Rip Tide

by Stella Rimington

  ‘Can you protect him now?’ There was the first note of fear in Jamila’s voice.

  ‘Yes.’ Liz was emphatic. ‘But only if we get him out of here. If he stays in Birmingham, there’s every chance these people will try again.’

  ‘You mean, he has to go away? But what about me? Can I go with him?’

  ‘Yes. Of course you can.’ They could also stay put, for the couple might simply refuse to relocate, but that would be a fatal decision in Liz’s view. It was much better for Jamila to think there was no choice.

  ‘When do we have to go?’

  ‘Straight away.’

  ‘You mean, now?’ she asked in disbelief.

  ‘Yes. You’ve brought a bag?’

  ‘The man said to bring the things that mattered most – my jewellery, family photographs, that sort of thing. But I haven’t brought much else,’ she added plaintively.

  ‘We can buy any clothes you need.’ It was best to be matter-of-fact, to deal with the small things and avoid discussing the sheer enormity of what was going to happen to this woman. That would all come later; one of Liz’s colleagues was trained to deal with the inevitable emotional crisis that would follow when Jamila realised that her life was about to undergo a complete cataclysm. She would never see her home again; from now on she would have a different place to live, in a different city, and she would even have a different name. But Liz’s first priority was to get her out of danger. Discussing anything else would only upset Jamila and make things even more difficult for them both.

  ‘Where are you taking us to?’ asked the young woman. Inwardly Liz sighed with relief that at least she’d accepted that she had to leave.

  ‘We need to get you far away right now. There’s a place in London we’ll take you to, and a private hospital where your husband will stay until he’s discharged. Our priority is to make sure you’re both safe. And that’s not possible for you in Birmingham.’

  Jamila nodded, but Liz could see she still hadn’t taken it all in. Suddenly she put her face in her hands, and her shoulders shuddered. Liz said gently, ‘I know it’s hard. Believe me, we wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t necessary.’

  Jamila took her hands from her eyes and slowly lifted her face. Behind her tears she looked bewildered. Liz put one hand on her shoulder as Jamila wiped the tears from her cheeks and said, ‘I am sorry, but you have to understand . . . five months ago I was in Pakistan, preparing for my wedding. To a man I had never met, about to go and live in a country I had never even visited. But I agreed to do it because . . . because I had no choice. All through my childhood I did well at school, and I was determined to continue my education. But my parents would not allow me to go to university. I wanted to read law,’ she added, half-proudly, half-hesitantly, as if Liz would not believe her. ‘But it was out of the question if I stayed in Pakistan. So I let my parents arrange my marriage, and it turned out they chose well. Salim is a good man, a thoughtful man. I even had hopes of restarting my education.’

  ‘That is still possible, Jamila.’

  The other woman’s eyes widened, and for the first time Liz saw hope in her them. ‘Really?’

  ‘Absolutely. But first I need to get you both out of here.’

  Forty-five minutes later long strips of the yellow plastic tape used to secure crime scenes were being strung across the entrance to Ward 6, where in room 37B Salim lay half-conscious, his wife in a chair beside his hospital bed, and a ‘friend’ (the armed Special Branch officer) seated close to the door. Once the OK had been given by the hospital administrator, things had moved fast.

  But that ‘OK’ had not been immediately forthcoming; the administrator, a fierce-looking woman called Albright, seemed to have a pre-existing low opinion of the police that she extended towards the Security Service also. Liz had listened patiently as the woman explained all the difficulties inherent in doing what they asked. Then, suddenly running out of patience, Liz snapped that if the hospital administrator didn’t co-operate immediately, she would find herself being telephoned by the Home Secretary personally; furthermore, if anything happened to the patient in room 37b, it would be the sole responsibility of Ms Albright. After that, the OK had been forthcoming pretty sharply.

  Liz overheard a nurse talking to a prospective visitor on the other side of the tape. ‘I’m sorry but the ward’s closed temporarily. One of the cleaners has spilled some chemicals, and we need to clean them up thoroughly before we can let anyone in.’

