by John Marrs
“Don’t let that idiot keep upsetting you,” continued Nia. “He isn’t worth any more of your tears.”
“I just feel so stupid for falling for it all.”
“We all would’ve fallen for it. That’s why so many people out there love you, because you are just like them.”
Libby took a sip from her glass and looked around the pub. A couple waiting at the bar were staring at her. On catching her eye, they quickly turned their heads. “Do you think I’ll ever get my old life back again?” she asked.
“Do you want it?”
“You know I’m not comfortable with all the attention, but it’s given me the opportunity of a lifetime to make a difference in something I’m passionate about. However, sometimes I miss normality.”
“You have to see this through or you’ll be left wondering what you could’ve achieved. Your job will be there when you’re ready to come back after your sabbatical. But you’re going to have to come to terms with the fact it’s unlikely you’re ever going to be normal again.”
“That’s what worries me.”
CHAPTER 62
Libby and Nia held on to the handrails adjacent to the train doors, giggling and steadying themselves as it pulled into Birmingham’s New Street Station.
Libby stretched out her arms and wrapped them around Nia, pulling her in close as she hugged her friend goodbye. “Thank you for coming with me,” said Libby. “And thank you for listening to me moan yet again. I don’t know how I’d have coped in the last few months without you.”
“Ah, hush your mouth. You’re drunk.”
“A little, but I mean it. You’re an amazing friend.”
“And don’t you ever forget it.” Nia smiled. “And remember what I said about he who shall not be named. You need to start clearing that boy out of your head. The sooner he goes, the sooner you’ll meet someone who deserves to be with you. Promise me?”
“I promise.” Libby hugged her friend again before the train doors beeped and then opened, and the two went their separate ways.
She took her phone off airplane mode, and thirty-plus messages appeared from friends and co-workers congratulating her on wiping the floor with government spokesman David Glass. As Libby predicted, the video had gone viral.
The fifty-minute high-speed train journey from London to Birmingham had been an uneventful one, with just two requests for photographs as Nia and Libby took up residence at the onboard bar. By the time they reached the city, it was still only the early evening but dark. And Libby was somewhere in between woozy and drunk. Nia had been just the tonic she needed, even if it meant waking up with a hangover tomorrow morning. Preparing for the inevitable, she stopped off at a kiosk to buy a bottle of water and a packet of aspirin before walking home to clear her head.
As Libby made her way through the outskirts of the city centre, she was pleased to see people driving vehicles again and not vehicles driving them. The hijacking’s aftermath had seen a sharp upturn in demand for Level Two and Level Three cars, and the use of city bikes had also skyrocketed. Humans were no longer such slaves to technology.
David Glass had been correct about the damage inflicted upon the British economy with the suspension of Level Five production. The concept was also losing billions in foreign sales as countries halted purchasing or further developing the concept for the time being. It wouldn’t last, as progress and technology were inevitable, but at least the future would be more transparent. And while Libby might never completely warm to autonomous vehicles, she believed that when AI was in the right hands, the pros outweighed the cons.
As the face of TIAI, Libby occasionally took the brunt of unwanted attention. She and her fellow campaigners were blamed by disgruntled out-of-work employees for contract cancellations and reduced hours and incomes. Earlier that evening, when a scruffy, bearded man bumped into her on the train and knocked her handbag to the floor, she feared he might be acting on threats made against her. However, he shuffled off without a harsh word or an apology.
But each time she doubted the courage of her convictions, she recalled the black smoke rising across Birmingham’s horizon as driverless cars collided with one another. It was her duty to ensure nothing like that could ever happen again.
Libby drank from her water bottle and carefully made her way down the floodlit steps to the canal towpath. She clicked on an app on her phone linked to the seven cameras inside and outside her house that her father had insisted they install. Soon after the hijacking, the paparazzi took up residence outside her gated community, hiding in parked cars with blacked-out windows and inside rooms rented from a handful of less-than-scrupulous neighbours. On every occasion, Libby refused to talk to the snappers or to act on their vile insults as they tried to goad her. Eventually, she wore identical outfits each time she left the house when she learned that publications weren’t interested in printing pictures of celebrities wearing the same clothes, day in, day out. To the reader, it looked like old news. The paparazzi gradually began to leave her alone.
Her watch began to vibrate. Her mum had left her a video message, and Libby pressed play. “Hi, Libs, are we still okay to come up this weekend?”
Libby recorded one of her own and sent it. “Of course,” she replied. “Let me know which train you’re catching and I’ll come meet you. Love you. Kisses.”
As two cyclists raced past her under the bright white streetlights, she recalled how another consequence of the hijacking was reconnecting with the estranged parents she had virtually shut out of her life. When reporters besieged her home, they had insisted she stay with them in Northampton. And despite having spent much of the last decade avoiding the family home because of the memories associated with her brother’s death, she was too sapped of energy to protest.
