The judge was across the room. But North felt the animal sensation of the other man’s mouth against his. The lips parting. The hard muscled tongue forcing his mouth open. The urge to devour and swallow and make him disappear. He shook his head and Tarn’s lust broke into a thousand sharp and dangerous pieces. It was time. Overdue. North’s finger curled round the trigger refused to obey the neural instruction from his damaged brain.
“Apart from one thing, Tarn. Peggy set you up. The authorities wanted to draw you out in the open and you fell for it.”
The judge’s face set in a rictus of dismay.
“The smart chip doesn’t work. We reprogrammed it. Peggy left behind the coding to destroy it all, and a 14-year-old called Fangfang Yu just blew down your house of cards. Everything’s connected, you said it yourself. We uploaded your destruction.”
“She wanted to destroy it, write its own destruction into the program,” Hone told him and they wouldn’t let her. But Peggy did it anyway. She wrote the program, and swaddled it in plastic and tarp to keep it from harm and dropped it into the cold North Sea. Trusting her friend to find it. Trusting her protégée to know the right thing to do.
The final chime and the air settled to silence but for the soft crackle of the fire, but outside the wail of sirens grew closer – police cars squealing to a halt outside the judge’s house, their revolving blue lights reflected in the drops of rain running down the glass.
North picked up Peggy’s skull. The police were at the door. He would leave the judge to his public shame. To sentence and confinement. Out from the anonymity of power and into the bright white glare of accountability and punishment. And what was left of the Board would make sure that Tarn hanged himself on remand. Or died one night of a broken heart lying on a prison cot.
Tarn ignored the ringing of the doorbell, the pounding on the front door, which in turn shook the bevelled window-glass in its sash frame. He got to his feet. He wasn’t finished yet. “Everything I’ve done, North, was for my country.” His chin was up. “There are always casualties in war. You. Peggy. You are all disposable.”
He raised the glass as if to make a toast to himself. Judge Lucien Tarn’s verdict on Judge Lucien Tarn was “innocent”. He was a hero and a patriot and a member of the Board.
Forever. Britain. Say it isn’t so.
North pulled the trigger. The bullet smashed through the brandy glass, the judge’s teeth, the soft tissue of the brain, the bone of the cranium before coming to rest in the padded leather of the chair. It was quick. He owed Tarn that much. And it was lethal. Which was for Peggy.
Chapter 75
It was a first class omnishambles come clusterfuck. DCI Slim Hardman was beginning to understand why he’d been seconded to the Metropolitan Police. The judge murdered in his own home. Moreover, a murdered former Supreme Court Justice who was allegedly responsible for bombings and kidnappings throughout the country. A naked corpse with no face in the bedroom. Two dead Muscle Marys in a basement gym which looked like Al Capone shot it up. Traces of human remains in the kitchen. And if the conversation with Honor Jones, MP, had any truth in it, a conspiracy that would delay his retirement for a decade as he unpicked it and it played out through the courts. He sucked in his stomach in anticipation of the press photographs. His wife would insist on a new suit.
The folder laying out JP Armitage’s accounts landed in his inbox yesterday – he might be a good detective but he was no forensic accountant. The forensic accountants though were all over it before he even made it to his car for the drive south. The accounts reeked. Standing next to a one-eyed man who was never introduced, Northumbria’s Chief Constable had made it plain – he wasn’t asking Hardman to go to London. He was telling him. “You’re the man of the moment,” he said. “I don’t envy you.”
Hardman didn’t know who sent the folder, and he was willing to bet he never would. It came with no message other than the instruction to ring Honor Jones’s private mobile number and an exact time to call. “She’ll want to talk,” the message said. A message signed with a cross and a nought – a hug and a kiss, his young sergeant translated for him.
All he knew was that life got very interesting after the death of Walt Bannerman. Ever since the arrest of Michael North, who disappeared back into the shadows as if he’d never existed.
“Sir,” the white boiler-suited figure held a piece of blood-splattered crested paper between his tweezers. He slid it into a transparent evidence bag as his superior approached, his youthful face pale and serious.
DCI Hardman took in the list of names all of them written in green ink. Military. Business. The political Establishment.
His wife wouldn’t be pleased when he told her the post-chemo holiday to New Zealand to see their boy and the grandkids was off. He was disappointed himself, but he would make it up to her. He’d tell the lad to come home – pay for the tickets and maybe he’d stay.
Hardman took out his phone and snapped the list. When he had a quiet moment, he would send it to Honor Jones. Against procedure but it seemed the least he could do. And he wouldn’t want the list “disappearing”. He handed back the evidence bag, meeting the studiously disinterested face of the forensics technician with the same equanimity.
“Process it, sonny,” he said, turning away. He allowed himself the smallest of smiles as he smoothed the tie over his belly.
Chapter 76
As North exited the back lane three streets from the townhouse, he looked left and right. He couldn’t be sure, but by Soho he knew, Hone’s people weren’t following him. He was free and clear. If he went back to Mayfair, there’d be no trace of any intrusion in the old lady’s apartment, there’d be no old lady in the fridge – only yellow sheets and silence. And across the road where Hone kept them under surveillance, there would be no coffee cups, no ash and no spread-eagled corpse bleeding into a Persian carpet. It would be like the one-eyed man was a bad dream.
