Again the abrupt pull from the floor; again the replacement of her chair beneath her. Blake moved around and leaned on the back of his own chair. He repeated the question.
“What did you take, and where did you hide it?” He was furious, this man. He was itching to hit her again, would probably do so even if she told him what he wanted to hear.
“I didn’t . . . take anything.” It was an effort to talk. Her tongue was thick; her stomach was on fire. She was still recovering her breath from the first blow. She focused on a little bead of yellow paint on the floor, studied its contours. “I didn’t hide anything.”
Blake looked at the mirror and smiled, the paper-thin skin around his mouth stretching. His lips were cracked. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a little brass device with three finger holes, and placed it delicately on the table. “Come along now. Or I’ll use this for a bit. And after that we’ll start working on those hands of yours.”
“Please. I don’t understand what I’m supposed to know.” She tried to hide the tiny things she had learned in the back of her mind, Thorne’s letter, and the man Gethin and the bookshop and the photograph, but it was no good, she could feel them swelling in her mind, and she knew that one or two more blows and the surface might crack.
“I’m sorry. I told Warwick everything. That’s it.” She felt herself beginning to believe her own story. Better. It was so close to the truth, it could surely hold. She focused again on the little dab of yellow paint on the floor.
Blake stood and pulled the brass ring over his fingers. “Your choice.” He began moving toward her—then stopped at three loud knocks on the door. He moved across to open it, leaned out of the room. Another voice spoke, low and urgent. Blake looked back at her, regret commingling with dislike. “Be seeing you,” he said, and slipped from the room.
TWENTY
Her brother was waiting outside, standing by his car and smoking. He was holding her bag. As he saw her, he started; she wondered how bad she must look.
“Jesus. Ellie.” He dropped his cigarette, forgot to stub it out.
“Hi, Mark.” He gave her a small, tentative embrace, which hurt her bruised ribs so much she grimaced. Her wrists still chafed with the marks from the handcuffs.
After Blake had left, two guards from the next room had taken her from the cell to a little medical chamber at the end of the corridor; it held a hospital bed, a huge array of bottles, and a cheerful, matronly orderly, who smiled brightly and chatted as she cleaned the cut on Hopper’s head. She wondered what other horrors had passed through that room, whether the orderly ever lost her composure.
“What happened? Where did they put you? Jesus, I was worried. What the fuck happened?”
She had lost track of time; it was late evening, she saw from his wristwatch. The clouds had cleared; the sun was gradually warming up the cars again.
“I’m fine, Mark. I’m just tired.” She pulled open the passenger door and sat inside. He opened his door and sat beside her.
“Seriously, Ellie, what the fuck happened? Did you get in a fight?”
She couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah, Mark. I got in a fight. But to give the other guys a chance, I let them tie my hands first.”
“But—”
“Let’s just go, can we? Or I’ll walk, and take my chances with the night wagons.”
He started the engine and pulled out of the car park onto the Embankment, toward the bridge.
The bank of the Thames rolled past her window. Every so often they would pass a bored-looking guard, slowly waving the afternoon traffic through. It must be better being bored in London than being one of the poor bastards patrolling the Highlands. She’d heard that when the insurgents up there caught a soldier, they would wire the corpse to a mine. Most units didn’t have minesweepers, or enough expertise to defuse mines, so you had to watch your colleagues rot on every patrol.
“We’ll be home in about ten minutes, I’d say.”
“OK.” Home. She didn’t have a home. She had had a little monkish cell at the rig, and now she didn’t even have that. Christ, Warwick had taken her job. Fifteen years of work, studying the currents, trying to make sense of the chaos, and it had been taken away in a second. How would she live? How would she eat?
The streets were thick with people, the crowds around Brixton as busy as they had been when she arrived. Hopper shrank in her seat as they drove, embarrassed by the luxury of the car.
When they reached the house, Mark reversed into the drive, and sat back in his seat. The front gate slid shut behind him automatically.
“Ellie, what is going on?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“When you didn’t come home this evening, I asked a friend to look up any possible admissions: hospitals, police stations. You came into Scotland Yard about twenty minutes before he started searching. It’s lucky I had a friend on the desk. Christ, it’s lucky I knew who to call. You could have . . .” He was breathing hard. His hands reflexively gripped the steering wheel, and let go.
“Could have what, Mark? Could have been killed, by your colleagues?”
“For pity’s sake. We don’t kill people. I don’t.”
“You know Warwick, don’t you?”
He reddened. “We’ve met four or five times. Seminars, functions, that sort of thing. She’s senior to me, El. She’s senior to the whole department.”
“Well, next time, maybe you should let her know her pet goon beat me up. He was about to do much worse when you arrived.”
“Christ. It shouldn’t have happened. They probably didn’t know who you were.”
“They knew exactly who I was. That’s why that woman came to question me.”
“Well . . .” He looked out to the right awkwardly.
“Well what?”
He’d clearly mastered his discomfort, because he said it anyway. “Why were you in that house in the first place?”
“I’m not going to talk about it.”
“Why did you run?”
