The Dead Line

by Holly Watt

  ‘Right,’ said Casey. She liked his voice, she decided.

  ‘Anyway, these pirates worked out that if they snatch the beacons and wait around for a bit, the trawlers would come looking for them. It saved chasing the trawlers around.’

  ‘Clever,’ said Casey.

  ‘But not always lucky,’ said Ed. ‘A month or so after we started out here, one of the Chinese trawlers called us over the radio. Said that they had caught ten pirates, and would we come and take them off their hands? They thought we could pass them to the Seychelles or Kenya, where they have something approximating a justice system.’

  ‘There are worse places.’

  ‘We started heading towards the trawler. The fishermen were in a hurry though. Impatient. I think they thought we were holding them up, and wanted to get back to fishing. As we got nearer, the number of pirates in captivity fell . . . Ten. Nine. Eight. By the time we got there, they were all gone. The fishermen hadn’t quite finished cleaning down the decks. There was a lot of blood.’

  He wasn’t looking at Casey as he spoke. He was looking at the horizon. The ship was heading east; the sun setting in an extravagantly pink farewell to the day.

  ‘That’s awful,’ said Casey. ‘Couldn’t you do anything?’

  ‘What could we do? Out here. This lot’ – he gestured towards the pirates – ‘were actually quite relieved to be caught by the British. The Russian navy caught some of the pirates a few weeks ago. They put them back in their little boat, two hundred miles from the shore, with no diesel and no food. They were laughing about it.’

  ‘That’s barbaric.’

  ‘You know, one in three pirates never make it back to Somalia from one of these trips,’ said Ed. ‘Two weeks ago, we found one of their little dhows. We pulled up alongside it, this huge ship and that tiny boat. They’d run out of water. Been dead for weeks.’

  Casey shuddered.

  ‘Can you imagine how bad it must be, back in Somalia, for people to take those odds?’ said Ed. ‘The desperation.’

  He fell into silence. Casey shifted on the pile of rope.

  ‘What will happen to this lot now?’ Casey asked. She waved at one of the pirates. ‘They seem pretty friendly now.’

  The pirate waved back at her.

  ‘They’re almost certainly killers, this lot,’ said Ed. ‘You can be both, quite easily, it turns out. We’re taking them to the Seychelles.’

  They sat in silence for a moment, with only the creaking of the huge ship. The deck was stained with oil, the heavy smell mixing uneasily with the sea air.

  ‘They’re not amateurs though,’ Ed grinned at her. ‘This lot had RPGs on board their dhow.’

  Casey had seen rocket-propelled grenades being fired, long ago in Libya.

  ‘Did you know that, when you were zooming up to their little boat?’

  ‘No.’ He smiled briefly. ‘Better that way, really.’

  Casey looked at him and thought that she might fall in love.

  She’d seen him, just once, after he flew home from the Indian Ocean. Sunburned from his long tour. Waiting for her at the train station.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’ So familiar, unfamiliar.

  They had wandered through the streets of London all day, hands almost touching. It was so hot, an odd quirk of that spring. He bought her red peonies, from a flower stall vivid with colour.

  Later the rain came, people splashing through puddles, their shoes ruined, cross, the sky spiked by black umbrellas.

  ‘This way.’ They ran to the top of Primrose Hill, as the storm flickered around them, the city below like a game. ‘It feels like you’ve climbed into the thunderstorm,’ he shouted over the wind. ‘Into the wilderness.’

  ‘Madman.’

  He kissed her then, just for a moment, the rain hammering down, the city lit up by the storm.

  But then he jerked away. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry, Casey. I’m so sorry.’

  And he ran. Down the hill in the rain, slipping and sliding in the mud. And she stood there alone, the red peonies falling from her hands.

  She knew what had happened to the Royal Marines, of course, out in the heart of the wars. The bootnecks were sent into the worst of it, time and time again. She had watched as the flags dipped for the long drive home. Talked to the women waiting back at the base. And she had interviewed the veterans, afterwards, as doctors battled to fix splintered bodies.

  The minds, though. They were different.

