But it wasn’t until he went to reclaim
the back-up memory stick which, three years ago, he had pasted behind the framed
photograph of his maternal grandparents on their wedding day, that he felt a real
frisson. The picture was hanging where it had always hung: in a bit of dead corridor
between the hall and the lavatory. Every time he had thought of moving it over the
years, he had failed to come up with a darker or less conspicuous spot and in the end
left it where it was.
And the memory stick was still there now,
secured beneath layers of industrial masking tape: no outward sign that it had been
tampered with. The trouble was, the picture-glass had been
dusted
, and by
Lula’s standards this was an all-time first. Not only its glass, but its frame.
And not only its frame, if you
please, but the
top
of the
frame, which was situated well above the height of diminutive Lula’s natural
reach.
Had she stood on a chair? Lula? Had she,
against all previous form, been seized by an urge to spring-clean? He was in the act of
calling her – only to break out in derisive laughter at his own paranoia. Had he
really
forgotten that Lula had taken herself off on holiday at short
notice, to be temporarily replaced by her infinitely more efficient and Junoesque friend
Tina, all of five foot ten tall?
Still smiling to himself, he did what
he’d set his mind on doing before it went chasing after wild geese. He removed the
masking tape and took the memory stick to the living room.
His desktop computer was a source of worry to
him. He knew – had had it religiously dinned into him – that no computer
ever
was a safe hiding place. However deep you may think you’ve buried your secret
treasure, today’s analyst with time on his side will dig it up. On the other hand,
replacing the old hard drive with the new one that he had bought in Cardiff also had its
risks: such as how to explain the presence of a brand-new drive with nothing on it? But
any explanation, however implausible, was going to sound a lot better than the
three-year-old voices of Fergus Quinn, Jeb Owens and Kit Probyn, as recorded days or
even hours before the disastrous launch of
Operation Wildlife
.
First retrieve the secret recording from the
depths of the desktop. Toby did. Then make two more copies of it on separate memory
sticks. He did that too. Next, remove hard disk. Essential equipment for the operation:
one fine screwdriver, rudimentary technical understanding and neat fingers. Under
pressure, Toby possessed them all. Now for the disposal of the hard disk. For this he
needed the Beefeater’s box and the Kleenex tissues for padding. For an addressee,
he selected his beloved
Aunt Ruby, a solicitor who practised in
Derbyshire under her married name, and not therefore by his calculation toxic. A short
covering note – Ruby would expect no more – urged her to guard the enclosed with her
life, explanations to follow.
Seal box, inscribe to Ruby.
Next, for that rainy day he prayed would
never dawn, address two of the padded envelopes to himself, poste restante, to the
central post offices of Liverpool and Edinburgh respectively. Flash-forward to visions
of Toby Bell on the run, arriving panting at the counter of Edinburgh main post office
with the forces of darkness hot on his heels.
There remained the third, the original, the
unconsigned memory stick. On his security courses there had always been a game of
hide-and-seek:
So, ladies and gentlemen, you have this
highly secret and compromising document in your hands and the secret police are at
your door. You have precisely ninety seconds from now before they will begin
ransacking your apartment.
Discount the places you first thought of: so
NOT
behind the cistern,
NOT
under the loose
floorboard,
NOT
in the chandelier, the ice compartment of the fridge or
the first-aid box, and absolutely
NOT
, thank you, dangling outside the
kitchen window on a piece of string. So where? Answer: the most obvious place you can
think of, among its most obvious companions. In the bottom drawer of the chest currently
containing his unsorted junk from Beirut resided CDs, family snaps, letters from old
girlfriends and – yes, even a handful of memory sticks with handwritten labels round
their plastic cases. One caught his attention:
UNI GRADUATION
PARTY
,
BRISTOL
. Removing the label, he wrapped
it round the third memory stick and tossed it into the drawer with the rest of the
junk.
He then took Kit’s letter to the
kitchen sink and set fire to it,
broke the ash and washed it down the
plughole. For good measure he did the same with the duplicate contract for his hire car
from Bodmin Parkway railway station.
