Jago (77 page)

Knowing why didn’t make things better.

Hand in hand, Lytton and Susan came across the lawn. Maskell’s men gathered, jeering.

‘Are you all right, Allison?’ Susan asked.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault, dear.’

‘I have papers with me,’ Maskell said, ‘if you’d care to sign. The terms are surprisingly generous, considering.’

Lytton and Susan were close enough to see the knife.

‘You sheep-shagging bastard,’ Susan said.

Lytton’s other gun appeared from under her shawl. She raised her arm and fired. Allie felt wind as the bullet whistled past. Maskell’s jaw came away in a gush of red-black. Susan shot him again, in the eye. He was thumped backwards, knife ripped away from Allie’s throat, and laid on the grass, heels kicking.

‘I said I didn’t like guns,’ Susan announced. ‘I never said I couldn’t use one.’

Lytton took hold of Susan’s shoulders and pulled her out of the way of the fusillade unleashed in their direction by Budge and Terry Gilpin.

Allie twisted in Erskine’s grasp and rammed a bony knee between his legs. Erskine yelped, and she clawed his ear-bandages, ripping the wounds open.

The Constable staggered away, and was peppered by his comrades’ fire. He took one in the lungs and knelt over the Squire, coughing up thick pink foam.

In a flash of gunfire, Allie saw Lytton sitting up, shielding Susan with his body, arm outstretched. He had picked up a pistol. The flashes stopped. Budge lay flat dead, and Gilpin gurgled, incapacitated by several wounds. Lytton was shot again too, in the leg.

He had fired his gun dry, and was reloading, taking rounds from his belt.

Car-lights froze the scene. The blood on the grass was deepest black. Faces were white as skulls. Lytton still carefully shoved new bullets into chambers. Susan struggled to sit up.

Reeve Draper got out of the panda car and assessed the situation. He stood over Maskell’s body. The Squire’s face was gone.

‘Looks like youm had a bad gyppo attack,’ he said.

Lytton snapped his revolver shut and held it loosely, not aiming.

The Reeve turned away from him. ‘But it be over now.’

Erskine coughed himself quiet.

Allie wasn’t sorry any of them were dead. If she was crying, it was for her father, for the chickens, for the vegetable garden.

‘I assume Goodwife Ames no longer has to worry about her cows being destroyed?’ Lytton asked.

The Reeve nodded, tightly.

‘I thought so.’

Draper ordered Gary Chilcot to gather the wounded and get them off Gosmore Farm.

‘Take the rubbish, too,’ Susan insisted, meaning the dead.

Chilcot, face painted with purple butterflies, was about to protest but Lytton still had the gun.

‘Squire Maskell bain’t givin’ out no more pay packets, Gary,’ the Reeve reminded him.

Chilcot thought about it and ordered the able-bodied to clear the farm of corpses.

* * *

Allie woke up well after dawn. It was a glorious spring day. The blood on the grass had soaked in and was invisible. But there were windows that needed mending.

She went outside and saw Lytton and Susan by the generator. It was humming into life. Lytton had oil on his hands.

In the daylight, Susan seemed ghost-like.

Allie understood what it must be like. To kill a man. Even a man like Squire Maskell. It was as if Susan had killed a part of herself. Allie would have to be careful with Susan, try to coax her back.

‘There,’ Lytton said. ‘Humming nicely.’

‘Thank you, Captain,’ said Susan.

Lytton’s eyes narrowed minutely. Maskell had called him Captain.

‘Thank you, Susan.’ He touched her cheek. ‘Thank you for everything.’

Allie ran up and hugged Lytton. He held her, too, not ferociously. She broke the embrace. Allie didn’t want him to leave. But he would.

The Norton was propped in the driveway, wheeled out beyond the open gate. He walked stiffly away from them and straddled the motorcycle. His leg wound was just a scratch.

Allie and Susan followed him to the gate. Allie felt Susan’s arm round her shoulders.

Lytton pulled on his gauntlets and curled his fingers round the handlebars. He didn’t wince.

‘You’re Captain
James
Lytton, aren’t you?’ Susan said.

There was a little hurt in his eyes. His frown-lines crinkled.

‘You’ve heard of me.’

‘Most people have. Most people don’t know how you could do what you did in the War.’

‘Sometimes you have a choice. Sometimes you don’t.’

