The Wraiths of War

by Mark Morris

  ‘Monroe’s in there,’ Benny said. ‘She wants to speak to you.’

  ‘Why here?’ I asked.

  ‘How the fuck should I know? I’m only the fucking chauffeur.’

  ‘A highly paid one, no doubt.’

  Benny’s eyes flashed at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘You want to watch your lip, son. I’ll only be pushed so far, money or no money.’

  I sighed. ‘Who told you to bring me here? Was it the older me or Clover herself?’

  ‘It was you. I haven’t seen Monroe or spoken to her since our trip to Wales. And I don’t give a shit whether you believe that or not. I’ve already been paid, so as soon as you get out of this car I’m fucking off. And if I ever see you again, it’ll be too soon.’

  I wouldn’t trust Benny as far as I could throw him, but I believed him nonetheless. I looked up at the dark block of the house through the bars of the gate, and sighed again.

  ‘Nothing good has ever happened to me in there,’ I said. ‘First time I accidentally killed a man. Second time I was arrested.’

  ‘Third time lucky then,’ said Benny bluntly.

  ‘Here’s hoping.’

  I heaved and winced my way out of the car. As I hobbled across the pavement to the gate, the December cold throbbed in my bones, which were aching from exertion. Although I couldn’t claim to have been on my feet a great deal in the past hour or so since leaving the hospital, it was still a more concerted period of exercise than I’d managed in the previous week, when the only time I’d been upright had been on the few occasions I’d hobbled to and from my en suite bathroom in the hospital. I hated being an invalid, but consoled myself with the thought that it would have been a lot worse without my little nanite buddies working away inside me. In fact, if it hadn’t been for them I’d almost certainly be dead now.

  Reaching the gate, I clung to it with my good left hand and half-turned. ‘See you, Benny.’

  His passenger window was down as if he intended to deliver a parting shot, but all he said was, ‘I hope not.’ Then the window slid up, the engine started and the car pulled away from the kerb.

  I watched it until it was nothing but a pair of rear lights at the far end of the street, then I lifted my right arm with the cast on it and gave him the middle finger. ‘It’s been emotional,’ I muttered, and turned back to the gate. I pushed it open and limped up the gravel path towards the house, not bothering to conceal my approach by walking on the grass.

  I headed by habit not towards the front door, but around the side of the house towards the French windows at the back. I kept my left hand wrapped around the heart in my pocket the whole time. If there was anything about this situation that didn’t smell good I was out of there.

  The first time I’d come here, the house and grounds had been pitch black, which under the circumstances had been both reassuring and eerie, but as I neared the corner of the house that led around to the French windows, I saw a dim illumination seeping out from that area, flecking the trees and grass in front of me with brownish light. I paused a moment, licked my dry lips, then moved forward again, more cautiously. When I reached the corner I pressed myself against the wall, then slid around it. The glow of light was stronger now, yellowish-orange rather than brown. And it was flickering, not steady. Candlelight.

  I sidled up to the edge of the French windows and peered through them. The drawing room beyond, where I’d first clapped eyes on the heart, and where I’d killed Barnaby McCallum, was illuminated by around a dozen candles. Around half that number had been set on top of the mantelpiece to my right. Sitting in an armchair to the left of the mantelpiece, with what looked like a big book on her lap, was Clover. When I moved into view she looked up, the candlelight falling over her face and making her skin glow like gold.

  She raised her arm and mimed turning a handle, which I guessed was her way of letting me know the French windows were open. Her apparently relaxed demeanour was disarming, but I was still wary. I opened the French windows and stepped into the house, my eyes darting to check out the darker corners of the room.

  ‘It’s okay, I won’t bite,’ she said, sounding half amused, half sad. ‘And neither will anything else.’

  ‘What’s going on, Clover?’

  ‘It’s explanation time. Time for you to be given some of the answers you’ve been looking for. You’d better brace yourself.’

  At her words, my guts started crawling with excitement and apprehension. ‘What answers?’

