glasses, and his mouth and nose were obscured by a green mask. Both men were looking down at the spot where, presumably, Billy lay.

“Christ,” Sean muttered, as Vernon shifted slightly to allow a view of the blood stains that swirled across what must have been a surgeon’s apron. “Christ.”

Nonchalantly, as if he were plucking a pen from his top pocket, the surgeon extracted something slender that glittered.

“Christ.”

He knelt out of sight. Vernon moved back across Sean’s line of vision and he didn’t see anything else until Vernon was striding back across the ploughed field, sliding a neatly wrapped parcel of white, greaseproof paper into his pocket. Neither the surgeon nor the boy were anywhere to be seen.

Vernon came towards the four-by-four bringing the collars of his coat up around his neck. The wind played with his pony tail. He threw the bat and the briefcase onto the back seat as he settled behind the wheel with a contented sigh.

“Is he all right?” Sean asked.

“Depends what you mean by ‘all right’. Actually, come to think of it, it doesn’t depend on anything. He’s not all right. He’s dead, but he hasn’t quite got the grip of it yet.”

“How do you mean?”

“Look at this place, Sean. Look at the people here. Staggering, blasted shells of people they are. This isn’t living. It’s not life. Is it?”

Yes it is, Sean wanted to say. It might not be what they hoped for, but it’s what they’re dealing with.

Vernon fired the engine. He switched on Radio 3. “I like classical music after a job like this. Calms you down.”

Sean persisted. “What did he give you? What was in that white parcel? Who was that fucking freak you were talking to? Where did he come from?”

Vernon selected first gear and took the Shogun on a slow, bumpy arc away from the field. “Ask me no questions,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper, “I’ll dig you no shallow grave.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN: PIRATES

MORNINGS THEY STRUCK out early, trying to force the cold from their bones. Around midday, they rested for an hour or two, wherever they could find shelter. Come nightfall, exhausted and hungry, they would steal food, smashing the windows of bakers’ shops in villages, and sleep in dilapidated houses, huddled together for warmth.

Though he did not say it, Will was happy for Sadie’s presence. He was grateful for the way she unconsciously geed up both himself and Elisabeth. He was glad too that she acted as a check on his emotions. Had it been just Eli and Will, he might have tried to develop their night-time huddles into something more intimate as the memory of her smell seeped into his. Or he might simply have gone to pieces, happy to rot while his mind tried to cling to the broken images of Catriona.

It had been five days since the bombs went off. They were no nearer finding out who or what had been responsible for the blasts. Will had sent Sadie into a village in the Midlands to see if she could find out some news but she had returned at speed. Someone had tried to follow her, she said. It was best that they took no chances.

“How can it be that Sadie’s drawing this kind of heat?” he asked Elisabeth one night, as Sadie slept.

“She might be imagining it, Will,” Eli suggested. “She was hiding when you found her. She’s probably been frightened by what has happened to me and you. There’s tension in the air. The poor child hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep. She might be imagining it.”

“Possibly,” Will said, unconvinced.

Elisabeth was moving better now. She had taken a battering, but there was no lasting damage. She felt better once they had stolen some fresh clothing from a washing line; the blood on her own shirt had stiffened to a dark red crust. She looked good in the new clothes. Her pallor might almost have been of her own design. Her beauty was fragile, non-committal. Brittle as porcelain.

They were covering around eight to ten miles a day now, Will estimated. They shied away from people, choosing to make their way across country. It was slower, but it meant they were guaranteed passage without scrutiny. The only people they had to dodge were farmers in tractors ploughing their fields or heavy-coated figures taking dogs for a walk.

Good luck paid them a visit when Sadie found a gulley partially shielded by trees. At the bottom ran a disused railway line, great tufts of weed sprouting between the sleepers. It was a joy to walk along the gravel, hidden from view; it created a pocket of silence. It gave them direction and purpose. Occasionally, if they did hear someone approaching, they could clear the track in seconds for the shade of the boughs that dogged the line.

“How far will the line take us, do you think?” Sadie asked.

“It would be nice if it took us to the front door of Sloe Heath,” Will said. “But I doubt it will. Let’s take advantage of it though. Try to walk a bit further than usual today.”

They talked little, but the further they went along the tracks, the more Will’s thoughts turned to what he might find at Sloe Heath. He had no contact name and no understanding of what kind of facility it was. Presumably he wouldn’t be allowed to just walk in and start hunting around for clues. He wondered too if he would see any of the men that had broken into his and Cat’s flat. His palms itched. He hoped so.

Sadie was slowing them down with a series of games. First she had been playing hide and seek, which distressed Elisabeth, and now she was walking along the line, arms outstretched, pretending to be a tightrope walker. Irritated, Will barked at her to catch them up and stop fooling. His charity towards her was lessening by the minute.

“I knew it was a bad idea, bringing you along,” he snapped.

“Will,” Elisabeth said, in a voice that he recognised from their past. It was her stop it now or we’ll have an argument voice.

“Well, it was. We’ve got enough to worry about without playing mum and dad too.”

“Pretend I’m not here,” Sadie retorted. “I don’t need a nanny.”

“What were you doing back there, anyway?” Will stared at her. “What were you doing hiding in that old farmhouse? Where are you from?”

“Never mind.”

“No, come on,” Will persisted. “I want to know. You could be a missing person for all we know. The police could be trying to find you. Which wouldn’t be helpful, let me tell you.”

“What difference would it make? The police are after you anyway. They think you killed your wife.”

Elisabeth stepped between them. “We aren’t getting anywhere. Why don’t we talk while we walk?”

“Elisabeth, she could be, I don’t know, she could be helping them out.”

Elisabeth frowned. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“She might be on their side. She might be – oh, I don’t know.” Will stalked away, angry with his inarticulacy and the lunatic thought that Sadie might somehow be plotting against him. If he was going to do something for Cat, it wasn’t going to happen with his head full of wool. Elisabeth caught up with him.

“What is wrong with you, Will? She’s just a girl. What does it matter where she’s from? If she doesn’t want to talk, she shouldn’t have to. She’s with us. Friends. Let her feel secure for a while. At least until we get where we’re going.”

Will’s eyes were fixed on the horizon, where perspective made the tracks vanish. “I’m sorry, Eli. I’m not myself. I can’t stop it. I feel as though I’m being hollowed out, chipped away. I just want to get there and find out what it is I have to find out.”

Elisabeth rubbed his arm. “You’re harder than this,” she said.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Ten days ago I was sitting in an armchair, wearing a pair of sheepskin slippers, while Catriona read out crossword clues. We were drinking tea. We were being a couple, in any of the million dull ways people are couples. Like we were a couple once. Just getting on with things, quietly.”

Eli pressed her forehead against his shoulder. “I wonder if we should have had children,” she said. “I mean, obviously, considering what happened between us, it was better we didn’t. But I wonder if you’d be better with Sadie if you had kids.”

Will couldn’t speak for a while. Cool wind swept down from the top of the gulley, spiced with burnt wood smells. Bonfire smells. It would be darkening within the hour.

“Go and talk to her,” Eli said. “She might offer some information about herself before too long. It could be that she just needs to get to know us first. Feel happy around us.”

Will nodded. He turned to Sadie, trying to smile. But she was gone.

“THIS IS EXACTLY what we don’t need,” Will said again. It was all he had said for the past hour as they hunted though the trees and bushes that sidled up the gulley. Elisabeth had given up shouting out Sadie’s name.

“We should just go,” Will said. “She’s pissing us around. She’s probably watching us now.”

Elisabeth was pale with worry. “We can’t just go, Will. We can’t leave her.”

“Why not?” Will snapped. “She left us. She’ll be fine. She’s not a child.”

He couldn’t explain to Elisabeth, but the need to get to Sloe Heath had changed him. Instilled in him was a fresh impetus, unbidden yet as critical as the life force. He could no more ignore it than the instinct to get out of the way of an oncoming train.

“If we hang around here much longer,” he complained, “this track will be re-opened.”

“She can’t have gone far,” Elisabeth countered.

“I hope she has.”

“Will.”

“Okay,” he said. “Another quarter of an hour. Then it will be dark and we’ll have to go on. But I promise you, she’s sitting in some tree, wetting herself watching us.”

The search proved fruitless. The smells of the bonfire were thickening. Elisabeth said, “Maybe we should…” and though Will didn’t relish the thought of mixing with strangers, he saw how they must at least investigate. As much as he cursed Sadie’s selfishness, it would be better if he knew where she had run to.

FOUR OR FIVE fires had been ignited across a patch of concretised wasteland comprised of a couple of acres that must once have been some kind of service depot for the long-departed trains. Ancient barrels of diesel lay around like fat drunks. Jagged holes in the metal showed how they had been siphoned of fuel. The foundations of a large building – some kind of maintenance shed – had left their outline in the ground. Lengths of scaffolding had turned the concrete it touched orange with rust. Into the grey surface, which was slowly being invaded by dandelions, pictures had been scratched in an infantile hand: cats and alien spaceships and steam engines. A skinny black dog trotted across the wasteland, giving Elisabeth and Will only cursory attention. Up ahead, where the fires were clustered together, came the occasional sound of laughter and swells of music. The tubercular grind of a car’s failing engine would at times drown out any other noise.

“I’m not too happy about this,” Elisabeth said, reaching for his hand.

There was a party in full flight. The fires contained it and illuminated it and encouraged it. Beyond the ring of flames, four or five caravans stood in the gloom like ruminating beasts. Will counted about half a dozen men sitting on blankets on the ground, passing a huge glass jug around that contained what looked like scrumpy from where they stood. The music worked on the three women in the ring like the moon on the tides, pulling and pushing them into fresh configurations. Barefoot, they wore wraps of fabric across their hips, slit to reveal legs tanned by the fire. They wore nothing on top. Four children played with toy cars in the dust at the far edge of the circle. From Will’s viewpoint, they looked misshapen, though that must have been down to the unreliable light. Sadie was not among them.

They moved forwards into the clearing. “Hello?” Will called out, trying to project his voice above the music, but not so powerfully that he startled his intended audience. One of the children looked up, then turned to the men and, waving to get their attention, pointed to Will before going back to his miniature traffic jam.

The music was turned off.

A man in a fleece zipped up to his throat sauntered over to Will and Elisabeth. The women reduced the energy of their dancing by degrees until they were gently swaying from side to side, all eyes turned on the visitors. Their skin seemed incandescent. Perspiration had failed to bead; it coated the flesh of their arms, their breasts, which were silvered by the moon or gilded by the flames, depending on the tilt of their bodies.

“Why are you here?” the man asked. His voice was touched by an accent Will couldn’t place. Something European.

“We’ve lost a little girl,” Will said.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” the man replied. “There are places you can go to for counselling, as I understand it.”

Low laughter from his male companions. One of the children stood up and threw a stone at Will and Elisabeth. It skipped along the floor and pinged off Will’s boot.

Elisabeth said, “What he meant was—”

The man blinked slowly. “She isn’t here.”

“Do you mind if we look around?” Will asked. “She could be hiding. We only lost her a little while ago.”

Now the other males sitting on the blankets rose and moved slowly to be with their friend. One of them hitched up a shirt that was worn loose over his jeans, exposing the curved, polished handle of a knife.

Will said, “We don’t want any trouble.”

“Well then,” said the man in the fleece, “you came to the wrong place.”

The man with the knife stopped in front of Elisabeth. “This your wife?” he asked, taking an age to look her up and down. He leaned over to give her a side-on appraisal too.

“Yes, she’s my wife. We’re lost. My daughter… our daughter was playing. She ran off. We’ve called the police.”

A bowing of the lips, a tiny shake of the head. The slow blink. “I don’t think you called the police. I don’t think you have a phone. I don’t think you know where you are.”

“We’re in the Midlands,” Elisabeth said. She was darting looks around her. Will could feel her bristling beside him. She would take off in a minute, he could tell. He would be right behind her.

“Ah,” intoned the man in the fleece, “the Midlands. ‘Hello, police? Yes, we’ve lost our little daughter. Come and help us find her please. She’s in the Midlands. Somewhere.’”

More laughter from the gang. It was uneasy laughter now though, forced as they considered, like Will and Elisabeth, what would come next. What would be their signal? Will hoped that he and Elisabeth might be away before they found out.

The man with the knife reached out and pushed his fingers through Elisabeth’s hair.

“Don’t touch her,” Will said, in what he hoped was a hard voice. He was no midget and the lack of a shave, he knew, lent his face an aggression that did not exist.

“You’d rather I touched you?” said the man with the knife, failing to take his eyes off Elisabeth. His hand lowered, fastened on her left breast. Elisabeth winced.

“Just leave us alone,” Will insisted. “She’s been in a car accident. She isn’t well.”

“She feels fine to me,” came the lazy, beer-loose voice. His hand palpated and pinched the breast. The cold, rather than his ministrations, was thickening her nipple. But Knifeman didn’t have the wit to understand. Will wanted to smack the curl from his lips, tear those sleazy, half-shut lids wide open. His blood rushed with the thought of violence.

“Do you dance?” asked Knifeman, stepping closer to Elisabeth. He licked his broad lips and they gleamed as though forged from metal. He pressed a denim-clad thigh into the dip where her own met. “You have a dancer’s body. I bet you move like nobody’s business.”

The head on top of the fleece started jerking with laughter. “Want to trade a dance with your wife for your girl?”

Will clenched his hand into a fist. “So she is here?”

“She is for the sake of my offer. Whether she is once your bitch shakes her arse for us might be a different matter.”

Something went wrong in Will’s mind. It was like the slow bend of a green stick deep within: nothing snapped, but he went dizzy for a second, the earth slanting away from him at an alarming angle. He heard himself say You fucking and then there was just a thrum of blood turning his ears hot. When conventional images were tucked into his eyes once more, he saw that his hand was badly gashed and Knifeman was out cold, his blade held loosely between his thumb and forefinger. Elisabeth scrabbled for the knife as the other men closed in. They faced each other uneasily. The women pulled shawls around their nakedness, the children ran into the shadows.

Very clearly, a cry, Sadie’s cry, went up into the freezing sky: “Don’t!”

“So,” Will said, trying to keep the edginess from his voice. “Where is she?”

The fires were burning down. Before long they would be dead, plunging the wasteland into complete darkness. Any advantage that the knife was giving them would be lost. Sadie shrieked again.

“What’s happening to her?” Elisabeth demanded, passing the knife to Will.

“We only wanted you to dance for us,” Fleece said. “Now look at what you’ve done. I think, after we’ve fucked your daughter, we’ll kill you and bury you in the cow shit in that field.”

Will, as if in slow motion, stepped forwards and slid the point of the knife almost nonchalantly into Fleece’s shoulder. He yelled to Elisabeth to run, and they did, Will dropping the weapon in his shock and panic. He followed her towards the caravans while shouts and curses raged behind them. Catching up, he grabbed Elisabeth’s hand.

“We’ll lose them in there somewhere. Try to be quiet and keep your head down. Just for a little while. Till I find Sadie.”

