by David Laws
He strode back to his bike, screwing up his face against a biting wind, and determined to continue his quest as before. But for him, this was more than a simple quest to unearth a scandal. There was something else, a deep-down, close-up personal matter to be considered. It had been needling him since childhood. Since his student days. An image came to him then of a photograph showing his father’s sad and beaten face, and he knew he could never be happy, could never rest, until he had found some satisfying answers.
Harry expertly flicked the bike on to its stand and closed the garage doors at Blackthorpe, but when he stepped through the front door he almost collided with Stefan’s new maths tutor, forcing him to confront an entirely different problem.
“Oh, hi!” said Harry, stepping to one side and noting the man’s grim expression. After the lock-in scare at the school, Erika had refused to let Stefan out of the house and was insisting on what she termed “home education”.
“How’s the boy doing?” Harry inquired.
Robin Pitt-Miller, a skinny man in his sixties with a wispy grey goatee, was used to coaching the children of anxious and aspirant parents. “He’s behind,” he said. “Well behind.”
“Behind what exactly, or who?”
“Behind the standard he should be at for an eleven-year-old. And I can tell you he’ll need a big effort to catch up, if you’re going to put him in for Rushbrooke.”
Harry hadn’t discussed any such thing with Erika, who knew nothing of the vagaries of the English school system, still less about the entrance exam to Bury’s top public school. This, of course, had been Pitt-Miller’s assumption.
“He’s a bright boy,” the tutor said, “a very bright boy, and if he is as dedicated as I think he is he’ll catch up, but it will need a big effort from him to do so. However, there is a personality issue here. If he goes for an interview with the headmaster he’ll bomb. It’s difficult even to get him to talk coherently, but for the interview he’s got to become a more rounded character. You’ll have to work on him. Engage him in conversation about other things apart from his obsession with numbers.”
Harry sighed inwardly, knowing this was a task for which he wasn’t fitted. Up to now he had been glad he hadn’t been called upon to play more than a cameo role in the boy’s upbringing; told himself he’d need a degree in maths just to help the kid with his homework. “Not my bag,” he’d said. Who’d want children anyway? He was not in the least interested, as he put it, “in replicating myself”. No thanks! Harry preferred to be footloose, ready to roll with the next big story or next big adventure. In any case, the boy seemed to exist in his own little world, as if shut off from those around him by an invisible curtain. But now things were changing, along with Harry’s relationship with the boy’s mother. He was hoping that this time Erika would stay, even after the present crisis was over, and perhaps that meant he had to be more involved with Stefan’s education.
The tutor was still talking. “Frankly, you’ve got your work cut out. This boy could end up designing a moon rocket or the next big thing in space, or some algorithm that will change the world, but before that we have to get him to a decent school and a decent university. Can’t do that until he can talk to people. And present himself at an interview.”
“But if he’s that bright,” argued Harry, “perhaps he won’t need private education.”
“I would say that Rushbrooke would benefit him immeasurably.” Pitt-Miller put his hand on the doorknob to let himself out before adding, “However, that’s your decision.”
Rushbrooke Hall. Harry had often seen it from the road, its grounds vast with glimpses of quaint towers and gables nestling behind a curtain of trees. He was a state-school boy himself, and it brought to mind the stark comparison with his own childhood: the old Victorian block with the word BOYS picked out in raised brick letters on one side of the building and GIRLS on the other.
How was he going to explain all this to Erika? And then he shook his head vigorously when he viewed the prospect of a financially crippling future tied to public-school education.
Chapter 22
Wednesday 13th March 2019; 16 days to go
It was Wednesday, the day Erika met the man she had vowed to destroy.
The knock at the door, when it came, did not trigger the usual alarm signals. Most probably it was Harry back early from work. An hour before she had abandoned her lookout in favour of the kitchen and was chopping onions and carrots on a wooden block, preparatory to making her son his favourite dish, a strange English concoction called shepherd’s pie. The oven fan was full on – she wasn’t keen on the smell of the lamb she’d bought the day before. The rap on the front door could only just be heard above the City rock band on her radio.
She walked through the hall, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel, comfortable in a maroon cardigan and threadbare jeans, her mind on the next step in her pie-making, and omitted the usual precaution of peering through the peephole. When she opened the door and saw who was standing on the step she was momentarily frozen in shock.
Then her hand flashed to her waistband.
He flinched.
She cursed.
Damn the empty space!
Her eyes blazed and she drew a deep breath. Damn again! The claw hammer, too, was out of reach. Instead, she bared her teeth. “You! What a nerve. Turning up on my doorstep…”
She could hardly believe it. After all the years of fruitless searching, there he was, smirking like the devious person she knew him to be, as if he were a neighbour just dropping round for a coffee. For a moment she considered the copybook response. The flat-of-the-hand to the carotid artery, fingernails in his eyes, a kick to the groin. She’d cheerfully have finished him off with strangulation, but then she knew he was just as conversant with these techniques as she. And he was more powerful. And ready.
