by Lee Stone
Neilson looked troubled. Rachel was creating a mystery for herself. He could see it happening, right there in front of his eyes. Creative people go mad if they’re left alone with their guilt. She was creating a mystery so she could rush off and solve it, instead of sitting at home blaming herself for Barr’s death. Neither option was particularly healthy, but Neilson was weighing up which one would get Rachel back on the radio quickest. He was a compassionate businessman. But ultimately, he was a businessman. And having Rachel White off the air was bad for business.
“There’s more,” she told him as he took a sip of his black coffee. “David Barr didn’t jump off the building last night.”
Neilson nearly choked on his coffee, but regained his poise and swallowed before scowling at her. “Rachel, half a million people heard it happen.”
Rachel shook her head.
“Something was wrong with it,” she said. “Something felt wrong, so I listened back to the tapes this morning.”
“When?”
“When it was still dark,” she shrugged. “I wasn’t sleeping.”
No shit.
Suddenly Rachel looked excited. Her tired eyes became sharp and alert as she told Neilson her secret.
“There’s a second breath on the tape. I can hear Barr grunting, and a second breath in the background. People can’t breathe twice at the same time, so David Barr wasn’t alone up there. Someone else was with him. Somebody pushed him off.”
Neilson was having none of it.
“Rachel, this Barr guy sat talking to you for five minutes about how he was going to jump off.”
“I know,” she replied excitedly. “But then he didn’t jump off. He was pushed. I’m certain of it. Someone pushed David Barr off the roof live on my show. So, I’m going to Pine Bluff, and I’m going to find out who the hell he was.”
Neilson told her to leave it to the police, but he could see that she wasn’t going to listen. She was stubborn, and the sooner he helped her to work this thing through, the sooner she’d be back on the air. Before he could tell her to be careful, her phone rang. International code. Neilson looked at Rachel and raised an eyebrow.
“Who do you know in the UK?”
Chapter Forty-Four
Starbucks, Hope Street Los Angeles.
“Come together right now, over me.”
– The Beatles, Come Together
For a split second, Rachel White had considered letting whoever was ringing her cell phone go to voicemail. But she didn’t. She picked up on the third ring. The accent on the other end matched the international code, and the voice started talking straight away.
“Rachel White?”
A man’s voice. Probably in his thirties. Educated. Confident.
“Yeah. Who’s asking?” She flashed her eyes at Neilson across the table. He was still blowing at his damn black coffee. Always cautious.
“I just saw your name on a TV report and I thought I should call” the voice replied. “I called the radio station, and they gave me your number when I told them who I was.”
“And who are you?”
He thought back to the desert, and what Barr had told him about the safety of anonymity all those months ago.
“I’m Charlie Lockhart,” he said. Barr was dead, and the time for hiding was over.
It took Rachel about two seconds to place the name. Only because she was tired. Only because she hadn’t slept. Only because she’d listened to someone being killed nine hours ago. Lockhart was the name that David Barr had shouted out as he fell from the roof. Charlie Lockhart is fearless. Rachel didn’t even know what that meant.
“So, are you fearless?” she asked. She was reaching. She stopped performing for Neilson and twisted in her seat, searching for a bit of privacy. Intimacy. She shielded her conversation with a hunched shoulder and a curtain of dark brown hair.
“Yes,” replied the voice on her cell. “I’m Fearless.”
Honest. Patient. Definitely in his thirties. The fact that he was fearless made no sense to her, but she played along, hoping everything would fall into place.
“What can I do for you, Charlie Lockhart?”
“I need a favor.” Lockhart said. “I’m trying to work out what happened to David Barr.”
“Well, there’s something we have in common,” Rachel sighed. “Do you have any idea?”
Lockhart explained that he had met Barr briefly in Kandahar. He described how Barr seemed to have fallen in with the wrong crowd and described Tyler to the woman on the end of the phone. Rachel listened, trying to piece the fragments into a story in her mind. Barr had sounded like a nice guy last night. A nice guy who had run into a lot of trouble.
“I’m going to Pine Bluff,” Rachel suddenly blurted out. Christ, she was tired. One minute she was thinking about a trip to Pine Bluff. Steeling herself. The next minute she was telling the guy on the phone about it. A guy who she didn’t know at all.
On the other side of the coffee table, Neilson shook his head and dialed a number on his own cell. He started talking quietly to someone on the other end. Making himself busy to give Rachel some space.
“What’s Pine Bluff?” Lockhart asked.
“Hell on earth, apparently,” she said, watching for Neilson’s reaction, but he was busy with his own conversation. “It’s where Barr got enlisted and got married and spent half his life, according to the detective I spoke to earlier. His family is still there, and I want to find out who he was.”
Lockhart said nothing. A trip to Pine Bluff sounded like a bad idea on all kinds of levels, but he understood why she wanted to go. He’d probably go himself if he wasn’t holed up in Woodridge. The snow had been coming down for three days and was piling up against the old stone walls which divided up the livestock and the landscape.
“I guess I just feel bad for him,” Rachel admitted. “I just want to know who he was, and what happened to him.”
Lockhart leveled with her. She had been fairly open with him.
