The Hit List

by Holly Seddon

  She closes the photos down, raw and shaking. Those people, those moments, they’ve become something different. Characters rather than memories. A loss so deep she can’t look at it.

  Instead, Marianne searches the internet. She discovers the Latin name for the common bluebell, a few celebrities whose daughters are called Bluebell and not much else.

  ‘Bluebell Greg Darrow’, search.

  ‘Bluebell slavery victim’, search.

  ‘Bluebell charity’, search.

  ‘Bluebell slang’, search.

  ‘Bluebell prostitute’, search.

  ‘Bluebell betting’, search.

  ‘Bluebell fucking help me here’, search.

  Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Where else?

  The white rabbit winks at her as Marianne’s fingers find their way back. In minutes she’s staring at the dark web browser again, snapping back to it despite all her earnest intentions. First she tries the marketplace forum. The screen seems to crawl and metamorphose in front of her, updating, pulsing as hundreds of cockroaches around the world ply their hateful wares. She doesn’t read any of it. Instead, she clicks into the search box.

  Bluebell. Search.

  The site flexes and blinks while she holds her breath.

  No results found.

  Next, she goes to the activist chat room, searches there too. The wait is painful. But no result there either.

  She goes to the email login screen, tries ‘Bluebell’ as a password, as a username, a frenzy of attempts with desperate combinations. Nothing.

  Marianne goes to the final tab, the hacked hit-list database. Despite hoping it will be gone, a figment of her drunken imagination, the website is still there.

  She types ‘Bluebell’ carefully, one finger at a time. Search.

  She can barely stand to look at this site, its simplicity hiding the viper’s nest underneath.

  No results. Try again.

  She types angrily, hopefully, fast. Marianne Heywood. Search. Please, please, please let it be gone. Let me have imagined it. Let it be a hoax. A randomly generated response that won’t come up this time. Please. The site seems to freeze, and Marianne holds her breath until her chest hurts.

  Search results: Marianne Heywood, Hackney, date of birth: 7 August 1987.

  Her face.

  That damn skull emoji again. Congratulations, someone wants you dead.

  *

  Marianne imagines Greg heading out to work on his final day. She’d already gone. She always left before him during term time, throwing a goodbye at him as she pulled the door closed.

  When he died, he was wearing an old black hoodie that she’d more or less commandeered over the years, not the reflective jacket she’d bought him. Time was, they would wear each other’s clothes interchangeably. His hoodies hanging baggy on her, his joggers swimming on her legs, her old T-shirts tight to his chest, worn with boxers while they curled up to watch TV. Time was.

  She knows precisely what he was wearing that final morning because she received it back afterwards, ripped and tattered, laced with gravel and blood.

  On that last day, Greg must have closed their flat door around half past eight, having dragged his bike down from the stairs where it was awkwardly balanced. He only got three streets away. An accident, by every measure.

  Her back runs cold with sweat. Did Greg see her name on the list and try to fool them by wearing a hoodie she’d been recently wearing? Surely he wouldn’t do something that stupid, he’d just tell her what he’d found?

  Unless he did something to put her on that list and then tried, in a round-about and fucked-up way, to put it right? Is that why he took out insurance on himself, by way of goddamn apology? Either way it didn’t work.

  My name is still on there, Greg!

  *

  Marianne goes to the kitchen to get a blast of fresh air. She slides the window open and an autumn chill puckers her skin. Anyone could be standing in the rat run of alleyways behind her building, she’d never know. The city had always felt so safe to her. Yes, there’s an edge to it, but it offered protection in numbers too. Now those numbers are all faceless murderers, able to get right up close to her, crawling around her life like the mice in the roof.

  She closes the window tightly again and pulls down the blind. She’s out of fags but there’s a pack in her car. There’s no way she can cope with everything without cigarettes.

