End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Kit nodded.

  “And I’m not really sure why earth was chosen.”

  “For what?”

  “To house all the fugees. Because it was empty, I guess. A planet without a people for a people without a planet.” Neku sighed. “It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  Together Kit and Neku watched the sky beyond his window get lighter and the stars, already faded by the city’s sodium glare, fade further, until they vanished into the perfect upturned bowl of an early summer morning.

  Kit thought Neku was dozing until she suddenly spoke again. “Okay,” she said. “What are we doing today?”

  “I’m seeing Patrick Robbe-Duras,” said Kit. “To show him Mary’s key. Pat says he doesn’t remember Mary owning a trunk but I can take a look anyway.”

  “Can Charlie come too?”

  Kit was about to say, But I’m going alone…and then decided to save himself the argument.

  Quite why Pat expected Kit and Charlie to mow the lawn while Neku sorted buttons from a button box was never explained. Although by the end of the afternoon the grass was trimmed, raked, and mowed and all of the buttons collected by Mary as a small child had been sorted by size and type.

  As a reward, Pat gave them tea on the freshly cut lawn. Charlie set up a wooden picnic table and Neku carried the china. She would have made the sandwiches, but Pat insisted on making those himself, somewhat crossly.

  “He’s tired,” said Kit.

  “No,” said Neku. “He’s dying.”

  When Pat returned he found Neku and Charlie crouched by the river. Charlie was feeding digestive biscuits to the ducks, though every now and then he’d dip a finger into the water to take a bit of weed that Neku indicated. Just as Neku would discard a pebble from her mouth to taste another, when she found one she liked better.

  Neither looked up when Pat got back.

  “I’ve upset them,” said Pat, putting a plate of cucumber sandwiches on the rickety picnic table. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” said Kit. “You’re tired. Neku understands that.”

  “Talked about me, did you?”

  At Kit’s nod, Pat sighed. “People have been talking about me my entire life. Well, about Katie really. Speaking of which, she called yesterday to say you’d be in contact about some bloody key. So I told her you’d been in contact already.” He shrugged. “Not sure if Katie was angry about my already knowing or glad you were pushing on with finding Mary.”

  Pat held out his hand. “I suppose you’d better show me.”

  Taking the key Kit offered, Pat turned it over in his hands and pulled a pair of reading glasses from his jacket pocket to take a closer look.

  “Recognise it?” asked Kit.

  “No,” said Pat, handing the key back. “Anyway, it’s not like Mary went to that kind of school. You know why?”

  Kit shook his head.

  “Because the first private school we tried refused to take her. Oh, she passed their exam all right. Except someone told them about Katie, and we had a very embarrassed letter from the headmaster saying he’d made a mistake with class sizes and he was really sorry, but there wasn’t a place after all.”

  “What happened?”

  “Half the school burned down.”

  Kit looked at him.

  “Before term began,” said Pat tiredly. “No one got hurt.”

  “Were you upset?”

  “About Mary losing her place? Of course not. I was delighted. It was Katie who…” He stopped as Charlie escorted Neku up the bank, her fingers closed tight around a dripping mass of leaves, petals, and water weed.

  “What’s that?”

  Neku smiled. “You’ll see,” she said.

  When Neku and Charlie reappeared it was with a glass full of cloudy water and a tiny box made from neatly folded paper. “Drink this,” said Neku, putting the glass on the picnic table. And the fact Pat did showed either extreme faith or an unusual level of tact.

  “God,” he said. “That tastes vile.”

  “Maybe,” said Neku. “But it will help. My grandmother taught me about plants.”

  “About plants?”

  “Well, poisons…they’re close enough. It’s what you do at the molecular level that matters.” Holding out her paper box, Neku showed how it opened to reveal one pebble. Kanji characters on each side of the box had bled into soft focus as ink seeped into paper.

  “The box is meant to look like that,” Neku insisted.

  “I’m sure it is,” said Pat. “What does this charm do?”

  “It summons the kami,” promised Neku.

  Pat smiled.

