Sacrifice of Fools (37 page)

‘Red Earth,’ Gillespie says, remembering the names of the
hahndahvi.

‘Divider of Waters,’ it says.

‘The Cutter.’ Gillespie completes the trinity.

‘As your
hahndahvi
have entered our dreaming, so we enter yours,’ the Slayer of Fools says.

‘Who are you?’ Gillespie asks. The joggers bounce past. They show no surprise at the Shian avatar standing by the path. That’s how Gillespie can be sure he is in the dreaming.

‘Sex and Violence,’ the figure in red says. ‘It is for us as for you. Sex and violence.’

‘What do you mean?’ Gillespie says. ‘You can’t even be straight with me in dreams.’

The Slayer of Fools smiles. It flips the knife end for end, catches the point, offers the hilt to Gillespie. He finds he has a
genro
staff in his hand. He does the Shian ‘no’ and shakes out the staff.

The Fool Slayer looks at the staff, looks at the blade, looks at the joggers vanishing around the bend and the dog paddling up and down in the water with a stick in its mouth, and lunges forward, too quick for Andy Gillespie, seizes him as only a dream can seize. It leans over him, bares sharpened teeth. Jesus, I’m dead, Andy Gillespie thinks; throat bitten out in my own childhood dream. And the Fool Slayer whispers the word of grace in his ear.

In the Shian dreaming, when you are given the word of grace, you know that you can trust it absolutely. God has spoken. Alleluia.

And he’s back, kneeling on the floor, trying to cough the clinging, niggling thing that isn’t there any more out of the back of his throat. The concrete is very hard and cold and solid. The arcane geometries of the sacred space whirl above him. But he knows. The word of grace is sharp and clean and true. Sex and violence.

‘Are you all right?’ Dunbar actually sounds concerned.

Gillespie shakes the scraps of dreaming out of his head.

‘Woo.’

‘It would not have worked had your brain not been imprinted with receptors for Narha,’ Thetherrin Harridi says. ‘It worked for Eamon Donnan, it should then work for you.’

‘What did he see?’ Gillespie asks.

‘What you saw.’

‘You were telling the truth,’ Gillespie says. ‘All along.’

‘Of course,’ Thetherrin Harridi says. ‘You had to see it for yourself.’

‘The children,’ Andy Gillespie says.

‘Yes, the children,’ the Outsider agrees.

‘The children?’ Roisin Dunbar asks as Gillespie buckles his seat belt. And again at the lights at the end of Queen’s Quay Road.

‘The children?’

‘The children,’ Andy Gillespie says carefully.

‘What did that Outsider do to you in there?’

‘Showed me how to work it out for myself. Showed me the Slayer of Fools.’

The traffic is slow over the bridge. Not even woo-woos can get you through solid crush-hour.

‘And what did this Slayer of Fools looks like?’

‘A child,’ Andy Gillespie says. ‘It’s all sex and violence. Like Littlejohn says, murder is sex misspelled. It’s the same for them as it is for us. The mechanics are different because the biology is different, but it’s still sex and death.’

‘The mechanics.’ She treats Cromac Street to a two-second excerpt of woo-woos. The traffic scatters like seed. Ah, the abuse of power.

At least something will move for her. Something will recognize her.

‘It’s all chemicals with these people. They make them love, they make them fuck, they make them travel between stars, they make them kill. We’ve no idea, no idea at all, what
kesh
does to them. We think it’s like a good party, or doing a dozen poppers, or a Marbella night club on an eighteen-to-thirty holiday. We think it’s a couple of degrees hotter than the hottest we can go. We aren’t even close to it. It tears their fucking souls out. It burns away everything they are. It destroys their minds. It’s insanity. Racial insanity. The whole species goes mad. If it turns adults into animals, can you imagine what it’s like for a kid when the chemicals hit that first time? Nine, ten years old, you’ve just got used to having a sex, when one morning you wake up and you’re someone else full of desires that scare you stupid, that you have to obey or you’ll explode. And you’re far away from home, on your own, a stranger in a very very strange land, no one to help you, no one to guide you, except the dreams in your head. You turn to them, those old friends you’ve grown up with through your childhood, who’ve guided you and helped you and seen you right and all that; and you can’t find them. They’re gone, the chemicals have changed them into something else. Something with a knife in its hand that’s telling you what you already know, that it’s a big, wide, scary world full of shit and humans. You’re alone, you’re afraid, you don’t know what to do, except stop the things that scare you, any way you can.’

