84k

by Claire North

  Until whatever it is that seemed so important at the time, has ended.

  At Bletchley Neila rambled: “The Company runs things—I mean they always have what are you going to do about it it’s just how …”

  And saw Theo’s face, and stopped talking, and felt strangely embarrassed.

  Half a mile later three men and a woman came the other way on a wide barge covered in tarps, and as they passed the woman slowed and called out across the water, “Are you going to Milton Keynes? There’s nothing there. They closed the ski slope and they don’t play hockey any more. The cows were taken up from the roundabouts and sold to a man who owns things. There’s only patties, children and screamers there now, apart from the sanctuaries, and they shoot strangers. You don’t want to go to Milton Keynes. If you go, if you see my daughter, tell her that I didn’t mean the things I said. I didn’t mean them, it’s just the meds. She’ll understand.”

  Neila smiled and didn’t answer, and Theo went inside and checked the bandages where he was bleeding again, and couldn’t be bothered to change them, and didn’t want to make a fuss.

  Chapter 20

  These are the rituals of Theo’s life:

  Up, run, 10km on a Saturday, trailing along at the back of a park jogging group who all sort of know each other vaguely enough to smile but not well enough to ask anyone their name.

  Bicycle to work

  murder rape arson abuse neglect negligence conspiracy fraud …

  In the evenings he’d stop off at the supermarket in Balham. He didn’t go there often, but there were ingredients he couldn’t find elsewhere, and he’d overload his basket and struggle back to Mrs. Italiaander’s in second gear, huffing and puffing through the clogged-up traffic to get home and make

  fish grilled with red peppers

  lemon mushroom risotto

  roast feta and black olive salad

  aubergine and tomato baked with balsamic vinegar

  When he first moved in, Theo worried that he was hogging the kitchen, had tried to keep every meal fast, take up no space on the long black counter. After a while he’d realised that he was almost the only resident who liked cooking at all. Marvin lived on microwave meals and takeaways—some of Budgetfood’s products no less. Theo had tried to tell him about where it came from, about Shawford and the sea, but Marvin didn’t pretend to care.

  Mrs. Italiaander lived on the same meal every day, which consisted of two slices of wholegrain, seed-studded bread, toasted without butter; an onion cut in half and microwaved, a couple of slices of smoked salmon, half a pot of yoghurt, some celery sticks, with hummus on Tuesdays and Fridays only, and a half-bottle of rosé wine.

  Nikesh made curries with paste from a jar, to which he added whole chillies and a tablespoon of salt.

  Every six or seven weeks Theo made food for everyone, though no one ate at the same time, and his contract was always peacefully renewed, and Mrs. Italiaander whispered that he was almost like a son to her and not to tell her boy she felt that way.

  Sometimes, when it was raining or there was something he really wanted to see, Theo went to the cinema. A local art-house place had installed screens in the basement where you could watch documentaries from its archive for no more than the price of an expensive cup of coffee. Once he’d got locked in when the cleaner hadn’t spotted him, hunkered down in his alcove, watching a film about the hunting birds of Patagonia.

  On the first Sunday of every month he helped the local community gardening group with their planting boxes down by the rookery, and one April he shared shovels with a woman called Celeste who had been funny and clever and beautiful and

  Theo didn’t have many friends

  … but she’d checked her horoscope the morning after, and it warned that Saturn was entering an unwelcome aspect, and he was a Taurus and she didn’t want to argue with the stars. Who did really?

  They met again at the monthly gardening group and smiled at each other, but now the whimsy and the merriment that he had found enchanting before seemed frankly infantile and very, very annoying.

  The morning after the night before …

  Theo must have slept because he wakes and he is screaming, his head is screaming. He read once upon a time about a thing, exploding-head syndrome so your head doesn’t actually explode but you feel like it’s going bang boom a bomb going off in his skull

  SHE’S YOUR DAUGHTER!