  Outside, the street is quiet and damp. A bus lurches past, its windows steamed opaque. Silhouettes move lazily inside. A few couples walk arm in arm down the pavement, or stomp in the single file of an imminent break-up. A dog walker briskly marches a Labrador, headed for the grass with a knot of poo bags coiled around his lead. A group of teenagers smoke weed in the scrubby parkland.

  Her car is two streets away and she holds her keys in her left hand, spiked through her fingers like Freddy Krueger. Her phone sits heavily in her coat pocket and her pyjamas trail along the stained street. Marianne looks around, trying to be subtle, while her heart crashes around in her chest. She’s feeling her way, unused to being in any danger beyond the baseline fear that all women are handed as children.

  She turns the corner and sees her little Fiat 500 where she left it. It looks infantile and she feels a pang of protectiveness. Its roof has a scattering of leaves while a flyer flaps lazily from under the windscreen wiper. The same takeaway advert that is fluttering around on all the neighbouring cars. She opens the door, looking furtively around, and snatches the cigarette carton, locks up and rushes back along the streets, slipping inside her front door and locking it. She presses the timer light so it bursts into life, ticking like a heartbeat.

  She starts to mount the stairs and catches the black sight of a spider, scuttling into the corner of one of the steps. Fuck. She’ll have to go past it but, god, she hates them so much. The way they move, the sheer darkness of them. Jagged scribbles of evil.

  The weekend before last, a daddy-long-legs had clattered its haphazard way towards her as she lay under Noah’s warm duvet. Before she’d had time to freak out, Noah had leapt naked from the bed, cupped the insect in his big hand, unlocked the window with the other and clapped it outside. ‘That was something else,’ she’d laughed.

  ‘Here to protect and serve, ma’am,’ he’d said, doffing an imaginary cap.

  If only he were here now.

  She waits for the spider to take the hint, to just disappear without any input from her, but he just sits in her eye line, taunting her.

  ‘OK,’ she says, and rushes past him, up the next couple of steps, then slows to regain her composure.

  The timer light switches off and plunges her into darkness in the windowless space. Her stomach drops and she crouches in fear. In the darkness, she imagines the spider crawling into her hair. Shadowy hands cling to her and mouths hang open in silent screams. There’s no one to help her fight her own imagination, let alone any real danger lurking.

  She takes a breath and rushes up the steps, her feet finding the well-worn dips in the carpet and her hand reaching for the light switch on the landing. The hallway grows reassuringly yellow again. She’s still alone. Still safe. No hands or mouths or eyes, and she can no longer see the spider. She hurries back into the flat and locks the inner door as well.

  Sam

  I take a circuitous route back to Hackney. I’m seen in a baseball cap driving into the bruised bit of Greater London where Essex and London bleed into each other. The plates on my car are not real.

  I am seen in a thin jacket and sunglasses, tapping an unregistered Oyster card at an unmanned station and settling into a train that boils me at my ankles thanks to unnecessary radiators. I dismount and dump my charity-shop jacket in a waste bin.

  As I stroll through Hackney Wick, I pull a fresh fold-up anorak from my pocket and over my head.

  The weather rolls over me, the air swells with damp and the sky hangs dull and grey. I turn sharply and join the path alongside the Thames, a thin metal fence on my left, t
he bold graffiti wall of an old warehouse on my right. I whistle a nameless unknowable tune that is probably a distant cousin of an old radio jingle or a song my son once sang. The thought stops me for a moment and I blink out at the brightly coloured houseboats of Fish Island, bobbing on the water like bath toys. The scene blends with the remnants of old summer days spent in a garden I’m not allowed in anymore. There is no one watching as I slap my face, hard, and shake myself sensible again.

  I arrive back on Marianne’s road just as she slips inside her front door, closing it with a slam. I stroll past the door without changing pace and pass in time to hear her footsteps. All alone.

  Marianne

  Marianne makes a cup of herbal tea and some toast. She’s brought the gloom back in with her and wraps a knitted blanket around her shoulders as she sits heavily on the sofa. Greg’s mum made this for them. A moving-in present, brought down by plane as an extra piece of hand luggage. Marianne had hated it on sight. Too fussy, too old fashioned, not them at all.

