Refuge

by Richard Herley

  Who knew what she was enduring at Bex’s hands? She had been brutally bereaved. Her father was being held at gunpoint. She had never laid eyes on Suter and never would. Even if she did: what would she see? Martin, her late husband, had been about twenty-nine, Suter’s exact age at the end of the plague. Twelve years had gone by since then, twelve years during which, unseen by anyone, Suter had become steadily older and uglier. Now he was a middle-aged hermit. He was bearded, suspicious, a confirmed assassin. He was a coward and a sneak, to boot. He had run away from Shanley, despite Muriel’s pleas, her faith in him. His heart was blacker than that creosote-smoke.

  Muriel had told him, ‘I’d be feeling rather ashamed of myself, if I were you.’

  Suter remembered the way he had stood with his shotgun on the landing in the house on Baldwin’s Lane. Wearing only his shirt and underpants, he had forced himself downstairs to prove he wasn’t afraid. He saw now that he had taken the lorry for the same reason.

  Forget! Forget everything! Everything! And no more German, d’you hear me?

  His loneliness was still growing. It was coming back in all its force, as bad as it had ever been, even just after the plague, when he had thought himself the only human being left alive. Under gloomy March skies he had wandered London. Avoiding bodies and abandoned vehicles, he had crossed Westminster Bridge towards the Houses of Parliament. Halfway over he had stopped and climbed the parapet, intending to leap into the Thames.

  ‘You can shave that beard off, too.’

  ‘What are you gibbering about now?’

  ‘Shave it off. You’ve been hiding behind those whiskers ever since. Look at yourself full face. See what you’ve grown into.’

  There, in that moment on the parapet, arms raised, he had undergone his epiphany. He had drawn strength from the very river itself. Its course wound magnificently through the rich heart of England, carrying everything down towards the sea: leaf-mould, silt, youngling salmon, the gold and scarlet progress of the Royal Barge. And he, Suter, he alone was its sovereign. Exulting, shouting defiance into the sky, he had railed against God and dared him to contradict. But God too had been hiding behind his whiskers. For it had ever been so, and ever would.

  Did he say that aloud, or only think it?

  He whispered, ‘Sweet Jesus, am I really off my head again?’

  To distract himself he raised the binoculars. Though he had already convinced himself that no one had invaded his house, he wanted, out of habit, out of caution, to take one last look.

  It was then that he saw, moving in the corridor beyond the drawing room, the dim and momentary play of a flashlamp.

  PART THREE

  1

  Danzo called out to Pinch, as loudly as he dared, ‘Switch that bleeding thing off!’ and the torch beam instantly disappeared.

  While Pinch blindly made his way back along the corridor towards the kitchen, Danzo tightened his lips and shook his head in the darkness. He had to control his temper. If he finally lost it with Pinch, all his painstaking work would go down the tube. And he was very close. Pinch was unable to follow the simplest orders. He argued at every turn. As a result, it was Danzo who had done everything. Pinch had hardly helped at all. At the one difficult point in the tracking, his big feet had cost them over half an hour, for he had actually gone on ahead without permission and trodden the man’s trail.

  Danzo was seated in a fireside armchair in the main kitchen. He had set the chair so that it faced the entryway from the back porch. It was this porch that the single occupant of the house habitually used. The other external doors were opened either very rarely or not at all.

  The occupant of the house, the sniper, the so-called angel, St Michael, was not only mad but obtuse. He had been so unthinking as to have given Muriel a little stone figure which had been in Martin’s pocket. This, Bex had seen at once, tied the sniper to Martin’s body. St Michael had obviously found it somewhere downstream and followed the river system back to Shanley. It could hardly have been simpler for Danzo and Pinch to locate the place where he had started. The walk had taken them no more than a few hours. Almost as soon as they had got here, they had even found the patch of grass where he had burned the body. The cremation had taken place within the past week: last Wednesday or Thursday, to judge from the state of the ashes.

