by Clare Carson
‘It’s a story Jim told me – that summer when Anna stayed – about a damaged king who can’t guard the treasure he’s supposed to be looking after because of his wound, so his precious chalice is stolen and the land around him is cursed. I remember seeing you limp that afternoon you dropped Anna and Valerie, and somehow in my head I associated the story with you. You were the wounded Fisher King and the drought was the curse.’
Pierce’s mouth opened, lost for a reply, and Sam wondered whether she had put her foot in it, overstepped some boundary. Unforced error. She often misjudged these things, hung back too much and then made a bad move to compensate for her awkwardness. Pierce recovered himself.
‘The Fisher King.’ He chuckled. ‘Yes, Jim was always a bit of a storyteller. Aren’t we all in one way or another? I like that. Operation Fisher King. Mission objective – contact Anna. Code name Miranda. No mission creep.’
‘No. Definitely not. No mission creep.’
She couldn’t help warming to Pierce. He was OK. Open. Sensitive, relatively anyway. A wave of maudlin self-pity hit her; Anna had a caring father. A living father. She felt herself sinking. She had to move, breathe fresh air, clear her head.
‘I’d better get going, I want to stop off at Pegal Bay on the way back to the ferry.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course.’
He held the front door open; the sun poured in, the crescent of Rackwick Bay spread below and she wondered, as she crossed the threshold, whether it was possible to find a more enchanting front-door view, anywhere.
‘Oh, one more thing I forgot to tell you.’
She turned.
‘She’s changed her name.’
‘Anna?’
‘Yes. Changed it to Hilary Bird. Don’t ask me why, I’m not sure it was necessary, I’m the target not her. But there we go. We all overreact, I suppose. I just wanted to let you know.’
‘Right. Hilary Bird.’ She wanted to laugh; she couldn’t imagine Anna as Hilary, it didn’t seem right. Quite odd, in fact, but then being the daughter of a spy was strange, and she had done odd things herself in response to perceived dangers. So now Anna had three names: her real name Anna, Hilary her cover name, and Miranda the cipher that she had to use with Pierce to ensure that neither of the other two names were revealed. This was going to be a laugh. Or maybe it wasn’t.
‘Knew I could rely on you. Like your father. Trustworthy. Smart. Ariel,’ he added. ‘Fitting.’
She didn’t look back as she traipsed down the path. She could tell he was still standing there, watching. Reassuring in some way to have his eyes on her back.
*
THROUGH THE GREY valley, the sun brightening the northern slope, right on the coast road, past Betty Corrigall’s grave, white against the heather. Enticing Pegal Bay. She pulled over, scrabbled through the chest-high bracken, reached the gurgling burn, removed her plimsolls, dipped her foot in the clear water, retracted it immediately. Freezing. She swirled her hand in the stream, searched, pulled out a glassy black rock, scratched it, saw the red streak on her hand. Jim had told her about the hermatite that summer. He was on the phone arguing with somebody as she entered the kitchen to fetch a couple of ice pops from the freezer – one for her, one for Anna. He slammed the phone down. Bloody personnel department, he had said and he waved his hand dismissively. Fucking pen pushers, he added. He’d never be one of them. He’d find something else to do without their bloody help. And then he asked, how do you get blood out of a stone? Look for a rock made of iron oxide, he said, without giving her a chance to think of an answer. Hermatite. You can find it at Pegal Bay. Hoy. God only knew where all his odd nuggets of information came from. Jim. Police spy. Storyteller. Getagrip the fearless Celtic warrior. She thought she had him settled in her mind and then somebody said something or other and she saw him from a different angle. Fault. She tossed the hermatite into the water. It splashed and sank leaving a faint trail of red on the burn’s surface, reminded her of the red mosaic tiles Anna had taken; they were made from ironstone the creepy curator had told them. Bloodstone. She sat back on her heels, wiped her wet hands down her coat. Ariel. She liked her code name; fitting, as Pierce had observed. Ariel the storm maker. The free spirit. Except Ariel wasn’t a free spirit at all, she remembered now, not until he’d done Prospero’s bidding.
