The Dead Line

by Holly Watt

  ‘Anyway,’ Savannah went on. ‘This woman’s daughter had gone missing a few weeks ago. She just disappeared one morning. The mother’s devastated, of course. But today, she told me she had a call from her daughter, out of the blue. Romida, the girl was called. Is called, I should say. I used to know Romida. I’d see her around the camp. Shamshun – that’s the mother’s name – told me Romida had managed to call her. She had managed to get a phone from somewhere, God knows how. Romida was crying, Shamshun said. Romida couldn’t stop crying.’ Savannah’s voice dried up.

  ‘Where was she?’ asked Casey urgently.

  ‘Romida didn’t know where she was.’ Savannah’s words were tight. ‘She said a man had driven her, in the dark, for miles. She was tied up in the back of a van or something. With a blindfold, so she didn’t have any idea where she was. But now,’ Savannah hesitated, ‘she was in a big room, with some other women.’

  ‘And what?’ Casey said. ‘What was happening to Romida?’

  ‘Romida said she didn’t know what was going to happen to her,’ said Savannah. ‘Just that she was being held in this room. She said . . .’ Savannah paused, cleared her throat. ‘It sounded from what she described like they were doing medical tests on these women. Like you might do before IVF.’

  Casey stared around her beautiful hotel room, at the hazy painting of a lake on the wall above her bed.

  ‘Did they say how?’ Casey kept her voice clipped.

  ‘The other women have told her that some of them have been inspected.’ Savannah took a second to answer. ‘Scanned. Blood taken. Someone gives them injections, over several days. At other times, they’re ordered to take tablets. Pessaries, sometimes. Then they’re taken off somewhere, and they don’t come back. It doesn’t seem like anything has happened to Romida, yet. But she may not have wanted to say to her mother.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ said Casey. ‘How can . . .’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Savannah gave a long sigh, cleared her throat again. ‘Romida said they were fed well though. I suppose that is one thing they would do . . .’

  ‘How did the phone call end?’

  ‘Shamshun said Romida started crying. Shamshun was screaming at her, begging her to say where she was. But Romida just didn’t know. And then the phone . . . It just went dead.’

  ‘Did Romida say,’ Casey spoke fast, ‘how long she was in the van?’

  ‘She thought maybe six hours,’ said Savannah. ‘They stopped in a small street somewhere, and drugged her in the van. She woke up in a room with these other women.’

  ‘Could she hear anything outside the room? Were they in a city? Street noise? By a river? By the sea?’

  ‘I’ll ask Shamshun,’ said Savannah. ‘Tell her to ask this if Romida calls back. But I can’t imagine she will, if I’m honest.’

  ‘No,’ said Casey sadly. ‘I don’t suppose she will. Did Shamshun get the number Romida was calling from?’

  Savannah read it out. ‘It’s just a Bangladeshi mobile.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do with it,’ Casey said. ‘How many women did Romida think were being held there?’

  ‘Only four or five,’ said Savannah. ‘At the moment. The women said other girls have been taken somewhere else. They are sleeping on mats on the floor. There’s only one bed, which some of them share. But they can’t open the windows, Romida said. And the lights are only switched on a couple of hours a day.’

  Casey stared out of the window of the Four Seasons. ‘Savannah, how old is Romida?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Thirteen,’ Savannah said quietly. ‘Her mother said she’s thirteen years old.’

  ‘Right,’ said Casey, because there was nothing else left to say.

  ‘Casey.’ Savannah’s voice was urgent. ‘You’ve got to get these fuckers, OK? You have got to find these girls. The police won’t do anything here, you know that. Shamshun was beside herself when she was talking to me. And there is nothing she can do.’

  ‘I will,’ Casey promised. ‘I’ll do everything I can.’

  ‘All right,’ said Savannah. ‘You do that. For Romida.’

  Savannah rang off. And Casey sat there for a long time, in the elegant suite of the Four Seasons, trying not to scream.