  CHAPTER 42 — Friday, 29 June

  It was Pat’s suggestion that Charlie and Neku travel back in Charlie’s old Mini and Kit stay for coffee. “It’ll only take five minutes,” Pat told Neku. “I just want a quick talk and Charlie needs to get home.”

  “But I don’t have front door keys,” said Neku, sounding put out.

  “It’s all right,” promised Pat. “Kit will catch up with you.” When Neku looked doubtful, Pat smiled. “Charlie can drive slowly,” he said.

  Charlie nodded.

  “She’s a good kid,” said Pat, once the gravel was empty and the Mini a memory of noisy horn bursts from the road beyond. “And she’s obviously worried about you.”

  “Worried?”

  “She told me you were in trouble. Something about Yakuza bosses and fire bombing. Katie mentioned you had problems, but didn’t tell me what…Katie always tried to keep that stuff from me.” Pat took a deep breath, then lost a whole minute to the coughing fit this induced.

  “Shit,” said Kit, when he’d finished helping Pat inside.

  Spitting into a tissue, Pat nodded. “I’ll live, for a while anyway…What I kept you back to say was that I’m grateful for the help you’re giving Katie, but if you’re really in trouble then tell her. Katie has contacts. Call it payment.”

  “Kate hates me,” said Kit. “And the debt is mine.”

  “You were kids,” Pat said crossly. “It’s time you forgave yourself.” He sat in silence for a while after that, watching Kit sip luke-warm coffee from a battered mug, while staring out of the window at the river beyond. “I never liked how Katie lived,” said Pat. “It was always a problem between us.”

  He was talking about the Firm, Kit realised, the web of criminal connections that Kate O’Mally inherited, built into something altogether grander, and eventually passed to her nephew Michael, the man Kit had half-blinded beside a hedge in Wintersprint.

  “She told me once,” said Pat, “that it was just a job.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That it was a job in which people died. She told me mortality was the human condition.” Pat sighed. “I blame her priest. When I told Katie that wasn’t good enough, she said at least it was the right people who died, and it was the only answer she had.”

  “I should go,” said Kit, “if I’m going to catch up to them.”

  “What I’m trying to say,” said Pat, sighing, “is that Katie has connections. Global connections. The Yakuza, the Camorra, the ’Ndranghala, the Mafia…Katie’s mob might not have a fancy name but they still command respect. If you have problems talk to her.”

  Kit shook his head.

  “At least pretend to think about it,” Pat said.

  Peeling off his gauntlets, Kit kicked the Kawasaki onto its stand and unbuckled his helmet. Charlie was already negotiating his battered Mini into the spot where the Porsche usually parked, so Kit guessed he was planning to see Neku inside.

  The sun was low enough in the sky to be lost behind a tower block and Hogarth Mews stood in shadow, its front doors half hidden. Which might have been why Kit didn’t spot the zinc bust of Karl Marx until he almost tripped over the thing. The door to Sophie’s flat was also wedged open, only this time she’d used a small marble vase overflowing with 5 pence pieces.

  “You’re back,” said Sophie, crushing a cigarette un
der her heel.

  “Yes,” said Kit. He caught her glance at the Mini. “Is that a problem?”

  “Someone was looking for you. Said they were from the police.”

  “The Sergeant again?”

  “No.” Sophie shook her head. “Plain clothes this time. A woman, claimed she knew you.”

  Kit waited.

  “Inspector Avenden…”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “Whatever,” said Sophie, pulling a battered packet of Gauloise from her jeans. “She wanted to wait. I said she couldn’t. So now she’s in Caffé Nero sulking, well probably…”

  “Probably?”

  “As I said, she wanted to wait here. I suggested the Inspector find a café in Charlotte Street and wait there instead.”

  “Not fond of the Met, are you?”

  Sophie’s scowl was fierce. “I’m old enough to remember them unarmed,” she said, “before the laws changed. So are you,” she added. “I used to love this city. Now it’s all fake threats and real guns.”

  Beside them, Charlie and Neku had stopped to listen. Charlie was nodding, which Kit found interesting. The boy didn’t look like revolutionary politics came high on his list of interests.

