Inheritance

by Ellen Kefferty

  Her call forty minutes earlier had found him still in bed. He should come and pick her up immediately. There was no need for her to impress on him the urgency, her tone being clear enough. Only the reasons were obscure. The night before left unsaid, she had neither time nor will to mention it. The call filled with a rushed and bracingly incoherent explanation of the plot she had stumbled upon.

  The car stopped at traffic lights outside Sale. He let his eyes rest on her, wishing that she would say something. She returned the gaze. Her lips parted to speak. Uncertainty drove the words back down. Ben had outlined a plan, a vague sketch of how to stop the attack, plausible enough. Putting it together in just a few hours would be chaos. Andrius would have to agree, if he believed all the ridiculous things she had garbled to him over the phone. Tucking a lock of hair behind her ear, she shivered and stared at the lights, willing them to turn green.

  “I didn’t believe you when you told me.” Andrius turned away to watch the lights, his hand on the gearstick ready to drive. “I thought you had gone mad, like some massive paranoid fantasy. But your voice, Edith, your voice. I’ve never heard you talk like that. You sounded like another person. I knew you were serious.” He laughed nervously. “Or that you had gone truly mad, in which case I should come see you anyway.”

  “Thanks.” She eyed him cautiously. She then turned to face him fully.

  “It didn’t stop me from doing some research, of course.” The lights were green. Andrius drove on.

  “Research? At seven in the morning?”

  “I have a friend who works in vehicle automation.”

  “You have lots of friends, it seems.”

  “Well, this guy, actually he doesn’t know much about the technical side of automation, but he gives legal advice to companies who want to use patents for such vehicles but are...,” Andrius stopped for a beat, unafraid to show his need for prevarication, thinking that it gave him an air of mystery, “...well, let us say they are not the customary owners of such patents. Anyway, I gave him a call and asked him about that article you sent to me. The one about self–driving trucks.”

  “Do these people not sleep?”

  “It’s daytime where they are in California, well, maybe evening. My friend explained that driverless trucks are old technology. They’ve been around for decades experimentally, but the technology is basically consumer grade now.”

  “Consumer grade?”

  “Cars with inbuilt automation will be on sale within a couple of years. You can already buy a conversion kit for your own car,” he shrugged his shoulders as though not wishing to drive your own car was the oddest desire, “if you want to.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s not cheap for the average person, but I guess a group like this has lots of resources?” He turned and nodded, seeking some kind of confirmation of his guess. Beyond the basics of the plot he knew almost nothing about the perpetrators. Other than that their earlier assumption about the Establishment had been wrong.

  “I guess so. Gervase was the director of a company which provided cars for the other murders. He had plenty of money himself. The group can’t lack assets.”

  “Good. So here’s where it gets interesting. My friend explained that the news story was really about the legal aspects of it now they’re actually going to be used in England. The government is looking to lead their introduction and build up a regulatory framework.”

  “Is this relevant? Do we have time to discuss regulatory frameworks? I hope this doesn’t take five hours else we’re out of luck.” She sighed and held her head. The pain of Gervase’s blows beat back into her brain. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just a bit stressful.”

  “Babe, don’t worry. I understand.” Andrius leant over and roughly stroked her shoulder. He was too busy watching the road to notice her flinch. “It’s boring stuff, but here’s the key part. If you buy one of these conversion kits you get all the tech to attach to your car, but also the software to run it. The existing regulations mandate that this software must have the safety features built–in and, most importantly, impossible to disable.”

  “How’s that relevant?”

  “The safety features mean that the vehicle will drive down a road like this one, obeying all the laws. If it is confronted by a hazard, such as another car, a pedestrian, or even a cat, it will disconnect.” He smiled. “No way you can ask it to drive into a parade.”

  “Right. So they’re not going to use it, is this what you’re saying?”

  He raised a finger as his hand moved to the gearstick. “The key thing is that in such a situation the self–driving system is programmed to hand control back to the driver.”

  “Then the driver drives the truck through the parade?” She shook her head. “Why go to all the bother of a driverless truck if you’re going to have a driver anyway?”

  “The driver doesn’t need to be in the truck . Though it’s totally illegal, you can also convert a vehicle to remote control. And that’s actually quite easy, anybody with a bit of knowledge about electronics could manage it. If you installed both systems you would have a truck which could deliver itself to a preprogrammed location and then let drive it yourself from the comfort of your...”

  “Hotel room. Dad was on the right track. The room isn’t a grandstand to enjoy the scene, it’s essential for the attack to go as planned. He just didn’t quite know how.” She shifted in her seat and gazed out the window. She needed a moment to think, to go over her father’s plan and figure out how it would fit what she now knew. It might work. It should work. There was still a piece which needed putting into place.

  “You can take my bag to your apartment. I’ll change there and we’ll go to the Beetham tower together.” She mumbled her instructions.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Drop me off at Cornbrook Station. I’m meeting Sunny from the tram. We’ll need her help.”

  “Maybe she can come inside? Wouldn’t that be best, if the attacker is going to be inside the hotel?”