Chapter 77
Honor opened the door of her garden flat before he raised his hand to knock on it. No Peggy. When he stepped towards her, she didn’t resist, instead there was a small groan and she buried herself in his chest as if she couldn’t bear to look at him, or bear for him to see her.
She cried for three straight hours when he told her about Peggy. Warning her before he drew out the skull from the jacket he’d wrapped it in. She screamed anyway. Before she got angry. Ranting and raving, and beating her fists against the walls till they were bloody.
After the anger came silence. Then more weeping. Quieter this time. Peggy’s skull between her hands. Sadder and darker in the bedroom she wouldn’t let him enter. Before she opened the door again and called for him. Her eyes dark and terrible. Like the worst had happened and would keep happening. Before she moved into his arms, her lips found his, and he comforted her the only way that was left.
“I went into politics because she told me that was how to make things better. It’s not enough. If the coup is over with Tarn dead, what happens to the hostages they took?”
He’d been asking himself the same question.
“The Board’s pragmatic or it would never have survived this long. The soldiers will unlock the doors and let them walk away. They won’t hold on to them – there’s no reason to. The moment’s over. The Board know where they live – it’ll be made clear that they can come for them and theirs anytime if they speak out. ”
Her elbow took her weight as she leaned in towards him, her crazy-hot breast against his chest, the sheets gathering around her, their starchy white folds emphasizing the satin smoothness of her skin.
“I’ve got a lawyer looking for Peggy’s refugees – Rahim and the children. I’ve made sure they’ll have a home and enough money to live on. It’s not much, but Peggy would want it done.”
She went quiet again at Peggy’s name and the thought passed through North’s mind that Honor was settling her affairs.
“I couldn’t save her, but I can say why she died. We’ll tell the world t
hat Tarn killed Peggy and why. That the Board was behind the disappearances – some among the disappeared will come forward, I’m sure. I’ll tell the police everything I know about the bombs – all those deaths. How they used me, and JP’s involvement. I don’t want there to be any place for these people to hide. There’ll have to be an inquiry – more than one. Prosecutions too. The smart chip needs stripping out of whatever it’s in and production needs to stop immediately. JP left everything to me, so I can do that myself. The New Army has to be taken apart. And the Board exposed for what it is.”
When he met her that first morning at dawn in the park, she trembled at the sight of him. The thought of what he was there to do. Seven days had passed – her hair was shorn and her face older, warier, harder. Unrecognisable from the photographs of the smiling, polished politician Tarn first sent him in the black envelope.
“Aren’t you frightened?”
She lay back, her head resting on her crossed arms and stared at the ceiling. “Should I be?”
“You’ve seen what they can do. Peggy would want you alive.”
Her body didn’t move but her head turned towards him. “I’ve been frightened my entire life, North. That’s long enough.
“Peggy sent me a postcard once of something Churchill was supposed to have said. I already knew it. It was based on one of his speeches. ‘Never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.’ Do you know it? ‘Never yield to force: never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy’. ‘Convictions of honour’ – I can relate to that.”
There would always be a place for the Board in the darkness, North knew that even if Honor didn’t. Whatever case Hardman constructed – or was allowed to construct.
Whatever light Honor attempted to bring, would shine for a while, maybe even a year or two, perhaps as long as a decade. But eventually it would go out and the shadows come back. Still, for a while at least, there would be light and truth and Honor would be the one to bring it.
He wondered if it would help ease her grief for Peggy. She didn’t mourn JP – it was enough he’d been involved in Peggy’s disappearance – and North hadn’t told her yet of JP’s role in the fraud that tipped her father over the edge. Perhaps that was always where fate meant her father to go, and perhaps not.
“How do you cope, North?”
The bullet was part of him. He fought against what it took away and what it brought with it. But, lying with Honor, he accepted what he was – that he could know men and women, and not judge them for their sins.
The index finger of her right hand lay against his lower lip like a reminder to tell the truth.
He liked the touch of it.
It made him want to kiss it. Kiss all of her.
“How do you cope with always being alone?”
You don’t miss what you’ve never had.
But right now, he’d never felt less alone. He hadn’t found the words before she spoke again.
“With Peggy gone, I’m just that girl in her bedroom who knows no one is coming, because everybody she loved is gone.”
Her eyes were dry but her voice cracked at the word “gone”.
North wished there was a way to bring Peggy back for Honor. For her not to hurt.
The problem with loving someone was that either you left or they did, and there was never enough time together.
He always believed love was an impossibility for him, because he never had a pattern to follow. And he knew this much – that it was hard to love someone. But he knew too, that it was harder not to love at all.
“You didn’t stay in the dark, Honor. You unbolted the door and you came out.”
But it was too early to talk about tomorrows and families. They both knew that.
And later, when he could speak again and when she spoke too, when they were close and warm, she said: “I’m sorry it took me so long to trust you. All I could think about was finding Peggy and keeping her alive.”
