Raikesdale, North Yorkshire
June 1

It’s only a lump of cloth, and not a particularly alluring one. The sleeves are frayed at the ends, the buttons are missing and some of the stitching is starting to come loose.

But it’ll do its job this morning. Christina Kyte’s cropped denim jacket — vintage 1974 — will persuade her, if no one else, that despite all the other evidence to the contrary the rebel hasn’t quite been tamed.

Tina rests the jacket on the end of her bed before sitting at the dressing table to see to her make-up. This is the third day in a row that she’s done so wearing a girdle and stockings — on Tuesday she’d allowed herself to appear in a blouse and slacks — an unthinkable transformation for someone whose attachment to denim her sister had once described as verging on the pathological.

That was before the letter from SciTel had arrived, inviting her to London for an interview as a trainee computer programmer. Tina hated the idea of selling out, but she detested Ellerby more. She’d decided at once that her best chance of success was to adopt the image of a typical young professional now, so she’d be comfortable with it when the big day rolled around.

Choosing her outfit had been easy. The dark blue jacket with its barely visible grey pinstripe, the matching low-cut knee-length dress and the black, medium-heeled shoes had all but marched up to the till themselves. She’d felt less certain about her smart new hairdo; watching the stylist finish off by removing the last little tufts hiding her ears, then moving her cherished dead-centre parting over to the side had brought home to her how much like her kid sister she now looked.

Maybe she should have bowed to current fashion trends and had it permed.

And wear purple, and a red hat that doesn’t go…

Tina takes extra care masking the laughter lines at the corners of her eyes and the areas around her mouth where she’s recently detected the beginnings of tiny creases. Those who don’t know the family well have always assumed she’s the younger of the pair, when in fact Ellie is twenty-six and Tina twenty-nine. With her hair cut in the same style as Ellie’s, Tina knows the likelihood of that mistake being repeated is low. Even her dad said it was nice to see her looking her age at last.

And go out in my slippers in the rain…

All for a job she probably won’t get.

It would have been different if she was fresh from college. She’d sailed through the City & Guilds course the Department of Employment had sent her on. She was proficient in BASIC and COBOL, drew a mean flowchart and for the practical component of the exam had devised a stock-control system that worked beautifully.

But no modern telecommunications firm was going to be that keen to hire a single girl who’d turn thirty before the end of the summer. They’d figure that within a year or two she’d want to start a family, thus rendering their investment in her training a waste of time and money. She could argue all she liked that she’d never planned to have children, that she’d waited so long for the chance of a meaningful career that she wasn’t about to throw it away now, but would they believe her?

You say that now, Miss Kyte. What about when you’re thirty-four, thirty-five…?

And pick flowers in other people’s gardens…

Tina runs a comb through what remains of her fringe, then sprays it back from her forehead. Her fingers move to the neatly clipped hair above and behind her right ear, and from there to the nape of her neck.

Maybe it’s short enough to put Evan off. He hasn’t seen her ‘shorn sheep’ look yet.

On the other hand, rumour has it that he’s slept with at least one of the Chinese girls — and they’re all as bald as badgers.

No, it’ll take more than a change of image to get Evan Lodge off her back.

The more she thinks about it, the more certain she begins to feel that the only feasible solution is to agree to go out with him. Evan’s the kind of boy who only wants what he can’t have; once Tina becomes just another of his conquests it won’t be long before his gaze wanders elsewhere. It’s not as if she doesn’t find him attractive — and he’s got his own wheels.

Though it means being the older woman, a situation which will be new to her.

And press alarm bells…

“Are yer goin’ to be much longer?”

Her mother’s voice echoes up the staircase, reminding her of the ordeal ahead. Elevenses at aunt Peggy’s in Brompton, followed by a visit to the nursing home where her grandma is now living.

“I’ll be down in a minute.”

And run my stick along the public railings…

Tina steps into the flowery summer dress she’s selected from her sister’s extensive collection, zips herself up and smooths out the ridiculously wide hem. She adds a pair of white slingbacks, plain ear studs and an unpretentious silver necklace.

And her denim jacket. The rock chick won’t be kicking the bucket today.

She picks up her handbag and trots downstairs. Mum is in her tweeds and brogues, fussing with the round-brimmed hat pinned to her hairnet. Dad is on his way out to the shed; retirement fits him like a faithful old raincoat.

The keys to the Skoda are on the telephone table. Tina reaches for them, but her mother gets there first.

“I’ll do drivin’,” she insists. “You hare along them lanes like yer at Brands Hatch.”

“Suit yourself.”

“An’ couldn’t yer ‘ave found yerself a cardie instead o’ that thing?”

“Obviously not.”

“It’s hacky.”

“Well if any of us gets fleas I’ll take blame, right?”

Tina opens the front door and moves to stand by the car. The weather is warm but overcast. From the moors at the top of the valley come the sound of curlews. Nothing seems to be moving in the fields and woods below them.

This isn’t life.

It’s a tableau, frozen in time.

If she’s not careful she’ll become part of it.

And hoard pens and pencils…

Her mother eventually appears carrying a large parcel tied with a bow. She asks Tina to hold it while she unlocks the boot, at the same time giving her a look that says she ought to have had the common courtesy to enquire whether anything needed to be taken out.

And that she should have a steady job like her sister.

Or if she didn’t fancy working for a living, a husband to provide for her.

Not that a subtext is necessary. Those statements are implicit in every interaction Tina and her parents engage in.

She lowers herself into the front passenger seat, twists open her handbag and finds she’s left her cigarettes behind. But wasn’t she down to her last couple anyway? It makes more sense to buy another pack at the village shop than to traipse back up to her room for them.

“Mind if we–“ she begins, but her mother is frowning at the folds of cotton covering the gear stick.

“If yer can move all that lot I might be able to get it started,” she grumbles.

“Sorry…”

“Yer never do owt by ‘alves, do yer? For years we despair, Fred an’ me, o’ seein’ yer in a nice frock, now it seems yer can’t wear owt else. An’ for goodness sake pull that ‘em down. Yer a thirty year old woman.”

It’s going to be a long, long day.

There are more censorious mutterings when Tina asks her mother to stop outside Josie’s, but she doesn’t care. All she wants is nicotine, and fast.

She hurries through the shop doorway and immediately feels her whole body go rigid. To her left, holding a bag of long-grain rice, stands an apparition who’d have been perfectly at home stalking the torchlit corridors of a Transilvanian castle. She’s dressed in a heavy black cloak, the hood pulled back to reveal her hairless scalp and the sinister row of black gemstones running from the centre of her forehead to the nape of her neck. And if she can’t be more than seventeen years old, there’s something deep inside her oriental eyes that speaks of a force more ancient than the dawn of humanity.

Tina edges away from her, glad of the central display that allows her to reach the counter without having to push past the witch.

“What’s she doing dressed like that?” she whispers to the shopkeeper, a blowsy woman of forty-five with sagging jowls and Sybil Fawlty hair. “I thought they always wore wigs and proper clothes when they came down to village?”

“Blessed if I know, love. That ‘un there might. She’s in charge of ‘em, or I’m Florence out o’ Magic Roundabout.”

Tina follows Josie’s glance over to the freezer, where two more black-cloaked figures are loading pre-packed onions, carrots and greens into their shopping baskets.

The taller of the pair turns towards her.

“Salam, Christina Kyte,” she says through her jet black lips.

Tina’s hand goes to her mouth. This must be the girl she and Ellie had spoken to for a few minutes one evening last week. Then she’d been wearing a headscarf; a lock of her dark hair had escaped from it. And there’d been none of those black jewels stuck to her forehead. Now she looks exactly the same as the others.

But it isn’t just that. Tina had got the impression that the girl was a novice, that her beliefs were still in their formative stages. The person standing in front of her now has no such misgivings. Her faith is sure and immovable.

“Sorry, I don’t remember your name,” Tina mumbles.

“Deng Liu-xiang.”

“Oh yeah. Um, okay…”

“There is no reason to fear us, Christina Kyte. Nor should you do so, Josephine Bishop.”

The three cult members have drawn together. The fact that they’re all clutching items of food does nothing to detract from the air of menace the trio are generating.

Pull t’other one, love. Yer’ve got that look in yer eyes, same as rest of ‘em. Now clear off afore I set dogs on yer.

That’s what her dad had shouted at the English girl. Tina had heard him when she crept into her parents’ bedroom to get a closer look at her.

Ruth Pattison tried to deceive us. She did not know that our policy has always been to make enquiries into the background of any woman who professes a desire to join our community. When we discovered that she was facing quite a serious criminal charge, we told her that as guests of this country we felt obliged to contact the authorities. We also confiscated her belongings.

Yet Ruth had gone back to Sunny Hollow of her own free will. She’d even taken the witch’s arm.

And there hadn’t been a police car. Dad was out the front all morning. He’d never have kept quiet about it, not when someone had claimed she was being kidnapped.

What had they done to her? What the hell was going on in that house?

Ignoring Josie’s anxious shake of the head, she strides forward and pushes Deng Liu-xiang in the shoulder.

“That Ruth you were on about the other night, it’s you isn’ it? You’re the lass who asked dad for help.”

“Am I ‘earin’ this right?” says Josie, lifting the hatch at the end of the counter.

“Get her to wipe that muck off her eyes an’ I bet anything you like we’ll find the bald-headed cow’s as Chinese as we are.”

Deng Liu-xiang lean overs to the two younger converts in turn, whirring and chirruping into their ears.

Three sets of ebony lips curl in identical smiles. The syllables they hiss are in no language Tina is familiar with. But their meaning is clear — and when she looks at Josie she knows the shopkeeper has received the same message.

Deng Liu-xiang pays for the goods and leads her acolytes from the shop. They raise their hoods as they step through the door, spectres haunting the quiet village street.

Tina stares at the pound note she’s taken from her purse. She puts it back and walks outside, knowing mum is anxious to be on her way.

Eleanor Kyte frowns as Terry Wogan lavishes his melodious Emerald-Isle charm on yet another contestant destined to win nothing more memorable than a Blankety Blank cheque book and pen.

“Yer wonder why they bother,” she sighs. “I mean, top prizes are nowt to write ‘ome about either.”

“I think that’s supposed to be the point,” says her sister from the front window.

“Come again?”

“It’s called post-modern irony. Doing the opposite to what people expect.”

“Seems more like an excuse to save a few coppers to me.”

Ellie leans forward to pick up the Teesside Gazette from the coffee table and opens it at the television page. At this time on a Friday evening she’d normally be getting ready to go out with Rob, but he’s at a stag do in Northallerton. She hopes for his sake that he keeps himself right; if he starts mithering on about his hangover tomorrow she’ll make sure she has a headache of her own when they get back from the reception.

ITV, 8pm. Play Your Cards Right. Bruce Forsyth’s latest opportunity to spout his inane catchphrase.

Nice to see you. To see you, nice.

Why did the audience find that funny? What did it even mean?

So another game show, then a sit-com, a police series and the news. Not much better on the other two channels.

But at least they had a choice. Most nights it was mam who decreed what the family watched. Perhaps there was something to be said for Tupperware parties after all.

Ellie tosses the newspaper aside. She spends a few moments filing her nails, her mind flitting forward to what shade she’s going to paint them in the morning. Nothing too dramatic; she can’t be seen trying to outshine the bride.

She notices that Tina is still at the window.

“Expectin’ somebody?” she jokes.

“No, not really.”

“Not really? Yer either are or yer aren’t.”

“You can’t reduce everything to dualisms.”

“Always ‘ave to use posh words, don’t yer?”

Tina picks a speck of dirt from the side of her dress — Ellie’s dress — then takes her vanity case from the handbag resting on the sill.

“I think I should keep it like this,” she mutters, patting the cropped hair at the back of her neck.

“I might grow mine for a bit. Just till it’s long enough to tek a curl.”

“Good idea. It’ll give everyone time to get used to me being the one with the short hair.”

“All right,” sighs Ellie. “First yer knock cigs on ‘ead an’ now this. Where’s Tina an’ what ‘ave yer done wi’ er?”

“She’s growing up, that’s all.”

Ellie thinks about having a bath. She hasn’t changed out of her work clothes, and she’s beginning to whiff a bit. If the bank would relax the rule about stockings she might not have this problem. It wasn’t as if any of the customers could actually see her legs.