Towards the rear of the cluster of caravans, they found another scattering of spent fuel drums. They huddled among them, shivering. Sometimes the voices came close and then drifted away. Will couldn’t work out whether it was proximity or a trick of the wind. He held Elisabeth close to him, and after what felt like hours, the voices faded until they were rewarded with complete silence.

Will lifted his head above the rim of an oil drum. The caravans were little more than grainy pale blocks against the night. One or two windows pulsed with waxy, orange light. The camp was asleep.

“I should go,” Will whispered. “I should find Sadie. That fucking girl.”

Elisabeth’s eyes broadened under the skimpy moonlight. “I have to come with you,” she urged.

“No. Please stay here. If something goes wrong, you have to get away. Contact the police. Sort it all out.”

“Why don’t we do that now?” Elisabeth said, but the tone of her voice had already answered her own question.

Will said nothing, but gradually worked at Elisabeth’s hands until he was free. “Give me twenty minutes,” he said. “If I’m not back by then, get out quick. Promise me?”

Elisabeth drew him to her and kissed him clumsily, almost desperately. “Hurry. Please,” she whispered, looking away from his face.

“Wait, Eli,” Will said. “Twenty minutes.”

And then he was away. She tried to keep track of him as, crouching, he crept towards the first of the caravans, but it was too dark. Did he stumble? Was that what caused the sudden confusion of noise? And now a shape approaching her. Pale. Was it him? Was it Will, returning already?

CHAPTER TWENTY: THE WALL

SEAN MET THE others for breakfast at 8.30. The sky was teeming. Figures without umbrellas were bent double, their coats and jackets drawn up around their heads. Water sluiced along the street, reflecting the miserable black seam of cloud.

“It’s just sitting there,” observed Robbie, a huge mug of tea obscuring most of his face. “A big, black bladder of piss. Pissing on us.”

Lutz flicked a baked bean at him from his plate. “That… is poetry.”

Trio’s was like any other breakfast hang-out. Populated mainly by the men working on the demolition site, it was also first-stop for a number of ashen-faced office workers poring over briefcases filled with pages and mobile phones that never seemed to cease ringing. The windows were simultaneously drenched with condensation and fogged with heat. The place was run by three Italian guys. During the rush, when plates of chips, sausage, egg, toast, and bacon were being passed around and devoured, their voices ricocheted off the walls as they called out fresh orders or lambasted the help: two women dwarfed by the huge steel tea urns, apparently doomed to a lifetime of scraping a layer of butter onto bread or hunting down the carousel of red and brown sauce.

Sean was sitting with his back against the wall, watching the smears of colour hurry past the window. He felt nauseated by what had happened the day before, but the boys around him were helping to make him feel normal again, part of a crowd, rather than someone picked out for the limelight.

There was one customer he had noticed who visited every day and seemed to end up bickering with the staff about his order. Here he came now. He wore a red, corduroy jacket and blue jeans. Caterpillar boots. Simple black T-shirt. He shed his earphones and dug in his pocket for some change with one hand while the other marked his place in a paperback.

“No,” the chap was saying now. “I said mustard. Who has tomato sauce on a hot beef sandwich? Mustard. Anyway, it doesn’t even sound like tomato sauce. Or ketchup.”

The old Italian guy said sorry maybe a dozen times, his voice thick with accent. Sean liked Luigi. He had a kind face, even though it was heavily lined. He had friendly, sorry eyes magnified by unflattering glasses; his hair was oiled and swept back from his forehead. His brothers were younger, beefier. Sansone had a series of diagonals shaved into his right eyebrow and wore a Fiorentina football shirt; Pepe sweated profusely and rarely lost his expression of bewilderment.

“Reminds me of Salty, that,” Robbie said, gesturing towards the counter. “Every day is the fucking same for Salty in this caff. He asks for marmalade on his toast. Every morning. They stick Marmite on it. He says something about it and some of them, especially the hard-looking one, complain, make a big song and dance. I half-think he does it on purpose. Fucking Italian stereotype game. Scowling like he’s some mob fuck with an itch up his shitter. He goes: ‘Fack, meester, iss like you ask Marmite I give you Marmite but iss no facking good. Iss marmalard you want. Haysoo facking Chrize, man. You thin’ I here for your good health an sanidy?’

“So this morning, right, he gets it spot on, first time. Without Salty having to ask for it. Marmalade. No problem. Salty, mad bastard, tells him he wants Marmite. The fucker barred him. Barred him from a caff, for fuck’s sake.”

“This weekend,” Nicky Preece was saying. “What do you say?”

A friend of the family was getting married. Nicky, as best man, was organising the stag do, which would be an all-day affair. The celebrations were due to begin on the Saturday morning: a game of football at Victoria Park. Nicky was trying to recruit some ringers.

“It’s nothing serious, just a kick-around, really.”

“Will there be nets?” Jez asked.

“Does it matter?”

Jez shrugged. “I find you can’t have a really decent game of footie unless you get some nets. It’s the sound of the ball hitting the back of it. That kind of wet, whipping noise.”

Robbie laughed. “A noise you and your mother know all too well, eh, Jezzer?”

“’K off.”

“Look, we need five more people. That’s all. It’d be great if you lot turned up. We’d have a laugh.”

“This Saturday, you say?” Lutz asked. “Only I can’t make it.”

“Fuck,” Nicky spat.

“Me either,” said Jez.

“But you were just asking about nets.” Nicky looked around him, as though for confirmation that this was so.

“Yeah, but I was just asking for the others. You can’t have a decent game without nets.”

Sean said, “I’ll go. If you want me.”

“That’s great,” Nicky said. “Anyone else? Robbie?”

Robbie nodded, his mouth full of bread.

Nicky gave him an OK sign. “Come on, Tim. You look like a footballer.”

Tim was bent over his poached egg on toast, still bovinely chewing his first mouthful. In this time, Lutz had gobbled his breakfast and was half-way through his second mug of tea. Tim sat up at the mention of his name and swivelled his large, moth eyes until he was staring at Nicky.

“Brittle bones,” he said. “Asthma. Glue ear. Angina…”

“Okay, okay,” Nicky said, wearily. “I asked you if you wanted a game of footy. I didn’t ask you for a list of stuff queuing up to kill you.”

Tim said, “Piles.”

THEY MADE GOOD progress that morning. Nicky and Sean worked as a team on a fresh wall while the others pulled up floorboards in another room. In his T-shirt, sweat hooping the neck and armpits, Sean had mastered the art of talking and working with the hammer.

“We going to need special kit for this game?” he asked, swinging the tool over his head.

“Nah,” Nicky said. He was taking a breather, leaning against the handle of his hammer while he watched Sean work. “We’re hiring kit from the sports centre there. Nothing serious though, we’ll just have a kick-about if not that many turn up. I doubt they will. Freezing cold morning. I must be bloody mad. Should be good though.”

“You lot hang around together quite a bit then?”

“Yeah, pretty much. It’s a tight little unit, you know.”

Sean whipped his head around, trying to get the sweat out of his eyes. “And Vernon. Is he part of it?”

“Vernon’s his own man. We hardly see him. I like it like that. Same with Salty and the Rap. Upstairs men. Not like us. Salty, maybe, but not really.”

Sean let him chew on the silence a while and concentrated on his job, waiting for the question. The wall was coming apart, slowly, but the deeper they got into the building, the sturdier the construction. It was as though in the building of the de Fleche tower they had run out of decent stuff towards the top and substituted inferior materials. It was hard going now and would become harder. But that suited Sean. He was building himself up in the evenings, working hard at his press-ups and sit-ups and squat thrusts. He was running hard in the mornings, up to five miles a day now, and he felt better than ever.

“The other day, when Vernon wanted to see you. How did it go?”

“Fine,” Sean said. “He just wanted to welcome me on board. Took me for a beer.”

“Oh,” said Nicky, non-committally. “Nice one.”

“You don’t sound convinced. Did he not buy you a pint when you joined up?”

“Well, yeah. But me and the boys thought there was something more than that.”

“Really?” Sean said, not giving anything away. He didn’t want to piss Nicky off too much. He desperately wanted to inveigle his way into the gang; a football match and an afternoon in the pub would go a long way towards cementing their relationship.

“Well. Yeah. We knew Kev. The guy who was… well, I suppose he was Vernon’s right-hand man. He was invalided out, couple of weeks ago. We all thought Lutz was going to get picked to work with Vernon but then you came along.”

“Invalided out?”

“Vernon didn’t tell you any of this?”

Sean stopped swinging the hammer. He stepped back and ran his forearm across his face. “No he didn’t. Where’s Tim? I need a drink.”

Nicky Preece was obviously unsure as to whether or not to go on with his story. He picked up his mallet and took over from Sean, bashing the wall at a much quicker pace than his partner, but with less power.

“Kev got shot,” said Nicky. “He and Vernon were visiting the owner of a nightclub. This guy, he owed Vernon some money, I think. But the nightclub owner was savvy to him. Tooled up. Vernon got out by the skin of his teeth. Kev was cornered in an alleyway by a couple of bouncers. Shot through the throat. He works on his allotment now. Digging beetroot and shit.”

“Where?”

Nicky said, “Out Bewsey way. The bouncers got their comeuppance though. One of them was blinded in an acid attack a few weeks later. Nobody’s saying nothing about who did it, but, well…”

Sean looked at him calmly. Nicky returned his gaze. He downed tools and smiled at Sean, breathing hard. “You know,” he said, “it’s the weirdest thing. I can’t help it, talking to you, but it’s like talking to the police.”

Sean laughed. “I’m as much a policeman as you are a circus clown.”

“I don’t mean anything by it, mate,” Nicky said. “I don’t want to get on the wrong side of you or anything, but you don’t half act like a copper sometimes.”

“How do you mean?” Sean asked, trying to appear amused.

“The silences. The one-word questions. The look. You have got the classic look of a copper.”

“Which is?”

“No offence, but bland as fuck. You know. Dead cold stare. No expression.”

“And you’d know all about that, would you?”

Nicky grinned. “Too much. I’ve been a good lad these past five years, but I was a terror, let me tell you, when I was in my teens.”

“So what about Vernon? What’s he up to?”

“You tell me, PC.”

Sean kicked the hammer across the floor. “That isn’t funny. And I’d prefer it if you didn’t bring this up again with any of the others.”

“Why not? It’s just a laugh.”

“I don’t find it funny. And I don’t want people thinking I’ve got anything to do with our boys in blue. Okay? Jesus Christ, I’ve had a hard enough time as it is without being mistaken for a fucking flatfoot as well.”

Nicky patted him on the arm. “I’m sorry, all right? I’m a tit. Speak my mind, that’s all. No harm meant.”

“Okay, then. Let’s forget it. But Vernon… tell me about Vernon.”

Born Vernon Lord, nobody knows where, nobody knows when. Left school without any qualifications. Worked for a series of low-lifes and hoods across the Northwest of England and, for a short period, as bodyguard to a stripper in a Soho bar.

Never married. No form. No known relatives.

Vernon Lord now lives in a very nice house in Appleton. He knows his martial arts and his military history. He knows his weapons best of all.

It is rumoured that he has murdered in the region of seventeen people over the last twenty-five years.

What is it with this fucker? Sean thought. No form? No form? The man is a psychopath. He was standing over the stove, steaming some broccoli to go with his re-heated curry from the previous night.

As if summoning the man, his mobile chirped. It was Vernon.

“Tomorrow night. Runcorn. I need to drop by on a client. And then we’ve got to get some video rolling. Can you come?”

“I don’t know about that, Vernon. I’m supposed to be cooking dinner for a friend.”

“You’re not doing too badly, are you? Only been here five minutes and you’ve got work and mates coming out of your backside. Bird is it?”

“A friend,” Sean reiterated.

“Name?”

“I couldn’t possibly tell you that.”

“Aww, and us best chums and all. You can tell me.”

“Esmerelda, her name is. Esmerelda Arbuckle. The third.”

“Right. I see. So the job. The job. You won’t do it? I strongly advise that you do. Bring your woman with you. Big, is she?”

“Go to hell, Vernon. I’m not your puppet.” Phone down.

Sean poured himself a drink. A large brandy. No longer hungry, he switched off the stove and took his glass to the window. Some view. Not that he was taking it in. The steep embankment choked with nettles and fast-food wrappers was a dark slab in the night, bejewelled with frost. The sleepers gleamed coldly atop it. Something squirmed through the undergrowth: a rat, maybe, or a cat. A bottle smashed in the alleyway and a flurry of giggles followed the sound.

Sean was thinking of Tim Enever.

He had left Nicky when the questions had veered too close to home, using his thirst as an excuse. The rest of the building was consumed with noises generated by the wind. He was convinced that there must be animals living on some of these floors, judging by some of the scratching and scampering sounds that echoed through the walls. The others were working a floor beneath him and Nicky, stripping out architraves and dados and skirting boards. He saw Tim leaving them, scuffing his way towards the lifts that were no longer working and standing in front of them for a few seconds before the penny dropped. Plodding to the stairwell, he descended two floors and moved into a room off the main corridor; this much Sean could see from where he stood.

Sean followed. He watched Tim moving through the rooms of what had once been a suite of offices. A notice board on the wall contained a holiday planner for 1994 and a photograph from an office party: three men and three women adorned with tinsel, wearing funny hats and booze-loosened smiles. Tim observed the traffic through the window as it was chased along the carriageway by sunlight slipping from a bank of hard, black cloud low to the west. Then he went to the opposite wall and placed his hands against the plaster, moving them as a doctor might against the flesh of a worried patient. He was whispering too, words that Sean couldn’t fathom, though he recognised the tenderness in the delivery of them.

“Tim?”

Tim moved as quickly as he could away from the wall: still a languid movement. “What?” He blinked.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing. Wandering around.” His voice was wet, catarrhal. Listening to him breathe was like listening to a sucking wound in casualty.

“You were touching that wall up like it was your girlfriend.”

Tim reddened. He pushed the babyfine floss of his hair away from his eyes and made to walk past Sean. It was easy to block his path. A cobweb would have impeded him.

“What were you doing, Tim?”

“I. Was. Do-ing. No-thing.” Enunciating every syllable, Tim tried to stare out Sean, summoning as much fury to his puppy face as possible.

“Okay, Tim,” Sean said at last. “I don’t mean anything. I was just curious.”

Tim seemed to slump; relief wiped the pitiful attempt at pique from his features. “Do you want anything from the shop? I’m just off to get Salty a packet of fig biscuits.”

“Bottle of water,” Sean said. “Thanks.”

“Right. Put the money in the tin, won’t you?”

“Always do. See you later. We’re going to the pub, aren’t we?”

Tim nodded. He was waiting for Sean to leave the room with him. Sean didn’t disappoint, heading back up to where Nicky Preece was stationed, but as soon as Tim had pushed through the revolving doors, Sean was back down the stairs. He retraced his steps through the offices to the wall that Tim had been caressing. It was a wall scarred by tiny holes where nails or tacks had fastened charts and plans and diagrams to it. Pale green paint was chipped here and there, revealing a sickly pink undercoat. Feeling somewhat self-conscious, Sean placed his hands against the wall in the same way that Tim had. The plaster was warm to the touch and he could feel a slight vibration: no doubt Jez or Robbie or Lutz working with a power tool down below. Sean moved his hands across the wall, wondering what it was that Tim had been doing. Could he have some kind of demolition fetish?

