Nash thanked his old friend and agreed, having absolutely no intention of going home. He was supposed to sit patiently on his arse and wait for the unholy shitstorm that was certain to come rolling out of that house full of dead immigrants, was he? Fuck that straight to hell with brass knobs on. The Trust needed to be insulated from this as soon as possible.
He drove across town, just a little apprehensive about leaving the parish boundary after dark and in such circumstances. He didn’t think She would have had anything to do with the accident – what did She stand to gain by it? – but Hester and death were like sharks and blood, and there was no telling how She might react. On balance it was a risk worth taking. He certainly wasn’t going to trust a phone, hackable as it was, for the conversation he needed to have right now.
The house he pulled up at was large, detached, and expensive – the kind of property owned by a man who made the kind of money that a close association with the Trust brought. The man in this case was another of Nash’s cogs: Hugh Watkins, owner of ProTherm Heating and Electrical, the company which maintained the Trust’s properties at a price which was very favourable to their annual budget. Although ‘maintained’ in this particular case now clearly seemed something of an overstatement. It was tempting to let Watkins swing in the wind for the accident, but Nash hadn’t been lying when he’d told Peter Feenan that things with the Clegg Farm development were at a delicate stage financially, and this was precisely the wrong time to have his investors spooked by accusations of multiple deaths by criminal negligence.
He rang the front doorbell several times and stamped his feet impatiently in the cold. In the driveway next to him was a freshly minted Subaru SUV with personalised plates: W4TK1N5.
‘You’re doing altogether too well out of me,’ he murmured.
Lights went on behind curtains and footsteps thumped towards the door which Watkins opened on the security chain as he peered out. He had a face which was all chin and no forehead, like the top and bottom halves of his head were made from different skulls, the smaller on top.
‘Morning, Hugh,’ he said amiably.
‘Morning?’ Watkins whispered, incredulous. ‘What the fuck do you mean by “morning”? As in fucking four o’clock in it? Richard, what the fuck are you doing here?’
‘I’ve come the bearer of bad news, I’m afraid. Can I come in?’
‘No you can’t fucking well come in! I—’
‘Who is it, darling?’ asked a female voice from deeper inside, probably at the top of the stairs, clutching her hair curlers.
Watkins turned and called, ‘Nothing, dear. Just a work thing.’
‘At this time of—’
But he’d shut the door and was standing out on the front step with Nash in a bright tartan dressing gown. ‘What,’ he hissed. ‘Do. You. Want?’
As Nash told him about the carbon monoxide poisonings on Pestle Road, Watkins seemed to deflate, growing paler and smaller until he was leaning against his front door for support and muttering, ‘Oh shit oh shit oh shit,’ on a loop.
‘By my reckoning,’ Nash continued, ‘it’s going to take the coroner a week minimum to arrange for an examination of the boiler and the heating system, which gives you plenty of time to get in there and make sure that what they find doesn’t point back at us. And by us I mean you, obviously.’
‘You know what that’s called? “Perverting the course of justice”, that’s what.’
‘How does “manslaughter through gross negligence” sound instead? Any better?’
Watkins ran both hands over his face as if trying to scrub it off the front of his head, and groaned. ‘But I don’t understand. We put detectors in all the flats. Didn’t any of them go off?’
‘You mean those cheap-arse Chinese ones? What do you think?’ Nash could see Peter Feenan in his office right now, waving one of them around and lecturing him about safety standards. What made the whole thing worse was that he’d been right. If he got so much as a whiff of an I-told-you-so from Mr Peter Holier-than-fucking-thou Feenan after this he’d gleefully tear the skinny little mick’s throat out with his teeth.
‘Everything I put in that building was legal,’ Watkins insisted. ‘Everything you told me to use was legal. They can’t do us for negligence.’
