Kill The Monster, Chapter 9

VII. I WISH IT COULD BE CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY

He'd imagined a drink would steady Wilson's nerves. So far he'd had three, and his hands were still shaking. Sean had had to stop the car once since they'd left the tower to allow Wilson to lean out the window and throw up.

The pub was a mid-sized gritstone-and-slate structure standing on its own on the hillside - the first pub out of town into the hills. Sean been alarmed to find himself reasoning that the high moorland above Sheffield would be useful if he needed to kill Wilson and dump the body. After all, many of Hindley and Brady's burials had still not been found even to this day.

Now he was up here, the logic of that decision bore serious re-examination. A cold wind was blowing from the north, and snow was beginning to drift across the fields, was already piling up against the windowpanes as if sprayed on from a can. The ground would be frozen hard; it would be like trying to bury a man in a car park.

The pub was full of coach parties. Three huge coaches labelled FIRST MAINLINE were pulled up in the car park. Sean had previously been under the impression that a mainline was a thing a junkie did in a dirty toilet, but apparently in Sheffield it was a transport company. The inside of the building was wall-to-wall party hats, silly string, and flashing electric reindeer antlers. Obscenely fat, hideously wrinkled slabs of Northern gristle were trotting round the room shaking plastic mistletoe in the faces of women who appeared to have dyed their hair in motor oil. The only kisses these people should have gotten all year in a decent universe were being exchanged. Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody was belting from speakers someone had positioned at every corner like Orwellian CCTV, ensuring there was no escape.

Would it be so bad if all this were destroyed and rolled in fire, to be replaced by a vicious theocracy that made sure Christmas began on December the First and ended on Twelfth Night?

"I'm sorry about your father", said Wilson. "I assure you I knew nothing about it. The rescue centres are designed to defend themselves using any and all means necessary. Usually with minimum force, of course, but -"

"Why cars?" said Sean, sipping his J20. He had never tried one before. If the manufacturers' chemical formula was to be trusted, it ought to be an oxide of an as-yet-undiscovered transuranic element. He doubted it. It wasn't glowing. Instead, it seemed to contain apple and mango.

"What do you mean?" said Wilson. He was drinking beer - expensive Belgian bottled beer which seemed to have doubled in price since Sean's last visit home - at Sean's expense. There was also a Christmas party going on in the main bar. Sean winced as a fusillade of Silly String sailed past his nose, narrowly missing his drink.

"Why cars? Surely, if you're in control of time, all you need to do is invest one pound in a bank back in 1800, and wait around in the year 2000 to pocket the proceeds."

Wilson's face grew strained, as if being forced to explain how mummies and daddies made babies to a small child. "Yes, if two hundred years of history worked like a schoolboy's model of compound interest, that would be just dandy. But history isn't like that. Charles the First, for example, simply used to dip into the coffers of Britain's private banks whenever he needed to finance a war. A Communist revolution wiped out every single bank in Russia in 1917. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank faced severe setbacks in 2025 when Hong Kong and Shanghai ceased to exist. Any business which intends to survive the centuries must be dynamic, must be motile, must move to escape the vicissitudes of time." He leaned back in his chair and rolled his head against the cold glass of the window as if trying to drive out a secret pain within him.

"I take your point. And you say you're here by accident. Due to a navigation error." Wilson nodded. "Okay, so what were you supposed to do after you found yourself stranded in the past?"

"To make my way to a rescue centre and activate its retrieval beacon....We're provided with a basic kit for bush survival, mine contained a British passport, one thousand GBP, a driving licence, a compass, survival rations, water purification pills, crocodile repellent -"

Sean choked on his J20. "Crocodile repellent?"

"Absolutely...don't forget, the Axial Shift Bug is a known error. We know what it'll do when it does it. We know it'll drop us out at the self-same spot on the Earth's surface, the exact number of years ago that we intended to travel light-years out. A friend of mine was going out to Mu Arae via the transmit station in Novaya Zemlya. He was given iodine pills, a geiger counter and a seal harpoon."

A heavily tattooed drunken fat woman sailed into Sean's lap and yelled an attempt at 'GIZ A KISS FER CHRISTMAS LOVER' in his ear. She was retrieved almost immediately by a heavily tattooed drunken fat man who informed Sean that she was drunk and that, if truth be told, so was he.

"YOURE NOT GOING TO ASK ME FOR A KISS TOO, ARE YOU?" yelled Sean warily.

