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Chapter 50

Lady Helen Arnslade, Marchioness of Mantell, seventeenth of that name, sat before the portrait and said:

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?”

Her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather-in-law, who’d served under the Duke of Wellington and damn well shown those pesky Indian natives whose flintlock-fuelled culture was morally superior thank you very much, shifted uneasily against the stiff wooden frame that held him high above the unused fireplace of her tower room. Flakes of oil paint drifted down from his mighty whiskered face as he considered the problem.

“I suppose,” he mused, “that it’s much the same as the divine right of kings…”

“Precedent,” she agreed, pulling open and shut, open and shut the white dressing gown that swathed her grey, thin body. “Or do I mean proportionality?”

“Is the monarch the state, is the state greater than the sum of its people, are the people really the best judges of the value of the state and…” pondered Lord Arnslade, eleventh Marquess of Mantell, one hand resting on the turning globe, another on the golden handle of his sword, his favourite spaniel frozen, eyes wide and frightened, mid-gambol at his feet. His family had earned its title, so the rumours went, not for mighty military service but for questionable sexual liaisons with a monarch who probably should have known better. Several centuries later he knows these things are all culturally relative, but still…

“I do still love him, of course,” mused Helen. “But can love not be loving by going against his wishes? Can you not…” She paused to scratch at the eels coiled in her hair, which, while perfectly acceptable guests, still sometimes got on her nerves when she was trying to concentrate on more important matters.

“You’re talking about making decisions for other people,” the Most Honourable Marquess concluded sagely, feeling on safer ground here—making decisions for other people was something he excelled at.

“I suppose. But then isn’t that the whole point?”

“The moral framework…”

“…well yes there’s the…”

“The whole issue of how…”

“Are my ethics of an acceptable standard to…”

“Having conviction is more than most people ever really achieve, of course.”

Lady Helen hesitated, staring up at her long-deceased, paint-frozen relative, and for a childish moment realised she was chewing her fingernails, a disgusting habit that had been ground out of her decades ago, ridiculous that it was back now. “I don’t think I have conviction,” she said at last. “I used to, but I don’t think I have anything like that any more.”

Lord Arnslade strained, wishing that the painter who’d captured him in oils hadn’t given his chin such a haughty upwards tilt, it was giving him a right crick in the neck now, and though his eyes could naturally follow anyone around the room no matter where they wandered, most of the time he was most comfortable studying the cornicing, which upon consideration he considered to have been rather poorly done. All this made thinking about the serious issues—the deeply concerning matters—that were now before him that much harder.

At last he concluded, a little shower of dust trickling down from the back of the canvas with the effort of it: “Action is belief.”

He felt very proud of himself for having expressed this, essentially condensing his entire life story to three deeply sage words.

Lady Helen looked less convinced, and he felt the globe turning beneath his fingers slow as her confidence waned. Hastily, before the moment passed him by, he added, “Also he is a total shit, if you think about it, and probably has it coming.”

“But he is my son. Granddad? Can I call you Granddad? He’s my son. He’s my son. He’s my…”

But Lord Arnslade was just paint and canvas again, the harsh light of the overhead chandelier bouncing off his thick dark curves, the spaniel still waggy-tailed and wide-eyed leaping for ever at his feet, and there was blood in her mouth, and Lady Helen realised she needed to wash her hair.

Chapter 51

Theo Miller drives.

He sleeps in the back of the car.

Eats egg-and-cress sandwiches.

Reads on the old laptop of Jacob Pritchard’s younger son, who long since upgraded and fled abroad to Spain, where things were a different kind of easy.

Records of deals done, of lives sold.

He wonders where Lucy is.

For a little while thinks about praying, and realises that he is praying to his daughter. She should not be God, she is not God, and yet he feels this urge to bend his knees and pray, pray for…

It’s a stupid instinct, so he gets back into the driving seat and keeps going west.

“Hi, Edward Witt, Criminal Audit Office, I’m… yes that’s—no I can…”

He sits in a service station off the M40 and enjoys being his boss, for a little while.

“No, still here thank you—yes it’s about Lucy Cumali that’s right Cumali you might also have Rainbow Princess it’s—that’s the one thank you. Criminal Audit Office, yes so I’m looking at a request from a lawyer on behalf of a corporate entertainment company enquiring as to the value of her indemnity is it… I see. I see. Yes. No that’s more than I think they were expecting it’s… can you send me that file? Thank you yes my email address is…”

He read Lucy’s file while eating a kebab in the passenger seat of his car, pulled up in a high street that sold birthday cards, burgers, scones, second-hand mattresses and not much else.

A corporate entertainment company was interested in buying her parole.

The governor warned that she had an attitude problem.

Not a problem, replied the company. Our girls get to be very pliable, very soon. It’s all part of the training.

A road, sweeping down a V carved between two chalk cliffs, breaking out into crimson-leafed forest, pillowed mounds of darkness, hammer ponds and running brooks through hills where the sun only sometimes managed to peek out from between the leaves.

He ate at a pub and rode their Wi-Fi connection and the menu was red cabbage and wilted spinach and Chantilly carrots and roast lamb and giant Yorkshire puddings and after twenty minutes the community Company officer came and asked him for his ID and if he worked nearby because you see the people here had paid their Company tax and there was a surcharge for visitors.

In the night he sat on a hill looking down towards the village, and saw a flash of firelight as the first torch was lit, followed by another, and another, and another.

The Company support team stood by with sand buckets, health and safety you see, but otherwise didn’t intervene as the people of the town walked out in robes of black, flaming torches held aloft, went down to the edge of the town and circled its boundaries three times, twice clockwise, once anticlockwise, and spoke their prayers.

Protect us, Lord, from the evils that come in the dark protect us from the world that claws at our edges protect us from change and from pain and from evil and from…

After, they went home to play Xbox.

Theo didn’t have the paperwork to enter the Cotswolds.

He hid the car on the Oxfordshire border, driving down the path to an abandoned industrial estate and tucking it into the deepest corner of the dark. Then he waited for the grey hour before dawn, and sneaked across on the footpaths with a pair of kids, dodging into the hollows of great-bellied trees to evade the patrols who swept the area in beams of white, looking for intruders.

His guides, fourteen and sixteen, brother and sister, made their living by taking strangers across the border. They knew where the motion sensors were, and the flight paths of the drones. For only two hundred quid they could get you a month pass to the Cotswolds, complete with 5 per cent discount at this big manor house where once a president had stayed, or maybe a military dictator, they weren’t sure. They were all the same anyway.

He paid fifty quid for their skills, and didn’t ask if they had family or if they’d be okay getting home. By early morning he’d reached a village of old stones and running water, a mill silent by the stream, narrow stone bridges criss-crossing through the village, a manor house offering spa experiences and corporate dining.

He washed his face in the stream, waited for the sun to climb higher, descended to the tea room to order a scone and a pot of Earl Grey.

“You’re here for the walking are you?”

“Yes, the walking. My family have a cottage in Chipping Campden.”

“Beautiful around there, beautiful. So how long have you been…?”

“I entered a few days ago. I like to come here at this time of year—fewer people. You can walk for hours and not see…”

“Of course! It’s not like the Lake District around here!”

An entrance pass to the Lake District was sometimes affordable even by people who weren’t on the Company payroll, and there were some corporations who still insisted on sponsoring Boy Scout trips up the mountains too. Not that anyone had any problem with Boy Scouts, not really, it was just that people like that… cluttered things. They made everything feel terribly…

…cluttered.

“I was thinking of visiting Danesmoor. I heard that the paintings are…”

“Remarkable, yes, remarkable do you know the…?”

“Arnslade; of course. I work at the Ministry—he’s such a good boss, I mean you’ll know of course, but such a pleasure and…”

His hostess, blue and white striped apron, green beads at neck and wrists, beamed, and topped up Theo’s cup with a little more steaming tea, milk in first.

One cream tea later, a family of three arrived, bright blue matching hi-tech jackets, matching red walking sticks, matching immaculate, mud-free boots. Theo watched them from the corner of his eye, waited for the child, a boy of seven, to be particularly obnoxious and vile, then stood up, swept by, and stole the father’s travel bag. The entire exercise was ludicrously easy.

Sat on the edge of town, he rifled through the contents, stealing clothes, water bottle, money, credit card, papers.

Threw the rest into a gully, kept on walking.

A flock of grouse scattered down the side of the hill; a horse with wide brown eyes trotted to the edge of the field, inviting nuzzling, sugar cubes, company.

A town where a single church sang out a joyful peal of bells to the rising day.

A village with an autumn fête in full swing, the children laughed and played and spun around the maypole, there was face painting, giant bubbles drifted through the air, home-baked goods for 50p to raise money for a local charity, a fair for old cars, polished to perfection, 1930s two-seaters, tops down, men sat on the shining black leather seats exclaiming, without being allowed to actually drive, “Parp parp parp!” giggling with childish delight.

As he moved on, he passed a red phone box which had been converted into a station for CPR defibrillator panels.

A tourist shop selling hand-painted china, a thousand whiskered cat faces.

A security post manned by a member of the Cotswolds Appreciation Corporation, who scurried out as Theo passed and blurted, “Can I see your pass, please?”

“Of course just…”

“Where did you enter?”

“I prepaid at Blenheim. It was part of the tour, I have the receipt somewhere just here for…”

“If you don’t have the proper paperwork then you can’t—we have to protect the Cotswolds for the residents, for paying visitors, the purpose of the…”

“Here.” He handed over the stolen paperwork, smiled and waited.

“Says you’re with a family,” the man muttered at last, cautious.

“Yes; they’re still in town, enjoying the fair.”

“Where are you going?”

“We parked the car back on the hill. I’m going to pick it up; my wife and son don’t want to walk it’s…”

He stumbled on the words, picked himself back up, smiled.

The man returned his papers. “Have a good trip, sir. The Cotswolds are the perfect place to enjoy the English countryside without anxiety or bother!”

Theo nodded, and kept on walking.

After a while it started to snow.

He looked down on a land turning from green to white, and it was beautiful. It was one of the most beautiful things he thought he had ever seen, and as he stared across the slow slopes he said out loud, “So Lucy, you may not like walking holidays but surely even you can appreciate…”

And stopped himself.

Put his hands in his pockets, lest they grow cold in the empty, biting air.

Kept on walking.

“Hi, Edward Witt again. Yes, the Cumali case—I was wondering yes I was thinking could I maybe talk to her, it’s just

no.

no I understand of course.

Of course.

You have to…

Well thank you. Sorry to have bothered you I’ll just…”

Theo sits a while, and stares at nothing, and only moves when the cold becomes unbearable. In the valleys below, the bells are singing a joyful song, and somewhere there is the laughter of children, behind the walls.

Theo reached Danesmoor on the early afternoon of his second day of walking.

Paced around the great stone wall that cut it off from the rest of the land.

Paid £19.50 for the entrance fee, showed his Cotswold papers, hoped no one cross-checked, for by now surely the theft would have been reported.

An old woman in a heavy lambswool coat sat behind the counter in the gatekeeper’s lodge, and did not cross-check his papers.

“There’s tearooms by the stable,” she barked, handing him his receipt. “We close at 4 p.m.”

Theo thanked her, walked up the neat gravel path, framed by yew trees carved into clownish spheres, towards the front door.

A beautiful house.

Three storeys of light brown stone, pitched grey roof, smaller windows on the top floor, servants’ quarters. A series of stone arches and pillars had been raised at the end of the garden, mimicking something Roman. Beyond, forest began to intrude into the tended knee-high yew mazes and cherub-capped fountains.

Approaching the house down a gravel path, he found white doors standing half-open despite the cold, a blast of heat from radiators tucked away behind carved wooden facings striking his face as he went inside. A wooden sign in the shape of a pointing hand directed VISITORS towards a staircase, and a plinth invited him to remember that Danesmoor was a working family house, and guests were welcome only to appreciate a fascinating historical and cultural heritage.

Black and white marble floors, locked together in geometric squares and triangles to create a map of a madman’s chessboard. Plaster ceilings, adorned with horsehair carvings of Greek gods and heroes: Hercules fighting a lion, Persephone reaching out towards fading summer as Hades dragged her down into perpetual night, Venus and Mars locked in an embrace, the Goddess of Love glancing a little away from her husband’s shoulder as if catching sight of some other entanglement more interesting than the limbs of the God of War.

Paintings. Lords, ladies, their spaniels and babies, the dynasties that had gone before. A statue of a woman, veiled, weeping; a marble carving of a boy throwing a javelin, muscles tight and buttocks bare, head turned to one side as if, at the moment of truth, he had heard a voice cry from the crowd, but it was too late now to stop the spear’s flight.

A roped-off route for guests to walk, little stands explaining the significance of this room or that flowerpot, the history of a fireplace, the craftsmanship of a chair. Theo wandered, and was the only wanderer, while outside the snow grew a little thicker, until he came at last to a sign that said NO ENTRY and, trying the door handle, found it unlocked.

The private family rooms of Danesmoor had all the painted grandeur of the public areas. Portraits still hung on the walls, but on the mantelpieces above the pink-veined fireplaces were photos of younger men and women, drunk, tongues waggling at the camera or dressed up in heroic swatches of leather and paint for a stag do. On the sofas, tattier, softer than the sculpted furniture in the rest of the house, out-of-date newspapers, magazines ringed with coffee stains, the sound of a TV somewhere below playing a reality show in which the contestants had to eat bugs, or a snake’s heart, or their own vomit or some such, to win prizes and the adoration of the texting crowd.

TVs in most rooms, playing at empty air. Once Theo heard someone move, and ducked through a white wooden door disguised as another piece of panelling which turned out to hide a toilet, complete with a bottle of bleach on top of the cistern and a waste basket containing a collection of old tampons wrapped in tissue.

Footsteps passed by, and he waited, and when they were gone, he let himself out and continued wandering.

A room

potted plant a portrait above a long table he

knelt down by the plant and looked up and saw in that moment the image he had seen in a film on a USB stick, where once Simon Fardell and Philip Arnslade had stood and said, “The problem with the excess is that…”

Another room.

Crystal glasses, the port decanter had been refilled, thick purple liquid behind shimmering glass. A white cat with a black spot at the top of its tail, curious, brushed against his ankles. He stroked its head, rubbed under its chin, tickled its belly, until, too excited by this play, it flicked out joyfully at his wrist and nearly scratched him, at which point he pulled back, and it grew bored and slunk away, a king disappointed by a courtier.

A flight of stairs. A bin filled with blue latex gloves, a golden drinking chalice on a table next to a half-drunk bottle of Diet Pepsi. Light fading through the windows, the end of the day; a man ringing the bell in the courtyard outside to summon the tourists away.

A noise from the corridor. He ducked through a closed door because it was there, shut it quietly, pressed his ear against the wood, listened, waited, heard footsteps pass, let out a breath.

Looked around the room.

A single bed, long dressing table, a mirror, a picture of a cat, ginger, hackles raised, painted in oils, hissing from the wall. A TV, the volume turned down, showing a programme about organising garden parties. On the dressing table—pills. Over two dozen bottles, orange plastic, containing fat ones thin ones square ones round ones, big red horse-pills and small yellow stubs that vanished under the tongue, and boxes in which these pills could be laid out in order—Monday morning, lunch, dinner, bed; Tuesday morning lunch dinner bed Wednesday morning lunch

Someone was halfway through filling a box, and had been called away by something else. Theo picked up a pill between thumb and forefinger, rolled it around, put it down, turned to go.

Saw the door, big black key in the lock, the sound of a radio playing static-cracked Russian classical music from the other side, something triumphant and brassy.

Hesitated.

Went to the door.

Tried the handle, slowly.

The door was locked.

Turned the heavy iron key, felt an oiled latch slip back.

Tried the handle again.

Pushed the door open.

The stink hit first the stink it was like…

He gagged, turned away, closed the door, caught fresher air.

Put his sleeve over his mouth, opened the door again, looked.

The sound of the radio, high and proud, a chorus of children’s voices raised in triumphant song. A double bed, carved wooden post in each corner, no curtains hanging from the frame. At the end of the bed was a low, long bench for sitting on and taking shoes off, or leaving books on or for a sitting cat, he wasn’t quite sure. On one wall was a picture of a man, one hand on a turning globe, a spaniel leaping in perpetual surprise at his feet, its eyes wild as if to wonder what cruel fate it was that it would be caught for ever leaping, never catching its prize. A single lamp was on by the bed. In the shadows to its left was an armchair, upholstered in thick, itchy thread woven with pale roses. A woman was in the armchair, eyes closed, head on one side, yellow-flecked spit on her chin where it had rolled from the corner of her mouth, fluffy slippers on her feet and a thick dark blue dressing gown around her frame. A blue cap had been pulled over her head, capturing the white fluff of her hair; her nails were cut to translucent stubs, and where her legs emerged beneath gown and nightie, brilliant blue-black veins throbbed and spidered over her chalky flesh.

The smell seeped through arm and cloth pressed over his mouth, there was no denying it, no pretending that there wasn’t vomit in a bowl just visible under the bed. No one had bothered to remove it or change it, it was just vomit, a bowl full of vomit.

he closed the door again, thought he might puke, didn’t, took another deep breath, opened the door, tried again

a yellow stain in the centre of the bed, old urine, new urine, brownish smear of faeces too but the woman sitting by the radio didn’t seem to mind she was just

sitting.

Asleep perhaps or maybe

He looked again, and her eyes were open, drifting up to the ceiling, her head rolled back. She made a little noise.

Uh uh uh.

Perhaps language, of a sort.

Theo closed the door, didn’t lock it.

Stood for a while with his back pressed to the wood, the key pushing into the base of his spine, and it seemed to him that there was a story to be told here. There was evidence which would be very easy to deny there was…

Theo opened the door, one more time, to the room where the old woman sat.

Crossed the floor.

Squatted down in front of her, trying to ignore the fact that if he rocked back too suddenly he’d sit in puke, trying to exhale into the stench.

Took her hands in his, held them softly, waited for her drifting eyes to drift down to him, pupils far too wide, tongue loose in her mouth, the flicker of her gaze somewhere in the vicinity of his but unable to stay still.

“Lady Mantell?” he whispered. “Ma’am? My name is Theo.”

“Who the hell are you?”

A sudden leap of noise from the room next door, a man in the open door pursued by a blast of TV, a cheerful chorus of, “So with her customised bunting in place it’s now time for the final touches as…”

The man standing in the door to the stinking bedroom wore black T-shirt, blue jeans, carried a tray of baked beans on toast and a flask of sugary orange gloop.

For a moment the two men stared at each other, wondering which way the next twenty seconds of their lives would go. An instant, perhaps, in which there could have been some bluff, some bluster, but no sooner had Theo begun to formulate the lie than it was too late, the opportunity to deceive had passed them by.

The man dropped the tray and lunged for a grey button on a thin cord by the door.

Theo threw himself across the room, caught the man’s wrist before he could press it, kneed him hard in the stomach, not really knowing why or if it would work, he’d never kneed anyone anywhere before, but he had a knee and the man was in his way and so he

kneed him and it didn’t really go as well as he’d hoped because the man gave a little grunt and then caught Theo by his left ear and tugged. He’d probably been aiming for hair, but in the scramble ear would do, and it hurt less than Theo thought it would do so he resisted and tried instead with his free hand to dig his thumb into the man’s eyeball, he had no idea where that idea had come from it just seemed

the man let go of Theo’s ear, caught his wrist as he went for the face, and for a moment there was an awkward push-pull of strength as neither knew quite where they were supposed to go from here, teetering with arms locked and fingers scrambling, bodies swaying until their balance broke and the pair tumbled down, Theo pinned beneath the larger man. The fall smacked the breath out of his body, smashed a bowl of baked beans beneath his left ribs, orange gloop and white ceramic shards smattering across the room. He lost his grip on the man’s right hand, and now the man had found a brilliant thing to do with elbows, tucking his left elbow under his body and letting his whole weight drive it down, point first, into Theo’s belly.

Theo tasted half-digested sandwich in his mouth, gagged, curled and writhed and couldn’t get any breath inside, and the man sensing this snarled in expectant triumph and punched Theo across the face. He couldn’t punch very well; there wasn’t any room to draw the fist back and release, but it seemed to make him feel good so he did it again, a ring on his third finger slicing through Theo’s cheek, warmth spreading inside his mouth as the pain knocked through to the back of his head, and again, and again and

then the woman in the dressing gown hit the man over the head with the remnants of the dinner tray, and his eyes went wide and his weight buckled to one side, and she hit him again, then dropped the tray, followed immediately by dropping herself, sitting with her legs curled up under her like a child picking daisies, and her eyes rolled up again and her mouth drooped open, but Theo

pushed the man off him, caught the fallen tray and hit him again and again and again and

at some point realised that the man wasn’t moving, and there was blood on the floor, and it wasn’t Theo’s and

and wondered if he’d killed a man and

and if that man had a daughter and

Theo dropped the tray, crawled across the floor, felt through the blood on the man’s face, found a pulse.

Felt around his skull, couldn’t feel anything that had buckled or caved.

Looked into his eyes, saw that they were open and looking back, but the man didn’t move, didn’t speak, little gasping breaths, wondered if there was something he’d broken if there was

wanted to apologise, thought it was stupid

stood up

fell down

something inside him was, if not broken, then certainly turned around and he’d not really had time to heal from Shawford, he’d not really known what he did he’d not really stopped to think about

Crawled to the woman sitting on the floor.

Held out one hand.

“Lady Mantell?” he breathed.

Her eyes drifted again to his face, danced this way and that, fell away, rose, fell away again.

“Helen,” he murmured softly. “My name is Theo. May I take you away from all this?”

Chapter 52

They stole a car.

For a moment Theo wondered if he’d have to hot-wire the thing. He’d read plenty of reports of people doing it, a minimum of £550 if you were caught hot-wiring any vehicle over an estimated road value of £3275, it was also likely that you’d be charged for…

But the man he’d beaten had some car keys in his pocket, so that made things easier.

He found a coat in a wardrobe, wrapped the ribbon-faced woman in it. He put her carer in the recovery position, eyes still open, that didn’t seem right that wasn’t normal that wasn’t

took the car keys

held the woman gently under the arm

led her away.

A car in the staff car park.

A little Nissan that smelled of chips and sporty deodorant.

He put the woman in the passenger seat, and she didn’t object.

He sat in the driver’s seat, turned the engine on, and the moment he did the radio came up, far too loud, a Michael Jackson number, he turned it off quickly lest it upset the woman, and she didn’t seem to care either way.

There wasn’t a barrier to smash triumphantly as he drove out of the car park, and the woman on the ticket desk didn’t look up from her mobile phone as they passed, which Theo found a little disappointing.

Chapter 53

He parked the car on the edge of a town whose name he couldn’t find. Sodium light shot up the spire of a red-brick church. A large shop selling light fittings resembling mallards and soup bowls painted with puppies’ faces cast white light out of its long windows onto the street. A fish and chip shop was still open, selling mushy peas with English mint, beer-batter fish, and chips three-times cooked in duck fat. Theo looked at his face in the mirror, and saw bruising and a long cut from a stranger’s ring.

The woman slept.

He drove on.

Four miles from the Cotswolds border he saw the first sign: POLICE SEARCH IN EFFECT. EXPECT DELAYS.

He pulled off the road into a farmer’s field, where a herd of fat-bellied cattle regarded him suspiciously for a while before forgetting and returning to the business of eating the wet winter grass.

The woman was still sleeping.

Theo watched her a while, and wondered what the hell he’d done.

Washing his face in a brook.

Somewhere upstream there was probably a dead sheep or something, so he didn’t drink the water, just washed the blood away, which upon consideration was probably worse.

When the emergency fuel light came on, he drove the car to the edge of a ten-house village built around a small manor house that now hosted poets’ retreats. He shook the woman awake gently. Her eyes opened slowly, the pupils shrinking down tight as light met her face. Her gaze fixed on him for a moment, confused but steady. Then she said, “I need socks.”

Theo licked his lips. “Okay. I’ll see if I can find some.”

“Thank you,” she replied, and closed her eyes, and went back to sleep again.

Theo walked into the village.

Found a house with no four-by-four parked outside.

Tried the front door.

Found it unlocked.

Went inside.

Climbed stairs of soft cream carpet, leaving muddy boot tracks behind him.

Brushed past the pictures of family friends and family cats.

Used the toilet, because it was there, washed his face in hot water, found it sensational, wondered if he should have a shower, decided against it.

Found the bedroom. Stole some socks, trousers, shirts—armfuls of the stuff, he didn’t even know why he took so much.

Shoved it into plastic bags that he found in the kitchen, in the cupboard that held the washing machine.

Helped himself to bread and last night’s roast chicken, saw that this was a family who kept their ketchup in the fridge rather than the cupboard but seemed to just leave mayo standing wherever they wanted—odd that, very odd. He was at a loss to understand.

Walked back towards the car.

A curtain twitched, but he kept walking, a man with nothing to hide, and no one shouted, and the wind pushed the fallen leaves through the narrow cobbled lanes.

Chapter 54

They hid in an old stone hut where once the shepherds had tended their flocks, and which now only the kids and the teenagers used, the bored ones from the village come to drink beer and smoke pot and maybe try this sex thing.

Theo laughed despite himself as he kicked condom packets and crunched-up aluminium cans out of the way, remembering for a moment a night with Dani on the beach, cries of “Ow it’s really cold is there more blanket… my bum’s gone to sleep!” At the time it had been as close to magic as his teenage brain could really…

…but now it was something else and for a little while Theo chuckled silently as he laid the old woman down on a bed of stolen clothing, resting her head out of the wind, and as she slept, he put two pairs of socks on her feet and, having nothing better to use, another two on her hands, to keep her fingers from going blue.

For three days

“For three days,” mused Theo as they stared down at the ice encasing the Hector, thin for sure but even thin ice could do so much damage, “or maybe it was only two? I think that perhaps it was…”

For maybe only two days

They hid in that stone cottage on a hill.

Theo drove the car as far away as he could, abandoned it in a field when even fumes wouldn’t keep it moving, walked back along the paths. That took nearly four hours, and when he returned it was dark and he was cold and soaked to the skin, not by rain but by a falling dampness on the air that made him shiver uncontrollably. The woman was awake, watched him arrive with the setting sun fading behind his back and said simply, “Come here.”

He’d lain down on the bed of stolen clothes, and she’d pulled a stolen blanket over him, and held him tight, and soon she was shivering from the cold that radiated off his soaking clothes, and after a while they were both warm, and Theo slept, and so did she.

The next morning she threw up and couldn’t hold even dry bread down and squatted behind the hut and shouted at him not to come near her, not to look at her, and for a while he hid behind the stones and covered his ears as she heaved and shook and choked and spat and coughed orange liquid out of her nose. The act of vomiting made her bowels go too, her bladder her…

And then she called, “Pass me some clean clothes—don’t look!” and he passed her some clean clothes and didn’t look, head turned down to the grubby earth, and she changed in the cold and returned wearing the clothes of a woman much younger and far fatter than she and without a sound lay down beneath the blanket and waited for Theo to lie down too, so that she might take some of his warmth, which before she had so preciously given.

