Page 21 of The Quarterlands (Dark Water #4)

Chapter Seven

Josiah

He flicked through his holopad files to find Gideon’s last known address then set off.

He arrived at a park home site a couple of hours later – hundreds of AV homes laid out in neat rows, very close together.

After the Rising, there had been an explosion in this kind of accommodation: easy, cheap, and movable if the waters rose again.

He found Gideon’s among the multitude and knocked on the door. A woman answered, middle-aged, grey-haired, frazzled. He flashed his badge at her and smiled his most charming smile. She peered at him suspiciously.

“I’m looking for Gideon Bart,” he said.

“He died ages ago. Last year sometime.” She tried to close the door, but he’d taken the precaution of wedging his foot in it.

“Did he leave anything behind?”

“No.” She glared at his foot .

“What happened to his stuff? His furniture, personal effects, and so on?”

“No idea. Place was empty when we moved in.”

“I see. Well, thank you so much for your help.” He removed his foot, and she slammed the door in his face. This seemed to be a dead end, but he wasn’t prepared to give up so easily. He walked over to the site office.

“Gideon Bart?” The manager, who had a helpful nanobadge with Mr Nugent glowing on it, glanced up.

“Yeah. He rented a van home here for a few months before he died. I remember him because he was always so elegant and had such posh manners. You never saw him in a rumpled suit, even though they hung off him. He was skin and bone. Cancer, he said. Liver, I think. He had this yellow tinge.” Nugent gestured to his face. “Poor bastard.”

“What happened to him?”

“He went into hospital and never came out again. Then we had notification from his next of kin saying he’d died.”

“His next of kin?” Josiah frowned. “Who was that?”

“A nephew. I’ve still got the notification.” Nugent found the document and pinged it into the air. It was short and matter-of-fact, simply informing the manager that his uncle had died, and he would arrange for his accommodation to be cleared out as soon as possible.

“Was it?” Josiah asked.

“Yeah, within a few days. All very efficient.”

“Did you meet the nephew?”

“Nope. Don’t think he came. He sent someone with an AV. They took the stuff and that was that. It was all paid up. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Did he leave anything behind?” This seemed to be another dead end.

“Don’t think so. Let me check.” Nugent looked through some more documents on his holopad, then shook his head.

“I see.” Josiah was disappointed, although he wasn’t sure what he’d expected.

“Oh, hang on! There was something else. I forgot about it. He left me a note before he went into hospital that final time. Not often anyone writes anything by hand these days, that’s why I remember.”

He went out to the back, then returned and handed Josiah a piece of white paper. The writing on it was tiny and a little wavery, the writer clearly not in the best of health, but there was a neatness to it that tallied with what Joe knew about Gideon.

Dear Mr Nugent, I enclose my next month’s rent. Thank you so much for your kindness and assistance. It’s been a glorious summer, but the raine will come soon, and by then, I’ll have gone home.

“What does he mean by that?” Josiah frowned. “This was his home, wasn’t it?”

“Dunno. I assumed he meant… you know…” Nugent pointed up at the sky. “Or maybe he meant he’d moved in with his nephew? To be honest, I thought he might have gone a bit nuts.”

Josiah read the letter again. Gideon’s handwriting was very small but very precise – all except that one word: rain . Was that a tiny e on the end? Raine? He felt a sudden chill creep up his spine.

“Can I keep this?” He held up the note.

Nugent shrugged. “Be my guest.”

Josiah strode back to his duck, his heart beating fast. He read the note again.

Was he clutching at straws, or was this a coded message for him?

Gideon was such a meticulous person, and the rest of his note written so correctly.

How likely was it that he’d make a mistake and add an extra “e” to the end of the word “rain”?

What did the message tell him, though? It seemed to be instructing him to search for Gideon at “home”, but this was his home.

His only other home had been Belvedere, and he definitely wasn’t there.

Josiah found a café, ordered a hot chocolate and a choc-chip cookie because, right now, he needed as much chocolate as possible, then took out his holopad and searched for everything he could find about Gideon Bart.

There wasn’t much. He’d worked at Belvedere for years, and prior to that, at The New Dorchester hotel.

Then Josiah saw something on the IS database that caught his attention.

