This Is How It Ends Read online

  ‘He’s different,’ she says quietly.

  ‘The police caught him at the scene, covered in accelerant, for Christ’s sake. He was never going to walk away from that. What was the point of Ella going down as well?’

  She doesn’t answer and I’m relieved she doesn’t have the stomach to go through this conversation again. We’ve each said our piece half a dozen times and I thought when she agreed to come to the party that it was a sign of maybe not forgiveness, but at least understanding.

  These things happen when you take part in direct action. Some people get arrested, others are luckier and make their escape. And it isn’t like he was blameless. Quinn led Ella and that boy into a situation neither of them were prepared for, changed the game with no warning and expected full and total support. Carol has always insisted they knew the score, but she’s blind to Quinn’s failings.

  Just like I’m blind to Ella’s, she’d say.

  And she would have been right a few days ago.

  ‘Would she do the same for you?’ Carol asks gravely. ‘Put herself on the line like that? Lie to the filth to protect you?’

  I give no answer and she nods.

  ‘That girl is no fucking good, Mol.’

  ‘I know.’ It’s almost a whisper and I press my fingers to my mouth as soon as I’ve spoken, feeling tears welling up, all these days and sleepless nights catching up on me in a rush. I take a deep breath and then a long drink. ‘Where’s Quinn now?’

  ‘Spain,’ she says. ‘He’s gone to Barcelona to meet up with some friends.’

  ‘When did he leave?’

  Carol’s brow furrows. ‘What’s this all about?’

  ‘Please, Carol. When did you see him last?’

  ‘The day he got out, I went to meet him, took him for a drink and something to eat. He was pale as a ghost – good thing he’s gone abroad, he needs some sun on him.’

  ‘When was this?’ I ask, sick of dancing around the big question, wanting to just say it but still not ready.

  She checks her phone. ‘He got out Wednesday, March the first. He was taking the Eurostar on the Friday morning. We found him a cheap ticket while we were in the pub. Alright?’

  Meaning he was in London the night of the party and planning to leave the very next morning. If he was going to repay Ella for getting him sent down, then the party would have been the perfect time to do it, leaving almost no chance for his crime to be reported before he was gone.

  ‘Did he know you were coming to Ella’s party?’ I ask.

  Carol stands up sharply. ‘What the hell’s all this about, Mol?’

  ‘Please, sit down,’ I say, immediately infected by her tension. ‘Carol, please. This isn’t easy for me to tell you but you have to promise to stay calm and hear me out.’

  She stares at me, eyes wide, caught between confusion and anger. Slowly she sits again and even that small gesture feels like a success in this atmosphere.

  ‘Have you spoken to Quinn since he got to Barcelona?’

  ‘No.’ She spreads her hands wide. ‘Why?’

  ‘Have you got a photo of him on your phone?’

  For a moment she looks incredulous and then, finally, mercifully, she catches on and I don’t have to say it.

  ‘You think Quinn’s the bloke they pulled out of the lift shaft?’

  I hesitate.

  For a second I think she’s going to lash out. But she doesn’t. Her hands curl into fists, knuckles white, all the energy running into them.

  ‘Ella did that,’ she says. ‘Did she tell you?’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Did she tell you she killed him?’ Carol says, each word hard and deliberate.

  ‘Please—’

  ‘I knew it. I knew there was more to the Brighams action than Quinn was telling me. It was Ella, wasn’t it? He was going to tell everyone she was there and she had to stop him.’ Carol snatches up her phone. ‘She’s not going to get away with it.’

  ‘Wait.’

  Carol reaches into her bag, starts rummaging through it but can’t find what she wants. She turns it out on to the sofa.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Calling the police.’

  ‘We don’t grass,’ I say desperately.

  ‘She killed Quinn,’ Carol snarls. ‘This isn’t grassing, it’s justice.’

  The room is spinning around me as I get to my feet. I grab her by the shoulders and turn her to face me. It takes all my strength.

