Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2 Read online

  Praise for A Lovely Way to Burn

  ‘I was with Louise Welsh’s gutsy gripping heroine Stevie Flint every terrifying step of the way’ Kirsty Wark, author of The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle

  ‘I read it in two sittings, pausing only to sleep and dream about it. Gripping, perfectly paced and beautifully written’ Erin Kelly, author of The Poison Tree

  ‘A terrifying journey into the possible, this is dystopia for today. Feral, frightening and fascinating, A Lovely Way to Burn gripped and chilled me in equal measure’ Val McDermid

  ‘This intelligent thriller creates an alarmingly convincing picture of London on the brink of disintegration; it reminds us how fragile we are’ Andrew Taylor, The Spectator

  ‘I’ve felt for a while that we are in the mood for an intelligent slice of London-based dystopia, and I think Louise Welsh has cracked it with A Lovely Way to Burn … it kept me up all night nervously turning the pages’ Cathy Rentzenbrink, Bookseller

  ‘The London of the novel at once recalls sci-fi dystopia, Dante’s Inferno and accounts of the 1665 great plague … Welsh’s plot is ably handled … She has in Stevie … an engaging, stroppy heroine’ Sunday Times

  ‘A thrillingly dystopian mystery … It’s a fine setup, and Stevie is a strong character, a forthright blend of sales sass and reporter brass. Welsh is particularly good at describing the institutional and social disorder that accompanies the outbreak of the sweats’ Guardian

  ‘This is a novel rich in the kind of iridescent word painting that has long been Welsh’s speciality, and the vulnerable, often maladroit Stevie is a wonderful protagonist’ Independent

  ‘Welsh plays brilliantly on our worst fears, and the pace never lets up. Seriously scary’ The Times

  ‘Scary, shocking and touching by turns, this apocalyptic thriller will enthral. I haven’t been so buried in a book in a while’ Irish Independent

  ‘Suspenseful and intelligent dystopian fiction. Welsh writes snappily and with filmic precision … Her setting, vivid and initially familiar, grows increasingly alien as the crisis worsens’ Sunday Business Post

  ‘Welsh develops a fantastically written mystery which keeps you hanging on to every word … A must read, which will leave you dreaming – or having nightmares – of apocalyptic London for weeks’ Irish Examiner

  ‘The writer [Louise Welsh] reminds me of most is Ian McEwan: both specialise in secrets, rather chilly sexuality, sudden reversals of fortune, and uneasy intimations of doom … A Lovely Way to Burn is superb popular fiction – a box-set waiting to happen’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘Louise Welsh writes elegantly and has visualised London in extremis with immense and detailed clarity’ Literary Review

  ‘The relentlessly taut suspense of A Lovely Way to Burn still lingers on my psyche. Such an apocalyptic crisis does not seem improbable and here’s hoping freakishly foul weather and tube strikes are not an omen of things to come’ Stylist

  ‘A propulsive read, written in lean sentences and snappy cliffhanging chapters … Most impressive of all is the Scottish writer’s evocation of a London that, with a Dickensian swagger, emerges as a pulsating untameable beast in its own right’ Metro

  ‘You know you’re in for a seriously chilling read in this apocalyptic thriller when three very unlikely killers – an MP, a hedge fund manager and a vicar – go on a murderous rampage in the sweltering capital’ Marie Claire

  ‘A scary vision of London falling apart that’s addictively readable’ Saga

  ‘A tense, claustrophobic medical whodunit with an apocalyptic tone that cranks the stakes ever higher’ Herald

  ‘The descriptions of London and society unravelling into chaos are utterly compelling and scarily realistic … Great if you like tense thrillers’ Heat

  ‘A taut thriller so involving that I missed my bus stop!’ Woman & Home

  ‘A brilliantly imaginative thriller with a compelling heroine and well-paced plot that keeps the tension high’ Hello

  Also by Louise Welsh

  The Cutting Room

  The Bullet Trick

  Naming the Bones

  Tamburlaine Must Die

  The Girl on the Stairs

  A Lovely Way to Burn

  JOHN MURRAY

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by John Murray (Publishers)

  An Hachette UK Company

  © Louise Welsh 2015

  The right of Louise Welsh to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law 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.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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

  ISBN 978-1-84854-655-4

  John Murray (Publishers)

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  For my nephew Zack Welsh

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  PART TWO

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  … darkness shades me,

  On thy bosom let me rest,

  More I would, but death invades me;

  Death is now a welcome guest.

  ‘Dido’s Lament’ from Dido and Aeneas,

  libretto, Nahum Tate

  On the second day

  The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.

  On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,

  Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day

  A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter

  Nothing. The radios dumb …

  ‘The Horses’, Edwin Muir

  Prologue

  The Oleander left Southampton on 24 May under the command of Captain Richard Greene for a fourteen-day Mediterranean cruise. The liner had a crew of 1,150 and a passenger list of 2,300 souls. Many of the crew would be engaged in the essential business of sailing the ship, rather than catering to passengers’ whims,
but the cruise was advertised as luxurious and the Oleander’s brochures made a feature of the ratio of one crew member to every two passengers.

