He made the instruction sound brutal. No sympathy. Only the expediency of a professional speaking to an amateur. The line between her finely drawn eyebrows became deeper and longer, but she didn’t argue.
One of the grannies snipped through her trailing wool with dressmaking scissors – the scything noise loud in an all-of-a-sudden silent pocket of time, white wool falling back to the skein lying next to her black orthopaedic shoes. And it came to him where he had seen the one-eyed man from the harbour – outside his Marylebone flat before he got the assignment, before his world turned inside out and upside down. North didn’t think he was the Board, so who was he, and why was he following him? North did a rapid review of his recent jobs – the powerful men, the friends they had in high and low places. Had one of them come looking for revenge? Because the last thing he needed was another shadow chasing him. This one out of his past.
A shaft of sunlight hit the stained glass windows at the far end of the bar and spangles of red and blue and saffron yellow painted over Honor, leaving him in darkness. He lifted his hand, bringing it up to the sticky, varnished table where crimson covered it.
Chapter 24
NEWCASTLE
Seven Years Earlier
“Do you think you’ll ever have children?” Honor lay stretched out on the carpet, Peggy on the sofa. Propping herself up on one elbow, she reached for the poker, before plunging it into the bed of coal, once, twice, three times.
Peggy turned her head to watch. “Yes, and you’re going to kill that fire.”
Honor attempted to stand the poker upright but it fell with a clatter on to the tiled hearth. She cursed and picked up the bottle of red wine, filling their glasses to the brim, before handing Peggy her glass.
“I don’t want children. I’ve decided. Never. Ever.”
“Why not?”
Honor made a face. “What if I had a boy and he looked like my dad? What if it stopped me loving him?”
“You’ll change your mind.”
Honor shook her head. She wasn’t changing her mind.
“I’m probably too old already,” Peggy said. “We’re way past our biological prime. Anyway, I might not be able to. My mother had seven miscarriages before me. Christie said they’d given up trying when I came along.”
“Worry not, old lady. I’ll carry the beastly sprog for you if you can’t do it yourself.”
Peggy looked surprised. Pleased. “That would be hard, though. Giving up a baby you’ve carried for nine months.”
“No sweat, amigo. You’d do it for me.”
“Bearing in mind what you just said, I want you to know I absolutely would.”
Honor rolled on to her stomach to stare up at her friend. “What if I needed you to help me kill someone?”
Peggy laughed. “Do you have anyone in mind?”
“That’s not the point,” Honor said. “Let’s say someone does something terrible to me and I decide to kill them, would you help?”
“How terrible?”
“Really bad. Rape. Buggery. Burns down my house. Pulls out my toenails. Throws battery acid in my face.”
Peggy thought about it.
“What about the police?”
“He gets off. He has a great lawyer. A real bastard. ”
“Then yes.”
“Would you help me bury the body.”
“Definitely. I don’t want it lying around incriminating us.”
“Is there anyone you’d like me to kill on your behalf?”
Peggy laughed out loud. “No, but thank you for the offer. I’ll bear it in mind.”
“If you want a baby any time soon, you need to get less picky about men by the way,” Honor said.
“I could get a sperm donor. A Swedish rocket scientist who’s an Olympic oarsman and is good to his mother. ”
“Chances are you’d get a donor who says he’s a Swedish rocket-scientist. There’s a difference. And he probably is good to his mother, because he still lives in her back bedroom. Don’t you want a man around to help with the baby at least?”
Peggy thought about it. “No.” She sounded surprised at herself.
“What if you died?”
“That’s easy. You’ll look after her.”
“The baby’s a girl?”
“Yes”
“But I said I didn’t want a baby.”
“She’s not any baby. She’s my baby.”
Honor grinned. “All right. Providing you know that I’ll make a terrible mother.”
Peggy grinned. “I wouldn’t want you any other way.”
