Brand New Friend

by Kate Vane

  ‘So much more useful than your little anarchist pamphlets.’ She sounded amused now.

  ‘Then there was that day when I came up to Edinburgh and you wouldn’t let me shout you lunch.’

  ‘You know I don’t eat lunch.’

  ‘At first I was offended that you thought I wasn’t worth the trouble, but then, going to your flat, it was almost as if you were inviting me to see you at your worst, to know that you’d been punished.’

  She sipped at her espresso, but he no longer noticed because it was no longer unusual. The world had caught up with Isabel. Or more particularly, Isabel had stood still. Frozen.

  ‘And you were never involved with the Raven Theatre.’

  ‘That was my fatal error.’ She smiled at him, the old sardonic smile. ‘Do you want to put the handcuffs on now?’

  She laid her arms on the table, and he saw the marks that had both fascinated and frightened him all those years ago. They were faded, the skin was smooth, the scar tissue a subtly different shade. How could he have found her unhappiness seductive? As if it were a performance for him to enjoy.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Your urgency on the phone.’

  And yet she had been cool and offhand. He had been full of adrenaline, wanting to take the next available flight, to drive if necessary, to run or crawl. She had forced him to consult his calendar to find a mutually convenient date on which to accuse her of murder.

  Worked it out. He thought about her words.

  He was meant to come to this conclusion.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  She looked around, then eased closer so her face was close to his. He remembered his fantasies of Isabel’s sweet breath. Now, it smelt of coffee and cigarettes and he felt a moment of horror, a wish to recoil, but he stayed close.

  She drained her tiny espresso cup then began. ‘When I came to Leeds for the open day, we got the usual tour. This is the library, this is the bar, whatever.’

  He remembered his own open day. Before fees, before everyone was a PR professional and parents were handing over thousands of pounds, the open day was just a rainy weekday afternoon with a bored student. He’d missed a day of sixth form, travelled up by coach and wondered why he bothered.

  She was still speaking. ‘The student who was showing us round took us all into the Union for a drink. We got talking and I had another vodka and another and – suddenly I realised I was late. Someone told me to get a bus but someone else said I could walk it if I cut through campus and – I hated waiting.

  ‘So that was what I decided to do. Only I got lost and so I asked a security guard. And he was really friendly and he said he’d show me so I followed him and next thing I knew we were in a dead end and there was no one around and – well, he raped me. It wasn’t even dark, there were people walking not ten yards away, laughing, but we were hidden behind a wall and his hand was over my mouth and –’

  The sparrow was now on an empty table in the café area. One of the staff came to shoo it away and it went back up to the roof.

  ‘They come in through tiny holes in the roofspace,’ said Isabel. ‘The pest control people keep blocking them up but they always find another one. Only it seems they can find their way in but not out again.’

  ‘You didn’t report it?’

  She didn’t respond and he didn’t blame her. Instead she continued with her story.

  ‘I avoided him but I couldn’t help seeing him on campus. I learnt his name. It was on a badge that he wore, but I hadn’t noticed that at the time. I was always aware of him. As if he were just outside my field of vision. Whenever I was on campus, whatever I was doing, there was part of me that was looking, listening, wondering if he was there. I saw him in the Union bar once, talking to Claire when she was working. I was on my way to have a drink with her but I turned around and locked myself in a toilet cubicle until I calmed down.

  ‘Then one night Claire started talking about how the security guard was guarding the professor who was attracting controversy with his animal experiments, and I thought your merry band of conspirators might actually do something with those little bombs that Claire didn’t even understand.’

  He noticed the undertone of hostility, how it seemed to be directed at Claire in particular. Claire whose only crime had been to adore Isabel. Or did she despise them all?

  ‘And so –’ she began.

  ‘So you thought you’d kill someone and blame us?’

  He was both horrified and a little impressed. She hadn’t cared. They had fussed and flustered about their tiny little plans and finally abandoned them, and she had just gone and done this. No posturing, just action. She had killed someone!

  Of course, in his career Paolo had met people who had killed. People who called themselves soldiers, terrorists or freedom fighters. He had interviewed at least one dictator who had ordered murder and torture and perhaps even killed with his bare hands, for sport. But this was different, somehow. They were on the other side of the microphone. They were meant to behave like that. For all his intellectualising, his ‘but for the grace of God’ protestations, on some gut level he felt that the people he interviewed, observed, recorded, were different from him. But not Isabel.

  He sat back. The knowledge seemed to affect him physically, leave him with a strange exhaustion. What to do now?

  ‘You would have let us take the blame? Claire?’

  ‘No,’ she said, but she frowned, as if she wasn’t sure herself. ‘Not if it had come to that. I hoped it wouldn’t. None of you were known to the police. Of course, I hadn’t reckoned with Mark.’

  The irony was that because of Mark they were both known to the police and protected. But Claire – Claire had had to live with the guilt all these years. And the suspicion of the people around her.

  ‘How did you know about the devices?’

