The dual carriageway became a road became a track littered with leaves and mud. On either side, ploughed fields spread out, their furrows parallel to the road, perspective sucking all of their lines to a point straight ahead where a farmhouse with a sunken, defeated look sat waiting for them.
Sean ditched the car half a mile shy of the building, having turned it to face the opposite direction. He pocketed the keys and they took to the field. Hunched low to the ground they slowly neared the farmhouse, their breathing becoming more laboured, hanging like empty speech bubbles around their heads.
It was late in the afternoon and the sky was heavily bruised but no lights had come on in the farmhouse.
“We could be in luck,” Sean said. “It might be empty.”
“Wait,” she said. She drew him to her under the protective spread of an oak tree made naked by the cold. The bark of the tree was true and good. Somebody had carved their name in the wood, an ancient graffito professing love for another. The person who had scratched that wish might well be dead now. Emma clung to her man and her skin felt as crumbly and delicate as the tree’s. Sean had made his mark on it long ago, before he was aware of her, branding her with his heat. She had felt the scorch of it deep in her heart and she knew the warmth she felt now was partly down to Sean’s arms around her, but also partly due to the core of need he had fixed in her all those years ago. She wanted to make love to him here, now, but it was too cold and he was too focused.
Something about the farmhouse worried her. It might have been the way its slouched windows frowned down at her or the broad door beneath its arch, like an opened mouth. She held on to Sean and rubbed his back, ran her fingers through the clipped fuzz at his nape, and moved her body so that as much of its surface was in alignment with his. She searched for the things she wanted to say to him. She wanted to tell him she loved him, but the look in his eyes told her that he was fully aware of that.
“I don’t like it, Sean,” she whispered. “It doesn’t feel right. I’m not happy.”
Sean pulled back and placed the warm flat of his hand against her cheek. “It’s all right. We’ll be careful. Promise.”
She allowed herself to be escorted closer to the farmhouse, but the nearer they got, the more she felt repelled by the ugly building. Red curtains in the windows reminded her of the freshly harvested hide of animals her grandfather had hunted during her youth. She remembered one freezing morning in particular when she had been given the treat of accompanying him on a shoot in the fields near his house. She had trotted happily alongside him, the memory of the warmth of her bed lost to her but for a crumb of sleep in the corner of her eye and her pyjamas, which she had refused to take off and which provided an extra layer of warmth beneath the jumper and coat and trousers.
The sky had a bleached look about it. The sun was imminent, a burst yolk dribbling across the horizon. Chalky scratches in the blue told of aircraft nosing towards somewhere far away and much warmer than this starved place. Emma had gabbed away at the hawkish profile of her grandfather as he stalked across the frozen ridges of the field, shotgun broken across his arm, heading towards the mist-bound acres of the wood at its far end. She couldn’t remember what she had talked about – her dolls, maybe, or an enjoyable painting session at school. But she remembered turning around when the church bells tolled six to see the quickening sun pull the shine out of the spire and the clockface. For a moment, the church seemed to be on fire, and then she heard a mighty crack and she whirled to see her grandfather’s gun slotting smoothly into the cushion of his shoulder. She caught a brief glimpse of movement high to her right, a flutter of wings, and then came the explosion of the gun and she screamed, tears in her eyes before the retort’s echoes had spent themselves on the field’s furrows and fences.
He sent her to collect the downed wood pigeon and she did so, not because she wanted to – she could have been the definition of squeamish in the dictionary – but because her grandfather, in that moment, though she loved him enormously, had scared her more than anything else in her short life. His face had retained its shadows despite the sun’s attempts to pick them out. The smoke from his shotgun coiled around him, snagging on his clothes, his jaw, as if its true home was inside his body and it was struggling to return.
She picked the bird up by its legs and was grateful that there didn’t seem to be any blood, but when she had returned to her grandfather and he took the bird from her, she saw a streak of it on her hand. Her grandfather lifted it off with a thumb and daubed it against her forehead.
Sean said. “What is it?”