‘Maybe not,’ Nash conceded. ‘But the scandal will ruin the Trust, and it will take you, me, and everybody else down with it. Good luck making the payments on this place when nobody will trust you to fix a dripping tap. You’ll be lucky to get a job rodding the bloody drains.’ He paused to let this mental image sink in with Watkins. ‘Obviously you can’t make it look like there’s nothing wrong with the boiler at all,’ Nash continued. ‘Bang it about a bit, make it look like the residents were fiddling with it, use your imagination.’
‘But the cops will be all over the place. I’ll never get in!’
‘That’s the bit you leave to my imagination.’
He watched Watkins pace up and down the length of his driveway, back and forth past his expensive car parked in front of his expensive house inhabited by his no-doubt expensive wife, all the while muttering to himself as he built up the guts to agree, as if he had a choice. Finally he stopped.
‘All right then,’ he said. ‘But if I get caught—’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Nash waved it away. ‘Let’s skip the fine print, shall we?’
31
REMEMBRANCE
TOBY HAD ONLY EVER TRIED WEED ONCE, AT HIS OLD school. There’d been an old shipping container at the bottom of the playground which was used to store sports kit, but all the kids called it the Smokehouse since that was what happened in the bushes behind it. A kid had got hold of some stuff from his older sister, allegedly, and word had got around and Toby had gone along that one lunchtime to see what it was like – partially out of peer pressure, partially out of sheer curiosity. It hadn’t made him feel blissed out or mellow or whatever it was they said he was supposed to experience; it had just made him feel dislocated from reality, as if he was observing his actions in the world as part of an out-of-body experience, but hollow and detached. He hadn’t enjoyed it, and he’d never tried it again, but going to school the day after the gas accident felt exactly like that all over again. Judging from the way a lot of the other kids in his year were behaving, they were experiencing much the same thing. There were visits from grief counsellors and the police, special assemblies, opportunities to talk it through with the few teachers capable of having a human conversation. But still, every so often a girl or a boy would suddenly leave the classroom in tears, or pick a fight for no reason, or be found just staring into space.
They congregated at the Rec, that passing-through place which wasn’t a park and wasn’t a field but was uniquely their space because its nature was indeterminate and nobody knew what to do with it, just like them – at least for a few more years, until they’d finished passing through from childhood in the supermarket playground to the adult space of the village green. Mostly they chatted about what they always chatted about, taking comfort in each other’s company, huddling close in their circles under the trees because any gap big enough for a person to fill only reminded them of the one person who never would again. They sat and played through Maya’s favourite YouTube streams or the Spotify playlists she’d shared, laughing at or singing along with whatever she’d laughed at or sang to, or else they got high or drunk or just cried and held each other. In the absence of a funeral or a body to say goodbye to yet, they held their own digital wake and celebrated what lived of her online.
Toby avoided the Rec to begin with, knowing what was buried under there, but had no choice when people started to comment on his absence.
krishdog181:
u avoiding us or sthing toeB?
astrobwoy:
toeB or not toeB lol
cheekynando7:
Leave off. He’ll come if he wants.
Some of us need more alone time than others.
damo666:
unless
hes hiding
krishdog181:
from? got no reason 2 hide among friends
damo666:
think we all no why. Trust issues lol
cheekynando7:
STFU!!!
Everyone knew what had happened, and none of them did. There was a gas leak, that much was certain. It was a faulty boiler, or else it was Rajko’s fault for fiddling with it; he was on a mechanics course, wasn’t he? And where was he, anyway? He was dead too, or arrested, or run away, or living with an uncle in Sheffield. Or else it was a murder-suicide which had escalated catastrophically. It quickly became common knowledge that Maya’s building was managed by Haleswell Village Trust, and that was when the trolling started – anonymous accounts accusing the Trustees of murder, hoping that they died of cancer/poison/ suffocation, or any menu item from the trolls’ drop-down list of abuse. They posted sick images and jokes about gas chambers, calling Toby’s mum a fucking Nazi, threatening to set fire to their home. He switched off all his social media and went dark. Then he switched it all on again half an hour later because hearing nothing at all was somehow worse.
