The Convenience of Lies

by Geoffrey Seed

  McCall’s eye was caught by a group of four or five men emerging from the portable cabins used as offices and mess rooms by the dock’s security team. They began running towards the MV Arta. And there was Pinkie Aldridge, trying to keep up.

  ‘Christ, we’ve been rumbled,’ McCall said. ‘Look who’s got to Charlie.’

  Right at the front was Roly Vickers. He stopped to dragoon two patrolling squaddies to join his advance towards the ship.

  ‘We can still make it,’ Benwick said. ‘And don’t forget, Vickers has about as much legal authority here as we do.’

  Without quickening his pace, Benwick led the way onto the busy road beyond the port gates to a pub called The Sportsman. The bar was crowded with seafarers and dockworkers. Sitting in the corner was the stocky Russian they’d stayed with in Leeds and who’d driven them to the safe house in Barton.

  He looked up, saw Benwick then left his beer. Not a word was spoken. They followed him out to a nearby street where he’d parked his Volvo. He opened the tailgate and Benwick gestured to McCall to climb in and lie under the blankets as before. But something didn’t feel right this time.

  ‘I’m not doing this,’ McCall said. ‘I’ve taken too much on trust. I want to know what the hell I’m involved in and where it’s all leading.’

  ‘You’ll know everything soon enough. Don’t waste time, we’ve got to move.’

  ‘No, I’ve had enough of being kept in the dark.’

  The Russian’s arms dropped by his sides, fingers twitching. Benwick fixed his eyes on McCall’s. He took a very deep breath and the faint outline of the Makarov became visible beneath his tightened jacket.

  ‘I’ve enjoyed your company till now,’ he said. ‘But if you don’t get in the car, we’ll kill you where you stand.’

  Forty

  Coming downstairs to prepare breakfast, Hester could still smell the sage she had burned to purify the cottage sitting room the night before. She’d wanted to create an atmosphere without stress or anxiety for Lexie to envision her spiritual, mental and even cellular being with greater clarity and thereby connect to nature and the cosmos. By this, she might also come to understand the healing power of positive thinking and surrender to other dimensions beyond those which are scientifically proven.

  This was Hester as shaman, ministering to Lexie in these early days of her uncertain journey towards recovery. But the move to Staithe End and life by the sea was already having benefits, not least for Ruby. This was in contrast to Garth Hall which had begun to show its darker face to hypersensitive Hester.

  Its many rooms and narrow landings had come to appear sunless and oppressive, inexplicably lacking that sense of enfolding welcome she’d previously known.

  It was as if all the benign ghosts of Garth had been overwhelmed by the inrush of those evil influences which always attended McCall’s work but now laid siege to his home.

  She still worried about his safety and hated leaving the old house locked and silent and her garden to run wild. But his absence at such a threatening time suggested a selfish lack of concern about Lexie’s well being and did him no credit.

  Lexie and Ruby had to be her primary responsibility now. They had need of her whilst McCall appeared to have need of no one.

  *

  By late that Saturday morning, the weather improved enough for Hester to suggest making a fire on the beach to cook the sea trout she’d bought from a fisherman’s shed on the harbour. They took overcoats and scarves and set up a coloured plastic windbreak around them. Hester and Lexie gathered driftwood from the wrack line and Ruby ran up and down from the water’s edge, carrying big pebbles to make a hearth.

  ‘I don’t think we’ve seen her as content as this before,’ Lexie said.

  ‘We’re giving her back her childhood, that’s why.’

  ‘She’s not wetting her bed anymore and even the cat’s settled in nicely.’

  ‘I know. And doesn’t Ruby seem fascinated by the sea? That’s all she’s drawing now.’

  ‘Which is why I need to say something to you, Hester.’

  ‘What’s that, honey?’

  ‘Look, if it doesn’t work out for me, I want you to take care of Ruby… properly, I mean… legally become her guardian.’

