To the Lions

by Holly Watt

  They let the silence hold.

  ‘We know about the camp,’ stated Miranda.

  ‘Camp?’ Bewilderment, and then the quickest flicker of something else. ‘What camp?’

  ‘Don’t, Adam.’ He flinched at his name.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You do, and you’re going to tell us,’ said Miranda. ‘We know what they do there.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about’ – too quickly.

  ‘Adam,’ Miranda paused. ‘They are killing people.’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’ The shift to despair was so familiar. ‘It was nothing to do with me, I swear.’

  ‘People, Adam.’ Another statement.

  ‘But I’ve never been.’ His voice taut, as if he couldn’t quite breathe.

  ‘People, Adam,’ Miranda hissed. ‘They kill people.’

  ‘I said it was wrong. I told him so.’

  ‘Wrong?’ The wind whipped through the trees. ‘Wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’ He was edging towards defiance.

  ‘You’re going to tell us everything you know.’

  ‘No!’ It was instinctive. ‘I won’t.’

  ‘We know everything about you, Adam,’ Casey joined in. ‘And you’re going to tell us about this.’

  ‘I can’t.’ He glanced around in panic. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Miranda. ‘We need to know who told you about killing them.’

  ‘No.’ His voice rising to a scream. ‘You can’t prove anything.’

  And he was away, racing between the trees, slipping and sliding, running blindly towards home and safety and Lulu.

  They watched him go, icy-faced, in case, even in his panic, he turned back for a second.

  ‘Well.’ Casey dug through her pockets, pressed pause on her recorder. ‘He certainly knows something.’

  They were waiting for him the next morning, as he left his flat, dropping into his stride and flanking him.

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ he yelled, bringing the busy street to a halt. ‘Leave me alone.’

  He sprinted towards the lake, dodging through bewildered commuters.

  ‘I don’t think,’ Miranda said thoughtfully, ‘that we are going to be able to catch him.’

  ‘He hadn’t slept,’ said Casey. ‘He was grey. Gaunt.’

  ‘He’s going to get greyer.’

  ‘Do we give him one more chance?’

  ‘I don’t think he fucking deserves one.’ Miranda’s mouth was set.

  ‘You spoke to him.’

  ‘Yes. Maybe.’

  ‘We’ll have to . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  They never liked doing this, because you could never be sure about loyalties.

  Miranda and Casey took a taxi to the Cyan office, back to the café opposite the grand pillars. The waitress welcomed them, ever more baffled.

  ‘Coffee and cheque?’ – and a professional smile.

  They sipped cappuccinos, eyes never leaving Cyan’s doors. Jefferson reeled in half an hour later, looking shell-shocked. He had lost his tie somewhere on the walk to work.

  A few minutes later, Azarola’s battleship-grey car appeared, the usual chauffeur.

  ‘Go,’ said Miranda.

  Moving fast, they cut off Azarola before he reached the door.

  ‘What the . . .’ He looked them up and down, eyes narrowed.

  The chauffeur leaped back out of the car. ‘Ladies . . . Sorry, sir.’

  ‘I recognise you.’ But, for a second, he couldn’t place Miranda, in her charcoal Armani suit.

  ‘Gigi’s.’ And she watched the recognition flicker across his face.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘It would be better if we talked in your office. Sir.’

  ‘Not until you tell me who you are.’ He was used to making a dozen decisions in the time most men choose their coffee.

  ‘It won’t take long.’ Miranda edged forward.

  ‘Tell me who you are.’ Azarola was used to being obeyed.

  ‘Miranda Darcey from the London Post, and Casey Benedict.’ They had decided not to play him any more. He would not enjoy being fooled once, they thought. Twice would be unforgivable.

  ‘I don’t talk to journalists.’ The shutters came down.

  ‘It’s very important, Mr Azarola.’

  ‘Get lost.’

  He turned on his heel, striding towards the door. The receptionists were peering down the steps, flustered and nervous, unsure if they had got something wrong.

  ‘It’s about one of your competitors,’ Casey said quietly.

