by Clare Carson
Harry shrugged. ‘He didn’t try to help Reznik, did he?’
‘No.’
‘Leave him. More trouble than he’s worth. Don’t want two bodies floating around. Anyway, with any luck, he’ll wait until we’ve gone then pick up his ex-boss and dump him somewhere out at sea. He won’t want to leave a trail that might lead back to him.’
Reznik had joked about Wolf’s fishing skills – dropping more bodies than he caught. Too bad, she thought as she watched the dinghy skulking on the far side of the bay, that the joke turned out to be on him.
‘How did you find me anyway?’
‘I’ve had a busy couple of days. I got your phone message, couldn’t contact you, heard Reznik was back, got wind he was on his way to Orkney, so I thought I’d better head north too. I knew Pierce was on Hoy – I’ve known that all along, in case you hadn’t worked that out.’
She had.
‘I took the ferry from Stromness this morning, managed to rustle up a car at Moaness, but drove the wrong way – headed south to Lyness. Fortunately for you, I went to the bar this evening and heard a ferryman talking about a young woman heading north along the coast road on a Honda 50. Not scared of Halloween ghosts, he said. I thought it might be you. I suppose that’s the good and the bad thing about small islands – nothing goes unnoticed. I’d already ruled out Moaness, so that left the road to Rackwick Bay and I took it. Spotted the bike behind a wall. Honda 50.’ He grinned. ‘Where’s your noodles then?’
‘What?’
‘Noodles. The Japanese made Honda 50s for noodle carriers. Semi-automatic. No clutch, see, so the takeaway drivers could carry a bowl of noodles.’ He curved his arm to demonstrate.
She smiled – why had she ever doubted Harry? ‘Did you have a Honda 50 then?’
‘No, I was more of a BSA man myself, back in the day – the old beezer. British classic. To me a bike’s not a bike if it doesn’t leak oil on your trousers.’
He dug in his pocket, removed a torch, shone the beam on a sodden piece of paper he had fished out of Reznik’s pocket. A driver’s licence.
‘That’s odd.’
‘What?’
He shook the document dry, inserted it in his jacket pocket. ‘Never you mind.’
She knew better than to persist. Instead she asked, ‘Were you going to warn Pierce about Reznik?’
‘No. I was going to warn Pierce to stop playing his stupid bloody games.’
‘What stupid games?’
‘These stupid games he’s playing with you – asking you to contact Anna for him. Playing the go-between. Jerk.’
‘How did you know he asked me to contact Anna?’
‘Because I wasn’t born yesterday. I know what he’s like. And I know what you’re like too.’
‘Somebody must have warned Pierce about Reznik, because he’s disappeared.’
‘MI5, and I suspect they were warning him about me not Reznik. Because that’s how far up their own arses they are.’
She decided not to mention the note the jogger had stuffed in her pocket. Don’t trust Harry.
‘Where does Pierce live then?’
She pointed. ‘The white croft.’
His eyes didn’t follow the direction of her finger; he tilted his head, gaped at the heavens. The intensity of the glow behind the hills had dimmed, but the green haze was still visible, a mysterious light in the dark. They both gazed for a while, held by the beauty of the swirling rays. Eventually she said, ‘Harry, do you have any children?’ She wasn’t quite sure what had made her ask, and she thought as soon as she had said it that he would take offence. He didn’t.
‘Yes. A daughter, your age or thereabouts. I don’t see her these days, though. Her mother, my ex, moved to Australia.’
She said nothing. They watched in silence until the emerald gleams had died.
*
THE DOORFRAME WAS splintered, the latch kicked clean away.
‘There’s no electricity.’
Harry found the paraffin lamp, fiddled with the wick, lit it with a Bic.
‘Blimey. You’ve managed to make that lamp shine brightly. Pierce kept it dimmed.’
‘You don’t say. Sums him up if you ask me; keeps people in the dark.’
He held the lamp high, illuminated the chaos on the floor. Papers, envelopes, books, pens, photos. Reznik had taken the desk drawers, emptied them, kicked everything around as if he were having a tantrum.
‘What do you think he was searching for?’
