Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2

by Louise Welsh

  Twenty-One

  ‘Do you mind?’ The vicar, if he was a vicar, nodded at Magnus’s rifle. He had a Yorkshire accent and his voice was soft and slightly apologetic, but the gun that had killed the driver was still in his hand. Magnus placed his rifle on the edge of the ditch and raised his hands in the air. ‘Thank you. I’d like your friend’s weapons too please. Don’t worry.’ He smiled as if he had not just blown the top of the driver’s head into a blizzard of shards. ‘It’s just a precaution.’

  Magnus’s hands were shaking and it was difficult to slide the rifle from Jeb’s back, but he managed it. He had intended to ignore the gun tucked inside the leather jacket, but to his amazement, Jeb offered it up. The man raised his eyebrows as if he were also surprised.

  ‘That makes me wonder what else you have on you. Check his socks for skean-dhu, please.’ Magnus avoided Jeb’s eyes as he took the Bowie knife from its sheath and laid it beside the other weapons. ‘Thanks.’ The man put the revolver into one pocket and the knife into another. He laid the shotguns in easy reach on the bonnet of the Audi and turned his attention to Jeb. ‘How badly hurt are you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jeb’s voice was compressed by the weight of metal lying on his chest. He had wiped some of the sweat and blood from his face and his skin was pale beneath the bloodstains. His mouth grimaced, but when he spoke he sounded detached, as if he were discussing someone else. ‘I’ve smashed my leg.’

  Magnus could smell cracked earth and greenery beneath the butcher-shop stench of blood and brain. The gunfire had scattered the birds, but the chaffinches were singing again. Chip, chip, chip, chooee, chooee, cheeoo. A robin landed on a bush and tilted its head to one side. Its black button eyes seemed to take in the scene: the dead body with its ruined head, Jeb pinned beneath his motorcycle, the army cleric rummaging in the boot of the custard-yellow Audi. Magnus bent over and was noisily sick in the ditch. The robin flew off, chirping a warning call.

  ‘Our luck’s in.’ The stranger lifted a tow chain from the boot of the Audi. ‘The car’s driver was a belt and braces man.’

  Jeb’s eyes were glassy. His words came out in painful starts. ‘I thought slashing that bastard’s tyres would keep him off our backs, but I forgot he had all the time in the world to get himself a new car and track us down. I guess he got lucky.’ The grin tightened. ‘If he’d taken another road he would have missed us.’

  ‘The road less travelled,’ the priest said, beneath his breath. He fastened one end of the tow chain to the Audi and swung the other end down into the ditch towards Magnus who fastened it to the bike.

  Pulling the motorcycle free of Jeb was easier than Magnus had expected. When it was safely up on the bank the man slithered into the ditch beside them. Jeb’s motorcycle trousers had stood the test of the accident. They were badly scuffed, but un-torn. The man squatted in the ditch, took the Bowie knife from his pocket and carefully slit the leather from hem to knee. He examined the damaged leg with a gentle efficiency that made Jeb swear between gritted teeth and Magnus ask if he was a doctor.

  ‘I suspect I’m the nearest thing to one you’re going to get, but no. I just picked up a few things along the way.’

  The economy of his movements reminded Magnus of Jeb and he wondered if the altered world would be ruled by men like them, practical men who would not let pain or emotions interfere with getting the job done.

  Jeb’s leg was purple with bruises that seemed to deny the separation of blood and skin. It looked swollen and ripe, like a fruit ready to split its casing.

  ‘Without an X-ray it’s impossible to know if it’s broken,’ the priest said. ‘We’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way. Can you stand?’

  Jeb pushed himself up and tried to put his weight on the injured leg, but his face buckled with pain and he sank into the side of the ditch.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ the man said, as if something he had suspected all along had just been confirmed. His eyes met Magnus’s. They were bright Anglo-Saxon blue. ‘Why did that maniac want to kill you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Come on.’ For the first time the vicar’s voice was more army than Church. ‘I may have lost my immortal soul to save you. I deserve to know why.’

