Sunny saw. And she ignored.
“We have to go. We can’t stay here for long. Somebody might have heard.”
“There’s...,” Edith stumbled her words, shocked at her rasping voice, “...there’s no houses for miles. Right?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out. It’s always best to leave the party early.”
“You saved my life.”
“We can do that bit later, we have to go now. Did you bring anything with you? We can’t leave anything which might lead back to us.” She picked up the rounders bat and slung it into the Jaguar.
“Dad’s car.” Edith looked at the vehicle Sunny had arrived in, curious that it still worked.
“No, I drove this. You came in my Punto. I saw it parked up the lane.”
“Yes. Okay.” Edith’s words came with gaps of laboured thought. “How did you find me?”
“We were meant to go dress shopping.”
“Oh.”
“You never turned up, and you didn’t answer your phone.”
“It’s at home.”
“So I went and asked Dad where you had gone.”
“I would like to have seen that.” Edith tried to laugh. She could only cough.
“No you wouldn’t.” There was a coldness in Sunny’s voice. She swiftly hid it for the sake of her sister. “Are you alright to drive?”
“I...,” Edith managed a straight thought, “...not really.”
“Okay, that was stupid question number two from me.” Sunny sighed. “But tough shit, kid, you’ll have to manage. I’ll drive you up to the Punto. You only have to follow me, and I’ll drive slow.”
“Yeah.”
Edith staggered onto her feet. Sunny rushed to steady her. At that moment she saw the gun resting on the chair. She performed a rudimentary check then swiftly pocketed it.
“How do you know that isn’t his?” Edith was leant heavily against the chair.
“Just a guess. Now get in the car.” Sunny opened her door and pointed Edith to the passenger side.
Edith tread, still swaying, over the debris of the smashed window. She rounded the chair and saw Gervase lying supine behind it. The blood of his wounds was obvious, the misshapenness only apparent with a second glance.
“Is he dead?” Edith knew the answer to the question. The words had to be spoken. They had to escape her mind.
“Yes.” Sunny’s tone was sharp to the point of fact. “Now get in the car.” She sat down and shut her door.
Edith stepped over Gervase. His phone still lay where he had left it on the other arm of the chair.
Sunny was looking elsewhere. She wouldn’t notice. It would take only a second.
Edith slid the phone into her pocket.
Day 19: Sunday 19 November
Edith woke with a start at the beep of her phone. A faint ache within her bones swiftly flowered into pain. Limbs curled up tight. The night before had been real. The clock said six, exactly. Who had messaged her at such a time? Andrius, most likely, as he was yet to learn what had happened.
There was no message. She threw the phone back on the bedside table and turned over It might be impossible to explain everything to Andrius in a way which wouldn’t drive him mad with thoughts of what could have happened. Dad had the expurgated account last night. His daughter was alive and Gervase was dead. That would have to satisfy him. It was all she could manage once home. Sunny hid the damaged Jaguar in the garage and sorted out loose ends.
Only one task had kept Edith from sleep. One by one, image by image, she had tortuously deleted every photograph of her from Gervase’s phone. It could have waited until morning, but then too would the memories. To live that day once was enough, to relive it the next day gratuitous. Best done while the trauma was fresh and the wounds were still open. It would all heal as one. The phone would end up in the Ship Canal shortly after. A double surety that the images were gone forever and the phone would not be found in her possession.
She twisted and sprang upright. A terrifying realisation had lodged in her brain. Her hand reached down to the floor and fished among the mass of clothes slung there the night before. Fingers grabbed a solid mass, Gervase’s phone. She swiped to open the screen. There was a message.
‘Ready for the main event.’
In the back of her mind she knew what the message meant, or what it could mean. Her body protested, it ached, it was tired. It was Sunday, she should sleep to her satisfaction, on this morning more than ever. She sunk down beneath the duvet, eyes screwed tight to exclude any intruding thoughts, any niggling guilt. Just a minute, a bare minute, and she would fall into sleep once more and the message would no longer be her problem. Somebody else could deal with it. She had already done her part. She had already suffered enough.
It was all for nothing. With a protesting moan she pulled her duvet away. The cold air was an unwelcome wake–up, badly needed. She stepped out of bed and quickly dressed. A gentle rap on her father’s door to ensure his wakefulness, then she entered with the news.
“Dad? Are you awake?” She spoke through a crack of the inner door.
“Yes, princess. I was thinking of you.”
“Oh.” She slid into the bedroom and shut the door behind her. She took a few steps toward her father’s bed, phone carelessly in hand despite the light it might shine. “I thought you might still be asleep. It’s six o’clock.”
“I couldn’t sleep thinking of you.” Ben’s voice was quieter, his face turned to the wall. “I want to apologize for everything. For placing you in...”
“Dad, not now. This phone.” She held it up, stupidly, before lowering it unseen. “It’s Gervase’s”
“You brought his phone back here? Why? That’s an incredibly silly thing to have done.” He turned in bed. He paused to gather his thoughts. “I’m not angry at you, sweetheart. Of course not. But they could trace it. You need to get rid of it immediately. For your safety.”
