Something Coming Through, page 23
part #1 of Something Coming Series
‘It was badly burned, and they aren’t set up for DNA analysis down there, but they found Skip’s wallet and badge, and pulled prints off two of his fingers,’ Lucille said. ‘The county constable believes that either he ran into some bad people, or he was involved with them and had a falling-out. I told him that Skip was an upstanding officer. I hope I’m right, because internal affairs will be going deep into his background. The people of the seventh floor are already looking for someone to blame for this, and who better than a dead man?’
‘The kid was clean. A Boy Scout. If anyone thinks differently let me talk to them. I’ll change their minds,’ Vic said, and meant it.
He asked about the multiple murder. Lucille said that she didn’t have much information. ‘It was on a farm several kilometres west of the town. A serious shootout, vehicles set on fire, five dead. A witness claimed that some kind of laser was involved.’
Vic felt a sudden chill. ‘The ray gun.’
‘My thought exactly. Skip wanted to go out there when he found that the chief suspects in this murder had left town. He told me that they had some quarrel over an Elder Culture site. But it was outside our jurisdiction and he had no evidence, so of course I turned down his request. But then he heard about this shootout.’
‘And thought it had to be something to do with McBride and Drury. I should have known the kid wouldn’t give up on the case,’ Vic said. ‘I should have seen this coming.’
‘We can apportion blame later,’ Lucille said. ‘Right now, we have a man down, and I want his body back before the dust storm hits. Which means in the next couple of days.’
‘Yes, chief.’
It was a punishment. It was a reprieve.
‘No doubt the county constable will want to interview you about Skip’s investigation,’ Lucille said. ‘When he does, you will be polite and cooperative, no more, no less. Remember that it’s his case. Do not get involved. Do not offer assistance. You are going there only to confirm the identity of a fallen officer and to bring him home. Am I understood?’
‘Loud and clear,’ Vic said, knowing that he had every intention of disobeying his captain’s orders.
Now, outside Skip’s home, he asked the uniform who was inside.
‘The girlfriend, one of her friends, the family liaison officer. There was a neighbour, too, but she just left.’
‘What about the CS techs?’
‘They came, they went. This is fucked up, uh?’
‘Beyond fucked,’ Vic said, and with his heart gathering weight in his chest walked up the flagstone path and rang the bell. Feeling the same awful foreboding of every death knock, every interview with raw grieving wives and husbands and partners.
Corinda Summerville was in the living room, curled up in a corner of a sofa. Her friend, another blonde woman around her age and about six months pregnant, sat at the other end. The TV was on, sound muted. TVs were often on at times like this. The anaesthetic quality of television for once being actually useful. Vic sat on an armchair across from the two women. The family liaison officer, an anxiously cheerful young man, offered to make tea and drifted out when no one responded.
Vic got past the awkward bit about how sorry he was. Corinda said, ‘They won’t tell me when they’re bringing him back.’
There were three kinds of bereaved, in Vic’s experience. The angry and baffled. The complete meltdowns. The numbly brisk. Corinda was the third kind, more or less. Haunted and red-eyed but determined, holding it together with a frail dignity.
He said, ‘I’m going down there to sort that out. And I’m going to do my best to find out what happened, too.’
‘I’ll have to tell his parents,’ Corinda said. ‘I can’t decide whether to write a letter or rent time on a q-phone.’
Her friend reached over and squeezed her hand and told her that she didn’t have to worry about any of that now.
She was the self-appointed guardian angel, and didn’t bother to hide her resentment over Vic’s intrusion. He ignored her. He needed to ask some delicate questions, and he had another piece of business to deal with before he flew to Idunn’s Valley.
He said, ‘It would help if I could ask a few questions.’
‘This is all about that ray-gun thing of his,’ Corinda said.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘She’s already talked about that,’ the friend said.
Corinda said, ‘I’ll do anything if it’ll help find who did it.’
