The wrought iron gates were eaten by rust, so too the links of the hefty chain that bound them together. The padlock, Gareth noticed, was brand new. Caroline Jacobs’ fingers deftly rolled its numbered dials and the lock clicked. She slid away the chain and swung the gates open; they squealed a little in protest. Hopping back into the cab she drove the car beyond the gates and high, redbrick walls and stopped opposite a brooding Edwardian house that stood in almost complete darkness, a blackened lump against a sky bearing an orange wash from the glow of distant street lamps. She went back to the gates, checked outside to see if anyone had noticed their arrival and closed them again. She flicked the dials on the combination lock and went back to the car. She swung open the rear door.
How is she?’ she asked.
Gareth’s reply was leaden. ‘She’s lost a lot of blood, Caroline. And I can’t seem to wake her up. She desperately needs a doctor.’
‘You know it’s not that simple,’ she said, reaching in and patting Erica’s cheek. ‘Come on, girl, don’t do this to me. Time to wake up.’ She didn’t move. ‘Carry her inside, Gareth,’ she said. ‘I’ve got medical supplies inside.’
He did as he was ordered, lifting Erica gently out of the car. She moaned in pain but didn’t open her eyes. Alarmingly, he felt hot, sticky blood on his hand and noticed a large dark patch on the car seat. ‘What is this place?’ he asked as Caroline snapped open a padlock on a sheet of steel that blocked the original door.
‘It’s just one of around thirty-thousand houses around the country that have been abandoned. This one’s owned by the local council and scheduled for demolition later this year.’ She guided him through the open door. ‘Careful, it’s dark. Take her into the room on the left.’ He carried Erica inside the room. A damp, musty smell assailed the nostrils. ‘There’s a mattress on the floor,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, it’s clean. Put her down there.’ Caroline went over to the boarded-up bay window and bent to her haunches. She ran her fingers across the bare floorboards.
She lifted up a loose board and stuck her hand deep down inside the hole. She pulled out a black plastic bag, then another, and then reached in again. She removed a primus stove from the hole and out of the black bags she removed a few tins of food, basic items of crockery and a small pan. ‘All the home comforts you could ask for,’ she said. From the other bag she produced what looked like a green army satchel of some kind. He noticed a red cross emblazoned on it. She snapped open the fasteners.
‘You think this woman really is my mother?’
Caroline regarded him from under her brows. ‘Let’s have a look at her,’ she said, ignoring him for the moment. Between them they gingerly removed Erica’s sweatshirt and Caroline screwed up her nose. ‘Damn, that looks real bad.’ She took a pulse. ‘Real bad. I can do my best dress the wound, give her something for the pain, but the bullet is lodged deep inside. She’s bleeding internally, and fading fast.’ She looked up at him. ‘Yes, she’s your mother, Gareth. She put herself between you and a bullet to save her son’s life. If you want final proof then look at her. She’s dying, Gareth. She’s dying because she put herself in danger to save you. And I don’t just mean stopping one of Tremain’s bullets. She could easily have stayed in hiding, gone abroad somewhere, but no, she put her life at risk as soon as she came to warn you. Some might call it motherly love; I call it stupidity. She’d have been better off keeping her head low. But I don’t have kids, so what do I know?’
‘She can’t die,’ he said, alarmed. ‘We have to get her to a doctor, get her to hospital.’
‘It’s too late for that, Gareth,’ she said, the cotton wool she used to clean the wound sopping wet with blood. ‘I saw plenty of this out in Afghanistan. She’s not going to live long.’ She put on a mock German accent: ‘For her the war is over…’
‘How can you be so fucking cruel?’ he cried angrily.