He pushed himself away, chuckling to himself and feeling embarrassed that he had allowed Tim to get at him like that. At the threshold of the room he heard the wind getting up outside the building, howling through the brick nets and chutes and scaffolding. The traffic had dwindled on the carriageway. The cloud had infected the entire sky. It was as though the sun didn’t exist any more.

EMMA ARRIVED JUST as the evening news was beginning on the television. Sean let her into the flat and then returned to the set, where a man with too-pink skin was standing by a curve of motorway. A crater in the road’s surface was the size of a large roundabout, straddling the central reservation. The crash barriers had ruptured and bent like toffee. Days after the explosions on the M6 and M1, forensic teams were combing the area around the detonated bombs, looking for clues.

“…as yet nobody has claimed responsibility for the explosions and, although it seems unlikely from the sheer scale of the attack, police are not ruling out the possibility that the culprit is a lone terrorist…”

Sean was wiping his hands on a tea towel. Emma plucked it from his fingers and, stepping into the circle of his arms, kissed him deeply.

“Hello to you too,” Sean said, smiling, when she eventually pulled away.

“That was just a message to you, from me,” she said. “Whatever went before… it doesn’t matter to me. I’m here if you want me.”

Sean had made a stew of tomatoes, bacon, and beans. He served it up with hunks of bread and glasses of merlot. They sat eating on the floor, cross-legged, leaning lightly against each other while sleet spattered the windows and the news played out its awful theatre to them.

Later, sitting among the dirty dishes and listening to music, Emma asked Sean what he thought about the motorway bombs.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve seen nothing like it before. I mean, look at the number of cameras they’ve got out on the roads these days. And you’re telling me nobody picked up anything on them?”

“They aren’t all working all the time, are they?”

“No, but you’d think, if what, over fifty bombs had been planted, that something would have been filmed. It’s all too perfect. Nobody has that kind of luck during an operation. Nobody.”

“Well, it looks like they have now,” Emma said, absently stroking the soft fuzz on the nape of Sean’s neck.

Sean thought of the way Tim had moved his hands over the pimpled, scarred surface of the wall. He had treated it almost reverentially.

“I wish I could open you up sometimes,” Emma said, her voice changed. Nervous. Gentle. “You’re so quiet, really. You’ve always been quiet.”

She pressed against his ribcage as though, in the bones that patterned his skin, she might read something about him that she didn’t know. “In here is the real you. The you I want to understand and get to know better. I want to get under your skin, Sean. Does that upset you at all? Does that kind of talk scare you?”

They held each other until it grew too cold to remain on the floor. In bed, they watched the heat of their bodies reach out to the window and slowly draw a grey veil over the freezing railway embankment and the broken sodium lamps. It was a magical time, an immanent time. It felt like Christmas Eve, or a leaden sky at the cusp of emptying itself of snow. Sean felt the hair at the base of his spine lifting with the deliberate grace of a spider’s legs. He wanted to make love to Emma, but something was holding him back. Maybe it was maturity. At the edge of sleep, he thought he understood the secrets of the world and the reason behind too many things that were never considered in life. He stirred, his head woolly, tears in his eyes. Naomi was perched on the edge of the bed, waggling his big toe between her thumb and forefinger. The further out of sleep he came, the more insubstantial she grew, until she was no longer there. She said, as she faded from view, “There doesn’t have to be a door for there to be a doorway.”

Sean crept from bed to the window and palmed away the condensation. Outside, shadows beneath the trees teased themselves into and out of faces he thought he recognised. Some of the people he saw were long dead. Voices from his past tried to re-establish themselves in his memory but they had been gone too long for them to gain purchase. His grandfather was there somewhere, his face as grave as an eagle’s. The hooded eyes, the jut of the jaw, the thick blade of a nose. But the voice would not come.

Dwelling on all of this, he failed to remember what it had been that drew him from sleep in the first place. His toe, when he reached to feel it, was warm where the rest of his foot was cold. He trudged back to bed, arrested in his movements as he saw Emma, the bedclothes shrugged off her, the light streaming through the window hitting her arched body and giving Sean the illusion of transparency; he could see everything in her. Everything.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: DODO

IT WAS A woman. An old woman.

Elisabeth tried to shy away from the approaching figure dressed in a diaphanous nightgown and a pair of waders that sucked and squelched in the mud surrounding the caravans, but the old woman was making a beeline for her.

“Don’t bother hiding, sugarsweetie,” she said, in a voice that suggested she was bored by her quarry before she’d even been exposed to it. “I’ve got eyes like you wouldn’t believe. Like a shitehawk’s eyes, my eyes.” She gargled laughter and reached out a hand, hauling Elisabeth from behind the fuel tanks with astonishing strength.

“Now,” she continued, “if you want to get away from here with the skin on your back in one piece, you’ll close any or all of your holes and come with me. Sharpish.”

Elisabeth wasted no time. She hurried after the woman as she returned to the caravans. She had no choice. If she didn’t acquiesce, the woman would out her and that would be that.

“Where’s your man friend?” the old woman asked, shooing her through the door of a tiny caravan that listed so prominently to one side that Elisabeth had to put out her hands to stop herself from toppling into the wall. Candles in ornate glass holders spilled nervous light across the cluttered cabin and drenched the air with a hot, animal smell.

“He went looking for Sadie. We heard her earlier.”

“Maybe you did. But the silly bastard will get himself killed. We have ourselves sentinels in this little camp of ours. We need to watch ourselves all the time. Not popular our lot. We’ve had attacks before. Caravans burnt down. We have to protect ourselves.”

“I’m sorry,” Elisabeth said. She was at a loss as to what to say but felt she had to fill the gaps fed to her by the old woman. “What’s your name?”

“We’ll put our cosy faces on when I get back. I have to look for your hero, don’t I? Stay here. Don’t open the door.”

The woman wound a scarf around her throat and went outside. Elisabeth closed her eyes and pressed the heels of her hands into them until motes of colour spattered across her inner vision. A ginger cat swerved through the legs of the chair and sat by her feet, lack of interest spreading its features into a yawn. Elisabeth reached for the cat but it batted her hand away and turned its back on her. Around her, the caravan seemed to draw itself in, as though it were expelling breath. The fidgeting shadows started a headache behind her ears. Paintings of sullen men in burnt umber and cobalt absorbed the light. A bookshelf described a faint grin across the wall under the weight of triple-stacked volumes. The furniture was spindly and unwelcoming; it might have been antique for all Elisabeth knew.

She went to the window and teased apart the curtains, wishing she had been strong enough to repulse the old woman at the fuel drums. Ten minutes had passed since Will left her. That all was silent outside ought to have encouraged her, but it did not. The featureless dark sucked at her eyes.

Elisabeth, suspicious that the woman might turn her in, grabbed a stubby knife from the kitchen area and hid it under her jumper. The cat rubbed at her ankles now that she was near food but Elisabeth ignored it. She was geeing herself up to leave when the door flew open and Will ducked into the caravan, holding Sadie by the arm. The old woman brought up the rear. Will was smiling. Sadie looked tired and cold. Blue hoops hung beneath her eyes.

“Sorry,” she said.

The old woman poured water into a kettle. “I’ll make you tea. I’ll give you sandwiches. But then you must leave.”

Elisabeth said: “What happened?”

Sadie had been intent on hiding from them behind the trees until they stopped their bickering, no more, but when she had heard men talking beyond the embankment she had decided to check them out in case they might be looking for Will. One of the strangers had spotted Sadie and was friendly, offering her chocolate. He was around Sadie’s age. The other man was older and was walking a docile-looking dog; he moved away when Sadie approached.

The boy, whose name was Jacob, was good-looking and Sadie had warmed to him. They talked for a while and Jacob asked if she would like to see a bird’s nest. It was then that she realised she might be missed and explained that she needed to go back. But the boy grabbed her arm and begged her to go with him. The man with the dog returned. The dog was no longer placid and scared her into going with them. They gave her something hot and sour to drink from a bottle without a label that made her feel dizzy. She remembered someone trying to pull her top up and she had struggled with him. He’d had a grope of her breasts and seemed to be satisfied with that. Then she had been being pushed into a caravan where she had fallen asleep on a sofa. Blankets that smelled of tar. Then nothing more until Will and the old woman found her.

“They’ll notice she’s gone,” the old woman said. “Won’t be long. You should be on your way soon.”

Elisabeth ignored her. “Are you all right?” she asked Sadie.

“Fine,” Sadie replied.

“No,” Elisabeth intoned, more firmly. “I mean, are you all right?”

The old woman pursed her lips as she handed mugs of tea around. “If you mean, ‘Have they raped you?’, why not say?”

Elisabeth put her mug down. “We should go to the police about this,” she said. “Sadie was kidnapped. We don’t know what’s happened to her. She was drugged.”

“Your daughter was not raped.”

“She isn’t my—”

The old woman paid no attention. “She was not raped. I know my kind.”

“We’ll see about that. She was kidnapped, at any rate. There’ll be prison sentences in this, I promise you.”

The old woman rounded on her. “There’ll be death before there’s prison sentences, I promise you that, if you carry on with this nonsense.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Well what do you think it is? A brace of pheasants?”

Will moved, breaking the tension that was thickening in the cabin.

“Eli,” he said gently, “Nula helped us. She helped us. We should be grateful.”

“And what would have happened to her if we hadn’t come after her, Will? What then?”

Nula offered Elisabeth a thick slice of bread spread with margarine. Despite her hunger, she spurned it.

“She’d have come with us,” Nula said, re-directing the bread towards Will, who took it. “She’d have been safe with us.”

“Safe?” Elisabeth mocked. “Safe?”

Sadie stood up. Groggily, she said: “I’m okay. They didn’t touch me. I promise.”

Elisabeth closed her eyes. She felt close to tears. Regardless of her mistrust of the old woman, she didn’t want to go back out into the cold and dark. The cabin, though cluttered and musty, was at least warm. “Let’s get out,” she said.

THEY WALKED IN silence until they rejoined the railway line. Before dawn, they scattered, hiding in the bushes as three helicopters chattered low overhead, arc lights swooping over the embankment and the tracks.

“Do you think they’ll come after us, those people?” Will asked. “When they find that Sadie is gone?”

Elisabeth shook her head. “Not if they’ve any brains between them,” she said. Will’s reluctance to report the incident had refreshed the frost between them that had until that point been gradually thawing. At lunchtime, exhausted, Will conceded that if they weren’t to alert the authorities about the camp, they should at least treat themselves to a decent lunch for a change. It would be worth the risk. And after last night, he privately considered, he wasn’t bothered any more. What happened now didn’t matter.

Leaving Elisabeth and Sadie on the edge of a car park, Will, conscious of how soiled and grizzled he appeared, tramped along a road to a supermarket where he bought bread and cheese and a bottle of wine without making eye contact with anybody. He wished he had enough money to enable them to take a train or a bus, one of which, cruelly, passed him as he made his way back to the car park, splashing him with some of the road’s surface water. The windows were misty with inner warmth; figures were black, lumpen, huddled into the enervation of their journeys.

Will could now see Elisabeth and Sadie perched on two small concrete bollards, talking, and the sight lanced him to the quick.

In the days leading up to Cat’s death, he had been imagining how the shape of his own baby might fill his hands. How the heat of it would travel through his fingers. He had imagined breathing the air that moved across its hot little head, and of what it might have smelled.

Being with Elisabeth too had re-opened in him a scar he thought long healed. The manner of their separation had always frustrated him. It had been avoidable, he knew, but neither he nor she had lifted a finger to arrest the slide. It was as though they had been fascinated by the speed of their decay, loath to prevent it in favour of observing something spectacular. From aisle to courtroom, their marriage had lasted three months. And for what? An imagined infidelity on her part; a suspicion on his that she had married him because he was the only person in her last-chance saloon at the time.

After the fallout (there had been much, and it had spread wide), Will had failed to come up with a satisfactory reason for their divorce. It was almost as if they had feared the dedication and commitment marriage demanded of them and had wimped out at the first opportunity. By then he had met Cat and was too involved to consider raking through the ashes to see if any embers remained.

“A feast,” he said cheerfully, as he rejoined them. Although he hadn’t said as much, he was mightily pleased to have Sadie back with them. Finding her in Fleece’s caravan, he had hugged her and told her how sorry he was. But then Fleece had entered, his arm and chest sodden with wet blood, and, upon seeing Will, had turned and hurried outside, tripping as he did so and winding himself on the ground.

“Wait here, just a second,” he had told Sadie and ran after Fleece. In the dark, before Fleece had a chance to muster the breath to call for help, Will knelt on his back and caught his chin between his hands. Summoning all of his strength, and thinking of Cat alone with those evil, evil bastards, he wrenched Fleece’s head back, relishing, yes, relishing the tear of muscles, the gullet’s collapse in a sound like that of disintegrating polystyrene, the crack of bone as his throat gave way. At the moment that Fleece went limp in his hands, a strange haze, like some glittering stage curtain, had manifested itself in front of (or was it behind?) his eyes. It threatened to part, but Will recoiled, jamming his hands against his eyes, inexplicably fearful of what he might see. He had dragged the body fully three hundred yards, into a scrim of gorse, and kicked loose dust at the corpse until its shape was sufficiently concealed.

And then the old woman, scurrying through the dark, her Wellington boots scuffing across the ground. Bringing him out of it.

Sadie and Elisabeth wolfed their food and traded secretive glances as they ate. At one point they laughed out loud. Will, his gut full of food, picking crumbs from his jumper and in as good a mood as any since leaving the farmhouse, asked them about the joke they were sharing.

“Don’t look now,” Sadie said, “but look behind you.”

This nonsense set Elisabeth off again. Will, happy that they were happy, glanced over his shoulder and started laughing too.

There was a man in the car park in a crash helmet. Huge coils of rope were slung over his shoulder. He was climbing. He was climbing the car park. Horizontally.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: WETWORK

MAY MOULDER IS 63. Until her husband, Brian, died five years ago, they lived in Toxteth. She recently lost her sight thanks to diabetes. She worked all her life at a factory, punching the asbestos from grids for gas fires. She’s been battling to get her dilapidated flat repaired by the council. The environmental health declared it unfit to live in but the council won’t do anything about it. She also has trouble with the electricity board, paying over the odds to heat her house, and they are charging her for a fridge and cooker she never bought. Payments are being deducted through her electricity token meter.

Fuck her.

Sean put the page back in its folder and tossed it into the box where all the other files sat on the back seat. He’d gone on what? Nine, ten jobs with Vernon now, and there had been no progress. No feeling of getting under his quarry’s skin at all. Vernon was holding back from him. Vernon didn’t want him too close. Sean thumbed through the documents filing cabinet of his memory and tried to find some clue that he might have missed, but always, at the moment of closure, he was sent away.

