Redlaw - 01 (38 page)

He squinted, craning his neck.

“And there, I believe, it is. On schedule. The first glimmer of light over the hills. Rosy-fingered dawn bringing a blush to the firmament, banishing night. When the sun comes up, it’ll come up fast. Let’s clear the dome so we can get a better look at it.”

He rotated the dial clockwise. A soft hum could be heard, and the panes of glass overhead lightened to reveal a smoky-grey sky.

“Giles, Gail, ringside seats for you.” Lambourne motioned them to the parapet. He had become sinisterly gleeful, a master of ceremonies overseeing some ghastly ritual.

Redlaw realised Nathaniel Lambourne wasn’t the sociopath he’d pegged him as. It was worse than that. He was, underneath all that moneyed sophistication, quite evil. And quite mad.

“Stop this,” he begged. “Stop it. She’s done nothing to you. It was me, not her. I’m the one you should punish. Turn that dial back. Do something to me, anything, whatever you like, but not her.”

“Hush up, John,” said Macarthur. “You’re disgracing yourself. Pleading for mercy for a
vampire
?” She uttered the word with unusual contempt. “The man you used to be, the perfect SHADE officer, he’d spit on you if he saw you like this.”

Slocock had his hands clasped together. He was gazing eagerly down into the pit. “Funny. It’s only light. We can’t even feel it—and it’s going to incinerate her like a giant blowtorch.”

“No!” Redlaw struggled and writhed, futilely. “You devils! You unspeakable monsters!”

Lambourne’s smile sharpened into a grin, and he rotated the dial several notches further. The dome became almost entirely transparent. The sky was shot with silver streaks of brightness, some of them turning gold.

“Here it comes,” he breathed. “Here comes the sun.”

“John?” Illyria, from the pit, plaintively. “John, look at me. Please. Just look at me.”

Redlaw leaned his head over the parapet as far as he could. Illyria’s eyes were wide and sparkling.

He held her gaze.

Sunlight, lambently amber, spread into the observatory. It touched the rim of the parapet. It began to slide down the inside wall, erasing shadow as it went, like an eclipse in reverse. It was as though the darkness was a liquid, pouring from the pit, draining out.

Illyria lay still, resigned to her fate.

“Kill them,” she said to Redlaw, barely a whisper.

Redlaw, no less helpless, nodded. Whether he could actually bring himself to do such a thing or not, he didn’t know, but at that moment he meant it. He would kill them all.

The sunlight—so swift—reached the foot of the wall. It glided in a shimmering wave across the floor of the pit, picking out the black-red topography of Vlad’s filth. Soon enough it touched Illyria’s foot. Instinct overcame self-control and she shrank away. The light continued to advance. Illyria, shuffling backwards, ended up in a crouch, at the extremity of the chains’ tether, nowhere left to go. Onward the light crept, remorseless. Lambourne, Slocock and Macarthur looked on, their faces solemn but their eyes greedy for the horror to commence.

Illyria found Redlaw’s gaze again.

There was nothing left to say.

The light crawled over her feet, her legs. She started to buck and squirm.

Then to scream.

Then the charring began, the wisps of smoke rising, the crackle of burning, and Redlaw turned away, dropped his head to his chest, squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to listen, tried not to think, tried not to be present.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

A minute passed, and it was over. Lambourne clasped his hands together in satisfaction, while on Macarthur’s face there was an expression of grim rectitude. What needed to be done had been done.

As for Slocock, he felt queasy but pleased with himself. He had kept watching throughout, though several times he’d been sorely tempted to avert his gaze. He’d been brave, and so had chalked up another milestone in his life. He could now claim he had witnessed a person burn to death.

It wasn’t quite the same as an actual immolation, of course, like seeing a witch put to the pyre in the dark ages or an Indian widow committing
suttee
. She’d been a vampire, and it had been unnaturally quick. Still, a horrific sight. The body blackly consuming itself. The clothes smouldering, flaring into flame, from the tremendous heat being released beneath them. The flailing and shuddering that gradually lessened until, by the time the sunlight had reached Illyria’s waist, it had ceased altogether. The reduction of a solid physical form to a silhouette of ashes, in less than sixty seconds. Near-instantaneous cremation. Utter annihilation.

