Coincidence: A Novel

by J. W. Ironmonger

  ‘And don’t tell me that the chances are one hundred per cent,’ she adds. ‘I know your answer to this question. History happened, and we all live extremely unlikely lives. I don’t want to hear that. I just want to know the particular probability in this case. Wind back to 1962. Now tell me the chances of every significant date in the life of Azalea Lewis crashing into Midsummer’s Day.’ She is hunched up in a deep leather armchair, watching him like a patient predator.

  ‘In most of Europe,’ Thomas says miserably, ‘people don’t even celebrate midsummer on 21 June. They celebrate it on 24 June.’

  ‘Well that,’ Clementine says, ‘is plain stupid. But it doesn’t answer my question.’

  Thomas rises from his seat. There is a flipchart propped up against the wall. He writes ‘Midsummer’ in faint red marker pen at the top.

  ‘Midsummer’s Day 1962,’ he says, ‘Abraham Yves is lost at sea.’

  He writes this down.

  ‘Midsummer’s Day 1982, Marion Yves is murdered at a fairground.’

  ‘Twenty years later,’ Clementine says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what happened on Midsummer’s Day 1972?’

  ‘Nothing. So far as I know.’

  ‘Good.’ She taps her walking stick on the floor. ‘Next.’

  ‘1992. June 21st. Luke and Rebecca Folley are gunned down at the Langadi Mission in Uganda.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Am I sure of what?’

  ‘Are you sure they were gunned down? How do you know?’

  Thomas thought about this. ‘Because it said so in the newspaper.’

  ‘Which paper?’

  ‘The Nairobi Daily Nation,’ Thomas says, but his expression is troubled.

  ‘You’ve seen the article?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been researching Azalea’s coincidences. I found a library copy.’

  ‘Do you believe everything you read in the papers?’

  ‘Not always, but this was a pretty authoritative article. It had a photograph . . .’

  ‘A photograph of the bodies?’

  He stalls a little. ‘No,’ he says. ‘A photograph of Luke and Rebecca and Azalea standing outside a building.’

  ‘All alive?’

  ‘Well. Of course.’

  ‘And this photograph proves what, exactly?’

  He looks uneasy. ‘I guess it proves that the journalist who wrote the article must at least have visited the mission. Someone must have given him the photograph.’

  ‘You’ve just assumed,’ the elderly psychoanalyst says, ‘that John Hall and a group of mercenary soldiers simply took off after Azalea and risked their lives to save her. Why? Why would they do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it.’

  ‘Someone must have paid them. Isn’t that what mercenary soldiers are – paid muscle?’

  ‘I guess . . .’

  ‘So who paid them?’ She fixes him with a glare. ‘Less than twelve hours after the abduction, someone is paying mercenaries to rescue Azalea. Who would do that?’

  Thomas gulps slightly. Clementine’s forensic intelligence makes him nervous. ‘Someone else from the mission?’ he suggests. ‘And we aren’t sure it was just Azalea they were after.’

  Clementine leans forward and slides open a narrow drawer. She pulls out a sheet of paper. ‘Do you remember the report you saw in the Kenyan paper about the mercenaries being deported?’ she asks.

  He nods.

  ‘Did you make a note of their names?’

  Thomas looks surprised at the question.

  ‘One name is notably absent,’ she says. ‘John Hall. It seems that he died before they could deport him. But the other names were given, and I tracked one of them down.’ She gives him a satisfied grin.

  He looks at her in disbelief. ‘You tracked . . . How did you do that?’

  ‘Google. A lot of international phone calls, a friend in Johannesburg and some serendipity.’ She waves the printed page at him.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s an email from our friend,’ she says. She pulls on her spectacles. ‘Pieter van der Merwe.’

  ‘The Pieter van der Merwe?’

  ‘The same,’ she says. ‘Pieter van der Merwe, mercenary and rather unpleasant alumnus of the Johannesburg police.’ She tosses the page across the room and Thomas snatches it up.

  ‘Have you spoken to him?’ he asks with urgency in his voice.

