Fractured: International Hostage Thriller

by Clàr NÕ Chonghaile

  Don said he would get back to me by the end of the day. He would talk to the kidnap expert, a guy called Edward Chadwick. It would be better if I went with him.

  “Maybe I can actually help,” I said, hating the pathetic need in my old lady’s voice.

  Don’s sharp, angry breaths told me he was holding back.

  “Maybe,” was all he said. He always knew when to keep quiet. A man of few words and no waste. He spoke as he wrote. I have always liked that.

  I made myself a cup of tea, staring blankly across the concrete inner courtyard three floors below as the kettle boiled. The scrawny black cat was back, lurking in the shadows, lifting its paws delicately as if stepping across a minefield. I had never realised how naturally wild cats were until I went on safari in South Africa with Peter, before we fell out. It was five, maybe six years ago, and it was our last real holiday together.

  He was all grown up but his face flared like a child’s when we came across some cheetahs by the road. They were sleek, thinner than I had expected, and deliciously aloof. We watched them for an hour as they sat in the dry, brittle grass, licked their fur, swished their tails and clambered onto a fallen tree to survey the surrounding area.

  “They really don’t care that we are here,” Peter whispered, letting the camera drop to his knees for a moment. “So dignified, so remote. They seem to need so little. It’s the perfect existence.”

  I took my tea through the red-tiled hallway, past the open cupboard where Peter’s dinner jacket was still hanging. He left it here after the Foreign Correspondents’ dinner last month. He stayed that night. I thought maybe he had had a row with Michelle, but he said it was just easier, closer to the restaurant. Knowing Peter that was probably true. He isn’t the man for a dramatic walkout on a girlfriend, and he left happily the next morning.

  Michelle. That had to be dealt with before I left.

  I slumped on the couch and turned up the volume. I had been watching the news obsessively since Don called me to say he had lost touch with Peter. His name was out there now, but few other details. The paper, of course, was saying little, just that they were in contact with the relevant authorities. No photo of him yet. No confirmation of who had taken him.

  A French journalist from AFP had called me, but I said nothing. That’s what the young man from the Foreign Office advised when I spoke to him. In his plummy voice he told me they were doing their best to find out where Peter was being held, but he was vague on the details, prefacing every tricky answer with an awkward, guilty-sounding cough. He said they knew about the ransom demand but insisted Britain could not be involved in direct negotiations with terrorists. I said little. I didn’t expect answers from Whitehall. This would have to be resolved at some other level.

  The sun poured in my long, thin windows. We bought this flat when we returned from Ivory Coast in 1983. It’s probably worth a lot now, although the 13th is still not Paris’ most fashionable district. At that time, I suppose Tim and I had imagined we would grow old here together. Despite our problems, and the distance that had been growing between us in Abidjan, we had still not given up all hope.

  Now, I am here, an old lady in a young city. A city made for lovers, for new lives, for dreams and fresh hopes. Sometimes, I enjoy walking along the Seine, especially when it’s sunny but cool, looking at the paintings and posters, and the youngsters cuddling, rollerblading or holding hands. But sometimes, it makes me so sad I hurry home and hole up for a few days, preferring to be invisible in private rather than invisible in public.

  Tim was devastated when he heard about Peter. I hated having to tell him over the phone. I imagined him sitting in that navy armchair in his little cottage not far from Cork city, looking out at pine trees being tickled and teased by the cheeky sea breeze. The feather-fingered branches would have kept dancing as I spoke, as if nothing was happening, as if the bottom wasn’t dropping out of his world.

  He didn’t say much. He asked if he should come. I wasn’t sure if he meant to Paris or to Mogadishu.

  “Sit tight for now,” I said.

  I wasn’t planning to go myself at that stage, but in any case, age has been kinder to me. Tim suffers from arthritis and finds it hard to move around. He can still walk and lives by himself but when I saw him last year, I was shocked by how long it took him to sit down.

  “Damn rugby,” he grimaced, half angrily, half foolishly as he lowered himself inch-by-inch into the chair, clinging to a part of his youth if only through his injuries.

