by J. S. Monroe
Jar hears a phone ringing and, after a moment, realises that it’s his own.
‘Jar, it’s Amy. Where are you?’
‘On the pier,’ he says, shielding his phone from the wind.
‘Get yourself away from there, away from Cromer.’
Jar looks around him, glancing at the huddle of hooded fishermen. One of them catches his eye.
‘Is everything OK?’ he asks, his stomach tightening.
‘The police are here.’
‘Where?’ Jar scans the shoreline for flashing blue lights. ‘What’s going on?’
‘They’ve taken away my new computer. And they’re asking about the old hard drive. They’re looking for Rosa’s diary, Jar. I know they are.’
‘Have you told them anything?’ His mind is racing; calculations, consequences.
‘Martin thinks the computer man must have tipped them off.’
‘About Rosa? Why?’
‘Maybe he thought her diary might be evidence, I don’t know. He was asking about Rosa, knew all about her death.’
The line drops before he can reply. Jar suddenly feels very exposed on the pier. They’re looking for Rosa’s diary, Jar. I know they are. They – the people who burgled his flat, the man in the café opposite work – don’t want him to know what happened to Rosa that night, don’t want him to read her version of events. Did they follow him up from London on the train, clock his meeting with Amy at the hotel? He sets off down the other side of the pier, away from the fishermen, his thoughts churning like the sea beneath him.
‘Jar! Where are you going?’
Jar stops in his tracks and turns. A woman, ten yards behind him, near where he was standing, has stepped up on to the lower railings, face obscured, arms held high above her head.
‘Don’t you love it when the wind’s whipping up the waves like this?’ she calls out.
‘Rosa,’ Jar says, walking towards her. ‘Will you please get down from there.’
‘It reminds me of Cornwall, when the sea comes crashing over the harbour wall.’
‘You’re scaring me now,’ Jar says, breaking into a run as Rosa climbs another rung of the railing, leaning out to sea to balance herself.
‘I’m not going to do the song, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ Rosa turns to him, smiling, her arms stretched out either side of her now, as if she’s about to sing. ‘Just kidding.’
Jar grabs her around the waist and holds her there, his head pressed against her back. Then she turns to face him, slides down off the rails and hugs him, burying her face in his neck.
‘You all right?’ a voice says. Jar turns to a man standing next to him, the fisherman who had caught his eye.
‘Fine,’ Jar says. ‘I’m fine.’ Jar releases his grip on the railings. There is no one else around.
*
At the post office, on his way to catch the bus, Jar buys a padded envelope and gives Carl a call, propping his mobile under his chin as he picks up a pen.
‘It’s Jar. I need your home address.’
The hard drive is a tight fit, its sharp corners pushing against the envelope, but it will have to do.
‘Everything OK? Your group-email said you’d gone to A&E after injuring your tongue with a clothes peg.’
‘I’m fine,’ Jar says, hoping his latest excuse had spread a little happiness in the office. ‘Just need the address. Gibson Street, isn’t it?’
‘Number nine,’ Carl says, giving the Greenwich postcode too. ‘Are you sending me flowers? Bless.’
10
Cambridge, Spring Term, 2012
Just when you think you know what someone’s like here, you realise you don’t. I thought Phoebe and I were friends, the first proper friendship I’ve made at uni, but things shifted between us at Formal Hall tonight, in a way that I hadn’t expected.
Phoebe and I got on from the moment we met in Freshers’ Week – she shares my misgivings about the drinking-club crowd, the banter boys and their initiation rites. She likes a drink or three, just without the need to join an eighteenth-century student dining club, and is not bothered by her weight or her unkempt hair, which has been shaved at the back but is like a stack of brambles on top, held in place with a bright headband.
She’s also into radical student politics, which I think will be good for me, and claims that the intelligence services have already got a file on her anti-establishment activities. (‘Badge of honour,’ she said, when I asked if she was worried. ‘And at least you’ll know why I ended up at the bottom of the Cam.’)
