End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Lady Neku raised this with Nico, but he wasn’t interested. As for her other two brothers they barely understood the question.

  “Moon,” said Lady Neku, leaning against the wall of the duelling room. “You know, used to go round us like a baby planet back when the days were shorter?”

  “Who’s us?” Petro asked.

  “The earth,” said Lady Neku, nodding towards a window.

  “We’re not earth,” said Petro. “We’re family.”

  “Anyway,” said Antonio. “Who said days were shorter?” He glanced at Petro, who grinned. “Oh, I get it,” Antonio said. “The kami told you.”

  Both brothers burst into laughter.

  Lady Neku left them to their laughter and the fight. Since High Strange could protect itself and fugees were forbidden to use weapons, training with blades was utterly pointless. Apparently, the sheer pointlessness was the point. At least it was according to Nico, who could beat both his brothers without even breaking a sweat. Not caring was what he told Lady Neku, when his sister first asked how he managed it. She’d been working hard to copy him ever since.

  The d’Alamberts arrived in eleven ships. They arrived on the morning of the third day after her mother told Lady Neku about her marriage and the whole of High Strange gathered to meet them.

  “Empty,” said Petro, looking at the ships. “No one has this many servitors.”

  “No,” Nico said. “I’ve checked. The major domo says the vessels are full.”

  Petro laughed.

  “Multiple life signs,” insisted Nico. “On all of the ships.”

  “Animals then. To make them look occupied.”

  “Maybe not,” said Antonio. “It could be ground dwellers.”

  “Same thing.”

  “But they’d die,” said Neku. Everyone knew ground dwellers grew sick if moved out of their sphere. “The d’Alamberts wouldn’t do that.”

  “Who the fuck knows what they’d do?” said Petro, then shut his mouth at a very pointed stare from his mother.

  “Look straight ahead,” Lady Katchatka told her daughter. “And for heaven’s sake start smiling.” Lady Neku did as she was ordered.

  The first ship was the biggest. It was red and yellow, although the yellow had faded. The ship behind looked newer, being bright red with no contrasting colour, and the ships beyond that were shades of violet, pink, and blue. Despite herself, Lady Neku was impressed. She’d never seen a ship that wasn’t black.

  “Family colours,” said Nico, wrapping his arm about his sister.

  She edged away.

  “Provincials,” said Petro. “What can one expect?”

  Lady Katchatka shook her head. “You’re wrong,” she said. “They just like to appear that way. Always remember, looking weak can sometimes be a strength.”

  An army poured from the first ship. A hundred men streamed down the ramp. They wore gold and red, carried hand weapons, and gazed intently at the family and servitors gathered to meet them. It was only when Lady Neku looked closely that she realised the group included old men and those who were little more than children.

  “And this is meant to impress us?” asked Nico.

  The hundred men gathered into two lines and turned to face the door of the second ship. “Lord d’Alambert,” muttered Nico before the door had even begun to open.

  “No,” said his mother. “Luc…”

  “How did you know?” asked Lady Neku, when a thin figure hesitated in the doorway, only to flinch at a command from someone out of sight. Raising his chin, Luc d’Alambert put one foot on the ramp and forced himself to take another step. His subsequent steps came more easily.

  “If we let the boy live then the old man will follow.”

  Lady Neku looked at her mother in case she was joking. From the look on Lady Katchatka’s face, her daughter guessed not. “Is that how you’d do it?”

  “Probably,” said her mother. “But then I have three sons. Lord d’Alambert has only one.”

  The boy in the red jacket walked slowly towards the foot of the ramp, only too aware that all eyes in the hangar were on him. He hesitated slightly at the bottom, before stepping onto the deck.

  “What does he think?” said Antonio. “That we’ve electrified that exact patch of ground?”

  Nico looked interested. “Is that possible?”

  Antonio ruffled his brother’s hair. “Anything’s possible,” he said, “given sufficient will.”