Emma touched the spot on her forehead and took a step back. “I can’t go in,” she said. “I won’t go in.”
“Okay,” he said. “That’s okay. But you know I have to.”
She nodded. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
He handed her the keys. “Go and sit in the cab,” he said. “Wait for me. I’ll be no more than fifteen minutes. If I’m not back by then, drive away and get the police. Tell them anything. Tell them you saw a murder here. Get a lot of police out here.”
She nodded. “I’m sorry.”
Sean kissed her hair and her mouth. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. He turned his back on her.
HE GOT IN through a rear window that had not been properly returned to its latch. His foot landed in something soft: a tray of dog food, he saw, as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. He realised instantly that he was not alone in the house and told himself that maybe that was a good thing. From deep inside the house came the sounds of exertion – grunts and thoughtless curses – and the squeal of wood as either its tensions were released or increased. It was the sound of light wind filling a sail, timber finding its own balance.
He padded to the door, taking care not to disturb any of the steel pots hanging from hooks on the wall. One of the pots was on the range, a thick skin having developed on its contents. Yesterday’s soup, by the look of it. In the hallway, about a dozen pairs of heavily muddied wellington boots stood to attention. The walls were festooned with brass and leather trinkets. A door on the right of the hall gave on to a drawing room with a fireplace, cold ashes in its hearth, and a table with a chess set, its pieces set up for a game that had managed just one move so far: king’s pawn advanced two squares. Classic, predictable. Sean smiled. He had the measure of these men. The paper tiger that was Ronnie Salt; the tragedy of Vernon Lord; Tim Enever who had impressed him at first, before it became clear that he was just a shabby fence. They were no-marks this lot, lowlife chancers who had hit the big time and were beginning to realise that it was a little bit too big for them.
He returned to the hall and whispered up the stairs. Momentarily, before he reached the landing, he thought he heard the beep of a car horn. He glanced out of the window up the lane to the taxi, the shape of which he could just see behind the hedgerow. No other cars.
Okay. Okay. Keep moving.
Bedrooms. Four of them. All empty. A bathroom. Ditto. He returned to the stairs. That creaking, squealing noise again. Very clearly, he heard a voice: Test it. Have a swing.
He was about to put his eye up against the crack in the door when he heard a chair being drawn back on its hind legs. He turned to see Vernon Lord standing by the chess set, looking at him. A gun was dangling from his right hand. His left held the chair and he was nodding his head, inviting him to sit.
“There’s always someone else who can do things better than you,” Vernon said as Sean entered the room. “You could practise for hours, finger shadows, perfecting a little rabbit, say, and someone will come along and do a honey osprey tearing a mouse apart.”
Sean sat in front of the black pieces. Vernon sat opposite, regarding the carved wooden figures with the interest a hungry man displays for a good steak. “Do you play?” he asked.
“I have done. When I was younger.”
“Course you have. Bright, healthy lad like you. With your big words and your gymnasium muscles. You look the part, mate, but you’re soft. You ta
lk the talk but you don’t walk the walk. You don’t even limp the walk.”
Sean said, “If you’re trying to get a rise out of me, you’ll have to try harder.” He moved his own king’s pawn, mirroring Vernon’s move.
“There’s a surprise,” Vernon noted. “Follow my leader. That’s you all over, isn’t it? You could have had what you wanted, you know? You could have been somebody instead of fucking using me to get inside, to get at us.” He swept the pieces to the floor with his left hand and brought the fist holding the gun crashing onto the board. The barrel dented the soft wood, its muzzle pointed at Sean’s gut. Vernon’s palms were raw with rope burns.
“All I want to know is,” Sean said, trying to keep his nervousness in check, “who was it that killed Naomi Clew?”
“Who the fuck,” Vernon sneered, “is Naomi Clew?”
“I can answer that.” Another figure at the door, removing his suede gloves finger by finger.
Sean turned in his seat. He moved his lips but the air rushing past them didn’t possess enough strength to carry the name. The man had been with him since childhood but had not been allowed to dally in his thoughts too often. A man that was as synonymous with misery and dread as any of the wraiths from the Brothers Grimm.
