‘Think of a number from one to ten,’ Rush said. ‘Then take away five.’
The girl’s forehead creased in a frown. ‘A pink elephant from Denmark. It’s old and it’s stupid. Now be quiet. Or do you want me to cut you?’
And suddenly she had a knife in her hand. It was a weird, asymmetrical thing, with a flat extension like a hook or a bracket to one side of the blade. Rush stared at it, and then at the girl’s face. After a moment, she slipped the knife back inside her shirt. There must be a sheath there, strapped to her shoulder: the strap would go down between her breasts, and the knife would sit underneath. And now he was looking at her breasts — and she was looking at him looking at her breasts, which maybe wasn’t such a great idea.
‘If you cut me, you don’t have a hostage any more,’ he said. He was just about able to keep the tremor out of his voice.
‘No, boy,’ the girl said patiently. ‘If I kill you, I don’t have a hostage. I can still cut you.’
That shut him up for a good ten minutes. But he’d read a thriller once where the detective said that psychopaths found it easier to kill you if they didn’t have to see you as a human being. So he gave it one more try.
‘My name’s Ben,’ he said. ‘What’s yours?’
Instead of answering, the girl rummaged in the kit-bag she carried, brought out a narrow strip of straw-coloured cloth and started to twist it into a braid. She looked at Rush expectantly.
He weighed up the pros and cons. It was a good sign, really, that she’d decided to gag him instead of taking the knife to him.
But he really didn’t want to be gagged.
But maybe if she got in close enough to put the gag over his mouth, he could do something. Shift his weight at a crucial moment, maybe, and push her out of the hayloft.
He knew that wasn’t going to happen. Even if he had both hands free, the girl could fold him into an origami sculpture.
But what the hell was he, anyway? She’d called him boy, and he had to be at least a full year older than her, and probably more like two. And he hadn’t done one damn thing, so far, besides get smacked around and tied up and questioned and intimidated by her.
‘Those are really, really small tits,’ he said, after a long and pregnant silence. ‘But they look great on you. If you’ve ever considered plastic surgery, I’d say don’t go for it.’
The gag was uncomfortable, and it bit slightly into the corner of his mouth, but Rush was very slightly cheered by the fact that the girl had been blushing when she tightened the knot.
Now I’m human, he thought. And what’s more, so are you.
43
On the A3100, just south of Shalford, there was a sign by the side of the road that read DEAD PEOPLES THINGS FOR SALE. It stood in front of a windowless wooden shed, whose peeling white paint gave it a leprous look. The first time Kennedy had been driven along this road, as a girl of twelve, she’d mainly noticed the missing apostrophe, and in a priggish way disapproved of the sign. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder who the dead people were, and how their things made their way out here to the arse end of Surrey.
Three years ago, riding as now in the cab of a fourteen-wheeler with Tillman beside her, driving, she’d only been amazed that the sign was still there.
Today, with the sun hiding its face from moment to moment behind sudden, scudding banks of cloud, the unwelcome reminder of death struck her as a bad omen.
When Tillman pulled the truck off the road and onto what was left of the drive of Dovecote Farm, it was death that was chiefly on her mind — her own as much as anybody else’s. On that previous visit, three years before, she and Tillman had been trapped on the roof of the farmhouse as it burned, with a trio of Elohim on the ground taking free potshots at them every time they stuck their heads up above the guttering. Kennedy had been close to jumping off the roof-ridge, with a vague hope of staying intact enough when she landed to make a run for it, but really, she was just choosing a broken neck over being burned alive.
But Tillman had turned the tables on their attackers, who thought themselves invincible in the dark. Firing from the roof, he’d blown up the gas tank of the truck they’d arrived in with a home-made incendiary round. One of the Messengers had died in that explosion, and Tillman had shot the other when he came running — much too late — to help his friend.
Except it wasn’t his friend. It was his brother. They were Tillman’s own sons, Ezei and Cephas, who he’d known as Jude and Seth. And because he hadn’t seen them since they were four and five years old, and because in any case he’d never been close enough to see either of their faces clearly, Tillman never had the slightest idea what it was he’d done — how his quest of twelve years had finally brought him back to his family just so he could gun them down.
But Kennedy was pretty sure that Diema-who-used-to-be-Tabe-who-used-to-be-Grace knew it very well. That she’d chosen this place where her brothers fought and died because in some way it fitted her agenda for today. And now, as Tillman rolled to a halt on that same sad piece of scorched earth, Kennedy found herself genuinely afraid of what that agenda might be.
Tillman looked a question at her: ready? She gave him a curt nod, turned the handle of the door and climbed down out of the cab, holding the print-out of Toller’s book under one arm. The blackened substrate under her feet — even after three years, probably as much charcoal as dirt — crunched as she put her weight on it. She looked around, and as Tillman rounded the cab, she pointed wordlessly.
Rush was in plain sight. When the farmhouse was still standing, the barn that Diema had chosen would have been hidden from sight behind it: now it faced them across thirty metres of nothing very much. The hayloft doors were wide open, or more likely just gone, and Rush was sitting in what looked like an ordinary kitchen chair, close to the edge, looking down at them. His hands were behind his back, presumably tied or cuffed.
Kennedy wondered for a moment why he hadn’t called out to them. Then she saw the gag in his mouth.
The girl wasn’t visible at first, but then she stepped forward from deeper inside the hayloft and stood beside Rush, her hand resting on the back of the chair. Her expression was calm and cold. They took a step towards her, but she tilted her head in a warning motion and they stopped.
‘Something you should hear before you go any further,’ she called down to them. She raised her hand. Something small and white was resting on her palm. She pressed it with her thumb and the digitised chimes of Big Ben wafted down to them. As far as Kennedy could tell, they were coming from Rush.
‘This is just the ringer from a wireless doorbell,’ Diema told them. ‘But I want you to take a good look at your friend.’ Kennedy did. Rush was wearing something bulky over his shirt — a sleeveless garment like a life jacket. It was shiny black, and whatever was inside or under it showed in rectangular bunchings on its surface. A suicide vest. And the ringer from a doorbell would make a perfectly good detonator at this range. Diema had just armed the explosives. If she pressed the ringer again, they’d detonate.
‘Now we understand each other,’ the girl said, lowering her hand to her side again. ‘Come on up. I won’t ask you to drop any weapons you might be carrying. Just know that any misbehaviour on your part will lead to a more even distribution of this boy across the landscape.’
‘Then maybe we should talk down here,’ Tillman said bluntly.
Diema stared down at him — and there was something of mockery in her face, or maybe contempt. ‘Are you afraid of dying, Tillman?’ she asked him.