  ‘It’s like I said.’ Jeb had bitten his lip and spots of blood jewelled his mouth. He licked them away. ‘We slashed his tyres.’

  ‘He tried to run us off the road a while back.’ Magnus glanced at the gun. The man had holstered it, but he had proved his willingness to shoot to kill. ‘There was no reason for it except boredom or badness. We managed to get away, but we ran across him later by accident when we stopped at a service station. He was somewhere inside, but we recognised the Porsche he was driving. It was parked next to a fleet of around twenty fast cars. We thought he would be less likely to bother us again if we put them out of action.’

  ‘And so it starts,’ the vicar muttered. ‘So few of us left, but already we’re fighting.’

  There had been no need to shoot their attacker in the head; a shot in the leg or foot would have put the driver out of action without killing him. Magnus said nothing and when the vicar hooked an arm beneath Jeb’s left shoulder and nodded for him to take the right, he obeyed without a word.

  In the end they pulled him from the ditch backwards, arse on the ground, ruined leg dragging painfully against the earth. Jeb kept up a low and steady stream of invective as they eased him out. It was hard work and all three of them were sweating and powdered with dirt by the time they reached the roadside. Magnus looked to see what kind of vehicle had driven the vicar to their rescue, but there was only the yellow Audi, abandoned diagonally across the road like a prop in a cop show. The priest opened the car’s back door. Jeb lowered himself gently on to the back seat and slid, still swearing, until he was propped against the other door, his injured leg stretched out in front of him, the other in the footwell, bracing his body against a fall.

  ‘Thanks.’ Magnus unzipped his motorcycle jacket and peeled it off. It was a relief to feel the air on his skin. He realised that he should have thanked the man before and added, ‘You saved our lives.’

  The vicar nodded. ‘Were they worth killing for?’

  Magnus looked at Jeb and then back at the other man. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘What are you going to do with them?’

  Here it was, Magnus thought, the pitch for God. ‘I don’t know.’ He gave the grin that had never worked on his school teachers, but which he seemed destined to greet authority with. ‘Live them.’

  There was another groan from the back of the car and Jeb said, ‘If I don’t fucking die first.’

  The cleric in the stranger seemed to recede again and he reverted to army mode.

  ‘We’ve a place nearby.’ He looked at Magnus. ‘I’ll drive. We can send a truck to collect your bikes later.’

  Magnus wondered who the ‘we’ were. He said, ‘I’d rather follow on my bike.’

  ‘I know these roads. You won’t be able to keep up on that thing.’ The man turned away as if the conversation was over and began unfastening the tow chain from the handlebars of Jeb’s damaged bike.

  The shadows thrown by the trees had lengthened. The crash and its aftermath had swallowed time. Late afternoon was edging into early evening and in a few hours the dark would start to drift in. Magnus leaned inside the car. Jeb was hunched on the back seat, clutching his leg.

  ‘I don’t fancy this.’ Magnus’s voice was a whisper. ‘We could be walking back into prison.’

  Jeb looked at his leg. ‘I’m not walking anywhere. I’ve smashed this good.’ His breath juddered and he said, ‘I’ve done my ribs in too. A sudden move and one of them might puncture my lung; then I’d be truly fucked. Sorry, mate.’ It was the first time Jeb had apologised for anything, the first time he had called Magnus ‘mate’. ‘I don’t like it, but I’ve got no choice. I’ve got to go with the Righteous Avenger. You do what you have to do.’

  It was in Magnus’s mind to
say that he could drive north while Jeb convalesced in the back of the car, but a look at the strained expression on the parchment face told him it would be impossible. He had planned to ditch Jeb, but the prospect of continuing his journey on his own made him uneasy.

  The vicar was at the car now, the tow chain still in his hands. ‘Ready to go?’

  Magnus straightened up. He pulled his motorcycle jacket on and dragged his bike from the hedge where he had abandoned it. ‘Where are you heading? An army base?’

  ‘My base is a hundred miles south-west of here.’ The chain clinked as the man dropped it into the boot of the car. ‘It was hit hard, everywhere was hit hard. I’m the only survivor. I came here looking for someone I knew.’