Chapter 25
NEWCASTLE
A Year Ago
Peggy nailed it. If she said so herself. She was nervous as hell when they asked her to do the TED talk. She had said No till she told Honor and Honor rang them back and said Peggy was congenitally deaf, had misheard and, of course, she’d love to speak. When and where?
She lay back against her pillow and pressed loudspeaker – Honor’s voice filling the room.
“I like the part where you gesture with your hand. It’s strong. I use it myself in the Chamber.”
Peggy smiled at the thought of Honor chopping away in debate. They were watching it for the third time. Each of them in their separate beds, in their separate cities.
“Christie would be so proud.”
“Do you think?”
Peggy didn’t need to ask, but she wanted to hear Honor say it.
“The guys at the allotments would never have heard the end of it.”
Jansky leapt for the bed, circling over and over till he decided it was safe to collapse. Peggy’s fingers reached for him, and he rolled on to his back, spindly legs in the air, his narrow nose pointing at her, his pink tongue lolling and eyes pleading for more attention.
“You are a ridiculous dog,” she said, as she tickled behind his soft ears, sliding her hand along his skinny ribs, ruffling then smoothing the fur. He whined in appreciation, his hind leg beating the air in quiet ecstasy.
She heard Honor’s lips part, draw breath.
“Tell me you aren’t smoking in bed,” Peggy said.
There was a whoosh of air as Honor denied it. “It’s my emphysema playing up.”
“If you fall asleep with a fag in your hand, you will burn to death.”
“If I fall asleep with a fag in my hand, he will be a lucky man. And also, a little confused.”
Peggy shoved the laptop off her knees, as she leaned over the other side of the bed to reach for the off switch on the lamp. Immediately the room darkened, lit only by the golden glow of her own lamp, and the cool blue of the Mac screen as it powered down. There was a scratching noise from Jansky.
“And how is JP?” Peggy tried to keep the disapproval out of her voice, but she suspected Honor heard it anyway.
“Devoted.”
“And more than 20 years too old for you.”
“You like old things. Stars are very old. I heard that in a superb TED talk.”
“I like old things which are far, far away.”
Honor giggled.
“I should go. JP is getting cross. His Viagra must be wearing off.”
“That picture is now in my head for all-time. I may puke.”
“Kiss Janksy for me. Love you.”
“Back at you.”
Peggy reached for her own light, and there was darkness.
Chapter 26
LONDON
Peggy’s lips were dry, her tongue thick and heavy in her mouth. She was getting used to the iron tang of blood, the white noise of pain like the sound of pulsars. She wondered if he’d come again to talk. He gave the impression he enjoyed their conversations, would miss them. Yesterday he ordered the thug she hated – the huge one with the wolf’s teeth, who looked at her as if she was so much meat – to chain her where she could see the stars from the window. A small kindness. It was bitter cold in the cell tonight and the night sky dark and clear. Hugging her knees on the stone floor, she was home again. They were so
far away. Billions of light years.
She missed her father. His arm around her when she was small, sitting on the backyard doorstep as he named the stars. Wave at Mam, Peggy girl. Missed her life. All of it. Honor’s laughter. Her voice. Jansky. The sunshiney taste of grapefruit juice on a morning. Green tea. How it felt to decipher a pattern in the numbers, sense their beauty and order. The plaintive call of the curlew on the beach. The rock and motion of the boat as she fished. Friendship. Joy. The breathtaking smile of the daughter she’d never see. Leaving it all behind as she walked into the sky she knew so well, through the Milky Way, her hands trailing through the dark matter, energy running through her absorbing her back into the cosmos. Solar flares and explosions. Noise everywhere. The thought – whether light years away anyone was listening?
And in the furthest corner of the bare room, a key turned in a lock with a soft, dull click and the door began to open.
Chapter 27
NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY
9.35am. Wednesday, 8th November
The physics department hummed with earnest young men and women in jumpers and spectacles, clutching folders and laptops to their chests. In another life this could have been him. If he’d been more locked on at school. If his mother hadn’t been an addict, and if he hadn’t killed a man when he himself was still a boy.
