Orkney Twilight

by Clare Carson

  Well he would, Sam thought with slight irritation: ex-military, not quite what he seems.

  ‘Steve was very interested in all the stuff we had been organizing for the miners,’ Anne continued.

  ‘What stuff was that?’

  ‘Oh, a bunch of us have been going up to the pits around Doncaster for years to hand out the Black Flag, so we know a few of the colliery workers up there quite well. When it was obvious a strike was on the cards, we organized a benefit to raise some money. Steve came with us to deliver the cash. He made friends very quickly with some of the younger blokes up there.’ She paused, sighed. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t spot it sooner. He went back there on his own almost every weekend after that. He said he was distributing copies of Class War.’

  Sam frowned.

  ‘Anarchist version of the Beano. All the men round here think it’s great.’

  Anne nodded in the direction of an amateurishly printed broadsheet slung on the table: a cartoon picture of a boot adorned the front cover, ‘kill the bill’ scrawled over the top.

  ‘Then one evening – it must have been early May – we were having a couple of drinks outside the George Canning and Steve told me he had this plan to train some of the strikers to use explosives so they could blow up the railway lines being used to transport the coal from the stockpiles. I thought he was joking at first. Or fantasizing. Showing off. Being macho. It was such a terrible idea. But he insisted some of the younger blokes at the pit were up for it and he knew what he was doing because he’d been in the army. And he said he had a contact who could supply him with the materials.’

  The Watcher, Sam noted to herself; the map with the Watcher’s car registration must have indicated a pick-up point for explosives, bomb-making equipment.

  ‘Steve said he was going to take the gear with him next time he went north. Kept going on about mercury fulminate. He said he could get hold of some, but he wasn’t sure about using it because it was so unstable. That was when I began to worry that he might be serious. So I tried to talk him out of it. His plan seemed so stupid to me. Apart from the obvious danger, I just couldn’t see how it could work. The tabloids were having a field day already with Scargill. Blowing up railway lines was hardly going to help the cause. It would just give the cops an excuse to come down harder on the strikers.’

  Anne dragged on her rollie, let the smoke slip out of her mouth, glanced towards the covered window before she continued.

  ‘I thought he simply didn’t understand the politics because he was South African. I tried to make him see sense, but the more I argued against him the more stubborn and aggressive he became. I actually began to feel a bit scared; worried that he might turn on me. So I just backed off. The next day, when he had calmed down a bit, I told him he had to move out and find somewhere else to live. He didn’t disagree. He said someone had just opened up a new squat further along Railton Road and he could move in there. He left some of his stuff here while he sorted out the room. And I went through his belongings.’

  So Anne had acquired the information on Intelligence plans by rummaging in Steve’s bags. Sam wondered whether she had more in common with Anne than she had first thought.

  ‘I found some papers in a trouser pocket that seemed to confirm the story he had told me. At the bottom of his rucksack I discovered a British passport with his photo and a different name. Anthony Baines. Everyone round here knows how to get a fake passport. It’s not difficult. And I knew already that he had a good reason for wanting a new identity.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Because he shot his commanding officer.’

  ‘What? You mean, killed him?’

  Anne nodded. ‘He told me he had to shoot him to get away. He was in Angola, out in the bush. Part of the South African operation to overthrow the socialist government. He said he would be court martialled if he ever went back. Executed.’

  Sam realized her mouth was open. Shut it. Felt slightly faint. South African Steve was a killer. Wet-worker, she thought. Hitman.

  ‘Well, obviously,’ Anne continued, ‘if I’d known that to begin with, I might have been a bit more hesitant about inviting him to stay. Maybe I’m not a very good judge of character.’

  No, no, you’re really not, Sam shouted silently in her head.

  ‘Anyway, you can see his motivation for wanting a fake ID,’ Anne said.

  Sam nodded.

  ‘But it was definitely odd that someone who had only been in the country a couple of months would be able to fix it up so quickly. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that something wasn’t quite right. He was too well organized, too well set up. He had contacts and seemed really certain about what he was trying to do. That was when I put him together with Chris’s warning about a possible plant trying to use our links with the miners.’

