During the short drive to the police station Evan began to rhapsodise about bacon and eggs in the canteen. ‘With fried bread, tomato, sausage, all the trimmings. Best meal they do!’
Guy shrugged. A cup of tea maybe, he thought; he couldn’t face food. Though he didn’t say it, he was puzzled at his own feelings about Kath and Dorothea; he was just as fatalistic as that woman at the roadside. Whatever had happened, it was nothing he could control; perhaps that was the reason.
‘Are we being misled about the larval stage, that’s the big question,’ came Derek’s voice unexpectedly from the back seat. ‘They bore through the timber so rapidly, I don’t know what to think.’
‘Weeks rather than months,’ Guy agreed, meaning to encourage him. He recalled what Tony had said.
‘Days rather than weeks would be nearer the mark, judging from how quickly they’re spreading. They’re obviously reproducing at quite an incredible rate.’ Derek fell silent again, deep in thought. Since that earlier meeting his attitude had changed.
They arrived at the station and went to check in. It was one of the rules the superintendent had instituted, and just as well under the circumstances. Several officers had gone missing during the night; at least two were known to have died.
‘Captain Archer.’ The desk sergeant stopped him as he was about to go for a wash. ‘Your wife’s been in looking for you. Left you a note.’
‘She’s gone, then?’ The disappointment hurt like a knife.
‘Wouldn’t wait.’
‘Is she all right? How did she look?’
‘How do any of us look? Like she doesn’t know what’s hit her. Isn’t that how we all feel?’
Guy nodded. He tore open the note, which had been scribbled on police paper, folded and then stapled together. Guy — your daughter Kath has run away, she’d written. Really, this time. It is my fault. I was in bed with Pete when she opened the door and saw us. Made me feel a slut which Fm not, you know that. You won’t like this but there it is. I've searched everywhere and can’t find her. I do blame myself, Guy.
Blunt, uninhibited Dorothea, he thought, hating her. He pushed the note into his pocket.
15
Guy counted the motorcycles as they overtook the car on both sides. It was the biggest such gang they had seen so far. Silencers punctured as usual. Riders in black leather with face protectors, goggles, heavy boots — all the gear; it was impossible to judge whether they were male or female.
Their fists hammered against the car as they roared past, flaunting their contempt.
He glanced at Evan, who was calmly steering with one hand while with the other he unclipped his microphone to report in. Normal policing was no longer feasible, but they still liked to keep tabs on such gangs.
‘From the look of them this is a new lot,’ he was saying. ‘Black gear with a straight yellow stripe painted down the spine, and two white dots, one over each shoulder-blade.
Not come across that insignia before. What? How many? Oh, I’d think about..
‘Thirty-two,’ Guy told him.
‘Thirty-two,’ Evan repeated.
During the past few days — in fact, since the Army had been brought in to evacuate most of the civilian population — London had become a no-man’s land in which motorcycle gangs were just the latest phenomenon. They ran the gauntlet of the giant bloodworms, deliberately seeking them out and risking death by challenging them. It was a killer sport, but better — as one told Guy before he died — than ‘skulking in some evacuation centre’. Buckingham gangs, the superintendent called them, after it was reported that one of their initiation ceremonies for new recruits was held in the bloodworm-infested state rooms of Buckingham Palace.
Despite the evacuation, isolated groups of people still lived among the ruins, most of them squatting in modem concrete buildings which had very little timber to attract the bloodworms; any wooden fitting they invariably stripped out and burned. In the hope of finding Kath or Dorothea, or at least hearing some news of them, Guy and Evan teamed up to make a systematic survey of such groups, but it was a frustrating task.
No one they questioned had even heard of Kath or Dorothea; nor were they interested. Missing? Hadn’t everyone some member of the family who was unaccounted for — children, a wife, a husband?
if they’re dead, mate,’ one old man with gnarled arthritic hands lectured Guy severely, ‘then they’re lucky. You don’t think these worms and beetles have finished with us yet? Nor with those evacuees, if you ask me. Heard on the radio that the Government’s moved up to Harrogate. Harrogate? Plenty of old wood in Harrogate, I can tell you. Asking for it, they are.’
Another problem was that these groups were not permanent communities. They split up, they moved to different buildings; on scavenging expeditions some were caught by bloodworms. Anything they needed could easily be looted from the abandoned shops. It was not unusual to find entire groups dressed in expensive clothes from West End stores, and there was no shortage of tinned foods; on the other hand they had no fresh food, nothing frozen, no electricity, no unbottled water. The buildings they occupied soon became unpleasant to enter, so they went on to the next, always on the move, never staying long in one place. To Guy, the thought of Kath or Dorothea living like that was a nightmare.
‘But what else can we do?’ he demanded as they drove on, following the direction taken by this latest motorcycle gang. It led them down Shaftesbury Avenue, where every theatre and shop lay in ruins and rubble strewn across the roadway made the going rough. ‘We’ve sent details to all the regional reception centres, to the police computer, the Salvation Army, the Red Cross.. Honestly, Evan, I’ve just about come to the end.’
‘Everybody’s looking for missing relatives. It could take months.’
‘They haven’t all gone missing under these circumstances.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ Evan commented, his tiredness betraying itself in his manner. ‘Guy, I know this is hard to take, but I think for once the superintendent’s advice should be followed.’
‘Get out of London?’ He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t do it.’
‘You need the rest and so do I. What’s more important, our friend Dr Derek Owen hasn’t been in touch for twenty-four hours. It would do neither of us any harm to go up on the next available helicopter to check what he’s doing with all that stuff we sent him.’
‘Perhaps,’ Guy said moodily.
After the first night of the bloodworm attacks Derek had returned to Oxfordshire, but then came a series of telexes from him demanding photographs, specimen beetles, larvae, sections of old timber, and including long lists of questions about each incident for Guy and Evan to answer individually, without getting together over them. Every day the helicopter had flown there with cargo of sealed containers and completed questionnaires. He must be working on them now, Guy assumed, which was why he was unusually silent.
‘Now what the hell are they up to?’ Evan demanded, suddenly slowing down. He pointed to a cluster of motorcycles parked on the far side of the road, unguarded. ‘I could swear those are the bikes we saw just now.’
Guy agreed. ‘Same colour. No number plates. Nicked out of some showroom, by the look of them.’
‘So why have they stopped outside that office block?’ It was a typical example of what Guy usually called packing-case architecture: a stumpy five-storey structure in steel and concrete designed not to be noticed, dirty white in colour, with blank windows which couldn’t be opened. Not even bloodworms found them inviting.
‘Let’s take a look,’ Guy suggested, reaching for his shotgun. ‘It’s what we’re here for.’
Since emergency regulations had come into force they all carried arms on duty. Revolvers were mandatory, but the specialist crowd-control forces were also equipped with mace gas and baton rounds, though so far these had only been used on three or four occasions right at the start. Against beetles and the smaller bloodworms Guy still used chemical sprays for his own defence, plus a shotgun to break up the giants.