by Jo Bannister
He forced a little laugh, folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. ‘Take no notice. For an international whiz-kid of a businessman I’m a sentimental sod at heart. What about you? What’s your heart made of?’
The unexpected sensitivity he had touched in her vanished like smoke. ‘Stainless steel,’ she said briskly.
Tariq didn’t believe her. ‘But under that?’
‘Titanium?’
He smiled slowly. ‘And under that?’
‘What is this?’ she demanded indignantly ‘GCSE physics?’
‘I know what bothers you,’ he suggested, holding her gaze. ‘The possibility that, under the steel and the titanium and the triple-cantilever multiple cycling locks, there’s a human being who’s not only very bright and very determined but also rather warm and funny and perceptive and kind. Is that why you’re so spiky with people? Because if you got to like them, if you let them like you, you’d have to open the vault and take a look at what was in there?’
So intent were they on one another that the sudden mighty clangour backstage, that made everyone look up, sent the large dark-skinned man and the small dark-haired woman rocketing from their chairs. But they barely had time to trade a wry grin before a shrill scream had everyone piling into the corridor.
Chapter Eight
They found Mrs Venables in the makeshift kitchen surrounded by debris.
‘Whoops.’ Miriam knelt to shovel cutlery and broken china back on to the big tin tray. But the housekeeper kept staring wildly at the door. Miriam sat back on her heels, her brow furrowed. ‘Esme? Are you all right?’
‘I didn’t drop it.’ The older woman’s voice was as tight as the top string on a violin; tight enough for a perceptible involuntary vibrato. Her face was powder-pale.
Joe stepped out of the press in the doorway, took her arm and guided her to a chair. ‘Sit down, Mrs Venables. Get your breath back. There’s no harm done. Nothing that can’t be replaced at the nearest Woolworths.’
Her capable hands were fisted tight. ‘You don’t understand. I didn’t drop it, it was knocked over. By—’
The man’s heavy brows knitted. ‘Who?’
She made an effort to get a grip on herself, sitting straight on the straight-backed chair. ‘I’m not sure. I thought, an animal.’
Miriam gave up trying to salvage the tea, looked round as if it might still be there. ‘An animal? What – a cat?’ She tried to imagine how the heavy tray had been balanced that a cat could send it flying.
‘Of course not a cat!’ From the sharpness of her tone Mrs Venables considered that absurd too. ‘A big animal reared up against the table when I came out of the pantry.’ She indicated the open door behind her. Planned as a storeroom, its shelves made a good repository for foodstuffs that didn’t require the fridge.
Joe was more confused than ever. ‘A dog?’ They were six hundred feet above the street and the only way up was the lift. He’d have put the chances of a stray dog finding its way up here right around zero.
But Mrs Venables nodded slowly. ‘It could have been a big dog. I barely saw it, you understand. I put the tray on the table, went into the pantry for the scones, and when I came back it was – right there. It must have heard me, though, because it was already heading for the door. It knocked the tray down as it went.’
Richard had found a broom and took over where Miriam had left off. ‘Why don’t you take Mrs Venables next door while I put on a fresh pot of tea?’
A tweedy arm around her shoulders steered the housekeeper to a quiet corner of the conference room. As they sat down Miriam murmured, ‘I don’t understand why you screamed.’
Mrs Venables flustered like a disturbed hen. ‘I was surprised, I didn’t know what it was. Then it knocked my tray flying.’
‘And then you screamed. After it was gone.’
‘I suppose I froze. You don’t expect to see something like that.’
‘Like what?’ She waited but there was no reply. ‘Was it a dog, Esme? You screamed because a dog upset your tray? It doesn’t seem like you. You might have yelled and thrown something at it but I wouldn’t have thought you’d have screamed.’
The housekeeper’s eyes flared, alarm lingering in their depths. ‘I don’t know what it was. I barely saw it, just the size of it and the movement. It was dark and big, and it moved—’
‘Like a dog?’
