Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2 (18 page)

In the end they pulled him from the ditch backwards, arse on the ground, ruined leg dragging painfully against the earth. Jeb kept up a low and steady stream of invective as they eased him out. It was hard work and all three of them were sweating and powdered with dirt by the time they reached the roadside. Magnus looked to see what kind of vehicle had driven the vicar to their rescue, but there was only the yellow Audi, abandoned diagonally across the road like a prop in a cop show. The priest opened the car’s back door. Jeb lowered himself gently on to the back seat and slid, still swearing, until he was propped against the other door, his injured leg stretched out in front of him, the other in the footwell, bracing his body against a fall.

‘Thanks.’ Magnus unzipped his motorcycle jacket and peeled it off. It was a relief to feel the air on his skin. He realised that he should have thanked the man before and added, ‘You saved our lives.’

The vicar nodded. ‘Were they worth killing for?’

Magnus looked at Jeb and then back at the other man. ‘I hope so.’

‘What are you going to do with them?’

Here it was, Magnus thought, the pitch for God. ‘I don’t know.’ He gave the grin that had never worked on his school teachers, but which he seemed destined to greet authority with. ‘Live them.’

There was another groan from the back of the car and Jeb said, ‘If I don’t fucking die first.’

The cleric in the stranger seemed to recede again and he reverted to army mode.

‘We’ve a place nearby.’ He looked at Magnus. ‘I’ll drive. We can send a truck to collect your bikes later.’

Magnus wondered who the ‘we’ were. He said, ‘I’d rather follow on my bike.’

‘I know these roads. You won’t be able to keep up on that thing.’ The man turned away as if the conversation was over and began unfastening the tow chain from the handlebars of Jeb’s damaged bike.

The shadows thrown by the trees had lengthened. The crash and its aftermath had swallowed time. Late afternoon was edging into early evening and in a few hours the dark would start to drift in. Magnus leaned inside the car. Jeb was hunched on the back seat, clutching his leg.

‘I don’t fancy this.’ Magnus’s voice was a whisper. ‘We could be walking back into prison.’

Jeb looked at his leg. ‘I’m not walking anywhere. I’ve smashed this good.’ His breath juddered and he said, ‘I’ve done my ribs in too. A sudden move and one of them might puncture my lung; then I’d be truly fucked. Sorry, mate.’ It was the first time Jeb had apologised for anything, the first time he had called Magnus ‘mate’. ‘I don’t like it, but I’ve got no choice. I’ve got to go with the Righteous Avenger. You do what you have to do.’

It was in Magnus’s mind to say that he could drive north while Jeb convalesced in the back of the car, but a look at the strained expression on the parchment face told him it would be impossible. He had planned to ditch Jeb, but the prospect of continuing his journey on his own made him uneasy.

The vicar was at the car now, the tow chain still in his hands. ‘Ready to go?’

Magnus straightened up. He pulled his motorcycle jacket on and dragged his bike from the hedge where he had abandoned it. ‘Where are you heading? An army base?’

‘My base is a hundred miles south-west of here.’ The chain clinked as the man dropped it into the boot of the car. ‘It was hit hard, everywhere was hit hard. I’m the only survivor. I came here looking for someone I knew.’

Magnus noted the past tense and did not ask if he had found them.

Jeb mumbled something. The man glanced into the car and said, ‘Your friend’s going into shock. The sooner we get some meds into him the better.’ He glanced at the bike. ‘Don’t worry. I told you, I’ll send someone for it.’

‘I’m used to country roads. I’ll follow you.’

‘Not on that.’ The vicar nodded at the back wheel of the motorbike.

Magnus followed his gaze and saw an evil rip grinning in the bike’s back tyre. ‘Shit.’ He knelt down and touched the torn rubber, though he did not need a closer look to know that the damage was beyond patching. It could have happened when he skidded out of the Audi’s path, but he had heard no explosion, felt no tell-tale loss of control. Jeb groaned in the back of the Audi and Magnus got to his feet.

‘I’ll be heading north tomorrow, in this car if I can’t find a way to fix my bike.’

He set the motorbike at the side of the road and slid into the passenger seat of the Audi, wondering why the vicar was so desperate to ensure he accompanied them.