She lifts her weary body from the sofa, bends to pick up the shoes she kicked off when she first got in, and climbs the stairs to her room. Opening her wardrobe, she fondles the lemon suit she’ll wear at the wedding; with any luck it’ll be the last one she attends before her own. If she only knew Bev a bit better, they could have arranged for Ellie to catch the bouquet. Let Rob try and worm his way out of that one!

A car pulls up outside. The engine continues to run. The front door slams shut.

The lying little tart! ‘Not really’ my backside!

Ellie dashes down to the living room. From the safety of the curtains she peers at a scene which becomes stranger by the second.

Tina is standing perfectly still, her arms by her sides. A few yards away, a woman is hauling her bulk from the front passenger seat of a red Mini Minor.

Josie Bishop! What’s she doing here?

Now the driver joins her. She’s a girl roughly Ellie’s age, maybe a year or two younger, with bright red hair cut in a short bob. She’s also heavily pregnant.

Tina is shaking her head. She backs away from them — one step, then another — but stops.

Now Josie is walking towards her. She raises a hand, and for a moment Ellie fears she’s about to slap Tina in the face. Instead she trails chubby fingers along her cheek, and leans forward to whisper something in her ear.

Tina relaxes, but Ellie has seen enough. She strides into the hallway, pulls open the door and gasps at the sight of Josie bundling her sister into the back of the Mini.

“No! You can’t make me!” she hears Tina cry before the overweight shopkeeper dives in beside her and the car screeches away up the lane.

Ellie wants to run after it, but she’s in her stockinged feet and has to waste valuable time fetching her shoes.

She doesn’t think about going out to the shed to tell dad. He’d have a fit if she told him they were heading up to Sunny Hollow.

Because that’s where this came from. After what mam said she saw in the village this morning she’s convinced of it.

She sets off with fire in her belly. Although Tina makes it difficult for people to get close to her, she’s family — and in Ellie’s eyes that counts for a lot. What it might do to her parents if their eldest falls into the hands of those witches is something she daren’t contemplate.

She’s jogged less than a hundred yards when another vehicle, a dark blue Vauxhall Cavalier, roars past the old crossing. She waves at it frantically, stepping into the middle of the road as if challenging the driver to either stop or run her down. To her relief he chooses the former option.

“Can yer…can yer give us a lift?” she wheezes at the young man behind the wheel. “I’ve got to catch up wi’ our Tina. In’t far where they took ‘er…”

“Who took her?” asks his companion, an attractive woman in early middle age.

“Josie from shop an’ this lass wi’ red ‘air. She were up stick–“

“We know who you mean. Get in.”

Ellie’s too shocked by her sister’s abduction to register this information on any but the most superficial level. She’s still in a daze when the Cavalier stops outside Raikes barn, behind a Dormobile and the red Mini Minor.

“I’m Gemma, and this is Paul,” says the woman as they leave the car. “The young lady in question is Paul’s sister-in-law.”

Ellie nods, but hasn’t the presence of mind to introduce herself.

“It’s them witches down there,” she murmurs, pointing to the concealed entrance to Sunny Hollow.

Gemma touches her lightly on the shoulder.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” she says softly. “I know who those women are. I’ve dealt with them before.”

“I knew summat was up when mam said she saw three of ‘em in black cloaks ‘stead o’ gear they normally wear when they go in village.”

Gemma’s eyes narrow. Only now does Ellie notice how immaculately turned out she is, from the pillbox hat pinned to the stippled veil covering her dark brown curls to the trendy Dior-inspired Corolle jacket and flared skirt.

“Are you sure, dear?”

“Course I am. An’ she said our Tina were in shop at same time as ‘em an’ all.”

Paul takes Gemma to one side.

“What d’you reckon?” he asks her.

“I don’t know. The MoD wouldn’t have put them here if they thought there was any serious threat to the local population. They couldn’t afford the publicity. You remember how quickly the press descended on Northcroft.”

“Didn’t stop our Trisha catchin’ this virus or whatever it is.”

“She may not have been infected here. This nest could have acted as the trigger.”

“But that means–“

“Yes, if Helen Sutton was responsible your wife probably has it too. Why do you think I was so keen to meet her? All I can tell you is that the prognosis is hopeful. In fact I’d…oh God, stop her, Paul.”

Ellie has run out of patience. She flies down the path, trips and falls headlong into the dirt. Paul lifts her to her feet, then lets out a low groan.

On the grassy terrace in front of the house stand Josie Bishop and the pregnant redhead, the girl Paul called Trisha. Both are holding one of Tina’s arms; she continues to struggle, but can’t seem to break free.

But it’s the four refugees facing them, bald and bare-breasted, their jewelled crests at once reptilian and utterly alien, that have stunned him into helpless immobility.

Ellie dusts down her skirt. She turns to steady Gemma as she arrives at the foot of the path, suddenly finding strength in the solidarity of their shared womanhood.

“Are you all right?” Gemma asks her.

“A few ladders, but I’ll live.”

“Paul? Paul! Get it together, me old china!”

Me old china?

Ellie has no time to ponder over Gemma’s incomprehensible lapse into Cockney rhyming slang. Another witch has arrived, and this one carries herself with the authority of a high priestess. Every head bows in supplication.

Except Tina’s, Ellie notes with pride.

“Oh look, it’s Baba Yaga,” her sister spits. “Well you might’ve put these two under your spell but it won’t work on me.”

The witch smiles through her evil black lips.

“How many cigarettes have you smoked today, Christina Kyte?”

“What?”

“It is a simple question.”

“But I don’t…”

A single movement of the witch’s jewelled brow has Josie and Trisha releasing their hold on Tina.

“Of course you do not. The hive does not wish it.” She extends a beringed, black-nailed finger to Tina’s chin, lets it fall to her neck and trails it languidly across her breast. “And though we do not intend to transform you now, Christina Kyte, you are an avatar of the Sunny Hollow hive. As are Josephine Bishop and Alice Hodgson.”

Josie and Trisha turn towards Tina.

“One shall be all, then all shall be as one,” they intone.

“This is your new type of consciousness, is it, Ruth Pattison?” Tina snarls, and now Gemma is tugging at Ellie’s elbow, saying they have to leave at once. “Make us all into fuckin’ robots?”

Ellie shrugs Gemma’s hand away.

“Come on!” the older woman insists. “We can’t do anything for them!”

“Like ‘ell we can’t!”

“You don’t understand. That’s–“

“No, you’re the one that doesn’t understand. I’m goin’ for me sister.”

Ellie launches herself forward, determined to tear the witch’s ugly face to ribbons. Two of her followers, women almost as large as Josie, quickly move to block the way. Gemma pushes her aside and throws herself straight at the slightly shorter of the pair, delivering a right hook Mohammed Ali would have admired.

“Run, you idiot!” she yells as the other bald-headed matron crashes into her and the three go down in a heap.

Run she does — but Ruth Pattison is her target, and she isn’t going to let anything deflect her aim.

How she ends up on her back, winded, the two teenage witches resting their feet on her wrists, Ellie can’t say. Nor is it clear to her why Ruth’s attention is now fixed on Gemma, who is being dragged from the ground by her captors. And what Paul thinks he’s playing at by staring at his sister-in-law like a dog waiting to be asked to sit up and beg is beyond her.

She can’t see Tina, but out of the corner of her eye she watches Gemma’s gaze travel from Ruth’s bald, crested scalp to the oversized breasts protruding from the long strings of beads hanging to her waist.

“How did they get to you?” she asks.

“Your enemies and ours, Yvette de Monnier.” Ruth leans closer. “No, not Yvette…”

“Very good.”

The witch’s almond-shaped eyes widen.

“Oh, you’re him! How fascinating for you!”

“Yeah, it’s a laugh a minute. But you’d know all about that.”

“Raise your voice all you wish, J G Egerton. A kuzkardesh gara’s former identity is of no concern to us. It is what she is that matters.”

“And you’re a hive queen. I’ll admit it’s better than working at the Gladstone. So what’s the plan then? Create some deranged fantasy like that vampire bitch in Bucovina? You might as well tell me, you’re going to convert me anyway.”

“Deng Liu-xiang intends to be a great deal more circumspect than that misguided creature. Did Yvette tell you about her? Together they transformed thousands.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Yvette de Monnier was once a kuzkardesh gara. She and Gabriela Balcescu are jointly responsible for the situation that exists in Bucovina today.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Yvette was infected by Helen Sutton. She searched for a cure, but the pull of the universal female mind was too strong.”

“How the hell can you possibly know that?”

Ruth indicates her four acolytes with a graceful sweep of the hand.

“They were converted in Bucovina, where they learned much that the enemy is unaware of.”

“But Yvette isn’t kuzkardesh gara now,” Gemma points out.

“No, she is not. Perhaps your assimilation will help us find out why.”

Ellie has listened to every word of this exchange and understood none of it. Who is Yvette de Monnier? Who are these ‘enemies’ Gemma and the Chinese witch seem to have in common? And why did Ruth refer to Gemma as ‘him’?

“First we must transfer our centre of operations,” Ruth is saying, and now her words are meant for everyone to hear, even Ellie. “Alice Hodgson has been chosen to initiate proceedings in Northcroft. She will be assisted by her hyzmatkar Paul Smailes. The transformed kuzkardesh gara will remain in Sunny Hollow.”

“What about the rest of them?” asks Gemma.

“You will all retain your human characteristics until the Northcroft hive is established and enough subsidiary nests have been set up to make military intervention futile.”

“And you?”

“The time has come for Ruth Pattison to go back to work.”

Ruth’s ebony lips curl in a conspiratorial grin — one which Gemma, to Ellie’s horror, mimics faithfully.

The young acolytes release Ellie’s wrists. She sits up, rubbing the feeling back into them.

“Let it take you, Eleanor Kyte,” says Josie, smiling down at her.

“There’s really nothing to be afraid of,” adds Tina.

Ellie starts to cry. The world she knew less than half an hour ago has gone.

“I won’t be me any more,” she sobs.

“You won’t be just you,” Josie assures her.

Ruth, Gemma and the four transformed kuzkardesh gara go into the house. Tina and Josie help Ellie to stand while Paul and his sister-in-law walk over to join them.

“This avatar is to wait here for instructions,” Trisha — or Alice as she’ll be known from now on — informs them. “Hyzmatkar, you will take the others to their homes, then return to your family.”

Paul nods his agreement.

“Something very special has begun this evening,” Tina tells her sister. “We are both privileged to be a part of it.”

“But what about that job in London you were after?”

“Christina Kyte must attend the interview as planned — and now she is certain that the position will be hers.”

“This isn’t goin’ to stop ‘ere, is it?”

“The universal female mind is eternal. It will embrace everyone.”

Tina’s hand reaches to caress Ellie’s cheek. Her own fingers have returned the gesture before she’s aware of them moving.

“Bir bolmak hemme,” she hears herself chant in unison with the other converts, “song hemme bolmak agzybir.”

And although Eleanor Kyte has lost a sister today, she knows she’s gained something immeasurably more wonderful.

The Priory Inn, Northcroft-on-Heugh
June 9

Toby Cunningham doesn’t think his has become the most boring job in the world.

He knows it.

For the last hour and a half he’s been sitting in the corner of a smoky pub trying to make a bitter top — they call it a ‘pint touch’ up here because you can’t get proper bitter, just the carbonated chemicals they originally brewed specially for the dock workers — last until he hears something he can include in his report other than complaints about the weather or how bad the unemployment situation is.

Because that’s all it seems to be these days, waiting around and filling in forms.

And driving.

Jesus, he’s sick of that. If it wasn’t for the fact that his expenses were so ludicrously easy to fiddle he might be tempted to think the fuck with it and put in for a desk job. It might not be what he’d joined up for, but at least he’d have Saturday nights free.

They’d warned him at Stokes Bay that being a secret agent isn’t all yachts, Martinis and pouting blondes. Too bloody right it isn’t. The most fun Toby’s had in the last six months was winding up that lanky kid who got turned into a girl. A man is following you. He’s armed, and he may be under orders to kill you. Oh yeah, and it’s an alias, of course. Happy days.

Unless it was the time he’d snogged her on the way over to the Isle of Wight. He hadn’t meant to, but those come-to-bed eyes had pulled the rug from under his feet. Did she realise what effect that kind of look had on a bloke? When he knows that a tasty bit of stuff like she’d become is gagging for it?

