by Tom Holt
She nodded. “Apparently they’re a great trial to it. Well, you know what it’s like getting anything done by a committee. Imagine having to get a unanimous vote every time you want to move.”
“I don’t care,” Maurice said. “I just want it out of here and gone, all right?”
There was a brief silence. Then she said, “I don’t know why you’re looking at me like that.”
Maurice blinked. “You’re trained,” he said. “You’re a professional. Obviously, you know what to do.”
“Me? Good God, no.” She gave him a blank stare. “The course was basically about their life cycle, habitat and how you go about killing them. We didn’t go into disposal. Different department.”
“What?”
She nodded. “They just said, when you’re all done, call the Sappers and they’ll be along at some point with a van and take it away. Stop gawping at me like that, will you? It was just an introductory-level course, you know. We had a lot to get through.”
He felt as though all his bones had suddenly melted. “So you don’t know—”
“Sorry.”
A brief note on the legend of Pandora’s box. Ever wondered why, bundled in with all the torments and sufferings of Mankind, the gods put Hope down there at the bottom? Answer: because, in certain circumstances, hope can be the worst torment of them all. “That’s it, then,” Maurice said. “I’ve got a dead dragon in my bedroom and you don’t know what to do. That’s just perfect.”
“Not a dragon. Hydra.”
“Whatever.” He was sorry. He hadn’t meant to snap, and she was still his best, read only, hope. But see above about hope. “Come on, Stephanie. You’re an army officer. You people are supposed to be able to cope in emergencies. Think of something.”
“Steve.” She frowned, and her hedge-like eyebrows moved together like tectonic plates. “Well, I guess, we cut it up, shovel it in bin bags and cart it away. I’m pretty sure that’s what the engineers do.”
Maurice looked at her and quietly thanked God from the bottom of his heart for perestroika; because – if this was what they fast-tracked you through Sandhurst for – if we’d ever had to fight the Russians, we’d have been screwed. “Cut it up.”
“I should think so, yes.”
“What with?”
She considered the remains carefully for a moment. “Probably a chainsaw’d do it. Failing that, a block-cutter, something like that. You could get one from one of those tool-hire places.”
He nodded. “And the noise wouldn’t be in the least suspicious. All right, let’s move on. Bin bags?”
Maybe she was starting to get the idea. “You’d need about…” She quantity-surveyed. “Probably about a thousand.”
“Right. So, between the two of us, that’s two thousand trips up and down four flights of stairs. I should also like to point out, we’re on fortnightly collections. And if it won’t fit in the wheelie-bin, they really don’t want to know. At that rate – bear with me a moment – I make that just over nineteen years before it’s all gone.”
“Oh, you’d need a car, or a van or something.”
“I haven’t got a car.”
“If you’re just going to make difficulties.”
“Stephanie.” No, wrong approach. He needed her for this. “Steve,” he amended. “No disrespect, but I don’t think we’re going to be able to do this on our own. We need to call someone.”
She nodded. “I was thinking that,” she said. “Trouble is, if we do, you’re going to be in so much trouble—”
He winced. “Look,” he said sweetly, “don’t you know someone? In the military, I mean. Someone with soldiers and lorries and stuff who owes you a favour.”
She gave him a withering look. “It doesn’t quite work like that,” she said. “I can’t just ask the joint chiefs of staff if I can borrow the Coldstream Guards for the weekend, if they’re not using them for anything.” He was about to express his disappointment, but she gave him her special Shush look. “No, what you need,” she said, “is a private contractor.”
His heart stood still. “A what?”
She frowned. “We’re not really supposed to know about them,” she said, “let alone have anything to do with them, because they’re all a bit, you know. Private security consultants and all that. But—”
“You really mean to tell me there are companies who deal with dead dragons?”
“One or two. I could get a few names for you.”
Well, he thought, why not? Except—“How am I supposed to pay for something like that? It’d cost a fortune. I haven’t got any money.”
