Matt Hilton - Dead Men's Harvest

The smoker had his back to me. He was tall and square shouldered, dressed in a polyester suit and scuffed rubber-soled shoes. Didn’t look like either a maid or cook to me. He wasn’t finished concealing the cigarette. I saw him duck down and brush more dirt over the incriminating hole, probably stalling before returning to his duties. As he crouched, his jacket rode up on his hip. There was a gun clipped to his belt. That made up my mind.

As the man stood, brushing soil from his fingertips, I moved on him. I slipped my Ka-bar into my belt so both hands were free. Moving low so that he didn’t catch me in his peripheral vision, I raced towards him. I caught him just as he was turning back to the house, looped one hand under his jaw and grabbed at his opposite shoulder. My other hand I latched on to his hair, yanking him backwards as I stamped into the soft flesh at the back of his right knee. Twisting him as he fell, I jammed him face first into the lawn, stifling his shout of alarm. Then dropping to my knees, straddling his lower back, I hauled up and back and heard the resulting crack of his spine. I allowed him to flop down, inert. His nose was inches from where he’d concealed the cigarette butt in the earth, and I wondered if his final living sensation would to be to smell the tobacco he’d planted.

Rolling the man on his back, I saw his face for the first time, and was surprised to find that I knew him. He was one of the men who’d survived the breakout when I’d liberated Rink from the house in North Carolina. He’d stood alongside Baron, ineffectively aiming a gun at us as we’d taken off in the Bell UH-1N helicopter. If he was here, then it stood to reason that Baron might be here too. Better and better: the opportunity to finish two of my enemies at the same time.

Of course, the stakes had just risen tenfold. Despite downplaying Baron’s abilities earlier, I knew he wasn’t going to be easy to kill. Indeed, he might take me out first. His presence made me wonder about Imogen. Had she made it safely to Machias as I’d hoped, and had Hartlaub and Brigham successfully picked her up? Surely Baron couldn’t have got to Maine, snatched her and then travelled back here in the time we’d been over at Rene Moulder’s place? No, I decided, it wasn’t possible. I tried to put Imogen out of my head, but it wasn’t easy. Since rescuing Rink I’d been pretty single-minded, but now that she’d intruded on my thoughts, Imogen wasn’t going away.

I gave myself a mental shake. I remembered thinking once that I couldn’t allow a pretty face to distract me from my mission. On that occasion the face had belonged to Imogen’s sister, Kate. The reminder was equally valid now. I bent and grabbed the dead man’s ankles, dragged him across the lawn and shoved him between two large bushes. Then I set to my main agenda. Kill Hendrickson and Baron. Then kill Cain. Otherwise no one I cared for was ever going to be safe.

Jennifer Telfer was a pretty woman. A little thicker around the waist and thighs than Tubal Cain preferred in the female form, but she had an excuse. Bearing two kids had left its mark on her body as it did for many mothers. He watched as she walked from the black taxi to the front doors of her tenement building. She was laden down with six plastic carrier bags full of frozen food. Cheap brand name on the bags. The weight of the bags made her stoop and he could detect the strain in her face and the cords of her neck. Her hair was swept up and knotted at the back, a mother-of-pearl clip holding it in place. Beneath her lightly tanned skin he could see the fine line of her mandible, the high cheekbones, and the curves of her orbital sockets. He looked beyond the flesh, judging the bone structure, knew that her cranium would be a fine trophy.

Jennifer entered through a glass door smudged by thousands of handprints. The interior of the building was deep in shadow, but within seconds a spill of light fell across her as the doors of an elevator swept open. Jennifer stood aside, making way for an old man. They exchanged a nod and a couple of words then Jennifer stepped inside, placing the bags down gratefully. She looked out as the doors began to close. She seemed to have straightened, looking even prettier now that the effort had disappeared from her features.

From his hiding place, Cain watched as the old man came out on to the street. He didn’t even look Cain’s way, just bent at the waist and set off with a determined stride, as though conscious of stepping on cracks and inviting bad luck to fall upon him. When the old man was out of sight, Cain moved out of the alleyway and across the road. He shouldered his way through the palm-smudged glass door and into the foyer of Jennifer’s building. The gloom wasn’t so bad once he was inside, most of it down to the effect of the leaden sky on the glass doors. Opposite him the elevator doors had closed but the mechanism still groaned as it delivered its passenger to the upper floor. He made instead for a stairwell. The stairs were filthy, mud-stained and streaked with other things Cain shuddered to imagine. He went up as quickly as he could, pushed through on to a landing and saw the door to Jennifer’s flat closing. There followed a rattle of deadbolts and chains.

Cain shrugged, went back down the stairs.

The children weren’t home yet, so it was too soon at any rate. He left the building, made his way back across the road and took up position again. Then he thought, To hell with this! Jennifer wasn’t going anywhere. She’d be busy unloading her budget-priced shopping into her freezer. She’d be preparing a meal for when the children got in from school. Maybe she’d tidy up the house a little, or read a novel or watch some daytime TV. He didn’t have to stand in this crappy alley all day long.

He walked back out through the estate.

Manchester was a city with many faces. After a bomb was detonated by the IRA, it led to a revamp of the city centre, but here where the normal people lived things still looked a bit like the Bronx did in the 1970s. The only thing that shattered the time-slip illusion was the profusion of satellite TV dishes bolted to the sides of the buildings. Some of the poorer households, where he guessed it was a struggle to put food on the table, weren’t without the dishes either. That told him a lot about the people here.

Out on the main road things looked better. There were semi-detached Edwardian and Victorian-era houses with tiny gardens at the front. Parking was a problem; these roads had never been designed with such a number of vehicles in mind. It made him yearn for the wide open spaces of the roads he was familiar with back home. Most of the cars belonged to mothers waiting to go collect their brats from school. Soon enough the rush would be on. He crossed the road — jaywalking wasn’t an issue here — and approached a cafe. More accurately it was a tea shop, as the sign proclaimed. He pushed inside, a bell announcing his arrival, and caught a young woman picking off a hangnail. She perked up at sight of him, offered a gap-toothed smile.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Do you serve coffee on your menu?’

‘Yeah, of course. Come and sit down, over here by the heater. Mug of milky or water?’

Milky or water?

‘Uh, is a “milky” the same as a latte?’

‘Same thing but about two pounds cheaper,’ the woman said.

‘Sounds good to me.’ Cain walked to the table she’d indicated. Beside it was a convection heater that was welcoming after his stroll in the damp air. He held his hands over it while the woman wiped down the table. Judging by the state of the cloth, it would have been better to leave it as it was. The woman bustled off to make his drink, straightening the ties on her apron. He studied the menu that had quite obviously been designed and printed on a home computer. He was bewildered by the food on offer. What the hell was a barm cake?