Susan left Allie and slipped round the gate. She kissed Lytton. Not the way Lytton had kissed Janet Speke, like a slap, but slowly, awkwardly.

Allie was half-embarrassed, half-heartbroken.

‘Thank you, Captain Lytton,’ Susan said. ‘There will always be a breakfast for you at Gosmore Farm.’

‘I never did give you the ten shillings,’ he smiled.

Allie was crying again and didn’t know why. Susan let her fingers trail through Lytton’s hair and across his shoulder. She stood back.

He pulled down his goggles, then kicked the Norton into life and drove off.

Allie scrambled through the gate and ran after him. She kept up with him, lungs protesting, until the Village Oak, then sank, exhausted, by the kerb. Lytton turned on his saddle and waved, then was gone from her sight, headed out across the moors. She stayed, curled up under the oak, until she could no longer hear his engine.

T
hroat clogged with sulphurous filth, Orlando clung to a skinny lamp-post and coughed out his lungs. Stinging, liquid ropes hung from his mouth and nose; he shook them away, and wiped the last snail-tracks on his coat cuff. God Almighty knew, worse was on his clothes. The harder he ran, the more fog he inhaled, which forced him to stop and noisily purge his chest. It was as good as shouting ‘come on and get me’ to the conductors. There were three uniforms, and he did not doubt they wanted to do him harm, certainly grievous, probably fatal.

He looked up at the eye-blue lamp-flame, piss-green in the sick-yellow murk. His eyes smarted, and crossed when the fore horn of his too-large tricorn hat dipped into his vision. London fog wasn’t proper weather, but airborne industrial waste from the tanneries, factories and processing plants along the Thames. The famous pea-soup was so heavy with flammable by-products that spontaneous combustions of the atmosphere were common. When the yellow tide rose to the level of the burning gas-lamps, whole streets could go up in a swift puff of flame: cats burned hairless, faces blacked for music hall minstrel turns, buildings dusted with soot. Just now, that might be a mercy.

His ears were rat-sharp, as well they might be. All too often he needed eight or nine senses to get out of scrapes like this. He listened for footsteps, the clank of ticket machines, the creak of boot- and strap-leather. The conductors might not be interested in a ninepenny fare to Streatham Hill, but they had the full London Transport kit. Now he thought of it, the gear was too new, too mint. And what were the chances of three random busmen being white? Next time he was tempted to rely on public transport, he would get a minicab and flip for the fare with his two-headed sovereign.

The conductors were near. He wondered if there were a manhole in the road nearby. If possible, he wanted to avoid the sewers.

The labyrinth below the city had its own particular dangers. Even this far south of Hampstead, the Black Swine ruled the tunnels. Their forefathers had gone underground two centuries back, and piggy generations had bred away from the light, subsisting on human ordure and carrion, developing fearsome tusks, wrought-iron hides and extra-sensitive snouts. Those eyeless pork-goliaths could fetch off a good-sized workman and render him to bones in minutes. It was rumoured they picked late-night drunks from platforms along the Jubilee Line Extension. Orlando was small enough to pass for a boy if a recruiting sergeant was about. His wrists and ankles twisted the wrong way, and his back had a kink that came whenever, as now, he was forced to exert himself. He was not up for a tussle with mutant man-killer pigs.

A shrill whistle cut through the fog. The first few notes of ‘Champagne Supernova’. Another whistle answered, further off, carrying on the tune, strangling the notes.

They were triangulating on him.

Orlando was determined not to be killed by Oasis fans. It would be too much bleeding embarrassment. Manchester was a spent force, still occupied by the Army of the South-East. Just after the reunification, he had been up North with a carpet-bag full of Abbey Road acetates, but few fortunes were to be made on the club scene for anyone with his accent.

He controlled his racking cough and stood still. He had taken care to practise the trick of slipping into the fog, becoming one with the night.

Ordinary bus conductors would never have found him. These fellows, however, had fog-skills of their own. Since the Civil War, a lot of dangerous people were milling in with the general citizenry.

Even before he saw the vaguest shape in the fog, a peaked cap and broad shoulders, Orlando heard footfalls. Good boots—too good for a ticket-puncher—on cobbles.

He thought of shinning up the lamp-post. If there was an overhanging roof, he might scramble up and down valleys of slick slates. Being small, light and crooked was an advantage up among the chimney pots.

But they were on him.

