by Mike Binder
She missed her already. She thought about her so much more now than she did when she was alive, but that’s how it was, she figured; you only realize what you have when you’ve lost it. Edwina had been a good friend. It had been Edwina who was on duty when sixteen-year-old Steel landed at Scotland Yard with a wild tale of taxicabs being used to disrupt the Queen’s Jubilee. It was Wells who first sensed there was something to her story. Something to Steel. It was Wells who had convinced her parents to let the young Davina take the courses she took and then to serve her country.
“You’ve made me good and proud, Davina Steel.” She heard that, over and over. She missed her friend, and she burned bright now, smoldering with anger. She had been duped. She had been lied to. She had been treated with disdain, by a traitor. Georgia was somewhere laughing at her, she thought, laughing at her and reveling in the power she had stolen, laughing at the people that she was supposed to be looking over. Steel would bring her down, make her pay. She would make Edwina Wells proud.
* * *
SHE WENT TO see Darling at SO15. She realized there was a possibility that the major general was involved with the bombing as well. There were considerable resources spent in the reframing of the Dorrington murders. It would take someone high up in that world to push those kinds of buttons. It didn’t make sense to her, though—not Darling. He wasn’t a clubby political type. He was a soldier, a man of virtue. He was too rigid to chase that breed of fox. She didn’t see Turnbull or any of the others even having the audacity to confront someone like Darling with such a scheme.
She felt strongly that she knew people, could sense the superficially unseen. Events had proven that right. Her reputation spoke of it regularly. Yet she missed on Georgia, missed that one completely, hadn’t she? Could she be this wrong about Darling? She thought not.
* * *
“THE PM’S INVOLVED. From the beginning. She’s aligned with Heaton. I’m sorry, sir, but it’s true.” Darling sat wordless, a good three minutes—an eternity when you’re sitting across from someone whom you’ve just dropped the world on. Darling kept staring at her, chewing his lip underneath his bushy mustache. His spartan office walls were closing in on her. She was about to beg him for an answer when he finally spoke.
“It’s preposterous, but it makes some sense.” Again more silence; then, “I mean the whole thing makes no sense, yet oddly, this does make some sense. If it’s true, if you’re correct, then it’s a horror. A tragedy for England.” He got up, paced. “If you’re wrong though, Steel, if you’re off on this, it’s going to be the end of you, you realize that? It’ll gut you. From here on in. You’ll be done. Can you see that?”
“I’m not wrong. She’s involved. There are others as well. I was there. I saw what happened at Dorrington. I still have the bite marks.” Darling looked back to her now. She knew what he was thinking: Dorrington. A conspiracy. It all could be true. High-level connections? It would make strong sense with Heaton involved, but this was the prime minister she was implicating.
“I could set a trap for her, sir, make her reveal herself to you. Would that help?” He went back to his desk, sat across from her, played with his facial hair for another interminable amount of time, and then finally looked over the desk intently.
“What kind of a trap do you have in mind, Steel?”
TATUM ■ 4
Ryan Early never liked the Croydon Youth Center at the West Croydon YMCA. It had a feeling of being like a kid’s version of an old folks’ home. The furniture smelled like his grandmother’s place in Liverpool and the chubby counselors who made the rules and kept the kids in line all had a dull, vacant drone to every proclamation they made.
He was there because his mates were there, almost every day after school—playing football, watching movies, drinking Cokes, and stealing smokes. Ryan, fifteen, was a good kid. He was thin and sort of gawky. Like his father, he had a birdlike face. He also had a serious acne problem, one that came with the package of being fifteen and a lover of fried foods, candy, and sugary soft drinks. He liked girls in a way that he was too young and too closed down to realize wasn’t anywhere near as unhealthy as he thought it was.