Slocock patted the snuffbox in his jacket pocket. God, he could do with a line or two right now. Three, even. He thought he might make himself scarce, nip outdoors for a moment. Lambourne disapproved of coke—of all intoxicants stronger than alcohol—so he would have to come up with a decent cover story. Maybe “I fancy a spot of fresh air” would do it. After all, the observatory did reek of shit, and now barbecued meat, cloyingly, chokingly. It wasn’t easy, or pleasant, to breathe in here.

“Nathaniel, I—” was all Slocock managed to get out before Lambourne grasped him by the shoulder and said, “Giles. Another little job for you.”

Slocock was about to ask what, but Lambourne pre-empted the question by planting Redlaw’s Cindermaker in his hand.

“Here,” he said. “You know what to do.”

Slocock gaped in disbelief. “You can’t mean... I can’t...”

“Of course you can,” Lambourne said cheerily, as though he were encouraging Slocock to help himself to seconds of dessert or cross a room to talk to a beautiful woman. “It’s not difficult. Barrel to temple, pull trigger. What could be more straightforward? You were at Sandhurst.”

“Not for long.”

“Long enough to have learned about guns. And if you’d stayed the course, what else would they have taught you but how to kill a man? That’s essentially what you went there for, to become a soldier, a trained killer. Think of this as making up for a part of your education you missed out on. Like going to crammer college.”

“B-but...” Slocock stammered; actually
stammered
. “You want me to just... shoot him?”

Redlaw sat with his head hanging. He looked lost within himself, elsewhere. If he was registering any of the conversation, he gave no sign of it.

“Why not?” said Lambourne. “You beat people up for fun. I’ve heard you put an opponent in a coma once.”

It was true. And the Nigerian from the other night had been left in a very bad way, needing urgent medical attention.

“How’s this much worse than that?” Lambourne went on. “At least there’s no chance of getting hurt yourself.”

“But a man’s life... I’m an MP.” Odd how Slocock should fall back on that, his public office, his status, when it normally meant so little to him. “There’s no possible way I can commit
murder
. You must have a goon who does this sort of stuff for you, Nathaniel, some professional bagman who makes all your problems go away. Call him in.”

“I prefer to keep this one simple. The fewer people involved, the better. As for your career, your future prospects, let’s just say you can quit Parliament tomorrow, come to work for Dep Chem the day after—
if
you do what I’m asking.”

Lambourne gave the gun a shake, reaffirming Slocock’s grip on it.

“Consider this a final test,” he said. “Pass, and think of what awaits you. A seven-figure salary, and you’ll barely have to do a lick of work. The odd board meeting, the occasional ‘fact-finding’ junket to somewhere nice and hot with sandy beaches and women in bikinis, flying first class everywhere, the best hotels... It’s the life everyone dreams of, Giles, and it can be yours in, what, a minute from now?”

“I want no part of this,” said Commodore Macarthur. “I’m not stopping you, but I’ve no wish to be here when it happens.”

“Yes, of course, Gail,” said Lambourne. “Go. Head down to the house. I’ll be right behind.”

She went, not before giving Redlaw one last lingering and distinctly sorrowful look.

“Well now, Giles,” said Lambourne. “Over to you. What’s it to be?”

“What about cleaning up afterwards?” Slocock asked, aware that he had more than halfway made up his mind.

“Not a problem. Toss the body into the pit. The guns will do the rest. There’ll be hardly anything left of him by the time they’re finished. Then, I think, perhaps tonight, a mysterious fire. The observatory goes up in smoke, taking the evidence with it. I’ll have the debris bulldozered flat and a new observatory built in no time, and nobody’ll be any the wiser.”

Except me
, Slocock thought.
I’ll always know what I did here. And so will you
.

