Killing State

by Judith O'Reilly

  Something about the smell of the pub took him back there.

  He stepped out into the fresh air. Walking over to the edge of the Quayside, he tossed the final strip of purple pills into the moving river. He’d used them to dull whatever was going on in his brain long enough. Leaning against the railings, he pulled out the black book. A textbook on advanced mathematics, first and second year, the same shape and heft of Peggy’s notebook, wrapped in a bookstore plastic bag, shoved deep down into Honor’s pocket. He’d made the switch. He wasn’t proud of himself and Honor would be furious, but he was doing it for her own good. This wasn’t a civilized world and every second counted. Honor would waste time travelling back to London. Persuading JP to credit her incredible story. North didn’t have that luxury because he had a plane to catch. Destination: Freedom.

  Just as soon as he found out the whereabouts of a scowling Chinese waif in blinged-up bovver boots.

  Chapter 33

  NEWCASTLE

  11.00am. Wednesday, 8th November

  Chinatown was 15 minutes’ distance from the riverside up through the city’s shopping streets. He’d checked out the route when he thought he and Honor would be going there together. As he walked, North pulled out the F grade essay.

  “Radio astronomy is a branch of observational astronomy that grew out of technology developments in the 20th century. It enables scientists to detect electromagnetic radiation from cosmic sources at centimetre or millimetre wavelengths - wavelengths that are much longer than those of visible light to which our eyes are sensitive.”

  He began to wish his brain – with or without its bullet – was bigger.

  Flipping open the black notebook, he stopped walking long enough to set Peggy’s flaring pictures and the rising and falling pop and fizz of her graphs against the essay. “Preliminary calculation work,” Bannerman said, dismissing the notebook. He didn’t appear to be lying – even so, North didn’t trust him. Bannerman was a rival academic with his own agenda which made him the wrong choice as interpreter. They needed a disinterested expert as a proper translator. All he had to do was find her.

  He stared again at the essay. Why hadn’t she written her name on it? Isn’t that what students did? He looked again at the F. Scrawled. Messy.

  What if it wasn’t an F?

  What if it was a Chinese symbol?

  Chapter 34

  CHINATOWN, NEWCASTLE

  11.15am. Wednesday, 8th November

  He started at one end of the street – down from the Chinese archway with its scowling guardian lions. Yin and Yang. Male and Female. Both of them covered in the graffiti and excrement that passed for political comment. There was increasing anti-Chinese feeling in the country since the latest price hikes by the Chinese corporations who had taken over the utilities. These days people didn’t need much of an excuse to dislike a neighbour or a foreigner.

  Staff at the Golden Wonder all-you-can-eat buffet £7.95 a head, hadn’t opened up yet, though behind the glass he caught glimpses of white jacketed cooks moving through the dark restaurant – all of them ignoring the stranger knocking at their window.

  The 30-something manager in the Jade Gardens did at least take the paper and examine the character before shrugging. Divn’t have a clue, mate.

  Not till the 11th restaurant, the Royal China, did the young lad in a bow tie abandon his table laying to translate the character for him.

  “Yu,” he said. The lad took out his own phone and did a search. “Good job you aren’t looking for her in China, there’s more than seven million of them over there.”

  He shouted through to the kitchen and a bespectacled woman, her black hair in a French pleat, came out. North smiled but the French pleat-woman didn’t smile back. He guessed she blamed him for the abandoned knives and forks and the unpolished wine glasses.

  “Auntie, this guy is looking for a family called Yu with a 14-year-old girl studying at the uni. He thinks they run a takeaway.”

  Chapter 35

  NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY

  1.30pm. Wednesday, 8th November

  Mrs Craggs loathed the way she got older and uglier, while students remained young and beautiful. No one liked her and she knew it. The only one of the academic staff who made time for her was Walt Bannerman. Ten years ago, she wanted to marry him. Five years ago, sleep with him. There was an embarrassing fumble after one departmental drinks do that neither of them acknowledged afterwards. But Mrs Craggs was glad it happened because it released the sexual tension between them. These days she was happy enough to pop her head round the door to offer him a butterscotch and spend a few minutes gutting whoever was attracting her ire. Like that flibbertigibbet Dr Peggy Boland, for instance.

