Woman of State

by Simon Berthon

She notices his use of the future tense and feels a combination of thrill and fantasy. The memory of how unreal she found their first meeting hits her – irritated, she tells herself to dismiss it.

  They scroll the movies on the hotel TV menu. ‘Hey, that’s impressive,’ he exclaims, ‘they’ve got Four Weddings and a Funeral. It’s only just come out.’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ she says.

  ‘Then it’ll be an education for you.’

  They snuggle up – she winces at the foppish young Englishman and friends from another universe but can’t help finding them funny. ‘Are there really people like that?’ she asks when it’s over.

  ‘I thought you were with one of them.’ For an instant, she can almost believe him, then he says ‘ha-ha’ and starts kissing her with an exciting deepness. There’s something febrile about his lovemaking but second time around he relaxes and they find an ease with each other she feared had gone missing.

  He kisses her goodnight on the forehead and rolls away on his side. Within seconds, she can hear his even breathing as he appears to sleep, but every now and then he twitches and she’s not sure. At one point, she stretches out a hand to graze his shoulder. He stirs and turns. He cups her face and moves closer.

  ‘I want you to know, Maire, that I love you. Never believe anything else. I love you more than you could ever understand.’

  She sees a tear in his eye. ‘And I want you to know, David, that I feel more for you than I ever thought it would be possible to feel for anyone.’ She still cannot say the word. He doesn’t ask for it or seem to mind. Instead he smiles and rolls over. Soon, all she can detect are the tiny risings and fallings of the rhythmic breathing of sleep.

  She cannot imitate him. She’s unusually restless as her stomach fights the unfamiliar richness of food and her mind churns too many inchoate thoughts. She remembers how she sprayed the word love into her pillow talk with Joseph. How wrong a word it was to describe her teenage idolizing of a selfish boy who ended up exploiting her. How right it would be, if their worlds could ever be aligned, to describe the wondrous feelings she’s had for this man. She starts. What did he mean by ‘Never believe anything else’? Why ever would she?

  She inspects his silhouette, outlined by a shaft of street light. Inch by inch she follows the curves from his head, around his shoulder, the decline to his slim waist, the rise over his buttocks and waist, and the descent to his heels. The rising and falling has almost ceased – his breathing barely audible. The twitching has stopped. There’s something about his stillness that seems unnatural. She watches until, finally, exhaustion overcomes her.

  She awakes just after nine o’clock, daylight streaming through a gap in the curtains. She stretches out a hand. Nothing. She turns over. He’s gone. In his place he’s left a slender silver bracelet and matching earrings which dangle in the shape of a capital D. When she leaves the key at reception and asks about the bill, she’s told it’s all been paid.

  That evening, she sits alone in her room at Mrs Ryan’s, trying to work it out. It’s ended – she’s sure of that. He’s gone, maybe he’s already back in England. He’s handed in the thesis and rejoined his people, leaving her behind. It doesn’t fully add up. He doesn’t add up. He loves her, she’s sure of it. Something’s driven him away. She thinks back to what Martin said. No sense there either. She thinks back to David’s behaviour in recent weeks – his stress, his absences, his apartness at times. She thinks back to the whole period since the visit to her family. Perhaps they could never fully recover from it. Perhaps the distance between them was always going to be too much.

  She asks herself again and again why she could never bring herself to use the word – to tell him she loves him. Because, now that he’s gone, she knows she did. And does. She has an overwhelming sense of something unmatchable being lost. That, wherever he’s gone, there’s a part of him that remains unreached.

  However unreachable it may now seem, it’s a part she must not allow to escape.

  CHAPTER 15

  Post-election, Tuesday, 9 May

  Checking her private phone was in her jacket pocket, Anne-Marie took the lift down to reception, exited left into Marsham Street and over the lights, and headed north past Church House towards St James’s Park. Just past the entrance to Churchill’s war rooms she crossed Horse Guards Parade, intending to lose herself among the plane trees sparkling with early summer leaf and mallards flapping around the lake. She had the half-hour she had told Jemima to clear from her lunchtime diary.

