Drake crossed the Great Plain on foot, taking just under two days to reach the Miners’ Station, where he stowed away in one of the empty cars halfway down the train. He didn’t have long to wait before it left — a few soldiers from the Division boarded the guard’s car and it heaved out of the station. He was ready with the Limiter rifle if any of them decided to carry out a snap inspection of the rest of the train, but they never came. That was unusually sloppy of them.
And when the train drew into the Colony station, Drake couldn’t believe his luck. As he clambered out of the mammoth car and dropped by the trackside, he was stunned that the portal was completely unattended. So it was child’s play to get into the streets of the Colony. But once there, he found that a thick black smoke permeated the air. As he entered the huge expanse of the South Cavern, he was met by a strange sight. Broad columns of smoke rose up right in the middle of it, glowing with a fiery redness that illuminated the rock canopy high above.
“The Rookeries,” Drake said to himself. It was clear that something earth-shattering was taking place, and he had to see it for himself. He stole closer, until he was at the outskirts.
Legions of soldiers from the Styx Division bordered the area, brandishing burning torches. Drake saw figures frantically trying to fight their way out of the Rookeries and through the solid cordon of soldiers, and heard the screams as they were slaughtered. Again and again the desperate occupants of the Rookeries, their clothes burning and their faces blackened with smoke, attempted to get through. But each time one broke from an alleyway, they were brutally cut down by the soldiers, who were wielding their scythes like the farmers of old, harvesting corn.
Other Styx, in their long black coats and white collars, strode imperiously behind the lines of soldiers, shouting orders. The systematic destruction of the Rookeries was in progress — for centuries the Styx had allowed the rebels and malcontents of the Colony’s population to persist in their self-contained ghetto, but now the decision had evidently been taken to eradicate this “underbelly.” Drake watched as a four-story building collapsed in on itself, and in the avalanche of old masonry he glimpsed human forms … worst of all, children … their small limbs waving helplessly as they were crushed by the cascades of limestone blocks.
There, hidden in the shadows, this toughest of men, who had survived years of hardship, both at the hands of the Styx and in the Deeps, broke down and wept. The inhumanity of what he was witnessing was almost too much for him to bear. And there was absolutely nothing he could do, just one man against so many Styx, to stop the atrocity.
With the radio blaring a Turkish station and the maxed-out heater filling the interior with scorching warmth, the minicab rocketed through the streets. As if the driver knew the synchronization of every set of traffic lights, time and time again he managed to squeeze through on the amber or just as they’d turned red. And he didn’t even seem to notice the numerous speed bumps in the roads, with the result that Mrs. Burrows was bounced in her seat as surely as if she was on a runaway camel.
A heavy rain was falling, but she wound the window all the way down and leaned her head against the door frame so that it caught the rushing air. As she relished the breeze and the raindrops on her face, she let her unfocused gaze skim over the shiny-wet pavements. She lost herself in the random lines and patches of light reflected in them from the shop fronts, not really thinking about anything in particular, but feeling a sense of liberation after her time in Humphrey House.
She looked up, seeing where they were with some surprise. “Highfield?”
“Yes, the roads, they are clear tonight,” the driver commented.
“I used to live here,” she replied, as they sped past the turn-off that would have taken her to Broadlands Avenue.
“Used to?” the driver inquired. “No more home?”
“No,” she said.
She’d sold the house at the peak of the market, and it had provided her with a tidy sum to live on. Although she no longer owned the property, she felt an unexpected tug to see it, to go back and look at the old place one last time. Even though that chapter in her life had ended, there was so much left unresolved. “No more home,” Mrs. Burrows whispered, telling herself that it wasn’t the time to indulge herself with a visit. She had more pressing matters to attend to.