And she slept.

And sometimes, but not very often, Theo slept too.

Until one evening, probably on the second maybe on the third day, a group of kids appeared at the door of the hut and stared, confused, bewildered, to find it inhabited, and muttered amongst themselves, for they had meant to come here and do such naughty things as open bottles with their teeth and maybe dare each other to touch their own vaginas or penises or something truly dangerous like that and it was going to be…

But here were two people, a man and an old woman, lying on a pile of filthy clothes and it was obvious to the kids that these were intruders, interlopers, bums, because even the most intrepid walkers of the Cotswolds Ways used licensed glamping sites.

So they muttered amongst themselves and scuttled back to the village, and one—the second-biggest and most brave—threw a stone at Theo that bounced off his shoulder, and Theo woke and saw the child, and the child shrieked and ran away.

Theo shook the woman and whispered, “We have to go we have to go there were… we have to go…”

And the woman opened her eyes wearily, and saw the shadow of the children running down the hill and grumbled, “Very well.”

And climbed to her feet, pulling her blue cap back over her short white hair, rubbing yellow flakes from her eyes.

They walked, the woman leaning on Theo, one arm across his shoulders, each step a gasp, her weight swinging from side to side. Their only direction was the opposite of that in which the children had run, until finally the woman stopped, looked up the hill, looked down it, turned to Theo and, craning her neck a little to examine his face more particularly, said, “My name is Helen.”

Chapter 55

Sirens in the night.

Police.

People—family people—heard rumours of bums, of interlopers on the hills of…

Theo said, “How fast can you walk?”

And she replied, “Not fast enough it’s not going to be… but I know a…”

They stumbled through the settling dark, the sunset sky overhead a purple-blue pillow that stopped abruptly at golden-red sheets thrown up from the western horizon, night and day competing violently for who would triumph at the final bell.

The sound of dogs, dogs howling, and once Helen fell and Theo caught her, and once Theo slipped in mud and Helen hissed, “Come on!” and he struggled up, half-breaking into a run, down a path towards a stream, the forest whispering overhead, getting dark now, too dark, the trees hemming in all things, a prison that hid the howling dogs from sight that made the sound of the police bounce this way and that; a place where men could die and the earth would take their bones and none would ever know that it had happened here, a place where—

A voice called out from the darkness on a ridge overhead: “Helen! Lady Helen, can you hear me? Are you…?”

Helen pulled Theo behind a tree three times their width, an ancient monster of gutted wood inside which a dozen creatures played, and the light of the torch passed by, but the barking of the dogs grew nearer.

“Come,” hissed the woman. “Come.”

Theo hauled her along, following the direction of her pointing fingers, whispered commands, along a path by the stream which he could barely see, twigs catching, mud rising to his ankles, they scrambled along until the darkness was so thick that Theo could only see the half-blackness of the trees a moment before walking into them, the stream a roar, he kept on missing his step and half-sliding into it, but always Helen hissed, “Come on! Come!”

Downhill, and down a little further, and then a light ahead, a yellow glow on a porch, and he hesitated but she did not, so he staggered on, and briefly the world was lit up blue as a light swept through the trees to his left, he hadn’t even noticed the road coming close, didn’t know where north was or what land he walked in but Helen seemed confident. Stepping over the now stride-wide stream as it entered a neatly mown garden, a plastic buggy for children to play at truck driver in, parked beneath a plastic swing, a car on the gravel before the door, little latticed windows beneath a thatched roof, a ceramic sign in the shape of a swan paddling on the river by the door: WELCOME.

Light behind the windows, thin curtains drawn. A floodlight turned on automatically as Helen reached the porch. She checked over her shoulder, then rang a bell, tingalingaling, an old black button with a real bell inside, nothing digital, not round here—nothing that did not conform to the standards set down in the Cotswold Corporate Community Charter.

The door opened.

A woman, younger than Helen by some thirty years, a green woollen jumper and bright purple leggings, stood in the frame. Her hair was brilliant red, bundled into a mess around her head. Her fingernails were painted black, her eyes were bright green, and as she recognised Helen with a little gasp of in-taken breath, a child scurried out from the room behind her, saw the older woman in the door and exclaimed, “Aunty!” running forward to wrap her arms around Helen’s mud-soaked legs.

A hurried conversation in the front hall.

“They said kidnapped they said—”

“Not kidnapped. My son has done something—I need your help I need to…”

“Are you sure because you look and who the hell even is—”

“His name is Theo, Kirsty please listen to me listen to me look at me do I look insane to you do I look…”

“No, but they said, I mean I saw you and—”

“They drugged me, my son—please the police are coming they are going to knock on the door please trust me you always trusted me your mother trusted me you know that I—”

“The police but this is—”

“Kirsty. For… please.”

“I… wait upstairs.”

She led them upstairs.

A ladder into a loft.

The loft was full of ancient trunks. Memorabilia from a bygone age. A grandfather’s gramophone. Models of toy aeroplanes built by relatives whose dexterous fingers were long since turned to bone. A scythe, rusted red. A bird’s nest, fallen to the floor from the rafters, the tiny white shells cracked, their babies long since flown. The ladder folded up behind them, and Theo sat with Helen on a trunk, and they waited.

The old woman’s head drifted to one side, rested on Theo’s shoulder.

A car pulling up below.

Maybe two.

Doors slamming, soft thunks in the dark.

Doorbell, tingalingaling, cheery come-on-Christmas sounds, a merry welcome to the hearth.

Door opening.

Voices.

Concerned.

Have you

No officer no I haven’t

this man is

I’ll keep an eye out for

Lady Helen—it’s very

I know, a close family friend. I’ll absolutely… is the search.. do they think she’s…?

We don’t know ma’am but if you

Of course, officer, of course, I’ll give you a call if I see anything

be safe

you too, you too.

Door closed.

Car doors opened, closed.

Engines.

The cars drove away.

They waited.

After a while

A broom handle knocked against the trapdoor to the loft.

“Okay. You can come down now.”

They took turns to use the bathroom.

Theo went first.

In the living room beneath Helen and Kirsty talked, and he wondered what they were saying.

The shower curtain was translucent, painted with whales blowing water from their spouts, a bright red ring of crabs scuttling along the bottom, eyes boggling, claws snapping at dancing fish.

When he emerged, swathed in towel, Kirsty stood at the door with her gaze averted, a bundle of clothes in her arms. “These were my husband’s. They might fit. You can change in there.”

She nodded once and said nothing when he thanked her.

Helen had a bath.

Theo and Kirsty sat in silence in front of a black iron stove, the TV on low in the corner of the room, the child enthralled at the rare treat of a late-night movie, her mummy should have guests more often if she got to stay up late like this.

Theo stared at his hands. Kirsty stared at his face.

From upstairs, the sound of water.

In the corner, the TV.

They waited.

Finally, Kirsty stood up, shot a look towards her child, another to Theo, then left the room.

Returned a few moments later with a plate of bread, cheese, ham. Put it down on the coffee table between them.

Theo ate slowly, stomach turning.

“Mummy can I watch another can I watch another please Mummy please I want to watch another I want to…”

“One more and then it’s bed—it’s already a long way past your bedtime this is a special treat, do you understand? And I want you to be good when it’s done, I want you to be very very good tonight it’s…”

Mother and child sat together in a corner and chose a cartoon. Theo watched. In the end, they chose the story of Bobby-X, an ordinary high-school kid who is secretly a ninja spy working for the Company to help stop the evil anarchists before they can destroy innocent children’s lives. He supposed it was quite good, in its way.

Upstairs, a plug was pulled.

Water drained away.

Theo and Kirsty waited in silence.

Helen came downstairs.

She was wearing clean pyjamas and socks. A towel was wrapped expertly around her head.

She took in the room, the cartoon, and at a cry “Aunty!” shuffled over to the child to hold her tight and exclaim how wonderful it was to see her and how she hoped she’d been good at school, good with her mum.

The child scowled, but yes, she’d been good just like everyone wanted her to be…

“Bed!” barked Kirsty.

“But Mum…”

“You’re not going to behave badly in front of Aunt Helen, are you?”

“No, Mum.”

“Bed!”

Mother and daughter hurried away.

Helen sat in the seat that Kirsty had vacated, and examined the half-consumed plate of ham and cheese in front of her. After a while, she reached out, made herself something resembling a sandwich, put it on a napkin and took a careful bite from the corner. The bread was thick and tough, took a long time chewing. She worked, swallowed, laid the napkin back on the table, folded her hands and looked at Theo.

“So,” she said. “We should talk.”

Chapter 56

“Family is everything,” Helen said.

“Family is everything,” whispered Dani Cumali to the winds that shred the ghosts.

“Family is everything,” muttered the father of the man who would be Theo as they severed his hand at the wrist.

“Family never did very much for me,” muses Theo Miller, the real Theo Miller, the one whose grave has no name.

They sit by the fire as Kirsty puts her daughter to bed, and Helen declares again, sacred words to steady her soul: “Family is everything.”

Her voice, tired, ragged around the edges. Theo wondered how much the words were costing, how much she remembered of the days before the forest, hot baths and this house, or whether she could still remember the smell of urine and puke on the bedroom floor.

After a while she leaned back in her chair, arranging words slowly around ideas, piecing them together as a child might tentatively try some new mathematical formula, or an artist compose with unusual paints. They came slowly at first, then a little faster.

“My son has been poisoning me. He has been… no, that’s not the place to start. I have this condition. My kidneys. Really, I feel absurd when I say it, you always think it’ll be something like the heart that gets you rather than bloody urine. It’s manageable. Not treatable. Just manageable. But after Philip found out—after he started… treating… me, it was…

My friends would visit, people I’ve known since I was… and they’d talk to me in that stupid little voice, that stupid ‘Oh Helen isn’t it lovely yes it’s so lovely you’re so lovely well we’re going now.’ Even though I wasn’t there, even with the drugs, I still knew. They put it in my drink, at first. Sedatives, mostly. Some other things. My son didn’t come to see me. He had people for that.”

A pause, scratching at the skin on the inside of her right arm. It flaked in little white mounds of damp flesh, forming ridges under her nails. If she noticed, she didn’t seem to care.

“Family is everything. I was born into wealth. We were what you would call the landed gentry. My father was a sir, my mother was a ma’am, and we lived in desperate poverty. It was desperate poverty because we had a manor house in Devon, and the upkeep of the place was eighty thousand a year. My father farmed the land nearby; to not farm the land was to let it spoil, and to let it spoil was to destroy the essence of what the land was. What it means to have land. What it meant to our ancestors. My mother worked as a manager at a call centre handling telecoms complaints. Between them they brought in around sixty thousand, which was spent on stopping the roof falling down—and the roof was always falling down—repairing the tractor, paying labour, providing electricity, water and heat for a family home containing seven bedrooms, five receptions, three kitchens, eight bathrooms and a billiards room, though no one enjoyed billiards except me. They took out loans, mortgages, and every few months let visitors come in for a fee, in order to raise a little more cash. But they were very badly organised; they never promoted it properly and never managed to turn the house into a business. Sometimes people turned up to the official open days. Usually people would just drift in at random, assuming that you were living in a public museum. My brothers hated it, and once George even threatened a man with a shotgun, and was arrested and had to be got out by his godfather, who was the magistrate. We couldn’t have afforded the indemnity. If my father had been willing to let someone else do the farming, if he’d not resented the idea of any other kind of work, then perhaps we could have saved something. But quitting wasn’t what men like him were meant to do.

By the time I was sixteen, my older brother was off at university, where he got a 2.2 in economics, and my younger was thinking of joining the army. I knew that we were in trouble, so I’d set up little events—fêtes and open days and trips for the local scouting group—to try and raise some cash. I’d get a few hundred quid too, but it never meant anything. Not in the grand scheme of things.

I tell you this because it’s very important that you understand—we never considered selling the house. Never. And we never went to the pound shop either. Frugality never occurred to us as an option. We still wore the best clothes, attended the best events, ate the finest food. We had no conception of alternatives.

Attempting to run the estate in a more businesslike manner, hosting weddings, conferences, that sort of thing—it wasn’t what you did. The house, the lands, the title. This was why we were born, our purpose, and we would see it all destroyed rather than dream of leaving our home. We felt, I have to tell you, very sorry for ourselves. Surrounded by silverware and the weapons of our grandparents pillaged in colonial wars, my family and myself would very calmly and simply state that we knew precisely how the people on council estates felt, except that they were lucky because they could get emergency corporate sponsorship, and we weren’t eligible.

When I was twenty-three, my father died, and the estate passed to my brother. He moved back immediately—it was his duty—and continued to run it into the ground. It wasn’t ever said that I needed to go, but it was obvious. He was the master now and naturally Mother could remain, but siblings were… well it smacked of something medieval, shall we say. Successors at the dinner table, with opinions…

I moved out, got a job selling perfume at the local superstore pharmacy. I wasn’t very well educated. It had never seemed like something that a girl needed to be. But my name still got me into the right places. When people asked what I did, I said I was a perfumer. Perfumer is an acceptable business for a daughter, as are vintner, equestrian and extreme sports. I met Jeffrey, my husband, at one of these parties, and lied to him about where I really worked until the day after we were married, and he laughed and forgave me instantly and we were very much in love.

Very much in love. It is important you understand this too.

Of course I had a duty to perform here, at Danesmoor. Jeffrey knew I understood what these things meant. I valued family as much as he did. It is incredibly important that these things are preserved, it is as vital as any library or work of art. We are the history of this nation, we hold within us part of its culture, which if it is destroyed is the death of a piece of Britain that everyone, no matter what, loves for its beauty and its charm and its essential Britishness. These things must be protected, and to do so, of course, I had to have boys. The line passes down through the boys, not because of sexism but because that is the culture, the history, the truth of who we are. I will not say anything else on that.

I had two sons and two daughters. My youngest daughter is married. My eldest died. My youngest son runs a trekking company in Arizona. My eldest is Philip. He inherited Danesmoor when my husband died, eight years ago. You will know him, of course. He is the minister of fiscal efficiency. He owns an island in the Mediterranean. He doesn’t use his title. Everyone calls him Mr. Arnslade, because if he was Your Lordship it might seem elitist. People are very anxious about that sort of thing in government. They don’t want to draw attention.

I am the only family left in Danesmoor, but the estate is run by a steward called Fish. Fish isn’t his real name. I don’t know his real name. He never told me. He arrived a few years ago and took over everything, and I caused a fuss because the estate had been a thing I managed, and it was going well, but Philip said…

There wasn’t much for me to do after that.

Fish wasn’t a bad manager he just didn’t

I felt like a foolish old woman and I was being treated like…

Do you know a man called Simon Fardell? He’s an old school friend of Philip’s, and they went to university together. They went to Oxford do you know

you do.

Simon is a shit.

I’m not saying this to excuse my son. My son is also a shit. But Simon was the shit that blocked the toilet, if you’ll pardon my saying so.

Naturally he assumes he isn’t. Most people assume they aren’t shits. It’s just good business. That’s what it amounts to. Business is good. Good is business it is

Anyway.

They would meet in Danesmoor. They’d have long weekends together, there’d be drink and I’d sit with their wives in the other room, that’s how this works. Philip is married to a useless trophy creature. I know that I’m his mother and it’s my job to dislike anyone my son marries, but she really is a vacuous little nothing. I quite like her, in a way. Being so empty-headed means that, unlike my son, she isn’t a shit. She’s just too useless to be anything better. Simon’s wife is far too good for him. Her name is Heidi. I think he hits her sometimes, but she always says… when it’s good, it’s really good, and when it’s bad, he always says sorry afterwards and that’s how she knows he loves her. I always thought I’d tell her to run away. It’s a very easy thing to say, much easier than anything that matters—but I never mustered the courage. We’d sit, us women, and drink tea and read magazines about holidays and handbags, and in the room next door the men would carve up the country and that too was just part of… how things are. How they have always been.

And one weekend I walk into the room while the men are talking to look for my mobile phone, which I’m always putting down somewhere, and they’re talking about mass graves.

They don’t call it that, of course.

They use the words ‘excess labour reallocation,’ and I think well, excess labour reallocation isn’t it wonderful if a little sad when your boys are all grown up.

But then they stop speaking when I enter and I wonder why, surely reallocating labour isn’t that bad after all, but they’re now pretending they were talking about anything else. Anything else at all. And I’m a little bit curious, I’ll admit, but don’t really think about it, except I do.

I do.

Because I know Philip’s face.

I know when he’s…

Once, when he was a young man, he got into a duel at university. He shot another boy. Killed him. I was mortified, but all he could talk about was the cost, and Jeffrey indulged him of course, paid the indemnity because it was that or let his son go to the patty line, so of course he paid but…

There was a look in Philip’s eye, a thing that reminded me of that day he came home with an indemnity and blood on his shoes, and I thought… hello, I thought. Hello, my boy. What have you done this time?

It didn’t take long to find out. I wasn’t being nosy, not at first. I was just… drifting into the study. Then I was just sitting at his desk. These actions I could explain as being casual deeds on an innocent afternoon. Even when I started rifling through his files, I thought, this is just a mother being interested in the son who she loves.

Which of course was a lie.

I knew he’d done something, and I wanted to know what, needed to know how bad things were, without ever admitting this to myself. When I found the files, I was almost disappointed at how easy it was. In his own home he hadn’t bothered to hide anything. Numbers of beggars rounded up from Birmingham city centre and sent without trial to the recycling yards for ‘rehabilitation through labour.’ Number of illegal immigrants caught on the last sweep, divided by age and gender, sent to the patty line for ‘indefinite reintegration.’ Companies who make dangerous products—chemicals, oils, fuels—don’t like to pay for their workers. Patty labour is much cheaper, but sometimes it’s hard to find. And when the patties can’t work any more, they sell them off cheap to another company, which is owned by a company which is owned by a company which is always owned by the Company. And when you can’t sell them, when they’re too broken to buy, you have to find an economic use for them.

It’s not that they’re shot.

Lined up against a wall.

They’re just starved to death.

Or set cleaning radioactive equipment.

Or beaten because they can’t work a seven-day week.

Or locked in solitary confinement until the noises stop.

It’s not murder.

It’s corrective rehabilitation integration. It is the individual repaying their debt to society through labour. Labour benefits business. Business is society. That is all.

These things take some time to contemplate.

And there were the documents. Paper, files, I even used the computer. A doddery old woman like me, fancy that I can click on ‘Yes’; Fish would be amazed.

When my son sold the government tax service to the Company, a lot of people got extremely rich. I’d say there were over a hundred people who became billionaires overnight, and another thousand or more who are now millionaires courtesy of their shrewd investments. But that’s all. A thousand people enriched and the Company now owns the country. A single stroke of the pen and they own everything. They own the law, the judges, the hospitals, the schools, the roads, the police, the army and the government. They own it all, and maybe that’s good, maybe that’s what we need, to be efficient to be…

But it’s not.

There are the obvious signs, of course. The mass graves behind the prisons. where they bury the ones who never got to see a lawyer before they died, whose sentences were always extended, always, because the paperwork went astray. The company that handles the paperwork is run by a company which is run by a company which…

The enclaves levelled because the people couldn’t afford to pay their corporate community tax. The homes destroyed, the migrants who died on the side of the road, villages and towns wiped out because they didn’t produce a decent profit margin for the Company. And then there’s the rest, the casual murders that aren’t even part of the plan, just happen on the side. The old people dying of cold in winter, heat in summer, because they can’t afford to pay their energy bills and the Company doesn’t make a profit on relief for that sort of thing. The dead in the hospitals. The dead in the cells. The police needed to save money to turn a profit, so the Company took over responsibility for reporting fatalities. The hospitals didn’t have enough money for the morgues, but the Company owns a company which owns a company which…

We all knew, of course. Everyone knows, but no one looks. We don’t look because if we look it makes us evil because we aren’t doing something about it, or it makes us sad because we can’t do anything about it, or it proves that we’re monsters when we always thought we were righteous because we won’t do anything about it. Either way, safer not to look.

I couldn’t stop myself; it was my son. I needed to know, to see. I spent so long trying to find a way in which he was doing right. Trying to find something which said that this was good. Of course it’s so hard to prove anything now, it’s so hard to find anyone who doesn’t just look at the facts and say that she who wrote this is a liar, there is no room for reason there is only…

Family is the only thing that matters.

My children are having grandchildren now. There will be more to carry the family name. Family is safety. It is love. It is a thing that you defend because it is the one thing which matters more than anything else, it is love in adversity, it is giving, it is that which lifts us up. It is the trust that spans the generations. It is the young who look to you to do them right. It is the old who look to the young to make a newer, faithful world. We carry humanity it is…

I bugged my son.

He’s got security teams, of course, but in Danesmoor they left us alone, didn’t bother to do any real checks inside the house, not when the threat was clearly going to come from elsewhere.

I stole documents, copied them, made a file.

Filmed his meetings.

No one suspected me—I am the lady of the house. I recorded everything. For three years I recorded everything, and didn’t know what I could do with it. That’s not true. I knew what I could do with it. I just never had the courage to do it. Maybe that’s love. Maybe that’s what it was.

They caught me, in the end. A man called Markse found one of the cameras I used, started a manhunt. I knew that he was going to fingerprint it and I hadn’t used gloves because the idea was ridiculous.

All of it was just so ridiculous.

This was… a month ago, perhaps?

There was a do scheduled, all of Philip’s Company friends, Simon fucking Fardell and his battered wife, all the best people, the mass murderers, out for a bit of a laugh, the shooting, the sport, Pimm’s on the lawn. I knew they were going to catch me, and that would be it. I felt like such a stupid old woman. I had all the proof in the world, and I hadn’t had the guts to do anything with it. Even with them closing in I couldn’t decide, couldn’t act.

Then I found my miracle.

Not a miracle, in fact. Not at all. There was a woman indentured to the catering company. I caught her trying to break into my son’s study and I was angry, instinctively, my house, I was the lady, I was furious and then…

Then I thought for a little moment longer, even in my panic, and I realised—she was trying to break into my son’s study.

And perhaps there was a reason.

I told her to come upstairs with me. Informed her, in my most imperious way, that if she didn’t obey I would report her instantly and she’d go back to the patty line. She came with me, she was so angry and scared. I sat her down and made her tell me why she was trying to break into my son’s study. I was trembling with excitement, but maybe she thought it was rage.

She refused to answer at first, but I could see it in her, the desperation, I saw the mirror of myself in her and finally she said, ‘I think your son fucked the fucking country.’

I was relieved. To hear her say those words, I was desperately relieved, and I think she saw that. ‘Your son fucked us,’ she repeated. ‘He’s gotta pay.’

She’d found something, working at the Ministry of Civic Responsibility. Some sort of documents, she’d been stealing for months. Someone had asked a question, spotted that there were figures not adding up, that the number of patties going to a sewage treatment facility in Cambridgeshire was greater than the number being released, and wondered where the discrepancy lay.

She’d been on the patty line. She’d seen friends vanish, and when the patties asked they were always told ‘reassigned’ and no one questioned it because if you asked questions, you might get reassigned too.

But she’d begun to question. To suspect. That’s why she’d come to Danesmoor. Blackmailed her own supervisor to do it. I was impressed, I liked her at that moment, I thought her supervisor sounded just like Fish.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘You’re nobody. If you find proof of anything, what do you think you can do?’

‘I can get my daughter back,’ she replied. ‘I can make them give her back to me.’

My heart fell.

I didn’t need an amateur blackmailer. I needed a firebrand, someone who would save my family name, protect it, go out into the world and do right, right as the family should have done, right as is the right that is the responsibility of this place of…

But she had lost her daughter.

Family is everything.

Family is everything.

To lose a child, it is…

When my daughter died I spent so long trying to make it my fault, because if it was my fault it wasn’t just luck. It was the action of man, it was fate, it was God, it wasn’t just a faulty car brake on a rainy day it wasn’t just that it wasn’t

and she isn’t

sometimes I still think maybe it was a trick, and she’ll be there

and sometimes in my dreams she is a presence who sits by me and is warm and kind and says that she loves me and I cry when I wake

and sometimes I spend days and weeks without thinking about her, and I am simply a woman without children.

That is who I am now.

I knew they would come for me, so I gave this stranger, this woman in prison clothes, a copy of everything I had.

I gave her everything and told her to run away.

The next day, after the party was over, Philip had breakfast with me. He hadn’t had breakfast with me for months, maybe even a year. He was so important, always so busy, but that day he made time to have breakfast and I thought… this is nice. This is nice. He loves me. Maybe it’ll be all right, maybe there’s something I don’t know. And he was charming, the brightest and kindest I’d seen him for years, he really seemed to want to know how I was, said we should go walking together by the lake, like we had when he was young, that it’d been too long since we’d just talked.

There were sedatives in the tea, of course. I thought I was having a funny turn, but the turn never stopped. Next thing I knew Philip was nowhere to be seen, and Fish was at my door telling me I had to take my medicine, and I said that’s stupid that’s absurd I don’t need any medicine

and he said yes, yes, your medicine your medicine

They put it in my food, in my water. I could taste it, occasionally, the bitterness of the powders masked by too much chilli.

They weren’t poisoning to kill.

They just took away my mind, my intelligence, my freedom and my will.

I haven’t seen my son since that morning. It was a beautiful morning. We ate in the eastern rooms, where the sun comes in. It was the perfect day I’d always thought my days were meant to be when I was a girl.

Sometimes friends would come over—Kirsty came a lot. They told her I’d had a stroke.

They told her that.

And they kept me alive.

I suppose that’s Philip’s thing. He stopped short of having his own mother killed when he found out what I did. I never found out what the woman did with the file. I assume she got her daughter back. But if she did, why would you be here?

Mr. Miller?

Why are you here?”

Time is

Neila gunned the engine and it refused to tick over, cursed and muttered and opened up the cover and in the end had to put a hot-water bottle on the blasted thing before it would start.

In a stranger’s house in the Cotswolds the mother of his enemy sat quiet before him, Theo pinched the tips of his fingers together beneath his bottom lip and tried to find words.

“I… there was…

…sometimes pieces come together and it’s…

So I used to be an auditor and while I was working on the job there was

Dani is dead.

Her name is Dani.

The woman who

her name is Dani.

She was murdered.

She was my friend.

Her daughter is my daughter. Her name is Lucy. Dani went to a journalist called Faris, I think she tried to… But they got found out. His daughter was Company and she told them and that was… They killed her, Dani, I mean. And I audited her death. Her life is worth £84,000. She left me a message. ‘Save the mother.’ So I came to Danesmoor and saw you and certain things fell into place and

here we are.

Here we are.

I have Dani’s information now. I have her copy of your file. She sent it back to the town where we’d grown up, so I could find it. She knew she was going to die, I think. She used me as a back-up plan.

