Live and Let Drood

the Drood dead? I’ve seen only one golden body so far. The place should be littered with them.…And why was the armour melted like that? As though it had been hit by a nuclear blast?”
    Molly didn’t say anything. She knew I wasn’t talking to her.
    I turned and went quickly back the way we’d come, hurrying back to the front doorway and the armoured body lying there. I crouched down beside it, studying the gleaming golden surface thoughtfully. It was covered with great spiderwebs of cracks, as though from a series of unimaginable impacts. The golden metal had become scored and distorted in places, touched by some incredible heat. The arms were fusedto the torso, the legs fused together.…And yet the armour, as a whole, was still intact. They hadn’t broken through to reach the man inside. I tapped the blank featureless mask with a single knuckle, and the sound was soft, flat, dead.
    “Can you override the torc?” said Molly. “Make the armour withdraw so we can see who this was?”
    “No,” I said. “Only the wearer has control over his torc. Basic security measure, in case of capture.”
    “Is there any chance he might be alive in there? Trapped, unconscious, maybe? The armour’s damaged but it’s still in one piece. It might have protected the wearer, preserved him.…”
    “No,” I said. “Thanks for the thought, but no. To damage the armour this thoroughly, the sheer force involved must have been horrific. The impact alone would have…I don’t even want to think about the condition of the body inside this armour.” I leaned in close to stare at my own distorted reflection in the featureless golden mask. “Who were you? Did I know you? Did you die bravely? Of course you did. You were a Drood.”
    We went back inside and I tried another direction. Still looking for something I couldn’t put a name to. I knew only that I’d know it when I saw it. We rounded a corner and found ourselves facing a tall and very solid-looking door. Somehow still intact, somehow still standing firm and upright in its frame. The walls on either side were gone. Reduced to piles of rubble. I put one hand to the door and it just fell apart, crumbling and falling away, collapsing into sawdust. The doorframe still held its shape. I walked through it, into the room beyond. Most of the outer wall was missing, giving an almost uninterrupted view of the grounds outside. But there was still enough of the room left to stir an unexpected memory. The left-hand wall had shelves full of books with charred and fire-blacked spines. When I touched one, the whole row of books fell in on themselves, disintegrating and falling to the floor.
    “Eddie, look at this.”
    I moved over to join Molly. She’d found a tall mirror on the right-hand wall. Completely untouched by the destruction all around it. Inthe mirror I hardly recognised the man standing beside Molly. I’ve been trained to be a field agent, trained to blend in anywhere and not be noticed, to look like no one in particular. The man before me looked damaged and angry and dangerous. Anyone sensible would run a mile from such a man. Molly was still a delicate china doll of a woman, with big bosoms, bobbed black hair, huge dark eyes and a mouth as red as sin itself. She looked as beautiful as ever to me, in her own eerie, threatening and subtly disturbing way. Right now she was looking at me…as though wondering where I’d come from.
    I turned away from the reflection to look at Molly. I did my best to smile normally. “I know,” I said. “But it’s still me, Molly. You can have your Eddie back when this is all over.”
    “When will it be over, Eddie?”
    “When everyone who had any hand in this is dead,” I said.
    I looked around the room. Something about it…troubled me.
    “I think…I remember being here before when I was just a child. If this is the room I think it is. I would have been very small, maybe four or five years old.…I’d been brought here to meet my grandfather Arthur. Martha’s first husband. I can’t remember who brought me here, though. Isn’t that odd? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Martha. I can remember being brought into this room and meeting Grandfather Arthur, but not who brought me here or why.
    “Arthur Drood—he seemed very old to me then, though he couldn’t have been more than fifty or sixty. I remember he poured himself a cup of tea but it was too hot to drink, so he poured some of it into the saucer to cool it and sipped