“I was drugged by the Iraqi police.”
“So you say.”
“I’m a journalist.”
Jennings shrugs dismissively. “What do you think that means? Special privileges? The law doesn’t apply? You think you understand this place, Mr. Terracini, just because you speak the language, but you’re no different to the other hacks and glory hounds who turn up here wanting to put gloss on a new career or resurrect a fading one. You look at this country and think you’re going to sum it up in a thousand crisp words, but you wind up in the bar of the al-Hamra trying to make sense of the horror. Nobody understands this place.”
“They can’t just kick me out.”
“Yes they can.”
Jennings forces himself to relax, pulling his neck from side to side until the vertebrae pop.
“What if I take my chances?” asks Luca.
“We won’t allow that. Should you be arrested, or imprisoned or kidnapped, the American government would be expected to negotiate your release. We would prefer not to have that situation arise.”
Jennings repacks his briefcase, putting each pen in the allotted place. It closes and he spins the combination lock.
“If you’ll excuse me, I have five bodies to repatriate.”
“American soldiers?”
“Civilians. Four Americans. One German. The attack on the Finance Ministry.”
“What attack?”
Jennings straightens his jacket and opens the door. “Oh, that’s right, you were in custody. There was an attack on the Finance Ministry. Four security contractors died and a UN auditor was abducted.”
Luca croaks, “Who?”
“Their names haven’t been released.”
“The auditor?”
“They found his body this morning in the river. Tortured. Executed. I had to call his parents in Hamburg.”
“There was a woman…?”
“Safe. The United Nations is pulling out all non-essential staff. You should get yourself on the same flight, Luca. Nobody spends any longer in Iraq than necessary. Your time is up.”
9
LONDON
Elizabeth North sleeps on her side with one knee exposed and an arm dangling over the side of the bed. She dreams that she’s naked in a dark tunnel, breathless and blind.
The phone is ringing. She rolls over too quickly and almost topples out of bed. Her fingers find the receiver.
“Hello?”
Silence.
“North? Is that you?”
Someone is breathing.
“What’s going on? Who is this?”
She waits.
“I’m going to hang up now… Hello?… If you’re not going to answer you can… can… you can get lost!”
Slamming down the receiver, she traps her finger between the handset and the cradle. The pain makes her eyes water. Sucking her finger, she sits on the edge of the bed. Once she owned a lap. Now she’s full of baby. She can’t see her pubic hair unless she looks in the mirror and she hasn’t bothered waxing since they took their summer holiday to Jordan.
It was a strange choice, but North had business in Amman and Damascus. Afterwards they went to a resort on the Red Sea with bungalows and swimming pools and a kids’ club. Elizabeth and North had fought because he spent so much time on his BlackBerry answering emails instead of playing with Rowan. They had make-up sex afterwards. Angry. Passionate.
Standing at the bedroom window, she watches a jet pass overhead on its way to Heathrow, flashing silver. The noise penetrates the double-glazing. Pressing her fingertips to the glass, she can feel it vibrating and the sensation seems to reach into her chest and shake something inside her like a wine glass resonating at the perfect frequency of sound. Her marriage used to be like that—resonating with a perfect frequency. Now it has the discordant ring of a dropped sword.
She and North had met at Cambridge when she was studying politics and he was doing his masters in economics and sleeping with every impressionable undergraduate he could charm out of her knickers. His car had broken down—an old Citroën C5—and he was standing by the road with his collar pulled up and a sodden newspaper over his head. Elizabeth had pulled over in her Peugeot.
“Want any help?”
“How are you with engines?”
“Terrible.”
“Can you stop the rain?”
“Afraid not.”
His hair was plastered to his forehead and he looked like a little boy.
“Get in.”
“I’m all wet.”
“It’s only water.”
North seemed too big for her car. His knees touched the dashboard and his head brushed the roof. She took him to his digs and he asked her out for a drink.
“I don’t go out with strangers.”
“You just picked me up.”
“I saved you from drowning.”
“Then let me say thank you.”
“You have.”
A week later North called her. He had tracked her down, found her number and done a little research. A bunch of flowers arrived five minutes before his phone call.
“About that drink?”
“I’m busy.”
“Did you get my flowers?”
“They’re very nice. Thank you.”
“One drink.”
“I’m seeing someone else.”
A few weeks later Elizabeth bumped into North in the university library. He smiled and said hello, but didn’t hassle her. She felt slightly disappointed. The following Saturday she went out with her girlfriends and they kicked on to a karaoke club in Cambridge Street. North arrived with six of his mates, none of them too drunk to be charming. Again North ignored her. One of Elizabeth’s girlfriends began flirting with him and Elizabeth felt herself getting jealous. On the spur of the moment, she pulled North on to the stage for a duet and whispered in his ear, “I don’t know what I hate most—you following me or you ignoring me.”
“You’re seeing someone.”
“That was a lie.”
That Mother’s Day, Elizabeth went home to London for the weekend and found North sitting in the kitchen of the house in Hampstead, eating her mother’s fruitcake and regaling her with stories of Cambridge.
