He waited until Finn was bent over the bathtub, rinsing the peroxide from his brassy blond hair. There was no need for him to see it coming.
The noise of the shot against the cast iron made Cyril’s ears ring. He felt a tug at his jacket, and turned to see the bullet buried in the washroom door. It had ricocheted and cut clean through the outer layer of his clothes, leaving his waistcoat intact. He let out a small breath, like a sigh but not quite, and stepped toward Finn’s limp corpse.
Water from the tap made his viscous blood curl like worms. Gray pieces of brain moved with the current, jostling bone fragments and bits of chipped porcelain. Finn’s head drooped below the rush of water. Cyril didn’t fish him out—his face would be a mess.
He let his hand linger, for just a moment, between Finn’s shoulder blades. The accountant had removed his pyjama top to rinse his hair. The skin of his back was still warm. Cyril’s fingers covered scattered freckles, tracing them like points on a map. Poor idiot.
No. Not an idiot. Obviously clever, to have come up with the memo scheme, to have run messages for Ari all this time right under the Ospies’ noses. So not an idiot. But a tool. A tool, for people he’d trusted and loved.
“Some people just aren’t cut out for it,” said Cyril, taking his hand away. He wondered who he was talking to. More importantly, who he was talking about.
*
The thing was, he could leave now. He wanted to kick himself. He’d planned this all wrong, expecting to end up in custody when he should have been expecting to run. What had Cordelia said? You’ve always gotta be the one pulling other people off the tracks. He had always thought of himself as selfish. Maybe he’d had the wrong idea.
Irrelevant now. He could take the papers and go … North, someplace. Damnation, he didn’t need to find Ari, not right away. He just needed to get out of Amberlough and go to ground.
There was a chance. If he could make it to Bythesea Station before the Ospies realized Moore and Massey had failed to report … He didn’t want to let himself hope. It had ended so bitterly the last time, and seemed so heartless now, with Finn hanging dead over the lip of his own bathtub.
And yet.
He stole the bicycle from Finn’s landing, careful not to let it rattle against the bannister or the steps as he carried it down. A little scouting revealed there was a back way out of Finn’s building.
He took side streets in a roundabout route to the river, which he crossed. There were myriad ways into Bythesea from the south, through the train yards, but if one approached it from the direction of the central city, ingress was limited to the two sister bridges of Seagate and Station Way. If the Ospies were onto him they’d be watching both of those.
If the Ospies were onto him he’d be lucky to get out of the city at all.
He rode up to the high wrought iron gates of the station’s western entrance, casing the approach as he went past. No one lingering … wait. Black bowler pulled low, smoking a cigarette just outside the revolving doors. The man’s eyes were sharp under the brim of his hat. Some sculler taking a smoke break? Or was he waiting for someone of Cyril’s description?
Hopping off the bicycle, Cyril deposited it in the rank against the gates, not bothering to lock it—he didn’t have the key. He tried not to look at the man in the black bowler as he passed, but he did allow himself a deep, audible breath when those sharp eyes stayed on the street and didn’t follow him through the spinning panes of the door.
Approaching the ticket counter, he hooked his thumb into his ticket pocket, where it brushed Ari’s letter. He had the folder under one arm, and wished he had his briefcase instead. Traveling without luggage wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. Still, it couldn’t be helped, and he was already here.
This early, there was no queue at the ticket counter—wouldn’t be, not for a few more hours. He approached the glass wearing what he hoped was the weary but charming smile of a man resigned to early travel.
The teller yawned and looked up from a crossword. “Help you, sir?”
Suddenly, he was viscerally glad he’d seen what he had of Aristide’s instructions. “The five o’clock, northbound.”
“How far?”
He tried to disguise his hesitation, wondering where he was supposed to get off. “Farbourgh City,” he said. It was somewhere to start. “Second class.” All he had was the money in his wallet, but in this suit he would stick out in a third-class compartment.
She started to make up the ticket, but caught herself halfway through. “Damnation. I forgot. Do you have your papers?”
“Must be hard,” he said, handing over the folder, “with all these new regulations.”
She started scanning the first page. “Like you wouldn’t believe, Mr. Darling.” Obviously reading from a cue sheet tacked to the inside of the glass, she asked “What’s your reason for traveling to Farbourgh?”