And he’d tried to make out he wasn’t gay.

For what seems to Toby like the eighth or ninth time since he sat down with his drink, someone has put Roxy Music’s ‘Dance Away’ on the jukebox. Jennie had been fond of that band — when they were still pushing the boundaries, before the post-punk backlash had produced this bland wallpaper music you were tortured with everywhere you went. He hopes that whoever she’s with now, he’s looking after her, because if he isn’t–

You’re getting soft, TC. You know damn well that you can’t afford to care about anyone in this line of work.

“By, it’s gettin’ a bit parky out there,” remarks yet another of the regulars as he comes through the door, as if the gradual fall in temperature is a phenomenon only he has been blessed with the ability to experience.

The geezer’s right, though. Toby wonders just how far north they’ve sent him. Nottingham’s the normal limit of his travels, and even there he always feels that if he sticks his heel into the grass it’ll meet permafrost. Walking up from the car park next to the bus station — it’s a bus station in the sense that Linda McCartney is a virtuoso keyboard player — he’d watched the old church you could see from New Stranton disappear before his eyes in churning clouds of fog. It’s supposed to be June, for Christ’s sake. What do you get for living here, government-issue long johns and a free instruction booklet on how to make igloos?

Then there’s the accent. If the locals had spoken proper Geordie he might have understood more than one word in five, but this was a speeded-up version that often sounded closer to Scouse than anything else. What the hell did ‘feggie’ mean? Who or what was a ‘rarf’?

And their attitude towards women! So far behind the times he half expects to look out of the window and see pterodactyls circling in the sky — or he might if there actually was a sky. Toby’s all for keeping a girl in her place, making sure she knows who’s wearing the trousers, but he draws the line at assuming she’s on the game just because she walks into a pub on her own.

He realises he would have been assigned to this shithole sooner or later. It was precisely because of the town’s cultural and geographic isolation that the MoD had dumped Helen Sutton here when they found she wasn’t just a carrier but a potential transmitter as well. No great loss to the country this place, if it had to be put under quarantine like southern Bucovina.

But it means keeping a watchful eye on the inhabitants, for there’s always a chance that Helen might have infected some of them during the fourteen years she’d lived on the headland. In theory she shouldn’t have been able to do that much damage; the trigger hadn’t arrived until a few weeks before she died. Yet she’d passed the virus to Solange Malraux four years earlier, and what a pack of rabid hounds that had unleashed!

In Toby’s opinion the people here are probably as safe as they’d be anywhere else. After Malraux’s meddling — she was calling herself de Monnier now, he remembered — had resulted in Helen’s death the clean-up squad had gone into intergalactic overdrive. Many had posed as newspaper reporters. There’d even been one or two bogus television crews. Experts in psychological profiling, every man jack of them. If any trace of the disease had remained, they’d have found it.

He takes another sip from his glass. The pub is starting to fill up, particularly around the pool table on the raised level furthest from the bar. Youngish crowd, all Edwardian suits and flouncy dresses, as if the 60s had been wiped from the history books. The married couples have gravitated towards the alcoves to the left of the main door; mostly they just sit and stare, out for the sake of appearances, nothing holding their relationship together except that it’s too much bother to bring it to an end.

He decides to go for a piss before he drives back to New Stranton, and the 3-star hotel where he’ll write a draft report and change into his glad rags before heading off in search of whatever passes for action over there. He’ll score, that’s not in doubt; what with is a different matter.

The condom machine in the Gents is broken, so he makes a mental note to visit the toilets in the Grand as soon as he gets there. He doesn’t give a shit what little problems his one-night stands might bring to the bellies of the women he fucks, but the treatments they administer in VD clinics aren’t designed to leave you indifferent as to whether or not you might have to go back for more. It makes his cock feel tender just remembering the nurse’s face.

When he returns to the bar, the three girls behind the counter are deep in conversation. Toby notices that they keep glancing towards the pool table, where two women in black jackets and dresses are handing out leaflets.

“Bit early for the Sally Army, isn’t it?” he quips.

“Worse than them,” says the barmaid who’d served him earlier. “This lot are tryin’ to get everyone to pack in drinkin’.”

“Drinkin’, smokin’, gamblin’, you name it,” complains her colleague.

“They won’t live longer, but it’ll certainly feel like it,” laughs Toby.

“Yer what?”

“Just the punchline to an old joke. So who are they, a temperance society?”

“Church of the…what was it again, Steph?”

“Eternal Mind.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

Toby’s hopes of a shag collapse faster than the England middle order on a green wicket.

The leaflet is professionally laid out, with a picture of Northcroft Borough Hall in the top right-hand corner. It invites the reader to a ‘dabara’, which Toby interprets as a kind of evangelical religious meeting, to be held there the following evening at 9 o’clock. The principal speaker will be an individual named Deng Liu-xiang, who promises to deliver a message that will ‘change forever the way you look at the world’. Admission is free, and a rider at the end stresses that donations will neither be asked for nor accepted.

Yeah, right.

Just another crank, out to make a killing with some half-baked eastern philosophy culled from the Bhagavad Gita or the I-Ching, that in the end boiled down to nothing more profound than a series of platitudes most junior school kids would regard as an insult to their intelligence.

But why target Northcroft?

The headlanders might be ignorant, but they’re not stupid. Their wallets aren’t exactly bulging either.

It’s enough to persuade Toby that he ought to call it in before he investigates this ‘church’.

He uses the payphone by the fruit machine. The number he dials is preceded by no STD code, and the coins he inserts are purely for show.

When he replaces the receiver, Toby Cunningham is no wiser than when he picked it up.

Watch and wait.

Just for a change.

He grabs his jacket and heads for the door. On the other side of the road, next to the gate that opens onto St Hild’s churchyard, the proselytisers have been joined by two men in their early thirties, both wearing smart black suits and both looking handy enough to sort out any trouble their associates might encounter. Toby quickly formulates a plan of action that will allow him to follow them at a distance, but before he’s walked more than a few steps one of the men begins loping across to intercept him.

“Good evening, friend!” he grins, holding out his hand. “Simon’s the name, enlightenment’s the game!”

Toby shakes it firmly. Now that his cover is blown, he decides to milk this guy for every drop of information he’s willing to give.

He takes the leaflet from his pocket and pretends to study the text.

“Interesting stuff,” he mutters.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Got your work cut out if you’re preaching abstinence in a town like this.”

“No cause is too hopeless,” beams the older of the two women. “I’m Gemma. This is Paul and his sister-in-law Alice.”

Toby notices that they’ve moved to cut off his retreat. He can also see that Alice is heavily pregnant.

Clever.

“I’m intrigued, I admit,” he says. “The problem is, I’ve been ripped off by this sort of thing in the past.”

“We won’t ask you for any money,” Gemma assures him.

“I meant ripped off in a…well, in a spiritual sense I suppose.”

“It didn’t do quite what it said on the tin?”

Toby returns her dazzling smile. She’s very craftily established her status as the leader of this troupe. Deng Liu-xiang needn’t lose sleep over the size of his Jersey bank account if he has many more followers as charismatic as this classy broad.

“Something like that.”

“We’re different. Although we call ourselves a church, we don’t put forward a set of beliefs, we don’t adhere to a creed and we are not here to make converts. All we’re doing is presenting a new way of thinking, a programme of mental exercises if you will, that have enriched our lives and that we feel compelled to pass on.”

“It’s a completely non-profit making organisation,” Alice puts in.

“So if I came along tomorrow evening I’d just get some advice about fine-tuning the old grey matter?” Toby asks her. “It won’t be a case of ‘this is what we can do for you, but only if you sign up for a correspondence course’?”

“You really have come across movements like this before,” laughs Gemma. “But it’s not a teaser, it’s the whole show.”

“I can’t say I’m not tempted. But as you can probably tell I’m a stranger up here, and the truth is I’ve arranged to meet an old mate from college for a few bevvies before I go back on Monday. Can’t see him being too chuffed if I drag him to a self-help gig. Him or the rest of his pals.”

“Why don’t you let Simon and I introduce you to her now?”

“Her?”

“Deng Liu-xiang, our inspiration. She’s always interested in meeting new people.”

Bingo! Worked like a charm!

“I’m Ben,” says Toby. “Ben Webster.”

“Well, Ben Webster, if you come with us I promise you’re in for a real treat.”

It takes less than five minutes for Simon and Gemma to lead him through the churchyard, past the rugby ground and a semi-derelict hospital to a fog-bound Marine Parade, bordered on one side by a wide stretch of grass offering no protection from the chilling breeze coming off the sea, and on the other by a four-storey terrace set back from the road by a series of long, bedraggled front gardens.

The last of these has been covered in tarmac and marked out as a car park.

Belonging to the Gladstone Hotel.

“Here we are,” smiles Gemma, and if the klaxons were only audible in the distance before, now they’re shrieking from every rooftop and chimney.

Not so bored now, are we? Oh no!

A foyer decorated with paintings of seascapes and a framed marine chart showing the harbour entrance. To the left, one door gives onto a television lounge, another an empty and unattended bar. Ahead, a narrow staircase and to the right of that the dining room.

Toby’s mind photographs these and countless other details as it goes into full operational alert.

Your part in this is to help out at the Gladstone, that’s all.

What the fuck has that stupid cunt gone and done?

A single movement from Gemma’s beautifully pencilled eyebrow has Simon hurrying upstairs.

“Liu-xiang will be down directly,” she tells Toby. “I think she’s amazing.”

From the dining room emerges a woman who appears to be in her middle thirties. She’s wearing a mauve twinset and a charcoal pleated skirt. Her hair is styled in the same fashion as Gemma’s, tightly curled and held in place by a thin net.

“Will you be wanting refreshments?” she asks timidly.

“I don’t believe so. Later, perhaps.”

“Very well, madam.”

“Thank you, Sylvia. You may return to your duties.”

Toby’s already heightened awareness reaches stratospheric levels of vigilance. That was the behaviour of a countess to a scullery maid, not a guest to a hotel proprietress.

But now it’s Gemma who begins showing deference, for the young woman descending the staircase emits an aura that demands it.

Her sleek, shoulder-length raven hair is brushed forward into a long fringe, framing pale, unexceptional features invigorated by intelligent almond-shaped eyes and full, dark red lips. Her emerald cocktail dress has only one sleeve, loose and gathered at the wrist with a thin cord, exposing her left shoulder, her plump, freckled left arm and rather more of her sizeable left breast than would be acceptable in most company. As she enters the foyer she extends one bejewelled, crimson-nailed hand for Gemma to kiss, then uses the other to dismiss the woman from her presence.

Deng Liu-xiang looks her visitor up and down, making him feel as if he’s being auctioned at a slave market.

“Welcome to the Gladstone Hotel, Ben Webster,” she says softly in an accent that carries just a hint of her Far-Eastern origins.

“It’s uh…it’s an honour to meet you.”

“Is Ben Webster your real name? Or is it another alias?”

Toby takes a step backwards. If he’d leapt out of the foyer, across the Town Moor and over the cliffs into the sea it wouldn’t have been far enough.

“You…” he gulps.

The girl Toby last saw climbing into Suki Tatsukichi’s car outside St John’s House flicks back her fringe, allowing him a clear view not only of the rows of tiny gemstones adorning her brows but also the larger jewel she wears in the exact centre of her forehead.

“Clearly they did not tell you that Ruth Pattison has gone over to the kuzkardesh gara,” she smirks. “Or that her conversion was the result of a deliberate move by the humans you work for to silence her. Perhaps you are not held in such high esteem by your superiors as you like to think, agent Cunningham.”

Toby’s dash for the door is anticipated by Simon, who employs his robust frame to shoulder-charge him aside. Toby manages to stay on his feet and aim two beefy punches into his opponent’s midriff, but the guy wrestles him to the floor with the ferocity of the possessed.

“Duralga!” hisses Ruth. “Hazir!”

Simon’s body goes limp. His eyes lose their focus. Toby pushes him away and tries to stand but can’t. It’s a few seconds before he realises that Ruth doesn’t want him to.

“What the hell are you?” he throws at her.

“You will address this avatar as saylanan,” she commands him.

And in response, all Toby Cunningham can do is whisper his assent.