  Greg had guessed as much but she grew to love it in the end. Did she ever tell him that? Did Marianne thank his mum properly or could she tell that her daughter-in-law was unimpressed? Ungrateful too.

  She thinks guiltily of his parents up there, in Greg’s childhood home. She’d ribbed him about his old bedroom the first time she’d visited. ‘This is like a shrine! It’s fucking creepy!’ She hopes it brings them comfort now. More comfort than her own little museum has brought her.

  While picking at the food, Marianne takes in the room as if looking through someone else’s eyes. It’s a scene of total dysfunction. The dining table still covered in laptops, notepads and scraps of paper. Four large bin bags straining with their contents. A tote bag full of essays to mark, long overdue.

  The sofa dips in two spots but she only ever takes the right-hand side, leaving Greg’s corner covered in mismatched cushions. Like a teenager sneaking out, leaving a fake pillow-person under the covers. She tucks her knees under her and lets her eyes close for just a moment.

  Congratulations, someone wants you dead.

  Her eyes snap open with the sickly click of a doll’s. This isn’t the time for rest. Marianne hauls herself from her nest to grab the pile of notepads and paper from the table and takes it back to the sofa, flicking on the light as she goes.

  There are so many pieces of him here, so many thoughts scored into these scraps. No beginning or end, just an infinite paper snake eating itself. She thinks of Greg’s soft fingers around a pen. Remembers the little crease in his forehead when he was concentrating. It appeared when he was stressed and anxious too. She saw it more and more during his final months, unaware that there was anything going on besides the uphill battle of an impossible job.

  She opens the first of Greg’s notepads. Always proper hardback notepads, never jotters. She touches the cover just lightly, imagines him picking it from the stationery cupboard at work. Are you in here, Bluebell?

  It’s full of doodles, scraps of names and telephone numbers. All meaningless to her. These are the notepads of a feverish, busy mind, catching every fleeting thought; it’s impossible to know what is important. She keeps flipping, sees dates of birth she doesn’t recognise, some kind of grading – A, B, D, O. Clients, no doubt. Some kind of shorthand for their status or needs. Almost always undocumented, names and dates of birth are often the only identifying information that people escaping trafficking have got. She remembers that much at least.

  There are probably hundreds of names across all of these notepads. Among them are drawings of little mice, minutes from meetings with actions starred with asterisks and calls arranged with related organisations. Hard, tight circles scored in frustration.

  Greg has dated some of the pages. The notepad she’s looking at right now seems to be from 2014, so she sets it aside and picks up another to flip through. This one is 2013. Fewer scored angry circles the further back she goes; neater writing too. A simmer rather than a boil. The notebook she picks up now is from late 2018 and she flips to the end but it’s just more meaningless scrawl, even as the year ticks over into 2020 – the year he didn’t see out.

  This last notepad she’s just picked up carries on where the other left off – summer 2020, a couple of months before he died. Only a third of it is full. The last used page is a series of work actions that Greg never came back to complete. Numbers. People to call, clients to check on, meetings to arrange with related charities that support forced-marriage victims or sex workers. As she flips through, she sees nothing that hints at life and death questions – for her or for Greg. Nothing relating to Bluebell either.

  Breathe, do this properly.

  Marianne leafs slowly through the notepad again, this time taking one page at a time. This is the notepad Greg was using just before he died, it’s too important to just thumb through. She even continues looking through the blank pages after the writing stops, just in case.

  As Marianne reaches the dead centre, she can see that a page has been ripped out, a little fringe remaining along the inner spine. She holds the pad up to the light. The imprint of whatever was written on the missing page has been pressed into its neighbour.

  She runs her fingertips along it. It’s no good, it’s impossible to decipher. She gropes around the room for a pencil and sits back down with the notepad on her lap, using a feather-light touch to rub the soft pencil stub over the indentations, watching the words come back to life.

