by Clare Carson
‘Well, it must be a different person.’ She sounded huffy.
Sam fumbled for another tack. ‘Have you given up fancying men then?’ God, that was clumsy. Becky didn’t seem to care; she had always been open about her sex life, couldn’t be bothered with coy secrecy.
‘I’ve not given up fancying them – but I’ve given up having relationships with them.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a probability calculation.’
‘Probability?’
‘Yeah, I mean if you are going on a long train journey and there are two seats available, one next to a woman and one next to a man, which do you choose?’
‘The one next to the woman.’
‘Right. Because you don’t want to run the risk of sitting next to a jerk. You know it’s more likely that the woman will be OK. It’s the same with relationships, as far as I’m concerned. I fancy men and women, but why take the chance of ending up with a tosser?’
She shrugged. ‘You could reduce the risks by following the rules.’
‘What rules?’
‘Never go out with a man with a beard, because they’re always hiding something.’
Becky grinned. ‘Any others?’
‘How about, once a bastard always a bastard.’
‘Where did you get that one from?’
‘A women’s refuge.’ She’d volunteered in a refuge when she was a student, and the first night she worked there the manager, a tiny black woman, took her into the office and showed her the notice pinned on the wall. Once a bastard always a bastard. You’d better be clear about that, the manager had said, because I’ve met so many women who thought it didn’t apply to them, who believed it when the man who beat them up said he’d never do it again, and in some cases, it cost them their lives. Don’t ever think there are exceptions. Working class, middle class, upper class, black, white, it doesn’t make any difference.
‘Once a bastard always a bastard. Very sound,’ Becky said. ‘I’ve got another one.’
‘What?’
‘Never trust a man from the West who insists on travelling by himself to Thailand.’
‘Why not?’
‘Seriously, Sam – you don’t know?’
Sam shook her head. Becky had travelled around Asia in the summer of the previous year; Sam hadn’t been outside Europe. Becky’s experience sometimes made her feel naïve.
‘Maybe I’m being judgemental, but it seemed to me that if you met a Western man travelling by himself in Thailand, there was usually only one reason he was there, and that was to buy sex. Half the time with underage girls.’ She pulled a face of disgust.
‘Jesus,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll definitely add that one to the rule book then.’
‘What about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Relationships.’
‘I’ve given up on them full stop. I want to get my PhD.’
‘That’s a bit drastic.’
‘Maybe.’
She sensed Becky was over her huffy reaction to Sam’s questions about Anna; she thought she could risk another move. Operation Fisher King commences. ‘Could I come along with you to the next poll tax meeting?’
Becky lodged her hands on her hips, an edge of aggression in her stance.
‘I suppose so.’
Sam ran her toe along the crack between the paving stones, chiselled the moss and damp earth. What was she doing this for? Jeopardizing her friendship with Becky for contact with somebody she hadn’t seen for thirteen years. Lying through her teeth, digging up her past even though she had resolved to leave her murky family history undisturbed. She was a mole. A snoop. No, she wasn’t; she was trying to help reunite Anna with her father, because if Anna didn’t talk to him now, she might regret it later. She was a go-between. She was Ariel, using her magical powers to heal the bond between Miranda and Prospero, reunite them on the enchanted island of Hoy. What was wrong with that?
‘By the way, your mate Tom kept calling while you were away.’
‘He’s your mate too.’
‘He used to be.’ Becky had fancied him once, a long time ago, but he didn’t fancy her. Becky and Sam had met him on a CND march in London. Sam had stayed in contact with him and he had come with her and Jim on holiday to Orkney the week before Jim died. He had been curious about Jim, which, at the time, had annoyed her. Now the fact that he had met Jim was a bond Sam didn’t want to relinquish. She was still hanging on to this relationship which had always been awkward, even when it was running smoothly. He asked too many questions for her liking. Tom was a journalist. He would, she reckoned, report on his granny if he thought he could get a by-line from it; always after a story. Coppers and journalists, he had once commented, had many similarities. Exactly: never trust any of them with a secret.
