The Sunken City Trilogy Read online

  That was another piece of the puzzle. Away from the distracting smells of the bar, she caught a whiff of stale sweat on its pages. Pax leafed through the unenlightening pages of notes. Hundreds of answers to three questions Rufaizu posed to night-dwelling strangers. Pax found herself answering the questions in her head as she read through others’ answers.

  What is your name? Pax Kuranes. Dad wasn’t especially empathetic with that one.

  What are you doing out? After-work drinks. I work later than most people.

  Why did you choose that drink? To find luxury in at least one area of my life. Another legacy of my father’s. Pound for pound, no other drink is as complex or rewarding as a whisky, he said. Always be a connoisseur, even in vice.

  Was it any wonder she’d ended up here? Hustling and hiding, separate from the world, refusing to aspire. Was it any wonder that Albie took refuge in fantasy worlds? He’d learnt to escape from their bullshit quicker than her. Had Rufaizu done the same?

  Pax grunted and abandoned the questions of life to grab a cubed bottle of cheap bourbon. To hell with being a connoisseur. She drank from the bottle, imagining herself a lowlife in a seedy American carpark. As far as she could get from her dad’s House Rules and drink-specific glasses.

  As she drank, she flipped through Rufaizu’s notepad, reading about other nighthawks’ habits. Most of their reasons for drinking were pathetic, either caused by minor tribulations or major personality defects: My life sucks or Because I rock!

  Pax came to the name Darren, though, and saw it had been heavily circled in pencil, with a big tick next to it. Annotated in the same style as the book’s margin notes. She realised, then, that the notepad, like the Miscellany, was not the work of one man. Many of the pages were written in slightly different handwriting. Similar, but with smaller letters, more angular. A more reserved, perhaps more mature writer than Rufaizu. Rufaizu had taken over this notebook from someone else, perhaps the Apothel who wrote the journal? With the Miscellany written in symbols, there was no way to be sure, but given how Rufaizu had revisited the original owner’s notes here, too, it seemed a safe bet. And given the similar handwriting, were they related?

  Rufaizu had celebrated this one name, in particular, with a scrawl alongside the entry: Citizen Barton! YES!

  The excitement in Rufaizu’s writing reminded Pax of his protests as he was being dragged out of the bar. He’d used the name then, too. Barton.

  She read Darren’s answers:

  Darren – sleep wastes the night – strongest and cheapest shit possible.

  Now we’re getting –

  Pax’s phone buzzed. She froze for a second, took a breath and held it up. A withheld number again. She answered and said, “I don’t find phone calls intimidating, okay?”

  “Glad we’re on the same page,” the woman replied, calmer than before. “I want to be clear on how serious I am. Look behind you.”

  Pax stood perfectly still, her natural instinct being to not do as she was told, purely because she had been told to do it.

  “It’s not a trick,” the caller assured. “I want to show you something.”

  Pax turned slowly, away from the kitchen area, back towards the open living room, where her ripped furniture, peeling walls and stacked bookshelves left a lot of untidy surfaces for hiding things. She looked through the window, too, the outside world still asleep.

  “Good girl,” the voice said.

  Pax’s skin tingled at the realisation that she was being watched. There was a terraced house across the street, the upper floor visible from here, the blinds in the window down. No sign of life there, but nowhere else for someone to hide.

  “Eyes on your wall.”

  Fighting the urge to resist, Pax looked to the side. In the middle of the wall sat the red pinpoint of a laser. It traced a small circle. Pax looked back to the window, trying to see where it was coming from.

  “You won’t see us. No one ever sees us.”

  “Congratulations,” Pax answered quietly, trying to muster more courage in her tone than she felt. “You’ve got a laser pen and found out where I live. What’s the next step, knock-down ginger and a burning bag of crap on the doorstep?”

  “The next step’s a bullet through your ovaries, how about that?”

  Pax cringed, but wasn’t done. “I deal with a lot of talkers –”

  There was a crack, and Pax jumped as the red dot exploded into a puff of wallpaper and mortar. She stared in shock for a moment, then slowly turned her gaze to the window. A line ran from the bottom of the pane up to halfway along the side, the glass split in two but still standing. In the middle of the line there was a web of smaller cracks. Pax couldn’t so much as blink.