And then she smiled at him, quite unexpectedly. “I have,” she said.
“What?”
“Well, there’s not all that much to spend your money on in Kandahar, and they do pay me for playing soldiers. I was saving a deposit on a house, but what the hell. You’ll have to pay me back, mind. Eventually.”
For a moment his mouth didn’t work. “Stephanie…”
“Steve. What?”
“Oh, nothing.” He looked at her. Of course, she still just looked like Stephanie, and always would. “That’s…”
“I know.” She nodded. “What friends are for. Besides,” she added, while he was still struggling with his defective larynx, “I owe you.”
“Really? What the hell for?”
“Thirteen years of never ever mentioning you-know-what.” It was as if she was one of those collapsible umbrellas, and someone had just pressed the button. She folded at the waist and sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. “I think about it all the time,” she said. “I try not to, but…”
News to him. He’d always assumed—“But Stephanie,” he said. “You ate the doughnut.”
She nodded. “I felt I had to,” she said. “To fight it, you see. That’s what I do; I fight things. I’m one of those horrible little yappy dogs that bite your ankles. Everything’s much, much bigger than me – it could stamp on me and I’d be squashed flat, but it doesn’t matter, I’ve got to fight; it’s the only way I know of dealing with stuff. So, yes, I ate the doughnut.”
“I thought…” He stopped to choose his words. “When you ate it,” he said, “that was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Quite. That’s me. Brave as two short planks. And, you know what? It was stale. The doughnut, I mean. If I’d got it from a shop I’d have taken it back and complained. And now,” she said, giving him a sweet, slightly scared smile, “it’s dragons. Sorry, hydras. So, of course, we’re going to fight the bastards, whoever the hell they are. We’re going to get rid of the body and pretend it never happened and try and make life go on, no matter what the cost. Otherwise…” She shrugged. “They win. And we can’t have that, can we?”
She spent the next half hour on the phone, insisting that he stay in the kitchen, so he wouldn’t hear any of it (“because then,” she said, “I’d have to kill you”; and of course she was joking, but even so… He closed the door and put the radio on.) Eventually she came out and joined him. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could do so she nodded, briefly, once. Then she sat down and told him to put the kettle on.
“You killed it,” she said, after a long silence.
“Yes, I think we established that.”
“On your own. With a breadknife.”
He nodded. “On account of, I don’t have a sword, or a howitzer, or a Cruise missile. Some people don’t, you know.”
“That’s pretty impressive.”
He shook his head. “No it isn’t,” he said with conviction. “It’s horrible and a bloody nuisance, and I really wish I’d known it only eats birds and mice and stuff. But—”
“Well?”
If he couldn’t tell her, he couldn’t tell anyone. “I lost my temper.”
“I see.”
“Not like that,” he said firmly. “Really, I was at the end of my rope. You see, the dragon wasn’t all of it, not by a long chalk.”
And he told her about th
e three women on the train, though not (for some reason) quite everything they’d said. She looked at him for a long time, then said, “Oh.”
“Remarkably enough, that’s exactly what I thought. Oh.”
She pursed her lips. They were, he noticed distractedly, well suited for the purpose. “I suppose we really ought to, you know, talk about it.”
“We don’t have to.”
“Maybe, but maybe we should.” She hesitated, then went on. “I just need to ask you one thing, OK? It did – well, just appear. Didn’t it?”
She meant the doughnut. “Yes,” he said. “Out of nowhere.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Stale?”
She nodded.
“So it was – well, real.”
“Oh yes. You don’t get much realer than stale.”
They looked at each other. That was quite enough of that. “So,” Maurice said, “you, um, found someone.”
She nodded. “They’ll be round in about an hour. Pretty efficient, huh?”
“And they’ll—”
“Listen.” She lifted her hand for what would probably have been a reassuring pat, but withdrew it again. “It’ll be OK; they’re good. Done a lot of work for the Bolivian gov ernment, my, um, friend told me. Apparently, they even shampoo the carpets.”