  “But the skybar is a ticket only event, isn’t it? And you only have two tickets?” Jealousy swelled within Edith. Sunny had saved her, and she was more than thankful, yet it meant their relationship was more uneven than before. She couldn’t live forever in her sister’s protection. Stepping back now would feel like the ultimate admission that she could never match up to her sister.

  Edith leant forward her hand cupped on her temple. Her brain throbbing inside her skull.

  “I could get another ticket.” Andrius hadn’t understood her pose as pained. “Even if they’re sold out, there’s always a way.”

  “No. The plan needs somebody outside. It’s important.” She snapped at him, ending the conversation.

  “Okay.”

  The white latticework of Old Trafford football stadium sailed over the roofs of nearby houses as they drove along Chester Road toward Manchester. The towers of Salford Quays rose in the distance, stretching further away to the west. Cranes pitched their long arms into the grey sky, idle on a Sunday.

  The road curved east and a thick hedge of tall bushes and silver birches rose up on either side of the road. The effect was disconcerting, denying the nearness of the city. For a minute or two it was eclipsed by foliage. They could have been anywhere. Far away from the city. If only.

  Andrius peeled off the road and slowed as he passed under an old railway arch. To the right lay the entrance of Cornbrook station. A lonely Sunny stood outside. He stopped to let Edith out and, after a perfunctory farewell, drove away.

  From across the road her sister called as she approached.

  “How are you?”

  “I guess I’m okay. Could do without this.”

  Sunny came forward and wrapped her arms around Edith. She searched her sister’s worn–out eyes and shook her head. “You can always sit it out. Let me deal with it. Just tell me what you know, and Dad’s plan. I’ll do it.”

  “No.” Edith wrested from her sister’s embrace and strod
e away.

  Heaped metal in a scrap merchant’s yard loomed over the road. A few decrepit cars straddled the pavement. When the gates opened they would become the crusher’s next victims. Behind them the road ended at a fence ostensibly blocking all further travel. Edith headed for a gap in the corner and snicked through. On the other side, mounting a bridge over a disused canal, she turned and beckoned to her sister far behind.

  “Come on! We have to talk.”

  Beyond the bridge the flat, open wasteland of Pomona island stretched before them. Once a busy dock forty miles inland from the Irish Sea, the warehouses and wharves had long died, their carcasses swept away. Weeds and scrub flourished now. All attempts at bringing the land into profitable use having failed. One solitary attempt, a block of eighties flats of beige and terracotta was being devoured by demolition machines in the middle distance. Its last residents having fled the rotten building and abandoned streets.

  Edith followed a footpath of shattered flagstones then crossed over a road of weed–pocked tarmac and waded into an expanse of scrub. Sunny followed. The silence from her sister, despite the insistence only a minute earlier of the need to talk, was her way of building up to something important. Together they reached the railing strung along the length of the ship canal’s wharfside.

  Leaning against the railing Edith gazed into water filled only with her own reflection. It was best not to look at Sunny. Seemingly rapt by the drabness of Ordsall on the opposite bank of the canal she fixed her stare. Words shuffled in her mind seeking the most honest, quickest, and sharpest way of communicating the oldest feeling in her vocabulary.

  “I’m jealous of you.” Edith pushed away from the railings. She strode away, toward the city.

  Sunny quickstepped to keep pace. “What?”

  “I’m jealous of you.” Edith still would not look at her sister as they walked. “I’m jealous of the time Dad spent with you. I’m jealous that he chose you instead of me.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you knew the truth.”

  “What about the truth? I’ve seen enough of it already in the last few weeks. There can’t be much left to learn, can there?”

  “Edith, there’s so much more. There’s a reason me and Dad have hardly spoken in years, you know that? Are you jealous of that?”

  “I think I must have hardly spoken to him in years, too. The years when he was always with you and never at home. At least you had the choice.”

  Sunny shook her head. “Why are you doing this now? You told me on the phone that there’s an insane plot to murder the royal family and yet you think this is a good time to angst over the past? What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t we do this tomorrow?”

  “This is the whole reason I’m even here.” Edith spat out her response without anger.

  “I thought you said you were running out of money?”

  “Yeah, that’s true. But only why I did it now. I’ve always wanted to do exactly whatever it was you were doing with Dad. I wanted to show him that I could.” Edith stopped and met Sunny’s eyes for the first time since they had begun to talk. “I wanted him to notice me, to think more of me than his surplus daughter. Or his maid.”

  Sunny was silent. It still wasn’t the right time for Edith to be saying such things. But she had to listen, she owed her sister that.

  Edith shrugged. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “I want to thank you for last night.”

  “You don’t need to thank me. Edith, you’re my sister. I would do anything for you. I would never let you come to harm.”

  Edith let her head sway and her gaze fall to the ground. “Dad gave me the gun. A gun, for fuck’s sake! He encouraged me to kill somebody. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, even though I knew it was justified. Then you came and killed him like...well, like it wasn’t the first time.”

  She raised her eyes to see her sister, lips parted, weighing up a response. She shook her head. “Sunny, don’t answer that. It’s not something I can handle. I didn’t know what to think when you showed me that money in your apartment. I was willing to believe the better possibilities. Now I understand the depth of my ignorance. Of Dad. Of you. I hardly know you, do I? What have you kept hidden from me?” A long tear tracked down her cheek.

