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by Claire North

  The next day he went into the kitchen, and it was spotless.

  “It’s great you’ve come,” whispered the girl as they squeezed by each other in the tight, carpet-torn corridor. “It’s really good to have something to work for.”

  Some of the people in the house wanted to scream, but this was London, and screamers weren’t welcome in this part of town, they vanished, disappeared at the slightest sound of trouble, emotionally assaulting the neighbours was the charge, causing distress. So they buried their heads into their pillows and howled until they were half-suffocated, and that appeased them a little bit, for a while.

  At 4 a.m. a man staggered in, his face coated with black, his hands coated with black, the smell of ash and the Underground on his boots, and he went into the bathroom and locked the door and fell asleep inside, and when they woke him with knocking in the morning his face was still black, but he’d got as far as washing his hands and didn’t seem to notice anything else.

  The next day Theo discovered that the original owner of the house was still there, living in the attic. “I used to be a banker,” he whispered when Theo brought him tea. “I made four twenty a year, before bonus. But one day I went to the patty line, an investment opportunity, and I looked. I looked. And once I’d looked I couldn’t forget, I couldn’t look away, I tried to look away and it was like it was burned. It was burned. I don’t like to go outside now. The guys downstairs look after me. They look after me. They look … everyone can see it. We can all see it. So now I’m here.”

  On the fourth day Theo caught the bus into the centre of town, pressed in with the old women and the children, the greasy-armed men in sweaty T-shirts, the travellers with bags too big for the luggage space who were glared at and who glared defiantly in return. He stood away from the one cracked security camera, head down, hood up, and did not watch the streets, and listened for his stop, which came fifty-five minutes later, just outside King’s Cross.

  He walked, unsure if this world was real, let alone familiar, a familiar place that he had known, up towards the canal, through the new buildings of silver steel and green glass, towers framed in skeletal shells, spined like porcupines; up to the restored old warehouses that now housed arts and dramas, music and penthouse flats. He sat by a fountain that spat bursts of white foam in busy, regimented rhythm, following a programme of surges and falls, and decided that it was all the same and only he had changed.

  A gym was on the other side of the water. Above the front door a picture of a woman with bad technique and a huge grin punched towards the camera. As the door opened, it revealed a counter where a bored man in red sold protein shakes, dumb-bells, yoga mats and memberships. Gym memberships were good for an extra £2000 on the cost of an indemnity, if you got murdered with one. Showed that you were really trying to look after your health.

  Theo waited.

  The sun set, and he waited.

  At 8.25 p.m. Mala Choudhary emerged, her dark hair swept back, bright pink trainers on her feet, legs sculpted in black leggings, a bag slung across one shoulder, chin high and skin hot from exertion. She walked towards King’s Cross. Theo followed until she caught a cab and vanished into the traffic.

  The next day he waited outside the gym for Mala to go inside, then followed Bea around to the service door. Bea knocked four times, then waited, head down, fingers tucked into her sleeves against the cold, a penitent monk in a tracksuit.

  The door opened. A woman with a plastic stud through her nose, scar on her chin, dressed in burgundy T-shirt and white shorts, stood on the other side.

  “Blessed are her hands,” whispered Bea. “Blessed are those who weave and those who break.”

  The woman nodded once, without smiling, and let Bea inside.

  Theo waited.

  Ten minutes later Bea emerged. She had a data card in her pocket, a copy of Mala Choudhary’s phone cloned onto it. She had photos of Mala’s credit cards, including the lovely Company platinum card for wining and dining high-value-indemnity clients—the mass murderers, arms and drugs dealers—in all the nicest places. The juicy crimes always paid the best. “It’s nice in there,” she mused as they walked away, the patty-line cleaner closing the door quietly behind them. “They have really nice hand lotion in the ladies’ lav, and the towels are fluffy.”

  Chapter 63

  There weren’t any messages between Mala Choudhary and her bosses on her phone.

  There weren’t any messages between Mala and Seph Atkins either.

  There were a couple of photos of Mala’s cat. A lot of her children. Theo was surprised. He hadn’t imagined she had kids or could spend so much time pressing them to her glowing cheeks, bursting with pride and excitement as she hugged them close. He hadn’t imagined Mala Choudhary was capable of feeling much of anything in particular.

  There was an online banking app on Mala’s phone.

  Corn flicked through its transaction history, a photo of Mala’s credit cards in his other hand. At last he said, “This will be enough. I can get a guy.”

  “No,” replied Theo. “It has to be Seph Atkins.”

  “That’s not gonna be easy.”

  “It needs to be her.”

  “Why?” When Theo didn’t answer, Corn half-turned from where he’d sprawled, feet up on the kitchen table, chair rocking back on the edge of tipping, to examine the auditor’s face. “I don’t need your shit. First sign of shit, her maj said, do him. Protect the patties, that’s what she said. Just do him.”

  “Atkins killed my friend.”

  A half-shrug. Corn has lost plenty of friends, and it hasn’t got to him. He’s just fine.

  “Atkins killed the mother of my child.”

  A slightly less emphatic half-shrug. Okay, so Corn’s never had that shit go down, that’s heavy yeah, but still, all the more reason not to bring your personal crap into this.

