End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “People have been calling,” Kate said, finally coming to the point. Sucking in a final mouthful of smoke, she let it escape between her lips and ground her cigar stub into a glass ashtray. “A surprising number of people.” She smiled. “A man from the MOD, for a start.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Said I’d never heard of you. Anyway, you know Jimmy the Greek?”

  Kit shook his head.

  “That’s good,” said Kate. “You don’t want to know him. Anyway, Jimmy was also on the line. He runs an outfit in High Barnet. One of his boys is called Robbie. Nasty temper, but a good chemist. Anyway, Jimmy’s worried because he loaned Robbie to a Russian and now the Russian is dead and Robbie’s scared that he and I have unfinished business.”

  “I told Robbie it was cool,” said Kit. “And the guy was Chechen.”

  Kate reached for another cigar.

  “Armand de Valois was Chechen,” said Kit. “Not Russian. Although he was pretending to be French…”

  “You were there when he died?”

  “I killed him.”

  “You? A Chechen mafia leader. Feel like telling me why?”

  He made the kid dance.

  “Neku,” said Kit, and the old woman nodded. It was answer enough.

  “The Greek wants a meeting.” Blowing fresh smoke towards the ceiling, Kate sat back in her chair. In anybody else this might be taken as a sign of relaxation, but Kit could tell Kate was worried about something.

  “So send your nephew,” said Kit.

  “That would make it business. I want you to go,” said Kate. “Sort out the problem…”

  Maybe laughing wasn’t the right response. “Look,” said Kit, when Kate had stopped scowling. “I’ll call Jimmy.”

  “Call him?”

  “That’s my best offer.”

  Kate pushed her mobile across the desk and waited while Kit punched in the number she gave him.

  “Mr. Giangos?”

  A sleepy grunt from the other end and a woman in the background, followed by a snapped instruction to be quiet. One didn’t need Greek to understand what was being said. “Yes?”

  “I’m calling on behalf of Kate O’Mally.”

  “What,” Jimmy Giangos said, “she can’t call me herself?”

  “It’s about Robbie,” said Kit, ignoring the question. “Mrs. O’Mally wants you to know there is no problem. In fact, everything is fine. She will tell her nephew this.”

  Kate raised her eyebrows.

  “The problem was Mr. de Valois. This has now been solved.”

  On the other side of the desk, Kate O’Mally actually began to smile. Although Kit’s next words knocked the smile from her face and reduced Kate to frozen silence.

  “What problem? He kidnapped Kate O’Mally’s granddaughter.”

  Jimmy Giangos actually gulped.

  “Robbie didn’t tell you that?”

  “No,” said Jimmy the Greek. “He forgot to mention that bit. We knew nothing about…”

  “Mrs. O’Mally understands that,” Kit said. “She sends her regards.” Shutting off the phone, Kit looked up to see Kate staring at him.

  “Look,” said Kit, “I had to say something.”

  “So that’s why Pat came back,” said Kate, barely listening. Pushing away her chair, she walked to the window and stared out into the darkness, only coming back to her desk to rummage for another cigar. “He must have worked it out for himself,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me in Tokyo?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “The truth.” Kate O’Mally shook her head crossly. “Everything finally makes sense. Mary’s postcards to you. Her leaving you the flat and her gallery. The reason she’d never talk about being pregnant and what happened while she was away.”

  Any objections Kit might make vanished as Kate’s phone began to buzz. Having listened, the woman nodded a couple of times and broke the connection without saying a single word. “The police,” said Kate. “It’s time we got you out of here. Come on.”

  But Kit was remembering what she’d said about Mary writing to him. He wondered whether to tell Kate that he knew where Mary was, assuming she was anywhere. I always thought this is where we’d both end up.

  It was the both that gave her away. Vita Brevis—bass/vocals/lyrics. Not one to waste words, ever…

  CHAPTER 54 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

  Her cloak stank of smoke and her knives were gone. High Strange was cold and empty and not at all as it should have been.