She stood, glaring, bereft of words, a blank response. The tension was as sharp as the silence was long.
Finally she sagged and opened wide the door, allowing him into the house.
Pounce from behind? No, she was out of practice.
And then they sat, speechless, on high stools, looking at one another across the scrubbed teak breakfast table, like two civilised people and not the hyped-up, nerves-on-a-string personalities they really were. And what were they? Former colleagues, sworn enemies, or something else? Status undecided. Waiting to see who would make the first move. No offer of coffee, just a long silence during which her mind was a racetrack of confusion. Her eyes went to the sharp knife she’d been using on the chopping board, and his eyes followed hers. She’d often rehearsed how she would confront him – if ever she located whatever rat-hole he’d crawled into. Rehearsed her coruscating speech that would crush his defences and the harsh ways in which she would extract revenge. How she would stalk him, trap him, place him in her power, see him crawl. She wanted him to experience fear, dread, remorse.
But now words deserted her. Instead, she stared at Karl Fischer, this ghost from her turbulent past.
After her release from Hohenschönhausen Prison and the fall of the Wall, Fischer had re-entered her life and changed it forever, transforming himself from Stasi interrogator into covert controller. “I recognised you, straight off, for what you were,” he’d told her, meeting up again at the city’s university, several years later. She’d been working in the office and realised he had deliberately sought her out. “You’re no ordinary person,” he said. “Someone with spunk. Someone who could out-think and outwit that slob who ordered the water torture. You have fortitude, deviousness and bravery, and they’re qualities I can use.”
“Use for what?” she demanded.
A new mission, purpose and direction, he said. Highly motivated, disciplined and under control. And he was right. For the first time in her life she became an insider, not an outsider. It was a turning point. If only it could have stayed that way.
&nbs
p; Finally, she came out of her spell of recall and broke the silence. “So what brings you out in the daylight?”
“Nice to see you again, Erika.”
“Don’t give me that. You’ve been hiding. Deep cover, no trace, no trail to follow, so why?”
“Necessity.”
“Scuttling away into a corner, frightened to face me, more like. Why?”
Silence.
“Why run and hide? What’s wrong with me – am I so awful?”
She caught herself then, wished she could unsay it. Hated herself for being upfront with the hurt, but it was too raw to repress, so she went on, further and further: “Not only do you do the dirty on me, but you run away like some frightened quitter, some pathetic chicken. We were a team, remember?”
He twisted his mouth into an expression of pain. “Face it, Erika,” he said, “you were impossible back then; there was no reasoning with you.”
“And with good reason!”
A black day, the last time they’d met. He’d sacked her and she couldn’t believe it. Like a stinging smack in the face. He deactivated her – that was the phrase used. Stand down, he said, go deep.
Now he was speaking again. “No need to go over all that old ground,” he said, almost pleadingly, but the opposite was true. Perhaps Fischer was linked to the men who had trashed Harry’s flat and been searching for her at Great Barton. Perhaps he was still one of the Kameraden.
“There’s every reason to go over old ground,” she said. “No way am I going to let this go. Not after all this time. The day I said no is as clear to me as we’re sitting here now. Whatever you say, we can only do what we believe in.”
Fischer winced, like he didn’t want to repeat the tired phrase about orders being orders, knew it was a red rag to her.
She said, “I’m not a robot, I won’t follow blindly.”
Fischer was in a corner. He had to defend: “No organisation like ours can exist on a basis of consent.”
She slapped a fierce hand on the table – this time he didn’t jump – and she shouted, “You know better than that. What we did, it was by consent, we believed in it, that’s why we did it. Belief, consent, that was at the heart of it, and when that went, everything went.”
Fischer sighed. “That’s why, for you, it had to end.”
A sour taste on her lips as she stuck out a challenging chin. “So, what have you been up to since? Still following orders?”
Silence, so she switched tack, turned, pointed to a football in the corner of the kitchen. This relationship was always more than simply trainer and leader. Much more personal. “And what about Stefan? Eh? Explain that to me. How you could run out on him as well as me. Explain how you could leave a boy without a father. Aren’t you even concerned about the welfare of your own child?”
Another grimace from Fischer. “You always were too intense, Erika, you wanted too much of me.”
“I wanted another child with you,” she blurted – and again wished she hadn’t.
“I know, and I wasn’t ready…”
At that she exploded. Maybe it was a yell, perhaps a shout, even a scream. She found herself prowling the room, circling the table, feeling like a lioness about to fight off a predatory male. She shouted more spittle-flecked insults at him: quitter, snake, rat. It all had to come out. She needed to shout it all, to wrench it from her system, for Erika was a woman split. She hated him. And she wanted him.
