Occasionally a relative or friend, North wasn’t sure which, stumbled among them searching, raising people’s heads, looking for husbands or colleagues – their fear of loss, of discovery, almost unbearable to him. They would plead with a nurse, she’d shake her head and they’d leave again, no wiser and no sorrier, but that much closer to the inevitable fact of death.
The injured sat on – in no hurry to leave. Even though they had been treated, glassy-eyed, their heads bandaged and wounds stitched, they found another plastic seat and went back to waiting. North had seen it before – the consolation of a stranger who’d shared the same experience worth more at that moment than the warm arms of a wife who hadn’t been there – could not imagine the horror, the realisation that what you had been through had changed you.
A groan from the assembled patients, a chorus of “No’s”. He looked back at the TV. Two white-coated doctors and a handful of pale, exhausted nurses had emerged from curtains and cubicles and tiny rooms. North couldn’t understand the pictures, couldn’t process what he was seeing. Overcome, a young nurse collapsed weeping against a colleague’s chest. The tickertape spelled it out – bomb attacks in seven venues in London. Aside from the Banqueting Hall, three other suicide bombers wrapped around with plastic explosives, the devices triggered by a pressure switch, one in the Dorchester, the others in the Westgate mall and Whiteley’s shopping centre, one suitcase bomb on a timer at Victoria Station, along with two car bombs of pressure cookers loaded with nails and pieces of metal outside Buckingham Palace and Chelsea Barracks triggered remotely.
A pressure switch. Sonja’s sorrowful, panicked eyes. Her hand had been wrapped around a pressure switch. Let go the switch – on purpose or accidentally and Boom.
Anarchy came to town.
“These people need locking up.” The middle-aged Cityslicker, one eye padded with gauze, had been furiously stabbing at his mobile phone since he sat down. Mobile communications were down across London and the South-East, the news report had already announced, and servers were working to resume normal service as soon as they could. But it didn’t stop him. As if he might get lucky and his text make it through. As if the rules didn’t apply to him.
A murmur of assent from the assembled crowd. “They should throw away the key.” The elderly diplomat who had been patting the young girl’s back stopped long enough to agree.
Then there she was. On the TV screen. Honor Jones – in a silver quilted jacket. Blood covered the pale skirt and there was a mauve bruise against her cheekbone which somehow made her eyes even greener. Her short hair was tousled as if she had run her hands through it but even so, it framed her face perfectly. She spoke directly to the camera against a backdrop of flames and burning shops. A nurse behind the desk turned up the volume.
Underneath the picture a tag line “Hero MP saves hundreds in shopping mall bomb disaster.” The picture cut away to grainy mobile phone footage, the shot dipping and falling – Honor mustering screaming shoppers. Her voice calm as she pointed to the exit. The power had gone and the only light was from the phone but Honor’s face remained clear of worry or fear.
“I’ve got you…Nobody panic. Hold hands. Keep together and keep moving everyone.”
There was something odd somewhere. The banker next to North who had stopped trying to text started again but he cursed and someone hissed at him to be quiet. That was it. The mobile network was down, but somehow this footage got through. And what were the chances that amid the communications chaos, the pictures to emerge were of Honor Jones, MP?
Maybe the call was a lucky one – routed through a wi-fi network? North considered the chances as the news cut back to Honor. She hunkered down, wrapping a foil blanket around the young girl weeping next to her. She stood up as a reporter asked a question – her face gleaming and perfect and suffering in the lights of the gathered cameras. Honor was smart. She knew something was off from the start. She must realise the Board was behind the bomb. This was her chance to denounce the conspiracy. To end centuries of manipulation and murder.
There was motion at the margins. A hum and a shuffling and the screen filled with people of all ages and colours and states of injury crowding into the space around Honor. Their need to be close to their saviour. Their need to listen. She pulled the little girl into her so they weren’t separated, her left hand resting on the child’s shoulder, and the child smiled broadly into the camera. Someone handed Honor a baby smudged with ash. “This is a truly terrible night. But I want to say this. We will not be defeated by acts of cowardice and terrorism. We pull together and we do whatever it takes, and mark my words …” she handed the baby off to a by-stander and pointed a finger directly into the camera “…those responsible for tonight’s events should not sleep easy. Because I, Honor Jones – No. We, the people, serve notice this night – we’re coming to get you. This country has fought wars against the odds before. Liberal values have their place, serve their purpose. But strength and security serve a purpose too. Keeping our citizens safe. Safer than our political system has kept them tonight. This nation is a great and sovereign nation. We will fight to our last breath to keep it that way. Britain Forever.”
She was Boudicca. She was Joan of Arc and Elizabeth I at Tilbury. It was perfect.
Inspirational.
A masterpiece of beauty, patriotism, courage, rhetoric.
It was a leadership bid in a country which had just lost its leaders.
