Refuge

by Richard Herley

  ‘It’s all right, Dad.’

  Bex was watching him closely. He reached into his coat pocket and produced an evil-looking machine pistol, which he placed on the table. ‘Do you recognise this?’

  ‘No,’ Davies said. ‘You’ve got all our guns.’

  The pistol was unknown to him. It must have derived from outside the village. That meant someone, or some people, had come looking for Bex. The sound of gunfire was now explained. Who, if anyone, had been shot? The newcomers? Some of Bex’s gang? No one from the village, Davies prayed.

  ‘I’ve never seen it before.’

  ‘You say.’

  ‘It’s the truth. I swear.’

  Bex picked up the pistol and pointed it at Davies’s face. ‘Do you recognise it now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How many villagers were there, on the day we arrived?’

  Someone had come for Bex. There could be no doubt. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The question’s simple enough.’ Keeping the pistol raised, Bex glanced sideways, at Pinch, before looking back. ‘Answer it.’

  ‘There were fifty-two, on the day you arrived.’

  ‘Not fifty-three? Or fifty-four?’

  ‘Fifty-two.’

  ‘Whom do you know outside the village?’

  ‘No one,’ Davies said. His questioner’s use of the objective case made him engage his eyes, as if Bex could somehow be reasoned with, as if his knowledge of the English language made him better, more civilised, than the others. ‘No one at all.’

  ‘Are you quite sure?’

  ‘Yes. There must be other settlements, but we never made contact. As I’ve already told you.’ Of course there were other settlements: where else had Bex himself come from?

  Bex took more deliberate aim. His finger curled round the trigger and appeared to be exerting pressure. His pupils suddenly distended. There was something perverse, depraved, in his expression Davies had never seen before.

  ‘You can lock your door against a thief, but not against a liar.’

  ‘I’m not lying.’

  ‘I say you are. And I thought we were friends.’

  Bex swung round in his seat and pointed the pistol at Helen.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Be a shame to waste totty like that,’ Bex said, ‘but I’ll do it if I have to. You’ve got five seconds.’

  ‘What do you want me to say? I’ll tell you anything!’

  ‘Not good enough.’

  Bex turned the gun back so that it was again pointing at Davies’s face.

  The muzzle made a single hypnotic eye, its pupil also distended, as if in tune with its master’s increasing loss of control. Beyond this eye lay neither mind nor conscience: only a lightless void that was indistinguishable from Bex himself.

  ‘Three. Four. Five.’

  In obedience to Bex, the gun alone then seemed to utter the words, ‘Time’s up,’ leaving no further margin of life for Davies to take his leave, to react, or even to flinch, before the first of its high-velocity bullets hit his head.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Still holding the night sight, Danzo bent to examine the sniping rifle.

  ‘Ultra piece of kit, this,’ he said, lifting it to confirm that the magazine had been removed. ‘Braked muzzle. Short-action bolt. Explosive ammo. Even so, bloke’s a lux shot. Seen the way he took Terry’s head off? I never could’ve done that first round, not with that drop. Not at two hundred yards.’

  Steve leaned closer. ‘What else you think he got?’

  Danzo indicated the disturbed soil and the crushed and broken stems of bracken. ‘Covered in shit.’

  An avenging angel, come down from heaven. Those were the wonky words Muriel had used to define him, not half an hour ago, just before she’d pegged out. Like the other villagers, like most of the people Danzo and Bex had encountered on their passage across the country, Muriel was – had been – a fundamentalist, jolly for Jesus, spouting the scriptures chapter and verse. It had been the same at Byfield, where Danzo, having escaped London at the age of eleven, had been raised. There, as elsewhere, survivors of the plague had imagined themselves favoured by the Almighty. In demonstration of their gratitude, and to make him think twice about changing his mind and infecting them after all, they had spent their time in praise. Had anyone been so crass as to remark that, surely, it had been the old codger himself who had sat by and done nothing to stop the pestilence, the answer was simple. All was his will! He had swept away the unrighteous, suffering the chosen to endure!