  ‘I have.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  She grins. She is enjoying this. ‘He told me that a man came to a hotel in Gulu to meet with John Hall. An Englishman. No one else met this man. It’s a long time ago and his memory is shaky, but Pieter is reasonably sure it was Luke.’

  ‘It might not have been.’ Thomas’s hands are shaking.

  ‘Whoever it was paid for the transaction with the deeds of a house in Cornwall,’ she says. ‘Those deeds are probably still in a safe somewhere in Uganda. The boys never did anything about it.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ Thomas straightens up. ‘Luke had a house in Cornwall.’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘So Luke is still alive?’

  ‘We don’t know that. But we do know that he was still alive on the afternoon of 21 June 1992,’ Clementine says. ‘Several hours after Azalea was abducted.’

  ‘Shit.’ Thomas begins to pace up and down the room. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

  She permits him this rush of expletives.

  ‘So if Luke survived the shooting in Langadi . . .’ Thomas tails off again, struck by too many new thoughts to process them all. ‘Why didn’t he go looking for Azalea? I mean, after the mercenary thing went belly-up? Why didn’t he try to track her down?’

  ‘How do we know he didn’t?’ Clementine removes her spectacles. ‘Just think about it. The trail must have been cold. According to Van der Merwe, John Hall told Luke not to come after them. He made that very clear. If no one made it back from the LRA camp with Azalea or any of the hostages, then they all had to be dead. So just imagine you’re Luke Folley. What do you do? You wait around for a few days, desperately waiting for news. It never comes. Eventually, what? What do young men do in such circumstances?’ She taps her stick as if it is helping her to think. ‘I would expect him to head north into Sudan looking for the LRA camp himself. But how would he find it? The mercenaries knew where it was – Luke probably didn’t. And the chances are that after their encounter with our dogs of war, the LRA would have moved the evidence anyway. But even if they hadn’t, what would Luke find? A bombed-out truck? A dead driver?’

  This is sinking in. ‘But what about Ritchie and Lauren?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Luke could have tracked them down. He must have had ways of contacting them.’

  ‘Why would he think to do that? So far as Luke knew, Ritchie and Lauren had fled the mission compound. He told them to go. He probably saw them go. He’d have expected them to be on the first bus back to Kampala and then the first plane back to London. He didn’t know they’d been abducted too.’

  Thomas remains silent, absorbing this.

  ‘And even if it did cross his mind to contact them, he could never have imagined that they would have known anything about Azalea – or where she was, because if they did know, they would surely have tried to contact him.’

  ‘One phone call,’ Thomas says, emphasising this by stabbing the air with a long finger. ‘One cheap, lousy phone call to Ritchie Lewis and he could have been back in touch with his daughter.’

  Clementine nods. ‘Luke couldn’t track down Azalea because he didn’t even know if she was alive. He would calculate that if even one mercenary had survived – just one – they’d have come back to him with news. He probably checked all the reports from Sudan and Uganda to see if there was any news of them. He’d probably never dreamed they’d fled to Kenya. Or that Ritchie and Lauren were with them. Or that the mercenaries would all end up dead, imprisoned or deported. Or
that Van der Merwe’s message would be lost. Or that Azalea would have changed her name. Even a very sharp detective would run aground on all of that.’

  ‘Not if the detective were as sharp as you,’ Thomas says.

  Clementine ignores this. ‘And then, Luke would also have assumed that if Azalea was alive, and if she had made it out of the clutches of the LRA, then she would be in touch. She was thirteen – quite old enough to find her way back to Langadi – or at least to tell someone to get a message to her parents. She was a resourceful teenager, by your account. Luke knew that. Living in Uganda he wouldn’t see the Kenya press. He probably never suspected that a newspaper in Kenya had told Azalea that he and Rebecca were dead. He would never have known that she’d mourned them both for twenty years.’

  ‘Clementine, you’re a wonder. Why didn’t I come to you before now?’

  She nods, enjoying this appreciation. ‘Why indeed?’

  ‘What an extraordinary set of circumstances.’

  ‘Would you call it chance?’ she asks, ‘or providence?’

