Her eyes flickered from the thread that held his side together to the embroidery on the wall, and she swallowed. “Yes. Well, it’s what you have to hand, isn’t it?”
At Marsworth they moored for the night opposite the water pump, and Neila turned the handle but no water came, just the chunk chunk chunk of air and ice deep within the iron, and she declared, “No showers, I think. Not for a little while.”
They ate sliced bread with jam and margarine, and Theo sat at the back of the boat wearing his oversized stranger’s woollen coat over his grey bloodstained jumper, and two pairs of socks and long johns beneath his tracksuit bottoms. He stank, but so did she, and after a while you just got used to these things.
And when the sun rose they began to climb through the locks, heading east where the canal branched, and she opened and closed the gates and he sat with one hand on the rudder on a little wooden stool and waited for her command and it was…
…all things considered…
easier with two than it was with one, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had cleared Marsworth so quickly.
The Hector sailed for Northampton.
Time on the water is
Neila would argue that it is the purest time which obeys only the laws of nature.
Dawn dusk
Winter summer
It is the time that must be taken to do the thing that needs to be done. It is not a time for
meetings conference calls texting email commuting running late jogging committing failing counting seconds until
Until whatever it is that seemed so important at the time, has ended.
At Bletchley Neila rambled: “The Company runs things—I mean they always have what are you going to do about it it’s just how…”
And saw Theo’s face, and stopped talking, and felt strangely embarrassed.
Half a mile later three men and a woman came the other way on a wide barge covered in tarps, and as they passed the woman slowed and called out across the water, “Are you going to Milton Keynes? There’s nothing there. They closed the ski slope and they don’t play hockey any more. The cows were taken up from the roundabouts and sold to a man who owns things. There’s only patties, children and screamers there now, apart from the sanctuaries, and they shoot strangers. You don’t want to go to Milton Keynes. If you go, if you see my daughter, tell her that I didn’t mean the things I said. I didn’t mean them, it’s just the meds. She’ll understand.”
Neila smiled and didn’t answer, and Theo went inside and checked the bandages where he was bleeding again, and couldn’t be bothered to change them, and didn’t want to make a fuss.
Chapter 20
These are the rituals of Theo’s life:
Up, run, 10km on a Saturday, trailing along at the back of a park jogging group who all sort of know each other vaguely enough to smile but not well enough to ask anyone their name.
Bicycle to work
murder rape arson abuse neglect negligence conspiracy fraud…
In the evenings he’d stop off at the supermarket in Balham. He didn’t go there often, but there were ingredients he couldn’t find elsewhere, and he’d overload his basket and struggle back to Mrs. Italiaander’s in second gear, huffing and puffing through the clogged-up traffic to get home and make
fish grilled with red peppers
lemon mushroom risotto
roast feta and black olive salad
aubergine and tomato baked with balsamic vinegar
When he first moved in, Theo worried that he was hogging the kitchen, had tried to keep every meal fast, take up no space on the long black counter. After a while he’d realised that he was almost the only resident who liked cooking at all. Marvin lived on microwave meals and takeaways—some of Budgetfood’s products no less. Theo had tried to tell him about where it came from, about Shawford and the sea, but Marvin didn’t pretend to care.
Mrs. Italiaander lived on the same meal every day, which consisted of two slices of wholegrain, seed-studded bread, toasted without butter; an onion cut in half and microwaved, a couple of slices of smoked salmon, half a pot of yoghurt, some celery sticks, with hummus on Tuesdays and Fridays only, and a half-bottle of rosé wine.
Nikesh made curries with paste from a jar, to which he added whole chillies and a tablespoon of salt.
Every six or seven weeks Theo made food for everyone, though no one ate at the same time, and his contract was always peacefully renewed, and Mrs. Italiaander whispered that he was almost like a son to her and not to tell her boy she felt that way.
Sometimes, when it was raining or there was something he really wanted to see, Theo went to the cinema. A local art-house place had installed screens in the basement where you could watch documentaries from its archive for no more than the price of an expensive cup of coffee. Once he’d got locked in when the cleaner hadn’t spotted him, hunkered down in his alcove, watching a film about the hunting birds of Patagonia.
On the first Sunday of every month he helped the local community gardening group with their planting boxes down by the rookery, and one April he shared shovels with a woman called Celeste who had been funny and clever and beautiful and
Theo didn’t have many friends
…but she’d checked her horoscope the morning after, and it warned that Saturn was entering an unwelcome aspect, and he was a Taurus and she didn’t want to argue with the stars. Who did really?
They met again at the monthly gardening group and smiled at each other, but now the whimsy and the merriment that he had found enchanting before seemed frankly infantile and very, very annoying.
The morning after the night before…
Theo must have slept because he wakes and he is screaming, his head is screaming. He read once upon a time about a thing, exploding-head syndrome so your head doesn’t actually explode but you feel like it’s going bang boom a bomb going off in his skull
SHE’S YOUR DAUGHTER!
And then he sleeps again, and wakes, ashamed that he slept at all, and wasn’t kept awake by the image of Dani’s face/brains/blood by the guilt of…
…of things he probably should be feeling guilty about he wasn’t sure he had hoped for a certain clarity at least but even that was
He slept in his clothes, face down, a little wet pool of dribble on his pillow where he fell. Twelve hours ago Dani Cumali lived; now she is dead, and Theo’s thighs ache from cycling, and he lies on his bed wide awake exactly two minutes before his alarm is due to go off, and his head is…
The pain already fading, with the rising light of dawn.
A grey sweep of a grey day across a world unchanged.
He looks out of the window.
