She was even prettier close up, Peggy thought. Smiling hazily, the girl took a step towards her. Two steps.
“You’re not her effing mother.”
The meathead jerked the girl back into him, holding her forearm tight enough to make her squeal. She slapped the palm of her hand against his barrel-chest in feeble protest.
“Bugger off, Lurch.” The voice of entitlement – the result of hundreds of thousands of pounds spent at the right sort of school with the right sort of people. Not that of a man used to disappointment or refusal. “If anyone’s seeing her home, we are. Aren’t we, boys?”
The captain leaned down to slam his wet lips against the girl’s, forcing open her pink lips and pushing his tongue into her mouth to the raucous cheering of his team-mates. She reared back, the blonde head moving from side to side as she tried to squirm away, but he held on, sliding his muscled thigh between the slim legs.
One of the team held his hockey stick in his hand, the curved head balanced on the floor as if it was a rifle and he was a solider on guard duty. He took the kiss as his cue to shove Peggy hard in a bid to get her moving, but she held her ground. It helped to be a big lass sometimes.
“Touch me again, and I will deck you,” she said to the rifleman and there was a roar of laughter and jeers from his teammates.
Why wait? It was inevitable.
Peggy slammed the heel of her hand into the soft tissue of the Roman nose on the right and heard it break.
Her dad, a roughneck on the oil-rigs, taught her never to wait for the lummocks to catch up. It was a waste of your valuable time and evolutionary advantage.
“Peggy lovey, when it’s going to end badly, be sure and get your retaliation in first,” he’d told her. “Don’t ever think you have to play nice. Trust your instincts and play by your own rules – not theirs.”
Blood gushed from the Roman nose as she wrested the hockey stick from the rifleman’s shocked grasp, driving the stick end into his belly and the wooden head into the jaw of the man on the left, raising her leg in the same moment and kicking him full-on in the crotch. Shrieking, he staggered sideways, bent over, his hands clutching his groin. If she was lucky she’d broken his jawbone and front teeth as well as dispatching his bollocks to his chest cavity.
She had seconds.
She grabbed the blonde’s wrist, hauling her away from her captor, taking a step backwards and then another, her eyes still locked on the shocked face of the team captain. The dancing girl moved as Peggy moved. Sobering up fast. Heat coming off her. The smell of blackcurrant and cider.
There, Peggy saw it.
A white-hot flare of outrage.
The big lump had disrespected him. In front of the boys. Failed to pay due deference. Worse yet, she was stealing his prize. His beautiful piece of flesh.
As the meathead rushed them, Peggy used the stick as a scythe shin-height forcing their attackers into reverse, tipping a chair, another, and then a table, glass shattering against the paved floor, before slamming the stick at an angle into the narrow doorway creating a barricade between them and the rats’ nest of boys.
The meathead shouted – hurling aside a broken chair, his teammates piling in behind, as Peggy shoved the blonde out into the corridor, slammed the huge outer door shut and rammed home the bolts. There was a moment’s silence as the two girls leaned their backs against the door.
It was cooler in the stone corridor. The air fresher without the fug of cigarette smoke and the heat of sweaty, compressed bodies.
There was a crashing noise as the ancient door juddered in its frame as if a bench was being used as a battering ram.
“Nice stick work,” the blonde said, as she smashed the glass case of the fire alarm with her elbow and pressed the button. “But how fast can you run?”
Chapter 11
OXFORD UNIVERSITY
Sixteen years earlier
The vomit came fast and violent, surging out of her stomach and up her oesophagus to splatter into the metal waste bin, pinging and humming as it hit the sides and bottom. Honor collapsed back on to the bed, but the arm behind her forced her up again. Sure enough the vomit hadn’t finished with her. She retched, and felt a cool hand sweep back her hair, hold it behind her ear and some part she hadn’t anaesthetised with vodka and tablets called out for her mother and the pain of missing started over.
Whoever was holding her must have decided Honor was done. She felt herself lowered back into the pillows and a cold flannel wiped over her face then laid across her pounding forehead.
