‘I’ve known your father a long time, Ms da Silva,’ Fairchild said as they walked down towards the lake. ‘We go back.’
‘The army?’
‘The army. He was a fine soldier. We were in some scrapes together in the first Gulf War.’
‘You were special forces too?’
‘I was. I understand the difficulties you’ve both faced.’
‘My father has two problems with me. First, as you may have noticed, I’m a girl. Second, when I do what he would have wanted a son to do, I fuck up. Not only that, but the whole thing becomes public. I’m court-martialled and he’s so embarrassed that in the end he takes early retirement from the Ministry.’
‘I’m sure he’s proud of your achievements. You’ve got an Olympic medal for shooting and were a world-class sniper, after all.’
‘Class is easily lost. I should know.’
They reached the boat and Fairchild gestured for Silva to climb in. ‘You might not fish, but do you row?’ he said.
‘Sure.’ Silva clambered into the boat and sat. Fairchild took the aft seat. He pushed off from the jetty and Silva used one oar to turn them around. Once they were facing out into the lake, she dipped both oars and pulled.
The boat glided across the water and Silva pulled again. She was facing to the rear so she could see her father sitting at the table. Mrs Collins had come from the house with a newspaper and a pen. Her father was intent on doing The Times crossword.
‘He loves you, of course,’ Fairchild said. ‘You do know that?’
‘It’s every parent’s duty to love their offspring and my father would never fail to carry out his duty.’
‘I’m sure it’s more than duty.’
‘I’m not. He loves me because it’s in the rule book. Page one hundred and fifty, subsection six, paragraph two.’
Silva took several more strokes and then shipped the oars. The lake was only small and they were already nearing the centre.
‘Forget about the mud weight, we’ll just drift,’ Fairchild said. ‘See where we end up.’
‘You like metaphors, don’t you, Mr Fairchild?’
‘I like intelligence. And, yes, wordplay. What about you?’
‘I don’t like waffle, so if you don’t mind, could you please get to the point?’
‘The point. Yes.’ Fairchild looked across the lake to where a coot busied itself with a strand of green pondweed. ‘She’s after the snails.’
‘Hello?’ Silva waved an arm at Fairchild. ‘I didn’t think I was out here to learn about waterfowl.’
‘No, of course not.’ Fairchild turned back to Silva. The chit-chat was over and his face wore a serious expression. ‘I was shocked when I heard about your mother’s death. Very shocked. It was an appalling crime.’
‘I’m done with condolences, Mr Fairchild. Sincere or not they don’t help. I’m trying to forget what happened and concentrate on remembering my mother as she was.’
‘Of course, that’s understandable, even commendable. However, what if I told you the circumstances surrounding the attack in Tunisia aren’t quite as simple as they first appeared?’
‘I don’t care. I can’t change anything, I can’t bring my mother back. Speculation is a waste of emotional energy and I don’t have much of it to spare.’
‘What do you know about what happened?’
‘I told you, I don’t want to go there.’ Silva reached for the oars. She’d spent several weeks trying to banish the images she’d seen on TV and now here was Fairchild dredging it all up. ‘I’ll take us back to the shore. You can have a nice long chinwag with my dad about the good old days and I can get on my bike and go home and forget this conversation ever took place.’
‘You haven’t heard what I have to say yet.’
‘I’m not interested.’ Silva dipped the oars and began to turn the boat. She could feel a rising panic, emotion about to overcome her. She swallowed and gave a half smile. ‘I’m sorry you’ve made a wasted journey, sorry you’ll have to disappoint my dad. I guess he put you up to this. He can’t help interfering. If I thought it was love, I’d be touched. Sadly, it’s pride.’
‘I think you misunderstand what’s going on here. Your father came to me because we’re old friends and he knew I’d be able to help. Well, I was only too happy to. The next logical step was to try and get you on board. He figured I’d be better at that than he would.’
‘So this is about a job? Well, I’m grateful for the offer, but I’m going to pass.’ Silva began to row. ‘At least you caught some fish.’
‘Perhaps I should elaborate.’
‘Elaborate all you want,’ Silva shrugged. ‘But the answer will still be no.’
Fairchild ignored her. ‘My work involves security. After I left the army I set up as a consultant of sorts. That’s a loose description, anyway. I tend to work abroad, the Middle and Far East. Occasionally South America and Africa.’
