The Age of Scorpio

by Gavin Smith

  The club had a large lock-up at the fort behind a huge arched doorway with two iron-reinforced doors. The padlock proved no challenge for du Bois, and he pulled one of the doors open. Inside was a dark cavernous space and the stench was overwhelming. It was the reek of people living rough, using the place as a toilet, and the smell of the sea at low tide.

  Du Bois moved cautiously. The place was a mess. Most of the equipment hadn’t been touched in months. His eyes cut through the darkness, amplifying the light from outside. The crates of diving equipment made it somewhat labyrinthine, but he could see no signs of life. There was a scattering of bedding and camping equipment, but something about their arrangement made them look more like nests than an area where people were sleeping rough.

  Du Bois stopped and looked up. Dangling from one of the exposed roof beams, suspended on a chain with a meathook through its lower leg, was a body. It had clearly been there, rotting, for a while. Du Bois knew what a partially eaten corpse looked like.

  Behind it was a large tank of murky green water containing a dark shape. Du Bois approached cautiously. He had the urge to draw the .45 but resisted. He still had the sense that there was nobody else in here, an intuition confirmed in part by his blood-screen. He magnified his vision and improved the resolution. It was an effigy made of scavenged bits of driftwood and marine detritus, and looked like a Sheela-na-gig, a fertility statue, an exaggerated and swollen pregnant female form. But there was something warped and wrong about the figure. All around the tank were the bodies of rats, birds, dogs, cats, various other small animals and even two sheep, a pig and a cow. None of them showed signs of having been eaten.

  Du Bois had had enough. It was clear the place had been abandoned long ago. With a thought he linked to his phone and texted a request to Control for a clean-up crew. Normal people couldn’t be allowed to know how weird the world actually was. Then with another thought he started a search on material relating to Fort Widley, putting it through various filters to harvest the information he was looking for, though he wasn’t sure quite what that was.

  Walking out into the murky morning light away from the stench was a blessed relief. The result of the search came back. Despite a mild feeling of being violated by information, du Bois sifted through the material in his mind rather than externally on the phone. The closest he came to what he was looking for were unsubstantiated urban myths about tunnels that led from the Palmerston forts on Portsdown Hill, down into the city and even as far as the sea defences on the front at Southsea.

  Du Bois thought tunnels unlikely in engineering terms. He double-checked against online Ministry of Defence files. According to documents from the Victorian era, they had looked at tunnels but found them to be ‘unfeasible’. He didn’t have time to go searching for legendary tunnels. He added a search request to the clean-up crew request and then climbed into the Range Rover. He headed north.

  The train pulled into the grey stone and concrete valley that was Bradford in the late afternoon. Never pretty, the murky weather had leached all the colour from the city. Beth had the money for a bus but felt better than she ever had before, her wounds all but healed during the journey. She almost ran up the Otley Road, past the cemetery where she’d spent many hours either with friends or alone, and turned into the familiar street of rain-slick-grey, stone terraced housing. It was only when she put the key in the lock that she knew this was for the last time.

  After all the life and movement in Portsmouth, after feeling content, however briefly, for the first time, after the possibility of an actual life and then the screaming red violence, the dusty dirty house where cigarette smoke hung constantly in the atmosphere seemed so still and dead. The smell of a human being rotting away added to the feeling. The thing was, Beth couldn’t remember a time when that hadn’t been the case.

  Her father was in the lounge, as ever, his oxygen mask hanging down as he sucked on a cigarette. The glow of the cigarette tip was the only point of light in the room.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’

  ‘Did you find her?’ he asked, his voice little more than a rasp. Beth shook her head and watched disappointment spread across his face. She tried to muster sympathy for him, even pity. All she could do was try not to be any crueller than she had to. He had made his choices. He had to live with them.

  ‘Who is she?’ She watched her father swallow hard. Saw the fear replace disappointment.

  ‘I . . .’ he started. It would have been easier if he had been a better liar. Then he could have told her that he loved her as much as Talia, or even just loved her at all.

  ‘I’ll go back and look . . . I’ll find her, but you have to not lie to me. If you lie, I swear you’ll never see either of us again and I’ll go to the police.’ It was a gamble, a bluff, but prison had made her a better liar than her dad.

  ‘The police will be the least of our problems.’

  ‘You’re dying. It doesn’t matter now.’ It wasn’t said unkindly. The saddest thing, for Beth anyway, was that there was just no feeling there at all. ‘You stole her, didn’t you? You took her from some nice people, destroyed their lives and brought her to this dead place?’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Beth was surprised by the anger in his voice, though it quickly subsided into a hacking cough.

  She watched him for a while and then realised that this was the cruelty she was trying to avoid. She stood up, took the cigarette from his yellow-stained fingers and stubbed it out in the overflowing ashtray. She was careful to make sure there were no sparks from the cigarette left before she put the mask over her father’s face and spun the wheel on the oxygen tank. She went and sat down, letting her father recover, until he took the mask off and spoke.

  ‘When you were born, you were too big, odd-looking. You did something to your mother, tore her up inside so she could never have children again, and we’d wanted to have a big family. It was you that killed her in the end, you know? Complications from your birth.’

