No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

What is now proved was once only imagined.

William Blake

When catastrophe strikes, we look for the signal in the noise – anything that might explain the chaos that we see all around us and bring order to the world again.

Nate Silver, The Signal and The Noise

Contents

Cover (#u9fedf814-3070-5dd0-afe0-0163c156066a)

Title Page (#ua5a8724c-46bd-52df-b575-25384b923428)

Copyright

Praise for James Smythe

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Part Two

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by James Smythe

About the Publisher

Prologue (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)

Laurence Walker presses play and the video begins.

On it, he is standing in a seemingly blank room. He is looking straight into the camera lens, or the facsimile of him is; a broken version, created from photographs and screen grabs. It looks like him, but only barely. There is something about the version of his face that the software has created – so blank and expressionless – that makes him feel sick to his stomach. Behind him he can see similarly wrong versions of his family, of his wife and daughters. This created version of him isn’t looking at them, his body language barely even acknowledging their presence. He wonders why they are so scared. Deanna and the girls are huddled together, clinging onto one another, terrified, backing away from him. Their faces are approximations of what that would actually look like: twisted and distorted and not at all real.

In the background, he hears a noise, a rustle that he cannot put his finger on; and then another noise, quieter in the mix. Sobbing. And then, finally, he notices that the version of him is holding something.

It’s a gun. He knows the thick black metal. The digital version’s thumb is on the trigger. The screen version of Laurence seems to shudder. More than a shiver: it seems uncontrollable.

Then the video cuts to black and a noise rings out that he knows can only be one thing: the crack, solid and sharp, the sound of a bullet leaving the chamber of a gun. The sobbing stops and turns into a scream, ringing through the darkness.

PART ONE (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)

1 (#u15c6d3d1-bfdc-572f-b6da-94e96de10fa8)

Deanna wakes up. She lies perfectly still at first, because she loves these moments of being awake, of being in control of everything for just a second, before the day allows itself to interrupt. She can hear Laurence breathing, a harsh snore that’s developed over the past few years into something akin to a growl. She can feel the slow rise and fall of his chest travelling through the mattress. After a while she rolls over and looks at him. He’s still propped up as he was when she was falling asleep, his back against the giant pillows that they have taken to using as a headboard. His reading glasses are hanging off his face and his tablet is on his lap, his hands clutching it. He doesn’t move much when he sleeps these days, she thinks, not since he became a senator. He tends to sleep so heavily that he stays perfectly still. The world could shift around him and he would somehow stay static.

She doesn’t want to wake him yet – the alarm isn’t set to go off for another half an hour, and he needs his sleep for today – so she turns away from him and slides to the edge of the bed. The floor is freezing cold on her feet, the house so draughty, always carrying a breeze up through the floorboards. She pads to the bedroom door and he doesn’t even shift slightly as she opens it and sneaks out.

She heads downstairs, turning the lights on as she goes, straight into the kitchen. The glass along the back wall, looking out into the backyard, is darkened and she flicks the switches on the counter to bring it back to a clear state; no glare from the rising sun, just the light pouring in. She loves the feeling of the warmth of it coming through the glass, heating up the kitchen while she makes the coffee, selecting pods for the machine – they each take a different flavor, and she has to do nothing past setting the thing going. She stands at the counter, both hands on the marble, propping herself up; and she basks for a few seconds. All is silence.

Laurence wakes up as she comes back into the room, because she’s not trying to be quiet now. He feels his glasses on his face and swats them away, a knee-jerk reaction; and then he opens his eyes and looks at Deanna front on. He sleepily smirks at her. This isn’t the first time it’s happened.

‘I slept like this?’ he asks.

‘You did.’