Kill The Monster, Chapter 7

V. DRAKE, SPEIGHT, JAKES AND CHANEY

"Yes, Pete, I know I'm letting you down."

"Yes, I know, I haven't been on site doing a stroke of work for a month now."

"No, I am not going to change my mind, and we have already discussed it."

"Don't get like that Pete. Pete, I am going to have to put the phone down now -"

He put the phone down. He had just put three good men out of work. Men who would probably now only be able to get decently paid work at the safe end of a rifle, if a rifle had a safe end. The current contract with the the UN Demining Unit DPKO would be completed, and then the BTR would be sold off to the Congolese, the lads would be paid off, and the company would cease trading. Maybe in a few years' time he could resurrect it as an estate agency of his very own. That would turn a few heads on the High Street. SOLD - AGNELLO MINE CLEARANCE.

The agency he'd spoken to was a small local operation in Truro. The initial interview had been upbeat - mostly bullshit, of course, filled with talk about how they cared for their employees. Sean knew full well that if he did not sell enough plasterboard-walled crap in the first two weeks, he'd be out on the streets agan. But it didn't matter - as the eventual inheritor of a million-pound estate, he could take greater risks, and make more money than those who took fewer.

He sat at the keyboard, scrolling through job advertisements. None too many, in this part of the world. The liquidated assets from Agnello Limited would amount to virtually nothing if he wanted to start another business. If a man wasn't in tourism, estate agency or divorce law in Cornwall, he was a surf bum.

Mickey was at school. Sam was at one of her crystal therapy courses. Her very expensive crystal therapy courses. After that, she would be spending the afternoon riding her very expensive horse.

All of which could be paid for by applying himself diligently to the task.

He alt-tabbed into his email. A message from the garage company confirmed that they had now successfully housed the new Hirondelle, which was under secure lock and key at a warehouse in Dagenham. Lilianne One had wanted an entire city between her and it. He'd been forced to choose optional extras before Hirondelle would deliver it. At first, he'd thought of maliciously lining the entire car with pink leatherette as revenge for the fact that he'd never be able to drive it. Eventually, however, he had thought of the resale value and settled on metallic aubergine for the bodywork, black calf for the interior. Calf would damage easily, it was true, but nobody would be driving the car for the next ten years, when the family would sell it and realize the value of the investment. Meanwhile, Lilianne Two, dad's white Mk II Jaguar, was sitting in the garage downstairs, a good honest Sixties gangster's car. Mum had sold Lilianne Three, the BMW 5 Series, and bought a Smart car, a gazebo, and a school in sub-Saharan Africa with the proceeds.

At first, he thought the message from the garage had been duplicated. A second unread email with the subject line hirondelle, from an unknown email address, secret.agent22@a1mail.co.uk, was also sitting in the Inbox. he clicked on it.

The mail read:

hi sean. results of wilson dna test received back. v. interesting. please call
078616 456715

He sat and stared at the mail. He looked at the date and time of sending.

Thirty seconds ago.

He clicked REPLY on the toolbar and set to typing a response with as much frantic speed as two fingers and no keyboard skills afforded.

what are results - sean

He clicked SEND, waited ten seconds, and clicked RECEIVE impatiently. Nothing. He waited another ten seconds and repeated the procedure, again with no result. Frustrated, he switched to the BBC website and started to read the news. People were being murdered in Iraq, big companies were cutting jobs in Britain, and a black man had been executed in Texas. The government was changing the way reading and writing were to be taught in schools.

He flicked back to his mail, clicked RECEIVE. An unread message appeared, with the subject WILSON.

u r on the ball. wilson is human alas but weird. want 2 know more?

Although he felt an instinctive loathing for people who emailed using textspeak, he did indeed want to know more. Relaxing now that he knew the other man was no longer likely to stand up and walk away from his monitor, he began punctuating his replies.

Certainly do. Weird in what way?

He switched to the BBC again, and was amazed to see a face he recognized. The bearded lunatic who had accosted him in Camden now seemed to be famous. The headline for the article read MATH MOVEMENT. He was further surprised (though only mildly so) by the fact that the lunatic was a physics professor. Formerly the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University - Stephen Hawking's old job, before he'd died - John Lang had apparently spent only one year in that prestigious position before being accused of using Rohypnol on a female student. He had resigned without being either fired or prosecuted, and then seemed to have semi-seriously pursued a course in theology at St. Cuthbert's Society in Durham for a year or so before vanishing off the academic map. Now he seemed to be back, and had formulated a new theory of 'Spiritual Dynamics'. The remainder of the article degenerated into arguments between Oxford and Cambridge dons as to whether or not Lang's theories should properly be called theories, paradigms, hypotheses, or Sean's own personal favourite, 'bollocks'.