The tattooed man grinned and planted a remora-like kiss on Sean's forehead before dancing away.

Sean turned back to Wilson - who seemed alarmed by this primitive behaviour - using his J20 bottle as a speaker's mace.

"Hang on a minute. The Earth moves constantly through space - doesn't move in a perfect circle either, or even an ellipse -"

Wilson hugged himself like a hypothermia victim on the other side of the table. "Doesn't matter. Time travel works in space-time, and space-time is heavily bound in with Einstein's rubber-sheet universe, with your position in a particular gravity well, not with your position in some arbitrary and fictitious absolute Cartesian coordinate system. There are no absolutes; everything is relative."

Sean complained round the neck of his bottle. "Doesn't sound very mathematically plausible to me."

"Look, who just wandered in out of the future here, you or me?"

Sean conceded the point. "So you didn't activate the retrieval signal."

Wilson shook his head irritably. "In fact, I disabled it. The Agni in the rescue centre couldn't do anything about it. I'm the only one who produces turannone hereabouts."

This was surprising. "There aren't any leaders at Hirondelle? Only, what was it you called them, Agni?"

"Nah. The Church doesn't like to send turannone into the past any more than it has to. 'Agni' is Latin for 'sheep'." He glared grimly into his beer. "The Faithful Flock."

Sean nodded. "Yeah, that figures. I think it's the same in Italian."

Two young men were flicking knotted scarves at one another up the length of the moon - a red-and-white Sheffield United scarf, and a blue-and-white Sheffield Wednesday. One man would present his buttocks obligingly to the other man's scarf, then attempt to snatch them away just in time, before taking aim with a flick of his own.

"It's also Sanskrit for Fire, the Most Pure Thing worshipped by the Zoroastrians. The Church doesn't despise the Agni - it teaches that they are the meek who will inherit the Earth. It's the leaders, the Pastors, who are the sinners, who carry the greatest karmic burden. The Agni are assured Heaven. They're bred to be good, to be without Original Sin. If an Agnus commits a crime, he's punished and rehabilitated much like people are here in your time. But if a Pastor commited the same crime, he could be tortured, hanged, publically humiliated, you name it. The punishment is far greater for the upper echelons."

"DA'S NOT QUICK ENOUGH!" yelled the Wednesday scarf man triumphantly.

"IS DA NESH?" yelled the United man back, baring his buttocks to whoops of feminine approval.

Sean nodded. "And you consider your society to be uncivilized, you say."

Wilson shuddered. "You have no idea. Church attendance - daily Church attendance - is a mandatory human right and duty. The Church teaches that Pastor Lamb is the Messiah, that the Earth was created in 4004 BC, and that 'conventional' science is a handy quick ready reckoner God has gifted us with for us to suspend our disbelief in while we're trying to design FTL systems and helotone delivery vectors and such. I'm a doctor of conventional science, in fact. I know what I'm talking about."

Sean recalled compulsory morning prayers at public school. He had been made to sing This Little Light Of Mine, Gonna Let It Shine. "It sounds like hell."

"It is. You know why we're going to other worlds? We've screwed up this one. Pastor Lamb's main campaign contributors were all oil- and automobile-related. We made war on the Chinese to snatch the last vestiges of our world's oil, and then, when we found out there were other worlds out there to conquer, we used the FTL transmitter on them to make ourselves as much oil as we wanted. We've sent simple animals, simple chordates, and red algae into the past of over a hundred colonized planets, and supervised their development into vertebrates, land life, and coal and oil swamps over millions of years of patient stewardship. And what did we do with them then? We set off a fifty thousand megaton cobalt bomb on each. The world I was going to, the one we've called New Canaan, had a planet-smasher dropped on it fifty years ago, wiping out all the quaint and quirky and economically unviable native life. I'm told there were a thousand sorts of amphibious flying fish, colourful as Christmas baubles. And water hydras over a hundred feet in length that anchored their tail ends in submarine roots and dragged prey caught at the waterline underwater. Bombardier flowers that actively sought out pollen delivery animals and fired pollen at them. All gone; all dead, after fifty years of nuclear winter."

The bar area began to sing along, as one festering organism, to the tune of Mistletoe and Wine, with new and improved lyrics.

Sean had difficulty with special genocide on such a cosmic scale. "All just for oil?"