Should she look? If she opened her eyes, it was going to hurt. Darkness was safer. Closer to blessed, longed-for oblivion. But she wasn’t being given a choice.
“Honor. Do you think you can drink some water?”
She opened her eyes. Bright sunshine. Agonising. Sweeping off the flannel, she squeezed them tight shut, turned over in the bed despite the shattering pain of it, face to the whitewashed wall. Leave. Her. Alone. For God’s sake.
It was night when she woke again. The headache there but dulled and, self-pitying, she groaned, opening her eyes just a fraction. All right, she was ready for that water and paracetamol.
But this time the figure by the lead-paned window didn’t move to her aid. She was gazing up into the stars.
“The strangest thing happened.”
Warm breath clouded the cold glass.
The figure turned, as if sensing Honor’s eyes on her. It was Peggy. The Northern nerd studying physics. Again. It was bad enough the other night when they did a runner from the bar. She was grateful. Obviously. Apparently, there’d been trouble with the hockey club before and it hadn’t ended well for the girl, which is probably why they didn’t bring in the police or the college authorities this time. Still, ever since, Peggy kept turning up. Knocking at her door with that smile where she never showed her teeth. Her eyes crinkling as if she had never seen anything better than Honor in her entire life. And Honor telling her things to fill the silence as they drank instant coffee together, before she could make her excuses and throw her out. Knowing Peggy would come back. Didn’t she know anyone else? Didn’t she have any real friends? She was like a stray dog. Honor didn’t need another friend. She had plenty of fun people to hang with. Admittedly, they weren’t here right now, and she didn’t feel like being alone. Plus if her memory served, she’d been sick so poor old Peggy might well have been on puke patrol. An unfamiliar sense of shame crept over Honor, settling somewhere in the pit of her bilious stomach. It was a bad one yesterday – the anniversary. That excoriating loneliness. The noise of the shotgun firing over and over. Blood everywhere. The wreckage of her mother’s face. Her father. She flung an arm over her eyes, willing herself back down into sleep, but it wasn’t there.
Peggy was talking again. Her voice flat and mellow, easy to listen to. Where was she from?
“I was out at the observatory a while ago and it was a clear night.”
The thrumming in Honor’s ears was loud but she held on to the words to pull herself through the noise and nausea, climbing hand over hand up from the solitary darkness where the only company were bleeding, worm-eaten corpses. Normally Peggy didn’t talk – she listened. Honor found herself wanting to hear what the other girl had to say.
“A right good night for watching. And what I’d wanted to see was the Crab Nebula because that’s my favourite. It’s what’s left after the explosion of a supernova nearly a thousand years ago – 6,300 light years away from earth, and I check on it every now and then, to make sure it’s still there.”
Tentative, Honor used her hands to lever herself up on to her pillows, resisting the sensation that meteorites were falling on her head, one after the other from an immense height.
“I’ve heard of it happening, but it’s never happened to me before.” She turned towards Honor. “I found it all right, the nebula, and then out the corner of my eye there were all these other stars, other galaxies, and it was as if the night-sky was swallowing me. It was so imm
ense, so infinite, and I was this itsy-bitsy little thing.”
Peggy smiled and Honor smiled with her at the thought the huge girl at the window could ever be itsy-bitsy, but Peggy’s eyes remained serious.
“I realised I was nothing and out there,” she gestured to the window, beyond the glass, “was everything, and that I didn’t matter.”
Honor lay still in the bed. She didn’t need to look into the stars to know she was nothing. Peggy left the window and walked towards the bed. It wasn’t far. Four steps. Three. But to Honor it seemed to take an age before the other girl sat down.
“The thing is, just for that solitary moment, I forgot that I do matter.”
“You don’t.” Honor’s voice to her own ears was ugly from the retching of earlier. “None of us do.”
