I swing my legs over the barrier and twist, then I lower myself down, my toes searching out footholds in the brick.
‘Rupert?’ I’ve got his attention. Good. He won’t leave now, not till I’m on the ground.
I jump down onto the adjoining building and then I tackle the wall.
My driving gloves protect my hands from the sharper bits of masonry and slowly, clinging to the tiny, almost imperceptible bulges and crevices, I descend.
I jump the last few feet and land awkwardly.
John stands back, hands on hips.
‘Jesus, I knew you were a climber but,’ he blinks, trying to focus, ‘that was some Spider-Man shit, right there.’ A whiff of his breath. After I left the bar he must have moved on to spirits.
‘Please don’t tell Mickey.’ I hold the tops of his arms, trying to stabilise him. ‘It will be bad for both of us.’
‘You want to know about bad?’ He reaches inside his jacket. ‘Let me show you a picture of the man whose kids no longer have a dad because of you.’ He fumbles, searching for his phone, and the contents of his inside pockets fall to the floor.
He crouches, patting the cobbles for his wallet, and I go to help collect the other stuff.
My hand lands on a length of black and silver. I think it’s a corkscrew at first, then I feel the weight of it in my palm.
‘A knife?’
He tries to take it from me and so I pull it back, out of his reach.
‘Unless you’ve forgotten already, this gang you’re in bed with like to kill coppers.’ He nods at the weapon in my hand. ‘That’s for my own protection.’
I press the button on the handle, out of curiosity more than anything, and the blade flicks out. The steel edge is curved, the bevel dark grey.
‘I used to think you were a good man, the best,’ he says and the sadness in his voice gives me hope. He cares about me too much to throw me to the wolves. Then he sneers. ‘Turns out you’re just like the rest of your family, a spoilt rich twat who does what he wants, no matter the cost.’
Its then I realise. He’s going to go through with this. No matter what I say, no matter what I do. Tomorrow he will expose me, tomorrow I will be ruined.
I come toward him and he laughs.
‘Seriously, so what, now you’re a killer too? Come on. The game is up.’ His whisky breath makes my eyes sting.
A shove and the blade goes in. Cutting through the muscle and tissue is harder than I thought, like that first jab through a chicken’s spine before you spatchcock it flat on the tray. His eyes widen and then he blinks, shock turning to acceptance as he realises how much he has misjudged this, how he got it and me so terribly wrong.
I stab him twice more, pushing the blade deep into the barrel of him, until he topples forward onto his knees. My hand is getting tired now, but still I stab him twice more in the back, the blade struggling against bone and cartilage.
He lists, collapsing onto one hip, and then, slowly, he lurches face-first onto the cobbles.
Felled.
I reach in beneath where he lies and slide out his burner. Wipe my gloves on my trousers. Then I assess the scene, forcing my brain into gear, trying to work out what else I need to take, to wipe, so that I leave no trace.
Shouts and laughter. People. They sound like they’re approaching the alley.
I panic.
They’re going to come in and find us. I need to leave now, quickly, before they catch me here. I square up to the wall, wedge my foot in a gap where the pointing had come loose, reach up my hand to grab a slightly distended brick and then I climb.
I’m almost at the top and getting ready to swing myself onto the small squat building that will lead me back to the Coal Board roof when I lose my footing. I scramble and curse, my hand grasping for a hold, and the knife falls from my pocket. In its descent it bounces against the wall and then disappears. I consider going down to retrieve it, but the voices are getting louder, and besides, I’m wearing gloves, there will be no prints.
I keep going, reaching and pushing until finally I pull myself back onto the restaurant roof.
I lie there starfished on the floor. It’s cold and before long I start to shiver.
Jem
Rupert stands over me, his foot pressed against my chest.
‘You came back?’
I try to get up and he pushes down harder. The pressure on my lungs makes it hard to breathe.
‘Why?’
‘Hannah.’
He rolls his eyes.