A long knife sliced across his coat, ripping the shirt-ruffle at his throat, cutting through the strap of his pannier-like satchel. Hands tore the satchel away from him. Nothing was in it he couldn’t afford to lose: a roll of snide cup tie tickets that’d pass in indifferent light, a bundle of French postcards manufactured in Romford, half of one of Bellamy’s pork pies, pirated wire recordings of the last two weeks’ worth of
Mrs Dale’s Diary.

A hard face emerged from the gloom. One eye was clouded, yellow as the fog.

‘I didn’t see nothing,’ Orlando said.

‘Anything,’ the man corrected. ‘You didn’t see anything.’

Yellow-Eye didn’t speak like a busman. His tone was more like a wireless announcer, correct and superior.

Orlando nodded, agreeing with him.

But he had seen the man on the bus. And the conductor knew he had seen him, had recognised—as anyone would—the face, and was asking himself questions.

Orlando wished he could burn out that segment of his past, touch a lit cigarette to his memory of the face as he could if it were printed in a newspaper.

It was no use.

Hands took his arms. The other conductors.

He had a two-shot pistolet holstered in the small of his back, a pig-knife in his boot, brass-knucks in his coat pocket, a pepper spray in his trousers-pocket, a straight razor in the concealed partition of his satchel and a loop of cheesewire inside his hat. All useless now.

Hands frisked him, professionally. They found everything.

‘Evidently, we have a charming character on our hands,’ said Yellow-Eye. ‘His real paper is in the sufficiently outlandish name of Orlando Boldt, Esquire, but he feels the need to port far less convincing fall-backs in the names of Aloysius Stonecarver, Brendan Two Roses, and, ah, Righteous Pilgrim Furie. Makes things easier all round, I think. This singular fellow would appear to be an entire krewe of double-desperate men.’

‘I know my rights,’ said Orlando.

‘I’m sure you do, Goodman Boldt. As should all public-spirited citizens.’

Orlando thought fast, but got nowhere: he had to pretend to be stupider than he was, stupider than his captors knew him to be, to go along with the game in the hope a hole would turn up, a hole he could slip through. Away from these three, he knew where to go, who to see. If he made a big enough noise, he’d save his life, make such a fuss that he would himself become insignificant. Then, other folk could do the threatening, fighting, wounding and dying.

‘I want a brief,’ he spluttered. ‘I can explain.’

Yellow-Eye laughed, nastily. ‘I’m not a policeman, I’m a bus conductor.’

‘And I’ve got three arses,’ Orlando replied.

He knew Yellow-Eye would hit him and that he’d be good at it, know where to land the blow. Orlando clenched his gut and closed his thighs, but the conductor chopped him across the throat.

His adam’s apple crunched and he spouted phlegmy spittle over Yellow-Eye’s uniform chest. He doubled over, all his weight dragging off-balance the conductor who had his arms pinned.

The knife was there again, at his face.

‘Three against one,’ said a new voice. ‘Scarcely sporting.’

The new man spoke like Yellow-Eye, precisely and with an officer’s command. Maybe it was the shaking his skull had just had, but to Orlando the man sounded like deliverance, voice resounding off the stones of the nearest buildings.

The third conductor, the one who had searched him, took a pistol out of his change-bag and there was a shot.

Orlando’s sensitive ears rang.

The shot had come not from the third conductor, who was looking surprised, a splash of blood dead-square in his chest, but from the new man. A swirl of the fog had combusted from the spark and Orlando saw a black-browed face lit yellow as by a stage magician’s flare. He didn’t know the man personally, but recognised him. During the Civil War, his face had been famous, often appearing in the illustrated press. There were ballads and broadsheets about his deeds. These last few years, the face was less often seen than the name heard.

Lytton. Captain James Lytton.

He had made some hard choices. Orlando understood Lytton hadn’t turned up to collect his medals at the War’s end. The rumour mill had him out West somewhere, camping with the hippies at Glastonbury or communing with Arthur at Tintagel.

Now he was here, somewhere just North of Clapham Common, an avenger with a pistol. Orlando made a poor maiden in distress, but this was still like a cover engraving of any number of
Andy McNab’s Ninepenny Marvel.
The ruffians, the victim, the gunman emerging from the fog. It was the sort of situation Orlando associated with Dr Shade, the penumbral outlaw adventurer whom the editors of the
Halfpenny Wonder
and
Union Jack Weekly
had sworn was real. The scene lacked only a faithful hound.