‘Let me guess, you run mercenaries, right?’
‘I knew you were clever.’
‘Not clever enough, apparently. And I doubt I’d be clever enough to work for you. I’m a risk. It wouldn’t look so good for your company if I killed a swath of innocents on one of your protection jobs.’
‘You shouldn’t blame yourself for what happened in Afghanistan. Most people would have made the same call. The probability was the boy was a threat and you acted decisively to remove the threat and protect the patrol. To do any differently would have been negligent. In my mind you should have been given a commendation.’
‘Funny, I don’t remember the commendation. I do remember being court-martialled and thrown to the wolves.’
‘Politics. It was important for the system to be seen to be working. You were a pawn in a game. Pawns are sacrificed so the queen can triumph. Ask yourself was it right for you to face sanction when a prime minister can give the order to kill tens of thousands and escape scot free?’
‘I’ve done that many times. The only conclusion I’ve come to is the common people get stepped on while the big beasts get away.’ Silva shipped the oars. They were a little way out from the jetty and the boat coasted in. ‘Could you?’
Fairchild reached for the jetty as they slowed. ‘They haven’t caught the terrorists who killed your mother, have they?’
‘No.’ Silva pulled the painter from the front of the boat and tied it off. ‘But I’m sure they will. It’s just a matter of time.’
‘You sound quite sanguine about it.’
‘Look, if I was on a tour and I got the chance to slot the bastards, I would.’ Silva lifted the oars from the rowlocks and stowed them in the boat. She stepped out onto the jetty. ‘The problem is, I’m not, and if there’s one thing my father taught me, it’s don’t sweat the stuff that isn’t in your orders because there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ve got to live with the way the world is.’
‘Very noble.’
‘Not at all, it’s simply a matter of survival.’ Silva bent and held the boat as Fairchild stepped out. When he had, she straightened. Tried to conceal her anger and appear gracious. ‘Nice to meet you, Mr Fairchild. Give my regards to my father.’
Silva turned and walked down the jetty. She headed across the lawn and round the side of the house. As she walked she heard her father call her name. She ignored him. At the front of the house she took her helmet from the bike and pulled on her leather jacket. As she was putting her gloves on, Fairchild came out of the front door. He’d taken a shortcut through the house. Silva sat astride the motorbike and fired it up. Blipped the throttle.
‘Rebecca!’ Fairchild stood alongside. He shouted above the grunt of the engine. ‘We need to talk!’
‘We just did. Goodbye.’
‘Your mother wasn’t simply a journalist caught in the crossfire.’ Fairchild placed a hand on Silva’s shoulder. ‘The news you’ve been fed isn’t the whole truth.’
‘What?’ Silva shouted too, not able to fully understand Fairchild through the padding of her helmet.
‘Your mother was killed deliberately. The fact the head of the women’s charity was hit was a blind to throw the authorities. Your mother was the intended target and she was murdered because of a story she was working on. There are dark forces at work, Rebecca, but I know who was behind the attack and their motive. That’s what I was, in a roundabout way, trying to tell you.’
‘Who?’
‘Turn the engine off.’ Fairchild gestured at the key. Silva hesitated for a moment and then hit the kill switch and the engine died. ‘That’s better.’
‘Who?’
‘Sorry about earlier. I should have come clean instead of trying to approach the subject from a tangent. Let’s go inside.’ Fairchild turned to the house. ‘I’ll explain everything.’
‘No!’ Silva undid the chinstrap and removed her helmet. ‘Don’t play games. Who was behind the attack?’
Fairchild shrugged and nodded. He went across to the black Range Rover, opened the passenger door and retrieved a manila folder from the glovebox. He turned and walked back towards Silva, stopping a few paces away.
‘This person, Rebecca.’ Fairchild reached into the folder and pulled out a glossy photograph. He held it up. ‘She was directly responsible for the death of your mother.’
Silva looked at the picture. It showed a woman standing at a podium. Long brown hair and catwalk-model features. Eyes like blue neon. Behind her dozens of placards held aloft by adoring supporters. To the front, flags waved by an enthusiastic crowd, their emotions whipped into a frenzy. The placards bore a single word: Hope.
‘Karen Hope?’ Silva had seen the woman many times on the news, read the approving commentaries in the papers. ‘Is this some kind of sick joke?’
