The UnTied Kingdom (39 page)

             
Chapter Twenty-Eight             

‘Thirty-three days,’ said the journalist. ‘Thirty-four, by the time they got you to a hospital. You must have been somewhere.’

‘I’ve said it before,’ Eve said calmly, looking down at the plectrum she’d spent a month trying to grasp. She strummed a few chords. There was a tune there, but no words.

There’s nothing you can say that won’t sound like goodbye
.

‘You “went away”?’

‘Yep.’ Eve looked at the other woman, challenging her to ask about rehab or slyly question her sanity. She’d heard it all anyway.

The journalist lost her nerve and looked down at her notepad. They generally did these days. Eve had discovered inner calm: it came with having nothing to lose.

‘Now, your comeback single,
Missing You
, has been doing really well, and you’re working on an album, is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Does it have a title yet?’

Outside, a taxi beeped its horn. A light buzzed overhead. Somewhere, someone was playing a radio.

‘Yep. It’s called
Rumours of My Death.
’

‘Clever,’ said the journalist, and Eve thought,
Not really
.

‘Will it be similar to
Missing You
?’

‘Some of it.’ Eve glanced at the bandages covering her newest skin grafts. ‘I’ve got some great collaborations lined up with some producers I really admire …’

The words came automatically, the way they had for Harker when–

Don’t think about Harker.
He said he’d see her again, and he always kept his word, but since Transport for London had eventually excavated the landslide and found nothing but more mud, the chances of Harker walking through her door seemed somewhere between slim and anorexic.

‘And with
Missing You
, you hinted that it was written about someone in particular. Would you like to elaborate?’

The Tower was different now. She’d visited the other day. And London Bridge was an ugly concrete thing, low and squat and easy to miss. Her old flat still stood in Mitcham, although some other poor sod had been moved in almost as soon as Eve went missing.

Everywhere she went she looked for Harker, but found no traces of him or his world. Nowhere in London held a memory of him; but everywhere, she remembered.

Eve looked at the woman calmly. ‘No.’

Again, the journalist tried to outstare her, and failed. Flustered, she looked at her notes again. ‘Right, er … yes, well, what about living in a hostel when you were released from hospital?’

‘I didn’t have anywhere else to go. And no money.’ Eve shrugged. ‘I’ve lived in worse.’

‘It was rumoured that you were going to sue the TV company who let you fly the paraglider without sufficient tuition. Why did you decide not to?’

‘They’d probably have to fire people in order to pay the settlement, and they’d most likely be people who really needed the money. And I sure as hell didn’t want to force anyone else to be as poor as I was.’

The journalist looked around Eve’s comfortable, bland hotel suite and tried a smile. ‘But now money’s not a problem?’

‘No,’ said Eve, who had found herself at the centre of a bidding war for her album. ‘It’s not.’

‘And your tax problems?’

‘It’s amazing how fast they go away when you can afford a lawyer who mentions nervous breakdowns,’ Eve said. Maybe that had been playing dirty, but she’d offered a cash payment and they’d backed off pretty sharpish.

Now Eve had a lawyer on retainer, and three accountants each desperate to find fault with each other.

‘Now, when you left Grrl Power, you cited artistic differences,’ said the journalist.

‘I hated the songs,’ Eve said.

‘Did you try writing your own material then?’

‘Yes, but,’ Eve shrugged, ‘I guess I had nothing to write about.’

‘So what made you try it this time?’

The songs had poured out of her since she had returned. Good songs. Songs about love and loss and anger and grief and life.
I didn’t need songs. I needed something to sing about
.

Eve stared out of the window at Park Lane, which was jammed with traffic. She’d walked to St James’s the other day, but found nothing to keep her there.

‘Well, as the man said, when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.’

‘Right,’ said the journalist, making a note. ‘Which man?’

In another cell, someone was sobbing, which Harker considered to be pretty pathetic. He was, as far as he knew, the only man there condemned to die, and he wasn’t crying about it.

He’d thought about it, but he hadn’t really seen the point.

He’d been asked if he wanted a special last meal, but since he’d never eaten well in his life, he didn’t see why he should start now. A priest had been sent to give comfort, but the only comfort Harker wanted had disappeared through a hole in the world.

In the morning they’d come and stick a bag over his head, lead him out into a private courtyard, and use him for target practice. Harker tried to be depressed about it, and found he couldn’t work up the enthusiasm.

The only thing he was annoyed about was that he’d run out of cigarettes, but then a packet landed by his feet and he looked up to see Saskia standing on the other side of the bars, her hand still raised.

‘Brought you something,’ she said.

He picked them up. ‘You always said these’d kill me.’

‘Well, it looks like I was wrong.’ She seemed to have something on her mind, frowning down at him. But then no one was smiling much these days.

Harker lit up a cigarette and sucked deeply. Better. Much better.

‘Harker … why did you go down to those tunnels?’

‘You know why.’

‘I want to hear you say it, to me.’

This was unnecessarily cruel. ‘I wanted to save Eve.’

She nodded. ‘And did you?’

He frowned. ‘What do you mean? Do you see her around anywhere?’

‘No, but … Harker, you said she’d gone back where she came from. But you never said where that was.’

‘Another world,’ he said, wondering, like Eve, if he’d gone mad.

‘And the … doorway was in those tunnels?’

‘Yeah.’ Until Sholt’s French bombs had destroyed it. Though why he’d wanted to destroy what he and his fellow Coalitionists had gone to so much trouble to dig out, Harker didn’t pretend to understand. Perhaps, in the end, Sholt’s hatred of Harker had sent him slightly mad.

‘Wheeler’s having them brought down tomorrow,’ Saskia said. ‘Bombing what’s left until it collapses. Can’t have Coalitionists running around under London.’

