by David Carter
There was a little church in Italy in the nearby village of Casanelli, and her mind travelled there. She adored it, that church, where one day the priest would take her confession, and absolve her of all her sins, whatever they might be. Poland had given her life, Britain; money, prestige and a profession, but Italy was the land of her dreams, the land of her future, and the land in her heart. It was where she would end her days.
Forty-Two
Joss woke early to the sound of coughing, three or four crusty throats, sounding like sick old men. Her throat was rough too, and her head was spinning, reactions she imagined to the cheap white cider that had appeared the previous night in great quantity.
Stig and Petal spent some time trying to persuade Joss to join their commune, as they called it. After several drinks Joss had a vague memory she might have agreed, but it wasn’t going to happen. In the cold light of the morning she knew she must not. The only thing she wanted to do was get back to the coast, and see her family, and Frank.
She was sure they would understand why she had run away, once she explained how they had been tricked from their palatial Norfolk accommodation, and everything that had happened after that. They wouldn’t force her to return, even Frank would sympathise, once he knew the truth. She expected they would hide her, pending an appeal, for surely there must be some kind of appeal procedure. The world hadn’t gone completely crazy. She crept over dozing bodies toward the door, and unfastened the bolt. It screeched, rusty metal on metal
Petal turned over and glanced up.
‘Where you going, babes?’
‘Need some fresh air, it stinks in here.’
‘Does it?’ she said, turning over again. ‘Can’t say as I noticed.’
‘See you later,’ said Joss.
‘Don’t be too long,’ mumbled Petal, as she closed her eyes.
Outside, the cold air hit Joss’s face like strong toothpaste on filthy teeth. For a moment she stood still and breathed in heavily. Even in the centre of the city the air was fresh first thing. She started walking briskly away, and as she reached the end of the road, a posse of three police cars passed her, heading for the squat. Joss peered over her shoulder and watched the coppers rushing from the cars, and crashing through the door, batons drawn, shouting and hollering something about Dirty Fucking Layabouts!
Sure, she felt guilty, but also relieved that she possessed the sense to get out of there before it was too late. She walked quickly southwest across the city, or in what she imagined to be that direction. She was looking for an arterial road, heading for the south coast and when she saw signs for Brighton, Portsmouth and Southampton in quick succession, she knew she was on the right track. She would use her charms to hitch another lift, and if the truck driver was real nice, she wouldn’t bite off any of his body parts. With a little luck, she might even be home by mid afternoon.
She recalled spitting out the point of Baz’s nose, and laughed aloud at the thought. She wondered where he was now, noseless Baz, and what he might look like. The thought of him strolling in to Martha’s Sinyard for a late breakfast, minus the end of his conk was the funniest thought she’d had in weeks.
ADAM HAD WOKEN AT ALMOST the same time, in Susie’s dad’s new garden shed. It stank of creosote, something that Adam hadn’t really noticed before, but after spending the night in there, the fumes had inveigled their way deep within his head. He felt nauseous, and his head pounded. He threw the door open and gulped down fresh air. It was cold.
His sense of timing had never been brilliant.
Mister Coombes was ambling up the path after emptying the rubbish in the wheelie bin. The guy was big, with straggly straight greying hair that was flailing about in the wind like mating octopi. He stopped dead, staring at the lanky youth who was stretching in the doorway of his precious new shed.
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I’m Adam,’ the kid muttered, ‘Susie said it would be all right if I kipped in the shed.’
‘Did she, now?’ said Coombes, rooted to the spot.
‘Susie!’ he roared. ‘Get yourself out here!’
The girl came outside. Her hair was wet and straggly and she was dabbing it with a worn blue towel.
‘What’s all the noise about, dad?’ and then she saw Adam, standing in the shed doorway, and her father glaring at the youth as if he might eat him for breakfast. She smiled a flickering smile at Adam, and then glanced back at her father.
‘Did you know about this.... this.... thing?’ said her father, pointing at Adam with his thumb.
