Surviving The Evacuation (Book 8): Anglesey (21 page)

“This isn’t a social call, Markus,” George said. “There’s been a death. A murder.”

“Oh?” Markus asked, joviality dropping from his voice and face. “You’re serious. Where? When? Who?”

“The man who Bill and Sholto rescued out on the mainland, David Llewellyn,” George said. “Someone stabbed him last night.”

Paul’s face paled. He turned to look at the door.

“You think it was me?” Markus asked.

“Was it?” George said.

“It was movie night,” Markus said. “A Romero double bill. I can give you a list of witnesses.”

“I bet you can,” George said. “What about you, Paul? Where were—”

The man sprung up, a gun in his hand. Sholto dived forward. I dived sideways, just as Paul fired. George fell, with a grunt of pain. I looked down. He was clutching his shoulder. I looked up, and saw Paul disappearing through the back door of the pub. Sholto vaulted over the bar.

“Go,” George hissed.

I limped to the front door and was outside before I realised I’d never catch him. I crossed the car park to the wall that separated it from the road. Below, I saw Paul running down the road, gun in his hand, his fists pumping. Sholto was thirty yards behind and closing. I’d drawn my pistol without even thinking and had it half raised before I forced my hand down. Even if Paul was standing still, it was unlikely I’d hit him. Sholto was gaining. Twenty yards. Fifteen. I wanted my brother to shoot Paul, but Sholto hadn’t even drawn his gun. Time seemed to slow as the distance between them shrank. Paul spun around, pivoting. His gun-hand came up. There was a loud, echoing shot. Paul collapsed. Momentum kept Sholto running a few more steps. He came to a halt by the corpse. His hands were empty. He’d not fired. Paul hadn’t fired. So who had? The shot had come from my right. I turned that way, looking for the shooter. I’m not sure whom I expected. Markus, perhaps, or Mister Mills, or maybe one of his sailors. It was Rachel. She stood near the rear door of the pub, holding an ancient hunting rifle. She lowered the gun, placed it on the ground, and then crossed to the low stone wall. She sat down and hung her head.

Sholto had a hand on his belt, and his eyes on the woman. Around him, in the street, were dozens of people. I’d been so intent on the pursuit, I’d not even seen them. Rachel. Paul. It was all too much to process. Then I remembered George. I ran back inside.

Markus and the bearded man were bent over the old man, applying a bandage to his shoulder.

“I didn’t know,” Markus said, speaking to me as much to George. “I really didn’t. I had nothing to do with it. I swear.”

“It’s a through-and-through,” the bearded man said, his voice gruff and low. “The bone’s not broken, but we need to get him to the clinic.”

“Rachel shot Paul,” I said.

“She did?” Markus asked. He looked at me, and I at him. There was something in his eyes. Confusion, yes, but something else. No, I realised, it was a lack of something. For some reason, he didn’t seem surprised.

“This isn’t the place to have a discussion,” Dr Knight said. A group of us had gathered in the clinic, outside the small ward in which George now lay, unconscious.

“We need Mary for this,” I said. “And the admiral.” Both women were by George’s bedside.

“How is he?” Kim asked.

“Asleep,” Dr Knight said. “If we had more morphine, I’d say he was sedated, but I’ve only enough to take the edge off the pain. The bullet went through muscle. He was lucky, but it’s still a bullet wound. At his age, he may never recover full use of his arm. He certainly won’t be going out into the wasteland this year, and never again if I have my way.”

“He won’t like that,” Donnie said.

“He’ll be grateful he’s alive,” Dr Knight said. “Why did he do it?”

“George, or Paul?” Donnie asked.

“We might as well only do this once,” I said. “Can we go in?”

“You can use the room next door,” Dr Knight said.

Five minutes later, we were sitting in uncomfortable armchairs, facing one another. Mary was pensive, only half with us. The admiral looked as if she was still weighing up whether she and her crew were going to stay or leave. Mister Mills looked furious, though I think it was with himself. Captain Devine sat at attention as if she’d retreated into the familiar comfort of regulations. Donnie was sitting with George, and I thought he might well be the lucky one. Heather Jones kept glancing back and forth between the military officers. Word of Llewellyn’s murder had spread to Menai Bridge, and she’d descended on Holyhead with Lilith, Will, Lorraine, and Simon. They were waiting outside, along with Gunderson’s escort. I’ll be honest, the two groups reminded more of rival war parties than bodyguards. Kim looked worried, Sholto tired, Dr Knight anxious to get back to her patient. Leon was halfway to Svalbard, and Sophia had already headed back out to sea. Our group was hardly democratic, and that was the crux of our problem.