North kept his head down as he navigated the corridors. He’d filched his own folder and a mathematical textbook from the Blackwell’s university bookshop he’d passed en route, stealing a plastic bag for good measure for added deniability. If he had more time, he’d have scouted out a beanie and scarf, but he didn’t want to push his luck.
There was a smell of institutional cleaning fluids and damp in the hallway as he ran his finger down a list of tutors. A tiny, scowling Chinese girl, her hair in two stubby plaits leaned against the notice board watching him, the heel of her gold Dr Martens boot working away at a hole in the plastered wall. He hesitated at the absence where Peggy’s name had once been. Moved down – Dr Walter Bannerman level 3, room14.
“He’s an idiot,” she said.
Judging by the pile of plaster-dust on the floor, the girl had been there some time.
“He knows more than I do.”
She rifled through a file in her arms, ripped out an essay and thrust it at him. Introduction to radio astronomy. It was marked with an “F”.
“Now you’re even,” she said, pulling herself away from the wall. She had the look of someone who’d been there long enough and knew it. “Ciao, moron-person.”
Chapter 28
Room 14 was three flights up and the door scarcely ajar when he reached it. The occupant, the dome of his bald head shining in the light cast by the Anglepoise, was bent over his desk, hammering away at a keyboard as if he hated it.
North pushed the door open wider – the movement of air enough to make Bannerman raise his head and frown – an unpleasant enough face made odder again by its lack of eyebrows and eyelashes.
“Did your mother not teach you to knock?” he said to the screen. “Come back later. I’m busy.”
North’s mother taught him how to roll skinny cigarettes, shoplift naggins of vodka without a coat, and how to fake an epileptic seizure if he was ever caught. Thinking about it, she never did teach him to knock.
Bannerman resumed his furious typing. The heat was intense – the office rank with body odour and stale caffeine. Cups in varying states of green and grey furred decay filled the windowsill above the industrial radiator turned up to High – more lined up in front of the desk. Dr Bannerman didn’t sleep well, North was guessing.
Ignoring the squawk of outrage, North sat down in the chair opposite the professor and drew out the book he’d rescued from the sea.
“Young man…”
“You spoke to a friend of mine – Honor Jones?”
Bannerman sat straighter in his chair, and tiny flakes of skin rose from his shoulders to fill the air around him, before falling and settling again on to the mustardy tweed. He pushed aside the computer screen to get a better view of North.
“The young lady looking for dear Peggy?” A wax-white tongue slid out of the hairless face to lick his cracked lips. “I hope they ‘hooked up’,” Bannerman leaned towards his visitor – an attempt to make him complicit.
“Hooked up” after all was an odd expression, thought North, made odder again by the breathy delivery. Sexual. Prurient. As if Bannerman hinted at something wet and intimate between the two women.
“They didn’t.”
“That’s a shame. Peggy apparently had as little compunction letting down her friend as she did letting down her colleagues. Miss Jones was very concerned as I remember and God knows there’s been a stream of oddities looking for Peggy since she left – some drooping Arab, her Chinese pet, not to mention that extraordinary creature with the hair.”
North filled with Bannerman’s resentment – envy writhing and squirming in the older academic’s stomach as he watched Peggy walk the stage delivering her TED talk. Loathing Peggy’s brilliance, resenting her talent. Her looks. Her gender.
North pulled his tee-shirt away from his chest where it had begun to stick to the skin. It was too warm in the office, the air dry and thick and coffee-tasting. Bannerman should turn down his radiator and open his windows to the world. It might improve his smell. “You didn’t much like Peggy?”
Pursing his lips and making his already small mouth smaller yet, the professor rearranged his wall of disgusting cups so their handles pointed outwards at the same angle.
