I parked the bike at the front between Sappho’s sporty little blue Subaru BRZ and a more sober BMW, and left my helmet hanging over the handlebars. I was still dressed in my Williams uniform, which was probably a good thing, I thought, as I would seem semi-official. Everything was extremely quiet. I walked up the front steps between the two pillars of the porticos and Sappho opened the front door before I could look around for the bell.
“Come through to my mother,” she said immediately. I could see she had been crying.
I hadn’t been sure what to expect. But basically, she was just what you might expect. A very beautiful woman in her early fifties, dressed elegantly in western clothes. She looked sharply at me.
“Hello,” I said carefully. “I’m Eve. I’ve been looking after Nish on behalf of Williams.”
She looked me up and down for a moment. I stood my ground.
“Do they know what’s happened?” She asked. Her accent was one hundred percent upper class Southern English.
I hesitated. Should I admit to it? But they’d almost certainly be getting in touch with her very soon. I nodded.
Sappho made an angry noise. “You promised not to tell.”
I looked calmly at her. “Mr Williams needed to know. It affects him too. And he’ll know what to do – or someone he knows will. They have a lot of connections and influence.”
Mrs. Gilbraith actually looked relieved.
“Do you have any idea at all what it’s about?” I asked, looking at Nish’s mother.
“Money I suppose,” she said contemptuously. “That’s what it’s always about, isn’t it?”
I frowned. “Why Nish though? What did their voices sound like? I mean – male, female? What sort of accent?”
Mrs Gilbraith looked away as though she didn’t want to answer that one. “Male,” she said. Then closed her lips tightly. She met my gaze and we stared each other out for a minute. Then we heard the front door slam. Sappho leapt up. “Rod!” She darted out.
She came back in with Roderick a few moments later. He looked to be in his late twenties. “I came as soon as I could,” he said as he strode across the room to bend and kiss his mother. “But I couldn’t leave the poor cow, she was too old to push. Shouldn’t have been mated really.”
At my gobsmacked look, Sappho got the giggles. “No Eve, I can tell what you’re thinking! He’s not a really rude Doctor – he’s a Vet!”
Roderick noticed me for the first time and gave a reluctant smile at my relieved expression. He was taller than Nish and more lanky. He had the same colouring but his features were all just slightly out of proportion, his nose bigger and bonier, his eyes and mouth smaller. I figured he probably took more after the Gilbraith side of the family. He eyed my uniform. “Williams?” He established.
I nodded.
“Any more news?” He asked looking around.
We all shook our heads. “Except Williams now know and are taking it in hand,” Mrs Gilbraith informed him.
Roderick nodded calmly. Yeah, I thought. He’s a guy I’d trust in a crisis. He glanced back at me and caught me weighing him up. We stared each other out for a moment. Yeah, I thought. Very different to Nish, who compared to his older brother here, suddenly seemed dependent and childlike. But then Nish had had every second of his past twenty-two years mapped out for him by his father, no doubt down to the finest detail, due the demands of the racing career, whereas Rod was clearly used to being in charge in a responsible job and making life or death decisions on a daily basis.
He looked back at his mother. “Who are they?” He asked.
I waited to see if she was more forthcoming with her assertive eldest son, than she had been with us lesser female mortals, but her eyes flickered warily and she gave an elegant dismissive flick of the fingers to indicate that she had no idea. Then she glanced at me. I looked fixedly at her. She knew for sure, I thought. She knows what’s going on here. So why isn’t she saying? I saw her nostrils flare in an incensed way as she fielded my accusing gaze.
Into the silence, the phone began to ring.
She pointed a long finger at me. “You,” she said, with evident dislike. “You can go.”
For a millisecond I refused to move. She wouldn’t treat Heskett like this, I thought. And then I thought – no, she has every right. It’s her house, and I’m just an intern. And no doubt Sappho has filled her head with all sorts of erroneous information about me. I turned on my heel and began to walk out, my face carefully expressionless, as it wouldn’t be the moment to look childishly defiant or sulky. I needed to keep my dignity and earn her respect. Then she turned on her daughter. “You too!” She ordered. She indicated the door with a dismissive hand. “Off you go.”
