“This is a safe space, Honor.” When the counsellor grew excited or agitated, she wriggled her fingers and there was a clacketty-clash of metal scraping against metal from the silver and turquoise rings on each of them. “You’re protected within our supportive community.” She flung out her arms as if she was a mother and the motley group of eight blank-eyed, twitching patients her most beloved children, and her rings smashed one against each other. “This is a sacred place of absolute trust.”
Honor folded her arms across her body and stretched out her legs. She crossed them at the ankles. No Surrender. The silver-haired counsellor sighed with apparent disappointment, excluding Honor by skewing her droopy body towards an easier mark – the bearded man and his coke addiction.
What was the point of speaking? Even Honor thought Honor sounded like a lunatic. Like a paranoid narcissist with suicidal tendencies. Like her father, in fact. Someone who trusted no one. She rubbed her upper arm where blue bruises bloomed under the skin. Certainly not the nurse with the apple cheeks who pinched her under the pretext of helping her dress. Not the avuncular psychotherapist this morning who with his fingers steepled, the tips pressing against each other, “brought her up to speed” with the “psychotic incident” at the Savoy. “Screaming, nudity, faecal matter and food spread over the bedroom walls, violence to staff,” he read from the admission forms in a kindly voice, and Honor was paralysed with shame. It came as no surprise when he refused her requests for access to a telephone. “Let’s concentrate on you for the time being.”
Trust? She had no intention of trusting this be-ringed dabbler in broken souls prodding her through the bars with a specially sharpened truth stick.
Dougie, the sex addict with a cocaine problem, who drank himself to sleep every night before breakfasting on a bowl of uppers, drew breath. He had “shared” enough to have the counsellor bug-eyed with good will as she wound up the session and congratulated “everyone” – a sorrowful glance at Honor – on their excellent work. Same time tomorrow, people.
The talker’s goatee suited him; he patted her hand as he left the session. “Stick with it, darlin’,” he said. “I should know – it’s my fourth time in here.”
The lounge door closed behind the last of the group – an over-eating compulsive hoarder – and Honor was left in silence, but for the ticking of the ancient radiator. The kindness of the stranger’s touch sank through her flesh and bones to lie upon her soul. In the magnolia emptiness, she took out the thought that “they” were right. That she was breaking apart into pieces. That despite her best efforts to control herself and her surroundings, she had inherited her father’s murderous insanity. That it was better for everyone if she was in here. The tiny pin-pricks on the back of her hand were gone – had they ever been there? She drew her fingers over the crimson line along her wrist, plucked at her tufted hair again. She looked like a convict. A lunatic. Was she self-harming?
Obsessing? Neurotic? Delusional? Honor shivered. Had she sailed over the edge of the world? A place she vowed never to go and was she still falling? According to the psychiatrist, she checked herself out of Tommy’s hospital and straight into the Savoy on Tuesday and went to ground, brocade curtains drawn, refusing housekeeping and food – hotel staff growing increasingly worried for her welfare.
She hadn’t been on her own though, she’d explained to the consultant. There was a witness to everything. Michael North.
The consultant listened. His hand covering his mouth when he wasn’t scribbling notes.
Had she considered that North represented a delusion of her manic imagination? The dangerous, damaging protector with the power of life and death. Who looked at her like he wanted to save her, like he wanted her to save him. “It’s telling,” the psychiatrist said, “that you invented this guardian angel, as it were, with a bullet in his head. Your own mind acknowledging the fiction, that a figure like this is a powerful, persuasive construct of your damaged psyche, a representation of your mental crisis – a crisis repressed since the trauma of childhood.”
Her head was thick and muzzy from whatever they pumped into her at the Savoy to subdue her; pins and needles crawling across her skull and down her neck. She rubbed her fingers over her forehead, rubbing away the confusion. Peggy left and it triggered madness. Maybe she left because of her? Because she was a lunatic? Because she thought Honor was a danger to both of them. Worse yet, perhaps Peggy didn’t even exist? Holding on to the idea of Peggy’s arms around her. The excitement in her face whenever she talked about space, about galaxies and supernova and everything there was still to know. Peggy at least was real. She had to be.