  ‘How long do I have to wait, then?’ asked a woman’s petulant voice, uninterested in the reason for the delay.

  ‘Won’t be long now,’ said the nurse briskly. ‘No more than half an hour.’

  And twenty minutes later Liz watched as a trolley was wheeled out through the rear door of the hospital by two orderlies, with a vigilant Fontana and his Special Branch colleague walking alongside. The ambulance was waiting, with Jamila and Dave Armstrong inside. As Boatman was gently stretchered into the rear of it, Jamila climbed out and ran across to where Liz was standing watching. Her eyes were wide and anxious. She reached out and touched Liz’s arm, as though needing the reassurance of something solid in her rapidly shifting world.

  ‘Will I see you again?’

  Liz hesitated. Ordinarily, the answer would be no. Jamila and Salim would have a designated team to look after them and help them in their choice of new identities and location. Then a handler would be assigned to them, someone whose full-time responsibility it was to look after people like the pair of them. Liz would not normally be part of this equation.

  But as she looked into Jamila’s doleful eyes, she realised this young woman was desperately in need of continuity – any kind of continuity. Her life had already been subject to so much upheaval: marriage to a man she barely knew, and a new life in a strange, foreign country, all in the space of not much more than six months; then to have that life stripped from her again, by people she didn’t know, with her husband too badly injured to help and advise her . . . It was too much to expect most people to cope with, but Liz sensed an underlying resilience in Jamila and wanted to help her.

  ‘Of course you will,’ she said.

  Chapter 38

  Martin Seurat finished his solitary supper and carried his coffee through into the comfortable sitting room. He stood by the window, looking out at the plane trees in the square across the street. It was high summer now and in Paris the days were breathlessly hot – hot enough to brown the foliage unseasonably – but now, as evening came on, a cooling breeze had sprung up, gently rustling the dry leaves. He stood watching the diners at the outside tables of Madame Roget’s small restaurant and realised with a sudden feeling of surprise that the melancholy that had been his companion in recent years had lifted. He felt light-hearted and hopeful, thinking happily of the weekend he was about to spend with Liz Carlyle.

  How his life had changed since they had first met! He’d had no inkling then that the attractive woman who had walked into his office that day barely a year ago, to question him about his former colleague, would have such an impact on it. When he thought of his ex-wife now, it was still with regret for the failure of their marriage, but without any of the lacerating sense of loss and betrayal that had afflicted him for so long. Now, not only could he imagine life without her, he could imagine life with someone else. The more he saw Liz, the more he wanted to be with her.

  He remembered their last time together, the weekend when she had taken him to meet her mother at her childhood home in the country. As they’d driven down to Dorset on the Saturday morning, Liz had told him something of her family background. Her father had been the land agent for the Bowerbridge estate, and with his job had come a tied house, the gatehouse of the estate. He had died while Liz was still at school and she and her mother had been allowed to stay on in the house.

  Then the estate had been sold and turned into a nursery garden, which her mother managed for the new owners; she had also been able to purchase the freehold of the house. Her
mother had hoped for years that Liz would give up what she always called her ‘dangerous job’ in London, and nagged her constantly to come back home and settle down in the country with some ‘nice safe young man’. But a few years ago Susan Carlyle had herself met a nice man, an ex-army officer who now ran a charity: Edward Treglown. Now that she was herself contented and happy, she seemed to have accepted that a safe life in the country was the last thing her daughter wanted.

  Martin had been surprised to find himself as nervous as a teenager meeting his girlfriend’s parents for the first time. He hadn’t known what to expect and his heart had sunk a little as he’d thought of what might lie ahead. He sensed it would certainly be deeply English. The chairs would be covered in chintz; the garden would be ordered, full of flowers and rose bushes – there would be a lot of rose bushes, all neatly pruned. Liz’s mother would be a tidy woman with tidy views, reserved and with a lurking suspicion of foreigners, particularly any foreign man attached to her daughter. They would have separate bedrooms, and the food would be heavy and stodgy.

