The Rhythm Section

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He took a step forward, she took a step back, until she found herself pressed against the sink. Her elbow knocked a wine glass to the floor. It shattered but her eyes never left Proctor. She felt the cold water splattering off the plates on to her arms. And then she felt the knife on the chopping board. She grabbed the handle and thrust the blade at Proctor who froze.

‘Come one step closer to me and I’ll kill you. I swear to God, I will.’

He raised his hands. ‘Take it easy, Stephanie. Just calm down –’

‘I mean it.’

‘Look, I’m sorry if I upset you.’

‘Sorry?’

‘If I misread the signals, I apologize. I didn’t want –’

‘Signals?’

‘I thought there was something … happening. Between us.’

‘Like what?’ Her fury was still building. ‘Do you see some neon sign over my head? You can fuck me if you want. What bloody signals?’

Proctor was bewildered beyond reason. ‘Stephanie, please …’

She was shaking. Her face had reddened at first but now the colour had drained from it entirely. He had never seen eyes so black or so brilliant. Her voice quietened to a brittle whisper: ‘If you ever touch me again …’

Proctor slowly extended his right hand towards her and said, softly, ‘Give me the knife.’

The swipe was so quick that neither of them saw the blade properly.

Stunned, Proctor looked at his palm, at the slice that extended from the base of the index finger to the edge of the wrist. For a second, it was a perfect scarlet line. Then the cut started to flow, streaming over his hand and fingers, curling around his wrist, coiling itself around his forearm, slicking the sleeve of his shirt, splattering on the tiles of the kitchen floor.

It was the sound of the front door closing that prompted him to gather his senses. Stephanie was gone and he needed medical attention.

At two in the morning, the busiest places in London are the night-clubs, the police stations and the Accident and Emergency departments of the city’s hospitals. Proctor descended from the first floor of St Mary’s Paddington and stepped out on to South Wharf Road. His palm had been stitched and bandaged. It was a freezing night. He glanced both ways, wondering which direction would most likely lead him to a taxi, even though Bell Street was not far away. To his right, he recognized the vast curved roof that covered the platforms of Paddington Station. Only a handful of lights were burning in the high-rise beyond. It stood out against the night, lit by the glare from the streets below.

Proctor turned left. He never saw Stephanie standing still in the shadows of the hospital. And she never saw him alive again.

8 (#ulink_3598394c-b11a-508a-bc5d-122587d2ec75)

I open the doorto Proctor’s flat with my key – with his key – and my breathing stops.

I have spent the night on the streets. This is nothing new for me. I am familiar with the city as a bed. Like so many others in London, I’ve slept in shop doorways and close to the warm air exhaled by Underground ventilation units. I’ve sneaked into hotel service areas and stolen a few warm hours. Sometimes, a train station – or a bus station – has been the best place to rest. But tonight I wasn’t looking for sleep. I was looking for answers.

So I walked through the streets, mindless of my direction and only vaguely aware of my surroundings, which is unusual for me. I have learned to be cautious. Working at night in the seamier areas of the city, one quickly develops a sixth sense for danger. I can see behind me. I can feel a threat, smell its scent on the polluted air. Unless the drugs or the Special Brew have kicked in. Then I’m useless and vulnerable, which was how I was last night. All my defences were down.

I cannot believe what I have done. Until dawn, I don’t honestly think I even accepted what I had done. It seemed like a dream. But morning tends to bring clarity, in all its painful guises.

I don’t understand why I reacted the way I did. I knew Proctor was going to touch me, to kiss me. I wanted him to. The moment had been telegraphed; I had plenty of time to kill it before it even happened but I chose not to. I knew he would be tender and understanding. When he put his hand on my hip and his lips on my lips, it was much as I hoped it would be. No, it was better than I hoped it would be. And then … I snapped. Just as I did with my last client, even though the two situations could hardly have been more different.

Around seven this morning, I stopped at a café for a cup of coffee. I only just resisted my craving for a cigarette. For an hour, I agonized about what I should do before stumbling to a decision. It was a cowardly choice; to sneak back to Bell Street, collect my things and flee. I prayed Proctor would be out to make it easier for me. Then I could leave my keys with a hastily-scribbled note of apology. A month ago, his absence would have been an invitation toscour for valuables. But not now. I owe Proctor. He is the only man who has shown me any kindness in the last two years. And how have I repaid him for that kindness? By cutting him with a knife.