  “You okay to take this up?” Kit asked Neku, holding out his helmet. “There’s someone I need to see. It won’t take long.”

  “Sure,” said Neku. “I’ll get supper on.”

  “If he wants,” Kit said, “Charlie can stay to eat.” The boy seemed pleased, although Neku looked entirely noncommittal.

  “I suppose you know what you’re doing,” said Sophie, when Charlie and Neku had disappeared in a clatter of feet on the stairs. “She’s cute. And I know she beds down on the roof terrace…I sleep with my window open,” she added, seeing Kit’s face. “I hear the kid stamping around in the night. All the same, she’s in love with you.”

  “No,” said Kit. “She likes Charlie.”

  Sophie shook her head. “Charlie likes Neku. Neku likes you.”

  “She’s a child.”

  “No,” said Sophie. “She’s not. Look at her…She’s cooking, cleaning, wearing neat clothes. She’s digging in for the long haul.”

  Kit gave a sigh.

  “Someone has to say it,” said Sophie. “And whatever you’re really doing in London, it doesn’t feel like something that should involve a kid.”

  A kid who’s killed. One who gets an ex-gangster eating out of her hands in the time it takes to make cheese sandwiches, badly. Instead of saying it, Kit just nodded, because all of the above still didn’t make Sophie’s words untrue.

  The ground floor to the café on Charlotte Street had three customers, all at a metal table outside. The counter itself was deserted, and the only member of staff Kit could see leaned against a stool, skimming that morning’s Metro.

  The floor above was almost as empty. A Chinese student made notes from a biology textbook at a round table at the top of the stairs. And, in the far corner, looking sullen in a black skirt, white shirt, and plain jacket, was a woman in her mid thirties, already climbing to her feet.

  “Inspector Avenden?”

  Nodding, the woman offered her hand, then let it drop. Maybe it was the way Kit’s voice turned her name into a question. Or maybe it was the fact he refused to shake. Either way, her eyes went flat.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “No,” said Kit, shaking his head.

  Honesty, it seemed, was the best policy. At least where Inspector Avenden was concerned, because her wide face regained a fraction of its smile. “Oh well,” she said, a Welsh lilt to her voice. “You always were more interested in Mary O’Mally.”

  He got it then.

  A kiss that tasted of cheap cigarettes, a footpath fumble and a promise—still unfulfilled—to go clubbing when she got back from somewhere or other. Amy Avenden had hightailed it out of Middle Morton almost as fast as he had.

  “Would you like…?”

  “Let me get…”

  Her laughter might be self mocking as their questions clashed, but her face was more relaxed than when Kit first appeared at the top of the stairs. He got the feeling this meeting was not entirely willing on her part. Which begged the question as to why it was happening at all.

  “I’ll go,” said Kit, and she let him.

  When Kit returned Amy had put a small notebook on the table and placed a pen neatly beside it. There was something formal about the arrangement.

  “Is this official?” Kit asked, putting down the lattes.

  “If it was,” said Amy, “that would be a voice recorder. Call it semi official…” She sat back and stared towards the ceiling, collecting her thoughts; collecting something anyway, because when she leaned forward it was to tell Kit his name had been cross linked on the computer.

  “Which means what?”

  “You sent an e-mail to Japan that put you on one list…a call you took from Kathryn O’Mally put you on another. When you came up a third time during a licence plate check with the DVLA, the machine flagged you as someone to watch.”

  “E-mail?”

  “Sent from your flat to an e-mail address in Tokyo. The bozozoku have connections with motorcycle gangs in America, Scandinavia, Russia, and Australia. When Scotland Yard checked with Tokyo’s Organised Crime Section they discovered the address belonged to the girlfriend of a foreign resident. Enquiries to Australia showed Tommy Nadif had a criminal record, involving drugs…”

  “Got it all sewn up, haven’t you?” said Kit.

  “You don’t approve?”

  “Not really…” Kit shook his head. “Although it’s obviously good to see you again.”