“I think he may have killed himself to escape a guy called Tyler,” he told her. There was a pause while Rachel thought it through.
“I’ll go you one better,” replied Rachel. “I think your guy Tyler was on the roof with him. I think Tyler pushed him off. Somebody did. And I think I can find out more in Pine Bluff.”
Rachel explained the scuffles, and the tapes, and her hour of careful listening. Lockhart looked out across the white field behind the house. The old stone walls which separated the fields had been swallowed by the mist which was rolling up the hill. He visualized Tyler throwing someone off a roof. It wasn’t hard to imagine. Rachel might be right.
Opposite Rachel, Neilson had finished his quiet phone conversation. He took a cheap napkin from a chrome holder in the center of the table and then pulled an expensive Parker pen from his jacket pocket. The type of pen you sign million-dollar contracts with. He wrote a quick note onto the soft paper and folded it over. Then he slid the folded note over to her along with cash to cover the drinks. She gave him an apologetic wink, and he squeezed her hand stoically. Then he leaned forward over the table and kissed her gently on the forehead in the way that a father would, but a boss shouldn’t. Rachel didn’t mind at all. Neilson slid out of the booth and through the door onto the street, leaving his troubled employee to her international call.
“So, do you think I should go?” Rachel asked Lockhart. “I don’t know what good it’ll do, but I think his wife should know. I think she should know that her husband didn’t jump.”
Lockhart thought hard about it and then told Rachel: “People only ask questions like that when they’ve already decided about the answer.”
Rachel knew he was right. It didn’t matter what he said, and it didn’t matter what Neilson told her either. She’d liked David Barr. She was the last person Barr ever spoke to. And she wanted some answers. She sat chewing it over for a moment. Lockhart interrupted her thoughts.
“Will you let me know where Barr’s family are?”
“Because I think David Barr was a good man caught up in a bad deal. I think he killed himself to protect his family. And I think his family are owed a payment for a job he was forced to do in Afghanistan. I’m going to cover the debt.”
Strong. Caring. Fearless, actually. Rachel could imagine how Lockhart had acquired the name. She imagined that he was about six feet tall and in good shape. She was about right.
“Why don’t you come as well?” she asked on a whim. “We could be Molder and Scully for a few days. I could use some new company.”
Lockhart would have loved to. Right now, he was stuck in a one road village that had been cut off by snow for three days. He hated waiting at the best of times. Today he was crawling the walls.
“Well, I hear Pine Bluff is beautiful at this time of year,” he said, and Rachel laughed. “But I can’t. I’m in Woodridge, the middle of nowhere. And Tyler is coming for me just like he came for Barr. The thing is, I want to make sure I’m here when they arrive.”
“You’re not going to run and hide?” Rachel asked.
“It didn’t do Barr much good, did it?” Lockhart said bitterly. “If you keep running, people catch you when you least expect it. If you’ve got a plan, you’ve got a chance. And I’ve got a plan, so I’m sitting here waiting for my chance.”
Rachel told him to be careful, which was pointless but friendly. Lockhart liked the sound of her. She told him she’d find Barr’s wife for him. Told him she’d tackle Pine Bluff on her own. Told him she’d deal with Tyler if she had to.
“Look after yourself, Rachel,” Lockhart warned her. “He’s a big mean guy.”
“Who says I’m not a big mean girl?” Rachel asked with a smile, and she hung up the phone. She never said goodbye. Not to anyone. It was one of her rules. She copied Lockhart’s number to her contacts and slipped her phone back into her pocket. She threw the cash that Neilson had left into the middle of the table as a tip. Then she unfolded the napkin he had left in front of her. The message was short and sweet:
LAX to Dallas Fort Worth booking ref JX45358
check-in tomorrow morning 07.40
BE CAREFUL!
Rachel White smiled. She was glad Neilson was in her corner. She drained the dregs of her coffee and walked out into the street. And straight into about a million journalists.
Chapter Forty-Five
Alum Rock, Birmingham
“Ready or not, here I come. You can’t hide.”
– Fugees, Ready or Not.
Daud had a simple room. The basics were crammed in; Bed, wardrobe, chest of drawers, desk. Nothing matched anything else and nothing was especially grand. The carpet looked fairly new but the curtains and the bedclothes had seen better days. The worn duvet was pulled taut over the bed, and the room was immaculately clean. The chest of drawers was closed tight, and nothing was poking out from the wardrobe.
The only assault on the tranquility of the room was a crowded desk. Daud ran his life from that desk, and it was spilling over with envelopes, papers, magazines and pens. There were writing pads covered with notes scribbled in different colored inks, coins and business cards. There was a Hajj picture and a French bus ticket and a bottle of sunblock and two coffee cups. His laptop was buried somewhere in the middle of the confusion.
The desk had a drawer, and the drawer had a lock. The key stayed in Daud’s pocket at all times. He found himself holding the key inside his pocket whenever he was on the bus, just in case it fell out. He found the touch of it reassuring as the metal warmed up between his thumb and finger.