I cannot believe myself. What kind of cold-blooded creature have I become?

There were papers strewn across the floor in the hall of Proctor’s pristine flat. They were the first thing that Stephanie saw. The self-pity and the shame evaporated. Her skin prickled, her throat dried. She paused for a moment, pushing the door completely open and listening for the sound of movement. Nothing. Then she stepped inside and quietly closed the door behind her.

The paper trail led to the office on the right. From the short hall, she could see empty desk-drawers on the floor, the swivel chair on its side, the activated computer screen. She turned left. In the kitchen, every cupboard and drawer had been investigated. The fridge was empty. Its door was open, all its contents spread across the tiles. Clean cutlery cluttered the steel sink. Proctor’s bedroom looked no more dishevelled than that of the average student but, normally, it was clinically clean and tidy. The mattress had been removed from the bed and sliced apart. The sheets were screwed into a bundle in the corner. The cupboards had been checked, all the slatted doors were open. In the bathroom, the bath itself contained all that had been inside the medicine cabinet and the cupboard beneath the sink.

Proctor was in the living room, an island in a scarlet ocean.

Stephanie stood over him and found she was unable to cry out for help, to gasp in horror, to shed a tear. This wasn’t Proctor. It was only his body. Just as she wasn’t Stephanie when a stranger was using her. The spirit was gone but the sight still stopped her heart.

Proctor had been shot in the forehead and through the left hand. Also, there were dark glossy stains on his shirt and on his trousers, one on the left thigh and one around each knee. The bandage that had been wrapped around his right hand during the night lay in a crumpled heap on the sofa. The stitches had been plucked free of the injury that Stephanie had inflicted upon him and the gash had been deepened and extended. There were four cross-cuts on the same palm and she could see that the little finger, the index finger and the thumb had all been broken. His eyes were frozen open. A fat drop of blood sat on the left pupil.

She could not imagine the agony he had endured before his death and wondered how his torturer had prevented Proctor from screaming; howls of pain would surely have alerted the other residents of the mansion block. Ransacking suggested the killer had been looking for something specific. Torture suggested the killer hadn’t found it. Stephanie wondered whether the prize was what lay behind the panel in the bathroom. She had noticed that it was intact. Or maybe the killer was after something else – something that was actually retrieved. A piece of hard information, perhaps? A secret locked in Proctor’s mind? Would he have surrendered it? He must have known that he was going to die so did he try to take it to the grave? How resistant had he been to the pain? How resistant would she have been?

Stephanie picked up the phone. She pressed nine once, then twice. Think about it. Then she stopped, before replacing the receiver. There was nothing she could do for Proctor now. She was all that was left. She wondered whether she was in danger herself. Had the intruder expected to find both of them in the flat or was Proctor the only target? And who had the intruder been? Bradfield? An associate of his? Or someone else, someone invisible to her?

She needed time to think and somewhere safe to do it.

Auto-pilot engaged and emotions temporarily suspended, she drifted through the flat. Her little rucksack was in the corner of the living room, its contents scattered across the cherry table. The money she had stolen from her King’s Cross clients was gone, everything else – the worthless stuff – had been left. The panic rose within her but she beat it back. She returned her belongings to the bag and searched for Proctor’s overcoat. That was what he had been wearing when she had seen him leaving St Mary’s Paddington. She found it in the bedroom among a heap of clothes on the floor. The wallet lay beside it. The cash was gone. Only the cards remained; Barclays Connect and Visa. She rummaged through her own pockets and found six pounds seventy.

She put his wallet into her rucksack and went into Proctor’s office. She examined the computer screen. It was a letter to a features editor of a magazine she did not recognize. She scrolled down the page. The content was innocuous. Then she remembered that he had told her that he kept nothing of value on his desk-top. The necessity for torture became more apparent.

It seemed Proctor had kept his filing cabinet locked and had not been forthcoming over the whereabouts of the key since it had been prised open with a hammer and a screwdriver, which had both been left lying on top of it. The files had been examined and discarded. Stephanie got down on her hands and knees and began to sift through the papers.

It took thirty-five minutes to find the slip of paper with the PIN code for the Visa card on it. She found no number for the Connect card but made a note of Proctor’s birth date, his phone numbers, his fax number, his National Insurance number, his passport number. A three-month-old bank statement revealed a nine hundred and eighty pound credit in Proctor’s current account. She hoped his Visa card was as healthy.

