by J. S. Monroe
It’s as he reaches the corner of Harley Street and New Cavendish Street that he sees the car pull up beside him. The next moment its doors are open and two men are standing on the pavement, blocking his way.
‘Jarlath Costello?’ one of them says.
Jar nods.
‘Police,’ the man says, flashing a badge at him. Jar thinks he sees the words ‘Metropolitan Police’, but he can’t be sure. ‘Please step inside the car.’
‘What’s this all about?’ Jar asks, his heart pounding. But before anyone answers, another man, approaching from behind, grabs his arms and handcuffs his wrists behind his back.
‘Jaysus, this is absurd,’ he says as he is bundled through the car’s rear side door, his head pushed down.
‘Jarlath Costello, I’m arresting you on suspicion of committing offences under the Sexual Offences Act and the Obscene Publications Act,’ the man beside him in the back seat says. ‘You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?’
‘I don’t understand, no,’ Jar says, but he knows exactly what’s going on. The police are following up on the hard drive, the one that Amy gave him. It’s the only explanation. He leans back against the headrest, trying to remain calm as his mind processes the implications. Finally, after five years, the authorities are taking his investigations into Rosa seriously.
He feels weirdly elated as they speed through the West End traffic. At Oxford Circus the driver turns on the siren. It sounds as if it’s coming from a different car, another world.
Jar’s never had much time for the police, even less so since they failed to investigate Rosa’s disappearance properly. It’s another reason why he was reluctant to report the burglary of his flat.
The siren falls silent. He should request a lawyer, he thinks. That’s what people do in this sort of situation. But he doesn’t need one. He just needs to hear them spell it out – we’re after Rosa’s diary because in it she might explain what happened, how she’s still alive – and he’ll be happy.
When the car reaches the police station on Savile Row, Jar is manhandled into the foyer, where his wallet and phone are taken from him and signed for. He’s then led to an empty cell, where he sits on the concrete floor, back against the wall.
At least time on his own allows him to work through every scenario and there’s one that won’t go away. He’s been arrested under the Sexual Offences Act and the Obscene Publications Act, which suggests they have a strong case against Martin, Amy’s husband. If the computer man really did find indecent images on his hard drive, as well as Rosa’s diary, it doesn’t look good for him. Or Anton. Or Carl. Jar has no wish to involve anyone else in this.
Two hours after his arrest, he is released from his cell and led to a small interview room with a table, a recording device and two wooden chairs. A tall, angular man sitting in the far chair rises to his feet as Jar enters.
‘Miles Cato,’ he says in a Scottish accent. Borders, Jar thinks, trying not to be thrown by the polite reception: the extended hand, this man calling himself Miles, with his urbane manner and chalk-striped suit. He’s not like any policeman Jar’s met before, and suspiciously friendly for the British.
They sit down at the table. Miles leans in towards the tape recorder, arms folded, giving his name and the time and date of their interview. Jar glances at the inert machine. There are no lights, nothing to suggest that it’s been turned on.
‘I don’t think it’s working,’ Jar says.
‘They never do, in my experience.’
Jar flinches at his thin-lipped smile. This is why people insist on a lawyer, he thinks.
‘I’m sorry about earlier,’ Miles continues, sweeping a hand through his thinning sandy hair as he pushes back his chair, scraping its wooden legs on the concrete floor with a sound that returns Jar to a cold classroom in Galway. ‘The sooner we can get you out of this place, the better. May I call you Jar?’
He’s been called Jarlath since his arrest. How does he know to call him Jar?
‘Why am I here?’ Jar asks.
‘We need your help.’
‘Who’s we?’
Jar has Miles down as Oxbridge-educated, early forties, his expensive tan more merchant banker than policeman. The cochineal-red socks and brown brogues don’t look like they’ve been on the beat either. He doesn’t answer Jar’s question. Not directly anyway.
‘I think you know Martin, possibly you know Amy better. He was recently arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images. Are you familiar with such things?’
The question is put to him matter-of-factly, as if he’s been asked whether he takes sugar with his tea.
‘Of course I’m bloody not.’
‘We think they’re level four, one short of the worst. Not pleasant.’
‘I’ll take your word for it. Amy told me he’s been released.’
‘Amy’s been very helpful. Explained how she met you in Cromer last Thursday and handed over her old computer’s hard drive. As far as I’m concerned, there was no need for you to be arrested today. Her late niece’s college diary was found on the hard drive – corrupted, I gather – and she thought you might like to read it, given you were once an item at university. Touching.’
Miles offers a small, camp smile. Jar doesn’t like him, his aquiline nose, where their conversation is going. Rosa is not centre stage here, she’s barely in the wings.
‘What you both couldn’t possibly know is that Martin’s been on our radar for a while now and we think the hard drive might have once contained a folder of images that contravene the Obscene Publications Act. The man who was trying to fix Amy’s computer came across some…’ He hesitates. ‘Some unusual file traces on an external hard drive and then discovered a catalogue reference to some encrypted image files on another hard drive – possibly the one you were given. He rang us to raise the alarm.’
Or did he ring someone about the diary, Jar wonders, his phone call running up a red flag somewhere in Whitehall that caught the attention of Miles Cato, whoever you are.
