Killing State

by Judith O'Reilly

  North reached across the desk and scooped up the notebook as Bannerman wailed, flakes of skin falling to the desk as he tried and failed to snatch it back. “I wouldn’t put you to the trouble.”

  Chapter 29

  As the door closed behind the rudest man Dr Walt Bannerman ever met, he reached for the phone. He’d memorized the number. He was good with numbers. Excellent. But he’d never had the recognition he deserved. Never been lucky. But with more money invested in his research, he had complete and entire confidence he would win prizes, and that the name of Bannerman would be one to reckon with. He’d shown such early promise and it would all be his again.

  “He was here.”

  It was all he needed to say.

  That his visitor was an animal. Abrupt. Ignorant. That despite himself he had been frightened if only by the man’s size, by the lurking violence in the deep-set eyes.

  But he played it beautifully.

  The money would arrive via an international respected scientific grants trust. The first indication of glory yet to come. The Vice Chancellor would be astonished.

  Bannerman put down his hands, and rubbed them together palm against palm, a blizzard of white swirling around him, the new skin rubbed raw and red as he opened them up like the book he’d wanted to keep–tiny pinpricks of blood rising everywhere. It was a shame the thug hadn’t handed over the notebook, but it might yet come his way, though it really didn’t seem to be anything he hadn’t seen already. Peggy. He’d always known she would flame out.

  Yes, the glorious future that would be his, was surely worth a small betrayal and a little work on the side. Sacrifices were always necessary in the name of scientific progress, and frankly he never did like Peggy Boland.

  Chapter 30

  NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY

  9.59am. Wednesday, 8th November

  Outside Bannerman’s study, North brushed himself down. He couldn’t see any of the Professor’s skin flakes on him but he didn’t want to take any chances. Honor was right – the good Professor was stomach-turning. The less they had to deal with Bannerman, the happier he’d be.

  He checked with the departmental secretary about the Chinese student. Mrs Craggs was almost as unhelpful with him as with Honor but then Honor didn’t possess North’s slow smile. He used it on the secretary like a Pathfinder missile to take out her defences. It didn’t yield much but it did yield the information that Peggy was helping a particularly bright teenager.

  “Not a nice child. At all.” He pictured the girl’s scowl. Her scorn. Walt Bannerman is an idiot. The intense brooding waiting. Was she waiting for Peggy? Hoping she would walk back in?

  “Kids,” he’d said, not having any idea what it meant, but noticing the picture of three ferret-faced children on her desk.

  Mrs Craggs softened, simpered, nodded, and he took it to mean. What can you do and You do your best and It’s never enough and I wish I’d never had them.

  The Chinese girl didn’t come into the department the normal way. She wasn’t a pupil at a school with established links or where students did outreach. So how had Peggy come across her?

  He felt his own temper rise. She’d been right in front of him. She’d spoken to him and he’d let her walk away.

  ‘Ciao moron-person.’ The kid called that right. Honor would not be happy.

  Chapter 31

  Wiping his face with the corner of his arm, North stopped by the wooden-slatted bin. Fast food wrappers and plastic bags of dog faeces running with water were piled up against the base. It was pouring with rain. If he ever bought that boat, he was mooring it someplace sunny and never getting wet again unless you count the tropical sea.

  College days were over and he wouldn’t miss them. Roll on spring break. Tossing the empty folder and textbook, he turned, then stopped. Slumped on a wooden bench close by, a tramp watched with interest.

  North reached back into the bin to lift out the textbook, weighing it momentarily in his hand. He wasn’t a moron-person like the kid said. He could use a book – even a book like this one. It might come in useful. The supermarket trolley loaded with plastic bags was parked up alongside the bench. North smiled in apology. The guy could salvage the file, but he was hanging on to Advanced Mathematics a while longer. He dropped it back into its plastic bag, folded it over and over, and carried on walking.

  Chapter 32

  It didn’t take him long to get back to the Gallows Widow.

