The Dead Line

by Holly Watt

  The silence wrapped around them, stifling as a scarf. The old ambassador’s face didn’t move.

  ‘That would be most improper,’ he said calmly.

  ‘I know,’ said Casey. ‘But I think you did it, all the same.’

  ‘You know I wouldn’t tell you,’ he said, ‘either way.’

  A man shrouded in secrets, Casey though. Entombed, even. A lifetime of silence, fashioned into an armour that she would never pierce.

  She tried, all the same.

  ‘Gabriel Bantham,’ she said. ‘He knew about it. And he told us. He told us everything he knew.’

  A flicker of sadness crossed the old face.

  ‘Gabriel,’ said Cavendish, and there was almost an affection there. ‘A young man in a hurry.’

  They waited.

  ‘I sent him off to Washington, you know.’ Cavendish said. ‘I knew he was close to the wrong people out in Dhaka, and I warned him. But I sent him to Washington. Gave him a second chance, one might say. And not everyone gets a second chance.’

  And he betrayed you, Casey couldn’t say. Not that he wanted to, but he betrayed you all the same. And I can never explain why, not to you.

  ‘How many?’ Casey asked.

  But he shook his head, waving her away like a fly.

  ‘You know I won’t tell you, Miss . . .’

  ‘Benedict. Cassandra.’

  ‘That organisation?’ He nodded to the teapot and the folded newspaper.

  ‘The Post,’ she said. ‘How many passports?’

  ‘Silence’ – he smiled the apology – ‘is just too old a habit.’

  ‘But we know,’ Hessa’s voice was unsteady, but firm, ‘that you did it. We just don’t know why.’

  Cavendish looked from Hessa to Casey and back again.

  ‘The eternal question,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  They waited. The sea pounded against the rocks, far below.

  ‘The wind is getting up,’ said Cavendish. ‘I do hope your ferry back to Corfu isn’t delayed. You can get awfully isolated over here, at this time of year. The ferry doesn’t come over for days. Or have you got a place to stay? Lakka, maybe? It’s the nearest village. Best not stay there, ideally. It’s known locally as Lakka facilities.’

  A half-wink, and he smiled to himself, sending a creak of laughter towards his feet.

  ‘Please tell us,’ said Hessa.

  She needed to be liked even when it was all a lie, thought Casey. It made the job so much harder.

  ‘If I had done all that you say,’ said Cavendish to Hessa, ‘surely these children would have gone to good homes? Loving homes?’

  ‘They might have done,’ said Casey. ‘But you couldn’t possibly know that. And what about the women left behind in Bangladesh?’

  ‘We want to know who was coordinating it all,’ said Hessa. ‘Who is behind everything.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Cavendish.

  He stood up, stepped away from the table, lost in the curved mirrors of memory. A pear tree stood there, just starting to bud. Cavendish ducked his head towards it.

  ‘Have you ever seen a Poire Williams?’ said Cavendish. ‘Eau de vie. Or brandy, really. With a whole pear trapped in the middle of the glass bottle. Now, I ask you, how do you get the pear into the bottle? That whole perfect pear? My permanent secretary asked me that question on my very first day at work, many years ago.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Casey.

  ‘You place the bottle over the growing pear,’ Cavendish gestured. ‘Right from the very start. And the pear grows inside the bottle. And, when it’s ready, you just snip the stem, and it is done.’

  He looked west, across the blue of the Mediterranean. There was an immeasurable sadness in his eyes.

  ‘You don’t realise you are trapped until it’s far too late,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘I should have been firmer with Gabriel, right from the start.’

  A bird sang in an olive tree beside the old stone wall. Cavendish took a few more steps away from the table.

  ‘The Venetians had all these olive trees planted,’ he said. ‘Back in the sixteenth century. Thousands and thousands of them, all over the island. In the summertime, the fireflies flit between the trees in the dusk, and that’s when you know there is an old magic here.’

  Hessa was staring at Casey, her eyes wide.

  ‘I wish my wife could have lived with me in this house.’ Cavendish took a few more steps. ‘We dreamed of it a thousand times. She never enjoyed any of those places. Dusty and chaotic, she’d say. Exhausting, all of it. I should never have taken her away. Not for a lifetime.’

