To the Lions

by Holly Watt

  ‘How did they know him?’

  ‘I don’t know. He mentioned a guy called Charlie . . . That’s all I know . . . He said that Charlie sorted it all . . .’

  Adam was crying, suddenly, shoulders shaking. Azarola eyed him with disdain.

  ‘I hate that I didn’t say anything,’ said Adam. ‘I should have done something . . .’

  ‘Do you think he could have been lying?’

  Adam looked up, grey-faced. ‘No. No. I don’t think that he could have been lying. It felt’ – Adam searched for the word – ‘like he was confessing.’

  The words fell into a silence.

  I must confess, Casey thought. I’ve all my lifetime played the fool till now.

  They went back and forwards, again and again, to see if the story changed.

  It didn’t change. Adam remembered a few more details, but the story didn’t change.

  ‘I guess we need to talk to Milo Newbury,’ Casey said eventually.

  Adam looked up. ‘No, you can’t.’

  ‘Of course we must,’ said Miranda. ‘It’s the next step.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘We have to, Adam,’ said Casey.

  ‘You don’t understand.’ His eyes were hollow now. ‘Milo . . . Milo is dead.’

  11

  ‘Bill!’ Dash shouted across the office.

  The newspaper’s diarist scuttled across the newsroom.

  ‘All right, poppet?’ asked Bill, which was his standard opening for anyone from princess to postboy.

  ‘Milo Newbury,’ said Dash. ‘Go.’

  Bill screwed up his face for a moment.

  ‘Met him a few times,’ he started.

  The hive mind of a newsroom can reach almost anyone. Worst case, someone will know someone who knows someone. Tap a room of journalists, and they know everything from mobile number to knicker colour for the Prime Minister to next year’s Best Actress. Information flows like a river.

  Bill scratched his forehead with his notepad, thinking.

  ‘Popped up on that reality show. You know, that Chelsea one. Few years ago and only a few scenes.’ Bill concentrated. ‘Wasn’t really his sort of thing. Heart not in it. Father’s an art dealer. Conrad Newbury. Sir. Old school. Shop on Dover Street. They do chichi private views fairly regularly. There’s a lot of money there. You’ll see them at the Serpentine party. Art Basel. Good-looking boy. Dead, which I assume is why you’re asking. Last month.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Clever,’ said Bill with certainty, ‘but arrogant. Pleased with himself, but one suspects that papa cast quite a long shadow. Knew all about the paintings, sure. Last saw him at their de Kooning opening. He was drunk. Too drunk. Papa was shooting him furious looks.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘November? Can check.’

  ‘Get the picture editor to pull photos.’

  ‘Sure. Anything else?’

  ‘Put together a memo on everything there is to know about Newbury. No calls, just cuts.’

  A cuts job was trawling through the archives, for the cuttings on a person.

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘And the people around him.’

  ‘On it. Toodles, sweet pea,’ Bill bounded back to the newsroom.

  ‘Arthur,’ Dash bawled.

  The crime reporter was at the door in seconds.

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘Milo Newbury.’

  ‘Died last month. We did a story.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Fell out of the window of his flat. One of those tall houses in Pimlico. From the top floor. He landed on the railings below. Impaled. Very, very dead. Think they had a bit of a hassle getting him off the spikes.’

  ‘Were there any questions about it?’

  ‘There’s an inquest. Open and adjourned. Can check when they’re doing the whole thing. Won’t be for a bit though. It was pointing towards suicide.’

  ‘Why?’ Casey was leaning against the wall.

  ‘Windows aren’t the right sort for falling out of,’ said Arthur. ‘One of the cops let me into the flat on the q.t. It’s a sort of mansard arrangement. You would have to properly climb out, and there were ashtrays and so on in the flat, so it wasn’t like he scrambled out to smoke or anything.’

  ‘Could have been murder?’ Miranda asked.

  ‘Well.’ Arthur blew out his cheeks and thought. ‘There was no sign of forced entry. He was a big bloke too. Over six foot, played rugby, hard to push around. But then there wasn’t a note either. He’d been drinking and there were drugs in the flat. Coke. Weed. Usual stuff, really.’

  ‘State of mind?’

