The Unblemished (37 page)

Sarah said, 'Ripping off heads.'

'It was taken from me, this knowledge,' Bo said. 'I never offered
it.'

'And all because you asked to see a map?' Tina asked.

'My life was in the litter tray,' Bo explained. 'I thought it might
spice things up for me, my work.'

'You were right.'

'If it hadn't been me,' he countered, 'it would have been someone
else.'

Tina said, 'So you're saying we should be grateful to you?'

'Not at all,' Bo said. 'But you might cut me a little slack. I didn't
ask for
this.
I'm trying to help. I'm trying to make things better.'

Claire stood up. Lamb went to her as if there had been some secret
signal between the two of them. Sarah didn't know whether she felt
jealous or reassured. 'Did you find anything we might use?' Lamb
asked. 'Before ... before Nick ...'

'Folders. Files. Plastic wallets,' Sarah said. 'That's about as
dangerous as it gets. We should have spent the night in an abattoir.
But we have some stuff from the hospital.'

'It will have to do for now,' Tina said. 'So. I'm getting jittery hanging
around here. Nick's body is getting cold upstairs. There's something in
here with us. I say it's time to leave, before it gets peckish.'

They were gathering themselves, congregating in the entrance
hall, when Sarah hung back and was violently sick. Bo noticed, but
did not offer any assistance. Their eyes met. He smiled briefly,
grimly, and nodded. She nodded back. Shock and fear had stolen
any colour that had remained in her face. She was soapstone.
Hurrying after them as they filed out into the grey dawn, scrubbing
at her raw lips with the back of her hand, she tried to clear her
mind for whatever might ensue, knowing things were far from an
end, knowing it was all likely to get far worse but incapable of
framing anything in her thoughts that didn't involve Nick ... and
the thunder of his body as it was systematically dismantled.

She moved through the group until she was at Bo's shoulder. She
didn't look back at the public baths, too afraid that she might see the
architect of their misery in a window. She didn't know what was
worse, the possibility that an attacker was stalking them, picking
them off one by one; or that it was walking alongside them.
Keep
your friends close, your enemies closer.
Bo was close enough to touch,
if she so wanted.

'Why Bo?' she asked.

'Sorry?'

'Bo. What's it short for? Is it like Beau? You know, like Beau
Bridges?'

'Nothing so pretty as that,' he said. 'My name isn't really Bo. It's
Joe. But I couldn't say that when I was a baby. It always came out
Bo.
And it stuck.'

They emerged on Long Acre. Clothes shops, in the main,
punctuated by the occasional pub or sandwich joint. A car was
overturned, its innards burned out, molten tyres hanging off the rims.
Six feet away, the carbonised remains of its driver were dead on the
ground, in a pose that suggested he had been trying to drag himself
clear of the wreckage.

'My God,' Sarah said, and tried to shield her daughter from the
shocking tableau.

'Forget it,' Tina said. 'Keep going.'

Bo said, 'The plague hit this part of London hard. It was rife here
in 1665.' He was standing in the middle of the road, looking around
him as if he were a tourist in an unfamiliar city. 'There were pockets
where it spread like wildfire. The black parts of a colour-coded map.
We might have made a mistake coming this way.'

'What do you mean? It was your idea to go in this direction.'

'He lured us,' Lamb said.

'They will have congregated in the places where food was most
abundant,' Bo continued, ignoring her. 'They will have filled their
bellies here in the past. You don't wander too far away from the
water-hole.'

'Can we go?' Sarah asked. 'We should at least keep moving.'

'There was a plague pit not too far away from here,' Bo said, with
the kind of relish a
bon viveur
might afford a bistro within sniffing
distance. He was looking around as if its location might become
known to him; Sarah thought he might suggest they go and admire it.
She heard his belly rumbling.

'Fuck this,' she said. 'I'm off.' She gathered Claire under her arm
and marched hard against the scream of the warning sirens in her
mind. The others hurried to catch her up.

'Which way, Claire?' Sarah asked. 'What do you think?'

