Woman of State

by Simon Berthon

  Heeding the instant, her audience ceased its cheering. An expectation created by her magnetic fragility reduced the hall to a hush.

  ‘Are human rights a joke?’ She fired the question like a crossbow bolt, puzzled faces beneath straining to understand its target.

  ‘Sometimes you might think so. We read stories of voting rights for child rapists. Refugees granted asylum to look after their cat. Such stories are always distorted, if not invented. But what they betray is an attitude. Human rights are a nuisance. Or silly. Or something foreigners deploy to take advantage of us.

  ‘Such a state of mind makes us an ungenerous nation. We give the impression of wanting to send asylum seekers into danger, not welcome them to safety. To keep families separated, not united. To make ourselves less civilized, not more.

  ‘But what ultimately prevents us from so demeaning ourselves is law. The laws that enshrine human rights. I want to tell you on this extraordinary night that I have stood in this election for the lawful human rights of every individual in this nation. And of those who with just cause seek refuge in it.’

  There were stirrings not just on the floor below her. A few minutes earlier, the party leader and his entourage had swept into Festival Hall, commandeered for a mass gathering of the ranks. Pummelled by jostlers and backslappers, they paused to watch the Lambeth West declaration, knowing that victory there would surely see them into Downing Street. After the announcement of the result, they made to move on but were halted by the remarkable speech of their winning candidate.

  For a moment Anne-Marie thought of stopping there. But, almost despite herself, the words flowed on, an undercurrent of payback throbbing within her.

  ‘No human right has been more trampled,’ she resumed, ‘than the right to live our lawful lives unobserved in the privacy of our homes, our meeting places, with our friends, with our families.

  ‘Under the cloak of fear, of exaggerated threats from terrorists and other convenient enemies, technology – and a lust for control – has created the surveillance state.

  ‘I condemn that state.’

  She could hear the collective gasp around her. A single cough reverberated like a gunshot. In Festival Hall, the volume dropped again and the now Prime Minister in waiting watched on. In a few still-lit rooms in Whitehall, in two fortress buildings by the Thames, and on comfortable sofas in commuter belts, a network of men, and a few women, were taking note of this upstart lawyer just turned MP.

  ‘There must be no more snooping on the lives of tens of millions of innocent people by NSA, GCHQ, CIA, MI5, MI6 or any other sets of initials and numbers the faceless, unaccountable watchers choose to hide behind.

  ‘There must be no more dirty tricks, extraordinary renditions, unexplained disappearances.

  ‘Every citizen of this country is entitled to a life that is private, unviolated, and free.

  ‘I make you a promise. I will work to dismantle the surveillance state. Nothing will deter me from keeping that pledge.’

  For a few seconds, the Lambeth West election revellers remained stunned in a frozen silence. Then came the first ripples of applause, followed by waves of cheering and chanting. At Festival Hall, normal service was resumed, though raised eyebrows were exchanged amid mutterings of, ‘Did you see that?’

  Social media buzzed. The speech began to trend on Twitter; party workers posted it on Facebook and ‘likes’ mounted in their thousands. Anne-Marie had hit a nerve.

  But, as well as in the secretive recesses of Whitehall, other nerves were less favourably struck. Long-in-the-tooth politicians noted the rashness of her words. Patriotic support of the ‘vital work’ of the security services was a mantra – particularly if you wanted your own secrets to stay buried. One senior member of her party amused himself by wondering what skeletons might lurk in pretty little Anne-Marie Gallagher’s cupboard.

  Having stepped down from the platform, Anne-Marie found Margaret Wykeham alongside her, leaning in for a hug. ‘Your speech was wonderful. But take care.’ They locked eyes, two women in a stadium where the gladiators were still largely male. ‘Get some rest. It’s allowed, you know.’

  It was past 3 a.m. Small groups were setting off to join the Festival Hall throng, beckoning her to come with them. She realized that all she wanted was to be rid of them, to find silence to take in what had happened to her. She waved happily, leaning the side of her face against joined hands to indicate sleep. While other newly elected MPs and defeated candidates retired to their homes with loving wives, husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends, she left the arena alone.

