Outside, the crowd screamed and the horses thundered and the morris dancers leaped and the ducks quacked and money changed hands and the helicopters came and left and sheep went baaahhhh and the patties washed the toilets where someone had pissed up the wall and in the rooms behind the course a man whispered, “There’s a market for anything. I can get you some very good-looking subjects on extended contract for just…”
And time was…
Theo wasn’t sure what time was, but he knew it was rushing, running, racing forward too fast to perceive, and it was slower than anything he’d ever endured and he was going to close his eyes and wake up six months in the past and nothing would be different and nothing would have mattered.
And he knew that he had probably condemned Helen to die, and it was his fuck-up and his fault and it would all be for nothing, just like everything he’d ever done had been for nothing always and…
After an hour and ten minutes the doors to the conference room opened. Two security men emerged, looked left, looked right, saw no immediate threats. Then Helen, leaning a little on the arm of a third, her face slack, eyes distant. Then two more security men, flanking Philip, taking turns to hold the door so that one always walked in front and one behind.
They headed, quiet, away from the crowds, towards the emergency exit.
Theo stopped fiddling with his phone and dialled the only number saved on it.
“They’re coming,” he said.
“Gotcha,” muttered Corn and hung up.
Theo waited for the group to be almost through the emergency exit before ducking under the rope that cut off their route from the main throng, following them. The door at the end of the corridor led to a grey concrete stairwell, brutally practical against the fascinators, ice buckets and soft velvet of the main event. He could hear footsteps descending, voices muttering into radios. He followed, moving no faster than Helen could, keeping at a distance.
The stairwell gave out to the service car park, caterers’ vans and patty transport buses. The brightness of the winter’s day was harsh after the half-gloom of fluorescents. Clouds scudding across the sun promised snow later, but only seemed to fracture the light, not dim it. Theo looked across the car park and saw the huddle of security, Helen and Philip already moving towards an exit, where two black cars were pulling up, ready to collect their passengers.
He looked through the parked vehicles, and saw Seph Atkins because he knew she had to be there, a shape more than a face clouded in grey, smoke drifting through the inch-open window of her car. Looked beyond her, thought he saw Corn move behind a floral delivery van laden with wreaths of holly and yew.
Thought he saw someone else moving on the edge of his vision, and knew it was probably Dani, or maybe Theo—the real Theo, the one who’d died by Philip Arnslade’s hand—and realised he was going to fuck this up again, just like he’d fucked up everything he’d ever done his whole life.
Helen was a few metres from the black cars, trying to say something, half-turning to look back the way she’d come. The security guard who held her arm tried to guide her forward, but her walk was unsteady, her will absolute. She mouthed something vague, words slurring, craned her neck, and saw Theo.
Their eyes met, and she raised her head a little higher, smiled.
Corn detonated the bomb.
The bomb was under a six-seater car that had brought dish washers from the local prison to the racecourse.
The dish washer who’d built the bomb had been put inside for arson, but that was only because the explosives had started a fire. Because of his special skills, he’d been sent to a chemical factory. When he lost an eye and the tip of his nose to acid, the inmates held their traditional party, a feast of scavenged tinned food and banging of fists on walls. He was one of them now, for ever disfigured and welcome in their tribe, and he was surprised to discover that he wanted to live.
He wanted to live, and concluded that this could only be because there was something left to live for.
At night he whispered prayers to the lady in the north, to her blessed hands, to the breaking of the cage.
He’d really enjoyed putting the bomb underneath the car. He’d enjoyed it so much that he’d scratched FUCK U into the tin-can housing, still smelling faintly of tomatoes through the ammonia, a little act that only he would ever appreciate. He liked blowing things up generally. Blowing things up for a cause felt…
… like something new.
The bomb, as bombs went, wasn’t as spectacular as Theo had expected. Cleaning products weren’t as good as the proper shit, its maker might have said. The sound of it hurt his ears, and the shock wave was a hot blast in his face like an air-conditioning vent for a big office building. But there wasn’t fire. There weren’t licking yellow flames, and though the security men went down to the ground, they dragged their charges down with them rather than being thrown off their feet, covering Philip’s head with their hands, pushing him beneath the shrapnel of metal that splatted out from the wreck of the car.
For a moment Theo thought that was it, and hoped it was enough.
Then Seph’s bomb, the much larger, much more professional bomb she’d put in the boot of her target Volvo, stirred into life by the shock wave from the less competent device, also detonated. Philip and his escort were already halfway to the ground, which is why the ball bearings as they flew through the air ripped apart only one of the guards, the slowest, the one who’d been last to comprehend his environment. The blast knocked Theo back against the emergency exit, slamming the breath out of him, and the three cars nearest the bomb didn’t have time to wail before glass, chassis and pipe were ripped to pieces, the poked frames lifted up and turned sideways, rolled over until they hit their next-nearest neighbours, which howled and shrieked, lights flashing and black smoke tumbling from broken, greasy valve as rubble and shattered metal began to drift down around them, soft against the singing in Theo’s ears.
For a few moments there was only the howling, the metal rain, black smoke.
Theo crawled upright, leaning against the wall, looking through biting acrid smoke for signs of life. One of the black cars that had been waiting by the car park gate had been knocked on its side. As he watched, a door opened at the top and a man, groggy and struggling to get a grip, scrambled up through what had now become the roof of the vehicle, swinging his legs round and flopping like an overweight fish onto the ground.
Of the security on the ground, one was dragging the shattered body of his colleague towards the waiting vehicles. Two more, crawling, bloodied, clothes burned, dragged Philip Arnslade, who staggered and blinked and seemed not to see or understand. A third crouched over Helen and didn’t know what to do.
A grunt of engine, out of time, unearthly in Theo’s muddled senses. Seph’s car zipped by, her fingers as white as her winter coat where she gripped the wheel. There was a thing on her face which might have been panic, and if she saw Theo as she rushed by, he did not seem to register.
Corn, slinking away.
Bea, upstairs, watching from a window, turned her face from the scene.
Theo, in the door, looked and looked, and waited for Helen to move, and she did not, and the smoke began to clear and the sounds of the world began to return, the sirens and the shouting and engines and now an alarm inside the building, evacuation, the racecourse evacuating, and Theo couldn’t move, and couldn’t see, and Helen did not get up.
Did not stand.
Did not move.
The phone was ringing in his pocket, and he didn’t answer, and Helen didn’t move.
The fire door opened at his back, and a man in a black suit with white gloves was there, a yellow bib hastily thrown over his jacket. He looked at Theo, and didn’t seem to understand, and growled through a world gone mad, “Sir we’re evacuating please make your way to…”