  ‘It was an accident.’ My voice is weak, my heart is hammering. I’ve never seen this much hate in Carol’s eyes before, but I keep babbling. ‘He attacked her and she pushed him away and he fell. He just fell, Carol. It wasn’t Ella’s fault. It was just bad luck.’

  ‘You knew?’

  Her eyes are popping. She shoves me back so brutally I almost go over. I see her twitch, that instinct to help too deep to fully contain, but she stays where she is.

  ‘Why am I surprised? Of course you’ve been covering for her. Christ, Molly, she isn’t your kid, okay? Do you get that? She’s just some little rich girl on the make. She’s used all of us. You more than anyone. You need to stop protecting her.’

  ‘I’m protecting me,’ I shout.

  Carol’s face goes slack. She looks like another person, someone I don’t know, who I’ve never known. Thirty years and here we are, made strangers by this moment.

  ‘What did you do?’ she asks, her voice low and toneless, and when I don’t answer fast enough, she grabs my arm, squeezes hard. ‘Molly?’

  ‘I didn’t know it was him. She called me and said some bloke had attacked her. She could barely string a sentence together she was that scared. She needed someone to help her.’

  ‘And still it’s all about Ella,’ Carol sneers.

  ‘I would have done the same thing for you,’ I tell her. ‘He was already dead, there was no saving him.’

  ‘You could have called the police. Turned her in.’

  ‘Is that what you’d have done?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. Not to a friend. You never did.’ I hold her furious gaze until it begins to soften. The thirty long years close around us again, all the cold nights protesting out under the stars, huddled inside tents and, when they were ripped away from us, inside the back of police vans. Always together and stronger for it. ‘Carol, I’m really scared. I think Ella’s going to put this all on me.’

  My voice cracks.

  I’m shaking, swaying on my feet. I feel like I’ve been standing here forever arguing with her, and before her Ella, and before that lying to Callum and the police before him. I’m all punched out, voiceless and empty.

  When I open my mouth to apologise to her no sound comes.

  Carol draws me into a hug, a distant and perfunctory one. Still, I feel better for having finally told someone. She steps back with a new determination on her face.

  ‘You understand that if it is Quinn, then Ella’s lied to you about it being an accident?’

  ‘We don’t know that.’

  ‘If it was anyone else, I’d agree with you,’ she says. ‘But this is Ella and Quinn we’re talking about. Their kind of history is a motive, right?’

  Reluctantly, I nod.

  ‘If she killed him, she did it to stop him exposing her involvement at the Brighams attack.’

  Again, I nod. I don’t agree but Carol is beginning to cool down and I can’t risk making her flare up by challenging her right now.

  ‘And if you think there’s a way she can put it all on you, then there’s going to be a way you can put it all on her.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s not how it works and you know it. Her father was a high-ranking police officer. He’s got decades of favours to call in. The only way I stay out of jail is if she does.’

  A sour look crosses Carol’s face.

  ‘We need to find out if it was Quinn,’ I tell her, knowing he’s her main concern and that her position will change if it isn’t
him. ‘Have you got a photo of him? The only one I could find online was his mugshot.’

  ‘Quinn’s always scrupulous about not being photographed. And obviously we don’t take each other’s photos,’ Carol says. ‘Come on, this is basic. If I get arrested and his photo’s on my phone then the filth know we know each other.’

  He is good, I realise. To be his age now and do what he does, without creating any kind of easily searchable online footprint. That takes guile and dedication far beyond the norm.

  ‘Can you get in touch with him?’ I ask.

  ‘If he’s still alive, you mean.’ She rubs her temple. ‘He’s gone dark for a few weeks. No mobile or anything. He messaged the people he was going to meet on my phone before he left London. I can contact them and see if he’s arrived. Assuming they’ll tell me.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they tell you?’

  ‘They’re an anarchist collective, Mol. They don’t trust anyone.’ She points a finger at me. ‘You could learn from them.’

