Jago (41 page)

‘Something in the water,’ someone said.

* * *

‘Don’t be frightened,’ Jenny told her. ‘There’s no pain. You’ll see. It’s like a kiss.’

‘The best kiss,’ Cindy added.

Hazel was in the centre of a swirl of warmth. The bath was wonderful, soothing all her aches and pains, all her doubts and disappointments. Now, she was embarking on a voyage. An exciting cruise.

* * *

‘Miss?’

It was the girl Paul had seen earlier, Janet. She was in a dream, standing by the steps of the Agapemone, gently shaking her head.

‘Can I help?’

‘No,’ she said, smiling. ‘It was the Love.’

Unexpectedly, without warning, she kissed him. He tensed as her lips brushed his, then felt suspended over an abyss. Janet’s kiss became moist, skilled, warm. She withdrew, and laughed pleasantly.

‘We share Love,’ she explained. It was something he’d been hearing a lot lately, although not from Hazel.

He thought of Hazel, up the stairs and beyond the door. Janet stroked his face, clucking a little.

‘There’s Love all around, Paul.’

He didn’t remember whether he’d told her his name. His tooth spurted pain into his mouth.

The Sister of the Agapemone mimed plucking a grape from a vine and popping it into her mouth.

‘Wouldn’t you like to drink champagne from the hollow of my throat?’

Again, Paul thought he’d just been out-weirded by a professional.

* * *

Allison went first, venturing on to the landing, then down the stairs, then into the hall. The others followed, Terry bringing up the rear, constantly turning to look behind them. They were an army unit. Her body prepared to lash out, she walked down the last flight of stairs and turned towards the front door. It was a long hallway, running the length of the Manor House. It wasn’t yet dark enough to have the lights on, but gloom had descended.

She saw the figure standing in the doorway, half in and half out of one of the big rooms off the hall, half his face visible. She made fists and brought them up, ready. The man didn’t move. Badmouth Ben was at her side, the others a little behind him. Her arm muscles went tight, and she calculated where to strike first. Throat, then balls, then eyes.

Ben held her upper arm and shook his head. They walked, slowly, down the hall. As they progressed, Allison saw more of the face. It was Jago. He was standing over a woman who lay in a faint at his feet. Ben eased past Allison and stood across the hall from Jago, looking him in the eyes. Jago was in his vicar outfit, reverse collar and black suit, eyes wide and hard. Allison looked from Ben to Jago, and saw similarities in stance and feature. Their eyes were alike, alive in deathmasks.

‘What…?’ Mike Toad began. Allison put two fingers over his mouth, shutting him up.

Jazz was momentarily unsteady on her feet, hips shaking, hands pushing against the fabric over her thighs. She had a belt of silver metal letters tight around her narrow waist, reading
SEX DEATH SEX
. Allison knew how the London girl felt.

Jago turned from Ben and looked directly at her. The memory of her climax flooded her, and her knees went again. Ben had the front door open and light was pouring in, hurting her eyes. She held herself up and stepped past Jago, feeling his gaze on her back. He was powerful, and his aura filled the whole house, shimmering in and out of sight, a quicksilver halo as delicate and complicated as a butterfly wing.

She got to Ben and he held her up again, supporting arm around her waist. Outside, the sun was setting, staining everything.

T
eddy was near the end of the village again. This time, he’d given up hope and was trudging mechanically. He wouldn’t get past the sign. He’d lost count of how many times he’d approached this point. The day had gone, the last of the sun fading from the sky. Traffic had quieted. Evening dragged on. He was near the garage and the Pottery. Soon, the pull would come. At first just a gentle tugging, it would become irresistible, drag him back up the road. After this, he might give up.

Alder was like the jam jar he’d seen on a wall at the Pottery last night, a wasp trap. It was easy to crawl in, all but impossible to get out again. Wasps buzzed around, waiting for death. He’d been walking all day and was tired to the bone, legs limp lengths of ache, head too heavy for his neck.

The main road was a street carnival. A clown in an oversized dinner jacket, with a stiff collar the size of a bucket, was doing magic tricks by the garage, entrancing a crowd that included Steve Scovelle and Mr Steyning. A little girl—Jenny’s little sister Lisa—clapped her hands and laughed. Jenny had looked exactly like Lisa when she’d been that age. Jenny had something to do with the pull. If Teddy could forget her he might break free. He remembered her face as she’d been the other night, and tried mentally to rub out her picture, feature by feature. But memory kept coming back, like the tide filling marks in the sand.

