Other Countries

by Jo Bannister

  She waited. It would have been nice if he’d picked that up and run with it; but perhaps she’d surprised him. She forged ahead. ‘We’ve talked about the future. About a future together – about sharing our lives for as far ahead as we can see. But if we’re going to talk about it some more, there are things we need to straighten out. I need to be sure that gratitude isn’t all that’s motivating you – because that’s no foundation for a lasting relationship. And you need to understand that, while I will never deliberately hurt you, nor am I going to tiptoe round you for fear you might take umbrage at some innocent remark.

  ‘I think it’s time you had a proper family, Oliver. Me, or someone like me. You’re too used to people saying “Yes, Mr Ford” and “No, Mr Ford” and “Would you like me to tie your shoelaces, Mr Ford?” You get that from people you employ, and maybe from people who employ you and don’t want to risk losing you. You don’t get it in a personal relationship between equals. You shouldn’t even want it in that kind of relationship.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Well, the time has come to decide what you do want. If you don’t want me here, if my jokes offend you and being teased, however affectionately, hurts your feelings, then I can be packed and out of here in half an hour. No blame, no shame – we can just say it didn’t work out because in the end we were too different. But if I stay, I need you to do a bit of growing up. You’re twelve years older than me – that’s too old to be behaving like a spoilt child.’

  Ford heard her out in silence. Hazel thought that was a good sign, that she wasn’t having to bat aside his denials in order to make her point. Now she was finished, she quietly indicated that it was his turn, tottering on her towering heels to the nearest sofa where she sat and waited for his response. At that moment she could not have guessed which way it would go. Whether he would accept her terms or call her a taxi.

  He didn’t call her a taxi.

  Slowly Ford’s stiff expression softened into a smile. It was an odd kind of smile, though, neither amused nor generous nor even tolerant. It was a superior smile. By the time he spoke, Hazel knew it wasn’t going to be an apology. Even so, she wasn’t ready for what came.

  He reached out and stroked her cheek gently with the backs of his fingers. He said, almost tenderly, ‘You’re right, of course – you’re very young. I forget sometimes. You have a woman’s body, but you still think like a child. You think that being pretty is enough to get you what you want. You think that being pretty makes you the equal of people who are older than you, better educated than you, more successful than you and richer than you. And oh, my dear, you have such a lot to learn!

  ‘You think – you really do think, don’t you? – that when I talked about gratitude, I meant I was grateful to you! And of course I am. You did me a service, even though you had to put yourself in danger to do it. But as you keep pointing out, that is your job. That is what you’re paid for. I was grateful, and I rewarded you – and now it’s time you stopped trading on it.’

  He took in Hazel’s stunned expression. ‘I see I have to spell it out. I am disappointed that you seem to feel so little gratitude for what I have done for you. I’ve shown you a world you didn’t even know existed – ancient places the tourists never visit, top hotels, first-class travel. I’ve bought you clothes from shops you couldn’t afford to go in; where the sales assistants make more money than you do. If you’d gone in on your own, they’d have assumed you’d made a mistake and directed you to the nearest Marks & Spencer.

  ‘And now you have the gall to set conditions on me? The day we met, you were nobody. Mere random chance put you in a position to do something valuable, to get your name in the papers, and now you think you’re something special. I’ll tell you how special you are. You’re as special as I make you. The clothes will wear out and you can’t afford to replace them; the smart hotels and the first-class air travel are entirely beyond your means; and the places I took you to will be shut if you go alone, and no one will remember you.

  ‘Now stop being such a silly bitch and go back to doing what you’re good at: adding a bit of fluff to my life. That’s the reason you’re here – the only reason you’ve been anywhere in the last month. I enjoy having you around, being young and pretty and a bit silly – it’s a change from the serious stuff I spend the rest of my time doing. So I’ll go on paying the bills, and you’ll go back to keeping me happy – all right? Because it would be a mistake to make me unhappy.’