  Glancing up, Luc d’Alambert caught the entire Katchatka family watching him and looked away. He was shaking, Lady Neku realised. For a second she considered walking out to meet him. Her mother might be furious. On the other hand, her mother might be impressed. The problem with Lady Katchatka was that it was never possible to work out which it would be in advance, and besides there were her brothers’ opinions to consider.

  Lady Neku decided to stay where she was.

  “God,” said Petro, watching the boy walk slowly towards them. “I’m surprised they didn’t drown the little shit at birth.”

  Luc d’Alambert was short of stature. Scrawny, with a narrow face and deep set eyes. And his skin…it was pale enough to be almost transparent. A paper cut-out of a real person.

  “Lady Katchatka, my Lords, Lady Neku…”

  Neku liked that she and her mother got name checks while her brothers were lumped in together, although she could tell from the stiffening of Nico’s shoulders that he’d already taken offence.

  “My Lord Luc…” Somehow, while Lady Neku had been watching Nico, Petro, and Antonio and wondering which was going to sneer first, her mother had moved forward to meet the boy.

  Shit, thought Lady Neku.

  “Go on,” hissed Nico.

  She shook her head. Waiting until she was summoned now seemed the safest option. What did he see? Lady Neku wondered. What did the boy see when he looked at her mother? A small woman in a black dress who walked with a stick, or a monster rumoured to have strangled her husband the moment she tired of him? Harsh times produced harsh people and few came harsher than Isabeau Katchatka, who joined the family as the fourteen-year-old bride of a man thirty years her senior and still ruled endless decades later.

  There was another rumour. One that said Nico, Petro, and Antonio shared no DNA with the father who died before they were born. If this was true, then the heirs to High Strange had no link to the original family other than name. It also threw an interesting light on an even darker rumour. That Lady Katchatka shared her bed with all three of her sons.

  If they came from her body alone, then Lady Katchatka was, if rumour be believed, effectively sleeping with herself. Personally Lady Neku doubted it. According to Nico, the only times he’d shared a bed with his mother, the woman had done nothing but fall asleep and snore.

  CHAPTER 32 — Sunday, 24 June

  A house phone started ringing half way through breakfast. Until then neither Kit nor Neku had realised the flat in Hogarth Mews possessed one. It was Neku who found the thing in an alcove behind a Warhol print near the front door.

  A joke, Kit decided, given the endless repetition of silk-screened ears on the print itself.

  The phone was ivory white, and so old it teetered on the edge of being fashionably retro. Although what Kit noticed was a row of keys hanging from hooks on the wall above. It looked like the police hadn’t needed to break the locks on Mary’s cupboard after all.

  “Kit Nouveau,” he said, picking up the receiver.

  The laugh at the other end was mocking. “How much longer are you going to keep calling yourself that?” demanded Kate, sounding herself now she was back on home ground.

  “Until I can be bothered to change it back.”

  “Which will be when?”

  “Probably never,” said Kit. “Maybe sooner. What do you want…?” He hadn’t intended to be so blunt, but with Kate it was probably the best way to be.

  “You saw Pat?”

  “Yes, of course. I told you I would.”

  “A
nd how was he?”

  “Dying,” said Kit.

  When Kate spoke again, even Neku, who hovered at Kit’s shoulder, could tell the woman was fighting to hold her temper. “He gave you Mary’s original letter?”

  “Yes,” admitted Kit. “He did.”

  “I knew he would,” she said. “Pat always wanted to send that letter on. Unfortunately, by the time he argued me into it you’d vanished. Anyway, I was more worried about tracking down my daughter.”

  “Who came back,” said Kit.

  “Eventually…So what have you found out so far?”

  “Kate!”

  “Just asking.”

  Kit considered what he knew. Wondered what the underlying tidiness of the flat said about Mary’s state of mind in the hours before she’d locked the door for the last time, leaving a bag of rubbish forgotten inside. The chaos was superficial, upturned drawers and emptied cases. The carpets had been clean and the floor tiles in the shower room wiped down. Even the wastepaper bin in the bedroom had been emptied.