“Oh, hello, dear,” her mother said. “Look who’s here! Richard has been telling me all about himself. Why didn’t you tell us you had a new boyfriend? Look at the lovely flowers he brought. My favorite. Isn’t that sweet?”
Elizabeth should have been annoyed. Instead she was amused. She didn’t even mind when North laughed uproariously through the home videos—including the one of her naked in the bath and the ballet recital that she brought to a halt by tumbling off the stage.
Later that night, her mother showed North to his room and whispered, “I’ve put you next door to Lizzie in case you get lonely.” She actually winked.
And so that’s how it happened. North knocked. Elizabeth let him in. They made love more than once. In the morning she could barely sit down without wincing.
After they finished college they lived together in London before they married. Elizabeth got a job as a researcher at ITV and later was offered a presenting role on a health and lifestyle show called What’s Good For You. The first summer after they married they took a holiday to her father’s hunting lodge outside of Aberdeen. North arranged it. It might have been quite romantic except that her father came too, along with his new girlfriend Jacinta.
North and Alistair Bach spent every day stalking deer together in the Highlands and their evenings discussing the merits of the international exchange rate mechanism and deregulation of the banking system. Elizabeth felt like a banking widow even though her new husband didn’t work for a bank.
When North was offered a job at Mersey Fidelity, she fought against it. She didn’t care about the salary package or the bonuses. She had married to escape her family and now she was being dragged back into the vortex.
Since then she’d come to accept that she would have to
share North with Mersey Fidelity and her family, particularly her father.
There is a knock on the door. Rowan appears. His pajamas are stuck to his thighs.
“Someone wet the bed.”
“Who?”
“The monster.”
“But there are no such things as monsters.”
“I think I saw him climbing out the window.”
“So he’s gone now?”
“Yes.”
The kitchen has a high ceiling and a scrubbed pine table and matching chairs. Rowan is drawing with crayons, a study of concentration. Polina is loading the dryer in the laundry. She’s wearing shorts, sandals and a pretty blouse.
“You are well this morning,” she says, making a question sound like a statement.
“I’m fine.”
“You will have something to eat. Orange juice? We have lots of juice.”
That’s because North isn’t here to drink it, thinks Elizabeth.
“Did you see him on Friday?” she asks.
“I beg your pardon?”
“North. Did you see him on Friday? He came home from work. He must have forgotten something.”
Polina chews on the soft inside of her cheek as if she’s trying to remember.
“I must have gone to the shops.”
“He was home for more than three hours.”
“How do you know?”
Elizabeth doesn’t want to explain about the private detective.
“He mentioned it,” she lies.
Polina’s eyes seem to glitter. “I must have been in and out. Perhaps he was working upstairs.”
She makes it sound so obvious. Problem sorted.
Mid-morning, late summer hazing the air, Elizabeth drives east along the river until the glass and chrome towers of Canary Wharf come into view, gleaming in the sunlight. This view of London could grace the cover of a science fiction novel, but it’s also a reminder of the 1980s, the decade that was brash, assertive and not very British at all. Margaret Thatcher. The Miners’ Strike. Heysel. Hillsborough. The IRA. Elizabeth had been a young girl but she remembers these events because her perfect childhood had seemed so often under threat.
The foyer of Mersey Fidelity is tiled in black Italian marble and has matching leather sofas. Rupert and Frank are behind the security desk. Elizabeth has known them for years—ever since she’d visit her father after school, trying to get money for chips or chocolate.
The receptionist is a new face, immune to her smile.
“I was hoping to see Mitchell Bach.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“I’m his sister.”
She rings upstairs. Cups the phone.
“I’m afraid Mr. Bach is busy.”
“How long will he be?”
“Perhaps you could come back later or make an appointment.”
“I’ll wait.”
The receptionist punches the number again. Whispers. “No… yes… that’s right… she wants to wait… I see… OK.”
Addressing Elizabeth, “Someone is coming down to collect you.”
Felicity Stone, the head of public relations, is in her forties with blonde cropped hair and very white teeth, which are too large for her mouth. She is masculine looking. Businesslike. She presses Elizabeth’s right hand in both of hers for a fraction of a second before leaving it suspended in mid-air.
“We haven’t been introduced. I’m Felicity. What a terrible way to meet. How are you holding up? We’re all so concerned about North. I’m sure everything is going to be fine. I once had an uncle who went missing for a week and we found him in a homeless shelter in Manchester. Transient Global Amnesia, they called it—short-term memory loss. You’re so pregnant. You must want to sit down.”
A lift carries them to the upper floors. Miss Stone continues talking, as though worried about losing her turn. They cross a large open-plan office dotted with computer screens. The European Desk. Global Equities. Forex. Futures. The traders are cradling phones beneath their chins and staring at charts and numbers.
They arrive at Mitchell’s office. Miss Stone takes a seat and logs on to a computer screen.
“How long will Mitchell be?” asks Elizabeth.
“He’s a very busy man. He’s asked me to co-ordinate things. We’re liaising with the police, calling hospitals, checking passenger manifests… We’re most concerned about your welfare. I’ve arranged for you to have a full check-up. Dr. Shadrick is a Harley Street OB…”
“I have my own doctor.”
