Suddenly Anne-Marie felt that this was not right. Perhaps she had rushed to an assumption and it was the wrong address. Or it was simply a location he had given her and Joseph was, at this moment, walking up the alleyway to meet her. She backed away from the door and retraced her steps. There was no sign of Joseph or anyone else. Her watch said 8.11. Eleven minutes after he’d said they’d meet. He was always a stickler for punctuality. He was not here.
She returned to the garage and told herself to stop being so timid. She raised the door in one deft, swift movement.
‘Oh, my God!’ she whispered, covering her mouth with her hand. ‘Oh, my God!’
She flinched and turned away, bile rising from the pit of her stomach. This could not be. She forced herself to look back, to check that she was not seeing some horrific apparition, some trick of the brain. She walked slowly forward, hand outstretched, steeling herself to touch.
A bearded man hung from a rope suspended on a meat hook. A single, unshaded light bulb cast a flat light on the limp body, shrouded in a scuffed donkey jacket and dark-brown corduroy trousers. Strands of greying brown hair had fallen haphazardly over the forehead. Standing on tiptoe, Anne-Marie stretched out both hands to separate them and reveal the uncovered face. The skin was cold. The eyes, bearing the dull glaze of death, bulged horribly, their whites dotted with livid red spots. A blackened tongue protruded from lips turned blue, beads of saliva dripping from the mouth. The air smelt of leeching body fluids. She tried to close the lids over the enlarged eyes but they were stuck, set in their misshapen rigor mortis. He hasn’t changed, she thought. Even the clothes. The hair was still luxuriant, the beard strong.
She stepped back from the hanging corpse, driving back the nausea, trying to take deep, even breaths. She heard a car starting up and moving. She rolled down the door, trapping the odours of death. The car must be reversing as it abruptly stopped, then, after a few seconds, accelerated fiercely past. Despite the smell, she could not face the light and mundanity of daily life outside. She cast around for somewhere to drop and saw a pile of tyres in the corner. She forced her legs towards it, sat and slumped, burying her head in her hands. After a few seconds she allowed her eyes to peer through gaps in her fingers, wishing that somehow the body would have disappeared and it was all a sick invention of her imagination.
The body still dangled. A rush of wind blew through the small gap between the concrete ground and door bottom and she thought she saw his feet and ankles judder. She closed the gap between her fingers but kept her eyes open. Joseph. An image of his boyish figure in swimming trunks by the sea came to her: skinny, covered with sand, an innocent smile covering his face, playfully baring the gap in his mouth as adult teeth waited to grow, then pulling his face with his hands, turning it into a hideous, comic monstrosity to frighten her. She closed her eyes and a smile of memory gave way to the bitterness of loss. She sniffed, found a tissue in her pocket and wiped her face. As her rational senses began to return, the stink from the corpse grew stronger. She could not go on sitting here in this dark cell of unnatural death.
She raised herself to her feet – it felt like a gigantic effort of will – and stared at the body. She looked up and down it several times, beginning to feel more familiar with it, less sickened. The visceral recoil of her guts gave way to the first prompting of questions about why, and how, he could have ended up like this. Certainly, whatever the secret was that he had wanted to tell her had now gone with him to the dust.
She tried to remember his words in those scattered fragments of phone talk. ‘Who pulled the trigger? Eh, Maire? . . . You made it, didn’t you? Infiltrated the bastards . . . It was a trick. We were all tricked. David too. It wasn’t like it seemed . . . It’s about the fucking British state. That’s what you gotta understand. That’s what I figured out. That’s what’s gonna blow them apart.’ She had instantly, and sickeningly, understood one of his allusions. But what did he mean about a trick? What was the truth about David that, even now, could be so explosive?
Her thoughts were disrupted by catching sight of a corner of brown paper sticking out of his coat pocket. She removed it – a rolled-up envelope, A4 size, too thin to contain more than a sheet or two of paper. Sensing too much time had passed, she hurriedly folded it into a small square and stuffed it into a pocket.
