The Clown Service (26 page)

Somehow he sensed me, turning as I ran towards him. His face gave me a moment’s pause. For the first time, seeing him in a clear light, that wasn’t the case – his skin was grey, his mouth half-open, his eyes terribly empty. He was a dead man standing.

I jumped at him, expecting him to fall backwards under the momentum of my attack. But I was more insubstantial than I had
hoped. As we collided it felt as if I had brushed into something – a large bush perhaps, or a heavy curtain; the resistance was nothing like as much as if we had both been solid.

He grabbed for me, gloved hands taking hold of my wrists, squeezing so hard his thumbs appeared to sink beneath the surface of what I perceived as my skin.

He threw me backwards and I couldn’t stop myself falling to the floor. As I landed it was as if the floorboards had been covered with something soft. I bounced slightly.

‘Troublesome ghost,’ he said, his mouth creaking into what might have passed for a smile. ‘You haven’t got what it takes to fight me. But I’m impressed. I didn’t think anyone but Shining could come after me here. My intelligence was clearly incomplete. Section 37 must be bigger than I had been led to believe.’

‘Not by much,’ I conceded, ‘but more than enough.’

I glanced at the radio. To take it out was vital. I had to focus on that.

It appeared to be wired into a separate generator (which certainly made sense – this place could hardly be over-burdened with electrical suppliers). If I could pull the cables …

Krishnin kicked at my legs. I felt them move to the side, but there was no pain. Though he was able to touch me, it seemed I couldn’t be hurt by him. I rolled over and grabbed at the floorboards, trying to pull myself forward.

His boot slammed down on my back and, for a moment, it was as if I was falling apart. Whatever body I possessed, held together by thought as it was, yielded slightly at the blow. But his boot passed through me and collided with the floor beneath. I turned over, trying to ignore the sight of his shin vanishing into my stomach. I reached up for him, grabbing at his belt and trying to pull him over.

He tilted as I yanked at him, but he didn’t fall.

‘There’s nothing to you,’ Krishnin sneered. ‘You’re smoke – let me blow you away.’

‘Not while I’m still here,’ interrupted a voice from behind him. Shining had appeared, and the small hammer from the torture instruments was in his hand. He brought it down on the back of Krishnin’s head. There was a sharp crack and the Russian staggered, his hands going to the back of his skull.

‘The wires!’ I shouted. Jamie had run up behind Shining, seen the radio set and understood what needed to be done. He moved towards the generator and snatched at the power cable. A flash of electricity sparked out making his hands ripple as, briefly, they lost their cohesion. With gritted teeth, Jamie pressed on and yanked the cable from its socket. The lights on the front of the radio transmitter flashed out.

‘Destroy it!’ I yelled to him as, on my feet again, I headed towards Krishnin. The Russian, slightly recovered, had grabbed Shining’s hands and shaken the little hammer from the old man’s grip.

Jamie moved behind the table the radio transmitter was sat on and, with obvious effort, willed himself solid enough to push it up and over, spilling the machine to the floor where it crashed with a pleasingly destructive sound.

Krishnin kicked at Shining’s knee and I heard a cracking sound.

I hurled myself onto the Russian’s back. Wrapping my hands around his neck I pulled with all the strength I could muster, feeling the man’s skull dislodge. There was a popping sound and his neck twisted. Krishnin fell to the ground.

Just smoke?
Fuck you
.

Shining had staggered backwards, his knee either dislocated or broken. He fell against the far wall, just managing to support himself.

‘That won’t do,’ he informed me, through gritted teeth. ‘He was dead already. It’ll take more than a broken neck to stop him.’

I looked over to where the radio had fallen. Jamie was now kicking at it. A few of his blows did damage, a dial snapping off here, a plastic fascia cracking there. But most just passed through ineffectually. I think Jamie was so panicked that he was losing the focus required to retain any solidity.

On the floor was a semi-automatic pistol, spilled from the table along with the radio.

‘The gun!’ I cried to Jamie. ‘Pick up the gun!’

Krishnin was rising up behind me, his head hanging at a sickening angle on his broken neck.

