Death and Other Lovers Read online

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  Contents

  Jo Bannister

  Epigraph

  1. Fire and Flood

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  2. Beasts of Blood

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  3. Kehama’s Reign

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Jo Bannister

  Death and Other Lovers

  Jo Bannister

  Jo Bannister lives in Northern Ireland, where she worked as a journalist and editor on local newspapers. Since giving up the day job, her books have been shortlisted for a number of awards. Most of her spare time is spent with her horse and dog, or clambering over archaeological sites. She is currently working on a new series of psychological crime/thrillers.

  Epigraph

  I charm thy life

  From the weapons of strife,

  From stone and from wood,

  From fire and from flood,

  From the serpent’s tooth

  And the beasts of blood.

  From Sickness I charm thee,

  And Time shall not harm thee;

  But Earth, which is mine,

  Its fruits shall deny thee;

  And Water shall hear me

  And know thee, and fly thee;

  And the Winds shall not touch thee

  When they pass near thee,

  And the Dews shall not wet thee

  When they fall nigh thee:

  And thou shall seek Death

  To release thee, in vain;

  Thou shalt live in thy pain

  While Kehama shall reign,

  With a fire in thy heart,

  And a fire in thy brain;

  And Sleep shall obey me,

  And visit thee never,

  And the Curse shall be on thee

  For ever and ever.

  “The Curse of Kehama”

  by Robert Southey

  (1774–1843)

  1. Fire and Flood

  Chapter One

  The fire told him it was time to move out, to move on.

  There had been other indications, but he had chosen to ignore them. He was happy where he was, with the woman he was with, and did not want to leave. The scratch-marks on his steel door could have been only an opportunist burglar—one with leather lungs, as Flynn’s apartment was five storeys and ten flights of stone steps above the river—and nothing to do with the visitation he had been half-expecting for the last four months. The funny phone calls that seemed like somebody checking to see if the apartment was empty could have been someone’s idea of a joke: someone he knew getting drunk in a Fleet Street pub and giggling into the lapels of his trenchcoat at the thought of Flynn having to stop what he was doing at intervals to answer the phone.

  About the fire, though, there was no room for doubt. The fire was arson, deliberate, premeditated, well-planned, well-executed arson, and it had been designed to destroy his darkroom and his home and maybe him too. It had come within an ace of killing Laura.

  Perhaps they had not expected to find her there. It was only these last few days that she had been living here: before that, when Flynn went out the apartment was empty. If they had laid their plans a week ago they might not have known about the woman.

  But they had seen her when she saw them, when she answered the door to them: two men, one in his twenties, one in his forties, of Middle Eastern appearance.

  In the brief time he had known her they had exchanged more intimacies than confidences, and he had not yet told her why he had to be wary of people of Middle Eastern appearance. In bed she had exclaimed over the scars on his back, but he had been too preoccupied then to tell her how he got them.

  Even so, she had lived in the world long enough to know better than to open the door of an isolated apartment atop an empty warehouse to two men without first ensuring that the chain was in place.

  It delayed them not a moment. The younger of the two produced long-handled shears from behind his back which nipped through the chain like nipping off a hang-nail. Then, still quite calmly, they shoved the door wide with enough force to knock her against the wall. Half stunned, she slipped down to the carpet.

  The younger one watched her. The older made directly for the darkroom; thirty seconds later he returned and they left. They took the key from the wooden inner door, locking her in. She picked herself up off the floor and stumbled to the phone, and while she was dialling the darkroom exploded.

  She owed her life to a hole in Flynn’s pocket. Even had she the presence of mind to go on dialling, the best fire crew in London could not have reached her before the chemical-fed flames did.

  But Flynn looked on camera-bags rather as overgrown handbags and would as soon have carried one as the other. Instead he piled lenses, filters and films into the marsupial pockets of an old combat jacket and slung the camera round his neck. But one of his pockets had a hole in it, and a zoom lens in its leather drum had squeezed through and bounced down half the steps outside the British Museum before he could catch it. It might be undamaged, but he did not want to take that risk with important photographs until he had examined it thoroughly on the bench and tested it. He went home for a replacement, and a safety-pin.

  The darkroom had no windows so there was no tell-tale smoke to alert him as he parked on the wharf and ambled towards the building. But as he reached the ground floor entrance, the one that was left open to accommodate the comings and goings of a community of winos who lived in the derelict lower levels, there was a sudden crash of sound above him and, startled, he shot his gaze upward in time to see his bedroom window sail through the morning in a million sparkling fragments that caught the pale sun as they cascaded towards the river. Behind them billowed thick, roiling smoke and a gout of flame.

