Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text (7 page)

‘Or so people
claim
,’ muttered Trudy Spice, large, grim and very reluctant to embrace anything which fell outside of the world she thought she knew.

‘They could have made it all up couldn’t they?’ suggested Ron Julip, the director of logistics.

‘So what about this
Dunner
business, then?’ asked the police chief impatiently. ‘This Dunner religion. Should
that
interest us in any way?’

Charles smiled and slowly repeated a rhyme that Furnish had recited for him:

‘Woddy wiv ’is one eye,

Dunner wiv ’is cock

Frija wiv ’er big tits

And two-faced Lok.’

‘That’s a
religion
?’ asked Trudy Spice.

‘It sounds more like the sort of thing you see on a toilet wall,’ muttered Ron Julip.

The assembled managers all laughed heartily. Charles shrugged.

‘It isn’t like our idea of a religion, I agree. The god Dunner is a brawling thug. His father Wod is a champion boozer and a serial adulterer. But I suppose a religion like that appeals to the kind of people who are also attracted to the idea of being shifters. My guess is that somewhere out there is a world where either the old Germanic religion has managed to survive into modern times, or it has been revived in some way, and that shifters have encountered it there. Or possibly some of them come from there in the first place. It’s not the only cult that shifters follow, and of course many of them don’t follow a cult at all, but it’s certainly very popular with the particular type of shifter that gravitates towards the Zones.’

He finished his sandwiches and pushed away his plate.

‘As I said, there are several groups of them here in Thurston Meadows. Furnish let slip that one group – and this one
is
a group of Dunner cultists – is headed by a man named Erik who he says is supposed to be very very clever and a “real psycho”. I don’t think Furnish himself has met the man but he’s apparently a pretty big wheel in the shifter network round here. I couldn’t get much out of Hassan. He was holding out for having his slip back in exchange for more information – his slip and Furnish’s in fact – but we obviously can’t do that. What is worrying is that Hassan didn’t contradict Furnish’s suggestion that one of the shifter groups is planning some kind of violent mischief. In fact he quite explicitly confirmed this, and said that he had more information which he would only give in exchange for the seeds.’

‘Mischief?’ they all cried together. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You couldn’t get
anything
else at all out of them?’

‘Hassan claimed he could give details if we gave him all the slip. I think they probably both swallowed seeds when they were arrested, so as to get away from here, but of course they still want seeds to take with them in case they don’t like the place they end up in.’

‘Well, why don’t we give him the stuff then?’ asked Janet Richards. ‘I mean if it will head off a problem here on the Zone, why not? Let’s do it!’

‘But that would be like giving a heroin dealer back his stash if he agreed to move to another neighbourhood!’

There was silence. It seemed they didn’t find this idea quite as preposterous as Charles had assumed they would.

‘Well, I suppose so,’ said Mrs Richards, ‘but it seems a pity.’

‘In any case,’ Charles said, ‘I think Hassan may have been bluffing when he claimed to have more information. Obviously I don’t know for sure but, as I said before, I’ve got a strong sense that he and Furnish have only just arrived here. The main point is that you need to be on the alert. The thing that makes slip so dangerous is that people can use it to escape the consequences of their actions. These people really can get away with murder.’

They all looked at one another.

‘Now if you’ll excuse me…’ Charles began, but he was interrupted by Janet Richards’ phone.

Someone at the other end had more bad news.

‘How many people…? You’ve got cars on the way over…? Okay I’ll put you onto Dick.’

She called her chief of police to the phone.

‘Some sort of disturbance on a recreation ground,’ she explained as she handed him the receiver.

Oddly the new crisis appeared to have had a positively soothing effect on her, and she seemed much less tense as she returned to the table to join the rest of them. Thugs with baseball bats, fights in recreations grounds: this was the kind of trouble she knew and understood.

‘I’ve got three air patrols and six cars on this,’ said Dick Thomas the police chief, returning to the table ‘Some sort of petty gang fight I should think, but if this was to turn out to be the mischief you were talking about, Mr Bowen, then I think we’ve got it pretty well in hand.’