“Yes, but Dr. Shadrick is the best. I’ve made a provisional appointment for tomorrow at eleven, but change it if you need to.” Miss Stone taps at the keyboard again. “Where are you going to stay?”
“At the house.”
“By yourself?”
“I have Rowan and the nanny.”
“Mitchell has suggested you move in with your father.”
“I want to stay in Barnes.”
“Oh!”
“He is coming home, you know.”
“Who?”
“My husband.”
“Of course, I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.” Miss Stone smiles apologetically. Her mobile is ringing. The sound is coming from a leather pouch clipped to her belt. Drawing it out like a gunslinger, she flips the phone open.
“Yes… No… I didn’t approve that… Nothing goes out unless I read it first… Tell them to wait… I don’t care what that arsehole wants, we’re not releasing a statement until we’re good and ready.”
Elizabeth tries not to look surprised by the language. Miss Stone closes the phone.
“Must dash. You’ll be all right on your own? Mitchell shouldn’t be long. Don’t answer the phone. The switchboard will pick it up.”
Alone now, Elizabeth gazes out the window looking west along the Thames to the Houses of Parliament just visible through the haze. Her feet hurt. The sofa is too low. Instead she sits in Mitchell’s desk chair. Two lights are blinking on his phone. Behind her on a bookcase is a leather-bound copy of the company history: the anniversary edition. A hundred years of Mersey Fidelity—the humble building society transformed into a global bank. Elizabeth knows the story. The history of the bank is almost her own family’s history.
Her father, Alistair Bach, had started working as a trainee bank teller in 1960 when Mersey Fidelity was a Liverpool-based building society giving respectable working-class folk the chance to buy their own homes. In the mid-eighties when “demutualization” became the buzzword and Thatcher’s Big Bang revolution set free the finance markets, Alistair Bach took advantage of the changes and turned the building society into a bank which could earn profits and pay dividends to shareholders, making the directors rich in the process. Bach became the youngest chief financial officer in the history of the FTSE 100 list of companies and Mersey Fidelity grew to become the fifth biggest retail and investment bank in the UK. He only stepped down as chairman in early 2007. By then Mitchell had been groomed for a senior position—a younger version of his father, cloned from the same stem cells—with a first-class mind and degrees from Cambridge and Harvard.
Elizabeth can feel Claudia stomping on her cervix. Up until a few days ago she was kicking up near her belly button, but now she’s lower down, pressing on her pelvis. Picking up the phone, Elizabeth punches North’s extension, knowing that his secretary will most likely pick up.
“Richard North’s office.”
“Hello, Bridget, it’s Elizabeth.” There is a pause. “I know you’re busy, but I’m in the building. Can we get a coffee?”
Another pause. “I’ve been told not to talk to anyone.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Bridget Lindop hesitates again, torn between self-preservation and common decency.
“This is me, Bridget. Elizabeth. I just want to talk.”
Silence echoes through the handset. Then comes a whispered reply. “I’ll meet you in the cafeteria.”
Opening Mitchell
’s door, Elizabeth looks along the corridor. Then she walks quickly to the lift, crossing the open-plan office, keeping her head down. None of the traders take any notice of her.
The cafeteria is on the tenth floor. They order tea in mugs and take a table near the window. On the far side of fifty, Bridget Lindop is tall and straight-backed with polished silver hair bound in a tight bun. A religious woman, who goes to Mass every day, she has a small silver cross on a chain around her neck.
“How was North when you saw him last? Was he worried about anything?”
The older woman hesitates and filters her words as if straining tea leaves. “Mr. North didn’t really confide in me.”
“But you saw him every day. Did he seem preoccupied? Why was he working late so many nights?”
“We were very busy.”
Elizabeth feels a lump forming in her throat.
“I think he was having an affair.”
Miss Lindop doesn’t react. She sits with her back straight, her knees together and her hands folded in her lap.
“I’m sure you’re mistaken. Richard talked only of you and Rowan.”
“He took a woman home while I was away.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ask him?”
“I would if I could.”
The statement vibrates in her throat. Miss Lindop reaches across the space between them and squeezes Elizabeth’s hand. Her voice drops to a whisper.
“He’s a good man, you know that.”
Elizabeth feels the skin on her face tighten. “What’s wrong?”
“He told me something a few weeks ago. He said a terrible thing had happened and it was his fault.”
“What?”
“I don’t know, but he said I wouldn’t respect him if I knew. It was about two weeks ago. He took the day off. He said he was trying to find the owner of an account. It was some sort of unlisted charity receiving money from one of our accounts. I shouldn’t be talking to you about any of this.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been told not to say anything.”
Miss Lindop looks up and her whole body stiffens. Her lips draw back from her teeth in a pained smile. She pulls her hand away from Elizabeth, breaking physical contact. Felicity Stone has appeared in the cafeteria, flanked by two security guards. Scanning the tables, her eyes come to rest on Elizabeth. She flips open her mobile and makes a call, moving between tables, closing the gap.
The Wreckage: A Thriller Page 17
