The Age of Scorpio

30

Now





A huge gun, shining and silver, held by a monster. Muzzle flash, slide going back in slow motion, used cartridge being ejected. Then the same again. Like getting punched in the chest, hard, except you don’t die when you get punched in the chest.

Beth gasped for breath and sat upright. She’d been killed. There was an afterlife. It looked like a motorway being negotiated at speed in a bloodstained Range Rover with spiderweb cracks in the windscreen.

‘Not professional. It was strange – they had skills but they acted like it was a school shooting spree.’ There was a pause. ‘Yes, download the satellite footage.’ Another pause. She was trying to recognise the voice. She’d been in a gunfight. No, that was ridiculous. She didn’t know the first thing about guns. Even as she thought that, all her knowledge about firearms became apparent to her. ‘I have the possibles. Yes, it’s likely they’ve changed the vehicle’s colour and plates.’ Another pause. His name was du Bois. He’d killed people in front of her. He wanted her sister. ‘We need to stop it. Police involvement worries me because the van’s armoured and they’re heavily armed. They’ll walk through the police but it could get Natalie hurt. That said, we need to stop them and a roadblock is the best idea I have.’ Another pause. ‘They are very resistant to damage. We need more nanite-tipped rounds.’

Beth turned to look at du Bois. He was driving like a lunatic, weaving the Range Rover in and out of the angry traffic. He was covered in drying blood.

‘Understood.’ This seemed to signal the end of the conversation though he wore no headset and she hadn’t heard the other side of the conversation from the Range Rover’s speakers.

‘What?’ Beth managed. She didn’t feel hurt, just weak and hungry.

‘You have no idea, do you?’

‘What?’ she managed again.

‘Someone’s put a lot of tiny machines called nanites in you. They’re very advanced. It’s technology derived from one or more ancient alien civilisations.’

‘What?’ Beth wondered why he would make this nonsense up.

‘You’ll have to cope with the denial later. Suffice to say, unless the damage is too much or there’s too little left of your body, they will put you back together.’ He slewed the Range Rover off the hard shoulder, up the slope at the side of the road and then back down onto the motorway in front of a furious driver who was liberally using his horn to critique du Bois’s driving.

‘Where?’ she asked, thinking this would be easier.

‘On the way to Southampton airport to stop the very nasty gentlemen who have kidnapped your sister from getting onto a private jet and flying somewhere even less convenient than Hampshire.’ Du Bois drifted the Range Rover across three lanes as they headed up a hill. Beth glanced behind her to see Portsmouth disappearing from view.

‘Those people . . .’

‘Who? The gunmen? They’re up ahead. Their van has changed colour and they’re driving carefully. I have a satellite link feeding me footage. At least I think it’s them. There are a couple of possibilities.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The footage? It’s being fed directly into my head. Remember those tiny machines we discussed.’ He was clearly mad. She still had her great-grandfather’s bayonet and suddenly she was hell on wheels in a gunfight and could survive being shot. She saw the faces of the zombies one after another as she’d shot them almost instinctively.

‘No, not the gunmen. The zombies.’ Du Bois didn’t say anything, just concentrated on weaving in and out of the traffic. ‘They were dead, weren’t they?’

‘They were slaved. Normal people who had been infected with a specific type of nanite that allows someone else to control them.’

‘Innocent people?’

‘Yes.’

Beth started to shake.

‘Could they have been helped?’

‘Given time and resources.’ After he had answered honestly, it did occur to him that it would have been better to lie.

Beth was not prone to hysteria, or panic, or tears, but she felt a pressure in her chest and was finding it difficult to catch her breath. She was also shaking like a leaf. Du Bois spared a glance at her. He could see how pale she was, even covered in dry blood. He wished he could have this sort of response, a normal healthy response, to having just killed a lot of people who largely didn’t deserve it. Instead for him it was a very cold and clinical, some would say cynical, equation. He would kill tens and many thousands would survive.

‘Okay, Beth. If you concentrate you can control this.’

‘Control this? Control this! I’ve just committed mass murder with some f*cking madman! I don’t want to control this!’

‘We had no choice. The death of those people was the fault of the men who have your sister. I need to know if you want your sister back.’ They were on the hard shoulder now, undertaking car after car.

‘You bastard.’

Manipulative or not, he needed her help.

‘Undoubtedly. I need you to handle a gun. Are you with me?’ She said nothing but he noticed that the shaking had stopped.

