by J. S. Monroe
‘Try to see this from where I’m sitting, Jar. We get a tip-off about Martin and his computers. When we investigate, it turns out he just happens to have given you one of his hard drives that might contain crucial evidence. You reluctantly hand it over to us, but not before it’s been heavily encrypted. Odd, by anyone’s standards, don’t you think? Some would say wilfully obstructive. I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, Jar. Others might not.’
Jar tells himself to hold on to what he knows. The email he’s just read from Rosa; the confidential document in his jacket pocket; the earlier anonymous phone call; Rosa’s diary; Max’s story…
‘Can we stop this charade?’ Jar says, raising his voice. ‘Stop pretending that your interest in the hard drive has nothing to do with Rosa and her diary. I know what happened to her, where she went.’
There’s a pause while Cato checks his phone for a text, letting Jar’s words wilt in the stuffy air. He’s good at this sort of thing, Jar thinks, his technique honed over many years in windowless interview rooms.
‘I’m sorry about Rosa,’ Cato eventually says. ‘And your struggle to accept her death. It can’t be easy. But that really is not what I’m here for. I just need access to the hard drive. And I need to know why you asked your friend to encrypt it. As things stand, we’ve got grounds for charging both you and Anton with impeding a criminal investigation and possible complicity to commit a crime under the Sexual Offences Act.’
Jar turns away, trying to shut out the possibility that Cato is telling the truth and has no interest in Rosa. They seem to be taking in a wide loop of Paddington, up the Edgware Road and back down behind the station.
‘Last night we paid Anton a visit,’ Cato continues. ‘We need him to show us how to remove the encryption from the hard drive, or better still, hand over the unencrypted copy he was using. Only he seems to have disappeared, gone to ground. Any idea where he might be?’
‘Why don’t you just go ahead and arrest Martin?’ Jar asks, wondering if Cato is bluffing, if Anton is already being interrogated about the diaries.
‘We don’t have enough evidence yet to bring charges against him.’ Cato pauses. ‘Understand this very clearly, Jar: you need to get a message to Anton, tell him to make contact. For both your sakes. Apologies if you’ve missed your train.’
They are now back at Paddington. The rear car doors unlock automatically. Jar knows it’s a mistake, but he can’t stop himself, can’t prevent his arm from bending at the elbow and his hand slipping inside his jacket pocket. He wonders for a moment if Miles thinks he’s about to pull a gun on him, but he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t show any reaction at all, even when Jar pulls out the confidential memo he was sent. It’s an irreversible escalation, a rash decision to show all his cards, but Jar can’t let the pretence carry on any longer.
‘You need to understand how much I know,’ Jar says, handing it over to Cato. He’s glad he made a copy, which is in his other pocket. ‘This isn’t about Martin. It’s about Rosa, who wants to come back. And if you and your people continue to follow me around, try to stop me finding her, there are others who are aware of the Eutychus programme, who know that Rosa is alive.’
Jar is bluffing now. Only Carl knows, and Max, and he’s not even sure if he can be trusted.
‘How did you get this?’ Cato says, taking the memo. Jar looks across at him, desperate for a sign, something to tell him he’s right. Cato is almost whispering – has the air been knocked out of his lungs? The colour has drained from his boyish cheeks, his normal equanimity replaced by hesitation. Or is Jar just willing it to be so?
‘That would be telling. Herefordshire, Karen, Sejal – I am aware of everything that you persist in denying. That’s Rosa’s date of birth, by the way,’ Jar adds, stabbing at the document, breathless now. ‘And here’s her date of death.’
‘You know you are in breach of the Official Secrets Act by being in possession of this.’
At last Cato is taking him seriously, Jar thinks. ‘So I’m giving it back to you, handing it in, being a good citizen now. It’s lost property, like all those laptops MI5 keep leaving on trains.’
‘This is Strap 3, the highest.’
