The Stolen Days of John Mann

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mann edged through the broken door of the small, deserted church. All inside had been ransacked long ago. He was saddened at the folly of the idea that the only things of use here had been considered earthly. The floor of the nave was littered with signs of the brief shelter the building had given over the years, dirty rags, crushed tin cans, and large black scorch marks on the flagstones where pews had been burned for warmth, or perhaps in anger at a God who had not stepped in to avert the calamity.

  He could hear pigeons cooing softly high overhead in the rafters. A draft through the door rustled the tattered remains of the heavy curtains that had once decorated the chancel. Miraculously the stained glass windows had survived, covered in decades of grime and cobwebs they barely allowed any light to enter now but it wasn’t hard to image the panes bright with colour.

  He knelt and bowed his head to ask forgiveness for ending the street youth. In the heavy, dusty silence he could almost hear the voices of the choir, a Latin hymn he knew from the Abbey.

  Keen had taken him there after escaping from Brighton that first time. She took him there to hide him and to heal him. He was broken in spirit and body, a bullet having clipped his temple during the last push to be free of the city. Keen’s twin Jakob was a Brother in the Abbey’s Order and she passed John into his care. She told John he’d be able to lie low for a few weeks until he mended. Five years later he had left a changed man.

  Life at the Abbey was a simple one that resonated deeply within him. The sparse cell he slept in, the silence at meal times, the labour in the gardens that used muscles he’d not worked since the farm, filling out his strong frame again. When he was well enough to leave he begged that he might be allowed to stay on for religious instruction from Father Woods, and he studied hard. During his lessons John found a God who spoke in a voice he understood, who gave him sound practical goals that he could work towards; serve God, pray, work, heal others, and abstain. The last had been a trial.

  Jakob, older by three years, had been a Brother at the Abbey since a youth. Once, when he and John were tending the herb garden, John had asked him how he coped with a life hidden away from girls. ‘I pray and that helps.’ he’d replied.

  ‘For me it isn’t a choice.’

  ‘Keen explained.’

  John reached out and crushed a sprig of Rosemary and inhaled the scent of the oil. ‘Anna smelled like this, always. She was a giddy girl really but I think she liked me too.’ Tears came to his eyes, ‘I never thought to die un-kissed.’

  Jakob told him that down the centuries men of vows who had struggled with aspects of their faith had worn hair shirts that pricked at them constantly and focused their minds on God and not distractions. They shared a laugh when Jakob remarked that anyway his sister served as a constant reminder for him of how vexing women could be.

  Mann left the ruined church and crept through shadowed streets towards the palace gardens. Before he’d left Treader he’d asked him to message Keen and tell her to meet him tomorrow at dawn. Meanwhile he would take a closer look at Chenko’s place, look for a weakness to exploit.

  ‘Where should I tell her to meet you?’ Treader had asked.

  ‘Tell her the Romans had a word for it.’

  ‘Ah, of course.’ Treader had laughed.

  Keen visited the Abbey once a year in the spring. Despite Jakob’s words they were very close. During her visits Keen and John would walk for hours, laughing and talking of the whole world up and down. Between her visits he would think of her as spreading warm sunshine and the scent of daffodils wherever she went and he knew he was being a mooncalf but he didn’t much mind. It was at the end of her fourth visit that she had first spoken softly of Amir and in such warm tones that John's blood had suddenly run as cold as deep well water.

  It was soon after this that his nightmares began driving a wedge between him and sleep. Doubt and fear began to plague his waking hours too. Was his lot always to live apart and alone, different and feared? God must have spared him for a purpose. Why had he been marked out in this way? Did he truly belong at the Abbey? If a cure could be got from him didn’t he have a responsibility to return to Russell’s tank?

  ‘John no one has a right to take from you against your will, to use you against your wishes. You alone should decide whether you belong in that place doing that work or whether you should follow a different road.’ Father Woods had told him.

  John had liked nothing better than to sit in the rose arbour and contemplate the huge brick built Abbey and soaring bell tower, fiery orange in the glow of the sun. Now its immense print on the earth began to weigh on him. And the Brothers at work in the gardens or hurrying to prayers, black habits billowing in the sea breezes, the Brothers who had shown him nothing but kindness, now looked like nothing more than earthbound Crows flapping broken wings.

  His regular lessons with the Father became sessions of counsel during his last six months at the Abbey. Between them they agreed that it was probably best that he return to the outside world. He had spent the last ten years of his life behind walls often in isolation and had never really had a chance to find himself as a man, to find his purpose in the world. Perhaps, beyond the Abbey walls, he might also find peace and reconciliation for the stolen days of his life. ‘God has spared us all so far for a reason and you more than most. Go and find your reason in life John and when you do perhaps you’ll also find sleep again.’

  On the day he left the Abbey he’d been given the identity papers belonging to Father Adam Moore, who had recently passed away. They were John Mann’s ticket to a new life in the outside world.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Keen entered the house carrying a trug of late season blackberries foraged from the lane. The sun was dying now but it was still a balmy evening. She wondered where Amir was, it was odd for him to miss a sunset. She put the basket on the kitchen table and moved through the downstairs rooms and on up the stairs. As she reached the gloom of the top landing Amir stepped out of the store room.