‘Why didn’t we just drive away with Talia? This thing’s armoured, right?’ Beth asked, though in the heat of the gunfight it hadn’t occurred to her.

‘We were armed to the teeth and very difficult to kill. It never occurred to me that we’d lose.’

‘So they can’t be killed either?’

‘There are ways, and I’m carrying two now.’ He had his .45 back. It was loaded with the only magazine of nanite-tipped bullets he had. He also had the punch dagger on his belt buckle. Beth didn’t say anything.

King Jeremy glanced in the side mirrors again. It was definitely the same Range Rover and it was closing on them fast. They must have been augmented somehow, which worried him. He’d heard rumours of other agencies that knew about the lost tech. He’d heard names like the City of Brass and the Circle but nothing more than that. If the goth girl was living tech, it could explain why others would be interested. He assumed they hadn’t fallen for the cosmetic changes they’d made to the van. The gunfight had been fun but he didn’t relish another.

Dracimus was next to him in the van’s cab. He hadn’t stopped talking about the fight and shooting the blond guy. Baron Albedo was in the back looking after the girl and stopping Inflictor from doing anything to her. Jeremy was trying to decide whether or not to try and bluff it or put some more of his uploaded skills into use and drive like he was playing Fire and Gasoline. British cars were boring. He had a pretty good visual overlay to make the whole thing look cooler if he went for it. He wanted to, but getting out of the country stealthily would make life easier.

Inflictor made the decision for him. King Jeremy heard one of the hatches on the rear window being popped.

‘Inflictor!’ King Jeremy screamed. His voice was drowned out by the thunder of big-bore rounds.

Du Bois was trying to make up his mind if it was them or not. The muzzle flashes, the roar of automatic fire and the sparks on the road helped. It looked like an entire magazine was fired. Du Bois was yanking the steering wheel from side to side, braking hard and then accelerating even harder as he tried to dodge the cars screaming to a halt or that had been hit. The cars that braked got rear-ended. One crashed into the central reservation, flipping into the lanes on the other side of the motorway. A tumbling, airborne car sideswiped the Range Rover. Du Bois fought with the vehicle, feeling two of its wheels leave the ground. He wrestled it back down onto all four.

Inflictor ejected one magazine and rammed home another. This one had red tape around the bottom of it. He poked it out through the firing hatch and pulled the trigger.

‘King J?’ Baron Albedo called.

‘Go ahead!’ Jeremy had to shout over the roar of the gunfire. Baron Albedo moved to the firing port in the other rear window.

Tracer fire filled the air, drawing lines of phosphorescent light between the van and the Range Rover, the lines continuing onwards as the rounds bounced off armour. There were two guns firing out the back of the van now. The second was accurate. Round after round impacted. The first was all over the place, firing at anything that moved, even cars on the opposite side of the road, causing more crashes as cars tumbled and flew through the air.

Du Bois accelerated, trying to get between the van and other vehicles. Their side of the road was mostly clear. The opening salvo had caused a pile-up that had effectively blocked the road behind them.

‘This many rounds, they must be Americans,’ du Bois muttered.

‘What now?’ Beth demanded over the sound of bullets impacting and the vehicle’s screaming engine.

‘We find a way to stop it without getting your sister killed!’ he shouted back. He hoped that the roadblock would work.

Then the ground started to shake. It shook so much that du Bois had to slow down to maintain control. He noticed that the van did the same. A crack in the motorway went shooting past – Du Bois almost crashed in astonishment. Something shot up out of the ground and grabbed the underside of the van.

For a moment he thought they’d run over someone. Which would have been cool. They’d just leave a red smear on the concrete, King Jeremy thought. Then the van stopped.

Seat belts bit into Dracimus and King Jeremy’s torsos. Talia had been laid on the floor and was slowly being buried in hot shell casings, her head towards the back of the van. Now her legs bent and she almost stood upright against the back of Dracimus’ seat. Baron Albedo hit her hard as Inflictor flew into the back of King Jeremy’s seat.

There was the tinkling of spent cartridges falling to the floor. Then nothing.

Jeremy recovered first. ‘Is she all right?’ he demanded. ‘Is she f*cking broken?!’ This could not be for nothing, he thought wildly.

‘She’s banged up but fine,’ a dazed Baron Albedo told him.

Du Bois had both feet on the brake as he tried to stop the Range Rover. The four-by-four left a lot of rubber on the road but stopped twenty feet short of the van.

Beth and du Bois looked in amazement at the tentacle sticking out of the road.

