Refuge Read online

  He sat back. It was not pleasant to be reminded thus of the first months on his own, of the first chapters of his journal, the shorthand itself as crazy as the things described.

  For over two years during and after the plague, at first crisscrossing Britain in his fruitless quest for survivors, Suter had been out of his senses. That Suter, the extinct Suter, had raised solitude to godhead. He it was who had exulted in ruin, who had raised his arms to the sky and yelled blessing on the pestilence, who had cast away his name on the surface of the swirling Thames; who had owned all the seasons and the rich, glacier-scoured lands of his childhood whereon he chose to dwell. In the frenzy of his writings could be traced the emergence of a peculiar literary intelligence: gloating, triumphant, the towering construction of a psychotic visionary, a zealot bathed in dazzling light, a tattered prophet from a painting by Blake, speaking in tongues or babbling the Elizabethan language of the Geneva Bible. His eyes, that beheld the landscape of the Revelation, had been clear and grey, with flawless sight. His body, then, had been young and strong, nearly as strong as his mind. Had it not been for that, he would not be sitting here tonight, grizzled, marooned, becalmed in middle age.

  14 November, 2016. That’s when news of the pestilence had been made public. 9 January, 2017: Helen’s death. 15 March, 2017: Suter’s last words with a living human being. 25 April, 2019: his resurrection, his recovery, the first resumption of his sanity.

  He had come back to this district because he had grown up here. The rivers and hills of his childhood, at least, were familiar, would keep him company. In his testament dated 25 April, 2019, he had renounced all hope of ever finding others alive. Since then he had hardly ventured more than four miles from his house and had never spent so much as two nights together away.

  Tomorrow, he continued, I shall set out to investigate. I must know where he came from. I shall just look, make no contact. If the murderers are within 10 miles and in substantial numbers I must think about finding somewhere else to live. Such an upheaval is almost unthinkable.

  He took another sip of brandy.

  Without roads I cannot relocate single-handed. Besides, this place is my home. I do not see why they should make me give it up. They have already destroyed my equanimity. Without even knowing it, without caring, they have muddied the water of my mind.

  Each drop of rain hitting the window made its own report, distinct from the drumming on the tiles of the roof and the splashing in the concrete yard, distinct from the trickling in the gutters and downpipes, in the conduits and soakaways deep below ground.

  ‘I love the rain,’ Suter thought; or murmured. Rain was the music of solitude, of humility and resignation. Falling drop by drop across the landscape, it collectively found its way into the water table, into the springs and tributaries, into the river that flowed past his house, and into the lake, the broad flooded pit that stretched away south.

  The lake had been instrumental in drawing him back to take up residence here. Its site had formerly been laid to rushy pasture, a river moor intersected by hedgerows. Its destiny had been sealed just below the turf, for millions of tons of gravel had lain there since the last ice age, brought down by the melting glacier that had made the valley and the river.

  The machines arrived in Suter’s boyhood: Ruston Bucyrus cranes, a Niagara wash-tower, yellow Volvo earthmovers, fleets of premixers and thirty-ton Fodens taking the dripping aggregrate to the expanding suburbs of north and west London. Snarling chainsaws made short work of his beloved trees and hedgerows. The turf in the places where he had found blackcaps’ eggs or lain watching stoats was clawed up, the topsoil spirited away. Indefatigably swinging back and forth, steel jaws ate at the ground. The vacancy they left was at once filled by water: the lake had started to form.

  For the sake of the new birds that appeared he forgave the machines and even acknowledged the sense of excitement brought by the chaos of noise and dust and glare. In the school holidays he would spend nearly every day at the gravel-pit, in shorts and T-shirt, binoculars round his neck, sometimes riding his bicycle along the adjoining canal towpath or down the track along the shore.

  The workmen, he knew, had tolerated the distant, obsessive, solitary trespasser; had probably shared jokes about him.

  ‘Tolerated,’ Suter said. ‘That’s the word.’

