by Mark Sennen
‘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.
&
nbsp; 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.
Chapter Seven
Silva spent a restless night in the cottage. She lay awake listening to every little sound: a creak on the landing, a fox screeching outside, the wind in the trees.
The previous evening she’d been on autopilot: escape from the water, get dry, find some spare clothes, treat the cuts, get some calories inside, try to rest. She realised her reaction had been a way of coping, the result of her army training. Push the emotion down and you survive, allow your feelings and fears to rise to the top and you end up making the wrong decisions. Now though, lying in the dark, the shock kicked in. Someone wanted her dead. If not that then at the very least they wanted to hurt her and scare her. But who? Fairchild’s ‘dark forces’? Whoever was in the black BMW?
Sometime in the predawn a car passed in the lane, the noise waking Silva from a fitful sleep. She jumped out of bed and went to the window. Headlights painted the hedgerows as the car drove away. The car was the final straw and she gave up trying to sleep and went downstairs.
She opened the back door and slipped outside into the pale light that preceded sunrise. The weir rumbled, the water churning in the pool below. She walked across to the sluice gate at the top of the weir and gripped the railings with both hands. The cold metal sent a sharp pain into the cuts on her palms. She flinched but continued to hold on, as if she needed to cling to some form of reality. She breathed in the sharp morning air, felt a mist on her face as spray rose from the frothing water, heard the sounds of birds starting their dawn chorus. All that was real. The other stuff, like Karen Hope, Fairchild’s dark forces, the break-in and the mysterious assailant who’d pushed her into the water, was just the opposite. The realm of fiction. Things she didn’t want to believe. Things she was frightened of.
Except it wasn’t fiction. Somebody had attacked her.
She relaxed her grip on the railings and turned, almost expecting to see someone lunging for her, hands outstretched, intent on violence. She shivered, aware of how vulnerable she was, and hurried back into the cottage and locked the door.
Inside, she fished out a tin of rice pudding from a cupboard for breakfast and changed back into her own clothes. She spent another hour clearing up the mess the burglar had left behind and then fired up her bike and headed for north London and Third Eye News, the agency her mother had worked for.
She raced along the M4 but heavy traffic on the North Circular meant the eighty-mile journey took well over two hours, and by the time she got to Highgate it was mid-morning. The agency was located in a maisonette above a wholefood shop and consisted of half a dozen rooms filled with desks and screens and chatter. As Silva entered several journalists came over to greet her, and it wasn’t until she’d spoken to them all that she was able to climb the stairs to the top floor where Neil Milligan, the editor, had his office. The room was a nook tucked in under the eaves and was crammed with piles of old newspapers and magazines. A desk sat beneath a skylight and a large TV hung on one wall showing rolling news. There’d been another terrorist atrocity, this one in Hamburg. A man had run amok with a knife and three people were dead. Not religious extremists this time: the attacker had been a white neo-Nazi, the victims young Turkish immigrants. Seeing Silva, Milligan rose from behind his desk and came over and hugged her. He was a thin man, his narrow face covered with a grey beard, his features sharp, his eyes keen.
‘Where’s it going to end?’ he said. ‘I’m getting tired of writing the same story over and over.’
Silva shrugged. Quite why Milligan expected she, of all people, would have an answer, she didn’t know.
‘Thanks for coming to the funeral, Neil,’ she said. ‘Thanks for setting up the fund too.’
Milligan had signalled his desire to create a scholarship in Silva’s mother’s name. The scholarship was intended to sponsor a journalism student through university. It was a nice touch and something her mother would have approved of.
‘Not much good can come of this.’ Milligan gestured at the screen. ‘But it’s important we try to cling onto some sort of hope.’
The final word of the sentence cut right through Silva. Hope. Karen Hope. ‘Yes.’
The response was flat and Milligan picked up on it.
‘You OK, Rebecca?’ He tutted to himself. ‘I mean, fuck, of course you’re not OK. What I meant was—’
‘Forget it, I know what you meant.’ Silva dismissed Milligan’s apology. ‘My mother was working on a trafficking story when she was killed, right?’
Milligan recoiled, almost as if Silva was being disrespectful by getting straight to the point. ‘Yes. She was trying to follow the migrant flows across the Mediterranean, talk to the victims, the perpetrators, the NGOs, the authorities. It was sheer bad luck she was interviewing the head of the charity when the attack happened.’ Milligan moved round and sat behind his desk. Shuffled a sheaf of papers. He appeared distracted. ‘I want you to know we’re not dropping the story, and I fully intend to publish something with your mother’s name on the byline.’
‘What happened to her laptop?’
‘It’s probably downstairs somewhere
. I know we had some equipment sent to us from Tunis.’
‘Can I see it?’
‘Why? There’s nothing on the machine. The disk has been wiped, ready for a fresh install.’
‘So how are you going to publish the people-trafficking story?’
‘Your mother’s files were backed up to cloud storage.’ Milligan nodded at his own laptop. ‘I can access them from here.’
‘I was wondering if there was anything else she was working on. Something much bigger than people trafficking.’
‘Bigger than trafficking? Not that I know of.’ Milligan glanced up from the laptop. ‘Look, I know what you’re trying to do. You want to make sense of this and understand why your mother died.’ He gestured at the screen on the wall. The chaos in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. ‘But there is no sense to it. She was just doing her job and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ Silva held Milligan’s gaze, sensing he was being evasive. ‘Because somebody broke into her cottage. They tried to make it look like a simple burglary but they removed the hard drive from her old computer.’ Silva lifted her hands and turned them over. The grazing from her fall into the weir was evident. ‘And when I was there yesterday someone attacked me and pushed me into the river. I nearly drowned.’
Milligan cocked his head. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m in one piece,’ Silva said, lowering her hands and noticing the slight shake as she did so. ‘Physically anyway.’
‘Did you report it to the police? They could help. Victim support. That kind of thing.’
‘No.’ Silva wondered why she hadn’t done just that. She’d been assaulted and the house had been burgled. At least the police would have been able to give her some reassurance. Unless… her train of thought was curtailed by an involuntary shudder. ‘But it got me thinking if my mother might have stumbled across something, something which could have got her killed. I’ve an idea about what it might be and it has absolutely nothing to do with people trafficking.’