‘He had nowhere to stay, dad, I thought you wouldn’t mind.’
‘Did you now? Well I do bloody mind.’
He lunged at Adam, grabbing his shoulders, and spinning him round. He pushed him down the path toward the front gate, and launched a kick with his slippered foot that caught Adam clean on the coccyx.
The youth yelled.
‘Get the hell out of it, and don’t you ever come back!’ bawled Coombes.
‘Dad!’ yelled Susie. ‘Don’t.’
‘You get yourself inside, young lady, before you feel the back of my hand!’
Adam glanced back over his shoulder.
‘Don’t you dare hit her!’
Mister Coombes flexed his biceps and turned back at the kid.
Adam nodded and said, ‘All right, all right, I’m going, but don’t you hit her. She’s done nothing wrong.’
Adam was on his toes again, running to nowhere, and soon afterwards he thought about going back to make sure she was OK, but that Mister Coombes was a big, bad and ugly git, and Adam was no match for the likes of him. His was running, penniless, and hungry, and devoid of any kind of ID. One more pull from the cops and he was dead meat, and the thought of that brought shivers to his spine, and concentration to his mind.
There was only one thing left to do, he must leave the area, get as far away as possible, and he would do that. But before then, he would try and find Eve. She had fed him before, and he felt sure she would do so again. She might even sub him a little cash.
COLIN CORNELIUS HAD followed the well-worn road to the Bletchington Clinic. It was made clear to him that unless he cooperated fully he would be sent to the Falkland Islands. Colin viewed that with mixed feelings. In some ways in his present predicament, he would be happy to be as far away from Britain as possible. It couldn’t be worse than here. Once there, he would attempt escape, or so he fancifully imagined, and memories of that old island prison movie Papillion flooded into his head. He remembered Hoffman and McQueen, scheming their escape across the sea. History seemed stuck in reverse, and where the hell was that taking us?
He could have no idea that Jemmie was now in custody too. She was undergoing LIDA tests, and unlike his friend Martin, and to a lesser extent himself, who had shared ideas on how to outwit such contraptions, Jemima fell into every crevasse LIDA strew across her path.
Time and again, she was shown to be lying; and fresh information extracted, until finally, the penny dropped like a ten tonne weight into the basement of the interrogators’ brains. This woman was no accidental accomplice, this was no wife of a suspected terrorist, this was no innocent bystander who had happened on vague information; this person was a big fish in a very murky pool. She was a cell leader, no less. This was someone who had organised and encouraged rebellion at every turn. When they asked her about the Tinbergen Papers, LIDA damn near flew off the scale. That was a first. It meant they were getting closer, and they knew it.
Before nightfall, their findings had been zipped through the latest computers, and the results printed out in some fancy new font that gave Liz Mariner a headache just reading it. Freaky font or not, the intelligence was indisputable. At last, they had bagged a ringleader. Now all they had to do was extract every last sliver of information that was secreted in that dizzy head of hers.
‘Well, well, well,’ whispered Liz to herself, as she sat alone and re-read the latest reports. There was so much more to come, she had been pr
omised, and it seemed obvious they had barely scratched the surface. Liz wanted in, before it was too late. She picked up the phone and was put through to the intelligence officers handling the case.
‘No more tonight,’ she ordered. ‘I shall join you at nine in the morning.’
‘Yes ma’am, as you wish.’
‘I will see you then.’
‘We look forward to it, ma’am.’
Liz rang off and dived into her computer, where she called up all the information known on the Cornelius family from Christchurch. The father was undergoing final interrogation in The Bletchington Clinic. The mother was spewing out unimaginable intelligence. The eldest daughter was on the run from her EWP service, the second daughter had been seen to be actively assisting SPAT killer, Adam Goodchild, yet curiously, thought Liz, Eve Cornelius herself had never been questioned.
That only left the young boy, Donald. What a family! Liz made a mental note that the young ones, the children, should be actively monitored. International underground movements had successfully used children for centuries. It was nothing new. Why should they be surprised? It was still happening.