Sappho was blazing with anger as she joined me outside the door. Her eyes were lit with humiliation and rage. “Right!” She said determinedly. She jerked her head. “Come with me…”
Inside the room we’d left, the phone had stopped ringing, which presumably meant that it had been picked up. Sappho led me quickly and lightly up the big staircase and darted ahead of me into one of the upstairs rooms which seemed to be another sitting room. By the time I’d got into the room after her and closed the door, she was very carefully and silently picking up the phone extension and putting it to her ear. She put a significant finger to her lips as she looked across the room at me. I crept across and she held the phone up between us. We exchanged bemused glances. Hers more gobsmacked than mine. Her mother was talking in a foreign language to the man at the other end. And the conversation was getting heated. I switched my phone to record and put it right against the ear-piece, but whether it would capture anything clearly enough, I had no idea. The call came to an abrupt end and Sappho waited until she was sure both sides had hung up before putting the phone back down. She stared at me. “I didn’t even know Mum could speak another language,” she said.
I frowned. “Well of course she can,” I said. “She grew up in Pakistan didn’t she?”
Sappho hesitated. “I know she’s from one of the top ruling families there, and I know she and Dad met at some high status embassy do. She attended a very expensive boarding school in Kent in her teens – but she never speaks about anything before the age of eleven. And somehow, I just kind of…” She trailed off.
“…Got conditioned into never daring to ask.” I finished off for her.
She stared at me, her lips parted, then she blinked. “Yes,” she said at last. “You’re so right. They never explicitly told us not to, it just somehow was never allowed.”
“I’m going back in,” I announced suddenly.
Sappho looked horrified. “She’ll be furious.”
“Tough!” I said, and turned on my heel. Sappho skittered hurriedly after me.
Back in the spacious sun filled living room, Mrs Gilbraith and Roderick were standing in deep conversation a few feet from the phone. She glared at me. “I told you to go!”
I walked swiftly towards her across the thin, busy patterned Turkish carpet and came to an abrupt halt in front of her.
“You were speaking Sindhi,” I confronted her. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but I was taking a punt on it.
Her face changed. She went in on the attack. “Oh yes, I’ve heard all about you and your anti-Pakistani crusade. You keep away from my son – you racist bitch!”
“Mum!” Roderick looked shocked. He also looked blank.
I raised my eyebrows at her. “What do they want?”
Her jaw clenched. “They won’t get it.” She sneered. “I told them in no uncertain terms that they were living in cloud cuckoo land if they thought they could influence my family by threatening my son. My family cut me off years ago. They couldn’t give a monkeys what happens to any of my heretical haram bastards!”
I took a deep breath. “So it’s politics?” I established.
She tossed her head. I could see now where Sappho got it from. “Yes, it’s politics,” she agreed. “Completely futile waste of time. I’ve of
fered them money instead. That’s the only thing they can get out of me.”
My heart sunk. Politics. Extreme Pakistani politics at that. Nish was in the hands of some sort of Muslim extremists who might have nothing to lose. A team of guys who’d just kidnapped him for cash suddenly seemed like a bunch of pussycats in comparison. I felt sick. I probably went pale. I saw her own body language signalling a sense of hopelessness in reaction to the fear and horror that my own expression must have been communicating. I thought of all the kidnaps that had been going on in various Muslim areas of the world recently. There’d been filmed beheadings of the prisoners. There’d been a pilot burned to death in a cage. I felt like all the blood had drained out of my body. Her lips tightened and she turned sharply away. She’s preparing herself for the worst, I thought. And then suddenly I realised that so was I…
Outside the house, I got straight on the phone to Heskett. I took a deep breath and tried to control the shake in my voice.
He listened in grim silence. “Sounds like it’ll have to be the Foreign Office, and the Embassies, and maybe Counter-Terrorism and MI5.”