‘Is this normal?’ she asked in a small voice.

‘It’s really not,’ du Bois said, his eight hundred or so years of experience proving useless now.

There was the sound of more automotive carnage. On the opposite side of the road a large articulated lorry had jack-knifed in the road, blocking all four lanes of traffic. To du Bois’s eyes it looked like it had been done on purpose. A car swerved and shot up the bank into the air and then turned over. More and more cars hit the truck. One came straight through the lorry’s trailer. In front of the lorry a Portsmouth city bus was coming to a halt.

Something burst out of the side of the bus. It was moving too quickly to make out clearly, but it had a wedge-shaped head, looked armoured, moved like a predatory animal but was vaguely humanoid in shape, though with entirely too many limbs. Landing on the road, it leaped at the van.

Something hit the side of the van.

‘Hey!’ Baron Albedo said as Inflictor grabbed his Desert Eagle while drawing his own so he had one in each hand.

The side of the van was torn open.

Beth opened the passenger door of the Range Rover, climbed out and aimed the FAL carbine through the gap between the door and the vehicle. Du Bois was out of the other side, the Benelli shotgun in his hands.

Men and women poured out of the bus at a shambling run. There was something wrong with them. With horror, Beth realised that they all looked like the thing that she had fought in the greyhound stadium. Du Bois fired the shotgun again and again and again at them. The shotgun blasts were knocking them down but not killing them, but du Bois needed the nanite-tipped bullets in the .45 for the gunmen in the van. He was pretty sure they were the DAYP.

There was the sound of gunfire from the van. The six-limbed armoured creature staggered back but did not fall. There were cries of panic from inside.

The sliding door on the van’s passenger side slid open. Beth watched as the big one stumbled backwards out, firing a pistol in each hand back into the van. She started firing. Aim. Short burst. Correct. Short burst. Repeat. Round after round hit the big one with the inhuman face. She turned him red, firing so quickly that although they were controlled bursts it was almost like she’d emptied the entire magazine into him at once. He stumbled with every impact, bringing one of the Desert Eagles up to fire at her ineffectively. She ducked behind the door, reloaded quickly and then fired another thirty rounds in short bursts at him until he fell over.

Then the door on the other side of the Range Rover was ripped off.

Too many. The shotgun was the wrong weapon. He heard the rapid firing of the carbine from the other side of the Range Rover – Beth was holding up her side of things. He fired the last round from the shotgun and let it drop on its sling. By now some of them had made it to the van. He could make them out crowding around the van and dragging someone, presumably Talia, out.

The six-limbed thing turned and looked at him as if noticing him for the first time. At least du Bois assumed it was looking; he could see no eyes on the bony, ridged, fan-like head. It bounded straight at him with surprising speed. He only just got out of the way as the door where he’d been standing moments before was ripped off its hinges. Du Bois fast-drew the .45 and at point-blank range fired again, and again, and again. The entire magazine was gone in moments. It sprawled across the tarmac, leaking some kind of violet fluid. The .45 was smoking, its slide back. Du Bois stared at the thing. He’d used all the nano-tipped rounds he had.

Two more of them clambered out of the passenger side of the van’s cab. Unerringly Beth poured fire onto them as they tried to bring their weapons to bear. Driven by a cold rage, she was giving some thought to going over there and sawing their heads off with her bayonet when she had finished shooting them.

Du Bois ejected the magazine from the .45 and slammed in another. Firing from one knee, he started putting two rounds into each of the mutated people carrying Talia. They staggered and some fell, but there were too many and he had to be careful not to shoot the girl.

He stood up, ejected the magazine, reloaded and fired again, walking towards the bus, using a different approach now – shooting them until they went down. Two more hit the ground, but they were still moving. He suspected he was putting a lot of rounds into members of the Solent Sub-Aqua Exploration Club. Another magazine hit the tarmac as a new one was slammed home. He’d grabbed more magazines from the compartment in the back of the Range Rover after the gunfight in Old Portsmouth, but after this one he only had one more left.

The shot caught him in the shoulder, spinning him around. The ragged nano-fabric woven into the rags of his leather coat hardened, as did his skin. Had he been a normal man, the hydrostatic shock would have blown the limb off. One of the gunmen was firing through the rip in the side of the van. Du Bois turned on him, firing one-handed as he advanced, his left arm rapidly healing. Few of the shots were hitting but they had the desired effect of making the shooter keep his head down. When his left hand could move again, he pulled a fragmentation grenade out of his pocket and yanked the pin out with his right. He let the spoon flip off, his internal systems counting for him. Baron Albedo was firing as the grenade flew into the van.