  7

  It was a grey day in London. Miranda dragged open the door to the sagging shed at the bottom of the garden. Loose on its hinges, the door screeched over the paving stones and then stuck hard. The shed smelled of damp and mushrooms. Miranda peered unenthusiastically at grimy bottles of weedkiller and half-empty paint pots.

  Sighing, she reached for a heavy pair of gloves, a small gardening fork and a sack of compost.

  There was the pretty sky-blue watering can she had bought during an eager trip to the garden centre just after they moved in. It sat next to a piece of broken trellis, covered in dust and spiderwebs. Miranda glanced at it resentfully.

  Hurrying now, she made her way through the house. There were four terracotta pots by the front door, all of them filled with dead plants.

  Miranda dumped down the compost and stared balefully at the selection of plants she had bought from the nursery the day before. She began to scratch at the surface of one of the terracotta pots.

  ‘You’re going to do what?’ Tom had stared at her in surprise that morning.

  ‘I’m going to do some gardening.’ Miranda had met his eye firmly.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be working?’

  I’m going to save my marriage.

  ‘I’m going into the office a bit late. They won’t mind.’

  ‘And are you sure you know how?’

  ‘Of course,’ she had lied.

  ‘All right.’ She had felt a surge of affection as he began to laugh. They had laughed together, just for a moment, everything left unsaid.

  The affection had echoed on as she waved him off for the Tube station. As she watched him walk down the pavement, he stopped to talk to old Mrs Markovic from three doors down on the right, who blossomed under his smile. Tom had always been able to do that, Miranda thought as she watched: remember small details about people’s lives, ask them about their day and really listen to the answers.

  Miranda remembered details when they would make good colour for a story, and asked people about their day to start them talking.

  She only knew Mrs Markovic’s name because Tom had been talking about her grandchildren – Boris got scouted by Arsenal, isn’t that amazing? – at the same time as Miranda had been investigating some Serbian war criminals.

  When Mrs Markovic had pottered back into her house, Tom glanced back at Miranda. ‘Off to hunter-gather,’ he said, and laughed. And she watched him hurry down the road.

  He’d never offered to stop his job, she thought, with a flicker of anger.

  Rebecca. Becky.

  Miranda forced herself to concentrate on the terracotta pots, tugging at the dead plants.

  How do you fix something you only want to break?

  ‘Hello, Miranda!’ It was Verity Taylor, right on schedule, off to drop her six-year-old twins at the primary school just down the road.

  ‘Verity!’ Miranda just managed to mirror the enthusiasm. ‘How nice to see you.’

  ‘You’re gardening!’ Verity’s china blue eyes opened wide. ‘What fun.’

  ‘Thought I should get stuck in. Do you fancy a coffee?’

  ‘After I’ve dropped off the kids? Why not? I’ll be back in five.’

  Verity, two doors down on the left, had stopped working at the BBC to bring up her children. Within a day of Miranda and Tom moving into this house, Verity had insisted that they come to a barbecue ‘just to meet a few people, you’ll love them’. Within five minutes of Miranda arriving at the barbecue, Verity had told her all about her twins being born ‘with the help of an amazing surrogate’. Verity believed in ‘honesty and openness about it all. Because I really think it helps people to see that everyone has a different path.’

  Miranda had decided that this honesty
and openness might be helpful; especially if Tom believed she was actually doing some gardening.

  ‘I like what you’ve done with the blinds,’ said Verity, so that Miranda was startled into noticing the blinds for the first time as she switched on the coffee machine.

  It only took a few minutes to get Verity talking about surrogacy, and then the words spilled out of her.

  ‘We went for Ukraine in the end, and they were so great.’ Verity took a sip of her cappuccino. ‘Couldn’t do enough to help.’

  ‘But didn’t you start off in the US?’

  ‘Yes, we did. How clever of you to remember!’ said Verity. ‘We did several rounds over there, with a surrogate from Minneapolis, of all places. But the embryo transfers just kept failing for some reason. They never worked out why.’

  ‘The embryo transfers? I don’t know anything about it. How do they work?’

  ‘Jonty and I flew over to a clinic in Miami,’ said Verity with all the enthusiasm of the obsessive. ‘And I stayed out there while I went through egg collection before the transfer.’

