“Not a chance. Tell me how my friends wound up dead and I wound up on the run. That’ll keep us both awake.”
So Leo – Rudi, apparently – told him a mad story of chefs and restaurants and catastrophic jumps and hot briefcases and heads in lockers, a riot in a national park, a fake barristers’ chambers, a year of moving from place to place incognito. The story was interrupted a couple of times by calls to one or other of the disposable phones, which Rudi answered tersely. Finally – it was daylight outside now – one call came through and Rudi held the phone out to him, and when he took it and put it to his ear he heard his father’s voice demanding to know what the hell was going on and why there was a strange person with a gun in his house.
“Dad,” he said when he got a moment’s silence. “Dad, just go with them. They’re there to help you. They’re going to take you somewhere safe.”
“Safe? Safe from what? Take us where?”
“Just go with them, Dad, please. I’ll be in touch later.” Rudi was holding another phone out to him. “I’ve got another call. I’ll be in touch.” And he took the other phone and had a similar conversation with his sister.
When he’d finished and put the phones down on the stack on the table, Rudi told him, “There was someone outside your sister’s house.”
Seth stared at him.
“I wanted them taken alive so I could find out who sent them, but there was… um.” Rudi shrugged. “Anyway, your family are on their way to safe houses right now. I’ll organise something more permanent for them in a day or so. Now will you get some sleep?”
IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON before Seth woke up, still tired and headachey, on the bed. Rudi was nowhere to be seen, but his bags – and the custom-built flechette gun – were still there, so Seth had a quick shower, dressed in fresh clothes, and went for a wander.
He found Rudi in the motel’s almost-deserted bar/restaurant, talking quietly on one of the disposable phones and staring at a sausage sandwich as if it had done him an unforgivable wrong. He ordered an Americano and a burger and sat down across from the young Coureur.
“So,” he said when Rudi had finished his call.
Rudi rubbed his face. “Well, Roger Curtis is unusable, I’m afraid. He’s wanted for the murder of your flatmate and his girlfriend.” He shook his head. “Which is actually quite elegant, if you think about it. Someone less sophisticated would have framed you or me.”
“I can get you out,” Seth said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I might not be all high and mighty and important like you, but I’ve got some contacts. I can get you out. But it won’t be cheap.”
“Nothing worth having ever is.” Rudi shrugged. “I’m sensing an ‘and’ hanging in the air between us.”
“I’m going with you.”
To his credit, Rudi didn’t even try to talk him out of it. He just nodded tiredly. “Yes, well, I’d taken that as a given, rather. Is it my imagination, or is there another ‘and’ here as well?”
“We have to go to Scotland.”
Rudi opened his mouth to say something. Closed it again.
“IT’S ALL ABOUT jurisdiction,” Seth said. “And the Acts of Union.”
Rudi shook his head. “I’ve spent almost a year on the run trying to get out of this fucking country. Why did nobody ever tell me about this?”
“It’s nuance,” Seth told him. “Nitpicking stuff. Body language, really. There probably aren’t more than a dozen people in the whole country who appreciate it properly, and they don’t want the public to know about it because it looks bad.”
They were driving across a rain-lashed landscape of moorland and forest in Northumberland. The B-road they were on was in a terrible state of repair, and the Espace’s suspension kept bottoming out in potholes and ruts in the tarmac. It was half past one in the afternoon, and already the light was taking on a dim, failing, underwater quality.
“Are you trying to tell me,” Rudi said, “that the border isn’t there?”
Seth sighed. “1603,” he said. “James VI of Scotland becomes James I of England. Most people think that’s when England and Scotland became one country, but actually, although there was one monarch, there were still two Crowns.”
“Because joining two countries together is just as complicated as splitting one up,” Rudi said. He lit a small cigar, opened the driver’s window a crack to let the smoke out.
“It used to be easier,” Seth said. “But that was when kings wore full armour and rode into battle on great fuck-off big horses and all you had to do was kill the other side’s king.” He took a bag from beside his feet, rummaged around in it, and came up with an apple. He took a bite. “Anyway, they actually had three goes at unification. First was under James I. He called himself ‘King of Great Britain,’ and he thought unification was a shoo-in, but the English Parliament was worried that it would mean some of the powers he had as King of Scotland being imposed on England. So. Close, but no cigar.
“Second try was in 1654. Cromwell occupies Scotland during the Civil War, and afterwards he issues an edict creating a Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. Scotland gets MPs at Westminster. This of course all disappears automatically when Charles II takes to the throne, and the Scottish MPs have to go home. He tries to get unification talks going again in 1669, but it all grinds to a halt.”
“Do children in this country have to memorise this stuff?” Rudi asked.
“This is just background,” Seth replied. “Anyway. 1707. Queen Anne. A Treaty of Unification is ratified. And ever since then the Scots have wanted to leave.”
“Ungrateful bastards.”
“The Scots started to call officially for devolution around the middle of the nineteenth century, I think,” Seth said. He shook his head. “After that it all just gets too fucking complicated. But the point is, when the Separation did take place twenty years ago, it happened in a hurry after a long and fractious history, and there was a lot of bad blood on both sides.”
“And all of a sudden, after a little more than four hundred years, there was a border between the two countries.”
“Well, there was always a border, but most of the time it was just marked with a couple of signs or some farm fencing. You drove back and forth or you got the train or you walked. Nobody stopped you. Half the time you didn’t even realise you’d crossed it. But yes. All of a sudden there was a border. Something that needed defending, patrolling, surveilling.”
“Which costs money.”
Seth grinned. “Oh, it’s much more complicated than that,” he said.
THEY STOPPED AT a bed-and-breakfast place, a farm more or less out in the middle of nowhere. There had been no need to make a reservation; the place was so isolated and the weather was so bad that they were more or less the only vehicle to pass by that day. The owner, a tall, patrician-looking woman with a strong Scots accent, seemed overjoyed to see them and happily booked them into adjoining rooms.
Later that evening – though notionally a bed-and-breakfast, there wasn’t anywhere within an hour’s drive to buy lunch or dinner – they sat in the farm’s little dining room, where Rudi seemed to thoroughly approve of the lamb stew and dumplings on offer, even going so far as to ask the landlady for the recipe.
“Scotland waited too long for independence,” Seth said when the landlady had gone back into another part of the farmhouse to watch television with her husband. “The country was almost broke when the Separation happened, but there was no going back once it had started. There would have been a catastrophe.”