For years, she couldn’t understand why her parents hadn’t sold the house where their eldest child had ended his life. She had hated that everything in Nicky’s bedroom remained unchanged, even down to the bedsheets he’d last slept on. It wasn’t as if they were awaiting his return from a school trip.
It was only when she confronted her fears and spent time under their roof that she understood by running away she had been denying herself the opportunity of forgiveness. Libby blamed herself for his death—she was the one with whom he had spent much of his time, the one he could talk to with unabridged honesty about his feelings of despair. And Libby was the one who had so wanted to believe he was managing his depression that he was ready to return home from his last admission to hospital. He had died on her watch; it was her fault.
Now she accepted that she had no more control over Nicky’s actions than she had over the Hacker’s. His room remained untouched not because their parents hadn’t come to terms with his death. It was the opposite. In accepting his decision, they’d found the closure Libby couldn’t. By the time she eventually left that house and returned to Birmingham, she had reconnected with the parents and brother she’d lost.
Libby reached her gated community before she knew it, and placed her head in front of a biometric facial scanner until it recognised her and opened the door. She was unsure whether it was the alcohol or her conversation with Nia that was making her smile. It didn’t matter; she was suffused with optimism. It was unlikely her life was ever going to be the same as it was before jury duty, but she was gradually accepting that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
She unzipped her bag to locate the key fob to her front door when she felt a smooth, flat object inside. Libby pulled it out—it was an electronic tablet. She stared at it, puzzled as to how it might be in her possession. She hadn’t brought it with her, and Nia always kept her tablet in a bejewelled pink case. Had she absent-mindedly taken somebody else’s from the bar on the train, assuming it was her own?
She closed and locked the front door behind her as the lights automatically switched on, and made her way to the kitchen diner. She glanced to the corner of
the room where she once kept the cage for her house rabbits, Michael and Jackson. When her media career soared, she spent too much time away from home to keep them. The neighbour’s daughter whom she offered them to promised that Libby could visit them whenever she liked.
Pouring herself a mug of coffee, she sat at the table and felt for the tablet’s on button. It immediately sprang to life, but there were no security clearances such as iris or facial recognition scans required. The home screen contained no apps or saved pages. There was just one icon, a symbol for a video clip.
Libby’s finger hovered over it as she deliberated whether she was invading the owner’s privacy by pressing play. Curiosity won over and with one touch, the video icon quadrupled in size. A man’s face appeared in a frame. There was something familiar about him, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. He sported a thick, dark brown beard and black-rimmed glasses, and a beanie hat covered his head. Then she recognised him as the scruffy man who’d collided with her on the train earlier that night.
“Libby,” he began. His voice gave her body chills.
It was Jude Harrison.
“I apologise for approaching you like this,” he continued. “But I had to find a way of reaching you, and it’s not like I can just turn up on your doorstep. Firstly, I need you to know that not everything I told you was a lie when we met in person a year ago or while you were at the inquest. What happened that day isn’t as black and white as it seems. And I would like the opportunity to tell you the truth because it’s what you deserve. But I’m not going to explain it now or through a video call. I want to do it in person. I’m in the city, Libby. I’m in Birmingham and I need to see you tonight.”
CHAPTER 63
Libby released her grip on the tablet as if it were burning her hands. Then she stared at the device in disbelief, trying to make sense of what she had just seen and heard.
Jude Harrison had returned. And he wanted to see her again.
When the shock passed, anger began to rise inside her, and she wanted to hurl the tablet against the wall until it shattered, then forget she had ever found it. But it wasn’t an option. She couldn’t unsee or ignore that Jude had broken cover to make contact.
She had to call the police. Her hands shook as she reached for her phone and asked her virtual assistant to find the electronic business card she had stored with the details of a chief inspector who was heading one of the many investigations into Jude’s disappearance. They had met on several occasions to discuss her first encounter with Jude. Then, together, they’d watched and listened to recordings of conversations in the inquest room, trying to pick out and piece together clues as to his potential identity.
“Would you like me to call the number you have requested?” asked the VA.
Libby opened her mouth but no reply came out. Instead, she kept replaying the moment on the train when Jude had bumped into her, angry with herself for having drunk too much and let her guard down. Perhaps if she were sober, she’d have immediately identified him, then called for help. There would have been no shortage of vigilantes on that train willing to apprehend the world’s most wanted man until the police arrived.
“Would you like me to call the number you have requested?” the VA repeated.
Libby considered how long Jude might have been following her. Had it only been on the London to Birmingham train, or had he been watching her all day? All week, perhaps? Longer? She felt sick at the thought of his proximity.
“Would you like me to call—”
“No,” Libby interrupted.
Her focus returned to the tablet, a part of her eager to watch the video for a second time but too afraid to press play. Eventually, she summoned up the courage, and Jude came back to life. “What happened that day isn’t as black and white as it seems,” he said. “I would like the opportunity to tell you the truth.”