  He looked back towards the house, and the jasmine reaching up to the cracked pink tiles.

  ‘Still,’ he said. ‘I hope I did some good.’

  He gazed out to sea, east across the waves, then shook his head. He turned back to Casey. ‘I am sorry not to be able to help you more,’ he said. ‘You must have known I would not be able to tell you anything useful.’

  ‘We will find out some other way,’ Casey told him firmly.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe not.’

  The old eyes met hers steadily. Sir William Cavendish would not tell her, Casey knew. She ducked her head. ‘Come on, Hessa. Let’s go.’

  ‘Goodbye, Miss Benedict,’ he watched them leave. ‘Good evening.’

  ‘Some people just won’t.’ Casey sipped at her glass of wine, staring moodily out at the sunset.

  ‘Will Ross be cross? That we’ve come all the way out here, and got nothing?’ Hessa sounded nervous.

  ‘I don’t care.’

  They were sitting on the terrace of an old hotel, high above the cliffs, a mile or so south of Cavendish’s house. The sun was setting in a blaze of gold scarlet, the cool of the night drifting in.

  ‘I care,’ Hessa told her lemonade.

  Casey contemplated Hessa, remembering her own days as the most junior reporter, terrified of Ross every day. It was difficult, this job. Ordered to override, day after day, the human instinct to be polite, to not intrude, to avert one’s eyes so civilly.

  Painful, almost, for someone like Hessa, naturally shy, instinctively courteous. Some reporters – ruthlessly pushy, brutally assertive – never seemed to care. But Hessa would always struggle, Casey thought. The intuition, the perceptiveness, the intelligence: crucial to the undercover work. But they made it harder to approach a witness, or an unwilling source. When the intrusion was unbearable, and every hint of body language was screaming: I am a human being in distress, please leave me alone. Please.

  Ross, knowing this, would be brutal. Targeting her, bullying her, kill or cure. Ensuring – quite deliberately – that Hessa was more scared of him than of the questioning. Forcing her through the habit of good manners to extract an answer from anyone.

  Two small fisherman’s boats were hurrying around the promontory, heading up the coastline. Casey watched them idly.

  ‘Did you always want to do this?’ Hessa asked.

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘And why do you do it now?’

  ‘So that’ – Casey was watching the sun disappear – ‘no one can ever say, “I didn’t know.”’

  There was a sudden howl of sirens to the north, unfamiliar on this holiday island. A few minutes later, a waiter hurried across, filled with the excitement of news. He refilled the peanut bowl, wiped the table and hovered until Casey asked the question he wanted: ‘What’s going on up there?’

  ‘The old man . . .’ he said. ‘They have called all the fishermen to come and search for him out in the sea . . .’

  ‘Why?’ asked Hessa, her face suddenly taut. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Old Sir Cavendish.’ The waiter’s eyes were wide. ‘He fell . . . He fell right from the top of the cliffs.’

  11

  Hessa cried on the flight, all the way home. The tears came suddenly, in Corfu airport, as she stood next to a huge red I-heart-Kavos sign.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Casey, not quite meanin
g it. ‘We don’t know what happened though, Hessa. He might have tripped.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll never know.’

  A fisherman, bobbing past, had seen the old man, high up on the cliff. Alone, staring out at the sea. There was something that made me keep watching him, he had told the police, with a certain relish, enjoying the circle of fascinated eyes. I don’t know what exactly. And then I saw him fall.

  ‘He was living such a peaceful, beautiful life,’ said Hessa. ‘And we destroyed it, just like that. In a few words. Like smashing an antique vase.’

  ‘Sort of,’ said Casey. Then: ‘You don’t have to do this, you know, Hessa. There is a choice.’

  ‘Is it always like this?’

  ‘No,’ said Casey. Thinking: sometimes, it’s worse. ‘But you don’t have to do it at all. Tillie’s desperate to work with us. You can go back to the newsroom. No one would blame you.’

  It sounded more brutal than she meant.

  For Romida.

  ‘We didn’t,’ Hessa’s eyes were puffy, ‘even get anything out of it. He took all his secrets with him.’