“Godspeed, Sean,” the other man said. “Long time no parlay.”
“I never thought I’d see you again,” Sean managed at last.
“Oh, I thought we’d bump into each other eventually. I was young when I saw you the first time. And I’ve kept myself fit, see? Five per cent body fat, you know. Five per cent. Not bad for a bloke pushing fifty-seven. D’you know, I’ve got cholesterol levels so low you’d have to be a worm to read them.”
He leaned against the back of a sofa and folded his hands neatly across his waist. Without switching his focus to Vernon Lord, he said: “Naomi Clew was one of the Inserts. The next wave. The new, improved, bright white, satisfaction-guaranteed-or-your-money-back Inserts that were being trained to go In Country to do for Mr. de Fleche, the bad man they wanted to tick off for trespassing.
“I was paid a hefty wedge, hefty for the 1980s anyhow, to blow these little bastards away. I’m still collecting a fair bit of interest on that pile, even though I didn’t make the first kill until Christmas.”
“You bastard,” Sean said. He could feel his heartbeat rising in his chest, in his throat, until it was sitting behind his ears, pulling tight the skin of his forehead.
“Hey, don’t have a go at me. I argued that we didn’t need to do it. You scarpered before I got the chance to open my account. But I had my orders from up high. They didn’t want to run the risk of your tiny minds being reactivated. They were quite happy to live with the fact that you might find it odd that you healed more quickly than the other girls and boys when you burned your fingers, but what did that matter, as long as you didn’t work out why?
“Truth be told, I have slowed down a bit over the years. And since it was you that found the Clew bint... do you realise, when you first knocked on the door, that she was still alive by the way? Since it was you that started up the itch in our little family’s balls that just would not be scratched, we had to call in outside help.” Here, Gleave’s smile faltered. “Not that it’s done us much good, it has to be said. But anyway. We seem to be on top of things now. Out of the three Inserts, Verny, only two are left, and they are both fucked.”
It became just another noise after a while, a noise that couldn’t get beyond the thrum of heat in his head. Even Vernon Lord seemed bored by Gleave’s speech.
“What is it you want?” Sean asked.
“I just want to plough my own furrow,” Vernon said. “I’m just making my own sweet way in the world.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Sean sneered. “You fucking evil piece of shit. You fucking body-snatcher.”
Vernon screwed up his face in mock disgust. “Ouch,” he said, and started laughing.
“You bent old bastard,” Sean continued, stoking his rage, letting it come, getting on top of it, controlling it for what he needed to do next. “You ancient, sad old has-been. But no, I’m being kind. Sad old never-was, more like.”
Vernon had stopped laughing and was stroking the butt of the gun. “Stop it right there, you little shit,” he said. Now it was Sean’s turn to laugh.
He said, “You think a gun can do me any harm, hey?” He got up and slapped Vernon hard across the face.
“You fuck!” Vernon screamed, lurching back and swinging the gun until it was flush with Sean’s forehead.
“Go on!” Sean screamed. “Go on!”
Gleave said, affably, “Do it, Vern. Shoot him.”
The sound of the blast in the closed room was enormous. A hole burst open in the back of Sean’s head that enabled Vernon Lord to watch the framed painting directly behind him take the exiting bullet. Sean staggered back and slumped onto his backside. His head slammed back into the fireplace and his hair caught fire. It smouldered, filling the room with a sickly-sweet scorching.
“Pull him out,” Gleave said, “before he catches fire.”
Vernon, his face red and puffy with exertion, stuffed the gun into the waistband of his trousers and reached down to grab Sean. The skin of his temples was being licked by the flame.
Sean said, “Get your fucking dirty old man’s hands off me.”
He sat up. The hole in his head was diminishing, slowly spiralling shut like the iris lens of a camera. Vernon Lord had frozen, his mouth open as if to take receipt of a spoonful of soup. Sean rammed the heel of his hand into the bridge of Vernon’s nose. The resultant snap was almost as shocking as the gunfire.
