The Happier Dead Read Free

bloody girl – victim’s name is Mr Prudence Egwu. Don’t publish until we’ve spoken to his next of kin. End text.”
     
     
    O ATES DROVE DOWN through Chelsea and along the Embankment. The good citizens of the day had relinquished their claim on London, and each of the people he saw posed a policeman’s question simply by virtue of being out in the rain and the small hours of the morning. There was a lone jogger puffing her way along the pavement by the swollen grey river, her face set in grim determination to be fit and thin for someone, and a group of young men from the St George estate hanging around the edge of Pimlico. Their cigarettes glowed in the darkness.
    There were a lot of police on the streets, walking in twos with their thumbs hitched in their stab-proof vests. A young black man had been run over by a police van in Peckham, and two days of mounting disorder in the suburbs had left the city restless.
    On Parliament Square the black bomb barriers glistened in the wet, and the protestors huddled in their tents beneath the statues of Churchill and Roosevelt. The rain soaked their cardboard placards, dissolving the demands. There were ranks of rough sleepers under the bridges. Still and silent in their bedrolls, they reminded Oates of rows of body bags, and of how heavy they were when you had to drag them into long lines under a hot sun.
    Past Blackfriars, robotaxis bore the tired lawyers back from the honeycombs of midnight offices to their sleeping wives. Oates had a feeling Grape was out there somewhere in the east; he had never asked her where she lived, and she wouldn’t have told him if he had, but you could hear the lairy pride of Bethnal Green in her voice.
    It took him almost an hour to make it out to the eastern edge of the city. The first thing he saw was the light atop the great dome, glimpsed through a screen of trees as he came out of the City through Canary Wharf and crested the hills on the edge of Essex. It was a shining red beacon designed to warn away the planes landing at City airport, but with the rise and fall of the earth, the darkness and the distance, it was impossible to get a sense of scale. He carried on along the A13, but the buildings hemmed in the view as he came through Rainham, flats stacked on top of fast food outlets and boarded shops, and it wasn’t until he passed the London Road that the staunch ranks of the Victorian High Street fell back, giving a view of the Great Spa nestling in the girdle of the M25. When he saw it for the first time, his instinct was to pull over on the hard shoulder of the motorway, to get out of his car and stare at the structure whilst the traffic swept eastwards beside him.
    In the five years since construction of the dome of the Great Spa had begun in earnest, Oates had resisted exhortations to visit the building with a certain grumbly pride at his own refusal to be excited. He had secretly been hoping for some job or personal errand that would take him out east so that he could see it without having to go to see it, but no such occasion had presented itself, and as the building moved from construction to completion, and the commentary moved from protest and excitement to simple awe, his stubbornness had compelled him to perpetuate his initial whim. He had seen photographs, he had even succumbed one evening alone in the living room to watching footage of a flypast by a BBC helicopter, but no photograph or recording of the thing could prepare you for the impact. The pace of the cars around him slowed perceptibly along with his own, as if the vast building exerted a gravitational pull at its periphery, and Oates craned forward over the wheel to get a full view.
    The building was composed of two distinct parts – the central structure was a dome stretching a kilometre and a half into the black, rain-strewn sky. It was the shape of an upright egg half-buried in the earth, so that the walls rose quite steeply from the ground and tapered into a