‘Pierce’s next hiding place possibly.’ He nodded at the mess. ‘He was pretty desperate to find him, it seems. Get shot of him. Wipe his slate clean.’
‘Don’t you think there might be more to it than that?’
Harry scooped up some of the papers, flicked through them. ‘Hmm.’ He dumped the papers on the kitchen table, tucked his hand in his jacket and removed the document he had retrieved from Reznik’s corpse.
‘See this driver’s licence? It’s fake ID, in the name of Freeman.’
She scrunched her face. ‘The Freeman tape.’
‘Exactly. Freeman was Pierce’s cover name. According to Pierce.’
According to Pierce, said with a sneer.
‘Why would Pierce and Reznik both use the same cover name?’
He plodded over to the window, the top of his head silhouetted against the star-splattered sky.
‘Maybe they didn’t.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, I’m not sure Pierce did use Freeman as a cover name. I think he just told his handlers he did.’
Sam shivered; the croft was freezing with its door kicked in and without the heat of the wood burner. She rubbed her hands, tried to concentrate.
‘So if Freeman was Reznik’s cover name, who taped the Libyan gun dealer?’
‘Reznik, I would assume.’
‘How did Pierce get the tape then?’
‘He must have acquired it from Reznik somehow, passed it on to his handler, claimed he had taped the conversation and took the credit for exposing the Libyan arms link to the Republicans.’
What else had Pierce lied about, she wondered.
‘When I was with Reznik before you... well anyway, he was talking about the bond he had with Pierce.’
Harry raised an eyebrow.
‘It sounded as if they had some sort of, I don’t know, relationship going back ages.’
‘There we go. They had a deal – information, cash. Both of them freewheeling, making extra dosh on the side, keeping their bosses happy with juicy snippets they’d got from each other. The Freeman tape would have been more valuable to our side than Reznik’s, so he sold it.’
‘And Reznik’s side was...’
‘The Soviets. I told you there was a rumour that Reznik went to the KGB after he left the StB.’
She had doubted him when he first told her and Pierce had dismissed the idea. She wasn’t about to question Harry’s word now.
‘Reznik’s real masters have always been in Moscow, if you ask me. Doubt whether he ever managed to cut that rope. No such thing as an ex-KGB agent.’
No such thing as an ex-spook full stop, she reckoned.
‘Might be the end of the Cold War,’ Harry ruminated, ‘but I doubt that means the end of the Soviet secret state. Moscow – they’ll play the long game. Patience. They can sit out the winter, enjoy the thaw, take their time to plan the spring offensive.’
A shooting star crossed the sky behind Harry’s head. Or perhaps it was a satellite. She stuck her hands in her pockets.
‘If Pierce and Reznik were exchanging information, doesn’t that make them both some sort of double agent?’
‘Possibly. Although in Pierce’s case, I think the word double agent is too glamorous. Too ideologically motivated. Bit of a shit, I would say. Treacherous twerp. Does anything to advance his own interests and protect his reputation.’
‘Oh god.’ She had risked her neck for him.
‘I did warn you.’
&n
bsp; She felt ashamed that she had doubted Harry.
‘What happened to Pierce in ’76 then?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I thought somebody – the Red Army Faction – found Pierce, roughed him up, questioned him and let him go. Or he escaped.’
‘Pierce wasn’t picked up by anybody. Where did you get that idea from?’
‘I heard him talking about it with Jim – when Pierce dropped Anna off at our place and then here in Hoy. Fucking tortured, Pierce said. I asked Pierce about it earlier this summer and he as good as confirmed he had been tortured and questioned.’
‘Then he was lying through his fucking teeth.’
Harry wasn’t making sense.
‘Well, what were Jim and Pierce talking about?’
‘Jim, I would have thought.’
‘My dad?’
‘Yeah. Your bloody father. Reznik and his mates picked him up in June 1976, held him for fuck knows how long, gave him the cold bath treatment.’
‘Jim? Questioned by Reznik?’
Of course, Reznik had told her as much when they were standing together on the shore; he had guessed she was Jim’s daughter because she liked coffee. He had picked them both up – thirteen years apart – played the same favourite drink game with her as he had with Jim.