‘Sure.’
‘Call an ambulance.’ I twist my neck, trying to see her. ‘She’ll die.’ I wriggle harder. I need to get to her, to give her more of the sugar water.
He removes his foot from my chest and I think he’s going to let me up but then I see his leg, lifted in the air. The sole of his shoe is beige, the section near the toes scuffed black. He brings it down hard on my face and then he does it twice more.
When I come to, my eye is swollen, my lip cut. I think he’s gone but then I see him, over by the bars. His shoulders jerk up and down, his hands busy.
‘It was you,’ I say, the words muffled by my broken mouth. ‘You killed John.’
He stops.
‘He was your partner, your friend.’
He turns round. His face is drawn, his features trapped behind his skin.
‘He was going to report me,’ he says, and I understand that it’s not me he’s bargaining with but himself.
He steps to one side and I see that he’s tied something blue and white to the bars. Hannah’s apron.
He steps back to survey his handiwork. ‘I’ve looked up how to do this so many times since John died.’ He yanks down on the material hard. ‘Never had the courage to go through with it.’
It’s then I realise.
He’s made a noose.
Is he about to hang himself?
He comes over to where I lie and hooks his hands under my arms.
‘I still don’t understand how your fingerprints ended up on his things, the knife especially, but I stopped questioning it during the trial.’ He drags me across the floor and over to the bars. I struggle as much as I can but my vision is blurred, my head light. ‘It meant the investigation had no interest in looking for a suspect elsewhere and for that I’m grateful.’
He looks from me to the apron and back again, his eyes narrowed, like he’s assessing something.
Even in the fog of my concussion I understand.
The noose isn’t for him, it’s for me.
I try to crawl away but I’ve barely got going when I feel his shoe connect with the back of my skull. Crack. I hit the floor and he drags me back over to the bars.
After placing a chair beneath the noose he lifts me onto it into a kind of slumped sitting position, and then, keeping one arm round my waist, he hoists me up and reaches for the apron.
We’re close – it’s like we’re hugging – and even though I can’t see straight, on reflex my hands start to roam, across his shirt, inside his jacket, the muscle memory a comfort, my own personal catechism. I take something and pocket it but I’m clumsy and, although he doesn’t understand what I’ve done, he’s suspicious and uses the other apron tie to fix my hands behind my back.
He places the loop over my head and I try to imagine what scenario he thinks will explain the scene the police will inevitably come upon. Once I’m dead will he untie my hands, wipe his prints from the syringe and place it in Hannah’s grasp, make it look like some strange double suicide? How will he explain my other injuries? Maybe he’s so desperate, so fraught with fear and panic that he’s no longer thinking straight, just hell-bent on trying to silence anyone that might expose him, with no real thought to what comes after?
The cotton is already close against my throat when he kicks the chair out from under me. The band clutches at my neck, the fabric squeezing my windpipe. I gasp for breath and the sound is raw. It scratches at the air and then wizens to nothing.
Rupert
faces me head-on. It seems that watching me die is a punishment he has decided on for himself. The veins in his neck twitch and strain, but he stands stock-still. He will not let himself look away.
Hannah
I open my eyes a crick. On the other side of the cell I can see a shape. Grey and white, it jerks up and down like a fish on a hook.
A grunt, bovine-deep, and then I hear shallow breaths.
I blink, trying to bring the cell into focus, and the moving blob sharpens into a person. Tall with shoulders that hover up near their ears, they are busy heaving something onto a chair.
Rupert.
Even in my post-hypo blur I know to be afraid and push myself away, toward the wall. Something red and white unsticks itself from my cheek and, free of my weight, pings back into shape. The baseball cap.
Jem. He came back.
I lick my lips. My tongue is sticky, my mouth glazed with a sweet, powdery substance.
Then I see him. His chin is wedged against Rupert’s neck. The skin on his left cheek is flayed, his nose bloody. Both eyes are swollen shut. Another grunt and Rupert shucks him over his shoulder like a sack of wheat.
