The Dark Isle

by Clare Carson

  She didn’t open the envelope until she was sitting safely at the front of the double-decker bus. It didn’t seem to contain much. A used chequebook. She flicked through the stubs. Boring. She replaced it in the envelope and removed what looked like a photo. A picture of Anna in school uniform staring nonchalantly at the camera. Only Anna could manage to look cool in a school photo. She had no idea how the envelope might have ended up in a biscuit tin in the back garden of Pierce’s deserted house. She half wondered whether Anna had left it there herself in the hope that Pierce might find it if he returned. Another of Anna’s strange designs perhaps, like the mosaic tiles, except this time she had left a trail of pictures of herself across south London in places she thought her father might visit. The possibility made her sad; the idea of Anna not knowing the location of her father was horrible. It wasn’t fair. She replaced the photo and the chequebook in the envelope, stuffed it in her back pocket. She couldn’t wait to tell Anna about it; the swarthy men, hiding in the grass, the beetle, the tin with the envelope. That would make Anna laugh. She would be impressed by her exploits.

  CHAPTER 17

  London, October 1989

  SHE WAS KNACKERED after a sleepless night on the train from Inverness. She pushed the front door of the Vauxhall house and listened. Becky snoring, still asleep. She was desperate for coffee, but it had to wait. She went straight upstairs to her room, removed The Secret Island from the bookshelf, placed the Bryant & May matchbox gently on her desk, dug out the envelope she had found in the garden of Pierce’s safehouse at the tail end of the summer of ’76. She opened the envelope and grabbed the chequebook, weighed it in her hand; she hadn’t taken much notice of it before, more interested in the picture of Anna. The cover was dirty cream, imitation vellum – Gaillard & Cie embossed in gold cursive letters. Cie, French for Company. The first page revealed an address in the City, the small print indicated the bank was registered in Lausanne. Swiss bank account. All the cheques had been used. There were no credit slips in the book, but at the back there was a printed calendar, a hole punch marking cash withdrawals. The holes made her smile, the dissonance of somebody with enough dosh to merit a Swiss bank account being subjected to such a menial process of recording transactions. The name printed at the bottom of the calendar provided an explanation, she suspected, for the attention to boring detail. Mr H. Davenport Esq. Henry was Pierce’s first name, Anna had once told her, although everybody who knew the real him called him by his surname. Perhaps he used his real first name as part of his fake identity, as spies sometimes did. Davenport was the surname on the gas bill that Anna had found, which had led them to the safehouse in Lewisham, where she had found the envelope.

  Pierce had obviously been concerned about the envelope – and she assumed it was this one. Harry had said he was a man of many identities – but it seemed likely that Davenport was the alias Pierce was using in 1976 when his cover was blown. She flicked through the cheque stubs. He had dutifully written details on each one: name, date, amount. He had confessed to his habit of noting every penny spent as if it was a weakness. Funny that he could change his outward identity so easily, but the ingrained habits remained, whatever his name. He probably insisted that the bank clerk made the hole punches in the calendar. She held the chequebook upside down, waggled it, half expecting a coded message on a Rizla paper to fall out. Nothing, but she could feel the tension in her hand, sensed there was something important there which she couldn’t quite discern. She replaced the book of stubs in the envelope.

  *

  BECKY STIRRED, STOMPED downstairs. Sam followed her to the kitchen.

  ‘Oh wotcha.’ Becky opened a cupboard, removed a cornflakes box, shook, reached for a bowl from the dirty pile in the sink, gave it a cursory rinse, filled it with cereal. ‘I didn’t hear you come home.’

  ‘I got back early this morning.’ Sam yawned. ‘What’s been happening?’

  ‘This and that.’

  The tension between her and Becky seemed to have evaporated in her absence – what a relief.

  ‘Want some coffee?’

  ‘Please.’

  Becky messed with some filter papers and a plastic funnel, reached for the kettle.

  ‘It’s official.’

  ‘What, you and...?’

  ‘Yep. We’re an item. Anna and me.’

  Anna had reverted to her original name, which quite surprised Sam – she must be serious about Becky.