  The first casualties appeared on day three, not far from Monte Carlo. Travel is well known for broadening the mind and upsetting the tummy, but many of the Oleander’s guests were elderly and so Captain Greene radioed ahead to let the harbourmaster know that there was a possibility of unplanned disembarkations.

  The weather in the Mediterranean was bright and warm, the seas calm. Over the next two days more passengers and crew were confined to their cabins with vomiting, diarrhoea and worrying respiratory complaints. The sick people huddled in bed in their air-conditioned cabins, soaking their sheets with sweat and all the time shivering like it was winter in Alaska.

  The first death was unexpected and was followed rapidly by another. Captain Greene radioed the news to the authorities and his boss at the shipping company. He was dismayed to receive the same command from both. The Oleander was to drop anchor immediately and await further instruction. He was equally dismayed to find that he was fighting the urge to throw up, and when the message came that the ship should on no account, repeat, no account, approach port, he was hunched over the ship’s barrier vomiting into blue Mediterranean waters.

  Perhaps it was the close confinement of the passengers and crew that allowed the virus to spread so swiftly. Or maybe it was the delay in getting extra medics to the ship, caused by onshore outbreaks of what was soon to be called the sweats. When a launch carrying medical personnel dressed in protective suits eventually arrived, there were fewer than fifty passengers still alive. Most of them were already showing signs of infection. Some determined souls had staged their own evacuation and lifeboats manned by the dead and dying drifted in the waters around the liner. Later some would wash up on pleasure beaches, but by then no one would care.

  It was not the first outbreak of the sweats, but it was one of the earliest and it made headlines around the world. Magnus McFall imagined the Oleander often in the months ahead. The giant liner becalmed on sunny waters, looking from a distance like a picture postcard of luxury; the rescue launch hurtling towards it throwing plumes of white foam in its wake; the stench of decay awaiting the medics in the lower decks; the impossibility of salvation.

  PART ONE

  One

  London was hotter than Mumbai that summer, hotter than Beirut, hotter than hell, or so people said. Magnus McFall believed them. The train’s windows were open, but the air blasting through the carriage had a nasty, second-hand quality that reminded Magnus of sliding into a recently vacated bath, warm water scummed with soap. It did not help that the passengers were rammed together as if it were the last train out of Saigon. He breathed in through his mouth and tasted burning rubber. Some summers the tracks melted, stranding passengers between stations. It would screw him, but the possibility brought a smile to Magnus’s face. He thought he might talk a wavering suicide bomber into sticking to his plan – paradise is worth dying for, son, pull that string and shame the infidel – if it meant the show would not go on, even though the show was the only thing that really mattered.

  Magnus caught a girl glancing at him from across the aisle and grinned again. The girl frowned and looked away and Magnus wondered if he should practise smiling without showing his teeth. His agent, Richie Banks, had advised him not to get them fixed: ‘They’re as crooked as a pyramid sales scheme, but they’re your best feature, chum. Make you look a bit less like your mother left you out in the rain.’ Judging by the photographs lining his office walls, Richie had represented some odd-looking comics in his time. Magnus was not sure his agent knew the difference between a funny man and a funny-looking man.

  Magnus glanced at his watch. Ninety minutes to go. He took a tissue from the pocket of his jeans and dabbed the sweat from his forehead, surprised by how calm he felt. It was the dead calm of the soldier about to go over the top, or an armed robber readying to storm a bank, but it was better than the gut-twisting that could cripple him before a show.

  He looked down the carriage. Most of the passengers were also bound for O2. The crush of teenage girls in baseball caps stamped Johnny Dongo Done Done Me Wrongo was obvious. So was the group of middle-aged women, co-workers in some office, he guessed, large bosoms quivering with the motion of the train, bags clink-full of bottles that would be confiscated at the stadium entrance. There were couples too, the women better dressed than a night in the dark warranted in deference to the high ticket price; the men smart-casual in best jeans and trainers. They were out for a good time and that meant they would give him a chance. The Johnny Dongo look-alikes, Dongolites, were a different story. There were four of them smart-arsing by the door, dressed like 1930s history dons on their way to enlist for the wrong side, their floppy hair plastered with sweat and styling gel. They would be impatient for Magnus’s set to end and for Johnny to take the stage. Magnus wondered how they could stand the combination of tight collar and tie, the tweed suits heavy with perspiration. One of the Dongolites took out a Meerschaum pipe and stuck it between his teeth.