  ‘A provocateur.’

  ‘Right. Working for Intelligence or some other bit of the secret services, I don’t know, trying to sabotage the strike by setting the miners up. I photocopied the passport and kept hold of all the other bits of paper I’d found. When Steve came back to pick up his stuff, I could tell that he realized something was wrong. He probably guessed I had been rummaging in his bags. That was when he disappeared. Left the squat. Nobody has seen him since. I was really disturbed by then, worried about what he might do. So I decided I had to give all the stuff I’d unearthed to Chris.’

  ‘What did you think my dad could do with it?’

  ‘He told me if he ever dug up enough information on Intelligence, he was going to hand it over to the press.’

  Sam scratched the back of her head, wondered whether Jim and the Commander really had intended to leak the information he acquired from Anne. His continual carping about journalists had blinded her to that possibility.

  ‘So I left a message with a mate of his who works behind the bar at the Chequers in Stockwell,’ Anne said. ‘And we arranged to meet in Orkney.’

  ‘Why Orkney?’

  ‘Remote. Chris thought it would be safer. The best way of avoiding anybody who might be watching him. I had planned to go up there anyway to see my brother. I knew Chris had been to Orkney before. He used to talk about it a lot – Skara Brae, Maeshowe, Viking runes. He was really interested in history, wasn’t he?’

  Sam nodded, not quite trusting her voice to say yes without cracking.

  ‘In fact, that’s what he told me he was trying to do,’ Anne said. ‘Lie low and finish a history degree he had started. Early Middle Ages, he said. History of the Norsemen. He said he was fed up with doing construction contracts, he needed to retrain, do something different.’

  ‘He told me he was thinking about finishing his history degree too,’ Sam managed to say. Her head was feeling woozy. She had hoped that meeting Anne would help her discover the real Jim, but the encounter was merely revealing another layer of Jim’s existence. The edges of her father were all blurred, it was impossible to discern where his true self ended and his cover began. His identities were piled on top of one another, layer upon layer, a compression of life-stories in one body. A cross-section of an archaeological excavation. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, uncertain whether she was on the verge of laughter or tears.

  ‘Orkney does have a mysterious charm,’ Anne said. She had a wistful gleam in her eyes. ‘I’m going back in a couple of weeks. I’ll probably stay up there for a while.’

  ‘You’re going to see your brother again?’

  ‘Yes. Well, partly. But mainly to see this man I met up there. A fisherman. A skipper actually.’

  Sam flushed. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘What’s his name?’

  As if she didn’t know.

  ‘Nils. He’s Norwegian.’

  ‘How did you meet Nils then?’ She was trying hard not to sound peeved. Anne was too old for him anyway.

  ‘It was quite funny really,’ Anne said, voice brightening. ‘He was one of the fishermen Mark talked to when he was doing his research. Somehow Nils had found out about his thesis. He turned up on the doorst
ep on midsummer’s eve, ranting because he thought Mark should have shown him what he was going to write. He didn’t want all the ins and outs of his business appearing in print, didn’t want to be caught out with his tax returns. Mark apologized for not running it all by him first, offered him a beer. Anyway, he stayed and we chatted, found out we had a lot in common.’

  ‘Right. Yes, that is quite funny. So now you and Nils…’ she trailed off, plucked away the sour strands of tobacco sticking to her lip.

  ‘So what happened to the envelope I gave to Jim?’ Anne asked abruptly. ‘Have you seen it?’

  Sam willed herself to maintain an innocent visage; she shrugged. ‘The police gave us his belongings, the things they had found at the crash. But there wasn’t an envelope among them.’

  Anne shouted with an unexpected flash of force. ‘Fucking hell. They must have taken it. That proves it. They did him in to get hold of the information.’

  ‘Do you really think that’s possible?’

  ‘Of course it’s possible. That’s the way it operates; the secret state, the security services. They know what they are doing. They can get away with murder. Assassination.’

  Sam closed her eyes for a second, felt the reaction as her identities collided – fusion, explosive pressure, an urge to blow, tell Anne everything, reveal that Chris was a spy, an agent of the secret state, admit she had the envelope, enlist her help, mend the fractures, ditch the pretence, become a whole person. Solid. Genuine. She took a deep breath. She knew that way led to disaster.

