The Iron in Blood Read online

CHAPTER 2

  Rebecca

  Those crutches were trying to kill me. I abandoned them after a couple of days and managed to get about in a kind of hip grinding straight legged stagger. My brothers thought it was hilarious to watch me trying to negotiate the stairs to my bedroom, and laughed a little too loudly for my taste. Fortunately Joe was away at a friend’s for most of the weekend, but I had to contend with Mark giggling and my mother trying not to smile.

  Then I thought about trying to negotiate all the stairs and passages at school, and I shuddered. The school I attended had more than its fair share of bullies, and my own personal nemesis was an oversized thug called Shanice. She infested my life with her greasy hair and her sneers and her motley collection of equally dysfunctional friends, and was one of the main reasons I was looking forward to the next academic year. Shanice would be leaving then to go and work in some factory or shop or live off the welfare system. I didn’t really care what she did, as long as I didn’t have to look into those piggy eyes ever again. Unfortunately that beautiful day was a good few months away, and until then I was stuck with her.

  I have to say, I was really not looking forward to Monday morning.

  Angus

  I spent the weekend doing a bit of investigating of my own. Fergus had given me a broad description of the car that had hit Rebecca, which he’d probably hacked from the police database; and then a list of matching cars in the region, starting with the ones reported stolen, and then those with a male teenager in the family, and then the rest. It took me four hours to find the hit and run driver. Turns out he had had an argument with his partner and had driven off in a blind rage after smacking her around a bit.

  I’d actually narrowed the list of potential suspects down to fourteen likely candidates, and twenty six more possibles. I visited each in turn, pretending to be looking for someone called Jack McShane, an entirely fictional character of my own making. I had asked for the same person at twelve different residences when I stumbled upon my target. I knew it was him as soon as he opened the door, and I felt the tangle of his thoughts sliding over the rage and frustration and meanness that was his mind. That was another of my talents, you could say – an ability to sense the general gist of someone’s thoughts without actually reading them in detail. It was a useful ability in situations such as these, where finding the correct quarry was not a straightforward “follow the clues” exercise.

  I looked briefly at the cowering woman in the background, with a fresh black eye and a small baby clutched in her arms, and I made a decision.

  In situations like these, where the man’s infraction was easily reported and proven, given the necessary resources, and which was punished by the laws of the country, I usually simply contacted the police and gave them the information needed anonymously, and made sure that they followed it up. But in cases where the law did not recognise the crimes being committed, I intervened. Wife beating was not usually considered a crime until the woman broke out of her prison of abuse and fear and reported it. I disagreed. I glanced again at the small vulnerable frightened mouse of a woman and her helpless baby, and I knew that this teenage thug needed a bit of corrective manipulation. It would give me something to do to pass the time.

  I picked him up the next day.

  Rebecca

  Sunday was a strange day all round. Big brother Joe was away someplace, so it was just me and Mark and Mum, who always cooked a vegetarian roast dinner for us on Sundays. She was rubbish at it, and usually turned out yellowed vegetables, crunchy roast potatoes and lumpy gravy, but we never complained. I cooked weekdays, or the boys would heat up some microwave meal and present it with a flourish, but Sunday was Mum’s day, and she took it seriously. Taste buds adapt, eventually.

  Our street was not a bad one for the area. The occasional gang of feral teenagers would come wandering down the road, hurl a few stones and be obnoxious to any passersby, but they would soon get bored and amble off again. So when the commotion kicked off across the road, everyone came out into their front gardens to see what was happening.

  The house that appeared to be at the centre of all the attention was more or less diagonally across the road from our place. It was occupied by a middle aged woman and her thirty-something son. They were a creepy pair. She had bright yellow hair and the deep wrinkles that you get from smoking too much, and a mouth like an upside down ‘u’. He always looked like he needed a bath, with his lank greasy hair and stained clothes. I never got close enough to him to find out, but he looked like he would smell funny, kind of musty and stale. They were both outside in their rubble-strewn front garden. She was yelling at a man carrying a settee into the removals van that was parked half-on-half-off the pavement. I was impressed. I had never seen anyone make so much noise with a lit cigarette dangling out the corner of their mouth.

