The Dark Isle

by Clare Carson

  ‘Yes. But not like your dad. Not fairy stories. They’re more like...’ Anna left the sentence hanging in the sticky air.

  ‘Does it bother you then?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because...’

  Anna screwed up her face, her lovely mouth twisted. Sam was afraid she might cry. She had been jealous of Anna when she first met her, envied her confidence, her charm, thought she had everything she needed, everything Sam didn’t have. But now she felt sorry for her. Her dad had disappeared, his life in danger, her pregnant mum poorly, and she had to stay in a stranger’s house. A lump formed in Sam’s throat; she stuck her hands in her pockets, tried to think of some way of cheering Anna up. A blackbird crashed through the branches, its feathers mangy, alarm call shrill. She suggested they find some woodlice and race them. The newspapers were full of stories about ladybird plagues – nobody seemed to have noticed that the woodlice were multiplying in the heatwave too, invading the scorched earth, crawling over desiccated leaves and carcases of frogs and birds.

  ‘OK,’ said Anna.

  They collected the woodlice in their hands, watched them curl, flicked them along the ground, rolled them into the earth’s cracks. When they were bored with racing them, they built a woodlouse city from the fallen twigs and half-formed acorns shed by the dehydrated oaks.

  The shadows were lengthening and the midges were glimmering in slices of amber light as they wandered back through the ragged wood. They reached the line where the trees ended and the allotments began. Jim and Harry were in view, sitting on the ground. Harry was waving a bottle in the air, pontificating about something or other. ‘Forget it. Don’t go trying to sort it out. Ignore it. That’s my opinion. Keep away.’ Jim was holding a bottle too, but his shoulders were hunched and his head was drooping. A thrush announced their advance. Harry started, nudged Jim and he straightened. Not quickly enough to correct Sam’s impression that there was something heavy weighing him down. He stood as they reached Harry’s allotment.

  ‘Been having fun?’ Jim asked.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Time to go now anyway.’

  He didn’t want them hanging around with him and Harry, didn’t want them joining in their conversation about Pierce. The tension was almost visible in the space between Harry and Jim, the way they didn’t look at each other, Harry’s tight smile, Jim’s clenched jaw.

  They trekked back through the wood in silence, the sun dropping over Brixton, everything purple and hazy under the canopy. A sudden snapping made Jim spin around, stop, stare through the trunks. Nothing. Dead branch falling. Fox.

  Jim said, ‘What a summer. We’ll remember this one for years.’

  CHAPTER 11

  London, September 1989

  JIM HAD BEEN right, she mused, as she climbed the wooded hill above Harry’s allotment; everybody remembered the summer of ’76. She wondered whether the drought had left physical marks on people too, whether a vertical cut would reveal a layer of parched flesh like a stratum of soil uncovered by an archaeological excavation or the growth rings of an axed tree trunk. This place had certainly looked different in the heat; the drought had coated everything with a sepia tinge. The wood had seemed wild that summer, an arid land where ghosts and gypsies wandered. Now there were signs of management. The lush undergrowth of brambles, ivy, dock leaves and long grass covered the dusty patches where they had searched for woodlice. Signposts offered directions to walkers. The oaks were vibrant, leaves bronze and gold in the early-autumn sun. The wood was healthier, but tamer. A place of Sunday strolls and picnics. Not dead people. She preferred it back then, she liked the wild edges.

  The sight of Harry’s bulky form hunched over a spade made her eyes brim. Harry had been a constant if sporadic presence in her life; since Jim’s death he had always been there when she needed advice. She blinked, waved as he spotted her. The signs of wear were beginning to show on his face these days, she realized as she approached him; his pale hair not quite as thick as it had once been, his eyes more hidden behind the creases of his flesh, his always bulky outline now gravitating to a paunch. He straightened and smiled.

  ‘So, you’ve bumped into Anna again, have you?’ He never bothered much with chit chat. She hadn’t told him about meeting Pierce on Hoy. Harry might be a friend, but he was still some sort of spook, still doing something or other for MI5. She had to watch what she gave away.

