‘If I could just speak to—’
The guard’s hand reached for something on his belt, but never arrived at its destination, as Everett produced the Webley and shot him in the face. There was a cry of ‘Shit!’ from inside the Defender and the driver slammed it into reverse, trying to turn around in the lane, but all that accomplished was to bring the driver’s window side on to Everett, who shot him twice through the glass. Then he went back and put another in the first guard just to make sure.
‘So much for the diplomatic approach,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in trying to be stealthy about it now; there’ll be more of these goons and the longer we hang about the more chance they have of nailing us. Ardie, where does Mother keep the knife and the carnyx?’
‘In St Mark’s,’ she replied, looking down at the bodies. ‘It’s a shame it had to be this way.’
He looked at her. ‘Second thoughts?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Good.’ He went back to the Defender, opened the door, dragged the dead driver onto the road and climbed into his still-warm seat. ‘Come on, you two. Chop chop.’
They climbed in and the vehicle drove away towards Swinley, leaving the winter morning sunlight to seep through the trees’ bare branches, dappling the bodies of the two men who lay on the road. The watches continued to tick blank and busy on their wrists, and the voices in their earpieces squawked and crackled with increasing urgency. Birdsong returned. After a while, a pig-like creature with a long, human torso crept out of the underbrush and sniffed at the scene. It approached the nearest corpse slowly, ears and nose a-twitch for any scent or sound of an intruder. With small and oddly finger-like trotters it worked at the baton that was attached to the man’s belt. It came free, and the Reckling snatched its prize up in its mouth and fled back into the bushes. The bodies had not begun to cool appreciably when the sound of a vehicle grew again and the Defender reappeared, swerving erratically from one side of the lane to the other. It pulled up short and hard before the bodies with a squeal of brakes and a chorus of complaints from inside.
Everett kicked one of the rear doors open and got out, helping Ardwyn after him. She was bleeding from a cut on her forehead and clutching a long cloth-wrapped object in her arms. Gar jumped out of the driver’s side and ran for the gate.
‘Who the hell taught you to drive?’ shouted Everett after him.
‘You!’ Gar shouted back.
‘Well, that’s the last bloody time!’
They scrambled through the hole in the fence and back to their own vehicle, which started up with a roar and disappeared into the labyrinth of small country lanes.
Sometime later the small pig-creature returned, and began to sniff around the Land Rover.
PART TWO
SOW THE SEEDS
1
DENNIE
DENNIE KEELING WOKE TO THE SOUND OF A LARGE dog whining.
Viggo was on his feet in the darkness beside her, his tail down, ears pricked forward, and nose within inches of the inside of the shed door; he was such a huge dog and the confines of her shed were so narrow that this put his head directly next to and above her own. She reached up and scrunched him at the back of the neck where he liked it.
‘Hey you,’ she murmured. ‘What’s your problem? Is it the Great Rabbit Uprising?’
Viggo licked her face with his great shovel of a tongue, but then resumed staring at the door. The noise he was making sounded pathetic for such a big lad.
‘Now that was just unnecessary.’ Dennie wiped the slobber off her cheek with one corner of the sleeping bag and batted about for her glasses which lay on a small shelf above her head. Putting them on, she peered at the luminous hands of her watch. It was a little after three in the morning. ‘Seriously?’
Viggo whined again and raised a paw to scratch at the door. Someone had once suggested to her that she install a dog-flap so that he could get in and out as he liked, but the Great Dane was so bloody big it would have been easier just to take the hinges off the side of the shed door and fix them to the top. Besides, her sleep was so thin these days that it was no great disturbance to let him out for his nightly manoeuvres. Dennie swung her legs out of her folding camp cot to sit up, and fumbled for the switch on the battery-powered lantern that sat beside her glasses. Then her hand froze, because Viggo wasn’t whining any more.
He’d started growling.
It was a low, loose muttering from deep down in his barrel of a chest which meant that he wasn’t scared – not yet – but there was something out there on the allotments that he wasn’t at all happy about. Something that wasn’t the usual kind of vermin.