"All just for oil. The Church is looking for alternative power sources, but it hasn't found any yet. Unfortunately, it unwisely declared nuclear fission anathema in the early days of the movement - very popular with powerful petrochemical lobby backers - and that made it very difficult to build atomic power stations even after the Church had charge of the Presidency." Wilson unenthusiastially slurped down a mouthful of beer. "You know, I'm telling you all about where I come from, I think you should tell me a little about this place."

"Logs down the toilet -"

This wrong-footed Sean. "What could I tell you? You already live here, you know all there is to know."

"Gifts round the treee -"

"Not at all. For example, why do men always choose the exact opposite end of the urinal to pee into if someone is already there before them?"

"Tree up the arse of, the Christmas Faireeee -"

"Oh, that's gay fear. The fear that someone might consider you to be looking at their penis, and therefore think you're gay."

Wilson's mouth made a silent o. "I see. We don't have any of that in our time. Homosexuals have all been exterminated."

Sean nearly bit the neck off his J20 bottle. "What?"

"It's considered an abomination against God. After the Great Twink Cull, I believe Hollywood and Broadway went through a creative doldrum. Very few all singing all dancing extravaganzas were produced for quite some time." Wilson stared earnestly across the table at Sean. "I would very much like to see one. What do they look like?"

This was exasperating. "They're not like the bloody Dodo, George. They look just like you and me -" imagination failed him at this point - "only, I don't know, gayer."

Wilson nodde,d absorbing this like a good tourist.

"Are you gay?" he said.

"Of course not!"

"But how would I know?" Wilson's eyes were big and innocent.

"I don't know. You just would."

"Would I need to go into a public toilet with you?"

"NO!" Sean searched his memory frantically for a scientific basis for Gaydar. "Look, you watch TV, right?"

Wilson nodded.

"You know Peter Mandelson? You've heard of Peter Mandelson?"

Wilson nodded.

"Well, he's gay."

Wilson's jaw dropped.

"NO."

Sean nodded. "And Elton John? You know Elton John?"

Wilson nodded. "He writes so many beautiful songs."

"Gay."

"NO!" Wilson folded his arms. "I refuse to believe it."

The inevitable conga line had started. Sean could think of no way in which the conga was intrinsically part of a traditional English Christmas, but somehow it always seemed to slither its vile multilegged form into every office Christmas party he'd ever attended.

"Do do do -
Come on and join the conga!
Choo choo choo -
A train across the floor -"

Wilson looked up at a barmaid who was passing to collect glasses, and banged his empty Leffe bottle on the table peremptorily.

"You can't do that", said Sean, attempting to fade into the background as the full force of the barmaid's disapproval glared their way. "She doesn't have to do what you say."

"Why not?"

"Because she's not an Agnus."

"But I'm paying for a service."

"Precisely. You aren't an Ancient Roman Emperor. You're only a customer."

Wilson drew himself up to his full unimpressive height on his stool. "But the customer is the most important person in the world!"

"Try ringing a Virgin Internet customer service line and see if you still believe that, buster."

"And another thing." Wilson was getting into his stride now. "Those men's briefs that you sell, the ones with the little hole in the front. What's the point of them? The small hole in the front is clearly designed to accommodate the penis, I imagine during either sex or urination. Yet it takes just as long to push my penis through the small hole as it does to completely pull the briefs down. What is the design purpose of the small hole?"

Sean loked gloomily out of the window. "I must admit, you have me there. I wear boxers myself."

"You said that you thought wiping out the Church would be impossible the way I'm doing it right now, but that you thought you could see a way round it." Wilson's eyes glittered with an intelligence that surprised Sean, given the man's obvious physical and mental fatigue.

"That's right."

"What's the way round it?"

Sean raised a hand, smiled at the barmaid, raised his J20 bottle and Wilson's empty Leffe. The barmaid smiled back and turned to the refrigerator behind the bar.

"She did it for you."

"I treated her like a human being. Plus, I'm cuter than you. Now, to your problem. Assuming the past cannot influence the present, you must resign yourself to the fact that, according to the rules of causality, all the enormities you tell me will happen between now and 2035 will happen no matter what, and you can't change that."

Wilson clearly didn't like this - Sean hadn't expected him to. But he nodded. "Okay, I'm assuming you're right. How can there possibly be a solution?"

"What if we could make your Pastor Lamb or whatever his name is die immediately after you step into the transmission station in New Guinea? That doesn't violate causality, and it solves your problem."

