The hen only rose from the straw piled in the corner at the very last – a flurry of feathers and squawking that put the fear of God into him. But where there was a hen, it was worth looking for an egg. He found three.
Sodden and even more wretched, by the time he came back in, Honor had dragged a Second World War tin trunk out from under the bed and changed into an outsized gansey, its sleeves rolled up, and a pair of jeans tucked into fishermen’s socks which she’d turned over the raw edges of an outsized pair of rubber boots. Another woman would have looked ridiculous, Honor Jones was killing it. Careful not to stare, he placed the eggs in the cottage’s only saucepan on the cottage’s only shelf. He was hungry now he thought about it. Starving. The chicken was lucky he didn’t wring its neck.
“They’re Christie’s – her Dad.” Across from him, Honor pointed at the Aran jumper and a threadbare pair of dark cords she’d laid out for him on the trunk lid. “He was a big bastard too so they should fit.”
Big bastard. She’d said it fondly. She must have met Christie. Known him.
He turned over the words in his head as he pulled off his wet clothes, making sure to transfer the strip of purple pills. They were sealed. Honor was filling a kettle by the sink. Keeping busy not to see his nakedness, she unhooked the shutters and pushed them apart. North decided to believe she was warming to him.
The clothes weren’t a bad fit. The sleeves a little short in the arm, but the cords buttoned, and they were at least dry.
“We smell of cedar,” Honor said, wrinkling her nose, but it wasn’t a complaint. Him and Her. Together. Both of them smelling of cedar.
There was a flint and dried moss, and skinny kindling in a wooden crate by the stove. The spark caught on the third attempt and the flame flickered as it decided whether to go out or burn. North blew on the tumbleweed of moss, willing it into life till, against its better judgment, it caught and he could feed it twigs and kindling and the smallest logs he had.
With a fire going and the winds pushing against the walls, the cottage was simple but cosier than he’d first thought with a back-and-forth rocking chair set by the hearth and a three-legged stool alongside. He surveyed the room. If you wanted to hide something of great value, where would you stash it? In a cupboard? Under the bed? Under a floorboard? He’d already pulled apart the wood store. This was a one-room cottage with a stone floor and a front door to the yard and a narrow backdoor out to the lean-to netty and the beach. The search wasn’t going to take long.
“What are we looking for?” asked Honor.
He shrugged. The art of looking was deciding what needed to be found.
The trunk was empty since they were wearing all of Peggy’s spare clothing.
The cupboard under the Butler sink was empty and the three drawers next to it held nothing but a couple of tea-towels, a wooden spoon, a whisk, and a pair of ancient lobster crackers. A bottle of Glenmorangie whisky stood on the window sill with the solitary glass, along with half a dozen tins of soup and baked beans, a percolator and a tin of ground coffee, and that was it.
He pulled out a drawer in the battered kitchen table – one enamel plate, one bowl, fork, knife and spoon, and one mug.
“She doesn’t bring anyone here,” said Honor. “Even I’ve only been once when she bought it. When Christie died, he left her enough for this place. He’d been putting a bit by every week to leave her something. She cried when she was telling me. I tried to cheer her up by telling her that I had a runaway place too, because JP had just bought a mews in Edward Place, close by Harrods. So that we could play house without the relationship getting into the press. She said I was the only person she knew who’d have a holiday cottage in Knightsbridge with a billionaire.” She looked downcast, perhaps at the thought of Peggy, or perhaps because JP wouldn’t want to play house with her ever again.
It was hard to feel sympathy.
The cottage was basic but solid. The only thing out of place was the enormous telescope set up at the rear window, its barrel tilted upwards. North pushed open the shutter and sat on the stool, his eye to the eyepiece, a little further away, closer, and the night-sky came into focus. A half moon, almost obscured by the dark scudding clouds of the storm, but shudderingly near. What it would be like to sit alone night after night by the stove watching the moon wax and wane, charting stars which died thousands of years ago? Did Peggy have a better perspective on her own mortality? Did she realise her insignificance? Accept it? Fight it? Did it overwhelm or comfort her?