  It would have taken even less time but he doubled back on himself several times in case he was being followed.

  His feet tacky on the Widow’s lurid carpet, he rapped once on the peeling painted wood of Room 7, and Honor hauled it open so violently the handle slipped from her grasp to bounce against the wall. Her eyes were red and swollen as she glared at him, her anger slamming into him so hard he had difficulty lifting one foot and then the other to follow her in. He breathed deeply, holding himself still as he resisted the rage blowing through his brain, knocking down and trampling over his own consciousness, taking over each and every cell in his body.

  Accommodation was on the first floor of the pub at the back with a slanting view of the arcing Tyne Bridge, the silvering river it crossed, and the steady falling-down rain. She was standing in front of the window, the newspaper shaking in her hand. Her mouth moved, but he couldn’t hear her, focusing his attention instead on the shifting River Tyne pockmarked by the reflected lights of the city spread out behind her.

  It came to him all in a rush, her words emerging from the white noise of anger. The missing banker. Hugh Carrington, 25. The back of her hand smacked the newsprint like she wanted to punish it. Look, her voice was raised. Look at Hugh’s mother, distraught, held upright only by the 50-something man next to her. Silver hair. Lean. Distinguished. Trying to be brave, a press conference asking Hugh to get in touch. Quotes from his colleagues who’d reported his absence from work. The man child she’d flirted with, given hope to.

  Killed. The sea-drowned corpse North abandoned on the hard-cold concrete of Seamouth harbour. No one important.

  He had already done his reckoning on the quayside. Honor trailed four dead bodies in her wake: Ned who tried to tell her a secret, the unfortunate Japanese tourist who broke Ned’s fall from grace, the nameless killer in her London bathroom, and Hugh who moved too close to the wrong woman.

  Hugh’s death wasn’t her fault. She had to know that.

  North took the paper from her and tossed it on to the blowsy chintz duvet covering the bed. The trust between them, fragile at best, lay in ashes and ruination. If he didn’t rebuild it, their alliance was over.

  Ask me again.

  Ask me who wants you dead.

  Who’d killed the young banker just as his life was starting? And North would tell her, because she had the right to know.

  But Honor didn’t ask.

  Instead, she slapped his face.

  The pain was sharp. Sudden. Stinging. Delivered with all the pent-up force of a woman who had wanted to wound him since the moment she first saw him.

  “That was Hugh’s body on the causeway. The one you said was ‘No one important’.”

  It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation and she made to hit him again, but this time he caught her hand by the bandaged wrist. Which must have hurt, but she didn’t cry out – glaring at him as if she expected no better, and he dropped the wrist like it burnt him to touch her.

  He should have told her at the time. Explained the Board had to be in a rush. That they’d collected Hugh in the clean-up. It would be too much of a coincidence to leave his body in London. The body of an MP’s neighbour. An MP slated to die any minute. Who knows how they planned to manage it once Honor was dead. Perhaps they’d have pointed the finger at the missing banker? Implied he was obsessed enough to kill her and disappear afterwards.

  North knew he should have told her, but he was trying to protect her. Surely she would understand. They had needed to move. Slide away from the police and the one-eyed man. It
was a mistake. He was sorry.

  “You leave bodies everywhere you go, North. Did you think he didn’t matter?” She was crying. The first time he had seen her tears. “That I didn’t need to know because he was – what? Collateral damage? What did you call him? Yes, I remember – ‘No one’. He wasn’t collateral damage – he was somebody. He was somebody else’s son, and you people are animals.”

  She picked up her jacket and shoved her arms into the sleeves, forcing her way past him. He blocked her exit and she went still. Dangerous. “I’m not that nice a person, North. Not like Peggy. I look after myself first, last, and always, but I’m not giving up, do you understand that? Whatever this was between you and me though – this is over. Things are getting worse all the time, and you’re part of that.”