  Melting into the night air and walking briskly to expel the fustiness of the crowd and the clamour, she cut through the side streets of low Victorian terraces towards the river, stopping occasionally to listen for pursuing steps. The further she walked, the more the sense of unreality took hold.

  Within half an hour she was entering her apartment block, one of five modernist buildings its architect called ‘pavilions’ overhanging the Thames – just one element in the massive new city within a city housing fifty thousand people. A new embassy row. A new haven for rich oligarchs when the going back home got rough. Thousands of pods of secluded anonymity. Her shield.

  She took the lift to the eleventh floor and entered the flat she had reserved two years before. Then, she had analysed the model in the sales suite and lined up the view she wanted. Now that imagined outlook lay before her in spectacular reality. It never ceased to take her breath away.

  She flicked on the television. Nearly 4 a.m. Counting had stopped for the night but her party was certain of an overall majority.

  She undressed, scrubbed her face and teeth, and changed into the comfort of her pyjamas. She walked to the swathe of glass revealing London and the river. To the right the Millennium Wheel was still alight and revolving on this long election night, catching its celebrating stragglers. Sweeping left came the tower of the House of Lords, the ugliness of Millbank, then, peeping through a tiny gap in the forest of concrete and brick, the face of Big Ben.

  She stared at these icons of the British state, the alien fortress she would soon inhabit. Below, apart from one lonely tug crawling slowly upstream, water gleamed emptily. A few cars flowed along the Embankment opposite, then an ambulance flashing its light. Their motion was silent and ghostly, deadened by the thickly insulated glass. She looked down on the river below and then right as the towpath resumed its curl towards Vauxhall.

  There she saw the figure.

  Stooping, long coat, dark brimmer hat concealing his forehead and upper face. He – it was a man for sure – lifted a cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger to his lips, puffed, and exhaled smoke that streaked into the night. He turned his head up and towards the window she was watching from. She caught a glimmer of chin and lip. There seemed something familiar about their contours. She felt she saw him start, as if he had seen an apparition. He threw the cigarette onto the path, turned on his heel, and shuffled away. It was his back view as he left, the brimmer raked at a hint of an angle over his neck, strands of hair falling beneath that made her shudder. A wraith dissolving into the blackness.

  The moment passed and she told herself to snap out of it. The transformative events of the past hours must have dislocated her. She repeated her calculation: any man with any interest in tracking her down these many years on was dead or disappeared.

  Cold logic dictated imaginings of coincidences.

  CHAPTER 4

  Post-election, Saturday, 6 May

  The rutted lane snaked up the hillside and emerged into a broad flank of heather-dotted fields forming a shallow ascent to a flat summit. Grey drizzle cast a familiar gloom over Irish border country, a sullen response to the excitement at Westminster.

  Peering through the monotonous beat of his windscreen wipers, Detective Chief Inspector Jon Carne felt he was disappearing into a primordial soup. Finally he could make out the working party a couple of fields away. He turned right through a gate and pulled up besi
de a four-by-four in the gaudy gold of the province’s Police Service, its roof light flashing like an irrelevant lighthouse in a deserted sea of washed-out green.

  Stakes were being driven into the ground and a wire fence assembled. He watched the mallet head swish down like an executioner’s blade. The point of wood below broke smoothly into the soft squelch of earth. Inside the fence a temporary tarpaulin was being erected over the excavation site.

  A sergeant stood guard. ‘SOCO’s inside, sir,’ he said.

  Carne crossed the fence boundary and approached the area where the tarpaulin was rising.

  ‘Morning, sir,’ said the scene-of-crime officer.

  ‘Morning,’ replied Carne. ‘So how and why?’

  ‘We got a call on the confidential line last night. Couldn’t do anything till first light.’

  ‘Credentials?’

  ‘He gave a password. It was a genuine one, operating in the early ’90s.’

  ‘When did they stop using it?’

  ‘1995, sir.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘His coordinates are spot on. The description of the field and where to dig, too. We found a few remains on the surface. Animal disturbance. We’ve done a preliminary dig. Skull’s well preserved. Fair bit of clothing.’

