by S L Beaumont
“Now, Jess, there are some things that you don’t know and some things that you can’t know. What I can tell you is that Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorism Command and MI5 have been undercover ever since we suspected that an unknown terrorist organization, with links to Al Qaeda, had established a base here in London,” Stevens said.
I nodded, not understanding as Rawlinson returned with someone behind him.
“Jess, this is one of our agents, Charlie Matheson. You know him better as William Johnston,” he said.
Will stepped into view carrying flowers. His left arm was wrapped in a bandage and one cheek shone with a dark bruise over which little cuts intersected each other like a two-tone tube map. Despite his injuries, his eyes shone and his mouth curved into a wide smile.
“Hey, you look a lot better than the last time I saw you,” he said.
I looked at him in complete confusion. “Will, is it true? You are not really who you said you were? All this time?” I whispered, not really wanting to hear his reply. He nodded. The pain was immediate. It started in my chest and spread upwards towards my throat and downwards into my stomach. “No,” I whispered, tears pouring down my cheeks, their saltiness stinging the cuts on my face. “Was it all lies?”
“No,” Will said in a soft voice, shaking his head. He opened his mouth to say something further, but was interrupted by Stevens.
“We can’t discuss any details of the mission at this stage, you understand, so I will have to stop you there.”
“Mission?” I asked in disbelief.
Will hung his head and sighed.
“I was assigned to track Colin and his circle, and working with you was the way in.”
Stevens cleared his throat.
I stopped listening and sat back against my pillows. I felt numb. My whole life was one big fat lie. I couldn’t even start to comprehend that.
“Jess, we’ll see you again tomorrow,” Rawlinson said, interrupting my thoughts.
“Can I just have a minute alone with her?” Will asked. “Please?”
Stevens nodded. “This is against orders. Make it quick.” Both men left the room.
“Jess, it wasn’t all lies. I care for you so much. I haven’t got time to explain now, but in the flowers is a card with my number. Call me when you are out of here and we can meet and I’ll explain.
He leaned down and kissed my forehead.
“I’m so sorry.” And he was gone.
PART II
Chapter 30
March 5
The wind cut through the layers I was wearing as though they were tissue paper and chilled me to the bone. Not that I felt it. I didn’t feel much of anything, anymore.
I stood on the windswept hill behind the little cottage above the village of Strathgarvan, looking out over the rugged Scottish coast, past a small offshore island to the vast ocean beyond. On top of the ridge beyond the village stood the ruins of Strathgarvan Castle, what remained of its crumbling grey walls desolate and unloved, a little like me.
Strathgarvan was to be my escape, my refuge from the world, their questions and their insinuations. I also hoped it would provide me with some answers as to just who that husband of mine had really been. I certainly didn’t share the media’s view that he was the leader of a small poorly organized group of misfits. Colin was way too smart for that. He had been involved in something much bigger. Of that I was sure. The agent from MI5 had mentioned a terrorist network. And this place, this cottage that he liked to escape to, seemed like the best place to start looking for answers.
I dreamed last night that I was at an airport. I was waiting at near the departure gate. Dad was there and a man was helping him with his bags. He looked up, saw me and walked over.
“Jessica, my darling girl.” He hugged me to him. “I have to go now.”
“I will see you when you get back,” I said.
“No, darling, I’m not coming back this time.” He kissed my forehead and returned to his travelling companion. I frowned. This made no sense. I watched as they strolled towards the departure gate and turned to wave.
Dad’s travelling companion was Will. They disappeared through the security checkpoint leaving me all alone.
Chapter 31
April 1
I closed the door behind me and dumped the heavy basket of firewood by the fireplace. Although it was supposed to be spring, it was still cold. I’d lit the fire each night for the last month which warmed my new home. The cottage was tiny. Just four rooms – kitchen, living room, bedroom and bathroom. It was sparsely decorated, if that’s what you could call the very masculine, plain decor, but I was starting to warm it up with a few feminine touches like a big vase of wild flowers on the old wooden dining table and another on the mantel above the fireplace. I had painted the wooden shutters in the kitchen a sunny yellow and thrown out the dusty old curtains and rugs, replacing them with fresh new ones.
My London belongings looked odd here, although most of my lovely china now resided on the open shelves in the kitchen. It didn’t seem like there would be much call for my crystal or slow cooker, so they stayed boxed up in the shed. My espresso machine, however, stood gleaming at one end of the small bench. After all, there were limits to my new country existence.
The cottage was about the only thing that Colin left me. The authorities had scooped up everything else that belonged to him as evidence, but they seemed happy to let me have this once they had been all over it. I suppose it wasn’t worth anything, a little cottage in the middle of nowhere. I’d also managed to hold on to the London flat since Colin had been too busy to sign the sale and purchase agreement when we bought it; it had been lodged in my name.
Colin had acquired this cottage somewhere along the line. I had never been here. It was his weekend getaway, and his alone. He would come up several times a year to have a golfing, shooting and fishing weekend with the local lads that he was friends with, but otherwise it stood empty. It was showing some signs of neglect, but nothing that couldn’t be rectified. I needed a project, so this was it for now.