  He paused, just for a second.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Aurora Partners.’ She hesitated just for a moment. Tyler Walton’s operation.

  He turned on his heel and came back towards them.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ He put his face close to hers. ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘We’re not going to go away though,’ said Casey. ‘You know we won’t just leave.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘It will take us five minutes to explain,’ Miranda interjected smoothly. ‘In your office.’

  A lift went straight to his office. It was the size of a tennis court, and the view opened out over the lake, blown to ripples by the cold breeze. The walls were pale grey, and a Picasso hung beside the window. Six computer screens lit up his desk.

  ‘Five minutes,’ he said. ‘No tapes. If you fuck me around, I will come after you for ever.’

  Miranda nodded. ‘Do you remember what we talked about in Gigi’s?’

  His face darkened. ‘Of course I remember. Psycho stuff. No one does that shit.’

  ‘We think someone did.’

  ‘Walton?’ He was incredulous.

  ‘No,’ Casey said hastily. ‘We are very sorry about that. It was nothing to do with him.’

  ‘What the fuck then?’

  ‘We overheard one of your staff talking about it,’ said Miranda. ‘They seemed to know about it.’

  ‘And you assumed they were talking about me.’ He was outraged. ‘Me?’

  ‘There was nothing else to point to you,’ Miranda said carefully. ‘We assumed. Wrongly it turned out.’

  ‘But we need to know who it was,’ said Casey. ‘We need to know who could do this.’

  ‘You listen to my staff . . .’ He trailed off, then the anger surged back. ‘How? Where? Where did you do this?’

  ‘It was only in Gigi’s,’ said Casey. ‘The London one. Back in April. You were celebrating something and I overheard . . . I was sitting nearby.’

  ‘Of course you were,’ he snarled at her. ‘Well, who was it? Who said this?’

  ‘Adam Jefferson.’

  ‘Adam?’ He was shocked. ‘Adam? I don’t believe it. He’s an analyst . . . He’s no one.’

  ‘He knows something,’ said Miranda.

  Casey took her recorder out of her handbag.

  ‘I said no fucking tapes.’

  Ignoring Azarola, she pressed a button. The recording was crystal clear.

  ‘People, Adam. They kill people.’

  ‘I said it was wrong.’

  Casey stopped the tape.

  ‘He knows, Mr Azarola.’ Casey looked at him squarely. ‘He knows.’

  ‘People,’ Miranda said again. ‘In camps.’

  Azarola blinked, just for a second. Then his mouth tightened.

  ‘You will leave Cyan out of this.’ It was an order.

  ‘Completely,’ Miranda promised. ‘We will never connect Cyan to this story at all. If you can help us, we will never reveal your link to this investigation.’

  He gave her a long hard stare, then turned to look out over the lake. The water glittered, silver on gunmetal. They couldn’t see his face.

  After a long minute, he turned to his desk, and pushed a button on his phone.

  ‘Send Adam Jefferson up to my office. Now.’

  It
took Adam a long time to get to Azarola’s office. They spent the minutes in silence. Azarola stared into space. Occasionally, his fists clenched.

  There was a quiet knock and Adam slid in, like a lost schoolboy, his good looks crushed by terror. He crumbled as he saw Miranda and Casey there, standing by the window.

  ‘What the actual fuck, Jefferson?’ Azarola turned on him in a rage.

  ‘They’re lying.’

  ‘I don’t think they are.’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’

  ‘I think we’ll be the judge of that.’ Miranda and Casey caught each other’s eye at ‘we’. Azarola was going to do their job.

  ‘Please . . .’

  ‘You are going to tell me every single fucking thing you know. Every single detail.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You will, Adam. You will, or I will fire you. Then I will have your visa rescinded and you will be thrown out of this country. Then I will ensure that no one in this entire industry employs you ever again. Do you understand me, Adam?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’ It was a plea.

  ‘Do you think this is a fucking joke, Adam? Do you think I won’t destroy you?’

  ‘I thought reporters protected their sources.’ Adam turned to Miranda. He was begging now, almost in tears.