I think you should understand that my life has been cowardly, futile and empty. You tell me that family is the most important thing in the world. You should understand that when I was a boy my father was arrested for theft, and died on the patty line, and I hated him because he wasn’t there for me and never gave me anything to believe in. And my mum sort of… faded out, and when I was given a second chance, I blew it. I went to university and realised that all the dreams which I thought were mine were just some fantasy that couldn’t ever come true, so I took the identity of a boy who I got killed—I killed him, I didn’t pull the trigger, but it was me, it was my fault, he died because of me. I took his identity. I became Theo Miller and with that opportunity, that amazing chance…

I blew that too, you see. I couldn’t ever find anything to care about. I couldn’t understand why anything mattered at all. I didn’t think there was any point to me. Just keep going. Just… go through the motions. I have spent my life sending people into slavery, and freeing killers because they were rich, or because the person they killed was poor, or an immigrant, or no good for society, and it was… I did it because it was a job. Because all I ever wanted was a job, and to be safe, and not cause any trouble.

I have led a thoroughly despicable life. Or rather… not despicable. My evils have been ordinary evils. My sins against the world are daily, little sins that no one would question. I am a normal man, and have done no wrong, and there is a place in hell waiting for me. That’s

that’s what I have decided.

That’s what I think.

I want to get my daughter out. I’ve never met her. She’s in an institution writing online reviews for sales products. She’s never getting out. Kids like her don’t. They get lost in the system. Dani’s supervisor said… there’s a market for anything. There’s a market for my daughter. He didn’t know that’s what he was saying, but that’s all I could hear. She’s probably not my daughter. I want her to have a better life. Even if I die for it, it seems now of extreme importance that I do something in my life which matters. Our children matter. There we probably agree. I plan to destroy the Company, the government and the country. When there is nothing left except ashes, then I get my daughter out, and make a better world for her.

I am probably going to destroy your son. I came to find you because Dani told me to. She seemed to have some sort of… of centre, something in her that was… real, and mattered, which I didn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe she was just a better person than me. I have some ideas. Do you want to help?”

Chapter 57

Time is

The children play in the park, they run and play as the city burns because the fire is beautiful and the sky is huge and their eyes are full of light and

time is…

Neila moored the Hector a few miles outside Nottingham.

She said, without fear or reproach, “It’s an enclave town. My insurance makes it difficult to…”

They sat in silence at the back of the Hector, looking towards the place where fields ended and bricks began, the low edge of buildings rising towards the empty shopping malls in the centre. Finally Theo said, “The queen of the patties once guaranteed me passage. Her word might still hold.”

Neila bit her bottom lip, hand resting on the rudder, contemplating the river. Then: “Screw it.”

They sailed on, towards the town.

She chugged down the middle of the canal, listening for every sound, whisper, bump and thump over the slow rattle of the engine. Fat wetlands gave way to streets of close-pressed houses, white chipped paint and boarded-up windows. A lone wind turbine spun in the distance. In an office block of grey lines and black windows a single light turned one rectangle of glass yellow. A sudden burst of tall red houses emerged from behind the overgrown hedges that hemmed in the canal, blue-black tiles curving up into little ornamental cupolas, before collapsing back down again into bungalows and lanes of grey. At Beeston Lock the water branched, wide river laced with blue-balustraded bridges in one direction, canal criss-crossed by silent railway lines and black brick arches in the other.

Neila stood at the back of the Hector as the water rose in the lock, and in her mind she counted steps to the kitchen knife, listened to the tock-clock of the winch in the gate as Theo turned the handle, wondered if she should tell him, it’s heavy, iron heavy, the crank could be used as a weapon just in case, you never know, just in case it becomes necessary.

The boat rose, and she headed into the narrower, softer waters of the canal.

A bonfire burning outside Lenton Abbey, she couldn’t see what fuelled it, just odd squares and hard angles breaking through the inferno, hints of black behind the smoke, the shape of figures moving around it, none turning to look at her as she sailed by.

Four children sat on the railway bridge, feet dangling over the sides. She sailed beneath them, waiting for them to spit on her, throw stones, laugh, shout, run for help. They didn’t. They watched her pass, then scrambled to the other side of the bridge to sit and watch her emerge, waiting silently, kicking their heels, fingers spun together in their laps.

At Castle Lock there were seven people waiting for them. Two held battery torches; one held a makeshift flaming torch of rag and wood. No street lights burned. A generator rattled somewhere far off. The turbine eclipsed the moon. The night was silent as Neila gunned the engine down and drifted, out of reach of the first lock gate, watching the people on the bank.

For a while all were silent. Then a woman called, “North?”

Neila nodded, then realised the gesture might not be visible in the dark, so called back, “Towards Gainsborough.”

The woman nodded, swept her torch across the boat, her expression lost behind the beam.

“Petrol?” she asked at last, a tired lilt to her tone.

“Not much.”

“We’ll take half.”

“No.”

“You wanna pass; we take half the petrol.”

No antagonism, no shouting. A simple statement, the truth, two women discussing the hardness of stone, the wetness of water.

Theo emerged from the cabin, stood next to Neila, squinted as the light swept his face.

“We’ll throw you a line,” continued the woman. “Fill our buckets. Then we open the gate.”

“No,” repeated Neila, calm and ready. “I won’t have enough to get to the next pump, and I can’t pay for more than what I’ve got.”

A shrug.

“We’ll turn back.”

“You’re going north.”

“We’ll turn back,” she repeated, resigned. “We’ll turn back.”

The woman on the bank hesitated, sensing a bluff to be called, uncertain where the cards lay. Then Theo said, “I was at Newton Bridge.”

The torch turned to his face, caught it in a tight circle of white. The figures on the bank were still, waiting.

“I served the queen. My name is Theo Miller. If she has a court…”

Silence in the darkness. Silence on the water.

“We’ll wait a little while,” he added, glancing at Neila for permission. “Then go back.”

Torches shone into their eyes.

Then three of the figures on the bank turned away and headed into the night.

Neila pushes the rudder this way and that.

Even the slow, tepid canal has energy, a life of its own. Take your eye off the current and you’ll drift, bump into walls, into locks, break against the ice she

holds the boat in the middle of the water and waits.

Theo brings her tea.

Holds her in his arms.

She puts her head on his shoulder.

Shivers a while in the cold, until she is a little warmer.

Holds them still, in the middle of the water.

Dawn pricked the eastern horizon with a hot needle of pinkish red.

The sun rose behind the low clouds, then emerged for a moment, glorious, between a band of low and high, before vanishing again into the greyness.

It started to snow.

Theo sat with one hand on the rudder, waiting, while Neila pretended to sleep inside the cabin.

After a while Theo realised that he too was sleeping, and jerked hard awake.

A man stood on the bank of the canal, flanked by a woman and another man. His skin was pale olive-brown, his eyes were flecked coffee, his hair was curly almond, exploding around his head. He stood bent to one side, favouring his left leg, and moved with a long, dragging limp. Wore oversized jogging trousers and a grey tracksuit top, and didn’t seem to feel the cold. He looked across the water at Theo and didn’t smile.

“So,” he grunted. “Still alive.”

They moored.

Theo stood on the back, and didn’t help with the ropes like he usually did, and put his hands in his pockets

then took them out

put them back

watched the man and the man watched him, and Theo was afraid.

Neila hesitated, but the momentum of the boat was already carrying them to the side, too late to turn back now. She watched Theo’s throat, the involuntary curling-in of his lips, the way he turned his gaze away at last, unable to meet the man’s eye, and thought for a moment, as she tied off, that Theo wasn’t even going to get off the narrowboat, but they’d be stood there in the cold freezing their…

Then he looked up.

Seemed to reach a decision.

Stepped off the boat.

The man in grey walked towards him slowly, stood before him, thought about the world for a moment, lips twisting as if they might smile, then dipping as if they would scowl.

Reached a decision, and punched Theo in the stomach, once, hard and precise, a short distance to send the blow but placed to cause pain, and as Theo buckled forward, he reached out and caught the smaller man by the hair, pulling his head back, so his body contorted like a lightning bolt, every part bending away.

Theo didn’t struggle or claw at his attacker.

For a moment they stood watching each other’s eyes, before with a shrug the man let go of Theo’s head and turned away, letting him fall to the ground to pull in breath. Neila moved forward quickly, caught him under the arm, whispered, “The wrench, or in the kitchen there’s…”

He shook his head.

Put his hand on hers, grateful, warm, squeezed once, stood up, bending over the pain, and followed the man in grey along the canal.

The two men walked a little distance away, then turned into the city.

Neila stood on the stern of her boat, and watched the woman who watched her.

After a while the woman got bored, and flicked dirt out from under her nails with the stub of a dried-up stalk.

Neila watched.

The woman finished.

Cracked the stalk in two.

Threw it away.

Sat on the long beam of the lock gate, waited.

The two women regarded each other as the snow thickened, and Neila was shivering, and so was the woman.

Then Neila said, “For fuck’s sake,” and went into the cabin, and put the kettle on, and made two cups of tea, and offered one to the woman. “Want a cuppa?”

The woman hesitated, then smiled, nodded and followed her inside.

“Ever had your fortune read?” Neila asked as the woman made a direct line for the heat of the stove. “I’ll get the cards.”

Three hours later, the man in grey and the man called Theo returned to the boat. Theo carried a bag containing two tins of tuna, one tin of peaches in sugary liquid, a bottle of flat lemonade, a toilet roll, a biscuit tin and an object wrapped in oiled cloth.

The man’s name was Corn. He joined them for supper and ate voraciously, and said almost nothing, except for once, when dinner was served.

“Blessed is her name, blessed are her hands upon the water, blessed is she the mother who gives life to the children in the mist, blessed are her hidden ways. Let the bars be broken let the journey end there is nothing at the end except darkness and the quiet place where all things fade amen.”

The words, a headlong chant, a habitual stream. The woman whispered a silent “Amen” as they finished, and they ate, and when they had finished Corn stood and shook Neila’s hand, and said, “Thank you,” and walked away, and the woman followed, and they slept the night by the side of the canal, and no one bothered them.

In the morning.

Theo opened up the object wrapped in cloth and said, “It’s… wrong… to have it on your boat and not tell you. Only half of the ammunition is live, the rest is blanks—it’s easier for… I’m sorry I brought it on without your permission but with Corn there it was difficult to explain why the…”

“I don’t want it on the boat. What happened, why is there…”

“I’ll go. I’ll go now and…”

“I don’t want it on my boat,” she repeated, knuckles white as she clung to the table.

“I’ll go.”

“Why do you have to have it?”

“To get my daughter back.”

“You’re going to kill… you’re going to kill someone.”

“You always knew what this was. You always knew. You always knew why I came here, you—I’m sorry, that’s unfair that’s making this… it’s not about… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“Give me the gun.”

He gave her the gun.

She’d never held a gun before. She was surprised how heavy it was, how cold the barrel was in her hand. Theo watched it for a while then blurted, “There’s a woman. Her name is Heidi. She loves my daughter. She took her but she’s married to this man, he took her, took my daughter too, and Heidi, she said that they had to protect her but he only agreed in order to

Heidi never had a daughter, you see. She never had a daughter and now she’s got mine and that’s…”

Neila stood up without a word. Went to the back of the boat, turned on the engine, held the gun over the water and

In the evening that bloody goddamn cormorant was still bloody bumping its bloody head against the side of the bloody cabin why couldn’t it just

Theo made supper, and she didn’t really eat, and conversation was stilted, and she didn’t check the cards as they sailed north.

In the land of the dead

in the place where the dead people lie

the real Theo Miller

the one who actually fell on the field by the river

looks up at the world of men and is, in his own quaint, deceased, skull-grinning way,

mildly amused at the way things have panned out.

Chapter 58

Three days after arriving at Kirsty’s house, Theo and Helen sneaked across the Cotswolds border at night.

They got out in the back of a horse trailer.

The trailer was owned by Kirsty’s sister. She had two horses, one doing quite well for the season. Whenever the horses left the farm, a sheep called Mitts would stand by the gate bleating piteously for her companions to return, her own species ignored until at last the horses came back and the sheep would snuggle up against the legs of its favourite runner, which tolerated the intrusion as a lazy cat might tolerate the nuzzling of a toothless pup.

Theo and Helen hid under blankets at the back of the trailer, sheltered from the door by the horses as they rocked and swayed down the soft hills of the valley. At the border fence they were stopped, papers examined, a torch shone briefly into the back of the trailer, illuminating animal, tack and hay, and waved on.

In Oxfordshire Kirsty blurted, “I’m not sure about this, I don’t think this is…”

“This is necessary. This is what I need to do.”

“But what about Philip what about the hall I mean Danesmoor is—if you leave now it’ll be…”

“This is important. This is absolutely what needs to be…”

“There are people out there. It’s not safe. It’s not safe out there you’ve seen the news you know that they don’t even show the bad things—everybody knows!”

“I have to do this,” she repeated, firmer. “It’s what is required.”

Theo watched in silence, huddled beneath a tree as the cold morning rain thickened to sleet, and Helen waited to watch as Kirsty and her sister drove away.

Theo tried to steal a car.

Stealing a car proved harder than reading about it in Audit Office reports. He remembered something clever about chips and Wi-Fi networks and maybe hijacking…

…and then there was this thing you could do with a coathanger, wasn’t there, but that was only on certain models and…

Pull out the key socket somehow you sorta popped it out and then twisted the green and the red or maybe the yellow and the blue or maybe just maybe twisted everything together or did something with a hairpin to make a connection and…

In the end Helen stole the car keys from a vicar she spotted putting them in his far-too-baggy jacket as he parked in his private space beside the church. Bumping into him and exclaiming, “Oh, my, sorry!” as she dipped a hand into his pocket turned out to be incredibly easy, and she was glowing with self-satisfaction for nearly ninety miles, until the wail of a police siren just outside Birmingham brought them back to reality with a hard thump.

Theo pulled onto the hard shoulder as the police car approached, M6 traffic rushing by.

Helen said, “Isn’t that going to…”

The policeman pulled up fifty yards behind, got out, walked along the edge of the turf, knocked on Theo’s window, which he wound down.

“Excuse me, sir, do you have any—”

Theo slammed his foot onto the accelerator, leaving the policeman cursing and puffing, running back to his own vehicle as Theo pulled away into the traffic, peeling around the streaming cars before turning late and hard onto the slip road off the motorway.

The police car followed, but as Theo tore across the roundabout at the top of the exit ramp, their pursuer vanished from the mirror, and another sharp turn pulled them into a petrol station a hundred yards further up.

“Out,” hissed Theo, and Helen was already halfway out, scampering for the pavement.

They walked briskly together, away from the petrol station into the small, scraggly mess of single-storey white-walled houses that clung together on the edge of the motorway, shaggy temporary homes which had become permanent, with a tin-roofed church and Portaloo school, marching stiff and upright as if they belonged. Behind the sirens wailed and the police car swept into the garage to find their abandoned vehicle.

They walked, a village with no name, as the skies drizzled, then sleeted, then drizzled again. On a hill above were silent concrete chimney towers. A gate led to a public footpath climbing towards a mobile-phone mast. They followed the muddy route in silence. A golf club to the left, blue lights behind, and after a while a helicopter overhead. Theo gripped Helen by the arm, felt her flinch, hadn’t realised he was holding so tight, relaxed, whispered, “Just walk. We’re just walking.”

“I know,” she muttered, and they walked.

The mud path narrowed to the width of one person, brambles pulling at legs, then widened again to a pebbled thing that crunched underfoot, then split in two. Theo chose a fork at random, followed it down to a country lane, shuddering whenever a car went by.

Another path away from the road brought some relief, and they walked until they came to another village, smaller than the first, the houses white-timbered and spread apart, a flag hanging limply from the branch of a tree overhead, the café shut, the charity shop boarded up, the chippie still doing a roaring trade.

Theo bought fish and chips.

They sat a while on a little wooden bench as the drizzle blew in sideways, threatening something close to rain, and ate in silence. After a while Theo realised that he’d put so much vinegar on his chips that the paper bag was starting to tear through, and he pulled off a strip of paper from the top to secure the greasy mess at the bottom before his meal ended up in his lap.

Helen ate one chip at a time with a little wooden fork, but struggled to find a decorous way to eat the fish, and eventually used her fingers, holding it by the tail to bite off chunks. There they sat, and no one looked at them, and no one asked any questions, and the helicopter vanished from the skies, and the rain gave up before it could really get going, and the sun began to set.

A cemetery, busier and neater than the village that protected it, spread behind a well-trimmed dark green hedge. White stones in perfect rows, a white pillar at its core. Monuments to soldiers fallen in battle. D. Aaron, d.1917. W. Acroyd, d.1915. E. Dwyer, d.1916. S. Gilson, d.1918.

Theo looked down and saw that his legs were splattered in mud.

Helen’s fingers shimmered with grease, and her lips were blue.

He murmured, “We can’t stay here,” and she nodded, and they waited by the bus stop to catch the fourth and final bus of the day, going north towards Stafford, and kept their heads down and eyes turned away from the CCTV cameras as it bounced and rattled its way through the country lanes.

They stayed in a room above a pub called the Stag. The pub advertised itself as being authentically historical, and the taps splurted and spluttered yellowish water into the sink. They stayed there because the landlord was impressed by Helen’s accent, and needed a cataract operation, and had to stumble his way up the stairs by memory, and knew the feel of a £20 note more than he could remember the face of the monarch that adorned it.

At night Helen groaned and couldn’t hide the pain in her belly, the slow pulling-apart of things inside. Theo tried to calm her, and when that didn’t work, he lay awake with his hands over his ears and prayed that she’d stop, that the nightmares would pass, that she’d exhaust herself into slumber, and at some point this must have happened. They slept too long, and woke when the sun was already high and their trousers still damp from scrubbing the night before, and their shoes squelched as they settled into them, and they walked.

“He was a terrible child really. At the time you don’t think of it that way, you just say he’s got high spirits—that’s what you call it. If you call him terrible you have to ask yourself why, you have to blame yourself and no one wants to do that. It’s the hardest thing in the world to say ‘I am a bad mother, and he is a bad father,’ it is impossible, it is devastating it is…

because if I am a bad mother then I am… there is nothing worse.

So of course Philip’s not a bad child, because I’m not a bad mother. I’m not. I know this as much as I know anything, and the only thing I know more is that I love him.

Then he was a teenager, and I suppose he was well behaved as a teenage boy. He was always careful to hide the worst from me. He was indulged. He knew he could get away with things and I thought well in a way if he gets away with it I suppose…

It’s very hard to deny your child in these circumstances. It’s very hard to say ‘I’ll show you the stuff of life’ if you don’t really have the stuff of life in you. And I did not. Then when he got into a duel at university, I managed to tell myself that it was probably Simon Fardell’s fault. He told me that the boy had done something awful. Hurt a woman or something. I didn’t really believe it, but you make yourself believe because the alternative is much worse.

You’re going to tell me not to blame myself, aren’t you, Mr. Miller? You’re going to tell me that it’s not my fault, the way Philip turned out.

Aren’t you?

Aren’t you?”

They walked a while.

Then Theo said, “I honestly don’t know.”

They walked a while longer.

“I think… some of it probably is your fault. I think it probably is. I think it has to be someone’s fault, at some point. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it isn’t. There was a time when he was a child, but then there was a time when he was a man, and when he was a man… there must be a moment when you take responsibility for your own actions, and stop blaming the past and stop blaming… so maybe I don’t. I don’t think I can. But I think it’s my fault that Lucy is in prison, and if it’s my fault that the daughter I’ve never met is in that place, then it’s got to be someone else’s fault too. You have to be a bad mother, you see, if I am going to spend the rest of my life knowing that I failed as a father. It’s not right. It’s probably not even true. It’s just the way I feel about it. Sorry.”

A forest of falling leaves, slippery underfoot. Yellow and spotted browns and greys, brilliant crimsons and faded ochres, black-tinged curling auburns and vein-riddled purples, frost in the morning, a herd of deer looking up, startled from a field, before realising that the people passing by were no threat, and returning to their chewing.

A path down to a river, round stepping stones over the running water, green moss and yellow lichen, white foam caught in whirlpools, a perfect hollow carved out at the bottom of a waterfall, a place where tiny fish played in the winter light.

Theo helped Helen wobble across, and for a while they sat by the water, listening to the wind through the trees.

Then Helen said, “Or maybe we’re just both totally fucked in our own delightfully unique ways.”

Theo considered this a while, then shrugged, and they kept on walking.

From a farm halfway up a yellow, treeless hill they stole two rusted bicycles that had been left behind an iron barn. Theo’s bicycle didn’t have any brakes. Helen’s was stuck in third gear. They pedalled down the country lanes until Helen could pedal no more. Then they sheltered from the wind beneath the silent spire of a concrete plant, sand and dust blowing in their faces, and ate pork pies purchased from a corner shop in a village where they used to make pottery and now made nothing at all, a population of seven still hanging on, hanging on, and didn’t talk, and didn’t sleep.

“So how ill are you?” asked Theo when Helen threw up without warning, a vomit with no matter in it, just clear acid and yellow slime.

They sat on the side of the path, morning frost melting beneath them, breath puffing thick in the air.

Helen thought about the question for a while, then smiled, shrugged, murmured, “Some things they don’t make a pill for.”

On this she had nothing more to say.

On the third day they came to a statue of an angel set in the middle of a treeless, stone-pocked landscape. The angel was carved from white stone, and stood four or five feet taller than them, its wings spread out in thin spires of cracked lime to catch the wind, its face turned downwards in sorrow at the sins of men. Tears of red paint had been daubed onto its eyes; names had been scratched into the hem of its robe. T♥P. LAUREN & J 4EVR. THE DOOGLES. K, L * W WER ERE.

A few hundred yards further on, a cairn of flat, faded stones, barely knee-high, grown a little taller over the years, built by travellers who paused to pick up stones and lay them on top of the uneasy structure, constructing a thing that might one day be ancient.

A sign stood next to it.

They kept on walking.

At night, as they huddled down on the edge of a treeless moor, they heard the sound of a single voice raised in rage from a village below, which was soon joined by the barking of a lone dog, somewhere higher in the valley. The screaming went on for nearly an hour, before whoever it was ran out of breath or stopped to make a cup of tea.

Chapter 59

“Helen?”

Theo’s voice was distant, carried away by starlight.

“Theo?”

He stared up at the sky, and couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen so many stars. Not in Shawford, not by the English Channel, where light from both sides of the water blurred everything to an orange-stained muck of factory shite. Not in London, where the sky was an eclipsed line between grey houses. He half-closed his eyes, and tried to remember, and couldn’t find anything that wasn’t a figment of his imagination.

“There’s something I want to ask you,” he murmured, and was surprised to hear himself speak so calmly. “I think I can destroy them. I think I can destroy your son. But I might have to put you in danger to do it.”

“Yes. And?”

“You might be hurt.”

“My own son was poisoning me, dear.”

“It might be bad.”

A slight sound of movement in the dark as Helen shifted, uncomfortable and cold on the ground. “Well,” she mused at last, and thought about it a little longer. “Well. I am a grown woman who knows the things to be said, and the things best left unsaid. I make my own choices, and that is all that can be asked. What did Dani say to you?”

“What?”

“When she died. Your friend Dani, you said she told you…”

“She said that Lucy was my daughter.”

“And?”

Theo cast his memory back, struggling to find a thing from a very, very long way away. “She said ‘Don’t fuck it up.’”

Helen nodded in the darkness, and for a moment Theo thought he could hear her expression, hear the twitching of her lips. “Sound advice that. Stuff of sense.”

Theo stared into an endless sky, and neither of them had anything more to say on the subject.

In the night in the dead of night in the dead place where the dead moved in the forest in the

A burst of torchlight an explosion of men and women they came from nowhere and they filled the world behind the torchlight they came from the dark they

grabbed Helen by the hair grabbed Theo by the throat they

there were dogs and torches and someone possibly had a gun but even if they didn’t they were

and they shouted and pushed and pulled at skin and faces and there weren’t really any questions in there just a lot of noise and that made it hard to answer and

they were pulled through the dark the dogs nipping at their heels the men half-running along gravel paths there was

a farmhouse where no lights shone and the skull of a sheep was nailed to the letterbox and there were

two trucks, the headlights on, the engines running, and

Theo was put in one Helen in the other he called out and tried to grab her hand, knew if he didn’t that he really would be a failure the greatest failure in the history of mankind

but they pulled them apart and he went in one and she went in the other and when he tried to see where they were going, someone kicked him in the ribs and it really bloody hurt

so he did as he was told, and stayed on the floor, one leg tucked to his chin the other stretched out behind and wondered if these people knew what it meant to make like a heron and whether they

Dawn, grey through the square open canvas at the back of the truck.

Someone turned the radio on and it was really bad pop, the pop played at a disco for the old folks who used to be sexy back when flares were in fashion and before the moonwalk made all the young things scream.

Theo realised he was sleeping, and the thought was so astonishing that he jerked wide awake.

One man in the truck

no—a boy

—no! A woman. Her hair cut short, tall and skinny but with a face that could have been a boy if she’d wanted, could have been a youthful beautiful boy but look at her hands, long fingers around her rifle she is

Praying.

Her words half-caught, a whisper between the rattle of the suspension as they bounce through potholed, ravaged roads.

“For those who lived for those who died,” she whispers. “For the children born to the sun for the ones who lie beneath the old man’s moon for those who…”

Theo prays.

He prays to the dead, who he thought he was helping and was almost certainly letting down.

He prays to his daughter, that one day she will open her eyes and see the sun and there will be only radiance on her face.

Knows he’s absolutely fine with dying, as long as it’s for her.

Neila prays.

To those she wronged to those she helped to the world she thinks she helped build, not in any spectacular form not in war or stone or blood or iron or

but in her deeds.

In her choices.

In the kindness bestowed on others there is a world somewhere where the children will be different from the kids of her days.

Dani gave up praying a long time before she died, but then, just before the end, there was a moment when she got on her knees to a deity unknown, to an idea that needed to be real and…

If Helen prays, she keeps her prayers to herself.

They came to a place called Newton Bridge.

It had begun with a bridge across a river. The bridge was stone and mortar, and horses and carts went across it, carrying cotton, mostly, which they wove at the watermill, before the businessmen discovered it was cheaper to pay for coal and build factories in places where the workforce was plentiful and less likely to go on strike.

Then for a while the bridge wasn’t crossed very much, except by the shepherds who roamed the hills and the farmers who built the walls that divided the fields.

Then one day it fell down and stayed broken.

And then one day it was rebuilt, restored even, only a bit of ironwork underneath to give a clue as to the industrial labours that went into its repair.

And then one day the town got a sponsor, a company specialising in executive glamping, and wooden huts were built on the edge of the village beneath the trees that spread morning shade and people came and drank red wine and it was all terribly lovely until the railway company stopped sending trains down the slow line.

And then the company left.

As did the doctor, teacher, vet, rubbish man, hairdresser, plumber, electrician—pretty much anyone, really, anyone who could get out, and only the buildings remained.

For a little while.

They pulled Theo from the truck with busy hands and roaring faces, which seemed unnecessary given he wasn’t going anywhere else.

Pulled Helen down too, for a moment he called out her name but she was pulled away, up a street towards a grey concrete hall that maybe had been a library once, or perhaps some sort of council office where they sorted the tax and where now…

He couldn’t see what now. Dragged down to the river, to the old watermill, pushed through a door onto a wooden floor, an abandoned bar where once they’d made cream teas or home-made fudge and where now the dust was imprinted with different shapes of trailing hands and doodles made with fingertips.

