by F. G. Cottam
‘If I can pick a route reasonably free of flood-damaged cars I can cycle there in an hour. An hour and a half, tops.’ He sounded relieved. Something had really bothered this man. Was still bothering him. If she gave him an hour of her time, she could still turn in before nine p.m., nine thirty at the latest. She couldn’t remember having felt more tired. She needed to be rested and alert in the morning for whatever the Baron Fleury had left for them to read about his life and motivations.
‘You don’t sound young.’
‘Until bowing out last year I was a member of the London Dynamos. A veteran member, but I can ride a bike.’
‘Fair enough.’
She told Father Gould where they were staying. She asked him to ring up from reception when he arrived.
But Father Gould never did arrive. Just under an hour after this conversation was completed, the glass in the window of the room they were in had danced its shattered path, some of it on to their carpet, some of it seven storeys further down to the street outside.
And Father Gould, having had a puncture on the bike he’d subsequently abandoned, was kneeling in a rubble-strewn train carriage on one of the handful of Overground lines restored after the flooding, clutching his missal, administering the last rites by the light of the torch on someone’s iPhone to one of three dying passengers crushed by stone shaken from the roof of the road tunnel they were under.
TWENTY-SIX
The hotel had to be evacuated. The risk of structural collapse was just too great for any other option. Juliet and Paul grabbed the duvet and pillows and joined the rabble army of hotel guests from all along Park Lane and headed for Hyde Park. Darkness fell on a white-wrapped litter of prone bodies, maybe 2,000 people too stunned to speak or even move as the aftershocks rippled through the still sodden grass beneath them.
Juliet woke at first light and roused Paul and they picked a careful path through the sleeping throng until they reached a park gate, from where they could see that the mass exodus from the capital had started, with gridlocked traffic on the road in both directions and pedestrians like a shuffling somnambulist procession burdened by suitcases and rucksacks and sullen, silent, fearful children.
Smoke rose, black pillars of it reaching skyward from burning buildings in every direction. No one raised a human voice above the heaving throb of traffic beneath its exhaust haze and heat-ripple.
‘The End Times,’ Paul said. ‘Oxford might be impossible now.’
Juliet went back into the park to find a quiet spot to make a phone call. Assuming the network hadn’t crashed. Assuming she could still raise a signal.
The Home Secretary answered before she had time to hear it ring at his end.
‘Where are you, Professor Harrington?’
‘Central London.’
‘Beck?’
‘With me.’
‘Both intact?’
‘So far, yes. We need to get to Oxford.’
‘I’ll have a chopper scrambled. Where are you precisely?’
‘Park Lane.’
‘Good. Find an intact hotel. One with a helipad. Call me when you’re there and I’ll relay your location to your air crew.’
Juliet thought ‘intact’ a relative term. Though getting into the hotels wasn’t a problem through yesterday’s glassed-in foyers, now smashed to pieces and therefore open to the world. Their own hotel had been open to guests despite the slime-smeared carpet in the vestibule, the non-functioning lifts, the walls on the ground floor discoloured to head height by recently receded flood water. ‘The Blitz spirit,’ the concierge had said. Juliet thought the Blitz spirit now evaporating fast.
Their helipad, when they found it, was twelve floors up and gave them a panoramic view of the devastation. Fires raged unchecked. Fissures several feet wide scarred roads. Almost no building seemed unscathed. The sleepers in their hotel sheets looked like corpses in their winding shrouds laid out on the park’s summer grass, which was damp and starting to steam under a strengthening sun in a vista rendered totally surreal. Elsewhere below them, looters ran here and there in the streets like swarms of ants.
Juliet rang the Home Secretary and gave him their location. ‘Not a single seismologist or geologist predicted last night’s quake,’ he said. ‘But then no meteorologist predicted the fog. And no epidemiologist could explain the plague outbreak. What’s happening simply isn’t normal or even explicable.’
‘We need to locate the Almanac.’