  Ice had taken a clutch of Hazel’s heart. Ice had stiffened her spine and frozen her limbs, and iced water was trickling over the surface of her brain. It wasn’t the crude threat that was responsible. Hazel had been threatened before, and by people both better motivated and better equipped to carry out their threats. What made Ford’s nastiness so chilling was the context. This wasn’t a dark alley round the back of The Flying Horse, popular with drug pushers and their clients, and prostitutes and their clients. This was the house she shared with someone she trusted. The confrontation had come out of nowhere, out of an amiable little joke, and she felt she’d been side-swiped by a train. That was how he thought of her? This man she’d contemplated spending her life with? He considered her a decoration? Like his Rolex watch and the gold chain which, against her advice, he persisted in wearing around his neck? He thought that, the way he’d bought them – seen them and liked them and bought them – he’d bought her too?

  She needed to say something, and to say it soon. She couldn’t find the breath. It was as if he’d kicked all the air out of her lungs.

  Finally she managed, ‘I think I should leave now. There isn’t much here that’s actually mine – what there is, I’ll come back for in a day or two. Will you drive me back to town, or shall I walk?’

  She had literally no idea how he would respond. Ford was a cultured man: perhaps he would murmur a civilised, ‘That might be best,’ and carry her bag to his car. But he was also a quick-tempered man: she readied herself for a rough hand to grasp her arm, manhandle her out onto the drive and slam the door behind her. Her mobile was in her bag: she must try to grab it as he hustled her out, though the surrounding forest meant she might have to walk for an hour before she would pick up a signal.

  Or might he back-pedal briskly, try to persuade her that she’d misunderstood? That there was still a future for them? She couldn’t see him begging her to stay. She couldn’t see him dissolving in tears of despair. She could, just, imagine him hitting her.

  Ford’s hands stayed by his sides. He said nothing. But by degrees his expression changed, the anger and the hardness in his eyes softening until she suddenly realised that, incredibly, he was smiling at her. A genuine smile. That impish, boyish smile she found so hard to resist.

  ‘What?’ he said finally, his head tipping on one side like an impudent bird’s. ‘You’re allowed to poke fun at my bald spot, but I’m not allowed to tease you?’

  ‘That …’ Hazel had to swallow and try again. ‘That was a joke? A joke?’

  He was frankly grinning by now. ‘You should see your face! You really thought I meant it, didn’t you? Admit it. You really thought I was going bunny-boiler on you.’

  ‘Oliver,’ she gasped, ‘I had no idea what was going on! You … you thought that was funny?’

  He bit his lip. ‘It was from where I’m standing. It still is.’

  ‘I thought you hated me!’

  ‘Hate you? My darling, how could anyone hate you? You’re utterly adorable when you’re confused!’

  He put his arms around her, confident of his welcome; and Hazel was too stunned to stop him. All she could do was mumble into his shirt-front, ‘Why?’

  Ford laughed richly into the top of her head. ‘You started it! Bald spot indeed. If it was true, it would be no joking matter. You think I’m vain? I’m a performer. It matters that I look the part. People expect it. I’d love to be able to say, To hell with it – I’m a man of nearly forty, who cares if I go bald? But the sad fact is, people would care. They expect you alway
s to look as you looked when they first saw you on television. Ridiculous, isn’t it? – that the more successful you are, the longer that success lasts, the more you have to lie about who you are.

  ‘But I don’t make the rules. For anyone working in television, appearance matters. We spend time and money that could be better used elsewhere on making sure we don’t disappoint our audience. It isn’t enough to be an authority on the Crusades; it isn’t even enough to be able to persuade people who don’t know the difference between Saladin and Aladdin that it might be fun to find out. If you want to be successful on television, it’s necessary to be eye-candy as well.’

  Her heartbeat was returning to something like normal. Hazel levered herself out of his embrace. Ford made no effort to hold onto her. ‘It matters that much to you? Being a celebrity?’