Since no one else was talking, I began. “At least fifty people saw Rachel shoot Paul,” I said. “We told them the same as we told Markus when we went into the pub; that Paul was wanted for murder, and that he ran.”

“Why did Rachel do it?” the admiral asked.

A good question, but I didn’t have a good answer. “She said it was because he shot at George. She said it was self-defence.”

“It was hardly that,” Sholto said. “Not from that range.”

“He had a gun almost pointing at you,” Kim said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Paul was turning around, there was a gun in his hand. He knew Sholto was pursuing him,” I said.

“He appeared to be aware that someone was pursuing him,” Devine corrected me.

“Did you gather any evidence from the crime scene near Willow Farm?” Heather Jones asked.

“I collected samples from underneath David Llewellyn’s fingernails,” Devine said, “and from the damp area of soil into which I believe the beer bottles were emptied. I took fingerprints from the light switch, the bottles, and the chair. There was an exercise book in the living room. Next to it was a half-drunk cup of tea. I believe that the victim was writing in the book at the time the killer came to the house. The first seven pages were ripped out. No other pages have writing on them. I have to assume that was done by the killer. We can store the samples, but we can’t do anything else. There’s no forensic lab on this island. When it comes to DNA, or running a spectroscopic analysis, we’d have to salvage equipment from somewhere else.”

“Captain, do you think that this man, Paul, was the murderer?” the admiral asked.

“A plausible narrative to that effect can be constructed from the available evidence, ma’am,” Devine said.

“Meaning?” Mills asked.

“Meaning probably,” Sholto said. “Paul shot George. He’s guilty, and he’s dead. That’s what matters.”

“What matters is what we do with Rachel,” Mary said, her voice was low, almost a whisper.

The room went quiet again. The silence grew expectant, uncomfortable. Again I decided to break it, because there was only one thing to say, only one course open to us.

“There has to be a trial,” I said. “A proper trial with a jury and a judge. She shot a man in front of fifty witnesses. Yes, I believe Paul was going to shoot Sholto, and that man had just shot George. I’ll say as much in court, but the words
do
need to be said in court, because what I believe, what anyone
believes
is true, isn’t the same as the
actual
truth. Look, we know what’s going to happen. We know the outcome. She’ll be set free, but it has to be done properly. We, here, can’t decide on her guilt or innocence anymore than we could on Paul’s. Not because we don’t know the outcome, not because we can’t draw as fair a conclusion from the evidence as anyone else, but because of the precedent. This won’t be the last time there’s a crime. It probably won’t be the last time there’s a murder. How we respond in the future will be determined by how act now. We need laws. We need justice. More than that, everyone needs to see that we have them.”

“It’s a waste of time,” Mills said.

“What’s the alternative?’ Kim asked. “Ask her nicely not to do it again? I don’t know the details of how you survived the outbreak, but you’ve read Bill’s journal. You know what happened to us. To me. You know what we did. Everyone does. It’s trite to say bad things happened, and foolish to believe only the victims survived. We say that what we did out there is forgotten, but look at Nilda and Rob. Look at how that could have ended. No, Bill’s right. What matters here is precedent. We need the trial to mark an official turning point, the moment when we distinguish past from present. The point where we say that it is what people do that matters, not where or when it was done. Not an amnesty, but an acceptance that we’re all flawed, all potentially guilty, but that we live in a place where everyone will get a fair hearing, a fair chance.
We
might know why Paul was running, but everyone else only knows what we told them, that he was wanted for murder. Do we want a society where a death doesn’t need to be investigated if it’s claimed the deceased was wanted for questioning? I don’t want to live somewhere like that, but there’s nowhere else. It’s Anglesey and Svalbard, and that’s all. If we want civilisation to have a future, it has to be here.”

“Then have a tribunal,” Mills said. “Like we did with the petty thefts. We’ll hold it in public. Everyone can watch.”