CHAPTER 6
London, September 1989
PIERCE’S CASH HAD already come in useful; she had treated herself to a bed on the overnight train to London and she had the two-person berth to herself. The Cairngorms rolled past the window, purple against the night sky. Moonlight whitened the ghostly limbs of the silver birches lining the single track. She had a sudden urge to leap from the train, roll down the embankment and hide away out here, the middle of nowhere. She thought about Pierce, alone in his remote and poky croft, estranged from his family and friends. Had fear of some Czech arms dealer really kept him there, lying low all this time, or was there something else, some hidden wound that bound him? She dug around in her backpack for the cheese and tomato sandwich she had bought in Inverness, peeled the top layer of soggy bread and regarded the paltry red crescents. She had worked in a café one summer and had been instructed in the art of laying two thin slices of tomato along the diagonal line of the sandwich cut, ensuring that the exposed edges promised more tomato than the sandwich delivered. Everyday life was full of petty deceptions of one kind or another. Everybody maintained a cover of kinds, the blank looks, unanswered questions, half-truths, white lies, mis-directions. Spies, like Pierce and Jim, they wove those petty deceptions into something different, another persona, a separate identity. And sometimes, she suspected, even they could not tell the difference between the real and the fake. If you lived a lie long enough, did it become the truth?
There had been moments, when Jim had been alive, when she had questioned her own existence, wondered whether she was merely part of his legend, a convenient prop for his undercover life. But now he was dead, she wanted to retain the good times with her father, let the bad memories slip away. She wolfed the last corner of the sandwich. Would Jim have done what Pierce did, she wondered, and gone to live in a remote hideaway without contacting them for years on end? Perhaps if he thought it was better – safer – for them. Or perhaps she was kidding herself about Jim, seeing him through rose-tinted glasses because it was too painful to remember him any other way. She washed the sandwich down with a cup of water from the tap above the tiny sink, peered through the grimy window as she drank, caught the moon rippling in the black water of Loch Insh. There was one dark fear about Jim that still lingered. The bad memory she couldn’t forget. Her meeting with Pierce had made it more solid, illuminated its outline. Was Jim guilty of harming Pierce? Had Jim played the part of treacherous Antonio to Pierce’s Prospero and betrayed him in some way? She couldn’t let go of the nagging doubts, the questions. She sensed she had a duty to help Pierce reunite with Anna because both Jim and she had played a part in their fractured relationship. She was Ariel, slave to her master on the enchanted island, until she had completed the task.
*
SHE HUMPED HER rucksack on her back, decided to walk home from the station. Walking was good for the soul, as well as being cheaper and more reliable than any other form of transport in London. Euston to Vauxhall, one hour she reckoned. There weren’t many journeys she needed to undertake in London that couldn’t be covered in one hour. By the time she reached Vauxhall Bridge, the sun was belting and she was sweating. Vauxhall had been Jim’s favourite bridge. Always a bit of a hotspot, he had said, a place where three rivers meet – the Thames, the Effra and the Tyburn. Jim had died on the south side of the bridge; the green patch behind the railway arches near the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.
Sam lived just beyond the bridge in a ramshackle hippy square. The first time she had lived there was in ’85 when she had taken a year off university to recover from her father’s death. She had suggested the square to Becky when she was looking for a cheap place to
live so she could complete her medical training. Then Sam had moved in with Becky after she had finished her history degree that May. Sam had always thought of Becky as the senior partner in their friendship. Becky was confident and pragmatic; got on with her medical course at King’s College while all her mates were hand-wringing and wondering about their place in the world. But as Becky was approaching her final year of study, she decided to have a break and signed up for a course on forensic science. A taste of the other side; investigating death rather than preventing it. She had enjoyed it more than her medical training, she admitted to Sam, and was wondering whether she should continue with the doctor’s training at all. For once their roles were reversed. Sam had a four-year plan while Becky was dithering.