He looked back up the road, towards the tree. By the Valiant Soldier, there was a thick crowd.

‘’Lo, Teddy,’ said a woman’s voice, startling him.

He turned and saw Allison and Kev’s mother, standing on her front doorstep. Mrs Conway had an apple-round face with a permanent smile like Kev’s. She didn’t look anything like her daughter. Allison hardly seemed from the same planet as her mother, let alone the same family.

‘You seen the children today?’

Teddy shook his head.

Mrs Conway tutted. ‘Up to mischief, I ’spect. Kevin’s a prop’r handful these days. I don’t know what gets into ’en.’

Though Mrs Conway expected Kev to be a bit of a tearaway, she refused to believe anything she heard about her daughter. The village monster was still her baby. Although, having known Allison all his life, Teddy couldn’t remember her ever being any better. The girl had been born strange, and taken a turn for the worse. He imagined Allison in her crib, glowing eyes in a fat frown, making tiny fists, teething in silence, waiting for the body she needed to grow around her.

Mrs Conway must have been busy all day, because she hadn’t yet taken her milk in. Three bottles stood by her front door, and a fourth was on its side, cracked and leaking.

‘Cats,’ she said. ‘I thought we’d seen the last of the blessed creatures, but they’m come back.’

Teddy helped her with the milk, picking up the three unbroken bottles while Mrs Conway cradled the other delicately. She led him down a short hall into the kitchen. She opened the fridge and he popped the milk in. She set the damaged bottle on a saucer, and left it.

‘Thank you, Teddy,’ she said. ‘Can I get you anythin’? Tea?’

Teddy shook his head.

He couldn’t remember being in the Conway kitchen before, although he’d been to the house to see Kev.

There were framed pictures of the children on the wall, Kev ashamed in a jacket and tie that would get him ribbed mercilessly if the photo became public knowledge, Allison in a black dress looking grown-up and sophisticated, eyes half-closed like a cunning cat’s.

‘Must be goin’,’ he said.

Mrs Conway kept smiling. ‘You should wait for the children. Maybe you’d all like to go out together, listen to the music.’

At the thought of a night out with Allison, a sliver of ice slipped between his shoulderblades.

‘When I were a girl, I used to love they pop bands,’ Mrs Conway kept on. ‘Bee Gees, Monkees, Blue Mink. Dad said it were all noise, daft old bugger.’

‘No,’ Teddy said, ‘I’d best be off. Be late for tea otherwise.’

‘All right then,’ she said, ‘mind how you go.’

Teddy escaped from the house, half-afraid Allison might be hiding ready to pounce in one of the dark rooms off the hall. When he got back outside he realized he’d been wrong to worry. Allison was about a hundred yards up the road, coming this way with a group of people. Terry was one of them.

Teddy didn’t want another beating. They hadn’t seen him yet. Allison and Terry had quite a gang now, enough to do him serious damage. Terry loped behind the others like an old dog. People stayed away from Allison’s gang, feeling threat boil off them like sweat smell. It
was
Allison’s gang. No matter how awful Ben looked, the girl gave the orders, kept them together.

Teddy considered ducking back into the Conway house and taking refuge. He didn’t think Allison would do anything if her mother were around. But he also had a bad feeling Allison could stab him to death in the kitchen, and Mrs Conway would just tut and refuse to see what was going on in front of her, offering Terry and Ben the Mutant tea and sandwiches, while they watched Allison hack chunks out of him with a carving knife.

By Mr Keough’s cottage was a half-built house the Starkeys were supposed to be working on. The builders hadn’t been in for weeks, so Tina’s dad must have run out of money. It was perfect. Before Allison and Terry saw him, Teddy stepped on to the building site and scraped along a side wall, pressing himself out of sight between Mr Keough’s cottage and the house shell.

He heard his heart, and thought it must be sounding out like a drum, alerting Terry’s wolf-sharp ears. Something furry and stiff writhed between his ankles, hissing. He jolted back against the wall, slamming shoulders against hard brick. Only a cat; it had given him a scare.

‘Kitty kitty kitty,’ he said, not looking down.