‘That’s good,’ Charles said. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I really should get back down there and…’

But he was interrupted for a second time by the phone. Janet Richards returned to it with a slightly theatrical sigh – she almost seemed to be enjoying having an audience - but her face fell as she listened

‘Vanished? In front of witnesses? How many? Missing from the Unit? Okay, I’m going to put you on to Val.’

Val Hollowby came to the phone. The Social Care Purchaser’s gaunt, skeletal face became even grimmer as she listened to whoever was on the other end.

‘But why wasn’t I notified earlier? Are you saying Jazamine didn’t follow procedures? Why wasn’t I told this girl was interested in shifters? Yes I know, but how
can
I support you if you…’

‘A fifteen-year-old girl went missing from outside our Assessment Unit this morning,’ Janet Richards explained to Charles. ‘She’s had a problem with absconding for years, apparently, so nothing new about that, even if her social worker does seem to have just
let her go
on this occasion. But the thing is that she was evidently at the centre of the incident in that recreation ground. It’s looking very much as if this could be another of your Dunner cases, Mr Bowen, because any number of people are now telling our officers that they saw her
vanish into thin air
.’

Val Hollowby came off the phone.

‘The girl’s called Tamsin Pendant,’ she said, ‘a.k.a. Delaney, a.k.a. Blows. She’s fifteen years old. Lots of history, lots of problems. Physical abuse. Sexual abuse. Been in the care system for years. Lots of trouble there. Placements breaking down. Absconding. Drugs. And she's been talking a lot recently, or so I
now
gather, about shifters and seeds and Dunner and all that.’

Suddenly she leaned forward, looking into Charles’ face with big watery eyes:

‘But you know, Mr Bowen, they
all
do all sorts of worrying things
.
It’s easy enough with hindsight to say we could have seen the signs, because there are
always
signs when you look for them afterwards! It’s not that we necessarily miss them at the time. It’s just that we can’t act on them all.’

‘Yes,’ said Janet Richards shortly, ‘but I’m concerned that they didn’t let you know in this case. I’m concerned about the lines of communication. That’s something we’ll need to look at.’

Janet Richards was putting down a marker. She was pointing out that a breakdown of communication had occurred at a level
below
that of one of her subordinates. It was a preliminary step in that old deskie dance of blame. And the Social Care Purchaser, understanding this instantly, darted her boss a look of pure hatred.

‘Who was the last person to see her?’ Charles asked.

‘Her social worker, Jazamine Bright,’ said Val Hollowby, ‘and before that a free-lance therapist we use called Sarah Ripping. One of the Unit staff took her to a session with Sarah, and then Jaz collected her and took her back to the Unit. When Jaz dropped her off, Tammy announced that she was going to disappear and that Jaz would never see her again. For whatever reason, Jaz didn’t actually walk her back inside the Unit as she’s supposed to do but just dropped her off, and Tammy never went inside. It seems she’s been talking a lot lately about shifters and having shifter friends and so on, so it all fits together. Too late though, of course, as will doubtless be said at the inquiry.’

Ms Hollowby gave a bitter little snort. ‘Though even if we
had
made the connection, I can’t see there’s much we could have done.’

‘Well my next job is to interview Jazamine Bright,’ Charles said.

‘She’s over in the satellite office at the moment,’ said Val Hollowby. ‘It’s about a mile from here.’

‘We’ll send for her!’ cried Janet Richards. ‘We’ll get her straight over. We’ve already booked an interview room for you. Would you like any more coffee, Mr Bowen? Or perhaps a cup of tea?’

~*~

At this point the door opened and another member of Mrs Richards’ little government came in.

‘Sorry, I couldn’t get here earlier.’

With his slightly lop-sided glasses and his threadbare suit, the newcomer struck Charles immediately as different from the others. He looked more like some sort of academic than a deskie, or maybe an artist or a poet. There was something dreamy and otherworldly about him.

‘I’ve been looking after my grandson while my daughter is away,’ the man explained, ‘and he’s gone down with flu. I’ve only just managed to line up someone to keep an eye on him.’

A little stiffly, Janet Richards introduced him.

‘Charles, this is Cyril Burkitt, the Senior Registration Manager for the Zone.’

