Safe from Harm

by RJ Bailey

  Initially at least, it was something simple – they would replace my iPhone with one of their own, with a high-gain microphone. I would simply leave it lying around with the car keys. They would do the rest remotely. They would turn it off during any sweep, but even if it did register – who didn’t have a smartphone these days?

  Do I look that stupid? I wondered. That was just a test, a toe in the water, to see if I could be trusted with such a straightforward task. You don’t toss minnows like me in with the sharks straight away. If I agreed to go along with them, then it was a slippery slope to . . . where? That was the question. Would I end up compromising Mrs Sharif and Nuzha? Well, getting their husband and father arrested on terrorism charges was at least an inconvenience.

  Think of it as carrying on Paul’s work, Swincoe had said as I was leaving The Dorchester, having told him I would think about it. I couldn’t help, after the second glass of red, remembering where Paul’s work had got him. I looked down at Jess, walking and texting, and thought how that, should I go the same way, I would be handing her over to Matt by default.

  She glanced up, just for a second before the screen dragged her back. Normally I wouldn’t tolerate this, and still wouldn’t while we were eating, but since Laura’s revelation about Jess’s condition I was using my best kid gloves. As we turned north towards Camden Passage, she asked: ‘You OK, Mum?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘You’re acting a bit moist.’

  Not my favourite word at the best of times and one whose meaning seems to mutate like a virus, just to keep we parents off balance. I was fairly certain ‘moist’ had meant ‘lame’ the previous week, but it had clearly evolved. At least I hoped it had.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Weird. Distracted.’

  The lights changed and we walked across. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since you went back to work, mostly.’

  ‘Jess, can you just put that down for a second.’

  I couldn’t see them, but I could almost hear her eyes rolling in their sockets. But she pocketed the phone.

  ‘Is it a problem, me being back at work?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. It’s . . . better than before. It’s just that when you get home, you’re not always at home, if you know what I mean.’ She waved a hand. ‘It’s like you’re still out there.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s been—’

  ‘It’s not a problem, Mum. I’m just saying. And Laura is safe.’

  Safe. Another one. It could be a greeting, a farewell, an adverb, an adjective or a noun but not all at the same time, apparently.

  Jess pulled out her phone again. ‘Don’t worry about it. Can I have pancakes instead of banana French toast?’

  Indeed she could.

  I went for eggs Benedict, promising myself a lengthy run that afternoon to pay off the debt to my body. While we were waiting I managed to snatch the phone off Jess and put it in my pocket. There was a squeal of outrage before she realised she was drawing attention to herself. I knew I had the tiniest of windows before she powered down into arms-folded sulk mode.

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Mum, not now.’

  ‘Not now what?’

  ‘Not now with the is-everything-all-right-at-school questions. Is anyone bullying me? Am I being made to feel like I should have sex? Am I Snapchatting pictures of my tits?’ She blushed on that one.

  ‘Are you?’ I asked, despite myself.

  ‘No! But they’re the questions all mums ask. We keep a list of them. Top Ten Most Embarrassing Questions.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. None of that stuff.’

  She relaxed, just a little.

  ‘I’ve decided you can go to Indonesia, and I will pay towards it—’

  The rest of my sentence was muffled as she leaned across and threw her arms around me, knocking over a glass of water as she did so. I had to say my piece. She would have to earn some of the money herself, possibly by babysitting or a part-time job. And she would have to agree to come with me to a family counsellor, to talk about Matt, although it would really be a cover to try and get to the bottom of the self-harming. Therapy by stealth.

  I managed to untangle her arms, mop up the spillage and was about to launch into my caveats, when a face I recognised only too well came past the table.

  They had dumped him in Edmonton Cemetery. It was becoming quite the villains’ playground. Some of the proceeds from the Hatton Garden safety deposit box heist had been hidden there. And the dismembered hands and feet of an unknown female had been left sitting on top of a selection of gravestones after that. And now, Vuk.