  ‘Of course, if that’s what you want but you mustn’t give in to negative thoughts.’

  ‘We have to, same as we’ve got to sort out her schooling and a doctor and a dentist.’

  ‘Around here, in Norfolk?’

  ‘Yes, because once my place in Bristol is sold, I’ll set up a trust fund for her with some of my profit and all of Etta’s money.’

  Hester was very tempted to ask where - and if - McCall fitted into her plan. But Lexie had said all she wanted to and it was best left there. They lapsed into silence. Each recognised the improbable mother-daughter bond developing between them, nurtured by more than just the warmth of a shared bed.

  Ruby asked if she could light the fire and managed to do it with the third match. She clapped her hands and added more small branches then some pinecones and dried-out pieces of salty grey wood.

  After this, she helped Hester wrap three trout in separate sheets of silver foil with lemon juice and herbs, ready to place in the embers when the fire got hot.

  Lexie watched them contentedly, lying back on a softly rising sand dune where they’d made camp. She shielded her eyes from the late autumn sun which broke on the waves in countless crystal shards whenever the restless clouds blew apart. How normal it all seemed, how natural and timeless. She could almost forget something was wrong, someone was missing.

  Far out to sea, container ships, trawlers, yachts, cruisers, all inched their way across the watery arc of the world. Whoever would know that in the depths beneath, mammoths once roamed and men had hunted across a land long since drowned and lost to sight?

  The sun caught the twin white derricks of a cargo vessel steaming south. Lexie paid it no more attention than any of the others. Their fish were nearly ready. Ruby spooned out salad onto paper plates then filled their glasses with homemade elderflower cordial.

  ‘Come on, let’s eat,’ Hester said. ‘And let us drink to those we have loved.’

  *

  Lexie went upstairs early that evening, exhausted by the trek to the salt marshes she insisted they made after their al fresco lunch. Ruby was already in bed with Ludo on guard by her feet. Hester sat alone before the dying fire, unable to stop going over the implications of Lexie’s offer if she lost out to her disease.

  She’d already committed herself to look after Ruby. She was genuinely fond of the child. The abuse she’d suffered so saddened and appalled Hester that the urge to protect her from any more harm was palpable. But being legally responsible for her upbringing imposed obligations she might not always be able to meet, however much she might want to.

  What if she had to return to the States? She had relations in Oregon and friends in California and beyond. How would Ruby react to even a holiday in such distant places? More immediately, Hester was just about nearer seventy than sixty. Who would care for Ruby when she no longer could?

  These were questions in search of answers. But she must hold to the still calm centre of her inner self. She pulled on a waterproof coat and walking boots then headed out under the night sky with a sleeping bag.

  Being in the littoral peace of Staithe End was getting her circadian rhythms back in balance. After the disorientating menace she’d endured in recent weeks, she needed them re-set in tune with the oscillations of the tides. Benevolent nature would do the rest then she might return to the path she was meant to travel, wherever it led.

  For now, she lay on the dunes amid the spiky tufts of marram grass and stared at the hierophany of the heavens which came and went between the ruffling clouds. At such times, she remembered what Einstein said about a spirit being manifest in the laws of the universe - a spirit vastly superior to that of man.

  Was that who or what we called God? But what purpose did our feebl
e, eye-blink of existence serve? How could we explain our role in a harmony of parts so complex that no one had yet to fully comprehend it - and may never do so?

  Not for the first time, Hester was asking herself about matters of divinity to which she still had no adequate responses.

  But at last this spark of life lit from the dust of stars slept - slept with the sound of the sea in her ears and her old hippie mind blown yet again by the sacrality of it all.

  Forty-One

  ‘What do you believe in, McCall?’

  ‘Far less than I did years ago.’

  ‘Why do you think that is?’

  ‘How much time have you got?’

  ‘Put like that, not a lot,’ Benwick said. ‘Best leave it for another day.’

