by T. J. Lebbon
Her son, Alex, comes crying to her with a grazed knee, grass stains surrounding the scratches.
Jane Smith paused only for a moment, last chunk of croissant halfway to her mouth. Her coffee steamed. A breeze sang through the corn crops in the neighbouring field and stirred the wild poppies speckling its edges like beads of blood on an abraded land.
She finished eating her breakfast and drinking her coffee, licking her fingers and picking up pastry crumbs from the plate. The memory was already gone. But every such memory was also always there.
This life was a thin veneer. Routine gave it substance, and repetition made it almost like being free.
But Jane Smith was more than one person. After brewing her third cup of strong coffee of the day, and still before nine in the morning, she picked up her iPad.
First she accessed Twitter. Her current account was under one of many pseudonyms, but it was time to change, so she opened a new account under a new name. A few quick posts about apple pie recipes, pictures of cakes, and a couple of funny cat memes, then she searched some cookery hashtags and friended a handful of random people. That done, she accessed five accounts that she liked to keep track of and friended those, too. These people were in her past, and though she’d made a promise to the few she liked, most would never want to see her again. She might have helped them, but in many cases she had corrupted and cursed them, too. Salvation came at a price.
She knew that more than most.
There were no messages there for her, secretive or otherwise, and nothing to raise her concern. She was glad.
She was always glad.
Leaving Twitter running in the background, she surfed other social media sites from a variety of fake ISP accounts. No name was her own, and none were those she had used in real life. Her net activity left no trail, and every relevant page or search was bookended with several random surfs.
Everything was quiet. That was how she liked it. She could have lived like this for the rest of her life, if her sense of morality allowed. It wasn’t that she was always out for vengeance. She wasn’t sure what it was.
It’s all I can do, she’d think when she mused on things. And considering what she had been, and who she’d had, that was the most depressing thing of all.
When she started scrolling through the news sites and saw the item, and scanned the first paragraph, everything changed. Her stomach dropped, and she felt the familiar sense of change settling around her.
The calm reality of her life at the gîte became a facade. Ever since becoming the person she now was, she’d had the sense of the world beyond her horizons conspiring to draw her out and cut her down.
There were plans, conspiracies, machinations, and sometimes she even imagined vast machines working secretly beyond the hills and past the curvature of the Earth, great steam-driven things that drilled and burrowed through the hollows she could not see, the places she did not yet know. They would connect like massive spider webs, drawing tighter and closer until there she was. Caught. Trapped by circumstance, and unable to look away.
All the horrors she had witnessed and experienced, and the terrors she had perpetuated herself, made looking away impossible.
‘Now here we are,’ she said. She read the whole article, picked up the phone, dialled. After four rings she disconnected, then she dialled again. He picked up after three. That way they both knew that things were well.
But not for long.
‘Have you seen the news?’ she asked.
‘I try to avoid it. Too depressing.’
‘There was a double murder in South Wales. A girl had her lips and nostrils glued shut.’
Silence from the other end.
‘Post office job gone wrong.’
‘So?’
She frowned. It was strange having this conversation in such calm, beautiful surroundings. Over the hills, she thought. Past the trees. Machines turning and steaming, vast cogs grinding, dripping oil, casting lines to hook into my flesh.
‘Don’t you care?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘But you’ve been waiting for something like this for years. Don’t you want to …’ She trailed off. He always steered these conversations even if she started them.
‘Take revenge? And how did that work for you?’
A slew of images flashed across her mind. None of them were nice. Her hip ached where she’d been shot in Wales three years before, stalking and killing the people of the Trail, the shady organisation responsible for her family’s deaths. Her arm was stiff, muscles knotted and hard from another bullet impact. They’d shot her, but she had survived. Perhaps she’d even triumphed. But she didn’t feel like a winner.
‘It’s a lovely morning,’ she said.
‘Beautiful. Anything else?’
She’d tried to get close to Holt over the past couple of years. He’d pulled her out of her alcoholism following the murders of her family, then he’d trained her, preparing her for vengeance. Even so, she knew that he’d shown her only a small part of what he had learned and experienced over the years. His history was deep, and bathed in blood and grief.
And all the time, every moment they were together or apart, Holt seemed totally in charge.
She hung up without saying any more. It was her own attempt to take control of the conversation.
Jane Smith, real name Rose, glanced at her watch and decided it was time for another coffee.
Rose ran.
She had never been a runner. It still felt like a new thing for her. But since that time in the Welsh hills with Chris Sheen three years before, and the Trail, and the violence and pain that had resulted, it had become therapeutic. The Trail had selected Chris for a human trophy hunt, holding his family hostage to ensure he played ball. If he was caught and killed by the hunters, his family went free. If he escaped, they died.
It was the same terrible dilemma that Rose herself had once faced at their hand. She had escaped. Her family had not.