  He’d left the Navy soon after the Indian Ocean, and found a new sort of life. He was in charge of security for journalists, out in Gaza, in Cairo, Mosul. Watching for trouble, as the hacks searched it out. Yanking them backwards out of danger, as the crowds roared, hungry for blood.

  He painted over the cracks, with an artist’s care.

  Until one day, she had called him again.

  Come with me, please, to the Sahara. We need you.

  And he’d come.

  ‘Ed would know what to do, out in Bangladesh,’ Miranda said now.

  ‘But he doesn’t look like Dominic Burton-Smith.’ Casey turned away, thoughts of Ed clashing with that expensive Surrey road.

  ‘He does, you know. Dye his hair a bit darker. He would do.’

  ‘Miranda,’ said Casey. ‘No.’

  ‘We will have to find someone though,’ said Miranda. ‘I wouldn’t trust Dominic out there.’

  ‘No,’ said Casey. ‘Never.’

  26

  ‘You could lose the baby,’ Dash said baldly.

  They sat there in silence, watching the rain spatter against the window of the investigations room.

  ‘It’s very unlikely,’ said Miranda.

  ‘A newborn,’ said Dash. ‘In the middle of Bangladesh.’

  ‘Children are born there all the time,’ said Miranda.

  And they die there all the time, Casey thought.

  ‘If the Burton-Smiths go to the police . . .’ said Dash.

  Blackmail, thought Casey. Attempted murder of the soul, a judge had called it once. It came with a long sentence.

  And what would it look like, a murder of the soul?

  Something like this, maybe?

  Yes, something like this.

  ‘You should have asked me first,’ Dash said. He jumped to his feet, paced the room.

  ‘You would have said no,’ said Miranda.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Dash. ‘I’ve looked up the Burton-Smiths. His mother’s a magistrate, for Christ’s sake. If they mention even a word of it to her, the mother will have to report you.’

  ‘The neighbour thought Emily was pregnant,’ said Miranda. ‘If the neighbour thinks that, everyone will think that. They obviously wanted to avoid the questions from all the chatty friends. Be the perfect family. They’re not going to tell anyone about the surrogacy.’

  ‘Is this because of Salama?’ Dash turned to Casey. ‘I should have taken you off this job, after that. I knew it.’

  ‘No.’ Casey’s throat filled. ‘I am fine.’

  ‘You’re not,’ said Dash. ‘I’ve been watching you, Casey. You look as if you’re seeing ghosts.’

  Casey stared at him, eyes hard. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘And you said’ – Dash turned to Miranda – ‘that you still need someone to go out there with Casey.’

  ‘I want Ed to go with her,’ Miranda said. ‘But we can think of someone else if he can’t make it.’

  ‘How about Luke?’ said Casey hopefully. ‘He knows the area from working out of Delhi. And he’s good at all that stuff. Done it before.’

  ‘Too well known in Dhaka as the Post’s man,’ said Miranda. ‘Luke could have been identified to anyone during a trip to Bangladesh.’

  It was why Casey avoided Parliament. Because you never knew who was whispering in a corner, and pointing like a curse.

  ‘I’d be happier if it were Ed going out with you,’ said Dash. ‘There’s a huge amount of organised crime in Bangladesh. It’s vicious. You can’t k
now what you’re going to be walking into. Ed’s pretty tough.’

  They all heard it in his voice. Dash was planning the journey.

  He was waiting for her under the bridge. Casey watched him as he idled through the second-hand books. He paused at one, an old hardback about Churchill. Leafed through it, glanced about – that quick glimpse around, always – and caught sight of her.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  Ed looked at her, eyes narrowed, and for a second, she thought that he might walk away. But he smiled, and stepped towards her. Kissed her, cheek to cheek for the briefest of moments. She almost flinched away, and almost turned towards him, and fought for a second to smile.

  ‘Hello, Casey.’

  He was wearing an old waxed jacket, zipped up, and faded jeans. And the solid boots that they all wear, the former military men, slightly battered, neatly tied. Despite the cold spring, his face was tanned and he looked older, with lines round his eyes from squinting under the sun.