  “Door,” said Lady Neku.

  The door, however, said nothing. It just stood there, black lacquered and shining, in the middle of the wall, with great brass hinges and a handle cut from a single block of obsidian.

  KATCHATKA STATION read a metal plate on the lintel. BUILT BY KITAGAWA INCORPORATED, SHINJUKU, IN ASSOCIATION WITH PEARL ISLAND ENTERPRISES.

  Neku shook her head. That description was wrong. It wasn’t the wall that had brass hinges. Well, yes, but not in the way her words sounded. And anyway, the door might be black but it wasn’t urushi lacquer, being made from a single block of obsidian, which meant the handle had to be something else.

  Details were hard to remember. Continuity glitches was the technical term and her life had been full of them. Crossing out three lines of hiragana script, Neku rewrote the door as obsidian and its handle as marble, changing this to diamond as being more likely. She made the hinges steel for the sake of it and because brass felt too predictable.

  Sixty-four pages it said on the back of her notebook, which was also the front, depending on which script she used. So far Neku had written alternate pages, from front and back, using a mixture of kanji, romanji, katakana, and hiragana, being Han script, Roman script, man’s script, and woman’s hand. She regarded it as her duty not to make the truth too accessible, also safer…

  “Come on,” said Lady Neku, giving the door a kick. “All you have to do is open.”

  “You know,” said the door, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Why?” she demanded.

  “Because,” said the door. “Once opened, I’m open. Returning to a time when I was locked becomes impossible.”

  “I can re-lock you myself.”

  “That’s not the same,” said the door. “And you know it.”

  “I’m going to hate what’s inside,” Lady Neku said. “That’s what you’re saying, right?”

  The door stayed silent.

  Every other door in High Strange had opened as Lady Neku approached. Only the council chamber stayed locked. Six sided, to reflect the high stations, the chamber had six doors, one for each family; every segment had a council chamber and the layout was identical for each.

  The door should have recognised Lady Neku instantly and opened itself. It was the grandest of the doors, because this was High Strange and that was how things worked. In the d’Alambert Sector, Luc’s family would have the grandest door, such things stood to reason.

  “You know who I am?”

  “Of course.”

  “So why won’t you open?” Lady Neku demanded, resisting the urge to kick the door again.

  “Because,” said the door. “You’re dead.” There were so many things wrong with that statement that Lady Neku barely knew where to begin, so she began with the most obvious.

  “If I were dead,” she said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  The door considered that.

  “Also,” said Lady Neku, “I can see my reflection.”

  “Do you look like you?”

  “Yes,” said Lady Neku, rather too fast. “At least, I look like the me I remember.” She stared hard at her reflection in the door’s black surface. Her face was coarser, her hips slightly thicker than she’d like and her hair had been dyed silver, but she still looked like her, despite the tattered lace of her cos-play dress. Lady Neku could definitely see herself in the other girl’s eyes.

  “I am Neku Katchatka,” she said. “You will open.” So
the door did and it was right, she didn’t like what was inside one little bit.

  A spread of shingle was washed by waves. The water so cold that she could feel nothing, although that might have been memories draining from her head. A boy was on the beach behind her, half kneeling, he seemed to be looking for someone and Neku was afraid it might be her. He never saw the man who put a gun to the back of his head and…

  “Wrong,” said Lady Neku, covering her ears. “All wrong.”

  The audience chamber was colder than she expected and icy underfoot, but for all its frosty chill the air was tainted with corruption. None of the lights lit on command, and the windows remained shuttered against the sky beyond. Flakes of ice had drifted into patterns on the floor. Lady Neku could only see these because light from the corridor flooded a strip of tiles in front of her. The rest of the chamber was in darkness.

  Lady Neku knew what answer there would be to her request for the shutters to open and the lights come on but she asked anyway, refusing to be shocked, surprised, or even disappointed when they stayed closed and the lights failed to work.