‘Not the first time he’s tipped us off. Amazing what you find, fixing people’s home computers.’ Miles pauses. ‘I just need you to return the hard drive, Jar. We have no interest in Rosa’s diary.’
He’s bluffing, calculated that it’s too late to stop him reading it. We have no interest in Rosa’s diary. Jar tries to shut out the words, extinguish them from his mind. Miles needs to establish how much he knows, whether Rosa’s spilt the beans about her disappearance.
‘Haven’t you got enough to charge Martin with already?’ Jar asks.
‘Not yet. He’s good with computers, covers his tracks. But we think he slipped up when he copied some encrypted images on to his wife’s computer. I’m assuming you’ve taken the drive to someone who knows how to recover corrupt files. We want it back, Jar. Intact. It’s potentially important police evidence.’
Evidence that she’s alive, Jar thinks. ‘Including the diary?’
Jar fixes Miles with a stare, searching for a clue that he is right, that this is all about Rosa. But Cato’s face remains blank, inscrutable.
‘Exactly as it was when Amy handed it over,’ he says coldly. ‘You’ve got until nine o’clock tonight.’
‘And if I can’t manage that?’
‘We go public about today. An Obscene Publications arrest never looks good, I’m afraid, particularly when combined with the Sexual Offences Act.’
20
Cambridge, Spring Term, 2012
I finally got to see Dr Lance today after our meeting was rearranged several times. The college counsellor, an American woman called Karen, popped her head around the door at the end for a quick chat, but more of her in a minute.
I’m still trying to work out why Dr Lance really wanted to see me. It was different from our normal awkward chats, where we have sat eating his wife�
�s homemade shortbread and drinking green tea while he asks if I am OK, whether I need to talk to anyone about Dad’s death.
To his increasing concern, I’ve turned down all offers of bereavement counselling, from the university when I first arrived and from our GP last summer, immediately after Dad’s death. The timing wasn’t great, I suppose. Dad died a month before the start of my first term and I had to make a decision: either I postponed going up to Cambridge for a year while I got my head around what had happened (too much introspection) or I threw myself into it, hoping that the excitement of starting university would take my mind off everything (problems further down the line).
I opted for the latter and somehow it seemed counter-productive to sign up to counselling while I was trying to dull the pain with Freshers’ Week. It hasn’t worked, of course. My first two terms at Cambridge have been an unmitigated disaster: too much pressure to enjoy myself, the reality falling far short of my high expectations. A constant sense of people achieving things elsewhere.
I should have delayed university until I’d come to terms with Dad’s death. I realise that now. A year, two years, whatever it took. Instead, I’ve been in denial, letting his death fester in the background, from where it’s cast ever lengthening shadows across my life here.
Dr Lance didn’t hold back this time. No awkward silences while we waited for his interminably slow kettle to boil. He’d heard that I was unhappy and seemed to think that talking about Dad – their time together at college, the unique nature of his work at the Foreign Office and so on – would cheer me up.
I started crying immediately, which was perhaps his real plan. He wanted to flush out my grief, and it worked: months of suppressed pain, no one to talk to. (I always talked to Dad about anything that troubled me, even during the ‘terror years’, as he called them, when puberty turned me into a teenage monster.)
Dr Lance doesn’t look like a man used to emotion in his life, but he couldn’t have been sweeter, or less embarrassed, offering me a (clean) chequered hanky and resting a hand on my shoulder while I gathered myself. Maybe it’s his beloved Goethe that makes him so at ease in the presence of grief.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, blowing my nose.
‘It’s quite all right. I’m sorry I didn’t realise something was amiss sooner. You seemed so together. And independent – until recently. Everyone was very concerned after your last supervision.’
Probably because I hadn’t finished my Marlowe essay on Hero and Leander, but I didn’t say that. Dr Lance steepled his fingers beneath his cropped beard, ginger with streaks of silver.
‘I do think it’s time you talked to someone, Rosa. We now have a very good in-house counsellor at St Matthew’s, which might be easier than going through the university’s welfare services.’
‘I miss him every day,’ I said. My face was red, my mascara smudged.
‘Of course. We all do.’
‘And I feel so guilty when I’m not enjoying myself here, doing the things that I know he would have wanted me to do.’
‘There’s a lot of pressure for these three years to be the best of your life. They invariably aren’t. Mine weren’t. Which is partly why I stayed on.’
‘Sometimes it feels like an eclipse, a darkness racing across the fields, the sun going out in the middle of the day, when I’m supposed to be at my happiest.’
‘Have you had any suicidal thoughts?’
I paused, surprised by his change of tack.
‘Tragically, we lose too many young people at this fragile stage of their lives,’ he added. I wondered if he was about to bring up Mum’s death, even though she died a few years after uni. The three of them were quite a gang at Cambridge, apparently.
‘Dad did, at his lowest moments. We talked about it once. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t thought about it too.’
‘Karen is a trained bereavement counsellor. I’ve asked her to drop in today. Is it all right if I call her now?’
I nodded, watching as he picked up his phone and rang her.