  Theo’s shoulders rolled forward, head down. “If … if it’s possible. It would be … it would be better that way. I would like to try.”

  Corn stared into the distance for a moment, face empty, then nodded at nothing much and muttered, “We’ll see.”

  Three days later Seph Atkins’ phone rang.

  This was unexpected and unwelcome.

  She hadn’t given this number to more than a couple of people, and they should know that she was in Cornwall, having a little me-time. She peeled slices of cucumber off her eyes, wriggled her fingers, wriggled her toes, marvelled at how, after barely an hour of luxurious nothing, they felt like different limbs, someone else’s body. She was putting on weight, she knew it. Could feel things pressing against her belly which hadn’t pressed before. She should eat less, but she really liked flavours. She didn’t like her bum. She felt it was pear-shaped, but that wasn’t a lifestyle thing, it was just …

  Her phone stopped ringing.

  Seph Atkins stared up at the cream-coloured ceiling as wooden flutes trilled earthy calm from the speakers behind her head, and waited for it to ring again.

  It did.

  She let it ring out.

  On the third attempt she answered, having worked through the worst of her annoyance on call two.

  “Yeah?”

  “Ms. Atkins?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Ms. Atkins, I wish to hire your services.”

  “I’m on holiday.”

  “I’ve been reading your file.”

  “I don’t have a file.”

  “A colleague at Faircloud Associates was kind enough to help me,” the voice replied politely, an old voice, female, someone rich perhaps, a woman who knew what she wanted and wasn’t used to hearing no. “You come highly recommended.”

  “I don’t work with people I don’t know. Bye.”

  She hung up, lay back and put some fresh cucumber over her now exasperated, weary eyes.

  Twenty minutes later her phone beeped.

  She ignored it, until at last thirst and an empty flask of icy water by her side provoked reluctant action. She grunted
as nose flutes snuffled their way to a tuneless conclusion, white towels tumbled around her body, and checked her phone.

  A bank transfer had been made in her favour, to the tune of ten thousand pounds.

  She phoned her guy, the guy who was good at this shit, the guy who’d got into the databases for fun, not even for cash, and had him back-trace the transfer just to check what she already knew.

  The funds had come from Mala Choudhary.

  Her phone rang again. “Ms. Atkins,” said the same wealthy, old voice. “Is now a convenient time to talk?”

  Chapter 64

  Later, Seph Atkins would admit that she was driven by greed.

  She’d not got into the killing business because she liked committing murder. Indeed, she found the actual homicide part of her job frequently boring and often disappointingly mundane. The tears, gurgling, wheedling, begging, the endless litany of bargains and pathetic offers made by the dying and the soon-to-be-dead as they failed to expire neatly with a single bullet, all of it dispelled any real sense that humanity was special, or more than just a fleshy, crawling animal.

  And the parochial motives given for her contracts—“They looked at me funny” or “I just know he’s gonna do me” or money—always money—left Seph Atkins feeling fairly convinced that the vast majority of mankind was either stupid, cowardly or self-obsessed to the point of myopia.

  Seph loved money, of course. But too many of her clients thought of nothing else. They wanted money not because they had a good idea for what to do with it—a thrilling investment or the adventure of a lifetime—but because it, itself, was their goal, rather than a means to something more exciting. She liked money because the lifestyle it purchased her was indeed according to her desires and expectations. If the glossy mags and glitzy journos hadn’t bridled at the thought of celebrating an assassin, she would have been all across the spreads and the mid-afternoon lifestyle programmes. From her weeks at the spa to her love of ska and Mozart, her polished skin and extensive holidays through the best of Renaissance Italy or the finest ski slopes of the Alps, she was indeed a woman to envy.

  She spent a lot of time dealing with the law, of course. But it was so much cheaper and easier to confess at once and have an indemnity taken out against her crimes than it was to go on the run that she regarded the process of arrest and bail as merely part of her professional labours. Sometimes she was hired to be the invisible bullet, the killer who could never be found, but in cases such as the Cumali job, where the indemnity was never going to be more than £90K for the patty slut, it was simplest to just phone the cops and save everyone a lot of bother.

  She should not have taken the job.

  She didn’t know her contact, but the transfer of funds directly from Mala Choudhary’s account was enough to pay for next month’s scuba diving, and the details when they came through seemed plausible.

  So it was that Seph Atkins went to the races.

  Chapter 65

  Helen sits alone as the sun goes down, and reads the names of the dead.

  The ones who’d died on the patty line

  the ones who’d died waiting for a lawyer who never came

  the ones who died in the hospitals, their corpses returned to their homes so the doctors could say they died in their beds, not under the Company’s care

  the names of the children

  the parents

  the ones gunned down for running away

  And no one listened.

  And no one cared.

  And it was shut down before it could cause a scandal.

  And she kept reading anyway, because her son had done this thing. He hadn’t fired the gun or dug the pit, but he had done enough.

  He had played his part, and she had made him and so

  She read the names of the dead.