  ‘Gosh, how does that work?’

  ‘Oh,’ Verity waved. ‘It goes on for ever, and everyone has slightly different protocols. It’s a nightmare. For example, our clinic made me take the pill – just an ordinary contraceptive one – for the month before I travelled out to the US, so that they knew exactly where I was in my cycle. Then once your period starts, they check to make sure your body is doing roughly the right thing and then you have lots of injections of FSH – that’s follicle-stimulating hormone – to make you produce lots of eggs. You’d normally only produce one a month, you see.’

  ‘How long does that go on for?’ Miranda winced.

  ‘They keep scanning you to see how the eggs are developing,’ Verity rattled on. Bored and bright, thought Miranda. It led to encyclopedic levels of knowledge. ‘And eventually you have a trigger shot, usually hCG – that stands for human chorionic gonadotrophin’ – Verity was showing off now, Miranda thought – ‘and then exactly thirty-six hours later, they do the egg collection. Legs up in stirrups; none of it is glamorous, Miranda, I tell you.’

  ‘Amazing.’

  ‘And then the eggs are mixed up with Jonty’s – well – contribution.’ Verity blew her thick blonde fringe out of her eyes, ‘And, fingers crossed, some of them are fertilised. And there’s your embryo.’

  ‘The science is extraordinary.’

  ‘So then’ – Verity was ticking off options on her fingers – ‘you either have one or two popped straight back in after a couple of days, or you freeze them. With standard IVF, they often freeze them anyway now because they think there is a slightly better chance of implantation after your body has had a month off to recover from all the drugs. Or you might freeze embryos while you are waiting to find a surrogate.’

  ‘Because that can take a while?’

  ‘That’ – Verity looked suddenly bleak – ‘can take a lifetime.’

  ‘And then how do you get them back . . . in . . .?’

  ‘Ah.’ Verity perked up. ‘That’s the frozen embryo transfer. Or FET, as you start to call them after a while. Everything has an acronym, Miranda. Everything. The FET is relatively straightforward, especially if you’re using a surrogate, because – hopefully – the host is super-healthy and hasn’t got any fertility issues. It’s basically just a matter of ensuring someone is at exactly the right point in their cycle, and then defrosting the embryo and going for it.’

  ‘So that bit,’ Miranda thought aloud, ‘could happen more or less anywhere?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Verity said. ‘It’s definitely the more lo-tech bit of the whole process.’

  ‘And why Ukraine? Why not – I don’t know – Bangladesh?’

  ‘Surrogacy breaches sharia law,’ said Verity crisply. ‘Most Islamic rulings have concluded it isn’t acceptable, certainly amongst the Sunnis. The Shiites are slightly more open to it, which is why there is some surrogacy in Iran, but not much.’

  The brisk summary reminded Miranda of Verity’s years at the BBC.

  ‘Do you ever miss journalism?’ Miranda asked without thinking. She saw the regret flicker in Verity’s eyes, the enthusiasm draining away.

  ‘Every day,’ Verity said tonelessly. Then she rallied: ‘But of course, I love the children more than anything . . .’

  ‘But why did you—’

  ‘Quit?’ Verity was fiddling with her coffee cup. ‘I thought that stress must be part of the problem. We’d been trying for years by then, and it just took over everything. Should I eat this? Should we book that holiday? Will we both be in London for the right forty-eight hours this month? Especially with Jonty’s job, travelling too.’

  ‘So you decided to reduce stress? I thought you’d stopped working to bring them up. I didn’t realise . . .’

  ‘Yes, we decided I should quit. We? I did. Or did Jonty? I don’t even remember any more. But it meant I could go off to Florida. For weeks, if necessary.’

  ‘It must have been tedious.’

  Verity’s jaw was clenched. ‘Tedious is one word.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know I am lucky,’ Verity’s voice was sharp. ‘And it worked out for us, while some people never get there. But it’s all so bloody unfair, isn’t it? Everything falls on the woman, time and time again. The ridiculous thing is that half the time, they reckon it’s the man’s problem anyway. Jonty’s life is . . . Well, it’s barely changed, has it? Apart from a couple of delightful children, whereas mine . . .’

