He had tried to play it cute. He kept his off-hand close to his chest for defence, he kept swirling his bladed hand to keep her guessing. She was still smiling. Her stance remained casual; her arms were raised and her legs were firmly planted but she managed to make it look patronizing. He felt sweat dripping into his eyes. He tried to blink it away but his vision blurred. The student wiped his eyes with his sleeve, and that was that. She lunged. He felt her foot hook behind his, lift sharply, and he toppled to the ground. As his head hit the mat, she was on him. The woman sat astride his waist, then worked her way up his body till her knees were locked in his armpits. He felt paralysed, pain searing across his chest.
‘Full mount,’ she said.
‘Submission,’ he said.
Today the car radio was off – the woman said she preferred silence. The windows were closed – the woman said she found open windows distracting. The student was sweating copiously. The woman had her eyes shut. He took the inside lane of the M6 and stayed at seventy miles an hour until the service station signs appeared.
‘We’re here,’ he said.
She opened her eyes, checked the buttons on her shirt. She picked at a thread, checked herself in the car mirror, retied the laces of her trainers.
She’s as nervous as me, he thought. And she doesn’t have poison in her pocket.
The slip road took them off the motorway and he swung the car into a space three lines of parking away from the main entrance. It was a wide space, but he made sure to park tight against a white van on his side, allowing the woman plenty of space to get out on hers. They both had clear lines of vision to the building’s large sliding doors. He breathed deeply.
‘Ready?’ he said.
‘Let’s watch,’ she said. ‘We’re early.’
He couldn’t sit in the car another moment. ‘I’ll clean the windows,’ he said.
He eased himself from the car, taking a cloth and a bottle of water from the driver’s door as he stepped out. It was another day of oppressive heat but it was a relief to breathe whatever it was that passed for fresh air here. Diesel fumes and a Cornish pasty stall competed for dominance. He dripped some water on the back window and started to rub. His eyes jumped everywhere. An ancient Ford Cortina rattled past, a grey Volvo estate parked opposite, a shouty family with the remains of a burger breakfast in their hands wandered in front of him. He thought it unlikely they were the forces of oppression that the leader had warned them about. Or members of another cell. But he watched them closely anyway. A beggar approached him, a filthy coat wrapped around nothing much. He held up a hand-painted piece of cardboard: ‘Very hungry. Homeless. God bless you.’ The student waved him away.
The woman was staring straight ahead. The concrete rubbish bin a few metres from the entrance had been the drop point last time. He assumed they were sticking to the routine. The bin, they had established before, was emptied approximately every half hour. The emptying at 10.30 was the trigger. A deliberately messed-up envelope would be dropped inside the bin by one cell. Ninety seconds later it would be retrieved by another. His cell. The woman’s cell. The leader’s cell.
The back window was clean but the student continued to rub.
A red Mondeo, a black Mercedes, a black VW Golf. A delivery man, a girl in a tracksuit, a wide woman in a business suit.
The student felt for the foxglove bloom. He wasn’t sure how long it would take before the poison worked but figured if he swallowed it as the woman completed the dead drop, he should just make it back to the house. Nausea, sweating, fitting and heart tremors were all likely. He hoped the flower and leaves were small enough.
It was the delivery man. Twenty-something, average height, average build, white. Unremarkable in every way. Brown cap, brown jacket and invisible. He hesitated as he walked past the bin, then as if with an afterthought produced a brown envelope from an inside pocket and placed it in there. He then drained a can of drink, dropped that on top.
The student tapped the car roof. The door opened. The woman got out. For twenty metres she would have her back to him. He had to do it now. Heart racing, he palmed the foxglove. Ten metres. His hand to his mouth. The petals smelt of nothing in particular. Two metres. They tasted of nothing in particular either but stuck to the roof of his mouth. A swig of water and they were gone. He uttered a silent mantra and dropped back into the car.
The woman got in, holding the stained envelope in her hands. He glanced at it. Apart from the sauce marks and damp patches, it was blank. No writing of any kind. The dashboard clock said 10.40. They’d be home by 11.30, assuming he was still capable of driving.
He had never expected to be ill before. His speed dropped in anticipation of what he thought was coming. The woman noticed.
‘Leader wants this as soon as possible.’ She tapped the envelope. ‘Speed it up.’
He felt fine.
31
THE STUDENT AND the woman arrived back at 11.35. She got out first, he glanced at himself in the mirror. He had messed up. Not enough leaves? The wrong leaves? He got out and walked to number 26 a few paces behind the woman. He had failed.
Boxer Street was narrow, shabby, unremarkable. The terraced houses were built in the 1930s; far enough from Coventry city centre to have avoided the Blitz of 1940 but close enough to the university to have been hit by students since 1968. Most of the entrances sported multiple doorbells. Bikes, overflowing bins and recycling tubs were scattered by front doors and along scrubby, broken paths. The smell of rotting vegetation was unmissable. Loud music pulsed from a high window opposite. Two women in denim shorts and sun tops smoked roll-ups on their front doorstep, an overflowing ashtray between them. They didn’t look up.
Inside 26 the leader was waiting for them in the hallway. Khaki shirt, baggy black cotton trousers. He held out both hands, as if in supplication. The woman placed the envelope on his upturned palms. He seemed pleased. ‘Today is a good day,’ he said, then turned and walked to the kitchen. The student and the woman waited in the lounge. She took the two-seater sofa, he leant on the wall by the door. He still felt fine.
After a few minutes of silence the leader strode in, followed by the sweating man, his head ringed with bandages. The leader stood by the empty bookshelves, a sheet of lined paper in his hand. The student could make out the indents of five lines of type, twelve maybe fifteen words a line. A long message this time. The leader waited for the sweating man to ease his way on to the sofa, then smiled. ‘A good day today, a better day tomorrow.’
Tomorrow? thought the student. Tomorrow?
He still felt fine.
The leader waved the paper. ‘We are about to jump-start the revolution. We cannot leave it any longer and our citizen friends in the London cell have offered us the next target. We will strike at the bankers, priests and the Jews of the oppressor class. The other leftists who side with the bureaucrats and the status quo will be shamed. They have learnt nothing. Arguing with us is pointless. Negotiating is pointless. They will be reviled.’
The student had heard all this before, but his delivery was more urgent now, more desperate.
‘When you marched against the war, did it stop? No. It stopped nothing. When you voted, in election after election, what did it change? Anything? No, it changed nothing. This is how we bring emancipation.’ He produced his wooden-handled knife, pointed at his audience in turn. ‘If you could at last change the world, would you step up and do it? Wade in filth. Embrace the butcher. Change the world.’