Authors: Clare Carson
‘Stop her. We have to get her. I’m going up. You stay here. We need back-up. Call head office on the direct number. Let him know what’s going on.’
Him? Don Chance? She watched the floor numbers illuminating. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Doors open. She pressed the button for the ninth as she jumped out of the lift. The thump of footsteps pounding up the emergency exit reverberated around the stairwell. She searched around wildly for a hiding place, clocked the sign for Third World Action above a dull grey door.
She pushed and found herself face to face with a man wearing a Greenpeace T-shirt, gold metal-rimmed John Lennon NHS glasses and a smug smile.
‘We’re not open today,’ he said. ‘I’m just here to sort out some campaigning materials. You can come back on Monday.’
‘But I want to help poor people in Africa.’ She was trying not to sound too desperate.
He smiled condescendingly. ‘Africa is a continent containing a wide diversity of countries, not all of them poor.’
‘Zaire. I want to help in Zaire. I want to volunteer, do something for poor people in Zaire.’
‘I’m afraid we don’t support volunteer programmes. Volunteers without any specific experience to offer are not a very good way to promote development. We prefer to support locally driven community action.’
He threw her the acutely raised eyebrow of a man who was determined to give her the benefit of his superior knowledge. She could hear footsteps on the landing now and then a pause: Avis trying to work out where she had gone.
She leaned towards him. ‘Right. I see your point. But what about women’s rights? What do you do for women?’
He scowled, irritated by her questions. Outside the fire door creaked as it was opened and swung shut again. Avis departing.
‘Thanks for your time anyway,’ Sam said. Gave him a wink as she backed out through the office door, glanced anxiously right and left, saw the coast was clear, dived across the landing and through the emergency exit.
She could hear footsteps running up above her now. Avis on her way to the ninth. She tumbled down the stairs in the opposite direction, cautiously pushed the fire door open a crack, surveyed the foyer; the guard was at the reception desk, phone clamped against ear, fat finger running down a directory page, saying yes to whoever was shouting at him from the other end. She would just have to risk it. She took a deep breath. Shouldered the door. Charged across the foyer. Through the revolving glass and out into the street before the guard had a chance to work out what was going on. She skipped into the line of traffic crawling along Westminster Bridge Road. A car braked. Renault. Green. The vehicle behind it squealed to a halt and honked. Peugeot. Red. She quick-stepped between boots and bumpers. Dashed to the far pavement. Looked behind – nobody was following her. Yet. She dodged right and as she did so, her elbow caught the wing mirror of a car parked badly with its front end jutting out into the road. Rover. Black. MVF 476X .The Watcher. Shit.
She darted left into Lower Marsh Street, scurried along the pavement, keeping close to the shuttered shop-fronts, sensing the shifty spirits of south London’s backstreets jostling her, tugging her coat, calling her to join them underground. She blocked out the whispering, no clear plan in her head except to escape. She lifted her eyes to check the slope of the taxi ramp up to the station. There was the Watcher striding down, cutting off her emergency exit. She glanced over her shoulder. Avis had tracked her down and was standing at the far end of the street, blocking her retreat. Only one route was open now. She would have to keep moving along Lower Marsh towards the Cut and up the far side of the station. She ran, but the Watcher ran too. She lowered her head and charged. He was there before she could reach the other side of the road. He grabbed her arm. She tried to twist free. He closed his hand around her wrist. She felt the dig of his fingernails. Inhaled the rank odour of stale smoke and Dettol.
‘You’re not going anywhere my little friend,’ he said, fag end clenched between his teeth. ‘Not until you’ve handed over the information.’
He stuck his hand in her coat pocket, groped around, pulled out the raven’s feather, snorted with disgust, shoved it back in her pocket again. Somewhere in the distance a single-cylinder motorbike revved.
‘Well, now. We know Jim picked up an envelope from his contact. But it has so far failed to materialize. So we can only conclude that he passed it to you. Correct?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Come on. Come on. I don’t have time for this.’ He reached into her other coat pocket. ‘We’re not in the playground now.’
Playground; the word echoed around the street, bouncing off the narrow brick shop fronts, carried along by the wind blustering south from the river. The gust-harried clouds spread their shadow over the Watcher’s face. His predatory eyes darted sideways and she momentarily glimpsed the bullied schoolboy behind the dodgy cover, the child who had never been unconditionally loved, the boy who had to make underhand deals to forge relationships. She almost felt sorry for the Watcher, a twinge of sympathy for a victim of Jim’s playground bullying. And then she remembered the gleam of pleasure when he had burned her arm. His groping hand.