  ‘Great.’ She managed to sound as if she meant it.

  ‘Anna said you were right, she did meet you in 1976.’

  Sam wavered, about to say told you so, before she decided smugness would not go down well here. ‘It doesn’t bother you then?’

  ‘Why should it? Your father was a police spy and I’ve never let that affect our friendship. Why should I care if Anna’s father was a spy and his work necessitated a name change? I don’t judge people by their father’s occupation. Or their names.’

  Anna had come clean, it seemed. The percolator bubbled. Becky poured and handed her a mug of coffee, settled down to eat her cornflakes.

  ‘Anna said you were a bit of a weirdo when she first met you.’

  ‘Weirdo?’

  ‘She said you collected beetles.’

  ‘What’s weird about that? Darwin did it too.’

  ‘She said you trapped them in jam jars and suffocated them with crushed laurel leaves.’

  Kind of Anna to reveal that detail.

  ‘You’re the Eichmann of the insect world.’

  ‘I only had about ten beetles in my collection.’ In a matchbox morgue under her bed. She was a weirdo. She’d given up collecting them – after Anna had mocked her, in fact. Decided she had to observe and respect, not collect. ‘Darwin had hundreds.’

  ‘I always suspected you had a dark side. That must be what attracts your war-junkie friend Tom.’

  ‘What’s he got to do with anything?’

  ‘He called while you were away.’

  She sipped her coffee.

  ‘I’m going into town in a bit. Do you want to come?’ Becky asked.

  ‘Thanks, but no. I’m too tired.’

  Becky lifted the bowl to her face, slurped the mush at the bottom, chucked it back in the sink. ‘I’m seeing Anna tomorrow.’

  *

  SHE LAY IN the bath, watched a spider weaving a web in a corner, listened to Becky schlepping around her bedroom, The Cowboy Junkies playing. ‘Sweet Jane’. Sam stuck her toe up the hot tap, wiggled it. Becky clicked the cassette player. The music stopped.

  ‘Bye.’

  Footsteps running down the stairs, front door slamming. Sam was irritated, with herself as much as anything. Anna hadn’t given Sam her phone number – don’t call me, I’ll call you. And yet she was canoodling with her best mate, hanging out with Becky and mocking Sam behind her back. The story about the beetles. Sod that. She removed her toe from the tap, climbed out of the bath, dried and dressed, checked through the window to make sure Becky’s Moggie Minor had definitely gone, and tip-toed into her bedroom. Why was she tip-toeing? There wasn’t anybody in the house to hear her. Guilt. She knew she was abusing her friend, invading her privacy, reverting to bad habits, well-worn techniques of the spying trade. Becky’s address book was lying on her desk, open at the A page. Anna’s name and number in red ink. Sam memorized the number, backed out the room. Once she had passed Pierce’s details on to Anna, she would go straight, never again resort to the tradecraft she had absorbed from her father. She ran to the phone box by the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.

  *

  ‘ANNA. IT’S SAM.’

  ‘I might have guessed. Where did you get my number from?’

  Sam ignored the question. ‘Can I come over and see you?’

  ‘OK.’

  She didn’t sound that enthusiastic.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Later. Eight.’

  ‘Your flat?’

  ‘No. The heath. The pond where we were
the other night.’

  ‘OK. See you later.’

  *

  THE YEAR WAS skidding away. Soon the clocks would be going back and it would be dark by five. The gloomy evenings never used to bother her, but now they felt oppressive. The pavements were covered in slushy leaves and dog shit. The undimmed headlights of a car coming up behind her on the hill made her turn. She shielded her eyes, a silver Beemer accelerated past. The seventies semis gave way to grander Georgian terraces as she neared the top of the hill. Was that a universal rule in London? The slummiest houses were always at the bottom, the lowest-lying land. She turned in to Hare and Billet Road, the expansive heath beyond. She passed the pub, glowing windows revealing men sharing a pint and the latest match scores. She sensed a car crawling behind her – searching for a parking spot? No – it drew alongside. Silver Beemer. Again. The window of the passenger seat lowered and a man in a green bomber jacket leaned out.