‘I think it might be too late,’ he said. ‘Is Oxford a decent lead?’
‘Oxford’s our only lead, sir.’
‘Then Godspeed, Juliet. Godspeed.’
She remembered the priest then, a man steeped in the rites of organized religion, a cleric with a claim concerning the phenomenon of the unrestful dead. Another lead? Another cul-de-sac? She retrieved and called his number, but heard only silence.
They were in Oxford by eleven a.m. After the sensory assault of an apocalyptic London, it looked as perfect in the summer sunshine as a film set might. Grass was verdantly green, the Cherwell sparkled prettily and the spires dreamed on oblivious to the carnage occurring only sixty miles away.
They’d been given a thoughtful pack of field rations as breakfast for their journey, washed down with a rejuvenating brew of strong coffee from a vacuum flask. Juliet could have done with a shower, but compared to the people they had left sleeping in the park that morning, she thought neither she nor Paul had any real cause for complaint. London had become a place of fleeing refugees. The unthinkable had happened to the capital. And it looked likely to continue to happen.
They walked through the tourist throng in the Bodleian’s courtyard and into the scholarly hush of the library itself like two people walking into another century: mullioned, burnished, leather-bound and sedate.
An archivist approached them as soon as they entered. Juliet was a familiar presence there, but in addition the Home Secretary had apparently prepared the ground on their behalf while they were still in the air.
The archivist was Ms Plummer. If she had a first name, Juliet had never heard it used. Ms Plummer had a grey bun and a pair of gold-wired spectacles on a thin chain. She also boasted a photographic memory, though ‘boasted’ was probably the wrong word. Her perfect recall was an attribute she acted as though everyone shared. It was a discreetly used gift.
Ms Plummer invited Juliet and Paul into her office. This honour was a first for Juliet. The office was small and book-lined and its shelves smelled of Morocco leather. Lozenges of light flushed the wooden floor through a single latticed window.
The archivist cleared her throat and said, ‘The Baron Fleury’s papers have never been catalogued. You’ll know why immediately when you see the chest in which they reside. There is a royal seal on the lock.’
Paul said, ‘Did the chest originally arrive here accompanied by a key?’
‘It did. But at the time it arrived, if you broke a royal seal, you took a one-way trip to the Tower, by boat, through the Traitors’ Gate.’
‘In what circumstances is it permissible to break a royal seal in the present day?’
‘When it’s life and death, Mr Beck. When it’s a national emergency, which the Home Secretary insists this is.’
Juliet said, ‘Where is this chest located?’
‘In the most impregnable of our secure basement rooms. Some of the material in this library is priceless. Some of our Bibles, some of our books dealing with cartography. And the whole world knows it. And there are some very unscrupulous collectors out there with extremely deep pockets.’
Paul said, ‘Which monarch’s seal is on the lock?’
‘The one who married all those wives, Mr Beck. The one with no compunction about cutting off his subjects’ heads. Some of them, at one time, his friends.’
The room wasn’t absolute in its period detail. Ms Plummer’s oak desk was ornately carved but equipped with an Apple laptop and a modern landline phone. And on the deep sill under her window, there
was a very modern looking espresso machine. Now she nodded towards it.
‘Would either or both of you like a coffee, before I take you through?’
Paul accepted. Juliet declined. She didn’t need to have her heart jump-started; it was already thumping along merrily enough. She was nervous, not about what they might find, but about what they might not.
Politicians exaggerated all the time. It went with the territory, was part of the game. But she did not think that the Home Secretary had exaggerated in the slightest in getting them their access to something censored, or embargoed, or just kept secret for hundreds of years.
Juliet Harrington did not want to leave this library without a solid lead. She was desperate for some clue as to the Almanac’s location. She was painfully aware that after today, there was nothing to examine and nowhere left to look. So she waited patiently for Paul Beck to drink his coffee and she pondered briefly on the saying of a prayer.
And doing that brought Father Thomas Gould again, momentarily, back into her mind. And she wondered whether the priest was alive or dead.
