After spending my second day helping Jude drill the soldiers at the gymnasium, I’m exhausted. I want to have some dinner and go and see Bea, but when I get home, Niamh is pacing the kitchen. Wendy, who is cooking dinner on the stove, shoots me a look I can’t translate as Niamh storms toward me. “Everything okay?” I ask.
“No, it is not.” Niamh has my pad in her hands, which she thrusts at me.
“Were you trying to contact me? I forgot it.” I look down. She’s managed to get into it. But what did she see? I haven’t been sending any incriminating messages or pinging anyone I shouldn’t. I’ve been very careful. “How did you open it?”
“Your password has been the same for years, Ronan. Picasso. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, why do you have a picture of Bea Whitcraft on your pad?”
I freeze. She’s right. At the station I took a photo of Bea, and she told me to delete it. Why didn’t I?
Wendy is stirring the pot furiously. “Anyone hungry?” she asks.
“Well?” Niamh says, prodding me.
I step back and open the photo application on the pad, then scroll through trying to look as nonchalant as possible. “That’s weird. Probably from school or something.”
Niamh snatches the pad from me and pulls up the picture. Bea’s fretful face is vaguely distinguishable—an orange sunset and ramshackle buildings behind her. “I checked the date and location. You took it when you were in The Outlands. Don’t bother lying. You met Bea?” I stare at Bea’s picture, not saying anything. If I look suitably ashamed, will she let it go? “So you did meet her,” Niamh says. “And instead of killing her, you took pictures. What the hell’s going on?”
“I met her, yes. But she’s no threat. She’s living like a drifter, and she’ll die out there. I couldn’t kill her in cold blood, Niamh. I just couldn’t. Could you?”
I mean it to be a rhetorical question because I don’t think Niamh has it in her to kill anyone, but she jabs Bea’s picture with her finger. “Anyone who contributed to the riots and Daddy’s death deserves to die. I’d knife her if I got the chance,” she says. Her face is steel.
“Dinner?” Wendy asks. She is trembling, and I should be, too.
I have to move Bea and the others, and I have to do it soon because if Niamh gets a sniff of who she’s living beneath, we’re all done for.