Oliver and Victoria, both in their late sixties, had been a middle-class couple retired to comfortable life in Stockton Heath, to the south of Warrington. Victoria contracted a virulent form of Parkinson’s disease. Oliver was caring for her full-time. Pitiful man, he was, Sean now remembered. Gone to seed but trying to put on the hard man act. Photographs of him as a young man, Kray-like in his intensity, his polish, were arranged around the rooms. Sepia pictures of him shadow boxing, or in the ring waiting for the bell to release him from his corner. Pictures of him and his mates standing on a street corner, toy gangsters in white shirts with big collars and dark suits.

Victoria needed medication every two hours. They received no relief from social services or the NHS – Victoria was assessed as not needing medical care – so it was left to the pair to make ends meet alone. Their savings were not large and would soon run out if they were to get nursing care or a stay in a home. Oliver, the hard man, was being ground down. No way out. What help did he get from Vernon? What promises?

And the others.

Homeless Cheryl, twenty-five, unable to get any kind of housing other than a night shelter haunted mainly by old men. Wasn’t she HIV+? Sean remembered her whimpering as Vernon stood over her in a dark archway connecting Sankey Street with the delivery road behind Woolworths in Warrington’s town centre. She told Vernon how she applied for hardship payments, but large amounts were docked to pay for the night shelter, leaving her with next to nothing to live on. She was sleeping on friends’ floors. All her friends used drugs and she was rapidly sinking into that lifestyle. The voluntary agencies were powerless to help her. Ah diddums, Vernon had said, striking the wall above her head with the bat and causing her to shriek, recoil, try to make herself invisible before him.

Sean remembered Jess and Daniel, neighbours on a Liverpool housing estate trying to escape from homes that were no better than diseased hovels. The health of their children was compromised. Sean recalled tiny, denuded faces staring up at him, like ghosts. Underfed children that played with him while Vernon raged in the kitchen. One boy playing with half a dozen cockroaches. A girl sitting in nappies that hadn’t been changed for days. Ignored by the council on the basis that their houses were no worse than any others on the estate, Jess attempted to find a house through a private landlord while Daniel withheld rent as a protest and faced eviction. Two of his children were severely asthmatic. That’s not all they’ll be, Vernon warned, if you don’t give me something to put in my pockets. The children waving at him from the window as they left.

“Putting these… dossiers together, what? Does that codify all this for you? Make it acceptable? Does this woman really need a visit with a baseball bat?”

“Codify,” Vernon said. “I like that. I love what comes out of your mouth, Redman. Love it.”

“You going to answer me?”

Vernon pushed a smile onto a face that didn’t welcome it. “I’m not answering anything. But while we’re at it, let’s sort us out a new rule, shall we? That rule is, you stop asking me questions. I’m trying to concentrate and you are making my shit hang sideways with this constant, cocking chat.”

He steered the four-by-four back onto Fiddlers Ferry Road. Across the St Helens Canal, Spike Island, a thick spit of mudland reaching into the Mersey, was tigered with mist, as was the Runcorn bridge, like a brontosaurus’s skeleton spanning the river. Thousands of roosting starlings made cloud formations above the bridge. Once they were across it, Vernon toed the accelerator and they moved on to the Spur Road at ninety.

“What did you tell your lassie, in the end?” Vernon asked, mischief returning to his features. “What was the wordsmith’s excuse tonight?”

“I told her that you rang me up and asked me to go out on a job with you.”

“And she said?”

“And she said, ‘Okay, fine, we’ll go out some other time.’”

Vernon seemed cheated. “Women today. No spunk in them at all.”

“Unless they’re in your films,” Sean said. That set Vernon off on a long, rich passage of laughter that turned into a hacking cough.

“Did you find us a lady? A lady who wants to be in pictures?”

“Maybe.”

Vernon thrashed the Shogun around a series of tight bends as they drove past the concrete mesas and buttes of Runcorn’s Shopping City. Up ahead loomed the urban goldfish bowl that was the Uplands. The porthole windows and token attempts at decoration were swamped by the vast edifice of cement out of which its features glared.

“You’re enjoying it though, the game, this rush?” Vernon asked. “All kinds of life is here. All kinds. Adds to your experience. Makes you more of a man. No?”

“Whatever you say, Vernon. I just wish you’d let me know what you’re doing. I thought you trusted me.”

“Time is on our side, Sean. Impatience is no help to anybody. You’re still on probation.”

Vernon parked the Shogun under a guttering streetlamp that sent shadows into his eyes as he pulled the bat from behind his seat and stuffed it into the deep inside pocket of his leather trenchcoat.

“Surely, Vernon, you don’t need that. She’s sixty-three. She’s blind for God’s sake.”

Vernon made a moue of his lips. “Her circumstances might’ve changed. She might have a big, beefy lodger. She might have bought herself a guard dog.”

They went up the graffiti-strewn stairwell, Vernon verbally ticking off each floor as he met it. On the fourth level, he ducked to his right and marched along a narrow passageway. Down below them, on a patch of grass, three boys were trying to set fire to a dead dog. A white Cosworth was up on blocks and a pair of jean-clad legs were sticking out from beneath it. A radio played Bryan Adams. A radio played Hole. A radio played Roger Whittaker.

At the door of Mrs Moulder’s flat, Vernon smoothed down his hair, adjusted his collars, and rubbed the toe of his left boot against his right calf. Then he yanked the bat out of his pocket and did for the door with one mighty swing.

“You want to be in with us on the softstrip,” Sean said. “An action like that.” An old joke now.

Filth on what remained of the carpet tried to glue Sean’s boots to the floor as they moved deeper into the flat. The kitchen was a laboratory of horrors, bad smells burping from the drains. Slicks of grease covered every surface. An ecstasy of silverfish writhed under the sink units. In the living room, dark mould spread fingers up the walls. The air was damp and reeked of piss. On the television, a gardener showed how to keep frost off a vegetable patch.

Sean listened to Vernon in the hallway, smashing a collection of tiny Wade whimsies from the MDF cabinets and wonky shelves.

“Where are you, Mrs Moulder? No point hiding, lovey. It’s not me who’s blind.”

Sean heard the click of the bathroom lock and was at the door as the handle turned and Mrs Moulder fell through the gap, her skirt around her ankles. She had hold of an emergency cord in her hands and was yanking on it.

“Jesus Christ, Vernon,” Sean said, bending to help Mrs Moulder to her feet. Her thighs were dark with waste. Her breathing was hard and shallow, her face white. “I mean, Jesus Christ, Vernon. She’s just an old woman.”

“It’s okay, Sean, I’ve got things under control now. Why don’t you go and make yourself comfy in the living room? Watch a bit of telly, and I’ll give you a call when I’m finished here, okay?”

Sean backed off, checking first that Mrs Moulder was okay and wasn’t likely to simply pitch over or succumb to a coronary. In the living room he tried to busy himself with the newspaper but the damp on the armchair was seeping into his trousers and Vernon’s voice seethed through the flat, making the ornaments shake.

“I give you so much leeway, May. So much. But no more. I do not put up with you lot pissing me around. No more. I will fuck you to within an inch, girl, if you try to piss me around any more. Now. You will hand it the fuck over, hear me? I’m not going away empty-handed this time, you night-seeing cunt.”

Sean felt the sensation of a darkening in the room, as if someone had pulled the curtains to on a bright day. Now he heard a conversation in the hallway. Two men.

This was not good. Not good. Sean gritted his teeth and tried to force the violence out of his body. What was driving Vernon Lord to this kind of action? Fear? He couldn’t actually enjoy terrorising old people, could he? And who was the other guy? Where the hell did he spring from? Sean edged to the threshold and peered around it. In the kitchen, the surgeon was standing with his back to Sean, a hand in a white rubber glove holding a pair of scissors that snipped at the air as he played with them. As he knelt, he gripped the old woman’s jaw with his free hand and Vernon leaned around him to close the kitchen door, winking and mouthing the words fuck off to Sean.

Footsteps in the glass outside the door. Sean’s head cocked to one side. Three men, it sounded like. Heavy. Fit.

He shrugged off his jacket to prevent it from limiting his movement. During his time in the police he had never once, despite the misfortune of some of his colleagues, been placed in a position of having to defend himself. Part of the reason for leaving, he considered now, as the footsteps transferred to the carpet, was that he did not want to invite physical violence which, the law of averages demanded, became more likely to visit him the longer he remained in uniform. On her first day in the Force, Sally had been headbutted by a shoplifter in Greenwich. Broke her nose. It could have been someone with a knife or a gun. Next time, it might be. Next time, it might have been Sean.

And here he was, tensing, ready for the mash of fists and the stamp of boots. Ready for blood on his lip. A blade, even. All in the name of Naomi.

“WHO WERE THEY?” Sean asked again. He couldn’t see out of his left eye. It felt as though somebody had inserted one of those needle adapters for footballs into his forehead and inflated the flesh. It ought to sting like a bastard, but he couldn’t feel any pain.

He felt drained and sick. His body was tight, as though his skin had been cinched around the muscles. Adrenaline drained away, lactic acid in the meat of his arms and legs conspiring to make him feel as shitty as one of old May’s stockings.

Vernon glanced at him again. There was affection and awe in the way he favoured him. His voice was cowed: “The way you moved,” he said.

“It wasn’t a Fred and Ginger moment in there, Vernon. It was down and dirty. I’ve never seen fighting like it. They were fucking evil.”

Vernon nodded. “I’ve not seen fighting like it either,” he said. “You didn’t give them a chance.”

Apart from the crack to his eye, an anonymous elbow early on in the skirmish, Sean hadn’t received any other injury. He remembered little of the scrap, apart from the way it started

(Sean: Who are you?

Bucket-faced ape: Chin that fucker. Deck him now.)

and the way it finished, with him slamming one head repeatedly into another while the third goon tried to breathe around the splintered newel post that had been rammed into his neck. All through it, Mrs Moulder had been whining like a puppy: “I haven’t finished paying for this carpet! I haven’t finished paying for this carpet!” Bizarrely it had helped him keep his focus. Vernon had stood there with the bat limp in his hand, drying his tongue out. When it had finished, he had been comically polite to Mrs Moulder, telling her that he would be back next month and thank you very much.

“Well? Who were they?”

As they bypassed it on their right, the cooling towers of Fiddlers Ferry power station belched white plumes towards Widnes. As a child, Sean had been able to see the towers from his bedroom window. Red lights punched into the towers gleamed like demonic eyes.

“I don’t know. You saw her pulling on that emergency cord like she was at bell-ringing practice.”

“They looked pretty tough for people who come round to plonk you back on your commode.”

“Estate security then, who knows? Who cares?”

They drove in silence until they reached the general hospital, where Sean told Vernon to drop him.

“A quick nip of something warm back at yours?” Vernon tried.

“Don’t think so, Vernon. I’m knackered. I’ll see you at work tomorrow?”

Vernon shook his head. “Got business out in the sticks tomorrow.”

“You don’t need me?”

Another shake. “Salty’s coming with me.”

Sean tried hard to seem nonplussed. “What’s this? I mean, why do you need me sometimes, and Salty others?”

“What if I do?”

Sean made a dismissive gesture. He was hungry. And he was sick of Vernon. “Whatever you say, boss.” He was about to walk away when Vernon tooted him on the horn.

“Thanks for back there,” he said. “You did well. There’ll be forward motion for you soon. I promise. Be patient.”

“Better than being a patient.”

Vernon chuckled. “You’re right there.”

BACK IN HIS bedsit, having walked once around the block to make sure that Vernon wasn’t tailing him, he withdrew the bottle of Absolut from the freezer compartment and sat by the window in darkness, refilling a cracked shot glass until the vodka had lost its syrupy chill and night clogged the streets.

Sean fought the urge to bang the rest of the bottle back and get started on another. Getting pissed wasn’t going to help matters; it would only make his confusion more cloudy. Already it resembled some congested storm-anvil of black thoughts, questions and possibilities, reaching up into his head. He sipped his drink and felt the air change outside, as if it were mirroring his emotions. A gust of wind staggered through the badly fitting window, drunk on exhaust fumes and the smell of dog shit drifting over from the park.

Sean couldn’t understand why he felt so instantly linked to Emma, but her ghost clung to his waking hours. He decided he was going to take another drink after all, as the rain started spanking down on the slates. The weather had made up its mind that it liked the taste of this town and bit deep. Wind howled at the weak spots of the house. Sean felt constantly as though he were trying to escape. Sometimes his skin felt too tight for the anger that moved within him. He felt directionless and wild. Emma had been like a magnetic field, drawing all of his focuses, taming the chaos. Swallowing the sour residue of his fourth, fifth shot glass of vodka and rising for a refill, he felt cheated. He had saved her, despite her protests, from a rape at least, murder at worst. Yet what would she be doing now if not what she had been paid to do before he helped her escape from those men?

In an effort to distract himself, he thought of Tim Enever, crapulous, coughing Tim Enever moving through the rooms of the de Fleche building as slowly as a sloth in lead boots. How he caressed the walls. What had he been up to? Was it enough that he was just weird? Sean didn’t think so. Maybe he should go back there. Later tonight. Check those walls, see if there was something behind them. Something hidden.

On the back of an envelope, without trying to think too much, he wrote the name de Fleche. He couldn’t understand why it might be important, but it wouldn’t hurt to check it out. Suicide, Rapler had said before Ronnie came in to shut him up. Suicide.

Had he ever considered, even obliquely, the easy way out in the days following Naomi’s death? Watching the creep of cold across his pane and the ice spreading through the puddles on the street, he couldn’t force his mind to find a region of similar cold. In the extremities of his despair, he had thought about a communion of thoughts with Naomi, but had he meant that to be as literal as it now appeared? He could never entertain such thoughts while her killer remained at large, but privately, he feared that he was not strong enough to stem the tide of such thinking for too long. The exertions of violence had wearied him, but the violence was nothing. It did not take a strong man to inflict pain on another, or to shed blood. The strongest people were the Emmas of the world. And yes, the Mrs Moulders. Sean took another drink and thought, yes, he would check himself out pretty soon if he ever found himself in a spot similar to the old woman. Outwardly he might appear strong. Inwardly he was as brittle as the icing on a stale cake.

Sometime around midnight, the empty bottle slipped through his fingers, skidded and slithered on the floor, coming to a stop with the mouth pointing his way. When the glass followed it and shattered a few seconds later, the sound was not sufficient to wake him. Foggy street-lighting caught in viscous dregs smeared across the fragments and reflected his slumped form in a thousand different ways.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: BROCKEN SPECTRE

SADIE AND ELISABETH were in the back of the Campervan, playing with Eiger the dog. Up front, Will shared his seat with about a hundred Ordnance Survey maps as well as half a tonne of karabiners and buckles and straps. Flint, the mountaineer, drove with one hand while the other searched his Berghaus waterproof for a tube of mints.

“Where was it you said you were going?” Flint asked. Will couldn’t see his mouth through the tangle of red beard. His eyes were dark, sharp and turned nasty by a ridge of black brows that reared away from his head. The hair was long and straggly, held back in a pony tail by an elastic band. It was a hard, north Wales voice, barely softened by years of travel.

“I didn’t,” Will said. “Where are you going?”