‘What did he want?
‘To see you.’
Becky stretched her arm above her head, twanged the lowest branch of the rowan, dislodged a shower of golden leaves and sent the sparrow fleeing skywards. ‘Why don’t you have a relationship with him? He hasn’t got a beard. He isn’t a creepy male sex industry tourist.’
‘He spent six months in Afghanistan by himself.’ Stringer for Reuters, reporting on the tribal rebels fighting the Soviets.
‘Afghanistan is a conflict zone. That’s a different form of perversion. Attraction to danger. He’s obviously keen to see you. You should find out what he wants.’
Sam could read the subtext; concentrate on your own social life.
‘Last time I spoke to him he was about to move. Did he leave his number?’
‘Yep.’
‘OK. I suppose I’d better call him.’
CHAPTER 7
London, September 1989
SHE HAD ARRANGED to meet Tom at the South Bank. She followed the Thames downstream, the autumn sun low in the sky, the damp breeze rustling the papery leaves of the overhanging plane trees. Remembering Jim. The first years after his death she had been haunted by him, glimpsed him on the Vauxhall foreshore at low tide, a solitary figure traipsing the river’s edge. Five years on, he didn’t occupy her mind in the way he had done in those early days and when he did materialize he was a more benign presence: a swagger, a whistle on the wind, a jaunty wave of the hand, a comic cop’s string of expletives. Perhaps she had just become more adept at locking away the ghosts. She had learned to deal with the shadows by becoming more like a spy, compartmentalizing, retreating into herself. She had once asked Becky whether she struggled to resolve her inner and her outer selves, and Becky had given her the blankest of looks, which made her think that some people negotiated their demons with greater ease than she did. Or maybe they had yet to stumble across their cupboard full of skeletons.
The South Bank was the middle-class version of the brutalist housing estates that littered London; a concrete ziggurat that people visited for entertainment before they went home to their cosy Victorian terraces. The café was under Waterloo Bridge. She was there first. She was always everywhere first, she couldn’t be bothered with being fashionably late. She parked herself at an outside table. A bedraggled pigeon hopped along the wooden rail marking the boundary of the café’s premises, shat down the slats, flapped away and sheltered on the rusty girders on the underside of the bridge. She tried not to inhale too deeply – she didn’t want a lungful of the petrol fumes from the traffic crawling overhead. Loops of white lights strung along the embankment swayed in the gusts, made the deserted riverside seem more melancholic than magical; a party which nobody had bothered to attend. Tom was late, as usual. She watched him approach; buzz-cut apricot hair like a mangy chick, tall and gaunt with a cautious stride as if he was worried about treading on a landmine. She wondered whether he was putting it on, this air of war-beaten vulnerability, and then felt bad for doubting him. They exchanged greetings, his accent still audible. He came from Bolton and made a big deal of his northern roots.
‘Let me buy you a drink.’
She used to drink whisky with he
r father. Since his death she hadn’t consumed much alcohol. She preferred dope. Tom had always been critical of her pothead tendencies, which she found a bit rich given his drinking habits. Drinking, apparently, went with the Fleet Street territory – another similarity between cops and hacks. She fancied a glass of something, though, to warm her insides.
‘I wouldn’t mind a red wine.’
He returned with two plastic beakers, sat opposite, gave her a meaningful look. He had brown eyes and pale lashes. His eyebrows were almost invisible, like hers. Eight years ago, when she first met him, she thought gingery hair and pale eyelashes were unattractive. She had never been able to tell whether he fancied her or not. Jess would have said of course he did, but then she thought sex was the prime motivator of all men. She suspected he didn’t; he had other reasons for seeking out her company. She took a sip of wine, the plastic beaker squishing in her hand. Vinegar. Yuck. It was also, she realized as her brain reacted instantly to the alcohol, a tactical error.