  ‘What are you doing here? I thought you lived in Dick Street?’

  The plain-clothes copper from the poll tax meeting. What a jerk. Hadn’t they got anything better to do than intimidate women?

  ‘Why don’t you fuck off?’ she said.

  He grinned and waved and wound the window back up, satisfied that he had managed to annoy her, she presumed. The car sped away. Tosser. But he left her feeling jittery, out here on the heath alone at night. She surveyed the clump of birches by the water’s edge; an amber flame leaped, hovered, flickered and vanished. Was that Anna rolling a spliff? She set off across the grass, its dampness slippery underfoot, dingy clouds shrouding the moon and making it difficult to see where she was treading. She reached the reedy edge of the pond, the water lapping gently. No sign of Anna. Perhaps she had imagined the flare. She edged around the pond, reached the trees, stood there in the shadows, listening for footsteps, watching the water. A ripple and a splash – a fish leaping for insects. An owl hooted. She searched for the bird among the branches and saw a ghostly figure emerging from the grey trunks. Anna.

  ‘Why do we have to meet out here?’

  ‘I think my flat is bugged.’

  ‘God, I’m not sure it’s any safer out here – I just saw the bouncer from your anti-poll tax meeting driving by in a silver Beemer.’

  ‘Oh, a bloody plod. I’m not worried about them.’ A plop of rain dimpled the surface of the pond. ‘Let’s get back under the trees. I’ll roll a spliff.’

  They huddled in the birch thicket; the last of the leaves provided some dripping cover.

  ‘You got a message to Pierce?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Anna had her head bent over the Rizla papers, her black curls flopping forward. Sam couldn’t see her face, found it hard to gauge her reactions.

  ‘Are you going to tell me where he is?’

  ‘Not exactly. I’ve got a PO Box number. You can write to him, fix up a meeting place. You have to use the name Steven Hill.’

  She lifted her head. ‘Steven Hill? Seriously. Why can’t you just tell me where he is?’

  ‘I swore I wouldn’t. I can’t.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake. Spies. Bloody spies. I thought I was done with spies.’ Anna swiped a branch, sending leaves and raindrops flying.

  ‘Why do you think he’s been hiding all these years? Do you think somebody is still after him?’

  Reznik the Butcher. But he had fled to the States. She briefly wondered whether Tom had unearthed any more details. Probably not.

  ‘He implied it had almost become a habit – hiding. He’s become used to living in exile.’

  As soon as she said it, she realized she’d given away the fact that she hadn’t just passed a message on to Pierce via some third party – she’d met him. But Anna knew that anyway. Too bad.

  ‘He’s had enough of being a hermit. I think he wants to move back to London.’

  ‘And do what?’

  ‘Work for an ethical PR company.’

  Anna handed her the spliff.

  ‘What’s an ethical PR company when it’s at home?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask him that.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever want to completely disown Jim?’

  She wrinkled up her face, tugged on the roach. She had been caught up in one of Jim’s old grudges a couple of years back. A difficult period she had tried to forget. She had seriously considered adopting a new identity so there was no chance that anybody else from Jim’s shady past could track her down; the idea had seemed too extreme at the time, adopting a false identity so she could cut free from Jim’s life as a spy. Better to face the demons. So she kept telling herself.

  ‘There have been times when I’ve not wanted to have anything to do with him because of his work.’

  ‘And what about the way Jim behaved at home? He was a bit of a drinker, wasn’t he, your dad.’

  ‘Yep. A bit of a drinker.’ Understatement.

  ‘Didn’t Liz ever get fed up with him?’

  ‘Of course she did.’

  Liz didn’t shout much, she was more likely to go for a sharp retort before she got in the car and drove away to one of her departmental meetings, but there had been unexpected outbursts. Crockery thrown, windows smashed, times when it was best to duck and run. The autumn after the heatwave had been particularly stormy, she recalled; arguments about Jim’s job, Liz yelling she’d had enough of his bloody secret operations, Jim saying he had to see it through. She gave the spliff a final toke, handed it back to Anna.

