Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2

by Louise Welsh

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Jacob pushed the final edge of the plastic beneath Henry’s head.

  ‘What can I do? Maybe it was one of our group, maybe it was a stranger. I’ll keep my eyes open and try and make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.’

  ‘It could have been Jeb or me, we’re strangers.’

  Jacob gave a weird grin. ‘Was it?’

  ‘No,’ Magnus said. ‘It wasn’t.’

  Jacob nodded. He looked Magnus in the eye. ‘It wasn’t me either.’

  Twenty-Eight

  The combine harvester they had found was bigger than the one his father had rented each year for the croft and Magnus guided it slowly through the ripe field of corn. Jacob sat in the cab beside him to ‘learn how it was done’, but Magnus was aware of the gun on the priest’s hip and his own lack of weapon. They were each wearing ear mufflers they had found on the driver’s seat, ready for a harvest that had come too soon for some now-dead farmer and his mate. It was too noisy to talk and neither of them had mentioned Henry’s body. Magnus was glad of the noise. Murder or not, there was nothing he could do about it. He liked the faint, familiar rumble of the combine’s engine, the smell of newly felled corn and the uneven jolt of the field beneath the machine. Sweat was beading his forehead and trickling down his back, but the task felt clean. There was something purifying in the labour and even with Jacob riding shotgun it gave him space to think. He would leave Tanqueray as soon as he had cut the three fields of corn they had agreed on.

  Magnus had visited Jeb and told him about Henry. One of the puppies had been curled on the floor of the room, chewing at the bedside rug’s fringes. Jeb had stretched out a hand, caught hold of the dog by the scruff of its neck and pulled it to its feet. He rubbed the dog’s ears. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t Jacob who did it?’

  It was a typical police response, Magnus decided, blame the nearest person, but he kept the thought to himself. ‘Why would you think that?’

  The dog made a lunge for Jeb’s shirt sleeve and he batted it away. ‘You saw the way he shot the guy who attacked us. He blew his head off with no warning. Jacob’s a soldier. He knows how to handle a gun. Okay, the man had a machete, but Jacob could have taken him out with a hit to the leg, a hit to the body if he wasn’t sure of his aim.’ The puppy jumped at Jeb’s sleeve again. He cuffed it gently on the back of its head and it trotted out of the room. ‘Jacob went for the execution shot. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful, but if you’re looking for a killer I’d say Father-armed-and-dangerous is an obvious candidate.’

  Magnus had wondered at the way Jacob had shot the Audi driver, but he had seen the grim set of the priest’s mouth as he looked at Henry’s wounds.

  ‘He took us to the body. Why would he do that if he had killed him?’

  Jeb leaned forward, still stern, but more confident than Magnus had seen him since the accident.

  ‘What’s the point in putting on a display if there’s no one there to admire it? We were trained to look out for the neighbour who’s a little too nosy about the crime scene; the person who’s over-eager to offer an opinion to the news cameras; the man or woman who knows a little too much.’ Jeb opened the desk drawer and took out a pencil and a piece of paper. ‘Describe what you saw in as much detail as you can remember.’

  Magnus looked out at the trees beyond the window. Jeb’s story about Cherry and Happy was harder to imagine by daylight. It seemed to belong to the night. He wondered about the truth of it; the woman jumping to her death with the child in her arms, the last terrified look at the world the girl had given before she was plunged into the sky beyond the balcony. Magnus’s trust in Jeb was wavering again, but he found that he wanted to tell him about Henry’s butchered body, the way the priest had touched the wounds gently with the nub of his gun. How he had tucked the dead man tight in plastic, as if preserving him for another day.

  Jeb listened silently, jotting down the occasional note. He nodded when Magnus mentioned the lack of defence cuts and the red weals Jacob had said were caused by handcuffs. When Magnus finished Jeb said, ‘I’d like to talk to the priest about this. Do you think you can get him to visit me?’

  Magnus had promised to see what he could do.