  As she taps out the text, I stand at my photo wall, looking at the image of Ella laid out in the road with a police baton poised to strike her. I think of how far she’s come since that afternoon and wonder how much of her progress is accident and how much she’s achieved by design. What, ultimately, does she want? To be an agent of progress or the kind of loud and persistent agitator who eventually gets drawn into the establishment because she’s too troublesome to be left outside it?

  I wonder how far she’s prepared to go to get what she wants and to keep herself safe. Who she’d sacrifice. Who she’d silence. Whether there’s a line in the sand she thinks she’ll never cross or if she’s already gone over it.

  I wonder if Quinn is the only enemy she’s made.

  Ella

  Then – 5th August

  It was 79˚F degrees according to Ella’s phone, but that was the air temperature when she was standing up. Down on the ground, on the sun-baked tarmac, surrounded by a crush of seated and sprawled bodies, suffering from heatstroke and dehydration, she was sure it was closer to ninety. She’d dressed for an English summer in jeans and a T-shirt and a lightweight parka that she’d shed within minutes of arriving at the demonstration.

  At first, she’d seen a lot of half-familiar faces; other students she recognised from around campus and the reading rooms and the roads nearby where most of them lived in shared houses just like hers. A few lecturers, mostly junior ones who would feel the force of the new zero-hours contracts sooner than their senior peers, and who probably felt they had so little to lose already that the fight was worth taking to the streets.

  When Ella asked around, she discovered that the older men and women were mostly from the unions, while a few others were dismissed as professional agitators. The kind who turned up anywhere there was a possibility of clashing with the police or taking a small chunk out of whichever branch of the establishment was available that month.

  The man who told her that was a lecturer in the politics department. A young fogey in a cream linen jacket who seemed to loathe anything vaguely left wing. Until he needed them to turn out and protect his employment rights.

  He went on talking, while Ella scanned the crowd for someone she knew and could join, complaining about the recent no-platforming of an Israeli historian. Ella had been at that event too, remembered discussing it with Dylan afterwards, feeling a mounting sense of frustration as he dismissed her concerns. The man was passionate about the upsurge of anti-Semitism in academia, rattling off the names of splinter groups she was surprised he knew. He warned her about getting involved with them.

  ‘Unless you’re planning on taking your PhD to Al Jazeera.’ He laughed and reached into his bag for a bottle of water. ‘In all seriousness, though, you should be careful which causes you support. You’re young, you don’t want to get blacklisted.’

  He pointed towards the police cordon, where fifty riot officers sweated inside their gear. A woman in civvies, large sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat shading her face was standing near them.

  ‘See the woman with the video camera? Intelligence gathering. They identify troublemakers and sell access to the lists to employers.’

  ‘Aren’t you worried about being on it?’ Ella had asked, shocked by his coolness.

  ‘I’m in it for the love, not the money,’ he said, with an enigmatic smile.

  A couple of hours after she arrived, she thought she caught sight of Dylan crossing the street on the other side of the cordon. But when he drew closer she realised it was just someone who looked like him, a touch heavier, and slightly younger.

  Another text vibrated her phone and she looked at them stacked up on the screen.

  I’m at the flat, where are you?

  I’m at yours. Has something happened?

  The meeting’s in fifteen minutes! Where the fuck are you?

  The meeting had been and gone and Ella imagined him making excuses for her, unable to hide his annoyance from the rest of them. People just as exasperated as he was, thinking that her failure to show only served to prove Dylan’s fears about her state of mind were well founded.

  It had been coming for months. She’d tried to hide it from him, kept working to maintain the image of someone fully in control, making progress, juggling her PhD and everything else she had going on. But Dylan saw through the facade. He started calling more often, at odd times of day and night, checking in on her, always catching her at the wrong moment. It was like being under surveillance. Then he found the pills, a prescription in her mother’s name, stolen from her bathroom cabinet during Ella’s last visit, and they had The Talk.

