“We’ll have to hide in the street and get away after dark.”
Donald kept urging her to crawl on further. They could still hear yells and boots from the far end of the passage. The cover out on the street was less than he had hoped, due to footpaths amongst the bushes. However, dusk was falling. They reached a kind of natural nest in a clump of birch trees and lay amongst the boles. Donald supposed a low animal like a vole or a field rat must feel like this, cringing on the ground. He put his arms around Sarah-Kelly, resting his face against the back of her head and uttered a long sigh. He was spent. His head ached and he felt sick. Sarah-Kelly turned around and hugged him, pressing her face against his shoulder.
The glories had made their point—they had shot the Party through the brains. Might had proved right.
*
They lay under the birch trees long into the evening, until the cold seeped into their bones and they shivered no matter how tightly they clutched each other. Music wafted over the rooftops from the private houses—it sounded like Haydn. The shriek of fighting cats made them both jump. He pushed his face under Sarah-Kelly’s hair, wishing, oh so wishing they were in bed, not freezing on these fucking damp weeds.
“It’s time to go, take your boots off. Tie the laces and hang them round your neck. Keep hold of my belt,” he said.
At the top of the street, the boulevard was a dark chasm. Normally there would be oil lamps hanging over gates. This night, there was nothing. It felt like a shunned place. Every rabbit around here knew what had happened and every one of them was cowering in their burrow.
They cleared the immediate area, silent in socks, without seeing or hearing anything. The distance to his own house was only a few hundred yards. Out of caution, he took an indirect route, checking for any followers and waiting for fifteen minutes near the lane to his house before leading the last stretch to the iron gate of his garden. He was on his own land but he was not safe. He had, after all, shot a senior glory officer.
*
“We’ve got to get out to North Kensington basin,” Donald said.
Sarah-Kelly shook her head.
“No way am I ever going back to that place.”
“Do you want to die here? I shot an account-captain first class. General Wardian won’t rest until they’ve tracked down who did it. They know two people shot back at them. I’m 99% certain they killed the other one.”
But Sarah-Kelly shook her head, with an absolute finality.
“I am not going back, Donald.”
“I can deal with Bartram, if that’s what’s bothering you.”
“Maybe. You’re far tougher than I thought you were, I’ll give you that.” Her smile faded. “But what about Nightminster?”
Donald knew that clarity of thought during the next ten minutes was a matter of life and death. Five people knew Donald Aldingford had been at Bloomsbury College. One was in his arms. Banner was dead. That left Valentin and his two side-kicks.
“What kind of guys are Valentin and his two chums?”
“Dead sound. I reckon they got away. They were behind us on the stairs and then they took off at the first floor to get out some other way. When I stopped and tried to say that, you pushed me down the stairs towards the shooting.”
Donald did not remember that, although it was true Valentin and his two pals had not come down the last flight of steps, which meant they could not have seen him shoot the account-captain. There had been some other guy shooting too, who had covered Donald and Sarah-Kelly when they fled down the corridor and escaped through the window of a lecture theatre. The situation was actually quite simple; if General Wardian had learned who shot their account-captain, they would have been waiting here at the house with an arrest squad. The reality was, they did not know. If they did not know now, that closed the matter. There was no way they could find out in the future—Donald was hardly going to volunteer the information himself after all. Should there ever be any question, TK would step in and hush it up. If there lingered any real danger, it came from within his own head in the form of conscience.
He lay back in his bed, drawing Sarah-Kelly closer, feeling her head on his chest and her arms under his. It surprised him how certainly he knew his conscience would never trouble him over shooting that bastard account-captain. There are some things that do not require the proof of time. He pulled the blankets around them. It was cold now, hours after the boiler had been damped for the night. Their boots stuck out the bottom of the rolled-up intimacy that plunged into anaesthetic sleep, until the rising insistence of knuckles upon the bedroom door finally retrieved Donald from its depths.
“What is it?”
Butler Campbell stepped around the door. His shock faded to a sour-egg expression of disgust. Sarah-Kelly lifted her head and peered through a curtain of blonde hair.
“Oh God, not him,” she groaned.
Donald jumped on the moment.
“Full breakfasts for two please, Jonathan.”
After the endurance test of breakfast, Donald wrapped an arm around Sarah-Kelly and nestled her upstairs into his study, where he sat her down and took a seat right opposite, so they were virtually knee to knee.
“I can’t stand these people with their eyes all over me, judging and despising. Can’t you get rid of them?” she said.
“They’re faithful servants.”
“How can you live like this?”
“Would you rather my twenty-five staff starved to death on the public drains?”
“Banner said when the Party came to power, common folk would have proper jobs in factories, building great machines to feed society. He said there’d be a national bank and legal tender and all the frontiers would get flattened and the whole world would come back to life.