As they drove down Main Street, there were the shops she knew so well. She saw the dry cleaner’s, and the newsstand where they had bought their papers and magazines. Then she spotted that the window of Clarke’s had been boarded up, as if it was no longer in business. The old-fashioned fruit and vegetable shop had been a firm favorite of Rebecca’s, something Mrs. Burrows always thought rather odd when there was a perfectly good supermarket that would do home deliveries. Finally, they passed the museum where her husband had worked, but Mrs. Burrows looked in the opposite direction. For her it was a place of failure, a monument to her stifled expectations.
The cab left Highfield and very soon had reached the junction with the North Circular road. A battered white car with the stereo at an impossible volume drew up beside them as they stopped for the light. It was crammed full of passengers, and through one of the open windows a young girl fixed Mrs. Burrows with an insolent stare. Probably only two or three years older than Rebecca, the girl looked tired, with dark smudges under her eyes, and her shoulder-length hair was limp, as if badly in need of a wash. Her cold eyes were still fixed aggressively on Mrs. Burrows as she spat out a piece of chewing gum, which hit the door of the minicab.
“What you do, dirty pig!” the driver exclaimed loudly, flicking his hand at the girl. He revved the engine furiously. “I wouldn’t let my little girl be doing thing like that.”
The girl was still trying unsuccessfully to stare Mrs. Burrows down. “No, I wouldn’t, either. I always know exactly where my daughter is — at home, safe and sound,” she declared.
“Me, too, but these people have no respect,” the driver said, leaning forward over his steering wheel to glare at the other car. “No respect,” he repeated, as he floored the accelerator and cut off the white car, sounding his horn as he did so.
Forty minutes later, they had crossed the river and were several blocks from the housing projects where three massive apartment complexes dominated the landscape. Mrs. Burrows thought she could see which of the three Auntie Jean’s flat was in, but every road they went down only seemed to take them farther away from it. The driver had given up using his A to Z street guide, and was relying entirely on Mrs. Burrows to remember the way.
“This looks vaguely familiar,” she said.
“South London. It all looks the same,” the driver chuckled, shaking his head dismissively. “No, thank you for me.”
“Wait a minute — I remember this — take a left here,” Mrs. Burrows instructed him. “Yes, I’m pretty certain this is it,” she said as she spotted the tower block that was indeed Mandela Heights. Then they turned down a cul-de-sac, and the minicab squealed to a halt.
“We are here,” he announced.
Mrs. Burrows got out of the minicab and collected her bags from the trunk. Then she gave the driver a hugely over-generous tip.
“God bless you and all your family,” he called after her as she lugged her bags into the entrance. She looked at the bank of buttons for the apartments, most of them vandalized, but then saw that the main doors were open, anyway. She went straight in and found, miracle upon miracle, that the elevator was working, though no less smelly than she remembered it. It shuddered up to the thirteenth floor and the doors scraped back.
“For goodness’ sake!” Mrs. Burrows grumbled as she stepped over a pool of vomit directly outside the elevator.
She pressed the doorbell and waited. Then she tried again, ringing for longer this time. After a while there was a scuffling sound from behind the door, and Mrs. Burrows noticed that someone was looking at her through the peephole.
“Open up, will you, Jean!” Mrs. Burrows said to the peephole. Still the door remained shut,
so Mrs. Burrows simply left her finger on the button. It took several minutes before her sister finally wrenched open the door.
“Who the ’ell do you think you are?” she shouted, huffing furiously, the ever-present cigarette tucked in the corner of her mouth. She was wearing her old housecoat, and her gray hair was sticking up on one side as if she’d slept on it.
“Hello, Jean,” Mrs. Burrows said.
Auntie Jean squinted at her, then shuffled a step back, as if this was the only way she could focus on the person standing there. “Celia! It’s you!” she shouted, her mouth gaping so wide the cigarette spiraled from her lips and struck the bald carpet with a tiny display of red sparks.
“Well, can I come in, then?”
“Course, course you can.” Her sister first had to extinguish the cigarette butt, which was burning a hole in her carpet. “‘Ow d’you know I’d be in, anyway?”
“When do you ever go out, Jean?” Mrs. Burrows said as she picked up her bags. The hallway was cluttered with piles of discarded newspapers, as it always was, and the air smelled sour.
