The Breach E-Book

M. T. Hill

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

From Philip K. Dick Award-nominated author M.T. Hill, The Breach is a unique science fiction mystery set in the dangerous underground world of the urban exploration scene. Freya Medlock, a reporter at her local paper, is down on her luck and chasing a break. When she's assigned to cover the death of a young climber named Stephen, she might just have the story she needs. Digging into Stephen's life, Freya uncovers a strange photo uploaded to an urban exploration forum not long before he died. It seems to show a weird nest, yet the caption below suggests there's more to it. Freya believes this nest - discovering what it really is and where it's hidden - could be the key to understanding the mysteries surrounding Stephen's death. Soon she meets Shep, a trainee steeplejack with his own secret life. When Shep's not working up chimneys, he's also into urban exploration - undertaking dangerous 'missions' into abandoned and restricted sites. As Shep draws Freya deeper into the urbex scene, the circumstances of Stephen s death become increasingly unsettling - and Freya finds herself risking more and more to get the answers she wants. But neither Freya nor Shep realise that some dark corners are better left unlit.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Praise for Zero Bomb

By M.T. Hill and Available From Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

A Fire in the North

The Landowner

Part I: Look, Don’t Touch

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

Sunday Rites

The Landowner

Part II: Vertex Island

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

Home by the Sea

The Landowner

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

PRAISE FOR ZERO BOMB

“Suffocatingly real… An inventive thriller about the increasingly blurred lines between machine and man, animal and AI.”

SFX

“Gripping… Grim in places, bitterly funny in others.”

SciFi Now

“Hill is a true innovator, a brilliant prose stylist and a writer with a high level of invention. Zero Bomb mixes intense human drama and political struggle to show that great SF exists as much on the streets of today’s Britain as it does in the stars.”

JEFF NOON, author of Vurt

“A beautifully written and profoundly dislocating book about a chillingly plausible near future and its discontents. Absolutely essential reading.”

DAVE HUTCHINSON, award-winning author of Europe in Winter

“Thrilling, audacious and timely, M.T. Hill’s visions of the future feel closer to reality than they should.”

HELEN MARSHALL, award-winning author of The Migration

“Vivid and richly imagined, Zero Bomb is a passionate examination of who we are and a warning of what we could shortly become. I couldn’t put it down.”

CATRIONA WARD, award-winning author of Rawblood

“Conceived at the height of an unprecedented national crisis, M.T. Hill’s Zero Bomb is a violent, vital novel about virtue, loyalty, decency and love, even as we watch these timeless human attributes dissolve in the stomach acids of the World Machine. Think E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, written for the Westworld age, and you may just gain a fingerhold on this crazed colt of a book.”

SIMON INGS, author Wolves and The Smoke

BY M.T. HILL AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

Zero Bomb

THE BREACH

M.T. HILL

TITANBOOKS

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The Breach

Print edition ISBN: 9781789090031

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789090048

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition March 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 2020 M.T. Hill. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For AI

A FIRE IN THE NORTH

The Landowner

The burning starts mid-evening, when Lakeland greens have run to gold and the foxes on heat are shrieking.

Em is on the phone to the solicitor when she notices the smell, a rich and bitter fug, though it doesn’t distract her much. After all, people burning stuff is normal up here in the Lakes. Bonfires, barbeques, campfires – walk any which way for miles and count the ash piles with your cowpats. It could be anglers on the tarn, a farmer clearing fallow fields, a young family gearing up for a restless night under canvas… anything like that. And so it’s easy for Em to blank it – especially easy given what the solicitor is saying. And when he’s done saying it, Em puts down the phone and stares into the grain of the desk.

‘Now what?’ she asks herself out loud. Now. What. And here it comes, sure as anything: the dread tide, the enormity of losing their home. The life she and her husband Ted have made here. There’s no ambiguity, no wriggle-room, because the solicitor has confirmed what they thought unlikely just months ago: the council is seizing land for development, and Em and Ted’s property – the farmhouse and its acreage, the barns, the old bunker – is now subject to a compulsory purchase order.

Em reaches for the bottle of red she brought up fatalistically from the cellar, decants the whole thing and starts drinking straight from the carafe. She sits there, looking around the reading room, as if to quantify what they stand to lose. When she gets up, her quiet existence lurches sideways.

The whole house. The whole thing. Another swig as Em goes to the window in a daze. The blinds are open, and gauzy smoke rises from the trees at the bottom of the lawn. Is that… is that on their land? Surely not. But Em settles the carafe on the sill and grimaces. What she’d assumed was woodsmoke has turned into a plastic stench she can taste. That, and the fox screams seem much closer than before. Closer and keener. She remembers that their gardener Graham is working down there, and now she’ll have to confront him. What the hell’s he burning? What’s he burning that could drive foxes up towards the house?

