A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

  “He found a dinghy yesterday,” Moira told her, “in one of the caves up beyond Glengarrisdale. He says there are strangers on the moor.”

  Miranda felt suddenly light-headed, struggling to understand what Moira was saying to her, the vodka doing its work.

  They left the county road at Ardlussa, and followed the track through the strip of ancient woodland that hugged the coast all the way to the island’s northern tip. They emerged on to the moor at Lealt. First, she saw the outline of the motionless wind turbine and then the house and finally Graeme by one of the outbuildings with an axe in his hands and a pile of newly split logs by his feet. The kids burst out of the car and dashed for the climbing frame.

  Graeme walked over to her and shook her hand. His grip was bone-crushing, his hand several times larger than hers. Graeme was a retired Royal Marine, a softly spoken giant with a shaved head and a long walrus mustache that made a pirate of him. The islands seemed to be full of retired soldiers.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “Fine,” she replied, automatically. Fine. It was what she always said.

  “Did Moira tell you about the boat?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ve made an effort to conceal themselves. The boat is under a camouflage net and the sand at the mouth of the cave has been swept. There are two of them, I think.”

  “What do you think they are here for?” she forced herself to ask.

  “Eggs from the eagles probably. I guess there’s a chance they’re here for your orchids.” His eyes narrowed. “You want to stay here tonight?”

  “No, I’ll keep going,” she said firmly.

  “I’ll give you a lift,” he offered.

  “I’d rather walk. I need to clear my head.”

  “Have you heard from Jonah?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied.

  They stood in silence for a few moments, and she would not meet his gaze. The dog rubbed itself against the back of her knee.

  She had no capacity for conversation about Jonah.

  “Be careful,” he said, eventually. “If you find them, don’t get yourself into a confrontation.”

  “I won’t,” she said.

  She waved to Moira and the kids and set off north on the track across the moor.

  An hour and a half later she walked over the brow of the hill and saw the house again. The lights were off and the yard was empty. Approaching, she willed herself to study the footprints in the mud of the courtyard. She spotted Coyle and Mulvey’s next to the ruts left by their car. Her own Caterpillars. There were others, though, and they looked new.

  She took five steps into the kitchen and stopped. She stood still and listened. She breathed in slowly with both her mouth and her nose and caught a whiff of sweat on the warm, still air and stale cigarette smoke. Someone had come and the lack of wind had betrayed them.

  She hung her bag on a hook in the passageway and stepped carefully down the passage towards the study. Halfway along, she caught it again: the same faint whiff of cigarette smoke. Not smoked here, that would be an elementary mistake, but carried into the house on someone’s clothes.

  She entered Jonah’s study and stood for a moment, re-familiarizing herself with the room. She ran her finger across the undisturbed dust on the writing desk. She sat in the swivel chair and wondered what they could have found apart from what they were supposed to find. Her passport and emergency money were hidden, away from the house. Everything else was on the flash disk that Jonah wore at all times around his neck, even in bed. He’d taken his laptop with him when he left. She pulled open a drawer. It contained pens and pencils, a box of drawing pins—nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing seemed to be missing.

  She swiveled in the chair, glancing at the walls.

  Something was different.

  Shit.

  She wouldn’t have noticed it, the collage was such a jumble, but she’d spent so much time since Jonah left just sitting here staring at the collage, reading highlighted text and wondering at the connections, that she had developed a strong sense of what was where on the wall.

  The postcard had been pinned directly on top of a map of Kandahar City. It showed a pier with a crane and a yellow hydraulic ram between two huge metal clamshells that rose out of the water, their striated surfaces shining like gold in the late afternoon light. In the background were the distinctive tent poles of the Millennium Dome. She pulled it off the wall and turned it over. On the other side was printed Thames Barrier, London. It had not been there before.

  She put it on the desk and returned to studying the collage. The postcard was not the only addition. There was a diagram of a ship: line drawings of it from above and from the starboard side and between the drawings a scale with an overall length of 440 feet. She was a freighter, by the looks of it, with five holds and hatches, and three masts and derricks. Using a pen, someone had drawn two score marks through the third hold just forward of the deckhouse. Beside the drawings, also in pen, someone had written a latitude and a longitude.

  51 28 00 N

  00 47 01 E

  She ripped it off the wall and threw it on the desk with the postcard.

  Below the ship’s diagram there was a color printout of a website page pinned over the top of the photo of Monteith. She tore it down as well. The page contained a table, a graph and a map. It was produced by the National Tidal and Sea Level Facility & Tide Gauge Network and had the title: High and low water times and heights for SHEERNESS. The map showed the location of tidal gauges in the UK, including the one at Sheerness in the Thames Estuary. The graph showed the predicted variance in tidal heights for September, ranging from zero to six meters, and the table gave the high and low water times in GMT for each day in the month ahead. A date ten days hence with a predicted high-water level of six meters at 11.00 p.m. had been ringed with a fluorescent marker. The date was September 12.

  She sat back in the chair and stared again at the collage. There was something else. Nothing more appeared to have been added. Things had been taken away. They’d removed all reference to the American Richard Winthrop. They must have come, whoever they were, ripped down the newspaper clippings of Winthrop and then pinned the postcard, the diagram and the page to the cork board.

