Jago Read online

  He picked up his petition and began to trudge home. To discourage burglars he always left the hall light on, and he could see it from a hundred yards away. He slowed his pace to a halt, and remembered his precautions. Tired and upset, he still knew the importance of precautions. He had seen what happened when those who should be vigilant got slack. Danny had no intention of joining the failures buried in a jumble in some military graveyard, their individual name markers a lie. The bodies had been so scrambled it was impossible to sort out who was what.

  He tucked the folder into the seat of his trousers like a schoolboy expecting a caning, and went down on all fours, stick in his right hand, ignoring his protesting knee. Slowly he crawled, stick sweeping the pavement in front for obstructions, trying to keep his body in the well of shadow made by hedges and fences.

  He passed his neighbours’ houses, alert to the slightest unusual sound. The Cardigans, the young couple who had moved into Mrs Graham’s cottage, were in their front room, cuddled up in front of the television. Danny was not sure of the Cardigans. They put up Labour Party posters during council elections and had a painting of two naked bodies twisted together hung over their mantelpiece. They had the lights off, so their window was dimly lit by the shifting colours of the television. He heard a newsreader’s voice talking about nuclear power stations. Television was such rot these days; even the BBC had gone over to the enemy. Sometimes he dreamed the real programmes came through if you twiddled the dial, wireless programmes: ITMA, Dick Barton, Special Agent, Much Binding in the Marsh. Danny stood up slowly and peered into the Cardigans’ window, just to make sure. On the sofa, Mr Cardigan had his hand inside his wife’s blouse, working away at her breasts. Not much of a threat, he supposed, but they ought to draw their curtains. They were lax, like all softie lefties. They wanted to give away all Britain’s weapons, but would be the first to moan when the enemy walked in. He left them fumbling in their ignorance, and edged nearer home ground.

  He remembered the first time he’d been made aware of the enemy. In the war, when the parachutist came to Alder, and the knot inside him had first been tied…

  All was quiet at Gosmore Farm as he crept past, in a crouch now, stick ready. The pottery sign hung unmoving by the front gate. He took care not to disturb the display on the verge. The pots were ugly, strange-coloured things, not at all like his own floral-pattemed plates and royal-family mugs. But he was still careful. The people who had the place over the summer would check in the morning. Certain they were with the enemy, he had not even bothered to take his petition to them. The man was supposed to be a writer. They were the worst, the so-called intellectuals, listening to violin music while they beat you with lead-filled hosepipes, wiping their arses with Union Jack toilet paper. When he was a kid, they had had real writers: Sapper, Captain W. E. Johns, Edgar Wallace. They had not written about slackers.

  The Conway house was quiet too. Bob and his wife were in bed; he could see an upstairs light. They probably didn’t care that their children had gone over to the enemy and were out terrorizing the countryside.

  His light was only a few houses away. His cock shifted, stiffening as his sureness grew. They were in the darkness somewhere, lying in wait. He was certain. He could picture them: olive-faced youths, tattooed numbers in the crooks of their elbows, oil on their skins, skeleton rifles at the ready. They would have someone on the garage forecourt, hiding behind the petrol pumps, rifle sighted on his front door. On some nights, they took pot shots at his greenhouse, shattering panes with silenced bullets for sport. They wanted him to know they were there, that they could come for him any time. They had all the modern equipment: sniperscope night sights, hair-trigger tripwires, body-heat-sensitive antipersonnel mines, brain-scrambling UHF transmitters.

  But he had the edge. They had trained on poxy A-rabs and bum-boy bombslingers. Easy meat. He was British, and this was Great Britain. He would outwit them. He would show the stuff that would make Dick Barton and Bulldog Drummond proud. He grinned, sucking in his teeth, fixing them tight in his mouth. He knew eight different death blows that could be struck with his cherry wood. He had practised on an old tailor’s dummy. The enemy was as good as dead.

