He drove as if he knew where he was heading. He was in. Best not to think too hard about whether he’d ever get out again.
Tanks under tarps lined the roadside interspersed with armoured vehicles and multi-wheeled low-loaders. Privatization pumped significant capital into the New Army’s hardware – hardware that looked as if it might be on the move any day. Back from the road, nasty boys marched in formation, eyes forward, combat boots crunching on gravel. The squaddies were new too. He could tell by the hesitation in the rhythm of every third or fourth recruit. Was it Left or Right? Which was Left? Which Right? The exasperated drill sergeant risked a swift look at the vehicle and its driver, concerned in case an officer was judging the performance. Only a private. He relaxed enough to shout a string of obscenities at the recruits as they wheeled left away from the road, and North breathed again.
Ahead, a double-storied building stood, bigger than the rest, its shallow concrete steps leading to double doors. HQ. Other Land Rovers were parked in front of it alongside a dozen or so civilian cars. The barracks were jumping. He drove into a space between a black Mercedes and a silver Porsche. Army pay had to be on the up.
No sign of the civilians. If they’d gone for breakfast, they would have finished by now and they’d be back in the huts. Honor Jones and her friend Peggy might both be dead, and this might be for nothing. He might be about to spend what time he had left behind bars in an Army brig, or very dead himself. Honor had green and gold eyes. He tried to remember them. He tried not to remember that most of the time she looked like she despised everything about him.
“Do you ever think of the consequences of your actions?” she’d shouted after he drove into the sea. Yes, he did. It just didn’t look that way when you were drowning.
He slung one of the two rifles over his arm, tucking the other under the passenger seat. He didn’t want anyone glancing into the vehicle and wondering why there was a rifle and no soldier. He slammed the door and started walking. He hadn’t had to walk like a soldier for five years. There was a knack. Don’t overthink it. Instead, trust your own body to know where to go. A bit like fighting. Hup, two, three, four. About turn. Pick it up. He found himself walking in time to the distant marching of the parade ground. Faster. Best plan: get in and get out before anyone knew he was here. Because once they did, it was getting grievous and fast.
From his vantage point out on the moorland, he’d made out the mesh wire wall running between normal barrack life and a no man’s land, alongside another mesh wire wall separating the no man’s land from the holding camp of civilians. He hadn’t however picked out the gate. He waited with apparent patience, while a soldier red-nosed and bleak with the bitter cold, hauled it open. The nasty boy didn’t look at him, only waved him through then banged the gate closed behind him, leaving North caught in the churned up open ground between the two fences.
Exposed.
A rat in a trap.
His skin prickled as, inch by inch, the second gate into the enclosure opened.
Same rat. Bigger trap.
A low buzzing this side of the wire. Engineers had brought in generators to flood the inner fence with electricity. North tightened the grip on the rifle. Hup, two, three, four.
The holding pen seemed bigger once he was through the gates, with three long low huts and a brick building out of which poured the greasy fumes of frying oil. The civilians had their own canteen – which made sense. Eating together maintained the division, the Other-ness. There were soldiers and there were prisoners – guilty by the very fact they were here.
The door to the first hut stood ajar. The smell hit him first. The sweat of bodies too closely confined. The harsh institutional antiseptic of bulk-bought cleaning products. A sweet underlying note of over-worked Army latrines which no chemical could kill. Then the colours – only greys and washed-out blacks. In a crumpled shirt and a knitted tie – a Bible clasped to his chest, an old man lay under the covers of the cast-iron bed nearest the door. Ranged around a large Formica table towards the back of the hut, thirty or more women sat alongside two dozen or more children. Ned had severely underestimated the numbers of the disappeared.
There was no sign of Peggy at the table.
No one had heard him come in. The old man’s breathing rasped in and out like sea over shingle, like something hurting. Ned’s voice. High-pitched and irritating. The old man’s eyelids were thin and veined over sunken eyes and his lips tinged with blue, even so North sensed his wakefulness. Ned’s list of the disappeared. Arcing wipers against the wet glass. Blazing headlights. The face in front of him was crisscrossed with a thousand lines and older than the thumbnail photograph North last saw in the car. Honor’s warmth next to him. Who was he? North struggled to recall the name – Anthony Walsh, veteran union leader. Former miner.
