Weeks in Naviras (33 page)

‘But who’s
they
, Gavin?’

‘I don’t know.’

It was the last time we would get to speak to each other during my trip to Washington. I was far from him at the funeral service at the National Cathedral, which was televised around the world. I stood next to James as we watched the coffin being brought down the aisle. James said it was heart-breaking to see, ‘Well, you know who put her there,’ I whispered. He looked at me, shocked, I just kept staring ahead.

There wasn’t really anywhere for Morgan to be buried except Arlington. She lacked a presidential library in California to be interned in, couldn’t go in any old public graveyard, that would’ve been exposed to robbers and vandals. Some of her erstwhile political enemies suggested she just be cremated, quickly disposed of and forgotten like her presidency. I wondered whether her successor would’ve liked that. As the booms from the twenty-one gun salute echoed around the cemetery I stood in silence, staring straight at Gavin. He found me in the crowds and looked at me. Not anguished, not angry, instead his face was demanding. Of me.

‘What did you say to me in the Cathedral?’ James asked me as we were driving to Dulles that evening for our flight back to London.

‘I don’t know what you mean’ I said.

‘Something about who put Morgan in that coffin. I heard you.’

‘I said nothing of the sort. Guilty conscience, perhaps, James?’

‘What the hell’s got into you?’ He was looking directly at me.

‘Oh, I can’t remember, something about the war putting her there.’

I think we travelled on the same aircraft back to London; the same first-class cabin, empty apart from James, me, Rav and some advisers from the Foreign Office and Number 10. After spending the first hour of the flight talking to them James eventually came back to our area, strapped himself in and started reading papers, an hour later he closed his eyes, leaving me to stare out at the moonlit cloudtops.

After half an hour of watching his breathing, of assuring myself he wasn’t just pretending to be out for the count, I slipped off my shoes and got up from my seat. I walked down the aisle. All the political team where shattered and trying to catch some sleep in the hour remaining of the flight. I headed towards the back of the plane, pulling back the curtain just an inch into the galley.

There was a special branch officer sitting on the jumpseat, not asleep but relaxed. He nodded slightly, but didn’t ask if I needed anything. I slipped back quietly into the cabin and padded along to the next aisle, pulling back the curtain and peering through to where the press were all seated. I could see Liz Brickman awake, her face illuminated by the glow of her computer screen. I looked down the rows of seats, counting them, working out the number she was sitting in. Then I turned around and slipped back into the first class cabin, finding an empty seat on the left-hand side, picking up the handset in the armrest and punching in the seat number.

She answered quietly. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s Ellie Weeks,’ I pressed the handset to my mouth, trying to align the pitch of my voice with the engines. ‘I’ve something I want to you to see, but I can’t come down and you certainly can’t come up.’

‘Go on.’

‘It can’t be emailed. I want to send it to you from my phone now, if you let me discover yours?’

‘I can do that.’

‘Passcode 0603,’ I said, before replacing the handset. Shortly our phones connected and I exchanged two files, the first two photos I’d taken of James’s screen. When they finally transferred I waited a moment, then called her seat-phone again.

‘Well this is unusual.’ I could tell Liz was trying not to smile to herself.

‘I want to give it to you. The story.’

‘Okay,’ she hesitated. Maybe she thought I was a prank call by one of the other hacks on the plane. I imagined her eyes darting. ‘What’s it about?’

‘I’m going to show you, soon. You know the country code for Portugal?’

‘Not offhand, no.’ Clearly she thought I’d taken leave of my senses.

‘One day soon, you’re going to get a call, it’ll be a number from there. When you do, I need you to go to a place called Naviras. It’s two hundred kilometres south of Lisbon, on the coast. There’s a house there called Casa Amanhã. When the time comes, be there. I’ll give you the story.’

