Dark Heavens

by Roger Levy

Genres: Science Fiction; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

DARK HEAVENS takes us back to Roger Levy's stunning vision of a world counting out its final years as it literally falls apart. London is awash with volcanic ash, the population fatalistically playing out their lives in VR. But ReGenesis, the radical movement who started Earth's death with a series of controlled nuclear explosions in the Marina's trench, have not finished with the planet yet. RECKLESS SLEEP was a supremely assured and visionary SF debut. DARK HEAVENS builds on that promise with flair and verve.

Release date: October 17, 2013

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 404

Sample

From the vantage point of the discreet Observer’s balcony, with its data-monitors and racks of screens so new they still itched with box static, Auger gazed down over the crowded park beneath Alexandra Palace. He had forgotten to spray his face before setting out, and the atmosphere was starting to scratch at his cheeks and neck. There was a MagNet facility that he could have used to scrub the air on the balcony, but Auger didn’t want the slight focus loss and the sense of distance that went with the Net. If he had to be here, he wasn’t going to be anaesthetised against it.

Monsignor Arden was standing almost directly below him on his spidery pulpit, facing out at the congregation, as Auger was. Auger felt he could almost reach down and touch the top of the priest’s head. He wondered what the hell was going on in that skull, to be doing this. It was insane. Auger leaned back, nauseous at the thought of it. And then leaned forward again, thinking, I’m damned if I’ll flinch for him.

Arden’s mirrorcloak, falling in slack folds to the ground, reflected the earth beneath him, so that to Auger he seemed to be sprouting from it, his neck and head erupting from the ground. His congregation wouldn’t be seeing that, of course. They, before and beneath him, would see his face with its broad, earnest features merging with the sky. He would be part of that, to them. Of the heavens.

Auger ran a palm over the brickwork of the balcony. It came away, sand between his fingers, crumbling at his touch. Everything he touched, everything he looked at, it sometimes seemed, was fraying at the edges.

He let his gaze rove over them, the seemingly unending sweep of people down the slope and beyond it, falling out of sight, Arden’s acolytes stretching away in every direction, every one of them dressed in the same rough, colourless, impregnated shifts. They stood, they coughed, they scratched at themselves in the abrasive air, and they waited with the infinite patience of the knowing. None of them was sprayed against the air, none wore a filter. They looked like shrouded phantoms.

Raising his eyes, Auger stared out towards the city beyond. Cloud shadows swarmed listlessly over the distant pitted landscape. He could imagine London the last deserted battlefield at the end of a lost war. The ash clouds could be the drifting smoke of bombs, the quaked and ruined buildings might have been ravaged by missiles. Auger took the wreckage in, his thoughts low, his mind wandering. Not a war, then, but something irretrievably lost. A lost cause. Even the sun above seemed lost, a tarnished, valueless coin.

As he tried to pull himself away from thoughts of lost causes, a small movement behind him made him turn. There shouldn’t be anyone else. He should be alone up here on the balcony, the Observer. His hand went instinctively for the weapon at his side, and then he relaxed, recognising that flux of blonde hair in the doorway.

‘Jay,’ he said, and squinted for a second as she emerged onto the light-flooded gallery from the shadows of the steps, raising a hand to hood her eyes against the sudden brightness. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I spoke to Wisch. He said it’d be okay. I didn’t think you’d mind.’

She smiled and, despite himself, Auger chuckled. In that moment he could have been alone with her and all might have been well. He could pretend he didn’t have to turn round again and be supervising this.

‘Wisch said that?’

‘I told him we’d had a fight. He didn’t believe me, but he knows how you felt about getting the short straw for today. He said he’d rather it had been someone else. But that’s the way of it.’ She came up and took his hand, Auger feeling comfort in the warmth of her fingers.

She looked out over the balcony, and fell quiet. Then she murmured, ‘So many. I never imagined . . .’

He didn’t know what to answer. ‘Are you sure you want to stay?’ he said, his voice suddenly a rasp. He swallowed, trying to smooth some feeling into it. ‘You don’t have to.’

Her head tilted up towards him and for a brief moment the sun forced through the stained sky and a spasm of light hit the balcony, granting her a halo and making her hair more golden than seemed possible. Then the light was gone and she was human again. She reached up to touch his cheek, and he felt the tightness inside him ease a fraction.

‘Do you want me to go?’ Her voice soft. Perhaps she was his sun, warming him. She could always do that to him.