  “Looks like they’re moving,” said Mark.

  “Good,” said Mum.

  And that was that.

  Angus

  It took me a while to explain to Mr Hit-and-run why he was tied to a chair in the middle of a conveniently deserted warehouse. He didn’t believe it at first, that someone would take the time to kidnap him because he’d run over some girl. When I told him that I didn’t like wife-beaters either, he looked positively stunned.

  “We’re not married!” was his excuse. That said it all for me.

  Make no mistake. It’s not that I don’t enjoy violence. I do. I was designed for violence, for tearing and crushing and snapping flesh and bone. So if I can control the brute in me, the seething rage and hunger that threatens to erupt every living minute of my life, if I can control that, then mindless idiots like the one whimpering in front of me had no business assaulting a defenceless woman because he was upset.

  I reached out and tasted the texture of his thoughts. I smelt the fear in his sweat. This one would be easy.

  About the time Marcus was setting up his lab and doing various degrees in genetics and physiology, I set out to explore the potential that my father had seen in me just before he died. I discovered that I was able to delve into the minds of people, to pick out the essence of who or what they were. I could sense fear, and anger, and greed, and lust, and hatred; although I couldn’t actually read people’s minds or hear what they were thinking, I could get a sense of their thoughts and feelings. And one day, as I was dealing out my own form of justice to an unrepentant paedophile, I realised that I could modify that essence, those emotions. Inserting anything into a human mind was almost impossible under normal circumstances. The rapidity and randomness of their flickering thoughts made it almost impossible to get through. It was like trying to penetrate a firewall.

  That day I discovered that there was one thing that slowed thoughts and concentrated the mind, allowing me to drive a specific concept or set of values into that briefest of gaps. Pain. Severe pain crystallised thought, and the amount of hurting required depended on the individual. Pain is always subjective. That paedophile had required hardly any. Some needed a lot more to render their thoughts motionless.

  I broke Mr Hit-and-run’s left femur with one hand while I searched for that elusive gap. It shimmered briefly into existence, and I thumped a silvery wedge into his mind. He would never knowingly hurt another living thing again. I cut the restraints that held him, and carried him to a nondescript white van parked just inside the massive doorway. I’d leave him near a deserted road, and then call emergency services anonymously. They’d find a bewildered man next to a road, he wouldn’t remember what had happened, or how he got there, and they’d assume that he was just another hit and run. Ironic, really.

  Rebecca

  The racket died down at about 6 that evening. It had been dark for an hour already, and cold even for January, so nobody had bothered to hang about outside to watch the show. I went out at seven to escape the stifling warmth that my ever shivering mother claimed she need to survive the long winters. The frost was already settling on the grass out front, and it crunched underfo
ot as I walked to the low brick wall that surrounded most of the house. I leaned against the wall, and closed my eyes, enjoying the relative silence and the biting cold on my skin, pretending for a few moments that the houses and all the people on this crowded island had vanished, and that I was utterly alone, breathing the icy air and hearing my heartbeat rushing in my ears.

  “Rebecca?” My mother. She never called me Becky or Bex, and I was grateful for that. I did prefer the long version of my name, but I wasn’t fussy. I’d answer to anything, really.

  “I’m out here.”

  “Come in, baby. You’ll catch a cold out there.” My mother firmly believed that getting cold caused all manner of illnesses. I’d explained to her about viruses and bacteria and all that. Made no difference. It always amazed me that someone who hated and feared the cold so much insisted on staying in a country renowned for its rubbish weather. I’d asked her about it before, and she’d said that she didn’t want to uproot us all just because of the weather. It seemed as good a reason as any other to me. And my “roots” were pretty weak, as roots go. I didn’t have any close friends; just acquaintances that I made conversation with at school to keep up appearances. The only ties I had were to my family. They were all I needed, I guess.

