An old house, but the corridors have been converted to medical dullness and I count the doors, the steps, the windows and the cracks in the wall until I reach her room, and knock twice and let myself in and as I do,
Gracie, my baby sister, looks up from her chair by the window, and her face bursts into a smile and she says, “Hope!”
Chapter 78
I find that I am…
… changing.
Things I steal for:
• Survival. I have, in recent months, attempted a few legitimate jobs, but it is hard — so hard. I have a profile on a website, with a picture of myself smiling to camera; I’ll clean your house, trim the garden hedge, fetch shopping, wash your car, walk your dog, deliver your parcel, repair your bike. Sometimes people contact me, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes I steal so that I don’t starve, to keep a roof over my head, and I will not feel remorse for living. I will not.
• Information. Byron14, where are you? Steal police database, steal ID of a man with contacts, steal knowledge, steal CCTV footage, steal a server, steal a network, steal whatever it takes to find her. Byron14 — what are you doing now?
• Justice. I live by my own code. I am a god, my eyes clear because no one sees me. I am the enlightened one. I am a criminal and a hypocrite. I am a pilgrim, struggling in jihad. I am obscene. I am wrong. I am righteousness.
The day I stole £65,000 from a defence lawyer in Doncaster whose speciality was getting people-smugglers off, I felt… proud. Not the ecstatic pride of a job well done, not the glee of Dubai, not the adrenaline rush of diamonds in my hand. The pride of… myself. Of who it was I was becoming. Not just thief. Thief who was also me.
I stole his money and cleaned it through fifteen different accounts, breaking it apart and rebuilding, scattering it through the internet before at last re-coalescing it into a hundred different cashpoints across the north-east, sending lump sums of £200–800 to the home where Gracie lived, a charitable donation, a promise of more to come.
The manager of the home, a needy, nervous lady, was at first excited, then frightened, then angry about these sudden donations. They presented that most dreadful of problems for anyone settled into a cushy position — change. With cash coming in, it was now possible to alter things, to have better food at dinner, or think about putting new thermostats into the rooms, or fix the leaking roof in the southern corner, or maybe save the money to buy a van for the house so they didn’t always have to hire when they went on trips, or to get another night-nurse for the patients who needed twenty-four-hour care or… or…
“We can’t spend it! It might stop!” she exclaimed after nearly £6,000 had arrived over the course of four months of gentle donating. The next week I donated £1,000, to make a point, and the manager shrieked in despair, her hands quivering like flytraps in a gale, “Who is doing this to me?!” and by a unanimous vote of the governor’s board that following week, the problem was removed from her power and work began immediately to install more handles in the corridor and bathroom areas for patients who would otherwise struggle to walk or use the toilets unsupervised.
The week they gave my sister a new wheelchair, lighter than the old, narrower around the hips and with footrests that locked in position, I wheeled her round the garden hollering, “You shake my nerves you rattle my brain! Goodness gracious great balls of fire!”
After a while, the NHS declared that it was unfair for the home to have such a generous private donor without spreading the goodness around, and I did see their point, so continued donations gently on the side even as funds were siphoned off to other projects around the trust, and as the money dribbled away, began to look for someone else who seemed a worthy
worthy, how strange this new use of worthy
target of my nefarious expertise.
And then, eleven months after I’d lost her in California, Byron was back.
Chapter 79
Perhaps nothing.
A three-hundred-word article, thrown in as trivia, less important than what celebrity did what to whom, or which prime minister’s wife was snubbed at what event, or whether immigrants were causing a strain on the bus services of Tyneside.
But it caught my eye, and I looked a little closer, and it was Byron.
A report from a book launch in Nîmes, a swanky affair, celebrities and the unsung wealthy elite gathered to hear their spiritual guru, Marie Lefevre, spirit-healer and mystic, launching her latest title: Soul of Love, Spirit of Truth, a book demonstrating that the path to great business and romantic success was through knowing your past lives.
I looked at a picture of Lefevre, and she was beautiful, stunning, perfect. The perfect man on her arm, the perfect smile, the perfect life. And I looked at pictures of the people gathered at the event, and they too were beautiful, rich and full of big ideas about time and space and their own position within, and I envied them, and wanted to be that beautiful and confident and memorable too, but then I saw the after-pictures, and even the beautiful bled, it seemed, and even the beautiful needed seventeen stitches to their faces and necks before the doctors would let them go.
Their attacker was Louise Dundas, an exceptionally beautiful, exceptionally lovely member of the gathering, who, listening to Marie Lefevre read one of her favourite bits of poetry, had suddenly, inexplicably and without warning attacked her fellow guests.
No — not just attacked, whispered the social media, hastily censured. The girl went insane.
In a statement issued by a somewhat shell-shocked Marie Lefevre after:
“We deeply regret the actions of one member of the gathering at today’s launch. Sometimes people who do not know themselves do extraordinary and violent things; the path to truth can be frightening and we are very sad to hear of how many of our loyal readers were injured in this event. We will of course co-operate fully with the investigation and wish peace, love and the eternal light to everyone caught up in these tragic happenings.”
Flicking through the photos from that night, the blood and the chaos, the out-of-focus shots as people fled for their lives, one man bleeding out as the insane girl bit deep enough to puncture the veins in his wrist, I saw terror and horror and chaos and
Byron.
Right at the very, very back, Byron, her face half turned away, moving like the crowd for the exit
there she was
Byron.
A copy of Marie Lefevre’s book under her arm, her head down, a pearl necklace at her throat, a few mere pixels against the chaos of the screen but it was her, it was
Byron.
A question for the survivors of the event.
What was happening before Louise Dundas went insane?
An answer, unanimously rendered: Marie Lefevre was reading a poem.
Question: what poem?
The answer, less unanimous through poetical ignorance. Eventually enough came together to pick the answer from the chaos, and it was this:
“SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY” BY LORD BYRON, 1813
I found Louise Dundas’ Facebook profile, trawled through its contents — photos of her on a yacht, with friends at a club, hugging her dog, trying new shoes, grinning hugely to camera as she stands beneath the departures board of Heathrow airport, a straw hat with corks on set at a rakish angle over her head. A catalogue of a life lived high, full of acronyms, OMG, LOL, WTF!