Killing State

by Judith O'Reilly

  “I felt really bad for her y’kna, but I was out of it.”

  When Jimmy the Sniff started talking, he didn’t stop. North could almost taste the other man’s curiosity, his fear. His heart almost stopping as the car’s headlights shone on him, then swept around. Pausing, reversing, wheels turning as the driver swung into the space. A late return. Parking up. Jimmy relaxed then. Stick to the darkness and the night would be his again soon enough. Waiting, as the driver pressed the button. A blip. Locking the car. A woman. Tall. Big boobs. Probably the boobs were the reason he didn’t see the men. At least four of them. The van with blacked-out windows. The ambulance that drew up parallel to the car – no siren, no blue lights. The woman drooping. Hooded. Half-carried into the ambulance. No light in the interior. Low voices. Smooth motors. No extraneous noise. Over and done with. The ambulance gone. Van. Woman. Car. All as if they had never been. Jimmy spooked at the coming and going, heart pounding, not wanting to know, not wanting to be there or to be seen, moving on to a different street.

  Still, if he could help now, he would. And he wouldn’t normally ask, but times were hard for the small businessman. North ignored him.

  Had Peggy been taken ill in the night as she worked late at her desk? Had she called from the car as she drove for an ambulance to meet her at home? Unlikely. North turned it over. Paramedics needed light to work by and this was an operation carried out in darkness and silence. Their patient hooded. But no one questions the comings and goings of an ambulance in the middle of the night.

  Shame she didn’t make it into her house.

  Or perhaps it was a lucky escape for the family she had opened her home to. He gestured Jimmy out of the car and into the street.

  “Ever broken into a house, Jimmy?” He could do it himself better but he had no intention of letting Jimmy the Sniff out of his sight till he was sure there was nothing else to know. “I always enjoy seeing a professional at work.”

  Chapter 47

  NEWCASTLE

  3.40am. Thursday, 9th November

  Like Honor’s before it, Peggy’s garden gate creaked as they opened it. North cursed. It was the middle of the night and he didn’t want to take the risk of a neighbour reporting a break-in. He pushed Jimmy past Peggy’s front door with its two terracotta pots of spindly lavender and along the path by the scrap of unmown grass to a back door.

  He didn’t see it at first – figured it for a shadow in the lee of the wall.

  The outstretched body of a greyhound lay on its side in the grass. Asleep? What did Honor say the dog was called? Jansky – the name came to him.

  The dog didn’t move. Not asleep. Dead.

  Jimmy knelt by Jansky’s corpse. With grubby fingers, he attempted to loosen the thin plastic cord wrapped around and around the throat. A washing line North guessed. Jimmy raised the boney head and half a dozen white maggots crawled out of the dog’s eye, and the dealer hurled himself away, landing on his bottom and hands, scrabbling away like a crab.

  North hauled him to his feet – the dealer shuddering in his arms. “That’s not on,” he said. “That’s sick, like.”

  He’d never have pinned Jimmy for the sensitive type, but appearances – they could deceive.

  They knocked first. Quietly – in case. But there was no response. North never thought there would be. The Board wasn’t one for loose ends. For all that Jimmy wasn’t much of a dealer, he was a talented enough burglar. The dead dog forgotten, he grinned at North as the lock clicked, pleased with himself – his mouth black and gummy. North pushed him back from the door.

  Jimmy the Sniff’s home was a rancid, crawling, stinking pit of dirt and disease, but this was worse because this was a dead house. No sweet-faced children. No grateful refugee parents. No great surprise that the house was echoing and empty. North opened a cupboard door in the kitchen. No food. A drawer. Nothing. Bleached clean. Even the unmoving air tainted and chemical.

  North went from the kitchen through to a small sitting room on the right and a larger living room on the left. If there had been sofas and bookshelves and a television, they were long gone, and the windows to each room shuttered.

  He moved up the staircase to the bathroom and the bedrooms – the master bedroom, a study and a guestroom. Nothing. No toy, no small sock, no sign of life. No sign there had ever been life. An antiseptic smell. Every surface wiped, every carpet lifted. Not a home – an empty house.

