End of the World Blues (25 page)

“Tell me honestly,” said Lord d’Alambert. “How do you feel about this marriage?”

She would have shrugged again, but something in those eyes told Lady Neku he would return to the question and keep returning to it until she answered.

“Does it matter?” asked Lady Neku.

“Yes,” said the old man. “Your genes will be mixed with those of my son. Has that been explained to you?”

“Yes,” said Lady Neku.

“We’re old-fashioned,” he added, almost sadly. “Hog-tied by tradition. You will be required to live with us. We will also expect you to birth your own children.”

“I’m not sure I can,” said Lady Neku. “Our record in that area is not very good…” She hesitated, wondering whether she dare say what was in her mind. “You’ve heard the rumours?”

Three generations made by splitting cells.

The old man smiled. His breath was sour and he leaned on her arm more heavily than Lady Neku liked. All the same she was shocked to realise she was starting to respect Lord d’Alambert, something so unlikely it made her wonder if he worked at levels more subtle than even her mother realised.

“I’ve heard the rumours,” said the man. “And you’ll be fine. I had you scanned as you came aboard. There’s nothing amiss that can’t be cured by inducing the menarche.” He smiled at Lady Neku’s expression. “You carry an ancient Bayer Rochelle modification for elective sterility…no breeding,” he added, when she looked puzzled. “Until we splice in a key.”

There were three likely answers according to Charlie, another seven possible and thirty-eight more that ranged from technically possible to unlikely, each with its own factor of probability. And though every one could be examined in isolation, it was unrealistic to consider why a handgun clip might hold a mix of live and blank ammunition without tightening the parameters.

“Could the difference between types be seen?”

“Unlikely,” said Neku. “Most clips are closed.”

“Would the man unload the clip?”

“Doubt it,” she said.

“And the blanks?”

“Crimped,” said Neku, adding, “No wax plug or fake bullet, just powder, minimal wadding, and crimped metal around the top.”

She grinned at the memory, clung tighter to Kit’s bike jacket, and leaned into a bend. Charlie had taken her problem away last Monday, called her Tuesday with his request for more information, and being refused, disappeared for another day, finally texting this morning to ask how many answers she’d like.

“Okay,” said Charlie, when she called. “I can give you probabilities or divide my solutions into unlikely, possible, and…”

“Give me the most obvious answer,” said Neku, ruining his carefully considered presentation. She knew she’d ruined it, because Charlie’s voice stumbled to a halt, leaving her alone on the roof with a silent phone and a distant police siren for company.

“Is this real?” he asked finally. “I mean, does it have something to do with the dead woman?”

“Mary,” said Neku.

“Yes,” Charlie said. “Mary.”

“No,” said Neku, flicking her Nokia to visual. She caught Charlie’s blink as the streaming video came on line, and then the widening of his eyes.

“Neku, you’re…”

I’m what?
she wondered, before realising he meant shirtless. “It’s hot,” she told him. “Tokyo has more wind.” He was about to say something else, but just nodded.

“So it’s not about Mary?”

“No,” said Neku. “Definitely not.”

“But it is for real?” Charlie said, carefully not facing his screen. “I mean,” he added, “you don’t strike me as interested in the hypothetical.”

Neku smiled, then realised it might have been an insult. “It’s real,” she said. “I’ve been trying to work out what it means ever since.” This wasn’t strictly true, she’d simply found the fact in a report amid the mess of papers from Major Yamota’s office and passed the problem straight to Charlie.

“Okay,” he said, “first thought, it’s obviously intentional.” Charlie must have been glancing at his screen because he responded to Neku’s frown. “If the clip had five blanks and three live shells…well, that could have been someone not bothering to empty the clip properly, but five blanks, two live, one blank.”

“Suggests what?”

Charlie took a deep breath. “Taking the five/two combination first,” he said. “Someone wants to frighten someone, while reserving the means to kill them. Second option, someone wants to frighten someone, then kill them. Third option, someone wants to frighten someone, then kill someone else…”

“Go on,” said Neku.

“There are other possibilities,” said Charlie. “But I’d need more background. The clip is logical until you consider that last blank. Why load a final blank having loaded two live shells above it?”

