CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: WORST CHASE SCENARIO

 

 

DEATHCHASER.

Will thought of the word and felt the bitter taste flood the back of his throat again. He had first heard it whispered in a café that morning as he breakfasted on poached eggs and toast. It had clearly been used to describe him; nobody else was eating at the neighbouring tables.

“You say something?” he asked the men hunched over the counter, drinking from chipped mugs of coffee. Heads shook.

Will had returned to his meal, mildly satisfied by the way he had silenced them. There had been a degree of fear in the way they regarded him, he felt. That could only be a good thing.

But, deathchaser.

They couldn’t know of his mission, could they? It was something he had decided to embark upon alone. So that meant – what?

Will twisted the rear-view mirror around so that he could see his face. Did he look that bad? Really that bad? The dusky arcs beneath his eyes, the pauperish complexion, the mottled aspect of the skin stretched across his hands – did these things make him appear as though he were on some irrevocable decline? Couldn’t it be seen as a good thing, his losing some weight?

He pushed the mirror away and concentrated on his job. On the passenger seat lay the Graham Greene novel. The End of the Affair. God, if only. It was in a parlous state now, that book. The covers had slowly come away and he had had to tape them up to keep the volume from disintegrating entirely. He had tried reading it, during cold nights parked off the roads, in an effort to keep sleep at bay, but as much as he admired the style, he had found it much too depressing. The bombs, the hatred, the jealousy of it all. It was all a little too close to home. Instead, he ran his fingers over the list of dates that Christopher had recited to him, in the hope that the ink from those dates past might imbue him with some comfort. The list was death. The list, though written in ink, might as well have been chiselled on stone, branded on the foreheads of the coming dead, an irrefragable mark of Cain.

The twenty-ninth of March, Hungerford Bridge, London, five past midnight.

Wasn’t it the ultimate irony, his travelling back to the capital after such a traumatic journey north? He felt like a character in a paranoiac novel, shoved from dire situation to even more dire situation. The night streamed around his car. Somewhere out there, Elisabeth and Sadie were buried or on the run. He hoped it was the former. It seemed that anyone coming in contact with him these days was better off dead.

He had narrowly missed out on the last date. The last English date, that was. He had neither the money nor the steel to attempt to travel to the other places in Christopher’s list. The chances of being picked up for Cat’s murder at air- or seaports were too great. Desperation had driven him to the roads. That and the knowledge that police resources would be stretched to extremes during this wave of terrorism.

Where had it been, that last one? His first attempt to get to one of the locations after the penny dropped as to what Christopher was getting at. Somewhere outside Leeds, a village on the outskirts. Boston something or other. Will had been trapped in traffic, maybe five miles from his goal, when the time Christopher specified elapsed. There had been nothing for it but to go home. On the way, his radio told of a fire in a tea shop on the main road through the village. A reporter at the scene was saying that fire crews were struggling to get the blaze under control and that the hopes of finding any survivors were low. It had been busy in the tea shop. It always was, according to neighbouring shopkeepers the radio reporter had interviewed. The woman that ran the tea shop never had a bad word to say about anybody, apparently.

Will checked his watch. He had a good six hours to make it to London and her river. This was positive action. Unlike the navel-gazing that Sean and Emma were being exhorted to undertake. He couldn’t understand how he had been cheated of new friends by that primping, preening prick Pardoe. For the first time he had felt safe, among similar lost souls who might be able to understand his dislocation, who might be able to offer answers to questions he did not yet know how to frame. But they were lost to him, hours after saving his neck.

“Jesus, Christopher,” he said. “Jesus. You were superb. But I’m glad I didn’t have to live in your head.”

21st January, Osaka, 2.03 p.m. There had been an earthquake in the afternoon, measuring 8.2 on the Richter scale, just as people were emptying canteens and parks in the city, filing back into their offices after lunch. The death toll, 24 twenty-four hours later, had been put at a conservative 12,500.

22nd January, Basel, 5.22 a.m. A coach from England, carrying around fifty tourists on a skiing vacation, plunged off the road into a ravine, killing everybody on board.

22nd January, Darwin, 6.47 p.m. A birthday party turned into a grisly search for bodies after half a dozen backpackers staying at the Froghollow hostel went for a swim and were set upon by great white sharks. Will had seen a picture of one of the two survivors. He had a chunk out of his torso that resembled a bite mark in a biscuit.

And on, and on. A catalogue of carnage. How had Christopher been able to foresee all of this? How did he live with the knowledge? More, why didn’t he act upon it and prevent the accidents from taking place? The more he dwelled on the questions, the worse he felt. But if it weren’t for Christopher and his crystal ball, there would be no way of finding out what had happened to Catriona, of that he was certain.

Five miles shy of the capital, Will ditched the car and thumbed a ride into the city from a woman in a Morris Minor on her way to Elephant and Castle. In the half-hour it took for Rebecca to take him to the Strand, he learned that she was coming to stay the weekend with friends as part of a college reunion. She was getting married in the summer, to a man she had met on her course ten years previously.

He wished her well as he released the seatbelt and lurched out of the car. She was smiling, and in the colour of her cheeks, the rude clarity of her eyes, he recognised, for a second, something in her that until recently had fed him. He felt saddened by their conversation, as if it had tried to impinge on a part of him that had once been aware of hope and love. The clunk of the door as he slammed it shut might have been the shutters locking in the part of him that had understood warmth and security. All he wanted now was answers. There wasn’t much time for sentiment. Not much space for it either.