‘Of course I don’t,’ he told her. ‘But I’m the Observer. I have no choice.’

‘And I’m going to be your wife. I’m not having you hold all this in, Cy. It’ll destroy you. You’re no good at standing back.’

She was right. He wasn’t a watcher. Of the two of them, Jay was that. She knew what was going to happen here, and now she had taken in the scale of it and was okay about it. That was the difference between them. She was the scientist, he was the catalyst. That’s what she had told him that night weeks ago, after they had decided to marry, had made slow love and then had sat up, talking, until the dogs howled and the dawn threw its queasy glow over the street outside.

‘I have a choice,’ she told him, her arm gentle at his waist. She swept a finger over the balcony’s crumbled brick and blew it into the air like a breath of angel powder. ‘I can stay with you, and I can go. I choose to stay, Cy. To be with you.’ A nod of her head took in the sea of people. ‘They have a choice too. Don’t forget that. You’re the only one here without that.’ She paused. ‘But then, you could leave CMS. Wisch can find someone else.’

She left that hanging in the air. For some reason, he took it up this time. Usually he just left it. ‘I’ll be in Active tomorrow. After today, after this—’ he glanced out at Arden’s flock ‘—in future this is going to be a Passive function and I don’t need to have anything more to do with it.’

‘So just be a functionary for once. For one day. Do the job, leave. Start in Active tomorrow. Forget Passive. It’s not your department, won’t ever be. End of story.’

She was right, he knew, but it always surprised him that she could be so objective. They talked about it in wine, at night, the wine smoothing their views, letting them believe there was common ground. She said her attitude was just acceptance of the craziness of humanity. ‘Love the ones you love, Cy, accept the ones you don’t. That’s all. You can change nothing.’

The wine had swirled in his glass, its colour catching the light like the gloss of ripe plums, as he had answered her, shaking his head, ‘But you can help, surely. Look at what you do, Jay. That helps.’

‘Yes,’ she had said evenly. ‘It helps. It doesn’t change things, though.’ She had gestured through the window, at the street, the buckled paving, a dead dog being dragged away through the shadows by a pair of tiny, ragged rats. ‘It’s too late for change.’

With no answer to that, he had just drained his glass, swallowing the bitter lees. And Jay, as always, had looked into his eyes, leaned softly into him and kissed the taste away.

He was aware of a swell of sound beneath the balcony. The prayers were about to start. Auger had seen the text of the service. The catechism before the cataclysm, as the News Holohead had described it. Monsignor Arden called it a service of passage, a rite of joy and homecoming. CMS called it a Leaving. Auger had a name for it too, but he kept his mouth sealed on that.

From the pulpit, Arden raised his arms, spreading his open hands to encompass the congregation, and a wave of motion spread back through the mass of people as if the priest had sown a great wind. The surge carried on down the slope, taking Auger’s gaze with it, and as it vanished like a waterfall out of sight, he saw the backdrop of stricken London again. It was as if they were pointing him towards what they were leaving, telling him why.

No, he thought. Even that’s no reason.

Arden’s voice boomed out. ‘My people, hear me. Hear me now. We are the Long Pilgrims. We are the chosen. We are the seekers of another sky. And today is Our Day.’

He punched his hands into his chest. Auger heard the thump of them, the priest sounding hollow and empty.

‘TODAY IS OUR DAY!’

Beside him, Jay whispered, ‘There’s nothing you can do, Cy.’ She might have been reading his thoughts. Sanctioning this. Licensing it. This was not the job of CMS. Not Leavings. Not to be passive in the face of this.

Arden was still speaking, his voice softer now, pressing silence onto the congregation. He was telling them of God and of destiny.

‘Who are they?’ Jay said, pointing at the groups of men gathering at the peripheries of the crowd. They were far away, beyond the high e-fence that contained the Long Pilgrims, but they stood out with their bright yellow smocks, chatting idly amongst themselves, passing time. The Pilgrims were chanting now, their words and any meaning lost and distorted between the near and far. Many had linked hands. Some parts of the immense throng were swaying, some were standing like statues. Auger rubbed his eyes. Even to stare at them was almost to be mesmerised.

Auger looked down at the priest again. He was throwing his hands out, clutching, striking, pleading, working his sermon. He was preaching a message of destruction in a voice of hope. But he was their guide, and he would lead their way. If he didn’t, Auger could halt the whole thing. It was the only thing there was to cling to. Thinking of that, Auger pulled up Arden’s body function display. The priest was fine and dandy, all his readout spikes marching smoothly along like files of drilled infantry. He was just fine. But then communion was still to come.