  ‘Yes.’ Casey’s thoughts were stuck in a groove, going over the conversation, and over and over. Because something didn’t quite fit. ‘But if he did jump, he made a choice, Hessa. He’d spent years in the Foreign Office. He knew how this all works. He could have told us what he knew, been a source. We’d have looked after him.’

  Off the record, deep background, all the old codes.

  ‘But he didn’t.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He wasn’t doing any harm to anyone out there on the island,’ said Hessa. ‘No matter what he might have done before.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has anything like this happened to you before?’

  ‘Not like this, no.’

  ‘But it could have. It could happen every single time. You never know what you’re walking into. What’s gone before.’

  A hen party clattered past, pink sashes, squealing. What happens in Kavos, stays in Kavos.

  ‘Every time you knock on a door,’ Hessa watched them cackle. ‘You never know what you’re going to find.’

  Back on the hotel terrace, as the sun faded to a memory, Hessa’s voice had stuck like a record. He jumped. He jumped. He jumped.

  Until the words lost their meaning, and Casey shook her, quite hard. ‘He’s gone, Hessa. I know. And I’m sorry. But you have to pull yourself together.’

  Staring at the peanuts, the scene was already clear to Casey: they had rambled past the old house, isolated in its few acres of bleached grass. There was nobody else around. Exchanged a few words, maybe. But nothing more.

  Nothing more, OK?

  A gasp. OK.

  In her mind’s eye, Casey saw the old man plunge through the air where his beloved swifts danced. The straw hat ripped away, the half-smile frozen.

  All the way down to the waves, and oblivion.

  Her heart felt as if it were being squeezed by a hard fist, and she turned away from Hessa. They had sat silently among the excited burble of theories, as the waiters reminisced about old Sir Cavendish.

  It took the coastguards a few hours to find the old man, drifting in the blue, blue sea, and there was nothing anyone could do. The policemen shrugged, filled out some paperwork and headed back to the taverna. No one ever asked Hessa and Casey a question.

  ‘You never give up, do you?’ Hessa said, sharp upright on the awkward airplane seat.

  Casey stared at the flight manual, the neat instructions for disaster. ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you feel bad?’

  ‘Of course I do. We couldn’t have known.’

  There were tears in Casey’s eyes, quite suddenly. She looked away, so Hessa didn’t see.

  ‘He’s dead, Hessa,’ said Casey. ‘Dead. Of course I . . .’

  The plane hit turbulence, heaving up and down in the sky, and the hen party’s cackles dissolved into screams.

  Now the plane was slowing into the long arc into Gatwick. Casey thought of the other planes lined up, ahead and behind, a necklace of lights flickering home through the dark.

  ‘It’s up to you, Hessa,’ said Casey. ‘You have to choose.’

  12

  Hessa was there the next morning though. She hadn’t slept, Casey could see. But she was there, eyes swollen, in the little investigations room.

  ‘So that line of inquiry’s closed down,’ said Miranda, quite brutally, so that Hessa’s eyes flicked to Casey, just for a second.

  Miranda had already spoken to Dash that morning.

  So he might have tripped?

  He might.

  Fine.

  Dash had moved quickly through shock to suspicion. They hadn’t told the editor.

  Need to know?

  Not really.

  All right.

  ‘It’s probably closed down,’ said Casey now.

  ‘But . . .’ Miranda was watching her closely.

  ‘It doesn’t quite make sense,’ said Casey. ‘Luke Armitage said that Cavendish was liked by everyone, and generally seen as a good sort.’

  In her hand, Casey held a rough draft of the Post’s obituary of Cavendish. The reminiscences, all of them, were glowing.

  ‘He and his wife bought that house years ago,’ said Casey. ‘And that’s where they planned to live out the rest of their lives. It was beautiful, yes. But it wasn’t the lifestyle of a retired gangster.’

  She thought about Cavendish’s battered straw hat, the chipped urns, the lion without a paw.

  ‘It was hardly,’ Hessa agreed quietly, ‘the lap of luxury.’

  ‘Maybe the fight went out of him when the wife died,’ suggested Miranda.

