Snakeskins

by Tim Major

Anise held up both hands, flummoxed.

  “Ilam Hall may have been completed in 1821, but work began in 1815. They started with the wings to extend the main building, with the facade left until the end. But I’ve checked and rechecked, and it’s true.”

  “Before my ancestor was made a lord. But what does that mean?”

  “It means that a larger building was required, at the very moment the second batch of Snakeskins made an appearance. Your family had no particular wealth then, which means that it was paid for by someone other than Hartwell. And what’s more, I think it also means that his reward, his being made a lord, was linked to the construction of the new hall, too.”

  “Oh God.”

  “I may still be wrong, Anise. But I think that Hartwell was bought off by the government of the time.”

  “And you said this is about the truth. So he was paid off in exchange for hiding the truth about something?”

  Gerry nodded. “In exchange for hiding the truth, and in exchange for hiding the people that could demonstrate the truth. Anise, here’s the thing. I’m pretty sure I’ve read all the historical accounts of that first year of sheddings. There are dozens of them, all slightly different in their own way. But only four of them mention the Snakeskin turning to ash.”

  Anise’s face had turned pale. “And the rest…”

  “My money is on the fact that the rest didn’t ash. At least, not at first.”

  With a shaking hand, Anise rubbed at the condensation on the windowpane. Ilam Hall appeared through the streaks. “And instead, they were in there.”

  Anise gripped both of Gerry’s hands. “You have to leave.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. I know this must come as a shock—”

  “No. That’s not it. You have to leave right now.”

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  Anise kicked her chair away, waking the sleeping man in the corner of the cafe. “I’ve been a fool. I thought he was a friend of yours at first, seeing as he was asking the same questions.”

  “Who? Who are you talking about?”

  “Terry? Todd? Trent? It started with a T. Dark little beard, like the Sheriff of Nottingham in films. Smart tweed suit and bow tie.”

  A shiver ran along Gerry’s spine. “What did he want?”

  “Why, the books.”

  “The census records? But you told me that they couldn’t leave the building. All that talk about ‘civic duty’. They’re what I trekked all the way back here for!”

  Anise wrung her hands. “But then you didn’t talk about all the legal stuff. Warrants and national security. And when I finally mentioned your name, he was less than complimentary about you.”

  “National security? Anise, are you telling me that you believed this guy was a crappy tabloid hack? He was a government employee – anyone could see that.”

  But why? Gerry’s mind reeled at the implications of the Party’s concern about the historical population of Ilam. And an equally important question: Why now?

  “I never was one for all that Party conspiracy nonsense. I’m a doddery old woman, all right? But this man, whatever his name is, made me promise to let him know if you ever showed up again. He even lent me a fancy phone.” She pulled the mobile telephone out of her apron pocket and brandished it.

  Gerry’s eyes widened. “So—”

  “He’s been staying down there in the village. He’s on his way right now.”

  So she had been sending a text message when Gerry arrived. It took all Gerry’s willpower not to lash out.

  “Is there another way out of here?” she said.

  “Through the kitchens – they’re shared with the youth hostel. But then don’t go out of the main exit, you’ll be too visible. Take the— Look, I’ll just take you. Come on.”

  With the speed of a much younger woman, Anise darted behind the counter and into the kitchens. Gerry followed, bumping from cabinet to cabinet, then burst out into a dark corridor that smelled of sweat and bleach. The heels of Anise’s shoes clattered on the bare wood of the stairs.

  “This way,” she hissed, yanking Gerry away from the glass-panelled front door of the youth hostel and into a featureless corridor. At first it appeared to be a dead end, but then Anise heaved downwards on the bar of a fire exit door.

  They emerged into a muddy clearing roofed by dripping foliage. Anise pointed along a pathway barely visible through the trees. “Keep going until you pass the giant squirrel sculptures, then there’s a sharp bend to the right. You’ll get to the car park the back way. With any luck, that fellow will already be much further up the drive.”

