Never Tell (23 page)

I returned to college in the autumn term. I worked hard and made up the time I’d lost. I avoided the funny looks I sometimes got. I didn’t party any more. I hung out with Jen and Liz, thankful for their refusal to pass judgement on me: I got a Saturday job in the Botanical Gardens and sat under Tolkien’s tree in my tea-break. I wrote for the
Cherwell
and then the new paper the
Oxford Student;
I drank occasionally in the King’s Arms – never in The Turl – though my taste for alcohol was largely gone.

Two years later, I graduated with a good degree and after travelling round India, I joined a broadsheet as a trainee. Eventually I travelled the world as a reporter. The dreamer in me had been crushed by the disaster. The naïve teenager from the provinces was dead: now I had a thirst for truth; putting things right wherever I could by reporting the news people needed to know. Intensely grateful that the final antics of Society X had been kept from the press, thanks to Higham’s omnipotence, I turned my back on the whole episode, never tempted to reveal the sordid facts to anyone. Only somewhere along the way, I had acquired a new craving for risk and danger that I could never quite suppress. And I never spoke to anyone in Society X again, until I met James years later.

A warm summer’s afternoon, July 2000. I was at the Gare du Nord in Paris nursing a hangover and an aching heart, staring dispiritedly at the dry old chicken baguette I’d just bought as I waited for the Eurostar after a disastrous and unusually alcoholic sojourn in Paris with yet another unsuitable boyfriend. My mobile rang: I hoped it might be him, phoning to explain, but actually Concorde had just crashed fatally outside the city.

The World Service asked me to file an on-the-scene report, which I did. Later that evening, sad and exhausted, I flopped alone on the huge and empty bed at my hotel in St-Germain. I tried to ring my old friend Jen, hoping she might be in town with the French Ambassador, but her voicemail was on. I chucked the phone on the bed, where it promptly rang again.

‘Guy on the other line says he is your friend. Saw you on the news apparently. Wants your number,
chérie
. He’s in
La Ville Lumière
too,’ my old colleague Bernard at the Paris bureau sounded world-weary. ‘Shall I tell ‘im where to go?’

I tucked the phone beneath my chin and kneeled in front of the mini-bar, debating vodka or gin. Alcohol might be no longer my thing, but I felt I was going down tonight: the grief of the Concorde tragedy; my own disillusionment with the lover whom I’d just discovered had a wife he hadn’t yet divorced, and two small children. His protestations about not being able to keep away from me, my irresistible sex appeal et al. simply weren’t soothing the heartache I now felt. Yet again, I’d chosen wrongly.

‘What’s his name?’ I broke the seal on the vodka. In for a penny …

‘James something. From your college, he said.’

‘James?’ I put the bottle down. ‘Not James Miller?’

Nervous but oddly exhilarated, we met that night for dinner on the Left Bank. It was a small Moroccan restaurant lit by a hundred tiny flickering candles; we sat on silk cushions beneath stained-glass lanterns and they served couscous from brightly coloured tagines.

James looked well. He was tanned and toned, dressed in a pale blue cashmere jumper and jeans. He was relaxed and charming, and full of funny stories about pop stars and actors he’d met in LA.

‘I miss England, though,’ he said as he topped up my glass of red. ‘I’ve been away so long. I miss the greenness.’

‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’ I thought of all the deserts I’d seen, the collapsed cities, bomb-torn buildings, ramshackle poor suburbs, half-naked kids in the slums.

‘But you know, Rose, most of all I miss the – familiarity.’

Something in his voice made my stomach lurch slightly. ‘It’s so nice to see you,’ I said quietly and, at the time, I meant it. He put his hand over mine.

‘Do you ever – have you ever seen anyone … ‘ He trailed off.

‘No.’ I shook my head vehemently and picked up my wineglass.

‘Rosie. Petal.’ He put his hand out for a moment and I felt myself start to exhale. As if I’d been holding my breath for eight years.

‘Do you feel like – do you feel like it changed you? For ever?’

‘Society X?’ He pushed away his plate and refilled his own tumbler. ‘Yeah, of course.’

‘We were so stupid, weren’t we?’ I said, shocked to feel tears spring to my eyes.

‘We weren’t stupid, Rose. We were just young. Young and incredibly naïve.’