  Magnus’s own stage gear was zipped inside a garment bag slung over his shoulder, a white shirt and gangster-sharp, midnight-blue suit that looked like a safe choice until you caught a glimpse of scarlet lining. His guts were beginning to clench. He looked out of the window, trying to keep his eyes on the horizon, the way you were meant to on a rocky ferry crossing the Pentland Firth. London blurred by, a strip of blue sky above rows of apartments, precipitous graffiti and concreted back yards cast in shade. It was a world away from Orkney, but the tall buildings reminded him of Stromness, the shadows thrown by the houses along the seafront on to the jetties lined before them. The memory made Magnus think of school and all of a sudden he wished Mr Brown, his maths teacher, was going to be in the audience. ‘You see, Mr Brown,’ he would say, ‘folk do find me funny. It turns out that I am a funny guy after all.’ But Mr Brown was as dead as Magnus’s father, both of them buried in the Kirkwall churchyard. The maths teacher felled by a heart attack he had cultivated as carefully as an investment banker might nurture his own pension, Magnus’s father killed in a careless accident. Bad luck, everyone agreed, especially as Big Magnus never even took a Hogmanay dram.

  He tried to picture his father swaying beside him, against the rhythm of the train, but imagined instead the old boy saying, ‘You’re the support act, son, not the headliner.’ Though phrases like ‘support act’ and ‘headliner’ had never been a part of Big Magnus’s vocabulary.

  Was it a bad sign that the only people he wanted to invite to his gig were dead? Probably just a sign that he was kidding himself. Magnus would not have invited them had they been alive. His wee mammy would have jumped on a plane to London at the hint of a gig; the same went for his sister Rhona, her man Davie and a whole swathe of aunties, uncles and cousins eager for a spattering of stardust.

  ‘No little lady you want to show off to?’ Richie Banks had asked, looking up for a moment from the contracts splayed across his desk. ‘Seeing a man on stage can do things to a girl, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘No one at the moment,’ Magnus had said, looking at the view of brick wall through the dim glass of Richie’s office window and wondering how his agent could have stood to spend the best part of thirty years there. ‘Come along if you want.’

  ‘It don’t have the same effect on me, son.’ Rich had laughed. ‘Anyway, sad to say, I’m already booked,’ and he had mentioned another of his stable who was a regular on television panel shows. ‘Gets the jitters before he goes on TV. Needs me to hold his hand.’ Rich had pushed the contract for six nights’ warm-up at the O2 across the desk to Magnus and pointed to where he should sign. ‘This is a big gig for you, a good opportunity, don’t fuck it up.’

  ‘Why would I fuck it up?’

  Rich slid the signed contract into an envelope. His grin was still in place, but he had raised his eyebrows, punting the question, which was no question at all, back to Magnus.<
br />
  O2 was the next stop. The man in the seat beside Magnus was reading an Evening Standard he had folded into a pocket-sized square. Magnus glanced over the man’s shoulder at the headline: ‘Mystery Virus Wipes Out Cruise Ship’. A photograph of an impressive-looking liner illustrated the article about the latest outbreak of the sweats. He scanned the text. There had been cases of the virus in London, but nothing on that scale. The article listed instructions on how to act. People should observe hygiene precautions, phone NHS Direct if they felt unwell, avoid close contact with strangers. Magnus looked at the crammed carriage and grinned. London had not closed for the Blitz, the IRA, or al-Qaeda. It would take more than a few germs to shut down the city.

  The train slowed. The man beside him coughed and then sneezed. He wiped his nose on a tissue and stuffed his newspaper into his jacket pocket. One of the Dongolites pulled out a spotty handkerchief and mopped his forehead. The boy was red-faced and shiny with perspiration; gleaming like a … like a … Magnus cast around for an image he could use on Dongolite hecklers, but nothing useful … pig, conker, bell-end … came to mind.

  Magnus followed the flow of people on to the platform. There was work being done in the station. Some of the barriers that flanked the platform’s edge had been taken down and temporarily replaced by traffic cones strung with fluorescent tape. They narrowed the walkway, pushing people even closer together.

  Magnus saw the crowd before and behind him and realised that the rest of the train had been as full as his compartment. There were other trains, one every fifteen minutes, all crammed with people. Most of them were heading to the stadium. Magnus swallowed. It would be all right once he was on stage. For now he was just a part of the crowd, everyone moving at the same slow pace towards the exit, like one body composed of many cells.

  The four Dongolites from his carriage paused up ahead. Magnus glanced in their direction as he drew level. The sweat-soaked youth was swaying gently on his heels, with the unfocused stare of someone about to be transported on a wash of acid. He was wearing black-rimmed spectacles, round and ridiculous, that made him look as if he had put his eyes to binoculars some Beano-reading wag had grimed with soot. The glass magnified the youth’s eyeballs and Magnus saw them roll back in his head, pupils spooling upward until all that was left was white, greased and boiled-egg shiny. The Dongolite tottered backward. The heels of his spit-polished brogues knocked a traffic cone from the platform’s edge. He swayed gently, took a step towards his friends, and then teetered backward again.