‘It was a very serious thing that Rosa did,’ Jar says, trying to control his breathing, desperate for Cato to drop his act, come clean with him. But Cato says nothing, wrong-footed by the turn of events, Jar tells himself, the incontrovertible evidence now in his hands. What can he do? Arrest him under the Official Secrets Act? That would only prove Rosa was still alive.
‘Just one thing,’ Jar says, opening the car door. He needs to get far away from Cato, who is still looking down at the document. Why the hell hasn’t he reacted more, made a call, told him he’s been right for the past five years of his life? ‘If you find Rosa before I do, be gentle with her.’ He banishes the thought that Cato is only interested in Martin. ‘She means quite a lot to me.’ He is on the pavement now, leaning into the car. ‘I’ll never forgive you if you’re not.’
44
Tread carefully with MC. I’ve learnt enough over the past five years to know that he will be the one who approaches you, if he hasn’t already. He will probably be using police cover, plain clothes. And he loves a good Scottish accent. I have no idea what story he will spin, but don’t believe a word of what he says. He’s trying to find me, just like the others.
The Americans will be pressuring British intelligence to do all they can to locate me. Needless to say, the programme will be over if it ever becomes public, along with the careers of all who are involved in it. Rather puts Snowden’s revelations in the shade, doesn’t it? And it would probably spell the end of the Special Relationship, too.
It’s important that we meet, however briefly. Come soon. I’m scared, Jar, scared that they will take me back to where I’ve been kept. Killing me will be a mercy.
45
Jar stands by the carriage door, breathing in the salty sea air through the open window. The train is snaking around Mount’s Bay, drawing up to its final destination, the railhead at Penzance. St Michael’s Mount is to his left, its fairytale castellations rising out of a blue pall of sea mist. Above him mournful gulls are wheeling.
Rosa used to speak about arriving on the sleeper in Penzance with her dad when she was young. In those days, you could put your car on the train, too. They would head off along the coast road in their VW camper van, driving through Newlyn to Mousehole, where they’d stay in the net loft her mum had inherited.
Jar’s plan is to take the bus, picking one up from the stop opposite the station. He will have to go to St Ives first, and then change on to another bus that will take him along the north coast, past Zennor, to Gurnard’s Head.
At Paddington, after he left Cato, he’d done what he could to shake off any further tails, but he didn’t have Max’s inside knowledge of ‘dry-cleaning’. How did Max know all that stuff anyway? Jar had boarded a late train bound for Swansea on Platform 5, where the ticket barriers were open, and sat there for as long as he dared. A minute before his night train to Penzance was due to depart, he had leapt off, run round to Platform 1, ignoring the guard’s shouts to stand away, and jumped on board.
Breathing hard, he had lowered a window and looked back down the platform, waiting for the train to move off. But there was a delay of some sort. It was as if the train was mocking him, his paranoia. Jar told himself this was a futile line of thought and moved away from the window. Embarrassing ‘cloak-and-dagger’ stuff, as Cato had called it. What was he thinking? This wasn’t his world. No one was following him. And then he took another look out the window. A tall man was showing his ticket to the guard, gesticulating towards the train. An argument ensued. Jar glanced at his watch. The service was two minutes late already. It was nothing, he told himself, but then the man pushed past the guard and ran towards his carriage. Jar pulled back from the window, as if he’d seen another train coming, before daring himself to look out again. The train was finally moving.
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br /> It was the man he’d spotted so often in the café opposite work, no question, and he was now almost level with Jar, the open window. They looked at each other, Jar transfixed, still trying to calculate if there was any way this man who had been following him for so long could board his train as it slowly gained speed.
Jar pulled up the window. His pursuer was younger than Jar had imagined, early thirties, rash-red skin, small gimlet eyes, and his face was out of balance in some way, swollen, contorted perhaps with the effort of running, and devoid of all emotion. As he realised the futility of the situation and fell further back, his features collapsed, punctured by exhaustion and despair. It was odd, but Jar sensed the man had no personal animosity towards him as he watched the train move away, just a sense of professional failure. He had lost his target.
