The Happier Dead (2 page)

“Come on, John.”

“A very polite request to respect that period detail. Once you’re inside the crime scene I don’t care what you do, but I’ve given standing instructions that everyone on the team is to dress in the clothing provided.”

“You must be joking.”

“If I was joking, I would say a rabbi, a priest and an imam walk into a bar. I intend for this to be a proper investigation, but in order to do that I need to make sure we’ve been as accommodating as possible along the way.”

“Right.”

“What?”

“I said alright.”

“There are some very distinguished noses under that dome, and I want them left in joint. It’s going to be a delicate balance. I’ve chosen someone with a light touch. Bhupinder and most of the team should already be there when you arrive.”

Oates said nothing. It was odd to hear his boss echoing Grape’s words so exactly. She must have hacked into a conversation or an email between the Superintendent and whatever higher powers he consulted when he allotted the case. He could feel the responsibility curling up in his stomach, getting comfortable for a long stay.

“Give my regards to your lady wife.”

“She’s asleep.”

“Sensible woman,” John said, and rang off.

Oates took his trenchcoat from the hook in the hall. He left his note, groped his way down the stairs, opened the front door of his house, and stepped out into the London night. The streetlight refracted in the drizzle. The downstairs neighbours had left the weights off the lids of the bins again. He didn’t want Lori to wake up to a garden full of rubbish as well as an empty bed, and the foxes had lately taken to knocking over the cans. He picked up the bricks and set them as quietly as he could on the metal covers.

He could smell smoke on the crisp night air. Something burning down by the river. Along with the dead leaves on the windscreen of his car there was a leaflet stuck under the wiper advertising cleaning services. The first line was misspelt. Oates could sense the wake of hope stretching out behind the flyer, maybe all the way to China or Somalia, smoothing into the void. The street was silent, his neighbours’ windows dark, chintz hanging down to hide the goods in ground floor rooms, and keep the modesty of first floor bedrooms. In the wee hours of the suburbs, he felt like the last man on earth.

Tacked to the inside of his front door, the note he had left for Lori read:
Case in Essex. Should know more by morning. John says it’s a quick one. Love to the boys. PS Keep safe.

A
S HE DROVE
down Putney hill and on into central London he thought for the hundredth time about applying for a move. He felt guilty at the idea, he would be leaving the others with even more work, but he wasn’t sure how many more notes Lori was willing to read. They were understaffed on the murder squad. All the jobs that involved death were short on recruits. A friend of Oates whose father had died had had such difficulty finding an undertaker that in the end he hired a taxidermist to help him with the corpse and built the coffin himself. He remembered it even in Syria, between his first and his second tour, the strange adjustment to the way the men regarded risking their lives.

It was just as he set out for his second six months that Nottingham Biosciences had confirmed the rumours surrounding the successful development of the Treatment. After that, being a soldier just felt incredibly shitty. There had always been the risk of dying, but at least you knew that everyone, even the fattest banker sitting in the softest seat in the City, was going to keel over sooner or later. “Do you want to live forever?” the Captain would ask them before they left the gates of the compound on patrol, invoking the war movies they had watched as boys. It made them laugh, it made them feel better, not because they were happy to die, but because they knew that everyone did in the end. It helped to put things in perspective.

Knowing that you were risking your life to try to keep a stable Middle East, so that a rich stranger wouldn’t lose his pension in oil shares, and that a hundred years after your funeral parade he might still be drinking champagne and chatting up your daughter’s granddaughter – that changed everything.

It hadn’t happened overnight, but he could remember someone from his regiment being awarded a posthumous George Cross for conspicuous gallantry, and when the news came through one of the lads had called him a fucking idiot for getting blown up in the first place. Not in a friendly or consolatory way, but dismissively. The Sergeant had knocked his teeth down his throat for it, but before the Treatment no one would even have dreamed of thinking like that, let alone said it out loud. They might have thought it a waste of a friend’s life, but not in a way that made a mug of him. This was before people really understood how the Treatment worked, certainly before people understood how much it would cost, but every man suddenly had the thought that if he could only make it home alive, he actually might be able to live forever. That made the Captain’s rallying cry a lot trickier.