She was back with her memories. She was a prisoner of her past, her life force locked up and frozen in that other time. She and Fischer had operated in an atmosphere of excitement and conspiracy. It had been part of something daring, dangerous and special. There was rifle shooting, weightlifting, running, wrestling. He indulged her childlike fascination for climbing and it didn’t stop at trees: walls, fences, buildings. He took her to a remote naval station in the Baltic, urging her to climb to the top of the highest flagpole. He taught her how to hold her nerve in high-risk moments by controlling her breathing; to stay calm and cool under stress. She craved his approval, but it was seldom given. At other times he would treat her like an equal and talk to her about his world view and Karl Marx, then disappear from her life for long, unexplained periods, turning up suddenly with a mission or a job, acting friendly and accommodating as if he hadn’t been away at all.
Back on her stool, she looked again at Fischer, closer now, examining him for signs of the passage of time. How had the years treated him? His hair was starting to go grey at the edges, but his sideburns were still ginger. His scar, the one he wouldn’t talk about, was still there, under his left ear. The kink in his nose that had always fascinated her was still in evidence, though the skin was rougher than before. And his tall forehead – so like her son’s! She noted his clothes: tight tailored jeans, a merino wool jumper and smart shoes. She was sure he wouldn’t wear them when he was back in the East.
So, he’d found her – but for what? Instinctively, she worried about her son. Where was Stefan? She didn’t want him walking in on this confrontation. It was time she brought their contact to a close, so in a quiet and controlled voice she said, “So what do you want of me? Just why are you sitting here?”
He was staring back at her. Perhaps he was reading her, deciphering her uncertainty. Were her emotions written clearly across her face? The ripples of doubt and confusion, like a slow procession of cumulus across a troubled sky.
“You don’t hate me,” he said.
“Yes I do.”
“We can’t live forever with the hurt of yesterday. We have to move on.”
She hesitated. Once they had been a couple, their future rosy: one child, Stefan, to be followed by another. Now, of course, her biological clock had ticked away; too late at forty-seven, another cause for bitterness. “Do you really think you can walk in here as if there’s no history between us, pretend nothing’s happened, pretend we’re friends?”
“But we are.” He spread his hands. “What happened between us wasn’t personal.”
“Liar!”
“Not at all. It was just something that had to be done. A professional decision, regardless of personal feelings. You have to see that.”
“You axed me,” she said. “Cut me off. And then I had to run for it. Flee to this country. I know what happens to those who are an embarrassment, a threat, a possible leak of old secrets.”
He shook his head. “You were, and are, welcome to your retirement.”
She studied him in silence for some time, then said, “So you want something… but why should I be interested? I’m out of all that. You saw to that. I’m retired. A new life. I’m a housewife now.”
“Erika…” He said the word slowly, like a disappointed schoolmaster. “Erika, we both know you’ll never be a housewife.”
She flicked her head dismissively. “Why should I even listen to you?”
“Because when you hear the details of what I have to offer, you will find them…” He broke off, looking up at the kitchen ceiling as if he might find inspiration there. Perhaps he did, because the final word suddenly came to him.
“Irresistible,” he assured her.
Chapter 23
16 days to go
There were some days when even the biggest stories had to go on the back burner. Like now. It was court day for Harry, who couldn’t afford to neglect his bread-and-butter income, reporting cases from the Crown Court at the Shire Hall in Raingate Street, just beyond the cathedral grounds in Bury.
Darius Knott and Wilf Duddenhoe, scrap thieves with serious form, were accused in Number 1 Court of stripping lead from the church roof at St Nicholas’ in Risbygate, along with Tinker Marsh, their fence, at the scrapyard in Little Grimley. This was page-lead material for The Anglian, and the prosecution’s opening of the case had taken all morning.
During the lunch adjournment Harry took the chance to leave the cou
rthouse and hurry across town to his flat. He left by the rusticated public entrance of the Shire Hall, leaving behind its barred basement cells with peepholes just above the pavement, and walked quickly along an avenue of highly pruned limes, past monster gravestones in the old cemetery and a row of houses built into the monastery ruins, then under the arch of the Norman Tower. Before turning into the cobbles of Abbey Hill he glanced at a line of bikes chained to the railings outside the Gothic revival Savings Bank of 1846. A monstrosity, he always thought, but all part of the charm of the place.
His journey was only the second time he’d been back to his flat in Cannon Street since the break-in. The first, timed for the early hours to avoid any watchers, had been to clear up and dispose of the contents of the fridge.
Today he was collecting post and a change of clothes. This was accomplished once more without any sign of surveillance, as far as he could tell.
Ten minutes later he was in the bar at the Cannon with his favourite corned-beef sandwich and a pint of Gunner’s Daughter. Not many customers were present to keep the publican’s wife busy and Ziggy was in an inquisitive mood. She had an old-fashioned beehive hairdo, a weathered face and a penchant for delving into other people’s heads.
“So where have you been hiding for the past week?” She pointed to Harry’s favourite chair. “When that’s empty, the pub feels empty.”
Harry said, “You know my place was turned over?”
“Is that why you’ve been away?”
He nodded. “Kept my distance for a bit. Had the feeling some heavies were looking for me.”
“Oh dear, what have you done, Harry, run up some debts?”
“No, no, nothing like that. It’s all about newspapers and people trying to shut me up.”