‘I don’t know. It was fast like a dog. But—’
‘Yes?’
She shook her head firmly, refused to think any more about it. ‘It must have been a dog. It couldn’t have been anything else.’
Richard brought in the tea and scones and an assortment of crockery designed for other meals. Helping herself to jam, Miriam chuckled. ‘Perhaps it belongs to one of the builders. Perhaps his wife won’t have it in the house.’
Mrs Venables shuddered. ‘I don’t blame her.’
The incident had broken everyone’s train of thought. They took the opportunity to stretch their legs, wander round, admire the view.
Richard took his cup to the window to watch the city closing down for the weekend. Midway through Friday afternoon, already everyone who could was heading out. The roads were twisting multicoloured ribbons of high-powered transport engineered for travel at a hundred miles an hour but here restricting one another to about three.
The tweed suit that had as much personality as some people he’d known arrived at his shoulder. He waited for Miriam to speak but for a while she just stood beside him watching the city wind down.
At length she said, ‘Why are you here really?’
The directness of that edged him on to the defensive. ‘I need – some help with my job.’
‘You have a good career – even I’ve heard of you. I can’t tell you anything about television reporting.’
‘I had a good career. I lost my nerve.’
‘What you call losing your nerve others might call learning some sense.’
Richard smiled. ‘You’ve been talking to my wife.’
‘Ah. An intelligent woman.’
‘She wants me to cover Westminster and come home nights. She reckons dodging bullets is a young man’s game.’
Miriam winced. ‘She really knows how to put the boot in, doesn’t she?’
Richard’s grin broadened, then faded. ‘Maybe she’s right. Maybe seven years is enough. Maybe it’s not something you should try making a life’s work of.’
‘But?’
He wasn’t convincing himself either. ‘But actually that’s crap. There are some great foreign correspondents in their fifties. Till this last year I always meant to be one.’
‘What happened this year?’
His eyes widened. ‘What didn’t? Mostly that charnel-house that for the sake of political correctness we call Former Yugoslavia. Look, I’m no virgin. I know what it is to look, and look carefully, at images no station could show. I know what it’s like talking to people who’ve suffered acts of appalling barbarism, and then travelling five miles up the road to talk to the guy responsible who thinks it’s all right to use people as kindling as long as their churches have a different symbol on the roof. Even so, some of the stuff they’ve done to each other—’ He shook his head in helpless disbelief.
‘But Bosnia isn’t the only place where the inconceivably awful gets worse every time you look. People are killing one another, with guns and knives and bombs and famine, over half of Africa. Then there’s the mad bastards in sheets.’
Miriam considered. ‘Who?’
Richard grinned tightly. ‘Sorry, journo shorthand. Muslim fanatics. You know, the ones who torture opponents and stone women and bomb tourists in order to show that Allah is merciful. There’s so much mayhem round the world I don’t know where to go for a holiday.’
‘And it sickened you.’
He chewed his lip. ‘Maybe. I mean, yes, it’s always sickening. There’s something wrong with you if you don’t feel sick and angry when there are people literally dying at yo
ur feet. You stand there with your well-fed face and your typhoid jabs and your flak jacket, and you know all you can contribute is a four-minute soundbite for the evening news. You want to shout at someone. You want to bang heads together. You want to take one of them – just one – put her under your coat and take her home, get her out of the madness and make her safe. And you can’t even do that.
‘So yes, I was sickened. But it wasn’t the first time. It’s worse at the start till you learn to do your job in spite of it. You tell yourself – maybe it’s not true but you tell yourself – that you don’t care any less, you’re not growing hard, but you’re a professional and the best you can do is a good job that might wake the world up while there’s someone left to benefit.’
He paused, long enough for Miriam to wonder if he’d finished. But she thought not, and finally he forced himself to the point he’d been circling. ‘It wasn’t feeling sick that stopped me. It was feeling scared. For seven years I accepted the risk. It was the price I paid for doing something that mattered to me. Because even when it makes you crazy, when you’d like to grab a gun and do some shooting of your own, reporting it well gives you a sense of achievement.
