A Ghost at the Door

by Michael Dobbs

  Edwards drew a little closer, lowered his voice a notch. ‘That missing-person case you brought to our attention,’ he said, his eyebrow arching cryptically, his accent adding further emphasis. ‘I can’t tell you where she is.’

  ‘I understand that, Hughie, but I was hoping for maybe a hint—’

  ‘No, you don’t understand. I can’t tell you where she is because I don’t bloody know, do I? Can’t find her. Not a ruddy trace. Oh, she landed at Heathrow all right, like you said, but since then your Miss Ranelagh seems to have vanished as effectively as my overdue promotion. Not used her credit card, her Internet account, her mobile phone. Nothing. Not a dicky.’

  ‘Isn’t that a little odd?’

  ‘Too damn right it’s odd. Not supposed to happen nowadays, no matter how many right-to-privacy laws you politicians pass.’ He paused. ‘Oh, I was forgetting, you’re not a politician any longer. Thinking of going back into that den of iniquity, are you?’ he asked, nodding towards the Parliament building.

  Harry shrugged; the effort made him wince. ‘Got other things on my plate.’

  ‘Politics. Like pneumoconiosis, so it is: no shifting it, not once it gets into the lungs. Never been my game. Thankless sodding task. Like my old dad used to say, it might seem like a rich seam of coal to you, boyo, but it’s just a few bags of nutty slack to them out there.’ The policeman’s tired eyes betrayed a tired soul; he was closing in on retirement and the constant compromises of his job had ground away at his enthusiasm.

  ‘So what can we do, Hughie?’ Harry asked, bringing him back to the business in hand.

  The policeman shook his head. ‘There’s nothing more I can do, not without someone making a formal request. I’ve already dangled my manhood over a meat grinder on this. I can’t push it any further.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘My old copper’s nose tells me something’s up with your Miss Ranelagh. When little old ladies disappear from the face of the earth it often means they’re under it. But that’s instinct. We need hard information and there is none.’ He glanced at his watch and placed his glass back on the windowsill. ‘I better be disappearing myself.’

  ‘You’ve hardly made a dent in your drink.’

  ‘Well, at least no one can accuse you of touching me up for information, then, can they? Can’t be too careful nowadays.’ He laughed his deep baritone laugh once more, but the red eyes didn’t join in and the trace of humour died quickly beneath the noise of passing traffic from Parliament Street. His expression was dark. ‘I know you, Harry Jones. You’re a mad bastard, so you are. Look at the state of you already. Tread safely. You mark my words, there be dragons out there.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dragons. He felt he’d been living with one since his return from Bermuda. His fault. Both he and Jemma were angry, but trying to make the best of it.

  ‘You’ll need some physio once that comes off,’ she’d remarked across the breakfast table, waving a knife smeared with Dundee thick-cut in his general direction. ‘I’ve got a friend, Tanya, she can sort you out. We did our teacher training together. Blonde. Excellent hands.’

  ‘Thanks!’ he said, perhaps a little too enthusiastically.

  ‘Just make sure it’s only your shirt you take off.’

  Was it a joke? Or a test, a sign she didn’t entirely trust him? He’d given her no cause to doubt him since they’d been together but a man with a hands-on past like his was always liable to conviction rather than be given the benefit of reasonable doubt. But Harry loved her, owed her, and not simply for all the things he couldn’t do for himself with only one arm. This was just a bad patch. So he decided to surprise her, fix dinner, even with only one arm. Couldn’t be too difficult, not for a man whose extreme survival training at Hereford had included killing and cooking a chicken with one arm strapped behind his back to simulate a battle injury. Simple enough. Pick up the chicken. Place teeth around head. And pull. It was astonishing how easily a chicken’s head came away from its body, although it did tend to flap around in protest for a while after. Anyway, a bowl of penne wasn’t going to put up too much of a struggle, didn’t even cluck.

  Even so, there was a price to pay. Every time he stretched or stirred, he hurt, and every time he hurt, his thoughts came back to Susannah Ranelagh. He knew he couldn’t drop it. He was standing in the small galley kitchen of Jemma’s apartment trying to chop herbs and growing increasingly frustrated. Why did women never keep their knives sharp enough? He reached for the phone.