“Mark, I’m not going to tell you anything.” Her wrist was throbbing from where she had hit the floor; she was very tired suddenly. The tide of adrenaline of Thorne’s house, of the station, even of Blake’s blows, seemed to have receded all at once. “And if I did, I’d have to report you to Warwick so she could beat it out of you.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” He pulled the keys from the ignition, petulant. “I’ve told them to leave you alone.”
“That’s gracious.”
“But I want you to stop whatever you’re doing. Promise me.”
Hopper’s whole body hurt. She couldn’t even let her head loll back against the seat, because of the hen’s-egg bruise at the back of her skull. She sighed. “Yes, Mark. I promise.”
He looked relieved. “Thank you. I’ll pass that on.”
As well as being a bad liar, the lovely thing about Mark was that he never knew when he was being lied to.
Inside the house, the older of Mark’s children, Tom, was still up.
“Auntie Ellie! Auntie Ellie!” He threw himself at her, and surveyed her gravely. “Did you fall over?”
She smiled. “I did. Very silly of me.”
He leaned closer, conspiratorial, and whispered in her ear: “Daddy fell over in the garden and he said a bad word and I heard it.”
“Really? Oh dear. Well, I hope you haven’t remembered it.”
He squirmed with glee. “I have.”
Laura walked in. “Come on, darling, time for bed,” she said, and then caught sight of Hopper. She visibly blanched; Hopper had to restrain a laugh. “Ellie. Christ. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m sure Mark will tell you all about it.” She felt a little bad for enjoying her sister-in-law’s evident discomfort quite as much as she did.
“You should . . . Well, Mark’s
looking after you. There’s food on the hob. Mark, do you have a moment?” Laura withdrew, taking Tom with her, and Mark followed.
Hopper ate alone.
* * *
As she was finishing the meal—some sort of vegetable hash; clearly they weren’t quite wealthy enough to eat meat every single day—Mark walked into the kitchen. He allowed himself the luxury of stepping up and down a couple of times, a kind of physical throat-clearing to gather his audience’s fullest attention.
“Ellie, if you’re mixed up in something, I can help. We can arrange for you to be moved, or . . . we can bring other people in if needs be. I can pull all sorts of strings. My point is, you’re not alone.” Her instinctive thought rebuked him: I am, I am.
But he looked so grave, so sincere, that she nearly told him Thorne had wanted to show her something before his death. And then, just as quickly, a gate in her mind closed against him.
“Mark, it’s been a busy day. I just want to sleep.”
She saw him swallow a tiny flash of irritation—really, it was amazing he had got anywhere in Security with such transparent features. “Fine, fine. Sleep on it. But I want to ask you again in the morning. We can get you back to the rig.”
“Too late for that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Warwick. She fired me.”
“Oh.” He looked deflated for a moment. “But maybe that’ll be in your favor. If there were people on the rig who were—”
“Leading me astray? It’s mostly soldiers and nuclear physicists there. When was the last time soldiers overthrew a democratic government for their own ends? Present circumstances excepted, of course.”
That did it. “That’s the kind of talk to get you in trouble, Ellie. I’ll let you get some rest. You know what I think and you’ve told me you’ll leave it alone.” He said the words as though speaking for an invisible audience. The possibility crossed her mind that he might have bugged his own kitchen.
“Good night, Mark.” Hopper left him alone and withdrew upstairs. It was quiet up here: now was a good time to hide the photo of Thorne and his colleagues. She retrieved it from her clothes and looked around the room. There was nowhere good enough. She went back out onto the landing, where there was a little side table bearing a few ornaments. At the back, there was a gap between two pieces of wood just big enough to jam the photo into. It was a risk leaving it out here; then again, it felt like a bigger risk to leave it in her room, or carry it on her. She retreated to bed feeling oddly vulnerable now the photo wasn’t on her person.
Twenty minutes later, she realized she was thirsty, and padded back downstairs. Her brother had not come up yet. The only light on the ground floor came from under a heavy oak door, a room she remembered as a small second parlor. On placing her ear to it, she heard the murmur of Mark’s voice, too indistinct to make out any words, and she silently moved upstairs again and tried to sleep.
After half an hour of wakefulness, her mind still too overwhelmed for sleep, she opened the shutters in her room and looked out at the bright night. Somewhere, an exhausted blackbird sang. Barring that, it was quiet.
They wouldn’t know she had the photo. And there was something else: the lawyer’s card she had spotted at Thorne’s house. Stephanie Clayford, that was her name. Tomorrow morning she would visit her, and then go over to that bookshop, Fisher’s. It wasn’t as if she had anywhere else to go now.
Eventually, she slept, and found herself at the bow of the boat she had discovered two days ago, moving across a blackened, charred ocean. From the front came a crunching noise. She looked ahead, and saw; the sea was not water. It was a dark, glistening carapace, ground by the boat’s motion into thousands of glittering shards like insects’ shells. From the closed hatch behind her there came the sounds of movement. There were hundreds of people down there—the dead, demanding her attention. And she knew too that her mother was somewhere among them: already one of their number, already beyond help.
