by Andy Maslen
“Which is excellent. We can carry on and hit our deadline.”
She nodded.
“How was your day?”
Gabriel told Eli about his spur of the moment trip to Swindon. When she’d finished laughing, he told her he was going to visit Fariyah Crace in Hampstead.
“Good,” she said. “You can tell her about your present-not-present moments. Did she ask you to stay?”
“For dinner, yes. But I guess if I drink too much they’ll have a spare room.”
“Just be back in good time tomorrow, OK?”
“Yes, miss.”
“So what now, Boss?”
“Now, we have some reading to do. Our covers arrived by courier while you were being stuck with needles.”
“Sex first,” she said. “Then showers. Then reading.”
On the dining room table, Gabriel spread out their travel documents: passports, visas, airline tickets; their British Council accreditations; business cards; and backgrounders on their new identities. Eli picked up a couple of business cards, turned them over then back again and began to read out loud.
“Melina Arifakis, Editorial Director, and Robert Denning, Publisher. Both of The Copernicus Press, who apparently publish books on ancient civilisations. Huh. Making me Greek was a smart choice. Similar colouring. Enough to throw the Iranians off the scent, hopefully.”
Gabriel made some coffee, and they settled down to read through their backgrounders, learning CVs, personal histories, relationships and significant life events. Then they moved on to role-playing, interviewing each other as if for a job.
“This is always the part of the job I find weird,” Gabriel said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like we lose ourselves. As if we’re not real people, just characters in a play.”
“Welcome to the undercover world. I thought you’d be used to it by now.”
Gabriel cast his mind back, over different missions, different identities. His favourite alter ego was Terry Fox, the aggressive ex-squaddie with a taste for bare-knuckle fighting. He’d enjoyed his time in Estonia masquerading as Fox. He’d got a job as a nightclub bouncer, while tracing the Chechen kidnappers of the family of a British pharmaceutical executive.
“Let’s just say it’s one more level of complication I could do without.”
“Fair enough. Robert.”
They spent a couple of hours reviewing their cover stories and reading the dossier on Darbandi. The afternoon’s work finished, Gabriel went upstairs to change. He put on the only clothes he had with him he considered vaguely suitable for dinner with an eminent psychiatrist and her family: clean jeans, a white shirt and a navy linen jacket.
Two hours and twenty minutes later, Gabriel pulled into the drive of Fariyah and Simon Crace’s house in Prince Arthur Road, Hampstead. As he climbed out and stretched, his kidneys made their presence felt with an ache around his midriff. So much for Audi engineering , he thought ruefully, as he massaged the afflicted area. That suspension might be fine for a racetrack, but it doesn’t do too well on crappy London streets.
He looked up at the house. Technically, he supposed a local estate agent would describe it as an end-terrace. But it fitted that description only so far as it was, indeed, at the end of a terrace of houses. Much as he might legitimately describe himself a civil servant, being both civil and a servant of the crown. In fact, now he came to think of it, even civility had its limits, as the growing list of Britain’s enemies now pushing up daisies would attest, if they were still capable of speech.
At ground level, a bay window looked out over the parking area, where the RS3 now sat plinking and ticking as its overstressed engine and exhaust cooled. To Gabriel’s left, a flight of 18 stone steps rose to the front door, which filled a gloriously gothic pointed archway rimmed with alternating sand and dark-red bricks. His eye met two further storeys as his gaze ascended to the roof, where a pair of dormer windows with scalloped lead flashing confirmed that the owners had “gone into the loft” as the jargon had it.
He’d stopped on the way through Hampstead village to pick up a bottle of white burgundy and a second of elderflower fizz. Having no children of his own, and virtually no experience of other people’s, he’d made a stab at presents he thought might be suitable for Fariyah and Simon’s. In an upmarket stationer on Heath Street named Bunthorne’s, the only shop still open, he’d bought black Moleskine notebooks and Lamy fountain pens, in bright shades of ice-blue, apple-green and buttercup-yellow.
