Northern Spy(63)

“No, I’m his mother. And you can fuck right off.”

“Watch yourself,” he says.

“Which speech?” asks Marian.

“Sorry?”

“At which speech were you planning to assassinate the justice minister?”

“The one in Portrush on Friday.”

Marian frowns. “We’re on cease-fire.”

“Well, not all of us agree,” says Seamus. “We never voted on a cease-fire.”

“So who ordered the assassination?” she asks. “Anyone from the army council? No? You lads just took it upon yourselves.”

“We’re not here about me, love. How did you contact Rebecca Main, Tessa?” he asks.

“I didn’t.”

Marian loosens her hair from the clasp and runs her hand through it. She smooths the hem of her jumper. “Seamus,” she says. “You’re right.”

The room draws together. Seamus turns, pained, to Marian. She says, “I’m an informer. I’ve been working with a nice man from the government so idiots like you don’t get in the way of the talks. You’re in our road. Everyone at the top knows it. You’re terrified of a cease-fire, aren’t you? Because what the fuck is a poor show like you going to do when this ends?”

His face burns red. Marian holds out her hand, looks at her nails. “Thanks for the books, though. I’ll be keeping them.”

I sit rigid, watching him stare at Marian. He’s about to lose his head. Which would be good. Better to have him shouting and raving than calm, controlling the situation. If he loses himself, we might have a chance.

Seamus doesn’t stand up, or throw his chair at her, though he looks like he wants to. Instead he points at me. “And Tessa?”

“Nothing to do with it. She doesn’t have the nerve, to be honest. You know that well enough yourself, that’s why you never gave her more than scouting. You know she’s not like me.” Marian smiles at him. “Do you remember coming round for coffee, years ago? You chose me yourself, and now here we are. Funny old world.”

“How long?” he asks through his teeth.

“God, you must be dying to know. Did the Brits choose me even before you did?”

Seamus waits across the room, a concentrated mass of fury, his eyes glittering.

“I don’t mind telling you. I’ll explain when they recruited me, and what I’ve told them, and which operations I sabotaged and which failed on their own. You’ve spent years trying to figure out why some of them didn’t come off. Let Tessa leave, and I’ll tell you.”

Seamus turns to me with a vague expression, like he forgot I was in the room. He doesn’t care about me. All of his attention is on Marian, on the girl he chose seven years ago, and what she has done. He wants to know the extent of her betrayal, to assess the level of rot in his unit. He has known me for a few weeks. Marian has been his life.

He’s in danger, too, if Marian has told the government about him. He will want to know about his own exposure. How many years he has been marked by them, when he’d thought he was anonymous.

Seamus looks at me, waiting, and every inch of my body stands to attention. Finn’s face blooms in front of me. If I nod, he will let me go home to my son.

“She’s lying,” I hear myself say, even as my whole being rushes toward Finn. “Marian’s not a tout. She’s just saying what she thinks you want to hear so you’ll let me go.”

Marian says, “I’m not lying. It’s over, Seamus. Let her leave.”

Seamus jogs his foot up and down on his knee, then purses his mouth in thought. “No,” he says, finally. “Tessa’s guilty, too, look how scared she is.”

Marian crosses the room and kneels in front of his chair. She’s going to beg him, I think, but instead she rises up and drives the metal point of her hair clasp into the side of his neck.

Blood sprays the air. Seamus lets out a sound, like a bark. As he falls forward, Marian catches his weight and lowers him to the floor. A glossy curve of blood spills toward me. It reaches the mattress and then starts to climb, wicked up by the sky-blue sheets.

I look at Seamus’s face above the shining mess of his throat. I look at the slack set of his mouth, the soft pouches under his eyes, his pale, sandy lashes. A few minutes ago, he was blinking, breathing, talking.

Marian is washed in his blood. It’s smeared on her chest, her throat, her hands. The ends of her hair are dripping. She must have used a lot of force, to push the clasp in that far. I look at her and my head swims. Her stained chest rises with her breath.

Marian kneels beside him and slides her hand under his back. She pats down his legs, then rocks onto her heels. “Oh, god,” she says, which means there’s no gun. The guards will be back soon. They will open the door and see the wet floor and wall.

“What have you done?” I ask.

“They had plastic sheeting in the hall,” she says. “He was going to kill us.”

I notice dots of blood on my own shirt, and my mind crawls. “Take off your shoes,” says Marian, unlacing her own. I shake my head. “Come on, Tessa. We need to go.”

A roll of plastic sheeting is outside our door. She was right. Seamus was going to kill us, and then wrap our bodies in it.

No other doors lead off the hall. We stand together at the top of the stairs, listening. The house is quiet. The guards might be smoking outside. I follow Marian down the stairs, holding my breath, unable to hear how much noise we’re making over the pounding in my ears.