  Gerry nodded, breathless. “Anise—”

  “You don’t have to say anything nice, and for Christ’s sake don’t make me feel any more guilty than I do already. But there’s one more thing. I’m pretty sure I know what you came here for and, as luck would have it, I haven’t had a chance to pass this nugget of info to our government friend yet.”

  Gerry was too out of breath to question her.

  “I mentioned the place you were asking about,” Anise continued hurriedly. “But he was all focussed on the census books, and then on finding out what I knew about you. But once he got his hands on the books he was out again in a flurry.”

  “What place? What did you mention?”

  “Up on the western hillside of the valley. Beside that wonderful outcrop, the one shaped like a cresting wave. You can see that outcrop from my bedroom window. I can’t tell you how many times—”

  “Anise,” Gerry interrupted. “Please. What about it?”

  “Well, I had a brainwave, soon after you left. I’d have phoned you, but I couldn’t summon the courage. I thought you’d finished with me. And then, when your friend didn’t seem interested, I suppose it dropped out of my mind.”

  Gerry’s hands clenched. Her fingernails dug into her palms.

  “My dad was a bit of a heritage nut, you see. But when he talked about all the old occupations in the village, I never made the connection to that building up there on the hill.” She looked up, then blinked several times, as though only now realising the urgency of the situation. “A shepherd’s hut. That’s what it was, the ruins you wanted to know about. Well, probably a little bigger than that sounds, but not much. But it turns out that there was a whole family in there.”

  Gerry’s hands went to her mouth. “At the time of the Fall? You’re certain?”

  “I did a bit of detective work myself. I’m not sure I’d ever actually read those books in the library before. There was never any need to look anything up. It took a bit of cross-referencing, but what I realised was that all the other people with ‘shepherd’ listed as their occupation were tenant farmers, not landowners. So there was actually only one family that fit the bill.”

  “And you got the name? Please tell me you got the name.”

  “I did, I did. An odd name, though. Creepy.” Anise pulled a notepad from the pocket of her apron and began leafing through its pages. “Unlucky, I thought at the time, though I’m the superstitious type anyway.”

  Gerry looked up at the ceiling. Any attempt to hurry Anise would only slow her down.

  “Here,” Anise said. “Like I said. Unlucky.”

  She turned the notepad so that Gerry could read the four letters in shaky handwriting.

  HEXT.

  TWELVE

  “You’re late,” Russell said.

  Ixion approached slowly. The shadows of the underground car park made his hooded face a blank, but his body language was quite different. Instead of the usual confident stride, his walk was hesitant and his paces shorter.

  He stopped several feet from Russell and they faced each other in silence. A faulty exit sign blinked on and off behind the man’s head. It was hard to believe that outside it was still daytime. Russell felt a fool for agreeing to meet here again. He ought to be setting the agenda. He was the one in possession of evidence. Then again, like the fool he was, he had already described the contents of the floppy disk ov
er the phone.

  “So what does it mean?” he said.

  Ixion didn’t reply. His head tilted slightly.

  “I’m not going to hand it over without an explanation.”

  Tracking down one of the new three-and-a-half-inch disk drives had been tricky. At the first computer shop, the staff member who tried to help him was in his early twenties and had no idea what Russell wanted. At a larger chain store further along Botley Road, a series of assistants had been summoned before a senior manager had finally, proudly, produced a box from some back room. “Not yet available to the mass market,” he had said, and the thing had accordingly cost a small fortune. When Russell had finally arrived home and hooked up the disk drive to his Acorn computer, he had discovered that the disk contained a single file also labelled Clients, a spreadsheet with fields in only three columns. The first two were both unhelpfully labelled ‘Name’, and the third simply ‘#’.

  The names listed in the second column had caught his eye first. He recognised many of them from his own work diary. These were the people that Ellis had been meeting, at the Randolph, the Old Parsonage and various other upmarket locations in the centre of Oxford. At first the strings of digits in the column headed ‘#’ baffled him, until he recognised some as phone numbers.