The second was down but the third had made it to cover in front of the van and was returning fire. Beth was switching between suppressing him and putting more rounds in the two on the ground to prevent them from healing.

The van exploded. Beth prayed her sister hadn’t still been in there.

Du Bois had already turned and was sliding his last magazine home into the .45. The bus was beginning to pull away. He started running, trying to get an angle to fire on the driver. He risked two shots but they went wide. He fired the remaining six into what he was pretty sure was the engine block, but the bus kept on going.

He heard and his blood-screen told him that there was someone coming up behind him. He turned to see a man staggering across the tarmac, skin and flesh regrowing as he made his way towards him. Du Bois grabbed the punch dagger from his belt buckle and rammed it into Baron Albedo’s throat. The blade of the dagger disintegrated into nanites that surged through Albedo’s systems, quickly overcoming the young man’s own nanite defences as they sought ways to kill him.

Baron Albedo, aka Clifford Sharman, had once been a nice kid from a little town in north-western Idaho who got picked on for being clever. He died on a stretch of motorway a long way from home.

Du Bois holstered the .45, ran back to the Range Rover and jumped into the driver’s seat, throwing the shotgun in the back. A lot of the mutated people he’d shot were starting to get up. He could hear sirens and there was a helicopter in the air above them. Du Bois prayed it was police and not media.

‘Beth!’ he shouted. Beth jumped in. ‘They’ve got Talia.’

‘What the f*ck were you doing?’ she demanded. He put the Range Rover into gear and gunned it forward. Du Bois ran over Inflictor Doorstep and Dracimus. King Jeremy ran for cover around the other side of the smoking van as they passed. Beth glared at du Bois. He felt her stare but did not acknowledge it. He’d failed her.

There was no door on du Bois’s side. He reached over and pulled his seat belt on as he drove. Beth did likewise and then loaded another magazine into the hot-barrelled FAL. Neither of them noticed that the tentacle that had exploded out of the earth to bring the van to a halt had gone.

Du Bois took the Range Rover up the bank at the side of the motorway and into farmland, taking it across country to a road that would get them heading back in the general direction of Portsmouth. As soon as they were on the road he had another one-sided conversation with himself, requesting that the police stay off his back. Then he was requesting more satellite footage.

‘Do you know where they are taking her?’ Beth asked. Du Bois nodded and then asked her to get something from the gun compartment in the back of the car.

Passing over the M27, they got a chance to see the carnage they’d help create, two severe pile-ups, one each side of the motorway. The emergency services were struggling to respond. It had happened so quickly and much of Portsmouth’s fire, ambulance and police personnel would be at the site of the gunfight in Old Portsmouth. Circle influence or not, du Bois didn’t think that he’d be able to get out of this one. Someone would be hung out to dry, and publicly. You couldn’t keep blaming the Muslims. On the other hand, Europeans had been doing that since the Crusades – he of all people should know that.

Up onto Portsdown Hill, looking down on Portsmouth and Hayling Island next to it, on the other side of the Solent the Isle of Wight, a beautiful fresh sunny day with barely a cloud in the sky. They were in a bus, he thought. How much further ahead could they be?

Past Fort Southwick, Control started sending the satellite footage directly into his skull. Not dodgy low-resolution, spy-satellite footage, but footage from the Circle’s own satellites, though they pre-dated the Circle; in fact, they pre-dated humanity. He saw the bus pulling into the lock-up at Fort Widley from high above.

There was no subtlety or stealth involved. Du Bois drove the Range Rover through the rickety wooden door of the lock-up in the Victorian fort, narrowly missing being impaled by splintering chunks of wood. He slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting the rear of the bus.

Beth and du Bois were out of the Range Rover. Checking all around them. Where their eyes went the barrels of their guns did as well. Beth still had the FAL carbine; du Bois carried the .45 calibre Heckler & Koch UMP sub-machine gun that Beth had got from the gun compartment in the back of the car.

The lock-up had the same feeling as it had the first time he had been there. Cavernous and empty. They moved through it quickly, searching. Beth found the sacrifices.

‘Is this what they want her—’

‘I very much doubt it. Focus.’

Beth shook herself out of it. Du Bois knew that she was very much playing a part at the moment. He’d dropped some high-end skills into her head, and her natural talents and level of fitness had allowed her to keep up and integrate them quickly, but she would pay for it later with migraines that would make her wish for death, and probably with internal bleeding as well.