  After that there was no question what happened next.

  She was to go home for a while. She needed to recuperate. A month, he suggested, maybe two. And just like that, it was agreed.

  But Ella knew once she stepped on that train there’d be no getting back here. Her father would have his say, her mother would find out everything and between them they’d make sure this new life she’d built for herself would be over for good.

  Sitting on the road, a white line burning hot under her calf, the distant prickle of a broken light casing digging into her palm – not unpleasantly – she surveyed the scene around her. More people were sitting than standing now, which gave her a clear view across the tops of all those heads to the police cordon.

  It had started as a march but the police were ready for them and they’d been corralled quickly on to a side road, allowing the Saturday-morning traffic on Camden High Street to keep flowing. Then the cordons started moving in, riot shields up, faces hidden behind helmets. Not as aggressive as Ella had expected, but they walked with determination, never gave ground, never slowed, just kept compressing the loose crowd of two hundred protestors into the smallest space they legally could.

  It was smaller than Ella was comfortable with, but she’d managed to keep her claustrophobia at bay by talking to people. If she focused on their faces she could block out the clammy crush of bodies around her and the fact that she couldn’t just get up and walk away.

  Now, with the sun at its height, burning her skin, making the roots of her hair sweat, she was beginning to feel the familiar climb in her heart rate, the telltale constriction around her lungs.

  ‘Have you got anything to drink?’ she asked the girl next to her.

  ‘Just Coke.’ The girl offered her the bottle.

  ‘Thanks.’ Ella drank a mouthful of flat, hot liquid.

  The police in their riot gear were breaking away at regular intervals to remove their helmets and pour water over their heads, other officers filling in the gaps they left in the unbroachable wall. They were getting impatient, she realised. Overheated and irritated.

  When a young man went up to the shield wall to try and get out, he was barked at, told to sit his arse down. It wasn’t meant to be like that; when you wanted out they were supposed to let you out, Ella thought.

  But she remembered Garton, the men and women she’d trained alongside, and ho
w single-minded they could be. Unable or unwilling to accept nuance in any situation. Some of them could be behind those masks, she realised. The bigger, dumber ones who were never going to make it to plainclothes and who were too aggressive to be satisfied with the day-to-day tedium of walking a beat. One man sprang immediately to mind, but he’d left Garton when she did, talking about joining the army, where the real action was.

  The girl next to Ella let out a low groan.

  ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘Bloody period pains,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think we’d get trapped like this. I don’t suppose you’ve got any ibuprofen or anything on you?’

  ‘Sorry, no. Have you asked about?’

  ‘A few people, yeah. Nobody else was organised either.’ She wrapped her arms around her abdomen and let out another muted wail. ‘It’s bad enough with pills. I don’t think I can stay here.’

  There was a film of sweat on the girl’s brow, pain etched in every angle of her body. Ella felt her own midsection tense up in sympathy and knew she had to do something.

  ‘Let’s get you out of here.’

  Ella stood up and helped her to her feet. They picked their way across legs and around bags, up to the cordon, Ella trying to find the most sympathetic-looking face behind the steamed-up visors. They all looked the same, though.

  ‘Please, my friend’s in a lot of pain,’ she said to the man. ‘She needs to get out and take her medication.’

  ‘Back into the middle.’

  ‘She’s going to pass out,’ Ella said. ‘Look at her, can’t you see what a state she’s in?’

  ‘Should have stayed at home then.’ His tone was flat and disinterested. ‘Back into the middle.’

  The girl gripped Ella’s arm. ‘It’s fine, I’ll ask some more people. Someone’s bound to have brought a first-aid kit with them.’

  She drifted away and Ella stood for a few seconds longer, trying to find the face through the visor, convinced in that moment that it was someone she knew behind there and that was why he was being such an arsehole. He was the right age, no older than her. Barely more than a boy once you stripped away the uniform and the borrowed power it gave him.