Never Tell
Claire Seeber
Your past will always find you…With her three beautiful children, millionaire husband and Cotswolds mansion, former investigative journalist Rose Miller has an enviable life. But behind the domestic bliss lies a secret past…As Oxford students in the early nineties, Rose and James belonged to Society X, an elite clique that knew no boundaries. Led by the enigmatic Dalziel, the group were hell bent on breaking down society's norms - until an unimaginable tragedy occurs.With the subsequent scandal covered up, Rose has settled into family life - but is afraid to admit her feelings of boredom. So when her ex-editor asks Rose to dig the dirt on a wealthy businessman new to the area, adrenaline enlivens her.But as Rose's investigation begins to threaten her family she backs away - and then a tragedy at her home begins to widen the cracks in her domestic façade. As their world crumbles around them, is Rose about to atone for the sins of her past?An utterly gripping novel that will captivate fans of Sophie Hannah and Nicci French.
CLAIRE SEEBER
Never Tell
Copyright (#ulink_0de08671-e8b5-5a52-aedd-1589b970a5ae)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.
AVON
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Copyright © Claire Seeber 2010
Claire Seeber asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
Extract from River of Time is reproduced by kind permission of the author. Published by William Heinemann Ltd, 1995
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007334674
Ebook Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780007334681
Version: 2018-06-18
For Tiggy & Bethy
As the song says, We are Family …
Last year I read ‘River of Time’ – a family favourite – by renowned journalist Jon Swain who reported so bravely on Vietnam and Cambodia. I’m immensely grateful to Jon for allowing me to use his words in NEVER TELL; they help explain Rose’s addiction to chasing a story.
I also owe barrister Rupert Bowers a great debt of gratitude (or maybe a bottle of wine or two) for all the court-room advice. (‘That would never happen’ – he said a lot: wherever fiction takes over from fact, I’ve chosen to ignore his tutelage). Thanks to Nicola and Matthew Sweet who really did make it to Oxford, and to all my mates who knew about guns and bombs. (Bit scary, really.) Thanks as usual to Flic Everett the 1st for speeding through the first draft and to Beth for taking it to the beach; to the Goldsmiths 4 for listening & commenting so constructively, especially when I was blushing in the more ‘shocking’ scenes! Thanks to Tim for letting me lock myself away.
Huge thanks as ever to all at Avon: especially Keshini Naidoo and Kate Bradley (and bon voyage, Max!). Sincere thanks to everyone who has supported me during the past year, particularly the last six months. You know who you are and I’m very grateful. Last but never least, thanks to my agent Teresa Chris for all the pep talks and the belief.
The desire to cover stories is sometimes irresistibly powerful; this ruthlessness for getting the story over and above all else, including love, has wrecked the personal lives of many colleagues …
There was a restlessness in my spirit, added to which I didn’t know how to say no to a challenge … an irreconcilable conflict of interest in my life.
River of Time, Jon Swain
Contents
Cover (#u1c97da2b-25bd-517a-8f70-e384e77f8122)
Title Page (#ua7cdb1d9-f9d1-5afe-baac-879fa4689cd2)
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Part Two
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Part Three
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
About The Author
Copyright
About The Publisher
PROLOGUE (#u5f91f007-643d-57f4-be2c-c586f858bc95)
All the way to London, the woman’s words circled round my head like carrion crows. She’d hung up before I could ask more; that silky voice echoing down the years, a voice I was sure I knew and yet couldn’t quite place. One more piece from the nightmare jigsaw the last year had become; one more piece nearly slotted back in.
Off the motorway, the traffic snaked back solid to the Blackfriars interchange. Frantically I watched the clock, creeping forward incrementally, until I could bear it no longer. Abandoning the car on a broken meter, I sprinted through the rush-hour fumes, dodging swearing cyclists and the motorbikes that sneaked down the middle, stumbling over the kerb on Ludgate Hill, until I was falling in panic, unable to right myself. A double-decker bore down on me, horn blaring; a builder in a yellow hard hat snatched me from its path in the nick of time, his warm calloused hand on mine. I was too stunned to do much more than blink at him and run on.
They were closing St Paul’s Cathedral to sightseers as I finally reached the great stone stairs. For too long now my life hadn’t made any sense; I had to know the truth. Someone, somewhere, had to know the truth.
Inside, the internal gate was shut.
‘Please,’ I gasped at the curate closing up. ‘Please, I have to – I’ve come so far.’
That someone might be here.
‘You look pretty desperate,’ the jolly curate relented, waving me through with his walkie-talkie. ‘Last one in. This one’s on God.’
‘How do I get up to the Whispering Gallery?’ I wheezed gratefully, leaning on the barrier for a moment to catch my breath.
It took me ten minutes to climb up, and my heart was banging so hard by the time I’d reached the gallery in the huge dome that I had to sit down as soon as I got there. I’d passed a gaggle of Italian tourists coming down the stairs, but otherwise the space was empty. I thought he hadn’t come, the anonymous writer – and I heard my name said softly, and I turned and saw him.
They say that when you’re drowning your whole life flashes before your eyes – though it seems unlikely that anyone could confirm it. True or not, I felt like I was falling backwards now, splashing messily through my own life.
He walked towards me, thin and no longer elegant, wiry-limbed and crop-haired instead.
‘Hello, Rose,’ he said, and I tried to find my voice.
‘I thought,’ it came at last, ‘I thought that you were dead.’
PART ONE (#u5f91f007-643d-57f4-be2c-c586f858bc95)
Chapter One GLOUCESTERSHIRE, SPRING 2008 (#u5f91f007-643d-57f4-be2c-c586f858bc95)
It wasn’t turning out to be one of the good mornings. Fred had been up three times in the night simply seeking company, so my eyes now stung with tiredness. Alicia was in a foul mood because Effie had scribbled all over her new birthday sketchbook in purple felt-tip. Effie had insisted sweetly that she was dying for porridge until finally I caved in, and spent ten minutes stirring it like an automaton, whereupon she spat the first mouthful dramatically all over the floor and refused even one more try, citing the ‘yucky bits’.
‘Put your other slipper on, Freddie. The floor’s freezing.’
‘It’s lost,’ he announced dramatically.
‘It’s not lost. It’s on the radiator there.’
He turned earnest eyes on me. ‘Superheroes don’t wear slippers, Mummy.’
‘Well super-heroes are going to have horribly cold feet then, aren’t they?’
I wondered plaintively for the three hundred and sixty-fourth consecutive day why James couldn’t get up just once and make the struggle with plaits, porridge and a three-year-old’s tantrums at least partly his own.
‘I want my milk warm, Mummy,’ Effie puffed, abandoning the cornflakes and dragging the milk bottle towards her across the table.
‘Just have it cold, Ef, OK?’
‘I want it warm,’ she pouted and promptly upended the entire pint over the flowery tablecloth.
‘For God’s sake, Effie,’ my restraint deserted me. ‘I told you not to do that, you silly child.’
‘Shut up, Mummy,’ she shouted back. ‘You’re rubbish.’ Her little red mouth was wobbling.
A Ready Brek-encrusted Fred looked in wonderment at the raised voices and cross faces; Effie and I glaring at one another, me wavering between laughter and annoyance until Alicia turned Radio One up loudly. My pounding head pounded harder as Alicia pronounced, ‘This is Fred’s favourite song,’ and jiggled so alarmingly at him that he fell backwards and promptly burst into tears. Finishing a complicated riff about some girl not knowing her name, she whacked her arm on the chair and burst into dramatic sobs that equalled her brother’s. Soggy J-cloth in hand, I gazed at them, weighing up my options: opening the gin or joining them.
Into this chaos walked Mrs McCready, never more welcome, unbuttoning the shiny old coat that hid her ill-fitting velour tracksuit, a choice baby blue today. (‘I think she sleeps in them,’ James remarked at least once a week.) She took one look at Fred’s furious red face and swept him off the floor.
‘Come here, my precious,’ she crooned, clutching his plump little body to her huge chest, his head half the size of one of her bosoms. ‘I’ll go and get him dressed,’ she said. ‘Won’t I, precious? Come on, Effie.’
I turned the radio down, tossing the cloth towards the sink. It hit the floor with a soggy thwack, narrowly missing the cat. I kissed Alicia’s arm better until her sobs eventually subsided, and retied her red ribbons before dispatching her to piano practice whilst I made a desultory attempt to clear up.
Waiting for the kettle to boil again, I gazed out of the mullioned windows at the cold March morning. It was crisp and clear now, the last tendrils of dawn mist dissipating under a slow-climbing sun. Two robins took a quick dip in the stone birdbath, flicking each other with something like affection. Below them a blackbird bounced along a lawn glistening with dew, hopefully pecking for a worm. It was chocolate-box perfect.
The kettle snapped off as I caught my reflection in the glass. I am in a stupor, I thought, I have been in a stupor for months. Not months, even – years. I move slowly, I have become plumper, my skin is soft and golden, the glow of repleteness is on me. And yet I’m not replete.
I shook myself from my self-indulgence. Things are good, I thought, trying to convince myself once again, and poured boiling water all over my hand as James appeared noiselessly behind me.
‘Ouch!’ I yanked my hand back quickly. Quickly, but too late.
‘Careful,’ James yawned, stretching, displaying a hairy stomach above stripy pyjama-bottoms. I ran my hand under the cold tap, the freezing water a new kind of pain on my scalded skin.
‘Any coffee going?’ J scratched his belly. ‘Have you seen my phone?’
He rooted through the piles of paperwork I’d stacked neatly last night, through the old newspapers full of articles I kept meaning to read and never got round to, forms for Alicia’s school trips and Effie and Fred’s dinner money, bank statements that needed to go to the accountants, my notebook full of scribblings for ideas that I needed to write up properly. Scribblings that were decreasing in number.
‘I need to call Liam. I’ve had a fucking blinding idea for Revolver. We’ve got to go all out on the VIP room. Marble, gold, the works. Seventies kitsch.’
I watched one pile slide dangerously to the right and bit my tongue.
‘Where the hell’s my phone? Did you move it again? I do keep saying just leave it.’
‘Oh, J, don’t mess it all up again,’ I muttered, but my beautiful symmetry was already descending towards the floor.
‘Don’t fuss, Rose.’ He found the phone in the pocket of his fleece. ‘McCready can tidy it. She loves it.’
Ruined.
‘Who’s she?’ Mrs McCready stomped back into the room, a beaming Fred beneath her arm like a small parcel. ‘The cat’s mother?’
‘Oh, McCready, you angel.’ James kissed her resoundingly on one thread-veined cheek. ‘You’re here to save us all, aren’t you, petal?’
I couldn’t help smiling. ‘I thought I was your petal?’
‘That’s right, Rosie Lee,’ my husband winked at me, ‘you are. My one and only petal. Bring the coffee to the studio, would you? I’ve got to get on.’
I caught McCready’s eye over his dark head. Obviously it was a good day.
‘Liam, that you? All right, sir?’ J winked at me again. ‘Listen, my head’s buzzing. I’ve had a fucking blinder of a plan. Think Joan Collins on a swing in The Stud, and forget all your troubles.’
McCready pursed colourless lips and released Fred from her grasp.
‘So, sir, get your arse …’ With a flurry of paper falling to the floor and a door slamming in his wake, J was gone. Troubles, I thought. The first I’d heard.
‘I’ll fetch him his coffee,’ McCready said, as I’d known she would. For all her disapproval, she adored James. As she left the room, Fred in her wake, the phone started to ring.
‘Thank you,’ I called after her, adding milk to my tea and looking for the handset. Before I found it, the answer-phone kicked in.
‘Pick up, Rosie, darling.’ My heart jolted at the familiar drawl. ‘We both know you’re there.’
I finally spotted the receiver, tangled in a pair of small carrot-stained dungarees in the washing basket.
A deep sigh into the machine. ‘There’s only so long you can avoid me. I need you. And,’ the voice dropped into a caress, ‘you know you need me, darling.’
My hand hovered indecisively above the phone as I watched an image on the small TV in the corner – an image that I couldn’t quite compute. The breakfast news: a man I hadn’t seen for years, since university. He stepped down from a private jet, smiling for the cameras. Those pale glacial eyes. Escorted to Number 10, shaking hands with the Prime Minister. Easy to see he’d once been the most powerful man in Britain.
I forgot all about the phone and turned up the volume quickly, but it was too late to catch the full story.
A man I’d hoped desperately I’d never see again. Dalziel’s father.
I dropped Alicia at school, Effie and Fred at nursery and then wandered absently round the supermarket. Amidst jars of apple purée and mountains of bright and shiny baby stuff, my mobile rang for the third time. Finally, I relented.
‘What?’ I muttered.
‘Charming.’
‘I’m really very busy, you know.’
‘Very busy doing what? Comparing nappy brands?’
I looked at a stack of shiny green Pampers.
‘No.’ I turned my back on the nappies. ‘I’m just going into a very important meeting, actually.’
Joyfully the Tannoy announced a large spillage in Aisle 4.
‘Really?’ Xavier sniggered. ‘About what? Which tea-shop to hold the local mothers’ meeting in?’
I smiled despite myself.
‘No, Xavier. About …’ I caught sight of Helen Kelsey studying nail polish in the beauty section. She really did look like a fox. Sleek, but a fox none the less. ‘About – about the local fox hunt.’ I slunk back round the corner of the Pampers before she spotted me.
‘I thought chasing foxes had been banned?’ Xavier drawled. ‘Don’t tell me you’re riding with those hounds.’
‘It’s still a point of serious debate in the countryside, actually.’ I tried to sound convinced. ‘There’s a lot of tension still between hunt and saboteurs.’
Xavier yawned loudly. ‘Oh, don’t be so dreary, dearie. Come back to me. You’re the best newshound I know,’ he persisted. ‘It’s such a waste.’
‘Flattery will get you everywhere,’ I sighed. ‘But I can’t. The children, Xav. I’m not doing that whole nanny thing. And the team really need me here. I can’t just up and—’
‘Oh, please,’ Xavier yawned again. ‘It’s hardly the Wall Street bloody Journal.’
‘Stop yawning.’ I chucked some baby-wipes in the trolley. ‘It’s so rude. The Burford Chronicle is a quality paper, I’ll have you know.’
There was a long pause. We both dissolved into giggles.
‘You silly cow,’ he said fondly. ‘Stop popping babies out and writing about giant marrows—’
‘Er, I’m not sure I like that analogy, thanks, Xav.’
‘- and cover this al-Qaeda story for me.’
I stopped laughing.
‘What story?’
‘New neighbour of yours.’
‘Really? Who?’
‘Hadi Kattan.’
‘The art dealer?’ Hadi Kattan was a regular face in the international media, from the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal to Hello! magazine; patriarch of a beautiful glamorous family; contemporary of Al-Fayed, but shadowy and enigmatic where his peer preferred the spotlight.
‘That’s the one. Moved into a mansion in your neck of the woods.’
‘Kattan is al-Qaeda? Pull the other one. It’s Middle England, Xav, not Helmand Province.’
‘So cynical. He was VEVAK for a while too apparently.’
‘VEVAK as in Iranian Secret Service? They’re nothing to do with al-Qaeda, surely?’
‘Whatever. He’s purportedly been involved with a smaller organisation, a branch of the tree. Al-Muhen, I think. Some Saudi Arabian mullah runs it from a madrasah somewhere outside Peshawar.’
‘Everyone north of the equator’s apparently got a link these days. Who’s your source?’
‘Guy in the Yard’s anti-terrorism unit.’
‘So well-connected, dear Xav.’
‘Let’s just say we share a sauna, darling.’
‘Oh, I see.’ I debated some sugar-free gingerbread men. ‘That kind of source. And he’s straight up, is he?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t say straight, necessarily.’
‘Hilarious! You know what I mean.’
‘Check it out and see.’
‘I can’t.’ Resolute, I picked up some over-priced organic crisps. The kids would prefer a lurid Wotsit any day. ‘I’ve retired. For now.’
