His daughter hung up without another word. Sir Malcolm hammered 
on the intercom with his entire fist, sinking down in his seat and 
shuddering convulsively. Samantha's tinny voice asked him if he 
was OK. 


"Tea," he said, voice faintly cracked. "Green tea. Now." 


Chapter Thirteen: "Breakdown" 


The ex-prisoner—especially one who is no longer confined through 


a series of unlikely events of which exactly none have had the public 
seal of approval of the criminal justice system—always faintly fears 
the prison visit. He suspects the doors may be closed behind him 
and he may not be allowed out again. This certainly formed a great 
part of Keagan's anxiety when he and Sam entered the gates of 
HMP Wormwood Scrubs. Another part, of course, was that he was 
asked to show some form of identification, which meant trusting 
again in the ever-helpful Martin Ball, the prolific European traveller 
and holidaymaker who didn't actually exist. Fortunately, just like the 
customs officials on his only intermittently stomach-churning return 
trip from Denmark, the prison guards squinted at the photo of the 
slightly blurry brown-skinned young man—a stock photograph for all 
Keagan knew—on the passport, compared it for a few seconds to 
the older, distinctly less clean-cut gentleman in front of them and 
presumably figured it had been a rough few years. 


Actually making a request to visit Creepy Bastard had been a 
tougher task that it needed to be, mostly because that was the only 
name for the lifer Keagan knew or could remember. Fortunately, the 
brief but unsettling mention of his crimes he had offered Keagan and 
his descriptions of the man were adequate to permit Sam to find him 
—he was siill in C block, still serving his discretionary sentence. 
Keagan and Sam were ushered into the same visiting room that 
Lauren had used to visit him, five months previously. 


"Is that him?" Sam asked as a prisoner was escorted in. Keagan 
didn't immediately focus on the man, having been too stunned by 
the sight of Taggart, looking just as scruffy as he remembered, if 
somewhat happier-looking and heavier around the gut. When he 
shifted his gaze to the young man he was escorting he almost didn't 
recognise his former cellmate—his blond hair was short, almost 
neat, and although his eyes were still watery they no longer shone 
with disturbing intensity. He was still long-limbed and skinny, but 
wore it better. He no longer seemed uncomfortable to be out of his 
cell, though an occasional nervous glance betrayed what Keagan 
remembered—though that might be because he had been called up 
by someone he didn't recall sharing a cell with to smuggle out a 
package he didn't remember hiding in his cell. 


"Good to see you again," Keagan said, extending a hand Creepy 


Bastard stared at without responding. "You look good, man." 


"Thank you," Creepy Bastard said with a surprised tone. "I guess 
I've been feeling good. Better. I'm sorry, | figured when | saw you I'd 
remember you. | have a good memory for faces, de- | mean, we 
must have shared a cell at some time for you to know about the 
letters." Keagan nodded. "That's not a very exclusive club, though. | 
went through cellmates pretty fast." 


"Don't worry," Keagan said. "A lot of people tell me I'm not very 
memorable." 


Creepy Bastard sighed. "We don't really have much to talk about, do 
we? Except the letters. | couldn't make a lot of sense of them, but 
they're something to do with the Kellogg murder, aren't they? The 
papers the police were looking for early on. | found them after 
everything had quietened down, when | started looking at my old 
drawings again. The real ones, | mean." 


"You've been getting the pictures out?" Keagan felt an odd sense of 
pride. "That's really great. | still say you should publish them." 


This effusiveness drew a quizzical blink from the man on the other 
side of the table. "I'm missing something." 


"Nothing important, really. Yeah, this is Sam, she's a reporter. The 
letters could help solve the case." 


"That's good. It wasn't right the way they just all stopped talking 
about it. No-one was arrested. You know, | saw his body. | just... 
can't remember what | did afterwards. | think | went outside. Why, | 
don't know, | didn't go outside my cell if | could help it back then. | 
thought | might have done it for a while. Killed him. | didn't, did 1?" 
He suddenly looked terrified. 


"No. You're not in the frame," Keagan said. 


"Thank—thank—well. I'd almost forgotten about it after McGage got 
killed. Wyncroft came back in with riot police, completely tore the 
place apart. But they missed my drawings. And the letters." 


"Tim McGage? The guard?" And Keagan suddenly remembered— 


two mattresses, thrown exactly the same way. The Judge's cell, 
tossed like a dawn raid. The tomahawk. A look in the man's eyes, 
that final inch of integrity bleeding out. Another piece of the puzzle, 
he thought. Maybe the last. "Was he killed in the Scrubs?" 


Creepy Bastard shook his head. "At home. Really gruesome stuff. 
They said it looked like a revenge killing." He watched Sam 
scribbling frantically. "What?" 


"That's actually really useful. Do you have the letters?" 
Creepy Bastard nodded. 


