Decay Inevitable (26 page)

Sean said, “I need this. It might help me to find who killed my parents. Who killed Naomi. Naomi was a part of it. She was like us. They want us dead.” His face was set and she could see this was something he had been patiently waiting for all his life. He was hooked. He said, “You’re not convinced, are you?”

She shook her head, a little sad smile trying to soften the blow. And then: “I don’t know.”

“Let’s get back,” he said. He said: “I love you.”

R
AIN, AND LOTS
of it.

Marshall left a dent in a corrugated fence, failing to stop as he barrelled out of the alleyway opposite the tower block. He hardly felt his knee smarting. All he could think about was the gun in his hand and the need to get up the stairwell without expiring. The smell of toasted car and petrol hung around his clothes and clogged his nostrils, flooding his throat with a burn that at least kept him awake.

He had never seen anyone move like that before. He looked back. She was nowhere to be seen.

He wiped his face with a soaking handkerchief. Okay. Up ahead, losing itself to the sheet of rain above the streetlamps, stood Bagg Tower, one of the less savoury estate buildings in this part of the city. He picked up his pace, splashing out into the main road, having to climb over the bumpers of the parked cars clogging the street. As he stepped onto the road a shot rang out and he watched his left hand turn to mist at the end of his arm.

It’s not hurting,
he thought, a moment before the pain exploded up his side and swamped his mind. Gritting his teeth, he dashed into the shadows beneath the punched-in forecourt of the estate, grateful that the streetlamps were smashed and the windows on the first two floors dead or boarded up. He chanced another look back from the safety of the dark but still couldn’t see anything. Another shot: the shell scorched his cheek as it screamed by and embedded itself in the wall.

He took the stairs at a canter, trying to listen above the clatter of his heart and the static hiss of rain for her noise as she pursued him. Pain flooded his body and he greyed out, only regaining his senses when he clouted his head against a drain pipe. He could smell the wetness of his flesh where the shell had torn him open.

Here she came. Here she came. He could hear her moving through the rain. It wouldn’t have surprised him to see her dodging the drops, mindful of how the water in her clothes might slow her down. The way she moved... in his delirium, Marshall almost laughed with the grace of it. He managed to lever himself up to look over the edge of the balcony, and as soon as he did so about a square foot of masonry disappeared, inches away from his face. She was shooting on the lam and she’d be here in about thirty seconds to mop up. He knew he was dead. It was just a matter of timing.

“Sean!” he called out, but his voice was relinquishing him, or he was relinquishing his voice. It was strange. He had never before felt so pumped up and yet so tired at the same time. The adrenaline flying through his system had no doubt been put there by the bullet that took his hand off, but the loss of blood was getting to him already. A veil was falling across his vision. There was not long left.

Marshall let himself into the flat with the key Sean had had cut for him. He moved through the corridor, listening to the rain fly off him and spatter the thin carpet. It was dark in there. Reaching out to flick on the light hardly helped, but he knew what all that was about. Hold out, just for a bit. God, the water. It was coming off him like he had a tap switched to flood mode. It was only when he reached the end of the corridor, where the unnaturally white glare from the strip-lighting in the kitchen fizzed its acid tones across the linoleum, that he realised that it was his gored arm that was causing the noise, emptying him of blood in little spurts and spits.

“Sean?” His voice was a croak, nothing more. Behind him, in the thrashing rain, he thought he heard footsteps on the stairwell, but they didn’t seem fast enough to be hers. He doubted he would hear her anyway. “Emma?”

Up ahead, the bedroom door was ajar. He could see shadows moving across the wall. He made his way, perilously slowly, towards the chink of light, wondering at the motes of colour that were spinning around the threshold. A moan. He heard a moan from the bedroom. God, please, had she beaten him to it? Was she here already? Was she killing them already?

Marshall staggered on the carpet and reached out his hand to break his fall. He collapsed against the door, feeling the specks of whizzing colour sting his flesh as though they were travelling right through him. In the bedroom, he saw through eyes that were filling with blood that Emma was naked, straddling Sean who lay on the bed. They couldn’t see him. They couldn’t hear him. Fading, he pulled his gun and summoned as much strength as he could to fire a bullet into the ceiling.

