Page 4 of Ashes & Aether

The evening begins at a kitchen table in an empty council flat, where I lay out what I need in a straight line: Vaughn’s bottle, Hargreaves’s vial, Rook’s override code, a flathead screwdriver and four letters of passage. The first two items go into the padded compartments of my case, the screwdriver into my coat pocket, while the paper from Croatia is already beneath my blouse.

I take nothing that could be called a weapon.

There are seven routes between the five compounds. Two are blocked by checkpoints after midnight, and one passes through an area where infected gather near the railway, which leaves four usable roads and forty-three minutes of contingency.

Vaughn expects grain figures, Hargreaves expects his medicine, Rook and Morgan don’t expect to see me at all, and Pike expects the name of a traitor in his organization.

I button my coat to the throat and leave.

23:10

Edwin Vaughn receives me in the drawing room of a Hampstead house that used to belong to a television presenter, who is now buried in the garden. Vaughn kept the wine cellar and the wife.

Tonight, the wife is upstairs, and his guards are playing cards in the kitchen. Vaughn has dismissed everyone else because I have brought figures concerning the winter grain supply, and he enjoys pretending numbers arouse him.

“Hargreaves will want twenty percent,” he says, scanning the report.

I make a noncommittal sound. “Hargreaves wants many things.”

Then I break the seal on a bottle and pour a mouthful into his glass. Vaughn watches me lift it, as he always does, and I taste blackcurrant, oak and the faint bitterness of the foxglove tincture I added an hour ago before rewaxing the seal.

A small mouthful isn’t enough to harm me.

I swallow, and Vaughn relaxes.

“You’ve made yourself very valuable, Margaret,” he says as I fill his glass.

“That was the intention.”

The poison dissolves into the wine, and he drinks while I explain why Hargreaves will settle for twelve percent. By the time I leave, Vaughn’s face is pale. Within the hour he will become nauseated, and his heart will fail before dawn.

Vaughn has complained of chest pains for months and executed the last doctor who told him to drink less. No one will question the diagnosis.

23:48

Anthony Hargreaves keeps his insulin in a locked refrigerator powered by its own generator. There are three keys: he wears one, his physician carries another, and I have the third because I arrange the supply runs.

The physician is treating a fever outbreak south of the river tonight, which will keep him there until morning.

Hargreaves lets me into his bedroom without looking up from the radio, where a woman is reporting gunfire near Croydon through a veil of static. He turns the dial, trying to clarify the signal.

“Anything from Vaughn?” he asks.

“He agrees that twelve percent is reasonable,” I reply. It’s the number Hargreaves wanted from the start.

Hargreaves snorts. “Of course he does. The man hasn’t got the stomach for a fight.”

Not for much longer.

I open the refrigerator and pretend to remove Hargreaves’s nightly vial. He insists on drawing the dose himself and trusts his own hands more than anyone else’s.

Unfortunately, the concentration isn’t what the vial I brought says it is.

I place it on his bedside table with a fresh syringe and take yesterday’s empty vial for disposal, following a routine that has not changed in all the months he has trusted me.

“You’re quiet,” he remarks.

“I’m tired.”