‘Cy?’

‘Sorry.’ Auger managed to shake Arden’s voice away. He glanced at the distant teams of yellow-jacketed men. ‘They’re the clearers,’ he said. ‘The Pilgrims paid for them, and for the disposal. Conditions of the licence. There won’t be any government funding for Leavings. The cult pays for their own psych reports and Understands, the hire of the park, they even pay for the licence. Hell, Jay, they’ve paid for me. In future these—’ he let out a breath, controlled his voice ‘—these events will be funding the whole of CMS, both Passive and Active. That’s the idea. Can you believe it?’

Jay didn’t say anything. She let some time pass, listening to the murmur and swell of prayer while Auger checked his screens. The spikes marched on. The sine waves rolled like ruffled water. The priest was fit and well and in control.

‘How many are there?’ Jay asked eventually.

‘Over three thousand. Three thousand, two hundred and forty-eight.’ He indicated a data monitor. ‘I can give you a breakdown by gender, by age, ethnic group, blood group, height, hair colour—’

‘There won’t be any pain,’ she said gently, interrupting him. ‘It’s what they want.’

‘Will it be what they expect?’ He heard the harshness in his voice.

‘Is anything ever what we expect?’

‘These people are going to die, Jay.’

‘We all are. Their deaths will be peaceful, at the side of the people they love. If they don’t go where they think, they won’t know otherwise.’

The swell of noise abruptly halted, and the priest turned round. He glanced up for a moment, and his eyes met Auger’s. Auger noticed a spike miss a beat on one of the screens, at the periphery of his vision. There was a look of tranquillity on Arden’s face that Auger hadn’t expected, and Auger felt an odd pang pass through him and vanish. For that moment he felt unbalanced, and then the priest was out of sight, concealed by the overhang of the balcony. A moment later he was in view again, rolling a heavy, slatted barrel into place beside the pulpit. He swung the barrel upright and steadied it with some effort, and it rattled into stillness. The barrel had been painted bright blue; it was the blue of a perfect summer sky, the blue of hope and memory.

A further rumbling came now, as if of distant thunder, and acolytes dressed in that same blue came into view to either side of Arden, ten of them, each controlling a barrel. The barrels stilled and the thunder ceased. Auger couldn’t help looking up at the sky. Grey and dead. There were no birds, but there were never birds.

With a flourish, Monsignor Arden released the round top of his barrel and let it spin to the ground where it settled in a faint drum roll. Then he reached into the barrel and brought out a tiny flake of something. He held it up between finger and thumb for the crowd to see. It was a wafer, a shining fragment of the same blue again, a flake of perfect sky.

‘This,’ he said, his voice a honeyed whisper, ‘is our Communion.’

The word filled the silence. There was no echo, but it seemed to remain fixed there.

As he said the word, the crowd shifted. Arden lowered his hand, and from the crowd someone came forward and took the flake from him and walked back into the mass of people, brandishing it over his head. The priest brought out another from the barrel and gave it away to the next man.

The acolytes moved now. From their barrels they took trays of Communion and handed them out to the crowd to be distributed among themselves. The Long Pilgrims moved with purpose, passing the trays back, or else queuing for a wafer and a blessing directly from the hand of Arden.

There was no impatience, no hesitation or indecision. The time for that was past. Two hundred and fifty-three who had registered and signed their Understands had either failed to turn up this morning or else turned back at the e-fence. Auger’s data monitors had all their details. It gave him little comfort. Those who remained were going to take their Communion. Auger felt blunted by their certainty.

He watched the congregation become suffused with shreds of glorious sky. It was possible to follow the progress of the trays by the blossoming waves of azure. After a few minutes, unable to continue watching it, Auger began checking the arrangements for after the Leaving.

He had almost forgotten Jay was still with him, and the unexpected touch of her hand jolted him. She had been as silenced by it as him. He looked up to see the congregation almost dizzyingly speckled with blue. The distribution was all but complete.

‘What is it?’ Jay said, making a gesture. ‘Their Communion?’

‘You really want to know?’

Jay nodded.