The room is surprisingly small, the bed only just wide enough for two to lie comfortably together. It has a lived-in feel; this must be where Ruth has slept since she first arrived at the hotel five months ago.

Does her reluctance to move indicate that she’d miss these quarters, that despite her transformation into a kuzkardesh gara — a hive queen, no less! — there remains within her a spark of humanity, one which might yet flare into life and save the town from being turned into a miniature southern Bucovina?

Toby doesn’t think so. Once the meme rewrites your subconscious the fat lady has sung, changed out of her costume and gone for a four-course meal in a fancy restaurant.

Except in one instance, and given Yvette de Monnier’s decision to go rogue after she’d been deprogrammed he wondered if she really was the exception that proved the rule.

Not that it matters to him any more. Ruth is holding her transmissions in check for the moment, keeping her acolytes as human as possible until she feels she’s in a position of such strength that the MoD will be forced to acknowledge her as an equal, yet the mental virus she’s infected him with has already made it impossible to leave her. Three times this evening he’s walked out of the front door, and on each occasion he felt as if he was abandoning a starving child in a burning building. It was as bad when he tried to phone HQ; the numbers kept forming and then dissolving in his head, never quite coming into synch with the fingers that wanted to dial them.

It’s his own guilt that the meme is feeding on. Deep down he must regret being the one who let Richard Brookbank walk into de Monnier’s trap, who fucked with her on the way to Hayden Park, who goaded her into a snog on the ferry, then insulted her about it later.

Well, she’s got her own back now. She’s made him her hyzmatkar.

Hyzmatkar.

Rough translation: human servant.

That’s what he’s been reduced to, Richard Brookbank’s personal fucking slave.

He daren’t imagine what indignities she’ll make him suffer through the course of the night.

And the next night, and the next…

Who the hell gave the order for her to be assimilated into the Sunny Hollow hive? Which genius failed to figure out that by being thrust into a body Yvette de Monnier had inhabited, Richard might very well have inherited her gift? What kind of surveillance team were so incompetent they let her return to Northcroft and begin a recruitment campaign?

Watch and wait.

Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right’s doing.

Toby starts looking through the pile of records stacked beside the Dansette opposite the wardrobe. It’s mostly MOR crap, but there’s a half-decent Stevie Wonder album he wouldn’t mind listening to before that bald-headed cow ties his wrists to the bedposts and takes her revenge on him.

No doubt it all just sounds like background noise to a kuzkardesh gara. Bit like lift music — or what’s in the charts nowadays.

The door opens, and to Toby’s surprise in walks Gemma.

“How are you feeling?” she asks him.

“What the fuck do you care?”

“That’s good. You’re not too far gone yet.”

She lifts a polythene bag from her jacket pocket. Toby’s eyes spring from their sockets when he sees the silvery, lozenge-shaped object inside it.

“How the…?” he gasps. “Jesus Christ, you’re…”

“I’m not Yvette de Monnier. She — or rather he — is in Romania trying to sort out the mess your lot created.”

“We’ve got it under control. We’ll nab her as soon as she tries to–“

“You really don’t have the faintest idea who she is, do you?” interrupts Gemma. “Cathryn Simmons is Gabriela Balcescu’s daughter. She was abducted during an Allied raid in the spring of 1942 so she could be used as a hostage to prevent the Bucovina hive joining forces with the Nazis. But we haven’t time to discuss that. Are you familiar with the way the transfer device works?”

“Yeah…it copies and rewrites the conscious memory.”

“It also stores the subconscious. That means it’s our ‘get out of jail free’ card. I used it after Ruth had converted me to wipe the virus and return to the person I was when Yvette and I swapped. It was difficult, make no mistake about that. Took every ounce of willpower I had. Ruth isn’t exerting her full control over us yet, but for a few hours I felt as if I was her most dedicated follower.”

“So why not use it on her?”

“It’s not as straightforward as that. She has to be the last one to touch it before the process begins, or we’ll just be exchanging one hive queen for another. Anyway, I can’t get near the bitch because of that lunk Simon Whitaker — who’s soon to become your bosom pal if we don’t act now.”

“Wait a minute. If you’re suggesting what I–“

“Yes, I am. And a minute may be all we have.” She begins unwrapping the device from its polythene cover. “I’ll be honest with you. Even if we get Richard back, the changes that have already been made to your subconscious will stay. That’s something you’re just going to have to live with. But there’s a real chance that if you spend the night in Ruth’s bed, by tomorrow you’ll be as loyal to her as Simon is. I can’t afford to let that happen.”

Gemma has him in a headlock before he realises she’s moved. Although he struggles free, the ice-cold object she’s attached to the back of his neck seems to be willing him into immobility.

It’s alive!

The fucking thing’s alive!

He feels his body falling towards the bed, but it never gets there. Instead there’s a blinding yellow light and a moment of total and utter disorientation that makes him call into question his very existence.

Just as quickly it’s over.

Toby looks down at the jacket and skirt she’s wearing, at the unmistakeably feminine curves of her bust and hips, at the elegant black shoes on her nylon-clad feet. Her tongue finds the underside of her dental plate, begins to work loose the bottom set from her gum. Despite the strangeness of finding herself in a different body, she has the sensation of having been liberated from something.

Then she sees the burly young man lying face-down on the bed.

The man she used to be.

“Take it…” she hears him say, jabbing a finger towards the metallic object still fixed to the top of his spine. “Now, before she…oh God, you were further on than I thought…”

Toby’s mind snaps into focus. Gemma is no use to her now; the best she can hope for is to retrieve the transfer device and hide it until she can think of a way to get Ruth to use it on herself.

She eases the machine from Gemma’s neck and replaces it in the polythene bag. She stuffs it in her pocket just as Ruth walks through the door, with Simon in close attendance.

“We wondered where you were,” she says to Toby, lifting a bejewelled finger to the older woman’s cheek and holding her gaze with those searching aquamarine eyes. “You know, darling, the situation has reached too crucial a stage for you to be acting on your own initiative. Perhaps it might be prudent to give you a boost.”

Toby is aware only of Ruth’s formidable breasts crushing her own as the saylanan extends her bare arm, places a hand on her shoulder and mouths a few nonsense syllables in a foreign language. She can’t imagine for the life of her what effect Ruth thinks they’ll have.

But when Simon leaves the room Toby follows him because she knows that is what’s expected of her.

And later, as she’s climbing into bed beside him, the transfer device quite forgotten, she doesn’t see anything unusual in that either.

The dream hasn’t changed.

The same overcast sky, the same line of cars outside the cemetery gates, the same tarpaulin draped over the earth heaped next to the grave, the same voices murmuring as she leans forward to place a single daffodil on top of the coffin about to be lowered into the ground.

I reckon she’ll do the right thing.

Aye, she’s thirty-four now. She’s done her gallivantin’.

A few more years an’ Norah’ll let ‘er run the place ‘erself.

The dream hasn’t changed. Everything else has.

Sylvia Russell opens the door to her mother’s room, holding her nose at the stench coming from the old woman’s bed. She doesn’t mind that so much; what she hates is seeing her in this pitiful condition when just a week ago she’d seemed as strong as an ox.

She heaves Norah onto her side so she can whip the urine-soaked sheet from beneath her. The groans and muffled complaints this brings are interspersed with pleas to fetch Dr Pounder.

“I told you, mam, it’s Dr Vasey now,” Sylvia reminds her.

“Don’t want ‘im.”

“Well you’ve got him, so there’s no point going on about it.”

It’s angina, Miss Russell. I’m afraid not enough blood is getting to her heart.

Dr Vasey is quite young, but he clearly knows his stuff. Ruth had done well to recommend him, just as she’d spotted that the medical encyclopaedia Sylvia had consulted when mam started having those headaches, and afterwards the drowsy spells, the times when she couldn’t recall her own name, and worst of all the chronic diarrhoea, was leading her down the wrong track.

She feels foolish now to have even given the idea houseroom, but those symptoms had accurately described the early stages of arsenic poisoning.

Her mother’s immediate needs attended to, Sylvia hurries through her morning routine with breathless efficiency. There is much to be done: Ruth and her guests need feeding, their rooms must be serviced and their uniforms pressed before she can start dusting and vacuuming downstairs. She also has to prepare the accounts so that Ruth can inspect them tomorrow, and type new menus in line with Ruth’s specifications.

She dresses swiftly, pulling on a sleeveless white blouse, a full black skirt and a pair of black low-heeled shoes. She sprays her curls stiff, then leaves the flat and climbs the stairs to the single room on the top floor. She knocks once and waits for the guttural syllable she knows will give her permission to enter.

Ruth is at her dressing table in her panties and stockings, making up her eyes. Sylvia lowers her head, grateful for the etiquette that saves her from having to look at that pale, freckled scalp and the repulsive row of black gemstones that bisect it. If she tries hard, she can still picture the tousled gingery blonde hair that used to hang to Ruth’s shoulders, still hear the educated southern accent that so often reminded Sylvia of the years she spent in London.

“Salam, Sylvia Russell,” Ruth says at length, though she continues to paint her face.

“Salam, saylanan.”

“This morning you will accompany the avatar known as Gemma Egerton to the house at 6 Redheugh Close. It is to be made ready for the visitors we expect to entertain following this evening’s meeting.”

“As you wish, saylanan.”

“Hyzmatkar?”

The man Ruth is addressing lies naked on the bed, the sheets barely hiding his genitals. Sylvia doesn’t remember seeing him before, though his physique is such that she can understand why the saylanan has taken him as her lover.

“Any chance of a bite up here, Sylv?” he asks her.

“Of course, Mr…?”

“Cunningham. You can call me Toby.”

Ruth stands from the chair. Sylvia notices that she’s gone back to wearing black lip gloss and nail varnish. Memories of her unannounced return to the Gladstone just over a week ago, flanked by Gemma Egerton and Carol Vasey’s youngest, threaten to converge into a coherent narrative but never quite do.

Who’ve you been staying with, the Addams family?

That’s where you’re mistaken, Sylvia Russell. The decision is not up to you.

There are some who have reached an age when the illusion of selfhood is too deeply embedded for the meme to overwrite it.

Ruth walks over to the bed. An image forms in Sylvia’s mind of the Soho ‘massage parlour’ she was once taken to, and the leather-clad dominatrix she’d glimpsed in one of the rooms there.

At least she’d had her hair.

“I don’t suppose…” Toby begins.

“Three times during the night, first thing this morning and you’re still not satisfied,” sighs Ruth.

“You promised me a kuzkardesh gara never refuses her hyzmatkar.”

“Of course she doesn’t. She is his woman.”

Before Ruth waves a bejewelled finger to dismiss her, Sylvia is compelled to watch her lick Toby’s penis erect and then take the engorged member fully into her mouth. If Sylvia’s concerns regarding her mother’s health have subdued her appetite, this removes it altogether.

Nor does she feel like eating once she’s finished serving breakfast. The days of bacon, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms and black pudding sizzling in the pan are past. Now it’s cereal and warm milk for the kuzkardesh gara, toast and preserves for their hytzmakar.

Such a transformation in only a week.

Mam would never have stood for it. She’d have got the women of the headland together and had Ruth tin-panned back to Yorkshire.

Sylvia waits until Gemma and Simon have left the dining room before setting the tables for this afternoon’s pre-meeting tea. She’s laying out the cutlery when Gemma returns, carrying a black jacket over her arm.

“This avatar will be leaving for Redheugh Close in approximately forty-five minutes,” she tells her. “See to it that this garment is fit for her to wear.”

“At once, madam.”

Sylvia takes the jacket, frowning as the woman walks back into the foyer. She’s come to regard Gemma almost as a friend, despite her airs and graces. The person who’s just spoken to her was different, not only in her attitude but her general deportment as well. And she’d referred to herself as ‘this avatar’, which was also new.

But it isn’t Sylvia’s place to question the behaviour of those much more vital to the saylanan’s cause than a hotel drudge. She drapes the jacket over the back of a chair and sets off in search of a soft brush, a clean tea towel and a steam iron, reckoning that the table in the outhouse, which she scrubbed laboratory clean yesterday, will make an ideal work surface. First she remembers to check the pockets.

What on earth…?

A polythene bag with a renewable seal. Inside, a silvery egg-shaped object five or six inches long and perhaps three inches across at its widest.