‘What have you been doing all summer then?’ Tom asked.
‘Nothing much.’
‘You’ve been away, though. I called your place a couple of times. Becky told me you were in Orkney.’
‘I was.’
‘What were you doing there? Or is it a state secret?’
‘Of course it’s not a state secret.’
‘You’re so cagy about everything. I sometimes wonder whether you’ve had the old tap on the shoulder.’
He was right; she had been tapped by Pierce, turned when she felt the eyes on her back, roped into the manoeuvres of an ex-spook. She flushed.
‘If anybody tapped me on the shoulder, I’d tell them to fuck off. I was doing a geophysical survey of the site of a Norse settlement mentioned in the Orkneyinga Saga.’
She hoped bringing Norse literature into the conversation would deter him from asking further questions about Orkney.
‘God. Is that what you’re researching for your PhD?’
‘Yes.’
‘Spare me the details.’
‘OK. What about you?’
He grinned; they were both more comfortable talking about him. ‘I’ve got a staff job at the Sunday Correspondent.’
‘The which?’
‘The Sunday Correspondent. It’s a new paper. It’s just been launched.’
‘I know. I was joking.’
‘Oh. I should have realized. I’m on the investigative journalism team.’
‘Team?’
‘There’s two of us.’
‘What are you investigating?’
He scratched his head. ‘I’ve got a couple of ideas on the go.’
‘Like what?’
He glanced over his shoulder, leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘They want me to do something on the demise of the Eastern Bloc.’
She nodded. ‘Go on.’
He scrunched his face. ‘Actually, I’m finding it hard to think of a good angle.’
‘Not like you, not sure of your story. No burning leads to follow.’
The pigeon landed on the table again. He shooed it away.
‘I need a killer idea. I feel a bit out of my depth, truth be told.’
‘What, with the subject?’
‘No. The paper. It’s a clique. All these Londoners who knew each other at Oxford.’
‘You could have gone to university.’
‘I know, but I didn’t. And I wouldn’t have got in to Oxford.’
‘You didn’t try. And anyway, you’ve been a war correspondent in Afghanistan. Doesn’t that give you an edge of rugged glamour?’
‘I was a stringer, not a war correspondent.’ He sucked his top lip. ‘An Oxford degree would have been better.’
She took another glug of wine; the embankment fairy lights blurred.
‘I haven’t found that an Oxford degree is the golden key to everything.’
‘That’s because you’re...’
‘What?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Nothing.’
‘Thanks.’
He always did this to her, riled her in some way, egged her on. She leaned forward now. She had an idea. Should she be doing this? There were pros and cons but her mind wasn’t clear enough to assess them. The Czech arms dealer. What had happened to him? Was he still a threat to Pierce? Where was he? Perhaps Tom could ask around, see what he could discover.
‘Why don’t you investigate what’s happening to all those Eastern Bloc spies who can see which way the wind is blowing? Are they digging in, retrenching, or are they breaking free and looking for other sources of income?’
He tapped his fingers on his mouth. ‘That’s quite interesting. But it’s... woolly.’
‘It was just a thought.’
‘I need something more tangible.’ He tipped his face to the pigeon squatting under the bridge, back at her.
‘Didn’t you once tell me that your dad hung out with KGB officers?’
It was true, she had told him her stories about Jim and the KGB. He used to work at Tilbury docks checking the boats coming in from the Baltic; he went on regular vodka-drinking sprees with his KGB counterparts. She didn’t want Tom going after stories about her father. She had to train him on the Czech.
‘Jim did hang out with KGB officers, but they were bottom of the ladder. Grunts. Not really worth the effort. Maybe you should start somewhere else. Somewhere a bit less hard-core than the KGB. Somebody told me about this guy, a Czech.’ She was being reckless, she knew it. But all secret missions involved some kind of risk, and if she was going to complete Operation Fisher King successfully, she should take a calculated chance right now.
‘A Czech? What about him?’