She’s one of the kindest people I know, too, a good listener (you have to be, with me). One night when I was feeling particularly low about Dad she knocked on my door, asking if I had a phone charger she could borrow, and obviously saw that I had been crying. She gave me a hug and then went off to make me a hot water bottle (it’s what her mother does for her whenever she’s upset).
We ended up chatting all night, talking about Dad, death, how you want the world to show some respect and stop spinning, at least for a few minutes, when someone dies, but life moves on. I told her about how the house was cold-called by a broadband provider the night Dad died. ‘Is Mr Sandhoe there?’ the voice asked. It wasn’t the seller’s fault. Everyone has to earn a living. I wanted to scream and shout, tell him that Dad had just died, but instead I put the phone down without saying a word and sobbed.
‘That was very big of you,’ Phoebe said, as dawn was breaking. ‘I would have told them to fuck off and die.’ She was up on my desk, hugging her knees, drinking Drambuie from a miniature bottle I’d found (we were that desperate).
Anyway, tonight, at dinner in Formal Hall, I found myself opposite Nick, a second year who had sat down with the sole purpose of chatting me up. I was meant to be going to dinner with some other people, but they’d stood me up and he spotted me on my own.
Nick’s reputation for getting freshers into bed is well known. (His favourite routine involves asking girls to have a bath with him, playing it down, as if he is suggesting an innocent game of Scrabble.) I was determined not to show any interest, but then he began to reel me in. Maybe it was the setting. Eating in hall is a strange, medieval experience but one that I think Dad had in mind when he urged me to try everything. There’s no electric lighting, just candles set in silver candelabras – on the tables, not floating, Harry Potter-style – and we have to wear our college gowns. Waiters with white gloves appear out of the shadows with food, we order wine that is brought up from the cellars, and the plates have the college coat of arms printed on them. As for grace, it can take a good minute for one of the fellows to recite – in Latin, of course.
So there I was, finding myself – against my better judgement – increasingly taken by this boy, listening to him sounding knowledgeable on Ladakh and its pre-Buddhist pantheon of gods, even though he’s never been there in his life. He seemed to know all about Neemu, too, the village where Dad and I acclimatised to the altitude after we flew into Leh from Delhi. And he talked with confidence of the Nubra Valley, the Kargil conflict of 1999 and how he would like to visit a tiny border village he’s read about called Turtuk – only the same tiny village that Dad and I once visited.
‘They say Turtuk’s apricots are the sweetest,’ he said.
All I could do was nod. Pathetic, in retrospect. I realise now that he’d just been on my Facebook page and read up on Wikipedia. But I was hooked, which was why I didn’t see Phoebe approaching our table.
I could sense she was momentarily puzzled, as Nick made space for her to sit down next to him. Only last week, I was pouring scorn on Nick’s rumoured ambition to shag every fresher in St Matthew’s. But then something happened. As she took her seat, they kissed each other on the lips.
I turned away and looked back at Phoebe, who was smiling at me. Her plump cheeks were flushed like ripe Braeburns and I could smell alcohol on her breath. I looked at her for an explanation, but none was forthcoming. The wine was reddening her eyelids and she looked more
vulnerable than triumphant.
‘Last week,’ she said. ‘We got together last week.’
‘That’s great,’ I said, dabbing my lips with a napkin. A more unlikely couple it would be hard to imagine, but maybe I’m missing the point of Nick. In Freshers’ Week, apparently, he persuaded Genevieve, a first-year Classics student, to lie naked with him on the floor of his rooms, surrounded by more than a hundred candles. They didn’t have sex: he just liked the tableau.
And now, tonight, my head is full of ungenerous, irrational thoughts. Why didn’t Phoebe tell me they’re going out? I should be pleased for them. Nick isn’t my type – I was just making polite conversation at Formal Hall. But I know that, for a few minutes at least, while we sat together in the candlelight chatting about India, I forgot that Dad had died.
11
‘I met her last night,’ Carl says, holding out a business card. ‘That bereavement counsellor I was talking about.’
