Looking at the solid form that was now rearing up on its knees over Pym, I didn’t think it would do him or me much good at all.
Chapter Eighteen
I was wrong. The cosh did do some good. I drew up behind the figure who was throttling Pete Pym and swung it down behind the ear, exactly as I’d been taught years ago on the auxiliary training programme. The blow made the attacker stiffen and take his hand off Pym’s neck, his upper body still upright. Then he turned towards me. I wasn’t waiting for an introduction. I belted him again, this time above the eye on the other side of his head. Still the bastard didn’t go down; he didn’t even flinch.
Pete Pym let out a long gasp. That was a relief – at least he was still alive. The sound seemed to affect the assailant. He was male all right, his muscular frame and bull neck more imposing even than those of the most fearsome prop forward in the inter-barracks rugby championship back home. He was staring at me, as motionless as a statue. It was difficult to make out his features under the nondescript peaked cap, but I caught glimpses of the empty black eyes I’d seen briefly in my bedroom and shivered. They regarded me with something akin to surprise. Then the big guy wiped his hands with improbable delicacy against the front of his overalls, pulled his headgear lower and turned away with what looked like a dismissive shake of his head. I watched as he disappeared round the next bend in the tunnel, his pounding steps eventually fading away, and for a moment I wondered where the underground passage led. Then I looked at my cosh and tried to work out how he’d sustained two heavy blows to the skull without visible effect.
Pete Pym groaned. I kneeled down beside him and put my arm under his head. I couldn’t see any sign of injury apart from the livid marks on his throat. He was desperately trying to get air into his lungs.
“What . . .?” he said hoarsely. His eyes were darting around and his expression was still that of a quivering infant. “Where . . . where is he?”
“He’s gone, Pete,” I said, manhandling his upper body into a vertical position. “I chased him off,” I added with a grin.
He gave a weak laugh in between the deep breaths he was taking. “No one chases off a Grendel,” he said. “Grendels are trained to kill. I’ve never heard of one slipping up.”
The words wrenched my gut and I remembered those blank, staring eyes again. It wasn’t just that I’d seen them in Brase. There was something else about them, something else about the preternaturally regular features: they were familiar but in a way that was impossible to pin down.
“We’d better get out of here,” Pym said, levering himself up from the damp tunnel floor.
“Where does this lead?” I asked, peering down the dank passage. “What were you doing down here?”
“You don’t want to know,” he said, moving off unsteadily in the direction we came from.
I caught up with him. “Yes, I do,” I said. “You owe me something for getting that thing off you, Pete.”
He glanced at me as he wiped muck from his long hair. “Yeah, I suppose I do.” He looked over his shoulder and shuddered. “Where does the tunnel lead?” He was looking straight into my eyes now. “It leads to the House of Dust.”
I’d been trying hard to stop myself jumping to that conclusion.
Pumping Pete Pym was hard work. He’d suddenly gone as coy as a male teacher giving a sex lesson in a girls’ school.
“What’s your problem, Pete?” I asked as we moved towards the patch of daylight at the end of the tunnel. “Yesterday you were keen enough to tell us about the prisons and the Poison Fields.”
He kept his eyes off me. “Every kid in Cowley knows what I told you. Who the fuck are you, Quint?” he demanded. “What were you doing following me down here? Why should I trust you?”
“I picked you up on the canal by accident.”
He stared at me in obvious disbelief. “That towpath you were on is restricted. How did you get on to it?”
“I’ve got free access from the Hebdomadal Council.” I saw I had to give him something, so I told him about the Grendel recruitment session I’d observed in Worc.
“Bugger me.” He sounded impressed. “We never managed to get over the fence there.”
“We?” I stopped him, my hand on his arm. “Come on, Pete, tell me what’s going on. I’m trying to find who killed your brother, remember?”
