He stares at the evidence that will condemn them both, his body flooding with anger. Wilde with his rule-breaking, protocol-flouting entitlement. A lifetime charming or buying his way out of trouble.
He can already hear Henderson’s voice from the phone downstairs, the call about to end.
After the anger comes the kick of self-preservation. If anyone learns of the outing, both their careers will be over. That much he knows for sure. Such a severe breach of procedure will kick off a major row between Vauxhall Cross and Langley. They will inevitably pay with their careers. He was complicit. He will go down as well.
He hears Henderson coming back up the stairs and looks down again at the evidence that will be used against them.
He considers the other option: shop Wilde, shatter the friendship, his stint as turncoat earning him a slim chance at a desk job on probation at best. But something stops him from doing it. He can see Wilde carted off to prison somewhere as a warning to others, undone by his own residual compassion at the sight of a detainee tortured free of a personality. Whatever else, Vine can’t let that happen.
In one quick move, he rips out the page. There is no time to burn it. Ripping it into shreds will leave evidence he can’t afford.
Instead, he scrunches it into a ball, forces it into his mouth and chews it down. What doesn’t exist can’t hurt them. If Henderson or the other guard say anything, he will claim to have seen one of their razors left casually in the bathroom.
As he waits, Wilde’s words spin through his mind again. Perhaps he is right, the scene in the bedroom the most humane way this whole enterprise can end.
Just as he swallows the final piece, Henderson’s wiry frame is in the doorway.
‘They’re on their way, sir.’
10
The London Eye continued its geriatric spin to the right, spectators estranged within the oddly shaped pods, as if afraid of contamination.
Vine tensed his fingers in his coat pockets. He said: ‘So you noticed the change about two years ago?’
Fergus Goodwin, Deputy Head of Station in Istanbul, nodded. They continued walking down the Embankment, pushing through the wind. ‘Yes. I think it was probably to do with the legal work Rose was doing at the time. He had started to help out with some of her pro bono cases on weekends and that sort of thing. You can spend your entire time barely going beyond the embassy.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Vine. It fitted with what Olivia Cartier had said about Wilde’s louder dissent. ‘Did he talk to you about his concerns over Western intervention in the Middle East and the Arab Spring?’
‘A bit. Mostly it was about how misunderstood Islamic culture was.’ Goodwin dabbed at his nose with a tissue and zipped his jacket further up his chest. His voice was curiously placeless. It had the faintest hint of an American twang, the product of a decade spent in the field. ‘He was coming up to forty. I always got the impression he’d had a slightly uneasy relationship with his father. He’d always seemed to me to be the epitome of Englishness, good manners, that sort of public-school charm. But I think he was looking back quite a lot.’
‘Was there ever any indication that he had gone beyond just an interest in Islamic culture?’ asked Vine, once again trying to find any concrete piece of evidence he could hold on to. ‘That he might have considered converting, for instance?’
Goodwin seemed to tense. His mouth pursed, as if snagging on a detail. ‘I shouldn’t really be talking,’ he said.
‘This is direct from the JIC,’ said Vine. ‘I’m just the messenger.’
Goodwin looked across. He was a man on the make with things to lose. Vine envied his situation.
‘There was one time when I burst in on him. We needed him urgently for something, I forget exactly what now. He’d left his door open, which was pretty unusual for him, most of the time telling everyone else to be safety conscious.’
‘What happened?’
‘When I went in, he was clearly preparing for something. He was too good to look surprised, just smiled and thanked me for telling him. I was a bit slow on the uptake, I suppose. But there was a mat …’
Vine tried not to let his interest show. He needed to keep coaxing out the information. ‘He was praying, you mean?’
Goodwin scrunched up his nose, desperately trying not to commit to an answer. ‘Something like that,’ he said.
They stopped for a moment to stare out across the water, figures inching along the South Bank opposite just visible through the light spread of mist.