  He passed the village hall, clawing uselessly at the festival posters. They wouldn’t come free. The Gilpin boy would be with them, of course, and Jago’s crowd of crazies. Killers all. It was easy to see where Allison Conway came in. She’d do for the whole troop every night. They would have her two or three at a time, getting into her from every angle while Bob and Nicola brewed them tea in the kitchen. They’d have taken over several families by now, just to get near him.

  He slipped into a narrow passage between two cottages, and squatted among the Starkeys’ dustbins. The folder made his waistband bite into his gut. He smelled rotten food. He had no reason to suspect the Starkeys, but it would be best not to bring them into it. They’d be a danger to themselves as much as to him. He went into the garden of the other cottage. It belonged to the Starkeys too, but had been gutted and was being refitted for sale. The piles of bricks, bags of unmixed concrete and stacks of wooden planks made ideal cover. He found a spot shielded from all sides, and paused to take stock.

  Peering over the top of a heap of rubble, he saw two tiny red dots up on the hill. They moved independently, occasionally vanishing behind trees. They were like the lights on his wireless that proved the batteries were working. The killers up in the woods had electronic equipment, obviously. It was so quiet he could hear a train rattling across the moor over five miles away. He breathed in silent gulps, nerving himself up for the final moves of the night. He’d be inside his house in ten minutes, the watchers beaten again.

  There was another narrow gap between the empty cottage and his own. From his kitchen window he could see through the hole in the wall where a similar frame would be put. Belly to the ground, Danny crawled through the doorless doorway into the enclosed dark. He stood up and leaned in a corner, out of the window lines of fire. He brushed dirt and wood shavings off his clothes. A bath would do him good. His knee flared up again, and he leaned hard on his stick. In the hot darkness, he discovered he’d been sweating freely. For an instant, as the blood went to his head, he was on the lip of blacking out. He pulled himself sharply back. Nearly home safe, he mustn’t let himself slip now. He stepped into the room that was once, and would soon again be, a kitchen. Glass crunched under his shoes. He tensed, stick up, ready for an attack. None came.

  He had the Jew-boy cowards on the run.

  The sink was tapless and dry. He climbed into it, and crouched, looking into his own house. The hall light seeped under the kitchen door, and he could make out the newspapers laid out under the cats’ bowls. He was sorry about the cats. They’d been company. But they’d got careless, and been casualties. The animals were unfit for the war. One, he was sure, had turned traitor. He’d caught her in a forbidden place and hanged her with all due ceremony. She wasn’t buried with the others. He’d put her in the dustbin.

  He braced his hands against the brickwork where the window frame would be, and lowered his legs. His back rubbed over the sharp ledge. His shirt came untucked, and his file shifted into an even more uncomfortable position. It’d be over soon. His feet touched the concrete of his own side path. He sagged between the cottages, hugging his own property. He listened for noises from inside the house. His ears were sharper now than they’d ever been. Breathing would give the bastards away. They could not hold their lungs for ever.

  There was nothing.

  Anyone would think the kitchen window was conventionally locked. The arm was in place and wired, but it was a dummy. Danny had hacksawed it through and glued it back in position as a blind. His whole house was like that; secure, but offering anyone who knew the secrets immediate emergency entry or exit. Only Danny knew the secrets. He looked both ways. The red lights were gone. They must be on the move. He didn’t have much time. He pushed the window inwards, and eased it gently to the right until he heard the hidden
catch click free. Then he pulled, opening a crack at the bottom. He felt under the frame, probing for a pull wire. That was the most favoured detonator. He couldn’t find trace of any infernal device.

  Silently, he yanked the window open and dragged himself into it. He nearly got stuck halfway, but managed to struggle free. Using the taps as handholds, he hauled his lower body into the house.

  Home free!

  In the dark, he sat on a tall stool by the draining board and pulled the window shut behind him. He secured it with the real bolts.

  His stick was still in the empty cottage, but he’d be able to get it back in the morning before the workmen began. The enemy could not operate in daylight. It was over for the night. They could huddle in their camouflage gear or take their turns with slag Allison. He was going to have a bath, then go to bed.