A flash of nautical yellow in the thicket. Em’s focus narrows, one hand on the window. ‘Oh no,’ she whispers. A sickening jolt between her ears, behind her ribs. A pain like drowning.

It isn’t foxes screaming.

It’s the girls.

Em splays her hands and pushes her face against the glass. The girls, sooty and screaming, are running up the garden. Before she can react, they’re in the house, tearing through the kitchen and the lounge and the diner and the conservatory. They’re still screaming, the worst kind of screaming, a rabid screaming, when they reach her in the drawing room.

The girls are filthy and stinking and screaming for their mother, and their mother is her. And because Em is their mother – because she breathes that sound as well as she hears it – she understands the burning can’t be a simple bonfire at all.

‘What’s the matter?’ she manages, biting her lip to try and stop it trembling. ‘What’s happened?’

She takes them in alternately. Their eldest, Dolly, grey and snotty and blubbing down her yellow cagoule. Their youngest, Damson, staring shock-dumb.

‘Tell me,’ Em says. ‘Tell Mummy what happened.’

She folds the children into her. She cradles Dolly’s face by the jawbone and wipes soot and ash from her cheeks with her own spit, with Dolly’s tears.

‘It was fairies, Mummy!’ Dolly says through her sobs. ‘It was fairies! We were making a den. We saw them come out. They said we shouldn’t look!’

Em swallows. ‘What do you mean, fairies? Come out of where? For heaven’s sakes, girls, you’re scaring me to death.’

But Damson and Dolly, six and eight years old, blinking and stinking of burning plastic, have no more words between them. Instead they take their mother by the sleeves and drag her through the house. She stumbles after them with her guts inside out.

Behind the house, in a panic, Em catches a shin on the handle of an upturned wheelbarrow, sees Graham’s hand trowel wedged in the lawn as though he’d thrown it down like an axe. Beside her, the hose reel on the back of the house is unwinding rapidly, the pipe snaking away across the lawn.

‘Where’s Graham?’ Em asks the girls. ‘Where’s he gone?’

‘Down with them!’ Dolly shouts. ‘He came to save us!’

Em breaks for the treeline, towards the smoke. The girls keep up, still yelling, ‘It was them! It was the fairies! They went all over!’

Here the smoke thickens, the same smell as on the children, and Em’s world is a chemical fire. First the ride-on mower, motor still going, and then Graham in a clearing. A ragged black line has been seared through the long grass, ending at the greenhouse, which is burning. Graham, in his tweed flat cap and wellies and fishing waders, has the hose nozzle aimed into the flames. He’s standing completely still.

‘Graham!’

Graham can’t hear Em, or ignores her. The girls pull on her waist and cuffs. ‘Mummy!’ Dolly shouts. She clasps Em’s numb fingers. ‘The fairies made a fire!’

‘That’s their fire, Mummy,’ Damson adds.

Em kneels in dewy grass. The clouds have closed over. She brings the girls close again. ‘Did you do this?’ she urges. ‘Did you set light to the greenhouse? Did you breathe that in?’

‘It was the fairies,’ Dolly insists. ‘We told you.’ She shakes off her mother’s embrace and crosses her arms. ‘Damson did a wee behind a tree and I was watching for strangers and there was a fizz in the air and the fire came up green and… and I said, “Damson – quick! What’s that?” And we only had a look, Mummy, just a very fast look, and they came whizzing about and one of them told us not to – not to snitch! And it called us all these mean things, it said we are so ugly, it said we are so small and useless—’

‘Damson.’ Em is staring at her youngest now, this little girl still too young to lie convincingly.

‘It was the fairies,’ Damson whispers. Then, quieter, ‘What if it was Marigold?’

Em’s throat catches as she watches her daughter speak. It feels like the whole Lake District has contracted to the size of the clearing. The hiss of water boiling off. Graham standing too still. ‘There’s no such thing as a mean fairy,’ Em tells Damson. ‘Marigold’s a tooth fairy. She wouldn’t light a fire because she’s only there to mind your teeth, and she’s fond of you. Of both of you. Now, I want to know the truth, and I won’t be angry. I won’t be mad at all. I’ll ask you once more. One more time. Did you take matches from Mummy and Daddy’s kitchen? From Uncle Graham’s shed? Did you accidentally light a fire? You have to tell me. If you tell me, I can fix it.’

‘No!’ Dolly screeches, and she starts to cry again. ‘Ask them! Go and see the fairies!’

Em looks to her youngest. ‘Damson?’

Damson squirms like she needs the toilet. She shakes her head, and her brow darkens the way Ted’s does. ‘I promise, Mummy,’ she says. ‘Brownie’s Honour. It was them.’

