CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: THE GUARDIAN
SEAN’S HEAD RESTED against the lip of the bath. His arms were bared, as if readying themselves for a needle. Blood in the water webbed the flesh below his elbow where it had been flayed. Deep cuts to his thighs hung in feathered crimson gouts. In his despair, he’d done for his left eye: its gelid cargo formed a clear, stiffening thread of fluid over his cheek. The razor blade was a red tablet sticking up from Sean’s thumb.
Emma studied the scene as a way to concentrate on staying upright and calming her heart. She found herself snagging on minutiae previously overlooked: a spatter of bleach discolouring the shower curtain, a crack in one of the wall tiles.
She sat down on the toilet lid. Eventually, Sean opened his good eye.
“I waited for ages,” she said. “I thought it was happening.”
He wiped the mess from his cheek and fingered the sticky remains of his socket. He said, “This isn’t going to fucking work.”
THEY HAD BEEN staying in the safe house for the best part of four weeks. As she dressed Sean’s wounds while he sat on the edge of the bath trying to fasten the gashes in his thighs with safety pins, Emma thought back to the moment that Pardoe had caught up with them. In the intervening weeks, she had been able to think of little else. The little man in the round spectacles and the brown worsted suit had arrived on Sean’s doorstep a little after three in the morning, when she and Sean were trying to relax Will. It had been a bizarre evening up until that point. After almost running Will over on the dual carriageway back into Warrington, they had bundled him into the back of the car when they saw what was trying to follow him through the gates of the hospital. All Will had done, in his delirium, was mumble what sounded like “casually” over and over. In a way, Emma had been grateful for the incident. It prevented her from concentrating too much on what had happened at 26 Myddleton Lane. It prevented her from suspecting she had finally gone mad.
Once they got Will back to Sean’s bedsit (he had railed violently against being taken to the hospital), they covered him in a blanket and let him sleep. Still he persisted with his strange litany, only now, Emma noticed, as he relaxed, did it sound as though he was repeating names. “Cat”, he would say. And “Eli”.
“Who do you think he’s talking about?” she asked Sean, but Sean wasn’t saying anything. He was sitting in the dark, in an armchair by his window, his fingers steepled together and pressed against his lower lip. She thought, maybe, by the way the low light from his kitchen glistened on his face, that he was crying. She did not go to him, but sought her own retreat, curled in a ball on Sean’s bed, hugging a pillow.
An hour later, Will woke her with his thrashing on the sofa. In sleep he was begging to be killed. She went to him and revived him, helping him to calm down, bringing him tea, stroking his forehead. Sean had not moved.
“What’s to be done?” she asked him.
“Things haven’t even started yet,” Sean said, cryptically. She wanted to ask him what he meant, but he was distracted by the sound of footsteps on the pavement. He put a finger to his lips and glared at her. When the footsteps ceased outside his door, Sean went downstairs. Emma heard him open the door while the visitor was in the middle of knocking.
It had been the strangest day she had ever lived. And now it just got weirder. The oddest thing, Emma thought now, as she carefully dressed Sean and kissed him lightly on the mouth, was that she had taken in everything Pardoe said to her as if he were trying to sell her life insurance. She had been mildly bored by it, yet understood that it was really quite important.
Jeremy Pardoe had been Sean’s guardian, many years before. “The only one left,” he said, almost smugly. “You would have had a guardian yourself, Emma, but no more. Frederique, her name was. Nice woman. Ran an amber shop somewhere out in East Anglia I believe. She died a number of years ago. I’m getting a little too old for running around after Sean now. I never thought I’d have to again of course, but, well, there you go. I’ve got some younger legs outside in the car to do my running for me.”
Pardoe had a sleepy voice that carried something of the Highlands’ softness in it. When she asked him about it, he confirmed that he was from Oban. A maltster by trade, as had been his father and grandfather.
“What brought you south?” she asked him.
Sean had rubbed his forehead, irritably. “Emma, he’s doing the talking. Let him finish, and then we can get on to swapping recipes and putting each other on our Christmas lists, okay?”
“No, Sean,” Pardoe had said. “It’s really all right. It might be best for her to hear this at her own pace. You’ve had a busy day.”
“Where’s
Pardoe had smiled. “You, sir, never had a guardian. But you’d make a very good guardian for someone else.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Will said, and turned away from their conversation.
“Well,” Pardoe sighed, moving to the window where he teased open the net curtain with his little finger. “I’ve known you, Sean, for a long time. I was detailed to shadow you from your fifteenth birthday, a couple of years after we lost you. You know, when you ran away from home.” He put his hand to his face and rubbed a while. “God,” he whispered. “I thought there’d never be a time when I had to tell you this. I thought the links were down. I thought the territory had been barred.”
Sean heard something squeaking stertorously but couldn’t be bothered to show surprise when he realised it was the sound of his own breathing. Deliberately, he walked to the sideboard and pulled Will’s gun from the drawer. Turning, he pointed it at Pardoe’s head. Pardoe was ice.
Emma said, “Who’s
Sean and Pardoe ignored her. Sean said, “You know about my parents?”
A nod.
“You killed them? What? You worked with them?” He was getting jittery. Sean had never trained a gun on anybody before and he did not like it one bit. In the Force, he had done a little target practice, but had never taken it seriously. A rookie, he was a long way off being considered for armed service.
Emma said: “
Now Pardoe held up a hand. “I don’t know about any of that. We didn’t know your father was involved with anyone or had deals with anyone. We were trying to track down people with, ah, a strong constitution.”
“What are you talking about?” Sean asked, his bead on Pardoe already wavering. Although he didn’t understand what the man was saying, he understood him to be innocent. Somehow he was as familiar as the jacket Sean had owned for ten years.
Emma’s first question caught up with him and he echoed it. “Who’s we?”
Pardoe did not answer. Clearly he had rehearsed this moment for some time, and his delivery was as dead and level as his hands were active, moving against each other, lightly greased with his perspiration. “You were the vanguard of a special project funded by a secret... society,” he said. “At the age of thirteen, as you reached puberty, it was decreed that you would be controlled, killed, and sent on your mission. You too, Emma. And a girl called Naomi.”
At this, Will turned his attention back to Pardoe. His face was all:
Sean dropped the gun to his side. He suddenly looked very weak. “Naomi? Killed? Mission? Jesus, Pardoe I–”
“There was a man. A very important, very dangerous man called de Fleche. He disappeared. To a place he should not have gone to. We had to track him and bring him back, or... things would have become really not very nice. That’s when we started work tracking down suitable Inserts. The first wave we tried either died or were trapped inside. With hindsight, I suppose we put them in too early, before their training was completed, before we really knew what we were dealing with. But
