Didn’t look away.
She took nearly an hour and a half to die.
For a little while Theo was terrified.
Then he was hopeful, because she wasn’t dying, so maybe she would live.
Then he thought he should plug the tubes back in, and nearly cried because he didn’t.
Then he was angry, because she was dying, and no one came, and no one cared.
Then he was bored, and was immediately guilty that he was bored.
All the time she watched him, and she struggled to breathe and did not look away from him, and after a while he held her hand in his, and she squeezed it once, and did not die, and did not die, and did not die, but lay a wounded shell.
And in the end, she died.
There wasn’t even a heart monitor to beep, an alarm to sound.
She exhaled, and a little foam popped around the hole in her throat, and she exhaled no more, and she died.
Chapter 71
Neila moored in an inlet of Keadby Junction, stood on the prow of the Hector, and watched Theo walk away.
In the afternoon that fucking cormorant finally pissed off too, stupid bloody bird.
It’d be back.
That was just the way things were.
Theo—the boy who would be Theo—sat by the sea with Dani Cumali, and she said:
“I’m gonna change things. This whole system is so fucked up, you know? It’s so fucked up, and people are just like, you’ll grow up and you’ll learn, and I’m like, fuck yeah, like you’ve learned yeah? but you know what people are like. Patronising wankers. You gotta remember what matters, you’ve gotta…”
Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe Theo’s making it up, now that time is becoming a little… now that his memories are more confused than they were, now that he might have a daughter who probably isn’t his and now that the life he built from a lie isn’t anything that matters at all, everything is sort of…
And Dani Cumali dies at Seph Atkins’ hands, and her daughter’s name isn’t on her lips.
But as she dies it occurs to her that things would have been better if she had whispered Lucy’s name, it would have been a proper way of doing things, and she is briefly annoyed that she was so busy being scared and in pain, and didn’t manage to fit it in.
Not least because, now she’s here, she finds nothing else really matters as much after all.
In a hospital in Greenwich, Helen Arnslade dies.
She does not smile, and as her body turns from a living thing into limp biology in a bed, Theo adds up the value of her life.
Approximately £5.8 million, give or take.
Assuming she wasn’t hiding any undeclared medical conditions or didn’t give excessively to charity.
He waits a little while longer, then gets up, and walks away.
And on New Year’s Eve Theo Miller walks away from the canal, a gun in his hand, Neila at his back, the sun hidden behind snow-threatening clouds, and has only one destination in mind, and only one thought in his trigger finger.
Chapter 72
Nearly fourteen days after two bombs went off in Ascot, Theo returned to Newton Bridge.
The men came out of the woods with guns and shouting and rage and hunger in their eyes, and he let them shove him from one side to the other and kick and roar, and this time they didn’t dump him in a cold, grey room, but dragged him straight up the hill to where Good Queen Bess was making an especially disgusting cup of camomile tea.
And she looked up as he was thrown onto the floor at her feet, and tutted and said, “You look like shit. Dog?”
It took Theo a little while to understand what she meant, until the strips of dried spaniel meat were produced, which he ate with his fingers off a blue and white willow-pattern plate.
In London, Markse said:
“There is good reason to think that Simon Fardell didn’t order the hit on you or your mother, Mr. Arnslade. There is footage of individuals at Ascot, including Mr. Miller, which implicates them in the crime. Further, there is reason to believe that Ms. Choudhary was not lying about having her financial information stolen…”
To Markse’s surprise, this information didn’t induce the gibbering relief he’d been expecting from the minister of fiscal efficiency. Instead, he found himself in the awkward position of having a grown man kneel at his feet, clutch at his trousers, exclaim:
“Oh Jesus oh fucking Jesus oh God I froze their fucking assets I froze their assets I thought Simon tried to kill me I did the only thing I could oh God oh God he’s going to kill me!”
Markse wondered what he was meant to do next. In a career spanning the mundane through the petrifying, he’d never before had his employer cry onto his polished leather shoes, nor did he know quite what to make of this development.
Moreover, he hadn’t been paid for ten days, and suspected he wasn’t about to be paid any time soon. It had become apparent that the Company’s contract for the collection of taxes hadn’t included lump-sum payments to the government, but rather a constant trickling-in of weekly finances controlled and carefully managed to maximise the efficiency of investment over…
…he hadn’t paid much attention to the details.
He was beginning to wish he had. The kitchen cupboard was getting quite bare, and the companies who delivered food to his local supermarket were owned by companies which were owned by…
And all things considered, the world was a mess.
And Markse couldn’t abide mess.
Twenty-four hours later, Philip Arnslade unfroze Company funds.
The action came too late.
Of the estimated thirteen thousand people who had died in the electricity blackouts, water cut-offs, transport breakdowns and failure to get access to clean drinking water and food, nearly nine thousand had been over the age of seventy, too old, frail or weak to make it to the resources on which they’d depended.
Another seven hundred and twenty had died when the police opened fire on rioters in Manchester and Birmingham.
Fourteen were Company Police, burned alive when their station was attacked. The crowds had danced around the building as they smoked and screamed, and kicked the still-burning bodies of those who’d thrown themselves from the windows, just to be sure they were dead.
In Shawford, formerly of Budgetfood, the ragers raged at the sea.
In the enclaves, the safe spaces on the cliffs, a man beat his wife to death for hoarding food. His indemnity would probably have been less than £100k, all things considered, but the police never came, and neither did the ambulance, and no one seemed to care.
At the Cotswold border the man babbled, “But the sheep are for the aesthetic the rural aesthetic they are part of the expected aesthetic of the—”
A woman hit him over the head with a shovel, and they left him for dead as they burst across the cordon to feast on fresh mutton and blood.
On the canal Neila watched the flames, and was grateful to be on the water.
A few trucks lumbered out of the processing plants with microwave meals and tins of food. No one was sure who was paying for this service, since the Company didn’t seem to be taking responsibility for anything much, but it seemed like someone ought to try.
Philip Arnslade resigned.
“Markse,” he whimpered as they led him to the helicopter. “Simon’s going to kill me. I’ve broken it all. He’s going to kill me. He’s going to…”
“Now sir,” murmured Markse, “I’m sure it’ll all be…”
The roar of helicopter blades drowned him out as he pushed Philip on board. The minister’s face was white as he stared out of the window, and on the ground below Markse felt he should almost be waving, smiling, a proud parent seeing a frightened child off to school. Markse was still watching the sky when, two minutes twenty-two seconds into the flight, Philip’s helicopter exploded mid-air.