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by Claire North

  Stopped again. Stared at nothing. Asked an incidental thing: “Did you kill Lady Helen?”

  Theo didn’t answer, looked away.

  Markse grunted. Said, “Tell me about the queen of the patties.”

  And he told him.

  And Markse said, “How many people does she have?”

  And he told him.

  And Markse said, “What weapons does she have?”

  And Theo

  lied a little bit, because he could, because he knew this game now, he could sense the flow of it he lied just a little bit

  Because somewhere on the other side of his city his daughter was alive and killing aliens.

  And nothing else mattered any more.

  Chapter 77

  When Simon Fardell came to visit he didn’t know where to begin. He just stood by the door and looked at Theo for a very long time and finally, because he seemed to feel like it, because he was angry and his world was coming apart, he kicked Theo a bit, and that made him feel better. He stopped when Theo’s breakfast came up again because it smelled a lot and he stood by the door and

  didn’t really have much to say for himself.

  Then:

  “Theo Miller died fifteen years ago. I was there. So who the fuck are you?”

  Theo crawled into a corner, pressed his head against the wall, licked acid from his lips.

  “Philip shot him. He died. I remember it very clearly. I don’t remember you.”

  When Theo didn’t answer, Simon looked for a moment like he might do a bit more kicking, but that would have meant stepping over the puke on the floor and that was just uch, it was

  So he leaned in close and whispered, “When I sell your daughter, it’ll be to someone who really appreciates the things you can do to little girls.”

  Theo managed to get a hand around Simon’s throat before security came in and stamped on him, and retrospectively Simon seemed more satisfied with this result than Theo could possibly be.

  Markse sat on a stool in the corner of the room, the smell of bleach on the floor, a bottle of water at the end of Theo’s mattress, and said:

  “Of course my life, in my line of work you make choices. Certain choices you make—you understand this you make these choices, and well …”

  Theo scratched at the sole of his left foot as Markse talked. The skin was soft and wet, came away in painless white flakes beneath his nails, oddly satisfying, like kneading pastry.

  “I found myself asking, what would make this ordinary man, this harmless individual, go to such extraordinary lengths? Principle? For a while I thought that was it. Just principle. You were the kind of man who—if you pardon me saying so—seemed enough of a socially isolated individual that principle, yes, you could compromise a lot for principle, but then I thought … all those years working for the Criminal Audit Office, surely there were other cases, worse cases, where your sense of morality would have been more offended this was hardly …

  So I looked again, and I thought maybe I’d got it wrong. Maybe the man who stands up for principle is a lie, because there was no evidence that you’d ever stood up for anything before. None at all. You were, in fact, a moral vacuum. Oh, not in a spectacular way. You were no more or less evil than anyone else in society, and in fact evil isn’t even the operative word. Apathetic, perhaps. Yes, that’s it. You were as apathetic as everyone else, and to square that now with your actions, maybe everything I had concluded was false and in fact …

  So what was left? There seemed nothing in you to hate, you hadn’t been rejected, didn’t seem unhappy at work, didn’t strike me as proud or motivated by irrationality, and when all these things were eliminated, at the very end the only thing it left room for was love. At the end it did do that. Of course my first instinct is love, when fear is discarded, the romantic angle, but when I met you that was clearly absurd. But as time went by …

  Your acquisition of the Theo Miller identity was excellent. I couldn’t have done a better job and I’m …

  It wasn’t that you made an error. It just that there had to be, there had to be something we’d missed.

  We found his grave, in the end. The real Theo Miller. That led to the opening of the files and there he was, dead in Oxford, shot by Philip Arnslade, and I thought that’s it! That’s got to be it, but what does that have to do with Dani Cumali how does that possibly …

  I still don’t know who you are. I still don’t. I thought perhaps someone else at the duel, someone else who … Simon Fardell says there was someone else there but can’t remember anything about him. A ‘scurrying nobody’ was how he put it. I thought … that sounds about right. A scurrying nobody who everyone forgets, that seems … and I thought, here’s this man who vanished and here’s this new Theo Miller who lived and I looked at the years and there was a moment, this instant where I had Dani Cumali’s life pinned to the wall and the life of the man who became Theo Miller on the other and there’s Lucy’s birthday, there she is and it’s …

  shitting hell almost exactly nine months

  practically to the day

  after Theo Miller died.