  I said nothing. We are all falling apart. It is only something to joke about before you realise what it really means, and what it feels like.

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything,” I told him.

  “Okay, okay. He’ll be all right, Ninny, won’t he?”

  I couldn’t answer. Tim hadn’t called me Ninny in years. We were already too far gone for nicknames by the time we left Abidjan. The secret of staying together is to never imagine being apart. We had started to imagine it. And, of course, it was my fault.

  After we split up in 1985, Tim stayed in Paris, working with a French relief agency. He still travelled, often to West Africa or to the French overseas territories like Guadeloupe, Martinique or Reunion. He moved to Cork when he retired two years ago. I had never really believed he would end up back in Cork, just a few winding miles from the house where he grew up.

  We used to joke about it when we were first married, when the future was hard and certain.

  “So, how about a little house in Crewe, near the railway. A nice, wee place with net curtains and a tidy, miniature garden and maybe some gnomes?” he would ask, picking on the things he found strangest about England, and about my hometown.

  “Over my dead body,” I laughed. “Maybe a little thatched cottage in Cork, with fat-arsed Friesians in the fields and the sea twinkling Irishly behind the rolling hills.”

  He laughed. I loved to make him laugh then.

  “You could wear a flat cap and ride your black bicycle slowly up the boreen, and stop to chat to the neighbours about the weather, or the price of hay.”

  “I don’t think so,” he had said, shaking his head, chuckling.

  But so it came to pass. Life is what happens when you’re making other plans, as they say. It is cruel like that. Surely, some of our plans should count for something. I never planned on being divorced, I never planned to finish my days alone in Paris, and I never, ever dreamed, my son, the son I loved and feared and betrayed and then loved again, would be sitting somewhere in a tent or a hut in a hot land, thinking of death and home and God knows what else.

  I felt so helpless. I sipped my tea and cried. For Peter now, for Peter then, for Tim and me, and me alone, and again, yes again, after all these years, I cried for Shaun. Is this all life offers? Mistakes and the time to rue them?

  I had to see Michelle. I walked slowly along the canal, past lunchtime strollers staring into the dirty waters, letting the soft sway of the water slough away their workday worries. It was a beautiful day, a day without compassion. No mood-matching dark clouds or rain for me. Just a blue sky, soft sun and a light breeze. A group of school children in bright red T-shirts stood on a green metal bridge that arched over the water, looking at their perfect reflections, an almost indecent symphony of colour and symmetry.

  I was nearly there. I knew Michelle would be home. She had been waiting by the phone since news of Peter’s kidnapping broke. I wondered if the press had bothered her. Peter’s colleagues here knew about her, of course, but they were being tight-lipped, honouring him with their silence. And Michelle did not want to be part of the story. Would that change after what I had to tell her now?

  I had thought for hours about what I was about to do. I was still not sure but I thought Peter would approve. It’s all bound to come out if the worst happens. And then I will not be here to try to explain. And even if the worst doesn’t, something will leak. Peter will be famous. It will be less than fifteen minutes, of course. He’s not a wo
man, he’s being held in Somalia, a place few lay people know very much about at all, and he’s not going to be communicative, or engaging, or dramatic when he is freed. If he is freed. But people know about Esther and Godwin. I know, Don knows and I’m sure some of Peter’s friends and colleagues in the field must know too. And Esther is part of the story, even if Peter hasn’t figured out yet where to place her and his son.

  After he told me about his son, and I foolishly shared my own secret, Peter pulled away. His silence was my fault but I was still hurt by how easily he had banished me from his life.

  He stayed close to Tim, and that rankled, of course. I’m not saying Tim did anything wrong, he was an innocent victim as well. But maybe not entirely blameless. I can’t be the only one responsible for the collapse of our marriage, can I?

  Michelle opened the door so quickly she might have been waiting with her hand on the handle.

  “Have you heard anything?” she said. “Couldn’t you tell me on the phone?”

