"Hutchinson, Dave - Tir-na-nOg" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hutchinson Dave)

He shrugged.

"You knew I'd hesitate," I said, "didn't you. You knew I'd hesitate and they'd chase me rather than you."

He smiled.

At Holborn we hopped on a Piccadilly Line train as far as King's Cross, and a brisk trot along the tunnels to St. Pancras brought us out to the main-line station just as the last few passengers were getting onto the 0745 to Nottingham. I just had enough time to retrieve my bag from the locker where I'd left it an hour and a half before and jog stiff-legged up the platform.

"Just tell me you didn't enjoy that," he said, shaking my hand.

"Don't ever drag me into anything like that again," I told him, closing the carriage door and leaning out of the window. "Never ever."

Then the train gave a jerk and Hey and the station sailed away backwards as I was carried out into the morning rain. At that point I would have been particularly happy never to see Hey again.




· · · · ·


All that was a long time ago, of course. Aldwych Station closed down a year or so later; a couple of years after that, the Council cleared all the homeless people out of Lincoln's Inn Fields and put up hurricane fencing to keep them out. These days, you can walk into any bank or branch of Thomas Cook and order up as many zloties as you want, but the exchange rate is no longer as advantageous as it was when we were younger.
Lots of things have changed.

Just over a month ago, my old friend Hey, genius, acrobat, coconspirator in the first and only Lincoln's Inn Marathon, went absent without leave from the corporation which owns him. Festooned with electronic bafflers which lesser minds are still struggling to understand, he simply walked through one of the most sophisticated cybernetic security systems ever installed in a house in this country, and evaporated.

Of the ten or fifteen staff on duty at the house that evening, only one was actually privileged enough to witness the Master Magician accomplishing his vanishing act. And, according to Benedict, Hey killed him.

A lot of people were left looking very silly, and, as far as I can understand it, Benedict and I represent part of the effort to put things right. Of course, in this context right is a relative term.




· · · · ·


The Nuclear Emission Spectrum scanner is like an intellectually muscular Geiger counter. Not only does it detect the presence and intensity of radiation, it also draws a map of the surrounding area and shows you where the emission is. Benedict has a large brushed-titanium suitcase full of such toys, any one of which would have given James Bond's Q a conniption fit of biblical proportions.
We walk the hills above the village all afternoon, Benedict carrying the scanner and hoping to pick up the nuclear battery we know Hey had with him in Lincolnshire, but all she finds is ancient background from the granite all around us.

Emptying into the loch near the hotel is a little burn, a rushing little stream foaming over rocks. Further up the hillside the burn cuts its own channel in the floor of a little U-shaped valley that opens way above the tree line into a craggy-walled glen cupping a tiny lozenge-shaped lochan, a perfect, still, black mirror of the sheer rock walls all around it and the streaks of cloud far above.

At the head of the glen I sit on a damp hummock of grass and light a small cigar. Benedict gives me a disapproving glare, but I flash her my best grin and carry on smoking and she drifts off holding the scanner in front of her like a charm against some very old and particularly British evil. A small group of sheep grazing near the lochan sees her heading its way and bolts, off-white blobs floating across the lumpy ground.

Benedict is from South Carolina. I like to think that makes her a Carolingian; it's my little history-teacher joke. She says she was born on one of the Sea Islands. Her father was a shrimp fisherman until one of the first great algal blooms of the early 2000s wandered up from the Florida coast and poisoned all the shrimp.

After that, he sold what he owned of the island on which Benedict was born and relocated the family to Savannah, where he found a job in some nontechnical branch of component manufacture, retrained to navvy for what they were still calling the Sunrise Industries when I was a boy.

The day after Benedict's tenth birthday, eighteen months after or so after leaving the Sea Islands, one of her father's workmates tried to ask him a question and found the ex-shrimper dead at his bench. He'd been dead for at least forty minutes, and nobody had noticed.

Benedict told me all this early on, when she was still interested in establishing a rapport. But I'm not very good at the kind of rapport she wants, the kind that amounts to betrayal.