“Dad, just forget that, this is important. There was a text message to his phone a couple of minutes ago.”
“So what? Everybody gets them.”
“‘Ready for the main event.’” She fought the urge to open the phone and show it directly to her father.
There was the sound of sheets being drawn back. He sat up in bed. “Well,” he scratched his stubble, “that does sound like something out of the ordinary. I dare say your guess is better than mine, Princess.”
“They’ve got something planned.”
“That’s obvious.” He was needlessly sharp in his reply. “I can figure that bit out for myself. But I don’t know more about this guy than what you told me last night, and that was all over the place.”
“It was a bit...,” she shifted her weight; Dad could never know exactly what happened, “...hectic. It turned out that this Gervase guy had nothing to do with the Establishment.”
“Right. Yeah, you mentioned that. It’s good news, we’ve a lot less to worry about if that’s the case. But who was he, and why was he killing the Faircotes?”
“It’s...complicated.”
“Try me.”
“I don’t think we’ve got the time, Dad.”
“Why not? He’s dead. Isn’t that game over?”
“There’s more than just him.”
“Okay...”
“And it’s not just the Faircotes they want to kill, but a whole load of people. Including the royal family.”
“Oh? That means...” He took in a shock of breath. “Fucking hell.”
“Exactly. Main event, Dad, main event. Gervase said the Faircotes were a sideshow. The royal family are the main event.”
“Well, then, it’s no surprise you got that text this morning, is it? Shit. There’s that big bloody parade of them through town.”
“I know.” She let her head drop into her hands. “I can’t believe it.”
“Aren’t you going to the parade? You said that boyfriend of yours is taking you.”
“Yeah, he was going to
take me to watch the parade from the skybar in Beetham tower. But I was going to slack it off. I’m knackered.”
“Not any more you’re not. If these bastards are planning something we have to stop them.” Ben jabbed his finger against the bedside table audibly.
“Can’t we just tell the police?” She pleaded. “Let them deal with it? Why do we have to get involved?”
“Because we killed a man.”
“Sunny killed him.”
“Hooray for Sunny. But you wouldn’t hand her over to the police, would you?”
“No! For Christ’s sake, Dad, what are you going on about?” She backed away from her father and leant against the far wall.
“If you tell the police you’ll have to tell them everything. So far, I bet nobody’s discovered Gervase’s body. A retired man, living alone up in the Peak in an isolated farmhouse, won’t be missed for a few days at least. Enough time for us to get rid of any evidence—including that bloody phone!—so the police won’t turn up on our doorstep. They find out now then we’re in deep shit.”
She began to pace the room, the soft pad of her feet barely heard on the carpeted floor.
“Besides...” Ben began.
“Besides what?” Her voice was full with resignation.
“The police are too damn slow. Princess, I know you and Sunny can deal with this. My girls are smart enough to get the job done.”
“I didn’t feel so smart last night.” Tears rose and Edith let them come. There were plenty enough the night before. There would be no end to them for a long time. She no longer cared if he heard.
“You’ve learnt the only lesson you ever need: don’t hesitate once you’ve set your mind on something. Everything else is icing on the cake.” He reached out and grabbed her hand, sure of its location even in the dark. He held her fingers softly and stroked the back of her hand with his thumb. “I swear, Edith, I’m sorry for everything I got you into. I’ve already lost one daughter.”
She gripped her father’s hand and choked back sobs. “I can’t...I can’t ever tell you all...everything that happened.”
“You don’t have to, Princess. I’ve kept many thing from you for the same reason. They’re not secrets. They’re simply things that we choose not to share.”
She nodded. He patted her hand then let go. “Now, get yourself together, we have work to do.
“We just need to figure out what they’re planning. It’s still early, we have plenty of time. The royal family will be most vulnerable during the parade, so that’s when the attack will happen. And the parade is not until one, more than six hours from now.”
“Okay.” Her mind was blank. Inwardly she doubted that they could do anything. “How do we figure out what they’re going to do?”
“The phone,” he gestured, “is the only link we have. We can’t go back to Gervase’s house, even if anything’s there which might help. It’s far too hot. Who did the message come from?”
She crept over to the light lock, opened the inner door, and leant in with the phone. “There’s no name, just a number.”
“Okay. What kind of number? Landline, mobile?”
“It’s a mobile number. Should I try to search for it on the internet?”
“No, don’t bother. It’s likely only used for this specific purpose. A burner phone. It’s easy enough to get a new mobile phone, or as many as you want.”
“Should I ring it?”
“Christ, woman, no!” He slapped his forehead. “At the moment we have the upper hand. We have Gervase’s phone and we know they’re planning something. They think everything is fine. They can’t know he’s dead if they’re still texting him. We shouldn’t alert them to what we know.”
“Couldn’t that cause them to call off the attack? If they knew they were compromised?”
“They might call off the attack, sure, but they might also have backups, ways of stopping us interfering. We just don’t know. We have to keep them as ignorant as possible.”
She laughed out her stress. “You mean, more ignorant than us? Cause I don’t see that we know all that much. The message is a dead end.”