It was only as the train sped through Reading, twenty-five minutes later, that Jar had finally felt calm enough to move away from the window and take his seat. The first stop was Exeter, which he was already dreading, but the rest of the journey passed without incident. At each station, Jar looked out for the same man on the platform, in case he had somehow managed to catch up, but he was nowhere to be seen and no one else caught his eye. Maybe it wasn’t the man from the café. Maybe it was just some regular fella trying to catch his train to Cornwall.
Now, as Jar walks out of the station in Penzance on a bright Saturday morning, he glances at the people clustered at the entrance, waiting for friends and family to arrive for the weekend. If Jar wasn’t so tense, he would have stopped to take in the scene: the thick granite-walled station marking the railhead, the limits of Victorian endeavour. No station is further west than Penzance. He has a sudden yearning to be back home in Galway. Perhaps it’s the smell of the sea, the big skies.
Outside in the sunshine, a taxi driver, standing by the door of his car, raises his eyebrows in hope, but Jar keeps going to the bus stands beyond. The next bus to St Ives is in twenty minutes, so he heads across to a café, where he orders a bacon sandwich. Again, no one seems to be following him.
Nursing a mug of dark tea, he looks around the café, thinking about the man who had tried to board his train. He must be working for Cato, whose role in all this is to find Rosa and shut down the case afterwards – silence anyone like him who might know too much. His police inquiry into Martin is just a cover, as the latest email from Rosa confirmed.
He recalls his conversation with Max, the suggestion that he’s being played by someone. It doesn’t seem possible, particularly since the emails have arrived. Rosa is on the run from her captors, hiding out at Gurnard’s Head, where she is waiting for him. If the world ever slipped off its axis… He swallows at the thought of seeing her after all these years, pushes Max’s scepticism away.
*
An hour later, Jar spots the bright yellow-ochre walls of the pub at Gurnard’s Head, standing out like a beacon of hope. Or maybe it’s a warning sign, he thinks. He has been on edge ever since he changed buses at St Ives and is now the only passenger. He rises to his feet.
‘The pub?’ the driver says. He sounds northern, Jar thinks.
‘Thanks.’
‘Cracking cream tea further on. Rosemergy, about a mile or so,’ the driver continues. It’s the first time they’ve talked and Jar wonders why it’s taken so long. ‘Best in Cornwall – cream on top, of course.’
‘I might well try it now.’
Jar stands on the roadside, watching the bus disappear into the barren moorland landscape. He should have talked to the driver more, enjoyed the company of a fellow human being, but he doesn’t trust anyone any more. There is no one around and the pub looks shut up. Then, behind him in the distance, he hears a car approaching from Zennor. He steps into the shadows of the building, to one side, by a track, and watches as the car, a racing-green Mini, slows as it passes the pub. Jar can’t see the driver, whose head is turned away. He waits until the car has disappeared over the horizon before he steps out again.
The pub turns out to be open and at the bar he strikes up a conversation with a young barmaid. At first it’s about cream teas, rumours of top scones nearby. It’s good to be talking. He’s spent too much time inside his own head in recent hours. She too recommends the place down the road, letting her jade eyes linger on his a moment longer than necessary for an exchange of information about tea.
Jar smiles, notices how good-looking she is: tanned, sun-bleached hair tied at the back. ‘I’m also trying to find a friend,’ he says, turning a beer mat in his hands. ‘A woman in her early twenties, black hair, big eyes.’
The woman looks up, her smile more muted now, professional rather than personal.
‘I was wondering if she was staying here,’ Jar continues.
‘Only couples at the moment,’ she says, checking the book in front of her. ‘And a family, two kids.’
Jar nods. Of course she wouldn’t be staying in a pub. What was he thinking?
‘Thanks now.’
As he turns the handle on the front door, she calls out to him. ‘We did have someone in last night.’
Jar stops, his hand resting on the side of the door.
‘A woman on her own, been walking the coast path. I think she’s camping.’
‘How old?’
‘Early twenties? Big eyes.’
Jar manages a smile, which is returned. Rosa loved to camp, used to go on camping holidays in the Lakes with her father.