Satisfied with progress so far, he showered,
changed into fresh clothes, put the two burners in his pocket, packed the envelopes and
parcel into the carrier bag and, observing the Security Department’s well-worn
injunction never to accept the first cab on offer, hailed not the second cab but the
third, and gave the driver the address of a mini-market in Swiss Cottage which he
happened to know operated a late-night post-office counter.
And in Swiss Cottage, breaking the chain yet
again, he took a second cab to Euston station and a third to the East End of London.
The hospital rose out of the darkness like
the hulk of a warship, windows ablaze, bridges and stairways cleared for action. The
upper forecourt was given over to a car park and a steel sculpture of interlocking
swans. At ground level, ambulances unloaded casualties in red blankets on to trolleys
while health workers in scrubs took a cigarette break. Aware that video cameras stared
at him from every rooftop and lamp post, Toby cast himself as an outpatient and walked
with an air of self-concern.
Following the stretcher trolleys, he entered
a glistening hallway that served as some kind of collecting point. On one bench sat a
group of veiled women; on another three very old men in skullcaps, bowed over their
beads. Close by stood a minyan of Hasidic men in communal prayer.
A desk offered Patient Advice & Liaison,
but it was unmanned. A signpost directed him to Human Resources, Workforce Planning,
Sexual Health and Children’s Day-stay, but none to where he needed to go. A notice
screamed:
STOP! ARE YOU HERE FOR
A&E
? But if you
were, there was nobody to tell you what to do next. Selecting the brightest, widest
corridor, he walked boldly past curtained cubicles until he came to an elderly black man
seated at a desk in front of a computer.
‘I’m looking for Dr
Probyn,’ he said. And when the grizzled head didn’t lift: ‘Probably in
the Urgent Care unit. Could be triage. She’s on till midnight.’
The old man’s face was slashed with
tribal marks.
‘We don’t give out no names,
son,’ he said, after studying Toby for a while. ‘Triage, that’s turn
left and two doors down. Urgent Care, you gotta go back to the lobby, take the Emergency
corridor.’ And seeing Toby produce his cellphone, ‘No good callin’,
son. Mobiles just don’t work in here. Outside’s another story.’
In the triage waiting room, thirty people
sat staring at the same blank wall. A stern white woman in a green overall with an
electronic key round her neck was studying a clipboard.
‘I’ve been informed that Dr
Probyn needs to see me.’
‘Urgent Care,’ she replied to
her clipboard.
Under strips of sad white lighting, more
rows of patients stared at a closed door marked
ASSESSMENT
. Toby tore off
a ticket and sat with them. A lighted box gave the number of the patient being assessed.
Some took five minutes, others barely one. Suddenly he was next, and Emily, with her
brown hair bundled into a ponytail and no make-up, was looking at him from behind a
table.
She’s a doctor, he had been telling
himself consolingly since early afternoon. Hardened to it. Does death every day.
‘Jeb committed suicide the day before
he was due at your parents’ house,’ he begins without preamble. ‘He
shot himself through the head with a handgun.’ And when she says nothing:
‘Where can we talk?’
Her expression doesn’t change but it
freezes. Her clasped
hands rise to her face until the knuckles of her
thumbs are jammed against her teeth. Only after recovering herself does she speak:
‘In that case I got him all wrong,
didn’t I?’ she says. ‘I thought he was a threat to my father. He
wasn’t. He was a threat to himself.’
But Toby’s thinking: I got
you
all wrong, too.
‘Does anyone have any idea
why
he killed himself?’ she enquires, hunting for detachment and not
finding it.
‘There was no note, no last phone
call,’ Toby replies, hunting for his own. ‘And nobody he confided in, so far
as his wife knows.’
‘He was married then. Poor
woman’ – the self-possessed doctor at last.
‘A widow and a small son. For the last
three years he couldn’t live with them and couldn’t live without them.
According to her.’
‘And no suicide note, you
say?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘Nobody blamed? Not the cruel world?
Not anyone? Just shot himself. Like that?’
‘It seems so.’