She took the screwdriver from the top of the filing cabinet and went to the bathroom, where she unfastened the panel and retrieved Proctor’s lap-top and the plastic pouch containing the seven floppy-disks. There was too much to squeeze into her rucksack so she found another small shoulder bag on the bedroom floor. She helped herself to a tatty Aran jersey, a relic from a bygone era in Proctor’s personal fashion history. She also took some thick socks, three T-shirts and a navy blue silk scarf, which she wrapped around her throat. On the cherry table, by her rucksack, she noticed Proctor’s portable phone, which was recharging. She took it.

Her scavenging concluded, Stephanie wanted to do something about Proctor, to cover him, or to arrange him in some way that looked less awkward – less pained – and then to alert someone. But she did none of these things.

Instead, she gathered her bags and left the flat, taking care to double-lock the front door as Proctor had always insisted she should.

It had started to rain when she stepped on to Bell Street. She looked left and right, half-expecting an approach from a stranger, or a dark-windowed car to screech to a halt beside her. Or the cold dart of pain as the tempered steel slipped between her ribs, courtesy of an invisible hand. But there was no one and nothing. She turned right and headed for the Edgware Road. Cash was her first consideration.

She tried the Connect card at the first two ATMs she came to, using variations of the month and year of Proctor’s birth and the last four digits of his phone number for the PIN code. All were rejected. At the Halifax ATM, on the junction of Edgware Road and Old Marylebone Road, Stephanie played safe and inserted the Visa card for which she had a valid PIN number. She withdrew two hundred pounds and turned her attention to the next priority: getting off the street.

Sussex Gardens offered plenty of cheap, anonymous accommodation, the dingy terraced hotels set back from the road behind railings and hedges. She could have picked any one of two dozen places but settled for the Sherburn House Hotel for the flimsiest of reasons: its name. Sherburn was the village outside Durham where she had stayed on the night that flight NE027 had plunged into the Atlantic.

She paid cash and registered under a false name that she forgot almost instantly. Her room was on the second floor. The single bed had an orange bedspread, the curtains were maroon. There was a single-bar electric heater mounted on a wall. The wallpaper had been buttercup yellow once – the original colour was preserved in a rectangle where a picture had hung for years – but now it was dirty cream, with patches of brown where the damp was worst. In the corner, there was a sink with a small green bucket beneath it, to catch the drips leaking from the U-bend in the pipe.

Alone, Stephanie dumped her bags on the floor and sat on the bed. The springs squeaked as she sank into the quicksand mattress. She put her head in her hands.

What now?

A cigarette. I’d give anything for a cigarette right now. And maybe a drink. Maybe two. A shot of vodka would help, especially if it was a double. The first of several, perhaps. And then maybe something a little stronger, just to be sure.

I am standing at the crossroads. Again.

I have been here before. Of the choices that are available to me, I know one well and I can feel it drawing me towards it. It is the path that offers to numb the pain. It is the path which promises the bliss of ignorance as a solution. It is the path I chose last time.

Proctor’s lap-top was operating Windows 98. The last time Stephanie had used a computer she had been a student and Windows 95 had been the freshest thing on the menu. She never cared much for computers, or for the sad souls who were so infatuated by them, but she had learned the basics. At the time, she had been surprised by how easy she found it. Now, two corrosive years later, she felt less complacent. Working cautiously, it took her two hours to refresh her memory to a standard that allowed her through the system.

There was a list of the material stored on Proctor’s desk-top. Most of the files from the original investigation were on that; the interviews with the families and friends of those who had perished aboard NE027. She supposed that included Christopher and wished she could have seen what he’d said to Proctor. How had he coped over the last two years? Stephanie had done all she could to bleach her own memory but her brother wasn’t like that. Since his emotions rarely rose to the surface, what lurked beneath remained a mystery.

There was a form of diary on the second of the seven disks that she inserted into the computer, a chronological report for Proctor’s investigation. It showed the order in which he had contacted the bereaved and each of their responses to his request for an interview. Where granted, there was a file reference for the interviews themselves, all of which were stored on the desk-top. Most people had only been interviewed once, either by phone or in person, but some had been interviewed twice or even three times. The chronology also showed Proctor’s travel schedule and the actual dates for all the interviews he had conducted. Stephanie saw that Christopher had only been questioned once.

