THE VILLAGER
Copyright 2015 Matt Kruze
All rights reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters and situations are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For my fellow villagers…Sleep soundly
Table of contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
One
November 16th, Wednesday
Scottish Borders
Abigail Fleming stared through the black square of glass that was her tiny kitchen window and squinted into the night. Snow fell in a slanting deluge of white, softly phosphorescent in the lighting from the house, billowing occasionally and twisting in the gales that drove up the valley in icy bursts. It was the first snow of winter, and it came down in stony granules, bouncing on the patio and clamouring against the glass. She sighed and a patch of mist bloomed and contracted on the cold window.
Her husband was late.
Only by half an hour. Probably held up at the office or on site with a client, but just for tonight, in this weather–a call would have been nice.
In the summer or on clear winter nights she might spot the car from almost a mile away as it rounded the head of the valley a mile to the north and began the descent into the village. But through the dark and the snow she could not make out even the meagre road lights that were spread thinly along the straight section of the B357 running along the valley floor like a stone river.
After a further five minutes’ vigil, Abigail drifted over to the dishwasher, slid out the top drawer and began absent-mindedly removing teacups, breakfast bowls, a few of the larger cutlery pieces that didn’t fit in the lower holder, and returning them to their positions around the kitchen.
At 7.15pm a nimbus of light bloomed in the window and she hurried over to it, exhaling from puffed cheeks as her husband’s car rolled to a gentle halt on the small, single driveway.
She walked quickly to the front door and opened it so that he didn’t have to stand in the falling snow fumbling with his keys. He would be there, she envisaged, briefcase lodged under one armpit, a few sheets of paper clamped between his lips, while he hastily sought the appropriate key to the door. Instead he only stood there on the mat, immotile, the shoulders of his suit jacket whitening under a wintry dandruff, hair similarly dusted, staring blankly through her.
Abigail’s smile withered. ‘Are you okay? You’re a bit late. I was worried.’
For a moment he continued to stare past her, eyes like glass. Then slowly, as though by conscious effort, they came to focus on her face and he offered a weak smile that didn’t progress beyond the lips. ‘Fine,’ he murmured. ‘You?’
Over the coming weeks Abigail Fleming’s husband sank ever further into a strange and disturbing blackness, so that he became by degrees more distant from her, more absent-minded. Within a month he had lost his job and, a week later, his life, as his negligence translated into parlous driving and he lost control of his car on one of the lofty hairpins approaching the village.
A declivitous chain of events, whose inception had been so sudden: one morning he had left for work as usual, pinching her backside as he hurried past her to the door, only to return the following evening a completely changed being. He could not even explain why he had arrived home late, even though it was not unusual.
But then, that was why he had been chosen.
December 20th, Tuesday
East Midlands
Jason Ryle cupped his hands together and breathed into them. He didn’t mind the cold, but the numbing of his fingers could impede the application of his work, so he kept them as warm as possible. The heat in the car was diminishing minute by minute, but he could not risk starting the engine for the white plume of exhaust would be conspicuous in the icy air; a signal, puffing and billowing like a windsock.
At 6.56pm the white Mercedes drove past the quiet cul-de-sac where he had parked and, indicating, rolled up the gentle slope onto the driveway.
Ryle consulted the notepad resting on his thigh. On Monday, the car had pulled up at 5.34pm. On Tuesday, 6.48pm. Wednesday, 7.25pm. Thursday, 6pm exactly. A perfectly erratic schedule. Nobody would notice if he was late home next week. Monday, he decided. That’s when he would take him.
And that would fulfil his quota in this village–three males, two females. Five was the usual requirement, although he had only been asked for four in the bleak little place on the Scottish border. Harvesting, they called it, an expression which at once amused and disgusted him. They, in their corporate domain, so afraid of the wet work necessary for profit, had a penchant for silly expressions like that, as though it somehow masked the nefarious truth of their operation. Perhaps it salved their consciences to think of it as a business process, something akin to a farmer bringing the crop in. He tossed his head in disdain.
Of course they weren’t all similarly spineless, Ryle accepted, and he swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry at the recollection of that softly rasping voice.
Mr Serus.
A shudder ran up his spine.
He pursed his lips. Ridiculous. He, Ryle, had encountered and overcome some of the most dangerous, threatening men to walk the earth. Who was he to be intimidated?
And yet…
He shook his head as though to rid himself of the voice, the faceless directives, and took a sip from the bottle of water which he had clasped between his knees. Looking at it he noticed that the label was frayed, pared down to whiteness in patches where he had been absently picking at it. He brushed the little white specks of paper from his legs, returned the bottle to the passenger seat, and fired the engine.
After Monday he would be done here, and then he would move south, to the little Buckinghamshire village. They wanted eight from there–it would be a busy few weeks.
Two
January 17th, Tuesday
Buckinghamshire/Bedfordshire Border
‘How should I know? I’m his wife not his bloody doctor. He’s just different.’
Sammy shook his head. What the hell did different mean?