  ‘Hi, Delicious.’

  ‘Harry, is that you? Harry Hero?’ she responded, recognizing his voice and sounding glad of it. ‘How’s the arm? The head? The rest of you?’

  ‘Suffering.’

  ‘You need to be back in Bermuda, not in that cold climate of yours. I did so tell you.’ She laughed.

  ‘Any news?’

  ‘Well, I went out with this new guy last weekend, but I don’t reckon on him becoming my life partner. Seems like he was more interested in getting off a speeding ticket than getting off with me.’ She laughed again, a rich, throaty sound that hinted of candlelight and long tropical nights.

  ‘He must be mad.’

  ‘Why, thank you, Mr Jones. I’m so glad you approve. And, er, how are things at your end?’

  ‘A little local turbulence.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, the mess you made of yourself.’

  ‘Now I guess that’s why I called, to hear your sympathy.’

  ‘Then you obviously hit your head harder than I thought. So what can I do for you, Harry?’

  ‘Miss Ranelagh.’

  ‘Great. I take second place to an old spinster with grey hair.’

  ‘The fire, can you tell me? Was it arson?’

  A short pause before: ‘Well, that’s what we normally call it when a jerrycan of unleaded is poured through a broken window. Unimaginative but surely effective. Is there a particular reason you ask?’

  ‘I think she’s gone missing. Not just in Bermuda but in Britain, too.’

  There was a short silence. ‘Time to level with me, Harry. Why are you taking such an interest in a woman you barely know?’

  ‘There’s something I may have omitted to tell you.’

  ‘Somehow I am not surprised.’

  ‘That traffic accident. It wasn’t. I got some considerable encouragement from three of your local hoods. They deliberately rode me over the cliff.’

  ‘You serious?’ The humour in her voice had vanished. ‘Why you been holding out on me?’

  He sighed. Another angry woman. Right now he wished he hadn’t thrown away all those painkillers. ‘It must have been the concussion.’

  ‘Hot damn, Harry. I’ll give you concussion. You stop playing with me now, you hear? You tell me why they tried to kill you. Right now I want to kill you myself.’

  ‘It’s just that I think it may all be mixed up with Miss Ranelagh.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘It’s not much more than coincidence. And instinct. And a broken arm.’

  ‘You still got one more arm to break.’

  ‘And there was me thinking we were partners.’

  ‘So you playing good cop or bad cop, Harry?’

  ‘Just wounded cop, I guess. So I was wondering, could you file a formal request with British police to try and locate her.’

  ‘And why should I do that?’

  ‘As a favour?’

  ‘Now I really feel the urge to break your other arm.’

  ‘You wouldn’t do that: I’m a hero.’

  Suddenly she lightened up and laughed, and Harry knew he was in the clear.

  ‘OK, on one condition. You’re going to have to make a statement. No way I’m going to have goons running round my island pushing people off cliffs. That’s my prerogative. You realize, of course, you may have to come back to Bermuda to give evidence.’

  ‘That would be my pleasure.’

  ‘I would do my personal best to ensure you got a warmer welcome than last t
ime.’

  ‘The way you put it, I can hardly wait.’

  ‘Then I’d better get on with the paperwork.’

  ‘You’re a special lady, Delicious.’

  ‘By name and nature.’

  ‘I owe you.’

  ‘Look forward to paying off your debts, Mr Jones.’

  ‘Can’t wait.’

  It was only a little innocent flirting, never did any harm, simply oiled the wheels, they both knew that. At least, that was the theory, until Harry turned and discovered Jemma standing in the doorway. He didn’t need to be any sort of detective to deduce that, from the look on her face, she’d been there some considerable time.

  Some women would have stormed out. Jemma stood her ground and punched low. ‘Who was that woman?’

  ‘How do you know it was a woman?’

  ‘That grin on your face and the strain on your zip.’

