by Paul Torday
As I came into the dining room Emma was standing beside the bar, loading a round of drinks on to a tray. She glanced at me. And in that single glance I saw that she knew. My face felt as red as fire. I couldn’t hold her gaze. I brushed past her, and put the stock book back in its place. I wondered whether she could smell Giulia’s musky perfume on me. At that moment I saw Giulia herself come through the double doors that led into the kitchen. She, too, gave me the briefest glance: haughty and complicit at the same time.
I tried to appear busy for a while, handing out drinks and chatting to customers waiting to be served. I sounded forced and uneasy, even to myself. After half an hour the restaurant quietened down. Most of the customers had now been seated and were eating. Emma walked over to me as I stood by the bar.
‘Come into the wine store with me. I want a word with you in private.’
I followed her dumbly into the room. She shut the door and turned to face me.
‘Is this where it happened?’
‘Where what happened?’
But Emma wasn’t in any mood to bother with my evasions.
‘You had that slut Giulia in here, didn’t you? I saw it written all over her face the moment she came back into the restaurant. I wondered what was taking her so long. Then I realised it was the boss, screwing her. I should think everyone in the restaurant knows that by now.’
I tried to think of something to say. I could hear the anguish in her voice and see it in her face. But I couldn’t do anything about it.
‘How could you?’ asked Emma. ‘How could you?’
I tried to explain that I hadn’t meant for it to happen. I tried to say that I was sorry. I might as well not have spoken; she wasn’t listening. I could see tears running down her face. When she finally managed to speak, though, her voice was firm.
‘Go back to the flat,’ she told me. ‘Take your stuff, and go. Leave your keys on the hall table. I don’t want to see or hear from you again.’
‘Em,’ I said, pleading. ‘It can’t end like this.’
‘You ended it,’ replied Emma. She looked at me with contempt. ‘Now just go. Please just go.’
Of course, life isn’t that simple. I did go back to the flat, and I hung around for an hour or two, hoping that Emma would come back and we could talk. But she didn’t: later I found out that she had gone to stay with a girlfriend that night. I stayed up waiting for her. At three in the morning I could stand it no longer so I packed a suitcase full of clothes and by six in the morning had found a hotel that was prepared to let me in at that time of the day. I stayed there for the next few nights until I found the flat I now live in.
For the first few weeks I tried to ring Emma, but when she heard my voice, she just hung up. Then I tried emails. Finally I started writing letters: long and desperate; short and angry. Neither style worked. I didn’t have the nerve to go round to her flat and confront her. I knew that one look from her would fill me with such shame I would lose all power of speech.
Who knows? Perhaps if we had seen each other again, she might have relented. But I doubt it. The betrayal had been so instant and so complete.
A couple of months later I heard that Emma had closed the restaurant. Or the bank manager had. She left London.
It shouldn’t have ended like that, but Emma was an old-fashioned girl: for her black was black and white was white and there was not much room for grey in her life. Well, that was her problem, I thought at the time. If she wanted to dismiss the last few years as if they had never been, that was her choice. I knew that there was nothing I could say to change her mind. My long affair with Emma was over: the only worthwhile thing in my life had ended.
I remember how, when she was still a teenager, my little sister Katie used to close down an argument when she knew she was losing. She would just stare at me defiantly and say, ‘End of story.’ That was how it was now. End of. I told myself it was all for the best. I told myself that if it hadn’t been one thing, it would have been another. I told myself that that’s how it was. And all the while another thought was running on at the back of my mind.
If only there was a rewind button you could hit. If only – when you got to a certain point in your life – you could just say: ‘I didn’t mean things to turn out like this’ – and then press the button. It was what you might think after a car crash: if only I hadn’t been doing sixty miles an hour in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. If only I hadn’t had another drink. If only. Pause. Rewind. If only.
