by White, Gwynn
And a great blue lump on her temple.
Leonie felt as if she were made of cellophane these days, and her rage was the match. If she caught, she’d go up and that would be that.
She smoothed the blankets over Fiona. “I can’t leave her with you for five minutes,” she whispered. “And she’s your daughter!” She knelt by the bed, dug in the cache of plastic shopping bags that held all their worldly goods. Some of these knacker bitches would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. Madelaine probably wouldn’t even notice. Panic: it’s gone—then her fingers closed on linen, slippery over hard curves of nose and forehead.
She made sure the screen was all the way closed before pulling Queen Adolfina’s head out of its virtue-proof bag. Gold hair tumbled over her arm. Leonie held the relic by its silver base. She had nothing wrong with her, thank God, so she didn’t want to accidentally touch the relic and go to sleep.
Madelaine strained higher on her pillow. “The paper! I borrowed it. I have to give it back …”
“I told you not to talk to anyone!”
Madelaine made a limp gesture as if to say, What does it matter? But her eyes said something different. “Read it,” she whispered.
Leonie tucked the relic into the bassinet with Fiona. She felt bad as she did it, even though it was justified this time by the lump on the baby’s head. She’d put Fiona to bed with her dead granny too often in the last few days. Back at Oughterard, she’d told Madelaine off for it, and now she was doing it herself, just to keep the poor little mite quiet.
“How’re you feeling?” she asked Madelaine when she’d tucked Fiona up. “Is your head better?”
“Never mind my head, the paper …”
An evening edition of the Ireland Herald was slipping off the foot of the bed. Leonie caught it, saw that it was folded open to the puzzles and games page. The acrostics and the crossword had been completed in an elegant hand. It hurt for some reason to think of Madelaine lying here, doing these stupid little puzzles.
She turned to the front page. Flood in Wales Kills Hundreds. Acting Regent Oswald Distributes Largesse to Victims. “Cor, that’s tragic.”
“Not that!” Madelaine said. “Page three. About the airport!”
Shutdown At Heathrow. Leonie squinted at the newsprint in the bad light. All flights in and out of Heathrow International Airport, Great Britain’s second-largest aviation hub, had been cancelled as of noon. A spokesman explained in a telephone interview that the closure was for security reasons, but did not elaborate. Meanwhile, troops stationed on the airport access road turned away all vehicles. Although the checkpoint commander refused to speak to a reporter, and the troops wore no identifying colors, a mobility vehicle to the rear of the checkpoint was observed to bear a green logo with a white emblem, consistent with unconfirmed rumors that the Overwhelm, the regiment of House Sauvage, has taken an active role in the Crown’s ongoing security operations …
“He’s taking Oswald’s side,” Madelaine whispered. A tear broke loose from the corner of her eye.
“Who is? Oh—Sir Guy.”
Maybe the news was significant. If House Sauvage came out in support of Live-Long Day’s regency, the other Great Houses couldn’t be far behind. But if that was the case, why not announce it openly?
“The traitor. Oh, it’s so shaming. It’s—”
“Will youse pack it in?” a woman’s voice boomed from the far side of the room. The crying baby fell silent; so did Madelaine. Fiona, on the other hand, squeezed her face up, then opened her eyes and mouth, getting ready to wail. Leonie snatched her out of the bassinet. She oughtn’t to have been awakened by the woman’s shout. The cure hadn’t taken effect yet. Or maybe the relic was no longer working.
“Hush, hush, ducky.” She padded back and forth alongside the bed, rocking Fiona. She had to keep moving or she’d panic. Queen Adolfina’s head was the only valuable they had left. She was counting on flogging it, eventually, to buy Madelaine’s passage out of the country. It couldn’t have lost its virtue. “Sssh now.”
“He’s the only man I’ve ever loved.” Madelaine had not eaten much of anything for two days. She was starting to look grotesque, her heart-shaped face collapsing along the lines of her skull. “And now he’s turned on me!”
Who? Oh, right, Sir Guy. “He doesn’t know he’s turning on you,” Leonie said wearily. “He thinks he’s taking your side, too. Everyone thinks you’re still in London with your husband.”