Wilson thought about this, and shook his head slowly, as if his head was heavy. "It doesn't solve the problem. The whole of my society is conceptually rotten, foundations to rooftree. It is based on the premise that it is morally defensible for a society to segregate itself into master and slave castes. Killing only one of the masters will not solve that." Sean was impressed with the other man's pragmatism. "However, I am interested in killing Pastor Lamb. How would we do that?"

"Any number of ways. For example, find out who and where he is in the world today, drug him, open him up, sew a packet of poison into the walls of one of his major veins that'll take thirty years to biodegrade. But any way of dealing with Lamb will involve making sure we have exactly the right man first of all. What does he look like?"

Wilson thought carefully. "He appears regularly on television. He has a beard."

"Gosh, that narrows it down a bit. Anything else about him? Any minor characteristics, no matter how unimportant? Like, is he black or white, for instance?"

"His beard is silver, so that makes him quite old, though some of us suspect his broadcasts are currently automated, so I don't know how old. He is white. His eyes are blue."

Sean frowned. "Well, if we were looking in Ouagadougou, that would narrow the field down considerably. But we're loking in the UK and America, so it doesn't."

"He has a highly distinctive scar down his left cheek. There are numerous urban myths about how he got it, though there is no official explanation."

"Aha, now we're talking! Though he could have received the scar at some time in our future, so it doesn't help us that much." Sean thought carefully. "Do you have any contacts in the police force?"

Wilson made his face of uncorrupted innocence. "No. Do you think that might be useful?"

"Our police aren't like yours. They're there to protect the innocent, not to seek out people who oppose the government."

Wilson thought about it and shook his head vehemently. "No. No. The Committee might have infiltrated them. The Committee are terrified of the years before the Church. They call them the Time Untaken-Up. If it weren't for an edict from the Pastor himself, the Committee would have wiped out the Time Untaken-Up altogether and established the Church in 4004 BC, is the rumour."

Sean found himself checking out the faces of the bar's other clientèle. "So there could be Committee members among us here today."

Wilson twitched nervously and reached out for the fresh Leffe bottle that had just materialized on the table. "Could be. Could be. No idea."

Sean could not believe it. The other customers were too weather-beaten, too familiar, too northern to be anything other than genuine. Unless the entire population of the pub had been replaced as one unit. But that way leads to me interrogating and shooting myself in the mirror as a spy.

"In any case, I probably know who Pastor Lamb is."

Wilson's eyes almost started from his head. "What? Who? Have you seen him? Ho old is he? What sort of security is there round him? How many -"

"Calm down, calm down. I'm not going to tell you till I'm sure I know we have the right man, and that you're not going to try to charge in guns blazing."

"But what if you go away tonight and get run over by a car? Then I'll never know."

"I assure you", said Wilson, "that I am not going to be run over by a car."

"But those sorts of things happen here! Cars are still manually controlled! My cousin was run over by one in three years' time! It killed him instantly!"

"Those sorts of things", said Sean, "don't happen to me. I also have several days of domestic bliss due to me, which I intend to take full advantage of. We will return to the business of Pastor Lamb in the New Year." He rose to his feet, doing up his jacket before going out into the cold.

"I could have Hirondelle hunt you down and kill you between now and the New Year", said Wilson with sudden venom.

Sean did not bother to turn round.

"That was a very unwise comment, George, particularly since, firstly, you would then be hunting down and killing the only man who knows who Pastor Lamb might be, and secondly, I still have a loaded gun in my coat pocket."

"Sorry", cringed Wilson.

"Do you want your coat back, by the way?"

"This coat's very nice. I have noticed how cold it gets in winter in your time. It's warmer where you come from, huh?"

Wilson nodded. "No polar caps. I know now why Iceland is called Iceland."

This shocked Sean. "No polar caps in only thirty years?"

"Global warming's gone haywire. Everybody knows it has, but the Church's official line is that sudden solar flares have caused catastrophic heating which will eventually pass. The Church doesn't care what happens to Earth. It's created a hundred more Earths for humankind to go to."

"Okay, okay. Keep the coat...by the way, while I'm helping you look for Lamb, I'm supposed to be working. There isn't any chance you could help me out financially, is there?"

Wilson's face scrunched into a snarl. "You'll get helped out financially when you start helping me kill Lamb."

"In the New Year, then."

Wilson thought about it, and nodded. "In the New Year."