“What is it you want, lad?” Walsh’s voice was alert and hostile as the eyes opened.
“Peggy Boland,” North kept his voice low and hoped the old man wasn’t deaf.
He glanced towards the door. That’s where they’d come from. Because some point soon, and it wouldn’t take long, the corporal and private would be missed. The parked Land Rover would confuse the situation. It implied they were back from patrol – unless anyone checked with his new best friend at the gate. If they did that, North had a problem sooner rather than later. But however it played out, the clock was on him. Not least because he needed to leave before the next patrol discovered the last patrol, an alarm went off and an anxious-to-please recruit who couldn’t yet march in step, shot him. Leaving would be the sensible thing to do – how to stay alive, because there are some things better left unseen, and there are some things which cannot be unseen. And men, women and children snatched up from their homes and imprisoned behind an electric fence on remote moorland guarded by New Army soldiers, was one of them.
Walsh attempted to sit up in bed, his breathing harsh and broken as if there was a storm blowing up over the sea.
“You’re too late.” Abandoning the attempt, he sank back against the pillows with a rasping sigh as he reached out to lay the Bible on the wooden chair next to him. Argument filled North’s head, Walsh young again and angry, speaking to a crowd, urging them on, outdoors, cold rain falling on the upturned faces and the NUM banners.
He picked up a tiny brass bell lying on the blanket that covered him. “Brace yourself, lad. We’ll have to bring in management.”
The tinkling bell.
A doorbell.
A young soldier ringing, then knocking on Walsh’s door, the furtive glance over his shoulder, the warmth of the old man’s greeting. Walsh knew the soldier, had done since he was a child, the lad’s shorn head bent, steam rising from the mug of sugared tea he held. A New Army recruit known to Walsh – a family friend? A neighbour’s son? He’d told his dad about the prisoners – that it didn’t seem right. There were women and kids. His dad had said to talk to Tony, see what the old man thought.
And what had the old man done? Rung the Ministry of Defence? Enough to draw attention to himself, and end up here. If North had it right, he didn’t want to think what happened to the young whistleblower. If he was lucky, the reluctant nasty boy was in a military prison or “peace-keeping” someplace hot and dangerous a world away. If he wasn’t, he was buried close by in a shallow grave out on the English moorland.
There were times North hoped he was delusional because otherwise his country was a darker place than he’d ever thought possible.
At the back of the room, a dark-eyed woman sat surrounded by children bent over jigsaws. Her arm was wrapped around a boy pressed up against her clutching a toy lamb – the boy who cried on his way to breakfast. She turned at the sound of the bell, her belly huge, and from across the hut, North felt the pregnant woman’s disturbance, her raw fear at the sight of the uniform, sensed the steady heartbeat of the child inside her. Behind the backs of the children, she pulled at the arm of the older woman along from her.
The white-haired woman was tall when she stood. In her sixties, he guessed. She put a hand on the head of the young girl next to her. Carry on. It was coming together perfectly. Bunty Moss, captain of ladies’ golf at her Surrey club. Her clipped bob emphasised the exhaustion in the long face and the coldness of the grey eyes as she walked towards them. One slow step. Then another. Refusing to be rushed by the sight of the enemy.
Walsh reached for her as she neared the bed and she took his hand, gentle but firm, as you ’d hold on to a child about to cross a road. Warmth. Camaraderie. Respect. North felt it go through him – tried to hold on to it, take part of it for himself, but couldn’t.
“This young chap’s asking for Peggy.”
North glanced towards the other women and children to check. The men must be in a different hut. Presumably, Walsh was in here because he was ill and the women were looking after him.
“Who are you?” Bunty’s voice was well-bred. Home Counties. Imperious.
“A friend. Is she in another hut? I’ve come to get her out.”
Bunty Moss took a moment to decide whether to trust him or not. What was there to lose?
A decision.
“She was here at the start when there were only a few of us. A day, that’s all.”
North cursed. He’d missed her.
“Do you know where they took her?”
Bunty Moss frowned. “I only wish I did. She punched two of them. Put one out cold. Told them she’d see them all in Hell. I believe they wanted her to do something for them, but I doubt very much that she’ll do it.”
They didn’t want her to name a star after Judge Lucien Tarn – that much was for sure.
