'Loner?' asked Simmonds. Simmonds was in her forties. She had large eyes that gave her the look of a St Bernard, always sad, expecting admonishment.
'Yes. Just outside here. Just by the railway bridge.'
'Gone now, though, yes?' Fielding still hadn't looked up to acknowledge Jane's presence. He fiddled with the fan of cards, getting them in a neat line under his fingers. Then he'd tap them together and fan them out again.
'Yes.'
'So?'
'So I thought you should know we've got fucking Skinners on the doorstep of the base.'
'Base changes site tomorrow,' Fielding said, handing him an envelope: this week's cipher.
'Time enough to have new holes eaten into your arse,' Jane said. Fielding wound him up like a cheap watch.
'I wouldn't worry,' Fielding said. 'And anyway, we could be sitting pretty before too long.'
His phrases. Jane could hit him sometimes. They were all emaciated; hunger was dragging them down. But Fielding had this optimism that made it all sound as though it was little more than a rainy day. It would blow over soon. It would all come out in the wash.
Jane wanted to eat. He had squirrelled away maybe a week's worth of tins for himself, Becky and Aidan by going without for a whole day, once in a while. It left him perilously close to fainting, and he knew that if he did that he would die – food for the Skinners. Or maybe someone else. He hadn't thought that way at all before, not even in the most desperate moments when he could feel his own famished body feeding off itself. It seemed a taboo too far. He would never do it himself. But then there had been a meeting among the Shaded, or some supposed faction of theirs. Hollow faces sitting around a table. Steepled fingers. Furrowed brows. Chins stroked as they debated whether to enforce euthanasia on those that were draining supplies but not giving anything back to the community. The mentally handicapped. The lame. Babies. There was calm talk of what to do with the bodies. There was mention of recipes.
Jane had not been there for the meeting, and rumour was as slippery as ever, more so now, so he wasn't sure what to believe. But he had to entertain the possibility. You keep the most dangerous option in view and it was one more safety measure, another peeled eye to keep you whole.
'What is it?' Jane asked. He hated having to probe and pry for information. Fielding was no further up the chain of command. There was
no
chain of command. 'One of the gardens suddenly full of shoots?'
'Would that it was. No, this is unsubstantiated . . .' Jane felt the flare of excitement dimming already. More rumour. '. . . But there have been enough mentions, from disparate sources, to give it credence. Or at last make it a concern that deserves independent exploration.'
It was like listening to a formal speech. He'd never really talked to Fielding about his background but Jane wagered there'd been some ambition towards public office there.
'What is it?' he said again, patiently.
Fielding stopped fanning cards and blinked. In that moment his gaze switched from the suits to Jane's eyes. Very theatrical, Jane thought. Very Fielding. 'Have you ever heard of the raft?'
'The raft? No. What about it?'
Fielding shrugged. 'Conjecture, at the moment. But a picture is building up. Some say it's a military op. Some refer to a ragtag group of engineers, architects, carpenters and metalworkers all pooling resources. But whatever, pretty much every report talks of a floating sanctuary being constructed off the Kentish coast. Self-sufficient. Currently anchored but with a crude propulsion system. Sheltered from the elements. And, um, capable of transporting a hundred people.'
'A hundred?' Jane spluttered. 'On a raft? Get some grub down you, Alex. You're delusional.'
'It's what we've heard.'
'Well, it's what I've heard too, now, and I think it's bollocks.'
'We have a duty to check it out.'
'Right. Is this the same duty we have to follow the rainbow to its end, or put a tail on someone who may or may not be a leprechaun?'
'We've got men on it right now. There's a reconnaissance team on its way to Kent. Another doing the rounds here, collecting evidence.'
'Evidence? Hearsay, you mean.'
'We're trying to ascertain where the rumours are originating.'
'And then what? Punish the kid who's been making this stuff up?'
'It might be true. And even if it isn't, it's a good idea. We've got the manpower and the smarts. We need to be more proactive, Richard. We're getting overrun.'
Gerber and Simmonds had quietly placed their cards on the table and removed themselves from the room. People tended not to chip in when Fielding was in full flow.
