The Age of Scorpio (58 page)

‘She’d heard that we wanted kids but were having trouble. You know how small this town is. Someone had offered her a lot of money to get pregnant with a view to adopting the child when it was born. Rich people. But she found out that wasn’t what they had in mind. They were some kind of cult. They thought she was important somehow – something to do with genealogy, bloodlines, selective breeding, all that nonsense. They had a place high up on the moors. She told us they were breeding children to be sacrificed.’

Beth was shaking her head.

‘No, it’s true! I didn’t believe it at first either, but she was scared, really scared. Not for her – she knew she was dead – but for the baby.’

What was clear was that her father believed this stuff. A week ago she would have dismissed it as nonsense, but it had been a busy week.

‘She had arranged to take the baby out – to Helmsley – and they’d let her, though they’d sent someone with her. We left you with your gran and actually disguised ourselves. We took a carrycot the same as Natalie’s and put a doll in it. Then in a tearoom we made the swap – in the bathroom. Scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life.’

And then you got your proper little girl. But she’d known, somehow she’d always known, and she’d resented us for it.
It occurred to Beth that they’d got away with it probably because they were so inconsequential.

‘They killed her, you know,’ he said between rasping gasps of oxygen. ‘Ran her down up on the moors shortly after we got Talia.’

Beth just nodded. She thought about saying all the things that she wanted to say. That it wasn’t her fault her mum couldn’t have children. That it shouldn’t have mattered that she was big. That she wasn’t actually ugly. That she had loved them unconditionally. That she missed her mum as well. That Talia was a horrible person who didn’t care about anyone but herself. But she knew it wouldn’t help. He genuinely wouldn’t understand. He was just a stupid, selfish, dying old man. He might as well have been a stranger. She stood up.

‘Where’s Talia?’ he demanded.

Your perfect little girl’s been doing porn, turning tricks and is very probably dead
. Beth very nearly said it.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where are you going? I need help. Looking after.’

Beth’s laugh was without bitterness, but was devoid of humour as well.

‘I’m going upstairs to get my records and then I’m going back to Portsmouth to find my bitch of a sister and get her out of whatever shit she’s in, and then that’s it for me and this family.’ Beth thought about it for a moment or two. ‘I went to prison because I killed Talia’s boyfriend. I caught him beating her. It looked like he was going to murder her. She testified against me, and none of you even came and saw me, let alone said thank you.’

‘You helped put your mother in the grave!’

‘I don’t think I did. I don’t think this family deserves me.’

Beth turned away from her father for the last time. She went upstairs to get her records. It was so sad that they were the only things left for her in this house.

He heard the front door pulled shut. It was the sound of finality, an end. Tears rolled down his cheeks. It wasn’t that Beth was gone. She had never done anything but bring pain to the family. It was just that she had been the last faint hope he’d had of seeing his little girl Talia again. After all Beth had done, he still found himself surprised by her selfishness.

‘That’s a fine young woman you have there, Mr Luckwicke,’ du Bois said from the corner.

‘I knew you’d come.’ He closed his eyes. From the moment they had taken Talia from the tearoom in Helmsley, he’d been living in fear, waiting for this moment.

Du Bois stepped into view. Twenty years gone, and Natalie’s bodyguard hadn’t aged a day.

‘Oh, how we looked for you,’ the blue-eyed, blond-haired killer told him.

‘Nobody ever thinks to look here. We’re not needed any more.’

Du Bois nodded.

‘Talia?’

‘Is not your daughter. Your daughter just left.’

‘You’re going to kill her?’

‘Beth? I hope not.’

‘Talia.’

‘I’m going to kill you, but I’ve known that for more than twenty years. I’m relieved that you’re not a pervert. I think you probably did the best you could for Natalie, but after the little exchange I just overheard, I don’t think I’m going to feel very bad about it.’

‘You don’t know—’

‘No,
you
don’t know how hard Beth has been fighting for her sister. Now do you want me to make it look like murder, suicide, natural causes or an accident?’ Du Bois hadn’t asked the question unkindly.

The old man looked at du Bois, appalled. ‘I’m not going to choose!’

‘It’s your last chance for a bit of control in your life.’