  And there it was, Beth thought, the reason for all the resentment she’d endured growing up. A crime she’d committed while she was being born. She said nothing.

  ‘And we were left with this strange little girl who didn’t look like other little girls, didn’t want to be like other little girls.’ He put the mask back over his face and took more gasping breaths. Wasn’t treated like other little girls, Beth added silently, wasn’t loved like other children.

  ‘So you stole a child?’

  Her father shook his head and removed the mask from his face.

  ‘No! We’re not monsters, not kidnappers. We saved that child. Saved Talia. And because we did something good, we got the daughter we deserved.’

  He put the mask back on. What Beth realised then was that he wasn’t actually trying to hurt her. He never had been. As far as he was concerned, this was just the way that things happened.

  ‘It was a friend of your mother’s from school. Not a close one, mind. She picked us because there was little connection between her and us. Beautiful woman, bright too, very intelligent and good at sports.’

  Not like us then.

  ‘She’d heard that we wanted kids but were having trouble. You know how small this town is. Someone had offered her a lot of money to get pregnant with a view to adopting the child when it was born. Rich people. But she found out that wasn’t what they had in mind. They were some kind of cult. They thought she was important somehow – something to do with genealogy, bloodlines, selective breeding, all that nonsense. They had a place high up on the moors. She told us they were breeding children to be sacrificed.’

  Beth was shaking her head.

  ‘No, it’s true! I didn’t believe it at first either, but she was scared, really scared. Not for her – she knew she was dead – but for the baby.’

  What was clear was that her father believed this stuff. A week ago she would have dismissed it as nonsense, but it had been a busy week.

  ‘She had arranged to take the baby out �
� to Helmsley – and they’d let her, though they’d sent someone with her. We left you with your gran and actually disguised ourselves. We took a carrycot the same as Natalie’s and put a doll in it. Then in a tearoom we made the swap – in the bathroom. Scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life.’

  And then you got your proper little girl. But she’d known, somehow she’d always known, and she’d resented us for it. It occurred to Beth that they’d got away with it probably because they were so inconsequential.

  ‘They killed her, you know,’ he said between rasping gasps of oxygen. ‘Ran her down up on the moors shortly after we got Talia.’

  Beth just nodded. She thought about saying all the things that she wanted to say. That it wasn’t her fault her mum couldn’t have children. That it shouldn’t have mattered that she was big. That she wasn’t actually ugly. That she had loved them unconditionally. That she missed her mum as well. That Talia was a horrible person who didn’t care about anyone but herself. But she knew it wouldn’t help. He genuinely wouldn’t understand. He was just a stupid, selfish, dying old man. He might as well have been a stranger. She stood up.

  ‘Where’s Talia?’ he demanded.

  Your perfect little girl’s been doing porn, turning tricks and is very probably dead. Beth very nearly said it.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Where are you going? I need help. Looking after.’

  Beth’s laugh was without bitterness, but was devoid of humour as well.

  ‘I’m going upstairs to get my records and then I’m going back to Portsmouth to find my bitch of a sister and get her out of whatever shit she’s in, and then that’s it for me and this family.’ Beth thought about it for a moment or two. ‘I went to prison because I killed Talia’s boyfriend. I caught him beating her. It looked like he was going to murder her. She testified against me, and none of you even came and saw me, let alone said thank you.’

  ‘You helped put your mother in the grave!’

  ‘I don’t think I did. I don’t think this family deserves me.’

  Beth turned away from her father for the last time. She went upstairs to get her records. It was so sad that they were the only things left for her in this house.

  He heard the front door pulled shut. It was the sound of finality, an end. Tears rolled down his cheeks. It wasn’t that Beth was gone. She had never done anything but bring pain to the family. It was just that she had been the last faint hope he’d had of seeing his little girl Talia again. After all Beth had done, he still found himself surprised by her selfishness.

  ‘That’s a fine young woman you have there, Mr Luckwicke,’ du Bois said from the corner.

  ‘I knew you’d come.’ He closed his eyes. From the moment they had taken Talia from the tearoom in Helmsley, he’d been living in fear, waiting for this moment.

  Du Bois stepped into view. Twenty years gone, and Natalie’s bodyguard hadn’t aged a day.

  ‘Oh, how we looked for you,’ the blue-eyed, blond-haired killer told him.

  ‘Nobody ever thinks to look here. We’re not needed any more.’

  Du Bois nodded.

  ‘Talia?’

  ‘Is not your daughter. Your daughter just left.’

  ‘You’re going to kill her?’

  ‘Beth? I hope not.’

  ‘Talia.’

  ‘I’m going to kill you, but I’ve known that for more than twenty years. I’m relieved that you’re not a pervert. I think you probably did the best you could for Natalie, but after the little exchange I just overheard, I don’t think I’m going to feel very bad about it.’

  ‘You don’t know—’

  ‘No, you don’t know how hard Beth has been fighting for her sister. Now do you want me to make it look like murder, suicide, natural causes or an accident?’ Du Bois hadn’t asked the question unkindly.