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yeah. Sorry Celia. Just thinking.’
‘He never says anything,’ she went on. ‘Not to me, not to his mum whenever she rings–he never calls her–he just has this vacant expression all the time. Like he’s not even on the planet.’
‘Doesn’t sound so different to me.’
‘Stop it! This is serious okay? I’m worried about him.’
‘I know, I know,’ Sammy soothed. ‘I’m sorry, just trying to make light of it. I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘When was this–when did you first notice anything?’
‘I can’t remember. Last week perhaps. I’m not sure of the day but he left for work as usual–a couple of stupid jokes, pretty light hearted. And then he came home and he was just…I don’t know–like a zombie. Completely vapid.’
Sam Faris was silent for a moment. He’d not even had time to unpack since returning from his course in Plymouth that afternoon. He needed a bath, some hot food, and instead he had Celia worrying over what would probably transpire to be nothing. Still, she and Andy had stuck by him, had looked after him when his wife was killed in a car accident last year, taken him under their wing even though he no longer made up part of the couple whom they had originally befriended. He played tennis with Andy, occasionally golf, but he hadn’t spoken to him while he’d been in Plymouth so had been oblivious to this change which had apparently come over him.
He sw
allowed. Celia had never confided in him before. ‘I’ll call him. Tomorrow. Maybe we can go and play tennis if he wants. I’ll organise something with him and see what’s on his mind okay? Don’t worry.’ Silence on the line. ‘Celia?’
‘I’m here.’
‘Seriously–he’ll be fine. Don’t panic.’
‘Thank you Sammy,’ she responded, then, changing the subject: ‘How was the course?’
‘You know,’ he replied, lowering his voice, ‘I can’t talk about it.’
‘You’re such an idiot.’
‘It’s actually true–you do realise that?’ Adopting the banter now, embracing the tone of joviality as though shining a light on the shadows of her sudden despair, banishing it.
‘And you love it.’
‘Ha, adds to the air of mystery anyway. Listen, I have to get cleaned up but I’ll call Andy tomorrow and I’ll let you know how it goes, alright?’
‘Alright. Thanks again.’
‘No problem. See ya.’ He hung up and rubbed his eyes. He was exhausted from the drive back from Plymouth and the week long course. It was true that he couldn’t discuss it but there was nothing mysterious about it. Upon his discharge from the Paratroop Regiment Sammy had embarked on a maritime security course where they taught you everything from the perils of hijack situations to how to fire a warning shot across the bows of a pirate vessel. Real Wilbur Smith stuff, he reflected, staring round the empty sitting room. His eyes came to rest on the mirror, his pale, bestubbled visage looking back at him. He needed some sleep.
January 20th, Friday
One down, seven to go.
Jason Ryle drove north-west, heading out of the Buckinghamshire village which skirted the border with Bedfordshire, to his current retreat–a cul-de-sac in an as yet undeveloped building plot. It was a bustle of machinery during the day, but after dark this sector of the sprawling development area was silent and he shared his domain with slumbering metal giants and half-erected houses. He slept every night in his car. It had been hard at first, harder, even, than sleeping in a rain-soaked ditch or nestled in a crevasse at four thousand metres. Cars were just not designed to sleep in. And yet, as with everything, the human body was able to adapt. He grew accustomed to the limited positions available to him and in time he was able to rest peacefully and benefit from a full and uninterrupted night’s sleep. He wouldn’t have complained anyway. They paid him for this, among other things.
In the car were his tools. These were expensive and complex in design, but simple in application.
There was a syringe and a phial of propofol. This was to render the subject unconscious and it was not a simple task to administer. For one thing, the effect of propofol is not instantaneous. It is fast, certainly, but not immediate. Additionally, it is not easy to inject a subject without their being aware of it. That took a great deal of creativity and was why Ryle charged–and was deemed worthy of–such a considerable salary. Any thug could kidnap someone and knock them out for half an hour, but to do it entirely inconspicuously, both pre- and post-abduction, took skill.
Stop fretting, Serus had reassured him. They don’t remember anything afterwards anyway. You’re in the clear.
Easy to say from a leather chair at a mahogany desk, expensive polished shoes nestled in thick, luxury carpet. Step out onto the front line and see if you feel the same way–
Ryle felt that shudder across his shoulder blades, a tightening of the skin, every time he recalled the voice of his paymaster. He shook his head clear.
The second tool at his disposal was a device known somewhat obscenely as an occipital dredge. In fact it was an automated probe which acted like a syringe and extracted a minute quantity of tissue from the appropriate section of the brain. This was the harvest, and his employers, Sylexon, treated it like liquid gold. Once the subject was rendered unconscious, the dredge was easy to employ. You simply placed the device, which resembled a delicate, stainless steel gun, against the back of the neck, and depressed the trigger. There followed the softest whirring of tiny machinery as the needle moved forward, and within twenty seconds the process was complete.
Approaching his nocturnal retreat, Ryle’s headlights swept over a scene which might have been the set of a ruined town–bombed-out, war-torn. There were muddy trenches here and there; roofless, windowless houses open to the elements.