  ‘I spoke to the girlfriend.’ Arthur sounded slightly defensive. ‘She said he’d been a mess recently. I think they might have broken up a bit before, to be honest, just she quite fancied being the distraught girlfriend. And she was a better quote as the current squeeze.’

  ‘Parents?’

  ‘Yes. Well, the father, anyway. Sir Conrad, himself. He sounded like he barely knew his son, from the way he was speaking of him. Said straight out that he hadn’t seen him for months.’

  ‘Odd,’ said Dash. ‘Did the police do the prints and all that?’

  ‘Not sure,’ Arthur admitted. ‘I can go back to them. I know the detective who was on it that day. He’s a bit bloody useless, if I’m honest. Can’t see him getting to the bottom of anything.’

  ‘Check in with them,’ Dash decided. ‘Just see if it’s something they are considering. Don’t make it a big deal.’

  ‘Sure. Shall I do a bit more digging?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Miranda.

  ‘Like that, is it?’ Arthur eyed her. Some of the specialists didn’t like the investigations team on their turf.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dash. ‘It is.’

  ‘Sure.’ Arthur rolled over. He would keep quiet, they knew. Journalists are surprisingly good at keeping secrets. Every day they see the consequences of a loose word here, a Chinese whisper there.

  ‘That everything, boss?’ asked Arthur. ‘Just Ross wants six hundred words on that vanished teenager five minutes ago.’

  Ross appeared at the door to Dash’s office.

  ‘Arthur, there’s a murder, down in Catford. Could you shift on down there?’ Ross paused, checked his phone. ‘Unless it’s black on black, Trident bollocks, in which case, stick with the vanished teenager and we’ll take agency copy on the stabbing.’

  ‘Ross!’ Casey winced.

  ‘You can shout all you want,’ Ross shrugged at her. ‘But I watch the metrics all day long, and I can see which articles people actually read. No one reads about bloody Trident deaths.’

  He strode away, to pick off his prey from the news desk.

  ‘That all then?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dash. ‘But I want a memo on Newbury as soon as possible. Copy these two in.’

  ‘No worries.’ Arthur disappeared back into the newsroom.

  Salcombe appeared at Dash’s door. He usually stayed in a glass box at the far end of the room, with a view over the busy street one way and a wary PA the other. ‘Doing anything interesting?’

  ‘Just working out where we are on Wynford Mortimer,’ Dash said smoothly.

  They smiled politely at each other. Miranda and Casey admired the stained grey carpet.

  ‘Can I get a readout of that soon,’ said Salcombe, not quite making it a question.

  ‘Of course.’

  The editor glided away across the office, reporters turning like sunflowers to smile as he passed. Dash peered at his computer for a few seconds, and Casey and Miranda didn’t ask the question.

  The picture editor tapped on the doorframe.

  ‘Pix from the de Kooning private view. Full set. Bill said you wanted them. Shout if you need anything else.’

  You could see that Milo was drunk. His eyes weren’t quite focused, his smile too big. Each photograph was captioned with the names of the people in the foreground. In one grouping h
e was grinning vacantly at a ravishing girl in an emerald dress. The girl was watching him ambivalently, while Sir Conrad Newbury eyed his son with barely concealed distaste.

  In another photograph, of three ravishing blondes, Newbury was in the background. Unlit by a smile, he looked distressed, the camera catching a despair missed by the room.

  ‘He’s suntanned in these photographs,’ said Casey thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes,’ said Miranda. ‘He is.’

  ‘Might be an all-year-round thing though, for someone like that,’ Casey added. ‘Skiing holidays, and all that.’

  ‘Need to speak to the girlfriend, or whatever she was,’ said Dash. ‘And parents and so on.’

  ‘I’ll try the parents,’ said Miranda.

  ‘And I’ll start here.’ Casey picked up the photographs. ‘Start here and work outwards. And find it.’

  12

  Miranda called the Newburys, and got nowhere.

  ‘Same thing as he said to Bill,’ she reported. ‘Virtually no contact with his son. No idea about any trips. Phone down. Useless.’