‘He used to work for the StB. That’s the Czech state security service.’
‘I know that. Státní bezpečnost,’ he added.
‘Exactly. Anyway. He was a front man for Omnipol.’
‘Oh, they sell guns and explosives to everybody. They don’t give a shit. What happened to him?’
‘He got booted out after the Soviet invasion in 1968, so he went freelance.’
‘As an arms dealer?’
‘Yep. And then he got involved in this arms deal in 1976. Well, in fact, it might have been a set-up, an MI6 sting, and then the set-up was blown.’ She showed him her palms in a there-we-are gesture.
His eyes flickered under his pale lashes. There was something gratifying about his interest. ‘Is that it?’
She tutted. ‘Isn’t that enough?’
‘No. It’s a nothing. It’s like all your stories, it’s a hint of something sinister with nothing solid behind it.’ His tone was accusatory, as if he had paid her for information she’d failed to deliver.
‘I thought it was quite a good story. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the privatization of the state monopoly on violence.’
‘Well, yes, it would be if there was some substance to it. Some facts. But at the moment there’s nothing there. The story you’ve given me isn’t even from this decade.’
‘It’s a start. A way in.’
‘I need a lead.’
Did she have a lead? The funny thing was, she might have one, from that sweaty day in Lewisham.
‘There is a lead actually.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
He clasped his hands in front of him on the table. ‘Are you going to tell me then?’
She drained her beaker.
‘I’ll get you a refill.’
Tom returned with a brimming cup, squirmed on to the bench opposite, the moon rising behind his head, vast and orange.
‘So, this lead?’
‘I’m not certain it is a lead. And even if it is, it probably won’t go anywhere because, as you said, it’s so long ago now.’
‘What is the lead?’
‘It’s a name and address. Somebody who knew the Czech. Possibly.’
It was only a possibility, but it seemed like a good guess. Pierce had been working on a sting which involv
ed a Czech arms dealer. The woman in Lewisham she’d spotted that day with Anna was Czech. She toyed with the name and address, wondered about the ethics of revealing them to Tom. Her rationale. She wanted to see if he could dig up anything on the Czech. The worst that could happen would be that Tom would go to the address, ring on the door bell and whoever lived there now would tell him to sod off.
‘Go on then, tell me.’
‘Karina Hersche. Castle Street. Number Fifty-two C. Lewisham. She was living there in 1976, so she’s probably long gone.’
He eyed her shrewdly. ‘You always did have a good memory.’ He reached for the notebook he always kept in his top pocket, a pencil parked in its spiral binding. ‘Karina. How do you spell Hersche?’
‘H.E.R.S.C.H.E. Will you look at that harvest moon?’
He twisted. Looked back.
‘How did you get hold of the name and address?’
‘It’s a long story. It was the summer of ’76.’
‘The heatwave?’
‘Yeah, I was with a friend, Anna.’ Tom’s pupils dilated. She shouldn’t have dropped Anna’s name. But what could he do with a Christian name? ‘Anyway, my friend’s father... might... have had something to do with this MI6 sting. And we discovered the name and address of one of his contacts. A young Czech woman. Or at least she was young then, in 1976.’
‘And?’
‘As I said, I was with a friend whose father...’
‘Anna. Whose father was a spy. Your childhood must have been...’
She had given too much away. It always ended up like this between her and him; she couldn’t resist the urge to show off, prove she had newsworthy secrets. And then she regretted it.
She pointed at the moon. ‘That’s the second red moon in a row.’ The first had been a blood moon on 17 August. She had stretched out flat on her back in the damp grass at Orphir and watched the shadow of the earth seeping over the milky lunar face, tinging it red, casting the meadow in a womb-like darkness and she had wondered whether it was an omen.
‘Do you think this Czech dealer could still be at large?’
‘Don’t know.’ She fixed her gaze on the moon, imagined its trajectory low over the black water of the Thames.
‘So go on. How did you find out about this contact?’