Redlaw - 01

by James Lovegrove

  The others grunted and growled in accord.

  Illyria gazed at them, placid, imperious. “Redlaw and I have set aside our differences for the time being, in pursuit of a common goal.”

  Probably shouldn’t have told them who I am, Redlaw thought. Mention of his name brought agitated hisses from the tongues of several of the vampires, and the crimson malevolence in their eyes darkened.

  “So you’re Redlaw,” the girl said, looking him over from head to toe. “Shorter than I expected. I always imagined you was a giant, the way everyone goes on about you. But you’re just an old man. Bit wobbly on your pins, too, looks like.” She put her hand on her hip. “Can’t say I’m impressed.”

  “Your opinion is of no consequence, child,” said Illyria. “Let me repeat. We don’t want trouble. The truck is yours. It has most of its load left—more cattle blood than the twenty of you can possibly drink in one go. Gorge on it. Enjoy it. But leave us be.”

  One of the vampires muttered something about a trap, and others agreed.

  “Yeah,” said the girl. “Talk about too good to be true. We’ve just left our Residential Area, where we’re supposedly protected, and where all night long shadies have been garlicking and holy watering us all to buggery and Stokers have been lobbing Molotov fucking cocktails at us over the fence, and now here’s another shady and some hoity-toity cow offering us a BovPlas truck to do with as we please, no strings attached, and we’re meant to just go ‘Oh, okay, that’s nice, thank you very much’? Yeah, right. Pull the other one.”

  Redlaw could see that Illyria was making every effort to keep her cool and finding it next to impossible. The Sunless girl had no idea what she was dealing with, just what sort of beast this was whose tail she was tweaking.

  “Why should I deceive you? Why betray my own kind? I’m presenting you with a generous free gift. You can do me the courtesy of accepting it.”

  “Free,” said the girl, “but it buys you and the shady your lives.”

  “My life,” said Illyria hotly, “is not yours to take, you ignorant little slut.”

  Redlaw knew then that this was not going to end well.

  “Slut, am I?” the girl replied. “Least I’m not a dry-titted old hag who hangs out with Sunless Public Enemy Number One. What d’you get out of it, being with him? A cheap thrill? Tips on how to knock us off? Because obviously we’re lesser beings, not good enough to mix with the likes of—”

  She didn’t say anything further. She couldn’t. Where she had had a throat there was suddenly a cavity, tatter-edged, running crosswise over the front of her neck, narrow but deep. Had she been human, blood would have fountained out, drenching the ground. As it was, the wound merely oozed drips of the glutinous fluid that suffused a vampire’s body.

  The girl lifted a disbelieving hand; touched the gouge; frowned at the sticky dark stuff that came away on her fingertips.

  Then, with a single swiping blow, Illyria finished what she’d started, taking the girl’s head clean off. Decapitated, the body crumpled to the tarmac, turning to ashes as it fell.

  There was a moment of shock. No one moved. Then another of the vampires, grey-haired and bearded like a grandfather, sprang at Illyria with a vengeful yowl. He was fast, but she was faster—infinitely faster. He looked almost astonished to discover that she had evaded his leap and punched a hole clear through his ribcage. His baffled face was the last part of him to disintegrate.

  The other vampires crowded in on Illyria, attacking because she was the adversary and Sunless looked after their own. When put on the defensive, invariably they went on the offensive. It was in their nature.

  They paid for it. Illyria flickered among them like a mirage, here one moment, there the next. Redlaw could scarcely follow her movements. She was eel-quick, and impossibly agile. The supermarket car park was an Olympic arena in which she performed like some inhuman gymnast, making the vampires look like flatfooted circus clowns by comparison. For all their lunging and clawing and artful leaping, they never laid a finger on her. She darted among them and around them, avoiding their every attack, and her hands slashed and punched and sliced, delivering terminal blows every time. In less than a minute the twenty vampires were whittled down to just a few. The rest had become long, low heaps of ashes which the wind swiftly set about dispersing.

  At last the Sunless, seeing sense, halted their assault. The remaining few backed away from Illyria in a huddle, heads bent, looking cowed and sheepish.

