The Road Between Us (2 page)

‘On Good Friday.’ The German must be feeling the same because he rises from the bed, crosses the room and rests a hand on Charles’s shoulder. ‘And we will meet there again on Good Friday next year, once the war is over. We will have oysters and champagne. Until then we can keep in touch via the Swedish Embassy in Berlin.’ With a fingertip he reads the vertebrae down Charles’s back. ‘You’re not the only one who knows people in the diplomatic service, Grumpy.’

Charles shivers and smiles. Feels for his friend’s hand. ‘Or we could meet halfway. In Paris.’ He is drunk now, intoxicated by the sinking, delicious helplessness of one who yearns to possess. ‘Don’t go, Dopey. Please.’

‘It won’t be for ever.’

‘There is an alternative. We can go away together. Start a new life in Ireland.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘We could leave this week. Take the ferry from Fishguard.’

Anselm considers this before answering. ‘You will be asking for a posting there?’

‘No.’ Charles exhales slowly, guiltily. Once the words have left him there will be no taking them back. ‘Ireland is going to stay neutral. The south, I mean. We can start a new life there. New identities. I have some money.’

‘You will become a deserter?’

It is time for his announcement, yet still he hesitates. ‘No, I …’ Now, Charles. Say it now. ‘I will fake my own death. I’ve worked it out. A sailing trip. They know I like to sail on my own. The abandoned boat will be reported. My body never found. Assumed washed overboard.’

Anselm tries to take this in. ‘You would fake your own death for me?’

‘Without you I’m a dead man anyway.’

Charles stares at a notice pasted on the peeling wall, one that stands out because it has had time neither to fade nor to gather dust. It informs hotel guests what to do ‘in the event of an emergency’, by order of the Home Office, and is dated 5 June 1939. Two weeks ago.

The sound of a key chattering in a lock makes him flinch. He turns his face to the door; reaches for Anselm’s hand.

Another key is tried and the door yawns open. Dimpled fingers feel for the light switch. When the hotel manageress, a short woman with badly dyed hair, sees the two naked men by the window, the fingers rise to her mouth in shock. She steps to one side to allow two RAF police officers to enter.

‘Northcote?’ the taller of the two says. ‘Pilot Officer Charles Northcote?’

‘You might have knocked.’

‘Get dressed please, there’s a good gentleman.’

‘Are you arresting me?’

‘We’re arresting you both.’

II

Kandahar Province. Late spring. Present day

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ELEVEN YEARS, ONE WEEK AND FOUR DAYS
, Edward Northcote opens his eyes and sees daylight. Recoiling in pain, he closes them again and, at the same time, tries to cover his face, only to realize his hands are tied behind his back.

He opens them again, two narrow slits this time. There is a blur of watery light, but no hard edges. After a succession of blinks, he is able to open his eyes a little wider and, by ignoring the stabs of light, look out on to a world that is strange and cold. A landscape in black and white.

He is lying on his side on what appears to be a dirt track. There are small rocks scattered around him. He stares at one of them, trying to find his focus.

What has woken him? A noise is dimming in his memory. It sounds like wood tapping against wood. He remembers now: it had been this noise that had been tapping its way into the depths, like sonar signals hundreds of leagues below the surface of conscious thought. He had been trying to climb towards them, against a weight of water, up a mile-high ladder.

He blinks again. There are blotches before his eyes now, floating like petals in a slow current, and, in his peripheral vision, a shape. It is a boy, about eleven years old, wearing a hooded sweatshirt over
a white cotton
thoub
and holding a cricket bat in one hand and a mallet in the other. The boy studies him for a moment then carries on ‘knocking in’ his bat.
Tap. Tap. Tap.

Edward tries to move his head but a dense gravity prevents him.

The boy stops knocking. ‘
Salaam alaikum
,’ he says with an uncertain smile.

Edward tries to speak but his vocal cords have no energy. Instead his narrowed eyes track from the boy to the cluster of concrete-grey, flat-roofed shapes at the end of the road. The boy follows his gaze, then turns and runs towards the shapes. Edward’s lids droop, the muscles unused to the heaviness.

