Rainbow Bridge (34 page)

Fiorinda went to the window and looked out. An immaculate garden, a band of trees; the empty A-road. The golf course tailored like velvet, as if nothing had ever changed, Didcot Power Station dominating the horizon, birds singing, the queen of all English landscapes in between.

Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill
…

Far too much fresh water was pouring into the North Atlantic, and the Feds’ crazy attempt to turn the rivers around had collapsed. Our winters will grow longer and summers shorter, the cold equations mount against us. Eco-revolution came too late, the beauty our Victorian ancestors thought eternal is bound to die. But still there was some sad kind of honey for tea at the Villa Vallombrosa, and there are worse things than climate change. She felt nothing but mournful emptiness in this room. What did that prove?

‘It was going to be a cultural icon, like Tate Modern,’ said Lance, beside her, bitterly. ‘Didcot. I suppose
they’ll
do that, now. We won’t be off the beaten track, when they make Ground Zero their capital.’

He wanted them to tell him this would never happen, but they could not.

‘No further incidents,’ said Sage, ‘since Dian died?’

Mimi and Lance shook their heads.

‘You saw her
talking
to the apparition? You witnessed that?’

Mimi shook her head again, reluctant, knowing this was a demotion of the Close Encounter, wanting to have the top quality for Dian. ‘No, but I heard her, and I’ll swear I heard two voices. Lance wasn’t in the house.’

‘I saw it. Oh, I definitely saw it. She was in bed, of course, propped up on pillows, her breathing was bad. It was eleven at night, the night my wife had heard the voices. I’d come up to listen, not to disturb her. We didn’t sit with her, she didn’t want that… I was looking through the door, like this.’ He crossed the room, stepped out onto the landing to demonstrate, reappeared. ‘If you look at the angle you’ll agree she couldn’t see me, which rules out a trick arranged for my benefit, I know you have to think of everything, although she was so ill. Between me and my daughter’s bed was a figure with its back to me. There was a nightlight, a common wax nightlight in a glass bowl, on the bedstand. That was all the light in the room. The light went through it. It was male, I’d say, if anything. Slim, er, medium height or less, very close-fitting dark clothes. I didn’t hear a voice. I couldn’t tell you if it was modern or historical, but I had the impression of someone enduring, or taking on, great pain—’

The detail and emotional colour gave something away. ‘You saw the apparition just once?’ said Verlaine.

Lance looked cast-down. ‘She was only here for a week.’

‘What did you do then?’ asked Fiorinda. Cosoleth snuggled closer, still wide awake and quiet. She was a snuggling adept now. She could do all kinds of tricks, her body felt entirely different, very grown-up. Mimi Buckley smiled sadly at the baby.

‘I went downstairs, Ms Slater. I didn’t know what I was seeing, I knew my girl was very, very ill. I thought, maybe, it was Death with her.’ He hesitated. ‘I didn’t want to disturb whatever was going on, and I was bloody scared, too. I told Mimi—’

‘Did you go back upstairs with him, to see for yourself?’

‘N-no. We thought better not.’

‘Did you ask Dian about it?’

‘In a way we did,’ said the mother hesitantly. ‘But she was very ill—’

‘She didn’t make any clear comment. Didn’t really respond.’ Lance looked at his wife, and she nodded. ‘Should we leave you alone?’ he offered. ‘The Chinese will have searched, scanned, the room, I’m afraid. They had the opportunity.’

‘There was no sign of a search after they’d gone.’

‘I said
scanned
, Mimi. They’ll have had non-invasive methods.’

‘No,’ Sage glanced at the others; no dissent. ‘No, we’re done.’

‘We’ll go down again then.’

This time they went to the conservatory, passing through a living room as desolately formal as the dining room, into the extension where the couple clearly spent their time, although it must be hell to heat. Mimi’s ironing board stood beside a grotto of hobbyist hardware; clean washing was piled on an old armchair.

‘That’s my ghostbuster rig,’ said Lance.

The floor was cold Italian-styled tile, they sat on rustic wheelback chairs, surrounded by straw-hatted donkeys, china animals, endless photos of Dian. Dian as a child on a pony, Dian hugging an Airedale terrier on the lawn. Dian gracing a VIP premiere, at her most inhumanly glossy. Dian on a beach with her parents, towerblock hotels behind, looking—at last—like the rock journo who’d been their camp-follower.

‘I have every room in the house digitally mapped in 3D,’ said Lance. ‘I did that as an exercise when I first got my rig. I was ready to go, soon as Mimi told me about the voices. I started recording, but—’

‘He’s done a lot of this. He’s quite an expert. Houses, barns, haunted pools, the library at Middle Clinton, where there were confirmed occurrences.’