Locked the door.

Left him there a while.

Theo waited, knees huddled to his chin.

Shadows moved and though he couldn’t see them moving, every time he checked they’d travelled a little bit further and he waited.

Theo waits.

The door opens.

Helen steps inside. Perhaps it’s her face, or something of her dignity, but they’re not in such a hurry to push her around.

Perhaps it’s his face, and his lack of dignity, maybe that’s the swing of things.

“Just tell them the truth,” she murmured quickly as a man in an oversized tweed jacket and rubber boots picked Theo up by the arm. “Tell them the truth.”

They led Theo outside, locked the door behind him, leaving Helen to watch the shadows. He wondered if she’d see them moving, even if he couldn’t.

Pulled through tight, curling streets up a hill, past shattered windows boarded up with card, children in bare feet who squatted on the pavement and glared, past a patch of ground where geraniums grew amongst the potatoes, an abandoned fire station where now men sat cleaning rifles, a once-fine town hall where the merchants used to gather to argue about the price of wool and where now the old people sat with one tooth per length of pink gum and chewed on air and glared at the passing skies.

Up, to the top of the town and then a little bit beyond, feet stumbling on muddy paths, to a cottage between the trees.

The cottage lay within a stone wall. In the garden the owner grew tomatoes, the vines long since plucked, and potatoes, and carrots, and cabbage. On the windowsills there were nasturtiums, blue cornflowers and trailing crimson-streaked dangles of ivy. Above the low front door was a pottery sign which said HOME SWEET HOME. Solar panels sat on the roof of the house, a tendril of cable running from them and heading back down into the village. Smoke carrying the smell of burning wood rose from a crooked chimney. A woman was tending the flowers. Wearing yellow rubber gloves she squashed the plague of black-bodied aphids that clung to the green stems of the nasturtiums, squeezing and scraping in oily genocide. Her hair was a faded yellow, spread through with oncoming white. Her chin rolled down into a secondary flange of flesh that bobbed in and out of existence as her neck moved. Her shoulders were broad, her legs were short, she wore a dark red body warmer over a torn grey woolly jumper, a brown skirt that stopped just above her knees and green boots that started just below, revealing a hint of expanding, pasty joint. She didn’t pay the men much attention as they deposited Theo on her garden path, but kept on tending her flowers, peering under leaves and fading yellow petals in her quest to exterminate her tiny-bodied enemies.

“Lady tells me you’re looking for your daughter,” she muttered at last, sparing Theo not a nod.

“Yes.”

“How’s that going?”

“Looking isn’t as hard as doing.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I know where she is. I know which prison. But getting her out is meaningless, impossible, until I can keep her safe.”

“Does she want to be found? Does she want you keeping her safe—keeping her anything?”

“Don’t know. Maybe not. She can make that choice, if she wants to, when the moment comes. Least there’ll be a choice.”

The woman nodded at nothing much, scraped the last aphid from a flower, straightened up, wiped her insect-smeared fingers down her skirt, peeled away the gloves, draped them over the side of a plant box, and turned to examine Theo.

“Don’t look like much,” she mused. “Come have a cuppa.”

Theo hesitated, and was duly poked in the back to follow her inside.

There was a wood-burning stove with an iron kettle on top, a smell of lavender and lace. The woman stood on a plastic orange stool to fumble on the top shelf of a cupboard, before bringing down a teabag. “It’s not proper tea of course,” she muttered as the kettle boiled and her escorts draped themselves around the low, sky-blue kitchen. “I think it has dandelions in it. Dandelions, it’s just…”

A scoff, a half-guffaw, you know how ridiculous it is it’s just…

“But it’s what we have and tea is an important binding social ritual, so sit you down.”

A hand on Theo’s shoulder plonked him down in a wooden chair at a small square table in the centre of the room. A bowl containing almost-blooming winter bulbs sat between knitted table mats. A mug stained with tannins, the front depicting a penguin performing a probably impossible sexual act, was put in his hands. He sniffed the tea and flinched. Sipping, his host watched him. He drank cautiously, and then quickly, getting as much of the heat and fluid as he could without having to spend too much time with the taste.

The woman beamed, sat down opposite him, let the heat from her mug seep into her skin.

“I’m the queen,” she said at last. “You’re Theo, yes?”

He nodded.

“You can call me ma’am, or your maj, or Bess. If you call me your maj without looking proper about it, my boys will take you out back and beat you till you bleed out your ears.”

“What’s proper?” he mumbled over the lip of the mug.

“Proper! Respectful. Proper respect.”

“But I can call you Bess?”

“Respectfully, yes.”

“All right.”

“And I shall call you Theo.”

“Okay.”

“So!” She slapped the table brightly with the open palm of her right hand. “Helen tells me that you’re looking for help. Says you have information that’ll take down the government, rip the Company apart and generally set things a-burning, is that about the short of it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Is it proper?” Theo hesitated, sucked in more liquid, tried to guess again at proper, at the mystic meanings of this word. Bess flapped impatiently. “Proper, proper, is it good, is it decent, or are you spinning me a yarn and are we gonna have to do the beating business?”

“I can prove that the Company is murdering thousands of people, imprisoning people without trial, all in the name of profit.”

She shrugged. “So? Stuff like that never makes it to court.”

“I know.”

“Then you’re wasting my time, yes?”

“I have financial records from the Company. Documents, records of—”

“This sounds like shite to me it sounds like—do you think this sounds like shite I think it’s…”

“I have Philip Arnslade’s mother. She is willing to testify against her own son. I can make the Company destroy itself, and in the process take down the government and all who sail in it.”

Bess raised a hand, stopping the men who’d already begun to move towards Theo’s slouching back. “Okay. Don’t be boring.”

Theo spoke, and by the way she listened, it wasn’t boring.

Chapter 60

The queen of the patties, Good Queen Bess, her name isn’t Bess of course she took it because it seemed nice, it seemed sort of regal, sort of majestic but also very down-to-earth, it was a name that implied a much grander name somewhere behind it but she wasn’t grand she wasn’t…

She killed her husband a long time ago. It was self-defence. She called the ambulance immediately, but he hadn’t paid for the health insurance like he’d said he had, so the ambulance didn’t come. He hadn’t paid for a lot of things that he said he had. The money was a big part of how the troubles began.

That was when she was still a teacher. Things were different, back then.

“So why’d you come to me?” she asked when Theo’s story was done.

“People are looking for us. Mostly looking for Helen, but also for me. We needed a place to go. Somewhere safe.”

“This ain’t safe. The police don’t bother to come here no more, but sometimes the Company sends in the boys and shoot the village up a bit, just to keep things ripe. They used to try to take the kids, or the pretty ones, but we shot back and it wasn’t a worthwhile economic investment. They think there might be some gas down beneath these hills, they want to dig it up, so they cut off the water, the electric, the roads, trying to starve us out. We are starving. It may look all lovely but they’re starving us to death. We go raiding for grub but they make it harder every year. This isn’t safe.”

“I heard the patties had a queen, they say these prayers, blessed are the—”

“Even atheists pray when they’re gonna lose a thing they love and know they can’t stop it. It’s the knowing they can’t stop it that makes them do the whispering.”

“They pray to you.”

She shrugged. “They pray to the idea that somewhere in the north there’s a place where the patties can be free, where we try again. They pray to that. I’m just sitting here.”

“Will you help us?”

“Maybe. Maybe. I don’t know about you, boy. But I like Helen. She’s got class. They don’t teach that, class, they don’t teach it at all. Now some might say I’m just responding to a certain socio-economic stereotype, that it’s the accent and maybe that’s true, maybe it is at that, but I dunno. If she’s willing to shaft her kiddy, that’s something. You think she’s got long left for this world?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think she knows?”

“Yes.”

“But she ain’t telling.”

“No.”

Bess beamed. “It’s that sorta attitude that makes the aristocracy so goddamn sexy.”

They took him back to the room where the shadows crawled, left Helen and Theo in the dark.

“How’d it…?” asked Helen.

“Fine. Fine. I think… fine.”

“Did she…?”

“She didn’t shoot us, did she?”

Helen laughed at nothing, and Theo realised just how stupid these words were, all things considered.

After a few hours, a man opened the door, gave them a bowl of thin potato soup each, and a couple of blankets, chewed a little around the edges.

In the morning:

“My name is Corn.”

“Theo.”

“I know.”

“I’m very happy to meet you, this is going to be—”

“I was arrested for assault. I did it. He attacked my sister. I attacked him. I got eighteen years on the patty line. After nine, I broke out. Killed a guard when I did it. I killed him. I didn’t mean to, and I’m not sorry I did it. It’s just the way it went down.”

“I see.”

“You used to be an auditor?”

“Yes.”

“Bess told me to help you. If you fuck us, I will make you eat your own fucking eyeballs.”

“Right. Well. That’s very clear.”

In a cottage ten miles outside Derby, a laptop, a connection, a woman who once did a favour for a man and the man loved her and never forgot, and now she helps the patties, the runners, the screamers, the faders, the ones who pray to the moonlight through the bars.

“I made the jam myself,” she murmurs, putting a plate on the table in front of Theo. “I won’t tell you how much sugar goes into these things.”

The jam is made from gooseberries. It is disgusting. Theo eats it anyway, as Corn watches. Helen sits by the fire, gossiping with the woman about condiments and cats and the weather and the state of politics and the problem with women’s fashion and how underwired bras are just a tool of oppression all things considered.

Corn fiddled with a camera. A young woman sat in the window of the living room, framed in light, one foot up on the sill, knee bent, eyes turned out towards the brilliant winter sun, a laptop shut at her feet. Corn murmured, not looking up from the camera, “She’s Bea. She does the machines. She’s good. She’s good.”

There was that in Corn’s averted gaze, the quietness of his speech, that made Theo look away.

By the first light of the new day they sat down in the kitchen, put a camera on a tripod, sat Helen in a wicker chair, a cup of tea by her side.

She took a few attempts to get it right.

“My name is Helen Arnslade, my son is Philip Arnslade, minister of fiscal efficiency. These are the names of the ones who died in HM Prison Lower Ayot, and whose bodies were put into the incinerator. Una Debono. Alice Turan. Janet Gantly. Rowena Ngongo. Claudia Hull. Michelline Heather…”

They stopped every hundred names or so for Helen to have more tea and Bea to check the camera. When the light faded, they had supper. Supper was porridge and gooseberry jam. Theo was too hungry to care what it tasted like, and had stomach ache well into the night.

They posted Helen’s videos online, and the contents of Dani’s USB stick two days later.

Waited.

For a few hours nothing happened.

Then for a few hours, the internet exploded.

Then they turned on the news, and nothing happened. GDP was up, unemployment was down, and the prime minister was heading off to the USA to visit key corporate innovators.

At 7 p.m. Corn tried looking up “Helen Arnslade” on the internet, and no results were returned by any search engine. He tried texting a message to the woman in the window with Helen’s name in it, and the message showed as sent on his phone, and she never received it.

“Well,” mused Theo. “I suppose it starts here.”

Chapter 61

Bea had trained as a weaver.

“I liked to play with computers when I was a kid,” she mused. “I was told I should do IT GCSE. The school hadn’t ever taught IT GCSE before, and the teacher didn’t know what it involved or how to teach it but I did it anyway I did it and I got a C and I was really proud of that but the school tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. It looked bad on the statistics it was just…

Anyway I was good at art too but there wasn’t any use for that, but then someone said why don’t you go into textiles, people always need clothes. And they do but they don’t want to pay for them and the moment you design something new someone’s ripped it off so I designed this T-shirt I thought it was really nice actually and I put a picture of it up on my blog and next thing you know…

I mean it was a large company who stole it, someone owned by a company which was owned by… anyway, I was like, give me my royalty cos you’ve nicked my design, and they said that I hadn’t copyrighted it and I’d hear from their lawyers and we had this meeting and the man called me a very silly little girl and on the way out I was so angry—I was just so angry—I scratched his car with my keys and the indemnity wasn’t much, but the guy put his lawyers on me and suddenly it was so much more it was, like, everything I had. I paid, but my parents, they lost their home. And now I was in the shitter, and this guy, it just made me so angry that he’d got away with this stuff, that he could do it and next thing he’s running for government and—get this—he said that rape, he said it’s a thing, like if women don’t take responsibility for

and I was so angry I just…

So I hacked his site. Redirected everything to a victim support charity. He made sure I got six years. He had friends at the Company, and the Company was funding the redevelopment of the courts, and the judge, well, his pension came from Company shares so…

They put me in a textiles prison. I got my own cell and everything. Special sponsorship. Made the T-shirt I’d designed for the guy who locked me up. Retailed for £8.99, big spring seller. Funny that. It’s all very funny, isn’t it?”

Data rolled between camera and computer, computer and internet. Bea watched a bar crawl towards completion and chewed her bottom lip. Helen sat by her side, waiting, polite and patient. At last:

“I like machines. People think if you do art you can’t like machines, but I always thought they were wrong. I think people like to be right. And they like to be told that they’re right. And they forget when they’re not, because it makes them feel bad, and most of the time they’re wrong.”

Helen smiled and mused: “I have led an incredibly privileged life. I am not ashamed of being privileged. If you could choose privilege you would, of course—but what matters is that you understand privilege for what it is. That you know this and see that with it comes a duty. Duty is the reason is why—”

And Bea replied, “I used to have my own loom. But different looms have different effects sometimes you want to achieve other things you want to—you’d really destroy your son for duty?”

A slice of the knife across the white of the egg on her plate, cutting off a triangle. She ate, and eating gave her time to think, and Bea waited, and Helen said, “Yes. Because my son is a good man who knows the difference between right and wrong. He is a man who understands that he has a duty. He does not destroy the world for an island in the Mediterranean Sea. That is the only acceptable truth.”

Bea looked like she was going to argue, but looked in Helen’s eyes and saw the tears that were waiting to grow there, and put her hand in Helen’s hand and didn’t say a word.

Chapter 62

Corn had a car. It was one of only two that the patties had running. The car was old, and made of different cars. He said, “We take it to Northampton, then we have to change cars. If you enter London in something like this—the CCTV—they pick you up, you have to be driving something proper.”

Helen made them sandwiches. The sandwiches were bad. The bread was thick and dry, and there wasn’t any margarine. She stood in the door of the farmhouse, pushed them into Theo’s hand and murmured, “Be safe, down there. Be safe.”

Bea sat in the front passenger seat because she got carsick, and took turns driving with Corn. Theo sat in the back, knees together, hands in his lap, and watched the land roll by. Gentle hills and bursts of thick trees, the leaves spiralling up and away in great gusts of wind that whooshed and crackled through the branches. A church spire peeking up from an orange-brick village. A manor house where once, centuries ago, a woman had hidden her brother from the Roundheads even though she didn’t believe in his cause, and where in another time the children had lounged in the setting sunlight by the still waters of the lake as the bombers went overhead, barely disturbing their tranquillity.

A petrol station where behind the counter a man with two dangling hollows in the lobes of his ears where the dress code didn’t allow him to wear his jewellery met them behind the air pump and pressed key’s into Corn’s hand and whispered, “Blessed is her name, let the bars be broken let the journey end.”

Corn squeezed his hand tight, and the man nodded, and scampered back to the shop before his supervisor could catch him skiving.

They found the next car parked two streets away from the garage. It smelled of dog and a tiny bit of dog vomit, but they wound the windows down and wrapped themselves in coat and glove, and headed south.

London grew at the bottom of the hill. Strange to think that the city had boundaries, strange to think that there was a place where it stopped that you could stand on this line and your left foot would be in mud and your right on concrete and to the south the grey towers reached up to prick the clouds and to the north the mud squelched on into the damp, stripped hills and…

Strange to think that this was how he was coming home.

Huddled in the back of the car with a couple of patties, a hat on his head and a scarf around his neck to hide his face from the CCTV, because they’d be watching, Bea said, they’d be watching.

They left the car in a car park in Archway, and walked down the steep slope of the hill. Houses of red and black, stained-glass windows above the shut front doors, little front patios not quite big enough to be gardens but too big just to be for the bins, no one seemed to know what to do with them, you could maybe fit in a rose bush but that was all but anything less and the space seemed bare.

Theo found this troubling. There didn’t seem any logic in it.

He pulled his chin to his chest, his hands in his pockets, and followed Bea and Corn down the hill.

They stayed in a house with four bedrooms and nine residents. Three of the inhabitants of the largest room moved into the beds of the others to give Corn, Bea and Theo a little privacy in a space not much larger than the double bed that inhabited it. The air smelled of stale cigarette smoke and spilt beer. The kitchen floor crunched underfoot when Theo walked on it. On his second night he found a needle in the toilet. The residents were all from the patty line. A girl with pale yellow freckles beneath her eyes caught his revulsion when he opened the door to the kitchen to find a month of dirty dishes, caked in tomato gloop, piled up to the walls. She looked away, ashamed, and her shame made him feel ashamed, and she looked back and saw he was embarrassed and she smiled and said:

“It’s hard. You clean it sometimes, but it just gets worse again. And when you’ve got nothing else, what’s the point of doing the dishes I mean what’s the point of…”

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.

No one slept that night, and every now and then a helicopter passed in the distance, and Corn hissed that they should have brought foil sheets or painted themselves in mud, and Theo wasn’t sure what difference these things would have made, but it seemed important to Corn, so he didn’t argue.

In the morning they shuffled down the shallow hill towards the railway line, light bursting golden white off the clinging frost on the stiff green grass. A few pigeons fluttered in the trees; something larger rustled away into the undergrowth. For a moment the land below them was radiant ivory snow, branch-grey and grassy green where the sun was beginning to drive back the frost. The station was a timber canopy, the perfect place for potted plants and a stationmaster who knew the locals by name; the station café sold sausage rolls, pork pies and clotted cream, and smoke rose from the mansions tucked between the drooping oaks. The memory of a great forest had shaped the land, and still lingered in ancient beech trees and scars of ivy cut through by roads and roundabouts.

They met a white van on the edge of Ascot, parked by a gate to an empty field overgrown with long, spined grass. The man at the back of the van stood arms folded, smoking a tiny brown cigarette, eyeing them up as they approached, nodded just once at Corn as they slowed.

“Yeah,” he muttered and, looking again from top to toe, nodded once more and added, “Yeah. Okay.”

He opened the back door of the van. A smell of mothballs and mildew rolled out in a cloud of fine, floating particles, and as Theo’s eyes adjusted to the gloom he saw clothes, piled on the floor and drooping out of stained cardboard boxes pressed to the side. For ten minutes they shuffled around in the back of the van, breath steaming and fingers blue-white as they fumbled with furs and velvets, Helen muttering, “Of course the code is less stringent for the jump season…”

In the end Theo found a black suit that didn’t look too ridiculous. Corn dressed in corduroy and looked remarkably like a man born to hunt, only missing a shotgun under one arm. Bea found blue silk and a fur stole; Helen clucked and exclaimed how wonderful she was, and Bea blushed, and Corn very deliberately and carefully didn’t look at her, and grunted something about how yeah, you know, it was like, good yeah.

Helen rolled her eyes and chose a more conservative dress suit of chequered black and grey.

They took turns to change in the darkness of the van, doors closed, Corn and Theo, Bea and Helen, hunched over double, slipping and sliding through a sea of shirt and sock, trouser and skirt, squinting in the gloom. When they were done, Corn held out money to the man with the van, who tutted and shook his head.

“Blessed are her hands,” he grunted, throwing the words at the notes in Corn’s fist, a condemnation as well as a greeting. “Blessed are the ones who scream, for they have heard the truth and the thunder.”

Corn hesitated, nodded, shoved the money back into his pocket.

The van drove away, and they hid their bags in a yew hedge by a field where the crows hopped over turned-up earth, pecking at straw, and, dressed in their finest, headed towards the races.

Corn muttered, “We’re everywhere of course. We’re everywhere, we’re cleaning the toilets and mending the sewers and driving the buses and…”

“Blessed are her hands,” whispered Bea as they trudged down the hill, coat and skirts hitched high, nose blue, lips white. “Blessed are those who break the silence.”

“Half the people we ask don’t even know if the queen is real, they can’t imagine it, anything changing. But the idea makes them feel better. That maybe they can do this really small thing, like this up yours to the world and maybe it’ll make a difference, maybe they count. That’s all the queen really is. She makes people think stuff they do matters. If you take that away, we’re all just fucked really. Just totally fucked.”

With every step towards the wide grass of the racecourse, the towering central stands, white barriers herding humans like sheep, Helen seemed to grow a little brighter, warmer, louder. As she grew, Corn diminished, words shrinking, shoulders curling. Bea seemed to feed on the older woman’s confidence, slipping in closer and hooking her arm around Helen’s as they neared the gate, happy relations on a wintery adventure.

“These things are seasonal,” explained Helen brightly. “They do flats in summer, jumps in winter, and they also have the shows—the last one I went to with my husband was spectacular. We came away with more trinkets than sense, couldn’t fit everything in the car, but the atmosphere, the people! They come from Dubai, you know, from the UAE, they really love their racing out there, they know their horses, the horses they breed in that part of the world are just magnificent, incredible stock.” She paused, head turning a little to one side, looking back on memories, shifting through time. “Then again, maybe I just remember it that way because it was our last together. Maybe we make these things more important than they were.”

Bea said nothing and shuffled a little closer to Helen, holding her tight. Theo stared at his shoes, tight brown leather, someone else’s, stolen. It was only after he’d chosen his clothes and the van had driven away that he’d found the stain under his left armpit where once someone had bled into the cotton, which bleach and chemicals had managed to fade to a pale purple tideline in the fabric.

As they neared the racecourse, the crowds began to grow, pouring in from car parks and the private train, helicopters and the airstrips. The sound of music drifted over the honking of cars queuing for a place, wintery festivities, a promise of hot wine and wooden market stalls selling amber, silver, home-made candles and winter woollens.

The queue at the entrance gates was a sluggish shuffle, pressing in through a narrow entrance watched by Company security in fluorescent yellow and navy blue. Bea collected four tickets from a woman dressed in grey as they waited, huddled on the edge of cold and warm. Laughter and an indignant cry at an outrageous joke drew Theo’s ear. As his eye swept across the crowd he thought he saw, for a moment, a woman, tall with short light brown hair, familiar in every way, and he wondered if he should make like a heron, and looked again and wasn’t sure he’d seen her at all.

They entered the enclosures of the racecourse, Helen chatting merrily all the way as if she had not a care in the world.

Theo had never been to a countryside fair, let alone a race.

Bodies swayed and spun around each other between aisles of wooden stalls with slanted roofs, yellow bulbs twinkling brightly behind the counters, walls of gingerbread, candles, packets of scented lavender, twee teapots in the shape of penguins, kittens and puppy faces. Sizzling meat straight off the grill, waxed-cotton jackets, hats with duck feathers in them, walking sticks, shooting sticks, an enclosure where you could buy luxury cars, luxury holidays, luxury horses and donkey rides for the kids. The piping bellow of winter music, a merry-go-round where white-painted ponies rose and fell, pink and blue plastic manes rippling in the wind; steaming hot mulled wine and chilled champagne, eight different kinds of hot chocolate and a stall selling Baltic amber and Venetian glass.

A temporary miniature town of ye-olde-timey delights, of money laid out on a whim, shopping that wasn’t spending on trash, not at all, merely innocent delight in necessary things. A monument to another world where you still walked to church across the rolling English hills, dogs lapping at your ankles and the neighbours calling your name. A bubble in time fed on 240 volts had cropped up around the fences and walkways of Ascot, selling a dream that only money could buy.

On the sidelines a few reminders of quaint pleasures for the discerning customer. The duck-herding competition was more enthralling than Theo had expected. The sheep race seemed too peculiar to take seriously, especially for those runners who had teddy-bear jockeys sewn to their bibs.

Corn put a pound on a race, and lost when his sheep refused to budge, and was in a foul mood for an hour.

Helen gossiped with Bea as they entered the stands, and sat away from the most glamorous and beautiful of the crowds, the ones who knew everyone else and thought they were marvellous, just marvellous, in case there were those who knew her, and Theo watched, and waited as those shoppers who liked to be seen to care detached themselves from the wooden stalls and climbed the stairs to the wall of chairs that looked down towards the racetrack. Horses, coats polished to a reflective ebony or pristine autumn brown, tossed their heads and flicked their tails, impatient, ready to run, dwarfing their jockeys as they marched towards the starting line, unfazed by the cheering of the crowd as a favourite entered the lines, or the poles and hedges before them. Theo wondered how they trained the horses not to care about the gaze of the thousands who looked down on them. Maybe at night they played the roaring of crowds at the stables, a cascade of cheering to lull them to sleep?

When Philip Arnslade arrived, it was not subtle.

First, his helicopter came in low and loud across the site, attracting a fair share of glares from those who were claiming to enjoy the white-clad, bell-jangling, stick-clacking circle of morris dancers.

Then his security arrived, faces like breadboards, feet splayed as if struggling to contain their bodies or souls within the confines of their suits. Then Philip, chatting to a someone who is definitely something, perhaps in oil, whispering confidential somethings sure to set the crowd a-tittering.

“Well,” mused Helen as her son drifted and waved his way down to his seat. “He is predictable. Comes here for the sultans, of course, the emirs and the sheikhs. Can’t resist a shiny thing. Always mistook having wealth for being cultivated. Not the same thing at all. Wealth buys a certain culture, it buys a certain…” She realised that Bea was staring at her, silent, frowning, and the older woman smiled and squeezed her arm and muttered, “I suppose these things are fairly arbitrary after all.”

On the grass, the horses ran, the crowds cheered, and the sky threatened more snow, which did not come.

Theo sat on the other side of Helen, and watched her, watching Philip.

She didn’t move, her arm hooked so tight in Bea’s that the younger woman visibly leaned to the side, pulled down towards Helen’s neck and face. Helen’s smile didn’t fade, but locked itself in place, an engraving on a skull, as Philip nodded and smiled, before settling into a seat in the centre of the throng.

Theo looked, and looked again, and saw Seph Atkins moving through the crowd.

Seph wore white. A white coat, hanging sleeves framed with fur, that stopped at her thighs. Tight white leggings, white knee-high boots, white gloves. Helen hadn’t seen her. Helen didn’t know who to look for.

Slowly, a woman in search of another drink, Seph turned through the crowd, and her eyes flickered over Helen, and lingered.

Theo dug his chin a little lower into his stolen, dusty scarf and whispered, “She’s here.”

Helen’s eyebrows flickered, once, the thinnest of movements, and nothing else changed on her face. “Good.”

“You don’t have to…”

“Darling boy, don’t be absurd. I hired the woman, didn’t I?”

“This isn’t…”

“What would your Dani Cumali do?” Theo looked away. “Well there.” She tutted. “That’s settled.”

Helen rose, and began to walk towards Philip. Bea followed a few yards behind, and Theo stayed sitting until they were on the walkway down between the rows of seats, watching Seph.

Corn stood at the front of the stands, waiting for the races, turning now to look back at the crowd as the track lulled. Theo caught his eye and turned his head a little towards the figure of Seph drifting up the stairs towards Helen, Helen descending towards Philip. Corn nodded, began to move through the crowd.

