Jeffrey’s eyes darted in all directions like startled birds ashe made a priority list. On the bed lay Luca, and, on the floor, the crumpled body of Noah. The latter’s blood and strands of hair were smeared across the wall.
He was wracked with guilt over what he had done to Luca but not Noah – Noah only had himself to blame. He was supposed to process what had happened between Jeffrey and Luca, declare his marriage over then leave. But when he’d lashed out, Jeffrey had had no choice but to suppress him. And, in doing so, Noah had created an extra layer of complication. Eventually he decided on dragging Noah’s body downstairs to store in the boot of his car until he could find somewhere to dump it permanently. Then he would come back and handle Luca.
Jeffrey made his way into the guest bedroom, slipped on the rest of his clothes and turned on his watch to check the time. He had missed a further eleven calls, alongside voicemails and voice notes from his supervisor Adrian. He didn’t need to listen to or read the messages to appreciate the mess Noah had left him in.
On his return to the other bedroom, a first glimpse of a lifeless Noah created an unexpected tidal wave of memories that hit him with great force. Suddenly, he was his fifteen-year-old self again, the night he’d killed Rosie Morrison. He was on his knees, straddling her body and glaring at her as if waiting for her to suddenly awaken. However, before he had time to understand his actions, the bedroom door opened and his brother Bobby appeared, reeking of last night’s booze.
Jeffrey scrambled to his feet as a bewildered Bobby glared at his naked brother, then his motionless girlfriend, and back to Jeffrey again.
‘It was an accident,’ Jeffrey blurted out, tears rolling down his cheeks and onto his bare chest.
‘What did you do?’ Bobby gasped and approached Rosie.
‘I begged her to stop shouting but I . . .’ His voice trailed off.
He watched as Bobby slipped his arm under Rosie and scooped her upright, his other hand patting her cheeks as if to rouse her from a deep slumber. When that failed, he laid her back on the bed and tried resuscitating her. It was too late.
Jeffrey was too hindered by shock and grief to avoid Bobby’s first punch. It caught him clean on the jaw and sent him sprawling to the floor. ‘You killed her!’ he screamed as the second blow reached Jeffrey’s eye socket with a crack. Next he felt Bobby’s hands on either side of his head, lifting it up before smacking it down against the floorboards with great force. Twice more it happened, dazing Jeffrey. But it wasn’t disorientating enough to make him drop an empty vodka bottle he’d grabbed from the floor. He slammed it against the side of Bobby’s head, stunning him. And with just a jagged piece of bottle left in his hand, he plunged into the back of Bobby’s neck, fracturing the bone connecting his spine to his skull.
Bobby fell to his side as Jeffrey scrambled to his feet. He steadied himself against the wall and watched helplessly as a haemorrhage sent his brother’s eyes spinning in the back of their sockets before the final breath left his lungs.
Jeffrey stumbled backwards into the corner of the room, trying to understand how he had just killed two people he loved. Despite his own fractured eye socket, blurred vision and a pulsing head, he slipped on his clothes and used a wet towel to wipe his fingerprints from outside and inside Rosie’s body. And before he called the emergency services, he made sure Bobby’s palm and fingerprints were spread across the pillow.
In his police statement, Jeffrey claimed he had woken to hear Rosie’s muffled screams and witnessed his drunken brother smothering her. Bobby had been too robust to be dragged away from her and had lashed out at Jeffrey, knocking him to the floor and causing him to black out.
When he came to, a frenzied Bobby was trying to kill him too and Jeffrey had only struck him in self-defence. Thanks to Bobby’s criminal convictions for actual bodily harm against a former girlfriend a year earlier, Jeffrey’s claims were accepted and no case was brought against him.
Now another message on Jeffrey’s watch flattened the tidal wave and returned him to Luca’s bedroom. Adrian was clearly desperate to speak to Jeffrey but he would not be returning his call. Instead, he approached Noah. The man’s face was barely recognizable under a sheen of crimson, matted hair. He could just about make out a golf ball-sized concave dent in his forehead. He placed his hands under Noah’s lukewarm armpits and began to drag him towards the door.
A groggy voice stopped him in his tracks.
‘What happened?’ asked Luca.
81
Anthony
Anthony closed his eyes and took a moment to listen.Aside from a faint tinnitus ringing in his ears – a hangover from a childhood punch by one of his mother’s violent exes – the only sounds in his office were his breaths and the tap of a stylus against the surface of his desk.
On purchasing their home three years earlier, a team of security experts had been sent by Hyde to soundproof Anthony’s office, install steel doors with biometric locks alongside reinforced glass windows and thick metal shutters. Then, Anthony thought transforming that room into a modern-day Faraday cage was an exaggerated and unnecessary measure, but now he was grateful. Because hidden inside it, he was protected from the interference of the outside world.
The silence engulfing the rest of the house was a different matter. It was uncomfortable. As he made his way out into the kitchen, he missed the excited squawks coming from the playroom as Matthew participated in virtual reality games with his friends in their 3D metaverse. He longed to hear the sizzle of oils in pans as Jada brought recipes from around the world into their kitchen. He craved the laughter of friends and family around the garden dining table on balmy summer nights. An absence of sound created by those he loved most rendered the house soulless.
He opened the fridge to remove a cold bottle of beer and finished it with the door still ajar. He did the same with a second. But no amount of alcohol could smooth out the rough edges. Anthony missed his family more than he ever thought possible.
A notification appeared on the wall-mounted digital calendar. There was apparently a takeaway delivery waiting outside on the doormat. Suspicious because he hadn’t ordered it, a quick check of the family organizer revealed Jada, still in Florida, was responsible for arranging it. A full monthly shop was to arrive tomorrow. She must have been remotely monitoring the contents of the fridge and cupboards through their sensors and saw that he was eating poorly. After all he had put her through, she was still caring for him, even halfway across the world.
On the doorstep, he unattached the food box from the drone’s pincers and pressed the recall button to return it to the Thai restaurant. Back in the kitchen, he habitually removed three sets of knives and forks from the drawer before realizing his mistake and replacing two of them. Then he returned to his office to eat alone.
Many times, he had clutched his phone ready to videocall his family, only to hold back. By seeing their faces, and hearing their voices, he might lose his focus and that would only prolong his work on the Young Citizen Camp project and being reunited with his loved ones. His plan was to condense three months of work into one. The sooner this was over, the sooner he could leave his job and put the camps and Hyde behind him. So he and Jada only communicated by concise, matter-of-fact emails. He hoped the emotional distance between them was not as wide as the oceans separating them.
Back in his locked office, Anthony ate as he scanned the screens on the wall and the volume of work he and his team had accomplished in such a short space of time.
By the morning, he had completed his workload for that week and logged out of the system. And, for a moment, he surrendered to his irrational but niggling fear that Hyde’s people had somehow snuck into his hideout and planted new listening devices while he was elsewhere in the house. He swept the room again until he was sure he was safe. Then he removed an outmoded laptop from under his desk and switched it on. He had already detached its wifi, Bluetooth, 7G internet and tracking capabilities, making it impossible for anyone to know that he was using an unmonitored, nonapproved device. Then he plugged in a digital memory stick to continue working on a side project of his own. One that Hyde and his team were oblivious to.
82
Jeffrey