He screwed his eyes up as if he were trying to see inside my head. Finally he nodded. “All right. I must be out of my mind dealing with one of Raphael’s—”
“I’m not one of hers,” I interrupted. “If I was, I’d have let the Grendel throttle you, wouldn’t I?”
He snorted. “That woman’s poison, Quint. There’s no telling what she’s scheming.”
“Take my word, I’m on your side,” I said. “So who’s we, Pete? Who are you working with?”
He squatted down and leaned his back against the damp brick wall. “You’d better not rat on us, Quint,” he said in a low voice. “One way or another, we’ll get to you.”
“For Christ’s sake, I don’t give a shit about the Hebdomadal Council. I’m trying to find the shooter who killed a friend of mine in Edinburgh.” If there was life after the crematorium, Lewis Hamilton would have been amazed to hear himself described in that way. Then I had a flash of Lister 25’s ashen face. “And I’ve just found another friend of mine down here who’s been fucked up by Raphael and her crew.”
Pym was still looking at me intently. “Yeah, well, we’ve all had that experience.” He thought for a few moments then nodded. “Okay, here’s how it is. For two years some of us in the suburbs have been building up an underground movement.” He smiled bitterly. “The stupid bastards give us nothing to do except clean up their mess and watch brain-numbing television programmes. Working out ways to shaft them is all that keeps us going.”
I nodded. The guardians back home were learning the same lesson from the youth gangs.
“After a while we managed to turn some of the students,” Pym continued. “Not many, mind. They’re mostly as committed to the university and the companies that sponsor them as pigs are to the trough, but a few of them can’t handle the way the subs are treated.” He pulled a small matt black device from his pocket. “See this? We call it a sub-machine.”
“Gun?” I asked.
He laughed. “I wish. It’s basically a communication unit, but it also contains an anti-surveillance device.”
“They don’t know you’re in here?”
He shook his head then his face darkened. “I’ll bet they know you are, though. Will they be looking for you?”
I raised my shoulders. “Maybe.” I had something else on my mind. “I thought Grendels were only allowed to operate outside the city. What was that specimen doing in here?”
Pete Pym let out a grunt. “The Council says that Grendels are only used in territory beyond the Poison Fields.” He gave a hollow laugh. “Never believe anything those fuckers tell you, Quint.”
I nodded. “I’ve been finding that out for myself.” I smiled. “Not that I was ever very good at believing people in power.” I caught his eye again. “So, are you going to tell me what you were doing down here? What is the House of Dust? You’re not the first person I’ve heard mention that place.”
He was returning my gaze. “Really?” he asked. “Who else told you about it?”
“Elias Burton,” I replied. “A shrivelled-up old don at Brase. Do you know him?” It had suddenly occurred to me that the academic might be part of Pym’s movement; he wasn’t exactly New Oxford’s number one fan.
But Pete shook his head again. “Never heard of him.” He glanced down the tunnel in the direction the Grendel had headed and shivered. “The House of Dust? We’ve been aware of it these last few months, but it’s only recently that we’ve managed to locate it.” He looked at me blankly. “People disappear into the House of Dust and they don’t come out again.”
“Is it a prison facility?”
He bit his lower lip. “Don’t know.
It doesn’t feature on any of the Crim Fac documents we’ve managed to access.”
“Do you think it might be—?”
The loud blast of a siren drowned out my words. It came from the canal end of the tunnel.
“Shit!” Pym said with a gasp. “You’ve led them to me.”
I opened my arms helplessly. “Not deliberately, Pete.” I looked at the thin strip of yellow light in the roof that snaked away into the darkness. “I’ll go out and take the heat. But you’d better go further down the passage.”
He swallowed hard, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. “Yeah, I suppose I will. After all, I was on my way to see if I could find a way into the House of Dust.” He gulped again. The expression on his face suggested that his encounter with the Grendel had put him off that idea. “I must be out of my mind. Let’s hope that monster’s long gone.”
Lights flashed on the brickwork at the entrance to the tunnel. The blare of the siren was echoing down the curved walls like the cry of a hungry carnivore.