“You shoulda rung first, just in case,” her sister said, then hacked loudly.
“I did. You hung up on me.”
Auntie Jean seemed not to have heard this. “Fancy a cuppa?” she offered as they went into the kitchen. “Thought you were in that Herbert House place, with all them doctors? They let you out, then?”
“I decided it was time to leave,” Mrs. Burrows said as she surveyed the appalling state of the kitchen. In the same breath, she asked, “I really thought Rebecca would’ve had this place spick-and-span by now. Where is she, anyway? In her room?”
Auntie Jean turned and blinked at her. “No,” she said — only it sounded more like a combination of “No” and a surprised “Oh.”
“What?”
“She’s gone.”
“What do you mean she’s gone?” Mrs. Burrows’s face blanched. She took a sudden step toward her sister, knocking a polished wooden bowl of half-rotted bananas and an overflowing ashtray from the table.
“Took herself off yonks ago. Packed her bags and walked out, she did.” Auntie Jean couldn’t look her sister in the face, as if she knew she had done something wrong. “I’m sorry, Celia, but I want nothing more to do with ’er. Little guttersnipe ruined all me ciggies and poured me —”
“But, Jean!” Mrs. Burrows grabbed her sister and shook her. “You were supposed to be looking after her for me. For heaven’s sake, she’s only twelve years old! When and where did she go?”
Auntie Jean was slow in answering. “I told you — it was yonks ago. And I dunno where she went. I left a message with the woman from social services ’bout it, but she never called me back.”
Mrs. Burrows released her sister and yanked one of the chairs from under the table, knocking more items to the floor. She sat down heavily, her mouth open, forming words but not actually saying anything.
Leaning against the sink, Auntie Jean was waving her hands and burbling on when she stopped and said, “Then Will came by with his cousin.”
Mrs. Burrows turned her head slowly toward her sister. “I’m sorry, did you just say Will? My son, Will?”
“Yes, ’e came by with ’is cousin. And they brought that lovely big pussycat, Bartleby, with ’em —”
“But Will’s been missing for six months. You know that. There’s a nationwide investigation going on for him and his friend Chester.”
“Can’t tell you ’bout no Chester, but all I can say is Will was ’ere ’bout two months ago. ‘E wasn’t well when ’e got ’ere, but that Cal — what a lovely boy — ’e nursed Will back to ’ealth. And Bartleby! Ain’t never laid eyes on a big cat like that before, ’cept down the zoo.”
“Big cat?” Mrs. Burrows said, without any emphasis. “Big cat?” She selected one of the many empty vodka bottles from the table and took it in her hand. She didn’t speak for a while, simply staring at the silver-and-red label. In the silence, all that could be heard in the small room was a rattle, then a low hum, as the fridge’s cooling system started up.
“It’s funny, but our Bessie’s been ‘aving bother with ’er eldest, too. ‘E ‘ad a bit of an episode and …” Auntie Jean trailed off, realizing that her effort to divert Mrs. Burrows from the matter with family gossip wasn’t going to pass muster.
Her eyes still locked on the silver-and-red label, Mrs. Burrows gave a small shake of her head, but remained silent. Auntie Jean grew increasingly agitated, until she suddenly blurted out, “Celia, speak to me! ‘Ow d’you expect me to know ’e was still missing? Why ain’t you saying nothing?”
Mrs. Burrows carefully replaced the empty bottle, sliding it back from the edge of the table as if it was a valuable ornament. She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, then she raised her eyes to her sister.
“Because, Jean, right now I don’t know whether I should call the police or … or whether I need to get you put away somewhere because you have so obviously lost the plot. Or maybe both.”
Following the frantic messages Mrs. Burrows left at the Highfield police station, someone finally managed to track down DI Blakemore. He rang back, and Mrs. Burrows had a lengthy conversation with him, explaining what she’d just learned. In thirty minutes flat, he turned up with a second DI from the local police station and a team of forensic officers.