In a pub on the main drag, he drank lager without tasting it and swung his gaze to the clock behind the bar with metronomic regularity. It was a busy night. The pub was convenient for Charing Cross station and welcomed a mix of politicians, City workers and theatre-goers. Cliques buzzed and vibrated in batches of movement and regimented colour, magnets that repelled other groupings. There was tension in the air and Will wondered if it was being engineered by something beyond this social bagatelle. Maybe it had its source in what Christopher had foretold. Did these people, as they sipped their Pimm’s and gins and Guinnesses, have some animal signifier that was coming alive within them? Did they sweat in its shadow? Did they prickle?

Will felt it, coursing through his bones like cold. A couple of women in tight, shiny dresses knocked into him as they made their way to the toilets. He barely felt it, although they had caused him to drop his glass. He didn’t hear it shatter, or their apologies or offers to buy him another drink. He pushed his way through a corridor in the scrum and felt the bitter night air crystallise on the sweat that coated his chest as he reeled outside. Rain flashed in broken obliques where the streetlamps picked it out, liquid Morse code carrying messages too swift to be read. He splashed down towards the riverbank, clutching the Greene novel in his hand as though it were a cudgel. A train was nosing out of Charing Cross station, one of the last rides home, and he watched its broken passage through the lattice of girders on Hungerford Bridge. Couples were bent against the driving rain as it laced them on the pedestrian walkway across the Thames. Big Ben tolled midnight. Will scampered up the steps to the bridge and waited, his tongue thick and dry in his mouth, for something awful to happen. He counted seconds and had reached 300 when he heard the beginning of it.

What had he suspected, during the lonely drive south? A drowning, a collision of trains. A car crash. A collapse of scaffolding. Someone. A few somebodies. A blip on the statistical charts compiled by end-of-year accident and emergency investigators...

The thrum sounded like persistent thunder. It vibrated in his chest and made the rails and the girders pick up the song. Studded in the rain-scratched darkness, following the trajectory marked by the old river on a path to Heathrow, were the headlights of what sounded like a jumbo jet. But there was something not quite right about the sound it was making. It sounded like a big plane trying to do an impression of an even bigger plane and failing badly. It sounded, machine though it was, like a shriek of distress.

Will felt the cold air drying his tongue but could not close his mouth to protect it. He watched as the jet came out of the sky, twisting over to the left in a graceful banking manoeuvre that did not correct itself. Black smoke was chugging out of one of the engines on the port side; its mate was intermittently breathing fire. Carbon streaks concealed much of the empennage and the portholes. The air appeared ready to shear apart under the weight of the protesting engines as the pilots struggled to right the plane. Will felt the bridge quake as the portside wing clipped it. What he saw next, as the plane tumbled overhead, was hindered by the criss-cross of black metal. The bridge, where it had been struck, was on fire. Some pedestrians, drenched with aviation fuel and alight, had thrown themselves into the water, mindlessly desperate to consume one form of death with another. A train with its roof ablaze stopped short of the platform, as if unsure as to what to do. Will could see figures on board, rushing along the aisles to doors that were locked.

He sprinted across the bridge to the South Bank, trying his best to dodge the liquid flames that dripped from the metalwork above him. He was just over half-way across when he heard the jet impact. He felt it through his feet as the bridge shuddered. He hurried down the stairs and followed the Queen’s Walk east. A false sunrise had come to the city. It lit up the south-facing sides of the Houses of Parliament and Banqueting House. It turned the water furious orange. Fire surrounded the London Eye, which was tilting precariously over the river. The smell of aviation fuel was mixed with scorched dust and a terrible stench that was like burnt hair. As he approached, the heat already drawing the skin tight across his face, the Millennium Wheel gave up the ghost and toppled into the Thames. A huge tidal wave took off up the river, competing with the roar of the fire. Unable to get any closer, Will cast about for some sign, frantic that he was missing something.

Arc lights stitched the night over the city: scrambled rescue helicopters coming in fast and low to circle the accident site. Will saw Lambeth Bridge in front of him and Waterloo Bridge behind become clogged with emergency vehicles, but their sirens were no match for this roast’s clamour. The snout of the jumbo had pitched up against what remained of Westminster Bridge, a jagged grin having torn the undercarriage away from the part that housed the cockpit. It resembled the head of a shark coming up to attack. Bodies flung from the aircraft lay naked and glazed in impossible positions. Across the water, on Victoria Embankment, a great swathe of people had materialised, appalled and mesmerised by the inferno.

Will’s tears evaporated as soon as they fell. He retreated from the intense heat when he realised his jumper was smoking. He was about to turn away from the broken jet – firemen were pouring onto Jubilee Gardens – when he caught sight of a dimpled sheet of molten metal that emerged from the twisting columns of black smoke at the heart of the fire. It was perfectly square, and upright. It looked to Will like a large mirror, but its reflecting surface was a rilling, fluid riot. He remembered seeing something like this on the motorway, when he had carried Elisabeth away from their wrecked car. Then, as now, he was tickled by the conviction that he had been allowed a glimpse behind the complexity of death and understood what it meant, what it signified. But it was like waking from a vivid dream and finding it unwilling to resolve itself in the mind. Out of reach, on the tip of his tongue: a black thing in a dark room, and Will was hunting for it wearing sunglasses.

The dimpled sheet faded from his view, perhaps as the shattered hearts around it gave up their pulses and their last pints of blood. He couldn’t have approached this thing and touched it, as he would have liked, or looked upon its surface to view what might have been written upon it, and hoped to survive. He’d have been dead as soon as he came within fifty feet of it.

It was only as he hurried back along the Queen’s Walk, bitterly enjoying the fresh bite of cold air, that he realised, after all, that might be the point.