A Loyal Spy (28 page)

‘Do you have any other means of contacting him?’ Miranda asked.

Flora shook her head. ‘If he has a mobile phone I don’t have the number.’ She reached for the bottle and filled her glass again. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Is Nor really coming here?’

‘Listening to him on that video, I think he’s coming. I think he’s angry enough to go through with his threat.’

Miranda stared into the bottom of her glass. ‘I have to find Jonah.’

Miranda was standing in the doorway to Calum’s bedroom. She’d followed Flora up the stairs. Calum was lying on his back with a tiny fist clenched in front of his face. Flora was kneeling in front of him, beside the bed, gathering the blankets to cover him again.

Flora looked back at her. Her eyes narrowed. ‘Jonah said that you lost your son?’

Miranda turned away. There was no light in the corridor. She walked along it as if it were a tightrope, step by step, trying not to fall. She sat on the carpet at the top of the stairs and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She had found it so difficult to accept that he was gone. For years after he was snatched, she imagined that he was alive somewhere and playing with his toys. Some nights she would tell anyone who was prepared to listen, ‘Omar’s coming home tomorrow.’ Often she dreamt that she saw him in a crowded playground and ran up to him and screamed,
Where have you been?
And he wouldn’t answer and she’d wake up in a cold sweat.

Once she dreamt that Omar was living in the desert with a beautiful dark-haired woman who had convinced him that she was his true mother. Miranda woke up from the dream and drove into the desert until dawn.

7–8 September 2005

‘It’s all I’ve ever known,’ Flora told her. ‘For years I had a camp bed in one of my father’s offices. I’m sure it was completely forbidden, but what could he do? If he got called out in the night, he’d bundle me up in a blanket in the back of the car and drive me up to London. I spent entire weekends in those basements, cutting out newspaper clippings for his bloody collage; either that or in Norfolk, getting dragged along behind him while he strode up and down the beach. It was so bloody sad. My mother never gave him any notice. She just left one night. I got a note, an apology of sorts. She boarded a ferry from Dover and that was the last we heard of her. It was obvious that she’d learned from him and made careful preparations. At first, I thought he might go looking for her. But he was too proud. He just strode up and down the beach staring at the North Sea. I remember I used to imagine it was him daring the tide to come in, so he could wrestle with it. That’s my abiding memory of my father from childhood: a little man with a lot of fight in him who was destined to lose. Beech always said they’d crucify my father if they knew even half of what he’d done.’

Miranda swore. ‘The tide,’ she gasped. ‘That’s it.’ She gripped Flora by the shoulder. ‘It’s something to do with the tide in the Thames Estuary, ten days from now.’

It was after eleven and they were sitting on the floor of Flora’s studio, surrounded by shelves of unfired pots, with their backs to the radiator and the kiln on the wall facing them. The whisky bottle sat on the floor between them.

‘In the end I was the one who tracked my mother down,’ Flora continued. ‘She was living in Lisbon. Her new husband was a building contractor with his own business. I was twenty by then, at university. She told me that there wasn’t any other way to do it. If she’d taken me with her my father would have followed her to the ends of the earth. She said she was sorry. We didn’t have much else to say after that.’

‘We have to watch the video again.’ Miranda got up and held out her hand for Flora to grasp.

They splashed through the muddy courtyard back to the house.

‘I swear to God,’ Nor said, speaking out of the tube, ‘the greatest tide that ever was remembered in England.’

Miranda was brandishing the items that she’d pulled down off the cork board in Jonah’s study: the postcard, the ship’s diagram, the print-out of the Sheerness tide tables. ‘That’s it! That’s it! Don’t you see? The tide! A six-metre high tide at eleven p.m. on September twelfth.’

‘It’s a bloody strange way of saying it. Wait.’ Flora leaned over her, minimised the clip and called down Google from the browser menu. She typed in
the greatest tide that ever was remembered in England
and hit search.

‘Look. It’s Samuel Pepys, December seventh 1663. The full quote is
There was last night the greatest tide that ever was remembered in England to have been in this river, all Whitehall having been drowned.
’

‘They’re going to flood the city,’ Miranda said.

Flora nodded. ‘It looks that way.’