  ‘You’re not a fucking source, Adam,’ said Miranda. ‘Sources tell us things. Right now, you’re absolutely nothing.’

  ‘We can protect you.’ Casey shifted to good cop. ‘No one ever needs to know you’ve spoken to us.’

  He turned to her, pilgrim to a cross.

  ‘Tell us what you know and we can work with you,’ she said, so softly.

  ‘I . . . I don’t know . . .’

  ‘It’s OK, Adam,’ said Casey. ‘We can look after you . . .’

  ‘I don’t know much . . . You promise?’

  ‘I promise,’ said Casey, although promises had stopped meaning anything a long time ago.

  ‘It was this guy I know . . . Milo Newbury . . . I was in London for a bit before I moved here. I’d met him a few years back, when he was in New York to party. So when I was moving to Europe, I gave him a call. He can be fun. We got to be friends. He’s always been, well, pretty wild. Drugs, obviously. Some pretty dark porn.’ Adam winced at a memory. ‘He was laughing about it.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Miranda.

  ‘Anyway, we started hanging out quite a lot. About a year after I arrived, I got invited to this shooting thing. Pheasants. They chase them down to you, with dogs. Somewhere in Yorkshire . . . It was raining, and freezing. Not very fun at all. Not like back home. Milo was there. We started chatting, between, what do they call them? Drives?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Casey.

  ‘And he said that it wasn’t as good as the real thing. And I had no idea what he was talking about, I promise . . . I never guessed. And then later . . . He was drinking all day. Hip flask. Whisky, I think. Later on, we were away from the others, and he said . . .’

  Adam’s voice trailed away.

  ‘Keep talking, Adam.’ Azarola’s voice was glacial.

  ‘I was sort of kidding along with him,’ Adam admitted. ‘We were laughing in this sort of library room . . . Playing pool. I made out like I was impressed. I asked him, what did he mean about the real thing. And he said there was this place you went, and it was like a proper safari, but . . . but you shot people . . .’

  ‘Adam.’ There was horror in Azarola’s voice.

  Behind Adam’s back, Miranda made an abrupt gesture to keep him quiet.

  ‘He said it was the most intense thing he had ever done. He said he felt completely different afterwards,’ and Casey heard the echo of his voice, part-gloating, in the club.

  Adam had laughed along, wondered after.

  ‘Where was the camp?’ Casey asked, to cover up her sudden contempt.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And who,’ Casey asked, the realisation rising like nausea. ‘Who were the people?’

  ‘I thought you knew,’ Adam said, almost wonderingly. ‘Refugees. They shoot at refugees.’

  10

  Casey had visited refugee camps all around the world. There are more refugee camps than anyone realises. Scattered across Africa, curving in a desperate arc around Syria. In Pakistan. In India. In Thailand. In Bangladesh.

  Her first visit had been to Zaatari, just over the Syrian border in the northern edge of Jordan. People forget about refugee camps. They don’t make the headlines. Casey had only been in Zaatari because of some grim milestone. Two million refugees, three million, four . . .

  There are no people running for their lives in the refugee camps. No explosions. The children aren’t starving. A refugee camp doesn’t look like a tragedy.

  But it is. It is.

  As they arrive, people hit pause on their lives. All those thousands of lives, all paused. Waiting for something. Waiting to live.

  That first day in Zaatari, to get orientated, Casey had been driven round the camp by her fixer. She and Khaled stared out of the window of the jeep, at the miles and miles of camp. The refugees stared back, sullen, bored. And angry.

  In South Africa, there are guided tours of the townships, gazing at scruffy children, safe in the air-conditioning. Snapping cameras at people, like lions at Longleat.

  In Zaatari, Casey was relieved to ditch the car.

  Originally, the camp had set up in neat rows of tents, but soon people began to move the tents around: to family groups, village groups.

  Ancient feuds. Old friendships. New sex. Astonishing how fast people rebuild the infrastructure of their lives. Mosques popped up. Market stalls opened. The main thoroughfare became – with stone-cold cynicism – the Champs Élysées.

  And children, children, everywhere children.