  And there were so many, the names running one into another, that she didn’t realise she’d said Dani’s name until at least six or seven names later. For a moment it seems to her, as she stumbles, that time is …

  Time is

  Neila sat with Theo and told stories as the river, too wide and broad for their little vessel, bumped gently against the side of the boat. She told stories and once she started, she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t stop speaking the words just fell from her, so many years of silence, so many years it all it being fine and she looked up to the horizon, and the horizon was burning, the country was burning and only on the canal was she safe, only here.

  And she said, “My brother had depression, he had depression and we all told him to get over it, we told him to just try and see the good side of things I mean, the good side it was just …”

  And in the villages around the canal the lights were dark and the streets ran wild and there was blood between the stones, but not here, not where the ice cracked before the prow of her ship, and terror gripped her heart and she blurted:

  “You ask people, when they tell you something terrible, you ask them ‘Are you okay?’ Of course they’re not fucking okay but what else are you meant to say. ‘Oh you must be feeling shit you must be so shit you must be …’”

  Theo is going to leave soon, she knows it. She can feel it and now that she’s taken a passenger on board, now that her heart has cracked and she chose human company, chose again to have someone in her life, anyone at all, she is terrified of letting go. She feels as if she is spinning out of control, just turning in the current, unable to find a way to steer in a straight line.

  By yellow candlelight she put her head against his shoulder and he put his cheek into her hair and their hands tangled together, warmth in the winter night as the fire burned down and Neila murmured:

  “My brother is better now. He is who he is. He knows that now he doesn’t hate himself he isn’t angry any more he doesn’t rage he isn’t …”

  And stopped a while, as the snow fell and the fire flickered and the light burned down to the bottom of the bowl.

  “In tarot, the Fool begins the journey. With an innocent heart and a soul full of wonder he sets out on his wanderings, looking to explore the universe, delighting in all things, trusting in all things the Fool is a card of exploration, hope. As he journeys, he meets many things. The wise Magician; the Emperor and Empress, the Lovers, the Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, the Hanged Man. The Hanged Man is the crossroads, is suspension, a choice that holds you back or will send you forward, a moment where all things stand on the edge. Sacrifice, surrender, martyrdom, treachery—in some drawings you can see it, a halo, there is an idea there of giving up something old to make something new, for others, half in sky, half on land, the world tree but you hang from it, Odin searching for knowledge, crucifixion, some see divinity others say they see Judas with a bag of silver in his hand. I don’t see anything noble in it, I used to think there was but now I just think it is the world. It is the truest card that is, the world we travel and we wish and we dream, caught between sky and earth. But we are tiny and the sky is huge and sometimes we cannot be all we think we are. We cannot be … there are some battles we cannot conquer and we push and we push until and still we are here, suspended, we did this to ourselves. We did this.”

  They sat together a while, and in the darkness another boat passed them by, the wake tipping the Hector a little from side to side, before washing itself out.

  “At the end of the Fool’s journey is the World. The Devil, the Tower, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, Judgement, the World. Once I saw a card, the queen of cups, and I thought … it always seemed to me that I was there, that she spoke to me. Sometimes I catch myself making stories from the things that happened in my life, making stories of who I will be, and in these stories I’m always the hero or the villain because that way I made a choice, I made a choice and I chose to be here and there wasn’t ever anything which I couldn’t control, there wasn’t a part of me that is …”

  She stopped.

  “Time is …”

  Stopped. Didn’t know what the words were that followed.

  �
�Do you regret?” she asked. “Do you look back, do you look at—when you think about the time you’ve had and the things—do you regret? Is that what you feel?”

  Theo thought about it.

  “I think I would,” he said at last. “If there wasn’t something more important to do.”

  Later, Neila stood alone at the back of the Hector, hand freezing on the rudder.

  The fucking cormorant didn’t even bother to fly away when she flapped at it now, just sat there on the roof of her fucking boat, minding its own business in the most insufferable way.

  And in the days before

  Helen sat with Theo on top of a hill as the sun set over the vales. In the town below someone was screaming, screaming, until they were silenced. Queen Bess didn’t hold with that sort of thing, not in her neck of the woods, but on the other side of the valley there were the tearers the ragers the faders the zeroes the

  Helen said, “Is it enough? Theo? Is it enough? Have I saved my son?”

  And Theo didn’t answer, and things didn’t seem to change that much after all.

  The next day they too went to the races.

  Chapter 66

  Getting into Ascot was easier than Theo had expected, and just as unpleasant.

  The first challenge was penetrating the Ascot cordon. None of them had the credit to get past the toll booths, let alone proof of identity for the car park. Public trains had stopped running several years ago, with only a private prebooked service for race days; £76 a ticket and a trolley cart serving champagne and hand-cut roasted vegetable chips from a boutique in Devon.

  In the end they crept in under cover of darkness, following the railway track and hiding in the trees until the patrols passed, camping without fire in the bitter, falling snow, huddled together in a chilly bundle as they waited for the sun to rise.

  Theo pressed close to Helen, and Bea seemed to share his concern, twining herself around the older woman as if she could will heat into Helen’s shuddering bones. Helen was too cold to refuse, shut her eyes and nodded in gratitude, blue lips curled in on themselves as if she might suck in warmth.