I wandered into the kitchen to switch on the coffee machine. A heavy bump against my leg made me jump.
“Buffy,” I admonished the large shaggy black and white English Sheepdog Collie cross, who stood looking up at me, her big brown eyes deep and soulful. I scratched behind her ears and she leaned into me, enjoying the attention. I had adopted Buffy from a neighbor in London, who had pleaded with me to take her when she heard that I was moving to the country. I had been reluctant, but acquiesced, and it turned out to be the best decision. We had quickly bonded. Buffy, named by my 1990s-loving neighbor after the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, turned out to be just what I needed. She was loyal and fun. Most days she was the only living thing that I talked to. I cuddled her on the sofa at night during the long lonely evenings, and although she had a basket in the lounge, she slept at the foot of my bed.
The cottage didn’t have a TV, so I was catching up on all the reading that the long hours working in the corporate world had curtailed. I also didn’t have a computer or the Internet. I didn’t own a radio and never bought a newspaper. I was thoroughly sick of reading some journalist’s twisted view of what had been my life. My days as a news junkie were well and truly over. My only technology allowances were an iPhone with a new number and my Kindle, which I loaded at a café with free Internet in Ayr once a week. I had switched off the internet browsers on both devices and only checked my messages at the Internet café. Marie, Rachel, Jimmy and Dave emailed most weeks, but I had resisted their invitations to go and stay with them in London and had refused their advances to visit me.
I spent days at MI5 once I’d been released from hospital, answering questions and trying to get to the bottom of Colin’s actions. I was as honest as I could be. I spoke at length to the agents and profilers about my marriage. I knew Colin and I had been growing apart, but I had thought we were just like any other busy young professional couple. But after these sessions, I c
ame to see just how much he had controlled me and I accepted that I hadn’t loved him in a very long time. Long before Will had come along. I mean, I had loved the man I married, but Colin had changed or perhaps he just allowed his true self to come to the fore. I was now not sure that I had ever really been ‘in love’ with him, especially when I compared my feelings for him with how I had felt about Will.
I was very conscious not to discuss my affair with Will in any detail with the agents. My interview sessions were all recorded and I was aware that whatever I said could be misconstrued and be embarrassing for him. I’m not sure why I even considered his feelings. In some ways his betrayal cut deeper than Colin’s, but I had put those emotions in a box and pushed them to the back of my heart and hadn’t allowed myself to take them out. I wasn’t sure that I ever would. Yes, what Colin had done, what he’d made me an unwitting part of, was a betrayal, but somehow, Will’s actions, his lies and how he had used me, hurt even more. I saw him several times during those days, standing in the foyer or waiting for me in a stairwell of the MI5 building, but I refused to speak to him. I just didn’t know what to say.
I explained over and over to the agents how my suspicions that Colin was up to something had taken hold, but that never in my wildest dreams had I considered anything like this. After picking through the wreckage of the explosion at the warehouse, they had confirmed a direct link to the bomb used in the Cheapside attack and similarities to the smaller Trafalgar Square and Windsor incidents. It was incomprehensible. I’d been living with a man who was responsible for all that death and injury all that time and had no idea. What did that say about me? By the end of the interrogations, I just felt numb.
Once the authorities were satisfied that I was not involved, I was released. The media intrusion had been brutal. I refused to comment or give any interviews. I was portrayed by some journalists as the simpering ignorant wife and by others as a sex-crazed double agent who jumped anything that moved, and everything in between. They camped outside the flat and chased me down the road, pushing cameras and microphones in my face.
I tried going back to work. Of course, the New York job was off the table, but they hadn’t replaced me in my old role, so I slipped back into that, but it was dreadful. Colleagues whom I had thought of as friends avoided me, and I could silence a room by just walking in. Marie, Rachel, Dave and Jimmy were loyal and kind, but I knew that my presence at the bank was making their work lives difficult. After a fortnight, my manager pulled me into his office and slid an envelope across the desk. I was offered twenty-four months’ full redundancy to leave. I signed it on the spot and within half an hour had cleared my desk and was sitting in a taxi on my way back to the flat.
After that, the decision to leave London had been easy. At first, I wasn’t sure where to go. I didn’t want to go home to Mum, as she wouldn’t have been able to cope with the media frenzy. I toyed with the idea of disappearing to a Spanish island for a while, but the unanswered questions around Colin bothered me and as far as I was concerned my father’s death was still very much unexplained. Colin simply couldn’t have planned all of the things that he was accused of, on his own. Something or someone had turned him and made him fanatical or maybe it was already there when I met him. Either way, he was answering to someone, but who? Certainly, Scotland’s First Minister and the MP for Ayrshire, whom Colin knew well from his student politics days, had both publically distanced themselves. After all, it was political suicide to be linked to a terrorist. I assumed that they’d been questioned too, in the wake of the warehouse explosion.
Colin’s comments during those last moments at the warehouse also haunted me. It seemed that I had been part of his cover. Young, malleable, Scottish. Except that I hadn’t been as malleable as he had intended. Gullible, definitely, I mean, I had no idea what my husband was up to and to make things worse I’d fallen for the man sent to spy on us. The pain that was a constant presence, just under my ribs, intensified with the thought.