Jamie reached down for the gun and snatched it up, only for it to fall through his fingers, clattering back to the floor between us. I jumped for it and actually felt Krishnin do the same, the weight of his body passing through me, his heavy hand pushing through mine and grabbing hold of the weapon.

As he turned to face me I fought to rise above him, desperate to find enough strength in my ghost hands to hold him down. We struggled, his head lolling freakishly, hideously.

I could hear Shining behind me, shuffling forward, trying to help.

Krishnin turned the gun on me and fired.

Good luck with that
, I thought. There was no way his bullets were going to stop me.

With one last surge, I managed to push down on him, twisting the gun from his hand. I snatched it and focused hard to keep
hold of it. It seemed to writhe in my fingers, constantly almost slipping free. I got up and turned the gun on him. Which is when I noticed he wasn’t fighting anymore. He just lay there. Smiling.

‘I can’t imagine what you’ve got to be so happy about,’ I spluttered, for now resisting the urge to empty the rest of the gun’s clip into him.

‘Tim!’

I looked at Jamie, who was staring over my shoulder.

The gunshots. They couldn’t hurt me. I was insubstantial. They just passed right through … right through and into …

I turned to see Shining flat on his back on the floor, two bloody wounds spreading across his shirt.

I couldn’t believe it. After everything we’d done.

I moved to his side, hoping desperately there was something I could do. Was it possible for me to push these ghost hands into him? Try to remove the bullets? It didn’t take long to see that August was beyond such help.

‘Ludwig,’ he said, his face rigid but determined, biting back on the pain. ‘This is so important,’ he said. ‘You did brilliantly. No need to worry. We stopped him. We did the job. Whatever else happens I want you to remember that. The rest doesn’t matter.
It wasn’t your fault
.’

And then he died.

I looked up at Jamie. He just stood there, staring, not knowing what to do or say.

Krishnin was lying still. Staring up at the patchy roof. That ghastly smirk still on his face. ‘He’s wrong, you know,’ he gloated. ‘All this never mattered. I sent the signal already. Black Earth is underway and there’s nothing any of you can do about it.’

The first call comes in at four minutes past nine on the evening of the 30th. The call is routed through to Nigel Rogers, who has been manning his post at the ECC without break for six hours and wants nothing more than to clock off, go home and sleep. It has been a stressful shift thanks to violence kicking off at a second-division football match and what seems like a whole asylum-full of the usual line-hoggers. His faith in humankind, already worn thin by his few months in the job, has all but vanished entirely by the time the automated system queues up the fateful call.

‘It’s …’ the voice splutters through his earpiece, ‘I think he’s dead. He was in the grave. He dug himself out …’

‘Can you give me your location, please?’ asks Nigel, quite convinced he’s dealing with a joker. ‘Tell me where you are.’

‘He looks like he’s screaming, but there’s no noise … Oh God … I think he’s going to kill me … he’s—’

The phone cuts off. Nigel is already checking the location.
You can’t be precise with a mobile, not without spending a lot of time and money, but you can get within spitting distance. He fully intends to report it: these time-wasters need to learn – it isn’t funny, it’s dangerous. They have more than enough on their hands without idiots like this adding to the load.

Within an hour the switchboard will be jammed by similar calls. Eventually the staff will concede they might be real.

Cemeteries are like cities – they fill up over time. However much you try to expand you are always fighting against one unchanging problem: people keep dying.

The City of London Cemetery and Crematorium is the largest in the country, a plot of land that has grown and grown in the hundred and sixty years since it was established. It holds something in the region of a million bodies. That number is about to drop.

Cathy Gates is a woman who relishes space. She lives with her mother in a house that drips resentment and arguments. ‘I didn’t have a child so that I could end up in a home,’ her mother says. ‘It’s about time you paid me back the loving care I showered on you all those years.’

If pressed to identify the love, Cathy would struggle. Yet she can’t abandon her remaining parent, however much she might wish to when the old woman’s voice becomes raised and the demands increase. And so her life is one of duty and remorse. Sadness over a life lost, sacrificed in the care of an unloving mother.

