‘Adamite?’ Rush said, with a grimace. ‘What? What’s that? The rest of us?’
‘That’s the rest of us, yeah. And these women, these “vessels” — the Kelim — get pregnant three times. As soon as the third child is old enough to travel, they just disappear. They go back to the tribe, taking the children with them. Mission accomplished.’
‘You’re putting me on,’ Rush protested. ‘Nobody would do that. It’s sick.’
‘Getting into this stuff,’ Kennedy said, deadpan, ‘it’s like stepping into another world, Rush. They’ve got their own rules. Their own way of seeing things. And it does the job. Stops them all dying from double recessives. But anything could happen to a woman out in the world by herself. A woman raised in seclusion, totally lacking in street smarts. So there are others. Agents. Operatives. People who act like guardian angels for the Kelim, and to some extent for the whole tribe. They’re called the Elohim, which is Aramaic for “Messengers”, and if they think someone knows too much … well, their speciality is accidental death, but they’re comfortable with straight murder, too. That’s what Alex Wales was.’
When she finally ran out of words, Rush stared at her for a few moments in complete silence.
‘I don’t know why I sat through all that lunacy,’ he said at last.
‘Yeah, you do,’ Kennedy said. ‘It was because you saw a man kill himself right in front of you today and you can’t get the picture out of your head. You’re willing to listen to any amount of lunacy if it will help you to understand that.’
‘That’d be great if it actually worked. But I’m not understanding any of this. It’s a stupid story.’
‘Yeah, isn’t it?’
‘But you say it happened to you.’
‘And to you, Rush, as of today. You were in the room. With any luck, they won’t know that, but maybe it’s just as well you made me tell you all this. At least now, you might be that little bit more paranoid at a time when you’ve actually got something to be paranoid about.’
‘Thanks,’ Rush said glumly. ‘Anything particular I ought to watch out for?’
‘What happened to Wales’s eyes, that’s something they seem to do a lot. When they kill. When they’re thinking about killing. Or sometimes just as a response to stress or emotion. It’s called haemolacria. They weep blood.’
‘Jesus.’
‘It’s because of the drug they take. It’s toxic and in the end it kills them, but it makes them faster and stronger and more resistant to pain. Believe me, it takes a lot to put one of them down.’
‘Like you said,’ he reminded her, ‘I was in the room.’ He pondered, staring into his empty glass. ‘But why didn’t he just kill us all, then? Wales, I mean. It wouldn’t have been all that hard.’
Kennedy felt the weight of that guilt and unease settle on her. ‘He could have done, if he’d wanted to. But I think he didn’t want to be questioned. They hide from the light. I threw that into the mix and hoped he’d run away. It didn’t occur to me that he’d kill himself to avoid answering awkward questions.’
She picked up her bag, straightened her jacket and generally did the premonitory things that mean you’re about to leave. Rush ignored the signals.
‘What do we do now?’ he asked her.
Kennedy frowned. ‘We don’t do anything now,’ she said. ‘We go to bed and sleep. Neither of us is in any shape for life-or-death decisions.’
Rush laughed hollowly. ‘You think it’s going to be up to us to decide? Really?’
Kennedy got to her feet. ‘I think we wait and see,’ she said. ‘If we’re lucky, this is where it ends.’
But it wouldn’t be. Of course it wouldn’t. That was why she’d told Izzy not to come home yet, and why she’d told Rush enough to put him on his guard. It wasn’t over. It couldn’t be.
Herself, and Emil Gassan. No coincidence. She’d been rolled up into something, by a force that she couldn’t see or define. She was in this mess for a reason and it sure as hell wasn’t her own reason.
‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ she told Rush. ‘I have to sleep.’
‘Okay.’
‘You’re staying?’
‘I need another drink.’
‘Just make sure you can still walk home,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
But as she turned, he called her name again. She looked back over her shoulder.
‘It’s Ben,’ he said.
His voice was slurred enough that she didn’t understand at first. ‘It’s what?’ she demanded.
‘Benjamin. Ben. My given name. I was christened—’
‘Okay.’ She waved him to silence. ‘Sorry. It’s way too late for that. You’re Rush now.’
He sighed deeply.
‘What’s the secret of a good joke?’ he asked Kennedy.
‘Timing.’
‘Right. So I guess I’m a bad one.’
She just about had time to jump on the Piccadilly Line at Leicester Square, then drop down to Pimlico on the last southbound train.
Kennedy’s feet were heavy and she was irresolute all the way back about where she was going to sleep. The night before, Izzy’s bed without Izzy in it had felt like an alien planet. But she suspected that her own would feel like a crypt.
In the end she went for Izzy’s because at least the bed was made and she could just fall into it. Whether she’d sleep was a question that would answer itself in due course.
She opened the door and stepped inside, wondering for a moment why the action of the lock seemed a little looser than usual, the cylinder rattling slightly in its housing.
As she stepped across the threshold, she saw the living room door ahead of her standing open. She knew she’d left it closed that morning, so now she knew why the lock was loose.
Stand or run? A professional wouldn’t give her a chance to run in any case, and if it was a casual burglar — please, God — she could probably take him. She reached into her bag for the pepper spray.
Arms locked around her from behind, pinning her hands to her sides. Something was pressed to her face and though she struggled not to inhale, consciousness slipped away before she could even register the smell of the drug.
13
The world came back piecemeal, a lot more slowly than it had gone away.
Kennedy was aware of sounds first: slow, discrete, shifted toward the bass register. Not words, as such — and they carried on not being words no matter how hard she focused on them.
Then a sourness that was half-smell, half-taste welled up from everywhere and nowhere, around and inside her. She balked.
‘Mistakh he. He met e’ver.’
‘Ne riveh te zi’et. Hu vihel veh le tzadeh.’
Hands clasped her head and shoulder. She tried to pull away from them, but they just turned her onto her side. Her stomach tightened, sending a peristaltic wave through her upper body. She retched weakly, felt warm liquid run over her lips and tongue.
Cloth beneath her cheek, beneath her body. Soft, and cool. It had rocked slightly when she moved. She was on a bed.
A blurred dot of light appeared, more or less centred in her field of vision. It expanded and there was movement in front of it, across and across.
‘Can you hear me? Can you hear what I’m saying?’ A man’s voice, deep and mellifluous.
Kennedy played dead as she laboriously assembled her recent memories into some kind of sequence. The stairs. The door. The bed. No, she was missing a step. Someone moving behind her, arms pinning her arms, the handkerchief pressed to her face. And then the bed. Fine.
Not fine at all.
‘I think she’s awake.’ A different voice, not harsher but deader, affectless: a voice that actually scared her, given the implications of why she was lying on a bed, why she’d been attacked at all.