“I’ve heard the rumours,” said the man. “And you’ll be fine. I had you scanned as you came aboard. There’s nothing amiss that can’t be cured by inducing the menarche.” He smiled at Lady Neku’s expression. “You carry an ancient Bayer Rochelle modification for elective sterility…no breeding,” he added, when she looked puzzled. “Until we splice in a key.”
CHAPTER 38 — Thursday, 28 June
There were three likely answers according to Charlie, another seven possible and thirty-eight more that ranged from technically possible to unlikely, each with its own factor of probability. And though every one could be examined in isolation, it was unrealistic to consider why a handgun clip might hold a mix of live and blank ammunition without tightening the parameters.
“Could the difference between types be seen?”
“Unlikely,” said Neku. “Most clips are closed.”
“Would the man unload the clip?”
“Doubt it,” she said.
“And the blanks?”
“Crimped,” said Neku, adding, “No wax plug or fake bullet, just powder, minimal wadding, and crimped metal around the top.”
She grinned at the memory, clung tighter to Kit’s bike jacket, and leaned into a bend. Charlie had taken her problem away last Monday, called her Tuesday with his request for more information, and being refused, disappeared for another day, finally texting this morning to ask how many answers she’d like.
“Okay,” said Charlie, when she called. “I can give you probabilities or divide my solutions into unlikely, possible, and…”
“Give me the most obvious answer,” said Neku, ruining his carefully considered presentation. She knew she’d ruined it, because Charlie’s voice stumbled to a halt, leaving her alone on the roof with a silent phone and a distant police siren for company.
“Is this real?” he asked finally. “I mean, does it have something to do with the dead woman?”
“Mary,” said Neku.
“Yes,” Charlie said. “Mary.”
“No,” said Neku, flicking her Nokia to visual. She caught Charlie’s blink as the streaming video came on line, and then the widening of his eyes.
“Neku, you’re…”
I’m what? she wondered, before realising he meant shirtless. “It’s hot,” she told him. “Tokyo has more wind.” He was about to say something else, but just nodded.
“So it’s not about Mary?”
“No,” said Neku. “Definitely not.”
“But it is for real?” Charlie said, carefully not facing his screen. “I mean,” he added, “you don’t strike me as interested in the hypothetical.”
Neku smiled, then realised it might have been an insult. “It’s real,” she said. “I’ve been trying to work out what it means ever since.” This wasn’t strictly true, she’d simply found the fact in a report amid the mess of papers from Major Yamota’s office and passed the problem straight to Charlie.
“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.