“He should have gone out and got drunk,” North said.
But Honor’s attention was fixed on the screen.
“This is no longer an analogue world, Ms Jones. We’re connected. Absence is noted. Felt. But we don’t search the streets. We don’t ask God. We search the net because that’s where the answers are. The truth.
“I went into the latest social media data dump. Normally there’s a delay of years, but I hit lucky – this dump was immediately after the hack.”
It was North’s turn to press pause.
“I checked it out,” Honor said, and North remembered that she must have watched the video before. That none of this was new to her, only to him. “When hackers breach security, they can dump all the usernames and passwords out there for anyone to see. But the companies have ‘hashed them’. They’ve converted the passwords to a string of letters and numbers and symbols which the hackers have to break to get to the personal info. Sometimes the hackers can’t break them and they can’t sell them, or they’re making a point about what they can do, so they leave them out there for all-comers.”
On screen, Ned was talking again.
“Peggy was there in the dump. It was a big one – 30 million users. I identified her from her username which is her email.”
He held up a piece of paper between both hands. On it was a line of characters, numbers and symbols written in black marker.
“This is Peggy’s new password. I can’t break it, but that’s irrelevant.”
He let go of the paper and leaned into the camera so closely his breath fogged the screen.
“It is also the password for 32 other people within the dump. The chances of two people sharing the same hashed password of 23 characters is less than one in ten to the 46. That’s less than one in ten septillions. That’s less than one in a thousand million,” Ned counts them off on his fingers, “million million million million million million million. That is to say, it’s never going to happen. And this is 33 people. Not two.”
North pressed pause. “This guy was a barman?”
“He used to be Peggy’s student, but his brain blew.”
“I can see how that would happen.”
Ned was still talking: “Furthermore, 25 of them with any kind of on-going social media presence had all signed off from the real world in broadly the same ways – an extended holiday, sickness in the family, bereavement, a new job.”
Ned held up a snap of two freckled identical girls. Leaning into each other, they looked as if they were trying hard not to laugh as they pouted, their eyes huge with winged eyeliner and their hair draped over their shoulders. It reminded him of the photo of Peggy and Honor he’d seen on her fridge door.
“Emily and Gemma Dolan from North London. They’re 17-year-old twins. Studying for A-levels. Their entire lives are online. Friends expressed concern that the girls had disappeared from their social networks. One week later, a message goes out that the girls are in Bali. But no photos. No updates. Emily and Gemma Dolan – each with the same hashed password as each other and as Peggy. Or, Bunty Moss from Surrey.” The photo held close to the camera was of a smiling older woman with a strong jaw. Her bobbed hair white and perfectly cut. “A retired ward sister and Captain of Ladies Golf, she sent out a general message with apologies days from a big tournament. Sickness in the family. She’d be in touch in due time. The same hashed password. Anthony Walsh, 83, a retired union official, went missing in the Peak District. The exact same day his password was changed.”
Honor’s face was set. North took time to glance at her. Ned chose his words with consideration.
“Their closest family believe or purport to believe these explanations, and there are no ongoing police investigations into these disappearances.” He isn’t surprised, as if he doesn’t expect much of the police and has yet to be disappointed.
The picture shifted, chopped off Ned’s head, as the camera filming him shifted. There was noise and movement and skinny fingers, as Ned settled it back on the laptop.
“Sorry,” he said, grinning somewhere behind the beard – young and vulnerable, not at all like he was going to be dead within a matter of hours.
What did Honor say at Portcullis House – North tried to remember – that she hadn’t believed Ned? Had she let it show? Had he gone to his grave disappointed? In her? In himself?
“One last thing, Honor. Do you mind if I call you Honor? You did once tell me it would be all right and it’s how I always think of you. On no account search these names on the net. There’ll be an alert out on them. Whoever is behind this, you don’t want them knowing you’re looking. Okay? Don’t write anything down. And if anything happens to me, if I disappear…” he shook his head in denial at the prospect, but North knew that Ned believed it might, “tell my mum and Jess I love them, and you need to run. I’m telling you that when we meet, but I mean it. Don’t trust anyone.”
