by Holly Watt
Bantham collapsed onto a brown tweed sofa in the sitting room. Casey waited for a second, then perched unasked in one of the armchairs. Hessa lingered in the doorway.
In the bedroom behind him, Casey could see that Bantham had made his bed before setting out for the day. She imagined him smoothing the blue-and-white striped duvet cover, just before the sky fell in.
‘Who are you?’ His voice was choked. ‘Journalists, I suppose?’
‘Maybe,’ said Casey.
‘You’re like vultures,’ he hissed. ‘Going for the eyes.’
‘Maybe.’
They gave him time to think, though, because they didn’t want his first, panicked reaction. As they watched, his hands slowly stopped shaking.
‘What,’ he said, in the end, ‘do you want?’
‘Bangladesh,’ said Casey.
‘Bangladesh?’ She watched him recalibrate, reassess. Not what he had expected, she could see. Her thoughts recalculated, again.
‘We want to know exactly what happened out there,’ she insisted.
‘I don’t know . . .’ The words caught in Bantham’s throat. ‘I don’t know what you mean . . .’
But there was a hesitation somewhere.
‘I think,’ Casey said coldly, ‘that you do.’
Bantham’s eyes roved around the comfortable room, and everything he had to lose. His back straightened.
‘This is ridiculous.’ He tried anger. ‘You’re completely mad.’
‘Don’t,’ said Casey patiently. ‘Don’t.’
‘How dare you?’ The outrage bubbled up, real now. ‘How dare you approach me like this? It is absolutely disgraceful.’
Bantham leapt to his feet, his movements still jerky, and took the few steps to the fireplace. A mirror hung above the mantelpiece, and Casey knew he was watching her in it.
‘None of this needs to go any further.’ Casey didn’t meet his eyes. ‘This is all just between us, at the moment. But we do need to understand a few things, my colleague and I.’
And it might be their secret, partly because Ross would have wanted the minister, not the nameless girls in some faraway country.
‘What do you mean?’ Casey glanced up and Bantham’s eyes were sharp in the mirror. Almost hopeful. He turned around.
‘I want to clarify exactly what happened,’ Casey said smoothly, ‘in Bangladesh.’
‘I don’t know anything about Bangladesh.’ Bantham shook his head. ‘You’re fucking mad.’
‘Tell us.’ Casey made it an order. ‘Right now.’
Bantham was scuffing his shoe against the floorboards.
‘I can’t imagine why you’ve targeted me like this.’ It was almost a plea.
‘You do.’ It was Hessa now. ‘You know exactly why we came for you.’
She pressed a button on the tablet again.
It doesn’t take much, I assure you.
You make it sound so easy.
It is.
Hessa stopped the recording. ‘That’s why.’
‘We just want to clarify a few things,’ Casey’s words floated across the room. ‘You’d be a source on our story. And we look after our sources, Gabriel.’
They let the silence run, and quite suddenly, Bantham disintegrated.
‘Do you mean it? That it’s just to help you clarify things.’
Casey tilted her head, in what might have been assent.
‘I may have organised a few meetings.’ Here was the desperation, so familiar. ‘Meetings that helped out a few companies, once or twice. I can see – now – how that might have been misinterpreted. Maybe. But nothing . . . Nothing . . .’
‘And the weeks away?’
Bantham’s eyes widened.
‘There was a weekend here and there, maybe,’ he said. ‘Ten days in Koh Samui, once. But you’re absolutely right, I shouldn’t have done it.’
The admissions were coming easily, thought Casey. Too easily.
‘And did you think no one would ever find out?’ she asked.
‘They were just research visits, really,’ he floundered. ‘Just to meet people, build contacts. You know how it is.’
The political cartoons sneered down from their cherrywood frames, the ignominy looming so close.
‘It was helpful for everyone,’ he finished lamely. Casey thought of the MPs, trundling out to DC for a quiet word. It happened everywhere.
‘Who was paying you?’ Hessa asked.
Bantham reeled off three companies busy building empires in the east.
‘I’ll never do it again,’ he promised, blindly. ‘And I suppose you’re recording this too, now . . . Oh God. I should never . . .’