Em’s patience runs out. She looks to Graham, the shrinking fire, and points back up the hill, towards the house. ‘The pair of you, inside,’ she says. ‘Lock the back door and shut all the windows you can reach. Then I want you to call Daddy, but no video, okay? I want you to tell him Mummy needs him home.’

The girls blink at her.

‘Do it,’ Em says, ‘and I’ll be up to run a bath. Don’t put your hands on the walls, either. Go on – scoot!’

The girls sprint up the hill. The back door slams. Em approaches the gardener.

‘Graham?’

Graham has the fire down, but the residual heat is immense. The greenhouse frame has deformed and blistered, and the roof glass drips gelatinously into what remains beneath.

‘What is it, Graham?’

The gardener doesn’t answer.

‘Was this the girls, Graham? Was it them?’

‘I din’t see,’ Graham says. ‘There were a tearing sound, like a wave breaking.’ He points at the strip of burnt grass. ‘And this.’

‘So it wasn’t you, either?’

He glares at her.

‘Then what? What the bloody hell’s that in there?’

Graham takes off his flat cap and looks at his boots.

‘Did the girls do it?’

Graham gestures to the seat of the fire with his hat. A black puddle, smouldering. Em doesn’t know why, but she worries it’s the neighbour’s cat.

‘What is that?’

‘Best you head inside,’ Graham says. He removes his hat, wipes his reddened brow. ‘See to them girls.’

‘Why’s no one telling me anything?’

‘Nowt worth telling, that’s why. Leave me at it. I’ll tidy now. Get it shovelled up and sling it down in the old bunker. We’ll hold it over till next bin collection day. Can’t have it stinking place out.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Em says. ‘You honestly didn’t see anything?’

Graham shrugs. They stand before this black thing in the fire, the stripe of scorched grass, and Em thinks of Damson’s face when she asked her for the truth. And she has to wonder – have you ever believed in fairies? Has Em ever believed in fairies at the bottom of the garden?

Because as far as Em could tell – assuming she still reads the girls better than anyone – Damson wasn’t lying to her.

PART I

LOOK, DON’T TOUCH

The Steeplejack

Not long after first light, Billy Shepherd, Shep for short, wakes up in the back of his work van. It’s a harsh start as mornings go. One side of his face is pressed numb against the cabin bulkhead, and overnight he’s spilled a tin of cheap lager inside his sleeping bag. He reaches for his phone, still flashing his missed alarm. He opens the back doors and swings his legs out over the bumper. Before him stand the huddled spires of Clemens, Scarborough’s new refinery. He should’ve been up the nearest chimney an hour ago.

Coughing in the chill, Shep rebuttons his damp overalls, gathers his harness, helmet and tools, and staggers over scrubland to the crew entrance. A sign above the security gate reads, WELCOME TO CLEMENS: A SAFE SITE. Beneath that, SILENCE IS CONSENT.

The site engineer is waiting for Shep near the stack’s base, clipboard ready. Around her a thrumming, fibrous copse of colour-coded pipework, cylinders and processing plant. Shep recognises the woman from the site’s training videos – an old roughneck, nearing obsolescence. Her face weathered, but her eyes still sharp. She watches Shep approach, sizing him up, then nods down at Shep’s waist.

‘That a real Stillson in there, lad?’

Shep touches the cold wrench in his toolbelt.

‘Oh aye,’ she says. ‘I’d spot one a mile off. What you doing with that?’

‘I found it,’ Shep tells her.

The engineer snorts. ‘You don’t find a Stilly, sunbeam. Best not be one of mine.’

Shep shakes his head. ‘I was on Fawley before here,’ he says. ‘Couple of old boys robbed some of Heighter’s gear. Divvied it out.’

The engineer goes quiet. She doesn’t seem to blink. ‘Hmm,’ she starts. ‘That’s about all you could say to make it morally right. But don’t feed me fibs. If you were on Fawley, how come you’re up here now?’

Shep rubs his jaw.

‘And don’t act daft, neither,’ the engineer says. ‘Gaping black hole, that place. Greens go in there and don’t come out till they’re dead or riddled.’

Shep shrugs with one shoulder. ‘It was inspection stuff,’ he says. ‘A fortnight, right through.’

The engineer whistles. ‘Two weeks? And then you got off? Think we’d better watch you, hadn’t we?’

Shep grins and slides past her towards the chimney ladder. Looks up along its panelling, the gentle undulation of its length. ‘Am I good?’ he asks.

‘Best be,’ the engineer says. ‘Since you’re an hour bloody late.’