  ‘Come and sit down.’ She waved at the chair on the opposite side of the fireplace. ‘I know you need to. How are you, by the way? That neck brace looks uncomfortable.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I muttered. ‘Well, no I’m not. But I will be.’

  ‘I know you will,’ she said. ‘And thank you. For saving my life when I was sixteen.’

  ‘What were you doing there? What’s going on?’

  ‘Please.’ Her voice was soft and, so it seemed to me, genuinely pained. ‘Please sit down. I’ll tell you. But I need you to be calm.’

  I hesitated a moment longer, then limped across the room and sat in the chair across from her. She looked nervous, which I wasn’t used to. ‘I’m sitting,’ I said. ‘Now what?’

  ‘I want you to look at this.’ She hefted the big book she was holding and offered it to me. It was an album of some sort, with a matt-black, spongy, leather-look cover. As she held it up, candlelight flashed on the word ‘Photographs’ printed on the front in a gold, calligraphic font.

  I looked at the book, but made no move to take it, which she took as an indication that my injuries were preventing me from doing so.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, a little flustered, getting up from her chair and crossing the divide between us. She offered me the heavy-looking book again, but because of my broken arm, taking it from her would have meant letting go of the heart in my pocket, and I wasn’t prepared to do that.

  When I didn’t lift my arms, she apologised again, then turned the book the right way round before placing it carefully on my lap. Then, as though to reassure me she meant no harm, she went back to her chair and sat down.

  I looked across at her and she looked at me. She looked more nervous than ever. She reminded me of one of my students, waiting apprehensively for my verdict on their end of term project.

  Turning eventually to the photograph album, I opened it carefully, as though dealing with something volatile. There was a layer of flimsy protective paper between each page of photographs, and the top one crackled slightly as I opened the book. I peeled it back.

  Baby pictures. I frowned. The book was unfamiliar, but the pictures weren’t. I’d seen them before. I looked up at Clover.

  ‘This is Kate.’

  She nodded.

  ‘What is this? Some sort of threat?’

  ‘Just keep going,’ she said.

  I turned another page. Kate as a toddler. Wearing a sun hat. Eating an ice cream. Sitting on a picnic blanket. Perched at the top of a slide.

  Another page. She was older here, three or four. Squinting at me through her first pair of spectacles. Opening presents on Christmas Day. Hugging her Jessie from Toy Story doll. Pointing out of a train window.

  The next page. Wearing her uniform before her first day of ‘proper’ school. Playing in a ball pool. Competing in an egg and spoon race. Standing next to a tank full of sharks at the Sea Life aquarium, pretending to be terrified.

  The next page made my heart leap. I felt suddenly dizzy, disorientated. Kate was only five, but in these photographs she was older. At least six or seven. She’d lost a little of her puppy fat. She looked taller, more willowy. There was more of a… it’s hard to describe, but more of a knowingness about her. I tried to swallow, but my throat felt too thick and swollen. I looked at Clover and shook my head.

  ‘Keep going,’ she said softly.

  I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t. I had to see.

  I turned another page. Kate was ten, eleven. These were all portraits now, all posed. The
y weren’t shots captured on days out or when she was in the process of doing something. They looked to have been carefully manufactured to be neutral – neutral clothes, neutral backgrounds. As if whoever had taken them had known that one day I would look at them, and didn’t want to give away too much information.

  By the age of eleven she was wearing different spectacles – with thin silver frames instead of pink ones.

  By the age of twelve she wasn’t wearing spectacles at all.

  By the age of thirteen her hair was longer and less unkempt, her face thinner and prettier; she was turning into a young woman.

  By the age of fourteen the resemblance was undeniable.

  I looked up at Clover. I was shaking. My head was swimming, and I thought I was going to faint.

  Clover still looked nervous, but she was smiling now, and her eyes were full of nothing but love.

  ‘You…’ I said, my voice thick. And then my throat closed up and I couldn’t say any more.

  ‘I wanted to tell you,’ she said softly. ‘I wanted to tell you so much. But I couldn’t. I had to keep it a secret.’