‘Then one day I couldn’t do it any more. Nothing had changed. I’d had close calls before, got drunk and moved on. But now every shot I heard, I felt the bullet. Every shell that burst I felt the shrapnel. If a bombardment started while I was on air, even if it was miles away, it was all I could do not to dive for the nearest doorway and bury my head in my arms. Sometimes I was shaking so much the cameraman couldn’t hold me in focus.’
‘Sounds a pretty healthy reaction to me,’ said Miriam.
‘After seven years? In seven years you’ve seen all there is to see. Chickening out then is like a heart surgeon starting to faint at the sight of blood.’
Miriam didn’t change the subject although for a moment she seemed to. ‘Why did you tell us about the girl in the river?’
Surprised, Richard struggled to answer. ‘You asked about letting people down. You can’t let someone down worse than letting her die.’
‘You tried to save her. You risked your own life. What are you ashamed of?’ His eyes avoided hers. ‘Was there more to it than that?’
Almost inaudibly Richard whispered, ‘Yes.’
‘Tell me.’
So he did. ‘I could have saved her. I had hold of her and help was on its way. But I started to slip. I let go of her. I promised I wouldn’t, but I did.’
She let her eyes shut for a moment, feeling his pain. ‘Richard, you did the best you could. Your own life was in danger. You held on for as long as you could.’
He would have given anything to believe it. He shook his head. ‘I could have saved us both.’
‘You didn’t know that. You don’t know it now. It’s easy to be brave after the event. It’s also easy to be wrong. You’re not a coward. You did everything for that girl except die with her.’
‘But I let her go!’ The passage of time had done nothing to soften the guilt. The whine in his voice turned heads. ‘I told them – the police, even Fran – I told them the tide pulled her out of my hand. But it’s not true. I let her go. I could have held her, and I let her go.’
‘And you’ve let it haunt you ever since. You damn fool. What’s been happening to you, it’s nothing to do with Bosnia. It’s that – having to choose between your life and that of someone who was depending on you. In that river you were forced to confront your limitations, and you still haven’t come to terms with it.’
‘But that’s more than a year ago!’
‘And your problems started soon afterwards, yes? – the next time you found yourself under stress, which in your line of work was always going to be somewhere like Bosnia. You came face to face with your own mortality in that river. In order to do your job you’d persuaded yourself that death didn’t apply to you, and now you knew it did.
‘Till then you’d got by on a cocktail of skill, luck and youthful self-confidence. Robbed of that you went into withdrawal. Suddenly there was no magic screen between you and death, and that scared you rigid. Trying to work it through instead of seeking help made it worse.’
‘I thought, if the other guys could cope – and I used to be able to—’
‘But they hadn’t been where you had – drowning by inches while you tried to save someone who couldn’t be saved. Then you tried to purge the fear by getting straight back to work. You thought that if you could do your work you couldn’t be a coward, whatever happened in the river. Only it backfired. Your subconscious decided that if you were a coward you couldn’t do your work. All the time you were fighting the wrong dragon – no wonder you kept getting the back of your neck fried!’
Richard stared at her, ashamed but almost daring to hope. Was she saying what he thought she was saying – that there was an answer? ‘So?’
‘Forget the job for the moment. Tackle the root cause. If you won’t take my word there was nothing more you could have done, find someone you will believe – the River Police maybe or the Coastguard. Talk about it, understand it, accept it. You don’t need forgiveness, Richard. Not being Superman isn’t a crime. You couldn’t hold on to her, that’s all; and now you can’t let her go. But you have to. She’s been dead for fifteen months: let her go. When you do you can start rebuilding your life. Not the way it was – you’ll never feel invulnerable again, that’s the prerogative of youth and you’ve grown up. But you’ll be able to work. You’ll be as good as anyone else. You can learn to live with not being better.’