  ‘She’s a police inspector in Bermuda. Her name’s Delicious.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Yes, a little whimsical, isn’t it?’ He turned back to the stove and resumed stirring, struggling to recall precisely what he had said, what she might have overheard. ‘She’s just a decent cop going the extra mile.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Look, Jem . . .’ He turned, exasperated, spoon held high, the sauce beginning to creep down the handle. ‘What’s with this suspicion? It’s like you don’t believe me.’

  ‘Not a word, not since you told me this latest near-death experience of yours was nothing but an accident.’

  Damn, she’d heard that much. The sauce glooped onto his wrist and began crawling down his sleeve. ‘I wanted to spare you that.’

  ‘So spare me. Drop this whole thing before it gets out of hand.’

  ‘I . . .’ He threw the spoon in the sink. ‘It’s not as simple as that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Precisely because they tried to kill me.’

  ‘Harry, entire armies have tried to kill you,’ she spat, her voice climbing through several octaves of despair, ‘yet you managed to put all that behind you.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Why, Harry?’

  ‘My father. He’s in the middle of all this. Somewhere.’ He took a towel and began trying to wipe his arm. ‘I need to know, to get to the bottom of it so I can move forward.’

  ‘It’s the past, Harry, for God’s sake! I’m forward. You and me. The future. Remember?’

  That was when he lost it. Frustration. Over everything. With the stubborn, sticky mess on his sleeve. With life beating him up at every turn. With Jemma for refusing to understand that this was really about her. With the pain that hit him from inside and out. He threw the towel onto the floor, his jaw moving, about to spit out his fear. ‘That’s easy for you to say with your nice suburban parents in their neat little semi, curtains drawn, slippers by the fire.’ Oh, dear God, he’d gone too far, let it all get to him, but he knew that when you’re dragged out in front of a firing squad you should never stand still. ‘I didn’t have that. I’m not sure what it is I had but I really need to know, to touch the places I came from, otherwise I’ll be fucked up like my father and you’ll end up just like my mother, never knowing when I walk out the door if I’ll ever be coming back.’ He was panting with emotion. ‘So don’t ask me to stop, no, don’t you dare. I can’t brush my father aside. I need to find out who he was so I can know who the hell I am. I didn’t just happen, I was made and I hate some of the bits that got mixed up in there.’ He was staring at the mess on his hand as though it were eating away at him. ‘Sometimes I think I shall never be clean. Never.’

  There were tears in his eyes when he looked up at her. His voice had grown thick and hoarse. ‘You know, while you were still toddling off to Sunday school in a clean little frock and singing hymns, I was slitting Iraqi throats. And sometimes I wonder, where was your God when I needed him, Jem? Didn’t see much of him, not where I was sent, not when I was having to decide how many Provies or ragheads or dark-skinned motherfuckers I needed to kill in order to save my own miserable life. And do you know what? The whole world said I did good, gave me medals for it, but when the band stops playing and the Queen goes back inside the palace for her tea you’re left on your own. All on your own. With nothing but the faces of the men you’ve killed and the noises they make when they’re dying. And no matter how many times you wash, you just can’t get rid of the smell of blood.’

  His hand was shaking; he began to wipe it feverishly on his trousers. ‘The only way you can live with that is by being able to live with yourself. And for me to know, in the middle of those quiet nights when you stir and then go back to sleep while I lie awake, that the noise I just heard was a car backfiring, the shadow moving on the wall is nothing more than a curtain blowing in the breeze, the noise at the window is only the scratching of rain and not the last sound I’m ever going to hear. So don’t lecture me about the past, Jem, or tell me to put it behind me, because I can’t. The past is what we are, what made us; the future is nothing more than maybe.’

  She had fled, in tears. She hadn’t come back until the early hours of the morning. She showered, changed, left for school. Not a word. He blamed himself. He was like a loaded gun, bullet in the breech, not knowing in which direction he was pointed.