The two men stared at each other for a while.

‘Suicide.’

Du Bois nodded. ‘Your guilty conscience does you some credit at the end.’

To Mr Luckwicke’s surprise, in his last moments he thought of Beth. He remembered her smiling and laughing when she was very young.

As du Bois walked across Peel Park to where he had left the Range Rover, he set his phone to checking mobile-phone call logs. When that didn’t work, he started cross-referencing traffic through cellular-phone masts.

He would have to drive quickly if he wanted to see any of Alexia’s concert.
Gigs, she calls them gigs
, he reminded himself. He had already arranged for her, the band and the gaggle of lackeys, parasites, sycophants and would-be lovers who followed her around to gain entry to Portsea Island through the roadblocks.

The Range Rover unlocked itself as du Bois approached, pulling off his leather gloves.

Du Bois had been right to bring his own whisky. The stuff they had behind the bar on South Parade Pier was horrible. Fortunately the bouncers had left him alone after he had shown them one of the warrant cards he habitually carried with him.

The venue was packed. He had made it back for the second half of the gig, though his driving hadn’t been terribly legal. Clearly Alexia’s band – Light – had something of a following, locally anyway. To du Bois’s eyes the audience all looked like they had gone out of their way to look either grotesque or as if they had next to no moral standards. The dancing looked more like the melee at the base of a castle wall during a siege. He watched as dancer after dancer scrambled onto the stage and then threw themselves back into the crowd, and wondered what the point was.

The music could have been worse. Du Bois could not deny the technical skill of both his sister and the musicians who played with her, and they definitely seemed to put feeling into their music. Their songs were much longer than the pop music he had come to expect in the last sixty or so years, but at ten to fifteen minutes were still much shorter than what du Bois considered to be proper music. There were moments of quiet melody and clean vocals that du Bois had to admit were quite beautiful. Alexia’s voice was still clear and pure but he struggled to listen to the incredibly heavy bits and all the screaming. Though he had to admit, in terms of endurance alone, the screaming was an extraordinary vocal performance, but if you were just going to scream like that he couldn’t see the point in writing any lyrics.

By the time he finished the whisky, he had overcome the guilt at taking the night off. Perhaps it was the darkness of the music making him pessimistic but it almost certainly didn’t matter now. He had a selection of possible numbers, all pay-as-you-go phones with no credit cards registered to them. He had phoned them en route from Bradford and managed to rule out four of the seven. The other three he had set his phone to ring on a regular basis, but they were all currently turned off. If there was an answer, it would connect through to him immediately and trace programs would triangulate the signal. There wasn’t much else he could do.

He waited until the venue was empty before he lit up a cigarette while he waited for Alexia. He assumed there were still staff from the pier somewhere, but the band had gone on and most of the venue had been swept up. The bouncers had left long ago.

‘Well?’ Alexia asked. After all these years he still struggled to find something honest to say that wouldn’t hurt her feelings. ‘You hated it, didn’t you?’ She was laughing.

‘I liked bits of it. You know, the bits with melody and form.’ She laughed at him again. ‘You knew I wasn’t going to like it. All the roaring and screaming.’

‘You are so old,’ she said, laughing at him some more. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Thank you for making this possible, and thank you for subjecting yourself to it.’ Du Bois looked pained. ‘No, really it means a lot.’ She straightened up. ‘Just let me clean up a bit . . .’

‘Are you still not ready? Everyone else has gone.’

‘Hush now. I’ll change and then we’ll find a deliciously sleazy club somewhere. Perhaps we can find some muscle-bound young stud who can help pull the stick out of your arse and maybe, then, we might be able to get you laid.’ Du Bois looked less than happy at this.

‘Is sex your answer to everything?’ he asked disapprovingly.

‘It seems a healthy response to the impending end of the world.’ Alexia was suddenly very serious. She turned and wandered back towards the changing room.

Du Bois stood up and headed for the stage. One of the keyboards hadn’t been put away. He sat down in front of it and pressed a few keys. Nothing happened. He had to download the instructions straight into his mind before he was able to plug it in, turn it on, get it to make noise and find a setting that made the instrument sound vaguely like a piano.

