Du Bois stopped and looked up. Dangling from one of the exposed roof beams, suspended on a chain with a meathook through its lower leg, was a body. It had clearly been there, rotting, for a while. Du Bois knew what a partially eaten corpse looked like.
Behind it was a large tank of murky green water containing a dark shape. Du Bois approached cautiously. He had the urge to draw the .45 but resisted. He still had the sense that there was nobody else in here, an intuition confirmed in part by his blood-screen. He magnified his vision and improved the resolution. It was an effigy made of scavenged bits of driftwood and marine detritus, and looked like a Sheela-na-gig, a fertility statue, an exaggerated and swollen pregnant female form. But there was something warped and wrong about the figure. All around the tank were the bodies of rats, birds, dogs, cats, various other small animals and even two sheep, a pig and a cow. None of them showed signs of having been eaten.
Du Bois had had enough. It was clear the place had been abandoned long ago. With a thought he linked to his phone and texted a request to Control for a clean-up crew. Normal people couldn’t be allowed to know how weird the world actually was. Then with another thought he started a search on material relating to Fort Widley, putting it through various filters to harvest the information he was looking for, though he wasn’t sure quite what that was.
Walking out into the murky morning light away from the stench was a blessed relief. The result of the search came back. Despite a mild feeling of being violated by information, du Bois sifted through the material in his mind rather than externally on the phone. The closest he came to what he was looking for were unsubstantiated urban myths about tunnels that led from the Palmerston forts on Portsdown Hill, down into the city and even as far as the sea defences on the front at Southsea.
Du Bois thought tunnels unlikely in engineering terms. He double-checked against online Ministry of Defence files. According to documents from the Victorian era, they had looked at tunnels but found them to be ‘unfeasible’. He didn’t have time to go searching for legendary tunnels. He added a search request to the clean-up crew request and then climbed into the Range Rover. He headed north.
The train pulled into the grey stone and concrete valley that was Bradford in the late afternoon. Never pretty, the murky weather had leached all the colour from the city. Beth had the money for a bus but felt better than she ever had before, her wounds all but healed during the journey. She almost ran up the Otley Road, past the cemetery where she’d spent many hours either with friends or alone, and turned into the familiar street of rain-slick-grey, stone terraced housing. It was only when she put the key in the lock that she knew this was for the last time.
After all the life and movement in Portsmouth, after feeling content, however briefly, for the first time, after the possibility of an actual life and then the screaming red violence, the dusty dirty house where cigarette smoke hung constantly in the atmosphere seemed so still and dead. The smell of a human being rotting away added to the feeling. The thing was, Beth couldn’t remember a time when that hadn’t been the case.
Her father was in the lounge, as ever, his oxygen mask hanging down as he sucked on a cigarette. The glow of the cigarette tip was the only point of light in the room.
‘Hello, Dad.’
‘Did you find her?’ he asked, his voice little more than a rasp. Beth shook her head and watched disappointment spread across his face. She tried to muster sympathy for him, even pity. All she could do was try not to be any crueller than she had to. He had made his choices. He had to live with them.
‘Who is she?’ She watched her father swallow hard. Saw the fear replace disappointment.
‘I…’ he started. It would have been easier if he had been a better liar. Then he could have told her that he loved her as much as Talia, or even just loved her at all.
‘I’ll go back and look… I’ll find her, but you have to not lie to me. If you lie, I swear you’ll never see either of us again and I’ll go to the police.’ It was a gamble, a bluff, but prison had made her a better liar than her dad.
‘The police will be the least of our problems.’
‘You’re dying. It doesn’t matter now.’ It wasn’t said unkindly. The saddest thing, for Beth anyway, was that there was just no feeling there at all. ‘You stole her, didn’t you? You took her from some nice people, destroyed their lives and brought her to this dead place?’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Beth was surprised by the anger in his voice, though it quickly subsided into a hacking cough.
She watched him for a while and then realised that this was the cruelty she was trying to avoid. She stood up, took the cigarette from his yellow-stained fingers and stubbed it out in the overflowing ashtray. She was careful to make sure there were no sparks from the cigarette left before she put the mask over her father’s face and spun the wheel on the oxygen tank. She went and sat down, letting her father recover, until he took the mask off and spoke.
‘When you were born, you were too big, odd-looking. You did something to your mother, tore her up inside so she could never have children again, and we’d wanted to have a big family. It was you that killed her in the end, you know? Complications from your birth.’
And there it was, Beth thought, the reason for all the resentment she’d endured growing up. A crime she’d committed while she was being born. She said nothing.
‘And we were left with this strange little girl who didn’t look like other little girls, didn’t want to be like other little girls.’ He put the mask back over his face and took more gasping breaths. Wasn’t treated like other little girls, Beth added silently, wasn’t loved like other children.
‘So you stole a child?’
Her father shook his head and removed the mask from his face.
‘No! We’re not monsters, not kidnappers. We saved that child. Saved Talia. And because we did something good, we got the daughter we deserved.’
He put the mask back on. What Beth realised then was that he wasn’t actually trying to hurt her. He never had been. As far as he was concerned, this was just the way that things happened.
‘It was a friend of your mother’s from school. Not a close one, mind. She picked us because there was little connection between her and us. Beautiful woman, bright too, very intelligent and good at sports.’
Not like us then.
‘She’d heard that we wanted kids but were having trouble. You know how small this town is. Someone had offered her a lot of money to get pregnant with a view to adopting the child when it was born. Rich people. But she found out that wasn’t what they had in mind. They were some kind of cult. They thought she was important somehow – something to do with genealogy, bloodlines, selective breeding, all that nonsense. They had a place high up on the moors. She told us they were breeding children to be sacrificed.’
Beth was shaking her head.
‘No, it’s true! I didn’t believe it at first either, but she was scared, really scared. Not for her – she knew she was dead – but for the baby.’
What was clear was that her father believed this stuff. A week ago she would have dismissed it as nonsense, but it had been a busy week.
‘She had arranged to take the baby out – to Helmsley – and they’d let her, though they’d sent someone with her. We left you with your gran and actually disguised ourselves. We took a carrycot the same as Natalie’s and put a doll in it. Then in a tearoom we made the swap – in the bathroom. Scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life.’