‘Don’t you mind living so close to the place where Jim died?’ Becky had asked when she had offered her the room. Sam didn’t mind, she found comfort in the river. In the aftermath of her father’s death she had wandered the foreshore near Vauxhall Bridge, searching for his presence. She had lost hours to the leaden flow of the Thames. Waiting for the jagged wooden stumps of the Bronze Age jetty to appear as the water ebbed, contemplating the violent death of her father, the hidden reach of the secret state. Submerged history, only revealed between the tides. It was harder to walk the Vauxhall stretch of the river now because, after many years of plans, false starts and delays, a construction company was digging foundations on the derelict land below the bridge, and access to the muddy banks had been blocked by some heavy-duty chainlink fences and a twenty-four-hour patrol complete with snarling Alsatians. Offices she presumed, although god only knew why they needed such aggressive security to guard a building site.
She was relieved to reach the coolness of the Vauxhall house. Old, damp, south London terraces, left to rot by Lambeth Council, the housing co-op granted a short-term lease on the square. Everyone was afraid that rocketing property prices meant the council would sell it off to the highest bidder. Their house was three storeys high, but Sam and Becky were the sole occupants because the top floor was a wreck.
Becky and she had very different habits. Becky was a collector of crap – second-hand clothes, magazines, ornaments from aunties. Sam couldn’t stand owning things – she didn’t voluntarily acquire stuff and if anybody gave her anything she waited a few weeks then gave it away. Liz had given her a spider plant to brighten up her college room and she had spent weeks battling the conflicting urges to water it and to let it die so she had an excuse to chuck it. In the end, she had let it die. It was a relief to bin it, although once she had dumped the withered thing she had felt guilty, wondered whether it revealed some deep streak of indifference that she couldn’t even manage to care for a plant. But she did hang on to some objects, if they meant enough to her. And she did keep hold of some friends. Becky being a case in point.
The front door snagged on the floorboards.
‘Becky, I’m back.’
No answer. She dumped her bag, wandered into the sitting room, surveyed Becky’s junk, walked over to a stack of newspapers by the sofa. She was snooping on her friend. No. She wasn’t snooping, she was just looking at her magazines. She grabbed a couple from the top of the pile, made herself a coffee and sat on the kitchen step down to the small backyard. Home, she suspected, to a family of rats. Late-morning sun fell through the leaves of the rowan tree and gathered in yellow puddles on the mossy paving stones. She sipped her coffee and glanced at the cover of one of the magazines: Marxism Today. She flicked through the articles, unable to work up much interest. A couple of years ago she might have read this kind of leftie verbiage with more enthusiasm. She had forged her friendship with Becky on CND marches and trips to Greenham. Becky came from a family of liberal Jewish politicos and had moved through the cabals of the left as a teenager, but even she had given up attending the activist meetings when she started her medical course; too knackered by her studies for comrades and committees. Or, at least, that was what Sam had assumed. The course on forensic science had allowed Becky more free time and she had obviously been filling it with activist stuff. See you later, I’m just off to this meeting about the poll tax. Sam hadn’t questioned Becky’s renewed interest when she cheerily shouted goodbye up the stairs, but since Pierce had mentioned it, she had been wondering whether Becky was going to these meetings for the politics, or whether something else was driving her interest.
She took another mouthful of bitter coffee. What was she doing, questioning the motives of her best mate? This was what happened when she associated with spooks; their sneaky ways started infiltrating her life. Tradecraft. She stared at the ivy creeping under the back fence. That was where the rats were nesting, in the roots of the ivy. They should get a cat. She grabbed another paper, not a glossy mag like Marxism Today. Militant. Marxism Yesterday. She scanned the pages; the Polish election, strike action by the dockers, and at the back a page of reports and grainy photos of meetings. She scrutinized the pictures. There, sitting in a row behind a table decked with a home-made banner proclaiming No poll tax was Anna. Hilary Bird. Miranda. The details were blurred, but the curly black hair and pale face stood out from the grey. Unmistakably Anna. She folded the paper, tucked it under her arm, ran through the kitchen, the hall, up the stairs to her bedroom.
