Secrets

by Jane A. Adams

  The man had turned his head and smiled that pained slow smile again. His face, half in shadow, turned to Adam, the other half, oddly white in the harsh sun. Slowly, he’d extended his left hand across his body, reaching towards Adam as though he might shake his hand.

  ‘Joseph Bern,’ he had said. ‘They call me Joseph Bern.’

  They call me Joseph Bern …

  Slowly, reluctantly and yet, with the kind of nervous, excited apprehension Joseph had always managed to inspire in him, Adam got out of the car, crossed the brief expanse of sodden gravel drive and made his way up the steps and into the hospice reception.

  TEN

  Naomi and Alec had eaten early and then retired to the bar and sat in a quiet corner enjoying a drink. The hotel was in a residential area that lacked a pub of its own and they had discovered that quite a few locals used it casually in the evening, coming for a meal or just a pint. Naomi listened abstractedly to the buzz of chat and clink of glasses. It was a friendly sound, normal and familiar.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she said.

  ‘You just had dinner.’

  ‘I know, not that kind of hungry, more the going to see if there’s any cake left, kind of hungry. You know, like at home, when we drifted into the kitchen and had a late supper, just because we wanted to.’

  Alec laughed. ‘You have to have your own kitchen if you want to do that,’ he said. ‘The chef seems the friendly type, but I’m not sure he’d let you raid his fridge. But I’m sure we can get dessert if you want some.’

  She thought about it and shook her head. ‘I think it’s more wanting the whole kitchen thing than the whole cake thing, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ he agreed. ‘Which brings us back to what next?’

  It was the first time she’d said anything like this and Alec took it as a sea change in the way Naomi was feeling. ‘I think it’s a kind of homesickness,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘That’s exactly it. Alec, I think I want to go home.’

  ‘You want me to phone the buyer, tell them it’s not going to happen?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, it’s a bit late for that. I think what I mean is we need to just decide on a place to be, buy somewhere that will do for now, that can be home while we figure out what we actually want. I mean, we’re in a very lucky position, we’ve got money to do a cash sale, how many people can say that? We can find somewhere that will be OK for now and then sort it out later, can’t we?’

  Alec nodded. ‘Sounds like a plan,’ he said.

  ‘But we’ve got to sort out this Molly thing first,’ Naomi said flatly.

  ‘We don’t have to. We can just walk away and let the police deal with it.’ He laughed. ‘See what I did then, I talked about the police like it’s them and us. I’m getting better at it.’

  ‘Hmm, a little. We can’t walk away, Alec, you know that, but what I want to do is put a time limit on things. If Molly won’t help herself well there’s not a lot anyone can do. We stay another week and then we move on. We do all we can to help out in that week, but after that, she sorts it out herself or she gives in and lets DI Barnes and his people help her. Agreed?’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Alec said. ‘So, where do we go looking for the “it’ll do” home?’

  She smiled. ‘We could try sticking a pin in the map,’ she said.

  Alec harrumphed, then realized he sounded like Molly. ‘I seem to remember we did that before,’ he said. ‘It didn’t work out so well that time.’

  Molly sat alone with her own thoughts. The radio was on and a classical concert played softly, but she wasn’t really listening. She was remembering the concerts she’d attended with Edward and the music they had danced to. Edward always loved to dance, even as they grew older and the idea of dancing all night was just a fond memory, he had still been a fine mover. Elegant and upright. But that was just Edward, wasn’t it, a man so upright and so convinced he knew what was right and what was wrong and Molly had believed whatever Edward said … even when she didn’t.

  She closed her eyes and recalled that young man coming up the stairs, gun in hand, pausing on her landing. It was his breathing that had warned her, told her he was unprepared for this. She could hear the tension in his chest as he drew the air into his lungs. It was that which had told her and she’d felt so insulted that they’d sent a mere beginner, an amateur, after her. Just because I’m old, Molly had thought, doesn’t mean I’m bloody helpless.

