Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2 (29 page)

‘It’s not much of a story.’ Belle boosted herself up on to the chest of drawers. ‘I was working in the King’s Cross Starbucks when the sweats started. My dad had a thing about his children learning to fend for themselves.’ She swung her legs, watching her feet scissor to and fro. Belle had lost more weight and her limbs looked long and insect-like. ‘They were at our holiday home in Portugal when the sweats got them. I should have been there too, but I’d had another row with my dad about money; a big one.’ Her eyes met Magnus’s. ‘He was pretty tight, my dad, but he usually came round in the end. I thought staying in London might make him miss me.’ She drew a circle in the dust beside her and dotted her finger into its centre, a glaring eyeball. ‘Imagine if I had gone with them. I’d be all alone now in a country where I don’t speak the language.’

‘Are you certain they didn’t make it?’

Belle stared at the surface of the chest of drawers and painted more patterns in the dust. ‘Dad telephoned to tell me that Mum was ill. I could tell he was worried, but he didn’t sound frantic. I thought she would be okay. He phoned back a day later. She had died and my sister was in hospital.’ Belle added another swirl to her dustscape. ‘I thought grief had made his voice hoarse, but later I realised it was the sickness. I phoned him back, phoned all of that day, into the night, through the next day and the next, but that was the last time I spoke to him.’ Her voice was flat, as if none of it mattered. ‘I wasn’t sure what to do so I phoned my aunt in Shropshire. We decided I should go and stay with her, but just as I was about to get on the train she called to say that she was unwell. I think she would have liked me to come anyway, but much as I was fond of my aunt, I wasn’t willing to die for her.

‘The girls I was sharing a flat with both went home. I had nowhere to go, so I stayed on, watching television and emailing and texting friends. One by one they stopped replying.’ She gave a small, sad smile. ‘I used to have some good friends.’ Her eyes were slightly glazed, her voice far away. ‘I ran out of food, but the Internet and television were trending riots and curfews and I was scared to go outside. I think I was ill for a few days, it’s all a bit hazy, but I do remember hearing a woman screaming in the street outside, as if she were being murdered, and hiding under my bedclothes praying for her to shut up. Then the Internet went off. So did the water and electricity. I saw a rat in the toilet. I wasn’t sure if it was real or if I was hallucinating, but somehow after that the flat didn’t seem safe any more. I knew that if I was going to survive I had to get out of London.’

Magnus remembered his own flight from the city. The smashed shops, abandoned cars and dead bodies lying forsaken in the streets. ‘That couldn’t have been easy.’

Belle’s eyes met his. ‘There were gangs rounding up women, did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘I saw one. Men armed with rifles guarding half a dozen women who were handcuffed to a chain. One of them was only a girl, a tiny little thing with big eyes. Another was ancient, a pensioner. It didn’t seem to matter what age they were or what they looked like, as long as they were female. A couple of the women were bruised and staggering, as if they’d been beaten up. I hid in a shop and watched the men force them into a van. After that I got myself a knife and only ever travelled at night.’ Belle had lowered her head as she spoke; now she raised her eyes to his. ‘I get so scared. I’ve thought about leaving ever since Melody hanged herself. But what if I met men like that?’

‘You trusted Jacob.’

‘Not straight away. I met Melody first. She was on a foraging trip. I followed her back here. She told me later that she knew I was there, but didn’t want to scare me away. That was what Melody was like, gentle. She persuaded me to stay the night and introduced me to Jacob. I thought the priest’s collar was probably a con. But by that time I was in bad shape. Melody and Raisha were living here and they seemed okay. I needed to be with other people and so I took a chance.’

‘Jacob thought Melody and Henry had been murdered.’

Belle shrugged. ‘Jacob wanted to live more than any of us. I think his lust for life embarrassed him, but he couldn’t help it. The idea that survivors would kill themselves offended him.’ She gave Magnus an apologetic look, as if the strength of her own opinion had surprised her. ‘That’s what I think, for what it’s worth.’

‘Maybe you’re right, but Jacob was definitely murdered.’ Magnus kept his voice gentle. ‘Do you know why he died?’