Whatever the terminology, Lang's movement now claimed to be over ten thousand strong, and were lobbying the government to be officially recognized as a religion. Tomorrow, Lang would be mounting a public address at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, where he claimed he would unveil an algorithm that proved the universe to have been created by a benevolent Prime Mover.

Sean grinned as he flicked back to his email. He opened the first of two new mails, the one that didn't refer to penis enlargement in the subject line. The mail read:

not over email. visit us in london, we will tell all

He frowned, clicked REPLY, punched the caps lock and typed back furiously:

JUST QUIT MY JOB. NO MONEY TO GO GALLIVANTING ACROSS ENGLAND. PAY FOR MY EXPENSES OR NO DEAL

He flicked back to the BBC website. The last chunk of permanent ice in the shrinking Icelandic Snæfelsjökull ice sheet had melted. There were fears for the far larger Vatnajökull and Hofsjökull icecaps in the interior, and for downstream settlements that could be washed away by sudden catastrophic melting.

He flicked back to the mail reader. There was another new mail, which read:

gordano services bristol 2pm tomorrow. will pay for ur petrol n buy u lunch. deal?

He grinned, opened a reply window and typed:

DEAL

He switched back to the jobs site. There were a couple of jobs going for groundsmen at Lanhydrock. The pay, hours and location were all appalling. He clicked on the advert to know more.

He heard the chug of the four-by-four in the drive. Sam would not like him borrowing 'her' car tomorrow. Still, she had no courses tomorrow, and she'd done most of her Christmas shopping on Amazon. Mysterious packages arrives daily, and were signed for, levered open, peered at darkly, ticked off on the Big List, and locked in Sam's study where neither Sean nor Mickey could get at them.

So, what am I doing tomorrow? Visiting an old friend from the Regiment? She knows all the old friends from the Regiment.

The front door banged open and shut. Sam was staggering in under a weight of consumer greed. Maybe not all her Christmas shopping.

He raised his voice. "IS IT OKAY IF I BORROW THE CRUISER TOMORROW?"

"Hello, darling, did you have a good day shopping?" yelled a voice from below.

"IS IT OKAY?" he yelled again.

"It's okay. What are you using it for?"

"I'M GOIN TO BRISTOL TO TALK TO A MAN YOU DON'T KNOW. HE'S JUST HAD ANOTHER MAN'S SPERM SCIENTIFICALLY TESTED AND THINKS I MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN THE RESULTS."

"That's nice, dear. Cup of tea would be lovely."

***

The services were busy. People were probably visiting their relatives just before Christmas. At least he wasn't the one who had to drive past Bristol. If the taximan had had any sence, he'd have arranged a meeting at the Leigh Delamere.

The coffee was, as ever, as expensive as Norwegian Guinness. Once drivers entered the motorway network and became trapped like corpuscles in a vein for the next hundred miles, the robber barons of the service stations could milk them for as much money as they wished.

The taximan had left his suit at home today. He was wearing a T shirt. The shirt said NO MORE SHIVA-RELATED POKINGS. Sean judged that he was probably not pretending to be a taxi driver any more.

"Good journey down?"

The taximan shrugged. "Roadworks just short of Swindon."

"Go down the A303. I always do. So, what am I doing here? I calculate my fuel costs at forty shiny brass Elizabeth Two's, by the way."

Sourly, the other man pulled out dog-eared notes from his wallet in the manner of a dentist pulling teeth without anaesthetic. He slapped down a white form on the table with them. "I've filled it out. Sign it and we're done." He supplied a ballpoint pen. Sean signed.

"It's not Wilson's DNA that's so interesting. It's the DNA of the two other stockholders."

Sean looked up from stirring his mocha. "The other stockholders."

"The other two recent ones. All those who have held Hirondelle stock in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries and whose names are not Jakes, Speight, Drake or Chaney. Their names are Smith and Jones. They disappeared recently, as you know. But one of them, Smith, fathered an illegitimate child before he did. The mother threatened to sue the company, and was given a very generous payout, all of this being back in 1957 -"

"A generous payment, rather than a brain haemorrhage?"

The taximan nodded. "That did admittedly happen to her about two years later. But Hirondelle did pay her around forty thousand pounds, which was a great deal of money back then."

"It's a great deal of money now. What about Jones?"

"Jones is an even more interesting case, in that we know something of his history prior to becoming a stockholder. He first turned up in the rural USA, speaking good English, claiming to be a tourist who'd been trailbiking across Colorado and dropped his bike in a ravine in the backwoods. He gave a name to the British consulate in Chicago which magically checked out as the name of the relative of a Hirondelle employee, was extradited back to the UK, and was reissued a passport and driving licence late in 2001. But prior to sending him home to the UK, the Colorado state troopers took blood samples from him, a routine drugs and alcohol test. Without really thinking they would, I asked if the lab archived the samples, and they had them on ice. I pulled a few strings to get hold of them. They made a very interesting comparison with Wilson's DNA sample, and with blood we took from Smith's illegitimate son."