  Casey, meanwhile, listed the details that Adam had recalled. Carefully, she sketched them out in her mind. Not the flat deserts around Zaatari; there had to be hills. It would be in one of the more chaotic camps, too.

  Along the Lebanese border, to the west of Syria, there are hundreds of unofficial camps. Where refugees scrambled over the hazy border, and collapsed in a ditch. Living under tents of scraps of plastic. Subsisting off handouts. Dying from forgotten diseases. The Bekaa Valley, where it scorches in summer and snows in the winter.

  Every one of those scratching existences could be called a refugee camp. It could be anywhere up there.

  ‘Lebanon,’ said Casey. ‘It has to be Lebanon.’

  The Bekaa Valley. Casey kept coming back to it. That slice of Lebanon, up above the cacophony of Beirut, edged by Syria to the north and east.

  When the world first heard of ISIS, in that summer of horror, it watched ineffectually as they raged east into Iraq and then flooded down the rivers. Down the Tigris and the Euphrates, almost all the way to a desperate Baghdad. And Isis meant to surge west, too, right across to the Mediterranean. That was the plan, for the rise of the caliphate. They wanted Iraq, but they wanted the Levant too, that whole swathe over to the Mediterranean.

  But to reach the sea from Syria, they needed to blaze through the Bekaa Valley, that wide sweep of beauty. It’s a delicate balance, peace in the Bekaa, and it always has been. With the Christians and the Druze, and the Shia and the Sunni, all living side by side.

  And as Isis raged towards Lebanon, they were only just held at the border and the refugees had escaped into the Bekaa in their millions. The lucky ones, they were, if you could call it luck. And now the Syrians were waiting for their world to stop crumbling. Years, they might wait. For ever, maybe.

  Casey examined it again. That beautiful wide valley, Lebanon’s grain store was hemmed in on both sides by mountains. Refugees, Casey thought. Refugees. And mountains. And sightlines.

  She analysed it again and again. It must be there that they go, she decided. Somewhere in the mountains that glower west over the Bekaa. It’s the very top of the Great Rift Valley, the Bekaa. That long split in the world that runs all the way from Lebanon to Mozambique. That must be where they went, these people, Casey decided. To the beautiful tinderbox of the Bekaa Valley.

  She thought for a bit, then picked up the phone.

  He answered at the first ring.

  ‘Darbyshire,’ he snapped.

  ‘George,’ she said, and told him what she needed.

  *

  He was waiting as she came through the arrivals gate at Beirut airport, arms wide.

  ‘The mountain,’ he shouted, ‘has come to Muhammad!’

  ‘Take me up to the mountains,’ she said.

  ‘As they say in Cairo,’ he grinned, ‘yalla, bitches.’

  Casey had met George Darbyshire in another airport, years before. She’d been marooned in Jakarta’s sprawling airport for seventeen hours, because the Post had got her a cheap, long connection. And George was stuck there because he wasn’t sure where he was going next, quite yet. She’d heard his voice, clipped and bored, and turned, almost in recognition. They’d got through most of a bottle of duty-free rum in the long easy hours, and nearly missed their flights.

  They’d been friends at once, and stayed in touch haphazardly.

  He was opaque about his past. A long time in special forces, she’d guessed. Still connected – deniably now – to the Foreign Office. In his early fifties, he stalked around the Middle East, on a series of vague tasks, directed by some nameless authority.

  With greying hair clipped close to his head, blue eyes and an irrepressible energy, George Darbyshire knew everything and everyone. He answered Casey’s questions, always: ‘On deepest, darkest background, you. I don’t exist, right?’

  They drove into Beirut, that smashed-up, beautiful city, with George laughing as she flinched at the traffic.

  ‘The Lebanese army’ll give us a lift up to the camps tomorrow morning.’ He dropped her off at her hotel. ‘I’ll pick you up at 6 a.m.’

  At the army base outside Beirut, the Lebanese major greeted George with a slap on the back, and some quick Arabic backchat.

  ‘As-salaam alaikum,’ the major greeted Casey politely.

  ‘Wa-alaikum-salaam,’ she returned, as she had a thousand times.