  Balling her damp man-size handkerchief and tucking it into her cardigan sleeve, she gathered up the few envelopes belonging to Bannerman. Everyone else had pigeonholes, but Mrs Craggs was happy to hand-deliver Walt’s. That’s what she called him – ‘Walt’.

  Everyone else was Dr This or Professor That. But Professor Walter Bannerman would always and forever be her Walt.

  Her new shoes rubbed her heels. She wondered if he would notice them. Tan leather loafers with tassels. She wasn’t convinced about the tassels. They seemed rather racy outside of the shoe shop, but when she was trying them on, they had made her less unhappy. She hoped that Walt would be kind. He could be a little abrupt.

  His door was closed. It often was. Especially over lunch. He didn’t like students any more than she did. He was a brilliant man, and it was entirely wrong of the university to expect him to teach when his skills would have been better employed in research. She knocked twice in rapid succession. The knock of a tasseled woman. Her knock – different to all the other knocks in the world. One Walt would recognise. She didn’t wait for him to say Come in. A woman who had “surrendered” herself to a man had certain rights.

  Bannerman was smiling as Mrs Craggs pushed opened the door – at least that was her first thought, her heart lifting, till she realised it wasn’t so much a smile, as a bleeding line scored across his throat, blood sheeting the shirt, making it look as if the dead man wore a bib ready for a dinner he was never going to eat. When she opened her mouth and screamed – her piercing voice echoed down the staircase, bouncing off the green painted walls, and something in her brain registered the smell of mouldering coffee mixed with Walt’s blood.

  Chapter 36

  NEWCASTLE

  1.20pm. Wednesday, 8th November

  The Oriental Dragon was a dingy hole, its metal shutters daubed in obscenities and spray-paint tags squeezed between a boarded-up bookies and a burnt-out laundrette in the worst part of the worst part of town. During his years in the Army, North must have eaten in grimmer joints – he just couldn’t think of any.

  As he pulled out the astronomy essay, the tiny takeaway owner unlocked the mesh grill between her and any customers, lifted the melamine counter and waved him through as if she was in a hurry. Her lack of surprise meant she’d been warned by the Royal China, but North expected that.

  The little woman didn’t look at him, because that way she didn’t see him. Instead, she bolted the grill again, flapping her plump hand at North as if he were a fly she wanted to kill. At the very least, she wanted him out of sight before paying customers came around.

  He pushed his way through the red, white and blue plastic ribbons into the smell and pop of cooking grease.

  Standing over a hob, an even smaller white-haired version of the front-of-house fly-killer threw handfuls of chicken feet into an enormous metal wok of sizzling oil, flames hissing and flaring. The smell of rice vinegar and pepper. With a gnarled and boney finger she pointed upwards, her eyes on the dancing chicken feet and not on the bad ghost bringing bad luck she didn’t need. The thought crossed his mind that he was wasting his time, as through the steam, Granny made a pushing gesture with her hand, towards the white painted plywood door behind him. He bowed his head in thanks, but she turned back to the wok. The bad ghost – s
omeone else’s problem now.

  Behind the door, the narrow staircase reeked of damp and incense. Condensation from the cooking ran down the walls, but it was at least cooler than the kitchen – as if every window upstairs was open to the elements. He hadn’t quite reached the top of the stairs when the razor-sharp steel throwing star whistled past the tip of his nose to embed itself in the moist wall. The fact the star wasn’t quivering in the parietal bone of his skull had less to do with skill and more to do with the moving air along the landing. North took the final few steps on to the landing, the palms of his hands damp. He wanted to think from the wall.

  “I didn’t say you could come up.” The voice was mulish.

  The girl had thrown the star from a sitting position at her desk in her study. She was still in her golden boots, her hair braided into two tight plaits either side of her round face, watchful eyes hidden behind heavy square black frames. She sported a “Hello World” tee-shirt and a ferocious scowl. At the university, although she was slight and short, he’d presumed she was a student, here at home, it was obvious she was still a child. She stood up from the desk to move towards him, her hand reaching for the door, ready to slam it shut.

