Back at passport control, I was shunted between various hatchet-faced uniformed officials – some dressed as if auditioning for the SAS – before I ended up in a room smelling of eggs with someone in civilian clothes.
Nice civilian clothes.
Not Savile Row, but made by someone who knew what that once looked like.
The double-breasted jacket fell in the ‘English Drape’, which meant it gathered into vertical folds across the chest. Good for hiding guns, although I doubt the designer intended it for that purpose.
He sat opposite me at a rectangular desk, the varnish full of scratches and carved initials. There was even a swastika on there. No doubt, a comment by a previous interviewee on the techniques employed by his interrogators. Or maybe it was just an ill-advised doodle. The latter, I hoped.
His hands were well-manicured and moisturised, with no rings of any description. There was a very faint tattoo on one finger, but it was indistinct. He had fine, sharp features, slicked-back hair and green eyes that raked over me as he flicked at my passport with his left hand and turned my phone over with his right.
I tried to keep my breathing easy. Why had they pulled me and not Freddie? Or did they have her in another room right now? What did they actually have on me?
‘Miss Wylde,’ he said eventually. ‘I am Inspector Gazim. I shall be handling your case. Do you know why you are here?’
‘Because I have a plane to catch?’ I almost bit my lip. The same lip that everyone warned would get me killed one day. Or, in this case, thrown into an Albanian jail.
‘I think I’ll be the judge of that.’ He paused and looked down at the phone. Did he need a warrant to look at its contents? In Albania, I doubted it. But I’d have to tell him the code to unlock it first. Although, a couple of his combat-equipped pals outside could hold me while he held the screen to my face. Facial recognition had its flaws.
‘A car registered in your name has been discovered on the Gencian Road.’
‘Well, thank goodness it has been recovered. Where is the Gencian Road?’
He didn’t answer that one. ‘Recovered, yes. All in one piece? No.’
‘Had it been in an accident?’
‘It was – is – full of bullet holes.’
‘Bullet holes? Really?’ I made my mouth into an ‘O’ of surprise, like I couldn’t possibly imagine guns or gunfights ever entering my life. Luckily, our own weapons were at the bottom of the lake in Tirana’s Grand Park. I wouldn’t miss that jam-prone piece-of-shit Beretta anyway.
‘Yes. Quite a number of them. Of course, we checked with the hire company and you were the renter.’ What he wasn’t mentioning were the dead bodies. It was possible the AK men had disposed of them, or the families had come and collected their fallen. ‘And now we find you leaving the country. What was your business here?’
‘Holiday. Walking holiday.’
His eyes flicked down to the passport and up again to me in the way all border officials and police are trained to do. I think the Gestapo first invented the ‘papers please scan’. Or maybe it was the Hollywood version of Nazis. Either way, it really caught on. ‘Yet, you have been here only a few days. It normally requires at least a week, or even two, to see our beautiful country.’
‘Your English is very good.’
He nodded, accepting the truth without explaining it. ‘Why the short visit?’
‘Well, the car was stolen, which was upsetting, and it rather ruined the holiday.’
‘But you didn’t report it stolen.’
‘I did. To the police station in Pulana.’
He gave me his weary-policeman smile. ‘There is no police station in Pulana.’
Fuck. Then something told me he was fishing. I had nothing to lose by spitting out the hook. I bristled a little. ‘Well, there was some sort of building full of cops who mostly ignored me.’
He nodded. ‘What I meant to say was, there is no permanently manned police station in Pulana. Four days a week. When did you report the vehicle stolen?’
‘Yesterday. We’d been for a walk around the town, which didn’t take long . . .’
He wasn’t ready for the details yet, which was a relief. I didn’t have any to give him.
‘What is it you do back in England, Miss Wylde?’
‘I’m a personal . . .’ Just the merest gulp as I swallowed the next word, which had tried to tag along. I hoped he hadn’t noticed. ‘Trainer.’
‘A what?’
‘A personal trainer. I help people get fit, lose weight, become toned.’ Release their inner selves, empower them, put them on the path to wellness. I’d had enough motivational gym sessions over the years to know the lingo, but I decided to spare him. ‘You have them here? Personal trainers?’