  His image had been on the front of the Observer that had been carried past us, just as the food arrived. I no doubt confirmed Jess’s diagnosis of weirdness by rushing out and buying my own copy. I managed to have a half-decent stab at the eggs Benedict, but my appetite had gone. What I really wanted was a cigarette and another espresso.

  I did manage to get my conditions across to Jess, who said she would leaflet locally for babysitting jobs and would ‘think about’ counselling, but that it would be highly embarrassing. Couldn’t she do it by herself? Maybe with Laura, someone closer to her own age to metaphorically hold her hand?

  Indeed she could.

  In fact, the whole therapy ploy had been Laura’s idea. Make it seem like Jess is in control of the situation, she suggested. Maybe even let her suggest she come along, which she would happily do. Now that was all over and done with, I calmed down enough to have a second go at my brunch.

  When we got home I spotted Lawrence sitting in a white Vauxhall, reading the Sunday Times. Did it have the Vuk story too? Is this what he had come to tell me? ‘Wanted War Criminal Executed in Gangland Feud’ is how the Observer had put it. I had only scanned the story, but Vuk had indeed been responsible for mass rape and executions. He had also moved into the drugs trade in London and, according to the report, had been shot in a turf war.

  Yet Swincoe had said he was expected to survive. Had they decided he would be too much of a burden on the NHS? Or that the world was better off without him? Or had the gunshot wound to the face been more lethal than they had first thought? I remembered that sewer-breath of his and the menu of what he planned to do to me and, you know what? I didn’t give a shit which it was.

  I ignored Lawrence until I had taken Jess inside and given the flat a once-over. Nothing was out of the ordinary, so I went back down, locking the new reinforced door behind me.

  I slid into the passenger seat of the car. He was dressed in tight skinny jeans, Converse slip-ons and a checked shirt. There was a diamond stud in one ear I hadn’t noticed before and the hint of a tattoo poking over the right side of his shirt collar. He couldn’t look less like a spy if he tried. Which, I suppose, was the idea. ‘You been sent to keep an eye on me?’

  Lawrence smiled. ‘I don’t think you need keeping an eye on. Seen the papers?’ He rustled his Sunday Times.

  ‘About Vuk? Yes. But that still leaves Bojan out there, wounded or not.’

  ‘The guv’nor wants to know if you’ve made up your mind.’

  ‘It’s a Sunday,’ I said, reaching up and turning the rear-view mirror towards me. ‘Day of rest.’

  ‘He said you said you’d sleep on it.’

  ‘I didn’t say how many nights.’

  His fingers drummed on the steering wheel. ‘Why did you join the army?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘I was reading your jacket.’ He meant my MI5 file. As Paul’s wife I was bound to have one. ‘Not an army family. Not the usual demographic. What was it? Patriotism? The desire to serve your country?’

  So he was going to play the Defend-The-British-Way-Of-Life card? If I was patriotic enough to join the army, maybe I’d become an unofficial foot soldier for MI5. For once I told the truth about why I enlisted. ‘I think I had the idea that they would teach me how to kill my father.’

  No surprise re
gistered on his smooth features. ‘And did they?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘You know the answer to that.’ I glanced up at the mirror once more as someone passed behind the car. Dog walker.

  ‘You can stop that now.’

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘The scanning. The checking the rear-view mirror. The Orange alert status. Day of rest, remember.’

  ‘PPOs have days of rest. I’m not sure parents do.’

  ‘Bojan was picked up at St Pancras last night, checking in for the Eurostar to Brussels. I don’t think he was off to The Hague to turn himself in. But we have him. We thought you’d like to know.’

  I felt like a punctured gas envelope as some of the tension left my muscles. It had been nagging at me constantly. Bojan was out there. He knew where I lived. Knew I had a little girl. Had threatened her when he snatched me. And he would be more pissed off than ever now. But Lawrence was telling me he was out of the picture. Yet again, I owed them.

  ‘Is he heading for Edmonton as well?’