“I’ve been in academia a long time, young man. I’m not a populist – I’m a scientist. A purist. The Peggys come and go. One lucky piece of research. The right publication. Some dumbed-down science show on television because they can talk faster than they can think, and suddenly they’re Einstein.”
North said nothing. Bannerman didn’t need him to. His face was alive with malice. “The research money gets channelled to them and they still witter on that it’s not enough. Their maw is ever open wanting more money. Bigger telescopes. More of them. Better facilities. Commercial partners. Fame. I hope she’s happier in Chile.”
“She didn’t go to Chile.”
Bannerman waved his hand. “What does it matter? Perhaps it was New Mexico with the VLA. That’s to say the Very Large Array.” His tone was supercilious as he pointed to the wall, making it clear he didn’t expect his visitor to understand the acronym. Next to his bookcase was a large black and white photograph of 27 huge dishes pointing up to the sky. “I’ve done work out there myself. A few years ago admittedly, but at the time it was well-received. I made something of an impression.”
North didn’t believe Peggy was in New Mexico any more than she was in Chile. He was beginning to think Bannerman didn’t believe it either.
“Wherever she is, I’ll say this. When a colleague leaves the field, particularly a colleague of Dr Boland’s standing, those of us left behind – the dutiful, the poor bloody infantry – are required to step into the breach.”
He waved a hand at the computer and the stack of papers on his desk which North guessed were meant for marking. North didn’t envy the professor’s students – particularly his female students. He couldn’t see him as a generous marker. And he had no great hopes Bannerman would be willing or indeed able to translate whatever was in the black book.
But he had to try. Moving aside the mouldering coffee cups, North laid the notebook on the desk and opened it on the first page.
Bannerman’s eyes narrowed as he drew the book towards him. He flicked from page to page to page. “How do you have this?” For the first time Bannerman sounded engaged. Curious.
“Peggy left it for Honor.”
Did she? Or did she leave it so she herself could retrieve it? Peggy must have known she was in danger if she hid the book, and Peggy knew her friend. Honor was an obsessive – relentless. Which meant she must have known Honor would come looking for her. Which meant she must have known the ch
ances were that Honor would find it.
“Do you know what it is?” North said.
Bannerman chewed at his dry lips like he wanted to hold back the words. “It’s hard to tell without any of the numbers attached, but they’re pictorial representations of noise coming from the earth, while these pages further on are preliminary calculation work. Nothing complicated or special. Nothing my third year students couldn’t come up with.” His disappointment appeared genuine, as if he’d expected more of Peggy.
“Her main work was noise cancelling?”
The professor nodded, his eyes still on the book, his hand over it, dragging it closer. “I’ll keep it for you and try to get a better idea. Perhaps if I spoke to her PhD students? Or even the Chinese misfit? ”
Did he see a chance to profit from Peggy’s work? To claim it? To build on it? Did he see himself on the stage, in the spotlights, holding forth to the world? A million views. A million likes.
North stood. It was too hot in here and too close. And the man in front of him too full of bile and wanting.
“Chinese misfit?”
The little girl in plaits and glittering boots kicking down walls.
Bannerman had his top drawer open – the book was poised halfway over it.
Disappointed or not, North didn’t need the bullet to tell him that Bannerman wanted that book.
“Absurd. The girl’s only 14 – she’s still at school. One of Peggy’s lost causes. She keeps hanging around hoping Peggy will come back. I’ve told security not to let her in but I do believe they’re frightened of her.” He relaxed – he thought the book was his – and celebrated. A wheezing noise came out of him. What passed for laughter. “She needs to crawl back to her takeaway, egg-fry some rice, and stay there.”
What would drive a respectable academic to buy duct tape and tarpaulin and leave her work in the sea? What did she think might happen? Did she think Walt Bannerman might get hold of it? Bannerman was an academic rival. Envious and unpleasant.
But did Peggy suspect he was more than that? Worse than that?
Killing State Page 16