He drifted to the station.
There was one train a day. By 4.17, when the train came, the empty town had produced forty or fifty travellers, waiting in silence on the platform. Theo couldn’t pay for a ticket, but there wasn’t a barrier, and no one at the counter to sell him anything or call him out for his crime.
The train smelled of broken toilet and diesel. He stood, face pressed to the glass, swaying as it rattled south towards York. No ticket inspectors boarded, and at York he changed to a larger train, growling engine and less pee, heading towards London, and waited to be arrested. People stood pressed armpit to armpit, nothing to hold on to except each other. An old woman had a duck in a bag. A young man held a baby, no carrier or straps for support, wrapped up in his jacket, pressed to his chest. No one spoke, no one met anyone else’s eye, no ticket inspectors came.
At Peterborough there wasn’t enough room for people to get on, and a fight broke out. The train began to pull away before it was resolved, leaving a woman howling on the platform, a door open. A man was pushed backwards out of it as the people crammed on board reached a collective decision, landing with a bone-crack on the platform below.
No one was waiting to arrest Theo in London, and he shoved through the open barrier behind a mother and her child and didn’t even bother to feel guilty.
Walked.
Sat a while by the river.
Maybe even slept, until the cold started him awake again.
Walked again, to the Kensington toll. It was manned not by people in Company uniform, but men in suits, local residents who, as this service had lapsed, had decided to take up the burden themselves. Theo almost laughed at the absurdity of it, and approached the pedestrian gate. “My name is Theo Miller. I’m here to be arrested.”
The man he spoke to raised his eyebrows, sucked in his lips. “Uhhhh…”
Theo smiled. “Do you want to call the police, or shall I just go to the station directly?”
“I uh… don’t know if the police are running a full service…”
“I’ll just go and turn myself in then, shall I?”
The man thought about this for a while, then shrugged, nodded, and stepped aside as Theo passed through.
Twenty-five minutes later, Theo knocked on the door of Simon Fardell’s Kensington home. A man with a bulge under his left arm and the look of one who punched bears answered the door. “Yeah?”
Behind him a woman’s voice called, “Who is it?”
Before the man could answer, she appeared at the door, pushing her head through the gap between chest and door frame to scrutinise Theo, nose wrinkled up, eyebrows down.
“Good afternoon, ma’am. My name is Theo Miller. I believe your employers have kidnapped my daughter. May I come in?”
The woman was in her early forties, and her efforts—make-up, lipstick, surgery—to appear as if she were in her twenties only made her seem older. Her face was vaguely familiar, from the TV, perhaps. Her hair was dyed blonde, cut to a balloon that bounced just above her shoulders. She blurted, “Oh goodness oh my!” and for a moment looked like she might cry. Then, composing herself hastily, added, “Would you mind waiting in the kitchen?”
Chapter 75
A very nice kitchen. It was possibly the nicest kitchen Theo had ever seen, which probably meant the people who owned it were also very, very nice. Black marble surfaces, polished taps, two dishwashers, fridge with ice maker and crushed-ice dispenser, and a nozzle for filtered cold water.
Theo picked dirt out of his nails and enjoyed flicking it onto the floor.
He was hungry, and wondered if anyone would mind him poking around in the cupboards. A chubby woman in maroon and green sat with him, playing on her smartphone, one leg folded over the other, face contracted in a frown, her hair haloed with a gentle fuzz of spray. At night she dreams of pulling out her hair one strand at a time and finding, instead of a little bulb of white root on the end, two tiny beetles twined in love, which begin to untangle and scuttle away as she disturbs them, until she slams her fist into them on the wall, smearing them into black-red smudges.
In Kensington nothing much has changed, except now people really, really don’t like to go outside the confines of the borough.
“Can I make some tea?” asked Theo, and the woman shrugged, so he put the kettle on and went through the cupboard above the sink in search of teabags until, with a huff of indignation, she opened a drawer by the fridge to reveal a panoply of herbs and brews.
The kettle boiled, but amid the lemongrass and lavender there wasn’t any proper builder’s.
Theo had ginger tea, and didn’t notice if it tasted of anything much.
“So,” he said after a while. “I heard that the Company is pulling out of all UK business operations.”
She shrugged.
“Cos of the riots. And the mass murders. And all of that.”
Another shrug.
“Heard Simon Fardell put a hit out on Philip Arnslade and his mum.”
A little huff now, the woman getting bored with all of this. “Whatever,” she grunted, eyes not rising from the movement of one busy finger across the greasy surface of her phone. “Just the way things work, isn’t it? Just how it goes.”
Theo smiled a paper smile, and drank his tea.
Markse stood in the door, a man in grey behind him. The woman glanced up, sighed, put her phone back in her pocket and left. Markse sat on a high chrome stool opposite Theo, the empty tea mug cold between them, laced his fingers beneath his chin, rested his face on their weave.
“Mr. Miller.”
“Markse.”
“You look…”
“Where’s Lucy?”
“Upstairs.”
“She’s here? In this house?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” Fury, indignation, a sudden surge of violence inside Theo’s soul he didn’t realise he had left in him.
“Because Simon Fardell wants to hurt you, very much.” Markse, uninterested in such things. “He blames you for Philip Arnslade’s death, even though he killed him. He blames you for riots against the Company, for the destruction of property and wealth, even though they have been committing mass murder for nearly a dozen years. He’s not wrong, of course, but even I find this…” A pause as he hunted for the word, which he couldn’t find. A half-shake of his head. “Personal is not good policy.” The commandment by which Markse had lived his life—a sacred mantra.
“I want to see her.”
“You can see Cumali’s daughter… your daughter…”
Theo flinched, Markse smiled without humour or relish. A question answered; a suspicion confirmed.
“…but there are some questions.”
“Lucy first.”
Markse’s head turned a little to one side, contemplating Theo’s face, listening to a sound only he could hear. Then, brisk, standing, straightening his grey trousers, walking towards the kitchen door.
Theo followed.
The carpets were thick, pale cream and not meant to be sullied by shoes.
There were black and white photos on the wall, great feats of architecture viewed from strange angles, fractals of metalwork and giddy tangles of timber and stone, a monochrome cat caught licking its paw as it sat on the wing of an aeroplane—it all probably had some sort of meaning, something about…