She walked to the roll-up door, took one last look back at him, and pushed it back up. There were no signs of activity. She stepped out, turned to lower the door, patted herself down and retraced her steps to the alleyway. She walked back past the block of flats, flicking glances in all directions as she went. She did not notice at the far end of the side road, beyond the turning into the alleyway, a parked car with a man in it reading a newspaper. Nor did she see him putting his newspaper down.
Back on the main road, protected by the sounds and shapes of rush hour, Anne-Marie slowed down. After the shock and revulsion, she understood that she had choices to make, choices that could be correct only if based on cool calculation.
I am a public figure entrapped by a secret that is of the here and now, she told herself. It may have emerged from a past which, unfairly and arbitrarily, has returned to haunt me, even play with me. But, whatever risk the past might bring, I must play my cards for the present.
The cardinal rule of political scandal was that it was never the deed, but the cover-up, that destroyed. By staying silent about what she had seen, she would take a first, irreversible step in the wrong direction. To avoid that step, she had to share her knowledge, or, at the very least, a part of it.
The Portuguese café came into sight; Hinds, seeing her, jumped from his table and walked over to the car. She called to him to get in and opened the front passenger door to sit beside him.
‘Minister?’ Her agitation was obvious.
‘Just drive please, Keith.’ The note of command was strident and unusual. Hinds looked at her – she was fighting to control something.
‘Are you all right, Minister?’ he asked.
‘I’ve had something of a surprise. More than that. A nasty shock.’
‘Yes, Minister.’ She looked at him. There seemed an inner decency about him, a protective sympathy. She made her decision.
‘Keith, I was rung by an old family friend yesterday, not a sick aunt. I hadn’t seen him for more than twenty years. He sounded worried about something and asked me to meet him at an address he gave me, 11a Ironmongers Mews, Stockwell. It’s a garage. Inside it his dead body is hanging on a cord suspended from a meat hook. I’d be grateful if, on my behalf, you could inform the police. No one else knew that I was meeting him. I’ll leave it you to decide precisely what you tell the police. Oh, his name is Joseph Kennedy.’
‘I was a policeman, Minister,’ he said gently.
‘Yes, you told me,’ she replied. For the second time he sensed vulnerability – a possible softness inside the shell.
‘So, in one sense, you have informed the police, haven’t you, Minister?’
She turned her head to him, the colour returning to her face. But those words of Joseph – ‘That’s what’s gonna blow them apart’ – rang ever louder in her ears.
Only the collar of a grey suit creeping over the back of a white lab coat marked out the man standing over the covered slab. Carne, despite his astonishment when told both of the caller and his request, had given immediate permission for a visit to the mortuary. He allowed him a minute and then approached, offering an indeterminate police-to-army salute.
‘Good afternoon, General.’ He was not going to ‘sir’ him.
‘Good morning, Chief Inspector, er . . .’
‘Carne. We met once at Lisburn, one of those pointless love-each-other days.’
‘My apologies.’
‘Forget it, it was enough to cry yourself to sleep.’
‘As you see, I am not here in uniform. This is a private visit.’ Carne noted a defensiveness unusual in such a senior figure – Kenneth Bowman had been General Officer Commanding, Northern Irel
and, for nearly a year. ‘I’d imagined,’ he said, reasserting himself, ‘they’d have put a local officer in charge.’
‘I am a local,’ replied Carne. ‘They welcome English coppers here.’ He felt irritated by Bowman’s assumption of superiority. ‘Romanians and Bulgarians, too.’
Bowman forced a smile. ‘I understand you have some new intelligence.’
‘Initially the location of a body was reported on the confidential line,’ replied Carne. ‘Yesterday a second call gave clues to a further, unreported disappearance in the early ’90s.’ He looked sharply at Bowman. ‘General, this is not a military matter, it is a police investigation. I have not yet officially released news of the body’s discovery. And certainly not of who it might be. May I ask how you came to know what you call “new intelligence”?’
Bowman shrugged. ‘Isn’t that rather by the by?’
‘Not if there’s been a breach of security.’