She patted him again, the heavier kind to reassure him. ‘Good boy, Viggo, good boy,’ she whispered. ‘What is it, hey?’
Burglars, most likely. It wouldn’t be the first time that thieving little shitbags had decided to help themselves to the contents of her neighbours’ sheds. It would be unusual for February, though. Come spring, when folks were waking up their plots there might be some newly bought tools worth nicking, and then in autumn it wasn’t unknown for folks to have had entire shedloads of harvested produce stolen, but in Dennie’s experience your average thieving shitbag wasn’t too keen on going out in sub-zero temperatures in the early hours during the depths of winter.
It was none too warm in here either, now that she was sitting up, despite her thermal long johns. Fifteen years ago she’d insulated the shed with Styrofoam panels, carpeted it and double-glazed its one window with Perspex, and the combined body warmth of herself and Viggo meant that she didn’t have to mess around with heating, but outside of her sleeping bag it was chilly all the same. She reached for and found her down jacket and her trousers; she knew the location of every item in her shed by touch and didn’t actually need any light. Still, she was helped by a thin glaze of ambient town light that seeped between the curtains, picking out the tools hanging on the walls and the shelves cluttered with a lifetime’s bric-a-brac. She shuffled her feet into unlaced boots and picked up a two-foot length of broom-handle. Any thieving shitbag who wasn’t going to be deterred by a hundred and ten pounds of Great Dane certainly wasn’t going to be bothered by his sixty-five-year-old owner either, but it couldn’t hurt.
Viggo was still growling. Dennie shushed him and gritted her teeth against the flaring of old pain in her lower back and left hip as she stood up and clipped the leash to his collar. It was purely psychological; there was no way she could physically restrain him if he chose to go for whoever was out there. Or whatever is out there, she thought, and wondered where that thought had come from.
Dismissing it, Dennie unbolted the shed door and eased it open.
‘Where is it, hey boy?’ she whispered. ‘Show me.’
Viggo licked her hand and padded off, tugging her after him.
The other plots spread out around her in a jumbled shadow-patchwork of sheds, polytunnels, water butts, cold frames, fruit cages, and wired enclosures, their silhouetted shapes glittering with frost. Few of them were actively worked at this time of year, and many were blanketed in sheets of plastic to keep off the worst of the cold. Some were in better condition than others. There was the Pimbletts’ place, its big oblong planting beds made with old railway sleepers. There was the Watts’ place, all foil pinwheels and plastic streamers from last year’s attempt to keep the pigeon hordes at bay. There was Shane Harding’s plot laid out like a Viking longboat, complete with a mast and sail that had been built by his partner Jason, who made narrowboats at the marina in Kings Bromley. Caz the Dragon Lady grew plants for dyeing rather than eating, and her plot was festooned with streamers and pennants around a large junk-metal sculpture of a dragon. Briar Hill Allotments were not all that large, bounded on three sides by suburban streets and the open Staffordshire countryside on the fourth, but in the silent darkness they seemed to stretch for miles. At first she didn’t recognise the plot that Viggo was leading her towards, but when she did she stopped dead, frozen by a chill
deeper than a February frost.
It was the Neary allotment.
Calling it an allotment was quite generous, though, since it was little more than a length of overgrown waste ground, tangled with weeds and brambles and heaped with piles of rubble, rotting fence panels, old tyres, broken tools, rusted garden furniture, and empty plastic sacks flapping like the wings of dying birds. For the twelve years since Sarah Neary had gone to prison no new tenant had ever taken it on and so it had become little more than a rubbish tip for the neighbouring plots – though Dennie had never dumped anything there herself. Nothing would induce her to go an inch closer to it than she absolutely had to, and right at this very moment she wished she’d stayed in bed and told Viggo to shut up.
Because there was someone crawling about on the Neary plot, and it was no common garden-variety thieving shitbag. She had no idea what this was.