‘It’s time to come out of retirement. Christ, Rose, most people would be biting my hand off.’
‘I appreciate it. I’m tempted. But it’s not fair on the kids. You know that.’
‘Rose, you had some babies, you didn’t become Mother fucking Teresa.’
‘She only had spiritual babies, I think you’ll find.’ I wheeled myself round to the Wotsits. ‘Look, I’ll consider it, OK?’
‘Which means you won’t,’ he sighed.
‘I will. I’m flattered, Xav. Thank you.’ For a moment I caught a glimpse of the old me. It was strangely reassuring that someone else occasionally did too.
‘It’s a bloody waste, you rotting out there in the cow-shit. You were the best, Rose.’
‘Thank you. Actually, talking about retirement,’ I said carefully, ‘I’m sure I just saw Lord Higham on the news.’
‘So?’
‘I thought he’d gone somewhere like Venezuela.’
‘He may well have done, darling. I’m not his travel agent.’ Xavier was snappy. ‘Word is he’s back on the political warpath. Officially he’s come in some advisor role to the PM.’
My stomach clenched uncomfortably.
‘Why the interest? Got a scoop?’
‘I just – he’s someone—’ I was getting tongue-tied. I took a deep breath. ‘Someone from the past,’ I finished lamely.
‘My dear! I’ve always liked an older man myself,’ Xavier purred.
‘Not like that. I knew his son, Dalziel.’
‘The one who killed himself?’
The years rolled back like the tide.
‘Rose?’
‘Yes,’ I mumbled. ‘Yes, that one.’
‘You have depths, my dear Rose, I’ve not yet plumbed.’
I jumped half a foot as a voice spoke in my ear.
‘Rose!’
Helen Kelsey. I forced a smile. ‘I’ll call you back, Xav.’
‘Before it’s too late,’ he drawled, and rang off.
Too late.
I summoned a smile for Helen; I wished my heart would stop beating so very fast.
Chapter Two (#u5f91f007-643d-57f4-be2c-c586f858bc95)
I arrived at the paper at eleven, which meant they’d all be on a fag-break out the back. I needed to busy myself: to stay in the present. Making myself a cup of strong tea, I checked the boards in the faint hope there might be a half-decent story for once.
‘Edna Brown’s prize-winning vegetables sabotaged.’ Next to this someone had scrawled ‘Watch out for her melons’ in green marker.
‘High School Musical comes to Cheltenham.’
‘Five sheep savaged near Ostley Woods – return of the Burford Beast?’
The only story that looked remotely exciting was apparent police interest in a local MP and an allegation of bribery. I vaguely remembered him from Alicia’s school fête, a sweaty, corpulent man more interested in the refreshment stall than the children.
Tina banged through the doors. Ex-Fleet Street herself, but sick of the horrendous hours and the in-fighting, she was happy and efficient running this little paper.
‘Hello, stranger.’ She slammed a pile of files down on her immaculate desk. ‘How’s tricks?’
‘Tricks are OK, thanks, Tina.’
‘How’s the gorgeous husband?’
Everyone always loved James. The life and soul. ‘Good, thanks. Pretty busy with the relaunch of the club.’ I pointed to the board. ‘What’s Johnson being investigated for?’
‘Not sure exactly,’ she shrugged. ‘Something to do with taking some kind of bung, I think.’
‘Really?’ I perked up.
‘The by-election’s coming up. All sorts are stirring.’
‘Shall I take a look?’ I said carefully. I didn’t want to admit to myself how much I needed some kind of spur.
‘I think Richard’s on it, thanks, love.’ She booted her old computer up. It made a sound like it was dying inside. ‘Why don’t you take a look at Edna Brown’s lovely vegetables?’
‘Oh, right.’ I suppressed the sudden urge to scream. ‘Yes, of course.’
Richard Sawton rushed through the door and scooped his car keys off the desk.
‘Hey Rosie,’ he winked, his long face almost excited, ‘fancy a spot of doorstepping?’
‘I was going to talk to Edna Brown about her—’
‘Fuck Edna Brown.’
‘I’d really rather not,’ I grinned.
‘Come on. The word is Johnson’s going to get picked up again today.’ He was almost out the door by now. ‘I could do with a second opinion.’
I glanced at Tina; she waved us onwards with her trusty green Pentel. Grabbing my bag I followed Richard, feeling something I hadn’t for the longest time. Adrenalin.
The Johnson story turned out to be a damp squib. Richard and I spent a chilly hour supposedly hiding outside his house, drinking stewed tea in polystyrene cups from the Copper Kettle, only for the wife to arrive at our window and bang on it with a cross be-ringed hand.
‘This is private property, I’ll thank you.’ Her front tooth was tipped with fuchsia lipstick.
‘It’s not you know, love, it’s a public highway, actually,’ Richard pointed out affably. ‘Have you got any comment on your husband’s recent arrest?’
‘He was not arrested.’ Her soft chin quivered as she drew her camel coat tighter around her. ‘He was merely ‘elping the police with enquiries.’ She’d got very grand, apparently, since her husband won his seat four years ago. A stone squirrel gazed at us from the pillar behind her, concrete nut held forever between his paws.
‘Rightio. And why was that, then?’
She drew herself up to her inconsiderable height. ‘I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask him. But, I might add,’ she fixed us with steely little eyes, ‘he won’t tell you.’
‘Rightio,’ Richard repeated. ‘Well, thanks for your help.’
I leaned across him, offered her my hand. ‘Hi, Mrs Johnson. Rose Miller.’ She refused my hand and glared at me instead. ‘We will find out, you know, Mrs Johnson. It’ll be in the public domain before long, so you’d be doing yourself a big favour by telling us your side of things now.’
‘I have no interest in speaking with you,’ she said stiffly. ‘None whatsoever.’
‘This is your chance to put your side of the story across. We could offer you an exclusive.’
‘No comment,’ she sniffed. The little boy statue peeing into the lily pond looked on languidly as she slammed the garden gate behind her and sailed towards her house.
Richard sighed, and started the car without looking at me.
‘Richard, I—’
‘What?’ He concentrated overhard as he pulled out.
‘I hope – I mean, you didn’t think I was stepping on your toes back there?’
‘Of course not.’ He was obviously lying.
‘I just thought – she needed some coercion, and—’
‘Rose, it’s fine really.’ We slowed to a crawl behind an old red tractor. ‘I understand, honestly.’
But he still stared straight ahead, refusing to look at me. My heart sank. I rarely mentioned my previous incarnation, and although sometimes they actually asked my advice at the Burford Chronicle, it was hard not to see how differently we had done things on the nationals. I was used to the pace of the major broadsheets, the fast-track of a story you had to turn around immediately. I was used to working alone, pushing on despite being told no, unrelenting when I was on the trail of a story. But in Burford they ran a polite ship – it was just that kind of operation. However welcoming they’d been since I’d joined their ranks a year ago, sometimes I felt they just suffered me because they were just – well, polite.
‘So, what now—’ I began as a shiny black Range Rover with partially-tinted windows swung into the small lane far too fast, ragga music pumping from it, narrowly missing our wing mirror. I ducked instinctively as Richard swerved into the hedgerow.
‘Blimey!’
An indignant crow flapped out with a rusty squawk.
‘Bloody idiots,’ Richard muttered. ‘Can’t even drive the bloody things. I don’t know why they bother.’
In the mirror I watched the Range Rover disappear round the bend. It was impossible to see who was driving.
‘Stupid poser,’ Richard muttered, reversing.
I thought of my husband’s big car and cringed.
‘It must be so annoying when you’ve lived here all your life,’ I murmured.
‘What?’
‘All these fake farmers driving round in Chelsea tractors.’
‘Or lived here since ‘ninety-eight, any road.’ Richard’s face finally relaxed into a smile. ‘Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind having a go in one of them myself. I bet they’re bloody powerful.’
We drove back to the office debating the finer points of Mrs Johnson’s twee front garden. In the end, the pissing boy won genitals-down.
* * *
I was packing up to leave when Tina called me over.
‘I have got one thing that might be more up your street. We want to do a kind of Homes & Gardens thing about the new guys up at Albion Manor. Bit of local glamour.’
‘Oh?’ I chucked my notebook into my bag, unenthused. It might be time to give up on the Chronicle. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Hadi Kattan.’ She stuck her pen behind her ear. ‘I want to approach them about a lifestyle piece. It’d be quite a coup, wouldn’t it? And I think they’ll be quite keen because he’s already involved with some community stuff. Word is he’s helping launch his son’s political career, so they’re getting stuck in all over the place. And you’re our big catch really, so he might buy it.’ She looked up at me. ‘Sound up your street?’
I had a chance to say no. I knew I should. But the part of me that had been chasing a story since I was twenty-one said yes.
‘Sure,’ I said quickly. ‘Always. Let me know what you want to do.’
At bedtime I realised Effie’s efforts at breakfast meant we were out of milk, forcing me to unearth a reluctant James from the studio. Leaving the kids glued to Alice in Wonderland, I drove to the garage at the end of the lane.
Pulling my cardigan over my head, I dashed through the driving rain to the kiosk, plucking a carton of milk from the fridge. As I joined the queue, there was a sudden screech of tyres on wet tarmac and a collective gasp. A small sleek silver sports car had taken the corner too fast, swerving to miss a motorbike, mounting the grass verge outside the garage and coming to a juddering halt inches from the Entry sign.
She looked like the mermaid from Alicia’s book of myths, the young woman who flung herself from the car, and she was wailing. Her soaked green dress flowed round her body like seaweed, her face streaked with black kohl, her long hair dark and tangled under the fluorescence of the petrol station forecourt. The rain drummed down and the queue shifted and muttered as one organism, succumbing en masse to horrified fascination – for a moment, I couldn’t drag my eyes from her either. I stared out of the kiosk window at this beautiful barefoot woman weaving unsteadily between the petrol pumps, the silver Porsche abandoned behind her, driver’s door flung wide. In this light it was hard to see where the rain ended and her tears began.
I looked away, discomfort palpable in my chest, gazing instead at the damp and rather dirty neck in front of me, its owner now halted in her laborious counting out of coppers as she too stared, the silver raindrops on her beanie glistening.
‘She’s pissed out of her head,’ the burly man in the next queue muttered. ‘She don’t know what she’s doing. Look at her.’
‘Someone should call the police,’ an elderly woman said, her whiskers twitching, her face a sagging mask of disapproval above her ill-fitting mac. ‘It’s a disgrace.’
The mermaid raised her face to the heavens and howled into the night, her words incoherent. There was something so primal in her voice that all the little hairs on my arms stood on end. I pulled my old cardigan tight around me and willed the cashier to hurry up.
‘You should call the police. They should, shouldn’t they?’ The man looked to me for approval as he folded his newspaper, but I found that I was speechless, as round-eyed as one of my own children.
When I looked back, the woman was falling. Her hands out before her to meet the ground, she crumpled like a wounded soldier until she was finally on her hands and knees, where she froze for a moment, head bowed. A car behind her sounded its horn irritably.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, pushing past a boy on a mountain bike gawping in the doorway. I hurried across the short distance to where she crouched, attempting now to pull herself up, doubled in half as if in pain.
‘Are you all right?’ I bent beside her. Her eyes seemed blind as she looked up at me.
A black Range Rover pulled up behind the Porsche, bumping up onto the grass, gleaming with rain and polish, braking just in time.
‘I …’ She wiped her face on her arm, smudging the streaming eye make-up further. She seemed slightly delirious.
‘Can you stand?’ I said, offering her my hand, trying quickly to assess what was wrong. ‘Are you ill?’
I was half aware of the Range Rover’s door opening, a tall fair man in a black windcheater jumping down now from the driver’s seat.
‘I – I’m not sure,’ she mumbled. Her hand was ice cold. ‘I don’t feel – I’m not—’
‘Maya,’ the man behind me said.
I turned.
‘Thank you,’ he said to me, but he was looking at her. He spoke with a faint Celtic burr that I couldn’t place. ‘I’ll take over now.’
Our eyes met briefly as I stood too fast, staggering very slightly. He put out a hand to me but I’d regained my balance so he turned back to the girl now, sliding his hand into hers, gently releasing mine. I stepped back. He had her now; supporting her, holding her upright. I thought I could smell lemon sherbet.
‘If you’re all right then …’ I backed away, ‘I’ll just—’
‘We’re fine, really. Thanks a lot.’ The fair man nodded at me. Under the artificial light, his eyes were frighteningly blue, his tousled hair sun-bleached like a surfer’s. ‘Ash is in the car, Maya. He’s been really worried. Let’s get you back home, OK?’ His tone was soothing, like he was coaxing a nervous animal into a cage.
Through the open car door I saw the shadowed passenger lean forward and pull the cigarette lighter from the dashboard. I hesitated for a second, and then I ran back to the kiosk before I got any more wet.
The unnerved cashier was still muttering to her colleague about what to do and the burly man in his smelly red anorak was still loudly demanding someone call the police when another collective groan went up. I turned to see the girl collapse again, and now another man was by her side, dark-skinned like her, dressed in an expensive navy coat. The fair man stepped back.
The dark man pulled her up with gentle force and for a moment she hesitated, pulling away. He said something to her, taking her chin in his hand and making her look at him. Her make-up was streaming down her face in rivulets as she gazed at him, and she seemed to be listening. Eventually she stopped resisting and let herself sink into him, almost gratefully, her face in his shoulder as he guided her towards the big car like a docile child, ensuring she didn’t fall despite stumbling several times.
The girl in front of me had finally pocketed her 10 Rothmans. ‘Blimey,’ she said, pulling her beanie down protectively, ready for the downpour. ‘You don’t see that every day.’
‘You can say that again. Bloody foreigners. Just the milk?’ My cashier held her hand out. ‘Eighty-four pence, please.’
When I looked again, the girl like a maddened mermaid was being swallowed by the Range Rover. The dark man shut the door behind her and turned with a graceful movement to his audience in the kiosk. He smiled politely, bowed his head to us in a courtly gesture. Instinctively I stepped back.
He climbed into the Porsche. With a screech of tyres the Sweeney would have been proud of, both vehicles were quickly swallowed up by the night.
And then I went home, put the milk in the fridge, checked the children, fed the cat and finally went to bed alone again, I found that the woman’s image was imprinted on the back of my lids. And even as I fell into sleep, I couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that the second man, the man called Ash, had been less guiding her towards the vehicle than forcing her.
And there was something else, something deeper down, something clicking, whirring into place, like the levers on a deadlock that are not quite true yet. Images from the day: the mysterious Kattan, the MP’s wife so outraged, James, all newly tense. These images fought something I couldn’t quite access, a memory buried deep. A memory fighting to the surface.
UNIVERSITY, AUTUMN 1991
FRESHERS’ WEEK
The vague city … veiled in mist … A place much too good for you ever to have much to do with.
Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
In the beginning …
In the beginning there was just me. And then they found me.
Had I known I was being chosen for such immoral ends, I like to think I would have declined the invitation, that I would have made good my escape before it was too late – though I fear that my belief only comes from the beauty of hindsight – and anyway, theory is too hard now to distinguish from fact. But if I had ever guessed it would all end in tragedy and death, I would have stayed at home.
But I didn’t know. I was a true innocent when I began.
Petrified and knowing absolutely no one, I arrived in the small soft-coloured city with my father’s best suitcase, a dog-eared poster of the Happy Mondays and a box-set of Romantic poets that my grandma had bought me for my eighteenth birthday. I’d tried really hard to decline the green velvet lampshade my mother insisted I take from the spare room, to no avail; I planned to dump it at the earliest opportunity.