"So, are they aliens?"

"Sadly not. They're as human as you or I, assuming for the sake of argument that you're as human as I am. But there are peculiarities. Peculiarities in that they all share the same group of genes on the fifteenth chromosome. I'm told that these genes code for the production of particular hormones by the sebaceous glands."

Sean watched the pre-Christmas crowds milling round the café, looking for Hirondelle faces. It would be easy to spot one. There were only four. "You mean they're clones?"

"No. No, nothing like that. And the Jakeses and Speights, they're not clones either, just hideously inbred members of the same four families. But for the same area of a chromosome to be genetically identical to this extent - the chances against it are bigger than big. It was only raw luck that one of the lab assistants spotted it, though; all the routine DNA tests are set up just to give a percentage match of two compared genomes."

"So someone artificially tampered with these guys' chromosomes."

"Possibly. But you haven't heard the best part yet. The work our lab guy had done on Wilson, Smith and Jones inspired him to go back and do likewise on the other samples we'd given him earlier, the Hirondelle employee batches. One of the hormones whose production is coded for by the identical section is a pretty much poorly understood beast called turannone. Biochemists have only known about it for the last couple of years or so. It's similar to androstenone in that it reduces theta wave activity in most women's brains when they smell even trace quantities of it, we're talking one part in a million -"

"So it's a sex hormone? Like that stuff they market in sex shops?"

The taximan smiled. He had beautiful Hindu teeth. "The stuff they market in sex shops is probably chalky water. No, it's not a sex hormone. Hormones like androstenone have a different effect on the male and female brains. Turannone, meanwhile, has exactly the same effect on a male brain as a female one. I pulled a few papers on it down off the net - it's been called the James Bond molecule, in that it makes blokes want to hang with you, and women want to fuck you. So, yeah, I suppose someone will end up bottling it sooner or later. When you look at the more serious research, though, a lot of it suggests that turannone acts as a sort of invisible control mechanism exerted by an alpha male over a group of betas."

Sean's brows crumpled. "You mean mind control?"

The other man nodded. "A lot of animals do it. Bees do it. The African Naked Mole Rat does it."

"Gosh, if the African Naked Mole Rat does it, who am I to complain?" Sean took another sip of coffee. "What's an African Naked Mole Rat?"

"A kind of rat that lives underground in Africa, and is naked", explained the taximan comprehensively. "One of the Naked Mole Rats in any given Naked Mole Rat colony, a female, will, when she grows to maturity, give off a hormone that stops the other females from breeding. She becomes larger than the other females, and becomes the sole producer of baby Naked Mole Rats. A sort of queen Mole Rat. It used to be believed that that sort of lifecycle would be counterproductive in mammals, but now we know that it works this way in at least this one species. So, if Mole Rats can have their behaviour controlled by hormones, then other mammals, maybe even humans, might too."

"So I could have my behaviour controlled by some guy who produces more of this, this turannone than I do?"

The taximan shook his head. "Not necessarily. Susceptibility varies genetically. Sensitivity to turannone is apparently located in a horrid-sounding place called the Vomeronasal Organ, and not actually in the nose proper. Some people's Vomeronasal Organs produce large quantities of the receptor chemicals necessary for smelling turannone, and some just don't. Two years ago, UCLA did a study of subjects randomly chosen from various different Indian castes, on the grounds that the Indian caste system used until recently to represent both the profession and the position in society that a person had been born into. Most other societies in the world have been far more mobile historically, and so would be less suitable for study. In the study, Brahmin subjects - the priestly caste, the scholars - exhibited virtually no reaction to turannone, and neither did the Kshatriyas, the warriors and rulers. Vaisyas and Sudras, meanwhile - farmers, merchants, and labourers - exhibited significant sensitivity, and the highest levels of sensitivity of all were found in Panchamas. Untouchables. Shit shovellers. Undertakers. The Vomeronasal Organs of all the turannone-sensitive individuals in the study were found to produce far higher quantities of a receptor enzyme, helotone, which combines with turannone to produce a chemical very similar to the so-called truth drug, scopolamine -"

Sean nodded. "Scopolamine isn't really a truth drug. It just makes the subject babble whatever the interrogator wants to hear. It's useless to policemen. Very useful to secret policemen, though."

The taximan nodded back. "And that gets us to the kicker. Our man the lab assistant, who is a clever, clever man with a biochemistry doctorate, checks the Speights, the Jakeses, the Drakes, and the Chaneys, samples of all of whom have now been provided to us by your good self."

Sean looked up and blinked in horror. "By me?"

