Kill The Monster, Chapter 3

I: OWNING A RONNIE

In the house, a spray of forget-me-nots and baby's breath lay on the dead man's chest, his hands coiled around them like a pharaoh holding his rods of chastisement. The coffin was a quality piece of work in dovetailed teak, handbuilt by craftsmen. The deceased would have approved.

Filing past the coffin, a seemingly endless succession of bounteously upholstered elderly ladies paid their last tearful respects, smothering the poor dead devil with hibiscus and magnolia. Sean wondered whether there was a such a thing as a factory that made sniffling fat women, and if so, whether one had currently taken up residence at the foot of the drive.

"Your aunt Irene was always fond of Owen", said Lilianne - and then, narrowing the crow's feet around her eyes - "a little too fond, if you ask me."

"Is she the one who goes on nudist holidays in Germany?"

"No, that's your aunt Esther. Owen used to call her Britain's answer to the Kaiser's war zeppelins. And her comes Auntie Vi. She is actually your auntie, you know, once or twice removed. Not an honorary one."

"What relation is she to me?"

Lilianne dunked a biscotto in her mulled wine absently. "You know on those anthropologists' charts, where homo sapiens has a common ancestor with pithecanthropus?"

"Something tells me you're not taking this entirely seriously, mum."

She actually stirred the wine with the biscuit, until it began to break apart. "Oh, I'm taking it seriously enough. Your dad's dead. He has gone beyond the one-way valve. You know he actually tried to explain his concept of death to me once in terms of a one-way valve?"

Sean sipped his own wine carefully. "Well, it's not often anyone makes the return journey. Ah, mum - your drink's full of floating biscuit bits."

She looked down in genuine consternation, and swirled the malted mess around in her glass. "Good heavens, however did I do that. What a waste of good alcohol. Ah well, nothing for it." She knocked the drink back in one, slammed it down on the silver platter passing on the end of a waiter. "Barman, line me up another."

"Mother, you're overtired."

"Whilst you're here, you might as well make yourself useful. There's a man in the hall who says he's from Hirondelle's. The car people." She grimaced and smiled wanly. "Oh. Oh my. I really shouldn't have drunk that."

Sean moved away into the hall, through the press of suits and gigantic floral headgear. A hand was thrust into his unasked. It had the consistency of leather, and pumped his arm as if its owner expected water to come out of his head.

"Aleister Stanley. GKN. Owen worked for us for longer than I care to remember. You'll be Sean, I take it. Got the nose, you see." Sean wondered if the sparkling array of teeth could possibly be real.

He searched his memory, and was too drunk to be polite. "Didn't GKN try to stop Dad from leaving and forming his own company?"

The teeth continued to sparkle. "I believe there was a bit of acrimony, yes; but I was all for it." Sean decided that the bite was too perfect. The straight line of the front teeth might have been measured with a spirit level. "So, it looks like Hirondelle have claimed another poor life, eh?"

This was clearly inaccurate. "Dad died of a heart attack."

A hand tapped the side of the nose. The extremely large nose. Sean seemed to remember reading somewhere that the nose never stopped growing throughout life. "Quite so, quite so. Just like five others in the last twenty years. And one death from anaphylactic shock, six carbon monoxide poisonings, three brain embolisms, and one water on the brain." The eyes twinkled, and Sean sensed a greater, possibly more evilly jubilant intelligence than he'd anticipated. "It's all there in the trade mags. 'Curse of Hirondelle.' Dangerous business, owning a Ronnie."

And then Aleister Stanley, old friend of the family, was gone with a wink, having delivered his final barb. Sean shook his hand and moved on into the dining room. Mickey was playing some bizarre game involving self-inversion on the Parker-Knoll. Sean took him in hand, straightened his smart clothes.

"Pretend to be a good boy, Mickey. Even though we both know all the world loves a bad one."

Mickey grinned in all directions. His teeth appeared to have moved around in his mouth since Sean saw him last. The Sudan contract hadn't gone on long enough to allow fresh teeth to sprout out of a child's head, had it?