  Instead she stopped at the nearest window, trying and failing to force its covering before moving to the next. High and lonely and arched into darkness above her, each shutter rejected her attempts. Their touch burned Lady Neku’s fingers and glued cold metal to her skin.

  “Fuck,” said Lady Neku, ripping herself free.

  Each window took her deeper into darkness, until the door by which she’d entered became a tiny smudge of light that vanished as she reached half way around the chamber and some object finally obscured the smudge from sight.

  She kept up her litany of swearing until she approached a window. Only to begin again when each shutter refused to budge. After a while, the words lost their meaning and Lady Neku’s voice lost its fury and the hot sweat beneath frozen arms, and the pain in her fingers, told her to stop doing and begin planning instead.

  Everything was linked…As surely as the solar system completed its orbit of the galaxy every 250 million years and fugees needed the floating rope world to protect them from being poisoned. Everything was linked. She could get somewhere with that thought, Lady Neku just knew she could.

  Forcing torn fingers into the web of a fresh shutter, Lady Neku heard a click, echoed from eleven other windows. As she watched, each began to iris, preparing to reveal light through a wall of metal flowers. And though every single one glitched before it was even a quarter open, this was enough.

  The obsidian door had been right; what was seen could not be unseen and doors could be re-shut but not unopened.

  What? Lady Neku told herself. You’re going to cry now?

  She made herself cross the tiles to the table where her family still sat, their food as frozen as those who’d been about to eat it. She did this by the simple expedient of refusing to give herself an option.

  Lady Neku’s mother grinned at the world from a gash that opened her throat from ear to jewelled ear. She’d either been the first to die, or accepted her death without complaint, because the arms of her chair still touched the table and her glass of wine stood icy but undisturbed. Blood crusted the surface of her Maltese lace shawl like beads of jet, sewn into random patterns.

  Her brother Nico had gone down fighting, his scabbard abandoned beside his half-seated body, his chair pushed back and twisted sideways. Antonio sat back and Petro slumped so far forward in his seat that his head rested on the table. Even his long black hair felt frozen.

  Everyone wore their best clothes, black velvet and lace, jewelled cloaks. Only one member of the Katchatka family was missing. The one staring down at the table and its barely touched wedding banquet.

  So this is what death looks like, thought Lady Neku. A massive smear of shit across the surface of the world. She should have known. All this, just to remember why she’d first run away.

  CHAPTER 55 — Monday Morning, 2 July

  So much of what Kit thought was right was wrong, starting with who killed Ben Flyte. The police had believed the killer was Armand de Valois, until Kit tripped up their conclusions, while Kit himself had decided it was Kate O’Mally, a woman he’d always believed capable of anything.

  It had been someone else entirely.

  “Ben Flyte?” demanded Pat, pulling off a muddy road. His question was meant to be throwaway. A sorry, what was that? Only Kit had watched his shoulders tense.

  “Mary’s boyfriend.”

  “Really?” Pat said. “I’m not sure we ever met. They kept changing…”

  “Kate mentioned him in Tokyo.”

  “He’s probably with someone else now,” said Pat. “Things are different these days.”

  Kit sighed. “You know,” he said, “what your mistake was?”

  Pat Robbe-Duras climbed out of the car. After a second Kit realised he was meant to follow. The sky was dark, the stars high, and the moon half hidden by a flat scrap of cloud. A flare of a match and the restless tip of a cigarette were the only clues that Pat was walking towards an open-fronted hangar, watched by sleepy cattle from a nearby field.

  “Tell me my mistake,” he said, when Kit caught up.

  “Never once mentioning him,” said Kit, then asked a question that had been troubling him, really troubling him. “No face, no fingers, no jaw, no teeth—how did you bring yourself to inflict that level of damage?”

  “He used to hit her,” said Pat. “Did Katie tell you that? Mary wouldn’t let either of us interfere. We were just meant to live with it. And then she went missing.”

  “The suicide?”