  ‘Do you remember meeting her the summer of 1976? Anna came to stay at our place and Jim brought us over here so her mum could have a rest.’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’ His voice was wistful; remembering Jim, his old mucker. ‘Seventy-six. Disastrous year for the veggies. The drought withered everything. I couldn’t use the hose.’ He surveyed his allotment, the ghosts of harvests past. ‘I reckon something shifted in the earth that year – knocked it out of kilter. I don’t think anything’s been the same since.’

  She would have scoffed at the idea if it had come from anybody else.

  ‘What’s changed?’

  ‘Little things. I notice them, digging the same plot of ground, year in, year out. More foxes, fewer hedgehogs. Not so many thrushes.’

  ‘I think you might be right. Do you remember I used to collect beetles?’

  ‘That’s right, you used to kill them with crushed laurel leaves.’

  Everybody remembered that detail.

  ‘Yes, but what I was going to say was, I haven’t seen a dung beetle on a cowpat for years.’

  ‘Antibiotics. Farmers give them to the cows, dung beetles get sick on their shit. And then there’s the weather. What’s going on? Summers hotter than before. Autumn doesn’t start until mid-October. That hurricane we had a couple of years ago, it toppled some of the oldest oaks in the wood.’ He swept his hand at the slope behind. ‘I reckon the drought damaged them, weakened their roots, made them less able to resist when the wind whacked them.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s what it was for the plants, the drought. A trauma.’

  A tortoiseshell fluttered past her face.

  ‘I remember playing up there, and the leaves had already turned brown, even though it was only July. Some of the oaks were dropping deformed acorns.’ She paused. ‘You sat here all afternoon and talked.’

  Harry glanced away. ‘That’s right. So how come you met her again after all these years?’

  ‘Chance. I went to a meeting with a friend.’

  ‘Not one of your let’s protest outside a top-secret nuclear weapons base type meetings, I hope.’

  ‘No. Well...’

  ‘I thought you’d given all that stuff up and were concentrating on the studying.’

  ‘I am. A friend asked me to go with her. It was an anti-poll tax meeting.’

  ‘Poll tax. Bloody stupid idea.’

  ‘Exactly. And Anna was there.’

  He pulled his mouth down at the ends. ‘So?’

  ‘It’s just that...’ She had to think of a reason. ‘She pretended not to recognize me, and it unnerved me. My friend likes her, so I just wanted to find out whether there’s... I mean, why didn’t she say hello to me? Why did she insist her name was Hilary? Could she be an informer or something like that, a spy for somebody or other?’

  ‘You mean like Pierce?’

  ‘Yes, like her dad.’

  ‘What do you know about Pierce?’

  She reddened; he had caught her out.

  ‘Anna told me he worked for the Firm.’

  He shook his head. ‘Spooks and their kids.’

  Liz had once told her that Harry had been married, ages ago, but his wife had left him because she couldn’t put up with his job. He had never remarried. It hadn’t ever occurred to Sam that he might have had a child with his wife before they separated. Something about the sad way he said kids brought the possibility to her mind.

  He scanned the ground when he sensed her scrutinizing his face, found a carrier bag. ‘Here, you might as well have the last of the tomatoes.’

&n
bsp; ‘Thanks.’

  She poked among the drooping stems, delving for the ruby fruits, their ripe scent smothering. Harry leaned on his spade.

  ‘Pierce,’ he mused. ‘Pierce the hero.’

  Jim had once said he was a bit of a hero too.

  ‘Why the hero?’

  ‘The Freeman tape.’

  Freeman. The name had a ring of familiarity but she couldn’t pinpoint why – perhaps she had read it somewhere.

  ‘What’s the Freeman tape?’