That was the other thing about hanging around the YMCA youth center with all of his friends after school that interested him: the girls. The girls were there every day, not that they were much to look at, this pack, not that they spent any time looking back at him, but they were there, and happy, skipping, singing, and laughing, and he could look at them and dream. Girls like Chandra Johannsen, who was a neighbor and had incredibly giant breasts, or Mindy McTavis, whose dad worked for the government like Ryan’s dad did. They were the two top-tiered girls at the center, and neither ever bothered to say as much as a word to Ryan. They definitely didn’t seem to be inclined to do any of the “things” that he had his mind set on doing with them. He couldn’t even get them to acknowledge his existence.
The new girl had been coming around for about three days. She was, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, always there. She was beautiful. She was American. She was new in the area, from what word of her leaked down to Ryan and the oily boys in the cheap seats. No one was really sure where she came from.
The girls all took to her. She seemed always to have gossip or something to dispense and was constantly the center of attention in the middle of a pack of them, making the group laugh and squeal as one. Chandra Johannsen seemed to get a big kick out of everything she said. She had dark brown, bushy short hair that Ryan was sure must have smelled like a meadow, dark brown hair that Ryan would have no way of knowing was freshly dyed. She was a little older, maybe sixteen, with blue eyes and Hollywood teeth.
Maybe she was a movie star researching a part, studying how to play a girl from Croydon. That’s the notion that Ricky Finnegan was floating. They all wanted some good reason for her just being there, having landed among them. It wasn’t real unless there was a reason. She was too good to be true.
On the third day she said hello to Ryan at the water fountain. She was sweet, and luckily his breath was able to keep pace with his words and he didn’t embarrass himself too much. She looked into his eyes when she spoke to him. She had to have been an alien. She’s here studying life on earth. That’s all there is to it.
On the fourth day, as he was heading from the school over to the center, he saw her out and about on George Street coming out of an Orange mobile phone store. She was by herself, fiddling with a new phone. She even had the box and the bag still clumsily in hand. He watched for a bit and saw that she was frustrated. As she stopped and read the instructions, she turned and saw Ryan coming up the street. She showed a flash of embarrassment for having the problems she was having. The awkward teen wasn’t sure what to say or even how to say it. He just knew his heart was racing and he needed to move his lips, so he squeaked out a quick monosyllabic burp.
“Hey.” She smiled, appearing happy to see him.
“Hi. You’re from the center, right? I’m Trudy. Hello.”
“Ryan.” She reached out her hand. He shook it. Her skin was as friendly as she was—soft and warm to the touch. He was right, he thought. Her hair did smell like a meadow.
“Do you go to school here?”
“No. I’m from Illinois. My dad is here on business. I’m with him.”
“I didn’t think you were from around here.”
“I wish I was. I kind of like it here.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. I like the center. It’s fun. Plus it’s the only place my dad lets me go in the afternoons when he’s off working.” He wanted to say something clever but knew it was a bad idea, so he just nodded and stared at her.
“Do you know anything about phones? I’ve just got this new one and I’m trying to hook it up so I can text my dad, let him know I got it, let him know I’m okay. That I haven’t been taken or run away.” She made a comical face to empathize how lame she thought her father was. Ryan looked down at the phone as if he’d hit a jackpot. It was the same p
hone he had, the one he knew everything about. He wasn’t an expert at much but, boy, did he know the ins and outs of his phone.
“I know that one. It’s the same as mine, isn’t it?” He pulled out his phone and showed it to her so she knew he wasn’t lying.
“Oh, that’s great. Can you help me set this up? Is there any way?” It was everything he could do to contain himself.
“Where can we go?” she wondered as she turned to the coffeehouse across the street. “Can we go over there, grab a table? Have a coffee? I’m buying.”
She’s stunning. That’s all he could think about as they walked up to the corner and crossed at the crosswalk. Over and over to himself. She’s stunning, she smells amazing, her teeth are perfect, and she keeps touching my arm. Don’t mess this up. Don’t say too much. Don’t let her smell your breath.
* * *
LATER, AS SHE and her father drove back in the rented car her mother had gotten using her fake passport, Trudy was quiet. Adam sensed she wasn’t too happy to be involved with what they were doing.