The stack they’re commissioning is a four-hundred-foot steely, the newest type. On an old refinery it would be brick and mortar, a hardwood strip running to its summit – with maybe a few forgotten iron dogs, access fixings smoothed into nubs by years of weather. These new ones are modular builds, very fancy, with integrated ladders.

Parallel with the ladder runs Shep’s shunt line – his fall arrest system. Further round, the heavy-duty hand line the groundsman uses to run stuff up to the crew on top.

‘Best start thinking up excuses for them lot, too,’ the engineer says. ‘They’re waiting on you.’

Shep nods once and checks his toolbelt. Podger, quickdraw clips, carabiners, scaffold spanner, hand-welder. His Stillson – the pipe wrench that makes him feel like a proper jack. In his docs pocket is a signed copy of the crew’s method statement, and behind that, with the LEDs he prepared in the van with his final beer last night, there’s a pouch of tobacco. Not to smoke, but to trade for coffee on breaks.

‘Another reason we start early,’ the engineer calls over. When Shep turns, she’s pointing into open sky. Soft pink cloud filling slots between Clemens’ hard lines. ‘It’ll be a sunny one today,’ she says. ‘You creamed up?’

Shep pushes in his radio earpiece and sticks the freckle mic to his cheek. He steps into his harness and lugs it up to his hips. With the main belt secure, the biggest clip comes over his head, fastens across the sternum. Then he double-knots his safety rope for luck. He grips the first rung of the ladder, feels the cold alloy bite back. A kind of symbiosis: the ladder rails coursing up through Shep’s hands, airstream-silver and clean as wire. Above him, the early light glowing red on the steel.

‘Good to go,’ Shep says. And he clips on to the safety line and starts his ascent.

* * *

Apprentice steeplejacks get the worst equipment by tradition. So while Shep is generally seen as gifted, he’s still treated by the crew as a green – and the gear reflects it. Aside from the harness and helmet (new by law), his overalls hang baggy, his boots give him blisters, and through his earpiece he receives static-shot cuts from the crew on the flying stage and about every third word of the groundsman’s updates as he fills the supplies cradle.

‘I’m on my way,’ Shep tells them.

‘Ten men!’ someone shouts back through his earpiece. ‘About fucking time and all!’ From nowhere, something pings off the concrete by Shep’s boot. Shep squints. A puff of dust reveals a zinc fastener, still spinning.

‘Ten men!’ the voice cries. ‘It’s raining nuts and fucking bolts!’

The engineer starts screaming bloody murder at the crew.

‘Shepherd!’ the jack’s voice comes again. ‘If you don’t have that Thermos on you, you’re going straight down the shit-chute.’

Shep shakes his head and continues, mindful not to overgrip. Gloves or not, the cold will quickly work into your tendons, make a start on your bones.

‘He ignoring us?’ the jack says. ‘He’s ignoring us! This fucking space cadet.’

‘I’m not ignoring you,’ Shep says.

‘I’m looking down the shitter right now,’ the jack says. ‘Proper minging in there, pal, absolutely hanging. It’ll fit you nicely.’

Shep looks past his toes. The engineer is already thirty feet away, the wind starting to whistle. He goes dizzy momentarily, and his insides tighten. The hangover is kicking in.

‘Get on with it, squeaker,’ the engineer urges. ‘And you gorillas best stop chucking stuff, or the lot of you are off my site by noon.’

So Shep shins on. With no laddering required, it’s more like an easy route at the climbing gym. In his sinew, he knows he could solo this height without breaking a sweat. He’d only need his chalk bag, a pair of lightweight shorts. The air on his back, the satisfying smell of his body in motion. Soon he’ll be high enough to see the North Sea horizon.

‘Late bastards get washed!’ the jack shouts. And Shep hasn’t time to respond before it begins to rain – a warm and heavy rain that gets under his harness and spreads down his back.

Shep gasps for breath. Then he retches. It isn’t rain at all – the jack has just tipped the crew’s piss bottle down the ladder.

‘What happens when you dick us about!’ the jack laughs in his ear.

Shep removes his helmet and wipes his face down his sleeve. The smell. The tepid heat on his skin. He takes it, though – takes it because he has to. What else can he do, dangling there? Another glance down. Wind-reddened hands. Liquid falling away from his helmet. He’s two hundred feet up now, and the ladder’s lower rungs are no longer visible. The surrounding containers, massive from the ground, are bucket rims. Crew cabins and toilets like matchboxes and dice, casting shadows at right angles. Systems of process line, so intricate and precise you could believe they were lifted from a circuit board. And even at this height, that mingling of gases – eggy hydrogen sulphide, sharp hydrogen peroxide – with a whiff of bitumen, rich and meaty, from the gravy lines. Then to the wider refinery, immense and city-like: its glittering tips, steaming apertures, spider-silk trelliswork. Perimeter mesh already patterned with caramel rust, immense sheets of clean, implacable concrete. Contractors whose hi-vis jackets strobe as they move. Lastly, Shep gazes at the semi-circle of tarp around the stack’s base, on which the groundsman is prepping their next load.