The figure was little more than a deeper shadow against the background, and even though it was stooped over as it worked its way to and fro through the weeds, she could tell that when it stood upright it would be huge. It – he, she told herself, it must be a man – was tearing out clumps of weeds, snuffling at them and tossing them away again. Then it – he – scooped up a handful of soil towards his face and she distinctly heard the sound of chewing.
‘What the…?’ she breathed.
Its head snapped up, then it reared to its full height, and she heard it sniffing in her direction, catching her scent. It started to move towards her, its gait shambling, but Viggo, who had been very well behaved up until this point, was having none of it. His growls became full-throated and furious barks, slobber flying from his jaws, and even though she could feel him quivering through the leash that strained in her hand, he stayed with her since she hadn’t yet given him permission to attack.
The figure hesitated, obviously having second thoughts. Then it turned and was gone.
She let Viggo lead her back to the shed, and with hands that fumbled on autopilot lit her little camp stove for a cup of tea. Then she bundled herself back up in her sleeping bag and sat in her old wicker chair, sipping and staring into nothing while Viggo whined and thumped the floor with his tail, trying to reassure her. There was no chance of getting any more sleep tonight. At her age a decent six-hour stretch was a bonus anyway. It briefly crossed her mind to pack up and go back to the house, because what if it – whatever it was – was still out there and decided to come back? But it felt safer in here; she wasn’t surrounded by empty rooms where anything could have been hiding. She would have spent the rest of the night wandering around like a madwoman, convinced that she’d heard something in her children’s bedrooms, or the kitchen, or the study, or any one of a dozen other places. Here in the shed it was simple. Always had been.
* * *
She must have dozed off at some point, though, because she became aware of two things simultaneously: a grey morning light was sifting through the curtains, and the fact that she was as stiff as a board. Dennie groaned and levered herself out of the wicker chair. Her hip felt like there was ground glass in the joint. She swallowed a couple of ibuprofen with another cup of tea, fed Viggo, and when she couldn’t put it off any longer went to have a look at the Neary plot.
If she’d expected it to look harmless in the thin light of day, she was mistaken. It was fringed with a veil of white winter-dead rosebay willowherb whose stalks rattled and whispered to each other in the chill breeze. Further in, knots of black-red brambles curved amongst the piles of rubbish like tangled loops of shoulder-high razor wire, some of the stems as thick as her wrist and all crowded with thorns capable of piercing the thickest gardening gloves. Past them and towards the bottom end of the plot was a copse of skeletal hawthorns and orange crab-apples. The plot obeyed the standard dimensions of a council allotment – five yards wide by fifty long – but was so overgrown that it was impossible to see its full extent, giving the impression that it was much larger on the inside than it should have been, as if anyone careless enough to trespass over its boundary might find themselves lost in a wilderness of thorns. Absolutely impossible to tell if someone had really been here during the night. But if there had been, if it hadn’t all just been the product of her half-sleeping imagination, then it would have been up here, at the top end near the access track.
The end where Sarah Neary had buried the body of her husband.
The police have erected a blue evidence tent over the top end of Sarah’s plot, and officers in disposable white overalls have been bustling in and out of it all day. The allotments have been closed and uniformed officers are at the gates to stop gawkers from interfering. There is a forensics van on the access track with its rear doors open for the investigators in overalls to transfer the remains that they’ve been excavating, and the driver has tried to park as close to the tent as possible to shield their activities from ghoulish eyes, but that doesn’t stop Dennie from watching through the chain-link fence in the field behind the allotments and seeing what they are carrying out. Colin Neary’s remains are removed in several black plastic body bags, each small enough for a single investigator to carry unassisted. Colin had been a big man, too big for Sarah to move in one piece. Dennie hopes they find all of him.
She came back to herself with a shake and a shiver. Viggo was licking her hand and whining.
‘I’m okay,’ she told him, and scratched him between the ears. ‘Just wool-gathering, that’s all.’
She checked her watch. Ten minutes lost. Not so bad this time.