She pulls open the seal and lifts the ovoid out. It’s as light as balsa wood and yet as hard and inflexible as steel.

Cold too. Icy cold.

She drops it back in the bag, rubbing fingers that feel as if she’s used them to build a snowman without bothering to put on any gloves.

When the warmth has seeped back into them, she looks at the object once again. Perhaps it’s just that the light has improved, but the thing seems to be glowing.

Ought she to tell the saylanan? Gemma had been acting strangely, after all.

Yet if she’s hiding this from Ruth, she’s hardly likely to have left in her pocket for an underling like Sylvia Russell to find.

Underling?

It’s your mother’s hotel!

No, she’s got to say something. This is a special day for the saylanan. Imagine if Gemma’s merely pretending to be under her control, and this is a weapon of some kind. For all Sylvia knows it could explode or shoot out vicious poison-tipped spikes or burst open and bathe its victim in acid.

Poison…

She’s made up her mind. She’ll lock the object away so that Gemma can’t find it, then pick her moment to approach Ruth.

In the meantime, she has a jacket to iron.

Elsie Harbron’s curtains are drawn, and at half-past eleven on a bright Sunday morning.

“I hope she’s all right,” Sylvia says to Gemma as they reach the house at the end of Redheugh Close.

“She is old, Sylvia Russell. The future has no need of her.”

It wouldn’t miss Sylvia’s mother either. But that didn’t mean she deserved to die in her own excreta.

Gemma detaches her fingers from Sylvia’s arm. The door to number 6 is ajar; she walks straight in, to be greeted by a pregnant young woman with bobbed red hair who Sylvia recognises as Alice Hodgson.

“We bring specific instructions from the saylanan,” Gemma informs her. “This avatar’s hyzmatkar will arrive shortly with the equipment necessary to carry them out.”

Alice nods, then glances at Sylvia.

“This is the maid?”

“Sylvia Russell is at our disposal until three.”

“Then she can begin by cleaning the house from top to bottom.”

For the next couple of hours Sylvia’s world is one of mop and bucket, of feather duster and chamois leather, of disinfectant and furniture polish, of Hoover extensions and refuse sacks. She is allowed two short breaks from her labours, one to sip from a bowl of Chinese tea, the other to nibble at a plate of tinned peach slices dipped in plain yoghurt. Neither Gemma nor Alice show the slightest interest in her progress, preferring to watch Simon’s muscular frame being put through its paces as he attends to the various odd jobs they’ve given him.

We’ll see which one of us lands him first.

Sylvia had won that contest hands down. But the night Ruth came back…

At two o’clock Alice asks her to pour a glass of tonic wine for Mrs Harbron next door.

“You’ll find the bottles in the larder. Choose the elderberry, she likes that. It’s non-alcoholic, of course. And you needn’t knock. She expects a visit around this time.”

Elsie is asleep in the armchair when Sylvia enters the darkened living room. She places the glass on the mantelpiece, then pulls back the curtains and walks over to shake the old lady by the shoulder.

“Mrs Harbron…Mrs Harbron…I’ve brought your drink.”

Elsie’s eyes spring open. They immediately settle on Sylvia’s apron.

“So she’s got you skivvyin’ for ‘er, as she? How’d she talk yer into that?” When Sylvia doesn’t answer, Elsie sighs and shakes her head. “I see she’s sent yer with me daily dose o’ poison.”

“Poison?”

“That wine she wants us to drink. Elderberry, just like in the film. Come out durin’ the war it did. I took our Jim to see it. We ‘ad to get the tram into Stranton an’ watch it at the Lex ‘cause the Gaumont ‘ad burnt down a year or two before. Can’t think o’ what it was called or who was in it. Might’ve been Cary Grant. Aye, it was.”

Sylvia picks up the glass and holds it to her nose. There’s a suggestion of bitterness in the aroma coming from it, but no more than that.

“Are you saying there’s something wrong with this?”

“I know that the first few times I took it I used to wake up the next mornin’ with these splittin’ ‘eadaches, an’ I couldn’t get off the lavvy.”

“And now?”

“I just get rid of it when she’s not lookin’.”

“D’you think she’s–“

“Tryin’ to do away with us? Don’t be daft. I’m keepin’ me eye on ‘er though. An’ you better ‘ad too if she’s got yer waitin’ on ‘er ‘and an’ foot.”

Sylvia returns to number 6 in a state of increasing agitation. She knows that it’s wrong to doubt her suitability for the role the saylanan has chosen for her, yet Elsie’s last remark has left her feeling deeply ashamed of the menial position she now occupies.

A few more years an’ Norah’ll let ‘er run the place ‘erself.

She’d sacrificed everything to help mam keep the hotel going after dad had died. And Ruth Pattison has taken it from them.

How could she have let that happen?

That’s where you’re mistaken, Sylvia Russell. The decision is not up to you.

It isn’t right.

The Gladstone is mam’s property.

And if mam dies, what then?

Will the shell of a woman Sylvia has become prove strong enough to hold on to her inheritance? Is it not far more likely that she’ll just meekly sign it away?

In the kitchen, Gemma and Alice point her towards the loaves and buns, the cartons of eggs, the blocks of Cheddar and Double Gloucester, the carrots, the cress, the sticks of celery, the jars of mayonnaise and coleslaw, the tubs of margarine, the pickles, the crackers, the cakes, the gateaux and all the other provisions Simon has raided from the Gladstone’s stores. Sylvia goes to work on them at once, her features betraying not a hint of resentment at this casual appropriation of someone else’s goods. Her mind is elsewhere; it’s focused on the cupboard where she locked the object she discovered in Gemma’s jacket, and the bottle she saw on the bottom shelf.

She’ll have a look at that when she gets the chance.

Her thoughts are too jumbled for her to know why, but she has a nasty suspicion that it contains elderberry wine.

The entrance to Northcroft’s Borough Hall is as unspectacular as the rock garden it faces. A glass door is set beside a window less than a dozen feet wide through which can be seen tripods holding advertisements for the diminishing range of services the council can afford to run, and a felted backdrop filled with watercolours of the headland painted by local schoolchildren.

Sylvia Russell, whose task it is to hand out a programme of events to each of the congregation as they arrive, only has eyes for the black lacquer covering her nails and the glistening black gemstones mounted on the silver rings she wears on each of her fingers and thumbs. Even more than the smart black jacket and matching dress the saylanan presented to her by way of thanks for all the hard work she put in this afternoon, these accessories have convinced her that she has a real part to play in the movement, that the Church of the Eternal Mind has welcomed her into the fold if not yet as a full acolyte then certainly as a follower who possesses the potential to be one.

Her lips are black too, and didn’t that have Penny Cattrick’s brow lifting when she turned up with her niece! Paula Cockburn — Paula Harbron as was — looked as if she could have been knocked to the ground with a wad of cotton wool!

Sylvia’s doubts have evaporated. The saylanan’s message is about to be broadcast to the general public for the first time, heralding the dawn of a brand new era. Epiphany is coming, and its advent will begin here in Northcroft.

And yet it was elderberry wine…

Now the converted make their appearance, most of whom attended the tea held for them in the Gladstone a few hours earlier. Dr Vasey, his wife Carol and their eldest daughter Elaine. Eleanor and Christina Kyte. Josephine Bishop. Gemma Egerton and Simon Whitaker. Alice Hodgson and Paul Smailes. The four fully transformed kuzkardesh gara from the Sunny Hollow nest, bewigged so as not to alarm the local populace.

Finally the black limousine driven by Toby Cunningham, the saylanan by his side.

Sylvia bows her head as Toby helps Ruth from the car. So do the kuzkardesh gara, who have formed a guard of honour for their queen. But the atmosphere of reverence is disturbed by the knot of youths who have gathered on the other side of the road.

“Oi, witchy lips!” one of them shouts. “We don’t want people like you on the ‘eadland.”

“Aye, fuck off back to China,” another calls out.

Toby begins striding towards them, but Ruth pulls him up with a single hissed syllable.

“Why don’t you come in and hear what we have to say?” she asks the boys.

“No fuckin’ way.”

“Do we look like doyles?”

“You don’t understand. You’re not being given the choice.”

To Sylvia’s astonishment they all troop obediently forward, pausing only to collect a programme on their way through the door. She glances up at Toby, and sees something more disconcerting than awe and wonder in those wide grey eyes.

Fear.

Pure unadulterated fear.

Is this what the brave new world is to be founded upon?

She forces the heresy from her mind. Ruth is her mistress, her role model, her icon.

Her saylanan.

Even if it was elderberry wine.

Sylvia is the last to enter the building. She makes her way along the short corridor that leads to the hall itself, where about two hundred people are seated below the stage. Simon has already embarked on a warm-up turn, his enthusiastic demeanour and witty but gentle sense of humour drawing ripples of laughter from the audience. Before Sylvia has found an empty chair close enough to the aisle that she won’t have to make half the row stand to let her reach it, Simon has introduced Toby.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he smiles. “Are we going to be finished in time for last orders at the Priory? The answer is yes. But I’m confident that the majority of you, once you’ve listened to our speaker this evening, will go away from here so filled with inner peace it won’t occur to you to drown it in alcohol. Some claim, I know! In an hour you’ll appreciate why I’m justified in making it. Please welcome the saylanan of the Church of the Eternal Mind, Deng Liu-xiang.”

Sylvia gasps as loudly as anyone around her when Ruth’s first act on arriving at the lectern in the centre of the stage is to unfasten the hooks of her jacket and reveal the translucent bodice beneath.

“’A bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me’,” she quotes from the sheet in front of her. “’He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.’

“Those words come from The Song of Solomon. They are the last reference to religion you will hear in this meeting.

“It was once believed that nature, in all its varied forms, must have been created by a designer working to a plan. We now know that natural selection is responsible. That is correct, the Church of the Eternal Mind believes in the theory of evolution.”

The saylanan’s mesmeric voice and restless eyes, which neglect no section of the hall, soon have the audience entranced. She goes on to outline the idea of genes as self-replicating units of DNA, explaining how they determine our physical characteristics, our susceptibility to certain diseases and even the length of our lives. She then moves on to memes, which she argues are analogous to genes but consist solely of information. After presenting many examples, she makes her central point: that just as the human body is a vehicle for the transmission of genes from one generation to the next, so the ‘self’ is a construct to aid the survival of memes.

“We do not expect you to take this on trust,” she concedes. “But there are some mental exercises you can perform that may help you to see the self for what it is: nothing more than an illusion.

“One is to concentrate on the present moment. You can try it now. Look up at the ceiling, or down at the floor, or at one of the walls. If you’re thinking about something that happened in the past, let it go. If you’re thinking about the future, let that go too. Come back to the present. Notice what is there. Don’t label it with words, just see it.

“Better still, look out of a window. Watch a tree rustle in the breeze. With practice you’ll find that past, present and future merge into one. What you thought were separate events are in fact only a series of changes. The idea of a ‘self’ who is doing the watching will seem to fade away.

“Another method is to pay attention to everything at once. Have a go.” She waits for thirty or forty seconds. “Thoughts came from nowhere, did they not? How many of you remembered something you wish you’d said but didn’t? Or said and wish you hadn’t? How many of you heard a tune run through your head? How many of you thought about money? How many of you thought about sex? Those were memes, competing for ascendancy inside your brain. They were controlling the attention, not you.”

Ruth continues speaking, but Sylvia can’t hear her. Elsie Harbron’s words have returned to her, as they did when she opened the bottle of elderberry wine in the cupboard and smelled the same bitterness she’d sensed wafting from the ‘tonic’ Alice Hodgson had instructed her to give the old lady.

Elderberry, just like in the film. Come out durin’ the war it did… Can’t think o’ what it was called or who was in it. Might’ve been Cary Grant.

Cary Grant.

Famous for starring in some of Sylvia’s favourite movies when she was a teenager, including the Hitchcock classics To Catch A Thief and North By Northwest.

Before that, Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace.

Ruth’s ‘mental exercises’ have enabled Sylvia to see the situation as it really is. The facts that have been staring her in the face can all be connected, and they point to one inescapable conclusion.

The saylanan has poisoned her mother.