“
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes
?” Sholto murmured. “And do the watchmen write the laws as well?”

“We can stick with the old laws for now,” I said. “And repeal them when it becomes apparent they no longer apply. The key principle is to have a system where the laws protect everyone, apply to everyone, and can be challenged by everyone. Otherwise we might as well call ourselves a dictatorship now.”

“How do we organise the trial?” Mary whispered.

“Admiral,” I said, before anyone else could speak, “would you be the judge?”

“I’m a doctor,” she said. “I don’t know anything about British law.”

“You’re also an admiral,” I said. “And the rank brings a degree of respect. That you’re a doctor gives you more, and that you’re an outsider, newly arrived, gives you more impartiality than anyone else.”

Admiral Gunderson looked at Devine before answering. “Agreed.”

Inwardly, and careful not to let it show, I relaxed. The admiral could change her mind, but that was as close to a guarantee that she wouldn’t depart as we’d get. At least, she and her crew weren’t going to leave immediately, and right then, though I’m not sure everyone else realised it, that was the greatest danger to our fracturing community.

“How do you pick the jury,” Sholto asked.

“We’ll do it the old-fashioned way,” I said. “Use the electorate, and I think this is a time when a chance to sit on a jury might actually encourage people to register to vote.”

“A judge, a jury?” Mills murmured. “You know what you’ve missed? Punishment. Those have to be known and announced before the trial.”

“What punishment can there be?” I asked. “We can’t afford to imprison people, not for an extended period of time. We can’t fine them. So what’s left? Hard labour, exile, or death.”

“That’s harsh,” Kim said.

“But necessary,” Mills said. There was a general murmur of consent from everyone except Kim, and Mary, who had her eyes on the floor.

“I don’t like it,” Kim said. “This isn’t like being out in the wasteland. We’re sitting here, making up these rules, but we’ve no authority to do so, no right except that we happened to be here. Literally. If Annette and I had spent more time at the airfield this morning, we wouldn’t have come to the school in time to find out about Llewellyn’s murder. It’s not right that I get a vote here when no one else does, yet not right that I wouldn’t get a say.”

“We can spend the winter wrangling over a constitution,” I said, “but for now we need to hold things together.” I glanced again at the admiral. “We just need to stop it from unravelling.”

“Gottlieb,” Mary said.

The room went quiet again.

“I’m sorry,” Kim said.

“Rachel Gottlieb,” Mary said. “That’s her name. Rachel Gottlieb. David Llewellyn. Paul Harding.” She sighed. “This is not how I imagined it. I thought if we could wait until winter, the cold would force people off their boats. We’d plough the fields next year, and plant them the year after. It would only have needed a few of us working on the longer problems of what to do when we shut down the power plant, of salvaging the helicopters, perhaps even getting rid of the undead. Within five years, we’d have had a blueprint for civilisation, having salvaged all that was good from the old world. Not just material possessions, but ideas as well, leaving behind all that was archaic and rotten. Now I can’t see any of it coming to pass. At best, we might re-create what went before. At worst… I don’t want to think of it, though now it’s clear how much worse things can get.”

There and then she seemed older and frailer than ever before. I wanted to offer the comfort of some kind words, but there were none.

“It’s a fantasy,” I said. “A delusion from which we’re all suffering. It’s the same one those people ensconced in their boats are immersed in. At least when they disappear into old movies and older music, they’re not pretending they’re doing anything but seeking an escape from reality. Take George’s railroad, the people travelling the mainland ostensibly in search of survivors. They might find one or two, and kill just as many zombies, but not enough of either to make a difference. Captain Mills here may call himself mister, and he may have dropped the HMS from his boat’s name, but he’s still commanding his submarine and crew as if he was Royal Navy. Heather Jones and her people in Menai Bridge are preserving houses, but the bricks will have turned to dust before our population is large enough to occupy them again. Dr Umbert acts like he’s collecting data to present at some psychiatric conference. Markus thinks he’s running a smuggler’s den in 1940s Marseilles. Sholto has dreams of saving the world from an apocalypse he’s already failed to stop, and me? I’m house-hunting, and thinking of picnics and birthday cakes. We each had a vision of the future, an idea of what safety meant. It was what sustained us, what got us through the horrors, but none of us have let it go. Now we have to, we have to accept it was a mirage.”