  Her voice was heavy, drenched in the tears she had already cried. I had a sudden urge to hug her, but we have never been close. She just looked so frail standing in the dim hall.

  Suddenly, I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to demolish another certainty. Enough. But maybe this was my punishment. Redemption through suffering. I was too tired and too old to work it out so I followed my original plan.

  “No news, well not anything really new,” I said as I followed her down the narrow hallway into the sitting room. A room that we all, even Michelle, call the seomra suite. That’s Tim’s influence, a few Irish words from his childhood, echoing down the decades to this tidy apartment.

  I sat on a plump armchair and she leant against the grand, fireless fireplace, an absurdity in a room so small. Peter’s face beamed at me from the mantelpiece. He looked dashing, his smile wide, crinkling the edges of his cheeks, but his eyes were hidden behind his sunglasses, which showed only a faint reflection of Michelle behind a small camera.

  Perched awkwardly on the edge of the obese chair, I felt shabby and ancient in my high-waisted, badly cut jeans. My hair is still blonde, but the shade is a touch softer than my natural colour, and my curls are gone, cut short in deference to my age. Michelle is lithe and curvy. But I have known that grace, that confidence. We stared at each other, future and past.

  “I need to tell you something, Michelle. In case it comes out, later. I’m sorry. There’s no nice way to do this. Peter has a son in Liberia. He’s five.”

  I stopped. I was not sure what to say next. I had rehearsed this speech, but even then I couldn’t get beyond these words. I was not sure I had much to add. I know the mother’s name, and where she is from, and how Peter met her, and that he supports his child, but that’s it. I guess our relationship is still not wholly repaired. I should know more, but then Peter is not an easy man to know. He’s an easy man to think you know.

  Michelle took a breath, straightened, changed her mind and sat down on the sofa opposite me. At first, her face didn’t change, and then it was as if someone stuck a pin into her neck, letting the air hiss out. She shrank, her shoulders sagging. She stopped fingering the wooden bangle that Peter brought her from his last trip to Africa. Her hands fell into her lap, like birds shot from the sky.

  I wondered if I should leave. Not yet, I needed to get this done properly before leaving for Mogadishu. She needed to know everything she wanted to know. Everything or nothing. Slowly, she shook her head, raised her face and beneath her slowly smudging eyes, she smiled.

  “I think I always knew this day would come,” she said, speaking slowly as if she wanted to get the words exactly right. Maybe she had been rehearsing as well, I thought.

  “I’m surprised that he has a son. I’m not surprised that he has another woman.”

  “I don’t think that’s how it is,” I said carefully. I took a breath.

  “Her name is Esther, she’s from Sierra Leone. I think it was just one night.”

  I couldn’t say ‘one-night stand’. It seemed too flippant, too much of a cliché, and somehow disrespectful to Peter. To Esther and to Godwin.

  “I don’t think he’s seen her again. He… he has a photo of the baby, of Godwin, but as a very small baby. I don’t think he has been back since 2005. He doesn’t have a relationship with Esther, apart from a financial one. He sends her money every month to take care of the boy, of Godwin.”

  Michelle listened, watching my face closely as if she was a human lie detector. I blushed as I spoke. I wasn’t exactly ashamed of my son, but I felt sorry and sad for him, for them all, and for this tense, hopeful and now angry woman sitting in front of me, her legs in an expensive velour tracksuit crossed at the ankles, like a woman playing a role, a role she had long suspected she would be given.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t know what else to say. I wanted to ask her what she was going to do, but I imagined she didn’t know yet. I eased myself up from the chair.

  “I should go. I’m flying to Nairobi on Thursday and then on to Mogadishu.”

  I had to ask.

  “Do you want to come? I’m going with a kidnap-and-rescue expert hired by the Post. I know it’s a bit silly but I can’t sit here.”

  I waited. Michelle was looking at the ground. I picked up my bag and turned to go.

  “I can’t go,” she said, her voice steady now.