Belle gave a frightened giggle. ‘He died because someone shot his head off.’ She slid off the chest of drawers. ‘I don’t know why you’re so keen on getting Jeb out. Even if he didn’t shoot Jacob he killed that woman and her child. Either way he deserves to be locked up.’

‘If he didn’t kill Jacob then someone else did. Doesn’t that bother you?’

‘It bothers me.’

Magnus touched her arm. ‘Do you know the reason Jacob died?’

Belle gave him a brilliant smile, an underweight chorus girl whose grin could shine all the way to the back row. ‘I think he must have really pissed someone off.’

Thirty-Four

Magnus spent the next hour searching Jacob’s room, but there was no diary, no letter beginning
In the event of my death . . .
 The closest he came was a scrap of paper tucked into the pocket of a pair of trousers.

Motives

Love

Money

Power

The priest had scored a line through money, leaving love and power, like words waiting to be tattooed on the knuckles of someone’s hands. Jeb and Belle had made love, but there was none lost between them now. Will had taken charge of the group, but he was not a natural leader and Magnus thought he might secretly be grateful if someone came along to relieve him of that power.

‘Love and power,’ he whispered under his breath. One of the puppies wandered into the room and nudged his leg. Magnus scrunched its ears and the dog, satisfied that all was well, jumped on to the half-made bed. Magnus stared out of the window, beyond the garden where Jacob had died and into the darkening evening. Killing was the execution of power and love could also be mercy. There was power in love too, he supposed. Father Wingate’s all-powerful God killed for the love of humanity, or so the old man insisted.

‘Love and power.’

The dog on the bed shifted in its sleep. A flock of birds swooped over the vegetable beds, into the woods beyond. He would go down to the lower basement and speak to Jeb through the grille before it got too dark to see.

He was about to turn away from the window when a slight figure dressed in a dark tracksuit darted across the garden. Raisha had pulled the jacket’s hood up, hiding her features, but Magnus did not need to see her face to know that it was her. He left Jacob’s room, hurried down the stairs, through the kitchen and out into the dusk. The garden was empty. He jogged past the vegetable beds, past the spot where Jacob had died, in the direction Raisha had taken. There was no sign of her. Magnus skirted the wall until he saw a wrought-iron gate he had not noticed before. He pulled and pushed it, but the gate was locked.

‘Raisha?’ He hissed her name. There was no reply, only the sound of the breeze lifting the trees. The air was heavy with a presentiment of rain. ‘Raisha?’

Something caught his eye. He looked back at the house and saw the paraffin lamps glow into life on the kitchen windowsills, casting oblongs of light on to the lawn. Inside Father Wingate, dressed in a baggy jumper, crossed the kitchen and disappeared from Magnus’s sightline.

Magnus found a foothold on the rough stone wall, and boosted himself upward with the help of the gate’s wrought-iron curlicues. The first time he lost his grip and fell on to the damp grass. But the second time he made it on to the top of the wall. He sat there for a moment hoping to spot Raisha, but the belt of trees restricted his view, nodding and bobbing in the twilight. Magnus dropped down on to the other side. There was slim chance of finding anyone in the woods, but he might catch a glimpse of her in the open fields beyond.

Magnus jogged into the knotty pine scent of the wood and went from gloaming into night. There was a path of sorts, but the men who had husbanded the trees were all dead, no one had cleared it for a while and it was littered with twigs and fallen branches. Magnus slowed his pace, careful not to trip. His death might be waiting here, far from the sea, in a foreign landscape of tree trunks and waving branches, but there was no anticipating death, not unless you took the path his cousin Hugh had followed. ‘The road less travelled,’ Jacob had said, after he shot the driver of the yellow Audi.

Magnus had thought the evening silent, but things moved everywhere in the wood, rustling the undergrowth, creaking in the treetops above. There could be people here too: canny survivors who hid in the troll darkness instead of making a show of themselves, cutting harvests that weren’t theirs, burning barns, lighting lamps in windows and inviting murder. Magnus had assumed someone from their community had done the killings, but what if it was an outsider, some silent watcher picking them off one by one like a bogeyman in one of the video nasties he and Hugh had been thrilled by as teenagers? Something big shifted up ahead and Magnus froze, catching his breath, until whatever it was – a deer, badger, escaped jaguar, all claws and hunger – moved away. Magnus forced his breaths into an even rhythm and walked steadily into the not quite pitch-dark. Ghosties and ghoulies were stories for children. Orkney was short on trees, but the islands had their own legends, stories of seal folk, beautiful selkies who beguiled mortals into the sea.

