hallway. On guard duty. The stool creaked under him as he moved, uncomfortable holding the weight of that shotgun in his old liver-spotted hands.
She’d been surprised when she’d first seen Howard on his way over to one of Latoc’s sermons. Howard, Walter and Dennis, the three stooges, hunched over a cribbage board on many a dark evening. She’d found it hard to believe that those two old boys had taken on Latoc’s nonsense; had turned on Walter.
‘He’s taken over,’ she said.
Walter looked at her. ‘What?’
‘There was a public meeting this morning and he proposed a vote to remove me.’ She sighed. ‘The only person who objected out loud was Tami.’
The women had shouted her down. Quite an ugly scene. She was jostled as she spoke up from the crowd, and then baying voices had drowned her out. Valérie calmed them down to silence with a gentle wave of his hand and then Jenny had tried to speak.
‘I told them it wasn’t down to a bloody vote. I said this place was our home; you and me, the kids and the others that first set it up . . . our home. And that everyone else were guests that we’d allowed to stay. My house, my rules.’ She laughed sourly. ‘They just loved that, didn’t they?’
The mess had erupted with angry cries, and Alice Harton’s foghorn voice over the top calling her an ‘arrogant bitch’.
‘They voted Latoc as the leader. It’s all over, Walter.’
‘What’s going to happen?’
‘I think he’s going to evict you. He’ll probably evict us both. He won’t want me around causing him trouble.’
Walter shook his head. ‘He’s going to turn this place bad. Ruin everything we’ve built.’
Jenny nodded tiredly. ‘I know.’
‘You can’t let him do that.’
‘I can’t stop him, Walter. It’s done. Everyone’s chosen him to lead the community.’
I’m not sure I want to stop him either.
There was something quite appealing about the idea of taking a boat ride ashore and walking away from all of this. Just a long walk through Bracton and out the other side into the summer countryside and whatever overgrown silent villages and towns lay beyond. Find some nice quiet leafy meadow to lie down in and give up.
They sat in silence for a while, listening to the wind whistling through the crack, Howard shuffling outside, and the moronic clucking of the chickens a deck above. The smell from the slurry room, along the dark passage outside, was still strong, even though the melted plastic containers had been pulled out weeks ago.
‘I think . . .’ said Walter finally, ‘I think it was Valérie Latoc who took Natasha.’
She turned to look at him.
Presented with the evidence of her shoe on Walter’s boat, Jenny had allowed herself to believe, at least until now, that he was guilty. She’d turned her back on nearly seven years of trust between them. Seeing the truth in his eyes, she realised how stupid and unfair she’d been. Natasha could plausibly have been playing on his boat as it dangled from the davits, even though she knew she wasn’t allowed on there. A strong gust would have set the boat swaying and she could quite easily have tumbled over the side.
But Latoc?
She was surprised the possibility had never even entered her mind.
‘Latoc?’
‘I think he killed her, Jenny. I think he killed her then put one of her shoes on my boat.’
She tried to see it in her mind. Tried to imagine his calm impassive face attached to a killer’s hands. Tried to imagine where . . . how . . . he could do it. This small world of theirs was surely too crowded to do something like that. Especially on the compression rig where the majority of his people were camped up in that teeming maze of hammocks, bunks and laundry lines. A voice would carry; a voice crying out in pain or fear, it would reverberate around the hard metal walls of that module like a stone on a snare drum.
But he has those rooms at the top to himself, doesn’t he?
The top floor, the monitoring suite.
And Natasha and her mother were amongst Latoc’s faithful.
They’d trust him. Denise’d trust her daughter with him.
Jenny tried imagining again, and this time she could see him quietly enticing the little girl upstairs. In her mind’s eye she could see everyone outside at work in the sun spread out on the walkways, on the decks, on the terraces of other platforms, and Valérie Latoc, encountering the girl alone in one dark