For a moment Theo thought everything was going to fail. That Seph Atkins was too good at her job, too keen to get the work done, that it was all for nothing. Then Helen turned, stepped into a wide row of seats covered with cushions and draped with red blankets to swathe the viewers, pushed past grumbling knees and over leather bags, marched up to the nearest security man, who turned to block her path, and said, “I’d like to talk to my son, please.”

Seph kept climbing, oblivious to anything else in the world, towards the bar. Corn followed her.

“Excuse me!” exclaimed Helen as security did not move, her voice loud enough to catch the ears of listening strangers. “I would like to see my son!”

Her indignation, loud and clear, caught the ear of Philip and his guest. He looked around, and his face at once opened like an evening primrose, before locking back down into a grimace that might have wanted to be a smile.

“Mother… it’s so… Mother.”

Helen stabbed a finger towards him, having to lean past the bulk of the security guard to do it. “You tried to poison me,” she exclaimed, not with rancour but a ringing authority that sang out across the stalls. “You have suppressed evidence of mass murder and abductions on behalf of the Company and that shit of a friend of yours, Simon fucking Fardell. You have in short brought disgrace to your name, and I am thoroughly unimpressed.”

Theo, drifting downwards, put his hand over his mouth to stifle a laugh, an utterly inappropriate, terrible laugh, and realised at the same moment that he genuinely liked Helen Arnslade, that he admired her, that he wished he had more time to know her, valued her friendship, and that her death would be on his hands.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, Philip Arnslade!” added Helen, voice rising in shrill indignation. “You should be ashamed of what you’ve done.”

“Mother,” murmured Philip, slipping past the guard to grasp Helen gently by the elbow. “It’s such a relief to see you. Let me take you inside, let me take you…”

He led her away, while his wife pinned down his guests with a laugh and an anecdote about exfoliation. His security followed, and Theo and Bea followed them, Helen proclaiming all the way, “He sanctions the abduction of innocent people! Patties are held without charge! They are sent to die because they are economic burdens! These are the names of the dead—Kam Akhoon, Robert Ebutt, Ned Hayhurst, Dani Cumali…”

Philip swept his mother through a pair of double doors, cutting off her voice from the outside world, who tried texting their friends about her, and thought the text had sent, and didn’t really understand why they never got a reply.

They took Helen to a private meeting room. The racecourse had plenty, where the grand and the great could organise discreet encounters beneath grey ceilings, while projectors hummed and the coffee machine took for ever to produce something too hot to drink that burned the top of your mouth.

Theo waited with the throng at the edge of the roped-off corridor that led to the room, and utterly failed to drink a glass of overpriced white wine.

Waited.

Bea waited downstairs, watching the front exit.

Corn waited in the car park at the back.

So did Seph Atkins, huddled inside a hired Audi, smoking an e-cigarette with the window open an inch, releasing clouds of thick, blue-grey smoke that rolled upwards like an inverted waterfall through the window, and tasted of peppermint, and burned strangers’ eyes, and drove away anyone within a ten-foot radius.

In the conference rooms, various raised voices, muffled and distant.

“Mother it’s such a—”

“Tried to poison!”

“You’re not stable—she’s not stable—the medicine you were—kidnapped I can only imagine the trauma…”

“Don’t shit me, young man.”

“See you’re not just—she isn’t—it’s not that—”

“How could you do it? How could you do it to all those people? How could you do it to…”

Somewhere in the conversation Helen started to cry. She hadn’t thought she would. She hadn’t cried when her husband died. There had been so much to do. Funerals to organise, wills to read, people to inform. She had duties to perform and she had performed them and crying would have been a ridiculous distraction.

Now she cried, a foolish old woman who no one listened to, and was furious at herself for letting herself cry, even more angry with herself than she was with her son, and that just made her cry more until she could barely get any words out at all between her pathetic, useless sniffling.

Philip blurted, “Well you see, I mean really! Really, Mother this is all so terribly—and you’re ill—so we’ll take you home now. We’re going to take you home and you can have your medicine and then…”

At the end of the corridor, alone with a white wine and a mobile phone which sometimes he pretended he was using, Theo waited and watched the door.

Once, a security man left, speaking fast and urgent on a mobile phone.

Then he returned.

Then a man in a white suit, carrying a brown leather bag, arrived.

Then he left.

Theo thought he might throw up, and waited, and did not throw up, though the feeling didn’t go away.

Outside, the crowd screamed and the horses thundered and the morris dancers leaped and the ducks quacked and money changed hands and the helicopters came and left and sheep went baaahhhh and the patties washed the toilets where someone had pissed up the wall and in the rooms behind the course a man whispered, “There’s a market for anything. I can get you some very good-looking subjects on extended contract for just…”

And time was…

Theo wasn’t sure what time was, but he knew it was rushing, running, racing forward too fast to perceive, and it was slower than anything he’d ever endured and he was going to close his eyes and wake up six months in the past and nothing would be different and nothing would have mattered.

And he knew that he had probably condemned Helen to die, and it was his fuck-up and his fault and it would all be for nothing, just like everything he’d ever done had been for nothing always and…

After an hour and ten minutes the doors to the conference room opened. Two security men emerged, looked left, looked right, saw no immediate threats. Then Helen, leaning a little on the arm of a third, her face slack, eyes distant. Then two more security men, flanking Philip, taking turns to hold the door so that one always walked in front and one behind.

They headed, quiet, away from the crowds, towards the emergency exit.

Theo stopped fiddling with his phone and dialled the only number saved on it.

“They’re coming,” he said.

“Gotcha,” muttered Corn and hung up.

Theo waited for the group to be almost through the emergency exit before ducking under the rope that cut off their route from the main throng, following them. The door at the end of the corridor led to a grey concrete stairwell, brutally practical against the fascinators, ice buckets and soft velvet of the main event. He could hear footsteps descending, voices muttering into radios. He followed, moving no faster than Helen could, keeping at a distance.

The stairwell gave out to the service car park, caterers’ vans and patty transport buses. The brightness of the winter’s day was harsh after the half-gloom of fluorescents. Clouds scudding across the sun promised snow later, but only seemed to fracture the light, not dim it. Theo looked across the car park and saw the huddle of security, Helen and Philip already moving towards an exit, where two black cars were pulling up, ready to collect their passengers.

He looked through the parked vehicles, and saw Seph Atkins because he knew she had to be there, a shape more than a face clouded in grey, smoke drifting through the inch-open window of her car. Looked beyond her, thought he saw Corn move behind a floral delivery van laden with wreaths of holly and yew.

Thought he saw someone else moving on the edge of his vision, and knew it was probably Dani, or maybe Theo—the real Theo, the one who’d died by Philip Arnslade’s hand—and realised he was going to fuck this up again, just like he’d fucked up everything he’d ever done his whole life.

Helen was a few metres from the black cars, trying to say something, half-turning to look back the way she’d come. The security guard who held her arm tried to guide her forward, but her walk was unsteady, her will absolute. She mouthed something vague, words slurring, craned her neck, and saw Theo.

Their eyes met, and she raised her head a little higher, smiled.

Corn detonated the bomb.

The bomb was under a six-seater car that had brought dish washers from the local prison to the racecourse.

The dish washer who’d built the bomb had been put inside for arson, but that was only because the explosives had started a fire. Because of his special skills, he’d been sent to a chemical factory. When he lost an eye and the tip of his nose to acid, the inmates held their traditional party, a feast of scavenged tinned food and banging of fists on walls. He was one of them now, for ever disfigured and welcome in their tribe, and he was surprised to discover that he wanted to live.

He wanted to live, and concluded that this could only be because there was something left to live for.

At night he whispered prayers to the lady in the north, to her blessed hands, to the breaking of the cage.

He’d really enjoyed putting the bomb underneath the car. He’d enjoyed it so much that he’d scratched FUCK U into the tin-can housing, still smelling faintly of tomatoes through the ammonia, a little act that only he would ever appreciate. He liked blowing things up generally. Blowing things up for a cause felt…

… like something new.

The bomb, as bombs went, wasn’t as spectacular as Theo had expected. Cleaning products weren’t as good as the proper shit, its maker might have said. The sound of it hurt his ears, and the shock wave was a hot blast in his face like an air-conditioning vent for a big office building. But there wasn’t fire. There weren’t licking yellow flames, and though the security men went down to the ground, they dragged their charges down with them rather than being thrown off their feet, covering Philip’s head with their hands, pushing him beneath the shrapnel of metal that splatted out from the wreck of the car.

For a moment Theo thought that was it, and hoped it was enough.

Then Seph’s bomb, the much larger, much more professional bomb she’d put in the boot of her target Volvo, stirred into life by the shock wave from the less competent device, also detonated. Philip and his escort were already halfway to the ground, which is why the ball bearings as they flew through the air ripped apart only one of the guards, the slowest, the one who’d been last to comprehend his environment. The blast knocked Theo back against the emergency exit, slamming the breath out of him, and the three cars nearest the bomb didn’t have time to wail before glass, chassis and pipe were ripped to pieces, the poked frames lifted up and turned sideways, rolled over until they hit their next-nearest neighbours, which howled and shrieked, lights flashing and black smoke tumbling from broken, greasy valve as rubble and shattered metal began to drift down around them, soft against the singing in Theo’s ears.

For a few moments there was only the howling, the metal rain, black smoke.

Theo crawled upright, leaning against the wall, looking through biting acrid smoke for signs of life. One of the black cars that had been waiting by the car park gate had been knocked on its side. As he watched, a door opened at the top and a man, groggy and struggling to get a grip, scrambled up through what had now become the roof of the vehicle, swinging his legs round and flopping like an overweight fish onto the ground.

Of the security on the ground, one was dragging the shattered body of his colleague towards the waiting vehicles. Two more, crawling, bloodied, clothes burned, dragged Philip Arnslade, who staggered and blinked and seemed not to see or understand. A third crouched over Helen and didn’t know what to do.

A grunt of engine, out of time, unearthly in Theo’s muddled senses. Seph’s car zipped by, her fingers as white as her winter coat where she gripped the wheel. There was a thing on her face which might have been panic, and if she saw Theo as she rushed by, he did not seem to register.

Corn, slinking away.

Bea, upstairs, watching from a window, turned her face from the scene.

Theo, in the door, looked and looked, and waited for Helen to move, and she did not, and the smoke began to clear and the sounds of the world began to return, the sirens and the shouting and engines and now an alarm inside the building, evacuation, the racecourse evacuating, and Theo couldn’t move, and couldn’t see, and Helen did not get up.

Did not stand.

Did not move.

The phone was ringing in his pocket, and he didn’t answer, and Helen didn’t move.

The fire door opened at his back, and a man in a black suit with white gloves was there, a yellow bib hastily thrown over his jacket. He looked at Theo, and didn’t seem to understand, and growled through a world gone mad, “Sir we’re evacuating please make your way to…”

And looked at where his muster point should have been, and saw only wreckage, and was for a moment not sure what to do.

“Sir please… please make your way calmly to the front car park, where there will be… will be… do you need medical attention do you…?”

He’d only ever been taught one procedure for an evacuation, and it hadn’t involved there being a bomb round the back. His mouth went numb, lips stopped moving. Theo stared into his face, and thought he looked very stupid, and felt very sorry for him, and looked back to where Helen wasn’t moving, and said, yes, yes. I’ll go. I’m going. I’m fine. Yes.

And went back inside.

And followed all instructions to proceed calmly and quickly to his designated exit.

And did not answer his phone.

And knew he had not failed, and thought that Dani walked with him, and that his daughter would be ashamed of who he had been, and who he had become.

Chapter 67

Seph Atkins phoned the police eight miles outside Virginia Water.

She’d reached the conclusion it was the smart move. Making them give chase would only increase the value of the indemnity, and whatever had happened, she would be safe.

She would be safe.

She would be…

The racecourse put on complimentary transport for anyone who needed it, to their destination of choice. If you had passed through the Ascot cordon, you could expect a certain level of service, of discretion and respect. This wasn’t the first time people had targeted them. People were so resentful, they just lashed out, lucky really that more guests weren’t hurt, it was all so deeply unpleasant.

Bea and Corn took a taxi to Victoria Station.

They couldn’t find Theo in the crowd, and he didn’t answer his phone.

Five hours after Seph Atkins was taken into custody, the police came to Mala Choudhary’s door.

She said, “But this is ridiculous, get your hands off me—get your hands off me!” and was for a moment so shocked that she forgot she was a lawyer, and punched a policeman instead. That got her Tasered and put in handcuffs, but at least the cop wound up with a broken jaw. She’d have been disappointed in herself if he’d got away with anything less.

On the canal Theo is ice he is ice there is ice around the boat there is ice in the morning which they crack with a hammer there is ice and the snow turns all things black and grey it cuts down vision it reduces the land to silence to

In the prison Lucy Cumali writes:

Last night her bunk mate was put on half rations for not complying with company-standard review practices. Her bunk mate is twelve years old, and weighs five and a half stone. They say she’s a burden; a real economic burden.

Seph Atkins said, “I want my lawyer.”

And Seph Atkins said, “I want my lawyer.”

And Seph Atkins said, “I want my lawyer.”

And when her lawyer came, she said, “This is the wrong lawyer,” and he replied:

“I’m afraid Ms. Choudhary has been arrested. There were funds found in your account which appear to have come from her. This impropriety renders her unable to conduct your defence and so…”

Corn and Bea went back to the house in Archway, and turned on the TV, and discovered that a wonderful celebrity couple were looking forward to twins—twins they’d be so adorable!—and that the price of Marmite was rising again, if you liked that sort of thing, but it was all right because there was strong growth in the banking sector for the ninth consecutive quarter.

Theo did not answer his phone.

In the police station Seph Atkins said, “Okay. Okay. Yeah, I was hired to do Helen Arnslade. I was given a time, a place where she’d be. They said she’d go to the races, and then leave by the back, through the car park. They gave me the number plate of the car she’d be driving. Said she was having a meet there, all hush-hush, and to do her when she left. That was my brief.”

And her lawyer said, “And the money?”

“It came from Choudhary.”

“I’m afraid Ms. Choudhary is denying that she ever sent you a penny.”

A shrug.

“You do see how this situation is complicated…”

Another shrug.

Three cells down:

“No check again—check again! Yes, I represented Atkins but I never hired her, I never… do my kids know what’s going on? You don’t tell them, you don’t… you don’t fucking tell them!”

In the hospital room Philip Arnslade stares down at the sleeping form of his mother and is for a while silent as the choices of his life, the mad, headlong rush of recollection—no, of something worse; of introspection, of that terrifying reliving of the past in the present, of looking back and asking the questions now that perhaps should have been asked then—floods upon him.

And at the end of it, a thought strikes him, and it is certain, and it nearly sends him onto the floor, but his security man is standing right behind him, and puts a steadying hand on his arm, and always seems to know what Philip needs.

“Fuck,” whispers Philip Arnslade as revelation dawns. And then: “Fuck!” And one last time, to make sure that it’s real, to run the question again and see if it returns the same response. “Fuck. It was meant to be me.”

Later, it started to snow.

Chapter 68

Neila and Theo sat together on the roof of the Hector as the snow fell, and in the distance watched Scunthorpe burn.

Neila put her head on Theo’s shoulder. He wrapped one arm around her, pulling her close. The smoke was a beacon drifting off to the south, pulled high and thin by the wind. The flames were a spinning orange dance in the sky on the horizon.

At last Neila said, “So you did that?”

“In a way.”

“You burned it all?”

“Not that place per se…”

“But you burned the country?”

“I suppose.”

“And killed people?”

He didn’t answer.

“To get your daughter back?”

No reply.

Neila shuffled in a little closer, enjoying his thin warmth, and for a little while longer they watched the flames.

“Cool,” she breathed, letting her eyes drift shut as if she could feel the heat of the fire from the water’s edge, warming through to the bottom of her soul.

Three days after two bombs went off at Ascot the British government froze the assets of the Company.

Philip Arnslade, minister of fiscal efficiency, made the choice unilaterally. It was within his power, after all, and the civil servants who made the call were surprised to discover that they actually could make this happen.

The banks said: are you kidding me no way that’ll destroy everything the Company is the banks the banks are the Company we can’t just stop trading their assets this is…

So the minister of fiscal efficiency ordered the Nineteen Committee to exercise its emergency powers, which it did, and shut down the banks’ computer systems.

The Cabinet, when they found out, exploded, and demanded in fairly short order that the computers were unlocked, the assets unfrozen and that Philip Arnslade resigned. Unfortunately, by that time Philip Arnslade had vanished for a vital meeting somewhere—Birmingham, perhaps, or was it Hull?—and the calls they made to his phone went straight to voicemail.

By the time the Cabinet met fully at 2.40 a.m., they had all received the same file. They’d seen it before, of course, on the day it was released on the internet. Helen Arnslade, reciting the names of the dead. Names of places. National Insurance numbers. Bodies tumbling into graves. Severed limbs and walking skeletons. There was nothing new in this. Even those who hadn’t fully appreciated or suspected weren’t as surprised as they wished they had been.

What was surprising was that this time the file came from Philip Arnslade.

The Company tried to kill me and my mother, he explained. This has gone too far.

The debate on whether to unfreeze Company assets and reopen the banks raged on until 9.45 a.m., by which time the files had been re-released to the internet, and the search blockers appeared not to be working any more. Cabinet chose not to act at this time. It seemed the least dangerous course.

Nine hours later, Philip Arnslade resurfaced in Wales, where he had taken temporary residence in a castle, along with thirty armed men and a news crew.

Chapter 69

The phone call that evening between Simon Fardell and Philip Arnslade wasn’t recorded, but no one in proximity to either end of it could have missed the basic gist.

“Philip, it’s Simon, and what the fuck do you think you are fucking doing? I will fucking burn you I will fucking… I DIDN’T FUCKING TRY TO KILL YOU OR YOUR FUCKING MOTHER WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU all right all right. Okay. Let’s just… think this through, shall we? Let’s just talk about this, let’s just… okay…”

There would be no trial for either Seph Atkins or Mala Choudhary.

Seph Atkins confessed, cleanly and precisely as she always had.

“I was hired to kill Helen Arnslade. I was given a time and a place. I received payment from Mala Choudhary. No, I never spoke to her. That is all I have to say at this time.”

For her own protection she was transferred to a high-security prison where the inmates made concealer sticks and foundation for fair and pale skin. Seph Atkins said not a word as they loaded her into the truck, not a word as they took her through the prison gates. She made no sound as she was strip-searched and dressed in the inmates’ yellow jumpsuit branded with the logo of the cosmetic company and inspiring brand slogans—“Be the true you!” and “Inner beauty, outside.”

On her second night someone tried to beat her up, just because that was how they showed who was boss, and their body was found face down in a vat of boiling pig fat. Seph was put into isolation, and transfer orders came from somewhere, and a van came to collect her, and some time after that the paperwork was lost, and she was not seen again.

Mala Choudhary said, “I didn’t do it. I didn’t hire her. I DIDN’T HIRE HER. I don’t know how the money left my account. I’ve been robbed. I don’t know how the Company money came into my account either. THIS IS A SET-UP can’t you see this is a set-up you stupid fucking…”

And two days later she said, crying, “I did it. It was me. I did it alone. Will my kids be all right? They’re at this great school, they really love it, and there’s all these extracurricular activities they both really love music camp they really love it, they love music camp please don’t take them away from the school. Please don’t take them away from it.”

She too might have vanished, but at the last moment, as they led her towards the edge of the pit on the outskirts of Dagenham, freshly dug and ready to be sealed over with a skimming of hot tar, she remembered that she was the South London Women’s Flyweight MMA champion three years in a row, and she roundhouse-kicked the nearest guy in the gut and smashed another man’s nose against her kneecap, and only as she turned to deal with the final bloke did he have the nerve to shoot her, twice in the leg, once in the belly, once in the chest, his arm sweeping up in an uneasy, jerking arc as he fired.

A further two bullets went astray. One severed the femoral artery of his colleague with the broken nose, who bled out in less than four minutes in the back of the truck. The other hit the wall of the empty, abandoned warehouse behind, and on the ricochet lodged in the ankle of the man doubled over his bruised stomach, who only noticed it five hours later and never walked the same again.

With all the fuss, they didn’t properly bury Mala’s body, and a dog-walker found it nine hours later, the vat of tar cold and set to a solid cylinder next to her carcass.

Somewhere from a castle in Wales, Philip Arnslade roars, “KILL ME KILL MY FUCKING MOTHER I mean she was an embarrassment, a problem yes, she was a real problem and I was embarrassed, I was personally embarrassed, I was…”

Markse has given up trying to get a word in edgeways, so sits patiently, left leg crossed over right, and flicks through the pictures of the dead, the pictures of the vanished, as Helen Arnslade’s voice continues to drone its endless litany of corpses from the laptop on the coffee table.

“When my mother started with her shit, Simon was furious. He’s always had a temper, don’t you believe the things he says, he’s always been a… but he was furious he said we should just have killed her when she betrayed us the first time, just kill my FUCKING MOTHER ARE YOU FUCKING LISTENING TO ME?”

Markse smiles, nods, and that seems to be enough.

“KILL MY MOTHER so I’m searching the country and we stop it, we tidy things up, yes, there’s a scandal but it passes we shut it down by now Simon worries that I’m ‘unreliable’ and I think, hold on there matey, and then he PUTS A FUCKING BOMB IN FUCKING ASCOT fucking uses the SAME FUCKING LAWYER and the SAME FUCKING KILLER-BITCH to try and fucking kill me he doesn’t even have the decency to try and cover it up ‘liability’ he said ‘loose cannon’ well I’ll fucking…”

It occurs to Markse, somewhere in the midst of all this, that his employers—whoever they are now—perhaps lack some of the temperament that he would otherwise wish of those in high office.

Chapter 70

Five days after the banks shut down, Theo found Helen Arnslade.

The hospital was south of Greenwich, with a view up the hill towards the observatory and the green laser that shot out into overcast skies to mark the line of the Greenwich Meridian, dividing the world between east and west. He’d already searched every other likely hospital in London, and was about to try and force his way back into the Cotswolds when he stumbled on her, sleeping in a private, guarded room on the third floor, on a wing reserved for patients on life support, in comas or permanent vegetative states. She’d been signed in as Mrs. Danesmoor, and no further notes on her condition were kept. Theo waited for the late-night cleaners to go on shift, and whispered to a sallow-eyed man with a mop bucket and a limp, “Blessed are her hands…”

And he grasped Theo’s arms below the elbows before he could answer and hissed, “Is it true? Is there a queen in the north? Will there be a rebellion? Are we going to be free?”

Theo didn’t have an answer, couldn’t find anything good to say, so he lied. “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes. It’s all true.”

The man wept, and as he stripped out of his uniform and passed Theo his access pass, the tears rolled down his blotched, sponge-cake face, and he gibbered thanks and prayers to an unknown deity, and Theo thought perhaps he should offer comfort, and didn’t know what to say.

Instead, he cleaned the hospital.

He mopped floors, sprayed sinks, sprayed bleach around toilets, kept trundling up and down, shoulders hunched, feet shuffling the slow-motion shuffle of someone with nowhere to go, nothing to do, just going through the motions. It was a natural walk for him, he found, and comforting to a weary brain.

There were very few doctors, and only a couple of nurses on shift. The hospital was owned by a company which was owned by a company which was…

However that old song went. Somewhere at the top of the pile there was the Company. On the TV, Philip Arnslade faced the camera. The volume was muted, but subtitles took their best shot at an accurate rendition, lighting up his words in cyan on a black background.

The Company

Abused its responsibility

Government forced to

Reconsider its relationship with

Revoking contracts to

A few minutes later Simon Fardell’s face appeared.

The stoppages

Hospitals

Banks

Schools

Buses

Trains

Supermarkets

Farms

Food

Water

…all the government’s fault. If they seize our assets let’s see who folds first let’s see who’s really…

The TV station was owned by a company which was owned by a company which was…

And at midnight it too went offline, when the video techs realised they weren’t going to get their salary for the week, and they had to get to the shops before the last of the petrol and food went.

At 2.17 a.m. the man guarding the door to Helen’s room in a hospital in Greenwich fell asleep, and Theo let himself in.

The light through the half-open blinds on the window was a pink-orange reflection of street light. A car passed below, the sweep of its beams running like a clock hand across the ceiling. Fresh yellow flowers were beginning to droop a little in murky water by the bed. A flask of water was empty on a tray, a bowl of stewed pears had not been touched, the custard solidifying to yellow concrete.

Helen lay, one arm stretched by her side, the stub of the other arm wrapped in pristine white bandage. An accordion of blue plastic and clear tubes rose and fell by her side, supplementing the progress of her lungs, the end of the machine plugged into a careful incision in her trachea. Her face was rounded, purple-brown; she wore surgical socks beneath the blue blankets, her toes peeping out the end. A sac of clear fluid was nearly empty on its hook by her head, the line running into a needle hidden somewhere beneath her loose green robe.

Theo leaned his mop against the wall, pulled up a huge padded beige armchair covered with plastic that stuck to skin and held the white tidemarks of previous sweaty inhabitants. The pump by her bed inhaled, clicked to full, exhaled in a long whoosh. Her chest rose, fell. At the foot of her bed yellow fluid drip-drip-dripped out of a tube into a plastic litre-jar, nearly full, of faintly bloodied amber liquid. Theo watched her.

Lucy has a new bunk mate, after Moira became too thin to work and was taken away for reassessment. Hanna doesn’t know who her mum is. By day she tells Lucy that she’s a stupid slag and even the men wouldn’t bother to rape her. By night they lie together, holding each other tight, sharing warmth against the winter, and never speak of these things, and are silent, and it’s okay to be afraid.

Blessed is her name, blessed are her hands upon the water blessed is the mother who gives life to the child blessed is the moonlight through the bars blessed are the whisperers of the hidden truths blessed are those who stood before the fire blessed is the heat of the ash blessed is

Neila said, “Navigating the Trent to the Ouse requires a licence. It’s tidal where it meets the Humber, there’s a two-day transit on the lock it’s…”

Theo sat in the cabin of the Hector as she put his hand on the deck of cards and said, “Ask a question.”

“I don’t know what to ask.”

“Think of something that matters. Think of Lucy.”

A flicker of a frown, anger almost, which went as quickly as it had come. He closed his eyes, hand below hers, and let out a breath, and held the tarot pack tightly.

They waited

He cut the cards

dealt the top nine.

She turned them over.

He studied the arrangement on the table. “What does it mean?” he asked at last.

“Nothing,” she replied, heart leaping, tears of relief and gratitude pricking the corners of her eyes. “Nothing at all.”

Stood.

Went to the locker above the sink.

Opened it.

Removed the gun from inside, still wrapped in the same plastic bag it had been when Corn gave it to Theo in Nottingham. Said, “I was going to throw it overboard. I wanted to. I was so angry with you I was so angry. But I think…”

Put it in his hand.

“I think this is maybe where you get off.”