  She dialled the number Joseph had left. It was answered instantly with a single word.

  ‘Yes.’ The voice was hoarse but there was no doubt.

  ‘Joseph?’

  ‘Yes, Maire.’

  ‘Is it really you, Joseph? How can I know?’

  ‘You know all right, Maire. You got my message, didn’t you?’

  She resigned herself. ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Then that’s that.’

  ‘Where are you? Where have you been? For God’s sake, it’s over twenty years. What are you doing suddenly contacting me?’

  ‘There’s nothing sudden. I just took my time.’

  ‘What is this, Joseph?’ She told herself to stay calm, not to betray her fear. ‘You know you can’t show your face again. You’d be shot. Even now.’

  ‘Is that right, Maire?’

  ‘Christ, Joseph, you know that’s fucking right!’

  ‘Maybe I don’t care. Maybe I want the truth.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Who pulled the trigger? Eh, Maire? That’d be one truth.’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘No, I’m very sane.’

  She paused, sensing a whole elaborate web unravelling. ‘Have you been following me?’

  ‘No.’ Another pause. She did not believe him. ‘I’ve been watching your progress, though.’

  ‘Where from? Where are you?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. You can be anywhere these days. Not like then.’

  ‘Why now, Joseph?’

  ‘I decided it was time.’ He said it perfunctorily. They both held the silence. ‘I phoned them about a body.’

  ‘A body? Whose body?’

  ‘Christ, Maire, whaddya mean “Whose body”?’

  ‘I’ll ask you again. Whose body?’

  ‘You playing some kind of game?’

  ‘OK. Just tell me what you did.’

  ‘I phoned them. The police. Confidential line.’

  ‘What made you do that?’

  ‘Whaddya think? You getting elected. That’s what made me do it. And look at you now.’ He paused to splutter. ‘You’ve risen high and fast, haven’t you, kid?’

  ‘You sound out of your mind, Joseph.’

  ‘You can’t explain me away like that, Maire.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘I gave the coordinates.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’

  ‘When we’ve done, I’ll be phoning again with some clues to who it might be.’

  ‘Might be, Joseph?’

  ‘Christ, you’ve come some way.’

  ‘Where is it?’ she interrupted.

  ‘You don’t need the coordinates, Maire.’

  She tried to think – nothing came but the obvious and desperate. ‘Whaddya want, Joseph?’

  ‘Christ, Maire, the accent slipped there.’ He paused, allowing time for the barb to sting. ‘As I said, it’s time.’

  ‘Time for what?’

  ‘You made it, didn’t you? Infiltrated the bastards.’

  ‘What do you mean, “infiltrated”?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you, Maire?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Joseph.’

  ‘Christ above, it killed your brother, didn’t it?’

  She said nothing, feeling the sinking in her heart and the return of crushed hope.

&nb
sp; ‘Anyway, doesn’t matter now,’ he rasped on. ‘I’m dying. I want it to come out before I go.’

  ‘What do you want to come out?’

  ‘I need to see you. So I can explain.’

  ‘I can’t see you, I can’t even know you.’

  ‘It’ll only be the once.’ His voice was now reduced to a diseased moan, a note of surrender she had never heard before. ‘There’s something you need to know.’

  ‘All that’s gone, Joseph. It’s over. The past. I’m not Maire any more.’

  ‘Sure, you’d like it that way. But it’s never over.’

  ‘Are you trying to threaten me?’

  ‘Now I wouldn’t do that, would I? Jesus, Maire, don’t you remember what we once were?’

  ‘I’ve never forgotten that, Joseph.’

  ‘Then that’s something, isn’t it?’

  She heard the old bitterness. ‘So tell me why.’

  ‘I heard your speech.’ He paused, breaking into more splutters of coughing. ‘It was a trick. We were all tricked. David too. It wasn’t like it seemed.’

  ‘You’re speaking in riddles.’

  ‘It’s the state. You said it yourself. That’s why we have to meet.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Joseph, I’m going to ring off.’

