Through the smoke and the flame and the blood dripping now into the water, Markse watched from the cover of the path beneath the bridge as
one step at a time
Theo ran.
Chapter 81
Time is
“Oh my oh yes now of course yes bleeding by the canal do you have an address for that… I’m not seeing you on my map do you have premium or standard service support for an extra £4.99 a month you can upgrade…”
And time is
“Mike’s boy, right?”
“No.”
“I’ve got no time for your boy-shit, boy.”
And time, which also seems to spin around the centre of the universe, another product of mass and motion
time is
“Is that… cornflower blue?”
“Well, you know it’s just what you have to hand…”
Theo walks along the canal and sometimes he is in a boat and sometimes there is candlelight and ice and macaroni cheese and
Cormorants can count to seven, very clever birds really, and herons stand fishing on one leg even though the fish are probably dead below the water and
In Nottingham, Theo and Corn walk together along the canal.
“Fucking should have killed you,” muttered Corn. “Should have killed you for what you did. Said we should run, she should run, but Bess said no. Said they’d never come for us, not now. We’d won, the Company was broken, there weren’t no point coming for Newton Bridge now. I said that isn’t it. You don’t come cos you’ve won. You come cos you lost, and you wanna hurt. All we’d built, you couldn’t just let something like that die. It was the principle of the thing the fucking principle Bea is…”
For a while they stand and watch the water.
Then: “Why’d you tell them? Why’d you let them kill us?”
“Because they had my daughter. They didn’t hurt her in front of me. They didn’t need to. It was very clear that if I didn’t tell them what they wanted to know, they’d hurt her. That was all. That was the only thing that mattered. Everything else seemed very small.”
In Leicester Markse says, “I know it’s hard for you to believe, but you have to trust Heidi Fardell. She knows you’re coming. Simon’s never had much respect for his wife. She’s turned off the burglar alarms, cut the connection to the security hut. You can get in and they won’t come running, she promises that…
it’s nearly over now.
It’s nearly over.
I thought I served a thing which was
You arrogant son of a bitch you ignorant stupid fucked-up
I suppose that’s…”
The water flows towards the sea, and they stand in silence a while.
Corn with hands buried in his pockets, watching his own reflection.
“We defended it all right, for about five minutes. That’s how long it took them to kill us. They sold the land to some sort of sheikh or something. They’re going to redevelop Newton Bridge for a yoga retreat. Or like a place to write poetry, we’re eyesores we are the
are you going to kill them?
Are you going to kill them?
I’ll give you a gun. Just promise me you’ll kill them all.”
Theo stands on the top of the hill and looks down towards the house.
The low morning mist rising from frost-cracked grass the sun above burning it clear the moisture in the air blurs the light makes it a swimming-pool sky of reflected gold makes the light across his fingers pale silver makes
There is a gun in his pocket, and he knows who’s home.
He looks up at the sky and down at the earth, tastes rain on his lips and feels the heat of blood inside his bones.
He begins to walk, towards the end.
Chapter 82
In the north there was a house where coal and wood burns in the fires.
It was a homey house, the kind of place where there was always a spare soft blanket, and no mould in the bathroom.
It sat behind red-brick walls topped with white stone.
There is fresh gravel on the drive, two cars parked out front. At Christmas they put a wreath on the door, red berries gleaming fat, a silver card reading HOME suspended from silver thread woven into the bows. The windows have eight panes of glass between lines of stiff white wood, and slide up and down to let in the summer breeze. Repointing the chimney cost a small fortune, but not as much as trying to central-heat the place. There’s a pantry at the back where they keep eggs collected fresh from the hutches at the end of the garden. When Simon and his siblings were young, they loved to gather eggs, it was the best thing ever, sometimes they’d go out two or three times a day just to see if another hen had laid, but when they got older they lost interest in such things, and Heidi never had children.
A cook and a cleaner sleep upstairs, in the slant-roof rooms at the top of the house, beneath electric blankets. They aren’t called a cook and a cleaner; she is executive caterer, he is house manager, and as they sleep, they dream, and the world across the darkness of their minds is full of stars, spinning around a core of darkness.
Theo climbs over the wall by a twisted oak tree.
Walks through mushy leaves.
Stops outside the house, in the dark, waits a while for the lights inside to go out.
Just one lantern burns above the front door.
He goes around the back.
The kitchen door is locked.
The window isn’t.
Climbs in, head first, crawling over a table where fresh-cut blue flowers shine in a white porcelain vase. The burglar alarm does not go off. The lines to the security guards, slumbering in the old stables outside, were cut days ago, and no one bothered to check because Heidi says it’s fine.
Theo walks barefoot across a floor of cold black stone, leaving his shoes by the still-hot stove, socks dirty and wet.
Runs his fingers over the wall as he walks.
Feels paper, picture frames, portraits and family snaps.
Stops a little while in the living room, pine needles on the floor where the cleaner missed the last remnants of the Christmas tree, embers orange in the fireplace, the TV on standby, a canvas of splashed ochre and red across one wall, longer than a sleeping man’s body, colour to the edge of the world, dragging in the eye, spinning the universe.
Climbs the stairs.
Passes the master bedroom, hears snoring, sees the faint movement of shadows against low light under the door as a woman crawls into bed beside her already unconscious husband.
Moves on to the study.
Sits a little while behind Simon Fardell’s desk.
Opens it.
Rifles through.
Finds the gun in the second drawer from the top on the right-hand side. It’s one of a pair kept in an old wooden box with padded purple lining.
It is a familiar gun. He feels its weight a while, then sights down it. He isn’t sure if this is the gun that the real Theo Miller sighted down the day Philip Arnslade killed him. Maybe it’s Philip’s gun. The thought makes him feel unclean, and he puts the gun back in the box, the box on the table. Pulls out his own gun, thinks about things for a while, then puts it away.