  ‘I’ve always liked it here.’ She gestured round at the rows of second-hand books, safe from the rain below Waterloo Bridge.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Shall we walk?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He put Churchill back on the table and they wandered along Southbank, towards the City. The air was full of mist, and the threat of rain. There were only a few people walking beside the grey of the Thames, hand in hand or hurrying with their briefcases. The skateboarders clattered, bright as graffiti, while another huge building soared up, room by room, gouging scoops of air from the sky.

  ‘How are you?’ Ed looked sideways at her.

  ‘Fine. You know. You?’

  ‘Fine.’

  The pause lengthened.

  ‘Are you working . . .’ She gestured back towards the Savoy on the other side of the river.

  His stride hesitated. ‘How did you know?’

  She shrugged. He smiled.

  ‘It’s a good job, you know, working for him. I know his reputation, but . . .’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Really, I am glad.’

  ‘And what are you working on?’

  ‘You know,’ she gestured. ‘This and that.’

  ‘I saw that you got some of the shooters.’

  ‘Some of them, not all.’ Casey scowled towards the city. ‘We couldn’t prove a few of them had definitely done it, and they lawyered up fast. Others we never even got near.’

  Ed watched a seagull wheel over the river. Casey shook her head, dispelling her thoughts. ‘How’s your shoulder, anyway?’

  ‘Fine.’ Ed spun his arm as if he were bowling. ‘Those doctors were brilliant.’

  And your mind? She didn’t ask. Because she didn’t know how. ‘I’m very glad,’ she said.

  They walked on, towards Blackfriars. It was raining properly now, the rain pattering across the river.

  ‘What do you want, Casey?’ Ed’s voice was abrupt.

  ‘I don’t want . . .’

  ‘You must want something.’

  Is that what you think?

  ‘I’m working on a new project,’ Casey admitted. ‘We’ve been told that there are women . . .’

  Her voice stalled for a second, her eyes prickling unexpectedly. Ed kept walking, waiting for her to speak.

  ‘They’re stuck in Bangladesh, these women,’ said Casey. ‘Refugees from Myanmar. Or what used to be called Burma. They’re been trafficked to a farm somewhere, forced to be surrogates . . . For British women. I think they’re being held near Cox’s Bazar.’

  ‘Cox’s Bazar?’

  ‘Down in the south of Bangladesh.’

  Ed stopped walking, turned towards her. She couldn’t look at him.

  ‘And what are you planning to do, Casey?’

  ‘There’s a couple in England.’ Casey couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘Their baby is due any week now. They say I can travel out to Bangladesh, instead of them. Meet up with the traffickers, and try and find out where the women are being kept.’

  ‘Why would they let you go out there in their place?’ asked Ed. ‘They must know the risks are . . .’ He turned away. ‘Oh, Casey.’

  A car horn blared from the bridge. The Shard was knifing the sky in the distance, glistening layers of apartments and hotel rooms and money.

  ‘What about the Rohingya women?’ Casey sprang in front of him. ‘We can’t leave them out there, just being used as incubators.’

  ‘But what gives you the right to get involved in all this, Casey?’ Ed tried to step past her. ‘What gives you the right to play god with these people’s lives?’

  Thousands of readers, a strange sort of democracy.

  ‘Nothing.’ She blocked his path again. ‘But it’s the right thing to do, Ed. Surely you can see that?’

  ‘The right thing to do?’ Ed stared at her in disbelief. ‘How can you possibly judge what is or isn’t the right thing to do? You, of all people?’

  Casey flinched away.

  ‘Don’t you remember, Casey?’ Ed scrubbed at his eyes. ‘Don’t you remember walking up that hill towards Salama?’

  His voice was rising. A couple walking along the river with a pram turned towards them, eyes sharply interested.

  ‘Of course I remember,’ Casey tried to hush him.

  ‘How was that the right thing to do?’ But his voice was quieter. ‘How . . . We could have done something, and we didn’t.’

  ‘You know we couldn’t do anything else out there.’ Casey’s words sounded meagre, even to her. ‘They would have killed us, without blinking. We came back, and we wrote about it, and we stopped it all.’

  ‘As far as you know.’