‘Kids.’

‘Gensoon.
Shian singletons on their first
wanderjahr.
Transients caught out by the season. The ones who’ve found Holds have the support to make it through the season and back to sanity.’

Dunbar turns into University Street, slows down to cruise for a parking space.

‘And you have records of all transient movements into the province at the centre?’

Gillespie nods. He’s still rocky, but Dunbar can’t judge if it’s the lingering effect of vodka, sacred space and whatever that Outsider put into his head, or the vertigo of the Shian species falling from grace.

‘You admire them, don’t you?’ she ventures, finding a space, swinging the car into it.

‘I did admire them. I thought I knew them. I thought I could trust them. Now I don’t know anything any more. I don’t know what anything means. I’ve got these words of theirs in my head, but they’re just jabber. Just sounds.’ He pauses. You look in hell, Roisin Dunbar thinks. ‘I’m going to need your help with this.’

‘Certainly.’

They both stop in the hall outside the open office door. Each knows the other is seeing it as it was, and that they will never be able to see it any other way. Gillespie takes a deep breath.

‘Hardcopy or computer?’

‘I don’t know your database architecture. I’ll shuffle papers. What am I looking for?’

‘Gensoon
referrals since the autumn season. If they don’t find a Hold within six months, they either move on or form one with whoever’s around. You can probably chuck out any that have been sent direct to Holds, unless the Hold’s called back here to ask us to refer him or her to another Hold. They move about a lot, these people.’

Us. These people. Which are you, Gillespie? Which Nation do you belong to?

Roisin Dunbar opens the filing cabinet and groans.

‘Oh, God. Any chance of some coffee?’

‘There’s a jar in my office. They were allergic to it. Came out in lumps. Break in fifteen minutes?’

All those clambering clockwork names. Jangs. Ongs. Anks, Ouns. What kind of place is Shelter from the Sky to come from? Or Cool in Summer, or We Built it Good? As much as Dungannon or Dunmurry or Ballymena or Belfast would, literally translated. Sasammaven Seyonk, from Fifth Small Hill Hold in Ontario. Eleven years old. You read eleven years old and you see a human eleven-year-old sitting strapped into a seat on a 747, wandering lost around airport transit lounges, being scammed by taxi drivers, driven off into white slavery. At eleven they are adult. Fully grown, complete sexual beings. We think our children grow up too quickly. But our children want to grow up. They’ve no patience with childhood.

How would you feel if it were Louise fully grown, flying out on her eleventh birthday into the rest of her life? How would you feel if Mikey could breast feed her too, be as much a mother to her as you are?

Redundant. Old. A walking womb.

If you were Shian, you would just walk away from Mikey. No recriminations, no unravelled ends to tie off, no mess, no fuss. A little hurt, a few tears — except they don’t cry, they go dark around the eyes — and onwards to new lives and loves. Maybe there is a big sanity in the way they keep sex and love separate. Love is sanity, sex is insanity. But could you live that way, never having sex with those you loved, never loving those you have sex with?

And how do you feel about Mikey right now?

‘Got one.’ She never noticed that coffee has arrived, and gone cold.

‘There’ll be more.’

She finds the next one within the minute. Gillespie’s got three.

‘We’ll need to cross-check these. It’s possible some of them may have formed their own Holds,’ he says. Pages flick at epilepsy speed across the screen.

‘I can see the connection in this, but I still can’t get the logic,’ Dunbar says.

‘What logic was there to Jeffrey Dahmer, Fred West, Denis Nilson? There’s a logic to this, but it’s Shian logic. Dreaming logic. They’ve rewritten the rules of murder, like they’ve rewritten the rules of everything else we know. The killer is protecting his unborn children from the threat of the fools. That’s the logic. And he won’t stop until the threat is exterminated.’

‘Where do you stop in this country?’

‘Exactly.’

‘I think I get the logic now. The children are protected by the adults, but who protects the adults from the children?’

‘You’ve got it. That’s the irony of the
hahndahvi.
Bitch, isn’t it?’

They work without speaking for another hour. More coffee goes cold. It all comes down to going through the files, Dunbar thinks. Willich should have told her that as the third secret key of detective work. It’s only in the movies that you get the car chases and final cliff-hanger shoot-outs.

‘I’m done,’ she says, stretching locked joints and stiff muscles.

