Her stomach wanted her to get food now, but she needed a plan. She was in a worse position to help Melinda than before. She had no one she could contact. And no clue where to start.
Her heart slumped. The only advantage she had was that no one knew where she was and they probably thought she was drowned. Her parents would think she was dead, and so would the police, the Purity, her friends at school, and Miss Kepple.
Miss Kepple had not given her away to the Purity, even if it was because she fancied her. She might be someone Chloe could talk to. Someone who might be able to help her, but she had no way of contacting her and had no idea where she lived.
That settled it. There was nothing she could do in that direction right now. What she needed was food. So that’s what she would try for. It wouldn’t be wise to go back to the houses behind her since they would be on their guard against food thieves. If she headed in the general direction of Didsbury she would find somewhere to get something to eat, and might be able to contact Miss Kepple if she could find an open terminal.
It wasn’t much of a plan but it would do.
Chloe hopped forward along the ridge tiles, slippery with snow, but she kept her balance well enough. When she reached the end, she jumped off.
She landed with a gentle crunch on the virgin snow of the garden. The untended hedge had grown into something massive and bushy over the years. She leapt over it and touched down softly in the road. None of the buildings around her showed any lights and the snow absorbed sound.
Pushing herself into long, slow strides she headed along the road towards the park. She went over the fence effortlessly. The grounds had been dug up and turned into plots for growing crops. Veering more east than south, she went through a wooded area before reaching the far fence and coming out on to the main road. And headed off with the lights of the hospital fading behind her.
Chapter 22
Yates
‘Why do you have to be such a bloody pain?’
‘Why do you make impossible requests? I’m not starting this car until you apologise.’
‘If I had a wife I think she’d sound exactly like you.’
‘If you had a wife there’s not a shadow of a doubt she’d kill you in the first three months.’
Yates sighed and shifted himself into the passenger seat. There was no way he was going out into the wind and snow blowing round outside. ‘What’s wrong with my suggestion?’
‘We don’t have either the man or processing power to scan all riffy records for ones with flat bio-signatures.’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘Of course you don’t, since you haven’t the slightest understanding of the size of the task involved.’
‘What if we narrowed the parameters?’
‘You know how it turns me on when you talk all science-y.’
‘Sweet Jesus!’
The car powered up and rolled into the falling snow. It was almost impossible to see where they were going.
‘What did you have in mind, DS Yates?’
‘If this is an assassin using a fake riffy to kill people, we only need to look into situations where someone has died.’
‘That’s a good point.’
‘I thought so.’
‘Just murders?’
‘Oh no, accidents and suicides as well.’
‘Very well, I’ll assign some resources.’
‘Thank you.’
‘There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?’
‘Shut up.’
Yates would be glad when winter set in properly, then the snows would mostly stop and they could just get on with their lives as usual. It was the act of snowing that made everything so unpleasant.
Lament was quiet for a time. His image faded slowly from the screen, then he reappeared.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’
‘Cold feet?’
‘Very funny.’
‘Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it,’ said Yates.
‘Do you think going to Paul Banner’s home to interview him is a good idea? Protocol under these circumstances would be to inform your superiors. A more senior officer should at least be present when interviewing a member of either the Board of Utopia Genetics, or a Purity officer. And in this case he is both.’
Yates looked out of the window into the shifting white that obscured the dark buildings as they crawled past them.
‘Have you covered your back now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. How long before we get there?’
‘Seventeen minutes.’
Yates glanced at his watch. ‘Any background information you can give me?’
‘No.’
‘Publicly available information?’
‘He’s in charge of Security for Utopia and is their official Purity representative.’
‘I already knew that.’
‘I know. You know as well as I do that any information on Purity officers is confidential.’
‘Could you access it if you wanted to?’
There was a fraction of a second’s hesitation from the machine. ‘I’m not sure I can even answer that question.’
‘I’ll take it as a yes.’
‘If you like.’
The minutes passed interminably. The whiteout didn’t help since there was very little impression they were even moving, except for the occasional turn. They were still going at a reasonable speed, forty miles an hour if the speedo could be trusted. No reason why it shouldn’t be. Yates chose not to enquire how it was possible Lament could drive so fast when nothing could be seen.
They came to a stop, finally, and the motor shut down.
Lament’s face became more animated. ‘Want me to come in with you, partner?’
‘Funny. I think I’ll be safe enough.’
‘Arriving unannounced isn’t good.’
‘You know as well as I do that if I was announced, I’d never get to see him.’
‘Try not to irritate him.’
‘I don’t think my promotion prospects were good even without this,’ said Yates. ‘Besides, being a DS is perfect for me—I have the authority without the responsibility.’
He pulled his coat round him and climbed out of the car into the snow. Maybe he needed to get a hat like Mitchell’s. Truth was he really wasn’t sure this was a great idea, but he was following a lead. There was a snowball’s chance in hell that Banner would see the inside of a cell even if he announced his guilt.