She stays out when she can. To get some fresh air. Be at peace. She walks. She tends the grave of her father, a man who
escaped that oppressive house ten years earlier, struck down by a heart attack in the middle of a work shift at the bakery.

‘I shouldn’t feel jealous,’ Cathy says, looking down at her father’s headstone, ‘but some days I wish my heart was as weak as yours.’

What a terrible thing to say
, she thinks, brushing away embarrassed tears and making her way back towards the South Gate.
What a horrible, horrible person I am
.

The grass is wet with that morning’s rain and Cathy tries to find beauty in her surroundings. Something sweet to lighten the bitterness.

To her left she can see someone kneeling at another grave. They are clearly overcome with emotion, she thinks, to have fallen to their knees. She feels embarrassed to have noticed them but can’t help but watch as the distant silhouette appears to be waving its arms about, as though beating away attackers.

Maybe they’re in pain
, she thinks, her mind going back to her father and the mental image she has always had of him, spreadeagled on the flour-dusted floor of the bakery, clutching at the air as his heart pounds and clenches in his chest.
I should probably check
…

She leaves the path, cutting through the rows of burial plots, her eyes fixed on the figure ahead of her. She doesn’t notice, for the moment, the movement elsewhere. She doesn’t hear the scattering of earth and the shifting of rocks.

‘Head in the clouds,’ her mother often moaned, ‘that’s your problem – always dreaming.’

As Cathy gets nearer she realises this is no mourner. The ground is dug up around the grave, piles of dirt and scattered clumps of turf.
They must be relocating some of the graves
, she
thinks. She’s heard that the council have to shift bodies now and then, though why anyone would move this one, stuck at the heart of the cemetery, she can’t imagine.

If only she were to look around her she would see that this is happening all over the cemetery – splintered stumps of hands, worn down by their work, reaching for the light. But she doesn’t. Her eyes remain fixed on this one grave.

Cathy steps beneath the shadow of the pine tree and the figure begins to turn towards her. It is not sitting in a neatly-excavated hole; it is writhing in a mess of disturbed earth. She is reminded of an old cowboy picture she watched with her father when she was a child, the hero sinking into a patch of quicksand, his friends trying to feed a rope to him so they can pull him free.

‘Are you all right?’ Cathy asks, the first question that pops into her head.

The figure is now looking at her. Cathy’s second question goes unvoiced. ‘
His face, what’s wrong with his face?
’. She is too busy screaming.

April Shining is furious enough to kill. Not an unusual state of being for her, however much she might affect an attitude of carelessness, the people around her frequently drive her mad.

‘Douglas,’ she shouts into the mouthpiece of the phone, ‘if you patronise me one more time I will drive that voter-paid-for BMW of yours right into the front of your taxpayer-funded house. I am not in the habit of wasting your time with rubbish. If I tell you that you’re facing an emergency then you most certainly are.’

A monotone dribbles out of the earpiece in response, the sort of aggressively calm speech that fuels all the best arguments in the House of Lords.

‘Oh piss off!’ she shouts and cuts off the call with a thumb stabbed so viciously it nearly forces the rubber button irretrievably into the phone housing.

Her attempts to mobilise a response to the threat of Operation Black Earth have not been successful. She has warned, begged and bribed but nobody wants to know.

‘The thinking on the Harry Reid case,’ one of her contacts at the Met has explained, ‘is that it must be some form of hoax.’

The evidence against such a pointless theory is substantial and convincing, but she has no time to offer it before the call is cut off.

She needs to get off the phone and start bullying people in person. To hell with phones. No one ignores April Shining.

‘Sir Robin?’

The jelly-like civil-servant quivers into life from the stupor brought on by his perusal of
The Times
and looks up at the man addressing him. He is a young man, smartly dressed but in a manner that suggests a nightclub rather than Cornwell’s. The club has thrived for over one hundred years by providing a warm place for gentlemen of secrets to sink into leather armchairs. It is like a well-maintained greenhouse, built for the cultivation of decadent begonias. It has a set of rules so long and complex it is said the main proof of being worthy of club membership is to be capable of understanding them. If Sir Robin had his way, one of
those rules would ban the heliotrope tie this man is wearing. A pity he is no longer on the committee.