Life's Lottery (68 page)

‘Mary, check on the brother,’ Hackwill orders. ‘And on Ben McKinnell while you’re at it.’

Read 220, go to 246.

Y
ou look around for the weak link. Sean is scared to the point of hysteria. Shearer is silently cried out. Shane positions himself just behind and to the left of Hackwill, ready to be ordered into action.

Sitting down, in front and to the right of Hackwill, is Reggie Jessup. The bully’s sidekick, the boy who gets his jollies egging on his bigger pal.

Now you think about it, Jessup is even more contemptible than Hackwill. The councillor will stand up to you, put on a blank face, tough it out. Jessup won’t. And you’ll bet he knows where the bodies are buried.

‘Reg,’ you say, ‘what’s going on?’

Jessup looks startled even to have been noticed. ‘Keith?’ he asks.

‘You always know, Reg. You know everything. You like to sit there smiling to yourself, knowing. You know more about all this than anyone.’

‘I don’t get your drift.’ Jessup smiles, fatly.

Mary has slipped round the room, and stands over Jessup’s chair. Suddenly, she leans in and pinches his cheek, not playfully.

‘What happened to Warwick?’ you ask.

If Jessup knows who did it, if it seems he’s going to take the blame, he’ll talk.

‘You were seen,’ you say, ‘sneaking out after him. Were you lovers? Secretly, behind Kay’s back? Did you quarrel? Was he going to leave you?’

‘I’m not queer,’ Jessup mumbles.

‘You’ve never been married,’ says Mary. ‘Never had a girlfriend, so far as I know. At school, they said you were Hackwill’s bum-boy.’

The pinch is hurting badly now. Jessup looks to Hackwill for support. ‘Who saw me?’ he asks.

‘You admit it?’

‘No.’

‘This is silly,’ Hackwill says, at last. Not a very strong protest.

‘You’re on your own now, Reggie,’ you say.

It occurs to you that Reg Jessup, past forty, is probably a virgin. There are still people like that. It’s almost sad.

Jessup tears his face loose from Mary’s grip and bolts upstairs. You follow. He pulls open the bathroom door and drops to his knees to be sick.

‘Couldn’t you make it to the toilet?’ you ask, in disgust.

Then you see that the bathroom is occupied. McKinnell is sitting on the toilet, dead.

Go to 230.

W
hy have you stayed behind? It’s not as if Warwick is going anywhere. In too many movies the kids fetch the sheriff back to where they found the corpse, only to find it’s been shifted. That doesn’t happen in real life.

Then again, this doesn’t happen in real life either.

You’ve identified most of the boots. You know yours and James’s, and recognise Mary’s Docs and Hackwill’s specially-bought-for-the-course top-of-the-range survival boots. You work out which of the others belong to which guest. You think the ‘missing’ pair are McKinnell’s.

You study your own boots and the duplicates on your feet. The pair you aren’t wearing seem more like the originals, the real boots.

Water ripples around Warwick. The rain raises the level until it’s lapping around the dead man’s face.

This culvert is a place of gathering, filtering out things from great natural movements. Things like Warwick. And the boots.

There’s a shimmer in the drizzle. Mary appears.

‘They sent you,’ you say.

She is startled to see you. She is wearing long mittens on her feet.

Suddenly, you know it’s not Mary.

Yes, it is. But not the Mary you spent the night with. That Mary has a scarf arranged over bite-marks on her neck. This Mary’s throat is bare and unmarked.

She is carrying James’s mobile phone. How did she get that?

This Mary is hostile. Her knife comes out. She rushes at you and embeds the blade in your chest, twisting hard. In her eyes as she kills you, you see puzzlement. She’s not your Mary; but you aren’t her Keith, either.

She tosses the phone down next to the straggle of boots.

As you die, she steps back through the shimmer.

Go to 0.

‘
N
o,’ you say, firmly. ‘That’d be insane. Look, you sit tight, keep everybody together, watch them all. I’ll go for the police. When you get a chance, phone ahead and say I’m coming. This whole gig is way out of hand.’

‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’

‘That’s okay, James. This isn’t a normal situation.’

‘Good luck.’

James hugs you and walks back to the Compound.