Claire seemed to be coming out of the stupefaction of her
situation. She was rallying in a way that Sarah could barely
comprehend. If Sarah had been in a similar situation, she believed she
would have opened a vein by now. But that was the beauty of human
nature; there was always someone else stronger than you. Sarah was
glad of that. Lamb too seemed to be recovering from her own
problems; the pinch and the pallor of her face were receding and she
was displaying a nice line in sarcasm and bite. Let Bo fawn over the
city's bleak history, let his juices flow.

They negotiated the warren of side streets running south off Long
Acre, the high-class fashion boutiques and accessory shops, the
overpriced burger-and-noodle restaurants, the tiny pubs, and
members-only clubs. Sarah learned quickly to stop flinching
whenever they walked past a display in a window containing a
mannequin. She forced her attention on what was directly ahead and
what might be coming at them from behind. In this way, they made
progress, emerging from the tight knit of alleyways on Southampton
Street that fed them into the Strand. Like the other arterial roads they
had crossed, this too was devoid of human life. There were plenty of
cars and buses, abandoned, parked in the skew-whiff attitude that
suggested hasty abandonment, but no hint of what had happened to
their occupants.

'We have to cross the river,' Claire said, her voice slurring badly.

'Why don't we take one of these cars?' Tina asked. 'I mean,
wouldn't it be safer?'

'Maybe,' Sarah said, 'but it would be slower too. You could drive
to the next barricade of vehicles and swap to a new one, I suppose.
Keep doing that until we got to where we needed to be. Or died of
old age first.'

'I'm just trying to help. There's no need to be snippy.'

'There's every need to be snippy. Nick is dead. Maybe if we were
a little more on top of what we're doing and what needs to be done,
he would still be with us.'

'You were with him when he died,' Tina ripped back at her. 'What
did
you
do to help?'

Sarah opened and closed her mouth. She felt like a bee whose sting
had been deployed; close to unravelling, close to losing her belly all
over these cold paving stones.

'Let's deal with what's happening now,' Bo said, catching up. 'We
can argue about right and wrong later, when we're safe.'

They moved along the Strand until it diverged, turning into the
loop of Aldwych to the north and Lancaster Place to the south, which
would deliver them on to Waterloo Bridge. As they hurried on to the
bridge proper they heard a high-pitched whining sound, underpinned
by a seething, insectile rasp. Bo ushered the others onwards, appalled
by how exposed the bridge had left them. He had once kissed Keiko
on this bridge, late evening in June, a buttery sun turning what
seemed like every window in the world into a square of gold. He had
imagined that kiss reflected in all of those pieces of glass and believed
that they would remain there, strange ghosts trapped for ever,
imprinted on London and subliminally appreciated by any office
worker who spent a few idle minutes looking out at the scenery.

A swarm rose from the Strand Underpass. He took in the scene for
as long as it took to understand that he was looking at hundreds, not
dozens, and they were all carrying either weapons or limbs or heads.
They spotted Bo and their song found a new intensity. They arrowed
towards him.

'Run!' Bo screamed, as much to himself as to the others. Already
the horde had cut the distance between them by at least a third; Sarah
was the only one of their group who was athletic enough to be able
to cover the bridge's span without being caught, but she was hanging
back, encouraging Claire and Tina, who had no chance, she was
carrying too much weight. Lamb was crying and screaming. Their last
chance at remaining on the north bank of the river had gone; their
pursuers had drawn level with the walkway down to the terrace at
Somerset House. Very quickly Bo realised what they were going to
have to do.

There was no discussion to be had; he simply had to show them
what was required. He sprinted until he overtook Lamb, who, despite
her hysteria, was still a few metres ahead of the others. Light-headed
with the sudden bolt of activity, and the insanity of what he was
about to do, he stopped and turned to regard his companions.
Wordlessly he climbed the three white bars on the guardrail alongside
the pavement. He ignored Sarah's pleas. He looked back at them and
beckoned with his finger. Then he leaped.

It is difficult to survive the river. Despite a sometimes placid surface,
the currents within can run at well over three knots, a speed almost
impossible to swim against. The water is a mix of fresh and salt,
which reduces buoyancy. Bo Mulvey dropped nine metres before he
hit the Thames, which was just two degrees above freezing, and was
dragged under by the weight of his clothes and the current. Within a
few seconds he had travelled the length of Victoria Embankment and
resurfaced by Blackfriars Millennium Pier.