  Then he had turned his attention to the names in the first column. A few of their surnames nagged at him. Hadn’t he shopped at a department store of that name? Hadn’t he seen those names on the list of benefactors at the Ashmolean and at the Natural History Museum? Further down the list, he discovered names that he recognised immediately. Nathan Fix, the CEO of Cormorant Media. Oma Williams, an up-and-coming Pinewood star who specialised in villainous roles requiring an affected American accent. Maxine Kemper, the inner-city property investor he had read a puff piece about in the Daily Counsel only last week, focussing on the assertion that non-Charmers were perfectly capable of making a fortune from the ground up.

  Some of the names featured umlauts and strings of consonants; this peculiarity triggered something in his mind. He looked again at the strings of digits in the ‘#’ column. Perhaps they were all phone numbers, but the unusual ones represented contacts in other countries – assuming foreigners had phones. The immensity of this breach of the law actually made him shudder. He searched for some of the British names in the phone book, to no avail. He had leafed through all of the reference books in the office and managed to locate several names in lists of board members of influential companies. One thing was clear. The people listed in the spreadsheet were stupidly wealthy.

  “What do you think it means?” the man said after a long pause. His tone of genuine uncertainty contrasted oddly with his too-loud, deep voice.

  Russell sensed that he was falling into the trap of giving information and receiving none, but he couldn’t think how to avoid a direct reply. “I think it means that there’s funny business going on. Money changing hands. I think it shows that whatever Ellis Blackwood – whatever the government – is up to goes beyond local funding and development, and beyond national security, even.”

  “Because.”

  “Is that supposed to be a question? You really need to work on your conversation skills. Because… Because the contents of this disk—” He patted his right jacket pocket, then wished he hadn’t. His intention had been to pretend he hadn’t brought it with him, if Ixion refused to answer his questions. “—show that the people involved are outside of the government. These ‘clients’ aren’t Party members, and they aren’t even Charmers as far as I can make out. Most of them aren’t even British, for goodness’ sake.”

  Ixion’s low sigh was wheezy, like radio static. He nodded.

  s“Do you know what it means?” Russell said.

  Once again, Ixion seemed reluctant to speak. Several seconds passed in silence before he replied, haltingly, “It means we have a lead.”

  Interesting. We, as opposed to I. Several times, Russell had wondered whether Ixion was operating alone. Would that have made the handing over of data more or less rash? Or more or less illegal?

  “What will you do?” he said. “And I insist that you tell me something about Nell Blackwood’s part in all of this.”

  Ixion’s silence might have indicated stubbornness or uncertainty. Russell imagined throttling the man, forcing him to speak. Perhaps it was down to the fact that this was their third meeting, but Ixion no longer seemed nearly so imposing. Russell realised that he was actually the slightly taller of the two of them.

  A small, gloved hand stretched out. “The disk, please.”

  In the weeks before all this intrigue had begun, Russell had spent his evenings working through a VHS box set of wildlife documentaries. Suddenly, he could think of nothing more pleasurable than locking the door to his flat, fetching his duvet and falling asleep to footage of tottering newborn foals. He pulled out the disk from his pocket and held it up.

  “Have you taken a copy?” the man said. His voice cracked slightly. Despite his deep pitch, he sounded anxious, or even afraid, or… young.

  “Of course not,” Russell replied. In fact, he had made two copies, after a great deal of fiddling with the computer. One of the disks was on top of his boiler, the other wedged into a hole behind his sofa where the skirting board had come away.

  Ixion gave a hollow chuckle. “Don’t let anybody find it.” His thin outstretched fingers twitched, beckoning.

  As Russell stepped forwards to offer the disk, with his other hand he pulled an object from his back pocket. The electrical-shop manager had nodded conspiratorially when Russell had described the other item he wanted to buy. “The old marital disharmony, am I right?” the manager had said with a smirk. “This is what you need, trust me. It’ll clip onto any item of clothing, light as a feather. She won’t feel the weight of it, no matter what she’s wearing.”

