He tried to keep the resentment from his voice as he said: ‘Recon. We have a vermin problem in Mayfair. No more than anywhere, I suppose. No Skinners that I saw.’
‘And how about Maida Vale? Skinners there?’
‘Not my patch.’
‘No, it isn’t. So why were you seen there? Three times in the last week. At least.’
‘You know why.’
‘We need you elsewhere. We don’t have the numbers. The resistance has many weak spots. Only by adhering to the tight disciplines and schedules we’ve set ourselves can we hope to keep ahead of the Skinners.’
‘Spare me the team talk, Alex. I do my job. Anything outside of that I do in my own time.’
‘But you have to face up to the facts. It’s been ten—’
‘Shut up. I’m warning you to shut up. I haven’t slept well. I haven’t eaten today. I am in no mood for this discussion.’
Fielding gazed at him, his face a serene blank. Jane waited. He could see this inspection was meant to unsettle him. Let Fielding make his silent judgements and evaluations. Let him report back to his stupid committee with its imaginary powers.
‘The pills are running out, Richard,’ Fielding said. His voice had cracked – it was nothing like as calm and assured as the face that delivered it. ‘The booze is running out too. Someone – a Skinner, I hope – ransacked one of the warehouses. There’s nothing left: no grain, no barley, no potatoes with which to make any new stuff. There’s nobody with the knowledge, or the machinery, to synthesise new prophylactic drugs either. When we run out, we’ve had it. And I don’t intend to hang around long once that happens. Our only chance is to get off this island, find someone, a health team that can cure us, a surgeon who can cut this out of us, I don’t know, but staying here is sitting in a waiting room for a GP who isn’t coming into work any more.’
The soft tang of footsteps on a distant walkway. Jane thought about the cells. There was dried blood on some of the bars where inmates had tried to squeeze through or tear a way out. He could almost believe that the echoes of their cries were flying around the heights of the prison, like trapped birds.
‘How can you stand it in here?’ he asked, but he was only filling the silence. Fielding knew that. There was no answer to the question. Anywhere was better and worse than the place where you were. You’d still be trapped inside yourself, with yourself, with what you were likely to become. ‘I haven’t heard anything of these rumours. You mentioning the raft just now, that’s the first I’ve heard of it.’
‘It could just be a rumour, like I said. We have to take it seriously. But if it exists I don’t want us sitting on our arses here while people are paddling to safety. We have to hope it’s real and we have to hope that anywhere other than here is a safer, better place to be.’
‘It might be worse.’
‘I know you have more optimism in you than that, Richard.’
‘You want me to find out what I can?’
Fielding nodded. ‘We’ve got the whole of recon on this. Depending on what you dig up, we could be out of this shitpit within two weeks.’
‘Or up to our chins.’
‘There you go again. You know, this unremittingly sunny disposition of yours is beginning to get me down.’
Jane had to smile, despite his feelings towards the other man. He kept trying to convince himself that it was in order to prevent the muscles of his face from atrophying.
‘Come and find me if you get any leads,’ Fielding said. He curved his lips into a cold smile and held out his hand. Jane shook it. ‘Come and find me if you don’t.’
Jane struck north-east, consulting his bible. There was a much folded and annotated patrol map of the city glued into the back cover. He opened it on the lam and studied the zones he had whited out. No real rhyme or reason to their location, other than a preference for areas that contained Tube stations, especially those that serviced the deep Northern Line. There were a lot of Skinners in Camden, Oval, Kennington and Leicester Square. They congregated too in open spaces; pretty much all the parks were off-limits. But rogues had been spotted too. Including the tiger. There was talk of the tiger being a leader, but there was no understanding of who he was leading, or to what end.
Jane visited buildings across Crouch End. He found a terrace of boarded shops near Finsbury Park. Behind the blinds of corrugated iron and chipboard were empty rooms. No rat spoors. No evidence of Skinners. He chalked the walls orange and moved on. It was getting dark. Another day lost to fear and suspicion; work was the only way to carve a way through the hours without dropping to your knees, screaming and crying, immobile until the moment they came and drilled their fingers through your skull. It seemed pointless sometimes. This was no winnable war. It was running from shadows and shivering in the dark until morning, hoping you weren’t uncovered. It was hide-and-seek played for unspeakable stakes.
Jane was shivering by now. Cold had found the weak spots of his clothes and yanked them open with its insistent, powerful fingers. He felt it burning under his shoulder blades, in his knees and neck. A damp pain that would take a long time to shift. No hot showers. The luxury of a bath took far too long to create. He’d be little more than something serving itself in its own broth for the Skinners the moment he stepped into it. He wondered if all his years of diving had somehow made him more prone to feeling the cold; maybe his bones were less dense, therefore more sensitive to these sinking temperatures. Or maybe it had something to do with the drugs that he and everyone else were taking: a side effect, maybe. There were alternatives to these gastro-resistant capsules. Hard booze worked well, and many cleaved to it easily, but you had to drink a lot and keep topping it up; Jane didn’t like the associated loss of control. The omeprazole was a bind only insofar as he had to remember to keep taking it, but that was no hardship considering the penalty you paid if you missed a dose or two.
He remembered the panic in London when it had become clear that the seed that had been laid down by whatever cosmic wind had swooped upon the planet was germinating not only in the ready fertiliser of the dead but in the living too. People vomited blood and felt a searing pain unwrapping itself in their guts, in their lungs. Jane had never seen a case of what some bleak wit had termed a ‘moving-in party’, and he didn’t want to. There was a rumour that you could feel the shape of the body that was growing inside you, slowly devouring you from the inside out before you died. An inner shadow worming itself into your hollows and crevices like a hermit crab tucking into a new shell. You’d feel the unholy pain of your bones melting, your organs gnawed; a contained explosion. Creatures filled the casing of your skin, growing to whatever limits surrounded them: cat, horse, man. If they had blossomed within the remains of a cadaver, the Skinner would look like some animated scarecrow; you’d see the rumours of its true physiology through the ruins of what had gone before it. Jane had seen a mangy dog trotting in the night, looking for carrion, breath labouring through the holes in its hide. On one morning of noxious mists in Alexandra Palace he’d stood transfixed in awe as the broken silhouette of a stag clattered through a blasted coppice, its antlers like frozen black lightning, matted, slavering, skeletal.
Becky had been on the medical team who conducted emergency medical trials. Take-’n’-shake wards were set up in gutted churches, municipal offices, school halls. Pills of every kind were shovelled down the throats of men and women desperate to prevent or delay the fatal invasion. Nostrums were embraced. Self-harm. Self-help. Fervent prayer. They found that alcohol worked, but only in doses that rendered you insensate. A breakthrough was made with drugs associated with heartburn. Pharmacies were raided for their stocks of omeprazole, lanzaprazole. Those at risk swigged antacids from flasks. People were mugged for Rennies and Gaviscon.