Because of course he accepted that it was all his fault. If he’d given Maya the secret priority emergency contacts then Rajko might have had them and help might have arrived soon enough to save her life. If he’d done what Rajko had asked him in the first place and got his mum to push for their boiler to be fixed, none of this would have happened, but instead he’d been too fixated on finding out everything he could about Hester – and this was the sickest ironic twist of all: killing a building full of innocent people by his obsession with one who was already dead. Even if She had somehow arranged it, it must surely have been only to get at him, and through him his parents.
That first night after he’d heard about the accident he’d gone out to the garden stone, looking for Her.
‘Did you do it?’ he called to the empty darkness. ‘Did you kill those people because of me? Because you can’t get to me or my parents? Is that how this works?’ There had been no reply. She would not be granting an audience, it seemed. Neither his questions nor his pain would be answered, and it suddenly enraged him. ‘I know where you’re buried!’ he screamed, snot-faced and weeping like a spoilt child. ‘I’ll dig you up and piss on your fucking bones!’
He knew how this must have looked to his parents – losing it and shouting at thin air, but who knew? Maybe they thought it was good and cathartic, finally getting something out of his system. It was certainly more of a reaction than he’d shown in the aftermath of the break-in. He didn’t want to hear what they were saying about him – he didn’t even want to hear the murmur of their voices downstairs and have to imagine what they were saying. He plugged his ears into his phone and sketched, or pored over Mrs Drummond’s books, and then eventually bowed to the inevitable and went down the Rec to be with his friends. At least if someone wanted to have a go at him they’d have to do it face to face.
The press got hold of it, obviously – first the local papers, then the nationals. The Trust did a good job of circling the wagons, putting out a press statement and coaching his mum what to say if reporters came knocking, but since she wasn’t on the Executive Committee nobody did. Richard Nash got his face on the TV news, looking full of concern and empathy as he said that of course the Trust would cooperate fully with any investigations to determine the cause of this appalling tragedy.
A scumbag tabloid newspaper hack even came to the Rec to get dirt from the victim’s schoolfriends, trying to bribe them with cash and iTunes vouchers (as if anybody actually used iTunes anymore) to say that the flats in Maya’s building were crammed with illegal immigrants ten to a room. The reporter’s smarmy insinuations were met with a wall of sullen adolescent silence, and that moment of solidarity to the memory of their friend was one of the few bright spots for Toby in an otherwise dark week. The hack wrote his story anyway, making it up completely, with the headline IMMIGRANT GAS CHAMBER OF HORRORS, so they bought up as many copies of the paper as they could find and had a nice bonfire in one of the dumpsters behind the supermarket.
Someone who knew someone who knew someone else found out that since the post-mortems had definitively established the cause of death as carbon monoxide poisoning, the coroner had issued a Certificate of the Fact of Death for each of the victims, even though her investigation would probably take many weeks to establish the exact cause of the poisoning, which meant that grieving relatives could finally lay their loved ones to rest.
The funerals were staggered over several days, at various churches and mosques, while the burials would be at a large municipal cemetery rather than St Sebastian’s, which was too old and small and had been closed to new interments for decades. On the day that Maya and her family were buried Toby stayed at home, drinking mint tea and reading ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’.
* * *
After the words, the tears, the prayers and the earth swallowing his family, Rajko stood by the row of graves alone. He had told his Uncle Andrii that he’d be along soon, as people would be gathering at the daca to pay their respects; although his family hadn’t been practising, Orthodox tradition was still strong, and he was going to need some time to get himself together if he was going to be able to cope with a massive meal and the condolences of distant relatives whom he barely knew.
The two largest graves were in the centre, the smallest on the right, the middle-sized one on the left. Almost like in a fairy tale about bowls of porridge and chairs and beds. Not too hot, not too cold. There should have been a fifth one for him in the middle – just right – but there wasn’t, and that was wrong, because he was dead. He had to be. It wasn’t possible to have had so much life ripped away and still be living – it was just that his body hadn’t caught up to the fact yet.