He yawned as he brought the car to a halt. He would eat, sleep, and in the morning return to the village to take its second subject.
Three
January 21st, Saturday
Unzipping his tennis racquet, Sammy was expecting one of two things to happen: either Andy would emerge from the misty, trance-like state in which he had found himself lately enmeshed, to overcome Sammy with his customary insouciance, or he would slump to a rare defeat. What really stunned Sammy though, the one outcome he had not expected, was the pronounced imbalance of the lopsided score line. They played the best of three sets as usual.
Sammy won 6-0, 6-0 and even with the minor debilitation of his chest injury, he was barely panting at the end.
They walked back to the car in frightening silence and on the brief drive back to the Smith house, Sammy was unable to coax more than single-word, monosyllabic responses from this pale shadow of the man he had once known.
He had gleaned nothing from Andy that he could employ as some scintilla of reassurance to Celia–could find not one encouraging sign, only the portent of a spirit waning, dying.
‘I’ll call you later in the week or something, okay?’ Sammy suggested as Andy opened the passenger door and stepped out onto his driveway.
‘Thanks. Yeah.’ Just a vapid gaze somewhere over the car’s roof, breath pluming slowly in the brittle air, then he was ambling towards the front door, trainers crunching on the frosty, white-furred gravel.
Sammy reached across to the passenger door, which Andy had neglected to close, and pulled it shut. He flicked the catch on the glove compartment and took out his mobile. Sorry Celia, he typed. I don’t get it. Give you a call later, but he needs a dr.
January 22nd, Sunday
Sunday broke in a blaze of colour, rosy sunlight striking glass and metal and laying a fiery blanket over frosty fields.
At 8.05am Sammy slammed the front door behind him and took the first tentative steps of a five mile run. He hadn’t run for almost four months now, what with the course in Plymouth and prior to that his discharge from the Paras following a sniper wound to the chest in Kabul. The injury, coupled with the icy air, would have a searing effect on his lungs. Still, he was overdue some exercise and his surgeon had said he could commence some light aerobic training. Besides, he needed to clear his mind; Andy was his friend, but it was Celia’s issue to deal with. Only she could get him to the doctor, and ultimately begin the process of investigation into his disturbing malaise.
Patrolling the streets of Kabul, one learned not only to look for danger and the threat of a ‘contact’, but in time to feel it, sense it. His training, as it was for all Paratroopers, had been second to none and prepared him for the perils of urban warfare, but like all conflicts, Afghanistan’s was a process of combat evolution. The enemy developed, modified their tactics, learned to understand your own countermeasures and tried to surmount them. And in time you became indoctrinated in the ways of that evolution so that you were always looking for the next threat, that incipient hazard which hadn’t yet made it into the training manual. And in so doing you developed your own degree of conditioning, sensing rather than seeing which pile of rubble in a dusty street strewn with detritus might conceal an improvised explosive device, or IED.
They were easy to spot at first, because the IEDs, as the term suggested, were crude and basic weapons. They required a cable, usually running from a nearby house, to trigger the detonator. In the early days of the war you would see a wire trailing across the earth, snaking away from a mound of bricks or broken furniture or old cans of paint, and disappearing into a window or doorway. Later, as tactics on both si
des evolved, the wire would be covered by a speciously random scatter of rubbish, and then later still, buried an inch below the earth. You learned to spot all the signs though–or you were dead.
And if it wasn’t IEDs it was snipers. You held your breath at every window, scanned every parked vehicle. You trusted no pedestrian. You developed an instinct for danger, and eventually that instinct became so deeply embedded in the subconscious that you could not free it.
And then, as if fate had been laughing at him that day while he dodged bullets – not always, it would transpire in the end, successfully – and picked his way around IEDs, his wife Marie had been killed in a head-on collision with drunk a driver on the mundane streets of rural Buckinghamshire.
Nevertheless as Sammy jogged past the innocuous grey Ford parked on the High Street just beyond the Post Office, his instincts flicked a few switches in his cerebral workings. Firstly, the Buckinghamshire street map on the passenger seat suggested the driver wasn’t local. Secondly, he spent a lot of time in his car, not just driving it like a salesman or regional manager might, but sat in it, killing time; because next to the street map was a fiction novel. Sammy didn’t have the chance to see what it was as he ran by, but it was open, face down, probably about half read. Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, the man also slept in his car: on the back seat was a pillow. Not a cushion or a travel pillow–the kind of adornment you might see in any number of vehicles–but real bedding. In his mind’s eye Sammy saw the sleeping bag or blanket folded up in the boot.
His instincts instructed him not to stop for a second look. He had approached the car head on, and he would like to have stopped now to make a mental note of the number plate, but given his position he could not do so inconspicuously, without being seen by the driver in his mirrors. He ran on, perhaps allowing his imagination to get the better of him, he accepted. Maybe it was a welcome distraction to the issue Andy had very absent-mindedly and unwittingly presented him with.