Your feet are loose in McKinnell’s big boots. You know your ankles will tense up. It’ll be agony by nightfall.

You turn and start walking down into the valley.

* * *

Two and a half days later, when you make it to the nearest village, you find that no one has phoned ahead to the police. You have tried not to think about what was happening back at the Marion Compound.

Your feet are numbed and you are as cold as you’ve ever been. Last night, there was a thunderstorm. You were out in it, wading forward, resisting the impulse to curl up and sleep, to succumb to hypothermia or even drown.

In the village, you collapse.

‘We’re sending a helicopter,’ the Welsh police sergeant says. ‘The rescue boys.’

You let yourself sleep.

* * *

When you wake up, there’s a media circus. A lot of plainclothes police are around. You are dragged into a room and questioned minutely about what happened.

The thing is, you don’t know. You realise you’re being probed to see how much you know. You catch from a slip of the tongue that McKinnell isn’t the only victim. A policeman refers to ‘suspicious
deaths
’.

They hammer on and on about James’s mobile phone. The one on which he didn’t call them. You try to keep your story neutral. You worry that James is in trouble, that he tried on his own to do for Hackwill.

You’re asked a lot of questions about the others, and what your relationship with them was.

‘Tell me,’ the sergeant says, ‘this Councillor Hackwill. You’d known him a long time. Did you or your brother have any ill-will towards him?’

If you lie, go to 229. If you tell the truth, go to 242.

F
inally, you get a break. The
Daily Comet
, the Derek Leech tabloid, runs an exposé of ‘Day-Trip Lottery Thieves’, foreigners who buy tickets in our Lottery because theirs are restricted, offering far lower pay-outs. Leech is crusading to make it illegal for foreigners to play, claiming it’s supposed to be national, not international.

Among the Lottery thieves is the Other Winner: Thierry Lethem, from Brussels. A Belgian.

There’s a blurry passport photo in the paper. A bland, anonymous young man. With £6.5 million that should be yours.

If Leech gets his way, Lethem wouldn’t be eligible to carve off half your jackpot. He couldn’t even buy a fucking scratch-card.

But even if Leech prevails, it’s not going to be retroactive. Your money has gone abroad.

You’ve been cut in half. You feel transparent, a shadow-spider, empty.

* * *

You can’t enjoy Mustique.

The mansion is a cell.

Your family are ghosts.

Only Lethem is real.

Bastard Belgian.

* * *

The
Comet
reports that Lethem, Lotto Snatcher Number One, has been deluged by sackfuls of righteous hate-mail from patriotic Britons. In his ‘Derek Leech Talks Straight’ editorial, the proprietor says Britain has had enough of the fascist jackboot of Brussels. The country is dying, assets bled away by Eurovampires like Thierry Lethem.

You write Leech a personal letter of thanks, and he responds in kind.

Someone understands.

Read 13, then come back here.

* * *

You go to Belgium but Lethem has left the country. He’s unmarried – lucky git – and has no children, no living relatives. He is alone in the universe with £6.5 million. He stalks your world like a giant spider, chortling at you, extending cobweb tendrils of power. You know he is plotting against you.

You have only £4 million left. You’re getting poor and the Belgian is getting rich.

* * *

You pay the Rhodes Investigation Agency, a reputable firm, to track Lethem down. To convince Sally Rhodes, its director, to take the commission, you spin a story about receiving letters threatening your co-winner and having dreadful visions of his spiral into danger. You claim to feel an almost supernatural connection with the Belgian.

That, at least, is not a lie. Sometimes, you
know
what he’s doing. You have a scent of perfume and the sense of tropical night, an unfamiliar taste on your tongue or buzz in your nostrils. Soft skin pressed against yours. Warm liquid coursing over you.

You know he has your life.

The Rhodes Agency reports that Thierry Lethem is in the Far East. You thought as much. Thailand, Malaysia, Macao. Some fleshpot where everything is available for a man with £6.5 million.

You ask the agency to look further.

* * *

‘Mr Marion,’ Sally Rhodes says as you step into her office, ‘I’m so pleased you could fit me in.’

She smiles easily, deep lines round her mouth. There are pictures of a kid – her son, you suppose – on the desk, and quite a bit of personal clutter. She’s wearing a man’s pinstripe jacket over dark tartan trousers. You find her attractive.