Vic led her through it as gently as possible. What Skip had told her before he left. What his mood had been. What he’d said when he called to tell her that he’d arrived. It didn’t give him much and made him feel like a wasteman, and all the while Corinda’s friend was staring at him like a mastiff wondering which limb to rip off first.
He clicked his card on the coffee table, amongst scrunched tissues and tea cups. ‘Anything you remember, even if you don’t think it’s important, you can call me. Any time.’
‘All right.’
‘Or even if you just want to talk.’
‘Bring him home.’ Corinda’s stare was bright and fierce. She was hugging a cushion to death. ‘Do that for me. Bring him home.’
Vic broke his rule of never promising something he wasn’t certain he could deliver.
‘I won’t come back without him.’
31. Ugly Chicken
England–France | 10–11 July
‘I still don’t know if I made the right decision,’ Fahad said. ‘But Rana says that he’s happy with it. So there’s that.’
Rana had consulted Ugly Chicken in a Burger King on the A13, after Chloe had called the emergency number that Sandra Hamilton had given her, and had been told to sit tight and wait for pickup. The little girl had mumbled into the microphone of her fist and cocked her head as if listening to a reply, sometimes with a grave expression, sometimes smiling and nodding. ‘It’s private,’ she’d said, when Chloe had wondered what they were talking about. And, ‘He’ll tell me if he has anything to say to you.’
Chloe asked Fahad if Ugly Chicken ever spoke to him, but he ignored the question, saying, ‘Maybe it’ll come good in the end.’
They were sitting at a pine table in the kitchen of a safe house somewhere in Kent. Fahad was absent-mindedly sketching on a pad of paper that Sandra had supplied. Rough outlines of the usual landscape done in swift confident lines with red and black Sharpies, each image torn from the pad and crumpled when it was done. He was left-handed.
He told Chloe that the need to draw came over him like a fierce hunger. The first time, he’d stayed up all night, growing ever more frustrated because he couldn’t get down on paper what pressed inside his head. The raw urgent need had frightened him, but he’d learned by trial and error which drawings eased its grip.
He was scribbling with the black Sharpie now, outlining the shape of the alien space he’d tried to reproduce in the squalid bedroom at the sea fort. Chloe asked him if it was the interior of one of the spires; he said he wasn’t sure.
‘I call it the black room, but I don’t know if it’s really a room. Rana shows her drawings to Ugly Chicken, but he won’t talk to her about my stuff. He won’t say what they are, or why he makes me draw them. Maybe he doesn’t know how he affects other people.’
‘I think he had a pretty good idea about what he was doing, at the Reef.’
‘We can’t control it. It just happens.’
Fahad hadn’t seen the manifestation at the Reef: he’d never seen Ugly Chicken in any guise. And although Rana drew her starburst pictures over and over, she wouldn’t ever draw her imaginary friend. It was one of the things he didn’t like, according to her. After showing her pictures of all kinds of birds, Fahad believed that Ugly Chicken looked a little like a cross between a pelican and a turkey vulture. Sort of squashed and mostly naked, patched with bright colours. A big crooked beak for a mouth, eyes of different sizes and number, not all of them on its head. He spoke directly to Rana and they had created a world of rules and customs, things that had to be done in a particular way, things that were forbidden. Fahad said that she’d always liked to order her family of dolls and stuffed animals and robots about, explaining their relationships to each other, refereeing their squabbles. She had incorporated Ugly Chicken into those games; it used those games to communicate with her. And it put pictures in Fahad’s head, and he felt that he had to get them down on paper or die.
He ripped out the half-completed sketch of the black room and smoothed the next sheet of paper and picked up the red Sharpie, drew the outline of a spire in two swift strokes, dashed lines on either side to indicate the rounded hills at the horizon. Looking up at Chloe, smiling. ‘At first, I thought I had gone crazy. Now I know it has a purpose.’
Chloe picked up one of his crumpled sketches, flattened it on the table, and said, ‘You know what this is, where this is?’
‘Do you believe in fate?’
Fahad had a way of abruptly changing the subject when she asked him a question he didn’t want to answer.
Chloe said, ‘That depends on what you mean by fate, I guess.’