  She remembered how she’d squared her shoulders and cast aside the now useless phone. Dimly, she could hear the woman calling her name, but Molly had tuned her out, knowing she’d only have seconds to act and that she had to get it right, sirens from the approaching cars cutting through the night, approaching far too fast, now. The help she had summoned arriving both too early and too late.

  Molly opened her eyes and stretched, unwilling, for the moment, to think about what had come next, not because it bothered her but because she had to keep her story straight.

  ‘You think only about your legend,’ Edward had told her. ‘Replay your legend until it becomes the truth. Nothing else, no other thought, no uncertainty. Make your truth the truth. There can be nothing else.’

  ‘Nothing else,’ Molly said softly. ‘I never lie.’

  ELEVEN

  The television report was vague, Bill thought, but then the whole event had been a bit vague. He’d finally got home for lunch, leaving the police still there, attended now by his colleagues on the day shift.

  News from the hospital had not been good. Tony was in intensive care, his wife had called Sheila twice, but there was nothing new to tell. He’d come through an operation and they were worried about pressure on the brain, that was all she could say.

  ‘She doesn’t blame you,’ Sheila had told Bill. ‘There’s nothing you could have done. Bill, it could just as easily have been you.’

  They’d watched the television news obsessively all day, wondering if reporters would come knocking at their door and hoping not. There were reporters at the warehouse and at the hospital, but the police liaison officer they’d spoken to seemed to think the fuss would die down soon enough.

  ‘So far as the media know, a security man was attacked during a robbery,’ she’d told them. ‘Bill, I know that’s not the whole truth, but the investigation won’t be helped by a lot of speculation. You understand that? We don’t want whoever did this to know exactly what we know. We want to keep them off balance, so we’re only releasing certain facts.’

  He’d nodded, not sure he agreed, but well, what could he do. He’d had to tell Sheila, though, about the men in the van and his efforts to get them out and the police arriving and then that awful moment of realization, that all this was just a decoy, some elaborate plot to get the warehouse clear for some strange kind of robbery.

  ‘It’s not right,’ Sheila said, echoing Bill’s thoughts. ‘They’ve not said anything about those poor men in the van. I mean, they could be dead and we wouldn’t know. What about their families? It’s getting like a police state, them telling us what we can’t say.’

  ‘It’s not like that, Sheila, love. They just want to be able to investigate without falling over reporters, I suppose. Like the policewoman said, they want to keep the criminals in the dark too.’

  Sheila was obviously not convinced and to be truthful, neither was Bill. He’d seen that van, seen how elaborate and strange the events had been and he knew, he just felt it in his water, that this was much bigger than they could guess and likely bigger than the police could guess either.

  Several hundred miles away, Bud was channel surfing. There was a nag at the back of his brain that wasn’t usually there once he’d finished a job. Something about this one refused to let go. Bud wasn’t in the business of having a conscience about his actions, so he knew that the nag had nothing to do with that. It was more, he recognized, that the whole project felt unfinished; unresolved, which seeing as he wasn’t usually in the business of both
ering about what happened after he’d been paid, was an equally strange sensation for him to be indulging in.

  He’d caught something on one of the rolling news channels earlier and that had got him thinking too. It was only a vague hint of a report, not repeated in the next bulletin, but there’d be an item about a warehouse being broken into and a security guard badly injured, and then that small scrap of information; that an ambulance had been called out to the scene a half-hour earlier in response to some incident with a van. The report implied that this had, maybe, been a simple RTA, and the reporter had clearly not been told if the two incidents were related. The van had been missing from the next bulletin, had scant mention in the third, but Bud had been watching closely by then, looking behind the cordon as the reporter spoke to camera, and he had caught just a glimpse of the van and it had confirmed his suspicion. It was the van he had briefly driven in with Ryan the afternoon before.

  The niggle left the back of his brain and came and perched on his shoulder. So, what’s this really all about, the niggle said.

  ‘It’s about none of my business,’ Bud told it, but a few minutes later he was down in reception, checking out and telling the curious receptionist that he’d had a call from his wife and needed to head for home.

