‘Good to know, bruv. And the best of luck, I hope you find the woman of your dreams.’
I already had her, thought Arthur.
By the time he had returned from the kitchen with a fresh mug of tea, the envelope icon on his television was flashing. The first email was from Mr Warner, informing him that the court had accepted his guilty pleas for both fraudulent pension claims and failing to report June’s death, but with diminished responsibility. However, because he was making an effort to find a new partner, his lawyer was confident that, along with no criminal record and an exemplary career, a custodial sentence was unlikely.
Arthur turned to the spot on the sofa June had favoured and stared at it. He had been too bound by grief to bring himself to sit on that couch since her death.
‘How has it come to this, June?’ he asked aloud, but there was no response. He badly missed hearing her voice, even if it was only in his head.
But if she wasn’t going to respond after her body had been removed from their house, she was unlikely to return now he was planning to meet other women, whether he wanted to or not.
36
Anthony
Anthony closed his eyes and rested his head against thetiled wall of the shower. The four hours he had slept had been good, solid sleep, the kind he resented waking from when his alarm sounded. Despite the heat of the water bouncing off his shoulder blades, a shiver ran down his spine when his watch began to vibrate in varying lengths of frenetic bursts. The message spelled ‘priority’. He couldn’t ignore it.
‘Have you seen the news?’ the next one said.
‘No,’ he dictated quietly, hoping Jada was still asleep in the bedroom.
A moment later a video clip appeared. ‘Shower off,’ he said and ordered his watch to play. It was footage taken from a news channel.
‘Up to a dozen members of opposition party Freedom for All were killed last night in three separate arson attacks,’ a broadcaster began. ‘The properties in Old Brighton, Old Dorset and Old Nottingham were all set ablaze in what police believe to have been reprisal attacks following the death of Jem Jones. While three people escaped from an address in Old Coventry, an adult and two children are thought to have died as a result of smoke inhalation.’
The clip stopped and Anthony’s watch pulsed again.
‘The spirit of Jem Jones lives on,’ read the message. ‘Good work again.’
He didn’t move. A cold brush of air made every hair on his naked body stand upright. He may not have killed those people with his own hands, but he might as well have.
*
Anthony stared at his son Matthew across the kitchen table. The boy’s leg was twitching and he had been unable to focus his attention on any one thing for more than a few minutes at a time.
‘What’s this, Daddy?’ Matthew asked. He was holding a small, fabric-covered speaker he’d unearthed in a cupboard.
‘It’s an Echo,’ he replied. ‘Like an early version of the Audite. They stopped making them a long time ago.’
‘What’s it for?’
‘Playing music, mostly, or reading books, weather forecasts, turning on light bulbs.’
Matthew laughed. ‘Is that it?’
‘Pretty much, yes.’
‘Was it yours?’
‘No, it belonged to my mum.’
‘Why’ve you kept it?’
‘I don’t know, I just have.’
It was the only object he possessed that contained recordings of his mother’s voice. Sometimes, when he was alone, he plugged it in to listen to her reciting a shopping list into its memos or leaving him a message to play when he arrived home from school and she was elsewhere. And each morning it reminded her to divide their medication, a Ritalin for him and two anti-psychotics for herself.
The table shook as his son’s leg and foot picked up the pace, moving back and forth. Anthony’s often did the same when he struggled to centre himself. And, like Matthew, that morning, Anthony was also finding it increasingly difficult to tether himself to a stationary frame of mind.