And what was he even guilty of? Acquiring some chips? Did Banner have the ability to make a fake riffy? Yates had no way of finding out.
There was a big fence around the house but the gate wasn’t locked. Yates slogged through the snow up the long drive.
How the other half lived.
The building emerged from the snow. It was two storeys and looked as if it had been built maybe a hundred and fifty years ago, in the 1920s maybe, with its curved corners and big windows with metal frames.
There hadn’t been any suggestion Banner had a family, but it was a big house for just one person, but then the Purity liked to give its people a good helping of self-importance. Not that they usually needed help with that.
As he approached the door Yates got a sinking feeling. The front door was ajar, which, in his years of experience, had never been a good sign. He was already wearing gloves, so without touching the handle he pushed the door open.
The hall was dark. Yates pulled out his flashlight and clicked it on. Wooden floor, rugs, antique furniture and a dusting of snow on the inside that had not melted. No footprints. He glanced back the way he had come. There were indentations he hadn’t noticed before that could have been footsteps now filled in by windblown snow.
There was an open staircase curving round to the upper floor and doors leading off on the left and right. And two more to the rear.
‘Hello, Mr Banner? It’s the police!’
His voice echoed through the place. It can’t have been very inviting
at the best of times.
‘Hello, Mr Banner!’
Yates reached inside his coat and took out his gun. Another feature of the Purity: higher-ranking members did not have their riffy records available to the police. How Lament had got Banner’s last location was mystery enough, they certainly weren’t able to do any bio-monitoring.
Though the Purity must do that?
Yates shook his head. There was so much they didn’t know when it came to the Purity. But, he supposed, once they had absorbed the police that would no longer be an issue.
He took the rooms one at a time, from the left moving clockwise. Each one was nicely furnished but empty of Paul Banner.
He found the house owner in his bedroom, at least he assumed it was Banner’s. Sparsely furnished but comfortable enough. Snow had blown in through the open window and there was a rope going outside that was tied to the solid wood curtain rail. Taking care not to touch anything that might have fingerprints, he leaned out and was met with the top of Paul Banner’s head. The body was dusted with snow.
‘Are you alive, Mr Banner?’
There was no way he could check for a pulse and no way to determine how long the body had been hanging there. There had been a terminal in the office downstairs. Yates headed back down to it then changed his mind.
He retraced his footsteps back to the car, shutting the front door of the house firmly behind him. The window wound down as he approached and he leaned into the warmth.
‘Banner’s dead, looks like suicide. Better call it in.’
‘Was it suicide?’
‘I don’t know, but who leaves their front door open when they’re going to kill themselves? Let’s keep that between ourselves for now. I’m going to take a wander round the outside of the house and discover his body that way. Someone wanted this to look like suicide so let’s not disabuse them of that idea.’
Chapter 23
Chloe
The cloudy night made the streets dark and the shadows darker. As the temperature fell, the surface of the fallen snow became crisp and crunched beneath Chloe’s feet. The tiny sounds bounced off the walls, buildings and vehicles, augmenting her limited vision with the flat surfaces, the trees and non-functioning lamp posts.
If she had not been so hungry she would have been excited by it.
Unfortunately she knew she was lost.
There had been a big roundabout and she was certain the second exit should have taken her in the right direction. But there was a big park to her left and empty houses on the right. She would have broken into one of them if all she needed was a place to rest. But what she needed was food and there wasn’t even the slightest hint that any of these places were occupied.
Even the snow on the road she was following showed very little in the way of traffic.
If it had been a clear night with a moon she would at least have been able to read the road signs, but her acute hearing did not help her with that. She had long since stopped running and the cold seeped through her clothes. Her feet were numb.
The road was curving to the left in a gentle bend. The angular trees lined the road on the left while the right continued to be open grass—or she assumed it would be grass under the snow. It was undulating flatness.
She had had a flashlight in her original backpack.
If only she could get home, her mother would give her something to eat.
For a moment she did not know if she was hallucinating but she smelled bacon. Drawn like a moth to a light she followed the smell and it grew stronger. There were two low buildings running parallel to the street with an empty parking space between them. The second one had light leaking around the curtained windows.
The smell of bacon grew stronger. Someone laughed loudly behind the door. A deep male laugh and coarse with it.
She hesitated. She needed to eat but she must be cautious. She crept forward to the side of the building, between the two. The thought of cold was gone. She focused only on the interior.
There were sounds of movement. She closed her eyes though there was little need. In her mind’s eye the room on the other side of the wall was laid out. Three men in chairs and a sofa around a low table, all facing in towards it. They were talking about the card game they were playing and betting on.
There was a kitchen off to the side. It was small but that was where the bacon was cooking, or had been. There was no sound of it now.