  He took up again his Ordnance Survey maps and studied them in the lamplight, refreshing his memory of places he had not visited for years.

  For much of its length the river and two of its tributaries had been canalised, but he had in 2019 chained the locks as far up as Tring, making a huge reed-marsh of the middle valley. Had he not done so, the body would never have found its way past his house.

  Dead a week? the notebook read. In water same period?

  Even from Tring, a freely floating object would take no longer than a day to fetch up at Harefield. Thus the body must have been delayed elsewhere, perhaps several times, by catching in fallen trees or by grounding at bends. Grounding seemed likely: No eyes. Eaten by crayfish?

  It would have come free with a rise in water-level, or by the accumulated force of current breaking the impeding branches.

  With his pencil, Suter marked on each tributary the obstructions above which he knew the site of the murder could not lie. He was left with some twenty miles of watercourse to explore.

  Twenty miles, no more.

  Everything he had believed in had been turned upside down.

  He put the maps aside, in favour of his diary, and resumed writing.

  I have just decided that I cannot, will not, change my place of abode. I shall set out tomorrow. If I find a settlement no nearer than 10 miles from here, I shall observe it for a while in the hope that I can afford to withdraw without making contact. If I find a settlement within 10 miles and it has more than, say, 15 inhabitants, I shall observe it for longer in case I decide that I have no choice but to make myself known.

  Before rising from his chair, Suter drained his brandy-glass and, in his neatest Pitman’s, believing it as he wrote, formed the final sentence of the day.

  If there are fewer than 15, I shall shoot them all.

  5

  Suter found the village at dawn on the third day. At about noon, having spent the morning watching the place and trying to come to terms with his discovery, he was on the point of deciding to change position, to move to the other side of the valley, when he was taken unawares by someone coming up behind him.

  He heard a woman say, ‘Who are you?’

  Either she had approached in silence or, more likely, he had been so engrossed in thought that he had simply failed to hear.

  ‘No!’ she cried, as he rolled over. ‘I’m unarmed!’

  In blind consternation, he kept the Glock, double gripped, pointing at her head. His hands began to shake uncontrollably as he realised the enormity of the blunder he had made: he looked furtively about and raised himself from the supine to the sitting position. Never, never before had he been so lax, so negligent, so deserving of death.

  But the woman seemed to be alone.

  She was no longer young, or even middle-aged. A basket with an open top hung, rucksack-style, at her back. His eye took in the drab headscarf, the rainproof jacket, the muddy jeans and boots.

  ‘I … I’ve been gathering fungi,’ she explained, to placate him. ‘That’s the only reason I saw you. I wasn’t on the path. Otherwise …’

  Still he kept the pistol levelled.

  ‘Don’t shoot me.’

  Her calmly uttered request sounded so reasonable that it penetrated Suter’s consciousness enough to register, and he understood then that she did not wish to be shot, to be torn in half, blown to pieces with a lacerating burst of fire. He noticed the perilous firmness of his grip on the trigger and made himself ease the pressure.

  And then, with four simple syllables, he broke the spell and put an end to his twelve-year sentence of solitary confinement.

  ‘What is your name?’

&n
bsp; ‘Muriel. Muriel Taylor.’

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Yes. I promise.’

  Again Suter looked about him. He was just inside the wood here. Most of the tree-trunks were too narrow to conceal a hiding man.

  ‘I assure you,’ she said. ‘I’m alone and I mean you no harm. Please lower your gun.’

  Not taking his eyes from her face, nor yet lowering the pistol, Suter rose smoothly to his feet.

  Despite the Glock, she was regarding him almost sympathetically. He discerned openness, resolution, in the cast of her features. In her youth she could have been handsome. She could have belonged to that race of Englishwomen which had enabled and indeed taken a prominent role in winning the Empire. The sort who had ordered natives about and been worshipped in return.

  He should have been nonplussed, but was not, when, apparently apropos of nothing, she said, ‘Do you believe in God?’

