London, the day Anna dies
It is dusk. The road is not yet dark but the early evening glow of the streetlamps casts pools of light, like fingerprints, along the pavement. Harry moves quickly, heartbeat rising as the house comes into view. The wisteria that had burst with new life just a few months earlier now clings to the brick like sinew, exposed beneath the skin of a corpse.
From his vantage point at the bottom of the tiled front steps, he notes through the panes of glass in the front door that inside the hallway is dark. Briefly he imagines movement in the kitchen, at the back of the house where a wall of glass overlooks the garden. He visualises the perfectly manicured lawn rolling down towards the Heath, bathed in moonlight, muted by the shadows of the trees.
The girls are not home yet, but they will be soon. There isn’t much time, but not much time is needed; what they are here for will not take long.
Hearing the faint sound of the doors closing behind him, Harry feels a brushing of rope against his arm as the figures from the car pass him on the steps and disappear into the shadows beside the entrance, just out of sight.
When their positions have been taken, Harry breathes in sharply, not allowing himself to pause. Stepping forward, he bends down and pushes open the letterbox with gloved hands.
His voice does not falter as he calls out.
‘Anna, it’s me. Open the door.’
As she does so, her expression churns, in just a split second, from confusion to anger to fear. ‘What are you doing here?’
And then her eyes widen further as she sees the men step out from behind him, the hand moving over her mouth before she can scream. Harry turns away, walking quickly down the steps, hearing nothing but the door close behind him.
It is almost a physical tearing sensation as a part of himself leaves his body forever.
There is no discernible noise other than the faint distant rumble of a train as he steps onto the street and turns right towards the Heath. Perhaps she had known it was coming, perhaps she doesn’t resist.
Reaching the entrance to the Heath at the top of Parliament Hill, Harry stumbles towards the nearest bush and vomits. Why hadn’t she just left, months ago, when he told her to? She nearly had – it had been so close. She had got as far as Greece before Clive and his men lured her back under the pretence of David’s death. At every stage, they had been one step ahead, waiting to make their final move.
He stands straight and reaches in his pocket for a cigarette, his gloved fingers trembling as he lights up. The colour is draining fast from the sky. Following his feet, he walks over the hill and pauses for a moment, drawing the fresh air deep into his lungs.
On the bench at the top of Kite Hill, he spots a young woman, her knees pulled up to her chest.
‘Can I nick a ciggy?’ she calls out.
The mundanity of her request catches him off-guard and he moves towards her, pausing briefly to pass her a cigarette before moving down the hill towards Highgate Road.
Around him, London is just as it was, the lights of the city starting to twinkle in the distance, couples walking arm-in-arm over the brow of the hill. But something inside him has shifted, and will likely never re-centre. As he reaches the tennis courts, his phone rings.
Clive’s voice is calm. There is no hint of celebration, or even relief, in his tone.
‘Is it done?’
‘It’s done,’ Harry says, treading the butt of his cigarette into the grass. ‘It’s over.’
Meg had called it, that evening all those years ago in the flat in Bethnal Green. You think you can do what you want and that there will be no consequences – you destroy everything that is good. She had seethed at him, the rage pulsating through every part of her being.
She had been alluding to Harry’s attempt to draw her into this world – there was no way she could have predicted anything more than that, back then – but perhaps she had seen in him a certain recklessness, the ability and ultimately the willingness to crush out a life.
It had happened slowly, discreetly, on the periphery of his vision while he had been busy looking elsewhere. And yet, he was not the only one who would have reason to pause at the sight of his own reflection. How easy it is to list one’s intentions in a series of neat bullet points, to quantify, out of any context, the risks and chances one is willing to take; the values and beliefs one holds dear. This is who I am and this is who I intend to be.
But life takes place between the lines. In that space between the definable, the pure, the sacrosanct, that is where reality emerges: chaos born out of clarity; a murky cloud made up of the everyday choices we all make, the mistakes we have no way yet of knowing were mistakes – polluting the space between those absolute truths, the smell of the lead unnoticeable until it chokes us.