Chris had shown how running could keep you alive, and not just because you stayed ahead of those who meant you harm. It cleared the mind, flushed the veins, worked your systems. It was like a detox of the brain, gasping away accumulated ideas that were growing staid and stale. It drained thoughts that might do you harm. It was a form of freedom and serenity, when Rose rarely felt free, and to be serene was a state she had forgotten years before.
After leaving Wales, she had started with a few miles. She quickly became obsessed. When it was just her and her route, she might have been free. Now, she often ran eighty miles each week, but she never seemed to get anywhere she wanted to go.
Every step she took jolted up through her damaged hip.
Take revenge? And how did that work for you?
Holt knew how it had worked for her. Not at all. Killing the people who had murdered her family had done nothing to lessen the hollowness their loss had carved out inside her.
The grief was not tempered, the rage not calmed. It was something she’d had to do, and he had been partly responsible for her achieving and surviving the task. But so many deaths by her hand had done nothing to make the past more bearable, nor the future more certain.
She dreamed of them less now, at least. Her husband and three children, slaughtered in that basement by the Trail, gone forever without any of them having a chance to say goodbye. But maybe that lessening of dreams was more down to the passage of time than anything she had done.
Sometimes, she wondered whether her killing spree had achieved anything at all.
Rose pounded down the sloping woodland trails towards the lake. There were public footpaths through here, but they were rarely trodden, and she let herself run free. She wore shorts and a vest, knobbly trail shoes, and brambles and nettles scratched and stung her legs, tree branches lashed at her bare arms and shoulders. She welcomed the pain. She never actively hurt herself, but whenever pain came she relished it. It was one thing she’d never talked about to Holt. Partly because it frightened her, but
she was also terrified that he would nod, understand, and tell her that she was now just like him.
She didn’t want to be like that. She didn’t want to descend so far, become so lost. They had worked together several times since the hunt in Wales. She took jobs for people who needed her help, innocents who were suffering or naive people pulled into difficult situations. She liked to think she still had morals, and that her sense of injustice drove her to do the things she did.
It was more complex than that, of course. Rose knew that well enough, but analysing too deeply scared her.
With Holt it was … fun. He didn’t need the money, and she could not even convince herself that he did those things to be closer to her, or to protect and help her.
She truly believed he enjoyed it.
By the time she reached the lake she was sweating heavily, panting, and her legs were burning. She turned left and followed the path along the shore, leaping a fallen tree, skirting around an area where the bank had collapsed into the water, arriving eventually at the small silt beach. The ground here was hard, the water having receded several feet due to the blazing hot summer they were still experiencing. Dropping onto the compacted sand, she kicked off her trainers and stared across the lake.
The other side was two hundred metres away, heavily wooded and rising beyond into a series of low hills. She’d circled the lake a dozen times before, a tough eight mile run that necessitated passing through several private properties. She was never seen or heard. Now, a group of kids larked on the shore and in the water directly across from her. Music was playing, a sibilant hiss, and they were jumping in from a tree that stretched out across the lake. Their laughter and delighted screams seemed to come from so far away.
Rose waded into the water, still in shorts and vest, and felt the slick bed closing around her feet. She jumped forward and went under, and after surfacing she turned on her back and floated. With her ears below the surface the world was silent, cool, consisting of nothing but a burning sky. She drifted there for a while. Hardly moved. Listened to her breathing, the gentle pop of water in her ears, her world for now so close around her that nothing else seemed to exist.
Molly, her sweet daughter, jumps into the pool, laughing as she surfaces, splashing Rose where she sits reading a book.
Rose rolled onto her front and started swimming. She breathed every three strokes, keeping her eyes closed underwater. Swimming was her least favourite exercise, partly because of the pain in her right arm, but mainly because she did not feel totally in control. She never went far. Fifteen minutes of hard swimming and she left the lake, enjoying the coolness across her skin as the sun dried the water. Even before she was fully dry she slipped her trainers on and started running again, heading along the shore towards the eastern tip of the lake, and the small footbridge that crossed the narrow river that fed it.
She’d already decided what she had to do. It was too easy for Holt to dismiss her on the phone, and it had been six weeks since they’d seen each other face to face.
It took another hour to complete her run and return.
She showered quickly, and as she was crossing the spare room where she kept her clothing and kit, she caught sight of herself in the wardrobe mirror. Even now she sometimes surprised herself. She paused and stared at the stranger staring back. Thinner than she’d ever been, leaner, stronger, she was also so far removed from the mother and wife who had let grief suck her into a well of alcoholic despair. Not a single drop of alcohol had passed her lips for over five years. Sometimes, the despair remained.
Even her dead husband, Adam, would have difficulty recognising her now. Her hair was shorter than it had ever been, spiked and dyed blonde. She wore green-tinted contact lenses. Her face was drawn, cheeks hollowed, and she’d lost every ounce of the fat that had given her what he’d called cherub cheeks. Laughter lines remained at the corners of her mouth and eyes, the scars of old smiles. Her left ear was pierced three times, and she wore a stud in her nose.
It was a diamond. She thought such luxury amusing.
