Esme looked at her feet.
‘I just want to know that he is OK. That’s all.’
She wouldn’t meet Miranda’s eye.
‘It’s OK, Esme. It’s me.’
‘You mustn’t tell anyone,’ Esme said, after a pause.
‘I won’t. I promise.’
‘Wait.’
Esme turned on her heels and ran across to the far side of the playground. The dog stuck his snout through the fence, eager to follow. Esme stopped next to an older girl and they had a short discussion. The older girl glanced at Miranda. Something was exchanged and Esme sprinted back over to the fence. In her hand she held two dog-eared postcards that had been folded in half.
‘You mustn’t tell,’ she said.
‘It’s all right,’ Miranda told her.
Esme passed the cards through the fence. On one was a photograph of Wadi Rum. She turned it over. It was addressed to E and signed ‘Bear’. It said:
I miss you, sweetpea.
The stamps were from Jordan, postmarked Amman. The other was of the Bala Hissar, identical to the one sent to her from Peshawar. It said:
I’m thinking about you
. She was beginning to put together a sense of his movements. He had been in Peshawar, Pakistan, and then Afghanistan, and then just a few days ago Amman in Jordan.
‘He sends them to Elisabeth, that’s the big girl over there,’ Esme explained, ‘she brings them to school and reads them to me.’ She shifted from foot to foot and then she glanced around. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.
‘It’s nice to see you,’ Miranda said.
‘Say hi to Dad,’ she said, and for a moment her face was transformed by a glowing gap-toothed smile. Then she sprinted away.
‘I will,’ Miranda said to herself, ‘I will.’
She walked back to the bus stop with the dog following.
She had to wait an hour at Port Askaig for the ferry back to Jura, and she sat at a picnic table outside the hotel and nursed a vodka and tonic. She stared across the sound. Unusually the surface of the water was as still as a mirror. She flicked through the local newspaper but the words blurred and she could not hold the sense of them. Why hadn’t Jonah sent her a postcard from Amman at the same time as he had sent the one to Esme with the message
I miss you sweetpea
?
Did he miss her too? All he’d written to her was:
I have things to take care of.
She felt angry. Had she wasted two years of her life, wandering the island, while he wrote his stupid memoir? Why had he stopped writing to her? And what was he doing in Amman? Just as Inspector Coyle had described Peshawar as a staging post for Afghanistan, she knew that Amman was a staging post for Iraq. Was that where he was?
It had been in Iraq during the 2003 invasion that Jonah had invited her to come back to the UK with him. He’d told her that he loved her, and in the heady, supercharged atmosphere of those first few days of the war – so-called
shock and awe
– it had seemed possible that it was true. She herself had felt a strong desire for it to be true. After all, there was nothing left for her in the Gulf. She had learned that her son was dead. She had a British passport. There was nothing to stop her. Why not go with him?
The ferry set off across the sound towards her. It had been August 2003 when they had arrived in Scotland and taken up residence at Barnhill on Jura. And there they had lived for two years, ostensibly because Jonah’s daughter lived with her mother on Islay, the adjacent island, but in fact in a sort of self-imposed exile. She hadn’t set foot on the mainland for two years. Jonah had been over to visit his parents but never for more than three or four days. Then one afternoon, he had returned from Craighouse, Jura’s only village, and she understood immediately from the brooding expression on his face that something was up. He had said to her, ‘I have to go away for a few days. It may be nothing.’
She had felt then that she deserved more of an explanation. He’d told her that he was going to the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides to speak to a former colleague named Andy Beech.
‘I won’t be gone long,’ he’d said, distractedly, ‘I’ll come straight back.’
She rode the short distance to Jura standing at the ferry’s ramp, and a tourist couple gave her a ride as far as the hotel in Craighouse. She had another vodka and tonic in the empty public bar. By the time she left it was school closing time, and as she was crossing the street to the bus stop she saw Moira Campbell and her four boys. Moira lived in a stone cottage at the river crossing at Lealt, about seven kilometres south of Barnhill.
‘Need a lift?’ Moira called.
‘Please.’