  Magnus noted the past tense and did not ask if he had found them.

  Jeb mumbled something. The man glanced into the car and said, ‘Your friend’s going into shock. The sooner we get some meds into him the better.’ He glanced at the bike. ‘Don’t worry. I told you, I’ll send someone for it.’

  ‘I’m used to country roads. I’ll follow you.’

  ‘Not on that.’ The vicar nodded at the back wheel of the motorbike.

  Magnus followed his gaze and saw an evil rip grinning in the bike’s back tyre. ‘Shit.’ He knelt down and touched the torn rubber, though he did not need a closer look to know that the damage was beyond patching. It could have happened when he skidded out of the Audi’s path, but he had heard no explosion, felt no tell-tale loss of control. Jeb groaned in the back of the Audi and Magnus got to his feet.

  ‘I’ll be heading north tomorrow, in this car if I can’t find a way to fix my bike.’

  He set the motorbike at the side of the road and slid into the passenger seat of the Audi, wondering why the vicar was so desperate to ensure he accompanied them.

  Twenty-Two

  The yellow Audi ate up the country roads at what felt like racing-track speed. The vicar had been right. It would have been impossible for Magnus to have matched the pace on his motorbike, even if its tyres had been undamaged. Magnus sat silently, trying to hide the urge to press his foot against an imaginary brake pedal. He pulled down the sun visor and glanced at Jeb in the vanity mirror. His eyes were closed, his lips moving silently. Magnus wondered if he was praying.

  ‘What’s your name?’ the vicar asked.

  Magnus snapped the visor back into place.

  ‘I’m Magnus McFall, he’s Jeb Soames.’

  ‘Short for Jebediah?’

  ‘I don’t know, I never asked.’

  The vicar ignored the road markings, keeping to the centre of the track as if he were confident of meeting no one coming the other way, though the whole reason for their haste was that the Audi itself had come the other way. The route was as winding as the man had implied. The old Magnus would have relished the challenge of its twists and turns. He had loved the sensation of speed and rushing air, the roadside flashing by, blurring on the edge of his vision.

  ‘I’m Jacob Powe.’

  Civilisation ran deep, Magnus thought. Everything was broken, but the man still felt an obligation to exchange names, as if they had met at a dinner party or a neighbourhood barbecue. He said, ‘You’re a minister?’

  ‘An Anglican priest.’

  Magnus had never got the hang of English religions with their married priests and un-Catholic masses.

  ‘An army man?’

  ‘A captain, if the army still exists.’

  It was strange, a priest with a gun in his hand, though it was not so hard to imagine Jesus armed and ready to fight the good fight. It was the Messiah’s beard and long hair that did it. The New Testament’s hippy look brought back images of IRA and Afghan terrorists, or freedom fighters, depending on your point of view. There were the makings of a good routine there (a God routine), he thought, and remembered again that there was no comedy circuit, no audience waiting to be shocked into laughter. He wondered if they had anything to drink at the place where they were going. He had a thirst that would drain Christ dry.

  ‘What do we call you?’ he asked. ‘Captain or Father?’

  ‘Jacob.’ The car slowed and Jeb muttered something as they turned into a driveway guarded either side by massive stone gateposts, each one topped with a carved pineapple, regal in its spikiness. ‘Welcome to Tanqueray House.’

  The driveway was hemmed on either side by an avenue of trees. The road’s surface was tamped earth that had been covered some time back with shale. It was pitted with potholes and Jacob took it slowly. It was clear that the place had been neglected before the arrival of the sweats. An explosion of rhododendrons reached across the drive from overgrown verges, occasionally tapping against the car windows, like paparazzi in search of an incriminating photograph. The flowers were the same bright reds and purples of the saris that had sometimes drawn Magnus’s eyes on London streets; they had died too, the straight-backed Asian women with beautiful hair. Magnus rolled down the window and the scent of rotting foliage, more perfumed than the smell of decomposing flesh, but tainted all the same, slid into the car. He rolled up the window again. People went on about the beauty of trees, but Magnus had never felt easy around them. The branches bobbed and tangled above the drive, like mothers separated from their children, straining to touch even their fingertips. The image made him think of his own mother, how much she would be worrying about him. He pushed the thought away. There was no point in dwelling on possibilities. His task was to get home. He would leave in the morning. If he made steady progress he could be at the ferry terminal in a few days. The ferry would be no use, but it was the shortest crossing point. There would be other boats moored there and he would find one to suit him.