“I’m sure they’ll love them,” the eager, bespectacled shop assistant said, though for Gabriel it was more of a shot in the dark than anything else. Did kids even know how to write anymore? Weren’t they all blogging? Or on Instagram? She’d seemed young enough to be one of Fariyah’s children herself though, so maybe she was right.
He mounted the stone steps, feeling unaccountably nervous, and stopped on the half-landing to take a couple of breaths and to close his eyes briefly to focus on lowering his heart rate. Then, eyes open again, he continued up to the front door and rang the bell.
Meet the Family
Fariyah answered the door a few seconds later. Over the time he had known her, Gabriel had become fascinated with the range of colourful hijabs she wore. Today’s was a soft rust, shot through with glittering yellow threads that picked up a gold tone in her coffee-brown skin. Her almond-shaped eyes were twinkling with what looked like genuine pleasure at seeing him, and he felt his shoulders dropping and relaxing.
“Gabriel,” she said, smiling. “Welcome to my home. Come in.”
Knowing she wouldn’t touch a man not part of her family, Gabriel made no move to hug or kiss her, but stepped past her into the cool of a black-and-white tiled hallway. An eclectic mixture of art covered the walls, from small black-and-white drawings to colourful watercolours and oils. The effect was humorous, rather than jarring, expressing an almost exuberant attitude to collecting and displaying pictures the owners were attracted to.
“Thanks. I brought these,” Gabriel said, holding up the bags from Bunthorne’s and the off-licence.
“We’re all down the end,” Fariyah said. “Let’s see what booty you’ve brought in the kitchen.”
She led him to a big kitchen painted robins-egg blue and spacious enough to accommodate a large, scrubbed-pine table and six chairs as well as a couple of saggy sofas upholstered in bright floral fabrics. The large room smelled deliciously of lamb, cumin and garlic. More pictures adorned the walls, including a large family portrait photograph taken against a white background. One wall was covered from knee to head height with framed certificates for music exams passed, usually, Gabriel noticed, with distinction: piano, violin, saxophone and guitar. A white-painted pillar, clearly the remains of a long-gone dividing wall, was marked with an ascending column of overlapping pencil and pen marks: short horizontal lines with accompanying dates, heights and initials: A, J and P.
Sitting at the table, hunched over a maths textbook, was a teenaged boy, a floppy fringe of deep-brown hair obscuring his eyes. On the sofas checking their phones sat two girls. One looked to be about 18, the other younger, though Gabriel couldn’t figure out by how much. And standing at the stove, tasting something from a wooden spoon, a man in his early fifties wearing a green apron. He returned the spoon to a space beside the hob and wiped his hand on his apron before offering it to Gabriel.
“Hi, Gabriel. I’m Simon. Let me introduce our brood.” He pointed to the boy sitting at the table. “This is Alexis.”
Alexis looked up and Gabriel was struck immediately by his resemblance to his father. Although he had Fariyah’s colouring, his bone structure was exactly the same as his father’s: high cheekbones and a narrow, angular jaw. He stood and shook Gabriel’s hand.
“Pleased to meet you, Gabriel,” he said with a shy smile that revealed braces, before resuming his homework.
Before Simon could introduce her, the older girl got up from the sofa and came to stand closer to Gabriel
, sticking out her hand.
“Hi, Gabriel. I’m Persia. I know men find it impossible to judge children’s ages, so I’m sixteen. Alexis is fourteen going on twenty-five and Juno,” she pointed at the younger girl who had stayed sitting but was regarding Gabriel with a smiling, open face, “is twelve.”
Gabriel instinctively liked the rest of Fariyah’s family, with their friendly faces and easy social skills. He remembered having none of the same ease as the child of the British Ambassador in Hong Kong, instead being browbeaten and sometimes plain beaten into behaving appropriately. My turn, he thought.
“Hello all of you. Simon, Persia, Alexis and Juno. I brought these,” he said for the second time, proffering the two bags, one paper, the other plastic.