He was almost in tears, the sophistication ravaged.
‘My parents,’ he begged. ‘There’s only me . . . They couldn’t bear . . .’
For a split second, Casey thought of an old lady, shamed by her son. The silver head bowing, everything lost. But he is still my son.
Casey forced herself to focus instead on those companies, so ruthless, seizing the opportunity and ramming it home. It wasn’t fair, no.
‘The passports,’ said Casey. ‘What about the passports?’
It puzzled him, she could see that at once.
‘The passports?’ he asked. ‘Passports?’
Bantham was fidgeting with a paperweight now, shifting it from hand to hand, like a magic trick. The paperweight had a pale yellow rose in it. Trapped in glass, preserved for ever, gleaming as Bantham fidgeted.
‘We know about the passports, too.’ Casey kept her face stern, but she could feel the ground slipping away.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
Bantham put the paperweight back on the fireplace, and turned to Casey.
‘Stop it,’ Casey snapped at him, bullying now. ‘Tell us.’
‘No.’ His eyes were wide. ‘Really . . . I don’t . . .’
And she didn’t know enough to trap him, this time. Had to tread so carefully, because if he guessed her ignorance, he would surge off the back foot at once, and they might lose it all even now.
‘You do know,’ she said flatly, risking it. ‘You know about the British couples, and the babies.’
There was a long pause.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That.’
‘Yes.’ Casey’s confidence flooded back. ‘I need to know about that.’
‘But I don’t know,’ said Bantham. ‘I don’t know what was going on. Not really.’
‘Yes, you do.’ Casey was headmistress-firm. ‘And you’re going to tell us all about it.’
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t me. I had nothing to do with any of that business.’
‘Then who?’ Hessa couldn’t contain herself. ‘Who was doing it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Bantham choked.
‘Tell me,’ Casey spat. ‘Right now.’
‘I promise it wasn’t me,’ Bantham swore. He glanced around one more time, and crumbled. ‘It was the old ambassador. It was Sir William Cavendish.’
9
‘Do you think he was telling the truth?’ Miranda leaned her chair back.
They were in the Post’s offices, straight from an overnight flight into Gatwick.
Casey looked across at Hessa.
‘I thought he was,’ Hessa offered. ‘He was feeling guilty about some of the visits and things. The trip to Koh Samui, and so on. But he went blank when we asked about the passports. There wasn’t any guilt there.’
‘We could check up on him,’ Casey said carefully.
Miranda raised her eyebrows.
‘How?’ asked Hessa.
‘His business card has his private email address on it,’ Casey said delicately.
‘And his first pet was Beau, and his mother’s maiden name is Kilmartin,’ Hessa realised. ‘I wondered what you were . . .’
Because with his birthday publicly available, it would only take seconds to crack into an account from some anonymous internet cafe.
Only in extremis though
, that sort of thing. Only when there was no other way.
For Romida.
‘Would it help?’ asked Miranda.
‘Probably not,’ said Casey. ‘I think I could tell when he was lying, and I think that he was telling the truth when he was talking about Cavendish.’
‘I thought Luke said that Cavendish was clean,’ said Miranda. ‘One of the good guys.’
‘We’ve been told that before,’ said Casey.
Casey was watching Hessa. Hessa had asked – quietly, sleepless in the airport – as they waited for their plane: ‘What happens to Bantham now?’
‘Nothing happens to Bantham now,’ Casey’s voice was cold. ‘Not now.’
Casey had ground it into Gabriel before they left the apartment: You tell no one about us. There is no quiet warning to Cavendish. No guilty confession. Nothing. Don’t forget what we have on you.
And he’d looked up at her, from the depths of his brown tweed sofa. I promise. I promise. I’m sorry.
‘But Bantham admitted it, that stuff with the companies.’
‘Do you think,’ Casey had turned to Hessa, surrounded by the endless marble of Dulles airport, ‘that he will ever do anything like that again?’
Hessa thought of the broken man, tear tracks on his face.