'We have options open to us here,' Jane countered. 'We have secure bases all across the capital. We know the zones where the Skinners tend to congregate. Surely, once they discover that this place is not the free buffet they thought it was they'll move on.'
'Secure bases, you say?' Fielding mugged, one eyebrow raising. Jane felt like an opposition politician who has let slip a crucial piece of information. He felt skewered. 'Let me show you something.' He led the way to what had once been the prison governor's office. Any decoration – bookshelves, paintings, framed certificates – had been removed. The floors and walls displayed a series of pale parallelograms where things had once been. There was a map of London spread out on the floor, anchored at each corner by a shoe. Much of the centre of it had been whited out with Tipp-Ex.
'Our main base at Elephant and Castle was attacked last week,' Fielding said. 'We've moved out. Burned it down. Their net is closing, Richard. We're vastly outnumbered.'
'And the answer to that is to play cards?'
Fielding did not look up from the map. He sighed. He was a big man, or had been once. Everyone was a shade now, a blueprint of what once was. 'I just finished a twelve-hour shift burning dead bodies and scouring bad zones in south Tottenham. I watched Alan Poole get trapped in a loop of fire of his own making. Burned right through the oxygen hose on the tank on his back. We pulled him out – he'd been breathing fire for twenty seconds. He's going to die. At the moment Doctor Sinclair is making a decision as to whether to let that happen without painkillers, as we really can't spare them. Go down and have a listen to Poole breathing and then tell me what I should do to take my mind off things instead of playing cards.'
Jane chewed at his resentment. 'I'm sorry,' he said.
'Forget it.' Now Fielding raised his head, and there was spice in his eyes as he regarded Jane. 'What have you been doing?'
Spoken as if he was in charge. The implicit needle:
Whatever it is can't be as important as what I've been up to
. Jane felt disgust rising. The best part of sixty million people dead and here they were playing office bitches.
He tried to keep the resentment from his voice as he said: 'Recon. We have a vermin problem in Mayfair. No more than anywhere, I suppose. No Skinners that I saw.'
'And how about Maida Vale? Skinners there?'
'Not my patch.'
'No, it isn't. So why were you seen there? Three times in the last week. At least.'
'You know why.'
'We need you elsewhere. We don't have the numbers. The resistance has many weak spots. Only by adhering to the tight disciplines and schedules we've set ourselves can we hope to keep ahead of the Skinners.'
'Spare me the team talk, Alex. I do my job. Anything outside of that I do in my own time.'
'But you have to face up to the facts. It's been ten—'
'Shut up. I'm warning you to shut up. I haven't slept well. I haven't eaten today. I am in no mood for this discussion.'
Fielding gazed at him, his face a serene blank. Jane waited. He could see this inspection was meant to unsettle him. Let Fielding make his silent judgements and evaluations. Let him report back to his stupid committee with its imaginary powers.
'The pills are running out, Richard,' Fielding said. His voice had cracked – it was nothing like as calm and assured as the face that delivered it. 'The booze is running out too. Someone – a Skinner, I hope – ransacked one of the warehouses. There's nothing left: no grain, no barley, no potatoes with which to make any new stuff. There's nobody with the knowledge, or the machinery, to synthesise new prophylactic drugs either. When we run out, we've had it. And I don't intend to hang around long once that happens. Our only chance is to get off this island, find someone, a health team that can cure us, a surgeon who can cut this out of us, I don't know, but staying here is sitting in a waiting room for a GP who isn't coming into work any more.'
The soft
tang
of footsteps on a distant walkway. Jane thought about the cells. There was dried blood on some of the bars where inmates had tried to squeeze through or tear a way out. He could almost believe that the echoes of their cries were flying around the heights of the prison, like trapped birds.
'How can you stand it in here?' he asked, but he was only filling the silence. Fielding knew that. There was no answer to the question. Anywhere was better and worse than the place where you were. You'd still be trapped inside yourself, with yourself, with what you were likely to become. 'I haven't heard anything of these rumours. You mentioning the raft just now, that's the first I've heard of it.'