Persia took them from him while her parents looked on. She seemed to be quite happy playing the role of hostess. Or at the very least aide de camp to the true hostess, Fariyah.
“Thanks,” she said smiling. “Now, this one clinks. Let’s assume it’s wine and, ooh!” she said, peering inside, “sparkling elderflower, lovely!”
She looked inside the paper bag from Bunthorne’s and this time the smile was genuine surprise rather than the arch display Gabriel felt she’d put on for the drinks.
“Wow! Come and look, you two. Gabriel’s a stationery geek like us.”
Alexis and Juno stood to crowd round their elder sister as she retrieved the notebooks and fountain pens. Each chose a colour without squabbles, then, after effusively thanking Gabriel, retired with the notebooks to begin writing immediately.
Fariyah spoke.
“That was really generous, Gabriel. And completely unnecessary—”
“No it wasn’t!” Juno called from the sofa.
“—but thank you. Let’s get some drinks poured, then perhaps you’d like to come through to the conservatory and we can have a chat.”
Simon opened the wine, which was already cool, having come from the off-licence’s fridge, and poured two glasses, handing one to Gabriel, who gratefully took a large gulp. Then he opened the elderflower and poured a long glass for Fariyah, before adding a slice of lime and rough chunks of ice from a bulbous, cream, upright freezer in the corner.
Sitting facing Fariyah in a huge wicker armchair padded with more floral cushions, Gabriel set his glass down on a side table with a clink . Waiting. Fariyah took a sip of her drink then copied Gabriel. She smiled. And waited.
“Shall I start?” Gabriel asked, rubbing at the back of his neck and feeling unaccountably nervous.
“Why not? You’re between operations, I’m guessing?”
“Yes. The last one was personal. This one is official.”
“Tell me, how did the personal one go?”
Gabriel smiled at the memory of his final meal with Terri-Ann Calder and JJ Highsmith. The widow and her imposing yet gentle Texas Ranger friend.
“It went well.”
“Do you remember last time we talked about your need for redemption? And that ultimately God – or whoever you choose to believe in – judges us on our actions, not our desires? How do you feel now?”
Gabriel scratched at his scalp before running his hand over his hair and down onto the back of his neck again.
“Better, I think. I did what I promised I would. I investigated my friend’s death. His murder, as it turned out. I put things right. I brought some sort of resolution to Terri-Ann’s pain. And I didn’t get anyone killed.”
Fariyah’s finely arched eyebrows lifted very slightly.
“Nobody?” she asked.
“I didn’t get anyone killed. We should probably leave it there.”
Fariyah smiled and nodded.
“We probably should.”
Gabriel recalled her telling him the first time they’d met that she’d worked as an army psychiatrist. It explained her realistic attitude to his work and the business of killing. It was one of the things that helped him be open with her.
“But there’s something else. Something bothering me that I can’t quite put my finger on.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s about Michael.”
“Your brother.”
“Yes.”
“Do you still have trouble believing his death wasn’t your fault? That would be completely understandable.”
Gabriel shook his head and took a hurried sip of the wine.
“Not exactly. I mean, part of me does, but I’ve accepted that I was only a child. Like he was.”
“Then what’s troubling you?”
Gabriel frowned and sighed, trying to articulate the strange feeling he’d been experiencing that Michael was trying to tell him something. From so long ago and so far away. Something important.
“I remembered how he was always so confident when we played rugby together. He was always trying to boss me around. I know it’s important but I don’t know why.”
Now it was Fariyah’s turn to frown.
“That’s very interesting. Perhaps because you’ve begun to make peace with yourself for your perceived – and I stress the word perceived – shortcomings as a brother, as a friend, as a leader, you’re becoming more open to new ways of seeing the world. And about your own history.”
Gabriel shrugged.
“Maybe I am. But how can I get to this, this, thing I have stuffed away in my head like a loose round at the bottom of a kitbag?”