‘How many times do I have to tell you?’
‘Well, you’ve never told me before.’
‘You didn’t ask. And anyway, you know too much. Or not enough. A little knowledge, as you seem to have discovered, can be a very dangerous thing.’
She continued, undeterred. ‘But when Jim was interrogated, do you think he give them any information about Pierce?’
‘No. He said nothing about Pierce. He might have mentioned Davenport, but that was because he was sticking to his cover story, which was what he had been trained to do. He told them he was part of this...’ Harry waved his hand, ‘other organization who were trying to buy weapons. Davenport was their middle man. He had disappeared and he was searching for Davenport too because he wanted to find out what had happened to their money. And in the end, Reznik believed him and let him go.’
She rubbed her arms trying to generate some heat, remembered that endless sweaty summer; Jim had been absent for months before he reappeared without announcement in July.
‘But then the rumour mill started churning,’ Harry continued. ‘Drip-feeding stories. Jim had been loose-tongued, handed over details about Pierce and his family to Reznik. All total bollocks. I talked to Jim about it that day you visited me in the allotment, told him I thought Pierce was the two-faced gob-shite source of all the crap and he would do best to steer clear.’ He sighed. ‘Jim didn’t take my advice.’
And now she realized that she’d got it wrong too. She’d overheard Jim confronting Pierce about the rumours, but had misunderstood the fragments of conversation. Fucking tortured. Water. Fault. She had sensed the tension and she’d been scared. Her child’s imagination had created a story to account for Jim’s peculiar behaviour and the strange events of that difficult summer, a story that she’d buried deep, left to fester. When she talked to Pierce he’d drawn it out, picked it up, encouraged her to believe that her father was a traitor, the treacherous brother Antonio who betrayed Prospero and had him exiled to this island. What a jerk.
‘Pierce is full of bullshit,’ Harry said. ‘Always was. Spins his stories to protect his own back. Deflect attention.’
Was that what he had been doing all along – pointing his finger in the wrong direction to cover his own actions? Pierce was the one who betrayed me, Reznik had said in the moment before he was shot.
‘Do you think it was Pierce who let the Red Army Faction know that Reznik wasn’t a straight arms dealer?’
‘I would say so.’
‘Why would Pierce betray his own informant when they had a good deal going?’
‘Maybe he was worried he was about to be uncovered as a double dealer by Reznik, wanted to get rid of him. Dropped some information that he hoped would be a death sentence, one way or another.’
‘What a shit.’
‘Spies often are, I’m afraid.’
She sniffed, searched her pockets for a tissue, found a damp rag.
‘One more thing, Harry...’
‘Yes?’
‘What was the organization Jim was monitoring, the other one that wanted to buy arms from Reznik?’
Harry’s reply was sharp. ‘You don’t need to know that.’
‘But why...’
‘Look.’ He put his hands in his pockets. ‘I know it’s difficult, but sometimes it’s better not to know. Let it go.’
Perhaps he was right; she’d found out what she wanted to know. Jim hadn’t betrayed and injured Pierce. Maybe she should listen to Harry this time.
She swooped, lifted a photo she’d spotted among the papers: Pierce somewhere exotic, palm tree behind him, white cotton shirt unbuttoned, arm wrapped around a young woman. What nationality was she? South-east Asian. Thai perhaps? Malaysian? She held the picture closer. The girl was very beautiful. Very young. It made her queasy looking at it. She stood, crossed to the kitchen bin, pressed the foot pedal, ripped the photo, let the pieces drop.
‘What did you do that for?’
‘Felt like it.’ She didn’t want to explain. She wasn’t sure she could. Gut feeling, and not a good one. She returned to the mess Reznik had created on the floor, scuffed the papers with her boot. ‘Perhaps Reznik was worried that Pierce was holding on to some incriminating evidence that he had paid him for information. Pierce told me he always kept records of payments. He admitted it was something of an obsession.’
Harry gave her a sidelong look. ‘What a stupid bloody game this is. Egos. Office politics. All disguised as something more honourable. Defence of the realm. National security. What’s the point of it all?’ He gestured at the bay. ‘Why would anybody bother with all that stupidity when they could have the sea and the cliffs? The Milky Way. Wouldn’t mind living somewhere like this myself. Grow a few vegetables – plenty of seaweed for fertilizer. Fix up a wind turbine.’
