Together by Christmas

by Karen Swan

  Together by

  Christmas

  KAREN SWAN

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  For Helen Fearn.

  Another strong mama.

  Prologue

  Turkish–Syrian border, 2014

  ‘I can’t believe you got a car.’ Lee looked around the spartan interior of the old Toyota Hilux, impressed.

  ‘Of course I got a car.’ Cunningham looked across at her and winked, the hot wind blowing his dark hair back, his eyes hidden behind his aviators.

  She shook her head with a sigh. He could charm the devil. ‘How’d you do it?’

  ‘Fifty bucks and all my smokes.’

  She arched an eyebrow. ‘All of them?’

  ‘Well, maybe not quite all.’ He grinned, reaching into the pocket of his flak jacket and handing some over.

  She shook her head.

  ‘You quit?’ He sounded incredulous. Cigarettes and whisky were some of the only pleasures to be had out here.

  ‘Trying to. Those things will kill you, you know.’

  He threw his head back and laughed, replacing the cigarettes in his jacket pocket. ‘Yeah, right – it’s the cigarettes that’ll get me.’

  She smiled too, dropping her head onto the armrest, feeling happy to be back. The windows were open – the air con had died in this car long before war had broken out – and she could feel the sun beating ferociously on her arm as it lay flat on the ledge.

  Her camera lay on her lap, ever-ready, but for once she didn’t pick it up. She wasn’t working yet and her eyes grazed the empty landscape, looking for beauty – a green tree, a high-flying bird, cattle grazing, some flowers. Instead, they were amid an unbroken panorama of red, baked earth, mountains at their backs, the mighty Euphrates a few miles south. Every so often, they passed a stray coil of barbed wire twisted on the ground, a deep gash in the ground where an IED had gone off, tumbling concrete ruins of what had once been villages, plumes of dust in the sky from not-so-distant gunfire and mortar attacks.

  She closed her eyes, enjoying the feeling of her blonde hair tickling her face in the breeze, trying to resist sleep. She had only been back out here for three days but those three days had been spent on the road trying to catch up with Cunningham since her flight into the military airbase in Hama, the region where they were supposed to have met up. She had gone home for six weeks for a badly needed break but Cunningham hadn’t stopped moving in that time: she had left him in Raqqa, he’d journeyed through Hama – seemingly without stopping – and now, here they were in Aleppo province, nudging the Turkish border.

  To Lee – momentarily softened again by her retreat to the land of electricity and hot running water, of luxury cars and feathered beds – it felt like standing on the knife-edge of the world, the horizon found and captured with nothing else beyond. The colours, the heat, the noise – everything was raw here. Conditions seemed to have deteriorated in the time she’d been gone; she wouldn’t have thought that was possible after Homs, but somehow the level for rock bottom kept dropping down.

  The road was in desperately poor condition, deep potholes and ruts bouncing them around alarmingly; it seemed unlikely the old Toyota’s suspension could take it, and yet somehow the little car kept motoring along, blooms of dust in their wake.

  ‘I saw you hooked up with Schneider.’ She arched an eyebrow.

  He looked across at her and gave a bemused laugh. ‘Now don’t you get jealous. I had to use someone. I didn’t know if you were even gonna come back.’

  ‘I said I would, didn’t I?’

  He gave her one of his looks, the ones that went where words wouldn’t. They both knew how she’d been when she’d left here. Homs had been brutal, a relentless, pounding bombardment that had pulled the marrow from the bones of even the most seasoned reporters.

  ‘He’s not a patch on you, Fitch, and you know it.’ He gave her one of his famous grins and she couldn’t help but grin back – she did know it – both of them feeling the adrenaline surge that came from doing this job. By any normal definition of the word, they were mad, driving headlong into a conflict zone and actively looking forward to it.

  How many assignments had they been on together now? Eleven, twelve? Pretty impressive given the areas they’d worked, given this had been an accidental partnership in the first place. But Homs had been a pivot for them both. She’d thought she’d seen the worst there was to see, she’d thought barbarity had lost its shock value for her and no depravities remained to break her heart. Until the barrel bombs had started falling from the skies. Even now, the sight of a helicopter, the sound of its distinctive drone, made her blood stand still in her veins.

  And what was it for? Why did she and Cunningham put themselves through this, dismantling their own souls, putting their lives on the line when it didn’t change anything? Words on the front page of a newspaper weren’t enough; a photo of a child’s terror, a mother’s desperation, wasn’t enough to stop those bombs from falling, because still they fell, and harder than ever. But she was drawn back here – against her better judgement, against all reason – for the very simple reason that if not her, then who? People only believed what they could see; she had to be their eyes. These stories had to be told. These people had no one else. And neither did she.

  Cunningham reached over and squeezed her thigh. ‘It’s good to have you back, Fitch. I missed you.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess I missed your ugly mug too. Although I’d have appreciated you telling me to meet you here, instead of a hundred miles away,’ she said with a sarcastic smile. ‘That was three nights’ sleep I’ll never get back.’