"You didn't think that little device you dropped into their toilet was some sort of listening device, did you? Good gracious, no. It was a shit collector. Wedged down the S-bend of their crapper for a couple of days or so, picked up a few choice fragments from whoever sat on the nest during that time, then finally unwedged itself when a little clockwork jigger inside it tripped a spring and was washed downhill to a drain cover outside where 'council workers' -" here he made inverted commas in the air with his fingers, which always irritated Sean - "were digging up the road. Worked like a dream, it did. Had seven shades of shit in it when we fished it out." He flushed with unconcealed pride. "I designed it."

Sean stared across the table. There was a pause of several seconds.

"Were the results useful?" he said.

"Very much so. The Speights, Jakeses, Drakes and Chaneys also have a whole load of genes in common, but this time on chromosome nineteen. Our lab assistant looked this up and found out that, sure enough, those genes code for the production of helotone, the endoscopolamine precursor." The taximan's eyes looked for a reaction from Sean.

Sean realized he had forgotten to breathe. He breathed in deeply.

"So the Hirondelle guys are the workers, and Wilson, Smith and Jones are the...queens?"

The taxi driver shrugged. "Or alpha males. The one certain fact is, all these genomes, these people, seem to have been consistently altered with some effect in mind."

Sean sat silent, listening to the hubbub of crowds, the roar of hurtling traffic, the moronic schmaltz of the service station's once and only Christmas DVD.

Stop right there. It's dark and cold here, but it'll do me. Last stop before insanity. Insanity's a bad area. They'll nick my wheels and marbles.

"What if something", said the taximan, "could infect human beings, with one of two genotypes, either the queen or the worker. Copying itself into their genetic code. A sort of jumping gene. Erm, I got that last expression off the lab assistant. I'm not really sure what it means." He looked down into his coffee guiltily.

"Your lab assistant hasn't thought it through. Genes don't work like that. Every change to the part potentially affects the whole. It's like slicing out one hundred lines of a million-line computer program and slotting in a hundred lines from the source code of your favourite First Person Shooter. You won't get Microsoft Word meets Deus Ex. You'll get garbage." Sean rubbed the tension out of his neck with one hand. "Christ almighty, why am I getting interested in this? No, what you have here is a human being carefully purpose-built using techniques I'm not sure exist anywhere on Earth." He looked around himslf nervously. "Is there a hidden camera around here somewhere?"

The taximan grinned. "Fraid not. I've been doing this for over a year now, and believe me, I have looked for the candid camera everywhere." His face grew suddenly serious. "Let me tell you something about me, Sean. Can I call you Sean?"

"Go ahead, though it seems a bit unfair, I don't know your name."

"It's Mahar. Ram Mahar. That name probably means little to you. To an Indian, though, it means a great deal. It's an Untouchable name. My family has a name that advertises its profession, and in my case, that profession is disposal of the dead."

Sean paused, unsure of the correct response. "So, are you still in the same line of business?"

"No, and that's precisely my point. My family worked its way out of poverty in India in the Eighties on the back of a scholarship initiative offering subsidized university places for Untouchables. My father became a doctor. His entire family still had to save up to put him through university, and there were Brahmin student mobs standing round the college gates jeering and throwing stones every day he went to study, but he got there. And then, of course, he came to Britain, because this country can't be arsed to train its own doctors. I was nine at the time. Of course, when I went to school in England I was treated as an Untouchable of sorts myself. I was called a Paki despite the fact that I was an Indian; kids at school used to ask me whether I cheered for England or Pakistan at cricket. And the Indian kids at school, the Sharmas, Patels and Ramaswamys, used to despise me too, because I was a Mahar. But my father was able to make something of himself despite his low birth, and sent money back home to his family in India to allow them to start their own businesses, send more Mahars to college, stop making their children cross the road to avoid higher caste kids in case they defiled them. Social mobility. It's been the making of this society, of every successful society in history. India's civilization stagnated because it denied the common man the right to make anything of himself. And I'm damned if anyone is going to make a Mahar out of me or anyone else in this country."

He believed it. He actually meant it. Sean suspected that if he laughed at this point, the taxi driver would punch him.

"But they're not bringing anyone else into their group", said Sean. "They've been the same four families for over a century."

Mahar, if that was his name, considered this, and reluctantly nodded.

"I don't know what their agenda is. But they must have one, right? Otherwise they wouldn't be here. And they've already killed UK citizens. That makes them Enemies of the State."

"Personally", said Sean, "I don't care if they're Enemies of the State. They're Enemies of Me. Now, I imagine you didn't call me down here just to tell me interesting things about the Indian caste system. You have something else for me to do."

"That guy", said Mahar, jerking his head up at one of the TV screens on the wall. Sean looked up. The TV, as usual, was out of synch with the loathsome Christmas music. It wa srunning Sky News, and Sean had no idea why; the whole programme would be incomprehensible apart from the occasional headline.

The headline read STILL NO LEADS IN FANTHORPE MURDER.

"I take it", said Sean, "that you have a lead in the Fanthorpe murder."