“He seems like a nice boy.”
“He is.” She looked out the window of the compact car as they ambled north, up by Streatham Common, toward the city. She once again started thinking about the last few weeks. All she was doing was what Étienne had done to her. He and his crazy weirdo French mother had been using Trudy, and she was just doing the same to this little goofy kid with the acne and the big nose. She wondered if maybe Étienne felt the same way about her. Did he just pretend to find everything she said funny? Find her “adorable”? Was it all an act? Had she really been used that badly? She finally turned back to her father.
“Promise me again that we aren’t going to hurt him.”
“Of course not, Trudy. We’ll make his father worry, but we won’t hurt him at all. I promise.”
“Okay. I mean it, though. I get why we have to do this, but I don’t think it’s fair if we just become like them.” He looked over at her and managed to smile.
“What?”
“You’re growing up. I like it.”
* * *
THAT NIGHT, AS Ryan was about to go to bed, his phone buzzed. It was Trudy—the angel. He had used his phone to make a test text that afternoon when he set her phone up, so she had his number. This wasn’t a test, though. She was actually texting him now. He looked at the phone as if it were radioactive, worried that if he touched it she’d know, and he’d have touched it wrong.
“Thanks again for setting my phone up, Ryan. You’re the best. See you tomorrow.”
Should he respond? Should he just keep cool? Be digitally aloof? No way. She texted him and he wanted her to know that he was there for her. Maybe she was just lonely enough that she’d want him to be her boyfriend while she was in Croydon.
“It’s cool. I can help more. Do other things.”
Jesus. That sounds weird. Creepy.
“To your phone. Not to you.”
Even stupider, he thought. I can’t believe I sent that. He mulled over what to text next, how to dig himself out of the hole he thought he was in. He almost went into a panic when his phone buzzed again.
“You’re funny. That made me laugh.”
It was followed with an emoticon of a face giving a big red kiss. Then it buzzed again.
“See you tomorrow at the center.”
He didn’t sleep a wink that night.
* * *
ADAM AND KATE got into a spat over what he had brought Trudy into. They talked quietly on Adam’s side of the connected duo of fuggy hotel rooms. He did his best to make his wife understand that they had no other choice. Things were speeding now to an inexorable conclusion. It was “us or them.” Jack Early needed to be coerced into helping him expose Georgia Turnbull and the others in order to clear Adam’s name.
“I’m just worried she’ll live with this forever, live with all of this forever.”
“I’m sure she will, Kate. There’s no doubt of that. This is a nightmare, for all of us. It’s pretty obvious, though, that if these people have their way, if they catch us, they’ll do to us exactly what they did to Richard and to your father.” She turned her head into the ratty bedcover on the lumpy bed and covered her face so he wouldn’t see the tears.
“I’m sorry, Kate, I don’t mean to scare you, but I don’t think we have a choice.”
* * *
ADAM, BILLY, AND Trudy drove down to Croydon the next morning. Adam didn’t bother to wake Kate to say good-bye. She was sleeping these days fifteen or sixteen hours at a time, cloaked in depression and fear-fueled self-pity. Adam couldn’t fix that. He made a decision to steer straight ahead. Let her be. She was safe asleep in that rat hole of a hotel room.
He would do what he had to do. He didn’t need her approval anymore. He was waiting for her to admit that she was wrong, waiting for her to apologize for not believing him when he told her that he was in trouble, that he was worried about the whole trip, that he didn’t want to go to Downing Street. For not trusting him when he told her the whole thing smelled bad and that her father was involved, but it wasn’t Kate’s way. She didn’t accept blame. She was a permanent victim. It was always she who had been wronged, and nothing about the state of their sorry lives right now got in the way of that familiar pattern. Let her fucking sleep, he thought. I have shit to do.