  Casey climbed into the helicopter and it swirled into the air. They soared over the mountains, and skimmed up the patchwork fields of the Bekaa Valley. Legs dangling, Casey gazed towards Syria as the helicopter hurtled north. Somewhere. Over there. Maybe. It was possible.

  Those men could have travelled to Beirut so easily. Direct flights, and everything. Then they would find their way up the valley, past the cedars and the ancient Roman ruins of Bacchus and Jupiter and Venus. Scramble up into the hills, and find their place, high above one of the camps.

  It could happen.

  Casey looked across to Syria. It would take only an hour or so to drive to Homs from here, right into the heart of the nightmare. But the valley below looked so peaceful, and so beautiful, with the orchards rolling like smoke into the distance.

  They landed in a cloud of dust, then drove down to the refugee camp, through the vineyards and the orchards, where the opium poppies fluttered, careless as pink silk.

  As they rolled into the camp, Casey looked up at the brown hills to the east. It could be here. It could be here, very easily.

  I am Malak.

  Thousands of people existed here, right in the shadow of Syria. They’d made it to Lebanon, but only just. A few steps ahead of the war, the silver lining of a nightmare cloud. A small crowd of refugees watched Casey lethargically as she climbed out of the jeep.

  They had lost everything.

  These tents were patched, sagging in the sun. Here and there were a few buildings, ugly with breeze block. Smoke rose from a thousand cooking stoves. A man hopped past on crutches, one leg missing. He turned to look at Casey and she saw that he had lost an eye, too, a long time ago.

  ‘There’s not much,’ George nodded, ‘in the way of medical care up here. They die of medieval diseases.’

  A scattering of children had made kites out of tattered plastic bags. They ran down a path, screaming giggles, kites almost fluttering into the air.

  Three of the children were playing with a wheelchair, one pushing, two riding solemnly.

  Squaring her shoulders, Casey walked over to one woman. The Lebanese translator talked rapidly to her. She had four-year-old twins, three-year-old twins, a two-year-old, the translator explained, and a baby. She was pregnant again.

  ‘I know,’ said the woman’s eyes, without any need for a translator. ‘Oh, I know.’

  Her left eye was bruised, and her headscarf grimy. She stood there, tugging at her abaya, lost among a few scraps of rubbish that might have been her possessions.

  With the se
maphore delay of a translator, Casey questioned the woman: had anyone been shot in the camp, were there any rumours, was there anything . . .

  No, the message came back. No. She hadn’t heard of anything like that. She could imagine it though. She could imagine anything. There were guns everywhere in the camp anyway. They were needed, though, because there had been an attack over the border before; and everyone was scared.

  They left her, shipwrecked among her children, without a backward glance.

  Patiently, the small group worked their way round a small slice of the camp. No one had heard anything, not even a rumour.

  They hesitated at a school, or an approximation of one.

  ‘This will be washed away as soon as the rains come.’ George frowned at the roof. ‘It’ll never last, this. It rains for days at a time up here, and everything gets wet. And then it stays wet for the whole rest of winter.’

  Casey was watching a small girl dancing in the dust. She was twirling, a tiny ballerina pirouetting in the sunlight. They all stopped to watch, as she leaped and spun. Joyous as any child, just for a moment.

  They clapped as she sank into a curtsy and grinned up at them, illuminated. Skinny, with a smile missing a front tooth. Dark hair that faded to gold where it was chopped into a rough fringe. She was wearing a frayed T-shirt with a smug cartoon cat, chucked into a charity box in Weybridge a long time ago.

  For thereby some have entertained angels unawares, thought Casey.

  ‘Yara,’ said her mother, proud as any mother. ‘Yara. My girl. Together.’

  ‘The babies freeze up here in winter,’ said George, suddenly angry. ‘There’s no clean water, no fuel for a fire, nothing . . . So they die . . . They die.’

  ‘Lebanon is doing all it can,’ persisted the translator. ‘But there are so many.’

  And there were. Millions and millions of refugees pouring into a tiny country, a country that struggled at the best of times.

  A boy was standing nearby, Yara’s brother, Casey guessed, in a tattered Manchester United shirt. Kicking a battered football, and limping from an old injury that had never been fixed.

  About thirteen and he didn’t like reporters, she could see. And why not be angry?