‘And he did it just before he was due
to sit down with my father and prepare to blow the whistle on whatever they had both got
up to?’
‘It seems so.’
‘Which is hardly logical.’
‘No.’
‘Does my father know yet?’
‘Not from me.’
‘Will you wait for me outside,
please?’
She presses a button on her desk for the
next patient.
As they walked, they kept consciously apart,
like two people who have quarrelled and are waiting to make up. When she needed to
speak, she did so angrily:
‘Is his death
national
news?
In the press, on TV, and so on?’
‘Only the local paper and the
Evening Standard
, as far as I know.’
‘But it could go wider at any
moment?’
‘I assume so.’
‘Kit takes
The Times
.’
And as an abrupt afterthought: ‘And Mum listens to the radio.’
A gateway that should have been locked but
wasn’t led across a scruffy patch of public park. A group of kids with dogs sat
under a tree smoking marijuana. On a traffic island stood a long, single-storey complex.
A sign said
HEALTH CENTRE
. Emily needed to walk the length of it,
checking for broken windows while Toby trailed after her.
‘The kids think we keep drugs
here,’ she said. ‘We tell them we don’t, but they won’t believe
us.’
They had entered the brick lowlands of
Victorian London. Under a starry, unobstructed sky ran rows of cottages in pairs, each
with its oversized chimney pot, each with a front garden split down the middle. She
opened a front gate. An outside staircase led up to a first-floor porch. She climbed. He
followed her. By the porch light he saw an ugly grey cat with one forepaw missing
rubbing itself against her foot. She unlocked the door and the cat shot past her. She
stepped in after it, then waited for him.
‘Food in the fridge if you’re
hungry,’ she said, disappearing into what he took to be her bedroom. And as the
door closed: ‘The bloody cat thinks I’m a vet.’
She is sitting, head in hands, staring at the
uneaten food on the table before her. The living room is sparse to the point of
self-denial: minimal kitchen one end, a couple of old pine chairs, a
lumpy sofa and the pine table that is also her workspace. A few medical books, a stack
of African magazines. And on the wall, a photograph of Kit in full diplomatic rig
presenting his letter of credentials to an abundant female Caribbean head of state while
Suzanna in a big white hat looks on.
‘Did you take that?’ he
asked.
‘God, no. There was a court
photographer.’
From the refrigerator he has rustled up a
piece of Dutch cheese, a few tomatoes, and from the freezer sliced bread which he has
toasted. And three quarters of a bottle of stale Rioja which with her permission he has
poured into two green tumblers. She has put on a shapeless housecoat and flat slippers,
but kept her hair bundled. The housecoat is buttoned to her ankles. He’s surprised
by how tall she is despite the flat shoes. And how stately her walk is. And how her
gestures appear at first glance gauche, when actually, when you think about them,
they’re elegant.
‘And that woman doctor who isn’t
one?’ she asks. ‘Calling Kit to say Jeb’s alive when he isn’t?
That wouldn’t impress the police?’
‘Not in their present mood.
No.’
‘Is Kit at risk of suicide
too?’
‘Absolutely not,’ he retorts
firmly, having asked himself the same question ever since leaving Brigid’s
house.
‘
Why
not?’
‘Because as long as he believes the
fake doctor’s story he doesn’t present any threat. That was the purpose of
the phoney doctor’s call. So for God’s sake let them think they’ve
achieved it,
they
, whoever they are.’
‘But Kit
doesn’t
believe it.’
This is old ground, but he goes over it
nonetheless, for her sake:
‘And has said so very loudly,
mercifully only to his nearest and
dearest, and me. But he pretended
to believe it on the phone, and he must keep pretending now. It’s only about
buying time. Keeping his head down for a few days.’
‘Until what?’
‘I’m putting together a
case,’ Toby says, more boldly than he feels. ‘I’ve got bits of the
puzzle, I need more. Jeb’s widow has photographs that may be useful. I’ve
taken copies. She also gave me the name of someone who may be able to help. I’ve
arranged to see him. Someone who was part of the original problem.’