He smiled, one front tooth crossing over the other.
“Apart from me.”
And this time there was shyness around the eyes. He was excited at the predicament he found himself in, North thought. Excited at the prospect of meeting Honor face to face again. Of finding Peggy and being a hero.
The video crashed to black and faces filled the screen. Men, women, children, all ages.
Names and addresses. Photos. Job descriptions. A jumble of the retired, professionals, students and babies. 63-year-old Bunty Moss, teenage twins Emily and Gemma Dolan. 83- year-old Anthony Walsh – a Methodist lay preacher. Jasmine Ramesh. Richard Patterson. Alex Hill. Angela Baxter. Marmaduke Pennington-Ward. Johnnie Cooper. Maisie Trumpton. Julia Morgan. It went on. Both sexes. All ages. All ethnicities. The names meant nothing to North.
It didn’t make sense. Whatever this was, the Board was involved. Honor was a target because she was looking for Peggy, and if Ned was right then Peggy wasn’t the only one to disappear lately. But why Peggy? And why these others – some of them children? The Board guarded the integrity of the state. North knew the Board would take action – even drastic action against individuals – if they judged it necessary, but at first sight these “disappeared” seemed downright ordinary.
Honor switched off the machine and turned her head to stare out of the window. The sound of rubber against wet tarmac.
“Is he right?” She turned back to face him. “Or crazy?”
“Both? Neither?”
He couldn’t tell her the truth. That if Ned was right, that was bad news for Peggy, because it meant this was deeper and more complex than he’d thought at first, and Peggy would be all the harder to find.
“What do we do? Do we start looking for these other people?”
“She’s still the best way into this.”
He glanced across. Honor’s body had quietened again. Holding itself ready for flight, but there was nowhere to go. They were trapped in a car travelling faster than they should be, as far away from London as they could get.
“Are your parents alive, North?”
He was silent, but she didn’t wait for an answer.
“Mine died when I was young.”
He was cold suddenly. And frightened. Staring out of Honor’s eyes into a bedroom with a locked door. The handle turning. The door rattling as whoever was on the other side threw themselves against it over and over. Yelling Honor’s name. Shouting at her to come out. Or else.
A horn blared behind him. The car was drifting over the line into the other carriageway. He swung the wheel. A lorry-driver wagging his head, mouthing obscenities as he overtook, keeping the flat of his hand pressed against the horn – spray from the wheels thundering against the glass and metal.
Did it happen? Was that true? Or was he constructing a narrative for her based on little more than guesswork and what he’d read when he researched her? She’d said she had personal experience of domestic violence when she was a child, hadn’t she? He gripped the wheel, steering himself back to the certainties of the present.
Slipping ba
ck again. Struggling to stay focussed on the fog-lights of the lorry in-front.
But it was no good.
Worse than the shouting was when the man’s voice dropped. Soft, coaxing. Telling her Daddy wasn’t angry. To come out. That her mother needed her. Couldn’t she hear her mother calling her. She was to come out like a good girl and do as her father told her.
He dragged himself back to reality. At this rate, he was going to do Tarn a favour and kill them both in a car smash.
He should ask her what happened. And know for certain and all time whether the bullet had added something to his cognitive function or taken away his power of rational thought.
But if he did that – she too would know. She would know he had a skill no one would want, and that she had no privacy or hope of it. That he belonged in a laboratory where white-coated scientists would use him up like one of their pink-eyed rats. Or that he belonged in an asylum for the criminally insane.
Either which way, she would know he was less than the sane, normal, everyday assassin he tried to be.
Chose discretion.
Fact: Honor Jones had strangers chasing her wanting her dead.
