Outpost

‘This is where they are drawn,’ said the dealer. ‘The barricades. We’ll join them, when our time comes.’ He guided her closer to the door. ‘Just stand for a moment. Close your eyes. Can you feel it? Can you feel the pull?’

Rye closed her eyes. She felt it. A skin-prickle like heat. She turned her head, like she was turning her face to the sun.

‘Yes, I can feel it.’

‘Blood music. That’s what I call it.’

She shouldered her way through the crowd and faced the locked door. She stroked the metal.

She could sense the crew of the refinery. She could smell them on the other side of the hatch. Rich and sweet. She began to salivate.

Fresh meat.

The Killer

Mal lay on the boathouse deck. His body had been stored in the unheated shed for a week. Too cold for decomposition. His shrouded corpse was completely frozen, rigid as a plank.

Jane used to live near the River Severn and had, on a couple of occasions, stood on the bank and blessed bloated cadavers as they were hauled from the water. The Severn Bridge was a popular venue for suicides. Corpses swollen with rot-gas frequently washed up on mudflats downstream. They were pecked by gulls until police frogmen dragged them to shore.

Mal would float south. He would probably wash up on the coast of Norway.

Jane decided to wrap a Ziploc bag beneath his shroud. She bagged his signet ring, his medallion and his passport. She wrote everything she knew about the man. Information from his personnel file. Home address, next of kin. It was a long shot. Even if his body washed up on a European beach there would be no one left alive to find him. But it seemed like the right thing to do. An attempt to preserve his identity as they dispatched him to the afterworld.

At some point during the funeral ceremony Jane would have to give an address. A summary of Mal’s life. She would have to list his virtues, his enthusiasms, the struggles he faced and overcame. But she knew nothing about him at all.

Jane crossed the ice to Hyperion. She took a wide detour to avoid infected passengers that spilled from the rip in Hyperion’s side.

Mal’s room.

The Magellan Suite. Red velvet and gilt fixtures. Lithographs of Napoleonic-era battleships. A senior officer’s dress uniform hung in the wardrobe. Jane experienced a sudden rush of class hatred. She had been an underdog all her life. She instinctively identified with the ship’s drone workers, east European immigrants who grovelled for tips. She wondered if junior members of the Hyperion crew, the cleaners, the waiters, the engine room staff, had been aware of the luxury enjoyed by the ship’s officers. Probably not.

Mal’s clothes lay in a heap by the bed. She prodded his longjohns with her boot.

Jane browsed the cupboards and shelves for any personal artefact that might give her an insight into the man’s life. An open book, a stack of CDs, a family photograph. Something that might reveal who Mal had been.

Nothing. A couple of empty vodka bottles. Socks soaking in the bathroom sink. She wanted to believe everyone had value. Everyone had a rich internal life, everyone was a little universe. Not this guy. He was empty.

She had asked around. What was Mal actually like? What went on in his head? Nobody knew. He was Nail’s shadow. Nail pulled deadlifts, and Mal pumped weights next to him. Nail watched TV, and Mal pulled up a chair.

Jane asked Nail for his opinion of the man. He shrugged.

‘He didn’t say a whole lot. I think he supported West Ham.’

She sat on the bath. She would have to talk to the other crewmen. Maybe Mal had confided his dreams, his great disappointments, to a friend during some late-night heart-to-heart.

There was something on the floor next to the toilet brush. A twist of foil dusted with brown powder. Jane held the crumpled foil in the palm of her hand and examined it from all angles.

Jane and Ghost took a suite near the bridge. Most nights they sat in silk bathrobes and watched a movie. They took turns to cook.

Jane felt self-conscious each time Ghost saw her naked. A lifetime of fathood had left her with sagging skin. Ghost didn’t seem to mind. He had a paunch and a hairy back.

‘All the supermodels are dead, baby,’ he told her. ‘Let it go.’

‘What do you make of this?’ asked Jane.

Ghost paused Annie Hall and took the foil from her hand.

‘Silver paper. What of it?’

‘My old church. Holy Apostles. There were little scraps of foil in the porch each morning. They were left by junkies.’

‘So where did you find this?’

‘Mal. His old suite.’

‘Some kind of drug deal gone bad, is that what you’re saying? You think Mal got involved in a big argument. A trade. A dispute over money, or whatever counts for money these days. Maybe someone pulled a knife.’

‘You used to sell weed, didn’t you? Your little hydroponics lab.’

‘I shared it around, swapped it for magazines and stuff. It was never an actual business.’

‘Were you ever offered anything hard in exchange?’