  Why do it? Except to remove incriminating evidence and plant incriminating evidence? She couldn’t think of any other explanation.

  Angrily, she went upstairs. Smoke again. She hadn’t smoked a cigarette for over a year and she had come to detest the habit. In the bedroom. there was more stale smoke. Perhaps there were other things here that had been planted.

  She sat on the bed and quickly reviewed events. She had crossed to Islay and, in her absence, they had come and tampered with the collage, removed evidence, added evidence; which probably meant that they were ready to swoop. So she presumed they were watching the house, even now. Two close observers in a concealed hide. There could be others. Someone might have followed her all the way to Bowmore. With a sinking feeling she realized that someone might have observed her talking to Esme. Her mind rifled through the passengers on the ferry, looking for anyone out of the ordinary, but it was the time of year for tourists. There could have been an observer with a half-decent set of binoculars, indistinguishable from the scores of birdwatchers that descended on the island, anywhere along the sound. Once she was off the island they had free rein.

  Outside, the sun was sinking toward the moor. Now she was back and it was time for action. It was time to run.

  She took her rucksack, her “crash-bag,” down off the peg in the passageway, unpacked it on the kitchen table and inspected the contents: a sleeping bag, a bivvy bag and a North Face pile jacket, all in compression sacks; three pairs of black cotton underwear and three rolled pairs of socks in a waterproof bag, because he’d said there was nothing worse than being short of underwear when you are on the run; wash kit and sewing kit for running repairs; a packet of wet wipes for luxury; mess tin/dog bowl; a black beanie hat, a boot cleaning
kit and her pair of Caterpillar boots.

  She turned the bag inside out and ran her fingers along the seams, looking for anything out of the ordinary. A locator. Nothing. She repacked the bag.

  She rolled up her yoga mat. Then she shoveled several handfuls of dog food into a plastic bag and tied a knot in it. It went in the rucksack, on top of her Caterpillar boots. As an afterthought, she pulled the postcard off the fridge and returned to Jonah’s study to pick up the papers that she had torn off the wall. They went in the crash-bag’s lid.

  She slung the rucksack across her back and tightened the shoulder straps, then stepped into her Wellingtons and pulled her waterproof trousers back up her legs to her waist.

  Ready.

  “Come,” she said.

  The dog sprang off the sofa.

  She eased herself back down the passageway to the drawing room and slipped out of the window into the lengthening shadows of the hollow on the house’s eastward side. Keeping the house between her and the mass of the hill beyond, she sprinted the hundred meters to the tree line, counting each breath as she went. Then she was in the tangle of alder, rhododendrons and stunted oak trees. She kept heading east until she reached the cliff edge and then followed the line of cliffs northwards toward Kinuadrachd.

  After a kilometer or so she dropped down into a narrow ravine between fractured stone walls that was filled with leaves and followed it down to a tiny natural harbor that was hemmed in by foliage. Jonah kept a dinghy, its outboard removed, under a tarpaulin in the rhododendrons. She stopped for a moment and listened to the gentle lapping of the waves. Nothing appeared to have been tampered with.

  She headed back up the ravine to the woods. She dug with her hands in the soft earth near an oak tree. Buried there, contained within a metal locker and immersed in grease, was the outboard. Beside the locker was a jerry can of fuel and beneath it a sealed plastic envelope. She zipped the envelope into the lid of her bag and carried the outboard down to the dinghy. Then she went back for the jerry can.

  She dragged the dinghy down to the shoreline and set about fixing the outboard. As she worked, she expected them to appear through the trees at any moment. She struggled to keep her mind clear and her actions orderly.

  The outboard started first time. The dog sat beside her in the boat, its snout raised to the air. Together, they headed east across the placid water.

  They spent a fitful night in a small wood beside a river, somewhere on the Craignish peninsula. Miranda woke every hour or so—the wood was full of noises, rustlings, the dapple of the moon and the melancholy hoots of owls—and felt the dog shift in response in its nest at the bottom of her sleeping bag. She realized that, lying on her back in an unknown wood, nobody knew where she was and she hardly knew where she was herself. She didn’t feel fear. Not as such. It was a long time since she had felt afraid. Though she could remember circumstances similar to these in which she had felt real fear, the kind of fear that would not let her sleep: nights spent wrapped in a blanket beside a temperamental Zil truck in the Hindu Kush, anticipating another day of playing cat and mouse with the Sukhois and Hinds of the Afghan air force.

  She lay there, watching the sky lighten, and she thought of her life. Things had always happened to her. Events swirled around her like gusts of sand in a desert storm. Sometimes she stood in the eye. Then, inevitably, there was another gust of wind, a buckle of thunder in the air, and she was carried onward. There was no point trying to fight it.

