corner of that large cathedral-like space. Natasha bunking class as she sometimes did. So wilful, just like Hannah used to be. Jenny could see him offering the girl a warm, friendly smile . . . and her smiling back. Absolutely nothing to be concerned about.
Mr Latoc is a good man. My mummy says so.
She could see him holding out his hand, her grasping it and him leading her up metal stairs past floors of hammocks and towels and rugs and dangling laundry. She could see him smiling down at her, the glint of a predator in those warm brown eyes as they headed along the walkway to his rooms.
This is my kingdom now, and these are my people. And yes, I shall do as I please.
‘I think he killed her,’ said Walter. ‘And he tried to set me up at the same time.’
She looked at him.
‘Two birds with one stone, Jenny. I’m in charge of the guns,’ he said gesturing to his chest, a thatch of grey-white bristles where once locker-room keys had nestled on a chain. ‘Or I was. He’s got those guns now.’
God help us, Walter, you might just be right.
‘Jenny.’
‘What is it?’
‘There’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘Do you think Hannah was dead already when we arrived?’
Jenny tried to remember the last moments before the blast. It was at best a tangled jumble of images. A rising sense of panic . . . fear they were never going to find her because she’d disappeared into the surging sea below.
‘I . . . I can’t remember.’
‘What if that was him, too?’ he whispered. ‘What if he took her there . . . did things . . . killed her, then pulled the methane pipe free to cover his tracks? He could have known something would set off the gas . . .’
He was talking some more, but she was no longer listening. She could see the scenario. She could actually see it because . . .
Hannah was very taken with him, wasn’t she?
She remembered seeing Latoc with Hannah on quite a few occasions, him talking quietly to her. She’d visited him countless times in Dr Gupta’s sick bay. Jenny wondered if those dark eyes she’d found so attractive had all the while been busy making plans from the moment he’d first come round.
‘Jenny?’
Walter had been saying something to her.
‘Jenny?’
She stood up. ‘I have to go,’ she told him.
‘Where are you going?’
She knocked on the storeroom’s door. ‘Howard! I’m coming out now.’
A bolt slid noisily and the door creaked open. ‘All done, Mrs Sutherland?’
She smiled at Howard standing in the dim corridor outside holding the shotgun uncertainly in both hands. Although Valérie Latoc was now in charge, the old boy still nodded deferentially at her.
Without thinking about it, she stepped swiftly out of the storeroom and snatched the gun out of his unready hands. He stared down, goggle-eyed at his empty palms. ‘Uh, Mrs Sutherland, could I have the gun back, please?’
‘In,’ she said, nodding at the storeroom.
‘In?’
‘Yes, in there with Walter.’
He nodded and stepped inside.
‘Jenny? What the hell are you doing?’ called out Walter as she swung the door shut on both men. She rammed the bolt home, locking both of them in. She didn’t need Walter trying to wrestle the gun off her. Trying to stop her.
‘I’m going to kill the bastard,’ she replied evenly.
Chapter 63
10 years AC
‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
‘Do you see? Once upon a time it was said that money was the root of all evil. Money was a bad thing, yes? But not as bad as the oil,’ said Valérie, his voice carrying across the still assembly of faces and bouncing off the hard metal ceiling of the compression chamber thirty feet above them. The ideal place to address them all, his voice seemed amplified in here.
‘Oil was the truly bad thing. It turned us into slaves, yes? We became lazy and greedy and selfish because of it. It allowed us to fill this world with too many people, to cover the land with endless cities, to fill the sky with poison and the sea with chemicals. You see, oil was a bounty we did not earn through hard work. It was merely found. It came to us as a free gift. A treasure we discovered in the ground. An offering from the Devil, you understand?’
They listened to him intently, all faces turned up to a gantry which served perfectly as a pulpit.
‘So,’ he continued, ‘for a hundred years mankind has lived on