Chloe had abandoned her sandwich: a processed-cheese slice, pallid slices of tomato, bread the texture of packing-foam pellets. She said, ‘I don’t eat meat.’
Henry took a big bite of what was left of his sandwich, chewed and swallowed, and said, ‘Sometimes I could murder for a bacon sarnie. Bacon and fried egg and brown sauce. I hear the Chinese are trying to engineer a new flu-resistant strain of pigs. None too soon if you ask me, and I bet you agree. Every vegetarian I’ve ever met has lust in their heart for a nice bit of bacon.’
He unfolded a paper map on the Range Rover’s bonnet. He didn’t use satnav, he told Chloe, for the same reason he didn’t use a mobile phone or a tablet if he could help it.
‘I like to operate off the grid. Keep things simple.’
‘How do you report to your bosses?’
‘On a job? I don’t. I do what needs to be done, and if it goes wrong it’s on me. Not that anything will go wrong.’ He traced a route with a blunt forefinger, read out the names of towns and villages, road numbers, then folded the map up. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to navigate. Let’s get going.’
‘You need to lose a few prejudices, Mr Harris. Henry. I’m a mean map-reader.’
‘And I’ve memorised the route.’
He started the motor, shoved an actual CD into the antique deck, a compilation of Geezer Rock tracks. Thrashing drums, chugging guitars, male vocals. He told Chloe the name of the band as each track started. Primal Scream. The Wedding Present. New Order. She said that she thought she’d heard of New Order.
‘I saw them when I was fifteen,’ Henry said. ‘In Finsbury Park. What are you into, Chloe? A-pop? Interstellar electronica? Or are you more of a classic-music buff?’
Her mother had liked to play opera very loudly on Sunday morning. It still reminded Chloe of her, instantly, whenever she heard it.
‘That’s Paul Weller,’ Henry said, when another track started up. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard of him, either.’
They drove past an airbase with a jet fighter angled on a fat pedestal at the front gate, followed a badly maintained dual carriageway for a while, then turned off into a maze of little roads that followed old field boundaries as they wound across a flat agricultural landscape. The sky was enormous. Heat shimmering across yellow hectares of oilseed rape. Froths of cow parsley along verdant verges. Pretty little villages of houses of brick and knapped flint, bungalows with fanatically neat front gardens. Pebble-dashed council houses. Thatched pubs. Once a red telephone kiosk, the first Chloe had seen in the wild for several years. Larger houses beyond high walls and shelter belts of poplars. Immemorial England.
Henry Harris seemed relaxed out here, driving with his elbow cocked at the open window. As they followed the ring road around Acle towards the harbour, he glanced over for the first time in more than an hour and asked Chloe to check the glove compartment.
‘It’s all the way in the back. You’ll see.’
It was a small snub-nosed pistol nestled in a litter of chocolate-bar wrappers and spent biros, its chequered plastic grip protruding from a snug holster of soft black neoprene. Chloe felt an electric shock, as if she’d found a coiled snake.
She said, ‘If that’s supposed to make me feel safer, it doesn’t.’
‘It’s supposed to make me feel safer,’ Henry said. ‘Especially in a confined space like a ferry. Not to mention funny little towns full of web-footed locals. Hand it over.’
She tried to use only her fingertips. He wriggled in his seat, clipping the holster to his belt, under the tail of his white shirt.
She said, ‘Is that legal?’
‘I was trained to use bigger guns than this.’
Which didn’t exactly answer her question.
‘It was a long time ago. The Iraq War, the second one. But I still know which end the bullet comes out of,’ Henry said.
Chloe realised who the face on his watch was. The old dead dictator. The ultimate pantomime villain.
Henry told her that he’d once had a spot of trouble with bootleggers out on the Flood. ‘They let you lead them to something good, and then they come in and take it. Happened to me once. When I got out of hospital, I swore it wouldn’t happen to me again.’
His gaze was neutral, daring her to challenge his story.
She said, ‘I shouldn’t think bootleggers would be interested in Fahad’s paintings.’
‘They might be interested in what makes him paint them, mightn’t they?’
It was a good point.
They left the Range Rover in a long-term car park and walked along the edge of the new harbour, a raw excavation faced with steel plating. Windrows of trash rose and fell amongst rainbow oil stains on sluggish waves. Gulls wheeled overhead like revenants of a prehistoric age.
The little ferry, its hold just big enough for half a dozen vehicles, churned out of the harbour more than an hour late. It chugged through channels between islands, hugging the shore, calling in at several villages and small towns. At one stop, there was a delay because a pickup truck had trouble backing down the narrow ramp. Men shouted instructions to the driver, who kept sounding his horn, as if for punctuation.
‘Left a bit, just a bit more. Now straighten up.’
Beep!
‘Straight on, straight on, stop!’
Beep!
‘You’re over to the right. Ease forward, come on back.’
Beep!
Henry sat on his army-surplus kitbag, watching this. Eating cheese-and-onion crisps, turning the empty packet inside out and carefully blotting crumbs from the corners with a wetted fingertip, somehow reminding Chloe of a squirrel. The ferry chugged on, ploughing through floating reefs of bubbleweed that glinted like frothy spills of blood in the late afternoon sunlight, past a line of pylons standing knee-high in the Flood, past a stretch of railway line on an embankment now colonised by the neat multicoloured shacks, vegetable gardens and wind turbines of fishermen. Most of them Dutch refugees, according to Henry. He’d been out this way a few times, he said, chasing down rumours that hadn’t panned out.
‘Like I said, there are plenty of ghosts out here. They outnumber the living.’
Past a shoal of small islands. One was completely covered in red weed, like a boil in the blue water. The sun was setting over the long treeline of the shore as the ferry turned due east, running through a channel cut in a wide beds of reeds, coming at last to the little town beyond a long reach of sand dunes, its lights twinkling in the soft summer evening.
16. Just Another Alien
Mangala | 25 July
The parking garage at the Hilton Hotel, where the Landing Day Ball had been held, had a valet service. The supervisor checked the registration numbers of vehicles owned by Danny Drury and his company against her spreadsheet for that evening, told Vic Gayle and Skip Williams that his car had been dropped off at seven-thirty and picked up around midnight, and pulled up footage from a camera that watched the entrance. Drury wasn’t driving the car, a shiny black Mercedes M Class, but there he was, getting out of it with a spectacular blonde woman at 7:34 p.m., and there he was again, his stupid ponytail brushing the collar of a white dinner jacket, stooping into the back of the Mercedes at a quarter past midnight.
‘There are plenty of ways of getting out of this place,’ Skip said. ‘He could have sneaked out at any time in between.’
Vic agreed. ‘You might want to check if his company owns any white vans.’
‘We should have asked him. McBride too.’
‘It shouldn’t be hard to find out. If they do, you can come back at them, see if they lie. Let’s see if McBride’s alibi holds water.’