Miranda remembered what Alex Ross had said to her in his car about the events unfolding in New Orleans:
It would be the same here, a flood like that. People would die in droves
. She remembered her dream of the night before, an immense wall of water toppling towards her.

She felt a shiver down her spine. ‘Jesus!’

‘Give me those coordinates.’

Miranda handed her the ship’s diagram with the latitude and longitude written on it. Flora clicked on the Google Earth icon on the desktop. It was preset to a satellite image of the earth with the UK at its centre. They plummeted and then raced eastwards from London along the Thames, with Flora keeping an eye on the racing ticker tape of coordinates on the bottom left of the screen.

‘There.’

A bright blue expanse. The sea. Flora zoomed out again and used the ruler. A point about a mile and a half north-east of Sheerness, where the Thames Estuary met the North Sea.

‘There’s nothing there.’

‘But maybe there will be on September twelfth,’ Flora said. ‘A ship perhaps?’

‘We need to tell someone,’ Miranda said.

‘Who?’

They stared at each other.

‘There’s no one to tell,’ Miranda said. She reached for the bottle.

Miranda was describing her ten-year search for her dead son. When looking for her son meant hunting for Bakr. A decade of cities that blurred into each other – Peshawar, Kandahar, Kabul, Grozny, Zenica – the refugee camps full of malnourished children, the hotels packed with journalists and the checkpoints manned by drunken militiamen. Thousands of dollars in envelopes of cash passed to policemen and pimps, guerrillas and gunrunners, all of it wasted on rumours of Bakr that never amounted to anything.

It was in Baghdad in March 2003, with missiles raining down upon the city, that she finally found her husband Bakr, and he agreed to take her to the grave of her son, in the cemetery of a Christian convent on the north side of the city.

‘I wasted ten years of my life looking for him. But he was dead all that time. Why didn’t I know, why didn’t I feel it here, in my chest?’ She pounded her ribcage. ‘What kind of mother am I?’

They were on the sofa in Beech’s study. Flora was holding her, her arm wrapped tightly around Miranda’s shoulders.

‘You wanted him to be alive. Any mother would. Do you think I’d give up if Calum went missing? You did what any of us would have done.’

Miranda wailed.

They were in the middle of a field. Flora was squatting, pissing. Miranda was staggering but staring skywards. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been this drunk.

‘Take a line from the edge of the frying pan and from the centre of the upturned
w
and where the two lines meet,’ she said and pointed, ‘that’s the North Star.’

Flora lurched towards Miranda. She grabbed her by the arms. ‘Jonah’s mother,’ she says. ‘You’ve got to find Jonah’s mother. She’s the one!’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘That’s what Beech said. If anything ever happened to them, they should go to Jonah’s mother. Jonah wasn’t having any of it, but Beech said that’s what they should do.’

‘Why?’

‘She’s in the House of Lords. For Christ’s sake, she’s chair of the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee.’

Miranda whistled.

‘I cut a picture out of a magazine. It was a bear. A polar bear … sitting on its bum on the ice … looking sorry for itself … like it didn’t belong. I gave it to him. I said you’re like this bear. Look at it, I said. You’re a fucking grumpy bear.’ Flora was talking about Jonah. She’d been talking about him for some time, her gestures becoming more animated and the volume of her voice rising as they emptied the bottle.

Miranda was remembering the morning after she had first slept with him, surveying the contents of Jonah’s wallet on the floorboards of the museum in Kuwait City. The usual selection of cards and two folded pieces of paper that caught her attention – a child’s wax-crayon drawing and a picture cut from a magazine of a polar bear slumped on an ice floe. She remembered him looming above her like a baited bear, at a rowdy party at the British embassy the night before, telling her that more than anything he wanted to
roar like a fucking warlock
. She’d felt the spark of desire leap from eye to eye. She remembered that she wanted him then, wanted to capture the raw heat of him and have him burn through the icy mass of her heart. For a while she thought that he had, but something had gone wrong.