Forty-Three
That afternoon, Eve had a free period. She left school at two and went straight home. She wanted to get her homework out of the way for there was something on the television that night she particularly wanted to see. As before, she found the house cold and silent and sad. Even after turning the heating and lights on, she never quite rid the place of the chill that had descended on it.
She sat in the dining room at the front of the house, with her books and papers strewn across the oak table. It was one of those dark windy November days when it never really grew light. In the background the latest Goosesteppers CD pounded away. Eve found she could work better with the sound system turned loud. Joss had switched her on to the band. Normally Eve detested anything Joss liked, and vice versa, natural sisterly rival hatred, but this was different, they were different. Goosesteppers Ruled, so said the ubiquitous graffiti.
Their odd fusion of indie, punk, grunge, and stadium rock, with those sing-along choruses was taking Britain by storm. How they had got away with their anti establishment lyrics was a puzzle to many. Their songs dealt with evading the EWP, running the VCS, they spoke out against Internet censorship, and God alone knows what else. Little wonder they were becoming the voice of a generation.
A strange feeling crept over Eve’s shoulders. She shivered.
We can’t talk at home. They are listening.
We can’t talk at home. They are listening.
That conversation with her mother whirled around her head. Yet am I alone, she thought, with my music. The feeling did not go away. Are they watching too? She pondered the thought. Listening and watching? Eve felt she was being watched. Unblinking eyes staring. She glanced up from her books, and almost died of fright.
A figure was standing at the window, watching her every move.
A face, a dirty haggard face, gaping through the glass. Joss’s face.
‘Open the door,’ she mouthed, pointing toward the front door. ‘Open the damn door!’
Eve stood up, not taking her eyes from her older sister. Joss looked pale and cold. It was a damp day, and she was not well dressed for outdoors. Joss pointed again toward the front door. Eve went through to the hall. She could see a blurred image of her sister leaning on the frosted glass. Eve approached the door.
‘Open up, you little madam!’
‘I can’t,’ said Eve.
‘What do you mean, you can’t?’
Her mother’s words flooded back to her.
I want to warn you about Joss.
I fear we have lost her.
When she comes home you must never trust her again, not with anything.
‘Open the damned door, you little bitch!’
‘No way.’
‘I’ll smash the glass!’
To the right of the door was a thick maroon curtain that her mother and father had spent a fun-filled Saturday night making and erecting, amid much laughter. It was drawn fully open, but at nights in the winter it was always swept across the door to keep out the draught. Eve reached across and slowly tugged the curtain across the door.
Outside in the cold, Joss watched it steadily blocking out the electric light.
‘I’ll get you for this!’ she screamed. ‘I’ll get you for this!’
Eve returned to the dining room, drew the curtains without a second thought, turned the music louder still, and hoped that Joss had gone. She resumed her homework and thought of her sister crossing the town in a blazing mood, heading for Frank Preston’s place. Eve didn’t care, and neither would she permit Joss to interrupt her train of thought.
She finished her work and went upstairs to her bedroom and lay on the bed and took out an old book and began reading. It was A Prayer for Owen Meany by some old American. She thought it a cracking book. It always made her cry. Abandoned in those New Hampshire fields she quickly lost all track of time, and forgot about Joss.
It wasn’t the lateness that brought her back to the present, nor the lack of food in her slim body, but the pinging on the bedroom window. Stones on glass. Her first thought was that Joss had returned, to plead for admittance, yet something told her this was different. She bounded down the stairs and pulled back the curtain and opened the door. Heavy fog had rolled in, riding the incoming tide. There was no one there, not on the path, or in the garden. In the distance she could smell smoke. There had been a spate of large boats on the river being set alight at night. Rumours had it that some people were trying to flee the country.
She took several paces down the path. ‘Hello. Is anyone there?’
A voice whispered from the bushes, ‘Can I come in?’
She glanced at the shrub, Griselina Littoralis. This bush did not lose its fleshy leaves in winter, and provided wonderful cover. Several weak branches parted either way, and in the cold darkness Eve could just make out Adam’s face.