  “You were right about Bannerman,” he spoke quickly, because the girl didn’t seem the patient kind. “He’s an idiot.”

  “I’m always right,” she lifted her small chin, daring him to argue the case, the door closing fast and hard on the blue and green blaze of computer screens behind her. North rammed his boot in its way and she glared down at it as if considering the best way to sever his foot from his body.

  “You were waiting for Peggy today, weren’t you?”

  “Peggy who? I’m compiling, bozo.” The kid wasn’t winning any congeniality contests any time soon.

  “Let me help.”

  “You’re too stupid to help me, old man.”

  He was beginning to feel a degree of sympathy for Mrs Anne Craggs. The kid was an immovable object powered by a neutron bomb.

  “Then how about you help me?” He smiled – to show her how it was done, as one of the cooks from downstairs opened the door and shrieked up the stairs. The girl shrieked in return, making him jump. A torrent of outraged Cantonese, and North figured her mother had asked her if she was all right with the bad ghost and the girl had told her to go back to granny and the chicken feet. In so many words.

  He glimpsed what might have passed for a softening perhaps at the mention of Peggy or perhaps because he’d helped irritate her mother. She snorted, moving back to her desk and he followed.

  It didn’t qualify as a bedroom. Maybe once upon a time, silver butterflies and sparkling fairies flew across a strawberry-pink duvet and an adorable girl-child tacked posters of fluffy kittens to lilac-painted walls. These days it didn’t even have a bed and the only poster had five throwing stars embedded in it, one for each member of the boy band she appeared to hate. What it did have though was computer power. Banks of monitors and servers, some of them ancient, two of them Macs, lined the room, each monitor compiling code at a rate of knots, open text boxes in each, one discussing the latest reality TV show, the others tech-speak North couldn’t begin to understand. From what he could gather from the message boxes, her hacker name was Miho.

  North ceased to exist for her. Her interest in him extinguished itself as she went back to her typing, her fingers blurring over three separate keyboards, lines of numbers and symbols across the screen moving faster than he thought possible.

  “Miho?”

  She sighed at the fact he was still there – talking, breathing. Tapping her watch, holding in front of her like a shield, before she brought it back to read the time. Except it wasn’t the time.

  “Michael North. Blah blah. Boring. Chalfont Securities. Suit-man. Bad tie. No further images. No social media footprint. No believe you.”

  She had facial recognition software installed on the smartwatch. One she had to have boosted. Impressive. One picture of him existed on the net, matching him to his cover.

  “And do I call you Miho?”

  “Fangfang.”

  He kept his face straight. “Like Bang bang? Bang bang. Pop pop. You’re dead – I’m not?”

  “You good at bang bang, pop pop huh? Big guy.” She snorted.

  “What does Fangfang mean?”

  “It means ‘Chinese mother does daughter no favours’.”

  Fangfang swivelled her chair to face another screen – this one a battered laptop with a multi-level sword-fighting game on it and made her move, lopping off a troll’s head with an axe, arterial blood gushing everywhere, then took a mouthful of Diet Coke, pushing the glasses back up off her button nose on to her head, dismissing him again. He was willing to bet the Coke was warm from the heat of the machine. A smell of hot metal and fried prawns in the room – the buzz and hum of the monitors inside his head.

  “How do you know Peggy?”

  Fang shrugged but behind the teenage disdain, North sensed that Peggy mattered. Or had done before she’d turned her back on her protégé. He heard Fang swallow the Coke, and start chewing gum – the sound wet and sticky against her teeth.

  “School,” she abandoned her pretence at pigeon English and slid straight into thorough-bred Geordie, “say I’m ‘disruptive’. It is so not true. I do not disrupt – I contribute.” There was a note of outrage.

  Class after class. Exasperated, red-faced teachers as she took control of their whiteboards on her smartphone. Her headteacher shouting, his arms windmilling after she crashed the school’s server. North had been there himself. Disrespecting staff, overturning desks, slamming his way out of class. The other kids’ wariness. North knew nothing about children but he knew that Fang was different and difference was a capital crime at 14.

