The Dark Isle

by Clare Carson

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘He was following me under the bridge. He’s taken your number plate.’ Jesus, it came to something when she was glad that a spook was taking notes about her. ‘MI5,’ she added.

  He scoffed, smoke puffing out his nose.

  ‘MI5. They won’t do anything. Don’t kid yourself, you’re not that important.’

  ‘I have friends waiting for me at home.’

  ‘Tell us your address and we’ll give them a call, let them know you’ve been held up.’ He released a whinnying snigger, amused by his own humour, didn’t seem to realize he had dropped the fact that he didn’t know where she lived. Unless he was bluffing. She suspected he wasn’t. They couldn’t have been shadowing her for long, they must have spotted her entering and leaving Karina’s. She had sensed she was being watched.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘The solicitor.’

  He looked like he could be a solicitor, but not the kind you’d feel relieved to see if you were banged up in a police cell. A bent brief. The car was picking up speed, heading east.

  ‘Who do you work for?’

  He opened his mouth. A phone rang, green light flashing between the front seats. The solicitor, if that’s what he was, leaned, retrieved the handset attached to the car with a curly wire, held it close to his face.

  The electronic crackling made it difficult to decipher the words of the caller.

  ‘Yes. Ten minutes.’

  He replaced the receiver in its cradle.

  ‘You’re expected.’

  ‘By whom?’

  He tapped his ash on the car floor, stared out the window. Fuck this, fuck this. What was going on? She wanted to scream but she had to keep calm. Getagrip. She’d been in worse situations. The solicitor wasn’t holding a gun to her head. There was no edge of hot menace to him, just a tepid indifference. He was somebody’s fixer. A factotum. Doing his job. She had to outwit him. Them. Whoever they were. She couldn’t escape from this car so she had to use her brain. Who was she dealing with? Not MI5; the lurking presence of the Merc had shocked the jogger as much as her. The Merc didn’t belong to Intelligence then, or at least not the part that had been trailing her. Another part of Intelligence? MI6? The Firm wanting to find out what she had said to whom about Pierce? Perhaps Harry had passed her phone message on to somebody, let them know she’d been leaking details about their agents to the press. Jesus. She hoped not. She had doubts about Harry, but she couldn’t believe he would betray her in that way. She was certain this was something to do with Pierce, but perhaps her abductors were nothing to do with the secret state. She stared at the back of the driver’s head visible through the head rest; cropped mousey hair, thick neck. Silent. His hand dropped to the gear stick, gripped it, white scars slashed his knuckles. Thuggish. What kind of thug had a solicitor? Kidnapped people off the street? Her stomach lurched.

  Racing through the Borough streets she had walked earlier that evening, heading across London Bridge. South of the river was home, north was uncharted territory. The dome of St Paul’s flat and grey against the rusty clouds, swerving around the City’s narrow streets, dark walls looming. Then east along the river again. Past the Tower of London to Docklands; streets lined with the ruins of half-demolished wharves, insides hanging out, the Merc’s tyres bumping over Wapping High Street’s cobbles.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  The solicitor twitched his head at a boarded warehouse, the gallows frame of a winch silhouetted against the sky.

  ‘Execution Wharf.’ He sniggered. There was an edge of nervousness to his laugh.

  The Merc swerved right and she had a split-second sense they were about to ram the wall before she heard the metallic scrape of heavy doors and the car descended a ramp to an underground car park, headlights swinging around the emptiness, veering, braking, reversing into a bay.

  The solicitor’s voice whined. ‘I wouldn’t try anything funny with him.’ He nodded at the driver. He turned around and stared at her – hard grey eyes, square jaw, thin cracked lips – before he lumbered out of the driver’s seat and opened the passenger door. He was huge. She clambered into the cavernous darkness and her eyes fixed on his scar-slashed knuckles gripping the door handle.

  ‘What’s your problem?’