‘He was so cut up by the divorce. It was infuriating … he didn’t love her … she didn’t love him. They should have split up years before,’ Flora told her, indignantly. Miranda was hardly listening, shaking her head from side to side. They were on the floor in the kitchen. ‘If they had back then I might have said yes when he asked … but I wasn’t going to throw everything away on the rebound … on damaged goods. He was so bloody shocked that I got together with Andy.’

Miranda was trying to work out why it had gone wrong. Maybe there wasn’t enough heat in him, or she was just too bloody cold.

‘I tried to make it work.’ Flora was crying, the tears running down her cheeks. ‘I really tried. But it was hopeless. I couldn’t get him out of my head. He was there. Every day. And I was screaming … how could you? What are you doing? What about Calum? But none of it mattered. I was falling. Then he said it. He was here … just speaking … here in this room. He said he felt the same.’

Or perhaps she wasn’t the right woman. And then finally, in a moment of drunken clarity, Miranda understood the antagonism, the look on Flora’s face that she now recognised –
I got there first
. She felt a rush of sudden anger. At that moment she hated Jonah with a ferocity that made her head reel.

‘Is that what happened here?’ she demanded. ‘Did he tell you that he loved you? Is that why your husband left?’

‘Oh God!’ Flora stared at her, a startled expression on her face. ‘I’m sorry. I really shouldn’t have told you that.’ She curled up on her side. ‘Shit!’

Miranda grabbed the bottle, in need of its final mouthful.

The dog’s whining woke her. He was on the bed beside her with his snout raised to the window. ‘What is it, dog?’

She groaned, reached for her watch and squinted painfully at the screen by moonlight. It was four in the morning: the vulnerable hour. Her head was thumping. Flora was curled beside her in a tangle of sheets. A moment’s groggy reflection and she remembered putting her to bed and then lying down beside her. She eased herself into a sitting position and then wished she hadn’t moved so rapidly. The contents of her head shifted painfully. Her bladder was uncomfortably full. She rolled her feet off the bed and lurched towards the window, careful to remain in shadow. She stood, silently watching. The moon cast a sparkling glow on the yard.

She almost missed him. In the shadows by the Land Rover was the silhouette of a man, standing like a sentry. She shrunk back. The dog slid across the back of her knees. She glanced across at her bag, at her clothes strewn across the floor, and had to resist the urge to stuff the bag and flee. There had been so many times in the past when she had done just that. Breathe, she told herself. This was no time for panic.
Breathe.

Minutes passed, cirrus cloud slid eastwards. A wave of nausea rolled through her.

The man stepped out of the shadows briefly and the moonlight made a wraith of him. He skirted the yard and was gone. Miranda remained standing, silently watching, as a wave of sudden anger took hold.

Not long after dawn she went from window to window upstairs. There was a gorse-clad hill to the north-west with a rock peak and a crumbling wall running up to it like a spoke, and it appeared to offer the best vantage point.

Just as earlier she had resisted the urge to flee, now she resisted the urge to make a beeline for the hill. She must control her anger. There was a system to searching. Dressed in black, in pile jacket and beanie hat, with her cash in her ankle wallet and the postcard and papers stuffed in the back pocket of her jeans, she went down the stairs with the dog at her heel.

She was halfway down the corridor on her way to the door when she stopped suddenly. There was an empty square on the wall, a picture hook but no picture. The photograph of the Afghan Guides had been removed.

She remembered Flora’s words from the night before:
Officially the Guides didn’t exist
.

Why remove the photo? After Nor’s confession, the existence of the Afghan Guides was circulating on the Internet; it could be denied but not entirely erased. What Nor hadn’t done was name the individual members of the unit. The photograph could be used to identify them – perhaps that was why it had been taken?

She let herself out of the house and began an anticlockwise spiral, working her way out from the house. She rolled over the walls. She stopped at any potential cover, squatted and inspected the ground. The pain in her head had settled to a steady throb.

Eventually she found what she was looking for: a mess of large, unmistakably male footprints behind a hunched, spindly blackthorn tree hard against the wall leading to the rock peak. Squatting, she stared at the house and found herself watching Flora moving back and forth in the bedroom window. The man had paused here and then advanced on the house. She looked back along the wall and saw beside it a line of footprints in the rough grass leading directly up the hill and disappearing into the gorse below the rock peak.