Sean hovered nervously, not yet ready to leave. "I can't really afford to die in the immediate future either, and I've killed three of your Hirondelle creatures. Could you possibly square things with them, if they're so keen on doing what you say?"

Wilson nodded. "There will be no recriminations."

"It's just that I have a wife and child to support -"

Wilson raised an eyebrow. "Do you? That's interesting."

"- who will not be harmed or further mentioned in any way. If they are, I will be on the first flight to Wilmington, Illinois, where I will find you, Mr. Wilson, and your family, and wipe you out while you are still a mewling infant."

"My name's not Wilson", said Wilson.

"I'll find you whatever your name is. If I have to go from house to house shooting every blue-eyed baby in town. If you want any help, I will give it to you gladly. Remember, your Church killed my father. But if you want my allegiance, act like an ally."

He handed the coat to Wilson. Wilson took it. Sean extended a hand. Wilson took it, and stood with Sean's hand in his as if unclear what to do next.

"Merry Christmas, Mr. Wilson."

"Merry Christmas."

As he walked out of the pub, Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody was belting from the walls. Hideous octogenarians were jiving like mating brontosauri. Horrid floral patterns that should never even have been inflicted on toilet lino were wobbling around gigantic one-piece bosoms. Party blowers were going off like a festive artillery barrage, and outside, snow was falling from the sky. Sean had commanded platoons full of these people's sons. These people had serviced his car, served him in supermarkets, punched his ticket in trains, laughed cruelly at his attempts at karaoke in night clubs.

God bless you, every one. If you want Christmas to start in August, let it be.

The Toyota started first time and roared off into the night.

***

The first signs of trouble should have been apparent in the drive. On Christmas morning, Sam's odious relatives normally rolled up in droves, returning to the same spot every year like mating salmon. Only Sean's driveway and house, it was commonly agreed, were large enough to support a small army of opinionated, Daily-Mail-devouring Tory halfwits. Sean had never voted Labour in his life, but the ill-informed ideas of Sam's Great Uncle Harry on what should be done with and to asylum seekers turned him miraculously into a Communist for one day every year.

The drive was free of vehicles. No-one was sitting smoking sheepishly in what Sam called a conservatory and Sean called a porch. There was no smoke coming from the chimney.

The panic began rising in him before the car even came to a stop.

Calm down. Calm down. Wilson's full of shit, and there's no police tape. If someone had been killed there'd be police tape -

Sam's car, the Beetle, was missing from the drive. It couldn't be in the garage. Dad's Jaguar was in the garage.

There was spray-on snow in the windows, together with stars, glitter, and silver lametta letters spelling out HAPPY CHRISTMAS DADDY. But somehow he knew there was no-one waiting behind the windows to deliver the message personally.

He took the gun out of the glove compartment, loaded it with feverish fingers. Though if they'd wanted me dead, I'd be dead already. In order to open the front door, he'd have to take one hand off the gun, meaning he wouldn't be able to brace it properly -

The porch door was open. It usually was. The front door was locked. The key turned in the lock. He stood to one side of the door as he opened it. It creaked open ominously, onto an empty hallway.

In the hallway stood a large and beautifully-wrapped present. The paper was patterned in urban camouflage. He had no idea where she'd found it. The whole confection was finished off with silver and pink ribbon tied in a beautiful bow.

He edged into the hall and craned his neck towards the present. There was a note on the front of it which said:

HAVE TAKEN MICKEY TO MUM AND DAD'S
AS YOU DO NOT SEEM TO BE HERE. HERE
IS YOUR PRESENT. AM BEGINNING DIVORCE
PROCEEDINGS IN THE NEW YEAR

He breathed out and sank back against the wall.

"Thank god thank god thank god -"

He decocked the Glock and sat down on the floor, and yawned. He wondered what the present was.

He was too tired to find out -

***

- he was running through sunshine. Brilliant, fierce sunshine that beat down with a pressure like water in the depths of the ocean. The city looked like a ruin, heaps of stones haphazardly put down in the desert, but he knew it to be the greatest city on Earth. Half the people he passed - the fat, well-fed ones, tourists from elsewhere - greeted him with waves and smiles. The wasted, emaciated ones, meanwhile, the ones who spent half their working day cursing their One God for the hard ground and the thorns and the locusts, looked away muttering darkly in Aramaic.

