The Marriage Act(33)
This time, Anthony’s eyes flitted around the room. Some of the faces appeared to approve, but others were suspicious. He wondered if any quietly shared his outright distaste.
‘Your thoughts, Anthony?’ Hyde asked suddenly. ‘I assume this is something that you can begin working on immediately?’
Anthony wanted to tell him no, that this was a step too far, that he could go to hell and find another puppet to do his dirty work. He wanted to rise to his feet, turn his back on them, walk out of the door and forget everything he had heard. He wanted them to know that in killing Jem, he had made a monumental lapse in judgement. That all he wanted was to return to his wife and his son, put the house up for sale and catch the first flight to Saint Lucia where they could start afresh and away from this madness. Only none of that was possible yet.
‘Of course,’ he replied, nodding his head in the same way he’d done for the last fifteen years. ‘I’m sure I can.’
25
Corrine
‘That isn’t traceable, is it?’ asked Corrine, a note of fear catching in her throat.
The person of indeterminable gender sitting next to her and hunched over a keyboard gave her a sideways glance as if to suggest it was a stupid question. Of course it wasn’t traceable, thought Corrine. As a former member of the now defunct collective, this person had escaped arrest despite a worldwide hunt for all associates. They were not an amateur.
‘What’s the kid’s name?’ they asked in a well-spoken accent that belied their scruffy baseball cap, jeans and army fatigue jacket.
‘Nathan, but I don’t have a surname.’
Corrine couldn’t follow what was being inputted, but it appeared to be some kind of coding. Moments later, the logo for Old Northampton General Hospital appeared on their screen. ‘Nathan Deakin,’ the hacker continued, reading from it. ‘Admitted after being found outside the hospital’s A&E department by junior doctor Noah Stanton-Gibbs on his way to start a shift.’
‘Yes, that’s him,’ Corrine said eagerly. ‘What’s his condition?’
‘As of last night, stable but still unconscious. A toxicology report found compounds of three drugs in his system – one a kind used for anaesthesia, another a hallucinogenic, and the other . . . oh, this is interesting, a drug that treats male impotence.’
‘So what’s going to happen to him now?’
‘Do I look like a doctor?’
Corrine hesitated. ‘Are you able to access the records of someone else?’
‘Who?’
‘An MP. Eleanor Harrison. She’ll have been taken to the private hospital in New Northampton.’
It took even less time for the hacker to access Harrison’s records. ‘She was discharged following a minor head injury.’
‘That can’t be right. You must be looking at a different Harrison.’
‘It’s the only one I can find listed.’
‘How did she recover so quickly? Only last week, the news reports said she was in intensive care. They reported her condition as serious.’
‘And that’s the first time an MP or her people have ever lied, right? It says here that it was a minor injury to the supraorbital foramen – which is near an eyebrow, I think – and they released her the next day.’
Corrine shook her head.
‘Anything else you want while I’m here? Passcode to Downing Street? A list of all members of the Illuminati? They do exist, by the way . . .’
‘No, but thank you.’
The hacker nodded their head and rose to their feet. ‘Check your phone,’ they said. Corrine glanced at the screen. It contained a telephone number with a message attached. ‘Memorize it if you need me again. It erases itself in twenty seconds.’ Corrine did as she was told as the text and the hacker vanished.
Alone, she sipped her now tepid coffee. She lifted her phone again, accessed a folder in her Cloud entitled Decoration Ideas and opened a video clip she had hidden from prying eyes. She had not viewed it since recording it. The footage was shaky and lasted approximately ten minutes. One particular moment caught her attention. She rewound it twice more then paused it.
There, in Eleanor Harrison’s apartment, Corrine saw her own reflection in the mirror and Harrison’s unconscious body lying on the floor below her. Blood dripped from Corrine’s hand.
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26
Roxi
The tinny, repetitive hold music that played on a loop wasn’t helping to lift Roxi’s irritable mood. Her phone lay on the dining-room table, the melody from its speaker filling the silence between her and Owen. Both stared at it, waiting to hear another person on the line speak again.
She distracted herself by re-reading the digital ad that had appeared in her inbox last night. It was her first paid collaboration, a national advertising campaign promoting recycled wedding rings. But the shine had been taken off the significance of the opportunity by the current circumstances and the interminable wait on hold.