Gideon had first sold himself into servitude when he was eighteen years old, and the address given for his childhood home was in the Quarterlands.

Josiah left the café in a hurry and directed his duck to take him there. He knew he should tell Esther, who had been very clear he wasn’t to go near any area of the Quarterlands again without backup, but he was in no mood to cool his heels waiting for that to arrive.

When he drew up outside the old tower block that had been Gideon’s home, he realised this was a very different kind of Quarter.

There were no packs of feral children lurking around the entrance; the place was clean, the bricks well scrubbed and the windows all intact.

A couple of raftsmen tethered his duck and then ferried him to the entrance, where a welcoming committee of three older women, dressed in plain but clean clothes, greeted him.

There would be no need for guns or fist-fights here, and as he entered the building, he could see why.

Above the door was a familiar sight: a cross on an ark, a bird circling above it with an olive leaf in its beak – the universal symbol of the Floodites.

The women also wore the symbol on cheap wooden beads around their necks.

“Welcome, sir. How may we help?”

He showed them his badge, and they frowned and discussed it for a moment in a huddle, then returned.

“We want no quarrel with the Thorities,” the oldest of the trio said. “We run a very orderly Quarter here. You may enter, but you must leave any weapons with us.” She pointed at the desk.

Josiah pondered this for a moment. He wasn’t keen to go into any Quarter without at least a stun gun, but their request wasn’t unreasonable, and Floodites were known for their strict religious adherence, so he handed it over. He had no intention of telling them about the knife in his sock.

He was taken down a well-lit corridor to a large room with a massive ark symbol painted on the wall.

As Quarters went, this one was the cleanest and most orderly he’d ever been in.

People walked around freely, and there were no signs of the violence, poverty, or drug use he’d seen in so many other Quarters.

Nobody here took the Quarterlands splash, he was sure of that.

The people were plainly poor, their clothes bearing the mismatched, threadbare evidence of being third-hand at best, but they were all clean.

There was a pervading smell of damp, but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as in some Quarters.

He was taken into a small office and introduced to a woman called Sister Marion.

“This is a religious Quarter?” Josiah asked, taking a seat on a rickety wooden chair.

“That’s right. We belong to the Fellowship of the Ark.” In other words, Floodites, although he wouldn’t call them that to their face as he knew they hated the term.

Sister Marion was a homely-looking woman in her late sixties, a good age for anyone living in the Quarterlands. Most died before they reached fifty.

“Has this always been an Arkian Quarter?” he asked.

“For as long as I’ve lived here, which is all my life. Now, Investigator Raine, how may I help you?”

“I’m looking for information about a man who lived here as a child: Gideon Bart.”

“Ah, Gideon.” Marion smiled.

“You know him?”

“Oh, yes. We were close when he was a child. His mother was abandoned by her husband and moved here soon after he was born. She was a religious lady. Very proper. Gideon adored her, and she did her best to school him in Arkian doctrine, but she died when he was seven.”

“That must have been hard on Gideon.”

“It was. I was a few years older than him and also an orphan. I was tasked with taking care of the little ones who had nobody.”

“That’s a lot of responsibility for a young girl,” Josiah observed.

“Not at all,” she said sharply. “Everyone in this Quarter pulls their weight. There’s only just enough to go around, but if we share and pull together, nobody goes hungry.”

“How do you fund this utopia?” Josiah asked bluntly.

She gave him a cold look. “We bring up our children to be obedient and hard-working. When they reach the age of eighteen, they’re encouraged to accept servitude outside the Quarter.

We take half the price of each contract, and the rest the employer keeps to give the child on completion.

All contracts last for ten years. The child is only twenty-eight when it’s finished and hopefully has learned a good trade or has a useful service history behind them.

Then, their lives are their own. The Quarter has been paid for bringing them up, and they are equipped to lead a useful life.

We also accept donations, of course. The Church of the Fellowship of the Ark is always generous, and our work is well known in the wider community.

Those more fortunate than ourselves will happily sponsor a child or elderly person living in our Quarter.

We pride ourselves on looking after the most vulnerable in the community. ”

“That’s very laudable,” Josiah murmured. “So, do any of your grown-up children ever return?”