Bloodtide

blokes.

I leaned across and I yelled right in his face. 'You know me, Hawkins. I'm Volson.'

I made sure it was loud enough for people to hear. That name means something still. The crowd muttered. Hawkins nodded.

'Well, Den, we didn't know, did we?' he said. That's what they call me round here. I kicked over the table and helped myself to a handful of money, just to rub it in, before I left them to it and dragged the bits back upstairs.

'Made a bit of a mess of him, didn't they?' Cherry scolded me. She had out the disinfectant and bandages and all the rest, dabbing the grit out of his face. They must have rubbed it in the road for him. He sat there wincing while she dabbed his face.

'Are you going to send me back?' he asked.

'What if I do?' I wanted to know.

'I failed,' he said. And he put his face in his hands and began to cry, harsh, dry sobs from his very heart.

I felt like crying myself. Poor kid, he was just a kid after all. I dug out a nail from the drawer and I hammered the note I kept from Do onto the wall.

'Your first trophy,' I told him. 'Pass. You passed. You stay with me.'

23

Siggy

He got round me that day by being so young and so brave but I regretted it because I knew he was no good. I mean, what sort of a mess were Signy and Loki going to make of him between them? In the end I had to add my dollop too, because he loved me, you see. Love makes you love back, I couldn't help it. Even though my sister manufactured the love, it worked.

I took him out to try him out – you know, big fat pig jobs, the sort of thing me and Signy used to like. 'Go in that window shaft, find your way round to the corridor, get out and let me in the door…' I'd say. His hard white face, nodded at me. In he'd go, all alone in the dark organs of the building. And guess who starts sweating? Me!

I'd start thinking, Holy Mother of Hel, what if he gets caught, they'll string him up. I'd stand in the shadows, scared silly. And then there'd be a rattle at the lock and the door'd open and there he'd be, looking all serious at me. Never so much as a smile or I-told-you-so.

'You stupid kid, what did you do that for?'

'You told me to.'

'Yeah, well go and jump in the fire…'

His life was worthless if it came down to an order and I was weak enough to love it. Whatever words fell from my mouth were the Gospel, no question. If I told him to peel the spuds, they got peeled. If I told him to hide down that shit-filled drain, he hid. If I told him to point the gun at that man's heart and shoot him if he moved, he pointed. He never had to shoot, though. He was only a kid but they knew, even the hardest of them knew just by looking that he'd do anything if he had to. Or maybe even if he just felt like it.

Oh, Styr put the spooks on everyone, man, animal or halfman but I reckon he wasn't any of those himself. For instance, he had my memories. He knew Val. He remembered him. He remembered sitting on his knee. I said, 'Listen, Val died before you were born.' And Styr'd smile and nod and say, 'But I knew him. I knowhim.' And he'd look me in the eye and dare me to contradict him, because he did know him – in his bones, the way a dog knows bite, the way a swallow knows where to fly in the winter. He knew things better than a man ever could.

He remembered my brothers being eaten by the Pig, too. Thanks, Mum! What a christening gift. What spooked me was, they were mymemories. So how'd Signy get her hands on them? Who stole them for her? Cherry? Odin? Loki? And it wasn't only mine. Styr could remember seeing Val's body strung up on a frame as Conor marched through town back to the Estate. Signy's memory. Would you give your child memories like that?

No Easter eggs. No Father Christmas. No bike rides, no toys or little friends. No you-show-me-yours-and-I'll- show-you-mine in the hedges. Just murder.

Some mother.

Apart from Conor, there was one other thing he hated. His other half, the one living with Conor. Little Vincent, my real son. Maybe it was because the little boy was the real one, the one who had the childhood, the one who had the mother. I tried to talk to him about it, but talk meant nothing to Styr. He never questioned his loyalties or his hatreds; they were given.

'He has no business,' he used to say. No business. No reason to be.

But he was loyal to me, and I was loyal to him, and I had to love him even though he filled me with fear. I was like a child. I was even jealous of his other loves. Oh, he had other loves, but not people. He loved revenge. You could see his eyes sort of glaze over when he talked about what we were going to do to Conor when we got our hands on him.

And one other thing he loved: Odin's knife. 'When you have the knife back,' he'd say. 'When the knife is in Conor's throat,' he'd say, all dreamy and soft. The knife was the bottle this baby never had. Except that he wanted me to have it. Now isn't that weird? To love something so someone else can have it? I mean, you do that for your kids, not for your parents. That's the tanks. You can make a man love anything, even a knife. But, funny thing, the more he went on about it, the more I wanted it. It was almost the only thing that seemed to make sense. I began to feel that all this mess was nothing more than a journey Odin's knife was making back to my belt.

It was the old routine – big fat pig, full of dripping. But these pigs were different.

James and Percy Wallace. Heard of them? You should've, but you won't. They were businessmen. Owned a lot of operations in and around London. They'd made themselves useful to Conor in the past and he gave them plenty more operations outside London in the new territory he held. He knew he could rely on them to do a job properly.

James and Percy were not popular. Well, so what? Nobody expects businessmen to be nice. What you expect businessmen to do is to make a fat profit with a fat slice for Conor, and that's just what these two did. They ran dirty operations, same as a lot of others, and perhaps the only difference was that these two were richer and dirtier than anyone else. They ran a chemical works in Hackney Marshes, the dyeworks in North Islington, the weapons unit in Kilburn – the one no one knew about until those seven streets collapsed, including a day school, with about three hundred dead.

The typical Wallace brothers set-up was the sort of place no one wanted to work in because you didn't live long. Life under Conor was no joke and you could usually find someone who was prepared to do any job, no matter how dangerous it was and no matter how low the wages. But not Wallace Brothers operations. Their places were manned by slaves from the new territories or people kidnapped off the street. No questions asked.

I reckon hundreds of people from our days – Val's days, I mean – had been underground when those streets fell in, and God knows how many Midlanders or central Londoners had died in the dyeworks. Who cared? So long as Conor got his slice, no one dared care. And of course out of town, all the really dirty work Conor left behind was handled by the brothers. They ran 'private security operations' (protection), 'information services' (torture), 'personnel management' (spying and assassination) – that sort of thing. And less obvious ones, too. A tyrant like Conor needs a lot of cleaning up afterwards, and who do you suppose it was dealt with the bodies? Genocide makes a big mess. What about when Conor decided to make an example of Ipswich? Where do you think those hundreds and thousands of bodies went? You have a think about it next time you buy a packet of bone meal from the corner shop.

So, big fat pigs. There were none bigger or fatter or piggier than these two. Now, I don't fool myself. Ridding the world of the likes of James and Percy wasn't going to change anything; there's always plenty more to pop up from whatever stinking pit they come from. But it made me feel better, and then again, news got out. People got to hear that the real dirt of this world had met the fate they deserved, and I like to think I gave a little satisfaction by doing it.