  Honor said the refugee family were staying in the house till Peggy returned. Two children. A pregnant woman and her husband with no jobs to go to, with barely any English and no place to live.

  Either the family decided to move on because they sensed trouble and wanted no part of it.

  Or they were persuaded to go.

  Persuaded by large men who were wiping away signs Peggy ever existed. Like the fact she’d left behind a home. And an ugly dog.

  Jimmy the Sniff pounded up the stairs. “North, mate.” The dealer had decided they were friends now they had broken into a house together. “I’ve just remembered. That ambulance like – it was an Army one, and there’s someone…”

  Which was the exact moment the world exploded around them, lifting Jimmy into the air and blowing him across the room as a crater opened up in the bedroom floor. For a second North fought for understanding. He was in Afghanistan. There was a bomb and they were under attack. Then he came back. He was home and surrounded by flames. Somebody, somewhere groaned. Him. He was groaning. Lying on his front, wreckage and plaster across his body. He moved, his head screamed and he moved anyway. The heat filled him – the marrow boiling in his bones. His hand touched his stomach, a large piece of wood stuck out from it like a pin in a voodoo doll. Gritting his teeth, he pulled out the wood, before clamping his hand to the wound which spurted warm and red. The blood all the brighter for the flames.

  Jimmy was sprawled beneath the window, his face pulped. North groped his way towards the limbs like sticks, finding a faint flutter of heartbeat under the cage of ribs. They killed Bannerman, they’ll kill me, they’ll kill you too. The dealer was right. Or at least they tried and might yet succeed.

  Flames lit up the stairs. Whatever was used to clean down the house was acting as an accelerant. A tongue of fire crawled across the walls and the ceiling, then another and another – feeling over the house, claiming the rooms before they filled up the space with searing heat. North slammed shut the door then went back to the windows, wrenching open the shutters with his free hand, the wintering cherry tree was up against the sash window.

  Had Peggy seen it blossom? He wrenched open the window. It was stiff on its runners. He heaved it the last few feet. The branch was slim. He had to hope it would hold his weight if he used it for a matter of seconds to reach the broader trunk. The problem was Jimmy the Sniff.

  At his feet the dealer lay crumpled and bleeding, his eye sockets sunken, a narrow line of blood trickling from his mouth. He’d watched and done nothing when Peggy was snatched. He was toothless trash who sold misery in baggies. He’d be missed by clients till they found another dealer and a nameless cat, and North wasn’t too sure about the cat. He might or he might not have a child, and wore a friendship bracelet because despite the odds somewhere somebody loved him. He was nothing and everything, and North wasn’t leaving him to die. Ignoring the pain that shot through his abdominal muscles, cursing, he dragged Jimmy into a sitting position, took hold, and threw him – sack-like – over his shoulder.

  Crouching on the narrow sill, swaying with the weight of Jimmy, North swung his feet over on to the narrow branch. The heat was at his back. They didn’t have long. Jimmy’s head and arms dangled into space – the tattered braided silk falling from the bony wrist into the dark. With one hand holding the sash open, North reached with the other for the trunk of the tree. Stretching. The flames were through the door and there was a splintering of glass from the front of the house as the devouring heat claimed the bow windows. Half-standing. Standing – he transferred his weight to the branc
h as his fingertips reached for the trunk, their tips touching against the bark. There was a ripping noise as the oilskin caught on the frame, jerking him back. Jimmy groaned, lifted his head, and North’s equilibrium shifted. They weren’t going to make it. There was a crack as the branch splintered under him and he grabbed with both arms for the branch above, but it wasn’t there. Beneath his feet, the branch gave way, there was air and there was falling. He and Jimmy together.

  Chapter 48

  SUFFOLK

  3.55am. Thursday, 9th November

  The screaming had been going on for some time before she managed to open her eyes. The high-pitched agonized shriek corkscrewing its way through Honor’s ear drum and into the soft matter of her brain to fill it with someone else’s pain and wanting, but still she hadn’t managed to persuade her eyes to open.