"Good god", he said to himself. "Fresh teeth grow out of its jaw like a shark's. I sired an alien."

"I vill suck your blood, Earth human man", said Mickey solemnly.

"Vot do you vant?"

"I Vant your Vomen."

"Not till you're thirteen, sport", said Sean, taking Mickey by the hand, which Mickey hated. He was overtired. Mickey was probably overtired too.

The Hirondelle man was polite, middle-aged, respectful. He reminded Sean of a Japanese feudal retainer, never speaking until spoken to. He had given up his seat in the hall to a heavily pregnant highly removed cousin who appeared to be wearing a flowerbed on her head, and who was carrying out a highly risqué conversation with a married man who was none of her three husbands.

"I'm here to collect the car, sir. Baronia Hirondelle's condolences on your loss." If the man had had a hat, he'd have removed it. If he'd had a forelock, it would have been tugged.

"I'm sorry?"

"The car, sir. The Hirondelle. We were notified of Mr. Agnello's unfortunate death. We've come to collect it."

Sean's face wrinkled like a grape turning into a raisin. "I'm sorry? Er, the will hasn't even been read yet."

"The car will be of little use to you now, sir. The warranty is invalidated. Unauthorised maintenance has been done on the engine. And a Baronia Hirondelle can only be maintained by Baronia Hirondelle, sir", said the retainer with the firm confidence that other men said the Earth went round the Sun.

Sean put his hands in his pockets and blew out air. A phrase occurred to him. "So - Hirondelle's claimed another, eh?"

The other man stood silent and dignified. "You're not putting that dirty great thing in me!" shrieked the pregnant flowerbed woman. Sean hoped to God it was a punchline. Mikey tugged at his arm. "Why did Auntie Valerie say -"

"I'm not sure I follow, sir", said the retainer.

"Oh, you know the statistics - fifteen heart attacks in the last twenty years, thirty brain embolisms, all with some connection to Hirondelles. The Curse of Hirondelle, eh?"

"I'm sure there's no such thing, sir."

"Quite so, quite so." Sean nodded. "But I'm afraid you can't have the car." He fished for reasons. "Ah, the police still have it taped off. And like I said, the Will's still under probate. We really don't know who it belongs to."

The man's brow wrinkled. "That's peculiar, sir, we didn't see any evidence of tape when we visited the scene earlier."

Sean looked at the retainer oddly. "When you visited earlier."

"Yes. We made a complimentary visit to set the engine back in order after the unfortunate incident, sir. It was terrible to see, sir. The air intake had been completely removed, breaking over thirteen warranty seals."

"But not actually damaged as such."

The retainer considered his reply carefully, but could find no solid ground to strike from. "Investigations are continuing", he said finally.

Sean nodded, wondering how much pressure it took to break a human skull.

"Tell you what", he said, "here's a wild idea, try it on for size - could you possibly come back at some future date when my father's actually cold and in the ground, there's a good chap?"

And if he gives me another smart comment, he's going out that beautiful stained glass front door occiput-first.

"I quite understand, sir." He nodded. He almost bowed. "I'll make my way out. Would you like to me to leave via the rear?"

"Ah, no, no. Out the front will be fine."

As the other man made a final half-bow and walked out through the beautiful stained glass rather more slowly than Sean had been planning to propel him, Sean caught sight of the tiny electric car he had arrived in. It was painted grey. Outside, Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley had been banished to the garden, and were playing with a small boy, a distant relative, circling him in a manner disturbingly similar to the way killer whales played with seal pups.

"Ooh, you've come over queer", said Auntie Valerie to Uncle Whoever.

"Daddy", said Mickey, "why's Auntie Valerie laughing at everything she says?"

"Because Auntie Valerie", said Sean quietly, "has no idea of proper comic delivery."

He took Mickey's hand and led him back into the big room with the dead thing in it.

***

"Why did we have to do that?" Sam had already taken off her hat, even as Lilianne One began to shrink in the mirrors. She was sitting in the rear seat so she could watch TV.

He searched for possible answers for this. As usual, he had to select one from the numerous ones that were wrong. "Erm, because he's dead and he's my father?"