  Of course, he’d been quite wrong. Susan Carlyle was immediately welcoming, beaming at Martin and greeting him with a kiss on both cheeks. She was shorter than Liz, with a round pleasant face but without her daughter’s striking eyes. There had been none of Liz’s reserve about her; indeed there was an endearing warmth and openness instead. They’d found her in the kitchen of the small Georgian gatehouse, setting out a lunch not even a Frenchman could fault – homemade pâté, a tomato and basil salad, both French and English cheese, and freshly baked bread.

  Susan’s friend Edward had been a surprise too. Liz had explained that, like Martin, he’d been in the military, as a Gurkha officer. So Martin had expected a hearty, opinionated character, with firm views delivered in staccato bursts.

  Instead, a tall, slightly rumpled-looking man had appeared, ducking down to avoid hitting his head on the lintel of the kitchen doorway. He was wearing a darned sweater and corduroys, and though his bearing was military, there was nothing remotely staccato about him. If anything he seemed a little shy. Having poured out two stiff gin and tonics, he led Martin out into the garden, leaving Liz and her mother to catch up with the gossip. There, in the garden, through a wicket gate, Martin saw row after row of the dreaded rose bushes, all neatly pruned and bristling with flowers. He pointed at them politely. ‘Formidable,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think so?’ said Edward. ‘Can’t say I’m keen on roses myself – and Susan can’t stand them. Thankfully, they belong to the nursery garden.’

  Martin laughed in relief and the ice was broken; by the time they’d gone in for lunch a bond had developed between them, two ex-soldiers who had seen their share of terrible things. But Edward’s stories about his army days were light-hearted – a cache of plum brandy en route to the Falklands that gave his whole regiment a hangover for two days; a travelling circus, composed predominantly of dwarves, that had appeared out of nowhere during a patrol on the Northern Ireland border.

  That evening they went to a village near Bowerbridge for a concert of chamber music, held in a primary school assembly hall. They’d sat on metal folding chairs and listened politely as Schubert’s Trout Quintet was played with excruciating slowness. At the interval, as they stood up, Edward said firmly, ‘I think we’ve earned a reward for that,’ and led them adroitly past the tables offering apple juice, then across the street for more robust refreshment in the pub.

  Later, back at Bowerbridge, they’d all sat up talking until after midnight. At one point Edward described two weeks he’d spent on manoeuvres in the Arctic, where he and his men were stalked by a polar bear. ‘But, you know, we were never very cold there – thermal blankets work wonders. In fact, the coldest I have ever been was a winter in Kosovo . . .’

  ‘I was in Kosovo’, said Martin. And they discovered they had actually overlapped in their visits to that strife-torn country, had even known a few of the same UN monitors based there at the time. Then it turned out that Edward and Susan had recently taken a holiday in the Quercy, not far from Cahors, where until their divorce Martin and his ex-wife had owned a small cottage on the river. By the time they’d all retired to bed, he’d felt as if he were among old friends. He could see Liz was pleased by how easily they had all got on, and how much they’d laughed.

  That was what he remembered most about the weekend – the laughter, and then the walk he and Liz had taken along the banks of the River Nadder on Sunday afternoon. She’d shown him her favourite spots, and where she used to sit as a girl to watch her father fish. Neither of them said much, but Martin sensed that Liz was letting him in to her past – and to her most private memories.

  For the whole weekend they’d left their professional lives behind them – though there had been one moment when work fleetingly made its presence felt. On Sunday morning they had sat out on the small terrace, and while Liz and her mother read the papers, Edward had talked to Martin about his work for a charity which provided operations to improve the sight of blind people in the Third World. When he mentioned the staff in Mombasa, Liz looked up sharply from the Sunday Times Magazine. ‘Did you ever have anything to do with a charity called UCSO?’ she asked.

  Edward shook his head. ‘Not professionally. I used to know its Director. Chap called Blakey. His wife was friends with mine, years ago – he was posted in Germany when we were there.’

  ‘You’ve not kept in touch?’