  “So,” she said, squaring her shoulders, “what’s it to be? Further opposition? Or have you learned your lesson?”

  One of them sank to his knees, and the others followed suit.

  “Better,” said Illyria.

  “Please,” a Sunless man piped up in broken English. “We are your. We belonging to you. Master. We call you master.”

  “You submit?”

  “We submit. We all.”

  “Then you survive.” Illyria walked among them, touching each bowed head in turn, like a priest bestowing a blessing. The vampires writhed in fawning delight. “I have defeated you and made you mine. You are bound hereafter to render me service. Should I need you, I will find a way to summon you. In the meantime, leave this place. Return home. Go!”

  The vampires scrambled to their feet and scuttled off up and over the embankment. One of them paused at the top to throw a glance Illyria’s way—a last, adoring look—before disappearing from sight.

  “Impressive,” said Redlaw, trying not to mean it. “If I could, I’d clap.”

  “They are like dogs in many ways.” Illyria brushed ash from her hands and sleeves. “They simply need to be shown who’s boss. Once that’s established, you have their loyalty forever.”

  “That how you run your gang at Hackney, is it?”

  “Some fear me, some love me. It’s all the same.”

  “You could rule the entire SRA if you wanted to. Queen of all you survey.”

  “Too much like hard work. I have what I have, and it’s enough. Now, your shoulder.”

  “What about it?”

  “I distinctly heard stitches ripping as you reached for your gun,” said Illyria. “Would you like me to take a look?”

  “No.”

  “I have some experience in the treatment of wounds.”

  “And in the making of them.”

  “I was a nurse with the resistance in the Second World War, during Mussolini’s occupation. ‘Before,’ before you ask.”

  “Still no.” Redlaw clumsily re-holstered his Cindermaker. “I know we’ve got a pact going, you and I, but I’m not letting a Sunless, a shtriga, whatever, anywhere near a big hole in my arm.”

  “It has begun bleeding again.”

  “Even more reason not to.”

  “I am able to control myself around blood.”

  “If you say so, but I’m not willing to put that to the test just yet.” He checked his watch. “Getting on for four. Sunrise is due in about an hour and half. I think it’s time you thought about finding somewhere to bed down for the day, unless of course you’re impervious to sunlight along with everything else. Frankly, I doubt it.”

  “Frankly, you’d be right.” Illyria nodded at the BovPlas truck. “And we just leave that here?”

  “Can’t very well go joyriding around in it any more. SHADE will be looking out for it, as will the cops. Supermarket staff will report finding it when they come in to work and BovPlas will come and retrieve it. Meanwhile, I’ve got my pouch of the blood here”—he patted his overcoat—“and I’ll get going on having it looked at once I’ve crashed for a couple of hours.”

  “Where do you intend to ‘crash’?”

  “Where do you think? Home.”

  “But your flat—will it be safe?”

  “What do you mean? Of course it’ll be...”

  And then it hit him. He had just never had to think this way before. He had never been the outsider, the outcast, the outlaw. He’d always been within the establishment, confiden
t of his place there and content with it. Now, at a stroke, all that had changed. He had left the beach and swum into the cold, murky waters of an unknown ocean, and there might not be any chance of getting back to shore.

  “Won’t SHADE have it under observation?” Illyria said. “Surely it’ll be the first place they think of to look. You can’t go back there.”

  Glumly, deflatedly, Redlaw acknowledged this. “Well, that’s certainly a drawback.”

  “You need to get rid of your phone as well. It’s a GPRS model, yes? They might try to trace you.”

  Reluctantly, Redlaw took out his phone and let it drop onto the ground. Illyria, without pausing to ask his permission, stamped it to smithereens.

  “There. Now, do you trust me?”

  “No.”

  “Can you at least try to?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Because I’m good at this—going to ground. Like the fox, I know how to find new burrows. Many times I’ve been cut off from my home, prevented from reaching it by lack of time or by circumstances. I’m still here because I have learned a trick or two. Will you let me do this for you—for us?”