  My head was not just swimming now, but spinning. I couldn’t get a grasp on my thoughts. I felt as though I’d shattered into pieces, and the pieces were swirling slowly around me in a glittering parabola, caught within my orbit. I tried, through sheer effort of will, to rein myself back in, to make myself complete again. I squeezed the heart, but it made no difference. And the nanites inside me could not repair a blown mind. This was something I was going to have to accept and come to terms with on my own.

  I forced myself to speak, if only to hear the words, to have them confirmed: ‘You’re Kate.’

  Clover nodded. ‘Yes. I’m all grown up.’ She gave a nervous laugh and spread her hands, as though showing me a new outfit. ‘What do you think?’

  I didn’t know what to think. Was I happy or upset? All I could really say with any certainty was that I was stunned.

  ‘But how?’ I said. And then all at once a splinter of denial mixed with anger slid into my thoughts, piercing my bubble of confusion.

  ‘You can’t be,’ I said. ‘You can’t be Kate. It’s not possible.’

  Clover stayed calm – almost as if she’d been expecting my reaction. ‘The evidence is there, Dad. Right in front of you.’

  Dad. It felt so weird to hear her calling me that. A woman who was only a decade or so younger than I was.

  And yet it felt right too. In my heart of hearts I knew she wasn’t lying. I knew that this woman – Clover, who had become my great friend and confidante – was also my daughter, Kate.

  Kate, who was currently only five years old.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said, unable to keep the indignation out of my voice. ‘You put me through all that heartache when all the time…’

  My voice choked off. Though I couldn’t help feeling it, I knew my anger was unjustified. Confirming what I already knew Clover said, ‘I’m sorry, Dad, but I was under strict instructions. Instructions from you.’

  I nodded jerkily, raising a hand to show that I knew, that I understood. My throat felt as though it had swollen to five times its normal size. As though to take up the slack, to fill the silence between us, Clover said gently, ‘That was why it was so hard to be with you when you brought me – the younger me – back to the house a few weeks ago. It was too weird. I couldn’t handle it. It was bad enough when we went to Wales that first time, but I knew I had to be with you then, because you were an emotional wreck, you needed my support. And there were other people around, so I didn’t have to have much to do with my younger self. But if there’d been just the three of us in the house…’ She shook her head. ‘Too weird. And I was worried that with only the two of us to concentrate on, you might have started to see the similarities between us before the time was right. You might have guessed.’

  My throat felt as though it was deflating now. I swallowed to enable myself to speak. ‘I still can’t believe it.’ I looked at my hands. ‘And I can’t stop shaking.’

  ‘It’s the shock. Do you want a drink of water? Or something stronger?’

  ‘No, I… I want to hear your story. I want to know how you got to this point. Sorry, but… I find it so hard to believe. So hard to get my head round.’

  ‘I don’t blame you.’

  ‘But you look so different! You and Kate. How can you and she be the same?’

  ‘I grew up, Dad. People do.’

  ‘But your eyesight… and your learning difficulties.’

  ‘I had eye surgery.’ She made a ‘going forward’ gesture with her hand. ‘In the future. You’ll take me, using the heart. And as for the learning difficulties, I got over them. I was bright, I was determined, I worked hard.’ She smiled. ‘And you were a great teacher.’

  ‘So how did you get to this point?’ I asked. ‘How did we get to this point? Tell me everything.’

  Still smiling, she said, ‘For you it started from this night. From the night you found out who I really was. You trained me, Dad – or you will. Because you knew from your own memories what my role would be in pointing you towards the heart in the first place, and helping you along the way. But you didn’t tell me everything. You told me just as much as I needed to know, and then you threw me in at the deep end. That way my reactions and emotions stayed genuine. There was so much I had no foreknowledge of. I didn’t know how Hawkins would end up, for example. Or poor Mary, who worked for me at Incognito. There were times when I hated you for not telling me. But I know it was right. I know you can’t dare try to change what you know has already happened.’