He stood up from the stool. Wherever Peggy was, she wasn’t on the moon, he knew that much. Whatever clues she had left to her disappearance, if indeed she had left any, were here on earth. Hauling the mattress from the bed, he slid a knife into it again and again, feeling with the tip for something, anything, the same way as in another life he felt for an artery or an organ.
Honor watched.
“If I’d called the police,” she said, “last night when you were outside my flat, what would have happened?”
Before the first blare of sirens, he would have faded into nothingness. As the blue light washed out the doorway where he stood through the night, the only thing it would have revealed was emptiness, broken tiles and cobwebbed corners. Then with the policemen’s reassurances still hanging in the cold night air, and the red tail-lights of the squad-car moving off and away into the distance, he’d have faded right back into focus again. Press play and fast forward to her certain death.
He wouldn’t lie to her. “I’d have killed you.”
“How?”
Honor leaned against the rocking chair and it swayed with her weight, its runners making a small click against the stone floor as it went back, a louder click as it came forwards. Seeing through the feathers and the motes of wool between them to his hand around the grip, the blade, to the gaping sliced-apart mattress.
He would have used the knife he held. She didn’t need his confession, because she understood.
Amid the ruination of the cottage, Honor spooned out scrambled eggs, yellow clumps falling from an aluminium pan on to the orange beans and cold corned beef. His in the bowl. Hers on the plate. She sipped the coffee with its shot of whisky, her elbows resting on the table, her hair tousled. Raising her arms, she re-knotted a red-spotted handkerchief around it, and darkness bloomed at the heart of a white bandage cuffing her wrist. This morning she’d almost died. Twice. And when he drove into the sea, he almost drowned her again. She was as hard to kill as he was.
“What did he mean? The voice in the car.” Her attention snagged again on the ripped cotton cover of the mattress, the rusty springs. “That you should know better than to waste time’.”
Tarn’s words were designed to sow dissension and fear. The judge branded North a ruthless killer who lacked all conscience. Yet Honor had picked up on the throwaway remark about the time he had left.
Talking about it, acknowledging his wound, admitting his mortality, made him vulnerable. It was enough to live with it – he didn’t need to talk about it. When he went to his Harley Street appointments, he kept his eyes fixed ahead as if he were back in the Army, barely glancing at the neurologist. Barely answering the questions. Yes, he was fine. Yes, he had headaches. Yes, he had insomnia. He refused to talk about the voices or the pictures that came into his head. No, nothing bothered him. If he said he was fine often enough, one morning it might turn out to be true.
But she was waiting.
“Five years ago, an enemy sniper had a good day. It was a headshot.”
Said out loud it was brutal. As if he’d slapped her. Should he tell her the bullet was still in there? Should he tell her without the purple pills he wasn’t sure he could manage to stay sane – that his mind might fly apart into so many pieces. No, he wouldn’t put that on her when she was relying on him to find Peggy and to keep her safe. She didn’t need every last detail.
Her face was pale. Was she pale before? He hadn’t noticed. Her eyes went to his face, searching it, up to his temple,
along his skull to the white flare of hair covering over his bullet wound. Across the table, he felt her cool slim fingers rake his scalp, looking for the ridge of a scar. If she looked long enough, she’d find it. Then again, didn’t everyone carry scars? Didn’t she?
“How did it happen?”
Honor was a civilian – he could tell her a story of bravery. That’s what the citation said and there was a ribboned medal to prove it, its silk in pretty stripes. But it wasn’t a story of bravery, it was a story of survival. They were on patrol – the day before they were due home. He was bringing up the rear when Jacko stepped on the first mine – the noise and dirt as it blew him apart, flinging him up in the air, tossing him through space, North’s ears bleeding, dazed, men all around him that he’d fought with, eaten and slept alongside – men in pieces. The lifeless 22-year-old Second Lieutenant, fresh out of Sandhurst. North taking over, calling it in, demanding air support, moving towards Jacko, desperate to reach him, watching for disturbed earth that hid other mines, copper wire snaking through the sand, certain that any moment another explosion would lift him up into the sky, towards the sun, only to fall down to the ground again – dead and broken. He thought he’d made it, that he was safe as they loaded Jacko on to the Merlin. But he wasn’t. The sniper was in no hurry. Lined up North’s helmet in his sights. Eased back the trigger. And fired.