‘I wish it was.’ Fairchild pulled the picture back and looked at it himself. ‘You’re right about who she is though: US Congresswoman Karen Hope.’
‘And how is she in any way connected to my mother’s death?’
‘You mother was investigating the Hope family and trod on too many toes. Quite simply she got in the way of Karen Hope’s ambitions.’
‘Her ambitions?’
‘Hope is a virtual shoo-in for the Democratic nomination. With the way the opinion polls are heading she’s almost certainly going to be the next president of the United States of America.’
‘And she killed my mother?’
‘Correct.’
‘Bullshit,’ Silva said.
She nestled in behind a car transporter and rode along the motorway at a steady fifty-five, unable to trust herself to ride safely if she went any faster.
Fairchild had made her angry but she blamed her father for that. He’d asked her to come and visit and, if she knew him, he had to have been the one behind the crazy accusation Fairchild had made. What the purpose of such a story was, Silva had no idea. Then again she’d never been able to work out her father’s motives and likely this was some kind of game or test. Pass and she’d be in his good books. Fail and his disapproval would follow. And walking out definitely fell under the fail heading.
Calmed by the monotony of the motorway, Silva played back everything Fairchild had said to see if she could work out exactly what was going on. Fairchild had claimed her mother was investigating Karen Hope, but that was plainly wrong. Her mother concentrated on the Middle East and North Africa, and she’d been killed while interviewing the head of a women’s aid charity. When Silva had visited her in Tunisia a few months before her death, she’d been filing report after report on the people traffickers preying on the refugees prepared to risk everything to make the deadly sea crossing to Europe. Her work had nothing to do with US politics. Silva guessed there were plenty of journalists digging around looking for dirt on the congresswoman, but it was inconceivable her mother was one of them.
She tried to recall what she knew about Karen Hope to see if there was anything that might be a clue as to what her father was up to. Like the cryptic crosswords he did, his games often involved some measure of obfuscation. Peel away the obvious and perhaps the answer would reveal itself.
She knew Hope was a Democrat and was involved with the military in some way. If Silva remembered correctly the family business built up by her father was armaments. That and the fact Hope was on the right of the party gave her an ‘in’ with Republican voters, and broad cross-party appeal meant she was the front runner in the race to be president. Aside from the obvious military angle nothing suggested a connection to her father. Was there something there? Something from his time in the Ministry of Defence? She didn’t know. If whatever he was up to was cryptic then she lacked the wherewithal to decode it.
She blipped the throttle and overtook the car transporter, noting a dark BMW with tinted windows behind her do the same. Now she thought of it, the car had been in her mirrors for several miles. Fairchild’s Range Rover came to mind. It too had smoked-glass windows. Silva dismissed the coincidence and accelerated up to eighty. She rode in the fast lane for several miles, trying to clear the cobwebs and confusion from her mind. When she slowed for some congestion ahead she glanced in her mirrors again. The car was still there. For a moment a chill slipped inside her leather jacket, but then she threaded her way down between two lines of vehicles and left the BMW stuck in the stationary traffic.
When she reached Swindon she turned off the motorway and headed south to the town of Marlborough. Her mother’s house lay a few miles outside the town on the banks of the young river Kennet. A lane led away from the main road and down to the river where a brick weir-keeper’s cottage stood next to a foaming pool of white water. A picket fence surrounded the front garden, the grass within long and in need of a cut. Silva kicked down the stand on the bike, pulled off her helmet and listened to the rumble of the weir. As a child she’d grown used to the sound, the constant white noise so pervasive that when she’d moved away she’d found it difficult to sleep.
She slipped the keys into the lock and the door opened against a mound of letters, free newspapers and junk mail. She pushed the pile to one side and closed the door.
Silence. A waft of air filled with the scent of jasmine and coffee beans. Silva inhaled and stepped into the living room. Shelves crammed with books either side of a fireplace. A sofa with a throw and an abundance of cushions. A Turkish carpet on the floor. A plant in the window bay with leaves brown from lack of water. She dropped into the sofa and pulled a cushion to her body and hugged the softness. Remembered back to when she’d lived in this house as a teenager. Remembered the arguments and fights and the way she and her mother had rubbed each other up. Parent and child. Back then the place had seemed claustrophobic and they’d been under each other’s feet with not enough space, Silva’s unsuitable boyfriends matched against her mother’s equally unworthy lovers. Later, when Silva was older and more world wise, the relationship had matured. Mother and daughter. Friends.