“Look at him.” Lambourne pointed to Redlaw. “Beaten. Comprehensively crushed. A broken man. It’ll be a mercy, Giles. A mercy.”

As soon as Lambourne had left, Slocock whipped out his snuffbox and treated himself to those lines. Three felt good, instilling him with confidence, but a fourth was required before he could no longer hear his conscience prowling around, muttering its little messages of fear and discontent.

Not so much Dutch courage—Colombian courage.

He grabbed the Cindermaker and marched over to Redlaw.
Get it done, get it done
. Like tearing off a sticking plaster, one quick decisive action, minimal stress.

Except, Redlaw had raised his head. He was looking at Slocock with those deep-set, appraising eyes of his.

Slocock lifted the gun and jammed the tip of the barrel against Redlaw’s forehead. The man didn’t flinch, just kept on looking. Staring.

Slocock thumb-cocked the hammer.

Redlaw continued to stare.

“Stop it,” Slocock said. “Stop looking at me. I’ll do this, I really will. I can. I will.”

“Go on, then,” Redlaw said calmly. “Don’t muck about. Pull the damn trigger.”

“I’m going to. Only, close your eyes.”

“No.”

“I’m not having you watch me as I do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re, you’re judging me. I can tell.”

“Judging? That’s not my responsibility. Only one being can judge you, Giles Slocock. He’s the one who’ll weigh your soul in His scales when the time comes, and decide whether you’ve lived a virtuous life or not.”

“That’s bollocks. There is no God. There is no heaven or hell or any of that shit. Anyone with any sense knows that.”

“Then what are you afraid of?” said Redlaw. “Shoot. Lambourne’s presented you with a perfect murder. There’ll be no comebacks. You’ll get away scot-free. You’ll be richly rewarded, what’s more. So where’s the problem? Shoot. Go ahead and do it. Shoot, you gutless worm. Blow my damn brains out.”

Slocock tightened his finger on the trigger, feeling it click softly. The tiniest further bit of squeezing, and the Cindermaker would leap in his hand, Redlaw’s head would jerk back, a geyser of brain and skull fragments would exit at the rear, and that would be that.

Slocock’s mind buzzed like a nest of wasps. He could do this. He
could
do this. No repercussions. A seven-figure salary. A life of idleness and sybaritic self-indulgence, in exchange for another man’s life.

But...

He
would know. Forever. It would always be with him, what he did here, if he did it. It would never leave him. He would never forgive himself.

But then could he ever forgive himself if he didn’t kill Redlaw? If he failed Lambourne’s “final test”?

“Come on,” Redlaw urged. “Put me out of my misery.”

The muzzle of the Cindermaker trembled ever so slightly.

“Come on.”

Slocock screwed his face up, half turning his head away.

“Come
on
.”

He shut his eyes.

No.

“No,” he said.

The gun dropped.

“I knew it,” said Redlaw. “I knew you couldn’t. Coward.”

Slocock lifted the gun again, lowered it again. He decocked it, then tossed it aside in disgust. Shame flooded through him. He had believed he was beyond morality, much as Lambourne was, but it seemed there was a line even he could not cross. It galled him to think he might, after all, be ordinary, as much in thrall to the taboos of society as the next man.

“Tell you what,” Redlaw said, “how about I make it easier for you? Untie me and we’ll fight, hand to hand. You’re half my age and trained, but still, you won’t find me a pushover. If you can’t shoot me when I’m a trussed-up victim, maybe you can beat me to death when I’m presenting a threat to you. Then you’ll be able to walk out of here with your head held high, higher than if you’d simply played firing squad with me. How about that?”

Slocock grabbed at the offer, almost absurdly grateful. “Yes. Yes, that might work. In the heat of combat...”

“Exactly. In the heat of combat, anything could happen.”

Slocock knelt beside the chair. Within moments the electrical flex was undone and Redlaw was standing.

“Can I have a minute to get my circulation back?” he said. “Can’t fight if I can’t make a fist.”