‘Come now,’ said Garnett, ‘you know that’s not how insurance works. It’s all about probabilities. And then there’s the absolute certainty of legal issues arising – that all goes on my insurance too. This principle of yours, whatever it is, is really going to cost me, Hope. I’m asking you to consider that. Please.’
Hope suddenly felt utterly weary about the whole thing. She couldn’t articulate her objection even to herself, let alone anyone else. Hugh supported her but didn’t agree with her. Her MP had nothing to offer but sympathy mingled with suspicion. The Labour Party certainly wasn’t going to help her. The argument was dying down on ParentsNet. The only victory she’d had was the ending of the school-gate harassment, with the help of Maya’s flash mob. That would be no help with the problem inside the gate, once the insurance issues kicked in.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘All right. Put me down as agreeing. Tick your box and be done with it.’
‘Thanks so much, Hope,’ said Garnett.
In the moments when Hope had considered giving up, she’d imagined that at least this moment would be one of relief. She didn’t feel relieved at all.
Back at the flat, Hope tied on an apron, made herself a coffee and sat down at the kitchen table to think. She still felt defeated and down. Her choices, given that she wanted to continue the pregnancy – and she did, oh how she did! – remained what they’d always been: to take the fix; to feign some faith position that would give her a conscience exemption; or to continue to refuse. The last of these would mean escalating pressure, all the way up to having some court order slapped on her and being finally, physically, forced to take the fix. The second was beneath her dignity, and if she tried it Hugh would throw a fit.
That left the first. The fix. It wasn’t so bad. If the foetus was as healthy as all the evidence showed, the fix wouldn’t even do very much. It would, on the other hand, do a lot for her. Just swallow one little tablet, and her troubles would be over. She winced at that way of putting it to herself. She was still thinking of it like a suicide. And so it would be; it would be killing something of herself. But what? Was it even an admirable part? She had no colours nailed to her mast, no principle to betray. Just this wordless objection. What if it was just spite? Just stubbornness? That was certainly what everyone else thought. Probably Hugh, too, loyal though he was. And Nick wouldn’t thank her for the disruptions in all their lives if she fought this thing to a finish – a finish that would, in any case, be just the same as if she hadn’t fought it all.
Ah, the hell with it, she thought.
She jumped up, suddenly decisive, and strode through the kitchen door to the hallway. She opened the cupboard, switched on the dim energy-saving bulb, kicked aside boots and toys and gloves on the floor, stood on tiptoe and reached up to the shelf. Her groping fingers connected with nothing. Damn. The carton containing the fix was still right at the back, where she’d flicked it. What a surprise. She sighed, fetched a chair from the kitchen, and set it down carefully in the cupboard. After giving the chair a preliminary shake to make sure it didn’t wobble, she stepped up. Now she could see the top of the shelf. The little yellow-and-white carton was indeed at the back. Right next to it was a frayed brown cardboard box, a bit bigger than a shoebox, whose top she couldn’t see over. She reached for the smaller carton, blew dust off it, and stuck it in her apron pocket.
She wondered what was in the other box. She didn’t remember leaving it there, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t. Probably an empty box that some gadget or toy had come in and that she’d tossed up there with the vague idea that it might come in handy to return or pack whatever the object had been. She hooked a finger over its rim and gave it a tentative, experimental tug. The box barely moved. Inside it, something clinked against something else.
Not empty, then. What could she have left up there? It annoyed her that she’d forgotten. That wasn’t something she usually did. Well aware that she was indulging in displacement activity to delay the inevitable, irreversible moment of swallowing the fix, she grasped the cardboard more firmly and pulled. The box slid across the shelf, with more rattling and clinking, and a friction suggesting a weight of two or three kilograms. She drew it off the shelf, on to an upturned palm, and stepped backward off the chair. Now on secure ground, she lowered the box with both hands and looked inside.
A 70cl bottle of Glenmorangie, the lid’s seal unbroken. A battered cardboard box a few centimetres square. And a large metallic-looking automatic pistol.
She almost dropped the box. Hands shaking a little, she laid it down on the seat of the chair and stared at its contents. She closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. When she opened her eyes, the gun was still there. She’d never been this close to a gun. Apart from on the hips of police and other officials, and in the hands of soldiers, she’d never seen a firearm in real life at all. She picked up the small cardboard box and prised open its furred and ragged flip-lid. Inside were lots of small lead pellets, rounded at one end, flared at the other. Air-pistol ammo. That was a small relief. Technically the pistol wasn’t a firearm, but by legal definition it was. Its relative lack of lethality didn’t make it any less illegal, or any less of a shock to find in her house.
Hugh had never shown the smallest interest in guns, other than the odd passing mention of how common shotguns and rifles were on the long island, where – for anyone other than a licensed game warden – they were just as illegal as here. But it must have been Hugh who’d hidden away the box. For a moment Hope considered another explanation: that it had been left by the flat’s previous owner. But – quite apart from the likelihood of its being discovered in the process of moving out and moving in – whoever had left the gun had also left the whisky, and that didn’t ring true at all. The single malt had probably cost a hundred pounds. Nobody would willingly abandon, or easily forget, something like that. And Glenmorangie was Hugh’s favourite whisky, though he could seldom afford the indulgence. It had taken him about a year to get through one bottle, before Hope had become pregnant with Nick. She wasn’t bothered that he had another bottle stashed away. He might even be keeping it to wet the baby’s head.
But what the hell did Hugh think he was doing stashing an illegal weapon in the house? Hope found herself looking over her shoulder. From where she stood, just inside the cupboard, she couldn’t see any cameras. She leaned backwards and looked up and down the hallway. She could see one lens above the front door and one at the opposite end, above the doorway to the kitchen. None at the sides.
She replaced the ammunition box and picked up the pistol. It was heavier than she’d expected. Though she knew rationally that it couldn’t explode, she handled it as if it were a ticking bomb. Angling it so that she could see the muzzle without pointing it at herself – she knew that much – she saw that the actual small air-pistol muzzle was set a centimetre or so back inside the barrel, presumably to make the replica more convincing. She placed the pistol back in the box, took the whisky bottle out and placed it on the floor, then climbed up and put the box back where she’d found it.
She took the whisky bottle through to the kitchen and set it on the table beside her glasses. After gazing at it for some time, she picked it up, shoved it to the back of a kitchen cupboard, put on her glasses and got back to work. It was only when she took her apron off at 3.20 to go and pick Nick up that she noticed again the yellow-and-white carton in the pocket, and realised that she’d put it completely out of her mind. She couldn’t understand quite why, but this made her feel happy. She stuck it in her jeans pocket and went out.