Of course your guilt is black and white! she thought. Forensics proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were never a Passenger in the car we’d been watching you in. There was no DNA, no empty food cartons or rucksack scattered across the rear seats like we’d seen earlier.
Jude Harrison’s life was never in danger because Jude Harrison never existed. He was a fictitious character no more real than those in the thriller novels she read. She repeated his words aloud. “I would like the opportunity to tell you the truth.” Nobody knew the truth, not even a version of it. Might this be her only opportunity?
Less than an hour had passed since Libby promised Nia she was going to start erasing Jude from her mind. But she knew that no matter what lip service she paid her friend, she would never truly rest until she had heard from Jude’s own lips the story behind what happened that day.
She replayed the message one last time before making her decision. She had to hear him out in person. If Jude had wanted her dead, it would have happened by now.
“How do I find you?” she said aloud. She scanned the tablet again on the off chance she had missed something. Once assured Jude had left her no way of responding to his request, she moved towards her coffee machine again and picked a capsule with the highest caffeine content. She needed her wits about her. The sound of the tablet vibrating against the tabletop caught her attention—it had received a message. And it could only have been from Jude. She read it tentatively.
There’s a car waiting outside for you. It’ll bring you to me.
Libby paused to catch her breath. “Do you think I’m just going to get into a car that you’ve sent?” she spoke aloud.
Seconds later, another message appeared on the screen. No, it read.
Libby froze. Jude was listening to her through her tablet.
Another message appeared. I have no reason to hurt you.
“You had no reason to hurt anyone that day,” she replied, her voice growing in confidence.
It wasn’t my doing, Jude texted. Let me tell you everything in person.
Libby hesitated. It was now or never. If she really wanted to hear the answers she craved, this might be her only opportunity.
She turned to face Jude’s tablet, took a deep breath, pulled her hair back into a ponytail, and attached a band to keep it in place.
“Okay,” she said. “Where am I going?”
CHAPTER 64
The vehicle Jude sent for Libby was easy to locate; it was the only car parked outside her complex with its headlights on, interior empty, and door ajar.
One last time, Libby gave careful consideration before entering. She peered inside; it was a Level Three at least. The dashboard contained a steering wheel and, below it, an accelerator and brake pedals. However, they could easily have been tampered with and rendered redundant. But what would be the point? she asked herself. There were much easier ways to kill her than this, if that’s what Jude wanted.
Eventually her all-consuming need for the truth rose above all else and she climbed inside. The door quietly closed without locking.
Libby’s heart pounded inside her chest as the vehicle set itself into drive mode. Her hands gripped the steering wheel tightly as her foot tested the brakes. They were operable. The journey through Birmingham lasted just ten minutes but it felt like much longer before the car came to a halt by a kerb. Libby recognised the location immediately—Monroe Street, the district where she had witnessed three generations of one family wiped out by a driverless car. She exited the vehicle quickly.
Immediately, she was riled by Jude’s choice of meeting place. He must have known how distressing it had been for her to witness that footage during jury duty. Awaiting further instruction, she held his tablet tightly to her chest until it vibrated. Number 360, a message read.
Shops, predominantly small independent boutiques, lined the road. As the major high street stores gradually shut to go online, town centres were becoming desolate. Meanwhile, there had been a resurgence in the popularity of smaller, independent stor
es. By day, Monroe Street was bustling, but with the time approaching nine o’clock, it was now mostly empty. Libby carefully examined each shop frontage until she found number 360, a former café with white wipe-off paint smeared across the windows to prevent unwelcome eyes. She switched on her phone’s torch and attempted to look through the glass-pane door, but caught only her own reflection.
You don’t have to do this, she told herself. But as much as the thought of confronting Jude terrified her, it would be too much of a struggle to live the rest of her life having walked away now. Tentatively, she pushed against the door handle and it opened. A bell attached to the top clanged louder than its size, startling her.
“Hello?” she asked, her voice tremulous. She shone the phone’s light around the room. She was surrounded by a dozen or so tables and chairs that were caked in dust, along with empty counters and shelving. A ladder, paint pots, and dust covers were scattered across the floor. Any redecoration work that had once begun had long since been abandoned.
“Close the door, please,” came a voice from further inside. She recognised it immediately and took a sharp, involuntary breath. With her hand in her pocket, she felt the cool metal blade of the vegetable knife she had pocketed while in her kitchen, and out of sight of the tablet’s lens. She clasped the handle and quietly closed the door.
“You won’t need the knife,” Jude continued. “But keep it with you if it makes you feel safer.”
As she turned in his direction, he switched on a lamp, and Libby’s eyes blinked as they adjusted to the light. Now she could see him clearly. Jude was sitting behind a table, hands flat on the surface, a phone next to him. He was dressed from head to toe in dark colours and fabrics, including a winter coat and thick laced-up boots. His beard was an inch or so thick, his hair short and tousled, and he wore glasses. In spite of herself, Libby felt flashes of something for him that she couldn’t put into words.