The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  ‘You’re positive it was Marvar who picked him up?’ Or had Marvar already been taken at this point by the Iranians, the Israelis or someone else, and had they collected Samir as leverage over him?

  ‘He did tell to Brian – our butler – that he was Samir’s father. And the camera on the gate, Gilles has seen the pictures. He says for sure it’s Marvar.’

  ‘He was clearly in a hurry,’ mused Dyer. ‘Maybe they had to catch a train. Or a plane.’

  ‘Maybe.’ But her voice was not believing. Samir and Marvar had only been missing for a few days, yet she was imagining terrible things. ‘Samir – I remember him waiting in the hall as if just now he is before my eyes.’ It could have been her son. It could have been Pierre. ‘Jean, if you learn anything, tell me. Please.’

  They promise to pass on anything they hear.

  Dyer had become more guarded on the telephone after his touchline conversation with Gilles about surveillance. He took the same precaution when surfing the internet, and had entered no further searches for nuclear fusion. It would have been suspiciously out of character, though, for him not to have shown an interest in Marvar.

  Already that morning he’d googled Marvar’s name. There was no report of a kidnapping. No suicide pact. No missing father and son jumping from Clifton Suspension Bridge.

  He telephoned the Oxford Mail, the Oxford Times, BBC Oxford to ask if any bodies had been found.

  Nothing.

  In Dyer’s heyday, the Updarks of this world counted on correspondents like him to tell them what was going on. Uncertain which way to turn now, Dyer behaved as any retired journalist might do when unable to verify a story, one furthermore that he still had to sort out where to place. He called his old newspaper and asked for Nat Royter.

  Cub reporters, they had joined in the same year. Nat’s ambition – which he achieved – was to be the political correspondent. He was one of very few survivors from the former regime, following the paper’s sale to a thirty-year-old Qatari billionaire and champion of Brexit domiciled in Minorca.

  They had met in the new Pimlico premises not long after Dyer’s return from Rio. Through a blue flame, over a warm glass of calvados, was the last occasion they had seen each other, on the eve of Dyer’s departure for Brazil. That was thirty-five years before. This time they had to settle for a snatched coffee in the lobby. Money was so tight in the newsroom, Nat said ruefully, that he couldn’t leave his desk for long, and definitely not for a three-course lunch at Clarke’s.

  ‘They’ve given me the foreign desk too,’ he said, ‘bless ’em.’

  ‘That would have pleased Frank,’ said Dyer, recalling the bald, wry features of their first foreign editor.

  ‘Frank Tullover,’ murmured Nat. ‘He who taught us: “Why is this person telling you this?”’

  ‘That, and: “Always justify your expenses in the second para.”’

  Without a pause, they chanted in solemn unison as if it were a psalm: ‘“As I sat face to face across the table in Red Square with Kim Philby, the man who had brought Western intelligence to its knees, drinking, at his insistence, the most expensive vodka to be obtained in Moscow …”’

  They looked at each other, then dissolved, shaking, into laughter, until rebuked by a glare from the receptionist.

  Nat wiped the corner of his eye. His nose had broadened like his chest. He used to smoke thin cigars. He had the air of a man itching for a cheroot.

  ‘You’re looking young,’ contemplating Dyer over a cup of machine latte. ‘But you always did. Bastard.’

  ‘The sun helped.’

  ‘And no deadlines!’

  ‘That too.’

  Nat came from a wind-nipped landscape of salmon-fishers and poachers. In the year that Dyer left for Brazil, he had inherited a pear orchard near Hereford; it was his pipedream, then, one day to give up journalism and make perry. Yet the courage or the right moment had eluded him; he had become snared in the mantrap of London.

  Seeing Dyer again made him reminiscent. ‘When that job came up in Rio, not one of us understood why you took it.’

  ‘There was no special reason,’ Dyer reflected. ‘My favourite aunt lived in Lima, and I had a friend at school who grew up in South America. It sounded different, interesting. Heath’s government, rats in the rubbish, nurses on strike, power cuts – I didn’t want to be around if that came back.’ Plus, after his mother died, he had a craving to learn for himself, from experiences denied to his parents. They had come of age in post-war Britain, with rationing, whale meat, bedsits with gas meters; they could have brought nothing to the party that Dyer found going on in Brazil.