‘I was unlucky there. Just missed the psychic incidence, I think some of them are like a meteor swarm, we pass through them, on a cycle of some kind?’

Years ago, Fiorinda had collected data on the explosion of paranormal activity that had seemed to follow Dissolution; for her own reasons. Counterculturals had ignored the project. They’d suspected (with justice) that Fiorinda was only gathering the facts to rubbish them. The bricks and mortar public had co-operated eagerly, and been hard to turn off. Lance Buckley was clearly one of those who would have ticked the
curious sceptic
box. He’d bought the gadgets, taught himself the skills. He could talk the talk (I thought Death was with her), but remained convinced his hobby was entirely rational, nothing to do with the Counterculture’s weird beliefs, blameless as metal-detecting; a perilous frame of mind.

The visitors had no opinion on ghostly meteor swarms. ‘You found you hadn’t recorded anything?’ prompted Fiorinda, gently. ‘It’s nearly always the way.’

Lance nodded. ‘Often the way, don’t I know it. It’s very tricky. Nothing that shows up on my humble rig, I tried everything. But you’ll see what you can do?’

Sage accepted a button of solid state memory, and a small manila envelope, which her father had found under Dian’s pillow and removed before the Chinese medics arrived. It was addressed to no one. ‘From the little she said to me,’ he explained, ‘when she was dying, I know it was meant for Mr Pender.’

‘Your baby came early,’ said Mimi to Fiorinda, to cover a slight awkwardness. A young mother couldn’t like to be reminded of her rock god’s previous attachment. ‘That must have been a shock. We were all waiting to hear the news from London.’

‘I had my dates wrong,’ Fiorinda mugged apology. ‘I don’t know how it happened. I was in prison when I fell pregnant, that’s my excuse.’

‘She’s
lovely
. So good. Do you take her with you everywhere?’

‘I don’t know a safer place she could be.’

‘You keep to that. You stick by that.’ Dian’s mother tried to smile, and had to cover her eyes with one hand, to hide the tears. ‘I’m sorry, excuse me.’

Lance cleared his throat. ‘I suppose you’ll want to give the kit a once-over. Check my parameters—’

Sage, Chip and Verlaine had given the hobbyist corner a glance as they walked in. They shook their heads. ‘No need,’ said Sage. ‘We can figure it out.’

The Buckleys looked at each other, crestfallen and alarmed. ‘You
are
going to look into this?’ insisted the father. ‘There’s got to be something in it.’

‘Of course. But the most likely explanation,’ said Fiorinda, frankly and kindly, ‘is transient psychosis, a symptom of acute stress. I know you don’t want to hear that, but if what you saw was in your minds, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. Or it wasn’t important. What you experienced was part of Dian’s dying—’

‘Did she seem to
know
the apparition?’ wondered Chip. ‘Maybe you needed to feel that Death came to her as a friend. How did she seem to be reacting?’

‘Tense,’ said Lance, with decision. ‘She was tense.’

‘We’ll take these things away,’ said Sage, ‘and we’ll let you know. But if I were you I’d get rid of any copies of the data. And get rid of the ghostbuster rig.’

‘The Chinese don’t know it exists,’ said Lance, like a child told to smash his favourite toy. ‘I’ll swear they don’t. They didn’t search down here. They can intercept a phone signal, but if they’d been snooping inside my house
I would know it
.’

‘He’d know it.’

‘All the same, it’d be wise. What looks innocent to you might not look so innocent to the AMID. I can’t advise you to stop pressing for an investigation of her death,’ added Sage, with appropriate gravitas. ‘That’s your right. But the Chinese say they can prove they acted properly, and viral pneumonia kills healthy adults all the time. Maybe you should accept the settlement they’re offering; without any admission of fault.’ He raised a hand. ‘I know it stings, and it won’t bring her back, but it’d be closure. Take the money. It’s hard, but you should let this go.’

Mr Buckley read the warning in those famous blue eyes, understood that the words were censored, and staggered under a final blow. The Triumvirate, his last hope, wouldn’t do a thing. ‘They’ll
pay us compensation
? They send our daughter back to us dying, like a…like a cast-off servant, and they’ll
pay compensation
! My Dian, an internationally famous writer—’

‘It was good of you,’ broke in Mimi. ‘Very good of you to come.’