Without another question, Goodwin went on, as if unburdening himself. ‘There were also the meetings,’ he said, shuffling his feet to try and regain some warmth. ‘He started circumventing normal procedure, going out to meet contacts at bizarre hours. Sometimes we wouldn’t see him for days. Other times, he refused to share what he was working on. It was as if he was hiding something. I started to get cut out of the process. I was worried he was having a breakdown or …’
Vine waited for him to say it. ‘Or what?’
‘… something more damaging. Don’t ask me exactly what. But something.’
Vine nodded. As with Olivia Cartier, he couldn’t press it too far, with only the tenuous cover of Newton to hide behind. ‘And did you do anything about it?’
‘I tried the Director first,’ he said, looking down at the ground, as if ashamed at grassing on a colleague. ‘Then even tried to take it to the Chief himself.’
‘To Cecil?’
‘Yes.’
Vine couldn’t hide his interest any longer. ‘What happened?’
Goodwin looked up. His face was riddled with emotion, desperately trying to find the right course of action. ‘I got told in no uncertain terms to get back to work. Cecil wasn’t interested.’ Goodwin shook his head and turned back to the view across the Thames. ‘As far as the fifth floor seemed concerned, Gabriel Wilde was untouchable.’
11
‘So what do you have?’ asked Newton. He wrestled the cork from the bottle of claret and poured them both a generous glass. They were standing on the balcony of the house in Chester Square owned on his late wife’s side.
Vine took a seat on one of the wicker garden chairs, crossed his legs and heard the sound of a bicycle bell cut through the stillness. A cold, butterscotch sun strained at his eyes. He watched Newton fill the seat opposite as he took a first sip of wine.
Vine thought back to the two interviews so far: Olivia Cartier and Fergus Goodwin. He had spent hours trying to match the Gabriel Wilde they described with the version he had known, the middle-aged doubt with the youthful arrogance, religious conversion with libertine morals, anguished principles with realpolitik. It was so difficult to tell truth from fiction, Wilde so adept at transforming one into the other.
‘I know that Wilde had begun expressing disdain for US and UK foreign policy, particularly after the Arab Spring and with the start of the civil war in Syria. Olivia Cartier also said Wilde often talked about having blood on his hands, guilt at not being there on the battlefield. Especially the last time they met, just before … well, you know. There is also evidence that, while in Istanbul, Wilde began practising as a Muslim.’
‘He was a practising Muslim?’ Newton’s voice was shot through with curiosity. He batted away a stray strand of hair from his brow.
‘According to Goodwin.’
‘So what do you conclude?’
Vine looked over at Newton, then took another quick spot-check of the balcony. He remembered all the courses they had been forced through during early training, just at the start of digital warfare. He knew how easy it was to get a take on anything if you knew what you were doing. Newton as Chair of the JIC was a top target for the key threat areas. This place could be crawling with bugs, one of the reasons they had chosen to talk outside.
He put his wine glass down on the side-table and folded his arms. ‘Something was going on,’ said Vine. ‘I don’t have enough facts yet to know what.’
‘But I was right to be
suspicious,’ said Newton.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m pleased. Good to know I still have a nose for these things.’ Newton remained silent, scratching at an itch on his right leg. ‘Dare we indulge in a hypothesis or two?’
Vine smiled. ‘You know I always prefer fact over theory.’
‘Forgive an old man his whim.’
Vine sat straighter in his chair. He let his thoughts cohere into an outline, the edge of a pattern beginning to emerge. ‘There are three possibilities so far,’ he said, ‘each of varying probability. The first is a random kidnapping. He looked rich, he was a Westerner and he foolishly refused embassy security. Like many before him, Wilde could have been the victim of a local gang. Taken for his money or to demand a ransom from his family. Statistically, the chances of that are reasonable. But the forensic evidence in the flat counts against that. The take-out was too clean, too professional.’
‘The second?’
