‘It would be illegal for her to help Stephen,’ says Bogdan. ‘And it would be illegal for anybody else to know she had helped. Would be illegal for me to know, would be illegal for you to know.’
‘I’m with you,’ says Donna. ‘Hypothetically, though, would you have helped her?’
‘I would have helped Elizabeth, and I would have helped Stephen,’ says Bogdan.
‘I know you would,’ says Donna.
‘So you think maybe Garth has the heroin? He’s found it somehow you think?’
‘I think it’s worth looking at,’ says Donna. ‘I think you’re right, Elizabeth is done for now. So wouldn’t it be nice to wrap this up by ourselves? Our little gift to her?’
‘Is an unusual gift,’ says Bogdan.
‘She’s an unusual woman,’ says Donna.
‘You really think you can f–’
Bogdan’s phone starts vibrating on the bedside table. It is three fifteen in the morning. He looks at Donna, who nods at him to take the call. His phone screen tells him it is Elizabeth.
‘Elizabeth,’ says Bogdan. ‘You OK? You need me?’
‘I need you,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Is Donna with you?’
‘She is,’ says Bogdan.
‘Bring her too,’ says Elizabeth. ‘I know where the heroin is.’
67
Will she ever sleep again? Elizabeth lies on the bed and wonders how a broken heart can beat so fast.
It is five to three in the morning. Anyone who has ever worked nights or been kept awake night after night will tell you that three a.m. to four a.m. is always the longest hour. The hour when brutal loneliness takes total control. Where every tick of the clock is agony.
It had needed to be done, she has to keep telling herself that. Stephen had given his orders, and Elizabeth knows how to follow orders. It had been right, it had been painless, Stephen had been in charge and in control, and that gave a final dignity to a man who had prized it and deserved it.
After Viktor had spoken to Stephen, he had reported back. We are agreed. Stephen knows what he wants.
Viktor had given her a little box of tricks. Where he had got them from she hadn’t cared to ask. All she had wanted to know is that it would be quick, and painless. And, yes, undetectable. That was the one final practicality. Stephen wouldn’t want her in prison and, truth be told, most of the law courts in the land wouldn’t want her in prison either, but they would have no choice. To stand by and do nothing makes you an accomplice. Thou shalt not kill.
The GP was an old friend from the Service. She had given him a time and a place, and there he was. His credentials were impeccable, should anyone care to look. They might, you never know. Time of death, cause of death, a hug and words of reassurance for the widow, and he was on his way. No need for a visit to Switzerland, no need to take Stephen away from his home.
So Stephen’s pain is over. He is no longer trapped in the static of his mind. Tormented by stabs of clarity, like a drowning man surfacing above the waves before being engulfed again. There will be no further decline. From here on the decline will be all hers. The pain all hers. She is glad of it, deserves to endure it. It feels like penance.
Penance for helping to kill Stephen? Is that right? No. Elizabeth doesn’t feel guilt at the act. She knows in her heart that it was an act of love. Joyce will know it was an act of love. Why does she worry what Joyce will think?
It is penance for everything else she has done in her life. Everything that she did in her long career, without question. Everything she signed off, everything she nodded through. She is paying a tax on her sins. Stephen was sent to her, and then taken away, as a punishment. She will speak to Viktor about it; he will feel the same. However noble the causes of her career were, they weren’t noble enough to excuse the disregard for life. Day after day, mission after mission, ridding the world of evil? Waiting for the last devil to die? What a joke. New devils will always spring up, like daffodils in springtime.
So what was it all for? All that blood?
Stephen was too good for her tainted soul, and the world knew it, so the world took him away.
But Stephen had known her, hadn’t he? Had seen her for what she was and who she was? And Stephen had still chosen her? Stephen had made her, that was the truth. Had glued her together.
And here she lies. Unmade. Unglued.
How will life go on now? How is that possible? She hears a car on a distant road. Why on earth is anybody driving? Where is there to go now? Why is the clock in the hall still ticking? Doesn’t it know it stopped days ago?
On the way to the funeral, Joyce had sat with her in the car. They didn’t speak because there was too much to say. Elizabeth looked out of the window of the car at one point, and saw a mother pick up a soft toy her child had dropped out of its pram. Elizabeth almost burst into laughter, that life was daring to continue. Didn’t they know? Hadn’t they heard? Everything has changed, everything. And yet nothing has changed. Nothing. The day carries on as it would. An old man at a traffic light takes off his hat as the hearse passes, but, other than that, the high street is the same. How can these two realities possibly coexist?
Perhaps Stephen was right about time? Outside the car window, it moved forward, marching, marching, never missing a step. But inside the car, time was already moving backwards, already folding in.
The life she had with Stephen will always mean more to her than the life she will now have going forward. She will spend more time there, in that past, she knows that. And, as the world races forward, she will fall further and further back. There comes a point when you look at your photograph albums more often than you watch the news. When you opt out of time, and let it carry on doing its thing while you get on with yours. You simply stop dancing to the beat of the drum.
She sees it in Joyce. For all her bustle, for all her spark, there is a part of her, the most important part, locked away. There’s a part of Joyce that will always be in a tidy living room, Gerry with his feet up, and a young Joanna, face beaming as she opens presents.
Living in the past. Elizabeth had never understood it, but, with intense clarity, she understands it now. Elizabeth’s past was always too dark, too unhappy. Family, school, the dangerous, compromising work, the divorces. But, as of three days ago, Stephen is her past, and that is where she will choose to live.
There weren’t many friends at the funeral, though she’d been able to gather a few together. She wonders if Kuldesh would have come if things had been different? Stephen spoke so much about him in the final weeks.
Elizabeth turns the bedside light on again. She won’t sleep. Perhaps she will go for a walk? While there is no one to see her, no one to give her their condolences. She is just thinking that she might come across Snowy doing his rounds, when she remembers. Poor Snowy. Elizabeth starts to weep. For Snowy, and Kuldesh. She will keep her tears for Stephen back for now. They will be of a different order entirely.
The poor fox. Buried up by the allotment, by the radishes that Stephen had become obsessed with in his final days. He was never a gardener, his brain just playing another trick on him.
She can just imagine him, wa–
Elizabeth has never known where moments of inspiration truly come from. The sudden thought that explains things, that shines a light where there once was darkness. The closest she can come to describing it is that inspiration strikes when two completely different thoughts come together, and they suddenly make sense of each other.
Stephen speaking so much about Kuldesh in his final days. ‘Saw him recently.’ Stephen talking about the allotment, and the radishes. ‘Promise you’ll take care of the allotment.’