The Unblemished (28 page)

In a visitors' book behind reception he found several entries by
people coming to fulfil appointments with the Detective Inspector.
Most of them referred to an office on the sixth floor, according to a
building plan taped to the rear of the reception desk. Bo slipped along
the corridor to the lift. He stepped inside and, gritting his teeth at the
churned pulp of the dead man's face, dragged his legs inside, allowing
the lift doors to close. He punched the relevant button and the lift
ascended. They were passing floor four when the dead man sat up. He
was spitting blood and air from a vague hole in his face.

'That Bernard? That Bernard?' he was saying, or trying to say. His
head was like a garishly decorated cake whose centre was under-cooked.

Bo crouched and put a hand on the man's back to support him. It
was incredibly hot and slicked with blood. He pressed his fingers into
the man's neck to search for a pulse but they kept slipping free. Some
of the man's own fingers were gone, snapped off like green twigs from
a branch. Through the blood on his leg Bo saw that most of his left
calf had been stripped away from the bone. He couldn't see from the
damage how much of his face remained. Death was all over him; he
just didn't seem ready to acknowledge it yet.

'What happened?' Bo asked.

'Hundreds,' the other man said, suddenly becalmed as if all he had
been waiting for was the sound of somebody else's voice. He heaved
air through that puncture with an intensity that belied his condition.
Bo could feel the strength ebbing from him. He smelled the sudden,
sour smell of waste as the man emptied his bowels. Everything was
abandoning this sinking ship, but he clung on. 'I ran. This way.
Because I didn't –' and here he actually laughed, an awful, ragged,
sucking wheeze that Bo flinched from '– want my. Death. To be.
Captured. On CCTV.'

'Do you know Joseph Laurier? Where I can find him?'

'I don't know if. Anybody. Survived.'

'But I talked to him on the phone, not too long ago.'

The man slumped a little in Bo's arms; a red eyeball swivelled
towards him.

'They were. Fast. But clumsy. Like kids, really. They were like kids
let loose. In a toy shop. They held me. Down. They ate. My leg. My
fuh– my fucking. Leg. While I watched. They left. Everyone for.
Dead. They didn't. Finish. Anybody off. No mercy killing. Terrible
injuries. Pain. The pain so. Bad. But I don't feel. It. Any more.'

'Laurier,' Bo said.

'Kill me,' he said.

'I'll get you an ambulance.'

Another snort of laughter. A choking fit. He felt, beneath Bo's
hands, like something bad liberated from an abattoir skip and
shovelled into a thin bag.

'There are no. Ambu. Ambu.'

He lay there, saying 'Ambu' until the life drizzled out of him. The
lift had stopped at the sixth floor, had opened and closed its doors for
him and was now waiting for further instructions. In a moment of
claustrophobia, Bo lurched for the button to open them again,
spilling him into a corridor filled with more crazed red daubings. He
felt insanity reach out like a boy in a childhood game of tag. He
flinched from it. Concentrated on breathing. Concentrated on one
foot in front of the other. Getting through, because there was no
alternative. It was this, or the black hole.

Bodies were strewn about like garden furniture after a hurricane.
Some of them were still breathing, but so terribly injured that the rise
and fall of their chests was as much as they could manage. Bo ignored
them and moved deeper into the maze of offices. He proceeded
slowly, conscious that the violence was long over, but aware too that
all of its perpetrators might not have vacated the building. The hum
of strip lighting was all he could hear.

And then, gradually, the temperature increased. Bo hesitated,
wondering if a fire had broken out somewhere up ahead. But he could
smell no smoke, nor hear the kind of subdued roar that a house fire
creates. Sweat stippled his skin, prickled beneath his clothes. The
blood of the man in the lift was turning to gum on his biker jacket.
He edged forwards, wishing he had a weapon, and closed his eyes for
a few seconds. It was enough to have a swarm of warnings pop
behind his eyes. He was being begged, cajoled, and demanded out of
the building. The tiny grid opened into a furious network of bright
activity. There were fizzing seeds all along it now, where previously it
had hosted the occasional blip. Something had been activated.
Something that he was not meant to know about.