  She fought them. Lids thick and heavy, intent on keeping her in darkness. The taste iron and bitter, leaving her mouth parched and her tongue swollen. Water. She needed water or she was going to die. The wanting dragged her into consciousness, forcing open her eyes. Water. It was all she needed. If she could taste water, the pain would stop and there would be silence and peace.

  Her vision blurred then came back. A beaker of water sat by her bed next to a jug. Ice in the thick plastic jug. Condensation running down its corrugations. She attempted to move her arm to reach for the glass, but it lay useless and disconnected by her side. What was happening to her? Honor willed herself to focus on the glass. She inched her way across the bed, forcing movement into her unwilling limbs – her legs, her arms. Her hand was stiff and clumsy as it moved towards the beaker – reaching for it, knocking it. The beaker sliding, falling, water spilling across the mahogany bedside cabinet, cascading down the drawer, the cupboard door and on to the thickly carpeted floor.

  The clatter was enough to bring the nurse.

  A plump, shiny-faced woman, the nurse’s greying hair was slashed into a vicious bob, each wing clipped into its rightful place with a rainbow-coloured barette.

  Tutting, she picked the beaker from the floor and filled it again, moving it just out of Honor’s reach. Honor let out a small groan as the nurse swept dry the cabinet, mopping the thick carpet with a towel she took from a sink in the corner of the room.

  Water would have revived her. It turned out anger did the exact same thing. Honor fought to remember. She was in Newcastle.

  It came back to her in a rush.

  With North.

  Looking for something.

  Someone.

  Peggy.

  North was a bad man.

  She felt fear at the memory of him. The knife. His eyes.

  His smile.

  But he was helping her find Peggy.

  Anger.

  No it wasn’t North she was angry with.

  It wasn’t Peggy.

  She was angry with JP Armitage. JP. Who betrayed her into darkness, and screaming. He’d said one of his companies owned some place in Suffolk. More like a spa than a clinic. The best people. Superlative care. Everyone goes there.

  The nurse spread the towel on the floor, her white shoes stamping on it, crushing the water out from the carpet – “Rowantree Psychiatric Clinic” woven into the hem. Only when she was satisfied did she pick up the towel and lay it, soaked and filthy, on the bedside cabinet beside the beaker. She gave a martyred sigh as she held Honor’s head away from the pillow and raised the drink to her lips. The transparent smell of cold water. Honor kept her mouth closed.

  JP wanted her out of the way, and it hurt. Worse yet, he had to be involved in whatever “this” was. She was going to pull him limb from limb.

  She heaved herself on to her elbow, taking the cup herself, her left hand with its tiny puncture wounds trembling. Suit yourself. The nurse turned away – making for the door, as Honor swallowed the sweet water. She was on her own. How it used to be.

  Chapter 49

  NEWCASTLE

  3.55am. Thursday, 9th November

  That he was still alive came as a shock. Lying on his back on the hard ground, unable to move, pain everywhere, the house towered above him, flaming from every window.

  Smoke belching and billowing from Edwardian brickwork. It wasn’t empty any more, but filled with darkness and Hell’s flames inside and out.

  He lost her. She was there and then she was gone. He tried to feel happy about it, retain that satisfaction with himself and his place in the world. Drawing himself in. Praying Honor was still alive. Then he saw her – walking towards him. Unsmiling and lit up by the flames. Relief. Guilt. Knowing that she didn’t want to be there – that she would rather be someplace else, anywhere else but with him.

  Deep within him, something shifted and he felt it like another explosion, like blast waves in the aftermath of a bomb, moving away from his core and through him. Like vibrations from immense silver bells pealing out across the countryside. Like there was music in the universe and he could suddenly feel it because he was part of it – feel it in the soul he didn’t think he possessed.

  There. In front of him.

  Her face.

  “North. North.” Calling him. Needing him. Shaking him. “North.”

  Shouting. Loudly. His head breaking apart with it.

  He opened his eyes.

  It wasn’t her. The sensation of loss all over again.