‘I loved him so bloody much, you know.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ he said ruefully.

I smiled. ‘I loved you too.’

‘Did you?’ He looked so dubious I felt a latent stab of guilt.

‘Yes, of course. It was just – well, you know. He was so – charismatic. I got … I got …’ I sought for the right word.

‘Side-tracked?’

‘Yes, side-tracked. He was so charismatic – and so bloody mad in the end.’

‘Well, I’d certainly never met anyone like Dalziel before.’

‘Nor had I.’ I grinned wryly. ‘I went to a comp in Derby, for God’s sake.’

‘So, then. He was from a different world. You were overwhelmed.’ He put his hand over mine. ‘Don’t beat yourself up about it.’

‘It’s hard, though, isn’t it? You know,’ I fiddled with my wooden napkin ring, ‘I did a report in Rwanda a few years ago, about survivors guilt.’

‘I definitely feel guilty.’

‘So do I. I think it’s kind of driven everything I’ve done since then – what happened in that hotel room that night.’

‘Are you saying we’re survivors?’

‘Well, I’m not equating us to the poor bloody Rwandans, if that’s what you mean, but still – I don’t know. It definitely left me – different.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Like, I was lucky to get out of it all unscathed.’

‘And?’

‘And now I have a – a kind of duty.’

‘What kind of duty?’

‘It’s hard to explain.’ I felt slightly abashed. ‘To help others, I suppose. It’s focused my career, definitely.’

‘Well, it’s left me –’ he drained his wine and grinned – ‘it’s left me with a duty to get drunk.’

I gazed at him, meeting the kind brown eyes that I remembered so well now. ‘Oh, James.’ Only later did I regret not heeding his oblique warning.

He held his hand up to my face, and slowly I felt myself start to relax in a way I hadn’t for years.

‘Shall we … ?’ Why did I feel suddenly shy? ‘Shall we go?’

We paid as quickly as we could. We walked back through the streets of St-Germain, past the brightly lit cafés and bars, crowds on the pavements in the sultry night – but we didn’t stop for a last drink. We went back to the hotel and we fell into bed. We didn’t get out for two days.

I couldn’t explain it at first.

We met and we reconnected. It was as if our secret held us together; as if we were the only two who could understand. Perhaps we remembered why we’d loved one another as teenagers, or maybe we just clung on, looking for something good to come from something terrible. And we shared a love of adventure, a thirst for new experience that perhaps Dalziel had taught us. Our reward from Dalziel: that, and a sense of guilt. Whatever the truth, the rest, well, the rest as they say, was history. Until today.

Chapter Fifteen
LONDON, MARCH 2008

I walked through St James’s Park and I felt like I’d drunk too much coffee, which I probably had. I also felt exhausted and a little mad, to say the least. Nothing quite added up and every lead swerved off, with nothing coming back to tie up neatly. But what I couldn’t decipher was, was there really no story worth covering – or had I simply lost my ability to follow a trail?

On the little bridge over the lake I stopped to watch the pelicans, who looked so venerable out on the fat rocks, bills resting on their plump chests. A tall couple in crackling anoraks handed me their camera, thanking me profusely in broken English. I took the picture and walked on, pausing beneath the frothing blossom trees in the sweet-scented air, in this oasis in the midst of all the fumes of London town. My mind was spinning fast as a Catherine Wheel.

If Xav refused to print it, perhaps I should write the story anyway: someone would want it, surely. It was my duty now to discern the facts – that’s all I could see. But I knew I was playing with fire. I thought about the children up at my mother’s house. This was the longest time I’d been away from them.

My phone bleeped. I didn’t recognise the number; the text message simply named a London hotel and asked me to come there in an hour, to tell Reception I had arrived.

I thought about how one day you don’t know someone and then the next, you meet and you can never go back, can never unknow them. I thought about the point at which our lives collide, like a great comet speeding across a huge sky, touching first one star, then immediately the next, connecting momentarily, arbitrarily – and then moving on. But that connection is indelible, even when it’s lost. It’s there for ever. Danny was in the forefront of my mind, but Maya and James were there too; and the tendrils of Society X were pushing their way up through the foundations of my life again.

I put the phone away and I walked on and on and on. The sky was so blue, a true blue, the clouds stacked and soft. I wanted to reach up and pull them down around me, hide away inside.