‘Cruel!’ she returned. ‘I’m not the one who’s been in denial, especially after all that’s happened to you. This woman, yes, she’s worth it — you, well I’m not so sure. Why have we all put ourselves in danger for you? Go ahead, if it pleases you, take her to the nearest hospital and let’s see how long she’ll live then. I’d give her a day or so before Doradus and his mob got to her, that’s even if she managed to live that long, which she won’t. All we can do now is make her comfortable, give her something to ease the pain, but beyond that if I were you I’d take this last chance to be with your mother. Christ knows, you’ve waited long enough, both of you have. At least you’re lucky; my mother died when I was only a year old, trying to help this woman. I never had that chance. So stop your fucking moaning and make out like a good son whilst you can, eh?’
She tended to the wound as best as she could, treated it and bandaged it and covered Erica with a blanket. In silence she fired up the primus stove and opened a couple of cans of soup, then left them alone together on the pretext of getting more provisions from the boot of the car.
Gareth brushed back Erica’s hair from her forehead. Her face was dreadfully pale, her breathing shallow, and he was instantly reminded of the night they first met in the snow-covered lane not far from Deller’s End, an age ago now. ‘Can you hear me?’ he said softly. ‘Erica, can you hear anything I say? Don’t die on me. Please don’t die.’
He fell quiet when Caroline came back into the room. She dumped a couple of carrier bags unceremoniously onto the floor. ‘Best get something to eat,’ she advised.
‘I can’t! How can I eat?’ He stroked Erica’s shoulder. ‘So what, we sit around eating soup till she dies, is that it?’
‘It’s all I can suggest. Welcome to our world. You’d better get used to it; it’s your world now.’
He rose shakily to his feet. ‘I’ve got to go get help. I’m not just going to stand here and watch…‘ He paused, the words lodging in his throat. ‘I’m not going to watch this woman die before my eyes without lifting a finger to help her. I’m going out to get help, phone for an ambulance’
‘You can’t do that, and you know it.’
‘This Pipistrelle you work for, this Lunar Club — get them to help. For God’s sake, do something can’t you?’
‘I am,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m fixing you soup.’
‘You’re fucking crazy!’ he said, storming to the door.
‘She’ll be dead before you get back,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you rather spend what little time you have with her? For her sake? After all she’s tried to do for you, after all the hell this poor woman has been through for countless years. It’s the least you can do. She’s had to endure severe and crushing loneliness for years, decades, centuries even. Don’t let her die lonely. At least let her die in the company of someone who she loves, and who loves her in return.’
He was taken aback by the tenderness in her voice, her hard exterior powdering away for a few telling seconds. She poured soup into the pan, watched it begin to bubble furiously under the intense heat. He came slowly back into the room, sat down beside the mattress and took Erica’s lifeless hand.
‘But if she’s immortal surely she can’t die,’ he said helplessly.
‘She’s not invulnerable. She ain’t no Superwoman. If she got hit by a bus, or a bullet for that matter, the effect is the same as on your ordinary person. We’re all mortal. So my advice is not to go around thinking you’re Superman, either. If I kick you in the balls then you’re going to feel it.’
‘What makes you so sure I’m like her? We don’t know who my father is.’
‘We’re not sure. But there’s a good fifty-fifty chance you are. Lambert-Chide was willing to bet you inherited her longevity gene, and Doradus wasn’t going to take any chances at all; he was going to bump you off just to make doubly sure. Something he’ll continue to do until he finishes the job.’
‘And you? Why are you taking a chance for someone who might turn out to be just another ordinary Joe?’
Caroline took bread out of its cellophane wrapper and poured soup into two plastic dishes. She handed one over to Gareth. ‘Don’t expect me to play house all the time,’ she said.
‘You’re avoiding my question again,’ he said. ‘Why are you involved in all this? Was it simply to get at Tremain?’
She blew over the hot soup, steam flaking off like spirits. ‘Pipistrelle is my father,’ she said, then checked herself. ‘Well, not really my father. I’ve no idea who that is. But he cared for me, brought me up when my mother died. He’s the only family I’ve got. I haven’t got anyone else. Regular orphan Annie.’
‘What is he, some kind of vigilante?’