  Redlaw was too drained, and in too much pain, to come up with a better proposal. “Just make it somewhere not too grotty, will you? I know about you ’Lesses and your standards of creature comfort.”

  “Have a little faith, old bean.”

  That, thought Redlaw as he traipsed after Illyria out of the car park, is about all I do have now. A little faith.

  So little, it was virtually nonexistent.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Giles?”

  Lambourne.

  “Nathaniel, do you have any idea what time it is?” Slocock said blearily into the receiver.

  “Big day. Can’t have you lolling around in bed. The news this morning is good—which is to say bad. Widespread violence throughout the night. Sunless on the rampage. Humans on the rampage. All the ammunition Wax and the PM need for their press conference. Nobody’ll even turn a hair at what they’re announcing, not after a night like that. It won’t be a hard sell. Like tossing a lifebelt to the drowning.”

  Slocock succumbed to a jaw-cracking yawn. “That’s lovely, Nathaniel, but couldn’t you have waited to share this with me ’til a reasonable hour? Like, say, anything past five o’-fucking-clock.”

  “Sleep is overrated, Giles. I get by on three hours a night, four at most. Sleep is the enemy of success.”

  “But it is the friend of the hard-working MP who’s been up late at an emergency session of Parliament, debating the Sunless crisis.”

  “Is that what they’re calling it officially? A crisis?”

  “The Leader of the Opposition is. Wax insists it’s not nearly that, though even he’s hardening his language.”

  “Softening everyone up,” said Lambourne. “Good, good. I’m looking forward to standing shoulder to shoulder with him and the PM later today before the ravening hordes of the Fourth Estate. I had a delightful chat on the phone with him yesterday afternoon, where he was all but crawling up my arse. My, how he’s altered his stance. I think he thinks I’m the light at the end of a singularly dark tunnel.”

  “And not the oncoming train?” Slocock murmured.

  “Eh? Didn’t catch that.”

  “Must be a bad line. I just said Wax takes some beating, doesn’t he?”

  “Oh, very good.” Lambourne laughed—a brutal sound, a hammer pounding in nails. “He is a bit of loser, isn’t he? I’d feel sorry for the fellow, if I knew what feeling sorry felt like.”

  After Lambourne had hung up, Slocock tried to get back to sleep but couldn’t. Eventually he went downstairs, brewed coffee, and practised at his punching bag for half an hour. It wasn’t hard to picture Lambourne’s face superimposed on the bag and imagine his cries as knee, elbow, fist and foot made contact. Slocock hated the man, and yet their destinies were so tightly bound together, he had no choice but to take whatever the CEO of Dependable Chemicals dished out.

  The relationship reminded Slocock of his schooldays. His father, a middlingly successful solicitor, had only been able to afford to send him to one of the minor public schools, Starkely College, a third-division place which modelled itself on the upper echelon establishments but lacked the budget to compete when it came to teaching staff and facilities—a kind of Happy Shopper Eton. At that time the tradition of personal fagging was still upheld there, meaning that for his first two years Slocock was effectively the unpaid scullery maid to one of the senior boys.

  The boy was Harry Parker-Hollingbury, a sixth former who could most fairly be described as an utter cunt. If Parker-Hollingbury’s study bedroom was not immaculately tidied, if there was a scrap of mud left clinging to the cleats of his rugby boots, if a cup of tea was not waiting for him at his bedside punctually at 6.30am every day, Slocock suffered for it. Sometimes Parker-Hollingbury would let him off with just a cuff round the ear. Sometimes it was a closed-fist punch. Mostly, though, the penalty was exacted after lights out, when Slocock would have to sneak out of the junior boys’ dormitory, go to Parker-Hollingbury’s room and wank him off on his bed. Once or twice Parker-Hollingbury made him lick him, but manual masturbation usually sufficed.

  “Slow cock,” Parker-Hollingbury would say. “No rush. Slowww cock. That’s it. Slowwwww.”