  The corn toppled beneath the combine’s blades in rows that were less straight than his father would have approved of, but which gave Magnus a forgotten sense of pride. He would find a van somewhere, pick up his abandoned motorbike, replace its damaged tyre and press on for Scrabster. The van would speed his progress and the bike would ensure he was not stalled by some obstacle: a tangle of abandoned cars, a collapsed bridge or a barricade that a larger vehicle could not negotiate. When he got to Orkney, Magnus would be able to tell his mother and Rhona (please God let them be alive) that he had done something good.

  Jacob was saying something to him. Magnus lifted his muffler, but the words were lost in the din of the engine. The priest pointed at the ignition. Magnus killed the engine and drew the combine to a halt.

  Jacob said, ‘Ready for a break?’

  ‘I can keep going for another hour.’ Every moment he worked was a moment closer to leaving.

  ‘I’m ready for a break and I think you should have one too. These are dangerous machines. It doesn’t do to drive them for too long.’ Jacob slung the bag with their water and sandwiches in it around his body, opened the cab door and climbed down into the field.

  Magnus said, ‘I’ve been driving these beasts since I was sixteen. I don’t need to be told when to have a break.’

  His father had been working his neighbour Bobby Bird’s field since sun-up on the evening he died. Bobby supplemented the yield from his croft by working in a bank in Stromness. He paid for the combine’s rental and Magnus’s father cut Bobby’s crop, then used the machine to harvest his own fields.

  ‘I told him not to batter it,’ Bobby had said tearfully to Magnus at the funeral, ‘but you ken your faither, God bless his soul, he wouldn’t touch his ain fields till he had done mine and he was feart the rain was coming in.’

  His father had been right. It had rained for three days after his death; torrential, biblical, sheets of rain. Bobby and the rest of their neighbours had worked in it, Magnus, Rhona and his cousin Hugh with them, to bring in his father’s crop. But it had not brought the man back.

  Magnus got out of the cab, slammed the door and jumped down into the stubbled corn. The sky was blue and almost cloudless. There were no jet streams intersecting in the sky, white on blue like ragged saltires. Jacob tipped a water bottle to his mouth. He wiped his chin with the back of his hand and then reached into his bag and passed another bottle to Magnus who unscrewed its lid and took a drink. Jacob was wearing dark Ray-Bans that contrasted oddly with his dog collar. It was hard to see his eyes, but Magnus could feel the priest watching him.

  Jacob said, ‘Did you tell anyone about Henry?’ Magnus considered lying, but he hesitated a moment too long and the priest asked, ‘Who? Jeb?’

  ‘He used to be a policeman. I thought he might be able to tell whether it was murder or not.’

  Jacob nodded. ‘The same thought crossed my mind.’

  Magnus said, ‘He told you he used to be in the police? You’re privileged.’

  ‘He didn’t have to tell me.’ The priest smiled, his eyes still hidden. ‘Jeb Soames is distinctive. He’s changed, grown a decade older in two or three years, but I got a feeling of déjà vu when I was setting his leg. The pain brought out those big bones in his forehead. It took me a while to place him, but then I remembered a newspaper photograph of him wearing the same expression as he was taken into court on the first day of his trial.’ The priest paused as if something had just occurred to him. ‘Do you know his history?’

  The sun was warm on the back of his neck. Magnus took a hanky from his pocket and mopped his face with it.

  ‘He told me some of it. He wanted to convince me he was innocent.’

  ‘Did he succeed?’

  Magnus though
t for a moment. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The judge and jury thought he was guilty.’ The priest’s voice was neutral, as if guilt and innocence were all the same to him. ‘The newspapers did too. Jeb was bulkier in the photo, like a human battering ram. I remember wondering how a man his size could bring himself to lay violent hands on a child.’ Jacob stared up the field at the rolled bales of harvested corn. ‘The girl who died was the same age as my younger daughter. Maybe that’s why the story stuck in my mind.’

  Magnus said, ‘And you don’t mind having him here?’

  ‘If I’d realised who he was when we first met, I might have walked away …’ The priest shrugged. ‘He’s here now. Maybe God intended it that way.’ He tilted his water bottle to his mouth and drank. ‘Is he getting close to Belle?’