  ‘Damn, you shouldn’t sneak up on me,’ he said clutching his chest, ‘you’ll be the end of me one day.’

  ‘A big man like you?’ She laughed ‘Why are you lurking in the store and not outside in the sun with me?’

  ‘I was hanging herbs to dry.’

  Keen eyed the silent set in the storeroom behind him, ‘Any word?’ Amir shook his head. Keen opened her mouth to speak but Amir took her hand and said. ‘We will leave at first light, track John, ok?’ He kissed her cheek.

  ‘You change your tune, why so?'

  Amir shrugged, ‘It troubles me to see you worry, so we follow after John. What my lady wants my lady gets. Except for Birch wine, all gone.’

  Keen watched Amir carefully close the storeroom door. ‘It was you?’ She asked.

  ‘What was?’

  She searched his face. Shook her own head slowly.

  ‘Drank the wine?’ He laughed, ‘Of course. Who else? You know just a sniff will knock John bandy.’

  Keen wrapped her arms about herself.

  ‘So. You want Nettle?’ Amir pressed.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Good.’ Amir descended the stairs leaving Keen in the shadows on the landing.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Mann stood in the wooded palace gardens, the smoke from the fire barrels stung his eyes, and the stench of burning fish oil turned his stomach. He had hoped to find an easy entry to the palace, but that seemed unlikely on this side of the building.

  Suddenly, the cold, insistent pressure of a gun barrel pressed behind his ear and forced him to step sideways away from the tree that he thought had him hidden. He had been so lost in thought he had heard no one approach and been caught as easily as a kit. He waited a moment, expecting either a command or a bullet but since neither came he chanced to edge slowly around to see his assailant.

  The one called Barge, Helen’s executioner. He was muffled this time but Mann would know him anywhere. A vacant cast to the b
ig man’s eyes suddenly mixed with fear as he recognised John Mann. Was he dull-witted? Mann cast back to Barge’s behaviour in Helen’s kitchen; perhaps so. The idea gave him a moment, but only a moment, of pause. The man had after all put a bullet through Helen’s brain. Barge’s child eyes were fixed on Mann’s mouth, the source of the worst scourge from hell as far as he was concerned. So he never saw coming the knee jerk that Mann landed square in his groin. All Barge knew was the explosion of agony between his legs that seared up through his belly and into his chest. The breath went out of him and he dropped to the ground and curled like a baby to cradle the pain. Briefly again, Mann felt he should stay his hand, something didn’t sit well with this. His heart wasn’t in the kill but at his feet Barge was already reaching for his dropped gun, ‘Leave it,’ Mann hissed, ‘Leave the gun.’ Barge seemed not to hear and began whimpering loudly, working himself up into a boil. Mann feared the noise would give up the game. He cursed the God who had spared him for this sort of work as he retrieved a loaded micro-syringe from beneath his lapel and pressed it home into the tender flesh below Barge’s ear. He muttered a prayer as he carefully pulled up the dying man’s muffler to cover his terrified face, and as he stepped away from the convulsing body he heard a sly tread behind him and whirled about to face Gunnar.

  ‘If you think you can cough out a spit-ball before I bury my knife in your heart you are welcome to try.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Russell squinted at the checkpoint document on the desk before her. The dispatch rider had hurried it through to her office only minutes before. She rolled up her sleeve to compare her own tattoo against the glyphs sketched onto the form. Beyond the differentials of date and place her inexpert eye could make out no change from the norm. It must be subtle and skilled work.

  ‘The Cryptographer is sure it’s not official?’

  ‘Yes Ma’am.’ Private Williams replied, ‘The man carrying this stamp definitely passed into Brighton this afternoon.’

  ‘We need to trace where he got these markings. And then look to Brighton.’ Russell said.

  Private Tate stepped forward ‘We would never find him in that city, it would be foolish even to enter.’

  ‘We could go in disguise Ma’am.’ Williams countered with ill-disguised impatience, ‘Who’d know what our business was?’

  Russell massaged her temples, she’d had a vicious headache since speaking to Secretary Hunt. She wasn’t stupid enough to think John wasn’t useful to a Government as some kind of a weapon but could she really just hand him over without at least trying to secure his agreement to run more tests for a vaccine? Or failing that binding herself more tightly to him so that when he was shipped she was assured of a ticket also. She didn’t doubt the threat behind Hunt’s words if she did forge ahead in her own fashion but she had no reason to believe his promise of rewards either.

  She looked at Tate and Williams awaiting her decision. ‘We might pass as travellers yes, and we can certainly monitor the roads out, he will, I assume, leave the city at some point.’

  At that moment Private Evans entered the room. ‘Ma’am, we’ve received a broadcast. It is clumsy in part but it appears to pinpoint where we will find Mann tomorrow.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  John Mann recalled a May Day carny from his youth. A man in a scarlet suit had thrown knives at a woman in scarlet drawers while she posed before a stack of hay bales. His knives had taken an apple from each of her shoulders and then her head in a deadly display of skill and intent. Gunnar evoked the ghost of that showman now, his right arm cocked, his fingers caressing a blade that reflected the orange flames from a nearby fire barrel. His eyes focused and unblinking, like a predator at prey.