  “She cancelled her milk, gas, and electricity,” said Kit. “But not her telephone. The washing up was done, her washing basket was empty, ditto the fridge, and her cooker’s been cleaned.”

  Mary had also put unwanted vegetables into a Sainsbury’s bag to throw away, then left them by the door. A single flaw to suggest she had bigger things on her mind. Neku had dumped the bag before Kit arrived, only to watch in bemusement as he hauled it back and upended it into the shower cubicle, sorting through a slush of long-rotted lemons, peppers, and carrots.

  “I thought it would be messier,” said Kit, “what with a police search and everything.”

  “They didn’t do one,” Kate said. “Apparently, once Pat confirmed Mary’s writing there was no need.” Her voice made clear exactly what Kate thought about that. “The police were too busy to come out.”

  “Really?” Kit was pretty sure the flat had been searched by someone. “Doing what?” he said.

  “Whatever they do these days instead of solving crimes. Rounding up people in Bradford probably.”

  It took all Kit’s will not to snort. Kate O’Mally, ex-crime boss and icon of old London—well, in certain circles—complaining about police inefficiency and their lack of commitment. He wanted to give the woman more…some hope, for whichever one of them really believed Mary was still alive, except nothing in the flat suggested she was. All the neatness, the card to Tokyo, cancelling the milk—it looked to Kit like a woman tying up the loose ends of her life.

  “Tell me again,” said Kit. “Why do you…” He paused, rewording his question. “What makes Pat think she’s alive?”

  “Her Visa card,” Kate said. “Someone used it in Gwent the day after she…” Kate’s voice trailed into silence.

  “Took the ferry,” said Kit, finishing the sentence for her. “What did the police say?”

  “Did Mary know her pin numbers by heart? Or might she have written them down…because her wallet and purse were both missing when her suitcase was found.”

  “And what was the answer?”

  Kit heard a deep sigh. “Mary couldn’t do numbers to save her life.”

  “Which means…”

  “I’m aware of what it means,” said Kate, breaking the connection.

  Kit had woken that morning to the clatter of dishes and the smell of burning toast. An acrid catch at the back of his throat had him out of bed before he remembered where he was. Stumbling from Mary’s bedroom, still glitching with jetlag, he found himself suddenly face to face with Neku, who seemed to be wearing nothing but a long black jersey. She was scraping carbon into an empty supermarket bag that she’d suspended from a door handle.

  “Built a fire,” she said.

  “You’ve—”

  “On the roof…it’s okay,” she added. “I’ve put it out again.”

  “And the bread?”

  “Bought it when I couldn’t find noodles. There’s a shop round the corner that sells underwear, bread, batteries, and milk. Also these.” She nodded to an MP3 player and that was when Kit realised he could hear music.

  “You didn’t go out like that?”

  Neku saw him gaze at her bare legs. “As if,” she said, putting the scraped toast onto a plate and placing the plate on the tiny breakfast bar in front of him. “I’ll buy butter tomorrow,” she promised. Huge eyes watched him from across the table. Eyes that were dark and speckled in colours he couldn’t remember having seen before.

  “What?” Neku asked.

  Kit shook his head. “Come on,” he said. “You still have to tell me why you followed me.” The shrug she gave was neither sullen nor pointed, simply matter of fact.

  “What choice did I have?” she said.

  Maybe he was missing something. Actually, thought Kit, it was a fair bet he was missing a lot more than one thing. Where Neku was concerned, he got the feeling everyone missed more than they caught. Her change of image for one thing. She’d gone from the ripped lace of a cos-play to black jersey and minimal make-up in a single week.

  “You’re going to have to tell me sometime,” he said.

  “So are you,” said Neku.

  “Tell you what?”