  He chuckled, his fingers tapping lightly on the top of the steering wheel. ‘Gotta go where the stories are, Fitch.’

  ‘There’s stories all over this hellhole. You can’t move for stories. There’s not a person in this country who doesn’t have a story.’

  He looked across and winked. ‘Not like this one.’

  Something in his body language caught her attention and made her antennae twitch. ‘Oh God,’ she groaned. She had seen that look only a handful times over the course of their partnership but she knew exactly what it meant. ‘What have you got?’

  ‘A tip-off.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she mumbled, waiting for more. Cunningham prided himself on his network of contacts; it ran across the country, criss-crossing regions like a gossamer spider’s web, unseen but for a tiny vibration in the wind.

  ‘There’s a small village, Khrah Eshek, eight miles west of here. There’s a guy there I want to talk to. Name of Moussef. I helped his cousin, Abbad, in Raqqa—’

  She watc
hed him as he talked, seeing how burnt his skin was, the dust in his hair, fatigue as worn upon his body as that shirt. Did he even notice any more? She had only been gone six weeks but her perspective was fresh again. She saw this place with new eyes.

  ‘—get his three kids out of their house when it took a direct hit. His little girl was pinned beneath a lintel. We managed to get her free but both her legs were crushed.’

  ‘How old was she?’ She winced, already seeing it clearly in her mind’s eye. How many other little girls had she photographed in the same anguish?

  He shrugged but she saw the little ball pulse in the corner of his jaw. ‘Six?’

  ‘Will she walk again?’

  ‘She’ll walk. But she’ll never be a dancer.’

  Lee inhaled sharply, looking back out of the window. No one danced here anyway. It was almost perverse to think of music and laughter and dancing when the sky was bright with fires, the country burning.

  ‘Anyway, that’s background,’ he said tightly, not wanting to dwell on what the little girl had lost; she was alive – that was all that mattered. ‘Moussef, like I said, is his cousin. The village has been overrun with people escaping Kobanî. You’ve no doubt heard ISIL have been ramping up the number of attacks there recently.’

  Of course she’d heard, and Lee squeezed her jaw in anger, already knowing the stories she and Cunningham would hear when they got there, already knowing how this would play out; the jihadists’ strategic aim wasn’t just about gaining control of the city, but the entire canton. They had overrun the region in recent weeks and had already taken control of hundreds of villages. Nowhere was safe. With the city under siege – there were reports of the electricity and water supplies already being cut off – it was no better on the outside either for the tens of thousands of displaced citizens fleeing from one toppled village to the next, straight into the arms of their enemy.

  Hadn’t these people been through enough? When would it end? There were already no more houses to live in, no shops to shop in, no people to rule – millions of Syrians had been displaced by this war already. What were they even fighting for any more? Dust?

  ‘But that’s not the story,’ he whispered, leaning towards her.

  Being first in on an ISIL insurgence wasn’t the story? She arched an eyebrow in surprise, seeing his excitement fizzing below the surface, his eyes burning. Instinctively, she picked up the camera and snapped him. In his element. She rarely took pictures of him, scarcely ever recorded the fleeting moments of brightness, but occasionally those moments felt as necessary as the dark ones, and right now, more than ever, she felt impelled to grab it, to remind herself that life was about more than just staying alive. She didn’t need to check the viewfinder to know she’d nailed the shot.

  ‘You remember those two teenage girls who left Lyons to become jihadi brides – about two years ago?’

  She watched him, waiting for the reveal. ‘. . . Vaguely.’

  ‘According to Abbad, they’ve fled ISIL and are hiding out in Khrah Eshek, trying to get to the border. Their husbands were killed in a drone strike; one of them’s got a kid, the other’s pregnant. They’re trying to get back to France but getting to the border camps is risky – ISIL have put a high price on their heads and they’re paranoid as hell they’re going to be sold out.’

  ‘That’s not paranoia. They will be.’

  He nodded.

  She frowned. ‘How does Abbad know this if he’s almost a hundred miles away?’

  ‘Moussef is helping them.’ Cunningham’s eyes glittered as his plan became clear. ‘Abbad thinks I could help swing the international spotlight on them. He’s offered Moussef to be our guide, and translator, if needed.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You can help get those girls out of there – and you also get a world exclusive?’ A sardonic note coloured her words.

  He shrugged, not denying it. ‘We get a world exclusive. An insider’s view of life within ISIL? It’ll be the pinnacle of both our careers.’ He glanced over, eyes shining, his body already primed with adrenaline, and she knew that whatever his motivations – glory, compassion or common, decent humanity – he never felt more alive than this. ‘You speak French, don’t you?’

  ‘Un peu.’ She sounded like she was spitting out a fly.

  ‘Good. Could be useful.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ she scoffed. ‘Unless they’re giving me directions to the bakery to buy two baguettes and a croissant. Or need to know the time. Or my daily routine when I was at school.’

  The first faint signs of the destroyed city that was Kobanî emerged on the horizon and they both flinched as a mortar flew out across the sky, miles from here, and yet close enough for them to feel the vibration in the ground as another building was levelled. More lives lost.