The trek down to the sea is about a mile and Jar takes most of it at a steady run, feeling the sea air on his face. He tries to recall her description of this place, her crazy drunken contingency plan in case of a meteorite strike. Jaysus, how much he loves her, misses her mad mind.
There’s a sandy beach at low tide – some delicious hidden coves – but it’s best to walk on around the bay, past the remains of an ancient chapel, and up to Gurnard’s Head. There are some big rocks on the headland, and a place you can hunker down, out of the wind. Shall we meet there? We could watch the seals below, maybe even porpoises if we’re lucky. The air is so pure.
It might be pure, but the Cornish air is still busting Jar’s lungs. He has allowed himself to get unfit in recent months – ever since Rosa died, if he’s honest. His whole life has slipped: no interest in his job, too much alcohol, a lack of discipline. Rosa used to talk of huge hikes, he remembers, sometimes in the Lakes, once in Ladakh.
He stops at the bottom of the track, next to the ruins of a stone building overlooking the sea. This must be the old engine house for the copper mine that he’d googled on the train. To his right is a small, steep cove and ahead is a cluster of rocks. To his left is a big bay that sweeps around to a dramatic rocky headland: Gurnard’s Head.
After glancing back up the hillside, he walks out on to the top of the cliffs, noticing some old iron girders embedded in the rocks. They look like bits of a winch or crane that must have lowered copper into boats below.
He turns and heads back to the ruined engine house, picking up a path that will take him around the cove and to the headland. Halfway there, he stumbles across the low remains of a wall: Chapel Jane, he guesses, its outline barely visible in the long grass. He pauses for a moment, wondering if Rosa has stood at this exact spot in recent days. She liked all that: Cornwall’s ancient past, the wells and chapels, water springs and Iron Age fogous.
The coastal path is deserted in both directions as he walks on towards Gurnard’s Head. Dark, ominous clouds are gathering in the north, over towards Zennor, but the headland stands vivid against what’s left of the blue sky. Atlantic rollers are bursting against the rocks below him, throwing up spray that glints in the sunshine.
At least they will have some warning, Jar thinks, if someone has followed him down here. There is nowhere else to go, nowhere further to run, but they will have a precious few minutes to be together after five years apart.
Jar is nearing the tip of the headland now, walking down a precarious path that runs along the rocky ridge leading out to Gurnard�
��s Head. It reminds him of Cleggan on the Connemara coast, that day he thought Rosa was walking by his side, when she called him a clumsy bogger. He smiles at the memory.
To his left, sheer cliffs and a two-hundred-foot drop to the sea below. To his right, a gentler slope leads to cliffs on the other side. There is an easier path there, through the grass, but he prefers the rocky route. He can see all around from up here.
It’s only as he reaches the final outcrop of rocks, Gurnard’s Head itself, that he acknowledges how nervous he feels. And how foolish. Why would she be here, of all places? He tries to run through the reasons again: she loved Cornwall, the land of her childhood; she feared meteorite strikes and once told him to meet her here if the world ever slipped off its axis. It’s not enough and he knows it.
There’s something else that has driven him to Cornwall, something he’s been trying to put out of his mind ever since it happened. The woman standing on the escalator at Paddington, with the rucksack and shaved head, the woman boarding the Penzance train: it was Rosa, for sure. No post-bereavement hallucination, or projection of his own grief, or spéirbhean, as his da would have him believe. It was the woman he loved at university, who supposedly took her own life one night in Cromer and whose body has never been found.
He sees the tent first, low and floral patterned, pitched on a small patch of long grass in the lee of some rocks, overlooking the Atlantic. It could be anyone, he tells himself, moving forward, but he has seen that pattern before, swinging from a rucksack on the concourse at Paddington.
His first instinct is to look back to where he’s come from, his gaze sweeping around the coastal path to the ruins of the old engine house at the foot of the track. The coast is still clear. Then he turns to the tent again, expecting it to have gone: another hallucination, brought on by five years of grief for a woman who never said goodbye. But it’s still there, rippling in the sea wind.