“A very apt analogy. Are you worried if you touch it, it might go off in your face?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. How could it be any worse than first forgetting I had a brother and then discovering I caused his death?” Gabriel caught a warning look in Fariyah’s dark-brown eyes. He smiled, ruefully, reflecting not for the first time that seeing a shrink was a bit like taking truth serum. There wasn’t any point trying to deceive them. Or yourself, come to that. “OK, OK, discovering I was playing with him when he died?”
“Maybe you’re right,” Fariyah conceded. “How about this? I know you like to work fast, and as we may not be seeing each other for some time, are you willing to be hypnotised?”
Used to employing the self-hypnosis techniques taught him by Master Zhao, Gabriel assented at once.
“Ready when you are, Doc,” he said with a smile.
He settled back into the chair’s comfortable embrace and prepared himself mentally and physically. He deepened his breathing, falling back on the simple ten-second breath. In for four, hold for one, out for four, hold for one. Rinse and repeat . And he let his shoulders become heavy, focusing on unwinding each muscle group in turn, from the sternocleidomastoid that connects the jaw to the neck and shoulder, the trapezius, the wing-like latissimus dorsi, and down through the intercostal muscles of the ribcage to the abs and lower back, the quads, hamstrings, calves and, finally, his feet and toes. As he tensed then released each group of muscles, he felt a familiar warmth and weight descending on him, and he realised with pleasure that his anxiety had abated.
Fariyah began speaking. He knew it was a specialised sequence of verbal commands, but that helped rather than hindered him: he wanted to go under. Needed to.
“Focus on your breathing, Gabriel, but also listen to the sounds in the room. The birds outside the window. The cars driving by at the end of the garden. Any planes in the sky. Do you hear them?”
“Yes.”
“Picture the number nine and say ‘ten’ in your head.”
Ten … ten … ten …
“Picture eight and say nine .”
Nine … nine …
“Think of the fifth letter in the alphabet. Make it a big painting of that letter.”
E
“What colour is it?”
“It’s bright green.”
“Picture seven and say eight .”
Seven … no, eight …
Sibling Rivalry
Fariyah’s voice came from far away.
“Do you hear the birds singing?”
“Yeah.”
“Picture zero and say one .”
>
Birdsong … zero … B … Fariyah’s voice is here but I’m not there. Where am I?
“Can you hear me, Gabriel?” Fariyah’s voice asks inside his head.
“Yes.”
“You’re nine years old now. A boy again. And we’re in Hong Kong,” Fariyah’s voice says. “In the park by Victoria Harbour. Tell me what the weather’s like.”
“It’s hot. The sun is shining. I’m really sweaty.”
“What can you see, Gabriel? What can you see?”
Gabriel looks around. There’s Mummy, sitting on the bench with her book. He waves. She waves back and smiles. She’s so beautiful. The most beautiful lady in the whole world. The grass is turning brown in the heat. But it’s still good for playing rugby on. There’s a big flower bed on one side of the park. It’s planted with big fluffy white roses. They smell sweet, like peaches. He tells the lady inside his head. She asks him another question.
“Michael’s there, and your Mum. Her name’s Lin, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But I call her Mummy.”
“You two boys are playing with your rugby ball.”
“We love it. Michael’s really good, even if he’s a little squirt.”
“He likes telling you what to do, doesn’t he?”
He looks over at Michael. He’s sticking his tongue out and waggling his fingers in his ears.
“Yes. He’s always trying to boss me around.”
“Even though you’re the older one?”
“Yes. He says I have to do what he tells me.”
“So you kick the ball for him to catch. Then what?”
“He says I’m not kicking it high enough. He says, ‘Kick it higher, Gable. You’re useless.’”
“What’s happening now?”
Gabriel looks down at the grass. He sees his right heel hacking out a divot to support the ball. Sees his two hands holding the orange ball, placing it carefully in the dent, tilting it back a little. Then he backs up. Looks at the ball. Backs up some more. And runs. Michael is shouting at him to make it a good one.