Two minutes later I was shaking Karen’s hand and we were being ushered by Dr Lance to the sofa in front of his fireplace.
‘I’m going to leave you in Karen’s capable hands,’ he said, his fingers touching my shoulder again before he left the room.
I was a little wrong-footed, conscious of how I looked after so much crying, but Karen must have been used to tear-stained student faces.
It was immediately obvious why all the boys in college are feigning depression to be on her books. Karen has blonde, shoulder-length hair, enviably high cheekbones and powder-blue eyes. Beautiful in an obvious sort of way. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. Nor that she’s American. I couldn’t really place her accent – East Coast? – but she had a manner about her that was at once reassuring without being patronising.
‘Dr Lance has told me all about you,’ she said. ‘And your mother and your wonderful father. I think I can help if you’re willing to let me.’
‘I’d like that,’ I said.
‘There are a lot of options open to us,’ she added. ‘Different ways to improve your life.’
There was only one thing that was unnerving about Karen: she did this short intake of breath just before she spoke. It was as if she’d suddenly remembered to breathe. The more she talked – about the sessions she wants me to attend, her background working with young people, her interest in post-bereavement hallucinations – the more I couldn’t help noticing it, until in my mind it became a deafening gasp.
Dad would have found it funny.
21
Jar looks for a public phone as soon as he is released from the police station. After searching for ten minutes, he finds a phone box on New Bond Street and calls Carl at the office. He doesn’t want to risk making a call on his mobile.
‘Wassup?’ Carl asks, in his faux gangsta voice. ‘The boss is pissed at you. I’ve been trying your mobile all morning.’
‘I was arrested.’
‘Arrested? By the police?’ Who else, Jar thinks. The Salvation Army? ‘What for?’
Jar fills him in on Amy’s husband, the case against him, hears the excitement fade from his friend’s voice, the fear creeping in.
‘But it’s a bunch of malarkey, Carl. They’re after the diary.’
‘Of course they are. I get that.’ Carl pauses. ‘But, you know, just supposing there are dodgy images on the hard drive… Could we be done for handling them?’
‘There aren’t any, trust me.’
‘I still need to ring Anton, warn him.’
‘They want the hard drive by 9 p.m. Can you get it back from him by then? I would go myself, but…’ Jar looks out of the phone box, checks the street.
Carl agrees, reluctantly, to collect the hard drive, says he will go over to Ladbroke Grove after work, meet Jar back at the Savile Row police station at 8.30 p.m. ‘I don’t like this, Jar. Anton won’t either. I’m just going to ask for the drive back, spare him the details.’
‘I also need him to copy the diary before we hand it over. Can he do that?’
‘I can ask. Are you coming into the office now?’
‘Tell the boss I’ve got splinters embedded in both corneas and was last seen wandering into heavy traffic, looking for an eye clinic.’
‘Ouch. How many days off are you after?’
Jar loves his friend, but he hasn’t got time to discuss sickie strategies. And his job feels more of an irrelevance than ever now. He needs to get back to his flat, check for more diary entries. They might be the last ones he reads if Anton can’t copy the files. He’s also got a plan to prevent Miles Cato from reading the diary himself. Or at least to slow him down.
22
Cambridge, Autumn Term, 2011
A man came to see me today, an old work colleague of Dad’s. Dr Lance introduced me to him in his rooms. He’s called Simon somebody – he didn’t give me a card.
Over a sweet sherry – yup, some old people still drink the stuff – in front o
f Dr Lance’s fireplace, glowing with coals, he asked if I knew the exact nature of Dad’s work at the Foreign Office, what he’d done for his country. I told him what Dad always told me: that he worked for the Political Unit, writing boring reports on far-flung countries that no one bothered to read.
‘Not quite,’ Simon said, glancing across at Dr Lance. He had a kind, almost cheeky face, at odds with his middle age. If it wasn’t for the dark suit, he could have been mistaken for a children’s entertainer. Or maybe a vet, someone who’s patient with puppies.
I was being flippant, my usual defence when I’m feeling emotional (it’s known as ‘week five blues’, apparently). Any talk of Dad is likely to set me off, particularly when someone is singing his praises. I was also a little resentful at having been summoned back to college from the Sidgwick Site, via a text message from Dr Lance, just when I was finally getting into my Coleridge essay.
‘It’s been decided to honour your father posthumously by appointing him to the Order of St Michael and St George,’ Simon said, running the sherry around his glass.
‘Sounds impressive.’ Order of St Michael and St George – he would have liked that.
‘He’s been appointed a Knight Commander, a KCMG.’
‘I’m sure he’d have been very proud. Tickled.’
It wasn’t the right word – the sherry talking – but I wasn’t ready for all this talk of knights and commanders. Simon humoured me with a fleeting smile.
‘We were wondering if you would accept the honour on your father’s behalf,’ he continued. ‘Next week.’
‘Where?’
‘St Paul’s Cathedral. Private chapel, small service.’
‘Sounds like he did more than he was letting on,’ I said.
I always knew Dad was not being entirely honest with me whenever we talked about his work, but we seemed to have arrived at an unspoken understanding that I wouldn’t ask too many questions and he wouldn’t offer any more details.