Silva went to the Costa on the high street opposite the agency. She bought a cup of coffee and a muffin and sat at a window seat. Milligan was inside because she’d seen him come to a window and peer out nervously. This wasn’t the Neil Milligan her mother had told her stories about. In his time as a front-line journalist he’d covered wars, famines and natural disasters. He’d been shot in the leg in the Balkans, captured by Angolan rebels in Africa and faced trial in Singapore for refusing to reveal a source. He’d won awards for his work. Silva concluded he’d either lost it or had a genuine reason to be frightened. Considering what had happened to her at the weir, she was inclined to think the latter and that wasn’t comforting. She turned her head and scanned the cafe. Milligan’s paranoia was infectious.
When she’d eaten the muffin and finished the coffee, she drummed her fingers on the table for a couple of minutes. She’d planned to wait for Milligan to emerge so she could try to talk to him again, but now, having seen him at the window, she came to the conclusion he wasn’t going to open up to her.
She decided instead to return to her mother’s place and take a good look through all the documents in the upstairs room. She dodged through the traffic and headed west, arriving at the cottage mid-afternoon. She sat astride the bike and removed her helmet. Listened. Nothing but the water tumbling through the weir. She kicked down the stand and dismounted. The attack had spooked her and she was angry it had changed her feelings about being here. After a minute’s contemplation she went inside.
She spent several hours going through all the box files. There were documents relating to research her mother had done years ago as well as more recent material, but there was nothing that mentioned Karen Hope.
The sun had sunk by the time she’d finished. Down in the kitchen she found a tin of curry in a cupboard. There was dried rice in a jar on the side. Two saucepans went on the stove. In another cupboard a rack held several bottles of red wine. Silva smiled to herself; her mother enjoyed a drink and it wasn’t hard to imagine her pouring a large glass and taking it outside to sit by the weir on a summer’s evening such as this one. Silva opened a bottle and checked the rice and curry. While she was waiting for the rice to cook, she drifted through to the living room. Above the fireplace there was a corkboard with photographs and postcards. There were several pictures of Silva as a child, some of her with her shooting medals, one of her standing beside a Foxhound armoured vehicle in Afghanistan. Silva pulled off some of the postcards. These were from friends, and she recognised the names of various people who’d come to the funeral. Like her mother, the friends were well travelled. Peru. Japan. New Zealand. South Africa. Chichester Harbour. Chichester Harbour? Silva turned the picture over, interested to know which of her mother’s friends would send a card from a little over fifty miles away. Presumably it was an attempt at ironic humour.
18 August
Dear Rebecca, remember the beach we used to go to here? West something or other, wasn’t it? Those were happy times, good memories, a place with buried treasure and hidden secrets to be passed on from one generation to the next. I so enjoyed the many times we visited. I definitely Hope you did too. Love always and forever, Mum.
Silva stepped back from the mantelpiece and sat down heavily in an armchair. She’d never received this postcard. It was correctly addressed to Silva’s boat at the boatyard, but there was no stamp. The card had never been posted. Had her mother meant to send the card and forgotten? All of a sudden Silva felt a wave of regret. If the card had been posted, if Silva had received it, things might have been different. She might have phoned her mother and perhaps the call could have changed events in some small way. A tiny ripple moving forward in time, disrupting the flow of atoms and altering history. The butterfly effect, but in this case not causing a storm but preventing it. Silva dropped the card into her lap. The cold shock at seeing the message had gone and now she found herself crying again, unable to reconcile the present with the past, reality with what might have been.
