Jeffrey looked at his watch. Night was drawing in and it was time to bid farewell to Doncaster. Suddenly his watch pinged to indicate that he’d received a new message. Curiosity got the better of him and he read it – three new couples had been added to the list of those requiring Responders.
Jeffrey hesitated, then logged back into the App, scanning the photographs, stopping as one particular pair caught his attention. When he registered their location in New Northampton, he almost dismissed them outright. It was a town he had avoided for all of his adult life.
But there was something about their photos that he couldn’t quite put his finger on and which piqued his curiosity. And as he read their profiles, the threads of a connection were already beginning to form.
Jeffrey placed the tablet and his suitcase inside his car, then returned to the house and set to work preparing it. Soon after the smoke alarms were disabled, he scattered firelighters throughout each room and doused soft furnishings with bottles of white spirit he’d found on a shelf in the garage.
As the flames engulfed everything in their path, Jeffrey was already driving away and preparing himself to meet with his next clients.
3
Corrine
‘Can you hear me?’ asked Corrine, trying to mask the fearin her voice. ‘If you can, please try and stay awake, okay?’
She peered at the body spread across the car’s seats reflected in the rear-view mirror. She was desperate for a response, even just a groan. ‘Stay with me,’ she continued, ‘I need you to tell me you can hear me.’ No reply came.
The light of the dashboard illuminated her ashen knuckles as she gripped the steering wheel. She was grateful she had not upgraded her car to a driverless vehicle. It would not allow her to break speed limits like she was now.
Her eyes flitted from signposts to overhead gantries as she attempted to gain her bearings, confused by a section of Old Northampton she hadn’t had cause to enter in years. She had no idea where its accident and emergency department was so she ordered her satnav to locate it, then followed its instructions until finally she reached its new home in the former Weston Favell shopping centre.
‘We’re almost there,’ she told her passenger. ‘Just hold on.’
She held her breath as she accelerated, driving through a set of red traffic lights, narrowly avoiding a trailer hitched to the back of a van. She hoped there was no CCTV camera attached to the lights, but surveillance in the Old part of town was unlikely. ‘Come on, come on, come on,’ she muttered, willing the vehicle to go faster, then cursing as she skidded to a halt at a busy junction.
‘Hey Mercedes – turn privacy windows and lights on,’ she ordered, and the vehicle became impossible to see into from the outside. She turned to check on the unconscious teenager lying behind her. He had one leg stretched out; the other hung loosely in the footwell. His arms were by his side and his head tilted to the right. His shallow breaths offered her a shred of comfort.
There was a tear in the knee of his dark trousers and an unhooked bow tie hung loosely from his neck. She noted the streak of blood across his wrinkled white shirt and couldn’t be sure if it belonged to him. On the seat next to her were the recordables she had stripped from him, including his phone and Smart watch. He was a skinny lad, and that had made him easier to pull across a lobby and into an elevator earlier that night. She could only hope the camera footage of his body also being dragged across the underground car park had been erased by the others before the police arrived.
She’d missed the traffic lights turning green and the blasting of a car horn behind them startled her. She turned off the interior lights and her tyres screeched as she pulled away. Minutes later, she reached the grounds of the A&E department.
As Corrine reached the car park barrier, she had second thoughts. Her registration plates might be captured on film and her credit card attached to the vehicle would automatically pay for her stay on exit. There couldn’t be any trace of her here. So, instead, she parked by the side of the road, opened the rear door and, for the second time that night, put her hands under the lad’s arms and used all her strength to pull him.
A white-hot pain in her muscles seared and she grimaced so hard that her already swollen lips cracked and bled again. Eventually, she reached a path on the outskirts of the hospital grounds where she planned to leave him for someone to find. But once there, she decided the road was too far from the entrance to guarantee a speedy discovery. He had risked so much that night and deserved better.
She rushed back to the car, removed a scarf from the glovebox and wrapped it over her face, then returned to the boy. She pulled him towards the brightly lit building ahead. As the sweat streamed down her forehead and was absorbed by her face covering, she felt every one of her fifty-five years. Finally, she propped him against the wall of the Resus department. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered before hurrying away.
Back inside her vehicle, Corrine tore off her scarf, turned up the air conditioning and gulped water from a flask. Her mind raced. She glanced once again into the rear-view mirror, this time at her lips. She hoped the swelling might go down by morning. She was lucky not to have lost any teeth with a punch like that. That would be much harder to explain.
Corrine started the car and began driving to a pre-programmed address. She verbally ordered the vehicle to erase every journey she had travelled in the last twenty-four hours from its memory, along with incriminating text messages on her phone – despite them being sent via an untraceable proxy server. She would give the boy’s recordables to someone she knew who could take care of them.
‘Hey Mercedes, radio on,’ she said aloud and the closing bars of a song played before the pips sounded to alert her to the one a.m. news.
‘The headlines,’ a newsreader began. ‘Social Media Influencer Jem Jones is confirmed dead after an apparent suicide, and Education Secretary and MP Eleanor Harrison is critically ill following an attack inside her home.’
Corrine took a deep breath.This is it, she thought,this is where everything changes.
Like the town in which she lived, her life would now be split into two halves: the one before and the one after she was responsible for Harrison’s attack.
4
Arthur
Arthur’s knees and spine cracked like dry twigs as he bentover to pick a handful of forget-me-nots.
The diminutive blue flowering plants had been appearing in his garden borders for the four decades he and June had lived in their Old Northampton house. Year after year, he dug up and re-potted clumps, then arranged them on a trestle table on the pavement outside for their neighbours to take. When cash was still used as currency, he’d leave an old ice cream carton for donations to the Fire Fighters’ Charity. However, now that goods could only be paid for with the tap of a plastic card, phone or watch face, it was more trouble than it was worth. The neighbours could take the plants for free if they wanted.
Arthur made his way up the crazy paving path and in through the back door. He arranged the flowers inside a small glass jam jar filled with water and placed it on a tray next to a plate with two slices of marmalade on toast. He added a steaming pot of tea and two mugs before carefully carrying them up the staircase and into the bedroom.