  She jumped, shook her head, unable to reply; she’d pin-pointed his accent. He’d said v instead of w. German. Her panicked brain went into overdrive, making dangerous connections. German. Kidnapped. Red Army Faction. Fanatics. Trigger-happy. I’ve dealt with them, Pierce had said. They had questioned him in ’76, she guessed, but he had survived and thought that was the end of it. They shot a couple of people in ’86, according to Harry. On the run, desperate for cash. Her mouth was dry. Was it possible they were chasing Pierce again for some reason? After the money Pierce had extracted from them in his arms dealing sting all those years ago? And she was their hostage.

  ‘This way.’

  No chance of making a dash for it with the enforcer behind her. Across the empty underground car park; damp walls, steel jacks holding the roof, water on the floor, the reek of the river in the air. Right on the shore, she reckoned, the Thames lapping at the foundations come high tide. Through a heavy door, round and up a dingy stairwell. Numbers tapped into a key pad, a click, door swinging into a narrow corridor, plastic sheeting on the floor, dangling wires from the ceiling. No source of external light, stark fluorescent strips overhead.

  ‘What is this place?’ She wanted to sound confident, but her voice wavered.

  ‘Luxury apartments. Or at least they will be when they are finished.’

  The solicitor scrabbled for something in his pocket, produced a bunch of keys, selected one, grabbed the handle of the first door on the left, pushed it, ushered her towards the pitch dark.

  ‘I thought you said somebody wanted to speak to me.’

  ‘You have to wait.’

  The solicitor handed the keys to the driver, shuffled away.

  ‘Hang on...’ She didn’t want to be left alone with him. He shoved her forward, caught her off guard with his aggression. She stumbled. The door slammed, key clicked in the lock.

  She shouted through the door. ‘Where’s the light?’

  ‘Shut your fucking mouth.’

  She stepped away from the door. Shivering. Eyes damp. Getagrip. Assess the surroundings. She could tell from the closeness of the air and the lack of echo that she was in a tiny space. Definitely not a luxury apartment. A broom cupboard more like. Fuck. Hot tears ran down her cheek. Incarcerated in a darkened cell in the middle of a deserted wharf by a gang of desperate terrorists and nobody even knew she’d been kidnapped. Apart from a useless MI5 shadow who had done nothing to help. Serve her right for messing in things she didn’t understand. She had no idea how long she would be stuck here. What if they didn’t let her go? She grabbed the door handle, pushed; it didn’t give. She banged.

  ‘Let me out. Let me out now.’

  No response. Waste of breath. She had to stay calm. Think. They wouldn’t keep her captive here for long – what would be the point? They were trying to mess with her head. She wasn’t going to let them scare her. Maybe she could reason with them. She was being dumb. They killed people. She had to escape. She stood for a moment, waiting for her eyes to adjust, and spotted a faint line of light hovering in the dark. She stumbled towards the glimmer – a few paces – ran her fingers along the source, rough and faintly warm, a plywood boarded window. No glass in the frame. She couldn’t be much above ground level; they had driven down a ramp and climbed one set of stairs. The room was on the left of the corridor, which meant it must be above the street not the foreshore of the river. She pushed at one corner of the boarding. It budged. The key in the door behind her turned; she jumped away from the window.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ His towering bulk filled the frame.

  ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

  He stepped into the room; the door swung shut behind him.

  ‘Don
’t fuck with me.’

  She could smell his beery sweat. He lunged, shoved her against the wall, and for a moment she thought he was about to assault her, but he stepped away. Slammed the door. She waited to see if he would return, still slumped against the wall, hardly daring to breathe. The lock clicked. Footsteps retreated. Blood pounding in her head. She had to get out. Now. She edged back to the window, dug in her pocket and removed the penknife she always carried, opened the longest blade, slipped it down the crack between boarding and frame, levered – there was some give. She wiggled the penknife, focused on the covering of the window, willing it to move. She levered again. The board creaked. Too intent on loosening the board to listen to what was going on behind. The door burst open.

  ‘Move away from the window.’

  He strode across the room. She managed to slip the penknife up the coat sleeve of her left arm before he grabbed her by the right, yanked her to the door.