  And I thought no.

  No.

  It wouldn’t be—it can’t be that simple it can’t be that

  But then how did you get Cumali’s information? She must have known you she must have trusted you there must have been some sort of pre-existing—some sort of …

  You must have known her.

  You must have.

  And even if the girl wasn’t your daughter even if she wasn’t then

  But she was.

  She was.

  I just

  It made everything more

  And even if she wasn’t I thought

  I don’t have any children. My line of work, it wasn’t ever a thing which seemed … apt.

  My office is funded by Simon. He sold a company that was owned by a company that …

  But I suppose we’ve always been owned by them, really. And my boss said, after Philip died, tell it to Simon. So I did. It’s my job, it is required, I am a man, you see, used to a certain order in things. I told him about your daughter, and he was delighted. We picked her up that very day, took her to Simon’s home, he fed her like a princess, he fawned over her it was …

  And I looked at him and thought, this man is going to …”

  Stopped himself.

  Looked, for the very first time, ashamed.

  “I think that perhaps … there are some despicable things I’ve done, but perhaps … but Simon has a wife, Heidi, and I think she can sense what he wants, knows that there is something in the way he looks at Lucy, and Heidi has been … she’s always wanted a daughter.

  I am good at my job. It’s important to be good at your job. It’s very important. It’s how we know we’re … good people. Because we work hard. We work hard and we do our best and … I am very good at my job. You were good at your job too, weren’t you, Mr. Miller? If we are both good at our jobs, then it doesn’t matter what these jobs are, because it isn’t the consequence that matters, just the doing.

  Just the doing.

  That’s how the world works. Everything is

  I thought that

  it’s how the world is it’s how

  you just do

  what you can when the world is

  how the world works.

  What else is there?”

  Theo didn’t answer. He thought there was perhaps a moment when he might have had something to say, something about standing up and taking control and being …

  But he can’t find it. It all seems very self-important, now.

  “Are you Lucy’s father?”

  No answer.

  “You don’t even know her. It can’t mean so much.”

  Theo looks for a moment like he might retch, fingers frozen mid-scrape along the damp heel of his foot.

  “Maybe it is love,” mused Markse, staring at the ceiling. “Maybe it is at that.”

  A while they sat, starin
g into their own places.

  “Of course my work,” Markse breathed. “Sometimes I look at the actions I’ve taken and

  if I had a daughter, and if she was in danger then …

  The threat, you see. The threat is itself a beastly matter, even if you never follow through. Here is your daughter, safe in the house of your enemies. Come now, or we will hurt her. We’ll hurt her. We’ll hurt this child. It is the vilest sort of

  But what has to be done.

  A question of the value of the thing. Of the balance. Once you have life on the line, even a child’s life—especially a child’s life, if you are willing to go so far. To kill a child.

  The vilest thing.

  What’s your name, Mr. Miller? I’m curious I don’t think it’s relevant it won’t affect …

  No.

  Well.

  I suppose—

  that’s fair, in its way.”

  At night the prison is cold and Dani Cumali sits next to him and says,

  “Ow that’s my arm it’s ow mind where you put your backside you great”

  Theo rolls over and stares at a concrete ceiling sprayed with seaside stars.

  “And I’m going to get a better job, a new job, and then I’ll be able to move away from here and actually maybe I’ll move first to get a new job because around here there’s nothing it’s just getting the money you know getting the money to move so job first then”

  He holds Dani close, and she stares up at the starlight with him and says:

  “My bum’s gone to sleep.”

  And he holds her closer still.