The only part of him which felt remotely alive was the rage burning low down in his guts. It had always been there, flaring up now and then and getting him into trouble; the last time had been when he held Richard Nash’s throat in his hands. Over the years he’d tried to keep it under control to stop it from burning his loved ones, except now his loved ones were all dead so that didn’t matter anymore.
It was a bright morning in early June but the summer sun didn’t touch him because he was dead. Flowers covered the graves and blossom was on the trees along the cemetery’s paths but he couldn’t smell it because he was dead.
This was not a season for the dead.
And yet there She was, standing behind Maya’s headstone, wearing his sister’s Cool Vibes jumper over a ragged smock. The dead girl showed Her wounds to him openly, and he probably should have been scared, but then fear was for the living. It was entirely possible that he had simply lost his mind. She didn’t threaten, however. If anything, Her deeply shadowed eyes seemed to be regarding him with sadness.
‘You’re dead, aren’t you?’ he asked, just to be sure. His voice was rusty, and it barely worked above a rasp.
She nodded. Yes.
‘Is my sister with you?’
She shook her head. No.
‘Do you know where she is?’
Yes. She pointed at the grave between them.
He swallowed thickly. The words, when they came, were like grit spat from between his teeth. ‘Did you do it?’
No.
‘Then why?’
She shrugged, gesturing around – up at the trees, down at the ground, everything and nothing.
‘What – you’re trying to tell me that it just happened? There was no reason? They’re dead and there was no reason at all? Fuck that! And fuck you too if that’s all you came for! Why are you here? What the fuck do you want from me?’
Her mouth moved but he couldn’t hear what She was saying. Thinking that She was whispering, he drew a little closer, but found that She wasn’t making any sound at all, or what sound She was making couldn’t reach him. She wasn’t entirely there – he couldn’t see through Her like a storybook ghost, but he noticed that She didn’t cast
any shadow.
‘I can’t hear you! You’re not, I don’t know – not close enough!’
The dead girl considered him closely, narrowing Her eyes, assessing. Then She reached under the sweater and brought out a knife – a small and crude thing, just a scrap of black metal with a wooden handle.
Rajko laughed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to do better than that if you want to scare me.’
But scaring him wasn’t Her intention. She held out Her other palm and slashed the blade across it. Instead of the bright splash of red blood, what oozed out of the new wound was sludgy and dark, more like mud. She reached over the top of Maya’s headstone and held Her hand out to him, as if inviting him to shake it.
It was obvious what She wanted him to do.
He stepped back a pace, shaking his head. ‘That’s not going to happen.’
She looked him up and down in withering contempt, then very deliberately wiped Her wounded palm across Maya’s sweater, or the illusion of it, obliterating the writing with a thick black smear. She turned to go.
‘No, wait!’
He looked around; on a nearby grave was a glass vase, murky with age and full of dead flowers. He tipped out the dry stems, smashed it over Maya’s headstone and took up a jagged shard. Before he could second-guess himself, he sliced it across his left palm. The blood came an instant before the pain, deep and burning. He stuck out his wounded hand.
‘Here. Do it.’
She raised her eyebrows. Really? Are you sure about this?
‘Here!’
She leaned across the headstone and grasped his living hand with Her dead one. The shock of Her dead blood entering his was like being injected with frozen battery acid. He gasped, fighting for breath as it crept up his arm like a tide and the blue veins under his skin turned black. Her grip was iron; he couldn’t have pulled away even if he’d wanted to. The world dimmed and a great rushing filled his ears as if he was surfacing from deep underwater, but through it he was aware that She was experiencing something equally traumatic, screaming silently as his living blood burned into Her. The black ice spread up his arm and past his shoulder, and now he could hear Her talking to him through gritted teeth, faintly at first but growing louder as it neared his heart.
The Plague Stones Page 24