  Nat had missed out on that party too. His carnival queen was Mrs Thatcher. The experience seemed to have soured him; he had not found the sun, the satisfactions of Corcovado, of tanned limbs. His face had browned like a pear.

  ‘You got out at the right moment,’ he told Dyer, his mouth turned down, ‘even if none of us thought so at the time.’

  Everything they had felt about journalism, the conviction, the adrenaline thrill, the confidence that what they wrote was read by a majority of the people they knew – this belonged to a pre-Columbian era. Today, Nat’s op-ed pieces were dictated to him from Minorca. The paper carried the same masthead, but an incubus had sucked out its spirit as well as its circulation.

  ‘They’ve sacked everyone, it’s like a Potemkin village. Five underpaid students do everything, overseen by a few overpaid kapos – editors demeritus, essentially, not one of whom would have been given a sub’s job on the old paper – who pander to the whims of the absentee playboy owner, and prowl about on seven-figure bonuses feverishly seeking ways to further slash costs. We don’t print scoops, we print handouts.’ It had become the kind of job that you turned your telephone off for.

  ‘I’m sorry, Nat Royter left us over a year ago,’ says a young woman’s voice. She is unable to tell Dyer where he might be contacted.

  He asks to speak to someone in the same department, but they’re busy. He asks to leave a message. Could someone on the foreign desk call him?

  ‘Can you say what it’s about?’ sounding no older than twenty.

  ‘Iran.’

  She has not heard of Dyer.

  When no one calls, he rings again and is connected to a harassed male voice. This man also is young; he doesn’t have a lot of time, he’s putting three stories to bed.

  Dyer feels sickened as he starts to explain himself. An image forms of the person at the other end, a face like Hissop’s. Half-listening, half-prepared, hankering to be somewhere else.

  ‘Nat Royter would vouch for me.’

  ‘Ah, Nat,’ with the edginess of a successor. ‘Friend of his, were we?’

  Quickly, Dyer explains his history with the newspaper, his two decades as its Latin American correspondent. He is ringing to ask about the situation in Tehran, one journo to another. ‘Is it plausible that the Revolutionary Guard would imprison and rape the wife of an Iranian nuclear scientist based in the UK who may have defected?’

  ‘Does a fish swim?’ relenting a little. ‘If she’s a dual national, like that jailed mum, she might get away with not being raped. If she’s Iranian, all bets are off. Why do you ask?’ Dyer can hear him tapping away at the keyboard, mouth open, unshaven. ‘Do you have someone in mind?’ in the voice of someone who doesn’t get out of Pimlico much, who hasn’t yet visited Tehran, Rio. Possibly not even Malvern.

  ‘Not really,’ said Dyer.

  ‘If your chap has defected, I hope for his sake it’s not to us – unless he fancies spending the rest of his life in Langley. The UK is pretending to go along with the EU in helping out Iran to circumvent US sanctions. Don’t believe it. I was at a briefing yesterday at the FO. This new extradition treaty the Foreign Secretary has signed – I’ll be putting it online later. Basically, anyone the Americans slap in a request for, we fly them to Virginia.’

  The whole exchange has been unsatisfactory, and recalls Nat’s bitterest complaints. It s
pikes any lingering notion of Dyer’s that the dark star of his nostalgia might have fertilised, about giving to the newspaper they both had worked for the first crack at Marvar’s story.

  Still, the young man’s reaction confirms what Dyer in his old reporter’s bones believes. If Marvar spoke the truth about his wife, then he was likely to be telling the truth about fusion. And if that were so, then the right recipient for Marvar’s post-it note is not Lionel Updark.

  ‘Wait, what’s your number? If I hear anything …’

  Chapter Twenty-four

  DYER RETURNED THE HANDSET TO its charger on the bookcase, beside Astrud’s photograph, and then went over to where he had hung his shoulder bag, checking inside. The bag had not been in his line of vision. Although it was absurd to suppose that anyone had crept in and riffled through it while he was talking on the sofa, he felt the irrational need to make doubly sure.

