Killing State

by Judith O'Reilly

  The tycoon sat back in the too-small chair, one arm dangling, and the hand Honor couldn’t see bunched itself into a tight fist.

  “Depression happens to the best of us. It’s not something to be ashamed of.” Coaxing. Charismatic. Armitage could be all of those – his worst enemies said as much. And he was working hard.

  She slowed her delivery. Spelling it out. Keeping it simple and hostile. “A man. Attacked. Me. In my bath. I was fully dressed. He cut me,” she brandished her wrist at him, “and did his level-best to drown me. I did not do this to myself.”

  North sensed Armitage’s surprise – he guessed not many people challenged the tycoon on anything. Sensed escalating anger and fear for Honor’s state of mind.

  Honor took hold of his lapel, plastic tubing flapping, the drip teetering on its casters with the movement, to bring Armitage closer. “JP, there’s a dead body in the flat.” Her voice trailed off into confusion. “Isn’t there?”

  As she let go, JP reached out to steady the drip, his face expressionless – that of a tycoon who did business deals and never allowed himself to be second-guessed, used to hiding his feelings from partners, colleagues and observers, maybe even from himself. North listened, but all he could catch from Armitage was concern for Honor.

  “And someone else attacked me this morning in the park when I was running…except…” She trailed off, hearing herself, disbelieving her own claims as if North might not be there behind the flimsy bathroom door, as if she needed to call him as a witness and prove something to herself if not to Armitage. Goosebumps rose on North’s arms as Honor contemplated the bathroom door, and JP half-turned. North held his breath. If she betrayed him, if she told Armitage he was there, it was over.

  Honor opened her mouth.

  But Armitage spoke before she could.

  “Honor, I love you, but life’s complicated for you and you put too much pressure on yourself. And that’s the truth.”

  His rugged features, the broken nose and flattened vowels – North thought how much conviction he carried, this hard man whose good opinion others sought, a self-made, bottom-up success.

  “You don’t believe me.” She gave him one last chance to contradict her.

  “I’ll be back in an hour.” He glanced at the heavy sparkling watch on his wrist as if when he said “an hour” he meant one hour and not one minute longer.

  “And we’ll take you somewhere lovely to rest up. One of my companies owns a place in Suffolk. The best people. Superlative care. More like a spa than a clinic. Everyone goes there. Then when you’re better, if Peggy still isn’t back, I’ll take you to New Mexico and on to Chile myself. We’ll visit every telescope out there till we find her. And as far as this ‘incident’ goes, my crisis management team is all over it. They’ll handle Downing Street, the constituency, the press. You just have to rest up.”

  He made it sound easy, thought North. Leave it to JP and he’ll make everything right again. Throw money at it. Pull strings. Bring in the spin doctors. A debilitating viral infection. Accute exhaustion. Physical collapse. Normal service will be resumed. Meanwhile, get his unbalanced lover into the best place with the finest head doctors and use some high-priced corporate security firm to track down her missing friend. If all else failed, charter a private jet or fire up his own. He was the type to have one on stand-by.

  Even so, JP’s brows were drawn together as he stood. He didn’t seem convinced by his own plan. Perhaps he doubted that they could keep it quiet? Or that Honor’s mind could be pieced back together?

  “You aren’t to do anything. You aren’t to talk to anyone. Your worries are mine, sweetheart, not yours.”

  Honor lay back on her pillows, her eyes unfocussed, hands hidden under the sheets – a picture of defeat and pretty acquiescence. And North had a sudden urge to warn the tycoon that she was lying. JP’s good opinion, his approval, had ceased to matter. Her face closed in on itself as she gamed her next move. Rebooting her system. She wasn’t checking herself in to any clinic. In her mind, the tycoon wasn’t even there any more.

  JP bent to kiss her, but instead of kissing her cheek, his lips found hers and North closed the door just a fraction so he didn’t have to watch.

  An aroma of citrus, cinnamon and money lingered as North emerged from the bathroom. Honor ignored him, reaching for the TV remote and pointing it at the corner of the room. It went through North’s mind that she was trying to turn off her life but then the TV blared.