  ‘You come with me now. You have to answer some questions. Or else...’

  He pulled her into the corridor and left the sentence hanging. She could work the ending out for herself. The Red Army Faction, terrorists trained by the East German Ministry of State Security. She didn’t need Tom’s notes to tell her about their methods because she’d found out when she was ten.

  CHAPTER 23

  London, October 1976

  THE SPLATTER OF rain on the windows broke the silence of the library. The long hot summer was well and truly over, but still it played on her mind. Since Anna’s disappearance she had nobody to talk to, nobody who would understand her fears. In the absence of Anna, she reverted to her old routines. Trying to join in with her sisters’ latest occult endeavour. Cycling up the long hill. Freewheeling back. The rain had driven her to the local library to return her overdue books. She wandered the fiction stacks, remembering the day in Hoy. Pierce shouting in his croft. Fucking tortured. Jim’s scary behaviour. Water. Fault. In the end, nothing terrible had happened, and yet she felt the threat lingering, the cracks beneath her feet.

  ‘Hello.’

  She jumped, startled by the voice behind her, then smiled when she saw it was her friend Ed, stacking the shelves. Well, he wasn’t exactly her friend – he was too old to be her friend, but she liked him. He was large, black and wore National Health blue plastic glasses held together with Sellotape. He worked at the library most days, but he wasn’t allowed to sit at the desk and stamp the books because the other staff thought he was slow. He wasn’t slow. At least not slow in the head. He was quite slow at reshelving the books, but Sam reckoned this was because he liked to align the spines. He had one of those brains that remembered things. She could ask him for books about a particular object or a place, and he could give her a list. He didn’t go by content, or even meaning – just the words in the title. In some ways, he was better than the other librarians because he never tried to guide her to books he thought she should read; he told her what she wanted to know.

  ‘Ed. You made me jump.’

  He pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘Are you looking for something?’

  She paused. Maybe she was looking for something. She could trust Ed not to ask questions. ‘Are there any books on torture in the library?’

  He didn’t blink. ‘Torture Methods Used in the Spanish Inquisition. Burquist and Havell. 1976. Oxford University Press. It’s just come in.’

  That wasn’t what she wanted. ‘Is that all?’

  He removed his glasses, fiddled with the Sellotaped arm hinge.

  ‘Amnesty International. Report on Torture. Revised Edition. 1975. It’s in the reference section. It’s got a red cover.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She scuttled off to locate the document, shelved in a corner above the phone directories, took it to an empty table. She looked at the contents page. A long list of countries, including the United Kingdom. She was shocked. Did they all use torture? She flicked to the index. Beating. Electric shock. Forced feeding. Fourth degree. She felt odd reading these things, but she persisted and she found the word she wanted: water. Immersion in water. She turned to the relevant pages.

  ‘Placing themselves on either side of me two soldiers took me by the legs and submerged me into a barrel of water which covered my head and chest up to my middle. I nearly drowned. They questioned me again. The next day they submerged me in the barrel four or five times before they pulled me out nearly drowned.’

  She read the paragraph twice. It made her queasy. Why would anybody do that kind of thing to somebody else? In the silence of the library, she could hear her heart thumping. Now she’d found what she was looking for, she wished she hadn’t. Fucking tortured. Water. She didn’t want to think about it. She shouldn’t have bothered.

  Ed was standing behind her.

  ‘You found the Amnesty International report on torture?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He leaned over her shoulder, read the words aloud.

  ‘Submerged me into a barrel of water which covered my head and chest up to my middle.’

  ‘Ssh.’ She looked around wildly, checking nobody could overhear them.

  He pushed his glasses up his nose again. ‘The Guardian had something on the front page about water and torture last week.’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘Yes. East German political prisoner tells of cold water torture.’

  ‘Cold water?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll get it for you.’

  He ambled over to the newspaper stacks. She could hear the soles of his shoes slapping the lino as he returned. ‘There.’