Emma whipped her head round at the retort. Marshall couldn’t be sure if the shock she registered was at the sight of him or the spectacle that filled the doorway behind him. He wished he could have stuck around in order to find out.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
N
INE:
W
ORST
C
HASE
S
CENARIO

D
EATHCHASER
.

Will thought of the word and felt the bitter taste flood the back of his throat again. He had first heard it whispered in a café that morning as he breakfasted on poached eggs and toast. It had clearly been used to describe him; nobody else was eating at the neighbouring tables.

“You say something?” he asked the men hunched over the counter, drinking from chipped mugs of coffee. Heads shook.

Will had returned to his meal, mildly satisfied by the way he had silenced them. There had been a degree of fear in the way they regarded him, he felt. That could only be a good thing.

But,
deathchaser
.

They couldn’t know of his mission, could they? It was something he had decided to embark upon alone. So that meant – what?

Will twisted the rear-view mirror around so that he could see his face. Did he look that bad? Really that bad? The dusky arcs beneath his eyes, the pauperish complexion, the mottled aspect of the skin stretched across his hands – did these things make him appear as though he were on some irrevocable decline? Couldn’t it be seen as a good thing, his losing some weight?

He pushed the mirror away and concentrated on his job. On the passenger seat lay the Graham Greene novel.
The End of the Affair.
God, if only. It was in a parlous state now, that book. The covers had slowly come away and he had had to tape them up to keep the volume from disintegrating entirely. He had tried reading it, during cold nights parked off the roads, in an effort to keep sleep at bay, but as much as he admired the style, he had found it much too depressing. The bombs, the hatred, the jealousy of it all. It was all a little too close to home. Instead, he ran his fingers over the list of dates that Christopher had recited to him, in the hope that the ink from those dates past might imbue him with some comfort. The list was death. The list, though written in ink, might as well have been chiselled on stone, branded on the foreheads of the coming dead, an irrefragable mark of Cain.

The twenty-ninth of March, Hungerford Bridge, London, five past midnight
.

Wasn’t it the ultimate irony, his travelling back to the capital after such a traumatic journey north? He felt like a character in a paranoiac novel, shoved from dire situation to even more dire situation. The night streamed around his car. Somewhere out there, Elisabeth and Sadie were buried or on the run. He hoped it was the former. It seemed that anyone coming in contact with him these days was better off dead.

He had narrowly missed out on the last date. The last English date, that was. He had neither the money nor the steel to attempt to travel to the other places in Christopher’s list. The chances of being picked up for Cat’s murder at air- or seaports were too great. Desperation had driven him to the roads. That and the knowledge that police resources would be stretched to extremes during this wave of terrorism.

Where had it been, that last one? His first attempt to get to one of the locations after the penny dropped as to what Christopher was getting at. Somewhere outside Leeds, a village on the outskirts. Boston something or other. Will had been trapped in traffic, maybe five miles from his goal, when the time Christopher specified elapsed. There had been nothing for it but to go home. On the way, his radio told of a fire in a tea shop on the main road through the village. A reporter at the scene was saying that fire crews were struggling to get the blaze under control and that the hopes of finding any survivors were low. It had been busy in the tea shop. It always was, according to neighbouring shopkeepers the radio reporter had interviewed. The woman that ran the tea shop never had a bad word to say about anybody, apparently.

Will checked his watch. He had a good six hours to make it to London and her river. This was positive action. Unlike the navel-gazing that Sean and Emma were being exhorted to undertake. He couldn’t understand how he had been cheated of new friends by that primping, preening prick Pardoe. For the first time he had felt safe, among similar lost souls who might be able to understand his dislocation, who might be able to offer answers to questions he did not yet know how to frame. But they were lost to him, hours after saving his neck.

“Jesus, Christopher,” he said. “Jesus. You were superb. But I’m glad I didn’t have to live in your head.”