  The old man looked at du Bois, appalled. ‘I’m not going to choose!’

  ‘It’s your last chance for a bit of control in your life.’

  The two men stared at each other for a while.

  ‘Suicide.’

  Du Bois nodded. ‘Your guilty conscience does you some credit at the end.’

  To Mr Luckwicke’s surprise, in his last moments he thought of Beth. He remembered her smiling and laughing when she was very young.

  As du Bois walked across Peel Park to where he had left the Range Rover, he set his phone to checking mobile-phone call logs. When that didn’t work, he started cross-referencing traffic through cellular-phone masts.

  He would have to drive quickly if he wanted to see any of Alexia’s concert. Gigs, she calls them gigs, he reminded himself. He had already arranged for her, the band and the gaggle of lackeys, parasites, sycophants and would-be lovers who followed her around to gain entry to Portsea Island through the roadblocks.

  The Range Rover unlocked itself as du Bois approached, pulling off his leather gloves.

  Du Bois had been right to bring his own whisky. The stuff they had behind the bar on South Parade Pier was horrible. Fortunately the bouncers had left him alone after he had shown them one of the warrant cards he habitually carried with him.

  The venue was packed. He had made it back for the second half of the gig, though his driving hadn’t been terribly legal. Clearly Alexia’s band – Light – had something of a following, locally anyway. To du Bois’s eyes the audience all looked like they had gone out of their way to look either grotesque or as if they had next to no moral standards. The dancing looked more like the melee at the base of a castle wall during a siege. He watched as dancer after dancer scrambled onto the stage and then threw themselves back into the crowd, and wondered what the point was.

  The music could have been worse. Du Bois could not deny the technical skill of both his sister and the musicians who played with her, and they definitely seemed to put feeling into their music. Their songs were much longer than the pop music he had come to expect in the last sixty or so years, but at ten to fifteen minutes were still much shorter than what du Bois considered to be proper music. There were moments of quiet melody and clean vocals that du Bois had to admit were quite beautiful. Alexia’s voice was still clear and pure but he struggled to listen to the incredibly heavy bits and all the screaming. Though he had to admit, in terms of endurance alone, the screaming was an extraordinary vocal performance, but if you were just going to scream like that he couldn’t see the point in writing any lyrics.

  By the time he finished the whisky, he had overcome the guilt at taking the night off. Perhaps it was the darkness of the music making him pessimistic but it almost certainly didn’t matter now. He had a selection of possible numbers, all pay-as-you-go phones with no credit cards registered to them. He had phoned them en route from Bradford and managed to rule out four of the seven. The other three he had set his phone to ring on a regular basis, but they were all currently turned off. If there was an answer, it would connect through to him immediately and trace programs would triangulate the signal. There wasn’t much else he could do.

  He waited until the venue was empty before he lit up a cigarette while he waited for Alexia. He assumed there were still staff from the pier somewhere, but the band had gone on and most of the venue had been swept up. The bouncers had left long ago.

  ‘Well?’ Alexia asked. After all these years he still struggled to find something honest to say that wouldn’t hurt her feelings. ‘You hated it, didn’t you?’ She was laughing.

  ‘I liked bits of it. You know, the bits with melody and form.’ She laughed at him again. ‘You knew I wasn’t going to like it. All the roaring and screaming.’

  ‘You are so old,’ she said, laughing at him some more. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Thank you for making this possible, and thank you for subjecting yourself to it.’ Du Bois looked pained. ‘No, really it means a lot.’ She straightened up. ‘Just let me clean up a bit . . .’

  ‘Are you still not ready? Everyone else has gone.’

  ‘Hush now. I’ll change
and then we’ll find a deliciously sleazy club somewhere. Perhaps we can find some muscle-bound young stud who can help pull the stick out of your arse and maybe, then, we might be able to get you laid.’ Du Bois looked less than happy at this.

  ‘Is sex your answer to everything?’ he asked disapprovingly.

  ‘It seems a healthy response to the impending end of the world.’ Alexia was suddenly very serious. She turned and wandered back towards the changing room.

  Du Bois stood up and headed for the stage. One of the keyboards hadn’t been put away. He sat down in front of it and pressed a few keys. Nothing happened. He had to download the instructions straight into his mind before he was able to plug it in, turn it on, get it to make noise and find a setting that made the instrument sound vaguely like a piano.

  Long steely fingers started with the opening strains of Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’. It didn’t feel the same as a real piano: there was something lacking in the personality of the instrument, no sense of exploration like you had every time you sat down at a new piano. However, he had to admit, as his fingers danced across the keys, that it sounded good. Quickly he was lost, playing the piece from memory. He remembered the first time he’d heard it – in a bar in Paris, played on a badly tuned upright as Europe headed inexorably towards its most ruinous war to date.

  ‘You’re much better than you give yourself credit for,’ Alexia said as he finished. He had known she was there and glanced over at her. She wore her long straight hair loose and had on a pair of tight jeans, ridiculously oversized boots and a sleeveless T-shirt with some horrible design on it that du Bois found difficult to approve of.