It had been explained to Auger and the rest of the team by the Medical Director the day before, just after Auger had drawn the Observer’s assignment. In the silence that had followed his speech the man had asked for questions, and Auger had just looked at him and said, ‘You developed this? And you say you’re a medic?’ Wisch had quickly shouldered him out of the room, warning the Director with a stare to keep his mouth shut. Outside, Wisch had said he’d Observe in Auger’s place, but Auger wouldn’t have it. ‘I drew it, I’ll do it. But that’s it, Wisch. Never again.’

Now he recollected it for Jay. ‘It’s a one-bite, two-stage process. Stage one’s a neurotoxin, stage two a muscle relaxant. The whole thing’s in a snap matrix. You bite into it to initiate it. Apparently it tastes like peppermint. After about ten seconds, your saliva releases the neurotoxin as a gas, which induces instant loss of consciousness. Then, only when you’re out, the muscle relaxant kicks in. So you stop breathing, your heart stops beating, you die. Perfect and painless.’

Jay stopped him there. ‘The saliva potentiates the neurotoxin and the muscle relaxant?’

‘No. Just the neurotoxin. It’s the snap matrix that activates the muscle relaxant. That first bite. It’s activated instantly, before the saliva releases the neurotoxin. But the muscle relaxant’s absorbed through the mucosal tissues of the mouth, which takes about a minute, so the neurotoxin kicks in first, knocking you out. That’s the whole point, obviously.’ He shrugged, seeing a faint frown on her face. ‘You don’t even need teeth, Jay. They’ve thought of everything. It’s delicate enough that you can crunch it with bare gums.’

Jay said nothing, just looked at him. Then she said, ‘Cy—’

‘Hold on. This is it.’

The priest had raised the blue wafer in his hand. He held it there for a moment, gazing as if to take in every single member of his flock.

Auger held his breath. Don’t take it. Don’t let him take it. Please, please don’t. He looked out over the crowd, Arden’s flock, seeing individual faces for the first time in the almost painted stillness. An old man, sallow-skinned, a faint tremor in his raised arm. Across to his left a woman of maybe thirty, bald, her face and skull glittering with piercings, her mouth open, ready for the flake in her hand. Behind her a man in his prime, unshaven, his hair wave-dyed red and black, the muscles of his arm sharply defined. Further back a woman with a child on her shoulders, a little boy, both brandishing their wafers. The boy had to be fourteen to have signed his Understand, though he didn’t look it. He was the spit of his mother, holding her free hand with his. Beyond them, another woman, another man, a family, another, another, another.

Don’t take it. Please, don’t let him take it.

Arden lowered his hand with the wafer. His voice needed only to be a whisper. ‘I take Communion.’

The priest opened his mouth and placed the flake on his tongue. And then his mouth closed. Above him Auger could see the small convulsive movement of his jaw.

It was done. Auger felt something heavy in his own gut, as if death had lodged there. He felt himself draw a single breath and felt it depart.

Ten seconds exactly. Auger counted them out in his head. The medics had it right. The priest collapsed like a rag. His mirrorcloak billowed as he fell and followed him down, settling gently over the priest’s body. Auger just stared. The cloak’s reflections were a muddle of sky and earth, and amongst them was a tiny skewed image of Auger’s own face, repeated and repeated.

He pulled back to scan the balcony’s displays. On a screen he watched Arden’s EEG jerk, smooth and ease away, just like it should. He was unconscious. Perfect, painless. In a minute the muscle relaxant would start slowing everything down, a few minutes later Arden would be dead.

It was done. Auger was aware of Jay tugging at his arm, saying something, but he had no time for her now. That was the last of the conditions fulfilled. The priest leading. There was nothing Auger could do now but watch.

The priest’s collapse was a signal to the Long Pilgrims. Now he was awaiting them, and it was their time to go to meet him again. In the congregation, the blue specks jerked and disappeared. Watching, numbed, Auger saw an odd shuffling of feet among them, a meeting of eyes, a touching of hands. He felt a stinging in his eyes and knew it for tears and not the air’s burn. Only the yellow jackets were for the first time silent and still.

Auger felt for Jay’s hand and found it.

Ten seconds later, marked by ten faint amber pulses on the scanner at the periphery of Auger’s vision, the land seemed to shift before him. The ground seemed to drop a few metres and then lock in place once more, to disconnect and catch again. It was like a quake, almost, but happening in absolute silence, and over instantly. There was no dust, no hysteria, nothing. Three thousand people, and silence. Auger felt dizzy with it.