“That’ll be a first, in this place.” He sighed, and sat down on the edge of the kitchen worktop. “Thanks, Stephanie,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”
“I do. That’s why I’m helping you. Honestly, I’ve seen grenades that go all to pieces less readily than you.”
He let that one go. The kettle boiled, and he made coffee. “So,” he said, handing her a mug, “how are things with you, anyway?”
She grinned at him. “Oh, you know.”
“As bad as that?”
She shook her head, and her hair sort of floated before it flopped. She’s grown it since I saw her last, he thought. “Not bad, just…” Shrug. “You know what it’s like. Every time I want something I make damn sure I get it, and then when I’ve got it, it turns out not to have been what I wanted.” She smiled. “Like I thought, Sandhurst, wow, how cool is that? And now, here I still am, doing basically the same sort of stuff but people call me sir.”
“You mean ma’am.”
“No, usually it’s sir.” She sipped the coffee; she always did have asbestos lips. “How about you? Still madly underachieving away like anything?”
“No.”
“Ah.”
“Actually,” he said, “I’m perfectly happy. Well, not unhappy. I mean, it’s sheer hell at work, because they’re probably going to fire between a quarter and a third of us and I’m probably slap bang in the crosshairs, so it’s only a matter of time, and then I’ll have to grind through all that going-to-interviews crap, and God only knows how I’m going to fool anyone into thinking I’d be an asset to their organisation—” He stopped. “That’s if I’m really lucky and my life isn’t changed utterly by that in there.” He jerked a thumb towards the bedroom. “Thanks, by the way,” he added. “I don’t know what—”
“You’ve already said that,” she interrupted. “But outside of work. How’s things?”
He pulled a face. “I eat and sleep,” he replied. “Getting the hang of both of those, thanks for asking.”
“No…?”
“No.”
“Ah.” She frowned. “Me neither. Not that I’m bothered. Overrated, if you ask me. I mean, look at our friends from school who did manage to find true love. Miserable as porridge, the lot of them.”
He looked at her. “Porridge?”
She blinked. “You like porridge?”
“It’s all right. I guess.”
“That’s because you’re not in the armed forces. The army does things to oatmeal that’d blow your mind.”
“Who’s miserable as porridge, then?”
She sat up straight and gave him a detailed report. He found it oddly reassuring. “Kieran and Shawna? You’re—”
“True as I’m sitting here.”
He shook his head. “That can only be some bizarre experiment conducted by a shadowy government agency,” he said. “Casualties?”
“None reported so far, remarkably enough, but it can only be a matter of time. I believe the authorities have sealed off the immediate area as a precaution.”
He looked at her; easier to do when they were both sitting down, since she was at least four inches taller than him. In an alternate universe, he thought, we could’ve been—He panicked, and shoved the thought away somewhere before it could hurt anyone.
The doorbell rang. “Hello,” she said. “Expecting anyone?”
“No.”
“That’s considerably less than an hour. I’m impressed. Well, don’t just sit there like a rice pudding. Let them in.”
So he went to the door and opened it, and saw an extremely old man in a brown shop coat and a flat cap. Some way behind him was an extremely young man, about seven feet tall, eating a sandwich.
“Yes?”
The old man smiled at him. “Rockchucker Disposal,” he said.
“You what?”
“Rockchucker Disposal,” the old man repeated. “That’s us. You’ve got a—” He lowered his voice a little. “—Bit of a problem? Hiss hiss, crawl crawl?”
The penny dropping hit Maurice like an asteroid. “Oh. Oh, right. Come in.”
The old man nodded, hesitated, turned round, snapped, “Art!” in a brisk voice and grinned apologetically. “He’s a good lad really,” he said, as the tall young man lumbered past him into the hall. He was so thin as to be practically two-dimensional, and he nearly banged his head on the doorframe.
“Just a moment,” Maurice said. “You’re the, um, here to clear up the—”
“Yes, that’s right.”