After a while she stood and went back to the kitchen. The rice was done and she drained it and served the curry. Poured herself some wine. She sat at the kitchen table, the postcard in front of her. She sobbed but as she read again she found herself unable to stifle a laugh. Nothing was right. For a start the card was post-dated. The eighteenth of August was several weeks off and yet her mother must have written it before she left for Tunisia months ago. Then the actual message on the postcard was all wrong. Remember the beach we used to go to here? West something or other, wasn’t it? West something referred to West Wittering, a beach Silva had been to with her father, but certainly not with her mother. Her father had taught her to sail on the waters of Chichester Harbour and they’d beached their dinghy at West Wittering on occasion. Her mother had hated sailing and hadn’t cared much for the sea. The message made no sense. Hidden secrets to be passed on… She turned the card over. The picture was of Chichester Harbour from the air and showed the vast expanse of water with all the little inlets. On a rising tide you could explore the creeks and, indeed, that was just what she’d done with her father.
Was that what her mother meant? That there was some kind of secret buried like pirate gold deep in a mudbank up a lonely creek? She turned the card back over and read the final line.
I so enjoyed the many times we visited. I definitely Hope you did too. Love always and forever, Mum.
As a journalist, her mother was unfailingly accurate in matters of grammar and punctuation, but in this case it looked as if she’d written the card in a rush. I definitely Hope you did too. The words definitely Hope was not only bad English, hope had a capital H, an obvious error and one Silva was positive her mother wouldn’t have made.
Holm was ensconced in his little office under the stairs by eight the next day. His head was clear and his body had recovered from the hammering he’d given it on the night out with Palmer.
After Javed had dropped the bombshell about the tweet, Holm had sent the lad away. He needed time to think, and Javed talked ten to the dozen. There was barely a gap between his words for a breath and he’d wanted Holm to act on the information immediately. They should go to Huxtable, make a request to Twitter for more information on the account that had sent the tweet, raise the terrorist threat level, possibly recommend cancelling the weekend’s football fixtures. The latter suggestion had caused an ache to thump in Holm’s forehead which had nothing to do with the copious amounts of alcohol he’d consumed.
‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Go home and act normally. We’ll talk tomorrow.’
Javed had slunk away like a scolded dog and Holm once again felt guilty for raising his voice. Still, it couldn’t be helped. He needed space to himself.
Back in his flat he’d made himself a strong black coffee and sat at the kitchen table, a pencil and a pad of paper at the ready. Now, in the office, he pulled out the pad from his briefcase and looked at his scribblings. Holm didn’t really understand Twitter or social media or why so many people lauded a medium that seemed to exist merely to allow the sharing of either pictures of cute animals or vile abuse. He did, however, understand the world of espionage, the world of covert communications. Except the tweet hadn’t been covert. It was hidden in plain sight. An account directly referencing Taher and Holm. There were a couple of possibilities he considered and discounted. First, it was a stunt by Palmer or another of his colleagues. No, the security services didn’t do pranks like that. It would be too easy for such a joke to backfire and endanger personnel in the field. The second possibility was the username was simply a coincidence. That seemed unlikely because the contents of the tweet mentioned the innocent one – which was what the name Taher meant, and the chance of random characters resolving to a cipher of RAVEN and the numbers of Holm’s birthday was astronomical.
Which left the real possibility that somebody was trying to communicate with him and Javed. Somebody, Holm reckoned, who was prepared to betray Taher.
Who will listen to my voice? Who will stop this madness?
Holm felt a buzz of excitement each time he recalled the message. Was this the beginning of the end for Taher? Slowly it dawned on him that here was the solution to his problems. A way to make amends, get his mojo back and, quite possibly, finish his career on a high note.
Javed arrived at nine in his now customary manner, carrying two coffees on a cardboard tray. Holm nodded his thanks and reached for the piece of paper which had been stuck to the door of the office earlier in the week.
The Top Top Top Secret Department.
‘See this?’ Holm held up the note. ‘This isn’t wrong. Not the way I’m going to play it.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘This says it all. Tells you everything you need to know about what people think of us.’ Holm flapped the piece of paper in the air again. ‘We’re a laughing stock. The has-been, washed-out time-server and the wet-behind-the-ears recruit. What relevance could we possibly have? Whatever we’re investigating must be trivial and hardly worth a moment of anyone’s time. We’re going to be ignored down here in our broom cupboard. If anyone thinks of us at all it will be as an afterthought. We’ll be mentioned in jokes over lunch, but the big boys will be concentrating on loftier matters.’