He spotted misshapen footprints in the grime on the floor. He cursed himself. He should have checked this place more thoroughly. He should have been more emphatic to Control about the importance of following this up and dealing with it, regardless of whether Control needed every last resource at the moment. The footprints led him deeper into the racks of equipment and down into the tunnels that ran through the fort. He signalled Beth and she joined him. They followed the prints.

They found the entrance in a storeroom. The passage was seven feet high and five wide. It looked recently dug. The walls looked fused somehow, which to du Bois’s mind wasn’t structurally sound. He glanced at Beth.

‘What dug this?’ she asked. Something didn’t look right. There was something more animal than human about this. On the other hand, it might have been her imagination playing tricks, what with all the strangeness of the last week.

‘At a guess, the same thing that drove a tentacle through solid ground to stop a van.’

‘Everyone wants Talia,’ Beth muttered.

‘Stay behind me and watch your shots. The rounds in your carbine will rip straight through people and into your sister; the ones in mine won’t. Any doubts, grab the automatic from the holster at my hip and use that instead, okay?’

Beth nodded and tried not to think about how many rounds she had put into the air during the fight on the motorway.

Du Bois didn’t say that if they encountered any more of the armoured six-limbed servitors they were in trouble because he had no more nanite-tipped bullets.

They crept into the tunnel. Moving swiftly, weapons ready. Du Bois was sure he could hear noises from further down.

It was a bump in the tunnel floor that gave it away. The walls of the tunnel, the roof and the rest of the floor were so smooth. It looked like someone had kicked up a bit of the floor on purpose. He stopped.

‘What?’ she asked.

He could hear her nervousness. Most of the rest of what had happened today had happened suddenly. Her system had been flooded with adrenaline, which her new augments would know how to use very efficiently if they were anything like his. But this walk into the tunnel was giving her a chance to think. Getting her scared. Giving her mind a chance to trip her up.

‘Malcolm?’ Nobody called him Malcolm except his sister.

‘Turn back. We need to get out of here right now.’

‘What? But—’

‘Now!’ They turned and sprinted back to the storeroom and then back out into the lock-up.

‘What’s going on?’ Beth demanded.

‘I think the tunnel was booby-trapped.’

‘You think?’

‘Would you prefer it if we were down there when it went off?’

‘What about Talia?’

It wasn’t so much that Beth was wearing him down – she had acquitted herself well, much better than most – it was more the day itself. It had been pretty intense, particularly for an operation on mainland Britain.

‘I just thought, perhaps unreasonably, that looking for your sister WOULD BE EASIER WITHOUT THOUSANDS OF TONNES OF RUBBLE ON TOP OF US!’ he screamed, finally losing it. Beth held her ground and looked like she was about to shout back. Du Bois was trying to work out how unprofessional it would be to have a cigarette. Meanwhile, he searched through the available information on the Solent Sub-Aqua Exploration Club via the liquid memory of his neuralware.

The tunnel blew. The door to the storeroom blew off its hinges; the collapsing tunnel squirted rubble out into the lock-up. Beth and du Bois were covered in dust.

‘Andrew Coulson, a member of the diving club and a demolition engineer,’ du Bois said, though he couldn’t really see Beth through the thick cloud of dust.

‘Did they have any lorry or bus drivers in the club?’ Beth asked. Du Bois thought she sounded a little sheepish.

‘Helen Smith, another member, had a full HGV licence, and Brian Wilcox was a retired bus driver.’

‘Maybe we should get out of here?’ Beth said.

‘What an excellent idea.’

They walked back to the Range Rover.

‘Do you know where they were going?’

‘I have some ideas. McGurk said that Matthew Bryant, the one you fought, was found in a cellar in a house close to the front. If there’s enough left of McGurk I’ll ask him which house.’ Beth looked at him sceptically. ‘I don’t know who or whatever they are, but they have their own access to S-tech.’

‘S-tech?’ Beth asked.

‘I’ll explain later.’ Or more likely it won’t matter, because you’ll be on a Circle operating table being vivisected, your nanites harvested, he thought bitterly, knowing she really didn’t deserve that. ‘But basically, seeding the local vermin didn’t work. And there’s a city in the way of accurate satellite thermographics, and that’s assuming they can’t counter thermographics anyway, which seems unlikely.’

Beth was staring at him blankly. ‘Are you just a madman?’

‘I’m not. Sorry.’