If the air had stirred. If the sniper had only missed. If North had only moved. He’d be whole, or he’d be dead. But the sniper didn’t miss and the Merlin took North too.
The bullet that passed through his helmet and his skull and the soft grey matter of his brain made him different to other men. He was going to die and he knew it. The fact was unavoidable and he lived with that knowledge. Faced it down. And lived anyway, as best he could. Most people denied the truth of how they end and ran from death as fast and as far as they could. He didn’t judge. If he could run. He’d run too. But it wasn’t a war story to be bandied around a camp fire. “Have you heard the one about the soldier with the bullet in his head who didn’t have the sense to lie down and die?”
“What does it matter? I got unlucky, then I got lucky again.”
Rebuked, Honor sat back against the spindles of the rocking chair, and behind her the long hand of the clock jerked towards the half hour.
“Why aren’t you dead?”
The question was pitiless. Honor’s brows drew together as if she was trying to figure him out, and North’s hand went to his jaw and he rubbed it hard. How often had he asked himself that question?
“The sniper was a craftsman. He cast his own bullets.” North swallowed. If he started talking, there was a chance he wouldn’t stop. “It’s small and it didn’t expand or break up, didn’t ricochet. It stayed in the same hemisphere and didn’t cross over. A one-in-a-million point of entry and pathway through the grey matter. The surgeons wrote a paper with a lot of long words – it said I was a ‘scientific anomaly’. I figure it meant they’d no idea.”
“Are you different?”
It took him a second to process that she wasn’t asking about the migraines or insomnia which she knew nothing about, or whether he retained full use of his limbs, or whether his memory was intact. She certainly wasn’t checking on the state of his intuition, or indeed the extent of his delusions. She meant did the bullet make him a killer, because she was deciding if there was an excuse for what he did and the lives he had taken. There was even a term for it. He had come across it in his own research. If he was psychotic, the most telling symptom was deemed “lack of insight”. Those suffering from this lack of insight had no awareness their behaviour was unusual. Like killing on the orders of another man.
He didn’t want to go there.
There were no excuses, and he wasn’t wasting anyone’s time pretending. “I’m the same as I ever was.”
Give or take his suspicion that the bullet might have triggered psychosis and tipped him into lunacy.
Across the table, Honor frowned.
She wanted an excuse to explain away his violence, but he didn’t believe in excuses. She didn’t have to trust him or like him. He didn’t need to hear what went on in her head because how she felt was written all over her face. She was pleased he wasn’t justifying his violence because deep down she believed there was no excuse for what he did.
His head pounding. Nauseous – the smell of eggs turning his stomach. To Honor Jones he would always be the man who came to kill her. An executioner. Was she right? Is that who he was? All he was? An executioner?
Moreover an executioner outside the rule of law? Which made him a murderer?
The hairs on the skin of his arms stood at attention, his spoon shrieked as it sawed through the yellow egg to scrape against the side of the bowl. He liked things clear cut – good and bad, friends and enemies, good men to die for and bad men to kill. There were worse philosophies to live by. If someone else opened that envelope with that photograph in it. With her name. Or if she never lit that cigarette to wait for him – daring him to do his worst, it would all be over. Instead of being stranded in the wilderness, he would be home. If Honor Jones had put her own survival first instead of walking into a minefield for the sake of her friend. If she hadn’t asked him that question: Where’s Peggy.
She stopped chewing, pushing a mountain of egg with deliberation towards the turned-about fork, packing it on, piling it neatly, patting it down. He waited.