She smirked. ‘Hardly the type,’ she said. She put the dish on the floor. ‘Look, final history lesson, so listen up. Pipistrelle — real name Charles Rayne. This all began when his grandfather, Inspector Thomas Rayne, a cop in the Met, investigated the murder of a man called Jimmy Tate back in 1929. It’s a murder that’s never solved. In fact a lid seemed to be put on the case, and Thomas Rayne finds himself put conveniently out of action when he starts to get close to the truth. Anyhow, he continues with his investigations privately. Charles Rayne, his grandson, takes over the project when his grandfather dies. He gradually builds upon his grandfather’s studies and is amazed to confirm what his grandfather had posited. See, once he realised Evelyn Carter had used one false ID after another, always following the same pattern of taking on a dead person’s identity he was able, over twenty years additional painstaking research, to build up a bigger picture as to how long she’d been doing it. And it turns out that stretched back a mighty long time.
‘Evelyn Carter and Jimmy Tate had something in common. First, they both used dead people’s identities — the first clue for Rayne that they were connected in some way; secondly, Evelyn’s reaction to the recounting of Jimmy’s death by David Lambert-Chide, as mentioned in Rayne’s journal, suggested she might have been closely attached. Turns out she was. So Charles did more digging around Jimmy Tate, using his trail of false IDs as stepping stones all the way back to a man called Stephen de Bailleul, a man who shared her death-defying genes, who taught her to survive. Charles’ conclusion was the bizarre possibility that there had obviously been a number of people who had lived a tad more than their allotted three score and ten. Not only that, his investigations into the medieval symbol uncovered the continuing presence, albeit in secret, of the Church of Everlasting Bliss. It soon became apparent to him that people like Evelyn Carter and de Bailleul had been systematically hunted down and exterminated by this Church. Condemned by the Church as being Serpentiles — you remember, the descendents of the original Eden serpent — they used some kind of God’s Holy Hit Man called Camael, otherwise known as the Dark Angel of Doradus, to despatch the unlucky victims in a sick and time-honoured ceremony. You’ve seen what that looks like and it isn’t pretty. So not only did these poor people have to continually reinvent themselves every few years so as not to draw unwanted attention to themselves, they had to contend with the Church of Everlasting Bliss on their tails determined to wipe out every last one of them. Anyhow, at the beginning the Lunar Club didn’t know fully about the Church and its workings. For Charles Rayne and his grandfather before him it all began with Evelyn Carter. It starts out as historical inquisitiveness — what would it be like to speak to a woman who has lived four hundred years? Every historian’s dream. Charles, however, has an illness that keeps him indoors out of sunlight so he thinks it’s time to go to his two colleagues who make up the Lunar Club, fellow historians whom he trusts. He convinces them she exists and they pool resources and skills, eventually managing to locate the woman they think might be Evelyn working as a maid in a hotel under an assumed identity.
‘They don’t want to spook her so Howard Baxter keeps a low profile, and just as he’s about to make first contact at the woman’s home men turn up and take her away. At first he thinks it’s Doradus, but he follows them to the Lambert-Chide building in Brentwood on the Golden Mile. More to the point they enter by the back door. She goes in but she doesn’t come out. The Lunar Club do some historical digging and discover that labs below the building had been used for clandestine research into chemical warfare during the Second World War.
‘They don’t fully know what’s going on, but by putting two and two together they suspect Evelyn is being held as part of some kind of experiments into ageing. They needed to get her out and that’s where my mother, Stephanie Jacobs, comes into it. Howard Baxter managed to secure a secondment in the archives at Brentford in order to spy out the comings and goings of staff. Eventually he spotted, and was able to target, my mother. Pipistrelle persuaded her to help get Evelyn out of the lab complex. She died freeing her.
‘Evelyn’s heavily pregnant with twins. You’re born OK, but as you know your twin sister dies during birth. Evelyn is moved to a safe house the Lunar Club have prepared. At first, they don’t agree about what they should do next. They know they’re sitting on weird stuff here. One of them argues for going public. The others urge caution. Whilst they’re arguing it out Doradus comes sniffing too close to Evelyn’s safe house. She suspects, wrongly, that the Lunar Club is in cahoots with Doradus and she makes a bolt for it with you as a babe in arms. Lambert-Chide was right: she chose to abandon you rather than risk Doradus finding you with her. That couldn’t have been an easy choice for her to make.