  He laughed again, a confident throwaway laugh. ‘Some are born celebrities, some achieve celebrity, and some have celebrity thrust upon them. Me, I kicked, bit and scratched to get where I am today. Damn right I want it to last.’

  Hazel nodded slowly. ‘So – no more jokes about baldness?’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘And no more jokes about’ – she couldn’t encapsulate his tirade in a single phrase, settled rather lamely for: ‘You know.’

  Ford kissed the top of her head. Into her short, springy hair he murmured, ‘Did I frighten you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she snorted. But that was the police officer speaking, who could be scared half to death but knew better than to show it. Ford wasn’t a gang of lager-louts: he was the man she lived with, the man who had talked about marriage, and she owed him honesty. ‘Well – yes, in a way. I thought – suddenly I thought I didn’t know you any more. Or maybe that I’d never known you. That I’d misjudged you, and therefore what we have together, so badly there was nowhere left to go.

  ‘I thought it was over, and for the worst of reasons: that it wasn’t real in the first place. That I’d talked myself into believing in us because I wanted it so much. That I’d blinded myself to the reality that we’re just too different. That the things that matter to us are too different. You can patch over the cracks, and then patch over the patches, but sooner or later the rain’s going to come through. I thought that was what was happening. That the rain was coming through.’

  Ford reached out for her again. He wasn’t a big man like Ash, but the strength of his arms was both assertive and reassuring. ‘I’m sorry. I went too far. I was … getting my own back … and I went too far. I didn’t mean to frighten you. You have nothing to be frightened of. You’re safe here. You’re safe with me.’

  ‘I know,’ she murmured into his shoulder.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Gabriel Ash was no good at lying. He was very good at seeing through the lies of others, a facility on which he had built not one but two careers; but he never got away with lying himself. As if he was wearing a cap-badge with the word ‘Fibber’ emblazoned on it, people knew as soon as he contemplated telling a falsehood.

  There was, he thought ruefully, only one lie he’d been able to carry off successfully, and that wasn’t exactly a lie, more a reluctance to volunteer a truth that no one would believe. No one knew that when he talked to his dog, she talked back. His reputation as the local idiot had afforded the secret some protection. Once when he had let the truth slip out, Hazel had dismissed it as a kind of foolish joke, which wasn’t much better.

  On the bright side, though he himself might be one of the world’s worst liars, Ash knew someone who was among its best. When he’d dropped the boys off for Saturday morning soccer practice, he returned to Railway Street.

  Saturday heard him out in mounting disbelief. ‘Gabriel – you used to work for MI5!’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Ash said shortly.

  Saturday raised one deeply unconvinced eyebrow. ‘No, of course you didn’t. People have heard of MI5, and the guys you worked for probably keep their number secret. Point is, you have contacts who could find Oliver Ford in two minutes, and have him sweating under an energy-saving low-emission eco-friendly twenty-watt bulb inside half an hour. What do you need me for?’

  ‘I don’t want to go through channels,’ admitted Ash. ‘I’ve already reminded my old boss that I’m back among the living; if I keep doing it, sooner or later he’s going to ask me to repay all these favours, and I really don’t want to get drawn into that line of business again.

  ‘And I particularly don’t want Hazel’s name to start coming up on Home Office computers. If she’s got herself in a fix, I’d rather sort it out myself. If I can find her, I’ll go and talk to her, see if she’s all right, and bring her home if she’s not. If I ask Philip Welbeck to find her, I know he’ll do it, but it may not end there. I don’t want him trying to recruit her. She’d be a good acquisition for him, with her ex-army father, her background in IT and her police training. But it’s not the kind of work I’d like to see her doing.’

  ‘I think she’d be good at the cloak-and-dagger stuff,’ said Saturday stoutly.

  ‘I think she’d be good at it too. And I think she’d jump at the chance. And I think that, sooner or later, she’d pay too high a price for it.’