‘For the lazy elite, yes. Body gurus, we call them. But most people in Albania keep fit by working hard.’ He sniffed to emphasise the point. ‘Your final destination today?’
‘London.’
‘Yet, you have only a ticket to Paris.’
‘Sorry, we are stopping off in Paris for a few days. Sightseeing.’
‘And your companion will confirm everything you have told me?’
Be a bleedin’ miracle if she did, I thought, because I’ve been making all this up on the hoof. I considered claiming Freddie was a fantasist suffering from a form of amnesiac autism that made her an unreliable witness. But I thought better of it. ‘Of course she will.’
‘Will you excuse me for a moment? I have some calls to make.’
He rose, readjusted the line of his jacket and slipped my passport and phone into his right-hand pocket. He left, closed the door and I heard a bolt snick across.
I turned and surveyed the room. There was no camera I could spot. Maybe they didn’t want whatever happened in here on tape. The floor was covered in scuffed, marbled linoleum tiles, but I could see no signs of blood. Only spilled coffee and food. And I guessed some of the latter contained the eggs that now perfumed the air. Maybe I was just being paranoid about the inspector being a rubber-truncheon man. That was the Albania of thirty years ago. Or so I hoped.
The room’s only decoration was a poster in English: Welcome to the Land of the Eagle. The eagle in question was swooping over jagged peaks that rather queasily reminded me of where we had just seen men slaughtered. The bird had a crudely drawn bubble coming out of its mouth, containing something written in what I assumed was Albanian. Maybe it said: Better they were slaughtered than you.
How long until the flight left without me? It had been forty-five minutes to boarding when they had called me in. I reckoned half that time had now elapsed. I knew there was a vast reservoir of panic inside me that I had managed to keep a lid on. All this, this chasing around the toilet bowls of Europe, had one endgame: get to Bali and find Jess, my lovely daughter whose face I couldn’t quite visualise any more. Who, in the many months she had been gone, would have blossomed into a beautiful young woman. And I was missing it all, thanks to her fucking father, who took her from me.
I could feel myself welling up – the reservoir had clearly sprung a leak – when I heard the bolt on the outside of the door draw back and Inspector Gazim re-entered, a pained expression on his face. He didn’t sit. He simply threw a red folder on the desk in front of me.
I waited. He let our lack of communication stretch out.
‘I have spoken to the duty sergeant at the police station at Pulana,’ he said eventually.
I raised a quizzical eyebrow. And? it said. While my brain said: Oh, fuck, here we go.
Gazim sighed. ‘He confirmed your account. There is a copy of the report in the folder. I have emailed a version to your car-hire company.’
It took a while for me to process this. Then I said: ‘You bastard.’
A brief smile flitted across his face, lightening those serious features, as if the sun had broken cover from behind cloud for a second. ‘Were it all too swift, my colleagues might have suspected I had not investigated properly.’ As soon as he had finished the sentence, it became gloomily overcast again and he was cop-like once more.
‘How long have you known the Colonel?’ I asked.
Nothing came back. He stared at me, impassive, that smile an anomaly to be disowned. Eventually he spoke, as if he were reading off a cue card. ‘I hope this unfortunate incident has not coloured your impression of our country.’
Well, if that was how he wanted to play it. ‘No, not at all.’
‘In which case . . .’ He extracted a pen from his pocket. ‘In the folder is a form saying that you have been treated fairly and courteously by the Policia e Shtetit and have no cause for complaint. It is standard procedure.’
Jesus, even the police want reviews now. CopAdviser.
I opened the red file, removed, folded and pocketed the official police report on our stolen car and signed the How did we do? form. At least it didn’t ask for star ratings.
‘Why did you bring me in here?’
He glanced up at the corner of the room. The meaning was clear. I had been right. There were no cameras to record him talking to the Englishwoman. Fair enough.
When I was done, he closed the folder and placed my passport and phone on the desk in front of me. ‘Thank you, Miss Wylde. Have a nice flight.’
As I collected my things I couldn’t help but notice that, whereas I had arrived in the room with just one phone, I was leaving with two.