  “Bloody mess, really. Don’t know how it got there. Don’t know what we did. Thought we had some control but actually I’m not sure we ever did not sure there was anything we could have done which someone else hadn’t decided it’s like when”

  And does not sleep, as the sky turns, far away.

  Chapter 78

  He thought it was late at night, and it was early in the morning, and still dark.

  They put him in a nine-seater car on the verge of becoming a truck.

  Next to him was Edward Witt, face grey, looking a little nauseous. Next to Edward was Faris. The old man smiled limply, shook his head at an idea that Theo didn’t understand, and looked away. The three seats opposite were turned to face them. Three security officers, two men and a woman, sat in silence and watched their passengers. The driver listened to Radio 2. Every fifteen minutes the broadcast was interrupted for traffic news. The traffic was bad. Sometimes they drove up the motorway on the hard shoulder, and no one tried to stop them.

  Edward didn’t look at Theo for a very long time, but wrinkled his nose. Theo imagined he smelled. He enjoyed imagining this. The windows were tinted, making the yellow street lights splay across the glass in thin little lines, starburst through a grate. The traffic news remained bad as they reached the M25 toll. Someone had driven off the road somewhere further along. A bus had skidded into a ditch. Maybe children had died; maybe they hadn’t. Maybe it was a miracle on the M25; maybe it was a tragic loss of life. Either way, here was another hit from the 1980s, bringing back that warm, glowing feeling inside.

  They stopped briefly at a service station. Everyone got out, so Theo did too. A security man stood by him without rancour. There were six cars in the convoy, men in suits, women in black leather shoes, tinted windows, four police motorcycle escorts. There were no other cars in the service station, and only one pump worked. Markse drank coffee, and didn’t look at Theo. Faces glowed in the white light of mobile phones. A harried woman in laddered beige tights balanced coffee for twelve on a couple of trays, swaying uneasily back through the car park, yellow lights of the twenty-four-hour coffee stop behind her. Two men returned, laughing, bladders relieved, bodies relaxed; one man with his back to the world shouted down a mobile phone, but the wind carried away everything except the anger.

  Edward stood next to Theo and swallowed espresso in a single gulp.

  “You little shit,” he said at last, not looking at Theo’s face, eyes narrowed on a small gaggle of women huddled together with clipboards. “You’ve no idea what you’ve done, have you?”

  Theo shrugged, and they got back in the car.

  The sun was rising by the time they reached Newton Bridge, but the smoke hid the brightest of the day. Theo smelled it before he saw the remnants of the town, mortar dust and boiling tar, petrol and timber.

  They pulled to one side in a narrow country lane, bouncing through the potholes as two yellow buses drove the opposite way. The windows were grated up; the prisoners inside were chained at the throat and feet. A handprint painted in scarlet pressed against the glass as they passed by.

  The convoy waited, then moved on.

  They parked in what had once been the car park for the local library, and did not pay. The noise of the bulldozers made it hard to hear the words that Markse spoke as Theo was pulled gently by the arm into the lee of a pale blue-grey wall. Sometimes rifle fire pitted out, to be met by machine gun; if there were voices raised, they were lost in the din. Theo stood, shivering in the morning cold, breath steaming, one side of his face dry and hot from the growing flames rising off the former town hall, the other chilled and cracked by the winter air. Faris, Witt, three or four more he didn’t recognise, stood next to him, and none of them moved. One was a woman, in a smart beige trouser suit. She held Faris’s hand, and if you knew she was his daughter, then it was impossible to see anything else in her face, and Theo was relieved that it was Faris’s daughter who was going to die today, and he couldn’t see Lucy in the line.

