D. Mitchell - The King of Terrors

He’d already been working on a story to cover the old man’s death, that Lambert-Chide was being kidnapped, possibly to be held for ransom, that security had given chase, the kidnappers had fired upon them unexpectedly. That’s when Lambert-Chide had been accidentally hit. On which note he was mindful of his nest egg up front. And what a fucking auction that’s going to be! He had both Russian and Chinese contacts that were falling over themselves to get their hands on these two. But first he had another score to settle — that bastard woman Caroline Cody had managed to outflank him somehow and that hurt like crazy. He was going to make sure she paid for it. He signalled for his men to take up positions on either side of him.

Tremain shouted, ‘Give yourselves up!’

More shots rang out, whether from his men or from the direction of the car he couldn’t be sure; the noise was bouncing around the rocks making it difficult to tell where anything was coming from. He’d instructed them to fire high, not to hit them — they were worth far, far less dead — but they were panicking under fire.

Gareth rose to his feet, dazed. He could not believe that Lambert-Chide had died right in front of him. Two more bullets whizzed over his head. Erica dashed out of the car and went over to him, raising the gun as she came to a halt and letting off three rounds, firing blindly towards Tremain and his men. She dashed in front of Gareth, pushed him towards the car.

‘In heaven’s name, Gareth, get inside!’

Then a volley of shots rang out and Erica lurched into Gareth, almost knocking him over. She groaned and slumped against him.

‘Erica!’ he said, grabbing hold of her, trying to support her dead weight. He put his arms around her and immediately felt the warm pulse of blood course over his fingers.

‘No! Stop it, you idiot!’ cried Tremain, dashing from out of the cover of the boulder to the man who had fired the shots. ‘Stop firing — you’ll hit them!’

Gareth saw the plum-dark silhouette bound from behind the rock. He prised the gun out of Erica’s tight grasp. As he backed away towards the car, half-carrying, half-dragging Erica with him, he raised the gun and let off a quick succession of rounds, firing wildly towards to where the shots had come from, surprised at the gun’s recoil. More shots flashed out of the dark in return and he heard a bullet strike the car with a dull, metallic ring. Caroline opened the passenger door and together they heaved Erica onto the seat.

‘Inside, quick!’ she demanded, thumping him between the shoulder blades with something like fury.

Caroline threw herself behind the steering wheel, ramming home the gear stick and jamming her foot hard onto the gas pedal. The car careered away in a cloud of dust, spraying pebbles far behind it. Gareth struggled to reach out and close the passenger door, almost being thrown out in the process. The car sped towards a barely visible opening in the trees which he hadn’t been aware of, and he closed his eyes briefly when he thought they might lurch headlong into a cliff wall or a boulder or straight into a tree trunk. He wrapped his arms protectively around Erica to prevent her being bounced around as the car hit a series of deep ruts, rattling the suspension.

‘You’ll kill us!’ he shouted as branches rapped the windows.

‘I didn’t want to feel left out!’ she said, wrenching the wheel this way and that. Finally the car burst out of the undergrowth in a veritable storm of leaves and twigs and onto hard tarmac. She slid the vehicle round and hit the gas again, forcing Gareth back in his seat. With a squeal of tyres the car raced down the black road.

Randall Tremain lay on his back, gasping for breath like a fish out of water, and every inhalation sent searing shards of pain spearing into his chest. He knew he had taken one of the bullets fired randomly by Davies; perhaps it was even the last one. He had been shot through the lung. He could even hear the sound of blood filling it up, or thought he could. He coughed, spewing up blood, and he screwed his eyes in pain. He suspected the bullet had gone on to lodge in his spine, because he could not feel his legs anymore. The two men came to his side, one of them chattering excitedly on the phone, the other bending down to him, unfastening his coat to check the wound by the dim light of a torch.

‘How bad is he?’ said the man with the phone.

‘Bad,’ returned the other, putting his gun away. He checked for a pulse. ‘He’s losing a lot of blood by the looks, getting weaker. I reckon he’s only just this side of alive.’

Randall Tremain winced as the words from over thirty years ago came back to peck at him like hungry crows attacking carrion. But the irony wasn’t lost on him.

Soon, very soon, he knew he would be just this side of dead.

A life. That’s what all this represented, he thought. His life. In the end, as with his grandfather before him, it all came down to the impermanence of physical things. This room, filled with an accumulation of the worthless, the seminal, purposeful and inconsequential. Drawn to people like iron filings to a magnet, and when that magnet is removed they will all fall away and be dispersed again.

A life.

Charles Rayne grabbed another armful of books and papers, carried them to a wheelbarrow by the back door and tossed them onto a similar mound of books and papers. When the wheelbarrow was full to overflowing he trundled it into the garden and tipped it onto a large pile of wood, books, files, sheaves of paper and cardboard storage boxes. He returned again and again, filling the wheelbarrow, tipping it onto the steadily growing pile in the dark garden, his actions lit only by the light of stars.

It felt sacrilegious to burn books, he thought. Some had been companions since his youth, staunch friends when friends were in short supply. But he knew he had to destroy everything that held even the slightest clue. There must be nothing left after he had gone, nothing that could be pieced together as he had laboured for a lifetime to piece things together. Nothing that would lead Doradus to them. He must protect them at all costs. He must continue to watch over them even after he was dead.

He stripped everything out of bedrooms, cellars, lofts, living room, kitchen, and his eyes were hot with tears as he did so. He knew this time would come. It was inevitable. He’d rather expected it sooner rather than later. But even so, it was difficult, in the end, to relinquish a life long-lived.

He paused only once, and this was over his grandfather’s old trunk. The catalyst to his life’s work. He allowed himself the indulgence of poring over the dusty old notebooks and journals one last time, the copious hand-written text and scribbled notes the results of many years of research and speculation. In them he found the connection between the young boy he’d been, disfigured by disease, and the old man he’d become, disfigured by duty.

He scooped out the contents piece by piece, as if scraping out a living thing’s insides, and gradually took it all down to the pyre. He placed the contents of the trunk carefully onto the pile, picked up a container of petrol and doused everything as thoroughly as he could. Pages of books fluttered helplessly in a thin breeze, the mound appearing strangely alive with their movement. He lit a match and flicked it onto the mound, watched the first bloom of blue flame spread across the fuel-sodden paper till the flames roared in triumph and raced across his life’s work.

He waited till he was certain it was being properly consumed, poking it with a long stick and letting air into it, sparks and tiny flares of burning paper spiralling into the night air like unearthly sprites.