  “…Reports are emerging that leading Tory backbench MP, Honor Jones, is today recovering in a London hospital after a failed suicide attempt.” The presenter’s face contorted itself into an expression of saccharine concern that such a terrible thing might happen.

  The assassin in him, the trained killer and professional soldier – admired the Board’s ability to pull together such an effective cover-up out of his own treachery, but he didn’t think it was wise to voice it.

  Away from the studio, the pictures cut to distant scenes outside Honor’s flat – blue lights, an ambulance at the kerbside, paramedics carrying a stretchered body, then grainier archive of the Honorable Member speaking in the Commons, on election night, beaming, youthful, happier than he’d thought she could ever look with a blue silk rosette pinned to a figure-hugging dress. Hectic with excitement, a skinny young woman stood outside the doors of the hospital – its name visible over her shoulder, her words tripping over themselves: “…set for a brilliant career…tipped to be a future Prime Minister…apparent history of psychiatric problems including a diagnosis of bi-polar disorder. Parliamentary colleagues are understood to be deeply concerned. Honor Jones – appears to be an unfortunate victim of her own tragic family history. Older viewers might remember…”

  Throwing the zapper at the screen, Honor let out a stream of obscenities. An impressive, imaginative, curated collection for a civilian, thought North as the remote smashed against the wall, plastic shrapnel, batteries and plaster dust exploding across the room.

  North unbuckled the rucksack. She had JP, but he was leaving the envelope with its cash and passport just in case. And he was going – he’d already been here too long.

  “Where’s the body of that animal who tried to kill me?”

  A long way from her flat by now. Another loose and messy end tidied away.

  North had left the front door ajar, before he laid her gently on the bathroom floor and slipped out the French windows into the garden at the last possible minute. He’d hopped the fence and from a little way up the street, he’d watched like any concerned neighbour as paramedics carried Honor out. Aside from the ambulance, there was a solitary police car and a handful of passers-by, but no TV cameras. He guessed that the TV pictures, shot from the far end of the street, showed the disposal of one dead assassin minutes later, rather than the rescue by the genuine emergency services of an apparently suicidal MP. Use the enemy’s own momentum against him. Use Honor’s injury and her personal history to demonstrate her mental state.

  “They’ve cleaned up,” he said.

  “By destroying my credibility?”

  He felt the loss in her. He didn’t know how ambitious she was, but a media firestorm about her mental health had to be a blow. Honor Jones wasn’t heading for political glory any more. Political comebacks were always possible, but even if she made it out of this alive, suspicions would linger that she wasn’t tough enough for the top job. That she wasn’t made of the right stuff. Politicians were flawed creatures when it came to drugs or drink or unsuitable bed-fellows. They were venal, grasping and morally dubious, and the public expected no less.

  But suicide?

  There was no recovery from that virus, however good JP’s crisis management team.

  Eyes shining, Honor blinked several times, forcing back what he took to be unshed tears as he shifted from foot to foot. Sympathy wasn’t his speciality. He should go.

  With a grimace, she tore away the tape attaching the saline drip to her arm, ripping the canula from t
he vein, to fling back the sheets from the bed, smothering the crimson-throated orchids without a thought.

  As she clambered out of the bed, she pulled at the ties at the neck of the hospital gown and it fell to the floor, before reaching naked into the wardrobe, regardless of North’s presence. Like Armitage moments before, he had stopped existing.

  He drew out of the rucksack the passport he’d rescued from her bag, and the envelope with its bundle of money which he’d already given her once.

  “I’m not getting on any plane if that’s why you’re still here,” she said, drawing up a pair of white lace pants.

  A few hours ago, she was about to leave her flat by the bathroom window – she never intended getting on any plane, then or now. Not to Chile. Not anywhere. With him or without him. He didn’t need telling, but he wanted her to have the cash anyway.