Gleave was inspecting his fingernails. Vernon sat dazed on the floor, a crimson hand trying to keep his nose on his face, looking bovinely at Gleave and then Sean and then Gleave again.
Sean said again, “What is it you want?” He could see out of the window that the taxi had vanished. Maybe Emma had heard the gunshot and decided to get help. He hoped she wouldn’t be long.
Gleave said, “Peter de Fleche is a great man. An architect, but not just of buildings. Of people and dreams and futures so wonderful they’d set your head spinning. He was a seer and a joker and a thaumaturgist. Him being over there, it’s paved the way for some amazing things. A dream centre here, maybe. Dream control. Could be huge.”
Sean said, “You killed my parents.”
Gleave’s face fell, his oration wasted. “He’ll be back soon, de Fleche. A glorious return. Once scum like you have been put in the earth. Once all the Negstreams have been sealed for good.”
Sean felt heat flood his fingers, his hands. His arms stiffened with intent. “You killed them.”
Gleave affected a demure look. “A trifling detail in my biography, but yes, you’re right, I bagged those cunts.”
Sean launched himself, knocking over the table and causing the remaining chess pieces to skitter across the floor.
“Kryptonite for Superman!” Gleave laughed, and turned his back coolly on Sean as he swung a fist for him. A length of rope fell on Sean from the balcony overlooking the room. It wasn’t just the weight of the rope or its tenacious coils that trapped him, but something in the rope, something that turned and twisted with its fibres and chilled him to the point of inaction. He felt weak, drained, as though he had just stepped from a long bath that was way too hot for him.
He watched Gleave through a net of grey walk towards a set of double doors. “That, my friend,” he said, “is shroud-laid rope. It consists of four strands wrapped around its heart. It is a strong rope, Sean. And that particular coil is an ageless specimen. Its loops have held dreamships steady in the harbours of the mind. That length has known so many knots and splices. Knots that have been tied by sailors from distant lands and distant centuries. Maybe a million hands have shaped that rope into what? – sheet bends and true-lovers’ knots; the blackwall hitch, the sheepshank, the hackamore. It’s the only weapon your lot understand. It’s my gun and it’s cocked, every chamber fi
lled; the muzzle is pointing at your heart.”
Gleave snapped the handle of the door down and let it swing open.
“It’s a long rope, isn’t it, Sean? I wonder where the other end of it could be? Hey, let me tell you, Sean, how to create a bowline knot. Let me show you how.”
Through the grey net that pulsed and shivered over his eyes, pledging to take him down into unconsciousness, he saw into the adjoining room. The rope snaked deep into it and rose into the air. Emma was swinging by the neck on the end of it, which had been lashed to a wooden tie-beam that traversed the width of the room. Her face was black and her tongue hung from her mouth, almost reaching as far as her collarbone. One of her shoes had slipped off. She swung like a metronome, ticking off the beat of his misery. He could still smell the apples in her hair.
The grey net turned black and he was saved from seeing any more.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE: THE BURN
DE FLECHE HAD approached him with the timid politeness of an elderly man who wants to know the time, or directions to the library. His smile was disarming, but there was something about his eyes that unsettled Will. They looked as though they belonged to someone else, as if this body had come across them by luck, or poached them from another. They were too bright and vibrant for this vessel. De Fleche’s head flopped against his shoulder at a sickening angle as though he had no bones in his neck. He regarded Will almost curiously, the bizarre set to his head giving him a shy appearance.
“You help the man, the woman, yes? You tell them runaway chop-chop?”
Will bore down on his distaste. The voice was loose and phlegmy and sounded as though it were travelling to him over a bed of smashed glass. The smell that floated off the man’s lolling tongue – the size of a dog’s tongue – was rank in the extreme.
“I don’t know them.”
“You don’t? You chit-chat away like old friends. Talking weather? Talking sport? Talking who is poking who?” A forefinger stabbed into the O made with his other hand.
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