The Relic Keeper by N David Anderson Read Free Book Online Page B

wandered off.
    “Hey, keep off the cordoned areas,” he shouted condescendingly as an afterthought.
    Yeah, I know! thought Philip, with a certain degree of resentment. He hated the way the police treated journos.
    The site was pretty wrecked. Most of the buildings had been burned out and Philip imagined that the complex could be made hard to escape from; after all, it had been built to stop people crossing its borders. There was the stench of burnt flesh in the air that somehow always reminded him of his mum’s cooking, and he hated himself for having made the connection. He walked across to the far side of the parade ground, checked that he wasn’t being watched, and slid under the cordon up to the smoking wooden shack in the centre. He eased the door open and slid inside.
    The smell almost made him vomit and the smoke in the air stung his eyes. Groups of people were sifting through the wreckage and in one corner a heap of filled body bags was mounting up. By the door were some tools: a crowbar, an agricultural fork and a couple of hammers. He kicked the door shut behind him. Even through the ash at the entrance he could make out four parallel lines on the wood. He slid his fingernails down the marks: they fitted. “Fucking way to go,” he said to himself out loud. He slipped back out and walked the perimeter of the site. He walked slowly around until he was nearly back to where he’d started when he felt a firm hand on his shoulder.
    “Brady, got something for you.”
    “Thanks. And it’s Brading.” Renfrew ignored him.
    “We’ve had preliminary reports through,” shouted the detective, despite being directly beside him. “We’ve got some details off their database. They seem to have had 183 members. Two were outside of the complex on some kinda missionary work yesterday. We’ll be starting work looking for them later today. But we got names for all the others.”
    “So you got 181 dead?”
    “Well…no. We’ll have to cross-reference everything. But from the records that they’ve kept and the on-site ID team, we have 179 bodies.”
    “Don’t tell me. The cult guru’s missing!?”
    “No! We have her. Caroline Atkins, she was in the east block, caught up by one of the blocked doors. We’re missing two nobodies: Nasreen Freeman and Deon Underdown.”
    Maybe, thought Philip, this is more of a story than I’d thought.

10
    Rei was troubled by her patient. The man spoke in an accent that was sometimes unfathomable and seemed to have little idea of what was happening to him. He obviously had problems with his memory on top of the medical condition that she still was not completely sure about. She’d checked the records available, which were incomplete, she noticed. She slipped off her jacket and poured a glass of tea from the dispenser. Sipping her drink she walked across the small apartment to the window and looked down on the sprawling city beneath her. It was animal: unkind and unknowing, London was the sort of place that should have disappeared years ago into nihilistic chaos. It was coiled: ready to strike; ready to kill. There really was no reason for places like this to exist today, she thought as she watched the people mill around on the street beneath her. The city streets were full of food carts, motorbikes, robbers, addicts and the millions of poor who she hoped she could in some small way help. It seemed an impossible task from this location looking out over the endless expanse of the vast conurbation. It was strange that her position, her birth, had made it possible for her to afford an apartment that was superior to anything that any comparable British citizen would live in, and this unsettled Rei, who often worried that it made her feel superior to the denizens of the city who needed people like her. She turned away from the sealed window and settled into her favourite position in the flat’s seating area. She put her black leather-bound case on the low table and took out a wad of