‘Where’s the fucking envelope?’ he hissed in her ear as he yanked her hard against his body, squeezing out the last residue of empathy, stoking her anger. She was on auto-pilot now, running on sheer will-power.
‘I left it at Ventura’s offices,’ she said. ‘I gave the envelope to the Ventura security guard to hand over to Avis Chance.’
The Watcher plucked the cigarette from his lips, pursed his lips and blew a puff of smoke into her face. She tried not to cough. From the corner of a smarting eye she glimpsed Avis hovering warily at the far end of the street, calculating her next move. He poked his fag back in his mouth, eyes flicking between her and Avis. She thought for a moment he was about to take the bait.
‘Don’t try your stupid games on me.’ He pushed the words out the side of his mouth.
She swallowed nervously, throat parched with anxiety and exertion. He must have noticed her falter; it set him off, he couldn’t resist rubbing her face in the dirt.
‘Unfortunately you’ve inherited your father’s tendency to imagine you are a bit superior to everyone else. A bit of a hero. But you’re no player. You’re just a silly little copper’s daughter.’
He leered at her. ‘So I suggest you hand over whatever you got from Jim and go home before you irritate me further and I decide that you’re a waste of space that has to be dealt with in other ways.’
Other ways. She felt the panic rising. Heard the bike revving again. The rider. The hitman. And then she sensed a prickling in her neck, a slight movement in the air. In the tail of her eye she caught a towering figure, a domineering presence emerging from the shadows: straight back, trenchcoat buttoned, trousers pressed. Lined face below the tilted rim of his trilby, the steel frames of his glasses glinting in the rays of the sinking sun. He took a step up the incline.
‘Leave this to me,’ he said to the Watcher. His voice was calm, educated, consonants pronounced without any audible twang. Golf-club English. It had to be the Commander. She almost cried with relief. Safe. She could hand the envelope over. He would sort the Watcher out.
The Watcher didn’t budge, kept his tight grip on her arm. The Commander glowered at him.
‘Let her go.’ The Commander spoke with an air of tedium which suggested he didn’t have much tolerance for people who disobeyed his instructions. The Watcher twitched, dug his fingers further into her flesh.
The Commander raised a greying eyebrow. ‘I said let her go.’
The Watcher released Sam’s arm and took a step backwards up the slope.
‘I’m really not sure why Intelligence insist on using you.’ There was a hint of tetchiness in the Commander’s tone now. ‘Everybody knows you are incapable of keeping to your mission objectives.’
He glared at the Watcher and the Watcher recoiled. ‘Everybody knows you always end up following your own private agendas. Your own personal grudges. Your own… obsessions. You can’t stop yourself, can you? I can only assume that Intelligence decided to hire you because they needed somebody disposable for this job.’
The Watcher’s eyes were on the Commander, hypnotized, ensnared by his own inner demons, the trammels of his past. The Commander sighed impatiently. His words mingled with the crack of a bike’s engine. Louder. Nearer this time. The rider appeared round the corner of the station, thundering down the slope from the taxi rank. The Yamaha drew level. Sam watched as the rider pushed his hand into his leather jacket. Pulled out a compact, metallic object. Packet of Benson and Hedges. It wasn’t. He lifted his arm. Shoot position. The Watcher’s face turned, expression locked, mesmerized by the barrel. Horrified, she saw death reaching out from the depths of the Watcher’s eyes a moment before she heard the shot. Suspended for a split-second between life and nothing. The crack of the engine firing followed the whip of the pistol as the bike revved and sped off towards the Cut.
Pink spittle bubbled from one corner of the Watcher’s mouth, the smouldering fag still clamped in the other. She gasped. He toppled to his knees, body flopping forward, his face hitting the pavement heavily, black blood quickly congealing on the curve of his cranium, head touching the gutter, the worn soles of his mock crocs upturned. In the unearthly silence that followed she inhaled the acrid scent of singed hair and burned flesh as the dead weight of his body extinguished his final cigarette.
She instinctively moved away, fearful of tripping over the invisible borderline, falling into oblivion. She looked up and saw the Commander smile.
‘I don’t think anybody is going to miss him.’
She returned his smile, too relieved to care about the clinical coldness of his reaction.