The temple was the largest haphazard heap of stones in the city. The attendant priest, a haphazard heap of skin named Eleazar, was one of the waving smiling people, but had been here so long, living the life of a local man so faithfully that he was no longer fat and well-fed. His smile, like a Cheshire Cat's, was the only original part of him that remained.

Eleazar turned that smile on him as he ran up to the temple steps, and stretched out an old, withered hand with less life in it than a backscratcher to pat his visitor on the head.

"You are Joseph's son", said Eleazar. "The carpenter. I have not seen you here before."

"I am not Joseph's son", he replied. "And I come from far away."

"I see", said the priest. "And who, then, is your father? What is his profession?"

"He makes", he said - and then, realizing there was no word for aircraft in this language, extemporized and said, "things that fly through the sky."

A magpie fluttered past overhead like a hurled dart with purely incidental wings. The priest indicated it. "Like that?"

The boy nodded. "Just so. But -" he searched for the word jet helicopter and failed to find it either - "hovering on fire."

"I see." The priest seemed pleased. "And tell me, who made the Heaven and the Earth?"

This one was easy. They'd done this one in Assembly. "God", he said; though as he was speaking another language, this came out "Yahweh."

"I see. And how many days did it take, this creation?"

"The Torah says seven", he said, "though my father says it took more like four proper English billions. A billion is a million million", he added.

"And how did it come to pass?"

He thought carefully. "Well, first there was nothing at all. Then there was a big bang, which made stars and the Sun. First there was no life at all on earth. There were plants before there were animals. At some point, the Moon came out of the Pacific Ocean. Then there were Ammonites, I think, and then fish, and then animals, and then people."

"You missed out the creation of the Firmament", reproved the priest, "but that is basically correct. And I believe the Ammonites are people too, who live to the east of Jordan north of Moab."

He shook his head. "No. They are disgusting spiral things with tentacles, and I am glad they are extinct."

The priest laughed out loud. "You have been listening to your father too much! I am told he and your mother saved you from the Edict of Herod by travelling into Egypt by way of Moab, though you would have been too young to remember."

"I do remember. We went to Cairo and Alexandria. We saw the Great Pyramid of Khufu, which is five hundred cubits on a side. And we saw temples made by a man who tried to make the Egyptians worship one god."

The priest cocked an eyebrow. "Is that so? Did he succeed?"

"Apparently not. His name has been chiselled out of all official monuments."

"Yes", said the priest in satisfaction. "I imagine it would have been. Do you know where that man's followers live now?"

He shook his head.

"They live here", said the priest. "We were slaves in Egypt, and in Babylon, and our god delivered us from those places. Soon Messiah will come to deliver us from the Romans."

"Oh no", he replied. "I'm pretty sure Messiah has already come."

"Are you certain of that?" said the priest.

"Definitely", he nodded. "And the Roman Empire falls in the Fifth Century in any case, due to a combination of barbarian invasions, a slave economy, and poor fiscal control."

He heard the return signal, a ram's horn, drone out across the valley, and shuffled his feet sadly.

"I have to go now." He paused. "I don't like it when I have to go. They do things to me to make me forget. I don't know what they are, but I'm pretty sure they're bad."

The priest reached out a hand and placed it on his shoulder. "Will you promise to come back and see me tomorrow? I have some friends who may have questions for you."

"Definitely. I believe it is on the schedule."

"Then run along. And give my regards to your father -"

***

He woke up. The light had flicked on and someone was standing over him. He brought the Glock up, and luckily he had made it safe.

"Sean? It's me."

It was her, and he'd nearly shot her. Mickey was standing on the other side of the hallway, staring at him open-mouthed. Her mother and father were coming through the front door behind her, bearing gifts, but looking far more like Greeks than Wise Men.

He took the sights off her as if he'd been electrified. He began to unfasten the magazine, but thought better of it, as he was being watched by her evil parents, who would then see clear proof that the weapon had been loaded.

"Sean, is that loaded?"

"I was asleep", he complained. "You woke me up."

"Sean, I could have been Mickey."

"Is it loaded?" said her malevolent mother, hovering behind a stack of ghastly soup tureens that she probably fondly imagined were bulletproof.

"I certainly hope not", said Sam. "It's certainly not licensed. He's not supposed to bring it into the house."

"If you pull a gun on my daughter -" began her ill-favoured father, drawing himself up to his full five feet six inches.

"Shut up, father", said Sam. "This is my house and I will deal with this situation as I see fit. Carry that stuff into the living room."