“Scotland way,” Flint replied, finally tracking down his elusive Trebors. He offered one to Will. “I want to get up to the Old Man of Storr, eventually. Always fancied that, though I’ve never done a stack climb before.”

“Well, we’re heading up to Warrington, if it’s convenient.”

“Nothing’s convenient, the way these roads are being systematically buggered.”

“We’ve been out of the loop,” Will said, conscious again of the state of his clothes. He wondered if he was starting to smell, but judging by the state of Flint’s Camper, he didn’t think it was something that would be noticeable here. “We’ve not heard any news.”

Flint coughed and spat out of the window. “Since the first wave of bombs, on the motorway, there’ve been daily attacks. Single explosions on A roads, B roads, bridges. Nobody has a clue why. Al-Qaeda have gone out of their way to dissociate themselves with it all.”

Off the motorways, progress was still frustratingly slow. The mountaineer had picked them up outside Nuneaton. They had followed the A5 around Birmingham to Shrewsbury, where they joined the A49 going north. Flint told them that this road, if it was safe, would take them straight into Warrington. So far, it had been ignored by the terrorists, but it was a main road that ought to be a target, if the roads that had been attacked over the past few weeks were any indication.

Flint was from a tiny village outside Wrexham. His father had died in a lead mine and he had been forced to bring up his brother and look after his mother, who had lung cancer, without any outside help. He said it had toughened him and made him feel able to deal with any situation. Climbing, Flint explained, was the only pastime that helped him feel alive, gave him back the youth that had been lost to endless days of cleaning and feeding and being the role model to his younger siblings.

“Have you ever fallen?” Will asked, feeling faintly stupid once the question was out, but enjoying the ebb and flow of the older man’s voice.

“Never,” Flint replied, sucking carefully on his mint. “I’ve seen plenty accidents, mind. I’ve seen a man fall twenty-five feet into the Bergschrund on the Hotlum/Bolam ridge, Mount Shasta, this is. California. A fourteen K peak. No injury. Not even a split lip. But I’ve seen death on the rock from the slightest fall. I was with a guy called Errol about five years ago. We were climbing some top-quality granite out at Oak Flats, in Arizona. Errol was this close to topping out when a flake came off and did for him. I was in the roof crack and was pulling slack up to clip when the rock came away in his hands. Nasty wet noise on the slab. I heard it forty feet away.

“He was lucky. There was a doctor, an orthopaedic guy climbing in the area. He heard me screaming my tits off for help and he helped stabilise Errol while someone drove to the rescue camp for help.

“Errol was out cold the entire time. He was splinted, back-boarded, insulated, intubated, the lot. They probably put a bandage on his dick so it didn’t feel left out. Helicopter short-hauled him out in a Bauman Bag. Turned him over to Eagle Air Med who flew him to Phoenix, seventy miles west of the Flats.

“He was mightily shagged, I tell you. Skull fractured like a slab of treacle toffee, left arm radial, ulnar and wrist fractures, left hip fracture and left leg tib/fib and ankle fucked to Shreddies. He was unable to speak. No shit. He was three weeks in Surgical Intensive Care. And for what? A bit of loose rock.

“The worst deaths I dealt with were never anywhere near the face. The worst deaths happen in beds, let me tell you.”

“I can’t agree with you,” Will said, his throat constricting slightly.

“Errol went in bed. This six foot fuck-off meat hill. Strong. The mountain made an old man of him. All that medical care and he goes and necks a big bottle of paracetamol, first thing he does when he gets home. No way he was able to climb again, so he checked out.”

Flint went quiet, concentrating on pushing the tired blue Campervan through the south Cheshire countryside. At Tarporley, he told them that their destination was maybe a quarter of an hour away. Then he said, matter-of-factly: “Police.”

At the moment of his saying the word, Will saw the spastic blue lights pulse and skitter around the interior of the van. Elisabeth knocked twice on the separating wall.

Will said, “Look…”

Flint was smiling. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

“What can you—”

“Well,” Flint said, “I can’t outrun them.”

“Somewhere in the back. We could hide?”

Flint laughed as he applied the brakes. “In a Camper? Piss off.”

“Then we’ve had it.”

“What did you do?” Flint said.

“They think I killed my wife.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“I believe you,” Flint said, simply. “Where is it you’re heading, exactly?”

“Sloe Heath,” Will replied, tensing in his seat as the police Rover pulled into the side of the road behind them. “The hospital there.”

“Right,” Flint said, and floored the accelerator. The van tore away, faster than Will might have expected. At the last moment, before Flint yanked the wheel to the left, sending the van bucketing over frozen shoulders of land, he heard sirens and the girls in the back of the van screaming. He saw Flint lean in close towards his face, lips peeling back into an obscene leer that didn’t seem possible in a mouth that had appeared so small. The black eyes consumed his as the van tipped into a fence by a small stream, sending it into a roll. The window smashed and Will felt himself bounce out through it, enveloped by sharp shards of night. He hit the ground hard and skidded across the topsoil of a field at the other side of the stream for about twenty metres until he came to a stop. Raising his head slightly, he saw two officers standing at the top of the road looking down at the upturned VW as steam billowed from its destroyed radiator.

Will stood up but his legs spilled him immediately. His shoulder flared with pain. Somehow he scrabbled over to the van but found it empty. The policemen were gingerly making their way across the stream. The intense dark in the field meant that he could not be seen. He risked calling out for Elisabeth and Sadie but there was no reply. More sirens. The feathered beat of a distant helicopter. Will saw its floodlight dancing across more distant fields than this one, approaching rapidly. He had to get moving, before its cameras picked him up. He moved through the field as quickly as his unsteady legs would allow, clasping his shoulder tight to him as he went. By the time he reached the far edge of the field, he was shivering violently and could not rid himself of the conviction that Elisabeth and Sadie were face down in the stream, unconsciously sucking water into their lungs.

A last look back as the authorities sealed off the accident site and searched for bodies. There was light everywhere, and mist resettling on the field where the movement had previously broken it up. Contained in one of these surging fists of fog, like something wrapped in a wad of cotton wool, Will saw a figure sprinting. It seemed far too tall and lithe for Flint, but suddenly it had flattened and spread into the elongated shape of a fast dog in full flight, changing so swiftly, so fluidly, that Will could not be sure he had thought the figure human to begin with.

Either the mist thickened, or the figure outran it. Either way, in a second or two, it was gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKES

THE PHONE CALL came at a little before six on Saturday morning. Sean was jolted from his chair, pain shooting through his back and legs as he listed towards the kitchen to answer it. Rubbing feeling into his thighs, he listened as Rapler told him to not bother going into work on Monday.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because there’s no work to go to,” he said. “There was a fire this morning. Around two o’clock. The fire brigade have only just got it under control.”

“Arson?”

“It’s too early to tell really, but if you were to ask me, I’d say that it was.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because de Fleche Cheshire South, down in Chester, went up too. At the same time, would you believe?”

“What about work?”

Rapler put on an avuncular tone. “Sit tight, mate. We’ll have something else come up soon. Build ’em up, knock ’em down, there’s always something going on. I’ll be in touch. The work you did for us did not go unnoticed.”

Sean replaced the receiver, wondering which work Rapler was referring to.

He breakfasted on toast and coffee, trying to rid himself of the vodka that had turned his head sticky. He briefly considered a run to purge himself further, but quickly rejected the idea. He had seen people vomiting in the streets: it wasn’t impressive. A cold shower and more coffee helped, as did sticking his head out of the window for a few seconds to let the wind strip it raw.

He didn’t know what to do.

There were various options available to him. He could take a trip out to the de Fleche building anyway, as he had promised himself the previous night, in case something turned up. He could find Tim and quiz him about his wall molestation. Really quiz him. Or he could follow Vernon, see what was so important for him and Salty to discuss.

It was then that he found the envelope upon which he had scribbled the previous night. He reached for the phone.

“SO, BONNY RONNIE,” Vernon Lord said. “What makest thou of events thus far?”

Ronnie Salt hated Vernon. He hated the way he dressed, the way he slicked back his hair in that ridiculous pony tail. He hated the way he talked. And more than that, Ronnie hated the way he talked to him.

“I don’t trust him,” Ronnie said. “The fucker stinks of cop.”

“What’s not to trust, Ronnie? The guy spilled blood for me.”

Ronnie hated this place too, with its high-backed stools and its lunchtime menu. He hated pubs that smelled of vinegar when you walked into them, instead of beer. Pubs were for drinking in, not eating, for Christ’s sake.

“So you and Redman are nicely loved up, eh? Well that’s nice. All I’m saying is that I don’t trust him. He’s not us. He’s not with us.”

Vernon steepled his fingers above his lager. “I think he should be.”

Ronnie bristled. “You want to bring in new faces when we’re this close? This fucking close?”

“Who was it, you think, who started those fires this morning, hmmm? Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think? There’s movement. London say so. Inserts on the prowl. There’s been a collision, son. You know, like has met like. Maybe it won’t be too long before they work out what’s what where they’re concerned.”

“London sorting it, are they?”

“One dead. Two left. They’ve got someone on the case, yeah. Someone shit-hot, from the way they went on about her.”

“Her? Her? Fuck me. We might as well pack up.”

“Ronnie. Become enlightened. Transcend this pig-headed stick-in-the-mud that you’ve become over the years. You don’t want people calling you Ronnie Sour, do you? Ronnie Bitter? Women… I tell you, women are the new men.”

“Fucking fuck-up, top to bottom,” Ronnie said. “Used to be security was an important matter. This tit Redman. What do you know about him?”

Vernon tapped his head and waggled his finger, then he put his hand to his gut and nodded. “Most of us think with the wrong organ, Salty. I don’t care for checking up on people. You can cover up. Everyone wears a different face when it suits them. I go by my gut. Always have. I went with my gut when you came on the scene, and I was right. I think I’m right with Sean too. If you saw the way he took punches for me, for us, Salty, you’d change your tune.”

“I hope you’re right, Vernon,” Ronnie warned. “We’ll break through before long and end it all. We could do without any interference.”

“If there’s any interference to be done, Ronnie, this woman from London will be doing it. For us. She… according to those in the know… is special.”

“So you say. So they say. Whoever. Whatever. I just want to be sure, that’s all. Nothing wrong with that.”

Vernon patted his arm and went to the bar. When he came back with more drinks, Ronnie said, “So the fires mean we’ve got two doors sealed. Any news on the third?”

SALLY CAME THROUGH with the information for him after just half an hour.

“Are you not busy enough?” Sean asked, when she called.

“Do you want this or not?”

“Go ahead.”

Sean made notes in a pad as Sally told him about de Fleche. He seemed to have been an interesting man, if completely insane. When she had finished, Sean made smalltalk and she answered him non-committally. When he asked her what was wrong, she told him she was feeling a little poorly. Her period was due, Rostron was being a wanker, and her new partner, a wet-nosed pup called Firmstone, was more interested in chatting her up than nailing villains.

“I wish I was still there, in a way,” Sean said, only half-joking.

“From what I gather, you’re busier than when you were in uniform. What are you up to?”

“Can’t say,” Sean whispered. “Phone might be bugged.”

Sally cut through him with a clipped, serious tone. “If there’s something going on up there, something serious, I want to know, Sean. I can help you.”

Sean said, “I know.”

“Why can’t you talk to me?” Sally asked. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“I’m just going over Naomi’s past. That’s all. Seeing what I can dig up.”

“These men you were telling me about. At her funeral. Who are they?”

“Not sure. Not sure about anything really. I’m just mooching about. I’m being careful.”

Sally’s sigh, 200 miles away, made him feel good to have her as his friend. He could picture her expression: tired, kind of happy, kind of sad. “You’d better,” she said, finally. “Call me. If things get rough. I can be there in two hours.”

“I’ll do that. I will.”

Sally said, “There’s more on this guy. Stuff about what he was into. Designs, you know. Too much to tell you over the phone. It’s in the post.”

Sean read through his notes as he made his way outside to the car. Peter de Fleche had been born in Helsinki in 1934. He studied at Helsinki Polytechnic and ended up lecturing there in the 1960s when he taught a student, Adrienne Fox, who would later become his wife. Nothing that Sally had told him pointed to any suicidal tendencies. Successful man who had modest tastes. No children. He had moved to the Northwest of England when he was commissioned to design a cluster of intelligent buildings for the Warrington-Runcorn axis during the boom years of the 1980s. Coincidentally, his Dutch father had roots in Merseyside and persuaded him to stay in the region. After the death of his father two years later, the year in which the de Fleche buildings were completed and his wife left him, the architect disappeared, or at least became a recluse. No address for him. No second-hand testimonies about him. No nothing. Apart from Ronnie Salt’s aside that he used to drive around at the dead of night, crawling past his constructions, one hand on the wheel, the other keeping an open bottle of brandy warm. Slowly going insane.

Sean got in the car and joined the late-morning traffic dawdling along the College Road, north out of town. A mile shy of Sloe Heath, he saw the old bell tower rising from the clutch of hospital buildings, capped with its roof, the arched windows black, sad eyes surveying the grounds. Whenever he saw Sloe Heath mental institute, Sean shivered. He remembered playing in the fields here with a friend whose father was a doctor. What was his name? Snarled up in traffic, Sean racked his brains for a face. A Pakistani, he was, who joined his school around the time that Naomi and he were becoming fast friends. Good at chess; they used to play during rainy playtimes, with a roll-up board and plastic pieces that packed together like Russian dolls.

Naeem. That’s it. Sean burst out laughing when he remembered. How could he forget? – it had tickled him because it sounded so much like Naomi’s name. He used to frustrate them by calling out Naeem’s name and when he turned round say, “No, I wanted Naomi,” or vice versa. Really funny.

The traffic came to a standstill. There had been a crash further up the road, towards the motorway traffic island, a shunt that had caused the two-lane carriageway to become hopelessly strangled.

Naeem had lived with his two brothers and two sisters in a big house on Hollins Drive. He was the youngest, Sean’s age. It was a good place to go to play. They would take their bikes and a football into the grounds of the hospital and kick it mindlessly back and to until it was too dark to see. Or they’d take their fishing rods and a few slices of bread for bait down to the gravel pit at the side of the M62 and try to tempt the tiny roach and perch to give themselves up while cows ambled over to watch.

Thursday nights, there was a film shown in the recreation hall, deep inside the hospital. He and Naeem would creep in, especially if it was an X-rated movie, and sit on the ping-pong table that had been moved to one side to accommodate ranks of plastic chairs for the patients. A fug of tobacco smoke hung around them, and something thin and antiseptic, as, slack-jawed, pyjama-clad, they watched what Naeem called “boo” movies: Jaws or Friday the 13th or Still of the Night. While Sean and Naeem jumped in all the right places, the audience’s reactions were disarmed by their dosages. There would be the odd moan, the zombified turn of a head, a cough that seemed too wet for anybody’s throat, but it added to the pleasure of the illicit viewing. Before the lights came up at the end of the film, the boys would leave, ostensibly to avoid capture by the projectionist, but mainly because the slow dance of the patients as they unwound from their seats was too horrible, too languid to observe.