I try to push myself up to sitting, but my arms are weak. I flex my fingers, trying to coax them back to life, and watch as Rupert brings Jem to standing on the chair.
A flash of something white round Jem’s neck but I don’t understand what I’m seeing until Rupert draws back his leg and, with a push of his heel, kicks the chair away.
Jem slams his legs against the bars, his feet searching for purchase on the steel. He gargles and spits, his face purpling under the pressure.
My rage is like a shot of adrenalin.
This cannot happen.
I will not let someone I love die again.
I spread my fingers against the bedspread, tense my forearms and will my muscles to work. My head spins and vomit lurks at the back of my throat but this time I manage to bring myself up to sitting. Jem is making too much noise for Rupert to notice any rustling I make and I manage to stagger upright and over to their side of the cell before he turns round and with a quick shove pushes me away, back onto the bed.
I land in a heap and my hand brushes against something sharp. The syringe he used to inject me earlier.
Jem is quietening, his breath no more than a wheeze.
I grab the syringe, haul myself back up to standing and launch myself toward Jem. This time when Rupert tries to block me I’m ready.
I lift my hand in the air and stab the needle into a spot just below his eye socket.
A scream and he recoils, eyes focused on the object lodged in his face he tries to pull it out, only for the needle to snap. He ogles the steel spike now protruding from his cheekbone and then turns his focus to me.
‘Bitch.’
He pats at his pockets, searching for something. When he can’t find it he comes toward me. His hands are on my throat when he stumbles and falls back.
A flash of grey. A yowl, strange and pitiful, like a baby’s cry. Poobah. He must have slipped in through the open front door again.
For a moment Rupert shifts his focus to the animal slinking through the steel bars. I take my chance and, with all the strength I can muster, push him toward the kitchen. He tumbles back, out of the cell. I pull the door shut and press down on the black button round my neck.
As soon as the door is secure I run to Jem, dangling against the bars, and take the weight of his body with mine. I pull and tug at the apron strings, trying to free him or at least relieve the pressure round his neck, but they are tied tight. Jem’s body mass is too much for me to handle. A wave of dizziness and I stumble. I can’t hold him much longer.
A clank.
Something has landed on the floor.
I must have dislodged it from his trouser pocket.
Rupert’s red climbing knife, gold initials embossed on the handle.
H.C.
Hugo Cammish. Rupert’s brother, the one that died.
Jem must have taken it from him before he got him into the noose.
Once a thief, always a thief.
I reach, grab it and flick it open. The blade is pristine, the steel polished. I hack at the apron strings but the canvas is thick and pulled taut. There is no give. Desperate, I hack even harder, bringing the blade against it in a downward motion. The material begins to fray. One last hack and Jem drops onto me, so heavy that I collapse with him to the floor. A red line circles his neck, the welt deep and wide.
I tilt his head and breathe into his mouth, then I cross my hands one on top of the other and press at his heart. Rupert watches me for a while and then he takes himself away from the cell, over to the French doors. Looking out at the snowy Heath, his shoulders drop. He seems relieved.
Free.
I perform CPR for as long as I can but I’m so wrung out from my hypo that I soon become dizzy, my hands flapping uselessly against his jumper. It’s over.
I lie down next to him and place my head on his chest.
I’m a pond-skater again, but now I feel like I’m sinking through the surface to the world below.
Footsteps on the stairs.
‘Hannah?’
Birkenstocks followed by the swish of cerise and yellow kaftan.
Kiki.
‘Poobah,’ she trills. ‘Poobah, are you in here?’
Entering the kitchen, she sees me first.
‘The cat,’ she says, too caught up in her own drama to process the rest of the scene. ‘I saw him in your garden, then he snuck inside.’
Her view broadens. She registers I am locked inside the cell with Jem. Looks from us to Rupert.