Nothing changed the rationale for killing, just for risking your own life. If anything they had been quicker with the trigger that last tour, and friendly fire incidents had increased so steadily that by the time Oates had come home his mates were attacking their own shadows.

Back home, back in peacetime, the distaste for death had spread. It wasn’t just yours anymore, it was anyone’s that seemed uncanny. Suddenly no one wanted to be a soldier, or an undertaker, or a fireman, or a paramedic. No one wanted to look after the elderly, or work the murder squad. A death in the family was something subtly shameful, the way Oates imagined a pregnant and unmarried daughter must have been in the 1950s.

T
HE ONLY THING
that hadn’t changed was the journalists. People might not want to be directly involved with death, but they still found it fascinating. Especially the violent, and the kind that the papers liked to call ‘senseless’. He had transferred from the army to the newly formed Domestic Order Unit in his early twenties, straight off the Hercules from his last tour in Syria. He and forty men, five from his squad and the others strangers, had walked down the ramp onto the tarmac at RAF Lyneham, the damp and the gentle grey light so alien after the desert. After they got their papers a couple of the single men went for a drink in a pub in Chippenham, and his Sergeant had told him about this new outfit that was starting up to deal with the trouble in London.

That was how he met Lori. She came up to him after a night of rioting, and said: “Thank you. You guys are doing a great job, trying to keep us safe.” That had been nearly twenty years before, and ever since then he had been hounded by journalists.

Grape was the least objectionable one he had come across, partly because she was unaffiliated, partly because she was good at getting him information in return, and could be trusted to sit on a secret until it hatched. She was a news puppy, running an independent blog that covered crime, home affairs and, when real stories were thin on the ground, the odd tidbit of celebrity gossip. He had visited her site once. It was as lurid as most. She was pushy, but he knew it was a precarious existence; she depended on a steady stream of scoops to keep her hits up, so the advertisers would keep buying space on her page.

The only strange thing about her was her forgetfulness. You couldn’t establish a running joke with her, you had to remind her of the details of previous conversations. She existed in a constant present.

Thinking of Grape and the heads-up she had given him, he spoke into his earpiece: “Text that bloody girl – victim’s name is Mr Prudence Egwu. Don’t publish until we’ve spoken to his next of kin. End text.”

O
ATES DROVE DOWN
through Chelsea and along the Embankment. The good citizens of the day had relinquished their claim on London, and each of the people he saw posed a policeman’s question simply by virtue of being out in the rain and the small hours of the morning. There was a lone jogger puffing her way along the pavement by the swollen grey river, her face set in grim determination to be fit and thin for someone, and a group of young men from the St George estate hanging around the edge of Pimlico. Their cigarettes glowed in the darkness.

There were a lot of police on the streets, walking in twos with their thumbs hitched in their stab-proof vests. A young black man had been run over by a police van in Peckham, and two days of mounting disorder in the suburbs had left the city restless.

On Parliament Square the black bomb barriers glistened in the wet, and the protestors huddled in their tents beneath the statues of Churchill and Roosevelt. The rain soaked their cardboard placards, dissolving the demands. There were ranks of rough sleepers under the bridges. Still and silent in their bedrolls, they reminded Oates of rows of body bags, and of how heavy they were when you had to drag them into long lines under a hot sun.

Past Blackfriars, robotaxis bore the tired lawyers back from the honeycombs of midnight offices to their sleeping wives. Oates had a feeling Grape was out there somewhere in the east; he had never asked her where she lived, and she wouldn’t have told him if he had, but you could hear the lairy pride of Bethnal Green in her voice.