The old man couldn’t have been a day less than ninety. “OK,” Maurice said, “that’s fantastic. You’d better come and take a look.”
He led the way into the bedroom. Stephanie didn’t join them – deniability, presumably. The old man looked at the dead dragon and made the sort of tooth-sucking noise that Maurice had believed was unique to the motor trade. “Well?” Maurice asked nervously.
“Awkward,” the old man said.
“Awkward?”
“Mphm. Of course, it’d be much easier if it was still alive.”
You’re telling me. “But is there anything you can—?”
“Just a tick.” The old man clambered painfully over half a dozen coils of dead tail, excavated a tape measure from his coat pocket, took a few measurements apparently at random; straightened his back with a faint moan; shook his head four times; put the tape measure away and took out something else, either a photographer’s light meter or a Geiger counter; waved it slowly backwards and forwards in front of the dragon’s array of glassy-cold eyes; clicked his tongue, scratched his head. “Awkward,” he said.
Maurice felt icy fingers of panic clawing their way up his spine. “Is there anything you can—?”
“Insulation,” the old man said.
“Sorry?”
“These walls.” He pointed. “Are they cavity-wall insulation, or what?”
Maurice had no idea. “I think so.”
“Uh-huh. You wouldn’t happen to know your residual radon count, would you?”
“Um, no. Sorry.”
“Well, let’s say for the sake of argument it’s less than five.”
“Oh, bound to be.”
The old man put his hands on his hips and looked round. “Mind you,” he said, “even if it’s below five, we might just be able to do something for you, if only—” He brought out the light meter thing again. “Of course, there’s always the small controlled explosion. How would you feel about that?”
“No,” Maurice said quickly. “I mean, I’d really rather not, if there’s any other way.”
“Mphm.” The old man shrugged. “Well, we’ll just have to try doing it the old-fashioned way, a
nd hope for the best, eh? Joists.”
“What?”
“Would you happen to know the precise spacing between your underfloor joists? To within nought-point-nought one, give or take a nibble.”
“Um.”
“Ah well, I s’pose we’ll just have to wing it. Art.”
The young man, who’d been leaning against the wall eating a jam tart, lounged forward and stood improbably, reminding Maurice of the bit in the Tom and Jerry cartoons where the cat runs off a cliff and hangs in the air for a moment, paws pumping furiously. No way those thin, spindly legs could support something that size for any length of time.
“Bosometer.”
“Uh?”
“Bosometer. Oh for crying out loud, don’t say you left it in the van.”
The young man reached in his pocket and produced a clingfilm-wrapped packet of sandwiches, two Jaffa Cakes, a banana and a small silver box. He gave the box to the old man, who opened it. There was a faint whirring noise and a pale green glow. “Thought so,” the old man said. “Ah well.”
It was more than Maurice could bear. “Excuse me,” he said, “but can you get rid of it or can’t you? Only—”
“Well.” The old man snapped the box shut. “We’ll have a stab at it and see what happens, right, Art? Who dares, wins, like we used to say in the service.”
Maurice frowned. “You were in the—?”
“Fire brigade,” the old man said. “And after that, thirty-five years in fingerprints with East Midlands CID. That’s before we got into private security, Art and me. Well, I promised his mum I’d take care of him.” The old man paused, dug in his other pocket, pulled out a huge grey handkerchief and blew his nose in it. “Let’s have the doings then, Art,” the old man said. “And hurry it up, can’t you? We got to be in Bratislava by ten.”
The young man finished off a sandwich, gobbling the crusts like a seal rewarded with fish, and slowly removed a doughnut from a paper bag. He looked at it sadly, as if it was his last sight of the old country, then handed it to the old man, who balanced it on the outstretched palm of his right hand in a way that Maurice found disturbingly familiar. “Just a—” Maurice said, but the old man turned, frowned gently and murmured, “Shh,” as if the doughnut was a baby that had just dropped off to sleep. Maurice stared in horror at the doughnut, which slowly began to rise.