If he wasn’t mad, if he was right, someone wanting her dead wasn’t a new experience for her. She’d known terror before, but she wasn’t ready to admit it.
‘JP wanted to take me in, but I refused. I moved in with a cousin of my mother’s but she was old and sick, already dying really. At 16, she paid for me to go away to school. I can’t say I made friends which was on me, not the other girls. I was a neurotic, toxic mess. When my cousin finally died, she left me enough to cover the end of school. No one knew. I didn’t tell them – I’d had enough of other people’s pity. Holidays I’d spend alone in a scummy hotel in some dying seaside resort eking out the money. I’d dress up so I was old enough to pass as a grown-up and sleep with waiters. There was no one to care who I was or what I did. And I did a lot. Until Peggy.” Her sigh was loud but she didn’t appear to notice.
“Peggy ‘fixed’ me. That’s what she does – fixes what’s broken.”
He had a lot that needed fixing. Too big a job even for Peggy Boland. “What’s she working on? Is it something that would get her dead?”
“I honestly can’t see why.” Honor frowned. “She’s an astronomer. She’s involved in setting up something called the SKA – the Square Kilometre Array, which is going to be the world’s largest telescope. It’s not literally one big telescope. There’s an “array” of antennae – hundreds and hundreds of dishes in South Africa and a million dipoles, which look like TV aerials, as well as some dishes in Australia. They’re linked by optical-fibre cabling.”
“And what will the SKA do?”
“Detect radio signals billions of light years away. Tell us how the universe was formed. Whether Einstein’s theory of relativity was correct. What dark matter is.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not Brian Cox.”
He slid a finger round his collar. Dipoles. Relativity. Dark matter. He had the growing sense that he wasn’t the best qualified person to be having this conversation.
“She wouldn’t have walked away from it.” Honor was adamant. “I don’t pretend to understand all of it, but she keeps it simple for me and it’s her life so I keep up as best I can. I know this much. The signals from space are really weak.”
North could understand that much, although his temples felt tight.
“And there’s two problems. One is handling the sheer amount of data the SKA will bring in. But Peggy was more interested in the other problem which is cutting the interference coming out from earth so that you can hear the cosmic signals better. It’s not like she’s developing biological weapons.”
Honor maintained her friend was a genius. North didn’t know much about geniuses. But he imagined they could get themselves into a mess like anyone else. Bigger maybe. The wrong decision. The wrong turn, and whosoever you were, life got shunted off course all too easily.
“The SKA operates from Jodrell Bank and the team there were the first ones I rang, in case she said anything to them about moving abroad, but she didn’t. Peggy and I talk – all the time. It doesn’t matter she’s there,” Honor gestured with her hand, to outside the car, up the road, “and I’m here. It’s like she’s in the room next door and I only have to raise my voice and she’ll reply. There’s been nothing from her for three weeks.”
“You must have been making a lot of fuss for me to have been brought in.” “Brought in” to kill you, he meant. She raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment.
“I kept calling her mobile but there was no response. Her office number rang out. The home number was dead from the get-go. I rang the university and they stonewalled. Then Ned cornered me, and I got a bad feeling about it. The next morning, when I found out he’d ‘jumped off a bridge’, I panicked and got on a train to Newcastle.”
North felt the desolation as Honor went back to staring out of the car window. A carriage window of a train – the world moving faster and faster while she sat still.
Chapter 16
NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE
A Few Days Earlier
Honor’s phone rang just as she was about to knock on Peggy’s front door.
The Whips’ Office. Again. She let it go to answerphone, and three seconds later, it buzzed with a text.
“You missed the vote so you better be dead. Where the Fkuc are you Honor? Ring in. NOW or yesterday.”
If she called, she could explain. But whatever the explanation, the Whips would tell her to get back, and she was hardly caught in traffic on the Embankment. She was in Newcastle upon Tyne nearly 300 miles from any place she should be. She typed. “Sorry. Family emergency. Back tomorrow.”