  “You like your ovaries, right?” the voice on the phone asked, plainly.

  Pax’s lips moved for a few moments in silence before any words came out. “What do you want?”

  “That’s the easy bit,” the woman said. “We want the boy you were with last night.”

  “Casaria?”

  “The boy. Your boyfriend took him, right?”

  Pax swallowed. “Who are you?”

  “Just do what we fucking tell you, all right? Find out where he is and get him back.”

  “You’ve got the wrong person,” Pax said, voice wavering. “I keep out of people’s business, they keep out of mine. You want someone found –”

  “You seem like a smart girl,” the voice interrupted, “so I’ll let you figure out what happens if you disappoint us. I’ll be in touch.”

  The phone went dead and the red light disappeared. Pax kept the phone by her ear for a few moments, scarcely able to believe it. Then she ducked out of view of the window, skirted across the room and threw the curtains closed. Plunged into semi-darkness, she sat on the floor, back to the wall, and cursed herself for not going home after last night’s game.

  7

  An hour since being fired at, Pax slumped on a park bench with her face buried in her hands. She had moved as quickly as possible, once she decided to get out of there, and after three Underground trains and a bus she was finally confident that she was not being followed. In the confusion, she’d left everything behind, bar what little cash she had, her keys and her phone.

  When she’d calmed down from the chase, she tried to come up with a plan.

  Pax liked to think she had friends. Acquaintances, at least. There were more than half a dozen contacts in her phone who could offer protection for a price. Linneman Forsyth, a weak five-card-stud player, could get her a gun in exchange for a commitment to join the working class when his revolution came. But that might get her on some kind of watch-list. And what would she do with a gun? Shoot an innocent bystander, probably. The host of a regular Chinese Poker game, Jack the Tee, could loan her a bodyguard. His thugs could dismember the woman caller. But the Tee was terrifyingly erratic. It was dangerous enough occasionally taking a pot from him in a game.

  What else could she do? Contacting the Ministry seemed like a risk in itself, considering Rufaizu’s notes and the fact that the lunatic with a gun apparently hated them. Doing as she’d been asked hardly seemed much better – there was no telling what the caller wanted Rufaizu for, let alone what she’d do to Pax if her usefulness ran out.

  She had one lead to follow, and that was figuring out who this Barton character was.

  In that, she thought of Bees again. Bees claimed to be in imports and exports, which everyone understood to mean drugs. You didn’t ask, not unless you wanted to become involved. Bees himself was only a foot soldier, though, for a man of similar standing to Jack the Tee. Bees’ apparently limited career aspirations led him to a hobby of collecting knowledge. At the card table, Bees candidly offered opinions on problems that ranged from the innocently simple, such as removing stains from kitchen towels, to the morbidly complex, such as hiding a corpse in plain sight. There was every possibility Bees would track down a person like this Darren Barton, AKA Citizen Barton, for the sheer curiosity of it. He’
d probably revel in the mystery in Apothel’s book, too, but Pax didn’t want him that involved.

  Pax texted Barton’s name to Bees: Only got the name and know he likes hard liquor.

  After another half hour, and a café croissant Pax could ill afford, the phone buzzed. Bees said, “Family man, works on IT servers for a blue chip, Raystaten. Wife Holly, kid Grace. If you’re thinking he’s a mark, you’re misinformed. No expendable cash, not on his salary, with a wife and kid and a place in Dalford.”

  “How do you know it’s him?” Pax replied, surprised.

  “All hard drinkers end up down the Sticky Tap eventually,” Bees explained. “And using a moniker like that, that’s a way to get remembered.”

  “Ralph knows him?” The Sticky Tap’s owner hadn’t been in last night. Would he have known something about Rufaizu, and nipped all this in the bud, if he had?

  “Barton was semi-regular a real long time ago. Ralph said it might’ve been as much as a decade.”

  “But he knew where he lived?”