“Suppose you are in the bath and the water is beginning to get cold,” Ruth is saying. “Do you get out now, or snuggle under for a bit longer? This is a trivial decision, but knowing there is no real self to choose and no free will, you can only reflect that your body either will or will not get up, and indeed it does. The decision makes itself. Although the brain may turn over the possibilities and come down on one side rather than the other, it can do so without the false idea that someone inside is directing it.”

The saylanan has poisoned her mother.

“All our hopes and desires are based on an inner self who must be kept happy. But if there is no self, what can be gained by wishing for things on behalf of someone who does not exist? They do not matter. There is no one for them to matter to.”

The saylanan has poisoned her mother.

She knew.

When she placed the polythene bag in her pocket, intending to use the metal egg inside to hold against Ruth’s cheek until she screamed out a confession, she knew.

The rings, the nail varnish and the lip gloss had seduced her into forgetfulness.

They couldn’t now.

The saylanan has poisoned her mother.

Sylvia starts coughing and spluttering, excuses herself and runs to the back of the hall. She takes a few moments pretending to recover, then inches towards the right-hand corner. From here she has a clear run to the steps going up to the stage. Simon is standing at their foot, but if she’s quick she’ll be past him before he knows what’s happening.

Keep moving.

Five rows of seats to go.

They haven’t seen her.

Four.

Take that thing out of the bag.

Three.

She’s still okay.

Two.

Oh God it’s cold.

One…

She hurls her body forward, leaps up the steps and brandishes the metal egg in full view of Ruth as she turns to confront her attacker. The saylanan’s eyes blaze with fury, but Sylvia’s momentum has endowed her with a force even the queen of a kuzkardesh gara hive cannot counteract. Lectern and saylanan go crashing to the boards.

Her fingers almost numb, Sylvia kneels to press the egg into Ruth’s face. She doesn’t care what the consequences might be, all she wants is for her mother’s poisoner to suffer.

“Wait!” cries Toby.

Sylvia is distracted for less than a second, but it’s long enough for Ruth’s hyzmatkar to snatch the egg from her. She bursts into tears, for now she really has lost everything.

She doesn’t see him place the object in Ruth’s palm as she attempts to rise.

She doesn’t see him twist the saylanan’s arm behind her head.

She doesn’t see him slam her hand into the back of her neck.

But she hears the sorrowful wail that follows, because it’s echoed by every convert in the hall.

Darkness.

As thick and as black as molasses.

I lift my hand and hold it so close to my face that my finger is touching my nose.

Nothing.

Maybe I’m blind.

There was that dazzling yellow light. I thought I was dying.

Who am I?

Where am I?

How did I get here?

Blind.

And alone.

More alone than I’ve ever been.

An intense sense of loss engulfs me. It’s very nearly intolerable.

Why do I feel like this?

Why can’t I remember?

Why can’t I remember?

Why can’t I remember…

Shadows.

Monochrome refracting into a suggestion of colour.

A face. Behind it, another.

The first is female. Not young. Not quite.

The second is male, and strangely familiar.

Cunningham?

When he steps forward. When he grabs hold of my waist and pulls me against him, so that my hands are resting flat on his chest. When his face comes so close I can see the stubble beginning to form on his chin. When I close my eyes and understand that in a moment or two I’ll know how it feels to be a woman being kissed a man. When that warm, moist softness brushes my lips and I part them in instinctive surrender. When his tongue has explored the inside of my mouth for so long that I can hardly breathe and I’m hanging on to his shoulders for dear life...

But that wasn’t me. It can’t have been.

Who am I?

Why can’t I remember?

I try to speak. The woman hushes me. She holds something in front of my eyes. A sudden brightness blinds me once again.

“It’s possible that she may show symptoms of post-traumatic amnesia.”

“How severe and how permanent?”

“Hard to predict at this stage.”

She?

They must be talking about someone else.

A name forms in my head.

Richard.

Is that me?

Why can’t I remember?

Now a sharp pain in my left forearm.

Faces, colours and voices fade.

Why can’t I remember?

I’m lying in a hospital bed looking up at the ceiling. It’s day, though the blinds are drawn across the window to my left.

Snapper Brookbank! It is you! Don’t you remember me?

Yes I do!

You were the blonde lass on the…

On the…

It’s no good. It just won’t come.

But you called me ‘Snapper’. That’s a start.

I lever myself to a sitting position. The room is small and sparsely furnished, but there’s a recess equipped with a lavatory and a washbasin. On the right-hand wall hangs a framed image featuring an anchor, a pair of wings, two crossed swords and a crown. Below it is printed a single word: HASLAR.

Haslar!

The naval hospital in Gosport!

It’s just that I’ve been told to deliver this dead expensive piece of machinery to HMS Almandine. I can’t hang around ‘cause apparently the order came from as near to the top as you can get, and if I’m late I know for a fact my bollocks are going to end up nailed to that flagpole.

I was talking to that bloke! The one who was standing behind the doctor last time I regained consciousness!

Only before he was dressed in a sentry’s uniform…

And I’m a civilian. If I’d fallen ill or something why would he bring me here?

This needn’t end in tears, Richard, but you must do exactly as I say.

Richard.

Richard Brookbank.

Of course. How could I have forgotten?

It’s all flooding back now!

I feel the hair at the back of my neck being parted. A feminine fragrance fills my nostrils. At the first touch of cold metal against my flesh it’s all I can do to keep the contents of my bowels in their current location.

Survival becomes my only wish. What would I not give, how many hours of unpaid charity work would I not perform, what humiliation would I not willingly endure in return for the sweet sound of her telling me I’m free to go?

The pressure at the top of my spine increases, and the watery scene in front of me swims sickeningly in and out of focus. Then everything coalesces into a brilliant yellow light. I don’t feel any pain, just an overwhelming sense of dissociation.

So this is dying. No choirs of angels. No glittering ladder climbing to heaven. No loved ones dressed all in white beckoning me to enter the afterlife. Silly to think there would be, really.

Just my consciousness shutting down to spare me the trauma of an agonising last few moments of existence.

When my vision clears…

I raise my hands from the blanket. My fingers are pale, delicate and covered in tiny freckles. My palms are softer, my wrists slimmer than they were before the weird experience the blonde put me through.

But that’s nothing.

Because I don’t need to undo the buttons of my pyjama top to see that I’ve got breasts.

And my hand doesn’t have to explore my groin to confirm the fact that it won’t find a penis or a pair of testicles there.

I’m a girl.

Somehow I’ve been turned into a girl.

Stranger things have happened, I suppose.

Can’t think of one right now.

My bladder politely suggests that I leave questions such as ‘what the fuck is going on?’ until its requirements have been met.

Climbing out of bed brings on a brief spell of intense dizziness. More worrying are the bandages I can feel when I touch my forehead.

Have I suffered a cranial injury? Could that be how I lost my memory?

You know it isn’t, Rich.

Rich…

I can’t very well be him now, not with these massive mounds of flesh bouncing and swaying every time I put one foot in front of the other.

I might have to wear a bra.

Might have to?

I lift the toilet lid and pull down my pyjama bottoms. Sitting to urinate feels natural, which it shouldn’t, but relief outweighs the addition of yet another piece to the puzzle.

As I flush I remember that I’ll have periods. Being female is going to prove quite a challenge.

Let’s have a look at the face I’ll be meeting it with.

Trying hard not to admire the womanly profile between my wide hips and strong, well rounded thighs, I step over to the washbasin and peer into the mirror above the sink.

Oh fuck…

And as Ruth Pattison’s reflection brings more of my memory trickling back, I begin to get the feeling that having nothing hanging from my crotch could turn out to be the least of my problems.

Dr Beverley Sanderson is brisk, blonde and has a bedside manner Attila the Hun might have envied but one I suspect few members of her profession would wish to emulate.

“Three times a day if you can manage it. Twice at the very minimum,” she insists, handing me the tub of thick green paste she’s just rubbed into my scalp.

“Feels all wet and sticky,” I complain.

“You can always keep the golf-ball look. It’s bound to come into fashion eventually.”

She fits my wig, which is ginger to match the colour my hair will be when it’s grown back. It’s long enough to brush my shoulders, and has a fringe that can be combed forward to hide the reddish-purple scab in the centre of my forehead. The rows of tiny black gemstones adorning my eyebrows are staying; Beverley thinks I need them to remind me of the hideous creature I became, and make me grateful for this second chance at learning how to be a girl.

Because I have to go through the adjustment process all over again. The transfer device may have given me back my humanity, but it did so by returning my subconscious to the condition it was in when Yvette de Monnier first swapped bodies with me. That means my mind has yet to attune itself to this body’s habits, tastes and preferences. The months I spent as Ruth might never have existed.

My only consolation — and it doesn’t seem like one, believe me! — is that provided I don’t fight it, the worst should be over within a couple of weeks. True, from a neutral observer’s point of view I have no incentive to rebel. No one is holding out false hopes for me to cling to. I’m going to be a woman for the rest of my life, so I may as well get used to it.

First I have to find out how serious the consequences of my actions in Northcroft are likely to be. Although de Monnier’s people appear to have done some sort of deal with the MoD that’ll at least keep them from bundling me into the back of a van with a view to leaving my corpse in a ditch by the side of a country lane, neither organisation is above the law — and attempted murder isn’t a charge that can easily be swept under the carpet.

I still can’t remember being converted. I have a few sketchy recollections of my time at Sunny Hollow, but they don’t amount to very much. As I explained to Beverley when she began my psychological evaluation the day before yesterday, it’s as if a whole section of my mind has been ripped out and shredded.

She didn’t have to fill in much of the gap to have me praying it’ll remain that way.

A kuzkardesh gara queen?

Me?

De Monnier, Egerton and Cunningham playing musical chairs with one another’s bodies?

Where did the real world go?

My wig secure, I pull on the blouse, slacks, popsocks and shoes Beverley’s young assistant Fiona brought for me in a box that also contained the make-up I managed to apply without smearing lipstick all over my chin and getting mascara in my eyes. As I fasten the buttons, I watch the cream-coloured cotton stretch and strain across the swell of my breasts. I’ve seen this so often before that it shouldn’t cause me to bat an eyelid, yet it does.

They’re part of you, Rich. They always will be. Like it or lump it, this is for keeps.

“What d’you reckon?” I ask Beverley once I’ve practised walking around in my shoes and discovered that one thing I won’t have to worry about is wearing heels. “Not bad for a first try. Well, it feels like a first try.”

She fusses with my collar, my cuffs, the button above the zip at the side of my slacks, even my turn-ups.

“You’ll do. She isn’t looking to hire a new secretary.”

“Your boss is a she?”

“She isn’t my boss. She’s been assigned to supervise your case, which technically makes her my superior.”

I twist in front of the mirror in an attempt to see my profile from as many angles as possible. Yes it’s a very feminine thing to do, but if I’m wearing popsocks…

“I hope she’s a bit less of a cold fish than the one I had last time.”

On the other hand, if she manages to rescue me from an extended holiday at Her Majesty’s Pleasure she can have the personality of a Bird’s Eye frozen cod steak for all it matters to me.

The door opens to admit Fiona.

“I thought you should see this, Dr Sanderson. It came back from the lab last night, but you’d gone.”

She passes a document to Beverley, whose brows lift as she begins reading.

“Oh my,” she grins. “Have you told them?”

“I’ll leave that to you.”

As Fiona departs, I’m almost certain that she winks at me.

“I’d recommend that you sit down,” says Beverley. “I’m serious. I have some news for you.”

“Can’t be any more of a shock than finding out I was a hive queen.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure. What are you doing on February 26th next year?”

“Next year? How should I know?”

“Well, you’d be wise not to plan anything you couldn’t put off for a while.” She hands me the document. “Congratulations, Ruth.”

And as I look in horror at the words her finger points to, another phrase crashes through my head.

Charlotte Annabel, D.O.B. 28/7/74, Bromley, Kent, UK

It never rains but it fucking pours.

There are two small bulbs on the panel to the right of the door. The red one is lit, and has been since Beverley left me standing here nearly ten minutes ago.

She’s doing it to prove how important she is. I bet she’s sitting at her desk with a copy of Cosmopolitan munching a Danish pastry.

Keep it together, Rich. You’re about to start fighting for your liberty.

And I’ll be delivering every punch reeling from the devastating double blow of discovering that not only am I expecting a child but that I already have a four year old daughter.

As if being female wasn’t enough to deal with.

But I’m not giving up just yet. Fate owes me, and one day I intend to collect.

