‘I’d be very grateful.’ Father Powell stopped the recording on his phone, put it away, and stood. ‘You know,’ he said after a moment, ‘we really do want nothing more than to help protect Haleswell.’
Nash rose and shook his hand. ‘So do I,’ he said, maintaining his grip. ‘More than literally anything else in the world.’
He nearly added or anyone.
The priest left, his shadow trailing after him along the grass.
* * *
Hester had not thought of Father Cuthbert’s pilgrim badge for longer than it would have taken several generations of men to die, and it disturbed her.
He had arrived in Clegeham as a fourteen-year-old servant to the old village priest, Father Euan; lanky and awkward, in robes that were too big for him, wrestling to carry Father Euan’s books and belongings. She had been ten, but remembered his arrival clearly. She decided from the moment she saw him that, priest’s servant or not, she was going to marry him.
She found or manufactured occasions to help Cuthbert with his work around the church, taking him gifts and quizzing him on what their life would be like together. She stole ale and food for him and endured her father’s beatings for this gladly, and Cuthbert tried to teach her what little learning he had.
And then, when Cuthbert was sixteen and she was twelve, Father Euan was kicked in the stomach by a cow and died, and the parish priest at Haleswell decided that Cuthbert would take his place. The Church would be his only bride. Moreover, he would undertake a pilgrimage to Canterbury to pray for the Lord’s guidance in his new vocation.
Hester was distraught. She had been as far as Warwick, and that had been adventure enough; the notion of travelling for weeks on the road to somewhere as far as Canterbury seemed dangerous and foolhardy. She clung to him and wept and offered to run away with him and threatened unspecific but dire retribution if he abandoned her, but he gently disentangled her hands from his and said that he had been called and so must answer, and that there was no greater love he could offer her than to shepherd her soul into the Lord’s care where they could be together for eternity.
In the end she had no choice but to let him go.
He returned three weeks later – leaner and with his clothes much stained from long travel, but there was a brightness to his gaze and in the way he greeted his old neighbours that told her his pilgrimage had indeed changed him. He seemed to have been filled up with something, as if there had been an empty space in his soul that even he had not known was there. She saw that and loved him even more, but she put aside her childish infatuation and tried to turn her love into something more befitting an unmarried woman for her priest, and accustomed herself to calling him Father. In token, perhaps, of this, he gifted her the pilgrimage badge that he had bought as a memento.
It was a pretty thing. She liked the way the light flashed on the pewter. It was fashioned after the image of a boat with a steeply curved keel, knights on the high fore and aft castles, and the saint himself standing by the mast, and Father Cuthbert told her the tale of how Saint Thomas had fled to exile in France for defying the king’s orders. Hester liked that story, secretly relishing the fantasy of saying No, I will not to a king. She never wore it openly, as it would have invited the envy of the other girls and opened Father Cuthbert to accusations of impropriety, but hid it within the straw of her bedding to take out at night and admire and dream impossible fantasies of escaping far away over the ocean with her beloved.
Then the pestilence came and took him from her.
She was the last to tend him, the other women having more than enough to contend with in caring for their own sick menfolk and children. The pestilence had ravaged his smooth skin with black lesions and open sores, but she endured the stench of it and helped him to sip as much water with his cracked lips as he could take. And when he died, she made sure that he was buried with the pilgrimage badge to guide him on his last and furthest journey.
No, she had not thought of this in a long, long time. It disturbed her.
It disturbed the black thing inside her which gave her the strength to punish her enemies.
The gwrach clefyd.
30
CATASTROPHIC CIRCUMSTANCES
RAJKO KNEW SOMETHING WAS WRONG WHEN HE SAW the light from the living-room window – it was two in the morning and everybody should have been in bed. Maya and the Ant had school in the morning, Papa was on an early shift at the sorting office, and Mama simply didn’t stay up that late. He killed the engine and got out of the car, staring up at the house. Had his parents argued? Was someone hurt?