He felt a convulsing inside him, a great shock. Perhaps his task as
the map-reader, as this superficially alien city's translator, had come
to its end. Perhaps now he was disposable. They knew this place as
well as he did, no doubt more so. Its old patterns had come shining
through the modernism. The shape of many of its streets were really
no different to the way they had been five hundred years ago. London
was still a warren. It jealously retained its shambles and alleys, the
veins of darkness feeding that tired, determined heart. The force of
their alarm and anger knocked him; he put out a hand to steady
himself and it slid across the wall, as if it itself were sweating.

He inspected his fingers and found a thin mucus coating them.
Here and there it threatened to thicken, became tuberous, like the
dense funnel webs of spiders he had searched for as a teenager on
tropical holidays. Further along the corridor, as it twisted and
turned, these rudimentary 'webs' became more structured,
substantial. They began to interlink, providing awkward obstacles
for him to climb over. The lights here had been switched off, or
had failed in the bizarre humidity. Bodies began to appear, bound
within these snowy pockets, ostensibly unharmed, but greyskinned,
drugged into lethargy. He recognised Laurier as one of
them.

His mobile phone was on the floor by his side. Most of his body
had been concealed behind a thick weave of matter. His jaw was
bruised badly. Some kind of thick parcel tape was wrapped around
his chin and traversed the top of his head. He looked like an old
cartoon of someone in a dentist's waiting room, bandaged up with
toothache. The depth of the lines in his face were accentuated by the
gloom. Bo found it touching to see his tie remained impeccably
knotted. One tiny red dot of blood in the centre of his chest spoke of
the only discernible wound to his body. Bo couldn't understand the
sudden delineation, a border between carnage and preservation. It
was almost as if they were being saved for later. In the coming of the
thought was the conviction that he had hit the nail on the head. They
would be back, then. Or others would, to raid this drop-in larder.

'Mr Laurier?' he said, and his voice fell flat among the webbing as
if it had absorbed any hope it might possess.

There was a slight twitching in the cheek. A shivering of eyeballs
behind lids thin as tissue paper.

Bo reached out and touched his arm. Laurier's eyes snapped open,
glassy with shock or pain or the trauma of recent memory. His lips
parted slightly. He managed to say something that might have been
graves
or
Dreyfuss.
The tape was preventing his mouth from properly
forming the words.

'Let me help you,' Bo said, checking behind him in case this was
some form of trap. The corridor was empty. He reached out and
picked at the leading edge of tape. Pulling it away produced a
strangled sob so he let go and went back to one of the desks, where
he found a letter opener. He used it to slice the tape at the gulley to
one side of Laurier's throat and the detective's jaw popped open,
shockingly wide, like that of a snake's in the moment of its unhinging.
Laurier might have yelled, or screamed, but Bo didn't hear it because
he himself was screaming. He scuttled back as dozens of tiny,
translucent eggs poured from between Laurier's lips. Laurier was
coughing and choking and groaning with pain; Bo saw now how his
jaw had been dislocated to prevent him from chewing the eggs to
death. The eggs shivered on the floor and it struck Bo that they were
trying to right themselves before crawling back to Laurier's warmth.

Laurier was staring down at them, wide-eyed, his jaw quivering,
hanging off his face, creating a terrible, crocodilian gape. Bo began
stamping the eggs into the thin, worn carpet tiles and didn't stop even
after he had finished them all off. He was seeing them everywhere.

But gradually he wound in his panic, helped by Laurier making
soothing noises. If he could manage that through the level of pain he
must have been experiencing, then Bo could grant him some
reasonable behaviour.

He began slicing at the rubbery mesh that shackled Laurier, but it
took a long time to free him as the knife kept getting trapped in
its warp and weft. Laurier was shaking his head. Either at Bo's
cack-handedness or the unacceptable scenario in which he found himself
immersed, Bo couldn't be sure. It wasn't a great time to ask him.