  ‘I do not.’

  He lowered the pistol, unable to comprehend the fact that he was holding a conversation, that some person other than himself had spoken and was now listening. ‘You caught me on the hop,’ he said.

  Now it was her turn to look uneasily around. ‘There’s no need to speak so loudly.’

  ‘Am I speaking loudly?’

  ‘Very.’

  He heard himself saying, ‘I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘You haven’t told me your name.’

  He saw no harm in revealing it. ‘Suter.’

  ‘Do you have a Christian name?’

  ‘A forename. John.’

  ‘That is a Christian name,’ she said, subtly emphasising the second and fourth words.

  ‘It’s my name.’

  ‘May I call you by it?’

  He assented. ‘What made you look over your shoulder just now?’

  ‘You’re nothing to do with them, then.’

  ‘With whom?’ he said, disingenuously.

  Looking at the place where he had been lying, she allowed herself a less guarded inspection of his baggage and equipment. ‘With Bex and his friends.’

  He did not reply. Shortly before the woman had arrived, Suter had resolved to spend another day, at most, in observation before retreating permanently to his own domain. He had already decided that there were too many people in the village for him to dispose of, even had he really been able to bring himself to do such a thing. Something horrible had befallen the place. He had no intention of becoming part of it.

  She said, ‘Do you mind if we sit down?’ and, without waiting for an answer, unhitched her fungus-basket. From her jacket she took a yard-square sheet of thick polythene, which she spread on the ground. Suter sat too, cross-legged in his waterproof trousers, heedless of the withered stems of dog’s mercury carpeting this part of the wood.

  He admired her pluck. She had been afraid that the Glock might go off, but she was not afraid of him – notwithstanding his camouflaged clothing and corked, bearded face, notwithstanding the twelve-bore pump-action Remington 870, the canvas bandolier, the holstered Browning at his belt, the saw-backed knife strapped to his leg.

  She said, ‘Have you come to kill Bex?’

  He lightly shook his head.

  ‘Then you aren’t from some other place where he’s been?’

  ‘You sound disappointed.’

  She looked at him askance. A moment later, she said, ‘How long have you been on your own?’

  Should he tell her? Why not? ‘Ever since the plague.’

  ‘What?’ she said in amazement. ‘Completely?’

  ‘I thought I was the only one left.’

  ‘Where have you been living?’

  ‘Somewhere safe.’

  She ignored the rebuke. ‘You must be a very remarkable person.’

  Suter smiled, for the first time, rather wryly. ‘That’s not exactly the word I would use.’ With a vague gesture he indicated the village, behind him and to his left. ‘Is it still called “Shanley”?’

  ‘Do you know it? I mean, did you know it, before?’

  ‘I came here sometimes with my parents. Or on my bike. When I was a boy. The church tower’s got some nice gargoyles, as I recall. Is the Manor House still habitable?’

  ‘Our head man lives there. Rather, he did live in the Manor. Now he’s being held hostage there, in the crypt.’

  ‘By Bex?’

  ‘By Bex.’

  Suter took out his notebook. ‘My memory isn’t what it was. I have to write things down.’

  ‘Then – do you want to know about Bex?’ He could see that she wanted to add, ‘And will you help us?’

  To which the silent and unequivocal answer was ‘No.’ But Suter had come here to gather information and anything she told him would add to his store. In particular he wanted to know what chance there was of any of these bastards finding their way downstream as far as Harefield Moor: as far as his house.

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Twenty or so. They’re all about that age.’

  ‘How many of them?’

  ‘Twelve. I mean, fourteen. Two more have joined them.’

  ‘From the village here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are they all males?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Suter added more outlines to his notebook. As he did so, without looking up, he said, ‘When did they arrive?’

  ‘About two weeks ago. At Michaelmas.’

  ‘On September the twenty-ninth itself?’

  ‘Yes, in the afternoon.’