It was easy, almost balletic. The old Pakistani lifer who had shared a 
cell with Cameron Moat was there with what looked like his 
granddaughter, and at a nod from Creepy Bastard he rose, 
announced in broken English that he wanted to use the bathroom 
and shuffled between Creepy Bastard's table and the camera. 
Taggart turned his back and suddenly become obsessively 
interested in a crack running across the ceiling—"Look at this. This 
is really dangerous," he said, in a tone that implied he'd pointed it 
out hundreds if not thousands of times before. "Could collapse at 
any moment. Take us all with it." 


Creepy Bastard pulled the already slightly yellowed papers—tightly 
creased where they had been folded up small and stuffed into the 
cracks in the walls—from the waistband of his trousers and passed it 
to Keagan, who passed it to Sam, who in about a quarter of a 
second had clipped them into her journalist's pad, nothing to say 
they hadn't been there the whole time. The old man turned and gave 
them an amiable if gap-toothed grin before shambling on towards 
the bathroom, and Taggart abruptly decided the crack in the ceiling 
plaster wasn't such a menace to the safety of the 1,200 prisoners of 
HMP Wormwood Scrubs as he had first thought, and resumed 
standing on duty. Keagan and Sam offered the former Creepy 
Bastard a few final pleasantries before indicating they were ready to 
leave. The doors of the visitors’ centre opened, and Keagan walked 
out into the afternoon air. 


Sam had, with some reservations, agreed that they should go back 


to her flat in Brixton to write up the story. 


"You should let me drive," she said. "I'm feeling much better now. | 
hate giving directions from the back seat." She was in fact now sat 
in the passenger seat, her spirits somewhat higher after the 
acquisitions of the letters, which she had spent the last twenty 
minutes reading through in the car. 


"Don't worry," said Keagan, slipping the car off the Embankment and 
onto the A203, "I reckon | remember where you live." 


"Well," Sam replied faintly, "that's not creepy at all, is it?" 


"| keep telling you, you gave me all your contact details when you 
came to visit me in the Scrubs. Told me to memorise them." 


"Only | have no memory of that at all. Why, exactly, does no-one 
remember you again?" 


"The Foundation used me in some kind of experiment. With 
something the Insurgency called a history-erasing machine. | don't 
think it worked the way they intended. 1447 did something, too." 


"The 'man in the metal box'? I'm afraid your conversation with 
Urquhart left me completely in the dark. Are we talking something 
like the Man in the Iron Mask here?" 


"It's probably best you don't know too much about that side of 
things. | get the impression both the Foundation and the Insurgency 
don't like people publicising what they're getting up to. Your best bet 
is to keep the story simple and understandable. Blackmail gone 
wrong, the coverup of a prison death at the hands of a guard and Sir 
Malcolm at the centre of it all. Don't for the love of God say anything 
about what he did back there in his office." 


"How can | leave it out? The man literally changed reality in front of 
my eyes. I've never seen anything like it." 


"Because, as Sir Malcolm said, any hint of it will make the whole 
story trash. Daily Star-grade, if that. Sir Malcolm once told me the 
Government doesn't want to believe in this stuff, even though they 
know it happens. By all means, include that you interviewed Sir 


Malcolm and he believes in all this stuff himself. That makes him the 
nut, not you." 


Sam scowled and looked away, clearly angry to be missing out on 
possibly the most important angle of the story. Keagan continued: 


"Besides, after you do an exposé on anything to do with the 
supernatural or whatever, how long do you think you've got before 
the Foundation knock down your door and take you away to be 
interrogated about how much you really know?" 


Sam looked out of the window. "One day, someone's going to blow 
the whistle on all this. The conspiracy's too big to keep silent 
forever. You can't tell people reality works one way then keep it 
secret that all the rules you've drawn up are just ... suggestions." 


"| used to think that," Keagan said. "Now, I'm not so sure. | think, at 
some point, the conspiracy becomes too powerful to expose; it 
becomes too unbelievable to expose, too big to fully understand, so 
anything you say about it is always partially wrong, too deeply 
embedded to get out through the established media." 


Silence, for a moment. "I'll stick to bringing down a Cabinet Minister 
in a sex and murder scandal, then." 


"Sounds about right. This it?" He slowed outside the apartment, 
signalling into the resident's carpark. 


Sam led the way up through the modest apartments until she 
stopped outside 16a. She fished out her key, which she kept ona 
cord around her neck in a little plastic wallet with her organ donor 
and NUJ cards. As she pushed the key into the lock, the door swung 
open, a slight wobble betraying that the lower hinge was loose. 
"That's ... not good,” she said. 


Keagan went in first, noting that the screws looked to have been 
partially torn from the wall. "No-one's here. | think we're alright,” he 
said after a minute. "Which is more than | can say for your place, 
unless you have a particularly unique taste in decor." Sam edged in 
after him and looked around in horror. 