Silva wiped away tears, aware she was crying not solely for the loss of her mother. The visit to her father had crystallised the absence that had been there all along. She’d never really known him, and now her mother was dead she was alone.
She pushed herself up from the sofa. As she bent to pick up the mail she felt a breeze touch her cheek. Those smells again. Jasmine and coffee. She left the mail where it lay and turned and walked down the hall to the little kitchen. A broken jar of Java beans lay on the quarry-tiled floor. Behind the sink a window was half open. In the garden outside the white flowers of the jasmine tumbled down a wooden trellis.
Silva looked at the beans and the window. Somebody had forced the catch and knocked the beans onto the floor as they’d climbed in. She tensed and for a moment she thought of Fairchild and the ‘dark forces’ he’d talked of. Wondered about the black BMW with the tinted windows. She turned and looked back down the hall to where the narrow stairs led upwards. Was the intruder still here?
She moved along the hall to the stairs and stood and listened. Nothing. She went up slowly, easing her feet from step to step, trying not to make a sound. On the landing she peeked into her mother’s bedroom. A jewellery box lay upturned on the bed and clothes had been pulled from a chest of drawers. The doors to a full-length cupboard stood open and several dresses lay on the floor. She moved across the landing to her mother’s office. A bed, a Coldplay poster and a shelf full of shooting trophies testified to the fact this had once been Silva’s room, but those were the only concessions to the past. A monitor sat on a table by the window while to one side several shelving units held an array of box files. Next to Chris Martin and his bandmates hung a huge map of the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East. She reached down for the switch on the computer cabinet beneath the desk. After a few seconds a message flashed on the monitor screen.
Disc error. The internal volume is corrupted or missing. Boot from external drive? Y/N
Puzzled, she stepped back, feeling something beneath the sole of her foot. She moved her foot, bent down and picked up a tiny screw. She reached for the computer cabinet and dragged it from beneath the desk. At the back the rear panel was secured with five screws and there was a hole where the sixth should have been.
She looked at the screen again. The machine was an old one and Silva remembered her mother had used a laptop while she was in Tunisia. But where was it? All the personal possessions her mother had with her in Tunis had been sent to Silva’s father; there’d been no laptop. Perhaps the device had gone to the agency her mother worked for.
Silva went back downstairs, uneasy. A local criminal wouldn’t have removed the hard drive from the computer; this was something different dressed up to look like a simple burglary. She cleared up the mess on the kitchen floor and closed the window. She watered the plant in the front room and then went outside and stood by the weir. A torrent of water roared down the concrete apron and hissed into the pool below. She’d stood here many times. There was something about the way the water tumbled and churned in a froth of white. The constant motion and noise cleansed the mind of thoughts, and Silva had often found staring into the flow had the effect of putting the world to rights. This time, though, the noise was angry and more of a growl, as if her mother’s death had conjured a malevolent spirit from the river.
The roar from the weir meant she didn’t hear the near-silent footsteps of the man who crept across the grass behind her. But she felt his hands on her back. A hard shove and she was falling onto the slime-covered, sloping face of the weir. She crashed into the concrete sill and was swept into the churning pool below. She managed to splutter a mouthful of water before the undertow took her down into the turbulent fury of the weir. She tried to fight her way to the surface but found herself being dragged back by the force of the water and the weight of her wet clothes.
If you fall in, swim down and out.
The words had been drummed into her by her mother when Silva had been a young child. A life ring hung on a post to one side of the weir but was useless if you fell in when no one was around. It was useless if you were dragged below the surface.
Swim down and out.
Silva ignored her instinct to head up towards the light. That way was to fight the current and was always doomed to fail. Instead she kicked out and dived deep, feeling a surge of water grab her and carry her downstream away from the weir. Her knees grazed the stones on the riverbed and she pushed the bottom with her feet and shot herself towards the surface. She bobbed up twenty metres from the weir, coughed out a mouthful of water and swam towards the bank. As she pulled herself from the river she heard a squeal of tyres and a car revving, the engine sound fading into the distance as she hunched over on the soft grass and gasped for breath.