  And then he sleeps again, and wakes, ashamed that he slept at all, and wasn’t kept awake by the image of Dani’s face/brains/blood by the guilt of …

  … of things he probably should be feeling guilty about he wasn’t sure he had hoped for a certain clarity at least but even that was

  He slept in his clothes, face down, a little wet pool of dribble on his pillow where he fell. Twelve hours ago Dani Cumali lived; now she is dead, and Theo’s thighs ache from cycling, and he lies on his bed wide awake exactly two minutes before his alarm is due to go off, and his head is …

  The pain already fading, with the rising light of dawn.

  A grey sweep of a grey day across a world unchanged.

  He looks out of the window.

  Mrs. Italiaander’s front garden is almost entirely rose bush, which does not flower, and castor oil plant. If she ever loses patience with her family, she threatens to turn it into ricin for that truly cataclysmic Christmas dinner party. She read about it online. It’s not that hard really …

  Beyond, the world carries on.

  Children are hurried out of bed

  milk into cereal bowls

  showers

  steam

  heat on tired muscles sigh of relief

  tying shoelaces

  checking the phone

  rattling the rubbish cart down the street

  smell of the bus

  hiss of pneumatic door

  Dani Cumali is dead and the world

  continues.

  And Theo Miller also.

  Chapter 21

  Theo took the train to work, and immediately remembered why he never did and how much he hated it.

  He arrived five minutes late. Usually arriving late earned a place on the Efficiency Wall, where photos of shamed members of staff who were not holding up departmental standards were displayed. However, Theo was never late, never, and rather than the ritual chiding, he received an automatically generated email informing him that he had been docked one hour’s pay, and a concerned knock on the door from Edward’s secretary, El, asking him if he was okay.

  “I’m fine. Think I’m coming down with something.”

  “Ah, yes …” she muttered, and beat a hasty retreat to the antibacterial gel she kept in the bottom drawer of her desk.

  Words on a screen.

  beaten to death with a clothes iron

  run over then run over again three times he drove the car until she was

  dropped the child out of the window

  claims he didn’t realise how hard he was hitting until it was too late

  a kitchen knife, the relationship had been deteriorating for

  When Theo’s calendar beeped, reminding him of the weekly team performance meeting, he nearly laughed.

  Sat at the back.

  Did his best not to fall asleep.

  Returned to his desk.

  Forgot to eat lunch.

  set on fire after school because she called her fat

  strangled after refusing to consider marriage with the man in

  trapped between the cot and the wall suffocated to death

  police investigation fee: £7891.56 (ex. VAT)

  societal responsibility levy: £81,000

  victim assessment fee: £128,918

  no. of pets left behind by deceased: 3

  value of pets: £5680

  cost of rehousing pets: £675

  But hey! The cats have already been spayed otherwise that’d be another £240 on the indemnity for the killer to pay, can’t have non-spayed cats running around it’d be …

&
nbsp; Dependent children remaining to deceased: 1.

  Age of child: 7.

  Added value of dependent minor: £18,900, plus a further £2715 because the child witnessed her mother die and will thus require mandatory counselling with a recommended sponsor who will charge …

  will charge …

  a fee equivalent to …

  on an hourly basis of …

  Theo realised he’d been staring at nothing, and started hard enough to knock his empty coffee cup off the desk.

  It tumbled to the floor, the handle cracking off the side, the rest of the ceramic surviving in one piece. He picked the handle up gingerly, wrapped it in tissue paper, put it in his bag. Maybe he’d be able to stick it back on. Superglue or tile grout or … something. Gripfill, perhaps.

  Email.

  A defendant had settled his indemnity, selling off a two-bedroom flat in Putney to cover the cost. Because he’d done so without taking the matter to court, he achieved a 10 per cent discount on the murder of his mother-in-law, thus taking the total profit to the department to a mere …

  But the woman on her third shoplifting charge had already sold her mother’s wedding ring and the indemnity was overdue so her case was to be referred to the prison service for labour rehabilitation, making something useful for society, like circuit boards for mobile phones, or those glasses that don’t have any lenses in to make you look cool, or face serum guaranteed to keep you both firm and soft all at once.