“I want to trust you, North, and I wish you weren’t one of them,” she put down the knife with a clatter, turned over the fork, eggs everywhere again, her voice louder. “But you are.”
“…Helicopter…” he heard her unspoken alarm a split second before the ferocious clattering of the blades.
Chapter 20
Through the thick wavy glass of the window over the sink, the helicopter’s brilliant spots swept the broken ground as it attempted to find a sure footing. It was almost down. North slammed and barred the shutters. Pushing Honor through a narrow wooden door in the far corner of the room, he grabbed for the rucksack as he shoved the table on to its side to slam it hard up against the front door – the tin crockery bouncing across the stone-paved floor, coffee everywhere. Even a minute’s delay was worth having.
Ahead, Honor was already scrambling helter-skelter down the dunes, slipping and sliding over the slimy rocks. Outside it was still gusting and dark, the moonlight skinny and the trees bending and bucking in the wind. The rain had all but stopped. Even so, no commercial pilot in his right mind would agree to fly.
He caught up with her. Holding her back by her forearm, speaking directly into her ear, blonde hair over his mouth, the wind ripping away his words. “Find a boat for us if you can. If you can’t, hide, and don’t come out whatever happens.”
She started to protest but he didn’t have time to hear her out.
“If I’m not there in three minutes – leave. If there’s no boat, keep to the rocks and work your way round the island till you get to a settlement. Then make as much noise as you can. Bang on doors. Shout blue murder. This lot will want to pull out before it’s light and they won’t want any fuss.”
“Stay with me, North.”
“Three minutes.”
Head down, she turned away and he gave her a push to get her going.
The house itself blocked the view of the helicopter’s crew. The chopper’s engine shifted, amid the whoomph and clatter of the blades – a roar, and then a whine. Down. Two minutes at the most before its passengers leapt from its belly, hit the ground and headed for the cottage. Thirty seconds before they shot their way through the front door. Thirty-one seconds before they worked out their targets had gone out the back and they followed.
Keeping to the shadows cast by the dunes, North strained to hear voices. If he heard voices, he would know where they were. But there was only the wind, the EC-130 motor and the noise of boots against the ground. Rocking, the helicopter was down, the pilot still in his seat, the massive blades slowing. North kept low
. The blades stopped turning. Their attackers’ focus was the cottage – a thin spiral of smoke coming out of its chimney, light behind the shutters like something from a fairy tale.
North counted five men including the pilot.
The first assailant was at the front door. He gestured to two of the men to go round the back, one each way.
North felt for the iron bar he’d left propped against the woodshed door. Finding splinters, rusty nails, stretching his fingers, straining for the length of metal. His fingertips grazed it, felt the air shift as the bar started to fall – catching hold just before it hit the ground.
The first assailant was broad-shouldered and enormous in the dark. Something about the set of his slab-like head. Bruno. His boot was raised to kick in the door.
They’d left only the pilot behind with the helicopter. North backed up, circling the helicopter, coming up behind it in a swift, straight line. Praying Bruno’s attention was fixed on the door. Praying that the pilot didn’t decide to turn the engine back on for a swift getaway. As the sole of Bruno’s boot landed against the door with a splintering crash, North thrust the metal bar up through the enclosed tail-fan with his full strength, wrenching it till the bar caught. There was a shout from the glass cockpit as the pilot glimpsed him in the mirror. North came out from behind the tail. The pilot was out, his door swinging open, a gun already in his hand. North slammed his fist into the other man’s jaw, spinning him round to catch his throat with his forearm, one hand over his mouth. The pilot’s legs danced and North braced as he took the full weight of the struggling man in his arms. He felt the gun fall, heard it bounce into the darkness. There was a choking sound. The agonized terror and scramble of dying. The heart’s frantic beat. A gurgling as North squeezed harder, the cartilage of the throat collapsing. Hope gone. The losing fight for air. Knowing. The last pump of blood, as all breath went out of the dying man.
Killing State Page 13