  Of course Slocock despised every second of this, but there was nothing to be done. He couldn’t complain to the housemaster, as schoolboy omertà forbade it. He couldn’t baulk or fight back, because Parker-Hollingbury, who played second row in the 1st XV, was built like a conspicuously large brick shithouse and Slocock was, during his early teens, a scrawny little streak of piss. He couldn’t even prevail on his father to send him to a different school, since Slocock senior was himself a product of the independent system and seemed to regard an all-male boarding school as some sort of educational nirvana; he wouldn’t hear a word said against Starkely College and would never have credited his son’s tales of inter-pupil sadism and sexual abuse.

  Slocock had no choice but to suck it up, as it were. Which he did for two long years, all the while fantasising about elaborate revenges on Parker-Hollingbury that he never actually got round to enacting.

  Since then he had vowed he would be no one’s bitch ever again. That was why he hadn’t lasted long at Sandhurst—no good at taking orders, especially not from drill sergeants born on council estates and educated in the state sector—although his habit of turning up for parade drunk and disorderly hadn’t helped. That was why a career in banking hadn’t worked out too well either. His bosses had a tendency to be, well, bossy, telling him to do stuff all the time and bollocking him when he failed to jump to it.

  Politics seemed to be the ideal vocation for a young man who wanted to be on top, dishing out, not underneath, receiving. There was no question that Slocock’s ascent up the rungs of the Conservative Party ladder, from well-connected wannabe to fully fledged MP, had seen him having to take a certain amount of shit from higher-ups along the way. His two years as a research assistant to one of the more reactionary old-guard Tory backbenchers had been no picnic, as the man was cantankerous and gaffe-prone and apt to blame others for his own shortcomings.

  For the most part, however, Slocock had felt quite at home in the corridors of power and had found that the more he let his own inner bully out, the faster he rose through the ranks. There was a strange dichotomy in effect at Westminster: those who wished to rule also liked to be ruled. So important was status to them that it almost didn’t matter how much they had, as long as each knew exactly where he or she stood. All you needed to gain an edge on someone was to be a slightly bigger bastard than him. For Slocock this presented no problem at all.

  Throughout his adult life, until he met Lambourne, Slocock had kowtowed to nobody in any meaningful sense, with the exception of Khun Sarawong. The little Thai, who came up to Slocock’s breastbone and couldn’t have weighed more than eight stone soaking wet, was the only person he allowed to
get away with chastising him, criticising him or treating him with open contempt. A muay thai pupil never spoke back to his instructor; that was a tradition Slocock could respect, and Khun Sarawong had valuable knowledge to impart. Thanks to his strict, rigorous coaching, Giles Slocock had become physically unafraid. The Harry Parker-Hollingburys of this world could never intimidate him again. No matter how big or brawny they came, he knew he could kick their arses seven ways to Sunday.

  Nathaniel Lambourne was a Parker-Hollingbury of sorts, but his hold over Slocock was subtler and more insidious.

  They had first got to know each other at a party fundraiser which Slocock helped organise. Right-wing worthies with plenty in the bank were invited to a slap-up dinner aboard a pleasure cruiser on the Thames and then, after the coffee and petits fours had been cleared away and while the port was still being passed, subjected to a PowerPoint presentation on the future of the Conservatives. It laid particular emphasis on the party’s bias towards big business, its lax attitude towards the income tax dealings of citizens with non-domiciled status, and its promise to deregulate working hours and employee pension provision. Then the guests were expected to write the party large cheques, which to a man and woman they did, regarding this—correctly—as a downpayment to be offset against substantially increased profit margins in the years ahead, once Labour was ousted and the Tories took the nation’s reins again.

  Later that night, Lambourne was out at the cruiser’s stern, leaning on the taffrail, puffing on a robust Stradivarius Churchill and enjoying the breeze and the solitude. Slocock bumped into him there, having just emerged from an alcove somewhere amidships where he had been helping himself to a little booster from his gold snuffbox. Bumped into him was almost literally how it happened, since the river was full and turbid that night and the cruiser had just cut across the wake of a freighter inbound for Chatham docks, so was yawing somewhat. This was well downstream of the Thames Barrier, approaching the estuary, on a broadening sweep of water all aglitter with moonlight.