The Happier Dead
First published 2014 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-658-9
ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-659-6
Copyright © 2014 Ivo Stourton
Cover art by Christophe Dessaigne/Trevillion Images
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
‘
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
“The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.”’
‘Tithonus’, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1860
01:45 HOURS
THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER
2035 (REAL WORLD)
O
ATES SLEPT WITH
his earpiece in so that if an emergency call came over the wires, it wouldn’t wake Loretta. She was grouchy because he’d had to cancel Christmas with her parents. Work wouldn’t let him leave London. He’d been getting up the courage to tell her for a few days, and had finally broached the subject that evening over dinner. Even after all these years she still got scared when he went out late at night, and her fear made her angry at him, so when the bleep tickled his eardrum he rose as quietly as he could.
The earpiece was programmed to caller ID, and Oates heard a recording of his own voice whispering, “
That bloody girl, that bloody girl
”. Lori stirred at the shift in the mattress, but said nothing. He padded out onto the landing, and stood there in his boxer shorts. He waited with his hands on his hips, deciding whether or not to pick up. For a few seconds sleep kept duty at bay, then yielded.
“Answer,” he said.
“Hey there daddy-oh. How are you doing?”
Her voice had a scratchy, narcotic edge. He could hear someone laughing in the background, and the steady repetitive beat of club music.
“I’m sleeping.”
“How’s the little lady?”
“Asleep.”
“How are those two lovely kids?”
“What do you want?”
The voice on the other end giggled, amused with itself.
“You know what I want. I want the inside line.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She tittered again.
“I’m hanging up.”
“Wait! Just tell me what you know about the Avalon call. Murder, right?”
“What?”
“Avalon, the Great Spa. Come on granddaddy-oh, wake up!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Grape.”
“Don’t tell me I scooped central! I’m everywhere, I see everything,” she whooped. “I’ll bet you hang to the left.”
Despite himself, Oates put his hand over his groin on the dark landing.
“There’s been a murder at the Great Spa. I reckon it will be pretty juicy, with all that money about. I reckon it will need a delicate touch.”
She broke off to shout at someone in the background to fetch her a beer.
“Well they haven’t asked me, so you’re wasting your time.”
“Okay. Sure. All the same, I wouldn’t bother going back to bed. Cross your heart you’ll download to me if they choose you?”
“Go to bed, Grape.”
“And don’t let them make you sign any confidentiality stuff! I want to know what goes on in there, I want–”
“End call.”
Oates looked back over his shoulder into his darkened bedroom. He wanted nothing more than to crawl back in beside his wife, but there was a job coming. Whatever else Grape might be, she was seldom wrong.
He opened the door to his sons’ room, and listened to their breathing in the darkness. The shapes of trains on the wallpaper were discernible in the moonlight, and on the ceiling there was an arrangement of luminous stars that he had stuck up at Harry’s insistence. He worried about that boy. Harry was so keen on staring at the stars that one day he might fall straight down a man-hole. Mike would be alright, he could already take apart the engine of Oates’s old motorbike, and sooner or later he would be able to put it back together.
The atmosphere was warm with the sweet scent of children’s bodies. He inhaled the smell. If he had to go he wanted to take it with him into the night outside, the way a soldier carries a love letter into battle. The house was silent but for their breathing; outside the city rustled faintly in the cold night. As his eyes got used to the darkness, he noticed that Harry had tied a skipping rope around the door handles of the wardrobe. Oates had checked it for monsters at bedtime, but his dad’s word was obviously not quite good enough.
What he would do to anyone who hurt his boys.
If he let his mind wander, sometimes it found its way to that thought. It was the only thing to alleviate the unbearable tenderness he felt listening to them sleep. It was part of what kept sending him out into the streets. In the shadows of the bedroom he could feel his nascent retribution, like a dog keeping watch over his children. He knew that revenge for their injury was a particular temptation for him, offering as it did the chance to earth once and for all the fury that was in him in an act of vengeance beyond reproach.
He went across the hall to the TV room where he kept a spare uniform ready for late night calls. He stood for a moment, bare-chested, and looked at the photograph sitting on sideboard. His daughter and his two sons all a-grin, wrapped in towels on Brighton beach. He shook his head and returned to dressing.
As he strapped the Velcro across his sides, as the heavy body armour settled on his broad chest, as his fingers splayed in the rough gloves, he changed his being, and there was nothing domestic about the eyes that met his in the hall mirror. He picked up the pad and pen from the radiator cover and leant the paper up against the wall. He tried to think of what to write for Lori. Once the call came through he might not have much time, but without any idea where he was going it was hard to know what to say. He didn’t want to upset her, or make a promise he couldn’t keep.
He was still holding the pen over the blank page when the call from central came, and it was the Chief Superintendent himself. A body of a guest, a financier named Mr Prudence Egwu, had been found in his room at Nottingham Bioscience’s Great Spa, Avalon in Essex.
“It’s not the best time to be leaving the family, John.”
“Oh, don’t you worry about all that. Besides, with good luck and a stiff tailwind you should be back by the end of the day. They reckon they’ve already laid hands on the man.”
“They reckon?”
“Well, he’s confessed. But I’ve had a look at his file. It doesn’t look like he knew the victim, and he’s a gentleman of restricted means.”
“Who is he?”
“He works as some sort of groundskeeper in the spa. Most of the staff sleep outside the dome, but apparently they do have access through the night.”
“So you think he’s an Eddy?”
“I was rather hoping you might do the thinking on this one.”
There had always been Eddies, men who confessed to the crimes of others out of loyalty, desperation or greed, but such cases had been few. The real evolution of the phenomenon had come with the Treatment. You couldn’t compensate a healthy man for thirty years of his youth with money, but if you could promise him a thousand more, what was three decades inside? Now Eddies were the scourge of the court system.
There was a grim humour to watching an interview play out, when an officer had to reject a confession, and the solicitor spent the whole interrogation trying to convince everyone that his client was guilty. Oates knew he had a reputation for winkling out the Eddies, for spotting the glint of inconsistency in a well-briefed confession. It worried him, being known for a nose, because it gave his opinion on a tricky case a weight that was hard to carry.
Oates tried to recall when he first heard the word ‘Eddy’, but he couldn’t pinpoint it. Eight years ago? Ten? Bhupinder had a theory that it came from a children’s character called Ever-Ready Eddy, a particularly reliable collie dog with a smiling, compliant face that showed up on t-shirts and lunchboxes. The Superintendent insisted it came from Edward the Confessor.
“Okay. Anything else I should know?” Oates asked.
“You’ve not been to the Great Spa before, I take it?”
“No. Why would I?”
“Well, quite. There’s something a little uncanny about the whole project to my mind. I’m rather jealous of you, parting the curtains of all those myths and rumours. I’ve had a chat on the phone with their management, and it seems you and your team may find the place a touch disorientating. Apparently they maintain their effect by absolute fidelity to period detail. We’ve had a request from their marketing department…”