  “I can’t go now. To be honest, I’m not sure I would have wanted to anyway. But I don’t want to see him, straightaway, if he… if he is released. It wouldn’t be fair on me or on him. I wish you hadn’t told me.”

  Her voice choked on the last words and she slammed her mouth shut, twisting her lips.

  “You’ve poisoned this, everything. I mean, he has. Peter has. I could deal with the worry, but now, what am I feeling now? And how can I be angry when he is in danger? And yet I am. This isn’t fair.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “Of course, it’s not.”

  I didn’t have anything else to say. I felt I should be more sympathetic but I didn’t know how to be. I lost faith in life a long time ago, on a sloping street in Monrovia and I don’t have what it takes to empathise with those who have yet to lose theirs. I slowly walked out and shut the door softly behind me.

  I flew to London two days later, arriving with the sun in Heathrow. I had a three-hour wait before the flight to Nairobi, and I had arranged to meet Edward Chadwick at the information desk in the departures hall. I was rummaging in my handbag for my phone when I felt a tap on my arm. I turned to face an imposing man with short, brown hair and an easy-going, open face.

  “Mrs Walters?”

  He had a deep voice, shot through with the cadences of a soldier. Something about the lie of his hair made me think it wanted to be cut even shorter, and there was something about his eyes that gave him a somewhat sinister, capable air. A tattoo, possibly of the end of a dagger, peeked out from his shirt cuff when he stretched out his hand to shake mine.

  “You must be tired. Would you like a coffee? We can get up to speed then.”

  He ushered me to a table in a nearby coffee shop. He went to order, taking his expensive-looking briefcase with him. I watched him in the queue. Was Edward Chadwick the man to get my son back? Don had emailed me a backgrounder on him. He’d been doing this job for three years, and had been involved in last year’s headline-grabbing release of a Saudi oil tanker, which had been held by Somali pirates for fourteen months. He was the one on the ground, negotiating with the pirates’ middle-men, and he organised for the money to be parachuted onto the deck as the massive ship lay at anchor off the pirate town of Hobyo, north of Mogadishu. The pirates then boarded small, rickety boats to make their escape. One boat capsized in a sudden storm and the two pirates drowned. A body was found a few days later, washed up on a beach with wet clumps of ransom dollars floating around it like the seaweed of the damned.

  “So, what do you need to know from me?”

  He leant back in the chair, st
udying me, keeping his voice low. I suddenly felt out of my depth. I had not expected to leap into details so quickly. I don’t get a lot of blunt speaking these days. The few friends who have stuck with me in Paris are my age. We don’t have much occasion to quiz each other. We know everything already so our conversations usually revolve around daily oddities, or anecdotes: we spin our meager story-webs elaborately to cover up the emptiness that lies beneath.

  “What will you do when we get there?” I asked.

  “I’ll have to go and see the authorities first, a courtesy call really. They don’t have any real sway in this matter, as far as we… eh… I understand. Obviously, I’ll be talking to AMISOM commanders. But again I am not expecting much there. There are others in Mogadishu who are more… informed, military men, of course. I can’t really say any more. So far, we think… there seems to be a consensus that Peter is not in Mogadishu. He might be somewhere just outside the city, probably not in Al-Shabaab territory for now. If these kidnappers are bandits, then they will be in neutral terrain. I’ve been in touch with our chaps as well. They believe, and I’m sorry I can’t tell you why or how, they believe he is being held in Wanlaweyn, it’s about ninety kilometres north of Mogadishu.”

  “Do they know anything about the people holding him?”

  “To be honest, I don’t think so. I’ll be meeting someone in Nairobi. I can’t tell you any more than that, but this person could help clarify some of these points. The British government obviously will not be officially involved in this extraction, but they are aware that we are working on it, and have ordered a media blackout on the case.”

  “Can they do that? Some of the details are already out there.”

  “Yes, I can’t guarantee that nobody will break the terms – and it can’t affect what’s already been reported – but it’s a legal ban ordered by the courts that should stop any new stuff coming out. The idea is that reporting details of the case could scupper our attempts to get Peter back.”