  The pictures came and he wished they wouldn’t. Ned falling through the sky, legs and arms flailing. Her own struggle for breath which wasn’t there in the bloody bathwater – the rippling face of her attacker looming over her. Waves coming at them as he drove them into the North Sea. Bullets spitting around them in the darkness. Terror. And knowing exactly who North was – right from the start. The sound of geese and his own face cold and brutal and terrifying. Refusing to forget, or forgive. “Give me back Peggy’s book.”

  He hesitated. Weighing up his options. Honor was making a mistake. Reacting emotionally to the deaths and the chaos. He understood, but he couldn’t help her with that, because he didn’t have the words. He could help her find Peggy though. Because they finally had a chance. Peggy collected protegees.

  Ned was dead.

  But there was a Chinese teenage nightmare out there who was very much alive and mad as bejesus.

  He was going to find her, and when he did he needed Peggy’s notebook.

  “Give me back Peggy’s book, or I’ll take it back.” Honor’s voice was eerily calm. He passed over the package and she shoved it into the pocket of the donkey jacket. “Bannerman was no help, was he?”

  “There’s a Chinese girl Peggy was teaching.”

  Honor waved her hand in dismissal. “I know all about her. I’m not dragging innocent children into this mess.”

  He opened his mouth to explain, but Honor showed no sign she was listening. She had got what she came for – Peggy’s secret. The thimble. And she was leaving. Because she saw North for what he was. Trouble – she couldn’t trust him. Never had. Never would. And why should she? He couldn’t trust himself.

  His hand reached for her but she crackled with her own force-field of scorn and he didn’t dare touch her. He didn’t want her to go. He’d been alone for a lifetime and never felt it. But he felt it now and she was still in the room.

  “He’s a liability and a sociopath.”

  Her voice? Or did his mind tell him exactly what he needed to know? Either way, Honor regarded him as a reckless criminal, and she had a point. Thought he was a bad’un, and maybe she was right about that too.

  “I’m going back to London and doing this through the proper channels.”

  “There are no proper channels. They’ll kill you.” Feeble, he knew as he said it and whatever the truth, it wouldn’t stop her.

  “I won’t give them that chance. I’ll make the authorities listen to me. Things have changed because I have Peggy’s book, and she’s missing. They can’t pull their Chile stunt twice. That dead boy on the quayside was my neighbour. What is that? A coincidence? I’m an MP for God’s sake and JP is a powerful man. The balance of probability has shifted, and it’s on my side. Something is rotten, and I don’t need you, or whatever it is you think you can do for me any more.”

  She hadn’t forgotten that in the car as they drove through the night, Tarn called him “a cold-blooded, vicious killer”. But he wasn’t that today. He was more than that and less than that and different to who he’d been. Because of her.

  It must have been in his eyes, because there was a nano-shift in her attitude. The shadow of a whisper of the start of what might have been a softening. Pity. She pitied him. He caught it and tried exerting his own gravitational pull to reassure her and draw her closer but she didn’t feel it, or resisted it. He was too much the stranger and she was too far away and moving further with every second.

  “Let go, North.” It was a Dear John. “For me, this is personal. It’s not that way for you. I’m ringing JP. He knows all sorts of legal types – we’ll get the police involved at the highest level, and I can’t do that with you around. How do I explain who you are?” She put the question with the patience of a teacher to a slow and struggling child.

  “Disappear. Catch that plane you’re always talking about. And try not to kill anyone ever again. Okay?”

  He took a step back. Putting distance between them. Peggy was everything to her, and nothing to him. Letting JP Armitage use his money and influence to make things better made all sorts of sense. Honor did right to get away. She was smart – no pushover. Without him, she could work within the Establishment to find her missing friend. Maybe JP Armitage would indeed keep her safe. Lock her in an ivory tower and set his New Army to guard her while he turned the world inside out to find Peggy. The tycoon couldn’t do a worse job than North himself had done.

  North would catch a plane and buy a boat. He tried to hold on to that logic. To the thought of warm seas and the warmer bodies of strangers. To the logic of letting her go.

  She slammed the door as she left and the walls shivered.