On the seventies glass coffee table at the heart of the circle of empty chairs, the vanilla-scented candle flame spluttered as it fought to stay alight in the puddle of wax. A week ago Honor believed she survived her childhood. Triumphed. She had a career and status. She was making a name for herself as a serious political player. She had a wealthy, skilful lover ready to marry her whenever she said the word; it was true she had no great talent for friendship, but she had a best friend to love and a future. She didn’t have that any more – she didn’t have anyone or anything. With a sigh the twisted wick with its bud of flame bent over into the molten wax, lay down and died.
Chapter 54
9.25pm. Thursday, 9th November
Pushing against the metal bar of the fire door, Dougie hardly seemed able to get it open, till it gave with a bang and he looked back at Honor with a smirk. The advantage of having been in the clinic before, he’d boasted, he knew which day was lime jelly, which orderly could be bribed to bring in cigarettes and exactly where was safe to smoke them. She should stick with him.
The fresh air was cold on her face. Aside from the morning run, she’d never been one for the outdoors but the windows of the overheated clinic barely opened wide enough to slide a palm of a hand through. Honor took a deep breath. She’d fought against the medication but they were insisting; Nurse Apple-cheeks pushing tiny pills through her sealed lips, smashing them against her teeth and holding her jaws closed till she swallowed. When she got out, she wanted that nurse defrocked – her watch snipped from her apron and her uniform burnt from her body with a blowtorch. When she got out. If she got out.
Truth to tell, she didn’t know the way because whatever the pills were, they left her foggy with a ringing headache like an iron band round her temples. Recovery – was it even a possibility when the disease was in the blood? One final gift from Daddy dearest. She’d never permit herself to have children, she knew that much. At least she could stop the bloodline. She was right when she told Peggy that years ago. Peggy. She shook away the thought. She’d think about Peggy later when she wasn’t so exhausted. She wrapped her arms around herself to stop from shivering. Put her head back. Drizzling, the freezing spats of water jerked her into wakefulness like so many volts.
Where was Peggy?
When she opened her eyes, Dougie was watching. A cigarette drooping between his lips, he stood on the edge of the flat tarmacadam roof, leaning against the crenellated wall. He held out the olive-green packet and she walked across to take one. Temptation.
The death wish.
The skull and crossbones. She hesitated.
“I gave up.”
Gave up when she met a construct of her imagination in the park.
“Good for you, hen.” He tucked the packet back into his trouser pocket.
The crenellation dipped where she stood, a thin iron bar bridging the gap, offering a view of the terrace lit up by solar torches, the urns speckled with the last of the blood-red geraniums, the wintry gardens with their evergreen trees, yellow gravel avenue leading to the closed wrought-iron gate and the spread-out patchwork pastureland and dark woods beyond.
The scratch of his stubble on her bare neck startled her. A sex addict – of course, he was going to try his luck. She laughed, polite, not wanting to offend. Raising her hand to ward off the kiss and as she turned she almost tipped, reaching he
r hands out to either side of the wall to keep herself steady, the safety bar pressing against the back of her thighs. Dougie pressed the length of his body against hers and she moved to shove him off, but he kept hold of her arms, stronger suddenly, bending her, tipping her backwards against the bar, his legs tight against her, the only thing keeping her from falling. Out of her peripheral vision, she caught sight of the roofline against the night sky, the Queen Anne facade, the flat windows of the second floor. No one could see her. No one would hear her scream so there seemed no point in it.
Close-up, his eyes were bloodshot – amused by her fear.
“It’s a shame we don’t have the time to get to know each other better, Honor,” he said. “After all, we’re the only sane people in here.”
The Glaswegian accent had gone. Instead the voice was upper class, patrician. He was cold and controlled, and no part of him shook.