‘Come on, pal,’ a different jack says in his ear. ‘We’re on our arses waiting.’

Drop a tool from up here and it’ll bounce a fair way back up. But if you’re not clipped in properly, or the ladder somehow fails, you’re only one mistake away from the ground yourself – and your head won’t bounce at all.

* * *

Mallory Limited – Shep’s employer – is northern England’s most respected firm for high-access jobs. A professional outfit compared to the cowboys and undercutters, the showboaters like Heighter. In digs, trying to sleep, Shep often hears the older jacks fretting about the robots emerging from Heighter’s R&D labs. Gear that might eventually score the bigger contracts. But so what if the competition goes fully automatic? Mallory stands loyal to its affordable but highly skilled steeplejacks, who don’t ask for much in the way of upkeep. Give your Mallory crew a problem to solve and that’s more or less that. Get your engineer to shout them a pint or six afterwards, and they’ll be good for the next day, too.

Besides, no site engineer Shep ever met will ever want a machine doing the work Mallory’s jacks specialise in. Most are too nostalgic, caring more about strong hands and beastly thighs. And so on that ladder, three-quarters towards the chimney lip, the rising sun in his eyes, soaked in the piss of several men, Shep isn’t worried about robots taking his job. Far better to believe there’ll always be thankless people climbing gantries behind the scenes, sliding under surfaces, toiling in the gaps – the phobic spaces between. Far easier to think he’ll retire someday and see his broadness go to fat or, if he works in a certain kind of place, on a certain type of contract, develop cancer and bow out early with a nice pile of compensation to blow.

Shep’s earpiece crackles. ‘Caught you daydreaming again?’

Shep cranes his neck. The corona of a hardhat above. He hauls himself up the last few rungs to meet the old jack waiting there. Gunny. Of all the crew here on Clemens, Shep likes Gunny the most; mid-fifties, sallow, but warm and honest. He says to Gunny, ‘Got the LEDs. They’re all wired, ready to go.’

‘Top man,’ Gunny says, and he attaches a quickdraw to Shep’s harness and brings him onto the platform, where Shep clips out and back in to the railings.

On the staging, grimacing against the wind, three of the crew are playing cards, carefully weighting those on the deck with carabiners. Two of them are smoking. The third must be winning. A fourth jack – jangling a handful of fasteners – leers at Shep from his perch on the far side. He’s the one. Bolt-dropper, piss-pourer. The arsehole whose name he never caught.

‘All right?’ Shep says, letting on. ‘I’ve got the lights.’

The arsehole leans across the cathead beam and holds out an empty hand. ‘Where’s my brew?’ he asks, dipping his head towards the waste-chute opening. ‘Telling you. This hole’s hungry for youth.’

‘Leave him be,’ another jack called Red mutters from the card game. ‘He’s decent.’

‘He still has to learn,’ the arsehole says. He spits straight off the chimney’s side. ‘These greens, man. They have to learn.’

Shep tips the LED units into the bowl of his hand. ‘Should be good to go,’ he tells Gunny. ‘Soldered them last night.’

‘In the back of your van?’ the arsehole says.

‘Yeah.’

Gunny clears his throat. ‘Weren’t you in the boozer past last orders?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Aye, and you look like dogshit,’ the arsehole says. ‘How’s this gonna be a clean job? Why aren’t you kipping with us in digs, anyway?’

‘Leave him be,’ Red says again.

The arsehole smirks. ‘You better than us? Is that it? That why you reckon you’re ten men?’

Gunny sighs. ‘Pack it in.’

‘I wouldn’t trust this muppet to change a light bulb,’ the arsehole goes on. ‘Or wipe his own backside, come to that. You don’t sleep with the lads, you can’t be trusted. End of.’

Gunny looks at Shep. He nods at the LEDs. ‘Did you test them?’

‘Yeah,’ Shep lies. ‘All good.’

‘Telling you,’ the arsehole goes on. ‘He’s a lazy bleeder. Needs a good slapping about, same as the old days.’

‘Did you oversleep?’ Gunny asks. ‘Honest? You’d had a fair few when I turned in…’

Shep shakes his head. ‘Safety had me going over the method statement. Ran my bloods.’

The arsehole huffs.

‘Clean, I hope,’ Gunny says.

Shep nods, and Gunny claps him on the shoulder. ‘You only missed me marking up, anyway. Now we can whack these buggers in.’