  ‘Guzen or hitsuzen?’ he echoes. ‘Either way, it was one almighty helping of crummy bad luck.’ He whistles slowly through his teeth and flexes his long arms. ‘You might even call it coincidence,’ he says.

  She grunts agreement. ‘You may pour me a glass of red wine,’ she says.

  ‘It would be a pleasure.’ He crosses her office to a set of bookshelves. He has done this before. There are volumes here by Freud and Jung, by Reich, Lacan and Schimek. He runs his finger down a row of spines.

  ‘Try the Pleasure Principle,’ she says. ‘Jenseits des Lustprinzips. Freud.’

  He locates the volume and slides it forwards. The book is a fake. Behind the false spine stands a bottle.

  ‘Chateau Talbot,’ she says. ‘Named after a Shropshire earl who died in the Battle of Castillon.’

  He retrieves the bottle, and a corkscrew. ‘Is it a claret?’ he asks.

  ‘My dear boy. Have you ever known me to drink anything else?’

  He pulls the cork and pours two generous glasses.

  Clementine savours the wine slowly, swirling it round the glass and inhaling the bouquet. ‘So Azalea went off to England with the Lewises,’ she says, ‘thinking that Rebecca and Luke were dead. But Luke – at least – was alive.’

  ‘And Rebecca?’

  ‘Who knows? It seems possible that she really was killed. But who knows?’

  Thomas releases a long whistle of a sigh. He swings his arms around behind his head.

  ‘Now,’ Clementine says, ‘can we get back to the maths?’

  ‘I need to get in touch with Luke Folley,’ Thomas says. ‘If he’s still alive, and if he’s still in Langadi, that must be where she’s gone.’’

  ‘Where who’s gone?’ Clementine asks.

  ‘Azalea. She left in February, and I’m sure that’s where she’s gone. Back to Langadi. Oh my God!’ He claps his hands to his face.

  ‘I see. Always assuming he survived this long.’

  ‘It was twenty years ago.’

  ‘How old was Luke when . . . ?’

  ‘He would have been forty-something. Forty-three. Or forty-four.’

  ‘Not so old, then.’

  ‘No.’

  They look at each other.

  ‘He probably wouldn’t still be in Langadi though,’ Thomas says.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because the mission doesn’t exist any more.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’

  ‘One hundred per cent. I’ve googled every possible combination of “Langadi” and “Mission”, and there’s no listing. I even had a letter from the Church Missionary Society. They say the St Paul Mission was closed down in 1992. They don’t have any record of any new mission in its place.’

  Clementine fixes him with a stare. ‘All the same,’ she says, ‘I would expect Luke still to be living in Langadi. He has to stay there. He has no choice.’

  ‘Why?’ Thomas looks puzzled.

  ‘Why do you think? In case Azalea ever comes home.’

  This is almost too much for Thomas. He covers his face with his hands.

  ‘Can we get back to my list?’

  ‘OK.’

  He lifts himself up and goes to the chart.

  ‘Two thousand and two?’ she prompts him.

  ‘Midsummer’s Day 2002, Gideon Robertson is lost at sea,’ Thomas says. He writes this down.

  ‘And finally?’

  He pauses, and breathes in slowly. ‘Two thousand and twelve. Midsummer’s Day . . .’

  There is a long silence. ‘You know the rest.’

  ‘I want to hear it from you.’

  ‘Azalea Lewis dies,’ he says. There is another long pause. ‘Or else she doesn’t.’

  ‘And what do you think will happen?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He feels a pressure on his chest. He screws up his eyes. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’

  ‘Perhaps it would help if we were to finish the calculation,’ she says.

  ‘OK.’ He drags his attention back to the scrawled list of names and dates.

  ‘Each of the events involves a death,’ Clementine says. ‘Every death is brutal and unexpected. No one dies in comfortable old age in the saga of Azalea Lewis.’

  She raises an eyebrow as if anticipating a challenge from Thomas on this point, but he shrugs agreement.

  ‘All the deaths happen on the same day of the year, at the same point in a decade.’

  Thomas nods.