They left Ms Plummer’s office, which she locked behind her. They walked along a wood-lined corridor and reached a descending spiral staircase. She led them down and then past several basement doors in a second corridor. Finally, she stopped at one. She produced a single key from a pocket and unlocked the door and ushered them into a small room.
The chest had been placed on a table at the centre of the room, probably that very morning during their flight. And the room had been furnished with two chairs. The box was about three feet long, two high and two wide. Henry’s seal was a belligerent looking lump of red sealing wax with the Tudor rose and the monarch’s single initial branded forcefully into its centre.
Ms Plummer produced the third key her pockets had contained that morning and she placed it on the table. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she said.
Juliet turned to her, surprised. ‘Aren’t you curious?’ she said.
Ms Plummer smiled slightly. She pushed her glasses more firmly on to her nose. She said, ‘I was faxed your security clearances. I can tell you that they were approved at the highest possible level. It’s not a distinction I share. Apparently this is a matter of national security. I’m simply not permitted to witness any of this.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
Dawn Jackson called Handy Andy Baxter using her dead brother Pete’s mobile phone. She personally didn’t own a mobile. She wasn’t on the spectrum, a fact proven on a daily basis by the lively and ongoing interest she took in current affairs. But she had no interest in selfies, texting, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp or any of the other tedious trivia with which teens tended to complicate their lives.
Pete’s mobile functioned for two reasons. The first was that Dawn had remembered to charge it overnight. The second was that Grandpa’s current account paid the bill by standing order every month. And, usefully, Handy Andy’s name and number came up when you scrolled through Pete’s contacts.
Dawn called Andy just as Paul Beck and Juliet Harrington walked through the courtyard on their way into the Bodleian. She’d spent most of the morning watching the crisis escalate on the TV. Grandpa had returned with even less interest in the exterior world than he’d had before his death. He was currently in the garden, hoping to catch a cat in the way his grandson had, twice, before Dawn arranged his incarceration in the cellar.
When Dawn had looked out of the kitchen window to check on her grandfather half an hour before calling Andy, he’d been squatting on his haunches eating a wood pigeon. The grossest thing about this was that the bird was still wearing its feathers. And those big yellow teeth he’d come back with appeared overnight to have got bigger and more discoloured. And sharper, Dawn thought.
She didn’t think he was a danger to her. He was reasonably friendly, when he wasn’t complaining about being hungry. He was quite communicative, in a basic sort of way. But he tended to sort of zone out, standing staring out a window like someone waiting for a bus in his own house. When obviously the bus wasn’t coming.
Handy Andy Baxter was coming. And she was going to lure Andy into the cellar for a reunion with her dead brother. Sneaky Pete, who really was sneaky in this current incarnation, was overdue a visitor. And Handy Andy was the perfect candidate.
She made the call.
‘Pete!’
‘It’s Dawn, Andy.’
‘Where’s Pete?’
‘He’s here. He’s finally home.’
‘Why doesn’t he call me himself?’
‘He can’t. He’s got laryngitis.’
‘I thought he had meningitis.’
‘He did. But now he’s got laryngitis. He’s lost his voice. He can’t talk. He wants you to come around.’
‘What’s the point if he can’t talk?’
‘He can do a kind of hoarse whispery thing. Doesn’t carry over the phone. Works OK face to face because what you can’t hear, you can lip-read.’
‘Have you seen the news, Dawn? I mean, have you seen what’s going on? I mean, blimey.’
‘There are going to be diseases spread by all the dead people they can’t easily recover from collapsed buildings, apparently. They hadn’t even sorted out the bodies from the flood yet.’
‘It’s like the End Times. In the Gospel of St John?’
‘I’d almost forgotten you were an altar boy.’
‘Is laryngitis catching?’
‘The word’s “contagious”, Andy. You need to learn that one. Going to be using it a lot.’
‘Contagious,’ Andy said.
‘And the answer’s no, by the way.’