  Gunnar’s free hand indicated Barge’s prone body, ‘He had nightmares about you coming to find him, and then he found you, what odds?’

  ‘It didn’t please me to end him.’

  ‘But you didn’t stay your hand. Perhaps he was an eye for the woman?’

  Mann briefly searched inside himself for the desire to kill Gunnar but found it absent for the moment. Perhaps killing Barge really had been enough. ‘It feels like a scale balanced, for now, but you still have to answer for the boy.’

  Gunnar looked at the building beyond Mann, ‘I don’t fancy you came all this way to end Barge and me and I reason you know about Chenko having the boy now, but you won’t find either here. He is leaving the city tonight, and the boy goes with him.’

  Forty minutes later Mann and Gunnar stood looking down into the harbour from the high coast road heading east out of the city. The moon was hidden by cloud and the dark waters below looked like thick oil moving with a deep swell, heaving a flotilla of fishing boats up and down. The large vessel amongst them was a great white beast and Mann could hear its painters slap against its tall masks even at this distance. A lighted lamp swung drunkenly from the stern deck while a steadier light blazed out from the cabin windows betraying restless, shadowy figures moving about inside.

  Mann and Gunnar had made their way through a silent city to this place. The few people they’d encountered on the streets had ducked out of sight, afraid to cross their path. Mann had asked Gunnar why Chenko would work to locate him and then leave. ‘Family trouble, they say. But don’t worry you are not forgotten. He knows you exist now and you are a prize worth the wait.’

  Mann looked at the long narrow strips of stony beach, to either side of the harbour, they had been washed clean and smooth by the tides. Seagulls patrolled the strand, or bobbed about on the shallow waves. To his right, in the far distance, he could make out the black skeleton of a long burned pier still standing, still defying the elements.

  Gunnar broke the silence. ‘There was one other priest in the area that night and he was fetched easily back by another team. We drew the straw to fetch you and our orders were to bring you back alive at all costs. We had no idea who you were,’ Gunnar looked hard into Mann’s face, ‘or what you were capable of. He sent us against you in ignorance. We were totally expendable. If you had killed us all it would not have mattered to him, but by leaving two of us alive your identity was more swiftly confirmed.’ Gunnar paused a moment, then said. ‘I regret delivering the boy to him but without the boy as a shield I’d have died in that room.’

  At the mention of David, Mann’s enmity towards Gunnar resurfaced. ‘If you mean to soften my attitude towards you with this sad tale of your ill use…’

  ‘I expect nothing from you but a choking death.’ Gunnar said, ‘Given the opportunity.’

  ‘That I could look for now.’

  ‘Then you would never recover the boy.’

  Below them, the white yacht’s motor suddenly coughed into life with a deep growl, and the vessel pointed its nose towards open water.

  ‘Is the plan to give chase now?’ Mann asked.

  ‘Only if you swim like a dolphin.’

  ‘But you know where the boat is headed.’

  ‘East.’

  ‘There is a lot of world to the east of where we stand.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Mann turned to face Gunnar whose eyes were tracking Chenko’s yacht out of the harbour. Now that he was without his mask Mann could study him more closely. His white blonde beard was closely cropped now, he had sharp features and intelligent eyes, and Mann saw humour where he had thought to find cruelty. ‘Level with me.’ He said.

  Gunnar returned Mann’s frank gaze. ‘A pact,’ Gunnar said, ‘I lead you to Chenko, you clear my path to him. You get the boy back, I get to part Chenko’s head from his neck. And then?’ Gunnar shrugged his shoulders, ‘You and I can settle up if you still think the scales weigh against you.’

  Mann looked again at the yacht out in clear water and then turned to Gunnar and extended his hand. Gunnar viewed it with suspicion.

  ‘You’ll know when it’s primed.’ Mann said, and Gunnar shook on their deal.

  ‘We should head out.’ Gunnar said.

  ‘I have a message to relay firs
t.’ Mann replied.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  As Russell opened the door a rush of stale air hit her. She’d have to order the fans fixed. She flicked on the overhead light and it blinked a dozen times before it kicked in with an angry buzz. She didn’t remember the light in here being this harsh, or noisy. She’d get someone to look at that too. It was fortunate the room had survived the blaze at all, the heavy lab door beyond had obviously held back the worst of the heat and flames, whilst other parts of the Facility had been razed and while all her stores of John’s samples had been lost the arsonists had failed to destroy this place.

  She walked around the room and ran her finger across the desk, checking for dust, but there was none. She studied the pencil drawings pinned to a board, the paper showed signs of having been balled up and smoothed out again. She re-pinned her favourite, a scene of a lightning struck tree, seared by a chance bolt from heaven, isolated, but still standing.

  She opened the chest of drawers and smoothed her hand across the clothes folded neatly inside, she hoped they were the right size. She sat down on the freshly made bed and checked her watch, tapping the glass, it was nearly midnight.