Peggy drew herself back, reaching out her hand to turn on the bedside light, changing the room from bluey-darkness to a golden yellow, and the pain was back. Honor shielding her eyes from the worst of it, blinking, adjusting to the brightness before she took away her hand.
Peggy waited.
“There’s the thing, Honor Jones. Look again, because you’re absolutely, bollockingly wrong. We do matter. All of us. Especially you and me.”
In the college room at the top of the winding staircase, they talked most of that night. Peggy drinking builder’s tea, Honor sipping water and then a weak cup of peppermint tea. Eating toast and anchovy butter. They talked through that weekend and by tea-time Sunday, they had it all worked out. Honor was studying law. She would be a lawyer. Right wrongs. She’d go into politics and become Prime Minister. While Peggy found new worlds, Honor would change this one into something altogether more marvellous. Peggy had no doubt it was an excellent plan and Honor was prepared to believe her.
Chapter 12
LONDON
1.30pm. Tuesday, 7th November
Names were scrawled in blue and green marker pen on a whiteboard behind the nurses’ station on Ward 23 at St Thomas’ Hospital. He’d followed the housekeeper through the door to avoid buzzing for entry. And as two nurses passed, their heads close together, he willed them not to look up. There was a moment’s panic as he scanned the board for “Honor Jones”. No such patient. No HJ. No MP. No Jane Doe. No Jane Smith. Perhaps someone advised discretion – who? A hospital consultant? A call from Downing Street?
How would you keep things discreet in a hospital?
In red pen, Room 1, marked “isolation measures”.
He pushed open the door, checking the corridor as he closed it behind him, the squeaky wheel of the housekeeper’s trolley receding into the distance. Honor lay in the hospital bed, unmoving and whiter than the sheet which covered her.
He’d watched the paramedics arrive at her flat, the blue lights of the police shortly afterwards. He wondered what they would make of the corpse. Exactly how the Board would erase it from their statements and memories.
When they stretchered Honor out, he slipped away. He did what he could. It wasn’t enough to keep her safe, but she was at least alive. He was keen to stay that way himself – to disappear and to believe that there was an outside chance that the Board would let him. That Tarn would argue he had served them well. That his discretion could be relied upon and that savage dogs should be left to sleep. But it wasn’t happening – the photograph proved as much. Tarn’s concern – telling him he mattered, that he could be a great man, all of it relied on North being the obedient son. Step out of his prescribed role and the sanction was ultimate and bloody. Bruno was probably pleading to be the one to deliver the coup de grace.
She sensed him rather than heard him, and her eyes fluttered and opened – widening at the sight.
“…killer…” he heard. A rabbit-punch. What did he expect? That she’d see him and think he was a hero? She didn’t trust him, he reminded himself, and that was okay.
“You look better,” he said. “Better” but still too pale. “Better” but a saline drip stood by the bed, its tube strapped to the right arm which lay above the sheet, a tight bandage around the wrist and up her forearm.
“Better” as opposed to exposed and ridiculous, which was how he was feeling. Her one-time murderer dropping by her bedside to visit. He should have brought black grapes and barley water.
She tried and failed to sit up straighter in bed, her head falling back on to the pillow at the effort.
She eyed the small rucksack on his back.
“I didn’t figure you for a rambler, Michael North.”
She hadn’t forgotten his name. He didn’t know whether to be flattered or worried.
In the rucksack was Honor’s ten thousand pounds and passport, and fifty thousand in sterling and dollars of his own along with a selection of credit cards in a brown Smythson wallet, passports and driving licences – in three different names – a couple of boxes of the purple pills and a Sig-Sauer P226, collected from a safe in Hatton Garden, where an Orthodox Jewish jeweller made discretion another God. North believed in escape routes.
“I owe you an apology. I didn’t believe you when you said they’d send someone else so soon,” she wrinkled her nose, “I didn’t want to believe there was some assembly line of sociopaths, all of them out to kill me.”
“If that’s you saying thank you. You’re welcome.”
