The Catalyst

by Helena Coggan

  He blinked, pulling himself up on his elbows.

  “Do you have a knife?”

  The girl gave it to him silently. The Commander pulled back the sleeve of his right arm, so that the swelling in his wrist was clearly visible. He paused, took off his jacket, twisted the sleeve into a hard knot of leather and bit down on it. Then he opened up his wrist with the knife. The blood came quickly, in slow, pulsing beats.

  The girl stared in horrified fascination as the Commander closed his eyes and prized something round and silver from his wrist. It was small and bloody, but it could still be seen to glow softly green in the darkness. The Commander took the jacket out of his mouth, opened his hand, and let the silver ball drop onto the pavement.

  The moment it left his skin, he changed. There was a snap, as if of static electricity, and a flash of green light, and abruptly the Commander was gone. Another man — younger, taller, green-eyed, brown-haired — watched her warily, kneeling on the concrete.

  The girl shrieked and pulled away, but David Elmsworth lunged forward and seized her arm with his injured hand. His grip was painfully tight. She stared at him in horror.

  “I saw you die,” she whispered. “You died, in front of me . . .”

  “I know.” His eyes darted around the street, checking for lights clicking on in the windows. “Where are we?”

  She was too terrified to answer for a moment. His eyes hardened. “Where are we?”

  “Dartford station. By the river. Nearly out of the city.”

  “Good,” he whispered. He looked back toward the end of the road, where the blackness thickened to impenetrability. “Were there any casualties?”

  “What?”

  “Tonight, in the Department. Who else did you see die?”

  She shook her head and swallowed. “No one. Not that I saw. They were all arrested. I dragged you into a closet until no one was looking.”

  “No Government soldiers died? None of your own? No . . . no girls with dark hair?”

  “No. We didn’t even have a chance to fight.”

  He nodded, slowly. She cringed away from him again, and he rose to a crouch, still holding her wrist.

  “You’re dead,” she said again, wishing desperately that it were true.

  He was looking behind him again, at the darkness at the end of the road. His blood had seeped into the palm of her hand. He turned back to her. “It’s all right. What’s your name?”

  “Katya.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Katya. You’ll be fine.”

  He waited until she had stopped shivering with fear, then leaned forward and reached for her throat. A sharp blow to the jugular vein and she dropped before she could fight back. He got up, pulling the green bomber jacket back on.

  He pressed his left hand to the wound in his wrist and it sealed up. Then he walked down to the end of the road. He could hear the low murmuring of the river ahead of him. The darkness was almost complete, and he had to feel for the road, listen for oncoming cars. There were none. He crossed to the riverbank.

  To his left were the lights of London. Streetlights and shouting and police cars. And somewhere in the midst of it all, his daughter, waiting for him.

  Good-bye to all that.

  He knelt beside the river alongside the grass-lined road and let the water run over his hands, cleaning them of his own blood. He looked down at the tarmac path, leading into the darkness, the wide starless hills and silence. He stood for a moment and listened to the shifting of the rippling black waters beside him. Then he walked away.

  The long, wonderful, unlikely process of writing this book has taken almost two years. Throughout all of it, I have received constant support, friendship and encouragement from various people who had far better things to do with their time, and for this I am inexpressibly grateful.

  First, my wonderful editor, Kate Howard at Hodder. Kate, it was you who took the time to read this manuscript, you who pitched it to the board, you who have given up so many months and so much effort towards it, and you who introduced me to butternut-squash cake. To this day I am not quite sure why you did any of these things, but I am lucky — incredibly, astronomically lucky — that you did. I have you to thank for so much of my happiness these days.

  Also at Hodder, Emily Kitchin’s insight and thoughtfulness vastly improved the book from its original drafts; Zelda Turner’s keen eyes and infinite patience made it far easier to read; and at John Murray, the generosity and kindness of Georgina Laycock was the beginning of all of this. My eternal thanks also to Becca Mundy, whose championing of the book did so much to get it out into the world, and to get people reading it. I am so grateful for her hard work, her patience and her faith in the book and in me, which remained steady, even when my own confidence was distinctly underwhelming. Her ability to make someone feel as if they can do anything — for just long enough to get them through the task at hand — has been especially invaluable, and I owe her a lot.