  He shook his head. ‘That was just a convenient disposal of a man who had inconveniently died on us. No, there are plenty of people who want to get their hands on Bojan. Here, America, Holland, Belgium, Croatia and Serbia. Whoever gets him, he won’t be troubling anyone except lawyers for a long time.’

  It must have been the relief that made me form the next sentence. ‘Tell Swincoe I’m in.’

  I regretted it as soon as I said it. But then, that night, I remembered to play back the reversing-camera footage from Saturday. And I knew I’d done the right thing.

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Sharifs were in Dubai for the Whitsun break. Not because it was Pentecost, but because Nuzha had two weeks off school – poor Jess had to make do with just the one, but then the more you pay for education, the shorter the terms – so a holiday abroad would not interfere with her studies. I was not invited. It involved some sort of extended family get-together and, although they didn’t say as much, I’d stand out like the sorest of thumbs. Mrs Sharif told me it would be a pretty conservative affair, as it coincided with Shab-e-barat, the night of forgiveness, which some of the clan still celebrated. That night, God would look back on the deeds of each person during the previous year and decide the fate of the coming twelve months. So her husband would have to metaphorically cork his Talisker and she and Nuzha would hide their hair and lower their eyes into modesty. You were expected to feel shame and guilt for your transgressions and ask forgiveness.

  In fact, she explained, on that night Allah forgave all sins, apart from soothsayers, magicians, people who are full of hatred – mushahins – alcoholics, people who harm their parents and those who insist on committing fornication. I guess she thought Mr Sharif didn’t count as an alcoholic. I didn’t think so either, but one man’s social drinker is another’s raving dipsomaniac.

  And fornication? I wanted to ask Mrs Sharif what she thought should be done with fornicators, but I bit my tongue.

  Shab-e-barat didn’t sound like too much fun but then again, there are those who find Christmas an extended form of abuse – but with the English spring still stubbornly chilly, there would be sun and there’d be shopping and they were putting up at the Burj-al-Arab, so there’d be plenty of gilt to go with the guilt.

  And security? Ali, who was also staying behind, had sent his deputy ahead of the family and he had contracted AirShield for the job. It was a good choice. Its operatives had local knowledge that it would take Ali and me weeks to acquire and they used females where appropriate.

  It all meant I had some free time, which I desperately needed. Free time with Jess and the opportunity to have a good read of the letters that had come from Matt’s solicitors, asking if I had considered his ‘contact time’ with Jess. I needed a sounding board for that, so, before my meeting with Ben Harris at Hippolyte, I met Nina in a restaurant on Farringdon Road, where I slipped into a wooden booth and realised I had to play origami to get my limbs in.

  ‘Don’t moan,’ she warned me. ‘At least they have cushions on the benches now. Time was you left here unable to feel your arse it was so numb.’

  I gave the menu a quick glance. It was mostly offal and cuts of meat I had never heard of. But it all looked and smelled good. The truth was, I wasn’t hungry. There was too much ahead of me that day to risk a post-lunch slump. Nor a drink. The latter news left Nina looking like I had not so much rained on her parade as taken a dump on it from a great height.

  ‘You go ahead,’ I said. ‘This one is on me for standing you up the other week.’

  It was, in fact, three weeks since my kidnap and my agreeing to work for Swincoe. Disappointingly, they had not been in touch apart from one brief meet with Lawrence, who assured me they were just making sure the phone/bug was foolproof. Which was fine by me – I didn’t want some lashed-together bit of kit that would mark me out as a snoop.

  ‘Right.’ She looked up at the waitress. ‘I’ll have a glass of the . . . no, I’ll have a half-bottle of the Abadia de San Campio. And the offal on toast to start, followed by the Fosse Meadows Chicken. And the chips.’ She fixed me with a stare. ‘The chips are the best in London.’

  ‘And for you?’ the waitress asked.

  ‘The red mullet. A side salad. And tap water.’