‘What’ve you got?’

‘Four.’

‘I’ve got three.’

Dunbar has her mobile out.

‘Hold on,’ Gillespie says. The cross-check takes fifteen seconds and reduces the list to three. Meshinkan Unshevret, from South Wales, in the transients’ house at Annadale Hold. Genstevra Tolamang, from The Hague, in the transients’ house in Mount Charles. Sinkayang Huskravidi in the transients’ house on Palestine Street. Two hes, a she.

Gillespie spreads hardcopies on the desk.

‘One of these is our Fool Killer,’ he says as if he doesn’t believe it can be that simple.

The unseen hunter. The shadow in the rain, with the maser and the gutting knife of the Fool Slayer. Kids. Eleven-year-olds. Do you know what your children are?

‘Any favourites?’

‘Could be any of them. Sex doesn’t matter. It’s not like human serial killing, where it’s almost always men. Could be a male, could be the female. They’re all well-positioned.’

He’d visited the Palestine Street house. Stood on the doorstep and asked questions of a young Shian with a patient expression who might have blown half a dozen people apart.

They look at the three sheets of paper.

‘I’m feeling a little anti-climactic,’ Gillespie says.

Dunbar has her mobile up.

‘DCI Willich, Roisin Dunbar. Boss, get yourself and the team over to the Welcome Centre. We’re also going to need search warrants, squads and I think three weapons teams.’ A lengthy pause. ‘Andy Gillespie has found us our murderer.’

The NIPS excel themselves in University Street this time. Four Mobile Support Unit vans, five armoured Land Rovers demothballed, five squad cars and a dozen assorted Fords, Nissans, VWs, and Ian Cochrane’s white Toyota. The heads are out in the Holiday Inn again.

Willich has the warrants. He divides the teams up. He and Cochrane will take one squad to Annadale; Darren Healey and Tracey Agnew will go up the road to Mount Charles; Dunbar and Littlejohn will call round on Palestine Street.

‘Littlejohn says that it’s highly likely there will be other, innocent, people in the houses. So knock first, smile second, say please; then sledge-hammer. But if something goes wrong, for fuck’s sake get out of the MSU’s way. Do not take any risks. Remember, we may be dealing with a stealth assassin. I do not want anyone coming back to me with no head or any other body parts missing, thank you. Got your paperwork? Good. We want to hit the targets simultaneously; we’ll go in at half past exactly. I’ve got twenty past five.’

‘Seventeen twenty, boss,’ Darren Healey jokes. Whistling past the graveyard. Times are synchronized. Willich leads his team off first. They’ve the furthest to go. Then Healey’s squad. Andy Gillespie demands that Roisin Dunbar take him on her team.

‘I found the bastard. You owe me this.’

Dunbar tells him he’s done enough, get away home, rest, recover from the shock of the
hahndahvi
contact in the sacred space.

‘Littlejohn’s going with you.’

‘We want to minimize civilian risk.’

‘The fuck you do.’

She resolves the issue by calling up her sister and asking her to drop Stacey and Talya at their father’s flat, 28 Eglantine Avenue.

‘You don’t want them sitting on the doorstep.’

‘Bitch. Let me know what happens.’

‘Don’t worry about that.’

She sends a uniform to make sure he goes straight home. And then she rounds up her squad and they move out and University Street is free and open again.

It’s a small, red-brick Victorian terrace house, two storeys, flush to the street, no bay. Its only characteristic is the yellow brick around the door and windows.

It looks like a classic serial killer’s house, Roisin Dunbar thinks as she glasses it from her car. Ordinary houses, ordinary people, no one ever notices them, everyone’s surprised when they find out that the next door neighbour has thirteen bodies under the patio, or heads, hands and spleens down the drain. They were so quiet, kept themselves to themselves. We thought it was just a transient house for Outsiders, well you know how they come and go. We never suspected.

‘Scared?’ Littlejohn asks. He’s noticed the binoculars are shaking.

‘Shitless. What time is it?’

‘Go go go time.’

The MSU Transit comes down the street. The squad cars come up the street. There will be two more cars moving into position at each end of the entry at the back of the terrace.

All the vehicles stop.

‘Go,’ Roisin Dunbar says quietly into the radio. And then, as she finds herself in the middle of Palestine Street with an MSU in full combat gear, four uniforms, two detectives and a consultant xenologist behind her, ‘Jesus.’