What Will Survive

by Joan Smith

‘What the fuck is this supposed to be? We can’t run this, what’s the picture desk playing at? Mandy, you still there?’

  ‘It’ll only take two minutes—’

  ‘Give Fiona a bell and let her know when to expect you.’ The line went dead.

  Ingrid raised her eyebrows.

  Amanda flopped back in her chair. ‘All he’s interested in is Diana. He wants me to get on a plane, do a piece on landmines — it’s crazy.’

  ‘So? Say you cannot get a flight till Wednesday.’

  ‘They know I’ve got a reservation tomorrow.’

  ‘Surely—’

  ‘I’m freelance, I can’t afford to offend them.’

  ‘You are not on staff?’

  ‘No, but I’m hoping — now I’m paying all the bills. Since Patrick left.’

  Ingrid’s expression softened. ‘In that case, Amanda, you should do as they ask and in a few days there will be nothing left to write. Lady Di was young and pretty and I am sorry for her boys, but what else is there to say?’

  ‘Well...’

  Ingrid made an impatient gesture. ‘Your editor is not thinking properly. No one expected this to happen. He is in shock like everyone in your country.’ She gestured at the TV screen. ‘These people, what do they think they are doing? It will be a — what do you call it — a nine days’ wonder. Will you have more coffee?’

  ‘No thanks, I’m starting to feel wired.’ Amanda sat up and began keying a number into her mobile. ‘I’ll talk to Sabri, see what he says.’ A moment later she gave Ingrid a despairing look. ‘Voicemail. I couldn’t get him yesterday either.’

  ‘What about Michael?’

  ‘Michael Scott-Leakey? I hardly know him.’

  Ingrid said, ‘I will call the airport and see if there is a flight this afternoon. Unless you want to do it?’

  ‘No, please, go ahead.’

  ‘Do you have a credit card?’

  Looking dazed, Amanda opened her bag.

  ‘If there is not, you will just have to use your old ticket in the morning. You cannot do more than that.’

  Amanda handed over her Visa card. ‘Can you make some more calls? About the — the other thing?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I can’t pay you after today. I mean, I’ll try, but I can’t promise.’

  ‘I am not doing it for money. I promised Um Marwan—’

  Amanda said, ‘I can do things from London — I’ve arranged to speak to his tutor, he’s supposed to be back in his office next week. If you concentrate on finding the driver, that’s the most important thing.’

  Ingrid had spent the previous afternoon ringing hospitals in Damascus. She said, ‘Samih’s brother-in-law is going to ring me when he has spoken to his friend in the health ministry. Excuse me, I need to get the number of the airline.’

  She got up and went into her office. Amanda turned back to the TV screen, where the same images were repeating themselves in a seemingly endless cycle: mourners outside Kensington Palace, the royal family attending church in dark clothes, the underpass in Paris where the crash had happened, the Prime Minister’s sound bite. It was hypnotic, making her feel as though something subtly different might appear in one of the clips if she watched long enough, and it took Amanda a while to realise she was wasting precious time.

  ‘There is nothing today, unless you want to go first class.’ Ingrid was back in the sitting room.

  ‘Thank God for that. I still have to do this piece about land-mines, though.’

  ‘Use my computer if you like.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Amanda’s phone beeped and she saw that she had a text from Samih. She opened it and read: ‘Does your Prime Minister not know better? Monarchy is the opium of the people.’ She laughed out loud and began to text him back.

  Stephen came into his office and threw down a copy of the Evening Standard. ‘The world’s gone mad. Absolutely stark raving bonkers.’

  His researcher, Sunil, did not look up from his laptop. ‘What now?’

  Stephen took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the door. ‘I’ve just walked down Whitehall and there’s a poster on a lamp post — high up, someone must’ve used a ladder. And what’s on it?’ He paused for effect. ‘A photo of Diana next to one of Jesus.’

  ‘Strictly speaking, there aren’t any photos of Jesus.’

  Stephen picked up the newspaper and cuffed the back of Sunil’s head. ‘Very clever. You know what I mean.’

  ‘It’s a cult,’ Sunil said, still hunched over the screen. ‘A mother cult, with its own rituals.’