About to become part of an institution so venerable and famous, in the place of pride I felt fear, constantly wishing I’d gone with Ruth to Bristol to study drama with all the cool kids. I’d endured a painful Freshers’ Week of starting stilted conversations with other monosyllabic teenagers, or worse, kids who wouldn’t stop talking about anything elitist. By and large the beautiful crowd from Britain’s public schools – Roedean and Eton, Harrow and King’s – all seemed to know one another already and were imbued with the knowledge they needed no one else. Completely ignored, I felt adrift and friendless; overawed by the beauty of the city and the magnitude of history resting on its shoulders. Everywhere I walked were buildings so classical I’d seen them in books or on television; everywhere I wandered, the voices of students far more erudite than I echoed in my ears.
Eventually, sick of my own company, and with the vague hope I could win kudos enough to hang out with the ‘journos’, I wrote a ridiculously pretentious piece for the student newspaper (cribbed largely from library textbooks) on the Romantic poets, their denial of organised religion and how they would have loved the speed and freedom of motorbikes. To my undying amazement, it was printed.
On the Sunday evening, about to venture to the college bar for the first time, confident I finally had something to talk about of interest, I stacked my ten-pences up on the top of the payphone in my corridor and rang my parents to tell of my first success. My mother had just answered when I heard a snigger behind my back.
‘Shelley fucked Mary on a Yamaha, didn’t you know?’
‘Yeah, but Keats preferred Suzukis, I think you’ll find. La Belle Dame Sans Suzuki. Brilliant.’
Mortified, I banged the phone down on my poor mother and hid in my room for a week.
But boredom eventually got the better of me and I finally accepted an invitation from my sole acquaintance, a sulky girl called Moira, to go to the bar – where I drank two pints of snakebite ill-advisedly fast through sheer terror. Moira, who’d attached herself to me the previous week in the introductory lecture on Women’s literature of the nineteenth century, was for some reason deeply bitter already, and I was concentrating hard on blocking out both her drone and her rather pus-encrusted chin when a dark-haired boy, who looked like he might be about to introduce himself, tripped over a stool.
‘Watch out!’ I shrieked, ten seconds too late. He’d deposited his entire pint in my lap, the cold beer soaking straight through to my skin. ‘Oh God.’
‘Very sorry,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘I’ll get you another one if you like.’
‘I don’t like, thanks very much,’ I huffed, standing up, my smock dress an unpleasant second skin. I had an odd feeling he’d done it deliberately. ‘I absolutely stink now. I’ll have to go and change.’
‘Oh, don’t do that,’ said the boy. ‘At least you’ll deter this lot.’ He nodded towards a group of apparently giant youths whose ears stuck out at funny angles and who had just begun a round of indecent rugby songs. One of them winked at me and immediately began to sing, ‘The girl with the biggest tits in the world is the only girl for me.’
‘I doubt it.’ I found I was emboldened by the alcohol. ‘The smell of beer’s probably a turn-on for them.’
The dark-haired boy laughed. ‘You could be right there.’
‘I’ll come with you.’ Moira shot to her feet, clamping my arm between slightly desperate hands as if she sensed she was about to be usurped. ‘I need to start work on my Wollstonecraft essay anyway.’
‘Oh dear, do you?’ I looked at the boy’s grin and then at Moira’s yellow pimples. ‘Look, actually, you go on.’ I eased my arm gently from her hold. ‘I’ll have a gin and orange please,’ I said to the boy with a confidence I didn’t really feel. It was what my grandma drank; the first sophisticated drink that came to my slightly panicked mind. ‘As long as you promise to stay between me and him.’
The rugby player’s ruddy face was gurning scarily at me as he invoked the delights of the arse of an angel. Moira stomped off muttering about beer and Wollstonecraft and ‘some people’.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I called after her, rather too quietly.
The evening became a blur of alcohol and fags, and smoking a joint round the back of the bar, which was not as scary as I’d feared before my inaugural hesitant drag, though my head did spin a bit, and then going to someone’s room in Jesus College, where someone else suggested a drinking game and we shared what they called ‘a chillum’, and I felt very debauched and grownup until a plump girl called Liddy was sick in the bin, so we left. And frankly I was relieved, because my head was by now on the verge of spinning right off.
‘I’ll walk you back if you like,’ said the boy, who was called James and had nice smiley eyes and freckles. He said his dad had been a butcher and he was the first in his family to go to university, which bonded us because I was also the first in my immediate family, though actually my uncle – the white sheep of the Langtons – had attended this college and I wasn’t entirely sure that hadn’t helped me a bit to get my place. That, and the fact that during my interview the white-haired professor had sucked a stubby old cigar throughout, most of the time gazing at the velvet smoke whilst I’d banged on about William Faulkner and the great American novel for fifteen painful minutes. Finally, as bored of the subject as the be-suited professor obviously was, I’d asked what brand he was smoking as my father imported cigars from Cuba to his little shop in Derby and loved a Monte Cristo himself. After a discussion about the hotspots of Havana, where I managed to drop in mentions of both Hemingway and Graham Greene, as well as the delights of a daiquiri, the enchanted professor was happy to recommend I got an unconditional place.
On the way back to my room James and I passed a polished Ducati parked between two obviously student cars, one of them an Escort leaning dangerously towards the pavement. Drunkenly I admired the bike; my big brother rode one and there was nothing I loved more than getting a lift on the back – though my mother always went mad when I did.
James looked at me strangely as I kneeled down by the bike (wondering, actually, whether I could ever stand again). ‘You’re the girl who wrote that article in the Cherwell, aren’t you?’
‘My fame precedes me,’ I agreed, too drunk to be embarrassed. The fresh air was doing nothing for my level of intoxication. ‘I thought it was quite good when I wrote it, but everyone else thought it was terrible. It was terrible wasn’t it?’
‘Do you know Society X?’ James said quietly. I could have sworn he checked behind him before he did so, but I was having some trouble focusing at all by now, so perhaps I’d imagined it.
‘Nope,’ I shook my head. ‘Never heard of Society X.’ I’d just attended the Freshers’ Fair because frankly I’d had nothing else to do. I’d signed up to do Martial Arts because I quite fancied Bruce Lee and the idea of felling a villain with the single chop of a swift hand, and the Poetry Society because occasionally I wrote a few fairly dreadful stanzas myself, mainly about my dreams – but to be honest I found large groups of people rather shy-making. So instead I made a bad joke about X-rated films but James didn’t laugh; he just looked at me strangely again before depositing me at the porters’ lodge without so much as trying to kiss me. I was a bit surprised but actually relieved because that week I was still in love with a boy called Ralph whom I’d met in the summer holidays and who had promised to call me a fortnight ago. I was still waiting.
And to be honest I forgot all about James and Society X until I met Dalziel, the aristocratic Honourable who spoke like he’d stepped from the pages of Waugh but partied like a rock star in the making.
UNIVERSITY, OCTOBER 1991
The heavenly Jerusalem.
Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
A week or so later Moira and I bumped into James on the Bridge after a tutorial, battered old guitar slung across his back.
‘Come for a drink. I might even play something, if you’re lucky.’ James winked at me, dodging the bike-riders who sounded indignant bells. I didn’t need much persuading; I realised I was pleased to see him. So far, university wasn’t turning out to be the social whirlwind I’d imagined. As I followed James into the King’s Arms, the pub where all the cool kids drank that term, I felt a quickening in my step. For the first time since I’d arrived in the city, I felt like I might actually be part of something.
I spotted Dalziel as soon as I walked in; it was impossible not to. His reputation preceded him; I’d heard a couple of girls whispering and giggling about him a few times in the bar or over coffee in the rec. He was apparently infamous, a third year known for his flamboyance, his looks and his charm. Lounging against the bar with an indolent grace, seemingly born of the innate knowledge that the world was his, he idly saluted James and then turned back to his friends. James bought a round of cider whilst Moira and I found a table beside Dalziel’s friends.
I watched Dalziel hold court, laughing about something, blowing smoke-rings. After a while, I found I couldn’t look away. I heard him mention a group called The Assassins.
‘I’ve never heard of them,’ I muttered to James. ‘What do they sing?’
‘They don’t sing anything, petal,’ James laughed. ‘They’re a group of supposed student dissidents who mess around with gunpowder, amongst other things.’ He downed half his pint in one. ‘Bunch of stupid schoolboys, if you ask me.’
‘I got sick of blowing things up, to be honest,’ I heard Dalziel drawl, and I felt a quiver of something visceral; a leap in my belly that I couldn’t name. I stared at him. ‘Pretty bloody tame.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Not enough banging.’
What did I feel then? Did I see a chance to be lifted from my so-far dull suburban life? The chance for the parameters of my life to be widened? Or did I just sense pure unadulterated danger?
Dalziel’s group leaned together and began to whisper. A peroxided beauty, small and dark-skinned, lazed beside him, biting her nails in evident boredom and scowling at a taller girl with a funny angular chin, apparently called Lena. Lena was swaying at the table between the bar and us; talking very fast and with great animation to anyone who’d listen. I heard the words ‘X’ and ‘commandment’ and then she was told to keep her voice down.
‘Is that the society – the X one?’ I asked James. ‘That you were on about before?’
‘Shh,’ he said nervously, sliding his eyes towards Dalziel.
‘What?’ I frowned at him. Moira came back from the loo and sat heavily between us. James looked even more worried.
‘It’s – I’m not – I shouldn’t have mentioned it really.’
‘What?’ said Moira. James ignored her.
The peroxide girl sat at their table too now, very deliberately kissing a beautiful Asian boy who had just leaned over her chair, her lithe body snaking round and up towards him. The tall girl had stopped talking and was staring at them aghast. After a few minutes, she slammed her chair back and flung herself out of the pub.
‘Oh dear,’ said James with glee. ‘Lena’s not happy.’
The other girl winked at him and turned back to the boy, but her eyes were on Dalziel the whole time.
‘Why’s it a secret?’ I persisted, my second pint making me bold. ‘What’s the big deal?’
The boy slipped his hand into the peroxide girl’s top. I looked away, embarrassed and, if I was honest, a little envious. I hadn’t heard from Ralph again, which was rather mortifying as I’d spent the whole of August agonising over whether to give him my virginity. Finally I’d awarded him with it, sure it would be the start of something great. To my undying disappointment it had been painful and deeply unromantic, my head knocking against his mother’s coffee table, fluff from her sheepskin rug tickling my nose, a carpet burn on my calf: all that, and I was still awaiting his call. Apart from the rugby players, I hadn’t met anyone yet who’d shown any interest in me since I’d arrived. I was too quiet, I knew that; I hung back, too diffident, too shy.
‘Just – please, leave it for now,’ James shook his head at me. ‘I’ll – one day, you might find out. I just …’ he trailed off unhappily.
‘OK.’ I was a bit hurt. I saw the inclusion I’d glimpsed slipping away. ‘I get the message.’
‘I think I might have to go, actually,’ Moira slurred. She looked a little green.
‘It’s not like that, Rose,’ James tried to explain. ‘It’s just—’
‘I’ll come with you, Moira.’ I finished my drink and stood, noticing that Dalziel had broken away from his companions and was waiting to be served at the bar.
‘Please don’t get offended,’ James was saying. ‘It’s just not my place to—’
On a sudden whim, I crossed to the bar, somewhat unsteadily.
‘Hello,’ I said shyly to Dalziel, and promptly dried up. His skin was like a girl’s, so smooth it glowed, and he was the kind of natural blond people paid hundreds to simulate. I stared up at him, fascinated.
‘Hello,’ he replied, obviously amused, and offered me a hand. ‘I’m Dalziel.’
‘I know.’ I took the hand. His skin was very cool.
‘Right. And you are …?’
‘I’m Rose.’
The barmaid was there. ‘A bottle of best white,’ he informed her.
‘Don’t get the Soave.’ I wasn’t quite sure how to say it so I pronounced it ‘suave’.
‘I wouldn’t dare,’ he assured me. ‘I said best – and anyway, I never drink Italian. Sancerre, please,’ he said, flicking through the list. A dog-eared copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost lay beside him on the bar.
‘I’m studying that next,’ I said shyly. ‘It’s difficult, isn’t it? All the old language.’
‘It’s twenty pounds a bottle,’ the barmaid sounded weary. ‘The Sancerre. Are you sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure.’ He didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘Greatest text ever written.’ He shoved the Milton in the back pocket of his tight black trousers. ‘Darkness visible, and all.’
I was impressed. James appeared at my shoulder, and I found I was irritated. Surreptitiously I tried to turn my back on him, but he was persistent.
‘Your friend had to go,’ James said. ‘She’s not very well.’
‘Ah, so you’ve met my old mucker,’ Dalziel said. Next to him James looked like a burly farm-boy, I thought drunkenly.
‘Have you read Scott Fitzgerald?’ I was staring again. The heat of the pub was making me feel sleepy.
‘Of course,’ Dalziel shrugged languidly. ‘The Beautiful and Damned. Most apt.’
‘You remind me of someone, you know.’
James snorted. ‘Great line, Rosie.’
‘It wasn’t a line.’ I was flustered.
‘It might not have been, sweetness, but I could certainly do with one.’
‘One what?’ I was lost.
‘One great line.’ Dalziel took the money from the barmaid idly and then folded a five-pound note into her pudgy hand. ‘Or more. For you, my angel.’
I gaped at him; not even my father tipped so extravagantly. Dalziel picked up the bottle and motioned for James to bring the glasses.
‘So, Jamie, my love,’ he threw over his shoulder, heading towards the table where we’d been sitting, ‘what do you think?’
James looked unsure. ‘About what?’
‘A Rose between two thorns, hey?’
I looked into Dalziel’s eyes. Later, I realised I’d never really known what colour they were. Amber perhaps.
‘Another little convert for us? And an English student too. Are you well read?’
‘Reasonably,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m getting there.’
‘Perhaps you can help with my Union debate about God and the Devil.’
I was overwhelmed with gratitude and excitement; surprised because he didn’t seem the godly type – but if it meant spending time with Dalziel, I would have converted to anything. For the first time since I’d arrived in Oxford, I was glad to be there. But then, I had no idea what was in store.
Chapter Three GLOUCESTERSHIRE, MARCH 2008 (#u5f91f007-643d-57f4-be2c-c586f858bc95)
The morning after I’d tried to help the wailing girl at the garage, I dropped the twins at nursery and drove homewards through the green Cotswold lanes, fighting a sudden longing for a cigarette. Xavier was still waiting to hear from me; and Lord Higham’s face was staring at me impassively from the morning paper on the passenger seat. Images I’d blocked for years flickered remorselessly through my head until I had to pull onto a farm track. The rain had finally stopped during the night and the hedgerow sparkled with moisture, but I felt strangely bleak. I’d always known it was a risk coming here. It was too close for comfort; it always had been.
But during my last pregnancy four years ago, James had been recovering from a serious bout of depression. His record label had narrowly missed a takeover bid, thanks to his business partner’s bad accounting, and the incident seemed to prompt the return of the nightmares from university days. He’d been haunted again, resulting in drugs and drink to counter endless sleepless nights. In the end he’d said the countryside was what he needed, he’d practically begged: and I’d craved peace myself, too exhausted to question his motives.
I sat in the car for a long time, thinking.
‘Oxford 15 m, London 53m’ read the quaint white fingerpost. Wearily I rested my head on the steering wheel as Mick Jagger bemoaned ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. I felt utterly confused and suddenly torn. London and Xavier lay in one direction; my family and my home were in the other. And somewhere suddenly in the middle were these memories, the cold clamp of the past pressing around me, the hideous misadventure James and I had fought to leave behind.
I restarted the car, startling a lugubrious cow peering over the hedge, and I saw it was already time to collect the twins. They were so pleased to see me, running into my knees with euphoric cries of ‘Mummy!’ like I was the best thing since ice cream or Father Christmas, that the guilt I felt was savage. I shouldn’t write about anything other than giant marrows: that much I owed my children. But my soul was aching for the thrill of the hunt. I took them home and kissed and hugged them until they told me to go away, and eventually deposited them in the garden sandpit with sandwiches and juice whilst I sat on the stone bench and watched them.