The
Senior Registration Manager, Charles noticed, not
my
Senior Registration Manager.

‘Senior Registration Manager?’ he asked. ‘Would you mind explaining what that is?’

‘Well, my job is to oversee the process which decides whether people should be on the Social Inclusion Register or not. Some people don’t want to be included in the Inclusion Register, you see. Some people would rather be excluded from the register and just
be
included. Or failing that, just be excluded, if you see what I mean…’

He gave a little snort of a laugh. The others looked embarrassed.

‘The thing about Cyril,’ Dave Ricketts explained, as if he felt some sort of justification was necessary for the man’s presence, ‘is that, more than any of us, he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the residents of the Zone. He’s worked on this Zone for – what is it Cyril? – twenty years isn’t it?’

‘Something like that,’ said Burkitt.

‘Twenty years. And it’s just incredible how much he remembers.’

‘Do you remember Tammy Pendant?’ Val Hollowby asked him.

‘Tammy Pendant? Yes of course I know her!’

‘Tell us what you remember of her history.’

‘Well I knew her first as Tamsin Delaney, then as Tamsin Blows. I was her social worker back in the days when I
was
a social worker. Her mother – Liz – gave her up for adoption at birth. She said she didn’t want the baby one bit. She said Tammy was the child of a rape. Anyway, Tammy was placed with adopters. They were going to change her name to Jessica I remember, Jessica Tamsin Ferne. But then, at the eleventh hour, Liz changed her mind and asked for her back. We could have tried to stop it through the courts – there were a number of reasons to worry about Liz as a parent – but we decided not to, a decision which turned out to be a bad mistake.’

He sighed.

‘A very bad mistake, in fact, because the upshot was that poor Tammy was seriously abused in Liz’s care and we had to take her back out. But the damage had been done by then. She was older and more wounded and we couldn’t settle her in a new family. I don’t know what’s been happening in the last year or two, but I know she’s had one placement after another break down on her. The expectation of rejection has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess. If she’d been placed as a baby things might have been different.’

He gave a weary shrug.

‘So what’s happened to her? She’s got involved with shifters has she? Where is she now?’

‘In another timeline most probably,’ Charles said. ‘Another universe.’

‘In another
universe
? You mean she’s…’

‘You see what I mean about Cyril, Mr Bowen?’ broke in Dave Rickets, as if to bring the conversation back onto less dangerous territory. ‘I told you his knowledge was encyclopaedic.’

‘It’s very strange,’ Cyril said, ‘that this should have happened today of all days, quite eerie in fact. I hadn’t thought about Tammy at all for ages, but this morning she’s kept coming into my mind.’

He looked round at the others, realised they were all reluctant to meet his eyes, and turned instead to Charles.

‘I keep getting this vivid image of her,’ he said. ‘I can picture it quite clearly as I’m speaking to you: Tammy on her own in the middle of an empty field, under a dark grey sky and… and a bitter wind blowing.’

~*~

In a field under a dark grey sky,
Charles thought as he waited in an interview room for the social worker Jazamine Bright. It had been in his mind too: a field, a threatening sky, a biting wind and a dark, diffuse, all-pervading sense of dread. These things happened around shifters.

He phoned his boss.

‘There’s way too much going on at once here, Roger, for me to able to deal with on my own. We’ve got two in custody who’ll disappear at any moment. We’ve got the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old girl. And on the top of that we’ve got the threat of some kind of violent incident instigated by another group of shifters. The deskies here don’t have a
clue
. All the signs were there to see that the Zone has been
crawling
with shifters for months but as usual they’re all completely in denial about the whole thing. I’m just not going to be able to deal with it all.’

Roger was a bright man and an experienced manager but all his jobs until very recently had been in conventional immigration work, and he had no direct shifter experience.

‘I know you shouldn’t have to deal with this on your own, Charles. But – sod’s law I suppose – things are blowing across the whole region just now. Mike and James have been at Lockleaze all day, Judy’s turned up a hornet’s nest in Swindon, and Fran’s boarding school looks like it’s going to keep her busy for at least a couple more days. I’ll try and…’