  ‘Every family has its disagreements.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Anna was getting cold feet about contacting Pierce.

  ‘I gave him the tile,’ Sam said.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He was... he didn’t say a lot.’

  ‘Has he still got the white ones?’ Anna blew a stream of smoke in Sam’s face. ‘Tell me. Did you see the white tiles? The Fisher King’s magic treasures?’

  Pierce had asked her not to tell Anna his address, he didn’t instruct her to keep quiet about the tiles. And, anyway, she wanted to crack Anna’s code; she was certain their movements and locations contained a hidden history of which she was part, yet she still couldn’t decipher their meaning.

  ‘I did find one of the white ones, in fact.’

  ‘In his house?’

  ‘No. On a grave. Betty Corrigall.’

  ‘Betty Corrigall?’

  ‘She was a young woman who committed suicide in the eighteenth century. She got pregnant out of wedlock and the father ran away to sea. She’s buried on a hill above the sea between two parishes. Unconsecrated ground.’

  Anna drew on the roach, tipped her head back. Was that a smile at the edge of her mouth or was it just the way she was puffing the smoke?

  ‘Wedlock.’ She couldn’t have been smiling, because there was definite anger in her voice. ‘That just about sums it up, doesn’t it, the institution of marriage. Wed bloody lock. A prison.’

  ‘Sure.’ Sam agreed. ‘The grave is very touching, though. Somebody from the island put a headstone there in 1976.’

  Anna blew more smoke. ‘So you found one of Pierce’s white tiles on this grave?’

  ‘Yes. I stopped off to pay my respects and spotted the tile lying in the bottom of a jam jar.’

  ‘Are you sure it was one of the tiles from Blackstone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She could have pulled it out from her pocket and shown her, but she sensed if she handed the tile back to Anna, she would never find out what it meant. Anna hadn’t asked for it anyway. She was kicking the ground, stirring the saturated leaves.

  ‘Fuck him. Fuck, fuck, fuck him.’

  Sam had seen Anna upset before, but not agitated like this. She didn’t know whether to try to soothe her or let her rant. Perhaps she was upset because Pierce hadn’t cared for the tile she had given him, relinquished it, left it on a stranger’s grave.

  ‘This isn’t going to work,’ Anna said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Me seeing Pierce again.’


  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve got my own life and he’s got his. We’ve gone our different ways. I’m not sure I want to explain myself to him, suffer his disapproval for the choices I’ve made.’

  ‘I’m sure he won’t disapprove of anything you’ve done.’

  ‘Really? You think he’ll be proud of my acting, the political protests? My girlfriends?’

  She examined the dead, mushy leaves carpeting the ground.

  ‘I don’t think he’ll mind that you’re gay.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘I...’

  ‘Did you tell him?’

  ‘About you and Becky? No, of course not.’

  ‘He hasn’t been in touch for thirteen bloody years and now, just as I feel like I’m getting my shit together, he’s in the mix again. I’m not sure I want to know. Fuck it.’

  ‘He’ll be really disappointed if you don’t get in touch.’

  ‘Tough.’ She jabbed the glowing end of the spliff at Sam. ‘What about you? Has he done some kind of a deal with you? Is he twisting your arm in some way, to make you play the go-between?’

  Anna was difficult to deceive. She gave it a go. ‘No. I just think you should try and make amends with your dad while you can. You don’t know how much longer he’ll be around.’

  ‘The dead dad card.’

  ‘It’s a good reason. If your dad suddenly died and you hadn’t seen him, you’d feel terrible.’

  ‘He’s not going to die suddenly.’

  ‘My dad did.’

  Anna stared at her. ‘Well, maybe that was because he was stupid.’

  ‘Stupid?’

  ‘Yeah, stupid. Fools rush in...’

  She’d heard Anna use that phrase about Jim before. ‘What are you saying?’

  Anna mashed the spliff on the ground. ‘I’ve had enough of hanging out here. I’m going home.’

  She turned and strode away.

  ‘Wait a minute, Anna.’

  ‘No. I’ll call you if I want to talk to you again. Don’t call me.’