“Go, Pete,” I said, pushing him gently.
He got up and headed off, giving me a rueful glance.
I watched him vanish round a corner.
Then stood up to face the siren song.
“Citizen Dalrymple.” Trout was standing on a motorised punt like the one that had been at the Raskolnikov murder scene. He was wearing an orange life jacket over his dark suit and his bowler hat was incongruous. “Kindly step out of the tunnel entrance.” He had to shout above the racket the siren was making.
I waited for a few moments to show him that he wasn’t boss, then walked into daylight. Perch was sitting at the stern of the punt. He held his eyes on me and deliberately refrained from killing the noise. Perhaps he was deaf as well as dumb. Eventually he pressed a button on the panel in front of him and calm was restored.
“What were you doing down there?” Trout asked. “Were you alone?”
I took my control card from my pocket. “I can go where I like,” I said, waving it at him. “Without surveillance.”
The bulldogs exchanged glances.
“Oh, we weren’t watching you, citizen,” Trout said. “We just happened to be patrolling the canal and noticed the footprints at the tunnel entrance. It’s a restricted area.”
“Is that right?” I turned and started walking up the towpath.
Perch executed a neat volte face with the punt. It drew alongside and kept up with me.
“Can we give you a lift?” Trout asked.
I gave him a look that I hoped he would understand.
“I see,” he said. “Can we be of service in any other way?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Why don’t you go and service your punt?”
After a couple of seconds the craft sped up and disappeared under the bridge. It seemed the bulldogs liked that idea a lot.
I got off the towpath and climbed on to Park End Street. The walls of the castle and prison reared up before me again. I could still hear crazed shouts. They made me wonder if the Department of Psychiatry was in charge of those premises. I struggled to imagine how New Oxford treated its mentally infirm citizens. Given the university’s commitment to the profit motive, they probably supplied the screams for the blockbuster horror movies that I’d heard were very popular in capitalist Vietnam.
I pulled out my mobile and pressed buttons. “Davie?”
“Quint? Where have you been?” He sounded tense. “I’ve been calling you for an hour.”
“I’ve been down in the sewer. Probably no signal. What’s up?”
“Raphael’s up. Connington’s up. Dawkley’s up. Will that do?”
“For a start.” I moved to the side of the pavement as a pair of male students in rugby kit ran past. “What do they want?”
“You, pal. What have you been doing? They’re all desperate to see you.”
I reckoned Raphael knew where I was even before Trout and Perch called in my latest position. She’d been playing an elaborate game of double bluff ever since we arrived in New Oxford. “It’s my innate charm, my cultivated conversation and, last but not least, my innovative sexual skills,” I said.
“Oh aye?” he said, stifling a laugh. “Have fun with the administrators then.”
“Have you turned up anything, Davie?”
“Uh-uh. Same old nothing of significance.”
“What about Katharine? And don’t say ‘What about Katharine?’, guardsman.”
“All right, I won’t. She’s gone off to a house on – hang on while I check my notebook – Banbury Road. Apparently Raskolnikov used to visit it every other evening. No one seems to know why.”
“Okay. Fancy looking over a desirable property before I hit the administrators?”
“Hold me back. Where?”
I told him and signed off. As I headed towards the city centre, I called Katharine. Either she was otherwise engaged or there was something wrong with the signal again, so I left it for later.
At that moment I was keener on a building than on Katharine – not that I’d been intending to tell her that.
“Carfax?” Davie said, looking up at the old tower that rose above the crossroads. I’d met him there and told him we were going to the House of Dust. “Why’s it called that? There aren’t any cars around here, let alone any fax machines.”
“Oh very good,” I said. I had my father’s guidebook open. “You’ll find it comes from the Latin quadrifurcus, meaning four forks or ways.” I glanced at him. “What’s a fax machine?”