  ‘What do you think we should do about it?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Nothing. There’s nothing we can do about it. Not if we don’t want to end up like Chris. We have to drop it.’

  ‘We have to do something,’ Sam said, uncertain whether the urgency in her voice was real or pretence.

  Anne grabbed a sheet of paper from her desk, thrust it under Sam’s nose. ‘This is what we should do. We can’t undo Chris’s death but we can fight the system that authorized it.’

  Sam focused on the words printed across the page. ‘Stop the City?’

  ‘It’s a protest against the military-financial complex. Against the rich jerks who make their profits from peddling weapons and destroying the planet. Against the secret state that supports them. Chris was always really enthusiastic about it. He was part of one of the groups that was planning some action there. You should go: 27th September. Just turn up. Chris would have approved.’

  ‘Maybe I should turn up then.’ Sam felt her eye twitching uncontrollably. She had to escape before it all became too much. But she still couldn’t fit the pieces together. She still needed one more nugget of information. One more question. She hesitated. Felt Anne looking at her curiously. It was now or never.

  ‘You know you said South African Steve worked his way up through Africa after he went AWOL.’

  Anne nodded.

  ‘Did he go to Zaire?

  ‘Yes. He spent quite a lot of time in Zaire in fact.’ Anne’s features hardened slightly. ‘Why are you asking?’

  ‘Just curious. I was thinking about doing some volunteering work in Africa and when I contacted VSO they mentioned Zaire as a possibility.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go to Zaire. It sounded quite dangerous from what Steve was telling me. He said he’d worked for a while as a security guard at some mine or other and he said the place was awash with guns. Shaba, I think he said.’

  Sam opened her mouth. The word Shinkolobwe almost slipped out.

  ‘Maybe I won’t bother with Zaire then.’ She glanced at her watch. Noon. ‘I’d better be moving. Thanks for all your help.’

  ‘Okay, but promise me you’ll forget about all this stuff with Chris and Intelligence. Swear you are going to drop it.’

  ‘It’s all way over my head. There’s no way I’m going to involve myself in any of that. But thanks for talking to me anyway. It’s really helped.’ She dragged on her rollie. ‘Sod it. It’s gone out again.’ She reached for the Zippo.

  ‘Take that lighter with you,’ Anne said. ‘It’s not mine anyway. It was Steve’s. He left it here.’

  Sam flicked the flintwheel with her thumb. Nothing happened. She flicked it again, harder this time and the flame appeared suddenly, dancing wildly, making her flinch. She turned her face to avoid being scorched and, as she did so, she caught sight of a rag thrown into a corner with a black smear on it, gasped, inhaled the scent of bike oil, pictured the rider outside the Coney’s Tavern, patting his pockets for his lighter and froze. Yamaha XT500. A bike that could race across the Sahara. A bike that could be driven up from South Africa, north, across a continent. Ridden by a bloke who liked a spot of trouble. She recovered herself. She knew she had seen the face on the false passport before.

  ‘Did Steve ride a motorbike?’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘It was just a guess,’ Sam replied, smoothly. She could really work this undercover malarkey, enjoy it even: the crack of living on your wits, the adrenalin. ‘The oily cloth,’ she said, nodding to the corner of the room, ‘reminded me of a friend of mine. Biker. He’s always leaving a trail of dirty rags behind him.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. God, you are like Chris. He never misses anything either.’

  ‘Missed,’ Sam said, dropping the Zippo in her pocket.

  ‘Missed,’ Anne repeated. She crossed to the window, removed the scarlet blanket, let the daylight trickle in. ‘Of course. Missed.’

  Sam reached for the door, closed it quickly behind her. As she passed the window, she caught a snapshot of Anne’s expression. Sad? Puzzled? She wasn’t going to hang around to find out. She strode rapidly along the veranda.