The two men stared each other down. Both tall, over six foot, both slim, both inscrutable.
Finally, Bowman spoke. ‘For heaven’s sake, Chief Inspector, what in this hi-tech day and age is the one phone line above others in this part of the world our security service friends are going to be monitoring?’
Carne slowly shook his head. ‘So much for confidentiality.’
‘How the information was obtained hardly matters to the man under there, does it?’ said Bowman.
‘So why is this of interest to you, General?’
‘The disappearance and death of any young man is relevant to me.’
‘That wasn’t my point.’
‘I’m sure it wasn’t. But I’d remember something if I was you, Carne. You’ve done your job, finding him. Young men come and go and some live, some die – drugs, fast cars, fighting battles, falling off mountains. And that’s it. I’d remember another thing. We’ve had peace here, more or less, for twenty years. Don’t allow relics of the past to disturb it.’
‘Is that something your intelligence friends asked you to convey, General?’
‘I’ll forget you asked that, Chief Inspector.’ Carne was surprised to get even that much of an answer.
Amy Riordan’s arrival interrupted them. Bowman introduced himself and stretched out a hand. Amy got a faint nod from Carne and shook it. ‘Good morning, General. Amy Riordan, state pathologist.’
‘Can we remove the cover, Miss Riordan?’ asked Bowman.
‘Yes,’ she replied, peeling back the white sheet, ‘but no touching, please.’
Stock still, Bowman stared, then began to ease ever closer. Carne, quietly taking up a position opposite him, saw the emotion in his face.
‘Am I to take it that, if the identity is finally confirmed, you knew this young man,’ said Carne softly.
‘There may be a complexity.’ He hesitated. ‘I knew the family.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Thank you. I’m grateful to you.’
After a few more seconds, Bowman suddenly and briskly straightened. He addressed himself to Amy, ignoring Carne. ‘Thank you, Miss Riordan. Now please forgive me, I must make some telephone calls.’ He turned, marched to the exit, flung his white coat onto a trolley and disappeared without a further word.
Watching him go, Carne and Amy exchanged raised eyebrows.
‘What the hell was that about, Jonny boy?’
‘I think it’s what they call a warning. Keep off my turf.’
At the day’s end, back in her flat, there was one final task. Anne-Marie took the jeans she had worn to the garage out of a shoulder bag. She retrieved the envelope she had removed from Joseph’s hanging body, unfolded it, broke the flap and pulled out a single sheet, a copy of a newspaper front page. From it, the smiling face of a fair-haired man in his mid-thirties, with his wife and two small children happily grouped around him, stared back at her.
‘Oh, God,’ she whispered.
CHAPTER 18
Post-election, Friday, 12 May
She was being hurled along a twisting lane, her eyes blinded by taut cloth, flashes of light breaking in rapid signals through the veil of black.
‘Why me?’ she whispered. ‘Why me?’ The response was as dark and silent as the night.
‘Why me?’
The rubber of wheels hissed over tarmac, swerving and skidding. Lurch, acceleration, the road to oblivion.
‘You’ll kill us!’ she tried to cry but words refused to escape. Her throat was sore, blocked, strangulated by an alien pressure.
‘Why me?’
The car sheered to the right; rubber spat out stones and the wheels slithered to a juddery halt.
She heard the click of the door handle and felt pressure at her back, propelling her across damp grass. She wanted to lift her feet, to stride out, to run. But each step was an excruciating effort, her toes bare, sinking into glutinous mud.
‘Why me?’
Her feet stuck, she stumbled and fell to her knees. The veil was lifted and stars circled above in a brilliant show of force. Though the night was dry, steaming beads of sweat dripped onto her nose and lips, slipping into the parched, rasping drought of her throat.
A black-gloved hand raised a torch, a second hand yanked back her head and a beam speared into her. Her eyes froze against its blinding harshness. Light seemed transformed into the slim sharpness of a dagger, coruscating with a thousand flickers against the moonlit backdrop, a symphony of macabre and lethal beauty.