  Lee saw his grip tighten around the wheel. ‘And you’re sure you can trust him, this Moussef guy?’

  ‘I saved his family, Fitch.’ He stared dead ahead at a horizon that had, somewhere along it, two terrified young women, far from home. Being hunted by some of the most dangerous individuals on the planet, they couldn’t know that right now their tickets to safety were hurtling towards them in a clapped-out pale-blue Toyota with a Canon 5D Mark III as their only defensive weapon. ‘. . . We’re going to do some good in this godforsaken hellhole today,’ he murmured, although whether for her benefit or his, she wasn’t sure.

  ‘Right.’ Lee shifted position, feeling the old familiar fear begin to pitch in her stomach as they drew ever closer to the red zone. She had hoped there would be some time at least before they ran headlong into the maws of war, even if it was just twenty minutes in a room with her feet on the ground, instead of endlessly bumping along hard, stony roads.

  He glanced over again. He could read her better than any other person on this planet. He instinctively knew when she was uncertain, afraid, unsure. ‘Hey, you trust me, don’t you?’

  She stared back at her old friend and sighed, her hands on the camera, all ready to lift and point. ‘God only knows why I do.’

  He grinned his prize-winning grin again. ‘Then what could possibly go wrong?’

  Chapter One

  Bloemgracht, Amsterdam, 14 November 2020

  ‘I can see him!’

  ‘Really? Yay!’ Thank God. Lee shifted her weight against the railing as Jasper wriggled on her shoulders, barely able to contain his delight. The parade was now coming into view, the growing cacophony of the crowd and the increasing din of a brass band telling her the great moment was finally upon them. Every under-ten in the city had been waiting for this moment all year, although she had begun praying hard for it herself about twenty minutes earlier – her neck was stiff from being bent forwards and her shoulders were screaming for relief from her beloved son’s jiggling, kicking weight as they stood awaiting Sinterklaas’s triumphant arrival in the city. Not to mention it was f-f-f-freezing. She had spent the past few minutes watching her own breath make lacy patterns in the air.

  ‘There’s Zwarte Piet!’ Jasper yelled, waving a red plastic flag excitedly above his head as the first boat in the flotilla passed by. It was laden with bewigged men and women dressed in brightly coloured velvet costumes, with puff sleeves and ruff collars, tossing sweets and gingerbread to the children on the banks. Their very presence here marked the start of the festive season and every child along this canal’s edge believed that, as of now, they – Sinterklaas’s helpers – would be scooting down their chimneys each night for the next few weeks, leaving small gifts for the good and well-behaved, in the build-up to Pakjesavond (or ‘present-giving evening’) on the 5th of December and St Nicholas’ Day on the 6th, the highlight of the Dutch festive calendar. Christmas came a distant second here, although having an English mother meant Jasper reaped the benefits of visits from both Sinterklaas and Santa Claus.

  ‘He saw me! He waved at me!’ Jasper yelled, drumming his heels painfully against her chest, utterly oblivious to her discomfort.

  ‘Stop kicking, Jazz,’ she cal
led up, squeezing his shin to get him to calm down.

  ‘But he looked straight at me and gave me the thumbs up! He’s going to visit, mama. I’ve been good, I’ve been good!’

  She couldn’t help but smile. ‘Of course you have. You’re the best little boy in the city, I keep telling you that.’

  ‘There he is!’ Jasper’s voice rose three octaves and the heel-drumming began again as Sinterklaas’s barge glided past them. The great man had a flowing white beard, was dressed in a red-and-white robe with matching mitre, and was carrying a hooked staff. He was waving beatifically to the great crowds gathered for him, knowing that as he disembarked a few hundred yards further up, ready to ride his white horse, Amerigo, through the streets, they would follow him too. There would be almost half a million out today, joining in the start of the festivities. ‘Let’s follow him!’

  ‘Okay then.’ She turned away from the water and moved uncertainly through the jostling crowd, her hands gripping Jasper’s skinny calves. He wouldn’t give her his hands, too busy waving frenetically and pointing at all the presents piled atop the barges as the Christmas convoy sailed into town. She slowly climbed the short slope to the humped bridge but it was like wading through treacle, prams and buggies not helping the sluggish flow as parents battled to keep their children both close and under control.

  Everyone had come out, it seemed, a carnival atmosphere permeating the cold streets, trumpets blaring intermittently and whistles blowing; even those without kids were leaning from their windows, watching the festivities with beers in their hands, music drifting from narrow apartments in the handsome seventeenth-century black-bricked buildings hooded with white gables.

  The congestion eased somewhat as they moved above the water, crossing the bridge. They had to walk down the very centre of it; there was no chance of getting near the edges with these numbers, not with that vantage point. From the sudden cheer, she could tell the boat had docked ahead and that Sinterklaas was disembarking.

  ‘Can you see him?’ she asked Jasper, who was still wriggling and twisting on her shoulders like she was a swivel seat.