‘What the hell are you doing in there?’ she said. ‘Come in before someone sees you.’
She turned back to the house and went inside, and in the next second he threw himself into the hall, and closed the door behind him, panting.
They sat up late, talking in whispers, and eating pizza, to a background of the Goosesteppers wonderful new CD, Resurrection, as Eve introduced Adam to cocoa made the Cornelius way. She told him all about her mother and father, both now in custody, of how mum had warned her about Joss, and that strange talk of the Tinbergen Papers, and of how Joss had come that very afternoon, only to be sent packing.
‘You did right,’ he said, and that pleased her.
Adam could barely believe this kid knew anything of the Tinbergen Papers. He told her everything he knew of them, and of how he had murdered Inspector Smeggan, à la King Harold, with a chocolate dagger in the eye, after Smeggan had confessed to murdering Adam’s father, and ordering the killing of his mother. It was well after midnight before they went to bed, Adam tucked up in Joss’s fragrant divan.
‘She worships that bed,’ Eve joked. ‘She would kill you, and me too, if she saw you in there.’
‘Then she must never know,’ he said, grinning.
‘Night,’ she said, standing in the doorway.
‘Night.... Eve,’ he said, with that practiced smile of his, and he winked at her.
Eve flushed, or thought she had. Inside, she was in turmoil, and though she tried not to show it, Adam guessed how she felt. That night Eve imagined sleep would be easy to come by, now there was someone else in the house, but it didn’t, just the opposite, and she wasn’t alone in that.
The following day, they had agreed they would leave the area. They would go and see the vicar at the Priory. He would send them overseas. It all sounded so beautifully simple. They would flee the country, flee the SPATs, flee their worries, and never return.
Forty-Four
Watery winter sunshine. Squirrels jumping over grey stone walls, seagul
ls squabbling and hollering in the blue sky. Adam and Eve hastened between the ancient gravestones and the sightseers, and closed on the impressive church. He opened the door with a clank and paused, and Eve stepped inside. Adam followed. Christchurch Priory, an amazing church. Not quite a cathedral, but reputedly the largest parish church in all of England. The local nobs married there, and were buried there too. There was no church in the kingdom quite like it.
‘Buggering hell,’ whispered Adam, glancing at the roof.
‘Shush,’ said Eve. ‘Watch your language.’
A warden approached and without warning kicked off: ‘Good morning to you. Do you know why Christchurch is called Christchurch?’
Adam and Eve looked at one another, askance.
‘Can’t say as we do,’ said Adam.
‘Then I’ll tell you,’ the old guy rambled, and he launched into a well-rehearsed diatribe. ‘In the first half of the 12th century it was decided to build a new church, two miles away on Saint Catherine’s Hill. The townspeople were dead against it. They did not want their church sited there, but the powers that be pressed on and began moving all the building materials up to the new location. But every morning when they went to work, they found the site deserted, and all the materials back here on the site of the original Saxon church. After this had happened several times Ranulf Flambard, he was the chap who was supervising the construction of the new church, decided that this was divine intervention, and that the building must commence on the original site, this site. During the early stages of construction a mysterious carpenter appeared and began assisting the builders, though he was never about at meal times, or on payday. One day, a hefty beam was required for the roof. The place where it was needed was measured and the timber was duly cut to the required length. But disaster struck, for when it was raised into position, it was found to be several inches too short. You can imagine the labourers’ language at that! It had to be lowered again, amid much recrimination, but as it was almost evening the workmen decided to leave it, and went home for the night. When they returned in the morning they found to their amazement that overnight the beam had grown to the correct length, and not only that, but it had been placed in the correct position. After that, the mysterious carpenter never appeared again, and afterwards it was assumed that he must have been Jesus Christ of Nazareth. He had personally helped in the construction of the church, this church, which duly became known as Christ’s church, and in due course the town adopted the name of Christchurch. Incredible, don’t you think?’