More hands gripped her shoulders, compressing her like an onrushing avalanche. She gasped for breath and her palms closed in supplication. Into them was thrust not the bread of communion but the polished weight of heavy metal, her forefinger wrapped around a cocked trigger.
A figure strapped to a chair rose in front of her, its head slumped and hands flailing, a seat of crucifixion. With agonizing slowness, the revolving head revealed an earlobe, the line of an emerging jaw, a partially blackened cheek, a chipped edge of nose, a flickering eyelash.
‘Shoot, fuck you, shoot!’ the figure screeched.
She tried to close her eyes and was blinded by an ear-shattering starburst of piercing light.
Anne-Marie Gallagher jerked awake and sat bolt upright. Only the low glow of the city night crept through the gap she had left at the bottom of the blinds. She pressed the remote control to raise them fully, checked her iPhone – 4.45 a.m., Friday the 12th – rose from her bed and walked over to the wall of glass. She looked down at the river pathway. Empty. No one watching, no men in hats.
After so many years the nightmare had returned – the second time in four nights. She felt her pulse – racing. She tried to blame exhaustion, excitement, trepidation at her bewildering elevation. She knew she was kidding herself. The image of Joseph’s hanging body dangled.
She recalled his words about another body. Was he telling the truth – or trying to scare her? She forced herself to be rational. Joseph had probably made it up; an invention like that would stem from the creature he had become. He had meant to frighten her. Why? What had he wanted from her?
Why was he now a corpse?
She went into the bathroom and switched on the mirror light. The traces of crow’s feet around her eyes seemed to glare back, the green irises bleached, veiled in a misty yellowing. She picked up a flannel and immersed her face in it. Forcing her woken mind to redirect itself, she began to see and hear the blues of sea and sky, a child’s laugh in the distance, speckled tips of waves glinting in the sun. She lifted her face from the basin and leant her head back, eyes shut, bob of brown hair falling from her neck. Droplets of water fell languidly onto the floor one by one.
She returned to bed. Five-fifteen. Sleep would not come. She craved distraction and retrieved from the floor the red box she had put down four hours earlier.
Aziz Al-Dimashqi. United States citizen. Until a few days ago, her client. He had travelled from Syria to Britain, finally entering on a flight from Schiphol to Heathrow, claiming asylum on arrival. His grounds were that he would be subjected
to inhumane treatment on arrest in the United States and an unfair trial. Audax Chambers, in the form of Anne-Marie and her junior, Zara, took up his case.
They had grown both to like and believe him. He had come to understand the futility of Islamist wars and now only wanted to work for peace. The extradition request from Washington was backed mainly by hearsay evidence. As the case passed through its appeal stages, Anne-Marie believed there was an outside chance that she could use the lack of concrete proof to win him asylum. But, two weeks before, the final appeal was lost. It was a decision for the Home Secretary – which he would take on the advice of the Minister for Security and Immigration. When she initially opened the file, her first thought was how Zara would judge her if she ruled against Aziz. She put the case to one side and worked her way through the rest of the box.
Her car arrived at 7.45 a.m. Keith Hinds looked at her in the mirror. ‘Working late, Minister?’
‘Does it look that bad?’ she replied.
On arrival at the office, she raised the Al-Dimashqi case with Dalrymple.
‘Can I get out of it, Alan?’ she asked.
‘Have you been thinking about it all night, Minister?’ he replied gently.
‘God!’ she exclaimed. ‘First Keith, now you.’
‘Minister?’
‘Forget it. Just advise me. It’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’ He backed off and she silently damned herself.
‘You have three sources of advice. The Department’s legal department. The Permanent Secretary. Or the Secretary of State.’
‘What would you recommend?’
‘I’m afraid, Minister, that really is one for you.’
‘Yes. Can you see if the Secretary of State can spare me a couple of minutes?’
Later that morning, she sat opposite a grinning Steve Whalley massaging his hands with glee. ‘Well, lass,’ he said, ‘you’re finding out what it’s like to be a politician. No easy choices, eh?’
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