A ragged, gathering cheer went up in the waiting room, picked up along the corridor as pain and shock were replaced by a heady, unholy joy, by a rush of devotion and righteous anger as a wounded country fell in love with Honor Jones, MP. Only one person wasn’t cheering – Michael North. He wasn’t one for coincidence. She worked it out. The camp full of innocents. The targeted bombing of the political elite. The coup was on. JP Armitage was dead and Honor Jones was without a protector. They’d snatched her up. And as far as she knew North too was dead – his corpse rotting in her Knightsbridge Wendy house. Stella never said she was his friend and Honor never told him she cared. No man ever kept her safe. Her murderous father. Her traitorous lover. North who came to kill her and who failed to save her over and over. Her best friend had disappeared, and her mother’s last words were to barricade herself in and stay alive at all costs. Unless she made herself useful, the Board had every reason to kill her. She was a comet trailing destruction. She’d pushed one man to his death from a rooftop. In calculating the odds this time, she had switched to the winning side. A sensible decision; the work of an ordered mind in a chaotic world. Persuasively, with skill and charm, she doubtless talked the gun out of Tarn’s hand. She had done it before. I understand. You’ve a job to do. But tell me one thing….
Why then did it feel like a betrayal?
The leather jacket hung off the back of the chair in the cafe, its dark brown sleeves puddled on the floor – its owner leaning in over the tiny zinc-topped table to talk to his companion, one arm around her. North shrugged himself into the leather jacket as he walked away from their table. He needed it more – on the streets of the capital his own shredded white dinner jacket was too obvious, bound to attract attention, curiosity – sympathy he didn’t need. His shirt was worse but he zipped the jacket up, checked the pockets – only coppers, flipped open the expensive Italian leather wallet he had lifted from the mobile phone addict in the waiting room. £90 and half a dozen credit cards – two of them platinum. As he turned his back on the crowded bright lights of the hospital, he kept the cash, discarding the wallet and cards on a brick wall. Somebody’s lucky night.
Chapter 67
LONDON
4.15am. Saturday, 11th November
His head pounding, his knee throbbing, it was still dark when he got to the Percy Hotel in the backstreets of Camden. He limped up the stone stairs, holding on to the metal work separating this seedy dive from the next seedy dive, from the next seedy dive – No Vacancy flashing orange in the gloom. The sallow-faced concierge barely look
ed up from the early morning copy of The Sun. An observer might even have said that the concierge made a point of not looking up as he slid a key across the pock-marked melamine counter. North wondered when he fixed up the room rental whether he was throwing away his money. But for three years, every six months, he spent at least four hours working his way across London, losing anyone who might be tailing him, losing his own shadow, to pay an exorbitant rent in hard cash and harder drugs. The hotel owner didn’t ask questions – he’d forgotten how, and the night-desk concierge simply didn’t see him. He needed the job and didn’t need the trouble. North was after all the perfect tenant. Regular. Paid his bills on time. So quiet you hardly knew he was there.
He checked the door to Room 13b before he went in. The arrangement involved absolute privacy. No housekeeping, no curious look-arounds, and no favours to working girls with low expectations and ready money who needed an hour in the dry, but the hair seal attached to the frame remained unbroken.
North pushed open the door and clicked on the light, taking care to close the door after himself and lock it. He put his eye to the spyhole but there was no one there – the fisheye lens distorting the striped bile-green wallpaper of the corridor into bulging prison bars. The room didn’t bear close scrutiny, but there was a plastic boxed shower in the corner reeking of damp, a dusty hotplate, and an ancient armchair – a spring poking through the seat covered by a tapestry cushion. It would do. He crossed over the threadbare carpet of sickly, swirling orange and brown, to push aside the yellowing nets at the window. Underneath, the rail tracks ran hither and thither. A goods train passed by, the walls of the hotel vibrating as the engine gathered speed and behind him the mirrored door of the plywood wardrobe creaked open and then closed again. He figured it did that a lot.
North crushed the heavy-duty opiates he’d swiped from the trolley as the nurse dressed his leg, and washed them down with a glass of lukewarm water tangy with rust; the tap screaming at him as he turned it, a brown stain chasing the hairline crack through the sink. Flowers in another sink. Ceramic shards. He refused to think about her. Refused to look at himself in the mirror – what was there to see? Only a fool.
The Board didn’t only seize family connected to key players working within their strategic targets. They mixed in the hostile and disposable. They’d strapped Sonja and God knows who else up with explosive and blown apart society. The coup was under way and they were already winning. He was too late.
And Honor, who believed there was good in him, was lost.
North threw himself down on the single bed – almost passing out with the pain from his ribs, the springs shrieking in protest, the raspberry-pink candlewick coverlet damp under him. Tarn bought Honor. The only question was – what with? Surely not money, she had plenty and would have had more with JP. The promise of safety? If you become a monster yourself – what’s to fear from the monsters under the bed? Or with power? The country was leaderless – the Prime Minister and her most senior government ministers were black and white memories, but every television channel pumped out Honor Jones in fabulous technicolour with her blood-soaked mandate for change. An heroic celebrity telling the nation she would lead it through the valley of the shadow of death to glory, glory, hallelujah days of milk and honey. It was beautiful. She was beautiful.