It was nice, it was good to remember this stuff, but there was something unpleasant there too, as if another memory was itching to be seized upon, a memory that Sean had purposefully kept hidden because of the damage it might do him. The changes it might wreak.

It was too seductive though, this business of remembering, to be able to stop now. He had not spoken to Naeem for nearly twenty years, but his voice was loud in his head now, his features clear. The way he Brylcreemed his hair to one side. The shirt and trousers and shoes, no matter what the occasion. Stealing through the windows of the lodge house to play interminable games of snooker. Finding a hospital gown and taking it in turns to wear it, pretend to be a patient, lumbering out in front of the traffic. Bored one day, they had followed a couple for a mile to a field full of haystacks and, giggling until Sean was sick, watched them make love.

A police car had arrived and its occupants were now directing traffic around the collision. Feeling cheated, yet oddly relieved, Sean forced his mind back to the road and accelerated away from the accident. He steered the car around the large church, with its smoke-black masonry, and parked at a pub nearby, the Swan.

He walked up and down Myddleton Lane, the street where, according to what Sally had told him, Peter de Fleche had built a house for his lover back in the 1980s. Yet none of the houses on this long street bore the hallmarks of the multi-purpose blocks that de Fleche had designed. An hour later, the air filling with flecks of rain, Sean went back and sat in the car where he tried to read through his notes again. But the words would not settle before his eyes. Little bits of the past were forcing themselves into his consciousness. How he had never shared any of the meals that were cooked in Naeem’s house because he had been scared of spicy food. He used to have beans on toast, or biscuits and milk. Or cream crackers, crumbled into a mug of coffee. He’d kill, now, for some of the dishes Naeem’s mother assembled in that large kitchen, infused with cumin and coriander and turmeric.

He looked at his watch. The boys were meeting up at Victoria Park in half an hour. In the back of his car were football boots that hadn’t seen the light of day for ten years. Sean could almost feel what the pain in his body would be like on Sunday morning. He guided his car back onto the road and travelled towards town. This time, he studiously ignored the tower as he sped past it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: THREE IN A BED

AT AROUND THE same time as Sean was receiving Rapler’s phone call, Will staggered out of a rapeseed field just south of Stockton Heath and flagged down the first of the early morning buses into town. He had just enough change on him for the short journey and huddled in the seat at the back, enjoying the heat of the engine and ignoring the distasteful glances his fellow passengers shot him. His arm was stiff and sore but it did not feel as though he had suffered major damage.

The meal he had eaten the previous day was a distant memory. He was finding it hard to consider anything beyond the simple desire for food, yet this was good, he reasoned. It meant that, guilty though it made him, it was easier not to wallow over the fate of Elisabeth and Sadie. All he could hope for was that they had been collected safely by the police and were now being looked after. Any of the other alternatives he wouldn’t entertain for a second.

It was less cold in the centre of town than in the fields, but he felt it more now, as he hopped from the bus, because he was no longer pushing himself. He was tired and hungry. The despair he felt at having no money to buy breakfast was compounded by the hostility with which he was greeted when he tried to ask the way to Sloe Heath.

In the public toilet, he did his best to wash the grime from his clothes. He soaped his hair and face and rinsed them clean. He polished his boots as best he could, ignoring the looks of the men who came to use the urinals. When Superdrug opened, he sprayed himself with a little tester aftershave to mask the sweat that was permeating his clothes. One of the shop assistants smiled at him.

He ordered breakfast at a small café, wolfed it, and ran away without paying for his meal when the waitress left the dining area. At the bus depot he talked to a driver who showed him on a map where Sloe Heath was. He didn’t have enough for a bus out there, but he reckoned he could walk it in an hour or so. He thanked the driver, who said something in return, a concerned look on his face. But Will didn’t hear him. The driver was retreating down a tunnel. Will reached out to grab hold of him so that he wouldn’t disappear, and the driver dropped his timetables. The sound was deafening as Will fell against him. Will was unconscious before he hit the floor.

GOALPOSTS WITHOUT NETS, the sound of metal studs clacking on concrete, the smell of wintergreen and cold, wet earth. Sean left the changing rooms and their stale tang of exertion for the wintry field. His breath hung around his face as he checked the half-dozen pitches to see where his team mates were warming up. He saw them in a distant corner, making half-hearted attempts at stretching and jogging, seven heavy men in red shirts that were a size too small for them and black shorts that enhanced the lard-white horror of their legs.

He trotted gently over to the pitch, where he was greeted by a stocky man with a goatee and gel in his hair. The man was rubbing his hands together and hopping from foot to foot like an overly enthusiastic games teacher.

“Hi,” he said, breathily, and jutted his hand towards Sean, who shook it. “Danny Chant,” he said. “I’m the unlucky bugger who loses all blow-job privileges as of tomorrow.”

“Sean Redman,” Sean said, smiling. He winked at Nicky Preece, who crossed him off a checklist that was fastened to a clipboard. Jamie Marshall, the guy who had joined the demolition squad on the same day as Sean, was stretching on the touchline. He lifted a hand in greeting. Robbie Deakin looked the part, lean and agile, running in short bursts and violently changing direction.

“Ignore Robbie,” Nicky said. “He does triathlete stuff, so he doesn’t count. Everyone will be knackered after ten minutes. He can run after the ball when it goes out. Drinks like a fucking jessie. He might last an hour on the park, but he’ll be the first one home tonight.”

Nicky introduced him to others whose names would be little more than a vomit-coated gargle by the end of the day. He paid scant attention to the Johns and Steves and Trevors, nodding and smiling and shaking hands. As they were taking up their positions on the pitch, Sean having been asked to utilise his “sweet left foot” in midfield, he saw Tim Enever sloping across the park, in danger of being swept away with the gusty wind, like the crisp packets and the dead leaves. He was dressed in a huge coat with a hood that, if it was deployed, would completely envelop his head. His legs were stork-like beneath the bottom of the coat, wrapped in the usual skin-tight black denim.

The football match lasted for as long as the fair weather. In that time, Sean managed to make a few impressive passes and tackles and his team went a goal up. He was starting to enjoy himself when the light failed quickly. Sopping from a cloudburst after about a quarter of an hour, Danny Chant called out, “Cocks to this, boys!” and legged it towards the changing rooms.

Back inside, socks downed, lolling on the benches as the steam from the showers mingled with the smoke from the gaspers, Sean gratefully accepted a bottle of Grolsch from a coolbox. Naked, misshapen men drifted through the steam, swearing and laughing, necking beer. One of them looked straight at Sean, swearing as he told some staggish tale of find ’em, fuck ’em, forget ’em, and then disappeared into the befogged showers. But the face lingered.

“Shit,” Sean said, softly. He knew the face but he couldn’t place it. He leaned over and put his face in his hands. A name suggested itself to him. Futcher. Was that right? Eddie Futcher.

Sean righted himself, and took another swig from his bottle. Had he, Sean, changed much, since coming up north? A haircut, the loss of a few pounds, a bit more pink to his cheeks? He hoped so. He hoped there was enough of an alteration to prevent Eddie Futcher – the first person Sean arrested during his stint in the police force – from recognising him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: MYDDLETON LANE

IT WAS HARD getting up the next day. But Sean had a little trick when things seemed to get too much for him. He thought about Naomi, and how she couldn’t get up, as much as she would have liked to. In these moments, rising from bed became ridiculously easy.

How much had he consumed the previous night? He pondered that while he showered and shaved, scrubbing the excesses from his skin, though he didn’t really want to put an amount to it. It was a lot. That was enough. A bruise had enveloped most of his left knee, another formed a blue grin across his chest where one of the boys had elbowed him during the football match. His eyes looked back at him from the mirror: someone else’s eyes, too small, too wet, red-rimmed. He chugged back a pint of Alka-Seltzer and went in search of coffee.

Outside he bought a newspaper and ducked through the doorway of Charlie’s, a small greasy spoon that was about to go out of service now that the hospital across the road was opening its own café. He ordered a full English, whispering in the hope that his stomach wouldn’t hear what was coming to it, and settled down with the crossword. He couldn’t do any of the clues. He couldn’t eat his breakfast when it came. He thought of Naomi and the third de Fleche building. He thought of Emma. And found, once he’d started, that he couldn’t stop.

He took out his mobile phone. Punched in some numbers.

“Come and have lunch with me,” he said, and then: “Cancel it. Come and see me instead. At the Swan. In Winwick. Take you ten minutes to drive out here. Come. Please. One o’clock.”

The rest of the morning stretched out in front of him, too many empty hours, too much bad booze in his veins. He sat back in his split plastic chair and stared at the traffic swooping under the railway bridge. He ordered more coffee and let it happen to him, every greasy, grizzly minute.

How had he got through that nightmare? It was bad enough trying to dodge Eddie, but there had been one outlandish, Carry On moment that almost undid him. Assembling outside the changing rooms, in preparation to move on to the nearest pub to start the day’s drinking in earnest, Sean had cried off to Danny and Nicky, complaining that he hadn’t slept well and was feeling really washed out. He had batted away all protests and was turning to go when Danny told him that Eddie wasn’t staying either and could give him a lift into town.

“Do you know,” Sean said, “I think maybe you’re right. Mullered as I am, it might just do me the world of good to get some ale inside me and have some fun for a change.”

It had proved to be only a slightly better alternative to facing up to Futcher and risking his being exposed as an ex-cop. Punishing wasn’t the word. There hadn’t yet been a word invented to describe the hell Danny’s stag night visited upon him and, judging by the appearance of some of them come midnight, his companions too.

After the football, relocating to the Cheshire Cheese for a restorative first pint, it was put forward that the logical progression for the day was to walk to town, dropping in at the pubs on the way, and then head in the opposite direction, stopping off for a few lanes at the bowling alley, then turn back into town for the evening slog, a curry, and on to a club.

Sean did all that, and the last thing he remembered before the alcohol took him over and plotted its autopilot course for the evening, was how pleasant it was, really, to be legless in daylight. Tim Enever hung on the coat-tails of the pack, drinking orange juice and eating endless packets of prawn cocktail-flavoured crisps. He refereed during an impromptu pool tournament at the Lord Rodney. He got up at Tempo, a fun-pub with more video screens than punters, and sang an excruciating version of “All Time High” on the karaoke that shut up the entire pub and brought the manager downstairs to ask if it was possible that Danny Chant’s party could leave “before freakboy scared everyone away”.

Sean remembered speaking to Tim, as well as Robbie – before he made his excuses – and Nicky Preece, but he couldn’t remember what it was they had talked about. All he could picture was Tim’s owlish eyes rotating in his head and spilling their rheum and Nicky with his arms around him, calling him his “Wonderwall” and asking if he was planning on knocking himself in with his lump hammer.

He had pretty much dismissed all suspicions of the boys being in with Vernon Lord at all, or having anything to do with Naomi’s death.

Two a.m., he had been sitting with Danny Chant and some guy called Norman who Sean was adamant had only just turned up but who, according to Danny, had been there from the very start.

“And you were dancing with him, Redders, in the club.”

They were sitting on a fence overlooking a bowling green belonging to a social club. A bottle of port nobody could remember buying was doing the rounds. As was a cold doner kebab. Danny’s eyes were doing figures of eight.

“I pity the poor sod who’s getting married,” he said. “You’ll never catch me at that game.” Then he leaned over to vomit gracefully in the rhododendron bush, slipped and was asleep before he hit the deck.

“I need to take a piss,” Sean said, and leapt down from the wall, landing a foot either side of Danny Chant’s head. Norman raised the port bottle in acknowledgement.

“Don’t mind me,” he said, taking a swig.

Sean staggered deep into the trees, enjoying the gentle striping of wet twigs against his face. The canal emerged through the knot of branches, coils of reflected white light mixing into the treacly water. Something thrashed against the surface, a pike maybe, before becoming submerged again, leaving only a cluster of bubbles and a spreading ripple to suggest a presence in the first place. It was impressive to think anything could survive in that soup. From here, the smell was brown and oppressive; it lingered like the urinous reek of scorched dinners in your clothes. Sean unzipped himself and added to the rich stew. He watched steam from his waste rise lazily and drift off to the row of gleaming black railings that separated the banks of the canal from a clutch of depressed shops and upper-floor bedsits.

Sense descended on him; he recognised this place. He had rescued Emma from the bushes over there. Remembering what he had been doing around here was harder to dredge, but it came, when he recalled the route he had taken while running that morning, and the defunct ironmonger’s that he had observed Ronnie Salt enter.

He was sobering by the minute thanks to the cold and this business of remembering. A pervasive mist was reluctant to leave the canal’s dip; it sat deep and itchy in the pit of his lungs. Sean slipped and skidded down to the fence that kept people away from the bank of the canal. As before, he leapt over it – somewhat less stealthily this time – and hunkered in the shadows, listening hard for any movement that his clumsiness might have provoked. The light here was poor, only just reaching him from the opposite bank of the canal, where an illuminated towpath accompanied the journey of the water. The diffuse glow bled through the mist, picking out broken computer monitors and the radiator grilles from cars that had ruled the road during his youth: Capris, Chevettes, Princesses, Cortinas.

At the wall, and the high wooden gates of Boughey’s, the ironmonger’s, he tried to see through the cracks but the light here was not so generous. At least the building looked as dead as last time; there was no flicker of a lightbulb in any of the windows, no sound from a tinny radio station, or rustle of a newspaper page being turned.

Sean rooted around in the grass and found an old carpet with more holes than weave to it. It smelled heavily of soil and mildew. He hauled it to the gates and rolled it as best he could before slinging it over his shoulder. He began to climb, jamming his boots sideways into the gaps between the wooden planks. Nearing the top, he let the weight of his upper body hang on his left hand, curled over one of the stiles that supported the gate against its hinges. With the other hand he shook the carpet open, gritting his teeth against the strain, and flung it as high as he could so that it dropped onto the razor wire, protecting him from it as he scooted over. He waited until his breath quickly returned to normal. Adrenaline was chasing the booze from his system. Again he listened for movement within the building before sidling up close to a window. The view was as inky as that outside. He couldn’t see much beyond a few vague lumps that were outlined against a window on the opposite side of the floor.

The back door was a bastard. No way that was going to budge. Sean had found an iron bar and was considering putting a window through when he saw the black zig-zag of a fire escape camouflaged against the sooty walls. He clambered onto it and skipped up the metal steps, making little ting-tang noises with the toes of his boots. At the top, the landing fed a fire door that was only slightly more substantial than the entrance to a Wendy house. Using the bar as a jemmy, Sean wrenched it away from the lock, almost splitting the puny wooden architrave apart as he did so.

A breath of old things enveloped him. A smell of dryness and polish.

Again, he listened. There was a metronomic plesh of water dripping from a tap or a crack. The fluting of wind through a chimney that had not exhaled smoke for decades.

Sean pulled the door to behind him and let his eyes become accustomed to this fresh dark. He wished he had a torch, and considered coming back in the morning to explore properly, but realised there was no way he could do that now. When Salty saw that the door was broken it would be repaired and a better job made of it next time.