Theo sat by Helen’s bed, and Dani was there too, and so was the real Theo Miller, the one who died, and it seemed to Theo that the past was just a present-tense thing that happened in his mind as he thought about it, not real at all, and that the future could only really be experienced in the present too and thus probably wasn’t real enough to worry about and that…

That he was very tired and that

Dani forgive me Dani forgive me I don’t know any way to I will always be there is no forgetting there is no forgiving I just stood there I didn’t listen I didn’t think forgive me forgive me there was there isn’t I shall never

Theo stopped praying when he realised that he was talking out loud, and looked down at the floor, and wondered if anyone had heard him, and when he looked up again, one of Helen’s eyes was open and fixed on him.

For a moment they sat together, watching each other.

Helen blinked, slow, once, twice, waiting.

Twitched, with her one good hand, tried to move it, couldn’t.

Twitched again.

Made a sound.

Uh—uh—huh.

The sound broke away against nothing.

Theo flapped, muttered, what do you… what can I…

Felt useless and dumb.

Rummaged in the bedside table. Found a piece of paper, a pen.

Put it carefully under Helen’s hand, balanced on the back of a dustpan.

She took an age to write, and every second was an eternity, and it was over in a moment.

END

Theo folded the piece of paper over.

Put it in his pocket. Pulled another piece of paper from the pad. Put it under her hand. Her one good eye narrowed, and again she wrote.

END

Theo sat back in the armchair, and stared at the ceiling.

Realised he hated hospitals.

Hadn’t known that until this moment.

At his feet the bottle of amber fluid was full, beginning to back up into the drain. No one came to change it. A pair of bellows inhaled, clicked, exhaled, and so did Helen.

He thought he should say something profound.

Thought he should find words that mattered.

Nothing came to mind.

He reached over, and unplugged the tube that ran into Helen’s throat. Air whistled from the plastic. Her body rose, sank.

She didn’t die.

For a while she lay there, and gasped.

Gasped, eye wide, fixed on him, blinking.

Gasped.

Wheezed.

Shuddered.

Gasped.

Didn’t look away.

She took nearly an hour and a half to die.

For a little while Theo was terrified.

Then he was hopeful, because she wasn’t dying, so maybe she would live.

Then he thought he should plug the tubes back in, and nearly cried because he didn’t.

Then he was angry, because she was dying, and no one came, and no one cared.

Then he was bored, and was immediately guilty that he was bored.

All the time she watched him, and she struggled to breathe and did not look away from him, and after a while he held her hand in his, and she squeezed it once, and did not die, and did not die, and did not die, but lay a wounded shell.

And in the end, she died.

There wasn’t even a heart monitor to beep, an alarm to sound.

She exhaled, and a little foam popped around the hole in her throat, and she exhaled no more, and she died.

Chapter 71

Neila moored in an inlet of Keadby Junction, stood on the prow of the Hector, and watched Theo walk away.

In the afternoon that fucking cormorant finally pissed off too, stupid bloody bird.

It’d be back.

That was just the way things were.

Theo—the boy who would be Theo—sat by the sea with Dani Cumali, and she said:

“I’m gonna change things. This whole system is so fucked up, you know? It’s so fucked up, and people are just like, you’ll grow up and you’ll learn, and I’m like, fuck yeah, like you’ve learned yeah? but you know what people are like. Patronising wankers. You gotta remember what matters, you’ve gotta…”

Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe Theo’s making it up, now that time is becoming a little… now that his memories are more confused than they were, now that he might have a daughter who probably isn’t his and now that the life he built from a lie isn’t anything that matters at all, everything is sort of…

And Dani Cumali dies at Seph Atkins’ hands, and her daughter’s name isn’t on her lips.

But as she dies it occurs to her that things would have been better if she had whispered Lucy’s name, it would have been a proper way of doing things, and she is briefly annoyed that she was so busy being scared and in pain, and didn’t manage to fit it in.

Not least because, now she’s here, she finds nothing else really matters as much after all.

In a hospital in Greenwich, Helen Arnslade dies.

She does not smile, and as her body turns from a living thing into limp biology in a bed, Theo adds up the value of her life.

Approximately £5.8 million, give or take.

Assuming she wasn’t hiding any undeclared medical conditions or didn’t give excessively to charity.

He waits a little while longer, then gets up, and walks away.

And on New Year’s Eve Theo Miller walks away from the canal, a gun in his hand, Neila at his back, the sun hidden behind snow-threatening clouds, and has only one destination in mind, and only one thought in his trigger finger.

Chapter 72

Nearly fourteen days after two bombs went off in Ascot, Theo returned to Newton Bridge.

The men came out of the woods with guns and shouting and rage and hunger in their eyes, and he let them shove him from one side to the other and kick and roar, and this time they didn’t dump him in a cold, grey room, but dragged him straight up the hill to where Good Queen Bess was making an especially disgusting cup of camomile tea.

And she looked up as he was thrown onto the floor at her feet, and tutted and said, “You look like shit. Dog?”

It took Theo a little while to understand what she meant, until the strips of dried spaniel meat were produced, which he ate with his fingers off a blue and white willow-pattern plate.

In London, Markse said:

“There is good reason to think that Simon Fardell didn’t order the hit on you or your mother, Mr. Arnslade. There is footage of individuals at Ascot, including Mr. Miller, which implicates them in the crime. Further, there is reason to believe that Ms. Choudhary was not lying about having her financial information stolen…”

To Markse’s surprise, this information didn’t induce the gibbering relief he’d been expecting from the minister of fiscal efficiency. Instead, he found himself in the awkward position of having a grown man kneel at his feet, clutch at his trousers, exclaim:

“Oh Jesus oh fucking Jesus oh God I froze their fucking assets I froze their assets I thought Simon tried to kill me I did the only thing I could oh God oh God he’s going to kill me!”

Markse wondered what he was meant to do next. In a career spanning the mundane through the petrifying, he’d never before had his employer cry onto his polished leather shoes, nor did he know quite what to make of this development.

Moreover, he hadn’t been paid for ten days, and suspected he wasn’t about to be paid any time soon. It had become apparent that the Company’s contract for the collection of taxes hadn’t included lump-sum payments to the government, but rather a constant trickling-in of weekly finances controlled and carefully managed to maximise the efficiency of investment over…

…he hadn’t paid much attention to the details.

He was beginning to wish he had. The kitchen cupboard was getting quite bare, and the companies who delivered food to his local supermarket were owned by companies which were owned by…

And all things considered, the world was a mess.

And Markse couldn’t abide mess.

Twenty-four hours later, Philip Arnslade unfroze Company funds.

The action came too late.

Of the estimated thirteen thousand people who had died in the electricity blackouts, water cut-offs, transport breakdowns and failure to get access to clean drinking water and food, nearly nine thousand had been over the age of seventy, too old, frail or weak to make it to the resources on which they’d depended.

Another seven hundred and twenty had died when the police opened fire on rioters in Manchester and Birmingham.

Fourteen were Company Police, burned alive when their station was attacked. The crowds had danced around the building as they smoked and screamed, and kicked the still-burning bodies of those who’d thrown themselves from the windows, just to be sure they were dead.

In Shawford, formerly of Budgetfood, the ragers raged at the sea.

In the enclaves, the safe spaces on the cliffs, a man beat his wife to death for hoarding food. His indemnity would probably have been less than £100k, all things considered, but the police never came, and neither did the ambulance, and no one seemed to care.

At the Cotswold border the man babbled, “But the sheep are for the aesthetic the rural aesthetic they are part of the expected aesthetic of the—”

A woman hit him over the head with a shovel, and they left him for dead as they burst across the cordon to feast on fresh mutton and blood.

On the canal Neila watched the flames, and was grateful to be on the water.

A few trucks lumbered out of the processing plants with microwave meals and tins of food. No one was sure who was paying for this service, since the Company didn’t seem to be taking responsibility for anything much, but it seemed like someone ought to try.

Philip Arnslade resigned.

“Markse,” he whimpered as they led him to the helicopter. “Simon’s going to kill me. I’ve broken it all. He’s going to kill me. He’s going to…”

“Now sir,” murmured Markse, “I’m sure it’ll all be…”

The roar of helicopter blades drowned him out as he pushed Philip on board. The minister’s face was white as he stared out of the window, and on the ground below Markse felt he should almost be waving, smiling, a proud parent seeing a frightened child off to school. Markse was still watching the sky when, two minutes twenty-two seconds into the flight, Philip’s helicopter exploded mid-air.

There were no survivors, and the spinning remains of a blade falling from the sky also killed a woman in the street below who was out looking for her cat.

No one seemed very interested in spending money on an investigation, and the funeral was held in private, an intimate family affair.

Chapter 73

Theo cycled through a country on fire.

The flames were distant, the paths were bumpy and rough.

The air was frozen winter glory, the sky was crystal blue.

In the morning the frost cracked underfoot.

In the evening he huffed out clouds of breath, and watched the golden peach of sunset tangle in the moisture.

Corn and Bea cycled with him.

Corn carried a rifle, slung across his shoulder.

Bea carried water, dried meat of uncertain provenance, a map and a torch.

Occasionally they left the cycle paths, and paused on little country lanes where the birds sang in the hedgerows and the signs pointed to villages of a hundred people, or to the North, or to the South, and didn’t give distances for either of these ideas.

Sometimes they passed food trucks guarded by local police, their Company insignia stripped, or by local men armed with shotguns and fire axes.

Once they passed a doctor’s clinic. A paper sign hung on the door. ALL WELCOME.

A woman pushed a pram away from the clinic, a child gurgling happily within. A woman with a Zimmer frame, bent into a right angle over her support, head bobbing up and down like a hungry deer to check her path as she walked, scowled at them as they passed by.

A queue snaked around the block to a broken hydrant from which fresh water flowed. A couple of teenagers had broken out boom boxes and were entertaining the crowds with home-made raps about revolution, love and how lonely it was smoking cigarettes by themselves cos no girl would give them sweet sweet lovin’.

The day before they reached the prison, they saw a TV on in a lit room, and passed a church hall where sleeping bags had been laid on the floor and tea was being served, and outside a wooden stake where a man had been hung to die of the cold, a sign around his neck: COMPANY MAN.

He hadn’t been anyone senior, hadn’t done anything wrong or exceeded the remit of his job. But his bosses had been faster getting out of town, and people knew him as the man who’d refused benefits when people didn’t fulfil the economic productivity eligibility criteria, so when he’d vanished, no one had looked, and no one had come to take his corpse down for proper burial, until his wife found it two days later, and wept until her lungs spasmed in the cold, and she had to be helped home by her children, who understood only that they were big kids now, and everything had changed.

When they came to the prison, the gates were already open.

A wire-mesh fence enclosed a single-storey yellow-brick building laid out as a hexagon. Buddleia grew from the cracks in the wall, grass from the cracks in the concrete. A single basketball hoop stood at the back, never used. Small square windows, covered with white wire mesh. A guard post was a black-burned shell. The heavy blue-metal doors of the loading bay stood open, and a fox had already been inside and had a piss in the corner.

They left their bicycles at the main entrance, and walked inside. Speakers stood grey and silent. Cold morning light drifted through barred windows and frosted glass. Posters on the wall, torn in two, declared from loose beads of Blu Tack:

A scuttle of feet, a noise in the grey. Corn swung his rifle round, holding it tight. Theo moved slowly down empty corridors, the bulbs dead, broken glass on the floor, doors knocked out of their frames. A workshop had already been gutted, the tools gone. A room of computers stood silent, screens shattered, the casings dented with hammers, chairs ripped in two, stuffing spread across the floor. In a dormitory a doll had been left tucked up neatly in bed, the only centre of calm in a world ripped apart. In a room of upended green chairs hung paintings in brilliant red and blue. Eyes, huge, gleaming. A child playing beneath a rainbow. A torn canvas where once there had been a picture of a house, smoke coming from the chimney.

A scuttle of feet, a whisper of voices.

Corn’s hands tightened on the rifle. The night before, three men had emerged from the woods by their campsite, and for a while they had just watched each other, no one moving, no one speaking, Corn with rifle in hand, and after a while the men had left, and since then Corn had stood never more than a foot from Bea’s side, and said not a word, and hadn’t put the rifle down, even when he wanted to sleep.

Theo followed the sound.

Pushed open another door, another dormitory of bunk beds, grey metal frames and thin stained sheets. Mattresses were toppled onto the floor, sheets torn up, blankets pulled free. In one corner, the furthest from the door, a small igloo of mattress and blanket had been piled up, encasing darkness. He approached it slowly, crouched down a few feet from the narrow black entrance to this bedding cave. Said, “Hello.”

The darkness didn’t answer.

“My name’s Theo. I’m looking for my daughter. Her name is Lucy. Is she here?”

Silence, except for a slight shifting of sheets within the wall of mattress.

Struggling to keep his voice calm, hold back the panic. “Her name’s Lucy Cumali. Lucy… Rainbow Princess. She was held here, she’s about fifteen years old. I won’t hurt you. I’m not angry. I just want to find my daughter.”

“Gun!” whimpered a voice from inside the burrow. A child’s voice, hard to tell boy or girl, too young to have definition.

Theo glanced back over his shoulder at Corn. “Would you mind waiting outside?” he asked softly.

Corn scowled, looked at Bea, who nodded. With a barely audible huff, he spun on his heel, marched out of the room. Bea squatted down next to Theo. “I’m Bea,” she breathed. “We won’t hurt you.”

A hurried whispering within the den. A muttering of voices in dissent. A final settling on agreement. A stirring of sheets. Then a girl, nine or ten years old, emerged slowly, crawling on hands and knees. She wore several layers of jumpsuit done up over each other, but her lips were blue and her face was bone. At her back eyes blinked and bodies shifted. The girl seemed to think about standing, then changed her mind, and plonked down, cross-legged, a chief guarding the entrance to her territory, and glared at Theo and Bea.

“Food?”

Bea hesitated, then opened her bag, handed over a wrapped package of dry dog meat, a packet of biscuits.

The girl took it quickly, tried to hide her excitement, passed it back to hands that emerged greedily from within the tent, then turned to face them again, stiff as a sceptre.

“Gates got opened week ago,” she barked. “Guards said they weren’t being paid to deal with this shit, they had families to look after, so they upped and went. Couple of parents turned up too, like, busting in and that, but they only took the kids what mattered to them. Some of us ran away. Lot ran away. I said they were dumb. They wouldn’t get nowhere. They’d just get into shit. So we stayed. We look after each other. That’s what we do.”

Theo licked his lips, waited on his haunches, seeing if there were any more pronouncements from this tiny monarch. When it seemed there were not, he glanced at Bea, then back to the girl, and breathed, “Lucy? Did you know Lucy? Is she here? I’m looking for my daughter.”

“I knew her.”

“Knew? Is she… where is Lucy?” Bea’s hand on his arm, holding him down even as his voice began to rise. He bit his lip, stared down at the floor, let out a breath, tried again. “Please. It’s very important that I find her.”

The girl thought for a moment, then nodded once, uncrossed her legs, rose to her feet and scampered past them, a light run, habit dictating speed. Theo uncurled and scampered after her. Corn jumped as they belted past him, but didn’t leave his post at the door. The girl ran, knowing every twist and turn of the shattered prison, her domain, broken windows and broken doors, smoke stains up the walls from the kitchen, furniture overturned and cupboards stripped bare. She ran until she reached another dormitory, the door open and undamaged, and pointed, triumphant, proud of her success.

Theo followed the direction of her finger inside. Bunk beds, less damaged than those where the children huddled.

Sheets in disarray, thin and torn.

An explosion of polystyrene beads across the floor, from packaging ripped recklessly apart, he wasn’t sure how long ago.

A photo on one wall.

The photo was new, stuck in place with masking tape.

Lucy glowered at the camera, daring it to make anything of her blotchy face, acne-pocked and starved of sun. Theo peeled the photo carefully away, turned it over.

On the back someone had written in neat biro.

MARKSE

Theo marches from the prison as the children look on and

Corn is all what the hell what

And Bea silences him and

Theo strides past the gate past the bicycles makes it to the road outside

And the children are clustered outside now, five of them, what’s happening why is the man sad why is he angry there is

Neila has a compass on her boat, it points north. Somewhere in the north there is her soul, there is the centre to which all things return, there is the fall there is the sky there is

“I did my best,” she whispers as the world spins and the cards tell only lies. “I did my best. I did my best. I did my best.”

Mala Choudhary’s kids are taken out of school now that Mummy is gone we can’t pay for these nice things you see we can’t afford to have music but it’ll be all right it’ll be

The real Theo Miller lies in an unmarked grave and laughs and laughs and laughs at the funny old way of things and

Theo made it fifty yards before falling down.

It wasn’t a sideways tumble or a face-down flop.

He was standing, and then he was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the street, a sack of potatoes dumped from tired hands. Corn followed, still trying to understand. Bea shushed him with a hard slice of her hands, then shuffled up to Theo, sat down by his side.

Held his hands in hers.

Whispered, “Theo? Theo? What does it mean? What does it mean?”

The picture of Lucy, crunched to a broken tube in his fist.

“Theo? Talk to me. Tell me what it means?”

He looked up at her, and cried, and didn’t say a word.

Theo didn’t speak for two days.

He obeyed commands, and they cycled, and he did not speak.

And one night Bea lay down next to Corn on the frozen ground, and Corn held her tight, and that was good, and they didn’t talk about it, and kept on cycling.

And then

When one of the TV stations was broadcasting again, its crew paid in vegetables, beer and promises, and the pundits were beginning to pundit and there was sometimes cabbage in the shops again, Simon Fardell held a press conference, and announced that the Company was going to commence a major restructuring programme resulting in the dissolving of several major assets and that all things considered he was grateful for the opportunity to reassess the corporate structure of

and there was Lucy.

There was Lucy.

There was Lucy.

There was

Lucy.

They watched it on the one working TV in Newton Bridge.

Theo hadn’t spoken, and did not speak when he saw his daughter’s face, and Bea thought she recognised it from the photo but couldn’t be sure, and everyone else cheered and said it was great, it was the beginning of something amazing, and there was a party that night complete with bad singing and home-distilled alcohol that bypassed the digestive tract and went straight to the retina.

And there was Lucy.

She was

Lucy.

For a while Theo thought it wasn’t her, but knew it was, and knew her face and there was

Lucy

Glaring at the camera, dressed in a silly duck-blue dress with a white collar

Heidi Fardell’s hand resting on her shoulder

Lucy

Lucy who is my

SHE’S YOUR DAUGHTER

who is my

Lucy who is

who is

obviously there are the usual words there are

love heart soul burning fire ice pain guilt grief there is

And Theo sees his daughter’s face and walks into the bathroom and locks the door and kneels and prays to a god who isn’t there he prays and prays as the tears flow

Blessed is her name, blessed are her hands upon the water, blessed is the shadow at the door forgive me forgive me forgive me forgive me

After

He went to find Bea, who lived in an attic above what had once been the undertaker’s. And he sat on the end of her bed as she huddles, knees hugged to her chin, wrapped in wool and dirty cotton, and he says:

“I’ve got to go to London.”

Bea’s head tilted a little to the side, waiting.

“They have my daughter, they… I have to… I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I thought maybe I could be a hero and then they… so I’m not. It turns out I’m not after all.”

“Do you need anything?”

He shook his head. “I’ll cut across to the railway line. If they don’t arrest me on the train, they’ll get me in the city. Bess will try to stop me.”

She shrugged.

“I think… when I’m gone, this place won’t be safe. Tell Bess. Tell her it won’t be safe.”

“Bess won’t leave here.”

“She might have to.”

“She won’t.”

“Please, I…”

Stopped.

Stared at the ceiling.

Stared at the floor.

Stood up.

“When I get to London,” he said, “they will tell me how they’ll hurt my daughter. And I’ll do anything to keep her safe. Anything.”

Walked away, without another word.

Chapter 74

Theo sneaked out of Newton Bridge in the middle of the night, and no one stopped him.

He crawled through bracken, and when no one came shouting, he walked down the side of the road, and when no vehicles passed, he walked down the middle, following white broken lines. Once a drone passed overhead, scouring the countryside for runners, screamers, ragers, ready to shoot, or maybe just flying because it still had power and it pleased its owner to fly, and Theo just kept on walking, reasoning that there was no hiding from this eye in the sky, and so he may as well not bother. And if they saw him, he wasn’t interesting enough, not a runner, not a screamer, so it buzzed on by.

In the morning he came to a motorway fenced off on either side to guard against the world. Two or three cars passed in ten minutes, and he followed it until he found a smaller road bending off to the west, towards a town with an empty market square and a hotel that offered Thai massage and Sunday roast. Two cars were pulled up outside, bare concrete between the door and the empty square where once there had been stalls selling bruised bananas and replacement phone screens. Theo looked for any sign of other life, and couldn’t see any, save for a single woman, hair wrapped in a white towel, body swathed in dressing gown and flannel slippers, who stood on the balcony of the hotel and looked out and seemed astonished to see him.

He drifted to the station.

There was one train a day. By 4.17, when the train came, the empty town had produced forty or fifty travellers, waiting in silence on the platform. Theo couldn’t pay for a ticket, but there wasn’t a barrier, and no one at the counter to sell him anything or call him out for his crime.

The train smelled of broken toilet and diesel. He stood, face pressed to the glass, swaying as it rattled south towards York. No ticket inspectors boarded, and at York he changed to a larger train, growling engine and less pee, heading towards London, and waited to be arrested. People stood pressed armpit to armpit, nothing to hold on to except each other. An old woman had a duck in a bag. A young man held a baby, no carrier or straps for support, wrapped up in his jacket, pressed to his chest. No one spoke, no one met anyone else’s eye, no ticket inspectors came.

At Peterborough there wasn’t enough room for people to get on, and a fight broke out. The train began to pull away before it was resolved, leaving a woman howling on the platform, a door open. A man was pushed backwards out of it as the people crammed on board reached a collective decision, landing with a bone-crack on the platform below.

No one was waiting to arrest Theo in London, and he shoved through the open barrier behind a mother and her child and didn’t even bother to feel guilty.

Walked.

Sat a while by the river.

Maybe even slept, until the cold started him awake again.

Walked again, to the Kensington toll. It was manned not by people in Company uniform, but men in suits, local residents who, as this service had lapsed, had decided to take up the burden themselves. Theo almost laughed at the absurdity of it, and approached the pedestrian gate. “My name is Theo Miller. I’m here to be arrested.”

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 most 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…”

Stopped again. Stared at nothing. Asked an incidental thing: “Did you kill Lady Helen?”

Theo didn’t answer, looked away.

Markse grunted. Said, “Tell me about the queen of the patties.”

And he told him.

And Markse said, “How many people does she have?”

And he told him.

And Markse said, “What weapons does she have?”

And Theo

lied a little bit, because he could, because he knew this game now, he could sense the flow of it he lied just a little bit

Because somewhere on the other side of his city his daughter was alive and killing aliens.

And nothing else mattered any more.

Chapter 77

When Simon Fardell came to visit he didn’t know where to begin. He just stood by the door and looked at Theo for a very long time and finally, because he seemed to feel like it, because he was angry and his world was coming apart, he kicked Theo a bit, and that made him feel better. He stopped when Theo’s breakfast came up again because it smelled a lot and he stood by the door and

didn’t really have much to say for himself.

Then:

“Theo Miller died fifteen years ago. I was there. So who the fuck are you?”

Theo crawled into a corner, pressed his head against the wall, licked acid from his lips.

“Philip shot him. He died. I remember it very clearly. I don’t remember you.”

When Theo didn’t answer, Simon looked for a moment like he might do a bit more kicking, but that would have meant stepping over the puke on the floor and that was just uch, it was

So he leaned in close and whispered, “When I sell your daughter, it’ll be to someone who really appreciates the things you can do to little girls.”

Theo managed to get a hand around Simon’s throat before security came in and stamped on him, and retrospectively Simon seemed more satisfied with this result than Theo could possibly be.

Markse sat on a stool in the corner of the room, the smell of bleach on the floor, a bottle of water at the end of Theo’s mattress, and said:

“Of course my life, in my line of work you make choices. Certain choices you make—you understand this you make these choices, and well…”

Theo scratched at the sole of his left foot as Markse talked. The skin was soft and wet, came away in painless white flakes beneath his nails, oddly satisfying, like kneading pastry.

“I found myself asking, what would make this ordinary man, this harmless individual, go to such extraordinary lengths? Principle? For a while I thought that was it. Just principle. You were the kind of man who—if you pardon me saying so—seemed enough of a socially isolated individual that principle, yes, you could compromise a lot for principle, but then I thought… all those years working for the Criminal Audit Office, surely there were other cases, worse cases, where your sense of morality would have been more offended this was hardly…

So I looked again, and I thought maybe I’d got it wrong. Maybe the man who stands up for principle is a lie, because there was no evidence that you’d ever stood up for anything before. None at all. You were, in fact, a moral vacuum. Oh, not in a spectacular way. You were no more or less evil than anyone else in society, and in fact evil isn’t even the operative word. Apathetic, perhaps. Yes, that’s it. You were as apathetic as everyone else, and to square that now with your actions, maybe everything I had concluded was false and in fact…

So what was left? There seemed nothing in you to hate, you hadn’t been rejected, didn’t seem unhappy at work, didn’t strike me as proud or motivated by irrationality, and when all these things were eliminated, at the very end the only thing it left room for was love. At the end it did do that. Of course my first instinct is love, when fear is discarded, the romantic angle, but when I met you that was clearly absurd. But as time went by…

Your acquisition of the Theo Miller identity was excellent. I couldn’t have done a better job and I’m…

It wasn’t that you made an error. It just that there had to be, there had to be something we’d missed.

We found his grave, in the end. The real Theo Miller. That led to the opening of the files and there he was, dead in Oxford, shot by Philip Arnslade, and I thought that’s it! That’s got to be it, but what does that have to do with Dani Cumali how does that possibly…

I still don’t know who you are. I still don’t. I thought perhaps someone else at the duel, someone else who… Simon Fardell says there was someone else there but can’t remember anything about him. A ‘scurrying nobody’ was how he put it. I thought… that sounds about right. A scurrying nobody who everyone forgets, that seems… and I thought, here’s this man who vanished and here’s this new Theo Miller who lived and I looked at the years and there was a moment, this instant where I had Dani Cumali’s life pinned to the wall and the life of the man who became Theo Miller on the other and there’s Lucy’s birthday, there she is and it’s…

shitting hell almost exactly nine months

practically to the day

after Theo Miller died.

And I thought no.

No.

It wouldn’t be—it can’t be that simple it can’t be that

But then how did you get Cumali’s information? She must have known you she must have trusted you there must have been some sort of pre-existing—some sort of…

You must have known her.

You must have.

And even if the girl wasn’t your daughter even if she wasn’t then

But she was.

She was.

I just

It made everything more

And even if she wasn’t I thought

I don’t have any children. My line of work, it wasn’t ever a thing which seemed… apt.

My office is funded by Simon. He sold a company that was owned by a company that…

But I suppose we’ve always been owned by them, really. And my boss said, after Philip died, tell it to Simon. So I did. It’s my job, it is required, I am a man, you see, used to a certain order in things. I told him about your daughter, and he was delighted. We picked her up that very day, took her to Simon’s home, he fed her like a princess, he fawned over her it was…

And I looked at him and thought, this man is going to…”

Stopped himself.