Those first couple of weeks at the cottage had been hell. I operated on auto-pilot most of the time, forcing myself to even remember to eat. I was grateful to fall into bed at night and had to drag myself out of bed in the morning. My only visitors had been the local minister and Alastair, the publican who was an old mate of Colin’s. They left knowing that I didn’t want company. I wasn’t ready to play nice with anyone. Alastair continued to check on me though and as the days passed, the ice around my heart started to thaw.
The coffee machine grunted and hissed, shaking me out of my reverie. I ground the beans, steamed the milk and took my cappuccino to the table.
“Okay, Buffy. Once I’ve had this, we’ll set the fire, then go and shoot some rabbits,” I said. Buffy’s ears pricked up at the word rabbit and she gave a single low bark of agreement.
When I’d moved into the cottage, I’d found a set of keys on a hook in the kitchen which unlocked the padlock on a small shed adjacent to the house. The door had creaked open and I’d peered inside with some trepidation. But the shed didn’t contain anything sinister, in fact it was tidy with several fishing rods propped up against one wall, an ancient hand-pushed lawn mower, a set of golf clubs, and two rifles racked on the far wall. I locked the shed again, but a few days later I’d decided that I wanted to learn how to shoot the rifles that Colin had left and was unlocking the shed again when a car pulled up. I turned to see Alastair, climbing out of his four-wheel drive.
“Hey, Jess,” he said, scratching at his mane of wild red hair, but keeping his distance, a wary look on his face as though he were approaching an untamed animal. “Thought I’d drop by and see if ya needed anything?”
I studied him for a moment before replying. “Actually, yes I do.”
Alastair looked surprised. Up until now I had turned down all offers of help.
“I need you to teach me how to shoot one of these,” I said, returning to the shed, picking up the closest rifle and stepping outside again.
“Whoa, easy, tiger,” Alastair said. “Point it away from me, in case it’s loaded.”
“Oh, sorry.” I swung the barrel towards the sky as he rushed towards me and snatched it from my grasp.
“Not loaded,” he said, sounding relieved.
“So?” I asked.
“So?”
“Will you teach me?” I gave him my most winning smile.
Alastair was easily six foot five, with a scruffy beard to match his hair and I was trying not to be intimidated by him. He looked me over for a moment before he smiled, transforming his features into that of a teddy bear. “Alright then, lass.”
He pushed past me into the shed and returned carrying a smaller rifle and a box of cartridges. “We’ll start with this one, Jess.”
“Okay.”
Alastair turned out to be a gentle, patient coach. First, he checked and cleaned the gun, then he showed me how to hold it, how to stand and how to aim. We lined up a number of tin cans on a board on the ground in front of the drywall stone fence at the base of the hill at the back of the property, well away from anyone. I stood as he instructed with my feet apart and the rifle tucked in against my shoulder.
“Now, Jess, this one will give you a kick back unless you brace yourself properly.”
I nodded and eased the trigger back. The rifle gave a loud crack and slammed into my shoulder.
“Holy shit,” I exclaimed much to Alastair’s amusement. I glared at him, after which he kept his laughter to himself.
My shot, of course, had gone wild, but I kept at it and an hour later, I was hitting more than I was missing. He showed me how to clean and store the rifle. So, for the next couple of weeks, I had locked Buffy in the house and lined up the cans to practice. Now I didn’t miss.
I had started shooting rabbits almost by accident. I was your typical city girl, who didn’t like giving too much thought to where the meat that we ate came from. I certainly wouldn’t eat rabbit or venison (Thumper and Bambi), but one afternoon as I set up my cans, I noticed a numb
er of rabbits sunning themselves on the rise behind the fence, so I adjusted my shot and lined one up in my sights. The crack echoed and the bunny fell. And I cheered. I didn’t analyze this too much, but I suppose my general numbness inside meant that I no longer had empathy or something. Anyway, I killed four rabbits by the end of that day and had no clue what to do with them.
I drove in to see Alastair. He looked so surprised when I called him out to the car to show him the spoils of my hunting.
“Do you know what I do with these?” I asked.
He studied me, with a new appreciation, it seemed. “Come with me.” He led me into the pub’s kitchen and gave me a lesson on skinning, gutting and preparing the rabbits. I left him with three and took one home to cook.
Cooking was the one thing that gave me some sense of enjoyment. I had always liked to cook but had never had the time, and Colin’s constant demeaning comments had shaken my confidence in my ability. A couple of weeks after moving into the cottage, I started at the beginning of one of my Jamie Oliver cookbooks and worked my way to the end, making every recipe. Accessing some of the ingredients in the village proved challenging and so I had started driving up to Ayr to the supermarket once a week to stock up. Of course, I was cooking far more food than either Buffy or I would ever eat, but the process seemed to be giving me back something of myself.
It was one afternoon, as I lifted a chicken and leek pie from the oven, that I noticed the local doctor’s car pull away from the neighboring cottage. The small whitewashed house was around three hundred meters from mine, down the driveway towards the village. An elderly couple lived there. We often exchanged waves, but they had left me alone, which suited me just fine.