The Turning Tide (33 page)
‘No,’ Heather’s gargoyle grin hardened. ‘Never.’
‘Heather, you have no other choice,’ Erykah said. ‘The police are downstairs. Put the microphone down. Just – just put it down, and come with me. We’ll go together.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Heather said.
‘Just come downstairs. It’s fine. It’s not far,’ Erykah said. She hoped to keep her talking, calm her down. Maybe not calm her, exactly, but enough to let someone else take over. What was it Heather wanted? She didn’t know, but it might have been something like she had wanted, or thought she wanted, once upon a time. Someone to listen and feel her pain. ‘You can talk to the police and tell them. What you told me. You can get your story out there. People will listen. They’re listening to you right now. You don’t have to hurt other people just because you’re hurting.’
‘Hurting.’ A snort. Heather stepped back a few paces, and tensed her legs like a sprinter at the start line. Her eyes focused on a spot over Erykah’s shoulder and she licked her lips. ‘You don’t even
know
about my hurt.’
‘So tell me.’
Heather snorted again. ‘I was in Switzerland when it happened,’ she said. ‘They didn’t even . . . the police walked into one of my tutorials and told me my father was dead.’
‘How did he die?’ Erykah said.
Heather held the mic like a pistol, straight under her chin. ‘There were two bullets,’ she said. ‘One he must have fired in the air as a test shot. Then the real shot. My mother was the one who found him.’ Her eyes hardened again and sought Erykah’s. ‘Do you know what that’s like?’
Erykah closed her eyes. She was sitting in the car outside her house, waiting for Buster and Billy to finish inside. They had told her not to come in, said it was because she might leave evidence, but it was her own house, her prints and hair were already all over the place. She knew they didn’t want her to see.
And she resisted the urge to look, kept resisting, when they drove past the canal. She heard them take the bag with Rab’s body out of the boot, heard the heavy steps to the water’s edge, heard the splash of the bag in the water. She didn’t open her eyes again until they got back in the Merc, until Billy told her it was safe to look, that they were going to the radio station now. ‘How did your mother react?’
‘The way she always did,’ Heather said. ‘It was a shock for her, but the money was always more important to her than he was. She was only there that day because she was waiting for her tennis coach. She didn’t love him the way – she didn’t love him any more.’ Her voice went softer, childlike. ‘She blamed him for everything that happened to us after that. Said he was selfish, said he had done it to ruin her social chances. He had life insurance, but it was a suicide, so it didn’t pay out. She never stopped blaming him for her having to come back to this country. But I knew him. And I loved him. I knew it wasn’t his fault.’
‘How did you feel?’
‘How did I feel,’ Heather said. She let her arm with the mic fall by her side, swinging. Her eyes focused on the gun. ‘How did I feel?’ She said it as if it was a punchline she was struggling to comprehend. ‘How do you think I felt?’ She was average size, maybe even slight. She was smaller than Erykah, but Erykah knew that wouldn’t matter much if she made a run at her armed with the microphone stand and the will to kill or be killed.
‘I think you felt as though there was no one left in the world who cared about you,’ Erykah said. ‘As if you were powerless. And that there was no one who would listen to the truth. I haven’t been through what you’ve been through, but I know what it feels like not to be heard.’ She licked her dry lips. ‘I’m listening to you. Whatever you have to say, you can tell me.’
Heather was silent. ‘You are the one who can end this now,’ Erykah continued as gently as she could. ‘You have the power to turn this around. Imagine Diana’s family having to go through what your family went through. Do you want to do that to someone else? Take someone else away from the people who love them?’ Heather didn’t answer. ‘Do you want more people to die? It won’t bring your father back. It won’t replace the family you lost. At least tell us what the poison is, and we can get her medical treatment right now. She can live. You don’t have to kill anyone else.’ Erykah’s arms started to shake violently. Her thoughts were flying. Was Heather going to try to get the gun? It wasn’t loaded. Did she know that? Did she recognise it from the Major’s office? Why weren’t the police here yet? When the police did come, would they arrest her too? Should she run at Heather? Or turn and run?
Heather shook her head slowly, her eyes not leaving the pistol in Erykah’s hands for a moment. ‘A good try with the first year psychology. No offence, but you’re more than a little out of your depth here.’
‘You have to talk about it to someone. You don’t have much choice. Maybe if someone hears your story, this won’t – this won’t end as badly as it could.’
Heather met her eyes and smiled. A cool, flippant smile that chilled Erykah to the bone. She flicked her hair over her shoulder as if they were two schoolgirls standing on the sports pitch, not two sweating and bleeding women about to be overcome by police. ‘No choice? Now that is where you are wrong,’ she said. ‘There’s always another choice.’
Suddenly, Heather sprang into motion and a bolt of fear travelled through Erykah’s body like a wave. Maybe she had been wrong after all, maybe Heather really did have it in her to kill. She really was going to do it.