  ‘He didn’t say who or exactly when.’

  ‘Just you’ll find an unlucky young man. That was it, sir.’

  Carne looked down at the muddled remnants so far revealed. Fragments of what may have been dark-blue jeans, the rubber soles of shoes, the jacket oddly intact, the macabre shape of head. He imagined the different endgames. A simple execution of a known enemy – or an assassination – just a bullet in the head. More likely, the last hours of a tout. Kicks and punches, cigarette burns, electrodes, hammers on kneecaps, scalpels on skin, two bullets in the head.

  What must it be like to be the parent of whoever who had become this set of bones and rotted clothes? An offspring who disappeared, never to return. Would they have had any idea – or suspicions? Were they ever told? ‘We’re sorry to have to inform you, Mr and Mrs . . .’ Carne tried to imagine the platitudes of a ghastly conversation. If he and Alice had been able to have children, they would have come into this world at the time this young man was leaving it. They would now be the age his short life was extinguished. What might they have become? But no child had arrived. And as the years passed, her memory receded into a different, long-gone life whose future had died along with her.

  ‘Pathologist’s on the way, sir.’ The scene-of-crime officer shook him from his distraction.

  ‘Who’s on call?

  ‘Riordan, sir.’

  ‘Good.’ He looked again at the skull. ‘I don’t care how long he’s been there. Any tiny trace, we want it.’ Carne’s bleakness conveyed little optimism. ‘And no talking. No media, no publicity. You tell this lot, make sure they get it. I’ll instruct the press office. I don’t want anyone out there scurrying for cover.’ He retreated from the covering canvas into the drizzle still driving across the rolling fields. A few mournful sheep, huddled against stone walls, munched disconsolately, occasionally raising their heads at the unfamiliar activity. This was a place where nothing ever happened.

  A battered-looking Ford Fiesta splashed through the gate, halting with a skid of the front wheels. Out of it jumped a chubby woman with bouncing blonde hair, a pert snub nose and hint of double chin, accompanied by a male colleague. For the first time that morning a galvanizing beam illuminated Carne’s face. He removed his cap, transforming the policeman’s dourness to reveal a handsome, dark-haired man belying his forty-seven years. Working with Amy Riordan, in his eyes the single argument for the state pathology service, was guaranteed to cheer him up. He briskly greeted her.

  ‘OK, make my life easy. Tell me who did it, why, when, and how.’

  ‘Sure. I thought you wanted something difficult.’

  She gave him an amiable punch in the ribs, headed up to the grave, laid out her evidence bags and carefully pulled on inner nitrile gloves and latex covers. She knelt beside the remains, spreading her weight to avoid disturbing the mud walls, and gingerly stretched down one hand. One by one, she removed shreds of clothing, passing them to her assistant to place in individual bags and mark. The work tensed her, beads of sweat forming around her mouth. After ten minutes of concentrated foraging, she came up for air and stood gazing at the skull.

  ‘So, early 1990s,’ said Riordan.

  ‘Yes, the password he used dates him.’

  ‘That fits. Twenty, twenty-five years.’ She shrugged. ‘Give or take a few. Looks like he had a bashing around the face. Signs of bullet damage in the skull. Doesn’t seem much on the other bones that are bared.’

  ‘Will we get anything?’ asked Carne.

  ‘Possibly,’ she replied. ‘The jacket’s synthetic, so it’s pretty intact. Might be something on it, or inside it. Jeans were denim, natural fibre, so not much left. But you never know. I don’t want to poke around the shirt fibres yet. He had a plastic belt. It’s slipped down his thighs. That’s probably the result of the corpse swelling, forcing his lower clothing down below the waist.’

  ‘Is that common?’

  ‘Reasonably, though it’s not widely studied. It can sometimes be interpreted as an indicator of sexual interaction with the victim. But actually, during decomposition this kind of abdominal bloating is frequent. Then, as the flesh and organs continue to decompose, it leaves this curious-looking position of the belt.’