* * *
TRUDY SPENT THE afternoon at the youth center. While she was there, doing her best to subtly further the friendship with Ryan, Adam spent the afternoon with Billy, waiting, killing time, having pizza, and playing arcade games. He tried to talk to his son, wanted to see where he was on all that was happening, but Billy wasn’t taking the bait. He didn’t want to talk. All of his answers were quick and clipped, brittle bricks in the sturdy barrier of noncommunication that he had erected around himself. Adam decided not to push. He could only imagine what must be going on in that poor little eight-year-old’s mind. He couldn’t help but think little Billy was actually holding up damn well.
He was proud of both of his kids. They may not have been wanting to say much, but the overriding emotion they were conveying, both of them, after the fear, was a protective desire to stand alongside their father, to do what they could to support him, to let him know they were there for him.
It was inside a yogurt shop in Croydon, while they were waiting for Trudy, sitting in plastic seats by the window, looking out onto the High Street, each slurping down a tub of frozen yogurt, that Billy finally started talking.
“Poppa’s dead. Right, Dad? He’s dead? Someone killed him up at that place in the woods, when you got bitten by dogs? Right?” Adam took a minute to answer. The subject up until then had been sidestepped. Kate had made the decision for them. She didn’t want Billy to know. She felt he had enough on his plate to deal with. They had told him they were going to see him again once they were home. In fact, they had lied to him. He was now instantly done with that. He turned to his son.
“Yes, your Poppa is dead. That’s true.”
“I’m never going to see him again?”
“You aren’t. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t really know him that well.”
“No, but he was crazy about you, Billy.”
“The people who killed him, are they the ones that are trying to make people think you’re bad?”
“Yes, the same people.”
“I wish that I could kill them myself, all of them. Shoot them.”
“I understand that.”
“I mean, how would they feel if someone had killed their Poppa? How would they feel, Dad?”
“I’m sure they wouldn’t like that.” Billy let it all roll around in his head some more. He sat in saddened silence while he looked distantly out to the street. After a few more minutes, Adam got rid of their trash. They left the shop without talking, walking down to the car. He opened the rear passenger door for his son, made sure his seat belt was fastened, closed him in, and walked around to the driver’s seat. As he sat in the car and
fished for his keys, he looked into the rearview mirror to see and hear Billy bawling his eyes out. He waited quietly, with nothing to add. He decided it best to let his young son have a good cry.
* * *
THEY PICKED TRUDY up around the corner just before dinnertime and drove back to London in the middle of rush-hour traffic. He had her text the Early kid once again as they crossed the Thames.
“Good seeing you today. My phone works great. You’re a star!”
He had her throw in another gooey emoticon for good measure.
* * *
RYAN ENDURED DINNER with his mom and two sisters in their tiny, newly redone West Croydon kitchen that night. He wanted to talk to someone about the girl, Trudy, the divine one. Her mom would just tell him not to waste his time. His sisters would giggle—they giggled at everything, especially things that Ryan felt strongly about—so he said nothing.
His father worked late, as usual. He had an important job. He was an important man, and now that his boss was the prime minister, he was even more vital. He didn’t have the time to come home to have dinner with them, let alone the bandwidth to talk to Ryan about some girl whom he helped set up a stupid phone for. He decided he wouldn’t mention Trudy to anyone. She would be his secret. He would eat dinner and go to his room in solitude and stare at his phone with a devotional hope that she would make it vibrate, praying that she would text some version of light into his lonely, drab, acne-scarred life.
In the morning he was up at the crack of dawn. He had fallen asleep with the phone in his hand. She hadn’t texted him at all that night. His father had just gotten in from a trip out to Chequers with Miss Turnbull and her entourage, which was most likely what had woken him. It was going to be a long day, waiting and wishing. His father having stumbled off to bed and his mother already headfirst into the laundry, he was given a handful of chores to do, a list of things to run out for, which he gladly took on as a diversion. Each and every moment and movement was wrapped and filtered by a guttural longing for his phone to buzz. It finally did.