"I don't mean that. I mean Mickey. Does he have to see dead people?"

"I see dead people", said Mickey with relish from the back seat.

"I", said Sean, carefully avoiding generously proportioned women manoeuvring their thigh fat around itself towards the lines of large expensive cars parked on the drive, "see fat people in ill-considered hats."

"Sometimes I think you get desensitized to death with all th dead people you see. In the job, I mean."

Sean nodded. "I've never really thought about it. Dead people weigh the same as live people, and they take the same size suits."

"Yes, well, sometimes I think you ought to appreciate that Mickey's never seen a dead body before."

"Have now", said Mickey. "It was class."

"You think that's something", said Sean, turning out onto the main road. "Most of the ones I get to see are in bits."

Sam kicked the back of his seat, jolting him a couple of notches closer to the pedals. The car surged forward slightly. But she was laughing. He could tell.

"Eyeballs?" said Mickey.

"Eyeballs and guts", said Sean. "Sometimes you get to see what they had for dinner."

"When I grow up", said Mickey, "I want to see people ripped to bits just like you, dad."

At that point he cast an eye in the rear view mirror and saw Sam's face turn whiter than Owen Agnello's had been in his coffin.

***

"No, I'm telling you to take the BTR."

"I don't care if it's Russian, Pete, it's a big solid steel box on wheels between you and the mines and it does the job."

"What did we say when we took up the contract, Pete? What did we say about clearing by hand?"

"I don't care if you do all of it yourself. I don't care if you volunteer to strip off and roll up and down the field stark bollock naked. I want you to take the BTR and there's an end to it. I am not making another explanation to another tearful widow."

"What do you mean there's no petrol? There has to be."

"He siphoned it out? What for?"

"Then get him to clear the bloody mines, then."

"I don't care about his goddamned four-by-fours. We've got a job to do, and the last time I looked, we worked for the United Nations, not the Congolese army."

"No buts, Pete, I want that petrol back in the BTR by sundown and for it to be chugging up and down the field happily exploding antipersonnel devices by sundown, or Lieutenant Makanga's Iron Legion can spend the next week on bended knee jabbing the ground with pangas. We are not doing any manual clearance work we don't have to, Pete. Period."

He clicked the phone off. The school bus was already dimly visible in the distance. It was cold, and he was standing on an exposed stretch of moorland in nothing but a T shirt saying BUSINESS IS BOOMING.

"He's his own worst enemy", said Mickey knowledgeably.

"He is that", nodded Sean.

"What sort of mines are they?" said Mickey.

Should I really be telling him this sort of thing? Oh, what the hell. "MS-3's, mainly. Russian antipersonnel jobs, dirt cheap, especially back when the Soviets were handing them out for cigars and bananas."

"They only need six kilos of pressure to set them off", nodded Mickey. "The Soviets used them in Afghanistan."

Sean was genuinely startled. Did I tell him that? It does sound uncannily like me being quoted back to myself.

The bus was very close now, big and blue. Buses avoided the winding coast roads like the plague. It was a three mile round trip up to the bus stop on the main road every morning. Sean hated the bus run; on the rare occasions when he was home, it was his chore.

"It want a poster of the new US Matrix mine", said Mickey. "The one that can be remote detonated by a laptop computer."

"I can probably get you one of those", said Sean absently. "Uh, hey, big fella - do the other kids at school ever, um, think you're weird for having pictures of antipersonnel mines all over your walls?"

Mickey thought about it. "I've never really thought about it", he said.

"Do the other kids ever come round our house?"

"Not very often. None of the other kids in the village go to Bolitho."

No. None of the other parents in the village can bloody afford it.

The bus rumbled to a halt, brakes hissing like serpents.

"Well, this is the last time we see each other for a while, big guy."

Mickey nodded. It wasn't good form to hug your dad in front of the whole school. Mothers didn't understand this sort of thing. Fathers did. So, how to proceed?

"I'll try and bring you back something African. A severed leg, if you're lucky."

"COOL!" Mickey grinned and clambered into the bus, evidently so full of the desire to tell his peers he would be receiving a severed limb back from Africa that he could hardly control himself. Sean grinned back at Mickey as the bus rumbled away.