Looked, for the very first time, ashamed.

“I think that perhaps… there are some despicable things I’ve done, but perhaps… but Simon has a wife, Heidi, and I think she can sense what he wants, knows that there is something in the way he looks at Lucy, and Heidi has been… she’s always wanted a daughter.

I am good at my job. It’s important to be good at your job. It’s very important. It’s how we know we’re… good people. Because we work hard. We work hard and we do our best and… I am very good at my job. You were good at your job too, weren’t you, Mr. Miller? If we are both good at our jobs, then it doesn’t matter what these jobs are, because it isn’t the consequence that matters, just the doing.

Just the doing.

That’s how the world works. Everything is

I thought that

it’s how the world is it’s how

you just do

what you can when the world is

how the world works.

What else is there?”

Theo didn’t answer. He thought there was perhaps a moment when he might have had something to say, something about standing up and taking control and being…

But he can’t find it. It all seems very self-important, now.

“Are you Lucy’s father?”

No answer.

“You don’t even know her. It can’t mean so much.”

Theo looks for a moment like he might retch, fingers frozen mid-scrape along the damp heel of his foot.

“Maybe it is love,” mused Markse, staring at the ceiling. “Maybe it is at that.”

A while they sat, staring into their own places.

“Of course my work,” Markse breathed. “Sometimes I look at the actions I’ve taken and

if I had a daughter, and if she was in danger then…

The threat, you see. The threat is itself a beastly matter, even if you never follow through. Here is your daughter, safe in the house of your enemies. Come now, or we will hurt her. We’ll hurt her. We’ll hurt this child. It is the vilest sort of

But what has to be done.

A question of the value of the thing. Of the balance. Once you have life on the line, even a child’s life—especially a child’s life, if you are willing to go so far. To kill a child.

The vilest thing.

What’s your name, Mr. Miller? I’m curious I don’t think it’s relevant it won’t affect…

No.

Well.

I suppose—

that’s fair, in its way.”

At night the prison is cold and Dani Cumali sits next to him and says,

“Ow that’s my arm it’s ow mind where you put your backside you great”

Theo rolls over and stares at a concrete ceiling sprayed with seaside stars.

“And I’m going to get a better job, a new job, and then I’ll be able to move away from here and actually maybe I’ll move first to get a new job because around here there’s nothing it’s just getting the money you know getting the money to move so job first then”

He holds Dani close, and she stares up at the starlight with him and says:

“My bum’s gone to sleep.”

And he holds her closer still.

“Bloody mess, really. Don’t know how it got there. Don’t know what we did. Thought we had some control but actually I’m not sure we ever did not sure there was anything we could have done which someone else hadn’t decided it’s like when”

And does not sleep, as the sky turns, far away.

Chapter 78

He thought it was late at night, and it was early in the morning, and still dark.

They put him in a nine-seater car on the verge of becoming a truck.

Next to him was Edward Witt, face grey, looking a little nauseous. Next to Edward was Faris. The old man smiled limply, shook his head at an idea that Theo didn’t understand, and looked away. The three seats opposite were turned to face them. Three security officers, two men and a woman, sat in silence and watched their passengers. The driver listened to Radio 2. Every fifteen minutes the broadcast was interrupted for traffic news. The traffic was bad. Sometimes they drove up the motorway on the hard shoulder, and no one tried to stop them.

Edward didn’t look at Theo for a very long time, but wrinkled his nose. Theo imagined he smelled. He enjoyed imagining this. The windows were tinted, making the yellow street lights splay across the glass in thin little lines, starburst through a grate. The traffic news remained bad as they reached the M25 toll. Someone had driven off the road somewhere further along. A bus had skidded into a ditch. Maybe children had died; maybe they hadn’t. Maybe it was a miracle on the M25; maybe it was a tragic loss of life. Either way, here was another hit from the 1980s, bringing back that warm, glowing feeling inside.

They stopped briefly at a service station. Everyone got out, so Theo did too. A security man stood by him without rancour. There were six cars in the convoy, men in suits, women in black leather shoes, tinted windows, four police motorcycle escorts. There were no other cars in the service station, and only one pump worked. Markse drank coffee, and didn’t look at Theo. Faces glowed in the white light of mobile phones. A harried woman in laddered beige tights balanced coffee for twelve on a couple of trays, swaying uneasily back through the car park, yellow lights of the twenty-four-hour coffee stop behind her. Two men returned, laughing, bladders relieved, bodies relaxed; one man with his back to the world shouted down a mobile phone, but the wind carried away everything except the anger.

Edward stood next to Theo and swallowed espresso in a single gulp.

“You little shit,” he said at last, not looking at Theo’s face, eyes narrowed on a small gaggle of women huddled together with clipboards. “You’ve no idea what you’ve done, have you?”

Theo shrugged, and they got back in the car.

The sun was rising by the time they reached Newton Bridge, but the smoke hid the brightest of the day. Theo smelled it before he saw the remnants of the town, mortar dust and boiling tar, petrol and timber.

They pulled to one side in a narrow country lane, bouncing through the potholes as two yellow buses drove the opposite way. The windows were grated up; the prisoners inside were chained at the throat and feet. A handprint painted in scarlet pressed against the glass as they passed by.

The convoy waited, then moved on.

They parked in what had once been the car park for the local library, and did not pay. The noise of the bulldozers made it hard to hear the words that Markse spoke as Theo was pulled gently by the arm into the lee of a pale blue-grey wall. Sometimes rifle fire pitted out, to be met by machine gun; if there were voices raised, they were lost in the din. Theo stood, shivering in the morning cold, breath steaming, one side of his face dry and hot from the growing flames rising off the former town hall, the other chilled and cracked by the winter air. Faris, Witt, three or four more he didn’t recognise, stood next to him, and none of them moved. One was a woman, in a smart beige trouser suit. She held Faris’s hand, and if you knew she was his daughter, then it was impossible to see anything else in her face, and Theo was relieved that it was Faris’s daughter who was going to die today, and he couldn’t see Lucy in the line.

People milled on mobile phones, and somewhere behind, another burst of gunfire, louder, broke across the slow hill of Newton Bridge. A truck on caterpillar tracks rode over the gentle mound where the pub had been; someone shouted, “Clear!” and another wall burst, rubble and flame and far off the sound of a woman calling for something lost. On the other side of the car park was a low stream, rushing down towards the bottom of the hill, all white foam and mossy rocks, a babbling brook you might even have called it, a playful spout of the river that had once fed the mill. Theo watched the water. A group of men in dark blue fatigues, assault rifles in hand, jogged briskly by, and the sun rose higher, burning away the mist, and somewhere a little too near for comfort the whoosh of a flame-thrower spat and a man burned alive screaming screaming that sound screaming but all the screams did was let in the flame that burned out his lungs and that was the end of the screaming and

Another car pulled up, flanked either side by heavy four-by-fours. It stopped fifty yards from where Theo stood, and no one got out, and shapes moved behind the glass, and nothing else happened.

Theo’s teeth chattered in the cold, and he wondered if the others were as cold as he was, and they probably were, but no one said a thing.

Footsteps.

A marching line of soldiers, weapons at the ready

a cluster of prisoners in between.

One woman helped another walk. Queen Bess could probably have walked by herself, but Bea hooked one arm under her elbow anyway, like a father escorting a bride to a reluctant altar. Both were coated in white dust; the side of Bea’s face and hair was matted to a thick black-crimson mortar with blood. Bess saw the wall, and stumbled, and Bea caught her and held her tight, and they kept walking, and joined the line in front of the empty library.

Theo looked at them, and they stared dead ahead and did not meet his eye.

After a little while Edward fell down, and Theo helped him up, and Edward clung to Theo’s arm and whispered, “All I did was ask. I just asked. I thought—I only asked.”

Theo nodded, and kept a grip on the crook of his elbow, and behind them something went whoosh, and the town burned, and a bulldozer crawled over the remnants of the patties’ little world and all things considered it died so easily, so easily, it died and

Theo closed his eyes and time is

shivering in the winter cold time is

The click of a safety coming off a gun.

Theo opened his eyes. Thought he would be able to keep them shut, was surprised to discover that he couldn’t. Thought he saw someone move behind the glass of the parked vehicle opposite. Saw, but didn’t entirely understand, a man in blue raise a pistol, and shoot Faris in the face. Faris fell.

Ching ching ching! £36,000 for cold-blooded murder, minus £2000 for not making your victim suffer needlessly, now what was the value of Faris’s life, he had been on the patty line but wasn’t currently a burden on the financial system, were there any health problems were there

about £92,000, Theo concludes before the body hits the floor. A deposit on a two-bedroom flat in Denmark Hill.

The man stepped past Faris’s body, wandered down the line, back once, up once, down again, picked a target, levelled the gun at Bea’s head, listened for an order only he could hear, shot Bea between the eyes. Stepped briskly past Edward, levelled the gun at Theo’s head.

Waited, listening for an order.

Theo stared into the barrel, and was briefly confused but not scared, and was surprised that he wasn’t afraid.

“Bang,” said the soldier, repeating words heard through an earpiece. “Lucy is dead.”

Then he nodded, turned to the queen of the patties, and shot her in the face and twice in the chest when she hit the ground.

Edward cried, and Theo waited and the man listened for instructions and nodded at something unheard and barked, “Right you lot. Let’s get them buried.”

They dug a pit in a field on the edge of town where sometimes cabbages were grown. Theo didn’t feel the pit was deep enough—the crows would get the bodies in no time, a strong rain would wash the soil away—but the work warmed him up and the guards seemed happy enough, so he and Edward Witt picked up Bea. Edward lifted her by the feet, Theo under the arms. Her body swung awkwardly in the middle, hinging at the hips, bum bumping along the ground. That made Theo more upset than her blood on his hands, her broken skull and ruptured eyes, staring. A woman like Bea shouldn’t have her backside dragged through dirt, she should be carried properly, he struggled to lift her, to haul her higher, but Edward didn’t seem to understand, didn’t seem to get why this was important, was just shaking and crying without making a sound, his silk suit ruined, spit flecking his mouth with every ragged exhale.

The burst bubble of Bea’s head rolled back, one open eye staring up into Theo’s face, the other shattered in blood, ink and lead. Theo thought if he met that gaze he would puke, and then couldn’t look away, and didn’t puke, and on a-one-a-two-a-three, swung her body down into the pit, went back for Faris’s corpse, then for Queen Bess, then a few more were added to the tally: a couple of men who’d tried to fight, a couple of women who’d been caught with loaded guns. £83,000, less if they’d resisted arrest. £52,000 for the man who’d shot back. £145,000 for the woman who’d died with her child in her arms. At least one or two middle-management figures in the Company would have to forgo their annual bonus to pay the price of this, if it ever became known. If anyone cared. That was all. The rest would be written off against tax.

Three black cars stayed in the car park at their backs as they moved the bodies, and the doors did not open

and when they were finished, a bulldozer came and shoved a great pile of earth onto the gentle bump where the bodies were buried, and Theo didn’t understand why it did that because it disturbed one edge of the pit, making it all lopsided, and if the crows weren’t coming before, they’d definitely come now

and the fire turned the midday sun pink and red, black smoke from the burning village spinning and twisting in the cold wind, making his eyes water, spit slick the inside of his mouth, and he wondered why he didn’t puke and didn’t cry and didn’t fall to the ground screaming and then they pulled him back to a car and put him in the back although this time they didn’t make him ride with Edward, who was a bit hysterical, and they drove away from the smouldering, flattened remnants of Newton Bridge, where the trucks were already grinding the dust to earth.

Chapter 79

Still alive.

They kept him alive and he didn’t understand why he was

still alive.

And the question once asked

is Lucy

is she

is Lucy is she

where is

is she safe is she

my daughter where is

He tried not to ask it before but now it comes again, it comes in the day it comes in the night it seeps into every part of him makes him rock and shake and pull at his hair he whispers it first then asks it out loud then paces muttering under his breath then slams his fists on the door hammers and punches and screams and

WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?!

and tears the sheets off his bed and wraps the pieces around his wrists until his fingers go numb and realises that he can imagine hanging himself hurting himself this is how it happens he knows he’s seen this before on the patty line you smear your own shit up the wall to get someone’s attention you throw urine across the mattress you cut yourself on the

the first time he cut himself he used the smashed glass of the light above his head, and sat in darkness gently bleeding, and felt a bit better, and felt very good indeed when the guards came in and put his head in a sack because that was progress that was someone taking him seriously now

WHERE IS LUCY WHERE IS

Markse sat on a plastic chair opposite him in a pale green room without windows, and stared at the floor a while as the clock went tick tick tick tick

tick tick tick tick

and at the end looked up and said, “The Company is selling 85 per cent of its assets back to the government. They’re paying £781 billion for it all. We’re going to be bankrupt for years. Simon’s got a house up north. He’s going to sell it and move to Monaco. They have good tax laws in Monaco, he’ll be able to keep a few billion in profit and…”

Stopped.

Couldn’t raise his head.

Said, “The Company has holdings in Monaco of course. They have an understanding with the Italian and French governments. Rehabilitation through labour is a popular way of making cheap goods for export and I believe they are going to take Lucy and—”

They’d cuffed Theo to the chair, but he still managed to rip it from the floor and get halfway across the room, stretching out for Markse’s eyes, before the waiting guards kicked him down.

A while, sitting in the dark.

Rocking in the dark.

They took away the lights because he’d smash them to pieces

they took away the mattress the sheets

they

he can still hurt himself though he knows but now he sits in the dark and

“She’s your daughter,” says Dani, knees huddled to her chin, arms wrapped across her shins, sitting next to him in the perfect blackness of

“She’s your daughter.

She’s your daughter.

She’s your daughter.

Don’t fuck it up.”

Theo stared up at the place where the ceiling probably was, and in his mind he filled it with stars.

“What are you going to do?” she asked. “What are you going to do? Theo?”

“Not my name.”

“I know.”

“Not my name.”

“Name of someone better. Someone better. Be someone better. What are you going to do?”

Theo closed his eyes, and watched the stars spinning across the vacuum of his mind.

On a day without a name, like any other, like all the rest, they took him to a room with fake plastic flowers in a blue glass vase, and gave him a cup of bergamot tea, which he sort of liked despite himself, and handcuffed one hand to the side of his white wooden chair, and said, “Would you like a biscuit?” and when he didn’t answer, left a plate of cookies on the table anyway.

He waited.

A clock showing the time in three different places ticked away. He wondered what the other two places were, or if the clock was just there to screw with his brain. Somewhere, far off, women’s voices were raised in song. They were singing to their infant children, the wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round, but the acoustics of wherever they were distorted sound, made it a distant prayer, priests crying out to an angry god, round and round, round and round.

The door opened.

Heidi Fardell stepped inside. He knew her from the photos, remembered her answering the door to Simon’s Kensington house.

She wore a bright blue jacket and matching skirt. She wore flesh-coloured tights and a white scarf. The red nail polish on her right hand was beginning to chip. When she had applied mascara, her fingers had shivered, and she sat as far away from Theo as she comfortably could, without removing her chair altogether from the vicinity of the table.

Thin lines crinkled in the nooks of her eyes. The red lipstick brought out the hatched contours of her lips. Her voice, when she spoke, was at first broken and inaudible, then stronger, ready for command.

She said, “Lucy is well.” Theo stared until she looked away, swallowed a lump of tepid weight in her throat, then looked up again, matching his gaze. “I thought it was important that you knew that. I thought it was…

Simon wanted you to see her, of course, next to him. Wanted you to know that… Were you Theo Miller’s second, in Oxford? What was your name?

He wants to burn it all, of course. He was so angry he was just so… he had to kill his best friend, he had to kill Philip, good business, but the queen of the patties, he just said she needed to die she needed to be, for what she’s done you see, for trying to… stamp out dissent now so that when the Company comes back, and it will, and he’s just so very…

Lucy is… when they first told me about her, I thought maybe, actually, she’s being used by these men, but I’ll look after her, I’ll make sure she’s happy and doesn’t know that there’s this…

that they’ll

I don’t think they’d ever have hurt her not really I don’t think they

But you clearly think that they…

My husband isn’t a bad man. The Company isn’t bad. It’s still run by people. People are good. People are good. They’re all good people. My husband is…

Then she arrived, and I had to look after this… vicious child… so that her father would see, and understand, and realise that he needed to surrender. Your daughter is vile. She is… rude and disrespectful and stubborn and angry, I’ve never met a child so angry she is

I never had a child I once there was…

And I always imagined that it would be and I thought it was me but actually it’s him. It’s him, though he still says that it’s just something to do with my uterus. Those are his words—‘Your uterus, darling, you have this very special uterus’—and I thought fuck you, nearly had a fucking affair just to get myself knocked up and prove a point but then he…

Lucy is fine.

She doesn’t really understand what’s happened to her. She was in prison, and now she’s with us. Simon wants to sell her. Get the paperwork sorted and put her on a plane out to somewhere where he can get a good price for…

A good price for her.

The day you came to my house, after they took you away I sat with her and just

just sat with her for a while and

I thought perhaps I could mould her. Make her better. That’s something I can do, I mean, with children. They have such problems, and if they just understood that they were being ridiculous! I wanted to tell her that just because she felt trapped, she was just stuck inside her own mind—there are breathing exercises which can help with that kind of thing.

Breathing exercises!

I thought I could give her some breathing exercises and I was thinking that and then I thought

breathing exercises, to help her deal with the fact that my husband ordered her mother killed

her father taken away

is going to sell her to…

Breathing exercises!

Maybe some serum to massage into her temples too. A nice Chinese mint smell.

And I suddenly thought

I just don’t know anything about people, do I? I started laughing and she looked at me like I was insane and of course I was and I told her

I told her that I thought her troubles could be fixed with breathing exercises

and she looked very angry for a moment but then she saw that it was

and for a little while she was laughing too.

She was

she’s just a child.

I don’t pretend there’s a connection there I don’t pretend that we’ll ever have but

The vast majority of parenting appears to be ghastly. Poo and crying and refusing to eat things and breaking things and yet you ask a mother what the most important, wonderful thing in her life is and she always says ‘my child’ and you look at the wriggly little wretch in its smelly little buggy, dribble falling out of its mouth and snot out of its nose and you think, seriously, darling, because if that’s your joy and that’s your wonder then…

Well.

Maybe it would be easier to have a puppy. Or a cat. Lovely self-cleaning things, cats are.

I wanted to talk to you, Mr. Miller.

I thought that perhaps

in its way

I owed it to you. Or maybe no, not to you you aren’t

but to Lucy.

I owe it to Lucy, to this child who is

she’s only a child she’s

I owe her, monstrous though she is. To tell you, to tell her father—she’s going to be all right. I’m going to, and I don’t care what Simon says I’m going to

she’s going to be all right. I’ll make sure of it I’ll make sure she’s…”

Theo’s heads fell into his hands, and from his mouth came a sound, an animal groaning, a grunt of physical pain a roaring a loss of everything a howling a

“Oh my is that um…” blurted Heidi, jumping to her feet. “Well yes I suppose it must be…”

staggering away

leaving the father behind.

And then

“Up! Move!”

He couldn’t be buggered, and let the men carry him down the hall.

New grey tracksuit.

Wash face.

Wash hands.

Have a piss.

Eat cereal. His stomach couldn’t handle it, he had to go straight back to the toilet, blurgh, just

down to a cluster of three cars, engines running.

The middle black car, tinted windows, heavy doors, into the back into the middle seat seat belt on!

They drove away.

Chapter 80

Theo Miller sits at the centre of the universe, on the way to his execution, and knows that time has no meaning.

A convoy of three black cars, no number plates, no police interested in asking questions, rushes through a city still spewing smoke into the sky. The hospitals are running emergency services only, the supermarkets are guarded by a ragtag remnant of armed police who aren’t sure where their next pay packet will come from but sort of assume that if they do what they did before, maybe it’ll be okay eventually.

And as the convoy passes, Neila is in a mooring basin just off the River Thames, she sailed from Maidenhead three days ago. She’s been coming to this moment her whole life, and didn’t know it, and didn’t have the right questions to ask the cards. Checks her fuel line, checks the water. Her breath freezes in the air her hands are strong her back is straight, she is fine. She is fine. She is always fine, when she is by herself.

She lays out the cards

three of wands, the Magician, the Hermit, the Empress, two of cups, six of cups, the queen of wands, the knave of swords, the Hanged Man (inverted) and if only she knew the questions to ask of the future

if only her questions weren’t tied up with

—happiness, hope, love, loneliness, dreams—

if only her questions weren’t in some way seeking to undo the present, to deny the present, to pretend that maybe the present will make something better of itself even though in her heart she knows that the present just keeps on rolling it keeps on keeps on keeps on

maybe she would see the truth in the cards and on the water

as she sails towards the bridge and the north.

and time is

Corn has found the place where the bodies were buried. He hid and now he has left his hiding place there is a hand reaching up through the soil it could be anyone’s hand but of course it’s hers it’s

Theo walks through a winter forest, a gun in his hand, and in his memory his father lives and his daughter grows up beside him and Dani Cumali isn’t dead in the bed and Seph Atkins does not pull the trigger and all of this all at once is real and now in his mind and he knows no sense of the past and no sense of the future, lives it all now in this instant all of it lives in him and time is

The truck rammed the first car in the convoy, spinning it a hundred and eighty degrees so its bonnet slammed into the front of the car behind. In this second car Theo’s teeth crunched into the top of his skull, before his whole body slammed down and forward, neck and chest bouncing hard against the seat belt, cutting bone-deep before the car bounced back on its suspension, momentum knocked from its wheels. An instant later, the third and final car scraped across its boot as the driver turned hard to avoid a collision, and outside someone opened fire. Hands pushed Theo’s head down, holding him by the back of the neck. The driver opened the door, ducking behind its shelter to shoot at the lorry in front, while behind, another scream of brakes announced the arrival of a van adorned with images of swirling flowers and summer leaves, stolen from a florist’s. Something was thrown that burst open with a smoke-roaring bang, filling the inside of the car with an acrid stench, clawing at the back of Theo’s throat, then the back doors of the florist’s van opened and three men in balaclavas scrambled out into the street, one with a rifle, two with handguns, firing fast and wild at the convoy.

The driver of Theo’s car fell hard, without a sound, didn’t seem to understand that he’d been hit or why he couldn’t move. The rear windscreen popped and cracked, buckled at another scattering of shots across the reinforced glass. The car in front tried to reverse, rolled a few inches into the wall of the lorry skewed across its way, bumped back, tried again, couldn’t get momentum, bumped again before another man, face hidden behind motorbike helmet and mask, leaned out of the passenger window of the lorry and shot out the back wheels of the car in a pop-bang of rubber and gas.

Somewhere against the din Theo heard swearing, cursing, frightened men who’d trained for this but actually the training was only four hours long, cost-saving they called it cost-fucking-saving and now there are these fuckers with actual fucking guns and

A man screamed and fell, and kept on screaming, clutching at his stomach, he’d probably never screamed like that in his entire life, he thought maybe he could keep the sound in and he couldn’t, being silent was so much worse and this wasn’t even a choice thing, it wasn’t choice it was just

Then someone in the car, someone who intended to survive, put a gun against the back of Theo’s head and roared, “I’ll fucking kill him! You want him, I’ll kill him!”

Slowly, popper-pop-pop, the gunfire went out.

Sense returned, slow, spinning through the boil of blood and adrenaline that blurred Theo’s sight. He became aware that someone was trying to push him out of the car, and it was awkward. He had to do a sideways shuffle, realised he was still wearing his seat belt, struggled to find the buckle even as the man hissed, “Move, move!” seemingly oblivious to the strap that held him in place. He didn’t seem able to press the button hard enough, earning a knock across the back of the head that bounced his eyes in his skull. When he managed to unclasp the belt, he found the driver’s seat pushed back so far he couldn’t really get his knees into the space, had to twist and wriggle to swing his legs out of the open door, feet slipping on blood as he touched tarmac. At his back, the man with the gun, a security guard, petrified, full of bravado, on the verge of crying, also struggled to move, tried to manoeuvre his body out of the car while keeping the gun pressed into the base of Theo’s neck. It was, Theo decided, a very inelegant way of doing business, a terrible way to die, half in and out of a car, too dumb for a dignified exit.

A shove in the small of the spine propelled him forward, catching on the half-open door for balance, pulling himself up in a sudden stiff uncoiling. The man at his back unwound fast, pressing the gun into Theo’s spine, pulling him back and close with his other arm across his throat and bottom of his face, arching his back. It occurred to Theo that if he pulled the trigger, the bullet would probably pass straight through the back of his throat and out the other side, shooting the man who held him in the arm. The thought was almost funny.

“I’ll kill him!” the man gabbled, trying to achieve something like a defiant roar and failing at the last. “It’s him you want!”

This idea struck Theo as absurd; even more stupid to be shot by a man who thought he mattered. And yet the gunfire had stopped, and now there was just silence and blood on the tarmac.

Men in balaclavas hovered around the sides of the lorry in front. More figures moved around the floral van behind. Of those who’d been in the cars, the survivors hid behind doors and peered out from bullet-pocked chassis, not sure where to point their guns or who was in charge. A single car alarm wailed behind the lorry, set off by the rattle and roar. Somewhere far away, a helicopter chuggered, and a curtain twitched in a window, a light turned on and then quickly turned off again.

They were on a bridge. It hadn’t struck Theo until that moment. The lorry sealed off one end, the floral van the other. The bridge was short, with a red-brick wall on either side, and not wide enough for two-lane traffic. Below was a canal, black water turned stiff and matt with a thin sheet of ice. Low houses all around, yellow brick and dark windows, the street lights sparse off-pink lining the cracked towpath. He tried to work out where he was, and guessed somewhere in north-west London. He felt the gun against his skull and wondered if Dani had died with Lucy’s name on her lips and if he should try to go for the same effect, and what good that would do.

And on the bridge no one moved, waiting for time to resume its stately course.

Then a man stepped forward from behind the lorry, face hidden behind a dust mask and a baseball cap, and said, “Just give us Miller. No one else has to die.”

His face was hidden, but his voice was familiar, and now Theo laughed.

He laughed, a choking halfway sound that couldn’t work out what it wanted to be, and his head rolled back and his shoulders bunched up, and he gasped and chuckled with a gun at his head, and only Markse seemed to be undisturbed by this behaviour.

For a moment all things hung in balance at the centre of the universe.

And at the centre of the universe Corn walks towards Nottingham, the shame burning in his heart. He ran from Newton Bridge when the bulldozers came and called out for Bea, Bea, Bea my love my life I love you I never told you I love you I love you you know it I know you know it I’ll revenge you I’ll find you Bea I’ll find you alive not dead and

And at the centre of the universe

the ones who picked up a gun because it was a job to do to keep their family happy and safe

the ones who pulled the trigger because there was no way out except this

the ones sleeping, now roused, who in the light of day will say “this thing I saw” and

at the centre of the universe Neila turns over uneasily in her bunk, the Hector moored a half-mile or so from a bridge where now blood runs into the water and

at the centre of the universe Heidi takes Lucy’s hand and whispers, “I’ll make sure you’re all right,” but Lucy pulls away because she doesn’t understand and anyway, all people are good for are lies and

at the centre of the universe a man who’s only been in the job for a few days, who was told to ride with a convoy and didn’t ask any questions, and who now realises that he’s going to die on a bridge above a canal, reaches slowly under the seat of the car he’s been riding in, and finds the half-open box where they keep extra ammo and a few other things besides, and his fingers, in fumbling, close around the shape of a grenade.