  Nina pouted a little. ‘Jesus, it’s like being out with Gwyneth Paltrow. I know I told you to watch your diet, but not when you’re with me, please. So, what’s so important you’ll come over and watch me have a good feed while you pick fish bones out of your teeth?’

  I took the latest letter from Anthony Hazlitt & Co and slid it over.

  ‘Supervised contact?’ she asked. ‘With social workers? Christ, he’s not a pervert.’

  ‘Come on, Nina, start by being on my side.’

  What Matt, through the solicitor, was asking for seemed reasonable enough. He wanted some time at one of the teenage-focused National Association of Child Contact Centres where, for a couple of hours every other Saturday afternoon, he could ‘re-acquaint himself with Jess and vice-versa’ as it said.

  ‘They cost money, those things. Couldn’t he just come round to the flat?’ suggested Nina.

  ‘Could he fuck. I’m not buggering off because of him. It’s a foot in the door.’

  ‘What does Jess say?’

  I let my eyebrows do the talking.

  ‘You haven’t told her?’

  ‘We’ve got a lot on our plate at the moment.’ Laura and I were still inching towards the therapy session. The good news was, Laura said she thought Jess hadn’t cut herself since the day I had agreed she could go to Indonesia. She was too busy. Laura claimed her browsing history mainly consisted of checking what vaccinations she needed and if you could wear bikinis on remote Indonesian islands (an armful, and no, respectively). ‘I mean, we’ve broached the subject, but not these exact details.’

  ‘I think you have to tell her,’ said Nina. She tasted the wine and nodded her approval, eyes widening in anticipation as the Galician was glugged into her glass. ‘Look, it’s this simple. If you say no, he can go to a family court and the judge will make you do this. The thing is, once you get dragged kicking and screaming down that route, everything is out of control. You might think being a bodyguard is a decent profession for a mother – no, I know you’re GPOs or whatever you like to call yourselves – but who knows what the court will think? Lousy hours hanging out with lousy people who are lousy with money.’

  She never did see the appeal of being a PPO, did Nina.

  ‘What you think is benign or normal, you might find Matt’s solicitor will consider evidence of neglect or indifference.’

  My throat dried as I thought of the marks on Jess’s arms. I hadn’t told Nina about that. Now probably wasn’t the time.

  ‘So co-operate, is what you’d say?’

  Nina drank. ‘Yes, it is. You have a solicitor?’

  ‘Yes.’


  ‘Use him. Keep everything polite, business-like. If it goes all Jeremy Kyle, you’ll end up losing Jess, emotionally if not physically. And for fuck’s sake, get her input before you decide anything. She might not want to give up Saturdays for Dad. You have to be able to trust her.’

  Luckily the offal on toast arrived at that point, because I was about to blurt out how Jess was on the fringes of a world where parental trust came second to parental deceit. One thing at a time.

  Nina spoke between hearty mouthfuls. ‘Do you know what Matt is up to? How he’s making a living?’

  I shook my head. I could only run one surveillance at a time, and my head was full of the Sharifs and Swincoe.

  Nina began to smack her lips in pleasure. A tiny trickle of red-brown juice escaped from the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Oh, my phone just buzzed,’ I lied, tapping my jacket pocket. ‘You carry on, won’t be a sec.’

  I managed to extricate myself from the wooden booth with some degree of elegance. Outside, I took in a lungful of what passed for fresh air on the Farringdon Road and checked my phone. There was a missed call, from what would appear to the casual listener to be an automated machine trying to get me to sue someone or other. In reality it was a request for a meeting with Swincoe or Lawrence. The last word would tell me which of six possible locations. Sometimes you wonder if spies know just how predictable they are.

  I ignored that call for the moment and made my own. If Nina had done one thing so far, apart from demonstrate that offal-eating is not a spectator sport, it was convince me that I needed back-up. I was spreading myself thinner than Marmite on toast.

  So I called Freddie, my old army mucker. I didn’t know it then, but that was the moment when it all started to unravel for me.