Her hunger took over. She grabbed the mug from her bag and stepped out in front of the house. She lobbed the mug at the window. She didn’t care whether it smashed it, she just needed the distraction.
The glass of the window shattered as the mug flew through it. Chloe was already in flight in a bound that took her to the roof of the one-storey building. Directly above the front door.
She had expected at least one of them to come running out. They all moved and the room was highlighted in flashes as they readied their guns. She frowned and just squatted like a gargoyle on the tiles. They stopped moving and the room went dark to her. She almost held her breath.
They were waiting for the follow-up attack. She did not give it to them.
‘Check outside.’
‘You check outside.’
‘Oh shut up, I’ll go.’
One of them moved forward and reached the door. There was a small hallway with a door leading to a bedroom, as well as the one to the main room of the bungalow.
The door clicked and swung open. The smell of burning oil lamps filtered out with the warm air. The man paused at the entrance and peered out. It seemed he decided he could see nothing and clicked on a flashlight. The beam swung across, lighting the street beyond and shining out across the undulating snow. Then it tilted down and spotlighted her footprints.
‘Someone was out here.’
‘How many?’
‘One? Can’t see anyone now.’
‘Kids?’
‘What kids?’
Chloe tensed as he came out and his feet crunched into the untouched snow on the doorstep. He looked left and right. His light followed her footsteps round the side of the house.
‘Just checking.’
‘It’s freezing. We need to get something over the window.’
‘Get the spare mattress.’
‘I sleep on that.’
‘Just get it.’
The man below her stepped out and with his gun ready—Chloe thought it might be a shotgun—made his way towards the corner.
The second man inside was passing the front door on his way to the bedroom.
Chloe crossed her arms and grabbed the edge of the gutter. She lifted herself by bending her arms, twisted and swung herself into the hall. Carefully she pushed the front door. It closed with a snap.
The man who had gone towards the bedroom turned at the sound. The surprise in his eyes was cut short by her knuckles that drove hard into his throat. She got her arm round his neck. Sensei had always said it was not weight but leverage that mattered. And she agreed. But when you had as little weight as she now did, the length of lever needed was longer than her body. It was basic physics.
But she still had the strength and her sleeper hold was solid. He stepped back trying to drive her into the wall, but missed and fell backward. His weight on top of her drove her extras into her ribs. She bit down on the pain.
He went limp and she held the lock for the count of two. She might be driven by hunger but she still didn’t want to kill people. Unnecessarily.
‘Terry?’
The other one must have been alerted by the noise of her fall.
What she took to be the spare mattress, complete with smelly sheets, was next to her. She grabbed it up, spilling the linen off it. Because of its size, and her lack of weight, it was difficult to manage but that was good.
She held it up in front of her and awkwardly walked it down the narrow passage to the main room. The man inside was not moving or making any significant sound, and she had no idea where he was in the room.
; The mattress barely fitted through the door. Then she felt it being pulled away from her.
She jumped and hooked her fingers round the door frame. The mattress was leaning in at an angle and obscuring his view. With a quick movement she pulled up her knees and spun through the gap. She landed beside him and slammed her fist into his right kidney. He grunted with the pain but started to turn. She landed a kick on the side of his knee and something broke. This time he really did cry out.
The whole room snapped into reality at the noise. He was crumpling so she got her hand on his neck and tried to yank him back on to the table. Instead she went up. The relative mass meant she was more likely to move than he was.
He was going down slowly. She landed on his chest, flexed, lifted both feet up to the ceiling and pushed. He went down like a ton of bricks and smashed his head on the table. A bacon sandwich slid toward the floor. She snatched it before it struck the ground and shoved it into her mouth.
Taking a firm grip on his left wrist, she went to his right and pulled so he rolled over face down. There seemed to be very little fight in him. In a smooth move she twisted his arm behind him, got the position right and dislocated it with a snap. He groaned.
She chewed on the sandwich.
The clicking of a trigger highlighted the shotgun in the hands of the man outside. She flung herself to one side as it went off. She was blinded by the echoes and stung across her right side. She hit the ground, rolled and came back up on her feet. She grabbed the plate the sandwich had come from and spun it with all her strength towards the open window.
It shattered more glass as it went through and glanced off her attacker’s head. He grunted in pain but didn’t go down.
She watched him disappear into the dark. The sound outlines fading as his footfalls receded into the distance. Chloe went through the kitchen, either eating everything she could find or stuffing it into her bag.
The adrenaline wore off. And the places the shot had hit her ached and then hurt. She checked her side. There were just a couple of grazes from the pellets but they were barely even bleeding. She found a first aid kit and she slapped some cream on the scrapes.
The man on the floor groaned in pain.
She felt bad about it but there was nothing she could do.
Kymiera Page 40