‘No,’ said Hessa slowly. ‘It’ll be the straight and narrow for Bantham, from now on.’
‘Well then.’
A form of justice, maybe.
And Bantham might be useful one day, Casey didn’t say to Hessa. He might even end up a sort of friend. It happened, oddly often. There was a relief, sometimes, when someone already knew the worst about you.
‘Well done, back there, Hessa,’ Casey said aloud. ‘I know they aren’t easy, those front-ups. You did well.’
‘Thank you,’ said Hessa, very quietly.
Luke, annoyed with himself out in Delhi, had already found an address for Cavendish, safe in his Greek retirement.
‘Paxos,’ Luke wrote. ‘It’s a little island, one of the Ionians. Fly to Corfu, and then there’s a ferry the rest of the way. Not much there. Especially not at this time of the year.’
‘Can you come?’ Casey asked Miranda, when Hessa was out of the room.
‘No.’ Miranda was looking down at her screen, so Casey couldn’t see her face. ‘Not this time.’
Days before, Casey had caught Miranda staring at a picture of a pretty girl on a corporate-grey website. Curling highlighted hair, coy little eyes and a how-can-I-help-you smile. Rebecca. Becky.
‘OK.’
Changing the subject, Miranda told Casey about the conversation with Verity Taylor, and the rest of her research into surrogacy. ‘As Audrey said, there are different rules and regulations all around the world.’ Miranda spoke quickly. ‘Surrogacy divides approximately into altruistic and commercial procedures. Very few people will go through an entire pregnancy, not to mention the birth and all the tests, out of the kindness of their hearts. So that leaves commercial. The Kim Kardashian route.’
‘Right.’
‘California is the epicentre of US surrogacy,’ Miranda went on. ‘They’re seeing a rise in social surrogacy there – that’s if you just don’t want to be pregnant for whatever reason. Too busy running your company, or you’re a bikini model who doesn’t fancy a year or more out of the business. It’s hugely expensive though, and the price is rising, partly because there is more competition for would-be surrogates. Some of the brokers have started targeting military wives, because they’re often stuck in the middle of nowhere and struggle to get into employment.’
‘How nice,’ said Casey.
‘So it’s quite possible that our man in Bangladesh has spotted a viable market. If they can do surrogacy on the cheap in Bangladesh and get passports, while broadly maintaining appearances for the hopeful parents, then there’s the potential to make a lot of money.’
‘OK.’ Casey rubbed her forehead.
‘The other complication is that different religions take different approaches. IVF isn’t acceptable to some Catholics, partly because of the creation – and potential destruction – of embryos. The more conservative Jews don’t accept it either.’
‘Endless problems.’
‘Quite. It would most likely be regarded as unacceptable in Bangladesh, which could be why it has to happen under the radar.’
Hessa reappeared, with a tray and three cups of tea.
‘I think I found out about that British company operating in Africa,’ Hessa said. ‘The one that Bantham mentioned.’
She passed over her careful notes to Casey.
‘Tartarus Energy,’ Casey read aloud. ‘Registered in the Isle of Man, chaired by a South African oil man and owned through a Bermuda-based company. But there are a couple of Tory grandees on the board, and a serviced office with a brass nameplate on the door near St James’s Park, and so of course our MPs go into battle for it.’
She clicked on their website, a row of smiling suits under a logo of a charging bull.
Casey sighed, and put the notes to one side, swallowing a mouthful of tea. ‘Good work, Hess.’ Casey turned to her. ‘Now, can you call this number?’
It was the number that Romida had used to call her mother. Untraceable, Casey had discovered. Almost certainly a burner.
‘Are you sure?’ Hessa looked nervous.
‘You’ll be great,’ said Casey. ‘You know how to do it.’
And Hessa took a deep breath, and dialled the number.
Hello, can I speak to Anu please? In her best Bengali.
This is not his phone. A rough voice, a man’s voice.
Oh, silly me. Who is this then?
Don’t call this number again.
The line went dead. Hessa looked around at them in a silence. ‘Sorry.’
‘Why?’ Miranda was smiling at her. ‘You did brilliantly.’