  Desolation.

  Stella drove with one hand, shaking him with the other. He sat slumped in the front passenger seat, his forehead pressed against the cold window. Every bone in his body hurt. He moved his feet – he might as well know if he’d smashed his spine to dust in the fall. He turned his head as the blue light swept the interior of the car and the first then the second of the fire engines went by.

  Jimmy?

  Stella’s hand which had been on him went back to the wheel.

  Hard core, he heard. Poor bastard.

  “You were taking too long. The car’s got a tracker, and I wanted to check you were okay.” She made a tight right. Her half-and-half face set like a death mask. “Jimmy’s dead. You don’t mess around – I’ll give you that.”

  She thought he set the house ablaze. Her first instinct was that he killed Jimmy the Sniff for knowing too much or not knowing enough. He opened his mouth to explain, that the Board had found him. Something was wrong. His stomach felt fleshy and raw, a pain at the core of him. His hand wet. His head hurt – daylight flooding him with pain. Jimmy the Sniff’s “North, mate…” his last thought.

  Chapter 50

  NEWCASTLE

  7.20am. Thursday, 9th November

  North stirred, blinking his heavy eyes as names and numbers swam in and out of his vision. Beer delivery Thursday. No lager. Noughts and crosses. Strings of credit card numbers with names against them. Katya can’t do Fridays. Hangman with a dangling stick figure, its face blank under the half-finished word “DANG-R”. Drawings of pendulous breasts, flowering vulvas and immense penises. More drawings of copulating couples in intricate poses. Jess’s name over and over like a graffiti tag.

  Across the room the green-shaded lamp lit Stella as she worked at the desk, her hunched shadow huge and monstrous as North struggled to bring the room into focus. She put down the phone and turned to scrawl something, and the chalk shrieked, hurting his ears, insinuating itself into his brain. He closed his eyes then opened them again.

  His name was North, he reminded himself, and he had a job to do. He raised his head from the scoop of the pillow and a grenade went off inside of him, throwing him back into the dark. Hours passed – he didn’t know how many but when he opened his eyes again, the first thing he saw was his watch – the green figures in the gloom, it was past noon, and Stella was gone. He hadn’t dreamed it – the breasts and the hanging man were still there, chalked up on a wall which had been painted with blackboard paint. Cardboard boxes lined the other three walls. Gin, whisky, cigarettes. North fought the urge to open a box, then a bottle, then another bottle and blot it all out like he did five y
ears ago when he left the Army and tried to drown the voices in his head. Peggy’s notebook? He lifted his head again. There was no notebook anywhere close. It had burned along with Peggy’s house and Jimmy the Sniff.

  The truckle bed was lumpy and narrow but it beat the cold hard ground he hit a few hours before. As did the sight of Jess in red leather trousers and a hot pink halterneck in the doorway.

  “Mam says you attract trouble like dead meat attracts flies.” The girl sauntered towards him, the scent of popcorn and temptation coming with her. The red curls were loose now, artful and dishevelled, like she’d lifted them off the nape of her neck to shake them before she made her entrance.

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” North eased himself up in bed which rocked precariously, revealing his nakedness. Naked that is aside from a bandage wrapped tight around his stomach, and he thought of Honor’s bandaged wrist, wondered if it was healing. He covered himself over with the sheet and blanket.

  “Stella brought me back to the club?”

  “She says you promised her money and she doesn’t want you dying before you hand it over. But I think she likes you.”

  Perched on the edge of the bed, her warmth against the length of his thigh, North did his best to ignore the sensation.

  “Mam doesn’t usually like men.”

  “She must have liked your father.”

  “Nah. She shagged a bull or a swan or the Holy Ghost. Her story changes depending on the drink and the moon. When I was younger, I decided she liked a man once but changed her mind after, and ate him like a fat hairy spider.”

  She moved a fraction closer – dimpling as she pressed the back of her hand to his forehead as if to check his temperature. Her fingers were cool. “We should get married before she gobbles you up. We’d make beautiful babies. A girl and a boy, one for you and one for me.”