  Since leaving Ryan, Bud had changed cars twice, an hour later and he’d changed his ride yet again, and was heading further north and east, and the niggle had now grown into a fully fledged nag, that sat beside him in the passenger seat and told him to keep driving and not to stop.

  TWELVE

  Anywhere but the Congo in 1961 and the meeting Adam had just left would most likely have been impossible. Adis Ngouba, French schooled but British trained, aide to the embryonic Ministry of Trade. Duane Emerson, an American technician, doing his best to put his government’s case. Piotre Vasse, a Ukrainian engineer, who spoke English as if it were a language worth strangling. Edward Chambers, some kind of attaché with the British mission, who had flown in three days before, with his young bride, Molly, in tow. And Adam himself, another Brit, his specialty communications and electronics.

  The four men had met a dozen times in the past three weeks, then Edward joining the conversation late, but coming quickly up to speed. Twelve meetings, suffused with a heady mix of political manoeuvring and technical discussion. And an awareness that the country stood on the brink of civil war and that all the talk and planning could well come to nothing.

  Today Adam was glad to get free of the meeting. The conference room of the Leopold Hotel, the only neutral ground all five men and their backers could agree upon was stiflingly hot. Ceiling fans did their best to revive the stale air and all the windows had been thrown open, doing little to alleviate the heat, just letting in the noise and dust of the street below.

  Adam forced himself to remember how important these meetings were. The future of the entire country was being decided by men like him in rooms like this. Mostly the excitement of being in on the ground floor was enough to keep him going, but today, it wasn’t working for him.

  He was hot and tired and sick of cloudless skies.

  Out in the street, traders were shutting up shop and clearing their goods off the streets.

  There will be rain, they told him. Get inside.

  Looking up at the polished blue of the sky, Adam found it hard to believe them but his body, aching with the heat and clammy in his sweat-soaked shirt, wished they could be right.

  It was only a short distance from the hotel to the single-storey, wooden building that passed for a clinic here on the outskirts of Leopoldville, but Adam decided that he had no energy to walk. Besides, if the locals were right and the rain was coming, he’d be glad of the transport. So he drove, keeping his speed down on the narrow streets blocked by wandering people and stray dogs. Streets so dry that however slow his pace he raised a dust storm around the jeep that choked his lungs and filled his eyes with dirt.

  Christ! But he wished the rain would come.

  Adam got his wish just as he reached the hospital and cut the engine. In those brief moments the sky had lost its brilliant blue. Clouds, thick and black with rain, boiled and surged like some cauldron in a skyward hell. As Adam sprang from the jeep, the first rain began to fall, heavy and torpid and dropping with such force upon the dusty ground that the dirt exploded, fizzing into the air.

  Adam ran across the open area and thundered in hard boots on to the veranda. Then he paused to look back as the few leaden drops of rain became a solid curtain hiding the world from view and the sooty clouds created night at mid-afternoon.

  ‘I’ve come to see Joseph Bern,’ Adam told the woman at the desk.

  She smiled. ‘If I could just have your name, sir,’ she said to him, ‘and you’ll need to sign the book.’

  Silently, Adam did as he was asked and waited for her to tell him where to go.

  This wasn’t Africa, he reminded himself, and this wasn’t then. Not that hot afternoon that turned to vicious rain. Back in a time that seemed another life ago. Neither was it Venezuela or Cuba or Bosnia or any of the theatres in which he and Joseph had played their part.

  He followed the directions he had been given, down the corridor and into a small room towards the back of the converted house. The room was quiet and cool, a ceiling fan turned slowly, lazily, as though it tried hard not to break the peace. Joseph lay in a too neat bed, arms resting on the outside of the blue coverlet as though he had been carefully arranged and now lacked the strength to move.

  Adam was shocked. So shrunken. Joseph was younger than him by a good five years, but his face was so drawn and dry he appeared almost mummified.