He let himself in, and was halfway upstairs when he surprised himself by succumbing to a massive yawn that felt like it threatened to split his head in half at the jaw. He hadn’t realised he was so tired; it certainly wasn’t the latest he’d come home from a night out with the lads from college. Must be getting old, he thought with a quiet laugh. Old man, nineteen soon, responsible man of the family. Or maybe it was just the comedown from the coke. As he climbed he idly wondered whether he could use the Feenan kid as a way into the Trust’s cosy little middle-class bubble; had to be some friends there he could supply.
There was someone up on the landing ahead of him.
Wait – no, no there wasn’t. The landing was empty. But just for a moment it had seemed like there was the silhouette of a girl standing by his front door.
‘Maya?’ he called. ‘Maya, have you locked yourself out?’
There was no reply, because nobody was there.
‘Losing it,’ he muttered to himself.
Another yawn hit him on the landing as he was opening the front door, this one so hard that it left him a little dizzy. No, this was more like being stoned. He didn’t like it.
Down on the right-hand side of the hallway was the living room, with a line of bright light streaming underneath the door. And now he could hear the television; some kind of heavy rock music accompanied by metallic clanging sounds and a voice-over that he couldn’t quite make out.
This definitely wasn’t right – if he could hear it from the hallway, Mama would definitely be able to hear it from the adjoining room, and there was no way she would put up with that kind of noise at this time of night.
Another wave of dizziness washed over him, and he steadied himself with one hand on the wall. What the fuck? Had someone spiked him? And if they had, why was it kicking in only just now?
He pushed open the living-room door, and heaved a sigh of relief. Papa was asleep in his armchair with a can of lager next to him and the television on – some reality show about blokes trying to forge ancient weapons out of car parts. One of the presenters was testing the sharpness of a contestant’s blade by slicing at a pig’s carcass. Rajko switched the TV off and shook his father by the shoulder.
‘Come on, Papa, time for bed,’ he said.
This time when he yawned, the dizziness persisted until spots appeared before his vision and only went away when he shook his head fiercely. Something was wrong. And his father wasn’t stirring. His head didn’t even loll properly like it should have done if he was asleep – in fact, it moved with his torso, stiffly, as if the man were tied to a rigid framework.
‘Papa? What’s wrong?’
If his own head hadn’t been feeling like it was stuffed full of cotton wool Rajko would have seen right from the start what he only noticed now: his father’s skin was too pale, and his lips were blue. And he wasn’t breathing.
‘Papa!’ he screamed, shaking him with both hands.
His father’s corpse toppled forwards like a broken deckchair collapsing over itself, all hinges. His head struck the floor with a dull thud, like a block of wood in a sack. There was absolutely no chance that he might have been alive.
‘Mama! Come quick!’ In that moment Rajko wasn’t a young man on the brink of responsible adulthood but a little boy again. He backed away from the horror lying on the floor and ran to get his mother. She would know what to do.
He flung open t
he door of his parents’ bedroom and lurched across to the bed, shaking the figure that was lying there. She was lying on her side, facing away from him. ‘Mama!’ he sobbed. ‘Come quick! Papa’s hurt!’
It felt like trying to shift the trunk of a felled tree. Other than rolling slightly beneath his hand, she didn’t move, but the covers fell away from her shoulder to reveal the strap of a nightdress over pale, waxy flesh.
Oh Jesus no.
Then: Maya. Antony.
Despite his panic, he hesitated a little before opening the door to Maya’s bedroom, because in the last year she had started to get ferocious about her privacy, and heaven help him if he barged in on her while she was practising one of the Feminine Mysteries. The head and foot of her bed frame were strung with fairy lights, so that he could see her, sitting propped up against her pillows, with her phone in one hand as if she’d fallen asleep in the middle of chatting with her friends about whatever it was that girls chatted about. She was wearing a fluffy pullover with the words ‘Cool Vibes’ spelt out in letters shaped like doughnuts and ice lollies. It had been a favourite when she was younger and even though she never wore it in public anymore she still liked it for slobbing around at bedtime. The fairy lights were dim, but they couldn’t hide the blueness of her lips, or the thin line of drool which hung from them and made a damp spot in the front of her pullover.