Erykah dove to one side and landed hard on her left shoulder. A pain shot down her arm, so sharp it felt metallic. She rolled out of the way, the gun still clutched in her right hand.
But it wasn’t her that Heather was making a run for. Heather barrelled right past where Erykah had been standing and kept on going. She was heading straight towards the outside windows. Too late Erykah realised what she was about to do. It all seemed to be happening in slow motion: the leap, the mic stand held in front of her face, the last scream as Heather made a jump for it. She hit the huge single pane window at full speed. The sound of glass again, crinkling like cellophane, falling away from the rotten old window frames.
Jump before you’re pushed.
The time between when Heather jumped and when she landed felt like the longest few seconds of Erykah’s life. Her mind knew what she had just seen, but refused to process it.
There was a wet thump and crunch of bone on the pavement outside the
LCC
building, muffled from three floors away. Erykah hauled herself off the floor and tiptoed to the window, the gun hanging by her right side. People were crowded on the pavement and looking down at the body. The unnaturally twisted neck. A pool of dark blood started to spread from under Heather’s head. They hadn’t yet started to look up, to wonder where this strange and unexpected offering came from. One lone face was tilted to the sky. A pair of eyes met hers. His face lit up in recognition. It was the evangelist in the bad suit who spoke to her on the street outside the station the first time she met Kerry. ‘God has sent us a message from above! Repent sinners! Satan shall be defeated!’ he shouted. Erykah ducked back inside.
The pair ran out to find Diana and Jonathan still on the stairs. Diana had collapsed and Jonathan was unable to carry her. Erykah shoved the gun down the back of her jeans. She put her good shoulder under Diana’s arm, heaved her to a standing position and together the three of them managed to walk her down. The shoulder where Erykah had landed felt weak and she dared not look down in case it was broken. Run now. Deal with it later.
Seminole Billy was waiting at the bottom of the stairwell with Barrington and Kerry. He propped the door open with one shiny leather boot. ‘Jesus, woman, you know how to keep a man waiting. We have to dash. Like, fifteen minutes ago.’
A few dozen people were trapped in the foyer with them: the radio staff, the accountancy firm from the floor below, secretaries and a few irritated executives from other small offices. Their excited whispers hummed in the air. Nobody seemed to notice their small group emerging from the stairwell: they were looking at the glass front doors, pointing at the police trying to come inside. Some were even pointing their mobiles that way, filming something happening on the other side.
‘I know,’ she said, and nodded towards Diana. ‘And she needs a doctor. But how do we get out of here?’
‘Out the back,’ Billy said.
‘Door’s broken,’ Kerry shook her head.
‘Not broken, just out of order.’ Barrington produced a key chained to a large wooden stake from behind his back with a flourish. He caught the questioning look in Kerry’s eyes. ‘What? Vampire insurance,’ he explained.
‘We only got a few minutes before the police get in,’ Billy said. ‘Some weirdo chained himself to the front doors.’
‘You’re leaving?’ Kerry turned to Erykah. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Anywhere but here,’ she said. She was wired with adrenaline, short on sleep, and struggling to make sense of the last few days. But one thing was certain: she had no interest in being in front of the cameras again. Ever. The face of the evangelist looking up at her: had he recognised her? He must have done. Would he tell the police? She wasn’t about to wait around and find out.
‘You can’t go,’ Kerry said. ‘I mean for one thing, someone’s got to tell the police what happened.’
The girl had a point. With a crowd of several dozen people outside growing larger by the second, it was hardly likely that she would be able to slip out with a ‘no comment’ and a smile.
Erykah examined the few faces she could see through the doors. She saw a few of the evangelists, but not the man in the rumpled suit who had been looking up at the window when she was looking down. Was he out there? Maybe the crowd had ruined any chance of bringing people to Jesus today. Or maybe the sight of a real person falling from the sky for no reason had changed something in him. Death had a way of doing that.
‘So you’ll be me,’ Erykah suddenly said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Think about it. There’s no reason why this can’t be your scoop instead of mine.’ She took the handbag back from Kerry and unloaded the papers and notebooks and shoving them her direction.
‘But I can’t do that!’
‘Why not?’ For all anyone knew it was Kerry in the studio with Heather, not Erykah, when the radio was on. Kerry worked there. She was the anonymous tweeter already, the insider. She had done no wrong in the eyes of the press. Why not be the hero who saved the day as well? It was a better story that way; it made more sense. ‘Take the papers and go public. Show them what Media Mouse is made of.’
‘No,’ Kerry said. ‘I don’t know what most of this is.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Erykah said. She looked at Jonathan and Diana. ‘And you two – this never happened. You never saw me.’ She hoped, in the hurry and the shock, that they would listen to her. Or if they didn’t, that no one would believe them anyway.