  He recalled that Shanley church was dedicated to St Michael the Archangel. How he had remembered this he could not say, but the haphazard conjunction of facts served only to heighten his growing sense of illogicality. He was talking to this apparition, this Muriel Taylor, in just the same way that, for the past twelve years, he had been talking to himself. What in God’s name did he think he was doing, squatting on the ground, conversing with some phantom? Maybe none of this was happening. Maybe he had, after years of teetering, finally and irretrievably gone off his rocker.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ she said.

  ‘Everything’s wrong, far as I can make out. How many have they killed?’

  ‘Three. Two by ritual.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Satanic ritual. They worship Satan.’

  ‘Satan.’

  ‘Yes. Bex … he’s taught them to eat flesh. Human flesh.’

  Suter continued looking at her. She was in complete earnest. ‘When did these killings happen?’

  ‘Two on the day they arrived. The third a week later.’

  ‘How many have they wounded?’

  ‘Five. No, six. There was another one yesterday.’

  ‘How many assaulted?’

  ‘Nearly everybody.’

  ‘Rapes?’

  ‘Yes. All the time.’

  ‘Like this morning,’ he said. ‘In the meadow, by the bridge.’

  ‘You saw it, then. With those, I suppose.’ She indicated his binoculars. ‘It’s usually like that. Five or six together.’

  ‘Have they …’

  ‘They haven’t done it to me yet, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s the younger ones they want.’ Her eyes blazed. ‘Bex took our head man’s daughter. We haven’t seen her since the day they murdered Martin. That’s her husband. He —’

  ‘What sort of weapons do they have?’

  ‘Machine guns. They got them from the RAF place at Halton. Rifles. Pistols. Knives, machetes.’ She looked at him with new hope, encouraged by the turn his questioning had taken. ‘They’re stupid, most of them. Bex is the only one with a brain. If we could just get rid of him, the others would run around like chickens with their heads cut off.’

  ‘Do they have any dogs?’

  ‘Dogs? How do you mean?’

  ‘Tracker dogs.’

  ‘No. No dogs.’

  ‘What about infrared? Image intensifiers, anything like that?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

 
‘Any special equipment apart from the guns?’

  ‘No.’

  Suter was taking a verbatim account of everything she was telling him. ‘How did they find you?’

  ‘Philip – that’s our head man – Philip said Bex told him he had found the lane.’

  ‘What lane?’

  ‘We kept a lane open to Watford. It runs up behind the Manor. You can’t see it from here.’

  Suter expelled his breath.

  ‘You don’t think that was very clever of us, do you?’

  ‘Is anyone left alive in Watford?’

  ‘No. It’s in ruins.’

  ‘Do you know of any other survivors? Anywhere.’

  ‘We always assumed there were some. Maybe in another part of the country, or abroad. After all, we’d survived and were able to find each other. Philip was the first. He and Helen —’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Suter said, startled to hear the name spoken by other lips, disturbed that it had been misappropriated and attached to some other female.

  ‘His daughter.’

  ‘Martin’s wife?’

  ‘Yes. She’s the one Bex is holding. Philip and Helen were the only related survivors. Everyone else came singly. My husband died just before the plague, of cancer. We lived in Northwood.’

  ‘Did you have children?’

  ‘A son, in America. I never heard anything about him.’

  ‘How many children have been born since the community was founded?’

  ‘Nine.’

  Suter turned back to the previous page, reviewing what he had written so far. ‘So how many villagers are there in all?’

  ‘Forty-seven. There were fifty-two.’

  ‘And Bex lets most of you go about your business?’

  ‘As long as it meets his approval. Gathering and preparing food, mainly.’

  ‘Has anyone run away?’

  ‘He says he’ll kill Philip if they do.’

  Suter saw that she already knew that Bex would, sooner or later, kill them all. He said, ‘Do you have any vehicles besides the two tractors?’

  ‘A lorry. We keep it in the big barn. Over there.’

  ‘Any motorbikes?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Quad bikes?’