To say the apartment had been trashed is to say the Titanic had 
taken on a little water. If it had been merely aggressively ransacked 
—furniture and bookcases tipped over, TV smashed, drawers torn 
out and strewn on the floor—it would have been comprehensible. 
Instead: 


There was not a piece of surviving furniture in the living room. It had 
all been smashed apart, splinters embedded in the carpet. Swathes 
of the wallpaper had been ripped off, the skirtingboard snapped 
away in chunks and hurled across the room. The light fixtures had 
all been ripped from their fitments and dashed to the ground. Sam 
took a cautious glance into the bedroom to see tatters of sheets 
wound tightly around bits of bed, the wardrobe shivered into 
matchsticks. The kitchen: the entire countertop torn away and 
cracked in half, the taps ripped out and crushed. She picked up one 
of the pipes, hands trembling. Something had flattened it then 
twisted it into a helix. "Could a bomb have done this?" she asked out 
loud. 


Keagan shook his head. "I've seen something like this before. 
Whatever was in this room was looking for something; probably the 
letters. I've changed my mind—! don't think we should be here if it 
decides to come back. See if you can find any clothes that are still 
good—pack an overnight bag." 


Sam sorted through the shredded garments. ""Whatever'. You mean, 
you don't think it was human." 


"No," Keagan said. "Unless you know any humans who can bend 
metal into that curly pasta shape." 


"Rotini," Sam said. "It's rotini. Okay. Let me see if | can find the 
toothpaste then let's go." 


Keagan drove with no particular direction—his first instinct was 
simply to get out of London. Sam had gathered a few possessions in 
a carryall and sat with her hands on top of it in the passenger seat; 
Keagan stole a glance at her from time to time to see how she was 
holding up. She didn't seem sad, or depressed, or defeated—just 
angry. After a little while the city broke up into smaller towns and as 


they got out into the country the sound of traffic died back to the 
point where Keagan was able to hear the engine. 


"How long's your car been making that noise?" he asked while they 
idled at a set of traffic lights. A spitting, popping sound interrupted 
the sound of the motor every few seconds. 


"It's fine," Sam said, "it's been like that for ages. It's not a problem." 


Keagan dragged the car up to speed as the light turned green. "It 
really shouldn't be making that noise. It's accelerating unevenly as 
well. When was the last time you serviced it?" 


"Erm, serviced?" 


"God help us. Checked the tyre pressure, oil level, topped up the 
wiper reservoirs...?" 


"Oh, | think Dad did that the last time he visited," Sam seemed 
thoroughly uninterested. 


"Which was?" 
"About a year ago, maybe?" 


Keagan pulled in on the side of the road, squinting at the grimy 
dashboard and dragging his finger across it. The white van driver 
behind them put his horn on and swerved around them without even 
slowing down. 


"Hey," she said. "Why are you stopping?" 


"Because | don't much fancy the idea of breaking down on the 
motorway. You do know your dashboard lights are out, right? As in, 
I've got the handbrake on now and there's still nothing coming on. 
You might have a serious engine failure and you'd have no way of 
knowing." 


Sam yawned. "So are you going to look at it, or not?" 


Keagan opened the door halfway and began squeezing out so as 
not to step into the path of the traffic. "Hey, | should be charging you 


for this. My usual labour fee for a checkup is sixty-five quid." 


"Really? And there was me thinking my dropping a good half-grand 
of my own cash so far on your travel expenses meant something." 
She stuck her tongue out. 


"Okay, okay. Do you have any tools in the boot? Spanner, tyre 
pump?" 


"| think there's a bag with some things in. Dad put it there; I've never 
looked at it." 


Keagan sighed. "Great." 


The problem turned out to be relatively simple—a clogged air filter. 
By chance one of the items in the boot was a small hand vacuum, 
which did a reasonable job of dislodging the worst of the grime. He 
grinned as he waved through the windscreen at Sam and pointed to 
the offending item, but Sam wasn't looking at him. She was looking 
at the dark Audi A4 sedan with aftermarket tint parked thirty feet or 
so behind them. 


"What is it?" Keagan said. Sam said something, too quietly to be 
heard over the traffic, so Keagan wandered around to her side of the 
car and gestured for her to put the window down. She did so with 
quick, hurried movements and her voice was panicky. 


"That car was outside my apartment." 


"You sure?" Keagan asked. "No offence, but you don't really seem 
like the car type." 


"I'm not imagining it. R159 EWD. It's the same number plate." 


"Okay," said Keagan, trying not to appear rushed as he replaced the 
filter. He was getting the same eerie sensation he had felt back in 
Bembridge. 


"Keagan, someone's getting out." 


He immediately amended his previous strategy, roughly shoving the 
cover back on before he jumped into the car—provoking another