Mahar looked to right and left before judging it safe to nod. "You betcha. We've had a man on George Edward Wilson all week, following him wherever he goes."

"No doubt in the hope of scooping a juicy turd for DNA analysis", said Sean, rubbing his fingers together in mock glee. "Who was doing the following? Anyone I know?"

"Erm. Me", said Mahar, shivering against the cold from the swing doors on the entrance as a group of kids pushed each other into them, playing see-how-far-you-can-get-before-the-doors-open. Sean began to realize just how much of a shoestring operation the man's investigation was.

"So what did you find out by following Wilson?"

Mahar looked right and left again, then pulled out a brown envelope and slapped it down in front of Sean. "Go ahead; take a look." With the other man nodding at him triumphantly as if he'd found proof of the final resting place of Jesus, Sean pulled a sheaf of photos from the envelope and checked them over. Each photo had a red date/time stamp in one corner; one week ago.

"Is that Wilson?"

"Sure is." Wilson was black. Sean was not sure why this should surprise him. But of course, it was hardly surprising that it did. There were not many black multimillionaires, and certainly not that many young black ones.

"He looks human enough. So he's standing at a hotel window, so what?" He looked round the edges of the photo. "A really shitty hotel window. What's one of the beautiful people doing in a dive like that?"

"That's what I thought when he checked in. The place was so shitty it fell within my expense guidelines, and I was able to check in just after him. You won't recognize the building, I'm sure; no-one with any taste would. A spunky-mattress bed-and-breakfast pretending to be a hotel, Brighton's full of them. But here's the thing. Our man Wilson arrives, parks up - driving a Volvo rather than a Hirondelle, there's company loyalty for you - then spends half an hour wandering around the Grand Hotel, examining it from different angles. Finally, he checks in to a B & B in one of the streets behind it, asks the receptionist specifically for a south-facing window. Complains about the first room he gets put in, asks for one further down the hall. Not next door, mind you, but two rooms adjacent. Unloads a whole load of really heavy cases, won't let anyone else help him with them. Doesn't leave the room for the next twenty-four hours, but has the window open all night with the curtains drawn. And the room he takes just happens to overlook the window of the room in the Grand Hotel Neil Fanthorpe was staying in when he was shot."

"Whoah, whoah." Sean grabbed the edges of the table to steady himself. "We have left the firm rails of fact and are bouncing off on a space hopper into the wild blue yonder of conjecture."

"Later", said Mahar, his face deadly serious, "I checked with the receptionist at the Grand Hotel. He'd tried to check in there earlier that day, while I'd thought he was still busy parking his car. I, er, had to go to the Gents', and I had to go to a newsagent's to get twenty pee because there weren't any pubs open and they wouldn't let me go in McDonald's, and before I knew it, a thirty second slash had turned into twenty minutes."

Sean nodded. For a demonstrably intelligent man, Mahar seemed to have very little idea of the mechanics of tailing a suspect.

"When he was in the Grand Hotel, Wilson asked for the specific room the Biotech Minister died in. When he couldn't get it, he left in a huff. The receptionists thought he was crazy. Regarding Fanthorpe, have you seen the papers, by the way?"

Sean had come to rely heavily on the internet. "What papers?"

"Actually, I think it's only in the Telegraph. Hang on." Mahar wrestled with his briefcase, extracted this morning's edition, and spent a further few seconds flipping from page to page to find the article he wanted. Then he handed it across the table.

"'Minister killed by bullet with his number on it'", read Sean. "'Police forensic teams confirmed yesterday that the .3 calibre bullet used to kill government minister Neil Fanthorpe did indeed have an unexplained serial number embossed into it. The Telegraph has learned that this number, which was accompanied by the characters DB BASEL, in actual fact identify a checking account in Neil Fanthorpe's name held at the Dreiländer Bank in Basle in Switzerland.' So he was putting money away for a rainy day."

"About ten million Euros' worth of rainy day", said Mahar. "That's the rumour. Dreiländer haven't confirmed it yet. You know what MP's get paid?"

"Actually, I don't. Is it less than ten million Euro?"

"Just under sixty K, I think. There's no way Fanthorpe could have saved up that much money in his entire lifetime, especially with a mortgage that cost him three million to begin with."

"So he was dirty, like every other MP. That hardly explains why someone from another planet or dimension or whatever would want to spend time and energy getting here just to kill him. For one thing, that theory doesn't explain why Mandelson, Blair, and the entire Conservative cabinet between 1979 and 1997 are still alive."

Mahar grinned. "Perhaps not. But whoever put the number on the bullet wanted the world to know Fanthorpe was dirty."

"So why not just expose him? Writing to the Telegraph with the same number would have had the same effect."