  As Adam stood uncertainly just inside the door, the head on the pillow moved and the eyes opened. Still that piercing blue. Joseph stared at Adam and the lips moved. ‘Where?’ he managed. ‘Tell me where I am.’

  Adam stared at him, taken aback by the unexpected question, but then remembered that day, back when Joseph had first tumbled into his life, lurching out of the trees, bleeding from a wound to his head. Barefoot, his feet leaving reddened tracks in the dust. ‘Tell me,’ Joseph had asked him. ‘Tell me where I am.’

  ‘This isn’t the Congo my friend. This is England.’

  Joseph smiled. ‘You can tell them apart?’

  ‘Just about. The rain is colder here. What happened to you?’

  Joseph tried to laugh. ‘Always to the point,’ he commented. ‘Cancer. I have maybe a few days or maybe only a few hours. Not long.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I truly am.’ Adam crossed the room and pulled up a chair, angled so that Joseph could see him easily.

  ‘Come to my funeral?’ Joseph asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You must be sick of funerals. Mine will be the fourth, I think. This year, I mean. There have been too many to count before that.’

  ‘How did you know that? About the four this year?’

  ‘Oh, I read the obituary columns and there are mutual friends who keep me well informed. I was too ill to make it to any of them, I’m sad to say, but I remember Duane and Piotre. Adis died long ago, of course. You were there, I recall.’

  Adam looked away, shaking the memory before it took hold. ‘I was there,’ he confirmed. ‘We’re all getting older, Joseph. Death is bound to be a frequent visitor.’

  Joseph laughed again. ‘Death was always a frequent visitor, Adam, wherever we were he was certain to be invited. But this has nothing to do with old age. I have proof of that.’

  ‘Proof? Of what?’

  Joseph closed his eyes, his strength seeming to ebb. He coughed, then gasped for breath, the effort shaking his fragile body. Adam wondered if he should call for the nurse.

  ‘The drawer,’ Joseph managed finally, between painful gasps. ‘Red folder, in the drawer.’

  Puzzled, Adam reached into the bedside drawer and withdrew a fat, red file wrapped about with a half dozen elastic bands.

  ‘Take it and go,’ Joseph told him. ‘I don’t have the strength to tal
k any more, but I’m glad you came.’

  ‘What is this?’ Adam demanded. As always in his dealings with Joseph he had the feeling he was being set up for something; he suffered from the annoyance that he came back for more every bloody time.

  Joseph Bern smiled, it lit his face and danced in his eyes and, in that moment, Adam remembered just why he kept coming back.

  ‘Bosnia,’ Joseph managed. ‘Other things too, but mostly Bosnia and Congo. Read it, I prepared it for you. You could say that it is my legacy.’

  He closed his eyes then and Adam watched as his old friend and sometimes enemy fall into sleep. He wondered if he’d wake again.

  He paused at the desk to speak to the nurse, telling her that Joseph seemed to be having trouble breathing and to make sure the hospice had his contact details for when the inevitable happened.

  ‘He’s had very few visitors,’ she said. ‘He has no family?’

  ‘No. There’s no one left now. You’ll let me know if any arrangements have to be made.’

  She smiled. ‘It’s all been taken care of,’ the nurse told him. Joe has organized it all. ‘Some people feel the need, you know. It makes them feel happier if they’ve put everything in order.’

  Adam nodded, thinking wryly that logistics had always been Joseph’s forte. Then thinking it odd that the young woman should refer to him as Joe. No one, in Adam’s experience, ever had.

  He drove home, the red folder lying on the passenger seat. Adam eyed it suspiciously from time to time, wondering what it contained, wondering if he’d be better off not knowing. If he should just keep it until the funeral and then bury it, unopened, with the man who had compiled it. He no longer wanted any part in such matters as their mutual past had brought.

  Joseph stirred, the pain in his lungs interrupting his desire for sleep. He too remembered that first day, but his thoughts strayed to the hours before he had met Adam Carmodie that first time.

  He recalled the grit beneath his nails. The ground hard under his back and pinprick rough against the line of bare skin where his shirt had been pulled free.