‘This was an act of war from an Islamist cell, or a hostile intelligence service working inside Turkey and across the Syrian border. Wilde must have been running some sort of investigation and got too close to the truth. They pounced. They left the blood as a sign of victory. A warning to others.’
Vine looked across at Newton again, trying to interpret his inscrutable expression, the mask-like set of features. It was impossible to tell whether he was convinced.
‘And the third hypothesis?’ said Newton.
Vine let the conversations swirl through his mind for a final time. He knew how crazy the words sounded. They would be inadmissible to anyone who knew his history with Wilde. Yet the hypothesis couldn’t be ignored, underscored by the words that continued to baffle him, the dazzle of blue ink.
In case we don’t meet again, I want you to have this. All wisdom lies in this book. Take care of Rose for me …
‘What if Gabriel Wilde was never who he seemed to be? The anger over US foreign policy, the sense of blood on his hands …’
He said he’d found a way to seek redemption …
‘What?’ said Newton. ‘You think he’s committed suicide? Run off with intelligence secrets and given them to the Guardian?’
Vine had considered all possibilities. But there was always something about Wilde that refused to settle for second-best. The Gabriel Wilde he’d known wouldn’t shoot himself in a forest somewhere or down a bottle of pills. He would seek a grand finale.
‘What if there’s something else going on here?’ he said. ‘What if he’s still out there? If the abduction wasn’t quite what it seemed?’
‘You mean … ?’
‘Yes,’ said Vine, finally allowing himself the freedom to say the words. ‘What if this is all far worse than we think?’
12
2012
He feels himself tap across the floor of St Martin-in-the-Fields now, glad for dryness after the sour rain outside. He is early, as ever, hugging the routines, the sense of order they instil. He always takes the pew at the back, always at the end closest to the door so he can stare forwards across the serried ranks – the collection of overcoats, mackintoshes, scarves and woollies – all shapes of person crammed obediently into the hard wood of their seats. Others want a closer view of the choir, to inspect the faces of the singers. But he is happy to observe not participate, to watch the world at a distance.
It turns 7.30, and the choir rises, tidily turned out in their spotless black uniforms, the conductor with his exaggerated, jerky enthusiasm and straggly hedge of grey-streaked hair. They are a disorderly bunch appearance-wise, corpulent swell and wand-like thinness. But when they start singing, the strains of Handel’s Messiah rising slowly through the church, the music seems to smooth out the wrinkles of appearance, the act of performing to straighten their backs, add hauteur to their chins, varnish their workmanlike demeanour.
It is also a relief, a reminder of beauty amid the chaos. Being back in London is a welcome change after too many months of choking on the Beijing smog. London seems like an oasis of calm compared with the noise he has left, the queue-friendly order of the Tube, the patient understanding of street corners. He longed for these moments then, beached in a scrappy flat with the smell and sound of a country’s adolescence all around. He longed for the peace of a declining empire, not the ambition of a new one.
He sits back and lets the plangent notes of the choir wash over him. He hears the sound of the wooden door behind him creak open, the patter of delicate steps. He doesn’t stir, hogging the pew all to himself. He remembers the preciousness of solitude he hoarded at St Edmund’s during his childhood, the delicious few seconds away from the clutter of institutional life. Every morning, afternoon and evening trapped within the routines and rhythms of homelessness, the absence of domesticity haunting every hallway. Ever since – on trains, aeroplanes, pews and benches – there has been a luxury in selfishness.
He feels his composure sag as the latecomer’s presence hovers beside him, accompanied by a hushed whisper, a nod towards the emptiness to his left. He nods reluctantly, tucks in his legs to let her through. As he does so, he catches a split-second of her face as she passes, before she arranges herself on the space beside him. His attention to the singing is broken. He risks another confirmatory glance to his left, beginning to memorize the geography of her face: the wide blue eyes, the dip of her cheeks, the smooth texture of her skin. Then the hair, the shimmer of jet-black. A smile that seems without vanity.