After a while I went inside and unearthed my notebook from the tidy pile, peeling an ancient half-eaten Twix from the front, and took it outside. Sitting on the bench in the spring sunshine, watching Effie’s sand-cakes grow ever wetter, and Fred sampling some tasty mud, I scribbled for a while. When I’d finished, I closed the book and fished my phone out.
‘So’, I said carefully when he answered, ‘if I do it, can I have carte blanche?’
‘Don’t be silly. You’re not Kate bloody Adie, darling.’
‘Not quite, no,’ I said. ‘I’m a bit Northern but not nearly as posh.’
‘And you’re prettier. Well, marginally.’
‘Yeah, OK, Xav. Don’t go overboard.’
‘Listen, something else has just come through on the wire from Qatar about Kattan. It might be nothing. But I wanna be first if it’s there. Specially after the fucking Telegraph stealing our ten-p tax thunder. I’ll send everything over.’
‘OK.’
‘And, Rose, one thing. Be careful of interesting angles.’
‘Funny,’ I said shortly. I’d nearly been sued by the South African government the last time I’d written for Xav. Thankfully my instinct had been right, but it had been scary there for a while; the court costs mounting into six figures, me envisaging utter ruin.
‘You’ve got a week.’
‘OK.’ I hung up. Effie looked up at me and then carefully poured some sand into her red plastic cup.
‘Cup of tea, Mummy?’ she asked earnestly, holding it out to me.
‘Do you know what, my angel,’ I lowered myself into the sandpit between them, ‘I don’t mind if I do.’
I had meant to discuss my plans with James that evening, though secretly I was dreading it. He was happy with me doing one day at the local paper: returning to a national would be entirely different.
But by the time the children were fed and bathed and I’d thought of all the right things to appease him with, James’s partner in crime, Liam, had arrived for the night. Unsurprisingly, he had a new girlfriend in tow, a tiny jolly redhead with see-through skin and an over-inflated bosom.
Lord Higham was being interviewed on Radio Four when they arrived. I was desperate to listen but turned it down hurriedly as James walked into the kitchen. I knew he’d freak if he so much as heard the name.
‘Hey, babe,’ Liam kissed me. ‘This is Star.’
‘Wow.’ I suppressed a smile. ‘Hi, Star.’
‘That’s a funny name,’ Alicia said. ‘It’s like being called Moon.’
‘Or Bum-bum,’ said Freddie with a joyful snigger.
‘No it’s not, silly,’ said Alicia. ‘It’s not like Bum-bum is it, Mum?’
‘No it’s not,’ I said, trying to keep a straight face. ‘It’s very silly, Freddie.’
‘Bum-bum,’ Freddie repeated, his eyes round at his own daring.
‘Anyway you shouldn’t say that, should he, Mum? It’s rude.’
‘No, he shouldn’t,’ I agreed solemnly. ‘It is very silly, Freddie.’
‘Bum-bum!’
‘That’s enough, Fred,’ his father warned.
‘It’s not my real name actually – Star,’ Star offered in rather vacant Northern tones. ‘I wish it were, but it’s not.’
‘Oh.’ Alicia, disappointed, took a moment to absorb this. ‘What is it then?’
‘Sarah. But you don’t meet many film stars called Sarah, do you? It’s dead dull.’
‘Are you a film star then?’ Alicia’s eyes widened. ‘A real live one?’
‘No.’ Star shook her head sadly. ‘Not yet. I’m a podium dancer. But I will be one day.’
‘What’s a – a podion dancer?’
‘Well, my darling,’ Liam’s eyes lit up, ‘it’s a lady who—’
‘Alicia, have you finished your homework?’ I cut across James’s friend and partner, throwing him a warning glare. ‘We should do your reading, shouldn’t we? Do you need a hand?’
Liam was now swinging Effie wildly over his shoulder to screams of huge delight.
‘My turn, my turn …’ Freddie hopped up and down like a small jumping bean. ‘My turn, Uncle Liam!’
James pulled a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and three glasses out of the cupboard. ‘We’re going through to the studio.’ He winked at me. ‘All right, petal?’
It wasn’t a question.
‘Come on, Liam, put her down. You’ve got to listen to this new mix. And Don’s sent the new plans through. They’re fucking wicked.’
‘James!’ I admonished, but he just gave me a look.
‘Why don’t you all have some dinner first?’ I offered hopefully. I could do with the company. I wanted to hear Liam’s news and Star’s views on podium fashion and world politics – anything, really, rather than be stranded high and dry with my own thoughts. The radio stared at me malevolently.
‘You must be hungry. Did you eat on the way? I could knock up some pasta, if you like.’
‘That’d be grand,’ Liam began, but James glowered at him.
‘No time to eat, mate,’ he said. ‘No rest for the wicked!’
Liam shot me a look that said he wasn’t arguing. My heart sank. I knew this was the last I’d see of James till at least midday tomorrow. I made a final attempt.
‘Oh, come on, guys. You must be starving after your trek up the M40.’ I was almost pleading. ‘It’s no trouble. How about a nice carbonara?’
‘Rosie, love.’ James kissed me on the cheek, his voice dangerously low. I could smell whiskey on his breath. ‘I don’t think you need any more slap-up feeds right now. Know what I’m saying?’
I turned away quickly before they caught the glint of tears, knocking my notebook off the counter by mistake. I used to be at ease with my body, like Star seemed to be – once, before I’d had the children. James picked the notebook up. Idly he flicked it open at the last page, the page I’d scrawled on earlier, and began to read aloud in a stupid voice.
‘“I feel savage, and I can’t be, not here. I am confined by the honey-coloured stone, the sheer niceness of it all, the pretty houses, the postcard perfect village, the cricket green shorn to within an inch of its life, the twitching net curtains that are snowy white. It’s all perfect and yet I am not. It is perfect and it’s killing me.”‘
‘James, please,’ I said, trying to grab it back. Mortified, feeling like I’d just been horribly exposed, I couldn’t bear to look at the others as James held the book out of reach high above his head; with sinking heart, I saw he was poisonous with drink.
‘Oh dear, Rosie darling,’ he pouted. ‘Bit bored? Poor you. The perfect idyll and you’re suicidal.’
‘I’m not at all suicidal.’ I was flushing violently now. ‘It’s just an idea for a story.’
James chucked it down on the side. ‘Don’t give up the day job,’ he said with malice. ‘Oh, that’s right, you don’t have one any more.’
‘Come on, mate,’ Liam muttered. Star seemed oblivious, thank God.
‘James!’ I mumbled. ‘Please, don’t.’
As quickly as he switched, he switched back again.
‘I’m only teasing, darling,’ he said, stroking my face. His eyes were black with something. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean it. Come on, guys.’
‘You’re gorgeous, babe.’ Liam squeezed my hand as he left the room. ‘Ignore him. He doesn’t know he’s born.’
‘I like your house,’ I heard Star saying as they disappeared in James’s wake, off to the studio built in the old garage. ‘Is it real?’
As the door shut on them, I opened the biscuit tin and crammed two Jaffa Cakes down in defiance before sharing the rest with my delighted children. I wasn’t gorgeous any more, if I ever had been. I knew that.
‘Right, you lot. Bed.’
We’d moved from London just after I’d had the twins. I’d been in a stupor of sleep deprivation and cracked nipples, and possibly undiagnosed post-natal depression, worrying about Alicia and whether she felt pushed out, worrying that I didn’t have enough time or love to split fairly between three children. I did have enough love, it turned out – more than enough – but I didn’t have enough time. That had become clear quite quickly.
My mother had come to stay for the first month, unpacking boxes, heating bottles and washing an endless rotation of small babygros. My father watched the golf; sometimes I slumped beside him on the sofa, wondering how a woman who’d once partied for England, ridden in army helicopters above battlegrounds and regularly flown into places like war-torn Sarajevo for work could be so utterly pole-axed by two tiny babies and a boisterous three-year-old. Occasionally I also wondered what the hell I was doing in the middle of the Cotswold countryside, pretty but reminiscent of the rural life that I’d left behind in the Peak District as a teenager – and far too near Oxford for my liking. But I was victim of James’s whim after he’d shot a music video at Blenheim Palace and fallen in love with the place – apparently. Worried about the nightmares and the depression, I’d let myself be roller-coastered by his enthusiasm.
I’d given up everything for my kids, willingly; one of us had to and there didn’t seem to be any question that it would be me. I’d certainly never argued. I’d simply switched off my computer and left the paper, my city friends and my beloved flat in Marylebone for my children and the country air they needed. There wasn’t enough room for the pram on the pavement any more and, crucially, I didn’t want to foist them onto a nanny whilst I continued tearing round the world unmasking controversy in often dodgy situations. It was time for domesticity, I’d accepted that quite readily. I was tired of running – that was the truth.
When the children were asleep, I sat at the kitchen table and poured myself a small glass of wine. I opened the laptop, attempted to write something about Edna’s allotment – but giant marrows kept popping into my head. I saw myself through James’s eyes: I was just like a benign shepherd. Not even that, a well-trained and obedient sheepdog. I rounded my children up and chased them gently through the day, and even when they or I were asleep, one ear was always cocked, one ear pinioned by my duty. Gone were the days when I went leaping to the challenge of a good story. Now my role was to stay close, although James was apparently still free to roam, and I was too exhausted to argue.
After about twenty minutes of desultory typing and deleting, typing and more deleting, I checked my emails for distraction.
There was one from Xav with biog details of Hadi Kattan, which I perused quickly. He was a fascinating man. He was born in Iran. His parents and sister had been incarcerated under the Shah’s regime; he was the only survivor from his immediate family, thanks to being away at school in Britain. After their deaths he’d stayed here for some time, under an uncle’s wing, educated first at Rugby and then Cambridge. He had famously denounced Islam in his thesis, part of which was published to great acclaim and controversy in The Times, after which he’d rejected the literary career so many had predicted and had gone on to make his reputation as a brilliant but ruthless trader on the London and New York stock exchanges. He briefly headed the Equities division of the World-Trident Bank before moving into the art world and retiring early with a huge fortune. His wife, Alia, had died five years ago, leaving him two children. The rumours of political intrigue, and an al-Qaeda connection seemed unlikely to me, given Kattan’s political and religious background.
Below Xav’s email was another, forwarded from Tina at the Chronicle.
‘ASH KATTAN: HOPE FOR THE FUTURE,’ the header said, and there followed a message from Tina: ‘Hadi Kattan is hosting a party at his place on Tuesday to mark the launch of his son’s political campaign: we’re invited. Perfect opportunity to ingratiate ourselves. Grab that lovely husband of yours and get a babysitter.’
I contemplated it for a moment. I felt the adrenalin begin to course through my veins, and I knew, as I’d known all day, that I wasn’t going to be able to resist chasing the story.
UNIVERSITY, OCTOBER 1991
Sweet roses … Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made.
Sonnet 54, Shakespeare
Despite Dalziel’s apparent – if rather lackadaisical – enthusiasm for my help in the pub that night, I didn’t hear from him again. I was hugely disappointed, but not that surprised. Along with the realisation my brief encounter with him had been just a drunken fancy of his, my nebulous hope of acceptance into the upper echelons slowly died.
The Student Union put on a do on Saturday for Hallowe’en; resolutely I bought my ticket. Moany Moira was going home for the weekend, and I saw my chance. I had to make some proper friends. The theme was ‘Spooky ‘60s style’; I eschewed the normal array of ghosts and werewolf costumes, and went for a pretty spectacular multicoloured Mr Freedom jumpsuit I found in the local Oxfam and some plastic fangs. After an hour or so of pretending I was having a good time with a few people from the Poetry Society, bobbing around to the Bee Gees and Mama Cass, James arrived looking rather handsome as a be-fanged vampire in a Beatles suit, a besotted freckle-faced girl dressed as Twiggy in tow. James waved but didn’t come to say hello, and I felt a faint lurch as I watched the pair kissing passionately beneath fake cobwebs in the corner.
Surprised at myself, I drank too much cider, ending up cornered by an over-enthusiastic rugby player, a tall sandy-haired boy called Peter whose long hair had a nasty slick sheen, and who was so drunk he kept calling me Rosemary. Eventually I relented and let him kiss me outside the girls’ loos, but when he started to paw at the zip of my jumpsuit with a large sweaty hand, I pushed him away gently.
‘Com’on, Roze-mary,’ he slurred, swaying dangerously. ‘You know you want to really.’
‘Actually, I really don’t,’ I insisted, but he was heavy and drunk, and horribly persistent. His breath a cloying mix of beer and peanuts, his wet pink mouth leered above my face before closing down on mine.
‘Please!’ I pushed him away harder this time, his lips leaving a trail of smelly saliva and peanut crumbs across my cheek. ‘Get off!’
‘Fucking Christ,’ he snarled. ‘You bloody plebs are all the same.’ He lunged forward, slamming me against the wall as he pinioned me there, so hard that I hit my head on the skeleton hanging behind me. ‘Little prick-tease.’
‘Ow,’ I clutched my head as the plastic bones rattled, a little stunned. Before I could move, Peter lunged forward again – and then, as if an invisible wire had pulled him, suddenly he flew backwards, landing on his arse on the beer-stained floor.
‘Didn’t you hear the lady?’
Startled, I gazed at a glowering James.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes. Fine, thanks.’ Together we stared down at the crumpled Peter. Greying Y-fronts were visible above his ill-fitting brown cords, large sweat-patches staining the underarms of his striped shirt. I shuddered. I was drunker than I realised.
‘I don’t think she was enjoying that very much.’ James was absolutely nonchalant, but his fists were both clenched. ‘Were you, Rose?’
‘Not much,’ I agreed, nervously.
‘Who the fuck … ?’ Peter scrambled inelegantly to his feet, a mottled red suffusing his clammy complexion. ‘Who the fuck asked you?’
‘No one,’ James shrugged pleasantly, turning away.
‘Oi!’ Peter pulled James round by the shoulder. ‘I said, who asked you, you jumped-up little twat?’
‘Let go, mate.’ I could feel the tension rising in James as he stared at Peter’s hand.
‘You’re one of those Society X morons, aren’t you? Licking bloody St John’s arse.’
James punched Peter square on the nose. There was a nasty crunch and an almost immediate spurt of blood. The taller boy crumpled forwards again, clutching his nose. James just stared down at him, and the blankness on his face chilled me.
‘James!’ The pale girl he’d been canoodling with in the bar stood in the doorway, her red beret pulled down over her curls, false eyelashes like spider-legs framing her huge shocked eyes.
‘Yeah, all right, Kate.’ James shook his hand ruefully. ‘Ouch. His nose was harder than it looked.’
I gaped at him.
‘You might want to think about leaving now,’ James said softly, propelling me back towards the bar. ‘We could walk you …’
‘James!’ The girl was scowling. She was very young, fifteen or sixteen maybe. Younger than we were. Peter groaned on the ground.
‘I’ll be fine.’ I sensed her hostility. I’d had enough aggro for one night. ‘Honestly. Thank you, though.’
As I left the bar, I glanced back at James. He was holding his companion’s arm, apparently soothing her as they gathered their coats to beat a retreat themselves. Catching my eye, he held a hand up in farewell. I was utterly confused.
The following day was the anniversary of my French grandmother’s death. I spoke to my mother on the phone in the morning; she tried valiantly to mask her sadness.
‘Light a candle, love, if you get the chance. She’d like that,’ she said, but I knew it was unlikely I’d be near a church. I mumbled something placatory, and promised to write soon.
Around four o’clock, after a day spent struggling with Blake’s Songs of Innocence, I was desperate to get out of my stuffy little room. I grabbed my coat and fled into the fresh air.
The light was already dying in the chilly autumn afternoon as I walked aimlessly; my feet taking me across the Christ Church Meadow towards the old cathedral. The windows suffused with gold looked welcoming against the darkening velvet of the sky, and the choir were just finishing their rehearsals as I slipped into a pew at the back of the great building, listening to the last few beautiful lines of what I later learned was Handel’s Messiah.