Sage and Fiorinda had rendezvoused with the Londoners at Oxford station. They’d picked up a car from the rank to get to Rexborough. No driver, no minders had attended the visit of condolence. So here they were on the loose in the heart of the Occupied South West and it felt unreal. Fiorinda took the wheel, after a brief discussion with her co-parent: Sage took the baby. They needed a proper infant car-seat for her, but how do you get hold of one of those?

‘What the hell was that about Death looking like a friend, Chip?’

‘I was method-acting,’ said Chip, gloomily. ‘The clumsy juvenile sidekick.’

‘Sorry, don’t worry, you were okay… That house creeped me out.’

Last year at Ashdown Dian had told Sage a ghost story, and the Triumvirate had kept it to themselves. There’d been nothing they could do, that dark November, about the sinister idea that DK—dead or alive—was in Chinese hands. Now they had their freedom, to an extent, and it was a different world. The Chinese seemed decent enough overlords, peace was breaking out, Ax had hope. But then you find that Dian is dead, her body missing, and there have been unexplained psychic phenomena at her childhood home. Sage leaned back, soothing the baby’s head as if she were a kitten.

She spluttered ominously. Trust you, Coz. You liked the haunted house, you’re not hungry, what’s wrong with the nice hired car? And how does your mother always know exactly when to dump you?

He thought of the hollow woman at Ashdown, offering to be Mata Hari.

‘I’m glad we went, anyway. Thanks for coming along.’

‘No problem,’ said Verlaine.

The splutter segued through a bridge passage of grizzle to a piercing, repeated shriek. ‘If she isn’t hungry, she isn’t bored and she isn’t sleepy, she probably needs changing,’ said Chip. ‘That’s the rules. Babies rarely break the rules.’ Chip and Ver had notched up much experience over the years, what with Anne-Marie Wing’s brood, and the Snake Eyes kids. They liked to think they knew their stuff (suckers).

‘Pass her over,’ offered Verlaine, ‘we can do her back here.’

Fiorinda glanced at the baby. ‘She does stink a touch. I’ll stop.’

They were in Ground Zero’s shadow, the road surfaces eerily smooth; no traffic at all. They hadn’t meant to leave the car except at Villa Vallombrosa. But Fiorinda pulled off at the next lay-by, and they stepped out into the Thames Valley, the Reich’s lost holy ground. Under new leaves, in a riot of birdsong, Coz waved her dimpled legs and reached for sky-brimming speedwells, piercing-green grass blades. She beamed gummily at Chip, who’d taken charge of the front end, mood maintenance. He touched her nose with a fingertip.

Eh! said Coz, rearing her head like a little stranded tortoise without a shell.

‘Eh!’ said Chip, and thought of Verlaine wanting to have a baby. No problem. You pay for the boy-on-boy IVF, hire a kind lady who will lend her womb, and of course you’d have to get nearer to Sphere-central, the reconstruction not having progressed to fertility clinics here as yet. But the child was a stalking horse. It was something else Ver wanted, and Chip didn’t know what.

Sage looked inside the envelope, which wasn’t sealed, and shook the contents onto his palm. A lock of ice-blonde hair, coiled and sealed in a tiny plastic baggie, another baggie holding lint and cotton-buds. There she is, all that’s left of the green-eyed Valkyrie, one of those women I touched, and never knew it. Really hurt her, and I never felt a fucking thing. But these were not sentimental souvenirs.

‘Tissue samples,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Good for her. She had plenty of courage.’

‘Bugger all we can do about it, unfortunately.’

Fiorinda turned the baby over on her belly, so she could practise her mini-push-ups and improve her immune system by gumming soil. They sat around her in the cool, sunlit shade. Can we talk? Never trust a hired car, but out here we think so. Sage held the data button on his palm.

‘The question is,’ said Verlaine, ‘could Dian have had a b-loc phone?’

‘It’s a big leap,’ said Fiorinda. ‘But I’m with you.’

The description of that ‘ghost’ had been so suggestive, so familiar. And nothing’s for certain, but these four thought they’d know, and did not believe anything so-called supernatural had happened in that room.

‘She had a White Label pair,’ said Sage. ‘She was on the list. I can’t prove it, can’t remember seeing her with it, but I’m sure she got herself a commercial set later. They were must-have, before the Green Nazis took charge.’

The first bi-location phones had been packaged in pairs. There wasn’t much point in owning one unless you knew someone equipped to receive.

‘Would she have
kept
something like that?’ Chip imagined it. ‘The Chinese are here, she’s been working for the Second Chamber, all mind/matter tech is proscribed. She’s going to throw it in the River. Isn’t she?’