  Later that morning he found his way by foot and bursting Underground to Holland Park, glad to be anonymous in a crowd. Three minutes from the mouth of the Tube he found his old family home, a four-floor Victorian brick terrace with draughty sash windows looking out onto the Campden Hill Square. The area had gone up in the world since Harry lived there, had become an exclusive enclave, and the old house itself had been tarted up, too, with security lighting, marble where the York stone doorstep had been and new windows all round, yet this was still the place where he had lived and his mother had died. His bedroom had been on the top floor, at the rear, away from his parents’. He hadn’t minded. His mother and father weren’t good people to be near, not when they were together. No carpet in his room, just bare floorboards. Pity about that: the floorboards had leaked sound, his parents’ rows.

  It started to rain, a haphazard shower, and Harry had no jacket, he’d come unprepared. Not like him. He stood on the sloping pavement beneath the sprawling arms of an old beech tree dressed in all its summer splendour.

  His mother. Jessie. Her image in his mind was like a childhood dream, with no clear edges. His father had thrown all the photographs of her away, so that every time he reached for her she was already gone. But some memories never die. When he had reached the age of around ten, started to grow and no longer needed her, she had shrunk within herself to a place of dark and corrosive thoughts that had ended up eating her away. She’d made a private world for herself in her bedroom, on the first floor overlooking the rear garden, spent the final two years there, not ever leaving the home, so far as Harry could remember, until at the age of thirteen he’d been summoned back from boarding school to discover a large black sedan parked outside, a concerned neighbour looking on and a bundle of something being loaded in the back. ‘Too late, Harry,’ his father had said. ‘Perhaps for the best.’

  His mother had died of a broken heart, so Harry liked to think, although the death certificate had declared otherwise. No bloody imagination, those doctors. And by the time the school term had finished the house had been sold; in any event, his father hadn’t slept there for the best part of a year, had his own place, the apartment in Bloomsbury. When Harry had come to take a last look around, to say goodbye, it was nothing but empty rooms. He had sat in his mother’s bedroom, his back up against the wall, and tried to remember her. He’d felt something with his fingertips, wedged between the fitted carpet and the skirting board – a wristwatch. No strap, anonymous Swiss, not particularly valuable, not even gold, one Harry remembered his father complaining about because it lost time, a minute a day. ‘Timing is everything,’ he had said in another of his phrases. ‘A minute ahead of
the pack and you’re boss. A minute late and you’re bust.’ Yet, surprisingly, Johnnie had made a fuss about its loss, searched high and low before reluctantly buying himself a replacement, far more valuable piece. When Harry found the old watch he discovered an inscription on the back: ‘To JMJ. From his father.’

  It was raining more steadily now, the tree was no longer giving much protection. Harry still had that wristwatch. He’d put a new leather strap on it and had begun wearing it again. It still lost time but what the hell! It was all he had left of his father. He rubbed his fingers across its face, like a charm, pressing his body into the trunk of the tree as he’d done so many times while waiting for his parents to come home.

  There had been better times, of course, before Harry had been forced to take sides. Kicking autumn leaves on their way to Sunday morning coffee in Holland Park, when Johnnie had ransacked the newspapers while Harry fed his currant bun to the sparrows. Summer drives to a pub on Hampstead Heath so that Johnnie could meet his business contacts while Harry waited outside in the car, guzzling Coke and crisps. And that football. It had been a birthday present, and the best part of it had been when Johnnie had stolen a couple of hours to play with Harry, Harry in goal and Johnnie allowing him to make a few glorious sprawling saves. Harry could still recall the thud of the ball on his burning palms, the thump of his shoulder against the ground, the triumphant smear of mud on his cheek. He even imagined a post-battle mug of hot chocolate, although he was never entirely sure it had happened. There were many things in those days he wished had happened, like Johnnie being around to help fix his bike, take him for a swim, buy him a dog, but Johnnie wasn’t like other fathers. Harry had hated listening to the family gossip that other boys brought back to school. It made him at first isolated, then self-reliant, sometimes angry and ill-disciplined, but usually with his teachers and only once with another boy, who had asked Harry why his father never brought him back to school, never watched matches or came to school plays. ‘Are your parents divorced?’ he’d asked sneeringly. For want of a better reply Harry had thumped him, loosened a tooth. Harry had been sent home in disgrace and his mother had burst into wails of embarrassment. Johnnie had laughed his socks off.