I waited as they packed up, calling to each other jovially, agreeing to meet in the pub over the road, and then I wandered down to the great table where the candles were kept.
The door slammed behind the last chorister. I put my money in the honesty box, chose a candle and then carried it to the wooden rack where the others flickered. I placed it alongside the others, some still lit, some melted to tiny jagged stubs, the flames shining bravely in the dim light.
As I picked up the matches I thought I heard a footstep, but when I looked round, the cathedral seemed deserted apart from me. I lit my candle and tried to focus my mind, thinking fondly of my grandmother, her funny Anglicisms, her boeuf Bourguignon that melted in your mouth, her horror when my mother cut my infant hair short. (‘Mon Dieu! So common, Lynette. Vraiment, tout le monde dirait qu’elle est un garçon!’)
Placing the matches back, I felt a draught down the back of my neck. A sudden scraping noise made my heart jump – and then a great gust of wind blew through the cathedral from nowhere. All the flames guttered. My candle went out.
I tried to stand but I had cramp in my leg. Limping, I hurried as fast as I could towards the great doors – which suddenly seemed very far. I didn’t want to stay and relight the candle; I wanted to go now. But before I reached the door, a slim figure slipped from behind a pillar, framed against the stained glass like an unholy apparition. I blinked. It was Dalziel.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ I stuttered. I gathered my wits. ‘Hello.’
‘Praying for redemption?’ He arched an eyebrow. Wearing a long black Astrakhan coat, the collar turned up to frame his pale face, he looked otherworldly. ‘Are you the religious type then?’ He regarded me coolly. ‘You don’t really look it.’
‘No. I – it was my grandmother. She died – just, a few years – well, I – I just came to remember her, I suppose.’
‘Well, All Souls’ Eve is past.’ He flicked his blond hair back.
‘So?’ I didn’t know what he meant.
‘When, my dear, the boundary is open between the dead and the living. But perhaps she’ll rise again tonight.’
‘Oh.’ I thought of how very sick and slight my elegant grandmother had been at the end. ‘God, I kind of hope not. I think she might be happier where she is.’
‘Really?’ Dalziel looked amused. ‘Remind me of your name.’ He took a step towards me. ‘Something floral, wasn’t it?’
‘Rose. Rose Langton.’
‘Ah yes. Rose. “Of sweetest odours made.” Well, perhaps you can help me, now you’re here.’
I blushed hotly. ‘Help you?’
‘Yes. Number Four.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ I mumbled. He was so beautiful, close up. Ethereal, almost.
‘Never mind. No time to explain. Got to defile Sabbath’s day before the protectors get here.’ Dalziel picked up the bag at his feet. A bright pink feather boa protruded from one end. ‘Jesus needs a little help with his outfit. He’s been feeling a bit chilly.’
As I watched in amazement, Dalziel produced full suspenders and stockings, crotchless knickers and nipple tassels in red satin, a push-up bra in black lace and a bottle of champagne, still cold, all from his bag.
‘You open the Krug.’ He pressed the bottle on me. ‘I’ll dress him. And get a move on. This place is never empty for long.’
I didn’t dare admit I’d no idea how to open a bottle of champagne. Like a lost puppy, I followed him as he carried the underwear over to the six-foot Jesus, who gazed sadly down at the floor near our feet.
‘See.’ Dalziel ran his hand lovingly down Jesus’s torso. ‘He’s freezing, poor bastard. Where’s Mary when you need her, eh?’
Our eyes met and I felt a strange heat suffuse me, somewhere in the very core of me. Quickly I looked away again, struggled with the champagne’s foil, untwisting the metal. For some reason my hand was shaking.
‘Tassels or bra?’
The cork popped suddenly, nearly taking my eye out. It hit the pillar and ricocheted beneath a pew.
‘Oh, you bugger,’ Dalziel was murmuring to himself as champagne sputum poured over my leg, the froth spraying Jesus’s new outfit.
‘The tassels won’t stay on. His chest’s too slippery. So that decides it.’ Dalziel clipped the bra round the back of Jesus. ‘There we go.’ He took the bottle from my hand and toasted Jesus. ‘Genius.’
‘But …’ I looked at the incongruous idol before me. The suspenders flapped in a slight breeze coming from somewhere. ‘I don’t understand. Why …’
Voices were audible from the back of the cathedral. Dalziel took a quick slug and then shoved the champagne at me as he gathered up his bag. ‘Come on.’
‘You forgot the boa,’ I whispered.
‘Too late.’ Dalziel grabbed my other hand, and we ran for it, giggling up the side aisle, dribbling champagne and pink feathers as we went.
Outside we kept running, expecting to hear angry voices behind us, through the grounds, past the porter in his bowler hat and Crombie, towards the Meadow, ending panting beneath a huge tree as it began to drizzle. Dalziel took the bottle and drank, long and hard. He looked at me.
‘You know, you’re more fun than I expected,’ he said, and I felt my heart turn over. ‘Little Rose.’
‘I’m not so little,’ I protested. ‘I’m eighteen.’
‘Are you?’ He passed me the bottle. ‘Very grown up. What’s the time?’
I checked my watch. ‘Six thirty.’
‘Gotta go.’ He leaned down and kissed my cheek. He smelled a little of something sweet; later I learned it was patchouli oil. ‘Gotta meet a man about a dog.’ He winked at me. ‘See you around. Keep the Krug.’
He melted into the night. I stood for a moment under the tree in the Meadow, the city bright before me, the night dark behind me. In a window of Christ Church halls, a grinning pumpkin flickered.
I was more than a little light-headed. I was utterly intoxicated – and not just from the champagne.
GLOUCESTERSHIRE, MARCH 2008
James was shouting desperately in his sleep. As I came to, I could hear him moaning that he was being crushed.
‘It’s so dark,’ he kept repeating. ‘Let the light in, please.’
Befuddled with sleep, I pulled the curtains back although it was still night, and gently tried to wake him. He hadn’t had one of the really bad nightmares for a while. Now he was sweating and gurning, his face pallid in the moonlight, thrashing across the bed like a fish in a net. I tried to hold his arms still but it was impossible, his desperation making him strong as Samson. As he flailed he caught me hard across the face – but it was only the next day I realised he’d cut my cheek.
In the morning he said he didn’t remember the dream, but he looked unkempt and exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept at all, huge circles beneath his Labrador-brown eyes.
‘You’re up early,’ I said, plonking some toast in front of him that he pushed away. ‘Are you all right?’
He didn’t speak. He just sat at the breakfast table drinking black coffee and reading the Financial Times in sullen silence whilst the children ate cereal and bickered, and the Today programme murmured in the background. Liam and Star were still in bed; I didn’t expect to see them before noon.
I was plaiting Alicia’s hair when James ordered me to turn the radio up.
‘News just in this morning: as feared, the Nomad Banking Conglomerate has gone down with the most devastating effect,’ John Humphrys announced. ‘A huge shock to all involved. What exactly is it going to mean for the investors?’
‘Turn it off, for fuck’s sake.’ James stood up, his face horribly taut, a muscle jumping in his cheek. ‘Christ, all this fucking doom and gloom. I thought this was meant to be boom-time.’
I realised it wasn’t the time to reprimand the swearing.
‘Mummy,’ said Effie, ‘can I have a cross hot bun, please?’
‘I’m not sure how much more I can take actually.’ James rammed his chair into the table. ‘We’ll be lucky if we’re not out on the street soon.’
He was prone to exaggeration, but I wondered now if the warning signs of his former depression were rearing their head again. I thought rather nervously of the troubles he’d mentioned the other day.
‘James, please,’ I beseeched as Alicia looked at him curiously. ‘Let’s talk about it in a minute, OK?’
‘Cross hot buns, cross hot buns,’ the twins began to chant, oblivious.
James threw the paper on the table and slammed out of the room. It was obviously not the time to tell him I wanted to go back to work, although if the money worries were real, he might welcome it. I slathered my toast with marmalade and glanced at the front page.
‘Art Dealer’s socialite daughter protests for Islamic Fundamentalism,’ the headline read. There beneath the print was a photo of a girl struggling with a policeman in Parliament Square, dark hair falling across her beautiful but angrily contorted face, a black boy with short dreds behind her, partially obscured. Licking marmalade from my fingers, I pulled the paper closer and looked again. It was the girl from the petrol station.
UNIVERSITY, NOVEMBER 1991
The River of Oblivion rolls … whereof who drinks, Forthwith his former state and being forgets.
Paradise Lost, Milton
I didn’t see or hear from any of them again until the middle of November. There were vague murmurings on campus about the incident in the cathedral, and one mention in the Oxford Gazette; and sometimes I wanted to shout, ‘That was me’ – but I never did. Life went on as normal. I immersed myself in my work, but I found myself searching streets, bars and crowds longingly to see if Dalziel was there. He never was, and there was a part of me that was relieved. Once I saw Lena and the beautiful dark girl in the King’s Arms but they looked through me in a way that made me shrivel. I wanted to do well at Oxford and I had a feeling deep in my bones that these boys and girls, this group, were never going to be good for me. I asked a few people about Society X but no one seemed to want to talk about it. Some just smiled and looked away; lots had never heard of it – and a few looked faintly appalled when I mentioned it, so eventually I stopped; I started to forget about them all.
But one evening there was a folded note sealed with scarlet wax in my pigeonhole, my name in flowing black italics. For some reason, my fingers fumbled with the seal as I tried to open it.
‘X MARKS THE SPOT’ the note proclaimed, giving a time and an address, which later turned out to be one of the best streets in town, instructing me to ‘dress dangerously and bring something intoxicating’. I wasn’t exactly sure what the latter two meant – but I did as I was told, spending the last of my grant on a black velvet catsuit and the highest black heels I could find.
On the night in question I bought a bottle of Lambrusco for Dutch courage, and opened it in my room. I slicked my hair back, painted my eyes with kohl and my mouth with scarlet lipstick, splashing myself with Chanel No. 5 that I’d nicked from my mother. I was excited. Overexcited at the thought that I had an invitation into the elite.
And then I sat on my narrow bed and decided I couldn’t possibly go. I was terrified. I didn’t know anyone. They’d think I was an idiot; a country bumpkin. They’d laugh at me. I heard the other students on my floor come and go, the laughter of a Saturday night, music fading and increasing as doors opened and closed. Only I was alone, apparently. I reapplied my lipstick for the fifteenth time. I drank a bit more wine. I changed my mind, then changed it back again.
In the end I was there just before midnight, as instructed, clutching the Jack Daniel’s I’d bought because I’d read that Janis Joplin had drunk it, at the door of the tall town-house on Lawn Street. My belly squirmed with nerves. The lights were all out as I rang the doorbell and I thought for a horrid second they’d forgotten me – or perhaps it was all a nasty joke to get me stumbling around town in killer heels like a drunken fool.
The door opened a crack.
‘Password?’
‘Pardon?’ I said.
‘Password,’ the voice drawled impatiently.
‘I don’t know the—’ I began, and the door started to close.
‘No, wait.’ I had a flash of inspiration. ‘X?’
The door hovered – and then opened just wide enough to let me in.
‘That’ll do.’ Black-tipped fingernails grasped my arm, and pulled me through. The door slammed behind me. I was in.
I followed the tall girl called Lena, whose hair was now pink and who wore nothing but a bra and bondage trousers, down a white hallway into a very minimal room. The floorboards were painted black, the walls red, and there was no furniture at all apart from a red velvet divan, a black granite coffee table and long white curtains. It all looked like a stage-set, particularly as a hundred candles flickered and guttered in the breeze from the French windows. The room was terribly hot and music swelled from the expensive stereo in the corner, some kind of opera I didn’t recognise. A few people I didn’t know stood round the corners of the room, drinking, smoking, mostly silent. Everyone seemed to be wearing black and it was clear everyone was nervous, although there was a certain loucheness to most of them. They eyed me with feigned disinterest and chose to ignore me. Lena lit a chillum and handed it around.
James appeared, and I headed towards him gladly. He was wearing a dinner suit that rather drowned him, despite his stocky frame, and he too seemed on edge. His nervousness surprised me, and made my own heart thump more.
‘This is all a bit weird,’ I whispered. ‘What’s going on? Where’s Dalziel?’
‘He’ll be down in a minute.’ He eyed me warily. ‘You look nice.’
‘Nice?’
‘Good, I mean. Very good. You look like one of those girls in that Robert Palmer video.’
‘Do I?’ I was flattered. ‘Just need a guitar to get me going.’
‘You’ll need a bit more than that tonight,’ James said, producing a hip flask. ‘Drink?’
‘Thanks.’ I took a swig and choked. ‘God. What the hell’s that?’
‘Hell is right, you innocent,’ he scoffed. ‘Never tried the green fairy?’
‘Fairy liquid?’ I was confused.
‘Don’t be bloody stupid,’ he laughed. ‘Absinthe.’
I obviously looked blank.
‘All the French Impressionists drank it.’ He was impatient. ‘Toulouse-Lautrec lived on the stuff.’
‘Toulouse who?’
‘Painter. Very short man, Paris, turn of the century. Dancing girls? Fucking genius.’
‘Oh, I know.’ I was relieved. ‘Cancan dancers?’
A church clock nearby struck midnight. James took another swig and pocketed the flask. ‘It’s time,’ he whispered reverently.
‘Time for what?’ I giggled nervously. ‘Are you going to turn into a pumpkin?’
‘Shh,’ James’s brown eyes were dilated in the candlelight. ‘He’s coming.’
The door opened slowly and Dalziel walked in. He looked ridiculously sophisticated in a tight-fitting black suit, a pristine white shirt, his blond hair sleek, his long bony face deathly pale apart from two spots of high colour on his cheeks, his eyes ringed with kohl. When he turned I saw he had attached to his back a pair of beautiful angel wings that looked like they were made from swan’s feathers. He really was quite unlike anyone I had ever met. Five or six beautiful boys and girls, all wearing black, all in varying states of undress, followed him into the room. He regarded us all, then turned off the music and, placing a cigarette in an ebony holder, lit it languidly. He was captivating to watch; I couldn’t tear my eyes away. We all waited.
‘Good evening, my lovelies. It’s wonderful to see you all here at the witching hour. Thank you for coming.’
We waited as he blew a perfect smoke-ring.
‘Now,’ we were treated to a smile, ‘if you could deliver your intoxicating materials for the good of one and all, that would be much appreciated.’
One by one we deposited our booty onto the table. James had a whole bottle of absinthe, but I noticed he kept the hip flask well hidden. I looked around for the beautiful peroxide girl who had always been with Dalziel before, but she wasn’t there. Lena put down a small plastic bag of white powder, another boy a couple of paper wraps, a tall girl a clump of straw-looking things, which I later discovered were magic mushrooms. More bottles and potions followed. Then Dalziel tipped a bottle of white pills into a small china bowl in the centre of the table.
‘One for all, and all for one,’ he murmured. ‘Never say my love is not shared between you.’
James pushed me forward and shyly I placed my Jack Daniel’s on the table.
Dalziel fixed me with a look. ‘Displaying a distinct lack of imagination there, my dear Rose.’ He inhaled through the ebony holder with wearied languor. ‘But as you are a Society X virgin, we will forgive your misdemeanour this time, although I might have to smack your bottom later.’
Low laughter rippled through the room and I flushed scarlet, staring at my feet.
‘Now,’ he looked around, ‘is that everyone?’
The room murmured assent. Dalziel whispered to Lena, who went to change the CD as he smiled slowly at us all. I had a sudden vision of us standing before him like lowly acolytes, mesmerised, a strange sense that we were all waiting to bask in his approval.
‘So. It is Commandments One and Seven we’ll be enjoying tonight. We’ve done Four most recently, we very definitely didn’t keep the Sabbath holy. It was most amusing, wasn’t it, Rose?’