‘The one who plays jungle in her waiting room?’ Jar says, taking the card. He reads the name: ‘Kirsten Thomas’. They are sitting under the Westway, watching a group of children being given a skateboarding lesson. Beyond the wire fence, on the far side of the skate park, Hammersmith and City trains are running up into Paddington, met by walls covered in graffiti.
‘Kirsten’s an older woman who happens to be very hot,’ Carl continues.
‘Not really what counselling’s about,’ Jar says.
‘Makes it more interesting when she asks you to lie on the couch.’
‘That was Freud.’
‘He wouldn’t have said no.’
‘To what?’
‘Fancying his therapist. “Can I call you mother?”’
Jar knows he should laugh with his friend, particularly when he’s going out of his way to help him, but he’s not in the mood.
‘Anyway, this Kirsten,’ Carl continues, relishing her name, ‘she specialises in grief. Post-bereavement hallucinations. And she’s American. Did I mention that? Hot American, like the pizza. Are you hungry?’
Jar takes a sip of his latte. Carl’s always hungry.
‘And for the record, she didn’t discount my theory about funeral dating. Said it’s tasteless and disrespectful and inappropriate, but the science is sound.’
Jar hopes Carl finds love one day, for the sake of female mourners everywhere.
They’ve been sitting here for thirty minutes now, trying to shelter from the icy wind that slips through the subterranean skate park like a pickpocket. Carl promised it would be worth the wait.
Jar returned from Cromer on Thursday, satisfied that no one followed him on the bus to King’s Lynn, or the train back to London. He didn’t go to work on Friday, preferring to lie low in his flat. It’s now Saturday morning and this is the first time he’s been out.
Despite his own formidable computer skills, Carl hasn’t been able to open Rosa’s diary, but he is intrigued by the challenge and knows a man who can. Which is why they are waiting incongruously with all the west London fathers, trying not to look like a couple of child molesters.
Anton, his bulging Rasta hat ballooning out behind him, lifts a hand, five fingers spread out, as he sweeps past on his skateboard, a pair of bulky headphones perched on his head. Jar glances at his watch. Behind Anton, a group of young children – they can’t be older than six, Jar thinks – follows him like a string of ducklings, pushing along on tiny boards, oversized helmets wobbling.
The dads are sitting in the stands with him and Carl: Notting Hill bankers, Jar guesses, wearing baseball caps in reverse and weekend jackets padded at the elbows and shoulders. Some of the mums are sitting in their 4x4s, jacked up on the pavement outside, preferring to sample the gritty end of their neighbourhood from the comfort of their cars.
As the lesson ends, an older child slips off his board, which shoots into the stands, coming to rest at Carl’s feet. Carl bends down but then seems to think twice about returning the board. Looking up, he sees the boy, unhurt, getting up off the ground and walking towards him.
‘May I?’ Carl asks the boy.
The boy smirks but doesn’t protest.
‘Is that a good idea now?’ Jar says.
‘I used to pop shove-it with the best of them,’ Carl says, getting on the board and pushing off with surprising smoothness.
‘Ten years ago. When you were fifteen,’ Jar calls out after him. But it’s too late. Flushed with confidence, Carl tries to flick his board in the air and falls heavily. The boy who lent him the board goes over to help.
‘I’m fine,’ Carl says. ‘Bruised pride, nothing more.’
Five minutes later, they are standing in a rusting forty-foot shipping container at the back of the skate park, where repairs are carried out. Anton, lesson over, leads the way, past a workbench covered in decks, trucks and wheels, to a desk at the end, where there is a bank of three computers, tools everywhere and the hard drive that Amy gave Jar.
Anton sits down on the stool, one leg bouncing as he spins back and forth between the screens like an agitated City dealer.
‘The file’s na’ corrupted,’ he says in a heavy Jamaican accent. Jar takes a moment to tune in. ‘It’s encrypted.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jar says, glancing at Carl, who seems less surprised. ‘I mean, I know what encryption is, but—’
‘Someone’s made it look like a corrupted file,’ Carl says.