  Theo looked away, marked the email as unread, went to the toilet, sat in the locked cubicle with his pants around his ankles, realised he had no idea what he was doing, sat a while longer, felt ridiculous, went back to work.

  At 4.55 the new case arrived.

  It hadn’t gone to him initially. But Charlotte Burgess, who specialised in well-paying homicides, had taken one look and done some quick maths—cause of death, manner of arrest, value of deceased—and concluded that the matter was fairly open-and-shut and couldn’t bring in more than £60,000, which wouldn’t count for much on her performance review so …

  she sent it on.

  Which was silly really, because if she’d looked closely she would have seen the discretion clause that any wise auditor could squeeze for at least another £90,000 if they played it right.

  Hey, Theo. This arrived, but I’m snowed under. Can you take a look at it? Thanks! xx

  All of Charlotte’s emails ended with two kisses. She’d once signed off to a high court judge with snuggles and lols! and the judge hadn’t known what these words meant, and assumed it was just a youth thing.

  Theo opened the case file.

  Homicide, suspect arrested and full confession given. Status: pending assessment.

  Dani Cumali.

  It occurred to him that he’d only seen her feet.

  And her brain of course but actually the brain on the wall, her bare feet pointing upwards these weren’t much to go by and he’d sort of assumed, he’d just thought well there it is, here we are but thinking about it he’d only really …

  He opened the file.

  The front of her face was remarkably intact, given the two bullets that had entered it. The back of her skull had taken most of the damage when the bullets exited, bursting open like an overheated pudding.

  The bruising across the rest of her body was almost black, the blood congealing between broken arteries post-mortem.

  A photo was attached of the killer.

  Her name was Seph Atkins, and the cops suspected this was an alias.

  Seph Atkins had called the police almost the second Dani’s body hit the floor. A transcript was attached.

  “Yes, I’d like to report a homicide … I’m sorry do you need to … yes, homicide, that’s right. No, I did it. Yes. Yes. The address is … as in sierra, echo … yes, echo … what do you estimate as being your response time? Yes, that’s fine. Thank you. Of course I can hold. Thanks.”

  And then in the distance, the sound of faint words, as if the killer was holding her phone against her shoulder, muffling her words, addressing someone else. The transcriber couldn’t decipher what was said, but Theo knew the words, heard the truth of it.

  “Now if you just make like a heron …”

  He closed the file, copied it to a USB stick, put the stick in his pocket and went home twenty minutes early. Such action might have caused something of a stir, but it being Theo, no one really noticed.

  Chapter 22

  Nearly fifteen years before Dani died, the boy who would be Theo took the train to Oxford. He had imagined that Oxford was always bathed in autumn sunlight, but when he arrived it was raining, and despite his best efforts he couldn’t seem to get invitations to any of those dinner clubs where they served whole roast pig and performed sexual acts with …

  … well, he didn’t know if he believed the rumours, but everyone said it was the best thing to do if you wanted to get ahead in life.

  He imagined he’d live on a quadrangle overlooking immaculate lawns, in rooms with high walls and medieval locks. His hall of residence was certainly near an immaculate lawn, but had been tacked on in the 1980s as a discreet extension, and featured disappointingly modern electromagnetic key fobs.

  He kept to himself. Sent Dani the odd email. Answered the phone when his mum called, and when they’d gone too long without talking would call her and they’d chat for an average of forty-three seconds.

  “Hi, Mum.”

  “Oh, you called. How nice. Yes. Very nice of you to call, yes, good that you remembered well I’m all right. I’m all right and I’m doing well it was good of you to call.”

  “I wanted to see if you were …”

  “Good of you to call, you are a good boy. Well, that’s lovely. Goodbye!”

  Mum didn’t like to intrude in his life.