  ‘But she died in Sri Lanka,’ said Casey. ‘Before he even went out to Dhaka. And it doesn’t make sense that it was then that he suddenly decided that he wanted to retire to gold taps and caviar.’

  ‘Luke said he adored her, didn’t he?’ said Miranda. ‘People do stupid things when they’re sad. You just don’t know. He might have been vulnerable. To a pretty girl in a bar, or just a kind ear.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Hessa. ‘My mother says that man is from Chittagong, by the way. She listened to the recording, said she was sure of it.’

  ‘Thanks, Hessa,’ Miranda nodded at her.

  ‘What if Cavendish was doing it for some other reason?’ asked Casey. She sat forward and punched an extension into her phone.

  ‘Harry?’ Casey said. ‘You couldn’t pop in here for a second, could you?’

  The obituaries editor sat in the newsroom, just a few desks away. Tall, gangly and impeccably polite, Harry de Villiers spent his days charming amiable anecdotes from weeping widows. ‘Although sometimes no one can remember a single nice thing,’ he said once, eyes wide with horror behind darkrimmed glasses. ‘Can you imagine? Not a single nice memory about a person.’

  ‘Probably a news editor,’ the Home Affairs editor had growled.

  ‘Harry,’ Casey said now. ‘Sir William Cavendish’s family. Who are they?’

  He is survived by . . .

  Harry glanced down at his notebook. ‘One son, forty-three, lives in Hong Kong at present. Unmarried, no children. Works in insurance. A daughter, Vivienne. She is married, to a Mr Hargreaves. Two children, three and tiny. They live in rural bliss, down in Devon. The daughter’s forty-one.’

  ‘Photographs?’

  ‘A few,’ Harry handed her printouts. ‘A nice one from his time in Cairo. And that one was taken at his daughter’s wedding.’

  Casey studied it: a pretty girl in white lace, young, carefree, smiling on a proud father’s arm. Casey looked closer.

  ‘Have you spoken to the daughter?’ Casey asked.

  ‘Not yet. She didn’t pick up the phone half an hour ago.’

  ‘What does she do?’

  ‘Nothing much, I don’t think,’ Harry shrugged. ‘Been a housewife since she got married from what I can tell.’

&nbs
p; ‘Do you mind if I speak to her instead of you? I’ll say I’m calling about the obituary. I can file you everything you need.’

  Obituaries were often the only section of the newspaper that some people didn’t mind speaking to, for hours sometimes.

  ‘Course not,’ said Harry.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘Yes, brilliant.’

  Harry half-bowed away. He didn’t know they had been out on Paxos when Cavendish died.

  And so Sir William Cavendish’s death would merit a polite obituary. Distinguished. Respected. At his home in Greece.

  ‘It’s the daughter,’ Casey told the investigations room. ‘Down in Devon. I bet that’s how it all started.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Hessa still sounded shivery. She had her hands tucked into her sleeves, and was chewing on a strand of hair.

  ‘A hunch,’ admitted Casey. ‘She looks young in her wedding photographs, but she didn’t have children until her very late thirties. She wasn’t some hectic business type either. So what was she doing during all that time?’

  They contemplated it.

  ‘Make the call,’ Miranda decided. ‘But keep it gentle for now.’

  Casey was charm personified on the telephone to Vivienne Hargreaves.

  Sorry to bother you, at a time like this.

  Not at all, I want people to know about his life. His achievements.

  People are flattered – in all walks of life – to be asked for their opinion, or their story. It is a very human urge, the record of accomplishments chipped into the walls of the cave.

  People want to tell their story, Ross had told Casey early on. Just give them the chance. Hold up the mirror.

  In a leisurely manner, Casey and Vivienne ran over the biographical details, and gradually Casey edged the conversation round.

  ‘It must have been fascinating for you, growing up in all those places? But difficult too, I imagine. Never being in the same place for long.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Vivienne. ‘But my parents were so good at making a place feel like home. My brother and I were sent to England, for school. I missed my parents very, very much.’

  ‘And did you visit him often in Greece? Since he retired?’

  ‘The children love it out there.’ Vivienne’s voice was light, with an echo of boarding school. ‘Paxos is always a bit chaotic, but it is such a special place. All our friends go out there too, of course.’