  “What all this is really about.” And then, luckily for both of them, Kate O’Mally telephoned. About three minutes later Neku’s new video phone started buzzing. She took one look at the number, began blushing, and retired to the roof garden outside.

  Charlie Olifard read maths at Imperial, wrote his own code until he was thirteen, when he got bored and began trying to work out if the Fibonacci sequence contained an infinite number of primes. In his spare time he mixed music, releasing his work into common ownership so it could be mixed further. He was quite keen on joining Government Communications Headquarters, but felt most spooks were probably boring by nature. So he was worried what joining GCHQ might say about him.

  Neku, by contrast, studied English at a language school behind Oxford Street. At least she did in the version of her life she gave Charlie. But then, according to her new friend, life was a mathematical construct, with solutions that made sense only if one first understood the question. So what did lying matter?

  “Your English is really good,” Charlie said. “You must have been studying for years.”

  “About six months,” said Neku, blushing when the boy turned to her.

  “God,” Charlie said. “And people claim I’m intelligent…now, what was it you wanted to do?” He ran one hand through shaggy blond hair. It was a nervous tic, the hair thing. Neku hoped he’d get over it.

  In response to Charlie’s original proposal that he show her the London Eye, Neku had suggested meeting outside the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street. Look rich, artistic, and messy, she’d told him.

  Neku had to admit he did it rather well.

  A battered suede jacket, black jeans, tight tee-shirt, and a watch that looked old and incredibly expensive. It was the gold Rolex that made Neku wonder if he was all of those things anyway.

  “You’ll find out,” she said.

  Canterville Gallery in Conde Street looked like any other boutique. Positioned between a lingerie shop selling hand-made silk bras and a place offering Moroccan ceramics, it had a green canvas canopy shading its front, bay trees on either side of a glass door, and a huge burglar alarm half way up the wall, which flashed at lazy intervals as Charlie and Neku approached.

  Open, announced the sign.

  A plastic mannequin in the window helped add to the idea that Canterville Gallery was a simple shop like any other. Although the fact that the mannequin was naked apart from a triangle of pubic hair made from copper nails rather undermined the effect.

  “Well,” said Charlie, as Neku reached for the door. “I take it we’re here.”

  “Good afternoon.”

  A woman in a black dress looked up at Neku’s greeting. Having stared for slightly longer than was polite, she remembered to smile. “Can I help?”

  “I hope so,”
said Neku. “I’m a friend of the new owner.” As intended, her words knocked the smile from the other woman’s lips.

  Charlie shut the door behind him and nodded at the mannequin. “Is that a Tessa Markham?” he asked.

  The woman nodded.

  “Thought so,” said Charlie. Of course it was, the mannequin’s base had a label at ground level. He’d simply read the thing before entering the shop.

  “I’m Charlie Olifard,” he said. “And this is…”

  “Lady Neku,” said Neku, wondering why Charlie blinked.

  “I’m Sylvia,” said the woman. “I run this place. Can I ask what your particular interest is?”

  Neku nodded. “Of course,” she said. “I’m thinking of buying it.”

  “The Tessa Markham?”

  “No,” said Neku. “The gallery.”

  Take a look at the gallery. Be discreet, Kit had said, when finally pestered into giving Neku something to do that didn’t involve her making plans to fly home. Something that was impossible, because to do that she needed a home in the first place. And take a look at Major Yamota’s police forms for me. Neku chose the gallery first because it sounded more fun. Besides, Neku had company…translating the police forms into English would be a waste of Charlie’s time.

  As for the boast about buying the place, maybe she would; but that wasn’t what this was about. Her brothers always said take control from the start. How better to make this woman nervous?

  Half a dozen oils hung from one wall. A glass dildo sat in a glass cabinet next to a Benin fetish mask. The dildo featured a spiral of cobalt blue along the shaft, like vapour trails within glass. The African mask had gold studs hammered flat around the edges and looked as old as the glass looked new.

  “Murano,” said Sylvia.