I felt like I’d stumbled into a Bond movie. But the tense pain in the pit of my stomach told me that it was real.
“Is there any mileage to be had in you staying out there with the Gilbraiths?” He asked
“No,” I said. “You need to be dealing directly with them now.”
“Come back here then and bring that recording with you,” he said, and rang off.
I drove a short way then parked up and got on my phone again.
“What?” Sahmir greeted me aggressively.
“How fluent are you in Sindhi?” I asked.
I stopped off at my flat and uploaded the recording from my phone onto my laptop, then sent it to Sahmir. Then I went back into the factory. The IT department took the recording off my phone. The executive conference rooms were full of men in suits. Heskett warned me not to return to Nish’s flat as it was now a crime scene, told me he couldn’t let me know anything that was happening from now on as it was top security, and made me promise not to let a syllable of what was going on leak out. An expressionless man with cool eyes grilled me on everything I could tell him about the break-ins, about the man and the car that I’d seen, and about what had happened at the Gilbraith’s, and then I was dismissed. I walked out of there shell-shocked. I had no further role. Nish was in the hands of some ruthless psychopaths and I wasn’t even going to be allowed to know what the men in suits were doing to get him out.
I rang Sappho. I told her that it looked like the stops were being pulled out by all the top bods. “But please, please Sappho,” I pleaded. “Keep spying won’t you? And please keep letting me know what’s going on your end – because they’re not going to tell me anything this end!”
Then finally I rang Quinn.
“Hiya, Ginty,” he greeted me casually. “What’s up?”
“How soon could you get down here do you think?” I asked him.
Just ten minutes later, Jo rang. I was a bit disorientated when she plunged straight into organisational details for the World Championship. After a few minutes she stopped short and said, “What’s wrong with you, Eve?”
But shit, I was sworn to secrecy, wasn’t I? I stumbled out a lame excuse about being tired after two racing weekends and being caught on the hop. “You use your discretion with the set-up Jo. And even if for some reason you can’t get hold of me in the lead up to the race, you just turn up there with the car and I’ll make my way there independently…”
“What’s going on, Eve?” She asked in a suspicious tone. “Why wouldn’t I be able to get hold of you before the race? And when have you ever before not had some pretty strong opinions about the engine set-up?”
I panicked. “Take it to Rob. Please Jo. He’ll sort it out with you.” And then I did a Jo on her, and rang off.
I opened the door to Quinn at eleven pm that night and fell into his arms. He seemed mildly surprised. I wiped the tears from my eyes and pulled him inside.
“Shit, Ginty,” he said when I’d filled him in. The look of horror on his face said it all. I saw his fingers were trembling slightly as he reached for the coffee I’d made him. I studied the expression in his eyes. He adored Nish, I could see that. And now he looked as sick and helpless as I felt.
“Fuck,” he added.
I snatched up the phone when I saw Sahmir’s name come up.
“Ok, so as I said – I only ever picked up enough to report back to Mum about school and such like, and it was really faint and I couldn’t make out more than one word in three, so I took it to Mum.”
“Oh, God! You did emphasise how important it was to keep confidentiality, didn’t you?” I groaned.
“Of course I did!” He snapped impatiently. “She knows how to keep a secret does Mum…”
Yeah, she would, I thought. “And..?” I pressed urgently.
“Mum thinks they’re SLA.”
“What?”
“Sindhi Nationalists. They’re a terrorist organisation called the Sindhudesh Liberation Army. They have this pie in the sky idea about making the region independent from Pakistan and they seem to specialise in blowing up railway tracks. God knows why! Attacking government infrastructure I suppose – I don’t follow this stuff. Oh yeah, and they’ve robbed a few banks… Guess bombing things to buggery takes some financing… But no history of hostage taking apparently – until now.”
I held my breath. “But what do they want? And what’s any of that got to do with Nish, for heaven’s sake?” I exclaimed.