‘What time should I come around?’
‘In an hour?’
‘OK.’
‘Another thing, Andy. So many people are leaving London that the food shortages are no longer a big problem.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Pete’s got laryngitis. Buy him some grapes.’
Dawn didn’t think that the current iteration of her brother, which she’d admitted to herself would be his last, would have an appetite any longer for fruit. His tastes were a bit more basic and closer to home these days. It was a good thought, though, a nice detail. Fruit was what you brought sick people. Grapes, in particular.
She put the Pete channel on. She couldn’t see her brother in the cellar and experienced an uneasy moment of panic before his face slid across the screen in extreme close-up, mouth leering and his one good eye vacuous. Then he suddenly scuttled backwards; tiny, rapid, insectile steps. And she got some perspective. She saw that he’d eaten his left arm all the way to the shoulder.
‘Gross,’ Dawn said, switching off the TV.
Andy Baxter was excited at the thought of seeing Pete again. It was perfectly possible that his hospital stay had reminded him of the personal hygiene routines he seemed to have forgotten living with his grandfather. He was still disappointed that Dawn hadn’t had the decency to pass on his get-well card. He hoped they’d got rid of those bloody bastard little turtles. And he remembered the noises from below on his last, clandestine visit; Dawn had previously told him they were caused by remedial work next door. But with Pete there, everything would be different.
Andy got lucky on the route. His journey to Pete’s grandfather’s house took him past a grocery store and a convenience store. The grocery store was closed now and had an abandoned, almost derelict look. When Andy peered into the window, all the vegetables in their wooden crates looked diseased. Peppers were collapsing in on themselves, cabbages blackening, potatoes growing white tendrils that groped out from their skins. It was a proper horror story.
But the convenience store was open and even though they were an outrageous price, they had bags of green grapes. Those grapes people in the know called white grapes, which Andy knew they definitely weren’t. He wasn’t colour blind.
He got to Pete’s house holding the brown paper bag out on his flat right hand so as not to crush any g
rapes. He was inside the front garden gate, on the gravel path, when he happened to look up.
Pete’s grandfather was standing at one of the upper windows in striped pyjama bottoms with a generous yellow patch of dried pee at the crotch and a vest daubed down the front with what looked to Andy like blood and feathers. Andy stopped dead, though the grapes he was holding didn’t and their momentum made them fall from his hand to the ground. They did so, to Andy’s ears, with a soft and fruity thud. This bit of unintended slapstick seemed to snap Pete’s grandfather out of some sort of daydream or trance. His face split in a grin exposing a mouthful of joke-shop teeth. They weren’t funny, though. They were grotesque. He was grotesque. Andy turned, and he fled.
Dawn observed the Andy part of this process through the security spy hole in the front door. She had to stand on tiptoe to reach that, which hurt her calves. She hadn’t heard her grandfather ascend the stairs but could guess at what had freaked Handy Andy out. He was a sight for sore eyes, was Granddad. He was a fucking apparition. He’d have to go, basically. Frankly, that was the least the wood pigeon population of Crouch End deserved.
And Handy Andy? There was always the sleep spell, the sung lullaby fatal for its subject. She’d need a photo, and he was bound to be on Facebook. Child’s play, really. Except Dawn thought that dying in his sleep was altogether too easy a demise for so troublesome a character. Andy Baxter needed to go out with more of a bang than a whimper.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The box contained a rapier, laid diagonally to accommodate its length, the Toledo steel surprisingly untarnished by time. That sat atop everything else.
‘His calling card,’ Paul said.
‘A warning, too. It’s a graphic way of saying to anyone opening the chest, Go no further than you already have. And with his reputation it would have been a warning taken seriously.’
Juliet pried the rapier out of the box and examined it. The guard was filigreed, the blade engraved, the sword light, its balance perfect. It was more a forensic tool than a weapon of war, she thought. It spoke of poise and quick reflexes, feathery footwork, a masterful arm. And utter ruthlessness.