  Her eyes dropped to the pavement. ‘It was all we could do.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘These are young girls,’ said Casey. ‘Children. You’ll regret turning a blind eye, Ed. I know you will.’

  She saw him flinch. His shoulders tensed as he straightened up. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘This is different.’ She tried to soften. ‘We can make things better, this time.’

  ‘Casey.’ Ed looked exhausted, all of a sudden. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

  He pushed past her, faster than she could react. And she could only watch him walk away down the river, back straight, long strides, leaving her far behind.

  27

  Casey stamped into the office.

  ‘Not’ – Miranda looked up – ‘going well then?’

  ‘No.’ Casey threw herself at her chair. ‘Disastrous, if you want my professional opinion.’

  ‘I wonder if it would work, telling him how you feel.’ Miranda contemplated her keyboard, her face all innocence. ‘Imagine the novelty.’

  ‘Stop it. Where’s Hessa?’

  ‘Sandwich.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell him,’ Casey scowled at Miranda, ‘just to get him out to Bangladesh.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Miranda. I would, she didn’t say. She pushed some notes towards Casey. ‘I’ve been doing more research about surrogacy. Did you know one Japanese guy fathered thirteen children with surrogates in Thailand? He was only twenty-four himself. That was on top of four more children in Japan and two in Cambodia. Apparently he wanted a thousand children in total.’

  ‘Did anyone stop him?’

  ‘No,’ Miranda sighed. ‘He’s the son of an IT billionaire, and they decided he just wanted a lot of children. He got custody.’

  Casey was staring out of the window, only half listening. ‘We will just’ – she stabbed her pen into the desk – ‘have to think of someone else who can be Dominic.’

  ‘Easier said than done.’ Miranda picked up a photograph of Dominic, snapped surreptitiously in Bath. ‘Dave Accardi is far too short. It would never work, if they’ve given the Bangladesh team even the briefest description of Dominic.’

  Accardi was a tough private detective, who could do a dozen accents with ease.

  ‘Just ringing up about my bank account,’ in a perfect Scottish accent. ‘Could I just check
my mortgage balance?’ a day later, in the Queen’s English. ‘Thank you so much,’ a polite West Country burr would wrap up the last call. ‘You’ve no idea how helpful you’ve been.’

  ‘Not Dave,’ Casey agreed. ‘How about Austin?’

  ‘He looks the part,’ Miranda blew out her cheeks, as she pondered the Post’s own social affairs editor. ‘But he gets stressed about a bloody deadline. He’d never cope in Bangladesh.’

  ‘Could Calvin help us out?’

  Calvin had quit his staff job at his old tabloid suspiciously soon after a new managing editor with a keen interest in expenses had started working there. He now charged newspapers four times his old salary for undercover work, and spent the rest of his time clubbing.

  ‘Do you really want to go abroad with Calvin?’ Miranda started to laugh. ‘He’s such a sleaze. Didn’t you hear about what he’s got up to most recently? Some kiss-and-tell girl came to him, to stitch up some Premiership dimwit. Calvin had worked with her before, and didn’t trust her as far as he could throw her. So he announced that he needed to hook up a camera in their hotel room to make sure what she said was happening was roughly right. So Calvin and that idiot sidekick of his were in one hotel room, and the footballer and the girl were in the next one.’

  ‘Calvin can be such a creep,’ said Casey.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Miranda went on, ‘the equipment went berserk for some reason and the television in the footballer’s room somehow started picking up Cal’s signal. All of a sudden, the footballer can see himself, with this girl, up on the bloody widescreen.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Casey, trying not to smile.

  ‘So Calvin and the idiot are in complete meltdown next door. Even the kiss-and-tell girl is looking a bit jumpy. But then Cal jumps on the hotel phone, and gets reception to put him through to the room next door. The footballer’s phone rings and “I’m terribly sorry, sir,” Calvin says, in his most upmarket tones. “There seems to be a very minor glitch with our automated babysitting service right across the hotel. Slightly bizarrely you may be able to see yourself on your television at this time! But don’t worry, sir! We’ll be right back to normal soon.” ’