“Follow him.” Ivy’s words push me out of my seat and down the hallway.
Blair is ten metres ahead, not looking behind her; her neck and back tense and a deliberate wall.
She’s ignoring us.
“Blair.” Ben’s voice echoes down the corridor and he stops. Any further and he risks being seen by someone who isn’t meant to know he’s alive.
She stops walking but doesn’t turn round.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I left you again and didn’t tell you why. I thought it would be easier and if something had happened to me…”
I see her shoulders drop, her head look down to the floor but she still doesn’t turn around.
“What do you need me to do to put it right because there isn’t much I wouldn’t do.”
She turns round now and starts to slowly walk back to where we’re stood, me just behind Ben.
“You killed your sister for me. I know there isn’t anything you wouldn’t do for me. But you didn’t trust me.” She stops a few feet away. “I’m not a fool. I understand why you did everything.”
Then her gaze lands on me.
“And I know this has killed you. I’m sorry for the things I said.”
If I could have one wish granted right now, it would be to never see her eyes fill with tears.
I look at her, standing with the hallway everlasting behind her, the world she was born into and won’t ever leave and I notice the hand on her belly, maybe an unconscious gesture, maybe not.
Ben backs away. He’s seen the same thing.
Blair turns around and walks away. Enough has been said.
* * *
Isaac’s father was here a lot as a guest while he was Prime Minister. There’s every chance he struck up an alliance.
The words rebound in my head as I head to my father’s house. He’s away, destination unknown, and his staff doesn’t sleep in when he isn’t there, so the house will be empty, apart from someone manning security remotely.
I head around the back, using the skills I learned as a kid to shift from long walled garden to walled garden, avoiding cameras and staying in the bushes. This is why I shouldn’t be a candidate to lead this country; my past is hardly savoury and I didn’t grow up in the shelter of hockey matches and white collar crime.
My father’s townhouse has cellars that he’s never bothered to convert. When guests came for the first time and he’d give a tour of the house with its blue plaque outside, announcing its place in London’s history, he left the cellars out, claiming they were damp and used for nothing.
I never believed him. I never believed much.
I slipped down there once as an older teenager, the summer of my second year at university. What I found didn’t shock me. By that point I’d been introduced to the broad spectrum of normal and that what people did in private wasn’t always what you imagined. The bench designed for someone to be restrained in and spanked was standard, nothing spectacular. The hooks in the walls for restraints was a little more out there, given that the restraints were high and there was no step.
I didn’t think about it too much. Didn’t consider my father’s proclivities because I wasn’t one to judge.
But I learned something.
My father had a weakness.
The cellars also had a weakness, which was something my fifteen-year-old self had figured. The alarm wasn’t a wireless one, and there was easy access through a door that had just one lock, easily picked and from there it was a hard push against a door at the top of the stone stairs and you were in the house. Although it would make some degree of noise.
That doesn’t matter now. The alarm was easy to turn off in the rest of the building and a power cut sponsored by my friend the computer wizard means I’m inside in a matter of minutes.
The study is another story. I end up having to take the door off the hinges, so I won’t be out of the building as quickly as I’d like after I’ve looked for whatever it is I need. And I don’t know what that is.
Correspondence between my father and someone at the castle? Photographs? Evidence of blackmail? I don’t know, but I need something. I need to end this.