I flushed under Dalziel’s scrutiny, nodding fervently, aware of the envy of some of the others. Lena shot me daggers.
‘Although the Bishop of Oxford clearly didn’t think so.’
‘No sense of humour, the bloody clergy,’ Lena was keen to join in. ‘Jesus in women’s underwear was fucking brilliant, I thought—’
‘Anyway,’ Dalziel cut her off, ‘tonight we will begin with Number One: You shall have no other gods before me.’ He cranked the music right up and unveiled a statue under a velvet cloth of a man with an enormous cock, festooned with a garland of thorns. ‘My dear friend Priapus. Let the party begin. Let us make darkness visible.’
Jimi Hendrix’s guitar screamed through the room and I felt a great surge of anticipation and, frankly, terror. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be here any more but I couldn’t drag myself away. Dalziel must have sensed my fear; he came to me.
‘You look very beautiful, darling,’ he said quietly, and he ran a finger down my cheek. ‘Very curvy and delicious.’ He put a pill in his mouth and then he leaned down and kissed me. I felt his tongue and then I realised the pill was now in my own mouth. For a moment I was about to protest but he handed me a glass and murmured ‘Swallow. I always do.’
So I drank and swallowed. Then he leaned down again and kissed me properly, and I felt the lust lick through my body like forest fire, and I pressed myself into his tall form and held his snake hips and kissed him back. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me: my wildest dreams coming true. Dalziel wanted me.
Abruptly he pulled away, grabbed the pink-haired girl and pulled her over to us.
‘Rose, meet Lena,’ and I smiled, and my legs felt a bit trembly in my very high heels, higher than I’d ever worn, and I went to shake her hand but Dalziel said, ‘Don’t be silly. Kiss her.’ I hesitated because I really didn’t like girls, not in that way, but Lena wasn’t so reserved; she leaned in and kissed me, and I just thought her mouth was very soft where a man’s is normally harder and there was no stubble, only soft skin, but it wasn’t so bad. I was starting to feel very strange, like the whole room was moving away and I was growing very tiny and then big again and then Lena was putting her hand on my breast and I pulled away because I felt a bit sick.
‘Don’t worry,’ Dalziel grinned; he’d been watching us lazily, ‘you’re just coming up. You’ll be fine in a sec.’
I stumbled to the French windows to breathe in the cold autumn air and after a moment or two the music started to overwhelm me. It had changed from Hendrix to something tribal, the beat of the drums pulsing through my veins, and I was beginning to feel like I was flying. I was ecstatic, in fact I was surely about to lift off the ground like a bird. The music was inside me, and outside me and then James was there and he held me and we danced and he got nearer and I pushed myself against him and I never wanted to let go.
‘This is amazing.’ I smiled and smiled, feeling my limbs were like liquid and so strange. I tried to articulate it but I couldn’t. ‘I’ve never felt like this before,’ I shouted over the music.
‘No, well,’ he smiled back, ‘you’ve probably never taken Ecstasy before, have you?’
‘God, no. Is that what it is?’ I forgot even to feel fear; I just felt amazed.
‘It is indeed. It’s gonna break down society’s barriers.’ His eyes were slightly glazed. ‘We will all love each other for ever and indiscriminately.’
And I felt decadent and cool and amazing, and then James was kissing me and I felt so odd, like I actually loved him and I kind of wanted to say that to him but I didn’t, I just kept kissing him. The music had changed to banging house and I wanted to dance now. The beat was in me, I was the beat and I was dancing now, writhing and turning, and I felt like everyone was watching me.
And then Dalziel was talking, far more dishevelled than earlier, his jacket was off and his shirt was unbuttoned, flowing loose from his trousers, exposing his smooth chest, his ribs that jutted out. He stood on the small table and he was asking for quiet and people were complaining, ‘Don’t turn the music off’ but he said it was time, time to do the seventh thing.
I didn’t know what he meant and I didn’t care.
A girl was led in wearing a strapless black dress, very fitted around her voluptuous curves. She was short, elegant, olive-skinned, with almond-shaped eyes, long dark hair in a French plait, a year or two older than us, perhaps. She was beautiful in a soft, rounded way. I smiled at her, but she ignored me, and I realised after a second that she was not quite here with us. Her eyes were unfocused and she stumbled slightly. At first glance she looked quite beatific but the longer I looked at her, the more it became apparent that she was in some kind of trance.
Lena stepped forward and blindfolded the girl, who appeared to acquiesce willingly, staggering slightly in her stilettos, a red satin scarf tied around her eyes. Lena ran her hands down the girl, slowly across her breasts, a lascivious smile spreading across Lena’s face. The music was put back on and the girl was led to the divan, her hands held before her as if in supplication or prayer. I wanted to dance again and I grabbed James’s hand, but he was distracted, I could feel that he was waiting for something. He watched Dalziel, who had a spray-can in his hand. In his great looping script he wrote on the wall. I thought that was quite amazing, writing on his own wall.
‘You shall not commit adultery,’ he scrawled, and then he turned triumphantly to us. ‘This is Huriyyah. She is the lover of someone I know well,’ he proclaimed, ‘very well indeed’. He looked around at his minions, challenge in his eyes. ‘And I have –’ he paused momentarily – ‘I have, let us say, persuaded her to help my fallen angels celebrate tonight. So – who will be the lucky taker?’
I was thoroughly confused.
‘Or the first, should I say?’
‘Christ,’ James muttered beside me, and then the door was flung open and someone wearing a demonic goat-mask stood there, horns curling up to heaven like a devil.
‘Azazel, my dear friend, come in,’ Dalziel purred. ‘Join the rest of your clan.’
‘Who the fuck’s Azazel?’ a girl behind us muttered.
‘Goat-demon, seducer of men and women.’ Dalziel gestured to him. ‘Cast out by the Archangels to abide in darkness for all time.’
Whoever he was, he stepped forward. ‘I am ready,’ he said in a gruff tight voice. ‘Please.’
And he approached the young woman, who was being held down now, lying on her back, seemingly insensate, one arm thrown elegantly back, her suspenders showing. The smooth skin above her stockings glistened in the candlelight and on her inner arm were bruises and what I supposed could only be track marks from a needle.
‘Is she up for this?’ I asked James nervously, not feeling absolutely as high as I had moments ago.
‘Looks like it,’ James shrugged.
‘But –’ I licked my dry lips – ‘but why would she be here if she’s someone else’s lover?’
‘I don’t know. Who knows what goes on between people?’
The girl was being helped by two of Dalziel’s boys to peel her pink knickers off, raising her hips off the divan so a dark triangle of pubic hair was visible. Despite my misgivings I felt the excitement in the room, the murmur as the air thickened with lust, the music pulsating so I felt it in my breastbone, wreaths of smoke from cigarettes and joints and God knows what else hanging in the air around us, and the drug already in my veins surged through me again.
‘Place her in the crucifix position,’ Dalziel ordered. They did it. She was almost frighteningly floppy and acquiescent.
Azazel removed the goat-head and we saw it was a boy with a head like a bullet and hair like a brush; a boy who looked somewhat out of place amongst all the beautiful people. He was sweating and red-faced, and his eyes glinted with excitement as he undid his trousers.
‘Form a queue,’ Dalziel drawled from behind the divan where he was stroking the naked arse of a tall dark boy. Then the short boy was between the girl’s legs and pulling her dress down, sucking on a dark nipple he had freed and fumbling with his trousers, and then with a great groan he was in her and she was turning her head back and forth as if she was indeed enjoying it, or perhaps she was just delirious. Then Dalziel and the dark boy were kissing and Dalziel bent the boy forwards over the divan and was biting his neck, grinding into him. Someone turned the music up louder still and couples were pairing off. Lena and another girl writhed against the wall together, and James took me by the hand and led me out through the French window.
He pulled me into him and kissed me again, and although the night was freezing I didn’t seem to feel it and he untied my halter neck impatiently and pulled my catsuit down. He hiked me up onto a small wrought-iron table and we fucked right there in the garden. He was only the second boy I had ever had sex with but I felt so fluid right now, made of air, I might do it with anyone. At one point a light in the upstairs window of the house next door went on and I didn’t even care.
‘Someone’s watching us,’ I murmured in James’s ear and he just thrust harder.
‘Let them,’ he whispered, and I moaned with pleasure.
Afterwards we went back inside to find the girl had gone. Only the silk scarf lying on the floor showed that she had been there. Dalziel and the boy were on the divan now themselves. They looked like they were sleeping, wrapped round each other, and suddenly I felt very cold.
‘You’re OK,’ James said, ‘you’re just coming down a bit,’ and he gave me his jacket; someone else offered me a line of white powder chopped out on the table but actually I didn’t want it. Lena was so out of it she was crawling on the floor, laughing in her knickers and bra, occasionally barking like a dog, much to the hilarity of various bystanders.
‘That was full on, wasn’t it?’ a dishevelled boy said to James, his eyes like saucers, his nose streaming from the drug he’d just snorted.
James lit a cigarette. ‘Too busy having my own fun, mate.’ He kissed my shoulder and I smiled decadently. ‘What was?’
‘When the girl started to come round.’
‘What girl?’ I said.
‘The druggie. She was about to change her mind, I swear.’
My stomach plunged, and I felt icy. ‘Change her mind?’
‘Yeah. She changed her mind for a minute there.’ The boy looked dazed, a little rueful, perhaps. ‘But Dalziel soon sorted her out.’
‘What do you mean?’ I looked around for my coat. ‘What does that mean?’
‘He sorted her some more smack. She was OK in the end. Could have been ugly, though, couldn’t it?’
‘Ugly?’ I intoned stupidly. I wanted to leave now.
‘Yeah. Less adultery. More like …’ He glanced round nervously.
‘More like what?’ James prompted.
‘You know what I mean. More like rape. Specially with bloody Brian.’
‘Brian?’
‘Azazel. The goat-demon. Very apt. He gets out of control, that boy. Dalziel wants to watch that.’ The boy zipped his trousers up. ‘That’s the trouble with oiks.’
I thought of the girl, all floppy and blank, and I winced. I thought of my little room in the halls of residence and all my things there, even the green lampshade from home, and I wanted to be there now.
‘Do you think she’s all right?’ I asked the boy, and he shrugged.
‘Happy as Larry last time I saw her. Once she’d stopped crying and the new smack kicked in.’
I grabbed James’s hand. ‘Can we go?’ I asked him. ‘Please. Now.’
We left.
‘God, I’m freezing,’ I said out in the street. ‘I can’t warm up.’
James put his arm round me, and we went back to my room and I stripped off and put on my pyjamas, socks, my warmest jumper, but still I was freezing. He held me as we listened to Massive Attack and got into my single bed, drinking tea and talking into the dawn. We didn’t mention Huriyyah but I knew we were both thinking of her. And somehow, James never left.
In the cold light of day I didn’t feel so proud of my behaviour, in fact I felt ashamed.
‘So that was Society X?’ I asked James as we walked into Brown’s coffee-shop the next day.
‘Yes, it was. Just for the privileged few,’ he said – which apparently included me now. James explained that it was Dalziel’s brainchild, his pet project. Was I a pet? I saw myself out in the garden half-dressed; I kept thinking of the girl’s vacant face and her eyes that were so glazed and unseeing. I didn’t understand what had got into me. Apart from James, and illegal substances, of course. I felt strange. Somehow different – and older.
It was all about breaking the Ten Commandments apparently, James explained, hence X, the Roman numeral for ten. Dalziel was writing a dissertation on it for his theology module, James said, and he apparently wanted to prove that you can have free will and choice and still live in the confines of civilised life but outside organised religion. It all sounded very peculiar to me – far more about decadence and doing exactly what you liked than any aspect of religion. And although there was a part of me that was hugely flattered by Dalziel’s attentions, the truth was, last night was beginning to feel more than a little sordid. I had enjoyed the Ecstasy at the time but it scared me too; how consumed I felt whilst I was on it. Society X felt dangerous and exciting, but also out of my league entirely. Over the next few weeks, it began to feel nasty and puerile too.
I made a few enquiries about Huriyyah but no one seemed to know her. I scanned the newspapers, but I never heard anything about her. I started to forget: I busied myself with my new life at Oxford. My father sent me money for a push-bike and I marched against the Kosovan conflict.
I found that I was enjoying my lectures. I finally shook Moira and met Jen and Liz, who were more like me: we became inseparable. I got on with my work. And James and I were sort of dating; he was sweet and seemed keen, and I found that I liked sex, I liked it a lot – it was liberating. But I was worried by Society X and the lure it had for him. I tried to fight the feelings that were emerging for him, his big brown eyes, his funny smile, his protective air. I would not go to any of the X meets that he asked me to, and this annoyed him though he tried to hide it. I could see the attraction but it repelled me too. I was not that kind of girl. I felt very grown-up when I made this decision.
I read a lot of Hardy and I thought of Jude’s words: ‘this city of light and lore’. I worked hard and started to embrace the fact that I was part of this ancient institution. Some of the confidence of the kids there rubbed off on me; I became less shy and slowly I began to inhabit my own style. Occasionally I felt confined – the tourists in their cagoules and with their big maps, snapping us through the railings, like animals in the zoo – but mostly I just felt proud to be here.
I still found myself looking for Dalziel when I was out, but it wasn’t with the same desperation of those first few weeks, and I was uncomfortable with the memory of Huriyyah, who
I never saw again. I resigned myself to the fact that the party was an amazing experience, but a one-off. I told myself that if she had been in any way unhappy about it, she would have come forward by now and I was content to leave it at that.
Chapter Four GLOUCESTERSHIRE, MARCH 2008 (#u5f91f007-643d-57f4-be2c-c586f858bc95)
As we rounded the bend in the long snaking drive, the floodlit manor house finally came into view between the great oak trees.
‘Christ.’ James stopped the car and, for a moment, we simply stared in awe.
For all my doubts about the Cotswolds, my own butter-coloured house was undeniably beautiful, the stone warm and inviting, a much-loved well-lived-in home. The great mansion that stood before us was not in the least inviting; majestic maybe, but somehow unsettling. Its dark stone spoke of antique grandeur rather than home and hearth. Gargoyles screeched wordlessly from the roof as we neared, the huge front door lit by flaming torches on either side, a line of expensive-looking cars parked neatly on the right.
‘I like the flames. Nice idea for the club,’ James said, driving up to the gatehouse, where a man with a clipboard stepped from the shadows.
James had only agreed to come because he thought there might be something in it for him. He always had an eye on the main chance, my loving husband, and I’d understood in the last few days that although the record label was still doing well, and his properties in New York and Europe were still ticking over nicely, the London club had just lost a major investor, meaning its relaunch was hanging in the balance. James was on the prowl for more backing, and fast.
At the top of the huge stone stairs we were handed champagne and shown through the dark-panelled hall, hung with tapestries of archers and deer, into a great drawing room, humming with polite conversation, the décor a peculiar clash of Gothic splendour and Arabic glamour. Small tables inlaid with gold sat between a leather three-piece suite and huge marble ashtrays festooned the antique sideboards, whilst the mantelpiece groaned with expensively framed photographs of family, a few of a grinning polo team and a huge white yacht in glittering blue seas.
The walls were hung with exquisite art that looked like it would be wasted on the majority of the guests, a mixture of portly middle-aged men and impeccable women with skinny ankles and expensive hair who basked in the heat of a great log fire.
‘Fuck,’ James muttered, downing his drink in two gulps. ‘Wake me up when the party begins. I thought you said this would be fun.’
‘Shh, J,’ I warned. ‘Be nice, please.’ My heart sank as I spotted the local MP, Eddie Johnson, in the corner. Thankfully Johnson’s wife was nowhere to be seen.
Tina and her bespectacled husband approached us now and they began to discuss the last series of The Wire with James whilst I eyed the photographs behind them. I’d just picked up a heavy gold frame housing the picture of a dark-haired doe-eyed teenage girl when a low voice made me jump.
