At last a shadow loomed out of the mist. Henry throttled back the fan and turned the airboat towards it. Chloe leaned forward on the bench seat, straining to see details as the shadow resolved into a rectangular platform supported by two fat, rust-stained concrete pillars. It stood at one end of a long mudbank crested with marram grass. Up on the platform, flat-roofed buildings huddled inside a low perimeter wall of raw breeze-block. Several wind turbines reared into the streaming mist, blades turning slowly.
The airboat nosed towards a landing stage at the foot of one of the pillars. Sandra jumped out and made the little craft secure; Henry told Jack Baines to be a good boy, and unlocked the handcuffs that fastened him to the bench.
Chloe was the last to climb the rusty ladder to the fort’s platform. A man was waiting there, tall and young and alert, dressed in tunic and trousers in grey and white camo that matched her jacket. He was cradling a matte-black shotgun with a pistol grip and a wide bore: a riot gun that fired non-lethal beanbag rounds. Chloe had been shot by one once, years ago, when she had been part of a protest against building a shopping mall at the edge of the memorial zone in central London. It had hurt like hell, and the resulting bruise, across her hip and half her back, had been spectacular.
The young man, Leo Halifax, led them through a junkyard clutter of coiled steel hawsers, oil drums, packing crates and rusting machine parts, everything dripping wet in the mist, to the cluster of buildings. Prefabricated huts and shipping containers jammed together, raised on footings of crudely mortared concrete blocks, heavy tarpaulins lashed over flat roofs with spiderwebs of ropes.
A warped plywood door opened onto a square room with a floor of pale driftwood carefully fitted together and mortared with black tar. A second man in camo clothing was sitting on a kitchen chair, watching a screen tiled with windows that showed different views of the fort’s platform and the misty marshland around it. As they crowded inside, he turned around and said, ‘Nothing showing.’
‘Any trouble getting in?’ Henry said.
‘Their security system was full of holes,’ the man said. ‘The drone took it down without breaking a sweat.’
A dumpy woman in her fifties sat on an old brass bed in the corner of the room, under a framed picture of the Virgin Mary rolling her eyes and clutching her chest like the ‘before’ picture of an antacid ad. The woman wore a moth-eaten cardigan and a headscarf; her sandals didn’t quite touch the floor. A pectoral cross crudely welded from steel hung around her neck. For a moment, Chloe wondered if she was one of the nuns, then saw that her wrists were fastened with plastic strip. Jack Baines stepped towards her, asked if she was all right.
‘You had to get involved,’ she said. She had a heavy accent, German or Dutch or Flemish.
‘And you had to tell them everything.’
‘You expect me to keep quiet? This is not one of your stupid films.’
‘Gert was very cooperative,’ the first young man, Leo, said.
‘Sit by your wife,’ Henry told Jack Baines. ‘We won’t take up much more of your time.’
The man sat down slowly, staring at Henry with a mixture of unease and defiance; Henry, Sandra and the two young men held a brief conference, their backs turned to Chloe, who failed to not feel excluded.
On a desk made of a length of plywood and a couple of trestles, a big monitor was showing the ancient starfield screensaver, triggering a memory of her mother’s study. For the longest time, she and Neil had kept the room as their mother had left it. Chloe had liked to sit in there, sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep. A narrow fourth bedroom with a wooden clerk’s desk and her mother’s ancient desk computer under the window, a chaise longue with lumpy upholstery, two steel filing cabinets and shelves of books, posters for old exhibitions in cheap frames, hundreds of photos and clippings Blu-tacked to one wall. Neil sat in there sometimes, too. It was the guest bedroom now. Chloe and Neil had cleared it out over a hot summer’s weekend a couple of months before he married. Had taken down the collage and packed the books and the old posters in plastic boxes they’d stacked in the roof space, loaded everything else into a hired van and taken it to the recycling centre. It had been liberating, actually. Not from their mother’s memory, never that, but from the hopeless weight of their own past.
Chloe stepped over to the desk and moved the mouse. The screensaver vanished and the monitor filled with icons tiled over an image of Sylvester Stallone, bare-chested and toting an unfeasibly big gun.
‘Don’t touch that,’ Jack Baines said.
Chloe smiled at him, said, ‘You’re a film fan. Me too.’
She totally didn’t go for those old films full of explosions and macho posturing, but the first thing you did in an interview was try to establish some common ground. The ploy didn’t work on Jack Baines, though. He ignored her, returned his attention to Henry Harris and the others, huddled in their private conflab.
Chloe studied the small tapestries hung on the wall over the desk: a sleeping cat, a dolphin caught in mid-leap, a starburst of lines stitched in different lengths and colours on black velvet. She said to the woman, ‘Are these yours?’
The woman’s gaze was dark and suspicious. ‘What if they are?’
‘Don’t talk to her,’ Jack Baines said. ‘She’s trying to play good cop.’
‘I’m not a cop,’ Chloe said.
‘Oh really? Because I saw what you did, when that bloke knocked off that avatar.’
‘Did you also see the police arresting me afterwards? I’m a civilian,’ Chloe said. ‘A researcher concerned about two missing kids. You were looking after them, I bet you’re concerned about them too.’
‘I’m concerned you lot want to use them like lab rats.’
The little huddle broke up. Henry dragged a chair across, sat close to Jack Baines and the woman. ‘You’re in a corner, Jack. You and your charming wife. Your bosses can’t help you now. Only I can. So how about telling me why they are so keen to find the kid.’
‘And if I don’t, you’ll what? Hurt me?’
‘How about this. Tell me what I need to know, and I won’t tell anyone about the nuns.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
Henry looked over at Sandra. She said, ‘We used infra-red imaging to check out this place, Mr Baines. It showed your wife, no one else.’
Henry said, ‘What happened to them, Jack?’
Baines looked at his wife. ‘You told them, didn’t you?’
‘They already knew,’ she said.
Henry said, ‘Your wife claims that they died of natural causes: that you buried them in the marshes. I’m prepared to believe that if you cooperate. Look at me, Jack. Look at me so I can see if you’re telling the truth. Why do your bosses want the kid?’
‘She told you everything, I bet,’ Baines said, staring at his wife, who stared right back.