  ‘Don’t. Just see me one time. Then it’ll be done. Then you’ll know. And you can decide. I won’t threaten you.’

  She said nothing, hearing only his rasping wheeziness.

  ‘I promise,’ he said.

  ‘What’s your plan?’

  ‘Is this your private phone?’

  ‘Yes. They’ve given me a new one for government business.’

  ‘I’ll text you a time and place.’

  ‘I’m not saying I will, Joseph. I need to think.’

  ‘I’ve given you my word. This’ll be it, Maire. Closure. I promise. But you don’t have a choice. It’s not about me, or you. It’s about the fucking British state. That’s what you gotta understand. That’s what I figured out. That’s what’s gonna blow them apart.’

  The phone went dead. She heard a voice calling. ‘Minister?’ She started, as if woken from a bad dream, her heart banging, and looked around. It was Jemima. She forced a smile.

  ‘Hello, Jemima. Here to talk to the ducks? Probably get more sense from them than our colleagues.’

  ‘They don’t answer back, do they?’ Jemima looked at her, wafting a rush of sympathy. ‘It’s a strange place.’ She paused. ‘And very male.’

  ‘Oh, I can handle them,’ said Anne-Marie. ‘They just want to be dominated really.’

  Jemima laughed. ‘Well, you’re better placed than me as a mere servant to do that.’ She tried again. ‘I just want you to know that if there’s ever anything . . .’

  ‘That’s kind of you, Jemima. But I must look after myself.’ She wondered if she had snubbed her and softened. ‘It’s the only way I know, I’ve been on my own too long.’

  Her weakness, she was all too quickly realizing, was that she was not.

  The skeleton, recovered piece by piece from its lonely field, was laid out on a steel trolley as coherently as the bones allowed. Carne could imagine the short back and long legs but anything else eluded him. He watched Amy inspecting her handiwork with pride, occasionally rearranging pieces of bone by what seemed no more than a millimetre or two. He failed to see the difference but it was giving her quiet satisfaction. She walked up to the head and gazed at the holes where eyes would have been.

  ‘What do you see?’ asked Carne.

  ‘I’m a scientist, not a seer,’ she retorted. ‘But, now you ask, I’ll look at my crystal ball. I see a man scared of something. Not of death, he isn’t a coward, but something unresolved.’

  ‘Stick to the science?’ suggested Carne, seeing he was being teased.

  She walked over and patted him on the chest. ‘Then watch how you phrase your questions.’

  ‘OK. Cause of death?’

  ‘Shot in the back of the head. Two separate bullet traces in the skull. There’s a marking on the back of the right femur.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He was given a beating, probably crude. Maybe with a large spanner or similar.’

  ‘Burns?’ He paused. ‘Electrics? Fingernail extraction?’

  ‘Can’t tell,’ she replied. ‘Make your own assumptions.’

  ‘But he didn’t walk into a field, shoot himself and disappear.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You see,’ reflected Carne, ‘it’s the idea of disappearance. Disappearances don’t just happen.’

  ‘Of course they do,’ Amy retorted with surprising sharpness. ‘Disappearances happen all the time. Sometimes folk reappear, kids come home, fathers leave the lovers they run off to. Sometimes they don’t.’

  ‘Disappearances like that never happened here.’

  ‘Sorry, Jonny, you’re beginning to lose me. Come in, ground control.’ She smiled at him, as if to commiserate with his mental waywardness.

  ‘What else?’

  She walked over to a grey, aluminium cabinet and pulled open a drawer. Inside, neatly pinned in regimented lines, were fibres from tattered cloth. In another drawer, the almost intact Gore-Tex jacket. It was a forlorn display – Carne felt an involuntary welling of sadness.

  ‘Did you confirm his age?’ he asked.

  ‘Mid-twenties to early thirties.’

  ‘Pointless.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’ She sounded like a schoolmistress ticking off an unthinking pupil.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Whether it was pointless. You don’t know.’