Twenty-Two

The yellow Audi ate up the country roads at what felt like racing-track speed. The vicar had been right. It would have been impossible for Magnus to have matched the pace on his motorbike, even if its tyres had been undamaged. Magnus sat silently, trying to hide the urge to press his foot against an imaginary brake pedal. He pulled down the sun visor and glanced at Jeb in the vanity mirror. His eyes were closed, his lips moving silently. Magnus wondered if he was praying.

‘What’s your name?’ the vicar asked.

Magnus snapped the visor back into place.

‘I’m Magnus McFall, he’s Jeb Soames.’

‘Short for Jebediah?’

‘I don’t know, I never asked.’

The vicar ignored the road markings, keeping to the centre of the track as if he were confident of meeting no one coming the other way, though the whole reason for their haste was that the Audi itself had come the other way. The route was as winding as the man had implied. The old Magnus would have relished the challenge of its twists and turns. He had loved the sensation of speed and rushing air, the roadside flashing by, blurring on the edge of his vision.

‘I’m Jacob Powe.’

Civilisation ran deep, Magnus thought. Everything was broken, but the man still felt an obligation to exchange names, as if they had met at a dinner party or a neighbourhood barbecue. He said, ‘You’re a minister?’

‘An Anglican priest.’

Magnus had never got the hang of English religions with their married priests and un-Catholic masses.

‘An army man?’

‘A captain, if the army still exists.’

It was strange, a priest with a gun in his hand, though it was not so hard to imagine Jesus armed and ready to fight the good fight. It was the Messiah’s beard and long hair that did it. The New Testament’s hippy look brought back images of IRA and Afghan terrorists, or freedom fighters, depending on your point of view. There were the makings of a good routine there (a God routine), he thought, and remembered again that there was no comedy circuit, no audience waiting to be shocked into laughter. He wondered if they had anything to drink at the place where they were going. He had a thirst that would drain Christ dry.

‘What do we call you?’ he asked. ‘Captain or Father?’

‘Jacob.’ The car slowed and Jeb muttered something as they turned into a driveway guarded either side by massive stone gateposts, each one topped with a carved pineapple, regal in its spikiness. ‘Welcome to Tanqueray House.’

The driveway was hemmed on either side by an avenue of trees. The road’s surface was tamped earth that had been covered some time back with shale. It was pitted with potholes and Jacob took it slowly. It was clear that the place had been neglected before the arrival of the sweats. An explosion of rhododendrons reached across the drive from overgrown verges, occasionally tapping against the car windows, like paparazzi in search of an incriminating photograph. The flowers were the same bright reds and purples of the saris that had sometimes drawn Magnus’s eyes on London streets; they had died too, the straight-backed Asian women with beautiful hair. Magnus rolled down the window and the scent of rotting foliage, more perfumed than the smell of decomposing flesh, but tainted all the same, slid into the car. He rolled up the window again. People went on about the beauty of trees, but Magnus had never felt easy around them. The branches bobbed and tangled above the drive, like mothers separated from their children, straining to touch even their fingertips. The image made him think of his own mother, how much she would be worrying about him. He pushed the thought away. There was no point in dwelling on possibilities. His task was to get home. He would leave in the morning. If he made steady progress he could be at the ferry terminal in a few days. The ferry would be no use, but it was the shortest crossing point. There would be other boats moored there and he would find one to suit him.

He asked,
‘How many of there are you?’

‘Seven – six.’ Jacob stumbled over the number. ‘Father Wingate was here before the sweats arrived. The house was a seminary and he was one of the brothers. He’s eighty-two, but in good health for his age, sharp as a blade.’

‘Eighty-two,’ Magnus repeated.

‘We’re lucky to have him. Father Wingate remembers the way a lot of things used to be done, before technology took over. His generation will be crucial to our survival.’

‘And the others?’

‘They came later. Waifs and strays, like you and Jeb. Like me if it comes to it.’

Magnus was about to say that he wasn’t a waif or a stray. He had somewhere to go, but the car swung around the final turn, the rhododendrons gave a last desperate clutch and the house appeared at the end of the drive. It was larger than he had expected, three storeys high and broad enough to suggest that once there had been other wings balancing the structure.