“I imagine,” said Neku, “it all depends on who loaded the clip.”

“On…?”

“How about, scare someone, kill someone else, get killed yourself?”

“Yeah,” said Charlie. “That works for me.”

He’d wanted to see her again, obviously enough, which was a fair price. At least Neku thought it was, but she had to tell Charlie she was busy next day and that led into telling him about Kate O’Mally and Pat and all the other slivers of information she’d prised out of Kit as reward for translating his wretched forms.

“Call me when you get back?” asked Charlie.

Neku promised she would.

The sky above the downs was a ridiculous shade of blue and the afternoon stank of warm earth, summer, and grass. It was all Kit could do not to put out one gloved hand to brush the hedge as he roared past.

The mill at Little Westover looked unchanged, the White Bear, on the corner, where Blackboy Lane crossed with the ghost of a Roman road, was festooned with flowers, its car park as full as ever.

But the old hut had gone.

Kit expected to find overgrown foundations or rotten walls and a broken roof, but it was gone completely. Someone had cleared the site, concreted it over, and installed mesh fencing and a steel gate. A Ukrainian tractor and trailer now stood where the hut had been.

For the first half of the ride, Neku had gripped his jacket and held tight. After they stopped at a café and Kit told her how to ride pillion, Neku loosened her grip and now leaned back, holding plastic handles that protruded from the Kawasaki’s cheap seat. They were using Sony earbeads, a modification that had cost almost as much as the old bike. Well, it did when you threw in the cost of earbead-compatible helmets.

“Okay,” said Neku. “Who am I?”

Kit twitched his head, then glanced back at the lane in time to see twin walls of cow parsley twist to one side. “Lean,” he ordered, and felt Neku ride the bend. Of course, Neku being Neku, explaining what she should do to ride pillion had also required him to explain why, so Kit ended up sketching a cross section of wheel onto a paper napkin.

“Precision and deflection,” she said. “Combined with centrifugal force…Simple enough.”

“If you say so.”

Now Neku threw herself into bends, which actually translated as leaning with the bike rather than against it. Kit had ridden these roads a thousand times before in an earlier life, and swept the curves from memory as he headed for Middle Morton and the old humpback bridge, but first he had Wintersprint.

The cottage was still there, although builders had removed the slate roof and added dormer windows. The thatch replacing the slates had been in place long enough to grow moss and turn black along its lower edges. The outside walls had been plastered and painted white. Half tubs, cut from beer barrels, overflowed with flowers on both sides of a glossy black door.

“Well?” demanded Neku, her voice loud in his earbead.

“Well, what?”

“How are you going to explain me to Mrs. O’Mally?”

“Hell,” said Kit. “How do I explain you to anyone?”

“You don’t.”

Flicking on his indicators, Kit kicked down a couple of gears and coasted to a halt beside a gap in the hedge. The potato field still existed. The earth bank around its edge might look a little flatter and the copse of trees at its far end a little closer than he remembered, but its dark earth was still cut into farrows and a trailer rusted in one corner beneath rotting sacks. A sign by the gate advertised,
Pick Your Own.

“Why have we stopped?”

“Because I need to stretch my legs,” said Kit.

Having watched him unbolt a five-bar gate, Neku said, “I’ll come with you.”

“No,” said Kit, “you won’t. I need you to stay with the bike.”

Fifteen years had gone and still he stood humbled at the site of a mindless fuck between teenagers, one of them half drunk, the other ramped on speed. A thousand other people would have been having sex that night, ten thousand, a hundred thousand…Yoshi had been wrong. No one could tie you tighter than you could tie yourself and it was the ropes you couldn’t see that bound you tightest.

“You’re crying,” said Neku, when he returned.

Kit put his helmet back on.

Seven Chimneys had changed in the time he’d been away. The yellow brick had lost its rawness and ivy had fanned out around the upper windows. The rose bushes had thickened and the flower bed outside the study been weeded and cut back so many times its earth had changed colour.

Even the huge brass lion of a door knocker had lost its brashness and been cleaned and polished into something that felt greasy beneath Kit’s fingers as he lifted its heavy ring and brought it down with a bang.

He had to knock another three times before he got an answer.

“Who is it?”