  School persuaded Peggy to take her on. Doubtless they’d used terms like genius and gifted, rather than ‘disruptive’ and ‘pain in the arse’.

  “Dr B. said they didn’t know what they were missing. I’m a ‘prodigy’.” Fangfang placed theatrical emphasis on the word “prodigy”. Peggy’s word. Peggy who had taken damaged, faithless Honor under her wing and healed her. A woman who always knew the right words to make things better.

  “And?”

  She shrugged again. “I did some work for her. Crunching data. Trying to make sense of it. She always said ‘Look for the unexpected’. And she promised to talk to Mam and Granny Po about getting me over to MIT early. She was okay.”

  The word “okay” sounded odd in her mouth as if it was the first and possibly last time she’d admit to such a thing.

  “I don’t care she went away – it was lame anyhow. I like computers not space-shite.” She cared enough to stake out the university department day after day, waiting for Peggy to walk back in. She was let down, gutted. The power-house brain that of an adult; the devastation that of an abandoned child.

  “Peggy didn’t walk out on you, Fangfang.” The girl returned to her coding – showing him just how much the prodigy didn’t care. “She’s disappeared and I’m trying to find her.”

  A more casual observer than North might have thought Fang stopped listening when she blew an enormous blue bubble then popped it, fragile skin exploding over her nose and lips. But North knew as her pink tongue worked the skin back into her open mouth, she was taking in every word. She just hadn’t decided how to feel about it yet.

  He pulled out the black book and laid it flat on the desk, opening it at a random page, turning to another.

  “Tell me what it says.”

  “Moron-person, I don’t give it away,” she said rubbing her index and middle finger together against her thumb.

  A teenage mercenary. He wished again for the bundles of red notes that had filled the rucksack that now lay at the bottom of the North Sea.

  “I’m good for it.”

  Fang’s fingers drummed on the desk. She wanted money, but she wanted to show him what she could do. The kid had thrown the star as a warning. It was a showy gesture meant
to impress.

  He left it a beat.

  “I thought you’d want to help me find Peggy, but maybe it’s too hard for you to understand, kiddo? No harm. No foul. Go back to your dragons.” He reached over her to take back the book but she swiveled in her chair so he couldn’t quite reach it. Her reactions were faster than Bannerman’s.

  “She didn’t go away like they said? To Chile or some place full of saddos?”

  “She didn’t go anywhere she wanted to go.”

  From her mouth Fang extracted a piece of pale blue gum and stuck it behind her ear and under a plait. She licked her finger and thumb with some daintiness, before wiping them this way and that on her tee-shirt and took hold of the book, pausing at each page, turning one or two of the pages upside down, reading some right-to-left and some left-to-right. She was too young. She didn’t want to admit she didn’t know, he’d decided. He would go back to Bannerman and threaten to kill him to help concentrate his mind. In his experience, people got a lot more helpful with the barrel of a gun pressed against their temple.

  Pulling the keyboard towards her, Fang turned her head to pick up the paintbrush tip of her plait and slide it between her teeth, sucking as her stubby fingers stroked the keys all in a rush. North couldn’t keep up as the girl pushed through the pure mathematics and complex calculations. Explosions of white light and electric impulses surged through her, fizzing and popping. There was a shift as her fingers paused over the keyboard and she spat out the plait. Irritation. A sense of being lifted, held over the void and a rushing, terrifying dislocation as something in her hurled out the distraction that was him. Was it real? Did it happen? Or had his analogue brain blown a digital fuse in its attempt to keep up with what he could see happening on Fang’s screens?

  He shook his head from side to side. The surging energy and excitement had felt real. The speeding numbers he could never begin to calculate. Did the girl sense some intrusion? Typing again, gum gone from behind her ear, Fang popped another blue bubble then gave a magnificent burp smelling of synthetic raspberries. He couldn’t tell. He wasn’t going back there. If it was a delusion, he could do without it. If it happened and he staged a home invasion on Fangfang’s brain, next time she might throw him clear out of his own mind, let alone hers, and straight into an abyss from which there was no return. He could decide if he was mad later. Right this second it was easier to watch the screen.