by Holly Seddon
*
The site is misleadingly simple for something that deals with death. Roughly chucked together with a search box. It looks like it was created by a child.
‘Want to know if you’re on a hit list?’ It says. ‘Search your name here.’
There is no back or forward arrow here so she cannot see who Greg searched for. Presumably the names of traffickers, perhaps other activists. Did he look for himself? Should he have looked for himself? Did he make any enemies while he was rummaging around down here, trailing god knows what and god knows who?
For a year, Marianne believed without question that Greg died in an accident. But what if …?
She’s tapping the keys before she can stop herself. Surely he wasn’t killed, surely not. But … but. The cursor seems to judder away from her as she types and she wonders if it’s the whisky or the website.
Gregory Darrow.
Enter.
Nothing happens for a moment and then the site wheezes into action and a line of text appears above the search box.
No results. Try again.
She tries: Greg Darrow.
Enter.
No results. Try again.
She exhales. Greg was knocked off his bike on a busy London road not far from here, the thirteenth cyclist to die in the city that year. A classic hit-and-run. He was a mild-mannered man who was liked by everyone he met. Yes, he could stretch his remit at work and go above and beyond to help those who needed it. But that meant lending people his own money or going on protest marches; maybe it meant trying to track ex-clients down through this kind of back channel, but not putting himself in the sights of a fucking assassin.
What is wrong with me?
Of course his bloody name wasn’t on here. He was the victim of a tragic accident and now she’s the victim of a stupid hoax.
As if to prove it to herself, she types again.
Marianne Heywood.
Enter.
Again, nothing happens. She blinks slowly and breathes deeply, deciding in that moment never to come to this terrible place again. Whatever Greg was trying to do down here was his world, not hers. And it was his business, his possibly ham-fisted methods for making the world a better place. And it’s the world’s loss, and hers, that he’s gone. She will file this place away with his grovelling message to Jenna and instead think only of the good times. To mourn the best of him and bury the questions because there’s no one here to answer them.
The page changes.
Search results: Marianne Heywood, Hackney, date of birth: 7 August 1987.
Next to this sits a tiny greyscale photograph of her face.
A line of text appears above the results with a skull emoji on either side: Congratulations, someone wants you dead.
Sam
I can smell the last dinner that he cooked as I tread carefully through his kitchen in the darkness, twisting this way and that to avoid corners. It smells like a fry-up, a breakfast to prepare him for the upside-down schedule of a night shift.
I cover my nose and breathe silently.
Even if I didn’t know for sure, I could tell as soon as I slipped inside that there isn’t a living soul in here. The air feels unbroken. No one else’s breath, no other body heat but mine. He’s deep in the warehouse at a DIY store now – a waste of his talents but the best place for him. Away from the public.
I keep the lights off. No need for a curious neighbour to get involved. I’m through the hallway and up the stairs in seconds. I know my way around from my last visit, and I’ve spent hours with my eyes closed, walking this route in my head, preparing. There can be no room for error. I’m not getting caught for this one, not for a man like him.
His office door is open, his computer screen now dull and grey. I don’t need to see what’s on there, I know very well.
I tread lightly into his bedroom. His bed is unmade and it stinks of his body. As before, his prescription sleeping pills are on the side table. I slide out an unused sheet and pop out the twelve pills, cradling them in one gloved palm as I slip the empty foil into my back pocket with the other hand.
I place four pills in the small glass of water next to his bed, swirling the liquid carefully. They’ll dissolve by the time he crawls under the covers, hopefully too exhausted to refresh the glass before taking a sip. And one sip should be enough to keep him asleep while the next part of the process kicks in.
Back downstairs, I place another four pills in the open and nearly finished bottle of red wine that sits next to the hob – a back-up. The final four plop noisily into the open pint of milk inside the fridge door. Some people like a milky drink before bed, especially those with sleep issues. The smell of food rushes out at me and I screw back the lid and shut the door quickly, my stomach curdling. Other people’s food turns me inside out.