  Danzo himself had never believed a word of it. Neither had Bex. That’s how they had first got close. At Byfield they had formed a society of two. Them against the rest.

  In the time they had been travelling, everything had gone their way. Any opposition had been easily quelled. They had found it easy to make recruits, to do whatever they wanted. There had never been any trouble.

  Now it looked as if that might have changed.

  Danzo stood up and put the night sight into his haversack.

  ‘We’re going to get him, ain’t we, Danzo?’

  ‘’S up to Bex.’ Danzo slowly moved forward, casting a knowledgeable eye over the ground, hoping to find blood. At the first semblance of a print, he bent over again. ‘Look at this. What size foot would you say?’

  ‘Eleven, easy.’

  ‘What about the pressure?’

  ‘No one weighs that much. He must have a pack.’

  ‘My thought exactly, Steve. He put it on over there. A heavy pack. Meaning?’

  ‘He’s from outside the village?’

  ‘Correct. He probably don’t have a camp, which means he’s come some way. Could be miles. He’s dumped his tool. So maybe he’s got others, if not on him, then somewhere else. In any case he don’t want to carry that one, but he had the magazine away. Why would he do a thing like that?’

  ‘To stop us using it.’

  ‘Also correct.’ Danzo stood up again. ‘Let’s go on a bit,’ he said, feeling even more apprehensive. The man they were dealing with was not a beginner. He had not panicked, despite the wall of fire they had sent up from the riverbank. He did not seem to have been hit. He was physically big and strong. He knew how to shoot. He had a source of primo hardware, like the night sight, like the rifle, like old Muriel’s Glock. And he had missed Bex by a hair’s breadth. That had left Bex very angry. More angry than Danzo had ever known.

  Again Danzo wondered how Bex was going to explain the death, in one afternoon, of no fewer than three of his disciples. How could he square that with what he had told them? Had they not been initiates of the New Order, flameproofed by Beelzebub himself?

  Still, Bex could sell anything. Sometimes Danzo almost believed that Bex really was immortal, that he really had entered the Covenant. Sometimes, he thought, Bex even believed it himself.

  About a hundred yards from the edge of the escarpment, the trail of the unknown sniper joined the muddy surface of one of the regular village paths. Ten or twelve paces later, Danzo was dumbfounded to see that the man had stopped to remove the galoshes from his boots.

  Danzo dropped to his haunches and with his fingertips traced the impression of the moulded boot-sole, crisply printed in the dark, squidgy autumn mud. The man was inviting them to follow. Meaning: he’d be waiting somewhere. With an unpleasant surprise. Involving firearms.

  Without speaking, Danzo read the mirror-written name at the centre of the instep. VIBRAM. Composition sole as fitted to the finest walking boots. Dog durable. The preferred brand of cognoscenti.

  In vain he looked for explanation at Steve, who had also squatted to examine the print.

  They rose to their feet. With one last glance at the northward-heading trail, Danzo gestured decisively at the escarpment. ‘Bring the rifle and the case,’ he said. ‘Quick as you can. I’m going back to Bex.’

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Suter’s plan took less vague shape as he forced himself onwards.

  His overriding desire was to keep th
e whereabouts of his house secret. On the way to the village he had not been as careful as he might, and it was possible that the trail he had left could still, by an expert, be traced back to Harefield. He had arrived from the south-east. He had, therefore, left Shanley by circling round to the north-west.

  According to Suter’s sums, there were now no more than twelve of them left alive. Fewer, if Muriel had done any good. How many would be in the search party? Unless Bex had decided to move on already, his problem would be to send enough men to do the job while leaving behind enough to keep the village secure. This equation had occurred to Suter even as he had been crawling backwards through the bracken: he had estimated that no more than four would be sent after him. Probably three. The group would include their best tracker, if they had one, and would, doubtless, not include Bex himself.

  If Suter could kill the search party, only eight or nine would be left in the village. By the time they realised the others weren’t coming back, his original trail would have disappeared completely. If he then took a circuitous route home, their chances of finding him would indeed be remote.