  ‘Well now, I don’t see the harm in telling you that. Worst-kept secret in the history of spying, everybody was talking about it in the seventies. Especially Pierce.’ His cynicism didn’t mean much; Harry was cynical about most of his fellow spooks. ‘Freeman was one of Pierce’s covers in the early seventies. One of many. He was one of those operatives who seemed to be able to manage dozens of different identities at the same time. Have to hand it to him, it takes some doing. Anyway, he was working on arms shipments to Ireland, and he managed to tape some bigwig Libyan talking about Gaddafi’s supplies to the Provos.’

  Harry swatted a wasp away with the back of his hand.

  ‘Big breakthrough. First solid piece of info on that supply line. Taped in a shared taxi apparently. The Libyan does all the talking. Freeman doesn’t say a thing. He listens, lets the Libyan run. You wouldn’t even know that anybody else was in the taxi except, right at the end of the conversation, the Libyan says his name. Freeman. Classic piece of tradecraft. It made Pierce. His reputation rests on it.’

  Pierce hadn’t told her about the Freeman tape; he didn’t play the hero. Not to her at least. She decided she could risk another prompt.

  ‘Then in ’76, he had to go into hiding.’

  ‘Yeah. That was the Czech.’

  ‘The Czech was an arms dealer?’

  ‘Arms dealer? The Czech? Not quite as simple as that.’

  She could hear the tension in his voice.

  ‘Oh? What was the complication?’

  Harry sucked his lips, and she thought she had blown it, overstepped her quota. But he continued. ‘The Czech wasn’t quite what he seemed. Although beats me why anybody should be surprised that a dodgy Czech arms dealer wasn’t quite what he seemed, but there you go. Reznik was his name.’

  ‘Reznik?’ Pierce hadn’t mentioned his name.

  ‘Yeah, Reznik. Do you know what Reznik means in Czech?’

  ‘No.’ Of course she didn’t.

  ‘Butcher.’ He slashed the air with his hand. ‘Lives up to his name. He’s got this funny-looking left eye apparently – scar tissue eyelid and no lashes. The story is he used to catch cats in the village where he grew up, strangle and skin them, then sell them in the next village as rabbit meat. But one cat fought back, scratched his eye. He got an infection, his eyelashes fell out and never grew back.’

  ‘God, he sounds evil. No wonder Pierce went into hiding.’

  ‘Hmm. Pierce was playing the link man between Reznik and that terrorist group – the Red Army Faction. They weren’t too nice either. Some of them are still on the loose.’

  ‘What, they’re still active?’

  ‘They assassinated a couple of people in 1986. Siemens manager and his mate. They’re fairly desperate these days. On the run and short of cash. Anyway, in ’76 it was Reznik that was the main concern,’ Harry continued. ‘Pierce had to go into hiding when his cover was blown – to avoid being butchered.’ He laughed. She blanched – Operation Fisher King was turning out to be riskier than she’d expected; she’d sent Tom off on the trail of the mad butcher. Still, it didn’t matter. He was a hack. He could handle it. He wouldn’t get anywhere with the lead anyway.

  ‘What happened to Reznik?’

  ‘He had to vanish too, because his credibility with his customers here had been blown. Rumour has it Reznik asked for a post in Moscow, but everybody there was scared of him, so they sent him across the pond. And our cousins over there eventually found out that he had connections with the KGB.’

  ‘He was a spook?’

  ‘You sound surprised.’

  She was, but she couldn’t tell him Pierce had said the Czech was working freelance.

  ‘Not uncommon. Loads of arms dealers have connections with spies, security services. It’s more a case of knowing who is working for whom.’

  Perhaps Pierce didn’t know about the Czech and the KGB. Perhaps Harry’s information was wrong. It sounded like it was all just stories anyway. Nothing definite. She ducked and searched for the low hanging tomatoes.

  ‘Is he still in the US?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  A two-spot ladybird landed on her arm, bumbled around for a moment then lifted its wings and fled.