“Don’t give up so easily. Take the number which sent the message and search the phone for anything else from the same person.”
“Okay, it’ll take a minute though. I’m not sure how to do it.” She shifted round further into the light lock and tapped away. She hoped nothing would come up, that the trail would go dead. It would absolve her of any duty. It was selfish, she knew. But she was so desperately tired. She had been through more already than she could have imagined at the outset.
“I’ve found something.” She called out from behind the door, instantly deflated of hope.
“What is it?”
“The same number sent Gervase a bunch of photographs a few weeks ago.”
“What are the photographs of?”
“It’s...a hotel room.” The immaculately presented room with bland furniture and no personal things was obvious. Nobody except for the terminally unimaginative actually lived in a room which looked like that. Hotel rooms were instantly recognizable the world over.
“Good view?” Ben pondered out loud, one step ahead of his daughter.
“Yeah, of course, a view of the town. Well, the rooftops.”
“Can you see the street?”
She zoomed in to the image, peering through the window at the buildings and streets below rather than the skyline above. They were familiar, more than familiar. She knew where it was.
“It’s Deansgate, isn’t it?” He beat her to the punch. “The longest, straightest road in the city centre. The royal family will parade right down it, from beginning to end, leaving themselves exposed for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. That’s the best window for any attack.”
“So, are they going to shoot them? Like, a sniper from the hotel room?”
“Nah.”
“How can you be so sure? You can’t just dismiss it like that! If we make a mistake that’s the end of them.” She was panicking. As the attack grew less abstract her fears too solidified.
“Calm down, Princess. They’re not going to sniper the lot from the hotel room. For a start, you could only get one shot before the security services reacted and bundled the rest to safety. Secondly, and rather more importantly, the windows in those hotel rooms don’t open, do they?”
She thought back to a trip she had taken to New York the summer after she had completed university. Her hotel, something like forty stories tall, had been built in the 1930s. She was amazed to find that, despite being on the twenty–fifth floor the window opened fully. In the warm summer nights she had perched on the cooling sill and peered out over Midtown. Most hotel rooms, modern ones at least, would never trust a guest so much.
“No, I doubt they open.”
“So there’s no chance of a sniper from there.” His tone was one of unneeded satisfaction, as though his logic had won a great battle.
“So what, then? You going to tell me, or not? If you’ve got it all figured out?” Her sharpness sprang direct from her father’s smugness. “I guess it’s easy to say what they’re not going to do, isn’t it? They’re not going to release a stampede of elephants to crush everybody, so we can knock that off the list. But I doubt we have time to go through the billion possibilities, do we?”
“Okay, okay! Hold onto yourself, Princess. There’s no need to be like that. Look, any attack has to be an all or nothing. A big, single whack. Take them all out without giving them time to respond.”
“Like a bomb?”
“Yeah, but the security services sweep for bombs. They’re going to be doubling down on that after everything that has happened. Besides, what would they need the hotel room for? A bomb fifty metres up isn’t going to do much.”
“What then?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged in the dark. “What else is on the phone?”
“There aren’t any pictures of weapons.” She ducked back into the light lock. “Just the
se for the hotel room. It’s obvious now that the pictures are from different angles, trying to get a good impression of the view from the windows. It looks like a corner room too, so they can see out down Liverpool Road.”
“The parade goes down that way after it turns off Deansgate. That’s where the new railway bridge is. Maybe they’re not fussy exactly when they strike. You know, they could get them on Deansgate if the timing’s right, but have a second chance on Liverpool Road. Doesn’t help us much with what the exact attack will be, but it...”
“Dad, there are some links.”
“Links?”
“Yeah, the same number sent Gervase some links. To news stories by the looks of it.” She read silently. Stories about the parade and its route. Each one with little maps and timetables. Useful for planning, but hardly incriminating. Then one unlike the rest. It dated from August.
“Hmm. ‘Self–Driving Trucks on English Roads by end of 2018’. That doesn’t seem...”
“Shit. That’s it. That’s fucking it.” Ben punched the darkness.
She held her hand over her mouth. A scream passed inwardly.
Through her fingers she managed to speak.
“They’re going to drive a truck into the parade.”
Washway Road in Timperley, heading north toward Manchester, lay broad and open early on a Sunday morning. Whatever passed for weekend traffic was still hours away. The diversions, the road closures, the extra visitors of the royal parade meant the day would hardly be normal. The insistence of the authorities that people come to the parade by public transport or not at all would keep the roads clearer than usual. Republicans, recusants, and anybody who wanted to give the parade a wide berth would head south into Cheshire or stay at home and watch it on television.
Andrius enjoyed having the road to himself. Edith sat by his side, uncomfortable in the sweltering heat of the car. His flight home from Abu Dhabi had only landed the night before and the cold was too much of a shock. The only words he had said about his trip were idle conversation fillers, followed by complaints about the unwonted cold and how dirty English streets were in comparison. A glance at Edith showed her deep in thought, worry limned on her face. Unready to talk, unsure what to say.
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