  ‘I have with his wife, but they’re not together any more. Bit of a bad show.’

  Susan Carlyle interjected, ‘What Edward means is that David Blakey behaved appallingly.’

  ‘Now, now, Susan. Always two sides to that kind of story. Anyway, sun’s past the yardarm, at least in France. Who’d like a glass of wine?’

  But that had been the sole remotely work-related moment of the weekend, and it was only as Liz and he drove back to London that Martin Seurat had felt his thoughts return to the job. He could sense that happening with Liz too, as they sat stuck in the traffic returning on the M4. Her face assumed a pensive, abstracted air, and he felt a momentary flash of sadness that she had drifted out of the weekend’s mood of relaxed intimacy.

  Standing now in front of his window, as night came down in a dark blanket over Paris, he remembered how his ex-wife had complained about the same thing. She’d say, ‘You’re always drifting away from me. Always thinking of something else.’ That’s how Liz had seemed as they’d returned to London and their respective problems. But Martin couldn’t resent her for it; he understood it only too well.

  Chapter 39

  The following morning he went straight to the Santé prison. He was focused solely on the interrogation to come and didn’t allow any of last night’s thoughts and recollections to distract him. A colleague had already questioned Amir Khan but had got nothing out of him. Liz had been slightly more successful on her visit, but hadn’t managed to break through to the real story. Martin had listened carefully to her account of the interview, and of Amir’s reactions to her line of questioning. He was determined to get something new out of this prisoner and not allow him to spin long and certainly misleading stories about his travels. He had some ideas of how he might do it. He had the advantage that Amir had been incarcerated in a foreign prison for a good many weeks and must by now be feeling both homesick and disorientated.

  The traffic in the Boulevard Arago was light on this warm weekday morning and there were few pedestrians – tourists were not much in evidence in the 14th arrondissement. Martin turned on to the Rue Messier and showed his ID at the little window in the high, forbidding exterior wall of the prison. Once inside, he was met by a warder, who led him past the exercise yard, into the high-security wing and downstairs to the interview room.

  Martin’s questions about the condition of the prisoner met with a shrug from the warder. ‘He speaks very little. As requested, we have segregated him from the other Muslim prisoners. He can’t converse with the French cons when he exercises, since he hasn�
�t any French. He hasn’t asked for reading material. He mostly just sits and stares at the wall – or prays.’

  ‘And his health?’

  The warder responded, ‘This is not a spa, M’sieur.’

  Once within the high white walls of the interview room, Martin remained standing until Amir Khan was brought in. He watched as, closely escorted by a warder, the young prisoner shuffled to a chair on one side of the table and sat down heavily, resting his manacled hands on the metal table top. Martin thought he looked older than the scrawny youth he had seen in the photograph. He seemed to have put on several pounds, presumably from lack of exercise and the stodgy prison food, and had let his beard grow, which made his face seem fuller.

  As the Frenchman sat down opposite him, Amir Khan slumped forward in his chair and stared down at the table, avoiding his gaze. He looked relaxed but his hands and legs were shaking, gently vibrating the light chain that connected them, setting up a faint metallic tinkling.

  ‘Well, Amir,’ Martin began, ‘I have good news.’ Khan lifted his eyes momentarily to look at him and then dropped them again.

  ‘Do you want to hear it?’

  Khan responded with a slight nod.

  ‘It should be possible to arrange your transfer to the United Kingdom. This could happen in a matter of weeks, possibly even sooner, depending on our conversation today. I assume this is acceptable to you – you can of course fight the extradition if you like. A court will appoint a lawyer to act on your behalf if you do. Would you like that?’

  There was no response.

  ‘You understand that if you are extradited you may be tried in a British court, and if found guilty, sent to prison there. On the other hand, there may not be enough evidence to convict you, and then you would be released. Where would you go then? Back to your family in Birmingham? If that happened, I would expect the British security authorities to be keeping a very sharp eye on you and your contacts there – and on your family, of course. Perhaps that would not make you very popular in your part of Birmingham. What do you think?’