“Even so, he’s betraying Daddy’s memory. He would never do that if he cared for me. But he doesn’t, of course. He never has.”
“I daresay not,” Leonie muttered.
“Hundreds of men would give their souls for a smile from me. And he prefers that common little cow, Dierdre Argent. Of course there’s nothing wrong with being lowborn. But she’s married; she’s at least forty!”
“Here.” Leonie shifted Fiona onto her hip, picked up Queen Adolfina’s relic. “Have a cuddle of your mum and you’ll feel better in the morning.” And they could make sure the relic was still working.
Madelaine cringed away as far as the narrow bed allowed. “No. Don’t make me.”
Leonie puffed in exasperation. She understood the allure of the healing sleep. It was sheer bliss to check out, spend ten or twelve hours in a dreamless void and awake with no pain. What she did not understand was why Madelaine resisted it.
“Your Highness. A bit of a sleep would do you good.”
Madelaine stared up at the ceiling, which was as far away as the roof of a church, the plaster bulging like clouds. “I don’t want to waste her on me.”
Leonie thought about the sanctity crisis. The saints aren’t what they used to be, can’t find a good saint anywhere. People were always saying that sort of thing. She herself was healthy in general, so she never paid much attention, but maybe she should. She thought about Sam, and Queen Adolfina’s relic possibly having stopped working, and all the people who were too sick to hold jobs, and the way that everyone in historical films was portrayed as strong and healthy, which seemed to be just fantasy, but maybe it reflected the simple truth. She thought about the plague scares that ran through the realm from time to time, frightening everyone into going to church and sending the price of holy dust through the roof. Black ague, Prussian flu, typhoid, polio, cholera, smallpox. Diseases that spread through the air and the water. You couldn’t not eat, not breathe …
Fiona wriggled in her arms.
Leonie slid to the floor with the baby, took out the the packet of chocolate biscuits she’d bought, gave one to Fiona and ate one herself. “I’ve got a sister with chronic lung problems.” At least, I hope I still have. I hope I still have a home. “She’s not incurable. It’s nothing like that. She’s an intractable. You know what that means?”
Madelaine nodded. “She’s got a chronic disease … that returns even after a miracle.”
“Exactly, and we can’t afford the caliber of saint that’d knock it right out of her lungs, someone like your mum here. There’s not many saints this good even available to the public, and those that are, the prices they charge, it’d make your eyes pop out of your head.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“You’ve got a slight fever and a headache. Your mum could knock that back in a few hours, and you’d be up and about again. Instead you choose to lie here feeling sorry for yourself, when there’s thousands that would literally kill to have a relic this good!” Leonie’s voice shook. She shut her lips tight.
The Next Morning. November 30th, 1979
Bright and early the next morning Leonie was back at the Accuchuin Haede Estate. Familiarly known as the Aching Head, this was the sort of place that in her Company days, she wouldn’t even have driven past alone. Much less gone into.
Brown brick tenements kinked around a maze of cul-de-sacs, spiraling out from a central area intended as a sort of village green, which was now a sea of mud where broken bicycles and litter floated in ice-rimmed puddles. The terraces were
pockmarked with demolition sites so long neglected they might have been actual bombsites left over from the Great War. Thistles and goosegrass grew out of the rubble.
The one thing the Aching Head had going for it was the view, and even that was bleak today. The sky spat rain.
She sat in the Mini at the edge of the muddy ‘green,’ fighting the urge to slide lower in her seat, knowing that dozens of invisible eyes had registered her presence. Both sides of the street were parked solid with cars ranging from wrecks on blocks to tarted-up drifters. The chimneys smoked. The streets were empty of human life.
Three minutes ago, a platoon of Ravens had driven in from the Shankill Road.
Leonie knew because she had been waiting outside the estate for them to go by, and had followed them in. Now she was waiting again, fingers resting lightly on the stock of the Myxilite, window rolled a few inches down.