‘No…’ he moaned. ‘Noooo…’
Black blotches rushed in from every side then, and almost overwhelmed him, but he smacked his head against the door frame until the pain chased them away. Whatever it was, it was getting worse. The only time he’d ever felt anything like it had been the only time he’d tried laughing gas – it hadn’t made him laugh at all, just feel sick and panicky because he knew that he wasn’t breathing proper air.
He wasn’t breathing proper air.
Dear God, the boiler the boiler THE FUCKING BOILER!
He staggered across Maya’s bedroom to the window and wrenched it open, and the flood of fresh air was like a bucket of cold water to the face. He took a couple of deep lungfuls and then doubled up as his stomach cramped, and he vomited an evening’s worth of booze and the remains of a kebab between his feet.
‘Sorry… sorry…’ he whimpered, not sure if he was apologising for the sick, or the fact that he had to abandon Maya to look for his baby brother, or for the broken boiler which had probably been filling their flat with carbon monoxide for hours, or maybe all of it. Shivering, weeping, hanging on to the walls for support, he left her room.
He found Antony curled up in bed as if fast asleep, thumb in his mouth, Simba clutched in the crook of one elbow. There were ten other people in the building who he knew he should have checked on too, but at the sight of his dead baby brother all rational thought for their survival, or even his own, disappeared. Rajko must have called the emergency services at some point, although he didn’t remember it, because when the paramedics arrived they found him on the floor beside the bed, rocking Antony’s body in his arms and howling like a soul newly damned.
* * *
The shrilling of Nash’s phone woke him and he fumbled it from the bedside table. It buzzed in his grip like an angry wasp while he tried to blink away the fog in his head. He frowned at the screen; without his glasses it was blurry even this close. Christ, his eyes were getting bad. It looked suspiciously like two something in the morning, but that couldn’t be right. Even his ex-wife wasn’t stupid enough to call at this hour.
Incoming call: Ingram, Daniel
He sat up straighter. Sergeant Dan Ingram was the officer in charge of Haleswell Neighbourhood Policing Team and a cog in the workings of the Trust machinery that Nash had worked very hard to keep turning smoothly for their benefit. Ingram’s children went to the grammar school, his wife’s law firm handled a lot of the Clegg Farm contracts, a sizeable chunk of their savings had been invested in the development – in return for which they were getting a sweet deal on one of the premium units – and all of this kept it in Ingram’s interests to alert Nash to anything which might throw a spanner in its delicately balanced workings.
So if he was calling the Trust’s chief executive at stupid-oclock in the morning it wasn’t going to be for anything good.
‘What?’ he grunted.
Then, as he listened: ‘Oh shit.’
By the time Sergeant Ingram had finished, Nash was halfway towards being dressed and out the door.
* * *
Even though Rajko was breathing the clean night air again, sitting safely in a police car with the back door open, it felt like the carbon monoxide had worked its way into every last atom of his soul: he was totally numb. The freezing cold of the early hours didn’t touch him. The strobing lights of ambulances, fire engines and police cars washed over him in waves of red and blue without making him blink. The chatter of radios as fire crews and paramedics tried to make sense of the situation remained meaningless and distant; even his skin felt as tight and lifeless as the oxygen mask that they’d given him. He wasn’t real, and here and alive – how could he be, given what had happened to the world? With so much dead, how could he not be too? The paramedics would have taken him to the hospital first, a lot earlier, if there’d been enough ambulances, and until they’d realised the scale of the disaster. He was able to pick at least that much information out of the insect buzz of their voices. Disconnected words and phrases slipped through:
…must have been building up for hours…
…detectors?…
…shitty ventilation…
…probably didn’t feel a thing…
Everyone on the first three floors of the house was dead. Of course nobody was saying that officially – there’d have to be a proper investigation first – but it was obvious from the futile resuscitation efforts going on around him and conversations between people in uniforms who had forgotten he was there (because he wasn’t; he was numb, dead, gone). Nine of his neighbours. Tamanna the teacher and her husband Stuart and his brother and the entire Ashok family. A nice baker’s dozen if you included his own family. Only old Mr Griffiths from the topmost floor, where the carbon monoxide hadn’t yet reached a lethal concentration, had been wheeled out alive.