A dawning realisation came on her. Dougie wasn’t a sex addict or a drug fiend. He had lured her to the roof with one intention. And it wasn’t to smoke a cigarette.
He was a killer sent by the Board.
Unbalanced, held out into nothingness by a man intent on nothing less than her death, Honor revived. She wasn’t mad. Misguided, patronising, controlling JP tried to keep her safe and make her better, but the Board found her anyway. Dougie – or whoever he was – had waited for his moment, until it was just them and until her death could be explained away. She was supposed to kill herself – like Ned. A most convenient suicide.
She gripped the lapels of his corduroy jacket. Men who kill women. Anger flared in the darkest, most primitive part of her at the prospect of dying at the hands of a violent man. Dying the way her mother died. Except she wasn’t her mother. Weeping. Pleading. Screaming at Honor to hide and not to come out. Extinguished. Taking tighter hold. If he pushed her off, he was coming with her.
“I understand your young friend Ned Fellowes died recently.” Dougie was enjoying his power. She could see it in him. The compulsion to control. “Let me extend my sympathies.”
The fire door, whipped open by the wind to smash against the wall, brought him round with a start. Honor raised her knee, pulled it up hard and the man she knew as Dougie doubled over, clutching himself, releasing her as he grunted in pain. She moved away from the edge of the roof. She thought afterwards that she didn’t have to do it. That she could have run, hauled the fire-door closed behind her as her mother would have wanted, taken the stairs two at a time, found a public space. Even at that moment, some part of her knew that. Knew it and decided against it. Let me extend my sympathies. Dougie killed Ned. She took a step back and turned her shoulder towards him before she ran at him. Too late he realised what she intended – realised only as his thigh hit the rusting iron bar and he tipped and fell, down, down to the paving below, to the stone urns with the last flowers of the winter.
She leaned over the parapet; the dead man’s arms and legs spreadeagled like a swastika, soil and flowers and black blood, spreading across the paving and down into the smooth green grass.
Satisfied at the stillness, with her two hands over the thin cotton shirt, she ripped it as a man might rip a woman’s dress in violent frenzy. The rending of cloth audible even over the sound of a woman screaming.
Chapter 55
NORTHUMBERLAND
4am. Friday, 10th November
The signs hammered to the wooden fence posts spelled it out. All lands within the marked boundaries were property of the National Defence Force (Inc.). New Army exercises were taking place and live artillery firing on-going. Red flag. Danger. Access Strictly Prohibited. Prosecution or Death guaranteed in the event of any and all trespass. North tapped the Glock Stella had given him for luck. He wouldn’t need a lawyer.
The woodland beyond the signs was scrubby and hard to walk through, but it had the advantage of discretion. Out on the Northumberland moorland, he’d be exposed. Even in the dark among the trees, with his face and hands muddied, he felt like a marked and hunted animal. This was the Army. The New Army admittedly. But still the Army. They had infra-red, night-vision equipment and a great deal of brand new weaponry which they liked to use. And that’s if his instinct about the disappeared people was right. There was a chance he had it wrong, and he was about to get himself shot or blown up for no good reason. Which would, he decided, be annoying.
Scanning the ground between the trees in front of him for stray incendiary devices or mortar shells, he trod with caution. There was still the best part of four miles to cross over rough terrain before he reached the barracks. His belly throbbed. Stella had done a good job, but despite the neat stitching, the yomp had opened up the wound. He gritted his teeth aware of the lips of the wound gaping, blood wet against his top. Pain was a state of mind. It wasn’t going to kill him. He glanced down at the compass he “salvaged” alongside binoculars, from an Army surplus store when he left the bar, the tip of the needle oscillating on the pivot, and checked the Ordnance Survey map. It felt strange, as if the years were rolling backwards and he was a soldier again. This time though he was on his own and if any other soldiers spotted him, they would undoubtedly shoot him.