She searched the spines of her books, located the one she wanted. The Secret Island. A fat, thick-paged hardback she had inherited from her uncle. He had hollowed the pages out when he was a boy and he had handed it to her when she was seven. The Secret Island, very appropriate. Ha ha. She used it to store her stash and the precious mementoes that had survived the successive culls of her possessions. She opened the front cover, flipped the first two pages to reveal the roughly hacked-out rectangular hidey hole. She removed the Bryant & May matchbox, couldn’t resist pushing the tray out to admire her prize specimen – emerald dung beetle, still glittering after all these years – placed the box on her desk. The envelope was wedged in the bottom of the hollow. She dislodged it with her fingernails, checked its contents – a used chequebook and a small school photo. She removed the photo, compared the face against the picture in the newspaper. Anna then and Anna now. As beautiful as ever. She replaced the photo in the envelope, jammed the envelope back in its hiding place, fitted the Bryant & May matchbox back on top, wiggled the book back into its space on the shelf, skipped down the stairs and resumed her position on the back step, dropped Militant beside her foot.
A sparrow pranced around the courtyard, searching for insects. The front door scraped. The sparrow fled to a topmost branch of the rowan, hopped and bobbed on its matchstick legs.
‘Hello, Becky. I’m home. I’m out here.’
Becky stuck her head around the door.
‘Good to see you. All right?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine.’
‘Find any skeletons up there in Orkney?’
‘No. What about you? Had a good summer?’
‘Not bad.’
She clattered around the kitchen, re-emerged clutching a mug.
‘Shift yer bum.’
Sam shuffled over, Becky plonked down beside her. Becky was larger than her, a broad frame on which her flesh was smoothly moulded; chocolate eyes, chestnut wavy hair and olive skin. She nodded at the newspaper.
‘What are you reading that for?’
‘I wasn’t reading, I was flicking. I’m so dozy. I couldn’t sleep on the train. I needed something to keep me awake.’
‘I would have thought Militant would have the opposite effect.’
Becky swiped a fly away from her face.
‘What do they do anyway?’
‘Militant? Oh, you know, Sam, what do any of these groups do? Sit around, talk about the evils of capitalism, make grand plans to overthrow the system, go to the pub.’
Sam’s thigh felt hot against Becky’s.
‘Are they the group that’s been organizing these meetings about the poll tax?’
‘Not organizing. You know they’re one of these parasite organizations.�
� She waved dismissively at the newspaper. ‘Entryists. Why are you asking anyway?’
‘I was curious that’s all. Wondering why you were going to these meetings.’
‘Because I’m fucked off with the poll tax.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘And because I’m interested in somebody.’
Sam drained the dregs of her coffee. ‘You mean you fancy somebody?’
‘Yes.’
‘Male or female?’ Becky had always said she went out with whoever she fancied; she didn’t want to be defined by who she slept with.
‘Female.’
Sam could see the inevitable coming, it made sense. Anna always was the kind of girl who everybody fancied. ‘What does she look like?’
‘Tall, leggy, dark curly hair, blue eyes. Gorgeous actually.’
Sam shivered, jolted the coffee cup in her hand.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes. Just tired.’
The spooks were monitoring Anna and whoever was watching her old friend had also spied on Becky. She wondered whether Becky’s crush on Anna had been noted, passed on to some faceless case officer who had passed it on to Pierce. Should she tell Becky? Let her know she was being watched? Maybe not until after she’d managed to speak to Anna.
‘What’s her name?’ Sam asked.
‘Hilary.’
‘Oh.’
‘Where did you meet her?’
‘She was handing leaflets out at King’s, I got chatting to her, and she invited me along to one of their meetings.’
Sam picked the paper up, flipped the pages, pointed at the picture of Anna. ‘It’s not her, is it?’
Becky scowled. ‘Yes. How did you know?’
‘I guessed. I was flicking through the paper and I saw her picture. I thought I recognized her. Somebody I knew when I was a kid. And then your description fitted the bill. Except the girl I knew was called Anna.’ Was that a mistake, revealing Anna’s real name?
Becky pushed herself to her feet, ambled over to the rowan.