‘Mrs Miller, I presume?’
‘Yes.’ I replaced the photograph quickly and turned, composing my face as my brain caught up with fact. ‘You must be Mr Kattan?’
‘Indeed.’ The elegant dark-haired man inclined his head politely. ‘Charmed to meet you.’
Involuntarily I looked back at the picture of the girl. The waterlogged girl from the petrol station, the girl from the protest in the newspaper. Kattan followed my eyes.
‘I believe you met my daughter the other night.’
‘Ah.’ The all-seeing eye. ‘Yes, I think I did.’
‘She was having a very bad day.’
‘A bad day.’ You could say that again. ‘She seemed a little – confused.’
‘Yes. She was taken ill on her way home from London. A bad oyster, I believe.’
‘Poor thing. Is she all right now?’
‘Yes, thank God. Salmonella can make you quite delirious, her doctor tells me.’
‘Sounds horrible. Is she here?’
He sighed. ‘I was sincerely hoping that she would be, Mrs Miller, but …’ His Middle Eastern accent was almost imperceptible. ‘The party would help her, I think. Meet some local people, make some new friends. But I am afraid she has gone – how do you say it? – walkabout?’
‘I’m sorry.’ The image of her wailing face spun through my head; the contorted face in the newspaper. ‘Doesn’t she like parties?’
‘Usually. But she has had some … some trouble recently with a young man.’
‘What kind of trouble?’ I was intrigued.
‘Oh, the usual, you know.’ He inspected his fingernails briefly. ‘I think the boyfriend is what the films might term a “heart-breaker.”‘
‘Poor girl.’ I was genuinely sympathetic. ‘There’s nothing more painful than love.’
He caught my eye. He had a neat intelligent face, dark hooded eyes. Not handsome but rather noble. ‘That, my dear Mrs Miller, is undoubtedly true.’
‘I hope she feels better soon. It’s a lovely party.’ I smiled again.
‘Thank you so much for inviting us. I’m looking forward to meeting your son.’
‘Thank you.’ He bowed again. ‘I’m afraid he is not here yet. I hope he will arrive soon.’ Dressed in a grey suit, Kattan was the epitome of elegance, with a presence that pervaded the party, that drew the guests’ eyes to him. His gestures were almost courtly, and his immaculate teeth, when he smiled, were a startling white against his olive skin. He might be renowned, but there was no doubt the man was also something of a mystery.
The heat of the room hit me and I fought a strange urge to sigh.
‘It is wonderful to see so many people in my home,’ Kattan said, beckoning a waiter. ‘I fear it is often a little empty. And I believe you are not alone tonight?’
I shook my head. ‘No. I must introduce my husband.’ I caught James’s eye across the room, he raised a hand in greeting.
‘I hope you do not mind me saying, Mrs Miller, this colour red, it compliments you well.’ His voice was like a caress, and I flushed, reminding myself I was here to do a job.
‘That’s a Stubbs, isn’t it, Mr Kattan?’ I indicated an old painting of a glossy racehorse on the wall behind him. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘It is indeed. One of my favourites for the line and realisation.’ Kattan stood beside me now. ‘I have some marvellous hunters here on the estate. I fear they do not get enough usage.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Do you ride? You could borrow one if you so desire.’
‘Thank you.’ I shuddered involuntarily. ‘But I don’t really.’ I would never ride again, I knew that much. ‘Do you?’
A flicker of something indecipherable crossed his face. ‘No. Maya does, occasionally, but it seems infrequent now.’
I had a sudden image of this man’s hand on my bare arm. It was incredibly warm in here; the drink was obviously going to my head. James finally wandered over to shake hands.
‘Great picture.’ My husband helped himself to a canapé from a tray, pointing at a Picasso next to an Emin. ‘Think I prefer his earlier stuff, though. Not sure about all those weird-shaped women, personally.’ He shoved the shiny caviar in his mouth inelegantly. ‘Bit spiky for me. I like a boob or two.’
‘James!’ I reproved softly, embarrassed.
He rolled his eyes. ‘So what exactly brought you to our neck of the woods, Mr Kattan?’
‘This property came up for rental. I liked the countryside here. It is peaceful to me.’
‘It is beautiful, isn’t it?’ James agreed.
I doubted James had noticed as much as a hedgerow since the day we left London. Very occasionally he ventured into the garden to kick a ball with Freddie, but he spent most of his time in the studio or rushing back to the city.
‘Also,’ Kattan stroked his beard lightly, ‘I have some interests in the area.’
‘Really?’ I was curious. ‘What kind of interests?’
‘My son, Ash, wishes to run for Parliament in the next election, Mrs Miller.’ Hadi Kattan caught my eye and held it. ‘He is very fond of the area. He was educated nearby. This party is for him.’
Ash. The name was like a klaxon. The man from the garage, the man who dragged the girl back to the car.
I glanced around uneasily.
‘Unfortunately he has been delayed. He’s travelling back from Dubai. He has only recently returned to Britain after a few years abroad.’
‘Why did he leave?’
Hadi Kattan sighed again. ‘He became tired of people moving away from him on the underground trains, I believe.’
‘That kind of prejudice must be very hard to bear,’ I grimaced. For some reason, my internal alarm was ringing.
‘It is the world we live in now, it seems,’ Kattan said with dignity.
‘Can you tell me about your son’s political ambitions?’
‘I’m sure he will be happy to tell you himself, when he arrives.’
I smiled. Thwarted. ‘So I believe you’re also a very important person indeed in one of the big banks.’ I took a sip of champagne, relieved to look away from his intense gaze. I noticed that no alcohol had passed his lips yet.
‘Briefly,’ he acquiesced graciously. ‘I was a director of World-Trident. But it was not for me. I do not particularly enjoy dancing to the corporate tune.’
‘A man after my own heart. Impressive, though, Mr Kattan.’ James raised an eyebrow. ‘One of the big players.’
Kattan shrugged elegantly. ‘Hardly. And banks are not the place to be at the moment, I think, my friends, as we are currently learning, no? I got out at the right time. I prefer the art in my home to the numbers on the screen.’
He gestured at the pictures; my eye was drawn to a diamond-encrusted skull in a glass case behind him.
‘Damien Hirst?’
‘Indeed. Are you a fan?’
‘Not really, I’m afraid.’ I went to take a better look. ‘He pretty much stands for everything asinine about the past decade. Clever bloke, though, I guess.’ I glanced at my husband. ‘Tapping into hedonistic greed the way he did.’
James drained his champagne and winked at me. ‘Another bloke after my own heart.’
As I straightened up, a silver Porsche hurtled up the drive and skidded to a halt in front of the house. I watched through the windows as a young black man flung himself out of the car and headed towards the house but he didn’t get very far before he was halted by a tall figure, hood up against the wind. Hand on his arm, he was apparently trying to calm the shorter man, who gesticulated wildly at the house. Kattan glanced at them, and then turned me gently away.
‘Anyway, I did not just mean business interests. I am more keen on the recreational type now.’ Heads had begun to turn at the commotion; both men were now getting into the car as I glanced round again. Kattan smoothed his lapel carefully with a flattened hand; he spoke a little louder. ‘I am thinking of taking up guns, actually. I have quite a selection here.’
‘Guns?’ My ears pricked up.
‘Shooting birds, you know,’ Kattan smiled benevolently. ‘Such a civilised part of your culture, I think.’
‘Yeah, well,’ James grinned and tossed an olive stone on the fire. The flames flared, ‘more civilised than shooting people, I guess.’
I glanced out of the window. The Porsche had gone.
‘Perhaps you would care to join me some time, Mr Miller. I would be honoured. We even have a hunting lodge on the estate designed specifically for lunch, I am told.’
‘Don’t mind if I do, Mr Kattan.’ James toasted Kattan with his glass. ‘Always up for a new challenge, me.’
‘I always thought I might be a good shot, actually,’ I interjected.
‘I am not sure about women with guns, I must be honest,’ Hadi Kattan bowed. ‘What do you think, Mr Miller? It is not that fitting, I feel.’
‘I don’t know,’ my husband smirked. ‘Think of Charlie’s Angels!’
I stared at James in disbelief. ‘I think we’re talking more The Shooting Party than Cameron Diaz, actually, James. Tweed and plus fours, not bikinis and bling.’
A thickset young Asian man with greased-back hair and small silver hoops in his ears entered the room now and hovered behind us, very still and straight, his hands clasped behind his back. The throb of a helicopter could be heard in the distance, above the sound of conversation.
‘Zack. Please,’ Kattan beckoned him over. The young man muttered something in his ear.
‘Please, excuse me.’ Kattan moved away from us. ‘I have a small business matter to attend to.’
‘What’s The Shooting Party then? A porno about coming?’ James muttered.
‘Don’t be so crude, darling,’ I murmured back. ‘It really doesn’t behove one so well educated.’
‘Don’t be a bitch.’ He glared at me.
‘I’m not, really.’ I felt exhausted suddenly. There was a crisscross of tension in this house; not only between me and James, but the men arguing outside – and Kattan’s own demeanour seemed rather intense. ‘I’m going to find the loo.’
Crossing the panelled hall, I caught my reflection in a great ornate mirror as the door to the party swung shut, the noise quickly fading behind it. My eyes were glittering from alcohol, which I was unused to these days, and James was right: I definitely looked more curvaceous in my old velvet dress than I should.
Hand on the loo door, my heart jumped as I heard a thud from above. I hesitated. Checking behind me, I turned back and quickly headed up the huge oak staircase.
Door after door on the first corridor revealed nothing but empty rooms, a few with furniture shrouded eerily in dust-sheets, like small children playing ghosts. I paused again. In the distance I could hear the chop of the helicopter above – and something more sinister.
Somewhere not far from me, a woman was crying.
Hastily I opened the last door to reveal an ornate bathroom, and shut it again. I hurried back to the staircase and crossed to the opposite corridor, a slight sweat breaking out on my top lip as the crying got louder. The first door was locked. I rattled the door handle.
‘Hello?’
I thought I heard a scuffle inside. Then silence.
‘Hello,’ I said more urgently. I thought of the wailing woman, although the crying had stopped. ‘Maya?’
I heard the rasp and flare of a match and spun round. The fair man I’d met so briefly at the petrol station was leaning on the wall behind me, watching me impassively. I was struck by the incredible ease with which he held himself.
‘Oh,’ I said stupidly. ‘You scared me.’
‘Lost, Mrs Miller?’ He chucked the match in the vase of roses beside him. ‘The party’s downstairs, I think you’ll find.’
I realised he’d just used my name. ‘I was just looking for the bathroom, actually,’ I stuttered. The champagne had definitely gone to my head.
‘Really? All the way up here?’
‘Yes, really. Like you said,’ I attempted a winning smile, ‘I got a bit lost.’
He stepped closer to me, close enough for me to feel the warmth of his body as he reached down and circled my wrist with his fingers; I pulled back. I could smell lemon again. His eyes narrowed as he contemplated me. He didn’t let go.
‘What happened to your face?’
‘It – it’s just a graze.’ I touched my cheek instinctively. I’d forgotten about James’s scratch.
His expression was impossible to read, but his fingers round my wrist tightened and he pulled me along the corridor to the first door so I stumbled in my heels.
‘What are you doing?’ I mumbled. He didn’t answer. He just leaned over me and opened the door, then turned me round.
‘I’m showing you what you were looking for.’
His hand was in the small of my back now as he pushed me forward. I tried to turn back, anxious not to be shoved into this dark room by him – but he blocked the way with his shoulder so I couldn’t pass.
‘I hope …’ my voice felt thick, ‘I hope …’
‘You hope what?’
‘I do hope you’re not threatening me.’
‘Don’t be so stupid.’ He looked at me with those blue blue eyes. ‘Why would I do that?’
We stared at each other. His eyes were blue as untroubled sky. Then slowly, very slowly, I backed into the bathroom and shut the door between us, leaning my cheek for a minute against the cool wood. The idea that he was there on the other side disturbed me intensely. I sat on the side of the bath and put my head between my knees for a while.
When I came out, he’d gone. I crept across the corridor and tried the locked door again. This time, it swung open. Behind it lay a pretty yellow bedroom, all sprigged wallpaper and a four-poster bed; in the corner, a Louis XIV chair with a woman’s silk robe thrown carelessly across it. There was a silver hairbrush set on the dressing table and a bottle of Dior perfume, but not much else – apart from another door in the corner, behind which I thought I could hear movement. Taking a deep breath, I headed towards it.
‘Hello?’ I said again, and then I put my hand out and wrenched it open. A hiss and a squeal, and a ball of white fur launched itself between my feet and disappeared under the bed. A bloody Persian cat! I laughed tremulously at my own stupidity.
As I went to close the bedroom door behind me, I glanced at a portrait hanging on the wall. The sleepy brown eyes of a young woman gazed down on me and I froze on the spot. I felt the same icy sensation I’d felt in the office the other day.
I stared and stared up at her, almost expecting her to blink back – but of course she didn’t.
I hurried down the stairs, back to the party, her eyes boring through the door into my back the whole way.
Downstairs, the party was beginning to thin out. Kattan’s young henchman was gone; the MP, Eddie Johnson, was so drunk he was in danger of toppling over like a giant Weeble. Over by the fireplace my husband was deep in conversation with Kattan, both talking in low voices, Kattan smoking a cigar. The smell reminded me of my childhood.
‘All right, my petal?’ James kissed my head as I arrived at his side. I smiled weakly. My every instinct screamed that something was terribly wrong in this house, that the veneer of wealth and respectability covered up a darkness I couldn’t yet fathom; that so far it was impossible to put my finger on it. I felt the strongest desire to run away – but a stronger instinct to know the truth.
‘Yes, thanks,’ I murmured, smiling at James, who looked like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat.
‘I was just telling Mr Kattan about Revolver,’ James said, pocketing something. My heart sank.
‘Indeed.’ Hadi Kattan, smiling pleasantly, exhaled a plume of blue smoke. ‘Every man should have the chance to own a nightclub. Life would be so boring without a little fun, no?’
‘I guess it’s always good to let your hair down.’ I took James’s arm like the loyal wife I was.
‘Here’s my card,’ James said. ‘Let me know what you think.’
‘I’m so sorry to drag him away, Mr Kattan, but I think – babysitters and all – you know … ‘ I wanted to be home with my children right now.
‘It’s been fantastic to meet you, sir.’ My fickle husband, so easily turned. ‘Guess we’re going to have to call a cab.’ James looked ruefully at his empty glass. I bit my lip. He had promised he would drive.
‘Please,’ Hadi Kattan took my hand, ‘Danny Callendar can take you home. I am sorry you did not get to meet Ash. Next time, perhaps.’
‘Oh no, that’s fine, honestly,’ I said quickly. ‘Thank you, but a cab’s fine.’
‘Please, Mrs Miller,’ Kattan’s voice was silky, ‘I insist.’ He pressed his warm lips to my cold hand.
Waiting on the front steps, I shivered: the sudden drop in temperature pervading my bones.
‘Something’s not right here,’ I muttered to James. ‘I can’t put my finger on it, but something’s not right.’
‘Rubbish.’ My husband shrugged himself into his leather coat and switched on his phone. ‘He’s a charming bastard, I’ll give him that.’
I thought of Kattan’s lips on my hand and shuddered. ‘All that stuff about women and guns, for Christ’s sake. It’s like the bloody dark ages. It’s like the bloody Taliban.’
‘For Christ sake, Rose,’ James’s cheerful demeanour dissolved, ‘you sound like that BNP bloke on the news the other day.’
‘I don’t.’ I was appalled. ‘I just – I don’t trust men like Kattan, and I’ve met a few. All smiles on the surface and bigotry beneath.’
‘You sound rather bigoted yourself, petal. You’re always looking for the worst in people.’
