by Ivo Stourton
First published 2014 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-658-9
ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-659-6
Copyright © 2014 Ivo Stourton
Cover art by Christophe Dessaigne/Trevillion Images
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
‘Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
“The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.”’
‘Tithonus’, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1860
01:45 HOURS
THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER
2035 (REAL WORLD)
OATES SLEPT WITH his earpiece in so that if an emergency call came over the wires, it wouldn’t wake Loretta. She was grouchy because he’d had to cancel Christmas with her parents. Work wouldn’t let him leave London. He’d been getting up the courage to tell her for a few days, and had finally broached the subject that evening over dinner. Even after all these years she still got scared when he went out late at night, and her fear made her angry at him, so when the bleep tickled his eardrum he rose as quietly as he could.
The earpiece was programmed to caller ID, and Oates heard a recording of his own voice whispering, “That bloody girl, that bloody girl”. Lori stirred at the shift in the mattress, but said nothing. He padded out onto the landing, and stood there in his boxer shorts. He waited with his hands on his hips, deciding whether or not to pick up. For a few seconds sleep kept duty at bay, then yielded.
“Answer,” he said.
“Hey there daddy-oh. How are you doing?”
Her voice had a scratchy, narcotic edge. He could hear someone laughing in the background, and the steady repetitive beat of club music.
“I’m sleeping.”
“How’s the little lady?”
“Asleep.”
“How are those two lovely kids?”
“What do you want?”
The voice on the other end giggled, amused with itself.
“You know what I want. I want the inside line.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She tittered again.
“I’m hanging up.”
“Wait! Just tell me what you know about the Avalon call. Murder, right?”
“What?”
“Avalon, the Great Spa. Come on granddaddy-oh, wake up!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Grape.”
“Don’t tell me I scooped central! I’m everywhere, I see everything,” she whooped. “I’ll bet you hang to the left.”
Despite himself, Oates put his hand over his groin on the dark landing.
“There’s been a murder at the Great Spa. I reckon it will be pretty juicy, with all that money about. I reckon it will need a delicate touch.”
She broke off to shout at someone in the background to fetch her a beer.
“Well they haven’t asked me, so you’re wasting your time.”
“Okay. Sure. All the same, I wouldn’t bother going back to bed. Cross your heart you’ll download to me if they choose you?”
“Go to bed, Grape.”
“And don’t let them make you sign any confidentiality stuff! I want to know what goes on in there, I want–”
“End call.”
Oates looked back over his shoulder into his darkened bedroom. He wanted nothing more than to crawl back in beside his wife, but there was a job coming. Whatever else Grape might be, she was seldom wrong.
He opened the door to his sons’ room, and listened to their breathing in the darkness. The shapes of trains on the wallpaper were discernible in the moonlight, and on the ceiling there was an arrangement of luminous stars that he had stuck up at Harry’s insistence. He worried about that boy. Harry was so keen on staring at the stars that one day he might fall straight down a man-hole. Mike would be alright, he could already take apart the engine of Oates’s old motorbike, and sooner or later he would be able to put it back together.
The atmosphere was warm with the sweet scent of children’s bodies. He inhaled the smell. If he had to go he wanted to take it with him into the night outside, the way a soldier carries a love letter into battle. The house was silent but for their breathing; outside the city rustled faintly in the cold night. As his eyes got used to the darkness, he noticed that Harry had tied a skipping rope around the door handles of the wardrobe. Oates had checked it for monsters at bedtime, but his dad’s word was obviously not quite good enough.
What he would do to anyone who hurt his boys. If he let his mind wander, sometimes it found its way to that thought. It was the only thing to alleviate the unbearable tenderness he felt listening to them sleep. It was part of what kept sending him out into the streets. In the shadows of the bedroom he could feel his nascent retribution, like a dog keeping watch over his children. He knew that revenge for their injury was a particular temptation for him, offering as it did the chance to earth once and for all the fury that was in him in an act of vengeance beyond reproach.
He went across the hall to the TV room where he kept a spare uniform ready for late night calls. He stood for a moment, bare-chested, and looked at the photograph sitting on sideboard. His daughter and his two sons all a-grin, wrapped in towels on Brighton beach. He shook his head and returned to dressing.
As he strapped the Velcro across his sides, as the heavy body armour settled on his broad chest, as his fingers splayed in the rough gloves, he changed his being, and there was nothing domestic about the eyes that met his in the hall mirror. He picked up the pad and pen from the radiator cover and leant the paper up against the wall. He tried to think of what to write for Lori. Once the call came through he might not have much time, but without any idea where he was going it was hard to know what to say. He didn’t want to upset her, or make a promise he couldn’t keep.