No, he saw that not quite everyone had fallen. A few, scattered here and there, were still standing. Maybe thirty or forty people. Auger watched them, not understanding it. It shouldn’t be. They knew it too, glancing around in clear panic, seeming as uncomprehending as Auger. One of them was the young boy who was kneeling, pushing uselessly at the slack arm of his fallen mother.

Auger looked around, spotting more of them, their uprightness and movement somehow horrifying in that deathly stillness. After a moment one or two of them began aimlessly to stumble over the bodies around them, tripping and rising again, and Auger thought, What the hell’s happening?

They seemed to be moving for ever, those few, as if searching for something, as if in a stagnant dream. Auger fleetingly wondered whether it was a dream of his in which they were caught. He closed his eyes hard and opened them, and it was still there.

They were making noises, some of them, he realised, sounds that weren’t words for Auger to comprehend. And then, suddenly, as if by joint decision, as if a signal had passed between them, they slowed down and fell first to their knees, and then toppled all the way. One or two of them half rose once more for a few moments, but finally all were still. Auger searched for the child again, but couldn’t locate him.

He shivered and let out a breath, calming himself, working it out. They hadn’t taken their communion initially. Something had stopped them, or made them hesitate. Nothing more than that. Their choice, like Jay had said. But they had made it in the end.

The child, though. Auger tried not to think about the child.

On the monitors, the priest’s readouts were fading and flatlining. A long, diminishing Eeep, and then just the background hum of the instruments. Arden was dead now.

Beside Auger, Jay was pale and shaking. It had hit her harder than it had hit him, he realised. He was about to say something to her when she said, urgently, her voice rising, ‘You have to find them, Cy. Those last ones. You have to get to them quickly.’ She looked up at him. ‘Now, Cy.’

‘Why? They’re dead. They made their choice in the end. They’re all dead, Jay. It’s over now. Like you said, end of story.’ Auger felt burnt out.

A second later she sighed once, hard. She looked at him, almost spoke, then looked away again. A long time seemed to pass. The screens nilled themselves, went to grey. Jay’s face was like chalk. Her voice shook. ‘Well, it’s too late now. They’re dead now. We’d never have located them.’

‘What do you mean?’

She hesitated, started to say something, the beginning of a word, then bit her lip and wouldn’t say any more. Auger didn’t push it. It had sounded like she was saying ‘Zero’.

After that, they watched as the clearers moved in, pushing the bodies into the centre of the slope with their foam-faced ’dozers, gathering the dead into a series of pyres and preparing to set light to them. The clearers were bLinkered, and Auger knew what they were seeing, piles of rags and rubbish and no more than that. No flesh, no faces. Auger wished he could be seeing rags too, instead of that desperate child pawing at his mother’s arm.

Beside him Jay activated the MagNet, and Auger made no move to stop her, grateful for the substitution of clean air and a film of defocus for the fumes of the dead. The afternoon turned slowly into night, and with the pyres, the night turned into hell. Jay held his hand as the flames rose, the impregnated shifts of the willing dead creating a brief, pure sheet of flame that lit up the city beyond like the world’s end.

A few hours later, nothing remained. Everything was consumed. The clearers began to rake the smoking earth. In the sky above them, ash added to ash. It made no difference. In the end, it was all pollution.

They left in silence, just before dawn, when there was beginning to be crimson in the sky. Auger was thinking of the few late suicides, troubled by the fact that he hadn’t noticed their blue flakes still held aloft a few seconds after everyone else had swallowed theirs.

Jay hadn’t talked about it for months afterwards. There had been two more Leavings since that first one, but Auger was in Active by then and not involved. The Communion of the Long Pilgrims had not been used again. Another Medical Director had introduced something else.

Auger still thought about it. But whenever he tried to talk to Jay about the Leaving, she changed the subject. It troubled him that she wouldn’t discuss it, because she was the stronger of them. He wondered what she was holding away from him.

And then, one night, full of wine, she had said it. Not any night. She had chosen the night before their wedding.

‘Xerostomia, Cy. Dry mouth.’ She threw back her head and swallowed the wine in two gulps, then took the bottle and refilled her glass. She held it up and stared into it, holding the glass still against the pale glimmer of the overhead light. It looked like blood. ‘The priest was calm, wasn’t he? Most of them were, calm and ready. But not all of them. They were stirred up by it, the adrenalin was flowing. Maybe they were the ones who weren’t quite so sure. So the saliva dried up on them. They took their communion, but they were dry. The neurotoxin wasn’t activated.’