Ahead, a narrow wooden staircase took him down into an open-plan office above what must have been the ironmonger’s proper, where two old desks were arranged, facing each other. There was a Bakelite telephone on one desk, thick cord wrapped around itself. There were also two polished wooden trays, bearing labels upon which were written, respectively, in a cursive hand: IN and OUT. On the other desk sat a bulky Remington Noiseless typewriter, edged with a grin of light that had found its way in from the main road. There was a bowl with a single lemon in it, that had dried and shrivelled before its small wound of rot was able to spread. A game of patience had been abandoned.

Everything was coated with a fine patina of gum and dust. On the wall, a calendar for 1976 was pinned, forgotten. Sean flicked through it for anything to inspire him, but there was nothing beyond the glossy curves of women with bouffant hairstyles and heavy make-up.

Sean went to the window and looked out at the main street, feeling an itch beginning in the back of his mind that wouldn’t go away. Something wasn’t right. Across the road, saplings in a garden had been wrapped in plastic sheeting to protect them against the cold. Down on the shop floor, there was still a great deal of unsold stock. Grates and bedsteads and ovens formed solid shadows. Sean walked the narrow aisles between them, breathing air that was heavy with the clean, almost animal tang of the metal. There were drawers from old chests that were used to store different gauges of screws, nuts and bolts. A huge ledger was open on a crate, balancing a mug and a pencil within its pages. Saws on a rack winked at him as he went by. A heavy cash register sat on the counter, its tongue out. Post was still being delivered to the shop. A glut of it was fanned out by the door, ignored by Salty or whoever else locked and unlocked it.

Sean ducked under the counter and checked the recess for anything that might give him some edge over his colleagues. Three cardboard tubes were tied together with string, leaning against the back of the register.

It was while he was trying to make sense of the charts within the tubes that a key trembled through the lock and the front door swung open.

It was Ronnie Salt. Sean hunched under the counter and watched the older man stride through the shop, a mass of rope looped around one shoulder. Level with Sean, he stopped and sneezed. Sean watched him press a nostril closed with his thumb and blow the contents of the other nostril onto the floor. He repeated this process with his other thumb before climbing the stairs to the office. Sean was wondering whether to take the charts and escape when Salty came back. He retraced his steps through the shop and relocked the door. From outside came the snarl of an engine and the sweep of headlights across the shopfront as Ronnie departed.

Breathing raggedly, Sean nipped up to the office with the charts and, throwing caution to the wind, wrapped his jumper around the shade of a table lamp and snicked it on. Under the crepuscular flood, at first glance, the charts resembled blueprints or schematics, or architectural drawings, so clean and precise was the presentation of their lines. Yet Sean soon realised that he was looking at a series of maps, though they were constructed along the rules and regulations of no projection that he knew. The lands that were represented did not stir any recognition; they were unlike any countries he’d seen in an atlas.

He didn’t understand how these maps, if maps they were, could be of any help to him. After a few moments’ consideration, he repackaged them and stacked them behind the counter in their original position. He left the way he had come, after a cursory search for clues had yielded nothing else. All the way home, he thought of nothing but the alien charts that he had seen. And he carried them into his dreams too, the lines given substance, and he realised the places he had seen on the paper were places he knew in his own mind. Areas of his brain that had not been walked for many years.

He woke in a sweat, his hands shaking, but the dream was dead in his mind. As much as he paced, drinking coffee, he could not remember what it was that had filled his thoughts during sleep. Frustration had him on the verge of tears. He knew there was knowledge to help him. He just didn’t know how to access it. What lingered too, more than the maps, was the vision of the rope on Salt’s shoulder and the noose tied into one end.

EMMA LED A rogue stream of sunshine into the pub as she entered. Her fringe was flattened by her hood, and as she released it she gave it a scrub with her hand and made a beeline for the bar, smiling and pointing to Sean’s glass to see if he wanted another.

“What’s that?” Sean asked, when she returned with another pint for him and a small tumbler for herself.

“Malt whisky,” she said, luxuriously. Her green eyes filtered the light and spat it back at Sean, glittering with colour. Light fed her face, made her look impossibly attractive. She took a sip and her meaty lips disappeared as she savoured it. When they reappeared, they were red and wet and smiling.

“What?” she laughed.

“I’ll tell you, before too long,” Sean said, leaning across the bar to kiss her. He felt empowered whenever she was near. Unassailable.

“So what’s happening?” she asked. “You buying me lunch?”

“Of course.”

“What is it brings you up this way?”

Sean told her about the architect. “The place where I’ve been working is one of his,” he explained. “I’m pretty certain that the guys I’ve been working with were looking for something there. But they won’t find it now.”

“Why not?”

“Someone burned it down today, this morning.”

Emma said, “My God.” She reached for his arm. “You could have been working there.”

Sean shook his head. “I think one of the boys I work with did it. I think they just wanted to be sure that this something was there. I don’t think it was something you could put in your pocket and take away with you.”

“How do you know?”

“Just a feeling,” Sean said. “I think it was a search and destroy job.”

“What king of thing?”

He smiled. “I don’t know.”

Sean showed her the notes he had made. “There’s a house around here. This architect chap used to live there, or at least keep his fancy women there. I think these guys I work with would like to know about this place too. I think this place has something else in it that they don’t want others to know about.”

“Where is it then?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “But neither do they.”

“Do you want me to help you find it?”

Sean drained his glass and nodded. “I think your intuitive skills might be of use. But no rush, hey?”

“Table twenty-six?” the waitress called out. They ate sandwiches and pinched chips off each other’s plates. Sean watched a customer punch buttons on the jukebox: Bowie, “Modern Love”. “This was the first single I bought,” they both said at the same time.

Emma told him that she was thinking of applying for a teaching course to get her out of the town. To start afresh. Sean spoke of his friendship with Naeem. Talking about him seemed to authenticate the memories, make them even more fresh and real in his mind.

“What’s he doing now?” Emma asked.

Sean shook his head. “I have absolutely no idea. Isn’t that the saddest thing? You grow up with these people and you think it’ll be you and them for ever. It should be you and them for ever, you get on so well. But something drives you apart. You lose touch. It’s criminal.”

Emma rubbed his hand. “It would be easy enough to find him, you know? Do an Internet search. Or he’s probably still in the book.”

“Maybe,” Sean said. “Come on.”

Outside, Emma ribbed him about the deliberate way in which he was walking. A huge articulated lorry thundered past, its logo in bright orange against a green background, a phone number two feet tall imploring customers to call now.

“I don’t seem to have a hangover any more,” he said, “but my legs are shot.”

Emma laughed. “They’ll be worse tomorrow. That’s what happens when you get older.”

Sean mock-chased her up Myddleton Lane, breaking off his pursuit when the uniformity of the buildings impinged upon him.

“He lived along here somewhere,” he said.

“Did he build the house himself?”

“I thought he would have done, but look, they’re all the same.”

Semi-detached blocks stretched away on either side of the street. Occasionally there were differences in taste represented by cladding or pebbledash or adornments, such as the metal butterflies stuck to the roof of one house, or the garish green used to paint the windowframes of another. Not one stood out. Nothing that said de Fleche.

“Have a nosey inside, then,” Emma suggested. “Maybe that’s what’s different.”

“It’ll take for ever,” Sean complained. “Do you know how many houses are on this street?”

“Ooh, I don’t know,” Emma said. “Twenty-six thousand?”

Sean stopped walking and stared at her. “What made you come out with that number?”

Emma shrugged. “I was kidding. Hyperbole, dear boy.”

“Something’s not quite right here,” Sean said.

“It’s raining, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, it’s numbers is what it is.” Sean grabbed Emma’s hand and led her across the road. “In the pub, what table were we on?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Then I’ll remind you. Twenty-six. It was table twenty-six.”

“So?”

“So you just said twenty-six thousand.”

“So?”

“So. The wagon that just went by. The phone number was two-six-two-six-two-six.”

“Sean. Don’t be so—”

“I’m not being so. The Bowie song in the pub. The guy keyed in A-twenty-six.”

“Ah. Well then, if you mention that, then it must—”

They came to a halt outside a house that looked much like any other they had scrutinised.

“Number twenty-six,” Emma said. “I didn’t know you were superstitious.”

“I’ve got nothing else to rely on,” Sean answered.

The garden was a riot of weeds. The bones of an ancient BSA motorbike leaned against the front wall, beneath the windows. There were no curtains in the windows at the front of the house but the view inside was hampered by a series of screens that reached from floor to ceiling. Two off-white buckets filled with cleaning rags and rusting screws, bolts and washers stood sentinel at the front door, comprised of a badly painted black frame that encased a single opaque pane, the view through which was further confused by an elaborate dimpling of the glass.

Sean rapped his knuckles against it and rang the doorbell. A few minutes’ wait brought nobody to answer it. He turned to Emma, who was standing by the gate, her arms crossed. He winked at her. “Let’s try round the back.”

A narrow archway punched between the semis allowed access to the rear of the house. Passing through a wobbly wooden gate that filled its intended space as well as a square peg in a triangular hole, Sean and Emma struggled across a tiny patch of thigh-high grass to a back window that was as miserly with its view as the front had been.

“What would you say to me if I told you that I think we should break in here?”

Emma closed her eyes and groaned. “I’d say, ‘What’s with this we shit?’”

“Good answer,” Sean said, and sent his elbow through the glass. They stood in silence, listening for movement, before Sean reached through the hole and unfastened the window.

“Cosy, isn’t it?” he said when they were standing inside, gingerly picking the larger shards of glass from his leather jacket.

“It’s bloody freezing,” Emma said, rubbing her arms and looking around the plain white room, which was unadorned by anything as simple as even a lampshade.

“It’s not been lived in for some time,” Sean guessed. There were two main rooms on the ground floor, of equal size, and a hallway, the floor of which was a mosaic of blue tiles that travelled from the front door to the back and gradually shifted through every conceivable shade from ice to navy as they did so.

“I think this is the place,” Sean said. “Let’s have a look at his kitchen.”

The kitchen was a bright, welcoming room with a large wooden table and a fireplace. The floor here was also tiled, in all shades of orange: a sun radiating spirals of energy reached out to the walls.

“Nice idea,” Emma said.

“Isn’t it?” Sean agreed, moving the toe of his boot along one of the spinning arms of colour. “Do you think it means anything?”

“There doesn’t have to be a signal in everything you see, does there?”

Sean looked at her. “I wonder, sometimes.”

Emma said, “Funny though, I feel I know this place. Maybe it was featured in one of those décor magazines once.”

Back towards the stairs, Sean held up his hand. The shadow of a man was on the glass of the front door. As long as they were frozen, studying the figure for a clue as to what action to follow, they could see that the man wasn’t doing anything. He was just standing there.

“Now that,” Emma said, when she realised it was an illusion, “is creepy.”

“Look at how he did it,” Sean said, pointing to a series of mirrors up the stairs that, when sunshine hit them, projected the shadow of a doll onto the glass of the door.

“What kind of a man wants to piss around like that?”

Sean started up the stairs, his boots thumping dully on the bare wood. “Maybe he liked to feel less alone,” he said. “Figures at the door, maybe they made him feel popular, as if he was getting lots of visitors.”

“Yeah, right,” Emma said, trudging after him.

On the top floor, the bathroom was an ice cavern, but without any shades of white whatsoever. It glowed in colours that could have been blue or green or both or neither. The two bedrooms were as spartan as the rooms on the ground floor. The tiles on the floor in the back room depicted a green island in the centre of a sea of aquamarine. Along the hallway to the front room, the colours suddenly disintegrated – soft reds meeting an ash-grey mess that took over until the threshold. Beyond it, the tiles created a perfect black limbo without anything to arrest the eye.

They were about to return to the ground floor when Emma stopped Sean. She had the look of someone trying to root around in her mind for the key to recognition of a face so weathered by time and experience that there could be no hope of success.

She was looking at a map of Pangaea stitched into heavy fabric hanging on the wall, the continents when they were all part of the same land mass. A breeze from somewhere was causing the bottom edge to move slightly.

She reached out and tugged one edge of the map away from the wall.

There was a door, a tiny wooden door with a loop of string for a handle, behind it.

A picture, drawn in crayon on an old piece of paper from a school exercise book, was tacked to its central panel. It was a childish scrawl, a bald man in grey standing on a green hill, with white holes for eyes. The sky was black and a black sun burned in it, edged with brilliance, like a perpetual eclipse.

Sean said, his voice breaking, “I know that place.”

Emma said, carefully, calmly: “I drew that.”

Their hands found each other.

Behind the door: more stairs. They were only half-way up, Emma at the rear, when she heard Sean’s voice, low and breathy, come whistling through his teeth: “Jesus fuck. Jesus fuck.”

The room stretched away from them. Emma was frightened to a point where she could not think clearly. None of the houses along this street had three floors, did they? And the roofs were too shallow to allow for this level of conversion. The ceiling was of an unknowable height, an insane height. The impossibility of it crushed her.

Sean stood on the threshold to the room and she could tell by the movement of his shoulders that he was crying.

“What is it?” she asked, softly. The house creaked and groaned around her as the wind and rain buffeted it. It too seemed affected by whatever it was that Sean had discovered.

“I’ve been here before,” he said. “When I was a child. But I can’t remember… I can’t remember how.”

She pressed against him and looked through the gap between his arm and the curtailment of the banister. The room had no tiles in it; the floor was covered with a ragged piece of matting. Chalked signs and messages had been scratched into it. The walls seethed in shadow and light, spoilt further by an imbroglio of graphite and ink and spray paint.

Emma said, in a voice too small for the room: “Me too.”

What illuminated the walls, what quaked and pulsed at the centre of the room, was hidden within a tube of fabric that was pinned and pegged to a scaffold that reached up to the eaves. An arched window, the only one on this level, provided a view of the tower at Sloe Heath, as if it were a painting, framed and hung.

Sean unfastened the fabric and let it fall. The fire that was revealed, burning in a small, ceramic crucible, was unlike any flame Emma had seen. The tongues of it, reaching to the newly revealed ceiling, were sometimes milky and smooth, sometimes purpuric. Acid whites became mottled with cartoon orange; sudden, impossible black flames measled with slowly expanding moments of electric green. At the ceiling, they rilled and plaited like flecks of rain on glass. The sheer alien spectacle was enough to shock tears from her, but what elicited the pain to go with it, a bone-gnawing sadness, was what coalesced at the heart of the fire.

She had not seen her grandfather for twenty years, yet here he was, bathed by the flames, as scrubbed and as fresh as a child. He turned to look at her, his eyes animated with joy. He was trying to speak to her but either the words were being soaked up by the conflagration or she wasn’t close enough to hear. The enticement of listening to a voice that had been lost to the vagaries of time and her untrustworthy memory was irresistible. She edged towards the tower of fire, cocking her head to improve the trajectory of his words, and saw Sean doing the same. Tears made his cheeks shiny. How could he be feeling this way for someone who belonged to her? She remembered weekends spent with this man, when her parents were having some time to themselves. She would sit on his knee while they watched Charlie’s Angels or Starsky and Hutch or The Six Million Dollar Man. He would waggle her toes and tell her stories about dark horses in stormy fields and angels who played with your hair while you slept and how that was what made you become more beautiful every day. He brought her cakes from the factory where he worked as a confectioner, icing buns and decorating birthday sponges.