  ‘And then quitting didn’t help anyway? Before you went for IVF?’

  ‘No. Although who knows? That’s the problem with this whole “miracle of life” business,’ Verity made quote marks with her fingers. ‘No one really knows anything.’

  ‘But you got there in the end.’

  ‘Just about.’

  Verity was gazing out at the garden. ‘It’s all madness, when you think about it. And so oddly medieval. Men don’t have to kill each other to prove they’re men any more, do they? So why do women have to have children to prove themselves? It’s insane.’

  They sat there for a moment, staring at the dank garden shed.

  ‘It’s our battlefield,’ said Miranda.

  ‘Are you and Tom . . .’ Verity let the question drift.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Miranda. ‘Not yet. No.’

  8

  A few hours later, Casey was waiting for Gabriel Bantham. On the street outside his Georgetown apartment block, as the birds sang into the dawn.

  Hessa had followed him home from the embassy the night before, to this home close to Rock Creek.

  This is a test, isn’t it?

  Not really. Yes.

  I’ll find his address.

  I know.

  Casey was neat now, dark hair tied back, waiting for Bantham’s door to open. She had felt her throat tighten, as his neighbours left for work, one by one. Every time the door opened, Casey wished she were somewhere else. Anywhere else.

  Usually, she and Miranda had a rule: whoever did the undercover escaped the front-up.

  Casey always hated the front-ups anyway. It was the change in the voices; that was the worst. From buoyant and brash, confident and ebullient, to uncertain and panicked and broken. The undercover front-ups were the worst. As they realised, so slowly, that it was a lie. All of it.

  It was you, all along. Wasn’t it? Whoever you fucking well are.

  Better, always, that it was an anonymous voice. So the humiliation and the shame were at least impersonal.

  Casey hated it. Hated it every time.

  But today, it had to be her, because Miranda was thousands of miles away. So Casey thought about Romida, the little girl living in the dark, and dug her fingernails into her palms.

  Above her head, the lights flicked on and off in Bantham’s building. It was a townhouse divided into apartments, smartened up recently. Casey waited and waited and waited.

  Finally, the door opened, and Bantham
took the steps down to the street in a rush. Late. Hurrying. Cross. And Casey stepped into his path.

  For a second, Bantham’s eyes swept over her, narrowing as they took in the tied-back hair, the jeans. Hessa was beside Casey, ice-still.

  ‘Katie?’ Bantham tried.

  ‘No,’ said Casey. Then, almost meaning it, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Who are you?’ His voice was almost a shout. ‘What do you want?’

  Wordlessly, Casey handed him a silver tablet. A tremor started in his hands, and Bantham pressed play almost involuntarily.

  There he was, leaning back in his chair, smiling. He was neatly framed by the Four Seasons’s white irises and a bottle of mineral water. The words clear, the picture sharp.

  It was almost artistic.

  Miranda had been known to move glasses, salt and pepper, a bottle of wine, into a shot. People love the undercover filming, you know. You want it to look the part, in the clips.

  But Casey just wanted a clear line of sight, and peace and quiet.

  And now she watched as Bantham crumbled.

  It doesn’t take much, I assure you.

  You make it sound so easy.

  It is.

  Around them, Washington’s commuters slammed out of their houses and set off for the metro.

  ‘Who are you?’ Bantham’s voice was ragged. He leant against a burr oak, as if he might stumble and fall. ‘What’s happening?’

  For Romida.

  ‘Shall we go into your house?’ Casey suggested politely.

  ‘No.’ He glanced around, thought of the neighbours. ‘Yes.’

  Bantham’s hand shook as he put the key in the door. There was a narrow shared corridor with polished floorboards, and a flight of stairs at the end. One floor up, his apartment was elegant and neatly tidy. Old political cartoons were framed on grey walls. In the sitting room there were dozens of books, an expensive television and a very lavish sound system. There was no sign of anyone else living in the few rooms.