‘I mean, do you believe that we were supposed to meet? That something ordered the world so that our paths would cross?’
Chloe took his questions seriously. She thought of how she’d walked out of the rehearsals for the select-committee appearance. How she’d decided to justify it by chasing up Mr Archer’s Facebook announcement. Had it been no more than a whim, or had she unconsciously responded to the background landscape of that announcement?
She said, ‘You think Ugly Chicken makes you draw that stuff because it knew I’d see it?’
‘You found me, didn’t you?’ Fahad said.
He had a nice smile, but rarely used it. He was serious and suspicious, with that mix of vulnerability and arrogance particular to teenage boys. He’d barely said more than a dozen words while they’d been waiting for Sandra Hamilton. Even Gail Ann hadn’t been able to crack his shell. And now that he was talking, it was clear that he wanted to steer the conversation in particular directions, to reveal only what he chose to reveal.
Chloe played along, saying, ‘Mr Archer’s meeting just happened to be taking place when I needed an excuse to be somewhere else. And anyone could have seen that announcement. Some other scout could have decided to check it out.’
‘But you did,’ Fahad said.
‘Me and Eddie Ackroyd.’
She thought of Eddie’s mysterious client. If he had been aimed towards that breakout, why not her? A shivery thought.
‘But he isn’t here, and you are.’ Fahad had sketched the intricate latticework of the spire; now he began to add the little spurs that ornamented its flanks. Quick precise tick marks. His tongue pressed into a corner of his mouth. When he was finished, he looked at Chloe and said, ‘I expect you think you rescued me. Me and Rana. But suppose we didn’t need to be rescued?’
‘I know you can look after yourself, that you can take care of your little sister. But there are some bad people looking for you, Fahad. Not just the police.’
‘We escaped from the bad people. All on our own. I found a place to live, got a job stacking shelves in a supermarket, Rana was back in school…But then Mr Archer started up his thing, and it seemed like a good idea to help him. Even though I sort of knew it wasn’t my idea. You found us, because of that, and then that weird sweaty guy in black…And I thought, maybe the bad guys could find us too.’
‘That’s why you ran away again.’
‘I didn’t run away. Rana and me moved in with some people I know. Friends, sort of, from the cage-fighting scene. And then you found us again. Maybe you could call it fate, but I don’t think so. I think he wanted it to happen.’
‘And what does he want now? What do you want?’
Fahad didn’t reply at once, but bent over the pad again, using the black Sharpie to cross-hatch the spire’s shadow across rocky ground evoked by spare dashes and scribbles of red ink. At last he said, ‘I suppose you know that my father is dead. Killed by the people he was working for.’
Chloe nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘He wasn’t a good man. He wasn’t even there for me most of the time. But he was trying to be good. When I was very young, in Pakistan, the government decided that intellectuals were enemies of the people. Both my father and mother worked in the University of the Punjab. She was a mathematician; he was a pharmaceutical engineer. There were pogroms, riots, against people like them. People were murdered. I had a sister, two years older than me. She was killed. One of my aunts had taken her shopping with our cousins, and they were all killed by a car bomb.’
Fahad had stopped drawing. He spoke quietly and precisely, as if reciting from memory. Retelling a story he’d been told many times.
‘A few days later, after the funerals, people shot at our house. So my father decided that it was no longer safe for us, in our country. He used his connections to send my mother and me to England. The university had been closed down by then, but he had a consultancy with a pharmaceutical company, and he stayed on so that he could send us money. You need a lot of money to come to England and live here. Six months later, my father was denounced by one of his former students and thrown in prison. Along with many of his colleagues.
‘He was in prison for eight years. Meanwhile, my mother brought me up. We lived in Oxford. She worked in the university, as a secretary. And then there was an amnesty, and my father was released. He went to Germany, as a political refugee, and then he came here. You can imagine how it was for me. This man, this stranger, claiming to be my father. Coming between me and my mother, who collaborated in the charade. But my father worked hard to win my affections, and he got a job with GlaxoSmithKline and we moved to Uxbridge. We had a nice house. My mother made a lovely garden, and Rana came along. I remember that we were very happy.