But they hadn’t bought her with the prospect of power, she wasn’t the type. She was an MP because she was a believer who wanted to save people from themselves, and from each other which meant Tarn bought and sold her for that most dangerous of commodities – love. For the promise of Peggy’s return if she behaved. A promised return she probably didn’t even believe in her heart of hearts was possible any more. North understood the temptation. Not to be alone. Honor decided if she couldn’t beat the system, she would salvage what there was to salvage, and North couldn’t fault her logic.
But she should have tried. She was wrong and she had been wrong too about the fact there was good in him. There was no goodness in the world and certainly no goodness in him. There never was. There never would be.
Trembling with pain, finally, he slept. Two hours. He woke to carnage but it was only in his head. Another hour. JP Armitage’s hand gripping his own – slipping from his grasp. Falling. Another hour. The bomb’s impact or the rumbling trains startling him into sweating, terrified wakefulness. Honor Jones – he should have her name tattoed on his body as a warning to himself and others never to believe. Trust was dead. First Stella and last Honor. He turned on to his side, groaning, pushing his face into the foam pillow that smelled of long-ago strangers, his broken ribs, the laser-claws of migraine gripping him, ripping into his flesh that would grow over and over again, devouring it all. The flash and white-hot burn of red and orange clashing light scouring his eyeballs, making them bleed.
The opiates gone. No purple pills. No one and nothing to get him through the pain and wakefulness.
Chapter 68
Once he thought he heard something. Sensed a body pressed against the door, another man’s breathing the other side of a thin wall. His eyes opened watching the door handle, waiting for it to turn, but there was no adrenalin surge. His muscles stayed heavy, his body torpid in the hollow of the damp bed. He wasn’t ready to move. Didn’t care. Life or death. It was all the same to him.
The floorboard creaked. Once. Stillness again. Silence. North imagined the bulky shadow, the crepe-soled shoes. He closed his eyes against the light and the sight of the door opening, the barrel of a gun, till he knew somewhere in the most instinctive part of himself that the shadow had gone. Whore? Punter? Chambermaid? Killer? Whoever had been there listening for him wasn’t any more, and he was alone again. How it should be.
Chapter 69
LONDON
6.35am. Monday, 13th November
Hunger finally drove him from the room. Light-headed, limping, his leg still stiff and drawing shallow breaths courtesy of the broken ribs, he passed through an empty reception out on to the streets. It was sheeting with rain and too early for the hurly-burly of commuters but even so, it was too busy for his taste. Nervous and dry-mouthed, he slunk along the crowded pavements. He wondered about the bullet – whether it had moved with the force of the pressure waves, how long he had until it killed him, thought about the fact no one would mourn him when it did. He caught a glimpse of a smashed-up face moving alongside, the temple raised and purple with bruising, the lips pulped and swollen, his heart pounding then realised it was his own reflection trapped in the plate-glass of a down-at-heel cafe.
Frankie’s Diner was as good a destination as any. Once upon a time Frankie nailed photographs of the Coliseum and the Trevi Fountain above the red plastic vinyl banquettes.
These days the photos were foxed, foam guts spilled from the ripped plastic, and the only atmosphere came from a heady mix of rancid chip fat and the stale bodies of the clientele. A tramp sat hunched in the corner, his filthy, shaking hands with their blackened ridged nails hugging a mug of tea, two skinny white slices of bread and spread on a plate in front of him. The vagrant didn’t want the bread – he wanted a cheap bottle of spirits that would kill him before his time – North knew the feeling.
North sat with a clear view of the door, the back of his head against the cold wall, the window to his left – condensation over the glass, black mould running the length of the sill. He kept his head down as he ordered, his voice rusty with disuse, his elbow on the table, a hand obscuring his battered face but the greasy-haired waitress didn’t notice or didn’t care about the damage. He couldn’t decide which.
The tea was stewed but the all-day breakfast of eggs and sausages, bacon and beans, was piping hot. North ordered another tea when he’d done and the waitress graced him with contempt and a steady pour of brown gunge, slopping over the top and filling the chipped saucer, before she clattered away with the dirty plate.
The bell over the door tinkled – fresh cold air, the smell of rain and the hum of building traffic, there, and then gone again, as the d
oor swung shut. Shaking out a black umbrella, furling it before he hung it on one of three button pegs, a lanky man in a long coat approached the counter. A mug of tea and apple pie à la mode, Frankie, he instructed the elderly owner at the till, his back to the tables. Shocking morning out there.
North rubbed at his temples. The fatty protein-heavy meal was reviving him and he wasn’t convinced that was a good thing. If he revived, he’d start to feel and he was getting used to the emptiness inside – it was safer that way. He could live with being nothing. Feeling nothing. Having nothing, though now he considered the matter of the opiate stash, he wanted more. He was in the process of running through how to access purple pills when company slid over the vinyl bench and into the seat opposite him.
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