The sun would burn the mist away very soon, but for now it formed a pale haze across the landscape. The large lawned garden that sloped down to the woodland, the fields beyond, and past them the wide lake and the steadily rolling hills, were all silent but for the sounds of nature. She did nothing to disturb the peace.
Still, she would not step from the door without dressing. The chance of anyone watching was small. But if a local had walked through the woods this early, and had strayed from the public paths to the edge of the gîte’s large property, she did not want to draw undue attention to herself. The quiet Englishwoman could have been anyone. The naked Englishwoman would draw second glances, and discussion in the village bar-tabac, and a form of notoriety.
Jane Smith was well versed in keeping herself unnoticed.
She took her coffee upstairs, showered and dressed. Then she locked the house and cycled her old bike up to the small village of Brusvily. The patisserie was already open, and she smiled and exchanged a few words with the owner in her broken French. She was getting better, and she knew that the locals appreciated her efforts. They were used to British holidaymakers assuming that everyone spoke English, and she made a point of only conversing in French when she was away from the gîte. Just another way to try and fit in.
She bought croissants for breakfast, and bread rolls, ham and cheese for lunch. That afternoon she planned a run down through the woods to the lake, a long swim in its cool waters, then a hike along its shore to the nearest town. She’d eat dinner there, then perhaps run back the same way, depending on how stiff her hip was. If it was giving her grief, she’d walk.
Back at the gîte she brewed more coffee and sat beneath the pergola on the terrace, eating the croissants with strawberry preserve, drawing in the sights and sounds of summer. This had been a long, hot one, and the lawns were scorched dry by the sun and lack of rain.
Her son, Alex, comes crying to her with a grazed knee, grass stains surrounding the scratches.
Jane Smith paused only for a moment, last chunk of croissant halfway to her mouth. Her coffee steamed. A breeze sang through the corn crops in the neighbouring field and stirred the wild poppies speckling its edges like beads of blood on an abraded land.
She finished eating her breakfast and drinking her coffee, licking her fingers and picking up pastry crumbs from the plate. The memory was already gone. But every such memory was also always there.
This life was a thin veneer. Routine gave it substance, and repetition made it almost like being free.
But Jane Smith was more than one person. After brewing her third cup of strong coffee of the day, and still before nine in the morning, she picked up her iPad.
First she accessed Twitter. Her current account was under one of many pseudonyms, but it was time to change, so she opened a new account under a new name. A few quick posts about apple pie recipes, pictures of cakes, and a couple of funny cat memes, then she searched some cookery hashtags and friended a handful of random people. That done, she accessed five accounts that she liked to keep track of and friended those, too. These people were in her past, and though she’d made a promise to the few she liked, most would never want to see her again. She might have helped them, but in many cases she had corrupted and cursed them, too. Salvation came at a price.
She knew that more than most.
There were no messages there for her, secretive or otherwise, and nothing to raise her concern. She was glad.
She was always glad.
Leaving Twitter running in the background, she surfed other social media sites from a variety of fake ISP accounts. No name was her own, and none were those she had used in real life. Her net activity left no trail, and every relevant page or search was bookended with several random surfs.
Everything was quiet. That was how she liked it. She could have lived like this for the rest of her life, if her sense of morality allowed. It wasn’t that she was always out for vengeance. She wasn’t sure what it was.
It’s all I can do, she’d think when she mused on things. And considering what she had been, and who she’d had, that was the most depressing thing of all.
When she started scrolling through the news sites and saw the item, and scanned the first paragraph, everything changed. Her stomach dropped, and she felt the familiar sense of change settling around her.
The calm reality of her life at the gîte became a facade. Ever since becoming the person she now was, she’d had the sense of the world beyond her horizons conspiring to draw her out and cut her down.
There were plans, conspiracies, machinations, and sometimes she even imagined vast machines working secretly beyond the hills and past the curvature of the Earth, great steam-driven things that drilled and burrowed through the hollows she could not see, the places she did not yet know. They would connect like massive spider webs, drawing tighter and closer until there she was. Caught. Trapped by circumstance, and unable to look away.
All the horrors she had witnessed and experienced, and the terrors she had perpetuated herself, made looking away impossible.
‘Now here we are,’ she said. She read the whole article, picked up the phone, dialled. After four rings she disconnected, then she dialled again. He picked up after three. That way they both knew that things were well.
But not for long.
‘Have you seen the news?’ she asked.
‘I try to avoid it. Too depressing.’
‘There was a double murder in South Wales. A girl had her lips and nostrils glued shut.’
Silence from the other end.
‘Post office job gone wrong.’
‘So?’
She frowned. It was strange having this conversation in such calm, beautiful surroundings. Over the hills, she thought. Past the trees. Machines turning and steaming, vast cogs grinding, dripping oil, casting lines to hook into my flesh.
‘Don’t you care?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘But you’ve been waiting for something like this for years. Don’t you want to …’ She trailed off. He always steered these conversations even if she started them.
‘Take revenge? And how did that work for you?’
A slew of images flashed across her mind. None of them were nice. Her hip ached where she’d been shot in Wales three years before, stalking and killing the people of the Trail, the shady organisation responsible for her family’s deaths. Her arm was stiff, muscles knotted and hard from another bullet impact. They’d shot her, but she had survived. Perhaps she’d even triumphed. But she didn’t feel like a winner.
‘It’s a lovely morning,’ she said.
‘Beautiful. Anything else?’
She’d tried to get close to Holt over the past couple of years. He’d pulled her out of her alcoholism following the murders of her family, then he’d trained her, preparing her for vengeance. Even so, she knew that he’d shown her only a small part of what he had learned and experienced over the years. His history was deep, and bathed in blood and grief.
And all the time, every moment they were together or apart, Holt seemed totally in charge.
She hung up without saying any more. It was her own attempt to take control of the conversation.
Jane Smith, real name Rose, glanced at her watch and decided it was time for another coffee.
Rose ran.
She had never been a runner. It still felt like a new thing for her. But since that time in the Welsh