  ‘I was looking for condoms in her knicker drawer. You must have run out.’ She smiled and for a moment they were back there, among the student smut and intrigue. ‘I wasn’t surprised when I found the would-be bombs. You weren’t exactly discreet with your discussions. Especially in drink. Apart from Mark, of course, who sat there quietly listening. You all seemed to think he was deep, just because he never said anything, but I was sceptical. And when Ratman was around, you always wanted to know about what he’d done. You were almost reverent towards him.’

  She seemed to find it amusing and he felt a moment’s anger. At least they had wanted to do good.

  ‘How? How did you do it?’

  ‘Getting into the building was easy. It had one of those keypads on the front door, remember, the old-school mechanical ones? I guess some academics like to work at night. I just stood around like I was waiting for someone and watched a couple of people tap in the number. Everyone was so nice and trusting at the university, weren’t they? They couldn’t believe that anything bad would ever happen.

  ‘They didn’t have sprinklers, I could see that. The fire alarm controls were near the staff kitchen. Placing the device, you know how that worked. Under the sofa, so it would burn. It was all straightforward, thanks to Graham’s textbooks.’

  She was proud of her cleverness, even now. He sat back, stunned. ‘And Claire knew all this?’

  Isabel shrugged. ‘I didn’t exactly tell her. I led her to infer that I might know something. She told me she didn’t want to hear it. She looked absolutely furious. Or petrified.’ She sighed. ‘I thought she’d be impressed. I guess she wasn’t as radical as I thought.’

  ‘To be fair I don’t think any of us advocated summary execution.’

  ‘I didn’t think of it in those terms. I just was in pain and wanted to make it stop. It didn’t work, of course.’

  He was struggling to take it in, thrown by the dissonance between the horror of what he was learning and Isabel’s cool manner.

  ‘Did Claire know about the security guard? What happened to you?’

  ‘She knew I’d been raped,’ she said, shaming him for hi
s use of euphemism. ‘I didn’t tell her who. But perhaps when she talked about him, I showed more interest than was normal in an anecdote about a random arsehole in the bar. After all, there were plenty of those.’

  ‘So what happens now?’ he asked instead.

  He noticed the goose pimples on her bare arms. He wondered idly if she had a jacket, a cardigan over the back of the chair in her cubicle, if there was a picture pinned to the baffle board. Maybe the little boy from the flat downstairs, the one who created her Facebook page?

  ‘I suppose you call the cops.’

  She looked at him, her glance steady but he thought there was a note of pleading in her eyes.

  ‘You want me to do this!’ he said. She lowered her head. He saw the image, like something from a TV drama, a subdued grey light, them walking up the steps to a police station (assuming they could find one that hadn’t been closed), cameras flashing, she taking his arm for support – He felt a kind of horror, that he was still under her spell. ‘This is your story, Isabel. If you want to be punished, you have to do it yourself!’

  ‘Okay.’ She was fidgeting, looking at her watch. ‘I need a cigarette before my lunch break is over.’

  Was she in shock? What did that matter now?

  ‘Shall I come with you?’

  She smiled drily. ‘For the cigarette or my incarceration?’

  ‘Either. Both.’

  ‘No need,’ she said, tersely, and he wasn’t sure if she was bravely holding back tears or just irritated by him and wanting to be alone.

  She had found her tobacco and papers and was rolling efficiently, despite a slight tremor in her pale hands and goosebumps on her arms.

  He suddenly couldn’t bear to stay. He gave her Afzal’s card. ‘This is the man you want.’

  61

  Paolo changed after his year abroad. Before then, he had been torn between laziness and ambition. After Cairo, ambition won. Marrakesh had been great, he’d loved travelling in Morocco and Algeria and Tunisia, but Egypt was the place he wanted to be. He was endlessly curious about the country, its people, its culture, and quickly learnt that journalism gave you a licence to ask questions you would normally never dare ask a stranger.

  He wrote a lot that year. Most of it was never published – he wrote about Cairo’s live music scene for a listings magazine and the Rough Guide to Egypt used a short piece – but it didn’t matter. He realised that he needed to get better, think deeper, rather than focusing on getting attention. Everything he did from then on would be working towards that.

  When he got back to Leeds he rented a room in a house full of foreign postgrads, including one from Luxor who indulged him by speaking Arabic with him. Otherwise he worked hard on his course and read up on Middle Eastern politics. He still went to the occasional gig but he didn’t drink much. He didn’t seek out any of his old housemates. He assumed they’d graduated and moved on, if he thought about them at all.

  Now he was going back to the Middle East on a mission to bury a story.

  Mark had decided they should fly from Manchester. Paolo let him go ahead and book, though he insisted on paying for his own flight.

  They met at the airport. They must have looked an incongruous pair. Paolo was wearing a lightweight, crease-free suit with a crisp white shirt, because they were going straight from the airport to see Dudley. Mark was wearing his usual black combats, boots and black T-shirt.

  Salma was still asleep when he left. She had accepted that he was going to Dubai with a kind of sad resignation. When he got in from work, she had already opened the safe where they kept their important documents and had put his passport to one side. Hers was there too. She said she needed it to open a new bank account.

  He’d asked if she wanted him to speak to anyone, pass on any messages while he was there, and for a moment he thought she was about to say something, but then she shook her head sadly.