  Babies were born, miles from their homes. And the elderly died, so quietly, dreaming of those long-lost graveyards.

  As they walked around, the next day, a woman, in the dusty veil, held up a tiny baby to Casey.

  ‘Malak. She is Malak.’

  The syllables were still new, and proud. Casey looked at the baby, wrapped in rags, with the green eyes of Syria. She was just a few weeks old. Khaled looked away.

  ‘The average age of a refugee camp is twelve years,’ the UNHCR worker said, almost casually.

  And Casey thought of that baby growing, almost to adulthood, before she had a hope of living her life anywhere except that raggedy camp.

  She is Malak.

  Later, Casey watched more refugees arrive, struggling through the entrance. Sometimes they were picked up by the Jordanian border guards and dropped, weeping, at the gates. They would join the back of the queue, the long queue of arrivals. The whole family crying. Broken. Even the men, ground to desert dust.

  They had held out, these people. Amidst the bombs, and the starvation, and the hunger, and the disappearances. Clinging on to what is ours. Ours. Our house. Our school. Our jobs. Our lives.

  Until finally, something happened. A brother vanishing in the night. A neighbour’s house blown to fragments. A last whispered warning. And finally, finally, they decide they have to leave.

  Days of walking, away from the known. Goodbye and goodbye and goodbye. The terror of being stopped. Abandoning precious, most loved objects one by one. Until all they can carry is the children. And the children are all they have left. And a last sacrifice, to bribe past the border guards.

  The queue, in the hot sun, weaved its way through the dusty shacks. And finally they were safe, for the first time in years. So they cried, there, in the hot blinding sun. And as they queued, her photographer snapped the pretty weeping children. Cameras in the face, right up close, so that, even then, they tried to smile. Although smiles weren’t what the man wanted.

  And as they moved up the queue, scraps of food and drink were handed out, and Casey watched them lift. It was like watching cut roses put in water.

  By the time they reached the head of the queue, the mot
her would be clipping ears and wiping noses. The father, in his fake Armani jumper, would be trying to forget he had ever cried.

  But they would never forget, any of them. And after struggling for days over a desert, people are grateful for a few weeks, a few days. Sometimes only a few hours.

  Then they looked around, and realised they had been interned for the crime of being born in a country that had fallen apart. A crime, their birthplace.

  Some of these Syrians had come from wealth, from education.

  ‘We had rooms in the house we never even used,’ a doctor said to Casey, shaking his head. He was living in a caravan, one room, his six children. ‘I cannot imagine it now. I cannot imagine it.’

  Casey left him sitting on his doorstep, looking out at nothing.

  ‘If it can happen to us, it can happen to anyone,’ he called after her. ‘Never think this can never happen to you.’

  But the refugees are supposed, if nothing else, to be safe.

  Now Casey looked at Adam with horror. ‘A refugee camp?’ she asked. ‘One of the refugee camps?’

  Both Azarola and Miranda were shocked to silence.

  ‘Adam . . .’ Azarola ran out of words. ‘Oh, Adam.’

  ‘Where’ – Miranda took over – ‘was the camp?’

  ‘I don’t know. He said it was a palace. This crazy house up in the middle of the hills. A huge white house with a golden roof. It’s a kind of hotel, I guess . . . He said it was amazingly luxurious, even by his standards. And then, a drive away, there’s this camp.’

  ‘How far away?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you know the name of the place?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of the refugee camp?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  Newbury had been careful about that, at least.

  ‘When did he go?’

  ‘We talked about it in January,’ Adam paused. ‘I got the feeling that it was quite recent, then.’

  ‘Did he say anything,’ Miranda asked, ‘about the person he shot?’

  ‘No.’ Adam winced. ‘Milo said she. He didn’t say anything else about it, but it was a woman. I’m sure . . .’

  ‘How?’ Casey asked the key question. ‘How did he know to go there?’

  ‘He said it was some really shady guys.’ Adam’s anxiety rocketed back up. ‘He said they were fucking crazy. He was scared of them. Deep down. You could see it.’