84k

by Claire North

The man he spoke to raised his eyebrows, sucked in his lips. “Uhhhh …”

  Theo smiled. “Do you want to call the police, or shall I just go to the station directly?”

  “I uh … don’t know if the police are running a full service …”

  “I’ll just go and turn myself in then, shall I?”

  The man thought about this for a while, then shrugged, nodded, and stepped aside as Theo passed through.

  Twenty-five minutes later, Theo knocked on the door of Simon Fardell’s Kensington home. A man with a bulge under his left arm and the look of one who punched bears answered the door. “Yeah?”

  Behind him a woman’s voice called, “Who is it?”

  Before the man could answer, she appeared at the door, pushing her head through the gap between chest and door frame to scrutinise Theo, nose wrinkled up, eyebrows down.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am. My name is Theo Miller. I believe your employers have kidnapped my daughter. May I come in?”

  The woman was in her early forties, and her efforts—make-up, lipstick, surgery—to appear as if she were in her twenties only made her seem older. Her face was vaguely familiar, from the TV, perhaps. Her hair was dyed blonde, cut to a balloon that bounced just above her shoulders. She blurted, “Oh goodness oh my!” and for a moment looked like she might cry. Then, composing herself hastily, added, “Would you mind waiting in the kitchen?”

  Chapter 75

  A very nice kitchen. It was possibly the nicest kitchen Theo had ever seen, which probably meant the people who owned it were also very, very nice. Black marble surfaces, polished taps, two dishwashers, fridge with ice maker and crushed-ice dispenser, and a nozzle for filtered cold water.

  Theo picked dirt out of his nails and enjoyed flicking it onto the floor.

  He was hungry, and wondered if anyone would mind him poking around in the cupboards. A chubby woman in maroon and green sat with him, playing on her smartphone, one leg folded over the other, face contracted in a frown, her hair haloed with a gentle fuzz of spray. At night she dreams of pulling out her hair one strand at a time and finding, instead of a little bulb of white root on the end, two tiny beetles twined in love, which begin to untangle and scuttle away as she disturbs them, until she slams her fist into them on the wall, smearing them into black-red smudges.

  In Kensington nothing much has changed, except now people really, really don’t like to go outside the confines of the borough.

  “Can I make some tea?” asked Theo, and the woman shrugged, so he put the kettle on and went through the cupboard above the sink in search of teabags until, with a huff of indignation, she opened a drawer by the fridge to reveal a panoply of herbs and brews.

  The kettle boiled, but amid the lemongrass and lavender there wasn’t any proper builder’s.

  Theo had ginger tea, and didn’t notice if it tasted of anything much.

  “So,” he said after a while. “I heard that the Company is pulling out of all UK business operations.”

  She shrugged.

  “Cos of the riots. And the mass murders. And all of that.”

  Another shrug.

  “Heard Simon Fardell put a hit out on Philip Arnslade and his mum.”

  A little huff now, the woman getting bored with all of this. “Whatever,” she grunted, eyes not rising from the movement of one busy finger across the greasy surface of her phone. “Just the way things work, isn’t it? Just how it goes.”

  Theo smiled a paper smile, and drank his tea.

  Markse stood in the door, a man in grey behind him. The woman glanced up, sighed, put her phone back in her pocket and left. Markse sat on a high chrome stool opposite Theo, the empty tea mug cold between them, laced his fingers beneath his chin, rested his face on their weave.

  “Mr. Miller.”

  “Markse.”

  “You look …”

  “Where’s Lucy?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “She’s here? In this house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” Fury, indignation, a sudden surge of violence inside Theo’s soul he didn’t realise he had left in him.

  “Because Simon Fardell wants to hurt you, very much.” Markse, uninterested in such things. “He blames you for Philip Arnslade’s death, even though he killed him. He blames you for riots against the Company, for the destruction of property and wealth, even though they have been committing mass murder for nearly a dozen years. He’s not wrong, of course, but even I find this …” A pause as he hunted for the word, which he couldn’t find. A half-shake of his head. “Personal is not good policy.” The commandment by which Markse had lived his life—a sacred mantra.