  It was all fine till they went through airport security. Paolo was feeling smug looking at all the people having their bags of liquids and toiletries and even nail scissors confiscated (how hard could it be to follow simple instructions?) when Mark got stopped. He wondered what the issue was. Vegan face wash? Swiss Army knife?

  One minute became five and then ten. The original security guard had referred the matter to her colleague who then seemed to be phoning someone else. He had visions of Mark being taken away to a small room. It had happened to Salma the last time they went to the States, him waiting anxiously outside, wondering if he needed to call a lawyer. When they let her go they had decided they would never put the girls through that humiliation, meaning the US was another country that was off their holiday list.

  He wondered whether he should call a lawyer now.

  Eventually Mark emerged.

  ‘What’s happening? Can we go?’ asked Paolo.

  The guard who first stopped him waved Mark through with an ironic bow.

  Mark mumbled as they walked. ‘She recognised me off the telly. Wanted to know if I was allowed to travel on this passport.’

  Or course! With everything else, Paolo had forgotten that Mark’s name was not his ‘real’ name.

  ‘You didn’t check before we left?’

  ‘The deal we made back then was that this identity would be valid for life. No one’s told me any different since the story broke.’

  ‘What happened in there?’

  ‘I’m not on any watchlist. They called the Met for clarification but they couldn’t find anyone who could give an answer. There isn’t really a procedure for this situation. So in the end they decided to let me go. Of course, they might not let me back in.’

  Paolo was about to say something but then he thought, if he doesn’t care, why should I?

  One of the cabin crew had recognised Paolo and given them an upgrade. It was the sort of thing Paolo abhorred in principle but quite appreciated in practice. She had looked a little doubtfully at Mark.

  ‘He’s a method actor getting into role,’ said Paolo.

  It meant they would get complimentary food and drinks which was handy, as his contactless card had been rejected when he’d gone for coffees in the departure lounge. Could be a card issue or it might mean they’d gone overdrawn again. It was ironic that Mark probably had a greater net worth than he did.

  Paolo and Salma were skint. Always. They had an income beyond his wildest imaginings growing up, but it came in and went out again, with the inevitability of the tides. He and Salma were equally hopeless about money, just in different ways. She never thought about it, assuming it would always be there, he spent with a reckless, illicit thrill. The thought that tomorrow it could all be gone was what got him up in the morning. The only assets they had, apart from a sliver of equity in the house, were two savings accounts for the girls.

  Paolo thought for a moment of his dad’s dad, who lived alone after his nan died. He carefully took his pay packet out each week and sorted the cash into separate piles. Housekeeping, bills, going for a pint. Paolo used to watch, fascinated. Grandad was no doubt trying to instil him with thrift but it hadn’t worked. It had seemed so sad, somehow, this measuring out of life in advance. He now saw that it was the loneliness, not the prudent financial management, that had permeated the kitchen with its faded lino and smell of old lard, but the association had been made and couldn’t be broken.

  ‘I’ve never been to the Middle East,’ said Mark.

  ‘It’s been a while for me. You haven’t been abroad for all these years?’

  ‘Never needed to.’

  ‘You never wanted to go back to Germany? Where you grew up?’

  ‘We were only there a few years.’

  ‘Joy Denton grew up there too, I think.’

  ‘We’ve talked about it.’

  Paolo thought that might be his one opportunity to ask Mark about himself. That since he was confined to his seat for the next few hours, with no obvious means of escape, he might, for once, share something.

  ‘Does Joy have a thing f
or you? When she’s not chucking bricks.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you seeing someone else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your ex-girlfriend in Oban. Was she made up?’

  ‘It was part of my cover. I thought if I said I was getting over an ex, people wouldn’t be interested in me like that.’

  ‘Shows how well you understand women.’

  Mark smiled. ‘That’s what Claire said.’

  Of course Claire would get there first with her insights.

  Mark looked out the window. ‘I read about your wife. It must be strange for you, going to Dubai when she can’t.’

  Was Mark giving him an opening to talk? It was a transparent tactic, deflecting the conversation away from himself, but here, in this bubble in the sky, Paolo suddenly felt he did want to tell someone.

  62

  ‘Salma got a tip. She and the people she worked with were about to be picked up. She went to warn them but the internet was down, her phone most likely tapped. The person who had put herself in danger to warn us begged us not to do anything that would lead back to her. It was a difficult decision but –’ Paolo stopped. A decision he could not easily explain.

  ‘It was still not light when we got in the car and drove. Even when we were in the air, on a flight for London, Salma couldn’t stop shaking. We didn’t know if they would turn the plane around. Unlikely, but you no longer know what to think, what makes sense. The girls didn’t understand the sudden move, they were expecting their grandmother to walk them to school and now they were going to a new country.

  ‘All the time she was thinking about her team. As soon as we turned on our phones at Heathrow, she saw it. Her friends had been arrested.’

  ‘It was her campaigning that got them freed,’ Mark said.

  Eventually. Along with pressure from governments on behalf of Salma and the other dual national. They were working independently, so there was no international news network to back them up, though a number of high-profile individuals and organisations had shown solidarity.