She still carried the tattoo on her thigh. She’d had it because the woman who’d killed her family had it, visiting the same tattooist to glean what information she could. Laser treatment had never occurred to her. It was small, and would only be seen by those looking closely enough. Since her husband Adam, no one had.
She dressed in her cycling kit, locked up, and hit the road.
An hour later, approaching the small caravan that Holt had taken for himself, she was struck once again by how deserted it seemed. Holt fostered such an image, but she braked and paused by the small gate into the field, shielding her eyes and scanning the caravan and its surroundings. There were no signs of life.
She carried her bike across the ridged field. Its crop had already been harvested, leaving only sharp stubble.
‘It’s me!’ she called. It was unnecessary. He’d already know who was there.
The door was locked. She knocked, using their code. Two knocks, five, one. No answer.
‘John?’ He was John Williams. She was Jane Smith. In public, on the phone, anywhere.
Convinced that she was alone, she took out her bike’s toolkit and flicked open the small knife. It took fifty seconds to pick the caravan’s lock. She was out of practice. It was something she’d feared when they decided to settle for a few months, that they would become rusty, complacent, soft.
Door unlocked, she opened it a crack and peered through. The failsafe he used when he was inside was disconnected. Anyone breaking in when he was in residence would take a shotgun blast to the face.
Inside, she could already see that he’d left in a rush. Anger coursed through her. He wouldn’t have changed his mind so quickly, that was for sure, and even as she’d called him he must have been packing and preparing to leave.
‘Holt, you bloody prick!’ she muttered. Whenever she thought she was getting close to knowing him, she realised he was more of an enigma than ever.
She couldn’t help feeling hurt. He’d seen the reports and chosen to go on his own, not with her. They’d never really been a team, but she liked to think they had become friends, working together a few times since taking down the Trail’s UK cell. She trusted him as much as she would ever trust anyone again. She believed in him.
He’d lied to her, left without her, and that smarted.
A small note was propped on the table, beside an empty water bottle. Changed my mind, it said.
‘Yeah. Right. Bastard.’ She sighed and sat outside the caravan, looking across the fields at the farmstead in the distance, and the sweeping patterns the breeze made in dozens of acres of crops.
It took only a couple of minutes to convince herself that she had to follow.
Chapter Eight
Manson Eyes
For the final few normal hours of her life, Emma followed a familiar routine.
‘Hurry up, you’ll be late for school!’
‘Okay, Mum.’
She stood at the bottom of the stairs, listening to Daisy humming along to something on her iPod. Every school morning was the same, and every morning her daughter was out of the door with seconds to spare. It was only her second week back in school following the summer holidays, but it seemed that this final year in primary school would be the same.
‘Come on! I’ve got to get ready myself, yet.’
‘Chill pill, Mum.’ Daisy appeared at the top of the stairs. Short and slight like Emma, but also possessing her mother’s athletic build and love of sports, Dom always said that Daisy was going to be a heartbreaker.
‘What?’ Daisy asked as she hurried downstairs.
‘You’re gorgeous.’
‘Like a princess?’
‘Gorgeouser.’
‘That’s not a word.’
‘It is. I’m your mummy and I say so.’
‘Mu-um!’ Daisy rolled her eyes. She hardly ever called Emma “mummy” any more, another milestone that had drifted by without them really noticing.
>
‘Got your homework and stuff for your art project?’
‘Yep.’
‘And you’ll walk straight home from school.’
‘No, I’ll go to town and go to the pub then go to the nightclub.’
‘And where’s my invitation?’
Daisy rolled her big blue eyes again. ‘Mu-um!’
‘Love you.’ Emma kissed her, opened the door, and watched the most precious thing in her world leave. She often watched Daisy down the driveway and along the street, knew she was embarrassed by it, but guessed that deep inside she also quite liked it.
Even so young, Daisy was quickly becoming her own person. She was growing into someone who made her parents intensely proud, but that couldn’t camouflage the sense that she was already leaving them.
Sometimes when Emma watched Daisy walking away, her heart ached.
She closed the front door and sighed. The house was suddenly silent, with no blaring music, hassled husband or singing daughter to stir the air. Emma didn’t really like the house this quiet. It sang with the ghosts of children unknown.
She had always wanted more than one child. It had taken three years of trying before Daisy was conceived, after being told by doctors that she would probably never have babies. They’d tried for another without success, and now in their early forties she and Dom were still leaving things to chance. But she felt her clock rapidly ticking, and she was resigned to their daughter being an only child.
Secretly, she was sure that Dom blamed her, probably because in her darkest moments she blamed herself. She hadn’t even known Dom in those wild few years she’d spent with Genghis Cant and Max Mort. He had been the steady rock further downstream in her future.
At the age of eighteen she’d fallen so easily into that life, attracted by the glamour of a touring band, the charisma of its lead singer, the carefree atmosphere and sense of freedom that came from being in a different town every week and a different country every couple of months. They’d never been huge, but they’d built a large enough fan base to enable them to tour constantly, make reasonable money from their regular albums, and buy and maintain a small tour bus.