Thirty minutes before landing I went to the bathroom again, this time right at the front of the plane but still on the opposite side from James. When I’d finished preparing myself for the cameras I opened the door to find Rav standing there. He’d pulled the curtain across so nobody behind us could see. ‘What’s new?’ he said.

‘The place we were, the thing that made us think we were dead, it’s called the Rendering,’ I whispered. ‘Morgan told Gavin about it, the night she killed herself.’

‘She did what?’

I tried to explain everything Gavin had told me, but only got half-way through when a flight attendant pulled back the curtain, saying politely that the area we were standing in needed to be kept clear. ‘He must know,’ was all I said to Rav before returning to my seat, cocking my head towards my husband.

James was awake but hadn’t noticed I’d been talking to Rav because he was facing backwards, as he always liked to. But he still looked up from his papers suspiciously as I sat down and buckled up. ‘You’ve been up and down. I think we need to have a chat, maybe? But not now.’

‘I agree,’ I replied, feeling the pull of gravity as the plane’s engines changed rhythm and the nose began to tilt downward. ‘Perhaps we can start with why you had Lottie and Luis killed? If they really are dead, that is.’

His eyes flew open. It was satisfying to see. ‘What the fuck?’

‘It’s fine,’ I said, lightly. ‘I can actually understand why you had to do it. I can see the rationale.’ The seatbelt sign came on. ‘But one day people will find out, James. Nothing stays a secret forever. Even if it takes a hundred years, people will know one day, what you did.’

I watched his adam’s apple start to pulse, his upper lip curling. ‘Not here, L. Please.’

‘Or else?’ I stared casually at my fingernails, keeping my voice low. ‘Will you have me killed, as well? Some kind of horrific accident, perhaps?’

‘I will talk to you about this later,’ he leaned forward as far as his seatbelt would allow. ‘Later today, I promise. But you have to know this,’ he hissed. ‘I did not kill Lottie, and I didn’t kill Luis. Whatever else you might think of me, I’m not a murderer.’

‘Oh, okay. So you’re merely an adulterer,’ I shot back, still talking quietly. It was gratifying to watch him unravel, stuck in his seat and unable to evade me. Pinned down in every sense for the first time in his adult life, I thought, before realising it wasn’t the first time. I’d seen that look on his face before in the Rendering, just before the cliffs in Naviras Bay had collapsed.

James was pulling the strangest face. He clenched his lips together so tightly they curved upwards into something resembling a smile. Maybe he saw everything in front of him teetering. He wasn’t looking directly at me; I watched his eyes narrow just slightly as he quickly tried to war-game his way out.

We drove from the airport to Downing Street in total silence. Both of us caught the footage of us disembarking the plane, endlessly looping on the news channel in the seat-back screen. James looking troubled, me with a little smile. The news was still firmly focused on US politics, a constant mix of talking up Morgan’s achievements in office and then knocking down the new president’s likely agenda. That fixation took the heat off James for a day or two, at least publicly.

By the time we got to Number 10 the kids had already been taken to school, though apparently not without extreme protest. James and I went upstairs; me first, him following and closing the door to the flat.

‘I’m think it’s best if we call the doctor, L,’ he said, out of breath. ‘I don’t think you’re at all well.’

‘I’m fine, James, really I am. I just want to know why you’ve done everything that you have. What purpose you think it’s served.’

‘Ellie, I’m sorry but I can’t deal with this. You need professional help.’

‘Oh, I’d love some professional help, James. A lawyer, maybe, to help me divorce you and get the kids away from you.’ Maybe I’d call Gail, I thought.

‘I won’t give you a divorce, Ellie. Not easily. I’ve done nothing to warrant it.’

‘Really? How about shagging Rosie in your office in Portcullis. How about killing Lottie and Luis?’

His lips pursed. ‘I don’t know what you know about me and Rosie, L, but that was a long time ago. And as for..’

‘I know because I caught you, James. I walked into your office while you were in the middle of doing it.’