'It could just be a rumour, like I said. We have to take it seriously. But if it exists I don't want us sitting on our arses here while people are paddling to safety. We have to hope it's real and we have to hope that anywhere other than here is a safer, better place to be.'
'It might be worse.'
'I know you have more optimism in you than that, Richard.' 'You want me to find out what I can?'
Fielding nodded. 'We've got the whole of recon on this. Depending on what you dig up, we could be out of this shitpit within two weeks.'
'Or up to our chins.'
'There you go again. You know, this unremittingly sunny disposition of yours is beginning to get me down.'
Jane had to smile, despite his feelings towards the other man. He kept trying to convince himself that it was in order to prevent the muscles of his face from atrophying.
'Come and find me if you get any leads,' Fielding said. He curved his lips into a cold smile and held out his hand. Jane shook it. 'Come and find me if you don't.'
* * *
Jane struck north-east, consulting his bible. There was a much folded and annotated patrol map of the city glued into the back cover. He opened it on the lam and studied the zones he had whited out. No real rhyme or reason to their location, other than a preference for areas that contained Tube stations, especially those that serviced the deep Northern Line. There were a lot of Skinners in Camden, Oval, Kennington and Leicester Square. They congregated too in open spaces; pretty much all the parks were off-limits. But rogues had been spotted too. Including the tiger. There was talk of the tiger being a leader, but there was no understanding of who he was leading, or to what end.
Jane visited buildings across Crouch End. He found a terrace of boarded shops near Finsbury Park. Behind the blinds of corrugated iron and chipboard were empty rooms. No rat spoors. No evidence of Skinners. He chalked the walls orange and moved on. It was getting dark. Another day lost to fear and suspicion; work was the only way to carve a way through the hours without dropping to your knees, screaming and crying, immobile until the moment they came and drilled their fingers through your skull. It seemed pointless sometimes. This was no winnable war. It was running from shadows and shivering in the dark until morning, hoping you weren't uncovered. It was hide-and-seek played for unspeakable stakes.
Jane was shivering by now. Cold had found the weak spots of his clothes and yanked them open with its insistent, powerful fingers. He felt it burning under his shoulder blades, in his knees and neck. A damp pain that would take a long time to shift. No hot showers. The luxury of a bath took far too long to create. He'd be little more than something serving itself in its own broth for the Skinners the moment he stepped into it. He wondered if all his years of diving had somehow made him more prone to feeling the cold; maybe his bones were less dense, therefore more sensitive to these sinking temperatures. Or maybe it had something to do with the drugs that he and everyone else were taking: a side effect, maybe. There were alternatives to these gastro-resistant capsules. Hard booze worked well, and many cleaved to it easily, but you had to drink a lot and keep topping it up; Jane didn't like the associated loss of control. The omeprazole was a bind only insofar as he had to remember to keep taking it, but that was no hardship considering the penalty you paid if you missed a dose or two.
He remembered the panic in London when it had become clear that the seed that had been laid down by whatever cosmic wind had swooped upon the planet was germinating not only in the ready fertiliser of the dead but in the living too. People vomited blood and felt a searing pain unwrapping itself in their guts, in their lungs. Jane had never seen a case of what some bleak wit had termed a 'moving-in party', and he didn't want to. There was a rumour that you could feel the shape of the body that was growing inside you, slowly devouring you from the inside out before you died. An inner shadow worming itself into your hollows and crevices like a hermit crab tucking into a new shell. You'd feel the unholy pain of your bones melting, your organs gnawed; a contained explosion. Creatures filled the casing of your skin, growing to whatever limits surrounded them: cat, horse, man. If they had blossomed within the remains of a cadaver, the Skinner would look like some animated scarecrow; you'd see the rumours of its true physiology through the ruins of what had gone before it. Jane had seen a mangy dog trotting in the night, looking for carrion, breath labouring through the holes in its hide. On one morning of noxious mists in Alexandra Palace he'd stood transfixed in awe as the broken silhouette of a stag clattered through a blasted coppice, its antlers like frozen black lightning, matted, slavering, skeletal.