The first part of the job is done now. One way or another, he’ll sleep for long enough to ensure the second part will work.
I’m back up the stairs in seconds, silent on soft, clean socks. I don’t need to check the floor plan on my phone. I know precisely where to find everything. I’ve done this part so many times in my mind that I had to remind myself on the drive over that this assignment has not been fulfilled. Wishful thinking, perhaps.
I tease the boiler cover open and unfurl my set of tools.
When the job is done, I take the final photo and upload it. Proof of the penultimate task’s completion. I allow myself the slightest smile as I pass the target’s office and head back down the stairs.
Then I pull up my mask, lower my hood, slip my boots back on and leave the way I came in.
Marianne
Marianne sits frozen in her chair, head grinding into the back of it as if she’s chained into a wild fairground ride.
Her flat is all shadows, there’s just a pale blue light seeping out from the laptop’s screen. Outside, someone shrieks. Moments later there is an eruption of laughter.
Heart still thundering, she looks again. It really is her name. And her suburb. Her date of birth. Her face. On a fucking hit list!
Marianne squints at herself, her expression frozen in monochrome. In the pale light, she touches her real flesh, feels the contours of her face as she stares at the tiny facsimile on the screen. When was this photo taken? Her hair is tied back, as it often is for work, and she isn’t looking directly at the camera. It could easily be from CCTV, cropped from a group photo on her school’s website. Uploaded as one of hundreds on Facebook.
She feels a bead of sweat run down her back, despite the chill.
Who else is on there? She remembers a news story a few years ago about a dating website for married people looking for affairs. It was hacked. The names and email addresses of every member uploaded to a website and searchable – even now – by any concerned spouse. There are apparently thousands of names and email addresses on there, real people’s indiscretions preserved forever. A catacomb of shame. But affairs are one thing; being placed on a hit list is quite another.
She clicks the back button, returns to the first page, then back again, but nothing happens. She clicks to the other tab, the one where Greg read about this website and clicks back, back, back but it just ends up at the main chat room for activists; there’s no breadcrumb trail that shows what Greg looked at or why.
She’s never felt scared at home before, not here in her nest. Even when one of Greg’s friends made an ill-advised joke about him haunting the place. Now she’s too scared to close her eyes. How is it so dark in here? She rushes from the table and turns on all the lights in the flat, double-locks the door.
If she hadn’t drunk so much, she’d run to her car and fly back to Noah’s. Taxi? No, he has his daughter home now and falling drunk out of an Uber, ranting about dark webs and assassination attempts is not the introduction she wants to make. For everything happening here tonight, that glimmer of a future is worth protecting. She doesn’t want to taint it with this. Whatever this is.
A chill creeps up her neck, the hai
rs standing up as if sensing she’s being watched. She spins to look behind her but of course no one is there.
Did Greg find me on here? Is that what he found a year ago? Why the fuck didn’t he warn me? And why the fuck would I have a price on my head?
But he couldn’t warn her, of course he couldn’t, because he was knocked off his bike before he had the chance. Maybe he assumed it was a hoax, regretted looking. Maybe he never even searched her name and this is … what? A coincidence?
What the fuck is even real?
She tries to think strategically. To parent herself into some kind of logical next move. What would Noah do? Laugh it off? But Noah wouldn’t look in the first place.
So what should she do? What does one do in a situation like this? Finding yourself listed as a murder target, in a dirty little shithole on the illegal netherworld below the internet?
She clicks back to the initial post about this and reads the replies. Lots of them are disputing the claim of hacking, most of them are calling anyone who searches their real name a grade A moron (in generally more colourful language). But one reply makes her blood freeze.
‘Don’t do it. Don’t look. Seriously. A guy I used to talk to on here, he found his name on another hit list and went to the cops. Fucking idiot. They laughed him out of the station and the next day he was found with his throat cut.’