It took him almost an hour to make it out to the eastern edge of the city. The first thing he saw was the light atop the great dome, glimpsed through a screen of trees as he came out of the City through Canary Wharf and crested the hills on the edge of Essex. It was a shining red beacon designed to warn away the planes landing at City airport, but with the rise and fall of the earth, the darkness and the distance, it was impossible to get a sense of scale. He carried on along the A13, but the buildings hemmed in the view as he came through Rainham, flats stacked on top of fast food outlets and boarded shops, and it wasn’t until he passed the London Road that the staunch ranks of the Victorian High Street fell back, giving a view of the Great Spa nestling in the girdle of the M25. When he saw it for the first time, his instinct was to pull over on the hard shoulder of the motorway, to get out of his car and stare at the structure whilst the traffic swept eastwards beside him.

In the five years since construction of the dome of the Great Spa had begun in earnest, Oates had resisted exhortations to visit the building with a certain grumbly pride at his own refusal to be excited. He had secretly been hoping for some job or personal errand that would take him out east so that he could see it without having to go to see it, but no such occasion had presented itself, and as the building moved from construction to completion, and the commentary moved from protest and excitement to simple awe, his stubbornness had compelled him to perpetuate his initial whim. He had seen photographs, he had even succumbed one evening alone in the living room to watching footage of a flypast by a BBC helicopter, but no photograph or recording of the thing could prepare you for the impact. The pace of the cars around him slowed perceptibly along with his own, as if the vast building exerted a gravitational pull at its periphery, and Oates craned forward over the wheel to get a full view.

The building was composed of two distinct parts – the central structure was a dome stretching a kilometre and a half into the black, rain-strewn sky. It was the shape of an upright egg half-buried in the earth, so that the walls rose quite steeply from the ground and tapered into a rounded point. At its uppermost limit, the great red beacon on the top was so close to the rainclouds that the light illuminated them from beneath with a cherry-red glow, giving the sky above the spa the look of a vast special effect, a stage show for the passing motorists. Down the sides of the dome there trooped long lines of maintenance ladders studded with blue lights. Around the circumference where the dome met the earth was a chain link fence which must have been thirty feet high, though, beneath the rise of the dome, it looked like a toy; a spot of detailing on a model prison.

The chain link fence was supplemented with guard towers at hundred metre intervals, their eyes turned outwards on the world. Beyond this, green fields stretched away to the M25 on one side and the edges of the east London suburbs on the other. They were illuminated in the glare of stadium lights erected around the building’s edge, so that the residents on the London side spent their nights in a perpetual false dawn.

The second part of the structure consisted of two giant tubes snaking away from the dome, extending half a mile in either direction. Along the sides of these were a series of buildings accessible from the outside of the structure, and Oates guessed that these were maintenance buildings and accommodation for staff. The whole edifice was so grossly out of proportion with the world around it that rather than being part of the landscape, it seemed to alter the dimensions of the sky and the earth to accommodate its own needs. Oates had the queasy impression that the whole scene existed not on the land, but deep beneath the ocean, and the Great Spa was not an artificial thing, but organic, a vast anemone spotted with bioluminescence, drawing in men and women like curious amoebae across the fields and motorways.

The purpose of the giant construction was not so much mysterious as vague. They didn’t administer the Treatment in there, that much everyone agreed. The Treatment was handled in a single Nottingham Biosciences clinic in Harley Street. They had been performing it for years before the Great Spa was even talked about. But you had to have had the Treatment to stay there. Nottingham had originally called it a health spa, a place its clients could de-stress, and it was that description which had given birth to the nickname that was now so universal that most people would have been hard pushed to remember the official one – Avalon.

Oates thought being eternally young and rich would have been enough on their own to massage the stress out of most men, but apparently not, as the Great Spa had been hoovering up footballers, potentates and billionaires since the day it opened its doors if the press were to be believed. He knew as much from Lori’s gossip magazines. He never read them, but she left them on the bedside table and beside the bath, and somehow just having the damned things in the house stimulated a kind of gossip osmosis.