‘Have you any news?’ you ask.

She sits you down and buzzes her receptionist to get you coffee. Then she prowls round the room, playing with things as she talks.

‘I’ve had a Far East agency we sub-contract for over here do some digging. They’re good people. We’re all international these days.’ She takes a file out of a cabinet. ‘I’m probably talking myself out of a nice little earner, but I thought I should ask you a bit more about your actual
interest
in M. Lethem.’

‘How do you mean?’ You aren’t comfortable.

‘Don’t feel awkward. I’m not a conventional person. I know people do things for strange reasons and that there are vast unknowables. There’s something about your link with Lethem that makes this inquiry out of the ordinary. It occurs to me that, well, there might be something unhealthy in it. For both of you.’

You’re sure your face is red.

‘I’m a detective,’ Sally says. ‘I feel a need to find things out. To
know
. Probably neurotic, but there you go. I often wish I didn’t know things that I do. But you can’t unpick your character like that. My reading is that you’re suffering a touch from that disease just now.’

‘You’ve found him,’ you say.

Sally does a little shrug, perched on her desk, fanning herself with a file.

‘You and Thierry are doing this little dance round the money you both won. All over the world. Maybe you need to meet, to sort out something cosmic. Or maybe you should be kept apart, maybe you’ll be fissionable together. You remind me a bit too much of John Wayne in
The Searchers
.’

‘He takes the girl home,’ you say.

‘But he was going to kill her. Frankly, Mr Marion, do you want to kill Thierry Lethem?’

Should you answer honestly? Can you answer honestly? Do you know what you’ll do?

‘I just need to know,’ you say. ‘You understand that, Sally, don’t you?’

‘Sadly,’ she smiles, ‘yes.’

She hands over the file. You
think
.

If you give the file back, go to 233. If you open the file, go to 260.

S
olemnly, you inter the tin of marbles. Men have died for lesser treasure. This time, you take careful markings with a tape measure, triangulating between the forsythia bush and Mum’s washing-line. You draw a pirate map, with Dad cheerfully helping out – a moment of closeness that prods you near tears – and resolve to dig up the tin next week. That will be the signal that this time you are in control.

But Mum moves the washing line.

You’d forgotten that. It was why you could never find the tin again.

You dig several holes but Dad’s patience runs out and he tells you not to do any more damage to the lawn.

That happened too. You remember it all now. The worst thing was not just losing the marbles but not even being able to search for them. You dig one last covert hole and try to put the turf back. Laraine tells on you and you get a smack.

That’s a shock. You’ve never smacked your kids but you were punished whenever you really went beyond the pale. Your shorts and pants are pulled down and you get a stinging but hardly heartfelt smack with your Dad’s bare hand.

You cry for hours.

You burn with a sense of injustice.

You’ve lost something.

Now, where were you?

* * *

Paul Mysliwiec sticks his hand in Timmy’s bird’s-nest hair, picking up Timmy’s germs, and comes after you, to pass them on. Paul slaps you harder than he needs to and says, ‘Now, you’ve got Timmy’s germs.’

Considering what will happen, what do you do this time?

If you chase Vanda and give her Timmy’s germs, go to 109. If you shrug and tell Paul you don’t want to play, go to 128.

W
ithout a thought, you step out of the hut and slip the blade easily into Hackwill’s neck. The blade transfixes him, point appearing through his double chin. You hold him as he dies.

Jessup turns to run, leaving his friend to die. One of his foot-towels comes apart and he yelps. James is on the bastard, stabbing in a frenzy, spreading blood all around. James purges himself of something, finishing off business begun in the copse all those years ago.

Hackwill is dead. You drop him. James finishes with Jessup and gets up. Now what?

‘Get on your way,’ James says. ‘There’s still a murderer up here with us.’

There are three now, you think. Unless Hackwill or Jessup killed McKinnell: that’d feel right. You’ve killed a murderer. Almost in self-defence, rear-approach self-defence.

‘I’ll dump the refuse,’ James says, meaning the bodies.

You don’t feel changed. You don’t feel like a murderer. You’re still just you. It’s a mountain. Air is thin. The rules are different.