  He pulled the folder out and dumped it on the kitchen table. Then he turned the lights on. The writing on the folder was a livid red. It hadn’t been there when he left the Valiant Soldier. It was in Hebrew script; he couldn’t read it, but recognized a death threat.

  The bastards! They must have someone in the house.

  He took a carving knife from the rack. The blade was keen enough to cut hair. Every week he gave it a hundred passes through the sharpener. They knew he was in the kitchen, but wouldn’t come to him. He’d have to draw the killers out. He opened his kitchen door and stepped into the hallway.

  Nothing happened.

  Then he saw it. The wire was almost spiderweb thin, stretched across space from the corner of his framed British Empire map to the overburdened coat rack, back again to the front-room door, then to the thermostat. He bent under the wire, which would have been about neck height, and went to the staircase. He lay full-length on the steps.

  Upstairs. The Irgun assassins were upstairs.

  Clocks ticked in the house. He had a silent digital on his bedside table and an ordinary mechanical clock in the front room. Otherwise, there was only his wristwatch. There were more tickings in the house than he could account for. Some of the bombs must be on time fuses. He had to deal with his human enemies quickly, then devote his energies to rooting out and disarming the devices.

  He crawled up his staircase, eyes up, expecting another taut wire to appear in front of his face. He wanted to piss again, or maybe just to touch his cock. In his peril, he was aroused. It had been a long time. Perhaps the enemy would have sent one of their killer whores for him, like the murderess who’d come to the barracks in ’47, a fat-titted slut with a switchblade taped inside her thigh. Or like the parachutist in her tight black suit, a swastika around her throat. He’d be well within his rights to give her a shafting before he snapped her spine. It wouldn’t be rape; it’d be an example to the others, a symbol of his contempt for the enemy.

  The tickings were louder. He heard his own pulses and the master pulse of his heart. His mouth was dry. There was sand on the stair carpet. Lower down, it was a fine dusting, like the prints of someone barefoot from the beach. Towards the landing, it became an inches-thick layer that shifted and cascaded as he climbed. Sand got everywhere: in your clothes, your eyes, your food, your foreskin. You had to be careful. Sometimes there were scorpions. And it retained the heat of the desert sun. You could burn your hands in it as easily as in scalding water.

  On the landing, his broken-necked cat waited for him. She miaowed askew but couldn’t do him any harm.

  He was expected in the bathroom or bedroom. They liked to take their victims while helpless—naked in the tub, hunched over a bowel movement, asleep in a guiltless bed. Bathroom or bedroom. One or the other.

  Bedroom, of course. In his bed, in fact. That was where his killer would be waiting.

  Danny crashed through his bedroom door, lurching into a net of sticky wires that cut him. He dropped his knife, which slithered down the net, where his fingers couldn’t reach. His digital clock alarm sounded, and the killer under his blankets stirred, stretching out a serpentine, perfumed arm. She shut off the alarm. Red jewels glinted on her rings. She pushed a mass of glossy black hair up, clearing her ancient, smooth face. Her eyes were darkest brown, with cat-slit pupils.

  ‘Hello, Danny boy,’ she purred.

  Bedclothes fell from ballooning brown breasts. An eye-jewel shone in her navel like a button in the cushion of her stomach. She was naked but for her jewels. She had a necklace of cartridge cases, and silver snake armlets. The hair on her arms and legs was oiled flat against her skin.

  The wires around him were getting tighter. A pair across his chest were cutting through his clothes, drawing lines of blood on his skin. Lower down also, he could feel sharp threads drawing tight. His ruined trousers fell away in sections. He was still erect. Strangely, in his pain, he felt younger.

  She spoke again, Hebrew gibberish this time, and came for him. Her right forefinger was a lacquered gun barrel, and a revolving cartridge chamber stood out in her wrist, balanced on bone.

  They had him.