  ‘I think he feels sorry for her.’

  The priest took off his Ray-Bans, wiped his eyes and put them back on. There were dark shadows beneath his eyes.

  ‘Love is the thing that will make the post-sweats world bearable, love and children; new life. But it’s probably best if Jeb doesn’t get too close to Belle. From what I remember of the press coverage she’s rather too like the woman he killed for any good to come of it.’ Magnus was about to say that Jeb might still be innocent, but the priest asked, ‘What did he say about poor Henry?’

  Magnus shrugged. ‘Nothing much, just that he’d like to talk to you about it.’

  ‘Did he tell you that he thought it was probably me who killed him?’

  ‘No,’ Magnus lied. There were whole fields surrounding them and no one to care if Jacob should decide to aim his gun and shoot. He went north, the priest would say, home to his family. ‘Why would he think that?’

  ‘I would in his position. You’ve already seen me kill and I was the one who found the body. I reckon that makes me a prime candidate.’ Jacob grinned. ‘Don’t look so worried. I’ve no intention of burying you among the corn. At least not until we get our three fields done.’ He reached into his bag and took out the bread and cheese he had been wrapping in wax paper when Magnus had joined him in the kitchen early that morning. ‘Next year at harvest we’ll be eating bread made with our own flour.’

  ‘I won’t be here.’

  Jacob passed Magnus one of the doorstop sandwiches he had made.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll come back.’

  Magnus bit into cheddar and home-made pickle. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I don’t blame you, I suppose, but you’d be a valuable asset to a new community like ours.’ The priest sat on the step of the combine. He took off his glasses, though the sun was still skull-cracking sharp and his eyes creased against its glare. ‘I know what Jeb was convicted of, but I don’t really know anything about you.’

  Magnus looked across the fields. The flatness of the land gave the illusion that you could see for ever, but there were plenty of places for people to hide among the long corn and he wondered if anyone was watching them.

  ‘I was a comic. I was doing okay and had the potential to do better. I might have been at a turning point in my career, or it might have been another false dawn. I’ll never know.’

  The priest’s eyes were almost as blue as the sky. Like bits of broken glass, his wife had said. He asked, ‘Why were you in prison?’

  Magnus’s sandwich caught in his throat. He coughed, tried to swallow and coughed again. When he had caught his breath he asked, ‘How did you know?’

  The priest sat with his legs stretched out in front of him. He bit into his doorstop as if he were at a Sunday-school picnic that had done away with daintiness.

  ‘I didn’t. I just made a guess.’

  Magnus shook his head at his own stupidity. ‘I was innocent. I hadn’t gone to trial and when I did, I would have been released.’

  The priest had finished his sandwich. He took an apple out of his bag and polished it against his shirt. ‘Why don’t you tell me what happened?’

  ‘What’s the point?’

  Jacob glanced at his apple, rubbed it against his shirt some more and then bit into its flesh. ‘I want to be able to trust you.’

  It was difficult to know where to begin and so Magnus told him about the Dongolite falling beneath the train, the drunken evening in Johnny Dongo’s hotel room, the fist Johnny had put in his face and the man pawing at the drugged girl in the alleyway. Once he had begun, Magnus found he needed to go on and so he told the priest about Pete dying slowly in the bunk beneath him, the man he had hit – killed – with the fire extinguisher. He even found himself telling Jacob about his father, caught in the blades of the combine and his cousin Hugh, walking into the sea, until the water covered him and the rocks in his backpack dragged him under. Magnus stopped suddenly, feeling lighter, but knowing that shame would soon follow. The priest tossed his apple core into the field beyond.