"No it wouldn't. Fanthorpe would still be alive. Maybe a living Fanthorpe is dangerous to these people, whether he's still an MP or not. Perhaps", said Mahar ominously, "we've stumbled into some sort of secret war. Perhaps Fanthorpe was another one of them. Another alien. Another genetically engineered human. Secret factions among us, planted to gain power for the people who control them."

"Perhaps everyone in the Palace of Westminster is. It would explain a lot. But in that case, why kill him and put the number on the bullet? We're not just looking at killing the enemy here. Someone wanted to both kill the enemy and let the world know what sort of man he was. There's hate here. Almost fanatical hate."

A waitress came by to clear the table. Like most waitresses in modern Britain, she looked to be not entirely British, having her hair covered by a headscarf. White european faces in hijabs still looked strange to him, even after a year in Kosovo, as if the whole effect wasn't properly moslem. The woman was most likely Kosovar or Bosnian; middle-aged, unthreatening, forgettable.

"If what you say is true", said Sean, "why haven't the security services had Wilson arrested?"

"Because", said Mahar, "all this happened four and a half days after the murder. Yesterday, in fact. The hotel staff were suspicious about him, but they imagined he must be some sort of journalist. Checking out the crime scene after the fact, that sort of thing."

"So what do you think he was doing?"

"I don't think he was planting anything, I think he was carrying out the business of killing Fanthorpe, there and then."

"A week afterwards." A grin was creeping guiltily around the sides of Sean's head, despite his best efforts to force it back. "With some sort of time machine, no doubt."

"Why not?" And those two words, why not, made a whole set of illogical facts suddenly, impossibly logical, shifting horribly into place.

"Hirondelle designed a car that anticipated another twenty-five years of mainstream auto engineering in 1886", said Sean. "Almost as if their production line was just waiting for Gottlieb Daimler to invent the car."

"Teams of investigators are wiped out", said Mahar. "Sometimes on the very same day that they begin to request data on Hirondelle. As if someone simply goes back to the day they started to get suspicious, and eliminate them."

"They anticipate the great wars and upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries", said Sean. "They move out of Belgium well before the Schlieffen Offensive. They move out of Rome before Mussolini joins the Axis in 1940. But they stay put in England throughout World War Two, when any sane man would have thought Britain was finished."

"And I'll tell you another thing", said Mahar. "They're going to move again."

This alarmed Sean. "What?"

"They're making tentative plans for a move out of London and Poyle to new purpose-built premises in Canada."

"Have they been bought by a Canadian owner? Is Wilson Canadian?"

"Nope. And Canadian labour is more expensive than British, though I think Canadian land is cheaper." Mahar's eyes went bleak. "Which must mean something bad is about to happen to England."

"Not necessarily." Sean thought it over. "History is written by the victors. All those car companies that didn't move house before their country lost a major war probably went to the wall. But that doesn't mean the ones that survived somehow knew anything was about to happen, any more than Cretaceous mammals knew anything bad was going to happen to the dinosaurs."

He didn't believe it even as he said it.

There was a lull in the conversation, filled by Bing Crosby warbling White Christmas. Due to the fact that the TV picture wasn't in synch with the sound, this was juxtaposed with images of half-frozen families being dug out of cars buried by early snow in Scotland. Another few hours, and that snow would be here. Little playful flakes were already beginning to dance in the wind beyond the window.

"So, what do you want me to do about it?"

"You're a proud Hirondelle owner. You can legitimately turn up at their premises any time you like."

Sean nodded. "And if I'm rumbled, I go the way of all other Hirondelle investigators. And who looks after my family then?"

Mahar held up a finger. "That won't necessarily happen."

"Says who?"

"I can see you'll take some persuading." He patted Sean's knee. "But I'm a persuasive man."

He suddenly jammed his hands into his pockets and sat in his chair, head bowed as if in pain. "Oh my. Oh my oh my oh my."

"My oh my what? Shirona?"

Mahar shook his head. "You really must excuse me. I have to visit the bathroom. Must be coming down with something."

He darted from the table, chest and abdomen frozen rigid, only his legs moving, like a lizard running bipedally. Sean stared after him as the toilet door on the other side of the vestibule banged shut.

He swept the biscuit crumbs from the table idly with his palm. Then his hand stopped dead in mid-sweep.

A one-inch-by-one-inch spot in the centre of the plastic tabletop was warm.

He put his hand on the spot. He felt a gentle, insistent vibration through his fingers.

He leaned over the table to investigate, and was hit sudenly in the pit of his stomach by gut-wrenching, vomit-making nausea, so serious that he nearly doubled up. He collapsed back into his seat, pulse thudding in his neck.

Breathing heavily, he gripped the sides of the table with both hands, and forced himself to bend awkwardly to peer beneath it.

The flat underside of the table was marred on Mahar's side by a streamlined oval slightly smaller than a smoke detector.

There was no smoke detector on Sean's side of the table.