  Amy’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “Always the charmer,” she said, her voice making it clear she meant exactly the opposite. She tapped a cigarette from a packet and fired up before Kit had time to offer.

  “Can I ask you something?” said Kit.

  “You can ask.”

  “Is the fact you’re here and we know each other a coincidence?”

  Amy had the grace to look embarrassed. “No,” she admitted, blowing smoke towards the ceiling. “I got a call…”

  “So you were sent because you knew me?”

  “Wrong again,” said Amy. “I was sent because I knew Mary. My boss called the Canterville Gallery to see if anyone had been asking about Mary or Ben Flyte. Your name came up. That was the fourth time you got tagged and every tag shifts you up a level. We’re used to looking for subtle connections and delicate webs of coincidence. Few people hit code red quite as fast as you did.”

  Great, thought Kit, the words frying pan and fire coming to mind.

  “I need to ask why you’re in London,” said Amy. “And what makes you think Mary O’Mally might still be alive?”

  “I don’t,” said Kit. “But her mother does. Unless it’s her father…I’m meant to help them find her.”

  Amy sighed. “What do you know about Benjamin Flyte?”

  “The cokehead?”

  “Her boyfriend,” said Amy. “The one who mysteriously vanished around the same time. Had the two of you ever met?”

  “Of course not,” said Kit. “I was in Japan. You think Mary’s disappearance has to do with Ben?”

  “No,” said Amy. “We think it’s much more likely Ben Flyte’s disappearance has to do with Kate O’Mally. He wasn’t a nice man,” she added. “And we’ve got a record of the police being called to more than one disturbance. Mary refused to press charges.”

  The Chinese student near the stairs made her final note and snapped shut her biology book, leaving in a tiny bubble of concentrated thought that prevented her from even noticing there were other people in the room. A girl in a black tunic arrived to clean up, carrying a broom and a washing-up bowl in which to collect the dirty plates and empty cups that still littered most tables. She seemed fairly surprised to see Kit and Amy. “We’re closing.”

  Amy nodded. “I’ll just finish my coffee,” she said. “Then
we’ll be gone.” She said this with such casual authority that the girl was nodding before Amy had even finished speaking. “In fact,” said Amy, “you might want to clean up downstairs first…”

  Kit watched the girl disappear, still carrying her bowl and broom.

  “Unregistered, probably an illegal,” said Amy, with a sigh. “Anyone who sounds as if they can cause trouble gets obeyed.” She shook her head, the first sign Kit had seen that Amy didn’t think everything was great in the world of policing.

  “Tell me about Ben,” he suggested.

  “Okay,” said Amy. “Some plod went to his flat in Chiswick to ask questions about Mary. The place was empty. I don’t mean it was deserted, it was empty, five rooms gutted of everything except a bed and a built-in wardrobe, even then, the mattress was gone.”

  “Which suggests what?”

  “High level competence,” said Amy. “The carpets were missing, the walls newly repainted. A local firm, paid in cash and instructed by phone. Worse than useless when questioned.”

  “You think Mary organised it?”

  Amy raised her eyebrows. “We considered that,” she admitted. “Only Ben Flyte was seen the day after Mary’s suicide…”

  “Where?” demanded Kit.

  “Here,” said Amy. “Well, at the flat you’re now using.”

  Another five minutes of conversation produced the following: The police had closed the case on Mary O’Mally’s suicide. Amy had pulled the files. No, that wasn’t entirely legal. Amy lived in North Barnet, near where her ex grew up. Yes, she was recently divorced, divorce being infinitely more common in police work than solved cases. No, this was definitely not an official interview. Yes, she’d be happy to grab something to eat for old time’s sake.

  On his way out, Kit remembered something from Sophie’s argument with Sergeant Samson, the uniformed officer she’d left standing at the door in Hogarth Mews.

  “What’s Section 44?”

  Amy stopped so abruptly that Kit almost ran into her. “It’s a clause from the old Terrorism Act that did away with the need for reasonable suspicion. Why?”

  Kit shrugged. “Someone mentioned it,” he said.