Outpost (32 page)

Rye
looked around. Upturned tables and chairs. Infected waitresses stumbled over
broken crockery and flowers.

'Could
you do me a favour?' asked Walczak.

'Sure,'
said Rye.

He
picked up a heavy statuette that had fallen from a wall niche. A dancing nymph.

'Kill
me,' he said. 'Do it clean.'

He
sat at a cocktail piano. He played 'I Get a Kick Out of You'. Rye stood behind
him.

'You're
pretty good,' said Rye.

'Yeah.
Always wished I'd gone professional'

Rye
killed him halfway through the third verse.

She
searched corridors surrounding the engine room. She opened every door marked
with a red flame emblem. Paint. Lubricant. White spirit.

She
found the fuel tanks. A long gantry overlooked vats of diesel and lightweight
marine oil. She tried to spin stopcocks but couldn't get them to turn.

She
descended steps to the tank hall floor. She hacked at the pipes with a wrench.
A joint ruptured, a narrow copper coupling at the foot of a tank. Fuel glugged
and splashed on to the deck plates. A slow leak, but if she returned in a
couple of hours the floor would be awash with diesel.

'Codeine.'
The dealer dealt two cards. Queen five.

Rye
pushed the cards away. Fold.

'So
what did you do? Write phantom prescriptions?'

'Yeah.'

'Sweet.
Must be great to be a doctor. Kid in a candy store.'

'I
lost a lot of years. I paid a heavy price.'

'Yeah.
Well. Don't be too hard on yourself,' said the dealer. He took a silver
cigarette case from his pocket, placed a cigarette carefully between his deformed
lips, and lit it with a click of his Dunhill lighter. 'There's that line by
Larkin. "All they might have done had they been loved." Every one of
us could have ruled the world if we'd got up early and done the right thing.
But we limp around dragging our personal damage like a tourist schlepping a
heavy suitcase through an airport. Blame your genes, your parents, your school.
Just a long chain of cause and effect. Life was mapped out long before you were
born.'

'What
is it about cards that makes people all priestly and sagacious?'

'It's
like communion. Dishing out wafers. Dishing out fate. That's the beauty of
blackjack. Blind chance. A reminder that you're not in control. You just sit
back and watch the numbers dance.'

'You
can pretend that you're not scared of dying. Personally, I'm terrified.'

'Anything
is better than this.'

'Where's
the fifth bloke?' Rye gestured to an empty seat. 'There were five of you. Now
there are four.'

'Casper.
A retired dentist. A pleasant man. A divorce, looking for love. That's what he
told me. Married thirty-five years. Wife took a bunch of cash and ran off with
his brother. Didn't seem too bitter about it, though. We had a lot of time to
talk it through, back in the days when he had a mouth.

'He
finally went native. It happened yesterday evening. I saw it in his eyes. The
moment the lights went out. He was looking at me. One minute he was Casper,
next minute he wasn't. He became one of them. Mindless. Blank. Lucky bastard.
All of us round this table praying for the same thing. That blessed day when it
will all be over. I never imagined it would come to this. I never imagined I
would hate to be alive.'

She
heard a faint scuffing sound. The rasp of a chair nudged aside.

'That's
him,' said the dealer. 'Casper. He's over there. He's lying by the wall. He
moves, now and again.'

'What's
he doing?'

'Migrating.
Would you like to watch? Everyone joins the flock sooner or later.'

The
dealer stood up. Half his face was rippled metal like melted candle wax. His
cheek was smeared over his bow tie and lapel. The rest of him seemed untouched.

'Excuse
me, ladies and gentlemen,' he said, addressing his fellow players. They were so
far gone, so far mutated, they could barely turn their heads. Each face was a
mask of blood and spines. Their eyes followed Rye and the dealer as they stood
to leave. 'We'll be back in a few minutes.'

Casper
slowly crawled towards the door. His legs appeared useless and his right arm
was fused to his body. He dug fingernails into the plush carpet and hauled
himself, little by little, through double doors into a service corridor. He
slithered on cold linoleum. He seemed unaware that Rye and the dealer kept
pace.

He
slowly dragged himself along the corridor, hand slapping on the tiles. He
reached a stairwell and began to squirm his way up the stairs.

'Where's
he heading?' asked Rye.

'I'll
show you.'

They
left Casper behind them and climbed three flights of stairs. They found
themselves standing at the back of a crowd.

Twenty
or thirty passengers jostled in front of a locked door. They scratched and
pawed at the metal.

'This
is where they are drawn,' said the dealer. 'The barricades. We'll join them,
when our time comes.' He guided her closer to the door. 'Just stand for a
moment. Close your eyes. Can you feel it? Can you feel the pull?'

Rye
closed her eyes. She felt it. A skin-prickle like heat. She turned her head,
like she was turning her face to the sun.

'Yes,
I can feel it.'

'Blood
music. That's what I call it.'

She
shouldered her way through the crowd and faced the locked door. She stroked the
metal.

She
could sense the crew of the refinery. She could smell them on the other side of
the hatch. Rich and sweet. She began to salivate.

Fresh
meat.

Mal
lay on the boathouse deck. His body had been stored in the unheated shed for a
week. Too cold for decomposition. His shrouded corpse was completely frozen,
rigid as a plank.

Jane
used to live near the River Severn and had, on a couple of occasions, stood on
the bank and blessed bloated cadavers as they were hauled from the water. The
Severn Bridge was a popular venue for suicides. Corpses swollen with rot-gas
frequently washed up on mudflats downstream. They were pecked by gulls until
police frogmen dragged them to shore.

Mal
would float south. He would probably wash up on the coast of Norway.

