The air stank of scorched hair and plastic explosive. I tried to shake Marisa awake, but her eyes rolled under her lids and her body sagged. She was gone.
“We’re on target,” Giselle shouted breathlessly at me over the urgent radio noise from the ground. “Almost there. You must hold them!”
I recovered Marisa’s pistol and, because I knew there was nothing for it, hauled her upright, wedging her in the doorway, piling the parachute packs around her into a makeshift wall.
Several of my uncle’s security detachment were already inside the cabin. Some were already heaving dead bodies aside. At first I thought that everyone had been killed, but Rhys was hauled to his feet. Though bloodstained and groggy, he didn’t look seriously injured.
My uncle came through the mangled doorway, also toting a pistol, looking briskly impatient. He motioned to the guards to drag Rhys over and turned towards me.
“Step aside, Owain.”
I was cowering behind Marisa’s corpse and the parachute bundles. Rhys’s head lolled, his eyes barely open. Behind me ground control was sending strident messages but neither Giselle nor the pilot was answering. I didn’t know the pilot; he looked far too young to have been given such an important duty.
“Step aside,” my uncle said again.
He was keeping his distance but looked consumed with a violent urgency. It felt despicable to be hiding behind the corpse of an innocent woman whom Owain had misused; but there was nothing else I could do.
“I don’t believe you’re any part of this, my boy. We need to end it now.”
I didn’t say anything. My uncle pressed the barrel of his pistol against Rhys’s temple.
“It’s in your hands.”
Bizarrely, in that moment everything slid to a halt, all movement and noise dwindling, no more hectic darting and jostling, no more gunfire or engine roar or relentless radio squawk. Even the smell of cordite was gone, along with the sense of defilement of my bloodied hands and the frantic thumping of my heart. Stillness and silence descended for what must have been the merest of instants, yet it was enough to absorb the implacable determination in my uncle’s face. He would have his way no matter what.
“En plein dans le mille!” Giselle said behind me.
I heard the shot, glimpsed Rhys’s head recoil, even as I thrust my gun-hand out and fired two, three, four shots at my uncle’s head.
The parachute packs began collapsing on top of me. There was more gunfire, and I thought I’d been hit, but no pain came. The flight deck door was slammed shut, bolted.
Giselle was holding a compact revolver. She let it drop as I scrambled to my feet. A burgundy stain was spreading under her left collarbone.
Gently I drew her to me. The pilot was looking around. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen.
“Maman?” he said.
She shook her head at him, gently but without comfort. Her gaze went to the window.
“Say goodbye, Owain,” she said softly in English.
Directly below us a seething ball of fire was billowing up from the ground. In the seconds before it consumed us I was already in mental flight back to Broadoaks. The green Scenic was standing in the car park near to Tanya’s Yaris. I heard Tanya say: “Are we going to let them see him?” The tall woman with the five children appeared. I experienced a jolt of recognition even as the two youngest girls broke from the others and began running towards us, shouting: “Mum! Dad!”
FIFTY
The hardest task for the historian, my father liked to assert, is to consider the evidence without prejudice. We all have prior agendas and tend to find what we’re looking for while ignoring anything contrary to our expectations. So history, because it is a human pursuit, is always partial and prejudiced no less than our own interior lives: both are just a sum of contingent memories.
“You still with me?” Tanya asked.
“My father,” I said. “I was remembering something he used to say.”
“Oh?”
“Words. For him everything in the end had to be reduced to them.”
“Well,” she said on reflection, “it was his trade.”
“His life. He could always express things pithily but he found it harder to act. To do the ordinary things that make us human.”
She was sitting in the passenger seat of the Yaris while I drove; or rather while we waited at a red light.
“I’d say his illness was having the opposite effect.”
I understood what she meant. The last couple of times we had visited him he was more emotional, prone to fits of laughter or bouts of tears. He would grin or shake his head if either of us addressed him with a question he considered too problematical. He still erratically recognised both of us, though sometimes he would talk as if we were his siblings or friends from his youth. All this was normal, Dr Pearce had assured us, a typical pattern of decline.
“I think he may actually be happier,” Tanya said.
“You might be right,” I admitted. “He’s lost his suit of mental armour. It’s made him lighter on his feet.”
The lights changed and we drove on. We were returning from a lunch in Kingston to celebrate Geoff’s eldest children’s birthdays. They fell within a week of one another, and it was an opportunity to get together. We had made it an afternoon gathering in a child-friendly restaurant close to where Geoff lived. His wife, Candida, was a solicitor. They had known one another since childhood and had married the year after Tanya and I wed. Three children, all under seven: James, Charlotte, and Robin. We were godparents to Charlie, as she liked to be called, and frequent visitors to one another’s houses. Geoff had always remained one of our closest friends. They had both been immensely supportive in the difficult aftermath of my accident. For a while everyone was worried that I might have suffered some permanent form of brain damage.
“Hang a left,” Tanya said.
I managed to indicate and turn at the last moment.
“Sorry,” I told her. “Daydreaming.”
“As long as that’s all it was.”
Her tone was gently questioning. She liked to check that I wasn’t off with the fairies, by which she meant back in Owain’s world.
“Honest, guv,” I assured her. “It’s not on my vacation list any more.”
We didn’t talk about it much these days. It was over, done with. Everyone there was dead, the entire world extinguished for all I knew. I had flashed from the final explosion to find myself already back in the house that I finally knew was my home. The same house which we were now approaching.
“I gather Rachel nearly thumped Adrian,” Tanya remarked.
They had also been at the party, Rachel a week overdue and desperate for a distraction. She had taken umbrage when Adrian was overtly attentive to one of the waitresses.
“She dumped a trifle in his lap,” I told her.
“Really?”
Tanya hadn’t seen it because she had taken the children into the garden when their party packs proved to contain plastic recorders that were much more fun when their mouthpieces were removed so that they could be used as blowpipes for raisins.
“You didn’t hear Rees laughing, telling him she’d creamed his jeans? He had jelly coming out of his nose. Keisha had to stop him colouring in all the pictures in the children’s party packs. It was like a pantomime.”
“Serves him right. He’s a bloody fool sometimes.”
She meant Adrian. “He wants the baby.”
“And what about Rachel?”
Both Tanya and Keisha had been very touchy-feely with her, gently kneading her bulge, delighting in any hint of movement.
I had no answer for this, though I hoped as she did that there would be a happy ending. Adrian was gung-ho for the new series, and it was as much as I could do to restrain him. At present I was only going into the studios two days a week and spending the rest of the time ostensibly doing background research at home. This actually comprised a little internet surfing and a slow progression through my father’s entire corpus. I had decided it was time I thoroughly acquainted myself with his achievements while he was still with us.