‘You could move here, now Pierce has deserted the place. Or do you think he will come back?’
Harry pursed his lips, sucked in air. ‘Interesting question. The thing is, Reznik might be dead, but Pierce still has enemies lurking out there somewhere.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Somebody told Reznik where he would find Pierce. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t you. It wasn’t anybody in MI5 or the Firm. So there’s somebody else who wants him out the way. Did you tell anybody where he was living?’
‘No.’ She hadn’t told Tom or Karina.
She wandered over to the kitchen, filled the kettle, searched for tea bags – better than nothing – and spotted a small, familiar object: the blue mosaic tile she’d passed on to Pierce from Anna at the beginning of October. Pierce had left it abandoned in a corner when he fled. Didn’t he realize how much these tiles, the Fisher King’s treasures, had meant to Anna? Couldn’t he even show some loyalty to his own daughter? She reached for Karina’s pendant dangling around her neck, thought of the tile she’d found on Betty Corrigall’s grave and her spectral apparition of Valerie running in the dark. Three tiles, three deserted women. She scooped the tile from the kitchen table and jammed it in her back pocket. She was a bit slow off the mark. She had given away Pierce’s location to the person who wanted him dead; she just hadn’t clocked she was doing it at the time.
CHAPTER 30
London, November 1989
THE RETURN FLIGHT from Kirkwall had been uneventful. She had slept through both legs of it, glad to be in the warmth of a plane even if it was delayed on the runway before takeoff. Becky had hardly noticed her absence, she’d only been away one night.
‘Was the party any good?’ she asked.
‘What party?’
‘You were wearing the Debbie Harry wig. I assumed you were going to a Halloween party.’
‘Oh. Yes
. Of course.’
*
SHE RAN UPSTAIRS to her room, located The Secret Island. Removed the used chequebook from the envelope. She knew what she was looking for this time. She flicked through the stubs. Three of them, Pierce had carefully noted, were hefty cash withdrawals for payment to Freeman, all made in ’74. That was why the name Freeman rang a bell when Harry first told her about the tape – she must have seen the name on the cheque stubs, registered it in some dusty memory file. Pierce had told her, back in September when he handed her three hundred pounds and noted it in a book as money for Ariel, that he had slipped up once with his records of cash paid to informers. It was important to give your contact a unique code name, he had said – because he’d made that mistake with Freeman. If he was handing cash to Freeman, it raised the suspicion that Freeman was somebody else, not him. Pierce the hero. What a jerk. She replaced the envelope, removed the white tile she had found on Betty Corrigall’s grave and dropped it in her pocket.
*
SHE SLEPT AND then she trudged to the phone box and called Anna’s number. The phone rang and rang. She waited a day and tried again. No answer. She took the train to Blackheath, puffed up the hill to Anna’s flat, rang on the door, banged and shouted. A neighbour appeared and said that Hilary had moved out suddenly and hadn’t left any contact details. Anna had vanished again. She paced across the heath, brown in the violet light of dusk; reached the pond where she had met Anna the last time she saw her, watched the clouds gathering in the water. The heron landed, raised one foot and dipped its beak in the reflections. She re-ran their conversations, looking for something, anything that might give her a lead. She blew on her hands to warm them, and when that failed, jammed them in her pockets and felt the white tile she had found on Betty Corrigall’s grave. Its marble iciness jolted her – and she remembered that Anna said she went to Valerie’s grave in Norwood Cemetery on the evening of the anniversary of her death. Guy Fawkes night.
*
SUNDAY 5TH NOVEMBER. A cold fog muffled south London, chilled her bones. She took the bus to West Norwood; located the side street to the cemetery’s entrance. The gothic stone arch that once admitted black-plumed horse-drawn hearses dominated the end of the road. The left side of the arch was buttressed with a line of towering railings, erected by the Victorians to deter body snatchers. On the near side, two teenage girls – fifteen or sixteen – were puffing fags, leaning against the wall.