Nineteen
I awoke to bright daylight. There was nobody next to me in bed. It seemed only moments ago that we had been in each other’s arms. I stretched and sat up and looked at my watch. It was nearly ten o’clock. I could hear Adeena’s voice. She was talking to someone. I got out of bed, pulled on some clothes and went through into the kitchen. As I came in, she put down the phone.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
‘Good morning, darling.’
I smiled and put my arms around her. She smelled so good. Then I released her and we stared at each other with the momentary awkwardness that sometimes overtakes new lovers.
‘Who was that on the phone?’ I asked.
‘My brother in Kabul,’ she replied. ‘You don’t mind if I use the phone? I know he worries about me.’
I sat down at the kitchen table and Adeena sat opposite me.
‘You remember what I said last night?’ I asked her.
‘You said many things last night.’
‘I mean about going to see Nick Davies. About doing a deal with him. Will you help me do that?’
‘Of course. If you think it is for the best.’
I was slightly surprised. Last night she had treated the idea with a mixture of suspicion and despair. Now she seemed much calmer.
‘Good,’ I replied after a moment. ‘That’s good. I’m going to have a shower and get dressed. Don’t go anywhere.’
When I came back Adeena was standing at the kitchen worktop where I had piled all my unanswered letters. She was looking at a card. She held it up so that I could see it.
‘What is this?’ she asked. ‘It says it is about Afghanistan.’
Christ. I’d forgotten all about it. And I’d accepted the invitation too.
‘It’s just a thing for veterans of the Afghan Campaign,’ I told her, ‘and this state visit that’s coming up. Don’t tell me it’s today.’
‘It says so here.’
She put down the card.
‘Will you go?’ she asked.
‘Let’s see what Nick Davies says first,’ I told her. ‘If he’ll see me today, that’s more important.’
I rang Nick on the mobile number he’d given me. After a couple of rings he answered.
‘Richard? I was just about to call you. We need to talk but I’m stuck in my office. I’ll send a car for you. The driver should be with you in about twenty minutes and he’s been told to bring you here. Is the girl with you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Make sure she stays in the flat.’
‘I thought you were watching it,’ I said.
‘I can’t – I haven’t got the manpower today. I’ll explain when I see you. I have to go now.’
He hung up, and I flipped my phone shut.
‘I have to go out soon,’ I said to Adeena. ‘Nick’s sending a car for me.’
‘I don’t like to stay here alone,’ said Adeena.
‘I’m sorry, but it’s best if I do the talking without you being there,’ I said. ‘Keep the door locked, and don’t answer to anyone.’
Adeena embraced me.
‘Yes, you must go. I understand. I know you will try to help me.’
‘I won’t be long, I promise. Maybe two hours.’
‘Richard …’ said Adeena. She clung to me for a moment longer, then she let me go and nodded. ‘I will wait for you.’
I left the flat, locking the front door behind me. It was much colder that morning than the day before. The sky was grey and the streets wer
e damp. As I came into the main road a red minicab flashed its headlights at me twice. I went across to the driver’s window and a ginger-haired man in his twenties sneered at me.
‘Party by the name of Gaunt?’
‘That’s me.’
I got in and we drove south through the heart of London and across Vauxhall Bridge. At first I wondered whether we were meeting Nick at the huge palace that houses the intelligence services on the south bank of the Thames. I was curious to see inside that enormous building, but we drove straight past it and then dived into the network of anonymous streets to the south of Wandsworth Road. We stopped outside a small parade of shops.
‘Here?’ I asked the driver.
‘Yes, mate. Fare’s paid for. Tip is up to you.’
I climbed out and gave him a pound. He took it wordlessly then shot away with a screech of tyres. While I was trying to work out where I was supposed to go, a door at the end of the row of shops opened and Nick emerged. He looked as dishevelled as ever. I wondered whether he ever slept, or changed his clothes. He certainly hadn’t shaved in a while.