I close my eyes and listen for the bob of Jem’s heart against his ribs.
‘Come back,’ I say.
Two syllables. Monogamous as lovebirds.
They hit the air and, in an instant, they are gone.
One year later
Hannah waited until the verdict had been delivered and then, shivery and exhausted, she stumbled toward the exit and down the Old Bailey’s deserted corridors.
The trial had been held in Court 3. A modern extension, it housed twelve courtrooms, but these days only a handful were in use. The surrounding empty rooms and dust-grimed witness boxes shouldn’t have made a difference to the trial acoustics – the walls were well insulated – but they did. Every word that had come out of the barrister’s mouth seemed to reverberate through the building.
Outside, she stood on the pavement and lifted her face to the sun. It was early spring and the trees were dormant with buds biding their time, the mud in the flowerbeds dark and sloppy.
She’d thought that seeing Rupert get what he deserved would make her feel more at peace – the Met and Aisling’s parents had pressed charges and so, as well as Aisling’s murder, Rupert had also been tried on multiple counts of police corruption and bribery, not to mention the conspiracy to murder Roddy Blessop, an undercover officer killed in the line of duty – but she found her fury was worse than ever. Her insides felt scorched, wildfired by a rage that kept finding ever more ways to burn brighter and hotter than before. Justice had been served but it wasn’t enough, it would never be enough.
Jem had been waiting for her in a cafe opposite. He crossed the road, one hand pushing the buggy, the other clutching the baby to his hip.
‘So?’ His expression was drawn, his skin pale.
‘Guilty,’ said Hannah. She remembered the barrister’s closing statement. The way she’d described how Rupert had strangled Aisling with such force he’d fractured two of her cervical vertebrae.
The baby screwed up his face and took a breath, readying for a crying jag, but then Jem bent in close, reached a hand behind his ear and produced a silver coin. He twirled it from thumb to finger, making sure to go slow enough for the infant to follow, and then, with a flourish, made the coin disappear.
A giggle.
Jem performed the trick again and the giggle grew.
‘You’ve got the knack,’ said H
annah.
‘Smoke and mirrors,’ said Jem and kissed his son’s head, his nose lingering in the downy white hair.
It was true what they said. Having a child made it feel like you were walking around with your heart outside your body. It left you vulnerable to grit and knocks but it also meant you experienced the rainbows of the world unfiltered, that you felt the comfort of a lover’s hand at your waist more keenly, the joy of a newborn’s mouth against your collarbone in your marrow.
‘No regrets?’ said Jem, strapping the child into the buggy. They’d decided not to take action for John’s murder and their respective assaults – they didn’t want the burden.
‘None.’ Hannah tried to take comfort in the fact that Rupert would spend the decades to come in the cells at Scotland Yard, being tended by his ex-colleagues, and would see out his twilight years with a Foster Host.
‘Me neither,’ said Jem quietly. ‘About any of it.’ His foster-brother Lucas had responded well to the gene therapy and although there were no guarantees, for now at least his cancer was under control. The Tarkers still had no idea as to the identity of their last-minute benefactor and Jem and Hannah planned on keeping it that way.
‘Home?’ said Hannah, searching for the nearest bus stop.
‘Home,’ said Jem, linking his arm through hers. In the buggy the baby gurgled, a golden hiccupy sound that sunshined the air.
Acknowledgements
This is a pretty crazy idea for a novel. I will be forever grateful to my editor Sophie Orme and my agent Madeleine Milburn for taking the leap and for their faith in me to pull it off.
Katie Lumsden, Felice McKeown, Clare Kelly and all at Zaffre.
Hannah Chambers and Jeremy Austin, for having a house that helped inspire my plot and for giving me permission to use it and its geography as I saw fit. Hannah and Jem are named for them, although anyone who knows the real couple will know that they bear zero resemblance to every aspect of my fictional characters, all except for one thing, their love is also fierce and strong and built to stand the test of time.
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