He was still holding the pen over the blank page when the call from central came, and it was the Chief Superintendent himself. A body of a guest, a financier named Mr Prudence Egwu, had been found in his room at Nottingham Bioscience’s Great Spa, Avalon in Essex.
“It’s not the best time to be leaving the family, John.”
“Oh, don’t you worry about all that. Besides, with good luck and a stiff tailwind you should be back by the end of the day. They reckon they’ve already laid hands on the man.”
“They reckon?”
“Well, he’s confessed. But I’ve had a look at his file. It doesn’t look like he knew the victim, and he’s a gentleman of restricted means.”
“Who is he?”
“He works as some sort of groundskeeper in the spa. Most of the staff sleep outside the dome, but apparently they do have access through the night.”
“So you think he’s an Eddy?”
“I was rather hoping you might do the thinking on this one.”
There had always been Eddies, men who confessed to the crimes of others out of loyalty, desperation o
r greed, but such cases had been few. The real evolution of the phenomenon had come with the Treatment. You couldn’t compensate a healthy man for thirty years of his youth with money, but if you could promise him a thousand more, what was three decades inside? Now Eddies were the scourge of the court system.
There was a grim humour to watching an interview play out, when an officer had to reject a confession, and the solicitor spent the whole interrogation trying to convince everyone that his client was guilty. Oates knew he had a reputation for winkling out the Eddies, for spotting the glint of inconsistency in a well-briefed confession. It worried him, being known for a nose, because it gave his opinion on a tricky case a weight that was hard to carry.
Oates tried to recall when he first heard the word ‘Eddy’, but he couldn’t pinpoint it. Eight years ago? Ten? Bhupinder had a theory that it came from a children’s character called Ever-Ready Eddy, a particularly reliable collie dog with a smiling, compliant face that showed up on t-shirts and lunchboxes. The Superintendent insisted it came from Edward the Confessor.
“Okay. Anything else I should know?” Oates asked.
“You’ve not been to the Great Spa before, I take it?”
“No. Why would I?”
“Well, quite. There’s something a little uncanny about the whole project to my mind. I’m rather jealous of you, parting the curtains of all those myths and rumours. I’ve had a chat on the phone with their management, and it seems you and your team may find the place a touch disorientating. Apparently they maintain their effect by absolute fidelity to period detail. We’ve had a request from their marketing department…”
“Come on, John.”
“A very polite request to respect that period detail. Once you’re inside the crime scene I don’t care what you do, but I’ve given standing instructions that everyone on the team is to dress in the clothing provided.”
“You must be joking.”
“If I was joking, I would say a rabbi, a priest and an imam walk into a bar. I intend for this to be a proper investigation, but in order to do that I need to make sure we’ve been as accommodating as possible along the way.”
“Right.”
“What?”
“I said alright.”
“There are some very distinguished noses under that dome, and I want them left in joint. It’s going to be a delicate balance. I’ve chosen someone with a light touch. Bhupinder and most of the team should already be there when you arrive.”
Oates said nothing. It was odd to hear his boss echoing Grape’s words so exactly. She must have hacked into a conversation or an email between the Superintendent and whatever higher powers he consulted when he allotted the case. He could feel the responsibility curling up in his stomach, getting comfortable for a long stay.
“Give my regards to your lady wife.”
“She’s asleep.”
“Sensible woman,” John said, and rang off.
Oates took his trenchcoat from the hook in the hall. He left his note, groped his way down the stairs, opened the front door of his house, and stepped out into the London night. The streetlight refracted in the drizzle. The downstairs neighbours had left the weights off the lids of the bins again. He didn’t want Lori to wake up to a garden full of rubbish as well as an empty bed, and the foxes had lately taken to knocking over the cans. He picked up the bricks and set them as quietly as he could on the metal covers.
He could smell smoke on the crisp night air. Something burning down by the river. Along with the dead leaves on the windscreen of his car there was a leaflet stuck under the wiper advertising cleaning services. The first line was misspelt. Oates could sense the wake of hope stretching out behind the flyer, maybe all the way to China or Somalia, smoothing into the void. The street was silent, his neighbours’ windows dark, chintz hanging down to hide the goods in ground floor rooms, and keep the modesty of first floor bedrooms. In the wee hours of the suburbs, he felt like the last man on earth.
Tacked to the inside of his front door, the note he had left for Lori read: Case in Essex. Should know more by morning. John says it’s a quick one. Love to the boys. PS Keep safe.