The kids squeezed in the back of the Land Rover with the dogs and Miranda rode in the front beside Moira. Moira’s husband Graeme was the gamekeeper for the estate, and he was one of the very few people that she had encountered in her wanderings on the moor in the previous months.
‘Graeme’s been meaning to stop by and talk to you,’ Moira said.
Miranda glanced across at her. Moira’s face was plain, honest and open. She wondered how it was that they had never become friends, but even as she floated the question she knew the answer. She hadn’t made the effort. For too long she’d kept entirely to herself. Someone had once told her that she had the independence of a cat. Afghanistan, Iraq and all the other places had hardened her to the point of numbness. There was a kind of aloofness that did not earn her many friends, particularly among other women. Besides, she had a bad habit of fucking their husbands.
‘He found a dinghy yesterday,’ Moira told her, ‘in one of the caves up beyond Glengarrisdale. He says there are strangers on the moor.’
Miranda felt suddenly light-headed, struggling to understand what Moira was saying to her, the vodka doing its work.
They left the county road at Ardlussa, and followed the track through the strip of ancient woodland that hugged the coast all the way to the island’s northern tip. They emerged on to the moor at Lealt. First she saw the outline of the motionless wind turbine and then the house and finally Graeme by one of the outbuildings with an axe in his hands and a pile of newly split logs by his feet. The kids burst out of the car and dashed for the climbing frame.
Graeme walked over to her and shook her hand. His grip was bone-crushing, his hand several times larger than hers. Graeme was a retired Royal Marine, a softly spoken giant with a shaved head and a long walrus moustache that made a pirate of him. The islands seemed to be full of retired soldiers.
‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ she replied, automatically
. Fine.
It was what she always said.
‘Did Moira tell you about the boat?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’ve made an effort to conceal themselves. The boat is under a camouflage net and the sand at the mouth of the cave has been swept. There are two of them, I think.’
‘What do you think they are here for?’ she forced herself to ask.
‘Eggs from the eagles probably. I guess there’s a chance they’re here for your orchids.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘You want to stay here tonight?’
‘No, I’ll keep going,’ she said firmly.
‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he offered.
‘I’d rather walk. I need to clear my head.’
‘Have you heard from Jonah?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she replied.
They stood in silence for a few moments, and she would not meet his gaze. The dog rubbed itself against the back of her knee. She had no capacity for conversation about Jonah.
‘Be careful,’ he said, eventually. ‘If you find them don’t get yourself into a confrontation.’
‘I won’t,’ she said.
She waved to Moira and the kids and set off north on the track across the moor.
An hour and a half later she walked over the brow of the hill and saw the house again. The lights were off and the yard was empty. Approaching, she willed herself to study the footprints in the mud of the courtyard. She spotted Coyle and Mulvey’s next to the ruts left by their car. Her own Caterpillars. There were others, though, and they looked new.
She took five steps into the kitchen and stopped. She stood still and listened. She breathed in slowly with both her mouth and her nose and caught a whiff of sweat on the warm, still air and stale cigarette smoke. Someone had come and the lack of wind had betrayed them.
She hung her bag on a hook in the passageway and stepped carefully down the passage towards the study. Halfway along, she caught it again: the same faint whiff of cigarette smoke. Not smoked here, that would be an elementary mistake, but carried into the house on someone’s clothes.
She entered Jonah’s study and stood for a moment, refamiliarising herself with the room. She ran her finger across the undisturbed dust on the writing desk. She sat in the swivel chair and wondered what they could have found apart from what they were supposed to find. Her passport and emergency money were hidden, away from the house. Everything else was on the flash disk that Jonah wore at all times around his neck, even in bed. He’d taken his laptop with him when he left. She pulled open a drawer. It contained pens and pencils, a box of drawing pins – nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing seemed to be missing.
She swivelled in the chair, glancing at the walls.
Something was different.
Shit.
She wouldn’t have noticed it, the collage was such a jumble, but she’d spent so much time since Jonah left just sitting here staring at the collage, reading highlighted text and wondering at the connections, that she had developed a strong sense of what was where on the wall.