“Looks like someone’s already started to strip this place apart” were his first words as he entered the hallway and surveyed the scattered letters and newspapers on the carpet.
“Oh, bloody brilliant,” one of the forensic officers behind him muttered resentfully. “We’ve got a hoarder here, lads,” he said to his colleagues. “Better call your wives and tell them you’re going to be working late.”
In seconds the police were searching everywhere, and Mrs. Burrows and her sister were carted off to the local station, where they were interviewed separately and both had to give statements.
It wasn’t until late Sunday morning that they were brought back to the projects in a squad car. Quite a few of Auntie Jean’s possessions had been bagged up and removed. The flat, although still in a state of disarray, actually looked considerably tidier than it had before the forensic team began to search it. At least the policemen had organized all the old newspapers and letters into piles and taken away the trash bags in the kitchen to check through their contents. Fingerprint powder had been left on most of the surfaces throughout the apartment, although one would be hard pressed to tell it apart from the dust that had been there before.
The two sisters, not bothering to remove their coats, flopped into the armchairs in the living room. They both looked exhausted.
“I’m dying for a gasper,” Auntie Jean announced and, finding a packet close by, pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “Ah, that’s better,” she said after a couple of heavy puffs. With the cigarette clenched between her lips, she cast about until she found the TV remote. “’Ere you go,” she said as she handed it to Mrs. Burrows, who took it from her automatically. “Watch whatever you like.”
Mrs. Burrows’s finger twitched over the buttons, but she didn’t press any of them. “Now I’ve lost not only my husband but both my children. And the police think I’m responsible. They think I’ve done it.”
Auntie Jean stuck out her chin as a cloud of smoke all but hid her face, “They can’t think —”
“Oh, they do all right, Jean,” Mrs. Burrows interrupted her loudly. “They asked me for a full confession. One of them even used the words ‘spill the beans.’ They’ve got some looney-tunes theory that my ‘accomplices’ kidnapped Will, but he came here after he managed to slip away from them. And don’t ask me what they think I’ve done with Roger and Rebecca, or Chester. I reckon they’ve got me down as Highfield’s first serial killer!”
Auntie Jean tried to grunt with indignation, but it triggered a rather unpleasant hacking cough.
“Are you certain Will didn’t mention anything at all about where he’d been?” Mrs. Burr
ows quizzed her after she’d managed to stop coughing.
“No, not a dickey bird. But wherever it was, I ‘ad the feeling ’e was going back there,” Auntie Jean said. “And ’e was taking the little lad, ’is cousin Cal, wiv ‘im.”
“I told you — there’s no one on Roger’s side of the family called Cal.”
Auntie Jean blinked wearily. “Whatever you say,” she mumbled. “I remember Cal didn’t like it ’ere much — ’e really wanted to get down south again.”
“Down south?” Mrs. Burrows repeated thoughtfully. “And you said this younger boy was the spitting image of Will?”
Auntie Jean nodded. “Peas in a pod.”
Mrs. Burrows stared at the blank television screen as her mind swam with various explanations. “So, if the mystery woman who turned up at Humphrey House was Will’s real mother, what if this other boy was his brother?” she posed.
Auntie Jean raised an eyebrow. “’Is brother?”
“Yes, why not?” Mrs. Burrows replied. “It’s not out of the question. And you said Will was furious with Rebecca?”
“Oh yes,” Auntie Jean said, ejecting a spout of smoke. “It was like ’e ’ated her, yet was a bit frightened of ’er, too.”
Mrs. Burrows shook her head with a mystified expression. “I’ve got to get to the bottom of all this. It’s like when I miss the beginning of a movie, and I have to try to figure out what’s already happened.”
Auntie Jean mumbled something about needing a drink, then yawned loudly.
“And to figure out this particular story, I need to go back to where it all started,” Mrs. Burrows announced as she rose to her feet. She contemplated the TV remote still in her hand. “And I certainly won’t be needing this,” she said as she chucked it into her sister’s lap, then hurried from the room.
Freefall Page 6