  The corner of her lower lip was caught between white teeth as she fiddled with the clasp of her white lace bra. He felt her recalibrate – the vibrations, the complex shifting of finely engineered machinery as pistons moved up and down, crankshafts turned and sparks fired. Who stood where? Which pieces were lost and whether the game was over. “But I’ll take your guilt money.” She said it like she was doing him a favour. “I’ll pay you back when this is over.”

  She took out a dress on a hanger and threw it on to the bed to unzip it, and he placed the envelope on the bedside locker next to a plastic jug of water.

  “Don’t go home, Honor.”

  Home to her blood-spattered bathroom. The home where they had already come for her twice.

  The third time they’d use pills and a note – or that’s how he would do it. Give her something to make her sleep, then wake her up and force her to take more, let her sleep, wake her up. She would need less persuasion each time.

  She faced him, the dress bunched in her hand, the hanger back in the wardrobe.

  Easy. Natural. Oblivious to the effect she was having on him.

  “I’m not an idiot. I’m not going home. I’m going back to the start.”

  She meant Newcastle where Peggy lived and worked. The Tyne Bridge. The river. Peggy’s smile.

  Holding out the dress by its shoulders, so that it pooled on the floor, she stepped into the emptiness of it, pulling it up in one smooth movement, its silk lining like a brush against the cymbal-length of her.

  “The last time we talked she said something strange.”

  He could hear her, but it was as if she was talking to herself.

  “She said that politics was my game of choice, but her favourite game was hunt the thimble.” Honor slid the zip up her spine to her shoulder blades, wincing as she reached down an arm to pull it the rest of the way. The dress was still damp – it clung to her.

  He couldn’t help but notice.

  Was that a strange thing to say? He had no idea. All he knew was that the body underneath the dress was exactly how he thought it would be.

  “Peggy’s favourite game is Risk. It’s been nagging at me ever since I saw it on her shelf at her place. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but she’s hidden something for me to find. Maybe at hers. Or in the university somewhere. But it has to be in Newcastle.”

  Honor Jones was a woman who leapt from A to B to Z without once looking down into the abyss.

  He was at the threshold, his hand on the handle ready to press down, pull open the door, walk out into the corridor and leave Honor behind.

  He wanted his boat.

  He wanted to see that body again. See the naked woman in the tangle of sheets that JP Armitage knew.

  He turned a fraction and her eyes held his. Dressed, hands on her hips, as she’d stood in the park.

  He fought the urge to walk across and strip the dress from her body. To hold her.

  “You should come with me.” Classic misdirection. Lying to him, on her way out of a window, to get as far away from him as she could. But that was then.

  He owed Honor nothing. But she stood there like she thought otherwise. The urge to see her naked again left him.

  “Honor, I am not coming with you. We’ll both end up dead.”

  “Did I say you were invited?”

  On his back was a rucksack of plausible IDs and ready cash. In Vienna, an account with more money than he had time to spend. She had her own means of escape – a sugar daddy with his very own Army, once she could persuade him she was sane, and she was persuasive enough. She’d be fine.

  North was walking away and living happily ever after for as long as he had left. He shouldn’t even walk. He should run. She could chalk up two corpses already – a conspiracy theorist called Ned and a nameless trained killer. Three, if you counted the unfortunate Japanese tourist who broke Ned’s fall. Proof, if anyone needed it, that she was dangerous to be around, helping her – reckless, treasonable, and liable to get you killed. He wished JP Armitage all the luck in the world.

  Tarn said he cared about him. North thought he did. But Tarn cared much more for power and his role within the Board. He’d sacrifice North and not lose a moment’s sleep: lay lilies on his grave, but he wouldn’t mourn him. In the Army North made friends, good friends he’d have died for without hesitation and they’d have done the same. He’d barely talked to them since he left the Army, and couldn’t say why. Because he wasn’t the same man? Because he didn’t want to be exposed to how they really felt and who they really were? Because he wanted to keep them decent and honourable and courageous like they were in his memory? But Tarn was a friend. No – more than that. A mentor. A wise man, and the closest thing to a father he’d ever known. And Tarn’s betrayal hurt when not many things hurt North any more because he didn’t let them, and he preferred it that way. Clean and cold and clinical.