  He yelled only, “Laura!” in horror and dread, the cry wrenched from him as if by torture; then he had flung aside the door and was racing up the stone flights as fast as his long limbs and his young man’s strength would carry him.

  On a corner he lurched into Derek the senior wino. Derek must have had another name once, probably another profession, but these were the only ones he acknowledged now. Flynn gripped his mouldering lapels and panted into his stubbly vacant face, “A fire. At my place. Get everybody out.”

  “Out?” Derek did not often go out. The last time was for a Crisis at Christmas reunion.

  “Out!” Flynn flung him aside and attacked the next flight of steps. By now the smell was percolating down through the building, a thick acrid smell with chemical overtones which were familiar but which he could not identify. There were all sorts in the darkroom, some o
f them flammable, some of them toxic. If it was like this here, what was it like in the apartment?

  Sheer physical exertion saved him from cowardice. Getting up these stairs left him neither the time nor the energy to dwell on what waited for him. All he knew, or cared, was that he had left Laura in the apartment—actually, still in his bed—when he went out two hours ago and so far as he could guess she would be there still. If the blast that took the window out had gutted the place, or if Laura had gone back to sleep, in all probability he was busting a gut for nothing but the chance to die in the same inferno.

  Going up the last flight he could not get enough air to feed his clamouring lungs, and his heart raced and leapt crazily in his chest in the effort to push round whatever oxygen was in his blood. The sound of it filled his ears. He could not be sure if the fire had stolen all the air, or if it had more to do with the ten flights of steps.

  The steel door barred his way. When he turned the corner and saw it through sweat-blinded eyes he thought, in a moment of utter despair, that he had left his keys in the car. But of course he had not: the car would not have been there when he went back. They were in his pocket—one without a hole—and he fumbled fitting them to the appropriate locks.

  Then the five-yard passage lit only by the naked top-light that burned night and day. The smoke was visible here, the smell overpowering. He could see it wreathing lazily under the inner door. He knew he should feel the wood to see if it was hot inside. He knew that if he did and it was he would not dare open it and Laura would die within a few feet, maybe within inches, of him. He blanked his mind, turned the key—luckily its twin was not in the lock on the other side—and threw the door open, flinching as he did so in expectation of the dragon’s breath of searing flame that would belch at him, crackling his skin, boiling his eyes.

  There was flame inside, and thick biting smoke, but not against the door. The burst window of the bedroom had drawn it from the adjacent darkroom and it was spreading out slowly into the living area. He hoped the livingroom window would hold out. If they got a through-draught in here …

  He shut the door behind him. The smoke made it hard to see. “Laura?” He got a mouthful of the stuff that sent his starved lungs into spasm. He doubled up, coughing until he tasted blood. All the time the smoke was thickening. Flames hung like a curtain, roared like Niagara, across the open door of the bedroom. He could not see her. If she was in there …?

  She had given him flowers, the day she moved in here. No-one had ever given him flowers before. He had to go out specially and buy a vase. If the tall glass flute he chose was not ideally suited to the frothy mass of chrysanthemums, Laura smiled and said nothing. The flowers were lasting well.

  Now he tore them out of the vase and shoved his handkerchief deep into the earthy-smelling water. With that over his face he could breathe—a little, maybe enough—without the fumes turning his lungs inside out.

  He had been in here maybe twenty seconds and still had not found Laura. There was a limit to how long he could stay: if the blaze flashed over it would kill him, but no more surely than if the air ran out of oxygen or filled up with toxic fumes. The time he had was a matter not of minutes but of moments. He had to find Laura, if she was here and still alive; and if she was not, establish the fact and get out while he still had a lining to his lungs.

  Keeping low, breathing the mingled smells of chemicals and chrysanthemum water, he moved along the wall. Smoke filled the upper half of the long room but for a few seconds yet he could still see under it. She was not behind either of the big couches set in the corner, not in the well between them; not among the forest of chair legs and table legs where ceiling-high bookshelves defined an arbitrary diningroom. She was not here. Had she been in bed still? The insides of him shrank. Nothing could have survived in there, the very wallpaper must be ablaze. He could not go in to make sure. Nobody could have gone in there. The thing was not possible. Surely to God he did not have to die to prove it?

  The kitchen? The bathroom was already a lost cause, filled with impenetrable smoke more deadly than the fire, but the kitchen was across the hall from the darkroom and the bedroom. If she had got in there and shut the door, and used tap-water to damp down her clothes, she could be safe—safer than him. He stumbled across the open space in the middle of the apartment, yawning before him like a football field though he had never found it too big before, and tried the kitchen door.

  She pulled him inside, slammed it behind them. Her eyes were enormous white saucers in her long black face. But she did not appear to be hurt, either by smoke or by fire; though he was not sure what burns on a black skin looked like.

