Decay Inevitable (19 page)

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.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
T
HREE:
B
ROCKEN
S
PECTRE

S
ADIE AND
E
LISABETH
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.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
F
OUR:
P
RE-
E
MPTIVE
S
TRIKES

T
HE 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.

“S
O, BONNY
R
ONNIE,
” 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.”