Casey had stopped the recording. ‘Can you tell where he was from, that man?’
‘I think it was a Chittagong accent,’ Hessa said. ‘They speak Chittagonian further south. It’s a dialect, I suppose. Closer to the Rohingya language.’
‘Would your mother know for sure?’ Casey asked.
‘Yes,’ said Hessa. ‘She likes working out stuff like that.’
‘Like her daughter,’ Miranda grinned. ‘I wonder if this man dropped his mobile somehow, out in the building, wherever they keep the women.’
‘Something like that,’ said Casey. ‘And now he’s got it back. Which means that Romida won’t be able to call her mother ever again.’
10
It was beautiful, the house of Sir William Cavendish. There was a perfect symmetry to the old stone front, the shutters faded to the softest blue. Jasmine sprawled around the front door, reaching up to the cracked pink tiles of the roof. Around the house, the overgrown olive trees drifted like ancient green ghosts.
The house was on the west side of Paxos, above grey cliffs that fell hundreds of feet to the sea. Nothing for a hundred miles, all the way to Italy.
The old man sat there as if he was waiting for them, under a threadbare violet parasol. He watched them picking their way up the ruined limestone steps, past the fallen stone posts that would once have held a gate. He got to his feet as they drew near, steadying himself on the slab of the table. Only just over seventy, Casey knew, but he looked older, with the habit of secrets in his eyes.
‘Good morning,’ he said, with a nod of his head. He was so polite, raising his tattered straw hat, that Casey hesitated.
‘It’s a beautiful day,’ she said.
‘It’s always glorious on Paxos.’ It was as if he were talking to someone else, a half-smile on his face. ‘I’ve lived in so many places, all over the world, but this has always been my favourite.’
For a moment, it was the polite conversation of a hundred receptions, and a thousand cocktail parties, and maybe something else.
Cairo, Delhi, Beirut, Jeddah, Casey thought. A lifetime of service, before, finally, Dhaka.
> ‘We found this house together, my wife and I,’ Cavendish went on. ‘On holiday. A few decades ago, now. We walked all the way along the paths, through the lavender and the bees, and one day we found it, just waiting for us around a corner. We loved it from the first moment we saw it.’
Lady Cavendish died a few years ago in Sri Lanka, Luke had told them. Not long before Sir William had meant to retire. She just didn’t wake up, one morning. Nothing to be done. An Englishwoman, buried thousands of miles from home. Cavendish had stayed on with the Foreign Office, after that. Gone to Dhaka, alone.
Casey looked around at the old house, and the dream it had once been.
‘Have you walked out along the cliff path?’ Cavendish went on. ‘There’s a spot just along from here where it looks as if a giant took a bite out of the cliffs. Like a huge scoop of ice cream. The swifts arrive there in the spring. Thousands of them, pausing on their journey from Africa to who knows where in the north. It’s like witchcraft, watching them dip and dive. The Greeks take potshots at them, of course, especially during their Eastertime. I very much hope they don’t hit them.’
‘It’s a magical island,’ said Casey uncertainly.
‘It’s so peaceful,’ he said. ‘Busier during the summer, of course. The villas fill up with people complaining about the sewage system and the potholes, which are troublesome, of course. Terribly hot, too. Although there is usually a breeze up here.’
Cavendish looked out over the sea again. The gardens ran to the edge of the cliffs, a crumbled stone wall marking the land. Two donkeys were grazing in the next field.
‘I haven’t walked out along that path yet,’ said Casey. ‘To the cliffs.’
‘You must,’ he said. ‘You must.’
He sat down at an old stone table, waved to wooden chairs. ‘Please.’
Hessa hadn’t spoken a word. They sat down. Yesterday’s newspaper was folded neatly under a green teapot. Pale pink geraniums straggled out of chipped urns, and a stone lion, curled up nearby, had lost half of his paw.
‘Now,’ said Cavendish, almost patiently. ‘Why are you here?’
Casey turned to him, squarely.
‘I understand that you signed off on a series of passports, Sir William. Out in Dhaka. For families going through illegal surrogacy in Bangladesh.’