  Stephen snorted. ‘Say that in the wrong company and you’ll get lynched. Christ, I thought I’d escaped the worst of it, being in Tashkent. Did I tell you Karimov asked us to give his condolences to the Queen? The Foreign Minister, I can’t remember his name, he asked whether it was really an accident.’ Stephen gave a bark of laughter. ‘Amazing, the number of people who suspect the royal family of homicidal tendencies.’

  ‘The goddess doesn’t die naturally, it has to be a sacrifice... Have you got time to look at the Clinton pamphlet? I’ve changed the order a bit and rewritten the first paragraph.’

  Stephen sat down on his desk chair, swinging from side to side. He looked at his watch and frowned. ‘It’ll have to wait. I’ve got a journalist coming in at four. What do you think of the title? Bit too provocative?’

  Sunil shook his head. ‘Nope. Should be able to sell an extract to the Speccie, they’ll go for that.’

  Stephen’s fingers moved restlessly on the surface of his desk and he glanced at his watch again. ‘Listen, Sunil, can you go down to the library and see how they’re getting on with that copying? No need to come back, she’ll be here any minute.’

  Sunil closed the file he’d been working on and hit several keys. ‘OK, I’m emailing this to you now so you can look at it later.’ He stood up, picked up his jacket, shrugged it on and slung his House of Commons pass round his neck. Although he was wearing a suit, he looked so young that Palace officials sometimes assumed he had become detached from a sixth-form outing. ‘Anything else?’

  Stephen was signing letters left for him by his secretary. ‘Don’t think so.’ He crossed out the phrase ‘yours sincerely’ on a letter to an MP with a neighbouring consituency, substituting ‘warmest regards’, and picked up a list of telephone messages. ‘Fuck,’ he exclaimed.

  Sunil paused on the threshold. Stephen looked up, surprised to see he was still there. ‘It’s OK. Just — personal stuff.’

  The researcher closed the door and Stephen threw down the list, infuriated by the number of calls he was getting from Carolina’s lawyers. They had begun while he was in Uzbekistan — immediately after she got his conciliatory letter, which seemed to have had quite the opposite effect to what he intended — and their demands were so outrageous that he had begun to think his financial prospects, if he left Parliament, were bleak. At this rate, he’d need every penny of his MP’s pension if he wasn’t to end up in a bedsit in an insalubrious part of London — Stephen checked himself, halting his descent into self-pity. After everything that had happened in the last few months, he was grateful to be alive and in a job, and Carolina had at least agreed to let him take the boys to a football match at the weekend.

  There had been a moment of madness in the summer, not long after Aisha’s death, when he’d seriously thought about resigning his seat, but he’d done nothing about it, other than sound off to Marcus Grill — who had been discreet, thank God. Now Stephen was in the process of building bridges with the leadership — sucking up, he thought in his darker moments — and he’d just had a useful lunch with a member of the Shadow Cabinet. The man didn’t seem to have heard any damaging rumours, and he even put his hand on Stephen’s shoulder as they were leaving the restaurant and suggested he talk to the Party’s deputy chairman, who had been asked to head a task force on widening the membership. The invitation had been followed by an apparently casual inquiry about Carolina, but Stephen
hadn’t come away with the impression that he was irretrievably damaged.

  Carolina — the thought of his wife made him wince and he reached for the phone, withdrawing his hand when he realised he did not want to be in the middle of a difficult call with his wife’s solicitors when Amanda Harrison arrived; it was about time he got a lawyer of his own, someone who was up-to-speed on divorce settlements and could be trusted not to gossip. Seconds later the phone rang, announcing the journalist’s arrival downstairs at the front desk of” Parliament Street, and Stephen braced himself for what he hoped would not be a difficult encounter.

  ‘Hi, come in,’ he said breezily when a woman in her late twenties appeared, wearing a pale-green suit. He indicated the sofa crammed under the window. ‘As you can see, it’s not exactly palatial, but have a seat.’

  She sat down and he noticed that she had good legs, although one ankle was slightly swollen. ‘Get you a drink?’

  She held up a plastic bottle. ‘I’ve got some water, thanks.’