This sounds like bullshit, but … But. Who might watch her if she went to the station? And if she did, what would the police even do? What would they look into, if she made herself known to them? Would they go through her and Greg’s computers? Her emails? Would they report their findings to the school? They’d have to, wouldn’t they?
And all that for what must be, surely has to be, a hoax.
She shuts everything down. As the light from the screen fades, the room seems to squirm. Her head swims with wine, whisky and what-ifs.
It must be a sick joke. Just a laugh, for someone who finds that kind of thing funny. Not a normal person – one of those trolls who takes pleasure in others’ distress. She has a few of those emerging in her older year groups already. Mostly boys, unsure of how to communicate and of who to be – and latching on to the wrong role models. One in particular comes to mind, Robbie. So different to his gentle older brother, Marc. The perennial smirk on Robbie’s face telling Marianne that he might know more than he should. About lots of things, including her.
How hard is it to scrape the normal internet for a photo and date of birth? Serve up a result as if someone else has listed her there? It’s probably a basic thing to set up if you’re into that kind of thing.
But why my name and not Greg’s? Surely any name should bring up a result if it’s a prank?
She rubs a hand over her face, scrabbling for logic and reason. No, calm down. Maybe it wouldn’t find Greg because he’s dead. The finality of that sentiment wakes her with a slap.
This just can’t be real. The exhaustion and the whisky have taken her mind. And you’re grieving, a memory of Greg whispers in her ear.
Yes, grieving. A year ago today, and that’s been shoved to one side by the mess of this night. She gets up too fast and the chair tumbles behind her, the noise echoing in the solitude of the flat. She stumbles through to bed, climbing into Greg’s side and wrapping his shirt around her, the sleeves long like a straitjacket.
She pictures him again on that last holiday, crouching over the pool, desperately fishing out the frogs. And the mice in their kitchen, oh god, the mice. She’d wanted to put poison down, to get rid of them as soon as she found their shit amongst the ransacked food. He was aghast and bought humane traps.
They hadn’t worked. Every time he’d pulled one out to check it was empty. ‘Give it time,’ he said.
Then they’d multiplied. Great piles of droppings to wipe out every morning, the shrill crescendo of hungry baby vermin seeping through the skirting board and the hole in the back of the food cupboard.
So she’d covered the hole in the cupboard and blocked the gaps in the skirting while he watched, appalled. ‘It’s poison or starvation,’ she said eventually. ‘You need to deal with problems head on and not leave them for me to handle.’ Did he take her advice too literally?
Sam
I tease out the little tray and switch the SIM cards in my phone. I can do this in my sleep now, my fingers telling me which SIM is which from the subtle scratches and indentations. Around me, people grind their teeth and stare into smartphones as they queue to collect their takeaway coffees and Sunday-morning muffins. So much caffeine and sugar, it’s a wonder the whole coffee shop isn’t vibrating.
As the phone whirrs back to life, I close my eyes. I can’t remember the last unbroken night’s sleep I had, and I can feel exhaustion tugging at my corners.
In my palm, the smooth metal phone vibrates with an encrypted message. The last assignment was a success. Carbon monoxide. A tragic accident. A box ticked. A happy customer.
Now another assignment waits.
I open the file. My face, should anyone look over at my table, is impassive. Bored, even. But the truth has many layers. It’s not exhilaration that is creeping up my spine, it’s more potent and fragile than that. Hope, perhaps. And a foundation of fear, always at the rock bottom of it all is fear. A pulsing fear that keeps me alert.
A waitress brings my coffee and I smile a thanks but she’s already looked away, uninterested. Finally the file opens. I swallow my coffee and scan the details.
Her name is Marianne.