  People milled on mobile phones, and somewhere behind, another burst of gunfire, louder, broke across the slow hill of Newton Bridge. A truck on caterpillar tracks rode over the gentle mound where the pub had been; someone shouted, “Clear!” and another wall burst, rubble and flame and far off the sound of a woman calling for something lost. On the other side of the car park was a low stream, rushing down towards the bottom of the hill, all white foam and mossy rocks, a babbling brook you might even have called it, a playful spout of the river that had once fed the mill. Theo watched the water. A group of men in dark blue fatigues, assault rifles in hand, jogged briskly by, and the sun rose higher, burning away the mist, and somewhere a little too near for comfort the whoosh of a flame-thrower spat and a man burned alive screaming screaming that sound screaming but all the screams did was let in the flame that burned out his lungs and that was the end of the screaming and

  Another car pulled up, flanked either side by heavy four-by-fours. It stopped fifty yards from where Theo stood, and no one got out, and shapes moved behind the glass, and nothing else happened.

  Theo’s teeth chattered in the cold, and he wondered if the others were as cold as he was, and they probably were, but no one said a thing.

  Footsteps.

  A marching line of soldiers, weapons at the ready

  a cluster of prisoners in between.

  One woman helped another walk. Queen Bess could probably have walked by herself, but Bea hooked one arm under her elbow anyway, like a father escorting a bride to a reluctant altar. Both were coated in white dust; the side of Bea’s face and hair was matted to a thick black-crimson mortar with blood. Bess saw the wall, and stumbled, and Bea caught her and held her tight, and they kept walking, and joined the line in front of the empty library.

  Theo looked at them, and they stared dead ahead and did not meet his eye.

  After a little while Edward fell down, and Theo helped him up, and Edward clung to Theo’s arm and whispered, “All I did was ask. I just asked. I thought—I only asked.”

  Theo nodded, and kept a grip on the crook of his elbow, and behind them something went whoosh, and the town burned, and a bulldozer crawled over the remnants of the patties’ little world and all things considered it died so easily, so easily, it died and

  Theo closed his eyes and time is

  shivering in the winter cold time is

  The click of a safet
y coming off a gun.

  Theo opened his eyes. Thought he would be able to keep them shut, was surprised to discover that he couldn’t. Thought he saw someone move behind the glass of the parked vehicle opposite. Saw, but didn’t entirely understand, a man in blue raise a pistol, and shoot Faris in the face. Faris fell.

  Ching ching ching! £36,000 for cold-blooded murder, minus £2000 for not making your victim suffer needlessly, now what was the value of Faris’s life, he had been on the patty line but wasn’t currently a burden on the financial system, were there any health problems were there

  about £92,000, Theo concludes before the body hits the floor. A deposit on a two-bedroom flat in Denmark Hill.

  The man stepped past Faris’s body, wandered down the line, back once, up once, down again, picked a target, levelled the gun at Bea’s head, listened for an order only he could hear, shot Bea between the eyes. Stepped briskly past Edward, levelled the gun at Theo’s head.

  Waited, listening for an order.

  Theo stared into the barrel, and was briefly confused but not scared, and was surprised that he wasn’t afraid.

  “Bang,” said the soldier, repeating words heard through an earpiece. “Lucy is dead.”

  Then he nodded, turned to the queen of the patties, and shot her in the face and twice in the chest when she hit the ground.

  Edward cried, and Theo waited and the man listened for instructions and nodded at something unheard and barked, “Right you lot. Let’s get them buried.”

  They dug a pit in a field on the edge of town where sometimes cabbages were grown. Theo didn’t feel the pit was deep enough—the crows would get the bodies in no time, a strong rain would wash the soil away—but the work warmed him up and the guards seemed happy enough, so he and Edward Witt picked up Bea. Edward lifted her by the feet, Theo under the arms. Her body swung awkwardly in the middle, hinging at the hips, bum bumping along the ground. That made Theo more upset than her blood on his hands, her broken skull and ruptured eyes, staring. A woman like Bea shouldn’t have her backside dragged through dirt, she should be carried properly, he struggled to lift her, to haul her higher, but Edward didn’t seem to understand, didn’t seem to get why this was important, was just shaking and crying without making a sound, his silk suit ruined, spit flecking his mouth with every ragged exhale.