  “Before that,” said Pat, disappearing into the hangar. When he returned it was to pick up his conversation where it left off. “Mary was due to have lunch with me about a week before she took the ferry. She never turned up, but Ben did in that wretched little car of his.”

  “Did he say where Mary was?”

  “No,” said Pat. “Hadn’t seen her in days apparently, and didn’t know where she’d gone, wanted my help getting her back.”

  “So you killed him.”

  “That was later,” Pat said. “When I realised he’d brought his shit into my life.”

  “What?”

  “He arrived with a Chinese lacquer trunk he’d found Mary for Christmas. Asked me to store it until they made up again, lying little fuck. I gave him about ten minutes, to make sure he wasn’t coming back, and then hacked the lock. You know what I found?”

  “Heroin.”

  Pat nodded. “So I called him up and said I knew where Mary was, but we needed to talk before I told him.” The old man’s face was a cold mask in the moonlight. “He came bouncing back, all smiles, promising to make everything right. And then he saw the open trunk…”

  Two men were leading a small plane out of the hangar, one of them walking ahead. The plane had both its engines going and was inching forward, running without lights. As Kit watched, it angled itself along a darkened runway.

  “You should go,” said Pat.

  “Say goodbye to Neku for me. And tell her I’ll see her soon.”

  “Of course.”

  Looking away, Kit said, “You never told me how you made yourself mutilate Ben Flyte. What drove you, was it anger?”

  “No one got tortured,” said Pat. “We had a whisky while Ben waited for me to tell him where to find Mary. Only his glass was loaded with my painkillers. I put him in the freezer and hacked him up later, when he’d frozen. It was meant to make his body hard to identify.”

  “It worked,” Kit said. “And the drugs?”

  “Into the river.” Pat looked sad. “That was my big mistake,” he said. “They killed the fish.”

  The waters of the English Channel were dark beneath the plane. A sheet of oxidised lead hammered flat by moonlight and wind. A bank of tiny diodes on a console were the only lights in the cabin. Kit was pretty certain that flying dark was illegal but he kept his mouth shut and watched sullen lead turn into wild grass instead.

  Dawn was an hour a
way. Which would give Kate’s pilot time to land in France, turn around, and be back over Kent before the sun clipped the horizon. A feat quite within the Beechcraft’s capabilities, according to a tatty leaflet Kit had been reading before take off.

  The Air King E90 was a turbo prop, once popular with air charter companies. It could stay airborne for six hours and was designed to seat eight, two pilots, four passengers in club chairs, and two bodyguards, chauffeurs, or junior staff in seats at the back.

  In the plane they used, someone had long since ripped out the leather seats and replaced the carpet with sheet steel, unless that was the original floor. Over the steel had been taped polyethylene, now badly scuffed and somewhat torn. Whatever this plane usually carried it was unlikely to be Business Class passengers, or their assorted hangers on.

  The pilot was a young Asian called Tony. At least that was how he’d introduced himself at the small airfield, where Kit had been dropped by Pat, who turned out to drive almost as quickly as Brigadier Miles.

  “Calais…right?” It was the first thing Tony had said since take off.

  “Apparently.”

  “Okay, I’m to give you this.”

  The padded envelope contained euros, two credit cards, an EU driving licence, one of the new ID cards, and a passport, all made out in a name Kit didn’t recognise. Kate O’Mally had obviously spent the last half hour before Kit left pulling in favours. It said something for her reputation that the fakes were good.

  “Computers,” said Tony, glancing across. “Just drop in the photograph and hit print.”

  The licence and ID looked perfect. The back pages of the passport, when Kit examined them in the light, seemed slightly ruffled.

  “If anyone queries you,” Tony said, “say you got caught in the rain.” He shrugged. “And remember, the credit cards are only for show. Your boss said use cash.”

  My boss? Kit laughed.

  The wild grass gave way to French fields and finally to a small airstrip trapped between empty railway lines and the edge of a vast farm, one of those industrial outfits with tractors the size of small houses and pig pens the size of railway stations.