  “I want to see her.”

  “You can see Cumali’s daughter … your daughter …”

  Theo flinched, Markse smiled without humour or relish. A question answered; a suspicion confirmed.

  “… but there are some questions.”

  “Lucy first.”

  Markse’s head turned a little to one side, contemplating Theo’s face, listening to a sound only he could hear. Then, brisk, standing, straightening his grey trousers, walking towards the kitchen door.

  Theo followed.

  The carpets were thick, pale cream and not meant to be sullied by shoes.

  There were black and white photos on the wall, great feats of architecture viewed from strange angles, fractals of metalwork and giddy tangles of timber and stone, a monochrome cat caught licking its paw as it sat on the wing of an aeroplane—it all probably had some sort of meaning, something about …

  On the second floor, a closed white door. Markse knocked once, then opened it with a click of latch, a round brass handle, cold daylight seeping through from outside, the sound of gunfire, far off and bitten down at the edges.

  sofa

  giant TV screen

  wires across the floor

  Lucy sat cross-legged in the middle of it all.

  She wore pyjama bottoms and a green fleece jumper. She was shooting aliens. The aliens were half mechanoid, half insect, with six flailing limbs, guns held in four of them, and couldn’t aim for shit. Lucy’s gun fired pale purple bullets of light and every now and then she charged up some sort of special attack that made the screen shake and go briefly white and left many scattered pieces of dead things all over the place, but the landscape seemed oddly okay.

  “Lucy,” said Markse. “This is Mr. Miller.”

  “Hi,” she grunted, not taking her eyes from the screen.

  “Mr. Miller, this is Lucy Rainbow Fardell. She’s been sponsored by the Fardell family. She had some … difficulties … but now the family are paying her way and keeping her from … well. Are you enjoying your game, Lucy?”

  “Yeah.”

  A grimace flickered across her face as a new alien started lobbing something green and sticky that exploded in an emerald splash across the screen. She rolled behind cover, reloaded, came back up shooting, jumped, jumped again, landed next to a scuttling centipede thing that spat hot acid, killed it with knives, then ran to avoid another blast of digital gloop.

  Markse looked at Theo; Theo stared at Lucy.

  “Mr. Miller?”

  Theo didn’t move.

  An arm on his arm, gentle. “Mr. Miller? We should leave Lucy to her game.”

  “Mr. Miller?”

  “Mr. Miller?”

  “Mr. Miller?”

  An alien died.

  Lucy’s eyes flickered up from the game, met Theo’s.

  A flicker of

  well she doesn’t know what’s on his face but odds are that weird look is just another weird fucking thing so

  deal with it the way you always

  scowl

  shrug

  look away

  collect loot from fallen machine-alien corpses

  carry on.

  Bang bang splat bang wowzers!

  This is of course the moment when Theo is going to say something profoundly important, something to establish some sort of />
  “I hope you enjoy your game,” he says as Markse guides him away.

  Chapter 76

  They took him to some place in east London, near the Mile End enclaves. It had been a wood workshop where they made bespoke furniture, nice dressers for you to put your pretty things in, bespoke handrails—really hard to make a handrail actually it took a huge amount of craft to balance the twist with the drop but

  now it was a prison.

  They gave him a grey tracksuit and white T-shirt to wear, shoes without laces, bright trainers he wondered where they’d found them and time is

  Neila does a three-point turn on the canal. It’s tricky, you can see the place where metal hull has rammed concrete towpath, but if she’s careful …

  And having turned she turns again to point back north, then realises that’s ridiculous and turns again and for a while is spinning, spinning and time is

  time is

  the real Theo Miller, the one who died

  now when they were in the back of the ambulance did he say

  it’s your fault

  it’s not your fault

  it’s your fault

  it’s not your fault

  it’s your fault it’s your fault it’s your fault it’s

  They gave him porridge with jam, which was remarkably nice, and they sat down at a grey table in a grey room and Markse said:

  “What happened with Helen Arnslade?”