‘Come upstairs,’ he said. ‘That’s where our office is at the moment. Temporary quarters, apparently. The usual reorganisation of the department. Every time it happens we’re given new offices, new organisation charts and a new internal phone directory. Then we’re told to get on with it. It’s extraordinary that any real work ever gets done.’
We climbed a steep flight of stairs and came to a landing with a glass door. Nick pressed the keys on a pad next to it and the door clicked open. A moment later we were in a large, dingy space that ran above the shops. About twenty people were sitting at rows of desks on either side of a central aisle, staring at computer screens and talking into phones. It could have been a call centre for selling life insurance. Nick led me along the centre aisle towards a glass-partitioned office at the far end. He sat down behind a desk and beckoned me to take a seat, then shouted through the door: ‘Coffee. Two.’
Then he sat back and gazed at me.
‘Thank you for coming,’ he said at last. A girl brought in two plastic beakers of black coffee, and a handful of sachets of dried milk and sweetener.
‘Did I have any choice?’
‘It’s a free country,’ said Nick. ‘But no, you didn’t. Where’s the girl?’
‘Still at my flat.’
‘Married life OK? How was your friend Aseeb? Didn’t he object to you taking the girl away with you?’
‘We agreed to differ on the point.’
‘There was a man admitted to the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford yesterday with a gunshot wound to the leg. Know anything about that?’ Nick continued.
It must have been Kevin.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘He’ll live,’ said Nick. ‘But he’ll never run the one hundred metres. Name’s Kevin. You might have met him?’
‘Cut the crap, Nick,’ I said. ‘Will you help Adeena get permission to stay here if I make sure she talks to you?’
Nick Davies sipped his coffee.
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘That’s dishwater. You’re lucky you got away with it. Where did you get the gun? I don’t suppose you’ll tell me that either. I honestly wasn’t sure you’d get out of there, let alone with the girl. I can’t think why Aseeb let you take her away. Doesn’t he want the girl?’
I wondered what new information had come in. If I waited long enough, Nick would get around to telling me.
‘We received a warrant to pick him up yesterday evening,’ said Nick. ‘Issued by the department that closes doors after the horse has bolted. By then Aseeb had vanished. The house was empty.’
‘Then what’s all the panic? Why did you send for me?’
‘State visit. The president of Afghanistan arrives here this afternoon. I’ve lost practically all my staff for the next couple of days. I might have to join a conference call shortly, so let’s press on. You want to do a deal with me on behalf of Nadine Lemprière?’
‘I call her Adeena,’ I said.
‘Well, her file says Nadine Lemprière.’
Before Nick could say any more, his phone rang, and he answered it, at the same moment pushing a photo across the desk towards me. It showed a much younger Adeena. She was wearing a black gown and a headscarf. She looked different: younger, and wilder. Cruel, inhospitable ridges of rock filled the background of the picture and in the foreground was a dusty hillside, strewn with boulders and other objects I could not make out. Adeena was staring up and the shot had been taken from somewhere above her. Behind her was an area of charred ground. The photograph was grainy and blurred, as if it had been reproduced many times. But it was Adeena, no question about it.
‘Ask someone else. I’m in a meeting.’ Nick slammed the phone down and turned his attention back to me.
‘This photo was taken at an al-Qaeda training camp in the Safed Koh mountains. That’s on the border between Afghanistan and north-west Pakistan.’
I felt myself go cold, as if my blood temperature had dropped a couple of degrees.
‘What training camp? Where did you get this picture?
‘It was in her file,’ Nick told me.
‘What file?’
‘The file that we eventually got from our allies: the Combined Security Transition Command in Kabul. The file of Nadine Lemprière, daughter of the late Jean-Paul Lemprière.’
Nick smiled at me, as if he’d laid down a particularly good hand of poker. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear any more.