  To my friends: if I am in any way deserving of the encouragement, sanity and support you have given me, you already know how grateful I am to all of you. If not . . . well. Thank you so much for everything. I would not be here without you.

  Tika, Lara, Hanna, Carlotta, Hannah, Frannie, Francesca and Grace — you all read various drafts and contributed immensely to it with your wise and thoroughly rational advice, of which I hope the final book is worthy. I thank you for that, and the hours — it must be hours by now — you have spent listening to me hark on about this. I will continue to siphon off your wit and wisdom for as long as you let me hang around you. Now, please, for the love of God, wipe those drafts from your hard drives and never tell anyone how terrible they were.

  Some of my teachers have had to put up with almost as much of my talking about this as my friends, and all of them have added hugely to my knowledge and well-being. Lest I run out of space, I won’t try to catalog everything I have to thank them for, but suffice it to say that without them this book would most certainly not exist. So, trolls: you know who to blame.

  And, of course, my family. All of them, especially my grandparents, have been fantastically excited and supportive about the prospect of publication. I hope this book is worthy of that support, and that it lives up to your expectations. With that in mind, I hope your expectations are very, very low.

  My parents, being journalists, know that everything you read in print is invariably true. So, with that in mind, I would like to state for the record that my mother is the cleverest and kindest woman in the world, and my father the bravest and wittiest man, and neither of them can correct me now because I’m ending the paragraph, ha ha.

  And then there is Catherine. Catherine — you are the sweetest, sanest, happiest, smartest, wisest and most violent younger sister anyone ever had. This book is dedicated to you — yours, forever — first as a tribute to that, but also by way of an apology for all the time I spent writing it when I should have been with you. I hope you enjoy reading it, but while you do, always remember:

  I love you more than any of this.

  The knock on the door came at half-past five in the morning. Rose, who had long since trained herself to be ultra-sensitive to any kind of suspicious noise, woke immediately. She stared for a few long moments at the glowing clock on her radio, and turned on the light. Angels knew she did not need this now.

  She sighed, wrapped herself in a dressing gown, and got up. Her coordination was not at its best this early, but she tried to keep her footsteps light as she passed Tabitha’s bedroom. The girl got precious little sleep as it was.

  Loren was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, messy-haired and disgruntled. “If these are journalists again,” he whispered, “do I have your permission to kill them?”

  “Do you need it?”

  “No, but it would be nice to know you wouldn’t hold it against me.”

  “I wouldn’t do anything of the sort. I’d help.”

  “It might be messy.”

  The knock came ag
ain. Loren considered, and nodded. “It will be messy,” he said, and went to the door. Rose made to follow him, but he put up a hand to stop her. She ducked behind the door frame of the living room.

  “Who is it?” she heard Loren call hoarsely.

  “It’s me,” came a familiar, muffled voice. Rose froze. There was a noticeable pause before Loren pulled the door open. His voice was abruptly curt.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here,” he said, “but I’m going to give you one chance to leave.”

  A hesitation. “I need to talk to Rose.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “She needs to explain —”

  “Like hell she needs to explain anything to you.”

  “Please, Loren. You don’t understand —”

  Rose stepped out from behind the door frame and waited as James’s voice trailed off. He stood in the doorway, dressed in khaki, pale and shivering. There was snow and streetlight glow in his red hair. He stared at her. Loren looked between them, and sighed.

  “Come in,” he told James, “but one wrong word —”

  “I understand,” said James immediately. “I won’t — I’ll behave myself.”

  “And if you say —”

  “I understand,” said James vehemently, almost angrily, and Loren stopped. James glanced at him, and stepped over the threshold.

  “Why are you here?” asked Rose in a low voice. “It’s been —”

  “Six months,” he said. “I know.” He looked at Loren. “Any chance of a coffee?”

  “No,” said Loren, and walked past him. James sighed, and gestured to the living room. Rose nodded, and sat down on her armchair. He took the opposite sofa. He’d been working in the army, apparently, over the past half-year, as a strategist. He was up for promotion. Suitable, really, for the man who revealed her father’s secret to the world.

  Big break for a seventeen-year-old.

  Of course it would have been embarrassing, working with David Elmsworth and his daughter for eighteen months and not suspecting a thing, but then Elmsworth had taken everyone in. And true, the story almost certainly would have broken without him. But it had been he who had filed the report, he who informed the authorities. He whose career had benefited most from her father’s downfall.