A buzzer sounds.

Green.

Here we go…

I knock once and enter. The office is tiny, the window at the back giving an invigorating if somewhat constricted view of the sun-sparkled sea and cloudless azure sky.

Not that I’d have spent more than a fraction of a second looking at it if I’d seen a fleet of Spanish galleons anchored offshore.

You work for us now. You always will.

The woman who stands to greet me is none other than Mitsuoko Tatsukichi.

“I hear you’ve been taking good care of my body,” she grins.

“You can have it back for the next nine months if you want.”

“I don’t think Sir Kingston would approve. He’s keeping that device under lock and key. He’d have buried it at the bottom of the Mariana Trench years ago if the powers that be had let him.”

“Would have saved us all a lot of trouble.”

“Some good’s come out of this. We understand a lot more about the infection vector than we did.”

“That makes me feel a load better.” I take a deep breath. “Get to the point, Suki. Am I going to prison or not?”

“Sit down.” Not the most heartening answer she could have made when I recall the last time I was given that instruction. But I do so, crossing one sturdy thigh over the other. “I’ll be honest with you, Durham Constabulary have been after your blood. If Jeremy Egerton hadn’t got you out of there I doubt whether even someone as influential as Sir Kingston Ferens would have been able to keep you from standing trial. But Mrs Russell is on the mend, and that helped us persuade her daughter not to press charges. Just don’t expect a birthday card from either of them this year.”

I don’t know if I want to laugh or cry. Removing the threat of a jail sentence has left the way clear for the full force of my guilt to wash over me.

“I think I need a cigarette after that,” I mumble.

“I imagine you do. But you’re not having one. Not in your condition.”

Something else to brighten my day.

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right. Okay, so what’s the plan? I mean I can’t go back to Northcroft, obviously.”

“We thought you might help us explore the nature of your gift.”

“I’m not sure I’m altogether with you. What gift?”

“You have the ability to transmit your subconscious thoughts. That’s putting it crudely, of course. The phenomenon is a complex one, and no theoretical basis for it has so far been established. But if what we’re beginning to believe is true, it holds the key to our struggle against the kuzkardesh gara.”

“You’re still making no sense.”

“Why do you think you became their queen? It was because you could broadcast the meme. The questions to which we need answers are,” and here she starts counting them on her fingers, “how many others are there like you? How do we identify them? How widely does the potency of this gift vary? Is it hereditary? Does it grow stronger or weaker with age?”

She says I’m gifted. Not as much as her, of course! No one is.

Gifted?

Yeah, but it’s not like being good at Maths. It’s more about working out what people are thinking deep down. That’s how I can tell mum isn’t frightened of boats any more. She was worried about something else, probably what she’s going to tell auntie Shannon and auntie Clare when she goes to see them. She’s gifted too, she just hasn’t learned to use it properly. Not sure about you, though. Strange one, you are.

Then there was that word…

“If it’s any use, I remember Niamh Latimer telling me something about a gift. What’s the score with her and Cathryn, by the way?”

“I’m sorry, but that’s classified.”

“It would be.”

“I don’t make the rules, so stop acting towards me as though I did. Just think about how lucky you’ve been to come through this in one piece and try to show a little more willing.”

Did I hear her correctly?

Did she just call me ‘lucky’?

I don’t care if she has saved me from having to wear a maternity dress with arrows on the front, it’s time I stopped letting myself be dragged from pillar to post and spoke my mind.

“Sorry, that’s not on. I was thrust into this body against my will while you lot stood and watched. Why? Because I just happened to have once been Helen Sutton’s favourite pupil. Then I get pulled off the street by that arsehole Cunningham, after which you tell me that basically the MoD are going to control everything I do for the rest of my life. And what’s my reward for playing along? Framed for blackmail and lured to a kuzkardesh gara hive, where because of some ‘gift’ I didn’t even know I had they make me their queen. I get one break, and even that came with a sting in the tail ‘cause now I’ve got to go through the whole adjustment thing again. You can add to that a crime I can’t remember committing, a kid I can’t remember having and another one on the way whose father I can’t remember sleeping with. So no, I don’t think I’ve been ‘lucky’. I think I’ve been anything but.”

I brace myself for the inevitable counterattack, but it never comes.

“Let’s go for a drive,” she says. “I want to show you something.”

A few miles west of Gosport town centre, the sprawling council estates finally give way to a narrow belt of green open space — though the airfield and the military buildings that have encroached on it negate the impression that this could ever be regarded as a slice of genuine countryside. In any case it ends too soon, the road now become a verdant suburban avenue lined with mock-Tudor detached houses screened by box hedges, trellised fences and a profusion of arboreality still tinted with the lushness of spring.

“We’re offering you a position on our new psychic research team,” says Suki as she urges her Austin Allegro past a pedestrian crossing and a roundabout that takes us into a less exclusive neighbourhood of post-war semis. “It’s based in Portsmouth Polytechnic, which I know you graduated from, and carries a starting salary of  £3800. If that doesn’t sound much, bear in mind that there’s a flat and a company car thrown in.”

“I won’t be a guinea pig, then?”

“It would be beneath me to dignify that with an answer.”

She pulls in opposite the entrance to Stubbington Nursery School, and it doesn’t tax many of my brain cells to work out why she’s brought me here.

“This is about Charlotte, isn’t it?”

“She lives with Tim’s parents. I can’t say it’s an ideal situation. That’s no reflection on them, you understand. They couldn’t do any more for her.”

“It hasn’t really sunk in yet,” I confess. “That I’m pregnant, I mean.”

“It won’t, not for a day or two.”

“I don’t know the first thing about child care.”

“I’d just turned eighteen when I found out I was expecting. What d’you think I knew?”

“You knew how to be female.”

“So do you. Put your hand on your heart and tell me you’re having as much trouble as last time.” She smooths the front of her skirt. “I’ll let you into a secret. The reason I kept quiet about Charlotte was because I rejected her. I didn’t try to expose her on Biggin Hill or send her floating down the Thames in a basket of reeds but I may as well have done for all the affection I showed her. It wasn’t far short of outright neglect. I only agreed to fight for custody of her when mum and dad said they’d give her a home. You can never repair that sort of damage, you know. I’m not talking about the kids, they’re much more resilient than we ever give them credit for. But as a mother you lose that vital connection…”

“What makes you think I can do any better? I’ve got the same subconscious you had before de Monnier barged into our lives with all guns blazing.”

“Ah, but older is wiser. You became the Ruth who regretted what she’d done, not the Ruth who went to ridiculous lengths to hide her bulge, the Ruth who revised for her A levels knowing that even if she passed them she wouldn’t be going to university, the Ruth who was bludgeoned down the aisle to exchange vows with a guy she couldn’t stand. Besides, I read a transcript of Trish Hodgson’s debriefing. I’d let you see a copy, but–“

“It’s classified,” we say together.

And look at one another and laugh.

We’ve never done that before, not even at Hart Street.

I lay my hand on the sleeve of her jacket.

“The decision you’re asking me to make…”

“I haven’t.”

“But you will.”

“I want you to try being pals with her first. Much as I’ve come to love Charlotte, she’s a contrary little so-and-so. You might not hit it off right away. But I hope you do. It’d be nice if we both had a shoulder to cry on when she introduces us to her first boyfriend or later, when she announces that we’re going to be grandmothers.”

There’s a limit to how much the human mind can process in the course of a single morning. The feeling that I may be starting to forge a deep, lasting friendship with this woman stretches it to the uttermost.

I’m a girl.

Okay…

I’m going to have a baby.

Terrifying, but still…

I’m mates with Suki Tatsukichi.

Yeah, and tinned mixed vegetables are delicious.

We leave the car and cross the road just as the children begin filing out of the building. I already know which of the little girls will skip over to the railings and say hello to auntie Sooks and her new friend Ruth.

It isn’t her hair, honey blonde with an intriguing dash of ginger.

It isn’t her ingenuous aquamarine eyes.

It’s something I inherited not as I thought from Yvette de Monnier but from Charlotte’s birth mother.

It’s her gift.

Rectory Lane, Cosham
June 16, 1979

“That one over there. See the red Ford Escort? Belongs to Rosie.”

The burly young man who has driven me here on what I have to agree is probably a fool’s errand makes sure the handbrake is on, then follows the finger I point across Woodford Road towards the steeply sloping drive shared by Kerrie Latimer and her neighbour.

“Can’t see a VW anywhere,” murmurs Jeremy Egerton through Toby Cunningham’s lips.

“No, but let’s not jump to conclusions.”

“Why don’t you just go up and ring the bell?”

“I think we should at least give her time to put her choppers in.”

“She’s got false teeth?”

“Didn’t you notice when you broke into her room?”

“Evidently not. Funny the things that escape your attention when you’re being shoved through a second-floor window.”

Evidently not.

It’s hard to imagine the real Cunningham saying something like that. I wonder how she’s coping as a woman? Probably no worse than I am.

Why the hell did I let Beverley talk me into putting on a skirt? It’s not that it makes me feel uncomfortable — when you’re wearing stockings you don’t know it’s there — but the sight of my knees, calves, shins, ankles and insteps through the sheer nylon acts as a persistent reminder that I’ve joined the distaff side for good.

I glance at my watch, the slimness of the strap adding fuel to that flame.

Twenty past eight. It’s a school day, so we ought to see some movement soon.

“One thing’s always puzzled me about that escapade, Jeremy: why did Yvette pick a fight with her?”

“It was a test. When Yvette found out about the will she gathered together as much information on the beneficiaries as she could. That’s how she learned Kerrie had survived the Loch Garman sinking but was still afraid of boats.”

There’s no queue at the ticket office, but I never seem to reach it. Maybe it’s the memories that flood through me when I watch the ferry pitch in the water as it turns to come alongside the landing stage.

Jeremy’s eyes have narrowed, bringing me back to the present.

I pretend to yawn.

“Sorry, go on.”

“If you could try to stay awake. This was your idea, remember? Anyway, Yvette followed her down to the Gosport ferry one day and saw her go to pieces at the top of the gangway. She figured that if Kerrie had the gift she’d be able to cure herself, so she whispered a trigger phrase in her ear and hey presto!”

Bejewelled, black-nailed hands grasp me by the waist. The softest of ebony lips caress my cheek, move sensuously to my left ear. Whispered words in a strange tongue invade my consciousness, soothing and strengthening me.

That was Yvette?

“And that morning in the dining room, Kerrie seemed to recognise her. So the insults and everything were an attempt to provoke her into giving away how much of this gift she possessed. They also gave me the chance to study you.”

“I hope you liked what you…hey, looks like we’ve got action!”

The door at the side of Rosie’s house is pushed open.

By Sinead Latimer.

“Maybe Kerrie’s staying with her sisters and Rosie’s made the two of them breakfast,” I venture.

“Or maybe she’s somewhere else.”

We wait until Rosie has followed Sinead into the Escort and guided it a safe distance along Woodford Road before stepping onto the pavement.

“I haven’t told you this, but about a month ago Gerald Cooper rang me at the Gladstone,” I confess. “It was actually the day I got enticed down to Sunny Hollow. I put on a local accent and said Ruth had left her job.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“He wanted to talk about Kerrie. I didn’t.”

A soft breeze ruffles my hem as we cross the road and make our way towards number 113. The sun has been up long enough to give the air a summery flavour and have me wishing I’d plumped for the sleeveless blouse Beverley picked out for me rather than the T-shirt I insisted upon.

Jeremy reaches the top of the drive before I do — but he isn’t broad-shouldered enough to block my view of the overgrown lawn.

“What d’you think?” he asks me. “About a month’s worth?”

I walk over to the kitchen window. The table and work surfaces inside are strewn with magazines, empty bottles of pop, unwashed plates and half-eaten packets of crisps. There’s also a full ashtray.

“Sinead’s been having friends round on the sly. Kerrie would never have let it get in this state.”

“I honestly don’t know what we can do,” says Jeremy. “If she’s gone out there then–“

“Then she’s in danger.”

“Don’t punish yourself for this, Ruth. However responsible you feel for what’s happened to this family, whatever errors of judgement you believe you made, you’ve paid for them many times over.”

He steps closer. I look up into his grey eyes and sense the concern radiating from them.