  ‘So those stories you spun me. About your background. About your dad, the vicar, and how you met Benny…’

  ‘They weren’t completely made up. Some of it was real – as far as Benny was concerned anyway. He was never in on what was going on, apart from you giving him a ton of money to look after your younger self in prison – don’t forget to do that, by the way.’

  I tapped the breast pocket of my jacket. ‘It’s all in the book.’

  She nodded. ‘You’ve got a load of setting up to do, Dad. I’ll help you with it when the time comes. It’s pretty complicated.’

  ‘When is it not?’ I said.

  She laughed.

  It was odd, but now that she had told me who she was, I could see Kate in her – the way she smiled and laughed, various little mannerisms. I was amazed now that I hadn’t noticed them straight away – though of course I hadn’t been looking for them, had I? Or maybe I had noticed, but only unconsciously. Maybe that was what had drawn me to Clover in the first place, had made me instinctively want to trust her even when I’d been wary and suspicious of who or what she might ultimately turn out to be.

  Even now, though, I had burning questions that needed to be answered. The most pertinent of which was the one that had led to me being hospitalised again.

  ‘What’s the story between you and McCallum? How did you get involved with him? And from such a young age?’

  She stood up. ‘That’s something it’s better to show than tell.’ She nodded towards my left-hand pocket. ‘Power up the heart, Dad. I need you to take us on a journey.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE SAME RAIN

  When we arrived it was raining again. No, scratch that. It was the same rain I’d been caught in when I’d last been here, about a month ago.

  Anticipating my agreement to accompany her on the little jaunt she’d suggested, Clover (or should that be Kate? Even though I’d accepted she was Kate, it still seemed too large and crazy a thing to get my head round) had acquired a hat and coat for me to wear that would at least mostly cover my very modern plastic neck brace and enable me to blend in.

  We arrived in a darkened doorway across the street from the Hippodrome just as the crowds leaving the theatre were thinning out.

  ‘This time you’ll be going in through the front with me,’ she said.

  ‘So where’s my past self now?’
/>   She pointed towards a dark slit between buildings on the opposite side of the wet and gleaming road. ‘At a guess I’d say you’ve just settled down to hide behind the dustbins.’

  ‘Happy days,’ I muttered, which made her grin.

  We waited a bit longer, until the last of the stragglers had dispersed, and then we crossed the road and ascended the steps to the theatre entrance. An old, saggy-jowled man in a light-grey doorman’s uniform was closing and locking the various sets of doors.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re closed, miss,’ he said, sounding genuinely apologetic.

  ‘We’re here to see the Great Barnaby. He’s expecting us. Mr Alexander Locke and Miss Clover Monroe.’

  The doorman gave us the once-over, then touched a finger to the peak of his cap. ‘If you’ll just wait here a moment, miss, I’ll inquire.’

  He went inside, closing the door behind him. We stood at the top of the now wet and dirty steps, shielded by the theatre awning, and watched people hurrying by, coat collars turned up and umbrellas raised against the rain.

  Now that we had a moment to reflect, I felt strangely tongue-tied. I glanced at Clover and she glanced back, smiling shyly.

  ‘This is weird,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she replied. ‘Sorry.’

  I shrugged. ‘You did what you had to do.’

  She was silent for a moment, then she said, ‘It was weird for me too at first. Teaming up with my dad, who was only, like, eight or nine years older than me. It’s a big relief the secret’s out now, though, not least because I no longer have to worry about calling you dad by mistake.’

  ‘Did you remember me looking like this?’ I asked. ‘From when you were little, I mean?’

  She scrunched her face into a very Kate-like expression. ‘Kind of. I remember my childhood pretty well. Going back to our old flat was weird, because before we got there I only sort of half-remembered it. But when I saw it again, even though it was smashed up, it all looked instantly familiar. But to answer your question – you didn’t really look all that different to me. Just… well, as if you’d had some sort of extreme makeover or something. A few nips and tucks here and there. A bit of gravity-defying Botox.’