I am bringing up my only child to revere disembodied limbs and have an unhealthily encyclopaedic knowledge of bomb-making equipment.

Ah, well. They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad.

He turned back to the Landcruiser. He imagined that he, of all parents in England, actually needed one. There were two fords and half a mile of farm track between here and home.

He had almost made it back to the door of the car when the mobile rang again. He scrabbled for it.

"For FUCK'S SAKE, Pete, I told you once, we are not crawling up and down fields getting our arms and legs blown off. I want you to get that big black Lieutenant to suck the juice back out of his Troopers and put it back into the BTR, otherwise they are going to be doing it all by hand -"

"Oh, hello, Mum."

"Er...no, just work."

"What?"

"But I told them. I told them they weren't collecting it."

"What does he look like? Bald guy, mid fifties, hair completely white?"

"Okay. Right. Now this is what you do. You tell them to leave. You tell them to leave now. Say nothing else, and if you see them snooping around the property again, you call the police. Call me again in ten minutes, and if I don't get a call from you in ten minutes I will call the police myself. I will be there in three hours. There's something very funny about all this..."

He thumbed the call closed, pushed the mobile back into his pocket, and tumbled into the Toyota. It rumbled into live, wasting the planet's precious diesel, and moved off in the direction of home, though not the home he had originally intended.

***

He was half expecting, half dreading to see one of the pathetic electric cars still parked in the driveway when he pulled up outside the house. Not to worry. Lilianne One was no sweet, easily dominated little old lady. He had seen her take hold of a skinhead who'd thrown a rock at her car and shake him like a terrier with a rat, back in the day.

She was, however, worried. She came right out of the house. That could only mean she'd been waiting in the outside porch. The double glazing Agnello Senior had installed would have blanked out any sound short of a rocket lifting off.

"Did they leave?" There was a good deal of barking. Mr. Darcy had recently been weaned off jumping up at guests, and contented himself with headbutting Sean in the groin. Mr. Knightley, meanwhile, launched a surprise attack from behind. The nose of a red setter, by some evolutionary mischance, seemed to be a perfect aerodynamic fit for the human buttock cleft. Both dogs were technically still puppies, though they had to weigh more than Mickey by now.

Eventually, they backed off to a safe distance, tongues out, eyes wide open. Hello! We are your friends! We are very excited by you! We have no idea why!

"They left. You don't think we're maybe going overboard on this a little?"

"I honestly don't know." He walked up the porch steps through the beautiful stained glass into the hall.

"They were really very polite. They didn't argue."

"I've never seen anyone that eager to take a car off a dead man's family before." They were walking through the kitchen now, past rows of gleaming cleavers sharpened to microscopic thickness, capable of slicing falling wedding confetti. Owen Agnello never did things by halves.

"What do you mean by that?"

"Dad was definitely by the car when you found him, right? In his overalls? Trying to reach for his mobile phone?" Now they were in the back garden, walking down perfect emerald swimlanes of lawn.

"It looked that way, yes. What are you saying, Sean?"

He considered telling her what she was already thinking, and thought better of it. "Don't know; don't know. Yet. Where did the mechanics leave the car?"

"Lilianne Four? In the bottom garage, down by the bean frames."

He nodded, pulling on a pair of gardening gloves hanging beneath the dry eaves of a shed.

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to have a look under the bonnet."

Lilianne One stood on the edge of the long grass in her house slippers, using this as an excuse to go any further. "Would that invalidate the warranty?"

"The warranty's already invalidated. As soon as that bastard car pops a gasket, either we get a chop shop to make us a part, or she stays in the garage forever."

"There's no need to use language like that."

"Sorry, Mum. A cup of tea would be nice."

"Right." She nodded stiffly and disappeared back up the garden. Women like that had made cups of tea for Montgomery and Wellington. He felt less like Wellington and more like Sean Agnello. He pushed open the garage door. The car's multiple headlights sparkled like spiders' eyes.

"Righto", he said. "Let's see what you're up to."