‘But that’s not quite the end of the story. Charles loses all sign of Evelyn but traces you to a welsh orphanage. He knows you are Evelyn’s child; you are found with a tiny coin on a chain which he saw her make for you after you were born. It was almost as if sooner or later she knew you must part ways, but needed some way of demonstrating who she was if she had to come back into your life. And that had to happen at some point, in order to help you survive.
‘As for the Lunar Club, things get a little heated. It dawns on them they’re dealing with something far more sinister, far bigger than they bargained for with the Church of Everlasting Bliss, meaning they dare not go public. That would have been virtual suicide when they realise the depth of Doradus’ influence in society. Two of them — Carl Wood and Howard Baxter decide it’s best to let the entire thing drop, for their own safety, so the Lunar Club collapses and the men hardly see each other again, keeping quiet about the entire affair. But Pipistrelle can’t forget Evelyn or you. He tries to find her again, but he can’t do it on his own. That’s why he eventually needed me.’
They ate in silence. Gareth’s mind had reached overload, all manner of conflicting emotions swirling sickeningly within him and adding to his utter sense of confusion. The overriding feeling was one of despair. It hung in the cold, clammy air, wrapped its chilled arms around him. Erica laid still, her face slightly twisted by pain. He put his barely-touched soup on the floor and lifted her head carefully so that it rested on his lap. He stared fixedly at the few strands of her hair that draped thread-like over his fingers.
‘She knew she had to help you survive, in the same way she’d been taught by de Bailleul,’ Caroline said. ‘She’d prepared false ID, and the box of gold was for you. It wasn’t stolen. It had been acquired over a long period of time. Gold is truly portable. She always avoided banks. Safer to have something stashed away you can exchange for money rather than traceable accounts. And she generally only took jobs where she could keep her head low, where few questions are asked about the comings and goings of employees, working for cash-in-hand, leaving as little a trail as possible. But Doradus discovered where she’d been working in Manchester, made a botched attempt at killing her then came close to discovering who you really were. So she was forced out of hiding earlier than planned. The rest is history,’ she said, not fully realising the irony of her words.
‘I still don’t read you,’ he said. ‘I still don’t get why you do this, why you’ve put your life at risk for us. We can’t mean anything to you.’ He saw how she looked at him, a strange, almost fond light in her eyes. She turned her head away from him. ‘What’s driving you, Caroline Jacobs?’
‘Hate,’ she said, though the word carried not an ounce of feeling. ‘The hatred of all the evil we are capable of. Religion, science, they’re both as bad as each other, both of them searching for their own Final Solution. Unspeakable things have been done in both their names. And science, well that’s just religious extremism in another guise, the search for the Holy Something that can never be found. Lambert-Chide and his kind are as bad as Doradus and every group that ever put a bomb under a car or flew a plane into a building. And in-between them both, ordinary people get crushed.’ She turned to study him, the angle of her chin lit by the faint blue glow from the primus stove which she’d left burning. ‘You and me, we’re not so different. Both of us alone. Both of us don’t know where we came from, don’t know where we’re headed.’ She rubbed at her temple with her index finger. ‘I do what I do to ease the hate, but it doesn’t work. I guess it never will. It’s like a cigarette for the soul. One last drag and it will all feel better. But it’s never one last drag, is it? You’ve gotta keep lighting up.’
‘Your mother was very special, to give her life for another. I don’t know if I could do that.’ He thought back to Fitzroy. All he had to do was say no but he couldn’t even manage that. He felt small, pathetic, useless, surrounded by all these brave people that held up a mirror to his own cowardice.