  Theo’s words were a drone from a script he’s already read, bored, tired, enough. “She found out her son was hiding the mass murder and kidnapping of patties and people from the enclaves. The skint. People who wouldn’t be missed. Petty crooks who got lost in the system. He was feeding slaves to Simon Fardell, the Company and the patty line. Helen wasn’t impressed. She gathered proof and gave it to Dani Cumali. Her son found out and dosed Helen with drugs. Had Dani killed.”

  “And you and Dani were …?”

  “We’d been friends once.”

  “But Lucy is your daughter.”

  “Yes. Perhaps. No. She might be.”

  “She … might be?”

  “Yes.”

  “You did this for … ‘might be’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Theo thought about it for a long time. Shrugged. “I imagine … that after nearly fifteen years of playing along, keeping my head down and selling indemnities against murder, I imagine … something had to change. Something had to switch, otherwise I’m just …” Stopped, searching the air for the word. “I am, fundamentally, a failure. I’ve known this most of my life. Since I was a child, it was always clear to me that the world I inhabited was not one I had contributed to. Everything that was good, other people made and paid for with their own sacrifice. Everything that was bad, I couldn’t control. All the ideas and dreams I thought were mine were in fact someone else’s, and the more I talked about taking control, being my own man, all the things you’re meant to say, the more I was talking to cover the very simple truth, that I wasn’t. I am not. I made some choices, of course, but they weren’t defiant acts of judgement. They were made because the alternatives were significantly worse. I coasted down the path I had with the feeling that it was the only path that was really before me, and when I chose to choose to do nothing, it felt like a kind of release, an admission that this was my life and I may as well live it. Nothing changed. Murderers walked free, people died and begged and grovelled and lives were destroyed for so little, for fear and anger and … but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Because it was just the way the world worked.

  And then Dani

  I just wanted her to go away, she wasn’t

  but she didn’t go away and I felt that this was yet another case of the universe coming and depriving me of my choices of making me

  and she had a daughter.

  Probably not mine.

  I did the maths and Lucy is almost certainly not …

  What do you think the point is of us, Mr. Markse? I don’t believe in God, I don’t think there’s a celestial paradise, and humanity appears to be a virulent species that destroys, strips and lays waste to the world and each other. Every day in every way we invent new methods for curtailing our own liberty. The pursuit of happiness, but there are so many happinesses to pursue that sometimes it’s hard to say that this is me, pursuing this truth, because instead I could just buy and sell truth for £2.99 down the local chemist and so I guess

  it didn’t matter if Lucy wasn’t my daughter.

  It didn’t matter.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Just one thing in my life, if not for me then for someone else a choice

  a choice

  I wanted her to have

  to wake in the morning and see the sky and feel

  I wanted her to know that there is more than what she’s been told. That she can find a value in herself, that mankind isn’t just a plague species, that we can be better, aspire to better, that ideas have meaning, value, that there is another way of living, that we can give more and be more and exceed the limits that we think we have or that have been put upon us and that one day we shall build something better, something kind and that

  Her world need not be defined by my mistakes, my failures, her world could be

  But even there I failed.

  And I look and it seems that she is condemned to be a slave to a path that is the only one available, just like her mum, just like …

  I think that’s it. That’s all.”

  For a while they sat in silence. Markse waited for Theo to look away, and Theo didn’t.

  Finally: “Tell me about Ascot.”