  Though he had made himself think these thoughts, his mind was in ferment. He could not stop remembering what he had seen through the zoom sight. Nor could he stop reliving the reaction those three reckless shots had unleashed, the release of so much firepower, so accurately delivered.

  And that was just the beginning. Just a foretaste.

  ‘Enough! That’s enough!’

  No more: if he continued like this he’d have no chance.

  His self-winding Seiko incorporated a stopwatch, which he had started soon after leaving the scarp. Suter checked the map again and saw he would have to increase his speed or risk the failure of his whole plan.

  He was already panting, already physically distressed. He had at least another eight miles to do, with pack, with shotgun, before he could rest. Including the valley wall. Including God knew how much scrub before he hit the lane.

  For the first part of his run he had used relatively open ground, relying on the belief that his pursuers would have needed time to consider what to do, gather weapons, take orders. From the open ground he had turned due north, through the thick scrub of hawthorn and birch that everywhere had invaded pasture and arable land. Then he had headed west, along a track leading down to a crossroads. This was the junction of the Chesham Road and the old lane from Shanley up to Flaunden. The lane crossed the river by means of a brick bridge, still intact.

  On the other side of this he slid down the nettle-grown bank. A waterfall debouched here from the course of the river to the west, which had long ago been widened to ornament the grounds of Iwaden House.

  Grasping at each breath, Suter looked yet again at his stopwatch, bent down, drank, and refilled both of his felt-covered flasks. He next removed his binoculars and waggled them in the clean, cold flow. Most, and then all, of the soil dissolved away from the eyepieces. The right-hand object-glass was scratched. Otherwise, the instrument seemed serviceable.

  Just as well.

  ‘Zeiss oder Leica, Leica oder Zeiss,’ he thought: an old mantra. Praise be to long-dead Germans for making such things. Zeiss or Leica. Or Swarovski. He never could decide which was the best binocular ever built. Rubber-armoured, nitrogen-filled, he could probably have stamped on this 8×30 with no ill effect. It was engineered to suck information from the view, to deliver every last scrap of light and colour and detail.

  He’d spent nearly two minutes here. His merciless stopwatch was telling him so, was already continuing into the future without him.

  ‘Up, up!’

  He climbed the bank. He felt terrible. His legs had turned to porridge.

  ‘Not quite as fit as you thought.’

  ‘You’re too old for this.’

  ‘Much too old.’

  ‘Not to mention stupid.’

  ‘No fool like an old fool.’

  Still reproving himself for what he had done, Suter resumed his course towards the town.

  9

  Set up on its bipod, the rifle lay lengthwise on the dining table. It formed a barrier between Bex and Danzo, seated as they were on opposing sides. As Bex listened to the news from the escarpment, he distracted himself by letting his gaze dwell on each uncompromising detail of the weapon. The whole thing was olive green except for, here and there, a tiny highlight in white. Engraved figures, for example, surrounded the little turret of the zoom control on the telescopic sight, each with its corresponding graduation marking the increment in magnification from 2.5 to ten times. Below the turret, mounted on the side of the sight, a finely knurled wheel bore the legend FOCUS, incised in the same white-filled typeface. This was the thing that he – whoever he was – had adjusted in the moment before sending an explosive round into Terry’s skull, in the moment before almost doing the same to Bex himself.

  Bex reached out and put his finger through the thumb-hole let into the forward part of the stock, which was moulded from some sort of high-density plastic. A webbing strap connected the D-rings at either end of the stock. It looked brand new, unworn, and may never have been used to carry the gun at all.

  ‘Let’s think about this for a minute,’ Bex said, when Danzo had finished his report.