  The robin was waiting for her at the bottom of the steps, perched on the spindly branch of a manky buddleia. Sam stepped into the dank courtyard and the bird hopped off, back towards the stairwell, twisting its little head around, almost as if it were checking that she was watching. What was it trying to tell her? She peered into the dark space, the red of the robin’s breast fluorescent in the gloom. She blinked. Empty space. Of course. The tramp had disappeared. She tried to recall what he looked like but all she could see in her mind was a pile of rags, the blurred outlines of a black knitted beanie and an unshaven face. She shook her head. No, that really would be just too pathetic for words.

  Still, she crossed the courtyard cautiously now, under the archway, out on to Railton Road, scouting left and right. The tramp was nowhere in sight. She was being paranoid. Silly. She stood on the pavement trying to work out her next move. A warm pressure against her legs made her look down: the mangy tortoiseshell cat had abandoned its gutter meal and was rubbing round her calves, demanding attention. She squatted, tickled its chin. It nuzzled her hand. Yowled. Wandered back to the decomposing Chinese takeaway. She watched it toy with a noodle, her head elsewhere, pulling the pieces together, trying to make a coherent story.

  So South African Steve was an agent provocateur. And the Watcher was his handler, contracted as a floating middleman by Intelligence. But the torn receipt in the envelope showed that South African Steve had also worked for Shaba Security in Shinkolobwe. And Shaba Security had to be another of Don Chance’s businesses. So did that mean Chance was actually running Steve – and was hooked up with Intelligence in some way? Jim must have found the torn receipt in the envelope. That was why he asked her and Tom if they knew about Shinkolobwe that day in Nethergate. Was it also the reason Jim didn’t leave the envelope at the Ring of Brodgar? He had realized that Don Chance was working with Intelligence and so Avis would destroy any evidence of that link rather than passing it on to the Commander.

  She glanced at the cat with its head buried in the silver foil takeaway tray. Jim must have guessed that Chance’s business activities in Shinkolobwe were extremely dodgy. So dodgy, in fact, that he would also want to destroy any information that might reveal his connection with the mine. Cover his tracks. Whatever the cost.

  She put her hand in her overcoat pocket and touched t
he cold metal of the Zippo, turning the pieces over and over. Her mind was beginning to feel blank, exhausted, eyelids drooping, almost dozing. Unable to see clearly. She was so lost in thought that she almost missed the soft footfall. She looked up, alarmed by the advancing tread, identified the dark coat appearing around the corner. The black beanie. The tramp.

  ‘Jim’s daughter,’ he shouted. ‘You’re Jim’s daughter.’

  He lunged. She ducked. Picked up the tinfoil container holding the mouldering remains of the Chinese takeaway, chucked it in his face. Direct hit. He yelled. Rivulets of feculent sweet and sour sauce running down his cheeks. She stumbled over the bloody cat. Caught herself. The ground tilted and righted as she banked heavily. Gathered speed. Tore down Railton Road. Gasping for air. Lungs painful. Jesus. She reached the line of dope dealers who had now materialized and were blocking the pavement, glaring at her as she hurtled forwards, arms pumping, barging through the jostling, hostile bodies.

  ‘That man,’ she gasped as she pushed, ‘that man behind me, the one dressed like a tramp. He’s an undercover cop. He’s in the drugs squad.’

  Her breathless claim was greeted with suspicious muttering. Hissing. But as she scrambled free, she sensed the rank closing behind her, forming a barrier, blocking her from sight. And then voices rising. Shouting. Cursing. Giving him a bit of a kicking, she hoped.

  She took her chance in the brief surveillance hole, swung left sharply, swerved right, legs nearly giving way beneath her. Left again. She was out on a main road, opposite the cupola of a dirty white church. She paused, trying to find her direction. Instinctively turned right. Weaving through the flow of pedestrians – punks, pushbikes, prams – heading for the high street. She spotted a 159 bus pulling away from the nearest bus stop. Destination Westminster Bridge. The address on Avis Chance’s business card flashed through her brain. Ventura Enterprises. 196 Westminster Bridge Road. She willed herself forward. Made a final run for it. She’d had enough. She didn’t care who was on which side. Who was doing what. She just wanted to get rid of the envelope now. It wasn’t worth risking her life for it. She was going to hand it over to Avis Chance.