  She was moving again. Her fingers combing her hair at the mirror over the sink, pinching her cheeks to put some colour in them, biting at her pale lips.

  But he did hurt. He admitted the truth of it as he watched Honor ready herself for the fight.

  There was hurt and there was anger.

  His name was written in green ink. Michael North. Extreme caution advised. Disposal: anyway possible. Who was he trying to kid?

  He was in this till the end. Locked in at the very moment he realised how precious freedom was. It all came back to Peggy. And if Peggy locked him in, then Peggy was the key to his freedom.

  “I’ve never been to Newcastle,” he said, and she paused – her right foot hovering half-in and half-out of its shoe. Like the dress, the shoes must still be wet. Her eyes widened as she completed the motion, before sliding the left foot home.

  “You should get out more.”

  Did he want to meet the woman who was the roundabout reason for Tarn writing his name in green ink and sealing it in a black envelope?

  Yes he did.

  North had no idea what time he had left. Not enough. But he wanted to do one thing before it was all over, he wanted to find Peggy Boland and ask her what she’d done that made her so damn dangerous to know.

  Chapter 13

  A WEST LONDON HOTEL

  A Few Days Earlier

  Honor slipped out of the function early on. She had had her fill of strangers for one night. Had enough of JP and his relentless networking of contacts over this New Army business. Frankly, JP wasn’t in her good books about Peggy. He didn’t even pretend to like her. He was probably delighted she’d disappeared off the radar.

  Anyway, it was cooler out of the crush and she preferred the space, the marble floors, the vaulted ceiling with its ironwork, even the huddles of Middle Eastern businessmen crouched over tables too low for them.

  One glanced in her direction as she passed. At the navy silk column dress with the cowl neck, the exposed back and shining blonde hair, and she smiled vaguely but didn’t make eye contact. In a chair in the far distant corner, she slipped off the silver mule and slid a bare foot under her as the waiter approached. It was wasteful to pay for a drink when they were free in the function room yards away
, but she ordered a glass of Pouilly-Fuissé and black coffee.

  Her slim fingers unclasped the crystal-studded clutch bag and extracted the phone, pressing Peggy’s mobile number again. The call rang out as a long-stemmed glass appeared, a pot of coffee. She raised her hand in thanks to the waiter as she imagined the Holst’s Planets ring tone blaring out in Peggy’s bag. Imagined Peggy reaching, pulling the bag up on to her lap, fumbling through papers and books and scarves to answer it. But the call went to answerphone – again. “Hey this is Peggy. Time may be infinite but speak now.”

  Honor frowned.

  As she sensed movement, she glanced up. But it wasn’t the waiter. A bearded young man in skinny jeans and a denim jacket stood by her. He moved from foot to foot as he glanced around the foyer – his eyes flicking between the tables, across to the reception with its glass bowls of spikey, tropical flowers, the gold braid of the concierge, the ornate doorway through to the fundraiser. Anywhere but at her.

  She was excellent with names, but it took her a second. The beard.

  The fact he was in London. Out of place.

  Ned Fellowes.

  What did Peggy say about him? That was it. “He’s always turning up. It’s downright uncanny.”

  Still without meeting Honor’s eye, Ned held out his hand. But when she attempted to take it, he slapped his palm against hers – once, twice – before curling his fingers into hers, then breaking away to snap them with a small click. He glanced in her direction, waiting. Normally he reserved his special handshake for Peggy. Honor clicked her thumb and middle finger, and the snap made the waiter turn and frown in their direction. She shook her head, waved him away as he started towards them, and Ned sank into the wingback chair opposite. There was a sweet smell of the deodorant meant for adolescent boys as he placed his canvas shoulder bag with due ceremony on the floor.

  “Are you planning to drink that?” he pointed at the silver pot, gnawing at the bed of his devastated thumbnail as Honor poured him a coffee. She was thankful he hadn’t claimed the glass of wine.