  “No. The guy never gave up much about himself in the bar. Just drank. A lot.”

  So Bees had used some other means to go from a physical description to knowing everything about him. Pax would grill him about it another time. Now, she had the lunatic sniper to consider.

  “Send me his address, and his number if you’ve got it,” she said. As an afterthought, she asked, “Do you know anything about the Ministry of Environmental Energy?”

  Silence on the line for a moment, before Bees said, “Got involved in something, Pax?”

  “Just someone I ran into. There’s nothing about them online that I can find. Have you heard it used as part of a con?”

  “Let’s meet up. Best not to talk about it over the phone.”

  Pax hesitated. Another bad sign. “I need to find this guy first.”

  Mid-afternoon, Pax found herself on Darren Barton’s doorstep, taking in Grace Barton as the slender teenager opened the door. She was fifteen at a push, and a natural beauty, perfect skin, a smile that could sell toothpaste. Her bright eyes regarded Pax with eager friendliness.

  “They started you early, didn’t they?” Pax commented, erasing that smile.

  “Excuse me?” the girl answered.

  “Nothing. I’m looking for your dad,” Pax told her. “Is he home?”

  “He’s not back from work yet,” Grace replied. “Can I help you with something?”

  “Starting to doubt it,” Pax said slowly, glancing over Grace’s shoulder into the hallway. Clean carpet, wall hung with clinically simple picture frames. Photos of the family. Put it together with the closely trimmed front garden, the dull grey mini-van and the quiet suburban avenue, and nothing about this picture added up to a man involved in psychotic snipers, monster books or shady government ministries. The one positive about coming here was that the low-lying, leafy suburb left nowhere for a gunman to hide, and Pax felt more positive that she’d lost her tail, now. She said, “Can I ask you a strange question?”

  “Sure,” Grace said, her smile returning.

  “Does your dad go out late much?”

  “Not any more. Is that how you know him?”

  Pax shook her head. “Friend of a friend. Thought he could help me with something.”

  “You should speak to my mum.” Grace turned and called for her mum before Pax could warn her off. Pax suddenly felt very self-conscious. These areas rarely housed people with enough expendable cash to make a card game worthwhile, and the thought of happy families, boxed up in their detached houses with their detached lives, made Pax’s skin crawl.

  Holly Barton came down the hall asking, “Who is it, honey?”

  She stopped and stared at Pax with unashamedly judging eyes as the two women got the measure of each other. Holly had a short bob of blonde hair and a shrewd face, petite but sharply unwelcoming. Objectively, she could be considered good-looking. Alongside her daughter, the bar was raised too high. Holly greeted Pax with raised eyebrows. “Oh, please tell me you’re not a drug dealer.”

  Pax shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not. I was just looking for your husband. I can come back later.”

  She looked over her shoulder, towards the street. Her own appearance troubled her in the presence of these two. Her boots, her slightly-too-big trousers, and heavy coat all had a practical purpose – hiding her posture from scrutiny, or hiding wads of cash. Above all, they were comfortable. They were not, however, remotely feminine or fashionable. This suddenly seemed important, with a blossoming teenager and her eagle-eyed mum analysing this mess of an outfit, and she wanted to get out of there. Holly stepped aside, though, leaving the doorway wide open, and said, “Fancy coming inside, telling me what it’s about?”

  Pax stared at the entrance hall carpet, not a spot of dirt on it. She shook her head. “No. Oh no, I don’t. Maybe I could leave my number, have him call me.”

  “Nonsense, you travelled all this way.”

  The implication was clear. Pax did not belong anywhere near here. Responding to the tone and not the words, Pax said, “You’re right. I should just get going.”

  She spun and thrust her hands deep into her pockets, marching away. Holly called something after her, a half-hearted invitation to stay, but Pax ignored it, out of the driveway in moments. She turned onto the street and saw a boxy Renault approaching, a family vehicle with blotches of rust around the wheel-arches. She slowed down as the driver leant into his window, watching her. A heavyset man in his early 40s, with the slightly disfigured face of a fighter, head shaved. He’d seen her leaving the house.