When they were kids, Terry had enjoyed terrorizing Mr Keough’s tribe of cats, always dragging Teddy into it. Terry had especially liked letting off rook-scarers—the incredibly loud fireworks Dad used to see off field pests—in the road, and watching the animals whizz like little missiles. The main road was a battlefield for cats, and Mr Keough’s platoon had been whittled down by enemy tyres. Also, Teddy guessed, Allison had scored a few kills, passing her work off by leaving corpses where traffic would squash them. It was a van, though, that had done for the boys’ faithful pet, Doug Dog.

The cat was gone, but Teddy heard a whining that came from Mr Keough’s cottage. Teddy didn’t know what it was. It might have been an animal but it might have been human. It was high-pitched and feeble, desperate. He imagined something bigger than a cat, badly hurt. A large dog, crying and drooling. Or an old man, lying face down, making sounds in the back of his mouth, trying to be loud enough to be heard, but incapable of raising anything but a thin, reedy moan.

The light wasn’t on in Mr Keough’s kitchen. The whining wouldn’t stop. It was definitely inside the house. In cities—Teddy heard from his mum—pensioners often died alone, and weren’t found for days or weeks, not until the smell annoyed the neighbours enough. That wasn’t supposed to happen in the country, in a village where everyone knew each other, where everyone looked out for each other. Mum had a whole speech about cities and how heartless they were. It was supposed to stop Teddy thinking about moving away. In cities, you could be robbed and murdered by perfect strangers. In cities, old people were thrown on a scrapheap to rot. In cities, the air was thick with poison fumes. In the country, you could be robbed and murdered by kids you’d been to school with. And old people still died alone.

‘Mr Keough,’ he said, as loud as he dared. ‘Are youm all right?’

The whine caught itself and gurgled something, trying to make words. It was getting dark. Teddy edged around the cottage into Mr Keough’s small, walled-in back garden. There were neglected bowls by the back door, with congealed turds of catfood stuck to them. The concreted-over area smelled like a zoo toilet. By the door was a cat’s-piss-yellowing pile of the
Western Gazette,
as high as a bench, threatening to topple.

Teddy wished he had a gun like James’s. He ought to be holding it up like a
Miami Vice
copper, inching towards a door he would kick in. It was open a split, darkness beyond. Someone had spray-painted symbols on the door and the back windows. Mostly Jewish squiggles, incomprehensible. But the crude skull and crossbones were recognizable. The whine was coming in feeble yelps now, increasingly far apart, like someone gasping for breath.

‘Mr Keough? It’s Teddy Gilpin. Youm okay in there?’

The whine was strangled, cut off. He felt his heart stop. The whine began again, frustrated and angry. He breathed again. If it was Mr Keough, at least he was still alive. Teddy guessed how it might have happened. The other night, in the pub, while Mr Keough was waving his petition, he’d been red-faced and flustered, almost weeping with anger. He’d always had a short fuse, getting heated about the festival, or Terry’s stupid antics, or foreign wars. If old people got too steamed, their hearts packed in. Mr Keough could have gone home fuming after his scrap with Terry, and his heart could have burst on him, leaving him paralysed, helpless.

He pushed the door. A sweet, nasty smell seeped out of the cottage at him and he coughed. He stepped on the doormat, and something snapped. Nerves on edge, he ducked towards the floor, mat shooting out from under his daps. There was a thud and the sound of breaking glass. He fell face forwards, hands out to push the floor away. His wrists were slammed, but he wasn’t hurt.

What had happened? The door had snapped shut behind him, one of the window panels smashed outwards. Two small hatchets were embedded in the wood, attached to a three-pronged fork which was fixed to a spring in the ceiling. A third axe had come free and shot through the window.

Carefully, Teddy stood, trying not to touch anything. The tripwire or balance plate or whatever had been hooked to the doormat. The kitchen was a lot like Mrs Conway’s, only smaller and messier. It had that fried-food smell Teddy knew from his own mum’s chips-and-pies-and-fish-fingers repertoire. And there was another smell. He couldn’t hear the whining now. The cottage was quiet as a monk’s tomb.

A muscle in his thigh twitched. His heart spasmed, ready for a motion-sensitive anvil to fall on his head. He couldn’t stay here. He took a step towards the hallway. Nothing happened. Another step. The hallway was dark, and Teddy didn’t want to risk a light switch. But he also didn’t want to chance his way in the dark. There could be any number of traps hidden in the shadows, waiting to tear him apart.