  The killer whore took his underpants down and squeezed his balls. Gently, at first. Not-quite-pain flooded him. He was drowsy, and dying. She stroked the length of his cock with her cold gunfinger. It stood to attention and she forced it down, jamming the head into herself. She slid smoothly over his erection, burying him. The whore ground against him. He opened his mouth for a death kiss, but her gritted teeth held back. Still thrusting with her wide hips, she reached up with one hand and held him by the back of his neck. The wires didn’t get in her way. Her gunfinger crooked as she touched it to his lips, then straightened stiff again. The metal tube forced its way into his mouth, displacing his dentures. His breath came in gargles as the first flashes of orgasm made him shake. The chamber in her wrist began to roll. Inside his head, something exploded.

  INTERLUDE SEVEN

  There was a plaque up in the church to mark the time when the village was the capital of Wessex, which was all there was of England in those days. In 877, King Alfred made his winter court in Alder, and, in the church that stood upon this site, King Gudrun of the Danes, lately defeated in battle by the armies of Wessex, was baptized into the Christian faith.’ In 1944, Jenny’s granddad, an American soldier who had come over for the war, had scratched, ‘and damn all has happened here since’ just under the plaque. When he told the story, Granddad always chuckled in a coughy way like an old cowboy on television and finished by saying, ‘Only, I didn’t exactly write the word “damn”.’ Actually, Jenny thought, something had happened to Granddad Steyning in Alder during the war, or why else would he stay? It wasn’t a subject her parents brought up at all, and she had one of her feelings that there was something they didn’t want to talk about tied up in it. Granddad Steyning had gone to Heaven when Jenny was small, but she could remember him well.

  On the day they heard on the radio about John Lennon being shot, the Lord God came to live in Alder. It was the Christmas holidays, and Jenny didn’t want to be in the house with Mum while she was crying over the dead Beatle. In all the years their house had had advent calendars, this was the first time no one remembered to open a window on the day it was supposed to be opened. When Jenny was only little, Mum had taught her the words to ‘Yesterday’ and ‘She Loves You’, playing along on the guitar which was in the loft now. Jenny bet Mum must have known John Lennon before she met Dad, and that was why she was so sad about him.

  Jenny played with her toy cars on the forecourt of Dad’s Shell station until Terry and Teddy Gilpin told her the Lord God was coming. She knew all about the Lord God, whose real name was Anthony Jago. He called himself ‘Reverend’, just like the vicar. He had bought the Manor House for himself and his disciples to live in. All the other people who had lived at the big old place had called it the Manor House, but Jago had put signs up changing its name to the Agapemone. She had tried unsuccessfully to put the syllables together in her mouth. Mum said that it sounded like a kind of fruit, but Dad, who had read about it in the paper, said agapemone was Greek for ‘abode of love’. Dad
said Jago was not the Lord God at all, but a dangerous weirdo. Jenny decided she would make up her own mind.

  Her parents didn’t much like the Gilpin brothers either, but none of Jenny’s school friends lived in Alder and there were only two buses a week to town, so she had to play with them during the holidays or watch boring television. Terry, the older, kept saying horrible things to her and trying to take her knickers down when there were no grown-ups around. She had called him a git once, and hit him with a biggish stick. She knew he hadn’t forgotten that. Terry was going to grow up to be like a baddie in a cowboy film, the kind who rustle cattle and try to shoot the goodie in the back. One day, he’d probably try to shoot her in the back. She was practising her hearing, so he would give himself away by stepping on a twig and she would get him first.

  Terry wanted to go and watch the Lord God and his disciples, ‘thick bunch of townie loonies’, move into the Aga-thingie. With Doug, the Gilpin dog, sloping along, they took the short cut across the soggy fields, getting over the ditches on planks although Terry wanted to jump, but staying away from cows. They found a place near the Manor Gate House and waited. It was not too cold, but the sky was cloudy and dull. Terry and Teddy threw stones in the ditch, making holes in the duckweed and watching them fill in. Teddy found a wedge of concrete he could barely lift, and heaved it into the water. There was a big splash, and Jenny got little green spots on her skirt. The Gilpin brothers thought that was funny, which just showed how stupid they were.