She’d tipped MI5 off herself, an anonymous phone call. She’d been afraid they weren’t taking her seriously. But they must be. For the platoon had driven into Holly Street, where the address Pod had very specifically not given Leonie was, and they hadn’t come out.
They hadn’t come out … The back of her throat hurt. She had no way of knowing if Dave was with them. What’re the odds? she tried to reassure herself.
Something thudded. Leonie jumped a mile, although she’d been waiting for it. A splintering crash. That’ll be the door going. Hoarse yelps of charged-up aggression. The bright-edged sound of breaking glass.
A moment of breathless quiet.
Blam. One isolated shot, another, then the yammering racket of full automatic panic.
Leonie took off the handbrake, rolled downhill to the end of the green, stopped where she could see straight down Holly Street.
One of the patrol’s LongHOGs was parked across the far end of the street, blocking it off. The other one stood outside a house halfway down. Two soldiers, neither of them Dave, were flattened to this side of the vehicle, pointing their rifles around it.
The gunfire had stopped and inside the house a man was screaming.
A bloke burst out of the front door. Shaggy brown hair, built like a 4x4, naked but for briefs and a t-shirt. Dragging a child by the wrist. The Raven sentries aimed their rifles, yelling warnings, but they did not fire. It would have been blatantly against the rules of engagement. In bitter fury Leonie let the Myxilite clatter into the footwell.
The bloke wrestled with the door of a car parked near her end of Holly Street. He pushed the child into the back and leapt into the driver’s seat. The Raven sentries gave chase. Too late. The car—an old blue Mobilo—rocketed down the street towards Leonie’s position. She got a clear look at the driver’s face as he screwed the car around and took off up the hill. She’d never seen him in her life before.
She let out the clutch and wrenched the Mini into gear. The suspect might just lead her to Alyx O’Braonain.
He drove out of the estate, taking the corners so tight that the Mobilo jounced over rubble spilling out of the empty lots. The Shankill Road stretched straight downhill for a hundred yards to the lights. She thought he would run the red, but he must’ve got a grip on himself; he waited until it changed and she caught the same green light, dawdling behind him, letting other vehicles fill the gap. Listening for the yowl of sirens, the throb of a chopper overhead, or a loudhailer blaring from an unmarked MI5 car that had been lying in wait.
Should have been lying in wait, if the Ravens weren’t the most useless tossers in the entire realm of tosserdom that was the British Army.
How could they have cocked it up? An unarmed man and a child!
From time to time the child—a boy of nine or ten with short blond hair—turned to stare through the back windscreen as the Mobilo sedately proceeded towards Belfast city centre.
Wary of being spotted, Leonie stayed as far back as she dared, which meant that twice she lost sight of the Mobilo and had to squeak through a red light so as not to lose it altogether. It was bloody hopeless trying to do this without backup. If the suspect was switched on at all, he’d have noticed her by now. He had his little rear observer on the job, too. Her only hope came from the fact that he hadn’t attempted any evasive maneuvers. Maybe he was overconfident, with his home turf advantage, and thought he’d gotten away.
He turned aside from the city centre. The traffic thinned out and sped up, rushing along a stretch of brand-new four-lane highway. On either side the city morphed into country. Pocket-sized orchards of leafless fruit trees, fields tucked into the crevices of the hills, forested peaks looming inland, black under the rain that was washing away yesterday’s light snowfall.
To the seaward side of the road, the vista opened out. Flat marshland, scrubby trees, the odd housing development.
A roadside pub appeared on the right, a tacky pile with mock crenellations and an enormous letterboard announcing FILLIGAN’S FREIDAY BRISCIDH—DOMMIE HATHAWAY & HIS BAND!!
The suspect swung across traffic, into the parking lot.
Shit!
Half a mile down the road, Leonie turned around and returned to Filligan’s. Scanning for the Mobilo, she saw the suspect first. He was sitting in the bus shelter at the edge of the parking-lot. He had trousers and a coat on now. The little boy was swinging around the support pole of the bus shelter’s roof, earning glares from little old ladies.