  Angus

  Marcus phoned late Sunday night to let me know that he’d confirmed the match with the blood sample that he’d somehow managed to acquire. Deception, probably. Marcus and Fergus could both get the biggest sceptics, the most narrow-minded bureaucrats, to glug down any story they chose to feed them. You could call it a kind of vocal charisma. Or long distance hypnosis. I was admittedly fairly good at convincing people to do what I wanted, but those two were devastating. Especially face to face. It occurred to me that they would probably be able to persuade Rebecca Harding to abandon everything she knew here and go with them just by looking at her. A small part of me suppressed that thought with what could have been jealousy or possessiveness, or maybe a bit of both. I wasn’t sure. These feelings were alien to me, so I ignored them. I’d already decided that I’d approach this rationally, explain the whole situation to the girl, hoping that she would understand and accept what I had to tell her. Give her a chance to come to terms with everything under her own steam. But if she said “No,” there was always plan B.

  Fergus had miraculously managed to purchase a house across from Rebecca and her family. The occupants had been persuaded to leave fairly abruptly, and he informed me that it was standing empty, and ready for me to move in at any time. He sounded smug. I grinned, and considered about wiping the smug look off his face, but it was a fleeting thought. I would have to deny myself that satisfaction until my task here was accomplished. Growing up with two brothers and a distracted father meant that we had spent most of the time fighting, testing our strengths and each other’s weaknesses, and the urge hadn’t really dimmed as we had aged.

  Marcus was the intelligent one, frighteningly so, able to read thick textbooks in hours, and not only remember their contents, but also comprehend every single concept contained between those intimidatingly numerous pages. He had about fourteen degrees, some of them achieved simultaneously, three or four at a time. Freaky by anyone’s standards, even ours.

  Fergus was slightly different, also gifted, but a bit like a kid with ADD. He was unable or unwilling to concentrate on one thing for long periods of time, and his flitting intelligence found a friend in the tangled workings of computers and the internet. No task was too complicated for him. He was probably the most accomplished hacker in the world, too good to even be detected. Humility was not one of his talents, though, and he laughingly resisted all my efforts to teach him.

  I was different to both of them, both in appearance and intellect. They were pale, with silvery blonde hair and startling grey eyes. I was just as pale, but my hair was much darker, almost black, and my eyes were brown, nondescript, really, which was why it was decided that I should become the reconnaissance expert. I wasn’t as extraordinarily gifted intellect-wise as my brothers were; my intelligence was apparently well above average (Marcus had tested us all a few years back – no prizes for guessing who got the gold star), but my strengths lay elsewhere. I could read people, of course, and after that occasion with the paedophile, I guess I could write them too, in a manner of speaking. I was strong and fast, but we all were, though I did have a bit of an edge on my siblings. A lot of an edge, really, but they didn’t like to admit it.

  My unique talent lay in hunting. Not the shooting defenceless animals type of hunting; anyone with a firearm and half a brain could do that. I hunted people, tracking down men and women who did not want to be found for whatever reason, and who often went to great lengths to not be found. I seemed to be able to anticipate their actions, and the direction that those actions would take them. Kind of like a mixture between a profiler and a strategist. I’d been employed by various organisations over the years, the GSG 9 in Germany, the SAS here in the UK, and the FBI eventually. I had made it a rule never to stay in the same place for more than five years, and always used a new identity forged by my hacker brother. Each establishment taught me new skills, but the work was seldom very challenging, and I‘d started drawing unwanted attention to myself by having a better solve rate than most. And there was always the frustrating problem of “proof”, and “beyond reasonable doubt”. I didn’t need these to make a decision about whether someone had perpetrated a crime. I looked at their minds and I knew.

  My father had conditioned us more or less from birth to shy away from attention of any sort. It’s a hard habit to break, so when the FBI started giving me commendations and asking all number of questions, I left, and started tracking people on my own. Bad people, unspeakably bad people, who eluded police through contacts and cunning and often sheer luck. Sometimes I was able to reprogram them, but if I couldn’t, if the hurting was too much even for me, I killed them and discreetly disposed of the remains. Marcus often asked me why I did it; how I was able to stand in judgement of these people, when so many others wouldn’t. I told him that someone had to do it.

  Everyone needs a hobby.