Jonathan shook his head. ‘Saw nothing,’ Diana stammered, her arms and legs limp. She held the sleeve of her shirt against her forehead to stem the trickle of blood running down her face, but she needed more than basic first aid, and fast.
‘Wait,’ Kerry grabbed Erykah’s shoulder. ‘What about me? What am I supposed to do?’ she said.
‘Everything you need is in there.’ She jabbed a finger in the stack of papers. ‘Schofield wrote his notes in code, here’s how it was decrypted. It looks like someone tweaked the government report on oil shale deposits, and he was going to blow their cover.’ She didn’t know what to make of what Heather said about her father and Schofield in Argentina, or whether it was even true. That would be somebody else’s job to figure out.
‘This is incredible,’ Kerry said, flipping through the notebooks and photocopies. The look on her face went from horrified and frightened to ecstatic, and back again. ‘And so fucked up. I mean, thank you . . .’
‘Don’t thank me,’ Erykah said. ‘Seriously, don’t. Find a journalist you can trust.’ She paused. ‘On second thought, there are no journalists you can trust.’ She nodded in the direction of Diana and Jonathan. ‘Definitely not these two. Find someone who will give you the credit for this. Make sure they publish everything. Stand over their shoulder while they type if you have to.’
‘Wait . . . are you sure? Don’t you want to do it?’
‘No way, no day,’ Erykah shook her head. ‘I’ve had enough of that treadmill to last the rest of my life. ’ Even the crowd on the other side of the doors unnerved her, and they were at a safe distance, at least for now. ‘Go on. Take it. Enjoy whatever this brings you.’
Billy was pulling at Erykah’s arm now, with Barrington the security man unlocking the back exit. ‘There’s no police if we go across the alley and through the next building,’ he said. ‘Barrington has the keys. But we have to hurry – come on.’
‘Where’s Buster?’
‘He’s at the canal with the car. I don’t want to keep him waiting.’ The risk Buster would be spotted was too high otherwise, and with the bags and cleaning supplies in the back of the car he would almost certainly be nicked.
Erykah looked from his face to Barrington’s. ‘What about security cameras? They would have got us coming in and up in the studio.’
Barrington shook his head. ‘Already taken care of. Power goes out, the system loses any data that wasn’t backed up, and we only back up at the end of the day,’ he said and nodded at Billy.
‘So the power loss wasn’t the police?’ Erykah said.
‘Hey, I didn’t say that.’ Barrington shook his head. ‘All I’m saying is, it turns out I owed this man a favour from a long time back, and he collected on that debt today.’
‘He’s an old friend of Buster’s cousin,’ Billy said.
On the other side of the revolving doors, police had dropped a plastic sheet over the body on the pavement and were pushing back the crowd, waiting for scene of crime officers to arrive. An ambulance had mounted the kerb, and paramedics were rushing for the doors to take Diana to hospital. Photographers pushed through, trying to get as close as they could to the body. ‘Now let’s get out of here before one of those dumb fucks catches us in a shot.’
‘Wait,’ Kerry clutched at Erykah’s jumper. ‘Is there some way I can get in touch with you? In case there are questions?’
‘You’ve been winging it fine so far,’ Erykah said. She walked to the back door where Billy was waiting.
Kerry looked at the scene on the other side of the glass, then back at the open door leading into the alley. Her mouth turned down at the corners. ‘I can’t. I’m not ready for this.’ Her voice wavered. ‘I never intended for this to turn into anything, nothing like this.’ Her thin arms wrapped tightly around the files. ‘Can I come with you?’
Erykah put a hand on her back. She could feel Kerry’s sharp shoulder blades through the cheap fabric of her shirt. The girl’s heart was beating so hard and so fast, rattling the ribcage, it might as easily have been her own. ‘I know you’re frightened,’ Erykah said. ‘But people are rooting for you. They want a whistle-blower. They want the little guy to win and the conspiracies to be exposed. You’ve captured something. You would be a fool not to grab this.’
‘They deserve better than just me,’ Kerry said. ‘I’m only an intern. Why me?’
‘Why not you?’ Erykah said. There was a tap of a truncheon on the glass. They had finally snapped through the chains and were about to come in through the barred doors. Barrington rushed over. ‘No one deserves what they get. And no one gets what they deserve.’ She pulled the scarf from her bag and wound the ends around the young woman’s neck. ‘Here, I forgot to give you this.’
Kerry dragged the end of a sleeve under her nose, took a deep breath, and nodded towards where a scrum of photographers was standing in a ring around Heather’s shrouded corpse, scene of crime officers in white plastic suits pushing their way through the crowd. ‘Any advice before I go out there?’
Billy pushed Erykah towards the open door into the alley. She started to go and then paused, counting off the fingers of one hand. ‘Never trust the press,’ she said. ‘Never marry someone less than a year after you meet them. And never, ever accept a key to a lock you haven’t tried.’ She turned and followed Billy. They walked out the door into the back alley, and then they were gone.
