Du Bois thought of the secret deep below the family seat on the stormy coast of western Scotland, and transmitted the information from the blood and the footage he had shot to Control. He ran the footage of the creature through an intelligent forensic image program, which reconstructed what it would have looked like the last time it was human. Finally he took the reconstructed images and ran them through facial recognition software against every database currently on the Internet.
He sat down, lit a cigarette and gazed at the body, thinking about Beth going toe to toe with what was effectively a killing machine. It took the software just over twenty minutes to find some matches. This was due to Internet speeds and the slowness of the systems it had invaded, not the software itself. Du Bois looked at the possibilities, discounting them until he found one that seemed to match. Matthew Bryant had lived in one of the nicer parts of Portchester, near the castle, and worked at a large computer company in senior management. He had two kids in their teens, the eldest at a good university. His life story was a list of the successful, sensible and responsible choices you made in life if you wanted a happy one – from a conventional perspective anyway. He had also been a keen scuba diver. It had been during a dive in the Solent that he had gone missing. It was assumed that he had had some sort of mishap, and his body had been washed away by one of the nastier tides in the channel.
Things were starting to click into place for du Bois. He began to understand why he was struggling to seed the city. There were still pieces missing, however. He switched applications on the phone and checked the trace. The missing pieces would have to wait. There was still some unfinished business to take care of.
It took more courage for Beth to push open the door to the flat than it had to fight the monster. What made it worse was that Maude was so relieved to see her still alive. It didn’t occur to her to be angry with her new friend. Her reaction nearly overwhelmed Beth. She had grown up in a very cold environment. She wasn’t used to this. The tears came again.
It wasn’t lost on Uday, however, that Beth had brought violence into their home. He glared at her angrily.
The explanations had been difficult. How could she tell them what had happened? She settled for saying that she had just got a bit of a kicking. She found out that the muscle she’d knifed in the leg was called Trevor. They had bound up his legs as best they could, given him lots of painkillers, some vodka and, astonishingly, made him a cup of cocoa. Eventually he had thanked them and with some difficulty limped away, telling them he was going to A & E but he’d keep them out of it.
‘My bayonet?’ Beth asked. Uday and Maude looked confused. ‘The knife.’
‘Oh,’ Maude said in a small voice. Uday gave Beth a look of disgust.
‘It’s in the bathroom sink. It’s still… dirty.’
‘It’s an heirloom, my great-grandfather’s,’ Beth told them by way of an explanation. She didn’t think it had appeased Uday in any way, shape or form.
‘I told you.’ It was all he had to say. She’d brought it down on them. She was just a different flavour of trouble from Talia.
‘I’m sorry.’ It wasn’t nearly enough. ‘I’m gone now.’
‘You don’t have to,’ Maude said, but Beth had been speaking to Uday, and his face was made of stone.
‘Will they come back here looking for you?’ he asked. Beth considered. She didn’t want to lie to them, not after this.
‘They might,’ she finally said. ‘Can you get out of Portsmouth?’
‘Yeah, we’ll just leave our degrees, drop everything and go into hiding, or maybe we can return to our families, thousands of pounds in debt with nothing to show for it,’ Uday suggested acidly, every word hitting home. ‘I take it we can’t go to the police?’ Beth wasn’t sure how to answer that.
‘We’re staying,’ Maude said firmly. Both of them turned to look at her. ‘I don’t care how scared we are, I’m not going to drop my life for these… bullies!’ The small goth was angry. Beth guessed it was this resolve that had stopped her from leaving university when evidence of her fledgling porn career had surfaced.
‘I’ll sort it,’ Beth said. She said it almost out of desperation and then realised that she meant it. She just didn’t know how to go about it. ‘I have to go up north then I’ll come back and sort it.’
‘Yeah?’ Uday demanded sarcastically. ‘You going to go up against some Pompey hood? Just like in a film? I’ve a better idea. Why don’t you just fuck off back to Bradford and stay there? In fact, leave us your address just in case any more arseholes come looking for you.’
‘Uday—’ Maude began.
‘No. She’s no better than her fucking sister. Worse. Talia brought drugs and exploitation with her; at least she didn’t bring violence! Didn’t have us taken hostage in our own house!’
Maude looked like she was about to cry. Beth knew that if Maude cried, she would.
She turned and left the lounge. In the bathroom, the sink looked like it belonged in a slaughterhouse. Beth cleaned the blood off her great-grandfather’s bayonet. She had a train to catch.
Du Bois parked the Range Rover outside Fort Widley on Portsdown Hill, another of the Victorian structures built to defend Portsmouth from a French invasion that had never come. A massive red-brick edifice built into the chalk of the hillside, the fort provided a commanding view of the suburbia and commercial estates below, then Portsmouth, the Solent, the Isle of Wight and beyond, though much was obscured in the murk of low cloud on the grey morning.
He checked the trace again. It was almost irrelevant now that they had an address. It was more a question of timing rather than anything else. He still had more than enough time to make the drive.
Du Bois climbed out of the four-by-four. It had been too late to make enquiries last night after he had let Beth go, but this morning he had rung around Mr Bryant’s friends and family, particularly other members of the Solent Sub-Aqua Exploration Club based at Fort Widley. He had discovered some interesting things. Anna Bryant was scared of something, something that she was not prepared to go into over the phone. When he’d tried to speak to friends of Bryant from the diving club he discovered a lot of the numbers were disconnected. Entire families had disappeared with only a few missing-persons reports filed.
Du Bois finally got hold of a spouse. Through tears and anger he was told that all the members of the club had begun to act strangely. They were spending more and more time either diving or at the fort, though they had become very secretive about what they were doing. The woman’s husband had become less communicative. He had been nasty, even with his children. His diet had changed. He had started to ‘smell funny’. Eventually he had announced that he was leaving his job and his family. The estranged spouse hadn’t used the word cult, but it sounded a bit like that.
The club had a large lock-up at the fort behind a huge arched doorway with two iron-reinforced doors. The padlock proved no challenge for du Bois, and he pulled one of the doors open. Inside was a dark cavernous space and the stench was overwhelming. It was the reek of people living rough, using the place as a toilet, and the smell of the sea at low tide.
Du Bois moved cautiously. The place was a mess. Most of the equipment hadn’t been touched in months. His eyes cut through the darkness, amplifying the light from outside. The crates of diving equipment made it somewhat labyrinthine, but he could see no signs of life. There was a scattering of bedding and camping equipment, but something about their arrangement made them look more like nests than an area where people were sleeping rough.