“Young man. Can you help us? We’ve children here. Babies. You can see Sonja is eight months gone. She needs urgent medical attention.” Bunty watched his face. “Can you get us out of this place?”
They were penned in, locked behind mesh fencing and barbed wire, surrounded by bleak and empty moorland – unless you counted the sheep, the red grouse and the skylarks. Moreover, they were guarded by soldiers who fought for money not for King and Country and certainly not for each other.
“One of you,” he said. He’d have brought Peggy out. He could at least attempt to take out Bunty Moss. Sonja was an impossibility – the risk too huge. He could feel Bunty’s wanting. The temptation as she closed her eyes imagining home, her husband’s arms around her.
But when she opened her eyes again, she said: “It’s all of us or none of us.”
The grip on the old man’s hand tightened, her knuckles white and North sensed the balance shift as the old man consoled the woman.
“This is a scandal,” the old man waved at the wooden hut, the lines of beds. “These are decent people, and they’ve been interned like enemy aliens – children among them. We’re not at war.”
North had the impression the old man made this speech in his head a thousand times a day. Walsh balled his fist as he hit the mattress, then grimaced with the pain of it. “I’m too old for all this.” He was grief-stricken, not for himself, but for the battle he wasn’t strong enough to fight. “You though – you’re young,” he looked at him appraisingly and North wondered if he could see the deaths he was responsible for, the darkness in him. He hoped not.
No court of law judged the people North killed over the last five years guilty. Only the Board. Did that mean those men were innocent? He didn’t think so – he saw their guilt over and over again. Their corruption and crimes. He read it in their files, he heard and felt their guilt course through him, and he saw damnation in their eyes over and over, before the last breath left their bodies. It was a ruthless justice, but it was justice of sorts. Wasn’t it?
“You can’t get us out but tell everybody. Not all my friends are in the grave yet…”
“Ring my husband at least,” Bunty reached out to touch his arm. “Let him know I’m alright. He’ll be frantic. And tell him he is on no account to pay them a penny or do whatever it is these despicable people want.”
North nodded. He could do that.
“His name is James Moss. Get him at work. He’s chief executive of Heathrow. Call there. Talk to Pam his PA. Tell her you’re my brother and she’ll put you straight through. My brother died last year so James will know to take the call.”
Heathrow. A stranglehold on a way in and out of the country. Everything ratcheted into place.
Respectable people.
“Emily and Gemma Dolan?”
Mrs Moss looked surprised he knew names. She nodded towards the table. At the far end sat two freckled girls braiding each other’s waist-length hair, each girl the mirror image of the other. They were being advised by a frizzy-haired 30-something woman in a tired suit.
“The twins’ mother is the Deputy Director General of the BBC. The young woman next to them is Jasmine Ramesh, her husband is head of British Telecom’s cyber security system. These are professionals for the most part, not the families of oligarchs.”
He pointed a finger at the pregnant woman.
“As I said – Sonja. Surname – Al-Farwaz.” Bunty briefed North as if she was making introductions at a cocktail party. A name. An interesting fact or two. “She has two children with her and her husband, Rahim, is in the other hut. She’s a refugee. Barely has any English. Her family certainly can’t ransom her.”
Sonja – Peggy’s refugee whom Honor had persuaded to stay in Peggy’s house. She should have followed her instinct, and left before the nasty boys came back. But the refugees were there because they had to be tidied away. Not like Bunty Moss or these others.
Was it really possible? Was Tarn so ambitious? Because outside the New Army was preparing to move. Tanks and armoured vehicles were chained and ready on low-loaders. A great many of them. Doubtless it was the same at every barracks across the UK. They had thousands of newly recruited soldiers and the latest hard-core weaponry, and they also had something very old-fashioned: hostages. And not just any hostages. They had hostages that would give them access to the utilities and infrastructure of an entire country. Husbands and wives, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers. Beloved and precious. Not only to their families but to the ruthless, secretive organization that had watched over a country for more than four hundred years. The New Army had everything in place for a coup. And the New Army was a tool of the Board. Tarn had told him its history when he recruited him. Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s spymaster set up the Board to protect the sovereign and the sovereign nation. North didn’t think Walsingham would have approved. He didn’t approve either.
But he did have a plan.
His plan was to stop it.
All he had to do was get out of a heavily guarded prison barracks in the heart of an Army camp in the middle of nowhere.