She watched an idea dawn on his face and raised an eyebrow.

‘When I spoke to Bryant’s wife, she seemed to be hiding something, or holding something back,’ he said.

They climbed back into the Range Rover as he instantly recalled Bryant’s wife’s address from his memory.

Down the hill through Cosham, onto the Southampton Road, under the motorway, Port Solent Marina and then Portsmouth Harbour proper on their left-hand side. Across the harbour they could see the grey stones of Portchester Castle. Beth noted that du Bois was driving less like a psycho now. Admittedly the roads were busy but she knew it meant less urgency. Less urgency meant less hope.

Du Bois turned the battered four-by-four, which was getting some stares – particularly as it was missing a door – into Castle Street. Beth noticed the nice houses down by the castle. She couldn’t even begin to imagine living here or what that world was like. It was more alien to her, almost, than the madness of the last few days.

The air was full of the sounds of sirens. There were now several helicopters in the air. She could see one close to the Spinnaker Tower at Gun Wharf. She guessed that was over the scene of the gunfight in Old Portsmouth. The others were to the west over the carnage on the motorway.

Some kids pointed at the Range Rover as they drove by. Beth stared back because she was too numb to think about turning away.

Everything about the house looked nicely suburban. Beth tried to suppress her contempt. She knew this was based on envy. Right now she would have given anything to live there and be oblivious to the madness that hid under the surface of the real world.

There was an estate agent’s For Sale sign stuck in the lawn with a big Sold sticker across it. The house looked empty. Du Bois didn’t curse, he just seemed to sag in the driving seat. Then the door opened. The woman coming out looked like she had been attractive when she was younger and had tried to hold on to her looks by using too much make-up and hair dye. She glanced at the Range Rover and put the box she was carrying into the back of a Volvo estate. She glanced at them again and headed back to the house.

Du Bois concentrated momentarily.

‘That’s her.’ He got out of the car and walked towards her. ‘Anna Bryant?’ She turned and stared at him. Apparently she didn’t like what she saw and backed towards the house. Beth got out of the jeep as well. ‘Mrs Bryant, I know we look a sight – it’s been a pretty rough day – but my name is Malcolm du Bois and I’m with Special Branch. We spoke over the phone.’ He reached inside his torn and battered leather coat and pulled out his warrant card and held it up for her. She stopped but still looked like she might bolt at any moment.

‘Is this to do with that?’ she inclined her head towards the noise of the sirens.

‘I’m afraid so. Can we talk in the house?’

She looked terrified but swallowed hard and then nodded. She must have worked out that it was something to do with her husband. Suddenly Beth felt absurdly guilty for the part she had played in his death.

‘I’m afraid I can’t offer you tea or coffee. We’re moving . . .’ she said, embracing platitudes to put off a difficult situation just a little longer. Du Bois assured her that was fine with a degree of impatience in his voice. ‘Why wouldn’t they let me identify his body?’ she suddenly demanded.

‘A possible biohazard issue,’ du Bois lied smoothly. It was the official cover story so the lie came easily. Mrs Bryant looked stricken. ‘When we spoke on the phone I was sure that you were holding something back. We need to know what that is, and we need to know now, I’m afraid.’ She had started shaking her head before he had finished talking.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ The lie and guilt were obvious.

Du Bois looked angry. Even so, Beth was shocked when a knife appeared in his hand and he rammed Anna Bryant back into the wall, putting the blade up against her throat.

‘Look we don’t have—’

Du Bois was astonished when Beth grabbed him by the back of his coat, spun him round and slammed him into the door frame so hard he fell to the floor.

Beth stood over him. ‘What the f*ck?’ she demanded. Du Bois looked apoplectic. ‘Not everything’s about bloody murder! Do you understand me?! Now you f*cking stay down there and think about what you’ve done!’ she continued before turning to the terrified Mrs Bryant.

Beth managed to calm her down and get the story from her. After she had reported him missing, after they had waited the requisite amount of time, after she had had him legally declared dead, she had seen him in the street, but he had looked odd. She had been too frightened to report it because it would have meant losing the insurance money and calling into question the house sale. She had not said anything because she assumed that he had abandoned her and the children.

Mrs Bryant had seen him go into a house on Alhambra Road opposite South Parade Pier.

There was silence as they climbed into the Range Rover.

‘You angry with me?’ Beth asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. I’m really f*cking angry with you. Want to take it out on somebody else?’

‘Yes, I do.’ Du Bois started the Range Rover, put it into gear and drove off.