  Since arriving this morning, Danzo had been able to deduce a great deal more about their dim-witted angel. A photograph album cum scrapbook, among various other documents, revealed that his name was John Suter. The inadvertent detail provided by the album disclosed that his background had been inconceivably privileged. His good luck had not stopped there: he was tall, proportionately formed, with blond hair and grey eyes. There was one professionally taken picture which Danzo had studied with particular resentment. In July 2004, aged sixteen, dressed in a tie and posh blazer, he had been captured at a school speech-day in the act of receiving, from a man wearing a black gown and mortar-board, some expensive-looking book, his reward for winning the school’s ‘Goodridge Prize for Biology’. Then, later, he became a university student. He was shown sitting cross-legged in 2007 among other young people on a lush lawn beside a river. Later still, in 2010 and 2011, he spent time in the fabled, legendary land of America, at a place called Northwestern University. Danzo had plucked from its mount a postcard dated August 2010 and addressed to ‘Mr and Mrs R. Suter’ in Gerrard’s Cross, Buckinghamshire, England. The card showed an amazing vista of skyscrapers, black and white and grey, with blue water beyond, and was labelled Looking north from the Sears Tower Skydeck, 1,353 feet above downtown Chicago. The message, in neat black handwriting, read I’m doing all the touristy things you’re supposed to do here. You’d love it! Lunched on pike at the Navy Pier. Yesterday we drove up to Waukegan and swam in Lake Michigan. Start work next week. Letter very soon. Love, John. After this, the exhibits in the album became fewer, with English or continental settings. A number of pages bore marks where photos had been torn out.

  The album provided information on the man’s appearance and upbringing. His personality was hinted at by the manic tidiness of the house itself. There was no sign that anyone had ever shared it with him. He had apparently been alone since the plague, and was plainly off his chump: hence his behaviour at Shanley.

  The tens of thousands of books and discs on his shelves were arranged according to some obscure system of classification. His monkish bedroom was ornamented solely by a Questar catadioptric telescope on a tripod, left focused on an island in the lake. The matching crockery and stainless steel utensils in the kitchen had all been cleaned and put in their places. Even his fuel-store bore witness to the manner of loony who had dared cross swords with Satan. It was vast, constructed of angle-iron with a sloping roof of corrugated fibreglass, and its racks contained at least a hundred cords of seasoning oak, beech, alder and ash logs, each square-cut to a standard length of eight inches, left whole or split lengthways into halves or quarters. A covered walk, also of corrugated fibreglass, came up to the kitchen porch so that he could refill his logbasket without getting his slippers wet.

  Danzo knew all about fuel. At Byfield he had been one of those appointed to scour the woods, to wield a chainsaw, to load the timber on the cart, to operate the bench saw, to raise and raise and raise again the heavy arm of the log-splitter. Firewood, its preparation, the boredom and labour involved, epitomised the reasons why Danzo had succumbed to Bex’s persuasion: and why he had pulled that Heckler and Koch machine gun on the chief elder.

  This man living here must have spent months or even years obsessively storing books and cutting wood for his old age. With the same robotic tenacity he had catalogued the huge quantity of objects he had salvaged from shops and houses and factories. A few of the ledgers were written in a peculiar scribble that Danzo could make neither head nor tail of, but most were in the form of printout from a computer database. Everything was cross-referenced to a series of box files which held instruction manuals, parts lists and circuit diagrams.

>   From the armoury on the top floor, Danzo had helped himself to a brand new Calico sub-machine gun, which he was now holding in his lap instead of the FN he had brought with him from Shanley. In another of the cupboards upstairs the catalogues had led him to a pristine set of Diurnox image intensifying goggles, complete with belt-borne power pack.

  The pack, holding ten penlight cells, could be recharged merely by plugging its adapter into a wall-socket. There was a bridge over the river just above the house. Next to one of the stanchions, the mad monk had installed a turbine. By means of a worm drive, this worked a dynamo housed in a concrete coal-bunker sited on the bank. The output had been marked by the manufacturer: 12V DC. At Byfield they had used similar technology, as indeed they still did at Shanley. From the bunker an armoured cable led to the garage and a row of lead-acid batteries. These in turn were wired to the old ring-main, allowing access to the current from any of the sockets in the house.