He closed his eyes, ran his hand through his hair. He said nothing for a minute. ‘Alright, so you got me. Yes, I cheated on you. Once in ten years. But I’m sorry, this stuff about Lottie and Luis, I mean it’s ridiculous. You’re delusional.’

‘Delusional! Yeah, you’re right, James. I have been, very. But you did kill them, or you had them killed. You must have known about it. They needed me to have some friends to play with, didn’t they? When they put me in the Rendering.’

He made a sharp, slow intake of breath. ‘What.’

‘Oh I know everything, James, I’ve seen all the files. I know about Orithyia. That’s what they called me, wasn’t it?’

‘Who have you spoken to about this?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Not Gavin?’

‘Gavin doesn’t know anything James, and he doesn’t care. He just wants to get away from all of this now, away from people like you. As do I.’

‘I don’t understand how you know all this then, if you haven’t spoken to anyone else about it.’

‘I think I’d prefer to keep my powder dry about that, thanks all the same.’

‘What do you intend to do?’

‘Just tell me why, please. Whose idea was it?’

He just stood there for a moment, knew the game was up. ‘There is a view, and it’s one I have a lot of sympathy with, that if you take religion out of the equation then people will never be happy. That was the plan.’ His phone started vibrating; he put it in his pocket. ‘All this misery, the depression, the anxiety, it’s all stemming from the collapse in faith. No wonder no party can ever get a decent majority. People don’t believe in anything. Actually, the Rendering was designed for a different purpose…’

‘Yes, a torture device.’

‘But now it’s being used for something quite different. It was meant to make you all believe there was something after this. But you crashed the simulation, L. Nobody knows why. Those scans they did on you after you woke up, there was something odd about them but they didn’t know. That’s why I asked you a fortnight ago whether you’d been on any medication. They thought they’d detected activity in your brain they couldn’t account for.’

I hesitated. I knew it was irrational to give away more secrets, but on some level I felt James had finally levelled with me, so deserved something back. ‘I was on antidepressants,’ I said. ‘From just before you got Downing Street to just after the attack. I never told anyone, apart from my doctor in Eppingham.’

James gave a little gasp. ‘Why were you on them? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You were the reason I was on them, James! Everything. Our joke of a marriage, you and Rosie, I could deal with all that. But when Lottie died, then me and Luis…’ I couldn’t finish. Perhaps I knew where that line had been going; would end up with me conceding that I was partly to blame. ‘Anyway,’ I said instead. ‘What they did to Morgan, those things attacking her, again and again. You must know I witnessed that.’

‘What things?’

I told him about the bees in the cave, how they’d come for me later. If he was only pretending to be shocked he did a good job of it. He sat down. ‘I didn’t know anything about that.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I don’t care if you believe me or not, L; it’s the truth.’ His voice was quivering. ‘I didn’t know they’d do anything like that to her.’ He put both his hands up to his cheeks, squeezed his lips together. ‘All they told me was how you’d wound up in a part of the Rendering you weren’t supposed to be. We lost you when you left Rav’s area. They said they didn’t find you again until you were back in yours. I was waiting for you there, with him. Luis.’ He looked at me. ‘I’m not the only adulterer in this marriage, am I.’

I snorted. ‘He was there for me, often. When you weren’t.’

I took that in for a moment. ‘So, you expect me to believe they never bothered to tell you they were torturing the President of the United States.’

He shook his head firmly. ‘I had no idea what they’d planned for her, I just suggested once that bees were something she wasn’t keen on. But they could’ve got that from anyone. Believe me, L, I wouldn’t advocate torture. But these decisions, you know, they weren’t made in committee.’

‘What did you hope to gain from it then?’

His chin touched his chest, his voice constricted. ‘Really, all I wanted was to get the Energy Bill through. I thought at least if the Middle East became unstable then it’d focus minds here, make people realise we can’t depend on the rest of the world for our fuel anymore.’

‘But the price of oil’s gone through the roof!’