  “Thank Christ!” He clutched her to him, feeling the tremble of her long body against his own. Abruptly he pushed her away. “We have to get out of here.”

  Her sculpted nostrils flared at him. “I’m not going out there—!”

  “It’s all right. We can make it, but we have to go now.”

  “Mickey!” Her eyes pleaded with him more eloquently than her voice, shrill and husky with smoke and fear.

  “There’s no other way.” He was struggling to stay calm, for both their sakes, but the panic he could keep out of his words and even mostly out of his voice was still audible in the elevated meter of his breathing. It might have been exertion, or the smoke, but it was not and—at least to him—it did not even sound like it. “It’s all right, Laura, I promise you. I came up that way only a few seconds ago. If we go now there’s no problem—we’ll be outside in half a minute.”

  “Mickey, I can’t go out there!”

  “You have to.” He turned both taps full on, dumped towels and tea-cloths under the flow. Then he used a jug to pour water over the long djellaba that was all she wore. The shock of the water hitting her drew from her a little breathy scream. He baptised himself in the same way. “Once we reach the steel door we can shut it off. The air stinks but there’s no fire.”

  Or had not been half a minute before. The roar outside was louder now. If the livingroom had filled with flame, or if the smoke had reached down from the ceiling, could they survive even the few seconds it would take them to reach the door? If it came to that, would they be better knocking out the kitchen window and jumping for the river? There was a narrow walk round the front of the building; they should have no difficulty clearing that, but it was a fall of five storeys into a river often thick with debris. Moreover, when the tide went out the water barely covered the silt below the long disused warehouse.

  He tried desperately to remember the state of the tide but could not, nor could he judge it from here. He thought it was a bigger risk than the fire.

  He pulled the towels from the sink, wrapped them round Laura’s head and hands. He could do nothing practical about her bare feet. “When that door opens, we’re committed. You keep hold of me, and you keep moving.”

  When the door opened he thought he had made a terrible mistake. Flames leapt in the doorway. Laura’s hidden face screamed in his shoulder. But mostly it was the movement of air which had made it flare up. The curtains were on fire now, the two couches smouldering, but the centre of the long room remained essentially free of fire, though the black boiling smoke was reaching down further from the ceiling every moment.

  Flynn had filled his lungs with the last clean air from the kitchen and doused his handkerchief again before tying it over his face. Now he hurdled through the frame of fire, dragging Laura with him.

  For a moment she was a dead weight resisting him; then she found courage from somewhere and she was running with him, letting him guide her but relying on his strength not at all. There was one bad moment when Flynn found the coffee-table in front of him and hurdled it, forgetting that Laura would not see it in time to do likewise. But somehow she did see it, or sense it, and got one bare foot on its polished surface, and the tug of Flynn’s hand and her own momentum carried her safely over, and then they were at the door.

  Flynn reached for the handle and yelped, snatching
back his hand. The mounting heat in the apartment had made the brass fitting hot enough to burn him. Before he could steel himself to grasp it anyway, Laura had one of her swathed hands on it and it was open.

  Fresh air fanning into the room fed the fire. They heard the roar behind them as the flames balled and burst, and the explosion of glass as the livingroom window flew out, but they saw nothing because they were running, heads down, backs bent, for the first real promise of safety which was the steel door.

  When they got there Flynn slammed it, shutting in the flames, and leaned against it, his chest heaving as if something had to give. But the safety they had reached was a temporary one at best: there was almost nothing here for them to breathe. They picked themselves up and proceeded, still quickly but no longer at that breakneck pace, down through the building.

  On the last flight of steps they met Derek. Flynn had his breath back by now, enough to ask, “Is everybody out?”

  “Out,” Derek agreed vaguely; “yes.”

  Flynn shook him by the shoulders. “Are you sure?”

  The wrecked man drew himself up with dignity. “Of course I’m sure. Else I wouldn’t be leaving, would I?”

  The first fire-engine arrived as they spilled out onto the wharf. The fresh air hit Flynn like a slap. His hands were shaking. Thinking, because he was still holding her, that it was Laura who trembled, he took off his jacket and put it round her shoulders.

  The firemen leapt from their appliance—which to firemen means a fire-engine and to most other people a truss—and began unspooling hose-reels. The officer in charge ran his practised eye along the assembled ranks of winos with growing despair. When he came to Flynn he breathed an audible sigh of relief. “You. Is there anyone still inside?”

  “Not where the fire is.” He explained about the chemicals and the steel door. “And as far as I know, not in the rest of the building.”

  One team trained a hose on the bedroom window belching red flame and black smoke above them. Another moved into the building and up the stairs, taking Flynn’s keys with them.