  McCall wasn’t convinced there would be one. They were drinking coffee in the cabin of a thirty-foot motor cruiser off the East Anglian coast, keeping the MV Arta in view but from distance.

  When it came to it, McCall had clambered into the silent Russian’s Volvo as ordered. From then on, he felt like their hostage - and a readily disposable one, too.

  He recalled the old Soviet proverb the less you know, the better you sleep. But McCall already had enough on Benwick to put him behind bars - not that he ever would, even if offered a deal by the police over his own criminal involvement. But Benwick wasn’t to know that.

  They sat across a table from each other. Neither was dressed for sailing. They wore the same suit and tie disguises - slept-in and crumpled now - in which they’d conned Charlie Aldridge. Only the Russian, in a roll-neck sweater and thick navy jacket, looked like a seafarer and held their course at the wheel.

  Whatever might yet play out in the unfolding drama of Benwick’s secret life, McCall blamed himself for getting too close. He’d always taken risks on stories but based on facts he could establish, people he could judge.

  This time, he’d been cut off by the tide of his own personal connection to Ruby. He should have quit long before. He’d enough exclusive material and pictures then for a colour supplement spread about the kidnapping and her amazing artistic talents. But his curiosity won out. And everyone knew what that did for the cat.

  After McCall and Benwick hid in the back of the Volvo, the Russian had driven them the fifteen miles or so up the coast to Bridlington and the motor cruiser he’d hired. All three slept aboard on Friday night, anchored out in the bay. Escape wasn’t an option. They set sail next day to arrive astern of the Arta just after she left Hull to begin her long voyage to Aqaba.

  A North Sea fog took a while to clear as both vessels progressed by the wolds of Lincolnshire then the landmark stump of Boston’s parish church, towering above the pan-flat fields. Glossy grey seals lay like river-rolled stones on the mud banks of The Wash and abov them, deckled clouds of wading birds yawed between their marshy feeding grounds.

  Then came the coast of north Norfolk. And somewhere amid its dunes and misty pine woods would be Staithe End - McCall’s own little corner of Arcadia where he had adored the woman who would never truly be his.

  This much he’d always known in his heart and in his head. Here was what the shrink in Oxford would’ve called cognitive dissonance had McCall stayed long enough to have his ills given names.

  For now, he stared back through time, back into all he held in amber for when his days lengthened into night. And he saw again how once she had been - that quizzical turn of her head, a glance half hidden behind wheaten hair, those eyes… conspiring, promising, treacherous.

  But the one who willed him such memories, the one he lay with all those years ago, was no more. Life and circumstance take from us all. What he loved was but a ghost from an irretrievable past. We cannot return, only ever drift further away.

  *

  ‘We’ll be parting company, soon,’ Benwick said. ‘I know you’ve got a lot of questions and I’ll be straight with you where I can but don’t expect answers to everything. OK?’

  McCall held Benwick’s unsmiling gaze, unsure if he’d just been offered the equivalent of a condemned man’s last meal. The sea looked very cold, very deep.

  ‘I hardly know where to begin. Each day is crazier than the last with you.’

  ‘Because we live in times of unprecedented corruption and intrigue, McCall. Even wicked old Harry Lime would find it hard to believe so we’ve no choice but to fight dirty and fight hard.’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘OK, tell me what you were doing inside the weapons factory.’

  ‘Trying to plant an explosive device in one of the underground arms dumps.’

  ‘There’s honest, if nothing else,’ McCall said. ‘Why were you doing that?’

  ‘Because they hadn’t taken notice of any of the warnings they’d been given.’

  ‘What were you warning them about and why?’

  ‘The warnings were given to those who develop or sell missiles and equipment to Saddam Hussein, the maniac who’s building up a chemical and nuclear capability to threaten the whole Middle East.’

  ‘But the Arta’s cargo is not for Iraq, it’s for Jordan… a western ally.’