21st January, Osaka, 2.03 p.m
. There had been an earthquake in the afternoon, measuring 8.2 on the Richter scale, just as people were emptying canteens and parks in the city, filing back into their offices after lunch. The death toll, 24 twenty-four hours later, had been put at a conservative 12,500.

22nd January, Basel, 5.22 a.m
. A coach from England, carrying around fifty tourists on a skiing vacation, plunged off the road into a ravine, killing everybody on board.

22nd January, Darwin, 6.47 p.m
. A birthday party turned into a grisly search for bodies after half a dozen backpackers staying at the Froghollow hostel went for a swim and were set upon by great white sharks. Will had seen a picture of one of the two survivors. He had a chunk out of his torso that resembled a bite mark in a biscuit.

And on, and on. A catalogue of carnage. How had Christopher been able to foresee all of this? How did he live with the knowledge? More, why didn’t he act upon it and prevent the accidents from taking place? The more he dwelled on the questions, the worse he felt. But if it weren’t for Christopher and his crystal ball, there would be no way of finding out what had happened to Catriona, of that he was certain.

Five miles shy of the capital, Will ditched the car and thumbed a ride into the city from a woman in a Morris Minor on her way to Elephant and Castle. In the half-hour it took for Rebecca to take him to the Strand, he learned that she was coming to stay the weekend with friends as part of a college reunion. She was getting married in the summer, to a man she had met on her course ten years previously.

He wished her well as he released the seatbelt and lurched out of the car. She was smiling, and in the colour of her cheeks, the rude clarity of her eyes, he recognised, for a second, something in her that until recently had fed him. He felt saddened by their conversation, as if it had tried to impinge on a part of him that had once been aware of hope and love. The clunk of the door as he slammed it shut might have been the shutters locking in the part of him that had understood warmth and security. All he wanted now was answers. There wasn’t much time for sentiment. Not much space for it either.

In a pub on the main drag, he drank lager without tasting it and swung his gaze to the clock behind the bar with metronomic regularity. It was a busy night. The pub was convenient for Charing Cross station and welcomed a mix of politicians, City workers and theatre-goers. Cliques buzzed and vibrated in batches of movement and regimented colour, magnets that repelled other groupings. There was tension in the air and Will wondered if it was being engineered by something beyond this social bagatelle. Maybe it had its source in what Christopher had foretold. Did these people, as they sipped their Pimm’s and gins and Guinnesses, have some animal signifier that was coming alive within them? Did they sweat in its shadow? Did they prickle?

Will felt it, coursing through his bones like cold. A couple of women in tight, shiny dresses knocked into him as they made their way to the toilets. He barely felt it, although they had caused him to drop his glass. He didn’t hear it shatter, or their apologies or offers to buy him another drink. He pushed his way through a corridor in the scrum and felt the bitter night air crystallise on the sweat that coated his chest as he reeled outside. Rain flashed in broken obliques where the streetlamps picked it out, liquid Morse code carrying messages too swift to be read. He splashed down towards the riverbank, clutching the Greene novel in his hand as though it were a cudgel. A train was nosing out of Charing Cross station, one of the last rides home, and he watched its broken passage through the lattice of girders on Hungerford Bridge. Couples were bent against the driving rain as it laced them on the pedestrian walkway across the Thames. Big Ben tolled midnight. Will scampered up the steps to the bridge and waited, his tongue thick and dry in his mouth, for something awful to happen. He counted seconds and had reached 300 when he heard the beginning of it.

What had he suspected, during the lonely drive south? A drowning, a collision of trains. A car crash. A collapse of scaffolding. Someone. A few somebodies. A blip on the statistical charts compiled by end-of-year accident and emergency investigators...

The thrum sounded like persistent thunder. It vibrated in his chest and made the rails and the girders pick up the song. Studded in the rain-scratched darkness, following the trajectory marked by the old river on a path to Heathrow, were the headlights of what sounded like a jumbo jet. But there was something not quite right about the sound it was making. It sounded like a big plane trying to do an impression of an even bigger plane and failing badly. It sounded, machine though it was, like a shriek of distress.