The computer record also told Stephanie something about Proctor’s MI5 contact. At first, she thought Smith was part of Proctor’s initial enquiry, someone close to one of the three hundred and eighty-eight dead. But the name cropped up more frequently than any other and Stephanie was then forced to reconsider her original opinion when she reached the following entries.

Watching and watched? Stephanie travelled through time, scrolling up and down the pages of the diary. She traced Smith’s first entry into the journal.

Stephanie proceeded slowly, assembling the bare bones of Proctor’s information. From the abbreviated notes in the diary, she saw how his initial opinion of Smith was gradually undermined. Each entry seemed to nudge him a little further along Smith’s path. The other contacts – the relatives and friends of the dead – made fewer and fewer appearances in the log until, on November 30, they ceased altogether, apart from Proctor’s first contact with Stephanie in mid-December. In passing, she saw two familiar names – Bradfield and Qadiq – which brought her back to the central questions: who killed Proctor? Why? And what about her? If Proctor’s flat had been under surveillance, the killer would have known that she was living there. Perhaps his murder had been more impulsive than that.

One of the disks had ‘Smith’ scrawled across the label in green felt-tip. Stephanie placed it into the computer. There were only three files on the disk. One of them detailed Smith’s version of the story, as told to Proctor.

Smith had become aware of Caesar – the name he, or maybe someone else, had ascribed to the alleged bomber of NE027 – when he had access to knowledge of an MI5 surveillance operation. It wasn’t clear whether Smith was actually part of the surveillance team detailed to watch Caesar, or whether he was running the operation, or whether he had no part in it but had, one way or the other, learned of its existence. Stephanie supposed the obfuscation was deliberate. It was clear that Smith had questioned the suitability of such an operation, only to be rebuffed by a higher authority. He claimed that SIS were aware of Caesar’s presence in London, as were factions within Scotland Yard. He also claimed that Caesar was currently masquerading as a student at Imperial College at the University of London, and he had even noted the course he was taking: a Postgraduate Study in Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology.

Smith’s outrage, Proctor noted, had felt genuine. And justified. Here was a man who had placed a bomb on an aircraft full of innocents – who had murdered them all – and who was now walking around London, as a free man, in the full knowledge of those agencies whose job it was to hunt such people and bring them to justice. Worse still, he was passing himself off as a student, living off government-funded grants paid for by the British taxpayer. Proctor, it seemed, had been persuaded of Smith’s integrity simply by the tone of his voice, since the two men never actually met.

During another conversation, Smith had warned Proctor to be careful about those with whom he spoke. Questions to the police, for instance, would inevitably be referred upwards and, sooner or later, someone on the inside would see his name. A direct approach to MI5 or SIS would obviously be swatted aside, in the first instance, and who could say what the longer-term consequences of such an action might be? The inference was clear. Tread cautiously, stay in the shadows, whisper it softly.

I am lying in bed, fully-clothed beneath the sheets, blankets and orange bedspread. The wall-mounted heater is on and radiating a pathetic amount of warmth. I am shivering but it has nothing to do with the fact that I am cold.

It is ten-to-midnight. There is a prostitute in the room to my left. She’s been intermittently busy since half-past-eight this evening. The headboard of her bed smacks the wall between us when she’s earning. I’m surprised she doesn’t break it since the partition is so thin I can hear nearly everything that is said between her and her clients. Those sad exchanges; the insincere teases and the lies. The whispers and moans of encouragement, the grunts and groans of faked release, I know her vocabulary in all its depressing entirety. I am her.

As for my shaking frame, who can say? It’s shock, certainly, and it was only a matter of time before I succumbed to it. Frankly, I’m surprised I lasted this long. But is there also something else?

Every time I close my eyes, I see Proctor, twisted and torn, drained, quite literally, of life. Or I see him as a kind man, someone who didn’t deserve to die, someone quite unlike me. All day, I was ruled by reason and protected from emotion. But now I am too tired to resist. An overwhelming sadness rises up within me and threatens to drown me. I think of his injuries and the sickening process that created them. And the fact that but for a cruel coincidence of timing – a coincidence born of my brutal behaviour – I would have been there when Proctor’s killer called. And either the two of us, as a team, would have survived, which is a jewel to add to my treasure-chest of guilt, or I would have gone the same way as him