The past twenty-four hours had changed my life irrefutably, I knew that much. I couldn’t go back to how I was before. And I was too exhausted to go home.

I walked on into town.

The hotel on Charlotte Street was discreet and green, with flags waving gently in the breeze outside, a shiny receptionist and a busy restaurant full of women who wore sunglasses on the tops of their coiffured heads, and men in chinos. A note at Reception asked me to wait in the restaurant; I was shown to a table in the corner where I ordered juice and, realising I hadn’t eaten for a while, a scone with cream and jam.

I’d just finished it when a young slim girl wearing a beige headscarf and black trousers arrived at my elbow.

‘Rose Miller?’ She had a familiar look but I didn’t know her. ‘Please, would you come with me?’

I followed her to a suite upstairs. She wore no jewellery and no make-up, and her hair was pulled back tightly under the hijab.

‘Please, have a seat,’ she murmured, taking off her jacket, and I perched on the edge of the armchair, waiting. Her skin was fascinating: smooth and shiny like marble. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I said. The sitting room of the suite was understated and furnished beautifully for a hotel, the smell from a huge vase of pink roses pervading the air; the door to the bedroom shut tight.

The main door opened and a suave man walked in; the girl immediately slunk into the background. I recognised him from the petrol station the other night. Only, when I looked closer, there was something familiar about his handsome face – something that still eluded me.

‘Mrs Miller?’ He extended a hand. ‘Ash Kattan.’

We shook hands.

‘Who – was it you who contacted me then?’

‘I believe you met Maya again yesterday. Maya and her doctor.’

Ash resembled his sister, tawny-skinned and sleek, though he looked more like his father than she did, perhaps. Only his round eyes were very different, more protuberant than Hadi’s, less veiled and far lighter. Reminiscent of someone else. I just couldn’t think who.

‘Yes, I did, very briefly.’ I wondered uneasily if the family also knew I’d called the police yesterday.

‘I think my father was surprised that you returned to Albion Manor when he had asked –’ he smiled – ‘well, you know.’

‘Asked me to leave?’ I helped him out. I thought I heard a noise from the other room, but he didn’t react. My heart beat a little faster. I wondered whether anyone was in London with them, and then I despised myself for hoping it might be Danny.

‘Yes. He can be quite – formidable, my father.’

‘Well, the thing is – Maya, she—’ I didn’t want to get his sister into yet more trouble. Quickly I backtracked. ‘I went to the house because, well, I thought I should make sure that your dad really didn’t want to speak to me again. I was hoping to write about him, you see. He’s such an interesting man, and the local community would be so fascinated by his life.’

Ash stood and walked to the flowers, which he studied for a moment. Flattery was getting me nowhere, that was obvious.

‘Mrs Miller.’ Ash Kattan had a low attractive voice, a voice that was used to speaking and being heard. I wondered how his political campaign was going, if he was after Eddie Johnson’s seat. Something told me he had bigger ambitions.

‘I’m very worried about my sister.’ Ash turned. ‘I will be frank. Maya is not a well woman, you must understand. She is devastated by the death of her boyfriend. She is not –’ he paused, searching for the right words – ‘she is not in control, I think would be the most true thing to say.’

‘What do you mean, control?’

‘She – she has some habits that are not good for her. That is why we have asked Dr Fisher to stay at the house for a few days. To observe her.’

‘And the medicine that she takes?’ I asked.

‘Maya is – she has had some mental health problems, Mrs Miller. She is of a – of what you might call a nervous disposition.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ I thought of Maya’s words about her own mother.
Busy losing her mind
. ‘Could you be a little more … expansive?’

‘My father would be upset that I’ve told you. He is very ashamed right now, ashamed and worried. But the truth is, Maya is an addict, Mrs Miller.’ For a second I thought Ash’s face might actually crumple. ‘My sister is truly addicted.’

The room felt stifling hot suddenly. ‘I see.’ My mind raced back to the times I’d met Maya. ‘I hadn’t realised that, I have to say. I thought she was … just broken-hearted, really. Brokenhearted and frustrated …’ I trailed off. I looked at Ash. He smiled back. He had a small black mole, almost like a beauty mark, by his mouth. He reached in his pocket, pulled out cigarettes.

‘She is broken-hearted, yes. Her boyfriend died.’