  It was a warm day and Amanda unbuttoned her jacket, gazing round the room with interest. She had expected an MP’s office to be larger and she wondered how he managed when his secretary and researcher, both of whom she’d spoken to at various times, were in the room. Stephen himself was good-looking, with dark curly hair and intense blue eyes; he struck her as alert, watchful, and she noticed that he kept glancing at a piece of paper on his desk. There was a row of snaps at the back, propped against the wall, showing two boys and a younger version of the MP with various Party bigwigs. Two more photos had fallen or been placed face down. Above them, half a dozen political cartoons had been framed and hung on the wall.

  Stephen shifted in his seat. ‘What can I do for you? You said something to my secretary about Aisha Lincoln — Aisha was a friend of mine, but that’s all. If you’ve heard any gossip —’

  ‘Gossip?’

  Amanda stared at him, her intuition confirmed: there had been something between them. Not that she cared, but it might make her task easier.

  ‘No, not at all. The thing is, I’ve just come back from Lebanon. Well, a couple of weeks ago, actually. I’ve lost track of time with all this Princess of Wales stuff.’

  ‘I was out of the country,’ Stephen said with alacrity. ‘I didn’t see any English papers till I got back. I thought it’d be all over now, to be honest.’ He lifted his hands. ‘Sorry I know you’ve got your job to do.’

  ‘I wish it was,’ Amanda said with feeling. ‘All over, I mean.’

  Stephen raised his eyebrows, looking interested in her for the first time. ‘You’re not a fan?’

  ‘Even my Mum’s getting fed up with it, and she really liked Diana.’

  He relaxed visibly. ‘I wonder what some of these people will do when someone they actually know dies. What did Chesterton say — when people stop believing in God, they start believing in anything? My researcher, who’s very smart, thinks it’s a modern version of a mother cult.’

  ‘Gosh, can I interview you about that? Another time, I mean.’

  Stephen grinned, and Amanda got a glimpse of his impish charm. ‘You must be joking. I’m trying to rehabilitate myself, not get into more trouble. So, tell me about Lebanon.’

  ‘Mind if I —’ She hesitated, then took off her jacket, folding it on the cushion beside her. ‘Gosh, where to start? I was supposed to be doing a colour piece for the magazine — what Aisha Lincoln was doing in Lebanon, finding her roots, that sort of thing. Were you going to say something?’

  ‘Her mother was Egyptian, not Lebanese.’

  ‘Yes, I knew that. Anyway, I went to Beirut and Damascus, which is a part of the world I don’t know at all, and I walked into something I absolutely didn’t expect.’

  Stephen’s eyes narrowed, his earlier wariness returning. ‘This is all very intriguing, but I’m not sure what it’s got to do with me. I’m not an Arabist —’

  ‘I know. Look, I’m going to be frank, I’m having a bit of trouble getting this story into the paper.’ Actually, she had encountered an apparently impenetrable barrier of scepticism each time she tried to bring up the subject, but Stephen didn’t need to know that. ‘If you were willing to ask questions in the House, it would make all the difference.’

  ‘Questions about what?’

  ‘How Aisha died —’

  ‘It was an accident, end of story.’ Stephen glanced at his watch. ‘If it’s landmines you’re interested in, I can put you in touch with my colleague Angus McSorley —’

  ‘No, it’s not that.’ Amanda turned aside and drew something out of her bag. ‘This is going to sound far-fetched to begin with, so I’ve put together a file. All I’m asking is that you read it — it won’t take long.’ Stephen said nothing and she pressed on: ‘It starts with some cuttings on targeted killings—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There have been several documented cases, both in Lebanon and the Occupied Territories. There’s one where they used a mobile phone, it was booby-trapped so when this Hezbollah guy turned it on... I’ve also found one where the Israelis killed someone from Hamas: they fired a missile at his car. It’s all in here.’

  ‘Why should I be interested in assassinations? I’m not following this.’

  ‘Obviously it was a mistake, Aisha wasn’t even the target and they made it look like an accident.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting — my God, you are. Christ.’ He stared at Amanda as though she was mad.

  ‘I didn’t believe it to begin with but I’ve spent the last fortnight on the phone to Lebanon... In between doing vox pops about Diana, which really is mad.’