She frowned as if she was thinking hard about something unpleasant – him probably – but as she opened her mouth, he raised his finger to his lips. Voices outside the door…
“she’s resting…shan’t disturb her…just need to…”
The visitor had no intention of being stopped.
North moved fast – easing the bathroom door in the far corner of the room all but closed, as the visitor pushed open the ward door – crashing it against the wall.
Honor raised her head, her arms reaching for her visitor, and in the windowless, antiseptic-smelling bathroom, North felt a flicker of envy.
North recognised the visitor because he read the papers. JP Armitage: 50-something communications billionaire, Conservative party donor, philanthropist and major shareholder in the country’s New Army.
“What on earth were you thinking, Honor?”
The tycoon threw down the swag of tiny pale-green and crimson-throated orchids across the bed as if they embarrassed him. His craggy face was set, his lips a line as he dragged the moulded-plastic chair closer to the bed, his powerful legs tucked under him – a big man sitting on a chair meant for a smaller one.
He gave up trying to keep his temper. He was incandescent. “You should have come to me.”
JP Armitage – rumoured to keep a black book of grudges that went back to his childhood in the cobbled back-to-backs of the roughest streets in Leeds. The third richest man in the country according to the Sunday Times Rich List – his wealth founded on his scrap metal company which had long since evolved into a transnational empire of communications and IT, real and cyber security, and high finance. The New Army just one more way to make money.
Armitage bent his head over the bandaged hand he held between his, and North sensed the tycoon attempt to master himself.
“I told you Peggy was missing,” Honor said.
“Peggy is in Chile – the university told you that. Or New Mexico. Star-gazing in some desert. Her mind’s full of pulsars and quarks – whatever the hell they are.”
“I only wish that was true.”
“I’ve set good people in both places looking for her. They’ll find her. Her brain doesn’t function the way your brain works or mine. She’ll be horrified when she gets home and sees what she’s put you through.”
So Peggy was some absent-minded professor who might forget the fact her friend worried about her? That might well be true, thought North, but it didn’t explain the death sentence on Honor.
“JP, you don’t even like Peggy so don’t pretend you care.”
“What do you mean ‘I don’t like Peggy’? She makes it perfectly clear she can’t stand me. She as good as accused me of grooming you w
hen you were a kid. It’s hard to spend Christmas with someone after that.”
JP knew Honor as a child. North re-evaluated the relationship as Honor narrowed her eyes.
“She’s important to me.”
“I respect what she did for you when you were younger,” JP’s tone softened. “But you’re all grown up.”
“Then stop telling me what to think. And what about that poor boy who died on the bridge?” Honor never lost focus North realised. Even when it appeared that she might be on the defensive, that she was distracted or changing course, in reality, she never lost sight of her primary target.
Armitage waved, dismissing the boy on the bridge and his leap into oblivion, keeping hold of Honor with his other hand as if she might slip away. She was off-message. From his vantage point, North could see Armitage’s foot bouncing up and down. He was working hard to control his anger.
“Ned wasn’t your responsibility. He was unbalanced. He needed a shrink, Honor – not a bloody MP.” JP’s voice was loud. This wasn’t their first argument about Peggy, North guessed. “I know you want to, and I know why, but you can’t save everyone.”
The colour in Honor’s cheeks rose as she made to draw her hand away, but the tycoon refused to let go, moving his chair closer to the bed.
“You think that you have to be perfect, Honor, but this isn’t a perfect world. I blame myself – this affair dragging on when we should be married. You need stability in your life and I’ve been too distracted by work.”
“JP, you flatter yourself.” Finally, freeing herself from his grip. “Someone tried to kill me – that’s not on you.”
A flicker of puzzlement crossed the craggy face before he smoothed it out, but Honor caught it anyway. She considered her bandaged wrist, and as she turned back to him her voice rose – an anxious child, one who can’t sleep because of the bogeyman under her bed. “Ask the doctors. They’ll tell you. Ask the police.”
Desperate for him to believe her. Desperate to sound normal. Failing.
Killing State Page 7