  Rose watched him settle himself uncomfortably on the sofa. He looked up at her.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said, somewhat lamely.

  “Clearly,” was her reply. From the kitchen, she heard Loren chuckle.

  James bit his lip.

  “They say your father’s not cooperating with his lawyer,” he said, softly enough that Loren would not be able to hear him. “They say he’s refusing to confirm his name and address.”

  “Is that why you’re here, James?”

  He hesitated. “No.”

  “Then get to the point,” she said. “What do you want?”

  He paused again. “I needed to ask you some questions.”

  “Then ask them.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone what he was?”

  “Because I love him,” she said. “Next question.”

  He persisted. “But why? Surely it would have been better —”

  “To hand him over,” she said. “To tell people what he was.”

  “Yes.”

  She leaned back into the armchair, studying him, trying to keep her voice flat. “James, you think he murdered those people, don’t you? Rayna Arkwood and Thomas Argent and God knows how many others?”

  All sound of movement from the kitchen stopped abruptly at the mention of Loren’s sister’s name.

  “That’s not what I’m here about.”

  “Oh yes it is. You think he’s evil, and you want to get me to admit it.”

  He lowered his voice. “Rose, he’s a monster. You don’t know what he’s capable of.”

  Something inside her burned and broke. She got to her feet.

  “I do,” she said. “I know exactly what he’s capable of. James, you worked with him. You trusted him. You don’t really think he’s evil. The man you knew was not a monster, not in any voluntary sense.”

  “I didn’t know — I wasn’t paying attention. He could have —”

  At her look, he faltered; she was giving him a glare of such utter contempt that anger flashed across his face for a moment.

  “Get out,” she said. “You don’t deserve answers.”

  “Rose, I need to know —”

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “You haven’t come here for information. You’ve come here to try and convince me that he’s a killer. And that’s not going to happen.”

  “No! Rose, I just — I want to know — Do you care more about justice, about what’s right, than you do about him?”

  “Of course not, you bastard. He’s my father.”

  “I know it looks like that to you, but the circumstances in which he found you — the fact that your birth parents never came forward — it looks suspicious, you must see that —” He stopped. Loren was standing in the kitchen doorway, watching him in the half-curious way a hunter might watch a deer he had just shot. After a second’s hesitation, James burst out, “He’s brainwashed you, Rose, can’t you see that?”

  “Get out,” said Loren quietly, “or I swear to God I will kill you.”

  James got up, half furious now, pulling on his coat. “Rose, please see sense, I’m trying to help you —”

  “Get out of my house,” said Loren again, with no change in tone. “Now.”

  James edged his way out of the living room, backing toward the door. “Rose, we used to be friends.”

  Loren pulled out his gun and cocked it. Rose glanced at him, worried. He was stony-faced.

  “Out,” he said.

  James’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t shoot me. I am a soldier —”

  “And I’m the acting Head of the Department,” said Loren, “and you of all people should know the order in which we shoot and ask questions.”

  James glared at him, and pulled open the door. They watched him. His expression softened as he looked at Rose. It was almost pleading. “Rose, I want to trust you.”

  “Oh good,” she said flatly.

  “Rose . . .” Something strange passed over his face, a pained contortion. Then, with obvious effort, he said slowly: “I am . . . sorry . . . that he is suffering.”

  “I will forgive you the day he is exonerated,” said Rose. “That good enough for you?”

  “Rose —”

  She glanced at Loren and stepped forward toward the door, toward James; he almost took a step back, but stopped himself. “James,” she said softly. “I love him, and that’s never going to change, so you may as well accept that now and work from there, all right?”

  He looked at her for a long moment and muttered something, and then strode down the garden path and left, slamming the gate behind him and huddling against the snow. Rose looked back at Loren, who still had his gun in the air and who was staring after James, eyebrows close together. She closed the door carefully.

  “Did you hear what he said?” she asked quietly.

  Loren put the gun down and sat on the stairs, still staring after James.

  “I think it was ‘give it time,’” he said.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2015 by Helena Coggan

  Cover photograph copyright © 2016 by Science Photo

  Library — PASIEKA/Getty Images (eye)

  Photograph on page 9 copyright © Image Farm Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First U.S. electronic edition 2016

  Library of Congress Cata
log Card Number pending

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