"Sammie, you're my daughter, and I feel -"

"Shut UP, father."

Her father obeyed instantly. Sean didn't blame him.

"Go in the other room with Mickey, please, Mum, and shut the door."

"But, chicken -"

"This is not negotiable, Mum. Go now."

With reluctance, the two misshapen in-laws oozed venomously away into the living room, and the catch on the door clicked to. He knew, however, that they would be listening on the other side.

She knelt down over him.

"Are you all right?"

He shook his head. "Pretty far from being all right. Nothing to do with Mickey, nothing to do with you."

"Sean, are you in trouble?"

He thought about this.

"Yup", he said, nodding solemnly and slowly. "Whole world of trouble. We're all in trouble. You, me, Mickey, mater and pater, Lilianne One, old Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. But not so bad", he said, breathing heavily, "that we can't get out of it."

"Are you drunk?"

"No." He breathed out heavily in her face. "Get a whiff of that. Horrid, but not drink."

She took hold of his hand. "You'll get a new job, sweetheart. You know you will."

Sweet saints in Jesus' loving heaven, a way out. Yes, that's why I'm behaving like a nutter. "Yes. I suppose so."

She slid a hand behind his back. "You shouldn't feel depressed. But if I see you with that gun in the house again, I will divorce you, and that's a promise."

He bowed his head in shame.

"I wasn't going to shoot you or Mickey with it. I fell asleep."

She held him like a child, rocking him back and forth. "I know. But you can't have that gun. I've got to take it off you."

He wasn't pretending any more; he really had broken down. Tears were rolling down his cheeks. "But I've got to protect you. There are people."

"What people?"

Just people." Play the nutter again. "Maybe I had a dream."

She kissed him on the forehead. "You had a dream? What sort of dream?"

"A bad dream."

"Well, you just give me the gun, and you can go to bed. When did you last sleep?"

He thought about this. "Friday."

"Well, I think you ought to do some more sleeping now. Can you take my hand?"

"Can I keep the gun a minute?" He had to unload it. He couldn't let her know it had been loaded. "It isn't loaded."

"All right, you can keep the gun. Can you put your hand round my shoulders?"

"Got to go to the toilet first."

"All right, we'll take you to the toilet. You haven't been taking anything, now?"

"Nothing. Just been sad." Which was true. "Want to go to the toilet on my own."

She considered this as she walked him up the stairs. "Okay. As long as you promise me you're not going to do anything with that gun while you're in there. As long as you come out of that toilet without blowing your head off, whatever is wrong, we can deal with it, okay? But I can't help you if you're dead, okay? That's a no-brainer, right?"

Lord Christ almighty, she thinks I'm going to top myself.

The toilet door closed. He locked it hastily, straightened up and began to think as furiously as his state of fatigue allowed. How to get rid of the bullets? She'd find them anywhere in the bathroom. Women found everything. A youth spent vainly attempting to conceal booze, porn and cannabis from Lilianne One had taught him this. Would a nine millimetre bullet fit down a plughole? He went so far as empty one out of the mgazine to check, then frowned as he realized it would almost certainly block the pipe, leading to a call to Dyno-Rod, leading in turn to...

The toilet cistern! The bullets would sink, and she'd put a brick in the cistern to save water and protect the bastard fluffy big-eyed bushy-tailed environment. But when he cleared all the make-up and Malawian Arse Washing Grains off the cistern, opened it, and lifted the brick out, it was flat-faced. There was concavity in its face in which to hide the slugs from sight. All that would be needed was a ballcock malfunction, and his deception would be uncovered.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he spied the ideal spot.

The bath was an old plastic avocado model, and was cracked in one corner where Mickey had kicked it while playing Godzilla, King of the Monsters at bathtime. Sam had been furious, and had been nagging him ever since to replace the bath. But the crack was an inch wide now, and let into the dark, deep, hot recess between bath and floor.

Carefully, and without shame of any kind, he began feeding the bullets one by one into the aperture, even remembering the single round he'd had up the spout. Then he replaced the clip in the gun, pressed an ear up to the door, and, hearing no-one on the other side, squeezed silently through the door onto the landing.

He left the empty gun on the newel post of the balustrade and came down the stairs as he'd learned to as a boy, with his hands on the balustrade and his feet on the skirting board. With no boards to creak under his feet, and sliding rather than shifting his weight to move, he could travel down soundlessly.