‘Do you think something drew him there?’ his sister Rhona had asked, not long after Hugh drowned. The two of them were in the Snapper Bar, both three sheets to the wind, though it was not yet dinner time. ‘Hugh was always sensitive, maybe something called to him.’ Magnus had walked away, out through the bar and down to the harbour for fear that he might slap her face.

There had been other nonsense spoken. ‘The sea demands her due,’ an old soak had said, his Guinness almost down to its last dregs of foam; low tide. Magnus had seen photographs in Tankerness museum of barrels of beer taken down to the shoreline and axed open. Men with waxed moustaches, flat caps and collarless shirts grinning as if the tradition was simply that and not a precaution; a nod to the old gods that they were not forgotten. When Magnus was around seven years old, his father had told him that in his grandfather’s time it had sometimes been a sheep they had foregone, rowing the poor beast out too far for it to swim back. Magnus had imagined the scene too well. The creature’s legs scrabbling as it was dropped over the side, the men careful not to upset the boat, the sheep trying to swim to shore, its head a speck of white above the water until the waves dragged it under. Magnus’s father must have enjoyed the effect of his story because he had gone on to say that in the days of the ancestors the sacrifice had been more vital; a girl or a boy taken out and drowned. The prospect had given Magnus nightmares for years after.

‘The sea demands her due,’ the old soak had said and Magnus had pulled back his fist.

‘The sea was not due my cousin.’

The quality of the light up ahead was different, the branches of the trees at the edge of the wood shifting against the brighter dark of the night sky. Magnus tripped in his haste to put the trees behind him. He righted himself and emerged into the edge of a field of yellow rape, looking down on to a low valley. Now that he was out of the shelter of the trees he could see the outline of the moon, a dim silver glow disappearing behind the clouds. He smelled rain on the air again and cursed himself for not stopping to grab a jacket. The crop of rape was beginning to rot. It added a sharp edge to the gunpowder scent of approaching storm. Raisha was somewhere ahead of him. Magnus started to walk. The fields beyond his were dark, but there was a patch of light further down the valley that might be a house. He would make for it and then, if Raisha was not there, turn back. The night boomed and he cursed again. When he was a young boy he had pictured thunder as giants’ feet pounding across the islands, flinging standing stones this way and that in a mighty game. It would be easy to return to the old suspicions now that the comfort of electricity was gone. Another rumble sounded. Magnus felt a drop of rain and picked up his pace. He dreaded the prospect of the house up ahead, the chance that he might interrupt Raisha in the act of tending some dead bairn. A fork of lightning jagged across the sky and he saw clearly for an instant the overgrown fields divided by neglected hedges and the white-painted house halfway down the valley. Magnus hurried on. Twice, three times he staggered and once he fell his full length. Rain stabbed his face, single drops that swiftened into a torrent, soaking through his T-shirt and jeans. Another bolt of lightning reived the sky and he knew that to turn back and make for the shelter of the woods would be foolish. He thought of Jeb listening to the thunder in the dungeon deep beneath the house and knew that the chance of proving him innocent was next to zero.

‘A fool’s errand,’ he whispered into the rush of wind and water, his face streaming with raindrops. ‘A fool’s bloody errand.’

The house was bigger than Magnus had thought from the glances the lightning flashes had granted him. It was more modern too. A barn expanded and converted into someone’s grand design. There were houses like it on Orkney, some of them barely used holiday homes, walls of glass juxtaposed with stones cut by the ancients and plundered from their sacred sites by Christian farmers. His father had made fun of them, but Magnus would have been happy to live in one; daylight streaming through an expanse of double glazing, a view of the Atlantic Ocean stretched out before him. There would be stylish homes for the taking now. The thought was no comfort.