  It had to be Darren Barton.

  8

  Barton pulled over ten metres from his drive, five metres ahead of the stranger, eyes never leaving her. He had spent enough time in the ugliest hours of night to know a fellow transient when he saw one, and there was no mistaking the fact that she had come from his house. He felt Holly watching, waiting to see what he would do. The darkly clothed young woman had stopped to stare, too.

  “Bollocks,” Barton muttered, cutting the engine. He emerged from the car and called out, sure to be loud enough for Holly to hear, “Did he send you? What are you thinking, coming to my home?”

  She raised her hands. “No idea what you’re talking about, mate. I thought –”

  “To my home?” He raised his voice.

  Barton stormed towards her like a bull, for a moment unsure himself if he was going to stop. She didn’t move, other than to raise her hands higher and cringe. When he got within striking distance, though, he caught himself, breathing into her face. She averted her eyes and he followed her gaze to the balled-up fist at his side. She took in the cracked skin on his knuckles.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Barton hissed, scanning his head around hers like a posturing animal. From her scruffy appearance there was no doubt she had something to do with Rufaizu.

  “I thought you might be able to help me,” she answered quietly.

  “The others at least knew never to come anywhere near here,” Barton snarled. He sensed Holly had wandered out to watch. Had to be convincing. “Who the hell are you?”

  The woman squinted, recognition dancing across her eyes. If she knew Rufaizu, surely she knew his situation?

  “I’m no one, definitely not who you think,” she said, quickly, too softly for the others to hear. “This guy, last night, he took my money and disappeared. I found this book, and someone’s put a bullet through my window. I don’t know shit, only that your name came up and I need this to stop.”

  Barton kept glowering at her, but it was hard to maintain the anger looking into her eyes. Big, worried. He said, “You’re not helping Rufaizu?”

  The young woman shook her head. “Wish I’d never met him.” She paused, like she was reconsidering, then added, “But he does need help.”

  Barton shot a quick look to his house. Holly hadn’t come any closer; she wouldn’t be able to hear them from that distance. “You know where he is?”

/>   “Some guy in a suit got him. I mean, like, beat him out of a bar and took him away without making a sound, and I don’t know what. Claimed to be from the government.”

  “Christ.” Barton bit his lip. He ran a hand over his face. “I can’t deal with this. I can’t. For the sake of my mind,” he tapped his temple, “and for the sake of my family. I can’t go through it all again.”

  “I’m not asking you to. I don’t even know what this is,” the woman said. “But these people are out to get me – and this book said this Ministry is dangerous – and they took my money –”

  “You going to introduce me to your friend, Darren?” Holly intervened. She crossed the road towards them as Barton waved at her with a forced smile. Through the side of his mouth, he said, “Forget your money. Don’t go looking for Rufaizu. Talk to no one. Trust me.”

  “Someone shot at me!”

  “Honey, I’ve never met her before, I was asking her to leave,” Barton said, stepping aside and holding out an explanatory arm towards the girl. She gave him a questioning look as Holly joined them and folded her arms.

  “Is that right,” Holly said, hardly convinced.

  “It’s true,” she said. “Rufaizu gave me your husband’s name.”

  The name made Holly pause. “What for?”

  “He wanted me” – the woman turned her eyes back to Barton – “to invite him back out. It’s been too long. I heard your husband used to be the life of the party.” Holly raised an eyebrow towards Barton, her suspicions confirmed. Hopefully the less dangerous suspicions, the ones that didn’t entertain the thought of him being unfaithful. Before he could add anything to cement that, the girl continued, “We missed him last night. Rufaizu got the idea an invite from a stranger might work.”

  “I’ll say,” Holly said, keeping her eyes on Barton. “That family was no good for Darren and I’m sure they’re no good for you. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t come back here.”

  The woman nodded, backing off, “Sure. I get it. Sorry to bother you.” She turned and went on down the street as Holly and Barton held each other’s gaze. Her voice piped back again, though. “One thing. These people who’ve been calling me. Rufaizu’s friends, I guess. Who are they?”