  Besides battery-chargers, the house contained all sorts of electrical appliances, designed or adapted to run on DC: halogen lamps, laptop computers, an inverter in the kitchen.

  It had taken no more than two hours to charge up the goggles. At nightfall, having moved the armchair into place, Danzo had donned them in preparation for St Michael’s return.

  Despite the lack of fresh tracks, he and Pinch had half expected him to be here when they had arrived. They had approached the place as though he were, finally entering and going from room to room. His continuing absence gave Danzo hope that Steve and the others might have got to him first.

  Still, Danzo had to assume they hadn’t. Bex had told him to wait here three days if necessary before heading back to Shanley.

  ‘What is it?’ he hissed, when he heard Pinch entering the kitchen. ‘What the fuck do you want now?’

  ‘I ain’t sleepy.’

  Danzo had told him to stretch out on a sofa in the big drawing room. They were supposed to be taking shifts in keeping watch.

  Pinch said, ‘He ain’t coming in the dark, Danzo, that’s for sure. I thought we might have something to eat. See what else he’s got, yeah?’

  Pinch had the irritating habit of appending this word, spoken in a rising inflection, to his most infuriating idiocies. ‘You can’t still be hungry,’ Danzo told him, struggling to retain control. ‘Not after what you stuffed down your neck.’

  They had taken only the best from the loony’s larder. In various caches upstairs and down, he kept gargantuan stocks of tinned and dried food, gallons of ghee and olive oil, vacuum-packed cereals, powdered milk and egg, dried fruit, nuts, army rations, lux grub of all kinds. Once their host was dead, Danzo would bring Bex and the others here. This would make an ideal base. There was enough ammo upstairs to supply them for ever.

  ‘Anyway,’ Pinch said, ‘it’s boring on me own.’

  Danzo was about to reprove him when he distinctly heard, just beyond the kitchen porch, an unwonted noise. Someone was outside.

  ‘He’s here,’ he whispered urgently to Pinch, as he scrabbled at his waistline for the switch on the power pack. ‘Get down. Keep quiet.’

  The goggles came to life and the darkness gave way to a flat, monochromatic, apple-green view of the kitchen: the dresser, the range, the inner door standing ajar, its handle, the painted jamb. Through Danzo’s mind flashed the thought ‘These are the mutt’s nuts,’ and he remembered then the conversation he had had earlier with Pinch: they had concluded that the man would not dare to stay outside for fear of dogs. If he was crazy enough to approach after nightfall, he would certainly try to get into the house.

  Danzo excitedly raised the Calico. His index finger curled round the trigger. His left thumb met the resistance of the safety catch and stealthily pushed it all the way forward.

  He was watching the oval brass handle on the outer door, waiting for it to turn, even by a fraction, before delivering one hundred parabellum rounds through the wood and frosted glass and into the idiot standing asking for it on the scraper-mat at the threshold.

  ‘Come on, John,’ he breathed. ‘Don’t be shy.’

  In the time since switching on the goggles, all Danzo’s systems had gone from inertia to the maximum pitch of expectancy. He badly wanted to pull the trigger. He loved guns. He loved killing people. At that moment he thought of Bex, vaguely, not specifically, but as an eternal presence entwined with the pleasure of dealing death. He was the crimson shadow on the wall, fake yet real, more real than anything in the world.

  The door handle remained unmoving.

  There was no further sound outside.

  In growing disappointment, and without taking his eyes from the door handle, Danzo warily rose to his feet.

  Suddenly, right inside the porch, there was a bang, not loud, but it made Danzo jump all the same. It had come from the lower part of the door.

  He just stopped himself from firing. The front legs and head of a compact, self-contained, monochrome cat, tabby green, were followed by its body and hind legs and tail, and then the plastic flap, green against paler green, fell back behind it and swung to a halt. Disdaining him, disdaining Pinch, the cat strolled to the kitchen range and inspected the empty green dish set on the floor there. Could cats see in the dark? Danzo didn’t know.

  ‘Only the cat,’ he explained to Pinch, who was crouching behind the chair.