Clouds covered what was left of the moon. Without it the sky was dark – unspoiled by pollution from houses and roads and cars and people. He liked it that way. There were those who closed their curtains against the darkness and huddled together round the hearth to tell stories and to keep safe. But that was never him. As he stepped out from the woods, a bat on leathery wings swept towards and past him, and he caught his breath, reaching up to ward it off but it disappeared back into the night as quickly as it came. He stood still. Was he making too much noise? So much noise that they would hear him across the miles and come for him? Enough that they would find him? A barn owl shrieked across the distance and the wind moved through the copse of scrubby pine behind him. A birdwatcher. He had binoculars. He could tell them he was a birdwatcher.
But they wouldn’t believe him.
According to his watch, it was another two hours before first light. He forced himself to take a step. Another. Crushing and snapping the stalks of grass. Plunging into and out of the mud. He had to believe there was enough noise to cover him, providing they didn’t have eyes on the ground. He had seen no cameras, no drones. The New Army’s protection lay in isolation, wire fencing, large wooden noticeboards with maps and skulls and crossbones and warnings of death and disaster for the foolish and rambling. “I didn’t take you for a rambler, North,” Honor said to him from her hospital bed. No, he wasn’t a fool and he wasn’t a rambler. Yet here he was.
It took less than two hours. It took one hour and fifty-four minutes which was as well because dawn came early. He spread himself flat behind a rising clump of grassland and to the left of yellow-blooming gorse, both legs wide to keep his profile close to the ground and the Glock within easy reaching distance. The position wouldn’t provide much cover if anyone looked hard enough, but he trusted they wouldn’t. He trusted that the guards at the barracks were concentrating on keeping people in, rather than keeping people out.
The guardhouse stood back from the 20-foot steel and mesh gate. Judging by the churn back and forth, the camp operated in a state of high alert. He counted four men in the guardhouse itself with eight more patrolling the perimeter fencing which was topped with barbed wire coils. North had no eye-line to the rear gate though he knew there was one, and he guessed there’d be the same number of guards there. From Fang’s research he also knew that the steep-roofed huts of the barracks could accommodate up to 400 troops on field training exercises. He kept his sights focused on the three huts to the left. Close by, the perimeter fencing ran in parallel lines – a few yards of broken earth between the neighbouring wires. Anyone on the inside wanting to make it to the outside would have to break through the first mesh fence then cross the no-man’s land before negotiating a second set of fencing with its own concrete posts and barbed wire topping. The enclosure would be the perfect place to hold p
risoners.
It took another 20 minutes to distinguish between the patrolling soldiers by their walk, by the chink of the largest who carried loose change in his pocket, the low chat between them as they scanned the horizon with glazed-over eyes. It wouldn’t be long before the day shift came on – even from a distance he could sense the fatigue, the longing to be off their feet, hungry for a hot meal and a warm bed.
The ear habituates itself to the rhythm of the countryside, the movement of the grass, the roll of the wind. Across the moorland, the occasional bleat of scattered sheep waking to another dawn, a curlew here then gone again. But the child’s voice cut through it all – wailing as if he was awakened too early and someplace he didn’t want to be. A soldier glanced across and grimaced at the noise.
The binoculars were heavy, the optics adjustable to each eye – Royal Navy issue from the Second World War, ancient but effective. Behind the diamond mesh, a tide of people spilled out of huts, their slow progress towards the cookhouse, steam pouring out of a tall tin chimney. Seven o’clock breakfast. Soldiers stood to one side, at ease, with weapons cradled in their arms. They weren’t worried about being rushed, or overpowered. The hungry people they guarded were civilians – more women than men, along with a smattering of children. The pounding of North’s heart felt as if it came up from the core of the earth. The crying boy with the shock of dark hair held his pregnant mother’s hand, a toy lamb clutched in the other, his feet scuffing the ground, dragging at her. As if the child sensed him, he turned towards the moorlands beyond the wire, at the wide pale blue and soft pink sky, the washed-out gold of the rising sun, and pointed as if in warning.
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