  ‘The end user paperwork is bullshit. The arms are for Saddam and the British government knows that Jordan is Iraq’s back door because that’s how Saddam gets hold of all his weaponry, whatever the international bans against him.’

  ‘And what did our government do about it?’

  ‘The answer is heading south at about ten knots,’ Benwick said.

  ‘But it’s carrying no nuclear weapons, surely?’

  ‘Not as such but Saddam’s slowly putting the means together to make and deliver them. This piece of kit from here, that piece of kit from there, labelled yarn or agricultural implements by the complicit governments and the arms dealers whose only god is profit.’

  ‘So the British are by-passing the sanctions on Iraq?’

  ‘Wise up, McCall. Billions are being made so there isn’t a man or a politician alive who’s beyond bribing or who’s unwilling to turn a blind eye for a decent kick-back.’

  Benwick said Saddam spent thirty five billion dollars on weaponry in the 1980s. The munitions on the Arta alone were worth almost five hundred million.

  ‘If the Brits don’t supply Saddam just because the West suddenly doesn’t like him anymore, you can bet your life that others will so we just do it through quieter channels.’

  ‘Let’s go back a bit. What happened to the woman you were with at the factory?’

  McCall saw from the hard look in Benwick’s eyes that he wasn’t supposed to know the accomplice was female. Maybe because he did, the reply was blunt and factual.

  ‘She was hit by a shunting engine on the site and killed then her body was dumped by a main line near the factory to make it look like a suicide or an accident.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Who covered up her death?’

  ‘The same team which picked up Malky Hoare pretending to be spooks and who’ve followed us right across the country and will kill me if they get half a chance.’

  ‘Yes, but who are they?’

  Benwick stood up as if exasperated at so dumb a question. He went through to the Russian and cadged a cigarette. McCall didn’t know he smoked. When he came back, he kept looking at his watch. There was a nervous intensity about him which he’d not shown before.

  ‘Let me mark your card very simply,’ Benwick said. ‘The British economy has been ramped up by huge overt and covert weapons deals under Margaret Thatcher. Behind her are the same money men, arms dealers, spies and business interests who brought her to power and who drive her foreign policy in line with America’s but telling the truth about this situation is a luxury our politicians can’t afford so they surround it in double speak and weasel words. If that fails, their lawyers deem it not in the public interest allowing them all to wash their hands in the blood of others.’

  McCall thought it a speech worthy of one
of Hester’s hippie rants against the military industrial complex.

  ‘OK, I hear all that,’ he said. ‘But who are the men who want to kill you?’

  ‘Ex-special services, ex-spooks, hired hands doing the deniable dirty work for the suits in offices who profit from the deaths of thousands of people in places where they’ve never been and wouldn’t ever dare to go.’

  ‘What else have you done to make them grumpy enough to want you dead?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Look, you’re not some damn peacenik on a one-man crusade, you’re a cop - ’

  ‘ - was a cop.’

  ‘OK, but there’s obviously an organisation with resources behind you, so who is it, who are you doing all this for?’

  ‘You’ve asked me this already and the answer’s still no comment.’

  ‘As you wish but we’re not going to get very far at this rate,’ McCall said. ‘Let’s try it another way. What’s all this got to do with the abduction of little Ruby?’

  Benwick checked that the Arta was still visible then threw the stub of his cigarette into the sea. An easterly wind was taking the tops off the swelling waves. There could be rain soon. McCall understood his dilemma. The kidnap of Ruby was only one conspiracy in a cellar full of others. He couldn’t shine light on one without McCall inevitably seeing the rest.

  ‘The key to most of it is Inglis,’ he said.

  ‘Now there’s a surprise.’

  ‘He’s always been of interest to MI5. They talent-spotted him at Oxford and have kept a close eye on him every since.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because he was a pony who could win the race, McCall. Politics is about backing winners and if your winner has a weakness, that’s to be exploited.’

  ‘And Guy Inglis’s weakness was sexually abusing children?’