Javed looked disappointed. ‘But Huxtable said we’d be working on something important.’
‘Important?’ Holm tapped himself on the chest. ‘If that was the case, then what the hell am I doing here? No, Farakh, your career is at an end before it’s even begun. You’ve fallen at the first fence, spun off at the end of the straight, blown your load before—’
‘All right, I get it.’
Javed poked at the froth on his coffee with a wooden stirrer and Holm let the silence build. After a minute he spoke.
‘What do you know about the animal rights lobby?’
‘Hey?’ Javed cocked his head on one side as if he’d misheard. ‘You mean the people who break into laboratories and stuff?’ He dumped the stirrer in his cup. ‘Nothing, boss.’
‘Well, I’ve decided that’s our brief. No one cares about animal rights. It’s not sexy like Islamic terrorism or espionage or threats to our national infrastructure from foreign governments, but there you go. Now, because we know nothing, we won’t be accomplishing much in the first couple of months. We’ve got to do research and map out our strategy. Lay the groundwork, build from the base up. Actually producing any meaningful results is a long, long way in the future.’
‘You’re kidding me, boss? This isn’t what I signed up to do. I speak fluent Arabic, I’ve got a degree in Middle Eastern Studies, my MA thesis was on the rise of ISIS, I know sod all about torturing bunnies.’
Holm smiled and gave a wink. ‘Calm down, lad, I think you’re missing the point here.’
‘I…’ Javed bit his lip. His gaze wandered to the computers and over to the filing cabinet. ‘We’re not really going to be investigating animal rights groups, are we?’
‘Of course bloody not. It’s a cover story.’
‘So what are we going to be doing?’
‘Keeping secrets. We don’t have to report to anyone but the Spider, and that’s down to me, right? You keep your lips sealed and if people ask you say nothing other than we’re looking into the activities of various, potentially violent, animal liberation groups.’
‘Sure, but you still haven’t told me what this is all about.’ Javed gestured at the sparse surroundings. ‘I mean we’re not exactly set up for a high-profile investigation.’
‘Look, Huxtable has given me the freedom to do whatever I like. She either expects me to bimble along doing relatively little or she’s hoping to give me enough rope to hang myself. Well, skiving isn’t my cup of tea and I don’t intend to get caught in her web.’
‘You’re mixing your metaphors, sir, and if I might say so, you’re continuing to evade my questioning. You’ve also not mentioned the information I gave you yesterday.’
‘Guilty on all counts.’ Holm raised his hands. ‘Time I came clean. The username was a cipher of RAVEN and my birthday, right? As you said, more than odd.’
‘But the cipher was simple. I cracked it easily.’
‘Just so. Which means whoever was behind the tweet wants us to know that they know the code name we use for Taher. What’s more, by sending it to you and using my birthday as part of the username, it was plainly intended for us both.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘However, if they know our code name they either have direct access to our systems or they’re being fed information by somebody.’
‘There’s a leak then, a mole.’
‘Or this is something different.’ Holm paused. He glanced over to the filing cabinet where he’d found the index card relating to the troubles in Northern Ireland. ‘Back in the day the IRA used code words to let the police know when they’d planted a bomb. It showed a threat was genuine and not a hoax. This could be similar. Somebody has passed my birthday and the code name of Taher – RAVEN – to an informant in the field. By using those two pieces of information in the username the informant has established they’re genuine.’
‘So, a benevolent mole?’
Holm shrugged. He didn’t really have a clue what was going on but he wasn’t going to let Javed know that.
‘Anyway, in light of this latest twist, perhaps you can guess what I intend to do with our little two-person operation now?’
‘I don’t believe it.’ A look of astonishment spread across Javed’s face. ‘We’re going to go after Taher?’
‘Precisely.’