  ‘Although one thing I do know.’ He turned and stared at her. ‘These are dangerous times. The turf is changing. All those old Soviet state assets – oil, land, manufacturing – they’re about to be sold off. Everybody’s jostling for position, trying to get their nose in the trough. Men like Reznik, they’ll be throwing their weight around. Nobody properly in control. He’s a mad man without a handler. Anna’s probably wise to be careful about revealing too much to anybody, keeping some other identity. Hilary, whatever; the name she’s been using since she left your place, I would guess. Can’t say I blame her for giving nothing away.’

  ‘You think she might be in danger?’

  He puffed his cheeks, surveyed the line of the hill.

  ‘I’d rather be safe than sorry if I were her, even if he is still in the States. Families – always a weak spot. Everybody goes for the vulnerabilities.’

  He nodded at the bag she was holding. ‘You’re a bit slow.’

  She twisted another tomato from its stem, placed it in the bag.

  ‘And you’d be wise,’ he added, ‘not to have too much to do with her. Anna or whatever she’s calling herself now. Take a leaf out of her book; don’t go digging.’

  She opened her mouth, about to protest, decided it was pointless.

  He shook his head. ‘Not that you’ll take any notice of what I tell you anyway.’

  ‘I will.’ She didn’t sound very convincing, even to herself.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I can see it’s going to bother you. This thing about Anna pretending not to recognize you. I don’t want you playing detective. I’m not going anywhere for a few weeks. I’ll ask some discreet questions, find out what I can about Anna. Check there’s nothing dodgy going on that you should know about.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘What’s the best number to call you on?’

  He dug around in a pocket, produced a notebook and pen. She scribbled the Vauxhall number down.

  ‘Do you think it’s safe to use my home phone?’

  ‘Have you heard anything on the line?’

  ‘No, but I’ve noticed people watching me a couple of times just recently.’

  He frowned. ‘What sort of people?’

  ‘Joggers.’

  ‘Joggers?’

  ‘Well, they wear track-suits.’

  He hesitated. ‘It’s always safer to use a phone box. I’ll give you three rings, put the phone down, three more rings when I’ve got something and you can call me back. But don’t expect too much, too soon. I’ve got to keep a low profile myself these days.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m on gardening leave.’ He wrenched his spade from the soil.

  She was shocked. She couldn’t imagine anyone daring to give Harry the elbow. ‘You’ve been sacked?’

  ‘Not yet.’ He lunged at the soil again. ‘When they told me to go on gardening leave, I don’t think they expected me to take it literally. Enjoying myself too much.’

  ‘What did you do wrong?’ She shouldn’t have said that, it sounded like an accusation.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. Like I told you, these are dangerous times. The boundaries are changing. We’ve got a new boss, clean sweep and all that crap. She wants new blood. Yuppies.’ He turned the soil. ‘And she doesn’t like me
or my kind. Old school. I’m on the compost heap. Not like Pierce. The hero.’

  ‘Is Pierce still working?’ That wasn’t what he’d told her.

  Harry jiggled the earth from the spade. He’d cut an earthworm in two, both halves wriggling independently of each other.

  ‘I’ve no idea what he’s doing.’ He gave her a stern look, which made her feel uncomfortable. Was she that transparent? ‘But our lot – domestic – are certainly interested in him. It’s his reputation, you see. The old Freeman tape; kept him protected all these years and now it’s getting him noticed again.’

  ‘Why now?’

  ‘End of the Cold War, as I said. Everybody’s looking for new agendas. It’s all change.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with Pierce?’

  ‘Intelligence are putting in a bid to take the lead on Ireland from the Force. The plods have always had the lead on Ireland up ’til now, but they’re going to have trouble keeping hold of it when the Cold War comes to an end and there aren’t any more commies for Intelligence to spy on. The Troubles. Terrorists. Plenty of demand still for information on that lot. Pierce’s a useful name for MI5 to throw around. A reminder of past triumphs, gilding on the bid. That’s probably why you’ve got joggers on your tail – they’re keeping an eye on Anna because of Pierce, and now they’ve spotted you talking to her at this meeting, they are checking you out.’