  He asked, ‘How many of there are you?’

  ‘Seven – six.’ Jacob stumbled over the number. ‘Father Wingate was here before the sweats arrived. The house was a seminary and he was one of the brothers. He’s eighty-two, but in good health for his age, sharp as a blade.’

  ‘Eighty-two,’ Magnus repeated.

  ‘We’re lucky to have him. Father Wingate remembers the way a lot of things used to be done, before technology took over. His generation will be crucial to our survival.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘They came later. Waifs and strays, like you and Jeb. Like me if it comes to it.’

  Magnus was about to say that he wasn’t a waif or a stray. He had somewhere to go, but the car swung around the final turn, the rhododendrons gave a last desperate clutch and the house appeared at the end of the drive. It was larger than he had expected, three storeys high and broad enough to suggest that once there had been other wings balancing the structure.

  ‘No vow of poverty,’ Magnus said.

  Jacob shrugged. ‘It was Father Wingate’s ancestral home. He donated it to the Church when he took holy orders, much to the outrage of his extended family, I imagine. The Church would no doubt have sold it in due course.’

  ‘In due course,’ Magnus repeated. Death was everywhere, and yet they still referred to it with euphemisms.

  The mansion’s roof was turreted and decorated with urns, like a house in an Agatha Christie movie where someone was due to topple to their death. Two staircases curved liquidly from an elevated porch down to a gravel courtyard where a Luton and a Transit van were parked. Each floor was defined by rows of windows, standing uniformly in line, black and secret. The house had been designed to impress, but it reminded Magnus of Pentonville, their flight across the courtyard uncertain of who was watching them. He wondered if people lurked behind the panes, observing their arrival and wondering in turn who the newcomers might be.

  As if on cue the door of the house opened and a young woman trotted down the left staircase towards them. The girl looked like she had been born to the big house. She was in her early twenties, blonde and slender, with a pert nose that looked too good to be natural. Magnus thought that she might have been one of the girls he had glimpsed earlier that day, crouching in a ditch, disguised as boys, but he coul
d not be sure.

  Jacob slowed the car to a halt and the girl opened the driver’s door. Magnus had thought their arrival would be an occasion, but she barely spared him a glance. She took hold of Jacob’s arm, as if she were about to pull him from the car and said, ‘Henry’s gone.’

  Twenty-Three

  Jacob poured himself a small measure of whisky from the not quite full bottle on the kitchen table. He raised the glass to his nose and inhaled the malt fumes. The house was without electricity and the room was lit by a cluster of candles that threw weird shadows against the walls. ‘This isn’t a prison.’ He had said the same thing as they sat down to dinner. His expression was serious, as if it were medicine he was about to put to his lips and not a fine Lagavulin. ‘Henry was at liberty to move on.’

  ‘He said he was going to stay.’ Belle’s voice had a rich-girl whine to it. ‘He promised me.’

  Magnus swirled the liquid in his glass, smelled a faint whiff of peat, took a sip and felt the malt slide down, warm and golden. The politics of the place were nothing to do with him. Now that they had eaten, only the bottle held him at the table.

  They had laid Jeb on a door and carried him up to the main entrance. He was delirious and Jacob had sent the girl, whose name was Belle, indoors to find something to strap him to the makeshift stretcher with. Magnus had expected to deposit Jeb somewhere on the ground floor, but the priest had led the way up a grand central staircase and they had manhandled the stretcher to a room on the first floor. Now Jeb was in bed, tucked tight in a medicated sleep, his leg firmly bound, his ribs cushioned on either side by pillows. Father Wingate was sitting with him.