  “It was for your own sake. It was better that it was kept from you.”

  “I know, I understand.” Edith tried to smile. “But now I’m on the other side of that, aren’t I? I’m no longer the outsider, even if I still know next to nothing. I guess I finally share in what you two have.”

  “Okay.” Sunny nodded. “I guess you do. I’m sorry that it had to happen this way.”

  The pair walked in silence beside the ship canal and through the deserted wasteland of Pomona. But for the occasional bird and distant tram nothing stirred. It was far too early for most people, for most things.

  The neck of the island narrowed as the ship canal curved east and butted into a mesh of older canals which ringed the south of the city. Railway viaducts—at first one, then two and three—arched overhead, blocking out the paltry sun. They had reached Castlefield. The canals and viaducts wove together in a dense landscape held over from the city’s industrial height. Former warehouses perched on wharfsides, long emptied of export cloth, now housing young couples and city workers. Newer blocks, in stout red brick to match their surroundings, filled the gaps where time had taken away the original buildings.

  A train rattled above on one of the viaducts. Then a tram swished by on another. A third, crenellated like an old castle, stood on thick iron pillars abandoned and overgrown. A garden in the sky. Narrowboats, strung out along the canal basin, smoked faintly from their flues. The city was slowly waking.

  “What’s the plan?”

  Edith sighed with thought. Ben’s instructions were a guide. It was her job to make them work. She had had as long as she ever would to think about them. Which was not nearly long enough.

  “I need you to spot for me.” She drew a tiny pair of binoculars from her pocket. “The attacker will be in the Hilton hotel, somewhere, but we don’t know exactly. The pictures we have are of a corner suite, but the hotel’s twenty floors tall, the whole bottom half of the Beetham Tower. Even if we guess that he’s going to be as high as possible for a better view, that could be one of several floors. And we won’t have a clue from the inside.”

  “Do you know what he’ll look like? Will it even be a man?”

  “Ha! It will be a man, certainly.” Edith laughed darkly at Gervase revelling in his misogyny. “But I have no idea what he will look like. Or even how you will know it’s him.”

  “That doesn’t sound hopeful.”

  They walked on through Castlefield, past the amphitheatre, and onto Liverpool Road. Deansgate ran perpendicular only a hundred metres away. Beetham Tower stood with its flank toward them, showing its unnatural thinness. The upper half was wider than the bottom. The overhang made the building appear instantly daring.

  Edith pointed to a spot half way up the tower.

  “The overhang is the skybar. That’s where me and Andrius will be. The last floor of the hotel is below that. Just count the floors downward.”

  Sunny looked at her phone.

  “There parade’s not for a few hours. You don’t expect him to make an appearance sooner than the parade, do you?”

  “No, I shouldn’t think so. I guess he’ll leave it as late as he can to draw the least attention.”

  “Great, because it’s half–freezing out here,” Sunny laughed, “and there’s a nice place on Deansgate which does breakfast, even on Sunday.”

  “I can’t believe you’re wearing that dress again.” Andrius stalked his apartment refusing to look at her.

  The argument had begun as soon as she changed. Edith tried to shut it down multiple times. Why did it matter right now? Was there nothing else more important? Even as she caked makeup on her face and neck to hide the bruises he continued. A swift kick to the bathroom door slammed it in his face
. She suspected that the argument was his distraction from worrying. Replacing fear with control, the important with the insignificant.

  “Leave it, Andrius.”

  Obediently, he didn’t mention it again in the apartment. As soon as they had left the foyer of No 1 Deansgate he gave it another outing. She greeted it with a cold backward stare and stalked off.

  The most direct way to the Beetham Tower was straight down Deansgate. The crowds were already swelling along the parade route. Neither relished swerving and badgering to fight their way through. There were a hundred other routes, longer and more circuitous, quieter and less hassle.

  Edith turned sharply left onto St Mary’s Gate and Andrius followed, agreeing with her choice without discussion. Crowds were here too, only slightly less.

  “Every man and his dog has turned out for these bloody royals.” He put on a mock English accent as he spoke, hoping to raise her mood. She gave him the merest smile in acknowledgement of his effort.

  They crossed the road between a gap in the crowd, took a right at the Royal Exchange and into St Ann’s Square. The crowds fell away almost instantly, leaving only shoppers. A busker plucked an mbira, the simple melody masking the din of the city beyond.

  The Georgian and Victorian buildings in the square gleamed ethereally in the pale clear light of winter. They framed St Ann’s church at the far end, which had managed to attract a few tourists looking for snaps before the parade began.

  Andrius smiled and led Edith by the hand.

  “What’s wrong?” She felt him tremble.

  “I’m nervous.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “No, it’s...wait.”

  He led her round the side of St Ann’s church and into the small arcade to the rear. He stopped outside a jeweller’s, the window display sprinkled with gold and silver rings on soft ivory cushions. He took Edith’s face in his hands and kissed her. She tried to pull away. He drew her nearer.