Vine turns his gaze back to the choir, the music feeling more strained than only moments earlier. He begins to feel scratchy and annoyed with the world. He is sick of this old routine, letting himself believe in the illusions. He prides himself as the realist who can only ever be surprised by hope, treasuring the shop-worn and the imperfect as a hard-won badge of maturity. The music is his only lapse, able to enjoy the symmetry of their voices.
He doesn’t risk another glance but just stares intently forwards. The choir remains a blur, the fellow audience members a smudge of colour. It has happened so many times before. They progress through to the grand finale of the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus, after which reality will, inevitably, intrude. Merely the dull thud of departure or strained small-talk, the glimpse of a wedding ring, perhaps, or throwaway darts of husband, home and family.
As the clapping starts and the singers beam merrily, Vine waits. He has decided to let her speak, if at all, not to puncture his cynicism without due provocation. In the previous hour he has imagined her voice to be everything from Sloane archness to slangy girlishness. When she does eventually speak, he is undone by the tone, an intentness in the speaking.
‘Sorry about squeezing past you like that,’ she says. ‘I missed my bus. Didn’t think I’d make it.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he replies, finally able to permit himself a closer look. With the music stopped, he has nothing to hide behind. He is beguiled by the quiet warmth of her eyes, the resonance of her voice, each element so at ease with the other. Her skin is white without being pale, soft and voluptuously smooth. Her cheeks reddish from the rain outside, lips faintly dewy. Her coat is a bluish check, a gold necklace beneath losing itself in the baggy folds of her scarf. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, and Vine scans her hands for any sign of a ring. But they are gloriously bare.
‘Do you come here often?’
‘Probably more than I should. How about you?’
‘Only for Handel,’ she says. ‘Once they start on Beethoven, I lose interest.’
‘Very sound.’ He is about to stop, to shut himself up and nod, when he spots a look in her eyes that persuades him to continue. ‘Everything after that is missing something, I find. Hard to describe …’
She nods. ‘Yes, I know what you mean. It loses its logic somehow, doesn’t it?’
And there is a quality so neatly wrapped in the way she says it that he feels his last defences drop. He is beyond the point at which he will be able to forget her. There is something too memorable to the fit of her, the alchemic effect
of her smile. Whatever happens now, he knows she will stay with him, lodged as part of his history. Of what will be, or what might have been. Factual or counterfactual.
‘Solomon,’ he says.
She smiles, the first draft of an expression that Vine knows he will parse for years, and says softly: ‘Rose.’
13
As Vine stepped off the 12.37 train from Paddington to Oxford, he realized how little it was possible to know of those who dominated your life. He remembered an exercise in class once where the teacher had asked if anyone knew the names of their great-grandparents. Not one person had put their hand up, almost making up for the rash of embarrassment he felt whenever questions of parentage were raised.
He knew Wilde had been at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, with temporary residence at a crammer that was always glossed over in the official version. It had been Westminster, rather than Eton, because some mutton-chopped forebear had once tossed a coin, and every member of the lineage had continued the tradition since. Christ Church, Oxford, because Cambridge was full of roundheads with their Bunsen burners and their maths books. The Wildes were always a family of cavaliers and politicians.
Oxford was crisp and brittle, far from its summer-varnished best. Cornmarket Street would be heaving with crowds, Broad Street a similar huddle of human traffic crawling past the Bodleian. If Wilde had got in over his head, Vine knew the secret would lie in his past somewhere. And one person could help him find it, the person who had recruited Gabriel Wilde to the secret world: Dame Angela Turnbull, Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and former Warden of Merton College, an inveterate storyteller and raconteur with hollow legs and a ticklish laugh. The final interview.
Vine followed the sign for the taxi rank and asked for Merton College when his turn came. He checked his phone and saw an email from Turnbull: ‘Much looking forward to lunch today. Mr T has commandeered the Jag for his midday fling at the doctor’s surgery. Bike means I might be a minute or two tardy. Please forgive. A.’
My Name Is Nobody Page 5