  Abruptly the dog scrambled up through the bag and raced off into the dawn. When she had recovered, she retrieved Jonah’s postcard from the crash-bag, which had been her pillow. She stared at it: the photograph of the Bala Hissar fortress in Peshawar in Pakistan. Bala Hissar meant “high fort” in Farsi. She vividly remembered the slow swirl of bicycles, donkey carts, trucks, auto-rickshaws, and cars around the hulking fortress. It was possible to say that her own journey had begun in Peshawar one spring, when riotous thickets of sweet peas climbed the walls like weeds. That another man, not Jonah, had taken her by the hand and first led her into the storm.

  AN ACCIDENTAL COLLISION

  1988–1989

  “I’ve been watching you,” the stranger said, in perfect English. She was sitting in the courtyard at Green’s Hotel in Peshawar. She had been there for several days while her boyfriend “Digger” limped around the market in an unraveling plaster cast, searching for cut-price parts for the truck. She was eighteen.

  The stranger was wearing a white shalwar kameez—the white of redemption—and later, when he removed it, she saw that his body was crisscrossed with scars. And he had beautiful eyes that, even then, seemed to contain several gazes. They’d glide across her and then away like a lighthouse beam, leaving her wanting more.

  “And I’ve been watching you too,” she said. It was March 1988, and the Soviet army was about to begin its withdrawal from Afghanistan.

  He laughed at her boldness and reached out to take her right hand, turned it in his so that the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger was uppermost. His thumb rubbed the blue letter inked there.

  “R for right?”

  “Yes,” she said, defiantly. “Digger” had broken his leg two days before they were due to leave England and had spent the trip in a plaster cast. She’d driven the truck and its load of disposable gas stoves all the way from Dover, with L for left written on one hand and R for right on the other. She told him that she’d never made a wrong turn.

  “We’ll call this an accidental collision,” he said. “My name is Bakr. I come from the Lion’s Den.”

  She had decided to sleep with him then. Later, beneath him in his bedroom, while her discarded boyfriend searched the corridors for her, an unexpected shudder passed through her body like a bolt of lightning. And afterwards, outstretched on the sheet, softly panting, she whispered: “Will you take me to the Lion’s Den?”

  The first leg of their journey was a seven-hour bus trip up to the Tochi Valley in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Bakr had secured her a place as a volunteer at a hospital in an Afghan refugee camp. It wasn’t the Lion’s Den. It was a stop on the way.

  The camp was a squalid collection of low, dun-colored buildings gathered around a square of baked earth. First, she was introduced to the camp administrator, who treated Bakr with a degree of deference which suggested that he was an important figure. The administrator served them tea and asked her questions about her family and origins. She told how her father had fought the Soviet-backed military regime in Somalia. He appeared satisfied with her responses.

  They were given their own hut, with a white plastic chair and a mattress resting on a pallet.

  “There’s a catch,” he said.

  “Which is?”

  “We have to get married.”

  Why not? she thought. He showed her how. She spoke the words: I have wedded you myself. She stated the agreed term of two years and her dowry, a basil plant in an old paint can. He said: I accept.

  They made love on the mattress and again he brought her effortlessly to climax.

  He was gone the next day.

  There were very few antibiotics or medicines. She spent her mornings improvising dressings for the wounded and mopping the floors. In the afternoon, she worked in the office. Occasionally the Red Crescent sent supplies, and she’d scrupulously check the delivery note against the invoice.

  It wasn’t really a hospital, at least not as she understood the term after an exile’s childhood in London. It was a first-aid post. It was built of rough breeze blocks with a tin roof. There were two connected rooms and each one held two rows of fifteen beds. Most of the wounded were in their thirties, though there were a few who were older—haggard, toothless old fighters who to her untutored eye could have been seventy or forty. There were no women.

  Across the camp, women were almost invisible. She’d see them in their burqas, flitting between huts like ghosts. The men ignored her. She wore a headscarf, but even the wounded turned their face
s from her. Only the children befriended her. She’d sit on a stone outside her hut, with the basil plant beside her, and the young girls would sit at her feet and teach her the Pashtun words for things.

  Bakr brought her a gramophone that he claimed to have recovered from the ruins of a house that had been occupied by a Soviet general in the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, along with some 45s. The general’s taste was distinctly capitalist, bourgeois even. They wound the gramophone up like a clock and danced to “Strangers in the Night” and danced to it again. It made them think they were in another place, another time.

  He was gone the next morning.

  Everybody had a gun, even the wounded, who kept their Kalashnikovs hanging from the bedstead or lying beside them. On several occasions, she watched as boxes of AKs were unloaded from trucks, and stored in a concrete bunker at the edge of the camp.

  As the summer temperature rose, the number of men passing through the camp increased. They were mainly Pakistanis, but there were others, Arabs from Egypt, Algeria and Saudi Arabia. They were on their way over the border to train in Afghanistan. She envied them. They were on their way to Bakr.

  The Arabs set up a makeshift firing range beyond the camp perimeter and spent the day shooting at improvised targets. When she wasn’t working, she’d go and sit on the ridge above the range, on a flat stone veined with marble. She’d watch them squatting and lying, with the stock of their weapons against their shoulders.

  It was the camp administrator who told her to expect him. Bakr arrived the next day. He was filthy. His body was bruised and his feet were raw. He stank of cordite. She shooed away the children, dragged the door shut and pushed him down on the bed.