  ‘Do me some sums,’ she tells him.

  ‘OK.’ He is at least on familiar ground here. ‘We should assume that the first death – the death of Abraham Yves – was a random day of the year. So we don’t need to calculate the odds for him.’

  ‘Very well. And for the record, we should note that Samuel Yves died on an altogether different date.’

  ‘March 6th 1949,’ Thomas says.

  ‘Exactly. So we start with Marion. What are the chances that she would die on exactly the same day of the decade as her father?’

  ‘Say there are three thousand six hundred and fifty days in a decade,’ says Thomas, ‘plus a couple of leap years – then those are the odds. One in three thousand six hundred and fifty-two.’

  ‘Excellent. Long odds, but not astronomical. Like having the winning ticket in the village raffle. So now we add Rebecca.’

  ‘Multiply three and a half thousand by three and a half thousand.’

  ‘Which makes . . .’ Clementine rummages on her desk and finds a calculator.

  Thomas punches in the numbers. ‘Thirteen point three million.’

  ‘About the same odds as winning the lottery. Now what if we add Gideon Robertson?’

  ‘Forty-eight billion.’

  ‘And now . . .’ she pauses to catch his eye, ‘ . . . we add Azalea.’

  Thomas exhales deeply. ‘So the chances of that are . . . one in one hundred and seventy trillion. Give or take.’ He drops the calculator back on the desk.

  ‘And you’re still worried about this?’

  ‘Well it doesn’t look very random, does it? If you throw five heads, it’s chance. If you throw fifty, then someone is messing with the coin.’

  ‘Maybe, Dr Post, you just proved the existence of God.’

  Thomas grimaces. ‘But what kind of God? One who kills people off at regular intervals just to taunt us?’

  ‘What if there’s another explanation?’

  It’s getting late. They walk out of the university and stroll up towards Euston Road.

  ‘Do you take the tube?’ Thomas asks.

  ‘My dear boy.’ She gives him an indulgent look. ‘With this leg?’

  ‘We could share a taxi.’

  ‘I thought you lived in Hackney.’

  ‘I do. But I’m not in a hurry. Let me travel with you.’

  They climb into the back of the cab. ‘Primrose Hill,’ Thomas tells the driver. ‘Elsworthy Road.’

  The
taxi pulls off into the evening traffic.

  ‘What you said,’ Thomas says, ‘reminded me of something.’ He reaches into his bag for a newspaper. ‘Look. It’s the Telegraph. I try to do it every day,’ he says. He turns the paper over for Clementine to see.

  ‘The crossword?’

  ‘I’m a cruciverbalist.’ He smiles. ‘Do you know the famous coincidence associated with the Daily Telegraph crossword?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘There was once a crossword compiler for the Telegraph called Leonard Dawe,’ he says.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘During the Second World War.’

  ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Then I think perhaps I do know the story. Didn’t he spook MI5 by putting all the code-words for the D-Day landings in a crossword?’

  ‘Almost. In the crossword on 16 August 1942, Dawe included the clue “French Port”, six letters. Innocuous enough, you might think. Then the next day the paper published the solution.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Dieppe.’

  ‘And the relevance was?’

  ‘The very next day, the Allies mounted a raid on Dieppe. It was a disaster. Three and a half thousand men were killed or captured. They lost over a hundred planes.’

  She is tapping her walking stick again. ‘And they thought the crossword may have been responsible for giving away the location of the raid?’

  ‘Not right away. The War Office did notice the coincidence. They looked into it, and decided it was just a fluke. But then two years later, more unlikely words started to appear. First Juno, then Gold, then Sword.’

  She nods in recognition. ‘Code names for the D-day beaches.’

  ‘Exactly. Then came Utah, and then, on 22 May the clue was “Indian on the Missouri”, and the solution was . . .’

  ‘Omaha?’

  Thomas grins. ‘Five days later one of the answers was “Overlord”, which was the code name for the whole operation. Then three more days and there was a clue, which was “The bush in the centre of nursery revolutions”. Eight letters.’

  ‘English is not my first language, dear boy,’ she rebukes him.