  It was Danzo who had suggested that they retreat to the dining hall for this conference, just the two of them, away from the ears of the others. Though Danzo had said nothing on the subject, Bex well knew how dismayed he had been to find, on his return, that the head man had been shot. The unspoken criticism rankled with Bex, especially as he himself did not understand why he had popped the head man. He had felt like it, perhaps, had not cared about losing a bargaining piece; and had wanted to teach the insufferable Helen a lesson. Davies had reminded him of the head man at Byfield. A sanctimonious Bible-bashing creep, reserving the best in the village for himself. The motive was compounded of all these things, and others: Redmond’s death, the shooting of Terry and Beezer at the river, and of course the unaccountable Mr Nemesis, bearing a great big grudge, at large in the countryside.

  Bex became conscious of the weight of the Glock at his side. He considered firing through his pocket, letting Danzo have it under the table. A burst of nine-millimetre slugs in his pelvis would certainly put a crimp in his lovelife. It might be worth it, if only to see the look of surprise on his face.

  But no. Not just yet. And he would need Danzo shortly, in the Long Room, where preparations were in hand for a divination.

  ‘As usual,’ Bex announced, ‘we have two options. We can do something, or we can do nothing. If we do nothing, we risk a repeat performance. He’s out there. Inviting us to get more closely acquainted. For some reason I can’t quite get a handle on, he’s not our friend. As you say, he could continue picking us off for as long as we hang around here. If we move on, he could follow. It looks like we’ve got to do something. Question is, how are we going to do it?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Kill the bastard, of course.’

  ‘Where d’you think he come from?’

  ‘Not from Shanley. He would have acted earlier. Essendon, maybe. Pinstead.’

  ‘We didn’t leave anyone behind.’

  ‘As far as we know.’ Bex stood up and went to the window, glad to be looking away from Danzo. Rain was still falling. Inducing mud. Blurring trails. ‘That’s a good stunt with the galoshes. He’s a clever boy, all right.’

  ‘Just what I reckon.’

  From here, looking across the lawns and beyond the yew hedges, Bex could clearly see the escarpment where the man had lain in wait. Stained by autumn, the bracken there seemed disordered, disarrayed, as well it might. The branches above it, some freshly smashed and splintered, also bore witness to the events of the afternoon. But higher up, and to each side, the nobility of the trees remained undisturbed. The brow of the escarpment marked the edge of the forest, no man’s land.

  A discourse between Bex and the sniper had already begun, a dialogue without words. The language c
onsisted of deeds, intentions, guesswork.

  Bex said, ‘Who knows anything about tracking?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Steve. He knows a bit.’

  ‘Yes. He does. He can lead. Two more. Carl. Gil. We’ll send them after him. Right now. Double pace.’

  ‘I’m better than Steve, Bex.’

  Bex turned round. ‘More than better. You’re a phenomenon. You can follow a gnat by its droppings.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘I’ve got something more important for you to do.’

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Danzo knew Bex for what he was: calculating, wilful, cruel to the point of madness and beyond. When they were apart, or when Bex, as he often did, was keeping him at arm’s length, Danzo regarded him with something like disdain. But when they were together, and when Bex chose to let him, Danzo still succumbed to the old fascination, the romance of Bex. He was so far ahead of everyone else that the privilege of being allowed to share his presence had become for Danzo an intoxication he could never renounce. He loved just hearing Bex speak, no matter what he was saying, no matter in which language. The quality of Bex’s voice, the rhythm of his speech, had, all those years ago, been Danzo’s undoing. That, and his physical beauty. He had the most magnetic eyes. In their expressive light, breathing the heady, seditious atmosphere of the potting-shed which he and Bex had used for their meetings, Danzo had willingly allowed himself to be seduced. Danzo was the elder by a year, but it was Bex who had shown him the way.

  Danzo had been sixteen then. That particular form of experimentation was long finished, though not by Danzo’s choice. Every time he saw or spoke to Bex the old yearning was never far below the surface. Now, as he stood behind Bex and helped him to adjust the ephod, Danzo was taking the opportunity to study him without his usual, feigned, heterosexual indifference.

  Three candles were burning in this side-room. From the doorway came the smell of incense: the other disciples had already prepared the altar. As Bex tightened the girdle, Danzo felt an urge to lean forward and kiss the exposed skin at his neck.