‘I promise.’ Libby hugged her friend again before the train doors beeped, opened and the two went their separate ways.
She took her phone off airplane mode and thirty-plus messages appeared from friends and co-workers congratulating her on wiping the floor with Government spokesman David Glass. As Libby had predicted, the video had gone viral.
The fifty-minute high-speed train journey from London to Birmingham had been an uneventful one, with just two requests for photographs as Nia and Libby took up residence at the onboard bar. By the time they reached the city, it was still only the early evening but dark. And Libby was somewhere in between woozy and drunk. Nia had been just the tonic she needed, even if it meant waking up with a hangover tomorrow morning. Preparing for the inevitable, she stopped off at a kiosk to buy a bottle of water and a packet of aspirin before walking home to clear her head.
As Libby made her way through the outskirts of the city centre, she was pleased to see people driving vehicles again and not vehicles driving them. The hijacking’s aftermath had seen a sharp upturn in demand for Level Two and Level Three cars and use of city bikes had also skyrocketed. Humans were no longer such slaves to technology.
David Glass had been correct about the damage inflicted upon the British economy with the suspension of Level Five production. The concept was also losing billions in foreign sales as countries put a halt on purchasing or further developing the concept for the time being. It wouldn’t last as progress and technology were inevitable but at least the future would be more transparent. And while Libby might never completely warm to autonomous vehicles, she believed that when in the right hands, the pros of AI outweighed the cons.
As the face of TIAI, Libby occasionally took the brunt of unwanted attention. She and her fellow campaigners were blamed by disgruntled out-of-work employees for contract cancellations, reduced hours and incomes. Earlier that evening, when a scruffy, bearded man bumped into her on the train and knocked her handbag to the floor, she feared he might be acting on threats made against her. However, he shuffled off without a harsh word or an apology.
But each time she doubted the courage of her convictions, she recalled the black smoke rising across Birmingham’s horizon as driverless cars collided with one another. It was her duty to ensure nothing like that could ever happen again.
Libby drank from her water bottle and carefully made her way down the floodlit steps to the canal towpath. She clicked on an app on her phone linked to the seven cameras inside and outside her house that her father had insisted they installed. Soon after the hijacking, the paparazzi took up residence outside her gated community, hiding in parked cars with blacked-out windows and inside rooms rented from a handful of less than scrupulous neighbours. On every occasion, Libby refused to talk to the snappers or to act on their vile insults as they tried to goad her. Eventually, she wore identical outfits each time she left the house when she learned that publications weren’t interested in printing pictures of celebrities wearing the same clothes, day in, day out. To the reader, it looked like old news. The paparazzi gradually began to leave her alone.
Her watch began to vibrate. Her mum had left her a video message and she pressed play. ‘Hi Libs, are we still okay to come up this weekend?’
Libby recorded one of her own and sent it. ‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘Let me know which train you’re catching and I’ll come meet you. Love you. x’
As two cyclists raced past her under the bright white streetlights, she recalled how another consequence of the hijacking was reconnecting with the estranged parents she had virtually shut out of her life. When reporters besieged her home, they had insisted she stayed with them in Northampton. And despite having spent much of the last decade avoiding the family home because of the memories associated with her brother’s death, she was too sapped of energy to protest.
For years, she couldn’t understand why her parents hadn’t sold the house where their eldest child had ended his life. She had hated that everything in Nicky’s bedroom remained unchanged, even down to the bedsheets he’d last slept on. It wasn’t as if they were awaiting his return from a school trip.
It was only when she confronted her fears and spent time under their roof that she understood by running away she had been denying herself the opportunity of forgiveness. Libby blamed herself for his death – she had been the one with whom he had spent much of his time; the one he could talk to with unabridged honesty about his feelings of despair. And Libby had been the one who had so wanted to believe he was managing his depression that he was ready to return home from his last admission to hospital. He had died on her watch; it was her fault.
Now she accepted that she had no more control over Nicky’s actions than she had over the Hacker’s. His room remained untouched not because their parents hadn’t come to terms with his death. It was the opposite. In accepting his decision they’d found the closure Libby couldn’t. By the time she eventually left that house and returned to Birmingham, she had reconnected with the parents and brother she’d lost.
Libby reached her gated community before she knew it and placed her head in front of a biometric facial recognition scanner until it recognised her and opened the door. She was unsure if it was the alcohol making her smile or her conversation with Nia. It didn’t matter, she was suffused with optimism. It was unlikely her life was ever going to be the same as it was before jury duty, but she was gradually accepting that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
She unzipped her bag to locate the key fob to her front door when she felt a smooth, flat object inside. Libbypulled it out – it was an electronic tablet. She stared at it, puzzled as to how it might be in her possession. She hadn’t brought it with her and Nia always kept her tablet in a bejewelled pink case. Had she absentmindedly taken somebody else’s from the bar on the train assuming it was her own?
She closed and locked the front door behind her as the lights automatically switched on, and made her way to the kitchen diner. She glanced to the corner of the room where she once kept the house rabbits Michael and Jackson’s cage. When her media career soared, she spent too much time away from home to keep them. The neighbour’s daughter who she offered them to promised Libby could visit them whenever she liked.
Pouring herself a mug of coffee, she sat at the table and felt for the tablet’s on button. It immediately sprang to life but there were no security clearances required such as iris or facial recognition scans. The home screen contained no apps or saved pages. There was just one icon, a symbol for a video clip.
Libby’s finger hovered over it, deliberating whether she was invading the owner’s privacy by pressing play. Curiosity won over and with one touch, the video icon quadrupled in size. A man’s face appeared in a frame. There was something familiar about him but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. He sported a thick, dark-brown beard, black-rimmed glasses and a beanie hat covered his head. Then she recognised him as the scruffy man who’d collided with her on the train earlier that night.
‘Libby,’ he began. His voice gave her body chills.
It was Jude Harrison.
‘I apologise for approaching you like this,’ he continued. ‘But I had to find a way of reaching you and it’s not like I can just turn up on your doorstep. Firstly, I need you to know that not everything I told you was a lie whenwe met in person a year ago or while you were at the inquest. What happened that day isn’t as black and white as it seems. And I would like the opportunity to tell you the truth because it’s what you deserve. But I’m not going to explain it now or through a videocall. I want to do it in person. I’m in the city, Libby. I’m in Birmingham and I need to see you tonight.’
Chapter 63
Libby released her grip on the tablet like it was burning her hands. Then she stared at the device in disbelief, trying to make sense of what she had just seen and heard.
Jude Harrison had returned. And he wanted to see her again.
When the shock passed, anger began to rise inside her and she wanted to hurl the tablet against the wall until it shattered, then forget she had ever found it. But it wasn’t an option. She couldn’t unsee or ignore that Jude had broken cover to make contact.
She had to call the police. Her hands shook as she reached for her phone and asked her virtual assistant to find the electronic business card she had stored with the details of a Chief Inspector who was heading one of the many investigations into Jude’s disappearance. They had met on several occasions to discuss her first encounter with Jude. Then together, they’d watched and listened to recordings of conversations in the inquest room, trying to pick out and piece together clues as to his potential identity.
‘Would you like me to call the number you have requested?’ asked the VA.
Libby opened her mouth but no reply came out. Instead, she kept replaying the moment on the train when Jude had bumped into her, angry with herself for havingdrunk too much and let her guard down. Perhaps if she had been sober, she’d have immediately identified him, then called for help. There would have been no shortage of vigilantes on that train willing to apprehend the world’s most wanted man until the police arrived.
‘Would you like me to call the number you have requested?’ the VA repeated.