And Rajko himself, of course.
Since he was conscious and talking lucidly the paramedics had been content to let him sit out front while they worked on those more urgently in need of help, which was just as well because even if they had tried to take him to hospital in one of the first ambulances to arrive he’d have fought them. He was not leaving while his family were still inside, it was as simple as that. So he sat, numb, waiting for the horror of it all to break through and shatter him into a million pieces all over again.
Then standing at the edge of everything, watching, he saw Maya.
Or at least, it wasn’t exactly Maya. It was a girl who looked a bit like his sister, an illusion strengthened by the fact that she was wearing Maya’s ‘Cool Vibes’ sweater. Then he remembered that girl he had thought he’d seen on the staircase landing.
‘Hey,’ he murmured. This wasn’t right. Had she sneaked back in and stolen Maya’s clothing off her dead body? Was she somehow responsible for all of this? She was looking right at him across the crowd of paramedics, fire crew and onlookers like she was taunting him.
‘Hey!’ he got out of the police car, but nobody was paying any attention to him.
She turned and started to walk away, into an alleyway between two houses.
‘Hey! Someone stop her!’
Faces turned his way but by that time he was running, weaving his way between stretchers, emergency vehicles and the people in uniforms, until he collided with two men standing on the periphery.
‘Fucksake, watch where you’re…’ started the larger of the two, and Rajko saw who he’d hit.
‘You!’
Richard Nash stumbled away as much from the shock of recognition as the physical contact.
‘Oh so now you turn up? Now? Come to see the results of
all your hard work, have you?’ He threw himself on Nash, locking hands about his throat and bearing him backwards against a wall, snarling, ‘You want to see it? You want to fucking see it?’
In moments other hands were pulling him away, pinning his arms to his sides, and a female police officer was in front of him. ‘Easy, mate,’ she said. ‘There’s no need for this.’ She turned to Nash. ‘Sorry about that, sir. Are you all right?’
‘Of course I’m not all right!’ snapped Nash. ‘This little bastard assaulted me! You saw him!’
Rajko tore uselessly against the hands. ‘You murdered my family, you motherfucker!’ he screamed. ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you!’
‘Are you going to stand there and let him threaten me like that?’ Nash demanded.
The second man, who Rajko only now noticed was wearing the kind of police uniform which meant that he was someone in charge, stepped between them. ‘The boy is in shock, Richard, look at him. He’s just witnessed something nobody should, and he needs to be looked after. Karen, please take him straight to the station and find an Appropriate Adult for him. An uncle, social worker, teacher – I don’t care who.’
‘Yes, Sergeant.’ The PC turned back to Rajko. ‘Are you going to let me look after you?’
But Rajko wasn’t ready to let it go yet. ‘He killed them, don’t you understand? His negligence! It’s his responsibility!’
‘Well you can tell me all about that in the warm with a cup of tea. Come on.’
Rajko felt the numbness slide back into his bones, and let himself be led away. It wasn’t until the patrol car was moving that he remembered the girl in his sister’s sweater, but by then it was too late to look for her.
* * *
Ingram was right, there was nothing Nash could do right at that moment. In time there would be a coroner’s investigation at which the Trust would be called on to give evidence, but that was weeks away. He should go home, try to get some sleep, and Ingram would update him first thing in the morning.
The Plague Stones Page 23