'I'm getting you out of here,' Bo said. When he was able to use his
hands on the loose edges of the web, the plasma came away more
readily, stripping free of the wall. He helped Laurier step clear of his
prison, but had to hold the older man upright because all of his
strength was gone. His limbs had turned to rubber. He saw
movement under the shirt, and more eggs spilling free of the folds in
his clothing. He picked Laurier up, bracing himself against the trickle
of any of them into his hair or against his skin, and forged his way
towards the office bearing Laurier's name. Next to it was an incident
room. Inside there were three woman wrapped in cocoons, all with
tiny red dots on their chests, their jaws strapped up. Their eyes
swivelled beseechingly towards him. Torn, ragged documents and
files were scattered on the floor and the desks. Maps on the wall had
been shredded. Some of the polystyrene tiles in the ceiling were gone,
revealing wiring and pipes; broken bits of the stuff lay around like
snow.

'I'm sorry,' he whispered, backing away. 'I'm so sorry.'

He retraced his steps to the lift and stepped out into the war zone
of the ground floor. He managed to get Laurier to hold on to him
while he kicked the bike into action, then they sprinted out of
Broadway just as a tide of figures came howling up Petty France
brandishing bricks and bottles and pieces of timber.

Bo said: 'Where do we go?'

If he smiled, his imprecise reflection in the dull steel reminded him of
himself, almost.

For as long as he carried the map, he would be known to them, in
every kind of way. They only had to wait for him to close his eyes and
they would have their own chart leading them to where he slept. If
they no longer needed him, he was perhaps more desirable dead than
alive, especially as he had resisted conforming to their ideals. What
worried him was the sadness, the grief, he had felt as he mashed the
life from those grubs into the stained carpet of New Scotland Yard. It
spoke of some tough spine of loyalty to this strange people who had
invaded his life and wrenched it out of true to a point where he
doubted he would be able to reshape it into anything resembling what
had gone before. But it was a loyalty forced upon him. He was being
coerced. He wanted no part of it. He wanted his old life back, or a
facsimile of it; even that would be welcome. As long as Keiko was still
involved, nothing mattered.

Laurier was asleep behind him on a deep sofa. Bo was trawling the
airwaves on a radio he had found in the kitchen but all of the stations
were down. On the short-wave band he had chased a weak signal for
twenty minutes, some male voice chattering at a hysterical rate, a
pirate transmission he hoped, but it always broke apart into static at
the moment he thought he might make sense of it.

They had forced their way into an abandoned house in a well-to-do
street in Pimlico where Bo had drawn a hot bath, stripped Laurier
and scraped the last of the eggs from his armpits and groin into the
toilet. He had bathed the older man like a baby, keeping a hand
behind his head so that he would not slip under the water. What Bo
had expected to be a tiny scratch on his chest turned out to be an ugly
hole, the size of a match-head, which had become infected. The flesh
around it was puffy and sickeningly soft, like the skin that has formed
on a loose custard. It was coloured black, with arresting green and
purple iridescent flashes, reminding him of ham on the turn. He had
cleaned it as rigorously as Laurier could stand and applied whatever
appropriate creams and sprays he could find in the first aid kit in the
bathroom.

Laurier had faded in and out of unconsciousness, and any attempts
to speak had been stymied by Bo's tight bandaging of his ruined jaw.
He had attempted to force liquid food through his lips before Laurier
drifted off into deep sleep. Soup, milk, honey; he had managed to
stomach only a little, but he looked significantly better than when Bo
had stumbled upon him back in SW1. Bo considered, briefly, trying
some of that simple nourishment on himself, but still his body was
not ready for it. However many days he had existed without food was
already too many. By rights he should be dead. He had massaged the
hard prominence of his ribcage, the hollows creeping into his face. He
was a cadaver with vast reservoirs of energy. He was dead on legs
that refused to accept it. Maybe when (if) the spell was broken, he
would drop into death with uncanny, tasteless speed. Sustaining
himself on things found in no conventional recipe book was a taboo
he was not prepared to think about. He could not believe that he
would take such a route, even in extremis. His appearance suggested
he was on some extended fast; that was eminently preferable.

Now Laurier's shallow breathing provided a strange comfort to
Bo, whose short span of lonely nights had nevertheless got to him,
depressing him more than he could understand. He had happily spent
a large portion of his youth a single man, yet here he was, suffering
loneliness for the first time in his life. Context was all, he supposed.
He pushed himself away from the radio and perused the bookshelves
of this invisible family whose house they had invaded. There were
books here that he had read, or at least owned. He saw that
kindredness as a tacit green light to the breaking and entering of
which he was guilty.