  ‘The absence of so many people makes the past seem stronger. We need to grieve, but we need to start making a future too.’ He took his Ray-Bans from his pocket and fingered them, as if he needed to give his hands something to do. ‘I thought about telling Father Wingate my suspicions, he’s my spiritual adviser.’ Jacob smiled. ‘We’re each other’s spiritual advisers. But however wise he is, he’s an old man who has been through a lot. He views the coming of the sweats as an opportunity to build a better society. I’m not sure what discovering there is still wickedness in the world might do to him.’ The priest looked up at Magnus, his eyes narrowed against the sun. ‘I had my suspicions about Melody’s death before we found Henry. There was something about the position of the chair she supposedly stood on to hang herself. It was lying too far from her body. I marked the spot and after we buried her I experimented with it. I’m taller and stronger than Melody was, but no matter how many times I kicked that chair away, it always fell short of where it was lying when we found her. I asked Henry if he had moved it, but he swore blind he hadn’t. At the time I convinced myself he had forgotten he’d done it. He was in a state of shock. But now that we’ve found Henry …’

  Magnus said, ‘What’s keeping you here? Why don’t you leave?’

  The priest put on his sunglasses, hiding his eyes again behind their dark lenses.

  ‘We have a perfect spot. Father Wingate’s right, it has the potential to be one of the foundations of a new society.’

  ‘There are other perfect spots.’

  ‘Which will also present their own problems. I’ve never been one for running away. If someone is killing people then I’d rather find them.’

  There was something final in the priest’s voice. Magnus said, ‘What will you do with them, if you find them?’

  The priest took a last swig from his water bottle and screwed its cap back on. He looked across the fields, as if he too wondered if anyone was watching them.

  ‘I was always a New Testament man, but we seem to find ourselves in Old Testament times.’

  Twenty-Nine

  Raisha came to him that night. The image of her tramping the countryside, seeking dead children to bury, had lodged itself in Magnus’s mind. He had wondered how he would be if she were to seek him out – could he stand hands that had cradled rotting flesh caressing his flesh? He was asleep when Raisha clicked open the bedroom door. A gust of cool air entered with her and Magnus woke a moment before she pulled back his sheets and slid naked into bed beside him. He flinched and she whispered, ‘Is it okay?’

  Magnus had begun to think of Raisha as a ghost flitting across the landscape in search of other ghosts, but now that she was beside him he could feel the heat of her body, the soft smoothness of her skin.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he answered, keeping his voice low, though there was no one there to hear or care what they did. He wanted to tell her that he would be leaving soon, but then her mouth was on his, warm and sweet, with no hint of the grave.

  A shaft of sunlight stretched into his room at dawn and prised Magnus’s eyes apart. Raisha was gone. The sensation of having been used and cast away struck him as a femini
ne one, and he tried to be amused by it, but the feeling haunted him for the rest of the day, a kernel of sadness wedged in his chest that the motion of the combine could not dislodge.

  There were four of them on the harvest crew now. Will and Belle worked the cut field gathering bales of corn with the aid of a forklift and a truck; a no-health-and-safety-team-of-two. Magnus and Jacob took turns on the combine, Magnus instructing the priest who learned quickly.

  In the old days, before mechanisation, harvest time had forced communities to unite in hard work. Technology had killed that necessity. Magnus’s father had complained about mega-farms and their obsessions with yields, but he had loved the ease of the combine, the blades that could fell a crop quicker than the sweats had felled London. Magnus tried to conjure his father’s voice, but it was lost in the din of the engine.

  Magnus remembered black-and-white photographs of his great-grandfather tilling his field behind a horse-drawn plough. He had risen with the dawn and gone to bed when the sun set. The misery of the long-bright, short-dark, repetitions of the seasons washed over him. London had been alive. Now it and all the other great cities, Paris, New York, Beijing, Mumbai and Moscow, were nothing but names on old radio dials. The loss of it all hit him again. If Magnus had been alone he might have stopped the combine and wept, but the priest was there and so he set his jaw and pressed on through the falling corn.

  The sun was fading into a rose-blush sunset when they eventually arrived back at the big house. Father Wingate had promised to cook ‘something hearty’ for their return. ‘Something hearty’ turned out to be a large pot of brown lentils and another of brown rice. Father Wingate said a hurried grace over the food before slopping generous servings into bowls.