Time becomes fragmented now as he drifts in and out of consciousness. Men wearing helmets and flak jackets are lifting him into the back of a truck. They are asking him questions, in English. One of them is wearing sunglasses and Edward manages to signal to him that he needs some, that the light is hurting his eyes. The soldier understands, takes them off and places them gently on Edward’s face. He can now see he is in a jeep. It has a long, whippy aerial that dances in the wind as they bump over potholes and swerve around corners. He recalls seeing an aerial like this years ago, on the day he was kidnapped, moments before his convoy was attacked.

I’ve survived, he now thinks, with sudden, shocking clarity.

It is over.

Now he is being dragged along on a gurney with a squeaky wheel. Drips are attached to his arms. Over his mouth there is an oxygen mask.

And now there are plumes of dust spiralling upwards and the
thump, thump, thump
of helicopter blades beating the air. After so many years of near silence, this noise seems impossibly loud, as if it is tearing at the very molecular structure of the universe.

Now there are flashbulbs and Edward is being dragged along on a gurney again. The flashes are creating a stroboscopic effect. Voices are calling his name.

‘What was it like, Edward?’

‘Was there a deal done for your release, Edward?’

‘What did you think when you heard about your wife, Edward?’

His next realization is that he is on a military plane of some sort – as cavernous as a hangar, as empty as space – and he is being strapped to a bed. A screen is being put up around him. There are more drips on stands. More electrical equipment. More lights. Webbing is clattering against the metal sides of the cabin. His stomach is lurching. They are taking off.

Level now. He can hear the steady throb of an engine. Stars are visible out of the small porthole but, having forgotten what they look like, he takes a while to register what they are. Needles are being stuck in his arms. He soon finds himself submitting to the spin of sleep.

Edward’s longest period of consciousness comes when he is in a hospital bed with a cage above it – a chrome contraption with pulleys. To his left is a machine with lights that are grey –
grey?
– a monitor of some sort. It is making a humming noise. There are electrodes taped to his chest.

Am I hurt?
He says this wordlessly; a thought that does not carry to his mouth. He doesn’t feel ill. There is no pain. A rhythm is pulsing in his head. I need a little time to wake up, wake up …

Sensation is returning in a flood now, a surge of warmth. He notices the oxygen mask by his bed and the drip taped to his arm. There is another tube taped to his stomach.

I’m being fed through a tube?

A woman appears in the doorway. She has pale, tumbling hair. Her grey eyes are flecked with grains of sugar. The eyes of a snow leopard. To Edward she is unmistakable. He has called out her name many times over the missing years, to himself, to the walls of the cave, to the darkness, but now the word comes as the sort of soft, gummy, slack-mouthed noise that dental patients make before the anaesthetic has worn off.

‘
Frejya!
’

The woman’s face contorts. She holds a hand to her mouth, then turns and leaves.

A tall doctor with hairy wrists and unnaturally white teeth arrives. He is wearing a grey, hospital-issue gown.

Why am I seeing everything in black and white?

‘Mr Northcote,’ he says. ‘Edward … You are in a hospital. The Cromwell Hospital in London. You are safe now.’

‘
Frejya!
’

‘I’m afraid … A lot has happened.’ Pause. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘
Frejya!
’

‘That wasn’t your wife you saw. That was …’ The tall doctor puts his hand to his mouth, as the woman had done. ‘Let me call … There’s someone waiting outside to see you. He’s from the Foreign Office. He will explain everything.’

With his well-pressed, navy-blue suit and cream-coloured, open-necked shirt, Sir Niall Campbell looks like what he is, a formal man who has removed his tie to try to make himself look informal. The tie is rolled up in his hand and he stares at it for a moment before stuffing it in his pocket.

In his other hand he is carrying a laminated TRiM card. It lists the standard Trauma Risk Management questions he is supposed to ask on behalf of Human Resources, so that an assessment can be made as to whether, or rather when, Edward will need to see a ‘psych’. Niall knows that the questions will be irrelevant in Edward’s case – Have you had any flashbacks? Any recurring dreams? Are you drinking more than normal? – but he finds it reassuring that he won’t be entering the ward empty-handed.

He breathes in, buttons up his jacket, the middle of three, then unbuttons it again and breathes out. Why is he stalling? Why doesn’t he simply march in like the busy man he is? He knows why. Northy might not recognize him. Niall has put on weight in the past decade. About two and a half stone. His once-thick and dark hair, meanwhile, has gone thin and grey.