Auger put his glass down carefully. He was half-drunk already, and afraid he was going to snap the crystal stem. In his mind he saw them there again, saw them standing surrounded by the fallen, and panicking. They had taken their sky blue flakes of death, ready for the next world, but maybe not quite ready, and maybe they had thought they were spared or something. Maybe they had even spat out the wafers, but it would have been too late by then. The muscle relaxant kicked in after a minute, and took two more to take full effect. Two minutes. Auger thought about it.

‘Two minutes, that’s it. And only then you start to die. Not a pleasant death, Cy,’ Jay murmured. Her eyes were glazed, her head drooping. Freed by the wine, she went on as if to herself, her voice fading. Auger heard every word, though.

‘You’re fully conscious, but your lungs stop. Every muscle in your body relaxes. You can’t move, can’t even blink. Not blink, can you imagine that? Can’t scream, oh, no. You lie in that great field of death and you can’t yell, Christ, here I am! Help me!’ She took a long, shuddering breath, and then giggled. ‘Can’t do anything but think, but feel. You’re in hell, Cy. You die of slow suffocation.’

Xerostomia. Zero. As she filled her glass again, spilling it down her chin as she swallowed, Auger wondered whether Jay had seen the boy with his mother.

They hadn’t said any more that night. They had finished the bottle and then two more before stumbling to their bed. Jay had rolled on top of him some time during the night and wordlessly urged an erection from him, and cased it in herself until he came. His orgasm felt like a small wave dying on a moonlit beach. She had fallen asleep then in his arms, but sleep wouldn’t come to Auger. In the morning, touching his cheek with her lips, Jay had just whispered, ‘I meant never to tell you that, Cy. I’m sorry. You didn’t need to know it.’

‘No secrets,’ he had answered inadequately. ‘Not between us.’

She took both his hands in hers and bit her lip, looking as if about to say something more. But all she added was, ‘Oh, Cy. How I love you.’

And that afternoon they had been married.

It was strange, he sometimes thought, that despite their wedding day, the dream that woke him screaming, night after night after night, even now, two years and countless Leavings on, was one of paralysed suffocation.

Jay would have explained it. Jay would have helped him through it.

But Jay was out of his reach now, and out of the reach of everyone. No one could help Jay.

‘Very funny,’ Sweet said. ‘Very, very funny. Jacko, that’s not funny at all. No one’s laughing. Our boy here isn’t laughing.’

Sweet jerked his head away from Jacko. ‘Auger, what do you think? You think he was bitten by a vampire, too?’

Auger looked at the emaciated body with its shock of lank red hair splayed out over the blue and white striped pillow. As if the hair was full of blood. Jacko was looking at Auger for help, but Auger wasn’t going to get involved in Sweet’s games. Not that he could have said anything more helpful anyway. It looked like airlock trauma to Auger, like the universe had drawn breath on the kid, licked out his contents and left him a husk, shock-white and lifeless. Airlock trauma in a warm, safe bedroom on the first floor of an air-conditioned student block at GenMed. Auger said nothing and Sweet turned his malice back to Jacko.

‘Okay,’ Jacko said, shrugging. ‘Maybe he was an albino. How about that?’

‘With hair like that?’

‘Could be dyed.’ As if he’d got one over on Sweet. And that was not a clever thing to do to Sweet, Auger thought.

Sweet said, ‘What do you know about albinos, Jacko? Do you know one thing about albinos? No, I thought not. If you’re an albino you want to look normal. You want to be invisible. You don’t dye your hair red for a start. Give me your hand.’

He took his subordinate’s hand, folding his own thick fist around it and pulling Jacko towards the bedside. He stretched out Jacko’s index finger into a pointer and swirled it above the corpse’s face like he was dowsing with it, circling until Jacko and his hand were relaxed. Jacko was chancing a smirk at Auger just as Sweet jabbed his stiff finger down hard into the corpse’s open eye.

Jacko pulled away, swearing.

‘Now tell me what that told you,’ Sweet said when Jacko had finished wiping his finger on the curtain.

‘Christ, Sweet.’ Jacko shook his head, his face twitching like Sweet had stiffed him into a power point. He was staring at his finger, turning it over and peering under the nail.

‘I’ll tell you what that told you. That told you he wasn’t wearing lenses. He has blue ey