“You remember, those things they had in pre-independence times that sent bits of virtual paper down the tele—” He broke off when he saw the derisive look on my face. “Up yours.”
“Come on then,” I said, leading him across the road. “Leave the Chariot here. Let’s do this on foot.” I was struck again by how little traffic there was apart from students on public-use bicycles. This was how to ease congestion on the roads: make everyone walk or ride a bike. Pity no government before the break-up of the UK had had the balls to legislate for that. It would probably have stopped the mob laying into Westminster. Then again, people were deeply in love with their cars – until the oil companies upped their prices once too often and the refineries were torched by committed but short-sighted activists.
“What do you think you’re going to see from the outside?” Davie asked, stepping out of the way of an elderly female academic with half-moon glasses and hair like a crow’s nest.
“Don’t know, pal.” I looked across St Aldate’s at an ornate building with arched mullioned windows and a grandiose entrance.
“What’s that place?” Davie asked.
I glanced at Hector’s book. “The town hall, as was. Jacobean gables, turrets, ogee roofs, balustrade of—”
“Change of function,” he said, pointing.
I focused on the words on the dark blue display screen by the door. “‘Faculty of Criminology’,” I read. “What a surprise.” I looked again. “Department of Prison Privatisation.”
“Oh aye,” Davie said.
“Oh aye exactly. That’ll be where the consultants they sent to Edinburgh came from. They no doubt make a pile of money from states that are desperate to get shot of the responsibility for their prisons.”
“That’s not what’s happening back home,” Davie argued. “The Mist’s got Public Order Directorate personnel running the New Bridewell.”
“For how long?” I asked. I was still puzzled about the relationship between the Council of City Guardians and Raphael’s regime. What was in it for New Oxford?
We walked down the road.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Davie said, pointing ahead. “The House of—”
I put my hand on his arm to silence him. There weren’t many people about, but I knew that, unlike bicycles, the name Elias Burton and Pete Pym had spoken wasn’t for public use.
From the north the amber walls of what used to be Christ Church were still impressive, even though the tall, narrow windows had been covered
by steel shutters and there were large patches of shell damage. The pair of vast metallic columns shot up into the sky like the amputated legs of a giant. I could make out wisps of steam or smoke around the cowling at their tops. The two small towers on either side of the main gate were in reasonably good condition, their stone a darker shade. But my eye was irresistibly drawn to the vast stump of the Tom Tower above. Christ knows what had happened to it. Some drugs gang must have had a serious aversion to the college: maybe the leader was a former student who’d come from a state school. A massive amount of explosives must have been detonated around the Gothic tower’s base. There was no sign of any debris. The raised edge of the stump’s outer rim indicated that the tower had fallen inwards. I felt what remained of my right forefinger begin to tingle in sympathy.
“What the hell goes on here?” Davie demanded, tugging at his beard.
“Not much, by the looks of it,” I said. “There’s nobody at the gate.” We were now standing directly opposite the heavy steel barrier. “It doesn’t look like that entrance is used much.”
“Are we going to cross over?” Davie stepped towards the road but I stopped him again.
“No. I don’t want to look too interested.” I screwed up my eyes. “Can you see a panel or sign saying what the buildings purport to be?”
After a few moments Davie shook his head. “Not a thing,” he said in a confused tone. “Why not?”
I felt a shiver run down my spine. “Information in New Oxford is pretty much on a need-to-know basis, wouldn’t you say? The people who know what goes on here don’t need a sign.”
Davie nodded, his face grim. “And the rest of the population pretends that the House of . . . I mean this facility doesn’t exist.”
I reckoned he’d hit the nail’s head well into the surface of the wood.
Back at Carfax I came to a decision. I activated my nostrum, ignored the list of Missed Calls and highlighted “Chief Administrator” in the Contacts Menu. Almost immediately Raphael’s face appeared on the small screen.
“Citizen Dalrymple,” she said with a mixture of relief and irritation. “Where have you been?”
House of Dust Page 31