  Amy was leaning back against the filing cabinet, her eyes shining with triumph. ‘I have something.’ She opened another drawer to reveal three small Perspex bags. From one she removed a plastic box, two inches square, dull worn red in colour, and held it up in triumph. ‘It’s a jewellery box. Faux leather, made from plastic so it’s lasted. It was in the inside pocket of the jacket. Guess what I found inside.’

  ‘The killers’ name cards?’ suggested Carne. This time, he got more than a pat in the ribs.

  ‘A gold signet ring. And a lock of hair.’

  ‘And it belongs to . . .?’

  ‘That’s your department. The ring’s in the lab. It’s just possible there might be a print on the inside of the signet because it’s flat. From the lock of hair we’ll get mitochondrial DNA. Won’t give you a single individual, but it’s shared by the female line.

  ‘A parting gift?’ mused Carne. ‘Wife? Mother? Lover? Sister?’ ‘Back to facts. If you can find me the family, there won’t be too many of its women in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  ‘Clever girl.’

  Carne wanted to hug her, but the skeleton on the table was too disconcerting a witness.

  Carne’s phone rang. ‘Yes, Billy.’

  ‘There’s been a second call on the confidential phone. Same source. Said, “I got some clues for you.” Then gave another name to check out.’

  Half an hour later Carne swung through the gates of Castlereagh and strode down its soulless corridors past the interrogation cells. Echoes and ghosts of the past darted by, confessions being extracted from bombers and assassins, hard-drinking interrogators who made this building their fortress, the daily threat of mortars. The nearest they got these days to serious crime was an improbable spate of local serial killers and sex fiends on television. Of course they could only be caught by star investigators specially imported from London and New York to alleviate the dull ineptitude of the foggy-brained local coppers.

  Now he had a real-world, unsolved murder on his hands with a body and a name. He flung open the door into the detectives’ open-plan office and marched towards Billy Poots. ‘So?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’ve a surprise for you, boss,’ replied Poots with unusual zest. ‘And for me, too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Disappearance number five. No form, no record. Zero, sod all. The silence of the damned and the d
ead, not even a whisper or a breath in the wind.’

  ‘What’s the fucking name, Billy?’

  CHAPTER 16

  April 1994

  The next Friday – nearly a week’s passed, she goes early to his flat. An estate agent’s board displaying ‘1st floor 2 bed for rent’ is mounted on the front railing. She opens the front door with the key he gave her and climbs the flight of stairs. The second key no longer fits the lock to his flat. She knocks – no answer. She kneels and lays her head on the floor to peer through the slit under the door. She can see floorboards and legs of furniture still and silent. The emptiness of his rooms compounds her sense of loss. The abandonment of place matches his abandonment of her. She’s alone with an unshareable grief.

  She retraces her steps into the street and waits until a tenant from one of the other flats leaves for work. She intercepts him.

  ‘I’m looking for David Vallely,’ she says. ‘I thought he lived on the first floor.’

  ‘You mean the young Englishman?’ the man replies.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He must have left. They came yesterday to move his stuff and put up the sign. Not much, just a few boxes.’ The man is about to move on, then examines her more closely. ‘Didn’t I see you come round once?’ he asks.

  ‘No, couldn’t have been me,’ she answers. ‘He was a friend of a friend. I never met him.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, then.’ He’s confused. ‘Must have been someone like you.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me.’ She sounds sharper than she intends. He retreats and hurries off. She feels low and mean. She must not allow his absence to demean her.

  On Sunday, a week after he’s left, there’s a phone call to the house.

  ‘It’s for you, Maire,’ yells Mrs Ryan up the stairs. ‘Your da.’

  Panic seizes her. She takes a deep breath, tells herself to calm down and descends the stairs.

  ‘Hi, Da.’

  ‘Hello, Maire. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘We missed you at Easter.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, too much work on.’

  ‘We understand.’ Silence. He’s trying to find a way of saying something. She knows it’s bad. ‘We were wondering if you’d seen Martin lately.’

  ‘He was down just before Easter. Not since then. Why?’