Leonie parked out of sight of the bus shelter. She left the Myxilite under the seat and locked the car. Scraping coins out of her jeans pocket, she walked towards the phone box outside the pub.
The bus came. A coughing monster, striped in the red and daffodil yellow of Sir Somebody’s Transport Ministry franchise, it bellied up to the shelter. People fought their way off. The suspect had one foot on the step. Don’t let him on, he’s barefoot! Leonie mentally yelled. But apparently in Belfast, no one cared about little matters of etiquette like that. The suspect got on, the little boy got on, and Leonie sprinted to the bus and jumped on after them, her coins going into the ticket machine instead of fetching help.
Packed to the gills, the bus reeked of wet woollies and the fried fish that someone was eating. Leonie hung onto the strap and let her head droop as if she were asleep on her feet. She could not see the suspect. Under her own armpit, she watched the exit door.
The bus swayed and stopped, swayed and stopped. Someone rubbed a clear space in the condensation on the window in front of Leonie. She glimpsed marshlands.
Another stop. The suspect’s head vanished out the door.
She waited to get off last, and by that time the un-id and his pint-size colleague had disappeared.
She scanned her surroundings. The bus had stopped near a freestanding arch that marked the entrance to a housing development. Not a Crown Estate but a corporate settlement: Sir Somebody’s logo of a magpie done in discolored plastic atop the arch, identikit bungalows plopped on the flat ground beyond. That was where most of the passengers who had got off were heading.
Just back the way they had come there was a bridge. Giving up, Leonie wandered out onto it. She pretended to fish for a camera inside her coat, although God knows there was nothing for a tourist to photograph. Another bus ought to be along soon to take her back to Filligan’s.
A canal ran out into the marshland past some sort of factory. Several fat-waisted towers loomed in the rainy distance.
The suspect and the boy were walking along the towpath.
Pulse thudding, Leonie searched for the way off the bridge. A slippery concrete stair. She hurtled down.
If they saw her now, she’d be bubbled for certain. There was no one else on the towpath. And she was unarmed. She loitered, content to glimpse them at intervals when the lazy curves of the canal straightened out.
A high wire fence separated the towpath from the grounds of the factory. The wind carried a chemical stink from the knots of piping above the trees. The path humped over a set of pipes dribbling petrol-colored waste water into the canal. A heron stood in the reeds, pecking at wh
at looked like a dead puppy.
Beyond the factory, the country on both sides lay flat and disused. The towers in the distance seemed to be no nearer. There were four of them—no, five—and they must be far taller than she had thought. She could smell the sea, and the canal ran as straight as jousting lists for a mile ahead, and her targets had vanished again.
She broke into a run. Nothing.
They must have left the path to cut across country. .
She’d lost them.
She wearily logged the location in her mind and trudged back the way she’d come. The day was rapidly darkening, although it was not even noon. A crack of clear sky out to sea glowed blue, which only made the clouds over the mountains even blacker.
Back at the bridge, a car sat on the verge, idling. The driver rolled down the window. Pod.
Leonie collapsed into the warm, fuggy cocoon of pop music. Pod turned down the radio and started the car.
“What’re you doing here?” she said.
“Thought you might need a ride.”
“My car’s at a pub a few miles back.” Leonie briefly explained what she’d been up to.
“You shouldn’t’ve been in the Aching Head.”
“Well I was, and a good thing too. I followed him all the way here—and lost him in that bloody marsh.”
“I know. I was behind you most of the way.”
Leonie felt stupid. She’d been concentrating so hard on the suspect, she hadn’t even looked to see if she had a tail.
“The Ravens cocked it up good style,” she said. “I heard shooting. I hope none of them’s hurt. Can you find out?”
Pod shook his head. “NatChiv’s breathing down our necks. Seen the news? The Crown’s fallen out with House Sauvage. There’s lots of Sauvage bondsknights up here, so we’re to watch them to make sure they don’t try anything. All days off cancelled, all other jobs suspended.” He tapped the cigarette lighter in, lit a fag. “My car radio’s on the fritz just now. Convenient, eh? But I don’t think it’ll happen again.”