  ‘The way you did,’ murmured Saturday.

  ‘The way I did,’ agreed Ash. ‘Well, Hazel’s made of stronger stuff than me. But being tough isn’t always enough. Even being lucky isn’t always enough. I don’t want to be the reason she gets involved in something that’s more likely to cause her grief than Oliver Ford is.’

  Saturday nodded his understanding. The fondness he had developed for both these people – the strong young woman and the broken man – was a firm anchor in the storm-tossed sea that had been his life. He had prided himself on having no friends, had believed that emotional attachments were a weakness, and a luxury no one in his position could afford. Well, weakness or not, he had friends now. Friends he was willing to do much more than lie for.

  ‘Tell me what you need.’

  A quick trawl of the Internet on the computer he’d bought with his second month’s wages gave Saturday the name and phone number of Oliver Ford’s agent. Then things got technical. He asked for Ash’s phone, and Ash watched in astonishment as the youth opened it up and ran a wire from it to the computer.

  ‘Whatever are you doing?’

  Saturday smirked. ‘Watch, my friend, and learn.’ He dialled the agent’s number.

  People employ agents partly as a filter between themselves and the general public. Perhaps Miriam Seward believed Saturday’s claim to be a journalist in search of an interview, perhaps she didn’t; either way, she was never going to give him Ford’s address or phone number. She offered to set up an interview within the next couple of weeks.

  ‘That would be great,’ said Saturday enthusiastically, ‘only there’s a bit of time pressure. I have a slot in a magazine, but I need to get the copy in next week. Which means getting together in the next few days.’

  ‘I doubt that will be possible,’ said Ms Seward. ‘Mr Ford is out of town – he’s working on his book.’

  ‘I know it’s asking a lot. But will you call him up and ask him? I’ll go anywhere he wants to meet. Can’t you at least ask him?’ He let a plaintive note catch his voice.

  It had the desired effect. ‘I’ll call and ask. But you shouldn’t get your hopes up. Mr Ford values his private time. What’s your number? I’ll get back to you.’

  ‘Right away? Will you call him right away?’

  ‘I’ll call him right away, young man,’ she promised. ‘But I don’t think he’ll say yes.’

  She rang off. Saturday grinned at Ash. ‘Neither do I. But then, it doesn’t actually matter what he says.’

  Ms Seward was as good as her word. She spoke to Ford, then called Saturday back. ‘I’m sorry. He’s busy with his book and doesn’t want to be disturbed.’

  Saturday thanked her for her time and rang off. By then the hack had connected and schematics were already appearing on the screen of
his computer. He leaned back with a grunt of satisfaction. ‘That’s where he is.’ There was a red dot superimposed on a road map.

  Ash shook his head in wonder. ‘Saturday – how do you know this stuff? You’re not telling me they taught you how to trace phone calls in your school IT class?’

  The boy gave a smug chuckle. ‘What you learn in IT classes is mostly how to find other guys who know more than you do. Who know more than your teachers do. Everything is out there. Everything. All you need is to know how to find it.’

  Even now, Ash was appalled at how much the world had moved on in the time he’d been out to lunch. Though it was a fact that no one of his generation was ever as thoroughly at home with the digital revolution as people who’d grown up with it. The new technology had proved infinitely valuable in the field of national security, but it wasn’t people like Ash and Philip Welbeck doing the actual computing. For that, they employed people like Saturday. Computer jockeys tend to be under thirty. The people running the security services tend to be over forty.

  On the other hand, Ash was old enough to know how to read a map, an ability that the sat-nav generation don’t always share. He fetched an Ordnance Survey of the West Midlands from the Volvo and quickly located the roads around the red dot. There weren’t many of them in quite a large area of woodland. ‘His agent wasn’t lying. Ford really doesn’t like being disturbed.’

  Saturday was peering over his shoulder. ‘How long will it take us to get there?’