Long steely fingers started with the opening strains of Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’. It didn’t feel the same as a real piano: there was something lacking in the personality of the instrument, no sense of exploration like you had every time you sat down at a new piano. However, he had to admit, as his fingers danced across the keys, that it sounded good. Quickly he was lost, playing the piece from memory. He remembered the first time he’d heard it – in a bar in Paris, played on a badly tuned upright as Europe headed inexorably towards its most ruinous war to date.

‘You’re much better than you give yourself credit for,’ Alexia said as he finished. He had known she was there and glanced over at her. She wore her long straight hair loose and had on a pair of tight jeans, ridiculously oversized boots and a sleeveless T-shirt with some horrible design on it that du Bois found difficult to approve of.

‘I’m not sure how much is me and how much is the blood,’ he said. Alexia came over and laid a hand on his shoulder. Du Bois could still remember the first time he had heard her – him, then – sing, the first time he/she had played the harp, in what seemed like a fleeting moment when their parents had been alive.

It got darker for a moment. A shadow had passed in front of one of the lights on the pier outside. It was a warning. Du Bois stood up, hand going into his jacket.

‘Malcolm?’ Alexia sounded worried. Outside the shadows seethed, coming to life like a swarm of black flies. Then the swarm was pouring in under the main doors to the venue.

‘Go!’ du Bois said.

‘But—’

‘Now!’ The .45 was in his hand as the swarm started to form into something resembling a solid shape. Du Bois ejected the magazine and replaced it with a magazine of nano-tipped bullets.

‘I’m not going to lea—’

Du Bois turned to her. ‘Alexia, please. I can’t fight and worry about you as well,’ he pleaded. The form was beginning to look like the bag lady they had seen at the hill fort.

‘It’s her, isn’t it?’

‘Go! Please.’

Reluctantly, Alexia left the stage. Du Bois moved towards the bag lady, the .45 held securely in a two-handed combat grip. She was a nano-form now, though he doubted she understood it in those terms. She probably thought she was some ancient thing of the earth.

‘So you’re not going to leave it alone then?’ she asked, her voice a gravelly rasp.

‘I can’t. Not until I hear a better plan.’

‘Stop trying to find the girl. Her mother is the sea. They tried to wake her once before and left only old night and chaos in their wake.’

Du Bois had no idea what she was talking about.

‘Are you here to kill . . .’ He began and then fired the pistol three times in quick succession, hoping to catch her off guard. His internal targeting systems showed him where each bullet was going to hit. Centre-mass, nearly perfect shots. She darted forward, turning into an animated cloud of black. Solid again, she lashed out with her stick even as it was elongating and starting to resemble something more like a spear. The .45 flew from numb fingers as the spear butt caught his hand. She brought the butt around again in a long but frighteningly fast sweep. Du Bois felt bones break in his leg as he was swept off his feet. It was more like the ground rushing up to hit him than him falling to the ground.

‘A gun!’ She was angry now. Fingers tearing through his flesh, even as it hardened. Fingers grasping ribs, rupturing internal organs. Happening too quickly. He felt himself picked up by his ribcage and flung through the air. The moment she let go, flesh started growing back, bones began to re-knit. He crashed through a window, thudding onto the wooden boards of the pier outside the venue.

She was a cloud again. Fortunately du Bois had the presence of mind to roll away as she solidified over him. She brought the spear down, breaking the railway-sleeper-thick beams of the pier’s walkway.

Du Bois rolled to his feet, the bones in his leg re-knitting just enough to support his weight again. He grabbed the punch dagger from his belt buckle and transmitted a desperate instruction to the assembler contained in its hilt.

The bag lady stalked after him and thrust out with the spear. Du Bois rammed the punch blade into some iron railings and jumped, grabbed one of the lamp posts on the edge of the pier and swung out over the water. The lamp post was bending dangerously, close to breaking. The spearhead just missed as she stabbed at where his back had been. He swung back round to the pier and let go, catching the bag lady with a kick to the head that sent her staggering back. She recovered quickly and delivered a stepping kick that drove him to the floor, then stabbed the spear down towards him. Du Bois rolled out of the way, using the momentum to bring him up into a crouch. The beams beneath where he had been exploded as the spear went through them.