‘Nope.’ First cigarette already exhausted, he lit a second. Saskia watched him a little while, then said, ‘I saw Charlie the other day.’

‘Yeah? How’s she doing?’

‘Not too badly. She’s on the waiting list for a prosthetic.’

‘It’ll drive her mad sitting in a wheelchair,’ Harker said.

‘It is. She’s constantly bickering with your Captain Haran – Daz, is it?’

‘He’s there, is he?’

‘Apparently by request.’

Well well
. Stranger things had happened, Harker supposed. Like the only woman he wanted disappearing through a hole in the world.

‘The two of them are advising a special team on how to use the computer. We’ve already intercepted a couple of enemy messages. One of them was about an attack on Nottingham. That computer saved lives, Harker. It might even lead to a turning point in the war.’

‘Glad to hear it.’

Her skin looked tight and pale. He knew she was thinking the same as him, that the one life that mattered was the one he hadn’t saved.

‘She can’t forgive you, Harker. Wheeler. It hurt her all the more because she’d always championed you.’

‘Making an example of me, isn’t she?’

Saskia nodded.

‘I ain’t going to ask for your forgiveness, Sask. I don’t deserve it.’

Her knuckles were pale. ‘You didn’t make her go with you. Charlie and Banks were very clear on that. They followed voluntarily.’

‘But still. I shouldn’t ...’

‘Shouldn’t what? Have gone after the woman you loved?’

Her face was tight with pain. Harker wondered if he’d have done the same for Saskia as he had for Eve. Wondered if he’d ever really loved Saskia all that much.

‘Tallulah was a soldier,’ she said, and there was the very tiniest tremor in her voice. ‘She knew the risks. And I ... oh, Harker, I wish–’

Her voice broke, which for Saskia was like a fit of hysteria. Harker waited until she’d composed herself.

‘I couldn’t influence anyone’s decision on your sentence,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to die.’

‘Makes two of us.’

‘But I ...’ She looked down, then back up again. Her eyes were wet. ‘I never hated you, you know.’

‘You ought to. I would, if I were you.’

‘Well, I suppose I’m a better person than you,’ Saskia fired back, and Harker gave her half a smile.

Saskia stared off down the corridor for a long moment, then back at him.

‘If there was a way for you to be with Eve, would you do it?’

He was sitting there waiting to be shot in the morning for what he’d done for Eve. What did she think?

‘She,’ he said, ‘is the only thing in the world that I want. But she ain’t even in my world any more.’

‘Very poetic,’ Saskia said.

‘Yeah, I thought so. I’d say put it on my headstone, but I don’t get one now, do I?’

‘No. You’re going to be shot in the tunnels where Tallulah died,’ Saskia said, her face displaying what Daz had called Officer Blank, but which Harker suspected Saskia had perfected long before she joined the army. ‘Wheeler gave me the choice.’

‘S’pose that’s poetic, too,’ Harker said.

‘They’re going to be collapsed immediately after.’ She watched him carefully. ‘I supervised the positioning of the charges myself.’

‘Did you?’ Harker said, without much interest, and then what she’d said penetrated his brain, and he looked up. She gave an infinitesimal nod in the direction of the cigarette packet.

There was a tiny folded piece of paper in it.

What was she planning? Some final degradation, an act of revenge? He looked up at her, her face cold and aloof. He’d taken from her the last thing she had left, the person she loved most in all the world.

‘Have you decided whether or not to wear the hood?’ Saskia asked.

‘Not yet,’ he said cautiously.

‘I’d advise that you do.’ She met his eyes, and Harker told himself it could all still go horribly wrong. He didn’t even know what she was planning.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor, and Saskia straightened. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Major.’

‘Thanks, Colonel. You’ve been a great comfort.’

She gave a wry smile, and turned to go. Then she stopped, turned back, and said, ‘Good luck in your next life, Will.’

‘Thank you,’ Harker said, and watched her go. Then he read her note, before burning it, lying back, and wondering if she was going to be able to pull it off.

Wind whipped at Eve’s hair as she stood on the bridge, staring out at the dirty Thames. Past the bulk of HMS Belfast she could make out the new, boring, London Bridge, squatting over the river like a concrete toad.
I wouldn’t need rescuing from there
, she thought. There were no narrow arches and wooden piers to thrash the tide into a frenzy. The only thing about London Bridge that could possibly kill someone was the sight of it.

There wasn’t much separating her from the water. Just a waist-high barrier and a drop that wasn’t nearly high enough to kill her. Eve glanced up at the high walkways above the road. Falling from there might kill someone.

‘Don’t do it!’

Eve closed her eyes for a second, then opened them again to see Jen, her newly acquired assistant, smiling at her own joke. But behind the smile was faint concern.
She really thinks I would
.

‘I’m not going to jump,’ Eve said, turning her back to the water. ‘Well, not unless the album flops.’

Jen smiled. ‘Come on away from there before a pappersnapper gets you and runs an
Eve Contemplating Suicide
headline.’

Eve allowed herself to be tugged away, her mind a hundred-and-fifty feet up.
How high was I when the sky changed?
she wondered.
Where did I fall through the hole in the world?

How could I get back up there?

Morning came, with what he had overheard Eve, standing over Martindale’s grave, call a glooming peace. ‘“The sun for sorrow will not show his head”,’ she’d added, mostly to herself.

Today I die
, Harker thought,
either way, it all ends today
. And he wasn’t afraid. They were beating some damn drum as he walked out to the wagon, and he was mildly disappointed that it wasn’t a tumbrel. Officers weren’t often executed, so a reasonably large crowd had turned out to watch.