‘No vow of poverty,’ Magnus said.

Jacob shrugged. ‘It was Father Wingate’s ancestral home. He donated it to the Church when he took holy orders, much to the outrage of his extended family, I imagine. The Church would no doubt have sold it in due course.’

‘In due course,’ Magnus repeated. Death was everywhere, and yet they still referred to it with euphemisms.

The mansion’s roof was turreted and decorated with urns, like a house in an Agatha Christie movie where someone was due to topple to their death. Two staircases curved liquidly from an elevated porch down to a gravel courtyard where a Luton and a Transit van were parked. Each floor was defined by rows of windows, standing uniformly in line, black and secret. The house had been designed to impress, but it reminded Magnus of Pentonville, their flight across the courtyard uncertain of who was watching them. He wondered if people lurked behind the panes, observing their arrival and wondering in turn who the newcomers might be.

As if on cue the door of the house opened and a young woman trotted down the left staircase towards them. The girl looked like she had been born to the big house. She was in her early twenties, blonde and slender, with a pert nose that looked too good to be natural. Magnus thought that she might have been one of the girls he had glimpsed earlier that day, crouching in a ditch, disguised as boys, but he could not be sure.

Jacob slowed the car to a halt and the girl opened the driver’s door. Magnus had thought their arrival would be an occasion, but she barely spared him a glance. She took hold of Jacob’s arm, as if she were about to pull him from the car and said, ‘Henry’s gone.’

Twenty-Three

Jacob poured himself a small measure of whisky from the not quite full bottle on the kitchen table. He raised the glass to his nose and inhaled the malt fumes. The house was without electricity and the room was lit by a cluster of candles that threw weird shadows against the walls. ‘This isn’t a prison.’ He had said the same thing as they sat down to dinner. His expression was serious, as if it were medicine he was about to put to his lips and not a fine Lagavulin.
‘Henry was at liberty to move on.’

‘He said he was going to stay.’ Belle’s voice had a rich-girl whine to it. ‘He promised me.’

Magnus swirled the liquid in his glass, smelled a faint whiff of peat, took a sip and felt the malt slide down, warm and golden. The politics of the place were nothing to do with him. Now that they had eaten, only the bottle held him at the table.

They had laid Jeb on a door and carried him up to the main entrance. He was delirious and Jacob had sent the girl, whose name was Belle, indoors to find something to strap him to the makeshift stretcher with. Magnus had expected to deposit Jeb somewhere on the ground floor, but the priest had led the way up a grand central staircase and they had manhandled the stretcher to a room on the first floor. Now Jeb was in bed, tucked tight in a medicated sleep, his leg firmly bound, his ribs cushioned on either side by pillows. Father Wingate was sitting with him.

The elderly priest was a slight, shrunken figure whose head seemed too large for his body, the way the heads of children or anorexics sometimes can. His hair was thin, but brushed over his forehead in a style that might once, when the hair had been thicker and darker, have been considered foppish. Father Wingate looked too slow to avoid a coffin for much longer, but he had been quick to offer his help. Magnus imagined him in the room along the passageway, murmuring prayers over the bed, trying to inveigle God into Jeb’s soul.

‘
Maybe something happened to Henry.’ Injury tinged Belle’s voice, as if the sweats had been a mean trick played on her alone.

‘Maybe,’ Jacob agreed. He stared at his barely touched glass, his voice as calm as the liquid it held.

Magnus wondered if the cleric had helped himself to something from the medicine cabinet when he had been dosing Jeb. There was a lifetime of whisky and pills still out there for the taking. If he got to Orkney and found it deserted he could drink himself to death on the supply in Stromness alone and if that did not work he could drink himself from house to house until he reached Kirkwall and beyond. He would take a man’s way out, unlike Hugh. His cousin had died a hysteric’s death. Stones in his pocket like some lady poet.
I was much too far out all my life and not waving but drowning.
They had learned that stupid poem at school, but Hugh had not been out of his depth. The inquest had reported that the water had barely reached his chest before he sank beneath it.