  One day—at the beginning of all things, a new spring and a new season—when the rain had stopped and the sun was wet through the leaves

  He stepped outside his room to find his neighbour also in the corridor, a skinny boy with the same dark hair and drooping shoulders as himself, and the boy said:

  “Hello.”

  “Hello.”

  “We must be neighbours.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s all a little surreal, isn’t it? Us, here, this place. Fount of learning and all that, passing the port to the left, snuff after dinner.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you doing law?”

  “No, maths.”

  “Oh, maths! I can’t understand maths at all, can’t get my head around it, just like, hello no! Very impressive, maths, although I suppose at your level it’s less about numbers and more about … ideas, yes?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “No, early days I imagine, early days and … my name’s Theo. Theo Miller.”

  “Hello, Theo Miller,” said the boy who would be Theo.

  “Are you … have you met anyone yet?”

  “No. I don’t know anyone.”

  “Me neither! It’s going to be a disaster. Say, shall we be disastrous together?”

  Later, a little drunk, which was the obligatory thing to be between the hours of 7 p.m. and midnight:

  “Family’s a catastrophe. My family—Christ! So my dad’s one of the biggest rubbish collectors in northern Europe. Don’t laugh, he is, it’s how he made his fortune, but he was also a survivor of the Scottish troubles, said he saw things during the campaigns that were … so he collects art. All these pictures of broken faces and wounded eyes, all these sculptures, bones and flesh in porcelain, things coming out of other things, I grew up with that can you imagine I grew up with—”

  “Theo …”

  “You don’t even notice these things until someone points them out and then you’re like yes, fuck me, yes, that is a bit fucking off actually, isn’t it? And Mother, well, he never really loved her, I think. I mean, at the beginning, she was something young and beautiful after his first marriage—and then after the divorce he remarried and
she was younger but also a good woman, amazing woman just the most—and I love my mother too but other Mum always did her best. I was mostly raised by Aunty—that was what we called my nanny—Aunty—she was the one who was there for me while Mum and Dad went sailing because I wasn’t allowed to go sailing, I got in the way but anyway—”

  “Theo, what is claret?”

  “Something French. So there they are, sailing around the world and me I’m in boarding school, and with the schemes of course I ended up here and you know they forget my birthday but Aunty remembers, Aunty has always been—”

  “I’m not sure I like claret.”

  “You won’t last long in Oxford if you can’t drink port or claret, believe me, more that’s just what you need some more of it there you go and anyway what about your family what about—”

  “Can I tell you a secret?”

  “Of course! I’m a drunken ex-boarding-school lawyer-in-the-making! Your secrets are my sacred practice. Or duty. Whatever.”

  “My father was the driver for a mob, my mum is kinda mad, and the only reason I’m here is because the biggest petrol smuggler in Kent threatened to kill the dean’s dog unless they let me in. As a favour, you see, for my dad, who’s in prison, cos of the pharmaceutical job.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well that does put Eton rather into perspective.”

  The boy who would one day be Theo sat next to the real Theo, the one born to the name, and ate strawberries on the grass and worried about stains on his gown and watched the sparrows fly between the pale brown spires of the college and thought that there was probably something he was missing, something very important which he’d forgotten and if only …

  And the real Theo

  the one who died, said:

  “Oxford is beautiful—of course it’s beautiful! I mean it’s not real, but in a way it’s so real because it’s the old place, the place of facts—it’s shaped the world but all the people dressed as wizards that’s a bit …”

  Somewhere out towards the suburbs, a fence is being put up to keep the riff-raff out. It’s not that they’re selling PhDs these days, not at all, candidates for the fast-track PhD programme have to hand in a 2000-word essay and complete an interview before making payment for their certificate. If you pay an extra £40,000 they’ll even hire a couple of MA students to write a full-length dissertation for you. That’s just how things are. They’ve always been that way, money was always what mattered, but the beauty of this system is that we’re honest about it. It’s just good business.