  Sam

  Through the gap in the curtains, from across the road in the park, I see Marianne Heywood leap up into view like she’s been shot.

  In her hands, she clutches a small book and struggles to keep hold of it, as if it’s grown hot to the touch. Now she holds it out in front of her and stares at it, her mouth hanging open.

  A plot twist, perhaps. Maybe a death.

  I know a lot about Marianne Heywood already but not the kind of books she reads and I wonder, pointlessly, about her tastes. Is this book in her hands some kind of modern-day bodice ripper? Or perhaps an action thriller, filled with a dizzying body count and a distinct lack of logic?

  My mother was a big reader, always thinking and dreaming. My father the opposite, practical, logical and prepared. I am more like my father, through nature and nurture.

  I wonder what my parents would think of my life now. They might understand the pragmatism, I think. But this is not the life they would want for me, any more than I would want this for my son.

  Marianne has disappeared already. Sinking out of view and back into her story. A little ship, bobbing up and down on a tide, and completely oblivious that she’s sailing in a direction from which there is no return.

  Marianne

  Pencil dust coats her fingers. She has made a frame of anxious charcoal smudges around the page. There isn’t much here. No doodles, dates of birth or angry scored circles. She’s stared at it for so long now that when Marianne closes her eyes, she can still see the words imprinted on her eyelids.

  Just five names, four of whom are total strangers. One who isn’t:

  Andrew Mackintosh

  Rosie Parsons

  David Ross

  Pavel Bourean

  Marianne Heywood

  There’s not even a glimmer of familiarity, no matter how hard she stares at the other four names on this list. Did I know anything about my husband?

  She looks at Greg’s Facebook profile, but none of those people are listed among his friends. With the exception of Pavel Bourean, they sound too British to be clients, who mostly come from outside the country. Marianne logs into Greg’s Gmail, searching for full names then just first names. Greg knew plenty of Andrews, none of them with the surname Mackintosh though. The rest come up totally empty, apart from, of course, Marianne Heywood.

  Why did you put me on this list, Greg? Who did you write it for?

  Back on Facebook, she finds thousands of people called Andrew Mackintosh, Rosie Parsons and David Ross. Too many to contact and none with any connections to
her or Greg. She finds no Pavel Bourean at all. Off-grid or made-up, the name is just as useless to her. It’s all useless to her.

  She tries Google but it’s the same story, a whole lot of nothing. And, in Pavel Bourean’s case, literally nothing.

  The light has faded, everything shrouded in shadow. She stares at the dark corner of the room and knows there is somewhere else to look for these names.

  This will be her third visit to the dark web in twenty-four hours, something bordering on a habit. Is this how it starts? Is this how it ends?

  *

  The wait is painful but the now familiar site is hardly a reassurance when it does reappear in front of her. She shivers despite the ambient temperature of the room.

  She copies the first name from the list carefully. How many people could be on this database in total, obliviously dancing towards the edge of something?

  Search results: Andrew Mackintosh, Godalming, date of birth: 2 July 1964.

  The black-and-white picture shows a middle-aged man in glasses. Marianne has never seen him before, but Greg had put him and her on a secret list.

  She searches the next, exhausted by the knowledge, some dreadful intuition, that she will find the next name too. And she does.

  Search results: Rosie Parsons, Tottenham, date of birth: 23 April 1993.

  A woman’s face looks directly at the camera, her blonde hair rendered silver in the monochrome image.

  Marianne searches the rest, writing down the dates of birth and locations until she knows the skeletal facts.

  Andrew Mackintosh, Godalming,

  date of birth: 2 July 1964.

  Rosie Parsons, Tottenham,

  date of birth: 23 April 1993.

  David Ross, Reigate,

  date of birth: 18 October 1976.

  Pavel Bourean, unknown,

  date of birth: unknown.