When he enters, his personal vanities evaporate. The skeletal figure on the bed bears only a passing resemblance to the tall, dark-haired, heavy-shouldered young man he had first met on the rugby
field as a student. Edward had been a flanker, Niall a fullback. A bitingly cold wind had been blowing in over the Fens and they had grinned at one another as they shivered. Niall had felt slightly in awe of Edward as a student, not least because he had been an all-round sportsman – as useful with a tennis racquet and a cricket bat as he was with a rugby ball – as well as a witty and persuasive speaker at the Union. Yet he had also been a man of quiet modesty and decency, all substance and no show, liked and known. And because Niall was part of his circle, he found himself becoming liked and known, too.

It was after they graduated and sat their civil service exams together that their friendship deepened. For eighteen months, they had shared a desk at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in a room with a fireplace. The fire was no longer used by the time they arrived, a tradition that had disappeared along with women having to resign when they got married. But on mornings when they had hangovers they would rest their heads on their desks, knowing that FCO custom meant they would not be disturbed (it being assumed that they had worked through the night).

It had been Edward, with his urbane manner and starred First, who was the one everyone tipped to go all the way. Then, with his posting to Norway, something changed. He fell in love. Had a child. Got married. And the price for his contentment was a loss of ambition. Edward had once confided to Niall that he sometimes thought of giving up the diplomatic service entirely to live off the land: growing his own vegetables, fishing, chopping wood. His wife’s family had a log cabin they rarely used, up near the fjords where the summers are short and the winters long. It was theirs for the asking. He could write a book there. A novel perhaps.

And Niall encouraged him. But instead Edward and Frejya moved to London, with plans to settle there and perhaps have a second child, and that book was never written.

Now, according to the chart on the end of his bed, Edward weighs just under seven stone. Niall has heard that they decided to test his DNA to be sure it matched that of the Edward Northcote
they had on record. He has also been told that, in the five days since Edward first opened his eyes in daylight, he has not managed to keep them open for longer than a few minutes.

Whether he is still aware of what is being said to him when his eyes are shut is debatable. Apparently there is not much sign of recognition, and scant evidence of memory.

But however prepared Niall thought he was for this encounter, the reality of it is shocking. Seeing a pedal bin in the corner of the room, he walks over to it, opens the lid and drops in the TRiM card.

Edward’s eyes have closed again now, and there is a clear fluid dribbling down his chin. His right arm flails, then goes limp. The bones are pushing against his skin, smoothing it out and leaving baggy creases where it falls away. His eyes appear to be sinking deep into his skull, as if his face is melting. The membrane inside his mouth is protruding so that it looks like part of his lips. Behind them, his teeth look too big for his mouth, brown and decayed with pus oozing out from the gum line. His hair is silvery and long, hanging below his shoulder blades. He has a beard that reaches his barrelled ribs, and his skin is yellow and leathery, almost translucent. The plastic hospital ID band around his wrist is loose on him. He looks a hundred years old.

‘Northy? Can you hear me?’

Niall wonders if his friend will remember the circumstances that led to his kidnapping, how he had been the one who persuaded him to go. The assignment had made sense, at the time. Because Edward had once worked as a cultural attaché in the Middle East – and spoke some Arabic – he had been asked to join a multinational UNESCO team being sent into the remote mountain region of Hazarajat in central Afghanistan. There had been reports that the Buddhas of Bamiyan, two sixth-century monumental statues carved into the side of a cliff, had been dynamited and destroyed by the Taliban. That was in March 2001, six months before the jihadists hijacked two passenger planes and flew them into the Twin Towers.

When Edward’s convoy had driven into an ambush, he had been in the third of four Land-Cruisers. A rocket-propelled grenade attack. Officially, there had been no survivors. But when eleven out of thirteen bodies were recovered and identified, Edward’s was not among them. In the weeks that followed, Niall had awaited the inevitable ransom or demand for the release of political prisoners, but neither came. Although the possibility that he had been taken hostage was never ruled out, the unofficial presumption was that he must be dead – and dead was what he was officially declared after he had been missing for ten years.