  He zipped it up and stood at the window, staring out. His conversations had depressed him, he was no further along. His mind kept returning to Marvar and his post-it note.

  What do you do when something like this tumbles out of the sky into your life? Dyer yearned to hand it in, get rid of it. But if not to Updark, then who? He’d looked for signs and there were none. He had hoped the cracks in the pavement would tell him. If he had believed in a higher power, he would have implored it to point a way.

  The post-it note was not his only concern. He couldn’t stop thinking about the life-or-death implications of what he chose to do, for Samir, Rustum, Shula and Jamileh. He had already promised to withhold information. Yet further holding him back from reporting Marvar’s findings to Updark or Euratom, or another neutral body, was Dyer’s fear that the Revolutionary Guard would simply execute Shula, as they’d have no further need of her as a bargaining chip. Then again, if Marvar and Samir had been picked up, this would render Shula’s life worthless to the unscrupulous entities who may have captured her.

  Meanwhile, where to put this pestilential scrap of paper? Marvar’s information was so radioactive that it ought to be kept locked in a vault with Madame Curie’s cookbooks. It wasn’t safe to carry about.

  Dyer stands there with his thoughts.

  On the far towpath, a shaven-headed man cast off a long barge. A woman walked by, pushing a pram that bounced up and down. Shula and her baby daughter. Too hard to think of them.

  Easier to fret about Marvar’s overcoat. Dyer couldn’t leave that in the Taylorian – the librarian would inevitably associate it with him. Even though the coat had made him a target, he still felt responsible for it, a connection. ‘Shula had it made for me before I came here.’ The knowledge that Magda was about to arrive galvanised him to go and fetch it.

  The overcoat would be too bulky to fit in his shoulder bag, but not into Leandro’s canvas games bag. Quickly, Dyer emptied out the mud-encrusted socks, shirts, shorts into the washing machine.

  As he pitched the soap pellet into the back of the drum, he remembered when a speculative North Oxford mother had congratulated him on being a modern father. He’d got that from his mother, he told her. ‘She did the taxes, my father cooked.’ When she died, he had needed to mother himself, and now he had to mother Leandro. He wasn’t shy of doing this, it was just another role.

  He turned on the washing machine and repacked into Leandro’s canvas bag: Marvar’s plastic sandwich bag containing the folder with the post-it note; his own eleven handwritten pages of their interview; his laptop; the collection of poems he’d been reading.

  After writing out a list of tasks for Magda, and leaving three £10 notes on the table, he opened the door and walked out.

  In the favela, to avoid muggers, Dyer took a different route every day. For the first time in Oxford, he changed his itinerary, not walking up Little Clarendon Street, but down Canal Street, over the pedestrian bridge, along the tinder path. Coming this way made it easier to observe if anyone was following.

  He stares into the unflowing canal. It’s like going back fifty years. He’s twelve. He and Rougetel are walking into town along the towpath so that they won’t be caught by Slimy or Jumbo. Rougetel’s parents live abroad, in La Paz, where his father works for a telephone company. He’s the younger brother Dyer never had, clever, unconventional, independent, who helps him with his prep, with whom he can play truant.

  A quick twenty-minute walk had brought Dyer out into Hythe Bridge Street.

  He checked over his shoulder as he turned into Worcester Street. How many times in the street or passing by in a car had he noticed someone he knew without them suspecting that he was watching; how many times had he been noticed by someone who chose not to make themself known, like a trout that had gone for his fly and he didn’t see it?

  Not recognising any of the faces, he continued up Beaumont Street, past the Ashmolean, into the Taylorian.

  He breathed out to see no peroxided head behind the counter.

  Still smothering the umbrella stand, Marvar’s overcoat hung in the passage, its hem brushing the floor. Dyer stuffed it into Leandro’s games bag. He was halfway down the stairs when he stopped.

  It was here, on the grey anonymous staircase, that Dyer had the idea. He reached out to the wrought-iron handrail, turned, and began to retrace his steps. Gripping the bag, he pushed open the door at the top of the stairs and walked, heart tripping, across the soft coral carpet. Suddenly, he saw a way to throw his enemies off the track.