‘I’m not. I just look for the truth.’ I thought of the painting in the bedroom; I remembered James’s recent terrible nightmare. All these events were conspiring to bring back memories I’d suppressed for so long. I wondered whether I dare say it. ‘James—’
‘What?’ He was more interested in his phone.
‘It’s very odd. I just saw a picture, a painting upstairs.’
‘So? The whole house is full of bloody paintings.’
‘It really looked like Huriyyah,’ I whispered.
I definitely had his attention now.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ His dark eyes were furious. ‘I actually had a good evening for once. Don’t ruin it now with your stupid imaginings.’
‘I don’t think I was imagining it,’ I protested quietly. ‘It really gave me a jolt.’
‘Just shut up, OK.’ He rounded on me. ‘OK?’
‘OK.’ I was taken aback by the force of his anger as the Range Rover pulled up beside us.
Grit and cut grass stung my eyes, and my hair lashed my face painfully as the helicopter finally landed, great blades chopping the air. James shoved me into the car and swung in beside me. ‘Cheers, mate,’ he yelled over the din. ‘This definitely saves us a wait.’
My heart sinking, I caught the fair man’s eye in the mirror and looked away as he raised an eyebrow, a very faint grin playing on his face.
‘Shame we can’t jump in the chopper.’ James stretched out his legs. ‘Best way to travel.’
‘It belongs to Ash Kattan,’ Callendar said, pulling away smoothly. The helicopter blades were slowing as I turned to take a final look at the house.
I saw a face at an upstairs window; I figured it was about where the bedroom I’d been in was. Just in time, I suppressed the urge to shout ‘Stop’.
‘Where is Maya Kattan at the moment?’ I leaned forward. ‘Do you know?’
‘For fuck’s sake, Rose,’ James hissed. ‘Just leave it.’
‘It’s just that Mr Kattan said he wanted her to meet us,’ I pressed on regardless. ‘It was a shame she couldn’t make the party.’
James took my hand and squeezed it so hard I winced. I glanced into the driver’s mirror as I sat back. Danny Callendar looked at me inscrutably.
‘I’m not quite sure where she is, Mrs Miller,’ he answered easily. ‘Perhaps she’s gone up to London for a few days. She often does.’
‘Why?’ I wondered who the man driving her silver Porsche had been. I wondered if I dared ask.
‘I wouldn’t know.’ His tone told me I would get no further tonight. He offered us a paper bag over his shoulder. ‘Lemon sherbet?’
We both declined.
Silence fell across the car. One thing was certain: I knew for sure I couldn’t do Xav’s story now. However much my appetite was whetted, I had to stay home with the children. I’d sworn for their sake I’d never do anything risky again; motherhood had to come first now, and the atmosphere in the manor didn’t bode well at all.
Leaning my head against the glass, I watched the tall hedgerows slide by in the dark, listening to the hiss of the tyres on the road. I was sitting beside my husband, but I was lonelier than I ever remembered being before I was married. I felt a strange longing for something I could not describe.
As we pulled into our drive, James’s mobile rang. ‘Cheers, mate,’ he thanked Danny Callendar as he picked up the call, sliding out of his side. ‘Good news, Liam. New backer in the offing, I do believe.’ My husband disappeared through the studio gate.
Before I could open it, Danny was already at the door.
‘I’m fine, really,’ I insisted quietly, but he held out a hand. Eventually I took it and looked up at him as I jumped down. I found I couldn’t smile.
‘Thank you very much,’ I said. My skin felt like it was burning where his hand touched me. For a split second his hand seemed to linger on mine, and then he was back in the car. I saw a flame through the dark window as he lit his roll-up, and then he was gone.
THE POST ON SUNDAY,
DECEMBER 1991
THE GENTLEMAN’S DIARY:UP THE CREEK?
We hear that Dalziel St John, eldest son of Lord Higham, our current Home Secretary and John Major’s great golfing buddy, has been living it up again of late. We all remember that St John Jnr went somewhat off the rails during his gap year: this kindly columnist will draw a veil over the episode. Suffice it to say that young Dalziel may have taken the ‘high’ in living the high life a little too literally down in North Cornwall’s elitist Rock. Now in his third year at Magdalen College, St John Jnr had apparently worried his parents again during the last summer holidays with talk of dropping out to model for Versace – amongst other ‘keen’ parties (homosexual French designer Gaultier famously called him ‘truly divine inspiration’, the fashion-conscious amongst you might remember). However, under the steadying influence of new girlfriend and sometime Sapphist Lena Holt (this lady is for turning obviously!), daughter of the late Marquis of Gloucester and opera singer Constantia Latzier, all has seemed well for a while: Dalziel has been safely ensconced back at Magdalen finishing his theology degree, after which he is expected to fly straight out to Argentina to manage the family polo farm for a while.
So could the rumours be true that Dalziel has just this weekend been caught defecating at the altar of Christ Church, the ancient cathedral? Yes you did indeed read correctly: defecating, not desecrating, though some might argue they are one and the same. It may yet turn out to be fortunate that his father is second cousin of the Bishop himself, although my sources tell me both men are very far from amused. Indeed, Lady Higham is so mortified that she has retired to Barbados for a sojourn at the Sandy Lane spa, citing ‘nervous exhaustion’ (something the poor lady has suffered much of, apparently, for one so young).
We shall, of course, keep our trusty readers posted of further developments – but let us just surmise for now that young Dalziel is well and truly up the creek and in the ‘proverbial’ with his folks …
‘Have you seen this?’ James threw the newspaper on the café table, spilling my tea. ‘I can’t believe that rag’s got hold of it.’
‘Yeah, I’ve seen it.’ I pushed the paper away and finished my poached egg as James sat down. ‘Me and the whole of college. I can’t believe you’d buy that rag, James.’ I was only half joking. I’d been discovering yet more political principles this term. ‘I’m shocked.’
‘You’re too liberal for your own good.’ He shook his dark head sorrowfully. ‘Dalziel’s old man did such a wicked job of keeping it quiet. He’s going to go ballistic. White coffee, please, love,’ James winked at the pretty waitress, who tossed her hair and immediately turned her back on him.
‘Who’ll go ballistic?’ I mopped up the last of the yolk. ‘Dalziel’s dad?’
‘No, stupid. Dalziel.’ James pinched a chip. ‘He’s done a deal with his dad to keep this kind of stuff out of the paper.’
‘How can he do that?’ I was intrigued. ‘Keep it out? He’s not God. Or royalty.’ I considered that last statement for a second. ‘Or is he?’
‘Not quite, but he’s pretty well connected.’
‘I never realised his dad was a lord. Or Home Secretary.’ I wasn’t quite sure whether to be impressed or contemptuous, given that St John Senior was such a dyed-in-the-wool Tory. My new worst enemies.
‘Anyway, Lord Higham owns half of Wapping. And,’ James lowered his voice, ‘Dalziel’s got stuff on his dad that would blow the government out of the water – and his dad knows it.’
‘God,’ I leaned forward, ‘like what?’ I was really curious now.
‘I’m not at liberty to say, petal.’ James stroked my cheek as the waitress brought the coffee. ‘He’d have my guts for garters if I breathe a word. Let’s just say it’s in Daddy’s interest – Daddy who likes lots of girls – it’s in his interest to cover Dalziel’s tracks. And anyway, he didn’t do it. Dalziel. The shitting thing.’
I felt inordinately relieved. It seemed so crass somehow; below Dalziel. The young waitress was staring at James’s fingers on my skin and shoved the cup down so hard boiling coffee slopped out, burning my arm.
‘Ouch!’ I looked at her reproachfully. She looked vaguely familiar, her hair pulled back tightly from her cross, freckled face.
‘Bloody students,’ she muttered, and slammed back into the kitchen.
‘Friend of yours?’ I raised an eyebrow at my some-time boyfriend.
‘Possibly,’ he grinned. ‘Are you jealous?’
I thought about it. ‘A little bit,’ I said, truthfully.
‘Don’t be. She’s just a skivvy.’
‘James!’ I was shocked.
‘A bit of rough can be a laugh, I guess.’ He raised his eyebrows at me, all arch. ‘An experience.’
‘For God’s sake, James.’ I took the bait. ‘You sound just like him.’
‘Who?’
‘Who do you think?’ I blew gently on my burned skin. ‘Your great lord and master.’
‘Don’t be fucking stupid,’ James bristled. ‘I’m my own man.’
‘Boy,’ I teased.
‘Man. No one tells me what to do.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes, really.’ James ladled sugar in his coffee, spoons and spoons of it. ‘He’s started talking about us all meeting again, actually.’ He was casual as he stirred his drink.
‘Oh.’ My stomach tightened. ‘Why?’
‘Not sure. He’s got some grand scheme up his ruffled sleeve. It’ll be a laugh. Just think of last time.’ He winked at me again, rather lasciviously for such a young man. It turned my stomach a bit; I was shocked at my own reaction.
‘I’d rather not,’ I muttered. I was still haunted by the vacant look on Huriyyah’s face. The fact she hadn’t really been present despite her body being in the room; the body that had been no more than a piece of meat. The vague rumours I’d heard since that both boys and girls had been lining up to take turns with her.
‘Come on,’ James persisted, ‘we’d never have got together if he hadn’t held that party. And it was a laugh, you’ve got to admit.’
‘I suppose so,’ I smiled weakly.
We both jumped as Jen knocked on the glass window, her short hennaed hair blowing upwards in the December wind, cheeks ruddy from cycling.
‘Gotta go.’ I gathered my things, relieved suddenly to be leaving the steamy little café. ‘I’ve already paid for mine. See you soon, yeah?’
‘Oh, right.’ He looked put out. ‘Like when?’
The bad-tempered little waitress was watching us. I realised with a jolt it was Twiggy from the Hallowe’en do. Instinctively I leaned over to kiss James full on the mouth.
‘I’ll be in the college bar later, I think,’ I said. ‘About six.’
‘And what shall I tell Dalziel?’ James swung back dangerously on his chair’s back legs.
‘About what?’
‘He’ll want to know who’s in.’
‘I don’t know,’ I frowned. ‘I’m not that bothered, to be honest, J. I’ve got a lot on. I’ve just had another article actually commissioned for the Cherwell. It’s got to be in by next week.’
Jen knocked again more urgently, pointing at her watch in elaborate mime.
‘I’m going to be late for my seminar.’
‘All right, Goody Two-Shoes,’ James taunted.
I let it go. ‘I’ll see you later.’
Cycling through town, my fingers frozen round my handlebars despite my woolly gloves, my mind kept darting back to Dalziel and how I’d felt when he kissed me that cold winter night, and how I’d felt when I’d watched him kissing that boy. But most of all, to the face of the girl on the divan: how utterly lost she had been.
Leaving my tutor group later, I realised I’d lost my scarf; on the way home I popped into the café to see if it was there. The sulky waitress was cleaning the coffee machine behind the wooden counter.
‘Haven’t seen it,’ she muttered, and I had no choice but to believe her.
‘Really fancies himself now, that boyfriend of yours, don’t he?’ she said as I opened the door to leave.
I paused and turned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You should have seen him last year.’ Her pretty face was flushed. ‘He was like a – a lost puppy and he dressed like a right bloody spod, carrying that stupid guitar everywhere. Only too glad to mix with the likes of me then.’ She wiped the steam pipe so savagely I thought it would snap. ‘Not that I was interested in him.’
‘Oh,’ I said rather helplessly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. Much better fish in the sea.’ She turned her back on me again before I could read the expression on her face. Her voice was strangely muffled. ‘You’re welcome to him.’
There wasn’t anything else to say really. I saw her in town a few weeks later with another boy; she was wearing my scarf. I decided she could keep it.
Chapter Five GLOUCESTERSHIRE, MARCH 2008 (#u5f91f007-643d-57f4-be2c-c586f858bc95)
The morning after the Kattans’ party, the taxi dropped me at the gates in the overgrown lane. I had a feeling of foreboding that I tried to dispel, but my stomach was churning slightly even before I began the long walk up the drive.
Last night it had been my turn to lie awake, sleepless beside a snoring James, recalling events I had blocked for years. And as I stared into the darkness, craving sleep and peace, I couldn’t understand why all these events were conspiring to meet now. But whatever the reason, the past seemed to be travelling inexorably towards me – and there was nowhere to hide. All night I’d pondered the portrait in the bedroom, until finally I’d decided that James was right: that I’d been mistaken: that one sloe-eyed beauty might look rather like another. But still I couldn’t quite push Huriyyah’s face from my mind.
The gravel crunched satisfyingly underfoot as I set off, my hand clasped round the car keys in my fleece pocket. In the past few weeks the earth had yawned mightily and begun to waken, and I was flanked now by creamy yellow daffodils that flickered lightly in the breeze, the great glossy camellias behind them festooned with buds as big as my fist. The temperature at night was still close to freezing, but this morning had dawned fresh and bright – a mismatch for my sense of apprehension. I intended to fetch the car and leave the property as quickly as I could.
My phone rang. Xavier.
‘Where are you?’
‘Fetching my car from Hadi Kattan’s house in Gloucestershire.’
‘You got in there then? Good girl.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And now I’m getting out.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s not for me, Xav.’
‘Don’t be a pussy, Rose.’
‘I’m not. Like I said, I’m flattered, and I think you should follow it up – but you need to get someone else to do it.’
‘But you’re in already. I’ve got more juicy stuff coming through; rumours that Kattan may have financed a trainingcamp from his home in Tehran. Plus he’s been the subject of a CIA investigation.’
‘Really?’ I thought of the man last night at the party, of the helicopter, of the hysterical and now apparently missing daughter.
Detecting my hesitation, Xav pounced. ‘Come on, Rose.’
‘I’ve already been warned off by his laconic idiot of a driver.’
‘A nice bit of rough? Right up your street.’
‘Up yours, you mean.’
‘Darling! All those coarse farmers are having a terrible effect on you.’
I thought of Hadi Kattan’s firm handshake and the way he held back from the rest of the crowd; the assurance in his stance. ‘Kattan’s much more my type.’ For all his inherent sexism, no man had smiled at me like that for years.
‘You’re a happily married woman, let me remind you, Rosie.’
A sudden breeze sent a flurry of blossom skittering before my
feet.
‘Not sure about the happily bit right now,’ I muttered.
‘At last she’s seen the light,’ Xavier drawled. He’d never bothered to hide his feelings about James.
The blossom whirled in circles on the ground before me.
‘Anyway, Kattan’s certainly a character. Very old-school polite, but a will of iron, I’m sure. And his son, Ash, is apparently disenchanted with Britain, and running for Parliament.’ I was rounding the last bend in the drive now, heading towards a stable block and garages on my right, walking into shadow beneath great elms that blocked the sun from my path. The gargoyles on the roof were still screaming silently as I neared. I had the unnerving feeling that I was being watched and I felt a shiver of apprehension. ‘But I’m sorry, I just can’t do it, Xav.’
‘Fuck, Rose,’ Xav swore softly. ‘It’s not like you to wimp out.’
The great windows of the Gothic manor frowned down like huge unblinking eyes, and then something stopped me in my tracks. I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d seen but it was like a flash of light, something white billowing in the window to the left of the great front door. Somewhere nearby the clank of metal on metal startled me. My own involuntary gasp made me laugh.
‘Rose?’
‘I’ll call you back.’ I hung up.
‘Hello?’ I called. Someone had been listening, I was sure.
Silence fell again; just the fluting of birdsong, and then the distant bleat of tiny lambs. It was an eerie sound; rather like my children crying. I took a few small steps towards an old cream-coloured racing car abandoned on blocks. Alongside the garage wall were stacked great canisters; presumably for petrol.
‘Hello?’ I steadied my voice. ‘Anyone there?’
There was no response. A sudden gust blew through the branches like a great breath as I took another step and then the light from the window struck me again, flashing across my face so I had to shut my eyes. Not a light I realised, some kind of red laser. It swept the ground before me and then disappeared.
I contemplated turning back – and then I heard the metallic sound again.
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