He looked up, and somehow, across the whole length of the room, through rows of tables, locked gazes unerringly with a middle-aged woman in a blue hijab. The woman's face did not seem properly moslem.

But there was something else wrong with the face. Something he had not noticed before.

You didn't remember to look for female members of the family.

She was a Speight, by the look of her. She was also terrified, staring into Sean's eyes like a frightened rabbit's into headlights.

He rose from the table, with some difficulty, keeping both eyes fixed on the Speight.

The fire alarm broke his concentration as if a gun had gone off in his ear.

He stared left and right, dumbfounded, as the station clientèle emptied obediently out into the car park, picking up their tea and sandwiches, grumbling amiably. The waitress was still looking directly at him, petrified, clearly aware of why his eyes were on her, even if he wasn't.

One of the café staff, shrugging his way into a fire marshal's tabard, nudged him in the elbow. "Come on, sir. We've got to clear the building. This isn't a drill."

The waitress was moving with him now, borne by a human tide spilling out of the seating area into the central corridor through the automatic doors onto the tarmac. All the time she moved, she still could not tear her eyes away from his.

He looked back up the station vestibule towards the toilets. A sign had gone up over the toilet entrance: CLOSED FOR CLEANING. He could not see Mahar in the crowd anywhere. Panicking, he began calling his name, the name he'd only learned ten minutes earlier. The waitress lowered her gaze guiltily.

"Don't worry, sir", said the fire marshal, who looked like neither a Speight nor a Drake nor a Jakes nor a Chaney. "We always check the building to make sure everyone's clear."

"He's in the toilet", said Sean. "In the Men's. He said he wasn't feeling well."

The fire marshal nodded. "I'll check", he said.

He turned to re-acquire the position of the waitress, who nodded - almost curtsied - directly at him, turned, and ran away round the side of the building. Sean broke from the crowd and ran after her, dodging café customers stamping their feet in the cold drinking coffee. He rounded the corner, and almost ran straight into a blank wall.

Around the corner was a blind alley, with no doors, windows or visible means of exit. There was an acrid smell of burning aluminium. One day, at college, he'd left an aluminium pan on a hotplate far too long. He'd come back to a kitchen filled with white smoke, but no flames - only a puddle of melted metal and the still-solid parts of the pan listing down into the puddle like the wreck of the Titanic. The smell in the kitchen had been like this.

Of the girl, there was no sign.

A boot crunched on snow. He turned, and stared with big round eyes. Of all the people he would have expected to meet here, this one was the least likely. However, on re-examination, it was logical.

"Uh", he said. "Hi", he added.

"Yes, it's me. It only looks weird because you normally see it reflected."

Sean shrugged.

"Okay", he said. "What do I do now?"

It was another twenty seconds before he heard the toilet attendant yelling blue murder.

***

Mahar was curled up in the end cubicle, one hand curled round a jagged shard of mirrored glass. The mirror above the line of sinks was broken. The skin of the hand that held the shard was cut and bloodstained. The skin of Mahar's neck was torn open in a ragged wound connecting one ear directly with the other. There was a great deal of blood. Luckily the floor was wipe-clean.

"Looks like this is the place where the fire alarm went off", said a pimply adolescent with a shiny plastic silverette badge that said MANAGER. The glass in the alarm on the wall had indeed been broken.

"But there's no fire", said the Fire Marshal, opening all the other cubicles in case an undiscovered fire was lurking one of them.

"Probably just wanted to top himself in peace", said a McDonald's employee called STEVE, who appeared to have three mock-goldoid stars for exemplary customer service.

Sean looked from the cubicle to the basin. A great splat of blood began there, then seemed to back away less effusively into cubicle number four, where it had grown to encompass three out of the four cubicles.

So it had happened at the basin. Probably while he was washing his hands.

They cut his throat. They walked up behind him and dragged a razor round from ear to ear. It hurt. He struggled. He knew it was happening to him. He knew he was lying on a cold toilet floor losing more blood than a human being could lose, and that he'd never be walking down King's Road again.

Why couldn't they have used a death ray, or some instantaneous painless poison?

Sean bent down to investigate the corpse, turned the head sideways. There was a bruise on the left cheek, hardly perceptible; if it had been formed in the last few moments of life, blood would have had little opportunity to rush to the site of the injury.

So, someone walks in here, while he's washing his hands in the basin there, slaps the alarm hard here, slaps him so hard on the left cheek that he falls over and his head hits the floor - he felt around the right side of the corpse's head, felt a slight concavity - here, and then smashes the mirror, picks up a bit of mirror to plant on him as a fake murder weapon, comes up behind him with the real murder weapon, a knife or a straight razor...

"Hey, did you know this guy? What are you doing in here?" The Manager was suddenly on his case, as if he'd only just noticed that somone was poking and prodding the corpse.

