“Okay,” he said, “first thought, it’s obviously intentional.” Charlie must have been glancing at his screen because he responded to Neku’s frown. “If the clip had five blanks and three live shells…well, that could have been someone not bothering to empty the clip properly, but five blanks, two live, one blank.”
“Suggests what?”
Charlie took a deep breath. “Taking the five/two combination first,” he said. “Someone wants to frighten someone, while reserving the means to kill them. Second option, someone wants to frighten someone, then kill them. Third option, someone wants to frighten someone, then kill someone else…”
“Go on,” said Neku.
“There are other possibilities,” said Charlie. “But I’d need more background. The clip is logical until you consider that last blank. Why load a final blank having loaded two live shells above it?”
“I imagine,” said Neku, “it all depends on who loaded the clip.”
“On…?”
“How about, scare someone, kill someone else, get killed yourself?”
“Yeah,” said Charlie. “That works for me.”
He’d wanted to see her again, obviously enough, which was a fair price. At least Neku thought it was, but she had to tell Charlie she was busy next day and that led into telling him about Kate O’Mally and Pat and all the other slivers of information she’d prised out of Kit as reward for translating his wretched forms.
“Call me when you get back?” asked Charlie.
Neku promised she would.
The sky above the downs was a ridiculous shade of blue and the afternoon stank of warm earth, summer, and grass. It was all Kit could do not to put out one gloved hand to brush the hedge as he roared past.
The mill at Little Westover looked unchanged, the White Bear, on the corner, where Blackboy Lane crossed with the ghost of a Roman road, was festooned with flowers, its car park as full as ever.
But the old hut had gone.
Kit expected to find overgrown foundations or rotten walls and a broken roof, but it was gone completely. Someone had cleared the site, concreted it over, and installed mesh fencing and a steel gate. A Ukrainian tractor and trailer now stood where the hut had been.
For the first half of the ride, Neku had gripped his jacket and held tight. After they stopped at a café and Kit told her how to ride pillion, Neku loosened her grip and now leaned back, holding plastic handles that protruded from the Kawasaki’s cheap seat. They were using Sony earbeads, a modification that had cost almost as much as the old bike. Well, it did when you threw in the cost of earbead-compatible helmets.
“Okay,” said Neku. “Who am I?”
Kit twitched his head, then glanced back at the lane in time to see twin walls of cow parsley twist to one side. “Lean,” he ordered, and felt Neku ride the bend. Of course, Neku being Neku, explaining what she should do to ride pillion had also required him to explain why, so Kit ended up sketching a cross section of wheel onto a paper napkin.
“Precision and deflection,” she said. “Combined with centrifugal force…Simple enough.”
“If you say so.”
Now Neku threw herself into bends, which actually translated as leaning with the bike rather than against it. Kit had ridden these roads a thousand times before in an earlier life, and swept the curves from memory as he headed for Middle Morton and the old humpback bridge, but first he had Wintersprint.
The cottage was still there, although builders had removed the slate roof and added dormer windows. The thatch replacing the slates had been in place long enough to grow moss and turn black along its lower edges. The outside walls had been plastered and painted white. Half tubs, cut from beer barrels, overflowed with flowers on both sides of a glossy black door.
“Well?” demanded Neku, her voice loud in his earbead.
“Well, what?”
“How are you going to explain me to Mrs. O’Mally?”
“Hell,” said Kit. “How do I explain you to anyone?”
“You don’t.”
Flicking on his indicators, Kit kicked down a couple of gears and coasted to a halt beside a gap in the hedge. The potato field still existed. The earth bank around its edge might look a little flatter and the copse of trees at its far end a little closer than he remembered, but its dark earth was still cut into farrows and a trailer rusted in one corner beneath rotting sacks. A sign by the gate advertised, Pick Your Own.
“Why have we stopped?”
“Because I need to stretch my legs,” said Kit.
Having watched him unbolt a five-bar gate, Neku said, “I’ll come with you.”
“No,” said Kit, “you won’t. I need you to stay with the bike.”
Fifteen years had gone and still he stood humbled at the site of a mindless fuck between teenagers, one of them half drunk, the other ramped on speed. A thousand other people would have been having sex that night, ten thousand, a hundred thousand…Yoshi had been wrong. No one could tie you tighter than you could tie yourself and it was the ropes you couldn’t see that bound you tightest.
“You’re crying,” said Neku, when he returned.
Kit put his helmet back on.
Seven Chimneys had changed in the time he’d been away. The yellow brick had lost its rawness and ivy had fanned out around the upper windows. The rose bushes had thickened and the flower bed outside the study been weeded and cut back so many times its earth had changed colour.
Even the huge brass lion of a door knocker had lost its brashness and been cleaned and polished into something that felt greasy beneath Kit’s fingers as he lifted its heavy ring and brought it down with a bang.
He had to knock another three times before he got an answer.
“Who is it?”
“Me,” he said, before realising how ridiculous that sounded. “It’s Kit,” he said. “I need you to look at something…” On the far side of the door bolts were drawn back, and when the door opened it was still held by a heavy chain.
“Who’s she?” demanded Kate.
Neku sighed. “Told you,” she said.
While Kit looked through the attics for a trunk or box that might take the little brass key, Neku and Kate made lunch, which mostly involved slicing tomatoes and sticking fat chunks of cheese between even fatter slabs of bread.
“Make a dressing,” Kate ordered. When Neku looked blank, Kate pulled wine vinegar, olive oil, and black pepper from a cupboard and dumped them in front of the girl.
“Mix them,” she said. “Then grate in some pepper.”
“What proportions?”
“How would I know?” Kate asked, dumping an empty mustard jar in front of Neku. “My husband used to make it.” She nodded at the jar. “He used that.”
Having poured oil and vinegar into the jar, Neku added black pepper and screwed the jar shut before shaking it hard. Then she drizzled the dressing over the top of the sliced tomatoes, because she couldn’t see what else she was meant to do with it.
“It’s pretty here,” she said.
Kate grunted.
Horses ran in a field beyond the kitchen windows and bees clustered around a vast spread of lavender that overflowed a stone trough next to a bench on the lawn immediately outside. The room itself was huge, with stone slabs for a floor and work surfaces cut from railway sleepers. The kitchen was too big for one person, almost too big for one family. It looked as if it belonged in a hotel.
“You and Kit,” Kate asked. “What’s that about?”
So Neku told Kate how she’d met Kit by accident while she’d been stealing a pen, notebook, and ink from a shrine shop in Tokyo because she had a story she needed to write.
“What’s the story about?”