Shep follows Gunny to the railings. N for north chalked on the first LED boss. He looks out to the Scarborough coastline, the dragging sea, the castle ruins on the hill, then a long way down. Seagulls hunting thermals. The dizziness returns, and Shep’s legs nearly go. It tells you something, working above the birds. A reminder this isn’t your place.

‘Pass’em here, then,’ Gunny says.

Shep gives him one of the LEDs. Holds the wires apart to try and help.

‘So,’ Gunny says, straightening the wires, ‘this is your male and that’s your female, and they make sweet love. Like this—’

Shep follows the LED unit into its boss. When it’s partway in, Gunny hesitates. ‘Oh,’ he says, surprised, like there’s a small amount of resistance. Like there’s muck on the wires. When he goes to speak again, there’s a sickly purple flash. A hideous, hot smell fills Shep’s nose.

Shep rubs his eyes and can’t work out why he’s suddenly sitting on the staging, or why Gunny is doubled over, mewling, clutching his right arm at the wrist. Like Shep, Gunny is now half a metre back from the chimney’s rim, and it looks like he’s trying to put on a red mitten.

Shep’s ears ring off. Thick, thick ozone. Red and the arsehole have their arms around Gunny’s chest, dragging him further away from the edge. Gunny seems afraid. The jacks’ playing cards are fluttering over the edge.

Shep swallows. The air rushes in.

‘What did you do?’ the arsehole shouts.

Shep gets to his feet, thoughts clotting.

‘The LED,’ the arsehole says. ‘What did you do?’

Shep blinks. A small green flame is burning at the north cardinal point. He looks again to Gunny, who’s slumped against the cathead’s upright, helmet wonky, face drained. A rope of bright saliva hanging from the corner of his mouth. He has his arm limply over one knee, and a parody of a hand dangles from his sleeve.

The arsehole scowls at Shep. Red and the other jacks, who are holding their faces or leaning on their knees, ashen. Shep sees only the mess before him: bright bone, seared flesh. Gunny’s hollow stare.

As the other jacks call it in, the arsehole gives Shep a headshake. ‘The state of this,’ he says in a quiet, stifled voice. ‘The state of it. Poor bastard’s got kids to feed – what did you do? What did you do?’

But Shep, with bile in his mouth, doesn’t respond. He can’t remember how to speak.

The Journalist

Freya Medlock tails the driverless hearse through the town and right up to the church. Somehow she’s ended up sixth in the funeral convoy, just two vehicles back from the parents. It’s pouring down with rain, and owing to her nerves she’s grateful her car is driving itself.

The church stands on the jut of a hill overlooking the Manchester basin. It’s a cold hill, harrowed and bald, and the church blends right in. Local gritstone gives it an imposing, almost prehistoric profile. A fitting place to bury someone.

Freya’s car parks itself uncomfortably close to the hearse, so Freya waits for the relatives to disperse before getting out herself. She throws up her umbrella, sets her Dictaphone recording in her pocket, and heads for the church entrance. The pallbearers stand off to one side, working out who’ll take which corner of the coffin.

A middle-aged woman emerges to greet Freya at the church doors. ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ she says, stoic in the crosswind. ‘Stephen’s aunt. Are you here alone?’

‘A friend from uni,’ Freya tells her.

The woman’s eyes flash. She smirks.

‘Really,’ Freya says. ‘Just a friend.’

‘Well, thank you for coming. Get yourself inside and take your pick. It’ll be a sad sight from wherever you’re sitting.’

Freya leaves the woman with a tight smile. Round a pillar, and the congregation fills both sides of the nave. Black cloth and blank faces. Freya grabs a space at one end of a pew and doesn’t look at the person beside her. The vicar steps forward and clears his throat. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he starts. ‘Please stand.’

They do, and between them comes the coffin, glistening with rain. The pallbearers’ shoes are saturated, the floor is uneven, and it’s easy to foresee a slip. But as the pallbearers reach the vicar and lower the coffin to its bier, only quiet prevails. On the vicar’s word, the congregation settles again, skin grey by the morning’s thin light. Nobody quite sure what to do, or where to look, or how they’ve ended up here.

The congregation have this coffin in common, of course. It carries a friend, relative, lover. Freya has done this enough times now to know they’ll each be churning with indignation, fear, stinging disappointment. Nothing will have lessened their confusion so far. No words will have rationalised the suddenness of their loss, or stayed its steady, ceaseless reverberations. They all want closure, believe this day will offer that, but no amount of ‘soul-searching’ or ‘looking out for each other’ will have worked to balm the shock. Then there’s the resignation, the maxims and the clichés: life is too short; live each day as though it’s your last. Regarding a stranger’s coffin, stark and still, Freya always pictures her own funeral, lapsing into negative space. Isn’t a healthy, young person’s death about as wasteful as it comes? The mourners here are massed in a kind of group freefall. They share this air as they visit private memories of the dead man, all plotted on a life that bears his name: Stephen Parsons.