For the next five minutes, he acts as a translator, not of Anton’s Rasta patois, but of the technical jargon. For some reason best known to Rosa, each of her diary entries has been separately encrypted. After working through the night, Anton has managed to extract a couple of them in no particular order.
‘It’s not going to be cheap,’ Carl whispers. Anton has his headphones on again, music playing, head nodding. (Carl’s own headphones are slung round his neck.)
Jar detects a certain excitement in his friend’s voice. Anton hands him a memory stick with the two diary entries on it. He then writes down a Hotmail address and password on a scrap of paper. After Anton has extracted each diary entry, he explains, he will put it into the drafts folder of the Hotmail account, where Jar can retrieve it. This way, the diary entries will never be transmitted across the internet.
Jar wonders if he is being ridiculed here – Carl says the drafts-folder system is regularly used by terrorist cells keen to avoid detection by the intelligence services – but both men seem to be taking him seriously.
After agreeing on a fee – subbed by Carl – they leave the skate park and walk back down towards Ladbroke Grove, stopping off to look at some vinyl at a stall where the Westway passes over Portobello Road.
‘I thought it would be more,’ Jar says.
‘He likes the challenge. It’s not every day you come across encryption like that. Not unless you work for GCHQ. They tried to recruit him once, you know.’
‘Who? Anton?’
‘He turned them down. Didn’t want to grass people up.’
Jar doesn’t wish to appear ungrateful, but the memory stick is burning a hole in his pocket. Every time he encircles it with his fingers, he is holding Rosa’s hand – just like he was in Cromer when Amy passed him the hard drive under the table.
‘I ought to make a move,’ he says, as nonchalantly as he can. ‘I can get you the money next week. Payday.’
Carl keeps flipping through old jungle records: DJ Dextrous, Remarc, Ragga Twins.
‘I’ve got to ask, Jar. Was Rosa into key-generation algorithms at uni?’
‘Not that I know of.’ It’s a question that’s troubling Jar, too. How did Rosa know how to encrypt the files? He can’t remember her ever showing the slightest interest in computers.
‘And why download the diary on to someone else’s computer?’
‘She didn’t intend anyone to find it. Not straight away.’
‘Or read it. I know it’s Rosa, and you two were an item and all, but it’s still nosing about in someone else’s private diary, right?’
‘Don’t think I haven’t asked myself that.’
‘Hey, Rebel MC,’ Carl says, holding up an old album. ‘Ras Tafari.’ Jar smiles at him and turns away. In another life, Carl will return as a Rastafarian, no question. Carl puts the record back and leans against the stall. ‘This is going to stir up a lot of things,’ he says. ‘Reading her diary.’
‘Maybe an explanation.’
‘Is that what you’re hoping for?’
‘A why would be nice, if not a how.’
‘Call Kirsten. Please.’
Jar can’t bring himself to say yes, but he gives Carl a look as he leaves to suggest that he might.
As he turns on to Ladbroke Grove, his phone rings. It’s Amy. Jar has tried to ring her several times since they met in Cromer, but her phone has been switched off. For a moment he thinks the line has dropped, but then she speaks.
‘They’re trying to frame him, Jar. He’s not like that.’
‘Like what? I can barely hear you.’
Jar stops opposite the Tube station, glancing up and down Ladbroke Grove as he checks the reception on his phone. Amy sounds like she is drunk.
‘Is it about the old hard drive?’ he asks.
Over the next few minutes, Jar manages to establish what’s happened. Martin has been arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images. It’s a ridiculous allegation, Amy says, a set-up, but enough for her to start popping her pills again. There’s a further complication, too.
‘Martin hasn’t told them about the old drive,’ she says.
‘Where do the police think it is?’
‘In the bin.’
That’s good, Jar thinks. Very good. ‘And where’s Martin now?’
‘In Norwich. They’re still questioning him. What should we do, Jar? This isn’t about any photos. They’re after the diary and they think he’s hiding it. He’ll have to tell them, sooner or later, explain that we gave the hard drive to you.’
‘I need more time, Amy. Another few days.’
‘Have you managed to open the diary?’