‘I guess it was hatred that drove her too,’ she said. ‘This time it was hatred of herself, at what she’d become. She was a Polish Jew, born in early 1945 shortly after her mother, my grandmother, arrived in Auswich. She was born into the camp. Stephanie and her mother survived, but her entire family were wiped out. Not an aunt, uncle or cousin remaining. They came to England after the war, settled in the north, Stephanie being put through university on the back of my grandmother’s hard graft in the cotton mills. She never really saw her daughter’s success, because ill health brought on by her time in the camps eventually killed her, leaving Stephanie all alone. All alone except for her medical career, which she threw all her energies into, doing the best she could for her mother’s sake. She got spotted and recruited by Lambert-Chide as an exceptional researcher for Project Gilgamesh.
‘But she finds herself involved in experiments that she convinces herself are for the greater good. She looks like she has everything — money, a bright career ahead of her and the patronage of one of the world’s wealthiest men. But the Lunar Club did some digging into her past, looking for some kind of emotional lever, maybe even something they could use as blackmail. Being historians they soon found out what had happened to her family during the Second World War. Pipistrelle used that information to make her see things as they were, and the evil nature of what they were doing to another human being. Confronted with this she realised that she was no better than those sick bastards at Auswich and she was horrified, felt compelled to do something to help. I don’t know, maybe it was partly some kind of atonement for her part in things; maybe by getting your mother out of Project Gilgamesh she was helping her own mother out of Auswich. Who knows exactly what goes on in people’s fucked-up heads?’ She tore off a chunk of bread and stuffed it into her mouth. ‘As for me, well I’m the product of one of a number of short-term relationships she had. Seems she struggled to hold them down.’ She gave a flicker of a smile. ‘Same trouble here. Like mother like daughter, eh?’ Then the smile wafted away as if on a breeze.
‘You don’t fool me,’ he said. ‘You come over as cold and heartless, but that isn’t you.’
‘No? What do you know?’
‘I know that it’s a mask you wear. It’s because you care that you are like you are, that you’ve done what you’ve done. So what is it, your time out in Afghanistan?’
She got hurriedly to her feet. ‘That’s not open for discussion.’
‘Who are you really fighting here, Doradus or your own little demons?’
‘Cut it, Davies.’ She went to the door.
‘Something screwed you up, that’s for sure,’ he said. ‘I’m betting this is the tale of a lonely young woman, missing a mother she never knew. I reckon she’s the worst kind of angry teenager and needs somewhere to let it all out, something to kick at when she’s finished kicking at all the doors she can. So somehow she ends up in the army. She finds comradeship, yet she can lose herself in a faceless mass. She’s good at her job, because she’s good at anything she does, launches herself into whatever it is with a passion, because passion burns up energy, helps burn up the hatred in her. Maybe they put her on special ops or something. Whatever it was they trained her for she witnesses things that screws up her head even more, because war isn’t therapy; it’s hell. She’s discharged but the war doesn’t go away, and neither does the lonely teenager kicking at doors. It’s all still in there, poisoning the soul. Then somehow she stumbles across what Pipistrelle’s been involved with. She persuades him to tell her about Evelyn and me. More importantly, she finds out how her mother really died. I don’t know, maybe Pipistrelle has to tell her because he needs her help. Whatever happened, she gets involved too. In some ways it suits her. It’s what she needs. Doradus is another door to kick against. She’s found her own private War on Terror.’ She had her back to him. He saw she was breathing heavily. ‘Tell me I’m wrong,’ he said.
‘It’s going to be light in a couple of hours,’ she said dully. ‘We can stay here for a while but we need to be out by nightfall.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m not leaving her,’ he said.
Caroline came across and bent down to her. She felt at Erica’s neck for a pulse. ‘You don’t need to worry about that. She’s dead,’ she said evenly. Then her eyes softened. ‘I’m sorry.’
Gareth was choked into silence. Whilst he’d been talking Erica had slipped quietly away. He stroked the woman’s shoulders tenderly, and without warning, against his will, he burst into a fit of uncontrollable tears. Caroline left him alone, going outside to stand in the cold, her arms folded tightly around her. She stared up at the massive cathedral-like dome of the sky as dawn began to furl back the chill of night.