All of the mourners, that is, except Freya.

Freya never knew Stephen Parsons, never met him. But owing to the manner of his death, the arrests of two men despite the coroner having already ruled misadventure, Freya’s editor thinks there might be a story here worth attracting the nationals, and has despatched her to the church to pretend she did. So as a fresh hymn begins to rise, swells against the old stone with unaccountable weight, Freya wills herself to concentrate. If the Dictaphone’s battery lasts the service – if she steals the eulogies her editor wants her to steal – it’ll be easier to win a byline. But if the battery doesn’t, she’ll need to be alert. Otherwise, tomorrow could mean writing another cheap story for a dribble of ad revenue. Shuffling another five-hundred-word, keyword-rich article closer to obscurity.

The vicar gazes among the pews as the congregation sings. Freya fidgets as he loiters on her a beat too long, even if she’s surely anonymous. Her scalp tingles at the idea he might understand her place in all this – that she’s a parasite, an ambulance-chaser. Like he’ll be hovering over her shoulder when she writes up the story tonight.

Stephen Parsons, 29, a data recovery technician and amateur rock climber from Oldham, Greater Manchester, died on a night out in Leeds after falling from the scaffolding of a city centre redevelopment project—

Freya tries to straighten her back. Her bra’s too tight, and when she assumes a better posture her blouse just gapes. She’s convinced the person on her right is watching her.

If you look back, your eyes will give you away.

So Freya twists left, looks across the aisle. The adjacent pew is stacked with lean-looking men and women. Stephen’s climber friends. The way they stand, the stepping of muscles through their clothes, makes her think about the climbing photos she’d scraped from Stephen’s social feeds that morning. In every shot, Stephen was a ballet of limbs caught mid-transition. Committed but grinning, regardless of the route – the problem, climbers call them. A grin so at odds with his casket. Shouldn’t he be here with these mates, or out there in some blissful wilderness? ‘Doing what he loved’? Were some of these climbers caught in Stephen’s pictures – obscured by a crop, or just out of focus? Did one of them take those photos of him?

Hundreds of mourners, including many of Stephen’s rock-climbing friends, gathered yesterday at the Parsons’ family church to pay their respects to a popular man whose death is now being probed by—

The hymn ends. The organ’s final note hangs heavy. The congregation sways.

‘Please sit down,’ the vicar says.

And as the congregation does, a woman in the group of climbers notices Freya and returns a flat stare.

Reverend Falkirk led an intimate service that celebrated Stephen’s life—

‘To start our service,’ the vicar says, ‘I want to invite Stephen’s brother Toby to share a few words.’

Freya swallows – this could be useful. Toby staggers up to the pulpit. His hands are clumsy as he adjusts the microphone, unfolds a piece of paper. His suit, too large, tumbles away from him. His face is bright with sweat. When he goes to speak – ‘My brother…’ – a knot tightens in his throat.

The church stills. Freya studies her feet, her dull patent heels. A vein pulsing over the leftmost metatarsal. What does Stephen’s body look like now? Waxy and blue? Still grinning? She gets the horrible urge to giggle and coughs for cover. How obscene can she be? As Toby struggles to start again, Freya’s conscience needles her. She shouldn’t be here, hearing this. Let alone recording it. Her face gets hotter and hotter, and she starts to worry the stranger next to her will feel her heat through the bits of them that touch.

But you need to do this. You need it.

‘My brother,’ Toby tries again, ‘was…’

A long exhalation; a rippling through the congregation.

‘You know what, right,’ he says, ‘bollocks to it. This is the first time our Ste’s shut up since I’ve known him.’

A murmur of anxious laughter in the family pews. Freya glances along the aisle, follows the gravestones towards the coffin, the altar. She smiles, desperate to look normal, correct – even as she feels more and more alien to these people, to Stephen. Her distance from his coffin, that silent box, is starting to make the whole church seem false. A stage set. The vicar’s figure, his shadow on the organ pipes, only multiplies the dissonance. When Freya concentrates on him, he takes on the aspect of an illusion – as if turning him would reveal a cardboard cut-out. Panic seizes her. Everyone here can tell. They can see her. She holds in a breath.

South Yorkshire police are currently questioning two men seen with Stephen at the scene—

The person next to Freya taps her arm and offers a tissue with a whisper: ‘Need these more than I do.’ It’s another middle-aged woman. Her face is open and her breath smells like make-up. Freya looks down and blinks; an inky droplet explodes between two buttons of her blouse. She takes the tissue.