  The walls of the big domed reading room were covered in books. Seven had been reserved by Dyer. These volumes were stored with many reserved by other members in a free-standing open case in the centre.

  Dyer stooped to a pile on the second shelf. He ran the back of his index finger down the spines, until it brushed against the wine-red copy of Uma Nova Luz Num Litoral Antigo, by Sergio Madrugada (University of Coimbra Press, 2017). He tugged the book out and took it into the French and German reading room next door. As he’d anticipated, this was empty, the regular tiny band of Modern Languages undergraduates no doubt attending a lecture downstairs.

  He sat at the end of a long table by the window and undid the blue canvas games bag, delving under Marvar’s coat and pulling out Basil Bunting’s Collected Poems. He opened this to a poem on page 72, and, drawing on knowledge acquired in this very room nearly three decades before, he started to create a code in his notebook, from time to time referring to the poem’s last six lines, and altering certain letters into numbers.

  His code established, Dyer dug out Marvar’s folder and withdrew the yellow post-it note. He tore off one of the two blank post-it notes on the back and, using his calculations and comparing these with Marvar’s – shielded in his left palm – he wrote out an altogether different algorithm on it, first one side, then the other, and finishing with the same words: ‘contrary to God’s will’?

  He checked it over one last time, this false formula with his Bunting code copied out in what he hoped resembled Marvar’s handwriting. Then he tucked it back inside the green folder. As an afterthought, he slipped the third and last, blank, post-it note into his wallet.

  Forty minutes had passed when Dyer folded Marvar’s original yellow piece of paper into the penultimate chapter of Professor Madrugada’s book, and returned to the stacks. He looked about. Three young women on the central round table, making notes. A chubby bald man in glasses, smiling to himself as he wrote a postcard. Reassured that no one was watching and there were no CCTV cameras to record his actions, Dyer reinserted Uma Nova Luz Num Litoral Antigo into the pile, and picked up his bag and left.

  The blonde-dyed librarian had sparked the idea. The memory of her voice had trailed him as he was going down the stairs, the meaningful way she had raised her God-white head and said: ‘You can have it out for one more week,’ after first revealing that no one would know that it was Dyer who had ordered Madrugada’s monograph. Something in her manner had recalled his editor when he commissioned Dyer’s valedictory piece on South America. It moved Dyer to treat the extension of a recon
dite library book with the respect that he once unfailingly approached every deadline. The date was arbitrary, of no significance at all, but it gave him another six days to work out what to do.

  For now, until 8 p.m. the following Tuesday, Marvar’s post-it note was safe between the pages of a book that no one was likely to want to read.

  Dyer had needed something extraordinary to motivate him, to take hold of his spirit. Now he had it. Marvar’s hard-edged folder had given Dyer a purpose and shamed him out of his morose mood.

  He had not forgotten Gilles’s touchline advice on how to avoid leaving a digital footprint. ‘Stay away from cameras. Buy a pack of SIM cards, and rotate them so they can’t get a pattern. And use a line of poetry for your password, no one will ever hack it.’

  At the Vodafone store in Cornmarket, Dyer paid £5 for a pack of ten SIM cards. Before returning home, he stopped off at the post office in Walton Street and bought two padded brown envelopes.

  Into the smaller one, he inserted his interview with Marvar, addressing it to himself. He sealed this up and folded it, along with a short letter, into the larger envelope, which he posted to a separate address copied from a page in his notebook that he then tore out and threw away, along with the notes for his code.

  The letter read:

  Dear Miranda,

  Please forgive me for intruding on you out of the blue. I’m aware this request is unusual, but would you keep the enclosed package safe for me? I will explain when we next meet (better for tedious reasons face to face, and not by email/phone). Meanwhile, find below a list of books about the Tupi.

  With fond regards,

  abáûera,

  John Dyer

  Moments later, Dyer was unlocking his front door when he heard the telephone whining in the kitchen. He raced inside, dropping the games bag onto the table, and ran to answer it.