“Coming here was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t say that. It’s one of the things you needed to cleanse from your system. And if it helps you draw a line under the past…” He touches my elbow. “Come on, let’s make tracks so we can get you moved in.”

We start back down the drive. High above Langstone Harbour, a wisp of cloud passes across the sun.

The lift doors open. I step into the corridor, still not quite able to believe that fate has led me back to the one place I thought I’d never see again.

Flat 806, Belvedere House, Clarendon Road, Southsea.

Wiping a suddenly clammy hand on the side of my skirt, I walk towards the future. Jeremy stands unintrusively beside the cases he’s carried up from the car. He knows how much this means to me.

I take the key from my bag and turn it in the lock. My freckled fingers freeze, just as they did all those months ago when I feared that death might be waiting for me in the room I was about to enter.

This time it’s life that’s scaring the pants off me.

The life that will begin as soon as I exert that tiny bit more pressure on the piece of metal I’m holding.

There. It’s done.

Whoever Ruth Maria Pattison turns out to be, this is the moment the process truly got underway.

Jeremy comes in a respectful distance behind me and lowers the first of the cases onto the woodland green carpet.

“Nice,” he remarks, nodding at the colour television set, the hi-fi stereo system and the desk with the snazzy new word processor.

“Better than I remember.”

The zebra-striped sofa, the velour armchair and the low coffee table in front of the gas fire are still there. The camp bed, thank the Lord, isn’t.

I cast an eye over the plain white walls and polished hardwood shelves, all as bare as the day I first saw them.

“You’re decorating, aren’t you?” grins Jeremy. “Typical woman.”

“Cheeky sod.”

“Don’t forget, I know whereof I speak.”

“Oh yes! And you’ve got that whole — what was it again? — twelve days’ worth of memories to call on.”

“I packed a lot into them. Simon Whitaker wasn’t the first guy I opened my legs for.”

My hand goes to my mouth.

“You do know the concierge is standing in the doorway,” I say through my fingers.

He isn’t, of course — but it’s worth the insult Jeremy launches at me when he finds out I’m teasing him just to have seen the stricken look on his face.

I head through the alcove into the kitchen, already composing a mental list of the items I’ll need to pick up when I visit the shops later this morning. Once I’ve checked the bathroom and run up another one I return to find Jeremy leafing through the instruction manual that came with the word processor.

“What exactly is this?” he asks me. “As far as I can tell it’s just a typewriter with a screen below the ribbon.”

“It is and it isn’t. When Beverley was teaching me how to use hers she said it was like a computer, but with only one program on it. The best thing is if you type the wrong letter you just press a key and it gets rid of it.” I hold up the box of floppy disks resting on the corner of the desk. “When you’ve finished you can store your work on one of these. It goes in that little slot there. Apparently it has enough space to hold a medium-sized novel. But the machine itself can only process a few thousand words at a time, so you have to keep stopping and saving what you’ve done.”

He starts rubbing his chin.

“I don’t know, this must be about as advanced a piece of equipment as you can buy, and it can hold maybe twenty pages of writing. Yet we’ve both got copies of our entire neural systems on a device no bigger than an ostrich egg. And Yvette told me she broke into Area 51 to photograph the blueprints. It has to be alien technology.”

“You could be right. There’s all those stories about Roswell…”

“That’s it! Interstellar journeys take so long the crew would all die of old age if they didn’t have fresh bodies to jump into. Perhaps they kept them frozen, or in tanks or whatever.”

“Well, we soon solved that one!”

“Yeah, if only everything else was as easy to sort out.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Cunningham was a mess. Especially with money. He only got by because he was fiddling his expenses. His gaff’s nothing special either. He didn’t mind, he was hardly ever there. So I’ll be looking for work, and I’d better be quick about finding some.”

“I don’t understand. You saved a whole town from being converted. Surely they can’t just turn their backs on you?”

“They haven’t. But I want out. Like you did when we talked on Waterloo Bridge, remember? Since then you’ve discovered that you can’t simply walk away from what you are. I can. I’ve got to. I’m determined not to become him, and I will if I stay with the MoD.”

“He’d have been okay with a woman to keep him on the straight and narrow.”

“Would you have taken him on?”

“I might’ve done if he hadn’t given me so many reasons to detest him.”

“So many that the very sight of him still makes your skin crawl?”

“No, it isn’t like that at all. You’re in there now. And from what Beverley told me you have an even chance of being the father of my child.”

He looks away and walks over to the cases. One by one, he lugs them through to the bedroom.

“What’s wrong?” I’m anxious for him to tell me.

He puts the last suitcase on the floor, then turns back to me. His face holds an expression I’m unable to interpret.

“I wasn’t going to mention that. But since you’ve brought the subject up I’ll put my cards on the table. I don’t think you’re adjusting quickly enough to get through this pregnancy on your own. You seem all right about it at the moment, but will you still feel the same way once the morning sickness and all the other things start? I spoke to Dr Sanderson; she told me all you have to do is say the word and she’ll terminate. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t dream of going against you if that’s what you really want. My fear is that you’ll panic, then realise you made the decision too early.”

I look down at my T-shirt, and the way it curves to follow the contours of my breasts. I’ve found that by doing my best to put them from my mind I’ve begun to accept that this is my natural shape. But in not that many weeks from now another part of me is going to blossom outwards, one I won’t be able to ignore because every square inch of it will remind me of the ordeal I’ll be facing in the delivery room, not to mention the years of parental care that will come afterwards. ‘Panic’ would appear to be a justifiable word to use.

I force myself to meet Jeremy’s grey eyes.

“What’s your solution?”

“That you divide the load with someone who appreciates the situation you’re in. Someone who understands a little of what you’re feeling. Someone who’s experienced a change of sex and had to come to terms with it.”

I feel my mouth fall open.

“Are you suggesting we–“

“I’m offering to be the guy who tidies the flat while you’re in the bathroom spewing up. I’m offering to be your punchbag when you want to lash out at someone. I’m offering to be there for you when it all gets too much.”

I want to shake my head and tell him to leave. I really do.

Apart from anything else, he’s just propositioned me. The kind of relationship he's describing won’t last very long if I make him sleep on the sofa. If I agree to him moving in I’ll be giving him my tacit permission to share my bed and therefore to expect regular sex. It can’t be any other way.

You’re not thinking like a woman, Rich. It doesn’t matter what he expects, it’s up to you what he gets.

He knows that. He’s been female himself.

But every morning I’ll be waking up next to a man!

That old chestnut. What about when you and Cunningham were on the ferry? You didn’t fancy him then, and look what happened. What you wanted to happen. Okay, you hated yourself for it but that was only because he was a cunt. This bloke’s got the same body, and none of the swagger. And he’s committed to looking after you. He’s perfect for you, babe.

But–

Shut up and listen. On this of all days, when you’ve decided that your new life as Ruth Pattison is really going to begin, do yourself a huge favour.

TAKE A FUCKING CHANCE!

Now it’s my turn to move closer. I don’t do it deliberately, but all the same my hand comes to rest on Jeremy’s sleeve.

“I reserve the right to kick you out any time I like,” I tell him.

“Of course. It’s your flat.”

“And don’t get any ideas about having the run of the place once I’ve started work.”

“I promise.”

“Oh, and as soon as I get my bulge I’m going on top.”

“That’s fine by me!”

“Good. I can see I’ll have you house-trained in no time.” I give his arm a squeeze. “Now you can take me shopping.”

Welcome to the sisterhood, babe.

I step from the shower, towel myself dry, brush my teeth and tie a robe around my middle. I think about lifting my wig from its stand, but decide against it. If Jeremy doesn’t fancy me as I am, he knows where the door is.

A splash or two of scent and I’m ready.

Only I’m not.

It isn’t the thought of being fucked that makes me hesitate. I can live with Jeremy thrusting his penis into my vagina night after night — I suspect I might even come to enjoy it. What’s stopping me is the sudden realisation that sex will be the cement that binds us together as a couple. After we’ve slept together I’ll be his girlfriend, with everything that implies.

I remind myself that Jeremy will be acutely aware of my misgivings. Not long ago he was a forty-four year old woman sliding out her dentures ready for a spot of fellatio with Simon Whitaker. If that hasn’t taught him to empathise with the female half of the population then nothing will.

My hand moves to the barely healed scar in the centre of my forehead, and from there to the first scattered patches of gingery down sprouting from my resuscitated follicles.

I owe that man so much!

Haven’t I a duty to at least try to make it work between us?

How I get there I don’t know, but finally I’m standing in front of the bedroom door.

I turn the handle as quietly as I can. Beneath the covers lies a naked man reading this week’s Melody Maker.

The man with whom I will spend the night.

It’ll be okay. It has to be.

Jeremy looks up. If he’s disgusted by my near baldness he hides it well.

I gesture with my eyes towards the light switch.

“Mind if I…?”

“Uh…no, go ahead.”

He folds his paper up and leans over to put it on floor. I plunge the room into darkness, then tread carefully forward. My knee finds the edge of the bed before my fingers do.

I sit. The mattress doesn’t give like it should. That’s because of the thirteen-stone lump of human flesh I’ll soon be lying next to. I can feel its warmth, smell its cologne, hear its breathing.

It’s a person. It’s Jeremy.

It’s the man who’s probably just as apprehensive about the journey on which we’re shortly to embark as I am.

Because neither of us knows what our eventual destination will be.

Might as well hit the road…

I pull back the sheet. God, there’s so little room!

I can’t avoid my body coming into contact with his so I don’t try. But I turn on my side, facing away from him. If I don’t know when it’s coming there’s less chance I’ll react badly and ruin everything.

For a long time we just lie there. I feel I ought to do something, if only to stop him falling asleep. How frustrating will that be, after I’ve psyched myself up all day for a rogering I’m sure I’ll remember when I’ve started mouthing the words I hear on the television news?

Eventually I find the mettle to let my back press against his chest so I can become accustomed to its rise and fall. Jeremy’s response is to let his feet play with mine, tickling their soles with his toes.

Then his hand touches my shoulder, making me shiver.

“You know I’ll stop the moment you ask me to,” he says softly against the lobe of my ear.

“It’s okay,” I whisper back. “Just first-night nerves.”

I’ve got this far without wanting to throw up. I’m not backing out now.

He begins caressing my plump upper arm. The sensation is pleasant enough, I suppose, but I can’t say that it excites me.

Then his other hand is on my waist. I gasp, because it doesn’t stay there but travels directly to my left breast. Not pawing, not kneading. Just holding it.

Which may explain why I grip his arm but don’t pull it away.

And now my lips part and my eyes widen in shock, for a boundary has been crossed. I’ve sent a signal that permits him to fondle my tits whenever he wants. I don’t have to endure it, I’m not his toy — but after I’ve deemed this form of petting acceptable I’d better have a very good reason for refusing it.

He slides his hand under my arm to cup my other breast, and for a while nothing else happens. He’s aware — as no other man could possibly be — that I need time to relax, that if it takes until the small hours for me to let him know I’m ready then so be it.

In the end it’s his erection that tips the scales. Not because of the electrifying hardness slowly widening the gap between the tops of my thighs as it pushes towards my sex, not because of the pulsing heat searing away the last of my male inhibitions, but because I appreciate how much he wants me. And that’s turning me on.

“Okay,” I murmur, leaving Jeremy to do the rest. There’ll come a time when I begin to take a more assertive role in our lovemaking, but tonight the rookie is happy to let the pro show her the ropes.

When he throws back the covers. When he kneels beside me. When he spreads my legs and I know that in a few seconds I’ll know how it feels to be a woman having sex with a man. When he pulls me roughly towards him. When our mouths meet. When that blistering granite rod finally slips between my labia and I fling my arms around his neck. When it withdraws, only to stab into me with renewed vigour. When it fills me again and again. When it spurts sizzling hot seed deep inside me…

When it’s over and I’m locked in an embrace with the man I must now think of as my lover, my initial reaction is that it’s all been a bit of an anti-climax really.

But when he takes me again, long and slow this time, and my back arches and I writhe and moan in pure animal ecstasy, my conscious mind remains detached and pensive. It reflects on the circuitous path along which destiny has tugged me since that damp November afternoon on the ramp outside Portsmouth Harbour station, a trail I can at last say has yielded up a reward I’ll cherish for the rest of my life.

Not Jeremy, for who can tell how strong the bond between us will prove?

But womanhood.