Jane
decided to wrap a Ziploc bag beneath his shroud. She bagged his signet ring,
his medallion and his passport. She wrote everything she knew about the man.
Information from his personnel file. Home address, next of kin. It was a long
shot. Even if his body washed up on a European beach there would be no one left
alive to find him. But it seemed like the right thing to do. An attempt to
preserve his identity as they dispatched him to the afterworld.

At
some point during the funeral ceremony Jane would have to give an address. A
summary of Mal's life. She would have to list his virtues, his enthusiasms, the
struggles he faced and overcame. But she knew nothing about him at all.

Jane
crossed the ice to
Hyperion.
She
took a wide detour to avoid infected passengers that spilled from the rip in
Hyperion's
side.

Mal's
room.

The
Magellan Suite. Red velvet and gilt fixtures. Lithographs of Napoleonic-era battleships.
A senior officer's dress uniform hung in the wardrobe. Jane experienced a
sudden rush of class hatred. She had been an underdog all her life. She
instinctively identified with the ship's drone workers, east European
immigrants who grovelled for tips. She wondered if junior members of the
Hyperion
crew, the cleaners, the waiters,
the engine room staff, had been aware of the luxury enjoyed by the ship's
officers. Probably not.

Mal's
clothes lay in a heap by the bed. She prodded his long- johns with her boot.

Jane
browsed the cupboards and shelves for any personal artefact that might give her
an insight into the man's life. An open book, a stack of CDs, a family
photograph. Something that might reveal who Mal had been.

Nothing.
A couple of empty vodka bottles. Socks soaking in the bathroom sink. She wanted
to believe everyone had value. Everyone had a rich internal life, everyone was
a little universe. Not this guy. He was empty.

She
had asked around. What was Mal actually like? What went on in his head? Nobody
knew. He was Nail's shadow. Nail pulled deadlifts, and Mal pumped weights next
to him. Nail watched TV, and Mal pulled up a chair.

Jane
asked Nail for his opinion of the man. He shrugged.

'He
didn't say a whole lot. I think he supported West Ham.'

She
sat on the bath. She would have to talk to the other crewmen. Maybe Mal had
confided his dreams, his great disappointments, to a friend during some
late-night heart-to-heart.

There
was something on the floor next to the toilet brush. A twist of foil dusted
with brown powder. Jane held the crumpled foil in the palm of her hand and
examined it from all angles.

Jane
and Ghost took a suite near the bridge. Most nights they sat in silk bathrobes
and watched a movie. They took turns to cook.

Jane
felt self-conscious each time Ghost saw her naked. A lifetime of fathood had
left her with sagging skin. Ghost didn't seem to mind. He had a paunch and a
hairy back.

'All
the supermodels are dead, baby,' he told her. 'Let it go.'

'What
do you make of this?' asked Jane.

Ghost
paused
Annie
Hall
and took
the foil from her hand.

'Silver
paper. What of it?'

'My
old church. Holy Apostles. There were little scraps of foil in the porch each
morning. They were left by junkies.'

'So
where did you find this?'

'Mal.
His old suite.'

'Some
kind of drug deal gone bad, is that what you're saying? You think Mal got
involved in a big argument. A trade. A dispute over money, or whatever counts
for money these days. Maybe someone pulled a knife.'

'You
used to sell weed, didn't you? Your little hydroponics lab.'

'I
shared it around, swapped it for magazines and stuff. It was never an actual
business.'

'Were
you ever offered anything hard in exchange?'

'No,
but it wouldn't surprise me if someone on board was dealing. It happens on a
lot of offshore installations. A big bunch of guys, nowhere to go, nothing to
do. If you smuggled a bag of pills or a brick of heroin on board you would find
a ready market. Probably double your paycheque. Make everyone dance to your
tune.'

Jane
thought it over.

'Did
Mal have a best friend? Anyone other than Nail?'

'No.
Just the gym posse. Nail's little muscle cult. He barely spoke a word to anyone
else. He was wallpaper. A complete blank.'

'Do
you think they fell out? Him and Nail? What do you reckon? Could Nail slit a
man's throat?'

'Yeah,'
he said. 'He's got a mean streak. A wife-beater's rage. Could he kill a man in
cold blood? I'm not sure. But would he lash out if someone pushed him hard
enough? Yeah, I think he might.'

'Okay,'
said Jane. 'I need to get it clear in my head. How does it fit together? What's
the chronology?'

'Nikki
took the boat. Nail's been simmering ever since. He got angry, argued with Mal.
He lashed out. Plausible scenario.'

'He's
been drunk for days. I thought he was pissed off at Nikki. Maybe it's guilt.
Maybe it's Mal.'

Ghost
thought it over.

'Punch
cooked us all a meal. We sat in the officers' mess. I went looking and found
the body.'

'So
Mal may have been dead and hidden before you all sat down to eat.'

'Hard
to credit,' said Ghost. 'Kill a guy then sit down for a plate of risotto? Talk
and joke like nothing happened? If it's true, if this was murder, then we are
dealing with a full-on psychopath.'

'We
need proof. We need to know for sure.'

Next
morning Jane and Ghost ran across the ice to Rampart and searched Nail's old
room in the burned-out remains of D Module.

They
shone flashlights over the scorched walls and ceiling. A grille had been
removed from the mouth of a wall duct and positioned neatly on the sprung frame
of the bed. The melted foam mattress had been laid in the corner.

'Someone
was here,' said Ghost. 'They took something from the duct.'

'Mal
or Nail?'

'Who
knows? Maybe we're getting carried away. Maybe Mal cut his own throat, after
all.'

Jane
kicked through the planks and slats of a smashed cupboard. She sat on the bed.
Frame-springs creaked and twanged.