‘My base is a hundred miles south-west of here.’ The chain clinked as the man dropped it into the boot of the car. ‘It was hit hard, everywhere was hit hard. I’m the only survivor. I came here looking for someone I knew.’
Magnus noted the past tense and did not ask if he had found them.
Jeb mumbled something. The man glanced into the car and said, ‘Your friend’s going into shock. The sooner we get some meds into him the better.’ He glanced at the bike. ‘Don’t worry. I told you, I’ll send someone for it.’
‘I’m used to country roads. I’ll follow you.’
‘Not on that.’ The vicar nodded at the back wheel of the motorbike.
Magnus followed his gaze and saw an evil rip grinning in the bike’s back tyre. ‘Shit.’ He knelt down and touched the torn rubber, though he did not need a closer look to know that the damage was beyond patching. It could have happened when he skidded out of the Audi’s path, but he had heard no explosion, felt no tell-tale loss of control. Jeb groaned in the back of the Audi and Magnus got to his feet.
‘I’ll be heading north tomorrow, in this car if I can’t find a way to fix my bike.’
He set the motorbike at the side of the road and slid into the passenger seat of the Audi, wondering why the vicar was so desperate to ensure he accompanied them.
Twenty-Two
The yellow Audi ate up the country roads at what felt like racing-track speed. The vicar had been right. It would have been impossible for Magnus to have matched the pace on his motorbike, even if its tyres had been undamaged. Magnus sat silently, trying to hide the urge to press his foot against an imaginary brake pedal. He pulled down the sun visor and glanced at Jeb in the vanity mirror. His eyes were closed, his lips moving silently. Magnus wondered if he was praying.
‘What’s your name?’ the vicar asked.
Magnus snapped the visor back into place.
‘I’m Magnus McFall, he’s Jeb Soames.’
‘Short for Jebediah?’
‘I don’t know, I never asked.’
The vicar ignored the road markings, keeping to the centre of the track as if he were confident of meeting no one coming the other way, though the whole reason for their haste was that the Audi itself had come the other way. The route was as winding as the man had implied. The old Magnus would have relished the challenge of its twists and turns. He had loved the sensation of speed and rushing air, the roadside flashing by, blurring on the edge of his vision.
‘I’m Jacob Powe.’
Civilisation ran deep, Magnus thought. Everything was broken, but the man still felt an obligation to exchange names, as if they had met at a dinner party or a neighbourhood barbecue. He said, ‘You’re a minister?’
‘An Anglican priest.’
Magnus had never got the hang of English religions with their married priests and un-Catholic masses.
‘An army man?’
‘A captain, if the army still exists.’
It was strange, a priest with a gun in his hand, though it was not so hard to imagine Jesus armed and ready to fight the good fight. It was the Messiah’s beard and long hair that did it. The New Testament’s hippy look brought back images of IRA and Afghan terrorists, or freedom fighters, depending on your point of view. There were the makings of a good routine there (a God routine), he thought, and remembered again that there was no comedy circuit, no audience waiting to be shocked into laughter. He wondered if they had anything to drink at the place where they were going. He had a thirst that would drain Christ dry.
‘What do we call you?’ he asked. ‘Captain or Father?’
‘Jacob.’ The car slowed and Jeb muttered something as they turned into a driveway guarded either side by massive stone gateposts, each one topped with a carved pineapple, regal in its spikiness. ‘Welcome to Tanqueray House.’
The driveway was hemmed on either side by an avenue of trees. The road’s surface was tamped earth that had been covered some time back with shale. It was pitted with potholes and Jacob took it slowly. It was clear that the place had been neglected before the arrival of the sweats. An explosion of rhododendrons reached across the drive from overgrown verges, occasionally tapping against the car windows, like paparazzi in search of an incriminating photograph. The flowers were the same bright reds and purples of the saris that had sometimes drawn Magnus’s eyes on London streets; they had died too, the straight-backed Asian women with beautiful hair. Magnus rolled down the window and the scent of rotting foliage, more perfumed than the smell of decomposing flesh, but tainted all the same, slid into the car. He rolled up the window again. People went on about the beauty of trees, but Magnus had never felt easy around them. The branches bobbed and tangled above the drive, like mothers separated from their children, straining to touch even their fingertips. The image made him think of his own mother, how much she would be worrying about him. He pushed the thought away. There was no point in dwelling on possibilities. His task was to get home. He would leave in the morning. If he made steady progress he could be at the ferry terminal in a few days. The ferry would be no use, but it was the shortest crossing point. There would be other boats moored there and he would find one to suit him.
He asked, ‘How many of there are you?’
‘Seven — six.’ Jacob stumbled over the number. ‘Father Wingate was here before the sweats arrived. The house was a seminary and he was one of the brothers. He’s eighty-two, but in good health for his age, sharp as a blade.’
‘Eighty-two,’ Magnus repeated.
‘We’re lucky to have him. Father Wingate remembers the way a lot of things used to be done, before technology took over. His generation will be crucial to our survival.’
‘And the others?’
‘They came later. Waifs and strays, like you and Jeb. Like me if it comes to it.’
Magnus was about to say that he wasn’t a waif or a stray. He had somewhere to go, but the car swung around the final turn, the rhododendrons gave a last desperate clutch and the house appeared at the end of the drive. It was larger than he had expected, three storeys high and broad enough to suggest that once there had been other wings balancing the structure.
‘No vow of poverty,’ Magnus said.
Jacob shrugged. ‘It was Father Wingate’s ancestral home. He donated it to the Church when he took holy orders, much to the outrage of his extended family, I imagine. The Church would no doubt have sold it in due course.’
‘In due course,’ Magnus repeated. Death was everywhere, and yet they still referred to it with euphemisms.
The mansion’s roof was turreted and decorated with urns, like a house in an Agatha Christie movie where someone was due to topple to their death. Two staircases curved liquidly from an elevated porch down to a gravel courtyard where a Luton and a Transit van were parked. Each floor was defined by rows of windows, standing uniformly in line, black and secret. The house had been designed to impress, but it reminded Magnus of Pentonville, their flight across the courtyard uncertain of who was watching them. He wondered if people lurked behind the panes, observing their arrival and wondering in turn who the newcomers might be.
As if on cue the door of the house opened and a young woman trotted down the left staircase towards them. The girl looked like she had been born to the big house. She was in her early twenties, blonde and slender, with a pert nose that looked too good to be natural. Magnus thought that she might have been one of the girls he had glimpsed earlier that day, crouching in a ditch, disguised as boys, but he could not be sure.
Jacob slowed the car to a halt and the girl opened the driver’s door. Magnus had thought their arrival would be an occasion, but she barely spared him a glance. She took hold of Jacob’s arm, as if she were about to pull him from the car and said, ‘Henry’s gone.’