  “We stole Mala Choudhary’s identity. Her financial details. We used them to transfer money from Choudhary to Atkins, and from Faircloud Associates to Choudhary. Helen contacted Atkins, claiming to be acting for Choudhary, and contracted a hit against herself. We thought it was more plausible, given everything, if the target was Helen. Helen had embarrassed her son, gone on record testifying against him. It was not inconceivable that someone would want her taken out, maybe even Philip. Far more likely than someone going after Philip directly. Helen knew her son would be at Ascot. We stole a car a week in advance, parked it by the gate at the back, told Atkins that this was Helen’s car. It’s surprising how people come to the patty queen’s cause. People want something to believe. We planted our own bomb near the car, as back-up in case Atkins didn’t go for it. We just needed Atkins to be there, for someone to trace that connection from her to Choudhary to Faircloud to the Company. Then it was a case of making sure that Helen and Philip ended up in close proximity. If it went wrong, Helen would be dead or locked up drugged to her eyeballs. When I first met her she was … but she said yes. She said it was more important to make things right—that was her phrase, ‘make things right’—than what happened to a foolish old woman. That was her too. ‘Foolish old woman.’ She was proud of those words. They were something people had said to her a lot, and she liked saying them when she knew they were a lie. She knew a lot about herself. I found that inspiring. She had this certainty. Dani had it too.Our bomb wasn’t very good. Didn’t need to be. But it triggered Seph’s. Seph’s bomb was too good. We’d always known it might be. It’s just … that was always a risk.

  Philip of course, he was … I imagine they put you on the case, yes? A manhunt for whoever tried to kill the minister of fiscal efficiency?”

  “They did. Seph Atkins stood out immediately; confessed for the discount.”

  Theo nodded at nothing much. “Figured she would.”

  “But her story didn’t make sense, so I looked again. You weren’t as good at avoiding the cameras as you thought.”

  Another shrug. “Good enough that you missed me the first time, though?”

  A little nod of the head, a tiny acknowledgement.

  “So what did you tell Philip?”

  Markse sighed, stretched in his plastic chair. “That the bomb which had nearly killed him, and was m
ost likely going to kill his mother, was planted by Seph Atkins.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t need to tell him anything else. He already knew who Atkins was. He’d agreed to the murder of Cumali. Simon and he were friends, at that time. When we traced the funds in Atkins’ account back to Choudhary, Philip rushed to a conclusion. I thought it unwise, thought it seemed too lazy for Simon to have used the same hit woman, the same firm to organise an attack on Philip, but he was already scared. His own mother was broadcasting his sins to the nation, and while we to a certain extent suppressed this, he knew it had done phenomenal damage to his reputation with the Company. He was a loose end, an inconvenience, and so was Lady Helen. It was not inconceivable that both would be easily removed, so he reacted … precipitately. He thought by freezing the Company’s assets he could bargain with them for an easy way out, hold the money hostage against his survival. The Cabinet only agreed because he convinced them that they were next, that the Company was going to come for them all, that it had already gone too far. In the end freezing assets was the only thing they could do, and it destroyed them.

  By the time I had proof that you, not Choudhary, were behind the assassination attempt, people were dead. I hold you accountable for that. I hold you accountable for most of this. You talk about your daughter, about being a hero. I find that hypocrisy of the highest order. How many mothers, daughters, sons and fathers have you killed, casually, as a senseless side effect of your crusade? How much have you destroyed because you thought it would make you more than just an ordinary man?”

  Theo didn’t answer, didn’t look away.

  Markse sighed, rolled his head around his neck, tucked his chin in, bunching a little bubble of flesh beneath his jaw, then stretched again. Declared to the ceiling and the sky, “Of course, Simon did kill Philip eventually. It was personal. Amazing how quickly friendship disappears when money is on the line. An apology wasn’t enough; the Company was dead. Everything they’d built together, for nothing. Philip knew it was coming, and I suppose I did too, but I didn’t think Simon would move so fast. My department is receiving pay again, a ‘restoration fee’ from the Company. There aren’t any strings attached. There aren’t any conditions. We are choosing not to investigate Philip’s death too hard because … we don’t talk about the why. We just … don’t look too closely. And we all get paid. The Company is closing up shop, but there are still companies which are owned by the Company which can be liquidated for some ready cash and Simon is not going to leave without …”