She couldn’t say “Grandad” back then. It was too hard a word for her. She called him “Gaga”.

“Gaga,” she said now, the first time she had uttered the name since his death in 1976. It was like understanding what life meant. It was like, for an instant, glimpsing a detail of God’s face. He might as well have died yesterday, so fresh in her mind was he now. And suddenly she could remember how he spoke. The richness of his voice slammed into her consciousness with such clarity that she staggered. Sean reached out and grabbed her arm. He appeared to her as though through a sea of syrup. His eyes were wide, his mouth comically stretched. Was he shaking his head?

Emma flapped his arms away and turned again to her grandfather. He was laughing, his eyes screwed up, happy wrinkles squeezed into the corners of the face. “Count my happy wrinkles,” he’d say. “Count my happy wrinkles and times by five, that’s how long I’ll stay alive.”

Here he was, saying things to her again that she couldn’t hear. Conscious that Sean was behind her, reaching out, trying to stop her from being with a man she had loved so much, she ran to her grandfather, arms outstretched. The flames, when they consumed her, didn’t hurt at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: SALAMANDERMAN

“CROSS HIS PALMS with crimson, traveller,” the nut said, capering in Will’s wake like a harlequin on speed, busting his guts to impress a king. Ahead of them both, a man in a long brown coat was striding across the cricket pitch, the straps of his First World War flying helmet whipping around his neck in the wind.

“Plasma or fire, he takes either,” the nut was saying now. “He’ll juggle with flames and make your blood disappear into his skin.”

Will was exhausted, and in no mood for verbal trickery. After recovering from his faint, the bus driver giving him a cup of tea from his flask, he had thumbed a lift to Sloe Heath from a guy in a lorry on his way up to Leigh. At the hospital entrance he had stood for an age, as sunlight began colouring in the things around him, not quite believing that he had reached his destination. His relief was offset by the hollowness of losing Elisabeth and Sadie so close to his target. If it wasn’t for him, neither of the women would be… Well, best not to think too much about that.

He had not been approached by any staff as he made his way through the hospital grounds. It seemed that they were quite happy to allow pedestrians to use the path through to the north end of the site. He had barely walked for five minutes before he was accosted by this nut and his tall, silent, striding friend.

“Where do you want to go?” the nut asked. “Where do you want to be?” He was dressed in blue plus-fours and a white T-shirt. A red baseball cap was jammed down on his head, the peak violently curved. He wore tiny round sunglasses. His eyebrows were conjoined, forming a single black bar above the lenses.

“I don’t know just for the time being, thanks,” Will said, in what he hoped was a dismissive way.

“Just browsing, are you?” the nut said, and gave him a shocking, wolfish grin, full of long, white teeth. “Tarry a while,” he said, putting on an upper-class accent. “Take tea with Christopher and I, and we’ll talk of how we might help you. He said you’d be coming. We waited for days. But he was right. He was right. You came.”

Christopher wasn’t hanging around to see what Will would do. Will shrugged. It was just nice to get the offer of help after such a long time making his own luck. Keeping up with someone who was around six and a half feet tall wasn’t easy though. Will and the nut had to jog in order not to lose him.

“What’s your name?” Will asked, in an attempt to halt his plasma and fire nonsense.

“Yoda,” the nut replied.

“What’s your real name?”

“Tonto Moratorium-Pith. Junior.”

“Yoda it is,” said Will, trying hard to conceal his irritation. “What about him?”

“That,” said Yoda, reverentially, “is Christopher.” He said the name in a voice filled with awe and looked at Will expectantly, as if he should know who he was talking about.

“Who is Christopher?”

Yoda affected a puzzled look and pointed at the diminishing figure. “Christopher’s him.”

“Yes,” Will said, patiently. “I know. But who is he?”

“He is special,” Yoda said. “Come on. He makes blinding tea. And biscuits. Sublime biscuits the like of which you have never eaten.”

The sublime biscuits turned out to be a plate of malted milk, ginger nuts, and Jammie Dodgers. In a room that was like a shrine to brown, Christopher served tea from a brown teapot and sat cross-legged to drink it, his attention solely on the television, which was broadcasting a Rita Hayworth film.

“He won’t blink while he’s watching this,” Yoda educated Will. “But his mind will be ticking over like a Swiss clock factory.”

Will slurped his tea and ate more biscuits than he was probably welcome to, and found that they were sublime after all.

Yoda said: “Watch this.”

He cleared his throat and crouched by Christopher, looking up at his face as a mother might regard a son who had just come top in an exam.

“Twenty-eighth of May 1959,” he said.

Christopher said, in a sing-song voice: “Thurs-day.”

“Fourth of February, 1962.”

Christopher said: “Mon-day.”

Will sniffed. “Is that right? How are we supposed to check?”

“You try him then, doubting John-Thomas.”

Will shook his head. “This is stupid.”

Yoda took off his sunglasses. He might as well not have bothered. The eyes were small, black and round. Red marks remained where the bridge and arms had been. “You pig our biccies and won’t play? Then git, boy. Git. And see if anyone else will help you out. Our hospitality is third to second. And we’re second. And we happen to be second to none and all.”

“Sorry,” Will said, and thought of his own birth date. “Christopher. Eighth of June, 1970”

Christopher said: “Mon-day.”

Will clapped slowly. He thought of the date he had lost his virginity. “Tenth of May, 1986”

Christopher said: “Sa-tur-day.”

“Hurrah,” Will said. “Nice trick. Impressive.”

Christopher turned to lock eyes with him.

“Oh dear,” Yoda said. “You distracted him from his viewing.”

Christopher was crying. He said: “Flame me.”

“What?”

Yoda was flapping. “You heard him. Quick, quick, or it’ll be blood he needs. Where are the matches. Where are those bloody-goody matches?”

He reached over and drew Christopher’s hand out, palm upwards. Yoda struck a match and gently placed it onto the skin. The match flared and went out. A line of smoke rose from Christopher’s palm. Christopher leaned over and inhaled it.

He said: “21st January, Osaka, 2.03 p.m. 22nd January, Basel, 5.22 a.m. 22nd January, Darwin, 6.47 p.m. 23rd January, Birmingham, 10.19 p.m.”

“What’s this?” Will said, laughing nervously.

“I don’t know,” said Yoda. “He’s done it before but I don’t know what it means.”

“Write them down,” Christopher said. “Write them all down. You’ll wish you had if you don’t.”

He went on for another ten minutes, listing dates and locations and specific times. His tongue peeking from between his lips, Yoda scribbled what he was saying on the inside cover of a tattered Graham Greene novel. When Christopher had finished, he fell into a deep sleep from which he could not be revived, even when Will started kicking his chair and demanding to know what these dates meant.

“Leave him,” Yoda said, reverentially. “He has spoken.”

“Spoken gibberish, more like. I shouldn’t have come here. What a waste of time.”

“Christopher said, while we were waiting for you, that the girl wasn’t dead. That she would return to you. Soon.” Yoda’s beatific smile failed to curtail Will’s sudden rage.

“Sadie? What do you know about it?” he shouted, leaping from his chair and causing Yoda to rock back on his heels and fall to the floor. “Where is she? What about Eli? Cat?”

“I don’t know,” Yoda said, trying to crawl away. “I don’t know. Christopher said…”

“Christopher said? Christopher said? He doesn’t fucking know me.”

Will didn’t know what he was going to do but he had a very strong feeling he might actually try to harm Yoda or Christopher, anything in order to get some information from them.

He was reaching down to grab hold of Yoda’s T-shirt, ignorant to the barked demands for an explanation for his presence from the starched nurse standing in the doorway, her hands squirming together. He was reaching when, out of the window, he saw the mountaineer, Flint, striding towards him across the grass, gripping by the hair the heads of Elisabeth and Sadie.

But then he saw that it wasn’t Flint after all, just a groundsman carrying buckets of pondweed. The nurse had her hand on Will’s arm now, but he couldn’t turn away, even though the shape of his shock had been softened, made manageable.

“I think you should leave, sir,” the nurse was saying, at the same time as exhorting Yoda, whom she called Mickey, to get up and tidy his magazines. “It is you who should be leaving, isn’t it?” she said to Will, her brow knitting as she volleyed a glance between the three of them.

“Probably,” Will said, shaking his head. Nice place, he thought. Even the staff get in on the madness. He took the Graham Greene novel and stuffed it in his coat pocket, wondering what he should do now. So much of his hope had been pinned on Sloe Heath that he had been unable to see beyond what might happen here. He had hoped to find an answer to Cat’s death, or even to find Cat’s killers. He had not expected this Laurel and Hardy nonsense to impede him. There must remain some kind of clue here – why else would those murderers have mentioned it?

Unless, he thought grimly, as he headed for the exit, he had misheard after all and had wasted all of this time. If that was the case, then he deserved to wander these corridors for ever, with the rest of the nutjobs.

“No, no, no,” he heard Tonto/Yoda/Mickey whining, “you’re not right. You’re not right,” and the increasingly shrill demands of the nurse to shut up and play nice.

Will ran his fingers along the dense block of pages in his pocket, wondering what the dates could mean. A slap resounded through the shiny corridor, followed by the smash of a lamp. Will heard Christopher, his voice laden with sleep, laced with terror, say: “You promised never to hurt me! You promised you’d leave me be!”

And now someone else was speaking, but it wasn’t Mickey and it wasn’t the nurse.

“Did I make a mistake?” it asked, in a voice that sounded full of wetness. “Did I err?” An airless giggle tightened Will’s skin. He stood in the middle of the corridor, looking back the thirty feet or so to the open door on the left. Thin shadows jerked across the blade of pale sunlight that had collapsed across the hallway matting. Mickey and Christopher weren’t talking any more.

Will crept back towards the doorway.

“Was it him?” the nurse was asking. “Was it the other?” Her voice was muffled, and punctuated by rhythmic, moist smacking sounds. A lump stuck in Will’s craw; he suddenly could not get the dream memory of himself fucking Sadie out of his mind.

As he reached the crack in the door, he moved only his neck, stretching to make sense of the movement within that narrow gap. He saw the nurse half-undressed. But then, how could clothes be expected to cling to her when her own flesh could not? She was gamely trying to gather loops of subcutaneous fat as they peeled apart from the muscle, like so much molten cheese. But her true focus was elsewhere. It looked as though she were kissing Christopher. Her mouth was fast against his, but surely her face should not be journeying so deeply. He heard her trying to talk again, as she burrowed further. The tall man’s body hung slackly from the powerful joist of her neck. His leather flying helmet jiggled around his throat.

Will turned and ran when he saw her teeth begin to inch their way out of the back of Christopher’s skull.

“My God,” he moaned, as he hurtled for the exit doors, waiting for the crash of her pursuit. “God.”

Outside he pounded across the car parks, past a gaggle of white-coated doctors bewildered by his haste. Climbing the rise that took him onto the cricket pitch, he risked a look around and saw the nurse’s arm like a prop from a horror film, reaching out through the brick wall.

“Fuck.”

The cricket pitch was greasy from the previous night’s downpour, and Will forced himself to traverse it before he checked again as to her whereabouts, lest he slip. He felt horribly exposed on this huge square of lawn, the naked trees surrounding him, rattling in the wind. The space made him aware of the frantic schuss of his coat and the hiss of his breath as he sprinted. The colour and shade of the grass merged and separated under the insistent wind, like the nap on a suede coat when it is brushed. He was almost at the other end of the pitch when he saw the nurse emerging from the grass: a swimmer hauling herself from the deep. She even shook her head a little, as if to rid her ears of water. He viewed, with nausea, how scraps of Christopher’s face clung to the uncertain flesh of her own, how green blades from the pitch slashed her skin as she dragged herself clear and turned to look up at him.

He wouldn’t meet her gaze; not until he had to. Not until she had him and he could look nowhere else. He swerved right and scampered for a ramp that would take him into the laundry department of the hospital. Large, lidded skips queued outside, bulging with yellow plastic bags awaiting incineration. The smell of shit and disinfectant hit him like a shovel as he shouldered the door open; he heard the ratty clitter of what could only have been claws moving fast across the road in his wake. Elbowing past great steel cages rammed with dirty linen, Will ducked into a mess room and forced himself to freeze. A kettle was boiling on a Baby Belling, funnelling steam into the face of a chimp on a calendar. That day’s Sun fought for possession of the small table with a series of coffee rings and a bowl of labelled keys. Will silenced the room by removing the kettle from the hotplate. Sweat blinded him. He blinked it away. What if she was smelling him out? As if to confirm the fear, he heard a snuffling in the corridor, as of a dog pinning down the location of a hidden bone.

When the door opened, and one of the cleaners came in, Will laughed in disbelief. Because it was her. It was her. The woman who had chased him and Elisabeth from her house all those days ago in London.

“Cup of tea, mate?” she asked, and in doing so, a slick of drool flooded from her mouth. “Bit parky, isn’t it?” Her top lip fell from her face like a slug from a branch.

She made to rub her hands together but the mime only resulted in her gluing the muscles of the two limbs together. Her flesh stretched and tore as she attempted to separate them, and, her concentration lost, she made herself fully known to him, shedding the hastily donned disguise of whichever hapless cleaner she had devoured outside. Will took two steps towards her and swung the kettle, connecting with her head just above the right eye. There wasn’t any sense of jarring, just a sickening giving way of the meat, as if there was no bone beneath to support it. Perhaps there wasn’t. Boiling water spattered her face, and poached an eye in an instant, turning it opaque. Her shriek, Will guessed, as he dived for the doorway, was not of pain but of frustration. He didn’t hang around to see how that fury would manifest itself.

He clattered through corridors, turning left and right at random, hoping that the sickly-sweet smell of medication, disinfectant, and mental decay would unhinge her and shake her off his tail. He thundered out onto a tarmac drive that led to the carriageway. He was half-way up the gates, trying to cock his leg over the evil spikes without skewering himself, when he heard her behind him, mewling like a lost pup. He watched as she staggered after him, and feared that there would be no respite until she had him dead and ingested.

In the seconds before he managed to disentangle himself and drop to the ground, he found himself marvelling at her mercurial skills, no matter how clumsy they were, because he knew she was better than she had been when he first encountered her and that she would no doubt continue to improve. He backed away from the gate as she shambled towards it, reassembling herself from whichever body patterns she had absorbed and made her feel comfortable. She hit the gate and wrapped herself around its bars, becoming interstitial, forcing the solids through her body with little grimaces of pain. He didn’t hear the sounds of tyres screeching on the road, or the blare of a horn. It was almost, in the moment that the car hit him, that Will had become like her, so that instead of being shunted onto the road the vehicle would simply travel through him, and he would filter the metal and plastic and leather and tissue through his body until it was on the other side of him, and the car could go on its way.

He didn’t see her finish her journey through the bars. He was too busy screaming at the pain that was ricocheting through his body. And dimly, he was aware that the scream was not just for his pain, but an accretion of agonies that had heaped upon him over the last week. Agonies and terrors in equal measure that his body, in extremis, was only now beginning to deal with.