Omega

Owain was acutely aware that he must show no sign of wavering. Legister would pounce on any kind of weakness or inconsistency. He had a formidable reputation. It was he who had overseen the amalgamation of the civilian police force and the security services into the Security Police, he who had formed the Counter Insurgency Forces, giving them quasi-military ranks and equipment to rival the best of frontline units. While the SP was becoming a refuge for invalids and incompetents, the CIF had grown into a private army, increasingly answerable to him alone.

The younger man emerged and walked across to Legister. He was holding Marisa’s bunched-up tights in his gloved hand.

Legister took them from him and put them to his nose. Sniffed.

“Difficulties, major?” he said, holding them up, letting the legs dangle so that their soiling was clearly visible. Their withered emptiness declared both his crime and his damnation.

Briskly Legister stepped forward, producing a slim silver cylinder from his overcoat pocket. He thrust it towards Owain’s face and something hissed from its end.

A waft of menthol-like vapour, swiftly followed by a numbing flood, as though his body had been severed from his head. As he fell, it was Legister himself who caught him.

I came surging out of Owain, and my first thought was that I too was paralysed. But no. I was lying alone in the single bedroom, dawn light seeping through the open curtains.

My heart was racing. I lay there until it had slowed, wondering what had happened to Owain. Not death, at least not yet: I had a continuing sense of his undeclared presence. But Legister had done something to incapacitate him. For once he had looked angry.

Had Owain actually killed Marisa? I could only find out by returning to him. And I had my own reasons. Like Owain I had a feeling that I was about to be exposed. I’d told Tanya everything but I had no idea what the consequences might be. Was my admission proof that I was making progress? It didn’t feel that way to me; if anything, there was a renewed sense of crisis.

For Owain it was literally a matter of life and death: for me it was a question of culpability. If my presence had somehow stimulated his assault on Marisa, I was partially responsible for whatever had happened to her.

I went into the bathroom to pee. The house was already warm, the blurred outlines of the garden visible through the dimpled window glass. I was afraid to look at myself in the mirror. In case I saw him there.

I flushed the toilet and went out on to the landing. There was no sound elsewhere in the house. Carefully I crossed to Tanya’s door. Slowly turned the handle.

She had locked it from inside.

THIRTY-SEVEN

“You must forgive me,” Carl Legister was saying to Owain without a trace of regret. “It was an infantile act, and one that inconvenienced all of us. Not least the men to whom I should be setting an example.”

They were in the back seat of Legister’s Bentley, which was moving along the street at a pace barely faster than walking, its engine noise muted.

The two CIF men sat in the front behind steel-meshed glass. They had bundled him down the Barracks steps and into the car, he semiconscious, completely numb from the neck down, breathing raggedly through his lolling mouth. Only now was the feeling beginning to return to his body.

“They tell me it’s a combination of an opiate and a motor inhibitor,” Legister remarked without looking at him. “N-pentathio something or other. One of the boffins at Porton Down christened it nepenthe.”

Owain managed to sit himself fully upright. The smell was now vaguely medicinal. The after-effects of the drug? Or did it come from Legister himself? Owain was drawn to notions of formaldehyde, as though the Secretary of State had been pickled, was no more really alive than the Silicon Chancellor. He gave off no body heat, was merely an animated object, instilled with sentience and intelligence but containing nothing visceral.

Legister gazed out the window as they drove along the Embankment, rolling a slender gold ring between his thumb and forefinger. It looked like one of Marisa’s but it hadn’t come from his quarters. They’d found only the tights.

The Bentley had special identification plates, was instantly recognisable. They passed through a checkpoint without delay, the duty guards coming to brisk attention, salutes held until they passed. Legister, hidden from their view behind mirrored bullet-proof glass, showed no interest.

Gingerly I probed Owain’s mind, but he still had no memory of what had happened the night before. Had I blacked him out? Possibly, but he’d woken in his own bed. Had he got rid of Marisa before succumbing to alcohol-induced amnesia? Or was it merely a symptom of a more general mental disintegration?

At present I had no answer. I could only wait and see what emerged.