AS HE DROVE down Putney hill and on into central London he thought for the hundredth time about applying for a move. He felt guilty at the idea, he would be leaving the others with even more work, but he wasn’t sure how many more notes Lori was willing to read. They were understaffed on the murder squad. All the jobs that involved death were short on recruits. A friend of Oates whose father had died had had such difficulty finding an undertaker that in the end he hired a taxidermist to help him with the corpse and built the coffin himself. He remembered it even in Syria, between his first and his second tour, the strange adjustment to the way the men regarded risking their lives.
It was just as he set out for his second six months that Nottingham Biosciences had confirmed the rumours surrounding the successful development of the Treatment. After that, being a soldier just felt incredibly shitty. There had always been the risk of dying, but at least you knew that everyone, even the fattest banker sitting in the softest seat in the City, was going to keel over sooner or later. “Do you want to live forever?” the Captain would ask them before they left the gates of the compound on patrol, invoking the war movies they had watched as boys. It made them laugh, it made them feel better, not because they were happy to die, but because they knew that everyone did in the end. It helped to put things in perspective.
Knowing that you were risking your life to try to keep a stable Middle East, so that a rich stranger wouldn’t lose his pension in oil shares, and that a hundred years after your funeral parade he might still be drinking champagne and chatting up your daughter’s granddaughter – that changed everything.
It hadn’t happened overnight, but he could remember someone from his regiment being awarded a posthumous George Cross for conspicuous gallantry, and when the news came through one of the lads had called him a fucking idiot for getting blown up in the first place. Not in a friendly or consolatory way, but dismissively. The Sergeant had knocked his teeth down his throat for it, but before the Treatment no one would even have dreamed of thinking like that, let alone said it out loud. They might have thought it a waste of a friend’s life, but not in a way that made a mug of him. This was before people really understood how the Treatment worked, certainly before people understood how much it would cost, but every man suddenly had the thought that if he could only make it home alive, he actually might be able to live forever. That made the Captain’s rallying cry a lot trickier.
Nothing changed the rationale for killing, just for risking your own life. If anything they had been quicker with the trigger that last tour, and friendly fire incidents had increased so steadily that by the time Oates had come home his mates were attacking their own shadows.
Back home, back in peacetime, the distaste for death had spread. It wasn’t just yours anymore, it was anyone’s that seemed uncanny. Suddenly no one wanted to be a soldier, or an undertaker, or a fireman, or a paramedic. No one wanted to look after the elderly, or work the murder squad. A death in the family was something subtly shameful, the way Oates imagined a pregnant and unmarried daughter must have been in the 1950s.
THE ONLY THING that hadn’t changed was the journalists. People might not want to be directly involved with death, but they still found it fascinating. Especially the violent, and the kind that the papers liked to call ‘senseless’. He had transferred from the army to the newly formed Domestic Order Unit in his early twenties, straight off the Hercules from his last tour in Syria. He and forty men, five from his squad and the others strangers, had walked down the ramp onto the tarmac at RAF Lyneham, the damp and the gentle grey light so alien after the desert. After they got their papers a couple of the single men went for a drink in a pub in Chippenham, and his Sergeant had told him about this new outfit that was starting up to deal with the trouble in London.
That was how he met Lori. She came up to him after a night of riotin
g, and said: “Thank you. You guys are doing a great job, trying to keep us safe.” That had been nearly twenty years before, and ever since then he had been hounded by journalists.
Grape was the least objectionable one he had come across, partly because she was unaffiliated, partly because she was good at getting him information in return, and could be trusted to sit on a secret until it hatched. She was a news puppy, running an independent blog that covered crime, home affairs and, when real stories were thin on the ground, the odd tidbit of celebrity gossip. He had visited her site once. It was as lurid as most. She was pushy, but he knew it was a precarious existence; she depended on a steady stream of scoops to keep her hits up, so the advertisers would keep buying space on her page.
The only strange thing about her was her forgetfulness. You couldn’t establish a running joke with her, you had to remind her of the details of previous conversations. She existed in a constant present.
Thinking of Grape and the heads-up she had given him, he spoke into his earpiece: “Text that bloody girl – victim’s name is Mr Prudence Egwu. Don’t publish until we’ve spoken to his next of kin. End text.”
OATES DROVE DOWN through Chelsea and along the Embankment. The good citizens of the day had relinquished their claim on London, and each of the people he saw posed a policeman’s question simply by virtue of being out in the rain and the small hours of the morning. There was a lone jogger puffing her way along the pavement by the swollen grey river, her face set in grim determination to be fit and thin for someone, and a group of young men from the St George estate hanging around the edge of Pimlico. Their cigarettes glowed in the darkness.
There were a lot of police on the streets, walking in twos with their thumbs hitched in their stab-proof vests. A young black man had been run over by a police van in Peckham, and two days of mounting disorder in the suburbs had left the city restless.