  As so often when watching and listening to Amy, Carne felt goose pimples of pride both at her manual dexterity and expert knowledge.

  ‘Mind you,’ she continued, ‘I might get something on sex. Saliva, semen, DNA. Maybe what type too if you’re dead lucky. Gay or straight, mouth or tongue.’

  ‘Let’s turn it into a musical,’ Carne chimed in.

  ‘Sure, you write the tunes, I’ll do the words.’ She gave him her full-on, inquisitorial stare. ‘Now you tell me something, Jonny Carne. What in the name of God, the Devil and all creatures in between is this young man doing lying in this grave in this field in this desolate part of this island of poets, artists and balladeers with bullet holes in his head?’

  ‘You tell me, Amy Riordan. Tout? Caught on the wrong side?’

  ‘Unlucky in love?’ she chipped in.

  ‘We need a name.’ Carne tensed. ‘We will investigate and we will find out what happened to him. Doesn’t matter who he is, or what company he kept. Or where it leads. Or who gets embarrassed. Or who ends up in a dock.’

  ‘That’s why I love you.’

  She approached him, gave him a kiss on the cheek and put her arm round him. They enjoyed the trust of a relationship where physical contact could not impinge. Amy made no secret of her sexuality and Carne felt revulsion at older men salivating after women half their age. Instead he almost saw her as his consolation – the daughter he had never had.

  He could feel a prickle in his eye; perhaps it was the life lost in the grave, the loneliness of the unpeopled hills, or the memory of loss. He needed to leave this place.

  ‘Over to you,’ he said. ‘Just find me a smoking gun.’

  Instead of driving north to join the motorway, Carne turned east. He could not yet face the desultoriness of the weekend office and its few occupants counting up their overtime. He wanted air, space, and time. He headed towards his favourite sight: the sculpted shapes of the Mourne Mountains rising stealthily from the sea to form their elevated pattern, even on as grey a day as this. He drew up to the vantage point he had made his own, switched off the engine and sat as still as the mountains in front of him – a hiding place where memory could not be disturbed.

  There was something about the interdependence of each summit that made every peak play its part in a communal enterprise of nature, a harmony that never failed to restore his inner peace. They seemed to be saying temporary matters, lives, people will come and go – but we will always be here watching the absurdities of your brief lives.
Perhaps they would be saying that about the loss of just one life more than twenty years ago.

  But then it struck him, unprompted by the word itself, that they would instead be mourning; and that, like each peak, all life was mutually dependent. To dismiss one was to dismiss all. Whatever the aloneness of his own life, he would not write off another human being for the sake of convenience.

  Enough poetic melancholy. A young man had not walked into a muddy grave in an isolated field to lie down for a rest: someone, more than one person, had buried him. This many years on, he knew there’d be pressure to let it lie – politics, amnesties, leave the Troubles behind. But, to him, a killing was a killing, wherever and why ever it happened. The rest was mealy-mouthed excuse-making. He would never allow himself to compromise with murder.

  Carne switched on the engine, accelerated hard and turned north. There was one man he needed to talk to. He pushed the number for Castlereagh switchboard and engaged the hands-free set.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Poots, please,’ he demanded. Carne tapped his thumb impatiently on the steering wheel as he cruised through the rolling hills of South Down. Thirty seconds later, the familiar gruff voice was on the line.

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘Billy, your great age is finally going to come in useful. Early- ’90s disappearances – I want the almanac.’

  ‘Christ, I thought we’d left all that behind.’

  ‘To the contrary. We have a new body in a field without a name.’

  ‘Ah, a ghost is coming alive.’

  ‘Ghosts indeed,’ said Carne. ‘That’s your department, Billy. Let’s get resurrecting him.’

  CHAPTER 5

  October 1993

  It’s the same boy who was in the library two days ago, the one she gawped at, the one she’d never seen before. Only this time he’s got there first and taken her seat. Maire wonders if it’s coincidental or deliberate, then chides herself for being so soft. He’s probably not given her a thought. Nor should she give him one. That’s not what she’s here for, and not what she’s spent the last two years for.