It wasn’t up to North to forgive Honor – he knew better than most what someone would do to survive.
“She was cleverer than all of them wasn’t she – JP, Tarn, your one-eyed man?”
Peggy hooked JP and showed him for what he was, destroyed Tarn’s plans to bring down democracy, and did what she thought was right when she was told to do wrong by a Cyclops. Yes, she was cleverer than all of them. Peggy fixed things. People. Problems. The unfixable. That’s who she was.
Honor’s thigh lay against his.
She kissed the forearm he had wrapped around her, her lips soft against his skin. She was done with the big picture for a while.
He once knew a girl called Jess who wanted to fly away to someplace warm. A smell of orange blossom. Did she catch the plane? Tears in her eyes as she sipped cold champagne, her mother’s seat empty beside her in the gloom of the cabin? Pulling up the blind. Flying above cotton-candy clouds and facing towards the New World. The rising sun through the window painting over her freckled face with gold. He hoped so.
North had no idea if he had a future with Honor. He had no idea how long he had left, or whether she could forgive him for what he had been. What he did know was that any future with Honor couldn’t be a violent one. Her father’s violence put paid to that. Theirs was a fragile partnership.
“I dreamed about her the other night,” Honor said. “We were young. Younger even than when we met. Small children. She was holding on to me and we were running. Pell-mell along the sand. But we were laughing as we ran, and we weren’t running away from something. We were running towards it. Do you believe in dreams, North?”
“I never sleep long enough to dream.” Why mention the nightmares.
Her naked back was to him, the spine curling in its own question-mark.
“Can you stop killing?” She tried to make the question sound casual but there was a tremor in her voice. The list of Board members Hardman sent through to her mobile, without comment, made for grim reading. North was glad it was Hardman’s problem and not his. Tarn was wrong – he didn’t want to know the members of the Board so he could kill them. North was leaving their fate to justice. Real justice.
He turned her over, putting his finger against her lips now. There would be a day very soon when he’d have to think about what he had done in the name of the Board, and the men he had killed. He’d have to go through each and every one and judge himself innocent or guilty of their deaths, but today wasn’t that day.
She carried on regardless. “Because whatever you’ve done, you’re not that man any more and you know I’m right. You’re a good man, North, and I don’t want you killing – not for me, not for anything or anyone. However it all turns out.”
She kissed him – her soft mouth against his and a key turned in his chest, unlocking him.
Her eyes were pale green, their rim a darker woodland green and at their heart a sunburst of gold. They searched his face for agreement. She was sadder than he’d ever known her. Hope gone. He read the grief in her for Peggy, felt it, saw it, but couldn’t mend it so he kissed her, his mouth against hers. She took it as an answer to her question. Maybe they had a future and maybe they had this one night before he sailed away on a ketch called Liberty? Either way, the killing was over for him. Eventually she slipped from him into sleep. He steadied his breathing, matching it to hers willing himself to follow her wherever she’d gone, and it came to him that he did have a soul, but that his soul lived in her. Even if he couldn’t form the words yet. He might live to be old – he allowed himself to hold the idea between his hands like a death’s-head moth. Or he might die sooner than he should. He once wanted a mother to love him who never did, and he once waited to die because he knew one day he had to. Not any more. Michael North would die when his time was up.
Till then every second ahead sparkled.
He always envied those who slept as easily as they breathed, their willingness to let go, their presumption no predator would come for the
m in the night. Letting himself into their bedrooms, stepping over their worn-down leather slippers, careful not to wake the wives next to them. Killing men as they slept. It was a mercy – why wake them to terror and the knowledge of certain death? Better to take them in their goose-down dreams. The glass of water undisturbed on the bedside table next to them. He didn’t envy the easy sleepers tonight. For now, he didn’t envy those who slept because he was content enough to feel her surrendered body against his. Moving closer, he stretched out his length along hers, his thighs tucked under hers and she sighed, her breath moving the hairs on his arm like a zephyr through spring grass.
Chapter 78
SURREY
6pm. Monday, 13th November
Bunty Moss let herself in to the house with a key she borrowed from a neighbour.
James didn’t get home till eight most days. Standing in the hallway, the front door out into the rainy day still open behind her, she rang Pam.
“He’ll be so pleased. How’s your brother, Bunty?”
It took a heartbeat for Bunty Moss to process the question.
“Long since dead, thank you, Pam.”
There was an intake of break the other end. Confusion.
“I’m so sorry. Let me put you through.”
The black-bound Bible was on the hall table. Walsh didn’t need it where he was. He’d died with his hand in hers. She didn’t know how it got there. If she had to guess, she’d say the young man who came looking for Peggy left it for her. She placed her palm against the cover, and it felt warm to the touch.
“Bunty?”
Her husband’s voice. Hope. Desperation. Thirty-five years of loving her.
She could hear too the faint noise of planes outside her husband’s office as he wept down the phone. He wasn’t a man for emotion in the general way of things. Landing and taking off. The gateway to a nation. Business as usual.
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