"I knew him", said Sean. "I was meeting him here."

"He was outside when the fire alarm went off", said the Fire Marshal, materializing at Sean's elbow. "But this dead guy never left the building. This guy here was worried about him. Wanted me to go back in and check."

"Looks like a suicide, then", said the Manager, looking straight at Sean and managing to make it sound like a question.

"Why were you worried about him?" said the Fire Marshal. "Did you think he was likely to do himself in?"

"Not our job to find that out", said the Manager. "All I know is, if we don't get this area cordoned off and quarantined inside the next twenty minutes, our clients will have nowhere to shit till they get past Bristol."

"But Pete", protested Steve, "the police."

"We'll manage that. Get back into the storeroom, get me some sellotape and all the bin bags you can found. There's still one cubicle on the end okay for laying fresh brown eggs in. I'll stay with the body, make sure nobody interferes with it." He stared at Sean darkly.

"But the customers, Pete", said the Fire Marshal. "There's a dead body."

"They don't know that yet and what they don't know won't hurt them." Pete the Manager looked up at Sean. "You still here?"

"Apparently so", said Sean.

"Well, don't go far. The police might want to talk to you."

Sean nodded. In his pocket, his fingers curled triumpantly round Mahar's car keys.

He left the toilet and walked out towards the car park, hoping the keys were the type that made a car's lights flash when the button was pressed. He had no idea what sort of car Mahar had come in.

***

Twenty minutes later, he was sitting in his own car just off the motorway. He had no idea what the village was called.

Mahar's name was indeed Mahar. The car he'd come in, a beaten-up Ford Focus which Sean suspected sadly had been his own personal property, had been full of papers - photographs, negatives, photocopied company documents liberally plastered with the words Baronia Hirondelle, photocopied passports, birth certificates, and driving licences. Many, many sweet wrappers - Mahar seemed to have been particularly fond of Riesen chews, half-finished packets of which Sean had found all over the car. Also - ardly surprising, considering this dietary over-reliance on caramel - many, many Rennies. The photographs, predictably, were all of the same five faces - various versions of Speight, Drake, Jakes, Chaney, Wilson et al.

He didn't think he'd left any fingerprints in the car. He also thought the CCTV in the service station car park might not have been properly ste up to capture him ransacking the Focus. Possibly Mahar had parked his car in that corner of the car park deliberately, leaving as little documentary evidence as possible of his visit.

There had also been an ID card wedged under one of the seats. For some reason, Mahar had left it behind when he'd wandered into the service station. One look at it sent Sean into hysterics.

Ram Mahar, Senior Investigator, Department of Work and Pensions.

"The Social", giggled Sean. "He was from the bloody Social."

Why would the DWP be interested in Baronia Hirondelle? The company would certainly have a very poor record on Equal Opportunities. Every single one of its employees, for the last hundred and twenty-five years, had been not only white, but white from the same four families. And nobody had ever been fired from Hirondelle or made redundant from it. Reports stamped CONFIDENTIAL in one of Mahar's many brown paper envelopes made this clear. Possibly the sheer impossible perfection of the company's statistics had awakened the department's interest.

He'd also found a brown paper envelope containing nothing but press cuttings, national insurance payment histories, photographs, and photocopied official documentation on himself. There was even a slim file on his father, and a single DWP-headed memo saying simply: Ram. This man might be useful. What do you think? Cheers, Alasdair.

There had also been a picture of a surprisingly good-looking Indian girl and two small children Blu-Takked to the dashboard. The back of the photo said TO DADDY WITH LOVE HEENA & MANISHA.

He happened to be holding one of the pictures of his own father in his right hand as he held the picture of Heena and Manisha Mahar in his left. Alarmed by a sudden sound, he looked up past the pictures, focussing on the middle distance. Further down the road, an elderly gentleman was manhandling a giant electric Santa across his lawn. An entire inflatable sleigh, complete with reindeer, was already sitting on the grass, weighed down with bricks and paving slabs.

He turned the sunshield down above his driving seat, slotted both photos into the mirror in its back, and sat looking at the small Asian faces.

"I promise", he said, feeling slightly ridiculous as he did so, "your daddy will be avenged."

Snow was beginning to swirl around the car. There was already enough snow to allow sheets of looted documents to be shoved under it and hidden completely. That would make his car empty of incriminating evidence when he went back to Gordano to talk to the police. With any luck, he might not even have been missed yet, might be able to sneak back in via the service road for the Days Inn which he'd used, illegally, to leave the service station. Luckily the force hereabouts was Avon and Somerset, not the Thames Valley officers who'd questioned him over the deaths of the Hirondelle men.

He got out of the car, decided on a fire hydrant sign standing up against a cottage wall as a convenient landmark, looked round to check whether any net curtains were twitching, saw none, and went to work. The snow was forecast to settle; he could retrieve the papers later.