Until this year, Daud’s life had been an open book. Recently though, he had found himself locking more and more of his papers away in the drawer. The official report about Ajmal in Kandahar. The claims he was a terrorist. The claims that Ajmal wanted to kill five hundred men. Somehow seeing the words in black and white made it worse.
Part of Daud burned with shame. When he couldn’t bare it anymore, he suppressed it by fueling the other part of him which burned with rage. Rage felt better than shame. He convinced himself of Ajmal’s innocence. Busied himself with his plans for justice and revenge.
As well as the official reports about Kandahar and the stark allegations against his brother, Daud also had letters from a human rights charity who had shown an interest in his brother’s plight. They spoke about the abuse that Ajmal might be living through, behind the razor wire. They sent letters from high-flying attorneys telling Daud how hopeless Ajmal’s case was.
Most of Daud’s life sat on top of his cluttered desk, but the letters about Ajmal always went back in a neat pile in the locked desk drawer. Under the letters were Daud’s notes. He had seen the report overnight about the suicide in Los Angeles and he had been planning ever since. The reports said that the man who tackled Ajmal on the roof was called Fearless. And now the soldier from Afghanistan had said that Fearless was Charlie Lockhart. He knew he was getting closer to having a target for his rage.
Daud had spent the night trawling through Facebook for the profiles of every Charlie Lockhart. There were about sixty of them, of which nearly half lived in the UK. Five of them were girls, and Daud ruled out another eight on the basis that they were too young or too old to have been in Afghanistan. He rejected another two because they were too fat to have realistically climbed the ladder and run across the roof in the way the military report had described.
That left him with sixteen Lockharts, and none of them had any mention of Kandahar on their profile pages. There was no way of knowing which one had been instrumental in sending his brother to Guantanamo. Daud had printed each profile out, stapled them together and locked them away in the desk drawer, underneath the official report and the human rights letters.
Beneath the printouts was a towel, folded neatly to fit into the space. Inside the towel was the revolver that Daud had bought from the fishmonger in the Crown and Sceptre. He needed it, but he hated it. He owed it to Ajmal to use it. But whenever he was downstairs, listening to his granddad telling stories about the magic that had created their family back in Quetta, Daud could think about nothing but the weapon hiding away in the bedroom upstairs. It was like an ugly heart beating away unseen in the center of a beautiful house.
Tonight, Daud was sitting on his bed, scowling at the desk, thinking about the dreadful job that fate had tasked him with. He had narrowed his search down to sixteen men. The time was getting closer. What if he was arrested? What if he had to spend the rest of his life in prison? It would be better than living in freedom while his brother was being tortured on the other side of the world. Revenge was a practical business, and a welcome distraction.
Apart from the warm yellow light bathing the chaotic writing desk, Daud’s room was lit only by a flickering television set which was perched on top of the chest of drawers. It was small and old, but it was one of Daud’s only luxuries. His father had given it to him on his eighteenth birthday, along with a short lecture about how he should not be seduced by television, and that he should continue to spend his evenings with his family.
He and Ajmal had spent hours watching films together. Sometimes their father would join them, but never for more than a few minutes. Occasionally, their granddad would poke his head around the door and ask questions about what they were watching.
“Who is she? Why is she kissing him? Now why is she crying? And why is she kissing him and crying at the same time?” He would keep going until he had distracted the boys enough to get their full attention. “You know that your grandmother never cries when I kiss her like that? Always she smiles because she knows that she is very lucky.”
He would grin from ear to ear. The boys would always shuffle along Daud’s bed and implore him to come and join them, but he never did.
Now Daud was on his own. Tonight, he sat on the bed feeling distracted, scowling at his desk and listening to the news. Then slowly he became aware the television was talking about the American soldier again. The one who had
jumped from the roof. The one who had told him Charlie Lockhart’s name as he plunged to his death.
Daud still couldn’t work out why the man had shouted out the name as he fell, but there would be time for that later. Today had been a good day because the dying soldier had helped him come closer than ever to knowing the truth. He was closer to finding the man who had ruined his brother’s life.
The news report cut to a street scene in Los Angeles. It was daytime. Earlier in the day, all the pictures had been of flashing police lights and pandemonium at the scene of the suicide. Now though, the cameras were focused on a young woman outside a coffee shop. She looked startled, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in a while.
“Of course I am sorry that it happened,” she was saying. “Wouldn’t you be? If you’re the last person to talk to someone, then you will always ask if you could have done something to change their mind.”
There was a general murmur from the gang of journalists.
“It makes no odds if you are on the radio, or on a helpline, or having a coffee with someone” the girl went on, finding a bit of composure. Beginning to construct an argument. A professional under pressure. Daud recognized her as the DJ who had been talking to the guy when he jumped. “If you’re the last one to talk to them, you’ll always wish you could have done more.”
She was trying to walk, trying to get away from the press pack without running. The video was picking up the sound of the photographer’s shutters snapping away. Lots of them. The camera was shaky, jostling for position.
“Do you know why he did it?” someone called from out of the shot. Random arms with microphones and tape recorders were pushing into the wobbling picture. Rachel White ran a hand through her hair for a second, thinking. Then she decided to give the press pack a story.