  Before he had finished speaking, Danzo’s senses were assaulted by an explosion behind him. On the far side of the kitchen, just out of his direct sight, a corona of jagged flame lit the walls and ceiling and, for a split second, as Danzo turned his head, revealed the face and half-turned torso of a camouflage-clad figure holding at arm’s length a big handgun. In the confined space the shot had sounded like a bomb going off. From the angle and downward direction of the man’s arm, Danzo guessed that Pinch might have been hit, even killed. When the goggles came to bear he saw that the muzzle was now pointing approximately at the armchair and himself. The man was firing blind.

  The gun discharged again. For a second time the intensity of the flash confused Danzo’s vision, but he had seen enough to know where to aim. The shot had missed him.

  There was a third shot, which also missed. Danzo whipped the Calico into the horizontal and feverishly squeezed the trigger. The man had entered the room just as Pinch had, from the corridor, and had shot from the doorway.

  In the instant before bringing the gun to bear, Danzo had glimpsed his feet. He was barefoot, like a saint or penitent, like the dead man walking Bex had once shown him in a coloured Albigensian almanac.

  Even as Danzo sprayed a broad arc across the doorway, smashing china and glass, ripping plaster from the walls, part of his mind remained detached. He was marvelling at the incorporeal stealth and strangeness of the initial attack. How had the man, how had Suter, how had he seen Pinch down there? How had he known where to aim? Could Suter and his tabby-cat, his familiar spirit, somehow have been collaborating?

  Danzo stopped firing when he knew that Suter was certainly dead. Gripping the gun with both hands, he moved towards the doorway. The cat was nowhere to be seen. It must have streaked back through the flap at the first of its master’s shots. Maybe it had heard or smelled him before, or sensed in some feline way that its benefactor had returned. But that didn’t explain how Suter had known where to point his gun. His catalogues listed only two image intensifying devices: the Diurnox high resolution goggles and a Pilkington night sight for a sniping rifle, the very same that Danzo himself had picked up on the escarpment overlooking the Manor House grounds. Steve had taken the night sight. Danzo had given it to him, together with two rubber straps to fix it to the barrel of his L85.

  What, then, had happened to Steve and Carl and Gil?

  Danzo reached the doorway. He was expecting to find the body a few feet back, out in the hall.

  It wasn’t there. Like his cat, the angel had disappeared.

  ‘Pinch?’ Danzo said, half over his shoulder.

  There was no reply.

  ∗ ∗ ∗<
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  Danzo’s search of the house did not get very far. Having looked into the rooms on either side of the main corridor, he arrived at the open double doors near the end. These led into the drawing room where he had told Pinch to sleep. The goggles revealed the sofa Pinch had vacated, the pillows, the duvet which had slithered to the moonlit surface of the parquet floor.

  The haversack in which Pinch had been carrying spare clips for his assault rifle, like the rifle itself, had gone. Beyond the grand piano, one of the doors to the terrace was standing open to the night.

  Alone in this cavernous space, Danzo swore to himself, trying to reassert his bravado, to quell his growing terror. The hermit, the loony, Suter – whatever he was – had killed Pinch in pitch darkness. He had unerringly pointed his semi-automatic at Pinch’s head and put a single shot straight through his brain.

  It had been the same with that superhuman display of shooting at Shanley. The guy couldn’t miss. Not unless he wanted to. If he missed, it was by design. It was only because he meant to lure his victims on.

  Danzo’s mind was struggling to make sense of it all. Until now he had dismissed Bex’s explanation as a copious and especially smooth helping of the stools he so freely fed his followers. He had thought that Bex believed it no more than he did. It was true that, in the past, Danzo had sometimes felt that Bex was beginning to believe. But that, surely, had amounted to no more than getting carried away. Recently Bex’s demeanour had changed. His manner yesterday at the divination and afterwards had been unnerving, as if he had finally and incurably caught the disease he had given the others.

  The divination had been conducted with the usual mumbo-jumbo, including the projector to cast the red shadow on the wall. As always, Bex had relied on Danzo’s complicity. But now it seemed that Danzo might have been the only non-believer present. And if Bex himself believed that an angel, that St Michael himself, had been sent down from the Third Circle of Paradise, then, Danzo was asking himself, might it really be true?