“Me,” he said, before realising how ridiculous that sounded. “It’s Kit,” he said. “I need you to look at something…” On the far side of the door bolts were drawn back, and when the door opened it was still held by a heavy chain.

“Who’s she?” demanded Kate.

Neku sighed. “Told you,” she said.

While Kit looked through the attics for a trunk or box that might take the little brass key, Neku and Kate made lunch, which mostly involved slicing tomatoes and sticking fat chunks of cheese between even fatter slabs of bread.

“Make a dressing,” Kate ordered. When Neku looked blank, Kate pulled wine vinegar, olive oil, and black pepper from a cupboard and dumped them in front of the girl.

“Mix them,” she said. “Then grate in some pepper.”

“What proportions?”

“How would I know?” Kate asked, dumping an empty mustard jar in front of Neku. “My husband used to make it.” She nodded at the jar. “He used that.”

Having poured oil and vinegar into the jar, Neku added black pepper and screwed the jar shut before shaking it hard. Then she drizzled the dressing over the top of the sliced tomatoes, because she couldn’t see what else she was meant to do with it.

“It’s pretty here,” she said.

Kate grunted.

Horses ran in a field beyond the kitchen windows and bees clustered around a vast spread of lavender that overflowed a stone trough next to a bench on the lawn immediately outside. The room itself was huge, with stone slabs for a floor and work surfaces cut from railway sleepers. The kitchen was too big for one person, almost too big for one family. It looked as if it belonged in a hotel.

“You and Kit,” Kate asked. “What’s that about?”

So Neku told Kate how she’d met Kit by accident while she’d been stealing a pen, notebook, and ink from a shrine shop in Tokyo because she had a story she needed to write.

“What’s the story about?”

“A marriage.”

“Whose marriage?”

“Mine,” said Neku, “to the son of a lizard prince.”

Kate raised her eyebrows. So Neku told Kate how she met Kit a second time on the streets of Roppongi, when he gave her a coffee one morning, because it was raining.

“Because it was raining?”

“That’s what he said.”

“And when was this?”

“Last Christmas,” said Neku. “He brought me coffee every day after that, and often daifuku cake. Stuffed with sweet bean curd,” she added, when Kate looked puzzled. “I came to rely on it. The days Kit forgot I went hungry.”

“You couldn’t just beg?”

“Maybe that would have been better,” Neku admitted. “Less trouble for everybody, but it seemed wrong.” She told Kate how she’d actually had a coin locker stuffed with millions of dollars she was unable to use. And how taking coffee from Kit had somehow felt different. “Anyway,” she said. “I saved his life from an assassin. So that was repayment.”

“Seems to be catching.”

“What is?” asked Neku.

“Wanting Kit dead.”

Neku shrugged. “He was fucking the wife of a gang boss and bikers used his bar to deal drugs, plus lots of
uyoku
felt Yoshi Tanaka should be married to someone Japanese. Then there’s
chippu
he owed to the local police and unpaid bills from a Brazilian transvestite who mends his motorbike. It could have been anyone.”

Kate laughed. “You tell a good story,” she said. “Almost as good as Patrick. All the same, I’d like the real story next time.”

After lunch, Kate carried her own plate to the sink and ran it under cold water, leaving it to dry on a wire rack. It was the action of someone grown used to living alone, life reduced to simple habits. Neku did the same for her own plate, Kit’s plate, and the plate on which she’d put the tomatoes, washing each before placing it next to the plates already there.

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water…
Neku found it hard to remember which actions carried weight and which got lost as static and dust in the slipstream from other people’s lives.

“I’m going for a stroll,” said Kate. “You can keep looking,” she added, speaking to Kit. “But there’s no trunk here and no tuck box. Mary didn’t go to that kind of school.” And, with this, Kate headed for the kitchen door.

Neku made to follow her.

“Neku,”
Kit said.

“What,” said Neku, “I’m not allowed to take a walk too?”

Cars locked up the M25, London’s orbital. They crawled towards turn offs, negotiated endless road works, and slid gratefully away, like single fish leaving a shoal as they finally headed home to leafy and not-so-leafy suburbs. About ten minutes short of his own turn off, Kit spotted a BMW up ahead and thought no more about it, filtering through the gap between the BMW and a white van.