‘You must be Sam,’ he said.
She nodded.
‘Jim talked about you a lot. He was very proud of you. He had a nickname for you he used all the time. Now what was it?’
She shrugged. He paused, glanced up to the sky and back. Moved on. ‘I’m so sorry about Jim’s death. It must be a very difficult time for you and your family.’
She felt herself warming to the Commander.
‘I was very sad I couldn’t join you at Jim’s funeral,’ he said. His face registered slight offence at the recollection and she thought she had better offer him an explanation for the prohibition.
‘That was Liz really. Jim had said he wanted the funeral to be friends and family only and my mum took it a bit literally. I’m sure he didn’t mean to exclude you.’
The Commander smiled again. ‘No, I’m sure he didn’t. We were always very close. He always was…’ he paused. ‘He always was my favourite.’ The end of the Commander’s sentence was almost drowned out by the screeching of a couple of rooks fighting in the road over a scrap of greasy bacon. Carrion birds.
‘Well, I don’t want to waste any more of your time,’ he continued briskly. ‘I suspect you’ve had a long day. So perhaps you’d like to hand over anything that you might have… taken from Jim.’
She flushed slightly, embarrassed by the fact that he was clearly aware of her theft of the envelope. She looked swiftly over her shoulder, caught sight of Avis. What was she doing still standing there? Sam was slightly surprised to see that she hadn’t disappeared as soon as the Commander had appeared on the scene. In fact, Avis had slipped along the road in their direction, as if she was closing in for the kill. That was odd. Something sparked in her brain. Some faulty connection. She couldn’t quite grasp it. The Commander stepped closer to her now as well.
‘It doesn’t matter how you acquired the information. So long as you give it to me.’
The undercurrent of impatience had returned to his voice.
‘You’re totally welcome to it,’ she said.
She dug her hand into her cargo trouser pocket and pulled out the manila envelope. She was about to hand it over to him when she caught sight of Jim’s doodled feather on the back. She paused. What was it about the feather that made her think that Jim had meant her to take the envelope all along? She sighed. Some things would just remain forever unexplained. Jim and all his peculiar manoeuvres, his cryptic hints, his jokes, his pointless instructions. The ban on coppers at his funeral, for example. She could almost have thought that the very purpose of Jim’s funeral instructions was to prevent her from communicating with the Commander. Stop her from handing the papers over to him. She hesitated. There wasn’t any reason for Jim to try and prevent her from communicating with the Commander. Was there? Somewhere in a distant corner of her mind she heard her father’s voice. You have to watch your back in this game. You can’t afford to trust anybody. Not even the people you think are on your side. Especially not the people you think are on your side.
‘The papers please.’
She stared at the feather, the black bars striping its barbs. Kestrel’s feather. That’s what it was. It had to be. A feather from a kestrel’s tail. She touched the doodle with her finger and, for some reason, she found her head was spinning. She focused on the drawing, trying to find her centre of gravity, and she remembered then the kestrel’s feather her father had given her that day at Tilbury. Its peculiar lightness and strength. Funny things feathers, Jim had said. Who would have thought something so flimsy could hold a bird aloft? She glanced down and realized the ground was tilting alarmingly. Everything was topsy-turvy. Getting smaller. Further and further away. She was on a rising thermal. Looping and looping. Soaring. Surveying the tower-blocks and wastelands of south London. Following the amber river towards the far horizon. And now when she looked down, everything made perfect sense, the pieces below fell into place. It was all so obvious: the repeat patterns of the landscape, the shape-shifting characters telling the age-old story. And there was Jim. Standing at the Commander’s shoulder. The Commander and Jim, his right-hand man. Odin and Munin, his favourite raven spy. I fear for Hugin that he will not come back, Odin said. Yet I tremble more for Munin. Of course he was more worried about Munin, because we always fear betrayal most from those to whom we are closest. She could see Odin clearly from up high and, even though his trilby was tipped to cover his face, she could tell that he was concerned, suspected that his favourite spy would fly off, leave him, take all his dirty secrets to the other side. Concealed in the manila envelope. And so the Commander had unleashed his wild hunt, searching out the traitor, turning on his own beloved right-hand man. Stung by the treachery. Chasing down Munin. Cornering Jim. He had to go. The Commander had to get rid of him. She knew that now. He couldn’t let his once-trusted raven fly free. She felt a tear trickling down her cheek and for a moment she thought she might not return to earth.