He didn’t tell his mother about it. He hoped that Jason Playne would find out who had killed Damian and tell the police and the killers would answer for what they had done, and that would be an end to it.
That wasn’t what happened.
The next day, a motor launch came over to the island, carrying police armed with machine-guns and the detectives investigating Damian’s death, who arrested Lucas for involvement in two suspicious deaths and conspiracy to kidnap or murder other persons unknown. It seemed that one of the men that Jason Playne had hired to help him get justice for the death of his son had been a police informant.
Lucas was held in remand in Norwich for three months. Julia was too ill to visit him, but they talked on the phone and she sent messages via Ritchy, who’d been arrested along with every other worker on the shrimp farm, but released on bail after the police were unable to prove that he had anything to do with Jason Playne’s scheme.
It was Ritchy who told Lucas that his mother had cancer that had started in her throat and spread elsewhere, and that she had refused treatment. Lucas was taken to see her two weeks later, handcuffed to a prison warden. She was lying in a hospital bed, looking shrunken and horribly vulnerable. Her dreadlocks bundled in a blue scarf. Her hand so cold when he took it in his. The skin loose on frail bones.
She had refused to agree to monoclonal antibody treatment that would shrink the tumors and remove cancer cells from her bloodstream, and had also refused food and water. The doctors couldn’t intervene because a clause in her living will gave her the right to choose death instead of treatment. She told Lucas this in a hoarse whisper. Her lips were cracked and her breath foul, but her gaze was strong and insistent.
“Do the right thing even when it’s the hardest thing,” she said.
She died four days later. Her ashes were scattered in the rose garden of the municipal crematorium. Lucas stood in the rain between two wardens as the curate recited the prayer for the dead. The curate asked him if he wanted to scatter the ashes and he threw them out across the wet grass and dripping rose bushes with a flick of his wrist. Like casting a line across the water.
He was sentenced to five years for manslaughter, reduced to eighteen months for time served on remand and for good behavior. He was released early in September. He’d been given a ticket for the bus to Norwich, and a voucher good for a week’s stay in a halfway house, but he set off in the opposite direction, on foot. Walking south and east across country. Following back roads. Skirting the edges of sugar beet fields and bamboo plantations. Ducking into ditches or hedgerows whenever he heard a vehicle approaching. Navigating by the moon and the stars.
Once, a fox loped across his path.
Once, he passed a depot lit up in the night, robots shunting between a loading dock and a road-train.
By dawn he was making his way through the woods along the edge of the levee. He kept taking steps that weren’t there. Several times he sat on his haunches and rested for a minute before pushing up and going on. At last, he struck the gravel track that led to the shrimp farm, and twenty minutes later was knocking on the door of the office.
Ritchy gave Lucas breakfast and helped him pull his boat out of the shed where it had been stored, and set it in the water. Lucas and the old man had stayed in touch: it had been Ritchy who’d told him that Jason Playne had been stabbed to death in prison, most likely by someone paid by the people he’d tried to chase down. Jason Playne’s brother had sold the shrimp farm to a local consortium, and Ritchy had been promoted to supervisor.
He told Lucas over breakfast that he had a job there, if he wanted it. Lucas said that he was grateful, he really was, but he didn’t know if he wanted to stay on.
“I’m not asking you to make a decision right away,” Ritchy said. “Think about it. Get your bearings, come to me whenever you’re ready. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Are you going to stay over on the island?”
“Just how bad is it?”
“I couldn’t keep all of them off. They’d come at night. One party had a shotgun.”
“You did what you could. I appreciate it.”
“I wish I could have done more. They made a mess, but it isn’t anything you can’t fix up, if you want to.”
A heron flapped away across the sun-silvered water as Lucas rowed around the point of the island. The unexpected motion plucked at an old memory. As if he’d seen a ghost.
He grounded his boat next to the rotting carcass of his mother’s old rowboat and walked up the steep path. Ritchy had patched the broken windows of the caravan and put a padlock on the door. Lucas had the key in his pocket, but he didn’t want to go in there, not yet.
After Julia had been taken into hospital, treasure hunters had come from all around, chasing rumors that parts of the dragon had been buried on the island. Holes were dug everywhere in the weedy remains of the vegetable garden; the microwave mast at the summit of the ridge, Julia’s link with the rest of the world, had been uprooted. Lucas set his back to it and walked north, counting his steps. Both of the decoy caches his mother had planted under brick cairns had been ransacked, but the emergency cache, buried much deeper, was undisturbed.
Lucas dug down to the plastic box, and looked all around before he opened it and sorted through the things inside, squatting frogwise with the hot sun on his back.
An assortment of passports and identity cards, each with a photograph of younger versions of his mother, made out to different names and nationalities. A slim tight roll of old high-denomination banknotes, yuan, naira, and US dollars, more or less worthless thanks to inflation and revaluation. Blank credit cards and credit cards in various names, also worthless. Dozens of sleeved data needles. A pair of AR glasses.
Lucas studied one of the ID cards. When he brushed the picture of his mother with his thumb, she turned to present her profile, turned to look at him when he brushed the picture again.
He pocketed the ID card and the data needles and AR glasses, then walked along the ridge to the apple tree at the far end, and stared out across the flood that spread glistening like shot silk under the sun. Thoughts moved through his mind like a slow and stately parade of pictures that he could examine in every detail, and then there were no thoughts at all and for a little while no part of him was separate from the world all around, sun and water and the hot breeze that moved through the crooked branches of the tree.
Lucas came to himself with a shiver. Windfall apples lay everywhere among the weeds and nettles that grew around the trees, and dead wasps and hornets were scattered among them like yellow and black bullets. Here was a dead bird, too, gone to a tatter of feathers of white bone. And here was another, and another. As if some passing cloud of poison had struck everything down.
He picked an apple from the tree, mashed it against the trunk, and saw pale threads fine as hair running through the mash of pulp. He peeled bark from a branch, saw threads laced in the living wood.
Dragon stuff, growing from the seed he’d planted. Becoming something else.
In the wood of the tree and the apples scattered all around was a treasure men would kill for. Had killed for. He’d have more than enough to set him up for life, if he sold it to the right people. He could build a house right here, buy the shrimp farm or set up one of his own. He could buy a ticket on one of the shuttles that traveled through the wormhole anchored between the Earth and the Moon, travel to infinity and beyond…
Lucas remembered the hopeful shine in Damian’s eyes when he’d talked about those new worlds. He thought of how the dragon-shard had killed or damaged everyone it had touched. He pictured his mother working at her tablet in her sick bed, advising and challenging people who were attempting to build something new right here on Earth. It wasn’t much of a contest. It wasn’t even close.
He walked back to the caravan. Took a breath, unlocked the padlock, stepped inside. Everything had been overturned or smashed. Cupboards gaped open, the mattress of his mother’s bed was slashed and torn, a great ruin littered the floor. He rooted among the wreckage, found a box of matches and a plastic jug of lamp oil. He splashed half of the oil on the torn mattress, lit a twist of cardboard and lobbed it onto the bed, beat a retreat as flames sprang up.
It didn’t take ten minutes to gather up dead wood and dry weeds and pile them around the apple tree, splash the rest of the oil over its trunk and set fire to the tinder. A thin pall of white smoke spread across the island, blowing out across the water as he raised the sail of his boat and turned it into the wind.
Heading south.