  The tracking device clipped onto Ixion’s jacket without a sound. Russell stepped away and tried to calm his breathing. Ixion gave no suggestion of having noticed.

  “Will you keep me updated?” Russell said.

  Ixion slipped the disk into his pocket. He shuffled backwards into the shadows, so that his diminutive outline became as difficult to make out as his face.

  “Thank you, Russell.”

  * * *

  Russell’s hand darted out to steady the tracking unit on the car dashboard. He looked up just in time to see the zebra crossing and the yellow-jacketed traffic warden striding to its centre. He slammed both feet onto the brake pedal. The car swerved from side to side and lurched to a stop. The engine stalled. The traffic warden glared at him and mouthed something indecipherable.

  Once a parade of toddlers had weaved its way across the road, Russell edged the car away, avoiding eye contact with the traffic warden and keeping the engine sawing away in first gear. He ignored the backed-up stream of cars behind him and fished beneath his seat for the tracking unit.

  The device was simple, with four bulbs at the ends of a cross printed onto its black surface. After he had set off in pursuit he had driven for five minutes, trying to orient himself north, before realising that the uppermost light represented a direction of travel – straight ahead – rather than a compass direction. After that, he’d broken the speed limit several times in his attempt to close the gap. Each bulb lit intermittently and there was no indication of distance. He was breathless from panic.

  Now the uppermost bulb was flashing on and off steadily. He guessed that meant he was close. He would have to proceed carefully. When he had left the underground car park he hadn’t seen which vehicle Ixion had taken.

  The car behind him sounded its horn. Russell accelerated away. In the rear-view mirror, the other driver showed him her middle finger.

  The bulb flickered faster and faster.

  He parked in a lay-by around the corner and hopped out of the car. The air was cool and refreshing. Each of the four bulbs began to light in turn, then all of them at once. The clipped tracking device must be very close.
<
br />   Half a dozen cars were parked in a row on the grass verge. All appeared empty. On the opposite side of the road was a wide, low building. A sixth-form college. Russell realised that he had been here before.

  It was Spencer Blackwood’s college.

  His stomach lurched. He thought again of Ixion’s slight figure, the uncertainty of his movements. The voice was harder to explain, but it was conceivable that it had been altered by some kind of mouthpiece.

  Was it really possible? Had he been meeting with his boss’s teenage son, all this time? All of this conspiratorial behaviour for the benefit of a shy, spotty kid.

  The next course of action was clear. He would call Spencer out on his pretence. Then, if there was anything to the conspiracy, they would discuss it as adults. He’d be damned if he was going to continue with the cloak-and-dagger game any more.

  An intercom was fixed beside the tall metal gates. Russell pushed the button and the intercom crackled.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Russell Handler. I’ve been sent by Ellis Blackwood, the MP. We’ve met before. Am I speaking to Freya?” When he had picked Spencer up from college before, the maternal receptionist had seemed quite taken with him.

  “No.” The voice fizzed with static. “Freya’s off ill. Got diarrhoea, she said.”

  “Minister Blackwood sent me here to collect his son. Spencer.”

  “Final bell isn’t for another half an hour.”

  “Well, not collect. I need to speak to him.” Russell winced. “To give him something.”

  The intercom went silent. “What is it, then?”

  “It’s private.”

  “Sounds weird.”

  “Look, the minister sent me. Ellis Blackwood. He’s quite an important man. I don’t know if you’re filling in for Freya while she’s suffering with – while she’s off ill – but I’d suggest that it’s probably not a good idea to—”

  “All right.”

  “Oh. Is it?”

  “I’ll send him out. I’m only here today, then I’m off to Butlins. Who gives a crap. I’ll bring him out.”

  Russell backed away from the intercom, baffled by his success. He began to pace up and down. What attitude should he take with Spencer? Paternal? Man-to-man? Or should he treat the boy totally seriously? Spencer wasn’t like other kids. Russell had always liked him. What if he had hidden his identity because he genuinely feared his father and whatever he was doing? Perhaps Russell was about to make a terrible mistake, outing Spencer in public.