She smiled at his expression, put her cup back on the table. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I want a word with Joe.’ She took a purposeful stride across the room.
Then the door of the conference room banged open, the handle chipping the new plaster, and Sheelagh stalked in, her face red with fury. Her cobalt eyes blazed round the room, ignoring the women present, striking sparks off the startled faces of the men. ‘Which one of you perverts,’ she demanded in a voice quaking with anger, ‘has been playing with my underwear?’
Chapter Nine
If she hadn’t been so clearly upset the response might have been ribald. Miriam looked quickly at Tariq, in her judgement the man most likely to light the blue touch-paper; but Tariq was watching with an absorbed expression and whatever he was thinking of it wasn’t a witticism.
Tessa was nearest. ‘What’s happened?’
‘My things!’ Sheelagh sounded close to tears: tears of rage, the sort that come with knuckledusters. ‘Someone’s been messing with my things. One of these bastards!’ Her eyes flayed the five men by turns.
‘Is anything missing?’
The thick black hair danced as Sheelagh shook her head. ‘No. But I know how I left them and they’ve been moved. And it’s not the first time.’ She told of the nightdress she put under her pillow not once but twice. ‘Jesus, I knew there were going to be some weirdos here, but I didn’t expect them to be sick!’
Tariq circled the company with his gaze, his face passive. ‘I wasn’t going to mention this, but my belongings have been disturbed too. I doubt anyone was interested in my underwear but my briefcase was opened. God knows why, there’s nothing of interest in it except to me and a few clients. Nothing valuable, nothing sensitive – must have been quite a disappointment. If somebody wants to say what they were looking for I’ll be happy to help.’
The silence could have been cut with something much blunter than a knife. Richard felt a change in the air like a pressure wave crossing the room as people who had come here tense and had then begun to relax, to enjoy one another’s company and start getting something out of the experience, were suddenly reminded how far from home, mentally and emotionally, they had strayed. They snapped back into themselves like overstretched elastic, suddenly wary of opening their hearts and souls to strangers whose motives they could not know and whose reliability they had no way of judging. Whoever rifled Sheelagh’s clothes and Tariq’s papers left them all feeling tampere
d with.
‘All right,’ said Miriam with ominous calm, ‘who’s playing silly buggers? Poking through each other’s personal property is an intrusion.’ The silence persisting, she looked at Tariq again. ‘When did you notice your briefcase had been opened?’
‘Five minutes ago. I went for a pen.’ He smiled. ‘I didn’t say anything because I thought it was you.’
‘Me?’ The psychologist’s eyebrows disappeared into her pudding-basin fringe.
‘That’s how fortune-tellers do it: they have someone palm your wallet, then impress the hell out of you by knowing your bank account’s overdrawn and your mum’s on holiday in Bognor.’
Miriam didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘Is that what you think? That what I do is some kind of conjuring trick?’
‘Excuse me,’ Sheelagh interrupted acidly, ‘but can we stick to the point? Somebody’s way out of line, and I want to know who and I want it stopped.’
‘Yes, of course,’ agreed Miriam contritely. ‘For the record, it wasn’t me. There’s nothing I can learn from your underwear or his papers that’s half as useful as talking to you. That means, I’m afraid, that it was one of you.’
It was interesting, she thought then, to see where each of them instinctively looked: Richard at Will, Will at Larry, Joe at her Tariq and Sheelagh at one another. Tessa was carefully looking nowhere, back in her safe neutrality.
Richard voiced what most of them were thinking. ‘Why? We’re strangers – what motive could we have to spy on each other?’
Miriam cleared her throat. ‘Let’s be charitable and suppose it was a joke. But it wasn’t funny, and if it happens again there’ll be trouble. Everyone here is out on an emotional limb. It takes courage to do this: to parade your problems in front of strangers. It’s difficult, it’s embarrassing, but it’s worth it for the support you can give one another. If somebody’s going to undermine that they’d better hope I never find out who.’