‘She told me her father was a journalist based in Qatar …’
‘That’s bollocks.’ Nick paused and watched me to see the effect his words were having. ‘Her father got his first entry on the files as a radical student. That was in 1968, during the student riots in Paris. He was right at the centre of the violence, a real hard-case anarchist. Then nothing was heard from him for quite a few years, until the CIA station in Beirut ran a check on him. By then he was working in the city, lecturing on journalism at Beirut University – on the days when it was open for business, that is. He had a reputation as an anti-Zionist, and an anti-American. While he was there he married a Palestinian girl from one of the camps in south Beirut. Nadine was the result. They lived in Paris for a while and then disappeared off the map.’
He paused, sipped his coffee again, and pushed the photo forward an inch.
‘This was taken six years ago from a Predator drone. It was overflying a camp in the Safed Koh mountains. Everyone was after Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar at the time, so the air was thick with flying cameras and missile platforms like the one that took this picture. Nadine and her parents had been living there for a while.’
He paused and looked at me, wanting to determine how much of this I already knew. But this version of Adeena’s story was very different to the one she’d given me.
‘Of course, Jean-Paul called himself a freelance journalist,’ continued Nick. ‘Of course, he said he was based in Qatar. But he was never there. The CIA became interested in him again when his pieces about al-Qaeda started appearing on various so-called ‘‘non-aligned’’ news channels. It was like he was the AQ in-house public relations department. The CIA – or someone – decided he had the wrong sort of friends and knew too much to be just a journalist. Eventually they picked up his image on the same flight that grabbed this picture of Nadine.’
Outside in the main office several phones started ringing at once but Nick was concentrating on his story.
‘The people operating the drone checked and confirmed the image. They knew if Lemprière was in that camp then some of the really bad guys would be there too. Luckily for them the kill chain was short: they were sitting looking at the pictures in real time in Nevada, and the senior officer they needed to talk to was in the same time zone and awake, for once. They got the heads-up to launch a Hellfire missile at the camp. I’d guess it was a few minutes after that photo was taken. It hit the target: parents both killed, as well as a dozen ot
her interesting individuals Jean-Paul had presumably been interviewing for his next big scoop. The CIA got a result but they didn’t get Nadine.’
There was a silence. At last I felt able to speak with a steady voice.
‘So what happened to Adeena?’
‘You tell me. Someone got her out of there. Someone got her a job as a translator for an aid agency in Kabul. That bit’s true. She did change her name to Adeena before she applied for that job. For all I know, Adeena Haq may now be her legal name, at least until she married you. But that’s not the issue here.’
‘Does she have a brother? A brother who lives in Kabul?’ I said.
‘No,’ said Nick. ‘No brother. Why do you ask?’
I thought about the phone calls to her ‘brother’ that Adeena had made from Hartlepool Hall and then from my flat. If there was no brother, then to whom had she been talking, and about what?
‘So what is the ‘‘issue’’?’ I said, not replying to his question.
‘The issue is Aseeb’s motive. Why did he bring Nadine here? It must have involved considerable personal risk. It’s not what he normally does, which is money laundering for his paymasters in Afghanistan and elsewhere. He didn’t bring her all this way just to sell her for a few hundred pounds or use her as a sex slave. He might have used her as a mule to carry money or drugs, but then why bother with all that marriage business?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied.
‘You’re not the thinking type, are you?’ said Nick. ‘A beautiful girl of mysterious Middle Eastern origins falls all over you, and you don’t even ask yourself why? You must have a very high opinion of your charms, Mr Gaunt.’
‘Of course I don’t,’ I said angrily. ‘They just picked me up off the street.’
‘Yes,’ interrupted Nick. ‘They picked you up off the street. That’s where it all went wrong for a moment. We’ve been talking to the lad Kevin. Instead of getting hold of some drifter, he picks up a slightly pissed ex-army officer who is trained to kill. Probably not what was in the original job specification. All they wanted was some poor bastard who was desperate enough to give his name to a marriage in return for a lump sum, very likely a lot less than they paid you in the end. But you went along with them anyway. Why was that?’