Marianne
Sunday, 12 September 2021
Dead sleep swallows Marianne until the early hours of Sunday, when a throbbing head and squirming guts wake her. She’s startled by the bright light still on in the bedroom, squinting as she hobbles to turn it off. She downs a pint of water, goes to the bathroom, then weaves her way back to bed, avoiding the entrails from last night. Knots of ash, an overnight bag bursting with unwashed clothes, a chair lying on its side.
In bed, she spends a few more hours thrashing around in the gossamer layer between disturbed sleep and semi-consciousness, groaning with her hangover from under the covers and waking for good while the sky is still an ill-formed sludge.
In the dim distance, the sound of Broadway Market drifts through the curtains. In the park over the road, children play wildly, crackling with life. All Marianne can do is lie as still as a corpse.
*
Yesterday when she woke up, she was in Noah’s bed. She’d felt his warmth pressed behind her. His salty smell rising from the duvet that tangled both their legs in the night. They were both half asleep as he pulled her nightdress up. The mid-morning sun drawing a yellow line around the curtains as she pushed against him. Heat, sun, morning salt. She felt something like pleasure. Something like forgetting.
Afterwards, she slid out of bed and his hand caught her wrist, his fingers pushing her skin so hard that white crescents formed. She gasped.
‘Oh god, I’m sorry,’ Noah said, alert then for the first time. ‘I just can’t get enough of you.’ She looked down and smiled, her hair falling like a stage curtain. As she traced a wrinkle in the sheet, an imperfection they’d just made, he pulled her into him. Thick arms like a cartoon sailor. The kind of man she used to laugh at. They used to laugh at. ‘Big as a barrel and thick as a brush,’ Greg would have said. But Noah isn’t thick. And he had kissed her like he could love her. She’d kissed him back in answer, morning breath be damned.
She can see herself loving Noah. And soon. It’s early days, but for all the darkness that led to them being available, time together is like a burst of light. She hopes he feels the same.
*
But now she lies alone, cold and haunted. The whole building is silent but for her. No neighbours on either side; those spaces are weekday offices filled with the crushed dreams of hourly paid temps. Below swells the blackness of a condemned business. The loft above is scattered with spiders and Christmas decorations she’ll never use again. She winces at memories of their last
Christmas. She was needlessly tetchy, and refused to go to his parents’ house. Would they ever forgive her for keeping his last Christmas to herself?
And then in the last December gone, her first Christmas without Greg, she’d flown out to her mother’s new house in France. Had spent most of it lying on the spare bed, unable to hold a conversation. She thinks now of Noah. Imagines his thick fingers carefully taping up the presents for Daisy. How will he manage when she’s a teenager, angry and unwinding, demanding and needy all at once? Marianne lets herself hope that she could join in with their family Christmas next year. And then in years to come, perhaps she will help Daisy navigate the horrors of adolescence, girl to girl. Not a replacement for her mum but something close. Maybe, if things work out, Daisy could have a little brother or sister.
If I’m still here.
Congratulations, someone wants you dead.
As a history teacher, death usually arrives in the classroom as a comma, a footnote. Thousands died here, a king died there. It’s as disposable as the biros she chews while the class works quietly. Death was not a part of her life for so long, and then it slammed into her at the same time those wheels slammed into Greg. What end could be planned for her? And why? Especially why?
Marianne has spent a year embroidering a new life. New routines, a new boyfriend. A future. And now death is tapping at her window again. But it can’t be true, surely?
The pulse of her heartbeat drums its way through her brain and her bones. Her stomach growls, only acid and bile left in place of the last piece of sacred pie. Her skin prickles from her scalp to the soles of feet. Every breath is shallow. She didn’t charge her phone last night, too drunk and rattled for normal concerns. She finds it tangled in her covers.
She shivers as she reaches over to plug in her phone, seasick from moving. A text from Jane in Dubai, asking if she wants to talk. A missed call from her mum that she must have slept through. A WhatsApp message from Noah. ‘Thinking of you x.’ It was sent at eleven last night, while she was still crawling down the rabbit hole, yet to reach the end.