The Whips had to be furious. She tried to care.
As she shoved the phone back into her coat pocket, she shuddered at the thought of Ned’s death, of his warning that Peggy was in trouble. It was no use thinking about Ned – what she had or hadn’t done. He was gone. She had to focus on Peggy.
The lace curtain upstairs twitched, and a still, small hope ignited that it was all a mix-up. Peggy would be astonished to see her when she opened the door. Contrite. Over a glass of red wine, they would mourn poor deluded Ned together.
Even so, Honor kept up the knocking, and the door opened a crack. The chain on it.
Whoever had opened it, was standing too far back to make out.
She smiled into the gloom. Peggy’s houseguests were called Rahim and Sonja she reminded herself. They had two children and they were refugees from a Syrian-Turkish bordercamp.
“Is Peggy home? I’m a friend of hers.”
Rahim opened the door just wide enough for Honor to slide through, before slamming it again behind her.
Peggy took in the family two months ago and the house smelled different already. Instead of lemons and fresh linen, the air was altogether richer and warmer – cumin and cinnamon and roasted chicken in there somewhere.
“No Peggy. No here,” Rahim said, shaking his head.
He was in his early 40s. Spectacles. Dark-skinned and slight. In the doorway of the kitchen, a woman who must be Sonja, broke off from washing up. She started nodding, as if she’d been expecting Honor, waving sudsy hands at Rahim to take their guest through to the lounge.
Peggy’s books were piled two deep on the shelves. More books stacked horizontally in the space between the books and the shelf above which carried Peggy’s old battered board games of Monopoly, Scrabble and Risk. Rahim went straight to the middle shelf.
The purse he handed to Honor was a burgundy embossed crocodile Mulberry.
Inside were Peggy’s credit cards, her driving licence, her departmental ID and £80 in cash along with a crumpled receipt. Slippers. Knickers. Socks. Vests. Trousers. Jumpers. Coats. £238. Peggy had gone shopping for the kids in town. But wherever she went, she was without any means to draw cash or prove who she was.
Rahim’s eyes were on Honor’s face. He didn�
��t like the fact Peggy left her purse behind.
Crumpling the receipt in her hand, Honor took out the £80 and placed it on the small table next to her. Whatever was going on, Peggy would want Rahim to have it.
She shivered as she sat back into the battered purple cord sofa, hugging herself, though the room was warm.
There was the sound of soft steps along a corridor. The smell of fresh coffee getting stronger as Sonja pushed open the door and the overhead light went on. Small, a shy half-smile. Sonja was pregnant, Honor registered somewhere in the back of her head, the other woman’s belly button pushing against the thin wool jumper she wore. An old one of Peggy’s, Honor realised.
Behind her mother, a 12-year-old girl with a plait down to her waist, held the hand of a toddling boy who clutched a toy lamb. What did Peggy say the girl was called? Honor struggled to remember. Amira? The child acted as the family translator, and Peggy said her English was getting better every day.
Honor dipped her head in thanks for the coffee.
“Amira, do you or your parents know where Peggy is?”
“Dr Boland hasn’t come back to the house for 21 days.” The girl was nervous of the stranger and formal. “My father…” she gestured, her voice defensive, “visited the university, but they were not helpful or kind. Also, he went to the refugee council and told them, but they said it’s okay we stay here. Dr Boland is happy with us. She invite us and it’s official. They said she must be on holiday and we hadn’t understood she was going away. But my parents are worried for her.”
The mother sat cross-legged on the floor, the toddler in her lap now, his tiny hands pulling at hair under its gauzy scarf. She said something and the girl argued with her briefly.
“My mother wants to leave.” Breath escaped from Amira’s lips in irritation at her mother’s weakness. “She says if we may stay tonight, we will leave in the morning. Early.”
Honor reached across the table for the mother’s hand and clasped it between her own. She could feel the bones.
Killing State Page 10