Mrs. Italiaander’s front garden is almost entirely rose bush, which does not flower, and castor oil plant. If she ever loses patience with her family, she threatens to turn it into ricin for that truly cataclysmic Christmas dinner party. She read about it online. It’s not that hard really…
Beyond, the world carries on.
Children are hurried out of bed
milk into cereal bowls
showers
steam
heat on tired muscles sigh of relief
tying shoelaces
checking the phone
rattling the rubbish cart down the street
smell of the bus
hiss of pneumatic door
Dani Cumali is dead and the world
continues.
And Theo Miller also.
Chapter 21
Theo took the train to work, and immediately remembered why he never did and how much he hated it.
He arrived five minutes late. Usually arriving late earned a place on the Efficiency Wall, where photos of shamed members of staff who were not holding up departmental standards were displayed. However, Theo was never late, never, and rather than the ritual chiding, he received an automatically generated email informing him that he had been docked one hour’s pay, and a concerned knock on the door from Edward’s secretary, El, asking him if he was okay.
“I’m fine. Think I’m coming down with something.”
“Ah, yes…” she muttered, and beat a hasty retreat to the antibacterial gel she kept in the bottom drawer of her desk.
Words on a screen.
beaten to death with a clothes iron
run over then run over again three times he drove the car until she was
dropped the child out of the window
claims he didn’t realise how hard he was hitting until it was too late
a kitchen knife, the relationship had been deteriorating for
When Theo’s calendar beeped, reminding him of the weekly team performance meeting, he nearly laughed.
Sat at the back.
Did his best not to fall asleep.
Returned to his desk.
Forgot to eat lunch.
set on fire after school because she called her fat
strangled after refusing to consider marriage with the man in
trapped between the cot and the wall suffocated to death
police investigation fee: £7891.56 (ex. VAT)
societal responsibility levy: £81,000
victim assessment fee: £128,918
no. of pets left behind by deceased: 3
value of pets: £5680
cost of rehousing pets: £675
But hey! The cats have already been spayed otherwise that’d be another £240 on the indemnity for the killer to pay, can’t have non-spayed cats running around it’d be…
Dependent children remaining to deceased: 1.
Age of child: 7.
Added value of dependent minor: £18,900, plus a further £2715 because the child witnessed her mother die and will thus require mandatory counselling with a recommended sponsor who will charge…
will charge…
a fee equivalent to…
on an hourly basis of…
Theo realised he’d been staring at nothing, and started hard enough to knock his empty coffee cup off the desk.
It tumbled to the floor, the handle cracking off the side, the rest of the ceramic surviving in one piece. He picked the handle up gingerly, wrapped it in tissue paper, put it in his bag. Maybe he’d be able to stick it back on. Superglue or tile grout or… something. Gripfill, perhaps.
Email.
A defendant had settled his indemnity, selling off a two-bedroom flat in Putney to cover the cost. Because he’d done so without taking the matter to court, he achieved a 10 per cent discount on the murder of his mother-in-law, thus taking the total profit to the department to a mere…
But the woman on her third shoplifting charge had already sold her mother’s wedding ring and the indemnity was overdue so her case was to be referred to the prison service for labour rehabilitation, making something useful for society, like circuit boards for mobile phones, or those glasses that don’t have any lenses in to make you look cool, or face serum guaranteed to keep you both firm and soft all at once.
Theo looked away, marked the email as unread, went to the toilet, sat in the locked cubicle with his pants around his ankles, realised he had no idea what he was doing, sat a while longer, felt ridiculous, went back to work.
At 4.55 the new case arrived.
It hadn’t gone to him initially. But Charlotte Burgess, who specialised in well-paying homicides, had taken one look and done some quick maths—cause of death, manner of arrest, value of deceased—and concluded that the matter was fairly open-and-shut and couldn’t bring in more than £60,000, which wouldn’t count for much on her performance review so…
she sent it on.
Which was silly really, because if she’d looked closely she would have seen the discretion clause that any wise auditor could squeeze for at least another £90,000 if they played it right.
Hey, Theo. This arrived, but I’m snowed under. Can you take a look at it? Thanks! xx
All of Charlotte’s emails ended with two kisses. She’d once signed off to a high court judge with snuggles and lols! and the judge hadn’t known what these words meant, and assumed it was just a youth thing.
Theo opened the case file.
Homicide, suspect arrested and full confession given. Status: pending assessment.
Dani Cumali.
It occurred to him that he’d only seen her feet.
And her brain of course but actually the brain on the wall, her bare feet pointing upwards these weren’t much to go by and he’d sort of assumed, he’d just thought well there it is, here we are but thinking about it he’d only really…
He opened the file.
The front of her face was remarkably intact, given the two bullets that had entered it. The back of her skull had taken most of the damage when the bullets exited, bursting open like an overheated pudding.
The bruising across the rest of her body was almost black, the blood congealing between broken arteries post-mortem.
A photo was attached of the killer.
Her name was Seph Atkins, and the cops suspected this was an alias.
Seph Atkins had called the police almost the second Dani’s body hit the floor. A transcript was attached.
“Yes, I’d like to report a homicide… I’m sorry do you need to… yes, homicide, that’s right. No, I did it. Yes. Yes. The address is… as in sierra, echo… yes, echo… what do you estimate as being your response time? Yes, that’s fine. Thank you. Of course I can hold. Thanks.”
And then in the distance, the sound of faint words, as if the killer was holding her phone against her shoulder, muffling her words, addressing someone else. The transcriber couldn’t decipher what was said, but Theo knew the words, heard the truth of it.
“Now if you just make like a heron…”
He closed the file, copied it to a USB stick, put the stick in his pocket and went home twenty minutes early. Such action might have caused something of a stir, but it being Theo, no one really noticed.