She clicked her fingers and Viggo fell to heel as she headed for the Pavilion to talk to Angie.
* * *
The largest and only permanent structure on Briar Hill Allotments had been given its ironic nickname because of its total lack of any similarity to a quaint old-fashioned cricketing pavilion. It was low and squat, its roof mostly moss and its panels sorely in need of a new paint job, and despite being made from a pair of old demountable portacabins joined together which housed the committee meeting room and a members-only bar one side and the allotments offices on the other, gave the impression that it had sprouted out of the earth like a large rectangular fungus and was going nowhere. Over the years efforts had been made to replace it with something more substantial – or at least hygienic – all of which had been resisted by the committee members who loved their ramshackle clubhouse and didn’t see the need to replace it just because the wiring was a bit dodgy and it tended to wobble in a strong wind.
Dennie found Angela Robotham in her office doing the accounts. Angie was almost a decade younger than Dennie, though her hair was iron grey and her face lined and tanned with years of working as a grounds team manager for the National Forest. Like most of the allotment holders, her work for Briar Hill was voluntary and part-time, undertaken on weekends and holidays. This being a Saturday, Angie was in early to catch up on the admin that nobody else wanted to do. She was sitting at her desk with a laptop open in front of her and wearing a heavy fleece jacket, since she also had a cigarette on and the window open next to her. A small electric heater whirred away on the other side, making a brave but doomed effort to alleviate the chill.
Dennie shivered. ‘You know it’s warmer in my shed,’ she pointed out.
‘Stinkier too,’ Angie replied without looking up. ‘With that great farting animal in there. Not to mention the dog.’
‘Ouch. At least he doesn’t smoke like a French soldier.’
Angie darted a bright blue eye at her. ‘Does he do anything else like a French soldier?’
Dennie laughed. ‘God, you’re foul!’
Angie grinned, a topography of contour lines shifting in her cheeks and around her eyes. ‘Morning, Dennie.’
‘Morning, Angie.’
‘Cup of tea?’
‘No thanks, I’m swilling.’
‘So, what can I do for you then? You haven’t come here for the dazzling repartee.’
Pinned to a noticeboard beside her desk was a large map of the allotments, most o
f the plots labelled with the name of their tenants with the exception of a few blank spaces such as the one where the Neary plot lay. Dennie tapped it. ‘I think we might have had a burglar last night.’
Angie closed the laptop and stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’
Dennie gave her an edited version of her encounter with the strange figure, leaving out some of the more problematic details such as its abnormal size and the way it had seemed to be eating handfuls of the soil – details which would have made it sound like nothing more than the nightmare of a senile old woman. Angie listened with mounting anxiety, but not for the reasons that Dennie had hoped.
‘And you thought you’d just go out and, what? Confront him? Jesus, Dennie, what if he’d had a knife? Or a gun?’
‘I had Viggo with me,’ she protested, scratching Viggo’s head. He thumped the floor with his tail, pleased to be part of the conversation.
‘Oh, so now he’s bulletproof, is he? Why didn’t you call the police?’
Now it was Dennie’s turn to be scornful. ‘Oh, come on, Angie, you know better than that. The police don’t bother with places like this. Remember when the Whites had that break-in? The buggers were in their home with their baby asleep upstairs and the best the police could do was tell them to lock themselves in the bathroom while it took them half an hour to get a patrol car out to them. You think they’re going to send anyone to help us? We have to look after ourselves, because nobody else will. Let’s face it, I’m the closest thing we’ve got to a security guard.’
Angie hmphed. ‘That scares me more than the idea of burglars. You need to look after yourself. You can’t be sleeping in your shed, Dennie. We’ve spoken about this. It’s against the by-laws, for one thing – and don’t start with me,’ she added, as Dennie opened her mouth to interrupt, ‘because I know exactly what you think of the by-laws. Besides, it’s just not safe. You’d have either set fire to yourself or been carried out with hypothermia long before now if it weren’t for that big hairy lump there.’
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