  It was a short report and she scanned it quickly: East German political prisoner escapes across Berlin Wall and tells of torture at the hands of the Ministry of State Security. They tortured him while he was in prison, he said. The worst was the water torture. They pushed him into a bath of cold water, until he was ready to confess to anything. He made up some story because he thought he was going to drown. She stared at the article, words replaying in her mind. Tortured. Water. Tortured. Water. Tortured. Water. Fault. She was shivering, rocking on the edge of a precipice, dark water sloshing below. She needed a way out, an escape route, a place to hide. She remembered Jim’s advice that day at Betty Corrigall’s grave: go somewhere safe in your mind. She traced the path across the dunes, along the round boulders, over the red rocks, followed the sandy inlet to the opening in the sandstone cliff, headed to the triangle of dry sand right at the back of the cave among the skeletons of gannets and seaweed and fraying blue polypropylene rope. A safe place where the sea couldn’t take her, above the high tide mark. She stayed there for a while, the sea creatures that spangled the cave walls gleaming in the last of the afternoon sunshine.

  She was aware that somebody was standing behind her.

  ‘I’ve found another book on torture,’ Ed said.

  ‘Thanks, Ed. I think I’ve read enough.’

  CHAPTER 24

  London, October 1989

  HE CHIVVIED HER along the corridor, stark in the strip-light glare. The blade of her penknife jabbed the fleshy base of her thumb; she had to curl her fingers and grip her coat sleeve to stop it from dropping. One door stood open at the far end of the passageway. He shoved her through. She stumbled, found her footing, surveyed her surroundings. A vast double height space, broken by concrete pillars, brick walls unplastered, copper pipes exposed, red, green, black wires dangling, empty apart from two chairs and a desk with two mugs and three thermos flasks lined neatly along one side. Beyond the desk, sliding glass doors through which she could see the darkness of the river and the lights of the south side twinkling. The solicitor was hovering shiftily by the glass and next to him the back of a broad-shouldered man with thick wavy hair cut short, check shirt, faded jeans and trainers. He had his hands in his pockets and at first glance she thought he looked too casual to be dangerous, but there was something – the subservience of even the hefty enforcer perhaps – that tripped an alarm bell in her head. Her inquisitor turned around to face her. Squ
are chin accentuated by short-cut beard and moustache, olive skin, sharp nose and steel-rimmed spectacles partially hiding his eyes. But not entirely. The rays from a bare lightbulb caught his left eyelid, peculiarly creased and red as if he suffered from eczema, its rawness drawing attention to his lack of lashes. Reznik the Butcher.

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’ Monotone voice, syllables propelled from his thin-lipped mouth like bullets. He held out his hand. She ignored it.

  ‘I hope Wolf has behaved himself.’ He gestured at his thick-necked enforcer. Wolf. ‘The company he used to keep before he was employed by me wasn’t known for its politeness.’

  He removed his spectacles, wiped the lenses on his sleeve, replaced them.

  ‘These are interesting times. The men who used to guard the Wall are now jumping over it themselves.’

  Wolf wasn’t a terrorist after all. Worse. He was a state killer. An Iron Curtain guard; a cog in the ruthless East German security machine. He must have realized which way the wind was blowing and decided to do a runner before the next regime turned on him. Palled up with Reznik. She realized her legs were shaking.

  ‘I’ve tried to get him to improve his ways, take up nice hobbies. He likes to go fishing at weekends, don’t you, Wolf?’ The guard grunted. ‘Unfortunately he tends to drop more bodies than he catches. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks is the saying, I think.’

  The solicitor sniggered. Fuck off, creep.

  ‘I need the toilet,’ she said. She had to find a better place to stash her penknife before it dropped on the floor.

  ‘Of course.’ He indicated a door on one side of the room. ‘I bought this property quite recently. It’s one of a number I have in my portfolio. It will eventually be converted into apartments. As you will have noticed, we haven’t got very far with the wiring. But there’s no problem with the plumbing. Plenty of water.’