‘My mother went back to work after Rana was born, with an insurance company in Wembley. One night she stayed late because a colleague was leaving and there was a party. She was driving home, it was raining, and a lorry ploughed into her car and killed her. My father took it badly. He believed that my mother’s death was a judgement. There was a payment from my mother’s life insurance. My father called it blood money. By then, he had begun to drink heavily. He fell in with some bad people and started to gamble. Cards, high stakes. He lost all of the insurance money, and then he lost everything else. He owed a lot of money to the wrong people, and to cover the debt he started to steal from his job. He was found out, and fired. And his gambling debt was bought by the McBride family, and he was told he would cook drugs for them, to pay it off. He refused, and Rana and I were kidnapped. Held as hostages until my father gave in.
‘So we moved to a little town in East Anglia, on the Flood. You saw what it was like. My father cooked shine. He was so good at it he was sent to Mangala, to cook meq. Rana and I stayed behind. We were hostages again. We weren’t treated badly, but the man and woman who looked after us were crooks. Thieves. My father got into the Elder Culture artefact business. He wanted to make enough money to buy a ticket to Earth. He sent things back to us, too. Things we could sell to make a little money. The people looking after us stole most of the stuff, but they let us keep a few things, including a little bead. And perhaps,’ Fahad said, ‘that was also fate. And perhaps it wasn’t.’
‘This was Ugly Chicken’s bead,’ Chloe said.
‘Who can say if it found its way to us by choice or by accident? You might say that it doesn’t matter, because by whichever path it arrived the destination was the same. But I think that it matters a great deal whether our lives are shaped by the choices we make, or whether they are shaped by the choices of something that stands outside of our ordinary experience.’
‘You’ve thought about this a lot.’
‘Wouldn’t you, if you were in my situation? Our guardians thought that the bead had no value, and gave it to Rana. I believe that the thought wasn’t their own. And I don’t think it was my father’s decision to send it to us, either. I began to draw my pictures. Rana began to talk to her new imaginary friend. And a few weeks later I found out that my father had been killed.
‘I saw how he died,’ Fahad said, his gaze dark and steady. ‘Rana and I escaped. That was the first time Ugly Chicken showed itself to other people. I stole some money, but it wasn’t enough. I was still wondering how I could buy a ticket to Mangala when you found us. Do you see now how it all works out? You saw my pictures and wanted to know what they mean. And they led you to me, and maybe you will help me get what I want.’
Chloe said, ‘If you want Ada Morange to help you find the people who killed your father, to bring them to justice, you’ll have to ask her yourself.’
‘I don’t want them “brought to justice”,’ Fahad said. ‘I don’t want them handed over to the police. I was brought up to believe that we should forgive those who trespass against us. But you and I know that it isn’t enough, don’t we?’
He was right about one thing, Chloe thought. She had been like him once upon a time, back when she had helped to set up the LFM wiki, when she had been looking for the truth about what had happened to her mother. When she had been looking for someone to blame. When she had been trying to make sense of the horror show that had knocked her life completely off course. Yes, Fahad was very like she had been, back then. Scared and angry, boastful and defiant. She understood his bitterness and his hurt, and wished that she could tell him that it would heal, in time. That you live all your life in the presence of your parents, and they’re suddenly gone, and it’s like a raw wound in the heart of your being. You can’t imagine going forward without them, but you do. And, gradually, the wound heals. A poem she had once found spoke of a tree falling in a wood, and the gap it leaves. And into the gap falls sunlight and new life. But she knew that Fahad wouldn’t care to hear that. He was still too raw, too angry. He wanted justice. An eye for an eye, and all that Biblical shit.
She said, ‘If Ada Morange agrees to help you, you’ll have to give something in return. That’s how it usually works. You’ll have to tell us about the pictures, where they are, what they show. You’ll have to tell us what Ugly Chicken really is, and what it can do.’
