Why am I always the one running away?
In the semi-darkness of public street lights and twilight gloom, the safe house in Sunbury looks to Joe Spork like a giant, rejected, saliva-covered mint. It makes him feel slightly sick. On the other hand, it is anonymous, which ultimately must be the point. A safe house: a house which is safe. Bartered on the spur from a startled estate agent, and paid in cash. This day, this money, no discussion, no visitors. Are we clear? Oh, yes, sir, and thank you very much.
Joe finds that his anger has drained away and, with its departure, his sense of hope. He does not honestly believe anywhere is safe.
He will be on the run for ever. Or—more likely—he will die.
The giant mint has a small door-knocker in the shape of an animal’s head. It’s probably supposed to be a lion, but it looks more like a sheep. Mercer fusses with the key and lets the little gang of refugees inside.
“Harticle’s was prettier,” Mercer says moodily. Polly nods.
“Yes, it was,” she says. “But this is what we have.”
She turns to Joe, looks him over. She’s being careful. It’s nice when someone who cares about you is careful. It means that they care. He’s tired again, so tired he wonders if he can ever sleep enough. He wonders if he will dream of electric shocks. If he will keep her awake. If she will still want to share the bed if he cries in his sleep.
Mercer slips past them up the stairs. “I’ve got a change of clothes. You should shower, Joe, I don’t mean to be unkind, but you smell bad enough that people will notice and you don’t want to be noticed.”
Story of my life. Don’t make a fuss. You don’t want to be noticed. Pay on time, work to order, play by the rules. Don’t misbehave. Do as you’re told, and you’ll be all right.
Except I did, and I’m not.
Bastion slouches, jellied by grief, and whines very softly. Joe rocks him. The woven-gold bee, the one Ted Sholt gave Joe in Wistithiel, crawls out of Polly’s handbag and flies slowly around the room as if in mourning. After a moment, it alights on a plastic shelf.
“I’m sorry,” Mercer says a little briskly, reappearing with a pair of jeans and a shirt. “We did everything we could, but we just couldn’t find you. We tried everything, Joe. We did. I promise.” He nods to himself. “Anyway. What you need now is a way out of the country, a place to go, and all that bloody quickly. We can do that much, at least. You’ll also need a false identity for travel, and then another one to live in, and finally an emergency one or maybe two. You’ve got to disappear.”
Joe shrugs. Mercer hesitates, then: “You’re very wanted. Very. Do you understand?”
Joe finds himself unsurprised. “What have I done? Did I blow up parliament?” He’s not bitter. He’s always felt there was no point in taking things personally. It’s just a slack, empty curiosity. He has nowhere left to fall.
“No,” Mercer says quietly. He slides a tabloid newspaper across the table. The front page is about the bees, a map showing their route around the world, the conflicts marked as little fires. Mercer sighs, and opens the paper. On pages four and five—just after Belinda from Carlisle in nothing but a pair of denim shorts—he finds SPORK: BLOOD WILL TELL! and LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON. Garish crime-scene photographs of places Joe has never seen, bodies draped. Old pictures, and new ones. A history of violence.
“This can’t be right!”
“I’m sorry, Joe, it is. The houseboat’s gone. The Watsons… It must have been the day after you borrowed the whaler. There was nothing you could have done. It’s not your fault.”
Joe feels the weight of it settle on his shoulders all the same. “What happened?”
“Someone set a fire. Abbie woke up just in time, she got the kids out, they’re fine. Griff… he’s in hospital. Smoke inhalation. He tried to save what they had. The police say you did it. Abbie called them to demand a full investigation and that little shit Patchkind told her this sort of thing was bound to happen if she made time with terrorists.”
“Terrorists? What the fuck does that mean?”
“That’s you, Joe, I’m sorry.”
“I’m a terrorist now?”
“You are a suspect in a terror investigation. Yes.”
“But I haven’t done anything wrong!”
It is a cry of agony, emerging from somewhere in his gut, and his voice climbs, stretches, and breaks on the last word into something animal, kicked and bewildered.
“They are fucking with you, Joe,” Polly Cradle says evenly into the silence which follows. “They are talking to you in the language of fucking. The message is: do as you’re told. Do what we say, when we say it, tell us what we want to know even if you don’t know it. The message is: don’t piss us about, sonny, or you’ll go the David Kelly road. The de Menezes road. Or whatever that poor bugger was called they topped at the G20 for walking with his hands in his pockets. This is the system coming down with all its might. The message is: this is what happens when you don’t behave yourself.” Her eyes are cold and flat, and there’s something prowling in their depths.
Mercer draws breath and carries on. “In the course of your terroristic activities, you were discovered by several people who are now missing or dead.”
“Who?”
“Billy, first of all. Then Joyce.”
“Well, she’ll say that’s not true. They weren’t going to be married. And she’s not dead, so that’s just ridiculous.” But they are both looking at him, and he realises he still has somehow not understood something fundamental.
Mercer carries on, inexorable. “And a girl named Therese Chandler, of Wistithiel, in Cornwall, who was found dead in her home early this morning. Apparently you met her in a pub.”
“Therese? Tess? She’s dead?”
“Yes, Joe. Joyce as well.”
“Joyce wasn’t even with Billy any more!”
“I know. This isn’t about that.”
“They killed her to get to me?”
“Or because they thought she might know something, however tiny. Yes. And now that I’ve met the enemy, I should think just for fun, wouldn’t you? I’m pretty sure he did for Billy in person. That seems about his style.”
Yes. It does. But it also seems impossible, even now, with the smell of Edie’s death still in his nostrils: blood and gunsmoke. “This is all wrong. It’s against the law. All that stuff.”
And somehow Mercer is angry, because he nearly shouts. “Yes, Joe! It is against the law! It always is! And yet it happens. Or did you think they only did this to taxi drivers from Karachi? They do it when they feel like it, when it’s expedient, when the situation demands it. And no one cares because it never happens to them!” Polly puts a restraining hand on her brother’s arm. “Sorry.”
In the paper, pictures of Tess and Joyce, alive. Descriptions of how they died. Descriptions so lurid you can’t help but wonder, unless you really know someone well, whether they might have done it, after all.
Almost everyone who trusts him that much is here, now.
Joe Spork stares at the dead faces, and the headline.
Every man’s hand is against him now.
Joe Spork stares into nothing and waits for his heart to break, or his mind. He waits for the impact of this appalling, impossible lie to cause everything he is to crumble and collapse. He looks up and sees Polly watching, and Mercer, and knows they are waiting too. Sorry, he thinks. I’m done. I don’t have anything left. He waits to hear his own mouth make nonsense sounds, for his body to curl up into a ball and just stay there, until they come for him.