4.15am. Saturday, 11th November
His head pounding, his knee throbbing, it was still dark when he got to the Percy Hotel in the backstreets of Camden. He limped up the stone stairs, holding on to the metal work separating this seedy dive from the next seedy dive, from the next seedy dive – No Vacancy flashing orange in the gloom. The sallow-faced concierge barely looked up from the early morning copy of The Sun. An observer might even have said that the concierge made a point of not looking up as he slid a key across the pock-marked melamine counter. North wondered when he fixed up the room rental whether he was throwing away his money. But for three years, every six months, he spent at least four hours working his way across London, losing anyone who might be tailing him, losing his own shadow, to pay an exorbitant rent in hard cash and harder drugs. The hotel owner didn’t ask questions – he’d forgotten how, and the night-desk concierge simply didn’t see him. He needed the job and didn’t need the trouble. North was after all the perfect tenant. Regular. Paid his bills on time. So quiet you hardly knew he was there.
He checked the door to Room 13b before he went in. The arrangement involved absolute privacy. No housekeeping, no curious look-arounds, and no favours to working girls with low expectations and ready money who needed an hour in the dry, but the hair seal attached to the frame remained unbroken.
North pushed open the door and clicked on the light, taking care to close the door after himself and lock it. He put his eye to the spyhole but there was no one there – the fisheye lens distorting the striped bile-green wallpaper of the corridor into bulging prison bars. The room didn’t bear close scrutiny, but there was a plastic boxed shower in the corner reeking of damp, a dusty hotplate, and an ancient armchair – a spring poking through the seat covered by a tapestry cushion. It would do. He crossed over the threadbare carpet of sickly, swirling orange and brown, to push aside the yellowing nets at the window. Underneath, the rail tracks ran hither and thither. A goods train passed by, the walls of the hotel vibrating as the engine gathered speed and behind him the mirrored door of the plywood wardrobe creaked open and then closed again. He figured it did that a lot.
North crushed the heavy-duty opiates he’d swiped from the trolley as the nurse dressed his leg, and washed them down with a glass of lukewarm water tangy with rust; the tap screaming at him as he turned it, a brown stain chasing the hairline crack through the sink. Flowers in another sink. Ceramic shards. He refused to think about her. Refused to look at himself in the mirror – what was there to see? Only a fool.
The Board didn’t only seize family connected to key players working within their strategic targets. They mixed in the hostile and disposable. They’d strapped Sonja and God knows who else up with explosive and blown apart society. The coup was under way and they were already winning. He was too late.
And Honor, who believed there was good in him, was lost.
North threw himself down on the single bed – almost passing out with the pain from his ribs, the springs shrieking in protest, the raspberry-pink candlewick coverlet damp under him. Tarn bought Honor. The only question was – what with? Surely not money, she had plenty and would have had more with JP. The promise of safety? If you become a monster yourself – what’s to fear from the monsters under the bed? Or with power? The country was leaderless – the Prime Minister and her most senior government ministers were black and white memories, but every television channel pumped out Honor Jones in fabulous technicolour with her blood-soaked mandate for change. An heroic celebrity telling the nation she would lead it through the valley of the shadow of death to glory, glory, hallelujah days of milk and honey. It was beautiful. She was beautiful.
But they hadn’t bought her with the prospect of power, she wasn’t the type. She was an MP because she was a believer who wanted to save people from themselves, and from each other which meant Tarn bought and sold her for that most dangerous of commodities – love. For the promise of Peggy’s return if she behaved. A promised return she probably didn’t even believe in her heart of hearts was possible any more. North understood the temptation. Not to be alone. Honor decided if she couldn’t beat the system, she would salvage what there was to salvage, and North couldn’t fault her logic.
But she should have tried. She was wrong and she had been wrong too about the fact there was good in him. There was no goodness in the world and certainly no goodness in him. There never was. There never would be.
Trembling with pain, finally, he slept. Two hours. He woke to carnage but it was only in his head. Another hour. JP Armitage’s hand gripping his own – slipping from his grasp. Falling. Another hour. The bomb’s impact or the rumbling trains startling him into sweating, terrified wakefulness. Honor Jones – he should have her name tattoed on his body as a warning to himself and others never to believe. Trust was dead. First Stella and last Honor. He turned on to his side, groaning, pushing his face into the foam pillow that smelled of long-ago strangers, his broken ribs, the laser-claws of migraine gripping him, ripping into his flesh that would grow over and over again, devouring it all. The flash and white-hot burn of red and orange clashing light scouring his eyeballs, making them bleed.
The opiates gone. No purple pills. No one and nothing to get him through the pain and wakefulness.