“They want regime change in the province. They want a resignation. They want certain political promises to do with setting up a referendum on independence.”
“Right…” I responded cautiously. That didn’t actually sound too extreme. I saw Quinn glancing worriedly at me trying to interpret my tone. “But still, what’s that got to do with Nish?” I persisted.
“They mentioned a name and it meant nothing to me, but I saw Mum’s face change,” Sahmir reported from down the other end of the line. “And it turns out that the brother of Nish’s mother is only the Chief Minister of the Government of Sindh Province at the moment! I did a bit of quick googling and it seems he worked his way up via Cabinet Minister for Law and then for Parliamentary Affairs, so I’m thinking he won’t have won many friends in the SLA in those posts!”
“So this is Nish’s maternal Uncle?” I established. I was silent for a moment. “Thing is, Sahmir, Mrs Gilbraith says her family cut all ties with her when she married Nish’s father. Sound familiar?”
Sahmir made a huffing noise.
“So that’s like someone in thirty years’ time threatening one of Nasim’s children in order to make Tariq do something for them. It ain’t gonna cut much ice back in the province.” I waited, but Sahmir said nothing. “Was there any hint of where they were holed up? Or any arrangements to meet up with her or anything?” I ascertained.
“No, apparently they finished up in a big row with her telling them where to get off, and she slammed the phone down on them.”
“Shit! That was a bit of a risk given they’ve just threatened to kill her son, isn’t it?” I commented nervously.
I could almost hear Sahmir shrugging down the other end of the line. “She got really mad with them…” He reported. “And you can tell she’s the patrician sort – well that’s what Mum said anyway – said she was coming over all high and mighty with them. Wasn’t going to be threatened by some filthy, uncouth, illiterate peasants.”
“Your mum’s interpretation, or what she actually said?” I clarified.
“Her exact words apparently.”
“Oh G-a-a-wd,” I groaned. “I hope they haven’t killed him already out of spite!”
Sahmir gave a slight laugh. “You’ve got your work cut out this time, Eve. What are you going to do?”
Good question. Not that I could see anything remotely humorous in it.
I rang Sappho. She whisp
ered to me, “I’m just going to find somewhere private, this house is stuffed full of uniforms!” She rang me back from her bedroom. She still kept her voice low. “There’s police, people from the Foreign Office, people who aren’t admitting to where they’re from, armed police at the front gate. The phone is being monitored – I mean – for all I know they’re monitoring my mobile as well! I’m pretty certain one guy is something like SAS.”
“No kidding?” I said, awed. I felt slightly better. If anyone could find him and get him out alive, they could…”
“Trouble is – they have no idea where they’re holding him. They’re waiting on another phone call to try and trace it…”
That night I curled tightly into Quinn’s arms and he pressed his face into my hair. We had nothing to say to each other. I was just grateful he was here.
Next morning I was obliged to get up as normal and go into work. Heskett passed me in a corridor and shook his head at me with a brief frown. I took that to mean that they had no news. Alan looked crossly at me. “Where were you yesterday?”
Please tell me that Heskett had given some sort of cover story? But no, apparently not. Alan was irate at my sudden disappearance from the factory yesterday.
“Mr Heskett sent me on an errand,” I said lamely.
Alan looked furious. “Who’s in charge of this department? Heskett or myself? If he wants to send you on an errand then he needs to have the courtesy to square it with me first!”
“I’m sorry,” I said in a small voice. “Please can you and Mr. Heskett sort it out between yourselves because I really don’t know who I’m answering to. Every week it seems to be someone different, and on top of that I seem to be expected to hop to it, every time Gilbraith clicks his fingers. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing…” My voice wobbled a bit more than it should have done and Alan looked narrowly at me. And then right on cue, Mizo stuck his head round the door and jerked it at me in an imperious way. I glanced at Alan and he folded his arms. “Right, that’s it!” He exploded. “I can’t work like this!” He stormed into his office and picked up a phone.
The Way Back Page 13