“Well,” mused Helen as her son drifted and waved his way down to his seat. “He is predictable. Comes here for the sultans, of course, the emirs and the sheikhs. Can’t resist a shiny thing. Always mistook having wealth for being cultivated. Not the same thing at all. Wealth buys a certain culture, it buys a certain…” She realised that Bea was staring at her, silent, frowning, and the older woman smiled and squeezed her arm and muttered, “I suppose these things are fairly arbitrary after all.”
On the grass, the horses ran, the crowds cheered, and the sky threatened more snow, which did not come.
Theo sat on the other side of Helen, and watched her, watching Philip.
She didn’t move, her arm hooked so tight in Bea’s that the younger woman visibly leaned to the side, pulled down towards Helen’s neck and face. Helen’s smile didn’t fade, but locked itself in place, an engraving on a skull, as Philip nodded and smiled, before settling into a seat in the centre of the throng.
Theo looked, and looked again, and saw Seph Atkins moving through the crowd.
Seph wore white. A white coat, hanging sleeves framed with fur, that stopped at her thighs. Tight white leggings, white knee-high boots, white gloves. Helen hadn’t seen her. Helen didn’t know who to look for.
Slowly, a woman in search of another drink, Seph turned through the crowd, and her eyes flickered over Helen, and lingered.
Theo dug his chin a little lower into his stolen, dusty scarf and whispered, “She’s here.”
Helen’s eyebrows flickered, once, the thinnest of movements, and nothing else changed on her face. “Good.”
“You don’t have to…”
“Darling boy, don’t be absurd. I hired the woman, didn’t I?”
“This isn’t…”
“What would your Dani Cumali do?” Theo looked away. “Well there.” She tutted. “That’s settled.”
Helen rose, and began to walk towards Philip. Bea followed a few yards behind, and Theo stayed sitting until they were on the walkway down between the rows of seats, watching Seph.
Corn stood at the front of the stands, waiting for the races, turning now to look back at the crowd as the track lulled. Theo caught his eye and turned his head a little towards the figure of Seph drifting up the stairs towards Helen, Helen descending towards Philip. Corn nodded, began to move through the crowd.
For a moment Theo thought everything was going to fail. That Seph Atkins was too good at her job, too keen to get the work done, that it was all for nothing. Then Helen turned, stepped into a wide row of seats covered with cushions and draped with red blankets to swathe the viewers, pushed past grumbling knees and over leather bags, marched up to the nearest security man, who turned to block her path, and said, “I’d like to talk to my son, please.”
Seph kept climbing, oblivious to anything else in the world, towards the bar. Corn followed her.
“Excuse me!” exclaimed Helen as security did not move, her voice loud enough to catch the ears of listening strangers. “I would like to see my son!”
Her indignation, loud and clear, caught the ear of Philip and his guest. He looked around, and his face at once opened like an evening primrose, before locking back down into a grimace that might have wanted to be a smile.
“Mother… it’s so… Mother.”
Helen stabbed a finger towards him, having to lean past the bulk of the security guard to do it. “You tried to poison me,” she exclaimed, not with rancour but a ringing authority that sang out across the stalls. “You have suppressed evidence of mass murder and abductions on behalf of the Company and that shit of a friend of yours, Simon fucking Fardell. You have in short brought disgrace to your name, and I am thoroughly unimpressed.”
Theo, drifting downwards, put his hand over his mouth to stifle a laugh, an utterly inappropriate, terrible laugh, and realised at the same moment that he genuinely liked Helen Arnslade, that he admired her, that he wished he had more time to know her, valued her friendship, and that her death would be on his hands.
“You should be ashamed of yourself, Philip Arnslade!” added Helen, voice rising in shrill indignation. “You should be ashamed of what you’ve done.”
“Mother,” murmured Philip, slipping past the guard to grasp Helen gently by the elbow. “It’s such a relief to see you. Let me take you inside, let me take you…”
He led her away, while his wife pinned down his guests with a laugh and an anecdote about exfoliation. His security followed, and Theo and Bea followed them, Helen proclaiming all the way, “He sanctions the abduction of innocent people! Patties are held without charge! They are sent to die because they are economic burdens! These are the names of the dead—Kam Akhoon, Robert Ebutt, Ned Hayhurst, Dani Cumali…”
Philip swept his mother through a pair of double doors, cutting off her voice from the outside world, who tried texting their friends about her, and thought the text had sent, and didn’t really understand why they never got a reply.
They took Helen to a private meeting room. The racecourse had plenty, where the grand and the great could organise discreet encounters beneath grey ceilings, while projectors hummed and the coffee machine took for ever to produce something too hot to drink that burned the top of your mouth.
Theo waited with the throng at the edge of the roped-off corridor that led to the room, and utterly failed to drink a glass of overpriced white wine.
Waited.
Bea waited downstairs, watching the front exit.
Corn waited in the car park at the back.
So did Seph Atkins, huddled inside a hired Audi, smoking an e-cigarette with the window open an inch, releasing clouds of thick, blue-grey smoke that rolled upwards like an inverted waterfall through the window, and tasted of peppermint, and burned strangers’ eyes, and drove away anyone within a ten-foot radius.
In the conference rooms, various raised voices, muffled and distant.
“Mother it’s such a—”
“Tried to poison!”
“You’re not stable—she’s not stable—the medicine you were—kidnapped I can only imagine the trauma…”
“Don’t shit me, young man.”
“See you’re not just—she isn’t—it’s not that—”
“How could you do it? How could you do it to all those people? How could you do it to…”
Somewhere in the conversation Helen started to cry. She hadn’t thought she would. She hadn’t cried when her husband died. There had been so much to do. Funerals to organise, wills to read, people to inform. She had duties to perform and she had performed them and crying would have been a ridiculous distraction.
Now she cried, a foolish old woman who no one listened to, and was furious at herself for letting herself cry, even more angry with herself than she was with her son, and that just made her cry more until she could barely get any words out at all between her pathetic, useless sniffling.
Philip blurted, “Well you see, I mean really! Really, Mother this is all so terribly—and you’re ill—so we’ll take you home now. We’re going to take you home and you can have your medicine and then…”
At the end of the corridor, alone with a white wine and a mobile phone which sometimes he pretended he was using, Theo waited and watched the door.
Once, a security man left, speaking fast and urgent on a mobile phone.
Then he returned.
Then a man in a white suit, carrying a brown leather bag, arrived.
Then he left.
Theo thought he might throw up, and waited, and did not throw up, though the feeling didn’t go away.