He isn’t sure what he’s going to do with it.

He doesn’t know why he’s here.

He didn’t realise his job would wind up like this. It wasn’t something he ever really planned on.

He pulls the pin, and as he adjusts his position to throw, someone sees the motion and shouts, “Grenade!” and all hell lets loose.

The first shot kills the man with the grenade, knocking his body backwards, forehead first.

Theo loses counts of who fires what immediately after as the bridge bursts to life again with running, firing, falling, screaming. A thin sense of self-preservation makes him duck, turning as he drops, which is why the bullet that would have taken out his head rushes by his ear, a deafening rupture, a physical force he feels slamming into his eardrum which makes it sing a nightingale shriek. As the gun moved round to fire again, he drove his full body weight into the man behind him, and another shot smacked wide past his shoulder. Then they were on the ground, and Theo caught the man by the wrist, astonished at how much he wanted to live, how much he wanted to hurt the man who would have hurt him. He held on with both hands, and the man seeing this pulled one hand free and clawed at Theo’s face. His fingers missed Theo’s eyes as he jerked away, but tugged and hooked into the soft flesh below, pulling at his cheeks, sliding towards his throat, driving his chin up and away. Theo felt his arms stretch and buckle, felt the gun turn towards his chest.

On the other side of the car, the grenade, fallen from a dead man’s grasp, exploded.

The blast punched Theo in the face, in the ears, lashed his head back and sent him sideways, slamming into the wall of the bridge. The car jumped a foot in the air, smashed back down with a shattering of pipe and suspension and rupture of tyre.

For a moment the gunfire paused, smoke and dust filling the air, soft falling patter of melted tar and shattered safety glass. Then it resumed, a few snapping shots from those furthest from the blast, then a few more as others joined in the fun, heard in Theo’s mind through an ocean, the sea sloshing in his ears, a faded-down, tuned-out whomph-whomph of bullets flying, of men screaming, of bones breaking of fire crackling

he rolled onto his front

knows that in some way he’s injured, but isn’t sure where, or by what

crawled onto his hands and knees

falls

up again, crawled, knew he would die in this place, knew he wouldn’t, that it was unacceptable, staggered a few paces forward, fell, cursed his body, the universe, Dani and Lucy and the world, crawled once more, blinking through the smoke and blood, sees a man running towards him, before a stray bullet, maybe from the front, maybe from behind, knocked into the man’s chest and he falls, surprised, one hand pressing against the wound and coming away red, who’d have thought it? Who’d have thought that today he died, in this place, who’d have imagined that?

Theo tried to call out, someone’s name, wasn’t sure whose, maybe Lucy’s, couldn’t see through the smoke and the blood running down his face, can’t make a sound, tried again, noise catching at the back of his mouth

tries to run and can’t

falls

feels the ground pop next to his ear as a bullet slams down beside him

sees a dead man staring at him from a few feet away, tongue lodged oddly between his lips like he was about to blow a raspberry, or as if his face had grown a third lip

Heard a helicopter high ahead, and more alarms, sirens now, sirens coming closer, a roar of emergency in the night

Then a hand grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, pulled him to one side, dragged him still clawing at the air, backwards, off the bridge.

Down they roll, messy and down, Theo kicking out, snarling, biting, writhing against the hands that hold him, he manages to strike something squishy and hears a man grunt, they roll down a sloping pavement, bump against a bin, the gunfire is growing less now but the smoke the fire everything moving in shadows against the light, the shadows now long, now short the helicopter’s searchlight splashing white across the world and then vanishing Theo kicks again

they roll

a tumbling mess of limbs

tumble off a raised ramp onto the towpath below, slamming down hard enough onto flagstone to knock the breath from both bodies, and for a while they lie there, limp and bleeding by the waters of the canal, while overhead battle rages.

The other man stirred first.

Crawled to hands and knees.

And time is

Neila turns and turns and turns again, spinning at the end of the canal, and

the cards fall on the table the Fool the Magician the High Priestess the Empress the Emperor the Hierophant the Lovers the Chariot Justice the Hermit the Wheel of Fortune Strength the

“Theo!”

Theo grappled, clawed at the face of the man who held him, everything in pain, fumbling without direction. His hands were swatted down, fingers curled around his wrists. “Theo!”

He blinked blood from his eyes, shook his head at something familiar, then flinched to the side as overhead the helicopter swept in low and bright, white light and sudden gunfire, louder, clearer, cleaner than anything that had been on the bridge, smacking into metal and flesh.

“Theo!” A man in a balaclava, a man with a familiar voice. He pulled his mask away, dragged Theo a little higher, shaking him, pressing him back against the wall that ran beneath the bridge. “Theo! Lucy is alive!”

Theo looked up into Markse’s face and didn’t understand anything much any more, except the words that had his daughter’s name in them.

“Are you with me? Are you here?” Markse shook him again, hissed, dragging off his coat, pressing it into the blood at Theo’s side it’s a dark wool thing far too big for Theo he wonders what it’s doing in his hands. “They’ll kill you they’ll kill her they’ll burn it all run!”

He pushed Theo for good measure. He staggered, caught himself against the wall, did not fall, did not raise his head, put one foot in front of the other, tested his weight, stepped, stepped again, did not fall

did not fall

and time is

“You should do it,” said Dani. “I think it sounds great.”

“Don’t be boring,” chided Queen Bess, lady of the patties

blessed is her name blessed are her hands upon the water she washes away the blood of our sins she washes away the shadows her fingers are balm of the eucalyptus tree her eyes are the

And in Leicester two men met, did meet, will meet are meeting and Markse said, “There you are. Shall we?”

And together they walked along the canal, Theo and the spy, and the latter mused as the sun dragged high and the day grew a little less sharp, “The problem is you want everything now. You want change now. But not just change. You want a change that is… compassionate. You want the world to see that it is cruel, and bleak, and that the powerful have mastery and the weak have nothing. You want the masses to rise, to build a world where the children are safe, the elderly are protected and all men treat each other as equals, and brothers, yes? A new, beautiful world where somehow it all works out for the best. But Mr. Miller, all you do, all this that you have done—it just makes the fear worse. The screamers, the faders, the ragers, the silent ones who watch from windows; did you really think that when the world shook on its axis, they would run to their neighbour’s aid? Did you really think that this was the way? Did you think that kindness is born of terror?”

And they walked.

And after a while Theo said, “She’s alive. The rest is detail.”

And Markse sighed, and handed over a piece of paper with an address written on it, and said, “You’d better hurry. They’re going to Monaco as soon as the sale goes through. They’ll take Lucy and that will be…” And stopped himself at the look on Theo’s face. “These things should never be personal,” he muttered, to himself more than the company. “But once they are, you may as well make some sort of choice with your life. They haven’t found out it was me, but they’re going to work it out tomorrow. That’s when they’ll catch my driver, and after that all the pieces will fall into place, so I’m heading for the border now. I’ve got some papers saved up, money, there’s a little place I’ve had my eye on for a while. That’s all, I think, that’s all that is…”

Through the smoke and the flame and the blood dripping now into the water, Markse watched from the cover of the path beneath the bridge as

one step at a time

Theo ran.

Chapter 81

Time is

“Oh my oh yes now of course yes bleeding by the canal do you have an address for that… I’m not seeing you on my map do you have premium or standard service support for an extra £4.99 a month you can upgrade…”

And time is

“Mike’s boy, right?”

“No.”

“I’ve got no time for your boy-shit, boy.”

And time, which also seems to spin around the centre of the universe, another product of mass and motion

time is

“Is that… cornflower blue?”

“Well, you know it’s just what you have to hand…”

Theo walks along the canal and sometimes he is in a boat and sometimes there is candlelight and ice and macaroni cheese and

Cormorants can count to seven, very clever birds really, and herons stand fishing on one leg even though the fish are probably dead below the water and

In Nottingham, Theo and Corn walk together along the canal.

“Fucking should have killed you,” muttered Corn. “Should have killed you for what you did. Said we should run, she should run, but Bess said no. Said they’d never come for us, not now. We’d won, the Company was broken, there weren’t no point coming for Newton Bridge now. I said that isn’t it. You don’t come cos you’ve won. You come cos you lost, and you wanna hurt. All we’d built, you couldn’t just let something like that die. It was the principle of the thing the fucking principle Bea is…”

For a while they stand and watch the water.

Then: “Why’d you tell them? Why’d you let them kill us?”

“Because they had my daughter. They didn’t hurt her in front of me. They didn’t need to. It was very clear that if I didn’t tell them what they wanted to know, they’d hurt her. That was all. That was the only thing that mattered. Everything else seemed very small.”

In Leicester Markse says, “I know it’s hard for you to believe, but you have to trust Heidi Fardell. She knows you’re coming. Simon’s never had much respect for his wife. She’s turned off the burglar alarms, cut the connection to the security hut. You can get in and they won’t come running, she promises that…

it’s nearly over now.

It’s nearly over.

I thought I served a thing which was

You arrogant son of a bitch you ignorant stupid fucked-up

I suppose that’s…”

The water flows towards the sea, and they stand in silence a while.

Corn with hands buried in his pockets, watching his own reflection.

“We defended it all right, for about five minutes. That’s how long it took them to kill us. They sold the land to some sort of sheikh or something. They’re going to redevelop Newton Bridge for a yoga retreat. Or like a place to write poetry, we’re eyesores we are the

are you going to kill them?

Are you going to kill them?

I’ll give you a gun. Just promise me you’ll kill them all.”

Theo stands on the top of the hill and looks down towards the house.

The low morning mist rising from frost-cracked grass the sun above burning it clear the moisture in the air blurs the light makes it a swimming-pool sky of reflected gold makes the light across his fingers pale silver makes

There is a gun in his pocket, and he knows who’s home.

He looks up at the sky and down at the earth, tastes rain on his lips and feels the heat of blood inside his bones.

He begins to walk, towards the end.

Chapter 82

In the north there was a house where coal and wood burns in the fires.

It was a homey house, the kind of place where there was always a spare soft blanket, and no mould in the bathroom.

It sat behind red-brick walls topped with white stone.

There is fresh gravel on the drive, two cars parked out front. At Christmas they put a wreath on the door, red berries gleaming fat, a silver card reading HOME suspended from silver thread woven into the bows. The windows have eight panes of glass between lines of stiff white wood, and slide up and down to let in the summer breeze. Repointing the chimney cost a small fortune, but not as much as trying to central-heat the place. There’s a pantry at the back where they keep eggs collected fresh from the hutches at the end of the garden. When Simon and his siblings were young, they loved to gather eggs, it was the best thing ever, sometimes they’d go out two or three times a day just to see if another hen had laid, but when they got older they lost interest in such things, and Heidi never had children.

A cook and a cleaner sleep upstairs, in the slant-roof rooms at the top of the house, beneath electric blankets. They aren’t called a cook and a cleaner; she is executive caterer, he is house manager, and as they sleep, they dream, and the world across the darkness of their minds is full of stars, spinning around a core of darkness.

Theo climbs over the wall by a twisted oak tree.

Walks through mushy leaves.

Stops outside the house, in the dark, waits a while for the lights inside to go out.

Just one lantern burns above the front door.

He goes around the back.

The kitchen door is locked.

The window isn’t.

Climbs in, head first, crawling over a table where fresh-cut blue flowers shine in a white porcelain vase. The burglar alarm does not go off. The lines to the security guards, slumbering in the old stables outside, were cut days ago, and no one bothered to check because Heidi says it’s fine.

Theo walks barefoot across a floor of cold black stone, leaving his shoes by the still-hot stove, socks dirty and wet.

Runs his fingers over the wall as he walks.

Feels paper, picture frames, portraits and family snaps.

Stops a little while in the living room, pine needles on the floor where the cleaner missed the last remnants of the Christmas tree, embers orange in the fireplace, the TV on standby, a canvas of splashed ochre and red across one wall, longer than a sleeping man’s body, colour to the edge of the world, dragging in the eye, spinning the universe.

Climbs the stairs.

Passes the master bedroom, hears snoring, sees the faint movement of shadows against low light under the door as a woman crawls into bed beside her already unconscious husband.

Moves on to the study.

Sits a little while behind Simon Fardell’s desk.

Opens it.

Rifles through.

Finds the gun in the second drawer from the top on the right-hand side. It’s one of a pair kept in an old wooden box with padded purple lining.

It is a familiar gun. He feels its weight a while, then sights down it. He isn’t sure if this is the gun that the real Theo Miller sighted down the day Philip Arnslade killed him. Maybe it’s Philip’s gun. The thought makes him feel unclean, and he puts the gun back in the box, the box on the table. Pulls out his own gun, thinks about things for a while, then puts it away.

Finds pen and paper in the desk.

Starts to write.

It takes eight pages to say what he wants to say.

When he’s done, he folds it, puts it in an envelope, writes his daughter’s name. The room is growing cold. There’s a fireplace against the eastern wall. He throws on some logs, pressing them down into the char with a black iron poker, sits back down at the desk, turns the TV on. The TV automatically goes to a financial news channel. There is a camera in the top of the screen for conference calls and so many buttons on the remote he struggles to find “Mute.” As he looks for it, voices blare out, announcing the latest turbulence, falls in stock prices, speculation, speculation, speculation you have to believe in the future, if you don’t then everything falls apart and right now the future is…

The noise disturbs someone in the house.

A light comes on.

Footsteps move.

Theo manages to coax the TV into obedience, and sits behind the desk, feet up, waiting.

The door opens.

Simon Fardell stands in the frame.

He looks at Theo, and is instantly afraid, and manages to hide it a moment later.

Looks round the room, and is confused.

Sees the open box on the desk, two guns in velvet, and does not move.

Theo said, “I’m here for my daughter.”

Simon licked his lips. To the wiser, richer man it seems for an instant that this moment in time has been coming his whole life, that there is mist rising by the River Thames that Theo Miller—the real Theo Miller—is dying at his feet that soon there shall be mist again and the sound of the fire in the hearth and that for just a moment there is something about time and this second which

But then the feeling passes because he’s got shit he needs to get on with, and people who depend on him, and no time for this kind of crap.

Simon stepped into the room, closed the door behind him so as not to disturb the house. Glanced towards the muted TV, looked back towards Theo, the box, the guns.

“I remember you,” he said at last. “I’ve been thinking about it. I remember you.”

Took a step towards Theo, stopped, testing the motion, discovered that moving didn’t cause offence, took another step, stopped again, a little over a metre from the desk.

“There are alarms,” he added. “Security are coming.”

“No, they’re not,” sighed Theo. “Markse has betrayed you. He attacked the convoy. Your wife has cut the alarms. She doesn’t like the fact you’re going to sell my daughter into a life of slavery. She doesn’t like my daughter either, but I think…” A smile crackled at the edge of his lips. “I think it might be the principle of the thing. No one is coming. The Company is dead, and all that’s left is tonight.”

Simon’s head turned a little to the side, lips thin and eyes narrow. He wore striped flannel pyjamas, done up to the topmost button, pushing against the pale skin of his throat, cuffs clinging to his wrists, as if flesh were toxic to the touch. He took another step towards the desk, and when Theo didn’t move, sat down in front of him.

For a while they watched as the TV danced with light behind them, silent. Then: “The Company is fine. A lot of jobs have been lost, a lot of investment gone to waste, but we’ll recoup. This is a global age. This is an innovative time. I remember you. The little coward, Theo Miller’s second. You were useless, I remember thinking, do I have to waste my time with this boy-child? but of course, I did. You have to put up with such things, for a little while.”

Theo smiled again, nodded slow agreement. “That was me. I suggested we put blanks into the guns. I thought you agreed that this was a good idea. I was wrong. If I hadn’t been so afraid, I probably would have been smart enough to know I was wrong. Amazing the capacity of the mind to convince itself of certain things, under pressure.”

“And now you’re here to kill me?” No fear; polite enquiry.

“I’m here for my daughter.”

“Your daughter is sleeping upstairs. I’ve already sold her to a company in Marseilles that specialises in girls like her. I thought maybe I could get a high-end deal, but actually she’s not worth it. She’s barely worth the cost of the flight.” Watching, face framed in firelight on one side, digital glow from the other, hot and cold mixing to strange shadows beneath his eyes, around his lips. “Do you think you’re going to stop it? I don’t think you can. The boy I remember from Oxford couldn’t do anything worth a damn.”

“Which one?” asked Theo. “The boy who lived, or the boy who died?”

Silence a while. Simon’s eyes ran over the guns on the table between them, box open, metal eating in the light.

Theo flicked the envelope around between his fingers, then laid it on the desk. Simon’s eyes darted to it, then away. Theo planted his feet, sat up straighter, lacing his fingers together on the desk in front of him, chin down, eyes up.

Then Theo said, “You shouldn’t let these things get personal.”

Simon raised an eyebrow, waited.

“Killing Philip… destroying Newton Bridge… you strike me as a deeply infantile man, if I may say so, so some of this probably won’t make sense. The patties whisper prayers to their goddess, a goddess without a name; a higher power—blessed is the water blessed is the moonlight between the bars blessed are they who cry out to the dark and hear no answer blessed is…

At the heart of it we find beauty in the darkness and the moonlight, and meaning in shadows because without that we really are just slaves to other people’s fortunes, crawling our way from the cradle to the grave and so…

Am I here to kill you?

I suppose in a way I am. Lucy might not even be my daughter, but I suppose… and I’m ashamed to admit it… that I can’t see any other way to…”

Simon lunged forward, grabbed the nearest gun from the box, sweeping it up off the desk, levelled it at Theo, fired.

He fired four times.

Theo flinched, frozen still, and waited.

Simon lowered the gun.

Lifted it again.

Lowered it again.

“Blanks, of course,” Theo mused. “Just so we’re clear, it was always going to be—that’s how these things…”

Simon looked down again, raised the gun, fired the last three shots at Theo’s head, clicked on empty, nodded once, put the weapon back down on the desk.

Theo pulled his gun from his pocket. Rested it on the edge of the desk, one hand on top of the metal.

Simon licked his lips. Murmured, “Killing me is… I have money, we can still settle this there are…”

Theo shook his head. “You shouldn’t have taken my daughter.”

“Your daughter!” A guffaw, half-hysterical, swallowed down into indignation. “You just said she’s probably not even your daughter you think this, for her, all of this for her it’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard it’s the most pig-headed selfish bloody thing and if killing her would save this country from someone like you then…”

Theo’s eyes flickered to the door, and Simon stopped speaking. Listened. Fire and steam, the hum of the TV, two people breathing, and two more by the door.

Simon turned in his chair.

Lucy, wearing pink pyjamas with teddy bears on, juvenile and absurd, she hated them, but Heidi hadn’t known what else to buy, didn’t know what teenage girls liked. Behind her, hands resting on the girl’s shoulders, protective, Heidi, leaning against the frame of the door, pale green nightgown stitched with thin yellow daisies, squinting a little without her contact lenses.

Time is

who knows what time is this moment is the moment when the universe turns and it is

tick tick tick

the counting down of infinity

tick tick tick

and it strikes Theo as briefly strange, and then briefly laughable, and then finally as correct, that the adults in the room are paralysed as a child stands in judgement, and looks down upon them all, and has in her power the final say of truth and

the universe spins

and the child judges

and her face condemns them all.

Until at last there is a flicker in her eyes, and she chooses a path, and Theo sees a choice.

“You got any cash?” she asked Theo, voice clear and capable.

He shook his head.

She nodded and vanished back into the darkness of the hall. Heidi put her head on one side, then followed her without a sound.

A while the two men sat, waiting, as the universe spun towards destruction.

When Lucy returned, she was wearing jeans, a large fleece jumper, a coat, scarf and gloves. She had a rucksack on her back, and carried an orange plastic bag in her right hand. “It’s his mum’s jewellery,” she explained at Theo’s raised eyebrow. “Also he keeps, like, a grand in cash hidden in this box in the garage.”

Theo contemplated this, then nodded, and rose.

He walked to the door, glanced back at Simon.

“Things don’t change,” blurted Simon. “That’s just how the world is. This is how the world is. The Company is full of people. They won’t change. Change will hurt them. That’s what makes them right. That’s what makes—”

Theo turned away, walking down the stairs.

After a moment his daughter followed.

The gate to the outside world was locked.

There were sirens in the distance.

High walls and no easy climb, the oak tree was on the other side. Theo glanced at Lucy, who shrugged, unimpressed.

Then a crunching of footsteps on hard gravel. Heidi Fardell behind them, a coat and boots pulled on over her nightdress, a handbag slung across that, and a plastic bag containing water and the remnants of yesterday’s curry in a Tupperware box, waves the key as she pants breathless up behind them, and blurts:

“Room for a little one?”

Chapter 83

A while they walk, three travellers through the new year’s snow.

They do not talk.

A while they rest on a bench in a village without a name.

Then walk again until they come to a railway station.

Heidi rifles through her wallet, finds some money, buys a couple of tickets. Lucy chooses the destination, going further north towards a place she thinks sounds not shit.

They sit a while on a bench waiting for the train. Lucy sits in the middle. Theo and Heidi do not look at each other.

The service is delayed. There is the wrong kind of ice on the line.

Lucy uses her stolen money, buys coffee for Theo, tea for Heidi, hot chocolate for herself.

They drink from cardboard cups, and afterwards he takes the cups to the bin, and they sit a little while longer.

When the train comes, it is packed, sticky and wet, breath condensing on the windows, they lunge for handholds, find a little space at the back, the door connecting the train carriages won’t stay shut it goes bang flop bang flop bang flop until Theo puts his knee in front of it. Lucy watches the land. Lucy wasn’t tall enough to grab the bar on the ceiling, so clung on to a strap by the window, even though it means she’s pressed next to a man reading a magazine about pony trotting in the Welsh valleys. Heidi and Theo press next to each other, awkward and silent as the train goes clacker-clack. Heidi opens her bag, pulls out a thin tube of something pink. Daubs a little something on her fingers, smells her skin once, twice, three times in a slow ritual, rubs her fingertips round and round her temples, lets out a sigh, moves to return the tube to her bag, hesitates. Offers it to Theo. He shakes his head. She shrugs and returns the tube to her bag.

And after a while Lucy reads the letter her father wrote.

When she’s done, she folds it and puts it back in her pocket.

They travel north, until they get to Penrith, where she says, “Just so we’re clear. It’s my money.”

Theo nodded, Heidi looked like she might object and stopped herself.

“I didn’t come with either of you. I just left there.”

Theo nodded again.

“Did you really do all that that shit they said you did, the stuff in the letter?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a nut-job.”

Theo shrugged.

“What was…” She stopped herself, glanced towards Heidi, then looked away. “I don’t want you to tell me what my mum was like. Not yet. But when I want you to, you tell me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I don’t know if you’re my dad.”

“I don’t either.”

“And you’re not my mum.”

Heidi nodded once and stared at her boots.

“I don’t care neither. It doesn’t fucking mean anything. You’ve both never been there for me my whole fucking life, so fuck you if you think you get to just turn up now and be all…”

They rocked in silence a little while longer, as the Scottish border patrol shuffled onto the train. Outside, a woman stood on the platform, selling carrot soup from a vat. The locomotive gently rumbled, a slow spinning of disconnected fans.

“You got a plan? Cos I haven’t got a fucking clue what the fuck I’m doing here.”

Theo thought about it, then smiled.

“I’m sure we’ll work something out.”

“That don’t mean nothing that’s just something people say when…”

“Hey, luv, you okay?”

Neila sits on the side of the canal, and can’t remember where north is, or which way the Hector is pointing, or where she’s meant to go now.

The woman who sits next to her wears a jumper adorned with waddling ducks and a black cap that would look bad on anybody.

“Luv? You all right? You okay?”

Neila is not okay.

She realises that she is not okay, and it is a blessing of majesty, it is the revelation of the divine, it is the most wonderful thing she has ever known, a truth that shines upon her soul. She is not okay, she is not fine, and it is beautiful.

“Come inside,” says the stranger. “Have a cuppa tea.”

Markse stands at the queue for airport security, a false passport in his pocket, a ticket to somewhere hot in his hand, and wonders what the hell he’s going to do now that he’s got principles and no pension plan, and concludes that it’s probably all a disaster anyway.

Corn watches the water run through Nottingham and says to the man who stands beside him, “Next time I’ll open my mouth whenever I please and give people a piece of my…”

Crows pick at a hand rising from a half-buried ditch in a field, and soon there’s only bone and a bit of pink left clawing at the sky.

As the police leave his empty, cold house, Simon Fardell turns off the TV in the study.

It doesn’t go immediately to black.

The TV has a camera in it.

The image shows the side of his face, as he listens to a man sitting at his desk.

“You shouldn’t let these things get personal.”

He watches in silence as he raises the gun, fires four times. Then raises it again, and fires another three. He isn’t sure now why he fired those last shots, and looking at his own face on the screen it seems a lot like the man who pulled the trigger isn’t entirely convinced about this course of action either.

The footage has been streamed around the world, of course.

That’s just what technology does these days. He’ll be fine, of course. He’s on a plane to Monaco tomorrow and has more than enough assets to recoup any losses. It’s just a question of how the Company views these things, the board as a whole. When Philip became a liability they had to get rid of Philip and now Simon is…

He’s fine.

He’ll be fine.

He’s fine.

His secretary phones, and asks if he wants to take the helicopter to the airport. He instinctively opens his mouth to say yes, then changes his mind and says he might drive instead.

They claim asylum at the Scottish border, and are put into a transit house just north of Kirtlebridge.

They sign the paperwork as father, mother and daughter, only because it’ll make it easier for the officials to…

only because of that.

Lucy rereads Theo’s letter a couple of times when she thinks he isn’t looking.

They have bread and jam for supper, and he sleeps in the men’s wing, and Heidi asks if she can pay for a hotel, and Lucy’s given her own private room for kids, which has pictures of steam trains and dinosaurs on the wall, which she finds patronising but gets over quickly enough because actually it’s sorta…

Three days later, as they sit on the coach to Glasgow, she says:

“If I wanted to do a DNA thing, like, to test for—could I do that?”

“Yes.”

“And if you weren’t then…”

“I’ll help you find your dad, whoever he is. There’s a man in Shawford, he’s—but it’s your call, I mean, whenever you’re…”

“Cool. Good. And it’s not weird I mean it’s not like…”

“This is your world. There’s a whole time, there was this time before and there is this time now and the future sometimes it seems that these things only exist now, as we remember and imagine, it is only now that we experience all of these things not then and not the yet to come, but the future—it’s yours, the future is yours to choose and make and build and it shall be a future of your living and it is…”

At the beginning and ending of all things.

Later, it started to snow.