The postcard had been pinned directly on top of a map of Kandahar City. It showed a pier with a crane and a yellow hydraulic ram between two huge metal clamshells that rose out of the water, their striated surfaces shining like gold in the late afternoon light. In the background were the distinctive tent poles of the Millennium Dome. She pulled it off the wall and turned it over. On the other side was printed
Thames Barrier, London
. It had not been there before.
She put it on the desk and returned to studying the collage. The postcard was not the only addition. There was a diagram of a ship: line drawings of it from above and from the starboard side and between the drawings a scale with an overall length of 440 feet. She was a freighter, by the looks of it, with five holds and hatches, and three masts and derricks. Using a pen, someone had drawn two score marks through the third hold just forward of the deckhouse. Beside the drawings, also in pen, someone had written a latitude and a longitude.
51 28 00 N
00 47 01 E
She ripped it off the wall and threw it on the desk with the postcard.
Below the ship’s diagram there was a colour print-out of a website page pinned over the top of the photo of Monteith. She tore it down as well. The page contained a table, a graph and a map. It was produced by the National Tidal and Sea Level Facility & Tide Gauge Network and had the title:
High and low water times and heights for SHEERNESS
.
The map showed the location of tidal gauges in the UK, including the one at Sheerness in the Thames Estuary. The graph showed the predicted variance in tidal heights for September, ranging from zero to six metres, and the table gave the high and low water times in GMT for each day in the month ahead. A date ten days hence with a predicted high water level of six metres at 11.00 p.m. had been ringed with a fluorescent marker. The date was 12 September.
She sat back in the chair and stared again at the collage. There was something else. Nothing more appeared to have been added. Things had been taken away. They’d removed all reference to the American Richard Winthrop. They must have come, whoever they were, ripped down the newspaper clippings of Winthrop and then pinned the postcard, the diagram and the page to the cork board.
Why do it? Except to remove incriminating evidence and plant incriminating evidence? She couldn’t think of any other explanation.
Angrily, she went upstairs. Smoke again. She hadn’t smoked a cigarette for over a year and she had come to detest the habit. In the bedroom more stale smoke. Perhaps there were other things here that had been planted.
She sat on the bed and quickly reviewed events. She had crossed to Islay and in her absence they had come and tampered with the collage, removed evidence, added evidence; which probably meant that they were ready to swoop. So she presumed they were watching the house, even now. Two close observers in a concealed hide. There could be others. Someone might have followed her all the way to Bowmore. With a sinking feeling she realised that someone might have observed her talking to Esme. Her mind rifled through the passengers on the ferry, looking for anyone out of the ordinary, but it was the time of year for tourists. There could have been an observer with a half-decent set of binoculars, indistinguishable from the scores of birdwatchers that descended on the island, anywhere along the sound. Once she was off the island they had free rein.
Outside, the sun was sinking towards the moor. Now she was back and it was time for action. It was time to run.
She took her rucksack, her ‘crash-bag’, down off the peg in the passageway, unpacked it on the kitchen table and inspected the contents: a sleeping bag, a bivvy bag and a North Face pile jacket, all in compression sacks; three pairs of black cotton underwear and three rolled pairs of socks in a waterproof bag, because he’d said there was nothing worse than being short of underwear when you are on the run; wash kit and sewing kit for running repairs; a packet of wet wipes for luxury; mess tin/dog bowl; a black beanie hat, a boot cleaning kit and her pair of Caterpillar boots.
She turned the bag inside out and ran her fingers along the seams, looking for anything out of the ordinary. A locator. Nothing. She repacked the bag.
She rolled up her yoga mat. Then she shovelled several handfuls of dog food into a plastic bag and tied a knot in it. It went in the rucksack, on top of her Caterpillar boots. As an afterthought she pulled the postcard off the fridge and returned to Jonah’s study to pick up the papers that she had torn off the wall. They went in the crash-bag’s lid.
She slung the rucksack across her back and tightened the shoulder straps, then stepped into her wellingtons and pulled her waterproof trousers back up her legs to her waist.