  Discretion was critical. Tarn said that from the start. It was bad enough when he didn’t kill her. It got worse when he killed the next guy along. It got beyond worse when he drove into the sea, brought down a helicopter with a handy iron bar and wiped out a small army. Escape. Freedom. They weren’t what he wanted now. They weren’t luxuries he had earned. They were what he needed to stay alive himself.

  From the window he watched and waited to see when she emerged. The rain had stopped.

  She made him unemployable. Worse. Turned him from an asset into an extreme security risk. Status: critical. Termination: essential, and written in green ink.

  If anyone could keep her safe, JP Armitage could, but the only person who could keep Michael North safe was Michael North. And the bullet in his brain meant he couldn’t even trust himself. For five years, he stayed on the margins as time ran through his hands.

  Believing that if he tried to hold on to it, leaving would be all the harder. Death was nothing. He told himself that every time he killed a bad man. It was a judgment, a verdict. How all life had to end. His own included.

  The door was obscured by the pub sign with its noose, so he didn’t see her face. Only the blonde head and her back as she walked away. She didn’t look back.

  The room was bleak. A place for travelling salesmen and shabby affairs by insurance clerks. Only the Edwardian wardrobe of shining walnut and dark oak lifted it into something grander. In its silvering oval mirror, he watched himself close the door behind him. He didn’t need to be here.

  No one would blame him for running.

  The walls along the landing corridor had been painted over so often it was impossible to make out the pattern of the embossed wallpaper, but he ran his fingertips over it anyway trying to make sense of it.

  He should get far away and do it fast. Dig down to a place of silence and darkness and hide himself as best he could all the days he had left to him. Buy a calendar. Strike through the days he lived. Monday to Sunday. Each one a victory over dying and over Lucien Tarn.

  The stairs down from the bedrooms to the ground-floor were steep, the mahogany rail sticky with spray polish and the sweat of other people’s hands.

  The problem was he didn’t live on the edge of things any more. Honor dropped him plumb-centre of the battlefield where those who loved life fought in hand-to-hand combat for what was theirs. He wanted to live. She made him want that. Showed him there was value in it. And he was fighting for whatever life he had left. Fighting for Honor, whether she wanted him to or not. And he was finding Peggy who
fixed things, or he was dying in the attempt.

  The downstairs bar was almost empty. No elderly early bird knitters. Lunchtime drinkers not yet at their posts. Behind the counter, the barmaid was opening and closing the till, lifting the drawer out to look under it. Her head craned to the back as she called through some question to an unseen colleague.

  North stepped around the to and fro of a dirty mop-head as a hunched-over cleaning woman marked time. The slops making things worse not better, bringing up a heady scent of last night’s booze and vomit from the black and white chequered floor or the mop or both. Honor must have gone this way. Down the stairs and through the public bar over the wet floor. The char following her over to the door, slow, methodical, erasing the footprints even as she walked, making it impossible to follow.

  Straight out of hospital, refusing more rehabilitation, rejecting Tarn’s offers of help, he took a doorman’s job in an East End club. An unspoken death wish. Take on the biggest and the ugliest and the most vicious brawlers in the place and hope that one of them would hit him so hard, it would all be over. He’d hated it, not because of the loud-mouthed drunks and the Big-I-Am’s, not because of the aggro and the regular knockabouts, but because of the cheap dinner suit he had to wear. In the evening, as he slid his arms into the sleeves of the jacket with its polyester lapels and sewed-in hanky snippet, shame filled him up to the brim. Out of his uniform, out of the Army and back in the gutter where he’d been born.

  The only good thing about working the door – the permission to do violence. That and the access it gave him to women. Women who would bring him over drinks he wasn’t supposed to drink and stand by him, their long legs painted an unnatural brown, giggling as the Every-Night-Is-Ladies-Night trebles took hold, tossing their shiny fake hair and licking their shiny sweet lips. They were toxic and the thought made them irresistible – his foot-to-the-floor route to oblivion.