Sam, her vile parents, and Mickey were all in the dining room. The door was half-open.

"He's gone crazy, Sammie. He's finally flipped. You have to phone the police. They'll take him in, the gun's not even licensed -"

"At the very least, you should phone an ambulance, chicklet. He'll be safer if he goes somewhere where he can get help -"

"He's still got the gun. He wouldn't let go of it. I couldn't tell whether it was loaded or not."

"Hopefully the little shit'll shoot himself with it."

"ANDREW -"

"Hopefully he won't. If he doesn't I think it would be a good idea to get him committed for a short while. I'm going to phone the ambulance."

In the handset on the hall table, he heard the tone notifying that the phone had been taken off the hook in the kitchen.

On a whim, he picked up the hall handset and carried it to the front door, carefully turning the handle.

"If he comes downstairs again, stop him from coming in here. I don't want him to hear this."

He heard footsteps moving obediently towards the dining room door. He just managed to make it out into the porch in time, pulling the front door to with his body behind it, not daring even to breathe.

They weren't going upstairs. They were hanging around in the hall. Hardly surprising - perhaps they thought he might actually use the gun without Sam there to calm him down.

Shit, he wasn't scared of a couple of old farts knowing where he was going. He left the porch and walked out toward the Toyota, holding the handset to his ear.

"Hello, I'd like an ambulance for my husband -"

"Did you hear something outside?"

"- I think he may be suicidal, and he has a gun -"

"Did you leave the front door open?"

"- well, yes, maybe we might need the police as well, I suppose -"

Andrew, I think the gun's at the top of the stairs."

"- you don't understand, he's not dangerous, not at all -"

He was in the Toyota now, and as the front door opened and Andrew cautiously poked his head out into the porch, Sean slid the key into the ignition.

" - well, yes, he did point the gun at me, but I don't have any proof that it was loaded -"

The Toyota's engine growled into life, was connected immediately to the reverse gear, and thundered backwards down the drive, writing a brief copperplate 'l' in the grass as it switched from reverse to forward.

"Sean? Sean, is that you?"

He clicked the handset off. Landscape sped past him at a hideous pace. The Cruiser bounced through a ford, luckily one of the watery kind. He had to force himself to slow down.

He had pointed a gun, an unlicensed gun, at his own wife. The police would be looking for him.

His mobile 'phone rang. It was Sam. He killed the call and flung the phone down onto he passenger seat beside him.

Then, on an impulse, he reached down to the phone, clicked it back into the hands free, and began flicking through the stored numbers. He'd stored many of the numbers he'd taken from Mahar's papers into it, and one of them was -

The phone was ringing at the other end. A surprised voice filled the hands-free speakers.

"George Edward Wilson."

"Wilson? It's Agnello. The man who threatened you with a gun earlier on today."

"What? Who?" Can you be more specific, so many people threaten me with guns...

"I've changed my mind about Lamb. I want to help you right now and screw the New Year. If you're interested, I'll meet you at your house at twelve a.m. tomorrow."

"What? How did you get this number?" Sean heard a sleepy woman's voice in the background saying something like I'll let myself out, thanks for the tip and grinned. "Same way I know where you live. I'll see you tomorrow."

He'd have to avoid the main road. The car would be hot as hell. The numberplate would be on every UK force's computers by daybreak. Give it half an hour for reporting and data entry, then wait till twelve midnight or whenever for it to filter through to every server via an overnight batch...

He came to a decision. His face was not on anybody's computer, and it didn't have a unique identification number.

He thumbed through the list of stored numbers again, found the one he needed, and dialled the number. The phone rang interminably, then a man's voice answered.

"Hargreaves Garage Services."

"Hello, I have a car with you. I'd like to pick it up. The keys are in your safe."

"Which car is it?"

"The Hirondelle."

"Good morning, Mr. Agnello. I'll have the keys taken out for you directly."

Sean grinned with the satisfaction of a proud Hirondelle owner. If you owned a Ronnie, everyone knew your name.

He ignored the turning that led to the A30, choosing instead the Z road that doubled back towards Penzance. Penzance had a main line railway station. He wouldn't make the mistake of buying a ticket with a card, either; card purchases could be tracked. Hole in the wall first, for cash; then a one-way ticket to Marylebone, paid for in crisp puke-coloured tenners. He would even be able to sleep on the train.

The mobile phone went off again. It was Sam. He turned it off.