She turned and walked toward the hatch, wanting to hold it down, knowing the people down there would overwhelm the boat as they emerged from its innards. It was no good: she saw the door rising like treacle against her will, saw desperate hands beginning to claw out of it, the nails on the fingers shredded, the skin like parchment tearing on the rough deck. She woke, and stared at the ceiling, dry-eyed, a knot in her throat.
TWENTY-ONE
Hopper woke shortly before seven, her alarm jerking her from a dream she couldn’t remember. Her body was aching. She could hardly move her shoulder as she dressed, and a patch of her cheek was sore and swollen. She startled herself in the mirror; her skin was pale through tiredness unmended by sleep, one eye unexpectedly reddened. She washed, and to cover her bruises applied makeup inexpertly, long out of practice.
Before going to bed last night, she had gone through her bag. It was in no greater disarray than usual: her envelope of money was intact, her papers in place. Even the little amulet she’d taken from the hold of the fishing boat was still there, upside down between a tube of sunblock and an unopened compact. It still had a little dirt on it, and she wiped it off before she could consider whether it was organic.
Once dressed, she padded downstairs, shoes held in her hand. The door to Mark and Laura’s room was closed as she passed it. She tiptoed through the hall, unbolted the door, and slipped from the house. She left no note.
She wondered if she was to be followed this morning; casually, she walked up and down, a hundred meters each side of the house, looking behind the wheels of parked cars, but saw nobody. The street was boiling. The night had clearly been cloudless, and the morning was too. As she walked to the bus, she felt the first prickle of sweat under her arms.
The buses were running already, and she boarded one bound for Temple. The queuing crowds were poor: Europeans, mostly, muttering in little cliques. French, German, Spanish; the pitiable survivors of the Continent’s collapse, tolerated as serfs and kept uncertain about their status.
She wondered sometimes how bad it must be on the Continent to prompt so many people from those areas to stay in Britain, living cramped and miserable lives of constant work without prospect of respite. Those permitted to stay were here on sufferance, as though the host nation were granting them the enormous favor of letting them work fourteen-hour days in solar fields or fertilizer pits. Nor were they secure. All it would take was a tweak of bureaucracy and the guarantees of the past would vanish like the foam lapping at the country’s shores.
She remembered the arrival of the Swiss. The constant sunlight had melted their glaciers within a few years. Some thirty thousand of them had come—unlike the vast majority of other arrivals, they had been welcome, an orderly people queuing for entry, trusted partners, practically preassimilated. It had all been arranged in advance with Davenport’s government, on terms unknown. Guns, probably.
Hopper had seen the convoy from her posting on the east coast. They had filed ashore in Felixstowe looking unwell—a landlocked people relieved to be off the water. They had been filtered through the huge steel gates like krill through a whale’s teeth, sorted by the leviathan machine of the state into separate channels, channels for security and registration and pathogen sprays, and they had meekly submitted to it, exhausted and dirty.
A few doubtless remained sweating in the high Alps, hunting the few poor livestock that were left and regressing to itinerant scrapers of the soil. Their children would be illiterate, their grandchildren half-dumb; a few generations from now, they might be little better than hunter-gatherers.
Of course, the Americans had it bad too, these days. Stories of privation and war had reached even the rig. The children of the old southern counties’ original residents had been taught to hate the people they blamed for the Southern Clearances; frequent attacks with nasty little bombs were launched against the interlopers from the west. The Americans were constantly recruiting for their defenses:
men, women, young, old. On the rare occasions Hopper had met any, there was a huge sadness about them. The land that had birthed them was now rejecting them.
Two women behind her were talking in low voices. Hopper stared out of the window, straining her ears.
“I heard the Fifth are losing the north badly. They lost an entire company last month. Got drawn right into a gully and slaughtered.”
“I heard that. My sister sends cards sometimes. They censor them, but they can’t disguise the strain. Her writing’s hardly legible.”
“You noticed they widened the bands again? They lowered the training age to thirteen last month. Thirteen. Jesus. My nephew’s thirteen, he can hardly tie his laces.”
Her stop was approaching. At the door, she turned and looked: the women wore coats, but beneath one she saw camouflage colors. For a moment she panicked, thinking she was being followed; but after the bus had pulled away, she waited in a doorway, and everyone else who had disembarked dispersed. Of yesterday’s men there was no sign.
Temple’s buildings had remained smart. The area had been—still was—rich in lawyers. The street Hopper needed was tucked away somewhere in the little warren below the main road; but it was still only just before eight. She settled into a café, ordered breakfast, and sat smoking and reading the Times, turning the pages awkwardly with her less painful arm. Progress on New Tower Bridge was brisk; a new cross-border force would cooperate with the Americans to stamp out terrorism; a new feed factory would help double livestock numbers within four years.
Outside, sirens rose and fell. Her thoughts drifted away from the paper. Was the photograph hidden back at her brother’s house the thing Thorne had wanted to show her? And if so, why was it so important? Where had he left the box in the picture? If she was lucky, the lawyer, Stephanie Clayford, would know.
Soon after nine, she paid and left. Again she perused the street, walked a circuitous route. She noticed nothing. If she was being followed, it was being done more subtly than yesterday. Maybe Mark really had intervened, helped call Warwick and Blake off.
The Last Day Page 16