He knew that if he did not get out of the water soon, within
another thirty seconds he would be dead.

He thrashed around wildly, trying to see if the others had followed
him into the water, and saw a figure falling from the bridge at the
same time that the great mass of the chasing pack reached the point
where he himself had jumped in. And then the water grasped him
again and he was pulled down into its green-grey heart. His lungs
were burning by the time he was belched back out, a little closer to
shore, and coming up fast on a small boat anchored between
Blackfriars Bridge and the Millennium Bridge. He managed to throw
out his good hand and snag a float, the rope biting into his freezing
skin, which already looked like the hand of a dead man: blue, clawlike,
yielding to the processes of rigor mortis.

He clung on with every shred of strength that he had and wrapped
a leg around the tip of the float. He was then able to use his other
hand, or the stubby fingers sprouting from it, to try to gain purchase
on the side of the boat. He slipped a few times, gashing his head on
the wood and almost spilling back into the water, but eventually he
slithered on to a deck swilling with blood and skin and bones. A man
with a bloody grin painted around his mouth, making him resemble
some hellish clown, came at him with a gaff. Bo heaved himself to his
left, his damaged hand slipping in the grim detritus and causing him
to go down hard on the side of his head. It was awkward and ugly,
but it saved his life; the curved hook of the gaff sank into the meat of
his thigh, rather than his chest. Almost in defiance of the cold, his leg
filled with fire as his assailant used the gaff to drag him closer. A
priest appeared in his other hand in readiness for the
coup de grâce.
Teeth jumped and rattled across the deck like dice as the wash from
another boat slapped against the hull. The tension in Bo's leg receded
a little as his attacker compensated for the swing in balance. Bo
kicked his leg into the other man's knee, crying out as pain bolted
along the length of his femur and replaced his pelvis with a cradle of
molten bone. The gaff came out of his leg with a nauseating suck. He
dragged himself further up the boat, still shooting glances at
Waterloo Bridge but unable to see anybody at the railings any more.

What Bo thought at first was the man's penis lolled over the
waistband of his baggy purple tracksuit bottoms, but this organ bore
a sharp black barb and receded, like a lipstick, into a sheath where a
navel might have been expected. As he leaned in again to swing the
gaff, the stinger protruded once more. Bo kicked out at it, trying to
avoid the gaff's delivery. He rolled over and tried to stand but the
deck was too slippery, his leg too painful. His hand buckled beneath
him as the deck forced his weight on to an impossible fulcrum; he
went down and saw the shadow bloat around him. He closed his eyes,
hoping that the hook, when it met the back of his head, would kill
him swiftly. But the blow never fell. The chop of water suddenly
shifted direction, sending him jerking away from the spot where the
gaff now landed, embedding itself in the deck.

Bo turned over quickly, raising a hand in defence, but the attacker
was busy trying to pull the weapon free.

The map burned in his brain, trying to turn him from what he was
about to do, but he had already seen the hanging oil lamp in the
wheelhouse. He grabbed it and smashed it down on the other man's
head. Fire streaked along his entire length but the man didn't seem to
notice, so preoccupied with the gaff was he, to the point where Bo
thought he might have to abandon the boat and take his chance with
the Thames again. But then his attacker seemed to realise what was
happening and let go of the wooden handle, tottered to the side of the
boat and folded over it, silently, into the river.

Bo skidded back, clamping a hand over the pumping wound in his
thigh, and managed to get to his feet. Inside the boat he found a teatowel
miraculously free of the blood that was otherwise splashed all
around the cabin. An arm was hooked almost casually over a work
surface in the galley. Bloodied clothes were piled in a corner of the
deck like souvenirs. He tore the towel into lengths and bound them
around his injury.

The engine of the boat started without any trouble. He directed it
back towards the bridge where he had abandoned his colleagues, in
the vain hope that he might find them bobbing merrily in the water,
waiting to be picked up. He couldn't see any of them. Either way,
they were all dead. Just being able to see the ribboning water from a
safe position, the current knifing through it, was enough to make him
feel faint about how close he had come. He had beaten high odds to
get out of that. The only thing he could think of – the crumb of
comfort – was that drowning was an infinitely more acceptable death
than what that chasing pack had intended.