‘Thank you,’ Freya says. Sitting outside herself, now. Where the shame and the guilt can’t reach.

In the pulpit, Toby has found his grit. He talks about Stephen’s obsessive climbing; his strength and ability; their weekends wild-camping; Stephen’s ‘urban exploring’; and, when they were both a lot younger, their run-ins with the police. Stephen’s upcoming project was Mont Blanc. ‘He was forever training for that,’ his brother says. Then, partway through an anecdote about Stephen climbing a cliff in Anglesey without any ropes, Freya has had enough. She can’t do it. She gets up, clammy, and stumbles towards the doors, realising everyone in the church will cast her as one of Stephen’s exes after all.

‘And Ste was teetotal,’ she hears Toby say. ‘So it doesn’t even make sense. He’d not touched a drop as long as I remember. Never drank, never smoked, never ate meat. Not in the whole time I knew him, and that was quite a while—’

Freya stops, and realises Toby has stopped too. She glances back. He looks disgusted by her.

Teetotal?

They’d missed this back at the office. The coroner’s toxicology report, backhanded to the editor, said Stephen was at least seven times the legal driving limit. He’d had too much, got cocky, taken the risk. But if he was teetotal, why would he drink that much? Was this why those men were arrested – because his family had protested about the inquest’s findings?

Freya mouths, ‘Sorry.’ She wants to stay, to hear more, but it’s too late: she’s made a scene, drawn attention to herself. She pushes outside. Gulps the damp air. Her fringe is stuck to her forehead. She scuffs her shoes on the path as she goes towards the car and wrestles the door open. Her head is full. Who are the men being interviewed? Was there a suggestion he hadn’t fallen, but was pushed? Or had he jumped?

Freya tells the car where to drive her. Unable to shake the questions, the tightness in her chest, she slips back into the leaded margins of the north. Maybe this hasn’t been a waste of time. Maybe the questions are enough.

The Steeplejack

After long jobs away, a free weekend can feel to a steeplejack like washing up on a strange island. Friday nights are especially disorientating. If a jack isn’t pulling overtime on some power station in the arse-end of nowhere – an industrial plant grafted to a post-industrial town – they might seem listless, lost. Having returned to empty homes or weary partners (dumping rancid overalls and safety gear in the hall), a jack will head straight to their local to decompress. In towns near a firm’s headquarters, you’ll likely find at least one jack at the bar, focusing on something indistinct, something far away. A remembered view – a vista of concrete, a blackened frame, a row of filthy brick megaliths. A power station lit up like an airport at night.

For Shep, though, this Friday is worse than disorientating. After the blood, the sirens and the horror, he’d left Scarborough under a black cloud. He’d desperately wanted updates from the hospital; to call Gunny’s wife; to seek forgiveness – or at the very least to be forgotten. To get his inevitable sacking over and done with. But then his phone died a few miles out, and he realised he’d left his charger in his locker. So, he drove straight to the Pea and Ham.

* * *

A few double-vodkas have just about dulled the brightest edges of Shep’s guilt. It isn’t enough, but it’s getting there. Luckily, being alone is also a mercy for Shep. He can escape into his own world this way. That, and coming to the Pea and Ham completes a cycle, because this pub is where Shep met his first boss, Mr Mallory himself.

Everyone knew old Mallory was a steeplejack. You recognised him by his flat cap, hunting vest, Dr Martens. He was a hodgepodge of fashions and eras, though not consciously; it was more like he’d stepped out of time to pick the garments he found most practical. Then there was his size: unmissably squat and wide, without definition or tone, yet solid all the same, his skin the rolled steel that held in the mass of him. You’d likely find him holding forth on politics and politicians – particularly Thatcher, whom he admired vocally despite Mallory’s older brother being a Sheffield collier, a foot soldier in the Battle of Orgreave.

Back then, Shep was earnest but terminally unemployed. Every week he collected his dole money and came up to the Ham to ask Mallory if there were any apprenticeships going at the firm. In return, Shep would get the stout nod that came to be a simple appreciation of his tenacity. Mallory would rear back and clink Shep’s glass and say, ‘Not this week! But let me tell you about a place where only knots matter.’

Table of Contents

Cover

Contents

Praise for Zero Bomb

By M.T. Hill and Available From Titan Books

Title Page

Review

Copyright

Dedication

A Fire in the North

The Landowner

Part I: Look, Don’t Touch

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

Sunday Rites

The Landowner

Part II: Vertex Island

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

The Steeplejack

The Journalist

Home by the Sea

The Landowner

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

Guide

Cover

Start of Content

Table of Contents