  ‘She was a model, in case you’ve forgotten. Who’d want to kill a model? Sorry to be blunt, you don’t look crazy...’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, you’re as bad as the rest of them!’ Amanda’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean...’ She rummaged inside the file and pulled out two pictures. ‘Have a look at this, please. Please. This is Fabio Terzano, the photographer who —’

  ‘I know who he is.’ Stephen’s mouth turned down.

  Amanda thrust the picture towards him and Stephen gave it a cursory glance. ‘So?’

  ‘And this is Abu Thaer. He’s Syrian, he makes bombs for Hezbollah. Don’t they look alike?’

  ‘Yes, but —’ Reluctantly Stephen took the pictures and held them side by side.

  ‘So Fabio takes Aisha to see this kid he knew during the war, right down in the south — practically in the bit of Lebanon that’s occupied by the Israelis, it’s absolutely crawling with militia.’ Amanda had a brief vision of the soldiers she and Ingrid met on the road, the SLA men with their AK-47s. ‘He’s taking pictures all afternoon, that’s when they first see the helicopter, according to Aisha. Or it sees them, more to the point. Next morning it comes back, so low it damages the roof of the house they slept in...’

  ‘The what?’ In his head, Stephen heard Aisha’s voice, repeating words he had listened to many times in her last message without assigning them any importance: ‘Sorry, I thought the helicopter was coming back — I can’t imagine what it’s doing in the middle of nowhere.’ His mouth was dry and he swallowed a couple of times.

  ‘Are you all right?’ His colour was rising and Amanda felt a spurt of anxiety, thinking he might have a medical condition. ‘Shall I go on?’

  Stephen made an impatient gesture with his hand.

  ‘OK, this boy they’ve come to see, Marwan Hadidi — I shouldn’t say boy, he’s in his late twenties by now. Anyway, they discover he’s been arrested, that he’s in a place called Al-Khiam. It’s notorious in Lebanon.’

  ‘You mean he’s a terrorist? He took Aisha to meet a terrorist?’

  ‘No. They got the wrong person. Marwan’s best friend, someone he was at school with — this boy does seem to have some connection with Hezbollah. Marwan was working in a law centre in Tyre, his boss is trying to bring a legal case —’

  Stephen slammed a hand down on his desk. ‘Christ. Christ
. He should be strung up by the balls.’

  Amanda stared at him.

  ‘Stupid fucker.’

  Stephen put his face in his hands and it took Amanda a few seconds to realise he was talking about Fabio Terzano.

  ‘I don’t think he realised — they hadn’t been in touch for years, not since the civil war.’

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

  Amanda waited. Eventually Stephen lifted his head and said dully: ‘What have you done about this? Who knows?’

  ‘I’ve tried talking to Sandra, she commissioned the piece, but she’s working on a special Diana issue. Simon, the news editor, he isn’t totally hostile but he hasn’t got the final say and the editor’s obsessed with Diana.’ Amanda rolled her eyes. ‘But I’m working with someone in Beirut, this is the good news, and she knows where the driver is. He’s got a nephew in the government, he got him into this private hospital in Ladhiqiyah, and he’s incredibly suspicious. The nephew, I mean — typical of the Ba’ath party. But if you could ask questions, get the Foreign Office involved...’

  He croaked, ‘Give me the file.’

  She handed it across. Stephen’s face was still flushed and his breathing was laboured as he glanced at each page. There were a couple of photographs of Aisha at the back, Amanda wasn’t sure why she’d included them, but Stephen looked at them for a long time without speaking. Eventually he said, ‘Can I keep these?’

  ‘Yes, didn’t I say? I can stand it all up, most of it anyway, but obviously we do need the driver. If the British embassy —’

  Still not looking at her, Stephen pulled a desk calendar towards him. ‘The House isn’t back till next month, Foreign Office questions are on a Tuesday...’ He flipped over a page and ran his finger along the dates, his hand trembling.

  He stopped, lifting a hand to his forehead. ‘Politically, I mean, how to handle... the Shadow Foreign Secretary... I’ll grab him in Blackpool next week, I’m not his favourite person but she was a Brit — a British citizen.’ He paused. ‘I don’t — have I got your numbers?’

  ‘Let me give you my card.’ Amanda felt in her bag, then a thought occurred to her. ‘This boy, Marwan, I really don’t think he’s a terrorist — his girlfriend, this is off the record, all right? His girlfriend is half-Jewish.’